ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear Is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear Is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Guns of

Navarone

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First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1957

© 1957 by HarperCollinsPublishers

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To my mother

Contents

1 Prelude: Sunday: 0100–0900

2 Sunday Night: 1900–0200

3 Monday: 0700–1700

4 Monday Evening: 1700–2330

5 Monday Night: 0100–0200

6 Monday Night: 0200–0600

7 Tuesday: 1500–1900

8 Tuesday: 1900–0015

9 Tuesday Night: 0015–0200

10 Tuesday Night: 0400–0600

11 Wednesday: 1400–1600

12 Wednesday: 1600–1800

13 Wednesday Evening: 1800–1915

14 Wednesday Night: 1915–2000

15 Wednesday Night: 2000–2115

16 Wednesday Night: 2115–2345

17 Wednesday Night: Midnight

ONE

Prelude: Sunday

0100–0900

The match scratched noisily across the rusted metal of the corrugated iron shed, fizzled, then burst into a sputtering pool of light, the harsh sound and sudden brilliance alike strangely alien in the stillness of the desert night. Mechanically, Mallory’s eyes followed the cupped sweep of the flaring match to the cigarette jutting out beneath the Group-Captain’s clipped moustache, saw the light stop inches away from the face, saw too the sudden stillness of that face, the unfocused vacancy of the eyes of a man lost in listening. Then the match was gone, ground into the sand of the airfield perimeter.

‘I can hear them,’ the Group-Captain said softly. ‘I can hear them coming in. Five minutes, no more. No wind tonight – they’ll be coming in on Number Two. Come on, let’s meet them in the interrogation room.’ He paused, looked quizzically at Mallory and seemed to smile. But the darkness deceived, for there was no humour in his voice. ‘Just curb your impatience, young man – just for a little longer. Things haven’t gone too well tonight. You’re going to have all your answers, I’m afraid, and have them all too soon.’ He turned abruptly, strode off towards the squat buildings that loomed vaguely against the pale darkness that topped the level horizon.

Mallory shrugged, then followed on more slowly, step for step with the third member of the group, a broad, stocky figure with a very pronounced roll in his gait. Mallory wondered sourly just how much practice Jensen had required to achieve that sailorly effect. Thirty years at sea, of course – and Jensen had done exactly that – were sufficient warrant for a man to dance a hornpipe as he walked; but that wasn’t the point. As the brilliantly successful Chief of Operations of the Subversive Operation Executive in Cairo, intrigue, deception, imitation and disguise were the breath of life to Captain James Jensen, DSO, RN. As a Levantine stevedore agitator, he had won the awed respect of the dock-labourers from Alexandretta to Alexandria: as a camel-driver, he had blasphemously out-camel-driven all available Bedouin competition: and no more pathetic beggar had ever exhibited such realistic sores in the bazaars and market-places of the East. Tonight, however, he was just the bluff and simple sailor. He was dressed in white from cap-cover to canvas shoes, the starlight glinted softly on the golden braid on epaulettes and cap peak.

Their footsteps crunched in companionable unison over the hard-packed sand, rang sharply as they moved on to the concrete of the runway. The hurrying figure of the Group-Captain was already almost lost to sight. Mallory took a deep breath and turned suddenly towards Jensen.

‘Look, sir, just what is all this? What’s all the flap, all the secrecy about? And why am I involved in it? Good lord, sir, it was only yesterday that I was pulled out of Crete, relieved at eight hours’ notice. A month’s leave, I was told. And what happens?’

‘Well,’ Jensen murmured, ‘what did happen?’

‘No leave,’ Mallory said bitterly. ‘Not even a night’s sleep. Just hours and hours in the SOE Headquarters, answering a lot of silly, damnfool questions about climbing in the Southern Alps. Then hauled out of bed at midnight, told I was to meet you, and then driven for hours across the blasted desert by a mad Scotsman who sang drunken songs and asked hundreds of even more silly, damnfool questions!’

‘One of my more effective disguises, I’ve always thought,’ Jensen said smugly. ‘Personally, I found the journey most entertaining!’

‘One of your –’ Mallory broke off, appalled at the memory of things he had said to the elderly bewhiskered Scots captain who had driven the command vehicle. ‘I – I’m terribly sorry, sir. I never realised –’

‘Of course you didn’t!’ Jensen cut in briskly. ‘You weren’t supposed to. Just wanted to find out if you were the man for the job. I’m sure you are – I was pretty sure you were before I pulled you out of Crete. But where you got the idea about leave I don’t know. The sanity of the SOE has often been questioned, but even we aren’t given to sending a flying-boat for the sole purpose of enabling junior officers to spend a month wasting their substance among the fleshpots of Cairo,’ he finished dryly.

‘I still don’t know –’

‘Patience, laddie, patience – as our worthy Group-Captain has just advocated. Time is endless. To wait, and to keep on waiting – that is to be of the East.’

‘To total four hours’ sleep in three days is not,’ Mallory said feelingly. ‘And that’s all I’ve had … Here they come!’

Both men screwed up their eyes in automatic reflex as the fierce glare of the landing lights struck at them, the flare path arrowing off into the outer darkness. In less than a minute the first bomber was down, heavily, awkwardly, taxiing to a standstill just beside them. The grey camouflage paint of the after fuselage and tail-planes was riddled with bullet and cannon shells, an aileron was shredded and the port outer engine out of commission, saturated in oil. The cabin Perspex was shattered and starred in a dozen places.

For a long time Jensen stared at the holes and scars of the damaged machine, then shook his head and looked away.

‘Four hours’ sleep, Captain Mallory,’ he said quietly. ‘Four hours. I’m beginning to think that you can count yourself damn lucky to have had even that much.’

The interrogation room, harshly lit by two powerful, unshaded lights, was uncomfortable and airless. The furniture consisted of some battered wall-maps and charts, a score or so of equally scuffed chairs and an unvarnished deal table. The Group-Captain, flanked by Jensen and Mallory, was sitting behind this when the door opened abruptly and the first of the flying crews entered, blinking rapidly in the fierceness of the unaccustomed light. They were led by a dark-haired, thick-set pilot, trailing helmet and flying-suit in his left hand. He had an Anzac bush helmet crushed on the back of his head, and the word ‘Australia’ emblazoned in white across each khaki shoulder. Scowling, wordlessly and without permission, he sat down in front of them, produced a pack of cigarettes and rasped a match across the surface of the table. Mallory looked furtively at the Group-Captain. The Group-Captain just looked resigned. He even sounded resigned.

‘Gentlemen, this is Squadron Leader Torrance. Squadron Leader Torrance,’ he added unnecessarily, ‘is an Australian.’ Mallory had the impression that the Group-Captain rather hoped this would explain some things, Squadron Leader Torrance among them. ‘He led tonight’s attack on Navarone. Bill, these gentlemen here – Captain Jensen of the Royal Navy, Captain Mallory of the Long Range Desert Group – have a very special interest in Navarone. How did things go tonight?’

Navarone! So that’s why I’m here tonight, Mallory thought. Navarone. He knew it well, rather, knew of it. So did everyone who had served any time at all in the Eastern Mediterranean: a grim, impregnable iron fortress off the coast of Turkey, heavily defended by – it was thought – a mixed garrison of Germans and Italians, one of the few Aegean islands on which the Allies had been unable to establish a mission, far less recapture, at some period of the war … He realised that Torrance was speaking, the slow drawl heavy with controlled anger.

‘Bloody awful, sir. A fair cow, it was, a real suicide do.’ He broke off abruptly, stared moodily with compressed lips through his own drifting tobacco smoke. ‘But we’d like to go back again,’ he went on. ‘Me and the boys here. Just once. We were talking about it on the way home.’ Mallory caught the deep murmur of voices in the background, a growl of agreement. ‘We’d like to take with us the joker who thought this one up and shove him out at ten thousand over Navarone, without benefit of a parachute.’

‘As bad as that, Bill?’

‘As bad as that, sir. We hadn’t a chance. Straight up, we really hadn’t. First off, the weather was against us – the jokers in the Met. Office were about as right as they usually are.’

‘They gave you clear weather?’

‘Yeah. Clear weather. It was ten-tenths over the target,’ Torrance said bitterly. ‘We had to go down to fifteen hundred. Not that it made any difference. We would have to have gone down lower than that anyway – about three thousand feet below sea-level then fly up the way: that cliff overhang shuts the target clean off. Might as well have dropped a shower of leaflets asking them to spike their own bloody guns … Then they’ve got every second AA gun in the south of Europe concentrated along this narrow 50-degree vector – the only way you can approach the target, or anywhere near the target. Russ and Conroy were belted good and proper on the way in. Didn’t even get half-way towards the harbour … They never had a chance.’

‘I know, I know.’ The Group-Captain nodded heavily. ‘We heard. W/T reception was good … And McIlveen ditched just north of Alex?’

‘Yeah. But he’ll be all right. The old crate was still awash when we passed over, the big dinghy was out and it was as smooth as a millpond. He’ll be all right,’ Torrance repeated.

The Group-Captain nodded again, and Jensen touched his sleeve.

‘May I have a word with the Squadron Leader?’

‘Of course, Captain. You don’t have to ask.’

‘Thanks.’ Jensen looked across at the burly Australian and smiled faintly.

‘Just one little question, Squadron Leader. You don’t fancy going back there again?’

‘Too bloody right, I don’t!’ Torrance growled.

‘Because?’

‘Because I don’t believe in suicide. Because I don’t believe in sacrificing good blokes for nothing. Because I’m not God and I can’t do the impossible.’ There was a flat finality in Torrance’s voice that carried conviction, that brooked no argument.

‘It is impossible, you say?’ Jensen persisted. ‘This is terribly important.’

‘So’s my life. So are the lives of all these jokers.’ Torrance jerked a big thumb over his shoulder. ‘It’s impossible, sir. At least, it’s impossible for us.’ He drew a weary hand down his face. ‘Maybe a Dornier flying-boat with one of these new-fangled radio-controlled glider-bombs might do it and get off with it. I don’t know. But I do know that nothing we’ve got has a snowball’s chance in hell. Not,’ he added bitterly, ‘unless you cram a Mosquito full of TNT and order one of us to crash-dive it at four hundred into the mouth of the gun cave. That way there’s always a chance.’

‘Thank you, Squadron Leader – and all of you.’ Jensen was on his feet. ‘I know you’ve done your very best, no one could have done more. And I’m sorry … Group-Captain?’

‘Right with you, gentlemen.’ He nodded to the bespectacled Intelligence officer who had been sitting behind them to take his place, led the way out through a side door and into his own quarters.

‘Well, that is that, I suppose.’ He broke the seal of a bottle of Talisker, brought out some glasses. ‘You’ll have to accept it as final, Jensen. Bill Torrance’s is the senior, most experienced squadron left in Africa today. Used to pound the Ploesti oil well and think it a helluva skylark. If anyone could have done tonight’s job it was Bill Torrance, and if he says, it’s impossible, believe me, Captain Jensen, it can’t be done.’

‘Yes.’ Jensen looked down sombrely at the golden amber of the glass in his hand. ‘Yes, I know now. I almost knew before, but I couldn’t be sure, and I couldn’t take the chance of being wrong … A terrible pity that it took the lives of a dozen men to prove me right … There’s just the one way left, now.’

‘There’s just the one,’ the Group-Captain echoed. He lifted his glass, shook his head. ‘Here’s luck to Kheros!’

‘Here’s luck to Kheros!’ Jensen echoed in turn. His face was grim.

‘Look!’ Mallory begged. ‘I’m completely lost. Would somebody please tell me –’

‘Kheros,’ Jensen interrupted. ‘That was your cue call, young man. All the world’s a stage, laddie, etc., and this is where you tread the boards in this particular little comedy.’ Jensen’s smile was quite mirthless. ‘Sorry you’ve missed the first two acts, but don’t lose any sleep over that. This is no bit part: you’re going to be the star, whether you like it or not. This is it. Kheros, Act 3, Scene 1. Enter Captain Keith Mallory.’

Neither of them had spoken in the last ten minutes. Jensen drove the big Humber command car with the same sureness, the same relaxed efficiency that hall-marked everything he did: Mallory still sat hunched over the map on his knees, a large-scale Admiralty chart of the Southern Aegean illuminated by the hooded dashboard light, studying an area of the Sporades and Northern Dodecanese heavily squared off in red pencil. Finally he straightened up and shivered. Even in Egypt these late November nights could be far too cold for comfort. He looked across at Jensen.

‘I think I’ve got it now, sir.’

‘Good!’ Jensen gazed straight ahead along the winding grey ribbon of dusty road, along the white glare of the headlights that cleaved through the darkness of the desert. The beams lifted and dipped, constantly, hypnotically, to the cushioning of the springs on the rutted road. ‘Good!’ he repeated. ‘Now, have another look at it and imagine yourself standing in the town of Navarone – that’s on that almost circular bay on the north of the island. Tell me, what would you see from there?’

Mallory smiled.

‘I don’t have to look again, sir. Four miles or so away to the east I’d see the Turkish coast curving up north and west to a point almost due north of Navarone – a very sharp promontory, that, for the coastline above curves back almost due east. Then, about sixteen miles away, due north beyond this promontory – Cape Demirci, isn’t it? – and practically in a line with it I’d see the island of Kheros. Finally, six miles to the west is the island of Maidos, the first of the Lerades group. They stretch away in a north-westerly direction, maybe fifty miles.’

‘Sixty.’ Jensen nodded. ‘You have the eye, my boy. You’ve got the guts and the experience – a man doesn’t survive eighteen months in Crete without both. You’ve got one or two special qualifications I’ll mention by and by.’ He paused for a moment, shook his head slowly. ‘I only hope you have the luck – all the luck. God alone knows you’re going to need it.’

Mallory waited expectantly, but Jensen had sunk into some private reverie. Three minutes passed, perhaps five, and there was only the swish of the tyres, the subdued hum of the powerful engine. Presently Jensen stirred and spoke again, quietly, still without taking his eyes off the road.

‘This is Saturday – rather, it’s Sunday morning now. There are one thousand two hundred men on the island of Kheros – one thousand two hundred British soldiers – who will be dead, wounded or prisoner by next Saturday. Mostly they’ll be dead.’ For the first time he looked at Mallory and smiled, a brief smile, a crooked smile, and then it was gone. ‘How does it feel to hold a thousand lives in your hands, Captain Mallory?’

For long seconds Mallory looked at the impassive face beside him, then looked away again. He stared down at the chart. Twelve hundred men on Kheros, twelve hundred men waiting to die. Kheros and Navarone, Kheros and Navarone. What was that poem again, that little jingle that he’d learnt all these long years ago in that little upland village in the sheeplands outside Queenstown? Chimborazo – that was it. ‘Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, you have stolen my heart away.’ Kheros and Navarone – they had the same ring, the same indefinable glamour, the same wonder of romance that took hold of a man and stayed with him. Kheros and – angrily, almost he shook his head, tried to concentrate. The pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to click into place, but slowly.

Jensen broke the silence.

‘Eighteen months ago, you remember, after the fall of Greece, the Germans had taken over nearly all the islands of the Sporades: the Italians, of course, already held most of the Dodecanese. Then, gradually, we began to establish missions on these islands, usually spear-headed by your people, the Long Range Desert Group or the Special Boat Service. By last September we had retaken nearly all the larger islands except Navarone – it was too damned hard a nut, so we just by-passed it – and brought some of the garrisons up to, and beyond, battalion strength.’ He grinned at Mallory. ‘You were lurking in your cave somewhere in the White Mountains at the time, but you’ll remember how the Germans reacted?’

‘Violently?’

Jensen nodded.

‘Exactly. Very violently indeed. The political importance of Turkey in this part of the world is impossible to over-estimate – and she’s always been a potential partner for either Axis or Allies. Most of these islands are only a few miles off the Turkish coast. The question of prestige, of restoring confidence in Germany, was urgent.’

‘So?’

‘So they flung in everything – paratroopers, airborne troops, crack mountain brigades, hordes of Stukas – I’m told they stripped the Italian front of dive-bombers for these operations. Anyway, they flung everything in – the lot. In a few weeks we’d lost over ten thousand troops and every island we’d ever recaptured – except Kheros.’

‘And now it’s the turn of Kheros?’

‘Yes.’ Jensen shook out a pair of cigarettes, sat silently until Mallory had lit them and sent the match spinning through the window towards the pale gleam of the Mediterranean lying north below the coast road. ‘Yes, Kheros is for the hammer. Nothing that we can do can save it. The Germans have absolute air superiority in the Aegean …’

‘But – but how can you be so sure that it’s this week?’

Jensen sighed.

‘Laddie, Greece is fairly hotching with Allied agents. We have over two hundred in the Athens-Piraeus area alone and –’

‘Two hundred!’ Mallory interrupted incredulously. ‘Did you say –’

‘I did.’ Jensen grinned. ‘A mere bagatelle, I assure you, compared to the vast hordes of spies that circulate freely among our noble hosts in Cairo and Alexandria.’ He was suddenly serious again. ‘Anyway, our information is accurate. An armada of caiques will sail from the Piraeus on Thursday at dawn and island-hop across the Cyclades, holing up in the islands at night.’ He smiled. ‘An intriguing situation, don’t you think? We daren’t move in the Aegean in the daytime or we’d be bombed out of the water. The Germans don’t dare move at night. Droves of our destroyers and MTBs and gun-boats move into the Aegean at dusk: the destroyers retire to the south before dawn, the small boats usually lie up in isolated island creeks. But we can’t stop them from getting across. They’ll be there Saturday or Sunday – and synchronise their landings with the first of the airborne troops: they’ve scores of Junkers 52s waiting just outside Athens. Kheros won’t last a couple of days.’ No one could have listened to Jensen’s carefully casual voice, his abnormal matter-of-factness and not have believed him.

Mallory believed him. For almost a minute he stared down at the sheen of the sea, at the faerie tracery of the stars shimmering across its darkly placid surface. Suddenly he swung round on Jensen.

‘But the Navy, sir! Evacuation! Surely the Navy –’

The Navy,’ Jensen interrupted heavily, ‘is not keen. The Navy is sick and tired of the Eastern Med and the Aegean, sick and tired of sticking out its long-suffering neck and having it regularly chopped off – and all for sweet damn all. We’ve had two battleships wrecked, eight cruisers out of commission – four of them sunk – and over a dozen destroyers gone … I couldn’t even start to count the number of smaller vessels we’ve lost. And for what? I’ve told you – for sweet damn all! Just so’s our High Command can play round-and-round-the-rugged-rocks and who’s-the-king-of-the-castle with their opposite numbers in Berlin. Great fun for all concerned – except, of course, for the thousand or so sailors who’ve been drowned in the course of the game, the ten thousand or so Tommies and Anzacs and Indians who suffered and died on these same islands – and died without knowing why.’

Jensen’s hands were white-knuckled on the wheel, his mouth tight-drawn and bitter. Mallory was surprised, shocked almost, by the vehemence, the depth of feeling; it was so completely out of character … Or perhaps it was in character, perhaps Jensen knew a very great deal indeed about what went on on the inside …

‘Twelve hundred men, you said, sir?’ Mallory asked quietly. ‘You said there were twelve hundred men on Kheros?’

Jensen flickered a glance at him, looked away again.

‘Yes. Twelve hundred men.’ Jensen sighed. ‘You’re right, laddie, of course you’re right. I’m just talking off the top of my head. Of course we can’t leave them there. The Navy will do its damnedest. What’s two or three more destroyers – sorry, boy, sorry, there I go again … Now listen, and listen carefully.

‘Taking ‘em off will have to be a night operation. There isn’t a ghost of a chance in the daytime – not with two-three hundred Stukas just begging for a glimpse of a Royal Naval destroyer. It’ll have to be destroyers – transports and tenders are too slow by half. And they can’t possibly go north about the northern tip of the Lerades – they’d never get back to safety before daylight. It’s too long a trip by hours.’

‘But the Lerades is a pretty long string of islands,’ Mallory ventured. ‘Couldn’t the destroyers go through –’

‘Between a couple of them? Impossible.’ Jensen shook his head. ‘Mined to hell and back again. Every single channel. You couldn’t take a dinghy through.’

‘And the Maidos-Navarone channel. Stiff with mines also, I suppose?’

‘No, that’s a clear channel. Deep water – you can’t moor mines in deep water.’

‘So that’s the route you’ve got to take, isn’t it, sir? I mean, they’re Turkish territorial waters on the other side and we –’

‘We’d go through Turkish territorial waters tomorrow, and in broad daylight, if it would do any good,’ Jensen said flatly. ‘The Turks know it and so do the Germans. But all other things being equal, the Western channel is the one we’re taking. It’s a clearer channel, a shorter route – and it doesn’t involve any unnecessary international complications.’

‘All other things being equal?’

The guns of Navarone.’ Jensen paused for a long time, then repeated the words, slowly, expressionlessly, as one would repeat the name of some feared and ancient enemy. ‘The guns of Navarone. They make everything equal. They cover the Northern entrances to both channels. We could take the twelve hundred men off Kheros tonight – if we could silence the guns of Navarone.’

Mallory sat silent, said nothing. He’s coming to it now, he thought.

‘These guns are no ordinary guns,’ Jensen went on quietly. ‘Our naval experts say they’re about nine-inch rifle barrels. I think myself they’re more likely a version of the 210 mm “crunch” guns that the Germans are using in Italy – our soldiers up there hate and fear those guns more than anything on earth. A dreadful weapon – shell extremely slow in flight and damnably accurate. Anyway,’ he went on grimly, ‘whatever they were they were good enough to dispose of the Sybaris in five minutes flat.’

Mallory nodded slowly.

‘The Sybaris? I think I heard –’

‘An eight-inch cruiser we sent up there about four months ago to try conclusions with the Hun. Just a formality, a routine exercise, we thought. The Sybaris was blasted out of the water. There were seventeen survivors.’

‘Good God!’ Mallory was shocked. ‘I didn’t know –’

‘Two months ago we mounted a large-scale amphibious attack on Navarone.’ Jensen hadn’t even heard the interruption. ‘Commandos, Royal Marine Commandos and Jellicoe’s Special Boat Service. Less than an even chance, we knew – Navarone’s practically solid cliff all the way round. But then these were very special men, probably the finest assault troops in the world today.’ Jensen paused for almost a minute, then went on very quietly. ‘They were cut to ribbons. They were massacred almost to a man.’

‘Finally, twice in the past ten days – we’ve seen this attack on Kheros coming for a long time now – we sent in parachute saboteurs: Special Boat Service men.’ He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. ‘They just vanished.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that. And then tonight – the last desperate fling of the gambler and what have you.’ Jensen laughed, briefly and without humour. ‘That interrogation hut – I kept pretty quiet in there tonight, I tell you. I was the “joker” that Torrance and his boys wanted to heave out over Navarone. I don’t blame them. But I had to do it, I just had to do it. I knew it was hopeless – but it had to be done.’

The big Humber was beginning to slow down now, running silently between the tumble-down shacks and hovels that line the Western approach to Alexandria. The sky ahead was already beginning to streak in the first tenuous greys of the false dawn.

‘I don’t think I’d be much good with a parachute,’ Mallory said doubtfully. ‘In fact, quite frankly, I’ve never even seen a parachute.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Jensen said briefly. ‘You won’t have to use one. You’re going into Navarone the hard way.’

Mallory waited for more, but Jensen had fallen silent, intent on avoiding the large potholes that were beginning to pock the roadway. After a time Mallory asked:

‘Why me, Captain Jensen?’

Jensen’s smile was barely visible in the greying darkness. He swerved violently to avoid a gaping hole and straightened up again.

‘Scared?’

‘Certainly I’m scared. No offence intended, sir, but the way you talk you’d scare anyone … But that wasn’t what I meant.’

‘I know it wasn’t. Just my twisted humour … Why you? Special qualifications, laddie, just like I told you. You speak Greek like a Greek. You speak German like a German. Skilled saboteur, first-class organiser and eighteen unscathed months in the White Mountains of Crete – a convincing demonstration of your ability to survive in enemy-held territory.’ Jensen chuckled. ‘You’d be surprised to know just how complete a dossier I have on you!’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Mallory spoke with some feeling. ‘And,’ he added, ‘I know of at least three other officers with the same qualifications.’

‘There are others,’ Jensen agreed. ‘But there are no other Keith Mallorys. Keith Mallory,’ Jensen repeated rhetorically. ‘Who hadn’t heard of Keith Mallory in the palmy, balmy days before the war? The finest mountaineer, the greatest rock climber New Zealand has ever produced – and by that, of course, New Zealanders mean the world. The human fly, the climber of the unclimbable, the scaler of vertical cliffs and impossible precipices. The entire south coast of Navarone,’ said Jensen cheerfully, ‘consists of one vast, impossible precipice. Nary a hand- or foot-hold in sight.’

‘I see,’ Mallory murmured. ‘I see indeed. “Into Navarone the hard way.” That was what you said.’

‘That was,’ Jensen acknowledged. ‘You and your gang – just four others. Mallory’s Merry Mountaineers. Hand-picked. Every man a specialist. You’ll meet them all tomorrow – this afternoon, rather.’

They travelled in silence for the next ten minutes, turned up right from the dock area, jounced their uncomfortable way over the massive cobbles of the Rue Soeurs, slewed round into Mohammed Ali square, passed in front of the Bourse and turned right down the Sherif Pasha.

Mallory looked at the man behind the wheel. He could see his face quite clearly now in the gathering light.

‘Where to, sir?’

‘To see the only man in the Middle East who can give you any help now. Monsieur Eugene Vlachos of Navarone.’

‘You are a brave man, Captain Mallory.’ Nervously Eugene Vlachos twisted the long, pointed ends of his black moustache. ‘A brave man and a foolish one, I would say – but I suppose we cannot call a man a fool when he only obeys his orders.’ His eyes left the large drawing lying before him on the table and sought Jensen’s impassive face.

‘Is there no other way, Captain?’ he pleaded.

Jensen shook his head slowly:

‘There are. We’ve tried them all, sir. They all failed. This is the last.’

‘He must go, then?’

‘There are over a thousand men on Kheros, sir.’

Vlachos bowed his head in silent acceptance, then smiled faintly at Mallory.

‘He calls me “sir”. Me, a poor Greek hotel-keeper and Captain Jensen of the Royal Navy calls me “sir”. It makes an old man feel good.’ He stopped, gazed off vacantly into space, the faded eyes and tired, lined face soft with memory. ‘An old man, Captain Mallory, an old man now, a poor man and a sad one. But I wasn’t always, not always. Once I was just middle-aged, and rich and well content. Once I owned a lovely land, a hundred square miles of the most beautiful country God ever sent to delight the eyes of His creatures here below, and how well I loved that land!’

He laughed self-consciously and ran a hand through his thick, greying hair. ‘Ah, well, as you people say, I suppose it’s all in the eye of the beholder. “A lovely land,” I say. “That blasted rock,” as Captain Jensen has been heard to describe it out of my hearing.’ He smiled at Jensen’s sudden discomfiture. ‘But we both give it the same name – Navarone.’

Startled, Mallory looked at Jensen. Jensen nodded.

‘The Vlachos family has owned Navarone for generations. We had to remove Monsieur Vlachos in a great hurry eighteen months ago. The Germans didn’t care overmuch for his kind of collaboration.’

‘It was – how do you say – touch and go.’ Vlachos nodded. ‘They had reserved three very special places for my two sons and myself in the dungeons in Navarone … But enough of the Vlachos family. I just wanted you to know, young man, that I spent forty years on Navarone and almost four days’ – he gestured to the table – ‘on that map. My information and that map you can trust absolutely. Many things will have changed, of course, but some things never change. The mountains, the bays, the passes, the caves, the roads, the houses and, above all, the fortress itself – these have remained unchanged for centuries, Captain Mallory.’

‘I understand, sir.’ Mallory folded the map carefully, stowed it away in his tunic. ‘With this, there’s always a chance. Thank you very much.’

‘It is little enough, God knows.’ Vlachos’s fingers drummed on the table for a moment, then he looked up at Mallory. ‘Captain Jensen informs me that most of you speak Greek fluently, that you will be dressed as Greek peasants and will carry forged papers. That is well. You will be – what is the word? – self-contained, will operate on your own.’ He paused, then went on very earnestly.

‘Please do not try to enlist the help of the people of Navarone. At all costs you must avoid that. The Germans are ruthless. I know. If a man helps you and is found out, they will destroy not only that man but his entire village – men, women and children. It has happened before. It will happen again.’

‘It happened in Crete,’ Mallory agreed quietly. ‘I’ve seen it for myself.’

‘Exactly.’ Vlachos nodded. ‘And the people of Navarone have neither the skill nor the experience for successful guerrilla operations. They have not had the chance – German surveillance has been especially severe in our island.’

‘I promise you, sir –’ Mallory began.

Vlachos held up his hand.

‘Just a moment. If your need is desperate, really desperate, there are two men to whom you may turn. Under the first plane tree in the village square of Margaritha – at the mouth of the valley about three miles south of the fortress – you will find a man called Louki. He has been the steward of our family for many years. Louki has been of help to the British before – Captain Jensen will confirm that – and you can trust him with your life. He has a friend, Panayis: he, too, has been useful in the past.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll remember. Louki and Panayis and Margaritha – the first plane tree in the square.’

‘And you will refuse all other aid, Captain?’ Vlachos asked anxiously. ‘Louki and Panayis – only these two,’ he pleaded.

‘You have my word, sir. Besides, the fewer the safer for us as well as your people.’ Mallory was surprised at the old man’s intensity.

‘I hope so, I hope so.’ Vlachos sighed heavily.

Mallory stood up, stretched out his hand to take his leave.

‘You’re worrying about nothing, sir. They’ll never see us,’ he promised confidently. ‘Nobody will see us – and we’ll see nobody. We’re after only one thing – the guns.’

‘Ay, the guns – those terrible guns.’ Vlachos shook his head. ‘But just suppose –’

‘Please. It will be all right,’ Mallory insisted quietly. ‘We will bring harm to none – and least of all to your islanders.’

‘God go with you tonight,’ the old man whispered. ‘God go with you tonight. I only wish that I could go too.’

TWO

Sunday Night

1900–0200

‘Coffee, sir?’

Mallory stirred and groaned and fought his way up from the depths of exhausted sleep. Painfully he eased himself back on the metal-framed bucket-seat, wondering peevishly when the Air Force was going to get round to upholstering these fiendish contraptions. Then he was fully awake, tired, heavy eyes automatically focusing on the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. Seven o’clock. Just seven o’clock – he’d been asleep barely a couple of hours. Why hadn’t they let him sleep on?

‘Coffee, sir?’ The young air-gunner was still standing patiently by his side, the inverted lid of an ammunition box serving as a tray for the cups he was carrying.

‘Sorry, boy, sorry.’ Mallory struggled upright in his seat, reached up for a cup of the steaming liquid, sniffed it appreciatively. ‘Thank you. You know, this smells just like real coffee.’

‘It is, sir.’ The young gunner smiled proudly. ‘We have a percolator in the galley.’

‘He has a percolator in the galley.’ Mallory shook his head in disbelief. ‘Ye gods, the rigours of war in the Royal Air Force!’ He leaned back, sipped the coffee luxuriously and sighed in contentment. Next moment he was on his feet, the hot coffee splashing unheeded on his bare knees as he stared out the window beside him. He looked at the gunner, gestured in disbelief at the mountainous landscape unrolling darkly beneath them.

‘What the hell goes on here? We’re not due till two hours after dark – and it’s barely gone sunset! Has the pilot –?’

‘That’s Cyprus, sir.’ The gunner grinned. ‘You can just see Mount Olympus on the horizon. Nearly always, going to Castelrosso, we fly a big dog-leg over Cyprus. It’s to escape observation, sir; and it takes us well clear of Rhodes.’

‘To escape observation, he says!’ The heavy transatlantic drawl came from the bucket-seat diagonally across the passage: the speaker was lying collapsed – there was no other word for it – in his seat, the bony knees topping the level of the chin by several inches. ‘My Gawd! To escape observation!’ he repeated in awed wonder. ‘Dog-legs over Cyprus. Twenty miles out from Alex by launch so that nobody ashore can see us takin’ off by plane. And then what?’ He raised himself painfully in his seat, eased an eyebrow over the bottom of the window, then fell back again, visibly exhausted by the effort. ‘And then what? Then they pack us into an old crate that’s painted the whitest white you ever saw guaranteed visible to a blind man at a hundred miles – ‘specially now that it’s gettin’ dark.’

‘It keeps the heat out,’ the young gunner said defensively.

‘The heat doesn’t worry me, son.’ The drawl was tireder, more lugubrious than ever. ‘I like the heat. What I don’t like are them nasty cannon shells and bullets that can ventilate a man in all the wrong places.’ He slid his spine another impossible inch down the seat, closed his eyes wearily and seemed asleep in a moment.

The young gunner shook his head admiringly and smiled at Mallory.

‘Worried to hell, isn’t he, sir?’

Mallory laughed and watched the boy disappear for’ard into the control cabin. He sipped his coffee slowly, looked again at the sleeping figure across the passage. The blissful unconcern was magnificent: Corporal Dusty Miller of the United States, and more recently of the Long Range Desert Force, would be a good man to have around.

He looked round at the others and nodded to himself in satisfaction. They would all be good men to have around. Eighteen months in Crete had developed in him an unerring sense for assessing a man’s capacity for survival in the peculiar kind of irregular warfare in which he himself had been so long engaged. Off-hand he’d have taken long odds on the capacity of these four to survive. In the matter of picking an outstanding team Captain Jensen, he reckoned, had done him proud. He didn’t know them all yet – not personally. But he was intimately acquainted with the exhaustive dossier that Jensen held on each one of them. These were reassuring, to say the least.

Or was there perhaps a slight question mark against Stevens? Mallory wondered, looking across the passage at the fair-haired, boyish figure gazing out eagerly beneath the gleaming white wing of the Sunderland. Lieutenant Andy Stevens, RNVR, had been chosen for this assignment for three reasons. He would navigate the craft that was to take them to Navarone: he was a first-class Alpinist, with several outstanding climbs to his record: and, the product of the classical side of a red-brick university, he was an almost fanatical philhellene, fluent in both Ancient and Modern Greek, and had spent his last two long vacations before the war as a tourist courier in Athens. But he was young, absurdly young, Mallory thought as he looked at him, and youth could be dangerous. Too often, in that island guerrilla warfare, it had been fatal. The enthusiasm, the fire, the zeal of youth was not enough: rather, it was too much, a positive handicap. This was not a war of bugle calls and roaring engines and magnificent defiance in the clamour of battle: this was a war of patience and endurance and stability, of cunning and craft and stealth, and these were not commonly the attributes of youth … But he looked as if he might learn fast.

Mallory stole another glance at Miller. Dusty Miller, he decided, had learnt it all a long, long time ago. Dusty Miller on a white charger, the bugle to his lips – no, his mind just refused to encompass the incongruity of it. He just didn’t look like Sir Lancelot. He just looked as if he had been around for a long, long time and had no illusions left.

Corporal Miller had, in fact, been around for exactly forty years. By birth a Californian, by descent three parts Irish and one part Central European, he had lived and fought and adventured more in the previous quarter of a century than most men would in a dozen lifetimes. Silver-miner in Nevada, tunneller in Canada and oil-fire shooter all over the globe, he had been in Saudi Arabia when Hitler attacked Poland. One of his more remote maternal ancestors, some time around the turn of the century, had lived in Warsaw, but that had been affront enough for Miller’s Irish blood. He had taken the first available plane to Britain and lied his way into the Air Force, where, to his immense disgust, and because of his age, he was relegated to the rear turret of a Wellington.

His first operational flight had been his last. Within ten minutes of taking off from the Menidi airfield outside Athens on a January night in 1941, engine failure had brought them to an ignominious though well-cushioned end in a paddy field some miles north-west of the city. The rest of the winter he had spent seething with rage in a cookhouse back in Menidi. At the beginning of April he resigned from the Air Force without telling anyone and was making his way north towards the fighting and the Albanian frontier when he met the Germans coming south. As Miller afterwards told it, he reached Nauplion two blocks ahead of the nearest panzer division, was evacuated by the transport Slamat, sunk, picked up by the destroyer Wryneck, sunk, and finally arrived in Alexandria in an ancient Greek caique, with nothing left him in the world but a fixed determination never again to venture in the air or on the sea. Some months later he was operating with a long-range striking force behind the enemy lines in Libya.

He was, Mallory mused, the complete antithesis to Lieutenant Stevens. Stevens, young, fresh, enthusiastic, correct and immaculately dressed, and Miller, dried-up, lean, stringy, immensely tough and with an almost pathological aversion to spit and polish. How well the nickname ‘Dusty’ suited him: there could hardly have been a greater contrast. Again, unlike Stevens, Miller had never climbed a mountain in his life and the only Greek words he knew were invariably omitted from the dictionaries. And both these facts were of no importance at all. Miller had been picked for one reason only. A genius with explosives, resourceful and cool, precise and deadly in action, he was regarded by Middle East Intelligence in Cairo as the finest saboteur in southern Europe.

Behind Miller sat Casey Brown. Short, dark and compact, Petty Officer Telegraphist Brown was a Clydesider, in peace-time an installation and testing engineer in a famous yacht-builder’s yard on the Gareloch. The fact that he was a born and ready-made engine-room artificer had been so blindingly obvious that the Navy had missed it altogether and stuck him in the Communications Branch. Brown’s ill luck was Mallory’s good fortune. Brown would act as the engineer of the boat taking them to Navarone and would maintain radio contact with base. He had also the further recommendation of being a first-class guerrilla fighter: a veteran of the Special Boat Service, he held the DCM and DSM for his exploits in the Aegean and off the coast of Libya.

The fifth and last member of the party sat directly behind Mallory. Mallory did not have to turn round to look at him. He already knew him, knew him better than he knew anyone else in the world, better even than he knew his own mother. Andrea, who had been his lieutenant for all these eighteen interminable months in Crete. Andrea of the vast bulk, the continual rumbling laughter and tragic past, with whom he had eaten, lived and slept in caves, rock-shelters and abandoned shepherd’s huts while constantly harried by German patrols and aircraft – that Andrea had become his alter ego, his doppelgänger: to look at Andrea was to look in a mirror to remind himself what he was like … There was no question as to why Andrea had come along. He wasn’t there primarily because he was a Greek himself, with an intimate knowledge of the islanders’ language, thought and customs, nor even because of his perfect understanding with Mallory, although all these things helped. He was, instead, there exclusively for the protection and safety he afforded. Endlessly patient, quiet and deadly, tremendously fast in spite of his bulk, and with a feline stealth that exploded into berserker action, Andrea was the complete fighting machine. Andrea was their insurance policy against failure.

Mallory turned back to look out the window again, then nodded to himself in imperceptible satisfaction. Jensen probably couldn’t have picked a better team if he’d scoured the whole Mediterranean theatre. It suddenly occurred to Mallory that Jensen probably had done just that. Miller and Brown had been recalled to Alexandria almost a month ago. It was almost as long since Stevens’s relief had arrived aboard his cruiser in Malta. And if their battery-charging engine hadn’t slipped down that ravine in the White Mountains, and if the sorely harassed runner from the nearest listening post hadn’t taken a week to cover fifty miles of snowbound, enemy-patrolled mountains and another five days to find them, he and Andrea would have been in Alexandria almost a fortnight earlier. Mallory’s opinion of Jensen, already high, rose another notch. A far-seeing man who planned accordingly, Jensen must have had all his preparations for this made even before the first of the two abortive parachute landings on Navarone.

It was eight o’clock and almost totally dark inside the plane when Mallory rose and made his way for’ard to the control cabin. The captain, face wreathed in tobacco smoke, was drinking coffee: the co-pilot waved a languid hand at his approach and resumed a bored scanning of the scene ahead.

‘Good evening.’ Mallory smiled. ‘Mind if I come in?’

‘Welcome in my office any time,’ the pilot assured him. ‘No need to ask.’

‘I only thought you might be busy …’ Mallory stopped and looked again at the scene of masterly inactivity. ‘Just who is flying this plane?’ he asked.

‘George. The automatic pilot.’ He waved a coffee-cup in the direction of a black, squat box, its blurred outlines just visible in the near darkness. ‘An industrious character, and makes a damn sight fewer mistakes than that idle hound who’s supposed to be on watch … Anything on your mind, Captain?’

‘Yes. What were your instructions for tonight?’

‘Just to set you blokes down in Castelrosso when it was good and dark.’ The pilot paused, then said frankly, ‘I don’t get it. A ship this size for only five men and a couple of hundred odd pounds of equipment. Especially to Castelrosso. Especially after dark. Last plane that came down here after dark just kept on going down. Underwater obstruction – dunno what it was. Two survivors.’

‘I know. I heard. I’m sorry, but I’m under orders too. As for the rest, forget it – and I mean forget. Impress on your crew that they mustn’t talk. They’ve never seen us.’

The pilot nodded glumly. ‘We’ve all been threatened with court-martial already. You’d think there was a ruddy war on.’

‘There is … We’ll be leaving a couple of cases behind. We’re going ashore in different clothes. Somebody will be waiting for our old stuff when you get back.’

‘Roger. And the best of luck, Captain. Official secrets, or no official secrets, I’ve got a hunch you’re going to need it.’

‘If we are, you can give us a good send-off.’ Mallory grinned. ‘Just set us down in one piece will you?’

‘Reassure yourself, brother,’ the pilot said firmly. ‘Just set your mind at ease. Don’t forget – I’m in this ruddy plane too.’

The clamour of the Sunderland’s great engines was still echoing in their ears when the stubby little motor-boat chugged softly out of the darkness and nosed alongside the gleaming hull of the flying-boat. There was no time lost: there were no words spoken; within a minute the five men and all their gear had been embarked, within another the little boat was rubbing to a stop against the rough stone Navy jetty of Castelrosso. Two ropes were spinning up into the darkness, were caught and quickly secured by practised hands. Amidships, the rust-scaled iron ladder, recessed deep into the stone, stretched up into the star-dusted darkness above: as Mallory reached the top a figure stepped forward out of the gloom.

‘Captain Mallory?’

‘Yes.’

‘Captain Briggs, Army. Have your men wait here, will you? The colonel would like to see you.’ The nasal voice, peremptory in its clipped affectation, was far from cordial. Mallory stirred in slow anger, but said nothing. Briggs sounded like a man who might like his bed or his gin, and maybe their late visitation was keeping him from either or both. War was hell.

They were back in ten minutes, a third figure following behind them. Mallory peered at the three men standing on the edge of the jetty, identified them, then peered around again.

‘Where’s Miller got to?’ he asked.

‘Here, boss, here.’ Miller groaned, eased his back off a big, wooden bollard, climbed wearily to his feet. ‘Just restin’, boss. Recuperatin’, as you might say, from the nerve-rackin’ rigours of the trip.’

‘When you’re all quite ready,’ Briggs said acidly, ‘Matthews here will take you to your quarters. You are to remain on call for the Captain, Matthews. Colonel’s orders.’ Briggs’s tone left no doubt that he thought the colonel’s orders a piece of arrant nonsense. ‘And don’t forget, Captain – two hours, the colonel said.’

‘I know, I know,’ Mallory said wearily. ‘I was there when he said it. It was to me he was talking. Remember? All right, boys, if you’re ready.’

‘Our gear, sir?’ Stevens ventured.

‘Just leave it there. Right, Matthews, lead the way, will you?’

Matthews led the way along the jetty and up interminable flights of steep, worn steps, the others followed in Indian file, rubber soles noiseless on the stone. He turned sharply right at the top, went down a narrow, winding alley, into a passage, climbed a flight of creaking, wooden stairs, opened the first door in the corridor above.

‘Here you are, sir. I’ll just wait in the corridor outside.’

‘Better wait downstairs,’ Mallory advised. ‘No offence, Matthews, but the less you know of this the better.’

He followed the others into the room, closing the door behind him. It was a small, bleak room, heavily curtained. A table and half a dozen chairs took up most of the space. Over in the far corner the springs of the single bed creaked as Corporal Miller stretched himself out luxuriously, hands clasped behind his head.

‘Gee!’ he murmured admiringly. ‘A hotel room. Just like home. Kinda bare, though.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Where are all you other guys gonna sleep?’

‘We aren’t,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘Neither are you. We’re pulling out in less than two hours.’ Miller groaned. ‘Come on, soldier,’ Mallory went on relentlessly. ‘On your feet.’

Miller groaned again, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and looked curiously at Andrea. The big Greek was quartering the room methodically, pulling out lockers, turning pictures, peering behind curtains and under the bed.

‘What’s he doin’?’ Miller asked. ‘Lookin’ for dust?’

‘Testing for listening devices,’ Mallory said curtly. ‘One of the reasons why Andrea and I have lasted so long.’ He dug into the inside pocket of his tunic, a dark naval battledress with neither badge nor insignia, pulled out a chart and the map Vlachos had given him, unfolded and spread them out. ‘Round the table, all of you. I know you’ve been bursting with curiosity for the past couple of weeks, asking yourselves a hundred questions. Well, here are all the answers. I hope you like them … Let me introduce you to the island of Navarone.’

Mallory’s watch showed exactly eleven o’clock when he finally sat back, folded away the map and chart. He looked quizzically at the four thoughtful faces round the table.

‘Well, gentlemen, there you have it. A lovely set-up, isn’t it?’ He smiled wryly. ‘If this was a film, my next line should be, “Any questions, men?” But we’ll dispense with that because I just wouldn’t have any of the answers. You all know as much as I do.’

‘A quarter of a mile of sheer cliff, four hundred feet high, and he calls it the only break in the defences.’ Miller, his head bent moodily over his tobacco tin, rolled a long, thin cigarette with one expert hand. This is just crazy, boss. Me, I can’t even climb a bloody ladder without falling off.’ He puffed strong, acrid clouds of smoke into the air. ‘Suicidal. That’s the word I was lookin’ for. Suicidal. One buck gets a thousand we never get within five miles of them gawddamned guns!’

‘One in a thousand, eh?’ Mallory looked at him for a long time without speaking. ‘Tell me, Miller, what odds are you offering on the boys on Kheros?’

‘Yeah.’ Miller nodded heavily. ‘Yeah, the boys on Kheros. I’d forgotten about them. I just keep thinkin’ about me and that damned cliff.’ He looked hopefully across the table at the vast bulk of Andrea. ‘Or maybe Andrea there would carry me up. He’s big enough, anyway.’

Andrea made no reply. His eyes were half-closed, his thoughts could have been a thousand miles away.

‘We’ll tie you hand and foot and haul you up on the end of a rope,’ Stevens said unkindly. ‘We’ll try to pick a fairly sound rope,’ he added carelessly. The words, the tone, were jocular enough, but the worry on his face belied them. Mallory apart, only Stevens appreciated the almost insuperable technical difficulties of climbing a sheer, unknown cliff in the darkness. He looked at Mallory questioningly. ‘Going up alone, sir, or –’

‘Excuse me, please.’ Andrea suddenly sat forward, his deep rumble of a voice rapid in the clear, idiomatic English he had learnt during his long association with Mallory. He was scribbling quickly on a piece of paper. ‘I have a plan for climbing this cliff. Here is a diagram. Does the Captain think this is possible?’

He passed the paper across to Mallory. Mallory looked at it, checked, recovered, all in one instant. There was no diagram on it. There were only two large, printed words: ‘Keep talking.’

‘I see,’ Mallory said thoughtfully. ‘Very good indeed, Andrea. This has distinct possibilities.’ He reversed the paper, held it up before him so that they could all see the words. Andrea had already risen to his feet, was padding cat-footed towards the door. ‘Ingenious, isn’t it, Corporal Miller,’ he went on conversationally. ‘Might solve quite a lot of our difficulties.’

‘Yeah.’ The expression on Miller’s face hadn’t altered a fraction, the eyes were still half-closed against the smoke drifting up from the cigarette dangling between his lips. ‘Reckon that might solve the problem, Andrea – and get me up in one piece, too.’ He laughed easily, concentrated on screwing a curiously-shaped cylinder on the barrel of an automatic that had magically appeared in his left hand. ‘But I don’t quite get that funny line and the dot at –’

It was all over in two seconds – literally. With a deceptive ease and nonchalance Andrea opened the door with one hand, reached out with the other, plucked a wildly-struggling figure through the gap, set him on the ground again and closed the door, all in one concerted movement. It had been as soundless as it had been swift. For a second the eavesdropper, a hatchet-faced, swarthy Levantine in badly-fitting white shirt and blue trousers, stood there in shocked immobility, blinking rapidly in the unaccustomed light. Then his hand dived in under his shirt.

‘Look out!’ Miller’s voice was sharp, the automatic lining up as Mallory’s hand closed over his.

‘Watch!’ Mallory said softly.

The men at the table caught only a flicker of blued steel as the knife arm jerked convulsively back and plunged down with vicious speed. And then, incredibly, hand and knife were stopped dead in mid-air, the gleaming point only two inches from Andrea’s chest. There was a sudden scream of agony, the ominous cracking of wrist bones as the giant Greek tightened his grip, and then Andrea had the blade between finger and thumb, had removed the knife with the tender, reproving care of a parent saving a well-loved but irresponsible child from himself. Then the knife was reversed, the point was at the Levantine’s throat and Andrea was smiling down pleasantly into the dark and terror-stricken eyes.

Miller let out a long breath, half-sigh, half-whistle.

‘Well, now,’ he murmured, ‘I guess mebbe Andrea has done that sort of thing before?’

‘I guess maybe he has,’ Mallory mimicked. ‘Let’s have a closer look at exhibit A, Andrea.’

Andrea brought his prisoner close up to the table, well within the circle of light. He stood there sullenly before them, a thin, ferret-faced man, black eyes dulled in pain and fear, left hand cradling his crushed wrist.

‘How long do you reckon this fellow’s been outside, Andrea?’ Mallory asked.

Andrea ran a massive hand through his thick, dark, curling hair, heavily streaked with grey above the temples.

‘I cannot be sure, Captain. I imagined I heard a noise – a kind of shuffle – about ten minutes ago, but I thought my ears were playing tricks. Then I heard the same sound a minute ago. So I am afraid –’

‘Ten minutes, eh?’ Mallory nodded thoughtfully, then looked at the prisoner. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked sharply. ‘What are you doing here?’

There was no reply. There were only the sullen eyes, the sullen silence – a silence that gave way to a sudden yelp of pain as Andrea cuffed the side of his head.

‘The Captain is asking you a question,’ Andrea said reproachfully. He cuffed him again, harder this time. ‘Answer the Captain.’

The stranger broke into rapid, excitable speech, gesticulating wildly with both hands. The words were quite unintelligible. Andrea sighed, shut off the torrent by the simple expedient of almost encircling the scrawny throat with his left hand.

Mallory looked questioningly at Andrea. The giant shook his head.

‘Kurdistan or Armenian, Captain, I think. But I don’t understand it.’

‘I certainly don’t,’ Mallory admitted. ‘Do you speak English?’ he asked suddenly.

Black, hate-filled eyes glared back at him in silence. Andrea cuffed him again.

‘Do you speak English?’ Mallory repeated relentlessly.

‘Eenglish? Eenglish?’ Shoulders and upturned palms lifted in the age-old gesture of incomprehension. ‘Ka Eenglish!’

‘He says he don’t speak English,’ Miller drawled.

‘Maybe he doesn’t and maybe he does,’ Mallory said evenly. ‘All we know is that he has been listening and that we can’t take any chances. There are far too many lives at stake.’ His voice suddenly hardened, the eyes were grim and pitiless. ‘Andrea!’

‘Captain?’

‘You have the knife. Make it clean and quick. Between the shoulder blades!’

Stevens cried out in horror, sent his chair crashing back as he leapt to his feet.

‘Good God, sir, you can’t –’

He broke off and stared in amazement at the sight of the prisoner catapulting himself bodily across the room to crash into a distant corner, one arm up-curved in rigid defence, stark, unreasoning panic lined in every feature of his face. Slowly Stevens looked away, saw the triumphant grin on Andrea’s face, the dawning comprehension in Brown’s and Miller’s. Suddenly he felt a complete fool. Characteristically, Miller was the first to speak.

‘Waal, waal, whaddya know! Mebbe he does speaka da Eenglish after all.’

‘Maybe he does,’ Mallory admitted. ‘A man doesn’t spend ten minutes with his ear glued to a keyhole if he doesn’t understand a word that’s being said … Give Matthews a call, will you, Brown?’

The sentry appeared in the doorway a few seconds later.

‘Get Captain Briggs here, will you, Matthews?’ he asked. ‘At once please.’

The soldier hesitated.

‘Captain Briggs has gone to bed, sir. He left strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed.’

‘My heart bleeds for Captain Briggs and his broken slumbers,’ Mallory said acidly. ‘He’s had more sleep in a day than I’ve had in the past week.’ He glanced at his watch and the heavy brows came down in a straight line over the tired, brown eyes. ‘We’ve no time to waste. Get him here at once. Understand? At once!’

Matthews saluted and hurried away. Miller cleared his throat and clucked his tongue sadly.

‘These hotels are all the same. The goin’s-on – you’d never believe your eyes. Remember once I was at a convention in Cincinnati –’

Mallory shook his head wearily.

‘You have a fixation about hotels, Corporal. This is a military establishment and these are army officers’ billets.’

Miller made to speak but changed his mind. The American was a shrewd judge of people. There were those who could be ribbed and those who could not be ribbed. An almost hopeless mission, Miller was quietly aware, and as vital as it was, in his opinion, suicidal, but he was beginning to understand why they’d picked this tough, sunburnt New Zealander to lead it.

They sat in silence for the next five minutes, then looked up as the door opened. Captain Briggs was hatless and wore a white silk muffler round his throat in place of the usual collar and tie. The white contrasted oddly with the puffed red of the heavy neck and face above. These had been red enough when Mallory had first seen them in the colonel’s office – high blood pressure and even higher living, Mallory had supposed: the extra deep shades of red and purple now present probably sprang from a misplaced sense of righteous indignation. A glance at the choleric eyes, gleaming light-blue prawns afloat in a sea of vermilion, was quite enough to confirm the obvious.

‘I think this is a bit much, Captain Mallory!’ The voice was high pitched in anger, more nasal than ever. I’m not the duty errand-boy, you know. I’ve had a damned hard day and –’

‘Save it for your biography,’ Mallory said curtly, ‘and take a gander at this character in the corner.’

Briggs’s face turned an even deeper hue. He stepped into the room, fists balled in anger, then stopped in his tracks as his eye lit on the crumpled, dishevelled figure still crouched in the corner of the room.

‘Good God!’ he ejaculated. ‘Nicolai!’

‘You know him.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Of course I know him!’ Briggs snorted. ‘Everybody knows him. Nicolai. Our laundry-boy.’

‘Your laundry-boy! Do his duties entail snooping around the corridors at night, listening at keyholes?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say.’ Mallory was very patient. ‘We caught him listening outside the door.’

‘Nicolai? I don’t believe it!’

‘Watch it, mister,’ Miller growled. ‘Careful who you call a liar. We all saw him.’

Briggs stared in fascination at the black muzzle of the automatic waving negligently in his direction, gulped, looked hastily away.

‘Well, what if you did?’ He forced a smile. ‘Nicolai can’t speak a word of English.’

‘Maybe not,’ Mallory agreed dryly. ‘But he understands it well enough.’ He raised his hand. ‘I’ve no desire to argue all night and I certainly haven’t the time. Will you please have this man placed under arrest, kept in solitary confinement and incommunicado for the next week at least. It’s vital. Whether he’s a spy or just too damned nosy, he knows far too much. After that, do what you like. My advice is to kick him out of Castelrosso.’

‘Your advice, indeed!’ Briggs’s colour returned, and with it his courage. ‘Who the hell are you to give me advice or to give me orders, Captain Mallory?’ There was a heavy emphasis on the word ‘captain’.

‘Then I’m asking it as a favour,’ Mallory pleaded wearily. ‘I can’t explain, but it’s terribly important. There are hundreds of lives –’

‘Hundreds of lives!’ Briggs sneered. ‘Melodramatic stuff and nonsense!’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘I suggest you keep that for your cloak-and-dagger biography, Captain Mallory.’

Mallory rose, walked round the table, stopped a foot away from Briggs. The brown eyes were still and very cold.

‘I could go and see your colonel, I suppose. But I’m tired of arguing. You’ll do exactly as I say or I’ll go straight to Naval HQ and get on the radio-telephone to Cairo. And if I do,’ Mallory went on, ‘I swear to you that you’ll be on the next ship home to England – and on the troop-deck, at that.’

His last words seemed to echo in the little room for an interminable time: the stillness was intense. And then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the tension was gone and Briggs’s face, a now curiously mottled white and red, was slack and sullen in defeat.

‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘No need for all these damned stupid threats – not if it means all that much to you.’ The attempt to bluster, to patch up the shredded rags of his dignity, was pathetic in its transparency. ‘Matthews – call out the guard.’

The torpedo-boat, great aero engines throttled back half speed, pitched and lifted, pitched and lifted with monotonous regularity as it thrust its way into the long, gentle swell from the WNW. For the hundredth time that night Mallory looked at his watch.

‘Running behind time, sir?’ Stevens suggested.

Mallory nodded.

‘We should have stepped straight into this thing from the Sunderland – there was a hold-up.’

Brown grunted. ‘Engine trouble, for a fiver.’ The Clydeside accent was very heavy.

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Mallory looked up, surprised. ‘How did you know?’

‘Always the same with these blasted MTB engines,’ Brown growled. ‘Temperamental as a film star.’

There was silence for a time in the tiny blacked-out cabin, a silence broken only by the occasional clink of a glass. The Navy was living up to its traditional hospitality.

‘If we’re late,’ Miller observed at last, ‘why doesn’t the skipper open her up? They tell me these crates can do forty to fifty knots.’

‘You look green enough already,’ Stevens said tactlessly. ‘Obviously, you’ve never been in an MTB full out in a heavy sea.’

Miller fell silent a moment. Clearly, he was trying to take his mind off his internal troubles. ‘Captain?’

‘Yes, what is it?’ Mallory answered sleepily. He was stretched full length on a narrow settee, an almost empty glass in his fingers.

‘None of my business, I know, boss, but – would you have carried out that threat you made to Captain Briggs?’

Mallory laughed.

‘It is none of your business, but – well, no, Corporal, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because I couldn’t. I haven’t all that much authority invested in me – and I didn’t even know whether there was a radiotelephone in Castelrosso.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, do you know, I kinda suspected that.’ Corporal Miller rubbed a stubbled chin. ‘If he’d called your bluff, what would you have done, boss?’

‘I’d have shot Nicolai,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘If the colonel had failed me. I’d have had no choice left.’

‘I knew that too. I really believe you would. For the first time I’m beginning to believe we’ve got a chance … But I kinda wish you had shot him – and little Lord Fauntleroy. I didn’t like the expression on old Briggs’s face when you went out that door. Mean wasn’t the word. He coulda killed you then. You trampled right over his pride, boss – and to a phony like that nothin’ else in the world matters.’

Mallory made no reply. He was already sound asleep, his empty glass fallen from his hand. Not even the banshee clamour of the great engines opening full out as they entered the sheltered calm of the Rhodes channel could plumb his bottomless abyss of sleep.

THREE

Monday

0700–1700

‘My dear fellow, you make me feel dreadfully embarrassed.’ Moodily the officer switched his ivory-handled flyswat against an immaculately trousered leg, pointed a contemptuous but gleaming toe-cap at the ancient caique, broad-beamed and two-masted, moored stern on to the even older and more dilapidated wooden pier on which they were standing. ‘I am positively ashamed. The clients of Rutledge and Company, I assure you, are accustomed only to the best.’

Mallory smothered a smile. Major Rutledge of the Buffs, Eton and Sandhurst as to intonation, millimetrically tooth-brushed as to moustache, Savile Row as to the quite dazzling sartorial perfection of his khaki drill, was so magnificently out of place in the wild beauty of the rocky, tree-lined bluffs of that winding creek that his presence there seemed inevitable. Such was the major’s casual assurance, so dominating his majestic unconcern, that it was the creek, if anything, that seemed slightly out of place.

‘It does look as if it has seen better days,’ Mallory admitted. ‘Nevertheless, sir, it’s exactly what we want.’

‘Can’t understand it, I really can’t understand it.’ With an irritable but well-timed swipe the major brought down a harmless passing fly. ‘I’ve been providing chaps with everything during the past eight or nine months – caiques, launches, yachts, fishing boats, everything – but no one has ever yet specified the oldest, most dilapidated derelict I could lay hands on. Quite a job laying hands on it, too, I tell you.’ A pained expression crossed his face. ‘The chaps know I don’t usually deal in this line of stuff.’

‘What chaps?’ Mallory asked curiously.

‘Oh, up the islands; you know.’ Rutledge gestured vaguely to the north and west.

‘But – but those are enemy held –’

‘So’s this one. Chap’s got to have his HQ somewhere,’ Rutledge explained patiently. Suddenly his expression brightened. ‘I say, old boy, I know just the thing for you. A boat to escape observation and investigation – that was what Cairo insisted I get. How about a German E-boat, absolutely perfect condition, one careful owner. Could get ten thou. for her at home. Thirty-six hours. Pal of mine over in Bodrum –’

‘Bodrum?’ Mallory questioned. ‘Bodrum? But – but that’s in Turkey, isn’t it?’

‘Turkey? Well, yes, actually, I believe it is,’ Rutledge admitted. ‘Chap has to get his supplies from somewhere, you know,’ he added defensively.

‘Thanks all the same’ – Mallory smiled – ‘but this is exactly what we want. We can’t wait, anyway.’

‘On your own heads be it!’ Rutledge threw up his hands in admission of defeat. ‘I’ll have a couple of my men shove your stuff aboard.’

‘I’d rather we did it ourselves, sir. It’s – well, it’s a very special cargo.’

‘Right you are,’ the major acknowledged. ‘No questions Rutledge, they call me. Leaving soon?’

Mallory looked at his watch.

‘Half an hour, sir.’

‘Bacon, eggs and coffee in ten minutes?’

‘Thanks very much.’ Mallory grinned. ‘That’s one offer we’ll be very glad to accept.’

He turned away, walked slowly down to the end of the pier. He breathed deeply, savouring the heady, herb-scented air of an Aegean dawn. The salt tang of the sea, the drowsily sweet perfume of honeysuckle, the more delicate, sharper fragrance of mint all subtly merged into an intoxicating whole, indefinable, unforgettable. On either side, the steep slopes, still brilliantly green with pine and walnut and holly, stretched far up to the moorland pastures above, and from these, faintly borne on the perfumed breeze, came the distant melodic tinkling of goats’ bells, a haunting, a nostalgic music, true symbol of the leisured peace the Aegean no longer knew.

Unconsciously almost, Mallory shook his head and walked more quickly to the end of the pier. The others were still sitting where the torpedo boat had landed them just before dawn. Miller, inevitably, was stretched his full length, hat tilted against the golden, level rays of the rising sun.

‘Sorry to disturb you and all that, but we’re leaving in half an hour; breakfast in ten minutes. Let’s get the stuff aboard.’ He turned to Brown. ‘Maybe you’d like to have a look at the engine?’ he suggested.

Brown heaved himself to his feet, looked down unenthusiastically at the weather-beaten, paint-peeled caique.

‘Right you are, sir. But if the engine is on a par with this bloody wreck …’ He shook his head in prophetic gloom and swung nimbly over the side of the pier.

Mallory and Andrea followed him, reaching up for the equipment as the other two passed it down. First they stowed away a sackful of old clothes, then the food, pressure stove and fuel, the heavy boots, spikes, mallets, rock axes and coils of wire-centred rope to be used for climbing, then, more carefully, the combined radio receiver and transmitter and the firing generator fitted with the old-fashioned plunge handle. Next came the guns – two Schmeissers, two Brens, a Mauser and a Colt – then a case containing a weird but carefully selected hodge-podge of torches, mirrors, two sets of identity papers and, incredibly, bottles of Hock, Moselle, ouzo and retsina.

Finally, and with exaggerated care, they stowed away for’ard in the forepeak two wooden boxes, one green in colour, medium sized and bound in brass, the other small and black. The green box held high explosive – TNT., amatol and a few standard sticks of dynamite, together with grenades, gun-cotton primers and canvas hosing; in one corner of the box was a bag of emery dust, another of ground glass, and a sealed jar of potassium, these last three items having been included against the possibility of Dusty Miller’s finding an opportunity to exercise his unique talents as a saboteur. The black box held only detonators, percussion and electrical, detonators with fulminates so unstable that their exposed powder could be triggered off by the impact of a falling feather.

The last box had been stowed away when Casey Brown’s head appeared above the engine hatch. Slowly he examined the mainmast reaching up above his head, as slowly turned for’ard to look at the foremast. His face carefully expressionless, he looked at Mallory.

‘Have we got sails for these things, sir?’

‘I suppose so. Why?’

‘Because God only knows we’re going to need them!’ Brown said bitterly. ‘Have a look at the engine-room, you said. This isn’t an engine-room. It’s a bloody scrap-yard. And the biggest, most rusted bit of scrap down there is attached to the propeller shaft. And what do you think it is? An old Kelvin two-cylinder job built more or less on my own doorstep – about thirty years ago.’ Brown shook his head in despair, his face as stricken as only a Clydeside engineer’s can be at the abuse of a beloved machine. ‘And it’s been falling to bits for years, sir. Place is littered with discarded bits and spares. I’ve seen junk heaps off the Gallowgate that were palaces compared to this.’

‘Major Rutledge said it was running only yesterday,’ Mallory said mildly. ‘Anyway, come on ashore. Breakfast. Remind me we’re to pick up a few heavy stones on the way back, will you?’

‘Stones!’ Miller looked at him in horror. ‘Aboard that thing?’

Mallory nodded, smiling.

‘But that gawddamned ship is sinkin’ already!’ Miller protested. ‘What do you want stones for?’

‘Wait and see.’

Three hours later Miller saw. The caique was chugging steadily north over a glassy, windless sea, less than a mile off the coast of Turkey, when he mournfully finished lashing his blue battledress into a tight ball and heaved it regretfully over the side. Weighted by the heavy stone he had carried aboard, it was gone from sight in a second.

Morosely he surveyed himself in the mirror propped up against the for’ard end of the wheelhouse. Apart from a deep violet sash wrapped round his lean middle and a fancifully embroidered waistcoat with its former glory mercifully faded, he was dressed entirely in black. Black lacing jackboots, black baggy trousers, black shirt and black jacket: even his sandy hair had been dyed to the same colour.

He shuddered and turned away.

‘Thank Gawd the boys back home can’t see me now!’ he said feelingly. He looked critically at the others, dressed, with some minor variations, like himself. ‘Waal, mebbe I ain’t quite so bad after all … Just what is all this quick-change business for, boss?’

‘They tell me you’ve been behind the German lines twice, once as a peasant, once as a mechanic.’ Mallory heaved his own ballasted uniform over the side. ‘Well, now you see what the well-dressed Navaronian wears.’

‘The double change, I meant. Once in the plane, and now.’

‘Oh, I see. Army khaki and naval whites in Alex, blue battledress in Castelrosso and now Greek clothes? Could have been – almost certainly were – snoopers in Alex or Castelrosso or Major Rutledge’s island. And we’ve changed from launch to plane to MTB to caique. Covering our tracks, Corporal. We just can’t take any chances.’

Miller nodded, looked down at the clothes sack at his feet, wrinkled his brows in puzzlement, stooped and dragged out the white clothing that had caught his eye. He held up the long, voluminous clothes for inspection.

‘To be used when passing through the local cemeteries, I suppose.’ He was heavily ironic. ‘Disguised as ghosts.’

‘Camouflage,’ Mallory explained succinctly. ‘Snow-smocks.’

‘What!’

‘Snow. That white stuff. There are some pretty high mountains in Navarone, and we may have to take them. So – snow-smocks.’

Miller looked stunned. Wordlessly he stretched his length on the deck, pillowed his head and closed his eyes. Mallory grinned at Andrea.

‘Picture of a man getting his full quota of sunshine before battling with the Arctic wastes … Not a bad idea. Maybe you should get some sleep, too. I’ll keep watch for a couple of hours.’

For five hours the caique continued on its course parallel to the Turkish coast, slightly west of north and rarely more than two miles off-shore. Relaxed and warm in the still kindly November sun, Mallory sat wedged between the bulwarks of the blunt bows, his eyes ceaselessly quartering sky and horizon. Amidships, Andrea and Miller lay asleep. Casey Brown still defied all attempts to remove him from the engine-room. Occasionally – very occasionally – he came up for a breath of fresh air, but the intervals between his appearances steadily lengthened as he concentrated more and more on the aged Kelvin engine, regulating the erratic drip-fed lubrication, constantly adjusting the air intake: an engineer to his fingertips, he was unhappy about that engine: he was drowsy, too, and headachy – the narrow hatchway gave hardly any ventilation at all.

Alone in the wheelhouse – an unusual feature in so tiny a caique – Lieutenant Andy Stevens watched the Turkish coast slide slowly by. Like Mallory’s, his eyes moved ceaselessly, but not with the same controlled wandering. They shifted from the coast to the chart: from the chart to the islands up ahead off the port bow, islands whose position and relation to each other changed continually and deceptively, islands gradually lifting from the sea and hardening in definition through the haze of blue refraction: from the islands to the old alcohol compass swinging almost imperceptibly on corroded gimbals, and from the compass back to the coast again. Occasionally, he peered up into the sky, or swung a quick glance through a 180-degree sweep of the horizon. But one thing his eyes avoided all the time. The chipped, fly-blown mirror had been hung up in the wheelhouse again, but it was as if his eyes and the mirror were of opposite magnetic poles: he could not bring himself to look at it.

His forearms ached. He had been spelled at the wheel twice, but still they ached, abominably: his lean, tanned hands were ivory-knuckled on the cracked wheel. Repeatedly, consciously, he tried to relax, to ease the tension that was bunching up the muscles of his arms; but always, as if possessed of independent volition, his hands tightened their grip again. There was a funny taste in his mouth, too, a sour and salty taste in a dry, parched mouth, and no matter how often he swallowed, or drank from the sun-warmed pitcher at his side, the taste and the dryness remained. He could no more exorcise them than he could that twisting, cramping ball that was knotting up his insides, just above the solar plexus, or the queer, uncontrollable tremor that gripped his right leg from time to time.

Lieutenant Andy Stevens was afraid. He had never been in action before, but it wasn’t that. This wasn’t the first time he had been afraid. He had been afraid all his life, ever since he could remember: and he could remember a long way back, even to his early prep-school days when his famous father, Sir Cedric Stevens, the most celebrated explorer and mountaineer of his time, had thrown him bodily into the swimming pool at home, telling him that this was the only way he could learn to swim. He could remember still how he had fought and spluttered his way to the side of the pool, panic-stricken and desperate, his nose and mouth blocked with water, the pit of his stomach knotted and constricted in that nameless, terrifying ache he was to come to know so well: how his father and two elder brothers, big and jovial and nerveless like Sir Cedric himself, had wiped the tears of mirth from their eyes and pushed him in again …

His father and brothers … It had been like that all through his schooldays. Together, the three of them had made his life thoroughly miserable. Tough, hearty, open-air types who worshipped at the shrine of athleticism and physical fitness, they could not understand how anyone could fail to revel in diving from a five-metre springboard or setting a hunter at a five-barred gate or climbing the crags of the Peak district or sailing a boat in a storm. All these things they had made him do and often he had failed in the doing, and neither his father nor his brothers could ever have understood how he had come to dread those violent sports in which they excelled, for they were not cruel men, nor even unkind, but simply stupid. And so to the simple physical fear he sometimes and naturally felt was added the fear of failure, the fear that he was bound to fail in whatever he had to do next, the fear of the inevitable mockery and ridicule: and because he had been a sensitive boy and feared the ridicule above all else, he had come to fear these things that provoked the ridicule. Finally, he had come to fear fear itself, and it was in a desperate attempt to overcome this double fear that he had devoted himself – this in his late teens – to crag and mountain climbing: in this he had ultimately become so proficient, developed such a reputation, that father and brothers had come to treat him with respect and as an equal, and the ridicule had ceased. But the fear had not ceased, rather it had grown by what it fed on, and often, on a particularly difficult climb, he had all but fallen to his death, powerless in the grip of sheer, unreasoning terror. But this terror he had always sought, successfully so far, to conceal. As now. He was trying to overcome, to conceal that fear now. He was afraid of failing – in what he wasn’t quite sure – of not measuring up to expectation: he was afraid of being afraid: and he was desperately afraid, above all things, of being seen, of being known to be afraid …

The startling, incredible blue of the Aegean; the soft, hazy silhouette of the Anatolian mountains against the washed-out cerulean of the sky; the heart-catching, magical blending of the blues and violets and purples and indigoes of the sun-soaked islands drifting lazily by, almost on the beam now; the iridescent rippling of the water tanned by the gentle, scent-laden breeze newly sprung from the south-east; the peaceful scene on deck, the reassuring, interminable thump-thump thump-thump of the old Kelvin engine … All was peace and quiet and contentment and warmth and languor, and it seemed impossible that anyone could be afraid. The world and the war were very far away that afternoon.

Or perhaps, after all, the war wasn’t so far away. There were occasional pin-pricks – and constant reminders. Twice a German Arado seaplane had circled curiously overhead, and a Savoia and Fiat, flying in company, had altered course, dipped to have a look at them and flown off, apparently satisfied: Italian planes, these, and probably based on Rhodes, they were almost certainly piloted by Germans who had rounded up their erstwhile Rhodian allies and put them in prison camps after the surrender of the Italian Government. In the morning they had passed within half a mile of a big German caique – it flew a German flag and bristled with mounted machine-guns and a two-pounder far up in the bows; and in the early afternoon a high-speed German launch had roared by so closely that their caique had rolled wickedly in the wash of its passing: Mallory and Andrea had shaken their fists and cursed loudly and fluently at the grinning sailors on deck. But there had been no attempts to molest or detain them: neither British nor German hesitated at any time to violate the neutrality of Turkish territorial waters, but by the strange quixotry of a tacit gentlemen’s agreement hostilities between passing vessels and planes were almost unknown. Like the envoys of warring countries in a neutral capital, their behaviour ranged from the impeccably and frigidly polite to a very pointed unawareness of one another’s existence.

These, then, were the pin-pricks – the visitation and by-goings, harmless though they were, of the ships and planes of the enemy. The other reminders that this was no peace but an illusion, an ephemeral and a frangible thing, were more permanent. Slowly the minute hands of their watches circled, and every tick took them nearer to that great wall of cliff, barely eight hours away, that had to be climbed somehow: and almost dead ahead now, and less than fifty miles distant, they could see the grim, jagged peaks of Navarone topping the shimmering horizon and reaching up darkly against the sapphired sky, desolate and remote and strangely threatening.

At half-past two in the afternoon the engine stopped. There had been no warning coughs or splutters or missed strokes. One moment the regular, reassuring thump-thump: the next, sudden, completely unexpected silence, oppressive and foreboding in its absoluteness.

Mallory was the first to reach the engine hatch.

‘What’s up, Brown?’ His voice was sharp with anxiety. ‘Engine broken down?’

‘Not quite, sir.’ Brown was still bent over the engine, his voice muffled. ‘I shut it off just now.’ He straightened his back, hoisted himself wearily through the hatchway, sat on deck with his feet dangling, sucking in great draughts of fresh air. Beneath the heavy tan his face was very pale.

Mallory looked at him closely.

‘You look as if you had the fright of your life.’

‘Not that.’ Brown shook his head. ‘For the past two-three hours I’ve been slowly poisoned down that ruddy hole. Only now I realise it.’ He passed a hand across his brow and groaned. ‘Top of my blinkin’ head just about lifting off, sir. Carbon monoxide ain’t a very healthy thing.’

‘Exhaust leak?’

‘Aye. But it’s more than a leak now.’ He pointed down at the engine. ‘See that stand-pipe supporting that big iron ball above the engine – the water-cooler? That pipe’s as thin as paper, must have been leaking above the bottom flange for hours. Blew out a bloody great hole a minute ago. Sparks, smoke and flames six inches long. Had to shut the damned thing off at once, sir.’

Mallory nodded in slow understanding.

‘And now what? Can you repair it, Brown?’

‘Not a chance, sir.’ The shake of the head was very definite. ‘Would have to be brazed or welded. But there’s a spare down there among the scrap. Rusted to hell and about as shaky as the one that’s on … I’ll have a go, sir.’

‘I’ll give him a hand,’ Miller volunteered.

‘Thanks, Corporal. How long, Brown, do you think?’

‘Lord only knows, sir. Two hours, maybe four. Most of the nuts and bolts are locked solid with rust: have to shear or saw ‘em – and then hunt for others.’

Mallory said nothing. He turned away heavily, brought up beside Stevens who had abandoned the wheelhouse and was now bent over the sail locker. He looked up questioningly as Mallory approached.

Mallory nodded. ‘Just get them out and up. Maybe four hours, Brown says. Andrea and I will do our landlubbery best to help.’

Two hours later, with the engine still out of commission, they were well outside territorial waters, closing on a big island some eight miles away to the WNW. The wind, warm and oppressive now, had backed to a darkening and thundery east, and with only a lug and a jib – all the sails they had found – bent to the foremast, they could make no way at all into it. Mallory had decided to make for the island – the chances of being observed there were far less than in the open sea. Anxiously he looked at his watch then stared back moodily at the receding safety of the Turkish shore. Then he stiffened, peered closely at the dark line of sea, land and sky that lay to the east.

‘Andrea! Do you see –’

‘I see it, Captain.’ Andrea was at his shoulder. ‘Caique. Three miles. Coming straight towards us,’ he added softly.

‘Coming straight towards us,’ Mallory acquiesced. ‘Tell Miller and Brown. Have them come here.’

Mallory wasted no time when they were all assembled.

‘We’re going to be stopped and investigated,’ he said quickly. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, it’s that big caique that passed us this morning. Heaven only knows how, but they’ve been tipped off and they’re going to be as suspicious as hell. This’ll be no kid-glove, hands-in-the-pockets inspection. They’ll be armed to the teeth and hunting trouble. There’s going to be no half-measures. Let’s be quite clear about that. Either they go under or we do: we can’t possibly survive an inspection – not with all the gear we’ve got aboard. And,’ he added softly, ‘we’re not going to dump that gear.’ Rapidly he explained his plans. Stevens, leaning out from the wheelhouse window, felt the old sick ache in his stomach, felt the blood leaving his face. He was glad of the protection of the wheelhouse that hid the lower part of his body: that old familiar tremor in his leg was back again. Even his voice was unsteady.

‘But, sir – sir –’

‘Yes, yes, what is it, Stevens?’ Even in his hurry Mallory paused at the sight of the pale, set face, the bloodless nails clenched over the sill of the window.

‘You – you can’t do that, sir!’ The voice burred harshly under the sharp edge of strain. For a moment his mouth worked soundlessly, then he rushed on. ‘It’s massacre, sir, it’s – it’s just murder!’

‘Shut up, kid!’ Miller growled.

‘That’ll do, Corporal!’ Mallory said sharply. He looked at the American for a long moment then turned to Stevens, his eyes cold. ‘Lieutenant, the whole concept of directing a successful war is aimed at placing your enemy at a disadvantage, at not giving him an even chance. We kill them or they kill us. They go under or we do – and a thousand men on Kheros. It’s just as simple as that, Lieutenant. It’s not even a question of conscience.’

For several seconds Stevens stared at Mallory in complete silence. He was vaguely aware that everyone was looking at him. In that instant he hated Mallory, could have killed him. He hated him because – suddenly he was aware that he hated him only for the remorseless logic of what he said. He stared down at his clenched hands. Mallory, the idol of every young mountaineer and cragsman in pre-war England, whose fantastic climbing exploits had made world headlines, in ’38 and ’39: Mallory, who had twice been baulked by the most atrocious ill-fortune from surprising Rommel in his desert headquarters: Mallory, who had three times refused promotion in order to stay with his beloved Cretans who worshipped him the other side of idolatry. Confusedly these thoughts tumbled through his mind and he looked up slowly, looked at the lean, sunburnt face, the sensitive, chiselled mouth, the heavy, dark eyebrows bar-straight over the lined brown eyes that could be so cold or so compassionate, and suddenly he felt ashamed, knew that Captain Mallory lay beyond both his understanding and his judgment.

‘I am very sorry, sir.’ He smiled faintly. ‘As Corporal Miller would say, I was talking out of turn.’ He looked aft at the caique arrowing up from the south-east. Again he felt the sick fear, but his voice was steady enough as he spoke. ‘I won’t let you down, sir.’

‘Good enough. I never thought you would.’ Mallory smiled in turn, looked at Miller and Brown. ‘Get the stuff ready and lay it out, will you? Casual, easy and keep it hidden. They’ll have the glasses on you.’

He turned away, walked for’ard. Andrea followed him.

‘You were very hard on the young man.’ It was neither criticism nor reproach – merely statement of fact.

‘I know.’ Mallory shrugged. ‘I didn’t like it either … I had to do it.’

‘I think you had,’ Andrea said slowly. ‘Yes, I think you had. But it was hard … Do you think they’ll use the big guns in the bows to stop us?’

‘Might – they haven’t turned back after us unless they’re pretty sure we’re up to something fishy. But the warning shot across the bows – they don’t go in for that Captain Teach stuff normally.’

Andrea wrinkled his brows.

‘Captain Teach?’

‘Never mind.’ Mallory smiled. ‘Time we were taking up position now. Remember, wait for me. You won’t have any trouble in hearing my signal,’ he finished dryly.

The creaming bow-wave died away to a gentle ripple, the throb of the heavy diesel muted to a distant murmur as the German boat slid alongside, barely six feet away. From where he sat on a fish-box on the port of the fo’c’sle, industriously sewing a button on to the old coat lying on the deck between his legs, Mallory could see six men, all dressed in the uniform of the regular Germany Navy – one crouched behind a belted Spandau mounted on its tripod just aft of the two-pounder, three others bunched amidships each armed with an automatic machine carbine – Schmeissers, he thought – the captain, a hard, cold-faced young lieutenant with the Iron Cross on his tunic, looking out the open door of the wheelhouse and, finally, a curious head peering over the edge of the engine-room hatch. From where he sat, Mallory couldn’t see the poop-deck – the intermittent ballooning of the lug-sail in the uncertain wind blocked his vision; but from the restricted fore-and-aft lateral sweep of the Spandau, hungrily traversing only the for’ard half of their one caique, he was reasonably sure that there was another machine-gunner similarly engaged on the German’s poop.

The hard-faced young lieutenant – a real product of the Hitler Jugend that one, Mallory thought – leaned out of the wheelhouse, cupped his hand to his mouth.

‘Lower your sails!’ he shouted.

Mallory stiffened, froze to immobility. The needle had jammed hard into the palm of his hand, but he didn’t even notice it. The lieutenant had spoken in English! Stevens was so young, so inexperienced. He’d fall for it, Mallory thought with a sudden sick certainty, he’s bound to fall for it.

But Stevens didn’t fall for it. He opened the door, leaned out, cupped his hand to his ear and gazed vacantly up to the sky, his mouth wide open. It was so perfect an imitation of dull-witted failure to catch or comprehend a shouted message that it was almost a caricature. Mallory could have hugged him. Not in his actions alone, but in his dark, shabby clothes and hair as blackly counterfeit as Miller’s, Stevens was the slow, suspicious island fisherman to the life.

‘Eh?’ he bawled.

‘Lower your sails! We are coming aboard!’ English again, Mallory noted; a persistent fellow this.

Stevens stared at him blankly, looked round helplessly at Andrea and Mallory: their faces registered a lack of comprehension as convincing as his own. He shrugged his shoulders in despair.

‘I am sorry, I do not understand German,’ he shouted. ‘Can you not speak my language?’ Stevens’s Greek was perfect, fluent and idiomatic. It was also, the Greek of Attica, not of the islands; but Mallory felt sure that the lieutenant wouldn’t know the difference.

He didn’t. He shook his head in exasperation, called in slow, halting Greek: ‘Stop your boat at once. We are coming aboard.’

‘Stop my boat!’ The indignation was so genuine, the accompanying flood of furious oaths so authentic, that even the lieutenant was momentarily taken aback. ‘And why should I stop my boat for you, you – you –’

‘You have ten seconds,’ the lieutenant interrupted. He was on balance again, cold, precise. ‘Then we will shoot.’

Stevens gestured in admission of defeat and turned to Andrea and Mallory.

‘Our conquerors have spoken,’ he said bitterly. ‘Lower the sails.’

Quickly they loosened the sheets from the cleats at the foot of the mast. Mallory pulled the jib down, gathered the sail in his arms and squatted sullenly on the deck – he knew a dozen hostile eyes were watching him – close by the fish-box. The sail covering his knees and the old coat, his forearms on his thighs, he sat with head bowed and hands dangling between his knees, the picture of heart-struck dejection. The lug-sail, weighted by the boom at the top, came down with a rush. Andrea stepped over it, walked a couple of uncertain paces aft, then stopped, huge hands hanging emptily by his sides.

A sudden deepening of the muted throbbing of the diesel, a spin of the wheel and the big German caique was rubbing alongside. Quickly, but carefully enough to keep out of the line of fire of the mounted Spandaus – there was a second clearly visible now on the poop – the three men armed with the Schmeissers leapt aboard. Immediately one ran forward, whirled round level with the foremast, his automatic carbine circling gently to cover all of the crew. All except Mallory – and he was leaving Mallory in the safe hands of the Spandau gunner in the bows. Detachedly, Mallory admired the precision, the timing, the clockwork inevitability of an old routine.

He raised his head, looked around him with a slow, peasant indifference. Casey Brown was squatting on the deck abreast the engine-room, working on the big ball-silencer on top of the hatch-cover. Dusty Miller, two paces farther for’ard and with his brows furrowed in concentration, was laboriously cutting a section of metal from a little tin box, presumably to help in the engine repairs. He was holding the wire-cutting pliers in his left hand – and Miller, Mallory knew, was right-handed. Neither Stevens nor Andrea had moved. The man beside the foremast still stood there, eyes unwinking. The other two were walking slowly aft, had just passed Andrea, their carriage relaxed and easy, the bearing of men who know they have everything so completely under control that even the idea of trouble is ridiculous.

Carefully, coldly and precisely, at point-blank range and through the folds of both coat and sail, Mallory shot the Spandau machine-gunner through the heart, swung the still chattering Bren round and saw the guard by the mast crumple and die, half his chest torn away by the tearing slugs of the machine-gun. But the dead man was still on his feet, still had not hit the deck, when four things happened simultaneously. Casey Brown had had his hand on Miller’s silenced automatic, lying concealed beneath the ball-silencer, for over a minute. Now he squeezed the trigger four times, for he wanted to mak’ siccar; the after machine-gunner leaned forward tiredly over his tripod, lifeless fingers locked on the firing-guard. Miller crimped the three-second chemical fuse with the pliers, lobbed the tin box into the enemy engine-room, Stevens spun the armed stick-grenade into the opposite wheelhouse and Andrea, his great arms reaching out with all the speed and precision of striking cobras, swept the Schmeisser gunners’ heads together with sickening force. And then all five men had hurled themselves to the deck and the German caique was erupting in a roar of flame and smoke and flying débris: gradually the echoes faded away over the sea and there was left only the whining stammer of the Spandau, emptying itself uselessly skyward; and then the belt jammed and the Aegean was as silent as ever, more silent than it had ever been.

Slowly, painfully, dazed by the sheer physical shock and the ear-shattering proximity of the twin explosions, Mallory pushed himself off the wooden deck and stood shakily on his feet. His first conscious reaction was that of surprise, incredulity almost: the concussive blast of a grenade and a couple of lashed blocks of TNT, even at such close range, was far beyond anything he had expected.

The German boat was sinking, sinking fast. Miller’s home-made bomb must have torn the bottom out of the engine-room. She was heavily on fire amidships, and for one dismayed instant Mallory had an apprehensive vision of towering black columns of smoke and enemy reconnaissance planes. But only for an instant: timbers and planking, tinder-dry and resinous, were burning furiously with hardly a trace of smoke, and the flaming, crumpling deck was already canted over sharply to port: she would be gone in seconds.

His eyes wandered to the shattered skeleton of the wheelhouse, and he caught his breath suddenly when he saw the lieutenant impaled on the splintered wreck of the wheel, a ghastly, mangled caricature of what had once been a human being, decapitated and wholly horrible: vaguely, some part of Mallory’s mind registered the harsh sound of retching, violent and convulsive, coming from the wheelhouse, and he knew Stevens must have seen it too. From deep within the sinking caique came the muffled roar of rupturing fuel tanks: a flame-veined gout of oily black smoke erupted from the engine-room and the caique miraculously struggled back on even keel, her gunwales almost awash, and then the hissing waters had overflowed and overcome the decks and the twisting flames, and the caique was gone, her slender masts sliding vertically down and vanishing in a turbulent welter of creaming foam and oil-filmed bubbles. And now the Aegean was calm and peaceful again, as placid as if the caique had never been, and almost as empty: a few charred planks and an inverted helmet drifted lazily on the surface of the shimmering sea.

With a conscious effort of will, Mallory turned slowly to look to his own ship and his own men. Brown and Miller were on their feet, staring down in fascination at where the caique had been. Stevens was standing at the wheelhouse door. He, too, was unhurt, but his face was ashen: during the brief action he had been a man above himself, but the aftermath, the brief glimpse he’d had of the dead lieutenant had hit him badly. Andrea, bleeding from a gash on the cheek, was looking down at the two Schmeisser gunners lying at his feet. His face was expressionless. For a long moment Mallory looked at him, looked in slow understanding.

‘Dead?’ he asked quietly.

Andrea inclined his head.

‘Yes.’ His voice was heavy. ‘I hit them too hard.’

Mallory turned away. Of all the men he had ever known, Andrea, he thought, had the most call to hate and to kill his enemies. And kill them he did, with a ruthless efficiency appalling in its single-mindedness and thoroughness of execution. But he rarely killed without regret, without the most bitter self-condemnation, for he did not believe that the lives of his fellow-men were his to take. A destroyer of his fellow-man, he loved his fellow-man above all things. A simple man, a good man, a killer with a kindly heart, he was for ever troubled by his conscience, ill at ease with his inner self. But over and above the wonderings and the reproaches, he was informed by an honesty of thought, by a clear-sighted wisdom which sprang from and transcended his innate simplicity. Andrea killed neither for revenge, nor from hate, nor nationalism, nor for the sake of any of the other ‘isms’ which self-seekers and fools and knaves employ as beguilement to the battlefield and justification for the slaughter of millions too young and too unknowing to comprehend the dreadful futility of it all. Andrea killed simply that better men might live.

‘Anybody else hurt?’ Mallory’s voice was deliberately brisk, cheerful. ‘Nobody? Good! Right, let’s get under way as fast as possible. The farther and the faster we leave this place behind, the better for all of us.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Almost four o’clock – time for our routine check with Cairo. Just leave that scrap-yard of yours for a couple of minutes, Chief. See if you can pick them up.’ He looked at the sky to the east, a sky now purply livid and threatening, and shook his head. ‘Could be that the weather forecast might be worth hearing.’

It was. Reception was very poor – Brown blamed the violent static on the dark, convoluted thunderheads steadily creeping up astern, now overspreading almost half the sky – but adequate. Adequate enough to hear information they had never expected to hear, information that left them silenced, eyes stilled in troubled speculation. The tiny loud-speaker boomed and faded, boomed and faded, against the scratchy background of static.

‘Rhubarb calling Pimpernel! Rhubarb calling Pimpernel!’ These were the respective code names for Cairo and Mallory. ‘Are you receiving me?’

Brown tapped an acknowledgment. The speaker boomed again.

‘Rhubarb calling Pimpernel. Now X minus one. Repeat, X minus one.’ Mallory drew in his breath sharply. X – dawn on Saturday – had been the assumed date for the German attack on Kheros. It must have been advanced by one day – and Jensen was not the man to speak without certain knowledge. Friday, dawn – just over three days.

‘Send “X minus one understood”,’ Mallory said quietly.

‘Forecast, East Anglia,’ the impersonal voice went on: the Northern Sporades, Mallory knew. ‘Severe electrical storms probable this evening, with heavy rainfall. Visibility poor. Temperature falling, continuing to fall next twenty-four hours. Winds east to south-east, force six, locally eight, moderating early tomorrow.’

Mallory turned away, ducked under the billowing lugsail, walked slowly aft. What a set-up, he thought, what a bloody mess. Three days to go, engine u.s. and a first-class storm building up. He thought briefly, hopefully, of Squadron Leader Torrance’s low opinion of the backroom boys of the Met. Office, but the hope was never really born. It couldn’t be, not unless he was blind. The steeppiled buttresses of the thunderheads towered up darkly terrifying, now almost directly above.

‘Looks pretty bad, huh?’ The slow nasal drawl came from immediately behind him. There was something oddly reassuring about that measured voice, about the steadiness of the washed-out blue of the eyes enmeshed in a spider’s web of fine wrinkles.

‘It’s not so good,’ Mallory admitted.

‘What’s all this force eight business, boss?’

‘A wind scale,’ Mallory explained. ‘If you’re in a boat this size and you’re good and tired of life, you can’t beat a force eight wind.’

Miller nodded dolefully.

‘I knew it. I might have known. And me swearing they’d never get me on a gawddamned boat again.’ He brooded a while, sighed, slid his legs over the engine-room hatchway, jerked his thumb in the direction of the nearest island, now less than three miles away. ‘That doesn’t look so hot, either.’

‘Not from here,’ Mallory agreed. ‘But the chart shows a creek with a right-angle bend. It’ll break the sea and the wind.’

‘Inhabited?’

‘Probably.’

‘Germans?’

‘Probably.’

Miller shook his head in despair and descended to help Brown. Forty minutes later, in the semi-darkness of the overcast evening and in torrential rain, lance-straight and strangely chill, the anchor of the caique rattled down between the green walls of the forest, a dank and dripping forest, hostile in its silent indifference.

FOUR

Monday Evening

1700–2330

‘Brilliant!’ said Mallory bitterly. ‘Ruddy well brilliant! “Come into my parlour said the spider to the fly.”’ He swore in chagrin and exasperated disgust, eased aside the edge of the tarpaulin that covered the for’ard hatchway, peered out through the slackening curtain of rain and took a second and longer look at the rocky bluff that elbowed out into the bend of the creek, shutting them off from the sea. There was no difficulty in seeing now, none at all: the drenching cloudburst had yielded to a gentle drizzle, and grey and white cloud streamers, shredding in the lifting wind, had already pursued the blackly towering cumulonimbus over the far horizon. In a clear band of sky far to the west, the sinking, flame-red sun was balanced on the rim of the sea. From the shadowed waters of the creek it was invisible, but its presence unmistakable from the gold-shot gauze of the falling rain, high above their heads.

The same golden rays highlighted the crumbling old watch-tower on the very point of the cliff, a hundred feet above the river. They burnished its fine-grained white Parian marble, mellowed it to a delicate rose: they gleamed on the glittering steel, the evil mouths of the Spandau machine-guns reaching out from the slotted embrasures in the massive walls, illumined the hooked cross of the swastika on the flag that streamed out stiffly from the staff above the parapet. Solid even in its decay, impregnable in its position, commanding in its lofty outlook, the tower completely dominated both waterborne approaches, from the sea and, upriver, down the narrow, winding channel that lay between the moored caique and the foot of the cliff.

Slowly, reluctantly almost, Mallory turned away and gently lowered the tarpaulin. His face was grim as he turned round to Andrea and Stevens, ill-defined shadows in the twilit gloom of the cabin.

‘Brilliant!’ he repeated. ‘Sheer genius. Mastermind Mallory. Probably the only bloody creek within a hundred miles – and in a hundred islands – with a German guard post on it. And of course I had to go and pick it. Let’s have another look at that chart, will you, Stevens?’

Stevens passed it across, watched Mallory study it in the pale light filtering in under the tarpaulin, leaned back against the bulkhead and drew heavily on his cigarette. It tasted foul, stale and acrid, but the tobacco was fresh enough, he knew. The old, sick fear was back again, as strongly as ever. He looked at the great bulk of Andrea across from him, felt an illogical resentment towards him for having spotted the emplacement a few minutes ago. They’ll have cannon up there, he thought dully, they’re bound to have cannon – couldn’t control the creek otherwise. He gripped his thigh fiercely, just above the knee, but the tremor lay too deep to be controlled: he blessed the merciful darkness of the tiny cabin. But his voice was casual enough as he spoke.

‘You’re wasting your time, sir, looking at that chart and blaming yourself. This is the only possible anchorage within hours of sailing time from here. With that wind there was nowhere else we could have gone.’

‘Exactly. That’s just it.’ Mallory folded the chart, handed it back. ‘There was nowhere else we could have gone. There was nowhere else anyone could have gone. Must be a very popular port in a storm, this – a fact which must have become apparent to the Germans a long, long time ago. That’s why I should have known they were almost bound to have a post here. However, spilt milk, as you say.’ He raised his voice. ‘Chief?’

‘Hallo!’ Brown’s muffled voice carried faintly from the depths of the engine-room.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Not too bad, sir. Assembling it now.’

Mallory nodded in relief.

‘How long?’ he called. ‘An hour?’

‘Aye, easy, sir.’

‘An hour.’ Again Mallory glanced through the tarpaulin, looked back at Andrea and Stevens. ‘Just about right. We’ll leave in an hour. Dark enough to give us some protection from our friends up top, but enough light left to navigate our way out of this damned corkscrew of a channel.’

‘Do you think they’ll try to stop us, sir?’ Stevens’s voice was just too casual, too matter of fact. He was pretty sure Mallory would notice.

‘It’s unlikely they’ll line the banks and give us three hearty cheers,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How many men do you reckon they’ll have up there, Andrea?’

‘I’ve seen two moving around,’ Andrea said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe three or four altogether, Captain. A small post. The Germans don’t waste men on these.’

‘I think you’re about right,’ Mallory agreed. ‘Most of them’ll be in the garrison in the village – about seven miles from here, according to the chart, and due west. It’s not likely –’

He broke off sharply, stiffened in rigid attention. Again the call came, louder this time, imperative in its tone. Cursing himself for his negligence in not posting a guard – such carelessness would have cost him his life in Crete – Mallory pulled the tarpaulin aside, clambered slowly on to the deck. He carried no arms, but a half-empty bottle of Moselle dangled from his left hand; as part of a plan prepared before they had left Alexandria, he’d snatched it from a locker at the foot of the tiny companionway.

He lurched convincingly across the deck, grabbed at a stay in time to save himself from falling overboard. Insolently he stared down at the figure on the bank, less than ten yards away – it hadn’t mattered about a guard, Mallory realised, for the soldier carried his automatic carbine slung over his shoulder – insolently he tilted the wine to his mouth and swallowed deeply before condescending to talk to him.

He could see the mounting anger in the lean, tanned face of the young German below him. Mallory ignored it. Slowly, an inherent contempt in the gesture, he dragged the frayed sleeve of his black jacket across his lips, looked the soldier even more slowly up and down in a minutely provocative inspection as disdainful as it was prolonged.

‘Well?’ he asked truculently in the slow speech of the islands. ‘What the hell do you want?’

Even in the deepening dusk he could see the knuckles whitening on the stock of the carbine, and for an instant Mallory thought he had gone too far. He knew he was in no danger – all noise in the engine-room had ceased, and Dusty Miller’s hand was never far from his silenced automatic – but he didn’t want trouble. Not just yet. Not while there were a couple of manned Spandaus in that watch-tower.

With an almost visible effort the young soldier regained his control. It needed little help from the imagination to see the draining anger, the first tentative stirrings of hesitation and bewilderment. It was the reaction Mallory had hoped for. Greeks – even half-drunk Greeks – didn’t talk to their over-lords like that – not unless they had an overpoweringly good reason.

‘What vessel is this?’ The Greek was slow and halting but passable. ‘Where are you bound for?’

Mallory tilted the bottle again, smacked his lips in noisy satisfaction. He held the bottle at arm’s length, regarded it with a loving respect.

‘One thing about you Germans,’ he confided loudly. ‘You do know how to make a fine wine. I’ll wager you can’t lay your hands on this stuff, eh? And the swill they’re making up above’ – the island term for the mainland – ‘is so full of resin that it’s only good for lighting fires.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Of course, if you know the right people in the islands, they might let you have some ouzo. But some of us can get ouzo and the best Hocks and the best Moselles.’

The soldier wrinkled his face in disgust. Like almost every fighting man he despised Quislings, even when they were on his side: in Greece they were very few indeed.

‘I asked you a question,’ he said coldly. ‘What vessel, and where bound?’

‘The caique Aigion,’ Mallory replied loftily. ‘In ballast, for Samos. Under orders,’ he said significantly.

‘Whose orders?’ the soldier demanded. Shrewdly Mallory judged the confidence as superficial only. The guard was impressed in spite of himself.

‘Herr Commandant in Vathy. General Graebel,’ Mallory said softly. ‘You will have heard of the Herr General before, yes?’ He was on safe ground here, Mallory knew. The reputation of Graebel, both as a paratroop commander and an iron disciplinarian, had spread far beyond these islands.

Even in the half-light Mallory could have sworn that the guard’s complexion turned paler. But he was dogged enough.

‘You have papers? Letters of authority?’

Mallory sighed wearily, looked over his shoulder.

‘Andrea!’ he bawled.

‘What do you want?’ Andrea’s great bulk loomed through the hatchway. He had heard every word that passed, had taken his cue from Mallory: a newly-opened wine bottle was almost engulfed in one vast hand and he was scowling hugely. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ he asked surlily. He stopped short at the sight of the German and scowled again, irritably. ‘And what does this halfling want?’

‘Our passes and letters of authority from Herr General. They’re down below.’

Andrea disappeared, grumbling deep in his throat. A rope was thrown ashore, the stern pulled in against the sluggish current and the papers passed over. The papers – a set different from those to be used if emergency arose in Navarone – proved to be satisfactory, eminently so. Mallory would have been surprised had they been anything else. The preparation of these, even down to the photo-static facsimile of General Graebel’s signature, was all in the day’s work for Jensen’s bureau in Cairo.

The soldier folded the papers, handed them back with a muttered word of thanks. He was only a kid, Mallory could see now – if he was more than nineteen his looks belied him. A pleasant, open-faced kid – of a different stamp altogether from the young fanatics of the SS Panzer Division – and far too thin. Mallory’s chief reaction was one of relief: he would have hated to have to kill a boy like this. But he had to find out all he could. He signalled to Stevens to hand him up the almost empty crate of Moselle. Jensen, he mused, had been very thorough indeed: the man had literally thought of everything … Mallory gestured in the direction of the watch-tower.

‘How many of you are up there?’ he asked.

The boy was instantly suspicious. His face had tightened up, stilled in hostile surmise.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked stiffly.

Mallory groaned, lifted his hands in despair, turned sadly to Andrea.

‘You see what it is to be one of them?’ he asked in mournful complaint. ‘Trust nobody. Think everyone is as twisted as …’ He broke off hurriedly, turned to the soldier again. ‘It’s just that we don’t want to have the same trouble every time we come in here,’ he explained. ‘We’ll be back in Samos in a couple of days, and we’ve still another case of Moselle to work through. General Graebel keeps his – ah – special envoys well supplied … It must be thirsty work up there in the sun. Come on, now, a bottle each. How many bottles?’

The reassuring mention that they would be back again, the equally reassuring mention of Graebel’s name, plus, probably, the attraction of the offer and his comrades’ reaction if he told them he had refused it, tipped the balance, overcame scruples and suspicions.

‘There are only three of us,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Three it is,’ Mallory said cheerfully. ‘We’ll bring you some Hock next time we return.’ He tilted his own bottle. ‘Prosit!’ he said, an islander proud of airing his German, and then, more proudly still, ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’

The boy murmured something in return. He stood hesitating for a moment, slightly shame-faced, then wheeled abruptly, walked off slowly along the river bank, clutching his bottles of Moselle.

‘So!’ Mallory said thoughtfully. ‘There are only three of them. That should make things easier –’

‘Well done, sir!’ It was Stevens who interrupted, his voice warm, his face alive with admiration. ‘Jolly good show!’

‘Jolly good show!’ Miller mimicked. He heaved his lanky length over the coaming of the engine hatchway, ‘“Good” be damned! I couldn’t understand a gawddamned word, but for my money that rates an Oscar. That was terrific, boss!’

‘Thank you, one and all,’ Mallory murmured. ‘But I’m afraid the congratulations are a bit premature.’ The sudden chill in his voice struck at them, so that their eyes aligned along his pointing finger even before he went on. ‘Take a look,’ he said quietly.

The young soldier had halted suddenly about two hundred yards along the bank, looked into the forest on his left in startled surprise, then dived in among the trees. For a moment the watchers on the boat could see another soldier, talking excitedly to the boy and gesticulating in the direction of their boat, and then both were gone, lost in the gloom of the forest.

‘That’s torn it!’ Mallory said softly. He turned away. ‘Right, that’s enough. Back to where you were. It would look fishy if we ignored that incident altogether, but it would look a damned sight fishier if we paid too much attention to it. Don’t let’s appear to be holding a conference.’

Miller slipped down into the engine-room with Brown, and Stevens went back to the little for’ard cabin. Mallory and Andrea remained on deck, bottles in their hands. The rain had stopped now, completely, but the wind was still rising, climbing the scale with imperceptible steadiness, beginning to bend the tops of the tallest of the pines. Temporarily the bluff was affording them almost complete protection. Mallory deliberately shut his mind to what it must be like outside. They had to put out to sea – Spandaus permitting – and that was that.

‘What do you think has happened, sir?’ Stevens’s voice carried up from the gloom of the cabin.

‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ Mallory asked. He spoke loudly enough for all to hear. ‘They’ve been tipped off. Don’t ask me how. This is the second time – and their suspicions are going to be considerably reinforced by the absence of a report from the caique that was sent to investigate us. She was carrying a wireless aerial, remember?’

‘But why should they get so damned suspicious all of a sudden?’ Miller asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me, boss.’

‘Must be in radio contact with their HQ. Or a telephone – probably a telephone. They’ve just been given the old tic-tac. Consternation on all sides.’

‘So mebbe they’ll be sending a small army over from their HQ to deal with us,’ Miller said lugubriously.

Mallory shook his head definitely. His mind was working quickly and well, and he felt oddly certain, confident of himself.

‘No, not a chance. Seven miles as the crow flies. Ten, maybe twelve miles over rough hill and forest tracks – and in pitch darkness. They wouldn’t think of it.’ He waved his bottle in the direction of the watch-tower. ‘Tonight’s their big night.’

‘So we can expect the Spandaus to open up any minute?’ Again the abnormal matter-of-factness of Stevens’s voice.

Mallory shook his head a second time.

‘They won’t. I’m positive of that. No matter how suspicious they may be, how certain they are that we’re the big bad wolf, they are going to be shaken to the core when that kid tells them we’re carrying papers and letters of authority signed by General Graebel himself. For all they know, curtains for us may be the firing squad for them. Unlikely, but you get the general idea. So they’re going to contact HQ, and the commandant on a small island like this isn’t going to take a chance on rubbing out a bunch of characters who may be the special envoys of the Herr General himself. So what? So he codes a message and radios it to Vathy in Samos and bites his nails off to the elbow till a message comes back saying Graebel has never heard of us and why the hell haven’t we all been shot dead?’ Mallory looked at the luminous dial of his watch. ‘I’d say we have at least half an hour.’

‘And meantime we all sit around with our little bits of paper and pencil and write out our last wills and testaments.’ Miller scowled. ‘No percentage in that, boss. We gotta do somethin’.’

Mallory grinned.

‘Don’t worry, Corporal, we are going to do something. We’re going to hold a nice little bottle party, right here on the poop.’

The last words of their song – a shockingly corrupted Grecian version of ‘Lilli Marlene’, and their third song in the past few minutes – died away in the evening air. Mallory doubted whether more than faint snatches of the singing would be carried to the watch-tower against the wind, but the rhythmical stamping of feet and waving of bottles were in themselves sufficient evidence of drunken musical hilarity to all but the totally blind and deaf. Mallory grinned to himself as he thought of the complete confusion and uncertainty the Germans in the tower must have been feeling then. This was not the behaviour of enemy spies, especially enemy spies who know that suspicions had been aroused and that their time was running out.

Mallory tilted the bottle to his mouth, held it there for several seconds, then set it down again, the wine untasted. He looked round slowly at the three men squatting there with him on the poop, Miller, Stevens and Brown. Andrea was not there, but he didn’t have to turn his head to look for him. Andrea, he knew, was crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse, a waterproof bag with grenades and a revolver strapped to his back.

‘Right!’ Mallory said crisply. ‘Now’s your big chance for your Oscar. Let’s make this as convincing as we can.’ He bent forward, jabbed his finger into Miller’s chest and shouted angrily at him.

Miller shouted back. For a few moments they sat there, gesticulating angrily and, to all appearances, quarrelling furiously with each other. Then Miller was on his feet, swaying in drunken imbalance as he leaned threateningly over Mallory, clenched fists ready to strike. He stood back as Mallory struggled to his feet, and in a moment they were fighting fiercely, raining apparently heavy blows on each other. Then a haymaker from the American sent Mallory reeling back to crash convincingly against the wheelhouse.

‘Right, Andrea.’ He spoke quietly, without looking round. ‘This is it. Five seconds. Good luck.’ He scrambled to his feet, picked up a bottle by the neck and rushed at Miller, upraised arm and bludgeon swinging fiercely down. Miller dodged, swung a vicious foot, and Mallory roared in pain as his shins caught on the edge of the bulwarks. Silhouetted against the pale gleam of the creek, he stood poised for a second, arms flailing wildly, then plunged heavily, with a loud splash, into the waters of the creek.

For the next half-minute – it would take about that time for Andrea to swim underwater round the next upstream corner of the creek – everything was a confusion and a bedlam of noise. Mallory trod water as he tried to pull himself aboard: Miller had seized a boathook and was trying to smash it down on his head: and the others, on their feet now, had flung their arms round Miller, trying to restrain him: finally they managed to knock him off his feet, pin him to the deck and help the dripping Mallory aboard. A minute later, after the immemorial fashion of drunken men, the two combatants had shaken hands with one another and were sitting on the engine-room hatch, arms round each other’s shoulders and drinking in perfect amity from the same freshly-opened bottle of wine.

‘Very nicely done,’ Mallory said approvingly. ‘Very nicely indeed. An Oscar, definitely, for Corporal Miller.’

Dusty Miller said nothing. Taciturn and depressed, he looked moodily at the bottle in his hand. At last he stirred.

‘I don’t like it, boss,’ he muttered unhappily. ‘I don’t like the set-up one little bit. You shoulda let me go with Andrea. It’s three to one up there, and they’re waiting and ready.’ He looked accusingly at Mallory. ‘Dammit to hell, boss, you’re always telling us how desperately important this mission is!’

‘I know,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘That’s why I didn’t send you with him. That’s why none of us has gone with him. We’d only be a liability to him, get in his way.’ Mallory shook his head. ‘You don’t know Andrea, Dusty.’ It was the first time Mallory had called him that: Miller was warmed by the unexpected familiarity, secretly pleased. ‘None of you know him. But I know him.’ He gestured towards the watch-tower, its square-cut lines in sharp silhouette against the darkening sky. ‘Just a big, fat, good-natured chap, always laughing and joking.’ Mallory paused, shook his head again, went on slowly. ‘He’s up there now, padding through that forest like a cat, the biggest and most dangerous cat you’ll ever see. Unless they offer no resistance – Andrea never kills unnecessarily – when I send him up there after these three poor bastards I’m executing them just as surely as if they were in the electric chair and I was pulling the switch.’

In spite of himself Miller was impressed, profoundly so.

‘Known him a long time, boss, huh?’ It was half question, half statement.

‘A long time. Andrea was in the Albanian war – he was in the regular army. They tell me the Italians went in terror of him – his long-range patrols against the Iulia division, the Wolves of Tuscany, did more to wreck the Italian morale in Albania than any other single factor. I’ve heard a good many stories about them – not from Andrea – and they’re all incredible. And they’re all true. But it was afterwards I met him, when we were trying to hold the Servia Pass. I was a very junior liaison lieutenant in the Anzac brigade at the time. Andrea’ – he paused deliberately for effect – ‘Andrea was a lieutenant-colonel in the 19th Greek Motorised Division.’

‘A what?’ Miller demanded in astonishment. Stevens and Brown were equally incredulous.

‘You heard me. Lieutenant-colonel. Outranks me by a fairish bit, you might say.’ He smiled at them quizzically. ‘Puts Andrea in rather a different light, doesn’t it?’

They nodded silently but said nothing. The genial, hail-fellow Andrea – a good-natured, almost simpleminded buffoon – a senior army officer. The idea had come too suddenly, was too incongruous for easy assimilation and immediate comprehension. But, gradually, it began to make sense to them. It explained many things about Andrea to them – his repose, his confidence, the unerring sureness of his lightning reactions, and, above all, the implicit faith Mallory had in him, the respect he showed for Andrea’s opinions whenever he consulted him, which was frequently. Without surprise now, Miller slowly recalled that he’d never yet heard Mallory give Andrea a direct order. And Mallory never hesitated to pull his rank, when necessary.

‘After Servia,’ Mallory went on, ‘everything was pretty confused. Andrea had heard that Trikkala – a small country town where his wife and three daughters lived – had been flattened by the Stukas and Heinkels. He reached there all right, but there was nothing he could do. A land-mine had landed in the front garden and there wasn’t even rubble left.’

Mallory paused, lit a cigarette. He stared through the drifting smoke at the fading outlines of the tower.

‘The only person he found there was his brother-in-law, George. George was with us in Crete – he’s still there. From George he heard for the first time of the Bulgarian atrocities in Thrace and Macedonia – and his parents lived there. So they dressed in German uniforms – you can imagine how Andrea got those – commandeered a German army truck and drove to Protosami.’ The cigarette in Mallory’s hand snapped suddenly, was sent spinning over the side. Miller was vaguely surprised: emotion, or rather, emotional displays, were so completely foreign to that very tough New Zealander. But Mallory went on quietly enough.

‘They arrived in the evening of the infamous Protosami massacre. George has told me how Andrea stood there, clad in his German uniform and laughing as he watched a party of nine or ten Bulgarian soldiers lash couples together and throw them into the river. The first couple in were his father and stepmother, both dead.’

‘My Gawd above!’ Even Miller was shocked out of his usual equanimity. ‘It’s just not possible –’

‘You know nothing,’ Mallory interrupted impatiently. ‘Hundreds of Greeks in Macedonia died the same way – but usually alive when they were thrown in. Until you know how the Greeks hate the Bulgarians, you don’t even begin to know what hate is … Andrea shared a couple of bottles of wine with the soldiers, found out that they had killed his parents earlier in the afternoon – they had been foolish enough to resist. After dusk he followed them up to an old corrugated-iron shed where they were billeted for the night. All he had was a knife. They left a guard outside. Andrea broke his neck, went inside, locked the door and smashed the oil lamp. George doesn’t know what happened except that Andrea went berserk. He was back outside in two minutes, completely sodden, his uniform soaked in blood from head to foot. There wasn’t a sound, not even a groan to be heard from the hut when they left, George says.’

He paused again, but this time there was no interruption, nothing said. Stevens shivered, drew his shabby jacket closer round his shoulders: the air seemed to have become suddenly chill. Mallory lit another cigarette, smiled faintly at Miller, nodded towards the watch-tower.

‘See what I mean by saying we’d only be a liability to Andrea up there?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do,’ Miller admitted. ‘I had no idea, I had no idea … Not all of them, boss! He couldn’t have killed –’

‘He did,’ Mallory interrupted flatly. ‘After that he formed his own band, made life hell for the Bulgarian outposts in Thrace. At one time there was almost an entire division chasing him through the Rhodope mountains. Finally he was betrayed and captured, and he, George and four others were shipped to Stavros – they were to go on to Salonika for trial. They overpowered their guards – Andrea got loose among them on deck at night – and sailed the boat to Turkey. The Turks tried to intern him – they might as well have tried to intern an earthquake. Finally he arrived in Palestine, tried to join the Greek Commando Battalion that was being formed in the Middle East – mainly veterans of the Albanian campaign, like himself.’ Mallory laughed mirthlessly. ‘He was arrested as a deserter. He was released eventually, but there was no place for him in the new Greek Army. But Jensen’s bureau heard about him, knew he was a natural for Subversive Operations … And so we went to Crete together.’

Five minutes passed, perhaps ten, but nobody broke the silence. Occasionally, for the benefit of any watchers, they went through the motions of drinking; but even the half-light was fading now and Mallory knew they could only be half-seen blurs, shadowy and indistinct, from the heights of the watch-tower. The caique was beginning to rock in the surge from the open sea round the bluff. The tall, reaching pines, black now as midnight cypress and looming impossibly high against the star-dusted cloud wrack that scudded palely overhead, were closing in on them from either side, sombre, watchful and vaguely threatening, the wind moaning in lost and mournful requiem through their swaying topmost branches. A bad night, an eerie and an ominous night, pregnant with that indefinable foreboding that reaches down and touches the well-springs of the nameless fears, the dim and haunting memories of a million years ago, the ancient racial superstitions of mankind: a night that sloughed off the tissue veneer of civilisation and the shivering man complains that someone is walking over his grave.

Suddenly, incongruously, the spell was shattered and Andrea’s cheerful hail from the bank had them all on their feet in a moment. They heard his booming laugh and even the forests seemed to shrink back in defeat. Without waiting for the stern to be pulled in, he plunged into the creek, reached the caique in half a dozen powerful strokes and hoisted himself easily aboard. Grinning down from his great height, he shook himself like some shaggy mastiff and reached out a hand for a convenient wine bottle.

‘No need to ask how things went, eh?’ Mallory asked, smiling.

‘None at all. It was just too easy. They were only boys and they never even saw me.’ Andrea took another long swig from the bottle and grinned in sheer delight. ‘And I didn’t lay a finger on them,’ he went on triumphantly. ‘Well, maybe a couple of little taps. They were all looking down here, staring out over the parapet when I arrived. Held them up, took their guns off them and locked them in a cellar. And then I bent their Spandaus – just a little bit.’

This is it, Mallory thought dully, this is the end. This is the finish of everything, the strivings, the hopes, the fears, the loves and laughter of each one of us. This is what it all comes to. This is the end, the end for us, the end for a thousand boys on Kheros. In unconscious futility his hand came up, slowly wiped lips salt from the spray bulleting off the wind-flattened wave-tops, then lifted farther to shade bloodshot eyes that peered out hopelessly into the storm-filled darkness ahead. For a moment the dullness lifted, and an almost intolerable bitterness welled through his mind. All gone, everything – everything except the guns of Navarone. The guns of Navarone. They would live on, they were indestructible. Damn them, damn them, damn them! Dear God, the blind waste, the terrible uselessness of it all!

The caique was dying, coming apart at the seams. She was literally being pounded to death, being shaken apart by the constant battering shocks of wind and sea. Time and time again the poop-deck dipped beneath the foam-streaked cauldron at the stern, the fo’c’sle rearing crazily into the air, dripping forefoot showing clear: then the plummeting drop, the shotgun, shuddering impact as broad-beamed bows crashed vertically down into the cliff-walled trough beyond, an explosive collision that threw so unendurable a strain on the ancient timbers and planks and gradually tore them apart.

It had been bad enough when they’d cleared the creek just as darkness fell, and plunged and wallowed their way through a quartering sea on a northward course for Navarone. Steering the unwieldy old caique had become difficult in the extreme: with the seas fine on the starboard quarter she had yawed wildly and unpredictably through a fifty degree arc, but at least her seams had been tight then, the rolling waves overtaking her in regular formation and the wind settled and steady somewhere east of south. But now all that was gone. With half a dozen planks sprung from the stem-post and working loose from the apron, and leaking heavily through the stuffing-gland of the propeller shaft, she was making water far faster than the ancient, vertical hand-pump could cope with: the wind-truncated seas were heavier, but broken and confused, sweeping down on them now from this quarter, now from that: and the wind itself, redoubled in its shrieking violence, veered and backed insanely from south-west to south-east. Just then it was steady from the south, driving the unmanageable craft blindly on to the closing iron cliffs of Navarone, cliffs that loomed invisibly ahead, somewhere in that all-encompassing darkness.

Momentarily Mallory straightened, tried to ease the agony of the pincers that were clawing into the muscles of the small of his back. For over two hours now he had been bending and straightening, bending and straightening, lifting a thousand buckets that Dusty Miller filled interminably from the well of the hold. God only knew how Miller felt. If anything, he had the harder job of the two and he had been violently and almost continuously sea-sick for hours on end. He looked ghastly, and he must have been feeling like death itself: the sustained effort, the sheer iron will-power to drive himself on in that condition reached beyond the limits of understanding. Mallory shook his head wonderingly. ‘My God, but he’s tough, that Yank.’ Unbidden, the words framed themselves in his mind, and he shook his head in anger, vaguely conscious of the complete inadequacy of the words.

Fighting for his breath, he looked aft to see how the others were faring. Casey Brown, of course, he couldn’t see. Bent double in the cramped confines of the engine-room, he, too, was constantly sick and suffering a blinding headache from the oil fumes and exhaust gases still filtering from the replacement stand-pipe, neither of which could find any escape in the unventilated engine-room: but, crouched over the engine, he had not once left his post since they had cleared the mouth of the creek, had nursed the straining, ancient Kelvin along with the loving care, the exquisite skill of a man born into a long and proud tradition of engineering. That engine had only to falter once, to break down for the time in which a man might draw a deep breath, and the end would be as immediate as it was violent. Their steerage way, their lives, depended entirely on the continuous thrust of that screw, the laboured thudding of that rusted old two-cylinder. It was the heart of the boat, and when that heart stopped beating the boat died too, slewed broadside on and foundering in the waiting chasms between the waves.

For’ard of the engine-room, straddle-legged and braced against the corner pillar of the splintered skeleton that was all that remained of the wheelhouse, Andrea laboured unceasingly at the pump, never once lifting his head, oblivious of the crazy lurching of the deck of the caique, oblivious, too, of the biting wind and stinging, sleet-cold spray that numbed bare arms and moulded the sodden shirt to the hunched and massive shoulders. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, his arm thrust up and down, up and down, with the metronomic regularity of a piston. He had been there for close on three hours now, and he looked as if he could go on for ever. Mallory, who had yielded him the pump in complete exhaustion after less than twenty minutes’ cruel labour, wondered if there was any limit to the man’s endurance.

He wondered, too, about Stevens. For four endless hours now Andy Stevens had fought and overcome a wheel that leapt and struggled in his hands as if possessed of a convulsive life and will of its own – the will to wrench itself out of exhausted hands and turn them into the troughs: he had done a superb job, Mallory thought, had handled the clumsy craft magnificently. He peered at him closely, but the spray lashed viciously across his eyes and blinded him with tears. All he could gather was a vague impression of a tightly-set mouth, sleepless, sunken eyes and little patches of skin unnaturally pale against the mask of blood that covered almost the entire face from hairline to throat. The twisting, towering comber that had stove in the planks of the wheelhouse and driven in the windows with such savage force had been completely unexpected: Stevens hadn’t had a chance. The cut above the right temple was particularly bad, ugly and deep: the blood still pulsed over the ragged edge of the wound, dripped monotonously into the water that sloshed and gurgled about the floor of the wheelhouse.

Sick to his heart, Mallory turned away, reached down for another bucket of water. What a crew, he thought to himself, what a really terrific bunch of – of … He sought for words to describe them, even to himself, but he knew his mind was far too tired. It didn’t matter anyway, for there were no words for men like that, nothing that could do them justice.

He could almost taste the bitterness in his mouth, the bitterness that washed in waves through his exhausted mind. God, how wrong it was, how terribly unfair! Why did such men have to die, he wondered savagely, why did they have to die so uselessly. Or maybe it wasn’t necessary to justify dying, even dying ingloriously empty of achievement. Could one not die for intangibles, for the abstract and the ideal? What had the martyrs at the stake achieved? Or what was the old tag – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. If one lives well, what matter how one dies. Unconsciously his lips tightened in quick revulsion and he thought of Jensen’s remarks about the High Command playing who’s-the-king-of-the-castle. Well, they were right bang in the middle of their playground now, just a few more pawns sliding into the limbo. Not that it mattered – they had thousands more left to play with.

For the first time Mallory thought of himself. Not with bitterness or self-pity or regret that it was all over. He thought of himself only as the leader of this party, his responsibility for the present situation. It’s my fault, he told himself over and over again, it’s all my fault. I brought them here. I made them come. Even while one part of his mind was telling him that he’d had no option, that his hand had been forced, that if they had remained in the creek they would have been wiped out long before the dawn, irrationally he still blamed himself the more. Shackleton, of all the men that ever lived, maybe Ernest Shackleton could have helped them now. But not Keith Mallory. There was nothing he could do, no more than the others were doing, and they were just waiting for the end. But he was the leader, he thought dully, he should be planning something, he should be doing something … But there was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone on God’s earth could do. The sense of guilt, of utter inadequacy, settled and deepened with every shudder of the ancient timbers.

He dropped his bucket, grabbed for the security of the mast as a heavy wave swept over the deck, the breaking foam quicksilver in its seething phosphorescence. The waters swirled hungrily round his legs and feet, but he ignored them, stared out into the darkness. The darkness – that was the devil of it. The old caique rolled and pitched and staggered and plunged, but as if disembodied, in a vacuum. They could see nothing – not where the last wave had gone, nor where the next was coming from. A sea invisible and strangely remote, doubly frightening in its palpable immediacy.

Mallory stared down into the hold, was vaguely conscious of the white blur of Miller’s face: he had swallowed some sea-water and was retching painfully, salt water laced with blood. But Mallory ignored it, involuntarily: all his mind was concentrated elsewhere, trying to reduce some fleeting impression, as vague as it had been evanescent, to a coherent realisation. It seemed desperately urgent that he should do so. Then another and still heavier wave broke over the side and all at once he had it.

The wind! The wind had dropped away, was lessening with every second that passed. Even as he stood there, arms locked round the mast as the second wave fought to carry him away, he remembered how often in the high hills at home he had stood at the foot of a precipice as an onrushing wind, seeking the path of least resistance, had curved and lifted up the sheer face, leaving him standing in a pocket of relative immunity. It was a common enough mountaineering phenomenon. And these two freak waves – the surging backwash! The significance struck at him like a blow. The cliffs! They were on the cliffs of Navarone!

With a hoarse, wordless cry of warning, reckless of his own safety, he flung himself aft, dived full length through the swirling waters for the engine-room hatchway.

‘Full astern!’ he shouted. The startled white smudge that was Casey Brown’s face twisted up to his. ‘For God’s sake, man, full astern! We’re heading for the cliffs!’

He scrambled to his feet, reached the wheelhouse in two strides, hand pawing frantically for the flare pocket.

‘The cliffs, Stevens! We’re almost on them! Andrea – Miller’s still down below!’

He flicked a glance at Stevens, caught the slow nod of the set, blood-masked face, followed the line of sight of the expressionless eyes, saw the whitely phosphorescent line ahead, irregular but almost continuous, blooming and fading, blooming and fading, as the pounding seas smashed against and fell back from cliffs still invisible in the darkness. Desperately his hands fumbled with the flare.

And then, abruptly, it was gone, hissing and spluttering along the near-horizontal trajectory of its flight. For a moment, Mallory thought it had gone out, and he clenched his fists in impotent bitterness. Then it smashed against the rock face, fell back on to a ledge about a dozen feet above the water, and lay there smoking and intermittently burning in the driving rain, in the heavy spray that cascaded from the booming breakers.

The light was feeble, but it was enough. The cliffs were barely fifty yards away, black and wetly shining in the fitful radiance of the flare – a flare that illuminated a vertical circle of less than five yards in radius, and left the cliff below the ledge shrouded in the treacherous dark. And straight ahead, twenty, maybe fifteen yards from the shore, stretched the evil length of a reef, gap-toothed and needle-pointed, vanishing at either end into the outer darkness.

‘Can you take her through?’ he yelled at Stevens.

‘God knows! I’ll try!’ He shouted something else about ‘steerage way’, but Mallory was already half-way to the for’ard cabin. As always in an emergency, his mind was racing ahead with that abnormal sureness and clarity of thought for which he could never afterwards account.

Grasping spikes, mallet and a wire-cored rope, he was back on deck in seconds. He stood stock still, rooted in an almost intolerable tension as he saw the towering, jagged rock bearing down upon them, fine on the starboard bow, a rock that reached half-way to the wheelhouse. It struck the boat with a crash that sent him to his knees, rasped and grated along half the length of the buckled, splintered gunwales: and then the caique had rolled over to port and she was through. Stevens frantically spinning the wheel and shouting for full astern.

Mallory’s breath escaped in a long, heavy sigh of relief – he had been quite unaware that he had stopped breathing – and he hurriedly looped the coil of rope round his neck and under his left shoulder and stuck spikes and hammer in his belt. The caique was slewing heavily round now, port side to, plunging and corkscrewing violently as she began to fall broadside into the troughs of the waves, waves shorter and steeper than ever under the double thrust of the wind and the waves and the backwash recoiling from the cliffs: but she was still in the grip of the sea and her own momentum, and the distance was closing with frightening speed. It’s a chance I have to take, Mallory repeated to himself over and over again; it’s a chance I have to take. But that little ledge remote and just inaccessible, was fate’s last refinement of cruelty, the salt in the wound of extinction, and he knew in his heart of hearts that it wasn’t a chance at all, but just a suicidal gesture. And then Andrea had heaved the last of the tenders – worn truck tyres – outboard, and was towering above him, grinning down hugely into his face: and suddenly Mallory wasn’t so sure any more.

‘The ledge?’ Andrea’s vast, reassuring hand was on his shoulder.

Mallory nodded, knees bent in readiness, feet braced on the plunging, slippery deck.

‘Jump for it,’ Andrea boomed. ‘Then keep your legs stiff.’

There was no time for any more. The caique was swinging in broadside to, teetering on the crest of a wave, as high up the cliff as she would ever be, and Mallory knew it was now or never. His hands swung back behind his body, his knees bent farther, and then, in one convulsive leap he had flung himself upwards, fingers scrabbling on the wet rock of the cliff, then hooking over the rim of the ledge. For an instant he hung there at the length of his arms, unable to move, wincing as he heard the foremast crash against the ledge and snap in two, then his fingers left the ledge without their own volition, and he was almost half-way over, propelled by one gigantic heave from below.

He was not up yet. He was held only by the buckle of his belt, caught on the edge of the rock, a buckle now dragged up to his breastbone by the weight of his body. But he did not paw frantically for a handhold, or wriggle his body or flail his legs in the air – and any of these actions would have sent him crashing down again. At last, and once again, he was a man utterly at home in his own element. The greatest rock climber of his time, men called him, and this was what he had been born for.

Slowly, methodically, he felt the surface of the ledge, and almost at once he discovered a crack running back from the face. It would have been better had it been parallel to the face – and more than the width of a match-stick. But it was enough for Mallory. With infinite care he eased the hammer and a couple of spikes from his belt, worked a spike into the crack to obtain a minimal purchase, slid the other in some inches nearer, hooked his left wrist round the first, held the second spike with the fingers of the same hand and brought up the hammer in his free hand. Fifteen seconds later he was standing on the ledge.

Working quickly and surely, catlike in his balance on the slippery, shelving rock, he hammered a spike into the face of the cliff, securely and at a downward angle, about three feet above the ledge, dropped a clove hitch over the top and kicked the rest of the coil over the ledge. Then, and only then, he turned round and looked below him.

Less than a minute had passed since the caique had struck, but already she was a broken-masted, splintered shambles, sides caving in and visibly disintegrating as he watched. Every seven or eight seconds a giant comber would pick her up and fling her bodily against the cliff, the heavy truck tyres taking up only a fraction of the impact that followed, the sickening, rending crash that reduced the gunwales to matchwood, holed and split the sides and cracked the oaken timbers: and then she would roll clear, port side showing, the hungry sea pouring in through the torn and ruptured planking.

Three men were standing by what was left of the wheelhouse. Three men – suddenly, he realised that Casey Brown was missing, realised, too, that the engine was still running, its clamour rising and falling then rising again, at irregular intervals. Brown was edging the caique backwards and forwards along the cliff, keeping her as nearly as humanly possible in the same position, for he knew their lives depended on Mallory – and on himself. ‘The fool!’ Mallory swore. ‘The crazy fool!’

The caique surged back in a receding trough, steadied, then swept in against the cliff again, heeling over so wildly that the roof of the wheelhouse smashed and telescoped against the wall of the cliff. The impact was so fierce, the shock so sudden, that Stevens lost both handgrip and footing and was catapulted into the rock face, upflung arms raised for protection. For a moment he hung there, as if pinned against the wall, then fell back into the sea, limbs and head relaxed, lifeless in his limp acquiescence. He should have died then, drowned under the hammer-blows of the sea or crushed by the next battering-ram collision of caique and cliff. He should have died and he would have died but for the great arm that hooked down and plucked him out of the water like a limp and sodden rag doll and heaved him inboard a bare second before the next bludgeoning impact of the boat against the rock would have crushed the life out of him.

‘Come on, for God’s sake!’ Mallory shouted desperately. ‘She’ll be gone in a minute! The rope – use the rope!’ He saw Andrea and Miller exchange a few quick words, saw them shake and pummel Stevens and stand him on his feet, dazed and retching sea-water, but conscious. Andrea was speaking in his ear, emphasising something and guiding the rope into his hands, and then the caique was swinging in again, Stevens automatically shortening his grip on the rope. A tremendous boost from below by Andrea, Mallory’s long arm reaching out and Stevens was on the ledge, sitting with his back to the cliff and hanging on to the spike, dazed still and shaking a muzzy head, but safe.

‘You’re next, Miller!’ Mallory called. ‘Hurry up, man – jump for it!’

Miller looked at him and Mallory could have sworn that he was grinning. Instead of taking the rope from Andrea, he ran for’ard to the cabin.

‘Just a minute, boss!’ he bawled. ‘I’ve forgotten my toothbrush.’

He reappeared in a few seconds, but without the toothbrush. He was carrying the big, green box of explosives, and before Mallory had appreciated what was happening the box, all fifty pounds of it, was curving up into the air, upthrust by the Greek’s tireless arms. Automatically Mallory’s hands reached for and caught it. He overbalanced, stumbled and toppled forward, still clutching the box, then was brought up with a jerk. Stevens, still clutching the spike, was on his feet now, free hand hooked in Mallory’s belt: he was shivering violently, with cold and exhaustion and an oddly fear-laced excitement. But, like Mallory, he was a hillman at home again.

Mallory was just straightening up when the waterproofed radio set came soaring up. He caught it, placed it down, looked over the side.

‘Leave that bloody stuff alone!’ he shouted furiously. ‘Get up here yourselves – now!’

Two coils of rope landed on the ledge beside him, then the first of the rucksacks with the food and clothing. He was vaguely aware that Stevens was trying to stack the equipment in some sort of order.

‘Do you hear me?’ Mallory roared. ‘Get up here at once! That’s an order. The boat’s sinking, you bloody idiots!’

The caique was sinking. She was filling up quickly and Casey Brown had abandoned the flooded Kelvin. But she was a far steadier platform now, rolling through a much shorter arc, less violent in her soggy, yielding collisions with the cliff wall. For a moment Mallory thought the sea was dropping away, then he realised that the tons of water in the caique’s hold had drastically lowered her centre of gravity, were acting as a counter-balancing weight.

Miller cupped a hand to his ear. Even in the near darkness of the sinking flare his face had an oddly greenish pallor.

‘Can’t hear a word you say, boss. Besides, she ain’t sinkin’ yet.’ Once again he disappeared into the for’ard cabin.

Within thirty seconds, with all five men working furiously, the remainder of the equipment was on the ledge. The caique was down by the stern, the poop-deck covered and water pouring down the engine-room hatch-way as Brown struggled up the rope, the fo’c’sle awash as Miller grabbed the rope and started after him, and as Andrea reached up and swung in against the cliff his legs dangled over an empty sea. The caique had foundered, completely gone from sight: no drifting flotsam, not even an air bubble marked where she had so lately been.

The ledge was narrow, not three feet wide at its broadest, tapering off into the gloom on either side. Worse still, apart from the few square feet where Stevens had piled the gear, it shelved sharply outwards, the rock underfoot treacherous and slippery. Backs to the wall, Andrea and Miller had to stand on their heels, hands outspread and palms inward against the cliff, pressing in to it as closely as possible to maintain their balance. But in less than a minute Mallory had another two spikes hammered in about twenty inches above the ledge, ten feet apart and joined with a rope, a secure lifeline for all of them.

Wearily Miller slid down to a sitting position, leaned his chest in heartfelt thankfulness against the safe barrier of the rope. He fumbled in his breast pocket, produced a pack of cigarettes and handed them round, oblivious to the rain that soaked them in an instant. He was soaking wet from the waist downwards and both his knees had been badly bruised against the cliff wall: he was bitterly cold, drenched by heavy rain and the sheets of spray that broke continually over the ledge: the sharp edge of the rock bit cruelly into the calves of his legs, the tight rope constricted his breathing and he was still ashen-faced and exhausted from long hours of labour and seasickness: but when he spoke, it was with a voice of utter sincerity.

‘My Gawd!’ he said reverently. ‘Ain’t this wonderful!’

FIVE

Monday Night

0100–0200

Ninety minutes later Mallory wedged himself into a natural rock chimney on the cliff face, drove in a spike beneath his feet and tried to rest his aching, exhausted body. Two minutes’ rest he told himself, only two minutes while Andrea comes up: the rope was quivering and he could just hear, above the shrieking of the wind that fought to pluck him off the cliff face, the metallic scraping as Andrea’s boots struggled for a foothold on that wicked overhang immediately beneath him, the overhang that had all but defeated him, the obstacle that he had impossibly overcome only at the expense of torn hands and body completely spent, of shoulder muscles afire with agony and breath that rasped in great gulping inhalations into his starving lungs. Deliberately he forced his mind away from the pains that racked his body, from its insistent demands for rest, and listened again to the ringing of steel against rock, louder this time, carrying clearly even in the gale … He would have to tell Andrea to be more careful on the remaining twenty feet or so that separated them from the top.

At least, Mallory thought wryly, no one would have to tell him to be quiet. He couldn’t have made any noise with his feet if he’d tried – not with only a pair of torn socks as cover for his bruised and bleeding feet. He’d hardly covered his first twenty feet of the climb when he’d discovered that his climbing boots were quite useless, had robbed his feet of all sensitivity, the ability to locate and engage the tiny toe-holds which afforded the only sources of purchase. He had removed them with great difficulty, tied them to his belt by the laces – and lost them, had them torn off, when forcing his way under a projecting spur of rock.

The climb itself had been a nightmare, a brutal, gasping agony in the wind and the rain and the darkness, an agony that had eventually dulled the danger and masked the suicidal risks in climbing that sheer unknown face, in interminable agony of hanging on by fingertips and toes, of driving in a hundred spikes, of securing ropes then inching on again up into the darkness. It was a climb such as he had not ever made before, such as he knew he would not ever make again, for this was insanity. It was a climb that had extended him to the utmost of his great skill, his courage and his strength, and then far beyond that again, and he had not known that such reserves, such limitless resources, lay within him or any man. Nor did he know the well-spring, the source of that power that had driven him to where he was, within easy climbing reach of the top. The challenge to a mountaineer, personal danger, pride in the fact that he was probably the only man in southern Europe who could have made the climb, even the sure knowledge that time was running out for the men on Kheros – it was none of these things, he knew that: in the last twenty minutes it had taken him to negotiate that overhang beneath his feet his mind had been drained of all thought and all emotion, and he had climbed only as a machine.

Hand over hand up the rope, easily, powerfully, Andrea hauled himself over the smoothly swelling convexity of the overhang, legs dangling in midair. He was festooned with heavy coils of rope, girdled with spikes that protruded from his belt at every angle and lent him the incongruous appearance of a comic-opera Corsican bandit. Quickly he hauled himself up beside Mallory, wedged himself in the chimney and mopped his sweating forehead. As always, he was grinning hugely.

Mallory looked at him, smiled back. Andrea, he reflected, had no right to be there. It was Stevens’s place, but Stevens had still been suffering from shock, had lost much blood: besides, it required a first-class climber to bring up the rear, to coil up the ropes as he came and to remove the spikes – there must be no trace left of the ascent: or so Mallory had told him, and Stevens had reluctantly agreed, although the hurt in his face had been easy to see. More than ever now Mallory was glad he had resisted the quiet plea in Stevens’s face: Stevens was undoubtedly a fine climber, but what Mallory had required that night was not another mountaineer but a human ladder. Time and time again during the ascent he had stood on Andrea’s back, his shoulders, his upturned palm and once – for at least ten seconds and while he was still wearing his steel-shod boots – on his head. And not once had Andrea protested or stumbled or yielded an inch. The man was indestructible, as tough and enduring as the rock on which he stood. Since dusk had fallen that evening, Andrea had laboured unceasingly, done enough work to kill two ordinary men, and, looking at him then, Mallory realised, almost with despair, that even now he didn’t look particularly tired.

Mallory gestured at the rock chimney, then upwards at its shadowy mouth limned in blurred rectangular outline against the pale glimmer of the sky. He leant forward, mouth close to Andrea’s ear.

‘Twenty feet, Andrea,’ he said softly. His breath was still coming in painful gasps. ‘It’ll be no bother – it’s fissured on my side and the chances are that it goes up to the top.’

Andrea looked up the chimney speculatively, nodded in silence.

‘Better with your boots off,’ Mallory went on. ‘And any spikes we use we’ll work in by hand.’

‘Even on a night like this – high winds and rain, cold and black as a pig’s inside – and on a cliff like this?’ There was neither doubt nor question in Andrea’s voice: rather it was acquiescence, unspoken confirmation of an unspoken thought. They had been so long together, had reached such a depth of understanding that words between them were largely superfluous.

Mallory nodded, waited while Andrea worked home a spike, looped his ropes over it and secured what was left of the long ball of twine that stretched four hundred feet below to the ledge where the others waited. Andrea then removed boots and spikes, fastening them to the ropes, eased the slender, double-edged throwing-knife in its leather shoulder scabbard, looked across at Mallory and nodded in turn.

The first ten feet were easy. Palms and back against one side of the chimney and stocking-soled feet against the other, Mallory jack-knifed his way upwards until the widening sheer of the walls defeated him. Legs braced against the far wall, he worked in a spike as far up as he could reach, grasped it with both hands, dropped his legs across and found a toe-hold in the crevice. Two minutes later his hands hooked over the crumbling edge of the precipice.

Noiselessly and with an infinite caution he fingered aside earth and grass and tiny pebbles until his hands were locked on the solid rock itself, bent his knee to seek lodgment for the final toehold, then eased a wary head above the cliff-top, a movement imperceptible in its slow-motion, millimetric stealth. He stopped moving altogether as soon as his eyes had cleared the level of the cliff, stared out into the unfamiliar darkness, his whole being, the entire field of consciousness, concentrated into his eyes and his ears. Illogically, and for the first time in all that terrifying ascent, he became acutely aware of his own danger and helplessness, and he cursed himself for his folly in not borrowing Miller’s silenced automatic.

The darkness below the high horizon of the lifting hills beyond was just one degree less than absolute: shapes and angles, heights and depressions were resolving themselves in nebulous silhouette, contours and shadowy profiles emerging reluctantly from the darkness, a darkness suddenly no longer vague and unfamiliar but disturbingly reminiscent in what it revealed, clamouring for recognition. And then abruptly, almost with a sense of shock, Mallory had it. The cliff-top before his eyes was exactly as Monsieur Vlachos had drawn and described it – the narrow, bare strip of ground running parallel to the cliff, the jumble of huge boulders behind them and then, beyond these, the steep scree-strewn lower slopes of the mountains. The first break they’d had yet, Mallory thought exultantly – but what a break! The sketchiest navigation but the most incredible luck, right bang on the nose of the target – the highest point of the highest, most precipitous cliffs in Navarone: the one place where the Germans never mounted a guard, because the climb was impossible! Mallory felt the relief, the high elation wash through him in waves. Jubilantly he straightened his leg, hoisted himself half-way over the edge, arms straight, palms down on the top of the cliff. And then he froze into immobility, petrified as the solid rock beneath his hands, his heart thudding painfully in his throat.

One of the boulders had moved. Seven, maybe eight yards away, a shadow had gradually straightened, detached itself stealthily from the surrounding rock, was advancing slowly towards the edge of the cliff. And then the shadow was no longer ‘it’. There could be no mistake now – the long jack-boots, the long greatcoat beneath the waterproof cape, the close-fitting helmet were all too familiar. Damn Vlachos! Damn Jensen! Damn all the know-alls who sat at home, the pundits of Intelligence who gave a man wrong information and sent him out to die. And in the same instant Mallory damned himself for his own carelessness, for he had been expecting this all along.

For the first two or three seconds Mallory had lain rigid and unmoving, temporarily paralysed in mind and body: already the guard had advanced four or five steps, carbine held in readiness before him, head turned sideways as he listened into the high, thin whine of the wind and the deep and distant booming of the surf below, trying to isolate the sound that had aroused his suspicions. But now the first shock was over and Mallory’s mind was working again. To go up on to the top of the cliff would be suicidal: ten to one the guard would hear him scrambling over the edge and shoot him out of hand: and if he did get up he had neither the weapons nor, after the exhausting climb, the strength to tackle an armed, fresh man. He would have to go back down. But he would have to slide down slowly, an inch at a time. At night, Mallory knew, side vision is even more acute than direct, and the guard might catch a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. And then he would only have to turn his head and that would be the end: even in that darkness, Mallory realised, there could be no mistaking the bulk of his silhouette against the sharp line of the edge of the cliff.

Gradually, every movement as smooth and controlled as possible, every soft and soundless breath a silent prayer, Mallory slipped gradually back over the edge of the cliff. Still the guard advanced, making for a point about five yards to Mallory’s left, but still he looked away, his ear turned into the wind. And then Mallory was down, only his finger-tips over the top, and Andrea’s great bulk was beside him, his mouth to his ear.

‘What is it? Somebody there?’

‘A sentry,’ Mallory whispered back. His arms were beginning to ache from the strain. ‘He’s heard something and he’s looking for us.’

Suddenly he shrank away from Andrea, pressed himself as closely as possible to the face of the cliff, was vaguely aware of Andrea doing the same thing. A beam of light, hurtful and dazzling to eyes so long accustomed to the dark, had suddenly stabbed out at an angle over the edge of the cliff, was moving slowly along towards them. The German had his torch out, was methodically examining the rim of the cliff. From the angle of the beam, Mallory judged that he was walking along about a couple of feet from the edge. On that wild and gusty night he was taking no chances on the crumbly, treacherous top-soil of the cliff: even more likely, he was taking no chances on a pair of sudden hands reaching out for his ankles and jerking him to a mangled death on the rocks and reefs four hundred feet below.

Slowly, inexorably, the beam approached. Even at that slant, it was bound to catch them. With a sudden sick certainty Mallory realised that the German wasn’t just suspicious: he knew there was someone there, and he wouldn’t stop looking until he found them. And there was nothing they could do, just nothing at all … Then Andrea’s head was close to his again.

‘A stone,’ Andrea whispered. ‘Over there, behind him.’

Cautiously at first, then frantically, Mallory pawed the cliff-top with his right hand. Earth, only earth, grass roots and tiny pebbles – there was nothing even half the size of a marble. And then Andrea was thrusting something against him and his hand closed over the metallic smoothness of a spike: even in that moment of desperate urgency, with the slender, searching beam only feet away, Mallory was conscious of a sudden brief anger with himself – he had still a couple of spikes stuck in his belt and had forgotten all about them.

His arm swung back, jerked convulsively forward, sent the spike spinning away into the darkness. One second passed, then another, he knew he had missed, the beam was only inches from Andrea’s shoulders, and then the metallic clatter of the spike striking a boulder fell upon his ear like a benison. The beam wavered for a second, stabbed out aimlessly into the darkness and then whipped round, probing into the boulders to the left. And then the sentry was running towards them, slipping and stumbling in his haste, the barrel of the carbine gleaming in the light of the torch held clamped to it. He’d gone less than ten yards when Andrea was over the top of the cliff like a great, black cat, was padding noiselessly across the ground to the shelter of the nearest boulder. Wraith-like, he flitted in behind it and was gone, a shadow long among shadows.

The sentry was about twenty yards away now, the beam of his torch darting fearfully from boulder to boulder when Andrea struck the haft of his knife against a rock, twice. The sentry whirled round, torch shining along the line of the boulders, then started to run clumsily back again, the skirts of the greatcoat fluttering grotesquely in the wind. The torch was swinging wildly now, and Mallory caught a glimpse of a white, straining face, wide-eyed and fearful, incongruously at variance with the gladiatorial strength of the steel helmet above. God only knew, Mallory thought, what wild and panic-stricken thoughts were passing through his confused mind: noises from the cliff-top, metallic sound from either side among the boulders, the long, eerie vigil, afraid and companionless, on a deserted cliff edge on a dark and tempest-filled night in a hostile land – suddenly Mallory felt a deep stab of compassion for this man, a man like himself, someone’s well-loved husband or brother or son who was only doing a dirty and dangerous job as best he could and because he was told to, compassion for his loneliness and his anxieties and his fears, for the sure knowledge that before he had drawn breath another three times he would be dead … Slowly, gauging his time and distance, Mallory raised his head.

‘Help!’ he shouted. ‘Help me! I’m falling!’

The soldier checked in mid-stride and spun round, less than five feet from the rock that hid Andrea. For a second the beam of his torch waved wildly around, then settled on Mallory’s head. For another moment he stood stock still then the carbine in his right hand swung up, the left hand reached down for the barrel. Then he grunted once, a violent and convulsive exhalation of breath, and the thud of the hilt of Andrea’s knife striking home against the ribs carried clearly to Mallory’s ears, even against the wind …

Mallory stared down at the dead man, at Andrea’s impassive face as he wiped the blade of his knife on the greatcoat, rose slowly to his feet, sighed and slid the knife back in its scabbard.

‘So, my Keith!’ Andrea reserved the punctilious ‘Captain’ for company only. ‘This is why our young lieutenant eats his heart out down below.’

‘That is why,’ Mallory acknowledged. ‘I knew it – or I almost knew it. So did you. Too many coincidences – the German caique investigating, the trouble at the watchtower – and now this.’ Mallory swore, softly and bitterly. ‘This is the end for our friend Captain Briggs of Castelrosso. He’ll be cashiered within the month. Jensen will make certain of that.’

Andrea nodded.

‘He let Nicolai go?’

‘Who else could have known that we were to have landed here, tipped off everyone along the line?’ Mallory paused, dismissed the thought, caught Andrea by the arm. ‘The Germans are thorough. Even although they must know it’s almost an impossibility to land on a night like this, they’ll have a dozen sentries scattered along the cliffs.’ Unconsciously Mallory had lowered his voice. ‘But they wouldn’t depend on one man to cope with five. So –’

‘Signals,’ Andrea finished for him. ‘They must have some way of letting the others know. Perhaps flares –’

‘No, not that,’ Mallory disagreed. ‘Give their position away. Telephone. It has to be that. Remember how they were in Crete – miles of field telephone wire all over the shop?’

Andrea nodded, picked up the dead man’s torch, hooded it in his huge hand and started searching. He returned in less than a minute.

‘Telephone it is,’ he announced softly. ‘Over there, under the rocks.’

‘Nothing we can do about it,’ Mallory said. ‘If it does ring, I’ll have to answer or they’ll come hot-footing along. I only hope to heaven they haven’t got a bloody password. It would be just like them.’

He turned away, stopped suddenly.

‘But someone’s got to come sometime – a relief, sergeant of the guard, something like that. Probably he’s supposed to make an hourly report. Someone’s bound to come – and come soon. My God, Andrea, we’ll have to make it fast!’

‘And this poor devil?’ Andrea gestured to the huddled shadow at his feet.

‘Over the side with him.’ Mallory grimaced in distaste. ‘Won’t make any difference to the poor bastard now, and we can’t leave any traces. The odds are they’ll think he’s gone over the edge – this top soil’s as crumbly and treacherous as hell … You might see if he’s any papers on him – never know how useful they might be.’

‘Not half as useful as these boots on his feet.’ Andrea waved a large hand towards the scree-strewn slopes. ‘You are not going to walk very far there in your stocking soles.’

Five minutes later Mallory tugged three times on the string that stretched down into the darkness below. Three answering tugs came from the ledge, and then the cord vanished rapidly down over the edge of the overhang, drawing with it the long, steel-cored rope that Mallory paid out from the coil on the top of the cliff.

The box of explosives was the first of the gear to come up. The weighted rope plummeted straight down from the point of the overhang, and padded though the box was on every side with lashed rucksacks and sleeping-bags it still crashed terrifyingly against the cliff on the inner arc of every wind-driven swing of the pendulum. But there was no time for finesse, to wait for the diminishing swing of the pendulum after each tug. Securely anchored to a rope that stretched around the base of a great boulder, Andrea leaned far out over the edge of the precipice and reeled in the seventy-pound deadweight as another man would a trout. In less than three minutes the ammunition box lay beside him on the cliff-top; five minutes later the firing generator, guns and pistols, wrapped in a couple of other sleeping-bags and their lightweight, reversible tent – white on one side, brown and green camouflage on the other – lay beside the explosives.

A third time the rope went down into the rain and the darkness, a third time the tireless Andrea hauled it in, hand over hand. Mallory was behind him, coiling in the slack of the rope, when he heard Andrea’s sudden exclamation: two quick strides and he was at the edge of the cliff, his hand on the big Greek’s arm.

‘What’s up, Andrea? Why have you stopped –?’

He broke off, peered through the gloom at the rope in Andrea’s hand, saw that it was being held between only finger and thumb. Twice Andrea jerked the rope up a foot or two, let it fall again: the weightless rope swayed wildly in the wind.

‘Gone?’ Mallory asked quietly.

Andrea nodded without speaking.

‘Broken?’ Mallory was incredulous. ‘A wire-cored rope?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Quickly Andrea reeled in the remaining forty feet. The twine was still attached to the same place, about a fathom from the end. The rope was intact.

‘Somebody tied a knot.’ Just for a moment the giant’s voice sounded tired. ‘They didn’t tie it too well.’

Mallory made to speak, then flung up an instinctive arm as a great, forked tongue of flame streaked between the cliff-top and unseen clouds above. Their cringing eyes were still screwed tight shut, their nostrils full of the acrid, sulphurous smell of burning, when the first volley of thunder crashed in Titan fury almost directly overhead, a deafening artillery to mock the pitiful efforts of embattled man, doubly terrifying in the total darkness that followed that searing flash. Gradually the echoes pealed and faded inland in diminishing reverberations, were lost among the valleys of the hills.

‘My God!’ Mallory murmured. ‘That was close. We’d better make it fast, Andrea – this cliff is liable to be lit up like a fairground any minute … What was in that last load you were bringing up?’ He didn’t really have to ask – he himself had arranged for the breaking up of the equipment into three separate loads before he’d left the ledge. It wasn’t even that he suspected his tired mind of playing tricks on him; but it was tired enough, too tired, to probe the hidden compulsion, the nameless hope that prompted him to grasp at nameless straws that didn’t even exist.

‘The food,’ Andrea said gently. ‘All the food, the stove, the fuel – and the compasses.’

For five, perhaps ten seconds, Mallory stood motionless. One half of his mind, conscious of the urgency, the desperate need for haste, was jabbing him mercilessly: the other half held him momentarily in a vast irresolution, an irresolution of coldness and numbness that came not from the lashing wind and sleety rain but from his own mind, from the bleak and comfortless imaginings of lost wanderings on that harsh and hostile island, with neither food nor fire … And then Andrea’s great hand was on his shoulder, and he was laughing softly.

‘Just so much less to carry, my Keith. Think how grateful our tired friend Corporal Miller is going to be … This is only a little thing.’

‘Yes,’ Mallory said. ‘Yes, of course. A little thing.’ He turned abruptly, tugged the cord, watched the rope disappear over the edge.

Fifteen minutes later, in drenching, torrential rain, a great, sheeting downpour almost constantly illuminated by the jagged, branching stilettos of the forked lightning, Casey Brown’s bedraggled head came into view over the edge of the cliff. The thunder, too, emptily cavernous in that flat and explosive intensity of sound that lies at the heart of a thunderstorm, was almost continuous: but in the brief intervals, Casey’s voice, rich in his native Clydeside accent, carried clearly. He was expressing himself fluently in basic Anglo-Saxon, and with cause. He had had the assistance of two ropes on the way up – the one stretched from spike to spike and the one used for raising supplies, which Andrea had kept pulling in as he made the ascent. Casey Brown had secured the end of this round his waist with a bowline, but the bowline had proved to be nothing of the sort but a slip-knot, and Andrea’s enthusiastic help had almost cut him in half. He was still sitting on the cliff-top, exhausted head between his knees, the radio still strapped to his back, when two tugs on Andrea’s rope announced that Dusty Miller was on his way up.

Another quarter of an hour elapsed, an interminable fifteen minutes when, in the lulls between the thunder-claps, every slightest sound was an approaching enemy patrol, before Miller materialised slowly out of the darkness, halfway down the rock chimney. He was climbing steadily and methodically, then checked abruptly at the cliff-top, groping hands pawing uncertainly on the top-soil of the cliff. Puzzled, Mallory bent down, peered into the lean face: both the eyes were clamped tightly shut.

‘Relax, Corporal,’ Mallory advised kindly. ‘You have arrived.’

Dusty Miller slowly opened his eyes, peered round at the edge of the cliff, shuddered and crawled quickly on hands and knees to the shelter of the nearest boulders. Mallory followed and looked down at him curiously.

‘What was the idea of closing your eyes coming over the top?’

‘I did not,’ Miller protested.

Mallory said nothing.

‘I closed them at the bottom,’ Miller explained wearily. ‘I opened them at the top.’

Mallory looked at him incredulously.

‘What! All the way?’

‘It’s like I told you, boss,’ Miller complained. ‘Back in Castelrosso. When I cross a street and step up on to the sidewalk I gotta hang on to the nearest lamp-post. More or less.’ He broke off, looked at Andrea leaning far out over the side of the cliff, and shivered again. ‘Brother! Oh, brother! Was I scared!’

Fear. Terror. Panic. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Once, twice, a hundred times, Andy Stevens repeated the words to himself, over and over again, like a litany. A psychiatrist had told him that once and he’d read it a dozen times since. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. The mind is a limited thing, they had said. It can only hold one thought at a time, one impulse to action. Say to yourself, I am brave, I am overcoming this fear, this stupid, unreasoning panic which has no origin except in my own mind, and because the mind can only hold one thought at a time, and because thinking and feeling are one, then you will be brave, you will overcome and the fear will vanish like a shadow in the night. And so Andy Stevens said these things to himself, and the shadows only lengthened and deepened, lengthened and deepened, and the icy claws of fear dug ever more savagely into his dull exhausted mind, into his twisted, knotted stomach.

His stomach. That knotted ball of jangled, writhing nerve-ends beneath the solar plexus. No one could ever know how it was, how it felt, except those whose shredded minds were going, collapsing into complete and final breakdown. The waves of panic and nausea and faintness that flooded up through a suffocating throat to a mind dark and spent and sinewless, a mind fighting with woollen fingers to cling on to the edge of the abyss, a tired and lacerated mind, only momentarily in control, wildly rejecting the clamorous demands of a nervous system, which had already taken far too much, that he should let go, open the torn fingers that were clenched so tightly round the rope. It was just that easy. ‘Rest after toil, port after stormy seas.’ What was that famous stanza of Spenser’s? Sobbing aloud, Stevens wrenched out another spike, sent it spinning into the waiting sea three hundred long feet below, pressed himself closely into the face and inched his way despairingly upwards.

Fear. Fear had been at his elbow all his life, his constant companion, his alter ego, at his elbow, or in close prospect or immediate recall. He had become accustomed to that fear, at times almost reconciled, but the sick agony of this night lay far beyond either tolerance or familiarity. He had never known anything like this before, and even in his terror and confusion he was dimly aware that the fear did not spring from the climb itself. True, the cliff was sheer and almost vertical, and the lightning, the ice-cold rain, the darkness and the bellowing thunder were a waking nightmare. But the climb, technically, was simple: the rope stretched all the way to the top and all he had to do was to follow it and dispose of the spikes as he went. He was sick and bruised and terribly tired, his head ached abominably and he had lost a great deal of blood: but then, more often than not, it is in the darkness of agony and exhaustion that the spirit of man burns most brightly.

Andy Stevens was afraid because his self-respect was gone. Always before, that had been his sheet anchor, had tipped the balance against his ancient enemy – the respect in which other men had held him, the respect he had had for himself. But now these were gone, for his two greatest fears had been realised – he was known to be afraid, he had failed his fellow-man. Both in the fight with the German caique and when anchored above the watchtower in the creek, he had known that Mallory and Andrea knew. He had never met such men before, and he had known all along that he could never hide his secrets from such men. He should have gone up that cliff with Mallory, but Mallory had made excuses and taken Andrea instead – Mallory knew he was afraid. And twice before, in Castelrosso and when the German boat had closed in on them, he had almost failed his friends – and tonight he had failed them terribly. He had not been thought fit to lead the way with Mallory – and it was he, the sailor of the party, who had made such a botch of tying that last knot, had lost all the food and the fuel that had plummeted into the sea a bare ten feet from where he had stood on the ledge … and a thousand men on Kheros were depending on a failure so abject as himself. Sick and spent, spent in mind and body and spirit, moaning aloud in his anguish of fear and self-loathing, and not knowing where one finished and the other began, Andy Stevens climbed blindly on.

The sharp, high-pitched call-up buzz of the telephone cut abruptly through the darkness on the cliff-top. Mallory stiffened and half-turned, hands clenching involuntarily. Again it buzzed, the jarring stridency carrying clearly above the bass rumble of the thunder, fell silent again. And then it buzzed again and kept on buzzing, peremptory in its harsh insistence.

Mallory was half-way towards it when he checked in mid-step, turned slowly round and walked back towards Andrea. The big Greek looked at him curiously.

‘You have changed your mind?’

Mallory nodded but said nothing.

‘They will keep on ringing until they get an answer,’ Andrea murmured. ‘And when they get no answer, they will come. They will come quickly and soon.’

‘I know, I know.’ Mallory shrugged. ‘We have to take that chance – certainty rather. The question is – how long will it be before anyone turns up.’ Instinctively he looked both ways along the windswept cliff-top: Miller and Brown were posted one on either side about fifty yards away, lost in the darkness. ‘It’s not worth the risk. The more I think of it, the poorer I think my chances would be of getting away with it. In matters of routine the old Hun tends to be an inflexible sort of character. There’s probably a set way of answering the phone, or the sentry has to identify himself by name, or there’s a password – or maybe my voice would give me away. On the other hand the sentry’s gone without trace, all our gear is up and so’s everyone except Stevens. In other words, we’ve practically made it. We’ve landed – and nobody knows we’re here.’

‘Yes.’ Andrea nodded slowly. ‘Yes, you are right – and Stevens should be up in two or three minutes. It would be foolish to throw away everything we’ve gained.’ He paused, then went on quietly: ‘But they are going to come running.’ The phone stopped ringing as suddenly as it had started. ‘They are going to come now.’

‘I know. I hope to hell Stevens …’ Mallory broke off, spun on his heel, said over his shoulder, ‘Keep your eye open for him, will you? I’ll warn the others we’re expecting company.’

Mallory moved quickly along the cliff-top, keeping well away from the edge. He hobbled rather than walked – the sentry’s boots were too small for him and chafed his toes cruelly. Deliberately he closed his mind to the thought of how his feet would be after a few hours’ walking over rough territory in these boots: time enough for the reality, he thought grimly, without the added burden of anticipation … He stopped abruptly as something hard and metallic pushed into the small of his back.

‘Surrender or die!’ The drawling, nasal voice was positively cheerful: after what he had been through on the caique and the cliff face, just to set feet on solid ground again was heaven enough for Dusty Miller.

‘Very funny,’ Mallory growled. ‘Very funny indeed.’ He looked curiously at Miller. The American had removed his oilskin cape – the rain had ceased as abruptly as it had come – to reveal a jacket and braided waistcoat even more sodden and saturated than his trousers. It didn’t make sense. But there was no time for questions.

‘Did you hear the phone ringing just now?’ he asked.

‘Was that what it was? Yeah, I heard it.’

‘The sentry’s phone. His hourly report, or whatever it was, must have been overdue. We didn’t answer it. They’ll be hot-footing along any minute now, suspicious as hell and looking for trouble. Maybe your side, maybe Brown’s. Can’t approach any other way unless they break their necks climbing over these boulders.’ Mallory gestured at the shapeless jumble of rocks behind them. ‘So keep your eyes skinned.’

‘I’ll do that, boss. No shootin’, huh?’

‘No shooting. Just get back as quickly and quietly as you can and let us know. Come back in five minutes anyway.’

Mallory hurried away, retracing his steps. Andrea was stretched full length on the cliff-top, peering over the edge. He twisted his head round as Mallory approached.

‘I can hear him. He’s just at the overhang.’

‘Good.’ Mallory moved on without breaking step. ‘Tell him to hurry, please.’

Ten yards farther on Mallory checked, peered into the gloom ahead. Somebody was coming along the cliff-top at a dead run, stumbling and slipping on the loose gravelly soil.

‘Brown?’ Mallory called softly.

‘Yes, sir. It’s me.’ Brown was up to him now, breathing heavily, pointing back in the direction he had just come. ‘Somebody’s coming, and coming fast! Torches waving and jumping all over the place – must be running.’

‘How many?’ Mallory asked quickly.

‘Four or five at least.’ Brown was still gasping for breath. ‘Maybe more – four or five torches, anyway. You can see them for yourself.’ Again he pointed backwards, then blinked in puzzlement. ‘That’s bloody funny! They’re all gone.’ He turned back swiftly to Mallory. ‘But I can swear –’

‘Don’t worry,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘You saw them all right. I’ve been expecting visitors. They’re getting close now and taking no chances … How far away?’

‘Hundred yards – not more than a hundred and fifty.’

‘Go and get Miller. Tell him to get back here fast.’

Mallory ran back along the cliff edge and knelt beside the huge length of Andrea.

‘They’re coming, Andrea,’ he said quickly. ‘From the left. At least five, probably more. Two minutes at the most. Where’s Stevens? Can you see him?’

‘I can see him.’ Andrea was magnificently unperturbed. ‘He is just past the overhang …’ The rest of his words were lost, drowned in a sudden, violent thunderclap, but there was no need for more. Mallory could see Stevens now, climbing up the rope, strangely old and enfeebled in action, hand over hand in paralysing slowness, half-way now between the overhang and the foot of the chimney.

‘Good God!’ Mallory swore. ‘What’s the matter with him? He’s going to take all day …’ He checked himself, cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘Stevens! Stevens!’ But there was no sign that Stevens had heard. He still kept climbing with the same unnatural over-deliberation, a robot in slow motion.

‘He is very near the end,’ Andrea said quietly. ‘You see he does not even lift his head. When a climber does not lift his head, he is finished.’ He stirred. ‘I will go down for him.’

‘No.’ Mallory’s hand was on his shoulder. ‘Stay here. I can’t risk you both … Yes, what is it?’ He was aware that Brown was back, bending over him, his breath coming in great heaving gasps.

‘Hurry, sir; hurry, for God’s sake!’ A few brief words but he had to suck in two huge gulps of air to get them out. ‘They’re on top of us!’

‘Get back to the rocks with Miller,’ Mallory said urgently. ‘Cover us … Stevens! Stevens!’ But again the wind swept up the face of the cliff, carried his words away.

‘Stevens! For God’s sake, man! Stevens!’ His voice was low-pitched, desperate, but this time some quality in it must have reached through Stevens’s fog of exhaustion and touched his consciousness, for he stopped climbing and lifted his head, hand cupped to his ear.

‘Some Germans coming!’ Mallory called through funnelled hands, as loudly as he dared. ‘Get to the foot of the chimney and stay there. Don’t make a sound. Understand?’

Stevens lifted his hand, gestured in tired acknowledgment, lowered his head, started to climb up again. He was going even more slowly now, his movements fumbling and clumsy.

‘Do you think he understands?’ Andrea was troubled.

‘I think so. I don’t know.’ Mallory stiffened and caught Andrea’s arm. It was beginning to rain again, not heavily yet, and through the drizzle he’d caught sight of a hooded torch beam probing among the rocks thirty yards away to his left. ‘Over the edge with the rope,’ he whispered. ‘The spike at the bottom of the chimney will hold it. Come on – let’s get out of here!’

Gradually, meticulous in their care not to dislodge the smallest pebble, Mallory and Andrea inched back from the edge, squirmed round and headed back for the rocks, pulling themselves along on their elbows and knees. The few yards were interminable and without even a gun in his hand Mallory felt defenceless, completely exposed. An illogical feeling, he knew, for the first beam of light to fall on them meant the end not for them but for the man who held the torch. Mallory had complete faith in Brown and Miller … That wasn’t important. What mattered was the complete escape from detection. Twice during the last endless few feet a wandering beam reached out towards them, the second a bare arm’s length away: both times they pressed their faces into the sodden earth, lest the pale blur of their faces betray them, and lay very still. And then, all at once it seemed, they were among the rocks and safe.

In a moment Miller was beside them, a half-seen shadow against the darker dusk of the rocks around them.

‘Plenty of time, plenty of time,’ he whispered sarcastically. ‘Why didn’t you wait another half-hour?’ He gestured to the left, where the flickering of torches, the now clearly audible murmur of guttural voices, were scarcely twenty yards away. ‘We’d better move farther back. They’re looking for him among the rocks.’

‘For him or for his telephone,’ Mallory murmured in agreement. ‘You’re right anyway. Watch your guns on these rocks. Take the gear with you … And if they look over and find Stevens we’ll have to take the lot. No time for fancy work and to hell with the noise. Use the automatic carbines.’

Andy Stevens had heard, but he had not understood. It was not that he panicked, was too terrified to understand, for he was no longer afraid. Fear is of the mind, but his mind had ceased to function, drugged by the last stages of exhaustion, crushed by the utter, damnable tiredness that held his limbs, his whole body, in leaden thrall. He did not know it, but fifty feet below he had struck his head against a spur of rock, a sharp, wicked projection that had torn his gaping temple wound open to the bone. His strength drained out with the pulsing blood.

He had heard Mallory, had heard something about the chimney he had now reached, but his mind had failed to register the meaning of the words. All that Stevens knew was that he was climbing, and that one always kept on climbing until one reached the top. That was what his father had always impressed upon him, his brothers too. You must reach the top.

He was half-way up the chimney now, resting on the spike that Mallory had driven into the fissure. He hooked his fingers in the crack, bent back his head and stared up towards the mouth of the chimney. Ten feet away, no more. He was conscious of neither surprise nor elation. It was just there: he had to reach it. He could hear voices, carrying clearly from the top. He was vaguely surprised that his friends were making no attempt to help him, that they had thrown away the rope that would have made those last few feet so easy, but he felt no bitterness, no emotion at all: perhaps they were trying to test him. What did it matter anyway – he had to reach the top.

He reached the top. Carefully, as Mallory had done before him, he pushed aside the earth and tiny pebbles, hooked his fingers over the edge, found the same toe-hold as Mallory had and levered himself upwards. He saw the flickering torches, heard the excited voices, and then for an instant the curtain of fog in his mind lifted and a last tidal wave of fear washed over him and he knew that the voices were the voices of the enemy and that they had destroyed his friends. He knew now that he was alone, that he had failed, that this was the end, one way or another, and that it had all been for nothing. And then the fog closed over him again, and there was nothing but the emptiness of it all, the emptiness and the futility, the overwhelming lassitude and despair and his body slowly sinking down the face of the cliff. And then the hooked fingers – they, too, were slipping away, opening gradually, reluctantly as the fingers of a drowning man releasing their final hold on a spar of wood. There was no fear now, only a vast and heedless indifference as his hands slipped away and he fell like a stone, twenty vertical feet into the cradling bottle-neck at the foot of the chimney.

He himself made no sound, none at all: the soundless scream of agony never passed his lips, for the blackness came with the pain: but the straining ears of the men crouching in the rocks above caught clearly the dull, sickening crack as his right leg fractured cleanly in two, snapping like a rotten bough.

SIX

Monday Night

0200–0600

The German patrol was everything that Mallory had feared – efficient, thorough and very, very painstaking. It even had imagination, in the person of its young and competent sergeant, and that was more dangerous still.

There were only four of them, in high boots, helmets and green, grey and brown mottled capes. First of all they located the telephone and reported to base. Then the young sergeant sent two men to search another hundred yards or so along the cliff, while he and the fourth soldier probed among the rocks that paralleled the cliff. The search was slow and careful, but the two men did not penetrate very far into the rocks. To Mallory, the sergeant’s reasoning was obvious and logical. If the sentry had gone to sleep or taken ill, it was unlikely that he would have gone far in among that confused jumble of boulders. Mallory and the others were safely back beyond their reach.

And then came what Mallory had feared – an organised, methodical inspection of the cliff-top itself: worse still, it began with a search along the very edge. Securely held by his three men with interlinked arms – the last with a hand hooked round his belt – the sergeant walked slowly along the rim, probing every inch with the spot-lit beam of a powerful torch. Suddenly he stopped short, exclaimed suddenly and stooped, torch and face only inches from the ground. There was no question as to what he had found – the deep gouge made in the soft, crumbling soil by the climbing rope that had been belayed round the boulder and gone over the edge of the cliff … Softly, silently, Mallory and his three companions straightened to their knees or to their feet, gun barrels lining along the tops of boulders or peering out between cracks in the rocks. There was no doubt in any of their minds that Stevens was lying there helplessly in the crutch of the chimney, seriously injured or dead. It needed only one German carbine to point down that cliff face, however carelessly, and these four men would die. They would have to die.

The sergeant was stretched out his length now, two men holding his legs. His head and shoulders were over the edge of the cliff, the beam from his torch stabbing down the chimney. For ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, there was no sound on the cliff-top, no sound at all, only the high, keening moan of the wind and the swish of the rain in the stunted grass. And then the sergeant had wriggled back and risen to his feet, slowly shaking his head. Mallory gestured to the others to sink down behind the boulders again, but even so the sergeant’s soft Bavarian voice carried clearly in the wind.

‘It’s Ehrich all right, poor fellow.’ Compassion and anger blended curiously in the voice. ‘I warned him often enough about his carelessness, about going too near the edge of that cliff. It is very treacherous.’ Instinctively the sergeant stepped back a couple of feet and looked again at the gouge in the soft earth. ‘That’s where his heel slipped – or maybe the butt of his carbine. Not that it matters now.’

‘Is he dead, do you think, Sergeant?’ The speaker was only a boy, nervous and unhappy.

‘It’s hard to say … Look for yourself.’

Gingerly the youth lay down on the cliff-top, peering cautiously over the lip of the rock. The other soldiers were talking among themselves, in short staccato sentences when Mallory turned to Miller, cupped his hands to his mouth and the American’s ear. He could contain his puzzlement no longer.

‘Was Stevens wearing his dark suit when you left him?’ he whispered.

‘Yeah,’ Miller whispered back. ‘Yeah, I think he was.’ A pause. ‘No dammit, I’m wrong. We both put on our rubber camouflage capes about the same time.’

Mallory nodded. The waterproofs of the Germans were almost identical with their own: and the sentry’s hair, Mallory remembered had been jet black – the same colour as Stevens’s dyed hair. Probably all that was visible from above was a crumpled, cape-shrouded figure and a dark head. The sergeant’s mistake in identity was more than understandable: it was inevitable.

The young soldier eased himself back from the edge of the cliff and hoisted himself carefully to his feet.

‘You’re right, Sergeant. It is Ehrich.’ The boy’s voice was unsteady. ‘He’s alive, I think. I saw his cape move, just a little. It wasn’t the wind, I’m sure of that.’

Mallory felt Andrea’s massive hand squeezing his arm, felt the quick surge of relief, then elation, wash through him. So Stevens was alive! Thank God for that! They’d save the boy yet. He heard Andrea whispering the news to the others, then grinned wryly to himself, ironic at his own gladness. Jensen definitely would not have approved of this jubilation. Stevens had already done his part, navigated the boat to Navarone, and climbed the cliff: and now he was only a crippled liability, would be a drag on the whole party, reduce what pitiful chances of success remained to them. For a High Command who pushed the counters around crippled pawns slowed up the whole game, made the board so damnably untidy. It was most inconsiderate of Stevens not to have killed himself so that they could have disposed of him neatly and without trace in the deep and hungry waters that boomed around the foot of the cliff … Mallory clenched his hands in the darkness and swore to himself that the boy would live, come home again, and to hell with total war and all its inhuman demands … Just a kid, that was all, a scared and broken kid and the bravest of them all.

The young sergeant was issuing a string of orders to his men, his voice quick, crisp and confident. A doctor, splints, rescue stretcher, anchored sheer-legs, ropes, spikes – the trained, well-ordered mind missed nothing. Mallory waited tensely, wondering how many men, if any, would be left on guard, for the guards would have to go and that would inevitably betray them. The question of their quick and silent disposal never entered his mind – a whisper in Andrea’s ear and the guards would have no more chance than penned lambs against a marauding wolf. Less chance even than that – the lambs could always run and cry out before the darkness closed over them.

The sergeant solved the problem for them. The assured competence, the tough unsentimental ruthlessness that made the German NCO the best in the world gave Mallory the chance he never expected to have. He had just finished giving his orders when the young soldier touched him on the arm, then pointed over the edge.

‘How about poor Ehrich, Sergeant?’ he asked uncertainly. ‘Shouldn’t – don’t you think one of us ought to stay with him?’

‘And what could you do if you did stay – hold his hand?’ the sergeant asked acidly. ‘If he stirs and falls, then he falls, that’s all, and it doesn’t matter then if a hundred of us are standing up here watching him. Off you go, and don’t forget the mallets and pegs to stay the sheer-legs.’

The three men turned and went off quickly to the east without another word. The sergeant walked over to the phone, reported briefly to someone, then set off in the opposite direction – to check the next guard post, Mallory guessed. He was still in sight, a dwindling blur in the darkness, when Mallory whispered to Brown and Miller to post themselves on guard again: and they could still hear the measured crunch of his firm footfalls on a patch of distant gravel as their belayed rope went snaking over the edge of the cliff, Andrea and Mallory sliding swiftly down even before it had stopped quivering.

Stevens, a huddled, twisted heap with a gashed and bleeding cheek lying cruelly along a razor-sharp spur of rock, was still unconscious, breathing stertorously through his open mouth. Below the knee his right leg twisted upwards and outwards against the rock at an impossible angle. As gently as he could, braced against either side of the chimney and supported by Andrea, Mallory lifted and straightened the twisted limb. Twice, from the depths of the dark stupor of his unconsciousness, Stevens moaned in agony, but Mallory had no option but to carry on, his teeth clenched tight until his jaws ached. Then slowly, with infinite care, he rolled up the trouser leg, winced and screwed his eyes shut in momentary horror and nausea as he saw the dim whiteness of the shattered tibia sticking out through the torn and purply swollen flesh.

‘Compound fracture, Andrea.’ Gently his exploring fingers slid down the mangled leg, beneath the lip of the jackboot, stopped suddenly as something gave way beneath his feather touch. ‘Oh, my God!’ he murmured. ‘Another break, just above the ankle. This boy is in a bad way. Andrea.’

‘He is indeed,’ Andrea said gravely. ‘We can do nothing for him here?’

‘Nothing. Just nothing. We’ll have to get him up first.’ Mallory straightened, gazed up bleakly at the perpendicular face of the chimney. ‘Although how in the name of heaven –’

‘I will take him up.’ There was no suggestion in Andrea’s voice either of desperate resolve or consciousness of the almost incredible effort involved. It was simply a statement of intention, the voice of a man who never questioned his ability to do what he said he would. ‘If you will help me to raise him, to tie him to my back …’

‘With his broken leg loose, dangling from a piece of skin and torn muscle?’ Mallory protested. ‘Stevens can’t take much more. He’ll die if we do this.’

‘He’ll die if we don’t,’ Andrea murmured.

Mallory stared down at Stevens for a long moment, then nodded heavily in the darkness.

‘He’ll die if we don’t,’ he echoed tiredly. ‘Yes, we have to do this.’ He pushed outwards from the rock, slid half a dozen feet down the rope and jammed a foot in the crutch of the chimney just below Stevens’s body. He took a couple of turns of rope round his waist and looked up.

‘Ready, Andrea?’ he called softly.

‘Ready.’ Andrea stooped, hooked his great hands under Stevens’s armpits and lifted slowly, powerfully, as Mallory pushed from below. Twice, three times before they had him up, the boy moaned deep down in his tortured throat, the long, quivering ‘Aahs’ of agony setting Mallory’s teeth on edge: and then his dangling, twisted leg had passed from Mallory’s reach and he was held close and cradled in Andrea’s encircling arm, the rain-lashed, bleeding mask of a face lolling grotesquely backwards, forlorn and lifeless with the dead pathos of a broken doll. Seconds later Mallory was up beside them, expertly lashing Stevens’s wrists together. He was swearing softly, as his numbed hands looped and tightened the rope, softly, bitterly, continuously, but he was quite unaware of this: he was aware only of the broken head that lolled stupidly against his shoulder, of the welling, rain-thinned blood that filmed the upturned face, of the hair above the gashed temple emerging darkly fair as the dye washed slowly out. Inferior bloody boot-blacking. Mallory thought savagely: Jensen shall know of this – it could cost a man’s life. And then he became aware of his own thoughts and swore again, still more savagely and at himself this time, for the utter triviality of what he was thinking.

With both hands free – Stevens’s bound arms were looped round his neck, his body lashed to his own – Andrea took less than thirty seconds to reach the top; if the dragging, one hundred and sixty pounds deadweight on his back made any difference to Andrea’s climbing speed and power, Mallory couldn’t detect it. The man’s endurance was fantastic. Once, just once, as Andrea scrambled over the edge of the cliff, the broken leg caught on the rock, and the crucifying torture of it seared through the merciful shell of insensibility, forced a brief shriek of pain from his lips, a hoarse, bubbling whisper of sound all the more horrible for its muted agony. And then Andrea was standing upright and Mallory was behind him, cutting swiftly at the ropes that bound the two together.

‘Straight into the rocks with him, Andrea, will you?’ Mallory whispered. ‘Wait for us at the first open space you come to.’ Andrea nodded slowly and without raising his head, his hooded eyes bent over the boy in his arms, like a man sunk in thought. Sunk in thought or listening, and all unawares Mallory, too, found himself looking and listening into the thin, lost moaning of the wind, and there was nothing there, only the lifting, dying threnody and the chill of the rain hardening to an ice-cold sleet. He shivered, without knowing why, and listened again; then he shook himself angrily, turned abruptly towards the cliff face and started reeling in the rope. He had it all up, lying round his feet in a limp and rain-sodden tangle when he remembered about the spike still secured to the foot of the chimney, the hundreds of feet of rope suspended from it.

He was too tired and cold and depressed even to feel exasperated with himself. The sight of Stevens and the knowledge of how it was with the boy had affected him more than he knew. Moodily, almost, he kicked the rope over the side again, slid down the chimney, untied the second rope and sent the spike spinning out into the darkness. Less than ten minutes later, the wetly-coiled ropes over his shoulder, he led Miller and Brown into the dark confusion of the rocks.

They found Stevens lying under the lee of a huge boulder, less than a hundred yards inland, in a tiny, cleared space barely the size of a billiard table. An oilskin was spread beneath him on the sodden, gravelly earth, a camouflage cape covered most of his body: it was bitterly cold now, but the rock broke the force of the wind, sheltered the boy from the driving sleet. Andrea looked up as the three men dropped into the hollow and lowered their gear to the ground; already, Mallory could see, Andrea had rolled the trouser up beyond the knee and cut the heavy jackboot away from the mangled leg.

‘Sufferin’ Christ!’ The words, half-oath, half-prayer, were torn involuntarily from Miller: even in the deep gloom the shattered leg looked ghastly. Now he dropped on one knee and stooped low over it. ‘What a mess!’ he murmured slowly. He looked up over his shoulder. ‘We’ve gotta do something about that leg, boss, and we’ve no damned time to lose. This kid’s a good candidate for the mortuary.’

‘I know. We’ve got to save him, Dusty, we’ve just got to.’ All at once this had become terribly important to Mallory. He dropped down on his knees. ‘Let’s have a look at him.’

Impatiently Miller waved him away.

‘Leave this to me, boss.’ There was a sureness, a sudden authority in his voice that held Mallory silent. ‘The medicine pack, quick – and undo that tent.’

‘You sure you can handle this?’ God knew, Mallory thought, he didn’t really doubt him – he was conscious only of gratitude, of a profound relief, but he felt he had to say something. ‘How are you going –’

‘Look, boss,’ Miller said quietly. ‘All my life I’ve worked with just three things – mines, tunnels and explosives. They’re kinda tricky things, boss. I’ve seen hundreds of busted arms and legs – and fixed most of them myself.’ He grinned wryly in the darkness. ‘I was boss myself, then – just one of my privileges, I reckon.’

‘Good enough!’ Mallory clapped him on the shoulder. ‘He’s all yours, Dusty. But the tent!’ Involuntarily he looked over his shoulder in the direction of the cliff. ‘I mean –’

‘You got me wrong, boss.’ Miller’s hands, steady and precise with the delicate certainty of a man who has spent a lifetime with high explosive, were busy with a swab and disinfectant. ‘I wasn’t fixin’ on settin’ up a base hospital. But we need tent-poles – splints for his legs.’

‘Of course, of course. The poles. Never occurred to me for splints – and I’ve been thinking of nothing else for –’

‘They’re not too important, boss.’ Miller had the medicine pack open now, rapidly selecting the items he wanted with the aid of a hooded torch. ‘Morphine – that’s the first thing, or this kid’s goin’ to die of shock. And then shelter, warmth, dry clothin’ –’

‘Warmth! Dry clothing!’ Mallory interrupted incredulously. He looked down at the unconscious boy, remembering how Stevens had lost them the stove and all the fuel, and his mouth twisted in bitterness. His own executioner … ‘Where in God’s name are we going to find them?’

‘I don’t know, boss,’ Miller said simply. ‘But we gotta find them. And not just to lessen shock. With a leg like this and soaked to the skin, he’s bound to get pneumonia. And then as much sulfa as that bloody great hole in his leg will take – one touch of sepsis in the state this kid’s in …’ His voice trailed away into silence.

Mallory rose to his feet.

‘I reckon you’re the boss.’ It was a very creditable imitation of the American’s drawl, and Miller looked up quickly, surprise melting into a tired smile, then looked away again. Mallory could hear the chatter of his teeth as he bent over Stevens, and sensed rather than saw that he was shivering violently, continuously, but oblivious to it all in his complete concentration on the job in hand. Miller’s clothes, Mallory remembered again, were completely saturated: not for the first time, Mallory wondered how he had managed to get himself into such a state with a waterproof covering him.

‘You fix him up. I’ll find a place.’ Mallory wasn’t as confident as he felt: still, on the scree-strewn, volcanic slopes of these hills behind, there ought to be a fair chance of finding a rock shelter, if not a cave. Or there would have been in day-light: as it was they would just have to trust to luck to stumble on one … He saw that Casey Brown, grey-faced with exhaustion and illness – the aftereffects of carbon monoxide poisoning are slow to disappear – had risen unsteadily to his feet and was making for a gap between the rocks.

‘Where are you going, Chief?’

‘Back for the rest of the stuff, sir.’

‘Are you sure you can manage?’ Mallory peered at him closely. ‘You don’t look any too fit to me.’

‘I don’t feel it either,’ Brown said frankly. He looked at Mallory. ‘But with all respects, sir, I don’t think you’ve seen yourself recently.’

‘You have a point,’ Mallory acknowledged. ‘All right then, come on. I’ll go with you.’

For the next ten minutes there was silence in the tiny clearing, a silence broken only by the murmurs of Miller and Andrea working over the shattered leg, and the moans of the injured man as he twisted and struggled feebly in his dark abyss of pain: then gradually the morphine took effect and the struggling lessened and died away altogether, and Miller was able to work rapidly, without fear of interruption. Andrea had an oilskin outstretched above them. It served a double purpose – it curtained off the sleet that swept round them from time to time and blanketed the pinpoint light of the rubber torch he held in his free hand. And then the leg was set and bandaged and as heavily splinted as possible and Miller was on his feet, straightening his aching back.

‘Thank Gawd that’s done,’ he said wearily. He gestured at Stevens. ‘I feel just the way that kid looks.’ Suddenly he stiffened, stretched out a warning arm. ‘I can hear something, Andrea,’ he whispered.

Andrea laughed. ‘It’s only Brown coming back, my friend. He’s been coming this way for over a minute now.’

‘How do you know it’s Brown?’ Miller challenged. He felt vaguely annoyed with himself and unobtrusively shoved his ready automatic back into his pocket.

‘Brown is a good man among rocks,’ Andrea said gently; ‘but he is tired. But Captain Mallory …’ He shrugged. ‘People call me “the big cat” I know, but among the mountains and rocks the captain is more than a cat. He is a ghost, and that was how men called him in Crete. You will know he is here when he touches you on the shoulder.’

Miller shivered in a sudden icy gust of sleet.

‘I wish you people wouldn’t creep around so much,’ he complained. He looked up as Brown came round the corner of a boulder, slow with the shambling, stumbling gait of an exhausted man. ‘Hi, there, Casey. How are things goin’?’

‘Not too bad.’ Brown murmured his thanks as Andrea took the box of explosives off his shoulder and lowered it easily to the ground. ‘This is the last of the gear. Captain sent me back with it. We heard voices some way along the cliff. He’s staying behind to see what they say when they find Stevens gone.’ Wearily he sat down on top of the box. ‘Maybe he’ll get some idea of what they’re going to do next, if anything.’

‘Seems to me he could have left you there and carried that damned box back himself,’ Miller growled. Disappointment in Mallory made him more outspoken than he’d meant to be. ‘He’s much better off than you are right now, and I think it’s a bit bloody much …’ He broke off and gasped in pain as Andrea’s fingers caught his arm like giant steel pincers.

‘It is not fair to talk like that, my friend,’ Andrea said reproachfully. ‘You forget, perhaps, that Brown here cannot talk or understand a word of German?’

Miller rubbed his bruised arm tenderly, shaking his head in slow self-anger and condemnation.

‘Me and my big mouth,’ he said ruefully. ‘Always talkin’ outa turn Miller, they call me. Your pardon, one and all … And what is next on the agenda, gentlemen?’

‘Captain says we’re to go straight on into the rocks and up the right shoulder of this hill here.’ Brown jerked a thumb in the direction of the vague mass, dark and strangely foreboding, that towered above and beyond them. ‘He’ll catch us up within fifteen minutes or so.’ He grinned tiredly at Miller. ‘And we’re to leave this box and a rucksack for him to carry.’

‘Spare me,’ Miller pleaded. ‘I feel only six inches tall as it is.’ He looked down at Stevens, lying quietly under the darkly gleaming wetness of the oilskins, then up at Andrea. ‘I’m afraid, Andrea –’

‘Of course, of course!’ Andrea stooped quickly, wrapped the oilskins round the unconscious boy and rose to his feet, as effortlessly as if the oilskins had been empty.

‘I’ll lead the way,’ Miller volunteered. ‘Mebbe I can pick an easy path for you and young Stevens.’ He swung generator and rucksacks on to his shoulder, staggering under the sudden weight; he hadn’t realised he was so weak. ‘At first, that is,’ he amended. ‘Later on, you’ll have to carry us both.’

Mallory had badly miscalculated the time it would require to overtake the others; over an hour had elapsed since Brown had left him, and still there were no signs of the others. And with seventy pounds on his back, he wasn’t making such good time himself.

It wasn’t all his fault. The returning German patrol, after the first shock of discovery, had searched the cliff-top again, methodically and with exasperating slowness. Mallory had waited tensely for someone to suggest descending and examining the chimney – the gouge-marks of the spikes on the rock would have been a dead giveaway – but nobody even mentioned it. With the guard obviously fallen to his death, it would have been a pointless thing to do anyway. After an unrewarding search, they had debated for an unconscionable time as to what they should do next. Finally they had done nothing. A replacement guard was left, and the rest made off along the cliff, carrying their rescue equipment with them.

The three men ahead had made surprisingly good time, although the conditions, admittedly, were now much easier. The heavy fall of boulders at the foot of the slope had petered out after another fifty yards, giving way to broken scree and rain-washed rubble. Possibly he had passed them, but it seemed unlikely: in the intervals between these driving sleet showers – it was more like hail now – he was able to scan the bare shoulder of the hill, and nothing moved. Besides, he knew that Andrea wouldn’t stop until he reached what promised at least a bare minimum of shelter, and as yet these exposed windswept slopes had offered nothing that even remotely approached that.

In the end, Mallory almost literally stumbled upon both men and shelter. He was negotiating a narrow, longitudinal spine of rock, had just crossed its razor-back, when he heard the murmur of voices beneath him and saw a tiny glimmer of light behind the canvas stretching down from the overhang of the far wall of the tiny ravine at his feet.

Miller started violently and swung round as he felt the hand on his shoulder, the automatic was half-way out of his pocket before he saw who it was and sank back heavily on the rock behind him.

‘Come, come, now! Trigger-happy.’ Thankfully Mallory slid his burden from his aching shoulders and looked across at the softly laughing Andrea. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Our friend here.’ Andrea grinned again. ‘I told him that the first thing he would know of your arrival would be when you touched him on the shoulder. I don’t think he believed me.’

‘You might have coughed or somethin’,’ Miller said defensively. ‘It’s my nerves, boss,’ he added plaintively. ‘They’re not what they were forty-eight hours ago.’

Mallory looked at him disbelievingly, made to speak, then stopped short as he caught sight of the pale blur of a face propped up against a rucksack. Beneath the white swathe of a bandaged forehead the eyes were open, looking steadily at him. Mallory took a step forward, sank down on one knee.

‘So you’ve come round at last!’ He smiled into the sunken parchment face and Stevens smiled back, the bloodless lips whiter than the face itself. He looked ghastly. ‘How do you feel, Andy?’

‘Not too bad, sir. Really I’m not.’ The bloodshot eyes were dark and filled with pain. His gaze fell and he looked down vacantly at his bandaged leg, looked up again, smiled uncertainly at Mallory. ‘I’m terribly sorry about all this, sir. What a bloody stupid thing to do.’

‘It wasn’t a stupid thing.’ Mallory spoke with slow, heavy emphasis. ‘It was criminal folly.’ He knew everyone was watching them, but knew, also, that Stevens had eyes for him alone. ‘Criminal, unforgivable folly,’ he went on quietly, ‘and I’m the man in the dock. I’d suspected you’d lost a lot of blood on the boat, but I didn’t know you had these big gashes on your forehead. I should have made it my business to find out.’ He smiled wryly. ‘You should have heard what these two insubordinate characters had to say to me about it when they got to the top … And they were right. You should never had been asked to bring up the rear in the state you were in. It was madness.’ He grinned again. ‘You should have been hauled up like a sack of coals like the intrepid mountaineering team of Miller and Brown … God knows how you ever made it – I’m sure you’ll never know.’ He leaned forward, touched Stevens’s sound knee. ‘Forgive me, Andy. I honestly didn’t realise how far through you were.’

Stevens stirred uncomfortably, but the dead pallor of the high-boned cheeks was stained with embarrassed pleasure.

‘Please, sir,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t talk like that. It was just one of these things.’ He paused, eyes screwed shut and indrawn breath hissing sharply through his teeth as a wave of pain washed up from his shattered leg. Then he looked at Mallory again. ‘And there’s no credit due to me for the climb,’ he went on quietly. ‘I hardly remember a thing about it.’

Mallory looked at him without speaking, eyebrows arched in mild interrogation.

‘I was scared to death every step of the way up,’ Stevens said simply. He was conscious of no surprise, no wonder that he was saying the thing he would have died rather than say. ‘I’ve never been so scared in all my life.’

Mallory shook his head slowly from side to side, stubbled chin rasping in his cupped palm. He seemed genuinely puzzled. Then he looked down at Stevens and smiled quizzically.

‘Now I know you are new to this game, Andy.’ He smiled again. ‘Maybe you think I was laughing and singing all the way up that cliff? Maybe you think I wasn’t scared?’ He lit a cigarette and gazed at Stevens through a cloud of drifting smoke. ‘Well, I wasn’t. “Scared” isn’t the word – I was bloody well terrified. So was Andrea here. We knew too much not to be scared.’

‘Andrea!’ Stevens laughed, then cried out as the movement triggered off a crepitant agony in his bone-shattered leg. For a moment Mallory thought he had lost consciousness, but almost at once he spoke again, his voice husky with pain. ‘Andrea!’ he whispered. ‘Scared! I don’t believe it.’

‘Andrea was afraid.’ The big Greek’s voice was very gentle. ‘Andrea is afraid. Andrea is always afraid. That is why I have lived so long.’ He stared down at his great hands. ‘And why so many have died. They were not so afraid as I. They were not afraid of everything a man could be afraid of, there was always something they forgot to fear, to guard against. But Andrea was afraid of everything – and he forgot nothing. It is as simple as that.’

He looked across at Stevens and smiled.

‘There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die – that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer. Or sometimes ten minutes, or twenty minutes – or the time it takes a man sick and bleeding and afraid to climb a cliff.’

Stevens said nothing. His head was sunk on his chest, and his face was hidden. He had seldom felt so happy, seldom so at peace with himself. He had known that he could not hide things from men like Andrea and Mallory, but he had not known that it would not matter. He felt he should say something, but he could not think what and he was deathly tired. He knew, deep down, that Andrea was speaking the truth, but not the whole truth; but he was too tired to care, to try to work things out.

Miller cleared his throat noisily.

‘No more talkin’, Lieutenant,’ he said firmly. ‘You gotta lie down, get yourself some sleep.’

Stevens looked at him, then at Mallory in puzzled inquiry.

‘Better do what you’re told, Andy.’ Mallory smiled. ‘Your surgeon and medical adviser talking. He fixed your leg.’

‘Oh! I didn’t know. Thanks, Dusty. Was it very – difficult?’

Miller waved a deprecatory hand.

‘Not for a man of my experience. Just a simple break,’ he lied easily. ‘Almost let one of the others do it … Give him a hand to lie down, will you, Andrea?’ He jerked his head towards Mallory. ‘Boss?’

The two men moved outside, turning their backs to the icy wind.

‘We gotta get a fire, dry clothing, for that kid,’ Miller said urgently. ‘His pulse is about 140, temperature 103. He’s runnin’ a fever, and he’s losin’ ground all the time.’

‘I know, I know,’ Mallory said worriedly. ‘And there’s not a hope of getting any fuel on this damned mountain. Let’s go in and see how much dried clothing we can muster between us.’

He lifted the edge of the canvas and stepped inside. Stevens was still awake, Brown and Andrea on either side of him. Miller was on his heels.

‘We’re going to stay here for the night,’ Mallory announced, ‘so let’s make things as snug as possible. Mind you,’ he admitted, ‘we’re a bit too near the cliff for comfort, but old Jerry hasn’t a clue we’re on the island, and we’re out of sight of the coast. Might as well make ourselves comfortable.’

‘Boss …’ Miller made to speak, then fell silent again. Mallory looked at him in surprise, saw that he, Brown and Stevens were looking at one another, uncertainty, then doubt and a dawning, sick comprehension in their eyes. A sudden anxiety, the sure knowledge that something was far wrong, struck at Mallory like a blow.

‘What’s up?’ he demanded, sharply. ‘What is it?’

‘We have bad news for you, boss,’ Miller said carefully. ‘We should have told you right away. Guess we all thought that one of the others would have told you … Remember that sentry you and Andrea shoved over the side?’

Mallory nodded, sombrely. He knew what was coming.

‘He fell on top of that reef twenty-thirty feet or so from the cliff,’ Miller went on. ‘Wasn’t much of him left, I guess, but what was was jammed between two rocks. He was really stuck good and fast.’

‘I see,’ Mallory murmured. ‘I’ve been wondering all night how you managed to get so wet under your rubber cape.’

‘I tried four times, boss,’ Miller said quietly. ‘The others had a rope round me.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not a chance. Them gawddamned waves just flung me back against the cliff every time.’

‘It will be light in three or four hours,’ Mallory murmured. ‘In four hours they will know we are on the island. They will see him as soon as it’s dawn and send a boat to investigate.’

‘Does it really matter, sir,’ Stevens suggested. ‘He could still have fallen.’

Mallory eased the canvas aside and looked out into the night. It was bitterly cold and the snow was beginning to fall all around them. He dropped the canvas again.

‘Five minutes,’ he said absently. ‘We will leave in five minutes.’ He looked at Stevens and smiled faintly. ‘We are forgetful too. We should have told you. Andrea stabbed the sentry through the heart.’

The hours that followed were hours plucked from the darkest nightmare, endless, numbing hours of stumbling and tripping and falling and getting up again, of racked bodies and aching, tortured muscles, of dropped loads and frantic pawing around in the deepening snow, of hunger and thirst and all-encompassing exhaustion.

They had retraced their steps now, were heading WNW back across the shoulder of the mountain – almost certainly the Germans would think they had gone due north, heading for the centre of the island. Without compass, stars or moon to guide, Mallory had nothing to orientate them but the feel of the slope of the mountain and the memory of the map Vlachos had shown them in Alexandria. But by and by he was reasonably certain that they had rounded the mountain and were pushing up some narrow gorge into the interior.

The snow was the deadly enemy. Heavy, wet and feathery, it swirled all around them in a blanketing curtain of grey, sifted down their necks and jackboots, worked its insidious way under their clothes and up their sleeves, blocked their eyes and ears and mouths, pierced and then anaesthetised exposed faces, and turned gloveless hands into leaden lumps of ice, benumbed and all but powerless. All suffered, and suffered badly, but Stevens most of all. He had lost consciousness again within minutes of leaving the cave and clad in clinging, sodden clothes as he was, he now lacked even the saving warmth generated by physical activity. Twice Andrea had stopped and felt for the beating of the heart, for he thought that the boy had died: but he could feel nothing for there was no feeling left in his hands, and he could only wonder and stumble on again.

About five in the morning, as they were climbing up the steep valley head above the gorge, a treacherous, slippery slope with only a few stunted carob trees for anchor in the sliding scree, Mallory decided that they must rope up for safety’s sake. In single file they scrambled and struggled up the ever-steepening slope for the next twenty minutes: Mallory, in the lead, did not even dare to think how Andrea was getting on behind him. Suddenly the slope eased, flattened out completely, and almost before they realised what was happening they had crossed the high divide, still roped together and in driving, blinding snow with zero visibility, and were sliding down the valley on the other side.

They came to the cave at dawn, just as the first grey stirrings of a bleak and cheerless day struggled palely through the lowering, snow-filled sky to the east. Monsieur Vlachos had told them that the south of Navarone was honey-combed with caves, but this was the first they had seen, and even then it was no cave but a dark, narrow tunnel in a great heap of piled volcanic slabs, huge, twisted layers of rock precariously poised in a gully that threaded down the slope towards some broad and unknown valley a thousand, two thousand feet, beneath them, a valley still shrouded in the gloom of night.

It was no cave, but it was enough. For frozen, exhausted, sleep-haunted men, it was more than enough, it was more than they had ever hoped for. There was room for them all, the few cracks were quickly blocked against the drifting snow, the entrance curtained off by the boulder-weighted tent. Somehow, impossibly almost in the cramped darkness, they stripped Stevens of his sea- and rain-soaked clothes, eased him into a providentially zipped sleeping-bag, forced some brandy down his throat and cushioned the bloodstained head on some dry clothing. And then the four men, even the tireless Andrea, slumped down to the sodden, snow-chilled floor of the cave and slept like men already dead, oblivious alike of the rocks on the floor, the cold, their hunger and their clammy, saturated clothing, oblivious even to the agony of returning circulation in their frozen hands and faces.

SEVEN

Tuesday

1500–1900

The sun, rime-ringed and palely luminous behind the drifting cloud-wrack, was far beyond its zenith and dipping swiftly westwards to the snow-limned shoulder of the mountain when Andrea lifted the edge of the tent, pushed it gently aside and peered out warily down the smooth sweep of the mountainside. For a few moments he remained almost motionless behind the canvas, automatically easing cramped and aching leg muscles, narrowed, roving eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the white glare of the glistening, crystalline snow. And then he had flitted noiselessly out of the mouth of the tunnel and reached far up the bank of the gully in half a dozen steps; stretched full length against the snow, he eased himself smoothly up the slope, lifted a cautious eye over the top.

Far below him stretched the great, curved sweep of an almost perfectly symmetrical valley – a valley born abruptly in the cradling embrace of steep-walled mountains and falling away gently to the north. That towering, buttressed giant on his right that brooded darkly over the head of the valley, its peak hidden in the snow clouds – there could be no doubt about that, Andrea thought. Mt Kostos, the highest mountain in Navarone: they had crossed its western flank during the darkness of the night. Due east and facing his own at perhaps five miles’ distance, the third mountain was barely less high: but its northern flank fell away more quickly, debouching on to the plains that lay to the north-east of Navarone. And about four miles away to the north-north-east, far beneath the snowline and the isolated shepherds’ huts, a tiny, flat-roofed township lay in a fold in the hills, along the bank of the little stream that wound its way through the valley. That could only be the village of Margaritha.

Even as he absorbed the topography of the valley, his eyes probing every dip and cranny in the hills for a possible source of danger, Andrea’s mind was racing back over the last two minutes of time, trying to isolate, to remember the nature of the alien sound that had cut through the cocoon of sleep and brought him instantly to his feet, alert and completely awake, even before his conscious mind had time to register the memory of the sound. And then he heard it again, three times in as many seconds, the high-pitched, lonely wheep of a whistle, shrill peremptory blasts that echoed briefly and died along the lower slopes of Mt Kostos: the final echo still hung faintly on the air as Andrea pushed himself backwards and slid down to the floor of the gully.

He was back on the bank within thirty seconds, cheek muscles contracting involuntarily as the ice-chill eyepieces of Mallory’s Zeiss-Ikon binoculars screwed into his face. There was no mistaking them now, he thought grimly, his first, fleeting impression had been all too accurate. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty soldiers in all, strung out in a long, irregular line, they were advancing slowly across the flank of Kostos, combing every gully, each jumbled confusion of boulders that lay in their path. Every man was clad in a snow-suit, but even at a distance of two miles they were easy to locate: the arrow-heads of their strapped skis angled up above shoulders and hooded heads: startlingly black against the sheer whiteness of the snow, the skis bobbed and weaved in disembodied drunkenness as the men slipped and stumbled along the scree-strewn slopes of the mountain. From time to time a man near the centre of the line pointed and gestured with an alpenstock, as if co-ordinating the efforts of the search party. The man with the whistle, Andrea guessed.

‘Andrea!’ The call from the cave mouth was very soft. ‘Anything wrong?’

Finger to his lips, Andrea twisted round in the snow. Mallory was standing by the canvas screen. Dark-jowled and crumple-clothed, he held up one hand against the glare of the snow while the other rubbed the sleep from his blood-shot eyes. And then he was limping forward in obedience to the crooking of Andrea’s finger, wincing in pain at every step he took. His toes were swollen and skinned, gummed together with congealed blood. He had not had his boots off since he had taken them from the feet of the dead German sentry: and now he was almost afraid to remove them, afraid of what he would find … He clambered slowly up the bank of the gully and sank down in the snow beside Andrea.

‘Company?’

‘The very worst of company,’ Andrea murmured. ‘Take a look, my Keith.’ He handed over the binoculars, pointed down to the lower slopes of Mt Kostos. ‘Your friend Jensen never told us that they were here.’

Slowly, Mallory quartered the slopes with the binoculars. Suddenly the line of searchers moved into his field of vision. He raised his head, adjusted the focus impatiently, looked briefly once more, then lowered the binoculars with a restrained deliberation of gesture that held a wealth of bitter comment.

‘The WGB,’ he said softly.

‘A Jaeger battalion,’ Andrea conceded. ‘Alpine Corps – their finest mountain troops. This is most inconvenient, my Keith.’

Mallory nodded, rubbed his stubbled chin.

‘If anyone can find us, they can. And they’ll find us.’ He lifted the glasses to look again at the line of advancing men. The painstaking thoroughness of the search was disturbing enough: but even more threatening, more frightening, was the snail-like relentlessness, the inevitability of the approach of these tiny figures. ‘God knows what the Alpenkorps is doing here,’ Mallory went on. ‘It’s enough that they are here. They must know that we’ve landed and spent the morning searching the eastern saddle of Kostos – that was the obvious route for us to break into the interior. They’ve drawn a blank there, so now they’re working their way over to the other saddle. They must be pretty nearly certain that we’re carrying a wounded man with us and that we can’t have got very far. It’s only going to be a matter of time, Andrea.’

‘A matter of time,’ Andrea echoed. He glanced up at the sun, a sun all but invisible in the darkening sky. ‘An hour, an hour and a half at the most. They’ll be here before the sun goes down. And we’ll still be here.’ He glanced quizzically at Mallory. ‘We cannot leave the boy. And we cannot get away if we take the boy – and then he would die anyway.’

‘We will not be here,’ Mallory said flatly. ‘If we stay we all die. Or finish up in one of those nice little dungeons that Monsieur Vlachos told us about.’

‘The greatest good of the greatest number,’ Andrea nodded slowly. ‘That’s how it has to be, has it not, my Keith? The greatest number. That is what Captain Jensen would say.’ Mallory stirred uncomfortably, but his voice was steady enough when he spoke.

‘That’s how I see it, too, Andrea. Simple proportion – twelve hundred to one. You know it has to be this way.’ Mallory sounded tired.

‘Yes, I know. But you are worrying about nothing.’ Andrea smiled. ‘Come, my friend. Let us tell the others the good news.’

Miller looked up as the two men came in, letting the canvas screen fall shut behind them. He had unzipped the side of Stevens’s sleeping-bag and was working on the mangled leg. A pencil flashlight was propped on a rucksack beside him.

‘When are we goin’ to do somethin’ about this kid, boss?’ The voice was abrupt, angry, like his gesture towards the sleep-drugged boy beside him. ‘This damned waterproof sleeping-bag is soaked right through. So’s the kid – and he’s about frozen stiff: his leg feels like a side of chilled beef. He’s gotta have heat, boss, a warm room and hot drinks – or he’s finished. Twenty-four hours.’ Miller shivered and looked slowly round the broken walls of the rock-shelter. ‘I reckon he’d have less than an even chance in a first-class general hospital … He’s just wastin’ his time keepin’ on breathin’ in this gawddamned ice-box.’

Miller hardly exaggerated. Water from the melting snow above trickled continuously down the clammy, green-lichened walls of the cave or dripped directly on to the half-frozen gravelly slush on the floor of the cave. With no through ventilation and no escape for the water accumulating at the sides of the shelter, the whole place was dank and airless and terribly chill.

‘Maybe he’ll be hospitalised sooner than you think,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How’s his leg?’

‘Worse.’ Miller was blunt. ‘A helluva sight worse. I’ve just chucked in another handful of sulpha and tied things up again. That’s all I can do, boss, and it’s just a waste of time anyway … What was that crack about a hospital?’ he added suspiciously.

‘That was no crack,’ Mallory said soberly, ‘but one of the more unpleasant facts of life. There’s a German search party heading this way. They mean business. They’ll find us, all right.’

Miller swore. ‘That’s handy, that’s just wonderful,’ he said bitterly. ‘How far away, boss?’

‘An hour, maybe a little more.’

‘And what are we goin’ to do with Junior, here? Leave him? It’s his only chance, I reckon.’

‘Stevens comes with us.’ There was a flat finality in Mallory’s voice. Miller looked at him for a long time in silence: his face was very cold.

‘Stevens comes with us,’ Miller repeated. ‘We drag him along with us until he’s dead – that won’t take long – and then we leave him in the snow. Just like that, huh?’

‘Just like that, Dusty.’ Absently Mallory brushed some snow off his clothes, and looked up again at Miller. ‘Stevens knows too much. The Germans will have guessed why we’re on the island, but they don’t know how we propose to get inside the fortress – and they don’t know when the Navy’s coming through. But Stevens does. They’ll make him talk. Scopolamine will make anyone talk.’

‘Scopolamine! On a dying man?’ Miller was openly incredulous.

‘Why not? I’d do the same myself. If you were the German commandant and you knew that your big guns and half the men in your fortress were liable to be blown to hell any moment, you’d do the same.’

Miller looked at him, grinned wryly, shook his head.

‘Me and my –’

‘I know. You and your big mouth.’ Mallory smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I don’t like it one little bit more than you do, Dusty.’ He turned away and crossed to the other side of the cave. ‘How are you feeling, Chief?’

‘Not too bad, sir.’ Casey Brown was only just awake, numbed and shivering in sodden clothes. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘Plenty,’ Mallory assured him. ‘Search party moving this way. We’ll have to pull out inside half an hour.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just on four o’clock. Do you think you could raise Cairo on the set?’

‘Lord only knows,’ Brown said frankly. He rose stiffly to his feet. ‘The radio didn’t get just the best of treatment yesterday. I’ll have a go.’

‘Thanks, Chief. See that your aerial doesn’t stick up above the sides of the gully.’ Mallory turned to leave the cave, but halted abruptly at the sight of Andrea squatting on a boulder just beside the entrance. His head bent in concentration, the big Greek had just finished screwing telescopic sights on to the barrel of his 7.92 mm Mauser and was now deftly wrapping a sleeping-bag lining round its barrel and butt until the entire rifle was wrapped in a white cocoon.

Mallory watched him in silence. Andrea glanced up at him, smiled, rose to his feet and reached out for his rucksack. Within thirty seconds he was clad from head to toe in his mountain camouflage suit, was drawing tight the purse-strings of his snow-hood and easing his feet into the rucked elastic anklets of his canvas boots. Then he picked up the Mauser and smiled slightly.

‘I thought I might be taking a little walk, Captain,’ he said apologetically. ‘With your permission, of course.’

Mallory nodded his head several times in slow recollection.

‘You said I was worrying about nothing,’ he murmured. ‘I should have known. You might have told me, Andrea.’ But the protest was automatic, without significance. Mallory felt neither anger nor even annoyance at this tacit arrogation of his authority. The habit of command died hard in Andrea: on such occasions as he ostensibly sought approval for or consulted about a proposed course of action it was generally as a matter of courtesy and to give information as to his intentions. Instead of resentment, Mallory could feel only an overwhelming relief and gratitude to the smiling giant who towered above him: he had talked casually to Miller about driving Stevens till he died and then abandoning him, talked with an indifference that masked a mind sombre with bitterness at what he must do, but even so he had not known how depressed, how sick at heart this decision had left him until he knew it was no longer necessary.

‘I am sorry.’ Andrea was half-contrite, half-smiling. ‘I should have told you. I thought you understood … It is the best thing to do, yes?’

‘It is the only thing to do,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘You’re going to draw them off up the saddle?’

‘There is no other way. With their skis they would overtake me in minutes if I went down into the valley. I cannot come back, of course, until it is dark. You will be here?’

‘Some of us will.’ Mallory glanced across the shelter where a waking Stevens was trying to sit up, heels of his palms screwing into his exhausted eyes. ‘We must have food and fuel, Andrea,’ he said softly. ‘I am going down into the valley tonight.’

‘Of course, of course. We must do what we can.’ Andrea’s face was grave, his voice only a murmur. ‘As long as we can. He is only a boy, a child almost … Perhaps it will not be long.’ He pulled back the curtain, looked out at the evening sky. ‘I will be back by seven o’clock.’

‘Seven o’clock,’ Mallory repeated. The sky, he could see, was darkening already, darkening with the gloom of coming snow, and the lifting wind was beginning to puff little clouds of air-spun, flossy white into the little gully. Mallory shivered and caught hold of the massive arm. ‘For God’s sake, Andrea,’ he urged quietly, ‘look after yourself!’

‘Myself?’ Andrea smiled gently, no mirth in his eyes, and as gently he disengaged his arm. ‘Do not think about me.’ The voice was very quiet, with an utter lack of arrogance. ‘If you must speak to God, speak to Him about these poor devils who are looking for us.’ The canvas dropped behind him and he was gone.

For some moments Mallory stood irresolutely at the mouth of the cave, gazing out sightlessly through the gap in the curtain. Then he wheeled abruptly, crossed the floor of the shelter and knelt in front of Stevens. The boy was propped up against Miller’s anxious arm, the eyes lack-lustre and expressionless, bloodless cheeks deep-sunken in a grey and parchment face. Mallory smiled at him: he hoped the shock didn’t show in his face.

‘Well, well, well. The sleeper awakes at last. Better late than never.’ He opened his waterproof cigarette case, proffered it to Stevens. ‘How are you feeling now, Andy?’

‘Frozen, sir.’ Stevens shook his head at the case and tried to grin back at Mallory, a feeble travesty of a smile that made Mallory wince.

‘And the leg?’

‘I think it must be frozen, too.’ Stevens looked down incuriously at the sheathed whiteness of his shattered leg. ‘Anyway, I can’t feel a thing.’

‘Frozen!’ Miller’s sniff was a masterpiece of injured pride. ‘Frozen, he says! Gawddamned ingratitude. It’s the first-class medical care, if I do say so myself!’

Stevens smiled, a fleeting, absent smile that flickered over his face and was gone. For long moments he kept staring down at his leg, then suddenly lifted his head and looked directly at Mallory.

‘Look, sir, there’s no good kidding ourselves.’ The voice was soft, quite toneless. ‘I don’t want to seem ungrateful and I hate even the idea of cheap heroics, but – well, I’m just a damned great millstone round your necks and –’

‘Leave you, eh?’ Mallory interrupted. ‘Leave you to die of the cold or be captured by the Germans. Forget it, laddie. We can look after you – and these ruddy guns – at the same time.’

‘But, sir –’

‘You insult us, Lootenant.’ Miller sniffed again. ‘Our feelings are hurt. Besides, as a professional man I gotta see my case through to convalescence, and if you think I’m goin’ to do that in any gawddamned dripping German dungeon, you can –’

‘Enough!’ Mallory held up his hand. ‘The subject is closed!’ He saw the stain high up on the thin cheeks, the glad light that touched the dulled eyes, and felt the self-loathing and the shame well up inside him, shame for the gratitude of a sick man who did not know that their concern stemmed not from solicitude but from fear that he might betray them … Mallory bent forward and began to unlace his high jackboots. He spoke without looking up.

‘Dusty.’

‘Yeah?’

‘When you’re finishing boasting about your medical prowess, maybe you’d care to use some of it. Come and have a look at these feet of mine, will you? I’m afraid the sentry’s boots haven’t done them a great deal of good.’

Fifteen painful minutes later Miller snipped off the rough edges of the adhesive bandage that bound Mallory’s right foot, straightened up stiffly and contemplated his handiwork with pride.

‘Beautiful, Miller, beautiful,’ he murmured complacently. ‘Not even in Johns Hopkins in the city of Baltimore …’ He broke off suddenly, frowned down at the thickly bandaged feet and coughed apologetically. ‘A small point has just occurred to me, boss.’

‘I thought it might eventually,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘Just how do you propose to get my feet into these damned boots again?’ He shivered involuntarily as he pulled on a pair of thick woollen socks, matted and sodden with melted snow, picked up the German sentry’s boots, held them at arm’s length and examined them in disgust. ‘Sevens, at the most – and a darned small sevens at that!’

‘Nines,’ Stevens said laconically. He handed over his own jackboots, one of them slit neatly down the sides where Andrea had cut it open. ‘You can fix that tear easily enough, and they’re no damned good to me now. No arguments, sir, please.’ He began to laugh softly, broke off in a sharply indrawn hiss of pain as the movement jarred the broken bones, took a couple of deep, quivering breaths, then smiled whitely. ‘My first – and probably my last – contribution to the expedition. What sort of medal do you reckon they’ll give me for that, sir?’

Mallory took the boots, looked at Stevens a long moment in silence, then turned as the tarpaulin was pushed aside. Brown stumbled in, lowered the transmitter and telescopic aerial to the floor of the cave and pulled out a tin of cigarettes. They slipped from his frozen fingers, fell into the icy mud at his feet, became brown and sodden on the instant. He swore briefly, and without enthusiasm, beat his numbed hands across his chest, gave it up and sat down heavily on a convenient boulder. He looked tired and cold and thoroughly miserable.

Mallory lit a cigarette and passed it across to him.

‘How did it go, Casey? Manage to raise them at all?’

‘They managed to raise me – more or less. Reception was lousy.’ Brown drew the grateful tobacco smoke deep down into his lungs. ‘And I couldn’t get through at all. Must be that damned great hill to the south there.’

‘Probably,’ Mallory nodded. ‘And what news from our friends in Cairo? Exhorting us to greater efforts? Telling us to get on with the job?’

‘No news at all. Too damn worried about the silence at this end. Said that from now on they were going to come through every four hours, acknowledgment or no. Repeated that about ten times, then signed off.’

‘That’ll be a great help,’ Miller said acidly. ‘Nice to know they’re on our side. Nothin’ like moral support.’ He jerked his thumb towards the mouth of the cave. ‘Reckon them bloodhounds would be scared to death if they knew … Did you take a gander at them before you came in?’

‘I didn’t have to,’ Brown said morosely. ‘I could hear them – sounded like the officer in charge shouting directions.’ Mechanically, almost, he picked up his automatic rifle, eased the clip in the magazine. ‘Must be less than a mile away now.’

The search party, more closely bunched by this time, was less than a mile, was barely half a mile distant from the cave when the Oberleutnant in charge saw that the right wing of his line, on the steeper slopes to the south, was lagging behind once more. Impatiently he lifted his whistle to his mouth for the three sharp peremptory blasts that would bring his weary men stumbling into line again. Twice the whistle shrilled out its imperative urgency, the piercing notes echoing flatly along the snowbound slopes and dying away in the valley below: but the third wheep died at birth, caught up again and tailed off in a wailing, eldritch diminuendo that merged with dreadful harmony into a long, bubbling scream of agony. For two or three seconds the Oberleutnant stood motionless in his tracks, his face shocked and contorted: then he jack-knifed violently forward and pitched down into the crusted snow. The burly sergeant beside him stared down at the fallen officer, looked up in sudden horrified understanding, opened his mouth to shout, sighed and toppled wearily over the body at his feet, the evil, whiplash crack of the Mauser in his ears as he died.

High up on the western slopes of Mount Kostos, wedged in the V between two great boulders, Andrea gazed down the darkening mountainside over the depressed telescopic sights of his rifle and pumped another three rounds into the wavering, disorganised line of searchers. His face was quite still, as immobile as the eyelids that never flickered to the regular crashing of his Mauser, and drained of all feeling. Even his eyes reflected the face, eyes neither hard nor pitiless, but simply empty and almost frighteningly remote, a remoteness that mirrored his mind, a mind armoured for the moment against all thought and sensation, for Andrea knew that he must not think about this thing. To kill, to take the life of his fellows, that was the supreme evil, for life was a gift that it was not his to take away. Not even in fair fight. And this was murder.

Slowly Andrea lowered the Mauser, peered through the drifting gun-smoke that hung heavily in the frosty evening air. The enemy had vanished, completely, rolled behind scattered boulders or burrowed frantically into the blanketing anonymity of the snow. But they were still there, still potentially as dangerous as ever. Andrea knew that they would recover fast from the death of their officer – there were no finer, no more tenacious fighters in Europe than the ski-troops of the Jaeger mountain battalion – and would come after him, catch him and kill him if humanly possible. That was why Andrea’s first case had been to kill their officer – he might not have come after him, might have stopped to puzzle out the reason for this unprovoked flank attack.

Andrea ducked low in reflex instinct as a sudden burst of automatic fire whined in murderous ricochet off the boulders before him. He had expected this. It was the old classic infantry attack pattern – advance under covering fire, drop, cover your mate and come again. Swiftly Andrea rammed home another charge into the magazine of his Mauser, dropped flat on his face and inched his way along behind the low line of broken rock that extended fifteen or twenty yards to his right – he had chosen his ambush point with care – and then petered out. At the far end he pulled his snow hood down to the level of his brows and edged a wary eye round the corner of the rock.

Another heavy burst of automatic fire smashed into the boulders he had just left, and half a dozen men – three from either end of the line – broke cover, scurried along the slope in a stumbling, crouching run, then pitched forward into the snow again. Along the slope – the two parties had run in opposite directions. Andrea lowered his head and rubbed the back of a massive hand across the stubbled grizzle of his chin. Awkward, damned awkward. No frontal attack for the foxes of the WGB. They were extending their lines on either side, the points hooking around in a great, encircling half-moon. Bad enough for himself, but he could have coped with that – a carefully reconnoitred escape gully wound up the slope behind him. But he hadn’t foreseen what was obviously going to happen: the curving crescent of line to the west was going to sweep across the rock-shelter where the others lay hidden.

Andrea twisted over on his back and looked up at the evening sky. It was darkening by the moment, darkening with the gloom of coming snow, and daylight was beginning to fail. He twisted again and looked across the great swelling shoulder of Mount Kostos, looked at the few scattered rocks and shallow depressions that barely dimpled the smooth convexity of the slope. He took a second quick look round the rock as the rifles of the WGB opened up once more, saw the same encircling manoeuvre being executed again, and waited no longer. Firing blindly downhill, he half-rose to his feet and flung himself out into the open, finger squeezing on the trigger, feet driving desperately into the frozen snow as he launched himself towards the nearest rock-cover, forty yards away if an inch. Thirty-five yards to go, thirty, twenty and still not a shot fired, a slip, a stumble on the sliding scree, a catlike recovery, ten yards, still miraculously immune, and then he had dived into shelter to land on chest and stomach with a sickening impact that struck cruelly into his ribs and emptied his lungs with an explosive gasp.

Fighting for breath, he struck the magazine cover, rammed home another charge, risked a quick peep over the top of the rock and catapulted himself to his feet again, all inside ten seconds. The Mauser held across his body opened up again, firing downhill at vicious random, for Andrea had eyes only for the smoothly-treacherous ground at his feet, for the scree-lined depression so impossibly far ahead. And then the Mauser was empty, useless in his hand, and every gun far below had opened up, the shells whistling above his head or blinding him with spurting gouts of snow as they ricocheted off the solid rock. But twilight was touching the hills, Andrea was only a blur, a swiftly-flitting blur against a ghostly background, and uphill accuracy was notoriously difficult at any time. Even so, the massed fire from below was steadying and converging, and Andrea waited no longer. Unseen hands plucking wickedly at the flying tails of his snow-smock, he flung himself almost horizontally forward and slid the last ten feet face down into the waiting depression.

Stretched full length on his back in the hollow, Andrea fished out a steel mirror from his breast pocket and held it gingerly above his head. At first he could see nothing, for the darkness was deeper below and the mirror misted from the warmth of his body. And then the film vanished in the chill mountain air and he could see two, three and then half a dozen men breaking cover, heading at a clumsy run straight up the face of the hill – and two of them had come from the extreme right of the line. Andrea lowered the mirror and relaxed with a long sigh of relief, eyes crinkling in a smile. He looked up at the sky, blinked as the first feathery flakes of falling snow melted on his eyelids and smiled again. Almost lazily he brought out another charger for the Mauser, fed more shells into the magazine.

‘Boss?’ Miller’s voice was plaintive.

‘Yes? What is it?’ Mallory brushed some snow off his face and the collar of his smock and peered into the white darkness ahead.

‘Boss, when you were in school did you ever read any stories about folks gettin’ lost in a snowstorm and wanderin’ round and round in circles for days?’

‘We had exactly the same book in Queenstown,’ Mallory conceded.

‘Wanderin’ round and round until they died?’ Miller persisted.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Mallory said impatiently. His feet, even in Stevens’s roomy boots, hurt abominably. ‘How can we be wandering in circles if we’re going downhill all the time? What do you think we’re on – a bloody spiral staircase?’

Miller walked on in hurt silence, Mallory beside him, both men ankle-deep in the wet, clinging snow that had been falling so silently, so persistently, for the past three hours since Andrea had drawn off the Jaeger search party. Even in midwinter in the White Mountains in Crete Mallory could recall no snowfall so heavy and continuous. So much for the Isles of Greece and the eternal sunshine that gilds them yet, he thought bitterly. He hadn’t reckoned on this when he’d planned on going down to Margaritha for food and fuel, but even so it wouldn’t have made any difference to his decision. Although in less pain now, Stevens was becoming steadily weaker, and the need was desperate.

With moon and stars blanketed by the heavy snow-clouds – visibility, indeed, was hardly more than ten feet in any direction – the loss of their compasses had assumed a crippling importance. He didn’t doubt his ability to find the village – it was simply a matter of walking downhill till they came to the stream that ran through the valley, then following that north till they came to Margaritha – but if the snow didn’t let up their chances of locating that tiny cave again in the vast sweep of the hillsides …

Mallory smothered an exclamation as Miller’s hand closed round his upper arm, dragged him down to his knees in the snow. Even in that moment of unknown danger he could feel a slow stirring of anger against himself, for his attention had been wandering along with his thoughts … He lifted his hand as vizor against the snow, peered out narrowly through the wet, velvety curtain of white that swirled and eddied out of the darkness before him. Suddenly he had it – a dark, squat shape only feet away. They had all but walked straight into it.

‘It’s the hut,’ he said softly in Miller’s ear. He had seen it early in the afternoon, half-way between their cave and Margaritha, and almost in line with both. He was conscious of relief, an increase in confidence: they would be in the village in less than half an hour. ‘Elementary navigation, my dear Corporal,’ he murmured. ‘Lost and wandering in circles, my foot! Just put your faith …’

He broke off as Miller’s fingers dug viciously into his arm, as Miller’s head came close to his own.

‘I heard voices, boss.’ The words were a mere breath of sound.

‘Are you sure?’ Miller’s silenced gun, Mallory noticed, was still in his pocket.

Miller hesitated.

‘Dammit to hell, boss, I’m sure of nothin’,’ he whispered irritably. ‘I’ve been imaginin’ every damn thing possible in the past hour!’ He pulled the snow-hood off his head, the better to listen, bent forward for a few seconds then sank back again. ‘Anyway, I’m sure I thought I heard somethin’.’

‘Come on. Let’s take a look-see.’ Mallory was on his feet again. ‘I think you’re mistaken. Can’t be the Jaeger boys – they were halfway back across Mount Kostos when we saw them last. And the shepherds only use these places in the summer months.’ He slipped the safety catch of his Colt .455, walked slowly, at a half-crouch, towards the nearest wall of the hut, Miller at his shoulder.

They reached the hut, put their ears against the frail, tar-paper walls. Ten seconds passed, twenty, half a minute, then Mallory relaxed.

‘Nobody at home. Or if they are, they’re keeping mighty quiet. But no chances, Dusty. You go that way, I’ll go this. Meet at the door – that’ll be on the opposite side, facing into the valley … Walk wide at the corners – never fails to baffle the unwary.’

A minute later both men were inside the hut, the door shut behind them. The hooded beam of Mallory’s torch probed into every corner of the ramshackle cabin. It was quite empty – an earthen floor, a rough wooden bunk, a dilapidated stove with a rusty lantern standing on it, and that was all. No table, no chair, no chimney, not even a window.

Mallory walked over to the stove, picked up the lamp and sniffed it.

‘Hasn’t been used for weeks. Still full of kerosene, though. Very useful in that damn dungeon up there – if we can ever find the place …’

He froze into a sudden listening immobility, eyes unfocused and head cocked slightly to one side. Gently, ever so gently, he set the lamp down, walked leisurely across to Miller.

‘Remind me to apologise at some future date,’ he murmured. ‘We have company. Give me your gun and keep talking.’

‘Castelrosso again,’ Miller complained loudly. He hadn’t even raised an eyebrow. ‘This is downright monotonous. A Chinaman – I’ll bet it’s a Chinaman this time.’ But he was already talking to himself.

The silenced automatic balanced at his waist, Mallory walked noiselessly round the hut, four feet out from the walls. He had passed two corners, was just rounding the third when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a vague figure behind him rising up swiftly from the ground and lunging out with upraised arm. Mallory stepped back quickly under the blow, spun round, swung his balled fist viciously and backwards into the stomach of his attacker. There was a sudden explosive gasp of agony as the man doubled up, moaned and crumpled silently to the ground. Barely in time Mallory arrested the downward, clubbing swipe of his reversed automatic.

Gun reversed again, the butt settled securely in his palm, Mallory stared down unblinkingly at the huddled figure, at the primitive wooden baton still clutched in the gloved right hand, at the unmilitary looking knapsack strapped to his back. He kept his gun lined up on the fallen body, waiting: this had been just too easy, too suspicious. Thirty seconds passed and still the figure on the ground hadn’t stirred. Mallory took a short step forward and carefully, deliberately and none too gently kicked the man on the outside of the right knee. It was an old trick, and he’d never known it to fail – the pain was brief, but agonising. But there was no movement, no sound at all.

Quickly Mallory stooped, hooked his free hand round the knapsack shoulder straps, straightened and made for the door, half-carrying, half-dragging his captive. The man was no weight at all. With a proportionately much heavier garrison than ever in Crete, there would be that much less food for the islanders, Mallory mused compassionately. There would be very little indeed. He wished he hadn’t hit him so hard.

Miller met him at the open door, stooped wordlessly, caught the unconscious man by the ankles and helped Mallory dump him unceremoniously on the bunk in the far corner of the hut.

‘Nice goin’, boss,’ he complimented. ‘Never heard a thing. Who’s the heavyweight champ?’

‘No idea.’ Mallory shook his head in the darkness. ‘Just skin and bones, that’s all, just skin and bones. Shut the door, Dusty, and let’s have a look at what we’ve got.’

EIGHT

Tuesday

1900–0015

A minute passed, two, then the little man stirred, moaned and pushed himself to a sitting position. Mallory held his arm to steady him, while he shook his bent head, eyes screwed tightly shut as he concentrated on clearing the muzziness away. Finally he looked up slowly, glanced from Mallory to Miller and back at Mallory again in the feeble light of the newly-lit shuttered lantern. Even as the men watched, they could see the colour returning to the swarthy cheeks, the indignant bristling of the heavy, dark moustache, the darkening anger in the eyes. Suddenly the man reached up, tore Mallory’s hand away from his arm.

‘Who are you?’ He spoke in English, clear, precise, with hardly a trace of accent.

‘Sorry, but the less you know the better.’ Mallory smiled, deliberately to rob the words of offence. ‘I mean that for your own sake. How are you feeling now?’

Tenderly the little man massaged his midriff, flexed his leg with a grimace of pain.

‘You hit me very hard.’

‘I had to.’ Mallory reached behind him and picked up the cudgel the man had been carrying. ‘You tried to hit me with this. What did you expect me to do – take my hat off so you could have a better swipe at me?’

‘You are very amusing.’ Again he bent his leg, experimentally, looking up at Mallory in hostile suspicion. ‘My knee hurts me,’ he said accusingly.

‘First things first. Why the club?’

‘I meant to knock you down and have a look at you,’ he explained impatiently. ‘It was the only safe way. You might have been one of the WGB … Why is my knee –?’

‘You had an awkward fall,’ Mallory said shamelessly. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Who are you?’ the little man countered.

Miller coughed, looked ostentatiously at his watch.

‘This is all very entertainin’, boss –’

‘True for you, Dusty. We haven’t all night.’ Quickly Mallory reached behind him, picked up the man’s rucksack, tossed it across to Miller. ‘See what’s in there, will you?’ Strangely, the little man made no move to protest.

‘Food!’ Miller said reverently. ‘Wonderful, wonderful food. Cooked meat, bread, cheese – and wine.’ Reluctantly Miller closed the bag and looked curiously at their prisoner. ‘Helluva funny time for a picnic.’

‘So! An American, a Yankee.’ The little man smiled to himself. ‘Better and better!’

‘What do you mean?’ Miller asked suspiciously.

‘See for yourself,’ the man said pleasantly. He nodded casually to the far corner of the room. ‘Look there.’

Mallory spun round, realised in a moment that he had been tricked, jerked back again. Carefully he leaned forward and touched Miller’s arm.

‘Don’t look round too quickly, Dusty. And don’t touch your gun. It seems our friend was not alone.’ Mallory tightened his lips, mentally cursed himself for his obtuseness. Voices – Dusty had said there had been voices. Must be even more tired than he had thought …

A tall, lean man blocked the entrance to the doorway. His face was shadowed under an enveloping snow-hood, but there was no mistaking the gun in his hand. A short Lee Enfield rifle, Mallory noted dispassionately.

‘Do not shoot!’ The little man spoke rapidly in Greek. ‘I am almost sure that they are those whom we seek, Panayis.’

Panayis! Mallory felt the wave of relief wash over him. That was one of the names Eugene Vlachos had given him, back in Alexandria.

‘The tables turned, are they not?’ The little man smiled at Mallory, the tired eyes crinkling, the heavy black moustache lifting engagingly at one corner. ‘I ask you again, who are you?’

‘SOE,’ Mallory answered unhesitatingly.

The man nodded in satisfaction. ‘Captain Jensen sent you?’

Mallory sank back on the bunk and sighed in long relief.

‘We are among friends, Dusty.’ He looked at the little man before him. ‘You must be Louki – the first plane tree in the square in Margaritha?’

The little man beamed. He bowed, stretched out his hand.

‘Louki. At your service, sir.’

‘And this of course, is Panayis?’

The tall man in the doorway, dark, saturnine, unsmiling, inclined his head briefly but said nothing.

‘You have us right!’ The little man was beaming with delight. ‘Louki and Panayis. They know about us in Alexandria and Cairo, then?’ he asked proudly.

‘Of course!’ Mallory smothered a smile. ‘They spoke highly of you. You have been of great help to the Allies before.’

‘And we will again,’ Louki said briskly. ‘Come, we are wasting time. The Germans are on the hills. What help can we give you?’

‘Food, Louki. We need food – we need it badly.’

‘We have it!’ Proudly, Louki gestured at the rucksacks. ‘We were on our way up with it.’

‘You were on your way …’ Mallory was astonished. ‘How did you know where we were – or even that we were on the island?’

Louki waved a deprecating hand.

‘It was easy. Since first light German troops have been moving south through Margaritha up into the hills. All morning they combed the east col of Kostos. We knew someone must have landed, and that the Germans were looking for them. We heard, too, that the Germans had blocked the cliff path on the south coast, at both ends. So you must have come over the west col. They would not expect that – you fooled them. So we came to find you.’

‘But you would never have found us –’

‘We would have found you.’ There was complete certainty in the voice. ‘Panayis and I – we know every stone, every blade of grass in Navarone.’ Louki shivered suddenly, stared out bleakly through the swirling snow. ‘You couldn’t have picked worse weather.’

‘We couldn’t have picked better,’ Mallory said grimly.

‘Last night, yes,’ Louki agreed. ‘No one would expect you in that wind and rain. No one would hear the aircraft or even dream that you would try to jump –’

‘We came by sea,’ Miller interrupted. He waved a negligent hand. ‘We climbed the south cliff.’

‘What? The south cliff!’ Louki was frankly disbelieving. ‘No one could climb the south cliff. It is impossible!’

‘That’s the way we felt when we were about half-way up,’ Mallory said candidly. ‘But Dusty, here, is right. That’s how it was.’

Louki had taken a step back: his face was expressionless.

‘I say it is impossible,’ he repeated flatly.

‘He is telling the truth, Louki,’ Miller cut in quietly. ‘Do you never read newspapers?’

‘Of course I read newspapers!’ Louki bristled with indignation. ‘Do you think I am – how you say – illiterate?’

‘Then think back to just before the war,’ Miller advised. ‘Think of mountaineerin’ – and the Himalayas. You must have seen his picture in the papers – once, twice, a hundred times.’ He looked at Mallory consideringly. ‘Only he was a little prettier in those days. You must remember. This is Mallory, Keith Mallory of New Zealand.’

Mallory said nothing. He was watching Louki, the puzzlement, the comical screwing up of the eyes, head cocked to one side: then, all at once, something clicked in the little man’s memory and his face lit up in a great, crinkling smile that swamped every last trace of suspicion. He stepped forward, hand outstretched in welcome.

‘By heaven, you are right! Mallory! Of course I know Mallory!’ He grabbed Mallory’s hand, pumped it up and down with great enthusiasm. ‘It is indeed as the American says. You need a shave … And you look older.’

‘I feel older,’ Mallory said gloomily. He nodded at Miller. ‘This is Corporal Miller, an American citizen.’

‘Another famous climber?’ Louki asked eagerly. ‘Another tiger of the hills, yes?’

‘He climbed the south cliff as it has never been climbed before,’ Mallory answered truthfully. He glanced at his watch, then looked directly at Louki. ‘There are others up in the hills. We need help, Louki. We need it badly and we need it at once. You know the danger if you are caught helping us?’

‘Danger?’ Louki waved a contemptuous hand. ‘Danger to Louki and Panayis, the foxes of Navarone? Impossible! We are the ghosts of the night.’ He hitched his pack higher up on his shoulders. ‘Come. Let us take this food to your friends.’

‘Just a minute.’ Mallory’s restraining hand was on his arm. ‘There are two other things. We need heat – a stove and fuel, and we need –’

‘Heat! A stove!’ Louki was incredulous. ‘Your friends in the hills – what are they? A band of old women?’

‘And we also need bandages and medicine,’ Mallory went on patiently. ‘One of our friends has been terribly injured. We are not sure, but we do not think that he will live.’

‘Panayis!’ Louki barked. ‘Back to the village.’ Louki was speaking in Greek now. Rapidly he issued his orders, had Mallory describe where the rock-shelter was, made sure that Panayis understood, then stood a moment in indecision, pulling at an end of his moustache. At length he looked up at Mallory.

‘Could you find this cave again by yourself?’

‘Lord only knows,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘I honestly don’t think so.’

‘Then I must come with you. I had hoped – you see, it will be a heavy load for Panayis – I have told him to bring bedding as well – and I don’t think –’

‘I’ll go along with him,’ Miller volunteered. He thought of his back-breaking labours on the caique, the climb up the cliff, their forced march through the mountains. ‘The exercise will do me good.’

Louki translated his offer to Panayis – taciturn, apparently, only because of his complete lack of English – and was met by what appeared to be a torrent of protest. Miller looked at him in astonishment.

‘What’s the matter with old sunshine here?’ he asked Mallory. ‘Doesn’t seem any too happy to me.’

‘Says he can manage OK and wants to go by himself,’ Mallory interpreted. ‘Thinks you’ll slow him up on the hills.’ He shook his head in mock wonder. ‘As if any man could slow Dusty Miller up!’

‘Exactly!’ Louki was bristling with anger. Again he turned to Panayis, fingers stabbing the empty air to emphasise his words. Miller turned, looked apprehensively at Mallory.

‘What’s he tellin’ him now, boss?’

‘Only the truth,’ Mallory said solemnly. ‘Saying he ought to be honoured at being given the opportunity of marching with Monsieur Miller, the world-famous American climber.’ Mallory grinned. ‘Panayis will be on his mettle tonight – determined to prove that a Navaronian can climb as well and as fast as any man.’

‘Oh, my Gawd!’ Miller moaned.

‘And on the way back, don’t forget to give Panayis a hand up the steeper bits.’

Miller’s reply was luckily lost in a sudden flurry of snow-laden wind.

That wind was rising steadily now, a bitter wind that whipped the heavy snow into their bent faces and stung the tears from their blinking eyes. A heavy, wet snow that melted as it touched, and trickled down through every gap and chink in their clothing until they were wet and chilled and thoroughly miserable. A clammy, sticky snow that built up layer after energy-sapping layer under their leaden-footed boots, until they stumbled along inches above the ground, leg muscles aching from the sheer accumulated weight of snow. There was no visibility worthy of the name, not even of a matter of feet, they were blanketed, swallowed up by an impenetrable cocoon of swirling grey and white, unchanging, featureless: Louki strode on diagonally upwards across the slope with the untroubled certainty of a man walking up his own garden path.

Louki seemed as agile as a mountain goat, and as tireless. Nor was his tongue less nimble, less unwearied than his legs. He talked incessantly, a man overjoyed to be in action again, no matter what action so long as it was against the enemy. He told Mallory of the last three attacks on the island and how they had so bloodily failed – the Germans had been somehow forewarned of the seaborne assault, had been waiting for the Special Boat Service and the Commandos with everything they had and had cut them to pieces, while the two airborne groups had had the most evil luck, been delivered up to the enemy by misjudgment, by a series of unforeseeable coincidences; or how Panayis and himself had on both occasions narrowly escaped with their lives – Panayis had actually been captured the last time, had killed both his guards and escaped unrecognised; of the disposition of the German troops and check-points throughout the island, the location of the road blocks on the only two roads; and finally, of what little he himself knew of the layout of the fortress of Navarone itself. Panayis, the dark one, could tell him more of that, Louki said: twice Panayis had been inside the fortress, once for an entire night: the guns, the control rooms, the barracks, the officers’ quarters, the magazine, the turbo rooms, the sentry points – he knew where each one lay, to the inch.

Mallory whistled softly to himself. This was more than he had ever dared hope for. They had still to escape the net of searchers, still to reach the fortress, still to get inside it. But once inside – and Panayis must know how to get inside … Unconsciously Mallory lengthened his stride, bent his back to the slope.

‘Your friend Panayis must be quite something,’ he said slowly. ‘Tell me more about him, Louki.’

‘What can I tell you?’ Louki shook his head in a little flurry of snowflakes. ‘What do I know of Panayis? What does anyone know of Panayis? That he has the luck of the devil, the courage of a madman and that sooner the lion will lie down with the lamb, the starving wolf spare the flock, than Panayis breathe the same air as the Germans? We all know that, and we know nothing of Panayis. All I know is that I thank God I am no German, with Panayis on the island. He strikes by stealth, by night, by knife and in the back.’ Louki crossed himself. ‘His hands are full of blood.’

Mallory shivered involuntarily. The dark, sombre figure of Panayis, the memory of the expressionless face, the hooded eyes, were beginning to fascinate him.

‘There’s more to him than that, surely,’ Mallory argued ‘After all, you are both Navaronians –’

‘Yes yes, that is so.’

‘This is a small island, you’ve lived together all your lives –’

‘Ah, but that is where the major is wrong!’ Mallory’s promotion in rank was entirely Louki’s own idea: despite Mallory’s protests and explanations he seemed determined to stick to it. ‘I, Louki, was for many years in foreign lands, helping Monsieur Vlachos. Monsieur Vlachos,’ Louki said with pride, ‘is a very important Government official.’

‘I know,’ Mallory nodded. ‘A consul. I’ve met him. He is a very fine man.’

‘You have met him! Monsieur Vlachos?’ There was no mistaking the gladness, the delight in Louki’s voice. ‘That is good! That is wonderful! Later you must tell me more. He is a great man. Did I ever tell you –’

‘We were speaking about Panayis,’ Mallory reminded him gently.

‘Ah, yes, Panayis. As I was saying, I was away for a long time. When I came back, Panayis was gone. His father had died, his mother had married again and Panayis had gone to live with his stepfather and two little stepsisters in Crete. His stepfather, half-fisherman, half-farmer, was killed in fighting the Germans near Candia – this was in the beginning. Panayis took over the boat of his father, helped many of the Allies to escape until he was caught by the Germans, strung up by his wrists in the village square – where his family lived – not far from Casteli. He was flogged till the white of his ribs, of his backbone, was there for all to see, and left for dead. Then they burnt the village and Panayis’s family – disappeared. You understand, Major?’

‘I understand,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘But Panayis –’

‘He should have died. But he is tough, that one, tougher than a knot in an old carob tree. Friends cut him down during the night, took him away into the hills till he was well again. And then he arrived back in Navarone, God knows how. I think he came from island to island in a small rowing-boat. He never says why he came back – I think it gives him greater pleasure to kill on his own native island. I do not know, Major. All I know is that food and sleep, the sunshine, women and wine – all these are nothing and less than nothing to the dark one.’ Again Louki crossed himself. ‘He obeys me, for I am the steward of the Vlachos family, but even I am afraid of him. To kill, to keep on killing, then kill again – that is the very breath of his being.’ Louki stopped momentarily, sniffed the air like a hound seeking some fugitive scent, then kicked the snow off his boots and struck off up the hill at a tangent. The little man’s unhesitating sureness of direction was uncanny.

‘How far to go now, Louki?’

Two hundred yards, Major. No more.’ Louki blew some snow off his heavy, dark moustache and swore. ‘I shall not be sorry to arrive.’

‘Nor I.’ Mallory thought of the miserable, draughty shelter in the dripping rocks almost with affection. It was becoming steadily colder as they climbed out of the valley, and the wind was rising, climbing up the register with a steady, moaning whine: they had to lean into it now, push hard against it, to make any progress. Suddenly both men stopped, listened, looked at each other, heads bent against the driving snow. Around them there was only the white emptiness and the silence: there was no sign of what had caused the sudden sound.

‘You heard something, too?’ Mallory murmured.

‘It is only I.’ Mallory spun round as the deep voice boomed out behind him and the bulky, white-smocked figure loomed out of the snow. ‘A milk wagon on a cobbled street is as nothing compared to yourself and your friend here. But the snow muffled your voices and I could not be sure.’

Mallory looked at him curiously. ‘How come you’re here, Andrea?’

‘Wood,’ Andrea explained. ‘I was looking for firewood. I was high up on Kostos at sunset when the snow lifted for a moment. I could have sworn I saw an old hut in a gully not far from here – it was dark and square against the snow. So I left –’

‘You are right,’ Louki interrupted. ‘The hut of old Leri, the mad one. Leri was a goatherd. We all warned him, but Leri would listen and speak to no man, only to his goats. He died in his hut, in a landslide.’

‘It is an ill wind …’ Andrea murmured. ‘Old Leri will keep us warm tonight.’ He checked abruptly as the gully opened up at his feet, then dropped quickly to the bottom, sure-footed as a mountain sheep. He whistled twice, a double high-pitched note, listening intently into the snow for the answering whistle, walked swiftly up the gully. Casey Brown, gun lowered, met them at the entrance to the cave and held back the canvas screen to let them pass inside.

The smoking tallow candle, guttering heavily to one side in the icy draught, filled every corner of the cave with dark and flickering shadows from its erratic flame. The candle itself was almost gone, the dripping wick bending over tiredly till it touched the rock, and Louki, snow-suit cast aside, was lighting another stump of candle from the dying flame. For a moment, both candles flared up together, and Mallory saw Louki clearly for the first time – a small, compact figure in a dark-blue jacket black-braided at the seams and flamboyantly frogged at the breast, the jacket tightly bound to his body by the crimson tsanta or cummerbund, and, above, the swarthy, smiling face, the magnificent moustache that he flaunted like a banner. A Laughing Cavalier of a man, a miniature d’Artagnan splendidly behung with weapons. And then Mallory’s gaze travelled up to the lined, liquid eyes, eyes dark and sad and permanently tired, and his shock, a slow, uncomprehending shock, had barely time to register before the stub of the candle had flared up and died and Louki had sunk back into the shadows.

Stevens was stretched in a sleeping-bag, his breathing harsh and shallow and quick. He had been awake when they had arrived but had refused all food and drink, and turned away and drifted off into an uneasy jerky sleep. He seemed to be suffering no pain at all now: a bad sign, Mallory thought bleakly, the worst possible. He wished Miller would return …

Casey Brown washed down the last few crumbs of bread with a mouthful of wine, rose stiffly to his feet, pulled the screen aside and peered out mournfully at the falling snow. He shuddered, let the canvas fall, lifted up his transmitter and shrugged into the shoulder straps, gathered up a coil of rope, a torch and a groundsheet. Mallory looked at his watch: it was fifteen minutes to midnight. The routine call from Cairo was almost due.

‘Going to have another go, Casey? I wouldn’t send a dog out on a night like this.’

‘Neither would I,’ Brown said morosely. ‘But I think I’d better, sir. Reception is far better at night and I’m going to climb uphill a bit to get a clearance from that damned mountain there: I’d be spotted right away if I tried to do that in daylight.’

‘Right you are, Casey. You know best.’ Mallory looked at him curiously. ‘What’s all the extra gear for?’

‘Putting the set under the groundsheet then getting below it myself with the torch,’ Brown explained. ‘And I’m pegging the rope here, going to pay it out on my way up. I’d like to be able to get back some time.’

‘Good enough,’ Mallory approved. ‘Just watch it a bit higher up. This gully narrows and deepens into a regular ravine.’

‘Don’t you worry about me, sir,’ Brown said firmly. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to Casey Brown.’ A snow-laden gust of wind, the flap of the canvas and Brown was gone.

‘Well, if Brown can do it …’ Mallory was on his feet now, pulling his snow-smock over his head. ‘Fuel, gentlemen – old Leri’s hut. Who’s for a midnight stroll?’

Andrea and Louki were on their feet together, but Mallory shook his head.

‘One’s enough. I think someone should stay to look after Stevens.’

‘He’s sound asleep,’ Andrea murmured. ‘He can come to no harm in the short time we are away.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that. It’s just that we can’t take the chance of him falling into German hands. They’d make him talk, one way or another. It would be no fault of his – but they’d make him talk. It’s too much of a risk.’

‘Pouf!’ Louki snapped his fingers. ‘You worry about nothing, Major. There isn’t a German within miles of here. You have my word.’

Mallory hesitated, then grinned. ‘You’re right. I’m getting the jumps.’ He bent over Stevens, shook him gently. The boy stirred and moaned, opened his eyes slowly.

‘We’re going out for some firewood,’ Mallory said. ‘Back in a few minutes. You be OK?’

‘Of course, sir. What can happen? Just leave a gun by my side – and blow out the candle.’ He smiled. ‘Be sure to call out before you come in!’

Mallory stooped, blew out the candle. For an instant the flame flared then died and every feature, every person in the cave was swallowed up in the thick darkness of a winter midnight. Abruptly Mallory turned on his heel and pushed out through the canvas into the drifting, windblown snow already filling up the floor of the gully, Andrea and Louki close behind.

It took them ten minutes to find the ruined hut of the old goatherd, another five for Andrea to wrench the door off its shattered hinges and smash it up to manageable lengths, along with the wood from the bunk and table, another ten to carry back with them to the rock-shelter as much wood as they could conveniently rope together and carry. The wind, blowing straight north off Kostos, was in their faces now – faces numbed with the chill, wet lash of the driving snow, and blowing almost at gale force: they were not sorry to reach the gully again, drop down gratefully between the sheltering walls.

Mallory called softly at the mouth of the cave. There was no reply, no movement from inside. He called again, listened intently as the silent seconds went by, turned his head and looked briefly at Andrea and Louki. Carefully, he laid his bundle of wood in the snow, pulled out his Colt and torch, eased aside the curtain, lamp switch and Colt safety-catch clicking as one.

The spotlight beam lit up the floor at the mouth of the cave, passed on, settled, wavered, probed into the farthest corner of the shelter, returned again to the middle of the cave and steadied there as if the torch were clamped in a vice. On the floor there was only a crumpled, empty sleeping-bag. Andy Stevens was gone.

NINE

Tuesday Night

0015–0200

‘So I was wrong,’ Andrea murmured. ‘He wasn’t asleep.’

‘He certainly wasn’t,’ Mallory agreed grimly. ‘He fooled me too – and he heard what I said.’ His mouth twisted. ‘He knows now why we’re so anxious to look after him. He knows now that he was right when he spoke about a millstone. I should hate to feel the way he must be feeling right now.’

Andrea nodded. ‘It is not difficult to guess why he has gone.’

Mallory looked quickly at his watch, pushed his way out of the cave.

‘Twenty minutes – he can’t have been gone more than twenty minutes. Probably a bit less to make sure we were well clear. He can only drag himself – fifty yards at the most. We’ll find him in four minutes. Use your torches and take the hoods off – nobody will see us in this damn blizzard. Fan out uphill – I’ll take the gully in the middle.’

‘Uphill?’ Louki’s hand was on his arm, his voice puzzled. ‘But his leg –’

‘Uphill, I said,’ Mallory broke in impatiently. ‘Stevens has brains – and a damn sight more guts than he thinks we credit him with. He’ll figure we’ll think he’s taken the easy way.’ Mallory paused a moment then went on sombrely: ‘Any dying man who drags himself out in this lot is going to do nothing the easy way. Come on!’

They found him in exactly three minutes. He must have suspected that Mallory wouldn’t fall for the obvious, or he had heard them stumbling up the slope, for he had managed to burrow his way in behind the overhanging snowdrift that sealed off the space beneath a projecting ledge just above the rim of the gully. An almost perfect place of concealment, but his leg betrayed him: in the probing light of his torch Andrea’s sharp eyes caught the tiny trickle of blood seeping darkly through the surface of the snow. He was already unconscious when they uncovered him, from cold or exhaustion or the agony of his shattered leg: probably from all three.

Back in the cave again, Mallory tried to pour some ouzo – the fiery, breath-catching local spirit – down Stevens’s throat. He had a vague suspicion that this might be dangerous – or perhaps it was only dangerous in cases of shock, his memory was confused on that point – but it seemed better than nothing. Stevens gagged, spluttered and coughed most of it back up again, but some at least stayed down. With Andrea’s help Mallory tightened the loosened splints on the leg, staunched the oozing blood, and spread below and above the boy every dry covering he could find in the cave. Then he sat back tiredly and fished out a cigarette from his waterproof case. There was nothing more he could do until Dusty Miller returned with Panayis from the village. He was pretty sure there was nothing that Dusty could do for Stevens either. There was nothing anybody could do for him.

Already Louki had a fire burning near the mouth of the cave, the old, tinder-dry wood blazing up in a fierce, crackling blaze with hardly a wisp of smoke. Almost at once its warmth began to spread throughout the cave, and the three men edged gratefully nearer. From half a dozen points in the roof, thin, steadily increasing streams of water from the melting snows above began to splash down on the gravelly floor beneath: with these and with the heat of the blaze, the ground was soon a quagmire. But, especially to Mallory and Andrea, these discomforts were a small price to pay for the privilege of being warm for the first time in over thirty hours. Mallory felt the glow seep through him like a benison, felt his entire body relax, his eyelids grow heavy and drowsy.

Back propped against the wall, he was just drifting off to sleep, still smoking that first cigarette, when there was a gust of wind, a sudden chilling flurry of snow and Brown was inside the cave, wearily slipping the transmitter straps from his shoulders. Lugubrious as ever, his tired eyes lit up momentarily at the sight of the fire. Blue-faced and shuddering with cold – no joke, Mallory thought grimly, squatting motionless for half an hour on that bleak and frozen hillside – he hunched down silently by the fire, dragged out the inevitable cigarette and gazed moodily into the flames, oblivious alike of the clouds of steam that almost immediately enveloped him, of the acrid smell of his singeing clothes. He looked utterly despondent. Mallory reached for a bottle, poured out some of the heated retsina – mainland wine heavily reinforced with resin – and passed it across to Brown.

‘Chuck it straight down the hatch,’ Mallory advised. ‘That way you won’t taste it.’ He prodded the transmitter with his foot and looked up at Brown again. ‘No dice this time either?’

‘Raised them no bother, sir.’ Brown grimaced at the sticky sweetness of the wine. ‘Reception was first class – both here and in Cairo.’

‘You got through!’ Mallory sat up, leaned forward eagerly. ‘And were they pleased to hear from their wandering boys tonight?’

‘They didn’t say. The first thing they told me was to shut up and stay that way.’ Brown poked moodily at the fire with a steaming boot. ‘Don’t ask me how, sir, but they’ve been tipped off that enough equipment for two or three small monitoring stations has been sent here in the past fortnight.’

Mallory swore.

‘Monitoring stations! That’s damned handy, that is!’ He thought briefly of the fugitive, nomad existence these same monitoring stations had compelled Andrea and himself to lead in the White Mountains of Crete. ‘Dammit, Casey, on an island like this, the size of a soup plate, they can pin-point us with their eyes shut!’

‘Aye, they can that, sir,’ Brown nodded heavily.

‘Have you heard anything of these stations, Louki?’ Mallory asked.

‘Nothing, Major, nothing.’ Louki shrugged. ‘I am afraid I do not even know what you are talking about.’

‘I don’t suppose so. Not that it matters – it’s too late now. Let’s have the rest of the good news, Casey.’

‘That’s about it, sir. No sending for me – by order. Restricted to code abbreviations – affirmative, negative, repetitive, wilco and such-like. Continuous sending only in emergency or when concealment’s impossible anyway.’

‘Like from the condemned cell in those ducky little dungeons in Navarone,’ Mallory murmured. ‘“I died with my boots on, ma.”’

‘With all respects, sir, that’s not funny,’ Brown said morosely. ‘Their invasion fleet – mainly caiques and E-boats – sailed this morning from the Piraeus,’ he went on. ‘About four o’clock this morning. Cairo expects they’ll be holing up in the Cyclades somewhere tonight.’

‘That’s very clever of Cairo. Where the hell else could they hole up?’ Mallory lit a fresh cigarette and looked bleakly into the fire. ‘Anyway, it’s nice to know they’re on the way. That the lot, Casey?’

Brown nodded silently.

‘Good enough, then. Thanks a lot for going out. Better turn in, catch up with some sleep while you can … Louki reckons we should be down in Margaritha before dawn, hole up there for the day – he’s got some sort of abandoned well all lined up for us – and push on to the town of Navarone tomorrow night.’

‘My God!’ Brown moaned. ‘Tonight a leaking cave. Tomorrow night an abandoned well – half-full of water probably. Where are we staying in Navarone, sir. The crypt in the local cemetery.’

‘A singularly apt lodging, the way things are going,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘We’ll hope for the best. We’re leaving before five.’ He watched Brown lie down beside Stevens and transferred his attention to Louki. The little man was seated on a box on the opposite side of the fire, occasionally turning a heavy stone to be wrapped in cloth and put to Stevens’s numbed feet, and blissfully hugging the flames. By and by he became aware of Mallory’s close scrutiny and looked up.

‘You look worried, Major.’ Louki seemed vexed. ‘You look – what is the word? – concerned. You do not like my plan, no? I thought we had agreed –’

‘I’m not worried about your plan,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘I’m not even worried, about you. It’s that box you’re sitting on. Enough HE in it to blow up a battleship – and you’re only three feet from that fire. It’s not just too healthy, Louki.’

Louki shifted uneasily on his seat, tugged at one end of his moustache.

‘I have heard that you can throw this TNT into a fire and that it just burns up nicely, like a pine full of sap.’

‘True enough,’ Mallory acquiesced. ‘You can also bend it, break it, file it, saw it, jump on it and hit it with a sledge-hammer, and all you’ll get is the benefit of the exercise. But if it starts to sweat in a hot, humid atmosphere – and then the exudation crystallises. Oh, brother! And it’s getting far too hot and sticky in this hole.’

‘Outside with it!’ Louki was on his feet, backing farther into the cave. ‘Outside with it!’ He hesitated. ‘Unless the snow, the moisture –’

‘You can also leave it immersed in salt water for ten years without doing it any harm,’ Mallory interrupted didactically. ‘But there are some primers there that might come to grief – not to mention that box of detonators beside Andrea. We’ll just stick the lot outside, under a cape.’

‘Pouf! Louki has a far better idea!’ The little man was already slipping into his cloak. ‘Old Leri’s hut! The very place. Exactly! We can pick it up there whenever we want – and if you have to leave in a hurry you do not have to worry about it.’ Before Mallory could protest, Louki had bent over the box lifted it with an effort, half-walked, half-staggered round the fire, making for the screen. He had hardly taken three steps when Andrea was by his side, had relieved him firmly of the box and tucked it under one arm.

‘If you will permit me –’

‘No, no!’ Louki was affronted. ‘I can manage easily. It is nothing.’

‘I know, I know,’ Andrea said pacifically. ‘But these explosives – they must be carried a certain way. I have been trained,’ he explained.

‘So? I did not realise. Of course it must be as you say! I, then, will bring the detonators.’ Honour satisfied, Louki thankfully gave up the argument, lifted the little box and scuttled out of the cave close on Andrea’s heels.

Mallory looked at his watch. One o’clock exactly. Miller and Panayis should be back soon, he thought. The wind had passed its peak and the snow was almost gone: the going would be all that easier, but there would be tracks in the snow. Awkward, these tracks, but not fatal – they themselves would be gone before light, cutting straight downhill for the foot of the valley. The snow wouldn’t lie there – and even if there were patches they could take to the stream that wound through the valley, leaving no trace behind.

The fire was sinking and the cold creeping in on them again. Mallory shivered in his still wet clothes, threw some more wood on the fire, watched it blaze up, and flood the cave with light. Brown, huddled on a groundsheet, was already asleep. Stevens, his back to him, was lying motionless, his breathing short and quick. God only knew how long the boy would stay alive: he was dying, Miller said, but ‘dying’ was a very indefinite term: when a man, a terribly injured, dying man, made up his mind not to die he became the toughest, most enduring creature on earth. Mallory had seen it happen before. But maybe Stevens didn’t want to live. To live, to overcome these desperate injuries – that would be to prove himself to himself, and to others, and he was young enough, and sensitive enough and had been hurt and had suffered so much in the past that that could easily be the most important thing in the world to him: on the other hand, he knew what an appalling handicap he had become – he had heard Mallory say so; he knew, too, that Mallory’s primary concern was not for his welfare but the fear that he would be captured, crack under pressure and tell everything – he had heard Mallory say so; and he knew that he had failed his friends. It was all very difficult, impossible to say how the balance of contending forces would work out eventually. Mallory shook his head, sighed, lit a fresh cigarette and moved closer to the fire.

Andrea and Louki returned less than five minutes later, and Miller and Panayis were almost at their heels. They could hear Miller coming some distance away, slipping, falling and swearing almost continuously as he struggled up the gully under a large and awkward load. He practically fell across the threshold of the cave and collapsed wearily by the fire. He gave the impression of a man who had been through a very great deal indeed. Mallory grinned sympathetically at him.

‘Well, Dusty, how did it go? Hope Panayis here didn’t slow you up too much.’

Miller didn’t seem to hear him. He was gazing incredulously at the fire, lantern jaw drooping open as its significance slowly dawned on him.

‘Hell’s teeth! Would you look at that!’ He swore bitterly. ‘Here I spend half the gawddamned night climbing up a gawddamned mountain with a stove and enough kerosene to bath a bloody elephant. And what do I find?’ He took a deep breath to tell them what he found, then subsided into a strangled, seething silence.

‘A man your age should watch his blood pressure,’ Mallory advised him. ‘How did the rest of it go?’

‘Okay, I guess.’ Miller had a mug of ouzo in his hand and was beginning to brighten up again. ‘We got the beddin’, the medicine kit –’

‘If you’ll give me the bedding I will get our young friend into it now,’ Andrea interrupted.

‘And food?’ Mallory asked.

‘Yeah. We got the grub, boss. Stacks of it. This guy Panayis is a wonder. Bread, wine, goat-cheese, garlic sausages, rice – everything.’

‘Rice?’ It was Mallory’s turn to be incredulous. ‘But you can’t get the stuff in the islands nowadays, Dusty.’

‘Panayis can.’ Miller was enjoying himself hugely now. ‘He got it from the German commandant’s kitchen. Guy by the name of Skoda.’

‘The German commandant’s – you’re joking!’

‘So help me, boss, that’s Gospel truth.’ Miller drained half the ouzo at a gulp and expelled his breath in a long, gusty sigh of satisfaction. ‘Little ol’ Miller hangs around the back door, knees knockin’ like Carmen Miranda’s castanets, ready for a smart take off in any direction while Junior here goes in and cracks the joint. Back home in the States he’d make a fortune as a cat-burglar. Comes back in about ten minutes, luggin’ that damned suitcase there.’ Miller indicated it with a casual wave of his hand. ‘Not only cleans out the commandant’s pantry, but also borrows his satchel to carry the stuff in. I tell you, boss, associatin’ with this character gives me heart attacks.’

‘But – but how about guards, about sentries?’

‘Taken the night off, I guess, boss. Old Panayis is like a clam – never says a word, and even then I can’t understand him. My guess is that everybody’s out lookin’ for us.’

‘There and back and you didn’t meet a soul.’ Mallory filled him with a mug of wine. ‘Nice going, Dusty.’

‘Panayis’s doin’, not mine. I just tagged along. Besides, we did run into a couple of Panayis’s pals – he hunted them up rather. Musta given him the tip-off about somethin’. He was hoppin’ with excitement just afterwards, tried to tell me all about it.’ Miller shrugged his shoulders sadly. ‘We weren’t operatin’ on the same wave-length, boss.’

Mallory nodded across the cave. Louki and Panayis were close together, Louki doing all the listening, while Panayis talked rapidly in a low voice, gesticulating with both hands.

‘He’s still pretty worked up about something,’ Mallory said thoughtfully. He raised his voice. ‘What’s the matter, Louki?’

‘Matter enough, Major.’ Louki tugged ferociously at the end of his moustache. ‘We will have to be leaving soon – Panayis wants to go right away. He has heard that the German garrison is going to make a house-to-house check in our village during the night – about four o’clock, Panayis was told.’

‘Not a routine check, I take it?’ Mallory asked.

‘This has not happened for many months. They must think that you have slipped their patrols and are hiding in the village.’ Louki chuckled. ‘If you ask me, I don’t think they know what to think. It is nothing to you, of course. You will not be there – and even if you were they would not find you: and it will make it all the safer for you to come to Margaritha afterwards. But Panayis and I – we must not be found out of our beds. Things would go hard with us.’

‘Of course, of course. We must take no risks. But there is plenty of time. You will go down in an hour. But first, the fortress.’ He dug into his breast pocket, brought out the map Eugene Vlachos had drawn for him, turned to Panayis and slipped easily into the island Greek. ‘Come, Panayis. I hear you know the fortress as Louki here knows his own vegetable patch. I already know much, but I want you to tell me everything about it – the layout, guns, magazines, power rooms, barracks, sentries, guard routine, exits, alarm systems, even where the shadows are deep and the others less deep – just everything. No matter how tiny and insignificant the details may seem to you, nevertheless you must tell me. If a door opens outwards instead of inwards, you must tell me: that could save a thousand lives.’

‘And how does the Major mean to get inside?’ Louki asked.

‘I don’t know yet. I cannot decide until I have seen the fortress.’ Mallory was aware of Andrea looking sharply at him, then looking away. They had made their plans on the MTB for entering the fortress. But it was the keystone upon which everything depended, and Mallory felt that this knowledge should be confined to the fewest number possible.

For almost half an hour Mallory and the three Greeks huddled over the chart in the light of the flames, Mallory checking on what he had been told, meticulously pencilling in all the fresh information that Panayis had to give him – and Panayis had a very great deal to tell. It seemed almost impossible that a man could have assimilated so much in two brief visits to the fortress – and clandestine visits in the darkness, at that. He had an incredible eye and capacity for detail; and it was a burning hatred of the Germans, Mallory felt certain, that had imprinted these details on an all but photographic memory. Mallory could feel his hopes rising with every second that passed.

Casey Brown was awake again. Tired though he was, the babble of voices had cut through an uneasy sleep. He crossed over to where Andy Stevens, half-awake now, lay propped against the wall, talking rationally at times, incoherently at others. There was nothing for him to do there, Brown saw: Miller, cleaning, dusting and reban-daging the wounds had had all the help he needed – and very efficient help at that – from Andrea. He moved over to the mouth of the cave, listened blankly to the four men talking in Greek, moved out past the screen for a breath of the cold, clean night air. With seven people inside the cave and the fire burning continuously, the lack of almost all ventilation had made it uncomfortably warm.

He was back in the cave in thirty seconds, drawing the screen tightly shut behind him.

‘Quiet, everybody!’ he whispered softly. He gestured behind him. ‘There’s something moving out there, down the slope a bit. I heard it twice, sir.’

Panayis swore softly, twisted to his feet like a wild cat. A foot-long, two-edged throwing knife gleamed evilly in his hand and he had vanished through the canvas screen before anyone could speak. Andrea made to follow him, but Mallory stretched out his hand.

‘Stay where you are, Andrea. Our friend Panayis is just that little bit too precipitate,’ he said softly. ‘There may be nothing – or it might be some diversionary move … Oh, damn!’ Stevens had just started babbling to himself in a loud voice. ‘He would start talking now. Can’t you do something …’

But Andrea was already bent over the sick boy, holding his hand in his own, smoothing the hot forehead and hair with his free hand and talking to him soothingly, softly, continuously. At first he paid no attention, kept on talking in a rambling, inconsequential fashion about nothing in particular, gradually, however, the hypnotic effect of the stroking hand, the gentle caressing murmur took effect, and the babbling died away to a barely audible muttering, ceased altogether. Suddenly his eyes opened and he was awake and quite rational.

‘What is it, Andrea? Why are you –?’

‘Shh!’ Mallory held up his hand. ‘I can hear someone –’

‘It’s Panayis, sir.’ Brown had his eye at a crack in the curtain. ‘Just moving up the gully.’

Seconds later, Panayis was inside the cave, squatting down by the fire. He looked thoroughly disgusted.

‘There is no one there,’ he reported. ‘Some goats I saw, down the hill, but that was all.’ Mallory translated to the others.

‘Didn’t sound like goats to me,’ Brown said doggedly. ‘Different kind of sound altogether.’

‘I will take a look,’ Andrea volunteered. ‘Just to make sure. But I do not think the dark one would make a mistake.’ Before Mallory could say anything he was gone, as quickly and silently as Panayis. He was back in three minutes, shaking his head. ‘Panayis is right. There is no one. I did not even see the goats.’

‘And that’s what it must have been, Casey,’ Mallory said. ‘Still, I don’t like it. Snow almost stopped, wind dropping and the valley probably swarming with German patrols – I think it’s time you two were away. For God’s sake, be careful. If anyone tries to stop you, shoot to kill. They’ll blame it on us anyway.’

‘Shoot to kill!’ Louki laughed dryly. ‘Unnecessary advice, Major, when the dark one is with us. He never shoots any other way.’

‘Right, away you go. Damned sorry you’ve got yourselves mixed up in all this – but now that you are, a thousand thanks for all you’ve done. See you at half-past six.’

‘Half-past six,’ Louki echoed. ‘The olive grove on the bank of the stream, south of the village. We will be waiting there.’

Two minutes later they were lost to sight and sound and all was still inside the cave again, except for the faint crackling of the embers of the dying fire. Brown had moved out on guard, and Stevens had already fallen into a restless, pain-filled sleep. Miller bent over him for a moment or two, then moved softly across the cave to Mallory. His right hand held a crumpled heap of bloodstained bandages. He held them out towards Mallory.

‘Take a sniff at that, boss,’ he asked quietly. ‘Easy does it.’

Mallory bent forward, drew away sharply, his nose wrinkled in immediate disgust.

‘Good lord, Dusty! That’s vile!’ He paused, paused in sure, sick certainty. He knew the answer before he spoke. ‘What on earth is it?’

‘Gangrene.’ Miller sat down heavily by his side, threw the bandages into the fire. All at once he sounded tired, defeated. ‘Gas gangrene. Spreadin’ like a forest fire – and he would have died anyway. I’m just wastin’ my time.’

TEN

Tuesday Night

0400–0600

The Germans took them just after four o’clock in the morning, while they were still asleep. Bonetired and deep-drugged with this sleep as they were, they had no chance, not the slightest hope of offering any resistance. The conception, timing and execution of the coup were immaculate. Surprise was complete.

Andrea was the first awake. Some alien whisper of sound had reached deep down to that part of him that never slept, and he twisted round and elbowed himself off the ground with the same noiseless speed as his hand reached out for his ready-cocked and loaded Mauser. But the white beam of the powerful torch lancing through the blackness of the cave had blinded him, frozen his stretching hand even before the clipped bite of command from the man who held the torch.

‘Still! All of you!’ Faultless English, with barely a trace of accent, and the voice glacial in its menace. ‘You move, and you die!’ Another torch switched on, a third, and the cave was flooded with light. Wide awake, now, and motionless Mallory squinted painfully into the dazzling beams: in the back-wash of reflected light, he could just discern the vague, formless shapes crouched in the mouth of the cave, bent over the dulled barrels of automatic rifles.

‘Hands clasped above the heads and backs to the wall!’ A certainty, an assured competence in the voice that made for instant obedience. ‘Take a good look at them, Sergeant.’ Almost conversational now, the tone, but neither torch nor gun barrel had wavered a fraction. ‘No shadow of expression in their faces, not even a flicker of the eyes. Dangerous men, Sergeant. The English choose their killers well!’

Mallory felt the grey bitterness of defeat wash through him in an almost tangible wave, he could taste the sourness of it in the back of his mouth. For a brief, heart-sickening second he allowed himself to think of what must now inevitably happen and as soon as the thought had come he thrust it savagely away. Everything, every action, every thought, every breath must be on the present. Hope was gone, but not irrecoverably gone: not so long as Andrea lived. He wondered if Casey Brown had seen or heard them coming, and what had happened to him: he made to ask, checked himself just in time. Maybe he was still at large.

‘How did you manage to find us?’ Mallory asked quietly.

‘Only fools burn juniper wood,’ the officer said contemptuously. ‘We have been on Kostos all day and most of the night. A dead man could have smelt it.’

‘On Kostos?’ Miller shook his head. ‘How could –?’

‘Enough!’ The officer turned to someone behind him. ‘Tear down that screen,’ he ordered in German, ‘and keep us covered on either side.’ He looked back into the cave, gestured almost imperceptibly with his torch. ‘All right, you three. Outside – and you had better be careful. Please believe me that my men are praying for an excuse to shoot you down, you murdering swine!’ The venomous hatred in his voice carried utter conviction.

Slowly, hands still clasped above their heads, the three men stumbled to their feet. Mallory had taken only one step when the whip-lash of the German’s voice brought him up short.

‘Stop!’ He stabbed the beam of his torch down at the unconscious Stevens, gestured abruptly at Andrea. ‘One side, you! Who is this?’

‘You need not fear from him,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘He is one of us but he is terribly injured. He is dying.’

‘We will see,’ the officer said tightly. ‘Move to the back of the cave!’ He waited until the three men had stepped over Stevens, changed his automatic rifle for a pistol, dropped to his knees and advanced slowly, torch in one hand, gun in the other, well below the line of fire of the two soldiers who advanced unbidden at his heels. There was an inevitability, a cold professionalism about it all that made Mallory’s heart sink.

Abruptly the officer reached out his gun-hand, tore the covers off the boy. A shuddering tremor shook the whole body, his head rolled from side to side as he moaned in unconscious agony. The officer bent quickly over him, the hard, clean lines of the face, the fair hair beneath the hood high-lit in the beam of his own torch. A quick look at Stevens’s pain-twisted, emaciated features, a glance at the shattered leg, a brief, distasteful wrinkling of the nose as he caught the foul stench of the gangrene, and he had hunched back on his heels, gently replacing the covers over the sick boy.

‘You speak the truth,’ he said softly. ‘We are not barbarians. I have no quarrel with a dying man. Leave him there.’ He rose to his feet, walked slowly backwards. ‘The rest of you outside.’

The snow had stopped altogether, Mallory saw, and stars were beginning to twinkle in the clearing sky. The wind, too, had fallen away and was perceptibly warmer. Most of the snow would be gone by midday, Mallory guessed.

Carelessly, incuriously, he looked around him. There was no sign of Casey Brown. Inevitably Mallory’s hopes began to rise. Petty Officer Brown’s recommendation for this operation had come from the very top. Two rows of ribbons to which he was entitled but never wore bespoke his gallantry, he had a formidable reputation as a guerrilla fighter – and he had had an automatic rifle in his hand. If he were somewhere out there … Almost as if he had divined his hopes, the German smashed them at a word.

‘You wonder where your sentry is, perhaps?’ he asked mockingly. ‘Never fear, Englishman, he is not far from here, asleep at his post. Very sound asleep, I’m afraid.’

‘You’ve killed him?’ Mallory’s hands clenched until his palms ached.

The other shrugged his shoulder in vast indifference.

‘I really couldn’t say. It was all too easy. One of my men lay in the gully and moaned. A masterly performance – really pitiable – he almost had me convinced. Like a fool your man came to investigate. I had another man waiting above, the barrel of his rifle in his hand. A very effective club, I assure you …’

Slowly Mallory unclenched his fists and stared bleakly down the gully. Of course Casey would fall for that, he was bound to after what had happened earlier in the night. He wasn’t going to make a fool of himself again, cry ‘wolf’ twice in succession: inevitably, he had gone to check first. Suddenly the thought occurred to Mallory that maybe Casey Brown had heard something earlier on, but the thought vanished as soon as it had come. Panayis did not look like the man to make a mistake: and Andrea never made a mistake; Mallory turned back to the officer again.

‘Well, where do we go from here?’

‘Margaritha, and very shortly. But one thing first.’ The German, his own height to an inch, stood squarely in front of him, levelled revolver at waist height, switched-off torch dangling loosely from his right hand. ‘Just a little thing, Englishman. Where are the explosives?’ He almost spat the words out.

‘Explosives?’ Mallory furrowed his brows in perplexity. ‘What explosives?’ he asked blankly, then staggered and fell to the ground as the heavy torch swept round in a vicious half-circle, caught him flush on the side of the face. Dizzily he shook his head and climbed slowly to his feet again.

‘The explosives.’ The torch was balanced in the hand again, the voice silky and gentle. ‘I asked you where they were.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’ Mallory spat out a broken tooth, wiped some blood off his smashed lips. ‘Is this the way the Germans treat their prisoners?’ he asked contemptuously.

‘Shut up!’

Again the torch lashed out. Mallory was waiting for it, rode the blow as best he could: even so the torch caught him heavily high up on the cheek-bone, just below the temple, stunning him with its jarring impact. Seconds passed, then he pushed himself slowly off the snow, the whole side of his face afire with agony, his vision blurred and unfocused.

‘We fight a clean war!’ The officer was breathing heavily, in barely controlled fury. ‘We fight by the Geneva Conventions. But these are for soldiers, not for murdering spies –’

‘We are no spies!’ Mallory interrupted. He felt as if his head was coming apart.

‘Then where are your uniforms?’ the officer demanded. ‘Spies, I say – murdering spies who stab in the back and cut men’s throats!’ The voice was trembling with anger. Mallory was at a loss – nothing spurious about this indignation.

‘Cut men’s throats?’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘My own batman. A harmless messenger, a boy only – and he wasn’t even armed. We found him only an hour ago. Ach, I waste my time!’ He broke off as he turned to watch two men coming up the gully. Mallory stood motionless for a moment, cursing the ill luck that had led the dead man across the path of Panayis – it could have been no one else – then turned to see what had caught the officer’s attention. He focused his aching eyes with difficulty, looked at the bent figure struggling up the slope, urged on by the ungentle prodding of a bayoneted rifle. Mallory let go a long, silent breath of relief. The left side of Brown’s face was caked with blood from a gash above the temple, but he was otherwise unharmed.

‘Right! Sit down in the snow, all of you!’ He gestured to several of his men. ‘Bind their hands!’

‘You are going to shoot us now, perhaps?’ Mallory asked quietly. It was suddenly, desperately urgent that he should know: there was nothing they could do but die, but at least they could die on their feet, fighting; but if they weren’t to die just yet, almost any later opportunity for resistance would be less suicidal than this.

‘Not yet, unfortunately. My section commander in Margaritha, Hauptmann Skoda, wishes to see you first – maybe it would be better for you if I did shoot you now. Then the Herr Commandant in Navarone – Officer Commanding of the whole island.’ The German smiled thinly. ‘But only a postponement, Englishman. You will be kicking your heels before the sun sets. We have a short way with spies in Navarone.’

‘But, sir! Captain!’ Hands raised in appeal, Andrea took a step forward, brought up short as two rifle muzzles ground into his chest.

‘Not Captain – Lieutenant,’ the officer corrected him. ‘Oberleutnant Turzig, at your service. What is it you want, fat one?’ he asked contemptuously.

‘Spies! You said spies! I am no spy!’ The words rushed and tumbled over one another, as if he could not get them out fast enough. ‘Before God, I am no spy! I am not one of them.’ The eyes were wide and staring, the mouth working soundlessly between the gasped-out sentences. ‘I am only a Greek, a poor Greek. They forced me to come along as an interpreter. I swear it, Lieutenant Turzig, I swear it!’

‘You yellow bastard!’ Miller ground out viciously, then grunted in agony as a rifle butt drove into the small of his back, just above the kidney. He stumbled, fell forward on his hands and knees, realised even as he fell that Andrea was only playing a part, that Mallory had only to speak half a dozen words in Greek to expose Andrea’s lie. Miller twisted on his side in the snow, shook his fist weakly and hoped that the contorted pain on his face might be mistaken for fury. ‘You two-faced, double-crossing dago! You gawddamned swine, I’ll get you …’ There was a hollow, sickening thud and Miller collapsed in the snow: the heavy ski-boot had caught him just behind the ear.

Mallory said nothing. He did not even glance at Miller. Fists balled helplessly at his sides and mouth compressed, he glared steadily at Andrea through narrowed slits of eyes. He knew the lieutenant was watching him, felt he must back Andrea up all the way. What Andrea intended he could not even begin to guess – but he would back him to the end of the world.

‘So!’ Turzig murmured thoughtfully. ‘Thieves fall out, eh?’ Mallory thought he detected the faintest overtones of doubt, of hesitancy, in his voice, but the lieutenant was taking no chances. ‘No matter, fat one. You have cast your lot with these assassins. What is it the English say? “You have made your bed, you must lie on it.”’ He looked at Andrea’s vast bulk dispassionately. ‘We may need to strengthen a special gallows for you.’

‘No, no, no!’ Andrea’s voice rose sharply, fearfully, on the last word. ‘It is true what I tell you! I am not one of them, Lieutenant Turzig, before God I am not one of them!’ He wrung his hands in distress, his great moonface contorted in anguish. ‘Why must I die for no fault of my own? I didn’t want to come. I am no fighting man, Lieutenant Turzig!’

‘I can see that,’ Turzig said dryly. ‘A monstrous deal of skin to cover a quivering jelly-bag your size – and every inch of it precious to you.’ He looked at Mallory, and at Miller, still lying face down in the snow. ‘I cannot congratulate your friends on their choice of companion.’

‘I can tell you everything, Lieutenant, I can tell you everything!’ Andrea pressed forward excitedly, eager to consolidate his advantage, to reinforce the beginnings of doubt. ‘I am no friend of the Allies – I will prove it to you – and then perhaps –’

‘You damned Judas!’ Mallory made to fling himself forward, but two burly soldiers caught him and pinioned his arms from behind. He struggled briefly, then relaxed, looked balefully at Andrea. ‘If you dare to open your mouth, I promise you you’ll never live to –’

‘Be quiet!’ Turzig’s voice was very cold. ‘I have had enough of recriminations, of cheap melodrama. Another word and you join your friend in the snow there.’ He looked at him a moment in silence, then swung back to Andrea. ‘I promise nothing. I will hear what you have to say.’ He made no attempt to disguise the repugnance in his voice.

‘You must judge for yourself.’ A nice mixture of relief, earnestness and the dawn of hope, of returning confidence. Andrea paused a minute and gestured dramatically at Mallory, Miller and Brown. ‘These are no ordinary soldiers – they are Jellicoe’s men, of the Special Boat Service!’

‘Tell me something I couldn’t have guessed myself,’ Turzig growled. ‘The English Earl has been a thorn in our flesh these many months past. If that is all you have to tell me, fat one –’

‘Wait!’ Andrea held up his hand. ‘They are still no ordinary men but a specially picked force – an assault unit, they call themselves – flown last Sunday night from Alexandria to Castelrosso. They left that same night from Castelrosso in a motor-boat.’

‘A torpedo boat,’ Turzig nodded. ‘So much we know already. Go on.’

‘You know already! But how –?’

‘Never mind how. Hurry up!’

‘Of course, Lieutenant, of course.’ Not a twitch in his face betrayed Andrea’s relief. This had been the only dangerous point in his story. Nicolai, of course, had warned the Germans, but never thought it worth while mentioning the presence of a giant Greek in the party. No reason, of course, why he should have selected him for special mention – but if he had done, it would have been the end.

‘The torpedo boat landed them somewhere in the islands, north of Rhodes. I do not know where. There they stole a caique, sailed it up through Turkish waters, met a big German patrol boat – and sunk it.’ Andrea paused for effect. ‘I was less than half a mile away at the time in my fishing boat.’

Turzig leaned forward. ‘How did they manage to sink so big a boat?’ Strangely, he didn’t doubt that it had been sunk.

‘They pretended to be harmless fishermen like myself. I had just been stopped, investigated and cleared,’ Andrea said virtuously. ‘Anyway, your patrol boat came alongside this old caique. Close alongside. Suddenly there were guns firing on both sides, two boxes went flying through the air – into the engine-room of your boat, I think. Pouf!’ Andrea threw up his hands dramatically. ‘That was the end of that!’

‘We wondered …’ Turzig said softly. ‘Well, go on.’

‘You wondered what, Lieutenant?’ Turzig’s eyes narrowed and Andrea hurried on.

‘Their interpreter had been killed in the fight. They tricked me into speaking English – I spent many years in Cyprus – kidnapped me, let my sons sail the boat –’

‘Why should they want an interpreter?’ Turzig demanded suspiciously. ‘There are many British officers who speak Greek.’

‘I am coming to that,’ Andrea said impatiently. ‘How in God’s name do you expect me to finish my story if you keep interrupting all the time? Where was I? Ah, yes. They forced me to come along, and their engine broke down. I don’t know what happened – I was kept below. I think we were in a creek somewhere, repairing the engine, and then there was a wild bout of drinking – you will not believe this, Lieutenant Turzig, that men on so desperate a mission should get drunk – and then we sailed again.’

‘On the contrary, I do believe you.’ Turzig was nodding his head slowly, as if in secret understanding. ‘I believe you indeed.’

‘You do?’ Andrea contrived to look disappointed. ‘Well, we ran into a fearful storm, wrecked the boat on the south cliff of this island and climbed –’

‘Stop!’ Turzig had drawn back sharply, suspicion flaring in his eyes. ‘Almost I believed you! I believed you because we know more than you think, and so far you have told the truth. But not now. You are clever, fat one, but not so clever as you think. One thing you have forgotten – or maybe you do not know. We are of the Württembergische Gebirgsbataillon – we know mountains, my friend, better than any troops in the world. I myself am a Prussian, but I have climbed everything worth climbing in the Alps and Transylvania – and I tell you that the south cliff cannot be climbed. It is impossible!’

‘Impossible perhaps for you.’ Andrea shook his head sadly. ‘These cursed Allies will beat you yet. They are clever, Lieutenant Turzig, damnably clever!’

‘Explain yourself,’ Turzig ordered curtly.

‘Just this. They knew men thought the south cliff could not be climbed. So they determined to climb it. You would never dream that this could be done, that an expedition could land on Navarone that way. But the Allies took a gamble, found a man to lead the expedition. He could not speak Greek, but that did not matter, for what they wanted was a man who could climb – and so they picked the greatest rock-climber in the world today.’ Andrea paused for effect, flung out his arm dramatically. ‘And this is the man they picked, Lieutenant Turzig! You are a mountaineer yourself and you are bound to know him. His name is Mallory – Keith Mallory of New Zealand!’

There was a sharp exclamation, the click of a switch, and Turzig had taken a couple of steps forward, thrust the torch almost into Mallory’s eyes. For almost ten seconds he stared into the New Zealander’s averted, screwed-up face, then slowly lowered his arm, the harsh spotlight limning a dazzling white circle in the snow at his feet. Once, twice, half a dozen times Turzig nodded his head in slow understanding.

‘Of course!’ he murmured. ‘Mallory – Keith Mallory! Of course I know him. There’s not a man in my Abteilung but has heard of Keith Mallory.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have known him, I should have known him at once.’ He stood for some time with his head bent, aimlessly screwing the toe of his right boot into the soft snow, then looked up abruptly. ‘Before the war, even during it, I would have been proud to have known you, glad to have met you. But not here, not now. Not any more. I wish to God they had sent someone else.’ He hesitated, made to carry on, then changed his mind, turned wearily to Andrea. ‘My apologies, fat one. Indeed you speak the truth. Go on.’

‘Certainly!’ Andrea’s round moon face was one vast smirk of satisfaction. ‘We climbed the cliff as I said – although the boy in the cave there was badly hurt – and silenced the guard. Mallory killed him,’ Andrea added unblushingly. ‘It was a fair fight. We spent most of the night crossing the divide and found this cave before dawn. We were almost dead with hunger and cold. We have been here since.’

‘And nothing has happened since?’

‘On the contrary.’ Andrea seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, revelling in being the focus of attention. ‘Two people came up to see us. Who they were I do not know – they kept their faces hidden all the time – nor do I know where they came from.’

‘It is as well that you admitted that,’ Turzig said grimly. ‘I knew someone had been here. I recognised the stove – it belongs to Hauptmann Skoda!’

‘Indeed?’ Andrea raised his eyebrows in polite surprise. ‘I did not know. Well, they talked for some time and –’

‘Did you manage to overhear anything they were talking about?’ Turzig interrupted. The question came so naturally, so spontaneously, that Mallory held his breath. It was beautifully done. Andrea would walk into it – he couldn’t help it. But Andrea was a man inspired that night.

‘Overhear them!’ Andrea clamped his lips shut in sorely-tried forbearance, gazed heavenwards in exasperated appeal. ‘Lieutenant Turzig, how often must I tell you that I am the interpreter? They could only talk through me. Of course I know what they were talking about. They are going to blow up the big guns in the harbour.’

‘I didn’t think they had come here for their health!’ Turzig said acidly.

‘Ah, but you don’t know that they have plans of the fortress. You don’t know that Kheros is to be invaded on Saturday morning. You don’t know that they are in radio contact with Cairo all the time. You don’t know that destroyers of the British Navy are coming through the Maidos Straits on Friday night as soon as the big guns have been silenced. You don’t know –’

‘Enough!’ Turzig clapped his hands together, his face alight with excitement. ‘The Royal Navy, eh? Wonderful, wonderful! That is what we want to hear. But enough! Keep it for Hauptmann Skoda and the Kommandant in the fortress. We must be off. But first – one more thing. The explosives – where are they?’

‘Alas, Lieutenant Turzig, I do not know. They took them out and hid them – some talk about the cave being too hot.’ He waved a hand towards the western col, in the diametrically opposite direction to Leri’s hut. ‘That way, I think. But I cannot be sure, for they would not tell me.’ He looked bitterly at Mallory. ‘These Britishers are all the same. They trust nobody.’

‘Heaven only knows that I don’t blame them for that!’ Turzig said feelingly. He looked at Andrea in disgust. ‘More than ever I would like to see you dangling from the highest scaffold in Navarone. But Herr Kommandant in the town is a kindly man and rewards informers. You may yet live to betray some more comrades.’

‘Thank you, thank you, thank you! I knew you were fair and just. I promise you, Lieutenant Turzig –’

‘Shut up!’ Turzig said contemptuously. He switched into German. ‘Sergeant, have these men bound. And don’t forget the fat one! Later we can untie him, and he can carry the sick man back to the post. Leave a man on guard. The rest of you come with me – we must find those explosives.’

‘Could we not make one of them tell us, sir?’ the sergeant ventured.

‘The only man who would tell us, can’t. He’s already told us all he knows. As for the rest – well, I was mistaken about them, Sergeant.’ He turned to Mallory, inclined his head briefly, spoke in English. ‘An error of judgment, Herr Mallory. We are all very tired. I am almost sorry I struck you.’ He wheeled abruptly, climbed swiftly up the bank. Two minutes later only a solitary soldier was left on guard.

For the tenth time Mallory shifted his position uncomfortably, strained at the cord that bound his hands together behind his back, for the tenth time recognised the futility of both these actions. No matter how he twisted and turned, the wet snow soaked icily through his clothes until he was chilled to the bone and shaking continually with the cold; and the man who had tied these knots had known his job all too well. Mallory wondered irritably if Turzig and his men meant to spend all night searching for the explosives: they had been gone for more than half an hour already.

He relaxed, lay back on his side in the cushioning snow of the gully bank, and looked thoughtfully at Andrea who was sitting upright just in front of him. He had watched Andrea, with bowed head and hunched and lifting shoulders, making one single, titanic effort to free himself seconds after the guard had gestured to them to sit down, had seen the cords bite and gouge until they had almost disappeared in his flesh, the fractional slump of his shoulders as he gave up. Since then the giant Greek had sat quite still and contented himself with scowling at the sentry in the injured fashion of one who has been grievously wronged. That solitary test of the strength of his bonds had been enough. Oberleutnant Turzig had keen eyes, and swollen, chafed and bleeding wrists would have accorded ill with the character Andrea had created for himself.

A masterly creation, Mallory mused, all the more remarkable for its spontaneity, its improvisation. Andrea had told so much of the truth, so much that was verifiable or could be verified, that belief in the rest of his story followed almost automatically. And at the same time he had told Turzig nothing of importance, nothing the Germans could not have found out for themselves – except the proposed evacuation of Kheros by the Navy. Wryly Mallory remembered his dismay, his shocked unbelief when he heard Andrea telling of it – but Andrea had been far ahead of him. There was a fair chance that the Germans might have guessed anyway – they would reason, perhaps, that an assault by the British on the guns of Navarone at the same time as the German assault on Kheros would be just that little bit too coincidental: again, escape for them all quite clearly depended upon how thoroughly Andrea managed to convince his captors that he was all he claimed, and the relative freedom of action that he could thereby gain – and there was no doubt at all that it was the news of the proposed evacuation that had tipped the scales with Turzig: and the fact that Andrea had given Saturday as the invasion date would only carry all the more weight, as that had been Jensen’s original date – obviously false information fed to his agents by German counter-intelligence, who had known it impossible to conceal the invasion preparations themselves; and finally, if Andrea hadn’t told Turzig of the destroyers, he might have failed to carry conviction, they might all yet finish on the waiting gallows in the fortress, the guns would remain intact and destroy the naval ships anyway.

It was all very complicated, too complicated for the state his head was in. Mallory sighed and looked away from Andrea towards the other two. Brown and a now conscious Miller were both sitting upright, hands bound behind their backs, staring down into the snow, occasionally shaking muzzy heads from side to side. Mallory could appreciate all too easily how they felt – the whole right-hand side of his face ached cruelly, continuously. Nothing but aching, broken heads everywhere, Mallory thought bitterly. He wondered how Andy Stevens was feeling, glanced idly past the sentry towards the dark mouth of the cave, stiffened in sudden, almost uncomprehending shock.

Slowly, with an infinitely careful carelessness, he let his eyes wander away from the cave, let them light indifferently on the sentry who sat on Brown’s transmitter, hunched watchfully over the Schmeisser cradled on his knees, finger crooked on the trigger. Pray God he doesn’t turn round, Mallory said to himself over and over again, pray God he doesn’t turn round. Let him sit like that just for a little while longer, only a little while longer … In spite of himself, Mallory felt his gaze shifting, being dragged back again towards that cave-mouth.

Andy Stevens was coming out of the cave. Even in the dim starlight every movement was terribly plain as he inched forward ago-nisingly on chest and belly, dragging his shattered leg behind him. He was placing his hands beneath his shoulders, levering himself upwards and forwards while his head dropped below his shoulders with pain and the exhaustion of the effort, lowering himself slowly on the soft and sodden snow, then repeating the same heart-sapping process over and over again. Exhausted and pain-filled as the boy might be, Mallory thought, his mind was still working: he had a white sheet over his shoulders and back as camouflage against the snow, and he carried a climbing spike in his right hand. He must have heard at least some of Turzig’s conversation: there were two or three guns in the cave, he could easily have shot the guard without coming out at all – but he must have known that the sound of a shot would have brought the Germans running, had them back at the cave long before he could have crawled across the gully, far less cut loose any of his friends.

Five yards Stevens had to go, Mallory estimated, five yards at the most. Deep down in the gully where they were, the south wind passed them by, was no more than a muted whisper in the night; that apart, there was no sound at all, nothing but their own breathing, the occasional stirring as someone stretched a cramped or frozen leg. He’s bound to hear him if he comes any closer, Mallory thought desperately, even in that soft snow he’s bound to hear him.

Mallory bent his head, began to cough loudly, almost continuously. The sentry looked at him, in surprise first, then in irritation as the coughing continued.

‘Be quiet!’ the sentry ordered in German. ‘Stop that coughing at once!’

‘Hüsten? Hüsten? Coughing, is it? I can’t help it,’ Mallory protested in English. He coughed again, louder, more persistently than before. ‘It is your Oberleutnant’s fault,’ he gasped. ‘He has knocked out some of my teeth.’ Mallory broke into a fresh paroxysm of coughing, recovering himself with an effort. ‘Is it my fault that I’m choking on my own blood?’ he demanded.

Stevens was less than ten feet away now, but his tiny reserves of strength were almost gone. He could no longer raise himself to the full stretch of his arms, was advancing only a few pitiful inches at a time. At length he stopped altogether, lay still for half a minute. Mallory thought he had lost consciousness, but by and by he raised himself up again, to the full stretch this time, had just begun to pivot himself forward when he collapsed, fell heavily in the snow. Mallory began to cough again, but he was too late. The sentry leapt off his box and whirled round all in one movement, the evil mouth of the Schmeisser lined up on the body almost at his feet. Then he relaxed as he realised who it was, lowered the barrel of his gun.

‘So!’ he said softly. ‘The fledgling has left its nest. Poor little fledgling!’ Mallory winced as he saw the back-swing of the gun ready to smash down on Stevens’s defenceless head, but the sentry was a kindly enough man, his reaction had been purely automatic. He arrested the swinging butt inches above the tortured face, bent down and almost gently removed the spike from the feebly threatening hand, sent it spinning over the edge of the gully. Then he lifted Stevens carefully by the shoulders, slid in the bunched-up sheet as pillow for the unconscious head against the bitter cold of the snow, shook his head wonderingly, sadly, went back to his seat on the ammunition box.

Hauptmann Skoda was a small, thin man in his late thirties, neat, dapper, debonair and wholly evil. There was something innately evil about the long, corded neck that stretched up scrawnily above his padded shoulders, something repellent about the incongruously small bullet head perched above. When the thin, bloodless lips parted in a smile, which was often, they revealed a perfect set of teeth: far from lighting his face, the smile only emphasised the sallow skin stretched abnormally taut across the sharp nose and high cheekbones, puckered up the sabre scar that bisected the left cheek from eyebrow to chin: and whether he smiled or not, the pupils of the deep-set eyes remained always the same, still and black and empty. Even at that early hour – it was not yet six o’clock – he was immaculately dressed, freshly shaven, the wetly gleaming hair – thin, dark, heavily indented above the temples – brushed straight back across his head. Seated behind a flat-topped table, the sole article of furniture in the bench-lined guardroom, only the upper half of his body was visible: even so, one instinctively knew that the crease of the trousers, the polish of the jack-boots, would be beyond reproach.

He smiled often, and he was smiling now as Oberleutnant Turzig finished his report. Leaning far back in his chair, elbows on the arm-rests, Skoda steepled his lean fingers under his chin, smiled benignly round the guardroom. The lazy, empty eyes missed nothing – the guard at the door, the two guards behind the bound prisoner, Andrea sitting on the bench where he had just laid Stevens – one lazy sweep of those eyes encompassed them all.

‘Excellently done, Oberleutnant Turzig!’ he purred. ‘Most efficient, really most efficient!’ He looked speculatively at the three men standing before him, at their bruised and blood-caked faces, switched his glance to Stevens, lying barely conscious on the bench, smiled again and permitted himself a fractional lift of his eyebrows. ‘A little trouble perhaps, Turzig? The prisoners were not too – ah – co-operative?’

‘They offered no resistance, sir, no resistance at all,’ Turzig said stiffly. The tone, the manner, were punctilious, correct, but the distaste, the latent hostility were mirrored in his eyes. ‘My men were maybe a little enthusiastic. We wanted to make no mistake.’

‘Quite right, Lieutenant, quite right,’ Skoda murmured approvingly. ‘These are dangerous men and one cannot take chances with dangerous men.’ He pushed back his chair, rose easily to his feet, strolled round the table and stopped in front of Andrea. ‘Except maybe this one, Lieutenant?’

‘He is dangerous only to his friends,’ Turzig said shortly. ‘It is as I told you, sir. He would betray his mother to save his own skin.’

‘And claiming friendship with us, eh?’ Skoda asked musingly. ‘One of our gallant allies, Lieutenant.’ Skoda reached out a gentle hand, brought it viciously down and across Andrea’s cheek, the heavy signet ring on his middle finger tearing skin and flesh. Andrea cried out in pain, capped one hand to his bleeding face and cowered away, his right arm raised above his head in blind defence.

‘A notable addition to the armed forces of the Third Reich,’ Skoda murmured. ‘You were not mistaken, Lieutenant. A poltroon – the instinctive reaction of a hurt man is an infallible guide. It is curious,’ he mused, ‘how often very big men are thus. Part of nature’s compensatory process, I suppose … What is your name, my brave friend?’

‘Papagos,’ Andrea muttered sullenly. ‘Peter Papagos.’ He took his hand away from his cheek, looked at it with eyes slowly widening with horror, began to rub it across his trouser leg with jerky, hurried movements, the repugnance on his face plain for every man to see. Skoda watched him with amusement.

‘You do not like to see blood, Papagos, eh?’ he suggested. ‘Especially your own blood?’

A few seconds passed in silence, then Andrea lifted his head suddenly, his fat face screwed up in misery. He looked as if he were going to cry.

‘I am only a poor fisherman, your Honour!’ he burst out. ‘You laugh at me and say I do not like blood, and it is true. Nor do I like suffering and war. I want no part of any of these things!’ His great fists were clenched in futile appeal, his face puckered in woe, his voice risen an octave. It was a masterly exhibition of despair and even Mallory found himself almost believing in it. ‘Why wasn’t I left alone?’ he went on pathetically. ‘God only knows I am no fighting man –’

‘A highly inaccurate statement,’ Skoda interrupted dryly. ‘That fact must be patently obvious to every person in the room by this time.’ He tapped his teeth with a jade cigarette-holder, his eyes speculative. ‘A fisherman you call yourself –’

‘He’s a damned traitor!’ Mallory interrupted. The commandant was becoming just that little bit too interested in Andrea. At once Skoda wheeled round, stood in front of Mallory with his hands clasped behind his back, teetering on heels and toes, and looked him up and down in mocking inspection.

‘So!’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The great Keith Mallory! A rather different proposition from our fat and fearful friend on the bench there, eh, Lieutenant?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘What rank are you, Mallory?’

‘Captain,’ Mallory answered briefly.

‘Captain Mallory, eh? Captain Keith Mallory, the greatest mountaineer of our time, the idol of pre-war Europe, the conqueror of the world’s most impossible climbs.’ Skoda shook his head sadly. ‘And to think that it should all end like this … I doubt whether posterity will rank your last climb as among your greatest: there are only ten steps leading to the gallows in the fortress of Navarone.’ Skoda smiled. ‘Hardly a cheerful thought, is it, Captain Mallory?’

‘I wasn’t even thinking about it,’ the New Zealander answered pleasantly. ‘What worries me is your face.’ He frowned. ‘Somewhere or other I’m sure I’ve seen it or something like it before.’ His voice trailed off into silence.

‘Indeed?’ Skoda was interested. ‘In the Bernese Alps, perhaps? Often before the war –’

‘I have it now!’ Mallory’s face cleared. He knew the risk he was taking, but anything that concentrated attention on himself to the exclusion of Andrea was justified. He beamed at Skoda. ‘Three months ago, it was, in the zoo in Cairo. A plains buzzard that had been captured in the Sudan. A rather old and mangy buzzard, I’m afraid,’ Mallory went on apologetically, ‘but exactly the same scrawny neck, the same beaky face and bald head –’

Mallory broke off abruptly, swayed back out of reach as Skoda, his face livid and gleaming teeth bared in rage, swung at him with his fist. The blow carried with it all Skoda’s wiry strength, but anger blurred his timing and the fist swung harmlessly by: he stumbled, recovered, then fell to the floor with a shout of pain as Mallory’s heavy boot caught him flush on the thigh, just above the knee. He had barely touched the floor when he was up like a cat, took a pace forward and collapsed heavily again as his injured leg gave under him.

There was a moment’s shocked stillness throughout the room, then Skoda rose painfully, supporting himself on the edge of the heavy table. He was breathing quickly, the thin mouth a hard, white line, the great sabre scar flaming redly in the sallow face drained now of all colour. He looked neither at Mallory nor anyone else, but slowly, deliberately, in an almost frightening silence, began to work his way round to the back of the table, the scuffling of his sliding palms on the leather top rasping edgily across over-tautened nerves.

Mallory stood quite still, watching him with expressionless face, cursing himself for his folly. He had overplayed his hand. There was no doubt in his mind – there could be no doubt in the mind of anyone in that room – that Skoda meant to kill him; and he, Mallory, would not die. Only Skoda and Andrea would die: Skoda from Andrea’s throwing knife – Andrea was rubbing blood from his face with the inside of his sleeve, fingertips only inches from the sheath – and Andrea from the guns of the guards, for the knife was all he had. You fool, you fool, you bloody stupid fool, Mallory repeated to himself over and over again. He turned his head slightly and glanced out of the corner of his eye at the sentry nearest him. Nearest him – but still six or seven feet away. The sentry would get him, Mallory knew, the blast of the slugs from the Schmeisser would tear him in half before he could cover the distance. But he would try. He must try. It was the least he owed to Andrea.

Skoda reached the back of the table, opened a drawer and lifted out a gun. An automatic, Mallory noted with detachment – a little, blue-metal, snub-nosed toy – but a murderous toy, the kind of gun he would have expected Skoda to have. Unhurriedly Skoda pressed the release button, checked the magazine, snapped it home with the palm of his hand, flicked off the safety catch and looked up at Mallory. The eyes hadn’t altered in the slightest – they were cold, dark and empty as ever. Mallory flicked a glance at Andrea and tensed himself for one convulsive fling backwards. Here it comes, he thought savagely, this is how bloody fools like Keith Mallory die – and then all of a sudden, and unknowingly, he relaxed, for his eyes were still on Andrea and he had seen Andrea doing the same, the huge hand slipping down unconcernedly from the neck, empty of any sign of knife.

There was a scuffle at the table and Mallory was just in time to see Turzig pin Skoda’s gun-hand to the table-top.

‘Not that, sir!’ Turzig begged. ‘For God’s sake, not that way!’

‘Take your hands away,’ Skoda whispered. The staring, empty eyes never left Mallory’s face. ‘Take your hands away, I say – unless you want to go the same way as Captain Mallory.’

‘You can’t kill him, sir!’ Turzig persisted doggedly. ‘You just can’t. Herr Kommandant’s orders were very clear, Hauptmann Skoda. The leader must be brought to him alive.’

‘He was shot while trying to escape,’ Skoda said thickly.

‘It’s no good.’ Turzig shook his head. ‘We can’t kill them all – and the other prisoners would talk.’ He released his grip on Skoda’s hands. ‘Alive, Herr Kommandant said, but he didn’t say how much alive.’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘Perhaps we may have some difficulty in making Captain Mallory talk,’ he suggested.

‘What! What did you say?’ Abruptly the death’s head smile flashed once more, and Skoda was completely on balance again. ‘You are over-zealous, Lieutenant. Remind me to speak to you about it some time. You underestimate me: that was exactly what I was trying to do – frighten Mallory into talking. And now you’ve spoilt it all.’ The smile was still on his face, the voice light, almost bantering, but Mallory was under no illusions. He owed his life to the young WGB lieutenant – how easily one could respect, form a friendship with a man like Turzig if it weren’t for this damned, crazy war … Skoda was standing in front of him again: he had left his gun on the table.

‘But enough of this fooling, eh, Captain Mallory?’ The German’s teeth fairly gleamed in the bright light from the naked lamps overhead. ‘We haven’t all night, have we?’

Mallory looked at him, then turned away in silence. It was warm enough, stuffy almost, in that little guardroom, but he was conscious of a sudden, nameless chill, he knew all at once, without knowing why, but with complete certainty, that this little man before him was utterly evil.

‘Well, well, well, we are not quite so talkative now, are we, my friend?’ He hummed a little to himself, looked up abruptly, the smile broader than ever. ‘Where are the explosives, Captain Mallory?’

‘Explosives?’ Mallory lifted an interrogatory eyebrow. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘You don’t remember, eh?’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘So.’ Skoda hummed to himself again and walked over in front of Miller. ‘And what about you, my friend?’

‘Sure I remember,’ Miller said easily. ‘The captain’s got it all wrong.’

‘A sensible man!’ Skoda purred – but Mallory could have sworn to an undertone of disappointment in the voice. ‘Proceed, my friend.’

‘Captain Mallory has no eye for detail,’ Miller drawled. ‘I was with him that day. He is malignin’ a noble bird. It was a vulture, not a buzzard.’

Just for a second Skoda’s smile slipped, then it was back again, as rigidly fixed and lifeless as if it had been painted on.

‘Very, very witty men, don’t you think, Turzig? What the British would call music-hall comedians. Let them laugh while they may, until the hangman’s noose begins to tighten …’ He looked at Casey Brown. ‘Perhaps you –’

‘Why don’t you go and take a running jump to yourself?’ Brown growled.

‘A running jump? The idiom escapes me, but I fear it is hardly complimentary.’ Skoda selected a cigarette from a thin case, tapped it thoughtfully on a thumb nail. ‘Hmm. Not just what one might call too co-operative, Lieutenant Turzig.’

‘You won’t get these men to talk, sir.’ There was a quiet finality in Turzig’s voice.

‘Possibly not, possibly not.’ Skoda was quite unruffled. ‘Nevertheless, I shall have the information I want, and within five minutes.’ He walked unhurriedly across to his desk, pressed a button, screwed his cigarette into its jade holder, and leaned against the table, an arrogance, a careless contempt in every action, even to the leisurely crossing of the gleaming jack-boots.

Suddenly a side door was flung open and two men stumbled into the room, prodded by a rifle barrel. Mallory caught his breath, felt his nails dig savagely into the palms of his hands. Louki and Panayis! Louki and Panayis, bound and bleeding, Louki from a cut above the eye, Panayis from a scalp wound. So they’d got them too, and in spite of his warnings. Both men were shirt-sleeved; Louki, minus his magnificently frogged jacket, scarlet stanta and the small arsenal of weapons that he carried stuck beneath it, looked strangely pathetic and woebegone – strangely, for he was red-faced with anger, the moustache bristling more ferociously than ever. Mallory looked at him with eyes empty of all recognition, his face expressionless.

‘Come now, Captain Mallory,’ Skoda said reproachfully. ‘Have you no word of greeting for two old friends? No? Or perhaps you are just overwhelmed?’ he suggested smoothly. ‘You had not expected to see them so soon again, eh, Captain Mallory?’

‘What cheap trick is this?’ Mallory asked contemptuously. ‘I’ve never seen these men before in my life.’ His eyes caught those of Panayis, held there involuntarily: the black hate that stared out of those eyes, the feral malevolence – there was something appalling about it.

‘Of course not,’ Skoda sighed wearily. ‘Oh, of course not. Human memory is so short, is it not, Captain Mallory.’ The sigh was pure theatre – Skoda was enjoying himself immensely, the cat playing with the mouse. ‘However, we will try again.’ He swung round, crossed over to the bench where Stevens lay, pulled off the blanket and, before anyone could guess his intentions, chopped the outside of his right hand against Stevens’s smashed leg, just below the knee … Stevens’s entire body leapt in a convulsive spasm, but without even a whisper of a moan: he was still fully conscious, smiling at Skoda, blood trickling down his chin from where his teeth had gashed his lower lip.

‘You shouldn’t have done that, Hauptmann Skoda,’ Mallory said. His voice was barely a whisper, but unnaturally loud in the frozen silence of the room. ‘You are going to die for that, Hauptmann Skoda.’

‘So? I am going to die, am I?’ Again he chopped his hand against the fractured leg, again without reaction. ‘Then I may as well die twice over – eh, Captain Mallory? This young man is very, very tough – but the British have soft hearts, have they not, my dear Captain?’ Gently his hand slid down Stevens’s leg, closed round the stockinged ankle. ‘You have exactly five seconds to tell me the truth, Captain Mallory, and then I fear I will be compelled to rearrange these splints – Gott in Himmel! What’s the matter with that great oaf?’

Andrea had taken a couple of steps forward, was standing only a yard away, swaying on his feet.

‘Outside! Let me outside!’ His breath came in short, fast gasps. He bowed his head, one hand to his throat, one over his stomach. ‘I cannot stand it! Air! Air! I must have air!’

‘Ah, no, my dear Papagos, you shall remain here and enjoy – Corporal! Quickly!’ He had seen Andrea’s eyes roll upwards until only the whites showed. ‘The fool is going to faint! Take him away before he falls on top of us!’

Mallory had one fleeting glimpse of the two guards hurrying forwards, of the incredulous contempt on Louki’s face, then he flicked a glance at Miller and Brown, caught the lazy droop of the American’s eyelid in return, the millimetric inclination of Brown’s head. Even as the two guards came up behind Andrea and lifted the flaccid arms across their shoulders, Mallory glanced half-left, saw the nearest sentry less than four feet away now, absorbed in the spectacle of the toppling giant. Easy, dead easy – the gun dangling by his side: he could hit him between wind and water before he knew what was happening …

Fascinated, Mallory watched Andrea’s forearms slipping nerve-lessly down the shoulders of the supporting guards till his wrists rested loosely beside their necks, palms facing inwards. And then there was the sudden leap of the great shoulder muscles and Mallory had hurled himself convulsively sidewards and back, his shoulder socketing with vicious force into the guard’s stomach, inches below the breastbone: an explosive ouf! of agony, the crash against the wooden walls of the room and Mallory knew the guard would be out of action for some time to come.

Even as he dived, Mallory had heard the sickening thud of heads being swept together. Now, as he twisted round on his side, he had a fleeting glimpse of another guard thrashing feebly on the floor under the combined weights of Miller and Brown, and then of Andrea tearing an automatic rifle from the guard who had been standing at his right shoulder: the Schmeisser was cradled in his great hands, lined up on Skoda’s chest even before the unconscious man had hit the floor.

For one second, maybe two, all movement in the room ceased, every sound sheared off by a knife edge: the silence was abrupt, absolute – and infinitely more clamorous than the clamour that had gone before. No one moved, no one spoke, no one even breathed: the shock, the utter unexpectedness of what had happened held them all in thrall.

And then the silence erupted in a staccato crashing of sound, deafening in that confined space. Once, twice, three times, wordlessly, and with great care, Andrea shot Hauptmann Skoda through the heart. The blast of the shells lifted the little man off his feet, smashed him against the wall of the hut, pinned him there for one incredible second, arms outflung as though nailed against the rough planks in spread-eagle crucifixion; and then he collapsed, fell limply to the ground a grotesque and broken doll that struck its heedless head against the edge of the bench before coming to rest on its back on the floor. The eyes were still wide open, as cold, as dark, as empty in death as they had been in life.

His Schmeisser waving in a gentle arc that covered Turzig and the sergeant, Andrea picked up Skoda’s sheath knife, sliced through the ropes that bound Mallory’s wrists.

‘Can you hold this gun, my Captain?’

Mallory flexed his stiffened hands once or twice, nodded, took the gun in silence. In three steps Andrea was behind the blind side of the door leading to the ante-room, pressed to the wall, waiting, gesturing to Mallory to move as far back as possible out of the line of sight.

Suddenly the door was flung open. Andrea could just see the tip of the rifle barrel projecting beyond it.

‘Oberleutnant Turzig! Was ist los? Wer schoss …’ The voice broke off in a coughing grunt of agony as Andrea smashed the sole of his foot against the door. He was round the outside of the door in a moment, caught the man as he fell, pulled him clear of the doorway and peered into the adjacent hut. A brief inspection, then he closed the door, bolted it from the inside.

‘Nobody else there, my Captain,’ Andrea reported. ‘Just the one gaoler, it seems.’

‘Fine! Cut the others loose, will you, Andrea?’ He wheeled round towards Louki, smiled at the comical expression on the little man’s face, the tentative, spreading, finally ear-to-ear grin that cut through the baffled incredulity.

‘Where do the men sleep, Louki – the soldiers, I mean?’

‘In a hut in the middle of the compound, Major. This is the officers’ quarters.’

‘Compound? You mean –?’

‘Barbed wire,’ Louki said succinctly. ‘Ten feet high – and all the way round.’

‘Exits?’

‘One and one only. Two guards.’

‘Good! Andrea – everybody into the side room. No, not you, Lieutenant. You sit down here.’ He gestured to the chair behind the big desk. ‘Somebody’s bound to come. Tell him you killed one of us – trying to escape. Then send for the guards at the gate.’

For a moment Turzig didn’t answer. He watched unseeingly as Andrea walked past him, dragging two unconscious soldiers by their collars. Then he smiled. It was a wry sort of smile.

‘I am sorry to disappoint you, Captain Mallory. Too much has been lost already through my blind stupidity. I won’t do it.’

‘Andrea!’ Mallory called softly.

‘Yes?’ Andrea stood in the ante-room doorway.

‘I think I hear someone coming. Is there a way out of that side room?’

Andrea nodded silently.

‘Outside! The front door. Take your knife. If the Lieutenant …’ But he was talking to himself, Andrea was already gone, slipping out through the back door, soundless as a ghost.

‘You will do exactly as I say,’ Mallory said softly. He took position himself in the doorway to the side room, where he could see the front entrance between door and jamb: his automatic rifle was trained on Turzig. ‘If you don’t, Andrea will kill the man at the door. Then we will kill you and the guards inside. Then we will knife the sentries at the gate. Nine dead men – and all for nothing, for we will escape anyway … Here he is now.’ Mallory’s voice was barely a whisper, eyes pitiless in a pitiless face. ‘Nine dead men, Lieutenant – and just because your pride is hurt.’ Deliberately, the last sentence was in German, fluent, colloquial, and Mallory’s mouth twisted as he saw the almost imperceptible sag of Turzig’s shoulders. He knew he had won, that Turzig had been going to take a last gamble on his ignorance of German, that this last hope was gone.

The door burst open and a soldier stood on the threshold, breathing heavily. He was armed, but clad only in a singlet and trousers, oblivious of the cold.

‘Lieutenant! Lieutenant!’ He spoke in German. ‘We heard the shots –’

‘It is nothing, Sergeant.’ Turzig bent his head over an open drawer, pretended to be searching for something to account for his solitary presence in the room. ‘One of our prisoners tried to escape … We stopped him.’

‘Perhaps the medical orderly –’

‘I’m afraid we stopped him rather permanently.’ Turzig smiled tiredly. ‘You can organise a burial detail in the morning. Meantime, you might tell the guards at the gate to come here for a minute. Then get to bed yourself – you’ll catch your death of cold!’

‘Shall I detail a relief guard –’

‘Of course not!’ Turzig said impatiently. ‘It’s just for a minute. Besides, the only people to guard against are already in here.’ His lips tightened for a second as he realised what he had said, the unconscious irony of the words. ‘Hurry up, man! We haven’t got all night!’ He waited till the sound of the running footsteps died away, then looked steadily at Mallory. ‘Satisfied?’

‘Perfectly. And my very sincere apologies,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘I hate to do a thing like this to a man like you.’ He looked round the door as Andrea came into the room. ‘Andrea, ask Louki and Panayis if there’s a telephone switchboard in this block of huts. Tell them to smash it up and any receivers they can find.’ He grinned. ‘Then hurry back for our visitors from the gate. I’d be lost without you on the reception committee.’

Turzig’s gaze followed the broad, retreating back.

‘Captain Skoda was right. I still have much to learn.’ There was neither bitterness nor rancour in his voice. ‘He fooled me completely, that big one.’

‘You’re not the first,’ Mallory reassured him. ‘He’s fooled more people than I’ll ever know … You’re not the first,’ he repeated. ‘But I think you must be just about the luckiest.’

‘Because I’m still alive?’

‘Because you’re still alive,’ Mallory echoed.

Less than ten minutes later the two guards at the gates had joined their comrades in the back room, captured, disarmed, bound and gagged with a speed and noiseless efficiency that excited Turzig’s professional admiration, chagrined though he was. Securely tied hand and foot, he lay in a corner of the room, not yet gagged.

‘I think I understand now why your High Command chose you for this task, Captain Mallory. If anyone could succeed, you would – but you must fail. The impossible must always remain so. Nevertheless, you have a great team.’

‘We get by,’ Mallory said modestly. He took a last look round the room, then grinned down at Stevens.

‘Ready to take off on your travels again, young man, or do you find this becoming rather monotonous?’

‘Ready when you are, sir.’ Lying on a stretcher which Louki had miraculously procured, he sighed in bliss. ‘First-class travel, this time, as befits an officer. Sheer luxury. I don’t mind how far we go!’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Miller growled morosely. He had been allocated first stint at the front or heavy end of the stretcher. But the quirk of his eyebrows robbed the words of all offence.

‘Right, then, we’re off. One last thing. Where is the camp radio, Lieutenant Turzig?’

‘So you can smash it up, I suppose?’

‘Precisely.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘What if I threaten to blow your head off?’

‘You won’t.’ Turzig smiled, though the smile was a trifle lopsided. ‘Given certain circumstances, you would kill me as you would a fly. But you wouldn’t kill a man for refusing such information.’

‘You haven’t as much to learn as your late and unlamented captain thought,’ Mallory admitted. ‘It’s not all that important … I regret we have to do all this. I trust we do not meet again – not at least, until the war is over. Who knows, some day we might even go climbing together.’ He signed to Louki to fix Turzig’s gag and walked quickly out of the room. Two minutes later they had cleared the barracks and were safely lost in the darkness and the olive groves that stretched to the south of Margaritha.

When they cleared the groves, a long time later, it was almost dawn. Already the black silhouette of Kostos was softening in the first feathery greyness of the coming day. The wind was from the south, and warm, and the snow was beginning to melt on the hills.

ELEVEN

Wednesday

1400–1600

All day long they lay hidden in the carob grove, a thick clump of stunted, gnarled trees that clung grimly to the treacherous, scree-strewn slope abutting what Louki called the ‘Devil’s Playground’. A poor shelter and an uncomfortable one, but in every other way all they could wish for: it offered concealment, a first-class defensive position immediately behind, a gentle breeze drawn up from the sea by the sun-baked rocks to the south, shade from the sun that rode from dawn to dusk in a cloudless sky – and an incomparable view of a sun-drenched, shimmering Aegean.

Away to their left, fading through diminishing shades of blue and indigo and violet into faraway nothingness, stretched the islands of the Lerades, the nearest of them, Maidos, so close that they could see isolated fisher cottages sparkling whitely in the sun: through that narrow, intervening gap of water would pass the ships of the Royal Navy in just over a day’s time. To the right, and even farther away, remote, featureless, back-dropped by the towering Anatolian mountains, the coast of Turkey hooked north and west in a great curving scimitar: to the north itself, the thrusting spear of Cape Demirci, rock-rimmed but dimpled with sandy coves of white, reached far out into the placid blue of the Aegean: and north again beyond the Cape, haze-blurred in the purple distance, the island of Kheros lay dreaming on the surface of the sea.

It was a breath-taking panorama, a heart-catching beauty sweeping majestically through a great semicircle over the sunlit sea. But Mallory had no eyes for it, had spared it only a passing glance when he had come on guard less than half an hour previously, just after two o’clock. He had dismissed it with one quick glance, settled by the bole of a tree, gazed for endless minutes, gazed until his eyes ached with strain at what he had so long waited to see. Had waited to see and come to destroy – the guns of the fortress of Navarone.

The town of Navarone – a town of from four to five thousand people, Mallory judged – lay sprawled round the deep, volcanic crescent of the harbour, a crescent so deep, so embracing, that it was almost a complete circle with only a narrow bottleneck of an entrance to the north-west, a gateway dominated by searchlights and mortar and machine-gun batteries on either side. Less than three miles distant to the north-east from the carob grove, every detail, every street, every building, every caique and launch in the harbour were clearly visible to Mallory and he studied them over and over again until he knew them by heart: the way the land to the west of the harbour sloped up gently to the olive groves, the dusty streets running down to the water’s edge: the way the ground rose more sharply to the south, the streets now running parallel to the water down to the old town: the way the cliffs to the east – cliffs pock-marked by the bombs of Torrance’s Liberator Squadron – stretched a hundred and fifty sheer feet above the water, then curved dizzily out over and above the harbour, and the great mound of volcanic rock towering above that again, a mound barricaded off from the town below by the high wall that ended flush with the cliff itself: and, finally, the way the twin rows of AA guns, the great radar scanners and the barracks of the fortress, squat, narrow-embrasured, built of big blocks of masonry, dominated everything in sight – including that great, black gash in the rock, below the fantastic overhang of the cliff.

Unconsciously, almost, Mallory nodded to himself in slow understanding. This was the fortress that had defied the Allies for eighteen long months, that had dominated the entire naval strategy in the Sporades since the Germans had reached out from the mainland into the isles, that had blocked all naval activity in that 2,000 square mile triangle between the Lerades and the Turkish coast. And now, when he saw it, it all made sense. Impregnable to land attack – the commanding fortress saw to that: impregnable to air attack – Mallory realised just how suicidal it had been to send out Torrance’s squadron against the great guns protected by that jutting cliff, against those bristling rows of anti-aircraft guns: and impregnable to sea attack – the waiting squadrons of the Luftwaffe on Samos saw to that. Jensen had been right – only a guerrilla sabotage mission stood any chance at all: a remote chance, an all but suicidal chance, but still a chance, and Mallory knew he couldn’t ask for more.

Thoughtfully he lowered the binoculars and rubbed the back of his hand across aching eyes. At last he felt he knew exactly what he was up against, was grateful for the knowledge, for the opportunity he’d been given of this long-range reconnaissance, this familiarising of himself with the terrain, the geography of the town. This was probably the one vantage point in the whole island that offered such an opportunity together with concealment and near immunity. No credit to himself, the leader of the mission, he reflected wryly, that they had found such a place: it had been Louki’s idea entirely.

And he owed a great deal more than that to the sad-eyed little Greek. It had been Louki’s idea that they first move up-valley from Margaritha, to give Andrea time to recover the explosives from old Leri’s hut, and to make certain there was no immediate hue and cry and pursuit – they could have fought a rearguard action up through the olive groves, until they had lost themselves in the foothills of Kostos: it was he who had guided them back past Margaritha when they had doubled on their tracks, had halted them opposite the village while he and Panayis had slipped wraith-like through the lifting twilight, picked up outdoor clothes for themselves, and, on the return journey, slipped into the Abteilung garage, torn away the coil ignitions of the German command car and truck – the only transport in Margaritha – and smashed their distributors for good measure; it was Louki who had led them by a sunken ditch right up to the road-block guard post at the mouth of the valley – it had been almost ludicrously simple to disarm the sentries, only one of whom had been awake – and, finally, it was Louki who had insisted that they walk down the muddy centre of the valley track till they came to the metalled road, less than two miles from the town itself. A hundred yards down this they had branched off to the left across a long, sloping field of lava that left no trace behind, arrived in the carob copse just on sunrise.

And it had worked. All these carefully engineered pointers, pointers that not even the most sceptical could have ignored and denied, had worked magnificently. Miller and Andrea, who had shared the forenoon watch, had seen the Navarone garrison spending long hours making the most intensive house-to-house search of the town. That should make it doubly, trebly safe for them the following day, Mallory reckoned: it was unlikely that the search would be repeated, still more unlikely that, if it were, it would be carried out with a fraction of the same enthusiasm. Louki had done his work well.

Mallory turned his head to look at him. The little man was still asleep – wedged on the slope behind a couple of tree-trunks, he hadn’t stirred for five hours. Still dead tired himself, his legs aching and eyes smarting with sleeplessness, Mallory could not find it in him to grudge Louki a moment of his rest. He’d earned it all – and he’d been awake all through the previous night. So had Panayis, but Panayis was already awakening, Mallory saw, pushing the long, black hair out of his eyes: awake, rather, for his transition from sleep to full awareness was immediate, as fleeting and as complete as a cat’s. A dangerous man, Mallory knew, a desperate man, almost, and a bitter enemy, but he knew nothing of Panayis, nothing at all. He doubted if he ever would.

Farther up on the slope, almost in the centre of the grove, Andrea had built a high platform of broken branches and twigs against a couple of carob poles maybe five feet apart, gradually filling up the space between slope and trees until he had a platform four feet in width, as nearly level as he could make it. Andy Stevens lay on this, still on his stretcher, still conscious. As far as Mallory could tell, Stevens hadn’t closed his eyes since they had been marched away by Turzig from their cave in the mountains. He seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep, or had crushed all desire for it. The stench from the gangrenous leg was nauseating, appalling, poisoned all the air around. Mallory and Miller had had a look at the leg shortly after their arrival in the copse, uncovered it, examined it, smiled at one another, tied it up again and assured Stevens that the wound was closing. Below the knee, the leg had turned almost completely black.

Mallory lifted his binoculars to have another look at the town, but lowered them almost at once as someone came sliding down the slope, touched him on the arm. It was Panayis, upset, anxious, almost angry looking. He gesticulated towards the westering sun.

‘The time, Captain Mallory?’ He spoke in Greek, his voice low, sibilant, urgent – an inevitable voice, Mallory thought, for the lean, dark mysteriousness of the man. ‘What is the time?’ he repeated.

‘Half-past two, or thereabouts.’ Mallory lifted an interrogatory eyebrow. ‘You are concerned, Panayis. Why?’

‘You should have wakened me. You should have wakened me hours ago!’ He was angry, Mallory decided. ‘It is my turn to keep watch.’

‘But you had no sleep last night,’ Mallory pointed out reasonably. ‘It just didn’t seem fair –’

‘It is my turn to keep watch, I tell you!’ Panayis insisted stubbornly.

‘Very well, then. If you insist.’ Mallory knew the high, fierce pride of the islanders too well to attempt to argue. ‘Heaven only knows what we would have done without Louki and yourself … I’ll stay and keep you company for a while.’

‘Ah, so that is why you let me sleep on!’ There was no disguising the hurt in the eyes, the voice. ‘You do not trust Panayis –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Mallory began in exasperation, checked himself and smiled. ‘Of course we trust you. Maybe I should go and get some more sleep anyway; you are kind to give me the chance. You will shake me in two hours’ time?’

‘Certainly, certainly!’ Panayis was almost beaming. ‘I shall not fail.’

Mallory scrambled up to the centre of the grove and stretched out lazily along the ledge he had levelled out for himself. For a few idle moments he watched Panayis pacing restlessly to and fro just inside the perimeter of the grove, lost interest when he saw him climbing swiftly up among the branches of a tree, seeking a high lookout vantage point and decided he might as well follow his advice and get some sleep while he could.

‘Captain Mallory! Captain Mallory!’ An urgent, heavy hand was shaking his shoulder. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’

Mallory stirred, rolled over on his back, sat up quickly, opening his eyes as he did so. Panayis was stooped over him, the dark, saturnine face alive with anxiety. Mallory shook his head to clear away the mists of sleep and was on his feet in one swift, easy movement.

‘What’s the matter, Panayis?’

‘Planes!’ he said quickly. ‘There is a squadron of planes coming our way!’

‘Planes? What planes? Whose planes?’

‘I do not know, Captain. They are yet far away. But –’

‘What direction?’ Mallory snapped.

‘They come from the north.’

Together they ran down to the edge of the grove. Panayis gestured to the north, and Mallory caught sight of them at once, the afternoon sun glinting off the sharp dihedral of the wings. Stukas, all right, he thought grimly. Seven – no, eight of them – less than three miles away, flying in two echelons of fours, two thousand, certainly not more than twenty-five hundred feet … He became aware that Panayis was tugging urgently at his arm.

‘Come, Captain Mallory!’ he said excitedly. ‘We have no time to lose!’ He pulled Mallory round, pointed with outstretched arm at the gaunt, shattered cliffs that rose steeply behind them, cliffs crazily riven by rock-jumbled ravines that wound their aimless way back into the interior – or stopped as abruptly as they had begun. ‘The Devil’s Playground! We must get in there at once! At once, Captain Mallory!’

‘Why on earth should we?’ Mallory looked at him in astonishment. ‘There’s no reason to suppose that they’re after us. How can they be? No one knows we’re here.’

‘I do not care!’ Panayis was stubborn in his conviction. ‘I know. Do not ask me how I know, for I do not know that myself. Louki will tell you – Panayis knows these things. I know, Captain Mallory, I know!’

Just for a second Mallory stared at him, uncomprehending. There was no questioning the earnestness, the utter sincerity – but it was the machine-gun staccato of the words that tipped the balance of instinct against reason. Almost without realising it, certainly without realising why, Mallory found himself running uphill, slipping and stumbling in the scree. He found the others already on their feet, tense, expectant, shrugging on their packs, the guns already in their hands.

‘Get to the edge of the trees up there!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Quickly! Stay there and stay under cover – we’re going to have to break for that gap in the rocks.’ He gestured through the trees at a jagged fissure in the cliff-side, barely forty yards from where he stood, blessed Louki for his foresight in choosing a hideout with so convenient a bolt-hole. ‘Wait till I give the word. Andrea!’ He turned round, then broke off, the words unneeded. Andrea had already scooped up the dying boy in his arms, just as he lay in stretcher and blankets and was weaving his way uphill in and out among the trees.

‘What’s up, boss?’ Miller was by Mallory’s side as he plunged up the slope. ‘I don’t see nothin’.’

‘You can hear something if you’d just stop talking for a moment,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘Or just take a look up there.’

Miller, flat on his stomach now, and less than a dozen feet from the edge of the grove, twisted round and craned his neck upwards. He picked up the planes immediately.

‘Stukas!’ he said incredulously. ‘A squadron of gawddamned Stukas! It can’t be, boss!’

‘It can and it is,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘Jensen told me that Jerry has stripped the Italian front of them – over two hundred pulled out in the last few weeks.’ Mallory squinted up at the squadron, less than half a mile away now. ‘And he’s brought the whole damn issue down to the Aegean.’

‘But they’re not lookin’ for us,’ Miller protested.

‘I’m afraid they are,’ Mallory said grimly. The two bomber echelons had just dove-tailed into line-ahead formation. ‘I’m afraid Panayis was right.’

‘But – but they’re passin’ us by –’

‘They aren’t,’ Mallory said flatly. ‘They’re here to stay. Just keep your eyes on that leading plane.’

Even as he spoke, the flight-commander tilted his gull-winged Junkers 87 sharply over to port, half-turned, fell straight out of the sky in a screaming power-dive, plummeting straight for the carob grove.

‘Leave him alone!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Don’t fire!’ The Stukas, air-brakes at maximum depression, had steadied on the centre of the grove. Nothing could stop him now – but a chance shot might bring him down directly on top of them: the chances were poor enough as it was … ‘Keep your hands over your heads – and your heads down!’

He ignored his own advice, his gaze following the bomber every foot of the way down. Five hundred, four hundred, three, the rising crescendo of the heavy engine was beginning to hurt his ears, and the Stuka was pulling sharply out of its plunging fall, its bomb gone.

Bomb! Mallory sat up sharply, screwing up his eyes against the blue of the sky. Not one bomb but dozens of them, clustered so thickly that they appeared to be jostling each other as they arrowed into the centre of the grove, striking the gnarled and stunted trees, breaking off branches and burying themselves to their fins in the soft and shingled slope. Incendiaries! Mallory had barely time to realise that they had been spared the horror of a 500-kilo HE bomb when the incendiaries erupted into hissing, guttering life, into an incandescent magnesium whiteness that reached out and completely destroyed the shadowed gloom of the carob grove. Within a matter of seconds the dazzling coruscation had given way to thick, evil-smelling clouds of acrid black smoke, smoke laced with flickering tongues of red, small at first then licking and twisting resinously upwards until entire trees were enveloped in a cocoon of flame. The Stuka was still pulling upwards out of its dive, had not yet levelled off when the heart of the grove, old and dry and tindery, was fiercely ablaze.

Miller twisted up and round, nudging Mallory to catch his attention through the crackling roar of the flames.

‘Incendiaries, boss,’ he announced.

‘What did you think they were using?’ Mallory asked shortly. ‘Matches? They’re trying to smoke us out, to burn us out, get us in the open. High explosive’s not so good among trees. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this would have worked.’ He coughed as the acrid smoke bit into his lungs, peered up with watering eyes through the tree-tops. ‘But not this time. Not if we’re lucky. Not if they hold off another half-minute or so. Just look at that smoke!’

Miller looked. Thick, convoluted, shot through with fiery sparks, the rolling cloud was already a third of the way across the gap between grove and cliff, borne uphill by the wandering catspaws from the sea. It was the complete, the perfect smoke-screen. Miller nodded.

‘Gonna make a break for it, huh, boss?’

‘There’s no choice – we either go, or we stay and get fried or blown into very little bits. Probably both.’ He raised his voice. ‘Anybody see what’s happening up top?’

‘Queuing up for another go at us, sir,’ Brown said lugubriously. ‘The first bloke’s still circling around.’

‘Waiting to see how we break cover. They won’t wait long. This is where we take off.’ He peered uphill through the rolling smoke, but it was too thick, laced his watering eyes until everything was blurred through a misted sheen of tears. There was no saying how far uphill the smoke-bank had reached, and they couldn’t afford to wait until they were sure. Stuka pilots had never been renowned for their patience.

‘Right, everybody!’ he shouted. ‘Fifteen yards along the tree-line to that wash, then straight up into the gorge. Don’t stop till you’re at least a hundred yards inside. Andrea, you lead the way. Off you go!’ He peered through the blinding smoke. ‘Where’s Panayis?’

There was no reply.

‘Panayis!’ Mallory called. ‘Panayis!’

‘Perhaps he went back for somethin’.’ Miller had stopped, half-turned. ‘Shall I go –’

‘Get on your way!’ Mallory said savagely. ‘And if anything happens to young Stevens I’ll hold you –’ But Miller, wisely, was already gone, Andrea stumbling and coughing by his side.

For a couple of seconds Mallory stood irresolute, then plunged back downhill towards the centre of the grove. Maybe Panayis had gone back for something – and he couldn’t understand English. Mallory had hardly gone five yards when he was forced to halt and fling his arm up before his face: the heat was searing. Panayis couldn’t be down there; no one could have been down there, could have lived for seconds in that furnace. Gasping for air, hair singeing and clothes smouldering with fire, Mallory clawed his way back up the slope, colliding with trees, slipping, falling, then stumbling desperately to his feet again.

He ran along to the east end of the wood. No one there. Back to the other end again, towards the wash, almost completely blind now, the superheated air searing viciously through throat and lungs till he was suffocating, till his breath was coming in great, whooping, agonised breaths. No sense in waiting longer, nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do except save himself. There was a noise in his ears, the roaring of the flames, the roaring of his own blood – and the screaming, heart-stopping roar of a Stuka in a power-dive. Desperately he flung himself forward over the sliding scree, stumbled and pitched headlong down to the floor of the wash.

Hurt or not, he did not know and he did not care. Sobbing aloud for breath, he rose to his feet, forced his aching legs to drive him somehow up the hill. The air was full of the thunder of engines, he knew the entire squadron was coming in to the attack, and then he had flung himself uncaringly to the ground as the first of the high explosive bombs erupted in its concussive blast of smoke and flame – erupted not forty yards away, to his left and ahead of him. Ahead of him! Even as he struggled upright again, lurched forward and upward once more, Mallory cursed himself again and again and again. You madman, he thought bitterly, confusedly, you damned crazy madman. Sending the others out to be killed. He should have thought of it – oh, God, he should have thought of it, a five-year-old could have thought of it. Of course Jerry wasn’t going to bomb the grove: they had seen the obvious, the inevitable, as quickly as he had, were dive-bombing the pall of smoke between the grove and the cliff! A five-year-old – the earth exploded beneath his feet, a giant hand plucked him up and smashed him to the ground and the darkness closed over him.

TWELVE

Wednesday

1600–1800

Once, twice, half a dozen times, Mallory struggled up from the depths of a black, trance-like stupor and momentarily touched the surface of consciousness only to slide back into the darkness again. Desperately, each time, he tried to hang on to these fleeting moments of awareness, but his mind was like the void, dark and sinewless, and even as he knew that his mind was slipping backwards again, loosing its grip on reality, the knowledge was gone, and there was only the void once more. Nightmare, he thought vaguely during one of the longer glimmerings of comprehension, I’m having a nightmare, like when you know you are having a nightmare and that if you could open your eyes it would be gone, but you can’t open your eyes. He tried it now, tried to open his eyes, but it was no good, it was still as dark as ever and he was still sunk in this evil dream, for the sun had been shining brightly in the sky. He shook his head in slow despair.

‘Aha! Observe! Signs of life at last!’ There was no mistaking the slow, nasal drawl. ‘Ol’ Medicine Man Miller triumphs again!’ There was a moment’s silence, a moment in which Mallory was increasingly aware of the diminishing thunder of aero engines, the acrid, resinous smoke that stung his nostrils and eyes, and then an arm had passed under his shoulders and Miller’s persuasive voice was in his ear. ‘Just try a little of this, boss. Ye olde vintage brandy. Nothin’ like it anywhere.’

Mallory felt the cold neck of the bottle, tilted his head back, took a long pull. Almost immediately he had jerked himself upright and forward to a sitting position, gagging, spluttering and fighting for breath as the raw, fiery ouzo bit into the mucous membrane of cheeks and throat. He tried to speak but could do no more than croak, gasp for fresh air and stare indignantly at the shadowy figure that knelt by his side. Miller, for his part, looked at him with unconcealed admiration.

‘See, boss? Just like I said – nothin’ like it.’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘Wide awake in an instant, as the literary boys would say. Never saw a shock and concussion victim recover so fast!’

‘What the hell are you trying to do?’ Mallory demanded. The fire had died down in his throat, and he could breathe again. ‘Poison me?’ Angrily he shook his head, fighting off the pounding ache, the fog that still swirled round the fringes of his mind. ‘Bloody fine physician you are! Shock, you say, yet the first thing you do is administer a dose of spirits –’

‘Take your pick,’ Miller interrupted grimly. ‘Either that or a damned sight bigger shock in about fifteen minutes or so when brother Jerry gets here.’

‘But they’ve gone away. I can’t hear the Stukas any more.’

‘This lot’s comin’ up from the town,’ Miller said morosely. ‘Louki’s just reported them. Half a dozen armoured cars and a couple of trucks with field guns the length of a telegraph pole.’

‘I see.’ Mallory twisted round, saw a gleam of light at a bend in the wall. A cave – a tunnel, almost. Little Cyprus, Louki had said some of the older people had called it – the Devil’s Playground was riddled with a honeycomb of caves. He grinned wryly at the memory of his momentary panic when he thought his eyes had gone and turned again to Miller. ‘Trouble again, Dusty, nothing but trouble. Thanks for bringing me round.’

‘Had to,’ Miller said briefly. ‘I guess we couldn’t have carried you very far, boss.’

Mallory nodded. ‘Not just the flattest of country hereabouts.’

‘There’s that, too,’ Miller agreed. ‘What I really meant is that there’s hardly anyone left to carry you. Casey Brown and Panayis have both been hurt, boss.’

‘What! Both of them?’ Mallory screwed his eyes shut, shook his head in slow anger. ‘My God, Dusty, I’d forgotten all about the bomb – the bombs.’ He reached out his hand, caught Miller by the arm. ‘How – how bad are they?’ There was so little time left, so much to do.

‘How bad?’ Miller shook out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Mallory. ‘Not bad at all – if we could get them into hospital. But hellish painful and cripplin’ if they gotta start hikin’ up and down those gawddamned ravines hereabouts. First time I’ve seen canyon floors more nearly vertical than the walls themselves.’

‘You still haven’t told me –’

‘Sorry, boss, sorry. Shrapnel wounds, both of them, in exactly the same place – left thigh, just above the knee. No bones gone, no tendons cut. I’ve just finished tying up Casey’s leg – it’s a pretty wicked-lookin’ gash. He’s gonna know all about it when he starts walkin’.’

‘And Panayis?’

‘Fixed his own leg,’ Miller said briefly. ‘A queer character. Wouldn’t even let me look at it, far less bandage it. I reckon he’d have knifed me if I’d tried.’

‘Better to leave him alone anyway,’ Mallory advised. ‘Some of these islanders have strange taboos and superstitions. Just as long as he’s alive. Though I still don’t see how the hell he managed to get here.’

‘He was the first to leave,’ Miller explained. ‘Along with Casey. You must have missed him in the smoke. They were climbin’ together when they got hit.’

‘And how did I get here?’

‘No prizes for the first correct answer.’ Miller jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the huge form that blocked half the width of the cave. ‘Junior here did his St Bernard act once again. I wanted to go with him, but he wasn’t keen. Said he reckoned it would be difficult to carry both of us up the hill. My feelin’s were hurt considerable.’ Miller sighed. ‘I guess I just wasn’t born to be a hero, that’s all.’

Mallory smiled. ‘Thanks again, Andrea.’

‘Thanks!’ Miller was indignant. ‘A guy saves your life and all you can say is “thanks”!’

‘After the first dozen times or so you run out of suitable speeches,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How’s Stevens?’

‘Breathin’.’

Mallory nodded forward towards the source of light, wrinkled his nose. ‘Just round the corner, isn’t he?’

‘Yeah, it’s pretty grim,’ Miller admitted. ‘The gangrene’s spread up beyond the knee.’

Mallory rose groggily to his feet, picked up his gun. ‘How is he really, Dusty?’

‘He’s dead, but he just won’t die. He’ll be gone by sundown. Gawd only knows what’s kept him goin’ so far.’

‘It may sound presumptuous,’ Mallory murmured; ‘but I think I know too.’

‘The first-class medical attention?’ Miller said hopefully.

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’ Mallory smiled down at the still kneeling Miller. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant at all. Come, gentlemen, we have some business to attend to.’

‘Me, all I’m good for is blowin’ up bridges and droppin’ a handful of sand in engine bearin’s,’ Miller announced. ‘Strategy and tactics are far beyond my simple mind. But I still think those characters down there are pickin’ a very stupid way of committin’ suicide. It would be a damned sight easier for all concerned if they just shot themselves.’

‘I’m inclined to agree with you.’ Mallory settled himself more firmly behind the jumbled rocks in the mouth of the ravine that opened on the charred and smoking remains of the carob grove directly below and took another look at the Alpenkorps troops advancing in extended order up the steep, shelterless slope. ‘They’re no children at this game. I bet they don’t like it one little bit, either.’

‘Then why the hell are they doin’ it, boss?’

‘No option, probably. First off, this place can only be attacked frontally.’ Mallory smiled down at the little Greek lying between himself and Andrea. ‘Louki here chose the place well. It would require a long detour to attack from the rear – and it would take them a week to advance through that devil’s scrap-heap behind us. Secondly, it’ll be sunset in a couple of hours, and they know they haven’t a hope of getting us after it’s dark. And finally – and I think this is more important than the other two reasons put together – it’s a hundred to one that the commandant in the town is being pretty severely prodded by his High Command. There’s too much at stake, even in the one in a thousand chance of us getting at the guns. They can’t afford to have Kheros evacuated under their noses, to lose –’

‘Why not?’ Miller interrupted. He gestured largely with his hands. ‘Just a lot of useless rocks –’

‘They can’t afford to lose face with the Turks,’ Mallory went on patiently. ‘The strategic importance of these islands in the Sporades is negligible, but their political importance is tremendous. Adolph badly needs another ally in these parts. So he flies in Alpenkorps troops by the thousand and the Stukas by the hundred, the best he has – and he needs them desperately on the Italian front. But you’ve got to convince your potential ally that you’re a pretty safe bet before you can persuade him to give up his nice, safe seat on the fence and jump down on your side.’

‘Very interestin’,’ Miller observed. ‘So?’

‘So the Germans are going to have no compunction about thirty or forty of their best troops being cut into little pieces. It’s no trouble at all when you’re sitting behind a desk a thousand miles away … Let ‘em come another hundred yards or so closer. Louki and I will start from the middle and work out: you and Andrea start from the outside.’

‘I don’t like it, boss,’ Miller complained.

‘Don’t think that I do either,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘Slaughtering men forced to do a suicidal job like this is not my idea of fun – or even of war. But if we don’t get them, they get us.’ He broke off and pointed across the burnished sea to where Kheros lay peacefully on the hazed horizon, striking golden glints off the western sun. ‘What do you think they would have us do, Dusty?’

‘I know, I know, boss.’ Miller stirred uncomfortably. ‘Don’t rub it in.’ He pulled his woollen cap low over his forehead and stared bleakly down the slope. ‘How soon do the mass executions begin?’

‘Another hundred yards, I said.’ Mallory looked down the slope again towards the coast road and grinned suddenly, glad to change the topic. ‘Never saw telegraph poles shrink so suddenly before, Dusty.’

Miller studied the guns drawn up on the roads behind the two trucks and cleared his throat.

‘I was only sayin’ what Louki told me,’ he said defensively.

‘What Louki told you!’ The little Greek was indignant. ‘Before God, Major, the Americano is full of lies!’

‘Ah, well, mebbe I was mistaken,’ Miller said magnanimously. He squinted again at the guns, forehead lined in puzzlement. ‘That first one’s a mortar, I reckon. But what in the universe that other weird-looking contraption can be –’

‘Also a mortar,’ Mallory explained. ‘A five-barrelled job, and very nasty. The Nebelwerfer or Moanin’ Minnie. Howls like all the lost souls in hell. Guaranteed to turn the knees to jelly, especially after nightfall – but it’s still the other one you have to watch. A six-inch mortar, almost certainly using fragmentation bombs – you use a brush and shovel for clearing up afterwards.’

That’s right,’ Miller growled. ‘Cheer us all up.’ But he was grateful to the New Zealander for trying to take their minds off what they had to do. ‘Why don’t they use them?’

‘They will,’ Mallory assured him. ‘Just as soon as we fire and they find out where we are.’

‘Gawd help us,’ Miller muttered. ‘Fragmentation bombs, you said!’ He lapsed into gloomy silence.

‘Any second now,’ Mallory said softly. ‘I only hope that our friend Turzig isn’t among this lot.’ He reached out for his field-glasses but stopped in surprise as Andrea leaned across Louki and caught him by the wrist before he could line the binoculars. ‘What’s the matter, Andrea?’

‘I would not be using these, my Captain. They have betrayed us once already. I have been thinking, and it can be nothing else. The sunlight reflecting from the lenses …’

Mallory stared at him, slowly released his grip on the glasses, nodded several times in succession.

‘Of course, of course! I had been wondering … Someone has been careless. There was no other way, there could have been no other way. It would only require a single flash to tip them off.’ He paused, remembering, then grinned wryly. ‘It could have been myself. All this started just after I had been on watch – and Panayis didn’t have the glasses.’ He shook his head in mortification. ‘It must have been me, Andrea.’

‘I do not believe it,’ Andrea said flatly. ‘You couldn’t make a mistake like that, my Captain.’

‘Not only could, but did, I’m afraid. But we’ll worry about that afterwards.’ The middle of the ragged line of advancing soldiers, slipping and stumbling on the treacherous scree, had almost reached the lower limits of the blackened, stunted remains of the copse. ‘They’ve come far enough. I’ll take the white helmet in the middle, Louki.’ Even as he spoke he could hear the soft scrape as the three others slid their automatic barrels across and between the protective rocks in front of them, could feel the wave of revulsion that washed through his mind. But his voice was steady enough as he spoke, relaxed and almost casual. ‘Right. Let them have it now!’

His last words were caught up and drowned in the tearing, rapid-fire crash of the automatic carbines. With four machine-guns in their hands – two Brens and two 9 mm Schmeissers – it was no war, as he had said, but sheer, pitiful massacre, with the defenceless figures on the slope below, figures still stunned and uncomprehending, jerking, spinning round and collapsing like marionettes in the hands of a mad puppeteer, some to lie where they fell, others to roll down the steep slope, legs and arms flailing in the grotesque disjointedness of death. Only a couple stood still where they had been hit, vacant surprise mirrored in their lifeless faces, then slipped down tiredly to the stony ground at their feet. Almost three seconds had passed before the handful of those who still lived – about a quarter of the way in from either end of the line where the converging streams of fire had not yet met – realised what was happening and flung themselves desperately to the ground in search of the cover that didn’t exist.

The phrenetic stammering of the machine-guns stopped abruptly and in unison, the sound sheared off as by a guillotine. The sudden silence was curiously oppressive, louder, more obtrusive than the clamour that had gone before. The gravelly earth beneath his elbows grated harshly as Mallory shifted his weight slightly, looked at the two men to his right, Andrea with his impassive face empty of all expression, Louki with the sheen of tears in his eyes. Then he became aware of the low murmuring to his left, shifted round again. Bitter-mouthed, savage, the American was swearing softly and continuously, oblivious to the pain as he pounded his fist time and again into the sharp-edged gravel before him.

‘Just one more, Gawd.’ The quiet voice was almost a prayer. ‘That’s all I ask. Just one more.’

Mallory touched his arm. ‘What is it, Dusty?’

Miller looked round at him, eyes cold and still and empty of all recognition, then he blinked several times and grinned, a cut and bruised hand automatically reaching for his cigarettes.

‘Jus’ daydreamin’, boss,’ he said easily. ‘Jus’ daydreamin’.’ He shook out his pack of cigarettes. ‘Have one?’

‘That inhuman bastard that sent those poor devils up this hill,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘Make a wonderful picture seen over the sights of your rifle, wouldn’t he?’

Abruptly Miller’s smile vanished and he nodded.

‘It would be all of that.’ He risked a quick peep round one of the boulders, eased himself back again. ‘Eight, mebbe ten of them still down there, boss,’ he reported. ‘The poor bastards are like ostriches – trying to take cover behind stones the size of an orange … We leave them be?’

‘We leave them be!’ Mallory echoed emphatically. The thought of any more slaughter made him feel almost physically sick. ‘They won’t try again.’ He broke off suddenly, flattened himself in reflex instinct as a burst of machine-gun bullets struck the steep-walled rock above their heads and whined up the gorge in vicious ricochet.

‘Won’t try again, huh?’ Miller was already sliding his gun around the rock in front of him when Mallory caught his arm and pulled him back.

‘Not them? Listen!’ Another burst of fire, then another, and now they could hear the savage chatter of the machine-gun, a chatter rhythmically interrupted by a weird, half-human sighing as its belt passed through the breech. Mallory could feel the prickling of the hairs on the nape of his neck.

‘A Spandau. Once you’ve heard a Spandau you can never forget it. Leave it alone – it’s probably fixed on the back of one of the trucks and can’t do us any harm … I’m more worried about those damned mortars down there.’

‘I’m not,’ Miller said promptly. ‘They’re not firing at us.’

‘That’s why I’m worried … What do you think, Andrea.’

‘The same as you, my Captain. They are waiting. This Devil’s Playground, as Louki calls it, is a madman’s maze, and they can only fire as blind men –’

‘They won’t be waiting much longer,’ Mallory interrupted grimly. He pointed to the north. ‘Here come their eyes.’

At first only specks above the promontory of Cape Demirci, the planes were soon recognisable for what they were, droning in slowly over the Aegean at about fifteen hundred feet. Mallory looked at them in astonishment, then turned to Andrea.

‘Am I seeing things, Andrea?’ He gestured at the first of the two planes, a high-winged little monoplane fighter. ‘That can’t be a PZL?’

‘It can be and it is,’ Andrea murmured. ‘An old Polish plane we had before the war,’ he explained to Miller. ‘And the other is an old Belgian plane – Breguets, we called them.’ Andrea shaded his eyes to look again at the two planes, now almost directly overhead. ‘I thought they had all been lost during the invasion.’

‘Me, too,’ Mallory said. ‘Must have patched up some bits and pieces. Ah, they’ve seen us – beginning to circle. But why on earth they use those obsolete death traps –’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Miller said rapidly. He had just taken a quick look round the boulder in front of him. ‘Those damned guns down there are just linin’ up on us, and muzzle-on they look a considerable sight bigger than telegraph poles. Fragmentation bombs, you said! Come on, boss, let’s get the hell outa here!’

Thus the pattern was set for the remainder of that brief November afternoon, for the grim game of tip-and-run, hide-and-seek among the ravines and shattered rocks of the Devil’s Playground. The planes held the key to the game, cruised high overhead observing every move of the hunted group below, relaying the information to the guns on the coast road and the company of Alpenkorps that had moved up through the ravine above the carob grove soon after the planes reported that the positions there had been abandoned. The two ancient planes were soon replaced by a couple of modern Henschels – Andrea said that the PZL couldn’t remain airborne for more than an hour anyway.

Mallory was between the devil and the deep sea. Inaccurate though the mortars were, some of the deadly fragmentation bombs found their way into the deep ravines where they took temporary shelter, the blast of metal lethal in the confined space between the sheering walls. Occasionally they came so close that Mallory was forced to take refuge in some of the deep caves that honeycombed the walls of the canyons. In these they were safe enough, but the safety was an illusion that could lead only to ultimate defeat and capture; in the lulls, the Alpenkorps, whom they had fought off in a series of brief, skirmishing rearguard actions during the afternoon, could approach closely enough to trap them inside. Time and time again Mallory and his men were forced to move on to widen the gap between themselves and their pursuers, following the indomitable Louki wherever he chose to lead them, and taking their chance, often a very slender and desperate chance, with the mortar bombs. One bomb arced into a ravine that led into the interior, burying itself in the gravelly ground not twenty yards ahead of them, by far the nearest anything had come during the afternoon. By one chance in a thousand, it didn’t explode. They gave it as wide a berth as possible, almost holding their breaths until they were safely beyond.

About half an hour before sunset they struggled up the last few boulder-strewn yards of a steeply-shelving ravine floor, halted just beyond the shelter of the projecting wall where the ravine dipped again and turned sharply to the right and the north. There had been no more mortar bombs since the one that had failed to explode. The six-inch and the weirdly-howling Nebelwerfer had only a limited range, Mallory knew, and though the planes still cruised overhead, they cruised uselessly: the sun was dipping towards the horizon and the floors of the ravines were already deeply-sunk in shadowed gloom, invisible from above. But the Alpenkorps, tough, dogged, skilful soldiers, soldiers living only for the revenge of their massacred comrades, were very close behind. And they were highly-trained mountain troops, fresh, resilient, the reservoir of their energies barely tapped: whereas his own tiny band, worn out from continuous days and sleepless nights of labour and action …

Mallory sank to the ground near the angled turn of the ravine where he could keep lookout, glanced at the others with a deceptive casualness that marked his cheerless assessment of what he saw. As a fighting unit they were in a pretty bad way. Both Panayis and Brown were badly crippled, the latter’s face grey with pain. For the first time since leaving Alexandria, Casey Brown was apathetic, listless and quite indifferent to everything: this Mallory took as a very bad sign. Nor was Brown helped by the heavy transmitter still strapped to his back – with point-blank truculence he had ignored Mallory’s categorical order to abandon it. Louki was tired, and looked it: his physique, Mallory realised now, was no match for his spirit, for the infectious smile that never left his face, for the panache of that magnificently upswept moustache that contrasted so oddly with the sad, tired eyes above. Miller, like himself, was tired, but, like himself, could keep on being tired for a long time yet. And Stevens was still conscious, but even in the twilit gloom of the canyon floor his face looked curiously transparent, while the nails, lips and eyelids were drained of blood. And Andrea, who had carried him up and down all these killing canyon tracks – where there had been tracks – for almost two interminable hours, looked as he always did: immutable, indestructible.

Mallory shook his head, fished out a cigarette, made to strike a light, remembered the planes still cruising overhead and threw the match away. Idly his gaze travelled north along the canyon and he slowly stiffened, the unlit cigarette crumpling and shredding between his fingers. This ravine bore no resemblance to any of the others through which they had so far passed – it was broader, dead straight, at least three times as long – and, as far as he could see in the twilight, the far end was blocked off by an almost vertical wall.

‘Louki!’ Mallory was on his feet now, all weariness forgotten. ‘Do you know where you are? Do you know this place?’

‘But certainly, Major!’ Louki was hurt. ‘Have I not told you that Panayis and I, in the days of our youth –’

‘But this is a cul-de-sac, a dead-end!’ Mallory protested. ‘We’re boxed in, man, we’re trapped!’

Louki grinned impudently and twirled a corner of his moustache. The little man was enjoying himself.

‘So? The Major does not trust Louki, is that it?’ He grinned again, relented, patted the wall by his side. ‘Panayis and I, we have been working this way all afternoon. Along this wall there are many caves. One of them leads through to another valley that leads down to the coast road.’

‘I see, I see.’ Relief washing through his mind, Mallory sank down on the ground again. ‘And where does this other valley come out?’

‘Just across the strait from Maidos.’

‘How far from the town?’

‘About five miles, Major, maybe six. Not more.’

‘Fine, fine! And you’re sure you can find this cave?’

‘A hundred years from now and my head in a goat-skin bag!’ Louki boasted.

‘Fair enough!’ Even as he spoke, Mallory catapulted himself violently to one side, twisted in mid-air to avoid falling across Stevens and crashed heavily into the wall between Andrea and Miller. In a moment of unthinking carelessness he had exposed himself to view from the ravine they had just climbed: the burst of machine-gun fire from its lower end – a hundred and fifty yards away at the most – had almost blown his head off. Even as it was, the left shoulder of his jacket had been torn away, the shell just grazing his shoulder. Miller was already kneeling by his side, fingering the gash, running a gently exploratory hand across his back.

‘Careless, damn careless,’ Mallory murmured. ‘But I didn’t think they were so close.’ He didn’t feel as calm as he sounded. If the mouth of that Schmeisser had been another sixteenth of an inch to the right, he’d have had no head left now.

‘Are you all right, boss?’ Miller was puzzled. ‘Did they –’

‘Terrible shots,’ Mallory assured him cheerfully. ‘Couldn’t hit a barn.’ He twisted round to look at his shoulder. ‘I hate to sound heroic, but this really is just a scratch …’ He rose easily to his feet, and picked up his guns. ‘Sorry and all that, gentlemen, but it’s time we were on our way again. How far along is this cave, Louki?’

Louki rubbed his bristly chin, the smile suddenly gone. He looked quickly at Mallory, then away again.

‘Louki!’

‘Yes, yes, Major. The cave.’ Louki rubbed his chin again. ‘Well, it is a good way along. In fact, it is at the end,’ he finished uncomfortably.

‘The very end?’ asked Mallory quietly.

Louki nodded miserably, stared down at the ground at his feet. Even the ends of his moustache seemed to droop.

‘That’s handy,’ Mallory said heavily. ‘Oh, that’s very handy!’ He sank down to the ground again. ‘Helps us no end, that does.’

He bowed his head in thought and didn’t even lift it as Andrea poked a Bren round the angle of the rock, and fired a short downhill burst more in token of discouragement than in any hope of hitting anything. Another ten seconds passed, then Louki spoke again, his voice barely audible.

‘I am very, very sorry. This is a terrible thing. Before God, Major, I would not have done it but that I thought they were still far behind.’

‘It’s not your fault, Louki.’ Mallory was touched by the little man’s obvious distress. He touched his ripped shoulder jacket. ‘I thought the same thing.’

‘Please!’ Stevens put his hand on Mallory’s arm. ‘What’s wrong? I don’t understand.’

‘Everybody else does, I’m afraid, Andy. It’s very, very simple. We have half a mile to go along this valley here – and not a shred of cover. The Alpenkorps have less than two hundred yards to come up that ravine we’ve just left.’ He paused while Andrea fired another retaliatory short burst, then continued. ‘They’ll do what they’re doing now – keep probing to see if we’re still here. The minute they judge we’re gone, they’ll be up here in a flash. They’ll nail us before we’re half-way, quarter-way to the cave – you know we can’t travel fast. And they’re carrying a couple of Spandaus – they’ll cut us to ribbons.’

‘I see,’ Stevens murmured. ‘You put it all so nicely, sir.’

‘Sorry, Andy, but that’s how it is.’

‘But could you not leave two men as a rear-guard, while the rest –’

‘And what happens to the rear-guard?’ Mallory interrupted dryly.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘No, but the rear-guard would. Quite a problem, isn’t it?’

‘There is no problem at all,’ Louki announced. ‘The Major is kind, but this is all my fault. I will –’

‘You’ll do damn all of the kind!’ Miller said savagely. He tore Louki’s Bren from his hand and laid it on the ground. ‘You heard what the boss said – it wasn’t your fault.’ For a moment Louki stared at him in anger, then turned dejectedly away. He looked as if he were going to cry. Mallory, too, stared at the American, astonished at the sudden vehemence, so completely out of character. Now that he came to think of it, Dusty had been strangely taciturn and thoughtful during the past hour or so – Mallory couldn’t recall his saying a word during all that time. But time enough to worry about that later on …

Casey Brown eased his injured leg, looking hopefully at Mallory. ‘Couldn’t we stay here till it’s dark – real dark – then make our way –’

‘No good. The moon’s almost full tonight – and not a cloud in the sky. They’d get us. Even more important, we have to get into the town between sunset and curfew tonight. Our last chance. Sorry, Casey, but it’s no go.’

Fifteen seconds, half a minute passed, and passed in silence, then they all started abruptly as Andy Stevens spoke.

‘Louki was right, you know,’ he said pleasantly. The voice was weak, but filled with a calm certainty that jerked every eye towards him. He was propped up on one elbow, Louki’s Bren cradled in his hands. It was a measure of their concentration on the problem on hand that no one had heard or seen him reach out for the machine-gun. ‘It’s all very simple,’ Stevens went on quietly. ‘Just let’s use our heads, that’s all … The gangrene’s right up past the knee, isn’t it, sir?’

Mallory said nothing: he didn’t know what to say, the complete unexpectedness had knocked him off balance. He was vaguely aware that Miller was looking at him, his eyes begging him to say ‘No.’

‘Is it or isn’t it?’ There was a patience, a curious understanding in the voice, and all of a sudden Mallory knew what to say.

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘It is.’ Miller was looking at him in horror.

‘Thank you, sir.’ Stevens was smiling in satisfaction. ‘Thank you very much indeed. There’s no need to point out all the advantages of my staying here.’ There was an assurance in his voice no one had ever heard before, the unthinking authority of a man completely in charge of a situation. ‘Time I did something for my living anyway. No fond farewells, please. Just leave me a couple of boxes of ammo, two or three thirty-six grenades and away you go.’

‘I’ll be darned if we will!’ Miller was up on his feet making for the boy, then brought up abruptly as the Bren centred on his chest.

‘One step nearer and I’ll shoot you,’ Stevens said calmly. Miller looked at him in long silence, sank slowly back to the ground.

‘I would, you know,’ Stevens assured him. ‘Well good-bye, gentlemen. Thank you for all you’ve done for me.’

Twenty seconds, thirty, a whole minute passed in a queer, trance-like silence, then Miller heaved himself to his feet again, a tall, rangy figure with tattered clothes and a face curiously haggard in the gathering gloom.

‘So long, kid. I guess – waal, mebbe I’m not so smart after all.’ He took Stevens’s hand, looked down at the wasted face for a long moment, made to say something else, then changed his mind. ‘Be seein’ you,’ he said abruptly, turned and walked off heavily down the valley. One by one the others followed him, wordlessly, except for Andrea, who stopped and whispered in the boy’s ear, a whisper that brought a smile and a nod of complete understanding, and then there was only Mallory left. Stevens grinned up at him.

‘Thank you, sir. Thanks for not letting me down. You and Andrea – you understand. You always did understand.’

‘You’ll – you’ll be all right, Andy?’ God, Mallory thought, what a stupid, what an insane thing, to say.

‘Honest, sir, I’m OK.’ Stevens smiled contentedly. ‘No pain left – I can’t feel a thing. It’s wonderful!’

‘Andy, I don’t –’

‘It’s time you were gone, sir. The others will be waiting. Now if you’ll just light me a gasper and fire a few random shots down that ravine …’

Within five minutes Mallory had overtaken the others, and inside fifteen they had all reached the cave that led to the coast. For a moment they stood in the entrance, listening to the intermittent firing from the other end of the valley, then turned wordlessly and plunged into the cave. Back where they had left him, Andy Stevens was lying on his stomach, peering down into the now almost dark ravine. There was no pain left in his body, none at all. He drew deeply on a cupped cigarette, smiled as he pushed another clip home into the magazine of the Bren. For the first time in his life Andy Stevens was happy and content beyond his understanding, a man at last at peace with himself. He was no longer afraid.

THIRTEEN

Wednesday Evening

1800–1915

Exactly forty minutes later they were safely in the heart of the town of Navarone, within fifty yards of the great gates of the fortress itself.

Mallory, gazing out at the gates and the still more massive arch of stone that encased them, shook his head for the tenth time and tried to fight off the feeling of disbelief and wonder that they should have reached their goal at last – or as nearly as made no difference. They had been due a break some time, he thought, the law of averages had been overwhelmingly against the continuation of the evil fortune that had dogged them so incessantly since they had arrived on the island. It was only right, he kept telling himself, it was only just that this should be so: but even so, the transition from that dark valley where they had left Andy Stevens to die to this tumbledown old house on the east side of the town square of Navarone had been so quick, so easy, that it still lay beyond immediate understanding or unthinking acceptance.

Not that it had been too easy in the first fifteen minutes or so, he remembered. Panayis’s wounded leg had given out on him immediately after they had entered the cave, and he had collapsed; he must have been in agony, Mallory had thought, with his torn, roughly-bandaged leg, but the failing light and the dark, bitter impassive face had masked the pain. He had begged Mallory to be allowed to remain where he was, to hold off the Alpenkorps when they had overcome Stevens and reached the end of the valley, but Mallory had roughly refused him permission. Brutally he had told Panayis that he was far too valuable to be left there – and that the chances of the Alpenkorps picking that cave out of a score of others were pretty remote. Mallory had hated having to talk to him like that, but there had been no time for gentle blandishments, and Panayis must have seen his point for he had made neither protest nor struggle when Miller and Andrea picked him up and helped him to limp through the cave. The limp, Mallory had noticed, had been much less noticeable then, perhaps because of the assistance, perhaps because now that he had been baulked of the chance of killing a few more Germans it had been pointless to exaggerate his hurt.

They had barely cleared the mouth of the cave on the other side and were making their way down the tree-tufted sloping valley side towards the sea, the dark sheen of the Aegean clearly visible in the gloom, when Louki, hearing something, had gestured them all to silence. Almost immediately Mallory, too, heard it, a soft guttural voice occasionally lost in the crunch of approaching feet on gravel. Mallory had seen that they were providentially screened by some stunted trees, given the order to stop and sworn in quick anger as he had heard the soft thud and barely muffled cry behind them. He had gone back to investigate and found Panayis stretched on the ground unconscious. Miller, who had been helping him along, had explained that Mallory had halted them so suddenly that he’d bumped into Panayis, that the Greek’s bad leg had given beneath him, throwing him heavily, his head striking a stone as he had fallen. Mallory had stooped down in instantly renewed suspicion – Panayis was a throw-back, a natural-born killer, and he was quite capable of faking an accident if he thought he could turn it to his advantage, line a few more of the enemy up on the sights of his rifle … but there had been no fake about that: the bruised and bloodied gash above the temple was all too real.

The German patrol, having had no inkling of their presence, moved noisily up the valley till they had finally gone out of earshot. Louki had thought that the commandant in Navarone was becoming desperate, trying to seal off every available exit from the Devil’s Playground. Mallory had thought it unlikely, but had not stayed to argue the point. Five minutes later they had cleared the mouth of the valley, and in another five had not only reached the coast road but silenced and bound two sentries – the drivers, probably – who had been guarding a truck and command car parked by the roadside, stripped them of denims and helmets and bundled them out of sight behind some bushes.

The trip into Navarone had been ridiculously simple, but the entire lack of opposition was easily understandable, because of the complete unexpectedness of it all. Seated beside Mallory on the front seat, clad, like Mallory, in captured clothes, Louki had driven the big car, and driven it magnificently, an accomplishment so unusual to find in a remote Aegean island that Mallory had been completely mystified until Louki had reminded him that he had been Eugene Vlachos’s Consulate chauffeur for many years. The drive into town had taken less than twelve minutes – not only did the little man handle the car superbly, but he knew the road so well that he got the utmost possible out of the big machine, most of the time without benefit of any lights at all.

Not only a simple journey, but quite uneventful. They had passed several parked trucks at intervals along the road, and less than two miles from the town itself had met a group of about twenty soldiers marching in the opposite direction in column of twos. Louki had slowed down – it would have been highly suspicious had he accelerated, endangering the lives of the marching men – but had switched on the powerful headlights, blinding them, and blown raucously on the horn, while Mallory had leaned out of the right-hand window, sworn at them in perfect German and told them to get out of his damned way. This they had done, while the junior officer in charge had come smartly to attention, throwing up his hand in punctilious salute.

Immediately afterwards they had run through an area of high-walled, terraced market gardens, passed between a decaying Byzantine church and a whitewashed orthodox monastery that faced each other incongruously across the same dusty road, then almost at once were running through the lower part of the old town. Mallory had had a vague impression of narrow, winding, dim-lit streets only inches wider than the car itself, hugely cobbled and with almost knee-high pavements, then Louki was making his way up an arched lane, the car climbing steeply all the time. He had stopped abruptly and Mallory had followed his quick survey of the darkened lane; completely deserted though over an hour yet to curfew. Beside them had been a flight of white stone steps innocent of any hand-rail, running up parallel to the wall of a house, with a highly ornamented latticework grille protecting the outside landing at the top. A still groggy Panayis had led them up these stairs, through to a house – he had known exactly where he was – across a shallow roof, down some more steps, through a dark courtyard and into this ancient house where they were now. Louki had driven the car away even before they had reached the top of the stairs; it was only now that Mallory remembered that Louki hadn’t thought it worth while to say what he intended to do with the car.

Still gazing out of the windowless hole in the wall at the fortress gate, Mallory found himself hoping intensely that nothing would happen to the sad-eyed little Greek, and not only because in his infinite resource and local knowledge he had been invaluable to them and was likely to prove so again; all these considerations apart, Mallory had formed the deepest affection for him, for his unvarying cheerfulness, his enthusiasm, his eagerness to help and to please, above all for his complete disregard of self. A thoroughly lovable little man, and Mallory’s heart warmed to him. More than he could say for Panayis, he thought sourly, and then immediately regretted the thought; it was no fault of Panayis’s that he was what he was, and in his own dark and bitter way he had done as much for them as Louki. But the fact remained that he was sadly lacking in Louki’s warm humanity.

He lacked also Louki’s quick intelligence, the calculated opportunism that amounted almost to genius. It had been a brilliant idea on Louki’s part, Mallory mused, that they should take over this abandoned house: not that there had been any difficulty in finding an empty house – since the Germans had taken over the old castle the inhabitants of the town had left in their scores for Margaritha and other outlying villages, none more quickly than those who had lived in the town square itself; the nearness of the fortress wall that formed the north side of the square had been more than many of them could stomach, with the constant coming and going of their conquerors through the fortress gates, the sentries marching to and fro, the never-ceasing reminders that their freedom was a vanished thing. So many gone that more than half the houses on the west side of the square – those nearest the fortress – were now occupied by German officers. But this same enforced close observation of the fortress’s activities had been exactly what Mallory had wanted. When the time came to strike they had only yards to go. And although any competent garrison commander would always be prepared against the unexpected, Mallory considered it unlikely indeed that any reasonable man could conceive of a sabotage group so suicidally minded as to spend an entire day within a literal stone’s throw of the fortress wall.

Not that the house as such had much to recommend it. As a home, a dwelling place, it was just about as uncomfortable as possible, as dilapidated as it could be without actually falling down. The west side of the square – the side perched precariously on the cliff-top – and the south side were made up of fairly modern buildings of whitewashed stone and Parian granite, huddled together in the invariable fashion of houses in these island towns, flat-roofed to catch as much as possible of the winter rains. But the east side of the square, where they were, was made up of antiquated timber and turf houses, of the kind much more often found in remote mountain villages.

The beaten earth floor beneath his feet was hummocky, uneven, and the previous occupants had used one corner of it – obviously – for a variety of purposes, not least as a refuse dump. The ceiling was of rough-hewn, blackened beams, more or less covered with planks, these in turn being covered with a thick layer of trodden earth: from previous experience of such houses in the White Mountains, Mallory knew that the roof would leak like a sieve whenever the rain came on. Across one end of the room was a solid ledge some thirty inches high, a ledge that served, after the fashion of similar structures in Eskimo igloos, as bed, tables or settee as the occasion demanded. The room was completely bare of furniture.

Mallory started as someone touched him on the shoulder and turned round. Miller was behind him munching away steadily, the remains of a bottle of wine in his hand.

‘Better get some chow, boss,’ he advised. ‘I’ll take a gander through this hole from time to time.’

‘Right you are, Dusty. Thanks.’ Mallory moved gingerly towards the back of the room – it was almost pitch dark inside and they dared not risk a light – and felt his way till he brought up against the ledge. The tireless Andrea had gone through their provisions and prepared a meal of sorts – dried figs, honey, cheese, garlic sausages and pounded roast chestnuts. A horrible mixture, Mallory thought, but the best Andrea could do: besides he was too hungry, ravenously so, to worry about such niceties as the pleasing of his palate. And by the time he had washed it down with some of the local wine that Louki and Panayis had provided the previous day, the sweetly-resinous rawness of the drink had obliterated every other taste.

Carefully, shielding the match with his hand, Mallory lit a cigarette and began to explain for the first time his plan for entering the fortress. He did not have to bother lowering his voice – a couple of looms in the next house, one of the few occupied ones left on that side of the square, clacked incessantly throughout the evening. Mallory had a shrewd suspicion that this was more of Louki’s doing although it was difficult to see how he could have got word through to any of his friends. But Mallory was content to accept the situation as it was, to concentrate on making sure that the others understood his instructions.

Apparently they did, for there were no questions. For a few minutes the talk became general, the usually taciturn Casey Brown having the most to say, complaining bitterly about the food, the drink, his injured leg and the hardness of the bench where he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink all night long. Mallory grinned to himself but said nothing; Casey Brown was definitely on the mend.

‘I reckon we’ve talked enough, gentlemen.’ Mallory slid off the bench and stretched himself. God, he was tired! ‘Our first and last chance to get a decent night’s sleep. Two hour watches – I’ll take the first.’

‘By yourself?’ It was Miller calling softly from the other end of the room. ‘Don’t you think we should share watches, boss? One for the front, one for the back. Besides, you know we’re all pretty well done up. One man by himself might fall asleep.’ He sounded so anxious that Mallory laughed.

‘Not a chance, Dusty. Each man will keep watch by the window there and if he falls asleep he’ll damn soon wake up when he hits the floor. And it’s because we’re so darned bushed that we can’t afford to have anyone lose sleep unnecessarily. Myself first, then you, then Panayis, then Casey, then Andrea.’

‘Yeah, I suppose that’ll be OK,’ Miller conceded grudgingly.

He put something hard and cold into his hand. Mallory recognised it at once – it was Miller’s most cherished possession, his silenced automatic.

‘Just so’s you can fill any nosy customers full of little holes without wakin’ the whole town.’ He ambled off to the back of the room, lit a cigarette, smoked it quietly for a few moments, then swung his legs up on the bench. Within five minutes everyone except the silently watchful man at the window was sound asleep.

Two or three minutes later Mallory jerked to unmoving attention as he heard a stealthy sound outside – from the back of the house, he thought. The clacking of the looms next door had stopped, and the house was very still. Again there came the noise, unmistakable this time, a gentle tapping at the door at the end of the passage that led from the back of the room.

‘Remain there, my Captain.’ It was Andrea’s soft murmur, and Mallory marvelled for the hundredth time at Andrea’s ability to rouse himself from the deepest of sleeps at the slightest alien sound: the violence of a thunderstorm would have left him undisturbed. ‘I will see to it. It must be Louki.’

It was Louki. The little man was panting, near exhaustion, but extraordinarily pleased with himself. Gratefully he drank the cup of wine that Andrea poured for him.

‘Damned glad to see you back again!’ Mallory said sincerely. ‘How did it go? Someone after you?’

Mallory could almost see him drawing himself up to his full height in the darkness.

‘As if any of those clumsy fools could see Louki, even on a moonlit night, far less catch him,’ he said indignantly. He paused to draw some deep breath. ‘No, no, Major, I knew you would be worried about me so I ran back all the way. Well, nearly all the way,’ he amended. ‘I am not so young as I was, Major Mallory.’

‘All the way from where?’ Mallory asked. He was glad of the darkness that hid his smile.

‘From Vygos. It is an old castle that the Franks built there many generations ago, about two miles from here along the coast road to the east.’ He paused to drink another mouthful of wine. ‘More than two miles, I would say – and I only walked twice, a minute at a time, on the way back.’ Mallory had the impression that Louki already regretted his momentary weakness in admitting that he was no longer a young man.

‘And what did you do there?’ Mallory asked.

‘I was thinking, after I left you,’ Louki answered indirectly. ‘Me, I am always thinking,’ he explained. ‘It is a habit of mine. I was thinking that when the soldiers who are looking for us out in the Devil’s Playground find out that the car is gone, they will know that we are no longer in that accursed place.’

‘Yes,’ Mallory agreed carefully. ‘Yes, they will know that.’

‘Then they will say to themselves, “Ha, those verdammt Englanders have little time left.” They will know that we will know that they have little hope of catching us in the island – Panayis and I, we know every rock and tree and path and cave. So all they can do is to make sure that we do not get into the town – they will block every road leading in, and tonight is our last chance to get in. You follow me?’ he asked anxiously.

‘I am trying very hard.’

‘But first’ – Louki spread his hands dramatically – ‘but first they will make sure we are not in the town. They would be fools to block the roads if we were already in the town. They must make sure we are not in the town. And so – the search. The very great search. With – how do you say? – the teeth-comb!’

Mallory nodded his head in slow understanding.

‘I’m afraid he’s right, Andrea.’

‘I, too, fear so,’ Andrea said unhappily. ‘We should have thought of this. But perhaps we could hide – the roof-tops or –’

‘With a teeth-comb, I said!’ Louki interrupted impatiently. ‘But all is well. I, Louki, have thought it all out. I can smell rain. There will be clouds over the moon before long, and it will be safe to move … You do not want to know what I have done with the car, Major Mallory?’ Louki was enjoying himself immensely.

‘Forgotten all about it,’ Mallory confessed. ‘What did you do with the car?’

‘I left it in the courtyard of Vygos castle. Then I emptied all the petrol from the tank and poured it over the car. Then I struck a match.’

‘You did what?’ Mallory was incredulous.

‘I struck a match. I think I was standing too near the car, for I do not seem to have any eyebrows left.’ Louki sighed. ‘A pity – it was such a splendid machine.’ Then he brightened. ‘But before God, Major, it burned magnificently.’

Mallory stared at him.

‘Why on earth –?’

It is simple,’ Louki explained patiently. ‘By this time the men out in the Devil’s Playground must know that their car has been stolen. They see the fire. They hurry back to – how do you say?’

‘Investigate?’

‘So. Investigate. They wait till the fire dies down. They investigate again. No bodies, no bones in the car, so they search the castle. And what do they find?’

There was silence in the room.

‘Nothing!’ Louki said impatiently. ‘They find nothing. And then they search the countryside for half a mile around. And what do they find? Again nothing. So then they know that they have been fooled, and that we are in the town, and will come to search the town.’

‘With the teeth-comb,’ Mallory murmured.

‘With the teeth-comb. And what do they find?’ Louki paused, then hurried on before anyone could steal his thunder. ‘Once again, they will find nothing,’ he said triumphantly. ‘And why? For by then the rain will have come, the moon will have vanished, the explosives will be hidden – and we will be gone!’

‘Gone where?’ Mallory felt dazed.

‘Where but to Vygos castle, Major Mallory. Never while night follows day will they think to look for us there!’

Mallory looked at him in silence for long seconds without speaking, then turned to Andrea.

‘Captain Jensen’s only made one mistake so far,’ he murmured. ‘He picked the wrong man to lead this expedition. Not that it matters anyway. With Louki here on our side, how can we lose?’

Mallory lowered his rucksack gently to the earthen roof, straightened and peered up into the darkness, both hands shielding his eyes from the first drizzle of rain. Even from where they stood – on the crumbling roof of the house nearest the fortress on the east side of the square – the walls stretched fifteen, perhaps twenty feet above their heads; the wickedly out- and down-curving spikes that topped the wall were all but lost in the darkness.

‘There she is, Dusty,’ Mallory murmured. ‘Nothing to it.’

‘Nothin’ to it!’ Miller was horrified. ‘I’ve – I’ve gotta get over that?’

‘You’d have a ruddy hard time going through it,’ Mallory answered briefly. He grinned, clapped Miller on the back and prodded the rucksack at his feet. ‘We chuck this rope up, the hook catches, you shin smartly up –’

‘And bleed to death on those six strands of barbed wire,’ Miller interrupted. ‘Louki says they’re the biggest barbs he’s ever seen.’

‘We’ll use the tent for padding,’ Mallory said soothingly.

‘I have a very delicate skin, boss,’ Miller complained. ‘Nothin’ short of a spring mattress –’

‘Well, you’ve only an hour to find one,’ Mallory said indifferently. Louki had estimated that it would be at least an hour before the search party would clear the northern part of the town, give himself and Andrea a chance to begin a diversion. ‘Come on, let’s cache this stuff and get out of here. We’ll shove the rucksacks in this corner and cover ’em with earth. Take the rope out first, though; we’ll have no time to start undoing the packs when we get here.’

Miller dropped to his knees, hands fumbling with straps, then exclaimed in sudden annoyance.

‘This can’t be the pack,’ he muttered in disgust. Abruptly his voice changed. ‘Here, wait a minute, though.’

‘What’s up, Dusty?’

Miller didn’t answer immediately. For a few seconds his hands explored the contents of the pack, then he straightened.

‘The slow-burnin’ fuse, boss.’ His voice was blurred with anger, with a vicious anger that astonished Mallory. ‘It’s gone!’

‘What!’ Mallory stooped, began to search through the pack. ‘It can’t be, Dusty, it just can’t! Dammit to hell, man, you packed the stuff yourself!’

‘Sure I did, boss,’ Miller grated. ‘And then some crawlin’ bastard comes along behind my back and unpacks it again.’

‘Impossible!’ Mallory protested. ‘It’s just downright impossible, Dusty. You closed that rucksack – I saw you do it in the grove this morning – and Louki has had it all the time. And I’d trust Louki with my life.’

‘So would I, boss.’

‘Maybe we’re both wrong,’ Mallory went on quietly. ‘Maybe you did miss it out. We’re both helluva tired, Dusty.’

Miller looked at him queerly, said nothing for a moment, then began to swear again. ‘It’s my own fault, boss, my own damned fault.’

‘What do you mean, your own fault? Heavens above, man, I was there when …’ Mallory broke off, rose quickly to his feet and stared through the darkness at the south side of the square. A single shot had rung out there, the whiplash crack of a carbine followed the thin, high whine of a ricochet, and then silence.

Mallory stood quite still, hands clenched by his sides. Over ten minutes had passed since he and Miller had left Panayis to guide Andrea and Brown to the Castle Vygos – and they should have been well away from the square by this time. And almost certainly Louki wouldn’t be down there, Mallory’s instructions to him had been explicit – to hide the remainder of the TNT blocks in the roof and then wait there to lead himself and Miller to the keep. But something could have gone wrong, something could always go wrong. Or a trap, maybe a ruse. But what kind of trap?

The sudden off-beat stammering of a heavy machine-gun stilled his thoughts, and for a moment or two he was all eyes and straining ears. And then another, and lighter machine-gun, cut in, just for a few seconds: as abruptly as they had started, both guns died away, together. Mallory waited no longer.

‘Get the stuff together again,’ he whispered urgently. ‘We’re taking it with us. Something’s gone wrong.’ Within thirty seconds they had ropes and explosives back in their knapsacks, had strapped them on their backs and were on their way.

Bent almost double, careful to make no noise whatsoever they ran across the roof-tops towards the old house where they had hidden earlier in the evening, where they were now to rendezvous with Louki. Still running, they were only feet away from the house when they saw his shadowy figure rise up, only it wasn’t Louki. Mallory realised at once, for it was too tall for Louki and without breaking step he catapulted the horizontal driving weight of his 180 pounds at the unknown figure in a homicidal tackle, his shoulder catching the man just below the breast-bone, emptying every last particle of air from the man’s lungs with an explosive agonised whoosh. A second later both of Miller’s sinewy hands were clamped round the man’s neck, slowly choking him to death.

And he would have choked to death, neither of the two men were in any mind for half-measures, had not Mallory, prompted by some fugitive intuition, stooped low over the contorted face, the staring, protruding eyes, choked back a cry of sudden horror.

‘Dusty!’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘For God’s sake, stop! Let him go! It’s Panayis!’

Miller didn’t hear him. In the gloom his face was like stone, his head sunk farther and farther between hunching shoulders as he tightened his grip, strangling the Greek in a weird savage silence.

‘It’s Panayis, you bloody fool, Panayis!’ Mallory’s mouth was at the American’s ear, his hands clamped round the other’s wrists as he tried to drag him off Panayis’s throat. He could hear the muffled drumming of Panayis’s heels on the turf of the roof, tore at Miller’s wrists with all his strength: twice before he had heard that sound as a man had died under Andrea’s great hands, and he knew with sudden certainty that Panayis would go the same way, and soon, if he didn’t make Miller understand. But all at once Miller understood, relaxed heavily, straightened up, still kneeling, hands hanging limply by his sides. Breathing deeply he stared down in silence at the man at his feet.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Mallory demanded softly. ‘Deaf or blind or both?’

‘Just one of those things, I guess.’ Miller rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead, his face empty of expression. ‘Sorry, boss, sorry.’

‘Why the hell apologise to me?’ Mallory looked away from him, looked down at Panayis: the Greek was sitting up now, hands massaging his bruised throat, sucking in long draughts of air in great, whooping gasps. ‘But maybe Panayis here might appreciate –’

‘Apologies can wait,’ Miller interrupted brusquely. ‘Ask him what’s happened to Louki.’

Mallory looked at him for a moment, made to reply, changed his mind, translated the question. He listened to Panayis’s halting answer – it obviously hurt him even to try to speak – and his mouth tightened in a hard, bitter line. Miller watched the fractional slump of the New Zealander’s shoulders, felt he could wait no longer.

‘Well, what is it, boss? Somethin’s happened to Louki, is that it?’

‘Yes,’ Mallory said tonelessly. ‘They’d only got as far as the lane at the back when they found a small German patrol blocking their way. Louki tried to draw them off and the machine-gunner got him through the chest. Andrea got the machine-gunner and took Louki away. Panayis says he’ll die for sure.’

FOURTEEN

Wednesday Night

1915–2000

The three men cleared the town without any difficulty, striking out directly across country for the castle Vygos and avoiding the main road. It was beginning to rain now, heavily, persistently, and the ground was mired and sodden, the few ploughed fields they crossed almost impassable. They had just struggled their way through one of these and could just see the dim outline of the keep – less than a cross-country mile from the town instead of Louki’s exaggerated estimate – when they passed by an abandoned earthen house and Miller spoke for the first time since they had left the town square of Navarone.

‘I’m bushed, boss.’ His head was sunk on his chest, and his breathing was laboured. ‘O1’ man Miller’s on the downward path, I reckon, and the legs are gone. Couldn’t we squat inside here for a couple of minutes, boss, and have a smoke?’

Mallory looked at him in surprise, thought how desperately weary his own legs felt and nodded in reluctant agreement. Miller wasn’t the man to complain unless he was near exhaustion.

‘Okay, Dusty, I don’t suppose a minute or two will harm.’ He translated quickly into Greek and led the way inside, Miller at his heels complaining at length about his advancing age. Once inside, Mallory felt his way across to the inevitable wooden bunk, sat down gratefully, lit a cigarette then looked up in puzzlement. Miller was still on his feet, walking slowly round the hut, tapping the walls as he went.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Mallory asked irritably. ‘That was why you came in here in the first place, wasn’t it?’

‘No, boss, not really.’ The drawl was very pronounced. ‘Just a low-down trick to get us inside. Two-three very special things I want to show you.’

‘Very special? What the devil are you trying to tell me?’

‘Bear with me, Captain Mallory,’ Miller requested formally. ‘Bear with me just a few minutes, I’m not wastin’ your time. You have my word, Captain Mallory.’

‘Very well.’ Mallory was mystified, but his confidence in Miller remained unshaken. ‘As you wish. Only don’t be too long about it.’

‘Thanks, boss.’ The strain of formality was too much for Miller. ‘It won’t take long. There’ll be a lamp or candles in here – you said the islanders never leave an abandoned house without ’em?’

‘And a very useful superstition it’s been to us, too.’ Mallory reached under the bunk with his torch, straightened his back. ‘Two or three candles here.’

‘I want a light, boss. No windows – I checked. OK?’

‘Light one and I’ll go outside to see if there’s anything showing.’ Mallory was completely in the dark about the American’s intentions. He felt Miller didn’t want him to say anything, and there was a calm surety about him that precluded questioning. Mallory was back in less than a minute. ‘Not a chink to be seen from the outside,’ he reported.

‘Fair enough. Thanks, boss.’ Miller lit a second candle, then slipped the rucksack straps from his shoulders, laid the pack on the bunk and stood in silence for a moment.

Mallory looked at his watch, looked back at Miller.

‘You were going to show me something,’ he prompted.

‘Yeah, that’s right. Three things, I said.’ He dug into the pack, brought out a little black box hardly bigger than a match-box. ‘Exhibit A, boss.’

Mallory looked at it curiously. ‘What’s that?’

‘Clockwork fuse.’ Miller began to unscrew the back panel. ‘Hate the damned things. Always make me feel like one of those Bolshevik characters with a dark cloak, a moustache like Louki’s and carryin’ one of those black cannon-ball things with a sputterin’ fuse stickin’ outa it. But it works.’ He had the back off the box now, examining the mechanism in the light of his torch. ‘But this one doesn’t, not any more,’ he added softly. ‘Clock’s OK, but the contact arm’s been bent right back. This thing could tick till Kingdom Come and it couldn’t even set off a firework.’

‘But how on earth –?’

‘Exhibit B.’ Miller didn’t seem to hear him. He opened the detonator box, gingerly lifted a fuse from its felt and cotton-wool bed and examined it closely under his torch. Then he looked at Mallory again. ‘Fulminate of mercury, boss. Only seventy-seven grains, but enough to blow your fingers off. Unstable as hell, too – the littlest tap will set it off.’ He let it fall to the ground, and Mallory winced and drew back involuntarily as the American smashed a heavy heel down on top of it. But there was no explosion, nothing at all.

‘Ain’t workin’ so good either, is it, boss? A hundred to one the rest are all empty, too.’ He fished out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and watched the smoke eddy and whirl about the heat of the candles. He slid the cigarettes into his pocket.

‘There was a third thing you were going to show me,’ Mallory said quietly.

‘Yeah, I was goin’ to show you somethin’ else.’ The voice was very gentle and Mallory felt suddenly cold. ‘I was goin’ to show you a spy, a traitor, the most vicious, twistin’, murderin’, double-crossin’ bastard I’ve ever known.’ The American had his hand out of his pocket now, the silenced automatic sitting snugly against his palm, the muzzle trained over Panayis’s heart. He went on, more gently than ever. ‘Judas Iscariot had nothin’ on the boy-friend here, boss … Take your coat off, Panayis.’

‘What the devil are you doing? Are you crazy?’ Mallory started forward, half-angry, half-amazed, but brought up sharply against Miller’s extended arm, rigid as a bar of iron. ‘What bloody nonsense is this? He doesn’t understand English!’

‘Don’t he, though? Then why was he out of the cave like a flash when Casey reported hearin’ sounds outside … and why was he the first to leave the carob grove this afternoon if he didn’t understand your order? Take your coat off, Judas, or I’ll shoot you through the arm. I’ll give you two seconds.’

Mallory made to throw his arms round Miller and bring him to the ground, but halted in mid-step as he caught the look on Panayis’s face – teeth bared, murder glaring out from the coal-black eyes. Never before had Mallory seen such malignity in a human face, a malignity that yielded abruptly to shocked pain and disbelief as the .32 bullet smashed into his upper arm, just below the shoulder.

‘Two seconds and then the other arm,’ Miller said woodenly. But Panayis was already tearing off his jacket, the dark, bestial eyes never leaving Miller’s face. Mallory looked at him, shivered involuntarily, looked at Miller. Indifference, he thought, that was the only word to describe the look on the American’s face. Indifference. Unaccountably, Mallory felt colder than ever.

‘Turn round!’ The automatic never wavered.

Slowly Panayis turned round. Miller stepped forward, caught the black shirt by the collar, ripped it off his back with one convulsive jerk.

‘Waal, waal, now, whoever woulda thought it?’ Miller drawled. ‘Surprise, surprise, surprise! Remember, boss, this was the character that was publicly flogged by the Germans in Crete, flogged until the white of his ribs showed through. His back’s in a helluva state, isn’t it?’

Mallory looked but said nothing. Completely off balance, his mind was in a kaleidoscopic whirl, his thoughts struggling to adjust themselves to a new set of circumstances, a complete reversal of all his previous thinking. Not a scar, not a single blemish, marked the dark smoothness of that skin.

‘Just a natural quick healer,’ Miller murmured. ‘Only a nasty, twisted mind like mine would think that he had been a German agent in Crete, became known to the Allies as a fifth columnist, lost his usefulness to the Germans and was shipped back to Navarone by fast motor-launch under cover of night. Floggin’! Island-hoppin’ his way back here in a row-boat! Just a lot of bloody eyewash!’ Miller paused, and his mouth twisted. ‘I wonder how many pieces of silver he made in Crete before they got wise to him?’

‘But heavens above, man, you’re not going to condemn someone just for shooting a line!’ Mallory protested. Strangely he didn’t feel nearly as vehement as he sounded. ‘How many survivors would there be among the Allies if –?’

‘Not convinced yet, huh?’ Miller waved his automatic negligently at Panayis. ‘Roll up the left trouser leg, Iscariot. Two seconds again.’

Panayis did as he was told. The black venomous eyes never looked away from Miller’s. He rolled the dark cloth up to the knee.

‘Farther yet? That’s my little boy,’ Miller encouraged him. ‘And now take that bandage off – right off.’ A few seconds passed, then Miller shook his head sadly. ‘A ghastly wound, boss, a ghastly wound!’

‘I’m beginning to see your point,’ Mallory said thoughtfully. The dark sinewy leg wasn’t even scratched. ‘But why on earth –?’

‘Simple. Four reasons at least Junior here is a treacherous, slimy bastard – no self-respectin’ rattlesnake would come within a mile of him – but he’s a clever bastard. He faked his leg so he could stay in the cave in the Devil’s Playground when the four of us went back to stop the Alpenkorps from comin’ up the slope below the carob grove.’

‘Why? Frightened he’d stop something?’

Miller shook his head impatiently.

‘Junior here’s scared o’ nothin’. He stayed behind to write a note. Later on he used his leg to drop behind us some place, and leave the note where it could be seen. Early on, this must have been. Note probably said that we would come out at such and such a place, and would they kindly send a welcomin’ committee to meet us there. They sent it, remember: it was their car we swiped to get to town … That was the first time I got real suspicious of the boy-friend: after he’d dropped behind he made up on us again quick – too damn quick for a man with a game leg. But it wasn’t till I opened that rucksack in the square this evenin’ that I really knew.’

‘You only mentioned two reasons,’ Mallory prompted.

‘Comin’ to the others. Number three – he could fall behind when the welcomin’ committee opened up in front – Iscariot here wasn’t goin to get himself knocked off before he collected his salary. And number four – remember that real touchin’ scene when he begged you to let him stay at the far end of the cave that led into the valley we came out? Goin’ to do his Horatio-on-the-bridge act?’

‘Going to show them the right cave to pick, you mean.’

‘Check. After that he was gettin’ pretty desperate. I still wasn’t sure, but I was awful suspicious, boss. Didn’t know what he might try next. So I clouted him good and hard when that last patrol came up the valley.’

‘I see,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘I see indeed.’ He looked sharply at Miller. ‘You should have told me. You had no right –’

‘I was goin’ to, boss. But I hadn’t a chance – Junior here was around all the time. I was just startin’ to tell you half an hour back, when the guns started up.’

Mallory nodded in understanding. ‘How did you happen on all this in the first place, Dusty?’

‘Juniper,’ Miller said succinctly. ‘Remember that’s how Turzig said he came to find us? He smelt the juniper.’

‘That’s right. We were burning juniper.’

‘Sure we were. But he said he smelt it on Kostos – and the wind was blowin’ off Kostos all day long.’

‘My God,’ Mallory whispered. ‘Of course, of course! And I missed it completely.’

‘But Jerry knew we were there. How? Waal, he ain’t got second sight no more than I have. So he was tipped off – he was tipped of by the boy-friend here. Remember I said he’d talked to some of his pals in Margaritha when we went down there for the supplies?’ Miller spat in disgust. ‘Fooled me all along the line. Pals? I didn’t know how right I was. Sure they were his pals – his German pals! And that food he said he got from the commandant’s kitchen – he got it from the kitchen all right. Almost certainly he goes in and asks for it – and old Skoda hands him his own suitcase to stow it in.’

‘But the German he killed on the way back to the village? Surely to God –’

‘Panayis killed him.’ There was a tired certainty in Miller’s voice. ‘What’s another corpse to Sunshine here. Probably stumbled on the poor bastard in the dark and had to kill him. Local colour. Louki was there, remember, and he couldn’t have Louki gettin’ suspicious. He would have blamed it on Louki anyway. The guy ain’t human … And remember when he was flung into Skoda’s room in Margaritha along with Louki, blood pourin’ from a wound in his head?’

Mallory nodded.

‘High-grade ketchup. Probably also from the commandant’s kitchen,’ Miller said bitterly. ‘If Skoda had failed by every other means, there would still have been the boy-friend here as a stool-pigeon. Why he never asked Louki where the explosives were I don’t know.’

‘Obviously he didn’t know Louki knew.’

‘Mebbe. But one thing the bastard did know – how to use a mirror. Musta heliographed the garrison from the carob grove and given our position. No other way, boss. Then sometime this morning he must have got hold of my rucksack, whipped out all the slow fuse and fixed the clock fuse and detonators. He should have had his hands blown off tamperin’ with them fulminates. Lord only knows where he learnt to handle the damn things.’

‘Crete.’ Mallory said positively. ‘The Germans would see to that. A spy who can’t also double as a saboteur is no good to them.’

‘And he was very good to them,’ Miller said softly. ‘Very, very good. They’re gonna miss their little pal. Iscariot here was a very smart baby indeed.’

‘He was. Except tonight. He should have been smart enough to know that at least one of us would be suspicious –’

‘He probably was,’ Miller interrupted. ‘But he was misinformed. I think Louki’s unhurt. I think Junior here talked Louki into letting him stay in his place – Louki was always a bit scared of him – then he strolled across to his pals at the gate, told ’em to send a strong-arm squad out to Vygos to pick up the others, asked them to fire a few shots – he was very strong on local colour, was our loyal little pal – then strolls back across the square, hoists himself up on the roof and waits to tip off his pals as soon as we came in the back door. But Louki forgot to tell him just one thing – that we were goin’ to rendezvous on the roof of the house, not inside. So the boyfriend here lurks away for all he’s worth up top, waiting to signal his friends. Ten to one that he’s got a torch in his pocket.’

Mallory picked up Panayis’s coat and examined it briefly. ‘He has.’

‘That’s it, then.’ Miller lit another cigarette, watched the match burn down slowly to his fingers, then looked up at Panayis. ‘How does it feel to know that you’re goin’ to die, Panayis, to feel like all them poor bastards who’ve felt just as you’re feeling now, just before they died – all the men in Crete, all the guys in the sea-borne and air landings on Navarone who died because they thought you were on their side? How does it feel, Panayis?’

Panayis said nothing. His left hand clutching his torn right arm, trying to stem the blood, he stood there motionless, the dark, evil face masked in hate, the lips still drawn back in that less than human snarl. There was no fear in him, none at all, and Mallory tensed himself for the last, despairing attempt for life that Panayis must surely make, and then he had looked at Miller and knew there would be no attempt, because there was a strange sureness and inevitability about the American, an utter immobility of hand and eye that somehow precluded even the thought, far less the possibility, of escape.

‘The prisoner has nothin’ to say.’ Miller sounded very tired. ‘I suppose I should say somethin’. I suppose I should give out with a long spiel about me bein’ the judge, the jury and the executioner, but I don’t think I’ll bother myself. Dead men make poor witnesses … Mebbe it’s not your fault, Panayis, mebbe there’s an awful good reason why you came to be what you are. Gawd only knows. I don’t, and I don’t much care. There are too many dead men. I’m goin’ to kill you, Panayis, and I’m goin’ to kill you now.’ Miller dropped his cigarette, ground it into the floor of the hut. ‘Nothin’ at all to say?’

And he had nothing at all to say, the hate, the malignity of the black eyes said it all for him and Miller nodded, just once, as if in secret understanding. Carefully, accurately, he shot Panayis through the heart, twice, blew out the candles, turned his back and was half-way towards the door before the dead man had crashed to the ground.

‘I am afraid I cannot do it, Andrea.’ Louki sat back wearily, shook his head in despair. ‘I am very sorry, Andrea. The knots are too tight.’

‘No matter.’ Andrea rolled over from his side to a sitting position, tried to ease his tightly-bound legs and wrists. ‘They are cunning, these Germans, and wet cords can only be cut.’ Characteristically, he made no mention of the fact that only a couple of minutes previously he had twisted round to reach the cords on Louki’s wrist and undone them with half a dozen tugs of his steel-trap fingers. ‘We will think of something else.’

He looked away from Louki, glanced across the room in the faint light of the smoking oil-lamp that stood by the grille door, a light so yellow, so dim that Casey Brown, trussed like a barnyard fowl and loosely secured, like himself, by a length of rope to the iron hooks suspended from the roof, was no more than a shapeless blur in the opposite corner of the stone-flagged room. Andrea smiled to himself, without mirth. Taken prisoner again, and for the second time that day – and with the same ease and surprise that gave no chance at all of resistance: completely unsuspecting, they had been captured in an upper room, seconds after Casey had finished talking to Cairo. The patrol had known exactly where to find them – and with their leader’s assurance that it was all over, with his gloating explanation of the part Panayis had played, the unexpectedness, the success of the coup was all too easy to understand. And it was difficult not to believe his assurance that neither Mallory nor Miller had a chance. But the thought of ultimate defeat never occurred to Andrea.

His gaze left Casey Brown, wandered round the room, took in what he could see of the stone walls and floor, the hooks, the ventilation ducts, the heavy grille door. A dungeon, a torture dungeon, one would have thought, but Andrea had seen such places before. A castle, they called this place, but it was really only an old keep, no more than a manor house built round the crenellated towers. And the long-dead Frankish nobles who had built these keeps had lived well. No dungeon this, Andrea knew, but simply the larder where they had hung their meat and game, and done without windows and light for the sake of …

The light! Andrea twisted round, looking at the smoking oil-lamp, his eyes narrowing.

‘Louki!’ he called softly. The little Greek turned round to look at him.

‘Can you reach the lamp?’

‘I think so … Yes, I can.’

‘Take the glass off,’ Andrea whispered. ‘Use a cloth – it will be hot. Then wrap it in the cloth, hit it on the floor – gently. The glass is thick – you can cut me loose in a minute or two.’

Louki stared at him for an uncomprehending moment, then nodded in understanding. He shuffled across the floor – his legs were still bound – reached out, then halted his hand abruptly, only inches from the glass. The peremptory, metallic clang had been only feet away, and he raised his head slowly to see what had caused it.

He could have stretched out his hand, touched the barrel of the Mauser that protruded threateningly through the bars of the grille door. Again the guard rattled the rifle angrily between the bars, shouted something he didn’t understand.

‘Leave it alone, Louki,’ Andrea said quietly. His voice was tranquil, unshadowed by disappointment. ‘Come back here. Our friend outside is not too pleased.’ Obediently Louki moved back, heard the guttural voice again, rapid and alarmed this time, the rattle as the guard withdrew his rifle quickly from the bars of the door, the urgent pounding of his feet on the flagstones outside as he raced up the passage.

‘What’s the matter with our little friend?’ Casey Brown was as lugubrious, as weary as ever. ‘He seems upset.’

‘He is upset.’ Andrea smiled. ‘He’s just realised that Louki’s hands are untied.’

‘Well, why doesn’t he tie them up again?’

‘Slow in the head he may be, but he is no fool,’ Andrea explained. ‘This could be a trap and he’s gone for his friends.’

Almost at once they heard a thud, like the closing of a distant door, the sound of more than one pair of feet running down the passage, the tinny rattling of keys on a ring, the rasp of a key against the lock, a sharp click, the squeal of rusty hinges and then two soldiers were in the room, dark and menacing with their jackboots and ready guns. Two or three seconds elapsed while they looked around them, accustoming their eyes to the gloom, then the man nearest the door spoke.

‘A terrible thing, boss, nothin’ short of deplorable! Leave ’em alone for a couple of minutes and see what happens? The whole damn bunch tied up like Houdini on an off night!’

There was a brief, incredulous silence, then all three were sitting upright, staring at them. Brown recovered first.

‘High time, too,’ he complained. ‘Thought you were never going to get here.’

‘What he means is that he thought we were never going to see you again,’ Andrea said quietly. ‘Neither did I. But here you are, safe and sound.’

‘Yes,’ Mallory nodded. ‘Thanks to Dusty and his nasty suspicious mind that cottoned on to Panayis while all the rest of us were asleep.’

‘Where is he?’ Louki asked.

‘Panayis?’ Miller waved a negligent hand. ‘We left him behind – he met with a sorta accident.’ He was across at the other side of the room now, carefully cutting the cords that pinioned Brown’s injured leg, whistling tunelessly as he sawed away with his sheath knife. Mallory, too, was busy, slicing through Andrea’s bonds, explaining rapidly what had happened, listening to the big Greek’s equally concise account of what had befallen the other in the keep. And then Andrea was on his feet, massaging his numbed hands, looking across at Miller.

‘That whistling, my Captain. It sounds terrible and, what is worse, it is very loud. The guards –’

‘No worry there,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘They never expected to see Dusty and myself again … They kept a poor watch.’ He turned round to look at Brown, now hobbling across the floor.

‘How’s the leg, Casey?’

‘Fine, sir.’ Brown brushed it aside as of no importance. ‘I got through to Cairo, tonight, sir. The report –’

‘It’ll have to wait, Casey. We must get out as fast as we can. You all right, Louki?’

‘I am heart-broken, Major Mallory. That a countryman of mine – a trusted friend –’

‘That too, will have to wait. Come on!’

‘You are in a great hurry,’ Andrea protested mildly. They were already out in the passage, stepping over the cell guard lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. ‘Surely if they’re all like our friend here –’

‘No danger from this quarter,’ Mallory interrupted impatiently. ‘The soldiers in the town – they’re bound to know by now that we’ve either missed Panayis or disposed of him. In either case they’ll know that we’re certain to come hot-footing out here. Work it out for yourself. They’re probably half-way here already, and if they do come …’ He broke off, stared at the smashed generator and the ruins of Casey Brown’s transmitter set lying in one corner of the entrance hall. ‘Done a pretty good job on those, haven’t they?’ he said bitterly.

‘Thank the Lord,’ Miller said piously. ‘All the less to tote around, is what I say. If you could only see the state of my back with that damned generator –’

‘Sir!’ Brown had caught Mallory’s arm, an action so foreign to the usually punctilious petty officer that Mallory halted in surprise. ‘Sir, it’s terribly important – the report, I mean. You must listen, sir!’

The action, the deadly earnestness, caught and held Mallory’s full attention. He turned to face Brown with a smile.

‘OK, Casey, let’s have it,’ he said quietly. ‘Things can’t possibly be any worse than they are now.’

‘They can, sir.’ There was something tired, defeated about Casey Brown, and the great, stone hall seemed strangely chill. ‘I’m afraid they can, sir. I got through tonight. First-class reception. Captain Jensen himself, and he was hopping mad. Been waiting all day for us to come on the air. Asked how things were, and I told him that you were outside the fortress just then, and hoped to be inside the magazine in an hour or so.’

‘Go on.’

‘He said that was the best news he’d ever had. He said his information had been wrong, he’d been fooled, that the invasion fleet didn’t hole up overnight in the Cyclades, that they had come straight through under the heaviest air and E-boat escort ever seen in the Med, and are due to hit the beaches on Kheros some time before dawn tomorrow. He said our destroyers had been waiting to the south all day, moved up at dusk and were waiting word from him to see whether they would attempt the passage of the Maidos Straits. I told him maybe something could go wrong, but he said not with Captain Mallory and Miller inside and besides he wasn’t – he couldn’t risk the lives of twelve hundred men on Kheros just on the off chance that he might be wrong.’ Brown broke off suddenly and looked down miserably at his feet. No one else in the hall moved or made any sound at all.

‘Go on,’ Mallory repeated in a whisper. His face was very pale.

‘That’s all, sir. That’s all there is. The destroyers are coming through the Straits at midnight.’ Brown looked down at his luminous watch. ‘Midnight. Four hours to go.’

‘Oh, God! Midnight!’ Mallory was stricken, his eyes for the moment unseeing, ivory-knuckled hands clenched in futility and despair. ‘They’re coming through at midnight! God help them! God help them all now!’

FIFTEEN

Wednesday Night

2000–2115

Eight-thirty, his watch said. Eight-thirty. Exactly half an hour to curfew. Mallory flattened himself on the roof, pressed himself as closely as possible against the low retaining wall that almost touched the great, sheering sides of the fortress, swore softly to himself. It only required one man with a torch in his hand to look over the top of the fortress wall – a cat-walk ran the whole length of the inside of the wall, four feet from the top – and it would be the end of them all. The wandering beam of a torch and they were bound to be seen, it was impossible not to be seen: he and Dusty Miller – the American was stretched out behind him and clutching the big truck battery in his arms – were wide open to the view of anyone who happened to glance down that way. Perhaps they should have stayed with the others a couple of roofs away, with Casey and Louki, the one busy tying spaced knots in a rope, the other busy splicing a bent wire hook on to a long bamboo they had torn from a bamboo hedge just outside the town, where they had hurriedly taken shelter as a convoy of three trucks had roared past them heading for the castle Vygos.

Eight thirty-two. What the devil was Andrea doing down there, Mallory wondered irritably and at once regretted his irritation. Andrea wouldn’t waste an unnecessary second. Speed was vital, haste fatal. It seemed unlikely that there would be any officers inside – from what they had seen, practically half the garrison were combing either the town or the countryside out in the direction of Vygos – but if there were and even one gave a cry it would be the end.

Mallory stared down at the burn on the back of his hand, thought of the truck they had set on fire and grinned wryly to himself. Setting the truck on fire had been his only contribution to the night’s performance so far. All the other credit went to either Andrea or Miller. It was Andrea who had seen in this house on the west side of the square – one of several adjoining houses used as officers’ billets – the only possible answer to their problem. It was Miller, now lacking all time-fuses, clockwork, generator and every other source of electric power who had suddenly stated that he must have a battery, and again it was Andrea, hearing the distant approach of a truck, who had blocked the entrance to the long driveway to the keep with heavy stones from the flanking pillars, forcing the soldiers to abandon their truck at the gates and run up the drive towards their house. To overcome the driver and his mate and bundle them senseless into a ditch had taken seconds only, scarcely more time than it had taken Miller to unscrew the terminals of the heavy battery, find the inevitable jerry-can below the tailboard and pour the contents over engine, cab and body. The truck had gone up in a roar and whoosh of flames: as Louki had said earlier in the night, setting petrol-soaked vehicles on fire was not without its dangers – the charred patch on his hand stung painfully – but, again as Louki had said it had burned magnificently. A pity, in a way – it had attracted attention to their escape sooner than was necessary – but it had been vital to destroy the evidence, the fact that a battery was missing. Mallory had too much experience of and respect for the Germans ever to underrate them: they could put two and two together better than most.

He felt Miller tug at his ankle, started, twisted round quickly. The American was pointing beyond him, and he turned again and saw Andrea signalling to him from the raised trap in the far corner: he had been so engrossed in his thinking, the giant Greek so catlike in his silence, that he had completely failed to notice his arrival. Mallory shook his head, momentarily angered at his own abstraction, took the battery from Miller, whispered to him to get the others, then edged slowly across the roof, as noiselessly as possible. The sheer deadweight of the battery was astonishing, it felt as if it weighed a ton, but Andrea plucked it from his hands, lifted it over the trap coaming, tucked it under one arm and nimbly descended the stairs to the tiny hall-way as if it weighed nothing at all.

Andrea moved out through the open doorway to the covered balcony that overlooked the darkened harbour, almost a hundred vertical feet beneath, Mallory, following close behind, touched him on the shoulder as he lowered the battery gently to the ground.

‘Any trouble?’ he asked softly.

‘None at all, my Keith.’ Andrea straightened. ‘The house is empty. I was so surprised that I went over it all, twice, just to make sure.’

‘Fine! Wonderful! I suppose the whole bunch of them are out scouring the country for us – interesting to know what they would say if they were told we were sitting in their front parlour?’

‘They would never believe it,’ Andrea said without hesitation. ‘This is the last place they would ever think to look for us.’

‘I’ve never hoped so much that you’re right!’ Mallory murmured fervently. He moved across to the latticed railing that enclosed the balcony, gazed down into the blackness beneath his feet and shivered. A long, long drop and it was very cold, that sluicing, vertical rain chilled one to the bone … He stepped back, shook the railing.

‘This thing strong enough, do you think?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know, my Keith. I don’t know at all.’ Andrea shrugged. ‘I hope so.’

‘I hope so,’ Mallory echoed. ‘It doesn’t really matter. This is how it has to be.’ Again he leaned far out over the railing, twisted his head to the right and upwards. In the rain-filled gloom of the night he could just faintly make out the still darker gloom of the mouth of the cave housing the two great guns, perhaps forty feet away from where he stood, at least thirty feet higher – and all vertical cliff-face between. As far as accessibility went, the cave mouth could have been on the moon.

He drew back, turned round as he heard Brown limping on to the balcony.

‘Go to the front of the house and stay there, Casey, will you? Stay by the window. Leave the front door unlocked. If we have any visitors let them in.’

‘Club ’em, knife ’em, no guns,’ Brown murmured. ‘Is that it, sir?’

‘That’s it, Casey.’

‘Just leave this little thing to me,’ Brown said grimly. He hobbled away through the doorway.

Mallory turned to Andrea. ‘I make it twenty-three minutes.’

‘I, too. Twenty-three minutes to nine.’

‘Good luck,’ Mallory murmured. He grinned at Miller. ‘Come on, Dusty. Opening time.’

Five minutes later, Mallory and Miller were seated in a taverna just off the south side of the town square. Despite the garish blue paint with which the tavernaris had covered everything in sight – walls, tables, chairs, shelves all in the same execrably vivid colour (blue and red for the wine shops, green for the sweetmeat shops was the almost invariable rule throughout the islands) – it was a gloomy, ill-lit place, as gloomy almost as the stern, righteous, magnificently-moustached heroes of the Wars of Independence whose dark, burning eyes glared down at them from a dozen faded prints scattered at eye-level along the walls. Between each pair of portraits was a brightly-coloured wall advertisement for Fix’s beer: the effect of the décor, taken as a whole, was indescribable, and Mallory shuddered to think what it would have been like had the tavernaris had at his disposal any illumination more powerful than the two smoking oil-lamps placed on the counter before him.

As it was, the gloom suited him well. Their dark clothes, braided jackets, tsantas and jack-boots looked genuine enough, Mallory knew, and the black-fringed turbans Louki had mysteriously obtained for them looked as they ought to look in a tavern where every islander there – about eight of them – wore nothing else on their heads. Their clothes had been good enough to pass muster with the tavernaris – but then even the keeper of a wine shop could hardly be expected to know every man in a town of five thousand, and a patriotic Greek, as Louki had declared this man to be, wasn’t going to lift even a faintly suspicious eyebrow as long as there were German soldiers present. And there were Germans present – four of them, sitting round a table near the counter. Which was why Mallory had been glad of the semi-darkness. Not, he was certain, that he and Dusty Miller had any reason to be physically afraid of these men. Louki had dismissed them contemptuously as a bunch of old women – headquarters clerks, Mallory guessed – who came to this tavern every night of the week. But there was no point in sticking out their necks unnecessarily.

Miller lit one of the pungent, evil-smelling local cigarettes, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

‘Damn funny smell in this joint, boss.’

‘Put your cigarette out,’ Mallory suggested.

‘You wouldn’t believe it, but the smell I’m smelling is a damn sight worse than that.’

‘Hashish,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘The curse of these island ports.’ He nodded over towards a dark corner. ‘The lads of the village over there will be at it every night in life. It’s all they live for.’

‘Do they have to make that gawddamned awful racket when they’re at it?’ Miller asked peevishly. ‘Toscanini should see this lot!’

Mallory looked at the small group in the corner, clustered round the young man playing a bouzouko – a long-necked mandolin – and singing the haunting, nostalgic rembetika songs of the hashish smokers of the Piraeus. He supposed the music did have a certain melancholy, lotus-land attraction, but right then it jarred on him. One had to be in a certain twilit, untroubled mood to appreciate that sort of thing; and he had never felt less untroubled in his life.

‘I suppose it is a bit grim,’ he admitted. ‘But at least it lets us talk together, which we couldn’t do if they all packed up and went home.’

‘I wish to hell they would,’ Miller said morosely. ‘I’d gladly keep my mouth shut.’ He picked distastefully at the meze – a mixture of chopped olives, liver, cheese and apples – on the plate before him: as a good American and a bourbon drinker of long standing he disapproved strongly of the invariable Greek custom of eating when drinking. Suddenly he looked up and crushed his cigarette against the table top. ‘For Gawd’s sake, boss, how much longer?’

Mallory looked at him, then looked away. He knew exactly how Dusty Miller felt, for he felt that way himself – tense, keyed-up, every nerve strung to the tautest pitch of efficiency. So much depended on the next few minutes; whether all their labour and their suffering had been necessary, whether the men on Kheros would live or die, whether Andy Stevens had lived and died in vain. Mallory looked at Miller again, saw the nervous hands, the deepened wrinkles round the eyes, the tightly compressed mouth, white at the outer corners, saw all these signs of strain, noted them and discounted them. Excepting Andrea alone, of all the men he had ever known he would have picked the lean, morose American to be his companion that night. Or maybe even including Andrea. ‘The finest saboteur in southern Europe’ Captain Jensen had called him back in Alexandria. Miller had come a long way from Alexandria, and he had come for this alone. Tonight was Miller’s night.

Mallory looked at his watch.

‘Curfew in fifteen minutes,’ he said quietly. ‘The balloon goes up in twelve minutes. For us, another four minutes to go.’

Miller nodded, but said nothing. He filled his glass again from the beaker in the middle of the table, lit a cigarette. Mallory could see a nerve twitching high up in his temple and wondered dryly how many twitching nerves Miller could see in his own face. He wondered, too, how the crippled Casey Brown was getting on in the house they had just left. In many ways he had the most responsible job of all – and at the critical moment he would have to leave the door unguarded, move back to the balcony. One slip up there … He saw Miller look strangely at him and grinned crookedly. This had to come off, it just had to: he thought of what must surely happen if he failed, then shied away from the thought. It wasn’t good to think of these things, not now, not at this time.

He wondered if the other two were at their posts, unmolested; they should be, the search party had long passed through the upper part of the town; but you never knew what could go wrong, there was so much that could go wrong, and so easily. Mallory looked at his watch again: he had never seen a second hand move so slowly. He lit a last cigarette, poured a final glass of wine, listened without really hearing to the weird, keening threnody of the rembetika song in the corner. And then the song of the hashish singers died plaintively away, the glasses were empty and Mallory was on his feet.

‘Time bringeth all things,’ he murmured. ‘Here we go again.’

He sauntered easily towards the door, calling good night to the tavernaris. Just at the doorway he paused, began to search impatiently through his pockets as if he had lost something: it was a windless night, and it was raining, he saw, raining heavily, the lances of rain bouncing inches off the cobbled street – and the street itself was deserted as far as he could see in either direction. Satisfied, Mallory swung round with a curse, forehead furrowed in exasperation, started to walk back towards the table he had just left, right hand now delving into the capacious inner pocket of his jacket. He saw without seeming to that Dusty Miller was pushing his chair back, rising to his feet. And then Mallory had halted, his face clearing and his hands no longer searching. He was exactly three feet from the table where the four Germans were sitting.

‘Keep quite still!’ He spoke in German, his voice low but as steady, as menacing, as the Navy Colt .455 balanced in his right hand. ‘We are desperate men. If you move we will kill you.’

For a full three seconds the soldiers sat immobile, expressionless except for the shocked widening of their eyes. And then there was a quick flicker of the eyelids from the man sitting nearest the counter, a twitching of the shoulder and then a grunt of agony as the .32 bullet smashed into his upper arm. The soft thud of Miller’s silenced automatic couldn’t have been heard beyond the doorway.

‘Sorry, boss,’ Miller apologised. ‘Mebbe he’s only sufferin’ from St. Vitus’ dance.’ He looked with interest at the pain-twisted face, the blood welling darkly between the fingers clasped tightly over the wound. ‘But he looks kinda cured to me.’

‘He is cured,’ Mallory said grimly. He turned to the innkeeper, a tall, melancholy man with a thin face and mandarin moustache that drooped forlornly over either corner of his mouth, spoke to him in the quick, colloquial speech of the islands. ‘Do these men speak Greek?’

The tavernaris shook his head. Completely unruffled and unimpressed, he seemed to regard armed hold-ups in his tavern as the rule rather than the exception.

‘Not them!’ he said contemptuously. ‘English a little, I think – I am sure. But not our language. That I do know.’

‘Good. I am a British Intelligence officer. Have you a place where I can hide these men?’

‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ the tavernaris protested mildly. ‘I will surely die for this.’

‘Oh, no, you won’t.’ Mallory had slid across the counter, his pistol boring into the man’s midriff. No one could doubt that the man was being threatened – and violently threatened – no one, that is, who couldn’t see the broad wink that Mallory had given the inn-keeper. ‘I’m going to tie you up with them. All right?’

‘All right. There is a trap-door at the end of the counter here. Steps lead down to the cellar.’

‘Good enough. I’ll find it by accident.’ Mallory gave him a vicious and all too convincing shove that sent the man staggering, vaulted back across the counter, walked over to the rembetika singers at the far corner of the room.

‘Go home,’ he said quickly. ‘It is almost curfew time anyway. Go out the back way, and remember – you have seen nothing, no one. You understand?’

‘We understand.’ It was the young bouzouko player who spoke. He jerked his thumb at his companions and grinned. ‘Bad men – but good Greeks. Can we help you?’

‘No!’ Mallory was emphatic. ‘Think of your families – these soldiers have recognised you. They must know you well – you and they are here most nights, is that not so?’

The young man nodded.

‘Off you go, then. Thank you all the same.’

A minute later, in the dim, candle-lit cellar, Miller prodded the soldier nearest him – the one most like himself in height and build. ‘Take your clothes off!’ he ordered.

‘English pig!’ the German snarled.

‘Not English,’ Miller protested. ‘I’ll give you thirty seconds to get your coat and pants off.’

The man swore at him, viciously, but made no move to obey. Miller sighed. The German had guts, but time was running out. He took a careful bead on the soldier’s hand and pulled the trigger. Again the soft plop and the man was staring down stupidly at the hole torn in the heel of his left hand.

‘Mustn’t spoil the nice uniforms, must we?’ Miller asked conversationally. He lifted the automatic until the soldier was staring down the barrel of the gun. ‘The next goes between the eyes.’ The casual drawl carried complete conviction. ‘It won’t take me long to undress you, I guess.’ But the man had already started to tear his uniform off, sobbing with anger and the pain of his wounded hand.

Less than another five minutes had passed when Mallory, clad like Miller in German uniform, unlocked the front door of the tavern and peered cautiously out. The rain, if anything, was heavier than ever – and there wasn’t a soul in sight. Mallory beckoned Miller to follow and locked the door behind him. Together the two men walked up the middle of the street, making no attempt to seek either shelter or shadows. Fifty yards took them into the town square, where they turned right along the south side of the square, then left along the east side, not breaking step as they passed the old house where they had hidden earlier in the evening, not even as Louki’s hand appeared mysteriously behind the partly opened door, a hand weighted down with two German Army rucksacks – rucksacks packed with rope, fuses, wire and high explosive. A few yards farther on they stopped suddenly, crouched down behind a couple of huge wine barrels outside a barber’s shop, gazed at the two armed guards in the arched gateway, less than a hundred feet away, as they shrugged into their packs and waited for their cue.

They had only moments to wait – the timing had been split-second throughout. Mallory was just tightening the waist-belt of his rucksack when a series of explosions shook the centre of the town, not three hundred yards away, explosions followed by the vicious rattle of a machine-gun, then by further explosions. Andrea was doing his stuff magnificently with his grenades and homemade bombs.

Both men suddenly shrank back as a broad, white beam of light stabbed out from a platform high above the gateway, a beam that paralleled the top of the wall to the east, showed up every hooked spike and strand of barbed wire as clearly as sunlight. Mallory and Miller looked at each other for a fleeting moment, their faces grim. Panayis hadn’t missed a thing: they would have been pinned on these strands like flies on fly-paper and cut to ribbons by machine-guns.

Mallory waited another half-minute, touched Miller’s arm, rose to his feet and started running madly across the square, the long hooked bamboo pressed close to his side, the American pounding behind him. In a few seconds they had reached the gates of the fortress, the startled guards running the last few feet to meet them.

‘Every man to the Street of Steps!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Those damned English saboteurs are trapped in a house down there! We’ve got to have some mortars. Hurry, man, hurry, in the name of God!’

‘But the gate!’ one of the two guards protested. ‘We cannot leave the gate!’ The man had no suspicions, none at all: in the circumstances – the near darkness, the pouring rain, the German-clad soldier speaking perfect German, the obvious truth that there was a gun-battle being fought near-at-hand – it would have been remarkable had he shown any signs of doubt.

‘Idiot!’ Mallory screamed at him. ‘Dummkopf! What is there to guard against here? The English swine are in the Street of Steps. They must be destroyed! For God’s sake, hurry!’ he shouted desperately. ‘If they escape again it’ll be the Russian Front for all of us!’

Mallory had his hand on the man’s shoulder now, ready to push him on his way, but his hand fell to his side unneeded. The two men were already gone, running pell-mell across the square, had vanished into the rain and the darkness already. Seconds later Mallory and Miller were deep inside the fortress of Navarone.

Everywhere there was complete confusion – a bustling, purposeful confusion as one would expect with the seasoned troops of the Alpenkorps, but confusion nevertheless, with much shouting of orders, blowing of whistles, starting of truck engines, sergeants running to and fro chivvying their men into marching order or into the waiting transports. Mallory and Miller ran too, once or twice through groups of men milling round the tailboard of a truck. Not that they were in any desperate hurry for themselves, but nothing could have been more conspicuous – and suspicious – than the sight of a couple of men walking calmly along in the middle of all that urgent activity. And so they ran, heads down or averted whenever they passed through a pool of light, Miller cursing feelingly and often at the unaccustomed exercise.

They skirted two barrack blocks on their right, then the powerhouse on their left, then an ordnance depot on their right and then the Abteilung garage on their left. They were climbing, now, almost in darkness, but Mallory knew where he was to the inch: he had so thoroughly memorised the closely tallying descriptions given him by Vlachos and Panayis that he would have been confident of finding his way with complete accuracy, even if the darkness had been absolute.

‘What’s that, boss?’ Miller had caught Mallory by the arm, was pointing to a large, uncompromisingly rectangular building that loomed gauntly against the horizon. ‘The local hoosegow?’

‘Water storage tank,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘Panayis estimates there’s half a million gallons in there – magazine flooding in an emergency. The magazines are directly below.’ He pointed to a squat, box-like, concrete structure a little farther on. ‘The only entrance to the magazine. Locked and guarded.’

They were approaching the senior officers’ quarters now – the commandant had his own flat on the second storey, directly overlooking the massive, reinforced ferro-concrete control tower that controlled the two great guns below. Mallory suddenly stopped, picked up a handful of dirt, rubbed it on his face and told Miller to do the same.

‘Disguise,’ he explained. ‘The experts would consider it a bit on the elementary side, but it’ll have to do. The lighting’s apt to be a bit brighter inside this place.’

He went up the steps to the officers’ quarters at a dead run, crashed through the swing doors with a force that almost took them off their hinges. The sentry at the keyboard looked at him in astonishment, the barrel of his sub-machine-gun lining up on the New Zealander’s chest.

‘Put that thing down, you damned idiot!’ Mallory snapped furiously. ‘Where’s the commandant? Quickly, you oaf! It’s life or death!’

‘Herr – Herr Kommandant?’ the sentry stuttered. ‘He’s left – they are all gone, just a minute ago.’

‘What? All gone?’ Mallory was staring at him with narrowed, dangerous eyes. ‘Did you say “all gone”?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes. I – I’m sure they’re …’ He broke off abruptly as Mallory’s eyes shifted to a point behind his shoulder.

‘Then who the hell is that?’ Mallory demanded savagely.

The sentry would have been less than human not to fall for it. Even as he was swinging round to look, the vicious judo cut took him just below the left ear. Mallory had smashed open the glass of the keyboard before the unfortunate guard had hit the floor, swept all the keys – about a dozen in all – off their rings and into his pocket. It took them another twenty seconds to tape the man’s mouth and hands and lock him in a convenient cupboard; then they were on their way again, still running.

One more obstacle to overcome, Mallory thought as they pounded along in the darkness, the last of the triple defences. He did not know how many men would be guarding the locked door to the magazine, and in that moment of fierce exaltation he didn’t particularly care. Neither, he felt sure, did Miller. There were no worries now, no taut-nerved tensions or nameless anxieties. Mallory would have been the last man in the world to admit it, or even believe it, but this was what men like Miller and himself had been born for.

They had their hand-torches out now, the powerful beams swinging in wild arcs as they plunged along, skirting the massed batteries of AA guns. To anyone observing their approach from the front, there could have been nothing more calculated to disarm suspicion than the sight and sound of the two men running towards them without any attempt at concealment, one of them shouting to the other in German, both with lit torches whose beams lifted and fell, lifted and fell as the men’s arms windmilled by their sides. But these same torches were deeply hooded, and only a very alert observer indeed would have noticed that the downward arc of the light never passed backwards beyond the runners’ feet.

Suddenly Mallory saw two shadows detaching themselves from the darker shadow of the magazine entrance, steadied his torch for a brief second to check. He slackened speed.

‘Right!’ he said softly. ‘Here they come – only two of them. One each – get as close as possible first. Quick and quiet – a shout, a shot, and we’re finished. And for God’s sake don’t start clubbing ’em with your torch. There’ll be no lights on in that magazine and I’m not going to start crawling around there with a box of bloody matches in my hand!’ He transferred his torch to his left hand, pulled out his Navy Colt, reversed it, caught it by the barrel, brought up sharply only inches away from the guards now running to meet them.

‘Are you all right?’ Mallory gasped. ‘Anyone been here? Quickly, man, quickly!’

‘Yes, yes, we’re all right.’ The man was off guard, apprehensive. ‘What in the name of God is all that noise –’

‘Those damned English saboteurs!’ Mallory swore viciously. ‘They’ve killed the guards and they’re inside! Are you sure no one’s been here? Come, let me see.’

He pushed his way past the guard, probed his torch at the massive padlock, then straightened his back.

‘Thank heaven for that anyway!’ He turned round, let the dazzling beam of his torch catch the man square in the eyes, muttered an apology and switched off the light, the sound of the sharp click lost in the hollow, soggy thud of the heel of his Colt catching the man behind the ear, just below the helmet. The sentry was still on his feet, just beginning to crumple, when Mallory staggered as the second guard reeled into him, staggered, recovered, clouted him with the Colt for good measure, then stiffened in sudden dismay as he heard the vicious hissing plop of Miller’s automatic, twice in rapid succession.

‘What the hell –’

‘Wily birds, boss,’ Miller murmured. ‘Very wily indeed. There was a third character in the shadows at the side. Only way to stop him.’ Automatic cocked in his ready hand, he stooped over the man for a moment, then straightened. ‘Afraid he’s been stopped kinda permanent, boss.’ There was no expression in his voice.

‘Tie up the others.’ Mallory had only half heard him, he was already busy at the magazine door, trying a succession of keys in the lock. The third key fitted, the lock opened and the heavy steel door gave easily to his touch. He took a last swift look round, but there was no one in sight, no sound but the revving engine of the last of the trucks clearing the fortress gates, the distant rattle of machine-gun fire. Andrea was doing a magnificent job – if only he didn’t overdo it, leave his withdrawal till it was too late … Mallory turned quickly, switched on his torch, stepped inside the door. Miller would follow when he was ready.

A vertical steel ladder fixed to the rock led down to the floor of the cave. On either side of the ladder were hollow lift-shafts, unprotected even by a cage, oiled wire ropes glistening in the middle, a polished metal runner at each side of the square to guide and steady the spring-loaded sidewheels of the lift itself. Spartan in their simplicity but wholly adequate, there was no mistaking these for anything but what they were – the shell hoist shafts going down to the magazine.

Mallory reached the solid floor of the cave and swept his torch round through a 180-degree arc. This was the very end of that great cave that opened out beneath the towering overhang of rock that dominated the entire harbour. Not the natural end, he saw after a moment’s inspection, but a man-made addition: the volcanic rock around him had been drilled and blasted out. There was nothing here but the two shafts descending into the pitchy darkness and another steel ladder, also leading to the magazine. But the magazine could wait: to check that there were no more guards down here and to ensure an emergency escape route – these were the two vital needs of the moment.

Quickly Mallory ran along the tunnel, flipping his torch on and off. The Germans were past-masters of booby traps – explosive booby traps – for the protection of important installations, but the chances were that they had none in that tunnel – not with several hundred tons of high explosive stored only feet away.

The tunnel itself, dripping-damp and duck-board floored, was about seven feet high and even wider, but the central passage was very narrow – most of the space was taken up by the roller conveyors, one on either side, for the great cartridges and shells. Suddenly the conveyors curved away sharply to the left and right, the sharply-sheering tunnel roof climbed steeply up into the near-darkness of the vaulted dome above, and, almost at his feet, their burnished steel caught in the beam from his torch, twin sets of parallel rails, embedded in the solid stone and twenty feet apart, stretched forward into the lightened gloom ahead, the great, gaping mouth of the cave. And just before he switched off the torch – searchers returning from the Devil’s Playground might easily catch the pin-point of light in the darkness – Mallory had a brief glimpse of the turn-tables that crowned the far end of these shining rails and, crouched massively above, like some nightmare monsters from an ancient and other world, the evil, the sinister silhouettes of the two great guns of Navarone.

Torch and revolver dangling loosely in his hands, only dimly aware of the curious tingling in the tips of his fingers, Mallory walked slowly forward. Slowly, but not with the stealthy slowness, the razor-drawn expectancy of a man momentarily anticipating trouble – there was no guard in the cave, Mallory was quite sure of that now – but with that strange, dream-like slowness, the half-belief of a man who has accomplished something he had known all along he could never accomplish, with the slowness of a man at last face to face with a feared but long-sought enemy. I’m here at last, Mallory said to himself over and over again. I’m here at last, I’ve made it, and these are the guns of Navarone: these are the guns I came to destroy, the guns of Navarone, and I have come at last. But somehow he couldn’t quite believe it …

Slowly still Mallory approached the guns, walked half-way round the perimeter of the turn-table of the gun on the left, examined it as well as he could in the gloom. He was staggered by the sheer size of it, the tremendous girth and reach of the barrel that stretched far out into the night. He told himself that the experts thought it was only a nine-inch crunch gun, that the crowding confines of the caves were bound to exaggerate its size. He told himself these things, discounted them: twelve-inch bore if an inch, that gun was the biggest thing he had ever seen. Big? Heavens above, it was gigantic! The fools, the blind crazy fools who had sent the Sybaris out against these …

The train of thought was lost, abruptly. Mallory stood quite still, one hand resting against the massive gun carriage and tried to recall the sound that had jerked him back to the present. Immobile, he listened for it again, eyes closed the better to hear, but the sound did not come again, and suddenly he knew that it was no sound at all but the absence of sound that had cut through his thoughts, triggered off some unconscious warning bell. The night was suddenly very silent, very still: down in the heart of the town the guns had stopped firing.

Mallory swore softly to himself. He had already spent far too much time day-dreaming, and time was running short. It must be running short – Andrea had withdrawn, it was only a matter of time until the Germans discovered that they had been duped. And then they would come running – and there was no doubt where they would come. Swiftly Mallory shrugged out of his rucksack, pulled out the hundred-foot wire-cored rope coiled inside. Their emergency escape route – whatever else he did he must make sure of that.

The rope looped round his arm, he moved forward cautiously, seeking a belay, but had only taken three steps when his right kneecap struck something hard and unyielding. He checked the exclamation of pain, investigated the obstacle with his free hand, realised immediately what it was – an iron railing stretched waist-high across the mouth of the cave. Of course! There had been bound to be something like that, some barrier to prevent people from falling over the edge, especially in the darkness of the night. He hadn’t been able to pick it up with the binoculars from the carob grove that afternoon – close though it was to the entrance, it had been concealed in the gloom of the cave. But he should have thought of it.

Quickly Mallory felt his way along to the left, to the very end of the railing, crossed it, tied the rope securely to the base of the vertical stanchion next to the wall, paid out the rope as he moved gingerly to the lip of the cave mouth. And then, almost at once, he was there and there was nothing below his probing foot but a hundred and twenty feet of sheer drop to the land-locked harbour of Navarone.

Away to his right was a dark, formless blur lying on the water, a blur that might have been Cape Demirci: straight ahead, across the darkly velvet sheen of the Maidos Straits, he could see the twinkle of far-away lights – it was a measure of the enemy’s confidence that they permitted these lights at all, or, more likely, these fisher cottages were useful as a bearing marker for the guns at night: and to the left, surprisingly near, barely thirty feet away in a horizontal plane, but far below the level where he was standing, he could see the jutting end of the outside wall of the fortress where it abutted on the cliff, the roofs of the houses on the west side of the square beyond that, and, beyond that again, the town itself curving sharply downwards and outwards, to the south first, then to the west, close-girdling and matching the curve of the crescent harbour. Above – but there was nothing to be seen above, that fantastic overhang above blotted out more than half the sky; and below the darkness was equally impenetrable, the surface of the harbour inky and black as night. There were vessels down there, he knew, Grecian caiques and German launches, but they might have been a thousand miles away for any sign he could see of them.

The brief, all encompassing glance had taken barely ten seconds, but Mallory waited no longer. Swiftly he bent down, tied a double bowline in the end of the rope and left it lying on the edge. In an emergency they could kick it out into the darkness. It would be thirty feet short of the water, he estimated – enough to clear any launch or masted caique that might be moving about the harbour. They could drop the rest of the way, maybe a bone-breaking fall on to the deck of a ship, but they would have to risk it. Mallory took one last look down into the Stygian blackness and shivered: he hoped to God that he and Miller wouldn’t have to take that way out.

Dusty Miller was kneeling on the duck-boards by the top of the ladder leading down to the magazine as Mallory came running back up the tunnel, his hands busy with wires, fuses, detonators and explosives. He straightened up as Mallory approached.

‘I reckon this stuff should keep ’em happy, boss.’ He set the hands of the clockwork fuse, listened appreciatively to the barely audible hum, then eased himself down the ladder. ‘In here among the top two rows of cartridges, I thought.’

‘Wherever you say,’ Mallory acquiesced. ‘Only don’t make it too obvious – or too difficult to find. Sure there’s no chance of them suspecting that we knew the clock and fuses were dud?’

‘None in the world,’ Miller said confidently. ‘When they find this here contraption they’ll knock holes in each other’s back congratulatin’ themselves – and they’ll never look any further.’

‘Fair enough.’ Mallory was satisfied. ‘Lock the door up top?’

‘Certainly I locked the door!’ Miller looked at him reproachfully. ‘Boss, sometimes I think …’

But Mallory never heard what he thought. A metallic, reverberating clangour echoed cavernously through the cave and magazine, blotting out Miller’s words, then died away over the harbour. Again the sound came, while the two men stared bleakly at one another, then again and again, then escaped for a moment of time.

‘Company,’ Mallory murmured. ‘Complete with sledge-hammers. Dear God, I only hope that door holds.’ He was already running along the passage towards the guns, Miller close behind him.

‘Company!’ Miller was shaking his head as he ran. ‘How in the hell did they get here so soon?’

‘Our late lamented little pal,’ Mallory said savagely. He vaulted over the railing, edged back to the mouth of the cave. ‘And we were suckers enough to believe he told the whole truth. But he never told us that opening that door up top triggered off an alarm bell in the guard-room.’

SIXTEEN

Wednesday Night

2115–2345

Smoothly, skilfully, Miller paid out the wire-cored rope – double-turned round the top rail – as Mallory sank out of sight into the darkness. Fifty feet had gone, he estimated, fifty-five, sixty, then there came the awaited sharp double tug on the signal cord looped round his wrist and he at once checked the rope, stooped and tied it securely to the foot of the stanchion.

And then he had straightened again, belayed himself to the rail with the rope’s end, leaned far out over the edge, caught hold of the rope with both hands as far down as he could reach and began slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, then with gradually increasing momentum, to swing man and rope from side to side, pendulum-wise. As the swings of the pendulum grew wider, the rope started to twist and jump in his hands, and Miller knew that Mallory must be striking outcrops of rock, spinning uncontrollably as he bounced off them. But Miller knew that he couldn’t stop now, the clanging of the sledges behind him was almost continuous: he only stooped the lower over the rope, flung all the strength of his sinewy arms and shoulders into the effort of bringing Mallory nearer and still nearer to the rope that Brown would by now have thrown down from the balcony of the house where they had left him.

Far below, half-way between the cave mouth and the invisible waters of the harbour, Mallory swung in a great arc through the rain-filled darkness of the sky, forty rushing, bone-bruising feet between the extremities of the swings. Earlier he had struck his head heavily on an outcrop of rock, all but losing consciousness and his grip on the rope. But he knew where to expect that projection now and pushed himself clear each time as he approached it, even although this made him spin in a complete circle every time. It was as well, he thought, that it was dark, that he was independent of sight anyway: the blow had reopened an old wound Turzig had given him, his whole upper face was masked with blood, both eyes completely gummed.

But he wasn’t worried about the wound, about the blood in his eyes. The rope – that was all that mattered. Was the rope there? Had anything happened to Casey Brown? Had he been jumped before he could get the rope over the side? If he had, then all hope was gone and there was nothing they could do, no other way they could span the forty sheer feet between house and cave. It just had to be there. But if it were there, why couldn’t he find it? Three times now, at the right extremity of a swing, he had reached out with his bamboo pole, heard the hook scrape emptily, frustratingly, against the bare rock.

And then, the fourth time, stretched out to the straining limit of both arms, he felt the hook catch on! Immediately he jerked the pole in, caught the rope before he dropped back on the downward swing, jerked the signal cord urgently, checked himself gradually as he fell back. Two minutes later, near exhaustion from the sixty-foot climb up the wet, slippery rope, he crawled blindly over the lip of the cave and flung himself to the ground, sobbing for breath.

Swiftly, without speaking, Miller bent down, slipped the twin loops of the double bowline from Mallory’s legs, undid the knot, tied it to Brown’s rope, gave the latter a tug and watched the joined ropes disappear into the darkness. Within two minutes the heavy battery was across, underslung from the two ropes, lowered so far by Casey Brown then hauled up by Mallory and Miller. Within another two minutes, but with infinitely more caution, this time, the canvas bag with the nitro, primers and detonators, had been pulled across, lay on the stone floor beside the battery.

All noise had ceased, the hammering of the sledges against the steel door had stopped completely. There was something threatening, foreboding about the stillness, the silence was more menacing than all the clamour that had gone before. Was the door down, the lock smashed, the Germans waiting for them in the gloom of the tunnel, waiting with cradled machine-carbines that would tear the life out of them? But there was no time to wonder, no time to wait, no time now to stop to weigh the chances. The time for caution was past, and whether they lived or died was of no account any more.

The heavy Colt .455 balanced at his waist, Mallory climbed over the safety barrier, padded silently past the great guns and through the passage, his torch clicking on half-way down its length. The place was deserted, the door above still intact. He climbed swiftly up the ladder, listened at the top. A subdued murmur of voices, he thought he heard, and a faint hissing sound on the other side of the heavy steel door, but he couldn’t be sure. He leaned forward to hear better, the palm of his hand against the door, drew back with a muffled exclamation of pain. Just above the lock, the door was almost red-hot. Mallory dropped down to the floor of the tunnel just as Miller came staggering up with the battery.

‘That door’s as hot as blazes. They must be burning –’

‘Did you hear anything?’ Miller interrupted.

‘There was a kind of hissing –’

‘Oxy-acetylene torch,’ Miller said briefly. ‘They’ll be burnin’ out the lock. It’ll take time – that door’s made of armoured steel.’

‘Why don’t they blow it in – gelignite or whatever you use for that job?’

‘Perish the thought,’ Miller said hastily. ‘Don’t even talk about it, boss. Sympathetic detonation’s a funny thing – there’s an even chance that the whole damned lot would go up. Give me a hand with this thing, boss, will you?’

Within seconds Dusty Miller was again a man absorbed in his own element, the danger outside, the return trip he had yet to make across the face of the cliff, completely forgotten for a moment. The task took him four minutes from beginning to end. While Mallory was sliding the battery below the floored well of the lift, Miller squeezed in between the shining steel runners of the lift shaft itself, stooped to examine the rear one with his torch and establish, by the abrupt transition from polished to dull metal, exactly where the spring-loaded wheel of the shell-hoist came to rest. Satisfied, he pulled out a roll of sticky black tape, wound it a dozen times round the shaft, stepped back to look at it: it was quite invisible.

Quickly he taped the ends of two rubber-covered wires on the insulated strip, one at either side, taped these down also until nothing was visible but the bared steel cores at the tips, joined these to two four-inch strips of bared wire, taped these also, top and bottom, to the insulated shaft, vertically and less than half an inch apart. From the canvas bag he removed the TNT, the primer and the detonator – a bridge mercury detonator lugged and screwed to his own specification – fitted them together and connected one of the wires from the steel shaft to a lug on the detonator, screwing it firmly home. The other wire from the shaft he led to the positive terminal on the battery, and a third wire from the negative terminal to the detonator. It only required the ammunition hoist to sink down into the magazine – as it would do as soon as they began firing – and the spring-loaded wheel would short out the bare wires, completing the circuit and triggering off the detonator. A last check on the position of the bared vertical wires and he sat back satisfied. Mallory had just descended the ladder from the tunnel. Miller tapped him on the leg to draw his attention, negligently waving the steel blade of his knife within an inch of the exposed wires.

‘Are you aware, boss,’ he said conversationally, ‘that if I touched this here blade across those terminals, the whole gawddamned place would go up in smithereens.’ He shook his head musingly. ‘Just one little slip of the hand, just one teeny little touch and Mallory and Miller are among the angels.’

‘For God’s sake put that thing away!’ Mallory snapped nervously. ‘And let’s get the hell out of here. They’ve got a complete half-circle cut through that door already!’

Five minutes later Miller was safe – it had been a simple matter of sliding down a 45-degree tautened rope to where Brown waited. Mallory took a last look back into the cave, and his mouth twisted. He wondered how many soldiers manned the guns and magazine during action stations. One thing, he thought, they’ll never know anything about it, the poor bastards. And then he thought, for the hundredth time, of all the men on Kheros and the destroyers, and his lips tightened and he looked away. Without another backward glance he slipped over the edge, dropped down into the night. He was half-way there, at the very lowest point of the curve and about to start climbing again, when he heard the vicious, staccato rattle of machine-gun fire directly overhead.

It was Miller who helped him over the balcony rail, an apprehensive-looking Miller who glanced often over his shoulder in the direction of the gun-fire – and the heaviest concentration of fire, Mallory realised with sudden dismay, was coming from their own, the west side of the square, only three or four houses away. Their escape route was cut off.

‘Come on, boss!’ Miller said urgently. ‘Let’s get away from this joint. Gettin’ downright unhealthy round these parts.’

Mallory jerked his head in the direction of the fire. ‘Who’s down there?’ he asked quickly.

‘A German patrol.’

‘Then how in the hell can we get away?’ Mallory demanded. ‘And where’s Andrea?’

‘Across the other side of the square, boss. That’s who those birds along there are firing at.’

‘The other side of the square!’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Heavens above, man, what’s he doing there?’ He was moving through the house now, speaking over his shoulder. ‘Why did you let him go?’

‘I didn’t let him go, boss,’ Miller said carefully. ‘He was gone when I came. Seems that Brown here saw a big patrol start a house to house search of the square. Started on the other side and were doin’ two or three houses at a time. Andrea – he’d come back by this time – thought it a sure bet that they’d work right round the square and get here in two or three minutes, so he took off like a bat across the roofs.’

‘Going to draw them off?’ Mallory was at Louki’s side staring out of the window. ‘The crazy fool! He’ll get himself killed this time – get himself killed for sure! There are soldiers everywhere. Besides, they won’t fall for it again. He tricked them once up in the hills, and the Germans –’

‘I’m not so sure, sir,’ Brown interrupted excitedly. ‘Andrea’s just shot out the searchlight on his side. They’ll think for certain that we’re going to break out over the wall and – look, sir, look! There they go!’ Brown was almost dancing with excitement, the pain of his injured leg forgotten. ‘He’s done it, sir, he’s done it!’

Sure enough, Mallory saw, the patrol had broken away from their shelter in the house to their right and were running across the square in extended formation, their heavy boots clattering on the cobbles, stumbling, falling, recovering again as they lost footing on the slippery wetness of the uneven stones. At the same time Mallory could see torches flickering on the roofs of the houses opposite, the vague forms of men crouching low to escape observation and making swiftly for the spot where Andrea had been when he had shot out the great Cyclops eye of the searchlight.

‘They’ll be on him from every side.’ Mallory spoke quietly enough, but his fists clenched until the nails cut into the palms of his hands. He stood stock-still for some seconds, stooped quickly and gathered a Schmeisser up from the floor. ‘He hasn’t a chance. I’m going after him.’ He turned abruptly, brought up with equal suddenness: Miller was blocking his way to the door.

‘Andrea left word that we were to leave him be, that he’d find his own way out.’ Miller was very calm, very respectful. ‘Said that no one was to help him, not on any account.’

‘Don’t try to stop me, Dusty.’ Mallory spoke evenly, mechanically almost. He was hardly aware that Dusty Miller was there. He only knew that he must get out at once, get to Andrea’s side, give him what help he could. They had been together too long, he owed too much to the smiling giant to let him go so easily. He couldn’t remember how often Andrea had come after him, more than once when he had thought hope was gone … He put his hand against Miller’s chest.

‘You’ll only be in his way, boss,’ Miller said urgently. ‘That’s what you said …’

Mallory pushed him aside, strode for the door, brought up his fist to strike as hands closed round his upper arm. He stopped just in time, looked down into Louki’s worried face.

‘The American is right,’ Louki said insistently. ‘You must not go. Andrea said you were to take us down to the harbour.’

‘Go down yourselves,’ Mallory said brusquely. ‘You know the way, you know the plans.’

‘You would let us all go, let us all –’

‘I’d let the whole damn world go if I could help him.’ There was an utter sincerity in the New Zealander’s voice. ‘Andrea would never let me down.’

‘But you would let him down,’ Louki said quietly. ‘Is that it, Major Mallory?’

‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘By not doing as he wishes. He may be hurt, killed even, and if you go after him and are killed too, that makes it all useless. He would die for nothing. Is it thus you would repay your friend?’

‘All right, all right, you win,’ Mallory said irritably.

‘That is how Andrea would want it,’ Louki murmured. ‘Any other way you would be –’

‘Stop preaching at me! Right, gentlemen, let’s be on our way.’ He was back on balance again, easy, relaxed, the primeval urge to go out and kill well under control. ‘We’ll take the high road – over the roofs. Dig into that kitchen stove there, rub the ashes all over your hands and faces. See that there’s nothing white on you anywhere. And no talking!’

The five-minute journey down to the harbour wall – a journey made in soft-footed silence with Mallory hushing even the beginnings of a whisper – was quite uneventful. Not only did they see no soldiers, they saw no one at all. The inhabitants of Navarone were wisely obeying the curfew, and the streets were completely deserted. Andrea had drawn off pursuit with a vengeance. Mallory began to fear that the Germans had taken him, but just as they reached the water’s edge he heard the gunfire again, a good deal farther away this time, in the very north-east corner of the town, round the back of the fortress.

Mallory stood on the low wall above the harbour, looked at his companions, gazed out over the dark oiliness of the water. Through the heavy rain he could just distinguish, to his right and left, the vague blurs of caiques moored stern on to the wall. Beyond that he could see nothing.

‘Well, I don’t suppose we can get much wetter than we are right now,’ he observed. He turned to Louki, checked something the little man was trying to say about Andrea. ‘You sure you can find it all right in the darkness?’ ‘It’ was the commandant’s personal launch, a thirty-six-foot ten-tonner always kept moored to a buoy a hundred feet offshore. The engineer, who doubled as guard, slept aboard, Louki had said.

‘I am already there,’ Louki boasted. ‘Blindfold me as you will and I –’

‘All right, all right,’ Mallory said hastily. ‘I’ll take your word for it. Lend me your hat, will you, Casey?’ He jammed the automatic into the crown of the hat, pulled it firmly on to his head, slid gently into the water and struck out by Louki’s side.

‘The engineer,’ Louki said softly. ‘I think he will be awake, Major.’

‘I think so, too,’ Mallory said grimly. Again there came the chatter of machine-carbines, the deeper whiplash of a Mauser. ‘So will everyone else in Navarone, unless they’re deaf or dead. Drop behind as soon as we see the boat. Come when I call.’

Ten seconds, fifteen passed, then Louki touched Mallory on the arm.

‘I see it,’ Mallory whispered. The blurred silhouette was less than fifteen yards away. He approached silently, neither legs nor arms breaking water, until he saw the vague shape of a man standing on the poop, just aft of the engine-room hatchway. He was immobile, staring out in the direction of the fortress and the upper town: Mallory slowly circled round the stern of the boat and came up behind him, on the other side. Carefully he removed his hat, took out the gun, caught the low gunwale with his left hand. At the range of seven feet he knew he couldn’t possibly miss, but he couldn’t shoot the man, not then. The guard-rails were token affairs only, eighteen inches high at the most, and the splash of the man falling into the water would almost certainly alert the guards at the harbour mouth emplacements.

‘If you move I will kill you!’ Mallory said softly in German. The man stiffened. He had a carbine in his hand, Mallory saw.

‘Put the gun down. Don’t turn round.’ Again the man obeyed, and Mallory was out of the water and on to the deck, in seconds, neither eye nor automatic straying from the man’s back. He stepped softly forward, reversed the automatic, struck, caught the man before he could fall overboard and lowered him quietly to the deck. Three minutes later all the others were safely aboard.

Mallory followed the limping Brown down to the engine room, watched him as he switched on his hooded torch, looked around with a professional eye, looked at the big, gleaming, six-cylinder in-line Diesel engine.

‘This,’ said Brown reverently, ‘is an engine. What a beauty! Operates on any number of cylinders you like. I know the type, sir.’

‘I never doubted but you would. Can you start her up, Casey?’

‘Just a minute till I have a look round, sir.’ Brown had all the unhurried patience of the born engineer. Slowly, methodically, he played the spotlight round the immaculate interior of the engine-room, switched on the fuel and turned to Mallory. ‘A dual control job, sir. We can take her from up top.’

He carried out the same painstaking inspection in the wheelhouse, while Mallory waited impatiently. The rain was easing off now, not much, but sufficiently to let him see the vague outlines of the harbour entrance. He wondered for the tenth time if the guards there had been alerted against the possibility of an attempted escape by boat. It seemed unlikely – from the racket Andrea was making, the Germans would think that escape was the last thing in their minds … He leaned forward, touched Brown on the shoulder.

‘Twenty past eleven, Casey,’ he murmured. ‘If these destroyers come through early we’re apt to have a thousand tons of rock falling on our heads.’

‘Ready now, sir,’ Brown announced. He gestured at the crowded dashboard beneath the screen. ‘Nothing to it really.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ Mallory murmured fervently. ‘Start her moving, will you? Just keep it slow and easy.’

Brown coughed apologetically. ‘We’re still moored to the buoy. And it might be a good thing, sir, if we checked on the fixed guns, searchlights, signalling lamps, life-jackets and buoys. It’s useful to know where these things are,’ he finished deprecatingly.

Mallory laughed softly, clapped him on the shoulder.

‘You’d make a great diplomat, Chief. We’ll do that.’ A landsman first and last, Mallory was none the less aware of the gulf that stretched between him and a man like Brown, made no bones about acknowledging it to himself. ‘Will you take her out, Casey?’

‘Right, sir. Would you ask Louki to come here – I think it’s steep to both sides, but there may be snags or reefs. You never know.’

Three minutes later the launch was half-way to the harbour mouth, purring along softly on two cylinders, Mallory and Miller, still clad in German uniform, standing on the deck for’ard of the wheelhouse, Louki crouched low inside the wheelhouse itself. Suddenly, about sixty yards away, a signal lamp began to flash at them, its urgent clacking quite audible in the stillness of the night.

‘Dan’l Boone Miller will now show how it’s done,’ Miller muttered. He edged closer to the machine-gun on the starboard bow. ‘With my little gun I shall …’

He broke off sharply, his voice lost in the sudden clacking from the wheelhouse behind him, the staccato off-beat chattering of a signal shutter triggered by professional fingers. Brown had handed the wheel over to Louki, was morsing back to the harbour entrance, the cold rain lancing palely through the flickering beams of the lamp. The enemy lamp had stopped but now began again.

‘My, they got a lot to say to each other,’ Miller said admiringly. ‘How long do the exchange of courtesies last, boss?’

‘I should say they are just about finished.’ Mallory moved back quickly to the wheelhouse. They were less than a hundred feet from the harbour entrance. Brown had confused the enemy, gained precious seconds, more time than Mallory had ever thought they could gain. But it couldn’t last. He touched Brown on the arm.

‘Give her everything you’ve got when the balloon goes up.’ Two seconds later he was back in position in the bows, Schmeisser ready in his hands. ‘Your big chance, Dan’l Boone. Don’t give the searchlights a chance to line up – they’ll blind you.’

Even as he spoke, the light from the signal lamp at the harbour mouth cut off abruptly and two dazzling white beams, one from either side of the harbour entrance, stabbed blindingly through the darkness, bathing the whole harbour in their savage glare – a glare that lasted for only a fleeting second of time, yielded to a contrastingly Stygian darkness as two brief bursts of machine-gun fire smashed them into uselessness. From such short range it had been almost impossible to miss.

‘Get down, everyone!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Flat on the deck!’

The echoes of the gunfire were dying away, the reverberations fading along the great sea wall of the fortress when Casey Brown cut in all six cylinders of the engine and opened the throttle wide, the surging roar of the big Diesel blotting out all other sounds in the night. Five seconds, ten seconds, they were passing through the entrance, fifteen, twenty, still not a shot fired, half a minute and they were well clear, bows lifting high out of the water, the deep-dipped stern trailing its long, seething ribbon of phosphorescent white as the engine crescendoed to its clamorous maximum power and Brown pulled the heeling craft sharply round to starboard, seeking the protection of the steep-walled cliffs.

‘A desperate battle, boss, but the better men won.’ Miller was on his feet now, clinging to a mounted gun for support as the deck canted away beneath his feet. ‘My grandchildren shall hear of this.’

‘Guards probably all up searching the town. Or maybe there were some poor blokes behind those searchlights. Or maybe we just took ’em all by surprise.’ Mallory shook his head. ‘Anyway you take it, we’re just plain damn lucky.’

He moved aft, into the wheelhouse. Brown was at the wheel, Louki almost crowing with delight.

‘That was magnificent, Casey,’ Mallory said sincerely. ‘A first-class job of work. Cut the engine when we come to the end of the cliffs. Our job’s done. I’m going ashore.’

‘You don’t have to, Major.’

Mallory turned. ‘What’s that?’

‘You don’t have to. I tried to tell you on the way down, but you kept telling me to be quiet.’ Louki sounded injured, turned to Casey. ‘Slow down, please. The last thing Andrea told me, Major, was that we were to come this way. Why do you think he let himself be trapped against the cliffs to the north instead of going out into the country, where he could have hidden easily?’

‘Is this true, Casey?’ Mallory asked.

‘Don’t ask me, sir. Those two – they always talk in Greek.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Mallory looked at the low cliffs close off the starboard beam, barely moving now with the engine shut right down, looked back at Louki. ‘Are you quite sure …’

He stopped in mid-sentence, jumped out through the wheelhouse door. The splash – there had been no mistaking the noise – had come from almost directly ahead. Mallory, Miller by his side, peered into the darkness, saw a dark head surfacing above the water less than twenty feet away, leaned far over with outstretched arm as the launch slid slowly by. Five seconds later Andrea stood on the deck, dripping mightily and beaming all over his great moon face. Mallory led him straight into the wheelhouse, switched on the soft light of the shaded chart-lamp.

‘By all that’s wonderful, Andrea, I never thought to see you again. How did it go?’

‘I will soon tell you,’ Andrea laughed. ‘Just after –’

‘You’ve been wounded!’ Miller interrupted. ‘Your shoulder’s kinda perforated.’ He pointed to the red stain spreading down the sea-soaked jacket.

‘Well, now, I believe I have.’ Andrea affected vast surprise. ‘Just a scratch, my friend.’

‘Oh, sure, sure, just a scratch! It would be the same if your arm had been blown off. Come on down to the cabin – this is just a kindergarten exercise for a man of my medical skill.’

‘But the captain –’

‘Will have to wait. And your story. Ol’ Medicine Man Miller permits no interference with his patients. Come on!’

‘Very well, very well,’ Andrea said docilely. He shook his head in mock resignation, followed Miller out of the cabin.

Brown opened up to full throttle again, took the launch north almost to Cape Demirci to avoid any hundred to one chance the harbour batteries might make, turned due east for a few miles then headed south into the Maidos Straits. Mallory stood by his side in the wheelhouse, gazing out over the dark, still waters. Suddenly he caught a gleam of white in the distance, touched Brown’s arm and pointed for’ard.

‘Breakers ahead, Casey, I think. Reefs perhaps?’

Casey looked in long silence, finally shook his head.

‘Bow-wave,’ he said unemotionally. ‘It’s the destroyers coming through.’

SEVENTEEN

Wednesday Night

Midnight

Commander Vincent Ryan, RN, Captain (Destroyers) and Commanding Officer of His Majesty’s latest S-class destroyer Sirdar, looked round the cramped chart-room and tugged thoughtfully at his magnificent Captain Kettle beard. A scruffier, a more villainous, a more cut and battered-looking bunch of hard cases he had never seen, he reflected, with the possible exception of a Bias Bay pirate crew he had helped round up when a very junior officer on the China Station. He looked at them more closely, tugged his beard again, thought there was more to it than mere scruffiness. He wouldn’t care to be given the task of rounding this lot up. Dangerous, highly dangerous, he mused, but impossible to say why, there was only this quietness, this relaxed watchfulness that made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. His ‘hatchet-men’, Jensen had called them: Captain Jensen picked his killers well.

‘Any of you gentlemen care to go below,’ he suggested. ‘Plenty of hot water, dry clothes – and warm bunks. We won’t be using them tonight.’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’ Mallory hesitated. ‘But we’d like to see this through.’

‘Right then, the bridge it is,’ Ryan said cheerfully. The Sirdar was beginning to pick up speed again, the deck throbbing beneath their feet. ‘It is at your own risk, of course.’

‘We lead charmed lives,’ Miller drawled. ‘Nothin’ ever happens to us.’

The rain had stopped and they could see the cold twinkling of stars through broadening rifts in the clouds. Mallory looked around him, could see Maidos broad off the port bow and the great bulk of Navarone slipping by to starboard. Aft, about a cable length away, he could just distinguish two other ships, high-curving bow-waves piled whitely against tenebrious silhouettes. Mallory turned to the captain.

‘No transports, sir?’

‘No transports.’ Ryan felt a vague mixture of pleasure and embarrassment that this man should call him ‘sir’. ‘Destroyers only. This is going to be a smash-and-grab job. No time for dawdlers tonight – and we’re behind schedule already.’

‘How long to clear the beaches?’

‘Half an hour.’

‘What! Twelve hundred men?’ Mallory was incredulous.

‘More.’ Ryan sighed. ‘Half the ruddy inhabitants want to come with us, too. We could still do it in half an hour, but we’ll probably take a bit longer. We’ll embark all the mobile equipment we can.’

Mallory nodded, let his eye travel along the slender outlines of the Sirdar. ‘Where are you going to put ’em all, sir.’

‘A fair question,’ Ryan admitted. ‘Five p.m. on the London Underground will be nothing compared to this little lot. But we’ll pack them in somehow.’

Mallory nodded again and looked across the dark waters at Navarone. Two minutes, now, three at the most, and the fortress would open behind that headland. He felt a hand touch his arm, half-turned and smiled down at the sad-eyed little Greek by his side.

‘Not long now, Louki,’ he said quietly.

‘The people, Major,’ he murmured. ‘The people in the town. Will they be all right?’

‘They’ll be all right. Dusty says the roof of the cave will go straight up. Most of the stuff will fall into the harbour.’

‘Yes, but the boats –?’

‘Will you stop worrying! There’s nobody aboard them – you know they have to leave at curfew time.’ He looked round as someone touched his arm.

‘Captain Mallory, this is Lieutenant Beeston, my gunnery officer.’ There was a slight coolness in Ryan’s voice that made Mallory think that he wasn’t overfond of his gunnery officer. ‘Lieutenant Beeston is worried.’

‘I am worried!’ The tone was cold, aloof, with an indefinable hint of condescension. ‘I understand that you have advised the captain not to offer any resistance?’

‘You sound like a BBC communiqué,’ Mallory said shortly. ‘But you’re right, I did say that. You couldn’t locate the guns except by searchlight and that would be fatal. Similarly with gunfire.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’ One could almost see the lift of the eyebrows in the darkness.

‘You’d give away your position,’ Mallory said patiently. ‘They’d nail you first time. Give ’em two minutes and they’d nail you anyway. I have good reason to believe that the accuracy of their gunners is quite fantastic.’

‘So has the Navy,’ Ryan interjected quietly. ‘Their third shell got the Sybaris’s B magazine.’

‘Have you got any idea why this should be, Captain Mallory?’ Beeston was quite unconvinced.

‘Radar-controlled guns,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘They have two huge scanners atop the fortress.’

‘The Sirdar had radar installed last month,’ Beeston said stiffly. ‘I imagine we could register some hits ourselves if –’

‘You could hardly miss.’ Miller drawled out the words, the tone dry and provocative. ‘It’s a helluva big island, Mac.’

‘Who – who are you?’ Beeston was rattled. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘Corporal Miller.’ The American was unperturbed. ‘Must be a very selective instrument, Lootenant, that can pick out a cave in a hundred square miles of rock.’

There was a moment’s silence, then Beeston muttered something and turned away.

‘You’ve hurt Guns’s feelings, Corporal,’ Ryan murmured. ‘He’s very keen to have a go – but we’ll hold our fire … How long till we clear that point, Captain?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He turned. ‘What do you say, Casey?’

‘A minute, sir. No more.’

Ryan nodded, said nothing. There was a silence on the bridge, a silence only intensified by the sibilant rushing of the waters, the weird, lonesome pinging of the Asdic. Above, the sky was steadily clearing, and the moon, palely luminous, was struggling to appear through a patch of thinning cloud. Nobody spoke, nobody moved. Mallory was conscious of the great bulk of Andrea beside him, of Miller, Brown and Louki behind. Born in the heart of the country, brought up on the foothills of the Southern Alps, Mallory knew himself as a landsman first and last, an alien to the sea and ships: but he had never felt so much at home in his life, never really known till now what it was to belong. He was more than happy, Mallory thought vaguely to himself, he was content. Andrea and his new friends and the impossible well done – how could a man be but content? They weren’t all going home, Andy Stevens wasn’t coming with them, but strangely he could feel no sorrow, only a gentle melancholy … Almost as if he had divined what Mallory was thinking, Andrea leaned towards him, towering over him in the darkness.

‘He should be here,’ he murmured. ‘Andy Stevens should be here. That is what you are thinking, is it not?’

Mallory nodded and smiled, and said nothing.

‘It doesn’t really matter, does it, my Keith?’ No anxiety, no questioning, just a statement of fact. ‘It doesn’t really matter.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

Even as he spoke, he looked up quickly. A light, a bright orange flame had lanced out from the sheering wall of the fortress; they had rounded the headland and he hadn’t even noticed it. There was a whistling roar – Mallory thought incongruously of an express train emerging from a tunnel – directly overhead, and the great shell had crashed into the sea just beyond them. Mallory compressed his lips, unconsciously tightened his clenched fists. It was easy now to see how the Sybaris had died.

He could hear the gunnery officer saying something to the captain, but the words failed to register. They were looking at him and he at them and he did not see them. His mind was strangely detached. Another shell, would that be next? Or would the roar of the gunfire of that first shell come echoing across the sea? Or perhaps … Once again, he was back in that dark magazine entombed in the rocks, only now he could see men down there, doomed, unknowing men, could see the overhead pulleys swinging the great shells and cartridges towards the well of the lift, could see the shell hoist ascending slowly, the bared, waiting wires less than half an inch apart, the shining, spring-loaded wheel running smoothly down the gleaming rail, the gentle bump as the hoist …

A white pillar of flame streaked up hundreds of feet into the night sky as the tremendous detonation tore the heart out of the great fortress of Navarone. No after-fire of any kind, no dark, billowing clouds of smoke, only that one blinding white column that lit up the entire town for a single instant of time, reached up incredibly till it touched the clouds, vanished as if it had never been. And then, by and by, came the shock waves, the solitary thunderclap of the explosion, staggering even at that distance, and finally the deep-throated rumbling as thousands of tons of rock toppled majestically into the harbour – thousands of tons of rock and the two great guns of Navarone.

The rumbling was still in their ears, the echoes fading away far out across the Aegean, when the clouds parted and the moon broke through, a full moon silvering the darkly-rippling waters to starboard, shining iridescently through the spun phosphorescence of the Sirdar’s boiling wake. And dead ahead, bathed in the white moonlight, mysterious, remote, the island of Kheros lay sleeping on the surface of the sea.

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About the Author

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulyssesa

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (short stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Force 10

from Navarone

An Imprint of Sterling Publishing

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STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of

Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1968

© 1968 by HarperCollinsPublishers

The author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9248-9 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4027-9249-6 (ebook)

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To Lewis and Caroline

Contents

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

EPILOGUE

ONE Prelude: Thursday 0000–0600

TWO Thursday 1400–2330

THREE Friday 0030–0200

FOUR Friday 0200–0330

FIVE Friday 0330–0500

SIX Friday 0800–1000

SEVEN Friday 1000–1200

EIGHT Friday 1500–2115

NINE Friday 2115– Saturday 0040

TEN Saturday 0040–0120

ELEVEN Saturday 0120–0135

TWELVE Saturday 0135–0200

THIRTEEN Saturday 0200–0215

EPILOGUE

Once again Captain Jensen and the British lieutenantgeneral were back in the Operations Room in Termoli, but now they were no longer pacing up and down. The days of pacing were over. True, they still looked very tired, their faces probably fractionally more deeply lined than they had been a few days previously: but the faces were no longer haggard, the eyes no longer clouded with anxiety, and, had they been walking instead of sitting deep in comfortable armchairs, it was just conceivable that they might have had a new spring in their steps. Both men had glasses in their hands, large glasses.

Jensen sipped his whisky and said, smiling: ‘I thought a general’s place was at the head of his troops?’

‘Not in these days, Captain,’ the General said firmly. ‘In 1944 the wise general leads from behind his troops – about twenty miles behind. Besides, the armoured divisions are going so quickly I couldn’t possibly hope to catch up with them.’

‘They’re moving as fast as that?’

‘Not quite as fast as the German and Austrian divisions that pulled out of the Gustav Line last night and are now racing for the Yugoslav border. But they’re coming along pretty well.’ The General permitted himself a large gulp of his drink and a smile of considerable satisfaction. ‘Deception complete, break-through complete. On the whole, your men have done a pretty fair job.’

Both men turned in their chairs as a respectful rat-a-tat of knuckles preceded the opening of the heavy leather doors. Mallory entered, followed by Vukalovic, Andrea and Miller. All four were unshaven, all of them looked as if they hadn’t slept for a week. Andrea carried his arm in a sling.

Jensen rose, drained his glass, set it on a table, looked at Mallory dispassionately and said: ‘Cut it a bit bloody fine, didn’t you?’

Mallory, Andrea and Miller exchanged expressionless looks. There was a fairly long silence, then Mallory said: ‘Some things take longer than others.’

Petar and Maria were lying side by side, hands clasped, in two regulation army beds in the Termoli military hospital when Jensen entered, followed by Mallory, Miller and Andrea.

‘Excellent reports about both of you, I’m glad to hear,’ Jensen said briskly. ‘Just brought some – ah – friends to say goodbye.’

‘What sort of hospital is this, then?’ Miller said severely. ‘How about the high army moral tone, hey? Don’t they have separate quarters for men and women?’

‘They’ve been married for almost two years,’ Mallory said mildly. ‘Did I forget to tell you?’

‘Of course you didn’t forget,’ Miller said disgustedly. ‘It just slipped your mind.’

‘Speaking of marriage –’ Andrea cleared his throat and tried another tack. ‘Captain Jensen may recall that back in Navarone –’

‘Yes, yes.’ Jensen held up a hand. ‘Quite so. Quite. Quite. But I thought perhaps – well, the fact of the matter is – well, it so happens that another little job, just a tiny little job really, has just come up and I thought that seeing you were here anyway …’

Andrea stared at Jensen. His face was horrorstricken.

ONE

Prelude: Thursday

0000–0600

Commander Vincent Ryan, RN, Captain (Destroyers) and commanding officer of His Majesty’s latest S-class destroyer Sirdar, leaned his elbows comfortably on the coaming of his bridge, brought up his night-glasses and gazed out thoughtfully over the calm and silvered waters of the moonlit Aegean.

He looked first of all due north, straight out over the huge and smoothly sculpted and whitely phosphorescent bow-wave thrown up by the knife-edged forefoot of his racing destroyer: four miles away, no more, framed in its backdrop of indigo sky and diamantine stars, lay the brooding mass of a darkly cliff-girt island: the island of Kheros, for months the remote and beleaguered outpost of two thousand British troops who had expected to die that night, and who would now not die.

Ryan swung his glasses through 180° and nodded approvingly. This was what he liked to see. The four destroyers to the south were in such perfect line astern that the hull of the leading vessel, a gleaming bone in its teeth, completely obscured the hulls of the three ships behind. Ryan turned his binoculars to the east.

It was odd, he thought inconsequentially, how unimpressive, even how disappointing, the aftermath of either natural or man-made disaster could be. Were it not for that dull red glow and wisping smoke that emanated from the upper part of the cliff and lent the scene a vaguely Dantean aura of primeval menace and foreboding, the precipitous far wall of the harbour looked as it might have done in the times of Homer. That great ledge of rock that looked from that distance so smooth and regular and somehow inevitable could have been carved out by the wind and weather of a hundred million years: it could equally well have been cut away fifty centuries ago by the masons of Ancient Greece seeking marble for the building of their Ionian temples: what was almost inconceivable, what almost passed rational comprehension, was the fact that ten minutes ago that ledge had not been there at all, that there had been in its place tens of thousands of tons of rock, the most impregnable German fortress in the Aegean and, above all, the two great guns of Navarone, now all buried for ever three hundred feet under the sea. With a slow shake of his head Commander Ryan lowered his binoculars and turned to look at the men responsible for achieving more in five minutes than nature could have done in five million years.

Captain Mallory and Corporal Miller. That was all he knew of them, that and the fact that they had been sent on this mission by an old friend of his, a naval captain by the name of Jensen who, he had learnt only twenty-four hours previously – and that to his total astonishment – was the Head of Allied Intelligence in the Mediterranean. But that was all he knew of them and maybe he didn’t even know that. Maybe their names weren’t Mallory and Miller. Maybe they weren’t even a captain and a corporal. They didn’t look like any captain or corporal he’d ever seen. Come to that, they didn’t look like any soldiers he’d ever seen. Clad in salt-water-and blood-stained German uniforms, filthy, unshaven, quiet and watchful and remote, they belonged to no category of men he’d ever encountered: all he could be certain of as he gazed at the blurred and blood-shot sunken eyes, the gaunt and trenched and stubbled-grey faces of two men no longer young, was that he had never before seen human beings so far gone in total exhaustion.

‘Well, that seems to be about it,’ Ryan said. ‘The troops on Kheros waiting to be taken off, our flotilla going north to take them off and the guns of Navarone no longer in any position to do anything about our flotilla. Satisfied, Captain Mallory?’

‘That was the object of the exercise,’ Mallory agreed.

Ryan lifted his glasses again. This time, almost at the range of night vision, he focused on a rubber dinghy closing in on the rocky shoreline to the west of Navarone harbour. The two figures seated in the dinghy were just discernible, no more: Ryan lowered his glasses and said thoughtfully:

‘Your big friend – and the lady with him – doesn’t believe in hanging about. You didn’t – ah – introduce me to them, Captain Mallory.’

‘I didn’t get the chance to. Maria and Andrea. Andrea’s a colonel in the Greek army: 19th Motorized Division.’

‘Andrea was a colonel in the Greek army,’ Miller said. ‘I think he’s just retired.’

‘I rather think he has. They were in a hurry, Commander, because they’re both patriotic Greeks, they’re both islanders and there is much for both to do in Navarone. Besides, I understand they have some urgent and very personal matters to attend to.’

‘I see.’ Ryan didn’t press the matter, instead he looked out again over the smoking remains of the shattered fortress. ‘Well, that seems to be that. Finished for the evening, gentlemen?’

Mallory smiled faintly. ‘I think so.’

‘Then I would suggest some sleep.’

‘What a wonderful word that is.’ Miller pushed himself wearily off the side of the bridge and stood there swaying as he drew an exhausted forearm over blood-shot, aching eyes. ‘Wake me up in Alexandria.’

‘Alexandria?’ Ryan looked at him in amusement.

‘We won’t be there for thirty hours yet.’

‘That’s what I meant,’ Miller said.

Miller didn’t get his thirty hours. He had, in fact, been asleep for just over thirty minutes when he was wakened by the slow realization that something was hurting his eyes: after he had moaned and feebly protested for some time he managed to get one eye open and saw that that something was a bright overhead light let into the deckhead of the cabin that had been provided for Mallory and himself. Miller propped himself up on a groggy elbow, managed to get his second eye into commission and looked without enthusiasm at the other two occupants of the cabin: Mallory was seated by a table, apparently transcribing some kind of message, while Commander Ryan stood in the open doorway.

‘This is outrageous,’ Miller said bitterly. ‘I haven’t closed an eye all night.’

‘You’ve been asleep for thirty-five minutes,’ Ryan said. ‘Sorry. But Cairo said this message for Captain Mallory was of the greatest urgency.’

‘It is, is it?’ Miller said suspiciously. He brightened. ‘It’s probably about promotions and medals and leave and so forth.’ He looked hopefully at Mallory who had just straightened after decoding the message. ‘Is it?’

‘Well, no. It starts off promisingly enough, mind you, warmest congratulations and what-have-you, but after that the tone of the message deteriorates a bit.’

Mallory reread the message: SIGNAL RECEIVED WARMEST CONGRATULATIONS MAGNIFICENT ACHIEVEMENT. YOU BLOODY FOOLS WHY YOU LET ANDREA GET AWAY? ESSENTIAL CONTACT HIM IMMEDIATELY. WILL EVACUATE BEFORE DAWN UNDER DIVERSIONARY AIR ATTACK AIR STRIP ONE MILE SOUTHEAST MANDRAKOS. SEND CE VIA SIRDAR. URGENT 3 REPEAT URGENT 3. BEST LUCK. JENSEN.

Miller took the message from Mallory’s outstretched hand, moved the paper to and fro until he had brought his bleary eyes into focus, read the message in horrified silence, handed it back to Mallory and stretched out his full length on his bunk. He said, Oh, my God!’ and relapsed into what appeared to be a state of shock.

‘That about sums it up,’ Mallory agreed. He shook his head wearily and turned to Ryan. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we must trouble you for three things. A rubber dinghy, a portable radio transmitter and an immediate return to Navarone. Please arrange to have the radio lined up on a pre-set frequency to be constantly monitored by your WT room. When you receive a CE signal, transmit it to Cairo.’

‘CE?’ Ryan asked.

‘Uh-huh. Just that.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘We could do with a bottle of brandy,’ Miller said. ‘Something – anything – to see us through the rigours of the long night that lies ahead.’

Ryan lifted an eyebrow. ? bottle of five-star, no doubt, Corporal?’

‘Would you,’ Miller asked morosely, ‘give a bottle of three-star to a man going to his death?’

As it happened, Miller’s gloomy expectations of an early demise turned out to be baseless – for that night, at least. Even the expected fearful rigours of the long night ahead proved to be no more than minor physical inconveniences.

By the time the Sirdar had brought them back to Navarone and as close in to the rocky shores as was prudent, the sky had become darkly overcast, rain was falling and a swell was beginning to blow up from the south-west so that it was little wonder to either Mallory or Miller that by the time they had paddled their dinghy within striking distance of the shore, they were in a very damp and miserable condition indeed: and it was even less wonder that by the time they had reached the boulder-strewn beach itself, they were soaked to the skin, for a breaking wave flung their dinghy against a sloping shelf of rock, overturning their rubber craft and precipitating them both into the sea. But this was of little enough account in itself: their Schmeisser machine-pistols, their radio, their torches were securely wrapped in waterproof bags and all of those were safely salvaged. All in all, Mallory reflected, an almost perfect three-point landing compared to the last time they had come to Navarone by boat, when their Greek caique, caught in the teeth of a giant storm, had been battered to pieces against the jaggedly vertical – and supposedly unclimbable – South Cliff of Navarone.

Slipping, stumbling and with suitably sulphuric comments, they made their way over the wet shingle and massively rounded boulders until their way was barred by a steeply-angled slope that soared up into the near-darkness above. Mallory unwrapped a pencil torch and began to quarter the face of the slope with its narrow, concentrated beam. Miller touched him on the arm.

‘Taking a bit of a chance, aren’t we? With that thing, I mean?’

‘No chance,’ Mallory said. ‘There won’t be a soldier left on guard on the coasts tonight. They’ll all be fighting the fires in the town. Besides, who is left for them to guard against? We are the birds and the birds, duty done, have flown. Only a madman would come back to the island again.’

‘I know what we are,’ Miller said with feeling. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

Mallory smiled to himself in the darkness and continued his search. Within a minute he had located what he had been hoping to find – an angled gully in the slope. He and Miller scrambled up the shale-and rock-strewn bed of the gully as fast as the treacherous footing and their encumbrances would permit: within fifteen-minutes they had reached the plateau above and paused to take their breath. Miller reached inside the depths of his tunic, a discreet movement that was at once followed by a discreet gurgling.

‘What are you doing?’ Mallory enquired.

‘I thought I heard my teeth chattering. What’s all this “urgent 3 repeat urgent 3” business in the message, then?’

‘I’ve never seen it before. But I know what it means. Some people, somewhere, are about to die.’

‘I’ll tell you two for a start. And what if Andrea won’t come? He’s not a member of our armed forces. He doesn’t have to come. And he said he was getting married right away.’

Mallory said with certainty: ‘He’ll come.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Because Andrea is the one completely responsible man I’ve ever met. He has two great responsibilities – one to others, one to himself. That’s why he came back to Navarone – because he knew the people needed him. And that’s why he’ll leave Navarone when he sees this “urgent 3” signal, because he’ll know that someone, in some other place, needs him even more.’

Miller retrieved the brandy bottle from Mallory and thrust it securely inside his tunic again. ‘Well, I can tell you this. The future Mrs Andrea Stavros isn’t going to be very happy about it.’

‘Neither is Andrea Stavros and I’m not looking forward to telling him,’ Mallory said candidly. He peered at his luminous watch and swung to his feet. ‘Mandrakos in half an hour.’

In precisely thirty minutes, their Schmeissers removed from their waterproof bags and now shoulder-slung at hip level, Mallory and Miller moved swiftly but very quietly from shadow to shadow through the plantations of carob trees on the outskirts of the village of Mandrakos. Suddenly, from directly ahead, they heard the unmistakable clink of glasses and bottlenecks.

For the two men a potentially dangerous situation such as this was so routine as not even to warrant a glance at each other. They dropped silently to their hands and knees and crawled forward, Miller sniffing the air appreciatively as they advanced: the Greek resinous spirit ouzo has an extraordinary ability to permeate the atmosphere for a considerable distance around it. Mallory and Miller reached the edge of a clump of bushes, sank prone and looked ahead.

From their richly-befrogged waistcoats, cummerbunds and fancy headgear, the two characters propped against the bole of a plane tree in the clearing ahead were obviously men of the island: from the rifles across their knees, their role appeared to be that of guards of some kind: from the almost vertical angle at which they had to tip the ouzo bottle to get at what little was left of its contents, it was equally apparent that they weren’t taking their duties too seriously, nor had been for some considerable time past.

Mallory and Miller withdrew somewhat less stealthily than they had advanced, rose and glanced at each other. Suitable comment seemed lacking. Mallory shrugged and moved on, circling around to his right. Twice more, as they moved swiftly into the centre of Mandrakos, flitting from the shadow of carob grove to carob grove, from the shadow of plane tree to plane tree, from the shadow of house to house, they came upon but easily avoided other ostensible sentries, all busy interpreting their duties in a very liberal fashion. Miller pulled Mallory into a doorway.

‘Our friends back there,’ he said. ‘What were they celebrating?’

‘Wouldn’t you? Celebrate, I mean. Navarone is useless to the Germans now. A week from now and they’ll all be gone.’

‘All right. So why are they keeping a watch?’ Miller nodded to a small, whitewashed Greek Orthodox church standing in the centre of the village square. From inside came a far from subdued murmur of voices. Also from inside came a great deal of light escaping through very imperfectly blacked-out windows. ‘Could it be anything to do with that?’

Mallory said: ‘Well, there’s one sure way to find out.’

They moved quietly on, taking advantage of all available cover and shadow until they came to a still deeper shadow caused by two flying buttresses supporting the wall of the ancient church. Between the buttresses was one of the few more successfully blacked-out windows with only a tiny chink of light showing along the bottom edge. Both men stooped and peered through the narrow aperture.

The church appeared even more ancient inside than on the outside. The high unpainted wooden benches, adze-cut oak from centuries long gone, had been blackened and smoothed by untold generations of churchgoers, the wood itself cracked and splintered by the ravages of time: the whitewashed walls looked as if they required buttresses within as well as without, crumbling to an extinction that could not now be long delayed: the roof appeared to be in imminent danger of falling in at any moment.

The now even louder hum of sound came from islanders of almost every age and sex, many in ceremonial dress, who occupied nearly every available seat in the church: the light came from literally hundreds of guttering candles, many of them ancient and twisted and ornamented and evidently called out for this special occasion, that lined the walls, the central aisle and the altar: by the altar itself, a priest, a bearded patriarch in Greek Orthodox robes, waited impassively.

Mallory and Miller looked interrogatively at each other and were on the point of standing upright when a very deep and very quiet voice spoke behind them.

‘Hands behind the necks,’ it said pleasantly. ‘And straighten very slowly. I have a Schmeisser machine-pistol in my hands.’

Slowly and carefully, just as the voice asked, Mallory and Miller did as they were told.

‘Turn round. Carefully, now.’

So they turned round, carefully. Miller looked at the massive dark figure who indeed had, as he’d claimed, a machine-pistol in his hands, and said irritably: ‘Do you mind? Point that damned thing somewhere else.’

The dark figure gave a startled exclamation, lowered the gun to his side and bent forward, the dark, craggy, lined face expressing no more than a passing flicker of surprise. Andrea Stavros didn’t go in very much for registering unnecessary emotional displays and the recovery of his habitual composure was instantaneous.

‘The German uniforms,’ he explained apologetically. ‘They had me fooled.’

‘You could have fooled me, too,’ Miller said. He looked incredulously at Andrea’s clothes, at the unbelievably baggy black trousers, the black jackboots, the intricately ornamented black waistcoat and violently purple cummerbund, shuddered and closed his eyes in pain. ‘Been visiting the Mandrakos pawn shop?’

‘The ceremonial dress of my ancestors,’ Andrea said mildly. ‘You two fall overboard?’

‘Not intentionally,’ Mallory said. ‘We came back to see you.’

‘You could have chosen a more convenient time.’ He hesitated, glanced at a small lighted building across the street and took their arms. ‘We can talk in here.’

He ushered them in and closed the door behind him. The room was obviously, from its benches and Spartan furnishings, some sort of communal meeting-place, a village hall: illumination came from three rather smoky oil lamps, the light from which was most hospitably reflected by the scores of bottles of spirit and wine and beer and glasses that took up almost every available inch of two long trestle tables. The haphazardly unaesthetic layout of the refreshments bespoke a very impromptu and hastily improvised preparation for a celebration: the serried rows of bottles heralded the intention of compensating for lack of quality by an excess of quantity.

Andrea crossed to the nearest table, picked up three glasses and a bottle of ouzo, and began to pour drinks. Miller fished out his brandy and offered it, but Andrea was too preoccupied to notice. He handed them the ouzo glasses.

‘Health.’ Andrea drained his glass and went on thoughtfully: ‘You did not return without a good reason, my Keith.’

Silently, Mallory removed the Cairo radio message from its waterproof oilskin wallet and handed it to Andrea, who took it half-unwillingly, then read it, scowling blackly.

He said: ‘Urgent 3 means what I think it means?’

Again Mallory remained silent, merely nodding as he watched Andrea unwinkingly.

‘This is most inconvenient for me.’ The scowl deepened. ‘Most inconvenient. There are many things for me to do in Navarone. The people will miss me.’

‘It’s also inconvenient for me,’ Miller said. ‘There are many things I could profitably be doing in the West End of London. They miss me, too. Ask any barmaid. But that’s hardly the point.’

Andrea regarded him for an impassive moment, then looked at Mallory. ‘You are saying nothing.’

‘I’ve nothing to say.’

The scowl slowly left Andrea’s face, though the brooding frown remained. He hesitated, then reached again for the bottle of ouzo. Miller shuddered delicately.

‘Please.’ He indicated the bottle of brandy.

Andrea smiled, briefly and for the first time, poured some of Miller’s five-star into their glasses, reread the message and handed it back to Mallory. ‘I must think it over. I have some business to attend to first.’

Mallory looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Business?’

‘I have to attend a wedding.’

‘A wedding?’ Miller said politely.

‘Must you two repeat everything I say? A wedding.’

‘But who do you know?’ Miller asked. ‘And at this hour of night.’

‘For some people in Navarone,’ Andrea said drily, ‘the night is the only safe time.’ He turned abruptly, walked away, opened the door and hesitated.

Mallory asked curiously: ‘Who’s getting married?’

Andrea made no reply. Instead he walked back to the nearest table, poured and drained a half-tumbler of the brandy, ran a hand through his thick dark hair, straightened his cummerbund, squared his shoulders and walked purposefully towards the door. Mallory and Miller stared after him, then at the door that closed behind him: then they stared at each other.

Some fifteen minutes later they were still staring at each other, this time with expressions which alternated between the merely bemused and slightly stunned.

They were seated in the back seat of the Greek Orthodox church – the only part of any pew in the entire church not now occupied by islanders. From where they sat, the altar was at least sixty feet away but as they were both tall men and sitting by the central aisle, they had a pretty fair view of what was going on up there.

There was, to be accurate, nothing going on up there any more. The ceremony was over. Gravely, the Orthodox priest bestowed his blessing and Andrea and Maria, the girl who had shown them the way into the fortress of Navarone, turned with the slow dignity becoming the occasion, and walked down the aisle. Andrea bent over, tenderness and solicitousness both in expression and manner, and whispered something in her ear, but his words, it would have seemed, bore little relation to the way in which they were expressed, for halfway down the aisle a furious altercation broke out between them. Between, perhaps, is not the right word: it was less an altercation than a very one-sided monologue. Maria, her face flushed and dark eyes flashing, gesticulating and clearly mad through, was addressing Andrea in far from low tones of not even barely-controlled fury: Andrea, for his part, was deprecatory, placatory, trying to hush her up with about the same amount of success as Canute had in holding back the tide, and looking apprehensively around. The reaction of the seated guests varied from disbelief through open-mouthed astonishment and bafflement to downright horror: clearly all regarded the spectacle as a highly unusual aftermath to a wedding ceremony.

As the couple approached the end of the aisle opposite the pew where Mallory and Miller were seated, the argument, if such it could be called, raged more furiously than ever. As they passed by the end pew, Andrea, hand over his mouth, leaned over towards Mallory.

‘This,’ he said, sotto voce, ‘is our first married quarrel.’

He was given time to say no more. An imperative hand seized his arm and almost literally dragged him through the church doorway. Even after they had disappeared from sight, Maria’s voice, loud and clear, could still be heard by everyone within the church. Miller turned from surveying the empty doorway and looked thoughtfully at Mallory.

‘Very high-spirited girl, that. I wish I understood Greek. What was she saying there?’

Mallory kept his face carefully expressionless. ‘What about my honeymoon?’

‘Ah!’ Miller’s face was equally dead-pan. ‘Don’t you think we’d better follow them?’

‘Why?’

‘Andrea can take care of most people.’ It was the usual masterly Miller understatement. ‘But he’s stepped out of his class this time.’

Mallory smiled, rose and went to the door, followed by Miller, who was in turn followed by an eager press of guests understandably anxious to see the second act of this unscheduled entertainment: but the village square was empty of life.

Mallory did not hesitate. With the instinct born from the experience of long association with Andrea, he headed across the square to the communal hall where Andrea had made the earlier of his two dramatic statements. His instincts hadn’t betrayed him. Andrea, with a large glass of brandy in his hand and moodily fingering a spreading patch of red on his cheek, looked up as Mallory and Miller entered.

He said moodily: ‘She’s gone home to her mother.’

Miller glanced at his watch. ‘One minute and twenty-five seconds,’ he said admiringly. ‘A world record.’

Andrea glowered at him and Mallory moved in hastily.

‘You’re coming, then.’

‘Of course I’m coming,’ Andrea said irritably. He surveyed without enthusiasm the guests now swarming into the hall and brushing unceremoniously by as they headed, like the camel for the oasis, towards the bottle-laden tables. ‘Somebody’s got to look after you two.’

Mallory looked at his watch. ‘Three and a half hours yet before that plane is due. We’re dead on our feet, Andrea. Where can we sleep – a safe place to sleep. Your perimeter guards are drunk.’

‘They’ve been that way ever since the fortress blew up,’ Andrea said. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’

Miller looked around the islanders, who, amid a loud babel of cheerful voices, were already quite exceptionally busy with bottles and glasses. ‘How about your guests?’

‘How about them, then?’ Andrea surveyed his compatriots morosely. ‘Just look at that lot. Ever known a wedding reception yet where anybody paid any attention to the bride and groom? Come.’

They made their way southwards through the outskirts of Mandrakos to the open countryside beyond. Twice they were challenged by guards, twice a scowl and growl from Andrea sent them back hurriedly to their ouzo bottles. It was still raining heavily, but Mallory’s and Miller’s clothes were already so saturated that a little more rain could hardly make any appreciable difference to the way they felt, while Andrea, if anything, seemed even more oblivious of it. Andrea had the air of a man who had other things on his mind.

After fifteen minutes’ walk, Andrea stopped before the swing doors of a small, dilapidated and obviously deserted roadside barn.

‘There’s hay inside,’ he said. ‘We’ll be safe here.’

Mallory said: ‘Fine. A radio message to the Sirdar to send her CE message to Cairo and -’

‘CE?’ Andrea asked. ‘What’s that?’

‘To let Cairo know we’ve contacted you and are ready for pick-up … And after that, three lovely hours’ sleep.’

Andrea nodded. ‘Three hours it is.’

‘Three long hours,’ Mallory said meditatively.

A smile slowly broke on Andrea’s craggy face as he clapped Mallory on the shoulder.

‘In three long hours,’ he said, ‘a man like myself can accomplish a great deal.’

He turned and hurried off through the rain-filled night. Mallory and Miller looked after him with expressionless faces, looked at each other, still with the same expressionless faces, then pushed open the swing doors of the barn.

The Mandrakos airfield would not have received a licence from any Civil Air Board anywhere in the world. It was just over half a mile long, with hills rising steeply at both ends of the alleged runway, not more than forty yards wide and liberally besprinkled with a variety of bumps and potholes virtually guaranteed to wreck any undercarriage in the aviation business. But the RAF had used it before so it was not impossible that they might be able to use it at least once again.

To the south, the airstrip was lined with groves of carob trees. Under the pitiful shelter afforded by one of those, Mallory, Miller and Andrea sat waiting. At least Mallory and Miller did, hunched, miserable and shivering violently in their still sodden clothes. Andrea, however, was stretched out luxuriously with his hands behind his head, oblivious of the heavy drips of rain that fell on his upturned face. There was about him an air of satisfaction, of complacency almost, as he gazed at the first greyish tinges appearing in the sky to the east over the black-walled massif of the Turkish coast.

Andrea said: ‘They’re coming now.’

Mallory and Miller listened for a few moments, then they too heard it – the distant, muted roar of heavy aircraft approaching. All three rose and moved out to the perimeter of the airstrip. Within a minute, descending rapidly after their climb over the mountains to the south and at a height of less than a thousand feet, a squadron of eighteen Wellingtons, as much heard as seen in the light of early dawn, passed directly over the airstrip, heading for the town of Navarone. Two minutes later, the three watchers both heard the detonations and saw the brilliant orange mushrooming of light as the Wellingtons unloaded their bombs over the shattered fortress to the north. Sporadic lines of upward-flying tracers, obviously exclusively small-arm, attested to the ineffectuality, the weakness of the ground defences. When the fortress had blown up, so had all the anti-aircraft batteries in the town. The attack was short and sharp: less than two minutes after the bombardment had started it ceased as abruptly as it had begun and then there was only the fading dying sound of desynchronized engines as the Wellingtons pulled away, first to the north and then the west, across the still-dark waters of the Aegean.

For perhaps a minute the three watchers stood silent on the perimeter of the Mandrakos airstrip, then Miller said wonderingly: ‘What makes us so important?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mallory said. ‘But I don’t think you’re going to enjoy finding out.’

‘And that won’t be long now.’ Andrea turned round and looked towards the mountains to the south. ‘Hear it?’

Neither of the others heard it, but they did not doubt that, in fact, there was something to hear. Andrea’s hearing was on a par with his phenomenal eyesight. Then, suddenly, they could hear it, too. A solitary bomber – also a Wellington – came sinking in from the south, circled the perimeter area once as Mallory blinked his torch upwards in rapidly successive flashes, lined up its approach, landed heavily at the far end of the airstrip and came taxiing towards them, bumping heavily across the atrocious surface of the airfield. It halted less than a hundred yards from where they stood: then a light started winking from the flight deck.

Andrea said: ‘Now, don’t forget. I’ve promised to be back in a week.’

‘Never make promises,’ Miller said severely. ‘What if we aren’t back in a week? What if they’re sending us to the Pacific?’

‘Then when we get back I’ll send you in first to explain.’

Miller shook his head. ‘I don’t really think I’d like that.’

‘We’ll talk about your cowardice later on,’ Mallory said. ‘Come on. Hurry up.’

The three men broke into a run towards the waiting Wellington.

The Wellington was half an hour on the way to its destination, wherever its destination was, and Andrea and Miller, coffee mugs in hand, were trying, unsuccessfully, to attain a degree of comfort on the lumpy palliasses on the fuselage floor when Mallory returned from the flightdeck. Miller looked up at him in weary resignation, his expression characterized by an entire lack of enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure.

‘Well, what did you find out?’ His tone of voice made it abundantly clear that what he had expected Mallory to find out was nothing short of the very worst. ‘Where to, now? Rhodes? Beirut? The flesh-pots of Cairo?’

‘Termoli, the man says.’

‘Termoli, is it? Place I’ve always wanted to see.’ Miller paused. ‘Where the hell’s Termoli?’

‘Italy, so I believe. Somewhere on the south Adriatic coast.’

‘Oh, no!’ Miller turned on his side and pulled a blanket over his head. ‘I hate spaghetti.’

TWO

Thursday

1400–2330

The landing on Termoli airfield, on the Adriatic coast of Southern Italy, was every bit as bumpy as the harrowing take-off from the Mandrakos airstrip had been. The Termoli fighter airbase was officially and optimistically listed as newly-constructed but in point of fact was no more than half-finished and felt that way for every yard of the excruciating touchdown and the jack-rabbit run-up to the prefabricated control tower at the eastern end of the field. When Mallory and Andrea swung down to terra firma, neither of them looked particularly happy: Miller, who came a very shaky last, and who was widely known to have an almost pathological loathing and detestation of all conceivable forms of transport, looked very ill indeed.

Miller was given time neither to seek nor receive commiseration. A camouflaged British 5th Army jeep pulled up alongside the plane, and the sergeant at the wheel, having briefly established their identity, waved them inside in silence, a silence which he stonily maintained on their drive through the shambles of the war-torn streets of Termoli. Mallory was unperturbed by the apparent unfriendliness. The driver was obviously under the strictest instructions not to talk to them, a situation which Mallory had encountered all too often in the past. There were not, Mallory reflected, very many groups of untouchables, but his, he knew, was one of them: no one, with two or three rare exceptions, was ever permitted to talk to them. The process, Mallory knew, was perfectly understandable and justifiable, but it was an attitude that did tend to become increasingly wearing with the passing of the years. It tended to make for a certain lack of contact with one’s fellow men.

After twenty minutes, the jeep stopped below the broad-flagged steps of a house on the outskirts of the town. The jeep driver gestured briefly to an armed sentry on the top of the steps who responded with a similarly perfunctory greeting. Mallory took this as a sign that they had arrived at their destination and, not wishing to violate the young sergeant’s vow of silence, got out without being told. The others followed and the jeep at once drove off.

The house – it looked more like a modest palace – was a rather splendid example of late Renaissance architecture, all colonnades and columns and everything in veined marble, but Mallory was more interested in what was inside the house than what it was made of on the outside. At the head of the steps their path was barred by the young corporal sentry armed with a Lee-Enfield .303. He looked like a refugee from high school.

‘Names, please.’

‘Captain Mallory.’

‘Identity papers? Pay-books?’

‘Oh, my God,’ Miller moaned. ‘And me feeling so sick, too.’

‘We have none,’ Mallory said gently. ‘Take us inside, please.’

‘My instructions are -’

‘I know, I know,’ Andrea said soothingly. He leaned across, effortlessly removed the rifle from the corporal’s desperate grasp, ejected and pocketed the magazine and returned the rifle. ‘Please, now.’

Red-faced and furious, the youngster hesitated briefly, looked at the three men more carefully, turned, opened the door behind him and gestured for the three to follow him.

Before them stretched a long, marble-flagged corridor, tall leaded windows on one side, heavy oil paintings and the occasional set of double-leather doors on the other. Halfway down the passage Andrea tapped the corporal on the shoulder and handed the magazine back without a word. The corporal took it, smiling uncertainly, and inserted it into his rifle without a word. Another twenty paces and he stopped before the last pair of leather doors, knocked, heard a muffled acknowledgement and pushed open one of the doors, standing aside to let the three men pass him. Then he moved out again, closing the door behind him.

It was obviously the main drawing-room of the house – or palace – furnished in an almost medieval opulence, all dark oak, heavily brocaded silk curtains, leather upholstery, leather-bound books, what were undoubtedly a set of Old Masters on the walls and a flowing sea of dull bronze carpeting from wall to wall. Taken all in all, even a member of the old-pre-war Italian nobility wouldn’t have turned up his nose at it.

The room was pleasantly redolent with the smell of burning pine, the source of which wasn’t difficult to locate: one could have roasted a very large ox indeed in the vast and crackling fireplace at the far end of the room. Close by this fireplace stood three young men who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the rather ineffectual youngster who had so recently tried to prevent their entry. They were, to begin with, a good few years older, though still young men. They were heavily-built, broad-shouldered characters and had about them a look of tough and hard-bitten competence. They were dressed in the uniform of that élite of combat troops, the Marine Commandos, and they looked perfectly at home in those uniforms.

But what caught and held the unwavering attention of Mallory and his two companions was neither the rather splendidly effete decadence of the room and its furnishings nor the wholly unexpected presence of the three commandos: it was the fourth figure in the room, a tall, heavily built and commanding figure who leaned negligently against a table in the centre of the room. The deeply-trenched face, the authoritative expression, the splendid grey beard and the piercing blue eyes made him a prototype for the classic British naval captain, which, as the immaculate white uniform he wore indicated, was precisely what he was. With a collective sinking of their hearts, Mallory, Andrea and Miller gazed again, and with a marked lack of enthusiasm, upon the splendidly piratical figure of Captain Jensen, RN, Chief of Allied Intelligence, Mediterranean, and the man who had so recently sent them on their suicidal mission to the island of Navarone. All three looked at one another and shook their heads in slow despair.

Captain Jensen straightened, smiled his magnificent sabre-toothed tiger’s smile and strode forward to greet them, his hand outstretched.

‘Mallory! Andrea! Miller!’ There was a dramatic five-second pause between the words. ‘I don’t know what to say! I just don’t know what to say! A magnificent job, a magnificent –’ He broke off and regarded them thoughtfully. ‘You – um – don’t seem at all surprised to see me. Captain Mallory?’

‘I’m not. With respect, sir, whenever and wherever there’s dirty work afoot, one looks to find -’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Quite, quite. And how are you all?’

‘Tired,’ Miller said firmly. ‘Terribly tired. We need a rest. At least, I do.’

Jensen said earnestly: ‘And that’s exactly what you’re going to have, my boy. A rest. A long one. A very long one.’

‘A very long one?’ Miller looked at him in frank incredulity.

‘You have my word.’ Jensen stroked his beard in momentary diffidence. ‘Just as soon, that is, as you get back from Yugoslavia.’

‘Yugoslavia!’ Miller stared at him.

‘Tonight.’

‘Tonight!’

‘By parachute.’

‘By parachute!’

Jensen said with forbearance: ‘I am aware, Corporal Miller, that you have had a classical education and are, moreover, just returned from the Isles of Greece. But we’ll do without the Ancient Greek Chorus bit, if you don’t mind.’

Miller looked moodily at Andrea. ‘Bang goes your honeymoon.’

‘What was that?’ Jensen asked sharply.

‘Just a private joke, sir.’

Mallory said in mild protest: ‘You’re forgetting, sir, that none of us has ever made a parachute jump.’

‘I’m forgetting nothing. There’s a first time for everything. What do you gentlemen know about the war in Yugoslavia?’

‘What war?’ Andrea asked warily.

‘Precisely.’ There was satisfaction in Jensen’s voice.

‘I heard about it,’ Miller volunteered. ‘There’s a bunch of what-do-you-call-’em – Partisans, isn’t it – offering some kind of underground resistance to the German occupation troops.’

‘It is probably as well for you,’ Jensen said heavily, ‘that the Partisans cannot hear you. They’re not underground, they’re very much over ground and at the last count there were 350,000 of them tying down twenty-eight German and Bulgarian divisions in Yugoslavia.’ He paused briefly. ‘More, in fact, than the combined Allied armies are tying down here in Italy.’

‘Somebody should have told me,’ Miller complained. He brightened. ‘If there’s 350,000 of them around, what would they want us for?’

Jensen said acidly: ‘You must learn to curb your enthusiasm, Corporal. The fighting part of it you may leave to the Partisans – and they’re fighting the cruellest, hardest, most brutal war in Europe today. A ruthless, vicious war with no quarter and no surrender on either side. Arms, munitions, food, clothes – the Partisans are desperately short of all of those. But they have those twenty-eight divisions pinned down.’

‘I don’t want any part of that,’ Miller muttered.

Mallory said hastily: ‘What do you want us to do, sir?’

‘This.’ Jensen removed his glacial stare from Miller. ‘Nobody appreciates it yet, but the Yugoslavs are our most important Allies in Southern Europe. Their war is our war. And they’re fighting a war they can never hope to win. Unless -’

Mallory nodded. The tools to finish the job.’

‘Hardly original, but true. The tools to finish the job. We are the only people who are at present supplying them with rifles, machine-guns, ammunition, clothing and medical supplies. And those are not getting through.’ He broke off, picking up a cane, walked almost angrily across the room to a large wall-map hanging between a couple of Old Masters and rapped the tip of the bamboo against it. ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina, gentlemen. West-Central Yugoslavia. We’ve sent in four British Military Missions in the past two months to liaise with the Yugoslavs – the Partisan Yugoslavs. The leaders of all four missions have disappeared without trace. Ninety per cent of our recent airlift supplies have fallen into German hands. They have broken all our radio codes and have established a network of agents in Southern Italy here with whom they are apparently able to communicate as and when they wish. Perplexing questions, gentlemen. Vital questions. I want the answers. Force 10 will get me the answers.’

‘Force 10?’ Mallory said politely.

‘The code name for your operation.’

‘Why that particular name?’ Andrea said.

‘Why not? Ever heard of any code name that had any bearing on the operation on hand? It’s the whole essence of it, man.’

‘It wouldn’t, of course,’ Mallory said woodenly, ‘have anything to do with a frontal attack on something, a storming of some vital place.’ He observed Jensen’s total lack of reaction and went on in the same tone: ‘On the Beaufort Scale, Force 10 means a storm.’

‘A storm!’ It is very difficult to combine an exclamation and a moan of anguish in the same word, but Miller managed it without any difficulty. ‘Oh, my God, and all I want is a flat calm, and that for the rest of my life.’

‘There are limits to my patience, Corporal Miller,’ Jensen said. ‘I may–I say may – have to change my mind about a recommendation I made on your behalf this morning.’

‘On my behalf?’ Miller said guardedly.

‘For the Distinguished Conduct Medal.’

‘That should look nice on the lid of my coffin,’ Miller muttered.

‘What was that?’

‘Corporal Miller was just expressing his appreciation.’ Mallory moved closer to the wall-map and studied it briefly. ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina – well, it’s a fair-sized area, sir.’

‘Agreed. But we can pinpoint the spot – the approximate location of the disappearances – to within twenty miles.’

Mallory turned from the map and said slowly: ‘There’s been a lot of homework on this one. That raid this morning on Navarone. The Wellington standing by to take us here. All preparations – I infer this from what you’ve said – laid on for tonight. Not to mention –’

‘We’ve been working on this for almost two months. You three were supposed to have come here some days ago. But – ah – well, you know.’

‘We know.’ The threatened withholding of his DCM had left Miller unmoved. ‘Something else came up. Look, sir, why us? We’re saboteurs, explosives experts, combat troops – this is a job for undercover espionage agents who speak Serbo-Croat or whatever.’

‘You must allow me to be the best judge of that,’ Jensen gave them another flash of his sabretoothed smile. ‘Besides, you’re lucky.’

‘Luck deserts tired men,’ Andrea said. ‘And we are very tired.’

‘Tired or not, I can’t find another team in Southern Europe to match you for resource, experience and skill.’ Jensen smiled again. ‘And luck. I have to be ruthless, Andrea. I don’t like it, but I have to. But I take the point about your exhaustion. That’s why I have decided to send a back-up team with you.’

Mallory looked at the three young soldiers standing by the hearth, then back to Jensen, who nodded.

‘They’re young, fresh and just raring to go. Marine Commandos, the most highly trained combat troops we have today. Remarkable variety of skills, I assure you. Take Reynolds, here.’ Jensen nodded to a very tall, dark sergeant in his late twenties, a man with a deeply-tanned aquiline face. ‘He can do anything from underwater demolition to flying a plane. And he will be flying a plane tonight. And, as you can see, he’ll come in handy for carrying any heavy cases you have.’

Mallory said mildly: ‘I’ve always found that Andrea makes a pretty fair porter, sir.’

Jensen turned to Reynolds. ‘They have their doubts. Show them you can be of some use.’

Reynolds hesitated, then stooped, picked up a heavy brass poker and proceeded to bend it between his hands. Obviously, it wasn’t an easy poker to bend. His face turned red, the veins stood out on his forehead and the tendons in his neck, his arms quivered with the strain, but slowly, inexorably, the poker was bent into a figure ‘U’. Smiling almost apologetically, Reynolds handed the poker over to Andrea. Andrea took it reluctantly. He hunched his shoulders, his knuckles gleamed white but the poker remained in its ‘U’ shape. Andrea looked up at Reynolds, his expression thoughtful, then quietly laid the poker down.

‘See what I mean?’ Jensen said. ‘Tired. Or Sergeant Groves here. Hot-foot from London, via the Middle East. Ex-air navigator, with all the latest in sabotage, explosives and electrics. For booby-traps, time-bombs and concealed microphones, a human mine-detector. And Sergeant Saunders here – a top-flight radio operator.’

Miller said morosely to Mallory: ‘You’re a toothless old lion and you’re over the hill.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Corporal!’ Jensen’s voice was sharp. ‘Six is the ideal number. You’ll be duplicated in every department, and those men are good. They’ll be invaluable. If it’s any salve to your pride, they weren’t originally picked to go with you: they were picked as a reserve team in case you – um – well –’

‘I see.’ The lack of conviction in Miller’s voice was total.

‘All clear then?’

‘Not quite,’ Mallory said. ‘Who’s in charge?’

Jensen said in genuine surprise: ‘You are, of course.’

‘So.’ Mallory spoke quietly and pleasantly. ‘I understand the training emphasis today – especially in the Marine Commandos – is on initiative, self-reliance, independence in thought and action. Fine – if they happen to be caught out on their own.’ He smiled, almost deprecatingly. ‘Otherwise I shall expect immediate, unquestioning and total compliance with orders. My orders. Instant and total.’

‘And if not?’ Reynolds asked.

‘A superfluous question. Sergeant. You know the wartime penalty for disobeying an officer in the field.’

‘Does that apply to your friends, too?’

‘No.’

Reynolds turned to Jensen. ‘I don’t think I like that, sir.’

Mallory sank wearily into a chair, lit a cigarette, nodded at Reynolds and said, ‘Replace him.’

‘What!’ Jensen was incredulous.

‘Replace him, I said. We haven’t even left and already he’s questioning my judgement. What’s it going to be like in action? He’s dangerous. I’d rather carry a ticking time-bomb with me.’

‘Now, look here, Mallory –’

‘Replace him or replace me.’

‘And me,’ Andrea said quietly.

‘And me,’ Miller added.

There was a brief and far from companionable silence in the room, then Reynolds approached Mallory’s chair.

‘Sir.’

Mallory looked at him without encouragement.

‘I’m sorry,’ Reynolds went on. ‘I stepped out of line. I will never make the same mistake twice. I want to go on this trip, sir.’

Mallory glanced at Andrea and Miller. Miller’s face registered only his shock at Reynolds’s incredibly foolhardy enthusiasm for action. Andrea, impassive as ever, nodded almost imperceptibly. Mallory smiled and said: ‘As Captain Jensen said, I’m sure you’ll be a great asset.’

‘Well, that’s it, then.’ Jensen affected not to notice the almost palpable relaxation of tension in the room. ‘Sleep’s the thing now. But first I’d like a few minutes – report on Navarone, you know.’ He looked at the three sergeants. ‘Confidential, I’m afraid.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Reynolds said. ‘Shall we go down to the field, check flight plans, weather, parachutes and supplies?’

Jensen nodded. As the three sergeants closed the double doors behind them, Jensen crossed to a side door, opened it and said: ‘Come in, General.’

The man who entered was very tall, very gaunt. He was probably about thirty-five, but looked a great deal older. The care, the exhaustion, the endless privations inseparable from too many years’ ceaseless struggle for survival had heavily silvered the once-black hair and deeply etched into the swarthy, sunburnt face the lines of physical and mental suffering. The eyes were dark and glowing and intense, the hypnotic eyes of a man inspired by a fanatical dedication to some as yet unrealized ideal. He was dressed in a British Army officer’s uniform, bereft of insignia and badges.

Jensen said: ‘Gentlemen, General Vukalovic. The general is second-in-command of the Partisan forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The RAF flew him out yesterday. He is here as a Partisan doctor seeking medical supplies. His true identity is known only to us. General, those are your men.’

Vukalovic looked them over severally and steadily, his face expressionless. He said: ‘Those are tired men, Captain Jensen. So much depends … too tired to do what has to be done.’

‘He’s right, you know,’ Miller said earnestly.

‘There’s maybe a little mileage left in them yet,’ Jensen said mildly. ‘It’s a long haul from Navarone. Now then –’

‘Navarone?’ Vukalovic interrupted. ‘These – these are the men –’

‘An unlikely-looking lot, I agree.’

‘Perhaps I was wrong about them.’

‘No, you weren’t, General,’ Miller said. ‘We’re exhausted. We’re completely –’

‘Do you mind?’ Jensen said acidly. ‘Captain Mallory, with two exceptions the General will be the only person in Bosnia who knows who you are and what you are doing. Whether the General reveals the identity of the others is entirely up to him. General Vukalovic will be accompanying you to Yugoslavia, but not in the same plane.’

‘Why not?’ Mallory asked.

‘Because his plane will be returning. Yours won’t.’

‘Ah!’ Mallory said. There was a brief silence while he, Andrea and Miller absorbed the significance behind Jensen’s words. Abstractedly, Andrea threw some more wood on the sinking fire and looked around for a poker: but the only poker was the one that Reynolds had already bent into a ‘U’-shape. Andrea picked it up. Absent-mindedly, effortlessly, Andrea straightened it out, poked the fire into a blaze and laid the poker down, a performance Vukalovic watched with a very thoughtful expression on his face.

Jensen went on: ‘Your plane, Captain Mallory, will not be returning because your plane is expendable in the interests of authenticity.’

‘Us, too?’ Miller asked.

‘You won’t be able to accomplish very much, Corporal Miller, without actually putting your feet on the ground. Where you’re going, no plane can possibly land: so you jump – and the plane crashes.’

‘That sounds very authentic,’ Miller muttered.

Jensen ignored him. ‘The realities of total war are harsh beyond belief. Which is why I sent those three youngsters on their way – I don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm.’

‘Mine’s water-logged,’ Miller said dolefully.

‘Oh, do be quiet. Now, it would be fine if, by way of a bonus, you could discover why eighty per cent of our air-drops fall into German hands, fine if you could locate and rescue our captured mission leaders. But not important. Those supplies, those agents are militarily expendable. What are not expendable are the seven thousand men under the command of General Vukalovic here, seven thousand men trapped in an area called the Zenica Cage, seven thousand starving men with almost no ammunition left, seven thousand men with no future.’

‘We can help them?’ Andrea asked heavily. ‘Six men?’

Jensen said candidly: ‘I don’t know.’

‘But you have a plan?’

‘Not yet. Not as such. The glimmerings of an idea. No more.’ Jensen rubbed his forehead wearily. ‘I myself arrived from Alexandria only six hours ago.’ He hesitated, then shrugged. ‘By tonight, who knows? A few hours’ sleep this afternoon might transform us all. But, first, the report on Navarone. It would be pointless for you three other gentlemen to wait – there are sleeping quarters down the hall. I daresay Captain Mallory can tell me all I want to know.’

Mallory waited till the door closed behind Andrea, Miller and Vukalovic and said: ‘Where shall I begin my report, sir?’

‘What report?’

‘Navarone, of course.’

‘The hell with Navarone. That’s over and done with.’ He picked up his cane, crossed to the wall, pulled down two more maps. ‘Now, then.’

‘You – you have a plan,’ Mallory said carefully.

‘Of course I have a plan,’ Jensen said coldly. He rapped the map in front of him. ‘Ten miles north of here. The Gustav Line. Right across Italy along the line of the Sangro and Liri rivers. Here the Germans have the most impregnable defensive positions in the history of modern warfare. Monte Cassino here – our finest Allied divisions have broken on it, some for ever. And here – the Anzio beachhead. Fifty thousand Americans fighting for their lives. For five solid months now we’ve been battering our heads against the Gustav Line and the Anzio perimeter. Our losses in men and machines – incalculable. Our gains – not one solitary inch.’

Mallory said diffidently: ‘You mentioned something about Yugoslavia, sir.’

‘I’m coming to that,’ Jensen said with restraint. ‘Now, our only hope of breaching the Gustav Line is by weakening the German defensive forces and the only way we can do that is by persuading them to withdraw some of their front-line divisions. So we practise the Allenby technique.’

‘I see.’

‘You don’t see at all. General Allenby, Palestine, 1918. He had an east-west line from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. He planned to attack from the west – so he convinced the Turks the attack was coming from the east. He did this by building up in the east a huge city of army tents occupied by only a few hundred men who came out and dashed around like beavers whenever enemy planes came over on reconnaissance. He did this by letting the same planes see large army truck convoys pouring to the east all day long – what the Turks didn’t know was that the same convoys poured back to the west all night long. He even had fifteen thousand canvas dummies of horses built. Well, we’re doing the same.’

‘Fifteen thousand canvas horses?’

‘Very, very amusing.’ Jensen rapped the map again. ‘Every airfield between here and Bari is jammed with dummy bombers and gliders. Outside Foggia is the biggest military encampment in Italy – occupied by two hundred men. The harbours of Bari and Taranto are crowded with assault landing craft, the whole lot made of plywood. All day long columns of trucks and tanks converge on the Adriatic coast. If you, Mallory, were in the German High Command, what would you make of this?’

‘I’d suspect an airborne and sea invasion of Yugoslavia. But I wouldn’t be sure.’

The German reaction exactly,’ Jensen said with some satisfaction. ‘They’re badly worried, worried to the extent that they have already transferred two divisions from Italy to Yugoslavia to meet the threat.’

‘But they’re not certain?’

‘Not quite. But almost.’ Jensen cleared his throat. ‘You see, our four captured mission leaders were all carrying unmistakable evidence pointing to an invasion of Central Yugoslavia in early May.’

‘They carried evidence –’ Mallory broke off, looked at Jensen for a long and speculative moment, then went on quietly: ‘And how did the Germans manage to capture them all?’

‘We told them they were coming.’

‘You did what!’

‘Volunteers all, volunteers all,’ Jensen said quickly. There were, apparently, some of the harsher realities of total war that even he didn’t care to dwell on too long. ‘And it will be your job, my boy, to turn near-conviction into absolute certainty.’ Seemingly oblivious of the fact that Mallory was regarding him with a marked lack of enthusiasm, he wheeled round dramatically and stabbed his cane at a large-scale map of Central Yugoslavia.

‘The valley of the Neretva,’ Jensen said. ‘The vital sector of the main north-south route through Yugoslavia. Whoever controls this valley controls Yugoslavia – and no one knows this better than the Germans. If the blow falls, they know it must fall here. They are fully aware that an invasion of Yugoslavia is on the cards, they are terrified of a link-up between the Allies and the Russians advancing from the east and they know that any such link-up must be along this valley. They already have two armoured divisions along the Neretva, two divisions that, in the event of invasion, could be wiped out in a night. From the north – here – they are trying to force their way south to the Neretva with a whole army corps – but the only way is through the Zenica Cage here. And Vukalovic and his seven thousand men block the way.’

‘Vukalovic knows about this?’ Mallory asked. ‘About what you really have in mind, I mean?’

‘Yes. And the Partisan command. They know the risks, the odds against them. They accept them.’

‘Photographs?’ Mallory asked.

‘Here.’ Jensen pulled some photographs from a desk drawer, selected one and smoothed it out on the table. ‘This is the Zenica Cage. Well named: a perfect cage, a perfect trap. To the north and west, impassable mountains. To the east, the Neretva dam and the Neretva gorge. To the south, the Neretva river. To the north of the cage here, at the Zenica gap, the German 11th Army Corps is trying to break through. To the west here – they call it the West Gap – more units of the 11th trying to do the same. And to the south here, over the river and hidden in the trees, two armoured divisions under a General Zimmermann.’

‘And this?’ Mallory pointed to a thin black line spanning the river just north of the two armoured divisions.

‘That,’ Jensen said thoughtfully, ‘is the bridge at Neretva.’

Close-up, the bridge at Neretva looked vastly more impressive than it had done in the large-scale photograph: it was a massively cantilevered structure in solid steel, with a black asphalt roadway laid on top. Below the bridge rushed the swiftly-flowing Neretva, greenish-white in colour and swollen with melting snow. To the south there was a narrow strip of green meadowland bordering the river and, to the south of this again, a dark and towering pine forest began. In the safe concealment of the forest’s gloomy depths, General Zimmermann’s two armoured divisions crouched waiting.

Parked close to the edge of the wood was the divisional command radio truck, a bulky and very long vehicle so beautifully camouflaged as to be invisible at more than twenty paces.

General Zimmermann and his ADC, Captain Warburg, were at that moment inside the truck. Their mood appeared to match the permanent twilight of the woods. Zimmermann had one of those high-foreheaded, lean and aquiline and intelligent faces which so rarely betray any emotion, but there was no lack of emotion now, no lack of anxiety and impatience as he removed his cap and ran his hand through his thinning grey hair. He said to the radio operator seated behind the big transceiver:

‘No word yet? Nothing?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘You are in constant touch with Captain Neufeld’s camp?’

‘Every minute, sir.’

‘And his operator is keeping a continuous radio watch?’

‘All the time, sir. Nothing. Just nothing.’

Zimmermann turned and descended the steps, followed by Warburg. He walked, head down, until he was out of earshot of the truck, then said: ‘Damn it! Damn it! God damn it all!’

‘You’re as sure as that, sir.’ Warburg was tall, good-looking, flaxen-haired and thirty, and his face at the moment reflected a nice balance of apprehension and unhappiness. ‘That they’re coming?’

‘It’s in my bones, my boy. One way or another it’s coming, coming for all of us.’

‘You can’t be sure, sir,’ Warburg protested.

‘True enough.’ Zimmermann sighed. ‘I can’t be sure. But I’m sure of this. If they do come, if the 11th Army Group can’t break through from the north, if we can’t wipe out those damned Partisans in the Zenica Cage –’

Warburg waited for him to continue, but Zimmermann seemed lost in reverie. Apparently apropos of nothing, Warburg said: ‘I’d like to see Germany again, sir. Just once more.’

‘Wouldn’t we all, my boy, wouldn’t we all.’ Zimmermann walked slowly to the edge of the wood and stopped. For a long time he gazed out over the bridge at Neretva. Then he shook his head, turned and was almost at once lost to sight in the dark depths of the forest.

The pine fire in the great fireplace in the drawing-room in Termoli was burning low. Jensen threw on some more logs, straightened, poured two drinks and handed one to Mallory.

Jensen said: ‘Well?’

‘That’s the plan?’ No hint of his incredulity, of his near-despair, showed in Mallory’s impassive face. ‘That’s all of the plan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your health.’ Mallory paused. ‘And mine.’ After an even longer pause he said reflectively: ‘It should be interesting to watch Dusty Miller’s reactions when he hears this little lot this evening.’

As Mallory had said, Miller’s reactions were interesting, even if wholly predictable. Some six hours later, clad now, like Mallory and Andrea, in British Army uniform, Miller listened in visibly growing horror as Jensen outlined what he considered should be their proposed course of action in the next twenty-four hours or so. When he had finished, Jensen looked directly at Miller and said: ‘Well? Feasible?’

‘Feasible?’ Miller was aghast. ‘It’s suicidal!’

‘Andrea?’

‘Andrea shrugged, lifted his hands palms upwards and said nothing.

Jensen nodded and said: ‘I’m sorry, but I’m fresh out of options. We’d better go. The others are waiting at the airstrip.’

Andrea and Miller left the room, began to walk down the long passageway. Mallory hesitated in the doorway, momentarily blocking it, then turned to face Jensen who was watching him with a surprised lift of the eyebrows.

Mallory said in a low voice: ‘Let me tell Andrea, at least.’

Jensen looked at him for a considering moment or two, shook his head briefly and brushed by into the corridor.

Twenty minutes later, without a further word being spoken, the four men arrived at the Termoli airstrip to find Vukalovic and two sergeants waiting for them: the third, Reynolds, was already at the controls of his Wellington, one of them standing at the end of the airstrip, propellers already turning. Ten minutes later both planes were airborne, Vukalovic in one, Mallory, Miller, Andrea, and the three sergeants in the other, each plane bound for its separate destination.

Jensen, alone on the tarmac, watched both planes climbing, his straining eyes following them until they disappeared into the overcast darkness of the moonless sky above. Then, just as General Zimmermann had done that afternoon, he shook his head in slow finality, turned and walked heavily away.

THREE

Friday

0030–0200

Sergeant Reynolds, Mallory reflected, certainly knew how to handle a plane, especially this one. Although his eyes showed him to be always watchful and alert, he was precise, competent, calm and relaxed in everything he did. No less competent was Groves: the poor light and cramped confines of his tiny plotting-table clearly didn’t worry him at all and as an air navigator he was quite clearly as experienced as he was proficient. Mallory peered forward through the windscreen, saw the white-capped waters of the Adriatic rushing by less than a hundred feet beneath their fuselage, and turned to Groves.

‘The flight plan calls for us to fly as low as this?’

‘Yes. The Germans have radar installations on some of the outlying islands off the Yugoslav coast. We start climbing when we reach Dalmatia.’

Mallory nodded his thanks, turned to watch Reynolds again. He said, curiously: ‘Captain Jensen was right about you. As a pilot. How on earth does a Marine Commando come to learn to drive one of those things?’

‘I’ve had plenty of practice,’ Reynolds said. ‘Three years in the RAF, two of them as sergeantpilot in a Wellington bomber squadron. One day in Egypt I took a Lysander up without permission. People did it all the time – but the crate I’d picked had a defective fuel gauge.’

‘You were grounded?’

‘With great speed.’ He grinned. ‘There were no objections when I applied for a service transfer. I think they felt I wasn’t somehow quite right for the RAF.’

Mallory looked at Groves. ‘And you?’

Groves smiled broadly. ‘I was his navigator in that old crate. We were fired on the same day.’

Mallory said consideringly: ‘Well, I should think that might be rather useful.’

‘What’s useful?’ Reynolds asked.

‘The fact that you’re used to this feeling of disgrace. It’ll enable you to act your part all the better when the time comes. If the time comes.’

Reynolds said carefully: ‘I’m not quite sure –’

‘Before we jump, I want you – all of you – to remove every distinguishing badge or emblem of rank on your clothes.’ He gestured to Andrea and Miller at the rear of the flight-deck to indicate that they were included as well, then looked at Reynolds again. ‘Sergeants’ stripes, regimental flashes, medal ribbons – the lot.’

‘Why the hell should I?’ Reynolds, Mallory thought, had the lowest boiling-point he’d come across in quite some time. ‘I earned those stripes, those ribbons, that flash. I don’t see –’

Mallory smiled. ‘Disobeying an officer on active service?’

‘Don’t be so damned touchy,’ Reynolds said.

‘Don’t be so damned touchy, sir.’

‘Don’t be so damned touchy, sir.’ Reynolds suddenly grinned. ‘O?, so who’s got the scissors?’

‘You see,’ Mallory explained, ‘the last thing we want to happen is to fall into enemy hands.’

‘Amen,’ Miller intoned.

‘But if we’re to get the information we want we’re going to have to operate close to or even inside their lines. We might get caught. So we have our cover story.’

Groves said quietly: ‘Are we permitted to know just what that cover story is, sir?’

‘Of course you are,’ Mallory said in exasperation. He went on earnestly: ‘Don’t you realize that, on a mission like this, survival depends on one thing and one thing only – complete and mutual trust? As soon as we start having secrets from each other – we’re finished.’

In the deep gloom at the rear of the flight-deck, Andrea and Miller glanced at each other and exchanged their wearily cynical smiles.

As Mallory left the flight-deck for the fuselage, his right hand brushed Miller’s shoulder. After about two minutes Miller yawned, stretched and made his way aft. Mallory was waiting towards the rear of the fuselage. He had two pieces of folded paper in his hand, one of which he opened and showed to Miller, snapping on a flashlight at the same time. Miller stared at it for some moments, then lifted an eyebrow.

‘And what is this supposed to be?’

‘It’s the triggering mechanism for a 1,500-pound submersible mine. Learn it by heart.’

Miller looked at it without expression, then glanced at the other paper Mallory held.

‘And what have you there?’

Mallory showed him. It was a large-scale map, the central feature of which appeared to be a winding lake with a very long eastern arm which bent abruptly at right-angles into a very short southern arm, which in turn ended abruptly at what appeared to be a dam wall. Beneath the dam, a river flowed away through a winding gorge.

Mallory said: ‘What does it look like to you? Show them both to Andrea and tell him to destroy them.’

Mallory left Miller engrossed in his homework and moved forward again to the flight-deck. He bent over Groves’s chart table.

‘Still on course?’

‘Yes, sir. We’re just clearing the southern tip of the island of Hvar. You can see a few lights on the mainland ahead.’ Mallory followed the pointing hand, located a few clusters of lights, then reached out a hand to steady himself as the Wellington started to climb sharply. He glanced at Reynolds.

‘Climbing now, sir. There’s some pretty lofty stuff ahead. We should pick up the Partisan landing lights in about half an hour.’

‘Thirty-three minutes,’ Groves said. ‘One-twenty, near enough.’

For almost half an hour Mallory remained on a jump-seat in the flight-deck, just looking ahead. After a few minutes Andrea disappeared and did not reappear. Miller did not return. Groves navigated, Reynolds flew, Saunders listened in to his portable transceiver and nobody talked at all. At one-fifteen Mallory rose, touched Saunders on the shoulders, told him to pack up his gear and headed aft. He found Andrea and a thoroughly miserable-looking Miller with their parachute snap-catches already clipped on to the jumping wire. Andrea had the door pulled back and was throwing out tiny pieces of shredded paper which swirled away in the slipstream. Mallory shivered in the suddenly intense cold. Andrea grinned, beckoned him to the open doorway and pointed downwards. He yelled in Mallory’s ear: ‘There’s a lot of snow down there.’

There was indeed a lot of snow down there. Mallory understood now Jensen’s insistence on not landing a plane in those parts. The terrain below was rugged in the extreme, consisting almost entirely of a succession of deep and winding valleys and steep-sided mountains. Maybe half of the landscape below was covered in dense forests of pine trees: all of it was covered in what appeared to be a very heavy blanket of snow. Mallory drew back into the comparative shelter of the Wellington’s fuselage and glanced at his watch.

‘One-sixteen.’ Like Andrea, he had to shout.

‘Your watch is a little fast, maybe?’ Miller bawled unhappily. Mallory shook his head, Miller shook his. A bell rang and Mallory made his way to the flight-deck, passing Saunders going the other way. As Mallory entered, Reynolds looked briefly over his shoulder, then pointed directly ahead. Mallory bent over his shoulder and peered forwards and downwards. He nodded.

The three lights, in the form of an elongated V, were still some miles ahead, but quite unmistakable. Mallory turned, touched Groves on the shoulder and pointed aft. Groves rose and left. Mallory said to Reynolds: ‘Where are the red and green jumping lights?’

Reynolds indicated them.

‘Press the red light. How long?’

‘Thirty seconds. About.’

Mallory looked ahead again. The lights were less than half as distant as they had been when first he’d looked. He said to Reynolds: ‘Automatic pilot. Close the fuel switches.’

‘Close the – for the petrol that’s left –’

‘Shut off the bloody tanks! And get aft. Five seconds.’

Reynolds did as he was told. Mallory waited, briefly made a last check of the landing lights ahead, pressed the green light button, rose and made his way swiftly aft. By the time he reached the jump door, even Reynolds, the last of the first five, was gone. Mallory clipped on his snap-catch, braced his hands round the edge of the doorway and launched himself out into the bitter Bosnian night.

The sudden jarring impact from the parachute harness made him look quickly upwards: the concave circle of a fully open parachute was a reassuring spectacle. He glanced downwards and saw the equally reassuring spectacle of another five open parachutes, two of which were swaying quite wildly across the sky – just as was his own. There were some things, he reflected, about which he, Andrea and Miller had a great deal to learn. Controlling parachute descents was one of those things.

He looked up and to the east to see if he could locate the Wellington, but it was no longer visible. Suddenly, as he looked and listened, both engines, almost in perfect unison, cut out. Long seconds passed when the only sound was the rush of the wind in his ears, then there came an explosively metallic sound as the bomber crashed either into the ground or into some unseen mountainside ahead. There was no fire or none that he could see: just the crash, then silence. For the first time that night, the moon broke through.

Andrea landed heavily on an uneven piece of ground, rolled over twice, rose rather experimentally to his feet, discovered he was still intact, pressed the quick-release button of his parachute, then automatically, instinctively – Andrea had a built-in computer for assuring survival – swung through a complete 360° circle. But no immediate danger threatened, or none that he could see. Andrea made a more leisurely survey of their landing spot.

They had, he thought grimly, been most damnably lucky. Another hundred yards to the south and they’d have spent the rest of the night, and for all he knew, the rest of the war, clinging to the tops of the most impossibly tall pine trees he had ever seen. As it was, luck had been with them and they had landed in a narrow clearing which abutted closely on the rocky scarp of a mountainside.

Or rather, all but one. Perhaps fifty yards from where Andrea had landed, an apex of the forest elbowed its way into the clearing. The outermost tree in this apex had come between one of the parachutists and terra firma. Andrea’s eyebrows lifted in quizzical astonishment, then he broke into an ambling run.

The parachutist who had come to grief was dangling from the lowermost bough of the pine. He had his hands twisted in the shrouds, his legs bent, knees and ankles close together in the classic landing position, his feet perhaps thirty inches from the ground. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Corporal Miller seemed acutely unhappy.

Andrea came up and touched him on the shoulder, gently. Miller opened his eyes and glanced at Andrea, who pointed downwards. Miller followed his glance and lowered his legs, which were then four inches from the ground. Andrea produced a knife, sliced through the shrouds and Miller completed the remainder of his journey. He straightened his jacket, his face splendidly impassive, and lifted an enquiring elbow. Andrea, his face equally impassive, pointed down the clearing. Three of the other four parachutists had already landed safely: the fourth, Mallory, was just touching down.

Two minutes later, just as all six were coming together some little distance away from the most easterly landing flare, a shout announced the appearance of a young soldier running towards them from the edge of the forest. The parachutists’ guns came up and were almost immediately lowered again: this was no occasion for guns. The soldier was trailing his by the barrel, excitedly waving his free hand in greeting. He was dressed in a faded and tattered near-uniform that had been pillaged from a variety of armies, had long flowing hair, a cast to his right eye and a straggling ginger beard. That he was welcoming them, was beyond doubt. Repeating some incomprehensible greeting over and over again, he shook hands all round and then a second time, the huge grin on his face reflecting his delight.

Within thirty seconds he’d been joined by at least a dozen others, all bearded, all dressed in the same nondescript uniforms, no two of which were alike, all in the same almost festive mood. Then, as at a signal almost, they fell silent and drew slightly apart as the man who was obviously their leader appeared from the edge of the forest. He bore little resemblance to his men. He differed in that he was completely shaven and wore a uniform, a British battledress, which appeared to be all of one piece. He differed in that he was not smiling: he had about him the air of one who was seldom if ever given to smiling. He also differed from the others in that he was a hawk-faced giant of a man, at least six feet four inches in height, carrying no fewer than four wicked-looking Bowie-type knives in his belt – an excess of armament that on another man might have looked incongruous or even comical but which on this man provoked no mirth at all. His face was dark and sombre and when he spoke it was in English, slow and stilted, but precise.

‘Good evening.’ He looked round questioningly. ‘I am Captain Droshny.’

Mallory took a step forward. ‘Captain Mallory.’

‘Welcome to Yugoslavia, Captain Mallory – Partisan Yugoslavia.’ Droshny nodded towards the dying flare, his face twitched in what may have been an attempt at a smile, but he made no move to shake hands. ‘As you can see, we were expecting you.’

‘Your lights were a great help,’ Mallory acknowledged.

‘Thank you.’ Droshny stared away to the east, then back to Mallory, shaking his head. ? pity about the plane.’

‘All war is a pity.’

Droshny nodded. ‘Come. Our headquarters is close by.’

No more was said. Droshny, leading, moved at once into the shelter of the forest. Mallory, behind him, was intrigued by the footprints, clearly visible in the now bright moonlight, left by Droshny in the deep snow. They were, thought Mallory, most peculiar. Each sole left three V-shaped marks, the heel one: the right-hand side of the leading V on the right sole had a clearly defined break in it. Unconsciously, Mallory filed away this little oddity in his mind. There was no reason why he should have done so other than that the Mallorys of this world always observe and record the unusual. It helps them to stay alive.

The slope steepened, the snow deepened and the pale moonlight filtered thinly down through the spreading, snow-laden branches of the pines. The light wind was from the east: the cold was intense. For almost ten minutes no voice was heard, then Droshny’s came, softly but clearly and imperative in its staccato urgency.

‘Be still.’ He pointed dramatically upward. ‘Be still! Listen!’

They stopped, looked upward and listened intently. At least, Mallory and his men looked upward and listened intently, but the Yugoslavs had other things on their minds: swiftly, efficiently and simultaneously, without either spoken or gestured command being given, they rammed the muzzles of their machine-guns and rifles into the sides and backs of the six parachutists with a force and uncompromising authority that rendered any accompanying orders quite superfluous.

The six men reacted as might have been expected. Reynolds, Groves and Saunders, who were rather less accustomed to the vicissitudes of fate than their three older companions, registered a very similar combination of startled anger and open-mouthed astonishment. Mallory looked thoughtful. Miller lifted a quizzical eyebrow. Andrea, predictably, registered nothing at all: he was too busy exhibiting his usual reaction to physical violence.

His right hand, which he had instantly lifted halfway to his shoulder in an apparent token of surrender, clamped down on the barrel of the rifle of the guard to his right, forcing it away from him, while his left elbow jabbed viciously into the solar plexus of the guard to his left, who gasped in pain and staggered back a couple of paces. Andrea, with both hands now on the rifle of the other guard, wrenched it effortlessly free, lifted it high and brought the barrel down in one continuous blur of movement. The guard collapsed as if a bridge had fallen on him. The winded guard to the left, still bent and whooping in agony, was trying to line up his rifle when the butt of Andrea’s rifle struck him in the face: he made a brief coughing sound and fell senseless to the forest floor.

It took all of the three seconds that this action had lasted for the Yugoslavs to release themselves from their momentary thrall of incredulity. Half-a-dozen soldiers flung themselves on Andrea, bearing him to the ground. In the furious, rolling struggle that followed, Andrea laid about him in his usual willing fashion, but when one of the Yugoslavs started pounding him on the head with the barrel of a pistol, Andrea opted for discretion and lay still. With two guns in his back and four hands on either arm Andrea was dragged to his feet: two of his captors already looked very much the worse for wear.

Droshny, his eyes bleak and bitter, came up to Andrea, unsheathed one of his knives and thrust its point against Andrea’s throat with a force savage enough to break the skin and draw blood that trickled on to the gleaming blade. For a moment it seemed that Droshny would push the knife home to the hilt, then his eyes moved sideways and downwards to look at the two huddled men lying in the snow. He nodded to the nearest man.

‘How are they?’

A young Yugoslav dropped to his knees, looked first at the man who had been struck by the rifle-barrel, touched his head briefly, examined the second man, then stood up. In the filtered moonlight, his face was unnaturally pale.

‘Josef is dead. I think his neck is broken. And his brother – he’s breathing – but his jaw seems to be –’ The voice trailed away uncertainly.

Droshny transferred his gaze back to Andrea. His lips drew back, he smiled the way a wolf smiles and leaned a little harder on the knife.

‘I should kill you now. I will kill you later.’ He sheathed his knife, held up his clawed hands in front of Andrea’s face, and shouted: ‘Personally. With those hands.’

‘With those hands.’ Slowly, meaningly, Andrea examined the four pairs of hands pinioning his arms, then looked contemptuously at Droshny. He said: ‘Your courage terrifies me.’

There was a brief and unbelieving silence. The three young sergeants stared at the tableau before them with faces reflecting various degrees of consternation and incredulity. Mallory and Miller looked on impassively. For a moment or two, Droshny looked as if he hadn’t heard aright, then his face twisted in savage anger as he struck Andrea backhanded across the face. Immediately a trickle of blood appeared at the right-hand corner of Andrea’s mouth but Andrea himself remained unmoving, his face without expression.

Droshny’s eyes narrowed. Andrea smiled again, briefly. Droshny struck again, this time with the back of the other hand. The effect was as before, with the exception that this time the trickle of blood came from the left-hand corner of the mouth. Andrea smiled again but to look into his eyes was to look into an open grave. Droshny wheeled and walked away, then halted as he approached Mallory.

‘You are the leader of those men, Captain Mallory?’

‘I am.’

‘You’re a very – silent leader, Captain?’

‘What am I to say to a man who turns his guns on his friends and allies?’ Mallory looked at him dispassionately. ‘I’ll talk to your commanding officer, not to a madman.’

Droshny’s face darkened. He stepped forward, his arm lifted to strike. Very quickly, but so smoothly and calmly that the movement seemed unhurried, and totally ignoring the two rifle-muzzles pressing into his side, Mallory lifted his Luger and pointed it at Droshny’s face. The click of the Luger safety-catch being released came like a hammer-blow in the suddenly unnatural intensity of silence.

And unnatural intensity of silence there was. Except for one little movement, so slow as to be almost imperceptible, both Partisans and parachutists had frozen into a tableau that would have done credit to the frieze on an Ionic temple. The three sergeants, like most of the Partisans, registered astonished incredulity. The two men guarding Mallory looked at Droshny with questioning eyes. Droshny looked at Mallory as if he were mad. Andrea wasn’t looking at anyone, while Miller wore that look of world-weary detachment which only he could achieve. But it was Miller who made that one little movement, a movement that now came to an end with his thumb resting on his Schmeisser’s safety-release. After a moment or two he removed his thumb: there would come a time for Schmeissers, but this wasn’t it.

Droshny lowered his hand in a curious slow-motion gesture and took two paces backwards. His face was still dark with anger, the dark eyes cruel and unforgiving, but he had himself well in hand. He said: ‘Don’t you know we have to take precautions? Till we are satisfied with your identity?’

‘How should I know that?’ Mallory nodded at Andrea. ‘Next time you tell your men to take precautions with my friend here, you might warn them to stand a little farther back. He reacted the only way he knows how. And I know why.’

‘You can explain later. Hand over your guns.’

‘No.’ Mallory returned the Luger to its holster.

‘Are you mad? I can take them from you.’

‘That’s so,’ Mallory said reasonably. ‘But you’d have to kill us first, wouldn’t you? I don’t think you’d remain a captain very long, my friend.’

Speculation replaced anger in Droshny’s eyes. He gave a sharp order in Serbo-Croat and again his soldiers levelled their guns at Mallory and his five companions. But they made no attempt to remove the prisoners’ guns. Droshny turned, gestured and started moving up the steeply-sloping forest floor again. Droshny wasn’t, Mallory reflected, a man likely to be given to taking too many chances.

For twenty minutes they scrambled awkwardly up the slippery hillside. A voice called out from the darkness ahead and Droshny answered without breaking step. They passed by two sentries armed with machine-carbines and, within a minute, were in Droshny’s HQ.

It was a moderately-sized military encampment – if a wide circle of rough-hewn adze-cut cabins could be called an encampment – set in one of those very deep hollows in the forest floor that Mallory was to find so characteristic of the Bosnian area. From the base of this hollow grew two concentric rings of pines far taller and more massive than anything to be found in western Europe, massive pines whose massive branches interlocked eighty to a hundred feet above the ground, forming a snow-shrouded canopy of such impenetrable density that there wasn’t even a dusting of snow on the hard-packed earth of the camp compound: by the same token, the same canopy also effectively prevented any upward escape of light: there was no attempt at any black-out in several illuminated cabin windows and there were even some oil lamps suspended on outside hooks to illuminate the compound itself. Droshny stopped and said to Mallory:

‘You come with me. The rest of you stay here.’

He led Mallory towards the door of the largest hut in the compound. Andrea, unbidden, slipped off his pack and sat on it, and the others, after various degrees of hesitation, did the same. Their guards looked them over uncertainly, then withdrew to form a ragged but watchful semi-circle. Reynolds turned to Andrea, the expression on his face registering a complete absence of admiration and goodwill.

‘You’re crazy.’ Reynolds’s voice came in a low, furious whisper. ‘Crazy as a loon. You could have got yourself killed. You could have got all of us killed. What are you, shell-shocked or something?’

Andrea did not reply. He lit one of his obnoxious cigars and regarded Reynolds with mild speculation or as near an approach to mildness as it was possible for him to achieve.

‘Crazy isn’t half the word for it.’ Groves, if anything, was even more heated than Reynolds. ‘Or didn’t you know that was a Partisan you killed? Don’t you know what that means? Don’t you know people like that must always take precautions?’

Whether he knew or not, Andrea wasn’t saying. He puffed at his cigar and transferred his peaceable gaze from Reynolds to Groves.

Miller said soothingly: ‘Now, now. Don’t be like that. Maybe Andrea was a mite hasty but –’

‘God help us all,’ Reynolds said fervently. He looked at his fellow-sergeants in despair. ‘A thousand miles from home and help and saddled with a trigger-happy bunch of has-beens.’ He turned back to Miller and mimicked: ‘“Don’t be like that.”‘

Miller assumed his wounded expression and looked away.

The room was large and bare and comfortless. The only concession to comfort was a pine fire crackling in a rough hearth-place. The only furniture consisted of a cracked deal table, two chairs and a bench.

Those things Mallory noted only subconsciously. He didn’t even register when he heard Droshny say: ‘Captain Mallory. This is my commanding officer.’ He seemed to be too busy staring at the man seated behind the table.

The man was short, stocky and in his mid-thirties. The deep lines around eyes and mouth could have been caused by weather or humour or both: just at that moment he was smiling slightly. He was dressed in the uniform of a captain in the German Army and wore an Iron Cross at his throat.

FOUR

Friday

0200–0330

The German captain leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. He had the air of a man enjoying the passing moment.

‘Hauptmann Neufeld, Captain Mallory.’ He looked at the places on Mallory’s uniform where the missing insignia should have been. ‘Or so I assume. You are surprised to see me?’

‘I am delighted to meet you, Hauptmann Neufeld.’ Mallory’s astonishment had given way to the beginnings of a long, slow smile and now he sighed in deep relief. ‘You just can’t imagine how delighted.’ Still smiling, he turned to Droshny, and at once the smile gave way to an expression of consternation. ‘But who are you? Who is this man, Hauptmann Neufeld? Who in the name of God are those men out there? They must be – they must be -’

Droshny interrupted heavily: ‘One of his men killed one of my men tonight.’

‘What!’ Neufeld, the smile now in turn vanishing from his face, stood abruptly: the backs of his legs sent his chair crashing to the floor. Mallory ignored him, looked again at Droshny.

‘Who are you? For God’s sake, tell me!’

Droshny said slowly: ‘They call us Cetniks.’

‘Cetniks? Cetniks? What on earth are Cetniks?’

‘You will forgive me, Captain, if I smile in weary disbelief.’ Neufeld was back on balance again, and his face had assumed a curiously wary impassivity, an expression in which only the eyes were alive: things, Mallory reflected, unpleasant things could happen to people misguided enough to underrate Hauptmann Neufeld. ‘You? The leader of a special mission to this country and you haven’t been well enough briefed to know that the Cetniks are our Yugoslav allies?’

‘Allies? Ah!’ Mallory’s face cleared in understanding. ‘Traitors? Yugoslav Quislings? Is that it?’

A subterranean rumble came from Droshny’s throat and he moved towards Mallory, his right hand closing round the haft of a knife. Neufeld halted him with a sharp word of command and a brief downward-chopping motion of his hand.

‘And what do you mean by a special mission?’ Mallory demanded. He looked at each man in turn and smiled in wry understanding. ‘Oh, we’re special mission all right, but not in the way you think. At least, not in the way I think you think.’

‘No?’ Neufeld’s eyebrow-raising technique, Mallory reflected, was almost on a par with Miller’s. ‘Then why do you think we were expecting you?’

‘God only knows,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘We thought the Partisans were. That’s why Droshny’s man was killed, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s why Droshny’s man –’ Neufeld regarded Mallory with his warily impassive eyes, picked up his chair and sat down thoughtfully. ‘I think, perhaps, you had better explain yourself.’

As befitted a man who had adventured far and wide in the West End of London, Miller was in the habit of using a napkin when at meals, and he was using one now, tucked into the top of his tunic, as he sat on his rucksack in the compound of Neufeld’s camp and fastidiously consumed some indeterminate goulash from a mess-tin. The three sergeants, seated nearby, briefly observed this spectacle with open disbelief, then resumed a low-voiced conversation. Andrea, puffing the inevitable nostril-wrinkling cigar and totally ignoring half-a-dozen watchful and understandably apprehensive guards, strolled unconcernedly about the compound, poisoning the air wherever he went. Clearly through the frozen night air came the distant sound of someone singing a low-voiced accompaniment to what appeared to be guitar music. As Andrea completed his circuit of the compound, Miller looked up and nodded in the direction of the music.

‘Who’s the soloist?’

Andrea shrugged. ‘Radio, maybe.’

‘They want to buy a new radio. My trained ear –’

‘Listen.’ Reynolds’s interrupting whisper was tense and urgent. ‘We’ve been talking.’

Miller performed some fancy work with his napkin and said kindly: ‘Don’t. Think of the grieving mothers and sweethearts you’d leave behind you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘About making a break for it is what I mean,’ Miller said. ‘Some other time, perhaps?’

‘Why not now?’ Groves was belligerent. ‘They’re off guard –’

‘Are they now.’ Miller sighed. ‘So young, so young. Take another look. You don’t think Andrea likes exercise, do you?’

The three sergeants took another look, furtively, surreptitiously, then glanced interrogatively at Andrea.

‘Five dark windows,’ Andrea said. ‘Behind them, five dark men. With five dark machine-guns.’

Reynolds nodded and looked away.

‘Well, now.’ Neufeld, Mallory noted, had a great propensity for steepling his fingers: Mallory had once known a hanging judge with exactly the same propensity. This is a most remarkably odd story you have to tell us, my dear Captain Mallory.’

‘It is,’ Mallory agreed. ‘It would have to be, wouldn’t it, to account for the remarkably odd position in which we find ourselves at this moment.’

‘A point, a point.’ Slowly, deliberately, Neufeld ticked off other points on his fingers. ‘You have for some months, you claim, been running a penicillin and drug-running ring in the south of Italy. As an Allied liaison officer you found no difficulty in obtaining supplies from American Army and Air Force bases.’

‘We found a little difficulty towards the end,’ Mallory admitted.

‘I’m coming to that. Those supplies, you also claim, were funnelled through to the Wehrmacht.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep using the word “claim” in that tone of voice,’ Mallory said irritably. ‘Check with Field-Marshal Kesselring’s Chief of Military Intelligence in Padua.’

‘With pleasure.’ Neufeld picked up a phone, spoke briefly in German and replaced the receiver.

Mallory said in surprise: ‘You have a direct line to the outside world? From this place?’

‘I have a direct line to a hut fifty yards away where we have a very powerful radio transmitter. So. You further claim that you were caught, court – martialled and were awaiting the confirmation of your death sentence. Right?’

‘If your espionage system in Italy is all we hear it is, you’ll know about it tomorrow,’ Mallory said drily.

‘Quite, quite. You then broke free, killed your guards and overheard agents in the briefing room being briefed on a mission to Bosnia.’ He did some more finger-steepling. ‘You may be telling the truth at that. What did you say their mission was?’

‘I didn’t say. I didn’t really pay attention. It had something to do with locating missing British mission leaders and trying to break your espionage set-up. I’m not sure. We had more important things to think about.’

‘I’m sure you had,’ Neufeld said distastefully. ‘Such as your skins. What happened to your epaulettes, Captain? The medal ribbons? The buttons?’

‘You’ve obviously never attended a British court-martial, Hauptmann Neufeld.’

Neufeld said mildly: ‘You could have ripped them off yourself.’

‘And then, I suppose, emptied three-quarters of the fuel from the tanks before we stole the plane?’

‘Your tanks were only a quarter full?’ Mallory nodded. ‘And your plane crashed without catching fire?’

‘We didn’t mean to crash,’ Mallory said in a weary patience. ‘We meant to land. But we were out of fuel – and, as we know now, at the wrong place.’

Neufeld said absently: ‘Whenever the Partisans put up landing flares we try a few ourselves – and we knew that you – or someone – were coming. No petrol, eh?’ Again Neufeld spoke briefly on the telephone, then turned back to Mallory. ‘All very satisfactory – if true. There just remains to explain the death of Captain Droshny’s man here.’

‘I’m sorry about that. It was a ghastly blunder. But surely you can understand. The last thing we wanted was to land among you, to make direct contact with you. We’ve heard what happens to British parachutists dropping over German territory.’

Neufeld steepled his fingers again. ‘There is a state of war. Proceed.’

‘Our intention was to land in Partisan territory, slip across the lines and give ourselves up. When Droshny turned his guns on us we thought the Partisans were on to us, that they had been notified that we’d stolen the plane. And that could mean only one thing for us.’

‘Wait outside. Captain Droshny and I will join you in a moment.’

Mallory left. Andrea, Miller and the three sergeants were sitting patiently on their rucksacks. From the distance there still came the sound of distant music. For a moment Mallory cocked his head to listen to it, then walked across to join the others. Miller patted his lips delicately with his napkin and looked up at Mallory.

‘Had a cosy chat?’

‘I spun him a yarn. The one we talked about in the plane.’ He looked at the three sergeants. ‘Any of you speak German?’

All three shook their heads.

‘Fine. Forget you speak English too. If you’re questioned you know nothing.’

‘If I’m not questioned,’ Reynolds said bitterly, ‘I still don’t know anything.’

‘All the better,’ Mallory said encouragingly. ‘Then you can never tell anything, can you?’

He broke off and turned round as Neufeld and Droshny appeared in the doorway. Neufeld advanced and said: ‘While we’re waiting for some confirmation, a little food and wine, perhaps.’ As Mallory had done, he cocked his head and listened to the singing. ‘But first of all, you must meet our minstrel boy.’

‘We’ll settle for just the food and wine,’ Andrea said.

‘Your priorities are wrong. You’ll see. Come.’

The dining-hall, if it could be dignified by such a name, was about forty yards away. Neufeld opened the door to reveal a crude and makeshift hut with two rickety trestle tables and four benches set on the earthen floor. At the far end of the room the inevitable pine fire burnt in the inevitable stone hearth-place. Close to the fire, at the end of the farther table, three men – obviously, from their high-collared coats and guns propped by their sides, some kind of temporarily off-duty guards – were drinking coffee and listening to the quiet singing coming from a figure seated on the ground by the fire.

The singer was dressed in a tattered anorak type jacket, an even more incredibly tattered pair of trousers and a pair of knee boots that gaped open at almost every possible seam. There was little to be seen of his face other than a mass of dark hair and a large pair of rimmed dark spectacles.

Beside him, apparently asleep with her head on his shoulder, sat a girl. She was clad in a high-collared British Army greatcoat in an advanced state of dilapidation, so long that it completely covered her tucked-in legs. The uncombed platinum hair spread over her shoulders would have done justice to any Scandinavian, but the broad cheekbones, dark eyebrows and long dark lashes lowered over very pale cheeks were unmistakably Slavonic.

Neufeld advanced across the room and stopped by the fireside. He bent over the singer and said: ‘Petar, I want you to meet some friends.’

Petar lowered his guitar, looked up, then turned and touched the girl on the arm. Instantly, the girl’s head lifted and her eyes, great dark sooty eyes, opened wide. She had the look, almost, of a hunted animal. She glanced around her, almost wildly, then jumped quickly to her feet, dwarfed by the greatcoat which reached almost to her ankles, then reached down to help the guitarist to his feet. As he did so, he stumbled: he was obviously blind.

‘This is Maria,’ Neufeld said. ‘Maria, this is Captain Mallory.’

‘Captain Mallory.’ Her voice was soft and a little husky: she spoke in almost accentless English. ‘You are English, Captain Mallory?’

It was hardly, Mallory thought, the time or the place for proclaiming his New Zealand ancestry. He smiled. ‘Well, sort of.’

Maria smiled in turn. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet an Englishman.’ She stepped forward towards Mallory’s outstretched hand, brushed it aside and struck him, open-handed and with all her strength, across the face.

‘Maria!’ Neufeld stared at her. ‘He’s on our side.’

‘An Englishman and a traitor!’ She lifted her hand again but the swinging arm was suddenly arrested in Andrea’s grip. She struggled briefly, futilely, then subsided, dark eyes glowing in an angry face. Andrea lifted his free hand and rubbed his own cheek in fond recollection.

He said admiringly: ‘By heavens, she reminds me of my own Maria,’ then grinned at Mallory. ‘Very handy with their hands, those Yugoslavs.’

Mallory rubbed his cheek ruefully with his hand and turned to Neufeld. ‘Perhaps Petar – that’s his name –’

‘No.’ Neufeld shook his head definitely. ‘Later. Let’s eat now.’ He led the way across to the table at the far end of the room, gestured the others to seats, sat down himself and went on: ‘I’m sorry. That was my fault. I should have known better.’

Miller said delicately: ‘Is she – um – all right?’

‘A wild animal, you think?’

‘She’d make a rather dangerous pet, wouldn’t you say?’

‘She’d a graduate of the University of Belgrade. Languages. With honours, I’m told. Some time after graduation she returned to her home in the Bosnian mountains. She found her parents and two small brothers butchered. She – well, she’s been like this ever since.’

Mallory shifted in his seat and looked at the girl. Her eyes, dark and unmoving and unwinking, were fixed on him and their expression was less than encouraging. Mallory turned back to Neufeld.

‘Who did it? To her parents, I mean.’

‘The Partisans,’ Droshny said savagely. ‘Damn their black souls, the Partisans. Maria’s people were our people. Cetniks.’

‘And the singer?’ Mallory said.

‘Her elder brother.’ Neufeld shook his head. ‘Blind from birth. Wherever she goes, she leads him by the hand. She is his eyes: she is his life.’

They sat in silence until food and wine were brought in. If an army marched on its stomach, Mallory thought, this one wasn’t going to get very far: he had heard that the food situation with the Partisans was close to desperate, but, if this were a representative sample, the Cetniks and Germans appeared to be in little better case. Unenthusiastically, he spooned – it would have been impossible to use a fork – a little of the greyish stew, a stew in which little oddments of indefinable meat floated forlornly in a mushy gravy of obscure origin, glanced across at Andrea and marvelled at the gastronomic fortitude that lay behind the already almost empty plate. Miller averted his eyes from the plate before him and delicately sipped the rough red wine. The three sergeants, so far, hadn’t even looked at their food: they were too occupied in looking at the girl by the fireside. Neufeld saw their interest, and smiled.

‘I do agree, gentlemen, that I’ve never seen a more beautiful girl and heaven knows what she’d look like if she had a wash. But she’s not for you, gentlemen. She’s not for any man. She’s wed already.’ He looked at the questioning faces and shook his head. ‘Not to any man. To an ideal – if you can call death an ideal. The death of the Partisans.’

‘Charming,’ Miller murmured. There was no other comment, for there was none to make. They ate in silence broken only by the soft singing from the fireside, the voice was melodious enough, but the guitar sounded sadly out of tune. Andrea pushed away his empty plate, looked irritably at the blind musician and turned to Neufeld.

‘What’s that he’s singing?’

‘An old Bosnian love song, I’ve been told. Very old and very sad. In English you have it too.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Yes, that’s it. “The girl I left behind me”.’

‘Tell him to sing something else,’ Andrea muttered. Neufeld looked at him, puzzled, then looked away as a German sergeant entered and bent to whisper in his ear. Neufeld nodded and the sergeant left.

‘So.’ Neufeld was thoughtful. ‘A radio report from the patrol that found your plane. The tanks were empty. I hardly think we need await confirmation from Padua, do you, Captain Mallory?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No matter. Tell me, have you ever heard of a General Vukalovic?’

‘General which?’

‘Vukalovic.’

‘He’s not on our side,’ Miller said positively. ‘Not with a name like that.’

‘You must be the only people in Yugoslavia who don’t know him. Everybody else does. Partisans, Cetniks, Germans, Bulgarians, everyone. He is one of their national heroes.’

‘Pass the wine,’ Andrea said.

‘You’d do better to listen.’ Neufeld’s tone was sharp. ‘Vukalovic commands almost a division of Partisan infantry who have been trapped in a loop of the Neretva river for almost three months. Like the men he leads. Vukalovic is insane. They have no shelter, none. They are short of weapons, have almost no ammunition left and are close to starvation. Their army is dressed in rags. They are finished.’

‘Then why don’t they escape?’ Mallory asked.

‘Escape is impossible. The precipices of the Neretva cut them off to the east. To the north and west are impenetrable mountains. The only conceivable way out is to the south, over the bridge at Neretva. And we have two armoured divisions waiting there.’

‘No gorges?’ Mallory asked. ‘No passes through the mountains?’

‘Two. Blocked by our best combat troops.’

‘Then why don’t they give up?’ Mallory asked reasonably. ‘Has no one told them the rules of war?’

‘They’re insane, I tell you,’ Neufeld said. ‘Quite insane.’

At that precise moment in time, Vukalovic and his Partisans were proving to some other Germans just how extraordinary their degree of insanity was.

The Western Gap was a narrow, tortuous, boulder-strewn and precipitously walled gorge that afforded the only passage through the impassable mountains that shut off the Zenica Cage to the east. For three months now German infantry units – units which had recently included an increasing number of highly-skilled Alpine troops – had been trying to force the pass: for three months they had been bloodily repulsed. But the Germans never gave up trying and on this intensely cold night of fitful moonlight and gently, intermittently falling snow, they were trying again.

The Germans carried out their attack with the coldly professional skill and economy of movement born of long and harsh experience. They advanced up the gorge in three fairly even and judiciously spaced lines: the combination of white snow suits, of the utilization of every scrap of cover and of confining their brief forward rushes to those moments when the moon was temporarily obscured made it almost impossible to see them. There was, however, no difficulty in locating them: they had obviously ammunition and to spare for machine-pistols and rifles alike and the fire-flashes from those muzzles were almost continuous. Almost as continuous, but some distance behind them, the sharp flat cracks of fixed mountain pieces pinpointed the source of the creeping artillery barrage that preceded the Germans up the boulder-strewn slope of that narrow defile.

The Yugoslav Partisans waited at the head of the gorge, entrenched behind a redoubt of boulders, hastily piled stones and splintered tree-trunks that had been shattered by German artillery fire. Although the snow was deep and the east wind full of little knives, few of the Partisans wore greatcoats. They were clad in an extraordinary variety of uniforms, uniforms that had belonged in the past to members of British, German, Italian, Bulgarian and Yugoslav armies: the one identifying feature that all had in common was a red star sewn on to the right-hand side of their forage caps. The uniforms, for the most part, were thin and tattered, offering little protection against the piercing cold, so that the men shivered almost continuously. An astonishing proportion of them appeared to be wounded: there were splinted legs, arms in slings and bandaged heads everywhere. But the most common characteristic among this rag-tag collection of defenders was their pinched and emaciated faces, faces where the deeply etched lines of starvation were matched only by the calm and absolute determination of men who have no longer anything to lose.

Near the centre of the group of defenders, two men stood in the shelter of the thick bole of one of the few pines still left standing. The silvered black hair, the deeply trenched – and now even more exhausted – face of General Vukalovic was unmistakable. But the dark eyes glowed as brightly as ever as he bent forward to accept a cigarette and light from the officer sharing his shelter, a swarthy, hook-nosed man with at least half of his black hair concealed under a blood-stained bandage. Vukalovic smiled.

‘Of course I’m insane, my dear Stephan. You’re insane – or you would have abandoned this position weeks ago. We’re all insane. Didn’t you know?’

‘I know this.’ Major Stephan rubbed the back of his hand across a week-old growth of beard. ‘Your parachute landing, an hour ago. That was insane. Why, you –’ He broke off as a rifle fired only feet away, moved to where a thin youngster, not more than seventeen years of age, was peering down into the white gloom of the gorge over the sights of a Lee-Enfield. ‘Did you get him?’

The boy twisted and looked up. A child. Vukalovic thought despairingly, no more than a child: he should still have been at school. The boy said: ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

‘How many shells have you left? Count them.’

‘I don’t have to. Seven.’

‘Don’t fire till you are sure.’ Stephan turned back to Vukalovic. ‘God above, General, you were almost blown into German hands.’

‘I’d have been worse off without the parachute,’ Vukalovic said mildly.

‘There’s so little time.’ Stephan struck a clenched fist against a palm. ‘So little time left. You were crazy to come back. They need you far more –’ He stopped abruptly, listened for a fraction of a second, threw himself at Vukalovic and brought them both crashing heavily to the ground as a whining mortar shell buried itself among loose rocks a few feet away, exploding on impact. Close by, a man screamed in agony. A second mortar shell landed, then a third and a fourth, all within thirty feet of one another.

‘They’ve got the range now, damn them.’ Stephan rose quickly to his feet and peered down the gorge. For long seconds he could see nothing, for a band of dark cloud had crossed the face of the moon: then the moon broke through and he could see the enemy all too clearly. Because of some almost certainly prearranged signal, they were no longer making any attempt to seek cover: they were pounding straight up the slope with all the speed they could muster, machine-carbines and rifles at the ready in their hands – and as soon as the moon broke through they squeezed the triggers of those guns. Stephan threw himself behind the shelter of a boulder.

‘Now!’ he shouted. ‘Now!’

The first ragged Partisan fusillade lasted for only a few seconds, then a black shadow fell over the valley. The firing ceased.

‘Keep firing,’ Vukalovic shouted. ‘Don’t stop now. They’re closing in.’ He loosed off a burst from his own machine-pistol and said to Stephan, ‘They know what they are about, our friends down there.’

‘They should.’ Stephan armed a stick grenade and spun it down the hill. ‘Look at all the practice we’ve given them.’

The moon broke through again. The leading German infantry were no more than twenty-five yards away. Both sides exchanged hand-grenades, fired at point-blank range. Some German soldiers fell, but many more came on, flinging themselves on the redoubt. Matters became temporarily confused. Here and there bitter hand-to-hand fighting developed. Men shouted at each other, cursed each other, killed each other. But the redoubt remained unbroken. Suddenly, dark heavy clouds again rolled over the moon, darkness flooded the gorge and everything slowly fell quiet. In the distance the thunder of artillery and mortar fire fell away to a muted rumble, then finally died.

‘A trap?’ Vukalovic said softly to Stephan. ‘You think they will come again?’

‘Not tonight.’ Stephan was positive. ‘They’re brave men, but –’

‘But not insane?’

‘But not insane.’

Blood poured down over Stephan’s face from a reopened wound in his face, but he was smiling. He rose to his feet and turned as a burly sergeant came up and delivered a sketchy salute.

‘They’ve gone, Major. We lost seven of ours this time, and fourteen wounded.’

‘Set pickets two hundred metres down,’ Stephan said. He turned to Vukalovic. ‘You heard, sir? Seven dead. Fourteen hurt.’

‘Leaving how many?’

‘Two hundred. Perhaps two hundred and five.’

‘Out of four hundred.’ Vukalovic’s mouth twisted. ‘Dear God, out of four hundred.’

‘And sixty of those are wounded.’

‘At least you can get them down to the hospital now.’

‘There is no hospital,’ Stephan said heavily. ‘I didn’t have time to tell you. It was bombed this morning. Both doctors killed. All our medical supplies – poof! Like that.’

‘Gone? All gone?’ Vukalovic paused for a long moment. ‘I’ll have some sent up from HQ. The walking wounded can make their own way to HQ.’

‘The wounded won’t leave, sir. Not any more.’

Vukalovic nodded in understanding and went on: ‘How much ammunition?’

‘Two days. Three, if we’re careful.’

‘Sixty wounded.’ Vukalovic shook his head in slow disbelief. ‘No medical help whatsoever for them. Ammunition almost gone. No food. No shelter. And they won’t leave. Are they insane, too?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m going down to the river,’ Vukalovic said. ‘To see Colonel Lazlo at HQ.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Stephan smiled faintly. ‘I doubt if you’ll find his mental equilibrium any better than mine.’

‘I don’t suppose I will,’ Vukalovic said.

Stephan saluted and turned away, mopping blood from his face, walked a few short swaying steps then knelt down to comfort a badly wounded man. Vukalovic looked after him expressionlessly, shaking his head: then he, too, turned and left.

Mallory finished his meal and lit a cigarette. He said, ‘So what’s going to happen to the Partisans in the Zenica Cage, as you call it?’

‘They’re going to break out,’ Neufeld said. ‘At least, they’re going to try to.’

‘But you’ve said yourself that’s impossible.’

‘Nothing is too impossible for those mad Partisans to try. I wish to heaven,’ Neufeld said bitterly, ‘that we were fighting a normal war against normal people, like the British or Americans. Anyway, we’ve had information – reliable information – that an attempted break-out is imminent. Trouble is, there are those two passes – they might even try to force the bridge at Neretva – and we don’t know where the break-out is coming.’

‘This is very interesting.’ Andrea looked sourly at the blind musician who was still giving his rendering of the same old Bosnian love-song. ‘Can we get some sleep now?’

‘Not tonight, I’m afraid.’ Neufeld exchanged a smile with Droshny. ‘You are going to find out for us where this break-out is coming.’

‘We are?’ Miller drained his glass and reached for the bottle. ‘Infectious stuff, this insanity.’

Neufeld might not have heard him. ‘Partisan HQ is about ten kilometres from here. You are going to report there as the bona-fide British mission that has lost its way. Then, when you’ve found out their plans, you tell them that you are going to their main HQ at Drvar, which of course, you don’t. You come back here instead. What could be simpler?’

‘Miller’s right,’ Mallory said with conviction. ‘You are mad.’

‘I’m beginning to think there’s altogether too much talk of this madness.’ Neufeld smiled. ‘You would prefer, perhaps, that Captain Droshny here turned you over to his men. I assure you, they are most unhappy about their – ah – late comrade.’

‘You can’t ask us to do this!’ Mallory was hard-faced in anger. ‘The Partisans are bound to get a radio message about us. Sooner or later. And then – well, you know what then. You just can’t ask this of us.’

‘I can and I will.’ Neufeld looked at Mallory and his five companions without enthusiasm. ‘It so happens that I don’t care for dope-peddlers and drug-runners.’

‘I don’t think your opinion will carry much weight in certain circles,’ Mallory said.

‘And that means?’

‘Kesselring’s Director of Military Intelligence isn’t going to like this at all.’

‘If you don’t come back, they’ll never know. If you do –’ Neufeld smiled and touched the Iron Cross at his throat – ‘they’ll probably give me an oak leaf to this.’

‘Likeable type, isn’t he?’ Miller said to no one in particular.

‘Come then.’ Neufeld rose from the table. ‘Petar?’

The blind singer nodded, slung his guitar over his shoulder and rose to his feet, his sister rising with him.

‘What’s this, then?’ Mallory asked.

‘Guides.’

‘Those two?’

‘Well,’ Neufeld said reasonably, ‘you can’t very well find your own way there, can you? Petar and his sister – well, his sister – know Bosnia better than the foxes.’

‘But won’t the Partisans –’ Mallory began, but Neufeld interrupted.

‘You don’t know your Bosnia. These two wander wherever they like and no one will turn them from their door. The Bosnians believe, and God knows with sufficient reason, that they are accursed and have the evil eye on them. This is a land of superstition, Captain Mallory.’

‘But – but how will they know where to take us?’

‘They’ll know.’ Neufeld nodded to Droshny, who talked rapidly to Maria in Serbo-Croat: she in turn spoke to Petar, who made some strange noises in his throat.

‘That’s an odd language,’ Miller observed.

‘He’s got a speech impediment,’ Neufeld said shortly. ‘He was born with it. He can sing, but not talk – it’s not unknown. Do you wonder people think they are cursed?’ He turned to Mallory. ‘Wait outside with your men.’

Mallory nodded, gestured to the others to precede him. Neufeld, he noted, was immediately engaged in a short, low-voiced discussion with Droshny, who nodded, summoned one of his Cetniks and dispatched him on some errand. Once outside, Mallory moved with Andrea slightly apart from the others and murmured something in his ear, inaudible to all but Andrea, whose nodded acquiescence was almost imperceptible.

Neufeld and Droshny emerged from the hut, followed by Maria who was leading Petar by the hand. As they approached Mallory’s group, Andrea walked casually towards them, smoking the inevitable noxious cigar. He planted himself in front of a puzzled Neufeld and arrogantly blew smoke into his face.

‘I don’t think I care for you very much, Hauptmann Neufeld,’ Andrea announced. He looked at Droshny. ‘Nor for the cutlery salesman here.’

Neufeld’s face immediately darkened, became tight in anger. But he brought himself quickly under control and said with restraint: ‘Your opinion of me is of no concern to me.’ He nodded to Droshny. ‘But do not cross Captain Droshny’s path, my friend. He is a Bosnian and a proud one – and the best man in the Balkans with a knife.’

‘The best man –’ Andrea broke off with a roar of laughter, and blew smoke into Droshny’s face. ‘A knife-grinder in a comic opera.’

Droshny’s disbelief was total but of brief duration. He bared his teeth in a fashion that would have done justice to any Bosnian wolf, swept a wickedly-curved knife from his belt and threw himself on Andrea, the gleaming blade hooking viciously upwards, but Andrea, whose prudence was exceeded only by the extraordinary speed with which he could move his vast bulk, was no longer there when the knife arrived. But his hand was. It caught Droshny’s knife wrist as it flashed upwards and almost at once the two big men crashed heavily to the ground, rolling over and over in the snow while they fought for possession of the knife.

So unexpectedly, so wholly incredible the speed with which the fight had developed from nowhere that, for a few seconds, no one moved. The three young sergeants, Neufeld and the Cetniks registered nothing but utter astonishment. Mallory, who was standing close behind the wide-eyed girl, rubbed his chin thoughtfully while Miller, delicately tapping the ash off the end of his cigarette, regarded the scene with a sort of weary interest.

Almost at the same instant, Reynolds, Groves and two Cetniks flung themselves upon the struggling pair on the ground and tried to pull them apart. Not until Saunders and Neufeld lent a hand did they succeed. Droshny and Andrea were pulled to their feet, the former with contorted face and hatred in his eyes, Andrea calmly resuming the smoking of the cigar which he’d somehow picked up after they had been separated.

‘You madman!’ Reynolds said savagely to Andrea. ‘You crazy maniac. You – you’re a bloody psychopath. You’ll get us all killed.’

‘That wouldn’t surprise me at all,’ Neufeld said thoughtfully. ‘Come. Let us have no more of this foolishness.’

He led the way from the compound, and as he did so they were joined by a group of half-a-dozen Cetniks, whose apparent leader was the youth with the straggling ginger beard and cast to his eye, the first of the Cetniks to greet them when they had landed.

‘Who are they and what are they for?’ Mallory demanded of Neufeld. ‘They’re not coming with us.’

‘Escort/Neufeld explained. ‘For the first seven kilometres only.’

‘Escorts? What would we want with escorts? We’re in no danger from you, nor, according to what you say, will we be from the Yugoslav Partisans.’

‘We’re not worried about you,’ Neufeld said drily. ‘We’re worried about the vehicle that is going to take you most of the way there. Vehicles are very few and very precious in this part of Bosnia – and there are many Partisan patrols about.’

Twenty minutes later, in a now moonless night and with snow falling, they reached a road, a road which was little more than a winding track running through a forested valley floor. Waiting for them there was one of the strangest four-wheeled contraptions Mallory or his companions had ever seen, an incredibly ancient and battered truck which at first sight, from the vast clouds of smoke emanating from it, appeared to be on fire. It was, in fact, a very much pre-war wood-burning truck, of a type at one time common in the Balkans. Miller regarded the smoke-shrouded truck in astonishment and turned to Neufeld.

‘You call this a vehicle?’

‘You call it what you like. Unless you’d rather walk.’

‘Ten kilometres? I’ll take my chance on asphyxiation.’ Miller climbed in, followed by the others, till only Neufeld and Droshny remained outside.

Neufeld said: ‘I shall expect you back before noon.’

‘If we ever come back,’ Mallory said. ‘If a radio message has come through –’

‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Neufeld said indifferently.

With a great rattling and shaking and emission of smoke and steam, all accompanied by much red-eyed coughing from the canvas-covered rear, the truck jerked uncertainly into motion and moved off slowly along the valley floor, Neufeld and Droshny gazing after it. Neufeld shook his head. ‘Such clever little men.’

‘Such very clever little men,’ Droshny agreed. ‘But I want the big one, Captain.’

Neufeld clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You shall have him, my friend. Well, they’re out of sight. Time for you to go.’

Droshny nodded and whistled shrilly between his fingers. There came the distant whirr of an engine starter, and soon an elderly Fiat emerged from behind a clump of pines and approached along the hard-packed snow of the road, its chains clanking violently, and stopped beside the two men. Droshny climbed into the front passenger seat and the Fiat moved off in the wake of the truck.

FIVE

Friday

0330–0500

For the fourteen people jammed on the narrow side benches under the canvas-hooped roof, the journey could hardly be called pleasurable. There were no cushions on the seats just as there appeared to be a total absence of springs on the vehicle, and the torn and badly fitting hood admitted large quantities of icy night air and eye-smarting smoke in about equal proportions. At least, Mallory thought, it all helped considerably to keep them awake.

Andrea was sitting directly opposite him, seemingly oblivious of the thick choking atmosphere inside the truck, a fact hardly surprising considering that the penetrating power and the pungency of the smoke from the truck was of a lower order altogether than that emanating from the black cheroot clamped between Andrea’s teeth. Andrea glanced idly across and caught Mallory’s eye. Mallory nodded once, a millimetric motion of the head that would have gone unremarked by even the most suspicious. Andrea dropped his eyes until his gaze rested on Mallory’s right hand, lying loosely of his knee. Mallory sat back and sighed, and as he did his right hand slipped until his thumb was pointing directly at the floor. Andrea puffed out another Vesuvian cloud of acrid smoke and looked away indifferently.

For some kilometres the smoke-enshrouded truck clattered and screeched its way along the valley floor, then swung off to the left on to an even narrower track, and began to climb. Less than two minutes later, with Droshny sitting impassively in the front passenger seat, the pursuing Fiat made a similar turn off.

The slope was now so steep and the spinning driving wheels losing so much traction on the frozen surface of the track that the ancient wood-burning truck was reduced to little more than walking pace. Inside the truck, Andrea and Mallory were as watchful as ever, but Miller and the three sergeants seemed to be dozing off, whether through exhaustion or incipient asphyxiation it was difficult to say. Maria and Petar, hand in hand, appeared to be asleep. The Cetniks, on the other hand, could hardly have been more wide awake, and were making it clear for the first time that the rents and holes in the canvas cover had not been caused by accident: Droshny’s six men were now kneeling on the benches with the muzzles of their machine-pistols thrust through the apertures in the canvas. It was clear that the truck was now moving into Partisan territory, or, at least, what passed for no-man’s-land in that wild and rugged territory.

The Cetnik farthest forward in the truck suddenly withdrew his face from a gap in the canvas and rapped the butt of his gun against the driver’s cab. The truck wheezed to a grateful halt, the ginger-bearded Cetnik jumped down, checked swiftly for any signs of ambush, then gestured the others to disembark, the repeatedly urgent movements of his hand making it clear that he was less than enamoured of the idea of hanging around that place for a moment longer than necessity demanded. One by one Mallory and his companions jumped down on to the frozen snow. Reynolds guided the blind singer down to the ground, then reached up a hand to help Maria as she clambered over the tailboard. Wordlessly, she struck his hand aside and leapt nimbly to the ground: Reynolds stared at her in hurt astonishment. The truck, Mallory observed, had stopped outside a small clearing in the forest. Backing and filling and issuing denser clouds of smoke than ever, it used this space to turn around in a remarkably short space of time and clanked its way off down the forest path at a considerably higher speed than it had made the ascent. The Cetniks gazed impassively from the back of the departing truck, made no gesture of farewell.

Maria took Petar’s hand, looked coldly at Mallory, jerked her head and set off up a tiny footpath leading at right-angles from the track. Mallory shrugged and set off, followed by the three sergeants. For a moment or two, Andrea and Miller remained where they were, gazing thoughtfully at the corner round which the truck had just disappeared. Then they, too, set off, talking in low tones to each other.

The ancient wood-burning truck did not maintain its initial impetus for any lengthy period of time. Less than four hundred yards after rounding the corner which blocked it from the view of Mallory and his companions it braked to a halt. Two Cetniks, the ginger-bearded leader of the escort and another black-bearded man, jumped over the tailboard and moved at once into the protective covering of the forest. The truck rattled off once more, its belching smoke hanging heavily in the freezing night air.

A kilometre farther down the track, an almost identical scene was taking place. The Fiat slid to a halt, Droshny scrambled from the passenger’s seat and vanished among the pines. The Fiat reversed quickly and moved off down the track.

The track up through the heavily wooded slope was very narrow, very winding: the snow was no longer hard-packed, but soft and deep and making for very hard going. The moon was quite gone now, the snow, gusted into their faces by the east wind, was becoming steadily heavier and the cold was intense. The path frequently arrived at a V-shaped branch but Maria, in the lead with her brother, never hesitated: she knew, or appeared to know, exactly where she was going. Several times she slipped in the deep snow, on the last occasion so heavily that she brought her brother down with her. When it happened yet again, Reynolds moved forward and took the girl by the arm to help her. She struck out savagely and drew her arm away. Reynolds stared at her in astonishment, then turned to Mallory.

‘What the devil’s the matter with – I mean, I was only trying to help –’

‘Leave her alone,’ Mallory said. ‘You’re one of them.’

‘I’m one of –’

‘You’re wearing a British uniform. That’s all the poor kid understands. Leave her be.’

Reynolds shook his head uncomprehendingly. He hitched his pack more securely on his shoulders, glanced back down the trail, made to move on, then glanced backwards again. He caught Mallory by the arm and pointed.

Andrea had already fallen thirty yards behind. Weighed down by his rucksack and Schmeisser and weight of years, he was very obviously making heavy weather of the climb and was falling steadily behind by the second. At a gesture and word from Mallory the rest of the party halted and peered back down through the driving snow, waiting for Andrea to make up on them. By this time Andrea was beginning to stumble almost drunkenly and clutched at his right side as if in pain. Reynolds looked at Groves: they both looked at Saunders: all three slowly shook their heads. Andrea came up with them and a spasm of pain flickered across his face.

‘I’m sorry.’ The voice was gasping and hoarse. ‘I’ll be all right in a moment.’

Saunders hesitated, then advanced towards Andrea. He smiled apologetically, then reached out a hand to indicate the rucksack and Schmeisser.

‘Come on, Dad. Hand them over.’

For the minutest fraction of a second a flicker of menace, more imagined than seen, touched Andrea’s face, then he shrugged off his rucksack and wearily handed it over. Saunders accepted it and tentatively indicated the Schmeisser.

‘Thanks.’ Andrea smiled wanly. ‘But I’d feel lost without it.’

Uncertainly, they resumed their climb, looking back frequently to check on Andrea’s progress. Their doubts were well-founded. Within thirty seconds Andrea had stopped, his eyes screwed up, and bent almost double in pain. He said, gaspingly: ‘I must rest … Go on. I’ll catch up with you.’

Miller said solicitously: ‘I’ll stay with you.’

‘I don’t need anybody to stay with me,’ Andrea said surlily. ‘I can look after myself.’

Miller said nothing. He looked at Mallory and jerked his head in an uphill direction. Mallory nodded, once, and gestured to the girl. Reluctantly, they moved off, leaving Andrea and Miller behind. Twice, Reynolds looked back over his shoulder, his expression an odd mixture of worry and exasperation: then he shrugged his shoulders and bent his back to the hill.

Andrea, scowling blackly and still clutching his ribs, remained bent double until the last of the party had rounded the nearest uphill corner, then straightened effortlessly, tested the wind with a wetted forefinger, established that it was moving up-trail, produced a cigar, lit it and puffed in deep and obvious contentment. His recovery was quite astonishing, but it didn’t appear to astonish Miller, who grinned and nodded downhill. Andrea grinned in return, made a courteous gesture of precedence.

Thirty yards down-trail, at a position which gave them an uninterrupted view of almost a hundred yards of the track below them they moved into the cover of the bole of a giant pine. For about two minutes they stood there, staring downhill and listening intently, then suddenly Andrea nodded, stooped and carefully laid his cigar in a sheltered dried patch of ground behind the bole of the pine.

They exchanged no words: there was need of none. Miller crawled round to the downhill-facing front of the pine and carefully arranged himself in a spread-eagled position in the deep snow, both arms outflung, his apparently sightless face turned up to the falling snow. Behind the pine, Andrea reversed his grip on his Schmeisser, holding it by the barrel, produced a knife from the recesses of his clothing and stuck it in his belt. Both men remained as motionless as if they had died there and frozen solid over the long and bitter Yugoslav winter.

Probably because his spreadeagled form was sunk so deeply in the soft snow as to conceal most of his body, Miller saw the two Cetniks coming quite some time before they saw him. At first they were no more than two shapeless and vaguely ghostlike forms gradually materializing from the falling snow: as they drew nearer, he identified them as the Cetnik escort leader and one of his men.

They were less than thirty yards away before they saw Miller. They stopped, stared, remained motionless for at least five seconds, looked at each other, unslung their machine-pistols and broke into a stumbling uphill run. Miller closed his eyes. He didn’t require them any more, his ears gave him all the information he wanted, the closing sound of crunching footsteps in the snow, the abrupt cessation of those, the heavy breathing as a man bent over him.

Miller waited until he could actually feel the man’s breath in his face, then opened his eyes. Not twelve inches from his own were the eyes of the ginger-bearded Cetnik. Miller’s outflung arms curved upwards and inwards, his sinewy fingers hooked deeply into the throat of the startled man above him.

Andrea’s Schmeisser had already reached the limit of its backswing as he stepped soundlessly round the bole of the pine. The black-bearded Cetnik was just beginning to move to help his friend when he caught sight of Andrea from the corner of one eye, and flung up both arms to protect himself. A pair of straws would have served him as well. Andrea grimaced at the sheer physical shock of the impact, dropped the Schmeisser, pulled out his knife and fell upon the other Cetnik still struggling desperately in Miller’s stranglehold.

Miller rose to his feet and he and Andrea stared down at the two dead men. Miller looked in puzzlement at the ginger-bearded man, then suddenly stooped, caught the beard and tugged. It came away in his hand, revealing beneath it a clean-shaven face and a scar which ran from the corner of a lip to the chin.

Andrea and Miller exchanged speculative glances, but neither made comment. They dragged the dead men some little way off the path into the concealment of some undergrowth. Andrea picked up a dead branch and swept away the dragmarks in the snow and, by the base of the pine, all traces of the encounter: inside the hour, he knew, the brushmarks he had made would have vanished under a fresh covering of snow. He picked up his cigar and threw the branch deep into the woods. Without a backward glance, the two men began to walk briskly up the hill.

Had they given this backward glance, it was barely possible that they might have caught a glimpse of a face peering round the trunk of a tree farther downhill. Droshny had arrived at the bend in the track just in time to see Andrea complete his brushing operations and throw the branch away: what the meaning of this might be he couldn’t guess.

He waited until Andrea and Miller had disappeared from his sight, waited another two minutes for good measure and safety, then hurried up the track, the expression on his swarthy brigand’s face nicely balanced between puzzlement and suspicion. He reached the pine where the two Cetniks had been ambushed, briefly quartered the area, then followed the line of brushmarks leading into the woods, the puzzlement on his face giving way first to pure suspicion, then the suspicion to complete certainty.

He parted the bushes and peered down at the two Cetniks lying half-buried in a snow-filled gully with that curiously huddled shapelessness that only the dead can achieve. After a few moments he straightened, turned and looked uphill in the direction in which Andrea and Miller had vanished: his face was not pleasant to look upon.

Andrea and Miller made good time up the hill. As they approached one of the innumerable bends in the trail they heard up ahead the sound of a softly-played guitar, curiously muffled and softened in tone by the falling snow. Andrea slowed up, threw away his cigar, bent forward and clutched his ribs. Solicitously, Miller took his arm.

The main party, they saw, was less than thirty yards ahead. They, too, were making slow time: the depth of snow and the increasing slope of the track made any quicker movement impossible. Reynolds glanced back – Reynolds was spending a great deal of his time in looking over his shoulder, he appeared to be in a highly apprehensive state – caught sight of Andrea and Miller and called out to Mallory who halted the party and waited for Andrea and Miller to make up with them. Mallory looked worriedly at Andrea.

‘Getting worse?’

‘How far to go?’ Andrea asked hoarsely.

‘Must be less than a mile.’

Andrea said nothing, he just stood there breathing heavily and wearing the stricken look of a sick man contemplating the prospect of another upward mile through deep snow. Saunders, already carrying two rucksacks, approached Andrea diffidently, tentatively. He said: ‘It would help, you know, if –’

‘I know.’ Andrea smiled painfully, unslung his Schmeisser and handed it to Saunders. ‘Thanks, son.’

Petar was still softly plucking the strings of his guitar, an indescribably eerie sound in those dark and ghostly pine woods. Miller looked at him and said to Mallory: ‘What’s the music while we march for?’

‘Petar’s password, I should imagine.’

‘Like Neufeld said? Nobody touches our singing Cetnik?’

‘Something like that.’

They moved on up the trail. Mallory let the others pass by until he and Andrea were bringing up the rear. Mallory glanced incuriously at Andrea, his face registering no more than a mild concern for the condition of his friend. Andrea caught his glance and nodded fractionally: Mallory looked away.

Fifteen minutes later they were halted, at gunpoint, by three men, all armed with machine-pistols, who simply appeared to have materialized from nowhere, a surprise so complete that not even Andrea could have done anything about it – even if he had had his gun. Reynolds looked urgently at Mallory, who smiled and shook his head.

‘It’s all right. Partisans – look at the red star on their forage caps. Just outposts guarding one of the main trails.’

And so it proved. Maria talked briefly to one of the soldiers, who listened, nodded and set off up the path, gesturing to the party to follow him. The other two Partisans remained behind, both men crossing themselves as Petar again strummed gently on his guitar. Neufeld, Mallory reflected, hadn’t exaggerated about the degree of awed respect and fear in which the blind singer and his sister were held.

They came to Partisan HQ inside another ten minutes, an HQ curiously similar in appearance and choice of location to Hauptmann Neufeld’s camp: the same rough circle of crude huts set deep in the same jamba – depression – with similar massive pines towering high above. The guide spoke to Maria and she turned coldly to Mallory, the disdain on her face making it very plain how much against the grain it went for her to speak to him at all.

‘We are to go to the guest hut. You are to report to the commandant. This soldier will show you.’

The guide beckoned in confirmation. Mallory followed him across the compound to a fairly large, fairly well-lit hut. The guide knocked, opened the door and waved Mallory inside, he himself following.

The commandant was a tall, lean, dark man with that aquiline, aristocratic face so common among the Bosnian mountainmen. He advanced towards Mallory with outstretched hand and smiled.

‘Major Broznik, and at your service. Late, late hours, but as you see we are still up and around. Although I must say I did expect you before this.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You don’t know – you are Captain Mallory, are you not?’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’ Mallory gazed steadily at Broznik, glanced briefly sideways at the guide, then looked back to Broznik again. Broznik frowned for a moment, then his face cleared. He spoke to the guide, who turned and left. Mallory put out his hand.

‘Captain Mallory, at your service. I’m sorry about that, Major Broznik, but I insist we must talk alone.’

‘You trust no one? Not even in my camp?’

‘No one.’

‘Not even your own men?’

‘I don’t trust them not to make mistakes. I don’t trust myself not to make mistakes. I don’t trust you not to make mistakes.’

‘Please?’ Broznik’s voice was as cold as his eyes.

‘Did you ever have two of your men disappear, one with ginger hair, the other with black, the ginger-haired man with a cast to his eye and a scar running from mouth to chin?’

Broznik came closer. ‘What do you know about those men?’

‘Did you? Know them, I mean?’

Broznik nodded and said slowly: ‘They were lost in action. Last month.’

‘You found their bodies?’

‘No.’

‘There were no bodies to be found. They had deserted – gone over to the Cetniks.’

‘But they were Cetniks – converted to our cause.’

‘They’d been reconverted. They followed us tonight. On the orders of Captain Droshny. I had them killed.’

‘You – had – them – killed?’

‘Think, man,’ Mallory said wearily. ‘If they had arrived here – which they no doubt intended to do a discreet interval after our arrival – we wouldn’t have recognized them and you’d have welcomed them back as escaped prisoners. They’d have reported our every movement. Even if we had recognized them after they had arrived here and done something about it, you may have other Cetniks here who would have reported back to their masters that we had done away with their watchdogs. So we disposed of them very quietly, no fuss, in a very remote place, then hid them.’

‘There are no Cetniks in my command, Captain Mallory.’

Mallory said drily: ‘It takes a very clever farmer, Major, to see two bad apples on the top of the barrel and be quite certain that there are none lower down. No chances. None. Ever.’ Mallory smiled to remove any offence from his words and went on briskly: ‘Now, Major, there’s some information that Hauptmann Neufeld wants.’

To say that the guest hut hardly deserved so hospitable a title would have been a very considerable understatement. As a shelter for some of the less-regarded domesticated animals it might have been barely acceptable: as an overnight accommodation for human beings it was conspicuously lacking in what our modern effete European societies regard as the minimum essentials for civilized living. Even the Spartans of ancient Greece would have considered it as too much of a good thing. One rickety trestle table, one bench, a dying fire and lots of hard-packed earthen floor. It fell short of being a home from home.

There were six people in the hut, three standing, one sitting, two stretched out on the lumpy floor. Petar, for once without his sister, sat on the floor, silent guitar clasped in his hands, gazing sightlessly into the fading embers. Andrea, stretched in apparently luxurious ease in a sleeping-bag, peacefully puffed at what, judging from the frequent suffering glances cast in his direction, appeared to be a more than normally obnoxious cigar. Miller, similarly reclining, was reading what appeared to be a slender volume of poetry. Reynolds and Groves, unable to sleep, stood idly by the solitary window, gazing out abstractedly into the dimly-lit compound: they turned as Saunders removed his radio transmitter from its casing and made for the door.

With some bitterness Saunders said: ‘Sleep well.’

‘Sleep well?’ Reynolds raised an eyebrow. ‘And where are you going?’

‘Radio hut across there. Message to Termoli. Mustn’t spoil your beauty sleep while I’m transmitting.’

Saunders left. Groves went and sat by the table, cradling a weary head in his hands. Reynolds remained by the window, watched Saunders cross the compound and enter a darkened hut on the far side. Soon a light appeared in the window as Saunders lit a lamp.

Reynolds’s eyes moved in response to the sudden appearance of an oblong of light across the compound. The door to Major Broznik’s hut had opened and Mallory stood momentarily framed there, carrying what appeared to be a sheet of paper in his hand. Then the door closed and Mallory moved off in the direction of the radio hut.

Reynolds suddenly became very watchful, very still. Mallory had taken less than a dozen steps when a dark figure detached itself from the even darker shadow of a hut and confronted him. Quite automatically, Reynolds’s hand reached for the Luger at his belt, then slowly withdrew. Whatever this confrontation signified for Mallory it certainly wasn’t danger, for Maria, Reynolds knew, did not carry a gun. And unquestionably it was Maria who was now in such apparent close conversation with Mallory.

Bewildered now, Reynolds pressed his face close against the glass. For almost two minutes he stared at this astonishing spectacle of the girl who had slapped Mallory with such venom, who had lost no opportunity of displaying an animosity bordering on hatred, now talking to him not only animatedly but also clearly very amicably. So total was Reynolds’s baffled incomprehension at this inexplicable turn of events that his mind moved into a trance-like state, a spell that was abruptly snapped when he saw Mallory put a reassuring arm around her shoulder and pat her in a way that might have been comforting or affectionate or both but which in any event clearly evoked no resentment on the part of the girl. This was still inexplicable: but the only interpretation that could be put upon it was an uncompromisingly sinister one. Reynolds whirled round and silently and urgently beckoned Groves to the window. Groves rose quickly, moved to the window and looked out, but by the time he had done so there was no longer any sign of Maria: Mallory was alone, walking across the compound towards the radio hut, the paper still in his hand. Groves glanced questioningly at Reynolds.

They were together,’ Reynolds whispered. ‘Mallory and Maria. I saw them! They were talking!’

‘What? You sure?’

‘God’s my witness. I saw them, man. He even had his arm around – Get away from this window – Maria’s coming.’

Without haste, so as to arouse no comment from Andrea or Miller, they turned and walked unconcernedly towards the table and sat down. Seconds later, Maria entered and, without looking at or speaking to anyone, crossed to the fire, sat by Petar and took his hand. A minute or so later Mallory entered, and sat on a palliasse beside Andrea, who removed his cigar and glanced at him in mild enquiry. Mallory casually checked to see that he wasn’t under observation, then nodded. Andrea returned to the contemplation of his cigar.

Reynolds looked uncertainly at Groves, then said to Mallory, ‘Shouldn’t we be setting a guard, sir?’

‘A guard?’ Mallory was amused. ‘Whatever for? This is a Partisan camp. Sergeant. Friends, you know. And, as you’ve seen, they have their own excellent guard system.’

‘You never know –’

‘I know. Get some sleep.’

Reynolds went on doggedly: ‘Saunders is alone over there. I don’t like –’

‘He’s coding and sending a short message for me. A few minutes, that’s all.’

‘But –’

‘Shut up,’ Andrea said. ‘You heard the captain?’

Reynolds was by now thoroughly unhappy and uneasy, an unease which showed through in his instantly antagonistic irritation.

‘Shut up? Why should I shut up? I don’t take orders from you. And while we’re telling each other what to do, you might put out that damned stinking cigar.’

Miller wearily lowered his book of verse.

‘I quite agree about the damned cigar, young fellow. But do bear in mind that you are talking to a ranking colonel in the army.’

Miller reverted to his book. For a few moments Reynolds and Groves stared open-mouthed at each other, then Reynolds stood up and looked at Andrea.

‘I’m extremely sorry, sir. I – I didn’t realize –’

Andrea waved him to silence with a magnanimous hand and resumed his communion with his cigar. The minutes passed in silence. Maria, before the fire, had her head on Petar’s shoulder, but otherwise had not moved: she appeared to be asleep. Miller shook his head in rapt admiration of what appeared to be one of the more esoteric manifestations of the poetic muse, closed his book reluctantly and slid down into his sleeping-bag. Andrea ground out his cigar and did the same. Mallory seemed to be already asleep. Groves lay down and Reynolds, leaning over the table, rested his forehead on his arms. For five minutes, perhaps longer, Reynolds remained like this, uneasily dozing off, then he lifted his head, sat up with a jerk, glanced at his watch, crossed to Mallory and shook him by the shoulder. Mallory stirred.

‘Twenty minutes,’ Reynolds said urgently. ‘Twenty minutes and Saunders isn’t back yet.’

‘All right, so it’s twenty minutes,’ Mallory said patiently. ‘He could take that long to make contact, far less transmit the message.’

‘Yes, sir. Permission to check, sir?’

Mallory nodded wearily and closed his eyes. Reynolds picked up his Schmeisser, left the hut and closed the door softly behind him. He released the safety-catch on his gun and ran across the compound.

The light still burned in the radio hut. Reynolds tried to peer through the window but the frost of that bitter night had made it completely opaque. Reynolds moved around to the door. It was slightly ajar. He set his finger to the trigger and opened the door in the fashion in which all Commandos were trained to open doors – with a violent kick of his right foot.

There was no one in the radio hut, no one, that is, who could bring him to any harm. Slowly, Reynolds lowered his gun and walked in in a hesitant, almost dreamlike fashion, his face masked in shock.

Saunders was leaning tiredly over the transmitting table, his head resting on it at an unnatural angle, both arms dangling limply towards the ground. The hilt of a knife protruded between his shoulderblades: Reynolds noted, almost subconsciously, that there was no trace of blood: death had been instantaneous. The transmitter itself lay on the floor, a twisted and mangled mass of metal that was obviously smashed beyond repair. Tentatively, not knowing why he did so, he reached out and touched the dead man on the shoulder: Saunders seemed to stir, his cheek slid along the table and he toppled to one side, falling heavily across the battered remains of the transmitter. Reynolds stooped low over him. Grey parchment now, where a bronzed tan had been, sightless, faded eyes uselessly guarding a mind now flown. Reynolds swore briefly, bitterly, straightened and ran from the hut.

Everyone in the guest hut was asleep, or appeared to be. Reynolds crossed to where Mallory lay, dropped to one knee and shook him roughly by the shoulder. Mallory stirred, opened weary eyes and propped himself up on one elbow. He gave Reynolds a look of unenthusiastic enquiry.

‘Among friends, you said!’ Reynolds’s voice was low, vicious, almost a hissing sound. ‘Safe, you said. Saunders will be all right, you said. You knew, you said. You bloody well knew.’

Mallory said nothing. He sat up abruptly on his palliasse, and the sleep was gone from his eyes. He said: ‘Saunders?’

Reynolds said, ‘I think you’d better come with me.’

In silence the two men left the hut, in silence they crossed the deserted compound and in silence they entered the radio hut. Mallory went no farther than the doorway. For what was probably no more than ten seconds but for what seemed to Reynolds to be an unconsciously long time, Mallory stared at the dead man and the smashed transmitter, his eyes bleak, his face registering no emotional reaction. Reynolds mistook the expression, or lack of it, for something else, and could suddenly no longer contain his pent-up fury.

‘Well, aren’t you bloody well going to do something about it instead of standing there all night?’

‘Every dog’s entitled to his one bite,’ Mallory said mildly. ‘But don’t talk to me like that again. Do what, for instance?’

‘Do what?’ Reynolds visibly struggled for self-control. ‘Find the nice gentleman who did this.’

‘Finding him will be very difficult.’ Mallory considered. ‘Impossible, I should say. If the killer came from the camp here, then he’ll have gone to earth in the camp here. If he came from outside, he’ll be a mile away by this time and putting more distance between himself and us every second. Go and wake Andrea and Miller and Groves and tell them to come here. Then go and tell Major Broznik what’s happened.’

‘I’ll tell them what’s happened,’ Reynolds said bitterly. ‘And I’ll also tell them it never would have happened if you’d listened to me. But oh no, you wouldn’t listen, would you?’

‘So you were right and I was wrong. Now do as I ask you.’

Reynolds hesitated, a man obviously on the brink of outright revolt. Suspicion and defiance alternated in the angry face. Then some strange quality in the expression in Mallory’s face tipped the balance for sanity and compliance and he nodded in sullen antagonism, turned and walked away.

Mallory waited until he had rounded the corner of the hut, brought out his torch and started, not very hopefully, to quarter the hard-packed snow outside the door of the radio hut. But almost at once he stopped, stooped, and brought the head of the torch close to the surface of the ground.

It was a very small portion of footprint indeed, only the front half of the sole of a right foot. The pattern showed two V-shaped marks, the leading V with a cleanly-cut break in it. Mallory, moving more quickly now, followed the direction indicated by the pointed toeprint and came across two more similar indentations, faint but unmistakable, before the frozen snow gave way to the frozen earth of the compound, ground so hard as to be incapable of registering any footprints at all. Mallory retraced his steps, carefully erasing all three prints with the toe of his boot and reached the radio hut only seconds before he was joined by Reynolds, Andrea, Miller and Groves. Major Broznik and several of his men joined them soon after.

They searched the interior of the radio hut for clues as to the killer’s identity, but clues there were none. Inch by inch they searched the hard-packed snow surrounding the hut, with the same completely negative results. Reinforced, by this time, by perhaps sixty or seventy sleepy-eyed Partisan soldiers, they carried out a simultaneous search of all the buildings and of the woods surrounding the encampment: but neither the encampment nor the surrounding woods had any secrets to yield.

‘We may as well call it off,’ Mallory said finally. ‘He’s got clean away.’

‘It looks that way,’ Major Broznik agreed. He was deeply troubled and bitterly angry that such a thing should have happened in his encampment. ‘We’d better double the guards for the rest of the night.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ Mallory said. ‘Our friend won’t be back.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ Reynolds mimicked savagely. ‘There was no need for that for poor Saunders, you said. And where’s Saunders now? Sleeping comfortably in his bed? Is he hell! No need –’

Andrea muttered warningly and took a step nearer Reynolds, but Mallory made a brief conciliatory movement of his right hand. He said: ‘It’s entirely up to you, of course, Major. I’m sorry that we have been responsible for giving you and your men so sleepless a night. See you in the morning.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Not that that’s so far away.’ He turned to go, found his way blocked by Sergeant Groves, a Groves whose normally cheerful countenance now mirrored the tight hostility of Reynolds’s.

‘So he’s got clear away, has he? Away to hell and gone. And that’s the end of it, eh?’

Mallory looked at him consideringly. ‘Well, no. I wouldn’t quite say that. A little time. We’ll find him.’

‘A little time? Maybe even before he dies of old age?’

Andrea looked at Mallory. ‘Twenty-four hours?’

‘Less.’

Andrea nodded and he and Mallory turned and walked away towards the guest hut. Reynolds and Groves, with Miller slightly behind them, watched the two men as they went, then looked at each other, their faces still bleak and bitter.

‘Aren’t they a nice warm-hearted couple now? Completely broken up about old Saunders.’ Groves shook his head. ‘They don’t care. They just don’t care.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Miller said diffidently. ‘It’s just that they don’t seem to care. Not at all the same thing.’

‘Faces like wooden Indians,’ Reynolds muttered. ‘They never even said they were sorry that Saunders was killed.’

‘Well,’ Miller said patiently, ‘it’s a cliché, but different people react in different ways. Okay, so grief and anger is the natural reaction to this sort of thing, but if Mallory and Andrea spent their time in reacting in that fashion to all the things that have happened to them in their lifetimes, they’d have come apart at the seams years ago. So they don’t react that way any more. They do things. Like they’re going to do things to your friend’s killer. Maybe you didn’t get it, but you just heard a death sentence being passed.’

‘How do you know?’ Reynolds said uncertainly. He nodded in the direction of Mallory and Andrea who were just entering the guest hut. ‘And how did they know? Without talking, I mean.’

‘Telepathy.’

‘What do you mean – “telepathy”?’

‘It would take too long,’ Miller said wearily. ‘Ask me in the morning.’

SIX

Friday

0800–1000

Crowning the tops of the towering pines, the dense, interlocking snow-laden branches formed an almost impenetrable canopy that effectively screened Major Broznik’s camp, huddled at the foot of the jamba, from all but the most fleeting glimpses of the sky above. Even at high noon on a summer’s day, it was never more than a twilit dusk down below: on a morning such as this, an hour after dawn with snow falling gently from an overcast sky, the quality of light was such as to be hardly distinguishable from a starlit midnight. The interior of the dining hut, where Mallory and his company were at breakfast with Major Broznik, was gloomy in the extreme, the darkness emphasized rather than alleviated by the two smoking oil lamps which formed the only primitive means of illumination.

The atmosphere of gloom was significantly deepened by the behaviour and expression of those seated round the breakfast table. They ate in a moody silence, heads lowered, for the most part not looking at one another: the events of the previous night had clearly affected them all deeply but none so deeply as Reynolds and Groves in whose faces was still unmistakably reflected the shock caused by Saunders’s murder. They left their food untouched.

To complete the atmosphere of quiet desperation, it was clear that the reservations held about the standard of the Partisan early-morning cuisine were of a profound and lasting nature. Served by two young partisankas – women members of Marshal Tito’s army – it consisted of polenta, a highly unappetizing dish made from ground corn, and raki, a Yugoslav spirit of unparalleled fierceness. Miller spooned his breakfast with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

‘Well,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘it makes a change, I’ll say that.’

‘It’s all we have,’ Broznik said apologetically. He laid down his spoon and pushed his plate away from him. ‘And even that I can’t eat. Not this morning. Every entrance to the jamba is guarded, yet there was a killer loose in my camp last night. But maybe he didn’t come in past the guards, maybe he was already inside. Think of it – a traitor in my own camp. And if there is, I can’t even find him. I can’t even believe it!’

Comment was superfluous, nothing could be said that hadn’t been said already, nobody as much as looked in Broznik’s direction: his acute discomfort, embarrassment and anger were apparent to everyone in his tone of voice. Andrea, who had already emptied his plate with apparent relish, looked at the two untouched plates in front of Reynolds and Groves and then enquiringly at the two sergeants themselves, who shook their heads. Andrea reached out, brought their plates before him and set to with every sign of undiminished appetite. Reynolds and Groves looked at him in shocked disbelief, possibly awed by the catholicity of Andrea’s taste, more probably astonished by the insensitivity of a man who could eat so heartily only a few hours after the death of one of his comrades. Miller, for his part, looked at Andrea in near horror, tried another tiny portion of his polenta and wrinkled his nose in delicate distaste. He laid down his spoon and looked morosely at Petar who, guitar slung over his shoulder, was awkwardly feeding himself.

Miller said irritably: ‘Does he always wear that damned guitar?’

‘Our lost one,’ Broznik said softly. ‘That’s what we call him. Our poor blind lost one. Always he carries it or has it by his side. Always. Even when he sleeps – didn’t you notice last night? That guitar means as much to him as life itself. Some weeks ago, one of our men, by way of a joke, tried to take it from him: Petar, blind though he is, almost killed him.’

‘He must be stone tone deaf,’ Miller said wonderingly. ‘It’s the most god-awful guitar I ever heard.’

Broznik smiled faintly. ‘Agreed. But don’t you understand? He can feel it. He can touch it. It’s his own. It’s the only thing left to him in the world, a dark and lonely and empty world. Our poor lost one.’

‘He could at least tune it,’ Miller muttered.

‘You are a good man, my friend. You try to take our minds off what lies ahead this day. But no man can do that.’ He turned to Mallory. ‘Any more than you can hope to carry out your crazy scheme of rescuing your captured agents and breaking up the German counter-espionage network here. It is insanity. Insanity!’

Mallory waved a vague hand. ‘Here you are. No food. No artillery. No transport. Hardly any guns – and practically no ammunition for those guns. No medical supplies. No tanks. No planes. No hope – and you keep on fighting. That makes you sane?’

‘Touché.’ Broznik smiled, pushed across the bottle of raki, waited until Mallory had filled his glass. ‘To the madmen of this world.’

‘I’ve just been talking to Major Stephan up at the Western Gap,’ General Vukalovic said. ‘He thinks we’re all mad. Would you agree, Colonel Lazlo?’

The man lying prone beside Vukalovic lowered his binoculars. He was a burly, sun-tanned, thickset, middle-aged man with a magnificent black moustache that had every appearance of being waxed. After a moment’s consideration, he said: ‘Without a doubt, sir.’

‘Even you?’ Vukalovic said protestingly. ‘With a Czech father?’

‘He came from the High Tatra,’ Lazio explained. ‘They’re all mad there.’

Vukalovic smiled, settled himself more comfortably on his elbows, peered downhill through the gap between two rocks, raised his binoculars and scanned the scene to the south of him, slowly raising his glasses as he did so.

Immediately in front of where he lay was a bare, rocky hillside, dropping gently downhill for a distance of about two hundred feet. Beyond its base it merged gradually into a long flat grassy plateau, no more than two hundred yards wide at its maximum, but stretching almost as far as the eye could see on both sides, on the right-hand side stretching away to the west, on the left curving away to the east, north-east and finally north.

Beyond the edge of the plateau, the land dropped abruptly to form the bank of a wide and swiftly flowing river, a river of that peculiarly Alpine greenish-white colour, green from the melting ice-water of spring, white from where it foamed over jagged rocks and overfalls in the bed of the river. Directly to the south of where Vukalovic and Lazlo lay, the river was spanned by a green-and-white-painted and very solidly-constructed cantilevered steel bridge. Beyond the river, the grassy bank on the far side rose in a very easy slope for a distance of about a hundred yards to the very regularly defined limit of a forest of giant pines which stretched away into the southern distance. Scattered through the very outermost of the pines were a few dully metallic objects, unmistakably tanks. In the farthest distance, beyond the river and beyond the pines, towering, jagged mountains dazzled in their brilliant covering of snow and above that again, but more to the south-east, an equally white and dazzling sun shone from an incongruously blue patch in an otherwise snow-cloud-covered sky.

Vukalovic lowered his binoculars and sighed.

‘No idea at all how many tanks are across in the woods there?’

‘I wish to heaven I knew.’ Lazlo lifted his arms in a small, helpless gesture. ‘Could be ten. Could be two hundred. We’ve no idea. We’ve sent scouts, of course, but they never came back. Maybe they were swept away trying to cross the Neretva.’ He looked at Vukalovic, speculation in his eyes. ‘Through the Zenica Gap, through the Western Gap or across that bridge there – you don’t know where the attack is coming from, do you, sir?’

Vukalovic shook his head.

‘But you expect it soon?’

‘Very soon.’ Vukalovic struck the rocky ground with a clenched fist. ‘Is there no way of destroying that damned bridge?’

‘There have been five RAF attacks,’ Lazlo said heavily. ‘To date, twenty-seven planes lost – there are two hundred AA guns along the Neretva and the nearest Messerschmitt station is only ten minutes’ flying time away. The German radar picks up the British bombers crossing our coast – and the Messerschmitts are here, waiting, by the time they arrive. And don’t forget that the bridge is set in rock on either side.’

‘A direct hit or nothing?’

‘A direct hit on a target seven metres wide from three thousand metres. It is impossible. And a target so camouflaged that you can hardly see it five hundred metres away on land. Doubly impossible.’

‘And impossible for us,’ Vukalovic said bleakly.

‘Impossible for us. We made our last attempt two nights ago.’

‘You made – I told you not to.’

‘You asked us not to. But of course I, Colonel Lazlo, knew better. They started firing star-shells when our troops were halfway across the plateau, God knows how they knew they were coming. Then the searchlights –’

‘Then the shrapnel shells,’ Vukalovic finished. ‘And the Oerlikons. Casualties?’

‘We lost half a battalion.’

‘Half a battalion! And tell me, my dear Lazlo, what would have happened in the unlikely event of your men reaching the bridge?’

‘They had some amatol blocks, some hand-grenades –’

‘No fireworks?’ Vukalovic asked in heavy sarcasm. ‘That might have helped. That bridge is built of steel set in reinforced concrete, man! You were mad even to try.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Lazlo looked away. ‘Perhaps you ought to relieve me.’

‘I think I should.’ Vukalovic looked closely at the exhausted face. ‘In fact I would. But for one thing.’

‘One thing?’

‘All my other regimental commanders are as mad as you are. And if the Germans do attack – maybe even tonight?’

‘We stand here. We are Yugoslavs and we have no place to go. What else can we do?’

‘What else? Two thousand men with pop-guns, most of them weak and starving and lacking ammunition, against what may perhaps be two first-line German armoured divisions. And you stand there. You could always surrender, you know.’

Lazlo smiled. ‘With respect, General, this is no time for facetiousness.’

Vukalovic clapped his shoulder. ‘I didn’t think it funny, either. I’m going up to the dam, to the northeastern redoubt. I’ll see if Colonel Janzy is as mad as you are. And Colonel?’

‘Sir?’

‘If the attack comes, I may give the order to retreat.’

‘Retreat!’

‘Not surrender. Retreat. Retreat to what, one hopes, may be victory.’

‘I am sure the General knows what he is talking about.’

‘The General isn’t.’ Oblivious to possible sniper fire from across the Neretva, Vukalovic stood up in readiness to go. ‘Ever heard of a man called Captain Mallory. Keith Mallory, a New Zealander?’

‘No,’ Lazlo said promptly. He paused, then went on: ‘Wait a minute, though. Fellow who used to climb mountains?’

‘That’s the one. But he has also, I’m given to understand, other accomplishments.’ Vukalovic rubbed a stubbly chin. ‘If all I hear about him is true, I think you could quite fairly call him a rather gifted individual.’

‘And what about this gifted individual?’ Lazlo asked curiously.

‘Just this.’ Vukalovic was suddenly very serious, even sombre. ‘When all things are lost and there is no hope left, there is always, somewhere in the world, one man you can turn to. There may be only that one man. More often than not there is only that one man. But that one man is always there.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Or so they say.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Lazlo said politely. ‘But about this Keith Mallory –’

‘Before you sleep tonight, pray for him. I will.’

‘Yes, sir. And about us? Shall I pray for us, too?’

‘That,’ said Vukalovic, ‘wouldn’t be at all a bad idea.’

The sides of the jamba leading upwards from Major Broznik’s camp were very steep and very slippery and the ascending cavalcade of men and ponies were making very heavy going of it. Or most of them were. The escort of dark stocky Bosnian Partisans, to whom such terrain was part and parcel of existence, appeared quite unaffected by the climb: and it in no way appeared to interfere with Andrea’s rhythmic puffing of his usual vile-smelling cigar. Reynolds noticed this, a fact which fed fresh fuel to the already dark doubts and torments in his mind.

He said sourly: ‘You seem to have made a remarkable recovery in the night-time, Colonel Stavros, sir.’

‘Andrea.’ The cigar was removed. ‘I have a heart condition. It comes and goes.’ The cigar was replaced.

‘I’m sure it does,’ Reynolds muttered. He glanced suspiciously, and for the twentieth time, over his shoulder. ‘Where the hell is Mallory?’

‘Where the hell is Captain Mallory,’ Andrea chided.

‘Well, where?’

‘The leader of an expedition has many responsibilities,’ Andrea said. ‘Many things to attend to. Captain Mallory is probably attending to something at this very moment.’

‘You can say that again,’ Reynolds muttered.

‘What was that?’

‘Nothing.’

Captain Mallory was, as Andrea had so correctly guessed, attending to something at that precise moment. Back in Broznik’s office, he and Broznik were bent over a map spread out on the trestle table. Broznik pointed to a spot near the northern limit of the map.

‘I agree. This is the nearest possible landing strip for a plane. But it is very high up. At this time of year there will still be almost a metre of snow up there. There are other places, better places.’

‘I don’t doubt that for a moment,’ Mallory said. ‘Faraway fields are always greener, maybe even faraway airfields. But I haven’t the time to go to them.’ He stabbed his forefinger on the map. ‘I want a landing-strip here and only here by night-fall. I’d be most grateful if you’d send a rider to Konjic within the hour and have my request radioed immediately to your Partisan HQ at Drvar.’

Broznik said drily: ‘You are accustomed to asking for instant miracles, Captain Mallory?’

‘This doesn’t call for miracles. Just a thousand men. The feet of a thousand men. A small price for seven thousand lives?’ He handed Broznik a slip of paper. ‘Wavelength and code. Have Konjic transmit it as soon as possible.’ Mallory glanced at his watch. ‘They have twenty minutes on me already. I’d better hurry.’

‘I suppose you’d better,’ Broznik said hurriedly. He hesitated, at a momentary loss for words, then went on awkwardly: ‘Captain Mallory, I – I –’

‘I know. Don’t worry. The Mallorys of this world never make old bones anyway. We’re too stupid.’

‘Aren’t we all, aren’t we all?’ Broznik gripped Mallory’s hand. ‘Tonight, I make a prayer for you.’

Mallory remained silent for a moment, then nodded.

‘Make it a long one.’

The Bosnian scouts, now, like the remainder of the party, mounted on ponies, led the winding way down through the gentle slope of the thickly-forested valley, followed by Andrea and Miller riding abreast, then by Petar, whose pony’s bridle was in the hand of his sister. Reynolds and Groves, whether by accident or design, had fallen some little way behind and were talking in soft tones.

Groves said speculatively: ‘I wonder what Mallory and the Major are talking about back there?’

Reynolds’s mouth twisted in bitterness. ‘It’s perhaps as well we don’t know.’

‘You may be right at that. I just don’t know.’ Groves paused, went on almost pleadingly: ‘Broznik is on the up-and-up. I’m sure of it. Being what he is, he must be.’

‘That’s as may be. Mallory too, eh?’

‘He must be, too.’

‘Must?’ Reynolds was savage. ‘God alive, man, I tell you I saw him with my own eyes.’ He nodded towards Maria, some twenty yards ahead, and his face was cruel and hard. ‘That girl hit him – and how she hit him – back in Neufeld’s camp and the next thing I see is the two of them having a cosy little lovey-dovey chat outside Broznik’s hut. Odd, isn’t it? Soon after, Saunders was murdered. Coincidence, isn’t it? I tell you. Groves, Mallory could have done it himself. The girl could have had time to do it before she met Mallory – except that it would have been physically impossible for her to drive a six-inch knife home to the hilt. But Mallory could have done it all right. He’d time enough – and opportunity enough – when he handed that damned message into the radio hut.’

Groves said protestingly: ‘Why in God’s name should he do that?’

‘Because Broznik had given him some urgent information. Mallory had to make a show of passing this information back to Italy. But maybe sending that message was the last thing he wanted. Maybe he stopped it in the only way he knew how – and smashed the transmitter to make sure no one else could send a message. Maybe that’s why he stopped me from mounting a guard or going to see Saunders – to prevent me from discovering the fact that Saunders was already dead – in which case, of course, because of the time factor, suspicion would have automatically fallen on him.’

‘You’re imagining things.’ Despite his discomfort. Groves was reluctantly impressed by Reynolds’s reasoning.

‘You think so? That knife in Saunders’s back – did I imagine that too?’

Within half an hour, Mallory had rejoined the party. He jogged past Reynolds and Groves, who studiously ignored him, past Maria and Petar, who did the same, and took up position behind Andrea and Miller.

It was in this order, for almost an hour, that they passed through the heavily-wooded Bosnian valleys. Occasionally, they came to clearings in the pines, clearings that had once been the site of human habitation, small villages or hamlets. But now there were no humans, no habitations, for the villages had ceased to exist. The clearings were all the same, chillingly and depressingly the same. Where the hard-working but happy Bosnians had once lived in their simple but sturdy homes, there were now only the charred and blackened remains of what had once been thriving communities, the air still heavy with the acrid smell of ancient smoke, the sweet-sour stench of corruption and death, mute testimony to the no-quarter viciousness and total ruthlessness of the war between the Germans and the Partisan Yugoslavs. Occasionally, here and there, still stood a few small, stone-built houses which had not been worth the expenditure of bombs or shells or mortars or petrol: but few of the larger buildings had escaped complete destruction. Churches and schools appeared to have been the primary targets: on one occasion, as evidenced by some charred steel equipment that could have come only from an operating theatre, they passed by a small cottage hospital that had been so razed to the ground that no part of the resulting ruins was more than three feet high. Mallory wondered what would have happened to the patients occupying the hospital at the time: but he no longer wondered at the hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs – 350,000 had been the figure quoted by Captain Jensen, but, taking women and children into account, the number must have been at least a million – who had rallied under the banner of Marshal Tito. Patriotism apart, the burning desire for liberation and revenge apart, there was no place else left for them to go. They were a people, Mallory realized, with literally nothing left, with nothing to lose but their lives which they apparently held of small account, but with everything to gain by the destruction of the enemy: were he a German soldier, Mallory reflected, he would not have felt particularly happy about the prospect of a posting to Yugoslavia. It was a war which the Wehrmacht could never win, which the soldiers of no Western European country could ever have won, for the peoples of the high mountains are virtually indestructible.

The Bosnian scouts, Mallory observed, looked neither to left nor right as they passed through the lifeless shattered villages of their countrymen, most of whom were now almost certainly dead. They didn’t have to look, he realized: they had their memories, and even their memories would be too much for them. If it were possible to feel pity for an enemy, then Mallory at that moment felt pity for the Germans.

By and by they emerged from the narrow winding mountain track on to a narrow, but comparatively wide road, wide enough, at least, for single-file vehicular traffic. The Bosnian scout in the lead threw up his hand and halted his pony.

‘Unofficial no-man’s-land, it would seem,’ Mallory said. ‘I think this is where they turfed us off the truck this morning.’

Mallory’s guess appeared to be correct. The Partisans wheeled their horses, smiled widely, waved, shouted some unintelligible words of farewell and urged their horses back the way they had come.

With Mallory and Andrea in the lead and the two sergeants bringing up the rear, the seven remaining members of the party moved off down the track. The snow had stopped now, the clouds above had cleared away and the sunlight was filtering down between the now thinning pines. Suddenly Andrea, who had been peering to his left, reached out and touched Mallory on the arm. Mallory followed the direction of Andrea’s pointing hand. Downhill, the pines petered out less than a hundred yards away and through the trees could be glimpsed some distant object, a startling green in colour. Mallory swung round in his saddle.

‘Down there. I want to take a look. Don’t move below the tree-line.’

The ponies picked their delicate sure-footed way down the steep and slippery slope. About ten yards from the tree-line and at a signal from Mallory, the riders dismounted and advanced cautiously on foot, moving from the cover of one pine to the next. The last few feet they covered on hands and knees, then finally stretched out flat in the partial concealment of the boles of the lowermost pines. Mallory brought out his binoculars, cleared the cold-clouded lenses and brought them to his eyes.

The snow-line, he saw, petered out some three or four hundred yards below them. Below that again was a mixture of fissured and eroded rock-faces and brown earth and beyond that again a belt of sparse and discouraged-looking grass. Along the lower reaches of this belt of grass ran a tarmacadam road, a road which struck Mallory as being, for that area, in remarkably good condition: the road was more or less exactly paralleled, at a distance of about a hundred yards, by a single-track and extremely narrow-gauge railway: a grass-grown and rusted line that looked as if it hadn’t been used for many years. Just beyond the line the land dropped in a precipitous cliff to a narrow winding lake, the farther margin of which was marked by far more towering precipices leading up without break and with hardly any variation in angle to rugged snow-capped mountains.

From where he lay Mallory was directly overlooking a right-angled bend in the lake, a lake which was almost incredibly beautiful. In the bright clear sparkling sunlight of that spring morning it glittered and gleamed like the purest of emeralds. The smooth surface was occasionally ruffled by errant catspaws of wind, catspaws which had the effect of deepening the emerald colour to an almost translucent aquamarine. The lake itself was nowhere much more than a quarter of a mile in width, but obviously miles in length: the long right-hand arm, twisting and turning between the mountains, stretched to the east almost as far as the eye could see: to the left, the short southern arm, hemmed in by increasingly vertical walls which finally appeared almost to meet overhead, ended against the concrete ramparts of a dam. But what caught and held the attention of the watchers was the incredible mirrored gleam of the far mountains in that equally incredible emerald mirror.

‘Well, now,’ Miller murmured, ‘that is nice.’ Andrea gave him a long expressionless look, then turned his attention to the lake again.

Groves’s interest momentarily overcame his animosity.

‘What lake is that, sir?’

Mallory lowered the binoculars. ‘Haven’t the faintest idea. Maria?’ She made no answer. ‘Maria! What – lake – is – that?’

‘That’s the Neretva dam,’ she said sullenly. ‘The biggest in Yugoslavia.’

‘It’s important, then?’

‘It is important. Whoever controls that controls Central Yugoslavia.’

‘And the Germans control it, I suppose?’

‘They control it. We control it.’ There was more than a hint of triumph in her smile. ‘We – the Germans – have got it completely sealed off. Cliffs on both sides. To the east there – the upper end – they have a boom across a gorge only ten yards wide. And that boom is patrolled night and day. So is the dam wall itself. The only way in is by a set of steps – ladders, rather – fixed to the cliff-face just below the dam.’

Mallory said drily: ‘Very interesting information – for a parachute brigade. But we’ve other and more urgent fish to fry. Come on.’ He glanced at Miller, who nodded and began to ease his way back up the slope, followed by the two sergeants, Maria and Petar. Mallory and Andrea lingered for a few moments longer.

‘I wonder what it’s like,’ Mallory murmured.

‘What’s what like?’ Andrea said.

‘The other side of the dam.’

‘And the ladder let into the cliff?’

‘And the ladder let into the cliff.’

From where General Vukalovic lay, high on a cliff-top on the right-hand or western side of the Neretva gorge, he had an excellent view of the ladder let into the cliff: he had, in fact, an excellent view of the entire outer face of the dam wall and of the gorge which began at the foot of the wall and extended southwards for almost a mile before vanishing from sight round an abrupt right-hand corner.

The dam wall itself was quite narrow, not much more than thirty yards in width, but very deep, stretching down in a slightly V-formation from between overhanging cliff-faces to the greenish-white torrent of water foaming from the outlet pipes at the base. On top of the dam, at the eastern end and on a slight eminence, were the control station and two small huts, one of which, judging from the clearly visible soldiers patrolling the top of the wall, was almost certainly a guard-room. Above those buildings the walls of the gorge rose quite vertically for about thirty feet, then jutted out in a terrifying overhang.

From the control-room, a zig-zag, green-painted iron ladder, secured by brackets to the rock-face, led down to the floor of the gorge. From the base of the ladder a narrow path extended down the gorge for a distance of about a hundred yards, ending abruptly at a spot where some ancient landslide had gouged a huge scar into the side of the gorge. From here a bridge spanned the river to another path on the right-hand bank.

As bridges go, it wasn’t much, an obviously very elderly and rickety wooden swing bridge which looked as if its own weight would be enough to carry it into the torrent at any moment: what was even worse, it seemed, at first glance, as if its site had been deliberately picked by someone with an unhinged mind, for it lay directly below an enormous boulder some forty feet up the landslide, a boulder so clearly in a highly precarious state of balance that none but the most foolhardy would have lingered in the crossing of the bridge. In point of fact, no other site would have been possible.

From the western edge of the bridge, the narrow, boulder-strewn path followed the line of the river, passing by what looked like an extremely hazardous ford, and finally curving away from sight with the river.

General Vukalovic lowered his binoculars, turned to the man at his side and smiled.

‘All quiet on the eastern front, eh, Colonel Janzy?’

‘All quiet on the eastern front,’ Janzy agreed. He was a small, puckish, humorous-looking character with a youthful face and incongruous white hair. He twisted round and gazed to the north. ‘But not so quiet on the northern front, I’m afraid.’

The smile faded from Vukalovic’s face as he turned, lifted his binoculars again and gazed to the north. Less than three miles away and clearly visible in the morning sunlight, lay the heavily wooded Zenica Gap, for weeks a hotly contested strip of territory between Vukalovic’s northern defensive forces, under the command of Colonel Janzy, and units of the invading German 11th Army Corps. At that moment frequent puffs of smoke could be seen, to the left a thick column of smoke spiralled up to form a dark pall against the now cloudless blue of the sky, while the distant rattle of small-arms fire, punctuated by the occasional heavier boom of artillery, was almost incessant. Vukalovic lowered his glasses and looked thoughtfully at Janzy.

‘The softening-up before the main attack?’

‘What else? The final assault.’

‘How many tanks?’

‘It’s difficult to be sure. Collating reports, my staff estimate a hundred and fifty.’

‘One hundred and fifty!’

‘That’s what they make it – and at least fifty of those are Tiger tanks.’

‘Let’s hope to heaven your staff can’t count.’ Vukalovic rubbed a weary hand across his bloodshot eyes: he’d had no sleep during the night just gone, no sleep during the night previous to that. ‘Let’s go and see how many we can count.’

Maria and Petar led the way now, with Reynolds and Groves, clearly in no mood for other company, bringing up the rear almost fifty yards behind. Mallory, Andrea and Miller rode abreast along the narrow road. Andrea looked at Mallory, his eyes speculative.

‘Saunders’s death? Any idea?’

Mallory shook his head. ‘Ask me something else.’

‘The message you’d given him to send. What was it?’

‘A report of our safe arrival in Broznik’s camp. Nothing more.’

‘A psycho,’ Miller announced. ‘The handy man with the knife, I mean. Only a psycho would kill for that reason.’

‘Maybe he didn’t kill for that reason,’ Mallory said mildly. ‘Maybe he thought it was some other kind of message.’

‘Some other kind of message?’ Miller lifted an eyebrow in the way that only he knew how. ‘Now what kind –’ He caught Andrea’s eye, broke off and changed his mind about saying anything more. Both he and Andrea gazed curiously at Mallory who seemed to have fallen into a mood of intense introspection.

Whatever its reason, the period of deep preoccupation did not last for long. With the air of a man who has just arrived at a conclusion about something, Mallory lifted his head and called to Maria to stop, at the same time reining in his own pony. Together they waited until Reynolds and Groves had made up on them.

‘There are a good number of options open to us,’ Mallory said, ‘but for better or worse this is what I have decided to do.’ He smiled faintly. ‘For better, I think, if for no other reason than that this is the course of action that will get us out of here fastest. I’ve talked to Major Broznik and found out what I wanted. He tells me –’

‘Got your information for Neufeld, then, have you?’ If Reynolds was attempting to mask the contempt in his voice he made a singularly poor job of it.

‘The hell with Neufeld,’ Mallory said without heat. ‘Partisan spies have discovered where the four captured Allied agents are being held.’

‘They have?’ Reynolds said. ‘Then why don’t the Partisans do something about it?’

‘For a good enough reason. The agents are held deep in German territory. In an impregnable blockhouse high up in the mountains.’

‘And what are we going to do about the Allied agents held in this impregnable block-house?’

‘Simple.’ Mallory corrected himself. ‘Well, in theory it’s simple. We take them out of there and make our break tonight.’

Reynolds and Groves stared at Mallory, then at each other in frank disbelief and consternation. Andrea and Miller carefully avoided looking at each other or at anyone else.

‘You’re mad!’ Reynolds spoke with total conviction.

‘You’re mad, sir,’ Andrea said reprovingly.

Reynolds looked uncomprehendingly at Andrea, then turned back to Mallory again.

‘You must be!’ he insisted. ‘Break? Break for where, in heaven’s name?’

‘For home. For Italy.’

‘Italy!’ It took Reynolds all of ten seconds to digest this startling piece of information, then he went on sarcastically: ‘We’re going to fly there, I suppose?’

‘Well, it’s a long swim across the Adriatic, even for a fit youngster like you. How else?’

‘Flying?’ Groves seemed slightly dazed.

‘Flying. Not ten kilometres from here is a high – a very high mountain plateau, mostly in Partisan hands. There’ll be a plane there at nine o’clock tonight.’

In the fashion of people who have failed to grasp something they have just heard, Groves repeated the statement in the form of a question. ‘There’ll be a plane there at nine o’clock tonight? You’ve just arranged this?’

‘How could I? We’ve no radio.’

Reynolds’s distrustful face splendidly complemented the scepticism in his voice. ‘But how can you be sure – well, at nine o’clock?’

‘Because, starting at six o’clock this evening, there’ll be a Wellington bomber over the airstrip every three hours for the next week if necessary.’

Mallory kneed his pony and the party moved on, Reynolds and Groves taking up their usual position well to the rear of the others. For some time Reynolds, his expression alternating between hostility and speculation, stared fixedly at Mallory’s back: then he turned to Groves.

‘Well, well, well. Isn’t that very convenient indeed. We just happen to be sent to Broznik’s camp. He just happens to know where the four agents are held. It just happens that an airplane will be over a certain airfield at a certain time – and it also so happens that I know for an absolute certainty that there are no airfields up in the high plateau. Still think everything clean and above-board?’

It was quite obvious from the unhappy expression on Groves’s face that he thought nothing of the kind. He said: ‘What in God’s name are we going to do?’

‘Watch our backs.’

Fifty yards ahead of them Miller cleared his throat and said delicately to Mallory: ‘Reynolds seems to have lost some of his – um – earlier confidence in you, sir.’

Mallory said drily: ‘It’s not surprising. He thinks I stuck that knife in Saunders’s back.’

This time Andrea and Miller did exchange glances, their faces registering expressions as close to pure consternation as either of those poker-faced individuals was capable of achieving.

SEVEN

Friday

1000–1200

Half a mile from Neufeld’s camp they were met by Captain Droshny and some half-dozen of his Cetniks. Droshny’s welcome was noticeably lacking in cordiality but at least he managed, at what unknown cost, to maintain some semblance of inoffensive neutrality.

‘So you came back?’

‘As you can see,’ Mallory agreed.

Droshny looked at the ponies. ‘And travelling in comfort.’

‘A present from our good friend Major Broznik.’ Mallory grinned. ‘He thinks we’re heading for Konjic on them.’

Droshny didn’t appear to care very much what Major Broznik had thought. He jerked his head, wheeled his horse and set off at a fast trot for Neufeld’s camp.

When they had dismounted inside the compound, Droshny immediately led Mallory into Neufeld’s hut. Neufeld’s welcome, like Droshny’s, was something less than ecstatic, but at least he succeeded in imparting a shade more benevolence to his neutrality. His face held, also, just a hint of surprise, a reaction which he explained at once.

‘Candidly, Captain, I did not expect to see you again. There were so many – ah – imponderables. However, I am delighted to see you – you would not have returned without the information I wanted. Now then, Captain Mallory, to business.’

Mallory eyed Neufeld without enthusiasm. ‘You’re not a very business-like partner, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m not?’ Neufeld said politely. ‘In what way?’

‘Business partners don’t tell lies to each other. Sure you said Vukalovic’s troops are massing. So they are indeed. But not, as you said, to break out. Instead, they’re massing to defend themselves against the final German attack, the assault that is to crush them once and for all, and this assault they believe to be imminent.’

‘Well, now, you surely didn’t expect me to give away our military secrets – which you might, I say just might, have relayed to the enemy – before you had proved yourselves,’ Neufeld said reasonably. ‘You’re not that naïve. About this proposed attack. Who gave you the information?’

‘Major Broznik.’ Mallory smiled in recollection. ‘He was very expansive.’

Neufeld leaned forward, his tension reflected in the sudden stillness of his face, in the way his unblinking eyes held Mallory’s. ‘And did they say where they expected this attack to come?’

‘I only know the name. The bridge at Neretva.’

Neufeld sank back into his chair, exhaled a long soundless sigh of relief and smiled to rob his next words of any offence. ‘My friend, if you weren’t British, a deserter, a renegade and a dope-peddler, you’d get the Iron Cross for this. By the way,’ he went on, as if by casual afterthought, ‘you’ve been cleared from Padua. The bridge at Neretva? You’re sure of this?’

Mallory said irritably: ‘If you doubt my word -’

‘Of course not, of course not. Just a manner of speaking.’ Neufeld paused for a few moments, then said softly: ‘The bridge at Neretva.’ The way he spoke them, the words sounded almost like a litany.

Droshny said softly: ‘This fits in with all we suspected.’

‘Never mind what you suspected,’ Mallory said rudely. ‘To my business now, if you don’t mind. We have done well, you would say? We have fulfilled your request, got the precise information you wanted?’ Neufeld nodded. ‘Then get us the hell out of here. Fly us deep into some German-held territory. Into Austria or Germany itself, if you like – the farther away from here the better. You know what will happen to us if we ever again fall into British or Yugoslav hands?’

‘It’s not hard to guess,’ Neufeld said almost cheerfully. ‘But you misjudge us, my friend. Your departure to a place of safety has already been arranged. A certain Chief of Military Intelligence in northern Italy would very much like to make your personal acquaintance. He has reason to believe that you can be of great help to him.’

Mallory nodded his understanding.

General Vukalovic trained his binoculars on the Zenica Gap, a narrow and heavily-wooded valley floor lying between the bases of two high and steep-shouldered mountains, mountains almost identical in both shape and height.

The German 11th Army Corps tanks among the pines were not difficult to locate, for the Germans had made no attempt either to camouflage or conceal them, measure enough, Vukalovic thought grimly, of the Germans’ total confidence in themselves and in the outcome of the battle that lay ahead. He could clearly see soldiers working on some stationary vehicles: other tanks were backing and filling and manoeuvring into position as if making ready to take up battle formation for the actual attack: the deep rumbling roar of the heavy engines of Tiger tanks was almost incessant.

Vukalovic lowered his glasses, jotted down a few more pencil marks on a sheet of paper already almost covered with similar pencil marks, performed a few exercises in addition, laid paper and pencil aside with a sigh and turned to Colonel Janzy, who was similarly engaged.

Vukalovic said wryly: ‘My apologies to your staff. Colonel. They can count just as well as I can.’

For once, Captain Jensen’s piratical swagger and flashing, confident smile were not very much in evidence: at that moment, in fact, they were totally absent. It would have been impossible for a face of Jensen’s generous proportions ever to assume an actually haggard appearance, but the set, grim face displayed unmistakable signs of strain and anxiety and sleeplessness as he paced up and down the 5th Army Operations Headquarters in Termoli in Italy.

He did not pace alone. Beside him, matching him step for step, a burly grey-haired officer in the uniform of a lieutenant-general in the British Army accompanied him backwards and forwards, the expression on his face an exact replica of that on Jensen’s. As they came to the farther end of the room, the General stopped and glanced interrogatively at a head-phone-wearing sergeant in front of a large RCA transceiver. The sergeant slowly shook his head. The two men resumed their pacing.

The General said abruptly: ‘Time is running out. You do appreciate, Jensen, that once you launch a major offensive you can’t possibly stop it?’

‘I appreciate it,’ Jensen said heavily. ‘What are the latest reconnaissance reports, sir?’

‘There is no shortage of reports, but God alone knows what to make of them all.’ The General sounded bitter. ‘There’s intense activity all along the Gustav Line, involving – as far as we can make out – two Panzer divisions, one German infantry division, one Austrian infantry division and two Jaeger battalions – their crack Alpine troops. They’re not mounting an offensive, that’s for sure – in the first place, there’s no possibility of their making an offensive from the areas in which they are manoeuvring and in the second place if they were contemplating an offensive they’d take damn good care to keep all their preparations secret.’

‘All this activity, then? If they’re not planning an attack.’

The General sighed. ‘Informed opinion has it that they’re making all preparations for a lightning pull-out. Informed opinion! All that concerns me is that those blasted divisions are still in the Gustav Line. Jensen, what has gone wrong?’

Jensen lifted his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. ‘It was arranged for a radio rendezvous every two hours from four a.m. -’

‘There have been no contacts whatsoever.’

Jensen said nothing.

The General looked at him, almost speculatively. ‘The best in Southern Europe, you said.’

‘Yes, I did say that.’

The General’s unspoken doubts as to the quality of the agents Jensen had selected for operation Force 10 would have been considerably heightened if he had been at that moment present with those agents in the guest hut in Hauptmann Neufeld’s camp in Bosnia. They were exhibiting none of the harmony, understanding and implicit mutual trust which one would have expected to find among a team of agents rated as the best in the business. There was, instead, tension and anger in the air, an air of suspicion and mistrust so heavy as to be almost palpable. Reynolds, confronting Mallory, had his anger barely under control.

‘I want to know now!’ Reynolds almost shouted the words.

‘Keep your voice down,’ Andrea said sharply.

‘I want to know now,’ Reynolds repeated. This time his voice was little more than a whisper, but none the less demanding and insistent for that.

‘You’ll be told when the time comes.’ As always, Mallory’s voice was calm and neutral and devoid of heat. ‘Not till then. What you don’t know, you can’t tell.’

Reynolds clenched his fists and advanced a step. ‘Are you damn well insinuating that –’

Mallory said with restraint: ‘I’m insinuating nothing. I was right, back in Termoli, Sergeant. You’re no better than a ticking time-bomb.’

‘Maybe.’ Reynolds’s fury was out of control now. ‘But at least there’s something honest about a bomb.’

‘Repeat that remark,’ Andrea said quietly.

‘What?’

‘Repeat it.’

‘Look, Andrea –’

‘Colonel Stavros, sonny.’

‘Sir.’

‘Repeat it and I’ll guarantee you a minimum of five years for insubordination in the field.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Reynolds’s physical effort to bring himself under control was apparent to everyone. ‘But why should he not tell us his plans for this afternoon and at the same time let us all know that we’ll be leaving from this Ivenici place tonight?’

‘Because our plans are something the Germans can do something about,’ Andrea said patiently. ‘If they find out. If one of us talked under duress. But they can’t do anything about Ivenici – that’s in Partisan hands.’

Miller pacifically changed the subject. He said to Mallory: ‘Seven thousand feet up, you say. The snow must be thigh-deep up there. How in God’s name does anyone hope to clear all that lot away?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mallory said vaguely. ‘I suspect somebody will think of something.’

And seven thousand feet up on the Ivenici plateau, somebody had indeed thought of something.

The Ivenici plateau was a wilderness in white, a bleak and desolate and, for many months of the year, a bitterly cold and howling and hostile wilderness, totally inimical to human life, totally intolerant of human presence. The plateau was bounded to the west by a five-hundred-foot-high cliff-face, quite vertical in some parts, fractured and fissured in others. Scattered along its length were numerous frozen waterfalls and occasional lines of pine trees, impossibly growing on impossibly narrow ledges, their frozen branches drooped and laden with the frozen snow of six long months gone by. To the east the plateau was bounded by nothing but an abrupt and sharply defined line marking the top of another cliff-face which dropped away perpendicularly into the valleys below.

The plateau itself consisted of a smooth, absolutely level, unbroken expanse of snow, snow which at that height of 2,000 metres and in the brilliant sunshine gave off a glare and dazzling reflection which was positively hurtful to the eyes. In length, it was perhaps half a mile: in width, nowhere more than a hundred yards. At its southern end, the plateau rose sharply to merge with the cliff-face which here tailed off and ran into the ground.

On this prominence stood two tents, both white, one small, the other a large marquee. Outside the small tent stood two men, talking. The taller and older man, wearing a heavy greatcoat and a pair of smoked glasses, was Colonel Vis, the commandant of a Sarajevo-based brigade of Partisans: the younger, slighter figure was his adjutant, a Captain Vlanovich. Both men were gazing out over the length of the plateau.

Captain Vlanovich said unhappily: There must be easier ways of doing this, sir.’

‘You name it, Boris, my boy, and I’ll do it.’ Both in appearance and voice Colonel Vis gave the impression of immense calm and competence. ‘Bull-dozers, I agree, would help. So would snow-ploughs. But you will agree that to drive either of them up vertical cliff-faces in order to reach here would call for considerable skill on the part of the drivers. Besides, what’s an army for, if not for marching?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Vlanovich said, dutifully and doubtfully.

Both men gazed out over the length of the plateau to the north.

To the north, and beyond, for all around a score of encircling mountain peaks, some dark and jagged and sombre, others rounded and snowcapped and rose-coloured, soared up into the cloudless washed-out pale blue of the sky. It was an immensely impressive sight.

Even more impressive was the spectacle taking place on the plateau itself. A solid phalanx of a thousand uniformed soldiers, perhaps half in the buff grey of the Yugoslav army, the rest in a motley array of other countries’ uniforms, were moving, at a snail-pace, across the virgin snow.

The phalanx was fifty people wide but only twenty deep, each line of fifty linked arm-in-arm, heads and shoulders bowed forward as they laboriously trudged at a painfully slow pace through the snow. That the pace was so slow was no matter for wonder, the leading line of men were ploughing their way through waist-deep snow, and already the signs of strain and exhaustion were showing in their faces. It was killingly hard work, work which, at that altitude, doubled the pulse rate, made a man fight for every gasping breath, turned a man’s legs into leaden and agonized limbs where only the pain could convince him that they were still part of him.

And not only men. After the first five lines of soldiers, there were almost as many women and girls in the remainder of the phalanx as there were men, although everyone was so muffled against the freezing cold and biting winds of those high altitudes that it was impossible almost to tell man from woman. The last two lines of the phalanx were composed entirely of partisankas and it was significantly ominous of the murderous labour still to come that even they were sinking knee-deep in the snow.

It was a fantastic sight, but a sight that was far from unique in wartime Yugoslavia. The airfields of the lowlands, completely dominated by the armoured divisions of the Wehrmacht, were permanently barred to the Yugoslavs and it was thus that the Partisans constructed many of their airstrips in the mountains. In snow of this depth and in areas completely inaccessible to powered mechanical aids, there was no other way open to them.

Colonel Vis looked away and turned to Captain Vlanovich.

‘Well, Boris, my boy, do you think you’re up here for the winter sports? Get the food and soup kitchens organized. We’ll use up a whole week’s rations of hot food and hot soup in this one day.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Vlanovich cocked his head, then removed his ear-flapped fur cap the better to listen to the newly-begun sound of distant explosions to the north. ‘What on earth is that?’

Vis said musingly: ‘Sound does carry far in our pure Yugoslavian mountain air, does it not?’

‘Sir? Please?’

‘That, my boy,’ Vis said with considerable satisfaction, ‘is the Messerschmitt fighter base at Novo Derventa getting the biggest plastering of its lifetime.’

‘Sir?’

Vis sighed in long-suffering patience. ‘I’ll make a soldier of you some day. Messerschmitts, Boris, are fighters, carrying all sorts of nasty cannons and machine-guns. What, at this moment, is the finest fighter target in Yugoslavia?’

‘What is –’ Vlanovich broke off and looked again at the trudging phalanx. ‘Oh!’

‘“Oh,” indeed. The British Air Force have diverted six of their best Lancaster heavy bomber squadrons from the Italian front just to attend to our friends at Novo Derventa.’ He in turn removed his cap, the better to listen. ‘Hard at work, aren’t they? By the time they’re finished there won’t be a Messerschmitt able to take off from that field for a week. If, that is to say, there are any left to take off.’

‘If I might venture a remark, sir?’

‘You may so venture, Captain Vlanovich.’

‘There are other fighter bases.’

‘True.’ Vis pointed upwards. ‘See anything?’

Vlanovich craned his neck, shielded his eyes against the brilliant sun, gazed into the empty blue sky and shook his head.

‘Neither do I,’ Vis agreed. ‘But at seven thousand metres – and with their crews even colder than we are – squadrons of Beaufighters will be keeping relief patrol up there until dark.’

‘Who – who is he, sir? Who can ask for all our soldiers down here, for squadrons of bombers and fighters?’

‘Fellow called Captain Mallory, I believe.’

‘A captain? Like me?’

‘A captain. I doubt, Boris,’ Vis went on kindly, ‘whether he’s quite like you. But it’s not the rank that counts. It’s the name. Mallory.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘You will, my boy, you will.’

‘But – but this man Mallory. What does he want all this for?’

‘Ask him when you see him tonight.’

‘When I – he’s coming here tonight?’

‘Tonight. If,’ Vis added sombrely, ‘he lives that long.’

Neufeld, followed by Droshny, walked briskly and confidently into his radio hut, a bleak, ramshackle lean-to furnished with a table, two chairs, a large portable transceiver and nothing else. The German corporal seated before the radio looked up enquiringly at their entrance.

‘The Seventh Armoured Corps HQ at the Neretva bridge,’ Neufeld ordered. He seemed in excellent spirits. ‘I wish to speak to General Zimmermann personally.’

The corporal nodded acknowledgment, put through the call-sign and was answered within seconds. He listened briefly, looked up at Neufeld. ‘The General is coming now, sir.’

Neufeld reached out a hand for the ear-phones, took them and nodded towards the door. The corporal rose and left the hut while Neufeld took the vacated seat and adjusted the head-phones to his satisfaction. After a few seconds he automatically straightened in his seat as a voice came crackling over the ear-phones.

‘Hauptmann Neufeld here, Herr General. The Englishmen have returned. Their information is that the Partisan division in the Zenica Cage is expecting a full-scale attack from the south across the Neretva bridge.’

‘Are they now?’ General Zimmermann, comfortably seated in a swivel chair in the back of the radio truck parked on the tree-line due south of the Neretva bridge, made no attempt to conceal the satisfaction in his voice. The canvas hood of the truck was rolled back and he removed his peaked cap the better to enjoy the pale spring sunshine. ‘Interesting, very interesting. Anything else?’

‘Yes,’ Neufeld’s voice crackled metallically over the loudspeaker. ‘They’ve asked to be flown to sanctuary. Deep behind our lines, even to Germany. They feel – ah – unsafe here.’

‘Well, well, well. Is that how they feel.’ Zimmermann paused, considered, then continued. ‘You are fully informed of the situation, Hauptmann Neufeld? You are aware of the delicate balance of – um – niceties involved?’

‘Yes, Herr General.’

‘This calls for a moment’s thought. Wait.’

Zimmermann swung idly to and fro in his swivel chair as he pondered his decision. He gazed thoughtfully but almost unseeingly to the north, across the meadows bordering the south bank of the Neretva, the river spanned by the iron bridge, then the meadows on the far side rising steeply to the rocky redoubt which served as the first line of defence for Colonel Lazlo’s Partisan defenders. To the east, as he turned, he could look up the green-white rushing waters of the Neretva, the meadows on either side of it narrowing until, curving north, they disappeared suddenly at the mouth of the cliff-sided gorge from which the Neretva emerged. Another quarter turn and he was gazing into the pine forest to the south, a pine forest which at first seemed innocuous enough and empty of life – until, that was, one’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom and scores of large rectangular shapes, effectively screened from both observation from the air and from the northern bank of the Neretva by camouflage canvas, camouflage nets and huge piles of dead branches. The sight of those camouflaged spearheads of his two Panzer divisions somehow helped Zimmermann to make up his mind. He picked up the microphone.

‘Hauptmann Neufeld? I have decided on a course of action and you will please carry out the following instructions precisely …’

Droshny removed the duplicate pair of earphones that he had been wearing and said doubtfully to Neufeld: ‘Isn’t the General asking rather a lot of us?’

Neufeld shook his head reassuringly. ‘General Zimmermann always knows what he is doing. His psychological assessment of the Captain Mallorys of this world is invariably a hundred per cent right.’

‘I hope so.’ Droshny was unconvinced. ‘For our sakes, I hope so.’

They left the hut. Neufeld said to the radio operator: ‘Captain Mallory in my office, please. And Sergeant Baer.’

Mallory arrived in the office to find Neufeld, Droshny and Baer already there. Neufeld was brief and businesslike.

‘We’ve decided on a ski-plane to fly you out – they’re the only planes that can land in those damned mountains. You’ll have time for a few hours’ sleep – we don’t leave till four. Any questions?’

‘Where’s the landing-strip?’

‘A clearing. A kilometre from here. Anything else?’

‘Nothing. Just get us out of here, that’s all.’

‘You need have no worry on that score,’ Neufeld said emphatically. ‘My one ambition is to see you safely on your way. Frankly, Mallory, you’re just an embarrassment to me and the sooner you’re on your way the better.’

Mallory nodded and left. Neufeld turned to Baer and said: ‘I have a little task for you, Sergeant Baer. Little but very important. Listen carefully.’

Mallory left Neufeld’s hut, his face pensive, and walked slowly across the compound. As he approached the guest hut, Andrea emerged and passed wordlessly by, wreathed in cigar smoke and scowling. Mallory entered the hut where Petar was again playing the Yugoslavian version of ‘The girl I left behind me’. It seemed to be his favourite song. Mallory glanced at Maria, Reynolds and Groves, all sitting silently by, then at Miller who was reclining in his sleeping-bag with his volume of poetry.

Mallory nodded towards the doorway. ‘Something’s upset our friend.’

Miller grinned and nodded in turn towards Petar. ‘He’s playing Andrea’s tune again.’

Mallory smiled briefly and turned to Maria. ‘Tell him to stop playing. We’re pulling out late this afternoon and we all need all the sleep we can get.’

‘We can sleep in the plane,’ Reynolds said sullenly. ‘We can sleep when we arrive at our destination – wherever that may be.’

‘No, sleep now.’

‘Why now?’

‘Why now?’ Mallory’s unfocused eyes gazed into the far distance. He said in a quiet voice: ‘For now is all the time there may be.’

Reynolds looked at him strangely. For the first time that day his face was empty of hostility and suspicion. There was puzzled speculation in his eyes, and wonder and the first faint beginnings of understanding.

On the Ivenici plateau, the phalanx moved on, but they moved no more like human beings. They stumbled along now in the advanced stages of exhaustion, automatons, no more, zombies resurrected from the dead, their faces twisted with pain and unimaginable fatigue, their limbs on fire and their minds benumbed. Every few seconds someone stumbled and fell and could not get up again and had to be carried to join scores of others already lying in an almost comatose condition by the side of the primitive runway, where partisankas did their best to revive their frozen and exhausted bodies with mugs of hot soup and liberal doses of raki.

Captain Vlanovich turned to Colonel Vis. His face was distressed, his voice low and deeply earnest.

‘This is madness. Colonel, madness! It’s – it’s impossible, you can see it’s impossible. We’ll never – look, sir, two hundred and fifty dropped out in the first two hours. The altitude, the cold, sheer physical exhaustion. It’s madness.’

‘All war is madness,’ Vis said calmly. ‘Get on the radio. We require five hundred more men.’

EIGHT

Friday

1500–2115

Now it had come, Mallory knew. He looked at Andrea and Miller and Reynolds and Groves and knew that they knew it too. In their faces he could see very clearly reflected what lay at the very surface of his own mind, the explosive tension, the hair-trigger alertness straining to be translated into equally explosive action. Always it came, this moment of truth that stripped men bare and showed them for what they were. He wondered how Reynolds and Groves would be: he suspected they might acquit themselves well. It never occurred to him to wonder about Miller and Andrea, for he knew them too well: Miller, when all seemed lost, was a man above himself, while the normally easy-going, almost lethargic Andrea was transformed into an unrecognizable human being, an impossible combination of an icily calculating mind and berserker fighting machine entirely without the remotest parallel in Mallory’s knowledge or experience. When Mallory spoke his voice was as calmly impersonal as ever.

‘We’re due to leave at four. It’s now three. With any luck we’ll catch them napping. Is everything clear?’

Reynolds said wonderingly, almost unbelievingly: ‘You mean if anything goes wrong we’re to shoot our way out?’

‘You’re to shoot and shoot to kill. That, Sergeant, is an order.’

‘Honest to God,’ Reynolds said, ‘I just don’t know what’s going on.’ The expression on his face clearly indicated that he had given up all attempts to understand what was going on.

Mallory and Andrea left the hut and walked casually across the compound towards Neufeld’s hut. Mallory said: ‘They’re on to us, you know.’

‘I know. Where are Petar and Maria?’

‘Asleep, perhaps? They left the hut a couple of hours ago. We’ll collect them later.’

‘Later may be too late … They are in great peril, my Keith.’

‘What can a man do, Andrea? I’ve thought of nothing else in the past ten hours. It’s a crucifying risk to have to take, but I have to take it. They are expendable, Andrea. You know what it would mean if I showed my hand now.’

‘I know what it would mean,’ Andrea said heavily. ‘The end of everything.’

They entered Neufeld’s hut without benefit of knocking. Neufeld, sitting behind his desk with Droshny by his side, looked up in irritated surprise and glanced at his watch.

He said curtly: ‘Four o’clock, I said, not three.’

‘Our mistake,’ Mallory apologized. He closed the door. ‘Please do not be foolish.’

Neufeld and Droshny were not foolish, few people would have been while staring down the muzzles of two Lugers with perforated silencers screwed to the end: they just sat there, immobile, the shock slowly draining from their faces. There was a long pause then Neufeld spoke, the words coming almost haltingly.

‘I have been seriously guilty of underestimating –’

‘Be quiet. Broznik’s spies have discovered the whereabouts of the four captured Allied agents. We know roughly where they are. You know precisely where they are. You will take us there. Now.’

‘You’re mad,’ Neufeld said with conviction.

‘We don’t require you to tell us that.’ Andrea walked round behind Neufeld and Droshny, removed their pistols from their holsters, ejected the shells and replaced the pistols. He then crossed to a corner of the hut, picked up two Schmeisser machine-pistols, emptied them, walked back round to the front of the table and placed the Schmeissers on its top, one in front of Neufeld, one in front of Droshny.

‘There you are, gentlemen,’ Andrea said affably. ‘Armed to the teeth.’

Droshny said viciously: ‘Suppose we decide not to come with you?’

Andrea’s affability vanished. He walked unhurriedly round the table and rammed the Luger’s silencer with such force against Droshny’s teeth that he gasped in pain. ‘Please –’ Andrea’s voice was almost beseeching – ‘please don’t tempt me.’

Droshny didn’t tempt him. Mallory moved to the window and peered out over the compound. There were, he saw, at least a dozen Cetniks within thirty feet of Neufeld’s hut, all of them armed. Across the other side of the compound he could see that the door to the stables was open indicating that Miller and the two sergeants were in position.

‘You will walk across the compound to the stables,’ Mallory said. ‘You will talk to nobody, warn nobody, make no signals. We will follow about ten yards behind.’

‘Ten yards behind. What’s to prevent us making a break for it? You wouldn’t dare hold a gun on us out there.’

‘That’s so,’ Mallory agreed. ‘From the moment you open this door you’ll be covered by three Schmeissers from the stables. If you try anything – anything – you’ll be cut to pieces. That’s why we’re keeping well behind you – we don’t want to be cut to pieces too.’

At a gesture from Andrea, Neufeld and Droshny slung their empty Schmeissers in angry silence. Mallory looked at them consideringly and said: ‘I think you’d better do something about your expressions. They’re a dead giveaway that something is wrong. If you open that door with faces like that, Miller will cut you down before you reach the bottom step. Please try to believe me.’

They believed him and by the time Mallory opened the door had managed to arrange their features into a near enough imitation of normality. They went down the steps and set off across the compound to the stables. When they had reached halfway Andrea and Mallory left Neufeld’s hut and followed them. One or two glances of idle curiosity came their way, but clearly no one suspected that anything was amiss. The crossing to the stables was completely uneventful.

So also, two minutes later, was their departure from the camp. Neufeld and Droshny, as would have been proper and expected, rode together in the lead, Droshny in particular looking very warlike with his Schmeisser, pistol and the wickedly-curved knives at his waist. Behind them rode Andrea, who appeared to be having some trouble with the action of his Schmeisser, for he had it in his hands and was examining it closely: he certainly wasn’t looking at either Droshny or Neufeld and the fact that the gun barrel, which Andrea had sensibly pointed towards the ground, had only to be lifted a foot and the trigger pressed to riddle the two men ahead was a preposterous idea that would not have occurred to even the most suspicious. Behind Andrea, Mallory and Miller rode abreast: like Andrea, they appeared unconcerned, even slightly bored. Reynolds and Groves brought up the rear, almost but not quite attaining the degree of nonchalance of the other three: their still faces and restlessly darting eyes betrayed the strain they were under. But their anxiety was needless for all seven passed from the camp not only unmolested but without as much as even an enquiring glance being cast in their direction.

They rode for over two and a half hours, climbing nearly all the time, and a blood-red sun was setting among the thinning pines to the west when they came across a clearing set on, for once, a level stretch of ground. Neufeld and Droshny halted their ponies and waited until the others came up with them. Mallory reined in and gazed at the building in the middle of the clearing, a low, squat, immensely strong-looking block-house, with narrow, heavily barred windows and two chimneys, from one of which smoke was coming.

‘This is the place?’ Mallory asked.

‘Hardly a necessary question.’ Neufeld’s voice was dry, but the underlying resentment and anger unmistakable. ‘You think I spent all this time leading you to the wrong place?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ Mallory said. He examined the building more closely. ‘A hospitable-looking place.’

‘Yugoslav Army ammunition dumps were never intended as first-class hotels.’

‘I dare say not,’ Mallory agreed. At a signal from him they urged their ponies forward into the clearing, and as they did so two metal strips in the facing wall of the block-house slid back to reveal a pair of embrasures with machine-pistols protruding. Exposed as they were, the seven mounted men were completely at the mercy of those menacing muzzles.

‘Your men keep a good watch,’ Mallory acknowledged to Neufeld. ‘You wouldn’t require many men to guard and hold a place like this. How many are there?’

‘Six,’ Neufeld said reluctantly.

‘Seven and you’re a dead man,’ Andrea warned.

‘Six.’

As they approached, the guns – almost certainly because the men behind them had identified Neufeld and Droshny – were withdrawn, the embrasures closed, the heavy metal front door opened. A sergeant appeared in the doorway and saluted respectfully, his face registering a certain surprise.

‘An unexpected pleasure, Hauptmann Neufeld,’ the sergeant said. ‘We had no radio message informing us of your arrival.’

‘It’s out of action for the moment.’ Neufeld waved them inside but Andrea gallantly insisted on the German officer taking precedence, reinforcing his courtesy with a threatening hitch of his Schmeisser. Neufeld entered, followed by Droshny and the other five men.

The windows were so narrow that the burning oil lamps were obviously a necessity, the illumination they afforded being almost doubled by a large log fire blazing in the hearth. Nothing could ever overcome the bleakness created by four rough-cut stone walls, but the room itself was surprisingly well furnished with a table, chairs, two armchairs and a sofa: there were even some pieces of carpet. Three doors led off from the room, one heavily barred. Including the sergeant who had welcomed them, there were three armed soldiers in the room. Mallory glanced at Neufeld who nodded, his face tight in suppressed anger.

Neufeld said to one of the guards: ‘Bring out the prisoners.’ The guard nodded, lifted a heavy key from the wall and headed for the barred door. The sergeant and the other guard were sliding the metal screens back across the embrasures. Andrea walked casually towards the nearest guard, then suddenly and violently shoved him against the sergeant. Both men cannoned into the guard who had just inserted the key into the door. The third man fell heavily to the ground: the other two, though staggering wildly, managed to retain a semblance of balance or at least remain on their feet. All three twisted round to stare at Andrea, anger and startled incomprehension in their faces, and all three remained very still, and wisely so. Faced with a Schmeisser machine-pistol at three paces, the wise man always remains still.

Mallory said to the sergeant: ‘There are three other men. Where are they?’

There was no reply: the guard glared at him in defiance. Mallory repeated the question, this time in fluent German: the guard ignored him and looked questioningly at Neufeld, whose lips were tight-shut in a mask of stone.

‘Are you mad?’ Neufeld demanded of the sergeant. ‘Can’t you see those men are killers? Tell him.’

‘The night guards. They’re asleep.’ The sergeant pointed to a door. ‘That one.’

‘Open it. Tell them to walk out. Backwards and with their hands clasped behind their necks.’

‘Do exactly as you’re told,’ Neufeld ordered.

The sergeant did exactly what he was told and so did the three guards who had been resting in the inner room, who walked out as they had been instructed, with obviously no thought of any resistance in their minds. Mallory turned to the guard with the key who had by this time picked himself up somewhat shakily from the floor, and nodded to the barred door.

‘Open it.’

The guard opened it and pushed the door wide. Four British officers moved out slowly and uncertainly into the outer room. Long confinement indoors had made them very pale, but apart from this prison pallor and the fact that they were rather thin they were obviously unharmed. The man in the lead, with a major’s insignia and a Sandhurst moustache – and, when he spoke, a Sandhurst accent – stopped abruptly and stared in disbelief at Mallory and his men.

‘Good God above! What on earth are you chaps –’

‘Please.’ Mallory cut him short. ‘I’m sorry, but later. Collect your coats, whatever warm gear you have, and wait outside.’

‘But – but where are you taking us?’

‘Home. Italy. Tonight. Please hurry!’

‘Italy. You’re talking –’

‘Hurry!’ Mallory glanced in some exasperation at his watch. ‘We’re late already.’

As quickly as their dazed condition would allow, the four officers collected what warm clothing they had and filed outside. Mallory turned to the sergeant again. ‘You must have ponies here, a stable.’

‘Round the back of the block-nouse,’ the sergeant said promptly. He had obviously made a rapid readjustment to the new facts of life.

‘Good lad,’ Mallory said approvingly. He looked at Groves and Reynolds. ‘We’ll need two more ponies. Saddle them up, will you?’

The two sergeants left. Under the watchful guns of Mallory and Miller, Andrea searched each of the six guards in turn, found nothing, and ushered them all into the cell, turning the heavy key and hanging it up on the wall. Then, just as carefully, Andrea searched Neufeld and Droshny: Droshny’s face, as Andrea carelessly flung his knives into a corner of the room, was thunderous.

Mallory looked at the two men and said: ‘I’d shoot you if necessary. It’s not. You won’t be missed before morning.’

‘They might not be missed for a good few mornings,’ Miller pointed out.

‘So they’re over-weight anyway,’ Mallory said indifferently. He smiled. ‘I can’t resist leaving you with a last little pleasant thought, Hauptmann Neufeld. Something to think about until someone comes and finds you.’ He looked consideringly at Neufeld, who said nothing, then went on: ‘About that information I gave you this morning, I mean.’

Neufeld looked at him guardedly. ‘What about the information you gave me this morning?’

‘Just this. It wasn’t, I’m afraid, quite accurate. Vukalovic expects the attack from the north, through the Zenica Gap, not across the bridge at Neretva from the south. There are, we know, close on two hundred of your tanks massed in the woods just to the north of the Zenica Gap – but there won’t be at two a.m. this morning when your attack is due to start. Not after I’ve got through to our Lancaster squadrons in Italy. Think of it, think of the target. Two hundred tanks bunched in a tiny trap a hundred and fifty yards wide and not more than three hundred yards long. The RAF will be there at 1.30. By two this morning there won’t be a single tank left in commission.’

Neufeld looked at him for a long moment, his face very still, then said, slowly and softly: ‘Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!’

‘Damning is all you’ll have for it,’ Mallory said agreeably. ‘By the time you are released – hopefully assuming that you will be released – it will all be over. See you after the war.’

Andrea locked the two men in a side room and hung the key up by the one to the cell. Then they went outside, locked the outer door, hung the key on a nail by the door, mounted their ponies – Groves and Reynolds had already two additional ones saddled – and started climbing once again, Mallory, map in hand, studying in the fading light of dusk the route they had to take.

Their route took them up alongside the perimeter of a pine forest. Not more than half a mile after leaving the block-house, Andrea reined in his pony, dismounted, lifted the pony’s right foreleg and examined it carefully. He looked up at the others who had also reined in their ponies.

‘There’s a stone wedged under the hoof,’ he announced. ‘Looks bad – but not too bad. I’ll have to cut it out. Don’t wait for me – I’ll catch you up in a few minutes.’

Mallory nodded, gave the signal to move on. Andrea produced a knife, lifted the hoof and made a great play of excavating the wedged stone. After a minute or so, he glanced up and saw that the rest of the party had vanished round a corner of the pine wood. Andrea put away his knife and led the pony, which quite obviously had no limp whatsoever, into the shelter of the wood and tethered it there, then moved on foot some way down the hill towards the block-house. He sat down behind the bole of a convenient pine and removed his binoculars from their case.

He hadn’t long to wait. The head and shoulders of a figure appeared in the clearing below peering out cautiously from behind the trunk of a tree. Andrea flat in the snow now and with the icy rims of the binoculars clamped hard against his eyes, had no difficulty at all in making an immediate identification: Sergeant Baer, moonfaced, rotund and about seventy pounds overweight for his unimpressive height, had an unmistakable physical presence which only the mentally incapacitated could easily forget.

Baer withdrew into the woods, then reappeared shortly afterwards leading a string of ponies, one of which carried a bulky covered object strapped to a pannier bag. Two of the following ponies had riders, both of whom had their hands tied to the pommels of their saddles. Petar and Maria, without a doubt. Behind them appeared four mounted soldiers. Sergeant Baer beckoned them to follow him across the clearing and within moments all had disappeared from sight behind the block-house. Andrea regarded the now empty clearing thoughtfully, lit a fresh cigar and made his way uphill towards his tethered pony.

Sergeant Baer dismounted, produced a key from his pocket, caught sight of the key suspended from the nail beside the door, replaced his own, took down the other, opened the door with it and passed inside. He glanced around, took down one of the keys hanging on the wall and opened a side door with it. Hauptmann Neufeld emerged, glanced at his watch and smiled.

‘You have been very punctual, Sergeant Baer. You have the radio?’

‘I have the radio. It’s outside.’

‘Good, good, good.’ Neufeld looked at Droshny and smiled again. ‘I think it’s time for us to make our rendezvous with the Ivenici plateau.’

Sergeant Baer said respectfully: ‘How can you be so sure that it is the Ivenici plateau, Hauptmann Neufeld?’

‘How can I be so sure? Simple, my dear Baer. Because Maria – you have her with you?’

‘But of course, Hauptmann Neufeld.’

‘Because Maria told me. The Ivenici plateau it is.’

Night had fallen on the Ivenici plateau, but still the phalanx of exhausted soldiers was trudging out the landing-strip for the plane. The work was not by this time so cruelly and physically exacting, for the snow was now almost trampled and beaten hard and flat: but, even allowing for the rejuvenation given by the influx of another five hundred fresh soldiers, the overall level of utter weariness was such that the phalanx was in no better condition than its original members who had trudged out the first outline of the airstrip in the virgin snow.

The phalanx, too, had changed its shape. Instead of being fifty wide by twenty deep it was now twenty wide by fifty deep: having achieved a safe clearance for the wings of the aircraft, they were now trudging out what was to be as close as possible an iron-hard surface for the landing wheels.

A three-quarters moon, intensely white and luminous, rode low in the sky, with scattered bands of cloud coming drifting down slowly from the north. As the successive bands moved across the face of the moon, the black shadows swept lazily across the surface of the plateau: the phalanx, at one moment bathed in silvery moonlight, was at the next almost lost to sight in the darkness. It was a fantastic scene with a remarkably faery-like quality of eeriness and foreboding about it. In fact it was, as Colonel Vis had just unromantically mentioned to Captain Vlanovich, like something out of Dante’s Inferno, only a hundred degrees colder. At least a hundred degrees, Vis had amended: he wasn’t sure how hot it was in hell.

It was this scene which, at twenty minutes to nine in the evening, confronted Mallory and his men when they topped the brow of a hill and reined in their ponies just short of the edge of the precipice which abutted on the western edge of the Ivenici plateau. For at least two minutes they sat there on their ponies, not moving, not speaking, mesmerized by the other-world quality of a thousand men with bowed heads and bowed shoulders, shuffling exhaustedly across the level floor of the plain beneath, mesmerized because they all knew they were gazing at a unique spectacle which none of them had ever seen before and would never see again. Mallory finally broke free from the trance-like condition, looked at Miller and Andrea, and slowly shook his head in an expression of profound wonder conveying his disbelief, his refusal to accept the reality of what his own eyes told him was real and actual beyond dispute. Miller and Andrea returned his look with almost identical negative motions of their own heads. Mallory wheeled his pony to the right and led the way along the cliff-face to the point where the cliff ran into the rising ground below.

Ten minutes later they were being greeted by Colonel Vis.

‘I did not expect to see you. Captain Mallory.’ Vis pumped his hand enthusiastically. ‘Before God, I did not expect to see you. You – and your men – must have a remarkable capacity for survival.’

‘Say that in a few hours,’ Mallory said drily, ‘and I would be very happy indeed to hear it.’

‘But it’s all over now. We expect the plane –’ Vis glanced at his watch – ‘in exactly eight minutes. We have a bearing surface for it and there should be no difficulty in landing and taking off provided it doesn’t hang around too long. You have done all that you came to do and achieved it magnificently. Luck has been on your side.’

‘Say that in a few hours,’ Mallory repeated.

‘I’m sorry.’ Vis could not conceal his puzzlement. ‘You expect something to happen to the plane?’

‘I don’t expect anything to happen to the plane. But what’s gone, what’s past, is – was, rather – only the prologue.’

‘The – the prologue?’

‘Let me explain.’

Neufeld, Droshny and Sergeant Baer left their ponies tethered inside the woodline and walked up the slight eminence before them, Sergeant Baer making heavy weather of their uphill struggle through the snow because of the weight of the large portable transceiver strapped to his back. Near the summit they dropped to their hands and knees and crawled forward till they were within a few feet of the edge of the cliff overlooking the Ivenici plateau. Neufeld unslung his binoculars and then replaced them: the moon had just moved from behind a dark barred cloud highlighting every aspect of the scene below: the intensely sharp contrast afforded by black shadow and snow so deeply and gleamingly white as to be almost phosphorescent made the use of binoculars superfluous.

Clearly visible and to the right were Vis’s command tents and, near by, some hastily erected soup kitchens. Outside the smallest of the tents could be seen a group of perhaps a dozen people, obviously, even at that distance, engaged in close conversation. Directly beneath where they lay, the three men could see the phalanx turning round at one end of the runway and beginning to trudge back slowly, so terribly slowly, so terribly tiredly, along the wide path already tramped out. As Mallory and his men had been, Neufeld, Droshny and Baer were momentarily caught and held by the weird and other-worldly dark grandeur of the spectacle below. Only by a conscious act of will could Neufeld bring himself to look away and return to the world of normality and reality.

‘How very kind,’ he murmured, ‘of our Yugoslav friends to go to such lengths on our behalf.’ He turned to Baer and indicated the transceiver. ‘Get through to the General, will you?’

Baer unslung his transceiver, settled it firmly in the snow, extended the telescopic aerial, pre-set the frequency and cranked the handle. He made contact almost at once, talked briefly then handed the microphone and head-piece to Neufeld, who fitted on the phones and gazed down, still half mesmerized, at the thousand men and women moving antlike across the plain below. The headphones cracked suddenly in his ears and the spell was broken.

‘Herr General?’

‘Ah. Hauptmann Neufeld.’ In the ear-phones the General’s voice was faint but very clear, completely free from distortion or static. ‘Now then. About my psychological assessment of the English mind?’

‘You have mistaken your profession, Herr General. Everything has happened exactly as you forecast. You will be interested to know, sir, that the Royal Air Force is launching a saturation bombing attack on the Zenica Gap at precisely 1.30 a.m. this morning.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Zimmermann said thoughtfully. ‘That is interesting. But hardly surprising.’

‘No, sir.’ Neufeld looked up as Droshny touched him on the shoulder and pointed to the north. ‘One moment, sir.’

Neufeld removed the ear-phones and cocked his head in the direction of Droshny’s pointing arm. He lifted his binoculars but there was nothing to be seen. But unquestionably there was something to be heard – the distant clamour of aircraft engines, closing. Neufeld readjusted the ear-phones.

‘We have to give the English full marks for punctuality, sir. The plane is coming in now.’

‘Excellent, excellent. Keep me informed.’

Neufeld eased off one ear-phone and gazed to the north. Still nothing to be seen, the moon was now temporarily behind a cloud, but the sound of the aircraft engines was unmistakably closer. Suddenly, somewhere down on the plateau, came three sharp blasts on a whistle. Immediately, the marching phalanx broke up, men and women stumbling off the runway into the deep snow on the eastern side of the plateau, leaving behind them, obviously by pre-arrangement, about eighty men who spaced themselves out on either side of the runway.

‘They’re organized, I’ll say that for them,’ Neufeld said admiringly.

Droshny smiled his wolf’s smile. ‘All the better for us, eh?’

‘Everybody seems to be doing their best to help us tonight,’ Neufeld agreed.

Overhead, the dark and obscuring band of cloud drifted away to the south and the white light of the moon raced across the plateau. Neufeld could immediately see the plane, less than half a mile away, its camouflaged shape sharply etched in the brilliant moonlight as it sank down towards the end of the runway. Another sharp blast of the whistle and at once the men lining both sides of the runway switched on hand lamps – a superfluity, really, in those almost bright as day perfect landing conditions, but essential had the moon been hidden behind cloud.

‘Touching down now,’ Neufeld said into the microphone. ‘It’s a Wellington bomber.’

‘Let’s hope it makes a safe landing,’ Zimmermann said.

‘Let’s hope so indeed, sir.’

The Wellington made a safe landing, a perfect landing considering the extremely difficult conditions. It slowed down quickly, then steadied its speed as it headed towards the end of the runway.

Neufeld said into the microphone: ‘Safely down, Herr General, and rolling to rest.’

‘Why doesn’t it stop?’ Droshny wondered.

‘You can’t accelerate a plane over snow as you can over a concrete runway,’ Neufeld said. ‘They’ll require every yard of the runway for the take-off.’

Quite obviously, the pilot of the Wellington was of the same opinion. He was about fifty yards from the end of the runway when two groups of people broke from the hundreds lining the edge of the runway, one group heading for the already opened door in the side of the bomber, the other heading for the tail of the plane. Both groups reached the plane just as it rolled to a stop at the very end of the runway, a dozen men at once flinging themselves upon the tail unit and beginning to turn the Wellington through 180°.

Droshny was impressed. ‘By heavens, they’re not wasting much time, are they?’

‘They can’t afford to. If the plane stays there any time at all it’ll start sinking in the snow.’ Neufeld lifted his binoculars and spoke into the microphone.

‘They’re boarding now, Herr General. One, two, three … seven, eight, nine. Nine it is.’ Neufeld sighed in relief and at the relief of tension. ‘My warmest congratulations, Herr General. Nine it is, indeed.’

The plane was already facing the way it had come. The pilot stood on the brakes, revved the engines up to a crescendo, then twenty seconds after it had come to a halt the Wellington was on its way again, accelerating down the runway. The pilot took no chances, he waited till the very far end of the airstrip before lifting the Wellington off, but when he did it rose cleanly and easily and climbed steadily into the night sky.

‘Airborne, Herr General,’ Neufeld reported. ‘Everything perfectly according to plan.’ He covered the microphone, looking after the disappearing plane, then smiled at Droshny. ‘I think we should wish them bon voyage, don’t you?’

Mallory, one of the hundreds lining the perimeter of the airstrip, lowered his binoculars. ‘And a very pleasant journey to them all.’

Colonel Vis shook his head sadly. ‘All this work just to send five of my men on a holiday to Italy.’

‘I dare say they needed a break,’ Mallory said.

‘The hell with them. How about us?’ Reynolds demanded. In spite of the words, his face showed no anger, just a dazed and total bafflement. ‘We should have been aboard that damned plane.’

‘Ah. Well. I changed my mind.’

‘Like hell you changed your mind,’ Reynolds said bitterly.

Inside the fuselage of the Wellington, the moustached major surveyed his three fellow-escapees and the five Partisan soldiers, shook his head in disbelief and turned to the captain by his side.

‘A rum do, what?’

‘Very rum, indeed, sir,’ said the captain. He looked curiously at the papers the major held in his hand. ‘What have you there?’

‘A map and papers that I’m to give to some bearded naval type when we land back in Italy. Odd fellow, that Mallory, what?’

‘Very odd indeed, sir,’ the captain agreed.

Mallory and his men, together with Vis and Vlanovich, had detached themselves from the crowd and were now standing outside Vis’s command tent.

Mallory said to Vis: ‘You have arranged for the ropes? We must leave at once.’

‘What’s all the desperate hurry, sir?’ Groves asked. Like Reynolds, much of his resentment seemed to have gone to be replaced by a helpless bewilderment. ‘All of a sudden, like, I mean?’

‘Petar and Maria,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘They’re the hurry.’

‘What about Petar and Maria?’ Reynolds asked suspiciously. ‘Where do they come into this?’

‘They’re being held captive in the ammunition block-house. And when Neufeld and Droshny get back there –’

‘Get back there,’ Groves said dazedly. ‘What do you mean, get back there? We – we left them locked up. And how in God’s name do you know that Petar and Maria are being held in the blockhouse? How can they be? I mean, they weren’t there when we left there – and that wasn’t so long ago.’

‘When Andrea’s pony had a stone in its hoof on the way up here from the block-house, it didn’t have a stone in its hoof. Andrea was keeping watch.’

‘You see,’ Miller explained, ‘Andrea doesn’t trust anyone.’

‘He saw Sergeant Baer taking Petar and Maria there,’ Mallory went on. ‘Bound. Baer released Neufeld and Droshny and you can bet your last cent our precious pair were up on the cliffside there checking that we really did fly out.’

‘You don’t tell us very much, do you, sir?’ Reynolds said bitterly.

‘I’ll tell you this much,’ Mallory said with certainty. ‘If we don’t get there soon, Maria and Petar are for the high jump. Neufeld and Droshny don’t know yet, but by this time they must be pretty convinced that it was Maria who told me where those four agents were being kept. They’ve always known who we really were – Maria told them. Now they know who Maria is. Just before Droshny killed Saunders –’

‘Droshny?’ Reynolds’s expression was that of a man who has almost given up all attempt to understand. ‘Maria?’

‘I made a miscalculation.’ Mallory sounded tired. ‘We all make miscalculations, but this was a bad one.’ He smiled, but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. ‘You will recall that you had a few harsh words to say about Andrea here when he picked that fight with Droshny outside the dining hut in Neufeld’s camp?’

‘Sure I remember. It was one of the craziest –’

‘You can apologize to Andrea at a later and more convenient time,’ Mallory interrupted. ‘Andrea provoked Droshny because I asked him to. I knew that Neufeld and Droshny were up to no good in the dining hut after we had left and I wanted a moment to ask Maria what they had been discussing. She told me that they intended to send a couple of Cetniks after us into Broznik’s camp – suitably disguised, of course – to report on us. They were two of the men acting as our escort in that wood-burning truck. Andrea and Miller killed them.’

‘Now you tell us,’ Groves said almost mechanically. ‘Andrea and Miller killed them.’

‘What I didn’t know was that Droshny was also following us. He saw Maria and myself together.’ He looked at Reynolds. ‘Just as you did. I didn’t know at the time that he’d seen us, but I’ve known for some hours now. Maria has been as good as under sentence of death since this morning. But there was nothing I could do about it. Not until now. If I’d shown my hand, we’d have been finished.’

Reynolds shook his head. ‘But you’ve just said that Maria betrayed us –’

‘Maria,’ Mallory said, ‘is a top-flight British espionage agent. English father, Yugoslav mother. She was in this country even before the Germans came. As a student in Belgrade. She joined the Partisans, who trained her as a radio operator, then arranged for her defection to the Cetniks. The Cetniks had captured a radio operator from one of the first British missions. They – the Germans, rather – trained her to imitate this operator’s hand – every radio operator has his own unmistakable style – until their styles were quite indistinguishable. And her English, of course, was perfect. So then she was in direct contact with Allied Intelligence in both North Africa and Italy. The Germans thought they had us completely fooled: it was, in fact, the other way round.’

Miller said complainingly: ‘You didn’t tell me any of this, either.’

‘I’ve so much on my mind. Anyway, she was notified direct of the arrival of the last four agents to be parachuted in. She, of course, told the Germans. And all those agents carried information reinforcing the German belief that a second front – a full-scale invasion – of Yugoslavia was imminent.’

Reynolds said slowly: ‘They knew we were coming too?’

‘Of course. They knew everything about us all along, what we really were. What they didn’t know, of course, is that we knew they knew and though what they knew of us was true it was only part of the truth.’

Reynolds digested this. He said, hesitating: ‘Sir?’

‘Yes?’

‘I could have been wrong about you, sir.’

‘It happens,’ Mallory agreed. ‘From time to time, it happens. You were wrong. Sergeant, of course you were, but you were wrong from the very best motives. The fault is mine. Mine alone. But my hands were tied.’ Mallory touched him on the shoulder. ‘One of these days you might get round to forgiving me.’

‘Petar?’ Groves asked. ‘He’s not her brother?’

‘Petar is Petar. No more. A front.’

‘There’s still an awful lot –’ Reynolds began, but Mallory interrupted him.

‘It’ll have to wait. Colonel Vis, a map, please.’ Captain Vlanovich brought one from the tent and Mallory shone a torch on it. ‘Look. Here. The Neretva dam and the Zenica Cage. I told Neufeld that Broznik had told me that the Partisans believe that the attack is coming across the Neretva bridge from the south. But, as I’ve just said, Neufeld knew – he knew even before we had arrived – who and what we really were. So he was convinced I was lying. He was convinced that I was convinced that the attack was coming through the Zenica Gap to the north here. Good reason for believing that, mind you: there are two hundred German tanks up there.’

Vis stared at him. ‘Two hundred!’

‘One hundred and ninety of them are made of plywood. So the only way Neufeld – and, no doubt, the German High Command – could ensure that this useful information got through to Italy was to allow us to stage this rescue bid. Which, of course, they very gladly did, assisting us in every possible way even to the extent of gladly collaborating with us in permitting themselves to be captured. They knew, of course, that we had no option left but to capture them and force them to lead us to the block-house – an arrangement they had ensured by previously seizing and hiding away the only other person who could have helped us in this – Maria. And, of course, knowing this in advance, they had arranged for Sergeant Baer to come and free them.’

‘I see.’ It was plain to everyone that Colonel Vis did not see at all. ‘You mentioned an RAF saturation attack on the Zenica Gap. This, of course, will now be switched to the bridge?’

‘No. You wouldn’t have us break our word to the Wehrmacht, would you? As promised, the attack comes on the Zenica Gap. As a diversion. To convince them, in case they have any last doubts left in their minds, that we have been fooled. Besides, you know as well as I do that that bridge is immune to high-level air attack. It will have to be destroyed in some other way.’

‘In what way?’

‘We’ll think of something. The night is young. Two last things, Colonel Vis. There’ll be another Wellington in at midnight and a second at three a.m. Let them both go. The next in, at six a.m., hold it against our arrival. Well, our possible arrival. With any luck we’ll be flying out before dawn.’

‘With any luck,’ Vis said sombrely.

‘And radio General Vukalovic, will you? Tell him what I’ve told you, the exact situation. And tell him to begin intensive small-arms fire at one o’clock in the morning.’

‘What are they supposed to fire at?’

‘They can fire at the moon for all I care.’ Mallory swung aboard his pony. ‘Come on, let’s be off.’

‘The moon,’ General Vukalovic agreed, ‘is a fairsized target, though rather a long way off. However, if that’s what our friend wants, that’s what he shall have.’ Vukalovic paused for a moment, looked at Colonel Janzy, who was sitting beside him on a fallen log in the woods to the south of the Zenica Gap, then spoke again into the radio mouth-piece.

‘Anyway, many thanks, Colonel Vis. So the Neretva bridge it is. And you think it will be unhealthy for us to remain in the immediate vicinity of this area after 1 a.m. Don’t worry, we won’t be here.’ Vukalovic removed the headphones and turned to Janzy. ‘We pull out, quietly, at midnight. We leave a few men to make a lot of noise.’

‘The ones who are going to fire at the moon?’

‘The ones who are going to fire at the moon. Radio Colonel Lazlo at Neretva, will you? Tell him we’ll be with him before the attack. Then radio Major Stephan. Tell him to leave just a holding force, pull out of the Western Gap and make his way to Colonel Lazlo’s HQ.’ Vukalovic paused for a thoughtful moment. ‘We should be in for a few very interesting hours, don’t you think?’

‘Is there any chance in the world for this man Mallory?’ Janzy’s tone carried with it its own answer.

‘Well, look at it this way,’ Vukalovic said reasonably. ‘Of course there’s a chance. There has to be a chance. It is, after all, my dear Janzy, a question of options – and there are no other options left open to us.’

Janzy made no reply but nodded several times in slow succession as if Vukalovic had just said something profound.

NINE

Friday 2115–

Saturday 0040

The pony-back ride downhill through the thickly wooded forests from the Ivenici plateau to the block-house took Mallory and his men barely a quarter of the time it had taken them to make the ascent. In the deep snow the going underfoot was treacherous to a degree, collision with the bole of a pine was always an imminent possibility and none of the five riders made any pretence towards being an experienced horseman, with the inevitable result that slips, stumbles and heavy falls were as frequent as they were painful. Not one of them escaped the indignity of involuntarily leaving his saddle and being thrown headlong into the deep snow, but it was the providential cushioning effect of that snow that was the saving of them, that and, more often, the sure-footed agility of their mountain ponies: whatever the reason or combination of reasons, bruises and winded falls there were in plenty, but broken bones, miraculously, there were none.

The block-house came in sight. Mallory raised a warning hand, slowing them down until they were about two hundred yards distant from their objective, where he reined in, dismounted and led his pony into a thick cluster of pines, followed by the others. Mallory tethered his horse and indicated to the others to do the same.

Miller said complainingly: ‘I’m sick of this damned pony but I’m sicker still of walking through deep snow. Why don’t we just ride on down there?’

‘Because they’ll have ponies tethered down there. They’ll start whinnying if they hear or see or smell other ponies approaching.’

‘They might start whinnying anyway.’

‘And there’ll be guards on watch,’ Andrea pointed out. ‘I don’t think, Corporal Miller, that we could make a very stealthy and unobtrusive approach on pony-back.’

‘Guards. Guarding against what? As far as Neufeld and company are concerned, we’re halfway over the Adriatic at this time.’

‘Andrea’s right,’ Mallory said. ‘Whatever else you may think about Neufeld, he’s a first-class officer who takes no chances. There’ll be guards.’ He glanced up to the night sky where a narrow bar of cloud was just approaching the face of the moon. ‘See that?’

‘I see it,’ Miller said miserably.

‘Thirty seconds, I’d say. We make a run for the far gable end of the block-house – there are no embrasures there. And for God’s sake, once we get there, keep dead quiet. If they hear anything, if they as much as suspect that we’re outside, they’ll bar the doors and use Petar and Maria as hostages. Then we’ll just have to leave them.’

‘You’d do that, sir?’ Reynolds asked.

‘I’d do that. I’d rather cut a hand off, but I’d do that. I’ve no choice, Sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir. I understand.’

The dark bar of cloud passed over the moon. The five men broke from the concealment of the pines and pounded downhill through the deep clogging snow, heading for the farther gable-wall of the block-house. Thirty yards away, at a signal from Mallory, they slowed down lest the sound of their crunching, running footsteps be heard by any watchers who might be keeping guard by the embrasures and completed the remaining distance by walking as quickly and quietly as possible in single file, each man using the footprints left by the man in front of him.

They reached the blank gable-end undetected, with the moon still behind the cloud. Mallory did not pause to congratulate either himself or any of the others. He at once dropped to his hands and knees and crawled round the corner of the block-house, pressing close into the stone wall.

Four feet from the corner came the first of the embrasures. Mallory did not bother to lower himself any deeper into the snow – the embrasures were so deeply recessed in the massive stone walls that it would have been quite impossible for any watcher to see anything at a lesser distance than six feet from the embrasure. He concentrated, instead, on achieving as minimal a degree of sound as was possible, and did so with success, for he safely passed the embrasure without any alarm being raised. The other four were equally successful even though the moon broke from behind the cloud as the last of them, Groves, was directly under the embrasure. But he, too, remained undetected.

Mallory reached the door. He gestured to Miller, Reynolds and Groves to remain prone where they were: he and Andrea rose silently to their feet and pressed their ears close against the door.

Immediately they heard Droshny’s voice, thick with menace, heavy with hatred.

‘A traitress! That’s what she is. A traitress to our cause. Kill her now!’

‘Why did you do it, Maria?’ Neufeld’s voice, in contrast to Droshny’s, was measured, calm, almost gentle.

‘Why did she do it?’ Droshny snarled. ‘Money. That’s why she did it. What else?’

‘Why?’ Neufeld was quietly persistent. ‘Did Captain Mallory threaten to kill your brother?’

‘Worse than that.’ They had to strain to catch Maria’s low voice. ‘He threatened to kill me. Who would have looked after my blind brother then?’

‘We waste time,’ Droshny said impatiently. ‘Let me take them both outside.’

‘No.’ Neufeld’s voice, still calm, admitted of no argument. ‘A blind boy? A terrified girl? What are you, man?’

‘A Cetnik!’

‘And I’m an officer of the Wehrmacht.’

Andrea whispered in Mallory’s ear: ‘Any minute now and someone’s going to notice our foot-tracks in the snow.’

Mallory nodded, stood aside and made a small gesturing motion of his hand. Mallory was under no illusion as to their respective capabilities when it came to bursting open doors leading into rooms filled with armed men. Andrea was the best in the business – and proceeded to prove it in his usual violent and lethal fashion.

A twist of the door handle, a violent kick with the sole of the right foot and Andrea stood framed in the doorway. The wildly swinging door had still not reached the full limit of travel on its hinges when the room echoed to the flat staccato chatter of Andrea’s Schmeisser: Mallory, peering over Andrea’s shoulder through the swirling cordite smoke, saw two German soldiers, lethally cursed with over-fast reactions, slumping wearily to the floor. His own machine-pistol levelled, Mallory followed Andrea into the room.

There was no longer any call for Schmeissers. None of the other soldiers in the room was carrying any weapon at all while Neufeld and Droshny, their faces frozen into expressions of total incredulity, were clearly, even if only momentarily, incapable of any movement at all, far less being capable of the idea of offering any suicidal resistance.

Mallory said to Neufeld: ‘You’ve just bought yourself your life.’ He turned to Maria, nodded towards the door, waited until she had led her brother outside, then looked again at Neufeld and Droshny and said curtly: ‘Your guns.’

Neufeld managed to speak, although his lips moved in a strangely mechanical fashion. ‘What in the name of God –’

Mallory was in no mind for small talk. He lifted his Schmeisser. ‘Your guns.’

Neufeld and Droshny, like men in a dream, removed their pistols and dropped them to the floor.

‘The keys.’ Droshny and Neufeld looked at him in almost uncomprehending silence. ‘The keys,’ Mallory repeated. ‘Now. Or the keys won’t be necessary.’

For several seconds the room was completely silent, then Neufeld stirred, turned to Droshny and nodded. Droshny scowled – as well as any man can scowl when his face is still overspread with an expression of baffled astonishment and homicidal fury – reached into his pocket and produced the keys. Miller took them, unlocked and opened wide the cell door wordlessly and with a motion of his machine-pistol invited Neufeld, Droshny, Baer and the other soldiers to enter, waited until they had done so, swung shut the door, locked it and pocketed the key. The room echoed again as Andrea squeezed the trigger of his machine-pistol and destroyed the radio beyond any hope of repair. Five seconds later they were all outside, Mallory, the last man to leave, locking the door and sending the key spinning to fall yards away, buried from sight in the deep snow.

Suddenly he caught sight of the number of ponies tethered outside the block-house. Seven. Exactly the right number. He ran across to the embrasure outside the cell window and shouted: ‘Our ponies are tethered two hundred yards uphill just inside the pines. Don’t forget.’ Then he ran quickly back and ordered the other six to mount. Reynolds looked at him in astonishment.

‘You think of this, sir? At such a time?’

‘I’d think of this at any time.’ Mallory turned to Petar, who had just awkwardly mounted his horse, then turned to Maria. ‘Tell him to take off his glasses.’

Maria looked at him in surprise, nodded in apparent understanding and spoke to her brother, who looked at her uncomprehendingly, then ducked his head obediently, removed his dark glasses and thrust them deep inside his tunic. Reynolds looked on in astonishment, then turned to Mallory.

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

Mallory wheeled his pony and said curtly: ‘It’s not necessary that you do.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Mallory turned his pony again and said, almost wearily: ‘It’s already eleven o’clock, boy, and almost already too late for what we have to do.’

‘Sir.’ Reynolds was deeply if obscurely pleased that Mallory should call him boy. ‘I don’t really want to know, sir.’

‘You’ve asked. We’ll have to go as quickly as our ponies can take us. A blind man can’t see obstructions, can’t balance himself according to the level of the terrain, can’t anticipate in advance how he should brace himself for an unexpectedly sharp drop, can’t lean in the saddle for a corner his pony knows is coming. A blind man, in short, is a hundred times more liable to fall off in a downhill gallop than we are. It’s enough that a blind man should be blind for life. It’s too much that we should expose him to the risk of a heavy fall with his glasses on, expose him to the risk of not only being blind but of having his eyes gouged out and being in agony for life.’

‘I hadn’t thought – I mean – I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Stop apologizing, boy. It’s really my turn, you know – to apologize to you. Keep an eye on him, will you?’

Colonel Lazlo, binoculars to his eyes, gazed down over the moonlit rocky slope below him towards the bridge at Neretva. On the southern bank of the river, in the meadows between the south bank and the beginning of the pine forest beyond, and, as far as Lazlo could ascertain, in the fringes of the pine forest itself, there was a disconcertingly ominous lack of movement, of any sign of life at all. Lazlo was pondering the disturbingly sinister significance of this unnatural peacefulness when a hand touched his shoulder. He twisted, looked up and recognized the figure of Major Stephan, commander of the Western Gap.

‘Welcome, welcome. The General has advised me of your arrival. Your battalion with you?’

‘What’s left of it.’ Stephan smiled without really smiling. ‘Every man who could walk. And all those who couldn’t.’

‘God send we don’t need them all tonight. The General has spoken to you of this man Mallory?’ Major Stephan nodded, and Lazlo went on: ‘If he fails? If the Germans cross the Neretva tonight –’

‘So?’ Stephan shrugged. ‘We were all due to die tonight anyway.’

‘A well-taken point,’ Lazlo said approvingly. He lifted his binoculars and returned to his contemplation of the bridge at Neretva.

So far, and almost incredibly, neither Mallory nor any of the six galloping behind him had parted company with their ponies. Not even Petar. True, the incline of the slope was not nearly as steep as it had been from the Ivenici plateau down to the block-house, but Reynolds suspected it was because Mallory had imperceptibly succeeded in slowing down the pace of their earlier headlong gallop. Perhaps, Reynolds thought vaguely, it was because Mallory was subconsciously trying to protect the blind singer, who was riding almost abreast with him, guitar firmly strapped over his shoulder, reins abandoned and both hands clasped desperately to the pommel of his saddle. Unbidden, almost, Reynolds’s thoughts strayed back to that scene inside the block-house. Moments later, he was urging his pony forwards until he had drawn alongside Mallory.

‘Sir?’

‘What is it?’ Mallory sounded irritable.

‘A word, sir. It’s urgent. Really it is.’

Mallory threw up a hand and brought the company to a halt. He said curtly: ‘Be quick.’

‘Neufeld and Droshny, sir.’ Reynolds paused in a moment’s brief uncertainty, then continued. ‘Do you reckon they know where you’re going?’

‘What’s that to do with anything?’

‘Please.’

‘Yes, they do. Unless they’re complete morons. And they’re not.’

‘It’s a pity, sir,’ Reynolds said reflectively, ‘that you hadn’t shot them after all.’

‘Get to the point,’ Mallory said impatiently.

‘Yes, sir. You reckoned Sergeant Baer released them earlier on?’

‘Of course.’ Mallory was exercising all his restraint. ‘Andrea saw them arrive. I’ve explained all this. They – Neufeld and Droshny – had to go up to the Ivenici plateau to check that we’d really gone.’

‘I understand that, sir. So you knew that Baer was following us. How did he get into the blockhouse?’

Mallory’s restraint vanished. He said in exasperation: ‘Because I left both keys hanging outside.’

‘Yes, sir. You were expecting him. But Sergeant Baer didn’t know you were expecting him – and even if he did he wouldn’t be expecting to find keys so conveniently to hand.’

‘Good God in heaven! Duplicates!’ In bitter chagrin, Mallory smacked the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Imbecile! Imbecile! Of course he would have his own keys.’

‘And Droshny,’ Miller said thoughtfully, ‘may know a short cut.’

‘That’s not all of it.’ Mallory was completely back on balance again, outwardly composed, the relaxed calmness of the face the complete antithesis of his racing mind. ‘Worse still, he may make straight for his camp radio and warn Zimmermann to pull his armoured divisions back from the Neretva. You’ve earned your passage tonight, Reynolds. Thanks, boy. How far to Neufeld’s camp, do you think, Andrea?’

‘A mile.’ The words came over Andrea’s shoulder, for Andrea, as always in situations which he knew called for the exercise of his highly specialized talents, was already on his way.

Five minutes later they were crouched at the edge of the forest less than twenty yards from the perimeter of Neufeld’s camp. Quite a number of the huts had illuminated windows, music could be heard coming from the dining hut and several Cetnik soldiers were moving about in the compound.

Reynolds whispered to Mallory: ‘How do we go about it, sir?’

‘We don’t do anything at all. We just leave it to Andrea.’

Groves spoke, his voice low. ‘One man? Andrea? We leave it to one man?’

Mallory sighed. ‘Tell them. Corporal Miller.’

‘I’d rather not. Well, if I have to. The fact is,’ Miller went on kindly, ‘Andrea is rather good at this sort of thing.’

‘So are we,’ Reynolds said. ‘We’re commandos. We’ve been trained for this sort of thing.’

‘And very highly trained, no doubt,’ said Miller approvingly. ‘Another half-dozen years’ experience and half a dozen of you might be just about able to cope with him. Although I doubt it very much. Before the night is out, you’ll learn – and I don’t mean to be insulting, Sergeants – that you are little lambs to Andrea’s wolf.’ Miller paused and went on sombrely: ‘Like whoever happens to be inside that radio hut at this moment.’

‘Like whoever happens –’ Groves twisted round and looked behind him. ‘Andrea? He’s gone. I didn’t see him go.’

‘No one ever does,’ Miller said. ‘And those poor devils won’t ever see him come.’ He looked at Mallory. ‘Time’s a-wasting.’

Mallory glanced at the luminous hands of his watch. ‘Eleven-thirty. Time is a-wasting.’

For almost a minute there was a silence broken only by the restless movements of the ponies tethered deep in the woods behind them, then Groves gave a muffled exclamation as Andrea materialized beside him. Mallory looked up and said: ‘How many?’

Andrea held up two fingers and moved silently into the woods towards his pony. The others rose and followed him, Groves and Reynolds exchanging glances which indicated more clearly than any words could possibly have done that they could have been even more wrong about Andrea than they had ever been about Mallory.

At precisely the moment that Mallory and his companions were remounting their ponies in the woods fringing Neufeld’s camp, a Wellington bomber came sinking down towards a well-lit airfield – the same airfield from which Mallory and his men had taken off less than twenty-four hours previously. Termoli, Italy. It made a perfect touchdown and as it taxied along the runway an army radio truck curved in on an interception course, turning to parallel the last hundred yards of the Wellington’s run down. In the left-hand front seat and in the right-hand back seat of the truck sat two immediately recognizable figures: in the front, the piratical splendidly bearded figure of Captain Jensen, in the back the British lieutenant-general with whom Jensen had recently spent so much time in pacing the Termoli Operations Room.

Plane and truck came to a halt at the same moment. Jensen, displaying a surprising agility for one of his very considerable bulk, hopped nimbly to the ground and strode briskly across the tarmac and arrived at the Wellington just as its door opened and the first of the passengers, the moustached major, swung to the ground.

Jensen nodded to the papers clutched in the major’s hand and said without preamble: ‘Those for me?’ The major blinked uncertainly, then nodded stiffly in return, clearly irked by this abrupt welcome for a man just returned from durance vile. Jensen took the papers without a further word, went back to his seat in the jeep, brought out a flashlight and studied the papers briefly. He twisted in his seat and said to the radio operator seated beside the General: ‘Flight plan as stated. Target as indicated. Now.’ The radio operator began to crank the handle.

Some fifty miles to the south-east, in the Foggia area, the buildings and runways of the RAF heavy bomber base echoed and reverberated to the thunder of scores of aircraft engines: at the dispersal area at the west end of the main runway several squadrons of Lancaster heavy bombers were lined up ready for take-off, obviously awaiting the signal to go. The signal was not long in coming.

Halfway down the airfield, but well to one side of the main runway, was parked a jeep identical to the one in which Jensen was sitting in Termoli. In the back seat a radio operator was crouched over a radio, earphones to his head. He listened intently, then looked up and said matter-of-factly: ‘Instructions as stated. Now. Now. Now.’

‘Instructions as stated,’ a captain in the front seat repeated. ‘Now. Now. Now.’ He reached for a wooden box, produced three Very pistols, aimed directly across the runway and fired each in turn. The brilliantly arcing flares burst into incandescent life, green, red and green again, before curving slowly back to earth. The thunder at the far end of the airfield mounted to a rumbling crescendo and the first of the Lancasters began to move. Within a few minutes the last of them had taken off and was lifting into the darkly hostile night skies of the Adriatic.

‘I did say, I believe,’ Jensen remarked conversationally and comfortably to the General in the back seat, ‘that they are the best in the business. Our friends from Foggia are on their way.’

‘The best in the business. Maybe. I don’t know. What I do know is that those damned German and Austrian divisions are still in position in the Gustav Line. Zero hour for the assault on the Gustav Line is –’ he glanced at his watch – ‘in exactly thirty hours.’

‘Time enough,’ Jensen said confidently.

‘I wish I shared this blissful confidence.’

Jensen smiled cheerfully at him as the jeep moved off, then faced forward in his seat again. As he did, the smile vanished completely from his face and his fingers beat a drum tattoo on the seat beside him.

The moon had broken through again as Neufeld, Droshny and their men came galloping into camp and reined in ponies so covered with steam from their heaving flanks and distressed breathing as to have a weirdly insubstantial appearance in the pale moonlight. Neufeld swung from his pony and turned to Sergeant Baer.

‘How many ponies left in the stables?’

‘Twenty. About that.’

‘Quickly. And as many men as there are ponies. Saddle up.’

Neufeld gestured to Droshny and together they ran towards the radio hut. The door, ominously enough on that icy night, was standing wide open. They were still ten feet short of the door when Neufeld shouted: ‘The Neretva bridge at once. Tell General Zimmermann –’

He halted abruptly in the doorway, Droshny by his shoulder. For the second time that evening the faces of both men reflected their stunned disbelief, their total uncomprehending shock.

Only one small lamp burned in the radio hut, but that one small lamp was enough. Two men lay on the floor in grotesquely huddled positions, the one lying partially across the other: both were quite unmistakably dead. Beside them, with its faceplate ripped off and interior smashed, lay the mangled remains of what had once been a transmitter. Neufeld gazed at the scene for some time before shaking his head violently as if to break the shocked spell and turned to Droshny.

‘The big one,’ he said quietly. ‘The big one did this.’

‘The big one,’ Droshny agreed. He was almost smiling. ‘You will remember what you promised, Hauptmann Neufeld? The big one. He’s for me.’

‘You shall have him. Come. They can be only minutes ahead.’ Both men turned and ran back to the compound where Sergeant Baer and a group of soldiers were already saddling up the ponies.

‘Machine-pistols only,’ Neufeld shouted. ‘No rifles. It will be close-quarter work tonight. And Sergeant Baer?’

‘Hauptmann Neufeld?’

‘Inform the men that we will not be taking prisoners.’

As those of Neufeld and his men had been, the ponies of Mallory and his six companions were almost invisible in the dense clouds of steam rising from their sweat-soaked bodies: their lurching gait, which could not now even be called a trot, was token enough of the obvious fact that they had reached the limits of exhaustion. Mallory glanced at Andrea, who nodded and said: ‘I agree. We’d make faster time on foot now.’

‘I must be getting old,’ Mallory said, and for a moment he sounded that way. ‘I’m not thinking very well tonight, am I?’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Ponies. Neufeld and his men will have fresh ponies from the stables. We should have killed them – or at least driven them away.’

‘Age is not the same thing as lack of sleep. It never occurred to me, either. A man cannot think of everything, my Keith.’ Andrea reined in his pony and was about to swing down when something on the slope below caught his attention. He pointed ahead.

A minute later they drew up alongside a very narrow-gauge railway line, of a type common in Central Yugoslavia. At this level the snow had petered out and the track, they could see, was overgrown and rusty, but for all that, apparently in fair enough mechanical condition: undoubtedly, it was the same track that had caught their eye when they had paused to examine the green waters of the Neretva dam on the way back from Major Broznik’s camp that morning. But what simultaneously caught and held the attention of both Mallory and Miller was not the track itself, but a little siding leading on to the track – and a diminutive, wood-burning locomotive that stood on the siding. The locomotive was practically a solid block of rust and looked as if it hadn’t moved from its present position since the beginning of the war: in all probability, it hadn’t.

Mallory produced a large-scale map from his tunic and flashed a torch on it. He said: ‘No doubt of it, this is the track we saw this morning. It goes down along the Neretva for at least five miles before bearing off to the south.’ He paused and went on thoughtfully: ‘I wonder if we could get that thing moving.’

‘What?’ Miller looked at him in horror. ‘It’ll fall to pieces if you touch it – it’s only the rust that’s holding the damn thing together. And that gradient there!’ He peered in dismay down the slope. ‘What do you think our terminal velocity is going to be when we hit one of those monster pine trees a few miles down the track?’

‘The ponies are finished,’ Mallory said mildly, ‘and you know how much you love walking.’

Miller looked at the locomotive with loathing. ‘There must be some other way.’

‘Shh!’ Andrea cocked his head. ‘They’re coming. I can hear them coming.’

‘Get the chocks away from those front wheels,’ Miller shouted. He ran forward and after several violent and well-directed kicks which clearly took into no account the future state of his toes, succeeded in freeing the triangular block which was attached to the front of the locomotive by a chain: Reynolds, no less energetically, did the same for the other chock.

All of them, even Maria and Petar helping, flung all their weight against the rear of the locomotive. The locomotive remained where it was. They tried again, despairingly: the wheels refused to budge even a fraction of an inch. Groves said, with an odd mixture of urgency and diffidence: ‘Sir, on a gradient like this, it would have been left with its brakes on.’

‘Oh my God!’ Mallory said in chagrin. ‘Andrea. Quickly. Release the brake lever.’

Andrea swung himself on to the footplate. He said complainingly: ‘There are a dozen damned levers up here.’

‘Well, open the dozen damned levers, then.’ Mallory glanced anxiously back up the track. Maybe Andrea had heard something, maybe not: there was certainly no one in sight yet. But he knew that Neufeld and Droshny, who must have been released from the block-house only minutes after they had left there themselves and who knew those woods and paths better than they did, must be very close indeed by this time.

There was a considerable amount of metallic screeching and swearing coming from the cab and after perhaps half a minute Andrea said: ‘That’s the lot.’

‘Shove,’ Mallory ordered.

They shoved, heels jammed in the sleepers and backs to the locomotive, and this time the locomotive moved off so easily, albeit with a tortured squealing of rusted wheels, that most of those pushing were caught wholly by surprise and fell on their backs on the track. Moments later they were on their feet and running after the locomotive which was already perceptibly beginning to increase speed. Andrea reached down from the cab, swung Maria and Petar aboard in turn, then lent a helping hand to the others. The last, Groves, was reaching for the footplate when he suddenly braked, swung round, ran back to the ponies, unhitched the climbing ropes, flung them over his shoulder and chased after the locomotive again. Mallory reached down and helped him on to the footplate.

‘It’s not my day,’ Mallory said sadly. ‘Evening rather. First, I forget about Baer’s duplicate keys. Then about the ponies. Then about the brakes. Now the ropes. I wonder what I’ll forget about next?’

‘Perhaps about Neufeld and Droshny.’ Reynolds’s voice was carefully without expression.

‘What about Neufeld and Droshny?’

Reynolds pointed back up the railway track with the barrel of his Schmeisser. ‘Permission to fire, sir.’

Mallory swung round. Neufeld, Droshny and an indeterminate number of other pony-mounted soldiers had just appeared around a bend in the track and were hardly more than a hundred yards away.

‘Permission to fire,’ Mallory agreed. ‘The rest of you get down.’ He unslung and brought up his own Schmeisser just as Reynolds squeezed the trigger of his. For perhaps five seconds the closed metallic confines of the tiny cabin reverberated deafeningly to the crash of the two machine-pistols, then, at a nudge from Mallory, the two men stopped firing. There was no target left to fire at. Neufeld and his men had loosed off a few preliminary shots but immediately realized that the wildly swaying saddles of their ponies made an impossibly unsteady firing position as compared to the cab of the locomotive and had pulled their ponies off into the woods on either side of the track. But not all of them had pulled off in time: two men lay motionless and face down in the snow while their ponies still galloped down the track in the wake of the locomotive.

Miller rose, glanced wordlessly at the scene behind, then tapped Mallory on the arm. ‘A small point occurs to me, sir. How do we stop this thing.’ He gazed apprehensively through the cab window. ‘Must be doing sixty already.’

‘Well, we’re doing at least twenty,’ Mallory said agreeably. ‘But fast enough to out-distance those ponies. Ask Andrea. He released the brake.’

‘He released a dozen levers,’ Miller corrected. ‘Any one could have been the brake.’

‘Well, you’re not going to sit around doing nothing, are you?’ Mallory asked reasonably. ‘Find out how to stop the damn thing.’

Miller looked at him coldly and set about trying to find out how to stop the damn thing. Mallory turned as Reynolds touched him on the arm. ‘Well?’

Reynolds had an arm round Maria to steady her on the now swaying platform. He whispered: They’re going to get us, sir. They’re going to get us for sure. Why don’t we stop and leave those two, sir? Give them a chance to escape into the woods?’

‘Thanks for the thought. But don’t be mad. With us they have a chance – a small one to be sure, but a chance. Stay behind and they’ll be butchered.’

The locomotive was no longer doing the twenty miles per hour Mallory had mentioned and if it hadn’t approached the figure that Miller had so fearfully mentioned it was certainly going quickly enough to make it rattle and sway to what appeared to be the very limits of its stability. By this time the last of the trees to the right of the track had petered out, the darkened waters of the Neretva dam were clearly visible to the west and the railway track was now running very close indeed to the edge of what appeared to be a dangerously steep precipice. Mallory looked back into the cab. With the exception of Andrea, everyone now wore expressions of considerable apprehension on their faces. Mallory said: ‘Found out how to stop this damn thing yet?’

‘Easy.’ Andrea indicated a lever. ‘This handle here.’

‘Okay, brakeman. I want to have a look.’

To the evident relief of most of the passengers in the cab, Andrea leaned back on the brake-lever. There was an eldritch screeching that set teeth on edge, clouds of sparks flew up past the sides of the cab as some wheels or other locked solid in the lines, then the locomotive eased slowly to a halt, both the intensity of sound from the squealing brakes and the number of sparks diminishing as it did so. Andrea, duty done, leaned out of the side of the cab with all the bored aplomb of the crack loco engineer: one had the feeling that all he really wanted in life that moment was a piece of oily waste and a whistle-cord to pull.

Mallory and Miller climbed down and ran to the edge of the cliff, less than twenty yards away. At least Mallory did. Miller made a much more cautious approach, inching forward the last few feet on hands and knees. He hitched one cautious eye over the edge of the precipice, screwed both eyes shut, looked away and just as cautiously inched his way back from the edge of the cliff: Miller claimed that he couldn’t even stand on the bottom step of a ladder without succumbing to the overwhelming compulsion to throw himself into the abyss.

Mallory gazed down thoughtfully into the depths. They were, he saw, directly over the top of the dam wall, which, in the strangely shadowed half-light cast by the moon, seemed almost impossibly far below in the dizzying depths. The broad top of the dam wall was brightly lit by floodlights and patrolled by at least half a dozen German soldiers, jack-booted and helmeted. Beyond the dam, on the lower side, the ladder Maria had spoken of was invisible, but the frail-looking swing bridge, still menaced by the massive bulk of the boulder on the scree on the left bank, and farther down, the white water indicating what might or might not have been a possible – or passable – ford were plainly in sight. Mallory, momentarily abstracted in thought, gazed at the scene below for several moments, recalled that the pursuit must be again coming uncomfortably close and hurriedly made his way back to the locomotive. He said to Andrea: ‘About a mile and a half, I should think. No more.’ He turned to Maria. ‘You know there’s a ford – or what seems to be a ford – some way below the dam. Is there a way down?’

‘For a mountain goat.’

‘Don’t insult him,’ Miller said reprovingly.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Ignore him,’ Mallory said. ‘Just tell us when we get there.’

Some five or six miles below the Neretva dam General Zimmermann paced up and down the fringe of the pine forest bordering the meadow to the south of the bridge at Neretva. Beside him paced a colonel, one of his divisional commanders. To the south of them could just dimly be discerned the shapes of hundreds of men and scores of tanks and other vehicles, vehicles with all their protective camouflage now removed, each tank and vehicle surrounded by its coterie of attendants making last-minute and probably wholly unnecessary adjustments. The time for hiding was over. The waiting was coming to an end. Zimmermann glanced at his watch.

‘Twelve-thirty. The first infantry battalions start moving across in fifteen minutes, and spread out along the north bank. The tanks at two o’clock.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The details had been arranged many hours ago, but somehow one always found it necessary to repeat the instructions and the acknowledgements. The colonel gazed to the north. ‘I sometimes wonder if there’s anybody at all across there.’

‘It’s not the north I’m worrying about,’ Zimmermann said sombrely. ‘It’s the west.’

‘The Allies? You – you think their air armadas will come soon? It’s still in your bones, Herr General?’

‘Still in my bones. It’s coming soon. For me, for you, for all of us.’ He shivered, then forced a smile. ‘Some ill-mannered lout has just walked over my grave.’

TEN

Saturday

0040–0120

‘We’re coming up to it now,’ Maria said. Blonde hair streaming in the passing wind, she peered out again through the cab window of the clanking, swaying locomotive, withdrew her head and turned to Mallory. ‘About three hundred metres.’

Mallory glanced at Andrea. ‘You heard, brakeman?’

‘I heard.’ Andrea leaned hard on the brake lever. The result was as before, a banshee shrieking of locked wheels on the rusty lines and a pyrotechnical display of sparks. The locomotive came to a juddering halt as Andrea looked out his cab window and observed a V-shaped gap in the edge of the cliff directly opposite where they had come to a stop. ‘Within the yard, I should say?’

‘Within the yard,’ Mallory agreed. ‘If you’re unemployed after the war, there should always be a place for you in a shunter’s yard.’ He swung down to the side of the track, lent a helping hand to Maria and Petar, waited until Miller, Reynolds and Groves had jumped down, then said impatiently to Andrea: ‘Well, hurry up, then.’

‘Coming,’ Andrea said peaceably. He pushed the handbrake all the way off, jumped down, and gave the locomotive a shove: the ancient vehicle at once moved off, gathering speed as it went. ‘You never know,’ Andrea said wistfully. ‘It might hit somebody somewhere.’

They ran towards the cut in the edge of the cliff, a cut which obviously represented the beginning of some prehistoric landslide down to the bed of the Neretva, a maelstrom of white water far below, the boiling rapids resulting from scores of huge boulders which had slipped from this landslide in that distant aeon. By some exercise of the imagination, that scar in the side of the cliff-face might just perhaps have been called a gully, but it was in fact an almost perpendicular drop of scree and shale and small boulders, all of it treacherous and unstable to a frightening degree, the whole dangerous sweep broken only by a small ledge of jutting rock about halfway down. Miller took one brief glance at this terrifying prospect, stepped hurriedly back from the edge of the cliff and looked at Mallory in a silently dismayed incredulity.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Mallory said.

‘But this is terrible. Even when I climbed the south cliff in Navarone –’

‘You didn’t climb the south cliff in Navarone,’ Mallory said unkindly. ‘Andrea and I pulled you up at the end of a rope.’

‘Did you? I forget. But this – this is a climber’s nightmare.’

‘So we don’t have to climb it. Just lower ourselves down. You’ll be all right – as long as you don’t start rolling.’

‘I’ll be all right as long as I don’t start rolling,’ Miller repeated mechanically. He watched Mallory join two ropes together and pass them around the bole of a stunted pine. ‘How about Petar and Maria?’

‘Petar doesn’t have to see to make this descent. All he has to do is to lower himself on this rope – and Petar is as strong as a horse. Somebody will be down there before him to guide his feet on to the ledge. Andrea will look after the young lady here. Now hurry. Neufeld and his men will be up with us any minute here – and if they catch up on this cliff-face, well that’s that. Andrea, off you go with Maria.’

Immediately, Andrea and the girl swung over the edge of the gully and began to lower themselves swiftly down the rope. Groves watched them, hesitated, then moved towards Mallory.

‘I’ll go last, sir, and take the rope with me.’

Miller took his arm and led him some feet away. He said, kindly: ‘Generous, son, generous, but it’s just not on. Not as long as Dusty Miller’s life depends on it. In a situation like this, I must explain, all our lives depend upon the anchorman. The Captain, I am informed, is the best anchorman in the world.’

‘He’s what?’

‘It’s one of the non-coincidences why he was chosen to lead this mission. Bosnia is known to have rocks and cliffs and mountains all over it. Mallory was climbing the Himalayas, laddie, before you were climbing out of your cot. Even you are not too young to have heard of him.’

‘Keith Mallory? The New Zealander?’

‘Indeed. Used to chase sheep around, I gather. Come on, your turn.’

The first five made it safely. Even the last but one, Miller, made the descent to the ledge without incident, principally by employing his favourite mountain-climbing technique of keeping his eyes closed all the time. Then Mallory came last, coiling the rope with him as he came, moving quickly and surely and hardly ever seeming to look where he put his feet but at the same time not as much as disturbing the slightest pebble or piece of shale. Groves observed the descent with a look of almost awed disbelief in his eyes.

Mallory peered over the edge of the ledge. Because of a slight bend in the gorge above, there was a sharp cut-off in the moonlight just below where they stood so that while the phosphorescent whiteness of the rapids was in clear moonlight, the lower part of the slope beneath their feet was in deep shadow. Even as he watched, the moon was obscured by a shadow, and all the dimly-seen detail in the slope below vanished. Mallory knew that they could never afford to wait until the moon reappeared, for Neufeld and his men could well have arrived by then. Mallory belayed a rope round an outcrop of rock and said to Andrea and Maria: ‘This one’s really dangerous. Watch for loose boulders.’

Andrea and Maria took well over a minute to make this invisible descent, a double tug on the rope announcing their safe arrival at the bottom. On the way down they had started several small avalanches, but Mallory had no fears that the next man down would trigger off a fall of rock that would injure or even kill Andrea and Maria; Andrea had lived too long and too dangerously to die in so useless and so foolish a fashion – and he would undoubtedly warn the next man down of the same danger. For the tenth time Mallory glanced up towards the top of the slope they had just descended but if Neufeld, Droshny and his men had just arrived they were keeping very quiet about it and being most circumspect indeed: it was not a difficult conclusion to arrive at that, after the events of the past few hours, circumspection would be the last thing in their minds.

The moon broke through again as Mallory finally made his descent. He cursed the exposure it might offer if any of the enemy suddenly appeared on the clifftop, even although he knew that Andrea would be guarding against precisely that danger; on the other hand it afforded him the opportunity of descending at twice the speed he could have made in the earlier darkness. The watchers below watched tensely as Mallory, without any benefit of rope, made his perilous descent: but he never even looked like making one mistake. He descended safely to the boulder-strewn shore and gazed out over the rapids.

He said to no one in particular: ‘You know what’s going to happen if they arrive at the top and find us halfway across here and the moon shining down on us?’ The ensuing silence left no doubt but they all knew what was going to happen. ‘Now is all the time. Reynolds, you think you can make it?’ Reynolds nodded. ‘Then leave your gun.’

Mallory knotted a bowline round Reynolds’s waist, taking the strain, if one were to arise, with Andrea and Groves. Reynolds launched himself bodily into the rapids, heading for the first of the rounded boulders which offered so treacherous a hold in that seething foam. Twice he was knocked off his feet, twice he regained them, reached the rock, but immediately beyond it was washed away off balance and swept down-river. The men on the bank hauled him ashore again, coughing and spluttering and fighting mad. Without a word to or look at anybody Reynolds again hurled himself into the rapids, and this time so determined was the fury of his assault that he succeeded in reaching the far bank without once being knocked off his feet.

He dragged himself on to the stony beach, lay there for some moments recovering from his exhaustion, then rose, crossed to a stunted pine at the base of the cliff rising on the other side, undid the rope round his waist and belayed it securely round the bole of the tree. Mallory, on his side, took two turns round a large rock and gestured to Andrea and the girl.

Mallory glanced upwards again to the top of the gully. There were still no signs of the enemy. Even so, Mallory felt that they could afford to wait no longer, that they had already pushed their luck too far. Andrea and Maria were barely halfway across when he told Groves to give Petar a hand across the rapids. He hoped to God the rope would hold, but hold it did for Andrea and Maria made it safely to the far bank. No sooner had they grounded than Mallory sent Miller on his way, carrying a pile of automatic arms over his left shoulder.

Groves and Petar also made the crossing without incident. Mallory himself had to wait until Miller reached the far bank, for he knew the chances of his being carried away were high and if he were, then Miller too would be precipitated into the water and their guns rendered useless.

Mallory waited until he saw Andrea give Miller a hand into the shallow water on the far bank and waited no longer. He unwound the rope from the rock he had been using as a belay, fastened a bowline round his own waist and plunged into the water. He was swept away at exactly the same point where Reynolds had been on his first attempt and was finally dragged ashore by his friends on the far bank with a fair amount of the waters of the Neretva in his stomach but otherwise unharmed.

‘Any injuries, any cracked bones or skulls?’ Mallory asked. He himself felt as if he had been over Niagara in a barrel. ‘No? Fine.’ He looked at Miller. ‘You stay here with me. Andrea, take the others up round the first corner there and wait for us.’

‘Me?’ Andrea objected mildly. He nodded towards the gully. ‘We’ve got friends that might be coming down there at any moment.’

Mallory took him some little way aside. ‘We also have friends,’ he said quietly, ‘who might just possibly be coming down-river from the dam garrison.’ He nodded at the two sergeants. Petar and Maria. ‘What would happen to them if they ran into an Alpenkorps patrol, do you think?’

‘I’ll wait for you round the corner.’

Andrea and the four others made their slow way up-river, slipping and stumbling over the wetly slimy rocks and boulders. Mallory and Miller withdrew into the protection and concealment of two large boulders and stared upwards.

Several minutes passed. The moon still shone and the top of the gully was still innocent of any sign of the enemy. Miller said uneasily: ‘What do you think has gone wrong? They’re taking a damned long time about turning up.’

‘No, I think that it’s just that they are taking a damned long time in turning back.’

‘Turning back?’

‘They don’t know where we’ve gone.’ Mallory pulled out his map, examined it with a carefully hooded pencil-torch. ‘About three-quarters of a mile down the railway track, there’s a sharp turn to the left. In all probability the locomotive would have left the track there. Last time Neufeld and Droshny saw us we were aboard that locomotive and the logical thing for them to have done would have been to follow the track till they came to where we had abandoned the locomotive, expecting to find us somewhere in the vicinity. When they found the crashed engine, they would know at once what would have happened – but that would have given them another mile and a half to ride – and half of that uphill on tired ponies.’

‘That must be it. I wish to God,’ Miller went on grumblingly, ‘that they’d hurry up.’

‘What is this?’ Mallory queried. ‘Dusty Miller yearning for action?’

‘No, I’m not,’ Miller said definitely. He glanced at his watch. ‘But time is getting very short.’

‘Time,’ Mallory agreed soberly, ‘is getting terribly short.’

And then they came. Miller, glancing upward, saw a faint metallic glint in the moonlight as a head peered cautiously over the edge of the gully. He touched Mallory on the arm.

‘I see him,’ Mallory murmured. Together both men reached inside their tunics, pulled out their Lugers and removed their waterproof coverings. The helmeted head gradually resolved itself into a figure standing fully silhouetted in the moonlight against the sharply etched skyline. He began what was obviously meant to be a cautious descent, then suddenly flung up both arms and fell backwards and outwards. If he cried out, from where Mallory and Miller were the cry could not have been heard above the rushing of the waters. He struck the ledge halfway down, bounced off and outwards for a quite incredible distance, then landed spread-eagled on the stony river bank below, pulling down a small avalanche behind him.

Miller was grimly philosophical. ‘Well, you said it was dangerous.’

Another figure appeared over the lip of the precipice to make the second attempt at a descent, and was followed in short order by several more men. Then, for the space of a few minutes, the moon went behind a cloud, while Mallory and Miller stared across the river until their eyes ached, anxiously and vainly trying to pierce the impenetrable darkness that shrouded the slope on the far side.

The leading climber, when the moon did break through, was just below the ledge, cautiously negotiating the lower slope. Mallory took careful aim with his Luger, the climber stiffened convulsively, toppled backwards and fell to his death. The following figure, clearly oblivious of the fate of his companion, began the descent of the lower slope. Both Mallory and Miller sighted their Lugers but just then the moon was suddenly obscured again and they had to lower their guns. When the moon again reappeared, four men had already reached the safety of the opposite bank, two of whom, linked together by a rope, were just beginning to venture the crossing of the ford.

Mallory and Miller waited until they had safely completed two-thirds of the crossing of the ford. They formed a close and easy target and at that range it was impossible that Mallory and Miller should miss, nor did they. There was a momentary reddening of the white waters of the rapids, as much imagined as seen, then, still lashed together they were swept away down the gorge. So furiously were their bodies tumbled over and over by the rushing waters, so often did cartwheeling arms and legs break surface, that they might well have given the appearance of men who, though without hope, were still desperately struggling for their lives. In any event, the two men left standing on the far bank clearly did not regard the accident as being significant of anything amiss in any sinister way. They stood and watched the vanishing bodies of their companions in perplexity, still unaware of what was happening. A matter of two or three seconds later and they would never have been aware of anything else but once more a wisp of errant dark cloud covered the moon and they still had a little time, a very little time, to live. Mallory and Miller lowered their guns.

Mallory glanced at his watch and said irritably: ‘Why the hell don’t they start firing? It’s five past one.’

‘Why don’t who start firing?’ Miller said cautiously.

‘You heard. You were there. I asked Vis to ask Vukalovic to give us sound cover at one. Up by the Zenica Gap there, less than a mile away. Well, we can’t wait any longer. It’ll take –’ He broke off and listened to the sudden outburst of rifle fire, startlingly loud even at that comparatively close distance, and smiled. ‘Well, what’s five minutes here or there. Come on. I have the feeling that Andrea must be getting a little anxious about us.’

Andrea was. He emerged silently from the shadows as they rounded the first bend in the river. He said reproachfully: ‘Where have you two been? You had me worried stiff.’

‘I’ll explain in an hour’s time – if we’re all still around in an hour’s time,’ Mallory amended grimly. ‘Our friends the bandits are two minutes behind. I think they’ll be coming in force – although they’ve lost four already – six including the two Reynolds got from the locomotive. You stop at the next bend up-river and hold them off. You’ll have to do it by yourself. Think you can manage?’

‘This is no time for joking,’ Andrea said with dignity. ‘And then?’

‘Groves and Reynolds and Petar and his sister come with us up-river, Reynolds and Groves as nearly as possible to the dam, Petar and Maria wherever they can find some suitable shelter, possibly in the vicinity of the swing bridge – as long as they’re well clear of that damned great boulder perched above it.’

‘Swing bridge, sir?’ Reynolds asked. ‘A boulder?’

‘I saw it when we got off the locomotive to reconnoitre.’

‘You saw it. Andrea didn’t.’

‘I mentioned it to him,’ Mallory went on impatiently. He ignored the disbelief in the sergeant’s face and turned to Andrea. ‘Dusty and I can’t wait any longer. Use your Schmeisser to stop them.’ He pointed north-westwards towards the Zenica Gap, where the rattle of musketry was now almost continuous. ‘With all that racket going on, they’ll never know the difference.’

Andrea nodded, settled himself comfortably behind a pair of large boulders and slid the barrel of his Schmeisser into the V between them. The remainder of the party moved upstream, scrambling awkwardly around and over the slippery boulders and rocks that covered the right-hand bank of the Neretva, until they came to a rudimentary path that had been cleared among the stones. This they followed for perhaps a hundred yards, till they came to a slight bend in the gorge. By mutual consent and without any order being given, all six stopped and gazed upwards.

The towering breath-taking ramparts of the Neretva dam wall had suddenly come into full view. Above the dam on either side precipitous walls of rock soared up into the night sky, at first quite vertical then both leaning out in an immense overhang which seemed to make them almost touch at the top, although this, Mallory knew from the observation he had made from above, was an optical illusion. On top of the dam wall itself the guardhouses and radio huts were clearly visible, as were the pigmy shapes of several patrolling German soldiers. From the top of the eastern side of the dam, where the huts were situated, an iron ladder – Mallory knew it was painted green, but in the half-shadow cast by the dam wall it looked black – fastened by iron supports to the bare rock face, zig-zagged downwards to the foot of the gorge, close by where foaming white jets of water boiled from the outlet pipes at the base of the dam wall. Mallory tried to estimate how many steps there would be in that ladder. Two hundred, perhaps two hundred and fifty, and once you started to climb or descend you just had to keep on going, for nowhere was there any platform or backrest to afford even the means for a temporary respite. Nor did the ladder at any point afford the slightest scrap of cover from watchers on the bridge. As an assault route, Mallory mused, it was scarcely the one he would have chosen: he could not conceive of a more hazardous one.

About halfway between where they stood and the foot of the ladder on the other side, a swing bridge spanned the boiling waters of the gorge. There was little about its ancient, rickety and warped appearance to inspire any confidence: and what little confidence there might have been could hardly have survived the presence of an enormous boulder, directly above the eastern edge of the bridge, which seemed in imminent danger of breaking loose from its obviously insecure footing in the deep scar in the cliff-side.

Reynolds assimilated all of the scene before him, then turned to Mallory. He said quietly: ‘We’ve been very patient, sir.’

‘You’ve been very patient. Sergeant – and I’m grateful. You know, of course, that there is a Yugoslav division trapped in the Zenica Cage – that’s just behind the mountains to our left, here. You know, too, that the Germans are going to launch two armoured divisions across the Neretva bridge at two a.m. this morning and that if once they do get across – and normally there would be nothing to stop them – the Yugoslavs, armed with their pop-guns and with hardly any ammunition left, would be cut to pieces. You know the only way to stop them is to destroy the Neretva bridge? You know that this counter-espionage and rescue mission was only a cover for the real thing?’

Reynolds said bitterly: ‘I know that – now.’ He pointed down the gorge. ‘And I also know that the bridge lies that way.’

‘And so it does. I also know that even if we could approach it – which would be quite impossible – we couldn’t blow that bridge up with a truckload of explosives; steel bridges anchored in reinforced concrete take a great deal of destroying.’ He turned and looked at the dam. ‘So we do it another way. See that dam wall there – there’s thirty million tons of water behind it – enough to carry away the Sydney bridge, far less the one over the Neretva.’

Groves said in a low voice: ‘You’re crazy,’ and then, as an afterthought, ‘sir.’

‘Don’t we know it? But we’re going to blow up that dam all the same. Dusty and I.’

‘But – but all the explosives we have are a few handgrenades,’ Reynolds said, almost desperately. ‘And in that dam wall there must be ten-to twenty-feet thicknesses of reinforced concrete. Blow it up? How?’

Mallory shook his head. ‘Sorry.’

‘Why, you close-mouthed –’

‘Be quiet! Dammit, man, will you never, never learn. Even up to the very last minute you could be caught and made to tell – and then what would happen to Vukalovic’s division trapped in the Zenica Cage? What you don’t know, you can’t tell.’

‘But you know.’ Reynolds’s voice was thick with resentment. ‘You and Dusty and Andrea – Colonel Stavros – you know. Groves and I knew all along that you knew, and you could be made to talk.’

Mallory said with considerable restraint: ‘Get Andrea to talk? Perhaps you might – if you threatened to take away his cigars. Sure, Dusty and I could talk – but someone had to know.’

Groves said in the tone of a man reluctantly accepting the inevitable: ‘How do you get behind that dam wall – you can’t blow it up from the front, can you?’

‘Not with the means at present available to us,’ Mallory agreed. ‘We get behind it. We climb up there.’ Mallory pointed to the precipitous gorge wall on the other side.

‘We climb up there, eh?’ Miller said conversationally. He looked stunned.

‘Up the ladder. But not all the way. Three-quarters of the way up the ladder we leave it and climb vertically up the cliff-face till we’re about forty feet above the top of the dam wall, just where the cliff begins to overhang there. From there, there’s a ledge – well, more of a crack, really –’

‘A crack!’ Miller said hoarsely. He was horrorstricken.

‘A crack. It stretches about a hundred and fifty feet clear across the top of the dam wall at an ascending angle of maybe twenty degrees. We go that way.’

Reynolds looked at Mallory in an almost dazed incredulity. ‘It’s madness!’

‘Madness!’ Miller echoed.

‘I wouldn’t do it from choice,’ Mallory admitted. ‘Nevertheless, it’s the only way in.’

‘But you’re bound to be seen,’ Reynolds protested.

‘Not bound to be.’ Mallory dug into his rucksack and produced from it a black rubber frogman’s suit, while Miller reluctantly did the same from his. As both men started to pull their suits on, Mallory continued: ‘We’ll be like black flies against a black wall.’

‘He hopes,’ Miller muttered.

‘Then with any luck we expect them to be looking the other way when the RAF start in with the fireworks. And if we do seem in any danger of discovery – well, that’s where you and Groves come in. Captain Jensen was right – as things have turned out, we couldn’t have done this without you.’

‘Compliments?’ Groves said to Reynolds. ‘Compliments from the Captain? I’ve a feeling there’s something nasty on the way.’

‘There is,’ Mallory admitted. He had his suit and hood in position now and was fixing into his belt some pitons and a hammer he had extracted from his rucksack. ‘If we’re in trouble, you two create a diversion.’

‘What kind of diversion?’ Reynolds asked suspiciously.

‘From somewhere near the foot of the dam you start firing up at the guards atop the dam wall.’

‘But – but we’ll be completely exposed.’ Groves gazed across at the rocky scree which composed the left bank at the base of the dam and at the foot of the ladder. ‘There’s not an ounce of cover. What kind of chance will we have?’

Mallory secured his rucksack and hitched a long coil of rope over his shoulder. ‘A very poor one, I’m afraid.’ He looked at his luminous watch. ‘But then, for the next forty-five minutes you and Groves are expendable. Dusty and I are not.’

‘Just like that?’ Reynolds said flatly. ‘Expendable.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Want to change places?’ Miller said hopefully. There was no reply for Mallory was already on his way. Miller, with a last apprehensive look at the towering rampart of rock above, gave a last hitch to his rucksack and followed. Reynolds made to move off, but Groves caught him by the arm and signed to Maria to go ahead with Petar. He said to her: ‘We’ll wait a bit and bring up the rear. Just to be sure.’

‘What is it?’ Reynolds said in a low voice.

‘This. Our Captain Mallory admitted that he has already made four mistakes tonight. I think he’s making a fifth now.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘He’s putting all our eggs in one basket and he’s overlooked certain things. For instance, asking the two of us to stand by at the base of the dam wall. If we have to start a diversion, one burst of machine-gun fire from the top of the dam wall will get us both in seconds. One man can create as successful a diversion as two – and where’s the point in the two of us getting killed? Besides, with one of us left alive, there’s always the chance that something can be done to protect Maria and her brother. I’ll go to the foot of the dam while you –’

‘Why should you be the one to go? Why not –’

‘Wait, I haven’t finished yet. I also think Mallory’s very optimistic if he thinks that Andrea can hold off that lot coming up the gorge. There must be at least twenty of them and they’re not out for an evening’s fun and games. They’re out to kill us. So what happens if they do overwhelm Andrea and come up to the swing bridge and find Maria and Petar there while we are busy being sitting targets at the base of the dam wall? They’ll knock them both off before you can bat an eyelid.’

‘Or maybe not knock them off,’ Reynolds muttered. ‘What if Neufeld were to be killed before they reached the swing bridge? What if Droshny were the man in charge – Maria and Petar might take some time in dying.’

‘So you’ll stay near the bridge and keep our backs covered? With Maria and Petar in shelter somewhere near?’

‘You’re right, I’m sure you’re right. But I don’t like it,’ Reynolds said uneasily. ‘He gave us his orders and he’s not a man who likes having his orders disobeyed.’

‘He’ll never know – even if he ever comes back, which I very much doubt, he’ll never know. And he’s started to make mistakes.’

‘Not this kind of mistake.’ Reynolds was still more than vaguely uneasy.

‘Am I right or not?’ Groves demanded.

‘I don’t think it’s going to matter a great deal at the end of the day,’ Reynolds said wearily. ‘Okay, let’s do it your way.’

The two sergeants hurried off after Maria and Petar.

Andrea listened to the scraping of heavy boots on stones, the very occasional metallic chink of a gun striking against a rock, and waited, stretched out flat on his stomach, the barrel of his Schmeisser rock-steady in the cleft between the boulders. The sounds heralding the stealthy approach up the river bank were not more than forty yards away when Andrea raised himself slightly, squinted down the barrel and squeezed the trigger.

The reply was immediate. At once three or four guns, all of them, Andrea realized, machine-pistols, opened up. Andrea stopped firing, ignoring the bullets whistling above his head and ricocheting from the boulders on either side of him, carefully lined up on one of the flashes issuing from a machine-pistol and fired a one-second burst. The man behind the machine-pistol straightened convulsively, his upflung right arm sending his gun spinning, then slowly toppled sideways in the Neretva and was carried away in the whitely swirling waters. Andrea fired again and a second man twisted round and fell heavily among the rocks. There came a suddenly barked order and the firing down-river ceased.

There were eight men in the down-river group and now one of them detached himself from the shelter of a boulder and crawled towards the second man who had been hit: as he moved, Droshny’s face revealed his usual wolfish grin, but it was clear that he was feeling very far from smiling. He bent over the huddled figure in the stones, and turned him on his back: it was Neufeld, with blood streaming down from a gash in the side of the head. Droshny straightened, his face vicious in anger, and turned round as one of his Cetniks touched his arm.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Not quite. Concussed and badly. He’ll be unconscious for hours, maybe days. I don’t know, only a doctor can tell.’ Droshny beckoned to two other men. ‘You three – get him across the ford and up to safety. Two stay with him, the other come back. And for God’s sake tell the others to hurry up and get here.’

His face still contorted with anger and for the moment oblivious of all danger, Droshny leapt to his feet and fired a long continuous burst upstream, a burst which apparently left Andrea completely unmoved, for he remained motionless where he was, resting peacefully with his back to his protective boulder, watching with mild interest but apparent unconcern as ricochets and splintered fragments of rock flew off in all directions.

The sound of the firing carried clearly to the ears of the guards patrolling the top of the dam. Such was the bedlam of small-arms fire all around and such were the tricks played on the ears by the baffling variety of echoes that reverberated up and down the gorge and over the surface of the dam itself, that it was quite impossible precisely to locate the source of the recent bursts of machine-pistol fire: what was significant, however, was that it had been machine-gun fire and up to that moment the sounds of musketry had consisted exclusively of rifle fire. And it had seemed to emanate from the south, from the gorge below the dam. One of the guards on the dam went worriedly to the captain in charge, spoke briefly, then walked quickly across to one of the small huts on the raised concrete platform at the eastern end of the dam wall. The hut, which had no front, only a rolled-up canvas protection, held a large radio transceiver manned by a corporal.

‘Captain’s orders,’ the sergeant said. ‘Get through to the bridge at Neretva. Pass a message to General Zimmermann that we – the captain, that is – is worried. Tell him that there’s a great deal of small-arms fire all around us and that some of it seems to be coming from down-river.’

The sergeant waited impatiently while the operator put the call through and even more impatiently as the earphones crackled two minutes later and the operator started writing down the message. He took the completed message from the operator and handed it to the captain, who read it out aloud.

‘General Zimmermann says, “There is no cause at all for anxiety, the noise is being made by our Yugoslav friends up by the Zenica Gap who are whistling in the dark because they are momentarily expecting an all-out assault by units of the 11th Army Corps. And it will be a great deal noisier later on when the RAF starts dropping bombs in all the wrong places. But they won’t be dropping them near you, so don’t worry.’” The captain lowered the paper. ‘That’s good enough for me. If the General says we are not to worry, then that’s good enough for me. You know the General’s reputation, sergeant?’

‘I know his reputation, sir.’ Some distance away and from some unidentifiable direction, came several more bursts of machine-pistol fire. The sergeant stirred unhappily.

‘You are still troubled by something?’ the captain asked.

‘Yes, sir. I know the general’s reputation, of course, and trust him implicitly.’ He paused then went on worriedly: ‘I could have sworn that that last burst of machine-pistol fire came from down the gorge there.’

‘You’re becoming just an old woman, sergeant,’ the captain said kindly, ‘and you must report to our divisional surgeon soon. Your ears need examining.’

The sergeant, in fact, was not becoming an old woman and his hearing was in considerably better shape than that of the officer who had reproached him. The current burst of machine-pistol firing was, as he’d thought, coming from the gorge, where Droshny and his men, now doubled in numbers, were moving forward, singly or in pairs, but never more than two at a time, in a series of sharp but very short rushes, firing as they went. Their firing, necessarily wildly inaccurate as they stumbled and slipped on the treacherous going underfoot, elicited no response from Andrea, possibly because he felt himself in no great danger, probably because he was conserving his ammunition. The latter supposition seemed the more likely as Andrea had slung his Schmeisser and was now examining with interest a stick-grenade which he had just withdrawn from his belt.

Farther up-river, Sergeant Reynolds, standing at the eastern edge of the rickety wooden bridge which spanned the narrowest part of the gorge where the turbulent, racing, foaming waters beneath would have offered no hope of life at all to any person so unfortunate as to fall in there, looked unhappily down the gorge towards the source of the machine-pistol firing and wondered for the tenth time whether he should take a chance, re-cross the bridge and go to Andrea’s aid: even in the light of his vastly revised estimate of Andrea, it seemed impossible, as Groves had said, that one man could for long hold off twenty others bent on vengeance. On the other hand, he had promised Groves to remain there to look after Petar and Maria. There came another burst of firing from down-river. Reynolds made his mind up. He would offer his gun to Maria to afford herself and Petar what protection it might, and leave them for as little time as might be necessary to give Andrea what help he required.

He turned to speak to her, but Maria and Petar were no longer there. Reynolds looked wildly around, his first reaction was that they had both fallen into the rapids, a reaction that he at once dismissed as ridiculous. Instinctively he gazed up the bank towards the base of the dam, and even although the moon was then obscured by a large bank of cloud, he saw them at once, making their way towards the foot of the iron ladder, where Groves was standing. For a brief moment he puzzled why they should have moved upstream without permission, then remembered that neither he nor Groves had, in fact, remembered to give them instructions to remain by the bridge. Not to worry, he thought, Groves will soon send them back down to the bridge again and when they arrived he would tell them of his decision to return to Andrea’s aid. He felt vaguely relieved at the prospect, not because he entertained fears of what might possibly happen to him when he rejoined Andrea and faced up to Droshny and his men but because it postponed, if even only briefly, the necessity of implementing a decision which could be only marginally justifiable in the first place.

Groves, who had been gazing up the seemingly endless series of zig-zags of that green iron ladder so precariously, it seemed, attached to that vertical cliff-face, swung round at the soft grate of approaching footsteps on the shale and stared at Maria and Petar, walking, as always, hand in hand. He said angrily: ‘What in God’s name are you people doing here? You’ve no right to be here – can’t you see, the guards have only to look down and you’ll be killed? Go on. Go back and rejoin Sergeant Reynolds at the bridge. Now!’

Maria said softly: ‘You are kind to worry, Sergeant Groves. But we don’t want to go. We want to stay here.’

‘And what in hell’s name good can you do by staying here?’ Groves asked roughly. He paused, then went on, almost kindly: ‘I know who you are now, Maria. I know what you’ve done, how good you are at your own job. But this is not your job. Please.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘And I can fire a gun.’

‘You haven’t got one to fire. And Petar here, what right have you to speak for him. Does he know where he is?’

Maria spoke rapidly to her brother in incomprehensible Serbo-Croat: he responded by making his customary odd sounds in his throat. When he had finished, Maria turned to Groves.

‘He says he knows he is going to die tonight. He has what you people call the second sight and he says there is no future beyond tonight. He says he is tired of running. He says he will wait here till the time comes.’

‘Of all the stubborn, thick-headed –’

‘Please, Sergeant Groves.’ The voice, though still low, was touched by a new note of asperity. ‘His mind is made up, and you can never change it.’

Groves nodded in acceptance. He said: ‘Perhaps I can change yours.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Petar cannot help us anyway, no blind man could. But you can. If you would.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Andrea is holding off a mixed force of at least twenty Cetniks and German troops.’ Groves smiled wryly. ‘I have recent reason to believe that Andrea probably has no equal anywhere as a guerilla fighter, but one man cannot hold off twenty for ever. When he goes, then there is only Reynolds left to guard the bridge – and if he goes, then Droshny and his men will be through in time to warn the guards, almost certainly in time to save the dam, certainly in time to send a radio message through to General Zimmermann to pull his tanks back on to high ground. I think, Maria, that Reynolds may require your help. Certainly, you can be of no help here – but if you stand by Andrea you could make all the difference between success and failure. And you did say you can fire a gun.’

‘And as you pointed out, I haven’t got a gun.’

‘That was then. You have now.’ Grove unslung his Schmeisser and handed it to her along with some spare ammunition.

‘But –’ Maria accepted gun and ammunition reluctantly. ‘But now you haven’t a gun.’

‘Oh yes I have.’ Groves produced his silenced Luger from his tunic. ‘This is all I want tonight. I can’t afford to make any noise tonight, not so close to the dam as this.’

‘But I can’t leave my brother.’

‘Oh, I think you can. In fact, you’re going to. No one on earth can help your brother any more. Not now. Please hurry.’

‘Very well.’ She moved off a few reluctant paces, stopped, turned and said: ‘I suppose you think you’re very clever, Sergeant Groves?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Groves said woodenly. She looked at him steadily for a few moments, then turned and made her way down-river. Groves smiled to himself in the near-darkness.

The smile vanished in the instant of time that it took for the gorge to be suddenly flooded with bright moonlight as a black, sharply-edged cloud moved away from the face of the moon. Groves called softly, urgently to Maria: ‘Face down on the rocks and keep still,’ saw her at once do what he ordered, then looked up the green ladder, his face registering the strain and anxiety in his mind.

About three-quarters of the way up the ladder, Mallory and Miller, bathed in the brilliant moonlight, clung to the top of one of the angled sections as immobile as if they had been carved from the rock itself. Their unmoving eyes, set in equally unmoving faces, were obviously fixed on – or transfixed by – the same point in space.

That point was a scant fifty feet away, above and to their left, where two obviously jumpy guards were leaning anxiously over the parapet at the top of the dam: they were gazing into the middle distance, down the gorge, towards the location of what seemed to be the sound of firing. They had only to move their eyes downwards and discovery for Groves and Maria was certain: they had only to shift their gaze to the left and discovery for Mallory and Miller would have been equally certain. And death for all inevitable.

ELEVEN

Saturday

0120–0135

Like Mallory and Miller, Groves, too, had caught sight of the two German sentries leaning out over the parapet at the top of the dam and staring anxiously down the gorge. As a situation for conveying a feeling of complete nakedness, exposure and vulnerability, it would, Groves felt, take a lot of beating. And if he felt like that, how must Mallory and Miller, clinging to the ladder and less than a stone’s throw from the guards, be feeling? Both men, Groves knew, carried silenced Lugers, but their Lugers were inside their tunics and their tunics encased in their zipped-up frogmen’s suits, making them quite inaccessible. At least, making them quite inaccessible without, clinging as they were to the ladder, performing a variety of contortionist movements to get at them – and it was certain that the least untoward movement would have been immediately spotted by the two guards. How it was that they hadn’t already been seen, even without movement, was incomprehensible to Groves: in that bright moonlight, which cast as much light on the dam and in the gorge as one would have expected on any reasonably dull afternoon, any normal peripheral vision should have picked them all up immediately. And it was unlikely that any front-line troops of the Wehrmacht had less than standard peripheral vision. Groves could only conclude that the intentness of the guards’ gaze did not necessarily mean that they were looking intently: it could have been that all their being was at that moment concentrated on their hearing, straining to locate the source of the desultory machine-pistol fire down the gorge. With infinite caution Groves eased his Luger from his tunic and lined it up. At that distance, even allowing for the high muzzle-velocity of the gun, he reckoned his chances of getting either of the guards to be so remote as to be hardly worth considering: but at least, as a gesture, it was better than nothing.

Groves was right on two counts. The two sentries on the parapet, far from being reassured by General Zimmermann’s encouraging reassurance, were in fact concentrating all their being on listening to the down-river bursts of machine-pistol fire, which were becoming all the more noticeable, not only because they seemed – as they were – to be coming closer, but also because the ammunition of the Partisan defenders of the Zenica Gap was running low and their fire was becoming more sporadic. Groves had been right, too, about the fact that neither Mallory nor Miller had made any attempt to get at their Lugers. For the first few seconds, Mallory, like Groves, had felt sure that any such move would be bound to attract immediate attention, but, almost at once and long before the idea had occurred to Groves, Mallory had realized that the men were in such a trance-like state of listening that a hand could almost have passed before their faces without their being aware of it. And now, Mallory was certain, there would be no need to do anything at all because, from his elevation, he could see something that was quite invisible to Groves from his position at the foot of the dam: another dark band of cloud was almost about to pass across the face of the moon.

Within seconds, a black shadow flitting across the waters of the Neretva dam turned the colour from dark green to the deepest indigo, moved rapidly across the top of the dam wall, blotted out the ladder and the two men clinging to it, then engulfed the gorge in darkness. Groves sighed in soundless relief and lowered his Luger. Maria rose and made her way down-river towards the bridge. Petar moved his unseeing gaze around in the sightless manner of the blind. And, up above, Mallory and Miller at once began to climb again.

Mallory now abandoned the ladder at the top of one of its zigs and struck vertically up the cliff-face. The rockface, providentially, was not completely smooth, but such hand-and footholds as it afforded were few and small and awkwardly situated, making for a climb that was as arduous as it was technically difficult: normally, had he been using the hammer and pitons that were stuck in his belt, Mallory would have regarded it as a climb of no more than moderate difficulty: but the use of pitons was quite out of the question. Mallory was directly opposite the top of the dam wall and no more than 35 feet from the nearest guard: one tiny chink of hammer on metal could not fail to register on the hearing of the most inattentive listener: and, as Mallory had just observed, inattentive listening was the last accusation that could have been levelled against the sentries on the dam. So Mallory had to content himself with the use of his natural talents and the vast experience gathered over many years of rock-climbing and continue the climb as he was doing, sweating profusely inside the hermetic rubber suit, while Miller, now some forty feet below, peered upwards with such tense anxiety on his face that he was momentarily oblivious of his own precarious perch on top of one of the slanted ladders, a predicament which would normally have sent him into a case of mild hysterics.

Andrea, too, was at that moment peering at something about fifty feet away, but it would have required a hyperactive imagination to detect any signs of anxiety in that dark and rugged face. Andrea, as the guards on the dam had so recently been doing, was listening rather than looking. From his point of view all he could see was a dark and shapeless jumble of wetly glistening boulders with the Neretva rushing whitely alongside. There was no sign of life down there, but that only meant that Droshny, Neufeld and his men, having learnt their lessons the hard way – for Andrea could not know at this time that Neufeld had been wounded – were inching their way forward on elbows and knees, not once moving out from one safe cover until they had located another.

A minute passed, then Andrea heard the inevitable: a barely discernible ‘click’, as two pieces of stone knocked together. It came, Andrea estimated, from about thirty feet away. He nodded as if in satisfaction, armed the grenade, waited two seconds, then gently lobbed it downstream, dropping flat behind his protective boulder as he did so. There was the typically flat crack of a grenade explosion, accompanied by a briefly white flash of light in which two soldiers could be seen being flung bodily sideways.

The sound of the explosion came clearly to Mallory’s ear. He remained still, allowing only his head to turn slowly till he was looking down on top of the dam wall, now almost twenty feet beneath him. The same two guards who had been previously listening so intently stopped their patrol a second time, gazed down the gorge again, looked at each other uneasily, shrugged uncertainly, then resumed their patrol. Mallory resumed his climb.

He was making better time now. The former negligible finger and toe holds had given way, occasionally, to small fissures in the rock into which he was able to insert the odd piton to give him a great deal more leverage than would have otherwise been possible. When next he stopped climbing and looked upwards he was no more than six feet below the longitudinal crack he had been looking for – and, as he had said to Miller earlier, it was no more than a crack. Mallory made to begin again, then paused, his head cocked towards the sky.

Just barely audible at first above the roaring of the waters of the Neretva and the sporadic smallarms fire from the direction of the Zenica Gap, but swelling in power with the passing of every second, could be heard a low and distant thunder, a sound unmistakable to all who had ever heard it during the war, a sound that heralded the approach of squadrons, of a fleet of heavy bombers. Mallory listened to the rapidly approaching clamour of scores of aero engines and smiled to himself.

Many men smiled to themselves that night when they heard the approach from the west of those squadrons of Lancasters. Miller, still perched on his ladder and still exercising all his available will-power not to look down, managed to smile to himself, as did Groves at the foot of the ladder and Reynolds by the bridge. On the right bank of the Neretva, Andrea smiled to himself, reckoned that the roar of those fast-approaching engines would make an excellent cover for any untoward sound and picked another grenade from his belt. Outside a soup tent high up in the biting cold of the Ivenici plateau, Colonel Vis and Captain Vlanovich smiled their delight at each other and solemnly shook hands. Behind the southern redoubts of the Zenica Cage, General Vukalovic and his three senior officers, Colonel Janzy, Colonel Lazlo and Major Stephan, for once removed the glasses through which they had been so long peering at the Neretva bridge and the menacing woods beyond and smiled their incredulous relief at one another. And, most strangely of all, already seated in his command truck just inside the woods to the south of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann smiled perhaps the most broadly of all.

Mallory resumed his climb, moving even more quickly now, reached the longitudinal crack, worked his way up above it, pressed a piton into a convenient crack in the rock, withdrew his hammer from his belt and prepared to wait. Even now, he was not much more than forty feet above the dam wall, and the piton that Mallory now wanted to anchor would require not one blow but a dozen of them, and powerful ones at that: the idea that, even above the approaching thunder of the Lancasters’ engines, the metallic hammering would go unremarked was preposterous. The sound of the heavy aero engines was now deepening by the moment.

Mallory glanced down directly beneath him. Miller was gazing upward, tapping his wristwatch as best a man can when he has both arms wrapped round the same rung of a ladder, and making urgent gestures. Mallory, in turn, shook his head and made a downward restraining motion with his free hand. Miller shook his head in resignation.

The Lancasters were on top of them now. The leader arrowed in diagonally across the dam, lifted slightly as it came to the high mountains on the other side and then the earth shook and ripples of dark waters shivered their erratic way across the surface of the Neretva dam before the first explosion reached their ears, as the first stick of 1,000- pound bombs crashed squarely into the Zenica Gap. From then on the sounds of the explosions of the bombs raining down on the Gap were so close together as to be almost continuous: what little time-lapse there was between some of the explosions was bridged by the constantly rumbling echoes that rumbled through the mountains and valleys of central Bosnia.

Mallory had no longer any need to worry about sound any more, he doubted he could even have heard himself speak, for most of those bombs were landing in a concentrated area less than a mile from where he clung to the side of the cliff, their explosions making an almost constant white glare that showed clearly above the mountains to the west. He hammered home his piton, belayed a rope around it, and dropped the rope to Miller, who immediately seized it and began to climb: he looked, Mallory thought, uncommonly like one of the early Christian martyrs. Miller was no mountaineer, but, no mistake, he knew how to climb a rope: in a remarkably short time he was up beside Mallory, feet firmly wedged into the longitudinal crack, both hands gripping tightly to the piton.

‘Think you can hang on that piton?’ Mallory asked. He almost had to shout to make himself heard above the still undiminished thunder of the falling bombs.

‘Just try to prise me away.’

‘I won’t,’ Mallory grinned.

He coiled up the rope which Miller had used for his ascent, hitched it over his shoulder and started to move quickly along the longitudinal crack. ‘I’ll take this across the top of the dam, belay it to another piton. Then you can join me. Right?’

Miller looked down into the depths and shuddered. ‘If you think I’m going to stay here, you must be mad.’

Mallory grinned again and moved away.

To the south of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann, with an aide by his side, was still listening to the sounds of the aerial assault on the Zenica Gap. He glanced at his watch.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘First-line assault troops into position.’

At once heavily armed infantry, bent almost double to keep themselves below parapet level, began to move quickly across the Neretva bridge: once on the other side, they spread out east and west along the northern bank of the river, concealed from the Partisans by the ridge of high ground abutting on the river bank. Or they thought they were concealed: in point of fact a Partisan scout, equipped with night-glasses and field telephone, lay prone in a suicidally positioned slit-trench less than a hundred yards from the bridge itself, sending back a constant series of reports to Vukalovic.

Zimmermann glanced up at the sky and said to his aide: ‘Hold them. The moon’s coming through again.’ Again he looked at his watch. ‘Start the tank engines in twenty minutes.’

‘They’ve stopped coming across the bridge, then?’ Vukalovic said.

‘Yes, sir.’ It was the voice of his advance scout. ‘I think it’s because the moon is about to break through in a minute or two.’

‘I think so too,’ Vukalovic said. He added grimly: ‘And I suggest you start working your way back before it does break through or it will be the last chance you’ll ever have.’

Andrea, too, was regarding the night sky with interest. His gradual retreat had now taken him into a particularly unsatisfactory defensive position, practically bereft of all cover: a very unhealthy situation to be caught in, he reflected, when the moon came out from behind the clouds. He paused for a thoughtful moment, then armed another grenade and lobbed it in the direction of a cluster of dimly seen boulders about fifty feet away. He did not wait to see what effect it had, he was already scrambling his way up-river before the grenade exploded. The one certain effect it did have was to galvanize Droshny and his men into immediate and furious retaliation, at least half a dozen machine-pistols loosing off almost simultaneous bursts at the position Andrea had so recently and prudently vacated. One bullet plucked at the sleeve of his tunic, but that was as near as anything came. He reached another cluster of boulders without incident and took up a fresh defensive position behind them: when the moon did break through it would be Droshny and his men who would be faced with the unpalatable prospect of crossing that open stretch of ground.

Reynolds, crouched by the swing bridge with Maria now by his side, heard the flat crack of the exploding grenade and guessed that Andrea was now no more than a hundred yards downstream on the far bank. And like so many people at that precise instant, Reynolds, too, was gazing up at what could be seen of the sky through the narrow north-west gap between the precipitous walls of the gorge.

Reynolds had intended going to Andrea’s aid as soon as Groves had sent Petar and Maria back to him, but three factors had inhibited them from taking immediate action. In the first place, Groves had been unsuccessful in sending back Petar: secondly, the frequent bursts of machine-pistol firing down the gorge, coming steadily closer, were indication enough that Andrea was making a very orderly retreat and was still in fine fighting fettle: and thirdly, even if Droshny and his men did get Andrea, Reynolds knew that by taking up position behind the boulder directly above the bridge, he could deny Droshny and his men the crossing of the bridge for an indefinite period.

But the sight of the large expanse of starlit sky coming up behind the dark clouds over the moon made Reynolds forget the tactically sound and cold-blooded reasons for remaining where he was. It was not in Reynolds’s nature to regard any other man as an expendable pawn and he suspected strongly that when he was presented with a sufficiently long period of moonlight Droshny would use it to make the final rush that would overwhelm Andrea. He touched Maria on the shoulder.

‘Even the Colonel Stavroses of this world need a hand at times. Stay here. We shouldn’t be long.’ He turned and ran across the swaying swing bridge.

Damn it, Mallory thought bitterly, damn it, damn it and damn it all. Why couldn’t there have been heavy dark cloud covering the entire sky? Why couldn’t it have been raining? Or snowing? Why hadn’t they chosen a moonless night for this operation? But he was, he knew, only kicking against the pricks. No one had had any choice, for tonight was the only time there was. But still, that damnable moon.

Mallory looked to the north, where the northern wind, driving banded cloud across the moon, was leaving behind it a large expanse of starlit sky. Soon the entire dam and gorge would be bathed in moonlight for a considerable period: Mallory thought wryly that he could have wished himself to be in a happier position for that period.

By this time, he had traversed about half the length of the longitudinal crack. He glanced to his left and reckoned he had still between thirty and forty feet to go before he was well clear of the dam wall and above the waters of the dam itself. He glanced to his right and saw, not to his surprise, that Miller was still where he had left him, clinging to the piton with both hands as if it were his dearest friend on earth, which at that moment it probably was. He glanced downwards: he was directly above the dam wall now, some fifty feet above it, forty feet above the roof of the guardhouse. He looked at the sky again: a minute, no more, and the moon would be clear. What was it that he had said to Reynolds that afternoon? Yes, that was it. For now is all the time there may be. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t said that. He was a New Zealander, but only a second-generation New Zealander: all his forebears were Scots and everyone knew how the Scots indulged in those heathenish practices of second sight and peering into the future. Mallory briefly indulged in the mental equivalent of a shoulder shrug and continued on his traverse.

At the foot of the iron ladder, Groves, to whom Mallory was now no more than a half-seen, half-imagined dark shape against a black cliff-face, realized that Mallory was soon going to move out of his line of sight altogether, and when that happened he would be in no position to give Mallory any covering fire at all. He touched Petar on the shoulder and with the pressure of his hand indicated that he should sit down at the foot of the ladder. Petar looked at him sightlessly, uncomprehendingly, then suddenly appeared to gather what was expected of him, for he nodded obediently and sat down. Groves thrust his silenced Luger deep inside his tunic and began to climb.

A mile to the west, the Lancasters were still pounding the Zenica Gap. Bomb after bomb crashed down with surprising accuracy into that tiny target area, blasting down trees, throwing great eruptions of earth and stones into the air, starting all over the area scores of small fires which had already incinerated nearly all the German plywood tanks. Seven miles to the south, Zimmermann still listened with interest and still with satisfaction to the continuing bombardment to the north. He turned to the aide seated beside him in the command car.

‘You will have to admit that we must give the Royal Air Force full marks for industry, if for nothing else. I hope our troops are well clear of the area?’

‘There’s not a German soldier within two miles of the Zenica Gap, Herr General.’

‘Excellent, excellent.’ Zimmermann appeared to have forgotten about his earlier forebodings. ‘Well, fifteen minutes. The moon will soon be through, so we’ll hold our infantry. The next wave of troops can go across with the tanks.’

Reynolds, making his way down the right bank of the Neretva towards the sound of firing, now very close indeed, suddenly became very still indeed. Most men react the same way when they feel the barrel of a gun grinding into the side of their necks. Very cautiously, so as not to excite any nervous trigger-fingers, Reynolds turned both eyes and head slightly to the right and realized with a profound sense of relief that this was one instance where he need have no concern about jittery nerves.

‘You had your orders,’ Andrea said mildly. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I – I thought you might need some help.’ Reynolds rubbed the side of his neck. ‘Mind you, I could have been wrong.’

‘Come on. It’s time we got back and crossed the bridge.’ For good measure and in very quick succession, Andrea spun another couple of grenades down-river, then made off quickly up the river bank, closely followed by Reynolds.

The moon broke through. For the second time that night, Mallory became absolutely still, his toes jammed into the longitudinal crack, his hands round the piton which he had thirty seconds earlier driven into the rock and to which he had secured the rope. Less than ten feet from him Miller, who with the aid of the rope had already safely made the first part of the traverse, froze into similar immobility. Both men stared down on to the top of the dam wall.

There were six guards visible, two at the farther or western end, two at the middle and the remaining two almost directly below Mallory and Miller. How many more there might have been inside the guardhouse neither Mallory nor Miller had any means of knowing. All they could know for certain was that their exposed vulnerability was complete, their position desperate.

Three-quarters of the way up the iron ladder, Groves, too, became very still. From where he was, he could see Mallory, Miller and the two guards very clearly indeed. He knew with a sudden conviction that this time there would be no escape, they could never be so lucky again. Mallory, Miller, Petar or himself – who would be the first to be spotted? On balance, he thought he himself was the most likely candidate. Slowly, he wrapped his left arm round the ladder, pushed his right hand inside his tunic, withdrew his Luger and laid the barrel along his left forearm.

The two guards on the eastern end of the dam wall were restless, apprehensive, full of nameless fears. As before, they both leaned out over the parapet and stared down the valley. They can’t help but see me, Groves thought, they’re bound to see me, good God, I’m almost directly in their line of sight. Discovery must be immediate.

It was, but not for Groves. Some strange instinct made one of the guards glance upwards and to his left and his mouth fell open at the astonishing spectacle of two men in rubber suits clinging like limpets to the sheer face of the cliff. It took him several interminable seconds before he could recover himself sufficiently to reach out blindly and grab his companion by the arm. His companion followed the other guard’s line of sight, then his jaw, too, dropped in an almost comical fashion. Then, at precisely the same moment, both men broke free from their thrall-like spell and swung their guns, one a Schmeisser, the other a pistol, upwards to line up on the two men pinned helplessly to the cliff-face.

Groves steadied his Luger against both his left arm and the side of the ladder, sighted unhurriedly along the barrel and squeezed the trigger. The guard with the Schmeisser dropped the weapon, swayed briefly on his feet and started to fall outwards. Almost three seconds passed before the other guard, startled and momentarily quite uncomprehending, reached out to grab his companion, but he was far too late, he never even succeeded in touching him. The dead man, moving in an almost grotesquely slow-motion fashion, toppled wearily over the edge of the parapet and tumbled head over heels into the depths of the gorge beneath.

The guard with the pistol leaned far out over the parapet, staring in horror after his falling comrade. It was quite obvious that he was momentarily at a total loss to understand what had happened, for he had heard no sound of a shot. But realization came within the second as a piece of concrete chipped away inches from his left elbow and a spent bullet ricocheted its whistling way into the night sky. The guard’s eyes lifted and widened in shock, but this time the shock had no inhibiting effect on the speed of his reactions. More in blind hope than in any real expectation of success, he loosed off two quick snap-shots and bared his teeth in satisfaction as he heard Groves cry out and saw the right hand, the forefinger still holding the Luger by the trigger guard, reach up to clutch the shattered left shoulder.

Groves’s face was dazed and twisted with pain, the eyes already clouded by the agony of the wound, but those responsible for making Groves a commando sergeant had not picked him out with a pin and Groves was not quite finished yet. He brought his Luger down again. There was something terribly wrong with his vision now, he dimly realized, he thought he had a vague impression that the guard on the parapet was leaning far out, pistol held in both hands to make sure of his killing shot, but he couldn’t be sure. Twice Groves squeezed the trigger of his Luger and then he closed his eyes, for the pain was gone and he suddenly felt very sleepy.

The guard by the parapet pitched forward. He reached out desperately to grab the coaming of the parapet, but to pull himself back to safety he had to swing his legs up to retain his balance and he found he could no longer control his legs, which slid helplessly over the edge of the parapet. His body followed his legs almost of its own volition, for the last vestiges of strength remain for only a few seconds with a man through whose lungs two Luger bullets have just passed. For a moment of time his clawed hands hooked despairingly on to the edge of the parapet and then his fingers opened.

Groves seemed unconscious now, his head lolling on his chest, the left-hand sleeve and left-hand side of his uniform already saturated with blood from the terrible wound in his shoulder. Were it not for the fact that his right arm was jammed between a rung of the ladder and the cliff-face behind it, he must certainly have fallen. Slowly, the fingers of his right hand opened and the Luger fell from his hand.

Seated at the foot of the ladder, Petar started as the Luger struck the shale less than a foot from where he was sitting. He looked up instinctively, then rose, made sure that the inevitable guitar was firmly secured across his back, reached out for the ladder and started climbing.

Mallory and Miller stared down, watching the blind singer climb up towards the wounded and obviously unconscious Groves. After a few moments, as if by telepathic signal, Mallory glanced across at Miller who caught his eyes almost at once. Miller’s face was strained, almost haggard. He freed one hand momentarily from the rope and made an almost desperate gesture in the direction of the wounded sergeant. Mallory shook his head.

Miller said hoarsely: ‘Expendable, huh?’

‘Expendable.’

Both men looked down again. Petar was now not more than ten feet below Groves, and Groves, though Mallory and Miller could not see this, had his eyes closed and his right arm was beginning to slip through the gap between the rung and the rock. Gradually, his right arm began to slip more quickly, until his elbow was free, and then his arm came free altogether and slowly, so very slowly, he began to topple outwards from the wall. But Petar got to him first, standing on the step beneath Groves and reaching out an arm to encircle him and press him back against the ladder. Petar had him and for the moment Petar could hold him. But that was all he could do.

The moon passed behind a cloud.

Miller covered the last ten feet separating him from Mallory. He looked at Mallory and said: ‘They’re both going to go, you know that?’

‘I know that.’ Mallory sounded even more tired than he looked. ‘Come on. Another thirty feet and we should be in position.’ Mallory, leaving Miller where he was, continued his traverse along the crack. He was moving very quickly now, taking risks that no sane cragsman would ever have contemplated, but he had no option now, for time was running out. Within a minute he had reached a spot where he judged that he had gone far enough, hammered home a piton and securely belayed the rope to it.

He signalled to Miller to come and join him. Miller began the last stage of the traverse, and as he was on his way across, Mallory unhitched another rope from his shoulders, a sixty-foot length of climbers’ rope, knotted at fifteen-inch intervals. One end of this he fastened to the same piton as held the rope that Miller was using for making his traverse: the other end he let fall down the cliff-side. Miller came up and Mallory touched him on the shoulder and pointed downwards.

The dark waters of the Neretva dam were directly beneath them.

TWELVE

Saturday

0135–0200

Andrea and Reynolds lay crouched among the boulders at the western end of the elderly swing bridge over the gorge. Andrea looked across the length of the bridge, his gaze travelling up the steep gully behind it till it came to rest on the huge boulder perched precariously at the angle where the steep slope met the vertical cliff-face behind it. Andrea rubbed a bristly chin, nodded thoughtfully and turned to Reynolds.

‘You cross first. I’ll give you covering fire. You do the same for me when you get to the other side. Don’t stop, don’t look round. Now.’

Reynolds made for the bridge in a crouching run, his footsteps seeming to him abnormally loud as he reached the rotting planking of the bridge itself. The palms of his hands gliding lightly over the hand ropes on either side he continued without check or diminution of speed, obeying Andrea’s instructions not to risk a quick backward glance, and feeling a very strange sensation between his shoulderblades. To his mild astonishment he reached the far bank without a shot being fired, headed for the concealment and shelter offered by a large boulder a little way up the bank, was startled momentarily to see Maria hiding behind the same boulder, then whirled round and unslung his Schmeisser.

On the far bank there was no sign of Andrea. For a brief moment Reynolds experienced a quick stab of anger, thinking Andrea had used this ruse merely to get rid of him, then smiled to himself as he heard two flat explosive sounds some little way down the river on the far bank. Andrea, Reynolds remembered, had still had two grenades left and Andrea was not the man to let such handy things rust from disuse. Besides, Reynolds realized, it would provide Andrea with extra valuable seconds to make good his escape, which indeed it did for Andrea appeared on the far bank almost immediately and, like Reynolds, effected the crossing of the bridge entirely without incident. Reynolds called softly and Andrea joined them in the shelter of the boulder.

Reynolds said in a low voice: ‘What next?’

‘First things first.’ Andrea produced a cigar from a waterproof box, a match from another waterproof box, struck the match in his huge cupped hands and puffed in immense satisfaction. When he removed the cigar, Reynolds noticed that he held it with the glowing end safely concealed in the curved palm of his hand. ‘What’s next? I tell you what’s next. Company coming to join us across the bridge, and coming very soon, too. They’ve taken crazy risks to try to get me – and paid for them – which shows they are pretty desperate. Crazy men don’t hang about for long. You and Maria here move fifty or sixty yards nearer the dam and take cover there – and keep your guns on the far side of the bridge.’

‘You staying here?’ Reynolds asked.

Andrea blew out a noxious cloud of cigar smoke. ‘For the moment, yes.’

‘Then I’m staying, too.’

‘If you want to get killed, it’s all right by me,’ Andrea said mildly. ‘But this beautiful young lady here wouldn’t look that way any more with the top of her head blown off.’

Reynolds was startled by the crudeness of the words. He said angrily: ‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘I mean this.’ Andrea’s voice was no longer mild. ‘This boulder gives you perfect concealment from the bridge. But Droshny and his men can move another thirty or forty yards farther up the bank on their side. What concealment will you have then?’

‘I never thought of that,’ Reynolds said.

‘There’ll come a day when you say that once too often,’ Andrea said sombrely, ‘and then it will be too late to think of anything again.’

A minute later they were in position. Reynolds was hidden behind a huge boulder which afforded perfect concealment both from the far side of the bridge and from the bank on the far side up to the point where it petered out: it did not offer concealment from the dam. Reynolds looked to his left where Maria was crouched farther in behind the rock. She smiled at him, and Reynolds knew he had never seen a braver girl, for the hands that held the Schmeisser were trembling. He moved out a little and peered down-river, but there appeared to be no signs of life whatsoever at the western edge of the bridge. The only signs of life at all, indeed, were to be seen behind the huge boulder up in the gully, where Andrea, completely screened from anyone at or near the far side of the bridge, was industriously loosening the foundations of rubble and earth round the base of the boulder.

Appearances, as always, were deceptive. Reynolds had judged there to be no life at the western end of the bridge but there was, in fact, life and quite a lot of it, although admittedly there was no action. Concealed in the massive boulders about twenty feet back from the bridge, Droshny, a Cetnik sergeant and perhaps a dozen German soldiers and Cetniks lay in deep concealment among the rocks.

Droshny had binoculars to his eyes. He examined the ground in the neighbourhood of the far side of the swing bridge, then traversed to his left up beyond the boulder where Reynolds and Maria lay hidden until he reached the dam wall. He lifted the glasses, following the dimly-seen zig-zag outline of the iron ladder, checked, adjusted the focus as finely as possible, then stared again. There could be no doubt: there were two men clinging to the ladder, about three-quarters of the way up towards the top of the dam.

‘Good God in heaven!’ Droshny lowered the binoculars, the gaunt craggy features registering an almost incredulous horror, and turned to the Cetnik sergeant by his side. ‘Do you know what they mean to do?’

‘The dam!’ The thought had not occurred to the sergeant until that instant but the stricken expression on Droshny’s face made the realization as immediate as it was inevitable. ‘They’re going to blow up the dam!’ It did not occur to either man to wonder how Mallory could possibly blow up the dam: as other men had done before them, both Droshny and the sergeant were beginning to discover in Mallory and his modus operandi an extraordinary quality of inevitability that transformed remote possibilities into very likely probabilities.

‘General Zimmermann!’ Droshny’s gravelly voice had become positively hoarse. ‘He must be warned! If that dam bursts while his tanks and troops are crossing –’

‘Warn him? Warn him? How in God’s name can we warn him?’

‘There’s a radio up on the dam.’

The sergeant stared at him. He said: ‘It might as well be on the moon. There’ll be a rearguard, they’re bound to have left a rearguard. Some of us are going to get killed crossing that bridge, Captain.’

‘You think so?’ Droshny glanced up sombrely at the dam. ‘And just what do you think is going to happen to us all down here if that goes?’

Slowly, soundlessly and almost invisibly, Mallory and Miller swam northwards through the dark waters of the Neretva dam, away from the direction of the dam wall. Suddenly Miller, who was slightly in the lead, gave a low exclamation and stopped swimming.

‘What’s up?’ Mallory asked.

‘This is up.’ With an effort Miller lifted a section of what appeared to be a heavy wire cable just clear of the water. ‘Nobody mentioned this little lot.’

‘Nobody did,’ Mallory agreed. He reached under the water. ‘And there’s a steel mesh below.’

‘An anti-torpedo net?’

‘Just that.’

‘Why?’ Miller gestured to the north where, at a distance of less than two hundred yards, the dam made an abrupt right-angled turn between the towering cliff-faces. ‘It’s impossible for any torpedo bomber – any bomber – to get a run-in on the dam wall.’

‘Someone should have told the Germans. They take no chances – and it makes things a damned sight more difficult for us.’ He peered at his watch. ‘We’d better start hurrying. We’re late.’

They eased themselves over the wire and started swimming again, more quickly this time. Several minutes later, just after they had rounded the corner of the dam and lost sight of the dam wall, Mallory touched Miller on the shoulder. Both men trod water, turned and looked back in the direction from which they had come. To the south, not much more than two miles away, the night sky had suddenly blossomed into an incandescent and multi-coloured beauty as scores of parachute flares, red and green and white and orange, drifted slowly down towards the Neretva river.

“Very pretty, indeed,’ Miller conceded. ‘And what’s all this in aid of?’

‘It’s in aid of us. Two reasons. First of all, it will take any person who looks at that – and everyone will look at it – at least ten minutes to recover his night-sight, which means that any odd goings-on in this part of the dam are all that less likely to be observed: and if everyone is going to be busy looking that way, then they can’t be busy looking this way at the same time.’

‘Very logical,’ Miller approved. ‘Our Captain Jensen doesn’t miss out on very much, does he?’

‘He has, as the saying goes, all his marbles about him.’ Mallory turned again and gazed to the east, his head cocked the better to listen. He said: ‘You have to hand it to them. Dead on target, dead on schedule. I hear him coming now.’

The Lancaster, no more than five hundred feet above the surface of the dam, came in from the east, its engine throttled back almost to stalling speed. It was still two hundred yards short of where Mallory and Miller were treading water when suddenly huge black silk parachutes bloomed beneath it: almost simultaneously, engine-power was increased to maximum revolutions and the big bomber went into a steeply banking climbing turn to avoid smashing into the mountains on the far side of the dam.

Miller gazed at the slowly descending black parachutes, turned, and looked at the brilliantly burning flares to the south. ‘The skies,’ he announced, ‘are full of things tonight.’

He and Mallory began to swim in the direction of the falling parachutes.

Petar was near to exhaustion. For long minutes now he had been holding Groves’s dead weight pinned against the iron ladder and his aching arms were beginning to quiver with the strain. His teeth were clenched hard, his face, down which rivulets of sweat poured, was twisted with the effort and the agony of it all. Plainly, Petar could not hold out much longer.

It was by the light of those flares that Reynolds, still crouched with Maria in hiding behind the big boulder, first saw the predicament of Petar and Groves. He turned to glance at Maria: one look at the stricken face was enough to tell Reynolds that she had seen it, too.

Reynolds said hoarsely: ‘Stay here. I must go and help them.’

‘No!’ She caught his arm, clearly exerting all her will to keep herself under control: her eyes, as they had been when Reynolds had first seen her, had the look of a hunted animal about them. ‘Please, Sergeant, no. You must stay here.’

Reynolds said desperately: ‘Your brother –’

‘There are more important things –’

‘Not for you there aren’t.’ Reynolds made to rise, but she clung to his arm with surprising strength, so that he couldn’t release himself without hurting her. He said, almost gently: ‘Come on, lass, let me go.’

‘No! If Droshny and his men get across –’ She broke off as the last of the flares finally fizzled to extinction, casting the entire gorge into what was, by momentary contrast, an almost total darkness. Maria went on simply: ‘You’ll have to stay now, won’t you?’

‘I’ll have to stay now.’ Reynolds moved out from the shelter of the boulder and put his night-glasses to his eyes. The swing bridge, and as far as he could tell, the far bank seemed innocent of any sign of life. He traversed up the gully and could just make out the form of Andrea, his excavations finished, resting peacefully behind the big boulder. Again with a feeling of deep unease, Reynolds trained his glasses on the bridge. He suddenly became very still. He removed the glasses, wiped the lenses very carefully, rubbed his eyes and lifted the glasses again.

His night-sight, momentarily destroyed by the flares, was now almost back to normal and there could be no doubt or any imagination about what he was seeing – seven or eight men, Droshny in the lead, flat on their stomachs, were inching their way on elbows, hands and knees across the wooden slats of the swing bridge.

Reynolds lowered the glasses, stood upright, armed a grenade and threw it as far as he could towards the bridge. It exploded just as it landed, at least forty yards short of the bridge. That it achieved nothing but a flat explosive bang and the harmless scattering of some shale was of no account, for it had never been intended to reach the bridge: it had been intended as a signal for Andrea, and Andrea wasted no time.

He placed the soles of both feet against the boulder, braced his back against the cliff-face and heaved. The boulder moved the merest fraction of an inch. Andrea momentarily relaxed, allowing the boulder to roll back, then repeated the process: this time the forward motion of the boulder was quite perceptible. Andrea relaxed again, then pushed for the third time.

Down below on the bridge, Droshny and his men, uncertain as to the exact significance of the exploding grenade, had frozen into complete immobility. Only their eyes moved, darting almost desperately from side to side to locate the source of a danger that lay so heavily in the air as to be almost palpable.

The boulder was distinctly rocking now. With every additional heave it received from Andrea, it was rocking an additional inch farther forward, an additional inch farther backwards. Andrea had slipped farther and farther down until now he was almost horizontal on his back. He was gasping for breath and sweat was streaming down his face. The boulder rolled back almost as if it were going to fall upon him and crush him. Andrea took a deep breath, then convulsively straightened back and legs in one last titanic heave. For a moment the boulder teetered on the point of imbalance, reached the point of no return and fell away.

Droshny could most certainly have heard nothing and, in that near darkness, it was certain as could be that he had seen nothing. It could only have been an instinctive awareness of impending death that made him glance upwards in sudden conviction that this was where the danger lay. The huge boulder, just rolling gently when Droshny’s horror-stricken eyes first caught sight of it, almost at once began to bound in ever-increasing leaps, hurtling down the slope directly towards them, trailing a small avalanche behind it. Droshny screamed a warning. He and his men scrambled desperately to their feet, an instinctive reaction that was no more than a useless and token gesture in the face of death, because, for most of them, it was already far too late and they had no place to go.

With one last great leap the hurtling boulder smashed straight into the centre of the bridge, shattering the flimsy woodwork and slicing the bridge in half. Two men who had been directly in the path of the boulder died instantaneously: five others were catapulted into the torrent below and swept away to almost equally immediate death. The two broken sections of the bridge, still secured to either bank by the suspension ropes, hung down into the rushing waters, their lowermost parts banging furiously against the boulder-strewn banks.

There must have been at least a dozen parachutes attached to the three dark cylindrical objects that now lay floating, though more than half submerged, in the equally dark waters of the Neretva dam. Mallory and Miller sliced those away with their knives, then joined the three cylinders in line astern, using short wire strops that had been provided for that precise purpose. Mallory examined the leading cylinder and gently eased back a lever set in the top. There was a subdued roar as compressed air violently aerated the water astern of the leading cylinder and sent it surging forward, tugging the other two cylinders behind it. Mallory closed the lever and nodded to the other two cylinders.

‘These levers on the right-hand side control the flooding valves. Open that one till you just have negative buoyancy and no more. I’ll do the same on this one.’

Miller cautiously turned a valve and nodded at the leading cylinder. ‘What’s that for?’

‘Do you fancy towing a ton and a half of amatol as far as the dam wall? Propulsion unit of some kind. Looks like a sawn-off section of a twenty-one-inch torpedo tube to me. Compressed air, maybe at a pressure of five thousand pounds a square inch, passing through reduction gear. Should do the job all right.’

‘Just so long as Miller doesn’t have to do it.’ Miller closed the valve on the cylinder. ‘About that?’

‘About that.’ All three cylinders were now just barely submerged. Again Mallory eased back the compressed air lever on the leading cylinder. There was a throaty burble of sound, a sudden flurry of bubbles streaming out astern and then all three cylinders were under way, heading down towards the angled neck of the dam, both men clinging to and guiding the leading cylinder.

When the swing bridge had disintegrated under the impact of the boulder, seven men had died: but two still lived.

Droshny and his sergeant, furiously buffeted and badly bruised by the torrent of water, clung desperately to the broken end of the bridge. At first, they could do no more than hold on, but gradually, and after a most exhausting struggle, they managed to haul themselves clear of the rapids and hang there, arms and legs hooked round broken sections of what remained of the bridge, fighting for breath. Droshny made a signal to some unseen person or persons across the rapids, then pointed upwards in the direction from which the boulder had come.

Crouched among the boulders on the far side of the river, three Cetniks – the fortunate three who had not yet moved on to the bridge when the boulder had fallen – saw the signal and understood. About seventy feet above where Droshny – completely concealed from sight on that side by the high bank of the river – was still clinging grimly to what was left of the bridge, Andrea, now bereft of cover, had begun to make a precarious descent from his previous hiding-place. On the other side of the river, one of the three Cetniks took aim and fired.

Fortunately for Andrea, firing uphill in semidarkness is a tricky business at the best of times. Bullets smashed into the cliff-face inches from Andrea’s left shoulder, the whining ricochets leaving him almost miraculously unscathed. There would be a correction factor for the next burst, Andrea knew: he flung himself to one side, lost his balance and what little precarious purchase he had and slid and tumbled helplessly down the boulder-strewn slope. Bullets, many bullets, struck close by him on his way down, for the three Cetniks on the right bank, convinced now that Andrea was the only person left for them to deal with, had risen, advanced to the edge of the river and were concentrating all their fire on Andrea.

Again fortunately for Andrea, this period of concentration lasted for only a matter of a few seconds. Reynolds and Maria emerged from cover and ran down the bank, stopping momentarily to fire at the Cetniks across the river, who at once forgot all about Andrea to meet this new and unexpected threat. Just as they did so, Andrea, in the midst of a small avalanche, still fighting furiously but hopelessly to arrest his fall, struck the bank of the river with appalling force, struck the side of his head against a large stone and collapsed, his head and shoulders hanging out over the wild torrent below.

Reynolds flung himself flat on the shale of the river bank, forced himself to ignore the bullets striking to left and right of him and whining above him and took a slow and careful aim. He fired a long burst, a very long one, until the magazine of his Schmeisser was empty. All three Cetniks crumpled and died.

Reynolds rose. He was vaguely surprised to notice that his hands were shaking. He looked at Andrea, lying unconscious and dangerously near the side of the bank, took a couple of paces in his direction, then checked and turned as he heard a low moan behind him. Reynolds broke into a run.

Maria was half-sitting, half-lying on the stony bank. Both hands cradled her leg just above the right knee and the blood was welling between her fingers. Her face, normally pale enough, was ashen and drawn with shock and pain. Reynolds cursed bitterly but soundlessly, produced his knife and began to cut away the cloth around the wound. Gently, he pulled away the material covering the wound and smiled reassuringly at the girl: her lower lip was caught tightly between her teeth and she watched him steadily with eyes dimmed by pain and tears.

It was a nasty enough looking flesh wound, but, Reynolds knew, not dangerous. He reached for his medical pack, gave her a reassuring smile and then forgot all about his medical pack. The expression in Maria’s eyes had given way to one of shock and fear and she was no longer looking at him.

Reynolds twisted round. Droshny had just hauled himself over the edge of the river bank, had risen to his feet and was now heading purposefully towards Andrea’s prostrate body, with the obvious intention of heaving the unconscious man into the gorge.

Reynolds picked up his Schmeisser and pulled the trigger. There was an empty click – he’d forgotten the magazine had been emptied. He glanced around almost wildly in an attempt to locate Maria’s gun, but there was no sign of it. He could wait no longer. Droshny was only a matter of feet from where Andrea lay. Reynolds picked up his knife and rushed along the bank. Droshny saw him coming and he saw too that Reynolds was armed with only a knife. He smiled as a wolf would smile, took one of his wickedly-curved knives from his belt and waited.

The two men approached closely and circled warily. Reynolds had never wielded a knife in anger in his life and so had no illusions at all as to his chances: hadn’t Neufeld said that Droshny was the best man in the Balkans with a knife? He certainly looked it, Reynolds thought. His mouth felt very dry.

Thirty yards away Maria, dizzy and weak with pain and dragging her wounded leg, crawled towards the spot where she thought her gun had fallen when she had been hit. After what seemed a very long time, but what was probably no more than ten seconds, she found it half-hidden among rocks. Nauseated and faint from the pain of her wounded leg, she forced herself to sit up and brought the gun to her shoulder. Then she lowered it again.

In her present condition, she realized vaguely, it would have been impossible for her to hit Droshny without almost certainly hitting Reynolds at the same time: in fact, she might well have killed Reynolds while missing Droshny entirely. For both men were now locked chest to chest, each man’s knife-hand – the right – clamped in the grip of the other’s left.

The girl’s dark eyes, which had so recently reflected pain and shock and fear, now held only one expression – despair. Like Reynolds, Maria knew of Droshny’s reputation – but, unlike Reynolds, she had seen Droshny kill with that knife and knew too well how lethal a combination that man and that knife were. A wolf and a lamb, she thought, a wolf and a lamb. After he kills Reynolds – her mind was dulled now, her thoughts almost incoherent – after he kills Reynolds I shall kill him. But first, Reynolds would have to die, for there could be no help for him. And then the despair left the dark eyes to be replaced by an almost unthinkable hope for she knew with an intuitive certainty that with Andrea by one’s side hope need never be abandoned.

Not that Andrea was as yet by anyone’s side. He had forced himself up to his hands and knees and was gazing down uncomprehendingly at the rushing white waters below, shaking his leonine head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. And then, still shaking his head, he levered himself painfully to his feet and he wasn’t shaking his head any more. In spite of her pain, Maria smiled.

Slowly, inexorably, the Cetnik giant twisted Reynolds’s knife-hand away from himself while at the same time bringing the lancet point of his own knife nearer to Reynolds’s throat. Reynolds’s sweat-sheened face deflected his desperation, his total awareness of impending defeat and death. He cried out with pain as Droshny twisted his right wrist almost to breaking-point, forcing him to open his fingers and drop his knife. Droshny kneed him viciously at the same time, freeing his left hand to give Reynolds a violent shove that sent him staggering to crash on his back against the stones and lie there winded and gasping in agony.

Droshny smiled his smile of wolfish satisfaction. Even although he must have known that the need for haste was paramount he yet had to take time off to carry out the execution in a properly leisurely fashion, to savour to the full every moment of it, to prolong the exquisite joy he always felt at moments like these. Reluctantly, almost, he changed to a throwing grip on his knife and slowly raised it high. The smile was broader than ever, a smile that vanished in an instant of time as he felt a knife being plucked from his own belt. He whirled round. Andrea’s face was a mask of stone.

Droshny smiled again. ‘The gods have been kind to me.’ His voice was low, almost reverent, his tone a caressing whisper. ‘I have dreamed of this. It is better that you should die this way. This will teach you, my friend –’

Droshny, hoping to catch Andrea unprepared, broke off in mid-sentence and lunged forward with cat-like speed. The smile vanished again as he looked in almost comical disbelief at his right wrist locked in the vice-like grip of Andrea’s left hand.

Within seconds, the tableau was as it had been in the beginning of the earlier struggle, both knife-wrists locked in the opponents’ left hands. The two men appeared to be absolutely immobile, Andrea with his face totally impassive, Droshny with his white teeth bared, but no longer in a smile. It was, instead, a vicious snarl compounded of hate and fury and baffled anger – for this time Droshny, to his evident consternation and disbelief, could make no impression whatsoever on his opponent. The impression, this time, was being made on him.

Maria, the pain in her leg in temporary abeyance, and a slowly recovering Reynolds stared in fascination as Andrea’s left hand, in almost millimetric slow-motion, gradually twisted Droshny’s right wrist so that the blade moved slowly away and the Cetnik’s fingers began, almost imperceptibly at first, to open. Droshny, his face darkening in colour and the veins standing out on forehead and neck, summoned every last reserve of strength to his right hand: Andrea, rightly sensing that all of Droshny’s power and will and concentration were centred exclusively upon breaking his crushing grip, suddenly tore his own right hand free and brought his knife scything round and under and upwards with tremendous power: the knife went in under the breastbone, burying itself to the hilt. For a moment or two the giant stood there, lips drawn far back over bared teeth smiling mindlessly in the rictus of death, then, as Andrea stepped away, leaving the knife still embedded, Droshny toppled slowly over the edge of the ravine. The Cetnik sergeant, still clinging to the shattered remains of the bridge, stared in uncomprehending horror as Droshny, the hilt of the knife easily distinguishable, fell head-first into the boiling rapids and was immediately lost to sight.

Reynolds rose painfully and shakily to his feet and smiled at Andrea. He said: ‘Maybe I’ve been wrong about you all along. Thank you, Colonel Stavros.’

Andrea shrugged. ‘Just returning a favour, my boy. Maybe I’ve been wrong about you, too.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Two o’clock! Two o’clock! Where are the others?’

‘God, I’d almost forgotten. Maria there is hurt. Groves and Petar are on the ladder. I’m not sure, but I think Groves is in a pretty bad way.’

‘They may need help. Get to them quickly. I’ll look after the girl.’

At the southern end of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann stood in his command car and watched the sweep-second hand of his watch come up to the top.

‘Two o’clock,’ Zimmerman said, his tone almost conversational. He brought his right hand down in a cutting gesture. A whistle shrilled and at once tank engines roared and treads clattered as the spearhead of Zimmermanns first armoured division began to cross the bridge at Neretva.

THIRTEEN

Saturday

0200–0215

‘Maurer and Schmidt! Maurer and Schmidt!’ The captain in charge of the guard on top of the Neretva dam wall came running from the guard-house, looked around almost wildly and grabbed his sergeant by the arm. ‘For God’s sake, where are Maurer and Schmidt? No one seen them? No one? Get the searchlight.’

Petar, still holding the unconscious Groves pinned against the ladder, heard the sound of the words but did not understand them. Petar, with both arms round Groves, now had his forearms locked at an almost impossible angle between the stanchions and the rockface behind. In this position, as long as his wrists or forearms didn’t break, he could hold Groves almost indefinitely. But Petar’s grey and sweat-covered face, the racked and twisted face, was mute testimony enough to the almost unendurable agony he was suffering.

Mallory and Miller also heard the urgently shouted commands, but, like Petar, were unable to understand what it was that was being shouted. It would be something, Mallory thought vaguely, that would bode no good for them, then put the thought from his mind: he had other and more urgently immediate matters to occupy his attention. They had reached the barrier of the torpedo net and he had the supporting cable in one hand, a knife in the other when Miller exclaimed and caught his arm.

‘For God’s sake, no!’ The urgency in Miller’s voice had Mallory looking at him in astonishment. ‘Jesus, what do I use for brains. That’s not a wire.’

‘It’s not –’

‘It’s an insulated power cable. Can’t you see?’

Mallory peered closely. ‘Now I can.’

‘Two thousand volts, I’ll bet.’ Miller still sounded shaken. ‘Electric chair power. We’d have been frizzled alive. And it would have triggered off an alarm bell.’

‘Over the top with them,’ Mallory said.

Struggling and pushing, heaving and pulling, for there was only a foot of clear water between the wire and the surface of the water, they managed to ease the compressed air cylinder over and had just succeeded in lifting the nose of the first of the amatol cylinders on to the wire when, less than a hundred yards away, a six-inch searchlight came to life on the top of the dam wall, its beam momentarily horizontal, then dipping sharply to begin a traverse of the water close in to the side of the dam wall.

‘That’s all we bloody well need,’ Mallory said bitterly. He pushed the nose of the amatol block back off the wire, but the wire strop securing it to the compressed air cylinder held it in such a position that it remained with its nose nine inches clear of the water. ‘Leave it. Get under. Hang on to the net.’

Both men sank under the water as the sergeant atop the dam wall continued his traverse with the search-light. The beam passed over the nose of the first of the amatol cylinders, but a black-painted cylinder in dark waters makes a poor subject for identification and the sergeant failed to see it. The light moved on, finished its traverse of the water alongside the dam, then went out.

Mallory and Miller surfaced cautiously and looked swiftly around. For the moment, there was no other sign of immediate danger. Mallory studied the luminous hands of his watch. He said: ‘Hurry! For God’s sake, hurry! We’re almost three minutes behind schedule.’

They hurried. Desperate now, they had the two amatol cylinders over the wire inside twenty seconds, opened the compressed air valve on the leading cylinder and were alongside the massive wall of the dam inside another twenty. At that moment, the clouds parted and the moon broke through again, silvering the dark waters of the dam. Mallory and Miller were now in a helplessly exposed position but there was nothing they could do about it and they knew it. Their time had run out and they had no option other than to secure and arm the amatol cylinders as quickly as ever possible. Whether they were discovered or not could still be all-important: but there was nothing they could do to prevent that discovery.

Miller said softly: ‘Forty feet apart and forty feet down, the experts say. We’ll be too late.’

‘No. Not yet too late. The idea is to let the tanks across first then destroy the bridge before the petrol bowsers and the main infantry battalions cross.’

Atop the dam wall, the sergeant with the searchlight returned from the western end of the dam and reported to the captain.

‘Nothing, sir. No sign of anyone.’

‘Very good.’ The captain nodded towards the gorge. ‘Try that side. You might find something there.’

So the sergeant tried the other side and he did find something there, and almost immediately. Ten seconds after he had begun his traverse with the search-light he picked up the figures of the unconscious Groves and the exhausted Petar and, only feet below them and climbing steadily. Sergeant Reynolds. All three were hopelessly trapped, quite powerless to do anything to defend themselves: Reynolds had no longer even his gun.

On the dam wall, a Wehrmacht soldier, levelling his machine-pistol along the beam of the searchlight, glanced up in astonishment as the captain struck down the barrel of his gun.

‘Fool!’ The captain sounded savage. ‘I want them alive. You two, fetch ropes, get them up here for questioning. We must find out what they have been up to.’

His words carried clearly to the two men in the water for, just then, the last of the bombing ceased and the sound of the small-arms fire died away. The contrast was almost too much to be borne, the suddenly hushed silence strangely ominous, deathly, almost, in its sinister foreboding.

‘You heard?’ Miller whispered.

‘I heard.’ More cloud, Mallory could see, thinner cloud but still cloud, was about to pass across the face of the moon. ‘Fix these float suckers to the wall. I’ll do the other charge.’ He turned and swam slowly away, towing the second amatol cylinder behind him.

When the beam of the searchlight had reached down from the top of the dam wall Andrea had been prepared for instant discovery, but the prior discovery of Groves, Reynolds and Petar had saved Maria and himself, for the Germans seemed to think that they had caught all there were to be caught and, instead of traversing the rest of the gorge with the searchlights, had concentrated, instead, on bringing up to the top of the wall the three men they had found trapped on the ladder. One man, obviously unconscious – that would be Groves, Andrea thought – was hauled up at the end of a rope: the other two, with one man lending assistance to the other, had completed the journey up the ladder by themselves. All this Andrea had seen while he was bandaging Maria’s injured leg, but he had said nothing of it to her.

Andrea secured the bandage and smiled at her. ‘Better?’

‘Better.’ She tried to smile her thanks but the smile wouldn’t come.

‘Fine. Time we were gone.’ Andrea consulted his watch. ‘If we stay here any longer I have the feeling that we’re going to get very, very wet.’

He straightened to his feet and it was this sudden movement that saved his life. The knife that had been intended for his back passed cleanly through his upper left arm. For a moment, almost as if uncomprehending, Andrea stared down at the tip of the narrow blade emerging from his arm then, apparently oblivious of the agony it must have cost him, turned slowly round, the movement wrenching the hilt of the knife from the hand of the man who held it.

The Cetnik sergeant, the only other man to have survived with Droshny the destruction of the swing bridge, stared at Andrea as if he were petrified, possibly because he couldn’t understand how a man could suffer such a wound in silence and, in silence, still be able to tear the knife from his grasp. Andrea had now no weapon left him nor did he require one. In what seemed an almost grotesque slow motion, Andrea lifted his right hand: but there was nothing slow-motion about the dreadful edge-handed chopping blow which caught the Cetnik sergeant on the base of the neck. The man was probably dead before he struck the ground.

Reynolds and Petar sat with their backs to the guard-hut at the eastern end of the dam. Beside them lay the still unconscious Groves, his breathing now stertorous, his face ashen and of a peculiar waxed texture. From overhead, fixed to the roof of the guard-house, a bright light shone down on them, while nearby was a watchful guard with his carbine trained on them. The Wehrmacht captain of the guard stood above them, an almost awestruck expression on his face.

He said incredulously but in immaculate English: ‘You hoped to blow up a dam this size with a few sticks of dynamite? You must be mad!’

‘No one told us the dam was as big as this,’ Reynolds said sullenly.

‘No one told you – God in heaven, talk of mad dogs and Englishmen! And where is this dynamite?’

‘The wooden bridge broke.’ Reynolds’s shoulders were slumped in abject defeat. ‘We lost all the dynamite – and all our other friends.’

‘I wouldn’t have believed it, I just wouldn’t have believed it.’ The captain shook his head and turned away, then checked as Reynolds called him. ‘What is it?’

‘My friend here.’ Reynolds indicated Groves. ‘He is very ill, you can see that. He needs medical attention.’

‘Later.’ The captain turned to the soldier in the open transceiver cabin. ‘What news from the south?’

‘They have just started to cross the Neretva bridge, sir.’

The words carried clearly to Mallory, at that moment some distance apart from Miller. He had just finished securing his float to the wall and was on the point of rejoining Miller when he caught a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. Mallory remained still and glanced upward and to his right.

There was a guard on the dam wall above, leaning over the parapet as he moved along, flashing a torch downwards. Discovery, Mallory at once realized, was certain. One or both of the supporting floats were bound to be seen. Unhurriedly, and steadying himself against his float, Mallory unzipped the top of his rubber suit, reached under his tunic, brought out his Luger, unwrapped it from its waterproof cover and eased off the safety-catch.

The pool of light from the torch passed over the water, close in to the side of the dam wall. Suddenly, the beam of the torch remained still. Clearly to be seen in the centre of the light was a small, torpedo-shaped object fastened to the dam wall by suckers and, just beside it, a rubber-suited man with a gun in his hand. And the gun – it had, the sentry automatically noticed, a silencer screwed to the end of the barrel – was pointed directly at him. The sentry opened his mouth to shout a warning but the warning never came for a red flower bloomed in the centre of his forehead, and he leaned forward tiredly, the upper half of his body over the edge of the parapet, his arms dangling downwards. The torch slipped from his lifeless hand and tumbled down into the water.

The impact of the torch on the water made a flat, almost cracking sound. In the now deep silence it was bound to be heard by those above, Mallory thought. He waited tensely, the Luger ready in his hand, but after twenty seconds had passed and nothing happened Mallory decided he could wait no longer. He glanced at Miller, who had clearly heard the sound, for he was staring at Mallory, and at the gun in Mallory’s hand with a puzzled frown on his face. Mallory pointed up towards the dead guard hanging over the parapet. Miller’s face cleared and he nodded his understanding. The moon went behind a cloud.

Andrea, the sleeve of his left arm soaked in blood, more than half carried the hobbling Maria across the shale and through the rocks: she could hardly put her right foot beneath her. Arrived at the foot of the ladder, both of them stared upwards at the forbidding climb, at the seemingly endless zig-zags of the iron ladder reaching up into the night. With a crippled girl and his own damaged arm, Andrea thought, the prospects were poor indeed. And God only knew when the wall of the dam was due to go up. He looked at his watch. If everything was on schedule, it was due to go now: Andrea hoped to God that Mallory, with his passion for punctuality, had for once fallen behind schedule. The girl looked at him and understood.

‘Leave me,’ she said. ‘Please leave me.’

‘Out of the question,’ Andrea said firmly. ‘Maria would never forgive me.’

‘Maria?’

‘Not you.’ Andrea lifted her on to his back and wound her arms round his neck. ‘My wife. I think I’m going to be terrified of her.’ He reached out for the ladder and started to climb.

The better to see how the final preparations for the attack were developing, General Zimmermann had ordered his command car out on to the Neretva bridge itself and now had it parked exactly in the middle, pulled close in to the right-hand side. Within feet of him clanked and clattered and roared a seemingly endless column of tanks and self-propelled guns and trucks laden with assault troops: as soon as they reached the northern end of the bridge, tanks and guns and trucks fanned out east and west along the banks of the river, to take temporary cover behind the steep escarpment ahead before launching the final concerted attack.

From time to time, Zimmermann raised his binoculars and scanned the skies to the west. A dozen times he imagined he heard the distant thunder of approaching air armadas, a dozen times he deceived himself. Time and again he told himself he was a fool, a prey to useless and fearful imaginings wholly unbecoming to a general in the Wehrmacht: but still this deep feeling of intense unease persisted, still he kept examining the skies to the west. It never once occurred to him, for there was no reason why it should, that he was looking in the wrong direction.

Less than half a mile to the north, General Vukalovic lowered his binoculars and turned to Colonel Janzy.

‘That’s it, then.’ Vukalovic sounded weary and inexpressibly sad. ‘They’re across – or almost all across. Five more minutes. Then we counterattack.’

‘Then we counter-attack,’ Janzy said tonelessly. ‘We’ll lose a thousand men in fifteen minutes.’

‘We asked for the impossible,’ Vukalovic said. ‘We pay for our mistakes.’

Mallory, a long trailing lanyard in his hand, rejoined Miller. He said: ‘Fixed?’

‘Fixed.’ Miller had a lanyard in his own hand. ‘We pull those leads to the hydrostatic chemical fuses and take off?’

‘Three minutes. You know what happens to us if we’re still in this water after three minutes?’

‘Don’t even talk about it,’ Miller begged. He suddenly cocked his head and glanced quickly at Mallory. Mallory, too, had heard it, the sound of running footsteps up above. He nodded at Miller. Both men sank beneath the surface of the water.

The captain of the guard, because of inclination, a certain rotundity of figure and very proper ideas as to how an officer of the Wehrmacht should conduct himself, was not normally given to running. He had, in fact, been walking, quickly and nervously, along the top of the dam wall when he caught sight of one of his guards leaning over the parapet in what he could only consider an unsoldierly and slovenly fashion. It then occurred to him that a man leaning over a parapet would normally use his hands and arms to brace himself and he could not see the guard’s hands and arms. He remembered the missing Maurer and Schmidt and broke into a run.

The guard did not seem to hear him coming. The captain caught him roughly by the shoulder, then stood back aghast as the dead man slid back off the parapet and collapsed at his feet, face upwards: the place where his forehead had been was not a pretty sight. Seized by a momentary paralysis, the captain stared for long seconds at the dead man, then, by a conscious effort of will, drew out both his torch and pistol, snapped on the beam of the one and released the safety catch of the other and risked a very quick glance over the dam parapet.

There was nothing to be seen. Rather, there was nobody to be seen, no sign of the enemy who must have killed his guard within the past minute or two. But there was something to be seen, additional evidence, as if he ever needed such evidence, that the enemy had been there: a torpedo-shaped object – no, two torpedo-shaped objects – clamped to the wall of the dam just at water level. Uncomprehendingly at first, the captain stared at those, then the significance of their presence there struck him with the violence, almost, of a physical blow. He straightened and started running towards the eastern end of the dam, shouting ‘Radio! Radio!’ at the top of his voice.

Mallory and Miller surfaced. The shouts – they were almost screams – of the running captain to the guard – carried clear over the now silent waters of the dam. Mallory swore.

‘Damn and damn and damn again!’ His voice was almost vicious in his chagrin and frustration. ‘He can give Zimmermann seven, maybe eight minutes’ warning. Time to pull the bulk of his tanks on to the high ground.’

‘So now?’

‘So now we pull those lanyards and get the hell out of here.’

The captain, racing along the wall, was now less than thirty yards from the radio and where Petar and Reynolds sat with their backs to the guard-house.

‘General Zimmermann! ‘ he shouted. ‘Get through. Tell him to pull his tanks to the high ground. Those damned English have mined the dam!’

‘Ah, well.’ Petar’s voice was almost a sigh. ‘All good things come to an end.’

Reynolds stared at him, his face masked in astonishment. Automatically, involuntarily, his hand reached out to take the dark glasses Petar was passing him, automatically his eyes followed Petar’s hand moving away again and then, in a state of almost hypnotic trance, he watched the thumb of that hand press a catch in the side of the guitar. The back of the instrument fell open to reveal inside the trigger, magazine and gleamingly-oiled mechanism of a sub-machine gun.

Petar’s forefinger closed over the trigger. The sub-machine gun, its first shell shattering the end of the guitar, stuttered and leapt in Petar’s hands. The dark eyes were narrowed, watchful and cool. And Petar had his priorities right.

The soldier guarding the three prisoners doubled over and died, almost cut in half by the first blast of shells. Two seconds later the corporal guard by the radio hut, while still desperately trying to unsling his Schmeisser, went the same way. The captain of the guard, still running, fired his pistol repeatedly at Petar, but Petar still had his priorities right. He ignored the captain, ignored a bullet which struck his right shoulder, and emptied the remainder of the magazine into the radio transceiver, then toppled sideways to the ground, the smashed guitar falling from his nerveless hands, blood pouring from his shoulder and a wound on his head.

The captain replaced his still smoking revolver in his pocket and stared down at the unconscious Petar. There was no anger in the captain’s face now, just a peculiar sadness, the dull acceptance of ultimate defeat. His eyes moved and caught Reynolds’s: in a moment of rare understanding both men shook their heads in a strange and mutual wonder.

Mallory and Miller, climbing the knotted rope, were almost opposite the top of the dam wall when the last echoes of the firing drifted away across the waters of the dam. Mallory glanced down at Miller, who shrugged as best a man can shrug when hanging on to a rope, and shook his head wordlessly. Both men resumed their climb, moving even more quickly than before.

Andrea, too, had heard the shots, but had no idea what their significance might be. At that moment, he did not particularly care. His left upper arm felt as if it were burning in a fierce bright flame, his sweat-covered face reflected his pain and near-exhaustion. He was not yet, he knew, halfway up the ladder. He paused briefly, aware that the girl’s grip around his neck was slipping, eased her carefully in towards the ladder, wrapped his left arm round her waist and continued his painfully slow and dogged climb. He wasn’t seeing very much now and he thought vaguely that it must be because of the loss of blood. Oddly enough, his left arm was beginning to become numb and the pain was centring more and more on his right shoulder which all the time took the strain of their combined weights.

‘Leave me!’ Maria said again. ‘For God’s sake, leave me. You can save yourself.’

Andrea gave her a smile or what he thought was a smile and said kindly: ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Besides, Maria would murder me.’

‘Leave me! Leave me!’ She struggled and exclaimed in pain as Andrea tightened his grip. ‘You’re hurting me.’

‘Then stop struggling,’ Andrea said equably. He continued his pain-racked, slow-motion climb.

Mallory and Miller reached the longitudinal crack running across the top of the dam wall and edged swiftly along crack and rope until they were directly above the arc lights on the eaves of the guardhouse some fifty feet below: the brilliant illumination from those lights made it very clear indeed just what had happened. The unconscious Groves and Petar, the two dead German guards, the smashed radio transceiver and, above all, the sub-machine gun still lying in the shattered casing of the guitar told a tale that could not be misread. Mallory moved another ten feet along the crack and peered down again: Andrea, with the girl doing her best to help by pulling on the rungs of the ladder, was now almost two-thirds of the way up, but making dreadfully slow progress of it: they’ll never make it in time, Mallory thought, it is impossible that they will ever make it in time. It comes to us all, he thought tiredly, some day it’s bound to come to us all: but that it should come to the indestructible Andrea pushed fatalistic acceptance beyond its limits. Such a thing was inconceivable: and the inconceivable was about to happen now.

Mallory rejoined Miller. Quickly he unhitched a rope – the knotted rope he and Miller had used to descend to the Neretva dam – secured it to the rope running above the longitudinal crack and lowered it until it touched softly on the roof of the guard-house. He took the Luger in his hand and was about to start sliding down when the dam blew up.

The twin explosions occurred within two seconds of each other: the detonation of 3,000 pounds of high explosive should normally have produced a titanic outburst of sound, but because of the depth at which they took place, the explosions were curiously muffled, felt, almost, rather than heard. Two great columns of water soared up high above the top of the dam wall, but for what seemed an eternity of time but certainly was not more than four or five seconds, nothing appeared to happen. Then, very, very slowly, reluctantly, almost, the entire central section of the dam wall, at least eighty feet in width and right down to its base, toppled outwards into the gorge: the entire section seemed to be all still in one piece.

Andrea stopped climbing. He had heard no sound, but he felt the shuddering vibration of the ladder and he knew what had happened, what was coming. He wrapped both arms around Maria and the stanchions, pressed her close to the ladder and looked over her head. Two vertical cracks made their slow appearance on the outside of the dam wall, then the entire wall fell slowly towards them, almost as if it were hinged on its base, and then was abruptly lost to sight as countless millions of gallons of greenish-dark water came boiling through the shattered dam wall. The sound of the crash of a thousand tons of masonry falling into the gorge below should have been heard miles away: but Andrea could hear nothing above the roaring of the escaping waters. He had time only to notice that the dam wall had vanished and now there was only this mighty green torrent, curiously smooth and calm in its initial stages, then pouring down to strike the gorge beneath in a seething white maelstrom of foam before the awesome torrent was upon them. In a second of time Andrea released one hand, turned the girl’s terrified face and buried it against his chest for he knew that if she should impossibly live, then that battering-ram of water, carrying with it sands and pebbles and God only knew what else, would tear the delicate skin from her face and leave her forever scarred. He ducked his own head against the fury of the coming onslaught and locked his hands together behind the ladder.

The impact of the waters drove the breath from his gasping body. Buried in this great falling crushing wall of green, Andrea fought for his life and that of the girl. The strain upon him, battered and already bruising badly from the hammer-blows of this hurtling cascade of water which seemed so venomously bent upon his instant destruction, was, even without the cruel handicap of his badly injured arm, quite fantastic. His arms, it felt, were momentarily about to be torn from their sockets, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to unclasp his hands and let kindly oblivion take the place of the agony that seemed to be tearing limbs and muscles asunder. But Andrea did not let go and Andrea did not break. Other things broke. Several of the ladder supports were torn away from the wall and it seemed that both ladder and climbers must be inevitably swept away. The ladder twisted, buckled and leaned far out from the wall so that Andrea was now as much lying beneath the ladder as hanging on to it: but still Andrea did not let go, still some remaining supports held. Then very gradually, after what seemed to the dazed Andrea an interminable period of time, the dam level dropped, the force of the water weakened, not much but just perceptibly, and Andrea started to climb again. Half a dozen times, as he changed hands on the rungs, his grip loosened and he was almost torn away: half a dozen times his teeth bared in the agony of effort, the great hands clamped tight and he impossibly retained his grip. After almost a minute of this titanic struggle he finally won clear of the worst of the water and could breathe again. He looked at the girl in his arms. The blonde hair was plastered over her ashen cheeks, the incongruously dark eyelashes closed. The ravine seemed almost full to the top of its precipitously-sided walls with this whitely boiling torrent of water sweeping everything before it, its roar, as it thundered down the gorge with a speed faster than that of an express train, a continuous series of explosions, an insane and banshee shrieking of sound.

Almost thirty seconds elapsed from the time of the blowing up of the dam until Mallory could bring himself to move again. He did not know why he should have been held in thrall for so long. He told himself, rationalizing, that it was because of the hypnotic spectacle of the dramatic fall in the level of the dam coupled with the sight of that great gorge filled almost to the top with those whitely seething waters: but, without admitting it to himself, he knew it was more than that, he knew he could not accept the realization that Andrea and Maria had been swept to their deaths, for Mallory did not know that at that instant Andrea, completely spent and no longer knowing what he was doing, was vainly trying to negotiate the last few steps of the ladder to the top of the dam. Mallory seized the rope and slid down recklessly, ignoring or not feeling the burning of the skin on the palms of his hands, his mind irrationally filled with murder – irrationally, because it was he who had triggered the explosion that had taken Andrea to his death.

And then, as his feet touched the roof of the guardhouse, he saw the ghost – the ghosts, rather – as the heads of Andrea and a clearly unconscious Maria appeared at the top of the ladder. Andrea, Mallory noticed, did not seem to be able to go any further. He had a hand on the top rung, and was making convulsive, jerking movements, but making no progress at all. Andrea, Mallory knew, was finished.

Mallory was not the only one who had seen Andrea and the girl. The captain of the guard and one of his men were staring in stupefaction over the awesome scene of destruction, but a second guard had whirled round, caught sight of Andrea’s head and brought up his machine-pistol. Mallory, still clinging to the rope, had no time to bring his Luger to bear and release the safety catch and Andrea should have assuredly died then: but Reynolds had already catapulted himself forward in a desperate dive and brought down the gun in the precise instant that the guard opened fire. Reynolds died instantaneously. The guard died two seconds later. Mallory lined up the still smoking barrel of his Luger on the captain and the guard.

‘Drop those guns,’ he said.

They dropped their guns. Mallory and Miller swung down from the guard-house roof, and while Miller covered the Germans with his guns, Mallory ran quickly across to the ladder, reached down a hand and helped the unconscious girl and the swaying Andrea to safety. He looked at Andrea’s exhausted, blood-flecked face, at the flayed skin on his hands, at the left sleeve saturated in blood and said severely: ‘And where the hell have you been?’

‘Where have I been?’ Andrea asked vaguely. ‘I don’t know.’ He stood rocking on his feet, barely conscious, rubbed a hand across his eyes and tried to smile. ‘I think I must have stopped to admire the view.’

General Zimmermann was still in his command car and his car was still parked in the right centre of the bridge at Neretva. Zimmermann had again his binoculars to his eyes, but for the first time he was gazing neither to the west nor to the north. He was gazing instead to the east, up-river towards the mouth of the Neretva gorge. After a little time he turned to his aide, his face at first uneasy, then the uneasiness giving way to apprehension, then the apprehension to something very like fear.

‘You hear it?’ he asked.

‘I hear it, Herr General.’

‘And feel it?’

‘And I feel it.’

‘What in the name of God almighty can it be?’ Zimmermann demanded. He listened as a great and steadily increasing roar filled all the air around them. ‘That’s not thunder. It’s far too loud for thunder. And too continuous. And that wind – that wind coming out of the gorge there.’ He could now hardly hear himself speak above the almost deafening roar of sound coming from the east. ‘It’s the dam! The dam at Neretva! They’ve blown the dam! Get out of here!’ he screamed to the driver. ‘For God’s sake get out of here!’

The command car jerked and moved forward, but it was too late for General Zimmermann, just as it was too late for his massed echelons of tanks and thousands of assault troops concealed on the banks of the Neretva by the low escarpment to the north of them and waiting to launch the devastating attack that was to annihilate the seven thousand fanatically stubborn defenders of the Zenica Gap. A mighty wall of white water, eighty feet high, carrying with it the irresistible pressure of millions of tons of water and sweeping before it a gigantic battering ram of boulders and trees, burst out of the mouth of the gorge.

Mercifully for most of the men in Zimmermann’s armoured corps, the realization of impending death and death itself were only moments apart. The Neretva bridge, and all the vehicles on it, including Zimmermann’s command car, were swept away to instant destruction. The giant torrent overspread both banks of the river to a depth of almost twenty feet, sweeping before its all-consuming path tanks, guns, armoured vehicles, thousands of troops and all that stood in its way: when the great flood finally subsided, there was not one blade of grass left growing along the banks of the Neretva. Perhaps a hundred or two of combat troops on both sides of the river succeeded in climbing in terror to higher ground and the most temporary of safety for they too would not have long to live, but for ninety-five per cent of Zimmermann’s two armoured divisions destruction was as appallingly sudden as it was terrifyingly complete. In sixty seconds, no more, it was all over. The German armoured corps was totally destroyed. But still that mighty wall of water continued to boil forth from the mouth of the gorge.

‘I pray God that I shall never see the like again.’ General Vukalovic lowered his glasses and turned to Colonel Janzy, his face registering neither jubilation nor satisfaction, only an awestruck wonder mingled with deep compassion. ‘Men should not die like that, even our enemies should not die like that.’ He was silent for a few moments, then stirred. ‘I think a hundred or two of their infantry escaped to safety on this side. Colonel. You will take care of them?’

‘I’ll take care of them,’ Janzy said sombrely. ‘This is a night for prisoners, not killing, for there won’t be any fight. It’s as well, General. For the first time in my life I’m not looking forward to a fight.’

‘I’ll leave you then.’ Vukalovic clapped Janzy’s shoulder and smiled, a very tired smile. ‘I have an appointment. At the Neretva dam – or what’s left of it.’

‘With a certain Captain Mallory?’

‘With Captain Mallory. We leave for Italy tonight. You know, Colonel, we could have been wrong about that man.’

‘I never doubted him,’ Janzy said firmly.

Vukalovic smiled and turned away.

Captain Neufeld, his head swathed in a bloodstained bandage and supported by two of his men, stood shakily at the top of the gully leading down to the ford in the Neretva and stared down, his face masked in shocked horror and an almost total disbelief, at the whitely boiling maelstrom, its seething surface no more than twenty feet below where he stood, of what had once been the Neretva gorge. He shook his head very, very slowly in unspeakable weariness and final acceptance of defeat, then turned to the soldier on his left, a youngster who looked as stupefied as he, Neufeld, felt.

‘Take the two best ponies,’ Neufeld said. ‘Ride to the nearest Wehrmacht command post north of the Zenica Gap. Tell them that General Zimmermann’s armoured divisions have been wiped out – we don’t know, but they must have been. Tell them the valley of Neretva is a valley of death and that there is no one left to defend it. Tell them the Allies can send in their airborne divisions tomorrow and that there won’t be a single shot fired. Tell them to notify Berlin immediately. You understand, Lindemann?’

‘I understand, sir.’ From the expression on Lindemann’s face, Neufeld thought that Lindemann had understood very little of what he had said to him: but Neufeld felt infinitely tired and he did not feel like repeating his instructions. Lindemann mounted a pony, snatched the reins of another and spurred his pony up alongside the railway track.

Neufeld said, almost to himself: ‘There’s not all that hurry, boy.’

‘Herr Hauptmann?’ The other soldier was looking at him strangely.

‘It’s too late now,’ Neufeld said.

Mallory gazed down the still foaming gorge, turned and gazed at the Neretva dam whose level had already dropped by at least fifty feet, then turned to look at the men and the girl behind him. He felt weary beyond all words.

Andrea, battered and bruised and bleeding, his left arm now roughly bandaged, was demonstrating once again his quite remarkable powers of recuperation: to look at him it would have been impossible to guess that, only ten minutes ago, he had been swaying on the edge of total collapse. He held Maria cradled in his arms: she was coming to, but very, very slowly. Miller finished dressing the head wound of a now sitting Petar who, though wounded in shoulder and head, seemed more than likely to survive, crossed to Groves and stooped over him. After a moment or two he straightened and stared down at the young sergeant.

‘Dead?’ Mallory asked.

‘Dead.’

‘Dead.’ Andrea smiled, a smile full of sorrow. ‘Dead – and you and I are alive. Because this young lad is dead.’

‘He was expendable,’ Miller said.

‘And young Reynolds.’ Andrea was inexpressibly tired. ‘He was expendable too. What was it you said to him this afternoon, my Keith – for now is all the time there may be? And that was all the time there was. For young Reynolds. He saved my life tonight – twice. He saved Maria’s. He saved Petar’s. But he wasn’t clever enough to save his own. We are the clever ones, the old ones, the wise ones, the knowing ones. And the old ones are alive and the young ones are dead. And so it always is. We mocked them, laughed at them, distrusted them, marvelled at their youth and stupidity and ignorance.’ In a curiously tender gesture he smoothed Maria’s wet blonde hair back from her face and she smiled at him. ‘And in the end they were better men than we were …’

‘Maybe they were at that,’ Mallory said. He looked at Petar sadly and shook his head in wonder. ‘And to think that all three of them are dead, Reynolds dead, Groves dead, Saunders dead, and not one of them ever knew that you were the head of British espionage in the Balkans.’

‘Ignorant to the end.’ Miller drew the back of his sleeve angrily across his eyes. ‘Some people never learn. Some people just never learn.’

SAM LLEWELLYN

Storm Force

from Navarone

The sequel to Alistair MacLean’s

Force 10 from Navarone

To David Burnett

PROLOGUE

March 1944

The radar operator said, ‘Contact. Three bloody contacts. Jesus.’

The Liberator dipped a wing, bucking heavily as it carved through one of the squalls of cloud streaming over the Atlantic towards Cabo Ortegal, at the top left-hand corner of Spain. ‘Language,’ said the pilot mildly. ‘Bomb-aimer?’

Down in the nose the bomb-aimer said, ‘Ready.’ The pilot’s leather-gloved hand went to the throttles. The note of the four Pratt and Whitney engines climbed to a tooth-rattling roar. The pilot eased the yoke forward. Girders creaking, the Liberator bounced down into the clouds.

Vapour streamed past the bomb-aimer’s Perspex window, thick and grey as coal smoke. At five hundred feet it became patchy. There was sea down there: grey sea, laced with nets of foam.

The bomb-aimer’s mouth was dry. Just looking at the heave of that sea made you feel sick. But there was something else: a wide, smooth road across those rough-backed swells, as if they had been ironed -

‘See them yet?’ said the pilot.

The bomb-aimer could hear his heart beat, even above the crackle of the intercom and the roar of the engines. ‘See them,’ he said.

At the end of the smooth road three long, low hulls were tearing chevrons of foam from the sea. The hulls were slim and grey, with streamlined conning towers. Slim, grey sitting ducks.

‘They’re bloody enormous,’ said the radar operator, peering over the pilot’s shoulder. ‘What the hell are they?’

They were submarines, but submarines twice the size of any British or German craft the pilot had seen in four years of long flights over weary seas that had made him an expert on submarines. They were indeed bloody enormous.

The pilot frowned at the foam-crested waves of their wakes. Hard to tell, of course, but they looked as if they were making at least thirty-five knots. If they were theirs, thought the pilot, they could really do some damage. Hope they’re ours -

Glowing red balls rose lazily from the conning towers and flicked past the cockpit canopy.

‘Theirs,’ said the pilot, slamming the plane into a tight 180° turn. The tracers had stripped him of his mildness. ‘Commencing run.’

There was a lot of tracer now, pouring past the Liberator’s cockpit, mixed with the black puffs of heavier flak. The Liberator bucked, its rivets groaning in the heat-wrenched sky. The bomb-aimer tried not to think about his unprotected belly, and closed his mind to the bad-egg fumes of the shell bursts and the yammer of the nose-gunner’s Brownings above his head. It was an easy two miles to bombs away: twenty endless seconds, at a hundred and eighty knots.

‘Funny,’ said the pilot. ‘Why aren’t they diving?’

The bomb-aimer stared into his sight. ‘Bomb doors open,’ he said. He felt the new tremor of the airframe as the doors spoilt the streamlining. The sight filled with grey and wrinkled sea. The submarines swam in V-formation down the stepladder markings towards the release point, innocent as three trout in a stream, except for the lazy red bubbles of the tracer.

The bomb-aimer frowned, pressing his face into the eyepiece of the sight. There was something wrong with the submarine in the middle. The deck forward of the conning tower looked twisted and bent. Christ, thought the bomb-aimer, someone’s rammed her. Nearly cut her in half. That’s why she’s not diving. She’s damaged -

Something burst with a clang out on the port side. Icy air was suddenly howling at the bomb-aimer’s neck. The little submarines in the bomb-sight drifted off to starboard. ‘Right a bit,’ said the bomb-aimer, calmly, over the hammer of his heart. ‘Right a bit.’ The three grey fish slid back onto the line. ‘Steady.’ His leather thumb found the release button. The tracer was horrible now, thick as a blizzard. The bomb-aimer concentrated on hoping that Pearl in the mess wouldn’t overcook his bloody egg again, like cement it was yesterday -

‘Steady,’ he said. The grey triangle was half an inch from the release point. ‘Going,’ he said. ‘Going-’

A giant hammer smashed into the fuselage somewhere behind him. He felt a terrible agony in his left leg. Hit, he thought. Bastard hit us. His hand clenched on the bomb-release button. He felt the upward bound of the aircraft as the depth charges dropped free.

Too early, he thought.

Then there was no more thinking, because his face was full of smoke and his head was full of the agony of a leg broken in four places, and someone was howling like a dog, and as the grey clouds reached down and closed their hands round the Liberator, he realised that the person making all that racket was him.

Ten minutes later the radar operator finished the dressing and threw the morphine syrette out of one of the rents torn in the fuselage by the shell. He thought the bomb-aimer looked bloody awful, but then compound fractures are not guaranteed to bring a smile to the lips. To cheer him up, the radar operator gave him the thumbs up and mouthed, ‘Got one!’ Through pink clouds of morphine the bomb-aimer saw his lips move, and tried to look interested.

‘Hit one,’ said the radar operator. ‘Saw smoke. One was damaged already, looked like someone rammed it. And we hit at least one.’ But of course he might as well have been talking to himself because you couldn’t hear anything, what with the engines and a sodding great hole in the fuselage, and anyway, the bomb-aimer was asleep.

Bloody great U-boats, though, thought the radar operator. Never seen anything like them before. Not that big. Nor that fast.

The Liberator droned north and west across the Bay of Biscay, above the corrugated mat of cloud, towards the Coastal Command base at St-Just. There the crew, nervously preoccupied with the hardness of their eggs, were comprehensively debriefed.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE March 1944

ONE Sunday 1000-1900

TWO Sunday 1900-Monday 0900

THREE Monday 0900-1900

FOUR Monday 1900-Tuesday 0500

FIVE Tuesday 0500-2300

SIX Tuesday 2300-Wednesday 0400

SEVEN Wednesday 0400-0500

EPILOGUE Wednesday 1400

About the Author

Also by Sam Llewellyn

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Sunday 1000-1900

Andrea stared at Jensen. The huge Greek’s face was horror-stricken. ‘Say again?’ he said.

‘A job,’ said Captain Jensen. He was standing in a shaft of Italian sun that gleamed on his sharp white teeth and the gold braid on the brim of his cap. ‘Just a tiny little job, really. And I thought, since the three of you were here anyway

As always, Jensen was dreadfully crisp, his uniform sparkling white, his stance upright and alert, the expression on his bearded face innocent but slightly piratical. The three men in the chairs looked the reverse of crisp. Their faces were hollow with exhaustion. They sat as if they had been dropped into their seats from a height. The visible parts of their bodies were laced with sticking plaster and red with Mercurochrome. They looked one step away from being stone-dead.

But Jensen knew better.

It had cost him considerable effort to assemble this team. There was Mallory, who before the war had been a mountaineer, world-famous for his Himalayan exploits, and conqueror of most of the unclimbed peaks in the Southern Alps of his native New Zealand. Mallory had spent eighteen months behind enemy lines in Crete with the man sitting next to him: Andrea. The gigantic Andrea, strong as a team of bulls, quiet as a shadow, a full colonel in the Greek army, and one of the deadliest irregular soldiers ever to knife a sentry. And then there was Corporal Dusty Miller from Chicago, member of the Long Range Desert Force, sometime deserter, goldminer, and bootlegger. If it existed, Miller could wreck it. Miller had a genius for sabotage equalled only by his genius for insubordination.

But Jensen valued soldiers for their fighting ability, not their standard of turnout. In Jensen’s view these men were very useful indeed.

The gleam of those carnivorous teeth hurt Andrea’s eyes. It does not take much to hurt your eyes, when you have not slept for the best part of a fortnight.

‘A tiny little job,’ said Mallory. His face was gaunt and pouchy. Like Andrea, he was by military standards badly in need of a shave. ‘Are you going to tell us about it?’

The grin widened. ‘I thought maybe you would be feeling a bit unreceptive.’

Corporal Dusty Miller had been almost horizontal in a leather-buttoned chair, staring with more than academic interest at the frescoed nudes on the ceiling of the villa Jensen had commandeered as his HQ. Now he spoke. That never stopped you before,’ he said.

Jensen’s bushy right eyebrow rose a millimetre. This was not the way that captains in the Royal Navy were accustomed to being addressed by ordinary corporals.

But Dusty Miller was not an ordinary corporal, in the same way that Captain Mallory was not an ordinary captain, or for that matter, Andrea was not an ordinary Greek Resistance fighter. Because of their lack of ordinariness, Jensen knew that he would have to treat them with a certain respect: the same sort of respect you would give three deadly weapons with which you wished to do damage to the enemy.

For in that room full of soldiers who were not ordinary soldiers, Jensen was not an ordinary naval captain. As an eighteen-year-old lieutenant, he had run a successful Q-ship, sinking eight U-boats in the final year of the 14-18 war. Between the wars he had been, frankly, a spy. He had led Shiite risings in Iraq; penetrated a scheme to block the Suez Canal; and as a marine surveyor employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, perpetrated a set of alarmingly but intentionally inaccurate charts of the Sulu Sea. Now, in the fifth year of the war, he was Chief of Operations of the Subversive Operations Executive. Some said that Allied victory at El Alamein had been partly due to SOE’s clandestine substitution of a carborundum paste for grease in a fuel dump. And in the last month he had successfully planned the destruction of the impregnable battery of Navarone, and the diversionary raid in Yugoslavia that had led to the fall of the Gustav Line and the breakout from the Anzio beachhead.

But Jensen had only done the planning. These three men - Mallory, the New Zealander, a taciturn mountaineer, tough as a commando knife; the American Dusty Miller, an Einstein among saboteurs; and Andrea, the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man-mountain with the quietness of a cat and the strength of a bear - were the weapons he had used.

If there were deadlier weapons in the world Jensen’s enquiries had failed to reveal them. And Jensen’s enquiries were notoriously very searching indeed.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Any of you gentlemen speak French?’

Mallory frowned. ‘German,’ he said. ‘Greek.’

Andrea yawned and covered his mouth with a gigantic hand, still covered in bandages from the abrasions he had sustained holding onto the iron rungs of a ladder under the flume of water from the bursting Zenitsa dam.

‘I do,’ said Dusty Miller.

‘Fluent?’

‘I had a job in Montreal once,’ said Miller, his eyes blue and innocent. ‘Doorman in a cathouse.’

‘Thank you, Corporal,’ said Jensen.

‘Il n’y a pas de quoi,’ said Miller, with old-world courtesy.

‘We’ve found you some interpreters,’ said Jensen.

Mallory sighed inwardly. He knew Jensen. When Jensen wanted you aboard, you were aboard, and the only thing to do was to check the location of the life jackets provided, and settle in for the ride. He said, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, why do we need to speak French?’

Jensen grinned a grin that would have looked impressive on a hungry shark. He walked across the bronze carpet to the huge ormolu desk, bare except for two telephones, one red, one black. He said, ‘There is someone I want you to meet.’ He picked up the black telephone. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Please send in the gentlemen in the waiting room.’

Mallory gazed at the veining on a marble pillar. Aircraft were droning overhead, flying air support for the troops advancing north from the wreckage of the Gustav Line. He lit another cigarette, the taste of the last one still bitter in his mouth. He wanted to sleep for a week. Make that a month -

The door opened, and two men came in. One of them was a tall major with a Guards moustache. The other was shorter, stocky and bull-necked, with three pips on his epaulettes.

‘Major Dyas. Intelligence,’ said Jensen. ‘And Captain Killigrew. SAS.’

Major Dyas nodded. Captain Killigrew fixed each man in turn with a searching glare. His face was brick-red from the sun, and something that Mallory decided was anger. Mallory returned his salute. Andrea nodded and, being a foreigner, got away with it. Dusty Miller remained horizontal in his chair, acknowledging Killigrew by opening one eye and raising a bony hand.

Killigrew swelled like a toad. Jensen’s ice-blue eyes flicked between the two men. He said quickly, ‘Take a seat, Captain. Major, do your stuff.’

Killigrew lowered himself stiffly onto a hard chair, on which he sat bolt upright, not touching the backrest.

‘Yah,’ said Dyas. ‘You may smoke.’ Mallory and Miller were already smoking. Dyas ran his hand over his high, intellectual forehead. He could have been a doctor, or a professor of philosophy.

Jensen said, ‘Major Dyas has kindly agreed to brief you on the background to this … little job.’ Mallory leaned back in his chair. He was still tired, but soon there would be something to override the tiredness. The same something he remembered from huts in the Southern Alps, after a gruelling approach march, two hours’ sleep, and waking in the dark chill before dawn. Soon there would be no way to go but up and over. Climbing and fighting: plan your campaign, grit your teeth, do the job or die in the attempt. There were similarities.

‘Now then,’ said Dyas. ‘To start with. What you are about to hear is known to only seven men in the world, now ten, including you. Other people have the individual bits and pieces, but what counts is the … totality.’ He paused to stuff tobacco into a blackened pipe, and applied an oil well-sized Zippo. ‘June is going to be an important month of this war,’ he said from inside a rolling cloud of smoke. ‘Probably the most important yet.’ Miller’s eyes had opened. Andrea was sitting forward in his chair, massive forearms on his stained khaki knees. ‘We are going to take a gamble,’ said Dyas. ‘A big gamble. And we want you to adjust the odds for us.’

Miller said, ‘Trust Captain Jensen to run a crooked game.’

‘Sorry?’ said Dyas.

Mallory said, ‘The Corporal was expressing his enthusiasm.’

‘Ah.’ Another cloud of smoke.

Mallory could feel that jump of excitement in his stomach. ‘This gamble,’ he said. ‘A new front?’

Dyas said, ‘Put it like this. What we are going to need is complete control of the seas. We’re good in the air, we’re fine on the surface. But there’s a hitch.’ Killigrew’s face was darkening. Looks as if he’ll burst a blood vessel, thought Mallory. Wonder what he’s got to do with this.

‘Submarines,’ said Dyas. ‘U-boats. There has been an idea current that between airborne radar and asdic and huff-duff radio direction finding, we had ‘em licked.’ Another cloud of smoke. ‘An idea we all had. Until a couple of months ago.

‘In March we had a bit of trouble with some Atlantic convoys, and their escorts too. Basically, ships started to sink in a way we hadn’t seen ships sink for two years now.’ The professorial face was grim and hard. ‘And it was odd. You’d get a series of explosions in say a two-hundred-mile circle, and you’d think, same old thing, U-boats moving together, wolf pack. But it wasn’t a wolf pack, because there was no radio traffic, and the sinkings were too far apart. So then they thought it was possibly mines. But it didn’t seem to be mines either, because one day in late March HMS Frantic, an escort destroyer, picked up an echo seven hundred miles off Cape Finisterre. There had been two sinkings in the convoy. The destroyer went in pursuit, but lost it.’ He returned to his pipe.

‘Nothing unusual about that,’ said Mallory.

Dyas nodded, mildly. ‘Except that the destroyer was steaming full speed ahead at the time, and the submarine just sailed away from her.’

‘Sorry?’ said Miller.

‘The destroyer was steaming at thirty-five knots,’ said Dyas. The U-boat was doing easily five knots better than that.’

Miller said, ‘Why is this guy telling us all this stuff?’

Mallory said, ‘I think Corporal Miller would like to know the significance of this fact.’

Jensen said, ‘Excuse me, Major Dyas.’ His face wore an expression of strained patience. ‘For your information, U-boats have to spend most of their time on the surface, running their diesels to make passage and charge their batteries. Submerged, their best speed has so far been under ten knots, and they can’t keep it up for long because of the limitations of their batteries.’ His face was cold and grim, its deep creases as if carved from stone. ‘So what we’re faced with is this: the English Channel full of the biggest fleet of ships ever assembled, and these U-boats - big U-boats - carrying a hundred torpedoes each, God knows they’re big enough - travelling at forty knots, under water. We know Jerry’s got at least three of them. That could mean three hundred ships sunk, and Lord knows how many men lost.’

Miller said, ‘So you get one quick echo. Not much of a basis for total panic stations. How fast do whales swim?’

Jensen snapped, ‘Try keeping your ears open and your mouth shut.’

It was only then that Mallory saw the strain the man was under. The Jensen he knew was relaxed, with that naval quarterdeck sang-froid. Piratical, yes; aggressive, yes. Those were his stock in trade. But always calm. As long as Mallory had known Jensen, he had never known him lose his temper - not even with Dusty Miller, who did not hold with officers. But this was a Jensen balanced on a razor-honed knife’s edge.

Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and frowned. Then he said, ‘Corporal Miller’s got a point, sir.’

‘Whales,’ said Dyas. ‘Actually, we thought of that. But one has been … adding up two and two.’ His mild voice was balm to the frazzled nerves under the frescoed ceiling. ‘Another escort reported ramming a large submarine. Then a Liberator got shot up bombing two U-boats escorting a third that bore signs of having been rammed. They were huge, these boats, steaming at thirty-odd knots on the surface. The Liberator reported them as damaged. But when we sent more aircraft out to search for them, they had vanished.

‘They were reckoned to be in no state to dive, so they were presumed sunk. Then there was a message picked up - doesn’t matter what sort of message, doesn’t matter where, but take it from me, it was a reliable message - to say that the Werwolf pack was refitting after damage caused by enemy action. Said refit to be complete by noon Wednesday of the second week in May.’

It was now Sunday of the second week in May.

The painted vaults of the ceiling filled with silence. Mallory said, ‘So these submarines. What are they?’

‘Hard to say,’ said Dyas, with an academic scrupulousness that would have irritated Mallory, if he had been the sort of man who got irritated about things. ‘The Kriegsmarine have maintained pretty good security, but we’ve been able to patch a couple of ideas together. We know they’ve got a new battery system for underwater running, which stores a lot of power. A lot of power. But there’ve been rumours about something else. We think it’s more likely to be something new. Development of an idea by a chap called Walter. They’ve been working on it since the thirties. An internal combustion engine that runs under water. Burns fuel oil.’

Miller’s eyes had opened now, and he was sitting in a position that for him was almost upright. He said, ‘What in?’

‘In?’ Dyas frowned.

‘You can’t burn fuel oil under water. You need oxygen.’

‘Ah. Yes. Quite. Good question.’ Miller did not look flattered. Engines were his business. He knew how to make them run. He knew even more about destroying them. ‘Nothing definite. But they think it’s probably something like hydrogen peroxide. On the surface, you’d aspirate your engine with air, of course. As you submerged, you’d have an automatic changeover, a float switch perhaps, that would close the air intake and start up a disintegrator that would get you oxygen out of something like hydrogen peroxide. So you’d get a carbon dioxide exhaust, which would dissolve in sea water. Or so the theory goes.’

Jensen stood up. ‘Theory or no theory,’ he said, ‘they’re refitting. They must be destroyed before they can go to sea again. And you’re going to do the destroying.’

Mallory said, ‘Where are they?’

Dyas unrolled a map that hung on the wall behind him. It showed France and Northern Spain, the brown corrugations of the Pyrenees marching from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and snaking down the spine of the mountains the scarlet track of the border. He said, They were bombed off Cabo Ortegal. They couldn’t dive, so they wouldn’t have gone north. We believe that they are here.’ He picked up a billiard cue and tapped the long, straight stretch of coast that ran from Bordeaux south through Biarritz and St-Jean-de-Luz to the Spanish border.

Mallory looked at the pointer. There were three ports: Hendaye, St-Jean-de-Luz, and Bayonne. Otherwise, the coast was a straight line that looked as if it probably meant a beach. He said, ‘Where?’

Dyas avoided his eye and fumbled at his moustache. Since he had been in the room, he had found himself increasingly unnerved by the stillness of these men, the wary relaxation of their deep-eyed faces. The big one with the black moustache was silent and dangerous, with a horrible sort of power about him. Of the other two, one seemed slovenly and the other insubordinate. They looked like, well, gangsters. Dashed unmilitary, thought Dyas. But Jensen knew what he was doing. Famous for it. Still, Mallory’s question was not a question he much liked.

He said, ‘Well, Spain’s a neutral country.’ He forced himself not to laugh nervously. ‘And we’ve got good intelligence from Bordeaux, so we know they’re not there.’ He coughed, more nervously than he had intended. ‘In fact, we don’t know where they are.’

The three pairs of eyes watched him in silence. Finally, Mallory spoke. ‘So we’ve got until Wednesday noon to find some submarines and destroy them. The only difficulty is that we don’t know where they are. And, come to that, we don’t actually know if they exist.’

Jensen said, ‘Oh yes we do. You’ll be dropped to a reception committee - ‘

‘Dropped?’ said Miller, his lugubrious face a mask of horror.

‘By parachute.’

‘Oh my stars,’ said Miller, in a high, limp-wristed voice.

‘Though if you keep interrupting we might forget the parachute and drop you anyway.’ There was a hardness in Jensen’s corsair face that made even Miller realise that he had said enough. ‘The reception committee, I was saying. They will take you to a man called Jules, who knows a fisherman who knows the whereabouts of these U-boats. This fisherman will sell you the information.’

‘Sell?’

‘You will be supplied with the money.’

‘So where is this fisherman?’

‘We are not as yet aware of his whereabouts.’

‘Ah,’ said Mallory, rolling his eyes at the frescoes. He lit yet another cigarette. ‘Well, I suppose we’ll have the advantage of surprise.’

Miller pasted an enthusiastic smile to his doleful features. ‘Gosh and golly gee,’ he said. ‘If they’re as surprised as we are, they’ll be amazed.’

Dyas was looking across at Jensen. Mallory thought he looked like a man in some sort of private agony. Jensen nodded, and smiled his ferocious smile. He seemed to have recovered his composure. ‘One would rather hope so,’ he said, ‘because these submarines have got to be destroyed. No ifs, no buts. I don’t care what you have to do. You’ll have carte blanche.’ He paused. ‘As far as is consistent with operating absolutely on your own.’ He coughed. If a British Naval officer schooled in Nelsonian duplicities could ever be said to look shifty, Jensen looked shifty now. ‘As to the element of surprise … Well. Sorry to disappoint,’ he said, ‘but actually, not quite. Thing is, an SAS team went in last week, and nobody’s heard from them since. So we think they’ve probably been captured.’

Mallory allowed the lids to droop over his gritty eyeballs. He knew what that meant, but he wanted to hear Jensen say it.

‘In fact it seems quite possible,’ said Jensen, ‘that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for you.’

Killigrew seemed to see this as his cue. He was a small man, built like a bull, with a bull’s rolling eye. He rose, marched to the centre of the room, planted his feet a good yard apart on the mosaic floor, and sank his head between his mighty shoulders. ‘Now listen here, you men,’ he barked, in the voice of one used to being the immediate focus of attention.

Jensen looked across at Mallory’s lean crusader face. His eyes were closed. Andrea was gently stroking his moustache, gazing out of the window, where the late morning sun shone yellow-green in the leaves of a vine. Dusty Miller had removed his cigarette from his mouth, and was talking to it. ‘Special Air Squads,’ he said. ‘They land with goddamn howitzers and goddamn Jeeps, with a noise like a train wreck. They do not think it necessary to employ guides or interpreters, let alone speak foreign languages. They have skulls made of concrete and no goddamn brains at all - can I help you?’

Killigrew was standing over him with a face of purple fire. ‘Say that again,’ he said.

Miller yawned. ‘No goddamn brains,’ he said. ‘Bulls in a china shop.’

Mallory’s eyes were open now. The veins in Killigrew’s neck were standing out like ivy on a tree trunk, and his eyes were suffused with blood. The jaw was out like the ram of an icebreaker. And to Mallory’s amazement, he saw that the right fist was pulled back, ready to spread Miller’s teeth all over the back of his head.

‘Dusty,’ he said.

Miller looked at him.

‘Miller apologises, sir,’ said Mallory.

‘Temper,’ said Miller.

Killigrew’s fist remained clenched.

‘You’re on a charge, Miller,’ said Mallory, mildly.

‘Yessir,’ said Miller.

Jensen’s voice cracked like a whip. ‘Captain!’

Killigrew’s heels crashed together. His florid face was suddenly grey. He had come within a whisker of assaulting another rank. The consequence would have been, well, a court-martial.

Mallory ground out his cigarette in a marble ashtray, his eyes flicking round the room, sizing up the situation. God knew what kind of strain the SAS captain must have been under to come that close to walloping a corporal. Jensen, he saw, was hiding a keen curiosity behind a mask of military indignation. Without apparently taking a step, Andrea had left his chair and moved halfway across the room towards Killigrew. He stood loose and relaxed, his bear-like bulk sagging, hands slack at his sides. Mallory knew that Killigrew was half a second away from violent death. He caught Miller’s eye, and shook his head, a millimetre left, a millimetre right.

Miller yawned. He said, ‘Why, thank you, Captain Killigrew.’ Killigrew stared straight ahead, eyes bulging. ‘Seeing that there fly crawling towards my ear,’ said Miller, pointing at a bluebottle spiralling towards the chandelier, ‘the Captain was about to have the neighbourliness to swat the little sucker.’ Jensen’s eyebrow had cocked. ‘I take full responsibility.’

Jensen did not hesitate. ‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘Or charges. Carry on, Captain.’

Killigrew swallowed, “ssir.’ His face was regaining its colour. ‘Right,’ he said, with the air of one wrenching his mind back from an abyss. ‘Our men. Five of them. Dropped Tuesday last, with one Jeep, radio, just south of Lourdes. They reported that they’d landed, were leaving in the direction of Hendaye, travelling by night. They were supposed to radio in eight-hourly. But nothing. Absolutely damn all.’

Once again, Miller caught Mallory’s eye. Jeep, he was thinking. A Jeep, for pity’s sake. Have these people never heard of road blocks?

‘Until last night,’ said Killigrew. ‘Some Resistance johnny came on the air. Said there’d been shooting in some village or other in the mountains twenty miles west of St-Jean-de-Luz. Casualties. So we think it was them. But there was a bit of difficulty with the radio message. Code words not used. Could mean the operator was in a hurry, of course. Or it could mean that the network’s been penetrated.’

Mallory found himself lighting another cigarette. How long since he had drawn a breath not loaded with tobacco smoke? He was avoiding Miller’s eye. They were brave, these SAS people. But Miller had been right. They went at things like a bull at a gate. That was not Mallory’s way.

Mallory believed in making war quietly. There was an old partisan slogan he lived by: if you have a knife you can get a pistol; if you have a pistol, you can get a rifle; if you have a rifle, you can get a machine gun -

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ said Jensen. ‘I’m grateful for your cooperation.’ Dyas and Killigrew left, Killigrew’s blood-bloated face looking straight ahead, so as not to catch Miller’s sardonic eye.

‘So,’ said Jensen, grinning his appallingly carnivorous grin. Think you can do it?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You may think this is a damn silly scheme. I can’t help that. It could be that a million men depend on those submarines not getting to sea. I’m afraid the SAS have made a balls-up. I just want you to find these damn things. If you can’t blow them up, radio a position. The RAF’ll look after the rest.’

Mallory said, ‘Excuse my asking, sir. But what about the Resistance on the ground?’

Jensen frowned. ‘Good question. Two things. One, you heard that idiot Killigrew. They may have been penetrated. And two, it may be that these U-boats are tucked up somewhere the RAF won’t be able to get at them.’ He grinned. ‘I told Mr Churchill this morning that as far as I was concerned, you lot were equivalent to a bomber wing. He agreed.’ He stood up. ‘I’m very grateful to you. You’ve done two jolly good operations for me. Let’s make this a third. Detailed briefing at the airfield later. There’s an Albemarle coming in this afternoon for you. Takeoff at 1900.’ He looked down at the faces: Mallory, weary but hatchet-sharp; Andrea, solid behind his vast black moustache; and Dusty Miller, scratching his crewcut in a manner prejudicial to discipline. It did not occur to Jensen to worry that in the past fourteen days they had taken a fearsome battering on scarcely any sleep. They were the tool for the job, and that was that.

‘Any questions?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Mallory, wearily. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a drop of brandy about the house, is there?’

An hour later the sentries on the marble-pillared steps of the villa crashed to attention as the three men trotted down into the square, where a khaki staff car was waiting. The sentries did not like the look of them. They were elderly, by soldier standards - in their forties, and looking older. Their uniforms were dirty, their boots horrible. It was tempting to ask for identification and paybooks. But there was something about them that made the sentries decide that it would on the whole be better to keep quiet. They moved at a weary, purposeful lope that made the sentries think of creatures that ate infrequently, and when they did eat, ate animals they had tracked down patiently over great distances, and killed without fuss or remorse.

Mallory’s mind was not, however, on eating. ‘Not bad, that brandy,’ he said.

‘Five-star,’ said Miller. ‘Nothing but the best for the white-haired boys.’

After Jensen’s villa the Termoli airfield lacked style. Typhoons howled overhead, swarming on and off the half-built runway in clouds of dust. Inevitably, there was another briefing room. But this one was in a hut with cardboard walls and a blast-taped window overlooking the propeller-whipped dust-storm and the fighters taxiing in the aircraft park. Among the fighters was a bomber, with the long, lumpy nose of a warthog, refuelling from a khaki bowser. Mallory knew it was an Albemarle. Jensen was making sure that the momentum of events was being maintained.

Evans, one of Jensen’s young, smooth-mannered lieutenants, had brought them from the staff car. He said, ‘I expect you’ll have a shopping list.’ He was a pink youth, with an eagerness that made Mallory feel a thousand years old. But Mallory made himself forget the tiredness, and the brandy, and the forty years he had been on the planet. He sat at a table with Andrea and Miller and filled out stores indents in triplicate. Then they rode a three-tonner down to the armoury, where Jensen’s handiwork was also to be seen, in the shape of a rack of weapons, and a backpack B2 radio. There were also two brass-bound boxes whose contents Miller studied with interest. One of them was packed with explosives: gelignite, and blocks of something that looked like butter, but was in fact Cyclonite in a plasticising medium - plastic explosive. The other box contained primers and time pencils, colour-coded like children’s crayons. Miller sorted through them with practised fingers, making some substitutions. There were also certain other substances, independently quite innocent but, used as he knew how to use them, lethal to enemy vehicles and personnel. Finally, there was a flat tin box containing a thousand pounds in used Bradbury fivers.

Andrea stood at a rack of Schmeissers, his hands moving like the hands of a man reading Braille, his black eyes looking far away. He rejected two of the machine pistols, picked out three more, and a Bren light machine gun. He stripped the Bren down, smacked it together again, nodded, and filled a haversack with grenades.

Mallory checked over two coils of wire-cored rope and a bag of climbing gear. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Load it on.’

In the briefing hut, three men were waiting. They sat separately at the schoolroom tables, each of them apparently immersed in his own thoughts. ‘Everything all right?’ said Lieutenant Evans. ‘Oh. Introductions. The team.’ The men at the tables looked up, eyeing Mallory, Andrea and Miller with the wariness of men who knew that in a few hours these strangers would have the power of life and death over them.

‘No real names, no pack-drill,’ said Evans. He indicated the man on the right: small, the flesh bitten away under his cheekbones, his mouth hidden by a black moustache. He had the dour, self-contained look of a man who had lived all his life among mountains. ‘This is Jaime,’ Evans said. ‘Jaime has worked in the Pyrenees. He knows his way around.’

‘Worked?’ said Mallory.

Jaime’s face was sallow and unreadable, his eyes unwilling to trust. He said, ‘I have carried goods. Smuggler, you would say. I have escaped Fascists. Spanish Fascists, German Fascists. All die when you shoot them.’

Mallory schooled his face to blankness. Fanatics could be trustworthy comrades; but that was the exception, not the rule.

‘And that,’ said Evans quietly, ‘is Hugues. Hugues is our personnel man. Knows the Resistance on the ground. Practically encyclopaedic. Looks like a German. Don’t be fooled. He was at Oxford before the war. Went back to Normandy to take over the family chateau. The SS shot his wife and two children when he went underground.’

Hugues was tall and broad-shouldered, with light brown hair, an affable pink-and-white Northern face, and china-blue eyes. When he shook Mallory’s hand his palm was moist with nervous sweat. He said, ‘Do you speak French?’

‘No.’ Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and held it.

‘None of you?’

That’s right.’ Many virtues had combined to keep Mallory, Miller and Andrea alive and fighting these past weeks. But the cardinal virtue was this: reserve your fire, and never trust anyone.

Hugues said, ‘I’m glad to meet you. But … no French? Jesus.’

Mallory liked his professionalism. ‘You can do the talking,’ he said.

‘Spent any time behind enemy lines?’ said Hugues.

‘A little.’ There was a wild look in Hugues’ eye, thought Mallory. He was not sure he liked it.

Evans cleared his throat. ‘Word in your ear, Hugues,’ he said, and took him aside. Hugues frowned as the Naval officer murmured into his ear. Then he blushed red, and said to Mallory, ‘Oh dear. ‘Fraid I made a fool of myself, sir.’

‘Perfectly reasonable,’ said Mallory. Hugues was fine. Pink and eager and bright. But there was still that wild look … Not surprising, in the circumstances. A Resistance liaison would be as vital as a guide and a radio operator. Hugues would do.

The last man was nearly as big as Andrea, wearing a ragged, oddly urban straw hat. Evans introduced him as Thierry, an experienced Resistance radio operator. Then he drew the blinds, and pulled a case of what looked like clothing towards him. ‘Doesn’t matter about the French,’ he said, ‘you can stick to German.’ From the box, he pulled breeches and camouflage smocks of a pattern Mallory had last seen in Crete. ‘I hope we’ve got the size right. And you’d better stay indoors for the next wee while.’

It was true, reflected Mallory wryly, that there would be few better ways of attracting attention on a Allied air base than wandering around wearing the uniform of the Waffen-SS.

‘Try ‘em on,’ said Evans.

The Frenchmen watched without curiosity or humour as Mallory, Miller and Andrea pulled the German smocks and trousers over their khaki battledress. Disguising yourself in enemy uniform left you liable to summary execution. But then so did working for the Resistance, or for that matter operating behind German lines in British uniform. In occupied France, Death would be breathing down your neck without looking at the label inside your collar.

‘Okay,’ said Evans, contemplating the Feldwebel with Mallory’s face, and the two privates. ‘Er, Colonel, would you consider shaving off the moustache?’

‘No,’ said Andrea, without changing expression.

‘It’s just that-’

‘SS men do not wear moustaches,’ said Andrea. ‘This I know. But I do not intend to mix with SS men. I intend to kill them.’

Jaime was looking at him with new interest. ‘Colonel?’ he said.

‘Slip of the tongue,’ said Mallory.

Evans looked for a moment faintly flustered. He strode busily to the dais, and unrolled the familiar relief map of the western part of the Pyrenees. There was a blue bite of Atlantic at the top. Along the spine of the mountains writhed the red serpent of the Spanish border.

‘Landing you here,’ said Evans, tapping a brisk pointer on what could have been a hanging valley above St-Jean-Pied-du-Port.

‘Landing?’ said Mallory.

‘Well, dropping then.’

Miller said, ‘I told Captain Jensen. I can’t stand heights.’

‘Heights won’t be a problem,’ said Evans. ‘You’ll be dropping from five hundred feet.’ He smiled, the happy smile of a man who would not be dropping with them, and unrolled another larger-scale map with contours. ‘There’s a flat spot in this valley. Pretty remote. There’s a road in, from Jonzère. Runs on up to the Spanish border. There’ll be a border post up there, patrols. We don’t want you in Spain. We’ve got Franco leaning our way at the moment, and we don’t want anything to happen that would, er, make it necessary for him to have to show what a beefy sort of chap he is. Plus you’d get yourselves interned and the camps are really not nice at all. So when you leave the drop site go downhill. Jaime’ll remind you. Uphill is Spain. Downhill is France.’

Andrea was frowning at the map. The contours on either side of the valley were close together. Very close. In fact, the valley sides looked more like cliffs than slopes. He said, ‘It’s not a good place to drop.’

Evans said, ‘There are no good places to drop just now in France.’ There was a silence. ‘Anyway,’ he said briskly. ‘You’ll be met by a man called Jules. Hugues knows him.’

The fair-haired Norman nodded. ‘Good man,’ he said.

‘Jules has been making a bit of a speciality of the Werwolf project. He’ll brief you and pass you on. After that, you’ll be on your own. But I hear you’re used to that.’ He looked at the grim faces. He thought, with a young man’s arrogance: they’re old, and they’re tired. Does Jensen know what he’s doing?

Then he remembered that Jensen always knew what he was doing.

Mallory looked at Evans’ pink cheeks and crisp uniform. We all know you have been told to say this, he thought. And we all know that it is not true. We are not on our own at all. We are at the mercy of these three Frenchmen.

Evans said, ‘There is a password. When anyone says to you, “L’Amiral”, you will reply “Beaufort”. And vice versa. We put it out on the BBC. The SAS used it, I’m afraid. No time to put out another one. Use with care.’ He handed out bulky brown envelopes. ‘Callsigns,’ said Evans. ‘Orders. Maps. Everything you need. Commit to memory and destroy. Any questions?’

There were no questions. Or rather, there were too many questions for it to be worth asking any of them.

‘Storm Force,’ said Miller, who had torn open his envelope. ‘What’s that?’

‘That’s you. This is Operation Storm,’ said Evans. ‘You were Force 10 in Yugoslavia. This follows on. Plus …’ he hesitated.

‘Yes?’ said Mallory.

‘Joke, really,’ said Evans, grinning pinkly. ‘But, well, Captain Jensen said we might as well call you after the weather forecast.’

‘Great,’ said Miller. ‘Just great. All this and parachutes too.’

TWO

Sunday 1900-Monday 0900

‘Ladies and gentlemen, sorry, gentlemen,’ said Wing-Commander Maurice Hartford. ‘We are now one hour from drop. Air Pyrenees hopes you are enjoying the ride. Personally, I think you are all crazy.’

Naturally, nobody could hear him, because the intercom was turned off. But it relieved his feelings. Why, he thought, is it always me?

It had been a nice takeoff. Six men plus the crew, not much equipment: a trivial load for the Albemarle, droning up from Termoli, over the wrinkled peaks of the Apennines, and into the sunset. The red sunset.

Hartford switched on the intercom. ‘Captain Mallory,’ he said, ‘why don’t you pop up to the sharp end?’

Mallory stirred in his steel bucket seat. He had slept for a couple of hours this afternoon. So had Andrea and Dusty Miller. An orderly had woken them for a dinner of steak and red wine, upon which they had fallen like wolves. The Frenchmen had picked at the food; nobody had wanted to talk. Jaime had remained dour. Hugues, unless Mallory was much mistaken, had developed a bad case of the jitters. Nothing wrong with that, though. The bravest men were not those who did not know fear, but those who knew it and conquered it. On the aeroplane, the Frenchmen had stayed awake while Andrea made himself a bed with his head on the box of fuses, and Miller sank low in his bucket seat, propped his endless legs on the radio, and began a snore that rivalled the clattering thunder of the Albemarle’s Merlins.

Mallory had slept lightly. What he wanted was ten days of unconsciousness, broken only by huge meals at four-hour intervals. But that would have to wait. Among the rockfalls and avalanches of the Southern Alps, and during the long, dangerous months in Crete, he had learned to sleep a couple of inches below the surface, a wild animal’s sleep that could give way to complete wakefulness in a fraction of a second.

He clambered out of his seat and went to the cockpit. The pilot gestured to the co-pilot’s seat. Mallory sat down and plugged in the intercom.

‘Cup of tea?’ said the pilot, whose ginger moustache rose four inches above his mask, partially obscuring the goggles he wore to keep it out of his eyes.

Mallory said, ‘Please.’

‘Co-pilot’s having a kip.’ The pilot waved a thermos over a mug. ‘Sunset,’ he said, gesturing ahead.

There was indeed a sunset. The western sky was full of an archipelago of fiery islands, on which the last beams of the sun burst in a surf of gold. Above, the sky was dappled with cirrus. Below, the Mediterranean was darkening through steel to ink.

‘Red sky at night,’ said the pilot. ‘Pilot gets fright.’

The plane bounced. Mallory captured a mouthful of tea and hot enamel. ‘Why?’ he said.

Quiet sort of chap, thought Hartford. Not bashful. Just quiet. Quiet like a bomb nobody had armed yet. Brown eyes that looked completely at home, completely competent, wherever they found themselves. A lean, tired face, motionless, conserving energy. Dangerous-looking blighter, thought Hartford, cheerfully. Lucky old Jerry.

‘Weather,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful weather up there. Front coming in. All right for shepherds. Shepherds walk. But we’re flying straight into the brute. Going to get very bumpy.’

‘Okay for a drop?’

Hartford said, ‘We’ll get you down.’ Actually, it was not okay for a drop. But he had orders to get these people onto the ground, okay or not. ‘Tell your chaps to strap in, could you?’ He pulled a dustbin-sized briar from his flying-suit pocket, stuffed it with tobacco, and lit it. The cockpit filled with acrid smoke. He pulled back the sliding window, admitting the tooth-jarring bellow of the engines. ‘Smell that sea,’ he said, inhaling deeply. ‘Wizard. Yup. We’ll go in at five hundred feet. Nice wide valley. All you have to do is jump when the light goes on. All at once.’

‘Five hundred feet?’

‘Piece of cake.’

‘They’ll hear us coming.’

The pilot grinned, revealing canines socketed into the holes they had worn in the stem of the pipe. ‘Not unless they’re Spanish,’ he said.

They hit the front over the coast, and flew on, minute after endless minute, until the minutes became hours. The Albemarle swooped and plunged, wings battered by the turbulent upcurrents. By the dark-grey light that crept through the little windows, Mallory looked at his team. Andrea and Miller he took for granted. But the Frenchmen he was not so sure about. He could see the flash of the whites of Jaime’s eyes, the nervous movement of Thierry’s mouth as he chewed his lips from inside. And Hugues, contemplating his hands, hands with heavily-bitten fingernails, locked on his knees. Mallory felt suddenly weary. He had been in too many little metal rooms, watched too many people, wondered too many times how they would shape up when the pressure was on and the lid had blown off…

The Albemarle banked steeply to port, then starboard. Mallory thought there was a new kind of turbulence out there: not just the moil of air masses in collision, but the upward smack of waves of air breaking on sheer faces of rock. He looked round.

The doorway into the cockpit was open. Beyond the windscreen the flannel-coloured clouds separated and wisped away. Suddenly Mallory was looking down a valley whose steep sides rose out of sight on either side. The upper slopes were white with snow. There was a grey village perched up there - up there, above the aeroplane. A couple of yellow lights showed in the gloom. No blackout: Spain, thought Mallory -

A pine tree loomed ahead. It approached at two hundred miles an hour. He saw the pilot’s shoulders move as he hauled on the yoke. The tree was higher than the plane. Hey, thought Mallory, we’re going to hit that -

But the Albemarle roared up and over. Something slapped the deck under his feet. Then the tree was gone, and the aircraft was banking steeply to port, into the next valley.

Mallory got up and closed the door. There were some things it was not necessary to see. Pine trees were, what? A hundred feet high? Maximum. Mallory decided if he was going to be flown into a mountain, he did not want to see the mountain coming.

It went on: the howl of the wind, the bucket of the airframe, the bellow of the engines. Mallory fell asleep.

Next thing he knew the racket was still there, and someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt terrible: head aching, thoughts slow as cold oil. The Albemarle’s bomb-aimer was pushing a cup of tea in his face. Benzedrine, he thought. No. Not yet. This is only the beginning.

He had woken into a different world: the sick-at-the-stomach world of dangerous things about to happen. He badly wanted a cigarette. But there would be no time for cigarettes for a while.

A dim yellow light was burning in the fuselage. Bulky camouflage forms swore and collided, struggling into their parachutes and rounding up equipment.

‘Five minutes,’ said the bomb-aimer with repellent cheerfulness, when he had finished checking the harnesses. ‘Onto the trench.’

‘Trench?’ said Miller.

The bomb-aimer indicated a long slot in the floor of the aircraft. ‘Get on there,’ he said. ‘Stand at ease, one foot either side.’ He pointed at a pair of light bulbs. ‘When the light goes green, shun!

‘Gee, thanks,’ said Miller, and shuffled into position. The first light bulb flicked on: red.

Hugues was behind him. Hugues’ mind would not stay still. It kept flicking back over the past two years, with the weary insistence of a stuck gramophone record. After the SS had done what they had done to his family, he had not cared if he lived or died. Then Lisette had come along. And in Lisette, he had found a new reason for living …

On a night like this, a reason for living was the last thing you needed. Remember what they taught you in school, he thought. Keep it buttoned up. Don’t let anything show -

Lisette. When shall I see you again?

Fear prised his mind apart and climbed in. Fear became terror. His bowels were water, and icy sweat was pouring down him. First, there was the parachute descent, and of course it was possible that the parachute would not open. Then, even if the parachute did open, that big thin man Miller had two boxes balanced in front of him - attached to him, for the love of God! - full of explosives. So they were all dropping out of this plane, six humans and a land mine, in a lump. Jesus. He would be all over the landscape. He would never see Lisette -

Underfoot, he felt a new vibration, like gears winding. The trench opened. The night howled in, black and full of wind. He felt stuck, trapped, cramped by this damned harness, Schmeisser, pack, equipment.

A hand landed on his shoulder. He looked round so fast he almost overbalanced.

It belonged to the big man who did not speak, the bear with the moustache. The big face was impassive. A reflection of the little red bulb swam in each black eye. One of the eyes winked. Jesus, thought Hugues. He knows what I’m thinking. What will he think of me?

But surprisingly, he found that the fear had lessened.

Jaime was not comfortable either, but for different reasons. He had the short legs of the mountaineer. In his mind, he had been tracking their route: up the Valle de Tena, then north, across the Col de Pourtalet. He had walked it himself, first with bales of cigarettes, then with mules bearing arms for the Republican cause in the last days of the Spanish Civil War. He reckoned that now they would be coming down on Colbis. He did not like the feel of the weather out there. Nor did he like the fact that they were flying in cloud down a fifty-degree hillside at two hundred miles an hour. Feet on the ground were safe. Mules were safer. He wanted to get back on the ground, because his legs were aching, straddled over the trench, and he could feel the fear radiating from Thierry, slung about with his radios, straw hat stuffed in his pack, his big face improbably healthy in the red light -

Thierry’s face turned suddenly green.

Shun.

Six pairs of heels crashed together. The static lines ran out and tautened. The hold was empty.

Through the bomb doors the bomb-aimer glimpsed points of yellow light forming a tenuous L. He said into the intercom, ‘All gone.’ The pilot hauled back on the stick, and the clouds intervened. The Albemarle banked steeply and set its nose for Italy.

The ground hit Mallory like a huge, wet hammer. There were lights looping in his eyes as he rolled. A rock made his ears ring. He got rid of the parachute, invisible now in the dark, flattened himself against the ground, and worked the cocking lever of the Schmeisser, taut as an animal at bay. For a moment there was the moan of the wind and the feel of grit on his cheek. Then a voice close at hand said, ‘L’Amiral.’

‘Beaufort’ he said.

There was shouting. Then more lights - a lot of lights, a ridiculous number - in his eyes. He levelled the Schmeisser. The lights wavered away, and someone shouted, ‘Non! Non! L’Amiral Beaufort. Welcome to France, mon officier.’

Unnecessary hands pulled him to his feet. He said, ‘Where are the others?’

‘Safe.’ A flask found his hand. ‘Buvez. Drink. Vive la France!’ He drank. It was brandy. It drilled a hole in the cold and the rain. People were lighting cigarettes. There was a lot unmilitary of noise, several bottles. A dark figure materialised at his side, then another.

Miller’s voice said, ‘Any minute now someone is going to start playing the goddamn accordion.’

‘All here?’ There were grunts from the darkness. There were too many people, too much noise, not enough discipline. ‘Hugues.’

‘Sir.’

‘Tell these people to put the bloody lights out. Where’s Jules?’

There was a conversation in French. Hugues replied, his voice rising, expostulating. ‘Merde,’ he said finally.

‘What is it?’

‘These idiots. These goddamn Trotskyite sons of-’

‘Quick.’ Mallory’s voice brought him up sharp as a choke-chain.

‘Jules is held up in Colbis. There was an incident with your forces last week. The Germans are nervous.’

That would have been the SAS, thought Mallory, charging around like bulls in a china shop.

‘But Colbis is only in the next valley. We will take you there, when we have transport. There is a problem with the transport. They don’t know what. A lorry will come soon, they say. Franchement,’ said Hugues, his voice rising, ‘I do not believe these people. They are like the Spanish, always mañana-’

‘Ask them how soon.’ And calm them down, thought Mallory. Calm them down.

They say to wait,’ said Hugues, not at all calm. ‘It is seven miles to the village. There may be patrols. There is a cave they know. It is dry there, and German patrols do not visit it. They say it will be a good place to wait. The lorry will come to collect you, in one hour, maybe two.’

Mallory looked at his watch. Raindrops blurred the glass. Just after midnight. Monday already. And they were being told to wait on a mountain top in the rain, and the Werwolf pack was leaving at noon on Wednesday.

He said, ‘Where’s this cave?’

‘I know it,’ said Jaime’s voice.

Mallory sighed. Patience. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Andrea appeared at his side. Mallory felt the comfort of his gigantic presence. ‘This is not good,’ said the Greek, under the babble of excited talk from the escort.

‘We will make it better,’ said Mallory. ‘Hugues. Tell these people to be quiet.’

Hugues started shouting. The crowd fell silent. They started to walk in the lashing rain.

Jaime set a cracking pace up the valley, towards Spain, following a track that wound through a field of tea chest-sized boulders which had fallen from the valley’s sides. The map had been right; those sides were not so much slopes as cliffs. From the rear, Mallory could hear Hugues’ voice, speaking French, raised in violent argument with someone. Mallory was beginning to worry about Hugues. Staying alive behind enemy lines meant staying calm. It was beginning to sound as if Hugues was not a calm person. He called softly, ‘Shut up.’

Hugues shut up. The procession became quiet.

Mallory said to Miller, ‘What was that about?’

‘He was looking for someone. Someone who’s not around.’

In ten minutes the valley floor had narrowed to a hundred yards, and the sides had become vertical walls of rock, undermined at their base, hidden in inky shadows. ‘Here,’ said Jaime’s voice from the dark. A flashlight beam illuminated a dark entrance.

Andrea materialised at Mallory’s side. ‘Bad place,’ he said. The cave had no exit except into the valley. And the valley was more a gorge than a valley. It felt bad. It felt like a trap. ‘Hugues,’ said Mallory, without looking round. ‘Tell these people that this is no good.’

Mallory turned. ‘Hugues,’ he said. ‘Tell these people-’

He stopped. There were no people. Hugues was a solitary dark figure against the paler grey of the rocks.

Hugues said, ‘They have left.’

‘Left?’ said Mallory.

‘Gone to look for the transport. Also, there was a … person I wished to see who did not arrive. That was why I had a discussion - yes - an acrimonious discussion.’ His voice was rising. ‘These people are frankly peasants-’

Andrea said, ‘Enough.’

Hugues stopped talking as if someone had flipped a switch. Mallory said to Andrea and Miller, ‘We’re stuck with this. We need the transport. If we move, they’ll lose us. We’ll have to wait. Take cover.’

Andrea and Miller were already fading into the dark, taking up positions not in the cave, but among the rocks on the valley floor.

The night became quiet, except for the sigh of the wind and the swish of the rain, and the drowsy clonk of a goat bell from inside the cave.

This is all wrong, thought Mallory. We have been inadequately briefed, and we are dependent on a Resistance organisation that seems completely disorganised. It sounds as if the SAS have already compromised us. If the enemy comes up the valley there is no way out, except into an internment camp in Spain.

Mallory lay and strained his ears into the wet dark rain, wind, goat bells -

And another sound. A mechanical sound, but not a motor. The sound of metal on metal, gears turning. The sound of a bicycle.

There was a sudden crash. The old sounds returned, with behind them the noise of a back wheel spinning, ticking to a stop.

Mallory waited. Then he heard the brief, otherworldly bleep of a Scops owl.

Mallory had as yet heard no Scops owls in the Pyrenees. But there had been plenty in Crete, where he had served his time with Andrea.

Something moved at his shoulder: something huge, blacker than the night. Andrea said, ‘I found this,’ and dropped something on the gritty ground beside him, something that drew breath and started to croak.

Mallory allowed the muzzle of the Schmeisser to rest gently in the hollow under the something’s ear. He said, ‘Quiet.’

The something became quiet.

Mallory said, ‘I am a British officer. What do you want?’

The something said, ‘Hugues.’

‘Good God,’ said Mallory.

The something was a woman.

The woman got her voice back. She batted at Mallory with her hands. She was strong. She said, ‘Laisse-moi,’ in a voice both vigorous and tough.

Out in the dark and the rain, Hugues’ voice said, ‘Bon Dieu!’ Mallory thought he could hear something new in it: shock, and awe. He heard the uncoordinated stumble of Hugues’ boots in the dark. ‘Lisette!’ cried Hugues.

‘Hugues!’ cried the woman. ‘C’est bien toi?

Then Hugues was embracing her. The fear was gone now. All the terrible things were gone. All Hugues’ life, people had taken what he loved away from him, for reasons that seemed excellent to them but incomprehensible to him. They had taken away his parents and sent him to a stupid English school. They had taken away Mireille and the children because he was a saboteur. And then he had met Lisette, in the Resistance, and become her lover. When SOE had flown him out in the Lysander, he had thought that that had been the end of Lisette, too.

But here she was. In his arms. As large as life, if not larger.

‘My darling,’ he said.

She kissed him on the cheek, murmuring what sounded like pet names. Then Mallory heard her tone change. She sounded frantic about something.

‘Merde,’ said Hugues, in his new, firm voice. ‘We must leave. Now.’

Mallory said, quietly, ‘Who is this?’

‘Lisette,’ said Hugues. ‘A friend. A résistante.’

‘Is she the person you wanted to see who did not arrive?’

‘Yes. She is an old friend. She knows the people on the ground in the region. It is an excellent thing that she has found us. Providential. She says there are sixty Germans coming up the valley.’

‘Three lorries,’ she said. Her accent was heavy, but comprehensible. ‘The ones who reached Jonzère told me they caught two of your reception committee, found them with parachutes.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Half an hour,’ said Lisette. ‘At the most. They told me to warn you.’

Mallory’s stomach felt shrivelled like a walnut. One and a half hours in France, and the operation was as good as over. He pushed the thought into the back of his mind. ‘Jaime!’ he said.

Jaime appeared out of the night. ‘Lisette,’ he said, without surprise.

‘Bonjour, Jaime.’

Briskly, Mallory explained the position.

Jaime said, ‘We must go to Spain. It is over. Finished.’

In his mind Mallory saw a soldier, pack on his back, seasickness in his belly and fear in his soul, squashed against the steel side of a ship by a thousand other soldiers. And suddenly, without warning, something stove in the side of that ship, smashed the soldier like an egg, and the cold green water poured in.

Once Mallory had been in a little steel room on a ship in the Mediterranean, checking grenades. There had been a bang. Someone had said, ‘Torpedo.’ Then the room had started to fill up with water, and the ship with screams, quickly cut off. Mallory had been one of four survivors. Four out of three hundred.

If the Werwolf pack got out intact, there could be a thousand such ships.

Mallory said, ‘No other way?’

‘None.’ Jaime seemed to hesitate. ‘Except the Chemin des Anges.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing. A goat track, no more. It runs from Jonzère, at the bottom of the valley, up the ridge, in the manner of the old roads. The pilgrims used to use it, the men with the cockle shells in their hats, bound for Santiago de Compostela, when there were bandits in the mountains. It is a dangerous road. It killed almost as many pilgrims as the bandits did.’

‘Where is it?’

Against the dark sky Jaime’s small shoulders appeared to shrug. He pointed upwards. ‘On the spine of the hill. Here it runs three hundred metres above the valley. Above the cliff. Then it turns over the mountain and down to Colbis. There were pilgrims’ inns in Colbis. But we can’t go to Jonzère, to the start of the track. It’ll be full of Germans-’

‘We’ll go up the cliff,’ said Mallory, as if he were proposing a walk in the park.

There was a second’s silence. Then Jaime said, ‘To join the Chemin des Anges here? That is not possible.’

Mallory said, ‘It is necessary.’

The chill of his voice silenced Jaime for a moment. Then he said, ‘But you do not understand. Nobody can climb those cliffs.’

‘That is what the Germans will think. Miller?’

Miller had been sitting on a boulder. He knew what Mallory was going to say, and he found the knowledge depressing. ‘Yep?’

‘Round up the people. Andrea and I are going up the cliff. We’ll do a pitch, belay and drop you a fixed rope. Make sure everyone comes.’

Miller pushed his SS helmet back on his head and looked up. For a moment it was like being in a tunnel. Then, far overhead, clouds shifted, and there appeared between the two cliff-masses a thread-fine crack of sky. The wind was blowing up the valley. He could hear no lorries. The dark bulk that was Mallory slung a coil of wire-cored rope over his shoulder and walked towards the cliff. Wearily, Miller rounded up Hugues and Lisette, and Jaime, and Thierry the radio operator, and assembled the stores, and the radio, and the two wooden boxes of explosives, under the cliff. Mallory and Andrea seemed to vanish into the solid rock. The group at the cliff foot sat huddled against the icy rain. From above came the infrequent sound of a low word spoken, the clink of hammer on spike, the scuff of nailed boot on rock. The sounds receded quickly upwards. Human goddamn flies, thought Miller, gloomily. Personally, he had no suckers on his feet, and no plans to grow any. He stood up, cocked his Schmeisser and moved fifty yards down the valley in the rain. Someone had to stand sentry, and the only person on the valley floor Miller trusted was Miller.

Fall in with bad companions and what do you get?

I tell you what you get, he told himself, settling into a natural embrasure in the rock and preparing for the first of the sixty Germans to come round the corner.

You get problems.

There had been times in Mallory’s life when he would have enjoyed a good crack at a limestone cliff in the dark. On a cold morning, perhaps, in a gorge in the Southern Alps, when you had got up at one in the morning, the stars floating silver and unwinking between the ice-white peaks of the range.

This was not one of those times.

This was a vertical slab of rock he could barely see. This was climbing by Braille, running fingers and feet over the smooth surface looking for pockmarks and indentations, tapping spikes into hair-cracks, standing with the tip of a boot-toe balanced on a foothold slim as a goose-quill.

But Mallory knew that there is a greater spur to climbing a cliff in the dark than a wish to dwell in the white Olympus of the high peaks. It is to get you and your comrades away from three lorry loads of Germans.

So Mallory climbed that sopping wall until his fingernails were gone, and the sweat stung his eyes, and the breath rasped in his tobacco-seared throat. And after fifty feet, he found a chimney.

It was a useful chimney, the edge of a huge flake of rock that would in a few hundred years separate from the face of the cliff and slide into the gorge. Mallory made a belay, called down to Andrea, and went up the chimney as if it had been a flight of stairs.

At first the chimney was vertical. After thirty feet it started to trend leftward. Then suddenly there was a chockstone, a great boulder that had rolled down the cliff and jammed in the chimney. It formed a level floor embraced on two sides by buttresses of rock, invisible from the bottom of the valley. It was more than Mallory had dared hope for. Fifty people could have hidden up there while the Germans rumbled up the valley and flattened their noses against the Spanish border. Over which they would assume the Storm Force had fled -

Mallory felt a sensation he hardly recognised.

Hope.

Don’t count your chickens.

Jaime was the first to arrive. He was carrying the bulky, square-edged radio pack. Jaime was a useful man on a mountain. There was a pause, and Andrea came up, carrying the second rope. ‘All at the base of the chimney,’ he said. ‘Stores too.’

‘Good,’ said Mallory, belaying the rope and letting the end go.

Now that there were two ropes, things started to move fast. Thierry came up one, breathing in a high, frightened whimper, his straw hat crammed over his eyebrows. The second rope seemed to be taking a long time. ‘It’s the woman,’ said Andrea. ‘She doesn’t have the strength in her arms.’ Mallory saw his huge back dark against the sky as he bent to the rope. She was a big woman; there were not many fat people in wartime France, but she was one of them. She must have weighed ten stone. But Andrea hauled her up as if she had been a bag of sugar, set her on her feet, and dusted down her bulk.

‘Merci,’ she said.

Andrea’s white teeth flashed under his moustache. He had the smile of a musketeer, this Greek giant. Even now, with the rain lashing down and Germans in the valley, Lisette felt enveloped in a protective cloak of courtesy and understanding. Andrea bowed, as if she had been a lady of Versailles, not a shapeless bundle of overcoats crouched on a cliff ledge. Then he let the rope go again.

Hugues came up, too breathless to complain, and went to Lisette’s side. Mallory had a nagging moment of worry. Hugues’ priorities had to be with the operation, not his girlfriend. Mallory did not know enough about this woman. And he did not know enough about Hugues. For the moment, if her information was good, she had saved their bacon. But if Mallory’s instincts were right, she was going to be a distraction. And distractions had no place on an operation like this. On this operation there was a single priority: find and destroy the Werwolf pack.

Hugues would need watching.

Mallory turned away, and hauled up the boxes of explosives and a couple of packs. The rain was turning even colder, developing a grainy feel. Mallory thought, soon it will be snowing. His hands were cracked and sore, and the plaster had peeled off the reopening wounds. God knew how Andrea must be feeling. But the stores were up, stacked on the edge of the boulder, and Miller was on his way up, but with no rope yet. Must get a rope to him; Miller was no climber.

The wind moaned and died. Andrea said, ‘Listen.’

There was a new sound in the raw, snow-laden air. Lorry engines.

All the way up the bottom forty feet of the cliff, Miller had been feeling the void snapping at his heels. The wind was freezing, but inside his uniform a Niagara of hot sweat was running. His knees felt weak, his hands shaky. Miller had been raised on the flatlands of the American Midwest. One hold at a time, he told himself. Don’t look down. Don’t think of the sheer face down there -

Miller patted the cliff above his head, groping for chinks and crevices. Mallory must have found some. But as far as Miller was concerned he might as well have been trying to climb a plate glass window. Both ropes were in use …

Hurry, please, thought Miller politely. For forty feet down, things were happening. On the wind from the valley came the sharp whiff of exhaust. He looked up.

The cold, slushy rain battered his face. What he could see of the cliff was black and shiny, the chimney a dark streak rising to the chockstone. He had seen Mallory in a chimney, his shoulders one side, his heels the other, gliding his way skyward with that weightless fluency of his. Miller’s limbs were too lanky for that, and his body wanted to plaster itself against the rock, not sit out over the emptiness as Mallory did, applying weight where it was needed, on fingers and toes -

Without a rope there was no way of getting to the chimney.

He pressed his face into the rock. The earthy smell of wet stone filled his nostrils. There was a lightening of the walls. Headlights down the valley.

He moved his hands again. The rock was rough, but there was nothing you could hold on to. Not unless you were a human fly like Mallory. Can’t go up, thought Miller. Can’t go down. So you just stand here, and hold on, and try not to follow that voice in your head that is telling you to shout and scream and keel gently out and back and plummet into space.

There were lights under his feet, and the gorge was churning with engines. A voice above him said, ‘Rope coming!’

The lorries were directly below him now. By the grind of their engines they were moving at a slow, walking pace. Searching. Nobody looks up. It is fine. Nobody ever looks up. Particularly not up sheer cliffs.

Not even Germans. No matter how thorough they may be.

You wish.

The rope nudged his face, cautiously. Miller said a quiet, polite thank you. Then he wound his hands into it and began to climb.

‘He’s coming up now,’ said Andrea, in his soft, imperturbable voice.

They were standing at the back of the ledge formed by the chockstone. Its edge was a horizon now, backlit by the glow of the lorries’ headlamps. Against the edge was something hard-edged and square. The radio.

‘Move that,’ said Mallory to Thierry.

Thierry started forward, shuffling, his great bulk moving against the lights. He was tired, thought Mallory. Tired and frightened, in a wet straw hat.

If he had been less tired himself, he might have prevented what happened next.

Thierry scooped up the radio and slung it over his shoulder. As he turned, his foot hit something that could have been a tuft of grass but was actually a rock. The rock went over the edge.

It whizzed past Dusty Miller’s head. At the base of the chimney it bounced, removing a fair-sized boulder. By the time it hit the valley floor it was a junior landslide. It landed with a roar fifteen feet to the right of the second truck in the convoy. Small stones pattered against the passenger door of the cab.

The truck stopped. A searchlight on the roof sent a white disc of light sliding across the black face of the cliff.

Miller was fifteen feet from the top, sweating, his breath coming in gasps. Clamp a hand on the rope. Pull up, shoving with feet. Clamp the other hand. There was shouting down below. Clamp the other hand. The hands like grey spiders against the cliff. They could have belonged to anyone, those hands, except for the pain, and the heavy thump of his heart.

And suddenly the other hand was not grey, but blazing, brilliant flesh-colour, and every fibre of the rope stood out in microscopic detail. And Miller was a moth, kicking on the pin of the searchlight.

A rifle cracked, then another. Chips of rock stung his face. His back crawled with the expectation of bullets. Ten feet to go. It might as well have been ten miles.

But there was a burst of machine-gun fire from above, and the searchlight went out, and suddenly the rope in his hands was alive, moving upwards like the rope of a ski tow. And he looked up and saw a huge shape, dim above the cliff, shoulders working. Andrea.

Andrea pulled him up those last ten feet as if he had weighed two hundred ounces instead of two hundred pounds. Miller hit the dirt in cover, rolled, and unslung his Schmeisser. Trouble, he thought. I am not a goddamn human fly, and as a result we are in it up to our necks, and sinking.

Beyond the boulder the cliffs were brilliant white. In their light he could see Andrea cocking a Bren.

‘I’ll cover you,’ said Andrea, in his unruffled craftsman’s voice. ‘Grenades?’

Miller and Mallory each took two grenades from their belt pouches and pulled the pins. Two, three,’ said Mallory. ‘Throw.’

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the metallic clatter of the grenades bouncing down the cliff, two left, two right. The world seemed to hold its breath. They would be setting up a mortar down there; taking up positions, radioing for reinforcements. Though, in a gorge like this, radio reception would be terrible -

Then the night flashed white, and four explosions rang as one, followed by a deeper explosion. Andrea crawled to the edge of the ledge. The lights had gone out. There was a new light, orange and black: a burning lorry. The firing lulled, then began again.

Mallory said, ‘Cover us for ten minutes. We’ll meet you at the top.’

Andrea’s head was a black silhouette against the orange flicker of the gasoline fire. The silhouette nodded. For a moment his huge shoulders showed against the sky, the Bren slung over the right. Then he faded into the rocks. The five other men and Lisette gathered up the packs. Jaime said, in a voice apparently unaffected by fear, ‘There is a path. A little higher.’

‘Miller,’ said Mallory. ‘We don’t want those trucks to get back. Or anywhere with anything like decent radio reception. Anything you can do?’

Miller shrugged. ‘I’ll give it the old college try,’ he said. His hands were already busy in the first of the brass-bound boxes. He felt for one of the five-pound bricks of plastic explosive, laid it on the ground, latched the first box and unlatched the second. The second box was thickly lined with felt. Unclipping a flashlight from the breast pocket of his smock, he used it to select a green time pencil: thirty seconds’ delay. Delicately he pressed the pencil into the primer and looked at the radium-bright numerals on his watch. Then he snapped the time pencil, yawned, and carefully lit a cigarette. By the time he had pocketed his Zippo, twenty-five seconds had elapsed. He took the brick in both hands and heaved it out and over the vehicles in the valley below.

Miller really hated heights. But nice, safe explosives were familiar territory. It felt great to be back.

For the space of a breath, there was darkness and silence in which the sound of Germanic shouting rose from the valley, mixed with the scrape of steel on rock as they set up the mortars. Then the night turned white, whiter than the searchlights, and Mallory was blasted against the cliff by a huge metallic clang that felt as if it would drive his eardrums together in the middle of his head.

‘Go,’ he said, the sound small and distant behind the ringing in his ears.

They began to file up the cliff: Mallory in the lead, then Jaime, Lisette, and Hugues, with Miller bringing up the rear. Andrea climbed the fifty-degree face behind the chockstone until he found another boulder. There he stopped, unfolded the Bren’s bipod, and rested it on the stone.

Fires were still burning on the valley floor. The flames cast a flickering light on torn rock and twisted metal, and many still bodies dressed in field-grey. There were three trucks. Two of them were burning. The other lay like a crushed beetle under a huge slab of rock prised away from the gorge wall by the force of the explosion. At the far side of the gorge, three grey figures were draped over the rocks beside what had once been a mortar.

One of the figures moved.

Andrea pulled the Bren into his shoulder, and fired. The heavy drum of the machine gun echoed in the rocks. The grey figure went over backwards and did not move any more.

Then there was silence, except for the moan of the wind and the patter of sleet on rock.

Andrea watched for another five minutes, patient, not heeding the icy moisture soaking through his smock and into his battledress blouse.

Nothing moved. As far as he could tell, the radio sets were wrecked, and there were no survivors. But of course there would be survivors. He had no objection to going down and cutting the survivors’ throats. But if he did, it was unlikely that he would be able to rejoin the main party.

Andrea thought about it with the deliberation of a master wine maker deciding on which day he would pick his grapes: perhaps a little light on sugar today, but if he waited a week, there was the risk of rain …

Naturally, the Germans would assume that the force that had attacked them had gone on to Spain.

Andrea took a final look at the flames and the metal and the bodies. He felt no emotion. Guerrilla warfare was a job, a job at which he was an expert. His strength and intelligence were weapons in the service of his comrades and his country’s allies. He did not like killing German soldiers. But if it was part of the job, then he was prepared to do it, and do it well.

To Andrea, this looked like a decent piece of work.

He slung the Bren over his shoulder and began to lope rapidly up the steep mountain. It had begun to snow.

It was a wet snow that fell in flakes the size of saucers, each flake landing on skin or cloth or metal with an icy slap, beginning immediately to melt. They slid into boots and down necks, becoming paradoxically colder as they melted. Within ten minutes the whole party was soaked to the skin. And for what seemed like an eternity, there was only the rasp of breath in throats, the hammer of hearts, and the sodden rub of boots against feet as they marched doggedly up the forty-five-degree slope in the icy blackness. Miller’s mind was filled with anxiety.

He said to Andrea, ‘What do you think?’

Andrea knew what he was being asked. ‘They will think we have gone to Spain.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And they will send out patrols. In case we have not gone to Spain.’

‘Exactly.’

One foot in front of the other. Hammering hearts. Sore feet. Soon they would have to stop. Food was needed, and warmth. But they were walking away from food and warmth, upwards. Into unknown territory. Where they had been assured Jules would be waiting, somewhere warm and dry. Assured by Lisette.

Mallory was having to rely on people he did not know. And that made Mallory nervous.

Mallory said quietly, ‘We’d better watch the rear, in case anyone drops out.’

Andrea stepped to one side. The walkers passed him: Jaime in the lead, Miller, Thierry. Then, a long way behind, too far, Hugues and Lisette: Hugues hunched over Lisette, apparently half-carrying her, their shapes odd and lumpy against the white snow, like a single, awkward animal. Andrea could hear Hugues’ breathing.

‘You all right?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ said Hugues, in a voice whose cheerfulness even exhaustion could not mar.

Andrea frowned. Then he fell in behind, and kept on upwards.

It felt like an eternity. But in reality it was only a little more than an hour before Jaime emitted a bark of satisfaction, and said, ‘Voilà!’

The ground had for some time been rising less steeply. Between snow flurries, Mallory saw a silvery line of snow lying across the black-lead sky: the ridge. Between the walkers and the ridge was what might have been a narrow ledge, running diagonally upwards, its lines softened by six inches of snow. Jaime kicked at the downhill side with his foot, revealing a coping of roughly-dressed stone. ‘The Chemin des Anges,’ he said.

The path was easy walking, following the contours, skirting precipices over which Miller did not allow his eyes to stray. They followed it up and onto the ridge.

Lack of effort let them feel the chill of their sodden clothes. They paused to let Lisette and Hugues catch up. Mallory took his oilcloth-wrapped cigarettes from the soaking pocket of his blouse, and gave one to Miller. Their faces were haggard in the Zippo’s flare. Hugues and Lisette approached.

Hugues said, ‘Lisette needs food. Rest, warmth-’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Lisette’s voice. She sounded weak, but resolute.

‘But my darling-’

‘Don’t you darling me,’ she said. ‘Can we go on?’

Mallory said nothing. It was possible to admire this woman’s spirit. It was less possible to admire the speed at which she moved. Too slow, thought Mallory. It was all getting too slow, and there was a hell of a distance to travel before they even got to the start line.

His watch said it was 0200 hours. He said to Jaime, ‘How long?’

‘Two hours. All downhill. The slope is not so bad now.’

Mallory could hear Hugues’ teeth chattering. There was a thin. icy wind up here, and the snow was colder. ‘Any shelter before then?’

‘In ten minutes. A shepherd’s hut. There will be nobody.’

‘We’ll stop for twenty minutes.’

‘Thank God.’

The shepherd’s hut had a roof and three walls, facing providentially away from the wind. The floor was covered in dung-matted straw, but it was dry, and after the snow it was as good as a Turkish carpet. They burrowed into the filthy straw, smoking, letting their body heat warm their soaking clothes. Jaime produced a bottle of brandy. Lisette was half-buried in the straw next to Hugues. When Mallory shone his flashlight at her, he saw her face was a dead grey. He took the brandy bottle out of Thierry’s hand and carried it over to her. ‘Here,’ he said.

The neck of the bottle rattled against her teeth. She coughed. ‘Thank you,’ she said, when she could speak.

Mallory said, ‘It was a good thing you found us.’

‘Love,’ said Hugues. ‘It was the power of love. A sixth sense -’

‘There was a little more to it than that,’ she said, dryly. ‘Hugues, you are getting carried away.’

‘Yes,’ said Mallory, warming to her toughness. ‘So how did you do it?’

She shook her head. Her shivering was lending a faint seismic movement to the straw. They were talking, the résistants. One of them I knew. They said the radio signal arranging your drop mentioned that you were carrying money, I don’t know if it’s true. They made a deal with a German officer. They are demoralised, some of these Germans in the mountains here. And of course the résistants too; some of them are no more than bandits. The German was to kill you. Then he was to give them the money and collect a medal, I guess.’ Her teeth gleamed in the pale reflection from the snow outside. ‘I saw them come back to warn the officer. I knew where they had come from. So I got on my bicycle, and fell off in the right place. And it didn’t work out for those pigs.’

‘Thank God,’ said Hugues, fervently.

Mallory found he was smiling. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He got up, his weary knees protesting. It looked as if there was a new addition to the party. A brave addition, but a slow one. He hoped that Hugues would get his ardour under control, and start acting human again. He said, ‘We’re moving out.’

An hour and a half later Jaime led them down a snowy path and into the trees above the village. There was another barn-like building in the trees.

Jaime opened the door and said, ‘Wait in here.’

Mallory said, ‘Where are you going?’

‘To find some friends.’ There was a fireplace. Jaime struck a match, lit the piled kindling, and threw on an armful of logs. ‘Be comfortable. Dry yourselves.’ His eyes were invisible in the shadows under his heavy eyebrows.

Mallory’s eyes met Andrea’s. He did not like it. Nor, he could tell, did Andrea. But there was nothing he could do.

Jaime disappeared into the night. Lisette sank down in front of the fire and began to pull her boots off.

‘Outside,’ said Mallory.

She looked at him as if he was mad.

‘What if Jaime comes back with a German patrol?’

‘Mais non,’ said Thierry.

‘Jaime?’ said Lisette. ‘Never. He hates Germans.’

Hugues’ face was pink and nervous. ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘How does anyone know? The Germans arrived at the drop site within half an hour. Someone betrayed us-’

‘I told you what happened,’ said Lisette. ‘Now for God’s sake -’

‘Outside,’ said Hugues.

Something happened to Lisette’s face. ‘Non,’ she said. ‘Non, non, non, non. I am staying.’

‘And I also,’ said Thierry, his big face the colour of lard under the straw hat.

‘Women,’ said Hugues.

‘I am not women! snapped Lisette. ‘I am someone who knows Jaime. And trusts him.’

‘Ah, ça!’ said Hugues. ‘Well-’

‘But perhaps you trust your friends more,’ said Lisette.

And when Hugues looked round, he saw that where Mallory, Miller and Andrea had been standing were only wet footprints.

Out in the woods Miller lay and shivered in a pile of sodden pine needles, and thought longingly of the warm firelight in the barn. He had watched Hugues storm out, heard the slam of the door. Then nothing, except the icy drip of rainwater on his neck, and the mouldy smell of pine needles under his nose.

After half an hour, the rain stopped. There was silence, with dripping. And behind the dripping, the wheeze and clatter of an engine. Some sort of truck came round the corner, no lights. Miller sighted his Schmeisser on its cab. Three men got out. As far as Miller could see, the truck was small, and not German.

A voice said, ‘L’Amiral Beaufort!’

Another voice said, ‘Vive la France!’

The barn door opened and closed.

Mallory saw Hugues come out of the bush in which he had been hiding, and walk across to the barn. Hugues knew these men, it appeared. That was Hugues’ area of speciality. So Mallory got up himself, and went in.

The men Jaime had brought wore sweeping moustaches and huge berets that flopped down over their eyes. They carried shotguns. Two of them were talking to Hugues in rapid French. Mallory thought they looked a damned sight too pleased with themselves.

‘There are no Germans in the village,’ said Jaime. ‘But there is a small problem. It seems that Jules has had an accident. A fatal accident, they tell me. He was shot at Jonzère, last night.’

Mallory stared at him. ‘How?’ he said.

‘A matter of too much enthusiasm,’ said Jaime.

Hugues ceased his conversation and turned to Mallory. He said, ‘Or to tell the truth, a mess.’

Jaime shrugged. He said, The résistants heard we had landed. There was an idea that we were a regiment, maybe more, because there were only two survivors from the German patrol in the gorge. So Jules heard all this and went to Jonzère to stop these hotheads getting themselves killed. But he was too late. They were firing on the Germans, and the Germans were firing back, and they got themselves killed, all right. And Jules got himself killed with them.’

Hugues blew air, expressing scorn. ‘It is not as it is in the north. These mountain people have too many feelings and too few brains.’

It was Jules who had known the man who knew where the Werwolf pack were being repaired. Without Jules, the chain was broken.

Mallory said, with a mildness he did not feel, ‘So how are we to continue with the operation?’

‘Ah,’ said Jaime. ‘Marcel has a surprise for you, in Colbis.’ He did not look as if he approved of surprises.

‘Marcel the baker?’ said Hugues.

‘That’s the one.’

Hugues nodded approvingly. ‘A good man,’ he said.

Mallory had the feeling that he was sitting in on gossip about people he did not know. He said, ‘I need information about the Werwolf pack, not bread.’

‘Voilà,’ said Jaime. ‘Marcel proposes breakfast in the … in his café. Then he will provide you with transport to where it is you wish to go. He has another Englishman there, you will be glad to hear, who may have information.’

May, thought Mallory. Only may. He took a deep, resigned breath.

‘Oh, good,’ said Miller, edging towards the fire. ‘And the dancing girls?’

‘You may find some dancing girls.’

‘Breakfast would be fine,’ said Miller.

Mallory beckoned Jaime over. The men with the berets followed him as if glued to his side. ‘Why are there no Germans in the village?’

One of the men with the berets grinned, and spoke quickly. Jaime translated. ‘Because they are all in Jonzère. First, fighting. Now, trying to catch some bandits before they arrive in Spain.’ There was more talk in a language that was not French. Basque, Mallory guessed. ‘This man says there has been a battle. Many Germans have been killed. There may be reprisals. It is said there was an Allied army in the mountains. In the next valley.’

Mallory raised his eyebrows. ‘An army,’ he said. From regiment to army, in the space of three minutes.

‘Yes,’ said Jaime, solemn-faced in the dim light of the torch. ‘And they say it is lucky that we were not involved, being so few, and one of us a woman.’

Mallory looked at Jaime hard. Was that the ghost of a wink? Andrea’s face was impassive. He had seen it too. His great head moved, almost imperceptibly. Nodding. Suddenly, Mallory found himself perilously close to trusting Jaime.

Mallory hardened his heart. ‘Now you listen,’ he said. ‘I am grateful for your offers of hospitality. But I don’t want to go into the village, breakfast or no breakfast. I want our transport out here, and I want to get up to the coast. The more time we spend in the mountains, the messier it’s going to get, the bigger the rumours. We want to do this quick and quiet. I don’t like rumours and reprisals, or battles. I want intelligence, and I want transport, and I want them before daylight. Tell these people to tell Marcel.’

Jaime said, ‘I don’t know-’

Mallory said, ‘And make it snappy.’

Jaime looked at the steady burn of the deeply-sunken eyes over the long, unshaven jaw. Jaime thought of the cliff that nobody could climb, that this man had climbed; of three burned-out lorries in the pass; and the pursuit on a wild goose chase towards the Spanish border. This was not a man it was easy to disobey. Perhaps he had underestimated this man.

‘Bon,’ he said.

‘And now,’ said Mallory, when the men in berets had gone outside, Thierry. Time to tell the folks at home we’ve arrived.’

Thierry nodded. He looked big and pale and exhausted. His head moved slowly, as if his neck was stiff, the big jowls creasing and uncreasing, stray strands of straw waving jauntily over the burst crown of his hat. He began to unpack the radio. Miller was in a corner, stretched out full-length on the straw, humming a Bix Beiderbecke tune. Andrea was relaxed, but close to a knothole in the door, through which he could keep tabs on the sentries. Mallory leaned his head against the wall. He could feel his clothes beginning to steam in the heat from the fire.

He said to Hugues, quietly, ‘What do you know about this Marcel?’

‘Jules’ second-in-command,’ said Hugues. ‘It is an odd structure, down here. Security is terrible. But they are brave men.’

‘And we trust them?’

Hugues smiled. He said, ‘Is there any choice?’

Mallory kept hearing Jensen’s voice. It seems quite possible that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for you.

Damn you, Jensen. What did you know that you did not tell us?

It was raining again, a steady rattle on the roof of the barn. On the mountain it would be snowing on their tracks. Perhaps their tracks would be comprehensively covered, and the Germans would not be waiting for them. Perhaps they would be lucky.

But Mallory did not believe in luck.

Thierry said, ‘Contact made and acknowledged.’

‘Messages?’

‘No messages.’

Mallory closed his eyes. Sleep lapped at him. Despite the fire he was cold. Two hours later, he was going to remember being cold; remember it with nostalgic affection. For the moment, he lay and shivered, dozing.

Then he was awake.

A lorry engine was running outside. He gripped his Schmeisser and rose to his feet, instantly alert. He could see Miller covering the door. Andrea was gone. What -

The door crashed open. A man was standing there. He was short and fat, with a beret the size of a dinner plate, and a moustache that spread beyond it like the wings of a crow. His small black eyes flicked between the Schmeisser barrels covering him. He grinned broadly. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Colbis welcomes its allies from beyond the seas. Allons, l’Amiral Beaufort.’

Mallory said, ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Marcel,’ said the man. ‘I am delighted to see you. I am only sorry that you had some little problems last night, of which I have already heard.’ He bowed. ‘My congratulations. Now, into the lorry. It will soon be light, and there are many eyes connected to many tongues.’

Outside, a steady rain was falling. In the grey half-light black pines rose up the steep hillside into a layer of dirty-grey cloud. The lorry was an old Citroën, converted to wood-gas, panting and fuming in the yard. ‘Messieurs,’ said Marcel. ‘Dispose yourselves.’

Mallory closed the Storm Force into the canvas back of the lorry, and climbed into the front. Marcel ground the gears, and started to jounce down a narrow track that snaked through the dripping trees. ‘Quite a fuss,’ said Marcel. ‘The Germans have met an army of maquisards, it is said. Oh, very good -’

Mallory said, ‘I am looking for three submarines.’

‘Naturally,’ said Marcel. ‘And I know a man who will take you to them. We must meet him now. At breakfast.’

‘A man?’

‘Wait and see,’ said Marcel, hauling the lorry round a pig in the road.

The trees had stopped. They were crossing open meadows scattered with small, earth-coloured cottages. Ahead was a huddle of houses, and the arched campanile of a church. Nothing was moving; it was four-thirty in the morning. But Mallory did not like it.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Breakfast, of course. In the village.’

‘Not the village.’ Villages were rat-traps. In the past eight hours, Mallory had had enough rat-traps for a lifetime.

Marcel said, ‘There are no Germans in Colbis. No collaborators. It is important that we go into the village. To see this person.’

‘Who is this person?’

‘As I say,’ said Marcel, with a winsome smile, ‘this will be a surprise.’

Mallory told himself that there was no future in getting angry. He said, ‘Excuse me, but there is very little time. I do not wish to commit myself to a position from which there is no retreat.’

Marcel looked at him. Above the jolly cheeks, the eyes were hard and knowing: the eyes of a lieutenant whose commanding officer had been killed in the night. Mallory began to feel better. Marcel said, ‘This person you must meet cannot be moved. Believe me.’

Mallory gave up. He pulled his SS helmet over his eyes, checked the magazine of his Schmeisser, and leaned back in the seat. Slowly the lorry wheezed out of the meadows and wound its way through streets designed for pack-mules into the centre of Colbis.

There was a square, flanked on its south side by the long wall of the church. In the middle were two plane trees in which roosting chickens clucked drowsily. There was a mairie, and a line of what must have been shops: butcher’s, baker’s, ironmonger’s. And on the corner, a row of tall windows streaming with rain, with a signboard above them bearing the faded inscription Café Des Sports.

“Ere we are,’ said Marcel, cheerfully. “Op out.’

Boots clattered on the wet cobbles. The etched-glass windows of the café reflected the group of civilians and the three Waffen-SS with heavy packs and Schmeissers; the civilians might have been prisoners. It was a sight to cause twitched-aside curtains to drop over windows - not that there was any visible twitching. The German forces of Occupation in the frontier zone were remarkably acute about twitched curtains.

Grinning and puffing, Marcel hustled his charges into the café, and shepherded them up through the beaded fringe covering the mouth of a staircase behind the bar. Miller’s nostrils dilated. He said, ‘Coffee. Real coffee.’

‘Comes from Spain,’ said Marcel. ‘With the senoritas and the oranges. Particularly the senoritas. Come up, now.’

Miller went up the stairs. Mallory was behind him. Miller stopped, dead. Mallory’s finger moved to the trigger of his Schmeisser. At the top of the stairs was a large landing overlooking the square. The landing had sofas and chairs. Too many doors opened off it. It smelt of stale scent and unwashed bodies.

Miller said, ‘It’s a cathouse.’

Mallory said, ‘So you will feel completely at home.’

They had been walking most of the night. Mallory was soaking wet and shivering. His hands felt raw, his feet rubbed and blistered inside the jackboots. He wanted to find the objective of the operation, and carry the operation out while there was still an operation to carry out.

And instead, they were attending a breakfast party in a brothel.

‘Village this size?’ said Miller. ‘With a cathouse?’

It should have meant something. But the smell of the coffee had blunted Mallory’s perceptions. All he knew was that he had to get hold of some, or die.

It was light outside, cold and grey. But inside on the sideboard there was coffee, and bread, and goat’s cheese, and a thin, fiery brandy for those who wanted it. Mallory drank a cup of coffee. He said to Marcel, ‘You said there was someone here.’

Marcel nodded. ‘He will be sleeping. Another croissant? I make them my own self.’

‘We’ll wake him.’

Marcel shrugged, and opened one of the doors off the landing.

The smell of sweat and perfume intensified. It was a bedroom, decorated in dirty pink satin. On the bed was a man in khaki uniform, lying on his back like a crusader on a tomb. Bandages showed through the unbuttoned waistband of his battledress blouse: bandages with rusty stains. On the chair beside the bed was a beret bearing the winged-hatchet badge of the SAS.

Mallory glanced at the pips on the epaulette. He said, ‘Morning, Lieutenant.’

The man on the bed stirred and moaned. His eyes half-opened. They focused on Mallory. They saw a man in a coal-scuttle helmet and a Waffen-SS smock, carrying a Schmeisser.

‘Hiding up in a brothel,’ said Mallory. ‘All right for some.’

The man’s hand crawled towards his pillow. Mallory’s hand beat him to it. His fingers closed on metal. He came out with the Browning automatic. ‘Relax,’ said Mallory.

The Lieutenant glared at him with berserk blue eyes. His face was white, with grey shadows. Pain. He was badly wounded. ‘SOE,’ said Mallory. ‘We’ve come to bail you out.’ Inwardly, his heart was sinking. This would be one of Killigrew’s men. One of the gung-ho shoot-em-up boys who had been dropped and got themselves lost. Who had probably compromised the operation already. Things were in a bad enough mess without a wounded SAS man to slow them down. A badly wounded SAS man, by the look of him. Perhaps he could be smuggled over the border into Spain.

‘How do I know that?’ said the Lieutenant.

‘Admiral Beaufort will tell you,’ said Mallory. ‘So did a little man called Captain Killigrew.’ He opened the buttons of the SS smock. ‘And this is British battledress. Seemed tactless to wear it on the outside, somehow.’

‘Who told you I was here? Marcel-’

‘Marcel was very discreet,’ said Mallory, soothingly.

Slowly, the blue eyes lost their berserk glare. The wariness remained. ‘Killigrew,’ he said. ‘Yes. When did you get in?’

‘Albemarle, last night,’ said Mallory. There was no time for chitchat. ‘I need to know what happened to you.’

‘Landed on a bit of a plateau … near here,’ said the SAS man. He obviously wanted to give as little away as possible. ‘Brought a Jeep.’ A Jeep, thought Mallory. A full-size actual Jeep. On parachutes. Amazing. But that was the SAS for you. ‘Heading for the coast. Ambushed. Other chaps bought it. I took a bang on the head and a bullet in the guts.’

Mallory said, ‘How did it happen?’

‘Driving down a track,’ said the SAS man. ‘Next thing we knew, there were two Spandaus. One either side of the road. Don’t remember much after that. The Resistance brought me here.’ There was a shake in his voice. He was very young.

‘So it was a road block?’ said Mallory.

‘Not much of one.’

Mallory nodded. Give me strength, he thought. Conning your way through a checkpoint behind enemy lines, SAS style. Two grenades and put your foot down. ‘Where were you going on the coast?’

‘Doesn’t really matter,’ said the Lieutenant. This was his first operation. It was just like school, on the Rugby XV. You went for it, and sod the consequences. Your own team tactics were your own team tactics, and you kept them to yourself. The only thing different about war was this damned bullet. He did not let his mind stray too close to the bullet, in case the pain made him sick again. It felt the size of a cricket ball, down there. And it hurt. Was hurting worse, lately … He concentrated on his dislike for this old man in the Waffen-SS uniform who had burst in and dropped a few names, and thought that gave him a license to pump him, take over the operation, grab the glory. Let him find out for himself.

The old man’s face was close to his. It had a broad forehead and very young brown eyes; eyes like old Brutus, who taught Latin at Shrewsbury and climbed Alps in the summer hols. The eyes seemed to remove the Lieutenant’s reserve the way a tin- opener would take the lid off a tin. The old man said, ‘Where were you going and who were you going to see?’

The Lieutenant summoned up his undoubted toughness. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

The eyes hardened. The old man said, ‘Don’t be childish. There’s very little time.’

The Lieutenant gritted his teeth. He desperately wanted to tell someone. It would be less lonely, for one thing, and he was really, terrifyingly, lonely. But a secret was a secret. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t … I’m not authorised.’

Mallory allowed his eyes to rest on this lieutenant. He really was absurdly young. His was the berserker’s bravery, frenzied and unbending. If the Gestapo got their hands on him, he would break like a twig.

Mallory sighed inwardly. He got up, opened the door and put his head out. There seemed to be a party going on. He said, ‘Andrea.’

The huge Greek padded across from his seat overlooking the square. His shoulders seemed to blot out the light in the little room. Mallory said, ‘If you won’t tell me, tell the Colonel.’

The SAS man frowned. He saw no colonel. He saw an unshaven giant with a huge moustache. He saw a pair of black eyes, eyes like the eyes on a Byzantine icon, that understood everything, forgave everything. ‘Colonel?’ he said.

‘Andrea is a full colonel in the Greek army.’

‘How do I know that’s not another bloody lie?’

Andrea sat down in the pink plush armchair. Suddenly the SAS man felt weak, and ill, and about fourteen years old. ‘You are frightened,’ said Andrea.

‘I bloody well am not,’ said the Lieutenant. But even as Andrea spoke, he could feel it draining away, all the team spirit, the gung ho, war-as-a-game-of-rugby. He saw himself as he was: a wounded kid who would die in a dirty little room, alone.

‘Not of dying,’ said Andrea. ‘But of yourself, of failing. I also am frightened, all the time. So it is not possible to let myself fail.’

He did not sound like any colonel the Lieutenant had ever heard. He sounded like a man of warmth and common sense, like a friend. Careful, said a voice in the Lieutenant’s head. But it was a small voice, fading fast.

Andrea’s eyes alighted on a crude wooden crutch, a section of pole with a pad whittled roughly to the shape of an armpit. ‘Yours?’ he said.

‘I’m going to use it,’ said the SAS man. ‘I can get around all right.’ It was not altogether a lie. He could move. It was just that when he moved, he could feel that bit of metal in his guts twisting, doing him damage. But that was not the point. The point was fighting a war. ‘Couple of days,’ he said. ‘Get into the hills.’

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ said Andrea, tactfully. This boy and his crutch would not last an hour in the mountains. He could see it in his face. ‘We will take you with us,’ said Andrea. ‘And you and I, and Miller and Mallory, will finish this operation.’

The Lieutenant’s eyes moved back to the first man, the thin one. ‘Mallory?’ he said. He saw newspaper front pages pinned to the board behind the fives courts. On the front pages were pictures of this man, with a pyramid of snow-covered rock in the background. That Mallory. He came to a decision. He said, ‘Jules told me. Guy Jamalartégui. At the Café de L’Océan in St-Jean-de-Luz. We would have told you. But … there’s been a lot of German activity. Radio silence, except in emergency. Jerry’s very quick.’

Mallory nodded. Radio detector vans would not be the only reason. The SAS liked to keep their intelligence to themselves, particularly when it was information that might help Jensen and SOE.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’ Sounds of revelry were percolating through the door. ‘Now. Can I get you some breakfast?’

Once the shock had worn off. Miller had almost started to enjoy himself. The coffee was undoubtedly coffee, and the bread was still warm from the oven, and while he was not a goat cheese enthusiast, in his present frame of mind he would have cheerfully eaten the goat, horns and all. And by the time he had finished eating, there had been stirrings behind some of the doors. At the Cognac stage, his glass had been filled by a dark girl in a red silk nightdress, and Miller was beginning to be reminded that while occupied France might be occupied, it was still France.

He lay back in his chair, and listened to the rattle of French and Basque from the maquisards, and sipped his Cognac. A corner of his mind was on the girl in the red nightdress. But most of it was out there in the square, patrolling the darkness under the trees and in the corners. Soon the village’s eyes would start opening and its tongues would start wagging. It was time they were out of here. The girl in the red nightdress ran her fingers through his crewcut. Miller grinned, a lazy grin that to anyone who did not know him would have looked completely relaxed. Which in a way, he was. Because Mallory thought it was okay to be here. So it was okay. In a life that had contained about ten times more incidents than the average citizen’s, Miller had never met a man he trusted more than the New Zealander.

He was not so sure about the Frenchmen. Jaime was sitting in a corner, coffee cup between his hands. Jaime seemed at least to know his way around. Now he was watching Hugues, who was fussing round Lisette. A lifetime spent in places where personality carried more weight than law had made Miller acutely sensitive to the way people got along. Miller had the distinct feeling that Jaime did not have a lot of time for Hugues.

Miller had his own doubts about Hugues. Sure, he knew his way round the Resistance. But he was an excitable guy. Lotta fuss that guy makes, thought Miller. And a lotta noise, too much noise. Lisette, now. They were stuck with Lisette. She was slow; she carried too much weight. But she was one tough cookie -

Jesus.

Lisette had been removing her outer clothing. She had been wearing an overcoat, two shawls, and a couple of peasant smocks of some kind. They had made her look like a football on legs. Dressed up like that, she had bicycled up a steep valley road without lights, climbed a vertical cliff and force-marched fifteen precipitous miles without sleep.

What dropped Miller’s jaw on his chest was not what she had done. It was the fact that she was just about the same shape without the winter clothes as with them. Face it, thought Miller. If you were Hugues, and Lisette was your girl, you would maybe feel a tad over-protective yourself.

Because the reason Lisette looked like a gasometer on legs was that she was at least eight months pregnant.

Somewhere a telephone rang, the tenuous ring of a hand-cranked exchange. Down the hall someone answered it, and started shouting in frantic Basque. Miller became suddenly completely immobile, listening. The voices had stopped. Cocks were crowing. Otherwise there was silence.

But behind the silence were engines. Lorry engines, a lot of them.

In the French frontier zone at this particular time in history, there was only one group of people who had a lot of lorries, and the fuel to run them.

Miller grabbed his Schmeisser and yanked the cocking lever. The girl in the red nightdress seemed suddenly to have vanished. Marcel the baker was standing up, smiling from a face suddenly grey and wooden. The engines were in the square now: four trucks with canvas backs. The trucks stopped. Soldiers were pouring out of the backs, soldiers with coal-scuttle helmets and field-grey uniforms, their jackboots grinding the wet cobbles of the square.

A staff car rolled into the square. A tall, black-uniformed officer got out, said something, and pointed at Marcel’s lorry. Two soldiers bayoneted the tyres. The lorry settled on its rims.

As Mallory put his head out of the SAS man’s door, Andrea’s hand went out and grabbed Marcel by the shoulder. Marcel was a big man, but Andrea held him at arm’s length with his feet off the ground. He said, ‘What are these troops doing here?’

Marcel’s face was a mask of horror. ‘I don’t know … I was assured …’

In Mallory’s mind, gears rolled smoothly and a conclusion formed. ‘It’s an SS brothel,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

Marcel’s face turned a dull, embarrassed purple. ‘It is a cover,’ he said. ‘A good cover. Now, gentlemen …’

Andrea dropped him. Marcel rubbed his shoulder. He said, ‘Follow me, please.’ His voice was calm and urbane: the voice of the perfect host. Already the girls had cleared away the traces of the breakfast. He pointed into the SAS man’s room. One of the girls was holding open the door of the wardrobe. The wardrobe had no back. Instead, a flight of steps led down into darkness.

Mallory trusted Marcel. But someone had betrayed them.

Who?

Andrea went to help the SAS man off the bed. The SAS man pushed him away, reached for his makeshift wooden crutch and hauled himself moaning to his feet. As Miller brought up the rear, he could hear the battering of rifle butts on the cafe’s front door.

More rats in more traps, he thought. And all for a cup of coffee and a girl in a red nightdress.

Maybe the coffee had been worth it, at that.

The back of the wardrobe slammed behind them. They went downstairs and out into a small yard, wet and empty under the sky. At the back of the yard was a shed, the lintel of its door blackened by smoke. There was a powerful smell of baking bread.

From over the wall came guttural shouts, and the barking of dogs. ‘Vite,’ said Marcel, shooing them into the shed.

The shed was a bakehouse. There were two bread ovens. The one on the left was shut. The one on the right was open. In front of the oven door was a big stone slab. On the slab lay a metal tray, six feet long by four feet wide. A small, one-eyed man in a dirty apron did not even glance at them. ‘On the tray,’ said Marcel. ‘Two at a time.’

‘Where are the others?’ said Mallory.

‘In the brothel. They speak French, bien entendu. Their papers are good. Vite.’

Miller jumped up onto the tray, and lay with his boxes on the big wooden paddle. Mallory climbed up beside him. ‘When the tray stops, roll off,’ said Marcel. ‘Cover your faces.’

Mallory could hear German voices. A trap, he thought. Another, smaller trap. After this trap, absolutely no more -

He was lying on the tray with his pack on his stomach. He covered his face with his hands. Someone shoved the paddle. A ferocious heat beat on the backs of his hands. He thought of the parabolic brick roof of the oven, smelt burning hair. The ammunition, he thought.

But the heat was gone, and they were shuffling off the paddle and onto a stone surface that was merely warm. Mallory raised his head. It was dark, black as ink. After six inches his forehead hit the roof. There seemed to be air circulating.

The tray returned, bearing Andrea and the SAS man. The SAS man was breathing hard and tremulous as Andrea shoved him off the tray. Somewhere, stones grated. That’s it, thought Miller. You’ve got your bread oven, circular, made out of bricks. And there’s a little door in the back of it, and we’ve been pushed through, and now they’ve closed the door -

Scraping noises emanated from the oven.

- and now they are going to bake a little bread.

He tried to raise his head, to see where the air was coming from. He hit the ceiling. Eighteen inches high, he thought. And nothing to see. Buried alive.

He put out his hand, touched his brass-bound boxes. On the way, his hand touched Mallory’s arm.

The arm was rigid, vibrating with what must have been fear.

No. Not Mallory. Mallory was cool as ice. Mallory had scaled the South Cliff at Navarone, when Miller had been mewing with terror at its base.

All right, thought Miller. But down in the middle of every human being there is a place kept locked tight, and in that place lives the beast a person fears most. But sometimes the locks go, and the beast is out, raging in the mind, taking over all its corners.

Mallory’s beast was confined spaces.

Dusty Miller stared at the invisible ceiling six inches above his nose, and listened to the sounds coming through the brick wall of the oven. There was a brisk crackling, and a sharp whiff of smoke. They had lit a fire in there, to heat the oven for the next batch of baking. How long do we have to stay in here? he thought. What if Mallory can’t take it?

He began to sing. He sang softly, ‘Falling in loaf with loaf is like falling for make-believe-’

‘Shut up,’ hissed the SAS man.

This is not well bread of you,’ said Miller.

‘For Christ’s sake-’

‘I’m oven a lovely time,’ said Miller. ‘And you’re baking the spell-’

Mallory knew it was the torpedoing all over again: the little metal room with four men jammed together, the thunder of the terrible blue Mediterranean pouring into the hull, four faces in six inches of air under the steel ceiling, the air bad, hot, unbreathable - and Mallory was going to die, of suffocation, certainly, but first of terror …

Someone seemed to be talking. Talking complete drivel, in a soft Chicago drawl. Beyond the drawl, far away, there were other voices. German voices.

Miller.

The terror went. Mallory found himself thinking that there were worse things than small spaces. Dusty Miller’s puns, for instance.

Miller felt Mallory’s hand prod him sharply in the side. He shut up. Mission accomplished.

Suddenly a dog was barking close at hand. Much closer than the far side of the fire in the oven. The compartment where the four men were hiding filled with the scritch of claws on stone. The air holes, thought Miller. There must be air holes, and the goddamn dog’s smelt us through them.

They lay looking up at the ceiling they could not see, in the dark that was full of the clamour of the dog. The little cell behind the oven grew steadily hotter. They began to sweat.

At the front of the ovens, Marcel was sweating too. His apron was smeared with flour and the ash of the bracken stalks he used to fire the oven. But he was not thinking about baking. He was looking at the SS officer who was leaning against the doorpost, slapping the barrel of his Luger into the palm of his black leather glove. The SS officer was smiling with great warmth, but his stone-grey eyes were the coldest thing Marcel had ever seen. ‘Where are they?’ said the officer.

‘Pardon?’ The yard was full of soldiers. A dog-handler came through, dragged by an Alsatian on a choke-chain. The Alsatian’s tongue was hanging out, and it was panting eagerly.

The officer said, with patient friendliness, ‘The dog has come from the brothel above the café. It is following the scent of someone who was sitting in one of the chairs in the brothel. The scent leads straight to your oven. Why do you think this would be?’

The oven was burning well now. Smoke was pouring out of the door, crawling along the ceiling of the shed and billowing up at the rainy sky above the yard. Marcel pointed into the oven door at the incandescent glow of the burning bracken. ‘What are these imaginary people?’ he said. ‘Salamanders?’

The smile did not waver. The SS man said, mildly, ‘If these people are imaginary, why would the dog be so interested?’

‘A mystery.’

The SS man said, ‘I have the strong impression that there are people in this village who have no business here.’

Marcel said, “What gives you this impression?’

The SS man smiled, but did not answer. His eyes slid over the bakehouse. He said, ‘And what is inside the other oven?’

Marcel yawned. ‘Who knows?’

‘It is in my mind,’ said the SS man, fingering his long, Aryan chin, ‘to pull this oven to pieces.’

‘Non,’ said Marcel, his eyes discs of horror. ‘My livelihood. Georges. In the oven. What is in the oven, in the name of God? Tell this gentleman.’

‘Pains Flavigny,’ said the one-eyed man.

‘Ah!’ said Marcel, his face cracking into a large grin. ‘Voilà!’

‘Bitte?’

‘Georges is from Alsace,’ said Marcel. ‘So he bakes from time to time pains Flavigny, whose vital ingredient is aniseed, beloved of dogs. They do not sell so well, of course. But you know how it is. One must keep the staff happy. It is so hard, in a war, to find-’

The SS man allowed the barrel of his pistol to swing gently towards Georges. ‘Open the oven,’ he said.

‘But the pains-’

‘Open it.’

‘They will be destroyed.’

The officer’s finger moved onto the trigger. Georges shrugged. He said, ‘It is a crime. But if you insist.’ He flicked up the catch on the door and shoved in a small wooden paddle. When he brought it out there was a cake on the end, round and brown. ‘Not yet cooked,’ he said. ‘See, nom d’un nom. Sacrilege. Ruin. It is sinking. They will all be sinking.’

The SS officer took the cake and crumbled it in his glove. The dog jumped up, lathering his hand with its tongue. He kicked it in the stomach with his jackboot. It shrank away, yelping. Delicately, he sniffed the crumbs. They smelt powerfully of aniseed. ‘Excellent,’ he said, still smiling. He turned, and walked out into the yard. ‘The dogs have led us astray, I fear. But there are other methods of arriving at the truth.’

Marcel had followed, wiping his hands on his apron. ‘Pardon, monsieur?’

‘Your countrymen have been very stupid,’ said the SS man. ‘Stupid as pigs. There are rules. We both know that. Rules have been broken. In Jonzère last night, there was fighting, with deaths. You people must learn that laws are to be obeyed. I fear you will find the lesson painful.’ The smile. Marcel stood smiling uncertainly back, his insides congealed with terror, watching the icy eyes. ‘There is a way of making it less painful. There are British agents in this village,’ said the SS man. ‘When I find them, I will leave.’ He walked through the baker’s shop, and into the square, and rested a negligent hand on the tonneau of the staff car. ‘Feldwebel!’

A sergeant crashed to attention.

‘Knock on the door of each house in this square,’ he said. ‘Politely. Whoever answers the door, bring them out into the square, and request them to stand …’ the cold eyes checked, then settled on the long, blank north wall of the church, ‘against that wall. While you are doing that, I want a Spandau set up under the trees.’

Marcel’s face had turned as white as his flour. He said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Fighting a war,’ said the officer. ‘When we have these people out here, we shall shoot one every ten minutes until I am told the truth. Your bread will be burning, baker.’ He smiled. ‘You had better go.’

THREE

Monday 0900-1900

Miller had been with the Long Range Desert Force, so he had been hot all right. But nothing on the parched ergs or the wind-blasted scarps of the Sahara had prepared him for the heat behind that bread oven.

He kept talking. He could feel that Mallory needed to be talked to. It was not easy to talk while being cooked, but it must, he thought, be a lot easier to talk while you were only hot than while you were hot and in a state of flat panic. Andrea talked too, reminiscing in a low rumble about the cave in Crete where he and Mallory had resided. And all the time the heat grew, hotter and hotter, searing the skin. There were smells, too: wood smoke and baking smells, with over it all another baking smell that Miller recognised but did not want to mention. It was the smell of confectioner’s almonds; the smell of gelignite cooking in its box.

There was a consolation, thought Miller. A small one. If the gelignite set off the Cyclonite, it was going to take some Germans with it. Not to mention the village of Colbis, and a fair-sized chunk of the northern Pyrenees -

A new sound floated through the wall: a harsh judder, dulled by layers of stone. The sound of a machine gun.

Mallory knew he had won. He had beaten his glands, or whatever it was that weakened the knees and liquefied the guts. The machine gun had taken him into the outside world. He was thinking ahead now. ‘We’re going to need transport to St-Jean-de-Luz.’

‘Transport?’

‘It’s thirty miles by road. The submarines sail the day after tomorrow, at noon. It’s too tight to march.’

‘Bicycles?’

There was a silence. They were all thinking the same: a pregnant woman and an SAS man with a bullet in the guts were no good on bicycles. A ruthless man who wanted to move fast would leave such impediments behind. Mallory did not know if he was that ruthless. Luckily, there was no chance of his being tested. The SAS man and Lisette knew too much to be allowed to fall into enemy hands.

Like it or not, they were along for the ride.

The SAS man had been lying very still, conserving energy in the heat, listening to the three men talking. Chattering was for girls and wimps and other classes of humanity despised by the SAS. Now he said, ‘There’s a Jeep.’

A Jeep. Presumably with Union Jacks all over it, two-way radios, heavy machine guns, mobile cocktail bar and sun lounge. You could not beat the SAS. Not unless you were the enemy.

‘Well, well,’ said Miller. ‘This is excellent news.’

Mallory said, ‘Where?’

‘In the barn at the back of the bakery. It’s the Jeep they dropped with us. Under the bracken. Marcel told me they brought it in.’

Mallory said, ‘Thank you, er …’

‘Wallace.’ Miller was surprised to feel a hand reach across him. He shook it. It shook his back. So that’s all right, he thought. We’ve been introduced, and now he’s lending us his car. And we’re walled up in an oven, cooking.

Goddamn limeys.

There was a new sound outside: a voice, at one of the air holes. Marcel’s voice. ‘You must come out,’ said the voice.

‘We’ll take the Jeep.’

‘Yes.’ The voice sounded strained. ‘You must go away from here. You know where. Your comrades are by the barn. Go soon.’

‘Just open the door.’

‘Yes.’

A pause. There were movements, felt in the walls rather than heard. Someone was raking the fuel out of the oven. The door separating them from the oven opened, admitting a scorching blast of air. ‘Tray coming in,’ said Marcel’s voice.

Afterwards, Mallory could not remember how they got out. There was a hellish blast of heat, and a smell of burning hair, and then they were standing in the bakehouse, surrounded by large, beautiful volumes of space.

‘The barn,’ said Marcel. He looked suddenly thinner, and his face was a bad greyish colour. ‘Follow me.’

Andrea gave Wallace his shoulder. They went into the yard and through a green door. The barn was half-full of bundles of dry bracken stalks. ‘Allons,’ said Marcel, and began tearing with more frenzy than effect at the faggots on the right-hand side. ‘Here.’

They began pulling the bundles away. After a couple of minutes the rear bumper of a vehicle emerged from the bracken.

‘Hey,’ said Miller. ‘SAS, we love you.’

The vehicle was a Jeep, but not just any Jeep. There was no cocktail bar, and no sun lounge, but they were about the only amenities missing. Mounted in the rear were a pair of Brownings. There was another pair mounted on the hood in front of the passenger seat. The ammunition belts were still in place.

‘Here are the other passengers now,’ said Marcel. ‘They have been in bed. Perhaps sleeping, perhaps not.’ He made a sound that might have been a laugh.

Thierry, Hugues and Jaime lurched into the barn. Thierry’s hat had a slept-in look. Hugues’ eyes were snapping, and he was chewing his lips. He said, ‘Where is Lisette?’

There was a spreading of hands and a shrugging of shoulders. Jaime said, ‘She is tired. Sleeping. It is best we leave.’ His face was grim. ‘She has good false papers. She will be safe there.’

Perhaps he was right, thought Mallory. He had better be. There was no time to dig her out wherever she was resting. It was a hitch, but not a setback.

Hugues said, ‘Non, merde-’

‘Jaime is right,’ said Marcel. Another burst of Spandau fire sounded from the square. He looked as if he was going to cry. He said, ‘Please. Be quick. Someone will talk.’

‘Talk?’

‘They are shooting people. One every ten minutes.’ His face collapsed. He put his hands to his eyes.

Hugues said, ‘For God’s sake, be a man.’

Marcel looked at him vacantly. His cheeks were wet with tears. He said, ‘The first person they shot was my mother.’

Hugues went red as blood, then pale.

‘God rest her soul,’ mumbled Andrea.

Mallory said, ‘She has died that others may live. We thank you for her great courage. And yours.’

Marcel met his eye firmly. He said, ‘Vive la France.’ He took a deep breath. ‘For her sake, I ask that you complete your mission.’

‘It will be done.’

He shook Mallory’s hand. Andrea put his great paw on his shoulder.

Hugues said, ‘I leave Lisette in your care.’

‘I am honoured,’ said Marcel. ‘Now you must go. Then I can make them stop.’

‘How?’

‘I will tell the girls to say they saw you.’

‘The girls?’

‘They are friends with some of the Germans. The Germans who come to this brothel. That is why they leave us alone. Used to leave us alone. The Germans will not hurt the girls.’

Mallory said, ‘How do we get out?’

‘Drive ahead,’ said Marcel. ‘The entry is beyond the bracken.’

Hugues said, ‘I must say goodbye to Lisette.’

‘You must go,’ said Marcel. ‘Please.’ He rummaged in a crate, came back with four bottles of Cognac. ‘Take these. Go.’

‘Non,’ said Hugues, his voice rising. ‘The child-’

He did not finish what he was going to say because Andrea had reached out a crane-hook hand and gripped his shoulder. Andrea said, ‘Like this brave Marcel, you are a soldier,’ and pushed him into the back of the Jeep.

Hugues said, shamefaced, ‘Tell her I love her.’

Marcel nodded dumbly.

‘Miller,’ said Mallory. ‘Drive on.’

‘By the square?’

Mallory turned upon him his cool brown eyes. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

The Jeep’s engine started first time. They lifted Wallace into the back and climbed aboard as best they could. The engine sounded very loud in the confined space. It would sound very loud in the village, too; there were no other engines running in Colbis.

Miller slammed the Jeep into four-wheel drive. The engine howled as he stamped on the throttle. He let out the clutch. The Jeep plunged into the dried bracken, and kept on plunging. The brittle fronds piled up against the windscreen and spilled into the back. Miller saw daylight, and aimed for it. Covered in a haystack mound of bracken, the Jeep shot out of the barn doorway and into the lane, turned on two wheels, and turned right again. At the end of the lane was a slice of the square, with plane trees. In the slice of square, three SS men were crouched round a Spandau. ‘Civilians keep down,’ said Mallory, cocking the Brownings on the bonnet and flicking off the safety catches. ‘Open fire.’

The Spandau gunners did not enjoy shooting innocent civilians. It was, frankly, a disagreeable duty, only marginally better than cleaning latrines. But Befehl ist Befehl. Orders are orders.

They were sitting there, ignoring the two clusters of bloody pockmarks on the church wall above the crumpled bodies of their first two victims, and concentrating on the third victim, the priest’s housekeeper, a thin, slope-shouldered old woman, standing stiffly to attention in a flannel dressing gown. The machine gunners were looking grim and efficient, because they were dying for a smoke. The sooner they got this over with, the better -

From the back of the square came a clatter like a giant typewriter. Something hammered the Spandau into the air and sent it spinning, tripod and all, across the square. Ricochets whined into the sky. Two of the machine gunners performed sudden ragged acrobatics and fell down. The third had enough time to spin round and think, machine-gun fire, and see a haystack with four wheels howling out of an alleyway, the muzzle-flash of machine guns dancing in the hay, which seemed to be catching fire. Then a succession of hammers walloped the last gunner in the chest and his legs lost their strength and his mouth filled with blood. And as his head bounced limply on the pavé of the square he saw his comrades, drawn up in lines, start tumbling like corn before the scythe, and heard the whoomp of a petrol tank exploding.

Then the machine gunner’s eyes grew dim, and he died.

Miller yanked the Jeep’s steering wheel to the right. The main road out of the square gaped in front of him. The clatter of the Brownings was a mechanical thunder in his ears. Something was burning, with a smell that reminded him of burning tumbleweeds when he had worked a summer in the Kansas oil fields. It was not tumbleweed, of course. It was bracken, set on fire by the muzzle-flashes of the heavy machine guns. It was dry as tinder, that bracken. Mallory and Andrea were still firing short sharp bursts. Miller yelled, ‘Get it off!’

From the square there came a higher, sharper crackle: rifle fire. A bullet spanged off the Jeep’s suspension and moaned away skyward.

Mallory said, calmly, ‘Fire low.’

A patrol of Germans had appeared in the road ahead. The Brownings thundered. More bullets cracked over the Jeep. Then the Germans were down, rolling, and the suspension was jouncing as the wheels went over the bodies. The street behind had vanished in a pall of grey-white smoke. The houses were thinning. The crackle of the bracken was a roar.

‘Get rid of it!’ yelled Miller.

Hugues’ coat was smouldering as he unfolded himself from the bed of the Jeep. He was coughing, his eyes streaming. He began to kick blazing faggots of bracken onto the road. Jaime was doing it too, and Thierry, who was making small, frightened prodding movements, clearing his precious radio first.

‘St-Jean-de-Luz,’ said Mallory, over the slipstream. ‘Which way?’

‘Up the road,’ said Jaime. ‘Then there’s a track.’ He brushed burning bracken from his sleeve. ‘Merde.’

There were strips of blue sky between heavy squalls of cloud. The last of the bracken lay fuming in the road, receding fast. Ahead the pavé stretched, polished black and gently curving. It was the main road out of the valley. A road crawling with Germans - Germans who would by now have found out by radio that a unit of the British army was on the loose in a Jeep. At least, Mallory hoped they would think they were a unit of the British army. That way, there might be no civilian reprisals.

But how had the Germans known to come to Colbis?

It seems quite possible that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for you.

Mallory said, ‘Where were you hiding in the village?’

‘They spread us round,’ said Jaime. ‘Me, I was in the brothel. In bed. In the most innocent way, of course.’

‘But they searched the brothel.’

‘My papers are in order,’ said Jaime. His face was dark and closed. ‘What have I to fear?’

Mallory nodded. Unanswered questions buzzed around his ears like flies.

‘Left,’ said Jaime.

Left was a track that turned off the main road, crept along the side of a mountain and into a wood. The Jeep ground through a deserted farmyard and onto a road of ancient cobbles.

‘The back way,’ said Jaime. ‘Arrives close to St-Jean-de-Luz. The main road goes down the valley and joins the big road to St-Jean-de-Luz at the foot of the mountains. This one takes us over a hill, into a valley, then over another hill, and down to St-Jean. But it is only good for mule or Jeep. It’s a small road. It doesn’t run over the frontier, so the Germans don’t pay much attention to it.’

They sat three in the front, four in the back. The SAS man was white, and his eyes were closed. When the Jeep hit a boulder, the muscles of his jaw tautened with pain. For an hour the Jeep moaned upwards into the mountains. Jaime and Hugues were talking quietly in French.

Suddenly, Hugues started shouting. His face was purple, contorted with rage. He got his fingers round Jaime’s neck and his knees on his chest, and he picked the small man’s head up and slammed it against the bodywork, and pulled it back, and was going to do it again when Andrea’s hands closed, one on each arm, and, without apparent effort, detached his hands. Jaime rolled away, coughing and retching. Hugues struggled futilely in Andrea’s grip, still shouting.

Mallory said, ‘Shut up,’ in a voice that cracked like a rifle bullet.

Hugues shut up.

‘What’s the problem?’

Hugues’ eyes were the size of saucers. ‘Lisette,’ he said.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s not in the village. She was supposed to be in the village, asleep. But not so. Jaime says he saw her. She was taken away. By a German in a leather overcoat. Gestapo.’ He put his face in his hands.

Mallory’s stomach was hollow with apprehension. He said, ‘Is this true?’

Jaime’s face could have been carved from yellowish stone. He said, ‘It’s true.’

Hugues sat up, suddenly. ‘We must go to Bayonne,’ he said. ‘Immediately. Without delay. With the guns we have, the explosives, we can get into Gestapo HQ -’

Mallory said, ‘How much does Lisette know about this operation?’

‘She knows we are going to St-Jean,’ said Hugues. ‘But she will never talk.’

Jaime said, ‘Everyone talks.’

‘Non!’ shouted Hugues, losing control.

‘She is pregnant,’ said Jaime. ‘What do you think they will do to the child?’

Hugues’ anger evaporated. He seemed to grow smaller. He covered his face with his hands.

Mallory said, ‘How did this happen?’

Jaime looked straight ahead, his face without expression. ‘I saw from the window of the bordel. She was led out. They put her in a big car, and drove away.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’

‘There is a thing we must do. The mother of Marcel has died for this thing. So has Jules, at Jonzère, and others. It is war. I kept quiet so our decision could not be … influenced.’ He looked at Hugues, then back at Mallory. ‘You would have done what I did.’

Hugues said, ‘Only a monster-’

‘Shut up,’ said Mallory.

Of course Jaime was right. The object of the operation was to destroy submarines, not chase Gestapo cars across the northern foothills of the Pyrenees. By pretending that Lisette was in Colbis until she was definitely beyond help, Jaime had prevented a worse crisis.

Not that it could be much worse for Lisette.

Mallory tried not to think about what would be happening to Lisette. He said, ‘She’ll talk.’

‘Not for two days,’ said Jaime. ‘That is the rule. She will hold out for two days to give us time to get clear.’

Thierry cocked his straw hat over his eye and delivered himself of an offensively cynical chuckle. ‘The Germans know this also. They will be very persuasive.’

Hugues said, ‘Jesus.’ His face was grey and bloodless.

‘But relax,’ said Thierry. ‘If the Gestapo ask the wrong question, they will get the wrong answer. How will they ask the right question?’

Mallory knew that in Gestapo HQ at Bayonne, there would be people who could make you beg to be allowed to tell them everything you knew, without a question being asked. He said to Hugues, ‘There is nothing we can do. I really am very sorry.’

Hugues looked at him with haunted eyes. ‘Old women have lived their lives,’ he said. ‘Soldiers protect their country. Who can use my unborn child as a weapon of war? What has this poor child done?’

Andrea said, ‘These are questions you must ask a priest.’ Mallory did not look at him. The Greek had found the bodies of his parents in the river at Protosami. They had been shot by Bulgarian soldiers, then lashed together and thrown to the fish. Andrea knew about total war. So had his parents’ killers, until they had died, very suddenly and all at once. ‘But the time for asking such questions is when the war is finished. For now, we must only obey orders and fight, because if we think, we go crazy.’

There was no more talking after that.

The Jeep ground on, up and over the mountain, away from the great hazy prospect of the valley. Hugues had opened one of the bottles of brandy Marcel had loaded into the Jeep. His blue eyes turned pink and glassy. A shoulder of wooded hillside interposed itself between the road and the valley. The sun came out from between the shredded clouds. Flies buzzed round Wallace’s bloody tunic. The track left the trees and wound across a marshy saddle between two peaks. High overhead, a pair of vultures hung in the blue. There were no Germans, no sign of the war raging out there in the world. As the road started downhill again, Dusty Miller saw a glittering blue line beyond a notch in the whaleback hills. The sea.

‘Progress,’ he said. ‘And about goddamn time, too.’

But the road dipped down again, into the first rank of the chestnut forests, and the blue line disappeared. As the Jeep ground on downhill, Miller’s spirits suffered the small but definite dip that with him passed for extreme gloom. They were nearing the coast at last. There was two-thirds of a tank of gas left in the Jeep. Keep on driving, and whatever happens will happen -

But there was a hell of a way to go, through Indian country, to a destination at best uncertain.

‘One kilometre now, a big road,’ said Jaime, rising from his gloomy silence like a diver from a lake. ‘Road to the frontier. Patrolled, I guess.’

“We’ll take it quietly,’ said Mallory. ‘Go on five hundred yards. Turn off the engine. Freewheel.’

The Jeep rolled down the track, silent except for the twang of its springs and the sniffing of Hugues. A light breeze sighed in the chestnuts. It was a beautiful spring morning, quiet except for the song of birds in the trees.

And the guttural voices that drifted up from the road.

Mallory tapped Andrea on the shoulder. The big Greek nodded. He jumped down from the Jeep and started down the track. His gigantic shoulders seemed to merge into the trees in a way not entirely attributable to the camouflage smock he wore. Watching him Hugues shivered, recalling the warm, padded but horribly powerful hands that had pulled him off Jaime as if he had been a light blanket.

His eyes slid to Jaime, to the stony face of the man who had lost him Lisette. Sometimes, being a soldier was impossible.

He looked away. Looking at Jaime hurt his eyes.

Andrea moved down the track quickly and quietly. When he could see the dark glimmer of the road below him he cut into the trees, placing his feet carefully among the ferns and dry leaves. He passed through the forest with the faintest of rustles, more like a breeze than a twenty-stone human. At the edge of the trees, he stopped.

The road was pavé, the square, polished cobblestones of France. Twenty yards to his left was a sandbagged enclosure with a single embrasure from which projected the muzzle of a machine gun. Beside the enclosure, a bar painted in red-and-white stripes blocked off the road. The machine gun was pointing to the right, north, towards France, and, coincidentally, the stretch of road across which the Jeep would have to travel to rejoin the track on the far side, where it dived into the forests at the foot of a tall mountain plated with grey rock.

Andrea absorbed all of this in perhaps ten seconds, checking off a mental list of options. Then he walked quietly back into the trees and inside the wood along the side of the valley, passing above the checkpoint.

From above, he saw that the machine gun was unmanned. Its three-man crew and two other soldiers were lying on the grassy bank of the road, smoking. One of them was telling what Andrea recognised as a dirty joke he had overheard in the town at Navarone. Swiftly, he walked fifty yards through the wood, parallel to the road, in the general direction of Spain. Then he slung his Schmeisser across his stomach, pulled his helmet down over his eyes, and walked out onto the pavé.

At the sound of his boots, the men on the bank looked up. They saw the biggest Waffen-SS they had ever seen, moving light-footed towards them, eyes invisible under the helmet. They had never seen an SS man with a moustache before. Being honest Wehrmacht footsloggers, they did not like the SS, and they did not like moustaches. So the sergeant who had been telling the joke pretended not to see this one until he was on top of them. Then he looked up. ‘What the hell do you want?’ he said. ‘A shave?’

The men in the Jeep on the hillside heard nothing. A thrush was singing. A pigeon crashed out of a chestnut tree. Otherwise, there was silence, a silence that reminded Mallory of the silence on the far side of an operating theatre door. Andrea would be doing his horrible worst. After five minutes, mingled with the thrush’s song came the metallic cry of a Scops owl.

Mallory said, ‘Drive.’

Miller started to drive. This time he used the engine, because there would be no enemies alive to hear it.

Andrea was waiting by the road, wiping a long, curved knife on a tuft of grass. On a grassy bank nearby, five men in grey uniforms were staring at the sky. There was a lot of red among the yellow and white flowers on which they lay. But it was too early for poppies.

Andrea clambered into the Jeep. Miller gunned the engine.

Up the road, a figure in field-grey stumbled out of the trees, buttoning his trousers. When he saw the Jeep, he shouted, ‘Halt!’

Mallory straightened his helmet and gripped his Schmeisser. He said, ‘I’ll deal with him.’ But the brandy Hugues had drunk was heating up his mind. The sky and the trees and the mountains were swimming. It was difficult, being a soldier, obeying orders. When it meant that this woman, the woman you loved, Lisette … her fingernails, he thought, her teeth. They pull them out with pliers. And the baby -

In the centre of his vision, something new was moving. Something grey. A German soldier.

Hugues knew he had made himself look foolish in front of these granite-faced soldiers. But in his mind was a newborn baby, and a man with a pair of pliers in his hand. He heard Lisette scream. Because the man was walking, not towards Lisette, but towards the baby -

The man who was a German, like the soldier.

Of course he would have to be killed. And it should be Hugues who killed him, to redeem himself in the eyes of the soldiers.

And suddenly there was a gun in his hand, and his finger was on the trigger, and the gun was jumping, and the air was full of the clatter of the Schmeisser.

The bullets went high. Somebody snatched the weapon out of his hands. The soldier flung himself to the ground and rolled out of sight into the ditch. His rifle fired three times. The last shot smacked into the Jeep. ‘Let’s go,’ said Mallory, quietly.

The Jeep roared across the road and up the track on the far side. After two hundred yards, Andrea said, ‘Stop here.’

The Jeep stood at the bottom of a long, steep incline. Andrea swung his legs over the side. He plucked the Bren from the back seat, slung it over his shoulder as if it had been a twenty-bore shotgun, and loped away down the track.

He did not have far to go. This side of the valley was armoured with big, grey plates of limestone on which nothing grew. He found a slab that overlooked the road, cast himself flat behind it, and raised his head in time to see the field-grey figure scuttle like a rabbit into the horseshoe of sandbags that was the machine-gun emplacement. The emplacement was full of shadows, but Andrea knew what the man would be doing as surely as if he could see him. There would be a field telephone in there, and the man would be using it to call for reinforcements.

Carefully, Andrea trained the Bren on that shadow-filled horseshoe and adjusted the backsight one notch up. Then he fired four single shots into the lip of the sandbags, spacing them like the four pips on the four of spades. Then he stood up, quickly.

Down in the machine-gun emplacement, the shadow was punctured by something that might have been a grey tortoise, or a steel helmet. The man interrupted his telephone call to defend his life. Andrea watched the tin helmet move as the eyes searched for him. The eyes found him. The helmet became a human figure, struggling to haul the heavy machine gun round on its mount. Andrea watched clinically, without hatred. Should have stayed on the telephone, he thought, with the detached disapproval of a craftsman watching a bodger. Fatal mistake. The Bren’s sight settled on the tin helmet. The huge finger squeezed the trigger.

The burp of the machine gun rolled round the cliffs and precipices of the valley. Down in the emplacement, the little figure flung its arms wide, jerked upright, fell over the sandbag parapet, and lay still. Even before the echoes had died, Andrea was striding back uphill.

He smelt petrol before he saw the Jeep. As he came over the hill the other men were out of the vehicle. ‘Problem solved,’ said Andrea.

‘We’ve got another problem,’ said Mallory. Andrea noticed a curious woodenness in the faces round the Jeep. ‘We’ve got a bullet in the petrol tank. Did your friend have time to contact his headquarters?’

‘No way of telling,’ said Andrea. ‘Gas all gone?’

‘All gone.’

Mallory, Miller and Jaime got behind the vehicle. Andrea lent his shoulder. The wheels started to roll. Miller twitched the wheel. The Jeep gathered speed, bounced on a boulder, and disappeared with a metallic crash into a ravine.

Thierry had been squatting by his radio, tinkering with the tuning dial. Mallory said, ‘Radio silence from now on, please.’

Thierry nodded. He shouldered the pack. ‘How far?’

‘Twenty kilometres to the sea,’ said Jaime. ‘There is one ridge in between. A high ridge.’

Miller yawned and shouldered his brass-bound boxes. ‘Nice to stretch your legs after a drive in the country.’

Andrea said, ‘I’ll help Mr Wallace.’

The SAS man was upright. His face was the colour of wood ash, with dark circles under his eyes. He said, ‘I’m all right.’

Andrea said, ‘Come,’ and walked towards him, hands out.

Wallace raised his crutch and held it against Andrea’s breastbone. He said, ‘I can manage.’

Andrea said, ‘Sometimes it is the bravest man who surrenders.’

But Wallace was in a corner, his eyes hardening, getting that berserk look. He said, ‘No SOE bastard tells me what brave men do.’ His hand was going to the automatic in the holster at his side.

Andrea shrugged and turned away. For a moment his eyes caught Mallory’s. There was no expression in them, but Mallory knew him well enough to see he was worried. They were on an island of limestone in a sea of Germans. There was more to worry about than regimental pride.

‘Don’t want you holding us up,’ said Mallory.

The SAS man snapped, ‘Nobody’s going to hold you up.’ He recollected himself. ‘Sir.’

Mallory shrugged. ‘Jaime first,’ he said. ‘March.’

They marched.

Things had improved, Mallory reflected.

There were too many of them, one of them was drunk, another wounded, and they had no transport. But they had a destination. That was the plus side.

On the minus side, there was a trail of dead Germans stretching back across the Pyrenees. But there was nothing to be done about that.

Except keep going.

The track climbed from the valley floor, rising steeply and trending northward. It was a good track, built for mules, with wide steps separated by six-inch copings of stone. The vegetation was sparse. The limestone plates lower in the valley continued, less broken up here, until they were walking up a dry gorge between huge, overhanging crags. Wallace plodded on, wincing at each grind of his crutch against rock, the flies buzzing and crawling round the blackened dressing on his belly.

At first it was hot. But the sun grew hazy behind veils of cirrus, and by eleven the sun had gone in and a black edge of cloud had crept across the sky. The adrenaline of the pursuit was gone, oxidised in the weariness of a night without sleep. Life was the slog against gravity, one foot in front of the other, up the interminable mule-steps along the dry valley towards a horizon that always gave way to another, higher horizon. Jaime moved at the steady, straight-legged pace of the mountaineer. Thierry plodded on under the weight of the radio, sweat running down his great jowls, darkening the collar of his shirt and the band of his straw hat. Hugues let his head roll on his neck, stumbled a lot, and would not speak when spoken to. And Wallace kept struggling grimly on, crutch grinding on the stones, face contorted with pain and effort.

By noon it was cold and spitting with rain. Another front was coming in from the Atlantic. Mallory said, ‘How far to the top?’

‘One hour,’ said Jaime. He squinted his small black eyes at the lowering clouds. ‘Soon we will need shelter.’

‘Why?’

‘Snow,’ said Jaime. ‘I know a cave.’

‘No more caves,’ said Mallory. ‘We must go on.’

‘This is a … particular cave,’ said Jaime. ‘Twenty minutes more.’

‘Particular?’

‘There will be a storm,’ said Jaime. ‘For now, we should save our breath for the road.’

‘On,’ said Mallory. ‘Twenty minutes.’

There was a crash and a clatter. Wallace had fallen. He was not moving. Andrea squatted by his side, hand on his forehead. He looked up at Mallory. His face, normally unreadable, was worried. ‘Fever,’ he said.

‘Can you carry him?’

‘Of course.’ Andrea picked the SAS man up, slung him over his shoulder, and began to march. The rain started, then stopped again. The cloud was still high, but patches of dirty mist were hanging in the crags, and the air was damp and raw on their faces.

The floor of the gorge rose until they were walking on a bare slope of limestone. It steepened to forty-five degrees. Mallory could hear Andrea’s breathing.

‘At the top,’ said Jaime.

At the top of the slope was a cliff. In front of the cliff was a little plateau that narrowed into a curious little gully, like a gorge in embryo. The gully went back into the cliff, steep-sided, and ended abruptly in a tangle of boulders.

‘In here,’ said Jaime. ‘Behind the rocks.’

Mallory paused at the top of the slope, listening to the breath in his throat, the pound of the blood in his ears.

And another sound.

‘Get into the cave,’ he said. ‘Quick.’

They began to run, slithering on the loose flakes of limestone that carpeted the ground. They had all heard it: the steady drone of an aeroplane engine.

They were not going to make it to the cave. ‘Down!’ roared Mallory.

They fell on their faces between the boulders. The droning intensified. The Fieseler Storch observation plane came slowly up the path. Between two boulders, Mallory was close enough to see the glint of the observer’s binoculars as the plane circled over the little plateau.

The Storch flew on, down the other side of the mountain. Slowly and with great effort, the Storm Force dragged itself into the cave.

The entrance was little more than a crack in the rock, but inside it became a room-sized chamber, with a floor of broken stones and goat droppings, and a ceiling that faded upwards into shadow. The walls were smooth, as if they had been worn by water. There was no water now, except for a few drips from the roof. A cold draught blew from the inside of the cave, bearing the musty smell of stone.

Thierry said, ‘Did they see us?’

Mallory shrugged out of his pack. ‘No way of telling,’ he said. ‘Twenty minutes. Then we move on.’

Andrea caught Mallory’s eye, and slipped back out of the entrance.

‘If they had seen us, they would have turned back the way they had come, and made their report.’ Thierry’s eyes were anxious under the brim of the straw hat. ‘Do you not think?’

‘Sure,’ said Mallory, not because he was sure, but to keep him quiet. ‘Food.’ He began rummaging in his pack, pushing out cans of sardines and blocks of chocolate.

‘Brew up?’ said Miller.

‘Not yet,’ said Mallory casually. ‘Take a look at Wallace, would you?’

Wallace was lying on the stony floor. Andrea had put a pack under his head. The flesh had fallen away from his face, so the nose and cheekbones looked as if they would burst through the skin. He seemed to radiate a dry heat. His eyes were open, but were dull and glazed. ‘Hurts,’ he said.

Miller crouched at his side. ‘Just a little prick,’ he said. ‘As the actress said to the bishop.’ He pushed a morphine syrette into the ice-white skin of the SAS man’s dangling upper arm. Wallace moaned and stirred, and said something in a high, incomprehensible voice. Then his eyes closed. Miller unbuttoned the tunic and started to unwrap the bandages on the stomach.

When he had unwrapped them he sat very still for a moment, face immobile. Then he lit a cigarette and took a deep, soothing drag.

The wound was by no means soothing. It was a crater on the right-hand side of the belly; a crater puffed at the edges to an unhealthy redness that shaded to yellow. A faint odour rose from it, the smell of a meat-safe the morning after a hot night. And that was only the outside. It looked as if the bullet had been travelling from right to left. It had passed behind the abdominal muscles. It was still in there, somewhere. Miller had no means of finding out what damage it had done, and very little inclination to do so.

He rummaged in his first-aid box and pulled out a can of sulfa powder. He sprinkled a heavy dusting on the entrance hole, and applied fresh dressings. While Andrea held Wallace up, he rebound the bandages so it looked neat and white and tidy.

Mallory said, ‘How is he?’

Miller lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. ‘Could be lucky,’ he said, without conviction.

‘Nothing you can do?’

‘You can sit there with your mouth open and wonder how the hell he managed to climb a three-thousand-foot mountain,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, I’ve packed it with sulfa. I may also pray a little.’

Mallory nodded. The weeks of effort were telling on Miller. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, and they held a manic gleam. Miller had always had an over-developed sense of humour, but now it was developing an edge colder than bayonet steel.

‘But I tell you something,’ said Miller. ‘If he can climb with a stomach like that, he can probably bloody well fly as well.’ He rummaged in his pack, pulled out a can of sardines and ate the fish in concentrated silence, using a knife.

Mallory sat down, let his aching limbs relax, and ate some sardines of his own. He was exhausted. Forty-eight hours from now, the Werwolf pack was due to sail. They were going to have to keep moving.

But if they left Wallace, he would die.

Drowsily, he debated with himself. They had already left Lisette. Why not leave Wallace?

If the Storch had spotted them, they would find him here. And he would talk.

Mallory found himself dozing. He sat up quickly, took a Benzedrine out of his pack and swallowed it.

Hugues was nodding over his bottle of brandy. Mallory leaned over and took it out of his hand. He washed the pill down with a fiery gulp and passed the bottle on to Jaime. Andrea was going to have to carry Wallace.

He looked around the grey, cheerless shadows. Andrea was not there. He would be standing sentry. Mallory climbed stiffly to his feet and went to the mouth of the cave.

The gully stretched away like a corridor roofed with sky. In the ten minutes they had been inside, the roof had become lower, changed from black to soft grey. And from out of the grey, whirling on the eddies of a bitter wind, there floated billions of snow-flakes. Already the outlines of boulders in the gully were melting and fusing under the chill, white blanket. Of Andrea there was no sign.

Jaime appeared at his side. He said, ‘Now only one small hill to the sea.’

‘How far?’

‘Twelve kilometres.’

‘It’s snowing.’

‘Not down below. Snow up here, rain down below.’ Jaime laughed. The brandy had given his eyes a mischievous glitter. ‘We can go the inside way, if you want.’

‘What do you mean?’

Jaime took his arm, led him back into the cave, and pointed at its shadowy inner recesses. ‘Once this was where a river came out of the cliff. The river is still in there, but it has found new ways out. Now it arrives in the valley close to the Hendaye road. And in other places, they say, it springs from the hill. I once met a man, Norbert Casteret, who told me he had walked inside this mountain. He was a great bore. In great detail he told me: shafts, waterfalls, and the rest.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Mallory. The Benzedrine was making his ears ring in the intense, snow-muffled silence. There was only Wallace’s stertorous breathing, and the drip of water from the cave roof. And now that Jaime came to mention it, something else, something more a vibration than a sound, as if far away, something hugely powerful was roaring and thundering. A waterfall, for instance.

Mallory’s muscles tensed and his palms sweated. Caves and water … Not fear, he told himself. Only the Benzedrine. He looked at his watch. They had been here fifteen minutes. Time they were moving on. He said to Jaime, ‘Moving out in three minutes. The outside route.’

Hugues and Thierry groaned, stretching their cold-stiffened limbs. Miller gathered his pack and his precious boxes. Mallory shouldered his own pack and his weapons. He went once again to the mouth of the cave and down the gully, and looked onto the little plateau. It was empty, except for snowflakes. Where the hell was Andrea?

Then something moved in the snow: a giant moustache, and a pair of black eyebrows that grew larger. Mallory realised that he was looking at Andrea; Andrea wearing a white snow smock, carrying the Bren.

Andrea said, ‘My Keith, we have a German patrol.’ He spoke calmly, but he was moving fast.

Mallory’s ears sang in the silence. ‘How many?’

‘Perhaps thirty.’

At the edge of the plateau, a ragged line of dark shapes was materialising in the snow. The shapes of German soldiers. And with the soldiers, other shapes, from which came the sound of whining and baying.

Dogs.

There was no point in trying to draw the men away from the cave: the dogs would not be distracted, even if the handlers were.

Andrea stared at him. He said, ‘I’ll go up the hill and draw them off.’

‘No,’ said Mallory. He hated saying it. But the dogs would not be drawn. ‘Back to the cave.’

Andrea said, ‘But the cave is a trap.’

‘There’s a back entrance.’

One of the figures in the snow shouted. The line stopped.

Andrea sighed, and took aim with the Bren. The machine gun’s stammer fell flat in the soft white world. One of the figures buckled and collapsed.

Mallory slid back into the gully. The Schmeisser chattered in his hands as Andrea fell back past him. Bullets smashed rocks above his head. He felt stone-chips sting his cheek, and the trickle of blood. He was moving back towards the cave mouth, Andrea firing past him, covering him. As he arrived at the cave mouth, four figures in field-grey appeared at the end of the gully.

Suddenly, Mallory and Andrea were inside the cave, and Mallory’s Schmeisser was bucking in his hands again. Next to him, Andrea was fumbling in his belt. His arm came over, and a grenade was tumbling through the air like a little dark egg, bursting with a big, flat slam in the mouth of the gully. There were screams. But there were a lot of bullets coming in now, spanging off the cave mouth and zipping into the dark interior.

The Benzedrine was chewing away in Mallory’s mind. How did they find us? Dogs. Or the Storch. It did not matter. Either they broke out now, or the patrol would call up reinforcements. Reinforcements were probably on the way already.

Outside, there was a big, steady hammering, and the entrance droned with stinging shards of stone. Reinforcements or no reinforcements, there was at least one heavy machine gun out there. Mortars next.

Mallory thought about what a mortar bomb would do in the mouth of the cave. He saw the air full of razor-sharp chunks of steel and the shrapnel of blasted rock, the ceiling falling in -

The ceiling falling in.

‘Miller,’ he said. Miller came. Mallory spoke to him. Miller nodded, trotted back into the shadows.

Mallory called over his shoulder. ‘Jaime. The exit?’

‘Found it,’ said Jaime.

Oh, God.

Andrea was crouching behind a boulder. He caught Mallory’s eye. His face was the same old face, large and impassive above the sweeping black moustache. But there was something about the set of the big, unshaven jaw that shocked Mallory. Andrea had walked alone from Greece to Bulgaria, through the heart of occupied Mitteleuropa. He was a full colonel in the Greek army, and with that army had suffered defeat. With him, Mallory had spent eighteen months behind German lines in Crete, stared death right between the eyes on Navarone and in the Zenica Cage. But in all that time, Mallory had never seen this expression on his face. Up here, five thousand feet above sea level, in a dank cave near the summit of this tilted sheet of limestone, Andrea’s face was … resigned.

Mallory found that his muscles were tense as boards, and in his mind something was scrambling and scuttling, like a terrified animal. He made himself think of the Channel covered with ships, the ships crammed with men, and among them giant submarines swimming swiftly, undetectable, laden with torpedoes. A Spandau burst punched into the cave wall above his head.

He said to Andrea, ‘Jaime has found the back way.’

Andrea’s face relaxed. Resignation gave way to the expression that with Andrea conveyed anything from polite curiosity to frenzied enthusiasm. ‘Then we should take it,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

Four minutes later Miller was alone, standing among the boulders at the back of the cave. The entrance was a narrow white window, pointed at the top. The rest of it was dark, black as ink, in contrast to the glare of the snow outside.

Miller filled his eyes with that glare, and tried for three seconds not to think about anything but daylight, and sky. But his right hand was chilled by the stone-flavoured draught blowing from the crack in the cave floor on his right - the crack down which his companions had vanished, and down which he must vanish himself, now that his preparations were complete -

A sleet of bullets lashed through the entrance, and the air was deafening with ricochets. The snow beyond the entrance was suddenly peopled with grey figures, running, firing as they came. Miller fired a burst of his Schmeisser into that brilliant white lancet. Then he lowered himself into the crack, and started to climb down the doubled rope into the dark.

The first two Germans flattened themselves against the walls outside the entrance. They pulled the string fuses on two stick grenades, and flung them into the cave mouth. There was a hollow boom, and smoke rolled out. There was no sign of life from the black interior. They threw in two more grenades, to make sure, and waited for the bang.

They did not get it.

What they got was a thunderous roar, and a sheet of flame that lashed out of the entrance and melted the snow for fifty feet, and picked up the men who had thrown the grenades and fired them like cannonballs out of the gully and onto the plateau, where they lay under a sheet of rock fragments that fell out of the sky like hard rain. Where the cave had been was a raw cleft in the mountainside, half-filled with fuming scree.

‘Gott,’ said the Feldwebel. ‘What are they putting in the grenades, nowadays?’

‘Whatever it is, it’s done the job,’ said the Sturmbannführer. ‘Now pick up those men and for God’s sake let us get out of this snow.’

Miller was twenty feet down the crack when the big explosion came. A blast of hot air frizzled his eyebrows and the doubled rope in his hands became two separate ropes. He thought, in one compressed moment: one kilo of plastic with a thirty-second time pencil will not only blow up a limestone cave, but cut a wire-cored climbing rope.

Then he had landed with a crash on wet stone, and a big pain in his leg was filling the world, and dust was in his lungs, and stone was falling on his head.

He became aware that he was lying in a place lit by yellow torch light, and that the stones falling on his head were small, and the pain in his leg was ebbing. Bruised, not broken, he thought. He groped for a cigarette in the breast pocket of his blouse, and lit it. The smoke rose vertical in the torch light. Before, there had been a draught.

He said, ‘Looks like the roof fell in.’

‘Quite,’ said Mallory, in a voice perhaps a shade lighter than usual. ‘Thank you, Dusty.’

And now all we have to do is get out of here, thought Miller, and find some submarines.

Mallory lit a cigarette himself. The entrance to the shaft had been narrow - almost too narrow for Andrea. Down here it had widened out. It was better down here, as long as you did not think of all those billions of tons of rock around you, the dynamited entrance -

His heart was going like a rivet gun. He could hardly breathe for all that rock up there, sitting on his chest -

Panic later, he told himself. Once you have done the job. For now, there are six men depending on you. The Benzedrine made that sound like a good thing. He took a deep breath. ‘Flashlights off,’ he said. ‘Use one at a time, only when moving.’ The light went out. Darkness descended, thick and suffocating as wet velvet. ‘Jaime,’ he said. ‘Your friend Casteret. What did he tell you?’

‘It was two years ago,’ said Jaime.

‘Try to remember.’

There was a pause, in which he could almost hear the wheels spinning in Jaime’s brain. ‘He entered the cave,’ he said. ‘The shaft. A river. He said there are many passages: the river made one way out, then found a way to another, lower down, then another. So the mountain is full of holes like a Gruyère, some blocked, some flooded. There is a route, because Casteret found it. But it took him many days.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

Many days. In this darkness. Mallory could hear his own breathing, very loud. ‘So if we head downhill, we can’t go far wrong.’

‘Maybe,’ said Jaime.

‘Very good,’ said Mallory. ‘I’ll lead. Hugues and Andrea, carry Wallace.’

They made a sort of sedan chair out of a couple of webbing straps and Wallace’s crutch. Mallory stood up, flexing his stiff limbs. He turned on his flashlight.

It began.

The beam of the flashlight showed a water-smoothed gallery heading steeply downwards. It was high, the gallery, so high in places that the flashlight failed to touch its roof. Once, it had been a runnel of acid rainwater, dissolving its way through a seam of limestone. The water had gone now, leaving a bed of grey pebbles down which they walked as if down the gravel drive of a house in the suburbs of hell.

They went two hundred yards like this, downwards at an angle of perhaps forty degrees, heading west by Mallory’s compass. Then the gallery took a turning to the right.

Mallory was pointing the flashlight down at the ground. Suddenly there were two flashlight beams, one where he was pointing it, and another on the roof of the gallery, which was low here. The reason that it was on the roof was that it was being reflected by the black pool that spanned the gallery from side to side before it sloped down into the water.

Dead end.

Mallory’s heart was thumping in his ears. In front of them, the roof ran down into the water. Behind them, the cave was sealed.

Trapped.

Dusty Miller saw the flashlight stop. He heard the drip of water, the rasp of the stretcher-bearers’ breath. He remembered the panic-stricken rigidity of Mallory in the bread oven. He fumbled in his breast pocket, and lit a cigarette.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Hugues, in a voice a good octave too high. ‘You will use up the air.’

‘Plenty of air,’ said Miller, languidly, for Mallory’s benefit. ‘There used to be a howling draught up that shaft, remember?’ He heard Mallory grunt, as if he did not trust himself to speak.

‘And this is a most commodious cave by cave standards. Did I ever tell you about the time I was working the Go Home Point amethyst mine back in Ontario? Little tiny shaft, and we get a flash flood. So there is me, a half-ton of dynamite, and as it turns out a rabid skunk, one hundred foot under the Canadian Shield, and that sucker is filling up quicker’n a whore’s bidet-’

‘Some other time,’ said Mallory.

Miller could hear his voice was back to normal. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Well, seems to me there must be some place above that water for all that air to have been coming from, before we blew the cave.’ He took a last drag on his cigarette. It made a bright shower of sparks as he threw it away. ‘So it ain’t the air we have a problem with, it’s the cigarettes, and I guess they need smoking right up, because I have a feeling I am going to get real wet.’ He walked forward, eyeing the swim of the flashlight beam in the water and unbuttoning his tunic.

‘Take a rope,’ said Mallory.

‘Sure.’

Miller’s body was long and pale, corded with stringy muscle in the dimness. He tied the rope round his waist in a bow line, took the waterproof flashlight in his hand, and stepped into the pool.

The water was so cold it burned. He set his teeth and walked on. The gravel under his feet sloped down sharply, continuing the forty-five degree slope of the cave’s floor. Within three paces the water was up to his chest, and he was gasping for breath. Within four, he was swimming, the coldest swimming he had ever done. He swam hard, hoping that he was right, that there was a way through here, between the gallery roof and the water, for the draught to blow -

But perhaps the draught had come from somewhere else, a hole in the rock high in the roof, invisible. Perhaps this was a blind-ended hole, deep as the mountain was high, full of this icy water.

What a way to go, thought Miller. Drowning in mineral water. I promise that if I get out of this, I will never drink anything but brandy again.

He clamped the flashlight between his teeth and dived.

Back on the gravel beach Mallory saw the light fade in the dark water, then vanish. He tried not to think of the cold under there, the pressing down of the roof, the ridges of stone that could catch you and keep you under there while you drowned, in the middle of miles of rock -

But the coils of rope moved slowly through his fingers and into the water. Miller was making progress -

The rope became still.

He’s in the air again, Mallory told himself.

But the rope remained still for a minute, then two. Mallory’s mind told him that it was normal, there was an explanation. But deep down, that creature was raving at him: he’s stuck, he’s drowned, for Christ’s sake -

Mallory found he had seized the rope and was tugging at it, hauling for all he was worth, and the bight of it was thrashing the black pool. Andrea was at his side, saying something soothing, but he could not hear what -

And suddenly a flashlight clicked on, and a voice said, ‘Colder ‘n the nipple on a witch’s tit in there.’ Miller’s voice.

For a second, Mallory felt deep shame.

‘It’s like the bend in your toilet bowl,’ said Miller. ‘There’s a little uphill the far side, stalagmites, stalactites, the whole shebang. I put the rope on a stalactite. Or ‘mite, whichever. Anyways, it’s cold and wet, but once you get to the other side you can breathe.’

Mallory put the shame behind him. There was a lot to do, and he needed a clear mind to do it with.

Miller wrapped his battledress in his waterproof cape, and went back through the icy water. The rest of them came after him, one by one, dragged under the low roof, breath held, clothes and weapons wrapped against the water, Andrea bringing up the rear. On the far side, they stood and shivered in the tomb-like cold. Wallace was the most worrying. ‘Work your arms,’ said Mallory. ‘Circulation.’

Wallace raised his arms weakly, let them fall again. Miller bent over him, tugging his tunic over his arms. He was too weak to dress himself. ‘Physical jerks,’ he said, and tried to grin. Even the grin suffered from lack of muscle power.

They sat and drank soup brewed on a pressure stove, and checked their weapons. Miller put his oil can down by the edge of the water, and went over the lock of his Schmeisser with a corner of pullthrough. When he had finished the gun, he looked down again at the oil can.

It had been six inches from the water’s edge. Now the water’s edge was lapping against its base.

Up in the world, there was wet snow and rain. Down here in the underworld, the waters of the earth were rising.

Best not tell Mallory.

After five minutes, Mallory stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’re off.’

The gallery ran downhill again. There were a couple more pools, neither of them more than waist-deep. Hugues marched through the blackness head down, hands in pockets, shoulder aching under the pressure of Wallace’s crutch. When he brushed against Wallace’s hand it felt cold as marble. It was obvious to Hugues that this man was going to die. Why carry him, when they had abandoned Lisette? It was folly, madness. Hugues was a soldier. He accepted that in war there were sacrifices to be made. But some things were too precious to sacrifice. Like the life of the woman you loved, and your unborn child. Deep under the mountain, Hugues was making promises to himself. If I live, he was thinking, things will be different. From now on, I will take care of the things I can see and touch with my own eyes and hands. From now on, it is not the big causes I will fight for. From now on, it will be the people I love.

If there is a from now on.

The brandy throbbed in his head. He marched on, detesting Mallory and Miller and this Greek killer Andrea, their cold, sunken eyes, the hard jokes they made, the way they did not care about individual people, thought only of their operation -

Andrea’s boot trod on his heel. He was out of step, stumbling, panting for breath, the blood roaring in his ears.

Not just the blood.

Ever since they had been inside the mountain, the air had been tremulous with a faint rumble. Now the rumble was gaining in intensity. At first it was a long, uniform growl. Then the growl had become a roar that shook the ground underfoot and vibrated in the still air of the gallery. After perhaps a mile the gravel underfoot had become finer, and the ground had started to rise. At the top of a low mound the gallery was suddenly blocked by a wall of rock.

The beam of Mallory’s flashlight wavered up the wall to a crack of darkness at its summit. The crack was a foot wide, the roar as loud as a bomber’s engines. He put a foot on the wall and began to climb.

It was only twenty feet high, but running water had smoothed away the footholds. It took him a careful five minutes to get to the top. And when he did, he wished he had not.

When he put his head through the crack, the thunder of falling water was like a hand that grabbed his head and shook it. He shone his torch into the darkness. The beam lanced into emptiness. He put his head into the racket, and looked down.

Once, the wall must have been the sill of a waterfall. Now the river had found a lower channel, and the place where the waterfall had been was now a cliff, smooth as ivory, falling away below beyond the reach of his flashlight beam, plummeting like a gigantic mine shaft into the bowels of the earth. From the depths rose the bellow of falling water, and a fine mist of spray that chilled Mallory’s face.

Curiously, this hellish hole in the world made Mallory feel better. It might be underground, and dark as the inside of a bank safe. But it was an open space; a problem that with a small stretch of the imagination could be regarded as a problem in mountaineering.

Mallory called for Miller and Andrea. They looked over the edge, and went back to the bottom of the sill. Miller said, ‘Holy cow,’ in a voice not altogether steady.

‘We’ve got two ropes,’ said Mallory. ‘I’m going to put them together, double. If I find anything useful, I’ll pull twice. Send Wallace down first. You’ll have to show the other three how to rappel.’

‘Ideal place to learn,’ said Miller.

Mallory knotted the first two ropes together, slung the last coil over his shoulder, and went over the edge.

The wall was as smooth as it looked: no purchase for feet. He kept his weight well out, rope over shoulder and up between his legs, walking down the wall. By the time he came to the first knot he was walking in complete darkness. Miller’s flashlight was a faint yellow glow far above. The roar of water surrounded him like a thunderstorm. He unclipped his own flashlight and shone it downwards.

Sixty feet below, the beam met something black and gleaming, muscular as the back of a giant slug. For a moment he could not work out what it was. Finally, the truth filtered through. It was a waterfall. A river, a big river, was pouring out of a ragged hole in the side of the shaft, tumbling down into a blackness too deep for the flashlight to penetrate. The roar numbed his mind. He saw a sudden picture of himself suspended like a spider on a string of gossamer, hung in this dreadful shaft. He blanked it out.

The shaft would have been a pothole: a whirlpool a million years old, a spinning auger of carbonic acid sinking its way slowly into the limestone. After the river had gnawed its way down a hundred and fifty feet, it had joined forces with another seam of water, and adopted its course as its own. The new waterfall emerged to his left, almost at right angles to the wall he was descending.

There should be a ledge. Where the old waterfall had been supplanted by the new, there should definitely be a ledge.

He knew he must be getting to the bottom of the second rope. The wall was still smooth. To his left, he could feel the wind of the down-rushing water, falling God knew where. The spray of it had soaked him to the skin. He felt cold and weak. What if there was no ledge, only this smooth wall falling direct to the bottom?

Something touched his back. He almost shouted with the shock. He was lying on his back on a ledge. He shone his flashlight. The ledge was four feet wide, twenty feet long, piled with boulders, crusted white with limy deposits, and shining with water. When he shone his light over the edge, he still saw nothing. There was only the black water rushing past with its mind-numbing roar.

He pulled the rope twice, hard. Then he sat with his back against the wall, and shivered, and gnawed some chocolate.

Wallace came down first, lowered by Andrea. Then there were two loads of packs and weapons and radios, then Thierry and Hugues. Somehow, Thierry had kept his hat. Hugues had had a bad descent: there was blood on his face. Then there were Jaime and Miller, who Mallory imagined would be swearing vigorously, and finally Andrea, leaping down the wall like a huge cat.

When they were all down, Mallory stood up, flexed his aching fingers, looped the ropes over a lime-cemented boulder, and went over the edge again.

This time it was easier. There were footholds, of a sort. Twenty feet after the halfway mark he entered a place where his flashlight, instead of making a yellow disc on black water, created a sort of white halo, as if in fog. The noise was more like an avalanche than a waterfall. There was wind, too, irregular flumes of draught that splattered limestone-tasting water in his face. And suddenly he was standing on dry land again.

This time it was not a ledge. This time the plunging roar of water told him that he was at the base of the waterfall, standing on a beach.

He tugged the rope twice. Then he flicked the flashlight on again, and began to grope his way round the beach. It was a broad horseshoe of broken boulders surrounding a thrashing pool of water. The waterfall must have been twenty feet across and ten feet thick, a solid column of water plunging down two hundred feet and hammering the pool to froth. The pool itself had a circular motion, like a giant bath plug -

Mallory’s heart thudded unpleasantly in his chest. He walked round the piled boulders to one margin of the waterfall. Then he went all the way back round, as far as the other margin.

If he had expected anything, it had been that the river would turn horizontal at the base of the waterfall, and make its way out through the side of the mountain. But there was no horizontal passage.

The shaft was a tube. The reason the water in the pool was spinning like a bath plug was because it was finding the way out, as water will…

Straight down.

Mallory sat on a boulder. Carefully, he fished in his blouse pocket for the oilcloth bag with his cigarettes and lighter. He put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it.

The draught blew the lighter out. He relit it, but the cigarette was soaked.

Soon, the others began to land on the beach. Mallory’s flashlight was dim yellow, the batteries gone. It went out. He flicked his lighter. The petrol caught.

The draught blew it out again.

He sat down, and concentrated on shivering.

Miller came down third, after Wallace, with his eyes shut, cursing. For a man who loathed and despised heights, it struck him that he had been doing an unfair quantity of mountaineering these past few weeks. When he reached the beach, he moved away from the base of the rope; having avoided death by falling, he had no desire to be flattened by a plummeting Frenchman. A gleam of yellow light showed him where Mallory was sitting. Miller flicked on his own flashlight. He was on his last set of batteries. He saw what Mallory had seen: there were no exits. He shivered, too. The reason he shivered was because of the wind -

The wind.

He flashed his torch at Mallory. Mallory’s face looked pinched and white. He looked like a man who had wrestled for a long time with a monster, and had discovered that despite his best efforts the monster was not yet dead.

Two packs arrived down the rope. Miller flicked his torch over them, and onto Wallace. Wallace’s face had the corpse-look, grey and sunken, but he raised a hand. Miller let the torch beam slide over his bandages. The wound did not seem to be bleeding any more.

Miller suddenly stopped thinking about Wallace. The beam of his flashlight had touched the margin of the water. Five minutes ago, there had been a brick-sized stone by Wallace’s foot. Now there was no stone.

Not that the stone had gone - brick-sized stones do not evaporate. What had happened was that the stone was under water.

The water was still rising.

It was not a military problem. But then Miller was not in any strict sense of the word a military person. In fact, having enlisted in the RAF and been posted to the cookhouse, he had simply walked away from his unit; not out of cowardice, but because he wanted to use his talents somewhere they could damage the enemy, not potatoes. He had been astonished when someone had informed him that this constituted desertion. But by then he had been behind enemy lines, causing Rommel severe headaches as a member of the Long Range Desert Force. And nobody had got round to court-martialling him.

But as he stood on that black and shrinking beach, Miller was thinking of a time before the Long Range Desert Force. It was not a time he was particularly proud of, but it was a time when he had caused the maximum possible mayhem using the minimum possible resources.

It had been during Prohibition. For reasons best left undiscussed, even with himself, Miller had found himself in Orcasville, a small white clapboard town on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. It was into Orcasville’s pier that a Canadian bootlegger called Melvin Brassman was wont to bring his cargoes of hooch. None of which would have posed any problems for Miller, except that Brassman’s boys were causing a lot of trouble in the town, culminating in the rape of three girls, one of them the minister’s daughter, and the burning of the warehouses of two merchants Brassman saw as rivals. Having committed these acts of mayhem, Brassman’s men had let it be known that any rival rumrunners would be treated as hostile, rammed, and sunk by the steel ex-tug Firewater, in which they plied their trade.

It was Brent Kent, one of the burned-out merchants, who had called in Miller, then dynamiting pine stumps in the Finger Lakes region. Kent had laid his problem before Miller, stressing the need for a swift, untraceable, no-blame vanishment of the Firewater. There were no explosives in the town, or at least none that could not be traced.

But Miller was more than a demolitions man. Miller was a practical chemist.

Miller had taken possession of an old but superficially seaworthy steam barge, which he had enigmatically christened Krakatoa. He had painted the exterior a pleasing royal blue, and let it be known that he was off to Canada to pick up a cargo of hooch. With great puffings and clankings, he and the Krakatoa had set off from the Orcasville quay. Just out of sight of land he had stopped the engine, and waited. After twelve hours, he had attended to the Krakatoa’s real cargo.

This consisted not of liquor, but several dozen barrels of tallow, and a similar number of carboys of sulphuric and nitric acids. Descending to the deck of the hold with an axe, Miller staved in the tallow barrels. Then, carefully, he uncorked the acid carboys and let their contents gurgle into the barge’s ancient wooden bilges. After that, he rowed clumsily away in a dinghy, and was collected by the mayor in his catboat. When they arrived ashore, Miller was observed to be the worse for liquor, bragging in a foolish manner about the large quantity of Canadian whiskey bobbing at anchor offshore, which, landed at nightfall, would wreck the Brassman booze market for good and all.

These braggings swiftly reached the ears of Brassman’s Orcasville lieutenant, who made certain long-distance telephone calls. That night, a night of full moon, the Firewater, steaming out of the north, saw the low silhouette of the Krakatoa at anchor, and took anticompetitive action. The Krakatoa was known to be rotten. The Firewater screwed down her regulator, achieved ramming speed, and ran her down.

What the Firewater’s master had not bargained for was Dusty Miller. When Dusty had rowed away, the barge had exuded a sour smell and a greenish chemical cloud. Now, twelve hours later, the acids swilling in her hold had compounded with the fatty fractions of the tallow, and formed a new substance.

So the rotting wooden barge into which the Firewater’s bow had knifed at twelve knots was not a rum ship. It was a rotting wooden barge that contained ten tons of impure and highly unstable nitro-glycerine.

The explosion that vaporised the Firewater also broke most of the windows in Orcasville, and woke the Mayor of Toronto eighty miles away. Miller left town the following morning, and the town reglazed. There was no further trouble from Melvin Brassman.

Hugues came down the rope. He saw by the dim and pearly light of a single torch that the American, Miller, had gone off to a section of beach opposite the waterfall, a section where, to judge by the boulders piled up against the face of the cliff, there had been a rockfall of some kind. Hugues shivered in the chill wind that was blowing from the direction of the rockfall: a wind that reminded him of the outside world. Merde, thought Hugues, gazing into the dark. This is not a war in which anything will be solved. And certainly not by these stupid old men who have brought me to the bottom of this well to die.

The light at the other side of the pool seemed to become suddenly animated, bobbing like a drunken firefly. He stared at it dully. Someone was walking, running, racing towards him. A hard body whacked him off his rock and onto the wet ground, and he was struggling, indignant, his mouth full of limy pebbles, while a voice, Miller’s voice, bellowed over the thunder of the fall, ‘Cover your ears!’

Suddenly, Hugues was given a vision. The shaft became a vast tube of grey rock, the waterfall a silver column falling out of a sky roofed with more rock, every ridge and ledge and pebble razor-sharp, illuminated by a huge flash of light. The noise of the water was momentarily replaced by a new noise, so loud as hardly to resemble a noise at all.

It was the noise of the five pounds of gelignite that Dusty Miller had packed into the rockfall at the point where the draught had been strongest.

When the rock fragments had ceased to fall Miller walked back across the beach, and examined the scene of the explosion. It was a neat job, though he said it himself. The boulders had separated like a curtain. At the focal point of the explosion was a ragged gap perhaps two feet square, through which the wind howled in a jet like water from a fire hose. Miller sniffed at it hopefully, trying to detect the herbs and aromatic plants of the maquis.

It smelt of damp Norman churches.

Can’t win ‘em all, thought Miller. He shone his torch through the hole. There were jumbled boulders, and beyond them the hint of space: a previous bed of the river. Quick, now, before the water rose far enough to spill down the channel. He walked along the beach to Mallory, directed his torch at his hand and gave the thumbs-up sign. The stony rigidity of Mallory’s face relaxed. They assembled the loads and shared them out. Then Miller led the way into the hole in the rockfall. Andrea was the last in. As he stepped up to the hole he found he was walking in water.

The new passage was another tube of water-smoothed rock. The wind was strong in their faces. Mallory looked at his compass. They were heading north. They must have crossed the mountain by now. Mallory was tired, and hungry, and cold, and his feet had been wet for so long that they felt like raw sponges. But they were heading in the right direction. In the gale that was making him shudder with cold he detected the breath of freedom.

Provided there was an exit.

The passage was flattening out. Hugues stumbled. Andrea trod on his heels again; Andrea, who walked with the stolid regularity of a machine. Hugues was exhausted. He wanted to drop his end of the crutch from which Wallace was hanging, stop, rest his blistered feet, sleep in the dark.

Behind him, Andrea’s voice said, ‘I’ll take him for a while.’

Hugues thought, he understands, this one. He understands exactly how weak I am, the way my mind will not be still, but must keep chewing at these questions that have no answers. There was something almost diabolic about that. Hugues felt naked, exposed.

To prove Andrea wrong, he said, ‘I’m fine.’

The stretcher party plodded on in the dark. The last torch was turning yellow. There was no sound but the harsh rasp of breathing, and the rustle of water over rock.

Andrea did not want to say anything, but the water in the passage was definitely getting deeper.

It had started as a wetness on the floor. Now it was shin-deep, and it seemed to be rising faster. He thought of the waterfall. He imagined all that water pouring down here. He imagined it pouring down into a chamber with a small exit, making a pool that spread back into the tunnel, a pool that would fill the tunnel up. That would be a problem for the operation, thought Andrea methodically. If they drowned, the operation would not be completed. It would be best if that did not happen.

Mallory walked on. The water shone under the now orange beam of his flashlight, chuckling merrily downhill.

The flashlight became an orange point, and went out.

Mallory lit his Zippo and held it above his head. The flame flickered in the rush of air.

Ahead, the tunnel broadened and became a flat sheet of water that led to a blank wall of rock. Above, at the height of a cathedral roof, a shaft led upwards. It was down this shaft that the wind was howling. The lighter went out. In the darkness left by its flame it was possible to see at the top of the shaft, bright as a diamond in the cold black velvet of far underground, a speck of light.

An unattainable speck. For as their eyes adjusted to the dim glow they saw that the chamber in which they were standing was roughly the shape of an inverted funnel, with the shaft as the spout.

Mallory’s mountaineering exploits had covered the newspapers of the Empire. But even master mountaineers do not have suckers on their feet.

Mallory felt a presence by his side. Miller raised his own lighter. The sheet of water was a pool, fed by the knee-deep torrent underfoot. Stalactites threw angular shadows across the ceiling, and stalagmites stood neck-deep in the pool. Beyond each stalagmite was a little writhing in the water.

‘It’s flowing,’ said Miller. ‘Must be going somewhere.’

This time he was so wet that there was no point in taking his clothes off. He tied the rope round his waist and waded in.

The first thirty feet was no more than knee-deep. Then, suddenly, the bottom sank away, and he was swimming, treading water rather, swept along by a fierce current in a narrow trench. At the rock wall ahead.

And he knew he had miscalculated.

He opened his mouth to shout, realised it was too late, and grabbed a deep breath of air instead. Then he went under.

The current was like a hand, grabbing him, tearing him down. He went headfirst, felt himself crash against a big rock. Then his shoulders were in a tight opening, too narrow for him to get through, and the current was forcing water into his nose, trying to get it into his lungs. He wriggled convulsively, got free, hit another rock with a bang that made his ears ring. He was in a pipe, a pipe of rock that was such a tight fit that he could not move his arms or legs. The shove of the water was huge. You goddamn idiot, he told himself. You can get away with it once, twice, ten times. But diving into God’s waterworks is asking for trouble.

And trouble is what you got.

His chest was bursting. The blood was hammering in his ears, and his head was roaring and juddering like that waterfall back there. Thirty more seconds of this, and he was going to be dead. And then those other guys would be dead. And then those submarines would go through that invasion fleet like three red-hot pokers through a pound of butter.

Chest full of air, oxygen turning to carbon dioxide. Going to suffocate you.

Make yourself smaller.

Breathe out.

Miller breathed out. The contraction of his chest shrank his girth by a fraction. The tunnel’s grip slackened. The water hauled him along the pipe, and slammed him into a hole through which his head only just fitted, and poured into his nostrils and gaping mouth.

Now he was going to die.

He was going to die with his head in daylight.

Daylight?

With the last of his strength, he writhed like an eel. And suddenly, whatever it was that was holding his right shoulder had given way, and he was through, out, beyond it all, flat on his back in a cheery little brook that was gurgling down a wooded valley under the five o’clock sky, from which a little snow was falling, but only a little.

He breathed twice, big breaths, with coughing. He looked back at the hole in the hill, a hole no bigger than a badger sett, as it burst out and expanded into a raw rent big enough for a bear, or even Andrea. The flow of water seemed to have lessened. He had broken the bottleneck. There might even be air in the tunnel now. He gave the two pulls on the rope.

It was cold in the little valley. The snow had not settled, but white skeins drifted in a half-hearted manner from heavy black clouds sailing in on the westerly breeze. They inspected and cleaned the weapons, fumbling with cold, water-wrinkled fingers. Jaime found some dry branches and knocked up a fire that burned with hardly any smoke. Andrea made soup. Thierry crammed his straw hat on his head, unpacked his radio, and began to inspect the parts.

Miller took Wallace a can of soup. None of them looked in the best of health, but Wallace looked terrible. His skin was like grey paper, but burning hot to the touch. His eyes were glazed. When Miller tipped some soup down his throat, he vomited immediately.

His wound looked pale and bloodless because of its perpetual rinsing in water. But the yellow edges looked yellower, and the red puffiness angrier. There was swelling, and a nasty putrid ooze. ‘Hurts,’ he said.

‘Bloody awful mess you are,’ said Miller. ‘Sooner we get you under a roof the better.’

Wallace opened a dull and rheumy eye. ‘Lea’ me,’ he said.

‘Leave you my ass,’ said Miller, sticking in the morphine syrette and squeezing the tube. ‘We’ll get a dressing on that. Still hurt?’

‘Can’t feel a thing,’ said Wallace.

‘Sure,’ said Miller, as if that was the right answer. ‘Just get a new dressing on that for you.’ He smeared damp sulfa on the wound, bandaged it up again, and covered Wallace with a more-or-less dry blanket.

Mallory said quickly, ‘How is it?’

‘Looks like it’s going wrong,’ said Miller, grim-faced. ‘Plus shock, I guess. I don’t know why he’s still alive.’

Mallory’s deep-sunk eyes were bright and distant. It was a mystery to him why any of them were still alive. ‘We’ll take two hours’ rest,’ he said. ‘Jaime knows where we are. The Germans think we’re dead. Andrea, get your head down.’

He watched as Miller spread a groundsheet over Wallace, rolled himself up in his poncho, and went immediately to sleep. Andrea was sitting with his back to a tree, eyes invisible. Asleep, awake, nobody knew, and nobody would ask. Jaime and Hugues were asleep. Only Thierry was awake, a large, crouching figure, fiddling with his radio, testing it after its immersion.

Mallory said, ‘That thing working?’

He had moved close to Thierry quietly; Mallory knew no other way of moving. Thierry looked up sharply. His fingers moved a switch. An indicator light went out.

Mallory bent and looked at the set. The light had been the TRANSMIT light. He felt the short hairs bristle on his neck. He said with a new, dangerous quietness, ‘Thierry. What are you doing?’

‘Testing the equipment,’ said Thierry.

Mallory said, ‘Just as long as you’re not transmitting.’

‘I heard what you say,’ said Thierry irritably, squashing the straw hat over his face and leaning back against a boulder. Mallory walked to the end of the valley. The snow had stopped. Between the squalls of black cloud deep ravines of blue were appearing. There was real warmth in the gleam of sun that lanced down into the trees. Warmth was what was needed. Particularly, it was what Wallace needed. In four hours it would be dark, and it did not seem likely to Mallory that Wallace would survive a night in the open.

And Wallace was not the only worry. Mallory guessed that they were at best halfway down the mountain. They still had to get down into the valley and walk to the sea, where this Guy Jamalartégui was waiting for them. Whether or not the Germans believed that they had died in the collapsed cave beyond the ridge, the roads to the sea would be heavily patrolled.

Mallory eased his sodden feet in his boots, and squeezed his cracked and abraded hands, to change the nature of the pain. The Benzedrine was wearing off. He felt weary and irritable. What they needed was to get dry. Being dry would change everything.

He was too jumpy to rest. He patrolled the wood, walking downhill until the trees started thinning.

Below him a meadow dropped steeply into the smoky blue deeps of the valley. The sun was out again. He could feel its warmth on his face. This far down the mountain the snow had melted as quickly as it had fallen, and the meadow grass was a brilliant green space in which swam constellations of wild flowers, falling away to a hazy gulf in which a village lay like a group of toys, and beyond it a shoulder of mountain, more heavy black clouds, and the metal sheet of the sea.

But Mallory was not looking at the view. He had faded back into the shadow of a stand of pines. He had his binoculars at his eyes. His grey-brown face was stony under the stubble on cheeks and jaw.

In the disc of the glasses the lower slopes of the meadow were lousy with grey mites. The sun gleamed off windscreens: the windscreens of half-tracks and lorries, and of an odd, boxy van with a steel loop on its roof, like the frame of a giant tennis racket.

A radio-direction-finding van.

It came upon Mallory like a flash of revelation: not a flash of lightning, but the dull, red blink of the TRANSMIT light on Thierry’s radio.

Thierry had not been checking the equipment. He had been transmitting.

Things began tumbling into place. That damn silly straw hat that Thierry insisted on wearing, rain or no rain, had nothing to do with vanity. It was an identification mark. Don 7 shoot the man in the straw hat, the orders would have said. The rest, kill them. Not the man in the hat.

In a manner of speaking, Jensen had said, they will be waiting for you.

Courtesy first of the SAS. And now Thierry.

A short mile away, at the foot of the meadows, three armoured cars had begun to grind uphill, hub-deep in the lush spring grass, leaving tracks like railway lines. Mallory faded back into the woods.

At the gully, everyone was asleep except Thierry, who was still squatting in front of his radio like a lard Buddha. Mallory did not look at him. Andrea was snoring heavily. Mallory shook him by the shoulder. He said, ‘I think you should shave off your moustache.’

Andrea said, ‘Wha-’

‘Quick.’

Andrea’s hand went to his upper lip. For the first time since Mallory had known him there was uncertainty in his eyes. ‘No,’ he said.

Mallory said, ‘The Germans are coming. Five hundred men. Armoured cars. Listen.’

Andrea listened. He hung his head. Then, finally, he nodded. Reluctantly, he pulled a razor from his pack and began hacking at the luxuriant growth on his upper lip. ‘Twenty years,’ he said.

But Mallory was gone, waking the others.

Within two minutes the upper lip was bare, except for a black stubble that matched the rest of his face. A new Andrea stood up: an Andrea clean-shaven, olive-skinned, with a nose increased and cheeks enlarged by the lack of moustache. And there was something else on his normally impassive countenance. Andrea would shave his moustache in the name of duty, but that did not mean he was going to be happy about the man who had caused his loss.

Andrea was angry.

Up on his rock Thierry was beginning to be nervous. People were stirring in the camp, when there should have been no stirring. He looked at the steep walls of trees on either side of him, the valley, the stream babbling out of the mountain. These people would fight to the death. He could imagine the chug of machine guns, the blast of mortar bombs. He was working for the Germans to keep himself safe, not expose himself to danger. A stupid straw hat would not save him from Spandau rounds or shrapnel.

Thierry found that he was on his feet, and that his feet were moving, sidling away towards the woods. He found he was yearning with his whole being for the anonymous shade of the trees. The sky was a bright, hopeful blue beyond those green leaves. His mission was over; there was no shame in running. He would collect the money Herr Sachs of the Gestapo had promised him, buy a bar, listen to dance music, run a couple of girls upstairs; and the sky would never, ever be anything but blue again.

There was no more sidling, now. He was running in earnest, his great bulk crashing through wild raspberries and chestnut saplings. From the corner of his eye he could see someone coming after him. His bowels were loose with terror. He thought he could hear engines now, and the crash of jackboots in the undergrowth. Holding the identifying straw hat on his head with one hand, he shouted, ‘Hilfe! Hilfe!’

The hat and the shouting must have slowed him down. He knew that something had smacked him hard from behind, on the left-hand side of the rib cage. He pitched forward. A voice in his ear said, This is from Lisette, animal.’ He thought, surprised, that was Hugues, the stupid Norman. What happens now?

There had been something wrong with the blow on his ribs. It hurt too much. It hurt very badly indeed, as if there was a red-hot iron bar in there. A heart attack? thought Thierry. The doctor had warned him: lose weight. But to die of a heart attack in a war. How stupid, thought Thierry, covered in cold sweat. How very stupid. Perhaps one can recover -

He tried to breathe. But his lungs were full of liquid. He coughed. Something poured out of his mouth.

Blood.

In front of him loomed the blank face of the blond Norman, Hugues. He was doing something to a knife. Cleaning it with a handful of chestnut leaves.

He stabbed me, thought Thierry, in a panic. With a knife. I may die.

He died.

The SS men in the armoured car stopped on the edge of the wood, and waited. The Gestapo were manoeuvring the third detector van into position, so the position of the radio could be pinpointed exactly. The terrorists could then be surrounded, and methodically crushed.

The SS men in the armoured car were ready to wait for as long as it took.

For there were rumours in circulation that made it sound very unwise to take any risks with these people. They had, it appeared, already accounted for almost a hundred men. The logical way of dealing with them was massive force. And massive force, thank God, was what was being applied to the problem.

The SS Obersturmführer was not like other men. He turned and watched scornfully as the grey straggles of soldiers marched doggedly up the mountain, and curled a lip. His men might welcome this great application of force. But it looked to the Obersturmführer like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. There were only five or six men, terrorists, Frenchmen, British: mongrels, members of inferior races. In the Obersturmführer’s view, it was time to get them out of the way, and get on with the war.

At that point, five men walked out of the edge of the wood; or rather, four men walked, carrying a fifth on an improvised stretcher. Three of the walkers and the man on the stretcher were wearing British battledress. Behind them, walking at a safe distance, was a fat, dark man, holding a Schmeisser trained on his companions, with two more Schmeissers slung round his neck. As planned, he was wearing a straw hat.

He looked up at the armoured car. His dark eyes took in the Obersturmführer’s black uniform with the lightning-flashes on the collar of the tunic. He said, in heavily-accented German, ‘Three English and two French bastards.’

The Obersturmführer allowed a clammy blue eye to rest on the man. He was disgustingly unshaven, and his clothes were too small and too wet. His accent sounded French, but not quite French. The Obersturmführer said, ‘There were supposed to be six of them.’

‘One of them is inside the mountain,’ said the man in the straw hat. ‘And ever more shall be so.’

‘Good,’ said the SS man. The chilly eyes flicked across the bedraggled group of Englishmen and their two French companions. He jumped down from the armoured car. ‘Werner and Groen. Bring the Spandau. Altmeier, radio Search HQ and tell them that the problem has been dealt with.’ He gazed clammily upon the prisoners. Herr Gruber, the Chief of the Gestapo in St-Jean-de-Luz, might want to interrogate them. But Herr Gruber was a civilian, an expert at pulling out women’s fingernails; he knew very little about the wars fought between man and man. The Obersturmführer sniffed. There was only one cure for vermin. ‘A clean death,’ he said. ‘It is probably more than you deserve. Komm.’

They set up the Spandau twenty-five yards away from the armoured car, pointing at a low cliff of limestone. Thirty or forty Wehrmacht soldiers in field-grey hung around, watching. ‘Good,’ said the Obersturmführer to the man in the straw hat. ‘Now tell them to dig.’

‘Dig?’

‘Not too deep,’ said the Obersturmführer. ‘Thirty centimetres will suffice.’

Two SS men unstrapped spades from the back of the armoured car, and threw them at the men. Mallory began to dig. So did Hugues and Miller. Wallace, on his knees, picked feebly at the spongy soil. The Wehrmacht men looked disgusted, and began to drift away.

‘Good,’ said the Obersturmführer ten minutes later, contemplating the shallow pit. ‘Tell them to undress.’

They undressed, slowly. The last of the soldiers in field-grey had gone. They hated the revolting tricks of the SS. A man who was a man could not watch this kind of thing. The execution party and its victims were alone under the birdsong and the dripping green trees by the little cliff at the margin of the wood.

There were the three men round the Spandau: the Obersturmführer, and two more SS. Facing them, white-skinned and goose-pimpled in the low sun, were the prisoners. Mallory said in German, ‘What about a cigarette?’

The man in the straw hat said, ‘Give them a cigarette.’

The Obersturmführer said, ‘For a traitor, you are a generous man.’

The man in the straw hat walked across to Mallory, gave him a cigarette, and lit it for him. The Obersturmführer had a sudden feeling that there was something wrong with the transaction.

It was the last feeling he ever had about anything.

Because as the man in the straw hat lit the cigarette for the man with no clothes on, he must have passed over the Schmeisser as well. And suddenly the Schmeisser was firing a long burst at the Spandau crew, who seemed to make a sitting jump backwards and lay twitching, gazing at the sky with sightless eyes. That left the Obersturmführer, his Luger halfway out of his holster. The Schmeisser turned on him. The firing pin clicked on an empty chamber.

The Obersturmführer started to run.

He ran well for a man wearing breeches and jackboots, but not well enough for a man running for his life. Deliberately, Andrea reached into his belt and pulled out a knife. Silver flashed in the sun. The figure in the black uniform stopped running suddenly and collapsed in an untidy tangle of arms and legs. His cap rolled away and came to rest against a thistle. The breeze fluttered his close-cropped yellow hair.

Andrea pulled his knife from the nape of the Obersturmführer’s neck and wiped it on the wet grass, waving away the flies that were buzzing over the wound. Already Mallory and Miller were stripping the uniforms from the bodies of the SS men. The Obersturmführer’s uniform more or less fitted Mallory.

They tumbled the corpses into the graves they had dug for themselves. They drove back to the little valley and loaded the gear and Miller’s boxes into the armoured car. Mallory sat bolt upright, head out of the turret, face grey and unshaven. ‘Go,’ he said.

Miller put his foot on the throttle. The armoured car jounced down the hill, through the remnants of the Wehrmacht force. The field-grey soldiers looked away. They knew what those Totenkopf bastards had been up to on the mountain.

Up on the edge of the wood the air was silent, except for the buzz of the flies over certain dark patches on the fresh-turned earth, and the whistle of a griffon vulture wheeling high between two clouds.

Down in the valley, the armoured car turned onto the pavé, and began to clatter officiously towards St-Jean-de-Luz.

FOUR

Monday 1900-Tuesday 0500

The inhabitants of St-Jean-de-Luz paid very little attention to an SS armoured car; they saw too many of them. Mallory stared straight ahead at the thickening houses. He said to Jaime, ‘We need a safe place. Not a cave this time.’

Jaime nodded. On the outskirts of the town he said, ‘Halt here.’

Miller turned the armoured car down a track, through a rusty iron gate with a chain and a padlock bearing a swastika seal. Jaime cut the chain, let them in, and hooked the broken links closed behind them.

Beyond the gate was a farmyard. It looked as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. The farmhouse windows were open, the remnants of shutters flapping in the breeze from the sea. The cattle-sheds were empty too. ‘The Nazis took the people,’ said Jaime. ‘The men to forced labour. Later, the women were sheltering résistants. They also went. Nobody has come here since.’

Mallory walked round the place. It had an evil, septic smell. There was mouldy hay in the mangers and dried manure still in the cowshed gutters. In the house, the bedclothes were still on the beds, and in the kitchen a saucepan full of mould stood on the cold stove. It was like a house visited by a plague.

But Mallory was less interested in the house than in the exits. The exits were fine. The house stood in a grove of ilex in open fields, plentifully laced with deep, useful ditches. The nearest house was two hundred yards away; the wall it turned on the farm was blank and windowless. And best of all, they were behind an iron gate with an apparently unbroken Nazi seal.

They drove the armoured car into the barn and heaved the door shut. They sat on the broken chairs round the kitchen table and lit cigarettes, while the fleas from the floor attacked their ankles. The westering sun made yellow shafts in the curling smoke. Mallory could have slept for a year.

Hugues said, ‘We must go to the café.’

Mallory nodded. Hugues’ face was pouchy with exhaustion. Mallory wished he trusted him more. It would be dangerous in the café. He said, ‘What if Lisette has talked?’

‘If she has talked, she has talked,’ said Hugues. ‘That is a risk I will take.’

After Colbis, Mallory had begun to think of Hugues as a weak link. But then he had seen him run down Thierry, a Thierry screaming for help, about to break cover under the eyes of the Germans. It had been a nasty job, a job Mallory had been glad he had not had to do himself. Hugues had done it.

And under the one eye of the SS Spandau, standing by the graves they had dug themselves, it had been the same. Certainly, Hugues was frightened. But he was a man who had the courage to face down his fear. And that, in Mallory’s book, was the true bravery.

But Hugues’ courage was not the issue. The issue was to find out the whereabouts of Guy Jamalartégui.

I am sorry, thought Mallory. But brave or not, I cannot trust you, not one hundred per cent. Once you are out from under our eyes it will be too tempting to bargain for Lisette’s life, and the life of your unborn child.

Mallory looked into the veil of smoke surrounding the head of Miller, sprawled in a chair with his boots on the table, and caught his eye. ‘I’ll go along,’ said Miller. ‘I could just about handle a drink.’

Ten minutes later they were walking towards the port of St-Jean-de-Luz. Miller made an improbably tall Frenchman, loping along in a black beret and a blue canvas workman’s suit whose trousers flapped round his calves. He had found the clothes in a wardrobe at the farm. They stank of rats. His papers, however, had been supplied by SOE and were in order. Hugues was dressed in the sweater and corduroys in which he had clambered through the mountain, and another beret. They were dirty and unshaven. They were chewing raw garlic, and they had rubbed dirt into the cracks and scrapes on their hands. They were convincing peasants on their way from the fields to the café.

St-Jean-de-Luz could almost have been a town outside the war zone. The golden evening light held the particular sparkle that comes from proximity to large expanses of water. The inhabitants were out enjoying the weather. A dark-haired girl haughtily ignored Miller’s wink. Miller sighed, and wished he had a cigarette. But all he had was blond tobacco, and smoking blond tobacco in this town would be like hauling up the Stars and Stripes and running out the guns.

The Café de l’Océan was strategically sited on the crossing of two narrow alleys in the Quartier Barre, north of the harbour. At the end of the alley Miller saw two grey-uniformed Germans with a motorcycle combination parked on the quay under a crowd of squalling gulls. They looked as if they were having a pleasant seaside smoke. Soon, an SS armoured car and six men would have failed to respond to signals enough times for there to be noise and fuss. But not, Miller devoutly hoped, too soon.

Outside the café, Hugues looked up and down the alley with the air of a conspirator in a bad play. ‘Get in here,’ said Miller, not unkindly, and shoved the door open for him.

The Café de l’Océan was a room twenty feet on a side, with a bar across the inside corner. It contained some thirty men, five women, and a fug of cigarette smoke. Two field-grey Germans were playing draughts at a table in the corner. Seeing them, Hugues stiffened like a pointer at a grouse. Miller knocked his arm and said, ‘Camouflage.’ He hoped he was right.

Hugues swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat above the frayed collar of his shirt. He elbowed his way up to the bar, next to an elderly gentleman with a beret, a large grey moustache and red-and-yellow eyeballs. He said to the fat man behind the bar, ‘A Cognac for me, and a Cognac for my friend the Admiral.’

The barman had eyes like sharp currants. ‘L’Amiral Beaufort?’

‘That’s the one.’ A fine sheen of sweat glazed Hugues’ pink-and-white features. The BBC had sent the password down the line. But it was always possible that something would have gone astray, that this impenetrable barman, whom he knew to be a résistant, would refuse to make the next link in the chain.

But that was all right, now.

The barman gave them the brandy, and scribbled a laborious bill with a stub of pencil. Hugues passed a glass to Miller, said, ‘Salut,’ and looked at the bill. Pencilled on the paper were the words Guy Jamalartégui - 7 Rue du Port, Martigny. Hugues pulled money from his pocket and passed it to the barman with the bill. The barman put the money in the till, tore the bill into tiny fragments, and dropped the fragments in the wastepaper bin.

‘Bon,’ said Hugues. ‘On s’en va?

Next to him, a voice said in a hoarse whisper, “Vive la France!’

Hugues’ heart lurched in his chest. The voice belonged to the man with the grey moustache. He turned away.

‘I saw the paper. He is a good man, Guy,’ said the man with the moustache. His breath smelt like a distillery. ‘A very good man. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Commandant Cendrars. Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you have heard of me?’

Hugues’ eyes flicked to the Germans at their draughts game. He smiled, an agonised smile. ‘Alas no,’ he said. ‘Excuse me-’

‘Croix de Guerre at the Marne,’ said the old man. ‘A sword long sheathed, but still bright. And ready to be drawn again.’ He put his head close to Hugues. A silence had fallen around him. Cendrars’ alcoholic rasp was singularly penetrating, his attitude visibly conspiratorial. ‘I am not the only one. There are others like me, waiting the moment. The moment which is arriving. Arriving even now. The great fight for the resurrection of France from under the Nazi heel. We are not Communists, monsieur. Nor are we Socialists, like the résistants. I trust you are not a Communist. Non. We are simple Frenchmen-’

‘Excuse me,’ said Hugues. ‘It will soon be curfew.’

Cendrars said, with a significant narrowing of his orange eyes, ‘In the mountains today, it is said that they killed six SS.’

The silence had become intense: a listening silence. Miller drained his glass, grabbed Hugues firmly by the arm, and marched him out into the alley. ‘What was he saying?’

‘Madness,’ said Hugues. ‘Stupid old bastard. Stupid old Royalist con-’

‘No politics,’ said Miller. ‘Home, James.’

They started to walk.

Miller kept a little behind Hugues. He did not like this Cendrars. He liked even less the fact that the news about the killing of the SS on the mountain was already gossip in the town. Germans did not sit still and mourn dead SS men. There would be searches and reprisals -

In front of him, Hugues stopped dead. He was talking to someone: someone small, in a woollen hat and a big overcoat. He had thrown his arms round the small person, was embracing this person, making an odd baying noise that might have been laughing but sounded a lot more like crying. It was a weird and dreadful noise, the sort of noise guaranteed to attract attention. It caused Miller to pull the beret down over his eyes and start his feet moving in a new direction.

Suddenly, the person said in French, ‘For God’s sake, shut up.’ Hugues leaped back as if shot. His face was amazed, mouth open.

‘Be a man,’ said the small figure.

The small figure of Lisette.

Miller said, ‘Hugues. We have to go.’

‘You have to go,’ said Lisette.

This is all we need, thought Miller.

Hugues stared at her. He did not understand the words she was saying. Through his tears of joy, her face looked luminous, like an angel’s. He had forgotten he was a soldier. He was a man, and this woman was bearing his child. There was nothing else he needed to know. Now they could be happy for ever.

‘Free,’ he said.

‘Correct,’ said Lisette. ‘Now for God’s sake get moving.’

‘Moving?’

Miller cleared his throat. Lisette looked as good as new. Not a mark on her. Eight months pregnant. Blooming with health.

That was bad. That was very bad.

Miller said, ‘They told us that you were taken to Gestapo HQ in Bayonne.’

‘I was,’ said Lisette. She looked up and down the alleyway. It was empty, except for the deepening shadows of evening. ‘They let me go. Because of the baby.’

Her face was the same as ever: pale, aquiline, with the dark-shadowed eyes and transparent skin of late pregnancy. This was not a woman who had been tortured.

Miller said, ‘What happened, exactly?’

‘They asked me what I knew, how I came to be in that village. I said I was visiting, that I knew nothing. They … well, they seemed to believe me. They said that a woman in my … condition would not tell them lies, out of respect for her unborn child.’ Her face split in a white grin that sent the shadows scuttling for cover. ‘Of course, I agreed.’

‘Sure you did,’ said Miller. ‘How did you find us here?’

‘I knew you were heading for St-Jean-de-Luz. It is a known thing that if you require information in St-Jean, you will find it in the Café de l’Océan.’

‘Is it?’ Miller did not like this. In fact, he hated it. No Gestapo man had ever been worried about an unborn child, let alone an unborn child whose mother had been apprehended in a raid on a Resistance stronghold. The only reason the Gestapo would have let Lisette out was so they could follow her to her friends.

Miller said, ‘I have to go.’

‘You?’ said Hugues.

Miller said, ‘We have a military operation here. It seems to me that this town is going to get real hot, real soon. And we have to be moving right along.’

‘So Lisette accompanies us.’

Miller looked at him with a face grey as concrete, ‘It is whoever has accompanied Lisette from Bayonne that gives me the problems.’ He watched Hugues’ face. He saw the frown, the struggle. He knew what the answer was going to be. Hugues had abandoned Lisette once in the name of duty. He would not do it again.

Lisette said, ‘You must go.’

Hugues said, ‘No.’

Miller turned away and started to walk, hands in pockets, stopping himself from running, keeping to a stolid peasant shuffle, heading towards the farmyard.

He heard footsteps behind him: one pair of short legs, one pair of long. In a pane of glass he saw their reflection. Hugues had his arm round Lisette’s shoulders and an agonised expression on his face. The steps slowed and halted. Miller walked on, faster, heading for the edge of town.

God damn it, thought Miller. Hugues had seen the address pencilled on the bill at the Café de l’Océan. And it would not take the Germans long to get it out of him.

It was a mess. A five-star, copper-bottomed, stinking Benghazi nine-hole latrine of a father and mother of a mess.

The houses were thinning. A truck engine clattered on the road ahead. Miller faded gently off the verge and into some bushes. A lorry load of soldiers rolled by, blank-faced under their coal-scuttle helmets. Hugues and Lisette had not jumped into the hedge. The lorry stopped alongside them with a wheeze of brakes. An officer climbed down from the cab. Miller heard him bark, ‘Papiers?’

In Miller’s pocket was an identity card, work permit, ration card, tobacco card, frontier zone permit, and a medical certificate signed by a Doctor Lebayon of Pau explaining that chronic lumbago had prevented him from being deported to Germany as a forced labourer. Miller derived a certain sense of security from carrying them, but he knew that a detailed cross-examination about his maternal uncles or the colour of Doctor Lebayon’s beard would scupper him, quick.

He hoped that Hugues and Lisette were in the sort of mental state that permitted clear thinking. He doubted it.

Quiet as a shadow, he slid away through the bushes. Ten minutes later, he was back in the farmyard.

Mallory said, ‘Where’s Hugues?’

Miller told him.

Mallory lit a cigarette. Then he dropped it on the floor and stamped it out, and shouldered into his webbing. ‘We’re off,’ he said.

‘Off where?’ said Miller.

‘Martigny.’

‘What if they talk?’

‘They talk,’ said Mallory. ‘The Germans will react. If they don’t react, nobody’s talked.’

And if they do, thought Miller, gloomily, we’re dead.

Again.

There was a peak in the Southern Alps that had done this to him: Mount Capps, a treacherous peak, full of crevasses and rotten rock, its upper slopes decorated with snow fields that in the morning sun fired salvoes of boulders and later in the day became loose on their foundations and came slithering down like tank regiments, roaring and trailing plumes of pulverised rock and ice.

Mallory had left his base camp on the third day of the climb, leaving Beryl and George, his companions, waiting. He had bivouacked in the lee of a huge rock, halfway up an ice field, and spent a cold, restless night among the cracks and booms of the refreezing ice.

He had woken at four, and gone out. The sky had been clear, the peak of Mount Capps a peaceful pyramid of pink-tinged sugar icing over whose slopes Venus hung like a silver ball. It was a beautiful morning.

Mallory had walked ten feet away from the tent, into the cover of the rocks he used as his lavatory. He dropped his trousers.

A rumble came from the mountain. Feathers of snow fluttered away from the rocks. The rumble became a roar. He looked back at his tent.

A fifty-foot wall of snow and ice and rock thundered across his field of vision. It must have been moving at two hundred miles an hour. The icy breath of its passage slammed him against the rocks.

Ears ringing, he dragged himself back on his feet.

In the tent had been his pack, with spare ropes, food, extra clothes, sleeping bag.

The tent was gone. In its place was a deep, rubble-filled scar in the mountainside. All he had left was the rope he had taken to the rocks, his ice axe, and the fact that he had been climbing mountains since his tenth birthday.

Mallory buckled his trousers. Beryl and George were down there, waiting for him. They had spent six weeks planning this expedition. Nobody had ever climbed the southeast face of Mount Capps.

Mallory had thought at four o’clock that December morning, nine thousand feet above sea level: Beryl and George and the rest of the team are counting on you. It is not just your life. You have responsibilities. So you get killed going up. On this mountain you are just as likely to get killed going down. Three hours to the summit, then nine hours to base camp.

If you are going to die, you might as well die advancing as die retreating.

So he had shouldered his single coil of rope and his ice axe, and made it back to base camp in eight hours.

Via the summit.

The papers had said he was a hero. As far as Mallory was concerned, he had done the job, and not let the team down, and that was enough.

And now the team were out there on the south coast of England, hundreds of thousands strong, waiting to embark on the transports.

It was a job with risks. But that did not make it any less of a job.

They left quickly across the fields, Andrea carrying Wallace. There had been very little sleep: enough to make men groggy and dazed, but not enough for anything approaching rest. As they tramped through the orchards and fields of young corn it was raining again, and a blustery wind clattered branch against branch.

The town lay in darkness under the evening sky. Night fell as Jaime led them round its southern fringes, crossing darkened roads, climbing a couple of low ridges and scrambling down terraces. Engines were roaring in St-Jean-de-Luz. On the other side of the bay the Germans were moving, there was no way of telling where, or who against. All they could do was hope that the movements had nothing to do with Hugues and Lisette.

One step at a time.

‘Wait here,’ said Jaime.

They had arrived on a cobbled lane that headed steeply downhill. At the bottom of the lane water flexed like a sheet of metal.

Jaime drifted off into the dark.

Mallory said, ‘Andrea. Recce?’

Andrea put Wallace down behind a wall, in what might have been a potato patch, and gently pressed a Schmeisser into his hand. Wallace’s head was buzzing with fever and morphine. At first, he had thought that these people were SOE bunglers, rank amateurs. Now he had changed his mind, or what was left of it. They were the coolest, most matter-of-factly competent team he had ever met up with. It was something that he would never have admitted to himself if he had been a well man. But frankly, they were a lot better than any SAS he had ever seen.

Think rugby. Think of a team that has trained itself not by running up and down the pitch and practising, but by playing first-class matches, and winning. Team spirit was for children. These men were in a different league.

Wallace wanted to live up to their standards. But it was hard to know how. He knew enough about wounds to know he was bad; really bad. Behind the morphine he was cold, except for the big, throbbing lump in his stomach. The lump seemed to be getting bigger, sending sickly fingers of poison into the rest of his body. Should have rested it, he thought. Should have stayed in the brothel.

But staying in the brothel would have meant a German bullet, probably with torture first.

There had been torture, bouncing along those dark, wet passages underground, metal twisting in his belly, burning up with fever, all those weeks - was it only hours? - ago. But it was a torture you could come through, if you were one of a team of grown men.

Hell of a life. Wallace felt the fever-taut skin of his face stretch in a grin. You think you’re doing fine in the children’s team, with the bombs and the Jeeps and the old gung ho. Then you get into the men’s team, and for a minute or two you feel like a man.

And after that, what?

Andrea went quietly over the back garden walls of the village. Somewhere a dog began to bark. Soon all the dogs were barking. In one of the houses a man flung open a window and swore. A light drizzle fell. At the base of the hill - more a cliff, really - the sea shifted silver under the sky.

But for the lack of lights, it could have been peacetime. Somewhere in Andrea’s mind there appeared the memory of a wedding, long tables with bottles, laughter and tobacco smoke rising into the hot Aegean night, the moon coming up out of deep blue water. This place could have been like that. And would be again.

But the memory was small, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, shrunk not by lenses, but by years of war. It was suffocated by the picture of his parents’ bodies, bloodless on the shingle bank of the river. It was suffocated by a choir of death-grunts, and hundreds of night-stalks on which Andrea had not been a full colonel in the Greek army - had hardly indeed been human; had been a huge, lethal animal with a mind full of death.

Andrea slid over the last of the garden walls, and walked across the field that led to the edge of the low cliff. There was a jetty at the bottom of the village, a crook of stone quay in whose shelter a couple of dinghies shifted uneasily on outhaul moorings.

The rain swished gently down. Andrea watched, patient as stone.

And was rewarded.

Down there in the lee of a shed at the root of the quay, a match flared, illuminating a face under the sharp-cut brim of a steel helmet, silhouetting a second helmet.

The rain fell. The dogs were still barking. Andrea returned the way he had come.

Mallory, Miller and Jaime were already under the wall.

‘Pillbox on the hill opposite,’ said Mallory. ‘Covers the harbour.’

‘Two sentries,’ said Andrea. ‘On the quay. No pillbox this side.’

‘No soldiers in the village,’ said Miller. ‘This Guy’s house is the third house up from the quay.’

‘Bring Wallace,’ said Mallory.

The dogs were still barking as the five of them went over three walls and came to the back of a cottage. A dog lunged at Andrea, yelling with rage. Andrea laid a great paw on its head and spoke quietly to it in Greek: soothing, earthy words, the words of a man used to working with animals. The dog fell silent. Very quickly, Mallory opened the back door. Miller and Jaime were well into the room before the man at the table even realised they were there.

He was small and thin, with a bald, brown head, a much-broken nose and crooked yellow teeth. There was a spoon in his right hand, a wedge of bread in his left. He was eating something out of a bowl.

He looked up, mouth hanging open, eyes shifting, looking for ways of escape and finding none. He took a deep breath, and prepared to speak.

‘We are friends of Admiral Beaufort,’ said Jaime. ‘Monsieur Guy Jamalartégui?’

The black eyes narrowed. The mouth closed and recommenced chewing. The head nodded. The mouth said, ‘Have you brought the money?’

‘We have.’

Jamalartégui said, ‘There are a lot of you. Only one person will speak at a time. There are Germans.’

‘Four in the pillbox. Two on the quay,’ said Mallory. ‘Is that all?’

Jamalartégui nodded. ‘Unless we get a patrol.’ He looked vaguely impressed. Andrea laid Wallace in a chair by the stove. Wallace was breathing badly. His face was bluish-white.

For a moment there was silence, except for the wheeze of the cooking range and the rattle of rain against the windows. There was a smell of garlic and tomatoes, wine and wood smoke.

‘Jaime,’ said Mallory. ‘Interpret.’

Jamalartégui dug thick glass tumblers and bowls out of the cupboard by the range, and spread them on the table. ‘The Germans steal the meat,’ he said. ‘But there are eggs, and many fish in the sea.’ He got up, and threw onions, peppers and eggs into a frying pan. The room filled with the smell. ‘Piperade,’ he said.

Then there was silence.

Mallory ate until he could eat no more. Then he mopped his plate with bread and refilled his wine glass. He said to Jaime, ‘Tell him he has some information for me.’

‘I am a poor fisherman,’ said Jamalartégui, after Jaime had spoken. ‘One does not eat without paying.’

‘What is a meal, without conversation?’ said Jaime. Mallory did not understand the words, but he understood the tone of voice. He reached into his pack, took out the watertight box, and opened it. In the dim yellow light of the oil lamp it was packed with sheets of white paper, bearing a copperplate inscription and the signature of Mr Peppiatt, Chief Cashier of the Bank of England. ‘One thousand pounds,’ said Mallory. ‘For the information, and transport to the site.’

The old man’s eyes rested on the five-pound notes. They glittered. He opened his mouth to haggle. ‘Take it or leave it,’ said Mallory.

‘I take half now,’ said Guy, through Jaime.

‘No.’

‘Perhaps you will not like the information I will give you.’

‘We shall see. Now talk.’

‘How do I know-’

Mallory stiffened in his chair. ‘Tell him that it is the duty of a British officer not to abuse the hospitality of an ally.’

Jaime spoke. Guy shrugged. Mallory watched him. This was the moment: the crucial moment, when they would know whether they were on a military operation or a wild-goose chase. The moment for which many people had died.

There was a silence that seemed to last for hours. Mallory found he was holding his breath.

Finally, Guy said, ‘Bien.’ Mallory let his breath out. Guy began to talk.

‘It is like this,’ said Jaime, when he had finished. ‘He has seen these submarines. They are at a place called San Eusebio.’

In his mind, Mallory searched the map. The coast of France south of Bordeaux was straight and low-lying: a hundred and fifty miles of beach, continuously battered by a huge Atlantic surf. The only ports of refuge were Hendaye, St-Jean-de-Luz, Bayonne, Capbreton and Arcachon: all shallow, all unsatisfactory for three gigantic submarines. He did not remember seeing any San Eusebio on the map. So we have been looking in the wrong place, he thought. All those people have died in vain.

He said, ‘Where’s that?’

‘Fifty kilometres from here.’ Mallory felt the blood course once again through his veins. All they needed to do was pinpoint the place and call in an air strike. The bombers would do the rest. Even if the submarines were in hardened pens - unlikely, or he would have heard of them - there were the new earthquake bombs -

‘In Spain,’ said Jaime.

Mallory felt cool air in his mouth. His jaw was hanging open. He said, ‘Spain is a neutral country.’

Jaime’s dark Basque face was impassive. He shrugged. ‘But that is where they are. To be in a neutral country could be a convenience, hein? And Franco and Hitler are both of them Fascists, c’est pareil.’

Mallory said, ‘Neutral is neutral.’

‘But submarines are submarines,’ said Andrea, quietly.

And as he so often did, Andrea made everything clear in Mallory’s mind.

For a moment he was not in this fisherman’s cottage, with the gale nudging the tiles, and the stove hissing, and the sentries on the quay and the pillbox on the hill. He was back in that briefing room in the villa on the square at Termoli, hot and cool at the same time, tracing the veins in the marble of the columns. It had sounded like a throwaway line then: You’ll be absolutely on your own, Jensen had said.

But of course, that was what Jensen had to say. Jensen could not order an operation against a neutral country.

There would be no RAF. No support of any kind. The Storm Force was absolutely on its own.

‘What the hell is this about?’ said Miller.

‘We get to blow up some submarines,’ said Mallory. “Very, very quietly.’

‘Oh,’ said Miller, with the air of a man saved from a great disappointment. ‘Is that right? I thought maybe Spain being nootral and all, you know? Fine.’

Mallory poured himself more wine, and lit a cigarette. It was at times like this that he knew he would never be anything but a simple soldier. Jensen had stuck knives between German ribs, and slipped bromide in the wine of Kapitän Langsdorff of the pocket battleship Graf Spee the night before she was scuttled. But he was also a diplomat; it was rumoured that he had been offered the crown of Albania, and to many Bedouin chieftains he was the official voice of the British Empire.

This business bore all the hallmarks of Jensen at his devious best. And perhaps the imprint of another hand, more powerful, normally seen clamped round a huge Havana cigar.

Spain’s neutrality was at best idiosyncratic. Twenty thousand Spaniards were fighting for Hitler on the Russian Front. The German consulate in Tangier - a Spanish possession - monitored Allied shipping movements in the Straits of Gibraltar. And Spanish wolfram provided a vital raw material for German steelworks.

But the British ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare, was prepared to ignore all this hostile activity in the name of keeping lines of communication open. He had set his face firmly against SOE operations in Spain, for fear of being compromised.

So Hoare would have been kept in the dark about the Storm Force. This operation was not just to prevent a repaired Werwolf pack carving a terrible swathe through an invasion fleet in the Channel. It was to send a signal over Hoare’s head to Franco. To tell the Spanish dictator that the Allies knew just how far he was bending the rules, and to give him an object lesson as to the kind of thing he could expect if the rule-bending continued.

As long as Storm Force achieved its objectives.

If it failed …

Mallory lit another cigarette, and tried not to think of being paraded through the streets of Madrid as a saboteur, an infringer of the rights of a neutral state.

Out of the question.

Damn you, Captain Lord Nelson Jensen.

He ground out his cigarette in his wine glass. He said, ‘We’ll be needing a map.’

Hugues and Lisette had been having a difficult evening. The inspection of their papers by the roadside had passed off well enough: the Germans seemed to be in too much of a hurry for more than a perfunctory cross-examination of an obviously pregnant woman and her lover. There was, after all, a dead SS patrol in the mountains, and justice to be done.

But Hugues was rattled. Was it possible that Lisette was a traitor? Knowingly, no. Unknowingly … yes, it was possible.

Hugues made his decision. The operation must continue without them. He took Lisette by the arm. They turned back, towards the middle of town. They had been a pair of lovers out for a stroll, and had been overtaken by the rain and the approaching curfew. What could be more natural than that they should now head home?

‘Where do we go?’ said Lisette.

Hugues forced a smile. ‘To make contact with our other friends,’ he said.

So they walked back to the Café de L’Océan, and Lisette sat gratefully at a table while Hugues ordered two coups de rouge, and wondered what the hell they did next.

The Café had emptied out. It was blowing half a gale now, and flurries of wind agitated the puddles in the road leading down to the port. But the Commandant was still at the bar, speaking in a low, warlike voice to the barman, who was looking sceptical. He glanced round at Hugues, caressed his strawberry nose at Lisette, and returned to his conversation.

A hundred metres away, on the quay, two men in raincoats were talking quietly in German. ‘She went in,’ one of them said. ‘The man with her.’

‘Did she make any other contacts?’

‘Not that I saw. I lost her for twenty minutes.’

‘Scheisse,’ said the taller of the two men. ‘It’ll be curfew in a moment, and we’ll lose her completely. I think it is time to start our hare.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Flush her out, and see where she runs.’

‘Ah.’

They walked into the house of M. Walvis, the undertaker, who was a nark for the Milice, the Vichy police. The taller of the two picked up the telephone and jiggled the cradle. When the operator answered, the man said in his heavily-accented French, ‘Give me the garrison commander.’

There was a pause while the switchboard operator plugged him in on her board. Then a harsh German voice said, ‘Wer da?’

‘Café de l’Océan,’ said the man. ‘Immediately.’ He hung up.

The garrison commander hung up too. At the telephone exchange, the operator released the breath she had been holding while she listened to the conversation, and reached for her plugs.

Two minutes later, the telephone at the Café de l’Océan rang. A woman’s voice said, ‘Fire at the Mairie.’

‘Merde,’ said the man behind the bar. ‘Les boches arrivent.’

Hugues had been expecting this moment, he realised. But now that it was upon him, he was paralysed. Being with those soldiers had taken away his willpower.

Not that willpower was any help, in a situation like this.

He stood irresolute, sweating. ‘Lisette,’ he said. ‘Hide yourself.’

‘No need,’ said the barman, wiping his fat hands on his gigantic apron. ‘Our friend in the telephone exchange gives us ten minutes’ warning.’ He poured himself a small Cognac. ‘Drink?’

The Commandant twirled his moustache, and accepted a Cognac for himself. ‘At moments like this,’ he said, ‘it is vital to steady the nerves.’

Hugues was beside himself. ‘Non,’ he said. Was this walrus-faced cretin seriously proposing to sit here and wait to be shot? These were résistants. If Lisette was found in their company, she would be arrested again. And there was the matter of his papers. His papers would never stand up under detailed scrutiny -

A roaring and clanging sounded in the street outside. With a squeal of tyres, an ancient fire engine skidded to a halt on the cobbles. The Commandant finished his drink and said, ‘All aboard!’ Leaping into the passenger seat, he clapped a huge brass helmet on his head.

‘Allez-y,’ said the barman.

Hugues stared at him. The barman made shooing movements with his fat hands. ‘Vite,’ he said. Lisette’s hand grasped Hugues’. ‘Come,’ she said. The Commandant was beckoning with arthritic sweeps of his arm. She hustled Hugues out and into the cab. The fire engine took off.

There seemed to be seven or eight other men on the engine, all elderly. ‘Where are we going?’ said Hugues to the Commandant.

‘The hour has come,’ said the Commandant. ‘We go to assist our friends the English.’

‘No,’ said Hugues. ‘You must not.’

‘And why?’ roared the Commandant, alcoholically. ‘Every man on this engine has fought for la patrie at the Marne. We are ready to fight and die. For the glory of France. Not for your damned Lenin, nom d’un nom-’

Hugues said, ‘It must be said that I am not a Leninist.’ Stupid old man, he was thinking. Café firebrand -

‘Sir,’ said the Commandant, drawing himself up. ‘I am a soldier. We are all soldiers, and we are fighting an honest war, face to face with the enemy, honourably, not hole-in-corner. Seventy men, hand-picked, will at dawn be rallying to the house of Guy Jamalartégui. The time has come.’

Hugues opened his mouth to tell him that he should keep his childish fantasies to himself. But Lisette got there before him. She said in a conciliatory voice, ‘You cannot do this.’

The Commandant raised a hoary eyebrow that fluttered with the speed of the hurtling engine. ‘Cannot? Madame, I must tell you that at the Marne, I and thirty of my comrades held our redoubt for three days against a regiment of Boches. Nothing has changed.’

‘Mon Commandant,’ said Lisette. ‘I will place confidence in you. What I am about to tell you is of the highest importance, a great secret.’ The parts of the Commandant’s face not concealed by the slipstream-whipped expanses of his moustache were pinkening with pleasure. ‘You will endanger an important Allied mission.’

‘My little cabbage, I thank you,’ said the Commandant. 1 accept your secret. Do not bother your pretty head with it further. And if you please, Mademoiselle, do not speak to me of fighting and other things you do not understand. A woman’s place is in the bedroom and the kitchen.’ He pinched her cheek. ‘Leave this to the men.’

The crack of Lisette’s palm on his ear was audible even over the sound of the bell. ‘Vieux con!’ she said. ‘Buffoon! At least do not arrive in your stupid fire engine.’

‘Monsieur,’ said Hugues. ‘This lady has only this morning escaped the clutches of the Gestapo, while you have been in the café since lunchtime.’

The fire engine was bowling along the southern side of the port. It was raining. From some secret locker in the back, one of the ex-poilus had hauled out rifles of ancient design. ‘We also fight, who sit in the café,’ said the Commandant sulkily, rubbing his ear. On the far side of the harbour, a few fishing boats were tied up at the town quay. Behind them, two large grey trucks were moving through the twilight.

‘Look,’ said Hugues, pointing. ‘They are following us. I beg you. You are endangering this British operation. Secrecy is vital-’

The Commandant said, as if scoring a debating point, ‘It is you that they are following.’

Lisette said, ‘Mon Commandant, the end result will be the same.’

‘I will not skulk,’ said the Commandant. ‘I am not listening to you.’

The road left the shore and began to wind uphill between small houses. ‘Bien,’ said Lisette, between clenched teeth. ‘In that case, there is only one solution.’ She reached forward, twitched the key from the fire engine’s ignition, and flung it as far as she could into the bushes that lined the road.

‘Now run,’ said Lisette.

She jumped from the cab. Hugues went after her. She ran well, for a woman who was eight months pregnant. My God, thought Hugues, this is certainly a remarkable woman. He had never loved her as much as he loved her then.

For they were free, she and he. She had left the Commandant, that old fool of a Commandant, to divert the pursuit. The Commandant would get himself killed, and the knowledge of Guy Jamalartégui’s address would die with him. And he and Lisette and their child could go to Rue du Port in Martigny, safe from pursuit, and reunite themselves with the English. And Lisette and the child would be safe again.

War was war. But Lisette was what mattered.

It was getting dark; it was after curfew, and the port of Martigny would certainly be guarded. But what other option was there?

At the top of the hill he paused and looked back the way they had come. Three broad-bottomed veterans of the Marne were head down in the bushes, looking for the keys. Beside him, Lisette was making a peculiar sound, as if she was weeping.

But she was not weeping. She was laughing.

Hugues took her hand and started walking uphill at a brisk clip. After five minutes there was firing behind them. Good, thought Hugues. So far, so good.

‘Nice place,’ said Dusty Miller. ‘Sea views. Sheltered bathing.’

They were looking at an Admiralty chart spread out on the scrubbed pine planks of the kitchen table of Guy Jamalartégui. It showed a coastline, steep-to, indented with small, stony coves exposed to the huge bight of the Bay of Biscay. But in the centre of that stretch of coast was something different.

In the times when the world was molten and rocks flowed like water, a huge geyser of liquid stone had forced itself through and at an angle to the other strata. Now, that great irruption of granite formed a peninsula that flung a protecting arm round the bay of San Eusebio. The arm was marked Cabo de la Calavera.

At its entrance, the bay was not more than a hundred yards wide; but inside, it broadened into a two-mile oval of water, deepening to twenty fathoms. The village of San Eusebio was on the landward side of the bay. On the tip of the peninsula, the chart said FORTALEZA: fortress. Below the fortress were buildings, with a note that said CHIMNEY CONSPIC.

‘There is a fort overlooking the entrance to the harbour,’ said Guy, through Jaime. ‘The Germans have put new guns. There is a magazine in the fort, well defended, vous voyez, I suppose for the ammunition of the guns and the torpedoes of the U-boats. Also, there is a line of fortifications here.’ He put a cracked and filthy thumb across the neck of the peninsula at its narrowest point. ‘This is the only way onto the Cabo. There are ancient fortifications, originally against the Arabs, and now also new ones from the Germans, I think. To seaward, the cliffs are high. The land slopes from the seaward side towards the harbour, so that there is a beach of sand looking across towards the town. On this beach there is much barbed wire, and a quantity of mines. These defences run from the inland end of the fortifications along to the buildings of the old sardine factory. There are also two merchant ships in the harbour, which arrived with supplies, ostensibly from Uruguay. These ships discharged their cargo at the fish factory quays. Now they are anchored off the factory. They have many machine guns on their decks, to cover the waters of the harbour.’

‘So where are the U-boats?’

Guy shrugged. ‘This is a very big fish factory,’ he said. ‘There was an American, a Basque who made a lot of money in the Pacific salmon fishing, and wanted to help his home town. He built four quays, with a dry dock, and many boats, and wanted to make a big sardine fishery. Naturally, it failed. There were not enough sardines in those years, or ever, on that scale: this was a madman, an American, need one say more? But the buildings are there still. It is a perfect place to make repairs on a ship, or a submarine, bien entendu.’ He drew with a matchstick, extending a puddle of red wine on the table. He drew four quays like the tines of a fork, forming three bays parallel to the shore. The innermost quay ran along the base of the rock. On the crosspiece connecting the tines, he hatched in a group of sheds. ‘There are the quays, the buildings, even the cranes. And it is an easy place to defend.’

Mallory’s eyes rested on the chart and the spidery puddle of wine beside it. It was indeed an easy place to defend; and a difficult one to attack. But there were glimmers of light. The brightest was the fact that it was in a neutral country. He said, ‘What size is the garrison?’

Guy shrugged. ‘It is not a good place to visit, to count soldiers. Perhaps five hundred. Some Wehrmacht. A certain number of SS. The crew from the U-boats. And the technicians, the dockyard people who make the repairs. They came in from Germany, they say, on these so-called Uruguayan ships in the harbour. Perhaps two thousand men in total. They are under the command of a man of importance. A man with a black uniform, I am told. A general, I think; or an admiral. SS or Kriegsmarine, nobody could tell me.’

‘They get their supplies from the ships,’ said Mallory. ‘Where do they get their power?’

‘They brought it with them,’ said Guy. ‘Behind the fortaleza is a little town of wooden huts where the men live. Between the huts and the fortaleza is a building that was once the laundry. Now they have installed many diesels, with generators. Naturally, it is heavily guarded. There is also a magazine, in a cave in the rock.’

Andrea had been sitting back in his chair, eyes closed, as if asleep. Now he said, ‘You know a lot about this place, monsieur. How?’

‘My friends work on the fishing boats out of San Eusebio. They tell me.’

‘There is still fishing at San Eusebio?’

‘But naturally,’ said Guy. ‘It is a port in a neutral country. There is a railway, to take the fish to San Sebastian. The town, it was destroyed by the Fascists. But the quay is a good quay. And the customs … well, there is always a need for money, so close to the border.’

Andrea said, ‘What does that mean?’

‘There are those who have business with the inhabitants. Business not strictly legal, and for which the cooperation of the customs is important.’

Jaime cleared his throat. ‘This I know to be true,’ he said.

‘You know this place?’ said Andrea.

‘In the course of business,’ said Jaime. ‘I did not know about these submarines, of course. For me, it was only a useful harbour for cigarettes, wine, commodities of this kind. There was only a little of the town left standing, after these Fascist bastards had finished with it. I have business contacts there.’

‘Had,’ said Guy.

‘Pardon?’

‘You are speaking of Juanito,’ said Guy. ‘It was Juanito who told me all these things. Two months ago.’

‘I was last at San Eusebio four months ago,’ said Jaime, his eyes on Andrea. He was deeply conscious of what Andrea could do to a traitor. He wished passionately for Andrea to be quite certain that he was not holding out on him.

Andrea nodded. He said, ‘This knowledge will be useful.’

‘Bon,’ said Guy. ‘So Juanito was found on the Cabo. He had been there two, three times before. This time he was selling Cognac to the troops. The Germans caught him. They hanged him from the top of the fortaleza. He is still there, what the gulls have left of him. On the flagpole. Pour encourager les autres.’ His eyes strayed to the tin of bank notes. ‘So this is a dangerous game.’

Andrea nodded, his great neck creasing and uncreasing like a seal’s. ‘In war,’ he said, ‘there is unfortunately a great deal of danger.’

There was silence, except for the sough of the wind in the tiles. The Frenchmen seemed improbably interested in their hands. Andrea’s presence occupied the room like a ticking bomb. Mallory waited. This was the crucial moment: the moment when the running stopped, and the troops had a chance to draw breath and reflect; reflect on the fact that now they had deliberately and with their eyes open to walk out over the abyss, and jump. The time for hot blood was passing. The time for cold blood had begun.

Mallory let Andrea’s presence sink in for a moment, as he had done so many times in so many small, hushed rooms these last eighteen months. When the silence had gone on long enough, he said, ‘And the seaward defences?’

The change of subject earthed the tension in the room like a lightning rod. Guy laughed, a short, scornful laugh. ‘Round the quays they have put anti-submarine nets. Beyond the nets are the cliffs,’ he said. ‘Eighty metres. And at the bottom of the cliffs, the sea, with waves that come all the way from America.’

‘No fortifications?’

Guy’s eyebrows rose under his beret. He smiled, the smile of a man who has the welcome sensation that he is once more on familiar ground. ‘Mon Capitaine,’ he said. ‘With such cliffs and such seas, fortifications are not necessary. Only four months ago, Didier Jaulerry was blown onto the base of the cliff, under the fortifications. He drowned, with his crew. His boat is still there, what is left of it. You can see it at half-tide.’

Mallory nodded. He said, ‘What time of tide was it when he went ashore?’

‘High water. A spring tide.’

‘And the boat is still there, you say.’

Guy’s mouth opened and closed again. ‘Monsieur. You are not -’

Mallory did not seem to hear him. He was looking at the chart, rubbing the stubble on his chin with a meditative thumb. At its narrowest, the neck of the peninsula was no more than a hundred yards wide. It would unquestionably be fortified.

‘What are the cliffs made of?’ he said.

‘Granite,’ said Guy. ‘But rotten granite. Many birds nest there.’

‘And at the bottom of the cliff?’

Guy looked at him as if he was mad. ‘Rocks. The sea. A big sea, with big waves. Listen,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I would think about the town. It is destroyed, this town. I told you. In the Civil War, the Republicans held out there. The Fascists burned everything. So there are not too many people, and those who remain live like rats in the ruins. No food, no water. Now that would be your place to land. If you could pass the fortifications in the harbour, you could make an attack …’

Guy fell into an uncomfortable silence. These men gave him the idea that he said too much, too lightly; that he was a child in the presence of his elders, babbling. ‘So,’ said Mallory, finally. ‘Your boat.’

Guy’s eyes moved to the flat tin box of bank notes under Mallory’s hand.

‘You will be paid as we land,’ said Mallory.

‘But, monsieur-’

‘These are the conditions. And of course, you will be inspired by the idea that you are helping make a world in which it will be possible to spend this money.’

‘Ah, ça,’ said Guy, shrugging with a smuggler’s realism. War was part of politics. Money was money; money was different.

‘Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘When can we leave?’ Mallory watched him with his cool, steady brown eyes.

Guy was not an impressionable man. But he found himself thinking, thank God this one is not my enemy. ‘There will be water in the harbour at four o’clock,’ he said. The sentries do not pay big attention then. The hour will be too early, the port too small. They will be half-asleep. Be in hiding near the quay. When it is time for you to come aboard, I will show lights for five seconds, by accident.’

‘And if there are Germans watching?’ said Andrea.

Guy smiled, a weary smile, the smile of a man who has already gone further than he intended and sees no way of getting back to safety. ‘I am sure you will know what to do with them,’ he said. ‘And once you are aboard … well, we are a fishing boat. We are one hour from the border here. I shall fly the Spanish ensign. The Germans will respect a neutral flag on the high seas, in territorial waters. It is not the same as the things that happen in secret on the Cabo de la Calavera.’

Andrea nodded. Guy was glad he had nodded.

‘Thank you,’ said Mallory, and reached for the bottle of wine. From the direction of St-Jean-de-Luz there came the sound of gunfire, mingled with explosions. Mallory lay back in his chair and listened to the clatter of the rain on the roof, the bluster of the gale at the windows, and closed his eyes. Miller and Jaime were already snoring; Wallace was quiet. The gusts seemed to be losing their force, becoming more widely separated. Miller will be happy about that, thought Mallory. And so will I. Miller hated the sea as much as Mallory hated confined spaces. Mallory did not hate it, but he did not understand it, and did not want to -

Then he was asleep.

When he woke up, it was dark. He had been asleep for no longer than four hours, by the taste in his mouth and the ache of his head. There was a voice in the darkness near him: Andrea’s voice.

Andrea said, ‘There are people outside.’

Knuckles rapped the door. A voice said, ‘L’Amiral Beaufort.’ Hugues’ voice.

Guy said, ‘Entrez.’

Hugues came in. Lisette was with him. She looked round at the grey, fleshless faces, pouched and deep-shadowed in the yellow lamplight. She said, ‘Bonjour.’

‘Bonjour,’ said Mallory, urbane and polite.

There was a silence.

Finally Hugues said, ‘Miller has told you, I think. Lisette was released. We have evaded pursuit. For some hours we have been hiding in a barn above the village. I kept watch. You can see the road from there. Nobody approached. The Germans have lost sight of us.’

Mallory rested his head on the back of the chair. Hugues looked pale and nervous. Lisette was holding his hand. There was shooting,’ said Mallory.

‘The Commandant and his men,’ Hugues explained. They are clever, those ones; clever and stupid, at the same time. They will occupy the Germans.’

Mallory nodded. Once again, he had the feeling that events were moving beyond his control. But at least Guy’s boat was a means of getting them back in hand.

The wind had become a series of squalls now. Between the squalls there was calm, except for the distant rustle of the sea.

‘Guy,’ he said, as if he were proposing a game of tennis. ‘I think it is time you went to fetch your boat. And the rest of us should move out of here. How long?’

Guy said, ‘I could be alongside in half an hour. There will not be much water. But maybe there will be enough.’ He pulled a large, tarnished watch from the pocket of his greasy waistcoat. ‘At four-thirty.’ He cleared his throat. ‘As I said, it will be important for you to be discreet.’

‘Zat right?’ said Miller.

‘Monsieur,’ said Guy. ‘I assure you. The sentries may be sleepy, but they make reports at five minutes to every hour, via a field telephone. I suggest you be very careful.’ Guy smiled, a nervous, perfunctory smile. He slid out of the back door and into the night.

Mallory looked at his watch. It was half-past two. Once again he was in a room, with his back to the sea, relying on other people to get him out of trouble. He hoped it would be the last time. He said to Andrea, ‘Bring Wallace. We’ll get out of here.’

Hugues said, ‘What will you do about the Commandant?’

Mallory had the sensation that he had not slept enough. He said, ‘The Commandant?’

‘The Commandant will be arriving before dawn, he said. With seventy men.’

‘The Commandant was drunk,’ said Lisette.

Hugues sighed. ‘I know this Commandant,’ he said. ‘He will arrive at dawn.’

Wallace said, ‘You’ll have a rearguard then.’

Lisette said, ‘Commanded by the Commandant? You’re crazy.’

Wallace said, ‘The Commandant is retired. I am a serving officer. I’ll take command.’

Mallory turned his head, and looked at the papery face, the glassy, fever-bright eyes.

‘I’m not up to a ride in a boat, sir,’ said Wallace. ‘Maybe one of these chaps can get me to Spain when the fuss dies down.’

Jaime said, ‘It is possible. Certainly, these old fools need orders. But monsieur cannot stay in Guy’s house. The Boche will destroy it.’

‘Hold on,’ said Mallory. ‘Seventy men arriving at dawn?’

‘Commanded by a drunk,’ said Hugues.

Mallory looked at Wallace. He would be no good in a boat. His only hope was to rest, and get over the border later, in discreet silence.

Mallory said, ‘We will send you the Commandant. We will tell him that you are his commanding officer. You will tell him to go home, and collect you when the fuss has died down.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Wallace.

Hugues looked at him, then at Mallory. ‘The barn where we stayed is quiet. There is a loft. You can see the road, the harbour. It’s a good command post.’

Mallory looked at the transparent face, the cracked lips, the glittering eyes. He walked across the room and shook Wallace by the hand. ‘Best of luck, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘It’s been good having the SAS along. We wouldn’t have got this far without you.’

Wallace grinned. ‘I think you probably would,’ he said.

Mallory said, ‘I’ll send up the Commandant.’ Then he beckoned Miller, and said, ‘Help Lieutenant Wallace up to the barn.’

They separated, leaving Mallory with the memory of a handshake that had been no more than a touch of icy bones.

‘Brave man,’ said Andrea.

Lisette was watching them. She nodded. There were tears on her face.

Miller’s steps faded on the path.

Wallace was gone.

Miller threaded across the dark vines and potato-ridges. He carried his burden up the road, into the barn and up the stairs. In the loft, he propped Wallace on the dusty, sweetish-smelling mow. ‘No smoking,’ said Miller.

‘Sure,’ said Wallace. ‘Thanks.’

‘Good luck,’ said Miller, arranging three canteens of water within reach.

In the yellow light of the lantern, Wallace looked like an Old Master painting: wounded soldier, with pack, Bren, Schmeisser, grenades and sulfa powder. His face wore a faint smile; a weird, faraway smile, Miller thought. ‘Give my regards to England,’ he said.

‘You’ll be there before us,’ said Miller, cheerily. ‘You can buy me a bourbon at the Ritz.’ He went down the stairs in two strides of his beanpole legs, and paused by the door. The view from the barn was excellent. The village lay spread out at the end of its road. Nothing moved in the potato-ridges. The night was still: the wind had dropped flat, and the stars were out. In the loft, Miller heard Wallace stir, a stifled moan of pain. Then hinges creaked.

Miller walked onto the road and down towards the houses. After fifty yards he glanced back. When he had carried Wallace up, the shutters of the loft had been closed. Now, a shutter stood open. From that open shutter Wallace would command a view of the road leading down to the quay.

Miller raised a hand in salute, and walked quietly down to the village.

Hugues said to Mallory, ‘Lisette will come on the boat.’ Mallory watched him from under his heavy brows. The eyes were tired, but they seemed to Hugues to see everything. ‘If we leave her, she may talk,’ said Hugues. ‘And there are often women on fishing boats. She will be … camouflage.’

A pregnant woman, thought Mallory. A hell of a member of a penetrate-and-sabotage expedition.

Lisette did not know where they were going, or why. But if she was picked up, she would talk, all right. This time, the Gestapo would make sure of that.

If she had not talked already.

He said, ‘Bring her along.’

It was twenty to four by the time Miller got back to Guy’s house. There was one dirty glass and one plate on the table. There was no sign that seven men and a woman had spent part of the night there. Mallory was waiting, pack on back, Schmeisser in hand. Miller shouldered his boxes. The Storm Force filed out of the back door, across the garden walls, until they came out onto the field at the top of the cliff from which Andrea had watched the sentries. The wind had dropped flat. The water was smooth as satin, the swells slopping against the jetty with a small roar. One of the rowing boats was gone from the outhaul. From out of the hazy darkness of the bay there came the pop and thump of ancient diesels as the fishing fleet got ready for the tide. Of the sentries there was no sign.

Mallory said to Andrea, ‘We’ll wait till the sentries give their all-clear at 0355. Then we’ll take care of them. That’ll give us half an hour to get clear.’

‘Half an hour?’ said a voice at his side. ‘Monsieur, you have my personal guarantee that you will have all the time in the world.’

Mallory spun round.

‘Mon Capitaine,’ said the figure, in a gale of old Cognac. ‘Permit me to introduce myself. Le Commandant Cendrars. At your service.’

‘I was telling you about the Commandant,’ said Hugues. ‘A valuable résistant.’

‘Pardon me,’ hissed the Commandant, shirtily, in French. ‘Chef de la Résistance of the region - ‘

‘Ah, ça!’ said Hugues, scornfully.

Mallory cut off whatever it was he was going to say next. ‘Commandant,’ he said. ‘I am most grateful to you. Hugues, please interpret. Tell the Commandant that his arrival is most timely. I am exceedingly grateful to him for his assistance. I am putting him under the command of Lieutenant Wallace, Commander of His Majesty’s rearguard. Rearguard HQ is the barn above the village. He is to report there immediately for orders. I would remind him that stealth and silence are of the essence.’

The Commandant became still. Down on the rain-blackened quay, a figure was marching slowly: one of the German sentries. The other sentry would be in the command post, standing by the field telephone for the 0355 report. The Commandant said, ‘A rearguard action, hein? Under the command of a lieutenant? I must say-’

‘Hey!’ said Miller. ‘Get out of there!’ Dark figures were crouching over the pile of equipment on the ground. ‘Mind your own damn business -’

Next to his head, something exploded, shockingly loud in the still, starlit predawn. It took him several heartbeats to work out that it had been a rifle going off. ‘In the army of the Marne, we do not sneak past the Boche,’ bellowed Cendrars. ‘We shoot him.’ And he fired again.

The German sentry, surprised by the bullet that had smacked into the granite coping of the quay three metres from his right foot, had dived from view. The second shot hit the empty quay.

Miller found that he was on the ground, his Schmeisser cocked and ready in his hands, his heart thumping. You goddamn maniacs, he was thinking.

Mallory saw the Frenchmen still standing against the sky, obvious targets for the machine gunners in the pillbox on the hill opposite. Wallace, he thought, you are on your own.

Perhaps that is what you wanted.

Miller and Andrea had disappeared, as he would have expected. He said, ‘Andrea?’

‘I’ll organize the pillbox,’ said Andrea’s voice from the darkness.

‘Good. Miller?’

‘Here.’

‘Sentries.’

He looked at his watch. The hands were at five to three. The wires would be humming with the sentries’ yelps: we are under fire, send reinforcements. The Commandant could not have chosen a worse moment if he had tried.

There was a moment’s eerie silence, in which it was possible to imagine that nothing had happened. Then, on the summit of the hill that rose on the other side of the valley in which the village lay, a stabbing flame began to flicker. The Germans in the pillbox were taking an interest.

The sound of the machine gun came a split second later, with the whip of large-calibre bullets. One of the Commandant’s men went over like a skittle. The rest of them lay down, old bones creaking. ‘Merde!’ said the Commandant. ‘What is that?’

Hugues was lying beside Lisette, clutching her hand. He said, wearily, ‘You foolish old men, why will you not obey orders?’

Jaime felt something that might have been a breeze pass by him, except that it was no breeze, because breezes do not talk; and this breeze said, ‘Come down in five minutes. Bring the equipment,’ in the unmistakable voice of Captain Mallory.

Andrea went down through the village and up the hill the other side at a steady jog, conserving energy. The pillbox was directly above him now, its tracers flicking across the top of his vision. He paid them no attention. He had seen the pillbox before night had fallen. This far south, and next to a friendly neutral neighbour, invasion was not a serious fear. So it was not one of the impregnable strong points that you found in Crete, designed to stand days of siege. It was merely a concrete box with a steel door and a slit from which the machine gun could enfilade the bay and the quay.

Something was moving out at sea: something that might have been a fishing boat. Its exact outline was hard to determine, because there was a haziness at sea level, a pale vapour like kettle-steam on the dark face of the waters.

Andrea slowed to a walk. There would be a sentry. He put his face close to the ground and saw the silhouette of a man crouching against the hillside. The silhouette looked nervous, flinching at the occasional bullet that whizzed raggedly overhead from the heroes of the Marne on the hilltop opposite.

The sentry was indeed watching that hilltop. It had taken a lot of wangling to get down here onto the Spanish border, where nothing ever happened. He had no idea what had got into these Resistance idiots. Reinforcements would soon be arriving from St-Jean. There would be shootings and burnings in the morning. Meanwhile, this was annoying.

Or perhaps something worse. Rumours of invasion from England were growing in force, no matter how savagely the SS and Gestapo suppressed such defeatist talk. The sentry felt a dull foreboding. Still, if you were going to survive this damned war, Martigny was the place to be stationed -

A forearm like a steel bar clamped across the sentry’s windpipe. The knife went in and out once, fast as a snake’s tongue. Andrea lowered the body to the ground, put the helmet on his own head, and walked softly to the pillbox door. He took three grenades from his blouse, cradling them like eggs in his vast hand. He pulled the pins from the grenades. He held two of them, levers closed, in his left hand. The other he held in his right hand. He waited for a pause between bursts of fire. Then he banged on the steel door with the grenade.

‘Hey!’ he shouted, in his fluent German. ‘Where is your damned sentry?’

Muffled voices came from within.

‘This is Sturmbannführer Wilp!’ roared Andrea in a voice hoarse with Teutonic rage. ‘This is an exercise. Open up!’

The door opened. The man who opened it saw a large shape topped with a coal-scuttle helmet silhouetted against the stars. He said, “Was?”

Andrea kicked him down the stairs and threw the grenades after him. He was already fifty yards down the hill by the time the gun-slits spouted flame and the flat, heavy explosion rolled across the bay.

The sentries were not the Third Reich’s finest. By the time Mallory and Miller arrived on the quay, they were in the guard post with the door shut, yelling at each other and into their field telephone, and someone was yelling back.

Mallory hoped Guy would be quick. There were a lot of German soldiers within five miles, and they would all be here in a very short time.

The guard post had once been a net shed. It had a stable door, in two parts. Mallory kicked both parts open. The Germans by the telephone looked round. They had wide, flabby faces, and looked well over fifty. They made no movement towards their rifles. Instead, their hands went up in the air.

‘Key,’ said Mallory.

The elder of the two handed him the key.

‘Rifles on the ground,’ said Mallory. The weapons clattered to the flagstones. ‘Kick them over here.’ He picked up the rifles. Then he smashed the telephone and closed the door. If by some miracle the Commandant of the St-Jean-de-Luz garrison had not been informed of his sentries’ screams down the telephone, he could hardly fail to ignore an exploding pillbox. The lorries would already be on the road.

‘Now listen,’ said Mallory. ‘This is a British army operation. It has nothing to do with the Resistance. We are about to board one of our submarines and withdraw. The civilian population have not been involved. Do you understand?’

The sentries nodded, dazed, their eyes shifting from the lean and haggard face, down the SS smock to the Schmeisser, unwavering in the hard, battered hands.

‘You will inform your commanding officer,’ said Mallory. ‘This has been a commando raid, to demonstrate our capabilities. Tell him to remember what we can do.’

The sentries nodded. Their minds would be full of the icy winds of the Russian Front. But the message would have got across.

Mallory and Miller went out onto the empty quay. Mallory padlocked the door.

There was a dampness in the air, mixed with the faint, industrial reek of high explosive from the pillbox. It was quiet, except for the sploosh of the waves and the nearby thud of the fishing boat’s engine.

And in the far background, on the edge of hearing, the sound of lorry engines.

The reinforcements were arriving.

Hugues scrambled down the cliff onto the quay, with Jaime and Lisette and Miller’s boxes. Andrea was back, too. The fishing boat was coming out of the horizon, masts moving across the stars in the handle of the Plough.

Mallory noticed that the lower stars of the Plough’s share had disappeared. He checked it off on a mental list. In the middle of all these disasters, that was something that could be useful.

He said to Jaime, ‘Where are those old men?’

‘Preparing for a final stand.’

‘Go and tell them that for every German they kill, ten Frenchmen will be shot in reprisal. Tell them that this is a British army operation, and that the British army is withdrawing. Tell them that I have informed the sentries accordingly. Make it quick.’

Jaime nodded, and trotted up the cliff. Hugues said, ‘For God’s sake, where is this fishing boat?’

A dark shape came out of the murk. The fishing boat glided alongside. Andrea said, ‘We won’t get far without air support.’

It was a joke. It was a joke that was too true to be good. If lorry loads of Germans soldiers arrived on the quay now, they would have no trouble sinking Guy’s boat. Machine guns, grenades, mortars, they would do the job.

If they arrived on the quay now.

Mallory thought of Wallace, the look in those china-blue eyes. Wallace was a berserker.

Good luck, Wallace, thought Mallory.

The fishing boat was a dark hulk alongside the quay now, the sound of its engine a clanging thump like the beat of a metal heart. The lorry engines were nearly as loud, approaching the top houses of the village.

‘Bon,’ said a small figure in Guy’s voice, but higher than usual. ‘All on boat. Quick, quick.’

Jaime had materialised out of the night, panting. ‘I told them,’ he said. They went aboard. The propeller churned water under the transom. The bow swung out and steadied on the strip of absolute blackness between the sea and the stars. For a moment the land astern lay dark and quiet, the houses of the sleeping village draped across their valley under the stars.

Then the valley erupted like the crater of a volcano.

In the cab of the lead lorry, the Hauptmann had been tired and bored. The bloody Resistance were having one of their fits. Whoever had knocked off the SS patrol in the mountains had in the Hauptmann’s opinion done a good job. It was just that the Hauptmann wished that, having shot the bastards up, they had gone to ground, instead of making a bloody nuisance of themselves in the suburbs of St-Jean-de-Luz and scaring the wits out of his sentries in hopeless little shallow-water ports like Martigny. Until someone had hammered on his door, the Hauptmann had been entertaining Big Suzette in his billet. Suzette might be large, but she was a person of surprising skill. And instead of testing those skills to the limit, the Hauptmann was sitting half-drunk, very tired, and in a state of aggravated coitus interruptus in a truck at the head of a column of three other trucks, one hundred men in all, on the way to sort out a bit of local difficulty in Martigny, on pain of transfer to the Russian Front.

Sod it, thought the Hauptmann.

The lead truck rounded a corner in the lane and started downhill, into the beginning of the valley, where the houses began. There was an old barn a hundred metres down the road on the right. The Hauptmann paid it no attention, because he was peering at the southern side of the valley, where the pillbox stood. The pillbox should have been heavily engaged, if there was real trouble. But the pillbox was silent. As the truck drew level with the barn it seemed to the Hauptmann that the gun-slits of the pillbox were illuminated by a dull orange glow that waxed and waned. But the brandy was playing monkey’s tricks with his eyesight -

A tight cluster of Bren rounds blew the windscreen in with a hellish jangle of broken glass. The driver went halfway out of the window and collapsed like a wet rag. The lorry slewed sideways across the lane, demolishing a wall and coming to rest against a boulder. One of the men in the back saw a jabbing flicker of flame in the open shutter under the roof of the barn by the roadside. As he opened his mouth to point it out, a line of bullets stitched across his abdomen. The last bullet hit one of the stick grenades at his belt. The explosion that followed set fire to the lorry’s gas tank. Men spilled out of the three lorries following, and took up positions in ditches and behind potato-ridges. There was obviously a considerable force in the barn. A machine gunner slammed his weapon on the ground in the lee of a ruined pigsty and fumbled for the trigger. He was a badly shaken man, partially blinded by the flames of the burning lorry. His first long burst went wild, the tracers striking sparks from the coping of the quay and whipping out over the water of the harbour. For a moment, half the weapons in the squad fired after his tracers, and the black water of the port was churned to foam. Then a Feldwebel who had been invalided home from the Eastern Front and knew what he was doing started screaming orders, and the squad turned its attention to the shutter under the barn roof.

There must be at least a company in there, thought the squad, hugging the ground and pouring in fire. The black opening became silent. The squad’s firing lulled. A man got up and scuttled in with a grenade. A hoarse, agonised bellowing came from the shutter, followed by the burp of two sub-machine guns. The streams of bullets started low and went high, almost as if the men firing them were too weak to hold the muzzles down. The man with the grenade ran into the first burst, and fell down. The Germans opened up again.

This time, the machine gunner put an accurate stream of bullets through the open shutter, one in three of them tracer. A light was then seen inside, yellow and blue, and volumes of smoke obscured the sky. The hay was on fire. And suddenly against that light there appeared the figure of a man; a man crawling on one hand and two knees. In the hand he was not using to support himself he held a Schmeisser, which he fired until it was empty.

Now they could see him, they shot him quickly, and he fell to the ground in front of the barn, which was burning well now as the last year’s hay rose in the draughts. The flames spread quickly to the rafters.

The Germans kept on shooting. They had killed one man, sure. But there was no possibility that only one man could have done so much damage.

So they poured lead into the burning barn, the flames dazzling their eyes, until the ridge went and the roof fell in, and a fountain of orange sparks rose at the cold and hazy stars. And when the place was merely a heap of glowing ashes and there was no possibility of anyone being left alive, someone went and looked at the body that had come out of the shutter.

He was lying on his back. His face was peaceful, pale, with a trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth. He was wearing a beret, with the flying hatchet of the SAS. The two privates next to the body were almost too frightened to touch it.

‘Doesn’t look very healthy,’ said one of them.

That’s because he’s dead,’ said the other one.

The battledress blouse was open. The bandages round the belly shone black and wet in the flames. ‘Ach,’ said one of them. ‘Stinks.’

‘Brave man,’ said the first German. ‘To fight like that with his guts hanging out.’

‘Bloody idiot,’ said the second. He bent and closed the eyes, which were blue, and berserk, and open.

It was four o’clock by the time they got the burning truck out of the lane and moved on down to the quay. This time, nobody was taking any chances.

But when they got down to the sea, there was only the sloosh of the ripples against the quay, and the smooth expanse of the harbour at high water, lightening now with the dawn.

Guy Jamalartégui did not see the huge bloom of flame at the top of the valley. From the wheelhouse window, he was saying, in broken English, ‘Messieurs, ‘dames, welcome to the Stella Maris. And now, Capitaine Mallory, it is a question of my money - ‘

Then the guns started up, and Jamalartégui stopped.

One moment the water was dark and smooth. Then it was churning with tracers from the fusillade following the first wild burst the German machine gunner had fired after Wallace had shot up the lorry. The air was whining like injured dogs, and a flock of hammers slammed into the wheelhouse. Guy said, ‘Oh,’ a curious, breathy sound, as if the air was coming out of more places than his throat. He fell on the deck with a crash like a bag of coal. There were more tracers, but random, whizzing into the air like fireworks, passing over the spidery masts of the Stella Maris, dimming and vanishing.

Miller knelt by the body and felt for the pulse in the scrawny neck. He said, ‘He’s dead.’

Mallory looked down at them through eyes sore with sleeplessness. He realised that it was getting light. He could see Miller, crouched on the deck, his bony knees by his ears. And down there beside him in a pool of something that looked black but was not black, was Guy. A Guy who was no longer breathing; whom that random burst of fire from the hill had caught fair and square across the rib cage.

Mallory stepped over the body. He took the wheel. From the chart he recalled that the shore of the bay ran southwest. So he steered southwest, aiming at the horizon, as the light grew.

The engine thumped on. The sea was black like an asphalt parade ground, the horizon clogged with pale haze.

Andrea fingered the upper lip where his moustache was meant to be, and reached for the bottle of Cognac, and took a long swig. ‘No rocks, my Keith, if you please,’ he said. ‘Only peace and quiet.’ Then he lay down in the lee of the wheelhouse.

Mallory kept the bow southwest and motored for the horizon, waiting for the drone of engines, aircraft or marine, that would mean that after all this time, it was all over.

After three or four minutes, he realised that there was something wrong with that horizon. It should have been a knife-sharp line. Instead it looked lumpy and ragged, as if it was made of grey wool. And suddenly the grey skein ahead rose and touched the sky, and the air was wet on his face, and he realised the truth. The Stella Maris had sailed into thick fog.

The world was a round room, with walls of grey vapour. It was a room that moved with the Stella Maris, southwest. It was a room impenetrable by ships and aircraft, except by accident. A most fortunate room.

As long as you did not mind being off a rocky shore in tides of unknown strength, not knowing where you were going.

FIVE

Tuesday 0500-2300

The sun rolled up, a blood-coloured disc above the ramparts of vapour. From somewhere - astern, possibly, it was hard to tell - heavy explosions thumped across the water. They sounded to Mallory like blasting charges.

Andrea said, ‘Wallace was a good man, my Keith.’

Mallory nodded. His eyes hurt with peering into the fog. Wallace had done his duty; more than his duty. Now he was another offering on the altar of war. Unlike most such offerings, his death had not been in vain. Mallory felt sadness, and gratitude.

And puzzlement.

Wallace had not had any high explosives with him. It was unlikely the Germans would have used such explosives to winkle one man out of a hayloft.

It must be Cendrars and his men. They must have got their hands on some quarry explosive, and be slugging it out with the Germans. Mallory profoundly hoped that he was wrong. A pitched battle between the Germans and the heroes of the Marne would only bring down horrors on the civilian population. But he turned his face resolutely away from such speculations. What mattered was what lay ahead, in San Eusebio.

The light grew. They wrapped Guy in a tarpaulin and weighted his feet with a chunk of old scrap iron from the Stella Maris’ noxious bilges. Jaime took off his beret and said a couple of Basque prayers. Hugues said, ‘Vive la France!’ The body pierced the black surface of the sea with scarcely a ripple, and was gone.

The sea was getting to Mallory. In the globe of fog it was quiet, and grey, and solitary: an oasis in the desert of battle and violence that he wandered like a Tuareg. But Mallory disliked the peace of the sea in the same way a Tuareg might find an oasis cloying. It produced in him a nervous sickness, the sickness that the Tuareg might feel under green palms among people he did not know, as he watered his camels and longed to return to the real life of furnace winds and red-hot sands. Mallory experienced a moment of longing for the rock and ice of mountains: hard mountains whose habits he understood. Mountains in which he was not the hunter and the destroyer; mountains in which the only enemies were the failure of finger and foot to cling to hold, or human will to continue upwards.

He looked down at Andrea. The Greek was lying by the wheelhouse, smoking, watching the oily heave of the sea. He felt Mallory’s eyes on him. He looked up. This is a most disgusting ocean,’ he said.

Mallory nodded.

‘These tides,’ said Andrea. ‘They are a thing of barbarians. How can men make ideas when the world they inhabit is being dragged here and there by the moon? It is for this that you are so restless, you of the North.’

Mallory laughed. They had escaped from a burning village and were on their way to attack a fortified rock. And Andrea was complaining about the tides.

But when he looked again at Andrea’s face, he saw something that stopped his laughing. Despite his claims to the contrary, Andrea was not afraid of men or bullets, night or war. But unless Mallory was very much mistaken, Andrea was afraid of the cold black waters of the Atlantic.

He lit a cigarette. There was a breeze now, enough to whip the smoke away. The sun had gone, and the sky was a leaden grey. Mallory wedged himself into the corner of the wheelhouse. Twelve hours, he thought. He took inventory.

The Stella Maris was forty-five feet long. She had a tall mast at the front end and a short mast at the back end, which probably made her a ketch. There were what looked like sails on the booms, which Mallory devoutly hoped they would not have to use. There was a big fish-hold amidships, a dirty little fo’c’sle, and an engine room abaft the wheelhouse. The engine was a single-cylinder Bolander hot-bulb diesel, with a rust-caked flywheel the size and weight of a millstone. In the bullet-shattered wheelhouse was a compass of unknown accuracy, and the bloodstained Admiralty chart Guy had spread on his kitchen table all those weeks - hours - ago. The Stella Maris was thumping southwest through the fog at something like five knots, Mallory estimated. They should have moved out of French waters into Spanish. There would be patrol boats.

He offered a cigarette to Andrea. Andrea took it and lit it, scowling from under his black brows at the grey and sunless sea. ‘A cold hell,’ he said. He began to rummage restlessly in lockers. He found a new bottle of brandy, sniffed it, took a swig, and passed it to Mallory. One of the lockers was full of flags. He pulled out a yellow one. ‘Quarantine,’ he said. ‘For when you have disease on board.’ His white teeth showed in his black and bristly jaw. ‘Or when you have goods to declare. This flag has never been used, I think.’

He’s beaten it, thought Mallory. Andrea was not one to let irrational fears occupy space more profitably reserved for rational fears, like fear of failure in the face of the enemy. ‘Guy said there was a Spanish flag,’ he said.

Andrea rummaged some more, and came up with a red-and-yellow ensign. It was big, for easy visibility, and looked as if it had done long, solid service. Mallory gave Andrea the wheel, walked out of the wheelhouse and ran the ensign up to the top of the mizzen mast.

So now the Stella Maris was a Spanish boat, and all they had to worry about was motoring full ahead into the cliffs of Northern Spain.

The wind was definitely freshening. Ahead, the fog was becoming pale and ragged, and the slow Atlantic heave of the waves was taking on a sharper, more urgent feel.

Behind the wheelhouse, Miller stirred and opened his eyes. He lay for a moment, watching the Spanish flag snapping in the crisp breeze. Then he sat up and lit a cigarette. ‘Buenos dias,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

‘If you please,’ said Mallory.

Miller stumbled down a flight of steps into the grease-varnished galley. From its door there emerged the smell first of paraffin, and then of coffee. He brought Mallory and Andrea mugs, well dosed with condensed milk and brandy. ‘Nice as this is,’ said Miller, eyeing the sea with scorn and dislike, ‘how long does it last?’

‘At least till nightfall.’

The Stella Maris thumped on, rolling heavily in the swell from the west. The fog was thinning in the breeze, piling into banks. One particularly heavy bank hung to the south, a heap of grey vapour that should, if Mallory’s dead reckoning was right, hide the land. Miller drank another cup of coffee and smoked two cigarettes in quick succession. His bony face, already pale with exhaustion, was turning greenish under the eyes. Mallory said to Andrea, ‘Better let him steer,’ and lay down on the bench at the back of the wheelhouse.

Sleep came immediately, deep as a lake. It all went: the submarines, fog, the approaching cliffs of Spain.

It was a peaceful sleep: not the two-inches-below-the-surface doze of action, but a deep, heavy coma, a sleep of the interregnum between the confusions of the Pyrenees and the task waiting on the Cabo de la Calavera. Watching him, Andrea saw the broad forehead smoothed of the tensions of the last three days, saw the knots at the hinges of the jaw relax. Rest well, my Keith, he thought. You have brought us a long way, but you have only brought us to the beginning.

Mallory dreamed. He dreamed he was in a place in the mountains, in a valley of grey stone through which a glacier inched. He dreamed that there were great birds wheeling in the sky that were not birds, but aeroplanes: Stukas. The Stukas were diving, dropping their bombs, which were bursting around him in red flowers of flame. But Mallory felt nothing, heard nothing, because he was separate from it all. A voice told him, ‘You are in the ice.’ Wallace’s voice. And Mallory realised that it was true. He was encased in a huge block of clear ice, which was saving him from the bombs. But at the same time it was preventing him from feeling anything, and that was bad -

Then someone was shaking him, and he was coming up out of that ice, his mind clicking into awareness that something had changed. The engine was still panting, the boat still rolling. But he seemed to be wet, and there was a new sound: a shrill wailing, an ululation, the sound of the Stukas -

He swung his feet to the deck, eyes searching the sky. There were no Stukas. There were only clouds, arranged in long squalls, their bellies trailing rain. Against them, the Stella Maris’ masts described jerky loops. Her stub nose rose and fell like a blunt wooden hammer, walloping the troughs into spray that came back down the deck in bucketfuls. The wailing was the wind in the rigging.

‘Land, er, ho,’ said Miller.

As Mallory stood up he saw the fog bank, smaller and lighter now, shift and writhe. Then a great hand of air seemed to grab it and wrench it aside.

Five miles away, across a grey and gnarled sea, the black cliffs of Spain stood high and clear. Through his glasses Mallory could see a bay, with a cluster of grey houses, and on one of the headlands, the ruins of what might have been a fortress. He took a bearing and checked the chart. ‘Forty miles to go,’ he said. Miller nodded, without enthusiasm. Miller did not like the sea. As far as he was concerned, four miles would have been better; a lot better, even if there were two SS regiments at the end of it. ‘Get Jaime on deck,’ said Mallory.

Miller went below. Mallory kept the boat’s head to the sea, blinking the spray out of his eyes. It had almost been better in the fog. He felt horribly exposed, out here in the clear grey breeze. And by the feel of it, they would be here all day; the Stella Maris was making four knots at best, labouring over these humpbacked seas like a weak-hearted charwoman climbing a flight of stairs.

Jaime appeared on deck, bleary-eyed. He squinted around him, said, ‘That’s Cabo del Lobo. Long way to go.’

‘What about patrol boats?’ said Mallory.

Jaime shrugged. ‘They make big trouble on the border. This far down the coast, maybe they don’t bother. Either way, they like money.’

‘Stay on deck,’ said Mallory.

Jaime nodded. He said, ‘One thing. If you stay out here, people will be suspicious. You’re a fishing boat. So we go in under the cliffs, no? That way, you are fishing. And nobody can see you from the land. And if we do get a problem, we throw some lobster pots in the sea.’

Mallory said, ‘You know a lot about this.’

Jaime grinned, the grin of a man in his element. ‘Frontiers are my business,’ he said.

Mallory nodded. Without Jaime, they would not have found the Chemin des Anges, or the cave system. Without Jaime, they would have been dead.

The Stella Maris closed the shore. Across two hundred yards of grey and lumpy sea the cliffs reared three hundred feet into the grubby sky swept by the white motes of innumerable seabirds. Miller did not like the look of them at all. At least when their caïque had blown into the south cliff at Navarone it had been decently dark. If Miller was going to get smashed to bits, he would rather not get smashed to bits in broad daylight.

Hugues was on deck, looking as nervous as Miller felt. ‘Is okay,’ said Lisette, showing her white teeth. ‘Jaime has sailed this route many times.’

‘I didn’t know you were a fisherman,’ said Miller.

Jaime grinned, his dark eyes glinting under his beret. ‘There are many people in the cigarette fishery,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you fish from a mule, sometimes from a boat.’

‘It is not only lobsters you find in the pots here,’ said Lisette.

Through the horrid queasiness of his belly, Miller thought that he saw in her something new, a confidence that she had not had in France. Of course, getting away from the Gestapo and into neutral territory would tend to improve your confidence, particularly if your guide in neutral territory was Jaime.

A sharp-crested hill of water swept under the Stella Maris’ bow and dropped her into a trough. For a moment, Miller was once again weightless. To seaward a great hole had appeared in the sea, floored with weedy rock. ‘Caja del Muerto,’ said Jaime. ‘Dead man’s chest.’ The waters closed over the rock with a boom, sending a depth-charge burst of ice-white spray a hundred feet into the wind.

For the next two hours the Stella Maris ground on down the inshore channel, invisible from the land. Mallory began to regain confidence. He went to Miller, who was lying in the scuppers alongside the wheelhouse, and said, ‘Four hours’ sleep. Then check your gear, and I’ll brief the team.’

Miller groaned and dragged himself to the fo’c’sle, where Hugues was snoring on his bunk. He rolled into the bunk underneath, and passed out.

Mallory leaned against the wheelhouse, apparently watching the gulls on the cliffs. He had been thinking about Guy’s chart of the Cabo de la Calavera and the harbour of San Eusebio. The approach was from the town quay, across the harbour, through the beach defences onto the Cape and into the U-boat repair docks. That was obvious.

Far too obvious.

The tide would be low, just after dark. The beach would be exposed and easy.

Far too easy.

Mallory lit a cigarette, and rested his head against the wheelhouse doorpost. There were features of the San Eusebio chart that had been making him think hard about cliffs; particularly if, as seemed likely, the wind fixed itself in the west.

‘Capitaine,’ said Jaime in a new, sharp voice, and pointed.

Mallory followed his finger.

Halfway to the horizon was the silhouette of a grey launch. As Mallory watched, the silhouette foreshortened until he could see the moustache of foam on either side of the bow.

He felt the muscles of his stomach clench and become rigid. San Eusebio seemed suddenly a long way away.

‘Well,’ he said, calm as a goldfish pond. ‘I suppose it’s time we hauled the pots.’

El Teniente Diego Menendez y Zurbaran was in a vile mood. It was not being posted to this wet green corner of Spain; he had fought hard for the Nationalists in the Civil War, so he had no objection to the sight of Basque towns in ruins and Basque children starving. It was worse than rain and Basques. A week ago, he had been told in an unpleasant interview with Almirante Juan de Sanlucar, his cousin and commanding officer, that he was to double his patrols and increase his vigilance generally. The Teniente had pointed out that his vigilance was as always at maximum, and that the patrol boat, known to its crew as the Cacafuego, was operating all the hours its ancient engine and weary rivets could stand. Sanlucar had assumed a dour, bellicose look, and told him that instructions from above did not take account of such objections. It was the will of… someone very exalted (here Sanlucar’s lips framed the words el Caudillo) that patrols on the stretch of coast for which the Teniente was responsible should be greatly increased.

At the framing of the Dictator’s august title, never lightly spoken aloud, the Teniente’s heart had started to bang nastily in his chest. At first he had interpreted it as a general rebuke for his laxity; the pay of a Naval officer was scarcely a living wage in this dreary province of surly people and expensive food, so he had fallen into the habit of accepting the voluntary contributions of the smuggling fraternity. But he realised that there was more to it than that after a conversation with Jorge, his bosun. Jorge had observed military activity on the Cabo de la Calavera, and had approached the sentries on the gate, who were dressed in the uniforms of the First Zaragoza Regiment, to offer them the services of certain Basque women he maintained in the Calle Brujo in Bilbao. The soldiers had chased Jorge away, cursing him in a language that was not Spanish. Jorge had expressed to the Teniente the opinion, based on certain military vehicles and black uniforms he had half-glimpsed through the heavily-fortified gate that cut off the neck of the peninsula, that the garrison on the Cabo de la Calavera was German.

And thirty-six hours ago, just before this patrol, the Teniente had been notified that his bow gun crew was to be replaced, as were the port and starboard machine gunners. When the replacements had turned up, they had been German.

The Teniente had nothing against Germans. He disliked them only insofar as he disliked everyone except himself. But their presence on Cabo de la Calavera made him nervous, and their presence at his guns insulted his pride. He valued Spain’s neutrality, because it meant his life was not in danger. He needed his bribes. And he had not taken kindly to standing on that worn patch of carpet in front of the Almirante’s desk in Santander, being subjected by the Almirante to a diatribe on the importance of duty under the cold grey eyes of an obvious homosexual from the German Embassy in Madrid. This coast was the Teniente’s personal patch. The fact that his superior officers’ new jumpiness was obviously German-inspired made him feel, insofar as such a feeling was possible for a Fascist, frankly bolshy.

So it was with no great sense of mission that he bore down on the familiar black hull of the Stella Maris, hauling lobster pots under the cliff.

He paused a hundred feet away, snarling at Paco the coxswain to keep the boat steady. The Stella Maris was head to wind, fat and black as ever. There were a couple of unfamiliar faces: two men who might have been northern Portuguese or even German, tall and lean, wearing singlets despite the cut of the west wind. They lurched uneasily on the Stella Maris ‘ splintery deck; it looked to the Teniente as if they were not used to hauling lobster pots. But they were hauling all right. And back in the wheelhouse - it looked as if something had happened to the wheelhouse - Jaime Baragwanath was waving and grinning from under his beret. There seemed to be a woman with him.

The Teniente knew Jaime of old, as a fixer and a smuggler. He brought coffee out of Spain to France, and in the other direction the wines of Bordeaux, to alleviate the suffering caused by vino negro. If Jaime was personally on board the Stella, she would be carrying a high bulk, high value cargo, like wine.

The Teniente was partial to a few bottles of claret of an evening. Normally, he would have taken his cut at the landing. But he saw in the Stella Maris a way to impress his new gunners - and thus, he suspected, the Almirante - with his zeal.

The Teniente lit a thin black cigar and tilted his cap rakishly over his right eye. Plucking the brass megaphone from its clips on the bridge, he put its oxide-green business end to his mouth. ‘Halt!’ he shouted. ‘I am boarding you.’ On the foredeck, the crew of the 75-mm gun swivelled their piece to cover the Stella.

Mallory put a couple of loops of tail-line round a samson post, and tied it off with a knot that had more to do with rock faces than boats. He shuffled aft at a fisherman’s slouch. He said to Jaime, ‘What is this?’

‘Routine inspection,’ said Jaime, his dark face still, avoiding Mallory’s eye. ‘This officer takes bribes. He’s used to seeing the Stella under the Spanish flag, as long as he get money. He maybe want some money. Or maybe some tobacco, drink, who knows?’

‘Jaime knows,’ said Hugues.

Mallory ignored him. He said, ‘Does he normally point guns?’

‘Not normally.’ Jaime frowned at the men on the Cacafuego’s foredeck. ‘He’s got new gunners.’

Mallory nodded and grinned, a simple fisherman’s grin, full of salty good nature, for the benefit of anyone watching from the gunboat. His eyes were not good-natured. They checked off the rusting grey paint of the bow, the two blond men balancing easily on the deck by the breech of the 75-mm gun. The Captain was on the bridge. Aft of the bridge, another two men stood at machine guns. Spandaus. Spandaus were light guns, but they could still unzip a boat the size of the Stella. A 75-mm gun could blow her right out of the water.

But the guns were not the main problem. The main problem was the array of radio aerials between the two masts.

In his mind, he followed the trail of wreckage back into the Pyrenees. If the guarda-costa sent out a signal about unusual occurrences off the Vizcayan coast, any German with a map and eyes to see would be able to grasp the general direction of this dotted line of mayhem.

There was only one solution.

Mallory trotted forward and shouted down the main hatch. Jaime started yelling at the patrol boat in Spanish. The patrol boat was yelling back. Mallory cast off the tail-line of the lobster pots. Then he went aft to the wheelhouse. He said to Lisette, ‘Get down, please.’ He politely took the wheel from Jaime, spun it hard-a-starboard, and drove the Stella Maris straight at the patrol boat’s mid point.

The Teniente started screaming into the megaphone. That was a mistake. By the time he had realised screaming was no good, the Stella Maris was twenty feet away. The 75-mm gun banged once. The shell screamed past the Stella’s wheelhouse and burst on the black cliff face two hundred yards behind. The Spandaus opened up, bullets fanning across the sky as the gunboat rolled. Then Andrea and Miller came out of the Stella’s forehatch like jack-in-the-boxes. Andrea hosed the gun’s crew with Bren bullets. They disappeared. Hit or not, it did not matter, as long as they were away from the gun. Miller took the Spandau crews. By the time he had finished his burst, the Stella Maris was in a trough, the gunboat on a wave. The patrol boat’s grey side came down with a rending crash on the Stella’s stem, and stuck there. The gunners on the patrol boat could not depress their sights far enough to bear on the Stella. Andrea had the Bren going by now, hammering a tight pattern of bullets into the patrol boat’s hull, at the place where the radios might be. Miller pulled the pins out of four grenades. He tossed them up the patrol boat’s side, heard them rattle down her decks, and heard the Mat of their explosions in the wind. The two boats hung together in the form of a T, bashed and wrenched by the short inshore chop, the Stella’s bow borne down by the patrol boat’s side. There was a hole in that side. The Cacafuego’s plates were no thicker than a tin can: a rusty tin can -

A wave came under. The Stella pitched away from the gunboat at the same time as the gunboat rolled away from the Stella. The gunboat’s plates gave with a wrenching groan. The two boats came apart, the Stella’s bow rearing high as Mallory took her round and away.

‘Fire!’ screamed the Teniente. His ears were ringing from the grenade explosions. The radio aerials were gone, streaming in the breeze. The Teniente heard the bullets clang and whizz, and felt an odd sogginess in his ship’s movements. ‘Fire!’ he screamed again. The Stella Maris was twenty yards away now. He saw the Spandau crews sprawled over their guns, and the foredeck by the 75-mm swept clean of men. He found that his feet were wet, and realised that his ship was sinking. He had been sunk by the Stella Maris. He opened his mouth to scream for help.

Then he thought of what his cousin would say when he told him that his armed patrol boat had been sunk by a bunch of smugglers.

The Teniente realised that the time had come to die.

He stood to attention, and shut his mouth.

The patrol boat rolled and sank in the space of twenty seconds. There was a tremendous eructation of bubbles. An oar came to the surface. Then nothing.

‘Jesus,’ said Jaime, pale to the lips.

Mallory turned his eyes away from the satiny patch of water where the patrol boat had been. Andrea’s eyes were blank. The blankness had very little to do with shock, or the violent sinking of a guarda-costa with half a dozen crew. He and Mallory were both calculating whether the guarda-costa had announced its attentions on the radio before it had tried to come alongside the Stella Maris.

Mallory said, ‘Full ahead, I think.’

Andrea nodded, and lowered his great bulk into the engine room.

The Bolander took on a more urgent thump. Mallory cut the tail-lines free from the bow. The Stella Maris heaved on westward, the wind cold in Mallory’s face.

Jaime came on deck with Lisette. She looked pale. She had reason to look pale. Jaime said, ‘Capitaine, I need a word.’

Lisette watched them walk to the wheelhouse, watched Mallory’s straight back, the precise step. Even on this filthy boat, that one walked like a soldier.

Jaime said, That was not normal.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I know this man,’ said Jaime. The officer commanding the guarda-costa. He is a bastard, but a careful bastard. He would never stop the Stella. He takes money from smugglers, but not on the sea. Only in the bar, after they have gone ashore. The only reason he stopped us is because someone told him stop any ship.’

‘So the Werwolf pack hasn’t left,’ said Mallory. ‘Good.’

Jaime said, ‘Was it necessary to kill those people?’

Mallory was not interested. There’s a war on.’

‘So you kill these men. Life into death. Like a mule turning food into shit.’

‘War is nasty like that,’ said Mallory. The reason we are here is to destroy submarines.’

Jaime grinned, a grin that held a horrible irony. ‘Perhaps it is just that I do not like to destroy a useful trading partner.’

There will be better trading after we have won the war,’ said Mallory. ‘Now, there are some things I need to know about the Cabo de la Calavera.’

By the middle of the day the sky was whitening under a veil of cirrus, and Miller had been sick fourteen times. Andrea was taking his spell at the pump; Andrea never got tired. Mallory came down into the fish-hold.

‘Briefing,’ he said. ‘Ready for this?’

Andrea nodded, impassive behind his three days’ growth of beard. Miller would have done the same, but nodding required energy, and he was saving his energy for when he really needed it.

Mallory said, ‘There’s a cliff on the seaward side of this Calavera place. Guy said it’s not climbable. So the Germans won’t be watching it. With luck.’

There was a silence, filled with the pant of the engine and the distant boom of waves on rock.

Miller said, ‘If it’s climbable, what do we do?’

Mallory lit his sixtieth cigarette since dawn. ‘Climb it,’ he said.

Miller shook his head weakly. ‘Ask a silly question,’ he said.

‘We’ll go over the side after dark,’ said Mallory. ‘In the dinghy. Jaime and Hugues and Lisette will take the Stella on into the harbour. They’ll look like fishermen in to make repairs. The Germans have put big defences on the harbour side of the Cabo. As far as I can see, there’s very little on the seaward side, because they’ve decided the cliffs will do the job. We’ll go up in the dark, get ourselves some uniforms. Dusty, you’ll want to check your equipment. We’ll all need to shave. Questions?’

Miller listened to the boom of waves on rock. He said, ‘How do we get from the dinghy onto the cliff? Seems to me that the sea has all these waves on it.’

Mallory flattened the chart on the filleting table. ‘The sea’s coming from the west.’ He pointed to the northerly bulge of the shore. ‘In behind here there’s a wreck; Guy’s friend Didier Jaulerry’s fishing boat, went up the beach four months ago. Jaime says that with the sea from the west, you sometimes get a smooth patch in the lee of the wreck.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘During the bottom half of the tide. Till about 2100 hours tonight.’

Andrea said, ‘It’s not full dark at 2100.’

‘It is at 2130.’

Miller said, ‘But what if the waves are breaking clear over that wreck at 2130?’

Mallory folded the chart briskly, and stuck it in the pocket of his battledress blouse. ‘Oh, I expect we’ll manage,’ he said.

There was more silence. There was a lot to hope for. They had to hope that the guarda-costa had not got a radio message off, and that the dinghy would not be spotted by the Germans or smash against the cliff, and that the Stella Maris ‘ remaining complement would escape notice in San Eusebio.

The wind went up, and so did the waves. Lisette put her swollen ankles out of her bunk, and moved towards the filthy galley. Hugues stopped her. ‘I’ll cook,’ he said. ‘You rest.’

She looked at him with the dark-shadowed eyes of late pregnancy. He saw hostility and frustration. He said, ‘What is it?’ and tried to put his arm round her.

She pulled away. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m tired.’ She turned her face to the wall. Hugues went grim-faced into the galley and rummaged in the boxes that lined the bulkhead. Half an hour later, smoke was issuing from the chimney, and the smell of frying onions mingled horribly with the stench of the Stella’s fish-hold. And in an hour, a stew of tomatoes, hard chorizo, onions and potatoes was steaming in a blackened tureen. Jaime pulled a bottle of suspiciously good red wine out of a locker. Mallory, Andrea and Miller sat themselves at the table in the saloon. Mallory and Andrea ate hard and long. There was no talk. This was the grim refuelling of war machines. At the end, Andrea poured another tumbler of wine, lit a cigarette and leaned back against the fishing boat’s side, eyes closed, humming a Greek tune full of Oriental runs and quarter-tones. Mallory looked across at him, the massive neck running into the colossal shoulders, the face peaceful in repose. He looked at Miller, smoking, pale-green under the eyes, in front of his largely untouched plate of stew. They looked like fishermen: tired fishermen, who smoked too much and drank too much when they could get hold of it. They looked like the kind of fishermen you would expect to find aboard this leaky boat with no bloody fish in the hold, and a smuggler, and an eight-months-pregnant woman, and the man who had got her pregnant.

They did not look like the cutting edge of a Storm Force whose task it was to climb a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot cliff in the dark, penetrate a strong and watchful garrison, and destroy the submarines of the Werwolf squadron.

Still, thought Mallory. Nobody would have believed the distance they had come to arrive at this point. But here they were. It was just a matter of carrying on: dividing the big problem into small, manageable problems, and solving them, one by one, with the tools at his disposal.

And a hell of a lot of luck.

Miller said, ‘I guess I’ll go turn in.’ He shambled forward to the bunks.

When they were alone, Andrea said, ‘What do you think about this?’

Mallory had known the Greek long enough to realise that he did not want an opinion, but a discussion. Mallory was in command of the expedition - there was no argument about that. But Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army as well as one of the most dangerous and experienced guerrilla fighters in the Mediterranean. To fight at his most lethally efficient, Andrea needed to understand the situation.

Mallory said, ‘It’s a good place to keep some submarines.’

‘Some hidden submarines.’

That’s right.’

‘Good security.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And that patrol boat. That was part of the security?’

‘The gun crews looked German.’

‘True.’ Andrea stroked the place where his moustache should have been. ‘And that was a routine patrol.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Not based on specific information.’

Mallory shrugged. ‘No way of knowing,’ he said.

‘Quite.’

‘Do we trust all these people?’

Mallory had been wondering the same thing. Jaime had a smuggler’s capacity for double-dealing. Hugues was brave, but he had an irrational streak a mile wide. And Lisette … well, Lisette under Storm Force control was safer than Lisette at large.

‘We’ve got to,’ he said.

Andrea nodded. There was a pause. Then he said, ‘It seems to me that the Germans will have problems of their own.’

That had also occurred to Mallory. Spain was full of spies. To keep the occupation of Cabo de la Calavera secret, the garrison would be manned and supplied from the sea, or across the Pyrenees, by night. Either way, it would be a smuggling operation, with all the inconveniences attendant on such operations. And German efficiency or no German efficiency, it seemed likely that a garrison hastily convened and furtively supplied would be a less well-organised garrison than the garrison of, say, Navarone. Confusion would be to the Storm Force’s advantage.

Andrea poured the last of the wine into the two glasses, and raised his to Mallory. ‘My Keith,’ he said. ‘Victory, or a clean death.’

‘And two days’ kip to follow,’ said Mallory.

He thought, in five hours, we will be on hard rock again, climbing. He raised his own glass and drank. Andrea swung his boots up onto the bench, put his head on his pack, and closed his eyes.

The door opened. Miller came in.

At first, Mallory thought he had been shot. His face was bloodless, his lips the colour of ashes. But he was walking well, braced against the heave of the Stella Maris’ deck. In his hands he was carrying the big, brass-bound boxes that held his explosives and his fuses.

Mallory said, ‘Sleep first. Check gear later.’

Miller shook his head. He did not speak: it was as if something had happened that had removed his voice. He lifted the boxes and placed them side by side on the gutting table. He unlatched them, opened the lids, and gestured at the contents.

If the Storm Force was a bomb, the personnel were the fuse and the casing and the fins. What was inside those two brass-bound mahogany boxes was the charge: the stuff that would do the job, blast those three Werwolf submarines into water-filled hulks and save the lives of all those men crammed into transports on the Channel.

Mallory looked into the boxes. His mouth became dry. His mind went back six hours, to the bay of St-Jean-de-Luz, the red ball of the sun hauling itself up through the fog, the heavy explosions coming from the land. He had thought that Commandant Cendrars’ old soldiers had got their hands on some quarry explosive.

He had been wrong.

They had been fifteen minutes on the cliff at Martigny, while Andrea disposed of the pillbox and Mallory and Miller had explained their wishes to the sentries. During that fifteen minutes, the boxes had been in the care of Commandant Cendrars’ enthusiastic veterans.

The veterans had profited from those fifteen minutes. Possibly their arsenal had been running low, or possibly they merely suffered from an enthusiastic lightness of finger. Whichever the case, the outcome was the same.

The brass-bound boxes that had contained the explosives and detonators that were going to blow the Werwolf pack to hell now contained, besides a few blades of wet grass and a couple of small stones, half a hundredweight of best Martigny mud.

There was a silence that seemed to last five years. It was Andrea who broke it. He yawned. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Now I must sleep.’

Take the bunk,’ said Miller, through lips numb with shock.

‘Thank you,’ said Andrea, and shuffled bear-like into the sleeping cabin. It was as if he understood Miller’s sense of failure, and attached to it little enough weight to accept the offer of the bunk as full reparation.

Miller said, ‘I let it out of my sight.’ Never let your tools out of your sight. If you carry a gun, carry it at all times. Keep your knife strapped on, even in the bathtub. And never, ever, leave your Cyclonite and your detonators to be guarded by heroes of the Marne with the wind under their tails. ‘We have grenades.’

‘Ten grenades,’ said Mallory. His knees felt weak. He was sweating. So this is how it ends, he thought.

Miller said, ‘Four. We used eight on the patrol boat.’ He was thinking again. ‘Anyway, grenades won’t work on U-boat pres- sure hulls.’ But he did not say it nervously. He said it in a measured, judicious voice, like a prosecution lawyer assessing the chances of convicting a known murderer on circumstantial evidence. If grenades would not work, the voice implied, it would be necessary to find something else that would.

Mallory heard that new voice.

For a moment, he had felt it all slipping away from him. That was because in his exhaustion he had forgotten that this was Dusty Miller, who had destroyed the guns at Navarone and the dam at Zenica, not to mention an Afrika Korps ammunition dump with a Cairo tart’s hairpins. Confidence began to tiptoe back into Mallory’s thoughts.

‘So I guess they’ll have a magazine there,’ said Miller. ‘And they’ll have to load the torpedoes some time. Your torpedoes take up most of the space on a U-boat. You couldn’t refit with torpedoes on board, could you?’ He folded his hands. ‘So there’s that. And then there’s the engines. Those Walter engines. Hydrogen peroxide, you said. Fuel oil. Water. Interesting stuff, hydrogen peroxide.’ He leaned his long back against the bulkhead, hands folded across his concave stomach, boots propped on the opposite bench, eyes closed. He seemed to be thinking.

Finally, Mallory could stand it no longer. ‘What about hydrogen peroxide?’ he said.

But Miller was asleep.

Mallory thought about waking him, then decided against it. If the Werwolf pack was sailing tomorrow at noon, would they not already have loaded the torpedoes? And what was so interesting about hydrogen peroxide?

He lit another cigarette. Relax, he told himself. Miller and Andrea were of the opinion that the operation was possible. So the operation was possible. Easy as that.

Within thirty seconds, Mallory, too, was asleep.

It was the gulls that were the first sign. All afternoon, after the turn of the tide, they had been thickening in the sky. When Mallory went on deck, groggy in the mind after too little and too shallow sleep, their cries filled the air.

The Stella Maris had moved out to sea again. A stiffish breeze was blowing from the northwest, and on it the gulls slid and balanced with frantic voices and perfect self-possession. The wind seemed to be blowing out of the sun, which had appeared pale and brilliant below the roof of grey cloud. It was twenty minutes before sunset, but there was no red in that sun. It glared like a big metal eye across the water, draining the colour from everything its rays touched, making the Stella Maris black and the seas grey, and the cliffs the dull non-colour of slate. And shining into the eyes of anyone watching from the land.

Mallory lit a cigarette, stuck it between the nicotine-stained fingers of his left hand, and pulled his Zeiss glasses out of their case. He panned the disc of vision across the crawling waves until he found the black line of the land: a flat black line, a continuous cliff, marred here and there by pillars of rock over which a mist of spray hung, silvering the towers of gulls. He moved the glasses to the west.

The line of the cliff suddenly rose into a rounded hump, sheer-sided. The sides plunged straight down into the sea. The structure looked like a steel helmet, or a skull. Cabo de la Calavera. The cape of the skull.

Mallory breathed smoke, and made a fine adjustment to the focus wheel.

On the crown of the skull, at the apex, a stubby white pencil jutted skyward: the lighthouse. The lighthouse was not showing a light. To the right of the lighthouse, on what might have been the skull’s forehead, were square-edged masses, topped by a tower. The fortress: an efficient fortress, dug into the cliff to cover the entrance to the harbour of San Eusebio. He moved the disc of the glasses eastward, along the spine of the ridge.

There was a structure of some kind slung across what must have been the throat of the peninsula, but they were too far away for Mallory to see what it was. He could guess, though. It looked like a stone wall, probably with battlements and a moat. The Germans would have supplemented it with a line of fences and trenches. As far as he could tell, it stopped abruptly some distance above the sea - where the cliff became vertical, he guessed. The base of the cliff was a continuous line of white water.

Mallory walked aft. Jaime was at the wheel. Mallory said, ‘You have come out of some port. You are in trouble. You are making repairs to the engine. Do you know anybody in San Eusebio?’

‘Only professionally.’

‘That will do. Get estimates for repairs.’ Mallory pointed at the radio set in the wheelhouse. That work?’

Jaime grinned. ‘A smuggler’s radio always works.’

‘Keep it switched on. Now let’s go ashore.’

‘How are you getting ashore?’ said Jaime.

Mallory said, ‘We’ll manage.’ At this stage in the expedition, there was no sense in telling anyone on the Stella Maris any more than he needed to know. He looked at his watch. It said 2015. ‘We’ll get to you before 1500 tomorrow. Be alongside the fish quay. We’ll sail immediately we’re on board.’

‘For where?’

Mallory looked pious. ‘The Lord will provide,’ he said.

Jaime looked at the black rock skull of the Cabo, with its cloud of gulls, tinted by the now-pinkening sun. ‘A-okay,’ he said. ‘Bonne chance.’

The Stella Maris’ nose turned and settled on the brow of the skull. The sun was sinking fast now, and as it sank its pink turned to blood, dabbling the cloud-roof with crimson. ‘Looks like hell,’ said Jaime.

‘Sorry?’ said Mallory. To him it looked like a sunset, followed by a hard climb in the dark.

‘No importa,’ said Jaime.

Darkness fell.

An hour later, Mallory, Miller and Andrea were in the Stella Maris ‘ dinghy, heaving up and down on the seven-foot swell rolling out of the Atlantic wastes. The pant of the Stella’s engine was receding eastward. In the dinghy with the three men were the two coils of wire-cored climbing rope, three Schmeissers with five spare magazines each, and the grenades. They were dressed in Waffen-SS smocks, camouflage trousers and steel helmets. In the breast pocket of his smock, Mallory carried the special pitons Jonas Schenck had made for him in 1938, out of the rear springs of a Model A Ford. Anything else they needed they would have to find on the Cabo.

At least, that was the idea.

Miller sat in the bow of the boat, his knees close to his ears, clutching the lock of his machine pistol to keep out the wet. Miller was fairly sure that this was it: the end. He would not have minded, except that he did not wish the end, when it came, to have anything to do with the sea. Miller had had enough of the sea.

The dinghy rose and sank again, vertiginously, on a glossy black wave like the back of a man-eating animal. Andrea dug in the oars and took a couple of strokes towards the darkness above the booming white line that separated vertical rock from Atlantic ocean.

‘There,’ said Mallory.

In the line of white there was a break; the merest hint of a break, the sort of paling that would come of a wave whose force was spent before it hit the wall. Spent, for instance, by the wreck of a fishing boat once the property of a M. Jaulerry, impaled on the boulders at the base of the cliff.

Miller thought, we will at any rate have the advantage of surprise. And if we live, nobody will be as surprised as me.

Then Andrea gave a final heave and the dinghy went up on the back of another wave, as huge and black as the last. Only this one did not stay huge and black, but while the dinghy was on its crest turned white and foaming, insufficiently substantial to support the dinghy, which was falling, with the whole of the rest of the world, stern-first, in a cataclysm of water that made a sound like an earthquake, and had no bottom -

They found the bottom. They found it with a sudden splintering crash that knocked the seat from under Miller. He discovered that things previously available for holding on to were no longer available for that purpose. Then the wave had him, and he was rolling away somewhere, he could not tell where, except that he had a Schmeisser slung round him, a couple of kilos of negative buoyancy that were going to drag him a watery grave among the boulders at the base of the cliff, and he thought, so this is it.

But then something had him by the collar of his smock, and was dragging him in the opposite direction from the direction in which the water wanted to take him. And he was out of that black whirl, and on something hard and slimy that he realised must be the deck of the wrecked fishing boat. And Andrea’s voice was saying into his ear, ‘When we get ashore, check your weapon.’ And things were back to normal.

Or what passed for normal, on the seaward side of the Cabo de la Calavera.

At the base of the cliff was a beach of boulders which had fallen from the crags above, forming a sort of glacis on which the waves beat themselves to white tatters. The fishing boat had hit this beach, been driven up to its summit, and landed wedged with a northeast-southwest orientation, its bow rammed against the main face of the cliff, which ran east-west.

Mallory, Andrea and Miller crouched for a moment on the slimy deck, tilted away from the hammer of the seas, feeling the concussion of the rollers in their bones. Then Mallory handed his Schmeisser to Andrea, slung one of the coils of rope over his shoulder, and stepped on nailed soles down the deck towards the ink-black rise of the cliff.

The first ten feet were boulders, slippery with bladder wrack, treacherous in the complete blackness, but by no means steep. Mallory went up carefully but fast, until his hands met something that was not seaweed. Lichen. Then a cushion of vegetation set in sand and peat that crumbled under his fingers. His fingers crawled above it, looking for a hold. They found loose rock. The cliffs of Cabo de la Calavera were not as solid as they looked.

He glanced downwards. The backwash of the breaking waves was a broad white road, cut aslant by the hull of the fishing boat. He felt wet on his face as a big wave hit.

He started to climb.

It was a bad climb. The rock down here was as rotten as cheese, and a sparse vegetation of moss and sea-thrift had taken hold in the cracks. Each hold meant a sweep with the fingers to remove loose soil, a gradual increase of pressure from the fingers until they bore his full weight, resting on at least two firm points while he tested a third, slow and sure, never committing himself. He went up the cliff inch by inch, chest sore from the cigarettes of the past three days, finger muscles burning, horribly aware of the clatter of loose stone down the cliff below him.

After five minutes the climbing became mechanical, as it always did: a delicate shifting of balance from hold to hold, working from the hips, so he seemed to float rather than crawl. And the part of his mind not filled with testing holds and balancing on rock went ahead, onto the Cabo. There were Totenkopf-SS up here, from what Guy had said. There would be Wehrmacht too. And Kriegsmarine, and dockyard workers. A force hastily assembled, wearing a diversity of uniforms, strangers to each other, probably in the final stages of preparing for departure. There would be confusion. Mallory devoutly hoped it would be a confusion he could exploit.

He was seventy feet up now. The wind was battering his ears, and the rumble of the seas had receded until it had become a dull, continuous roar. He reached out his hand for the next hold, fumbling like a blind man.

Suddenly he was no longer blind. Suddenly his hand emerged from the darkness, a pale spider groping its way across quartz and matrix towards the dark shadow of a hold. The cliff face had come into an odd, shadowed relief, a landscape of vertical hills and vales stretching down to a sea whose waves now looked not so much black as silver-grey.

And above the horizon of the cliff, where the sky had been a matt emptiness of squally cloud, there had taken place the change that had brought about all the other changes. The squalls had turned and separated. Between them fingers of deep black sky had appeared, specked with the needle-tips of stars. And into one of those bottomless chasms of darkness swam like a silver lamp a brilliant quarter moon.

Mallory froze, clinging to the face of the cliff. Far below, he saw white surf and the wreck of the fishing boat sheltering its tiny eddy of black water. He could distinctly see shattered wreckage from the dinghy spinning in the vortex. This was bad. Potentially, this was very bad. All it needed was a casual glance down the moonlit cliff. The Storm Force would be pinned down, brushed off the rock face like flies. And the Werwolf pack would sail at noon tomorrow, unmolested.

The wind blew, eddied, became for a second still.

Directly above Mallory’s head, someone coughed.

Mallory’s stillness intensified until it was like the stillness of the rock face itself. He turned his eyes upwards. The moon was sliding towards a lip of cloud. But before it went and darkness swept back over the cliff, he saw something he had not noticed before.

Up there on the cliff face was an overhang of rock too regular to be natural.

The coughing came again. There was a brief splash of yellow light. A little spark dropped past Mallory’s head. A spent match.

Mallory eased his feet on their minute ledges, and leaned in against the cliff. He turned his face upwards and watched.

To his dark-accustomed eyes, the regular glow of the cigarette was as bright as a lighthouse. Against it, he analysed the little bulge of masonry projecting from the cliff. It was a half-moon of stone or concrete, a demilune, a strongpoint built out from a narrow ledge of the cliff. Mallory rested, recreating in his mind the fortifications of the Cabo. This would be the seaward end of the line of fortifications running across the neck of the peninsula.

The moon slid out again. By its light he could see the joins in the masonry. Not German, he thought. Older than this war.

Something gleamed in the moonlight: something shaped like a small funnel. The flame deflector on the muzzle of a light machine gun. The old Spanish defences had new tenants.

For the blink of an eye, Mallory took stock.

To his right, the cliff was sheer, but climbable. But the moon was painting it a brilliant grey. Figures climbing over there would be plainly visible from the demilune. To the left, the cliff looked even easier, the summit concealed behind a shoulder of rock. There was no way of telling what was on that summit. There was only one thing you could be sure of: even if the top was undefended, and you could arrive there without being seen, you would be the wrong side of the fortifications at the top, and there would still be the gates to get through.

So there was only one way.

Straight up.

He eased the commando knife in the sheath on his right hip, and began once again to climb.

The moon was swimming in a wider gulf now. But Mallory climbed fast and efficiently, knowing that he was directly underneath the demilune, invisible. It took him ten minutes to cover the hundred feet: ten quiet minutes, choosing holds with a surgeon’s delicacy, breathing slow and deep through his nose. This was the Mallory who had moved remorselessly up the southeast face of Mount Cook, above the Caroline glacier. A crumbling Atlantic cliff was a stroll in the park to this Mallory.

The base of the demilune was a bulge of masonry rooted in the natural rock. Mallory paused on an exiguous ridge ten feet underneath it. He collected his breath, then took off his boots and socks and hung them round his neck. The sea was a dull mutter two hundred feet below. Above, he could hear a pair of boots walking four steps left, pause, four steps right, pause. He stood for a moment, fingers and toes gripping their holds, balancing like a man on springs, waiting for the four steps left, two steps right -

He took a deep breath, and went up the final ten feet like a spider up a wall.

If you had asked him then or afterwards what holds he had used or what route he had followed, he would not have been able to say. It seemed to him that one moment he was poised below the emplacement, and the next he was alongside it, looking over a waist-high wall at the silhouette of a figure in German uniform. The figure had its back to him, at the far end of the four steps left. And there was a bonus, because the figure stayed there, shoulders bowed, helmet brim lit flickering yellow from below. Lighting another cigarette. Very soon after the last one -

Mallory loosened the knife in its sheath, put his left hand on the parapet of the demilune, his right on the ledge at its side -

Two things happened.

Mallory’s right hand landed in a pile of twigs and dry seaweed and something warm and feathery that suddenly came alive and started to shriek in a high, furious voice. And the moon came out from behind its cloud.

For a split second, Mallory hung by his left hand on the wall, staring into the slack-jawed faces of not one, but two young German soldiers. Then he realised that he had no foothold, and fell, feet kicking air, to the full extent of his left arm. Fool, he told himself, feeling the crack of muscle and sinew, gritting his teeth against the agony of his clawed fingers on the rock of the parapet. He waited a split second that felt like a year, waited for the rifle butt to smash his fingers, waiting for the Germans to start yelling, alert the garrison -

His right hand was on the cliff face now, clawing for a hold, finding one. Somewhere he could hear the squawking of a frightened gull, the harsh breathing of young, panic-stricken Germans trying to work out a way of getting rid of this thing from the cliff, and forgetting that the easiest way of doing it was to yell and let their five hundred comrades do it for them.

Mallory had an idea.

He said, ‘Hilfe.’

He had learned his German at Heidelberg University before the war, and on the high crags of the Bavarian alps in the sunlit middle years of the 1930s. His accent was perfect; so perfect that the Germans hesitated.

‘Get a hold of me,’ said Mallory, in German. ‘I fell.’

The soldiers were bamboozled with relief. This was not an enemy but a victim, a comrade in need -

The hesitation lasted the fraction of a second. That was enough for Mallory. He heaved himself up and halfway over the parapet. The Germans looked undecided. This was a Mallory undisturbed by seagulls. This was a Mallory who for eighteen months had lived wild as an animal in the White Mountains of Crete.

The Germans did not stand a chance.

Mallory drove his dagger through the first one’s eye and into his brain. The second one opened his mouth to shout. Mallory drove his fist into his throat. He tugged the knife from the eye socket. As the body hit the ground the second German came at him, gasping. The man’s momentum carried him on, over Mallory’s shoulders and the parapet. Then he was hanging face down, caught by the toe of his boot, hooked on a small projection of the stone. If his vocal cords had been functioning, he would have been screaming.

Mallory felt an odd tugging sensation. He saw the German’s boot slip, millimetre by millimetre, in the moonlight. Some part of the German had gone through the spare coil of rope Mallory carried on his shoulder. When he fell, he was going to take Mallory with him.

Mallory dived inside the parapet. The German emitted a quiet, rasping croak. The boot went over the edge. A crushing load came suddenly on the rope. It lifted Mallory. But the friction of the parapet stopped it dragging him over the edge.

Cautiously, Mallory found an end of the coil and belayed it to the iron steps set in the rock above the demilune. Then he wriggled out of the toils.

The rope ran out. He looked over the edge.

The part of the German that had caught the coil had been his neck. Mallory left him to hang while he tipped the first German over the edge. Then he began to untangle the rope.

‘Okay, Schlegel?’ yelled a voice in German from above

‘Fine,’ shouted Mallory. Thirty feet below the demilune, the corpse of the second German swung like a clock pendulum over the dizzy swoop of the cliff and the rock-smashed waves at its base.

The moon went in. Mallory let an end of the rope go. The hanging German became a patch of darkness falling through greater darkness to the ribbon of white below. He thought he saw a little splash. Then he finished untangling the rope, and let it drop to where Miller and Andrea were waiting. While they climbed, he put his boots and socks back on.

Five minutes later, Miller and Andrea were with him in the demilune, breathing heavily. He pulled up the rope, coiled it, clambered over the parapet and hung it in the branches of a stunted juniper in the cliff, out of sight below the base. By the time he got back, he could no longer hear their breathing.

‘Ready?’ he said.

The silhouettes of the two coal-scuttle helmets nodded.

Mallory looked at his watch. The radium-bright hands said 2215. He said, ‘I’ll meet you by the generators at midnight. Check the sentries on the repair sheds. Look at rotas, timings. And Dusty. Your department. Bangs and so on.’

‘Sir,’ said Miller.

‘And if you could avoid getting caught?’

Andrea’s teeth gleamed suddenly in the moonlight. ‘But without my moustache, where shall I hide?’

Mallory laughed quietly. ‘See you at midnight,’ he said. He stepped lightly onto the parapet of the demilune, reached out a hand and a foot, and stepped onto the naked cliff.

For a moment, he hung there in the moonlight, poised easily on the apparently sheer rock wall. Miller closed his eyes and held onto the first of the iron rungs leading upwards from the demilune, his stomach weightless with vertigo. Climbing a rope was one thing. This human-fly business was another altogether.

When he opened his eyes again, the little cloud was passing away from the moon, and the face of the cliff was once more covered with light. But of Mallory there was no sign.

‘Off we jolly well go,’ said Andrea.

Andrea led the way up the iron rungs in the cliff face. It was a fifty-foot climb. At the top was a sort of stile in the parapet. Before he reached it, Andrea hooked an arm through the rung, brushed the worst of the cliff-dirt from his SS smock, and pulled back the cocking lever of his Schmeisser. This was easier than thrashing around in the Pyrenees. Here, you knew whom you could trust. It was the old team, without distractions: a well-oiled machine.

He stepped up onto the parapet, keeping his shoulders hunched to reduce his mighty bulk. He probably looked nothing like either of the men Mallory had killed. But it was elementary to suppose that if two men had clambered down a set of iron rungs to a stone gull’s nest, below which was a precipice and some sea, then the two men who came back up the rungs were the same two men, even if they looked different.

He said, in his perfect German, ‘Hell, it’s cold down there.’

The parapet formed the edge of a sort of terrace ten yards wide, down a flight of stone steps from another fortified level. A line of ancient cannons stood rotting at their embrasures. At the end of the line of cannons were the silhouettes of two men with a machine gun. One of the men said, ‘Bloody cold up here, too.’

Private soldiers, thought Andrea. No problem. ‘Coffee,’ he said.

‘There’s over an hour to midnight,’ said one of the shadows. ‘Befehl ist Befehl.’

Andrea shrugged. He looked down over the edge. The moonlit precipice fell away sheer to the sea. No sign of Mallory. ‘Hurry up, you.’

Miller came up and onto the terrace.

Andrea said, ‘We’ll get the coffee and take it down.’ The note of authority in Andrea’s voice had not escaped them. An officer. Officers had their reasons.

‘Marsch,’ said Andrea.

Miller in the lead, they stamped up the stone steps from the terrace to the summit level.

‘Right turn,’ said Andrea.

The two of them were marching along a flat plain, paved with stone, silvery under the moon. To their right, the parapet marked the edge of the cliff. Ahead and to the left, the ground sloped away and downwards into the black pit, beyond which guttered the few yellow lights of San Eusebio. Immediately to the left, cracks of light showed round the poorly blacked-out panes of what must be a guardhouse. Immediately behind them was an ancient battlement, topped with modern barbed wire, that looked as if it stretched from the cliffs to the beach facing the town.

They were in. In, but horribly in the open.

Somewhere in the guardhouse a bell rang and a man’s voice began screaming: a parade-ground scream, a scream of military emergency requiring immediate action. Lights jumped on. The surface on which Andrea and Miller were standing was suddenly a harshly illuminated plain on which each was the focus of an asterisk of shadows. Men in jackboots were pouring out of doors, lining up shoulder to shoulder, distancing off, shuffling jackboot heels on the granite stones. Miller could feel the sweat now, not climbing sweat, but the sweat of being in the middle of five hundred Germans.

Andrea yelled, ‘Shun!’ Miller crashed to a halt.

They were in, all right. But not all the way.

What they had not been able to see without the floodlights was straight: a second fence, running parallel with the wall, fifteen feet tall, topped with barbed wire strung between insulators, stretching from the rim of the cliff down to the black waters of the harbour. The area between the fences was a no-man’s land, bathed in a pitiless grey-white light that limned every speck of grit, every button and buckle on the hundred-and-twenty German soldiers fallen in between the guardhouse and the sandbagged machine-gun posts on either side of the main gate.

Miller could feel a trickle of sweat on his forehead. Andrea was massive and silent at his side.

In the middle of the inner fence was another gate. The gate stood open. On either side were more machine-gun emplacements. The floodlights gleamed off the steel helmets by the guns.

Andrea’s eyes flicked round the yard. The soldiers were Wehrmacht, not SS. His shoulders squared. In a voice of brass, he said, ‘Marsch!’ Holding their Schmeissers rigidly across their chests, the two men tramped steadily across the paving. The gate loomed up ahead, a goal of darkness in the palisade of the fence. Miller could feel the mouths of the machine guns pouting at him from their emplacements. At his side, he could see that Andrea’s helmet was tilted a fraction, and there was dirt on his camouflage smock. Must have been when he went up the cliff. Wehrmacht hated dirt. Almost as much as they hated SS …

Someone, thought Miller, had raised the alarm. It must have been those guys down by the cannons. They had waited for the intruders to walk right into the hornet’s nest, and then stirred it up with a pole. They would be looking for two men in SS uniforms. And here were these two men, in wet, dirty SS uniforms, marching across the killing floor under the floodlights.

Miller marched on. A small seed of hope took root and began to grow. Nobody was doing anything about it. Maybe, thought Miller, this is an exercise. Or maybe they are so frightened of the SS that they will not even screw with the uniform. Maybe this is just a a regular night in a major military installation, and you have been skulking in the mountains so long you have forgotten.

Pace by pace, the sandbags reached out and funnelled them towards the black gate. Behind them, someone was bellowing orders. On the right, three privates and a Feldwebel were standing rigidly to attention. Miller could feel the Feldwebel’s eyes flicking up and down: the eyes of a stickler, used to cataloguing a minute smear on the surface of a boot, a tiny flaw in the polish of a leather strap. And these SS guys were marching through his gate squelching with Atlantic and covered in half a cliff.

Andrea marched on, regular as a metronome, out of the gate area and away from the eyes and into the darkness beyond. The darkness that held the docks and those U-boats, waiting to slide out of the harbour and back into their black underwater world -

They were through. The lights were dimming, shaded by the brim of Miller’s helmet. Made it, he thought. We have goddamn well made it -

The darkness was suddenly full of metallic noises. Ahead and to the left, brilliant suns of light came into being. A voice said, in English, ‘Do not touch your guns. The hands out to the sides, if you please. You are completely surrounded.’

Miller squinted to one side of the light, but saw nothing. There could be one man or a hundred men back there. A hundred seemed more likely.

Slowly and reluctantly, he spread his arms out in an attitude of crucifixion.

So this is how it really ends, thought Miller.

Figures emerged from the dark, figures in SS uniform. The figures looped the Schmeisser straps over Miller’s head and stood on tiptoe to disarm Andrea.

‘Welcome, gentlemen,’ said the SS Hauptsturmführer. His accent was very good. ‘We have been expecting you.’

Then they marched them away.

SIX

Tuesday 2300-Wednesday 0400

They marched them through a little village of wooden huts, past a wire-fenced concrete building that throbbed with diesels. Living quarters, thought Miller, collecting information he would never use. Generator shed. Down on the left, the jackhammer rattle of riveting guns sounded, and the tame lightnings of arc welders flashed blue in the dark. Dockyard stuff. A privileged overview of the whole layout.

‘Halt!’ yelled the Hauptsturmführer in charge of their escort.

They were standing on a bridge in front of a gateway in a tall, windowless granite wall. The gate was studded with iron bolts. Above it were battlements. The sweat was cold on Miller’s body, and his body ached. He was exhausted.

A wicket opened in the gate. The Hauptsturmführer stepped forward and showed a pass to the gatekeeper. There was a pause, with the sound of telephoning. Then the double gates opened, and a machine pistol jabbed Miller in the kidney. The squad marched in. The gates clashed to behind them.

They were in a yard, paved with granite, surveyed by the barrels of three machine guns sited on the battlements. Same old thing, thought Miller. ‘No imagination,’ he said.

‘But very competent,’ said Andrea, his eyes moving, mapping the yard. ‘Thorough.’

‘That’s Germans for you,’ said Miller. ‘Thorough.’

The gun muzzle behind him jabbed him painfully in the kidney. ‘Silence!’ barked the Hauptsturmführer.

‘Don’t understand,’ said Andrea.

‘Don’t speak German,’ said Miller.

And for a second there was a small warmth in the notion that although they were in the hands of the enemy, mission not accomplished and never to be so, they had something up their sleeves.

Two things. There was also Mallory, still at large.

A door opened in the wall opposite. This was not your studded oak, medieval style. This was your basic twentieth-century armour plate, four good inches of Nazi steel. It gaped wide, exhaling a stink of damp stone and sewage. Then it swallowed them in, and the door clashed to at their backs.

They went down granite stairs, through corridors with bombproof roofs and whitewash blistered with mildew. There was a spiral staircase like the entrance to a tomb. At the bottom, a corridor lit glaring white was lined with steel doors. One of the steel doors was open.

‘In there,’ said the Hauptsturmführer.

‘We will take a look,’ said Miller. ‘If we don’t like the linen, we will speak to the manager about -’

The soldier behind him smashed him on the ear with the barrel of his Schmeisser. Miller’s head rang with pain. A jackboot shot him through the door. Andrea followed. The steel door clashed shut. Outside, jackboots tramped off down the corridor.

There was brilliant white light, and dirt, and silence.

The warmth had gone. They were in the stone bowels of the earth, and it was cold.

The silence was the worst part.

The room might have been designed as a magazine, or a cell. It had a domed roof, and no window. The floor was of granite flagstones, patched with concrete. There was a grating in one corner, presumably for use as a lavatory. From it there came a vile smell.

The silence was the silence of a place buried beneath tons of masonry and rock. It was the silence of a place with no secret passages, no hope of overpowering guards, no hope of escape. The silence of the tomb.

Mallory, reflected Miller, would have hated it.

Andrea yawned. He said, ‘This is really most unpleasant.’ Then, with the massive grace of an animal that refuses to be concerned about the future because it inhabits the perpetual present, he located a cleanish patch of floor, lay down, and closed his eyes.

They had left Miller his cigarettes. He pulled out the packet, found a dry one, and lit it.

Then he waited.

The hands on his watch ticked along to eleven-thirty. At eleven-thirty-one, a key clashed in the door, and five men came in.

Four of them were big Waffen-SS whose torsos strained at their camouflage smocks. The fifth was a man of about twenty-five, wearing civilian clothes: a blue double-breasted suit, with a stiff collar and a dark-blue tie. His hair was blond, with a wave. His mouth was a little red rosebud, his eyes blue slugs that crawled over the prisoners’ faces.

He waved a handkerchief under his nose. ‘Really,’ he said, in prissy, faintly-accented English. ‘They should do something about the smell.’ He smiled, a cherubic smile. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I am Herr Gruber.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Chair.’

One of the burly SS men trotted into the corridor, and returned with a hard chair. Herr Gruber flicked the seat with his handkerchief and sat down.

Miller and Andrea sat side by side, slouched against the wall. Miller yawned. Andrea watched Gruber with eyes that managed to be simultaneously hostile and condescending. In their travels in occupied Greece, both of them had had experience of the Gestapo. Neither of them understood why they were still alive. Herr Gruber was going to provide the answers.

Miller said, ‘So can we help you? Only I am kinda sleepy, and -’

Gruber had made a gesture to one of the SS men. The barrel of the man’s gun came round quickly, slamming into Miller’s already bruised ear. The pain of the cartilage trapped between metal and skull was ferocious. Miller’s eyes watered. He kept his anger down. Save it for later.

If there was a later.

‘So,’ said Herr Gruber. ‘I understand that now you would like to kill me and these soldiers.’ He smiled, his cherubic smile. ‘And the SS is not what it used to be. So I expect you could probably do it. But I would point out that the odds against you are most impressive. Even if you were to escape this cell, you would quickly lose your own lives. Which if you listen to me may not be necessary.’

Gruber watched the two men closely. Normally, when he told prisoners that there was a road to survival, they could not wait to get onto it and start running, jostling each other off the edge if necessary.

Not these two.

Their faces were haggard under the weatherbeaten glow. They were old: forty at least, and looking older. Herr Gruber could hardly believe that these people had done what they were reputed to have done: evaded a regiment of Panzerjäger, murdered a platoon of SS, found this place. But they had done it. And Herr Gruber was absolutely delighted with their success, which had turned a run-of-the-mill secret weapon into something much more important. They had played, as the saying went, into his hands.

But as they sat there, the big one with the flat, black-eyed stare of a Byzantine icon, and the thin American with the blood running red from his ear into the collar of his tunic, they did not look like men who were playing into anyone’s hands at all.

‘You have come here to destroy certain weapons,’ said Herr Gruber. ‘Which of course we cannot permit, not only because we value these weapons, but because of the diplomatic problems this would cause for our friends in Madrid.’ The smile did not falter. ‘Soon we shall be leaving. And I think that we shall leave you behind us. You seem quite comfortable here. A rest will do you good after your busy time. After which I suspect the Guardia Civil will receive an anonymous call to say that some Allied soldiers have become … locked in what will certainly be perceived as an embarrassing position. I hope you will still be alive then.’ The smile left his face. The lips were wet and shiny, the eyes icy. ‘Though I doubt you will last long in a Spanish internment camp. The guards are trigger-happy. Also the food is neither wholesome nor plentiful, and there is much typhus.’ The smile returned. ‘And I doubt that anyone at the British Embassy will be too keen to see you again, after the embarrassment you will have caused them. Spain is, after all, a neutral country, and your presence will be held to constitute a most cynical violation of this neutrality.’ He licked his lips. In his future he saw sunlit vistas of promotion, victory, universal success. ‘Your diplomats are bringing pressure to bear on the Spanish government just now to stop our wolfram exports, and to withdraw Spanish troops from the Russian Front. Your visit here will I think change all that. In fact, it seems to me not unlikely that at the end of this little … adventure, Germany will have a new ally.’ He sighed. ‘There is only one disappointment, of course. That is that politics prevents me from having you shot out of hand.’

Andrea spat in the general direction of the grating. The Gestapo man tutted. ‘Keep your spit,’ he said. ‘I think you will need it. Now. There is one thing. Your comrade. Where is he?’

Andrea said, ‘Comrade?’

Miller looked across at him. In the American’s posture the Gestapo man read the bitterness of defeat. Miller said to Andrea, ‘What are you trying to prove?’

Andrea said, ‘We have no comrade.’

Miller seemed to have developed a nasty twitch in his right cheek. His tongue ran round his dry lips. The Gestapo man spotted the signs of fear, an emotion he had had much practice recognising.

Miller said, ‘There’s no point.’ He turned to the Gestapo man. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘He’s-’

Andrea moved. He moved suddenly, but with the lumbering slowness of a bear, across the filthy floor to Miller. He grabbed Miller round the neck and pulled his head away from the wall, and the Gestapo man knew that next this big man was going to bash this thin man’s brains out. That would have been a thing he would have enjoyed watching.

But it was important that it did not happen.

So he gestured to the guards. The guards grabbed one of Andrea’s arms each, and pulled him off. It was not as difficult as the Gestapo man had feared. He might be big, but he was weak. These Mediterranean types. Hot blood, but no sinews.

Miller was rubbing his neck. ‘Hey!’ he whined. ‘Ain’t no call to beat up on a guy-’

‘Insect!’ hissed Andrea. ‘Reptile!’

‘Silence,’ said Gruber. The Greek subsided.

The American said, ‘The third guy. He’s dead.’

‘Come,’ said the Gestapo man. ‘Can you not do better than that?’

‘It’s the truth.’

The wet blue eyes were as blank as the indicator lights on a wrecked tank. ‘How did he die?’

‘He fell down the cliff.’

‘What was he doing on the cliff?’

‘Hiding.’ Steady, thought Miller. The Stella Maris was in the harbour. No sense involving them. ‘He’d led us round from the mainland. He placed the rope. He fell, poor bastard. Strangled himself. Take a look at the bottom of the cliff, you’ll find his body. Then you caught us.’

The Gestapo man fingered his chin. Certainly it would be possible to fall on those cliffs. He said, ‘It was not a clever thing to do, to enter by the cliffs. You made much noise. Naturally, you were caught.’

Miller hung his head. That was not what the Hauptsturmführer had said. The Hauptsturmführer had said they were expected, and Miller was inclined to believe him. ‘Shucks,’ he said.

‘Quite so,’ said Gruber. He stood up. ‘Well. I cannot say it has been a pleasure meeting you.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Chair.’

One of his SS men took the chair away. Herr Gruber walked across to Andrea, who was propped against the wall. ‘Goodbye, Greek,’ he said. The cane in his hand lashed out like a striking adder. It caught Andrea across the eyes.

Muscles swelled at the corners of the Greek’s jaw. Then he smiled, a happy, white-toothed smile of anticipation. Blood ran from his heavy black eyebrows into the smile. ‘For that,’ he said, ‘you will die.’

Herr Gruber smiled a superior smile, and strode out of the cell.

The door slammed. The lock clashed. The light went out. They were in darkness.

Miller said, ‘Colonel?’

‘Miller.’ The voice sounded strangled.

‘Can you see?’

‘I can see.’

‘More ‘n’ I can,’ said Miller. A peculiar noise rattled in the vaulting of the cell.

They might be locked up in the dark, facing the imminent failure of their mission, the decimation of the invasion fleet, and a diplomatic disaster in Madrid.

But Mallory was out there somewhere. And Miller was laughing.

For Mallory, being alone on the cliff had been a sort of liberation. After all those days and weeks of little rest and occasional food, the feel of rock under feet and fingers and the freedom of the great vertical spaces acted like a tonic. He trusted the other two to reconnoitre the landward side and the submarine sheds. But he trusted only himself to reconnoitre from the seaward. There were some things he needed to look at on his own. Mallory was a team player, but Andrea was too big, and Miller got vertigo. There were times when solo climbing was what you had to do.

The moon slid behind a cloud. In the darkness, he began to move swiftly sideways across the face of the cliff. He had gone a hundred yards when he heard the commotion up above: a bell, a voice screaming, the clatter of boots on granite; then the faraway double tramp of jackboots, and a voice, Andrea’s, yelling Marsch!

The boots stopped.

Mallory could hear nothing after that. But he did not need ears to tell him that this was trouble. He waited for the shooting to start. The shooting did not start.

He hung for a moment, waiting for a patch of moonlight to pass. The cloud returned.

Before he had been climbing diagonally upwards towards the parapet. But the sky above the parapet was glowing with a nimbus of ice-grey floodlights. So he headed low, towards the sea, acquiring the grammar of the crumbling stone through fingers and toes, keeping the bulge of an overhang between him and the parapet.

Soon the floodlights went out, and the Cabo de la Calavera was once again a domed and sinister lump of darkness against the sky. Whatever had happened had happened. Mallory took a deep breath. He knew that nobody would be there to meet him at the rendezvous by the generator sheds.

He was on his own.

Steady.

Worrying about Miller and Andrea was a waste of time. He kept his mind on the operation. One man needed to operate differently from three. Time spent on reconnaissance was time wasted now. He needed to penetrate the Cabo. He needed a weak spot.

He had one in mind.

He began to climb upwards.

Whatever Moor-hating grandee had built the fortaleza on the tip of the Cabo de la Calavera had chosen his spot well. The cliffs came sheer out of the sea - more than sheer, on some of the pitches. Mallory concentrated on the rock. Here on the sheer cliffs, it was less friable, and grass and sea-pink had failed to find a foothold. There were little cracks and corrugations that would have given pause to a fly with common sense. But Mallory was desperate. So Mallory went up the face, slow but sure, moving from the hips, gracefully, almost without effort. He worked his way steadily westwards, towards the point on which the fortaleza stood, working his way steadily higher. The clouds were thickening again, and the moon had gone. That was useful, even if it meant climbing by feel. The sea was a heavy murmur far below, the wind a tenuous hand pressing on his back.

After perhaps an hour, the wind brought him the stench of drains. When he next looked up, he saw the cliff above him had changed nature. It was no longer natural granite. It had become the outer wall of the fortaleza.

Mallory paused, standing on the sheer precipice connecting sky and sea. Cliffs were no problem, and masonry walls he could deal with. It was the transition between the living rock of the cliff and the cut stone of the fortress wall that would be the difficulty.

For where masonry met rock face, a heavy black line crossed the darkness of the wall. The outer face of the masonry was cantilevered out over the rock: machicolated, Mallory seemed to remember. Machicolation or cantilever, it boiled down to the same thing. What he had up there was a bloody great overhang. Mallory was solo, no rope, four spikes. Normally, he would have looked for another route to avoid an overhang. But this time, there was no going round.

Suddenly, Mallory was horribly tired.

He hung there for a moment. The smell of sewage was powerful in his nostrils. When he reached for the next hold, his right hand landed in a foul slime.

A foul slime that must have come from somewhere.

Suddenly, Mallory’s weariness was gone. Thank God for Spanish sanitation, he thought. For medieval Spanish sanitation, invented by Arabs, bringers of civilisation to the European world.

And with a bit of luck, bringer of Mallory onto the walls of the Fortaleza de la Calavera.

He started to climb again, keeping to the left, out of the stream of sewage. In two minutes, he was up against the bottom course of the machicolations.

He could see the detail of the overhang now. It was like an inverted flight of seven steps, a foot each, angled outwards at forty-five degrees. Impassable without a rope.

But ten feet to Mallory’s right, a vertical line of darkness broke the steps: a line perhaps two feet wide that was not a line, but a crevasse. To the designers of the fortaleza’s sanitation, it was the outlet from the castle garderobes. To a climber like Mallory, it was a practicable chimney in an impracticable overhang. The tiredness left him. There was a route here. In the face of a route, it was not possible to feel tired.

He crouched on a nearly invisible ledge and checked his spikes. He took his boots and socks off. He put his boots back on his bare feet, and pulled the socks over the boots. Then he swung himself round, face to the cliff, and started to move crabwise towards the chimney.

He knew he was under it from the stinging reek of urine and ammonia. He looked up, sighting against the sky with watering eyes. The slot in the machicolations reached out as far as the last two steps. If he could reach those last two steps, he would be able to get a hand up and onto the masonry of the vertical wall, and find a place to get a spike in.

Garderobe or no garderobe, it was a hideously difficult place. But the thought did not even occur to Mallory. It was a climbing problem, and climbing problems were there to be solved.

He reached in the pocket of his smock, checking his spikes and the leather-wrapped lead mallet he used as a hammer. Then he moved into the dreadful recesses of the chimney.

As he had suspected, it was a chimney of cut stone built out from the living rock. At first, he was climbing the slippery natural rock. When the rock gave way to masonry, he put his shoulders against one side, his feet against the other, and pushed.

The socks over his boots gave him a grip through the slime. The slime lubricated his shoulders as they slid up the cut stone blocks. Easy chimneying, if you could cut out the stench. He was moving outwards now, away from the face of the cliff, following the line of the machicolations. Once, the cliff’s sheerness had been daunting. Any minute now, it was going to seem almost like home.

As long as he ignored the black hole above his head, and what might come down it.

Brace the shoulders. Keep the feet against the far wall, hard, so the socks bite through the film of filth and the boot-nails grind into the solid rock. Do it again. And again -

Mallory’s helmet clanked against stone. He had run out of chimney.

He stood there, wedged shoulders and feet in that slot in the masonry, his breathing shallow. Two hundred feet below, white tongues of foam curled round jagged rocks and licked up the cliff wall.

Mallory fumbled in his pocket for a spike. Before the war, he would not have considered using spikes. Spikes were for Germans, during the assaults on the north face of the Eiger, the attempts on Kanchenjunga for the greater glory of the Third Reich. Mallory had on one occasion climbed the Big Wall on Mount Cook, removing the spikes left there by an unsportsmanlike German expedition. But in Zermatt he had met Schenck, an American blacksmith and climber who ran a forge in the back of his pickup truck. Schenck had seen a war coming, and foreseen the kind of things that someone would ask Mallory to do. He had forced on Mallory half a dozen of his specials: three-inch blades of steel cut from the rear springs of a Model A Ford, pierced to hold a loop of rope. When Mallory had demurred, Schenck had pointed out that whatever he thought about using a spike to beat a mountain, using a spike to beat a German was fine.

God bless you, Schenck, wherever you are, thought Mallory in his stinking chimney. He looped a spike’s cord round his wrist. Then he reached up and out and round the last two steps of the overhang, running the spike’s point across the stones like the point of a pencil until he felt the check that would mean a seam of mortar. Then, gingerly, one-handed, he began to tap it in.

He tapped slowly, with infinite caution, partly for the sake of quietness, but mostly because he had only four of those three-inch splinters of metal left, survivors of the original half-dozen. And much depended on these four: his life, Andrea’s and Miller’s, the lives of the invasion fleet. He tapped for a full two minutes, until he was sure. Then he put in another spike inside the chimney, level with his eyes. This one went in more easily; he was not working at arm’s length, and the mortar in the gully, attacked by hundreds of years of carbonic acid from the rain and uric acid from the garrison, was softer than the mortar on the outside of the wall.

When it was in, he tugged at it stealthily. It held firm. Reaching up, he found the loop of rope on the head of the first spike, shoved his hand through, and applied weight, without loosening his grip on the walls of the chimney.

The spike held firm.

He took a deep breath. Then he gripped that loop of rope and swung his weight out over the abyss. For a moment he was dangling free, a spider hanging from a cornice, a little creature of flesh suspended by a metal spike and a loop of quarter-inch cord two hundred feet above the sullen moil of white surf in sharp black rock. Then he put his left leg up, searching for the spike he had driven into the side of the chimney.

He put the sole of his boot onto that spike, applied his weight like a man applying weight to the pedal of a bicycle, and straightened his leg until he was standing, his leg in under the overhang, his torso vertical, parallel with the wall of masonry that went up, up, into the black sky. His left hand went to his pocket, found another spike, placed it above the first, made the pencil-like scribbling movements until the point caught, burrowed it in the first millimetres until it held, brought up the hammer, and began to tap. The muscles of his right arm and left leg were yelling that they could not be expected to keep this up, that they were going to cause pain, and cramp, until Mallory bloody well stopped this abuse. Mallory forced himself to pay no attention. Tap the spike gently, take your time -

There was the smallest of small movements under the sole of his left boot.

And suddenly he was falling, the full extent of his right arm, until the loop brought him up with a crunch of armpit sinews, and he was dangling once again from the edge of the cornice above the hungry rocks below.

The spike under his foot had fallen out.

Falling, the reflex is to open the hands, make the fingers a feeble approximation of feathers of flesh, spread the limbs, try to turn a solid body into a gliding thing that will fly away from danger.

Mallory knew about reflexes. He knew that the only direction humans fly is vertically downwards. Even as he swung, he kept his left hand clamped around the hammer.

After what felt like ten hours but was more like ten seconds, the swinging stopped. Mallory hung there. Rest, his body told him. But he knew that as he hung, the strength would be draining out of him, the blood leaving that arm. The muscles of the right arm needed all the blood they could get. Even if using them meant that the spike up there would pull out of the wall, and drop him through all that air onto all those rocks.

Damned if you hang. Not necessarily damned if you don’t.

Carefully, Mallory put the hammer into his pocket. Then he reached his left hand up to join his right, and pulled himself up like a gymnast chinning the bar.

The muscles crunched in his arms. His teeth bared in a rictus of effort. The blood roared in his skull.

But there were his hands, and the spike, and the blessed stones, level with his eyes.

He held on with his right hand, pulled a fold of his smock over the projection of the spike, and lowered himself until he was hanging by the methodical German canvas. Then, very carefully, he teased the last spike out of his pocket, and the hammer, and raised his arms above his head, and began to tap.

Two minutes later he was up, left hand holding the upper spike, right boot on the lower, right hand putting in the next spike. The overhang was a full two feet below: out of sight, out of mind. The wall of the fortress stretched above him, eighty-five feet of sheer masonry to the top of the tower. Mallory kept tapping the spike, not letting himself stop, because stopping meant reaction, and reaction meant the shakes, and the shakes were no good when you were balanced on two little stubs of steel, with no spares.

So Mallory did not stop. Mallory went on up.

It became a rhythm. Tap the spike. Test the spike. New hand. New foot. Shake out the bottom spike, move it to the top …

Keep climbing.

To the observer, Mallory would have seemed to drift up that wall in defiance of gravity. But of course there were no observers. The murmur of the sea receded. Small, thick-walled windows passed by to the left and right. Mallory ignored them. He heard the breath in his throat, the blood in his ears, mingled with the roar of the sea. Tap the spike. Test the spike. It had started to rain, a thin, persistent Atlantic rain, coming in with the wind on his back. The rain was a help. The reason he was climbing this stone oil drum was that anybody standing sentry on top of a tower rising three hundred feet above the sea would be watching halfheartedly at best. And this was the kind of rain that would turn half-heartedness into actual neglect of duty. New hand. New foot. Mallory had an idea that depended on the neglect of duty. Tap the spike. Test the spike.

Above, the tower was no longer a cliff losing itself in the dark. It was a wall, a sharp-cut semicircle of stone. Mallory was nearly at the top.

He paused, stuck to the wall like a fly, listening. The wind rushed round his ears, and the rain pulled a flat, mouldy smell from the stone. Above the drizzle of the rain he heard another noise: the tramp of booted feet.

Mallory waited.

The feet marched to and fro. The rain eased, then returned, harder now. A voice above his head said, ‘Scheisse.’ The footsteps changed sound, became muffled. There was the metallic click of a latch, a groan of heavy iron hinges. The sentry was taking shelter from the rain.

Mallory started climbing again. He was in a hurry now, but he did not let it alter the steady rhythm of his movements. The rain was becoming heavier, driving in hard and steady on the wind. After the sixth spike he found he could hook his fingers over the parapet. Then he was up, standing on the stone deck inside the battlements in his boots and socks, flexing his stiff fingers.

The top of the tower was flat, except for the turret with the staircase. Its door faced inland, away from the prevailing wind. On the roof of the turret were chimneys, emitting wood smoke, and a group of radio aerials. There were four aerials: three whips and a big shortwave array, and a flagpole. At the top of the flagpole something waved and bumped in the wind - something that was not a flag: a vaguely man-shaped mass against the clouds, but with a disgusting raggedness about the outline. Something that had once been Juanito the smuggler.

Mallory was cold and stiff from a dangerous hour crawling up a vertical wall. Now he felt an angry warmth spread through him, against a lunatic enemy who wanted to rip the world back into the Middle Ages.

His wool-padded boots thudded softly on the stones as he walked across the roof of the tower and flattened himself against the wall of the turret. He could hear a man coughing inside the door. Cigarette smoke wafted out through the keyhole. The sentry was alone.

Mallory waited with the patience of a hunting animal. The rain slackened.

The door opened.

The sentry never saw what hit him. There was a sudden, agonising pain in the left-hand side of his chest. Then there were no more thoughts.

Carefully Mallory wiped the blade of his knife on the dead man’s tunic. He unstrapped the man’s Schmeisser, and took the two spare clips from his bandolier. He went through the pockets and found the man’s paybook. Then he dragged the corpse across the wet roof to the parapet he had climbed, and rolled it over.

It fell with no sound, the way Mallory would have fallen, if he had fallen. Mallory did not stay to watch it.

He took the rags of his socks off his boots. The rain had washed a certain amount of the sewage from his tunic. He squared his shoulders, and checked the Schmeisser with his rope-raw hands. Then he went through the door, closed it silently behind him, and started down the spiral stone stairs inside.

He smelt cigarette smoke, and old stone, and sewage on his tunic. After fourteen steps there was a Gothic-arched doorway, closed with an iron-studded door. A cardboard notice on the door said, in Gothic script, WACHSTUBE: guardroom. God bless the orderly German mind, thought Mallory, with renewed hope. It may yet be the saving of us all.

Beneath the guardroom was another door. From behind it came voices, and the clatter of Morse keys. Radio room. A new noise was coming from below, a busy, many-voiced buzz of ringing telephones and scurrying feet and shouted instructions; the noise of a human anthill, bustling. If the submarines were moving out at noon, this would be the sound of last-minute arrangements being made, repairs finished, evacuations planned. Mallory permitted himself a small, grim smile. It was the kind of bustle that could with a little thought be turned into confusion, and taken advantage of.

He rounded the last turn in the stairs.

Ahead of him was a corridor lined on one side with doors, and on the other with windows looking out onto a darkened courtyard. The corridor was lit with dim yellow bulbs. Mallory began to walk down the corridor at a measured sentry’s tread, towards the stone balustrading round the stairway at its end. Cardboard signs labelled a navy office, a dock office, stores. Inside, men leaned over desks tottering with piles of papers, smoking and talking into telephones, and scribbling in the pools of light from their lamps. A German machine: dotting the last i, crossing the last t, before it closed itself down.

Two soldiers, pale men, clerkish, passed him. One of them wrinkled his nose and said, ‘What a stink.’ Mallory kept his face blank. The clerks accelerated away. Mallory tramped on, slow and steady, towards the stairs at the far end of the corridor, hiding in his measured tread the fact that he did not know where he was, or how to find what he was looking for. What Mallory needed was a clue, any clue. And in an operation like this, strolling tired and sore through the heart of an enemy installation, clues were not easy to come by.

Mallory arrived at the top of the stairs at the end of the corridor. A Kapitän of the Kriegsmarine was coming up. Mallory waited, crashed his heels together, extended a stiff right arm. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he said.

The Kriegsmarine Kapitän touched a negligent hand to the peak of his cap, frowning at the wall, not looking at him. To a German, the uniform signified more than the man. And of course, there was the stink.

Mallory offered silent thanks to the fortaleza’s sewage, which had let him in and was now keeping people away from him. He started to go down the stairs.

Then he was vouchsafed his clue.

Into the smell of sweat, and smoke, and sewage, and cold stone, had come another smell; a smell that transported Mallory for a split second back to Cairo three years ago, with the tinkle of fountains in marble patios, the murmur of staff officers with creased trousers and soft handshakes making assignations for drinks at Shepherd’s Hotel while the front line troops died hot, flyblown deaths under the desert sky.

The smell of expensive Turkish tobacco.

It was rising up the stairs, a mere hint of it in the column of cold, wet air. Mallory followed it like a hound.

He went down the stone-balustraded steps, and found himself on a corridor identical to the one above, except that this one was blocked off halfway by a door; not studded, this door, but made of black oak, with elaborate wrought-iron hinges, their strapwork in the form of stylised olive branches. It was an elegant door, built to please the eye as well as turn aside weapons of war. From the orientation of the corridor, Mallory guessed that the rooms beyond would look south, over the harbour. Once, these would have been the Commandant’s quarters.

The smell of Turkish cigarettes was stronger here.

These were still the Commandant’s quarters.

As Mallory walked up to the door, it opened. An Obersturmführer in the black uniform of the Totenkopf-SS marched quickly out, glanced at Mallory without curiosity, closed the door behind him, and marched on. In his hand was a sheet of paper, and on his face an expression of sulky haste. An odd, harsh voice pursued him. ‘Within one hour!’ it barked. It sounded as if there was something wrong with the speaker’s throat.

‘Jawohl, Herr General,’ muttered the ADC, and disappeared down the stairs.

Mallory pushed the door open.

The smell of Turkish cigarettes rolled out to meet him. Ahead, the corridor continued to a Gothic window full of night. Moroccan rugs covered the flagstones. The air was warm, and the smell of damp stone had disappeared. The light came from a gilt chandelier. Pictures of Spanish saints adorned the walls: male saints, stripped to the waist, bearing the marks of torture.

Mallory was not concerned with the interior appointments. There were two doors each side of the corridor. Three of them were closed; it was inconceivable that they would contain anything as vulgar and tasteless as a sentry. The fourth was open.

It was a huge room, forty feet on a side, with a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table. There was a vast fireplace, surmounted by the carved arms of a Spanish duke. At the far end was a Gothic solar window. In front of the window was a desk with two telephones, a green onyx desk set, a bell-push and an ashtray from which the smoke of a Turkish cigarette rose vertically into the still, warm air. Behind the desk was a man with a pointed head, bald on top but fringed with close-clipped grey-blond hair.

No sentries. How could there be no sentries?

If nobody could get into the castle, there was no need of sentries inside the castle. That was logical.

Mallory walked into the room and shut the door. The man at the desk did not look up. The lights of the room moved in the silver insignia of an SS General, the lightning-flash runes on the collar, the silver skull-and-bones below the eagle on the high-crowned cap on the desk. The thin fingers reached out for the cigarette. The sausage lips sucked, blew smoke. The eyes came up to meet Mallory’s.

The eyes were the colour of water, set above high cheekbones in a fleshless face with a cleft chin. The Adam’s apple moved in the neck. There was something wrong with the Adam’s apple: a dent in the right-hand side, a groove the thickness and depth of a finger. An old wound, perhaps. Striated webs of muscle shifted in the wasted areas where the cheeks should have been. ‘What?’ said the General, in his thin, harsh croak. He clipped his cigarette into his right hand. Mallory saw the hand was artificial, an unlife-like imitation of hard orange rubber.

Mallory reached in his pocket for the paybook he had taken from the dead sentry, stepped forward to the desk and held it out to the General. The General waved it away impatiently, wrinkling his nose at the smell. Private soldiers did not roll in sewage, then burst into General’s rooms and identify themselves. What on earth did this Dummkopf think he was doing? The orange rubber fingers of the prosthesis strayed to the bell-push.

Mallory plastered a foolish grin on his face, and swatted the artificial hand away from the bell. The General was looking up at him now. A ropy vein was swelling on either side of his neck. He ignored the hand with the paybook. He opened his mouth to shout.

The hand holding the paybook kept moving. The General ignored it. He was watching Mallory’s face. The anger was turning to something else, something like puzzlement, or even fear. But the hand with the paybook had gone further than a hand with a paybook need go, and it had dropped the paybook and folded the fingers under a hard ridge of knuckle and accelerated until it was an axehead aimed at the ruined Adam’s apple in that stringy neck.

Mallory put his whole weight behind that punch. It was designed to smash the larynx. But whatever the General saw in the brown eyes above Mallory’s foolish grin made him move his head at the final split instant, so the knuckles caught him on the side of the neck, bruising the larynx instead of smashing it, and he went backwards out of the carved-gilt chair and into the bow of the window, groping for the flap of his holster as he fell.

Mallory scrambled over the desk after him, his boot-nails leaving tears in the red Morocco top. The General was halfway up to his feet, his back against the stone tracery of the window. Mallory covered him with his Schmeisser. He said, ‘Put your hands in the air.’

The General said in a rasping whisper, ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘Do as you are told,’ said Mallory.

‘You are not a German soldier,’ said the General.

Mallory said, ‘No.’

The General’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. Self-possession returned to the cold-water eyes. He said, ‘If you shoot me there will be ten of my men in here before you can take your finger off the trigger.’

‘And you will be dead,’ said Mallory. ‘What good will that do you?’ He saw the flicker of calculation in the colourless eyes, and knew that this was not an argument that would work. It might have cut some ice with a junior officer. But for one of Heinrich Himmler’s inner circle, there were more frightening things than death.

‘So,’ whispered the General, with a smile that was no more than a stretch of the lips over the teeth. ‘We have been expecting you.’

‘That was clever of you,’ said Mallory. ‘How?’

The General said, ‘You will die wondering, I think.’

Mallory yawned. ‘Pardon,’ he said. It was the old chess game of lies and evasions. ‘You captured two men,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

The General’s face had relaxed. Mallory had shown weakness. He was in control. His orange artificial hand rested on the red leather desk. ‘Where you will shortly be,’ said the General. The bell-push was six inches away. ‘What are you trying to achieve?’ This one will hang from piano wire, his brain hissed furiously. From a meathook. He has no idea of the extent of his presumption. But he will learn, kicking his life out on the hook with the cut of thin steel at his damned impudent neck.

‘My objectives,’ said Mallory. The barrel of the Schmeisser moved like a snake’s tongue, and smashed into the General’s good arm above the elbow.

The General pulled his hand back. The pain was abominable. The arm was definitely broken. He said, in a whisper unstable with agony, ‘For this you will die.’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Mallory. ‘Where are your prisoners?’

The General stood there, cradling his good hand with his orange rubber fingers to take the weight off the upper arm. Nobody had spoken to him like this since the SA purge in 1934. The pain was terrible. He wanted to shout, but his vocal cords were paralysed. He wanted to push the bell, but he was frightened that some other part of him would be broken. When would von Kratow the aide-de-camp be back? An hour. He had told von Kratow to leave him alone for an hour.

He was alone and helpless under those pitiless brown eyes. And he knew, with the sure instinct of the merciless, that the man behind those eyes had as little mercy as himself.

In that moment, he recognised him. The Abwehr had circulated the name, the description, holograph cuttings from the London Times and the Frankfurter Zeitung, from before the war. Cuttings with pictures of this face, those eyes, fixed without mercy on the next peak to be conquered.

He said in his rasping whisper, ‘Mallory.’ He breathed hard. ‘You will all die together. It will not be an easy death.’

Mallory felt the sweat of relief flow under his stinking uniform. Andrea and Miller were still alive. He said to the General, ‘Please. Take your clothes off.’

The General’s brain felt starved of blood. He knew the things this man had done. He knew that he was in trouble. He said, ‘No.’

Then he dived for the bell-push.

Mallory saw him go, as if in slow motion. He lashed out again with the barrel of the Schmeisser. It caught the General on his bone-white temple. His eyes rolled up. His body went limp and dropped to the Turkish carpet. His head hit the flagstones at the carpet’s fringe with a loud, wet crunch. He lay still.

Mallory laid the Schmeisser on the desk. He stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, took another from the silver box, lit it, and inhaled deeply. He walked across to the door and quietly shot the big bolt. Then he crouched by the body on the floor, and took the pulse in the neck.

There was no pulse.

Mallory began to remove the uniform.

He pulled off the boots, the tunic, the breeches. He paused a moment, face immobile, eyebrow cocked. The uniform was bigger than the body. The General’s corpse was white and fleshless, little better than a skeleton. Under the dead-black uniform, the man was wearing ivory silk French knickers.

Mallory began to unbutton his tunic. He thew his sewage-stained clothes behind the curtain, and climbed into the General’s uniform.

It had been oversized for the General, but was about the right size for Mallory. He had climbed the castle tower without socks, and large areas of skin had come away from his feet. The General’s socks were clean and made of silk, which was soothing; the General’s mirror-polished jackboots were a size too tight, which was not. But Mallory’s own boots were not the elegant boots of a General, so there was no help for it.

When he had finished dressing Mallory transferred the contents of his battledress pockets to the General’s tunic and breeches. He caught sight of himself reflected in the glass of the window. He saw a tall, thin SS General, the hollow-cheeked face shadowed by the cap that came down far over the eyes, the unscarred neck hidden by the shirt collar. Unless he got too close to someone who knew the General well, he would pass. The Cabo de la Calavera force would be a scratch team. They would not know each other well.

You hope.

Stay in the shadows.

He took the cap off, and began to walk round the office. A door led to a room with a shortwave radio on a table.

Mallory went into the bathroom. He washed his hands and face. He changed the blade in the dead man’s razor for a new one. He shaved: SS Generals do not have twelve hours’ growth of stubble. As he shaved he thought about the way that the lights had come on after the landing, the instantaneous capture of Andrea and Miller. And what the General had said: we have been expecting you.

Mallory wiped the remains of the lather from his face, and decided that, disguise or no disguise, he could not face the General’s violet-scented eau de Cologne. He walked back to the radio room, stiff-legged because of the pinch of the boots. Jensen had made sure his men were trained in the use of German equipment. He flicked on the power, and tuned the dial to the Stella Maris’ frequency. ‘Ici l’Amiral Beaufort,’ he said.

There was a wave of static. Then a little voice said, ‘Monsieur l’Amiral.’ Even across the static it was recognisable as Hugues.

Mallory said, ‘I have laid large explosive charges at the main gate. Am expecting reinforcements from the landward.’

Hugues said, ‘What-’

Mallory hit his press-to-talk switch. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘Ignore all further radio communications. Await arrival of main force, one hour. Acknowledge.’ He lifted his thumb from the switch.

Static washed through the earphones. For a moment he thought Hugues had not received him. Then he realised that the silence would be the silence of confusion.

Or treachery.

‘Acknowledge,’ he said again.

‘I acknowledge,’ said Hugues.

‘Out,’ said Mallory, and disconnected.

Mallory hobbled back into the office. Very quietly he unbolted the door, walked back to the desk and pulled the body behind the curtain. Then he lit another Turkish cigarette from the box on the desk, and turned away from the door to face the window. It was dark out there. He waited five minutes. Suddenly, the night to the left whitened, as if many lights had come on. Mallory pressed the button on the desk. The door opened behind him. A voice said, ‘Herr General?’

Mallory could see in the rain-flecked glass the reflection of a young SS officer, standing to attention with tremulous rigidity, eyes front. The officer would not be able to see Mallory’s reflection. Mallory was standing too close to the glass. And of course, the officer was German, so he would notice uniforms, not faces.

At least, that was the theory Mallory was backing with his life. And Andrea’s, and Miller’s.

He said, in what he hoped was a replica of the General’s harsh croak, There seems to be a problem by the gate. The lights are on. What is happening?’

‘We have reports of enemy action.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Intelligence,’ said the voice.

Mallory said, ‘Investigate this. Personally. Come back only when you have established the nature of this action, and neutralized it. Take all forces at your disposal. The whole garrison, if necessary.’

‘But Herr General, the administration … we depart at dawn …’

Mallory’s heart seemed to stop beating. ‘At what time?’ he said.

‘At dawn,’ said the SS man, worried. ‘The Herr General will remember … it was the Herr General who issued the order …’

The time of dawn, idiot,’ snapped Mallory.

‘Of course.’ The SS man sounded flustered. ‘My apologies. 0500, Herr General.’

‘So you will raise the general alarm,’ said Mallory. ‘And you will proceed to the gate.’

‘But Herr General-’

‘With all the men you can find.’

‘But the work-’

‘Silence!’ barked Mallory. ‘Leave only the sentries, and one man. I need to interview the prisoners. I shall require an escort. The rest to the gate. I hold you personally responsible.’

‘But-’

‘You will go out in the rain,’ said Mallory, ‘and confront the enemy! There is worse than rain on the Ostfront!’

He heard boot heels crash together. The officer said, ‘Jawohl, Herr General,’ in a tight, offended voice. The uniform would be occupying the whole of his vision.

‘Send the escort in five minutes,’ said Mallory. ‘Dismiss!’

The boot heels crashed again. The door slammed. Alarm bells started ringing, rackety and imperious. Mallory turned, stubbed out the cigarette, and lit another.

Five o’clock. The U-boats were sailing seven hours early. And the Storm Force had not even begun.

There was the stamp of many feet in the corridor outside: the General’s staff, trotting off to the gate, scared witless by the prospect of the Russian Front. The footsteps faded. A double knock sounded on the door. Mallory turned back to the window. ‘Komm!’ he cried.

A nervous voice said, ‘Herr General.’

‘We will visit the prisoners,’ said Mallory. ‘Lead the way.’

‘The way?’

‘You lead,’ rasped Mallory. ‘I will follow you. About turn.’

The soldier about turned. Mallory clasped his hands behind his back and hobbled out from behind the desk.

In the corridor, he sank his chin into his collar and strode stiffly after the private. Anyone watching would have seen the General, cap pulled low over his eyes, deep in thought, doing his rounds. But there were only clerks to watch. The alarm bells had sent the garrison clattering for the assembly points, and from the assembly points the Feldwebels had bellowed them to the ramparts on the peninsula.

The escort’s boots rang in the vaulting and crunched grit on the stone stairs. The pain in Mallory’s feet and the aches of his body were small, distant inconveniences.

He had radioed the Stella Maris with false information. Within five minutes, that false information had been relayed to the garrison.

Someone on the Stella Maris was a traitor.

Lisette was out of France, away from the long arm of the Gestapo. Hugues had his girlfriend and his child safe alongside him; if he betrayed the Stella Maris party, Lisette would be separated from him, and probably killed. Which left Jaime: Jaime the dark and silent, the smuggler, connoisseur of secret paths and byways.

Not that it mattered just now.

The soldier halted, with a stamp of his feet. ‘Herr General,’ he said.

They were in a long corridor lined with steel doors. White lights glared harshly from the ceiling. There was a smell of damp and mould. The sentry standing rigidly at attention outside the nearest door coughed. Mallory said, ‘Key.’

The sentry was still coughing.

‘Key!’ rasped Mallory, holding out his hand.

The sentry said, ‘Herr General,’ and fumbled at his belt. He looked at Mallory’s hand.

And Mallory’s skin turned suddenly to ice.

For the sentry was frowning at that outstretched hand. The right hand. The hand of flesh and blood.

The hand that on the real General had been an artificial hand of orange rubber.

‘Herr General,’ said the sentry, with the face of one undergoing a nervous breakdown. ‘This is … you are not the General.’

‘The key,’ rasped Mallory.

But under the brim of his cap he saw the man’s hands going for the Schmeisser.

The cell had not changed. It was still cold, and it still stank, and it was still dark, dark with the absolute blackness of a pocket hewn from living rock. Midnight in the goddamn dungeons, thought Miller. Ghosts would be walking, witches doing whatever the hell witches do when it rains. As far as Miller was concerned, the ghosts and the witches could get on with it. Right here, midnight meant time for a cigarette.

He gave one to Andrea, put one in his own mouth, and lit them. The hot little coals began to glow in the dark, and for a couple of minutes there were warm points in this cold, evil-smelling universe.

But cigarettes end. And when they were finished, it was colder again, and lonelier, and worst of all, quieter.

What felt like two hours later, Andrea said, ‘What time is it?’

Andrea would be thinking about the operation. Miller was thinking about it too. Miller wanted to get finished up.

Some chance.

He looked at the radium-bright hands of his watch. ‘Five past twelve,’ he said.

‘Any minute now,’ said the rumble of Andrea’s voice. And although Miller knew it was a packet of bullshit, he felt for a moment that, any minute now, something might happen.

But nothing did.

Not for thirty seconds, anyway. After thirty seconds, the silence was broken by an odd noise.

It sounded like a jackhammer. It was not a jackhammer.

Someone was firing a machine pistol outside the cell door.

The door swung open. Brilliant light exploded into the darkness. A figure stood against the light, a black, angular silhouette. Andrea stared at it, dazzled. From the monochrome blur there emerged a spidery figure, jackboots set well apart, hands on hips, face invisible under the high-fronted black cap. It was the silhouette that stalked Andrea’s dreams: the rusty-black silhouette that had stood against the sun on the low hill in Greece, with the blue Aegean twinkling like sapphires under the sky.

Under the hill had been the house of Andrea’s brother, Iannis. It had been a small house, with a vine growing over a little terrace of red tiles, fanned by the small thyme-scented breeze that blew up from the sea.

By the time Andrea had got there, the damage had been done. His brother had been suspected of partisan activities, and captured in possession of British weapons. Under the pleasant green shade of the vine, the General had opened a bottle of Iannis’ retsina and poured himself a glass. Then he had perched elegantly on the wall, gleaming boots crossed at the ankles, and watched the show.

The show had consisted of lighting the fire of charcoal on which the family had from time to time cooked an alfresco meal. Three Croatian SS had then brought Iannis’ three daughters - Athene, six, Eirene, eight, and Helen, nine - out of the house. In the fire of charcoal they had burned off the girls’ hands. When Iannis’ wife had begun to scream, the General had had her hanged before the eyes of her husband and her still living children. Iannis they had left alive, nailing his hands to the house door against his attempts to claw out the eyeballs that had seen this thing, and wrench out the heart that was broken.

It was only after they had hanged the children beside their mother that Iannis had managed to tear his hands free and run, run like a maniac, eyes blinded with tears, to the brink of the high white cliff, and keep running, though his feet were no longer running on ground, but running on air, and he was falling down the glistening face of that cliff, falling happily, because he would see his children again, and his wife, and his parents, murdered by Bulgarians -

Five minutes later, Andrea had arrived, slowly, wearing a straw hat and leading a donkey in whose panniers were more weapons. Andrea had stood a moment, blank-eyed, watching. He saw the woman and the three children hanging from the vine that used to shade the evening drinking of ouzo. He saw the black-uniformed SS men, their thick red faces pouring rivers of sweat under the sun, laughing. The flames began to pour out of the roof of the house. He saw the silhouette of the General standing on the cliff, admiring a distant ruin, smiling complacently at the liquid-agate of the sun in the glass of retsina. He smelt burned flesh.

Then Andrea had seen nothing else.

When he could see again, there were five SS men dead at his feet. Them he fed to Iannis’ pigs. The General he shot in the knees and threw into the privy to drown. He heard later from the people of the village that it had taken three days; not that he was interested. For Andrea had not waited. He had gathered together the bodies of his brother and his sister-in-law and his nieces, and given them to the priest for burial. Then he had left, to fight for his country on other fronts.

Andrea did not like SS officers.

He growled, and started forward, his gigantic hands unclenching.

The SS General dropped the Turkish cigarette he was smoking, and ground it out with a fastidious toe. He said, ‘Unless you really like it here, I think we should leave.’ And his voice was the voice of Mallory.

There was a moment’s stunned silence, broken only by the sound of moaning from the corridor. Then Miller said, ‘Personally, I find it damp.’

Andrea’s eyes were pits of darkness. They moved from Mallory to Miller and back again. Then his teeth showed in a smile that was like the sun among thunderclouds. ‘You should be careful about second-hand clothes,’ he said. ‘You could catch something really nasty. Like a knife in the guts.’

Mallory said, ‘It is true that the owner wasn’t very well when I left him.’

There were two bodies in the corridor. ‘Get their clothes and their paybooks,’ said Mallory. Andrea dragged them into the cell, and shut the door. ‘And now?’ he said.

Mallory looked at Miller. “What do you need?’

What Miller really needed was his explosives back. But there was no use crying over spilt Cyclonite. ‘Whatever,’ said Miller. ‘These guys will be carrying torpedoes. You can have a nasty accident with a torpedo. I guess I’d like to see the magazine.’

Andrea nodded gravely. During the weeks he had known Miller, he had learned to take this languid, flippant American very seriously indeed.

‘I have a feeling,’ said Mallory, ‘that there might be a certain amount of confusion out there. So the sooner we get dressed, the better.’

Five minutes later, the SS General left the fortaleza by the main gate, escorted by two men in grubby Waffen-SS uniforms, one tall and wide, one tall and lanky, marching eyes front, with Schmeissers strapped across their chests. The sentries on the gate saluted. The General returned their salute with his left hand; the right, being artificial, he held rigidly at his side.

Once across the bridge over the moat, the party turned right, down a flight of wide, shallow stairs that led to a sort of crater in the shoulder of the headland. In the centre of the crater was a squat concrete bunker surrounded with barbed wire.

At a slow and stately pace, Mallory and his escort started down the stairs. There were few other people about. The welding torches still flickered their lightnings at the sky by the harbour, and riveters still rattled in the night. Somewhere, truck engines were rumbling; the evacuation was getting under way. But the armed men of the garrison were still apparently up by the main gate.

The garrison would not stay by the main gate for ever. Sooner or later, someone would decide that the threat might be based on faulty intelligence, or that it was not wise to leave the rest of the Cabo unguarded. Before that happened, there would be fifteen minutes, at best.

They were approaching the gate to the bunker. Seen close up, it was not so much a bunker as a fortified entrance, a steel door set behind a system of concrete baffles giving admittance to a low, tumulus-like mound, covered in salt-blasted turf. The entrance to the magazine.

The soldier at the gate stared straight ahead. ‘Pass?’ he said.

Mallory said, in the General’s harsh whisper, ‘Open the gate.’

‘But Herr General -’

Mallory said, ‘The weather in Russia is terrible at this time of year.’

The man’s face paled under the floodlights. ‘Herr General?’

‘Perhaps when you get there you will send me a postcard,’ rasped Mallory. ‘Now if you would kindly open the gate?’

There was a split second of inner struggle. Then the sentry hauled open the gate in the wire, and Mallory walked through at his cramped, mincing hobble. The sentry must have pressed some sort of switch, because the steel door swung open with a hiss of hydraulics. Mallory and his escorts walked in without pausing. The steel door swung shut behind them. Ahead was a flight of spiral stairs, with at its centre the hoists that fed ammunition to the guns in the fort. Mallory looked at the faces of his companions. They were pale and expressionless, tired, but with a tension to their tiredness that was new. It came from the closing of that steel door.

They were inside now. There were no sandbags to hide behind, no shadows to skulk in. Their only protection against five hundred enemy soldiers was the thin cloth of their uniforms and the shape of the badges they wore. They were small, fragile machines of flesh and blood, armed with small guns. With those small guns and their bare hands, they had to destroy huge machines of steel. It was a nasty feeling; a naked feeling. A feeling from a nightmare.

But this was real. And this was the way it was going to be, from now on.

Down those stairs, Mallory told himself, were the tools for the job. Put Miller near explosives, and his bare hands could shatter an army. Everything was going to be fine.

Except my feet, thought Mallory, hobbling on. His feet felt as if they would never be the same again.

The shaft with the staircase descended into the bowels of the hill. Shells could be carried by hoist. But torpedoes were big, and heavy, and needed to travel horizontally. The floor of the magazine would be on the same level as the floor of the quay.

Miller stamped down the stairs at what he hoped was a convincing Wehrmacht stamp. It was costing him some effort to keep his appearance military. He was a fighter, Miller, but he would have been the first to admit that he was not much of a soldier. As they rounded the last twist of the spiral staircase, he felt a pleasurable anticipation. Once again, it was time to improvise.

At the base of the stairs was a flashproof door. Miller pushed the door open. They were in the magazine.

It was a big magazine. It stretched away in front of them, lit harshly by white bulkhead lights, a devil’s wine cellar of grey concrete compartments, bins for shells, and bays for the trolleys that would roll the torpedoes down to the quays where the submarines waited, black and evil, crouching in the cold Atlantic.

Mallory looked at his watch. It was three forty-five.

Christ.

They went through the door, all three of them, and looked down the stark concrete perspective that was the magazine’s central aisle. This was where they would find the wherewithal to sink three submarines and scupper the Nazis’ last defence against the invading Allies.

But there was a problem.

The concrete bays and alcoves of the magazine contained a few crates. The dollies for the shells lay on their rails, and the torpedo racks, five hundred of them, stood padded with felt. But the crates were cracked open, the dollies burdenless, the torpedo racks bare. A gang of men was dismantling an electric motor.

But apart from the men, the magazine was empty.

They stood there, and watched, and let it sink in. The job was waiting. The tools were missing.

After a minute, Mallory began to hobble down the floor of the magazine, heading for the rails that would have taken the torpedoes to the quay.

The Stella Maris was lying on the outside of a raft of fishing boats against the quay wall of San Eusebio. Among the ruined buildings behind the quay, yellow dogs with feathered tails barked maddeningly in the rain. Hugues and Lisette were out of sight below. Jaime was on deck, propped in the splintered remnants of the wheelhouse, smoking. At his side a radio hummed gently to itself. There had been no signals. Jaime was not expecting any more signals.

Across the black water of the harbour, the sheds and quays of the old sardine factory on Cabo de la Calavera, which earlier had flickered with angle-grinder sparks and welder lightnings, were almost dark. It looked as if the work was complete. Now and then, a crane-jib caught the light as it swung. Loading up, thought Jaime. Not long now.

There was activity on the harbour too; the murmur of launches and lighters, moving out to the two five-thousand-ton merchantmen anchored in the deep water half a mile from the quay. On the move, thought Jaime. And who knew where it would all end?

‘Slow,’ said Mallory. ‘Your work is very, very slow. Work faster.’

The Leutnant in charge of the embarkation of the magazine stores felt a hot anger at the injustice of it all. But it was not helpful to be angry with SS Generals. So he clicked his heels and ducked his head and said, ‘As the Herr General wishes.’

‘The Herr General does,’ said Mallory. ‘Now I wish to inspect the magazine.’

‘Herr General?’

Mallory frowned. ‘You speak German, do you not?’

‘Herr General.’ The man had just been rated for slowness. Leading a tour of inspection for some damned Nazi with a skull-and-bones hat was not going to speed things up. But a General was a General.

‘Here were the shells,’ said the Leutnant. ‘All gone now, as per your orders. Here were the torpedoes. They are also gone, naturally.’ He waved a hand at the tunnel leading down to the quay, and walked to another bin lined with empty racks. A pile of grey boxes stood on the floor. ‘And in here, the small arms. A few only remaining. Grenades, mortar bombs. The last consignment will be leaving when the barge comes back alongside.’ He clashed his heels together again, thumbs nailed to the seams of his breeches. ‘I trust the Herr General is satisfied.’

Mallory eyed the three grey wooden boxes the officer had indicated. ‘Quite satisfied,’ he said. He looked round. Nobody was in sight. ‘Andrea?’

The huge Greek took one step forward and crashed his jackboots on the concrete. His shoulders moved. There was a sound like a felling axe hitting a tree trunk. The German officer sighed, and fell down.

‘Hide him,’ said Mallory. ‘Miller, boxes of grenades.’

Miller piled two boxes of grenades one on top of the other: ten grenades to the box, rope handles on either end.

‘We’ll go to the quay,’ said Mallory. His face was the colour of dirty ivory. Exhausted, thought Miller.

Mallory fumbled in his pocket. There were three Benzedrine left in the little foil packet. He gave them out, one each. Benzedrine was not good for you, thought Miller, stooping to pick up the grenades. But then, nor was trying to climb aboard a U-boat to blow it up.

It was a long time since Miller had eaten anything. The pill worked fast. He could feel the strength pouring through him. These pills, thought Miller, dry-mouthed and sweating. You will feel terrible later.

Except that later was hardly worth worrying about, under the circumstances.

Miller laughed. Then he walked with his two companions into the throat of the tunnel that led to the quay.

SEVEN

Wednesday 0400-0500

The tunnel was fifty yards long, lit with the harsh white bulkhead lights installed all over the Cabo. Rails ran down each side, for the torpedo dollies. Down the middle was the walkway. There were men moving up and down the tunnel, moving at a fast clip. When they saw Mallory’s uniform their eyes skidded away. Popular guy, thought Miller.

The three men began to march down the walkways, boots echoing. They had gone twenty yards when a voice behind said, ‘Halt!’

Mallory’s heart walloped heavily. He thrust his all-too-real right hand into his tunic. Andrea’s hands stole to the grips of his Schmeisser. Miller’s hands were sweating into the rope handles of the grenade boxes. Mallory spun on the heel of his agonising jackboot.

He was looking at a small, bald man with rimless glasses and a prissy mouth, bulging out of a badgeless uniform. The small man was holding a book.

‘Was?’ said Mallory.

The small man was not impressed by the death’s-head cap badge, the black uniform, the harsh croak of the voice. He pursed his lips. ‘It is necessary to fill out the requisite forms,’ he said. ‘For the withdrawal of these weapons from the magazine. Otherwise, correct systems cannot be maintained.’

Mallory said, ‘And you are the inventory clerk.’

‘Jawohl.’

‘Well, Herr Corporal,’ said Mallory. ‘Give me your book, and I will sign it.’

The clerk made tutting noises. ‘Signature alone is not enough,’ he said. ‘You will naturally need a requisition form signed by the garrison duty officer.’

Mallory said, in a voice crammed with broken glass, ‘Do you know who I am?’

The clerk moistened his small mouth with a grey tongue. ‘Yess, Herr General. You are the garrison commander, Herr General.’

‘And who signs the requisitions?’

‘The duty officer.’

‘By whose orders?’

‘By your orders, Herr General.’

‘So,’ said Mallory.

The clerk said, ‘I have my orders. The duty officer must sign the requisition.’

Mallory checked his watch. It said 0405. In fifty-five minutes the submarines were due to sail.

In fifty-five minutes, they could still be arguing with this clerk. The only thing stronger than the uniform was the system.

He said, ‘Corporal, I compliment you on your attachment to duty. The duty officer is on the quay. You will accompany us there, please.’

‘But-’

‘Schnell.’ Mallory’s voice was a bark that admitted no contradiction.

The clerk, he had decided, was a blessing. An officious little blessing with rimless glasses, but a blessing nonetheless.

‘Lead on, Corporal,’ said Mallory, in a harsh purr.

The clerk led on.

The mouth of the tunnel was walled off. On one side was an opening for the torpedo dolly track. On the other was a sort of wicket gate for the pedestrian walkway. By the wicket gate was a species of sentry box. In the sentry box were two figures like black paper silhouettes: SS.

From the corner of his eye, Mallory saw that Andrea’s hands had not moved from the grips of his Schmeisser. He wished he had a Schmeisser of his own. But he had a Luger, and the insignia of his uniform. That should be enough -

Except that the face above the uniform was not the right face.

He tugged down the peak of his cap.

The heels rang on. The SS sentries in the box had blank faces the colour of dirty suet. Their uniforms were rusty, their belts grainy, the folds of their jackboots cracking with salt. Their eyes were cold, and vicious, and restless. When they settled on Mallory’s uniform, something happened to them, something that was not the other ranks’ usual reaction to an officer’s uniform. It was a look compounded of furtiveness and pride. Esprit de corps, thought Mallory. Oh, dear.

There were fifty SS men on the Cabo de la Calavera: the élite, keeping an eye on things for Himmler. They would know each other, all right.

But the only way onto the quay was through that night-black wicket by the sentry box.

Mallory shouted, ‘Attention!’

The SS faces became blank and automatic. The General’s uniform was doing its job. The boot heels ground concrete as Mallory, Miller, Andrea, and the magazine clerk marched on. The magazine clerk looked pleased with himself, proud to be part of something important and official. Mallory was profoundly grateful to him. The magazine clerk was credibility. The SS knew the magazine clerk.

They were close now: ten feet away. Mallory walked with his supposedly artificial hand in his breast, head bowed, as if in deep thought. Through the wicket came the smells of the sea, stirring the chill, leaden air of the magazine. The smell of the endgame.

The eyes were on them now, peripherally at least. In the corner of his vision Mallory could see the white, large-pored skin, the brown eyes seamed below with the marks of arrogance and cruelty. He could smell the uniforms, the sour smell of rain-wet black serge badly dried, leather on which polish was fighting a losing battle with mildew. He could smell the oil on the Schmeissers, the tobacco smoke, and garlic on their breath.

Then they were past, and Mallory was sweating -

‘Herr General?’ said a voice, a hard voice, cold, a little tentative: the voice of one of the black-clad sentries.

Mallory took another step.

‘The Herr General will please stop,’ said the voice.

‘Quiet,’ murmured Mallory, in English. Then he said, in his approximation of the General’s bust-larynx rasp, ‘What do you want?’

‘If the Herr General would show us his pass?’

Mallory made a small, exasperated noise. ‘Clerk,’ he said. ‘Show them your pass.’

The clerk’s face was pink and shiny behind the rimless spectacles. He fumbled in his pocket.

‘Quickly,’ grated Mallory. ‘Time is wasting.’

The SS man’s eyes flicked at the clerk’s pass. He handed it back.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘the Herr General’s pass.’

Something seemed to have removed the bottom of Mallory’s stomach. There was a sort of icy purr in the voice, the sound of a cat about to stab a claw into a rat.

Miller put down the boxes of grenades. His hands were wet on the grips of his Schmeisser. He moved it casually, negligently, until it was covering the guard who was not doing the talking. The guard who was doing the talking had an odd expression on his face. Miller understood it.

It was the expression of a man who knew the General well, but who had been conditioned to respond to uniforms, not faces.

Miller knew that something bad was going to happen.

The SS man wet his lips with a grey tongue. He said to Mallory, ‘Herr General, what is the Herr General’s name?’ His right hand was under the level of the desk. There would be an alarm button down there.

Miller thumbed the selector on the Schmeisser to single shot, and took up the first pressure on the trigger. Andrea, he noticed, had his hands off his gun. Andrea said, with a wide, despairing gesture of both spread palms, ‘For God’s sake, who do you think you are talking to?’

The SS sentry opened his mouth to reply. But he never got the words out, because Andrea’s gesture had become something else, and his huge right had gone into the sentry’s face, the heel up and under the nose, driving the bone into the brain, while the other hand, the left, had sprouted a knife that went in and out of the other sentry’s chest, and in and out again. The two helmets clanged on the concrete.

There was a long, dreadful silence that lasted perhaps a second. Then something small scuttled past Miller. The clerk.

He stuck out a foot. The little man went flat on his face. His spectacles skittered away on the concrete. The face he turned to Miller was the face of a blind mole. He said, ‘Please.’

Miller looked at him. This was not an SS man. This man had all the malice of a ticket office clerk in Grand Central Station.

But this man could stop the operation dead.

Miller looked away.

There was a sound like a well-hit baseball. When Miller looked back, the magazine clerk was silent, face down, but breathing.

Andrea sighted along the barrel of his Schmeisser. ‘Thought I’d bent it,’ he said.

They dragged the clerk and the SS men out of sight behind the desk of the sentry box. The clerk was still breathing.

Then they walked onto the quay.

They were standing on the inshore end of the map the late Guy Jamalartégui had drawn beside the chart on his kitchen table with a matchstick and a puddle of wine.

The Basque-American who had donated the port to his sardine-fishing compatriots had not stinted. The quay was built of cut granite, on a scale that would have excited the respectful envy of a Pharaoh. The magazine entrance was set in the low cliff halfway down the long side of the innermost quay. Three more quays ran parallel to the first. There were rails set into the paving of the quays, designed presumably to carry waggonloads of sardines, first to the long sheds at the base of the quays for canning, and then to the sardines-on-toast enthusiasts of Europe.

Now, the black lanes of water between the granite fingers of the quay held no fishing boats; probably they never had. Instead, the long, sleek hulls and oddly streamlined conning towers of three great U-boats lay under the cranes.

Three men walked past, smoking, splashing in the puddles left by the night’s rain. They were wearing baggy blue overalls, and had the hell-with-you air of dockyard mateys the world over. They paid no attention to Mallory and his two guards. Their task was finished. On the nearest submarine - presumably the one that had been reported rammed - a small gang of men was packing up what looked like oxy-acetylene welding gear. For the rest, what was going up and down on the cranes was definitely stores. Mallory watched a tray of green vegetables and milk cans. Last-minute stores, at that.

More men in blue overalls drifted up the quay. There was a building up there, a green clapboard facade on a tunnel in the cliff. From it there drifted a smell of frying onions. The canteen, thought Mallory. The men going towards the canteen carried tool boxes. The men coming back had bags and bundles as well as the tool boxes. They had gone for a final meal up there, and picked up their possessions. At the far side of the harbour, launch engines puttered in the dawn; the engines of the launches ferrying the dockyard mateys out to the merchant ships waiting in the harbour, Uruguayan flags fluttering on their ensign staffs.

Mallory waited for another pair of workmen to walk past. They studiously avoided his eye, the way a skilled civilian technician of any nationality would avoid the eye of a murderer and torturer. The next pair came. One of them was a huge man, as big as Andrea.

That was what Mallory had been waiting for.

He said, ‘You and you.’

The two men gave him the looks of schoolboys with permanently guilty consciences. One of them dropped his cigarette and stamped on it. The big man’s cigarette dangled, unlit.

‘Don’t worry,’ croaked Mallory. ‘You have committed no crime.’

Their faces remained wooden.

‘Smoke if you wish,’ said Mallory. Another man was walking towards them, by himself. Mallory pulled out the General’s lighter and lit the big man’s cigarette with his left hand. ‘There is one little job,’ he said. ‘Hey! You!’

The solitary man halted. Mallory pointed back at the magazine tunnel. ‘Komm!’

He marched into the tunnel. The lights were very bright after the grey predawn outside. The dockyard men were yawning and sullen. It had been a long night shift, and they wanted to get some food and climb aboard a merchant ship and go to sleep. They did not want to do any more jobs, particularly jobs for this whispering child murderer and his nasty-looking bodyguards. The big one said, ‘What is it then?’

‘Further,’ said the SS General.

They were in the magazine tunnel. There were steel doors let into the wall, and a smell of new blood. The General pointed at one of the doors. ‘In there,’ he said.

The big man turned round. ‘Why?’ he said.

It was then he saw the bodyguards’ guns, foreshortened, looking between his own eyes with their own deadly little black eyes.

‘Take off your overalls,’ said Mallory.

The big man was a bully. He was tired, and hung over, and hungry. Being told to undress had the effect on his temper of a well-flung brick on a wasps’ nest. Nobody talked to him like that, SS General or no SS General. And word was that this SS General was a poof. ‘Take ‘em off yourself,’ said the big man, and took a swing at the General’s jaw.

He never saw what hit him. He merely had the dim impression that someone had loaded his head into a cannon, fired it at a sheet of armour plate, and dropped the resulting mess into a black velvet bag.

His two companions watched with their mouths open as Andrea dusted his hands, stripped the overalls off the big man’s prone body, and loaded the tools back into their box.

‘Strip,’ said Mallory.

They stripped at a speed that would have won them first prize in an undressing contest.

‘The door,’ said Mallory.

Miller went to the steel door. It closed from the outside, with a latch. Inside was a locker with tins of paint, ten feet on a side.

‘In,’ said Mallory.

One of the men said, ‘How will we ever get out?’ He looked frightened; he was a civilian, caught up in something not his quarrel.

Mallory did not believe that a grown man could stand back from a war. As far as Mallory was concerned, you were on his side, or you were the enemy. He said, ‘How do you get on those U-boats?’

“With a pass.’

“What pass?’

The man produced a much-folded card, seamed with oil.

‘Anything else?’

‘No. Who are you?’

Mallory went and stood so that his face was two inches from the German’s. ‘That is for me to know and you to wonder,’ he said. ‘I am going out there. I wish to move freely. If I am captured, I will not say a word about you, and that door is soundproof. So you have a choice.’ He could feel the sweat running down inside his uniform, see the impassive faces of Miller and Andrea. Not much more than half an hour now. ‘If you are telling me the truth, you have nothing to fear. If not, this locker will be your tomb.’

The man’s throat moved violently as he swallowed. He said, ‘There is … in fact … something else. A word.’

‘Ah,’ said Mallory.

‘Ritter,’ said the man. ‘You must say Ritter to the gangway sentry.’

Mallory said, ‘If you are not telling the truth, you will die in your underpants.’

‘It is the truth.’

‘Your overalls,’ said Mallory, ‘and what size are your boots?’

‘Forty-two.’

Thank God, thought Mallory. ‘Also your boots,’ he said.

Five minutes later, three dockyard mateys were wandering down the quay towards the ferry. They were carrying much-chipped blue enamel toolboxes and smoking cigarettes. Their faces were surprisingly grim for men bound for Lisbon, home and beauty. But perhaps that would be because of the danger of submarines.

Outside the sheds at the root of the quay, the three men stopped.

Andrea looked up. The clouds had rolled away. The sky was duck-egg blue. Dawn was coming up, a beautiful dawn, above this press of people and their deadly machines.

Mallory said to Andrea in a quiet, level voice, ‘We’ll want the Stella Maris standing by.’

‘I’ll arrange that,’ said Andrea.

Mallory looked down the first finger of granite. On either side were foreshortened alleys of water, with the bulbous grey pressure hulls and narrow steel decks of the submarines. There were two gangplanks down there, one leading left, the other right, a crossroads of quay and gangplanks. This was the access to two submarines. If you could get past the sailor at the base of each gangplank, rifle on his shoulder, cap ribbons fluttering at his nape in the small dawn breeze.

Mallory took a deep breath of the morning air, and tried not to think about the little steel rooms inside those pressure hulls, into which he must go with his grenades.

‘Peroxide,’ said Miller, sniffing.

‘Sorry?’

‘Hydrogen peroxide. Smells like a hairdressing parlour. Hunnert per cent, by the smell of it. Don’t get it on you. Corrosive.’

Mallory said, ‘What do you recommend?’

Miller told him.

‘Fascinating,’ said Mallory, taking a deep breath. ‘I’ll do the right-hand one. You do the left.’

Andrea said, ‘Good luck.’

Mallory nodded. There was such a thing as luck, but to acknowledge its existence was to hold two fingers up to fate. What Andrea had to do was potentially even more dangerous than climbing around U-boats with a toolbox full of hand grenades.

Not that there was much to choose between the jobs. Dead was dead, never mind how you got there.

Mallory was not wasting time thinking about death. He was planning the next phase.

Andrea slipped away into the crowds heading for the ferries. Mallory and Miller started to walk down the quay towards the sentries. Miller had his hands in his pockets, and he was whistling.

Good lad, thought Mallory. What would it take to get you really worried?

Miller’s thoughts were less elevated. The smell of peroxide had taken him back to Mme Renard’s house in Montreal, to Minette, a French-Canadian girl with an educated tongue and bright yellow curls. There had been something about Minette, something she had shown him with two goldfish and a bag of cement -

Concentrate.

Down in his saboteur’s treasure-house of a memory, he knew that the catalyst for hydrogen peroxide was manganese dioxide. Manganese dioxide would separate the hydrogen from the oxygen, and make a bang next to which a hand grenade would look stupid.

Manganese dioxide was the obvious stuff.

Unfortunately, it was not the kind of stuff people left lying around.

He was at the bottom of the gangway. He grinned at the sentry and showed him his pass. ‘Ritter,’ he said, rattling his toolbox. ‘Problem with lavatory. Two minutes only.’

The sentry said, Thank God you’ve arrived, then.’

Miller walked up the gangplank.

Andrea shouldered his way through the thickening crowd on the quay. There was a sense of urgency, now, and very little Teutonic efficiency about the milling scrum of men and soldiers. He made his way to the quay’s lip.

And stopped.

The queue might be inefficient, but the embarkation procedures were well up to standard. There were four iron ladders down the quay. At the bottom of each ladder was a launch. At the top of each ladder was an SS officer with a clipboard. As each man arrived at the front of the queue, the SS man scrutinised his identity card, compared the photograph minutely with his face, and checked his name off the list. Only then was he allowed down the ladder.

Once the launches themselves had left the quays they did not hang about. They went straight alongside the two merchant ships anchored in the harbour; merchant ships on whose decks were un-naval but nonetheless efficient sandbag emplacements from which peered the snouts of machine guns.

Even in the evacuation, the Werwolf facility was leaving nothing to chance.

Andrea’s overalls and identity card had belonged to Wulf Tietmeyer. No amount of oily thumbprints could obscure the fact that Tietmeyer, though roughly Andrea’s size, had red hair and pale blue eyes. Furthermore, Andrea had no desire to end up on a Germany-bound merchant ship.

Muttering a curse for the benefit of his neighbours, he turned back into the crowd, forging his way through the press with shoulders the size and hardness of a bank safe, a dockyard matey who had left something behind and was on his way to fetch it.

As he reached the root of the quays one of the submarines emitted a black cloud of exhaust, and the morning filled with the blaring rattle of a cold diesel. Start engines meant that they would be sailing at any minute. He looked at his watch. In eighteen minutes, to be precise. And precise was what they would be.

He looked across the mouth of the harbour at the town of San Eusebio, glowing now in the pale dawn. The windows of its houses were smoke-blackened, empty as dead men’s eyes, the campaniles of its two churches jagged as smashed teeth. But alongside the quays, in front of the blind warehouses lining the harbour, the fishing fleet was anchored two deep. And among them, on the outside near the front, were the tar-black hull and ill-furled red sails of the Stella Maris.

Four hundred yards away. A short swim in the Mediterranean. But the four-hundred-yard neck here had a roiling turbulence, with little strips of inexplicable ripples. The tide was going out, sucking at the base of the quay. It looked to Andrea as if there was a very large amount of water trying to get out of a very small exit. Andrea guessed that this might be a long swim indeed.

But Andrea had been brought up on the shores of the Aegean. Among his recent ancestors he numbered divers for sponges, and he himself had spent his childhood as much in as out of the water. Andrea swam like a fish -

A Mediterranean fish.

Slowly and deliberately, Andrea pulled a pencil and notebook from his overall pocket and walked to the seaward end of the outermost quay. Nobody paid him any attention as he passed the sentry at the foot of the gangway of the outermost U-boat. Why should they? He was a large inspector in blue overalls, frowning with his thick black eyebrows at the state of the quay. The Germans were a nation of inspectors. It was natural, in this little German world on the edge of Spain, that even in the final stages of an evacuation someone should be making notes on the condition of the quay.

At the end of the quay, iron rungs led down the granite. For the benefit of anyone watching, Andrea stuck his pencil behind his ear, pursed his lips and shook his head. Then he began to climb down the iron rungs.

As he sank below the level of the quay, he was out of sight of anyone except the sentries in the fortaleza, and he was hoping that with sixteen minutes to sailing, the sentries would have been withdrawn. From the bottom rung he let notebook and pencil whisk away on the current. He struggled out of his overalls, kicked off his boots, and removed the rest of his clothes. They hovered a moment in the eddy at the foot of the wall, then sailed off down the tide.

Naked, Andrea was brown and hairy as a bear. He touched the gold crucifix round his neck, and lowered himself into the green swirl at the foot of the rungs. He thought, it is freezing, this Atlantic.

Then he launched himself into the tide.

‘Ritter,’ said Mallory to the sentry at the foot of the gangway opposite the one up which Miller had disappeared.

The sentry was wearing leather trousers and a jersey coming unravelled at the hem. His face as he glanced at Mallory’s identity card and handed it back was pale, with a greasy film of sweat. Scared, thought Mallory, as he walked up the gangplank. These may be secret weapons, but they are still U-boats, and U-boat crews do not live long. To drown in a steel box, inch by inch …

Mallory had tried that once. It was not something he ever wanted to try again.

But he was standing on the U-boat’s grey steel deck, the worn enamel handles of the toolbox slippery in his hand, and there was a hatch forward, standing open. The torpedo room was forward. On a submarine this size, a grenade would do little damage. Unless, Miller had said, you used it as a fuse, a primer, stuck to the tons of Amatol or Torpex or whatever they used. Then you would get a result -

Mallory made himself walk towards the hatch. It would be easier to stay on deck, not go below, into that little steel space that might at any moment go under the water -

Easy or not, it had to be done.

The hatch was a double steel door in the deck. A steel ladder plunged into a yellow-lit gloom. At the bottom of the ladder a face looked up, sallow and bearded, blue bags under the eyes. A Petty Officer.

‘What the hell do you want?’ said the Petty Officer.

‘Check toilets,’ said Mallory, dumb as an ox.

‘I don’t know anything about any toilets,’ said the Petty Officer. ‘Go and see the Kapitän.’

‘Where’s the Kapitän?’ Mallory could feel the minutes ticking.

‘Conning tower. You’d better be quick.’

Mallory went back down the deck, and up the metal rungs on the side of the conning tower. He took a deep breath and let himself down into the tower itself.

The smell was oil and sweat, and something else. Peroxide. A man in a grubby white polo-neck jersey with an Iron Cross was arguing with another man. Both had pale faces and beards.

Mallory cleared his throat. ‘Come to fix the toilet,’ he said.

The man with the Iron Cross was wearing a Kapitän’s cap. ‘Now?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know it was broken. Get off my boat.’

‘Orders,’ said Mallory. The morning was a disc of daylight seen through the hatchway.

‘I’m Kapitän -’

‘The Herr General was most insistent.’

‘I shit on the Herr General,’ said the Kapitän. ‘Hell. Go and look at the toilet, then. But I warn you, we are sailing in ten minutes, and if you’re still on board I’ll put you out through a torpedo tube.’

Mallory said, stolidly, ‘That will not be necessary.’ But the Kapitän was back at his argument, with no time for dockyard mateys.

Engine at the back. Torpedoes at the front. Front it is.

Mallory hefted his toolbox, shinned down the ladder under the periscope and started along the corridor leading forward.

There was a crew messroom, racked torpedoes, bunks everywhere. The lights were yellow. There seemed to be scores of men, packed dense as sardines in a tin; but this was worse, because it was a tin in which the sardines had somehow suddenly come alive. Mallory shoved his way through. There are no windows, said the voice in his mind. You are below the level of the water -

Shut up, he told himself. You are still alongside.

He walked under the open hatch. The Petty Officer glanced at him and glanced away. Ahead, the passage ran through an oval doorway and ended. On the other side of the bulkhead he saw a long chamber lined left and right with fat tubes. The torpedo room.

And on his right, a tiny compartment: a lavatory. Head.

He looked round. The Petty Officer was watching him. Mallory winked, went into the lavatory and closed the door. His hand was sweating on the handles of his toolbox. Count to five, he thought.

There was a new sound, a vibration. The engines had started. Somewhere, a klaxon began to moan. Now or never, thought Mallory.

He walked quickly into the corridor, scratching his head, and turned right into the torpedo room.

There were two men in there, securing torpedoes to the racks. They were like horizontal organ pipes, those torpedoes. Both the men were ratings.

‘Shit,’ said one of them. ‘You’d better hurry.’

‘Checking seals,’ said Mallory. ‘Couple of minutes. Which one of these things do you fire first?’

‘Those,’ said the rating, pointing. ‘Now if you would be so good, go away and shut up and let us get on with getting ready to load those damn fish into those damn tubes.’

The torpedoes the rating had pointed at were the first rack, up by one of the ranks of oval doors that must lead into the tubes. Mallory wedged himself in behind the torpedoes, out of sight of the men. He found a stanchion on the steel wall of the submarine and looped the string lanyard on the grenade’s handle over it. Then he unscrewed the grenade’s cap, gently pulled out the porcelain button on the end of the string fuse, and tied it to the shaft of the torpedo’s propeller.

First one.

He took out a spanner and crossed the compartment. The rating did not look up. He attached a second grenade to the port side lower torpedo, where the shadows were thickest. The third and fourth he attached to the next row up.

There were feet moving on steel somewhere above his head. The vibrations of the engine were louder now.

‘That’s okay,’ said Mallory. ‘Don’t want sewage everywhere, do we?’

The ratings ignored him. He walked out of the torpedo compartment, down the corridor. The hatch was still open. He could smell the blessed air. He pushed past a couple of men, put his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

A hard hand took his arm above the elbow. A quiet voice said, ‘If you’re here to mend the toilets, what were you doing in the torpedo room?’

Mallory looked round.

The voice belonged to the bearded Petty Officer.

‘Cast off!’ roared a voice on deck.

Above his head, the hatch slammed shut.

Twenty yards away, Dusty Miller was in a different world. Miller was a trained demolitions man. He reckoned he had seven minutes. He had gone straight for the conning tower, checked out the Kapitän and the navigating officer bent over the charts. ‘Come to look at the lavs,’ he said.

The navigating officer gave him the not-interested look of a man ten minutes away from an important feat of underwater navigation. ‘What lavs?’

‘They just said the lavs.’

‘You know where they are.’

Miller shrugged, feeling the weight of his toolbox, the hammer, the spanners, the four stick grenades in the bottom compartment. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

Mallory had gone forward, looking for the torpedoes. Miller went aft.

On most U-boats, the engine room consisted of a big diesel for surface running and to charge huge banks of lead-acid batteries, and an electric motor for underwater running. The Walter process was different. The diesel did all the work. When the U-boat was under water, the engine drew the oxygen for its combustion from disintegrated hydrogen peroxide, and vented the carbon dioxide it produced as a waste gas directly into the water, where it dissolved.

Miller went down the hatch in the control-room deck and crept along the low steel corridor. Men shoved past him. He took no notice. He wandered along, apparently tracing one of the parallel ranks of grey-painted pipes leading aft along the bulkhead.

And after not many steps, he was in the engine room.

It was as it should have been: the thick tubes coming from the fuel tanks, each with its stopcock: oils, water, hydrogen peroxide. There were men working in there, working hard, oiling, establishing settings on the banks of valve wheels. The big diesel was running with a clattering roar too loud to hear. Miller caught an oiler’s eye, winked, nodded. The oiler nodded back. Nobody would be in a submarine’s engine room at a time like this unless he had business there. And at a time like this, the business would certainly be legitimate.

So Miller stooped, apparently examining the pipes, and ran his professional eye over the maze of tubes and chambers.

And made his decision; or rather, confirmed the decision he had made already.

On the surface, the Walter engine was a naturally aspirated diesel. The changeover from air to peroxide was activated by a float switch on the conning tower. It was a simple device; when the water reached a certain level, the switch closed, opening the valve from the peroxide tank to the disintegrator. In Miller’s view, the destruction of the valve would release a lot of inflammable stuff into a space full of nasty sparks.

There was a very real danger of explosions, thought Miller happily, opening his toolbox.

His fingers worked quickly. The float switch controlled a simple gate valve. Tape the grenade to the pipe. Tie the string fuse to one of the struts of the gate valve wheel. When the wheel turned, the string would pull out of the grenade. Five seconds later … well, thought Miller; ladies and gentlemen are requested to extinguish all smoking materials.

He arranged two more grenades, using the length of the string fuses to make for slightly greater delays, one on the water intake and one on the throttle linkage where it passed a dark corner. Then he walked back, climbed into the conning tower, and said, ‘All done.’

The navigating officer did not look up. ‘Piss off,’ he said.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Miller. He went up the ladder and into the chill, diesel-smelling dawn, and trotted down the gangplank and onto the quay.

He knew something was wrong as soon as his boots hit the stone. Two men were hauling the gangway of the boat opposite back onto the quay. Men were moving on the foredeck, waiting to haul in the lines when the stevedores let them go. Miller saw one of them bend and slam shut an open hatch. To left and right the quay was a desert of granite paving, dotted with a few figures in uniform, a few in overalls. Miller had worked with Mallory for long enough to recognise him, never mind what he was wearing.

None of the figures was Mallory.

So Mallory was still on the boat, and the boat was sailing.

On the boat opposite, a couple of heads showed on the conning tower. One of them wore the cap of a Kapitän.

‘Oil’ yelled Miller, above the pop and rattle of the diesels. ‘You’ve got my mate on board.’

The Kapitän looked round, frowning. The springs were off. They were down to one-and-one, a bow line and a stern line. They were sailing in two minutes. The Kapitän looked at the scarecrow figure on the dock, the chipped blue toolbox, the lanky arms and legs protruding from the too-short overalls. He shouted to one of the hands on the narrow deck.

The hand shrugged, scratching his head under his grey watch cap. He bent. He caught hold of the handles of the hatch, and pulled.

Mallory’s whole body was covered in sweat. His mind did not seem to be working. Drowned in a steel room, he was thinking. No. Not that -

‘What were you doing in the torpedo room?’ said the Petty Officer.

‘Pipes,’ said Mallory. ‘Checking pipes.’

‘Like hell,’ said the Petty Officer.

And at that moment, there fell from heaven a beam of pure grey light that pierced the reeking yellow gloom of the submarine like the arrow of God.

The hatch was open.

Mallory knew that a miracle had happened. It was a miracle that would take away the death by drowning in a metal room, and let him die under the sky, where he did not mind dying in a just cause.

He also knew that the Petty Officer could not live.

Mallory looked up the hatch. There was a head up there. ‘Now coming,’ he shouted. The head vanished. His hand was in the small of his back, closing round the handle of his dagger in the sheath there. It came round his body low and hard, and thumped into the Petty Officer’s chest, up and under the ribs. He kept the momentum going, shoved the man back onto a bunk, and pulled a blanket over him. Then he went back up the ladder.

The man on deck kicked the hatch shut. A stevedore had cast off the lines. Green water widened between the submarine and the quay. From the conning tower, a voice roared, ‘Jump!’

Mallory looked round. He saw the Kapitän, a cold, vindictive face above the grey armour plate.

‘Doesn’t like dockyard people,’ said the man on the bow line. ‘Nor do I.’ And he put up a seaboot, and shoved.

Mallory could have dodged, broken the man’s leg, saved his dignity. But what he wanted now had nothing to do with dignity. It was to get off this submarine, quick.

He jumped.

He heard the toolbox clatter on the submarine’s pressure hull. He saw the blue wink of it disappear into deep water.

It, and its three grenades.

Then the water was in his mouth and eyes, and he was swimming for the quay. He could hear the Kapitän laughing. He paid no attention.

He was thinking, five minutes to destroy the third U-boat.

How?

Andrea was swimming too. In fact, he was swimming for his life.

The waters of Greece were warm sapphires, blown by the meltemi certainly, but tideless, unmoving.

The waters of Vizcaya were different. The waters of Vizcaya were dark emeralds, cold as a cat’s eye.

And they moved.

When Andrea had lowered his shrinking body into the water and let go of the iron rung, the eddy had taken him and spun him, so that the quays and the harbour whirled around his head. The cold had stolen his breath at first, so he trod water, and watched the harbour wheel a second time. Then he had fixed his eyes on the distant, ill-kempt masts of the Stella Maris, and started to swim.

On the face of it, things were fine. But he knew as soon as he entered the channel that this was all wrong.

He could breathe now. He was swimming, the great muscles of his shoulders knotting and bunching, driving his body through the cold salt water. He was swimming breaststroke. If they saw him, they would see only a head, a small head, that they would think was a seal. There had been anti-submarine nets off the end of the quays. But those nets were down now, folded away in the holds of the merchant ships, because the submarines were coming out.

So it was just a four-hundred yard swim to the Stella Maris. Ten minutes. Fine.

Except that it was not working out that way.

The tide was like a river, sweeping him out of the narrows and into the sea. The Stella Maris’ masts were sliding away upstream, fast, terrifyingly fast.

This was new. And it was unpleasant, not because it was frightening, because nothing physical, not even death - especially not death - frightened Andrea. But Andrea’s life was based on not letting people down, and allowing the things that had been planned to come to pass. He had perfect faith that Mallory and Miller would accomplish their part of the job.

He was beginning to have less faith that he could do the same.

In spite of the Benzedrine, he was growing tired. Even he, even Andrea, was growing tired. He knew his reserves of strength were finite. There was no point in trying to swim straight at his objective.

Brains, not brawn.

He turned until he was looking at the tall black bows of the merchant ships anchored in the harbour. He could hear the clank of their windlasses as they came up over their anchors, could see a couple of launches crawling across the glossy shield of the water. He began to swim, facing directly into the current and about ten degrees to the right.

For anyone else, it would have been instant exhaustion, suicide.

For Andrea, it was possible.

He swam with short, powerful strokes into the current, building a bow-wave of water on his nose. The quay where he had started had fallen away as he had been washed out to sea. But after five minutes of hard swimming, it had also fallen away to the left.

And the inner of the two merchant ships, which had been stem-on, was now showing its starboard side.

He did not let himself hope that he was making progress. He swam on doggedly, another two hundred strokes. He crossed a spine of white-tipped standing waves. A couple of waves smacked his face. He inhaled salt water, choked. He was really tired now. Now he had to look.

He looked.

The Stella Maris was a long way ahead, up-tide. But she was only some twenty degrees to the right.

He was getting across.

But his troubles were by no means over.

There was a bigger lift to the waves now, a regular roll. When he looked ninety degrees left and ninety degrees right, he saw not the quays of the town or the cliffs of the Cabo beneath the walls of the fortaleza. He saw open sea.

Andrea swam on. He was holding steady now. There was less tide out here. But he could feel in the screaming muscles of his legs and shoulders and the hammer of his heart that he was approaching the limit of his strength.

In Andrea’s book, it was the mark of a man that he did not admit that there were limits.

Somewhere, Andrea found a reserve. With that reserve he started to move forwards. Progress heated his blood, and the heat of his blood helped progress. He found that he was moving up the slack water off the beach on the San Eusebio side of the channel, and that the quays, with their double ranks of fishing boats end-on, were coming closer.

He trod water for a moment.

His feet touched bottom. He looked back the way he had come. Except for a strip of deep green in the middle of the passage, the water on either side of the channel was paling. It looked as if it dried out at low tide. Ahead, the water was also pale, darkening only where the channel swept in under the quay where the fishing fleet was moored.

It had been a big swim.

But if he had waited another five minutes, he could probably have walked most of it.

Another man might have laughed, or cried, or felt relief. As far as Andrea was concerned, none of that was necessary. An exhausting set of conditions had ceased to apply, and a less exhausting set now obtained. The objective remained: to get aboard the Stella Maris within the next - he glanced at his waterproof watch - four minutes.

He began to wade.

Hauptsturmführer von Kratow did not like Spain. Latins were a slovenly bunch, racially suspect and entirely lacking in culture. But von Kratow did realise that to an operation such as Project Werwolf, they had their uses. It was just, he mused, trotting up the stone stairs of the fortaleza to report to the Herr General, that there seemed to be something in the air. Organising an embarkation should not be difficult. But there was a spirit of … well, mañana … that made even SS order and system show a tendency to buckle.

Still, everything was in order now. The attack at the main gate seemed to have been a false alarm. The embarkation was almost complete. All that remained was to report to the General, who would be highly delighted. A bastard, the General, with his Turkish tobacco and what his troops reckoned was the limpest artificial wrist in the Reich. But an appreciative bastard, particularly if, like von Kratow, you were a cleancut Junker with a nice leg for a jackboot, and you did your work correctly. Von Kratow was pretty sure that three repaired submarines and a smooth embarkation would mean promotion.

He pushed open the elaborate door of the General’s quarters, and sniffed for the Turkish tobacco.

There was no Turkish tobacco.

Von Kratow frowned.

For as long as he had been the General’s ADC, there had been a cigarette smouldering between the General’s artificial fingers. The only time he was not smoking was when he was asleep. He would not be asleep now, not with the evacuation nearly finished.

Von Kratow opened the door.

A buttery morning light was pouring through the part of the Gothic window not covered by the curtains. The tobacco smell hung stale in the air, and last night’s fire had died to bitter ashes. Von Kratow walked across to the desk, and collected himself a handful of Turkish cigarettes from the box. The General would never notice. The Luftwaffe brought him new supplies weekly; God knew where they found them nowadays.

Von Kratow yawned and stretched. It had been a long night, in a long series of long nights. But now it was over.

Beyond the stone fretwork of the windows the harbour was a sheet of green glass lit by a heavy yellow sun glaring just above the mountains to the east. The merchant ships were up over their anchors, the launches heading back on what must be almost the last of their journeys to pick up the now diminished clods of men from the quay. Down in the repair facility, the Werwolf boats were emitting a blue mist of exhaust. The inshore boat had dropped her shore lines and seemed to be nosing towards the exit.

So that’s it, thought von Kratow. Mission accomplished. Time to catch the boat. Time to make sure the Herr General caught the boat.

Von Kratow was a tidy-minded man. Before he went to knock on the bedroom door, he drew back the heavy brocade curtain that was half-obscuring the window.

That was when he found the General.

For perhaps ten seconds von Kratow stared stony-faced at the oyster silk underwear, the ivory-white skin of the face, the black flow of dried blood from the right ear. Then his hand went to the cigarette box on the desk. He lit one of the General’s cigarettes and thought, silk underclothes.

Then he put out a deliberate finger, and pressed the button behind the curtain.

The general alarm button.

Suddenly, the Cabo de la Calavera was full of bells.

Mallory crawled up the iron rungs on the granite wall, coughing water. The quays opened in front of his eyes: a sheet of granite paving and drying puddles, studded with cranes, riven by the three great crevasses of the submarine docks. The innermost submarine was moving. From behind him there came the clatter of diesels, and the churn of water blowing from ducted screws over rudders. That submarine - his submarine - was on the way out too.

The top of the conning tower of the last submarine was stationary. It stayed in his eye as he rested at the top of the ladder. He was tired now, Benzedrine or no Benzedrine, so tired that he could hardly drag himself up a set of rungs in the quay.

He saw a terrible thing.

He saw Dusty Miller on the conning tower of that submarine. Miller was arguing with a man in a cap, demanding admission, by the look of it. The man in the cap, the Kapitän, presumably, was telling him you are cluttering up the joint, and I am sailing now, so get off, before you get stuck.

Dusty Miller won. He vanished from view.

Quick, thought Mallory. For God’s sake, be quick.

He looked at his watch. It was three minutes to five. Early, he thought. They’re leaving early.

Too late.

Mallory began to crawl away from the submarine he had visited, the submarine with the dead Petty Officer in the head -

It was then he noticed that the harbour was full of bells.

The conning tower into which Miller had vanished began to slide along the quay.

Mallory could almost hear the orders: in the event of problems, move out.

So three minutes early, the U-boats were moving out.

And one of them had Miller on board.

Something snapped in Mallory. He clambered to his feet, exhaustion forgotten. He stumbled along the quay after that conning tower, yelling hoarsely with rage. But the conning tower slid away faster than he could chase it down the quay.

The three great U-boats gathered in the turning basin at the end of the quays, stemming the tide: huge grey metal whales the length of destroyers, solid as rocks with their squat, streamlined conning towers, white water churning from their propellers. Men scuttled on their decks, making the final preparations for sea. Their Kapitäns conferred, conning tower to conning tower, with the casualness of men who knew that a hundred metres of water made them untouchable.

Mallory looked over the edge of the quay, made frantic by the bells.

He saw a rowing boat.

It was a small, filthy rowing boat, a quarter full of water. But it held oars and rowlocks, and it was more or less afloat.

Mallory grabbed the painter that tied it to the bollard on the quay. He wound his ruined hands into that rope, climbed down it and cut it with his knife. The boat floated free. There was an idea in his mind, a crazy idea, born out of exhaustion. Go to that U-boat. Hammer on the hull. Tell them there had been a mistake. Dockyard matey inside. Needs taking off. Quick. Then they could go on, aboard the Stella Maris, and have at least some chance -

He pulled with the oars. The dinghy shot across the eddy at the end of the quay.

The tide caught it.

Four knots of tide.

Mallory could row at two knots, flat out.

The U-boats were gliding past at horrifying speed. Mallory turned, tried to get back.

Not a hope. The U-boats might as well have been in Berlin.

With a great sickness in his heart, Mallory began to crab across the channel towards the Stella Maris. Soon the air was full of whipping sounds, and little explosions, like fireworks. Someone was shooting at him. In fact a lot of people were shooting at him, from the merchant ships. Dully, he remembered the rings of sandbags on their hatch covers, the snouts of machine guns, other guns too. They would probably hit him.

Mallory found that he did not care. Something had gone wrong, he did not care what. They had lost Miller. A voice in his head, a voice like Jensen’s, said: if Miller had to die, this was how he would have wanted to die.

Mallory’s own voice answered: rubbish.

‘Orders,’ shouted Dusty Miller to the Kapitän of the last U-boat. ‘From the General. I have to check the officer’s head. You do not sail for five minutes.’

The Kapitän had a cropped bullet head and a broken nose, and a look of extreme exhaustion.

He said to the coxswain at his side, ‘Take this man below. Make sure that he is on the quay when we sail. This is your responsibility.’

‘Aye, aye,’ said the coxswain. He was a small, pale man, and he did not look pleased to be sent off the conning tower. ‘What is it you want?’

‘Engine room head,’ said Miller, rattling his toolbox.

‘There isn’t an engine room head.’

‘I got my orders,’ said Miller.

The coxswain said, ‘I’ll show you, then.’ He started down the ladder, and headed towards the back end of the boat.

The conning tower hatch was a disc of daylight above the control room. As Miller started down the ladder, he thought he heard bells, and shouting. But he knew he had five minutes in hand. The bells must be meaningless. What was in the forefront of his mind was how he was going to get rid of this damned coxswain.

The central alleyway of the U-boat was familiar territory to Miller now: yellow lights, heat, sweaty faces. What was not familiar was the sound of the engine. It was still a huge, clattering roar. But now it was a roar that changed pitch, went on and up, held steady, and went up again.

The coxswain stopped. He looked at Miller. His lips moved. It was not possible to hear what he said over the racket of the diesel. But it was easy enough to read his lips.

Miller’s heart thumped once, painfully, in his chest.

The words the coxswain’s lips were framing were, ‘We’ve sailed.’

For a second, Miller’s face felt wooden with shock. Then he grinned. ‘Well, then,’ he said, though he knew the other man would not hear him. ‘We’ve got a load of time.’

The coxswain arrived at the engine room. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘No head.’

Miller grinned, his wide, starry-eyed idiot’s grin. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said.

The coxswain pointed back along the corridor towards the ladder. Miller could almost see the thoughts running through the man’s mind: this is not my fault, it’s because we sailed early. All I have to do is get this fool back to the Kapitän. The Kapitän has forgotten him in the heat of the moment. I will be in the clear -

Miller stared at the coxswain, still grinning, as the coxswain made pointing gestures back towards the ladder. Miller craved that ladder like a fiend craves dope. The coxswain came back to him and shoved him towards the ladder.

Miller hit him.

He hit him hard in the stomach. If it had been Andrea, the punch would have killed the man. But Miller was a demolition expert, not a bare-hands killer. The coxswain whooped and doubled up onto the deck. Miller looked round.

There were three men in the alleyway. They were all watching.

Miller stepped over the body on the deck, and walked smartly aft. The roar of the engines had steadied now. He walked through the watertight door into the engine room. He slammed it, and dogged the handles quickly behind him. Ahead of him, hanging from a stanchion in the deckhead, was a chain hoist. Just like a mine, thought Miller, grabbing the chain. Miller had spent thousands of hours in mines, some of them very happy. As he wrapped the chain round the door handles, he felt right at home.

Someone was trying to undog the door now. When bare hands did not work, they started to hit the handles with what sounded like a sledge hammer. Bash away, thought Miller. We are talking good German chain here, and submarines are not built to resist the enemy within.

In fact, enemies within were virtually unknown on submarines. Because when a submarine went down it went down, enemy within and all.

Miller told himself: it had to happen, one day.

It did not help.

He bent and opened the toolbox, and took out the two grenades.

Suddenly, he smelt tobacco smoke.

Round the end of the diesel block came a pale, oil-stained man in a singlet, with an undoubtedly illicit cigarette in his mouth. He glanced at Miller’s face, the glance of a crew member who knows his shipmates and is baffled by the emergence of a new face from their midst. Then his eyes moved to Miller’s hands.

Miller grinned at him, and put the grenades stealthily back in the box.

The man’s eyes stayed glued to the grenades.

He went white as an oily rag. Then he picked up a wrench, dropped his cigarette, and came at Miller.

He was a short man, almost dwarfish, as wide as he was high. The coxswain had been out of shape because he only did whatever they did in the control room. This man was an engine room artificer, with big muscles under the white skin of his shoulders. He got both hands on his wrench, and he hefted it like a baseball bat, and he came down the aisle at Miller like an oil-stained Nibelung. Miller swung the toolbox at the man. It was an overconfident swing, inspired by too much Benzedrine and not enough judgement. It missed by a mile. The Nibelung smacked at the toolbox with his wrench. The toolbox flew out of Miller’s hand, skidding down the gratings, bursting open as it slid. Tools and grenades spilled out. Miller caught a glimpse of the grenades, unarmed, useless, skittering into the tunnel where the propeller shaft ran. Then he threw himself to one side, and the wrench whacked into the steel bulkhead where his head had been.

Miller stood there, back to the door, panting, heart hammering. The yellow lights shone in the short man’s sweat. His face was a flat mask of anger. Then Miller saw it flicker, and he knew why. There was a new note to the engine: a high-pitched whine. The deck was tilting underfoot, gently.

The whine was the disintegrator. The engine had switched from fuel-air to fuel-decomposed hydrogen peroxide.

The submarine was diving.

The squat man came at Miller again. Miller kicked him in the stomach. It was like kicking corrugated iron. The man came on regardless.

Away from the door, thought Miller. Can’t move away from the door, or he’ll take the chains off, and the rest of the crew will get in -

The spanner crashed against the metal. Miller skipped out of the way. Door or no door, he was no good with his head caved in.

Miller knew that he was losing.

But the squat man had forgotten the door even existed. He was a submarine engineer, and when people bring grenades into their engine rooms, submarine engineers lose the power of rational thought. He swung again.

Miller dodged clumsily. The wrench caught him on the shoulder, numbing his arm. He stumbled back against the engine, head between the clashing tappets, and rolled down to the grating.

He saw another wrench. Picked it up. Too heavy to swing. Better than nothing.

The Nibelung came at him again. Miller scuttled round the far side of the engine. Retreating, always retreating. This was a man who knew his patch, and what he was going to do was hound Miller into a corner, and kill him, and that would be that. A Werwolf on the loose, and all that work in vain.

It was the thought of the wasted effort that really upset Miller. Energy stormed through his veins. As the man came in again, he swung his wrench. The man jumped back. The heavy steel head whacked a pipe in the wall, just under the thread of a joint.

And suddenly the engine room smelt like a hairdresser’s salon.

The Nibelung’s face had changed, too. He was staring at that pipe that Miller had hit. And he did not look angry any more. He looked frightened out of his wits.

Miller felt the weight of the wrench in his hand. He knew he did not have many more swings left in him. One more.

The man still had half his mind on the pipe.

Miller swung the wrench at the pipe, then again, into the side of the man’s head.

There was a solid chunk that Miller felt rather than heard. The man’s eyes rolled back, and he went down like a bag of cement.

Dead, thought Miller. Dead.

Quick.

Peroxide was roaring out of the pipe, gurgling over the body of the engineer. As it hit the engineer’s body, it foamed.

There was another catalyst that broke down hydrogen peroxide into hydrogen and oxygen. It was called peroxidase, and it was found in human blood.

Miller ran to the aft end of the engine room. There was a sort of cupboard next to the propeller shaft gland, a steel-doored locker that bore the words Siebe-Gorman.

The engine room was filling with free oxygen and hydrogen.

On the deck, the Nibelung’s cigarette ceased to glow and began to burn with a hard, bright flame.

Quick, thought Miller.

It was all feeling very slow to Mallory, as if the world had started moving through a new kind of time, viscous and syrupy. He saw the flat green mirror of the water, the red and green tracers rising from the merchant ships, slow as little balloons, queuing up to accelerate round his head and kick the water to foam. Under the rocky brow of the Cabo de la Calavera he saw the U-boats moving, hovering, arranging themselves into line ahead. Miller was on the lead boat. Then came the other boat Miller had visited. Mallory’s was last.

The rowing boat rocked in the little waves of a tide-rip. The sun was warm on his face. Something smashed into the transom of the rowing boat. He shielded his eyes from the splinters, felt the rip of flesh on his cheek, the run of liquid that must be blood. The rowing boat spun in an eddy. He saw the San Eusebio town quay, the fishing boats tied up alongside. The movement of the rowing boat in the eddy made the masts of the boats appear to be moving -

One set of masts was moving. The masts of the Stella Maris.

They were moving slowly, crawling against the spars of the other boats and the blank shutters of the quayside warehouses. They were accelerating, the black hull narrowing, the masts coming into line as whoever was at the wheel pointed the nose straight at Mallory. Coming to pick him up.

But not Miller.

The U-boats were moving out from the quays now, gliding slowly across the peaceful green satin of the water. The first was already in the channel, the green water rumpling over its deck, diving. Diving quickly, so as not to be seen leaving a neutral harbour. Diving with Miller on board.

Metal smashed into the rowing boat by Mallory’s feet. Suddenly there was water where there had once been planking, water pouring in through three holes the size of fists. Mallory tried to stem the water with his foot, but his foot was too small, and suddenly the rowing boat was part of the harbour, and cold water was up around Mallory’s neck.

An engine was thumping close at hand. The tar-black nose of the Stella Maris swept up, pushing a white moustache of foam. A head leaning over the bow said, ‘Bonjour, mon Capitaine.’ The head of Andrea.

Andrea’s hand came down. It grasped Mallory’s wrist. Mallory felt himself plucked skyward, grabbed a wooden rail, and landed face down on the Stella’s filthy deck.

‘Welcome aboard,’ said Andrea. ‘Where’s Miller?’

A burst of machine-gun fire smacked into the Stella’s stern. Mallory pointed.

The lead U-boat was halfway down the channel. All that was showing was its conning tower.

Andrea’s Byzantine eyes were without expression. Only the great stillness of the man gave a clue to his emotion. The Stella Maris turned, and headed down the channel. Mallory lurched aft and took the wheel from Jaime. He steered the Stella right up to the flank of the last U-boat. There were still heads on the U-boat’s conning tower. One of the heads was yelling, a hand waving at this dirty little fishing boat to keep clear, keep out of the way. The fire from the merchant ships was slackening now, for fear of hitting the U-boat.

And down below, thought Mallory, down in the torpedo room the hands would be manoeuvring the hoists over to the first torpedo, opening the tube, loading up, ready for an enemy waiting out there in the Bay. The hoists would be lifting, stretching the string fuse of the grenade, scratching the primer, starting the five-second delay.

Mallory stood there in the cool morning breeze, watching the two conning towers ahead, one half-submerged, the other with its base awash. Sixty yards away, the water began to creep up the deck of the last U-boat. The heads were gone from the conning tower.

There was no explosion.

They have found the grenades, thought Mallory. How can you expect to destroy a U-boat with grenades and string? He wound the wheel to port, to keep the Stella in the narrow strip of turquoise separating the pale green of the shallows from the ink-blue of the deep-water channel. The U-boat’s hull was under now.

It was getting away.

Mallory groped for a cigarette, put it in his mouth, and watched the channel.

The channel blew up in his face.

It blew up in a jet of searing white flame that went all the way up into the sky, taking with it millions of tons of water that climbed and climbed until it looked as if it would never stop climbing, a reverse waterfall that made a noise loud enough to make a thunderclap sound like the dropping of a pin on a Persian rug. A wall of water smashed into the Stella Maris, walloped her onto her beam ends and broke over her. When she lurched upright again, her mainmast was gone. But somehow her Bolander was still thumping away, and Andrea was up among the rigging with an axe, chopping at shrouds and stays, kicking the tangle overboard where it lay wallowing like a sea monster, mingling with the oil and mattresses and other less identifiable bits of flotsam emanating from the still-boiling patch of sand and water that had once been one-third of the Werwolf pack.

Must have been right down in the channel, thought Mallory. Otherwise it would have blown us up with it -

Further out to sea there was another rumble, followed by an eruption of bubbles on the surface. The bubbles were full of smoke. When they burst, they left a film of oil on the surface.

Hugues said, ‘What was that?’

‘Another U-boat,’ said Mallory. The bubbles rose for thirty seconds: a lot of bubbles, big ones. No bodies. No mattresses. A machine of steel had become air and oil.

‘Bon Dieu,’ said Hugues, appalled.

Jaime said, The ships.’ He was looking backwards, over his shoulder.

The merchant ships had their anchors up. Magnified and indistinct beyond the pall of smoke and spray still descending from the first U-boat, they looked huge. From the machine guns on their decks the tracers were rising again.

‘Merde,’ said Jaime.

The ships were faster than the Stella Maris. They would catch her up and sink her. At best, they would sink her. Well, Dusty, thought Mallory, with a new and surprising cheerfulness. We are all in this together. Andrea had pulled the Bren out of the hold, and was lying on the Stella’s afterdeck, taking aim at the lead merchant ship. Flame danced at the muzzle. A Bren against ships. Not fair, thought Mallory -

From the seaward there came a rumble that made the Stella shudder under Mallory’s feet. When he looked round, he saw a white alp of water rise offshore. And he forgot about the merchant ships, forgot about everything. For that alp, collapsing as soon as it had risen, was a watery headstone for Dusty Miller.

Three out of three. One hundred per cent success.

But Dusty Miller was dead.

Bullets from the merchant ship lashed the air beside his head, and whacked into the Stella’s crapulous timbers. Mallory paid them no heed. He turned the fishing boat’s nose for the open sea.

It was calm, that sea, its emerald smoothness marred only by patches of oil and debris. The old fishing boat laboured towards the northern horizon, reeking of hot metal from the engine room hatch, rolling heavily with the volume of water in her belly.

And on her heels, gaining ground, Uruguayan flags limp on their halyards, spitting a blizzard of tracer, came the merchantmen.

Hugues said, ‘What now?’

Mallory grinned, a grin that had no humour in it. His eyes were shining with a brilliance that Hugues found completely horrible. ‘We take cover,’ said Mallory. ‘They sink us, or catch us, or both.’

Bullets were slamming into the Stella’s deck. The air whined with splinters. ‘She will fall apart,’ said Hugues.

‘Very probably,’ said Mallory. They were out of the harbour now. The leading merchant ship was entering the narrows, spewing black oil-smoke from its funnel, heading steadily down the dark-blue water of the channel. Once it was through the channel, it would speed up. And that would be the end of the Stella Maris.

They did not bother to take cover. They watched the bow of the merchant ship: the high bow, with the moustache of water under its nose, heading busily along the channel. Above its nose was the bridge, the thin blue smoke of the machine guns on its wings, and the heads of men, pin-sized, watching. It would be that moustache of water that would be the last movement. The Stella Maris would rise on it just before the merchant ship’s nose came down and rolled her under, crushed her into the cold green sea -

Suddenly, Mallory stopped breathing. Hugues was by his side, gripping his arm with fingers like steel bars.

For the moustache of white water at the stem of the merchant ship had disappeared. The steel knife-edge had risen in the water, and stopped.

The ship had run aground on the U-boat that had blown up in the channel five minutes previously.

As they watched, the tide caught the ship’s stern, slewing it until the freighter was a great steel wall blocking the channel: the only channel out of the harbour.

For a moment, the gunfire stilled, and a huge sound rolled over that windless frying pan of water.

The sound of Andrea, laughing.

Then the machine guns opened up again.

This time they opened up with a new venom, bred of fury and impotence. The bullets lashed the sea to a white froth, and the fishing boat’s hull shuddered under their impact. Mallory crouched inside the wheelhouse. Another five minutes, he thought. Then we are out of range. The noise was deafening. The air howled with flying metal. And mixed with it, another sound.

Hugues. Hugues, shouting. Hugues was standing on the deck, yelling, pointing at something in the water. Something orange. Something that moved, raised an arm and waved, a feeble wave, but a wave nonetheless. Something that was a hand, holding a fuming orange smoke flare.

And when the orange smoke rolled clear of the face, the face, though coughing and distorted, was unmistakably the face of Dusty Miller.

Mallory spun the wheel. The Stella turned broadside onto the merchant ships’ torrent of bullets. Hugues stood upright, insanely conspicuous, out of cover. Miller came floating down the side. ‘Grab him!’ yelled Mallory.

Hugues leaned over the side. As they passed Miller, he stuck his hand down, and Miller put his up, and the hands met and gripped. Now the Stella was towing Miller along, and Hugues’ arm was the tow line. Hugues suddenly shuddered, and four dark blotches appeared on his vest. But by then Andrea was there, grasping Miller with his great hand. He gave one heave. And then they were all lying on the deck: Andrea, Hugues and Miller, Miller gasping like a gaffed salmon, leaking water.

Mallory turned the wheel away from the harbour entrance. The orange smoke faded astern. Soon they were out of range, and there were no more bullets.

Miller lit a cigarette. His face was grey and white, the bags under his eyes big enough to hold the equipment of a fair-sized expeditionary force. He said, ‘Good morning. Do we have a drink?’

Mallory handed him the miraculously undamaged bottle of brandy from the riddled locker in the wheelhouse. ‘How did you get out?’ he said.

Miller raised the bottle. ‘I would like to drink to the health of two Krauts,’ he said. ‘Mr Siebe and Mr Gorman. And the cutest little submarine escape apparatus known to science.’ He drank deeply.

Andrea came aft. He said, ‘Hugues needs to talk.’

Hugues was lying on the deck in a red pond. Mallory could hear his chest bubble as he breathed. Hugues said, ‘I am sorry.’ He could speak no more.

Andrea said, ‘This man is a traitor.’

Mallory looked at the blue-white face, the suffocated eyes. He said, ‘Why?’

Hugues eyes swivelled from Andrea to Mallory. Andrea said, ‘To save Lisette, and his child. The Gestapo followed her to St-Jean. When they tried to pick her up with Hugues, he made a deal. They did not arrest us there, because it would have been more interesting for them to catch us in the act of sabotage. So when Hugues knew we were on the Cabo, he fed them information.’

Hugues shrugged. ‘I did it for my child,’ he said. Then blood came from his mouth, and he died.

Lisette was standing half-out of the hatch. She looked pale and tired, the shadows under her eyes dark and enormous. The eyes themselves had the thick lustre of tears.

‘He was a man who had lost everything he loved,’ she said. ‘When he was in the Pyrenees the first time, he told me what had happened to his wife, his children. He was a lonely man. I can’t described to you how lonely. He was a good man.’ The tears were running now. ‘A man of passion. For his country. For me. In war, these things can happen, and they are not so strange.’

‘Enfin, he was a traitor,’ said Jaime. Mallory looked at the dark, starved face, the heavy black moustache, the impenetrable eyes. Jaime shrugged, the shrug of a smuggler, of a man who would walk through mountains if he could not walk over them, of a man whose hand was against all other men. Nobody would ever know whether Jaime was fighting because of what he believed in, or because he wanted to survive. Probably, Jaime did not know himself.

Mallory looked at Andrea’s face, dark and closed, and at Miller’s haggard countenance, the oil and salt drying in his crewcut. Perhaps none of them knew why they did these things.

Perhaps, in the end, it was not important, as long as it was necessary to do these things, and these things got done. He clambered to his feet and put his arm around Lisette’s shoulders.

She said, ‘I did not love him. But he is the father of my child. And that is worth something, hein?’

It was not the sort of question Mallory knew how to answer.

EPILOGUE

Wednesday 1400

The Stella Maris was heading north on a broad navy-blue sea. Cabo de la Calavera had dropped below the southern horizon an hour ago. A radio message had been sent. Now there was nothing but the blue and cloudless dome of the sky, and dead ahead of the Stella, a tenuous black wisp no bigger than an eyelash stuck above the smooth curve of the world.

The eyelash became an eyebrow, then a heavy black plume. The base of the plume resolved itself into the Tribal class destroyer Masai, thundering over the low Atlantic swell at thirty-five knots, trailing an oily cloud of black smoke, her boiler pressures trembling on the edge of the red.

The Lieutenant-Commander who was her captain looked down at the filthy black fishing boat, stroked his beard, and hoped he was not going to get any of that rubbish on his nice paint. He walked down to the rail and said, ‘Captain Mallory?’

The villain at the fishing boat’s wheel said, That’s right.’

There were two other villains on deck: red-eyed, sun-scorched, bleeding, unshaven. But the Lieutenant-Commander’s eye had moved over the bullet-scarred decks and gunwales, and caught the glint of a lot of water through the open hatch of what was presumably the fish-hold. The Lieutenant-Commander said, ‘I wonder if you would care for a spot of lunch?’

Mallory looked as if lunch was not a word he understood. He said, ‘Could we have a stretcher party?’

‘You’ve got wounded?’

‘Not exactly wounded,’ said Mallory.

The stretcher party trotted onto the Stella’s splintered decks. Mallory pointed them towards the bunkroom. A curious noise came into being, a high, keening wail. The Petty Officer in charge of the stretcher party looked nervously over his shoulder. He had been on the Malta convoys, and he knew about Stukas.

Mallory shook his head.

‘Five for lunch?’ said the Lieutenant-Commander.

‘Six,’ said Mallory.

The Lieutenant-Commander frowned. ‘I thought you lost someone.’

‘You lose some,’ said Miller. ‘You win some.’

The stretcher came up on deck. Behind it was Jaime. Strapped to it was Lisette. And in her arms, wrapped in a red sickbay blanket, was a small bundle that wailed.

The Lieutenant-Commander gripped the rail. ‘See what you mean,’ he said.

‘I was a little more pregnant than the Captain thought,’ said Lisette. ‘I hope I cause no trouble.’

‘Quite the reverse,’ said the Lieutenant-Commander.

They walked onto the destroyer’s beautifully painted deck. A Lieutenant took them to the tiny but spotless wardroom, and poured them gigantic pink gins. ‘I expect you chaps have had quite a party,’ he said.

They stared at him, bleary-eyed, until he went as pink as his gin. A signalman trotted in, flimsy in hand. The Lieutenant read it. ‘Captain Mallory,’ he said. ‘For you.’

Mallory’s eyes were closed. ‘Read it,’ he said.

This was a horrid breach of etiquette. The Lieutenant said, ‘But-’

‘Read it.’

The Lieutenant squared his shoulders. ‘Reads as follows,

CONGRATULATIONS SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF STORM FORCE. TIMING PROVIDENTIAL. HAVE ANOTHER LITTLE JOB FOR YOU. REPORT SOONEST. JENSEN.’

Mallory looked at Andrea and Miller. Their eyes were bloodshot and horrified. So, presumably, were his.

He said: ‘SIGNAL TO CAPTAIN JENSEN. MESSAGE NOT UNDERSTOOD, BAFFLED, STORM FORCE.’ He held out his glass. ‘Now before we all die of thirst, could we have a spot more gin?’

About the Author

Sam Llewellyn is the author of several hugely successful nautical thrillers, including Hell Bay and The Iron Hotel. An experienced sailor, he has sailed all over the world and now lives in Herefordshire.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Also by Sam Llewellyn

DEAD RECKONING

BLOOD ORANGE

DEATH ROLL

DEAD EYE

BLOOD KNOT

RIPTIDE

CLAWHAMMER

MAELSTROM

HELL BAY

Alistair MacLean was the bestselling author

of thirty books, including the world-famous

The Guns of Navarone and Force 10 from Navarone.

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers,

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Characters and Ideas: Devoran Trustees Ltd 1996

Copyright © Text: Devoran Trustees Ltd and Sam Llewellyn

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 00 225296 1

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-34782-7

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Sam Llewellyn

THUNDERBOLT

FROM NAVARONE:

A Sequel to Alistair MacLean’s

Force 10 from Navarone

To Hex, Bert and Garlinda

Contents

Cover

Title page

PROLOGUE

ONE: Monday 1800-Tuesday 1000

TWO: Tuesday 1000-Wednesday 0200

THREE: Wednesday 0200-0600

FOUR: Wednesday 0600-1800

FIVE: Wednesday 1800-Thursday 0300

SIX: Thursday 0300-1200

SEVEN: Thursday 1200-2000

EIGHT: Thursday 2000-2300

NINE: Thursday 2300-Friday 0300

TEN: Friday 0300-Saturday 0030

EPILOGUE

Also by Sam Llewellyn

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Kapitän Helmholz looked at his watch. It was ten fifty-four and thirty-three seconds. Twenty-seven seconds until coffee time on the bridge of the armed merchantman Kormoran. At Kapitän Helmholz’s insistence, coffee time was ten fifty-five precisely. A precise man, Helmholz, which was perhaps why he had been appointed to the command that had put him here in this steel room with big windows, below the red and black Kriegsmarine ensign with its iron cross and swastika board-stiff in the meltemi, the afternoon wind of the Aegean. Outside the windows were numbers one and two hatches, and under the hatches the cargo, and forward of the hatches the bow gun on the fo’c’sle and the bow itself, kicking through the short, steep chop. Beyond the rusty iron bow the sea sparkled, a dazzling sheet of sapphire all the way to the horizon. Beyond the horizon lay his destination, hanging like a cloud: a solid cloud – the mountains of Kynthos, blue with distance. It was all going well; neat, tidy, perfectly on schedule. Helmholz looked at his watch again.

With fifteen seconds to go until the time appointed, there it was: the faint jingle of the coffee tray. It always jingled when Spiro carried it. Spiro was Greek and suffered from bad nerves. Kapitän Helmholz raised his clean-cut jaw, directed his ice-blue eyes down his long straight nose, and watched the fat little Greek pour the coffee into the cups and hand them round. The man’s body odour was pungent, his apron less than scrupulously clean. His face was filmed with sweat, or possibly grease. Still, thought Helmholz with unusual tolerance, degenerate Southerner he might be, but his coffee was good, and punctual. He picked up the cup, enjoying the smell of the coffee and the tension on the bridge as his junior officers waited for the Herr Kapitän to drink so they could drink too. Helmholz pretended interest in the blue smudge of Kynthos, feeling the tension rise, enjoying the sensation that in small ways as well as in large, he was the man in control.

A mile away, in an iron tube jammed with men and machinery, a bearded man called Smith, with even worse body odour than Spiro, crammed his eyes against the rubber eyepieces of his attack periscope and said, `Usual shambles up forward, Derek?’

`Probably,’ said Derek, who was similarly bearded and smelt worse. `Blue touchpaper lit and burning.’

‘Jolly good. Fire one, then.’

From the spider’s eyes of the torpedo tubes at the bow of His Majesty’s submarine Sea Leopard, a drift of bubbles emerged, followed by the lean and purposeful Mark 8 torpedo. Tracking the deflection scale across the merchantman’s rust-brown hull, Smith stifled a nervous yawn, and wished he could smoke. Three-island ship. Next fish under the bridge. That would do it. ‘Fire two,’ he said. It was not every day you bumped into a German armed merchantman swanning around on her own in the middle of nowhere. Sitting duck, really. ‘We’ll hang around a bit,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll have some Schnapps.’

‘Can but hope,’ said the Number Two.

Helmholz’s feeling of control did not survive even as long as it took to put his cup to his lips. It was one of the great ironies of his life that while at sea he was an automaton, as soon as he came in sight of land he was racked with an intellectually unjustifiable impatience. Suddenly his mind flooded with pictures of the Kormoran alongside the Kynthos jetty, unloading. The sweat of impatience slimed his palms. It was crazy to be out here with no escort; against reason. But there was such a shortage of aircraft for the direct defence of the Reich that the maintenance fitters had mostly been called back to Germany. So most of the air escort was out of action. The E-boats were not much better. Which left the Kormoran alone on the windy blue Aegean, with an important cargo and a pick-up crew …

He put his coffee cup to his lips.

Over the white china rim, he saw something terrible.

He saw a gout of orange flame leap up on the starboard side, level with number one hatch. He saw number one hatch itself bulge upward and burst in a huge bubble of fire that came roaring back at him and caved in the bridge windows. That was the last thing he saw, because that same blast drove the coffee cup right through his face and out of the back of his head. His junior officers suffered similar lethal trauma, but their good manners ensured that this was to the ribcage, not the skull. Perhaps Helmholz would have been consoled that things had been in order right until the moment of oblivion.

‘Bullseye,’ said Lieutenant Smith. ‘Oh, bloody hell, she’s burning.’

Burning was not good. Even if there was no escort waiting in the sun, the plume of black smoke crawling into the sky was as good as a distress flare. His thoughts locked into familiar patterns. The Sea Leopard had been submerged a long time. If there was to be a pursuit, now was the moment to prepare for it.

‘Breath of fresh air, I think,’ said Smith. ‘Up she goes.’

And with a whine of pumps and electric engines, HMS Sea Leopard began to rise through the gin-clear sea.

They were not more than half a mile from the Kormoran. Great creakings came to them, the sound of collapsing bulkheads. Poor devils, thought Smith, in a vague sort of way; they were all poor devils in this war. They were all men stuck in little metal rooms into which water might at any minute start pouring.

‘She’s going,’ said Braithwaite, the Number Two.

Sea Leopard broke surface, shrugging tons of Aegean from her decks. Smith was up the conning tower ladder and on deck with the speed of a human cannonball. The sea was steep and blue, the wavecrests blown ice-white by the meltemi. The black smoke of the burning ship leaped from the pale flame at its roots and tumbled away towards Kynthos. She was settling fast by the bow. One torpedo in her forward hold, one under her bridge. Nice shooting, thought Smith, wrinkling his nostrils against the sharp, volatile smell of the air. Not petrol. An altogether homelier smell; the aroma of stoves in the cabins of the little yachts Smith had sailed in the North Sea before the war. Alcohol. Not Schnapps: fuel alcohol.

The submarine began to move ahead, towards the wreck. In the crust of floating debris that covered the water were shoals of long cylindrical objects. Smith’s heart jumped. They looked like torpedoes. But they were too small. Gas bottles, they were; cylinders. He put his heavy rubber-armoured glasses on them. O2, said the stencilled letters. Oxygen. No bloody good to anyone.

There was a flash and an ear-splitting bang. When Smith could take notice again, he saw a great boil of bubbles. The ship was in half. Both halves sank quickly and without fuss.

The black cloud of smoke blew away. Except for the flotsam, the sea was empty, as far as you could see from a ten-foot conning tower among eight-foot waves. Petty Officer Jordan and a couple of ratings hooked a crate and hauled it aboard. ‘Aircraft parts,’ said Jordan.

Smith was disappointed. He really had been hoping for Schnapps. ‘Better get going, what?’ he said.

Jordan went below. Sea Leopard turned her nose west, for the friendlier waters of Sicily, away from the threatening smudge of German-held Kynthos. No survivors, thought Smith, raking the waves with his glasses. Pity. Couldn’t be helped -

He paused. A couple of miles downwind, something rolled on the top of a wave, and what might have been an arm lifted. He opened his mouth to say, steer ninety degrees. A human? Wreckage? Worth a look.

But at that point his eye went up, climbing the vaults of the blue blue sky. And in that sky, he saw a little square of black dots. Aircraft.

He hit the klaxon and went down the conning tower and spun the hatch wheel. Sea Leopard sank into the deeps. Kormoran had been just another merchant ship in just another attack. Now it was time for Sea Leopard to take measures to ensure her own survival, to do more damage.

‘Tea,’ said Smith. They usually had a cup of tea sometime between eleven and half-past. Just now, he saw, looking at his watch before he wrote up the log, it was eleven minutes past.

ONE

Monday 1800-Tuesday 1000

It was raining in Plymouth, a warmish Atlantic rain that blanketed the Hoe and blurred the MTB s and ML s sliding in the Roads. In the early hours of their captivity the three men in the top-floor suite of the Hotel Majestic had spent time looking out of the window. They had long ago given up. Now they sprawled in armchairs round a low table on which were two empty brandy bottles and three overflowing ashtrays: men past their first youth and even their second, faces burned dark by the sun, eye-sockets hollow with the corrosive exhaustion of battle. They were in khaki battledress, without insignia. One was huge and black-haired. Another was tall and lean, with the hard jaw and steady eyes of a climber. The third was a rangy individual with a lugubrious face, glass of brandy in one hand, cigarette in mouth.

It was the third man who spoke. ‘This is not,’ he said, ‘what I call a vacation.’

The third man’s name was Miller. In so far as he had a rank, he was a corporal in the US Army Catering Corps. He was also the greatest demolition expert in the Allied armies.

The man who looked like a climber nodded, and lit a cigarette, and returned to his thoughts. This was a man you could imagine waiting for ever, if necessary; a man completely in control of himself. This was Captain Mallory, the New Zealander who before the war had been a world-famous mountaineer, and who had since done more damage to Hitler’s armies than the entire Brigade of Guards. ‘It’s better than being machine-gunned,’ he said.

Miller thought about that. ‘I guess,’ he said. He did not look sure.

‘Soon,’ said the big man, ‘there will be work to do.’ His accent was Greek, his voice soft but heavy, spreading a blanket of silence through the room. Andrea was a sleepy-eyed bear of a man, dark enough to look perpetually in need of a shave, his upper lip infested with a black stubble of regrowing moustache. He looked like the less respectable type of bandit, a mountain of sloth and debauchery. This impression had misled many of his enemies, most of them fatally. In fact, Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army. Furthermore, he was as strong as a mobile crane, as fast and light on his feet as a cat, and as level-headed as an Edinburgh lawyer. When he spoke, which was not often, people gave him their full attention.

Miller and Mallory closed their minds to the soft rain on the window.

‘They think we are spies,’ said Andrea. ‘They think we have made a deal with somebody and run away. It is not an unreasonable suspicion. Do you blame them?’

Miller took a swig out of his glass. ‘They asked us to blow the guns on Navarone,’ he said. ‘We blew ‘em. They asked us to destroy the Neretva Dam. Up goes the Neretva Dam. They sent us after the Werwolf subs. The Werwolf submarines get broken.’ His long face was lugubrious. ‘And now they tell us they have another job for us, and they pick us up in the Bay of Biscay and bring us all the way to Plymouth, and to demonstrate their everlasting admiration they lock us up in a fleabag hotel and put sentries on the door.’ He coughed, long and loose and nasty. ‘Sure, I blame them.’

‘They’ve had ten-tenths cloud since the Werwolf raid,’ said Mallory. ‘They haven’t been able to do a photographic recce, and there’s no independent confirmation. And if you remember, it wasn’t an easy job.’

‘I remember,’ said Miller, grimly.

‘So look at it like this,’ said Mallory. ‘They locked us up here because they don’t believe we could have achieved our objective. But we know we did. So we’re right and they’re wrong, and when they find out they are going to be very sorry. So it is all a very nice compliment, really.’

‘I don’t want compliments,’ said Miller. ‘I want a few drinks and some decent food and a little feminine society. For Chrissakes, Jensen knows what we can do. Why doesn’t he tell them?’

Andrea put his hands together. ‘Who can tell what Jensen knows?’

There was a small silence. Then Mallory said, ‘I think we should go and talk to him.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Miller. ‘Very amusing. There are thirty commandos on the landing.’

‘I did not,’ said Mallory, ‘notice any commandos on the window- sill.’

Miller’s face was suddenly a mask of horror. ‘Oh, no,’ he said.

Andrea smiled, a pure, innocent smile of great sweetness. ‘Captain Jensen takes cocktails in the mess at ten minutes past six. The mess is in the basement of this hotel. It is now five past.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘I looked at my watch.’

‘About the cocktail hour.’

‘There is a chambermaid here from Roumeli,’ purred Andrea. ‘I talked to the poor girl. She was very pleased – are we ready?’

The room had filled with damp air. Mallory had raised the window. He was standing with his hands on the sill, looking down the sheer face of the hotel. ‘Child could do it,’ he said. ‘We’re off.’

The cocktail bar of the Hotel Majestic in Plymouth had been a fashionable West Country rendezvous in the 1930s, largely because it was the only cocktail bar in Plymouth, a town which otherwise found its entertainment in the more violent type of public house. It was eminently suited to wartime use. For one thing, it was mostly below ground, a comforting feature for those wishing their business to be undisturbed by the Nazi bombs that had all but obliterated large areas of the city. For another, its proximity to the naval dockyard gave the barman, an alert Devonian called Enrico, privileged access to the bottomless wells of gin which were as indispensable a fuel for His Majesty’s warships as the more conventional bunker crude.

At six, the usual crowd were in: seven-eighths male, eight- eighths in uniform, talking in low voices from faces haggard with overwork and lack of exercise. At five past, Captain Jensen walked to his usual table: a small man in naval uniform with a captain’s gold rings on the sleeve, a sardonic smile, and eyes of an astonishing mildness, except when no one was looking, at which point they might have belonged to one of the hungrier species of shark. With him was a stout man with a florid face and the heavy braid of an admiral.

‘Submarines/ the Admiral was saying. ‘Damn cowardly, hugely overrated in my opinion.’ He gulped his pink gin and called for another.

‘Yes?’ said Jensen, taking a microscopic sip of his own gin. ‘Interesting point of view.’

‘Not fashionable, I grant you,’ said the Admiral, whose name was Dixon. ‘But fashion is a fickle jade, what? Capital ships, I can tell you. The rest of it, well… Submarines, aircraft carriers, here today, gone tomorrow.’

Jensen raised a polite eyebrow. The Admiral’s face was mottled with drink. He had recently arrived as OC Special Operations, Mediterranean, having been booted sideways from duties in the narrow seas before he could do any real damage. Jensen was interested in the Mediterranean himself – had, indeed, conceived and commanded some Special Operations of his own. It would have been reasonable to assume that he would have resented the arrival of a desk-bound blimp like Dixon as his superior officer. But if he did feel resentment, he showed no sign. Jensen was a subtle man, as his enemies had found out to their cost. Acting on Jensen’s information, two Japanese infantry divisions had fought each other for three bloody days, each under the impression that the other was commanded by Orde Wingate. A German Panzer division had vanished without trace in the Pripet marshes, following a road on a map drawn from cartographic information supplied by Jensen’s agents. Since early in the war, others of his agents had been the unfailing fountainhead of the cigars smoked by the most important man in Britain. Jensen had a finger in all pies. He had paid close attention to the development of his own career, but even closer attention to the question of winning the war. In the second as well as the first, he was known to be completely ruthless – a fact that might have given a more intelligent man than Dixon cause for worry.

But Dixon could not see over the mountain of his self- importance. Dixon had room in his mind for only one thing at a time. Just at the moment, that thing was gin.

‘Lovely thing, drink after hard day at office,’ said the Admiral, waving for his third pinkers.

The Werwolf reconnaissance photographs/ said Jensen. ‘I’ve seen them. Total success.’

‘Yes,’ said the Admiral. ‘Where’s that damn waitress?’

‘Can I have your order to release my men?’

‘Men?’

‘The men you had confined to quarters.’

‘Tomorrow, for God’s sake. During office hours.’

‘They might value a little liberty before the mission.’

‘They’ll do as they’re damn well ordered. Waitress!’

Jensen’s small, hard face did not lose its mildness, but he was conscious of a little twitch of anticipation. He knew Mallory, Miller and Andrea well; had indeed hand-picked them from a pool of the hardest of hard men. He knew them for excellent soldiers. But he also knew that they were not the kind of troops the Admiral was accustomed to. Locking them in a hotel room under heavy guard because you did not have the imagination to understand the stupendous success of their last mission was not a tactful move. Mallory, Miller and Andrea were not used to the close proximity of superior officers. They obeyed orders to the letter, of course. Still, Jensen had a distinct feeling that there would be trouble –

There was a small commotion by the entrance.

The Majestic was the kind of hotel whose frontage is criss-crossed with string-courses, cornices and swags of stone fruit. Mallory had sniffed the wet sea air, sighted on the fire-escape two windows along. Then he had lowered himself from the windowsill on to the bunch of limestone plums that decorated the lintel of the window below. Here he had paused, then hopped on to its neighbour. Miller, cursing inwardly, took a deep breath and followed him. Six storeys below, a cat the size of a flea prowled in a yard of trash cans. Miller got his feet on the fruit. He took another breath, and jumped for the next lintel. It was not more than six inches wide. Mallory had landed on it soft and quiet and confident as if it had been the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. To Miller, it looked about as accommodating as a child’s eyebrow. His mouth dried out in midair. He felt his boot make contact, the toe bite, then slither. His stomach shrank, and as he teetered and began to fall his mind had room for one thought and one thought only. Navarone, Yugoslavia, the Pyrenees, and it ends here at the Hotel Majestic, Plymouth. How stupid –

Then a steely hand grabbed his wrist and Mallory’s voice said, ‘Hold up, there.’ Then he was standing on the lintel, breathing deep to slow the thumping of his heart. Suddenly the fumes of the brandy and the cigarettes were blowing away and he had the sense that something had started again, like a machine that was winding up, moving on to the road for which it had been designed. The hesitancy was gone. Thought and action were the same thing.

He took the next two lintels in his stride. On the fire-escape landing he looked back. Andrea was drifting across the face of the hotel like a gigantic shadow. The Greek landed light as a feather next to them. They trotted down the iron stairs, spread out, automatically, with the discipline that had established itself these last weeks. Covering each other, covering themselves … Going out for a drink.

They flitted off the fire-escape, trotted through the alley to the front of the hotel, and up the grand stone steps into the lobby. The man behind the desk saw three men in khaki battledress without insignia. He had been a hall porter on civvy street, and he knew trouble when he saw it. Among the immaculate officers walking through the lobby, these men stuck out like wolves at a poodle show. Their boots were dirty, their eyes bloodshot, and they moved at a murderous lope that made him wish he could leave, fast, and become far away. Alarm bells started ringing in his head. Deserters, he thought, and dangerous ones. It did not occur to him that deserters were unlikely to be hanging around in smart hotels. These men made him too nervous to think. His hand went for the telephone. He knew the number of the Military Police by heart.

He told the operator what he wanted. But when he looked up, the men had gone. For good, he imagined, dabbing sweat from his pale brow with a clean handkerchief. There had been no time for them to cause any trouble, and they would not get past the sentries on the cocktail bar. He cancelled the call.

But the men had not gone; and they had indeed got past the sentries.

It had happened like this: three men in battledress without insignia had attempted to gain entrance to the mess bar. Challenged, one of them had barked the sentries to attention, an order the sentries had (for reasons they did not properly understand) found themselves obeying. Another, a very big man with black curly hair, had taken away their rifles with the confidence of a kind father removing a dangerous toy from a fractious child. The third, having passed remarks uncomplimentary to their personal turnout and the cleanliness of their weapons, which he had inspected, had followed his two companions into the hallowed portals.

As they gazed upon the shut door, the sentries became aware that they had failed in their duty. There had been no chance of their succeeding, of course; the situation had been out of their hands. But that was not going to make matters any easier to explain to the sergeant. They were on a fizzer, for sure. As one, both sentries went through the door.

Through the fog of smoke, they saw their quarry. All three of them were with a small naval captain. They were standing rigidly to attention. The small captain caught the sentries’ eyes, and waved them away. ‘Really,’ he said, mildly, to the three men. ‘You’ll frighten the horses.’

‘Thought we’d pop out for a drink,’ said Mallory.

Jensen raised an eyebrow. Thirty commandos, said the eyebrow, and I hope you haven’t bent any of them.

‘We came down the fire-escape,’ said Mallory. ‘We were very thirsty.’

Into Admiral Dixon’s brain there had sunk the idea that something untoward was happening. He did not expect his evenings to be interrupted by soldiers, particularly soldiers as scruffy and badgeless as this lot. He was further amazed when he heard Captain Jensen say, ‘Oh, well. While you’re here, I can tell you we’ve got the snapshots. Total success. Well done. Briefing scheduled for 2300 hours.’

Admiral Dixon said, in a voice like a glacier calving, ‘Who are these men?’

‘Sorry,’ said Jensen. ‘Captain Mallory. Corporal Miller. Colonel Andrea, Greek Army, 19th Motorized Division. Admiral Dixon, OC Special Operations, Mediterranean.’

The Admiral rested his gooseberry eyes on the three men. Miller watched the veins in his neck and wondered idly how much pressure a blood vessel could take before it burst. ‘Why,’ said the Admiral, ‘are they improperly dressed?’

‘Disgraceful,’ said Jensen, with severity. ‘But as you will remember, they have just completed a mission. They were confined to quarters on suspicion of collusion with the enemy, so they haven’t had a chance to pop up to Savile Row. I think that in view of reconnaissance reports on the outcome of their mission, we can give them the benefit of the doubt. Unless you feel an Inquiry is necessary?’

‘Hrmph,’ said the Admiral, mauve-faced. ‘Mission or no mission, can’t have this sort of nonsense –’

‘Walls have ears,’ said Jensen smoothly. ‘You have called a briefing for 2300 hours. That will be the moment to discuss this. Now, gentlemen. Refreshment?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Miller. There was a waitress. Jensen ordered. The three men raised their glasses to Jensen, then the Admiral. ‘Mud in your eye,’ said Miller.

‘Here’s how,’ said Jensen.

The Admiral grunted ungraciously. He swallowed his gin and left.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Jensen. ‘We’re very pleased with you; most of us, anyway.’ He smiled, that gleaming, carnivorous smile. ‘You will be collected at 2245 hours. Till then, I bid you sweet dreams.’

‘Dreams?’ said Miller. It was not yet seven o’clock.

‘I always think a little nap can be most refreshing before a lot of hard work.’

‘Work?’ said Mallory.

But Jensen was gone.

‘Sleep?’ said Mallory. ‘Or drinks?’

Andrea pushed his glass forward. ‘You can sleep on aeroplanes,’ he said.

‘Drinks it is,’ said Mallory.

A car with a sub-lieutenant raced them through the blacked-out streets of Plymouth. The city was stirring like a huge, secret animal. The tyres kicked fans of water from deep puddles as they skirted piles of rubble and came to a set of high wire gates with naval sentries in greatcoats and bell-bottomed trousers. Beyond the gate was the dark bulk of a squat building with a sand-bagged entrance. The sentry led them through a heavy steel door into a disinfectant-smelling hall and down a flight of cement stairs, then another and another. Mallory felt the depth and silence pressing in on him. Suddenly he was tired, achingly tired, with the tiredness of two months of special operations, and the months before that…

But there was no time for being tired, because another steel door had sighed open, and they were in a windowless room painted green and cream. There were chairs, and a blackboard. Everything was anonymous. There was no clue as to where they were bound. There were three naval officers in the room, fresh-faced and wind- burned. Sitting apart was a willowy man in a Sam Browne over a tunic of excessively perfect cut. He was smoking a fat cigarette that smelt Turkish, gazing from under unnecessarily long eyelashes at the fire instructions behind the dais, and fingering a thin moustache. Mallory found himself thinking of Hollywood. It was an odd mixture of people to find a hundred or so feet under Plymouth.

Admiral Dixon and Captain Jensen walked into the room. With a scuffing of chair legs, the men stood to attention. ‘Good evening,’ said Jensen. ‘Stand easy. You may smoke.’ Dixon ignored them. He sat down heavily in a chair. His eyes were glassy and he was breathing hard, presumably from the effort of walking down all those stairs. Mallory reflected that if coming down had been that bad, someone would have to carry him up. Jensen, on the other hand, looked fresh as the morning dew. He stood on the balls of his feet, perky as a bantamweight boxer, while an orderly unrolled maps on the board.

Mallory knew that in the coastlines and contours of those maps their fates were written. There were the three fingers of the Peloponnese, blue sea, Crete, the island-splatter of the Dodecanese. And larger-scale maps: an island. Not an island he recognized, though when he glanced across at Andrea he saw him straight- backed and frowning.

‘Very good,’ said Jensen, when the orderly had finished. ‘Now I said I had a job for you, a tiny little job, really. It’s a bit of a rush, I suppose, but there it is, can’t be helped.’

‘Rush?’ said Mallory.

‘All in good time,’ said Jensen. ‘First things first. Admiral Dixon you already know. Gentlemen – ‘ here he turned to Mallory, Miller and Andrea ‘– certain people are very pleased with what you achieved last week.’ Admiral Dixon shook his head and sighed. ‘So pleased, in fact,’ said Jensen, ‘that they want you to do something else. Probably much easier, actually.’ He turned to the map at his back. Miller listened to the hum of the ventilation fans. It was all very well Jensen saying things were easy. He was not the one getting shot at. Miller doubted that he knew the meaning of the word.

The central map showed plenty of blue sea, and an island. It was the shape of a child’s drawing of a beetle, this island: a fat body dark with close-set contours and a head attached to its north-eastern end by a narrower neck. ‘Kynthos,’ said Jensen. ‘Lovely place. Delightful beaches. Very few Germans, but the ones there are particularly interesting, we think.’

Mallory and Miller slumped in their chairs. As far as they were concerned the only interesting German was a German they were a couple of hundred miles away from. But Andrea was still upright in his chair, his black eyes gleaming. Andrea was a Greek. The things the Germans had done to his country were bad, but they were much, much better than the things the Germans had done to his family. Andrea found Germans very interesting indeed.

‘I’ll start at the beginning,’ said Jensen. ‘Last year we bombed a place called Peenemunde, on the Baltic. Seems the Germans were building some sort of rocket bomb there; doodlebugs first, bloody awful things, but there was supposed to be something else. Germans called it the A3. Goes into outer space, if you can believe this, and comes back, wallop, faster than the speed of sound. Blows a hole in you before you’ve even heard it coming. Good weapon against civilians.’ Mallory searched Jensen’s face for signs of irony, and found none. ‘We’re expecting it any day now. And there’s something else; bigger version, larger, longer range, more dangerous, good for use against troops. Questions so far?’

‘Why bother with outer space?’ said Miller.

‘Think of a shell. Longer the range, higher the trajectory.’

‘You’d need a hell of a bang to get it up there.’

Jensen smiled. ‘Very good, Miller,’ he said. ‘Now what we believe is this. These A3 things are rockets. Thing about outer space, there’s no air to burn your fuel. So your rocket needs to take its own air with it. These A3 things are supposed to burn a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen. One of our submarines sank a ship off Kynthos the other day, surfaced to look for, er, survivors. All they found was oxygen bottles. And a stink of alcohol.’

‘Schnapps,’ said Miller.

Jensen smiled, and this time even the artificial warmth was gone from the ice-white display of teeth. ‘Thank you, Corporal,’ he said. ‘If that is all, I shall hand you over to Lieutenant, er, Robinson.’

Lieutenant Robinson was a tall, stooping man with round tortoiseshell spectacles and a donnish air. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Hmmyes. Kynthos. Typical Vesuvian post-volcanic structure, Santorini series, basalts, pumice, tufa, with an asymmetric central deposition zone –’

‘Lieutenant Robinson used to teach geology at Cambridge,’ said Jensen. ‘Once more, this time in English, if you please, Lieutenant.’

Robinson blushed to the tops of his spectacles. ‘Hmmyes,’ he said. ‘Kynthos is, er, mountainous. Very mountainous. There’s a town at the south-western end, Parmatia, more a village really, on a small alluvial plain. The road from the town transits a raised beach – ‘ he caught Jensen’s eye – ‘follows the coast, that is, mostly on a sort of shelf in the cliffs. There is no road across the interior suitable for motor transport. To the north-east of the mountain massif is another island, smaller, Antikynthos, connected to the main massif by a plain of eroded debris and alluvium –’ here Jensen coughed ‘– a stretch of flat land and marshes. This smaller island is itself rocky, taking the form of a volcanic plug with associated basalt and tufa masses, and on this there stands an old Turkish fort and the remains of a village: the Acropolis, they call it, the High Town. There has always been a jetty on Antikynthos. Recently this has been greatly improved, and the aerodrome upgraded. In the view of, er, contacts on the island, some sort of factory is being established.’ He took a photograph out of a file and laid it in an overhead projector. A man’s face appeared on the screen: a round face, mild, heavy-lidded eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Sigismund von Heydrich,’ he said. ‘Injured during the bombing of Peenemunde. Highly talented ballistician – ‘ Jensen’s eye again ‘– rocket scientist. He was spotted boarding a plane at Trieste, and we know the plane landed on Kynthos. They’ve built workshops in the caves under the Acropolis. But there’s only a light military presence. Couple of platoons of Wehrmacht, nothing worse, as far as we know.’

Jensen stood up. Thank you, Lieutenant,’ he said. The Lieutenant looked disappointed, as if he had planned to go on for some time. ‘Well, there you are. Simple little operation, really. We want you to land on Kynthos and make a recce of this Acropolis. You’ll be briefed on the development of the V4, which is what they’re calling this one. Any sign of it, and we’d like it disposed of: air strikes will be available, but if they’ve got it a long way underground, well, Miller, we have the greatest confidence in your ability to wreck the happy home. Questions so far?’

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory. ‘You say we’ve got someone on the island already?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Jensen. ‘There was a transmitter.’

‘Was?’

‘Transmissions ceased a week ago. It may be that the Germans found it. Or it may equally be that someone dropped it. Frightfully stony place, as you know.’

Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and saw the wary resignation he felt himself. Jensen did not pick them for the easy ones.

‘And of course there’ll be Carstairs in case you need help. Now if you’ve got any questions, ask them now, and we’ll get into the detail.’

Miller said, ‘Who’s Carstairs?’

‘Good Lord,’ said Jensen. ‘Hasn’t anybody introduced you? Very remiss. Perhaps Admiral Dixon will do the honours. Admiral?’

Dixon heaved himself to his feet. ‘Captain Carstairs, make yourself known,’ he said, and there was something in his face that much resembled smugness.

The man in the beautiful uniform stood up and saluted. His hair was brown and wavy, his moustache clipped into a perfect eyebrow. ‘Gentlemen, how d’ye do?’ he said.

‘Captain Carstairs is a rocket expert,’ said the Admiral. ‘He is also experienced in special operations. Before the war he led expeditions up the Niger and in the Matto Grosso. He has overflown the North and South Poles, and climbed the north face of Nanga Parbat.’

Andrea caught Mallory’s eye. Mallory’s head moved almost imperceptibly from side to side. Never heard of him, he was saying.

‘Wow,’ said Miller. The Admiral looked at him sharply, but the American’s eyes were shining with honest reverence.

‘So I am very happy to say,’ said the Admiral, ‘that Captain Carstairs will make an ideal commanding officer for this expedition.’

There was a deep silence, full of the hum of the fans. Mallory looked at Jensen. Jensen was gazing at the place where the ceiling met the wall.

‘Any questions?’ said the Admiral.

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory. ‘When do we start training, sir?’

The Admiral frowned. ‘Training?’

‘It’ll take a month. Six weeks, maybe.’

Blood swelled the Admiral’s neck. ‘You’re out of here on a Liberator at 0200 hours. You will transfer to an MTB near Benghazi. You’ll be ashore and operating by 0300 tomorrow. There will be no training.’

‘MTB?’ said Mallory.

‘Motor Torpedo Boat,’ said Dixon.

‘Bit indiscreet,’ said Mallory, who knew what an MTB was. ‘Noisy.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ said Jensen. ‘Sorry about the training, sorry about the MTB. But it’s a matter of… well, put it like this. There’s a bit of a flap on. These damned rockets are a menace to our rear and our flank in Italy. They can deliver three tons of HE with an accuracy of fifty yards. They need disposing of before they’re operational, and we think that will be soon. We’d fly you in, but Staff say it’s the wrong place for a parachute drop. So MTB it’ll have to be. Time is of the essence.’

‘Can’t be done,’ said Mallory. Suddenly he felt Jensen’s eyes upon him like rods of ice.

The Admiral’s neck veins swelled. ‘Look here,’ he said, in a sort of muted bellow. ‘It is against my better judgement that I am using an insubordinate shower like you to perform a delicate operation. But Captain Jensen assures me that you know what you are doing, and takes responsibility for you. Well, let me make myself clear. If you do not obey my orders and the orders of Captain Carstairs in this matter, you will be charged with mutiny so fast your feet will not touch the ground – what are you doing?’

Mallory was on his feet, and so were Miller and Andrea. They were standing rigidly to attention. ‘Permission to speak, sah,’ said Mallory. ‘You can get your court martial ready, sah.’

The Admiral stared, flabby-faced. ‘By God,’ he said. ‘By God, I’ll have you – ‘

Jensen cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, Admiral,’ he said. ‘Might I make a suggestion?’ The Admiral seemed to be beyond speech. ‘These men work as a unit. Their record is good. Might I suggest that rather than operating as a top-down command structure they be attached to Captain Carstairs as a force of observers, leaving Captain Carstairs in command of his own unit but without specific responsibility for these men, who would, as it were, be attached yet separate? This would obviate the need for special training, and establish the possibility of cross-unit liaison and cooperation rather than intra-unit response to ad hoc and de facto command structures.’

The Admiral’s jaw had dropped. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Mallory’s the senior captain,’ said Jensen. ‘And of course there is a colonel in the force.’

‘Who’s a colonel?’

‘I am,’ said Andrea.

Now it was Carstairs’ turn to stare. Andrea needed a haircut, and his second shave of the day. His uniform needed a laundry. Carstairs raised an eyebrow. ‘Colonel?’ he said, and Miller could hear his lip curl even if he could not see it.

The air in the briefing room was thick and ugly. ‘Greek army,’ said Andrea. ‘Under Captain Mallory’s command, for operational purposes.’

‘Uh,’ said the Admiral, looking like a man who had just trodden on a fair-sized mine.

Jensen said, ‘Come out here, all of you,’ and marched into the corridor. Out there, he said, ‘You’ve got Carstairs whether you like him or not. I want you on this mission. I’m ordering you to take him along.’

‘And wipe his nose.’

‘Also his shoes, if necessary.’ Jensen’s eyes were bright chips of steel.

‘Under my command,’ said Mallory.

‘I know about rockets,’ said Miller. ‘I know as much about rockets as anyone. We don’t need this guy. He’ll get in the way. We’ll wind up carrying him, he’ll–’

‘We would be fascinated to hear your views,’ said Jensen in a freezing voice. ‘Some other time, though, I think.’

‘So who needs this guy?’

‘If you mean Captain Carstairs, the Admiral wants him. And that, gentlemen, is that. Now get back in there.’

They knew Jensen.

They got back in there.

The Admiral said, ‘Captain Carstairs will be a separate unit, taking his orders directly from me.’

Carstairs smiled a smooth, inward-looking smile. Technically, Mallory was his superior officer. All the Admiral was doing was muddying waters already troubled. They stood wooden-faced, potential disasters playing like newsreels in their minds.

‘Last but not least,’ said Jensen. ‘Local support. Lieutenant.’

Robinson stood up, spectacles gleaming. ‘There is Resistance activity on the island,’ he said. ‘But we want your operation kept separate. Civilian reprisals, er, do not help anyone.’ Andrea’s face was dark as a thundercloud. He had found the bodies of his parents on a sandbank in the River Drava. They had been lashed together and thrown in to drown. He knew about reprisals: and so did the Germans who had done the deed, once he had finished with them. Robinson continued, ‘We will be landing you in Parmatia. There is a gentleman called Achilles at three, Mavrocordato Street in Parmatia. He will provide you with motor transport up the island to the Acropolis. We’ll have a submarine standing by at a position you will be given at midnight on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you’re there, hang up a yellow fishing lantern as a signal. If not … well, he’ll wait until 0030 on Saturday, then you’re on your own. Got it?’

‘Got it.’

‘But avoid all other contact. We’d like you to be a surprise. A thunderbolt of a surprise. That’s what this operation is called, by the way. Operation Thunderbolt.’

‘After the weather forecast?’ said Miller.

‘How did you guess?’ said Jensen.

‘You did it last time,’ said Miller.

Jensen did not seem to hear. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘The detail.’

For the next two hours, in the company of the geologist and a man from SOE, they studied the detail.

‘All right,’ said Jensen, as they folded away their maps. ‘Armoury next.’

The armoury was the usual harshly-lit room with racks of Lee Enfields. The Armourer was a Royal Marine with a bad limp and verbal diarrhoea. ‘Schmeissers, ‘e said you wanted,’ said the Marine, pulling out boxes. ‘Quite right, quite right, don’t want those bloody Stens, blow up on you as soon as Jerry, go on, ‘ave a look, yes, Corporal? Oh, I see you are the more discriminating type of customer, grenades, was it?’ But even his flow of talk could not hold up over the grim silence that filled that little room. Mallory and Andrea sat down on the bench and disassembled a Schmeisser each, craftsmen assessing the tools of a deadly trade. The hush filled with small, metallic noises. Andrea rejected two of the machine-pistols before he found one to his liking, then another. Miller, meanwhile, was in a corner of the room, by a cupboard the size of a cigar humidor. He had a special pack, lined with wood and padded. Into this he was stowing, with a surgeon’s delicacy of touch, buff-coloured bricks of plastic explosives, brightly-coloured time pencils, and a whole hardware store of other little packets and bottles.

Mallory reassembled his second Schmeisser. ‘For you, Carstairs,’ he said.

Carstairs looked languidly up from the sights of a Mauser. ‘Never touch ‘em, old boy.’

‘You’ll need one.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Carstairs, tapping a Turkish cigarette on a gold case. A silenced Browning automatic lay across his knees. ‘Stand off is my motto. Works with impala. Works with Germans. Now look here, Sergeant, have you got a hard case for this?’ He held up the Mauser carbine and a Zeiss 4X sniperscope. Several Mausers would be going to Kynthos – they were rugged carbines essential for long-range work. But the sniperscope was delicate as a prima ballerina’s tutu – nothing to do with the kind of knockabout you could expect if you were storming a hollow mountain full of rockets.

As they left the armoury, Andrea fell in beside Mallory. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘I think we should keep our eyes open.’

‘Exactly, my Keith.’ They walked on in silence. ‘And what is this Nanga Parbat?’

‘A mountain. In the Himalayas. There was an expedition to climb it in 1938.’ Mallory paused. He hated what came next. ‘A German expedition.’

‘There was no war in 1938.’

‘No.’

But all of a sudden Mallory’s stomach was a tight ball. There was something wrong with this. It was the same feeling he had had on the south icefield of Mount Cook, watching his right boot go up and forward, watching the weight go on, but because of that feeling, not committing himself. Which had been just as well. Because when it felt the weight of that boot – brownish-black leather, new-greased, criss-cross laces in the lugs, that boot – the world crumbled and slid away, and what had been smooth ice had turned into a cornice over a ravine, a cornice that had crumbled under him and was swallowing him up.

Except that he had taken warning from that knot in the stomach, and kept his weight back, and walloped his ice axe behind him at the full reach of his arm, felt it bite, and hauled himself out of the jaws of death and back on to clean ice. And climbed the mountain.

The knot in the stomach was not fear, or at least not only fear. It was a warning. It needed listening to.

TWO

Tuesday 1000-Wednesday 0200

Al-Gubiya Bay is a small notch in the coast west of Benghazi. That morning, it contained a group of khaki tents, a concrete jetty, and one and a half billion flies. Alongside the jetty an MTB crouched like a grey shark. Her commander, Lieutenant Bob Wills, was sitting on the forward port-hand torpedo tube. The sun balanced on his head like a hot iron bar, and the flies were driving him crazy, but not as crazy as the orders he had received. He wondered what the hell they were dropping him in this time.

A three-ton lorry clattered on to the quay, stopped, and stood snorting in its cloud of Libyan dust. The canvas back of the lorry twitched and parted. Four men got down.

Three of them walked together, silent, closed-faced. Their faces were gaunt and sunburned. They looked at the same time exhausted and relaxed, and under their heavy equipment they walked with a steady, mile-devouring lope. Ahead of the three was a slenderer man. He was dressed like them in battledress without badges of rank. But his walk had more of a strut in it, as if he thought someone might be watching, and at the same time he moved uneasily in the straps of his pack. This and a certain finicky neatness in his uniform made the Lieutenant think that he was not completely at home.

The neat man had quick brown eyes that checked the MTB and the cuff-rings of the Lieutenant’s tunic, hung from the barrel of the five-pounder. He said, ‘Good morning. I’m Captain Carstairs.’ The man smiled, a white, film-star sort of a smile. Wills was tired from months of night operations, and the smile was too dazzling.

He said, ‘How d’ye do?’ Carstairs’ handshake was a bonecrusher. Wills’ feeling of tiredness increased. ‘Good fight?’

‘Dreadful,’ said Carstairs. ‘Bloody Liberators. Can’t hear a thing. Bring back Imperial. The Cairo run, what?’

‘Yes,’ said Wills. Himself, he had never been able to afford to fly in the Sunderlands of Imperial Airways. Lot of side, this Carstairs, he thought. He raised a hand to Chief Petty Officer Smith, who was loading stores down the quay. ‘Chiefy. Help Captain Carstairs with his stuff, there’s a good chap.’

During his brief chat with Carstairs, the other three men had climbed aboard the MTB and stowed their equipment. Without appearing to move very much they seemed to get a surprising amount done. The shortest of the three introduced himself as Mallory in a voice with a faint New Zealand twang.

‘Morning,’ said Wills.

Mallory saw a square youth with sun-bleached curly hair and a sunburned nose.

‘Made yourself at home, I hope,’ said Wills.

‘Hope that’s all right.’

Wills grinned. ‘Top-hole,’ he said. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony here.’ He embraced with a sweep of his arm the blue bay, the parched dunes, the concrete jetty. ‘You get out of the habit, in a tropical paradise.’

‘Very attractive,’ said Mallory, brushing away a couple of thousand flies.

‘Wait till we get to sea,’ said Wills. He was older than he looked, Mallory realized. From a distance, he might have been your standard British sixth-former. Close up, you could see the eyes. The eyes were a thousand years old.

‘Been here long?’ said Mallory.

‘Long enough. Stooging around causing trouble on the island. Yachting with big bangs, really. Speak a bit of the lingo. Do what we can to make a nuisance of ourselves.’

‘Quite,’ said Mallory. He liked this youth. There was something in his eye that said he could really cause the Germans some trouble, if he put his mind to it, and putting his mind to it was what he was good at.

‘We ready?’ said Wills.

Mallory nodded.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills. Carstairs was not his cup of tea, but these men were different. They spoke quietly, and looked at him steady-eyed, and when they shook his hand their grip was firm but economical, as if in this, as in anything else they did, they would use just enough force to get the job done properly, no more, no less. This fitted neatly with Wills’ view of life, and he found himself favourably impressed. There was also another sensation lurking on the fringes of his conscious mind, and for a moment he did not know what it was. But ten minutes later, pouring the gin in the cupboard-sized wardroom, it came to him.

He was very glad they were on the same side as him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Couple of things to organize.’

The heavy throb of the MTB’s engines came through the wardroom bulkheads, and the stink of high octane gasoline. The sleek grey boat scrawled a white question mark on the blue bay, roared out to sea and turned east.

It was a calm and beautiful day. Carstairs went on deck, thrusting his chiselled profile into the twenty-knot slipstream. Mallory, Miller and Andrea found plywood bunks, rolled on to them, and closed their eyes: except Mallory. Mallory lay and felt the bound of the MTB over the swell, and the tremor of the Merlin engines, and rested his eyes on the plywood deck above him. There were matters he needed to ponder before he slept.

As they had left the armoury, a runner had caught him by the arm. ‘Telephone, sir,’ he had said.

The voice on the telephone had been light but hard: Jensen.

‘No names,’ it had said. ‘Something I wanted to say, between us two, really.’

‘Yessir.’

‘I wanted to say the best of luck, and all that.’

‘Yessir.’ Jensen would not have rung his mother to wish her luck. Mallory waited.

‘Our new friend,’ said Jensen. ‘The expert. He’s okay, but you might like to keep your eye on him.’

‘Eye?’

‘Just a thought,’ said Jensen. ‘I’ve got a feeling he might be on a sort of treasure hunt.’

‘Treasure hunt? What sort of treasure hunt?’

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be telling you to keep an eye on him, would I? Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to get on your way.’

Mallory lay and watched the deckhead. There were undoubtedly problems on Kynthos. But Mallory strongly suspected there was also a problem on the MTB, a problem called Carstairs. Mallory did not trust the man. Nor, it seemed, did Jensen. So why did Jensen insist that Carstairs be part of the mission? Of course, it had not been Jensen who had insisted. It had been Admiral Dixon. Mallory found himself thinking that a spell on the bridge of a destroyer would do Dixon a lot of good: or on an MTB, a floating fuel-tank, a bladder of aviation fuel with two Merlin engines…

But Dixon was safe behind his desk, and that was a law of nature. Just like the fact that Carstairs was along for the duration.

Railing against the laws of nature was entirely pointless. Mallory was not given to doing pointless things.

A new vibration added itself to the bone-jarring roar of the twin Merlins. Mallory was snoring.

He awoke much later, prised a cup of coffee out of the galley, and climbed on to the bridge. The sun was sinking towards the western horizon, North Africa a low dun line to the south. As far as any German aircraft were concerned they were heading east, for somewhere in the Allied territory in the gathering shadows ahead.

A rating brought up a plate of corned beef sandwiches and more coffee. It was quieter on the bridge. Mallory wedged a deck chair in a corner. As he ate his mind kept coming back to Carstairs. Why would an experienced guerrilla fighter have chosen a sniper rifle with a notoriously delicate sight? If they were all on the same operation, why were they notionally two separate units? Why –

A shadow fell across him. It was Carstairs, slender fingers in the pocket of his battledress blouse: like Clark Gable, thought Mallory. His hand came out with the gold cigarette case. He opened it, offered it to Mallory. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that,’ he said.

‘Just put one out,’ said Mallory. ‘Tell me something. What are you doing on this trip?’

‘Same as you,’ said Carstairs.

‘So what … qualifies you?’

Carstairs smiled. ‘I’ve knocked about a bit.’

‘And you’re a rocket expert.’

‘So I am.’

‘Where did you pick that up?’

‘Here and there,’ said Carstairs, vaguely. ‘Here and there.’

You got used to vagueness on Special Operations. It was a mistake to know more than you needed to know. So why did Mallory have the feeling that Carstairs was using this fact for his own purposes?

‘Ever done armed insurgency work?’ he said.

‘Not exactly. But there have been … parallel episodes in my life.’

‘What’s a parallel episode?’ said a new voice: Miller’s.

‘A not dissimilar operation.’

‘I had one of those, but the wheels dropped off.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Carstairs’ face was stiffening.

‘All right,’ said Mallory. Carstairs, it seemed, was too important to have a sense of humour. ‘You’re good in mountains. You can shoot.’

Carstairs yawned. ‘So they told me on Nanga Parbat.’

‘I thought that was a German expedition.’

‘It was.’ They stared at him. ‘The Duke of Windsor asked me to go. Rather a chum of mine, actually, so one couldn’t refuse. I speak pretty good German. I’m a climber. What’s wrong with that?’

Mallory said nothing. The Nanga Parbat expedition had been supervised by Himmler in person. It had conquered the peak, but only by cementing in spikes and installing fixed ladders and ropes. They might as well have put scaffolding up the face. It was not what Mallory called climbing.

Carstairs said, ‘The idea was to get to the top.’

Well, that was true.

‘And the rockets,’ said Miller, doggedly. ‘Where did you find out all this stuff you know about rockets?’

Carstairs was not smiling any more. He said, ‘We have all led complicated lives I am sure, and a lot of the things we have done we would not necessarily have told our mummies about. You can take it from me that I know what I know, and I am under orders from Admiral Dixon, Corporal. Now if you will excuse me I could do with forty winks.’ And he went below.

‘Temper,’ said Miller, mildly.

Mallory lit a cigarettee. He did not look at the American. ‘I would remind you,’ he said, ‘that Captain Carstairs is a superior officer, and as such is entitled to respect. I would like you to give this thought your earnest attention.’ His eyes came up and locked with Miller’s. ‘Your very close attention,’ he said.

Miller smiled. ‘My pleasure,’ he said.

The MTB churned on down the coast. The sun sank below the horizon. Miller lay on the wing of the bridge, watching the last light of day leave the sky, and the sky fade to black, and upon it a huge field of silver stars come into being. Wills murmured an order to the man at the helm. Over Miller’s head, the stars began to wheel until the Big Dipper lay across the horizon, the last two stars in its rhomboidal end pointing across an empty expanse to a single star riding over the MTB’s bow.

They had turned north.

It was eight hours’ hard steaming from Al-Gubiya to Kynthos. Rafts of cloud began to drift across the sky, blotting out patches of stars. The breeze was up, ruffling the sea into long ridges of swell. M-109 made heavy weather, jolting and banging and shuddering as she jumped from bank of water to bank of water. Nobody slept, any more than they would have slept in an oil drum rolling down a flight of concrete steps.

Up on the bridge, Wills peered into the black and tried not to dwell upon the fact that M-109 was the tip of a huge phosphorescent arrowhead of wake that shouted to anyone in an aeroplane ‘Here we are, here we are’. This was not a subtle operation. ‘Weave her,’ he shouted into the helmsman’s ear. The helmsman began to weave her port and starboard, panning the beam of the fixed radar scanner across the sea ahead.

‘What you got?’ said Wills to the man with his head in the radar’s rubber eyepiece.

‘Clutter,’ said the man. ‘Bloody waves–’

The MTB hit a wave, shot off into the air, and came down with a slam that blasted spray sixty feet in the air and buckled Wills’ knees. His coffee cup shot across the bridge and exploded in a corner. Somewhere, probably in the galley, a lot of glass broke.

‘Shite,’ said the radar operator, and twiddled knobs. ‘Dead,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, dead?’ said Wills, though he knew perfectly well, because this always happened with radar. But they were deep in bandit country here, and the MTB was his first command, and this was his first Special Ops run, and he wanted things to go right, not cock up –

‘Valve gone,’ said the radar operator. ‘Two, three valves.’

‘How long?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

Could be worse, thought Wills, lighting his sixty-third cigarette of the day. Could be better. Half an hour without radar, well, you can survive that.

So the MTB swept on blind under the stars: blind, but not unseen. Far down on the horizon, a dirty fishing caique was hauling nets. In her wheelhouse, a man trained German-issue binoculars on the pale streak of water to the westward. Then he picked up the microphone of a military radio, and began to speak, giving first a call sign, then a course and speed that corresponded to the MTB’s.

‘Done, sir,’ said the radar operator. ‘No contacts.’

‘Nice work,’ said Wills, looking at his watch, then at the chart on the table under the red night-lights. ‘Top-hole.’ He rang for port engine shutdown, half-ahead starboard. M-109’s nose settled into her bow wave. One engine burbling heavily, she crept towards Kynthos, twenty miles away now. The breeze had dropped: the sea was like black glass.

‘Still clear?’ said Wills to the radar operator.

‘Clear,’ said the operator.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills.

But of course the radar could not see astern.

As the engine note faded smoothly, Miller fell just as smoothly from a doze into a deep sleep. After what seemed like a couple of seconds he was awakened by somebody shaking him. ‘Morning, sir,’ said a voice, and an enamel mug was shoved into his hand, a mug hot enough to wake him up and make him curse and hear Mallory and Andrea and Carstairs stirring, too. When they had drunk the sweet, scalding tea, they went on deck.

There was no moon, but the Milky Way hung in a heavy swathe across the sky. By its light he could see a crumpled heap of rubberized canvas on the deck on the forward face of the wheelhouse. He groped for a foot pump, found one, plugged in the hose and started tramping away. The crumpled heap swelled and unfolded like a night-blooming flower, and became a rubber dinghy; an aircrew dinghy, actually, because unlike the naval dinghies it was boat-shaped instead of circular, and thus rowable; but unlike the dinghies used by the SAS, it was yellow instead of black, and would, if discovered by the enemy, be taken for the relic of a crashed aircraft instead of the transport of a raiding party. Andrea drifted up, silent as a wraith, and Mallory. Carstairs made more noise, his nailed boots squinching on the deck, grunting as he dumped his pack and his rifle.

‘Three minutes to drop,’ said a voice from the bridge.

Here we go again, thought Miller.

Then the night became day.

For a moment there was just stark blue-white light, the faces of the men on the bridge frozen, every pore mercilessly limned, the dinghy and the landing party in the slice of black shadow behind the superstructure. Then, very rapidly, things began to change.

The light blazed from a source as bright as the sun, behind them, low on the water. Someone was shouting on the bridge: Wills’ voice. From behind the light came the heavy chug of a large-calibre machine gun. The bridge windows exploded. Glass splinters hissed around the dinghy, and someone somewhere let out a bubbling howl. Then more guns started firing, some from the MTB now.

‘Stay where you are,’ said Mallory, calm as if he were walking down the Strand. ‘Two minutes to landing.’

‘Shoot that bloody light out!’ roared Wills, from the bridge.

They huddled in the shadow of the superstructure. Suddenly the blue-white glare vanished. The blackness that followed it was no longer black, but criss-crossed with ice-blue and hot-poker-red tracers. The MTB’s deck jumped underfoot like the skin of a well- thrashed drum. Whatever was attacking was big, and heavily armed. They heard Wills’ voice shout, ‘Full ahead both!’ The MTB started to surge forward.

But the tracers were homing in now. There was something like an Oerlikon or a Bofors out there. Into Miller’s mind there popped the picture of the back end of the MTB: a huge tank of aviation gas, contained in a thin skin of aluminium and plywood. One Oerlikon round in there: well, two, one to puncture it, one to light it…

Miller found himself longing passionately for a row in a rubber dinghy on the night-black sea –

Crash, went something on the aft deck. Then there was a jack- hammer succession of further crashes. The MTB’s machine guns fell silent. The engine note faltered and died, and she slowed, wallowing. An ominous red glow came from her after hatches.

Mallory’s mind was clicking like an adding machine. Options: stay on board and get blown to hell; go over the side, with at least a chance that they would get ashore and on with the mission. No contest.

‘Go,’ he said.

The MTB had slewed port-side on to the tracers whipping out of the dark. They manhandled the rubber boat over the starboard rail and into the dark water. Miller climbed down, and stowed the packs and the oilcloth weapon bags as Mallory and Andrea lowered them. The orange glow was heavier now, beginning to jump and flicker, so Mallory could see Miller and Andrea working, and Carstairs, eyes flicking left and right, nervous for himself, not for anybody else. Not a team player, Carstairs. Hard to blame him, on top of a burning bladder of petrol in enemy waters –

Whump, said something the other side of the bridge, and the shock wave blew Mallory on to the deck. Then there was another explosion, bigger, and a blast of air, dreadfully hot, that carried with it a smell of burning eyebrows and more glass. Something crashed on to the deck alongside. By the light of the flames, Mallory saw it was Wills, blown, presumably, out of the glassless windows of the bridge. Unconscious at least, thought Mallory, ears ringing. If not dead –

Wills opened his eyes. His face was coppery with burns, his expression that of a sleepwalker. He started to crawl aft. Another explosion blew him backwards into Mallory’s legs. The flames were very bright now, the air vibrating with heat. ‘Into the dinghy,’ said Mallory.

Carstairs went over the rail at a hard scramble, followed more sedately by Andrea. Aft of the bridge, the MTB was a sheet of flame. A man emerged, blazing, and fell back into the inferno. ‘Come,’ said Mallory to Wills. He half-saw other figures going over the rail, heard the splash of bodies.

Wills looked at him without seeing him, and started to walk into the wall of flame. Mallory grabbed his arm. Wills turned and took a swing at him. Mallory went under the punch, grabbed him by the shirt and trousers, and heaved him overboard. The deck was swelling underfoot like a balloon. Mallory went to the rail and jumped.

It was only when he hit the water that he realized how hot the air had been. He found himself holding the rope on the rubber flanks of the dinghy. ‘Row,’ he said. They already were rowing. There was another head beside him in the water: Wills, eyes wide and rolling. He scrambled into the dinghy and pulled Wills after him. Wills showed a tendency to struggle. He wanted to be with his ship –

The night split in two. There was a blinding flash. A shock wave like a brick wall hurtled across the water and walloped into the dinghy. Torpedoes, thought Mallory, against the ringing in his ears. Torpedoes gone up.

Then a thick chemical smoke rolled down on them. Under its black and reeking blanket they rowed and coughed and rowed again, squinting at the radium-lit north on Mallory’s compass, for what felt like hours. ‘Clearing,’ said Miller at last. Overhead, the sky was lightening. They sat still as the fumes thinned around them, leaving them naked and exposed on the surface of the sea. But there was no one to see them. As the last of the smoke eddied away, it was plain that under its cover they had got clear. All around them was black night, with stars. The best part of a mile to the westward, the dark shape of some sort of coastal patrol boat lay half-wrapped in smoke, moving to and fro in the water, shining lights, looking for survivors.

And in that confusing patchwork of light and smoke, not finding any.

To the eastwards, the sky stopped well short of the horizon, cut out by the jagged tops of mountains: the mountains of Kynthos.

Mallory called the roll.

‘Carstairs.’

‘Here.’

‘Andrea.’

‘Here.’

‘Miller.’

‘Sure.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Wills,’ said Wills, in a strange, faraway voice.

‘Nelson,’ said another. ‘And Dawkins. ‘E’s unconscious. I’ve ‘urt me arm.’

‘Okay,’ said Mallory, level-voiced, though inwardly he was worried. There was work to do, and not the sort of work you could do if you were carrying maimed and unconscious sailors about with you. They had hardly started Operation Thunderbolt, and already it was in serious trouble.

Save it, he told himself. They were on the deep sea, with three extra people and a job to do. What was necessary now was to get ashore.

‘Row,’ he said.

They rowed.

After a while, a voice said, ‘I’m getting wet.’ A sailor’s voice: Nelson.

It was true. The side of the rubber dinghy, which had been hard, was becoming flaccid. ‘Probably the air inside cooling,’ said Carstairs. ‘The water’s colder than the air, isn’t it? So it’d shrink–’

‘Got a leak,’ said Miller. He found the pump and plugged it into the side. There was no chance of using his feet, so he squeezed the concertina bag between his hands. After two hundred, his arms felt as if they were on fire. But the tube was not deflating any more. ‘Here,’ he said to Carstairs.

‘Sorry, Corporal?’ said the drawling voice in the dark.

‘Your go, sir,’ said Miller.

Carstairs laughed, a light, dangerous laugh. ‘I’m sorry, Corporal,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’m with you.’

Miller gave a couple more squeezes to the pump. The sweat was running into his eyes. ‘Yessir,’ he said. ‘Yessir, Cap’n, sure thing.’ Carstairs was only a dark shape against the stars, but Miller was sure he was smiling a small, superior smile –

‘Give it to me,’ said Andrea. Miller felt it plucked from his hands, heard the steady, monotonous pant.

‘Carstairs,’ said Mallory. ‘You can row now.’

Carstairs’ shadow froze. But Mallory’s voice had an edge like a hacksaw. ‘Delighted,’ said Carstairs. ‘Jolly boating weather, eh?’

For two endless hours, the oars dipped, and the pump panted, and the black mass of Kynthos crawled slowly up the stars. At 0155, Wills, who had been sitting slumped on the side, suddenly raised his head. ‘Port twenty,’ he said, in a weird, cracked voice.

‘What?’ said Miller, who was rowing.

‘Left a bit.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a beach.’

‘How do you know?’ said Carstairs.

‘Pilot book. Recognize the horizon.’ Wills made a loose gesture of his hand at the saw-backed ridge plunging towards the sea ahead and to the right.

Carstairs said, ‘You’re in no condition to recognize anything.’

‘So what do you suggest?’ said Mallory, mildly.

‘Straight for the shore,’ said Carstairs. ‘Up the cliffs.’

‘Listen,’ said Wills.

Miller stopped rowing, and Andrea stopped pumping. They listened.

There was the drip of the oars, and the tiny gurgle of the dinghy moving through the water, and something else: the long, low mutter of swell on stone. ‘Cliffs,’ said Wills. ‘Doesn’t feel like much out here, but there’ll be a heave. Lava rock. Like a cross-cut saw. Two foot of swell, bang goes your gear, bang goes you.’

It was a lucid speech, and convincing. Carstairs could find no objection to it. He lapsed into a sulk.

Mallory had seen the beaches on the map, all that time ago in the briefing room under Plymouth. There were half-a-dozen of them at this end of the island, little crescents of sand among writhing contours and hatchings of precipitous cliffs. If it had been him in command of the Kynthos garrison, he would have watched them like a hawk.

The muttering grew.

“Scuse me,’ said the voice of the sailor Nelson. ‘It’s Dawkins, sir. I think ‘e’s dead.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Carstairs, high and sharp. ‘Save it for later. We’ll–’

But Mallory had moved past him, and had his fingers on Dawkins’ neck. The skin was warm, but not as warm as it should have been. There was no pulse. ‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ he said.

‘Throw him overboard,’ said Carstairs. ‘He’s just dead weight.’

‘No,’ said Mallory, pumping.

‘You – ‘

‘I’m taking operational responsibility for Able Seaman Dawkins,’ said Mallory.

There were cliffs on either side and ahead, now, not more than fifty yards away. The dinghy lifted spongily in the swell. They were in a sort of cove.

Andrea said, ‘Wait here.’

‘What are you doing?’ said Carstairs.

Andrea did not answer. He seemed to be taking off his battledress. A pair of huge, furry shoulders gleamed for a moment under the stars. Then he was gone, quiet as a seal in a small roil of water.

‘Reconnaissance,’ said Mallory. ‘Hold her here, Miller.’

Cradled in the bosom of the sea, protected on three sides by a small, jagged alcove of the cliffs, they waited.

THREE

Wednesday 0200-0600

Private Gottfried Schenck was not in favour of Greek islands. The beer was terrible, the food oily and the women hostile, particularly in the last couple of days. Still, it was better than the Russian Front, he supposed. He had thought it a place completely without danger, until the unpleasantness on Saturday. Tonight he had seen the flick of tracer and the flash of a big explosion out at sea. It looked as if things were getting worse. He had commandeered a bottle of wine from a peasant he had met with a flock of goats; vile stuff, tasted like disinfectant, but at least it stopped the jitters. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. Four hours till his relief at dawn. Time to have a look in the next cove, perhaps have a crafty fag with his mate Willi.

He turned and walked along the edge of the sea, his boots making only the faintest of crunches on the sand.

From his vantage point by a rock thirty yards to seaward, Andrea watched him go, waited, counting; saw the sudden flare of a match beyond the headland …

Not that anybody normal would have seen this. But Andrea’s eyes were used to weighing matters of life and death in thick darkness. He waited in the milk-warm water, counting, watched the sentry come back on to the beach, throw away the glowing butt. Then, with no fuss or turbulence, he sank below the surface.

The cigarette had not done Private Schenck any good. He felt sleepy, and there was a filthy taste in his mouth. What he really needed was a swim, but if anyone caught him swimming on duty there would be hell to pay –

He had arrived at the end of the beach. He turned round and started back, moving smartly to wake himself up, shoulders square, eyes on the tip of his nose, trying as he often did to feel the way he had felt all those years ago at Nuremberg in the temple of searchlights, when he had believed in all this damned Nazi nonsense –

Behind him, something rose from the water beyond the small waves that broke on the shore: something impossibly huge that gleamed with water in the starlight and took two loping steps towards him, clapped a vast hard hand over his mouth and hauled him through the breakers and bent him creaking towards the water, as he tried to shout, but managed no sound at all, like a child in the hands of this terrible thing from the sea. Schenck had given up even before his face hit the water, gently, oh so gently, and stayed there, under those huge, remorseless hands, until his mouth opened and the bad taste of cigarettes and old wine became the taste of salt, and he breathed.

Andrea waited until the bubbles ceased to rise. Then he swam back to the dinghy, and talked low and short to Mallory. A minute later, the dinghy was heading for the beach.

Things now began to move very fast for the still-dazed Wills. As soon as the dinghy’s nose touched the sand, they were out, dragging the packs on to their backs, hustling him and Nelson up the beach and into the low scrub of thorn and oleander at its back. ‘Watch them,’ said Mallory to Carstairs. Carstairs looked as if he was going to protest, but suddenly Mallory and Miller were gone, and there was nowhere else to go, so Carstairs had no option.

Dimly in the starlight they saw Andrea drag Dawkins’ body from the dinghy, and tow him out through the little breakers and into deep water. Nelson started forward, but Wills put a hand on his arm. They heard the hiss as Miller enlarged the hole in the dinghy and left it in the surf, watched Mallory and Miller brush out the footprints on the beach, reversing up into the bushes.

Wills’ head was buzzing like a hive full of bees. He was streaming sweat, and he felt sick, or rather he felt as if someone else a lot like him felt sick, because he was somewhere else. Nearby, Andrea was climbing back into his fatigues. Wills heard himself say, ‘All right, Nelson?’

‘Shouldn’t have done that to poor Dawks,’ said Nelson.

‘He’s dead,’ said Wills. ‘He doesn’t know. He’s being useful.’

‘It ain’t right,’ said Nelson. He sounded aggrieved: bit of a barrack-room lawyer, Nelson. “E needs burying. There’s no call to chuck ‘im in the sea.’

‘There was a guard,’ said Andrea. ‘I killed him. Now the Germans will think he found poor Dawkins, and they fought, and both drowned.’

‘You ‘ope,’ said Nelson, who did not hold with foreigners.

‘Yes,’ said the foreigner, in that lion-like purr of his. ‘And so should you, if you do not want to die.’

Hearing the voice, Nelson realized that he desperately and passionately wanted to live.

‘Miller,’ said Andrea. ‘Have a look at Nelson’s arm.’

Miller pulled out a pencil light, lodged it between his teeth, and unwrapped the strip of rag from the seaman’s right forearm. The cut gaped long and red against the white skin. ‘You’ll live,’ said Miller. ‘Sew you up later.’

‘Jesus,’ said Nelson weakly. ‘It’s really bad. Oh Jesus. It feels bloody terrible.’

‘You won’t die,’ said Miller. ‘Not of a cut arm, anyway. No bleeding, and all nice and clean and tidy with seawater.’ He sprinkled sulfa into the wound, bound it swiftly and expertly with a bandage from the first-aid kit, and made a sling out of the rag. ‘Good as new,’ he said.

But as he tied the sling, he could feel that despite the warmth of the night, Nelson was shivering.

Mallory said, very quiet, ‘Put out that light and let’s go.’

They crossed a stony track along the back of the beach. Inland, the ground rose steeply. Mallory halted them in a grove of oleanders. ‘Wait here,’ he said. Nelson sat down with a heavy thump.

‘Shut up,’ said Carstairs, too loud.

Silence fell: a silence full of the rustle of the breeze in the oleanders, and the trill of the cicadas, and the small crunch of the surf on the shore.

And German voices, talking, from the next beach.

It was just the chatting of sentries bored by a long night duty. But it ran a bristle of small hairs up Nelson’s spine. And suddenly the silence of the group was not just six people keeping quiet, but a sort of frozen hole in the middle of the night noises. He felt sick, with burning petrol, and his shipmates gone, and a nauseating pain in his arm, and poor old Dawks chucked in the sea. And now he was mixed up in God knew what with a bunch of bandits, in enemy territory. He had signed up for the Navy, not the bleeding Commandos. What he wanted now was a nice POW camp, not to get shot out of hand for raiding enemy territory with the skipper and these four hard nuts …

These two hard nuts.

As Nelson counted the heads against the sky, he saw that in the middle of the silence – quieter than the silence itself, in fact – the big one and the thin one had vanished.

Mallory and Andrea went quickly down the track, one either side. They moved quiet as shadows, stooping to avoid the tell-tale flick of a silhouette against the sky. Their packs were with Miller in the oleanders. They carried knives and Schmeissers, and the knowledge that if they used either they were dead, and the mission was finished.

As he trotted on, part of Mallory’s mind was chewing at the problems of the mission. There were several ways of adding up a fire at sea, a cut-up rubber dinghy, a dead British matlow and a drowned German sentry. Some of them were innocent – a survivor of the wreck, a fight in the shallows. Others were not. The rubber boat was a type used in aircraft, not MTBs. Why would a guard drown, having fractured a British seaman’s skull? Anyone with any brains was going to bump into these questions, particularly on an island as sleepy as Kynthos. Perhaps in a couple of Wehrmacht platoons, there would not be too many brains.

But from Mallory’s experience, there would be brains in plenty: thorough, inquisitive, fine-slicing brains …

Speed was what was needed.

They had rounded a headland. There was a low, regular lump that might have been an observation post. They skirted it to the rear, and found the road improving, running round the back of a half-mile beach of pale sand washed with the drowsy roar of the small surf. Behind the beach, an untidy huddle of rectilinear blocks gleamed white in the starlight. Houses. Parmatia.

They moved inland, through a belt of scrub and onto a valley floor tiled with little gardens and lemon groves. A couple of dogs barked lazily as they passed. The air was warm and still.

Mavrocordato Street was a long jumble of small farms and sheds. Number three was shuttered up tight against the sickly influences of the night air. Round the back, a shutter stood open. Andrea and Mallory took a last look over the dark plain. Then Andrea went in through the window.

If Miller had not been Miller, he would have been getting bored. Instead, once he had closed the cut in Nelson’s forearm with a neat line of stitches he had propped his head on his pack, felt a large regret that in their present circumstances it was not possible to light a cigarette, and closed his eyes. Not that he was asleep. It was merely that Miller was a man who hated unnecessary effort. In the darkness of the rocks, the only thing you got from a visual inspection of your surroundings was eye-ache. Also, by closing your eyes you gave your ears the best possible chance. He lay there, and sorted the sounds of the night: breeze in the leaves, the rustle of the sea, cicadas, the small click of a beetle rolling a pebble, the breathing of Wills and Nelson and Carstairs –

No breathing from Carstairs.

Carstairs had gone.

Carstairs had gone God knew where.

Miller was a gambler. Before the war, he had spent much of his life in the weighing of odds. Since he had been mixed up with Mallory and Andrea, not much had changed, except that the consequences of losing a bet had become more deadly. And even in the old days, the kind of people Miller had played poker with were not the kind of people you welshed on and lived.

So Miller weighed up the odds. Carstairs was reputed to know what he was doing. Miller was a corporal, Carstairs was a captain, running his own show under the Admiral.

Carstairs was on his own.

Mallory waited outside the window in a horrible silence, the dreary silence of the hours before the dawn, when nature is at its lowest ebb and sleep most closely approximates to death. His finger rested on the trigger of his Schmeisser. He tested the night sounds, found nothing amiss. He was a soldier, Mallory, and a mountaineer, a man not given to fantasy or speculation. But once again he felt the tightness in his stomach he had felt on the way out of the armoury in Plymouth. This warm world that smelt of farms lay under the shadow of death –

The shutter creaked faintly. Andrea’s voice said, ‘Come.’

Mallory found himself in a cool room that smelt of scrubbed floors and old wine. The shutter closed, and there were fumbling sounds, as if someone was draping the window with a cloth. A match scraped, and a mantle flared and began to glow. The person who had lit it was small, with a hood over his head and a long, Bedouin sort of robe. ‘Achilles?’ said Mallory.

‘Achilles is dead,’ said Andrea. ‘The partisans have blown up the road. The Germans took reprisals. One hundred and thirty-one people were killed in the square on Saturday. Achilles was one of them.’

Mallory said nothing. If there was no road, it would be hard to get the Thunderbolt force across the mountains even if there were no wounded. With wounded, it would be next to impossible –

‘I will take you,’ said their host, and swept back the hood of the robe. Swept it back from a tangled mass of black hair, and a smooth face with a straight nose and big, black eyes that glowed with tears and fury.

‘This,’ said Andrea, ‘is Clytemnestra. She was the sister of Achilles.’

‘For twenty-three years,’ said the woman. ‘Twenty-three years, and two months, and three days, and four hours, before those pigs … those worse than pigs’ – here she plunged into a machine-gun rattle of abuse in a dialect that Mallory recognized from his months in the White Mountains in Crete – ‘saw fit to take him away and murder him.’ She pulled a wine bottle and some glasses out of a worm-eaten cupboard. ‘But we are together,’ she said. ‘We will be together again. Together, we will take you across the mountains.’ She sloshed wine into the glasses.

‘You know the paths,’ said Andrea.

‘Of course I know,’ she said. ‘And if I do not know, then my brother Achilles will walk at my side, and show me.’

They drank in silence. Mallory heard the glass rattle against her teeth. Too wild, thought Mallory. He made his voice calm and level, the voice of a policeman at the scene of an accident. ‘Could you bear to tell me what’s been going on, this past week?’

She did not look up. ‘The more people who know, the better,’ she said. ‘It should be carved in letters four feet high on the cliff of the Acropolis, so people can see – ‘ She caught Andrea’s eye. Then her head bowed again, and she took his mighty hand, and for some time could not speak.

After a little while, she dried her eyes on her rusty black shirt and took a deep breath. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

‘There is nothing to forgive,’ said Andrea, and the slow fire in his eyes kindled hers, and she nodded. ‘Tell us, and we will avenge your brother.’

‘Achilles was a farmer,’ she said. ‘A farmer and a policeman. There were half-a-dozen men in the mountains, klephts, thieves, what have you. We all on this island hate the Germans, we do what we can to make their lives awkward, in small ways, you understand. But these klephts in the mountains, they were always causing trouble. For their own pleasure, not Greece’s freedom. They stole Iannis’s wine, and Spiro’s sheep, and they raped poor Athene, and every man’s hand was against them, because they were bandits, not fighters. Then last Monday they tried to steal a German patrol truck, and they were drunk, so they made a mess of it and one of them got killed.’ Her head dropped.

‘Steady,’ said Andrea, squeezing her hand.

She nodded, pushing the hair out of her eyes. ‘So on Tuesday there arrived many aeroplanes at the aerodrome, with many soldiers. And the word went round the island that from now on it was a new world, with no mercy. But these klephts either did not hear or did not want to hear. So in revenge for the killing of their man they planted a big charge of explosive at a place where the cliff overhangs the road to Antikynthos and the Acropolis, the only road, you understand.’ Mallory nodded. He understood all too well. ‘And they blew the cliff down on to the road. Nobody was passing, of course.’ Here she looked disappointed. ‘But these new soldiers came, and they climbed over the rubble. They had a new kind of uniform, mottled-looking, like the sun in an olive grove. There was one man, with a crooked face and very pale eyes, the officer. He took one person for every metre of road destroyed, he said.’ The tears were running again. ‘One hundred and thirty-one people, men, women, children, it didn’t matter. The women and children he machine-gunned. The men he hanged.’ She fell silent.

Mallory left her in peace for a couple of minutes. Then he said, ‘And the partisans?’

‘They left the island the night before the hangings. Saturday. They stole Kallikratides’ boat, and went away, who knows where, who cares? They left a note saying it was a tactical withdrawal. But we know that they were frightened that someone would catch them, us or that man Wolf, it didn’t matter – ‘

‘Wolf?’ said Mallory.

‘That’s this officer’s name. Dieter Wolf, they call him, may he rot in hell. He hanged Kallikratides, too. With his own hands.’

‘The same Dieter Wolf?’ said Andrea.

‘Sounds like it.’

Andrea nodded, heavily. In his mind he could see a village in the white mountains of Crete, dry mountains, full of the song of grasshoppers and the smell of the herbs the peasants plucked from the wild plants to eat with their lamb. But today there was another smell wafting across the ravine. The smell of smoke, the black plume that rose from the caved-in roof of the village church. The church into which a Sonderkommando had driven the women and children of the village; the church to which they had then set fire. All this because one of the patriarchs of the village had shot with his old shotgun one of the Sonderkommando he had found in the act of raping his daughter …

Andrea and Mallory had lain in cover across the unbridged ravine that separated them from the village. They had arrived too late. In the shaking disc of his field glasses an officer stood: a man in scuffed jackboots, with a white, crooked face and no hair, cleaning a knife. Later, they discovered why the knife had needed cleaning, when they found a grandfather disembowelled by the roadside. Even at this range, the officer’s eyes caught the sun pale and opaque, like slits of brushed aluminium. Then he and his troops had boarded their armoured personnel carriers and roared away down the road to Iraklion.

Andrea had found out that this man was Dieter Wolf, and promised himself and the dead of that village that he would have his revenge.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘God is very good.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It will be getting light,’ he said.

‘I will get dressed,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Then I will show you across the mountains.’

She went. Doors slammed. Mallory poured Andrea a glass of wine, drank one himself, lit a cigarette.

According to Lieutenant Robinson in the bunker at Plymouth, Kynthos was a soft target. But if Dieter Wolf was here taking reprisals, that meant only one thing. Cambridge don or not, Robinson had been wrong.

He ground out his cigarette and tossed the butt into the stove. The door opened. Clytemnestra was wearing baggy black breeches, soft leather boots, a fringed shawl at her waist, a worn embroidered waistcoat lined with sheepskin over her black shirt. Her hair was bound into a black silk scarf. She looked dull, crow-black, a thing of the shadows. Only her eyes were alive, burning –

There was a thunderous knocking at the door. She shooed Andrea and Mallory on to the stairs. ‘Coming, coming,’ she said, and opened up.

Andrea’s world was keyhole-shaped. He could see very little, and his breathing was deafening in his ears. The kitchen seemed to have filled with people. There was silence, except for the shuffle of boots on tiles: not jackboots, though; boots with unnailed soles. The talk broke like a wave; a Greek wave. Despite all the noise, there were only two visitors.

‘Be quiet, be quiet!’ cried Clytemnestra. ‘Please!’ She seemed to be a woman people listened to. Silence fell. ‘Now. Ladas, what is it?’

‘There was this man,’ said Ladas. ‘Iannis the Nose saw him. He was snooping in the square, looking into cars, windows, you name it. Dressed in a soldier’s uniform. Not a German uniform: British, maybe, Greek, who knows? Straight away we thought, the partisans are back. And you may call us cowards, but you know yourself they were no better than thieves, and my poor Olympia that they shot … for a victory perhaps it might be worth losing a sister, but for those damned thieves of partisans, those Kommunisti bastards, never, God’s curse on – ‘

‘You are right,’ said Clytemnestra, soothingly, without impatience. ‘Tell me more about this man, in whom I must tell you I do not believe.’

‘He has curly hair and a thin moustache, so thin, like a worm on his lip. He carries a rifle, many grenades. When he saw me I thought he would shoot. But he vanished only, into the dark, like a ghost.’

‘Perhaps he is a ghost.’

Ladas scowled so that his mighty eyebrows nearly met his mighty moustache. He did not look like a man who believed in ghosts. ‘You know this town,’ he said. ‘It is full of spies. If a spy says to this German pig, “I have seen a ghost”, this German pig will kill people until the ghost comes to life. What can we do?’

‘Watch and pray until the ghost goes away.’

‘How can you know?’

‘This can only be a ghost. This is the way you deal with ghosts.’

There was a silence. The man with Ladas had a heavy, stupid face with small, suspicious eyes. He looked like a man who might believe in ghosts. He said, ‘She is wearing her clothes.’

‘Yes,’ said Ladas. ‘You are wearing your clothes.’

Clytemnestra looked drawn and weary. ‘When you have no man in the house,’ she said, ‘you must take the sheep to the mountain yourself. And it will soon be dawn. Now back to your beds. Some of us have work to do, even if you want to run around in the dark squeaking of ghosts.’

They left.

Clytemnestra opened the stairs door. ‘What is this?’ she said. ‘Who is in the village?’

‘Hard to say,’ said Mallory. But he knew. It was Carstairs, of course. There were things he needed to say to Carstairs. ‘It will soon be light,’ he said.

Outside, the air smelt sharp and fresh. The sky over the mountains was still deep blue and thick with stars, but low down, towards the peaks, the blue was paling.

‘This man,’ said Andrea to Clytemnestra. ‘He is one of our people.’

She walked fast through a maze of paths that wound among the gardens. ‘Then you should control him,’ she said. ‘Why is he wandering in the village like a madman? He will get people killed.’ They walked on in silence.

Something was worrying Mallory. ‘And you,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be with us. We are soldiers, in uniform. We have no connection with you. There will be no reprisals. But if they find you with us – ‘

‘If I don’t come with you, how will you find your way across the mountains?’

‘We have maps.’

She laughed, a large, scornful laugh that sent a couple of doves flapping from their roost. ‘Use them to roll cigarettes,’ she said. ‘If you use the tracks you will see on them, the Germans will find you. They have the same maps – ‘

‘Hush,’ said Mallory.

They were on the road through the dunes, approaching the southern end of the beach.

‘Down!’ said Andrea. A figure stood suddenly outlined against the paling sky. Its head was blocky with a coal-scuttle helmet, its shoulders tense over its rifle. ‘Wer da?’ it said.

Mallory’s breath was loud in his ears as he lay face down in the dunes. Andrea was at his side. Mallory knew what he would be thinking, because he was thinking it himself. The pre-dawn was quiet. The cocking lever of the Schmeisser would sound like a train crash. One shot, and it would all be over …

Clytemnestra walked forward, hips swaying insolently. ‘Who wants to know?’ she said, in Greek. ‘What murdering son of a whore comes to my home and gets between me and my work?’

‘Vas?’ said the soldier.

‘I looking for my sheeps,’ said Clytemnestra, in terrible German.

The soldier stood undecided. Mallory could not work out whether he had seen them. Beside him, Andrea sighted on the place under the man’s left shoulder blade where he would drive the knife. He put one mighty palm on the gritty soil, tensed his legs to spring –

‘Go on, then,’ said the soldier.

‘I evacuate my bowels on your mother’s grave,’ said Clytemnestra, in Greek. ‘I dig up her remains and feed them to my pigs, who vomit.’

‘Nice meeting you,’ said the German, in German, and stamped back down the beach.

Mallory took his hand away from the cocking lever. The palm was wet with sweat. He and Andrea rose from cover. After that, they marched in silence.

As they turned up the track behind the beach, Andrea said, ‘Wait.’

They waited.

Ahead, over the noise of the cicadas, there came the sound of a stone rolling under a boot.

‘Three minutes,’ said Andrea’s huge, purring whisper by Mallory’s ear. Then, silent as a shadow, he was gone.

The path unreeled under Andrea’s boots as he ran. He could feel the blood taking the power around his body, the thing that made him not a man in the grey pre-dawn, but a hunting animal closing with its prey. He saw the figure ahead, clambering up the path. He was alone, moving probably quite fast, but to Andrea slow and clumsy.

Andrea looked around him with that special radar of his. He sensed the town, Mallory and Clytemnestra behind him, the German soldiers on the beach, the two corpses in the surf, the little party ahead.

He sprang.

A great hard hand went over the mouth. The other hand went to the nape of the neck. He began the pull sideways to dislocate the vertebrae.

It was the smell that stopped him.

It was the smell of hair oil; a hair oil that Andrea had smelt before, on the MTB, in the dinghy, tonight. A powerful smell, sickly even by Greek standards. Expensive.

The smell of Captain Carstairs.

Andrea decided not to break the neck, after all. Instead he kept a hand over the mouth, and said, ‘No noise, or you die.’ Then he waited for Mallory.

So Miller lay with his eyes closed, devoting himself to analysis of the night sounds.

He heard Carstairs coming up the path, and rolled to his feet, Schmeisser in hand. Then he heard Andrea’s attack. After the brief scuffle came the brief bleep of a Scops owl. Mallory’s signal. Miller let out a long breath as three dark figures arrived in the camp.

‘All right,’ said Mallory’s voice. ‘Moving out.’

‘Where to?’ said Miller.

‘Germans on the beach,’ said Mallory. ‘Silence.’

Wills was already upright. Nelson’s cut had stiffened, and he needed some persuading. ‘Hurts,’ he said, whining.

‘Up,’ said Wills. ‘Show a leg.’

Grumbling, Nelson got up. Then they were slinging packs and weapons, starting up a steep, stony path among the bushes. And very soon the path was so steep that there was no spare energy even for wondering, or indeed doing anything except keeping the feet moving and the breath rasping and the heart beating. All the time, the sky in the east grew lighter.

FOUR

Wednesday 0600-1800

Just after six o’clock, the sun hauled itself over the mountain. ‘Stop now,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘We eat.’

They slumped to the hot, stony ground and started fumbling for cigarettes and chocolate. They were on a ledge, a bare shelf of rock made by a crack that ran across a great cliff that seemed to rise sheer from the sea. Nelson said, ‘Water.’ Miller passed him his canteen. The seaman drank avidly, water spilling down his face and on to his shirt. Miller twitched the water bottle out of his hand.

‘Sod that,’ said Nelson. ‘I’ve got a mouf like a bleeding lime kiln.’

‘We all have,’ said Miller. He pulled a cigarette from his packet and lit it with a Zippo. He had been a Long Range Desert Group man, doing damage behind enemy lines in the Western Desert. Water was more important than petrol, which was more important than motherhood, religion and the gold standard. ‘You drink in the morning and at night. Drink in the day, you just sweat it right out again. Now let’s have a look at your arm.’

Nelson would not let him. His face was bluish and hostile under his sweat-matted red hair. “S all right,’ he said, and fell back into a sullen silence.

Wills said, in his odd, marble-mouthed voice, ‘Pull yourself together, man.’ But Nelson would not meet his eye.

In daylight, Wills was a mess. He had no eyebrows, and no hair on the front part of his head. His skin shone with tannic acid jelly, and there was a great bruise on his right temple. As he looked out over the blue void of the sea, his eyes were glassy and his hand trembled. Mallory guessed that he was thinking about his ship. He offered him a slab of chocolate and a wedge of the bread they had brought from Mavrocordato Street. Wills shook his head.

‘Sorry about your ship,’ said Mallory.

Wills made a face that made him look ridiculously young. ‘Poor chaps,’ he said.

‘First command?’ said Mallory.

Wills nodded. There were tears in his eyes.

‘Can you go on?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good man.’

‘Don’t worry about Nelson,’ said Wills. ‘Top-hole chap.’

Mallory nodded. Loyalty to your men was a good thing. He just hoped that it was a two-way process.

Carstairs was sitting off to one side, by himself. There was dust in his greasy curls, and his eyebrow moustache was distorted by a wet red graze. ‘How are you doing?’ said Mallory.

‘Fine,’ he said, very curt.

‘I want you to stay close,’ said Mallory. ‘You could get hurt.’

‘Now you look here,’ said Carstairs, as if he was talking to a taxi driver who had taken him to the wrong street in Mayfair. ‘This is not the first time I’ve been behind enemy lines. Believe it or not, I am capable of looking after myself. And if you have any worries on that score, I suggest you cast your mind back to Admiral Dixon and the briefing. It is none of your damn business whether I get hurt or not.’

Mallory smiled, a peaceful white smile. ‘How’s your neck?’ he said.

Carstairs’ face filled with sullen blood.

‘Listen,’ said Mallory, ‘it’s my job to look after my men, and avoid reprisals against the islanders. So any time you want to do a little freelance snooping around the civilian population, I should be grateful if you would talk to me first.’

‘Ask your permission?’ he said. ‘Go to hell.’

‘Liaise,’ said Mallory.

‘Go to hell.’

Mallory was not smiling any more. He said, ‘Admiral Dixon is a long way away. You nearly had a nasty accident with Colonel Andrea. You are lucky to be alive. Think about it.’

Carstairs thought about it. ‘Where is Andrea?’ he said.

‘Sentry duty,’ said Mallory.

‘A colonel’s work is never done,’ said Carstairs, and smiled a superior smile.

‘So what were you doing in the village?’

‘I was looking for transport,’ said Carstairs. ‘Not that it’s any affair of yours.’

‘Transport where?’

‘To the Acropolis.’

Mallory pointed to his boots. ‘You’re looking at it.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The partisans blew up the road.’

‘Fine,’ said Carstairs. He grinned, suddenly. ‘I should have asked. Saved myself a stiff neck.’

Mallory nodded. It was nearly an apology. ‘All comes out in the wash,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Five more minutes, gentlemen. Make the most of them.’

The ledge where they had paused was in dead ground. But from Andrea’s vantage point above and to the side, he could see the beach where they had landed, and the bay of Parmatia, and the white town spread out like a map below.

Things were happening down there.

As he watched, three field-grey lorries moved out of the town and along the road behind the bay. For a moment they were hidden from view. When they came out, there were only two lorries. They halted at the landing beach. Ant-like figures spilled out, clotted into groups at the waterside.

It looked very much as if someone had found the bodies of Dawkins and the sentry. And the third lorryload of soldiers might have stopped to look for seashells.

Then again, they might have decided to start up the track into the mountains.

That might or might not be dangerous. As an army the Wehrmacht were fine soldiers. As individuals, a lot of them were conscripts, and a lot of them were going through the motions, waiting till it was time to go home, win or lose.

The Sonderkommando were different. The Wehrmacht felt a sort of horrified scorn for Dieter Wolf and his men. They were volunteers, hand-picked for fitness, ruthlessness and cunning – soldiers who loved killing for killing’s sake, particularly when it was seasoned with plenty of rape, loot and torture. Dieter Wolf was the nearest thing the Nazis had to a special forces leader. He was a known intimate of the lengendary Otto Skorzeny. The presence of his Sonderkommando on the island meant two things.

One, the Germans had no desire to be interrupted in whatever they were doing in the Acropolis.

And two, these mountains would soon be swarming with soldiers.

When Andrea went back to the ledge, the rest of the party was already upright. Wills put out a hand to steady himself, missed the rock, and sprawled in the dust. Carstairs raised an eyebrow. Miller helped him back on to his feet. His eyes seemed to be looking in different directions. ‘Sorry,’ he said, in that voice that sounded as if there were marbles in his mouth. Concussion, thought Miller. How would you understand an Englishman with concussion?

‘Up,’ said Clytemnestra. She kicked her boot-toe on to a small ledge, hoisted herself upwards and disappeared. The party followed; all except Nelson.

Nelson stayed at the bottom, shaking his head, shoulders bowed. He had a mop of red hair, white skin, a face flushed and sulky. Andrea, the rearguard, said, ‘You want help?’

‘My arm hurts,’ said Nelson.

‘Everybody hurts,’ said Andrea. ‘If we don’t walk, we get hurt worse.’

‘I’m not a commando,’ said Nelson. ‘I’m a bleeding matlow. What am I doing running around on cliffs like a poxy goat?’

‘Your duty,’ said Andrea. Gentle as a mother with a child he picked him up, and put him on the first step of the path. Nelson looked white-faced over his shoulder and downwards. Then he started climbing, using both feet and both hands. It struck Andrea that a man who could climb with such vigour might not have very much wrong with his arm at all.

All morning they climbed, at first on steep sea-cliffs, and then in a tangle of ridges and small valleys grown with scrub. By eleven o’clock they were five thousand feet above sea level, in a little valley of juniper and holm oak. Goats wandered among the boulders, their bells clonking mournfully. The men walked heavily. mouths parched, tormented by the small gurgle of the stream in the valley’s bed. ‘Too hot,’ said Clytemnestra, wiping sweat from her forehead. ‘We’ll rest here three hours.’ She led them on to a ledge overlooking the valley, and pushed aside a huge old rosemary bush. Behind the bush was the dark entrance of a cave.

Mallory was impatient to be pushing on. But he could see that Wills was just about done up. All of them could do with a rest: eight hours, never mind three.

Patience.

Carstairs had the map out. The mountains here formed ridges that spread from the central plateau like the fingers of a right hand. They had climbed from the beach between the first and second fingers, and crossed the ridge to the valley between the second and the ring fingers. Beyond the next ridge, between the ring finger and the little finger, the road ran. It was here (Clytemnestra said, pointing) that the partisans had blown the cliff down on to the road and blocked it solid.

Carstairs offered to stand sentry. Mallory settled down in the corner of the cave next to Miller and lit a cigarette to drive off the stink of goat dung.

‘Nice place,’ said Miller. ‘Reminds me of a boarding house I used to use in San Francisco.’

‘The carpet, you mean?’ said Mallory.

‘That and the fleas.’ Mallory’s eyes were closing. ‘I’ll do it,’ said Miller.

‘Yes.’ Mallory was asleep.

They both knew that what Miller had been talking about was keeping an eye on Carstairs.

So Miller sat and smoked. Andrea and Mallory snored, Wills fell into a sort of twitching stupor, and Nelson curled into a ball. As for Clytemnestra, she had gone into another compartment of the cave, and it was impossible to tell whether she was asleep or awake, though now he came to think of it, Miller could not imagine her asleep.

After about half an hour, Miller got quietly to his feet and crept to the mouth of the cave.

Carstairs had taken up position in the ruined walls of a hut further up the ledge, commanding a view of the entrance to the valley and the ridge opposite. It was a good place to see without being seen. Miller walked up to it quietly. The valley shimmered in the heat, and a lizard scuttled away over a stone. Inside the shadows of the ruin, Carstairs made no sound. Miller went to the door, and looked in.

Carstairs was gone.

Miller stood quite still, thinking. There could be reasons. Went behind a rock, Miller told himself; call of nature. But even as he had those thoughts his binoculars were out, and he was scanning the valley, rocks, trees, a goat dragging at a branch with its teeth –

There.

High on the ridge opposite, a small, khaki figure was toiling towards the crest, rifle over its shoulder. Miller lowered the glasses. For a moment he considered giving chase. But the ridge was steep, and God knew what lay beyond, and Miller was no mountaineer.

He went back to the cave and pressed Mallory’s hand. The New Zealander’s eyes snapped open.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Miller. ‘Carstairs gone.’

Mallory said, ‘Take guard.’ Then he slung over his shoulder his Schmeisser and a coil of silk rope, and went out at a fast lope.

Miller watched the rangy khaki figure jog into the bottom of the valley, step from boulder to rickety boulder with the casual stride of a man taking a morning stroll. A speck in the air caught Miller’s eye; an eagle soaring on a column of hot air. He watched it idly for a minute or so. When his eye returned to Mallory, he was surprised to see him already at the far side of the valley. Miller put the glasses on him, saw him come to the bottom of a cliff that anyone short of a fly would have walked around. But Mallory put his hands on it and went up it without fuss or difficulty, as if lighter than air. Miller propped himself against a rock, checked his weapon and lit a cigarette. As befits one who understands demolition, beneath his leathery exterior he was a sensitive man. He felt a sort of distant pity for anyone on the wrong end of that pursuit.

Even Carstairs.

Out of the shadow of the cave, it was hot; hot enough to swell Mallory’s tongue in his head and bring the sweat rolling down the creases at the corners of his eyes and down his hollow cheeks. The air in the valley hung still and heavy, full of the smell of thyme and baking stone, and the cigarettes Mallory had smoked all these days and nights and weeks of bad food and snatched sleep.

At first his head felt sore and out of step with the world. But after a couple of minutes he got his mind fixed on Carstairs. Carstairs taking off on his own, with a long-range weapon. Carstairs was a dirty little mystery who needed solving before he blew the mission.

So Mallory hitched up his Schmeisser and trotted across the bottom of the valley, and went straight up the cliff on the far side, feeling the life return to his fingers and back and legs as he shifted from hold to hold on the firm, warm rock. Within half an hour he was standing on the crest of the ridge: not on top, where someone could see him, but below the skyline, in the little puddle of shade at the foot of a boulder. Here he pulled out his binoculars.

It took ten patient minutes of searching that wilderness of rock and scrub before he saw the little flicker of movement: a man, moving at a steady, plodding walk towards a range of low ridges in the distance. Khaki battledress, slung rifle. Carstairs.

Mallory started after him.

The Englishman was not more than twenty minutes ahead. Not even a mile, in this terrain. Steadily, Mallory wore down his lead.

They crossed a couple of low spurs of hill. Mallory checked his compass, and pulled the map out of his blouse pocket. After an hour and a quarter, the ground dipped sharply. Ahead, Carstairs flicked into shadow, and became invisible. Mallory was not worried. He knew where his man was heading.

What he did not know was why. He brushed through a fringe of scrub, and stopped dead.

In front of him there was no more ground. Beyond the lip of the cliff was a deep gulf of air, in which swallows hawked and swooped, and beyond that, the vast blue void of the sea. He lay down, and peered over the edge. He was looking down a three- thousand-foot precipice. Somewhere far below, hidden by overhangs, the sea muttered at the island’s rocky skirts. A thousand feet below, the swoop of the cliff was interrupted by a flat platform of rock that ran along it like a step. It was fifty yards wide, this step, its outside edge scattered with wind-blasted shrubs, its inside blurred with the rock falls of centuries.

Vertically below Mallory’s eyes, a green fur of trees grew on a glacis of rubble. To his right, the glacis was huge, extending most of the way up the thousand-odd feet of the cliff, new and raw, blocking the shelf completely.

Along the shelf there snaked the white ribbon of the road, vanishing into the great cone of rubble. This must be what was left of the overhang the partisans had blasted down to cut the island in half.

It was not going to stay cut long. The sound of diesel engines clattered up to Mallory’s ears. Round the bulge of the landslide, there ran a pale band of levelled and compacted rock. As Mallory watched, a mechanical digger trundled round and deposited a load of rubble into what might have been a hole. It looked very much as if the road was nearly open again.

And Mallory was not the only one who thought that way. At the foot of the slide stood a little queue of vehicles: a horse and cart, three German army trucks, and a field ambulance, the red cross on its roof shimmering in the heat. A small knot of men sat in the shade of a little stand of pines.

And a couple of hundred feet down the cliff, masked from the vehicles by a buttress the size of a cathedral tower, a little khaki figure dangling like a spider on a thread.

Carstairs, descending.

Mallory watched him for a moment, weighing the odds. Let him go, catch him. Shoot him. Shooting him was the option he would have preferred, just now. But the Admiral was Jensen’s superior officer. Shooting involved noise, which would attract attention, and besides, he was well out of Schmeisser range. Shooting was just a beautiful dream.

Mallory moved in dead ground to the top of the buttress. Carstairs had doubled his rope around a natural fin of rock. Mallory pinched the ropes together and tied a constrictor knot around the pair. If Carstairs wanted to pull the rope down so he could descend further, he was in for a disappointment.

Mallory looked down. The rope was a white line ruled down the cliff, disappearing at an overhang. Mallory measured out enough of his own rope to reach the overhang. Then he belayed it on a knob of rock, turned his back to the void, and leaped out and down. The pyramid nails of his boots bit once, twice. Then he was by the overhang, holding, looking down.

There was a ledge below, thirty feet wide, running diagonally downwards to the slide area. It was broad enough to have trees on it, and an undergrowth of juniper and caper bushes. The doubled rope terminated in a small area of broken stone. Carstairs was nowhere to be seen.

Mallory went down Carstairs’ rope, braking just before he reached the bottom to avoid the tell-tale crunch of boots. Carstairs had left a flattened trail in the scorched grass by the bushes. Very quietly, Mallory pulled out his knife and followed it.

The ledge followed the curve of the cliff face for fifty yards, wide as a road, sloping towards the ravine floor at an angle of forty-five degrees. Through the head-high scrub Mallory could see grey vehicles, men moving, the red cross on the field ambulance’s roof. He moved on, very stealthy –

‘Don’t move,’ said a voice in his left ear. Something pushed into his left kidney. He knew without looking that it was the barrel of a silenced Browning.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he said.

‘Minding my own business,’ said Carstairs. His immaculate hair was disarranged, and sweat was rolling into his silly moustache. His eyes had a wild, dangerous look.

Mallory said, ‘If you shoot me, you’ll have fifty Germans after

The gun in his kidney did not waver. ‘Why are you following me about?’ he said.

‘Because you were standing sentry and deserted your post.’

‘Don’t be damn silly – ‘

‘You listen here,’ said Mallory. ‘I don’t care how many admirals you are taking your orders from, I am your superior officer by seniority and I would remind you that you are subject to my orders even if you are not directly under my command.’

There was a very faint lessening of pressure. Seventy-five feet below, the red cross on the ambulance roof glowed in the sun.

‘You won’t get through this alone,’ said Mallory. ‘It’s team work, or nothing.’

The pressure of the Browning faded. Mallory watched as Carstairs holstered it and half-turned, performing some operation that made a small, metallic sound, putting something in his pocket. Carstairs nodded, smoothed his hair, gave a rueful film-star smile slightly marred by the scabbing graze on his upper lip. ‘Just thought I’d pop and have a look,’ he said. ‘When I was in the town they said the road would be opening soon. So I thought, well, it’d shorten the journey, know what I mean?’

Mallory had a very good idea of what he meant. But what Carstairs meant had nothing to do with what Carstairs said. ‘We’ll carry on over the mountains,’ he said.

Carstairs shrugged. He bent and picked up his sniper rifle, and started back up the path towards the rope. A dove, disturbed by his passing, clattered out of a holm oak tree. Three more, disturbed by the first, zigzagged away over the road in a kerfuffle of wings. Carstairs and Mallory stood still, holding their breath. For a moment, a thick, pregnant silence hung over the gorge. Then there broke into that silence a voice, giving orders, steady and professional, in German. ‘Schmidt,’ it said. ‘Take two men and get on to that ledge and see what’s going on.’

Mallory and Carstairs turned and ran. ‘Go,’ said Mallory, when they reached the bottom of the rope.

Carstairs grabbed hold and went up, kicking his feet into the rock, making a lot of noise about it, Mallory thought as he unslung his Schmeisser, but travelling at commendable speed. When Carstairs got to the overhang, Mallory shouted, ‘Cover me!’ turned and gripped the rope, and started to walk the wall.

The rock was coarse and pitted, so it took no more than a couple of minutes to reach the base of the overhang. German shouts came from below. Mallory decided that this was one of those occasions when speed was more important than technique. He went over the overhang hands only, expecting to find Carstairs waiting, covering the cliff base, ready to open fire. But Carstairs had not bothered to wait: look after number one was Carstairs’ motto. He was a pair of bootsoles half-way up the cliff. Even as Mallory glanced up, a rifle banged down below, and a bullet kicked chips from the wall by Carstairs’ shoulder. The fixed rope was taut over the overhang. A German was coming up. Mallory pulled the pin from a grenade, let the lever spring back and counted to three, listening to the fizz of the internal fuse. On four, he tossed the grenade over the edge.

The sound of the airburst rolled around the hard faces of the cliff. The rope slackened suddenly. There were screams. Mallory tossed another grenade, five seconds this time, and started up his own rope. By the time he heard the flat bang from the ledge, he was half-way up. Someone was firing down there. He could hear the bullets strike, wild and far away. He found a perch, pulled another grenade out of his pouch, hauled the pin out with his teeth, and let it rattle down behind him. There was traffic manoeuvring in front of the landslip. They would be trying to get some vehicle- mounted weapons to bear. Bang, said the grenade. No sound from above. He was at the top.

Carstairs was hauling in his rope, coiling it. He glanced at Mallory, completed his coil, and started away uphill. Mallory caught him.

‘I said cover me,’ he said.

Carstairs cocked an eyebrow. ‘Didn’t hear,’ he said.

‘We’ve got to show ourselves.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

Mallory found that his Schmeisser was in his hands, pointed at the ground between him and Carstairs. ‘We need to show them it’s an Allied operation. Not partisans. In case of reprisals.’

‘Oh for God’s sake – ‘

‘If you disobey a direct order I shall regard it as a mutinous act.’

Carstairs saw in Mallory’s face what that meant. He flinched as if he had received a smack in the teeth. He laughed, a weak laugh. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I … oh, if you say so.’

Mallory took him along the clifftop in dead ground. Above the slide, he went to the edge of the cliff. The vehicles were still below. The men had gone: taking cover. Mallory stood up, dragging Carstairs with him. ‘Allied regular troops!’ he roared, in English and German. Then he threw his last grenade into the void and stepped back. A storm of machine-gun fire tore the air where they had been standing.

‘Now move,’ said Mallory, and started back the way they had come.

They were in trouble. The element of surprise was gone. If that had been Wehrmacht down there, it was big trouble. If it was Dieter Wolf’s Sonderkommando, it was big, big trouble.

Whatever shape the trouble came in, there was no doubt who lay at the root of it.

Carstairs.

They got over the top of the first ridge without being shot at, trotted into the valley beyond and scaled the far side. As Mallory went up the last low cliff to the summit, a bullet cracked by his ear. A rock by his right hand exploded into stinging chips. The ridge was there, knife-sharp against the blue sky. He jumped for it and hauled himself over. As he lay in cover to calm his breath, a burst of machine-gun fire pulverized the top six inches of the rock plates behind which he lay. Carstairs was beside him, spitting out powdered stone.

‘Give me the rifle,’ said Mallory. ‘Go and tell the rest of them.’

Carstairs said, ‘Oh, really.’ Then perhaps he remembered the conversation in the dead ground above the cliff, or perhaps he saw the look in Mallory’s eye. Whichever the case, he handed over the rifle and ran.

Mallory moved fifty yards below the skyline, resurfacing in a notch between two boulders, and rested the fore end of the Mauser on the ground in front of him. He snapped the guards off the telescopic sight, took a couple of deep breaths, and cuddled the butt to his shoulder. Into the disc of the sight floated rocks, low, dark-green bushes. The disc settled. And across it jogged a figure in field-grey uniform, coal-scuttle helmet, Schmeisser held across the body.

Mallory put the cross hairs on the centre of the chest and squeezed the trigger. The Mauser bucked. The grey figure flung its arms out and slammed backwards into the rocks. Behind it, Mallory saw the quick, dancing flicker of a machine-gun’s muzzle flash, heard the crash and whine of the rounds smacking rock. He paid no attention. His eye was back on the sight, and he was searching among the rocks, finding the grey cobblestones of the Spandau crew’s helmets. The machine gun opened up again. Mallory could just see the dark upright of the loader’s jackboot as he knelt by the weapon. He raised the sight a couple of clicks. Then he shot the man just below the knee. The gunner turned his face. Mallory shot him in the side of the head, and transferred his attention to the men advancing across the notched and rock-strewn plain –

There were no men. On the grey, ridged valley floor nothing moved but the bushes, fretted by the small wind from the sea.

Mallory began to crawl backwards, knees and elbows, behind the cover of the ridge. Once in cover, he doubled under the lee of the rocks. A Wehrmacht garrison would have been ragged and dull-edged. The men in cover looked sharp and well-disciplined. Behind the smell of thyme and rosemary and his own sweat, he seemed to detect the keen, ugly whiff of Dieter Wolf.

He went back to the ridge. A figure moved over to the right, out of the ground, over a rock, back into cover, fast as a rabbit. He sent a Mauser round after it, heard the whine of the ricochet. Missed. He slung the rifle and ran down the ridge, from stone to stone across the valley floor, hurdled the stream, went up the other side and into the cave.

Carstairs was back. He and the others were waiting, loaded up, ready to go. Mallory glanced in his direction. ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said.

Carstairs’ face turned blank, fish-white. ‘You can’t – ‘

‘Disarm him,’ said Mallory to Miller. Mallory’s Schmeisser just happened to be pointing at Carstairs’ stomach.

Stiff-faced, Miller removed Carstairs’ Browning and knife.

Carstairs said, ‘I didn’t mean – ‘

‘You have jeopardized the operation,’ said Mallory. ‘You will be dealt with later.’ He pulled out a map, beckoned Clytemnestra. ‘We’ve got thirty men after us,’ he said. ‘Where do we go?’ He gave her a pencil.

She drew a line: a tenuous line that zigzagged on to a tight bunch of contours until the contours ceased, giving way to the hatchings of rock faces. ‘We’ll mark the path with piled stones,’ she said.

He put his finger on a narrow white stripe among the contours and hatchings. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

She told him. Then they made a rendezvous, and she led the party out and along the ridge: Wills and Nelson, Wills still dazed- looking and rubber-legged, Nelson scared, sunburned under his carroty thatch, hugging his arm, grey-faced with pain or fear or both, and Miller with his big pack, and Carstairs somewhere between hangdog and arrogant.

‘Get up in those hills,’ said Mallory, handing Miller a copy of the map reference. ‘See you later.’

Miller tilted his head back, looking at the hills. If they were hills, so were the God damned Himalayas, he thought. And soon he was going to be up there, making like the abominable snowman or an eagle or something. Miller was a creature of the American Midwest. His idea of the ideal landscape was a billiard table, flattened out a little.

Take it easy,’ he said to Mallory.

‘We’ll do our best.’ Mallory’s face was set, his eyes remote. He was loading rounds into a Schmeisser magazine, already working on the problem of thirty Germans against two Allied troops who had first to fight a rearguard action and then to complete an operation.

‘We’ll be with you in two hours, maximum,’ he said. ‘If we’re not, you go on.’

Miller turned away, grim-faced. He shouldered his big pack, and set off in the wake of Carstairs, Clytemnestra and the two sailors.

The path led upwards: over the ridge, down the other side, along a little ribbon of flat ground that wove through a great field of boulders, and on to the face of a mountain – hill, Miller told himself, remember it’s only a hill – that if it had been by the seaside you would have called it a cliff.

The sweat ran into Miller’s eyes. The pack straps dug into his shoulders. From below came the hammer and crack of small-arms fire. Mallory and Andrea were busy.

Ahead, Wills stumbled and crashed into a rock. ‘All right,’ he mumbled. ‘All right.’

‘Help him,’ said Miller.

Clytemnestra pulled at his arm. She said, ‘He is too big for me, poor man.’

‘Cap’n Carstairs?’ said Miller.

Carstairs scowled at him. Then, grudgingly, he hauled the sailor’s arm around his neck. ‘Move it,’ he said.

Haltingly, the procession climbed on.

Back by the cave, things were getting complicated.

The Sonderkommando had sneaked up behind the ridge, making maximum use of cover. It had done them very little good. There was always a moment when they were going to be silhouetted against the skyline. They were superior in numbers. But they had no artillery and no mortars, and it did not look as if they ran to air support. While it was small arms against small arms, there was not a lot of progress that could be made against two determined defenders.

So Andrea and Mallory moved from the cave towards the ruined hut, keeping in cover, stopping to snipe at the matchhead-sized helmets that popped over the skyline, but never stopping in the same place twice. The sun was moving across the sky, but it was still hot.

At four thirty-one, there was a pause in the firing on the ridge opposite the cave. Mallory and Andrea were only ten yards apart. They looked at each other, then at the ridge opposite. Nothing moved. For a moment, birds sang, and the breeze blew, and there might have been no war at all. Then something a long way away made a small, flat explosion, and Mallory and Andrea grovelled on the ground, because they knew what that meant.

High in the air, a fleeting black dot came into being, hung for a moment, and fell to the ground thirty yards in front of them. There was a sharp, ear-damaging crump, and shattered stone flew past their ears. Mortar. When Mallory ran between two rocks, a gun opened up with a low, heavy clatter. They had brought up a mortar and re-manned the Spandau, and they were both on the other side of the ridge.

Mallory wiped away the blood that the stinging chips of stone had brought to his forehead. The idea of fighting a pitched battle against a numerically superior enemy with mortars and heavy machine guns was not appealing. But fight they must, to give the rest of the party time to get clear. He crawled to the other end of his line of rocks and fired. The machine gun opened up again. Under cover of its sheet of lead, five field-grey figures bounced out of cover, scuttled across five yards of open ground, and dived out of sight. Another mortar round pitched into the rocks, closer this time.

Andrea shouted. ‘Going, my Keith!’ he roared. It could have been a cry of pain: but Mallory knew it was precisely the opposite. Andrea was out to even the odds.

Andrea went up and over the ridge behind Mallory’s position, ran along it in dead ground for two hundred yards, recrossed the spine, and began to worm his way across the valley floor like a giant lizard. He heard firing and explosions up to his right; Schmeisser fire from Mallory now, the sound of battle, several defenders working hard; or of one man, moving around, making noise and fuss. They were a team, Andrea and Keith Mallory. So far, it was all satisfactory.

The ground had begun to slope uphill. There would be men posted to protect the flanks. Andrea lay still as a stone, moving his head up inch by inch.

Twenty feet to his right, a German soldier was sitting behind a stone, scanning the rocks down the valley.

Andrea allowed his head to sink away. He moved over the ground like a giant shadow, seeking the strips of darkness along the sides of bushes, the lee of small stones. He moved not like a man moving over ground, but like a huge ripple of the ground itself. In four steady minutes, he completed a semicircle. He was looking at the back of a helmet, a tunic with a leather harness, corrugated canisters at the waist, tense shoulders…

Andrea moved forward, silent as a shadow, knife in front of him. There was a brief struggle, without sound. The German made a sharp exhalation. No inhalation followed. Andrea laid the body in the dust, wiped his knife on its tunic, and went with great caution forward over the ridge.

Here he crouched behind a boulder and waited. He heard the whap of the mortar, the explosion on the other side of the valley. He saw the heads of the men around the mortar, the gleam of the sun on the tube of the weapon. And further up, in a nest of rocks on the reverse slope of the ridge, the machine-gunners. He noticed that the arc of fire from the Spandau pit was ahead only, and that apart from the man he had killed, there was nobody protecting the flanks. This must be a hastily-assembled squad, sent up the cliffs in hot pursuit, undermanned and under-equipped …

All this went through his mind in the blink of an eye. During this blink he had wormed through the rocks to the machine-gun pit. The gunner fired a burst at the hill opposite. In Andrea’s mind, the field-grey figures facing Mallory got up, ran forward, flopped down again: advancing.

From cover, Andrea threw three grenades into the mortar pit. Then he unslung his Schmeisser and stood up.

Mallory knew he was in trouble. The Sonderkommando were in Schmeisser range now. The mortar fire had ceased, presumably for fear of scoring own goals. He had laid aside the rifle, and was trying to look three ways at once. Under cover of the last burst of machine-gun fire, the enemy had come within a hundred and twenty feet. He had seen one scuttling away to the right, and up to the left he thought he had seen movement, though he could not swear to it. He was going to find out, though. He settled himself grimly behind the rock, and waited for the Spandau to open up: short burst, to get his head down and signal to the men. Then the longer bursts, the blizzard of metal that would keep his head down while the Sonderkommando swarmed aboard –

The Spandau burped; the short burp. Then there was a huge explosion: bigger than a grenade. It sounded like a lot of mortar bombs going off at once. Hot on the heels of the explosion was a long burst of Schmeisser fire, with screams.

In the silence that followed, he sighted through the crack in the stone wall. He saw the grey helmets rise, squeezed a short burst over the rock. Then the machine gun opened up again, and through the crack he saw the men rise from cover. He waited for the metal rain to start pelting around his ears. The machine gun started its deadly hammer. But the rain did not come.

He put his eye to the sighting cranny.

Down below him, the field-grey figures were up and advancing, but not under a curtain of friendly fire. They had risen into the open at the first burst of the machine gun. And the second burst had whipped not over their heads, but into the thick of them. The rocks below Mallory were strewn with field-grey corpses. To the right, a man was groaning. To the left, movement caught Mallory’s eye. He turned. A camouflage uniform, much stained with new blood, was lurching at him through the rocks. He put a short Schmeisser burst into the helmet. The man went over with a crash.

On the far side of the valley, a figure stood up. Acting on reflex, Mallory went for the rifle. Then he stopped.

It was Andrea.

Andrea walked quickly across the valley and up to the cave. By the time he got there, Mallory had his feet up on a rock and was smoking a cigarette. ‘That was useful,’ he said.

Andrea nodded. He was a superlative craftsman in the art of war, and he had done his job. Mallory gave him a cigarette. He lit it, shouldered his pack, and loped off up the hill. Mallory went after him.

At the top, he looked back at the valley where thirty men had died or run away. The shadows were lengthening towards evening. Evening of the first day. There was nothing to feel good about. The Germans knew there was a British force in the mountains. They did not know it contained two wounded sailors and a man who did not know how to obey orders. They would come looking, and soon.

What had happened in the valley had been a victory. But it had been only one battle in what looked like a very long campaign.

FIVE

Wednesday 1800-Thursday 0300

After the field of stones, the path led on and up. It was not much of a path: more a strip of bare mountainside, marked with stones placed one on another like the little men children put up on beaches to knock down with more stones. As they passed the markers, Mallory kicked them down. It was six o’clock, and the sun was heading for the rock-masses of the western horizon when they reached the top of the slope and found themselves at the base of a cliff.

‘What are we,’ said Andrea. ‘Flies?’

Mallory shook his head. He took a mouthful from his water bottle, and cast left into deep shadow, to a place where the cliff seemed less than vertical. At the base of the slope was one of Clytemnestra’s little stone men.

The slope was not a hill. It was more like the leading edge of the dorsal fin of a fish – a dorsal fin a thousand feet high and three feet wide, made of rotten rock, tapering away into the far distance. Mallory pointed at the map.

‘It’s a ramp,’ he said. ‘A stepladder. Up there, it gets wider.’

‘And then,’ said Andrea, sighing, ‘it gets narrower again.’

He had a point. But the sun was sinking, and this was no time for debates.

They went up.

It was easy climbing. Andrea plodded away, keeping his eyes in front of him, not thinking about the void on either side of the blade of rock – keeping his mind on the far side of the mountains; on the marshes, the Acropolis, how to cross the one and get into the other …

The path was broadening. It became a sort of plateau. Mallory came up behind him, and went ahead to reconnoitre.

From somewhere far away there came a small, remote buzzing.

Andrea found himself a ledge with a bush growing off it, squeezed himself in, and watched, cursing, as evening fell over his beloved country.

To the west, the island fell ridge on ridge to the mottled blue sheet of the sea. The valleys below were blurred with veils of haze, veils tinged faintly with flame-colour and blood-colour, prophesying thé sunset. And above it all, flying out from the high blind cliffs ahead, gleaming silver in that low sun, was an aeroplane.

Mallory watched that plane, too. Ahead of him the ridge threaded across to a maze of cliffs and canyons, cliffs piled on cliffs, and above them the summit of Mount Skaphos. And above the summit cliffs a sky of purest blue, and in that blue the aeroplane. A Fiesler Storch; a slow-flying aeroplane, with an observer. Looking for them.

The Storch banked gently, and began to spiral downwards. It came lower and lower, until from his position in the rocks Mallory could see the pilot’s head, catch the glint of binoculars in the observer’s seat…

He turned his face to the ground, and hoped the bloody thing would go away.

On the mountain shoulder at the far end of the ridge, Miller heard the engines, too. The rendezvous map reference was a cave – no more than an overhang of the cliff, really. Clytemnestra was dozing, Wills muttering in a half-sleep, Nelson sitting with his back against the cliff, hugging his slashed arm, staring bug-eyed at a boulder, as if it was showing him a film about things he did not find pleasing. As for Carstairs, he was in a clump of bushes in front of the cave, unarmed still, watching the ridge and the valley below.

‘What’s that?’ said Nelson.

‘Plane.’

‘What do they want?’

‘If I was a bird, I’d ask them.’

Nelson shook his head, an odd, feverish shake. Miller reckoned he was a nasty mixture of ill and frightened. Miller was a demolition man, not a nursemaid. But his good nature made him say, reassuring, ‘We’ll keep still, and not show our faces, and we’ll be fine.’ And then what? he thought. All the way over the mountains to storm some huge God damned bunker, and we say, listen, you wounded and you crazy, hang loose in the mountains till you hear a great big bang, and then Poppa will make sure you get home …

Sure.

He took out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it: on an evening like this, a spotter plane could see the flash of a buckle, the white of an eye, a puff of cigarette smoke.

In the back of the cave, Wills said in a loud, definite voice, ‘Henry!’

There were no Henries. ‘Back to sleep,’ said Miller. ‘There’s a good lootenant.’

‘Damned plane’s late,’ said Wills. ‘Got to be in Paris for lunch. Camilla’s waiting.’ He got to his feet, stood swaying. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said.

‘Sit down,’ said Miller, alarmed now.

‘You,’ said Wills. ‘You, that man. Siddown and shaddup.’ He came to the front of the cave. Miller stood up, to stop him going out on to the ledge. ‘Honestly,’ said Wills.

‘Please,’ said Miller. ‘Sir.’ The Storch was at the outer edge of its spiral, turning back towards them.

Wills said, ‘Stand away. She’s my fiancée y’know. We’re lunching in Paris. Top-hole. Special treat.’ His eyes were glassy, looking at things in a different world; customs at Croydon aerodrome, perhaps. He rummaged in the pocket of his filthy, sweat- stained jacket. ‘Here y’are.’ He might have thought he was pulling out his passport.

What he actually pulled out was his cigarette case. His silver cigarette case, highly polished. He waved it in Miller’s face.

‘Put it away,’ said Miller.

But Wills kept waving it. A flash of westering sun bounced off it and into Miller’s eyes. Horrified, Miller grabbed it out of his hand.

Behind them, the Storch’s engine-note changed from a drone to an angry buzz. The pilot opened the throttle wide, banked steeply, and flew straight as an arrow over Mount Skaphos, heading east.

It looked very much as if the pilot had seen it too.

Mallory watched the change of course, heard a second later the new roar of the engine. He knew what it meant, and so, judging by the way he came loping across the rocks, did Andrea.

They hit the ridge at a dead run, pebbles scattering under their feet and looping out and into the void below. Ten minutes later they were climbing a steep, near-invisible path among genista bushes, and Miller was materializing out of the rock face ahead.

‘Moving out,’ said Mallory. ‘Where’s Carstairs?’

Carstairs stood up in his bush. ‘Cigarette?’ he said, producing his case. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that.’

‘Put it away,’ said Andrea. ‘Captain Carstairs, I have something to say to you. Atten-shun!’

Carstairs dropped his cigarette and came to attention. His face was like the face of a man who, walking down the street in the dark, has just realized that what he has trodden on is not a paving stone but an open manhole.

‘Captain Carstairs,’ said Mallory. ‘I am changing our operational basis.’ His voice quiet and level, as always. But there was a cold power to it that made the hair rise on Carstairs’ scalp. ‘For the remainder of this operation you will consider yourself under my command and the command of Colonel Andrea. When the occasion presents, you will face court martial for desertion in the face of the enemy. Is that clear?’

Carstairs said, white-lipped, ‘That is not – ‘

‘Any complaints should be set out in writing and submitted after the conclusion of the operation,’ said Mallory. ‘Meanwhile continue to consider yourself under arrest. Your conduct under arrest will be taken into your account at your court martial.’

There was a silence. Carstairs stood pale and numb. The penalty for desertion in the face of the enemy was death. The message was clear and simple: behave or die.

Andrea said, ‘Corporal, return this man’s weapons.’

‘Pleasure,’ said Miller.

Carstairs found himself sweating. For a moment, this loose array of bandits had turned into a sharp, formal military unit. Carstairs realized that he had underestimated them; underestimated them badly.

From now on, he would have to use new tactics.

Mallory said, ‘Clytemnestra. We’ll need to go on into the mountains. Hide till dawn.’

‘Of course.’

Mallory drank water, shouldered his pack. ‘We’ll move out,’ he said. Clytemnestra took the lead. He walked beside her. ‘What are the chances of the Germans getting ahead of us?’ he said. ‘Cutting us off?’

‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘The other sides of the island are very steep. It is bad country up there.’

Miller was trudging behind them, cigarette hanging out of his mouth. ‘You wanna know what I’d do?’ he said. ‘I’d put some guys in a plane, maybe two lots, one ahead of us, one behind. And I’d fly them up here and I’d make them jump out, and they could chase us the hell and gone and their legs wouldn’t even ache.’

They toiled on up the thread of a path that zigzagged towards the summit of the steep slope above the cave. The breath rasped loud in Mallory’s ears. He was tired, but not yet tired enough for Benzedrine. There was a strange buzzing in his head …

There was a strange buzzing in the air. It grew, became a drone, then a roar.

He looked up.

Three aeroplanes rumbled across the sky: Tante Jus, Junkers Trimotors, lit gold by the sun like squat, ungainly millionaires’ toys. The doors in their sides were open.

Not toys.

Mallory’s head felt dry and empty, filled with the sound of his breathing. He made himself walk more quickly.

The rest of the group knew death when they heard the beating of its wings. They began to walk more quickly too.

Under Wills’ nose, the Gieves sheepskin-lined seaboots went trudge, trudge in the shale. It seemed to Wills that he had been walking for ever; up and up and up, with his feet boiling and his brain banging around in his skull like a turnip in a dixie. It hurt like hell, he would grant it that. It hurt like hell and tasted blue and smelt like aluminium and it felt sad as velvet. But he could remember his own name, now, so he supposed he was getting better. He also remembered that at some point in some world or other he had had a ship, and there had been a bang, and now he had no ship any more.

There was a slope up, and after the slope some rocks. And now there was a wall on his port-hand shoulder and to starboard a great deep swoop of nothing, and in his head the roaring, whining, zinging hum of blood, or aeroplanes, or something. He looked to the right, out over the void, even though the sun hurt his eyes. It was red, the sun, blood-colour. It shone on sea and land and jellyfish.

Jellyfish?

Jellyfish in the sky, floating down in to the deep shadows of the ground.

Something wrong with the above statement. Check details.

Details of what?

Under Wills’ nose, the Gieves sheepskin-lined seaboots went trudge, trudge in the shale.

Down below, the white silk parachutes of the Sonderkommando drifted earthward, each one pink as a baby’s fingernail in the warm glow of the sunset, on to the flat patch at the foot of the steep ridge Andrea and Mallory had climbed after their defence of the cave.

‘How long till dark?’ said Mallory.

Clytemnestra shrugged. ‘Forty minutes,’ she said.

Mallory looked at the slow laborious trudge of Wills, the agonized hobble of Nelson. The men on the parachutes were fresh. The people on this cliff path had climbed five thousand feet, and had not slept for twenty-four hours.

The path they were on was a narrow ledge running across the face of a sheer cliff. Ten minutes later, the ledge joined another ledge. The main path went off to the left. Another, scarcely visible, snaked away to the right. Andrea spoke at length with Clytemnestra, in Greek, then to Mallory. They bent their heads over the map. Then Mallory said, ‘Carstairs. You go with Clytemnestra and the wounded. Andrea, Miller, come with me.’

‘Smashing,’ said Carstairs, with a frank Boy Scout grin.

Mallory did not smile back. He said, ‘The Germans will be here in twenty minutes. Get a move on.’

Carstairs got a move on. The small, shuffling file disappeared up the thready path to the right.

Miller sat on a boulder. Twelve hundred feet below his boots, stunted olives rocked in the small evening wind. Beyond them, a file of tiny grey figures trotted towards the base of the slope. Miller lit a cigarette.

‘Okay,’ said Mallory. ‘Now listen.’

Miller listened. When Mallory had finished, he said, ‘Are you serious?’

Mallory looked him in the eye, hard and steely. He said, ‘What do you think, Corporal?’

Miller sighed. He reached above his head and stubbed his cigarette on the left-hand fork of the track, wide, obvious, well-used by men and goats. He said, ‘I guess you’re serious.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mallory. ‘Now, shall we get on with it?’

Averting his eyes from the frightful emptiness below, Miller began to scramble along the left-hand path.

It did not take long to find what he was looking for: a place where the ledge bulged out from the cliff face on a cornice of rock, with a little pile of debris at its inner edge. Miller dropped to his knees and began scuffling in the dirt on the inside of the ledge. He found what he was looking for: a letter-box-sized crack in the rock. Reverently, he opened his pack, took out four sticks of gelignite, and taped to them a time pencil. He snapped the glass ampoule in the time pencil, tamped the bomb into the letter box, wedged rocks over the top, and replanted the rosemary and spurge he had disturbed with his digging.

‘Done,’ he said.

Andrea nodded. The lower limb of the sun was kissing the horizon, drawing a road of fire across the sea. He was watching the place where he and Mallory had been hiding when they first heard the Storch. It lay empty under the sky, pink in the sunset.

Then it was not empty any more.

Suddenly, the empty area was striped with the shadows of men; one shadow, then two, shadows that dispersed quickly into the rough ground, taking cover. Andrea had counted sixty parachutes. He waited until he had lost count of the men on the outcrop. Then he took his Mauser, settled the sight on one of the helmets down below, and took up the first pressure on the trigger.

‘Ready?’ he said to Miller.

Miller was never ready for this kind of thing. But he nodded anyway. Andrea fired.

A quarter of a mile up the path, Mallory had found a narrow chimney; a seam between two plates of rock, polished smooth by the action of winter rains. He settled the two coils of silk climbing rope around his shoulders. Then he put in a boot, turned his foot to wedge the sole, stepped up, and raised his hand. He heard the crash of Andrea’s rifle, and the clatter of a Schmeisser. He kept climbing. The crack got narrower up here. He jammed in his right forefinger, and bent it to enlarge the knuckle. With his free boot, he groped the wall until he found a hold, no more than a pimple of rock. The pyramid nail of his boot bit home. He moved the first foot, got a new hold in the crack with the knuckle of his other hand. If he had looked down, he would have seen that he was already a man’s height above the ledge with the path, that the precipice was opening out below him. He did not look down. Instead, he concentrated on the rock-sheets in front of him, climbing from the hips, body out from the wall. Before the war, they had called it the Mallory Float; a perfectly balanced stance on the face that took him drifting up, defying gravity. One of the great rock climbers, they called him: and one of the great mountaineers. A man who could walk for thirty-six hours, and climb five thousand vertical feet at the end of it.

As long as nobody shot him.

After a couple of hundred feet the crack petered out. Mallory paused, drove in a spike with the leather-bound lead hammer in his belt, belayed to it the first of the two silk climbing ropes around his shoulders, and paid out the coil. The rope fell away into the shadows below. Then he went on up, climbing on hammered-in spikes until he came to a zone of rougher rock; rock about as rough as an old brick wall. To any climber except Mallory, it would have looked smooth and impossible. To Mallory, it might as well have been a stepladder. He went on up, slow and steady, not bothering with spikes. At three hundred and thirty feet, he came upon an area of rotten rock that gave way to soil. He had arrived at the top.

He belayed the second rope to a boulder, and dropped the free end down the face of the cliff. Then he lit a cigarette and told the weary ache in his limbs to be still, and settled down to wait.

Andrea and Miller were sitting down too; but not for reasons of repose. The inside of the path represented dead ground, so on the inside of the path they were sitting, backs to the wall, while a steady covering fire from the German troops below whanged up into the cliff face above their heads. Every now and then, Andrea stuck the barrel of his Schmeisser over the edge and squeezed off a short burst.

‘Go,’ said Andrea, after ten minutes.

They went.

As they belly-crawled along the ledge, the sun was a small red glow on the western horizon, and the stars were coming out. Andrea leaned over the path edge, blasted half-a-dozen rounds into the void, ducked quickly back, and carried on up the path. The space below suddenly crackled with blue-red muzzle flashes, the bullets splashing against the rocks safely to the rear. On the hook, thought Miller, with a solemn cheerfulness. Bless your innocent hearts.

On they crawled, the full quarter-mile, until Miller’s hand brushed the rope. He took a deep breath, and swallowed whatever it is that you swallow when your mouth is as dry as a Saharan cave floor. Then he grasped the rope and started to climb.

Down on the ledge, Andrea took the clip from his Schmeisser and groped for one he had reserved in a special pocket of his pack. His fingers found the two tapes he had wrapped around the magazine to identify it as tracer. He slapped it into the machine pistol, and fired: fired along the line of the ledge this time, back the way he and Miller had come, five rounds, tracer. The bullets smacked rock, tumbled in a firework display that said: up here; we went this-a- way. Then he fired another burst off to the right. From below, on the plain where the parachutists had landed, and where a radio operator might be sitting, it would look as if a battle was starting on the path.

Andrea slung his Schmeisser, gripped the rope and started to climb. When he reached the spike, he coiled the first rope and worked the spring-steel piton out of the rock. Then, light as a feather, he went up the second rope and over the cliff edge.

Mallory and Miller were sitting with their backs against boulders, dim, looming figures against the stars. From three hundred feet below, there came the clink of metal and the crunch of jackboots on shale: men, running in silence, chasing an enemy.

An enemy who was no longer there.

When the sound of pursuit had died away, Mallory, Miller and Andrea turned their faces east, for the precipices of Mount Skaphos and the plains beyond.

Private Emmanuel Gruber was a proud man and a good soldier. He was proud to be in the Sonderkommando: proud that Hauptmann Wolf had singled him out, proud that he had achieved the objectives of the training course, proud to have received a hint that he was in line for promotion to Feldwebel. And proud that tonight he had been ordered to bring up the rear of the pursuit squad; forty men, another twenty waiting at base as reinforcements. It was safe back here, too; though of course (Gruber told himself hastily) if Hauptmann Wolf ordered him into the jaws of death he would leap in without hesitation.

So on went Gruber at the double, supremely fit, right shoulder to the cliff, left shoulder to the void. He could have run all night.

Except that on the inside of the widening in the path he had passed a second previously, the time pencil of Miller’s blasting charge had come to the end of its sixty-minute career.

A gout of flame blasted straight out of the cliff face, and a clap of thunder drove Gruber’s eardrums together in the middle of his head. He staggered, head ringing. A flying chunk of stone caught him in the small of the back, and he would have staggered again, except that the foot meant to take his weight found not ground but space. He fell with a long, depressed cry, bounced twice, and had time to regain terminal velocity before he went into the olive trees below.

So he was not in a position to see what his comrades in the pursuit squad of the Wolf commando saw: that in the area of the blast the path they had been following no longer existed, and in its place was a cliff face as clear and lacking in footholds as a billiard table stood on its end.

Not that there was any point worrying about it. As the Leutnant lost no time in explaining, nobody was going back anyway. The order of the night was hot pursuit. The enemy had attempted to mine the path. Poor Gruber had taken what had been meant for all of them. Meanwhile, there was no time for hanging around.

The Sonderkommando turned and resumed the chase.

They trotted up the path, along the cliff, into a steep-sided valley. It was dark, and the radio did not work in this place of cliffs and ravines. After three hours’ running, they found themselves on a bare mountainside, in a steep-canted field of boulders that stood silent and ominous on the starlit rock. Here the Leutnant rejected with fury a suggestion that they should bivouac, the better to continue the search at dawn. ‘Vorwärts!’ he cried. ‘Onward!’

At that precise moment, seven miles, three gorges and two thousand five hundred vertical feet away, Able Seaman Nelson was reaching the end of his tether.

They were still walking. Nelson had difficulty remembering a time when he had not been walking. His feet were sliding in his boots, whether in blood or the fluid of burst blisters he did not dare look. The cut in his arm had always been painful. Now it had set up a deep, deadly throb that travelled up the inside of his bicep and into his armpit. It would have been at the centre of his world, that throbbing, had there been room for it.

But all there was room for at the centre of Nelson’s world was terror.

Not that he was a coward. You could not be an AB on an MTB, and fight your way through nights full of tracer bullets and high-octane petrol, and be a coward. Ashore in Portsmouth, after an air raid, he had come close to a George Cross, burrowing into the teetering pile of rubble that had once been a house, ARP and fire brigade shouting at him, don’t be a bloody fool, come back, she’ll collapse; but Nelson had kept going, found the middle-aged woman in the flowery housecoat, dragged her back out into the rain and the searchlights and the metallic clink of falling shrapnel.

But the MTB and Portsmouth had been with his mates. Now, Nelson had a hole in his arm the size of a slit trench, and he was blundering around some mountains with the Old Man, who had gone barmy, four bandits in uniforms without insignia, and a Greek bint with rolling eyes and grinding teeth who gave him the willies. It was the people and the mountains that were getting to Nelson. At sea, you fought your gun and took your chance with your mates, and while you did not like it unless you were bloody cracked, you could put up with it, like. The dry land was too bloody dry, and the people were too bloody violent, and you could see the look in their eye while they tried to kill you, and that was just not bloody on. A couple of hours ago there had been all that shooting down the hill, and a hell of a bang, God knew what that had been about. And now they were on this terrible path, black as the inside of a cow, and any minute now some Jerry might pop out from behind a rock and say, boo, you’re dead –

For the seventy-third time since sunset, Nelson caught his boot on a rock, stumbled, jolted his arm, and bit his lip to stop himself whimpering. Because this was not going to end. You had to face it. Things were going to get worse, not better. It gave him the willies, and that was bleeding that.

Ahead, Clytemnestra’s voice said something in Greek. Nelson followed the dim hulk of the person in front up a steep slope towards a small light that had somehow started to shine. Another bloody cave.

But it was not a cave. The walls were too smooth, the angles too perfect. In the middle of the floor was a sort of raised stone plinth. On the plinth, the big Greek man – he must have joined the file in the dark, though Nelson could not remember seeing it happen – was spreading the little tins of compo rations, a bottle of brandy, a radio.

Nelson slumped to the ground, propped his back against the wall, and let his head loll on his breast. The lanky American spoke, in Greek. Clytemnestra replied. Nelson did not like not understanding. ‘What does she say?’ he said, querulous.

Miller looked at him, saw a blue-white face, black circles under haunted eyes. ‘I said what is this place. She said it’s a tomb.’ He gestured at the plinth. ‘The dining table there is where they laid the stiff. Eat something.’ He waved a hand at the compo and the brandy.

But Nelson’s stomach was a small, clenched fist. He could not eat. He could only sit there and strain his ears at the night, at the thousand miniature nights contained in the shadows of this house of the dead. This house of the soon-to-be-dead …

He tried to get up. The muscles of his legs were too stiff. He toppled sideways. Someone was shouting, frantic, in his voice. Hands grabbed him, laid him out, tipped brandy down his throat.

He fell into a sort of coma. He was dimly aware of someone doing something to his bad arm, of a pinprick. Then there was a deep, buzzing silence.

They sat around the stove. The little blue flames cast fluttering shadows on the tomb’s ceiling. Nelson and Wills sprawled along a wall, Nelson’s arm new-dressed, half a syrette of morphine running in his blood; Wills snoring in a heavy, exhausted drone. Clytemnestra had folded her hands over her stomach and put her head on her pack, and was sleeping quietly as the tomb’s original tenant.

The remaining four men did not sleep; not yet. Their cigarettes pulsed and glowed. They were resting, but it was the rest of a hunting animal, or a latched spring, ready to leap from repose into violence with no intervening period of acceleration. Carstairs sat a little apart from the others, cleaning his machine pistol.

Mallory said, ‘Captain Carstairs, the court martial is in session.’

Carstairs raised an eyebrow, not lifting his eyes from the breech mechanism.

Mallory said, ‘By your actions this afternoon you have endangered the lives of your comrades and the success of the operation.’

‘Operational necessity,’ said Carstairs. He yawned, and lay back on the musty floor.

Andrea spoke. His voice had a note in it that Mallory had never heard before, and in the flicker of the stove-flames his bear-like shoulders seemed to fill the vault of the tomb. ‘Captain Carstairs,’ he said. ‘The charge is that today, having been posted sentry, you did desert your post in the face of the enemy. The penalty is death. You may speak in your defence.’

Under the cold lash of that voice, Carstairs seemed for a moment to freeze. Then he laughed, a thin, nervous laugh. ‘I don’t think Admiral Dixon will agree,’ he said.

‘I am not interested in Admiral Dixon.’ Andrea’s hands moved. There was the metallic sound of a Schmeisser cocking lever.

Carstairs looked at his own weapon, in pieces on the ground- sheet. He looked at Mallory and Miller, and found no comfort. His face was impassive, faintly quizzical, but there was a little sheen of sweat on the upper lip. He said, ‘If you put it like that.’ He took out the gold case, and selected a cigarette with deliberation.

‘There is an explanation,’ he said, eventually. ‘I have orders of my own, from Admiral Dixon. Who incidentally will not be very pleased to hear that you see fit to override his authority and haul me in front of a kangaroo court – ‘

The Schmeisser in Andrea’s hand moved upwards an inch, so Carstairs could see all the way down the barrel. Carstairs did his best to look bored. ‘But since you want an explanation, you can have one. There was a survivor.’

‘A survivor?’

‘After the Kormoran was torpedoed. Before she went down. Apparently someone hopped on to a life raft, bit of driftwood, God knows, and paddled off downwind and landed on Kynthos. This person was picked up by the Germans, in a very bad way, in a coma, actually, just before the partisans blocked the road.’

‘How do we know this?’ said Andrea.

‘Agent in Parmatia radioed in,’ said Carstairs. ‘That’s who I was looking for in town last night.’ He made it sound as if he had been doing the rounds of the night spots. ‘But apparently they got themselves killed shortly after they sent the signal.’ Andrea’s face was like stone. ‘Anyway, they told me in the village that this survivor was in the ambulance, in the convoy heading over the road as soon as it opened. Like today. He’s still unconscious, apparently. Important fellow in ways I am not at liberty to disclose. I have orders to debrief him. If you don’t like that, you can always check with Admiral Dixon, or your Captain, what d’ye call him, Jensen.’

Andrea said, ‘That’s it?’

Carstairs shrugged, nonchalant as his voice. His eyes were not nonchalant, though. They shifted between Mallory and Miller. ‘Just about,’ he said. He put his hands on his knees, and composed his features into something like manly frankness. ‘Look here. I can’t say I liked sliding off into the blue. But I thought, well, an hour and a half, make a recce, and it would be just my neck, not everyone else’s. How was I to know that Captain Mallory would come bumbling in and queer my pitch, what?’

Miller was watching Mallory. The New Zealander’s face was still and mild, but he was watching Carstairs closely. ‘You wanted to talk to this … survivor,’ said Mallory.

That’s it.’

‘And how were you planning to do that?’

‘I told you,’ said Carstairs, with the exasperation of a teacher repeating a lesson to a small child. ‘It was a recce. I wanted to see if the road was open. How am I meant to talk to an unconscious man in a military ambulance?’

Mallory said, ‘Why do you need to debrief this man?’

Carstairs smiled, all teeth and superiority. ‘Sorry, old boy,’ he said. ‘Love to help. But, well, Admiral’s orders. No can do.’

Silence fell, except for Wills’ snores and the bluster of the wind in the tomb’s entrance.

Finally, Mallory said, ‘He’s got a point.’

Miller said, ‘Has he hell.’

Andrea’s black eyes snapped at him. ‘Thank you, Corporal,’ he said. ‘That will be enough.’ The Schmeisser moved away from Carstairs’ eye. ‘Captain Carstairs, you are a member of this force, and will in future communicate your operational intentions to its field commander. The record will show that you have been reprimanded without loss of pay.’

Carstairs nodded, as if at a waiter who had brought him his change. He said, ‘I knew you’d see sense. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get forty winks.’

Mallory took first watch, sitting outside the tomb under the thick mat of the stars. The night was quiet, except for the sigh and bluster of the breeze in the rocks.

There was a faint movement at his side. When he looked round, he saw Andrea, blotting out a sizeable patch of sky.

‘What do you think?’ said Andrea.

‘Jensen says he’s okay.’

‘Jensen’s in England.’

‘Quite.’

There was a silence. Andrea and Mallory had worked together for a year; the kind of year that contains more than most lifetimes. They knew each other well. ‘So,’ said Andrea. ‘There is a problem, my Keith?’

Mallory lit a cigarette. ‘He says he was on a recce,’ he said. ‘So when I caught up with him, he was standing on the cliff directly above the ambulance, with a grenade in his hand and the pin out. And I thought, strange kind of recce. That’s the problem.’

‘I see,’ said Andrea. ‘Truly, I see.’ There was another pause. ‘But we must keep this man, because these are the orders of Jensen. Mouth shut and eyes open, I think.’

‘Of course,’ said Mallory. Andrea was right. But it was the last thing you needed, on an operation like this.

‘I’ll do the dawn patrol,’ said Mallory. Andrea nodded, and went in to sleep.

SIX

Thursday 0300-1200

Miller woke Mallory three hours after midnight. He tumbled out thumping-headed, dry-mouthed, to stand his guard. It came hard to some soldiers, this wakefulness in the dead time before dawn, when the metabolism was at its slowest. But Mallory was used to early mornings. He had spent his life in mountains where you could not climb after eleven a.m. because of the deadly rain of rock let go by melting ice fields. So he lay a second, his eyes wide open. Then he put his hand to where he knew his weapon would be, swung on his pack and went out into the air.

The stars still hung in the sky. He went up a slope of rocks and stationed himself above the tomb entrance, in a niche of the boulders. There was nothing but the rock, and the stars, and the clean night air. His mind flew back to other mornings on the shoulders of Mount Cook, the white peaks of the Southern Alps all around, waiting in frozen stillness for the first pink touch of the sun.

He pulled out a slab of chocolate and a round of flat Greek bread, ate until he did not want to eat any more, then kept on eating. It was going to be the sort of day when a body needed all the fuel that could be crammed into it.

He analysed the possibilities. The two sailors would have to be parked somewhere; here, perhaps. Must ask Clytemnestra. There was Clytemnestra herself. Clytemnestra needed to be kept out of sight, or there would be reprisals.

And Carstairs. Carstairs was a climber. Carstairs could fight. But Carstairs was the most dangerous of the lot. Mallory had never seen the Greek as angry as he had been last night. The Schmeisser-point court martial might have looked theatrical, but Carstairs had been within seconds of having his brains on the tomb roof –

Mallory stiffened.

The sky was lightening now, turning a darker-than-battleship- grey that cast the jagged peaks around him into sharp relief. But that was not what had made Mallory sit up and very quietly work the cocking lever of his machine pistol.

Down among the ravines and gulches they had travelled the night before, he had heard the short, sharp yip of a hunting dog.

He got up, and slid down the slope and into the tomb. It smelt of sleep. He passed among the supine forms like a cold wind, Miller and Andrea first, then Carstairs and Clytemnestra. ‘They’ve got bloodhounds,’ he said. ‘We must leave.’

‘We go on,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘It is downhill. Not so difficult.’

Mallory left her to wake the others, and tumbled outside again. He, Miller and Andrea faded into the rocks. The dog yipped again, very close. Five men in SS camouflage smocks came round the corner. The one in the middle had a lead in his hand. On the end of the lead, straining, was a black-and-tan dog. A Doberman, actually, thought Mallory, with the inconsequence that comes of extreme stress. Not a bloodhound.

The dog started a continuous strangled baying, and turned up the hill towards the tomb mouth. Mallory put his Schmeisser to his shoulder and opened fire.

Nelson had slept badly. It was more like a coma than a sleep, a sort of delirium in which the dreams writhed below the surface like maggots in a wound. Everything was burning: the terraced house in Coventry where he had been brought up, the B S A motor bike he rode to work, the house where he had gone to rescue the woman in the housecoat, the MTB’s bow gun crew: all solid and living one minute, the next stripped by the flames to rafter and bone, brick and tile and flesh melting away like wax. And the noise: the throbbing of his arm like an engine in the armpit, across to the heart, and with every heartbeat the engine accelerating in the horror of the dream, until the noise was continuous and Nelson knew he could not stand any more of this –

Then the real noise started, and Nelson slammed awake.

The roof was flickering with a hard blue-white light, and it was difficult to breathe because the tomb was full of fumes; the fumes of gunsmoke. In the blue-white flicker bodies were moving, made jerky by the flashes. There was the American running towards the door, and the big Greek in the entrance itself, rolling over and over, rising on one knee to squirt bullets into the dark, then rolling on and out beyond the light. Even Wills was up, dazed-looking, fumbling with the bolt of a big rifle.

Nelson hugged his arm, thirsty, head bloated with fever. He understood that there was nothing he could do. He could not shoot. He could not run. All that remained was to sit here and wait for the Germans to come barrelling in through the entrance – there would be a lot of them, he was sure of that, and the skipper and the Greek and the rest of them would be flattened by sheer weight of numbers. And when the Germans came in they would first look him in the eye and then blow him into little bits.

Nelson cringed at the thought.

Then he had an idea.

He was no good for fighting, not in this state. He was no bloody good to anyone. He would get himself out of the way, nice and safe.

Suddenly everything seemed radiantly simple.

But Nelson was leaving one thing out of account. In his veins there ran not only blood, and the throb of his wound, but also a considerable amount of morphine.

Andrea and Miller had had the same idea as Mallory. The rocks chattered with gunfire. The five Germans rolled over and were still. The dog, his handler dead, slunk whining into the boulders. Mallory lowered his gun.

Twenty-five more Germans came round the corner.

Mallory slammed a new clip into his Schmeisser and cursed. The new men were not in formation, like their late comrades in the dog squad. They had heard the gunfire. They were spread out among the boulders, bad targets for the Mauser, too distant for the Schmeissers. Normally, Andrea and Mallory and Miller would have faded into the landscape. But Clytemnestra and Carstairs and the sailors were still inside the cave.

Mallory began to sweat. This was the guerrilla’s nightmare: an assault by superior enemy forces on a fixed position. Either you faded, or the operation was finished. It was an evil decision to have to make.

Then all thoughts of the decision went out of his mind, and he was frozen by a strange and terrible sight.

A figure had walked out of the tomb; a strange figure, dressed in rags, with a blue-white face and red hair in a halo round his head. Nelson. Nelson with his good hand in the air, and his bad hand in its sling, and his eyes spinning in his head with terror and morphine. ‘Oi!’ he yelled in a high, cracked voice. ‘Me sailor. Me not soldier. Me non-combatant, prisoner of war, you savvy, cock? You no shoot, got that?’ He stumbled down the little path towards the rocks where the Germans lay hidden. The silence was so intense that Mallory could hear the squinch of a pebble under his foot.

There is a German behind that rock, thought Mallory, as Nelson approached a tall, pyramid-shaped slab. And I can’t cover Nelson because he won’t know what to do if I open fire …

Nelson was nearly at the pyramid rock, still waving his good arm and yelling. As he passed the rock, a camouflaged arm shot out and grabbed his collar, and a black boot kicked him behind the knees so they collapsed and he was suddenly kneeling on the path, sideways-on to the observers above the tomb. As Mallory watched, a hand with a Luger came out and dug into the nape of Nelson’s neck. The dull whap of the shot floated up the hill.

Nelson smashed forward on to his face and lay twitching.

Mallory had seen a lot of life, and a lot of death, too. But this cold assassination of an unarmed man in the process of surrender froze him to the spot. And that split second he stood frozen he heard a soft, metallic sound, and a voice behind him said in heavily- accented English, ‘Drop your gun.’

He dropped it. There was no chance of doing anything else. The order had only been an order, but the sound had been a rifle bolt. He waited for the bullet in the back of the neck, his mind clear of thoughts, his eyes on the mountains, rank on serried rank under the pink dawn sky.

The shot did not come.

The voice behind him said, ‘Marsch.’

Mallory marched.

He saw Miller walking towards him, a rifle at his nape. He saw the tomb mouth full of camouflage smocks, heard shouting, saw Carstairs come out, hands in the air, Wills, stumbling, eyes screwed up against the painful light of dawn.

A German strutted up to Miller, a Leutnant, sharp-faced under a grey peaked cap. ‘Is this all?’ he said, in English.

‘All what?’ said Miller.

‘All your people,’ said the German.

‘Nope,’ said Miller.

Mallory’s eyes rested on him with some curiosity. He trusted Miller. But he trusted Andrea too. And Andrea had disappeared, and so had Clytemnestra. He and his fellow-prisoners might be in considerable danger. But with Andrea on the loose, so were the Germans. What was Miller playing at?

‘Where are they?’ said the German.

‘As a citizen of the United States of America,’ said Miller, ‘I see all people as my people. Like it says, “Bring me your poor, your huddled millions” – ‘

‘Masses,’ said Mallory.

‘I thought it was millions,’ said Miller.

‘Silence!’ yelled the Leutnant. ‘Kneel!’

Miller looked at him, then at Mallory. They knelt.

‘What is your mission on Kynthos?’ snapped the Leutnant.

‘Name, rank and number,’ said Mallory. ‘I will give them to your superior officer.’

The Germans behind the rocks were coming out of cover, drifting towards them, curious now they had caught up with their quarry. Bunch up, said Mallory in his head. That’s good.

‘Together,’ said Wills, who sounded stronger and more definite, ‘with an official protest. How dare you.’ He was angry to the point of incoherence. ‘How dare you in contravention of the Geneva Convention summarily execute one of my – ‘

The Leutnant s jackboot sent him sprawling among the rocks.

‘Now,’ said the Leutnant. ‘Tell me now, or I will shoot you, this man first.’ Mallory could hear the shuffle of boots on rock as the men gathered round. Sonderkommando behaviour, he thought. Not Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht were soldiers. This lot were murderers.

‘Noo!’ cried Miller. ‘Please!’ He cast himself on the ground. Mallory cast himself down too, abasing himself.

And incidentally taking cover.

A sleet of lead blasted out of the rocks and the tomb mouth. The Leutnant screamed and fell across Mallory. Mallory grabbed the man’s Schmeisser. A German saw him move and brought his machine pistol round. Mallory saw the muzzle flash, felt the officer’s body shake as the rounds meant for him thumped into the Leutnant’s torso. Then his own Schmeisser was hammering, and the German’s machine pistol was firing in a great arc in the sky as his dead finger tightened on the trigger.

After that everything was quiet, except for a voice, shouting. At first it shouted in German. ‘Hands up!’ it said. ‘You are covered!’

The three Germans left standing raised their hands. ‘Keep hidden!’ roared the voice, in Greek. Talking to Clytemnestra. Mallory climbed to his feet. Miller was already up.

Somewhere, a radio said, in German, ‘A Force, A Force, come

Mallory found the set under a body, rolled it aside, lifted the mike to his mouth. ‘A Force,’ he said. ‘Mission complete.’

‘Please give me a code word with that,’ said the voice.

Mallory took his thumb off the transmit switch. ‘What is the code word?’ he said to the nearest living German.

‘Schultz, Feldwebel, 175609 – ‘

Something moved at the corner of Mallory’s eye. It was Carstairs, with a Luger. He knocked the German to the ground with the barrel and jammed it into the man’s mouth. Mallory heard the pop as a tooth broke. ‘The man said, code word,’ said Carstairs. He pulled the gun out of the man’s mouth. ‘One. Two – ‘

The German had no way of telling whether Carstairs was going to count to three or fifty, but with a gun muzzle half an inch from his eye socket he was not going to hang around to find out. ‘Wild Hunt,’ he said.

Mallory thumbed the transmit switch. ‘Wild Hunt,’ he said, and released it.

The set hissed an empty wash of static. There was no reply.

The German with no front teeth laughed. ‘You are out of time. They are looking for you already.’

‘Bastard,’ said Carstairs, and cocked the Luger. The German turned grey. Sweat stood on his forehead as he stared at death.

‘Leave him,’ said Mallory.

Carstairs raised an eyebrow.

Mallory said, ‘Take their clothes.’

‘Clothes?’ said Carstairs, looking down at his own immaculately- tailored tunic. ‘They won’t fit.’

‘Best-dressed corpse in the mountains, right?’ said Miller, who was already taking off his trousers. ‘Change everything but your boots.’

‘Why?’

‘So your feet don’t get sore,’ said Miller, struggling into the camouflage smock and hanging the radio on his belt. ‘Move it.’ He grinned at Carstairs, a grin not at all sincere. ‘Pardon me. Move it, Captain.’

Carstairs moved it.

They rolled the bodies over a cliff. They took away weapons and ammunition, and the survivors’ boots and socks. Then they bound and blindfolded them, and left them barefoot and helpless in a field of razor-edged lava rock. Nelson they buried as best they could. Then they resumed the march, Mallory first, Wills after him, then Carstairs and Clytemnestra, with Andrea bringing up the rear.

They were on a sort of plateau now, a high, windswept place without cover, still cold with the morning chill, but brilliantly lit by the low sun. They marched on, towing long shadows from their boot heels, squinting against the sun in their eyes. Mallory hoped nobody would put any aeroplanes up. It was a forlorn hope, he was pretty sure. German uniforms or no German uniforms, German radio procedures were cast in stone. A dud procedure meant trouble. And these were not the kind of people who closed their eyes to trouble –

Someone stumbled into Mallory’s back. He looked round in time to see Wills plough off to the right, trip over a stone and fall flat on his face.

‘Leave him,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory ignored him. He went and crouched beside Wills. For the first time, he saw the damage the Leutnant’s boot had done. The man’s face was a mask of blood, the bruise on his temple the colour of blue-black ink.

‘Leave me,’ mumbled Wills.

Miller came up, squatted and took out the first-aid kit. He said, ‘Hold up,’ and trickled drinking water between his cracked lips. ‘Think you can walk?’

‘Course,’ croaked Wills. ‘Dizzy spell.’ He got half-way to his feet, then toppled sideways in the dust.

Andrea said, ‘Come.’ He lifted Wills like a child, and hauled him on to his back. ‘We’ll find some shade.’

‘Quickly.’ Clytemnestra was chewing her lower lip. ‘We must cross this part. Then the ground is broken. Safer – ‘

Mallory held up his hand.

The breeze sighed in the rocks. Above the breeze, another sound: the small, faint drone of an aeroplane’s engine.

It was the Storch again; the same Storch. It saw them straight away, circled lazily in the deep blue morning.

‘Wave,’ said Mallory.

They all waved, even Wills, on Andrea’s back, raised a lethargic hand: a patrol of Waffen-SS saluting their comrades in the wilderness.

But Mallory was thinking radio. The observer would have been talking. Either the ground patrols had a listening schedule, to which they should have responded. Or he was talking to his base station, reporting five men and a Greek heading east, and the base station would be checking where the Greek fitted in …

After another half-hour’s march they were in broken ground, sloping away to the eastward. Clytemnestra walked out ahead now, moving fast and light among the hillocks and boulders like a hound making a cast. After ten minutes, she stopped and beckoned. They walked over to her.

She was standing at the head of a seam of the ground, deepened by running water into a groove no more than three feet wide. She led them down the groove. After a hundred yards it was already a ravine, plunging steeply downwards, disappearing from view round a colossal buttress of rotten stone. There was a path along the right-hand side of the ravine; a narrow ribbon of flat ground. This path Clytemnestra took. Another God damned goat path, thought Miller gloomily, trudging along. The German who had originally owned the smock he was wearing had been an eater of raw onions, by the smell of it –

‘Here,’ said Clytemnestra.

They had arrived at the end of the gorge, on a ledge balanced like an epaulette on a vast shoulder of rock. The ledge was perhaps thirty feet wide. On it were a couple of walls that might once have been part of dwellings. On its inside edge the cliff was patched with the stone fronts of cave-houses. ‘Very hard place to find,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Once, klephts live here, bandits. Now, nobody.’ She walked across to a patch of green moss and ferns between two of the walled caves. A trickle of water fell from a projecting rock into a bowl roughly carved from the stone. ‘Everything you need,’ she said.

Mallory was looking east.

Beyond the ledge, the ground dropped away three thousand feet in a series of precipices over a vast and hazy gulf. The bottom of the gulf was flat and green, marked into rectangular fields. At the southern end of the fields, a dark line, presumably a fence, separated out what looked like a group of huts and a brown-and-yellow expanse of baked earth and dry grass that must be an aerodrome, its eastern and northern sides formed by the sea.

Mallory raised his glasses to his eyes.

Beyond the fields was a stretch of reeds and whitish flats in which water glittered under the sun. It must have been the best part of a mile wide. On the far side the ground rose again, steep and black; the remains of a plug of magma, Lieutenant Robinson’s volcano, remnants of a cone of pumice and ash washed away by time. There were buildings up there, some white and gleaming, others ruined; and some, as Mallory focused his glasses, trailing a faint plume of dust.

‘Aerial,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory panned his glasses up an apparently endless face of bare black cliff. At the cliff’s summit, he saw the spider-like tracery of wires and pylons. An aerial array, all right.

‘They are building something,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘They take stone across, from the place down there.’

Three thousand feet below, a ruler-straight line ran from the base of the cliff, across the marshes, to a group of huts at the base of the Acropolis. ‘What is it?’ said Carstairs.

‘Railway line,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘For stone and gravel.’

‘Where’s the quarry?’ said Mallory.

She pointed straight down.

‘I’m a guy, not a fly,’ said Miller.

Mallory was not listening. He said, ‘Ropes. Weapons. Anything not vital, leave it up here. Clytemnestra, can you stay here for twenty-four hours? We’ll be back.’

She pointed down the ledge, to a place where the path narrowed, and there were the hard outlines of more ruined buildings. ‘There is the Swallow’s Nest,’ she said.

‘Password,’ said Mallory. ‘You’ll need one.’

‘Jolly boating weather,’ said Wills.

‘Shoot anyone who doesn’t use it.’

‘Jolly what?’ said Clytemnestra.

‘Never mind – ‘

‘Quiet,’ said Andrea. Over the dim rumour of humanity from the vale below there came once again the sound of an aeroplane engine.

They were standing on a wide part of the ledge, smooth as a parade ground, without cover. Standing up or lying down, they would stick out like a poached egg on a black table.

‘Wave,’ said Mallory.

The Storch came round the escarpment at eighty knots, not more than a hundred feet out. The people in SS uniform waved, the way they had waved last time. Mallory could see the faces of the pilot and the observer, curious, blank behind their goggles, not waving back. It went past once. ‘That’s it,’ said Carstairs.

The Storch dropped a wing and turned, so slow and low it almost seemed to hover. Mallory could see the observer’s lips moving as he spoke into his microphone. They were being checked up on. The carnage by the tomb would have been discovered by now.

‘Wave,’ said Mallory. Bluff, and bluff again, and hope like hell it worked, though hope grew harder to sustain –

But Carstairs had his Schmeisser at his shoulder, and its clatter was ringing in the cliffs, and the Storch was banking away, and a long line of pock marks appeared in the Storch’s unarmoured belly. The plane’s bank became a roll, a staggering roll that turned into a sideslip that would have been a spin except that half-way through the first turn the face of the escarpment came out to meet the aircraft. A wing touched delicately, crumpled like the foil from a cigarette packet. The propeller churned into the rock, the nose telescoped, a tiny spark of flame flicked back on the cowling, and among the noise of buckled and cracking metal came the big, solid whoomp of the fuel tank blowing. The Storch came momentarily to rest, perched nose-up on a sixty-degree slope, blazing from propeller boss to tailskid. Mallory could see the observer beating at the cockpit cover, jammed because of the heat. Then the plane began to slide tail-first into the abyss, gathering speed, leaving a long plume of black smoke, bouncing out from the cliff, over and over, breaking up as it fell.

Then it was gone, and all that remained was the smoke, tangled in the crags and bushes in the morning calm.

If you wanted a pointer to this place, thought Miller, you could not have done much better unless you had picked up a dirty great paintbrush and made an arrow on the cliff and marked it SHOOT HERE.

‘Good show,’ said Carstairs, stroking his silly moustache.

‘Excellent,’ said Miller, wearily.

Mallory felt tired to the marrow of his bones. And it had not yet begun. There would be men up here. A lot of men.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted. We’ll get down there. Clytemnestra. Situation’s changed. You’d better come too.’

Clytemnestra said, ‘No.’

‘Oh?’

‘Wills cannot move, not just now. The hiding places up here are very good. There will be no trouble. If we came, we would be in the way.’ She smiled, a ferocious flash of teeth in her face. ‘I think you are good fighters, you three.’ She turned to Carstairs. ‘But you will get yourself killed.’ She said in Greek, ‘And these other people, too. You are like a barnyard cock. A lot of noise and fuss, but that is all. No patience. A child, not a man.’

‘What does she say?’ said Carstairs.

‘She admires you intensely,’ said Miller, who had learned good Greek in the process of blowing up targets in Crete and the Peloponnese.

‘Objectives,’ said Mallory, hurriedly. ‘Listen.’

‘Permission to, er, speak,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory grinned at him, a grin without humour. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You will for the purposes of the next phase of this operation consider yourself under my orders, and keep quiet. Do I make myself clear?’

Behind its mask of sweat and grime Carstairs’ face was smooth, his eyes remote and distant. ‘Perfectly,’ he said.

‘Our objective is to destroy the rocket factory,’ said Mallory. ‘Yours is different. I authorize you to disclose it, to avoid confusion.’

‘It would be a great pity if we … interfered with one another,’ said Andrea. His big hands were resting on the Schmeisser, light and casual. The ledge was full of a studied politeness; but under the politeness lay a wire-taut thread of violence.

Carstairs was not stupid. He knew that for the third time, he had made life complicated and dangerous for the rest of the Thunderbolt Force. He knew that these men were used to achieving their objectives, and did not let anyone or anything stand in their way. The time had come for a dose of frankness – carefully measured, but a dose none the less. ‘I’ll go after the aerials,’ he said.

Mallory had been sitting apart, binoculars on the plain and the Acropolis. ‘It’s a bad climb to solo,’ he said.

‘I’ll manage,’ said Carstairs. He had his own glasses out. Things were moving on the airfield. A Trimotor was taxiing, and a group of vehicles was parked at the root of the causeway that took the road across the marsh to the Acropolis. There was an ambulance among them. ‘I’m off,’ he said.

‘Your objectives,’ said Andrea. This time, the hands on the Schmeisser looked firmer. ‘The aerials. Then this person you have to … debrief?’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Carstairs. ‘This is need-to-know information.’

‘We need to know,’ said Andrea flatly.

Far below, the Trimotor was taxiing to the downwind end of the runway.

“Very well,’ said Carstairs. ‘If you insist. The Kormoran was boarded before she sank. She was carrying new German code books. Maybe this … survivor saw the boarding party. Highly likely, actually. In Parmatia they said he was unconscious. I’m hoping he still is. If he has woken up and told the Germans what he saw and they transmit the news back to Berlin, or Italy, or anywhere else, then bang goes a very useful intelligence source. A vital intelligence source, you might say. So I don’t care what you men are doing, I’m going after those aerials to shut them up. And then I’m going to find the man who was in the ambulance, awake or asleep.’

‘And then?’ said Mallory.

Carstairs’ face was hard as stone. ‘Use your imagination, Captain,’ he said.

So now they were assassins, thought Mallory. Not soldiers. There was a difference.

‘Over there,’ said Mallory, pointing at the dark massif opposite. ‘Northern end. There’s a village.’

‘Once a village,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Now a prison. For slaves.’

‘Slaves?’

‘The men of the island. The Germans make them work in their factory.’

‘Well, well,’ said Mallory. ‘We rendezvous there at midnight.’

‘Where?’

‘There is a little street by the church,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Athenai Street. It is dark. There are no guards.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We go there.’

‘I thought it was a prison.’

‘It is. But we are Greeks. We will wait from midnight here.’ She pointed to a spot on the map in her hand. ‘Then if you have not found us we will come to find you at dawn.’

Far below, the Trimotor was up and off the runway, a minute grey cross chasing its shadow over the dim marshes. Soon, the plateau above would be full of paratroops.

‘Moving out,’ said Mallory.

How come I always say never again, thought Miller, and every time I say it I am doing it again within twenty minutes?

‘Go,’ said Mallory.

Miller did not look down. He knew what was underneath him: three hundred feet of cliff, with a slope of sharp scree to bounce on, then another precipice –

He braced the doubled rope over his shoulder and up between his legs, and started to walk backwards down the cliff. His packful of explosives wanted to unbalance him. His knees wanted to shake him loose. His breakfast wanted to fling itself into the glad light of day –

‘Hold up,’ said Carstairs’ voice. Miller found himself teetering on something that Mallory would probably have called a ledge, but as far as Miller was concerned was no bigger than a bookshelf, and a shelf for small books at that.

‘Between the legs,’ said Carstairs, with his oily smile. ‘Up the back. Round the – ‘

But Miller had gone, bounding out into space, half a hundredweight of explosives on his back. He did not like heights, but he liked Carstairs even less.

When Miller hit the scree slope, Andrea was already there. Carstairs and Mallory followed, pulled the ropes down and belayed again. Andrea and Carstairs, then Miller and Mallory went down again, and again, until they were standing on a scrubby shoulder of rock, a stratum that had stood up to rain and wind and sun better than the rest of the cliff. Mallory and Carstairs were coiling the ropes, making the coils fast, slinging them on their small packs.

Once Miller’s knees had stopped shaking, he had time to recognize a change in Carstairs. Miller on a cliff was a fish out of water. But as he watched Carstairs coil the rope and run his eye over the next pitch, he recognized that this was a man in his element.

The hard stratum made a broad, rubbly road along the cliff face, inaccessible from above and below. They had already lost two thousand feet in height. The valley floor was closer now, and from somewhere ahead and downhill came the pant and clank of heavy machinery.

The Tante Ju had gone overhead twenty minutes previously. If the Germans had dogs, they would be on the ledge by now. Miller wondered how Wills would be doing. Okay, as long as he had Clytemnestra there.

Miller frowned.

Clytemnestra reminded him of someone, for a moment he could not think who. As he scrambled through the dense and thorny underbrush, he remembered. Those eyes, that jaw, that figure; Darling Miss Daisy.

Darling Miss Daisy had been a good friend of his in Chicago during the Dirty Thirties. Darling Miss Daisy’s speciality had been removing all her clothes except a garter in front of the patrons of the El Cairo Tearooms, a rendezvous whose definition of tea was loose at best. As a token of their appreciation, the tea drinkers would stuff high-denomination banknotes into Miss Daisy’s garter. Miss Daisy had been a good friend of Miller’s, and had one night asked him along to witness the performance. This he had done with much appreciation. By the close of her act Darling Miss Daisy, nude except the garter and a pair of high-heeled pumps, had collected some eight hundred dollars, in those days a most considerable sum.

At this point, a citizen called Moose Michael had jumped out of the crowd, grabbed Miss Daisy from behind, and pushed a gun into her swan-like neck. Miss Daisy was no stranger to this sort of carry-on, and relaxed. Guys with what this guy had on his mind on their minds always made a bad move sometime, and that was when you set the dogs on them.

But Moose Michael’s hand was not groping for Darling Miss Daisy’s outstanding assets. It was groping for the money in the garter. This was not in the rules. Miss Daisy clenched her perfectly- formed fist, rolled her flashing black eyes, and gun in her neck or not, broke Moose Michael’s jaw in four places.

Miller could see a lot of Darling Miss Daisy in Clytemnestra. Trudging on through the scrub, he crossed her and Wills off the worry-list.

Ahead, the clank of machinery was getting louder.

SEVEN

Thursday 1200-2000

Leutnant Priem had been in North Africa, and at the invasion of Crete, and most recently in Yugoslavia. As he skirted the shoulder of the ravine (they could have done with a dog; but the dogs had disappeared) he thought: this could be a great posting, this island, if the commanding officer used his brains. One stupid Storch crashes, observer’s been drinking Metaxa, screaming down the radio, and Wolf panics, and here we are pretending to be mountain goats, heading for his bloody map reference as if we were doing a security sweep for a Führer visit…

The path came out on the ledge. Cicadas trilled in the noonday sun, and the air was heavy with the whiff of thyme and rue. Priem cast a scornful eye over the ruined buildings. How could you believe in the glories of Greek culture when the people lived in such hovels? Degenerate scum. No better than animals. Of course, nobody had been here for years …

‘Search the place!’ he barked. He lit a cigarette and sat in the shade. A lizard lay on a slab of rock, bringing itself up to temperature for the next hunting trip. Lucky damned lizard. Nothing to do but sit around in the sun all day. While Priem had to make a pretence of searching these places where nobody had been, ever. That was Wolf for you. Savage, but gründlich. Thorough –

‘Herr Leutnant!’ yelled a voice.

Priem stamped out his cigarette and went to interview the sergeant.

‘Buildings empty,’ said the sergeant. ‘Found this here, sir.’ He pointed with the tip of his jackboot at a little pile of golden cylinders. Cartridge cases.

Priem was suddenly not relaxed any more. ‘Good,’ he said. They were Schmeisser cases. ‘And the aeroplane?’ he said.

‘Over here,’ said the sergeant. ‘One hundred and three metres down.’

‘Rope,’ said Priem.

‘Rope in place,’ said the NCO.

The wreckage of the Storch was draped over a crag. Priem climbed round it, scrutinized the burned remains of the pilot and the observer, frowning slightly. He paused to examine the line of bullet-holes starting at the wing-root and vanishing under the belly.

He climbed back to the ledge in silence. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘We will establish a field HQ here. Search again, particularly down the cliffs. And give me that radio.’

Higher on the mountain, in what would once have been the uppermost street of the bandit village, Clytemnestra and Wills lay in darkness. It was a cool darkness, smelling slightly of mould, but that was not surprising, since their hiding place was situated under the ruins of the washing-copper in the corner of four walls that had once served as a laundry.

This village of bandits was a village for which searches and razzias were no novelty. The crusaders had rummaged it, then the Turks, then the Greeks. The Germans were merely the latest in line.

Just as long (Clytemnestra reflected, listening to the concussed muttering of Wills) as they did not bring their dogs.

It was a tidy enough quarry, as quarries went; a big horseshoe cut in the cliff, fans of fallen stone at the base, a couple of diggers moving across a white floor trailing clouds of dust. There was a crusher, a big machine with a hopper and a black funnel that belched smoke, panting and grinding, discharging crushed stone into another, larger hopper. Under the larger hopper ran a railway track. As the men on the quarry lip watched, a train reversed into the quarry and positioned the first of its four trucks under the hopper. The hopper-release opened. A dose of crushed stone roared into the truck. The locomotive moved on. Another dose roared into the second truck. Move. Roar. Move. Roar. The locomotive hissed steam and began to pull out, gathering speed.

‘Well?’ said Carstairs.

‘Wait,’ said Mallory, eyes down on his watch.

The train bustled off across the plain, shrinking on its converging lines, speeding on to a causeway across the marsh, shrinking still. At the far end a cloud of white dust rose, then whipped away on the breeze. The breeze was up, now. A long edge of grey was travelling down the sky from the north. ‘Twelve minutes,’ said Mallory. ‘Down we go.’

‘Why?’ said Carstairs.

The other men were slinging their packs. Miller pointed behind them, up the cliff, where little figures were descending on ropes, rummaging every ledge and hollow. ‘They’re still looking,’ said Mallory. ‘If we don’t keep moving, they’ll spot us.’ Carstairs’ mouth went dry. He scrambled to his feet, and down the flank of the quarry.

Far away, a long steam-whistle blew. The stone train had emptied its trucks. Now it was on its way back.

The four men went down the big fan of rubble on the quarry’s northern side. The sun beat hot on the white stone as they ran, jumping from stone to stone, slithering in the small gravel, dust trailing from their heels. Men below looked up; labourers, mostly, in dusty overalls, trailing shovels, smoking cigarettes. They saw four men in camouflage smocks and Wehrmacht caps sliding down a pile of rubble. They were used to seeing soldiers; too many soldiers.

A sentry walked over, Wehrmacht, a Feldwebel, bored and dusty. The Sonderkommando had only been on the island three days. Mallory was betting that between the Wehrmacht guards and the Sonderkommando there would be no love lost. ‘What do you want?’ said the Feldwebel.

Mallory said, ‘Mind your own damned business.’

The Feldwebel blinked. ‘It is my business.’

‘Perhaps you would like to explain that to Hauptmann Wolf.’

It did not work. ‘I have my own officers,’ said the Feldwebel. ‘I do not need to talk to your nasty little Hauptmann.’

Mallory said, ‘Very wise,’ and started to walk past him towards the rock crusher.

‘One moment,’ said the sentry. ‘Papers.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ said Mallory. They were all walking now, towards the shade of the crusher, the sentry nearly running alongside them. The cloud had covered the sun. The air felt thick and moist.

The sentry got in front of them and unslung his rifle. ‘Papers,’ he said, and in his eye there was a meticulous glint, the legendary obstinacy of the German NCO. Mallory’s heart sank.

‘All right,’ said Mallory. ‘Shall we go and see your commanding officer?’ Andrea was standing close behind him. Above them, the stilts of the rock crusher towered like the legs of an enormous insect. Mallory could feel Andrea moving. The guard’s life was hanging by a thread. He looked Mallory up and down …

And saw his boots.

They were caked with dust, scuffed and battered. They were variations on a theme of British paratrooper’s boots, manufactured for Mallory by Lobb of St James’ Street, London, in collaboration and discussion with Black’s of Holborn, expedition outfitters, fitted on his personal last, studded with pyramid nails hand-sharpened with the file Mallory carried in his pocket.

They should have been regulation German army jackboots.

There was no way of knowing what was in the Feldwebel’s mind, but Mallory could guess. The Feldwebel was a high priest of order and regulation, and the boots were heresy and sacrilege. The rifle came up. The eyes went round. The mouth opened to shout.

Mallory caught hold of the rifle barrel and pushed it sharply aside, stepping aside himself as he did so. Something very big and very fast came past him. The Feldwebel made a loud whooshing sigh, and crumpled forward over Andrea’s fist. Andrea heaved him upright. He whipped out the knife he had driven up and under the man’s ribs and into his heart, and in the same movement pushed the body back into the shadows under the crusher. The air was thick and still. A couple of big raindrops made dark blots in the dust.

Mallory lit a cigarette. Nobody said anything. Mallory blew smoke and said, ‘Listen.’

They listened. Thunder rumbled. The rails were humming. Three minutes later, the train came in.

In the cab, the driver yawned. He was German, and so was his fireman. Give a Greek this job, and nothing would get done. The soldiers were as bad. They were meant to sign each load in and out as the train went through the gate in the fence by the guardhouse. But they were Wehrmacht, not railwaymen. They had made him do all the signing at the beginning of his shift, so he could come and go as he liked –

The hopper roared. He pulled forward to the second red post, applied the brakes, turned to tell the fireman to chuck a bit more coal on. The fireman was blond, with blue eyes in a sooty face. The engine driver’s mouth fell open.

This was not him. This was a man with a lean brown face and the coldest grey eyes the driver had ever seen.

The engine driver was about to shout when he felt something press against his leather jerkin. Something sharp. He felt the sting of cold steel in the fat on his belly. He closed his mouth. ‘Fill up,’ said the man. ‘Then drive.’

The engine driver did not ask what had happened to his fireman. He said, ‘The pressure is down.’

There were two men in the cab with him now: the lean-faced man and another with an eyebrow moustache. The man with the eyebrow moustache opened the firebox, and shovelled in coal. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Off we go, what?’

The driver blew out his oil-stained moustache. ‘No,’ he said. The thing in his belly moved a couple of inches. Skin broke. Blood rolled. It was raining now, hot, steamy rain, but the driver was suddenly bathed in cold sweat. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Yes. Of course. Very well.’ His hand went to the regulator.

The leg of the hopper started to move. The train gathered speed. The quarry face faded into a grey curtain of rain. The gate loomed, guard post beside it. Mallory crouched on the footplate, and Carstairs bent, shovelling. The driver stared straight ahead, not acknowledging the wave of the crop-headed sentry drinking coffee in the wooden hut. And the train was travelling on an embankment over green fields. To the right was young corn and rain-grey sea. To the left was more young corn, terminated abruptly by a tall fence of mesh and barbed wire, with sheds and what looked like a fuel dump. Tailplanes stood like blunt sharks’ fins beyond the sheds. Ahead, down the cylinder of the ancient locomotive, the fields fell away. The train rattled through a belt of reeds. Then there were rain-pocked pools of water on either side, dead-looking, dotted with clumps of sickly vegetation. The margins of the pools were crusted with white deposits. The place had a flat, washing-soda stink. When Mallory licked his lips, his tongue was dry with lime.

Over to the left was another causeway, carrying a road. At its landward side it passed between high fences, with red-and-white- striped barriers, huts for a platoon of soldiers, and a machine-gun post on either side, one to cover the approach, the other to cover the causeway itself. Mallory was glad he had decided to come by train.

The far shore was upon them: first a glacis of new stone, then a flat area that looked as if it had been reclaimed from the marsh. Beyond the flat area, the basalt colossus of the Acropolis rose like a wall. On the far side of the reclaimed area, behind a chainlink fence, was a vehicle park. As Mallory watched, an ambulance rolled in. The doors opened. A pair of orderlies lifted out a stretcher and ran with it through the rain and into a steel door set in the face of the cliff.

Mallory glanced at Carstairs. Carstairs was watching the ambulance too.

The tracks ran across the reclaimed area on a trestled viaduct ending in a set of buffers. Below the viaduct was a pile of crushed stone. Two huge concrete mixers churned alongside the rock piles.

The train slowed to a crawl. The driver raised his hand to another lever and pulled it. The train shuddered. Looking back over the tender, Mallory saw the hopper of the first wagon tilt sideways, and dump its cargo over the side of the trestle with a roar. An explosion of dust mingled with the rain and spread over the cab.

‘Out,’ said Mallory into the fog.

When the dust settled, Carstairs was gone.

The driver reversed the engine and opened the throttle. The train shuttled back across the marshes and the fields, past the bored sentry and into the quarry. Men were still moving on the escarpment, searching. They were lower down, now.

It was only a matter of time, thought Mallory. The clock had been ticking. And now it was about to strike.

The train slowed. The locomotive came to a halt by the first red post. The driver pointed. On the steel staging beside the cab was a lever. Mallory stepped off the footplate and hauled. The hopper opened with a roar. The truck filled. Miller and Andrea appeared out of the shadows. ‘In,’ said Mallory.

Up ahead in the sentry box, there was turbulent movement. The sweaty guard came out of the door into the rain, cramming a steel helmet on to his cropped head with one hand, waving a rifle in the other. He was shouting, his words drowned by the roar of the diggers and the huge metallic pant and grind of the crusher.

It was time to leave.

The sentry had slung his rifle and was dragging the gates shut across the railway line, boots slipping in the big puddles. The train picked up speed. Mallory saw his face, red-eyed. Then the locomotive hit the gates with a crash, and there was a squeal of tortured metal, and the train was through. When Mallory looked back, he saw a wisp of smoke coming from the guardhouse window. His eyes fell on Miller. ‘I guess he sat in his ashtray,’ said Miller, returning his gaze with great innocence.

The wisp of smoke became billows, turning orange at the roots as the Thermite bomb Miller had tossed through the window burned its way through the desk and into the floor, consuming paper and timber and the sentry’s lunch, and most importantly the Bakelite of the telephone system.

‘Now listen to me,’ said Mallory.

They all listened. Even the train driver listened. He did not understand, but he trained his ears with maximum concentration on the string of incomprehensible syllables that came from the New Zealander’s lips. All of them knew that what was about to happen in the next five minutes was a matter of life and death. The train driver thought it would probably be death.

As it turned out, the train driver did not need to understand. The train thundered through dense curtains of rain into the marshes. As he stood trembling with terror, he felt himself seized by strong arms and flung like a human cannonball at the swamp. He landed in a pool of foul-smelling water that stung his eyes like caustic. When he could breathe again, he struggled on to a mud bank and lay there coughing. After a while, he heard a terrible noise.

The engine driver was a railwayman, not a soldier. He decided that discretion was the better part of valour. He still was not seeing too well. But he could locate the noise, all right. He began to crawl, swim and flounder as fast as he could in the opposite direction.

Andrea threw the engine driver out of the right-hand side of the cab, away from the greatest number of prying eyes. Then Mallory hit the throttle and jammed it right forward. Even with a full quota of trucks, the locomotive was over powered for the job. Now it was only half-loaded. As steam blasted into its cylinders it leaped forward, belching smoke, and shot across the last of the embankment. By the time it hit the trestled dumping section, it was travelling at forty miles an hour, all thirty-five tons of it.

‘Go,’ said Mallory.

As Miller jumped, he could see a steam-shovel working, hazy and grey in the rain, but he was not thinking about witnesses, because he had fifty pounds of high explosive in his pack, and besides, Mallory and Andrea were beside him in mid-air. Then they were hitting the side of a pile of crushed stone a terrible whack, rolling over and over in a soup of falling water and wet stone dust.

The train thundered through the buffers, corkscrewed into midair, drive-wheels spinning. It lost momentum, crashed on to the rubble bed of the reclaimed ground, and tobogganed forward into the cliff. The basalt face crumpled its nose like a cardboard mailing tube and drove its boiler back into its firebox. There was a mighty roar and a thunderclap detonation. The reclaimed ground was suddenly obliterated by a scalding fog of escaping steam and rain and stone dust.

In that fog, a voice close to Miller’s ear said, ‘Go now.’ Mallory’s voice. In the background was shouting, and the churn of the concrete mixers, and a klaxon.

Miller got up, and ran behind Andrea in what he assumed was the right direction. Somewhere, the klaxon was still screaming.

Andrea was bleeding. Miller imagined he was probably bleeding himself. There was an entrance ahead, a hole in the cliff. The klaxon noise was coming out of the horn above the hole. Andrea said, in German, ‘Herein.’ In. Somewhere a sergeant was shouting, a Feldwebel, telling people to take cover. Wait a minute, thought the rational part of Miller, that is a German secret weapon factory, you can’t go in there. Besides, where’s Mallory?

But by that time he was inside the mountain, and with a steady hum of hydraulics the steel door was easing to …

Was shut.

In the cellar of the ruined house above the ledge, Clytemnestra woke suddenly from a fitful sleep. Next to her she could hear the breathing of Wills: regular breathing, shallow. He was improving, she thought. Men do improve after a few days, unless they die … Her thoughts strayed towards Achilles: her own dear brother Achilles, tall and strong and quick to laugh, his falcon’s beak of a nose above the moustache, his eyes glittering with kindness and amusement. The whacking of rifle-butts on the door. The dragging away of Achilles, and her next – her last – sight of him, on the cart in the square, the Nazi swine yanking the noose taut over his head; the look in his poor eyes, that said this is really happening, to me …

Clytemnestra dragged her thoughts back from that thing too dreadful to contemplate. It had filled her mind with a turbulence that broke against the edge of her consciousness in waves of rage. She reached out her hand for her gun. She closed her fingers on the cool metal. It had a grounding effect, drew her back to the here and now.

To what it was that had woken her up.

When she remembered what that had been, she drew in her breath and did not let it out. And in the silence, that thing came again: half-way between a howl and a yelp, the distant sound of a dog. Not the sheepdogs they used in the mountains: a more purposeful sound. The sound of a dog hunting. One of the black- and-tan dogs the Sonderkommando used for hunting people.

She reached out and squeezed Wills’ hand. The feel of his warm flesh gave her encouragement. ‘What is it?’ he said.

She told him.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’d better do something about it, eh?’ As he said it, he felt a sense of wonder: his head was clear, his thoughts sharp. He remembered very little about the past twenty-four hours, except a blurred procession of images, feet walking over rock, Nelson, terrible dreams …

But that was all over now. He groped for his Schmeisser and snapped in a new magazine. Clytemnestra had her eye to the spyhole in the wall. ‘How many?’ he said.

‘Four. And the dog.’

‘One feels they may be in for a bit of a shock.’

Clytemnestra said, ‘A very big shock.’ She did not go in for his English understatement. After all, there was no shock like dying.

‘Good dog, Mutzi,’ said Tietmeyer, the handler.

Marsdorff did not agree. This damned animal had dragged him and Schmidt and Kohl up a cliff in the noonday sun. It had relieved itself on a handhold, which he had then put his hand on, and of course everyone had found that very amusing. Marsdorff was a pudgy, maggot-coloured man, who owed his place in the Sonderkommando more to a lack of scruple than to any positive military talent. Basically, Marsdorff was very good at hanging people, an accomplished hand with a red-hot iron and a pair of pliers, and no beginner when it came to the process of gang rape – a business that in Marsdorff’s view was often approached crudely and without thought. A really well-handled woman could keep a squad amused for some days –

‘Good dog,’ said the handler. The Doberman on the choke lead growled and slavered, claws scritching on the bare rock as it hauled Tietmeyer up the path towards the ruined house. It had needed some persuasion to come out of the rocks by the tomb, into which it had fled after the death of its previous handler. Now it was back at work, though, it seemed enthusiastic to make amends. ‘There’s been someone in there, all right. Gone now.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Marsdorff, with sarcasm. ‘Eagles, are they? Or mountain goats?’

‘Let’s hope they’re goats,’ said Kohl, who disliked Marsdorff. ‘I don’t mind shagging a goat, but eagles are right out.’

‘You have to draw the line somewhere,’ said Marsdorff, sagely. He was not joking. ‘On a bit.’

Negligently, the four men approached the next group of ruins. They did not believe anyone was on this island who was not supposed to be. Apparently there had been shooting. Well, they would believe it when they saw it.

The path had come to a narrow place, a defile dug out between a blade of rock and the cliff. The defile ended in a sort of groove, shoulder-deep in bare rock, leading to another group of ruined houses, the first of them a massive stone building, with loopholes staring blankly at the defile and the groove. They entered the groove, Tietmeyer in the lead. In one of the loopholes, something moved; a short, slender pipe. The barrel of a machine pistol. Tietmeyer said, nervously, ‘I don’t –’ There was a large and dreadful noise, and the groove filled up with bullets. All of them jumped. None of them hit the ground alive.

Wills walked up to the bodies. He was pale again. ‘Christ,’ he said.

Clytemnestra squatted by Tietmeyer’s body and liberated his Schmeisser, half-a-dozen magazines and a bunch of stick grenades. Then she spat in the dead face, and moved on to the next corpse. Wills watched the place where the path came round the bend in the rocks. ‘They’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Unless they’re deaf.’

Clytemnestra raised a scornful eyebrow. ‘So let them come,’ she said. She pointed upwards, to where the cliff bulged out in an overhang like the brow of a stone genius. ‘If they come there, we swat them like spiders.’ She pointed over the lip of the path. ‘There, they will not come unless they are birds. From this way’ – she pointed to where the path ended among the houses – ‘also, you will need to be a bird. And up the path, all must pass between the narrow rocks. It is like the path at Thermopylae. But you have never heard of Thermopylae, I expect.’

‘Battle in ancient Greece,’ said Wills. ‘Played in a mountain pass. Three hundred Spartans v. a hundred thousand Persians. Home team triumphant. Leonidas played centre forward.’

‘So now help me with these bodies, and we should get back to the houses.’

‘Quite,’ said Wills. It would have been bad taste to point out that the heroes of Thermopylae had died while achieving their victory. He helped Clytemnestra topple the bodies over the cliff. Then he gathered up an armful of guns and bombs and scrambled after Clytemnestra back to the Swallow’s Nest.

They were not the first people to have had the idea of defending this eyrie. The Swallow’s Nest was the fortress-like building commanding the defile, a tower that overhung the abyss like a swallow’s nest in the eaves of a roof. Wills’ boots rang in the thick-walled rooms. He put his head into something that might have been a waterspout, or a nozzle for boiling oil. The valley was full of rain and the mutter of thunder. Far below, the path was a faint zigzag rising to the base of the cliff. And on the path, little creatures crawled: German soldiers.

It occurred to Wills that while the Swallow’s Nest might be an impregnable redoubt, on an island crawling with German soldiers it was also a blind alley.

For a very small moment after the steel door hissed shut, Miller and Andrea stood quite still, listening. There was in all conscience plenty to listen to.

They were standing in a corridor hewn from the basalt. The corridor was lined with doors, full of voices echoing from the hard surfaces of the rock, and the steel plate of the door, and the girders that supported the staircases and the lighting and forced-draught units, and the loudspeakers that at this very moment were squawking klaxon noises into the babel below.

There were men everywhere. There seemed to be a lot of Wehrmacht, and a sprinkling of camouflage-smocked SS, and civilian workers, some mechanical-looking, in blue overalls, and one man in a white lab coat with pen-clips showing in the breast pocket, and rimless glasses below a head like a pumpkin. A squad of Greeks marched past, dressed in the rags of peasant field clothes, under the guard of four Waffen-SS. Everybody was too busy scuttling to and fro to spend any time staring at a couple of filthy, bloodstained men in ripped camouflage smocks.

For the moment.

The moment did not last long. A Wehrmacht NCO came marching past. He stopped, stared up at Andrea, and said, ‘What the hell do you think you’ve been doing, killer?’

Andrea stood to attention, eyes front, chin out.

‘How tall are you?’ barked the NCO. The man’s eyes were small and evil. Any minute now, thought Miller, they were going to slide down Andrea’s body to his boots, his British army-issue boots, and that would be that –

‘Two metres, Feldwebel,’ said Andrea.

‘Never seen shit piled so high in my life,’ said the NCO. Andrea’s eyes had slid down the corridor. A door had opened. A wisp of steam floated into the corridor. A man with a drawstring bag came out, fumbling with his tunic buttons. ‘You Sonderkommando cutthroats think you can march about the place with your arses filthy, you can – ‘

‘Permission to take a shower, Feldwebel!’ roared Andrea.

‘Permission to take a shower, Feldwebel!’ roared Miller.

Andrea turned left, cracked his boots on the concrete, and headed for the door. The Feldwebel turned away. If these Nazi animals wanted to take a shower during a general alert, then a shower they would take, Herr Gott. They were above the law, these brutes. The best you could hope was that they refrained from cooking and eating your men, and robbing the dead. God knew what the army was coming to. All mixed up with this Sonderkommando, and civilian labourers, and boffins, and God alone knew what other riffraff. Apparently some fool had crashed a train in the quarry, too. Beer, thought the Feldwebel. That was what you needed in a climate like this, at a time like this. He stumped off in the direction of the Sergeants’ Mess.

The klaxons had stopped. ALLES KLAR, said the big metal voice in the corridor. ALL CLEAR. STAND DOWN.

Andrea shoved open the door of the shower room.

It was a big shower room, full of steam and the cursing of men who had stopped their showers and hauled their uniforms on over soapy bodies only to be told that the whole business had been in vain.

So now they stood under the showers, brown heads and arms and legs and milk-white German torsos, and washed. Miller and Andrea found a steamy corner, took off their tell-tale boots, and buried them and their battledress under the camouflage smocks. Then they stepped under the water.

‘Most refreshing,’ said Miller.

‘Exactly so,’ said Andrea.

‘Murderers,’ said a small man, presumably Wehrmacht, under the next nozzle.

Andrea reached out a huge hand, picked him up by the chin, and said, ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

The Wehrmacht man was very small and very frightened, but also very brave. ‘What I said.’

Andrea gazed at him. Finally he said, ‘You’re quite right.’ He grinned horribly. The little man ran away.

‘Don’t like each other, do they?’ said Miller, in German.

‘Sometimes,’ said Andrea, grimly, ‘life can be very beautiful.’

He looked around in the steam, scowling, a hairy giant with someone else’s towel wrapped round his waist. Miller had a sudden mental glimpse of this shower room in a few hours: red gouts of flame shooting through the doors, the ceiling bulging in, dust and screams where the steam now hung …

If everything went according to plan.

Meanwhile, he knew what Andrea was looking for. Andrea was looking for someone in the shower with the same size feet as him.

Three hundred yards away, Mallory was thinking boots, too.

After he had jumped out of the train, he had hit the ground with his feet, cradling his Schmeisser. He had rolled, the paratrooper’s roll, come back on his feet like a cat, and started running through the rain and steam and dust for the cliff face. There had been shouts. He paid no attention. Carstairs was up the face of the cliff, heading for the aerials. He did not trust Carstairs. Carstairs needed watching. So Mallory was going up the cliff towards the aerials, to keep an eye on him. He knew the face of that cliff, had summed it up in his mind the way a yachtsman sums up a chart or a fisherman a stretch of river.

He arrived at the locomotive, a crushed barrel issuing jets of scalding steam. He ran up the iron side, avoiding the geysers. The white fog was thick here. Suddenly he was at the rock wall.

Once, it would have dropped straight into the marsh. Since the reclamation of the land it now dropped straight into the platform where the railway and the road causeways arrived at the Acropolis. But there had been building inside the cliff, and ten feet above the platform, a drainpipe had been cemented in. Now, Mallory ran along the locomotive’s boiler, jumped, locked his fingers round the drainpipe, drew up his legs, drove his bootnails into the rock, and straightened his knees. He got a foot to the top of the drainpipe, stood there a moment, perfectly in balance. The rain and steam were thick as porridge up here. Somewhere thunder roared, or perhaps it was the locomotive’s boiler, mingled with the sound of the big concrete mixers.

He reached up. At fingertip height, an electric cable ran across the sheer face. He flexed his knees, and jumped. The cable came into his hands, fat and solid, anchored to the wall with good German steel. He drove his boots into the rock and walked his feet up. Tenderly, so as not to pierce the insulation, he got a sole to the cable. Then he shifted his weight, bending his knee. In a couple of seconds he was standing on the cable, walking to the right, northwards, twenty feet off the ground.

From his vantage point he saw grey rain thickening into a solid mat of vapour, from which rose a confused roar of noise. The hiss of escaping steam was fading. The sound of voices was louder; raucous voices, bellowing orders, and the churn of the big concrete mixers. He did not have long. He walked on along the cable, one foot delicately in front of the other, water streaming down the cliff to his left. He was concentrating on his balance, tiptoeing along behind the curtain of the rain.

The concrete mixers were still grinding away below him. You did not stop concrete mixers. You kept them turning, or they went solid. From high above there descended on a cable an angel of mercy in the form of a great steel bucket.

There now began one of the longest minutes of Mallory’s life. He moved along the cable until he was standing on a concrete cornice directly above the concrete mixer. The cornice was eighteen inches wide. He lay along it, face averted from the yard.

Down below, men shouted and milled. The rain sheeted down, soaking Mallory to the skin. The bucket dropped, five feet from his right ear, clanked down into the enclosure in front of the mixer. He heard the flop of the concrete as the operator shot it down the pipe and into the bucket, the groan of the wire as it took the strain. Then the bucket was rising again.

Mallory got back on his feet. He saw the grease-black cable rise before him, no handhold there. He saw the battered steel rim of the big bucket. He knew it was now or not at all.

As the rim came up to eye level, he jumped.

His clawed fingers hit concrete-splattered steel, hung on. His toes found the flange at the top of the bucket.

Down below, someone started shouting. It was a new kind of shouting. It meant only one thing. Trouble.

He looked down. The reclaimed area was a mass of men, swarming around the wreck of the stone train like worker ants around a queen. Mallory scrambled on top of the bucket. His final glimpse stayed with him. Heads, helmeted or capped or just hairy, milling to and fro. And in the middle of all those heads, one face turned upwards into the rain, eyes wide, open-mouthed. Wehrmacht-grey shoulders. An expression of total shock.

Mallory sat on the handle of the bucket out of sight of the ground, and hoped that nobody would pay any attention to one man who had spotted something wrong with the concrete lifting gear. The cliff moved past fifteen feet away, sheer and black. Carstairs was up there somewhere; either that, or dead. Mallory would rather have been climbing. The bucket was a trap. There was no way off it –

The bucket stopped with a jerk, and hung swinging. Seven hundred and fifty feet below, little figures milled. Seven hundred and fifty feet is two hundred and fifty yards. At two hundred and fifty yards a human face is invisible, even if it is staring at you, or looking at you through binoculars, or aiming a rifle at you. Mallory drew his head back sharply. Then he looked up.

Some distance above – it was impossible to tell exactly how far, but it could have been a hundred feet – was a projection in the cliff face. A jetty or platform, crusted, by the look of it, with spilt concrete, and a crane jib. Not a crane, perhaps; a windlass. Call it what you liked, there were people up there. And the odds were that they had been warned by telephone that there was someone on the concrete bucket. So why would they halt the bucket in mid-ascent?

There were a lot of answers. The one that made the most sense to Mallory was that they were waiting for reinforcements.

Mallory looked at the cliff face. It had sloped gradually away from the bucket. Now it was a good twenty-five feet off through the rain, a wall of black basalt, but weathered up here, unsmoothed, pockmarked…

Only twenty-five feet. Too far to jump.

For a moment, Mallory watched that wall with the intensity of a falcon watching a pigeon. Then he unstrapped the lightweight rope from his pack, took a deep breath, and began.

He looped an end of the rope through the handle of the bucket, and hauled in until the two ends were equalized. He grasped the doubled rope, spat on his hands, and went over the side.

It was flimsy stuff, this silk rope, only one up from parachute cord. Harder to grip than the wire-cored Manila they had used on Navarone and in the Pyrenees; but lighter. Infinitely lighter. You could carry twice, three times the length for the same weight –

Comforting things, technicalities. They had brought him down hand over painful hand until he was hanging seventy-five feet below the bucket, like a spider on a thread, turning slowly.

He wound his left hand into the rope above his head, let go with his right. The horizon wheeled around him: clouds, the mountains on the far side of the valley, the sea, a ray of sunlight striking through the clouds making a sudden dazzling path; then the slopes and faces of the Acropolis, the cliff, twenty-five feet away, not far at all. His left hand was agony now, the rope biting like a cheese wire. His right fumbled with the rope, tying a double figure-of-eight as the world turned another forty-five degrees, ninety, to the lengthening shadows of the aeroplanes and the fuel dumps on the dim sward of the airfield. And directly below, spinning with wonderful slowness, the little corpse of the wrecked train.

The knot was finished. The two strands of the rope were tied together. Mallory jammed his right boot into the loop, and put his weight on it, and flexed his left hand to get the blood circulating again. He hung there and let the world turn another two hundred and seventy degrees. Nobody seemed to be shooting at him. When the spin had brought him face to the cliff again, he let his weight drop back.

Seven hundred feet above the wrecked train, seventy-five feet below the bucket, a hundred and seventy feet below the crane, he started to swing.

He swung like a child on a rope hung from a tree branch, except that he was a soldier an eighth of a mile from the ground. The arc grew. He could feel the air dividing in front of his face, smell, as he approached the cliff, that odd smell of hot wet rock, half clammy, half aromatic.

He started to analyse the place where he would land. His present arc would leave him somewhere too smooth. Over to the right, erosion had left a little hook, a semi-detached plate of rock with a tuft of sun-dried grass sprouting from the crevice above. It swept towards him. He reached out his hand, measuring. Just short. The next swing, he moved the axis, gave the rope a little extra pull, gained that extra ounce of speed; so that on the next swing he found himself at the top of the arc, weightless, standing for a split second on nothing, stationary at the apex of his swing. He put out his hand and grasped the little hook of rock, jamming his fingers into the crevice behind it. His weight came on to the flake. He heard his finger joints crack. His boot hit the rock. The nails found a hold. He stood for a second like a starfish, his right hand and right boot holding the cliff, his left arm and left boot engaged with the doubled rope. He shifted the foot. Now he had two boots on the face, his right hand on the flake, his left holding the rope. He would need the rope again –

The flake under his right hand gave way.

There was no warning. One second he was on the wall, getting balanced. The next he was out, falling, no holds anywhere except in his left hand, where the thin rope was sliding through his palm, and the ground far below was coming up to meet him.

He clamped his teeth and his fist at the same time. His fist slid to the knot he had tied in the end of the rope, the bulky double figure-of-eight. He stopped with a crack that tried to tear his arm out by the roots. Each swing tried to shake him off. He held on grimly. As the oscillations grew smaller, the centrifugal force was not so tormenting. He got his right hand on to the rope, then his foot. He manoeuvred himself into a standing position. He thought his knees into not shaking.

Then he started all over again.

This time, he left nothing to chance. He found a new handhold, and went for it. But this time, he committed himself only when he was quite sure. He found himself a place to stand, and he stood there, and methodically untied the figure-of-eight, and coiled the rope, and slung it, and started to climb up and to the left, into a sort of shallow gully or couloir, where he would be out of sight from below and above.

He went up hard and steady, climbing from the hips, his mind fixed on the next hold, never mind the top; the top was just another rest, and would look after itself. It was not until he got into the couloir that he started to shake.

Up in the Swallow’s Nest, Wills’ head was getting clearer by the minute. One of the things becoming clearest was that he was in a tightish spot, with a woman. He opened a tin of sardines, and looked at Clytemnestra, the olive curve of her cheek against the black fringe of her shawl; hard as a steel spring, light on her feet as a feather. The other thing he had noticed, now that his brain was working again, was that she was extremely beautiful. In Wills’ experience of women, which was limited to a few devoted hours spent carrying the golf clubs of his cousin Cynthia, they were not to be counted on in tight spots. Well, not not counted on, exactly; but their place was not in the line of fire, but on the … well … home front. Clytemnestra seemed to be different. This had come as a shock to Wills, though not a disagreeable one. He ate another sardine.

Clytemnestra was peering down one of the spouts of the Swallow’s Nest. As Wills watched, she took a German stick grenade, pulled the toggle, and dropped it through the spout.

Well, thought Wills, fitting her into a known structure. For Clytemnestra and the islanders of Kynthos, this is the home front. He watched the grenade fall, wobbling in the air. The little figures on the zigzag were bigger now, five hundred feet below. They did not look up.

It was a nicely calculated drop. The grenade burst in the air, at about waist height. Wills heard nothing that he could class as an explosion; a flash and a puff of smoke, and a split-second later a flat, ineffectual-sounding whap. Three of the little figures on the path were not on the path any more. The rest stopped and lay down; fifteen of them at the most, with more coming up behind. A lot more. They faltered, all of them. It must be unnerving to find yourself under fire from a place you could not see, on an island of which you were supposed to be in control.

After a while, small voices floated up from below, mingled with birdsong. The men below started to move in little rushes. If they had been on a plain or a hillside, they would undoubtedly have spread out. But this was a cliff, and the path was the only means of access. They were bunching again, directly below the Swallow’s Nest…

‘Thermopylae!’ yelled Wills, and pulled the strings on two bombs, and let them go.

Again the flash and the puff and the whap. Again the little figures, flung off the path and vanishing over the horizon. Again the silence.

But in that silence, a single word. Hoch. Up. And all of a sudden, in that huddle of figures, a series of pale discs: faces. And after the faces, the small flicker of muzzle flashes, and the sting and whine of bullets beyond the Swallow’s Nest walls.

Clytemnestra sat back, her legs out in front of her, and took a sip of water, and smiled at Wills, showing those white teeth and those fierce eyes, slapping the dirty floor-slabs as you might pat a horse. What she was saying was that there were six feet of good solid masonry between them and those bullets. Nothing was going to shift them, short of artillery.

Wills grinned back at her, feeling the stretch of burned skin on his face.

A shadow flitted across his thoughts. There were a lot of Germans out there. Up here in the Swallow’s Nest there was food and ammunition for a couple of days, no more. Maybe they would be relieved. The men in the Acropolis were good men, they had proved that already. Four men, said the small, dark voice in Wills’ head. Against a thousand or so.

He heard the scritch of grenade fuses, the blat of the explosions, Clytemnestra hiss a curse. A file of soldiers was running up the last zigzag and into the shelter of the cliff. The grenades knocked three of them down, but that left a dozen. Clytemnestra grabbed for her Schmeisser. The Swallow’s Nest filled with its jackhammer clatter. She swore again, stopped firing. The range was too big. Wills found himself a loophole that covered the mouth of the path, and waited, sighting down the groove in the stone. Clytemnestra had shot the first lot. It was Wills’ turn.

For twenty minutes, nothing moved out there except a lizard, hunting flies on the plates of rock at the mouth of the defile. Then the lizard became suddenly still, as if listening. A fly landed within six inches of it. It paid no attention. Fast as an eye blinking, it was gone.

After it there came, first of all, a boot. Wills rested the foresight of the Schmeisser on the place where the knee would be, and moved the v of the backsight up to cradle it.

A man came out, helmet down, like a rabbit with a ferret on its tail, slap into the sights. Wills fired a four-round burst. The man straightened up and fell backwards into the soldier who was following, stopping him. While he was stopped, Wills shot him in the head. He slammed back. Another man was behind him, and another. Wills fired a longer burst. Hands went up and legs buckled and somebody somewhere began shouting, whether from pain or shock he could not tell. The main thing was that nobody else came through the gap. Like pheasants, he thought. Like pheasants that you take out in front, one, two, except with a machine pistol you could take three, four, five. His head was light, and he thought that he might be going to laugh or cry, he could not tell which. ‘Like pheasants,’ he said.

‘Like Nazi swine,’ said Clytemnestra.

Suddenly, Wills was shaking. Clytemnestra put her hand on his shoulder, and made small, soothing noises. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, when he could speak. ‘I was in the Navy. It’s a new way of … seeing men die.’

She smiled and nodded. She did not understand, though. She had seen her brother hanged for no reason except that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was not thinking about the way she felt. She was thinking about the enemy, hoping one of them would show himself and she would have a chance to kill him. Kill or be killed, thought Wills, a little wildly: that is the whole of the Law –

Outside, a machine gun started hammering. The bullets whanged off the stones. None of them found its way through the loophole. Clytemnestra was firing now, short bursts again. She must have learned from someone, thought Wills. Short bursts don’t overheat, and guns that don’t overheat don’t jam. Andrea might have taught her –

‘Four more,’ she said, snapping out the magazine.

It was lives out there, Wills knew. Not weapons training. Seven men bleeding down that hillside. Five left.

The machine gun opened up again. Clytemnestra was still reloading. Wills popped up, saw two more men running along the groove, squeezed the trigger, tumbled the first one like a rabbit, cut the second one’s knees from under him. Don’t do it, you bloody fools, he was thinking. Christ, why am I saying this? I want to live. But now he could see these men, he wanted them to live too, to stop bursting out of the slot in the cliff and running down that gutterful of flying lead –

He got his wish. They stopped. Down below, the path zigzagged empty. Wills offered Clytemnestra a cigarette. She refused. He lit one himself. He could feel the pressure of the silence: fifty men, waiting in dead ground for the next thing to happen.

Whatever that was going to be.

They’re getting ready,’ he said.

Clytemnestra showed her teeth. ‘Soon, we kill them all,’ she said; Helen, Medea, the whole vengeful regiment of Greek myth rolled into one and carrying a sub-machine-gun.

They waited.

Nothing happened.

They both watched the slot in the cliff, the things lying in the rock gulley that had once been men, but were now mere bundles of rags drowned in a long gutter of shadow. The sun was going down.

‘What do we do when it gets dark?’ said Wills.

‘Leave,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘There is a way. A way beyond.’

‘So what happens if the Germans find it?’ said Wills.

‘Nobody will find it who was not born on Kynthos,’ she said, with a scorn so magnificent that it drove away the anxieties flocking round Wills, and really made him believe that there were things here invisible to normal eyes, things that only Clytemnestra could see.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills.

Something that sounded like an express train roared overhead. There was a huge explosion. The floor of the Swallow’s Nest shook as if in an earthquake. ‘Christos!’ said Clytemnestra. ‘What was that?’

‘Gun,’ said Wills. ‘Eighty-eight, probably.’ Now that there was actually a military problem to engage his mind, he felt oddly better. ‘They’ll have them on the airfield, for flak. They’ll be spotting it in, I expect. Chaps round the corner’ll be on the radio.’ His mind rolled on. There would be no radio to the airport gun emplacements. Telephone only. So the chaps round the corner would be transmitting to the big aerials on the top of the Acropolis, and someone up there would be calling the fall of shot to the chaps by the gun. Elaborate, but it seemed to work –

Another express train passed overhead and to the right. Another explosion pummelled their ears. Another earthquake shook the floor. Bracketed. Now all the gunners had to do was dot the i.

The sun was well behind the mountains, now. Far away across the valley, an edge of shadow was creeping up the sunlit crags of the Acropolis.

A great fist smashed Wills to the ground. He found himself lying with his head on Clytemnestra’s belly, his ears chiming like a belfry, bits of cement and chips of stone raining down on him. Overhead, where the roof should have been, he could see a patch of blue sky veined with little golden wisps of sunset cloud. There was a strong reek of burned stone and high explosive.

‘Wait till they hear about that,’ said Wills, in a voice that did not quite shake.

‘About what?’ Clytemnestra’s hand was in his hair. She stroked it absent-mindedly, as if he was a dog.

‘They’re zeroed in,’ said Wills. ‘Hang on to your hat.’

EIGHT

Thursday 2000-2300

The rain had passed. From the west face of the Acropolis, the sun was a red-hot cannonball falling into a sea of ink. Mallory climbed hard and fast, staying in gullies, where the shadows lay like a dark liquid. He was not interested in the view. He was looking forward to the falling of night. Things were safer in the dark …

He paused, comfortable in his foot and handholds, and looked about him. He was on a vast, curved face, a sort of oil drum of rock. He had bypassed a couple of vents and entrances; the concrete crane was a thousand feet below him. The oil drum was the final peak on top of which the aerial array stood. He was tired. Fumbling in his pack he found the Benzedrine, popped out a couple of pills, swallowed them.

High on the curved face of the rock, something flickered across Mallory’s vision. A mere speck, crawling from one gulley, across a sun-gilded ridge and into the next gulley. It might have been a bird, a bee, even. But Mallory knew that it was his quarry. Carstairs, climbing very fast, solo. He hoped the man’s technique was up to it.

There was only one way to be sure.

Mallory went after him. The Benzedrine spread cool energy through him as he drifted up that cliff, keeping just below the line of shadow the sinking sun drove up the cliff from the mountains at his back, relying on the contrast between the light and the darkness to hide him. Ten minutes later, he was in the same chimney as Carstairs, an easy chimney, with a chockstone seventy feet up, and the summit just beyond the chockstone. He looked up, shielding his eyes against the grit coming down off Carstairs’ boots. If Carstairs wanted the aerials, two would do the job more easily than one.

Mallory whistled.

Carstairs had never done such a long solo. He was an expedition climber, a man used to ropes and sherpas and a glass of cold champagne at base camp. At first, his knees had shaken, and the loneliness had pressed in on him. But he was a good technical climber, so he had taken it easy, taken it slow, driven himself up all those vertical feet, safe as houses, accelerating as he got the hang of it until he was climbing at a pretty fair speed. Oh yes, he had begun to think, I’m good at this. Now, as far as he could see, he was nearly at the top. There would be guards at the top; after all this climbing, fighting …

He was up and under the chockstone now. The boulder jammed into the crack blocked his further progress. He would have to go out on to the lip of the crack, work his way round the boulder, then prepare for the … well, final assault. He belayed his rope. Then he reached up a hand, straining round the boulder for a crack, probing with the tip of a spike. Found a place. The spike went in. He worked it in further; worked it in by hand. There would be guards up there. The clink of a hammer on a spike would carry. The guard would look over …

That was when he heard the whistle.

His heart leaped in his chest. He glanced down, saw the figure in the SS smock. A German. His hands were engaged. He could not get a weapon. He did not know it was Mallory, following him. All he knew was that that figure down there would go for his gun, shoot him out of the sky. He needed to get out of the line of fire. Over the stone. He put his weight on his right hand, swung out of the chimney …

He was half-way out when he lost his grip and fell.

He saw the floor of the world turn under his eyes. For a split second he thought, this is it. Then the rope caught him. He swung wildly. Something smote him a wicked bang on the head, and everything went first red, and then black.

Mallory saw the foreshortened figure above reach out, grab, slip, fall, swing. He heard the wet smack of the head on the rock, saw him twitch, then hang limp on the rope.

He waited for the rope to stop swinging, the deadly swing that could work a spike loose. Then he went up, fast, out of the groove in case Carstairs fell, up the right-hand side on holds a fly would have despised. He reached the spike and checked it. It was deep in the crack, holding; a good belay in a difficult spot. Carstairs knew what he was doing, all right.

Once he had checked the belay, Mallory went to the body. There was a good pulse, a lump rising on the back right-hand bulge of the skull under the hair, sticky with brilliantine and stone-grit. The man would live. Mallory hauled the body up into a sitting position, looped the tail of the rope under its armpits and rolling-hitched it on to the standing part. Now Carstairs was sitting on the end of the rope like a drunk on a bar stool, dangling over a thousand feet of nothing. Perfectly safe.

Mallory went through his pockets, found the cigarette case, the knife, the silenced Browning automatic in a shoulder holster; a murderer’s weapon. In the waist pouches, he found what he was looking for: two blocks of a substance like putty, wrapped in greasy paper. Plastic explosive. But no time pencils.

Mallory stood wedged in the chimney, sweating. Plastic explosive was funny stuff. You could burn it. You could spread it on bread and eat it, if the worst came to the worst. And of course you could blow a hole in steel with it. But only if you had some fulminate of mercury to start it off, in those little colour-coded pencils, the size of a long cigarette.

Mallory went back to Carstairs’ pockets. The gold cigarette case came out. There was lettering on it: ‘Darling Billy, from Betty Grable – What a night!’ Mallory opened the case one-handed.

Turkish this side. Virginian that. And in the middle, the time pencils.

Mallory shoved the case in his breast pocket and climbed on. The cliff face was curving away from him now, becoming less a precipice, more a slope. He could see the aerial pylons glowing as if red-hot in the last rays of the sun. He stayed low, creeping on his belly until he could see the whole dome of the summit. The pylons stuck out of the naked rock, a hundred feet apart, supporting a web of fine wires. There seemed to be a lot more wire than was required for normal short-wave apparatus. Mallory supposed that if you were shooting things into space, you would need some sort of sophisticated radio to find out what was happening to the machinery. Not that he cared. It was as much part of a weapon as a sight was part of a rifle. His job was to destroy it.

He made a circuit of the mountain top. It had the look of a place untrodden except by maintenance engineers. There was a trap door at the far side, a hefty steel object set in concrete. To the east, the Acropolis continued as a series of lower peaks, a series of plugs like the noses of a clip of giant bullets, a hot wilderness of shale and sun-scorched shrubs, its declivities filled with the violet shadows of evening; a hard place, with a sense of pressure underneath it. Mallory was a New Zealander. He knew the sensation of standing on a volcano; the feeling that the ground under his feet had once been a white-hot liquid, pushing to get out into the air, burn and destroy. No change there …

He found himself peering into the deepest of the valleys: more a hole than a valley, really. And in its bottom, instead of the usual dried-up pond with a patch of thorny scrub, was something else. No vegetation: a smooth, dark bowl. It was as if the hole was a deep one, made shallower with carefully-slung camouflage nets.

Mallory filed the information away in his Benzedrine-sharpened mind, and trotted up the dome to the base of the aerials.

There was a faint hum up here, a sense that the ether was troubled by invisible forces. Mallory crouched and wrapped a charge of plastic explosive round the base girders of one of the pylons, making sure it was good and close to the wrist-thick wire that snaked along the rock from the hole by the trap door. Should bring one pylon down, break that cobweb of wires. Mending them would take time – time during which the Acropolis would be dumb and deaf.

He packed on the charges, pushed in two black time pencils, crushed them and pulled out the safety tags. The electrolyte began eating away at the corrosion wire that held back the spring-loaded plunger from the blasting cap. Ten minutes, perhaps less on a warm evening like this. The sun was balanced on the horizon. Time to get clear. He went down the slope until the slope became a cliff. He doubled his rope around a projection of the rock, looped it over his shoulder and up between his legs, and walked backwards out and down, casting left and right for the chimney where he had left Carstairs.

He found it on his left, saw the chockstone coming up, slowed his descent. He would need to get the Englishman on to a ledge, keep him warm, get a briefing from him, leave him to recover -

He stopped next to the chockstone. Somewhere behind him and below, deep in the gulf of shadow that was the marsh and the valley, a gun fired: the peculiar flat crack of an 88. Normally, Mallory would have pitied the poor devil who was on the receiving end of that high-velocity, flat-trajectory packet of death. He would also have asked himself who, on this German-controlled island, was shooting at whom.

But he did not ask himself any of this, because he had other things on his mind.

He had left Carstairs unconscious, trussed into a sitting position, hanging from a piton over a thousand-foot drop.

Now, Carstairs was gone.

Mallory looked down. On the floodlit platform three hundred yards below his feet, people were moving, vehicles crawled, a gang was clustered round the engine. (Crack, said the 88 again, down in the valley.) There was none of the ants’-nest activity you would expect if the body of a commando with a Clark Gable moustache had plummeted out of the sky and into their midst.

Mallory thought for a moment.

There was no telling where Carstairs had gone. The only certainty was that in (he looked at his watch) four minutes, anywhere near the aerial site was going to be a very unhealthy place to be.

Hauling down his rope from the summit belay, he made it fast again, wrapped it round himself, and slid rapidly into the thickening shadows below.

For Miller, the shower he took in the entrance lobby of the Acropolis V4 complex was not the most refreshing in living memory. The water was hot, the soap plentiful, the hygiene nothing to complain about by the standards of twenty-four hours on a Sporadic mountainside. It was the company Miller objected to. Mixed at best, he thought gloomily, watching a rat-faced Wehrmacht private disrobe, pick his nose, and waddle under the showerhead. At worst –

‘Scrub my back?’ said a voice behind him. He turned to see a large blond individual with no neck and a crew cut smiling upon him tenderly.

‘Can’t reach,’ said Miller. The blond man pouted, and started to lather his vast acreage with violet-scented soap. He was about the same size as Andrea, something (Miller observed) that Andrea had not been slow to notice. Andrea was out of the shower, had dried himself on someone else’s towel, and was sidling towards the locker where the blond man’s clothes were hanging.

The blond man finished soaping himself. He had a disappointed air. He put himself under the jet of water and rinsed off the lather. There were SS lightning-flash runes tattooed on his mighty bicep. Miller could see Andrea struggling into a pair of jackboots. It looked as if he would be some time. The outside door opened. A man came in, lanky, about Miller’s height, with a brown engineer’s coat and a clipboard. The coat would be useful. The clipboard was a blessing from God. Miller said to the blond man, ‘You off, then?’

‘Not much happening here,’ said the blond man, sulkily.

‘Ah,’ said Miller. ‘Well I think this is your lucky day. See that guy just come in?’ He pointed at the man in the engineer’s coat. ‘Very nice guy,’ said Miller. ‘Likes a bit of fun.’

‘Zat so?’ said the blond. ‘Thanks, friend.’

‘Any time,’ said Miller, and sashayed rapidly on to dry land.

As he dried himself, he watched the lanky engineer hang up his overall coat with finicky precision, put his trousers on a hanger, arrange on the floor of the locker a pair of brown suede shoes, become indistinct in the steam, and start soaping himself. Miller saw the large figure of the blond SS man start making his way casually towards him. He tweaked open the locker, removed the engineer’s clothes and marched over to his own untidy pile. He put on his own undergarments and the engineer’s overalls, slung his pack on his back, and bundled his own clothes up inside the scarf so they looked like washing. When he turned he found himself looking at an SS leutnant with Andrea’s face and a washing bundle of his own.

‘Come,’ said Andrea. ‘Quick.’

Some sort of fight seemed to have broken out in the shower. ‘Ja, Herr Leutnant,’ said Miller. They walked out of the door, an SS man and an engineer, the engineer carrying a load of laundry, the SS man talking to him with earnestness and concentration.

‘What now?’ said Miller.

‘Find out the geography. What’s on your clipboard?’

There was a list of bolt sizes, with under it some blank paper. Miller shuffled the blank paper to the top. The pair of them walked off, Andrea chin up and arrogant, Miller trailing behind doing his best to look dazed and acquiescent, struggling under the awkward load of clothes and explosives.

‘Hey!’ said Andrea. ‘You!’

A small Wehrmacht man had been passing. He said, ‘Me?’

‘None other,’ drawled Andrea. ‘Take these clothes. Throw them away.’

‘Away?’ The man’s eyes were dull and stupid.

‘A tubercular patient in the village,’ said Andrea. ‘They are to be burned. Now. Where is the hospital?’

‘Third level,’ said the soldier.

‘Remember this,’ said Andrea. ‘The faster you go, the more likely you are to live. And don’t tell anyone, or they’ll give you the treatment.’

‘Treatment, Herr Leutnant?’

‘Paraffin enemas,’ said Miller, with a ghastly grin.

The private gulped and scuttled off, holding the bundles as far away from him as possible.

‘Now,’ said Andrea. ‘Let us see to the state of the wiring in this pest hole.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Miller, bowing his head over his clipboard and writing diligently. ‘After you, Herr Leutnant.’

They walked up the steel stairs, slowly, but putting distance between themselves and the crisis that would be developing in the shower. The base level seemed by a thrum in the rock to consist of machinery and shelters. Above were living quarters: they passed rooms in which double-tiered bunks stretched away to impossibly distant vanishing points, a couple of mess rooms wafting the sour smell of boiled sausage and fried onions. A Wehrmacht major was marching towards them. ‘Two hundred and ten,’ said Andrea. Miller scribbled on his clipboard. The Wehrmacht major stopped, frowning. Miller felt his stomach hollow out.

‘What are you doing?’ said the major.

Andrea crashed to attention. ‘Heil Hitler!’ he yelled, shooting out his right arm.

‘Oh,’ said the major, who had a mild, clerkish, non-Nazi sort of face. ‘Heil, er, Hitler.’ He gave the army salute. ‘What are you doing?’ he said again.

‘Light bulb audit,’ said Andrea, with a face like granite.

‘Light bulbs?’ said the major, frowning at the SS runes on Andrea’s smock.

‘Those are my orders,’ said Andrea.

‘Jawohl,’ said Miller, squinting furiously at the bridge of his nose and trying by willpower to stop the sweat running down his face.

The major sighed. ‘So they fly you from the Harz specially to count the light bulbs,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be torturing women or something?’

‘Herr Major?’ Andrea’s face was as stiff as a poker.

The major shook his head. There was drink on his breath. ‘Oh, hell,’ he said. ‘I suppose someone’s got to do it.’

‘Jawohl, Herr Major,’ shouted Andrea.

‘Carry on,’ said the major. He walked away, muttering.

They carried on. They went up more stairs to something that seemed from the smell of antiseptic to be a hospital level: though there was no hospital to be seen, merely a horizontal corridor with a steel catwalk suspended over a rough floor of volcanic rock. The hospital was an opening off the tunnel. At the tunnel’s end was a concrete doorframe with a lift inside it. On the right of the lift was a small wooden structure, like a sentry box, but bigger.

There were fewer people up here. A couple of men walked past, deep in conversation, wearing engineers’ coats like Miller’s. They looked at him as they passed. He nodded. They nodded back and walked on without altering their step. At the end they paused by the sentry box, fished out passes of some kind. An SS man came out of the sentry box. He looked at the passes, the engineers, back at the passes, the engineers again. Then the engineers signed a book, and moved on to the lift.

‘They’ve got keys,’ said Andrea.

‘You would almost think,’ said Miller, ‘that they did not want anyone to get in.’

As he spoke, there was a small, distinct bump that seemed to come not down the tunnel but through the rock itself. Miller felt a twinge of significant happiness. He was always suspicious of the ability of anyone but himself to use explosives. But it seemed likely now that Mallory had managed to make the stuff go off. And knowing Mallory, he would have put it in the right place.

All this he thought very fast indeed. There were klaxons moaning again, and he found that he was walking, walking alongside Andrea – not into the great mass of people seething and swirling behind them on the lower levels, but forward; forward towards the sentry box at the foot of the lift shaft.

Up in the Swallow’s Nest, Wills lay with his head on Clytemnestra’s belly and dust in his eyes and wondered why he was not dead yet.

He did not lie for long. He got up and grabbed at a Schmeisser and went once again to the loophole. The sun was all the way down now; outside, the world lay in deep shadow, deepest over the bodies crumpled in the gulley of the path. The killing ground was quiet, empty of living things. The last ray of sun lit the summit of the mountain above the Acropolis, where the aerials were.

From that summit there came a small, brilliant flash, followed some time later by the tiny thump of an explosion.

He raised his glasses to his eyes.

A black smear of smoke drifted in the light. The aerials had gone.

Down in the valley, the 88 crashed again. The shell smashed into the cliff, miles above their heads. Wills thought for a moment, then went back to Clytemnestra. He wanted to talk; but he found himself grinning too hard.

‘What is it?’ she said. She was picking herself up now.

‘They were talking to the radio room on the mountain,’ said Wills. ‘Someone was spotting for the 88. The aerials have gone. They’re firing blind.’

Clytemnestra got up and reeled to the loophole. She pushed the hair out of her eyes. Wills gave her a water bottle. She spat out the first mouthful, then drank deeply. ‘Fine,’ she said.

Wills had stopped grinning. The immediate danger was past. Longer-term, the situation had not changed. ‘We’re still stuck,’ he said. ‘All they’ve got to do is wait there till we starve.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Not true, my sad English friend. Now it is dark.’

‘Can’t eat dark,’ said Wills.

She laughed. It was a confident laugh, most encouraging. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘we eat not dark, but sheep.’

Concussion, thought Wills. Poor girl, what the hell will I do with her now? ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘More water.’

‘I have sat down enough,’ she said. ‘Also, I have drunk all a woman needs to drink, who is about to take a journey.’

‘Journey?’ said Wills, fogged.

‘We are leaving,’ said Clytemnestra, shouldering her pack. ‘Follow me.’

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills. He strapped on his pack and slung his Schmeisser. Once, before he had started skulking in the mountains with beautiful Furies, he had been the commander of an MTB. That had been in another life, over twenty-four hours ago. He squeezed a burst out of the loophole at the slot in the rocks, the muzzle flash making blue lightnings in the dark. Then he was jogging down the stone stairs into the mould-smelling lower room of the Swallow’s Nest, out into the warm night, up the alley that did duty as this hamlet’s main street, his back crawling with the expectation of bullets, through a passage so narrow he had to turn sideways, following the faint scuff of Clytemnestra’s boots in front. The passage became a path. Thick bushes brushed against his legs, and once something that looked like a wall of trees reared up in front of him and whipped his face, and he knew he had gone through a curtain of some kind. Then they were climbing athwart a slope so steep he could touch the ground with his right hand, while on his left he felt the presence of a dark and mighty gulf. At last, the voice in front said, ‘Stop.’ He groped his way along until he found an opening, and slid in. There was a scrape and a flare of light as Clytemnestra lit a match. She ran her hand along a ledge, and came down with a stub of candle. They were in a cave, square-sided: another tomb. ‘They won’t find us here,’ she said. ‘Not without dogs.’

There had been dogs everywhere. But Wills found himself so tired that he would not have batted an eyelid if the whole pack of the hounds of Hell had been baying at his heels. Tired or not, Wills had been decently educated at public school, and he knew how to treat a lady. ‘Are you quite comfortable?’ he said.

Clytemnestra yawned, the yawn of a sleepy cat. ‘I have killed some Germans,’ she said. ‘I am free in my country. How should I not be comfortable?’

‘You might have a nice armchair,’ said Wills. ‘Dinner at Ciro’s. Bottle of Romanée-Conti. Nip along to the Mottled Oyster afterwards – ‘

‘Mottled Oyster?’ said Clytemnestra.

‘Night club,’ said Wills. ‘Dancing.’

‘And you would need a woman,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘A beautiful girl.’

There was a short silence. Then Wills said, ‘No shortage here,’ and lay back, head on pack, so that even in the candlelight there would be no chance of her seeing the crimson in his face. When he glanced furtively across at her, he saw that she was smiling a small, contented smile. It suddenly struck him that he had been manoeuvred into saying what he had just said. Hello, he thought. Hello …

But before his thoughts could develop further, he was asleep.

Mallory welcomed the darkness as if it had been a long-lost brother. What he did not welcome was the fact that he had lost Carstairs. If he had fallen, that was very bad. If he had not fallen, then knowing Carstairs that was probably even worse.

He scrutinized the face of the cliff with a pair of small but powerful Zeisses that he had removed from a Panzer general, the Panzer general being at the time en route for a British prison camp having been plucked from the Cretan mountains by Mallory and his comrades. In the disc of his vision, Mallory saw the corrugations of the cliffs, ridge and gulley, boulder and boiler plate, precipice and ledge –

The disc stopped. Mallory balanced on two toes and a hand, and moved the focus wheel as gently as a biologist focusing on a new bacillus.

Across the cliff wall two hundred yards to his right, a shadow was moving – a shadow like a four-legged spider, scuttling and pausing.

Mallory shifted the disc of the glasses ahead, in the direction Carstairs was travelling. He saw a ledge; a ledge too sharp and clearly-defined in construction to be altogether natural. A way into the mountain. A way through to the Kormoran survivor. His objective.

But as Mallory started once more to watch him move across the cliff, he frowned. There was something wrong with the way the man was moving. He watched the right hand, a pale crab against the dark rock. It scuttled, then paused, patting the surface as if the mind guiding it was working in short bursts, going numb between bursts of lucidity. The mind, Mallory realized, of a man who had recently hit his head very hard on the side of a mountain.

Something on the ledge caught Mallory’s eye: a sudden flare of light, a face and a helmet-brim suddenly glowing sharp and clear as a soldier sheltered a match in cupped hands to light a cigarette.

Carstairs kept struggling on, as if he had not noticed anything. Perhaps he had not. Mallory would have cursed if there had been time for cursing. Instead, he took his boots off and hung them round his neck. Then he stepped across on to the wall and started climbing, fast and smooth.

He was travelling four feet to Carstairs’ three, but Carstairs had a long start. As he climbed, Mallory saw with increasing clarity that to Carstairs, the ledge was simply a way in, and that his brain was not working well enough for him to be cautious. What was going to happen was that he was going to blunder straight into the guard, who would have the advantage of surprise, and a clear head. If Carstairs was captured alive, Dieter Wolf would have him answering questions in about ten minutes. If the sentry killed him, the word would be out that the partisans in the mountains were now inside the Acropolis defences. Presumably, the Germans would have been relying on their security at the gates, rather than running checks inside the Acropolis. But that would change in a moment, and life would get very difficult for anyone who was inside.

Perhaps it already was.

Mallory climbed on, eating up the traverse. Holds were plentiful. Many men might have been made nervous by the six hundred feet of nothingness below. But Mallory had slept on the west face of Mount Cook, in a sleeping bag hung from two pitons over five thousand sheer feet. He climbed carefully, but with nerves untroubled by altitude.

What was preying on his mind was Carstairs, now thirty feet below and twenty yards to the right. Mallory could hear him: the scritch of nails on rock, the harsh gasp of his breathing. And if Mallory could hear him, so could the guard …

Carstairs was a biscuit toss from the ledge now. With his dark- adjusted eyes, Mallory watched the dreadful story unfold.

The guard had been smoking his cigarette and humming, gazing, no doubt, upon the beauty of the sea, now a silver-paved floor under the vault of the stars. Then suddenly he stopped, dropped his cigarette, unslung his rifle, moved right to the back of the ledge, and plastered himself against the cliff wall.

Carstairs’ boots sounded like a marching army. Mallory knew what was going to happen. There was a low parapet around the ledge. As soon as Carstairs’ head and shoulders came above it, the sentry would open fire, secure in the knowledge that Carstairs’ hands would be fully occupied with climbing.

Mallory as good as ran across the cliff. He could feel the stone tearing at his stockinged feet, but he paid no attention. As the ledge arrived twelve feet below, he began to move slowly. The cliff was gritty up here, and dislodging the smallest pebble could lead to disaster.

Very slowly, he moved across the face until the sentry’s steel helmet was a metallic egg below, the barrel of his rifle trained on the right-hand end of the parapet. If only he had had a silenced Browning, thought Mallory, like the one Carstairs carried, and Miller…

But all Mallory had was a knife.

He moved the last six inches to the left. Now he was in position directly above the sentry. He took the knife from its sheath and gripped it in his hand. He looked down at that steel helmet, and for a fraction of a second there flitted across his mind pity for this boy who was just doing his duty, and disgust at himself, washed by the current of war against this man, now the agent of his drowning.

He shifted his foot half an inch to give him a purchase, and prepared to jump. He felt the pebble roll, and stopped, knowing it was too late. He felt it escape, saw it fall, a tiny crumb of stone, heard the small plink as it hit the brim of the soldier’s helmet. The soldier looked up: a young face, shocked, mouth open. The last thing he saw was Mallory, falling like a thunderbolt, hands down, knife out, felt the crushing weight, the terrible sting of the razor- sharp steel.

Then he saw no more. He struggled for a moment, though: the wild, reflex struggle of an organism already fatally wounded, going through the motions of self-defence, to the limit of its dying strength.

Mallory was not prepared for it. The knife had gone in hard and deep, and he had expected the man to collapse. Instead he found the dagger torn from his hand and the man’s tunic rent away from his fingers as the spasming muscles jerked the man out of his grip and away, over the parapet.

And the ledge was an empty slice of rock, with a steel door concreted into the cliff at its back.

‘Carstairs,’ said Mallory, low-voiced.

Carstairs hauled himself over the parapet. He sat down, and let his head hang, and said, ‘What the hell happened?’

‘You tried to commit suicide,’ said Mallory, cold. ‘You nearly succeeded.’

‘Wha?’ said Carstairs, uncomprehending. ‘Oh, I see. Joke.’ He fumbled in his breast pocket. ‘Cigarette? Virginian this side, Turkish tha – Oh, God. Lost me case.’

‘Here,’ said Mallory, and gave it to him. ‘No smoking.’

‘Oh, I say,’ said Carstairs, frowning. His brain was not working. ‘Sentry’s gone. Relax, eh? Nobody knows we’re here.’

Mallory shook his head. He walked over to the steel door, and shoved it open. ‘They will,’ he said. ‘They will.’

Private Otto Schultz weighed eighteen stone, and this evening every single ounce of him was completely fed up. Some fool had crashed a locomotive, and Schultz had spent a miserably sweaty hour with winches and levers and NCOs screaming at him. Then he had gone for his dinner, and half-way through his fourth sausage all the aerials (someone had said it was the aerials, anyway) had been bombed or shot up, nobody knew which, so they had all had to go and sit in the shelters. And then, before he had had time to finish his food, he had been told to report for duty in the guardhouse with two of those Sonderkommando thugs. They had spent the last half-hour reminiscing about some place called Treblinka, about which Schultz had no desire to hear. Then one of them, Putzi he seemed to be called, had beaten Schultz at chess. Schultz was pretty sure Putzi had cheated, but that was not the sort of thing you accused a Sonderkommando man of, if you wanted to keep your head on your shoulders. Putzi had high cheekbones and hard blue eyes and a smile that never faltered. But sitting there across the table from Schultz, you could see he was just a piece of vicious scum, like all the rest of them. Schultz had been a mathematics teacher, and he did not enjoy being trounced at chess by thugs.

‘Your move,’ said Putzi, as if Schultz did not already know. Schultz moved. Putzi’s grin became more scornful. He moved his bishop. ‘Checkmate, fatso.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Schultz. But Putzi was right. He opened his mouth to concede.

But he never said it.

There was a crash like a bomb going off. Something fell on to Putzi from the sky, and he vanished, the table with him. Splinters of wood flew around the guardhouse. Schultz leaped to his feet and hit the red general alarm button.

Sigmund, the other Sonderkommando man, was bending over the mess on the floor. ‘Dead,’ he said.

Schultz gave the subject ponderous but methodical thought, and arrived at an understanding. A human body, by its uniform a member of the Wehrmacht, had fallen through the asbestos roof of the guardhouse with enough force not only to kill Putzi but to drive his corpse some distance into the floorboards. This implied that he had fallen from a considerable height – one of the lookouts on the cliff face above, no doubt. A tragic accident. Schultz wagged his head on its great rolls of neck.

Then Sigmund rolled the sentry’s jellified body off the crushed corpse of Putzi. It was at that point that Schultz sat down heavily, and started to shake.

For there was no part of Schultz’s imagination that could explain what kind of accident it was that had sent a Wehrmacht private plummeting out of the heavens with a British Special Forces-issue dagger driven to the hilt in its right eye.

When the charges on the aerials went off and the air-raid klaxon began to sound, Miller and Andrea had a short discussion. Men were still strolling in the corridor, unmoved by the moaning of the alarm. Presumably, they were far enough into the mountain to be safe from bombs. So they walked briskly down the steel staging to the sentry box in front of the elevator, and came to attention in front of the guardhouse. There was a Feldwebel and a private behind an armoured-glass window, wearing camouflage uniforms. They looked at Andrea. The Feldwebels eyes flicked from his dark Mediterranean features to his badges of rank. Miller saw the man start to frown, then deliberately smooth his face out. There was a fixed number of huge SS Leutnants on Kynthos. It looked as if this might be a Feldwebel with eyes and a memory. Look out, he thought: trouble.

Andrea said, ‘I want to look at your records.’

The sergeant said, ‘Records, Herr Leutnant?’

‘The pass records. There may have been a breach of security.’

The sergeant stiffened. ‘I can assure the Herr Leutnant that –’

‘Let us in.’

‘The Herr Leutnant will excuse me,’ said the sergeant. His hand went for the telephone.

Miller started to cough. He coughed very badly, doubling up, out of the vision of the men in the guard hut. He had his knife out, and as he doubled up he hooked the blade under a cable that ran out of the hut and away down the tunnel, and cut.

Inside the hut, the sergeant jiggled the cradle furiously.

‘Let me in,’ said Andrea, low and dangerous.

The sergeant was looking ruffled now. ‘But I do not … that is, I am not acquainted with the Herr Leutnant’s face.’

‘This is of no interest to me,’ said Andrea. ‘You will however remember the Hauptmann Wolf, with whom you will renew your acquaintance very speedily unless you open up as instructed, immediately.’

At the mention of Wolf’s name, the sergeant’s face turned a nasty grey, and his memory apparently lost its influence. ‘Open the door,’ he said to the private. The door opened. Andrea walked in. ‘The books,’ he said.

The sergeant handed over a large ledger. Andrea put it on the desk, leafed through the pages. ‘Excuse me,’ said the sergeant. ‘The telephone is kaput. I must arrange for repairs. Schmidt –’ he looked at the private ‘– fetch a maintenance crew.’

Andrea slammed the book. ‘All seems to be in order,’ he said. ‘But Schmidt, stay here. There is a general alert. Maximum vigilance. Now, give me the key.’

The sergeant snapped to attention. ‘Herr Leutnant?’

The key,’ said Andrea. ‘To the lift.’

‘The Herr Leutnant’s pass?’

Andrea said, patiently, ‘My pass is being renewed. Now my duty takes me into that lift.’

The sergeant’s face turned to stone. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘No pass, you cannot. It is not permitted.’

‘I am sorry too,’ said Andrea, in a low, dangerous rumble. ‘And you will be sorrier, I promise you.’

The sergeant stared straight ahead of him, the impassive stare of the German NCO who knows he is obeying orders, that the chain of command is complete, that his position is unassailable and his duty done.

Two engineers stopped at the window. ‘Carry on,’ said Andrea. The engineers signed their names and the time in the book. ‘You will please report this telephone out of order,’ said Andrea to the engineers. The private escorted them to the lift door. One of them opened it with his key, pulled back the inner door, slid the outer door into place. The lift machinery hummed.

‘Very good,’ said Andrea. ‘You have made a note, Herr Doktor Muller?’

‘I shall get my notebook,’ said Miller. ‘One moment.’ He crouched, opened the pack he had been carrying. The sergeant moved suddenly, and looked over the lid and inside. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped, and he raised the Schmeisser in his hands.

But Miller had a hand of his own, and in it was a Browning automatic with a long cylindrical snout. The snout coughed flame. The wall behind the Feldwebel turned red. He slammed backwards into the wall, eyes blank, a new eye in the middle of his forehead. The private ran out of the shed and started to run, unlimbering his own Schmeisser as he went. Miller went after him. The man turned. Miller raised the Browning two-handed. The private went down.

‘Hide the bodies,’ said Andrea, dragging the Feldwebel out of the shed and round to the back.

Miller nodded. He looked whitish in the face, and his hands were shaking. As he hauled the private back to the shed, the man’s heels clattered on the grating. Andrea bent, and retrieved a key from the ring on the man’s belt.

‘Signature,’ said Andrea, pushing the book at Miller. Both men signed the register. ‘Key,’ said Miller.

Once you had turned the key in the lock, it was a lift like any other lift. The motor hummed. Outside the concertina inner door the wall went by, a rough-hewn shaft that seemed to go on for ever, with iron step-rungs inset. It was an unpleasant sensation, Miller found, standing in this lattice-sided can with rock all around you, two bodies by the downstairs exit, God knew what waiting upstairs –

The lift stopped.

It did not stop at a floor. It stopped between floors. There was nothing to see except the walls, and the steps, and Andrea. ‘I am afraid,’ said Andrea, ‘that someone has found some bodies.’

‘The steps,’ said Miller. He hated this elevator. He wanted out as fast as possible.

‘They will be expecting that,’ said Andrea. ‘We will stay here, my friend. More or less.’

Well, thought Miller, what can you do, Andrea being a colonel and all, God damn it.

‘Up,’ said Andrea, and pointed to the escape hatch in the roof.

Oh, no, thought Miller. Not again. Not standing around waiting to be torn apart by machinery again. Nor waiting for a wire rope to break and the plummeting to start -

But by this time his head and shoulders were already through the trap door, and Andrea was shoving hard from below. Miller found himself standing in darkness on top of the lift, next to an oily cable. Andrea shoved up the pack, then came up himself, and sat on the trap door.

There was a jerk. The lift started upwards. It went up a long way. Miller could hear the engine. He started to sweat. To distract himself he examined as much of the machinery as he could. ‘This is a piece of cheap Kraut rubbish,’ he said, ‘not an Otis.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ said Miller, rummaging in the pack.

Then Andrea said, ‘Quiet.’

They froze. The sound of the machinery was very close above. Out of the corner of his eye, Miller could see a streak of light gleaming on the flange of a huge wheel spinning in the obscurity above. The streak of light from the upper door.

The lift rose past the streak, and stopped. The machinery was close overhead; close enough to touch. Many boots crashed into the car. ‘The ceiling,’ said a German voice. There was a grunting, as if someone was trying to push. Andrea stood on the door, braced against the axle of the winding drum above his head. ‘Help me,’ said the voice below.

Someone presumably helped him. Tall men, they must be, and big. Sweat rolled down Andrea’s face, and the veins in his neck stood out like hawsers. ‘Some fool’s welded it shut,’ said a voice from below. ‘Some bloody Greek.’

Which was not, thought Miller, as he worked at what was in his hand, so far off the mark.

‘No good,’ said a voice with the bark of authority in it. ‘They must be on the steps down below.’

Under Miller’s feet, the lift lurched, and started downwards. Miller and Andrea just had time to grab the axle overhead. It was turning, the axle, but it was greasy. The lift dropped away below, leaving a shaft like a well. Andrea heaved himself over to the wall and hung on to the first of the steps. Miller reached a hand towards Andrea. The big Greek caught him just as his fingers let go. Miller slammed into the ladder, grabbing the cold metal. ‘Out,’ he said.

‘There’ll be a guard – ‘

‘Out. There’s no safety lock.’

Andrea heard real urgency in his voice. He did not know what Miller was talking about. But he had worked with Miller long enough to trust his instincts.

Miller was right. The door slid open. Andrea and Miller stepped on to the threshold, blinking in the sudden light.

The eight Wehrmacht soldiers outside raised their Schmeissers to belly height. ‘Hände hoch,’ said the officer in charge. ‘Ausweis, bitte.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Miller, in his excellent German. ‘It’s one or the other.’

‘Hände hoch,’ said the officer. He had an efficient look that Miller disliked intensely. The lift was in a sort of lobby, shielded by concrete walls from whatever took place beyond. Andrea and Miller separated, standing one on either side of the door. The officer started rummaging in Miller’s pockets. It was evident to Miller, with four Schmeissers trained upon him, that he and Andrea were in big trouble. But then again, the only thing that really amazed him was that they had got this far.

Andrea had a look of great stupidity on his face. He rolled his eyes towards the empty door of the lift shaft, and gave Miller a wink cunningly judged to be both conspiratorial and obvious. ‘You bloody idiot,’ said Miller, with venom. ‘They’ve had it now.’

The German officer frowned. He said, ‘Cover me,’ to his men. Four of them went to the lift door, and peered down the shaft.

‘Nobody,’ said the officer.

Miller glanced at his watch. ‘Now, boys!’ he said.

From the lift shaft there came the sound of a large, hollow boom, followed by a twang of breaking cable, screams, and a crash. The men at the door were blown backwards by a blast of hot gas. The men covering Andrea and Miller clapped their hands to their scalded eyes. One of them fell into Andrea, who heaved him down the shaft.

Miller felt quietly proud. It was not everyone, he considered, who would, under the kind of pressure he and Andrea had suffered on the lift roof, have noticed that it was a device with neither a safety wire nor a shaft brake. Nor would it have been just anybody who would have taken the time to wrap half a pound of plastique round the cable, with a five-minute time pencil.

Miller flattered himself that it had all gone rather well.

But he did not waste time feeling smug. He pulled a fire extinguisher out of its clips, smashed the button in, and started spraying the men staggering about by the lift gate. ‘Hilfe!’ he yelled. ‘Feuer!’

When the first reinforcements came round the corner, they found a huge SS man and a lanky engineer in a cloud of evil- smelling smoke, dousing the fuming lift shaft and half-a-dozen smouldering soldiers with foam. The reinforcements started yelling as only German reinforcements can yell. More fire extinguishers started going off. And nobody paid any attention when the SS man hefted his pack and vanished into the workshops, accompanied by the engineer.

NINE

Thursday 2300-Friday 0300

Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Gunther Helm was a neat man. His brown overall was sharply pressed, his black shoes polished to a mirror-like sheen, and his dark, narrow moustache trimmed with mathematical exactness below his long, mobile nose. Helm was a specialist in inertial guidance systems. It had been bad enough to be removed from his comfortably ancient rooms above the river at Heidelberg University to a shed on a Baltic sand-flat at Peenemünde. This place, this hideous warren of black rock and bare cable and improvised factory space, was unpleasant. Worse, it was untidy.

Boots were crashing in the tunnel ahead. They belonged (Helm saw, as they rounded the corner) to two SS men. To two of the untidiest SS men he had ever seen. For one thing, neither of them seemed to have shaved for at least twenty-four hours. For another they were filthy dirty, smeared with white clay and blood, and unless he was gravely mistaken, wearing non-regulation boots. In addition, one of them had a moustache not unlike his own, but (Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Helm was compelled in all frankness to admit) considerably blonder and more lustrous. They had a wild look, as if they had been outdoors. They took up more room than seemed necessary. Frankly, Helm found them intimidating.

‘Where’s the hospital?’ said the one without the moustache.

‘The hospital,’ said Helm, flustered. ‘You proceed down this corridor. You will see three fire extinguishers on the wall, then a steel staircase. Ignore this. Proceed until you see a sign saying Ausgang – no, I am wrong; Eintritt, it says – ‘

‘What level?’ said the SS man, who was Mallory.

Helm was notoriously a hard man to stop, but there was enough violence in the voice to stop him. ‘Third level,’ said Helm, and found himself flung back against the wall by the breeze of their passing. Breathing heavily, he returned to his desk, picked up his slide rule, and re-entered the calm, ordered world of numbers. Somewhere at the periphery of his attention, he heard the klaxons going again. The klaxons were always going in the factory. It was part of the general untidiness. Since there was no way of controlling it, it was in the view of Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Helm best ignored.

He therefore ignored it.

The klaxons started as Mallory and Carstairs clattered down a steep set of spiral stairs. There was the distant crash of steel doors slamming, the bang of running feet. A squad of men ran up the stairs. Mallory braced himself. The squad ran past. Mallory started running again, full-pelt, down the endless latticed-steel corkscrew of the stairs. Endless stairs, in a vertical tube through the solid rock –

Carstairs was right behind Mallory now. Uniform or no uniform, thought Mallory, it was a nasty naked feeling to be inside this hollow mountain, knowing that one look at your papers –

Something hit him in the small of the back. A boot, he had time to think: whose boot?

Then Mallory was down, off balance, diving forwards, his shoulder driving into the sharp steel edge of the step, steel helmet (thank God for the helmet) ringing like a gong against the stair treads. Mallory bunched up and rolled, the way he had been taught to roll in his parachute training, tucking in his hands, protecting his fingers and his elbows and knees from the hammer of acute-edged metal. He went down twenty steps before he hit the wall. He lay there, ears ringing, winded. Carstairs ran past. Carstairs pushed me, he realized. Carstairs wanted time on his own. What for? To find the survivor of the shipwreck. Mallory remembered the grenade, pin out, above the ambulance in the gorge. Not to debrief the survivor. To do something more final than that …

A couple of Wehrmacht privates rattled down the stairs. One of them aimed a kick at his SS ribs. It hurt. But Mallory grinned. Dissension in the enemy camp was truly a marvellous thing.

Dissension in his own was a different matter. He spat blood, and hurried stiffly down the steps. Three minutes later, he came to a door. On the rock above the door was stencilled a broad black number three. Mallory went through it.

He was at the opposite end of the long, steel-floored corridor from the place where Andrea and Miller had taken the lift. ‘Papers!’ screamed a voice. It belonged to a Wehrmacht Leutnant, white in the face and greasy with sweat. Behind him, at the far end of the corridor where the lift doors had once stood, there was a throng of men, noise and smoke and shouting.

‘Papers!’ screamed the Leutnant, again.

Mallory gazed upon the man with freezing eyes. ‘There are wounded men down there,’ he said. ‘They need you.’ Then he walked straight through him. The Leutnant reeled back into the wall. His hand went to his holster flap. Mallory allowed his own hand to stray to the grip of his Schmeisser. The Wehrmacht officer thought better of his move, and hurried towards the lift door. Mallory walked through the doorway with the red cross above it. An orderly looked up from a desk. ‘The man from the shipwreck,’ said Mallory.

The orderly looked nervous. There had been too many alarm bells, and he really hated these SS. ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing down the corridor. ‘Your friend’s already with him.’

‘When I want your conversation I’ll ask for it,’ said Mallory, to pour oil on the flames. Then he crashed off down the corridor.

The door the orderly had indicated was closed. Mallory twisted the handle. It was locked. It was a hospital door, not a military door; a flimsy thing of cheap deal. Mallory hit it with his boot, hard, next to the handle. The orderly had been watching him. When he caught his eye he quickly looked away. The door held. Mallory knew he was on the edge. Never mind how much trouble there was between Wehrmacht and SS and boffins, there came a time when he would no longer get away with disobeying orders and wrecking government property. But Carstairs was behind that door, with a man Mallory was interested in, and who would not be alive for long, unless –

His boot hit the door again. This time it burst open with a splintering crash.

It was a small, green room, with a smell of cleanliness, a bed and a chair. There were two men on the bed: one lying down, legs thrashing, the other bent over him. The bending man was Carstairs. The reason for his bending was that he had a pillow in his hands, a pillow he was pressing over the face of whoever it was that was lying on the bed. The survivor of the Kormoran, at a rough guess.

Mallory could kill, all right. But he was a soldier, not an assassin. There was a difference between killing and murder.

He said, ‘Stop that.’

Carstairs did not answer. His face was set and ugly, ridged with muscle, holding the pillow down. Mallory lifted his Schmeisser. ‘Stop it now,’ he said.

Carstairs raised one hand to swat the barrel aside. ‘No noise,’ he said. ‘Quiet, you idiot.’ The assumption that he would not use the weapon fed Mallory’s irritation. He jabbed Carstairs on the arm with the barrel. The flapping of the supine figure’s legs was weakening. ‘All right,’ said Carstairs, face twisted with effort. ‘So fire.’

Mallory did not fire. Instead, he kicked Carstairs very hard on the bundle of nerves inside his right knee. It was a kick that would hurt like hell, but do no permanent damage.

It worked.

Carstairs crashed to the ground, grabbing for his dagger. Mallory stamped on his hand and let him look down the black tube of the machine pistol’s muzzle.

The man on the bed said, ‘Jesoos.’

‘Shut up!’ hissed Carstairs.

‘Hold your tongue,’ said Mallory.

The man on the bed was small and stout, with curly black hair and a thick black moustache and a very bad colour. ‘Don’ kill me,’ he said. ‘Don’ kill me. For why you want to kill me?’

Mallory looked at Carstairs, then at the black-haired man. He said, in English, ‘What happened to you?’

The small man’s eyes narrowed. He said, in German, ‘Why are you speaking English?’

Mallory lay wearily back in the chair. Carstairs was spluttering like an unexploded bomb on the floor. ‘Because I’m English,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Shut your bloody mouth,’ said Carstairs, frantic. ‘I forbid you to speak.’

‘So,’ said the short man, indignation getting the better of suspicion. ‘I answer your damned question, and you tries to suffocate me. And now there is another German SS who talk English and want to know. Is it for this that I swim, I paddle, I bring –’

‘Start at the beginning,’ said Carstairs, wearily. ‘Go on.’

‘How do I know who you are?’ said the Greek.

Mallory offered the man a cigarette, lit one himself, closing his mind to the idea that outside that door was bandit country, crawling with people who would kill him as quick as blow their noses. Carstairs had had orders from Admiral Dixon to assassinate this man. Mallory had countermanded them. There would be trouble in England, too. Wearily, he took off his helmet.

The Greek made a sound half-way between a gasp and a squeak. ‘Mallory!’ he said. ‘Is no possible.’

Mallory looked at him, one eyebrow up.

‘Mount Cook,’ said the Greek. ‘My cousin Latsis he went to New Zealand for the farm. But the farm no work out good so he get work with expedition, because he know how make food in fire far from roof. He cook with you. He send me photograph, newspaper story. You and Latsis. You remember? My cousin Latsis. Sure you remember. Yes, yes, you remember.’

Mallory remembered, all right. He remembered the Mount Cook expedition, the first and last major expedition he had led in the Southern Alps, after his lone climbs. He remembered far too many people, far too much organization: the green New Zealand sky over the white prisms of the mountains, the crisp new air, the sound of too many voices; the taste of burned beans. He remembered a charming Greek with a huge nose, a ready smile, and absolutely no talent in the kitchen.

‘Big nose,’ said Mallory.

If there had been wine in the little hospital room, someone would have opened it. As it was, the Greek seized Mallory’s right hand in both of his and shook it furiously. ‘I am Spiro,’ he said. ‘And I must tell you what I told your … this man.’ Here he narrowly failed to spit on Carstairs. ‘I have got the machine.’

‘The machine?’

Carstairs said, ‘Now look here –’

‘The seven-rotor Enigma,’ said Spiro. ‘Of course.’

‘What is the seven-rotor Enigma?’ said Mallory.

‘Nothing,’ said Carstairs. ‘Spiro, I should warn you –’

‘Shut the mouth,’ said Spiro. ‘I am tired. So bloody tired you would not believe. Always I keeps my mouth shut – ‘

‘A little longer,’ said Mallory. ‘First, we must get you out of here.’

‘So let’s get out,’ said Spiro. ‘And then I show you machine.’

‘Show us?’ said Carstairs. ‘You don’t really mean you’ve got it?’

‘Yes,’ said Spiro. ‘What did you think?’

Carstairs’ face had gone a nasty shade of grey. ‘They told me you knew about it,’ he said. ‘That you had been sent to steal it. But that there was no hope, what with the shipwreck. I was to … silence you before you were tortured. If I’d known

‘Of courses,’ said Spiro, nastily. ‘First murder, then asking questions. Fool.’

Carstairs gave him a sickly smile. ‘Awfully sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure you understand, what? Now, then. This is marvellous. Exactly where is it?’

Spiro turned upon him a puffed and hostile gaze. ‘I tell your friend when we are out,’ he said. ‘Just for now, it is in a safe place. Okay?’

‘Where?’

‘Out first,’ said Spiro. ‘Where later.’

Miller found the workshops most impressive. In the lava bubbles of the cold volcano, the Germans had built a fair-sized factory. There were machine shops and an assembly line staffed by brown- coated engineers, with Greek slave labourers in blue boiler suits wheeling racks of parts and tools. The air was full of the limey reek of wet concrete. Someone somewhere was building something. Miller found an abandoned trolley and loaded in the explosives pack. They trundled it along the lines of benches, through tunnels into new caverns, with curved alloy castings and cylindrical motors of huge complexity with nozzles and no driveshafts, fuel and lubricant tanks, steel doors marked with skull-and-crossbones stencils, until at the end they came to a series of concrete baffles built out across the passage. Standing in front of the baffles was an SS man with a Schmeisser. Above his head, a large sign said: Eingang Verboten.

‘Looks like it,’ said Miller. ‘Plan?’

Andrea did not answer. But Miller saw from the corner of his eye the huge Greek’s right hand go to the place on his belt occupied by his knife. And not before time: from behind, there was the sound of shouting and running feet. The confusion by the lift seemed to have sorted itself out.

Somewhere ahead, a field telephone rang. The SS man picked up the receiver and gave what must have been a password. Then his eyes bulged out of their sockets and his mouth opened and no sound came out, because Andrea had walked straight up to him and slammed his knife between his fourth and fifth ribs and into his heart, and as he slid to the ground had plucked the telephone from the dead fingers. ‘Bitte?’ said Andrea.

‘Intruders,’ said the voice. ‘Two men.’ The voice gave a fair description of Andrea and Miller. ‘Shoot on sight,’ it said. ‘Tell Hauptmann Weiss.’

‘Zu Befehl,’ said Andrea. He put the telephone down and tore the wire out of the junction box.

Miller had dragged the corpse out of sight. They walked round the baffles, and found themselves confronted by a huge steel door. Andrea rapped on it with his gun-butt. ‘Hauptmann Weiss!’ he said.

A slider on the door went back. ‘Who wants him?’

‘Wolf. Immediately.’

There was the sound of grumbling. A wicket opened in the steel door. A man in SS uniform started through. The silenced Browning jumped in Miller’s hand. The SS man fell back. The two men ran in, and shut the door behind them. Two SS privates were hauling their Schmeissers into firing position. Miller shot both of them.

‘Christos,’ said Andrea.

It was the first time Miller had ever heard him blaspheme. But he could see why.

They were on the concrete floor of an enormous yard. There were very few people. In the middle of the area, a hundred yards away, stood a cylindrical object painted in a black and white checkerboard pattern that gave it the look of an obscene toy made for the children of giants.

But it was not a toy. It was a rocket – a rocket so much bigger than any other rocket Andrea or Miller had ever seen that it removed the breath from their lungs.

It was standing in a framework of gantries. High above, a roof of camouflage netting billowed gently in the night breeze. From connection points on its bulging flanks, hoses snaked away to doors behind blast-deflection baffles in the sides of the … hole, was what it was, thought Miller; not a crater, but a hole left by the parting of the ways of three magma streams in three different directions.

‘Most impressive,’ he said.

Andrea just shook his head.

Behind them, someone was hammering on the steel door.

Miller rubbed his hands. They had now entered his area of special expertise. The gentle art of destruction, of which Miller was one of the world’s great exponents.

‘Now listen here,’ said Corporal Miller to Colonel Andrea, and opened the big wooden pack. Andrea listened. After a couple of minutes, he stowed four packages in his haversack, walked across the concrete to the gantry. Whistling, he trotted up the steps until he came to the level just below what he presumed was the business end. Here he paused, and moulded the putty-like explosive to the surface, leaving a thickness in the middle. Into the thickness he pushed an eight-hour time cartridge, crushed the tube, and withdrew the tag.

When he turned, a scientist was staring at him. ‘Monitoring,’ said Andrea. ‘Telemetry.’

The man pointed at the charge, mouthing. ‘Oh, all right,’ said Andrea, and kicked the man off the platform and on to the concrete. Then he started down.

Miller was nowhere to be seen.

He had strolled across to the baffles in front of the place where the pipes came out of the wall. Brennstoff, said stencilled letters. Fuel. He unlatched the door. There were no guards: nobody except another engineer in a brown coat, who simply nodded at him as he let himself into the chamber.

It was a squared-off cave, lit with harsh fluorescent lights. On the concrete floor, rank after rank of huge steel tanks lay like sleeping pigs. Half of them were thick-walled, pressurized: liquid oxygen. The rest were of riveted steel. Miller felt a momentary gloom at the thought of all that good alcohol going to waste. Then he sighed, took a little toolkit out of his pocket, and followed the hoses to their starting point. There were two tanks, one of oxygen, one of alcohol, the one next to the other. As he had hoped, their contents were indicated by ordinary Luftwaffe-pattern flow gauges downstream of the outlet valve. Humming, Miller pulled a tub of grease from the pocket of his overall. He unscrewed the cover of the valve, scooped some of the tub’s contents out with a wooden spatula, and greased the innards heavily.

‘Wer da?’ said a voice at his shoulder.

Miller turned to see an SS man pointing a machine pistol at him.

‘Maintenance,’ he said.

‘Vas?’

Miller shoved the grease under his nose. ‘Slippery stuff, cretin,’ he said. ‘Feel.’

But the soldier, thinking perhaps about the cleanliness of his uniform, said, ‘Nein,’ and pushed the tub away.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Miller, under whose arms the sweat was falling like rain. ‘Only twenty more to do.’

The soldier grunted. The rifle muzzle dropped. ‘Get on with it, then,’ he said.

‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ said Miller.

‘Someone’s stolen some uniforms in the showers,’ said the SS man. ‘So they’re all going crazy. Now the telephones are dead.’ He yawned. ‘So they panic, these Wehrmacht bastards. Some of us have got work to do. No time to panic.’

Miller grunted, took himself along to the next tank, unscrewed the gauge cover, smeared on the paste from his tub: his own patent paste, compounded of carborundum powder, magnesium, iron oxide and powdered aluminium. When the gauges started to spin, the carborundum would heat up. When it reached the right temperature, the magnesium would ignite and start the aluminium powder reacting with the iron oxide: an exothermic reaction, they called it, meaning that it got hot as hell, hot enough to melt iron and burn concrete. Certainly enough heat to ignite alcohol. And if by any chance an oxygen tank should rupture, well, the structural integrity of the entire V4 plant would be severely compromised. If not destroyed.

Personally, Miller was betting on destruction.

He did a couple more valves, for luck. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled, whistling, out of the fuel store.

Andrea was standing by the door, Schmeisser at the ready, as if on guard. ‘Hey!’ said Miller. ‘You!’

Andrea snapped to attention.

‘Follow me!’ Miller started up the wall of the crater. He marched quickly, though his leg muscles were suddenly cracking with weariness, the blood pounding in his skull and his breath rasping in his throat. They scrambled from rock to rock, pushed under the edge of the roof of tarpaulins and camouflage nets. Behind them, the crater glowed under its blue floodlights. They began to scramble over the rocks towards the rendezvous.

Outside the hospital, the corridor was an ants’ nest. Nobody paid any attention to two SS men with a stretcher. Mallory and Carstairs carried Spiro down two flights of steel stairs. The shift was changing. Greek workers were shuffling down a corridor Mallory had not previously visited. There were few light bulbs, and a smell of cheap rice cooking, and latrines badly cleaned. A hundred yards later they rounded a corner and came to a wire-mesh fence with a gate, beside which stood a bored-looking SS man. ‘Throw it into the sea,’ said the sentry, when he saw the stretcher.

‘First, it has work to do,’ said Mallory. The sentry laughed. ‘We’ll be a while.’

‘Long as you like,’ said the sentry, heaving the gate open. ‘Don’t touch the women, though. They’ll claw it off.’

Mallory could feel Spiro’s shivering transmitted along the handles of the stretcher. He walked on.

The camp was no more nor less than the old village of the Acropolis, cordoned off from the rest of the island by a wire fence, so the precipices and fortifications that had once kept out the Turk now served to hold prisoner the Greek. It was a depressed, ruinous place, harshly lit by the floodlights set in the cliff face above. They carried the stretcher into the shadows of Athenai Street, and set it down.

Mallory lit a cigarette, drawing the harsh smoke into his lungs. In the blue-white streets, black-overalled figures came and went. There was no curiosity. A village without curiosity, thought Mallory, is a village that is dead: and for a moment he felt a pure, clear disgust for the men who had killed it.

Then he said, ‘This machine.’

‘Po!’ said Spiro. ‘Po, this machina!’ The words began to pour out of him in a torrent.

‘Steady,’ said Mallory.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Only when they have you in this place, you keep your eyes shut one, two days, breathe slow, they say Ach Gott he sleeps still, they stick in you pins and needles, you do not twitching, wait for you do not know what, then when you think, well, now I will have to be awake but when I awake I will be fear and tell them all about everythings and they will kill me real slows real slows, the hell with it I will rather die than sleep no more, then sudden you get the angels down flap flap.’ Here he cast himself upon Carstairs and began to cover his face with wet kisses.

‘Ugh,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory watched with some enjoyment as Carstairs disentangled himself. ‘So what’s the story?’ he said.

‘The machina –’

‘From the beginning.’

‘Yais,’ said Spiro. ‘Give me cigarette.’

‘Turkish this side, Virginian that,’ said Carstairs automatically, proffering his case.

‘I spit on your Turkish,’ said Spiro.

‘The story,’ said Mallory.

‘Okay, okay. So I am in Trieste. In Trieste I am cook in café by docks, everything nice, when they tell me, Spiro, go on ship.’

‘Who tells you?’

‘SIS. Peoples in London. Spying peoples. They say Spiro, the King of Britains, big friend of the Kings of Greece, he need you stop listening to German mens talking in cafés, go to find cooking mans on Kormoran, arrange bad things. Then get on Kormoran and find out what goings on. So I find cooking man on Kormoran and give him accidents with open window and broken leg, and look at Spiro then, cook on this lousy God damned pig bastard ship Kormoran God rest his poor soul if his mother could see him now – ‘

‘The story,’ said Mallory.

‘The story, hokay. So I am working in the café with SIS and this guy, my contact, he say, get on this pig bastard ship Kormoran. So I go down to the port and it is a mess, you know, they are bombing him, and all the way down the back end there is this ship, this dirty little ship, and they say sure, the cook’s mate has fell down and broked his leg so we needs a cook’s mate and Spiro we know you are not a cook – normally,’ said Spiro, ‘I working as a thief, but the war, you know. So come aboard, they say. Well me I say I must go and kiss my girl goodbye, nice girl, very big moustache, but they say, no, come aboard now, so there I go, and they put me on that ship, slam door. Very strange ship. Outside dirty filthy like a latrine. Inside more tidy, clean, like German ship. And captain and officers stand-to-attention Heil Hitler sort of mens, must have all things regular and particular. Then big crateses arrives on an army sort of train, and more, gas bottles, I don’t know. Spiro had thinked, oh ho, stupid SIS peoples, false alarm. But then Spiro thinked, oh shits, if it ain’t a false alarm what in hells kind of alarm is this? But I carries on washing up, bringing bridge coffees, all that. Then,’ said Spiro, his vast black pupils swimming with sincerity, ‘come the miracles.’ He drew breath. He was panting. He was also, Mallory realized, very frightened.

‘It was morning,’ he said. ‘I took coffee to bridge. Ten fifty-five hours precisely. Kapitän Helmholz insist, exactly that time, no seconds before, no seconds after. Stupid bastards, dead now. So I get off bridge fast. And I am a little way down the stairs when bam! Something hit ship, then bam! Something else, and I can tell that all this is turning higgledy turvy and it is hot like hell and peoples screamings. So then I see the man go out of the radio rooms and up to the bridge, then one more bang and more broken glasses and he roll down stairses, head gone. Well I have seen before, bringing coffees to Sparks, that code machina, this seven- rotor Enigma, is in radio room, and SIS always pay good money for code machina. So I go quick double quick into the radio rooms and catches up the machina in his cases and jumps overboard double quick, big wind, everything terrible bright, and the case is a heavy thing and she wants to sink and it try to kill me but I do not let him. Well by the mercy of God the Creator the Redeemer may His name be blessed for ever and ever amen and also His holy saints’ – here he caught Mallory’s eye – ‘I am finding a big broken crate of wood, a hatch, who knows? And there is a great wind blowing. And it blow me far and away, and on to the shore of Kynthos. Now you tellings me, is that or is that not a miracles yes or no?’

‘Miracle,’ said Mallory. ‘Definitely.’

‘And the machine,’ said Carstairs. ‘What about the machine?’

‘Hah!’ said Spiro. ‘Well. I got him on beach. Very ill, I was. Lying with him, sleeping, very thirsty, sand in face, no move. Then a chap I think is there, speaking Greeks, give me drink of water.’ He was frowning, as if he did not remember properly. ‘Like dreams. Like dreams. Then I hear his voice loud, and other voices, not so loud, further away, and they are speaking Germans. I trying to get up, but no luck, fall on face bang, pass out again. And when I wakes up again I am in some ambulance, on some bed, and there are Germanses everywhere, but no machina.’

‘No machine,’ said Carstairs. ‘Then they’ve got it.’

‘Greeks man got it,’ said Spiro. ‘I spose. I never seen it no more. But I worry, I worry. I am thinking, if I wakes up, then they ask me questions, so I will be asleep and they will not ask me no questions and I will not be frightened. Because I am weak, you know, when I am tired like this, and I will tell anybody anything. So I make out I am knock out. So there.’

‘You pretended to be in a coma for a week?’ said Mallory.

‘Just about. Yes,’ said Spiro, with some smugness. ‘Eat, drink when nobody lookings. When you are very very frightens you can be very very brave.’

Carstairs said, ‘You are very brave and we admire you like hell, but we will tell you all about that later. Where is the machine?’

‘I remembers,’ said Spiro. ‘This chap who give me drink of water on beach. He said he was hiding this thing in a place that only he know, nobody else, ever. So is okay. He is a good guy, I think: hate Germans scums, fight for us, our side. And he give me his name. So now we go find him, tell him, British armies arrived, hand over, me old cocky. Everything hunky-boo.’

‘So what was his name?’ said Carstairs.

‘Achilles,’ said Spiro. Then, by Mallory’s computation about a thousand years later, ‘What wrong? You get problem?’

‘Yes,’ said Mallory. ‘Just a bit.’

Because Achilles was the name of the brother of Clytemnestra, who had been hanged in the Parmatia razzia. So it seemed very much as if the seven-rotor Enigma machine was somewhat lost.

In the dark very close behind them, someone cleared his throat. Mallory’s hand jumped automatically on the cocking lever of his Schmeisser.

‘Not today, thanks,’ said a voice. And Miller stepped into the lamplight, with Andrea close beside him.

‘I’ll go and find her,’ said Andrea.

‘Find who?’ said Carstairs.

‘Clytemnestra. Achilles’ sister.’

‘You heard.’

‘He wasn’t exactly whispering.’

Carstairs laughed, his short, patronizing bark. ‘Clytemnestra could be anywhere.’

‘We have a rendezvous,’ said Andrea. ‘The road’s open, again. We’ll take transport. We’ll find this machine.’

Carstairs nodded his head, wincing slightly. ‘I expect you will,’ he said. Then he swayed and lay down, suddenly.

‘What is it?’ said Mallory.

‘Giddy,’ said Carstairs. He tried to sit up, fell down again. ‘Christ.’

‘Stay there,’ said Mallory. You could not expect a man who had smashed himself unconscious on a rock to laugh lightly and carry on as if nothing had happened. ‘Andrea, get going. Miller, what’s your timing?’

‘Eight-hour fuses,’ said Miller.

‘Yes,’ said Mallory. ‘And the rest of it?’

‘Depends when they start pumping fuel,’ said Miller.

‘Any sign of anyone doing any rocket firing?’

‘Dunno,’ said Miller. ‘They’ve got one standing right there, pointed out of the roof. There weren’t no action we could see. But I guess they could have that sucker ready to go in, what, two hours, from a standing start?’

Andrea said, ‘I’ll be at the jetty by sunrise.’ There was no sound of movement. One moment he was there; the next, the darkness had flowed in to occupy the place where he had been standing.

‘Well,’ said Miller. ‘This is real nice.’ Miller was a man who believed in reconnaissance. On the way to the village, he had checked the place out. Once, it had probably been a thriving little community. Now, by the look of it, the original inhabitants had been displaced, the houses turned into dormitories for the men who worked inside the mountain, the church desecrated, a field kitchen on its mosaic floors turning out coarse bread and a soup whose smell did not inspire Miller to make its further acquaintance.

There was one bonus. The village was a prison, with the guards on the outside. The Germans would be looking for escapers, not intruders.

Miller left Mallory with Carstairs and Spiro, and went scouting. He walked quietly among the little knots of men in the village square. Soon, he observed a man with a disc-shaped loaf of white bread and a bottle of wine. Miller had lived through Prohibition in the States, and his nose for a bootlegger was practically supernatural. So he followed on down a narrow alley, and found a lamplit door and inside it an old man with a white bandit’s moustache, who looked at Miller’s gold drachmae with a face that did not budge an inch, but was still extremely impressed. ‘Where you from?’ he said.

‘Crete,’ said Miller.

‘How did you find me?’

‘I found you,’ said Miller, dour. He did not want to be gossiped about. ‘What you got?’

The old man hauled bread, wine and olives from a wormy wooden box. Miller blessed him, and walked out.

At the back of the church was a little house; the priest’s house, perhaps, built right up against the wall. It was dusty and cob- webbed, and had an odour suggestive of graveyards, and its floors were connected not by stairs but by a movable ladder, somewhat worm-eaten. But it was dry and secure, and to Miller it looked better than the Waldorf Astoria. He went back for Mallory and Carstairs and Spiro. Inside, he took out sardines and chocolate, and the bread and olives, and the wine. They ate like hungry wolves, tearing great lumps of bread and washing them down with draughts of turpentine-flavoured retsina. It seemed to Miller that for a man suffering from delayed concussion, Carstairs seemed to have a hearty appetite; a very hearty appetite indeed. Miller had taken a good few knocks on the head in his time as gold-miner and bootlegger. As far as he remembered – which was not, admittedly, very far, given the nature of the injury – for some weeks afterwards the very thought of food had been enough to make him spew his guts up…

Different strokes for different folks, thought Miller, watching Carstairs tap a cigarette on his gold case and light up. Very different folks. Carstairs was very different indeed.

Soon after this, in fact about ten seconds after this, he left his body behind, the sore eyes and the aching bones, and drifted down and down into a soft void, a place of no pain and total rest –

Then someone had hold of him and was yanking at his shoulder, and the softness was gone and the soreness in his head and his bones was back at double strength, and he was awake, looking at his watch. The watch that said he had been asleep for only ten minutes.

But during that ten minutes, the world had changed completely.

The crack under the door of the house had become a white-hot bar of light. Outside, there was noise; the noise of sirens squawking, of feet running; jackbooted feet. German feet.

Miller grabbed his thoughts by the scruff of the neck and told them to get themselves organized. They resisted, floating in and out of focus. Perhaps Andrea had got himself caught. Perhaps the Greek with the white moustache had reported that a stranger with a Cretan accent had paid him in gold. Perhaps they had found the plastic explosive charges on the rocket…

Or perhaps they had discovered all these things.

Mallory’s voice came out of the darkness by his ear. ‘Look after these two,’ it said. ‘I’ll do the rest.’

Miller opened his mouth to complain. But the words never came out. For at that moment, there was a thunderous knocking on the door.

‘The ladder,’ said Mallory.

The knocking ceased, then came again. This time, it did not stop.

Andrea had had no trouble so far.

He had left unhindered by the gate. From there he had walked down to the transport compound, drifting through strips of shadow, a darker patch of the general darkness. He watched a truck come in over the causeway, unload, reload, heard the driver receive his orders in the traditional Wehrmacht bellow. The truck was returning across the causeway to the aerodrome. Andrea crept up to it, attached two rope slings to the back axle leaf springs, and lay across them as another man might have lain in a hammock. The truck started up and roared across the causeway. The driver showed his pass, and was allowed into the aerodrome. The truck rolled to a halt by a group of sheds; by the sound of voices and crockery, a mess room.

Andrea waited for the driver to get out, then dropped to the ground. Two pairs of boots were walking away towards the Acropolis. Otherwise there was nobody in sight.

Staying in the shadows, Andrea walked quickly into the open darkness of the airfield, heading for the far side of the perimeter. Once the runway lights flicked on, and he lay flat as a twin-engined plane landed and taxied to the dispersal area. Otherwise the world seemed quiet, out here in the warm breeze and the smell of dust and bruised dry grass. He accelerated to a trot, came to the fence, took out the little wire-cutters from his pack, and made himself a small trap door in the mesh, a door just big enough to squeeze through, its lower edge camouflaged in the dirt. Against the sky he could see the leggy alien form of a guard tower. There would be sentries –

There was a sentry.

The man strolled by. Andrea smelt the smoke of the cigarette in his cupped hand. This was not a sentry on lookout; this was a sentry going through the motions. If he was looking for anybody, he would be looking for people trying to break in, not out. The sentry passed. Andrea moved on, keeping very low.

Suddenly the night turned white.

Andrea saw his hand in front of him, a great brown spider on the bare, gravelly soil. He saw the guard tower, every plank and strut lit in remorseless detail; he saw the sentry, half-turned, mouth open, eyes round with fear.

For a moment, Andrea thought they had turned on the searchlights, and braced himself grimly for the shouts, the thwack of bullets. Then he realized that the light was not coming from close at hand, but from behind him, beyond the marshes. He turned his head, glanced over his shoulder. The Acropolis was lit up like a wedding cake. Klaxons whooped in the night. Whatever was happening, it seemed unlikely to be an air raid.

In the tower a telephone started ringing. The sound broke the sentry’s trance. He trotted up the ladder. By the time Andrea heard his voice he was already moving on hands and knees across that flat gravelly stretch.

Then he was on his feet, loping away into the darkness. Behind him the perimeter lights jumped into life. But by then, he was far into the dark fringes of the night, less than a shadow against the loom of the mountains.

He was running across a checkerboard of fields, splashing through little irrigation gulleys, his feet brushing wheat and carrots, clogging with the rich volcanic soil of the plain. After a while, the ground began to rise. He was approaching the mountains.

Wills was in a churchyard. He seemed to be spending most of his time among the dead, nowadays. He hoped it was not an omen.

He had woken two hours ago, in the tomb above the Swallow’s Nest. There had been something on his face: Clytemnestra’s hand. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘We must go.’

He was groggy with sleeplessness. For a moment he did not want to go anywhere, except back into the comfortable dark. Then he remembered about Clytemnestra, and he got his feet under him, and told himself that there was a reason for moving, and that was to go wherever Clytemnestra was going …

Then he was out again in the soft night, climbing something that he knew in daylight would have scared the wits out of him, but which at this hour was merely a near-vertical wall of rock with foot and handholds at strategic intervals; a path, in fact; a vertical path.

They went up it and on to a flat place. Clytemnestra took his hand and squeezed it, signalling silence. They walked past the dark shape of a German sentry, all the way past until he realized that she was still holding his hand and he hers, which he put down to forgetting to let go. Then they were off, heading north, as far as he could tell, over a dizzy and bewildering series of paths and precipices, tending gently downhill. After perhaps two hours they burst from a maze of boulders on to a ledge or cornice of rock, spiked with black cypresses. They walked through a small area of grass, on which daisies glittered faintly under the stars, and into a plain white building. Nailed double doors swung open as they approached a church. A small figure, black as the sky and wearing a hat like a pygmy oil drum, flitted away into the night without speaking.

‘What was that?’ said Wills, unnerved.

‘The Patriarch,’ said Clytemnestra, and drew him in through the door, and closed it.

At first, there was darkness, musty with incense. Then there was the little yellow glow of a sanctuary lamp. Clytemnestra had taken her hand away from his. As his eyes got used to the gold-tinged gloom, Wills saw that she was kneeling, head bowed in prayer.

Wills had done a bit of praying himself, in chapel at school with the other chaps, and then less formally but more sincerely on lonely nights at sea with the E-boat tracers floating out of the dark at him. But up here in this strange, musty place, he felt there were more important things to do than pray.

He opened the door and slipped out.

There was a low parapet around the churchyard. Below it, the valley lay spread like a dark map. There were lights down there: runway markers flicking on, the roar of a plane landing, the markers flicking off again. The village on the Acropolis was lit, too, with the smaller yellow lights of candles. Then suddenly the airfield had become a blue-white square, dazzling in its intensity, and all over the Acropolis floodlights had leaped into being. And floating across the intervening gulf of air there came the sound of klaxons.

Something was happening.

Wills checked the clip in his Schmeisser. Then he hunkered down in the black pit of shadow between a wall and a cypress tree, and waited.

Time passed. There was only the thyme-scented breeze, and the night, and whatever devilry they were hatching on the other side of the marshes. Earlier, in his dazed wanderings, Wills had not cared whether he lived or died. He had lost his ship, and his men, and he was far, far out on the most precarious of limbs.

But since he had recovered enough to notice Clytemnestra, he was interested in living again. Of course it was never easy to work out how women thought, not if you had gone straight from Wellington to Dartmouth and then active service. But he did have the definite impression that she was not … well, averse to his company. She was a remarkable girl. A really spiffing girl –

Something descended on his mouth like a huge, soft leather cushion. A hand. Another hand came on the nape of his neck, and his chin was lifted until it would lift no further, and it dawned on Wills in a spasm of absolute horror that these hands did not care that this was as far as the chin went, they were going to go on lifting until his neck broke, and that would be the end of him –

‘Hands up!’ said a voice in Greek. A woman’s voice. There was the metallic sound of a cocking lever. The hands relaxed.

Wills fell forward on to the parapet, groping for his Schmeisser. ‘Back off,’ he said. Then, remembering, ‘Jolly boating – ‘

‘Captain Wills,’ said a voice he recognized: a soft voice that might have been a purr or a growl, there was no way of being sure. Andrea’s voice. ‘Captain Wills, you should not sit in a place where you can be seen against the sky.’

‘Go away,’ said the woman’s voice. Clytemnestra’s voice. ‘Leave him alone, you great stupid ox.’ She was beside Wills now, cradling his head in her hands. ‘Can’t you tell who is on your side and who isn’t? Are you blind?’

‘Understandable error,’ said Wills, checking that his head was still there. ‘Bit of luck you were coming out of the church, though.’

Clytemnestra snorted. ‘Do you think I would leave you alone in the night?’ she said. ‘I have been watching you for the past two hours.’ She put an arm around his waist. ‘If you can’t look after yourself, someone else will have to.’

Andrea cleared his throat. ‘I hate to interrupt,’ he said. ‘But tell me, how much did you know about the life and habits of your late brother?’

In the view of Josef Koch, this island was a filthy place. Only a week ago, he had been pleased. After a winter chasing partisans around Yugoslavia the prospect of a little sun, sand and sea had been very enticing. But once he was actually here it had all gone wrong, thought Koch, hauling at the wheel, dragging the lorry’s bonnet round yet another hairpin bend. The people on this island had the temperament of angry hornets, and most of the women had moustaches. If they were not fighting you, they were fighting each other. The Wehrmacht were bloody useless. The boffins were boffins: bloody useless too. Josef Koch’s mind floated back to happier times: Bosnia, a wood with half-a-dozen partisans wired to the trees, him and a couple of privates slinging a rope over a branch, setting up the seesaw: a novelty, the seesaw, a thing of Josef’s own invention. The idea was that the terrorist stood on one end of the seesaw, and Josef stood on the other. Josef was a big man: fat, some called him, if they dared. The terrorist, of course, had a noose round his neck tied to the branch above. The idea was that the private soldiers would tell Josef jokes, and try to make him laugh so he lost his balance, and the terrorist’s end of the plank went down, leaving the terrorist kicking, but not alive, not after five minutes, anyway. The other thing Josef liked to do was walk towards the terrorist, so the terrorist’s weight brought the plank down slowly, slowly, tightened the noose round the neck, while all the while Josef explained the error of the terrorist’s ways, and the terrorist died, twisting and jerking on the rope, looking into Josef’s thick-lipped grin and bulging, pink-veined eyes. It was fantastic, the fun you could have with a simple plank. Though obviously the terrorists did not enjoy it so much.

Josef sighed. He liked hanging people. He had had a goodish time in Parmatia last week, but that had been a small-scale operation. It sounded like there would be more such work soon, though. There had been fighting in the mountains, and trouble at the works, and … well, the Boss was severely ticked off, and when the Boss was ticked off, the best place to be was far away. So it was absolutely no hardship for Josef Koch to be driving this truck, on the Boss’s orders, down the coast road to Parmatia to bring back some suspected partisan sympathizers from the lockup.

Next bend. Haul the wheel, change down a gear, foot flat on throttle –

There was a stone in the road. More a boulder, really. Josef stamped on the brake. The lorry halted. That was another thing you got, on this island. Lumps of mountain all over the road. There was a crowbar in the back. Sighing, Josef opened the door, swung his legs out, and slid down from the cab.

That was when the peculiar thing happened.

As his boots hit the road, he found himself grabbed from behind, scruff of neck and seat of pants. All of a sudden he had no control over his own destiny. A boot landed with shattering violence on his back, and the dark ground was passing at horrid speed under his eyes as he headed for the verge.

Not that there was a verge.

At the edge of the road was a strip of loose stones, on which the Feldwebel bounced once, face first. Beyond the strip of stones was silence, moving air, and far below, the shift of the sea.

The Feldwebel found that he was falling down a cliff. He screamed. The scream lasted exactly the time it took to fall two hundred feet on to sharp rocks.

On the road, the lorry stood, engine purring. Andrea helped Wills drag the driver’s mate to the side of the road and roll him over into the dark, while Clytemnestra wiped the blade of her long knife on a tuft of dry grass. The driver’s mate had bled surprisingly little. Wills possessed himself of the man’s camouflage smock and took the wheel. Clytemnestra climbed into the middle, and Andrea squeezed his mighty bulk in next to her, lit a cigarette, and slumped back, hands on the grips of his machine pistol. ‘Parmatia,’ he said.

Beyond the windscreen, the world began to move, white stone, pine and juniper, cliff and gorge, gleaming in the light of the blacked-out headlights. The dark puddle on the road behind faded into the blackness of the night.

They headed for Parmatia.

From the top of the ladder in the house by the Acropolis church, Miller could see Mallory at the door. The knocking persisted. Carstairs was up through the hole in the ceiling now. Miller hauled up the ladder, fast. As he pulled its foot through the hole, the door opened, loosing a flood of blue-white light into the squalid ground floor. It picked out straw, rubbish, and Mallory. Mallory with his hands on his hips, glaring at the three soldiers outside, Schmeissers levelled: Mallory shouting in German, walking towards them, out into the light…

And that was the last Miller saw of him, because the ladder was up and he was lifting it to the next ceiling, where there was another hole. The floor creaked alarmingly as Spiro headed for the ladder. Miller picked out the joists with a pencil flashlight, shooed Carstairs to the ladder foot, then went after him. Spiro was already climbing, at a speed truly remarkable in one so recently bedridden. Carstairs went after him, more groggily.

At the top, they were in a low attic, whose ceiling was the underside of the roof tiles. ‘Leave the ladder,’ said Miller, and started to push aside the heavy clay half-cylinders. After five minutes’ steady work, his head broke through, and he was spitting worm-eaten beam and ancient bamboo lining into the night air.

In front of him was a low white parapet. Beyond the parapet was the roof of the church, sweeping at one end up to the cupola, and at the other to a belfry, open to the air, with a three-foot parapet running around its edge. The belfry would be accessible from the church, as well as over the roof.

Miller very much liked the look of the belfry.

He took off more tiles, scrambled through the roof, and pulled the other men after him. Then he replaced the tiles, and led them across the parapet to the dark slope of the church roof.

‘Shit,’ said Spiro. ‘I don’ likes highness.’

‘It’s not high,’ said Miller.

‘Looks high to me,’ said Spiro.

‘Go,’ said Miller.

‘No,’ said Spiro.

It was quite obvious to Miller that the Greek meant what he said. Hard to blame the guy, really. He had done plenty already, and everyone drew the line somewhere.

Pity it was right here, though.

Something barged Miller aside. It was Carstairs: Carstairs with something held out in front of him, something with a faint sheen under the stars. A very faint sheen: the sheen of the blued-steel blade of a killing knife, nine inches of razor-sharp unpleasantness. ‘Ow!’ said Spiro.

Carstairs said, ‘Listen, greasy boy. You heard what he said.’ His arm moved slightly.

‘Ow!’ said Spiro again.

‘We don’t really need you any more,’ said Carstairs. ‘So you give me one good reason to stop me carving out your nasty yellow liver.’

Miller was shocked. He did not, however, intervene.

Spiro became lost in deep thought for about three and a half seconds. Then he started to scuttle up the church roof like an overweight monkey.

Carstairs went after him. Miller followed, moving slow and careful. The roof seemed to be in doubtful condition. There was a nasty springiness to it, a suggestion of sag. Mindful of the fifty-foot drop to a hard stone floor that lay below it, Miller found himself holding his breath.

The belfry parapet loomed invitingly ahead. But they were moving out of the shadow now, and between them and the parapet lay a brilliant wedge of floodlit tiles. Spiro did not like the look of it. His pace was slowing perceptibly. He had chosen a bad place to slow down, because they had moved some distance along the roof, and below the eaves of the church was no longer the crumbling shelter of the priest’s house, but the village square. And in the village square, a squad of German soldiers was standing. All it took was for one of them to look up –

‘Go!’ said Carstairs.

Spiro froze.

Carstairs pulled out his dreadful knife and prodded the Greek’s foot. Spiro squeaked, scuttled like lightning up the roof and hauled himself over the parapet. His short legs waved for a moment in the air. Then he vanished. Safe.

Not safe.

In his last frantic scuffle, Spiro had dislodged a tile. It started slowly. It accelerated, rattling down the floodlit section of the roof. Miller stuck out a hand and made a grab for it. For a moment he thought he had it. But Greek roof tiles are heavy affairs, made with plenty of good solid clay, and no human fingertips can restrain one once it has got the bit of gravity between its teeth.

Miller watched that tile loop out into space and fall, tumbling over and over, towards the cobbles of the square where the squad of soldiers stood, only needing to look up.

When Mallory opened the door, light flooded in. There were three soldiers outside, rifles at the ready. Mallory looked them scornfully up and down. ‘What the bloody hell is all the noise about?’ he said, in a German pregnant with the accents of Heidelberg University, where in his pre-war climbing days he had indeed spent six months.

‘Orders to search the house,’ said one of the privates, squinting at this nasty-looking SS Leutnant, with shadowy hollows on his face and a rifle slung negligently over his shoulder.

‘I’ve already searched it,’ said Mallory. One of the soldiers opened his mouth to speak. ‘Give me that gun,’ said Mallory.

The man handed over his rifle without hesitation. Mallory looked it over with the scorn of an epicure who has found a dead rat in his soup. He pulled the bolt out of the rifle and threw it on to the ground. ‘It stinks!’ he said. ‘Clean it! Now get out of my way!’ He marched into the square.

There were a lot of soldiers: a terrible lot of soldiers. Mallory found himself seriously worried. A good search would certainly land them all in trouble. Carstairs he had little confidence in, besides which the man was woozy from his bang on the head. Spiro was a charming personality, but not what you would call a natural athlete. Miller would look after himself. But with that much dead weight round his neck, he was going to need all the help he could get.

Mallory marched briskly across the square, up the street towards the village gates, and turned sharply into Athenai Street where they had made rendezvous. The houses were dark and ruinous. At the end, the cliff face was a pit of blackness in the night. Settling the rifle firmly on his back, Mallory started to climb.

The cliff was steep but pocked with steps and holds where stone had been cut to build the village. Mallory went up until he was looking down on the rooftops illuminated by the blue-white lights mounted on the cliff face. He considered getting above those lights, sixty feet above him now. But he had a feeling that just for the minute, he might be better off below them. He moved along a ledge – a ledge to him, anyway; to anyone else, it was no more than a thread-fine irregularity in the face of the rock – until he came to a broad crack, sunk in black shadow. Into this he fitted himself, and stood invisible.

Below, the roofs of the village shone livid in the floodlights. The streets were stripes of violet-black, except for the square, a handkerchief of naked white under the stars.

In that white rectangle little black shapes moved, precise, mechanical movements, pairs attaching to other pairs to make bigger blocks, which in turn fragmented …

Mallory knew that what he was watching was a search of the town. And what was being searched for was him, Spiro, Carstairs, and Miller –

Something caught his eye. Behind the church was the priest’s house, leaning against the bigger building like a small, drunken man holding on to a fat wife. There was movement on the church roof.

Mallory watched the little figures wait by the parapet, saw the first of them – Spiro, it was – move haltingly towards the triangle of light that lay over the tiles. He unslung the Mauser and put it to his shoulder. Spiro swam into the sight’s circle; Spiro hesitant, Carstairs at his heel, jabbing. Mallory saw the tiles rock as Spiro pressed on. He saw the tile come free, accelerate, check as Miller got his fingers to it, carry on. The palms of his hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He panned the sight down. A line of German soldiers stood under the eaves of the church, at attention, listening to some officer or other, barking orders. The cross-hairs of the sight settled on the helmet of the soldier closest to the church wall. Mallory squeezed the trigger.

All hell broke loose.

The steel helmet flew off the head and smacked into the church wall. The soldier slammed flat on the cobbles, a dark patch of blood spreading around his ruined head. The report of the rifle rolled like thunder on the flat, hard faces of the buildings. Even before the echoes died, Mallory had his Schmeisser in the firing position and was hosing the square with bullets, the stabbing spear of flame from the gun’s muzzle saying here I am, here I am, up here on this cliff.

Down in the square grey bodies rolled and crawled and shouted, taking cover. There was fire coming up from the square now, sporadic bursts, ill-directed, but focused loosely on the crevice in which Mallory was hiding.

But Mallory was no longer there. He had moved away, upwards, in the shadows. Now he was approaching the lights. Below, the village seethed and muttered like a cauldron. Seventy feet above the place he had fired from, he paused and looked down. In the belfry of the church, he glimpsed three heads; visible only from above, those heads.

And what with one thing and another, nobody had noticed anything as trivial as the fall of a tile from a church roof.

Mallory moved on, shoulders and feet, up the crack in the rock. Above him the cliff soared for ever into the wild, cool dark. Below him, the village swarmed like an ants’ nest stirred with a stick. Someone was firing tracer, the rounds smacking the rock face and spinning away into the dark until it must have seemed that there were forty men up here, so more men opened fire from the town …

Really, thought Mallory, climbing fast and steady, it was a deplorable lapse of discipline. But he had no illusions. Soon the brilliant organization of the German army would reassert itself, and life would become even more difficult and dangerous than it was at the moment.

For him, anyway. The men in the village should be left alone: the Germans would assume that the whole squad was on the cliffs of the Acropolis. All he had to do was keep moving, draw away the pursuit.

Keep moving.

For a moment he hung on the face of the cliff and thought of the precipice above him, crag on crag, a couple of thousand feet to be conquered against gravity. He could taste the old cigarettes in his throat, feel the grit of sleeplessness in his eyes, feel the weary ache of continuous action in his bones. The Benzedrine had worn off. If he took any more, he would be seeing things…

Better to see things than to fall off.

Mallory took two of the pills out of the foil and swallowed them. Then, wearily, he began to haul himself up the wall. Forty feet above, he found what he was looking for.

He was on a level with the lights. Bullets still whined and spanged around him, but nobody was aiming. Between the spots of brilliance was only darkness, and it was in that darkness that he existed, anonymous.

He paused, eyeing the face. He could already feel the jump of the Benzedrine at his stomach, his blood beginning to fizz.

Just above his head ran a heavy cable: the cable that brought the power to the floodlights. Mallory pulled the clasp knife from his pocket and wrapped around its handle the rubberized bag in which he kept his shaving kit. He wished he had his commando knife, but the commando knife was gone. He had no idea of the clasp knife’s insulating properties, but rubber was supposed to be all right. Go on, the Benzedrine was telling him, it will be fine, you are immortal, if things don’t work out you can spread your wings and jump clear over the village and into the cool sea –

Steady.

He reached his right hand up, and positioned the blade on the outside of the thick insulation. Then he began to saw.

The edge of the knife sank into the rubber as if it had been butter. He felt the touch of some kind of armour. Then the blade went through the armour, and shorted out the live and the neutral.

The night suddenly turned blue, as if it had been struck by lightning. Then, just as suddenly, it turned black, as the lights went out. Pitch black: black as the inside of a coal hole.

Mallory left the knife wedged in the wire, and looped his silk rope over the cable. He whipped a new tracer magazine from his ammunition pouch and clapped it into his Schmeisser. He went back along the wire twenty feet, until the rope came taut. Then he fired a burst into the square, and let go of the cable.

The rope took him in a great swinging arc across the cliff face. He felt the scrape of rock at his hands and knees, felt himself rise again towards the cable, reached up a hand, gripped the rubber, and found a hold. In the same movement he fired again, another burst into the square, and swung back the way he had come. From the corner of his eye he could see tracers still spinning and ricocheting down there. He fired another burst, swung back. This time he did not shoot. The enemy would have seen three bursts of tracer virtually simultaneously, from places forty feet apart. There would be at least two men up here, they would assume; possibly more. Two men covering the retreat of a whole squad.

Diversion established, thought Mallory. Now it is time to get away from here. Up; gain height.

He hauled himself up on the cable.

The cable came out of the wall.

All of a sudden he was falling, hanging on to the rubber insulation, trying to remember what the hell happened further down the cliff: a wall to smash into, or merely a long drop … He clamped his hands and closed his forearms against the scrape of the rock. He could feel the staples popping up there one by one, the wild rush of the night on his face. It occurred to him that his knife would have fallen out of the wound in the rubber. The circuit would be open again.

Two things happened.

One, a staple held. Mallory found himself hanging there in the night, far above the village, heart pounding, the weight of his two weapons and equipment doing its best to pop his arms from their sockets.

Two, the lights came on. Mallory’s over-brightened brain saw quite clearly the cliff as visible from the square: a towering sheet of rock, with a dotted line of brilliant lights, dislodged from their moorings, dangling down its surface, saying: look here, this direction. And on the end, wriggling like a frog on a hook, a small human figure.

For a second, a great silence hung over village and cliff.

Miller had taken advantage of the darkness to stand in the belfry and assess the situation, secure in the knowledge that nobody could see him. When the lights came on, he had experienced the mild flicker of interest that in Dusty Miller passed for surprise. It had passed through his mind that Mallory, suspended on a bit of wire over about a hundred and twenty heavily-armed Germans, seemed likely to be in some trouble. Miller had already noticed with admiration the streams of tracer that had come pouring from various different spots on the darkened cliff. It had seemed exactly as if a fair-sized body of men was up there. So it would not be amazing if Mallory’s colleagues did a little something to cover him.

All this he thought in the time it took to unclip four grenades from his belt, two for each hand, pull the pins, and heave them over the belfry roof and into the square. All eyes in the square had been on the cliff, raising guns for the fusillade that would blow Mallory to kingdom come. The arrival of the grenades in their midst came as something of a shock.

Miller ducked down, saw the flashes light up the night, heard the crash of the explosions, the whine of shrapnel, the screams of the wounded. There was a sputter of gunfire, sporadic and disconnected. It said to Miller that the troops in the square had realized that they were disagreeably exposed where they stood on that brightly-lit rectangle of paving, and had decided to take cover.

But this was of only passing interest to Miller. What got his immediate attention was that the lighting cable, glaring up there on the cliff, now bore only its light fittings.

Mallory was gone.

‘Here,’ said Clytemnestra.

Wills stamped on the brakes. The lorry halted. Round the corner were the quarry and the landward end of the rail causeway. They were back.

Out in the dark, something moved. Wills cursed gently to himself. There were not supposed to be any sentries until the quarry fence. He flicked on the headlights, feeling a stealthy shift of weight as Andrea, who had been riding on the rear step of the truck, took his departure into the night.

There was a sentry in the lorry’s windscreen; a fat sentry with a sullen expression, blinking in the headlight beams that illuminated the rolls of fat at his belt and the spidery outlines of the quarry machinery and the shed Miller had burned, vanishing into the dark behind him. Wills put his elbow on the window and said, ‘Morning.’

The fat sentry frowned. He said, ‘Where’s Koch?’

Wills’ grin stiffened. His German was not up to deep conversation. Presumably, this man was a friend of the driver. The plan had been to drop Andrea off a mile short of the quarry. But they had overshot.

‘Went flying,’ said Wills, trying to hide his atrocious accent by mumbling.

‘Where?’

‘Back home,’ said Wills.

The sentry frowned again, and switched on his torch. Wills could feel Clytemnestra rigid in the seat beside him. This is bloody stupid, he thought. All the way across the island, no worries. Into Clytemnestra’s brother’s favourite cave for the machine. Grab machine, drive back towards rendezvous, everything tickety-boo.

And now one fat sentry was going to sugar the whole shooting- match.

The torch came closer to the driver’s side window. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing out here, this time of night?’

‘Minding my own business,’ said Wills.

‘Papers,’ said the sentry. Then he said something else – something with no words, that was the sound of all the air being driven out of his body for the last time ever – and slumped with a crash against the lorry door. Behind where he had been standing, a figure that might have been a bear stooped and cleaned what might have been a knife on a tuft of dry grass by the roadside. Andrea swung his pack into the cab. Where he was going, he would need to travel light. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Till dawn, at the airfield jetty.’ He paused, slapped the mahogany box on the passenger seat. ‘And look after this thing, yes?’

‘With my life,’ said Clytemnestra.

Andrea watched the lorry turn in the road and rattle off the way it had come. He looked across at the Acropolis. There were lights; too many lights for his liking. Silent as the night itself, he padded along the road to the quarry gates.

He heard the sound of voices, saw the glow of a cigarette where a couple of sentries were finding courage in conversation. Down the chainlink fence a little, he found a place where the base of the wire was loose. He wormed his way under. The root of the causeway lay just ahead and to the left. Andrea clapped a German steel helmet on his head, straightened up, and began to march steadily along the sleepers towards the Acropolis.

Mallory hung three hundred feet above the village, and wished he could smoke. He had almost forgotten what it was to walk upright on level ground. His bones felt the pull of gravity, and groaned.

As he stood wedged into a crevice, he had the sense that things had gone badly wrong. Below, the village was heaving with German soldiery. Andrea was out there in the night, on an errand that had only the smallest chance of succeeding. Miller, Spiro and Carstairs were treed in the belfry. Benzedrine or not, he was too tired. He needed four hours’ sleep. But in four hours it would be getting light. The enemy were waiting for the light, so they could find the scattered elements of the Thunderbolt Force and pick them off one by one. Command and control were what was needed. Command and control. Big words. Words for men who were not so tired that they could hardly move.

Mallory looked down. The church was below him. He needed to regain the belfry: establish rotas, stand watches, organize a way out, make the second rendezvous at dawn. He needed a way down to the church.

There was no way down that did not go straight through five hundred Germans.

In the square below, sentries had been posted. The world had settled. Hot pursuit had cooled. All the Germans had to do was wait. There had been too many operations, too much action, too little sleep. The Thunderbolt Force was fragmented like quicksilver. This looked very like The End –

Above Mallory’s head, something made a small noise. To his right, a pale streak had come into being on the dark rock. To his left, another. Ropes.

There was a new noise: a clinking and grinding. Boots.

Mallory knew then that he had been wrong about the waiting. The Germans were on the front foot; someone somewhere had argued his case, and argued it well. They were searching the Acropolis, pebble by pebble. The Wehrmacht garrison would not be combing cliff faces with ropes. This was Sonderkommando work. The work of Dieter Wolf, highly professional, utterly deadly.

Mallory unslung his own rope and looked down into the square. There were half-a-dozen men there, no more. The architectural and human debris of Miller’s grenades had been cleared away. There were the men descending from above, and the men waiting below. And Mallory in the middle.

From the movements of the ropes on either side, the men were quartering the cliff, poking their noses into every little nook and cranny, methodical at last. It was the least you expected of an élite German unit.

The men down below, possibly over confident, were not in cover.

Mallory made his plan.

Reaching out, he grabbed the nearest rope and sawed it off short with a razor blade from his shaving kit. Then he hauled in the other rope. In its middle he tied a marlinespike hitch and placed the knot around a hand grenade. Finally, he took the rope he had cut, coiled it, and belayed it to a little post of rock.

Mallory fitted the flash suppressor to the Mauser, and wished he had a silencer. But silencers cut the muzzle velocity, and their steel-wool baffles only worked for half a dozen shots. He filled the magazine and slotted it silently into the rifle. The scuffling noises from above were louder now. He ran the telescopic sight over the square. Two men in the open. Two behind the buttresses of the church. The gleam of a helmet in the alley.

Mallory made a list in his mind, measuring the necessary movements of the carbine. Then he took a deep breath, sighted on the gleam in the alley, and pulled the trigger.

The gun roared. He moved to the men by the church, one, two; one dead, one winged, but the heavy bullet would do him no good, and the men in the middle of the square were diving for cover as Mallory worked the bolt and pulled the trigger. One of them was down, not moving, the other one a pair of heels vanishing behind the buttress, damn, and the cat was properly among the pigeons now.

Mallory pulled the pin on the hand grenade he had looped into the searcher’s rope and let it swing away. He kicked the rope he had cut out into space, grabbed it, and went down as close to free fall as made no difference. There were shots from below, but the bullets went wide. Mallory’s boots hit the cliff, and he bounced out, a wide arc, descending. There was a scream from above. One of the searchers had discovered that his rope had shrunk. A body whistled past, bounced once, and crashed into the buildings at the cliff’s foot. Mallory was slowing now, crabbing sideways for the roof of a building. The bullets were getting closer. Then there was a heavy explosion overhead, and another body whizzed past, preceded this time by a length of rope. The grenade had done its stuff –

Mallory landed on a roof, let go of the rope and rolled, unhitching his Schmeisser. He was breathing hard, his heart hammering at his ribs. Above him in the lights he saw three men descending, foreshortened. He loosed off a burst at them, saw two of them let go, heard the crash of their bodies coming down. The third stopped in a crease of black shadow. Mallory saw the muzzle flash. Rounds whacked into the roof around him, and grit stung his face. He felt naked on this roasting-pan of a roof. There was no cover. He squeezed off another burst at the cliff face and scuttled to the edge of the roof. Bullets cracked past his head, whipping across the cobbles from the direction of the church. He could feel the breath rasping, the sweat running. Another burst of bullets from on high kicked chips out of the parapet by his head. He took another look at the square, squeezed off a burst, rolled over the parapet and dropped to the cobbles.

It was a long drop, longer than it had appeared. Mallory landed awkwardly, felt his ankle turn as far as his boot would let it, sharp prongs of pain jab up towards his knee. No more climbing, he thought, rolling and firing at the same time, heading for the patch of shadow, ankle hurting like hell and going to hurt worse later, if anything was going to be hurting at all –

He was across the alley and in the shadow. His helmet crashed into stone. A mounting block. He was invisible, in cover. Safe as houses.

For as long as it took someone to unhook a grenade. Say, twenty seconds. There was no way out. Mallory fought the Benzedrine, and the pain, and the weariness, scrabbling for an answer. Miller was up in the tower. Wills was off with Clytemnestra. Andrea was … well, God knew where Andrea was. The important thing was not to give Miller away. If they found Miller, they found Spiro, and if they found Spiro, Spiro could be expected to tell them everything he knew.

As far as Mallory was concerned, there were no answers.

A great hush fell over the square. Mallory lay ears pricked, waiting for the fizz of the grenade fuse, the rattle of metal on stone that would signal the finish.

But instead, he heard a voice.

‘Herr Kapitän Mallory,’ it said. It was a military voice, with an odd, bubbling hiss in it. How the hell does he know my name? thought Mallory.

‘We have recognized you,’ said the voice, as if it had heard his thoughts, ‘by your skill, at first, it must be said. Kapitän Mallory, there are things I should like to know.’

Of course there are, said Mallory to himself. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he said, aloud. He was surprised he still had a voice, let alone a voice that sounded clear and normal as it bounced from the surface of the buildings.

‘Hauptmann Dieter Wolf,’ said the voice. And to Mallory’s astonishment, a man walked out into the light. He wore a high-crowned cap, whose peak hid his eyes. Someone at some time had smashed his jaw, and whoever had mended it had not been a master of his craft, not by a long chalk. The lower mandible was horribly skewed; it looked as if it would not shut properly. Spit bubbled in the corner as he breathed, giving his voice its nasty liquid hiss. It gave him a permanent crooked grin; a crocodile grin. There was a Luger in his hand. No grenades, though.

‘Come out here,’ said Wolf.

‘Quite comfortable where I am,’ said Mallory.

Wolf’s twisted jaw writhed. ‘Let me put it like this,’ he said. ‘I have men in position who can drop some things into your hole. This would be a pity, I suppose. I have heard a great deal about you.’

Mallory had to acknowledge that Wolf was right, it would be a pity. He hesitated, his mouth suddenly dry: a dryness he had felt before, high on a Southern Alp without a name, foodless at the top of a couloir, the sun coming on to the ice above, freeing salvos of boulders that swept the gulley clean as a whistle. It was the dryness that came when you had run out of ideas, and you had to put judgement on the shelf, and trust to luck in a place where luck was not in plentiful supply.

Mallory pulled himself to his feet. His ankle hurt, now. Everything hurt. It was most unlikely that Hauptmann Wolf wanted to talk to him about the weather. More probably, he would want to cut him in half with a Schmeisser. ‘Closer,’ said Wolf. He had his Luger pointed at Mallory’s stomach. Mallory could feel the presence of Miller in the belfry. He schooled himself not to look up.

‘So,’ said Wolf. ‘We are honoured that you have been able to visit, Herr Kapitän Mallory. You and your friends, Kolonel Andrea of the defeated rabble once known as the Greek army. And of course Corporal Miller, of the Catering Corps.’

‘Who?’ said Mallory.

The saurian jaw stretched in something approaching a smile. The grin broadened. A thread of drool hung from the corner of the ruined mouth. ‘They are both dead,’ he said. ‘The Kolonel was shot. Miller we hanged.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Mallory. His ankle was killing him. He told himself he did not believe a word of this. But his stomach was hollow with something worse than hunger.

The weariness flowed over him in a heavy wave. Admit it. There were hundreds of them, four Thunderbolts. Wolf was lying about Miller. But Andrea …

‘And now,’ said Wolf, with horrid affability, ‘I am going to kill you.’ Delicately, he put the Luger back in its holster and secured the flap. Removing his cap, he skimmed it on to the mounting block. Fumbling behind him, he pulled out a nine-inch dagger. Mallory had heard of this dagger. Wolf liked to use it to disembowel people.

‘One thing,’ said Mallory. ‘I’m flattered that you recognized me. How did you do it?’

‘I should say that I recognized you from the newspapers before the war,’ said Wolf. ‘But it would not be true. The fact is that your friend Andrea told me, under torture. Just after he had told me where to find the charges you had placed so amateurishly on the Victory weapons.’ It was not just his jaw that had been broken. Without his cap, his whole head looked as if it had been crushed and clumsily reformed. The eyes were cold slits under a white-fuzzed cranium that might have been moulded from dough by a child with a taste for the macabre.

Mallory smiled at him, the bright, enthusiastic smile of someone who has just been given a lovely present. Andrea would not have revealed the time of day under torture. This unpleasant specimen was beyond a shadow of doubt telling lies.

‘Now,’ said Wolf. ‘Come here, Captain Mallory.’ He beckoned, with the dagger held out in front of him. As he beckoned, he advanced.

Mallory felt for his own knife, then remembered both of them were gone. He tested his ankle. Not good. He stood his ground, watching the knife.

They were two figures standing on that sheet of floodlit cobbles, feet apart, intent at the hub of their radiating shadows. One with pack on back, unmoving; the other stealthy, feline almost. Both of them focused on the little starburst of light on the point of Wolf’s dagger.

Wolf was close enough for Mallory to smell his sweat. It was a sour smell, violent, disgusting. Mallory watched the knife wrist sinking for the first upward thrust. He shifted his weight until it was on his good leg. Wolf’s eyes betrayed no feeling. His knife hand came round and up, hooking at Mallory’s belly. But Mallory was not there any more. He had arched away like a bullfighter from the horns, grabbing at Wolf’s wrist as it came past, to transfer the man’s momentum into a twist that would dislocate the elbow.

But as his hands locked on Wolf’s wrist, he knew it was not going to work. The SS man’s arm was thick as a telegraph pole. It was an arm whose owner had slept well and eaten well. Mallory’s fingers were worn with cliff and battle, and his reserves were close to rock bottom. He could not hold on. The arm wrenched away. Wolf brought his left hand round, fast, a closed-fist blow that made Mallory’s ears ring. He kept his feet with difficulty. Wolf came in again, hooking with the knife. Mallory aimed a kick at his knee, made contact, but he had kicked with his right foot, the bad foot, and pain shot up his leg and he fell over, feeling something burn his ribs, cool air on his side. Wolf had cut him. Not badly: a surface cut to the ribs.

It would get worse.

He struggled to his feet.

Wolf was waiting for him. His breathing was steady and even. Little bubbles of spit formed and burst in the corner of his wrecked mouth. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it to you now.’ He came in, knife in front of him like a sword. Mallory knew he was in bad trouble. He had lost sight of the fact he was going to die. There was no time for fear, or thinking ahead. The name of the game was survival, every second a bonus wrenched from the crooked jaws of death.

He got inside the knife, trapped the huge arm under his own arm, butted his steel helmet into that disgusting jaw, heard a tooth or two pop, brought his knee up into the groin, found it blocked by a leg that might as well have been made of wood. The arm was coming round behind him. He tried to cringe away from the knife, but the arms were remorseless, and he was exhausted –

The world went mad.

The square filled with a gigantic noise, the noise of a thousand typewriters, the whine of many hornets’ nests kicked to hell, two, maybe more huge explosions. Sensing a minute faltering of Wolf’s hold, Mallory smashed his helmet once more into the SS man’s face. This time the nose went, and the man grunted and reeled, and behind Mallory the knife clattered on the cobbles. But then the arms came on Mallory’s neck, tilting his head sideways, and Mallory knew that this time he had had it for sure, and for the first time the fear of death showed itself in his mind, a dark and ugly thing –

But only for a split second.

Because suddenly those terrible arms were off his neck and he was lurching back, free, and a voice was saying, ‘Get your weapon.’ A familiar voice.

Andrea’s voice.

It had, Miller reflected, been a bad five minutes.

They had been sitting in the belfry nice and peaceful. Miller had even managed to get a little shuteye – a very little, seeing that he did not trust Carstairs, and that Spiro was trembling like a frightened rabbit and muttering about bulletses and gunses and getting outses of here. Miller was worrying about Mallory, sure, especially after all that stuff with the lights. But when you knew Mallory as well as Miller, you could tell when he was in real trouble and when he was staging a diversionary action. The stuff with the lights, though it had made Miller’s flesh creep, was definitely a diversionary action. When Mallory had vanished from the end of the cable, there had been silence. A silence that Miller had very definitely appreciated. Then had come the shooting, and the voice in the square.

The voice in the square had been different.

It had woken Miller up, a thing he held against it. When he put his eye to the waterspout in the belfry floor, he saw the big man in the breeches and jackboots and high-fronted cap, standing tough and arrogant among the sprawled bodies of the Germans. He saw Mallory hobble out to meet him. Miller’s stomach became hollow with apprehension.

It was not just that Mallory looked tired, and the monstrous figure in the jackboots looked fresh as paint.

There were other things to be seen: things invisible to Mallory, but visible to Miller in his eminence. It was what staff would call a fluid situation. Staff could call it what they liked. To Miller, it looked like a mess.

Round the corner from Mallory, out of his line of sight, a machine-gun post had been set up. Miller did not know why, but he had a nasty feeling it could have something to do with reprisals on the civilian workers. He was not actually worried about the civilian workers, because when those rockets went up, the Germans were going to need all the manpower they could get.

What really worried him was something else: a shadow he had seen floating from darkness to darkness in the alley on the far side of the square. A big shadow, impossibly big: a shadow with the shoulders of a bear and the lightness of a butterfly.

He dug Carstairs in the ribs. ‘Stand by to give covering fire,’ he said.

‘You’re joking,’ said Carstairs, huddling into his corner of the bell tower. ‘They’ll have us in a second.’

‘Listen up, Captain,’ said Miller. ‘If you don’t give covering fire, I’ll blow your God damn head off.’

‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ said Carstairs.

‘I’ll blow your head off, sir,’ said Miller. Then he gave him his orders.

Down below, there was the sound of a dagger clattering on to cobbles. The man in the breeches had Mallory in a headlock and appeared to be breaking his neck.

‘Open fire,’ said Miller. He stood up, tossed two grenades, sighted the Schmeisser on the three heads inside the Spandau emplacement, and fired two short bursts. Behind him the belfry trap door slammed open, and Carstairs’ boots clattered down the ladder. A man stood up in the Spandau emplacement and fell across his gun. The grenades exploded, blowing him out again, accompanied by the two other men. There was movement in other windows as a squad of Germans took cover, Miller waited for the withering fire that would lash Mallory to the ground –

But while he had been disposing of the machine gun, the shadow had detached itself from the alley and moved in half-a-dozen great strides across the cobbles. The shadow was no longer a shadow, but had become Andrea. And Andrea had put a mighty forearm around the neck of the man with the crooked head, and wrenched him away from Mallory, and tucked Mallory in behind him like a hen protecting its chicks, and reversed towards the church door, using the crooked-headed man, Hauptmann Wolf in person, as a human shield, though human was not the word anyone who knew Wolf would have used.

Miller found it all very impressive. He heard the church door below burst open, Carstairs open up. Then he flung himself through the trap door in the belfry floor and went down the ladder into the dark, into the middle of a knot of people that consisted of Carstairs and Spiro, Mallory and Andrea, with Wolf instead of sandbags.

Andrea said, ‘Get behind me.’ The German had a face that Miller did not like. He seemed to be swearing. Andrea’s mighty forearm tensed. The squashed-pumpkin skull turned purple under the thistledown hair. ‘Now,’ he said.

Miller took Carstairs’ Schmeisser gently away from him, and gave it to Mallory, just in case. They moved towards the mouth of the alley, crossing the wide floodlit spaces of the square. It felt horribly exposed out here. But none of the SS would shoot for fear of hitting their commanding officer –

A man flicked into view behind the church, wearing field grey, not camouflage, lifting a rifle to his shoulder. Miller put the bead of the Schmeisser’s sight on the man’s chest and squeezed off a four-round burst. The man crashed back into the shadows.

‘Thank you,’ said Mallory.

‘Don’t mensh,’ said Miller. But beneath the grin was something they all knew. Wolf’s soldiers might not like to shoot their colonel. But the regular Wehrmacht garrison would not be bothered one way or the other. With the amount of noise and fuss coming out of the Greek village, it stood to reason that reinforcements would start arriving soon. And that this time, they would do the job properly.

The mouth of the alley closed around them. Ahead, two lines of houses jostled each other on either side of a strip of cobbles. Then the houses on the left-hand side gave way to a blank wall: a wall with steps of ancient stone rising to battlements.

‘Up,’ said Andrea.

They went up. Behind them, the village was suddenly quiet as the dead under its lights. Mallory peered down the walkway behind the battlements. There was a guard tower, but as far as he could see, no guards.

‘Over,’ said Andrea.

Mallory unlimbered his pack, tossed the silk climbing rope over the edge. ‘Spiro,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Spiro. ‘I no go. I stays. High places, bullets, very bads.’

‘You go,’ said Mallory. ‘Rope round your neck, round your waist, all the same to me.’

‘But sea down there,’ said Spiro. ‘Very bad, wets, no swim good.’

‘Fields,’ said Andrea. ‘Not sea. Get in a ditch. Now go.’

He grabbed the fat man’s wrists. Mallory tied a bowline round the barrel chest and tipped him, still struggling, between the battlements. He and Miller lowered him into the dark until a sound floated up, more a squeak than a shout. Spiro had arrived.

Still the village lay quiet.

Wolf said, ‘You’re crazy. Give up now.’

‘Carstairs,’ said Mallory. ‘Go.’

Carstairs took hold of the rope and launched himself over the edge.

‘Miller,’ said Mallory.

The lights blazed off the cliff. The houses of the village stood bone-white and still. But the world was changing. Outside the orbit of the lights, the sky seemed paler. And from the gates came the sound of nailed jackboots, running.

TEN

Friday 0300-Saturday 0030

As Miller put his foot over the wall, the first grey uniforms came round the corner. He flung himself to the ground, put the Schmeisser to his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. Two men went down. The others fell back.

‘Go,’ said Mallory.

Miller would have hesitated, but he knew that when Mallory spoke in that tone of voice you did what he said. He grasped the rope and went down hand over hand. He could hear a voice shouting in German. Andrea’s voice. Shouting something about Hauptmann Wolf.

Miller’s boots hit the ground. ‘Where?’ he said.

‘Here,’ said Spiro, in a terrified squeak. ‘Thank Gods you come.’

‘Now hear this!’ Andrea shouted, in German. ‘I have with me Hauptmann Wolf, a name known to you all. The Hauptmann is in great danger. Hold your fire.’

The noise of boots had stopped. The alley below the wall was empty. Silence had fallen. But it was not an empty silence. It was the silence of a village full of Greek labourers holding their breath; the silence of a platoon of Wehrmacht, waiting for Andrea to blink. A silence like the silence between the last tick of the timer and the detonation of the bomb.

Then a voice from the alley gave a curt order.

‘Nein!’ yelled Wolf.

But the order had been given by a serving officer of the Wehrmacht, and was not to be countermanded by an SS man in enemy hands. Half the platoon laid down covering fire. The other half began the advance.

Andrea felt Wolf’s body jump in his arms as the first salvo hit. A bullet scorched a track across the skin of his forearm. The body went limp. He dropped it, rolled back, his uniform wet with blood. Mallory was already over the edge. Andrea yanked the pin from a grenade, laid it carefully under the battlement round which the climbing rope hung noosed, grasped the rope and went over the edge.

He slid in silence through the night, rope crooked in his elbow, braking with the sole of one boot on the instep of the other. Against the sky – much paler seen from the thick blackness down here – he saw a head lean over, two heads, heard covering fire from below, finished counting, hoped the ground was close now –

And from above there came the great flat clang of the grenade detonating in the angle between wall and stone floor. The rope became immediately slack, the noose cut by the explosion. There were yells from above, yells Andrea scarcely heard because the ground had rushed twenty feet up to meet him and hit him with a bang, and he was rolling, once, twice, away from the wall, and behind him there were two crashes as the bodies blown over the wall hit the ground, but by that time he was on his feet, running away from the dark loom of the wall.

And a voice said, ‘Over here.’

Mallory’s voice.

Two more steps, and Andrea was in something that from the evil smell of its bottom and the steepness of its sides must be a drainage ditch. Now that his eyes were accustoming themselves to the dark, he saw that his head was on a level with a flat plain, more of the small fields that covered every horizontal square inch of this island.

‘Here,’ said Mallory again.

Andrea put his head down and began to run. There was tracer overhead. In its lurid flicker he could see reeds, blades of grass, the deep footprints of the rest of the party in the mud ahead. As he ran, his mind went back to a time when he had had a pack, equipment, maps.

Particularly maps.

Andrea was a deadly fighting machine, but fighting ability alone was not enough to make you a colonel. What made you a colonel was tactical sense, the ability to read from a map the features of any given terrain that a force could use to ensure the achieving of an objective.

The objective now was the aerodrome. Between here and the aerodrome, the marsh was at its broadest and stickiest. To the south was the causeway with the road, which would be heavily guarded. To the north, the fields ran up to the beach, and the jetty. According to the briefing, the jetty was heavily guarded too, but less heavily than the road.

It had been obvious for some time that the jetty was the only option.

He caught up with Mallory, who was limping along, bundling the little Greek Spiro along the bottom of the ditch: good man, Spiro, lot of noise of course, but very brave to have got this far. They paused to take stock.

At the base of the Acropolis cliffs, the high walls of the village stood out stark and black. Every now and then a burst of tracer whipped from the battlements into the fields. The shooting seemed to be directed in a northerly direction, towards the causeway. It looked like the spastic twitchings of a military force without a head – twitchings that both Andrea and Mallory knew would not last long. Soon, the superb military organization would reassert itself, and the marshes would be combed, blade of grass by blade of grass, and there would be no escape, for them or the Enigma machine.

‘Well, my Keith,’ said Andrea. ‘I think we must take up yachting.’

So it was that an intelligent owl would have seen a little straggle of men, heavily camouflaged with mud, deploy across the fields of young corn, and start to jog purposefully towards the bay on the northern shore of the Acropolis. They moved in a loose curve, using cover as and when they found it, a clump of oleanders here, a field-shed there. But the focus of their movement was the expanse of hard-packed gravel and mud with the long pier and deep-water jetty, connected to the water gate of the Acropolis by a mile of road.

An hour later, the sky was turning grey, and the island was emerging from the anonymity of the night. Mist hung caught in the olive groves on the slopes of the western massif, and drooled from the notches of invisible hammocks in the high Acropolis. A smear of peach-coloured cloud hung like a banner past the northeastern capes. Miller was lying in the rough grass by the edge of the road. To the right, the Acropolis loomed in the half-dark. To the left, the shed by the jetty stood dark against the shifting sea. The road connected the two. ‘The morning after the ball,’ he said.

Mallory blinked his gritty eyes. ‘First,’ he said, ‘the telephone line. Then we move in.’

Miller looked down the road towards the sheds. There were other shapes. Concrete shapes, squat and bulbous. Machine-gun posts, if they were lucky. Eighty-eights, if they were not.

He sighed, rolled over, and cut the telephone line. Then he bustled around, making his preparations.

Up and about the Germans might be. But to Dusty Miller, there was a feeling almost of homecoming. This was the old life, the Long Range Desert Group life, crouching in a ditch in flat land, waiting for the convoy.

Miller had always been a great believer in subtlety. During Prohibition, when others had run booze across from Canada in heavily-armed trucks with supercharged engines, Miller had been a master bootlegger. Having disposed of his principal competitors by persuading them to ram a bargeful of unstable nitroglycerine, he had bought himself a railroad wagon. This railroad wagon he had attached to various trains. It left Thunder Bay loaded with Canadian rye, was shunted into a siding north of Duluth, and unloaded into a private ambulance, whose uniformed driver did the rounds of his discriminating clientele. While others shot each other to bits for the sake of fancifully-labelled cleaning fluids, Dusty’s product had been of impeccable quality, and arrived as regularly as the tide. Miller had made a hundred and ten thousand dollars in very short order. Good business was good business, and nothing to do with fast cars and machine guns. It was not his fault that the gold mine he had bought with the profits contained less gold than the average three-year-old child’s teeth. Subtlety, thought Miller, dry grass up his nose. Subtlety was everything –

The first truck of the convoy passed. The second was opposite. Miller clicked the switch in his hand. A sun-bright flash appeared under the truck’s fuel tank. The truck slewed sideways, blocking the road. Thick smoke billowed from the wreck, composed partly of burning truck and partly of the smoke powder Miller included in his patent traffic reduction bombs. There was very little wind. The smoke settled in a pyramid over the road, blocking it. Someone somewhere was shooting, but Miller could hear no bullets. By the sound of it, Andrea and Mallory were making space for themselves in the front. Miller went to his allotted place in the rear of the lead truck, shooing Carstairs and Spiro ahead of him. The truck picked up speed. The pall of smoke dwindled behind, covering the still forms sprawled on the road. By the swerve and judder, at least two of the tyres were blown. Spiro’s eyes were spinning in his head. Carstairs was stroking his moustache. ‘Nice engines, these trucks,’ said Miller, looking at his watch. ‘Terrible ride, though. Oh, look. They left us a machine gun.’

The truck entered the jetty compound crab-wise, with a tearing roar and a cloud of dust. Faces behind the windows of the harbourmaster’s office hut looked pale and nervous. The telephones were dead, and something had happened on the road, there was no way of telling what. Still, it seemed as if the reinforcements had arrived.

A huge man in a Wehrmacht helmet climbed down from the truck. The men in the hut relaxed. This guy was the kind of guy you wanted on your side when things looked doubtful. Thank God, they thought, he’s one of ours.

‘Morgen,’ said the big man, smiling a huge white smile; Andrea was famous for the size and whiteness of his smile. ‘Telephone’s down.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said the under-harbourmaster. ‘What the hell’s going on up there?’

‘Bit of fuss in the camp,’ said Andrea. ‘SS man found fornicating with a goat. The Greeks didn’t like it.’

‘Poor bloody goat,’ said the harbourmaster, wrinkling his nose.

‘We’re taking a boat,’ said Andrea. ‘Checking the aerodrome perimeter.’

‘Nice day for it,’ said the harbourmaster. ‘Coffee later?’

‘Maybe,’ said Andrea, and loped off. The harbourmaster yawned. It was a lonely life out here on the dusty quay, now that the ships had stopped arriving. All you got was the occasional shipload of stores, and fuel, alcohol and oxygen for the factory, and aviation stuff to be barged across the shallow bay to the airfield landing. Otherwise, the gun crews were getting a tan, and everyone was getting hot, fly-mad and bored. They said there was going to be a rocket firing sometime today. Maybe that was what all the fuss was about –

The big man and his four companions were already on the quay. One of the men seemed to be a civilian. There was something wrong with their boots, but that was none of the harbourmaster’s business. They already had the harbour launch started up, and were climbing aboard. Someone cast off the shore lines. The boat puttered off the quay and into the ink-blue bay that lay between the jetty and the aerodrome. It shrank, heading for the aerodrome fuel jetty. Goodness, thought the harbourmaster, yawning, again. They’re in a hurry.

That was when the motor cycle and sidecar combination clattered out of the smoke. The man in the sidecar hung limp over his machine gun. The rider climbed off and started banging on the harbourmaster’s door, shouting. It took the harbourmaster a good three minutes to get any sense out of him. When he did, he almost wished he had not bothered.

‘Awfully sorry,’ said Carstairs, ‘but how exactly do you propose to get through the fence?’

‘I guess we’ll think of something,’ said Miller. Miller was sitting in the bottom of the boat, the wooden pack open beside him, pushing time pencils into his little buff bricks of plastic explosive. Spiro was looking away, like a child, knowing life was horribly dangerous, but not wanting to admit to himself the full scale of the horror.

‘Get us a plane,’ said Mallory.

‘Of course,’ said Carstairs.

‘What?’ said Spiro, no longer able to deny the evidence of his own ears. ‘You steals plane?’

‘Steal one. Buy one. Borrow one. Who can tell?’ He held out his cigarette case to Spiro. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that.’

‘I spits on your Turkish,’ said Spiro, mechanically. ‘No smoke. Much explodibles here.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Carstairs, applying the gold Ronson to a Muratti. ‘You can eat that stuff.’

‘No!’ roared Spiro. ‘You want explosion in belly, you eats it! Not Spiro – ‘

‘Quiet,’ said Mallory. He was looking back at the shore with his glasses. Men were swarming in the vehicle park by the harbourmaster’s shed. There was activity in the 88’s gun-pit, too, alongside where they had left the lorry parked. The boat chugged across the quiet blue surface of the bay. They were half-way. Not far enough. ‘Left a bit,’ he said.

Andrea pushed the tiller with his hip. The boat yawed. In the gun-pit, the muzzle of the 88 flashed. The report came at the same time that the shell kicked water and yellow high explosive smoke in the air eighty feet to the right.

‘Right a bit,’ said Mallory.

Another bang. This time the shell roared past with a sound like a train, clipped the surface of the bay, ricocheted and blew a hole in the beach. Nobody cheered. They were in a little wooden boat in the middle of a little blue bay, feeling very naked indeed.

‘This is it,’ said Carstairs. He was pale now. ‘The next one. Christ, what are we doing here? Like fish in a barrel –’

‘Tchah!’ said Spiro. ‘Coward! Be a mans!’

The 88 spoke again. This time the shell burst close enough to shower them with chemical-tasting spray. Another shell came, made a smaller splash, skipped, burst on the shore.

‘Hah!’ said Spiro, who had worked himself into a sort of frenzy. ‘Missed again! Bloody square-head fools!’

‘Shut up.’ Carstairs’ composure had cracked. ‘We’re dead. What the hell possessed me to –’

A huge explosion sounded from beside the harbourmaster’s hut. A mighty tree of black smoke grew in the sky.

‘Left a bit,’ said Mallory.

Carstairs climbed up from the bottom boards, and gaped at the shore. As the smoke cleared it was apparent that the 88 had been blown out of its pit. It now lay on the edge of a vast crater, a mass of twisted metal. As for the lorry, it had vanished clear off the face of the earth.

‘What was that?’ he said.

Miller gazed at him with blue and innocent eyes. ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that I must have left a bomb in the truck. Very careless.’

Carstairs swallowed. He did not reply. The boat chugged on. The far shore was coming nearer. Finally, he said, ‘Why aren’t the machine guns firing?’

Mallory kept his eyes outside the boat. ‘It’s all that petrol,’ he said.

‘Petrol?’

Miller pointed a kindly finger at the land ahead. The shore consisted of a strip of white beach with a jetty. Above the jetty was a sun-scorched grass bank. On top of the jetty and the green bank were small, coloured objects. ‘Oil drums,’ he said. ‘Gas cans.’ He pointed over the stern, directly behind them.

‘There’s your guns,’ he said. Then he turned, and pointed straight ahead. ‘And there’s your aerodrome fuel dump. So if they miss us and take a ricochet, up goes the whole caboodle. They have a problem, my man.’

Carstairs thought for a moment of pointing out that it was not only the Germans who would find an aviation fuel dump a problematic place to be in a hail of bullets. Given what he knew of the present company, he kept his mouth shut. It would soon be over.

One way or another.

There were no guard towers along the seaward side of the aerodrome – this far out in the Aegean, the designers of the defences could be forgiven for not expecting shallow-water sea-borne attacks. But as the boat came to within a couple of hundred yards of the shore, a lorry roared down the buff-green strip of vegetation between the security fence and the beach. Andrea gave the tiller to Mallory, sighted down the barrel of the Spandau he had commandeered from the truck, and opened fire. The lorry swerved suddenly and crashed on to the beach. Andrea kept hosing down the little figures that crawled out of the back. Soon none of them was moving. Just to make sure, he loosed a burst at the drums on the jetty. They felt the blast of the flat, oily explosions, smelt the sweetish reek of the black smoke that rolled off the burning drums. Then they were ashore, low, crawling to the fence. There was no time for delicacy. Mallory opened the decompression valve on the boat’s engine, unscrewed the lever, and put it in his pocket. Miller shoved a brick of plastic explosive against the bottom of the wire and snapped the time pencil. ‘Down!’ he yelled.

Thirty seconds later, a roar and a fountain of sand announced that the fence was now metal rain. Odd shots were coming in from the wreckage of the lorry. The Thunderbolt squad used the explosion crater as cover, hauling themselves and the Spandau up the sparse, burned slope of the berm. On the other side, fenced in by a mound of earth, was a half-acre field of oil drums, and a bowser.

‘Well,’ said Miller. ‘They’re not going to do a whole lot of shooting in here, I guess.’

Spiro could not speak.

Mallory had sized up the situation. Now he took control. ‘They won’t do anything to endanger their fuel dump,’ he said. ‘We’ll hold it here. Carstairs, how about you?’

‘Transport,’ said Carstairs. He was looking white about the lips and pinched about the nose. He took out his cigarette case. ‘Turkish this side, Vir –’

‘Not here,’ said Mallory, mildly. ‘Now you get over there with Miller’ – he pointed to the dumpy fuel bowser parked by the entrance – ‘and he’ll hot-wire it for you, and you and I will go and steal an aeroplane, and then we will come back and get everyone.’

‘Piece of cake,’ said Carstairs.

Five minutes later Carstairs came back in the bowser and Mallory climbed in. They rolled out of the fuel dump and across the aerodrome. Andrea gave quiet orders to Miller, who trotted over to the far end of the dump. When he returned, there were two people with him: Clytemnestra and Wills.

‘Good morning,’ said Andrea, with old-world courtesy.

‘Morning,’ said Wills. Clytemnestra was holding his hand.

‘You found your way.’

‘Been here most of the night,’ said Wills. They walked back to an above-ground firefighting pond. Beside it, lying casually in the dirt, was a polished mahogany box with a webbing handle.

‘Yais,’ said Spiro. ‘Yais, this is the damn bloody machine that will make us all killed. I spit on him’ – he spat – ‘and curse him to hell.’

‘Sure,’ said Miller.

‘Better take cover,’ said Andrea, shoving rounds into the magazine of the Mauser. ‘Here.’ He handed the rifle to Wills, and said to Clytemnestra, ‘Do you want one?’

‘What do you think?’ Her eyes flashed dark fire.

Andrea shrugged. ‘Cover me,’ he said, and gave his orders.

Miller and Clytemnestra went to the top of the grassy earthwork protecting the fuel. The surface of the aerodrome stretched away under the sun, a yellow-dun billiard table shot with shining patches of wind-flattened grass. And on that billiard table, small figures were advancing.

Andrea had been busy. He had rolled two fifty-gallon drums of aviation fuel to the top of the bank, siting them six feet apart. Between the drums, he set up the Spandau. Miller kept working, rolling the barrels up the slope, placing them along the crest of the earthwork.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Wills, whitening somewhat beneath the peeling mahogany of his face. ‘It’s an Aunt Sally.’

‘What does that mean?’ Clytemnestra was scowling down the sights of her rifle. The nearest soldier was four hundred yards away.

‘If the Germans shoot at us,’ said Wills in a dazed voice, ‘they stand a good chance of hitting one of those drums. If they hit one of those drums, they stand a good chance of knocking it down and setting it on fire, and rolling it down into a lot of other drums, and blowing up their principal fuel dump. Their supply ship has been sunk. This is precious stuff. They won’t want to lose it.’

‘So?’ said Clytemnestra, shrugging her broad shoulders. ‘They won’t shoot. This is good, no?’

‘Of course,’ said Wills, weakly. ‘It’s just not … normal, that’s all.’

‘Nothing is very normal,’ said Clytemnestra. A German soldier was walking on top of her rifle’s foresight. Her finger tightened on the trigger. Even as she squeezed, Andrea’s Spandau started to chug heavily. Out there on the bare brown plain tiny figures began to drop and roll.

Wills sighted and squeezed, worked the bolt, sighted and squeezed again, and felt the barrel grow hot in his left hand. There were a lot of them: a terrible lot of them. They were not shooting back, though. Thus far, the gasoline drums were a success. But there were too many. They would be able to capture the position by sheer weight of numbers. Unless …

Wills knew with a sort of gloomy certainty that Andrea would have other plans, featuring the destruction of the fuel dump and everyone in it.

The machine gun jammed. The enemy trotted on over the shimmering grass. Any minute now, thought Wills.

Then from behind the line of attackers and to the left, he heard the cough and roar of an aero engine starting; first one, then another, throttling up, then back into a steady clatter. And from the direction of the huts there taxied a twin-engined Heinkel.

The aircraft stuck its nose on to the yellow-dun grass and swung towards the advancing Germans. A heavy, road-drill clatter added itself to the roar of the engines.

‘My God,’ said Wills. ‘He’s machine-gunning them.’ And even as he spoke, the front line of the advance began to collapse. The Germans faltered and stopped. The Heinkel swung back towards the fuel dump and taxied, fast. It came to a halt by the dump entrance. Andrea said, ‘Go. I’ll come.’ He had cleared the Spandau jam. There was still movement out there; squads were re-forming on the grass, and NCOs’ yells drifted down the breeze. As they ran for the entrance, they heard Andrea’s Spandau begin to chug again.

The Heinkel’s door opened. Mallory looked out. Beyond him, Carstairs sat at the controls, smiling an odd smile; a smug smile, cat-gets-the-cream.

‘All aboard,’ said Miller, swinging the mahogany Enigma case in his hand. Mallory jumped down, and went to fetch Andrea. Miller heaved the case up and into the plane. Carstairs reached down and grabbed it. Miller was starting to help Clytemnestra on to the step when Carstairs said, ‘I don’t think so.’ There was a Schmeisser in his hand. The muzzle trembled slightly. It was pointing straight between Miller’s eyes.

‘What?’ said Miller.

‘Bit of a load, six people plus pilot,’ said Carstairs. ‘Not a good idea.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘We don’t want to take any chances with the machine, do we?’ said Carstairs. ‘I mean, who can you trust, nowadays?’

‘You bastard,’ said Wills. ‘You absolute bloody – ‘

Miller stopped him. He said, ‘What are you going to do with that thing?’

‘Take it to the Allies,’ said Carstairs. ‘Trouble is, I haven’t decided which ones. Everyone wants it. The Yanks have got dollars, the Russians have got gold, and even the poor old Brits have got a couple of bob stowed away in a sock, I shouldn’t wonder. And they don’t like each other much. I’m going to have a little auction, that’s all. Now stand back.’

Miller stood back, pulling Wills and Clytemnestra back with him. His face was completely blank. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

The door slammed. The engines throttled up. The Heinkel began to roll. Wills raised his Schmeisser. Miller knocked it down with his hand.

‘You can’t let him get away,’ said Wills. ‘He’s a bloody thief. A traitor. You – ‘

‘Hush,’ said Miller, and Wills observed now that Andrea had come down from his post. ‘The Germans think we’re all on that plane.’

The Heinkel reached the end of the runway and pivoted on one wheel. The engines crescendoed as the throttles went through the gates. It began to roll. It rolled faster and faster, shrinking with distance, the tail lifting, the wheels rising on their suspension until there was daylight under them and the undercarriage came up. A hand came out of the pilot’s window and waved. Then the aircraft turned over the buildings and headed out to sea, chased by the impotent black puffs of a couple of anti-aircraft shells.

‘Hell,’ said Wills. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

The Heinkel rose steeply into the deep Mediterranean blue. Soon it was no more than a dot, headed north-west, for Italy. Spiro was watching it as if it were a ghost. All his work, said his slack jaw and fishskin jowls; all his massive bravery, his tolerance of Captain Helmholz, his feigning of coma, his sliding around on ropes in the dark; all in vain.

Wills was not so tongue-tied. He was pale and shaking with rage. ‘Sir,’ he said to Mallory. ‘I must protest. I must jolly well tell you that I shall be submitting a report to my superiors about this shameful, pathetic – ‘

He stopped. The black dot hung high in the blue vault of heaven. And then, shockingly, it changed. There was a brilliant white flash, and a puff of smoke, and comet-tails of falling debris. And later, several seconds later, the small bap of an explosion.

‘It blew up,’ said Wills. ‘It just bloody well blew up.’

‘Goodness me,’ said Miller, mildly. ‘So it did.’

‘But he had the machine,’ said Wills.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Miller. ‘I knew there was something.’ He was leaning on the concrete lip of the firefighting pond. He pulled a string that led into the murky deeps. On the end of the string was a chunky oilcloth parcel. This here is the Enigma machine,’ he said. ‘Captain Carstairs only had the case. I guess someone must have put something else in it.’

Wills gaped at him, then at the Enigma machine; the key to the deliberations of German High Command, a window into the enemy’s most secret responses to the Allied second front, due to open any day now.

‘There is a game you play with three cups and a pea,’ said Mallory. ‘Corporal Miller is the world champion. Now let us find somewhere to lie up for the day.’

Spiro’s face was a miserable bag of sweating lard. ‘Lie up?’ he said. ‘You crazy. They searches everywhere, finds us, catches us. We deads, matey boy.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Miller. ‘Personally I am alive. And I have an idea that people in the great wide world are going to think we were on that plane.’

Spiro’s face suddenly shone with hope and anticipation. ‘My hell!’ he cried. ‘By the Godsalmighty you are one hunnert per cents!’

Andrea came down from the bank. ‘They’re coming,’ he said.

‘Time to leave,’ said Miller, looking at his watch. Like ghosts, they flitted over the earthwork and were gone.

Feldwebel Braun approached the fuel dump wall with his usual briskness, his squad well scattered over the ground, as per the tactical manual when advancing in the face of enemy fire. Except that there was now no enemy fire. The defenders of the dump had gone quiet – not surprisingly, since they had all flown away in that Heinkel. There had been a lot of disorganization and general unpleasantness these last few days. Braun looked forward to a more normal life in which regulations would be observed and there would be the minimum of fighting.

Crouching slightly – from habit rather than the expectation of enemy fire – he led his squad to the earthwork and into the fuel dump in a succession of short, textbook rushes.

But the dump was empty. He wandered into the stacked oil drums. There were signs of occupation: spent cartridge cases, a foil wrapper from a bar of chocolate. But they were safely out of the way; out of the sky, too, he thought, chuckling heavily. All that remained were the oil drums, like the stumps of a forest turned to steel.

There was a fungus on one of the stumps. Braun walked closer, to examine it. An odd brown growth, with a pencil-sized object sticking out of it, a pencil with a black stripe on the shaft.

Braun opened his mouth to shout. He never made it.

A black time pencil means a ten-minute delay at twenty-five degrees centigrade. It was a warm spring morning, so the corrosive action of the liquid in the pencil’s barrel was accelerated. As Braun ran towards the oil drum, the fuel dump blew up in his face.

They were sitting in a deep creek in a clump of reeds when the explosion came. The dry stems hissed and shook, and a blast of heat passed overhead, a waft of air hot enough to fill their nostrils with the smell of scorched grass. Then the smoke rolled up, and blotted out the sun.

Mallory put his head on his pack, and squinted up at the lip of the creek. Andrea was up there, standing sentry. When you are dead already, thought Mallory, you don’t have to die …

At which point he fell asleep.

The sun was going down as the four SS men and two civilians wound out of the marshes and started along the fence of the aerodrome where it ran by the sea. The wire was bent, the angle-iron posts melted. The launch was where they had left it. Over on the Acropolis, all was quiet.

Reverently, Mallory laid the Enigma machine on the bottom boards of the boat, lifted the engine cover, and screwed the decompression lever back into place. He wound the starting handle, dropped the decompressor. The engine caught with a big, heavy chug.

‘Nice night for a test firing,’ said Miller. The sky was a vault of blue velvet pricked with stars. He looked at his watch again. ‘They must have found the primary charges,’ he said. ‘They should have gone eight hours ago, easy.’

‘Cast off,’ said Mallory.

‘Wer dal’ said a voice from the shore. And suddenly there were figures there: dozens of figures, light gleaming on steel helmets and guns, and Mallory felt a great lurch of the heart, because the Thunderbolt squad were tired and sore and their identification would not stand up to scrutiny, and they had the most secret machine in the world in a sack on the boat’s deck.

‘Out,’ said the voice in the dark.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ said Mallory.

The voice said, ‘Show us your documents.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Mallory. ‘Refer to Hauptmann Wolf.’

‘Hauptmann Wolf is dead, thank God. Out,’ said the shadowy figure.

The not so shadowy figure.

The whole island was suddenly lit by a gigantic white flash. It illuminated with a pale and deadly light the twisted fence. It flung the shadows of the platoon on the shore up the scorched black berm of the fuel dump, and brought the glare of noonday to the black sheet of the water and the sugar-white houses of the Acropolis.

After the flash came a blast wave that raised a four-foot ridge of water and knocked most of the soldiers on the beach off their feet. The boat lurched high, then down again, bounced off the coping of the jetty. The people on the boat had been facing away from the explosion. The men on the shore had been looking into it. Their vision was a series of red blobs, shifting and wavering. ‘Must help!’ shouted Mallory, ears ringing. ‘Quick!’

The boat’s engine hammered. Water churned under her counter. She moved away from the jetty, towards the Apocalypse.

The mountain was burning. From tunnels and shafts and galleries there spewed gouts of flame and sparks. And from the top of the mountain, presumably the launching area next to which the fuel tanks had stood, there rose huge and twisting tongues of fire that burned and detached themselves and rose into the smoke that climbed and spread like a roof over land and sea.

‘Most impressive, Corporal Miller,’ said Mallory.

‘I was born on the Fourth of July,’ said Miller.

Under the roof of smoke the launch, with Wills at the helm, chugged across the dark water towards the jetty on the opposite shore. Some three cables short of the jetty, anyone watching would have seen the boat turn hard-a-port, run parallel with the eastern shore of the bay, continue its course past the headland and out to sea.

But there was nobody to watch small boats going about their business. All eyes were on the mountain of Antikynthos, erupting for the second time.

The boat’s engine became a fading heartbeat, and vanished into the inky shadows offshore.

Two hours later they were at the rendezvous, on the long, glassy corrugations of the sea. Andrea found a bottle of brandy in his pack. They passed it round. There was a fishing line in a locker. Miller dangled it over the side, smoking and dozing. Mallory lay against the engine box with his eyes closed. Spiro sat and shivered, his eyes jerking left and right, his face a jaundiced yellow in the light of the lantern on the stubby mast. And in the shadows, close together, Wills and Clytemnestra sat holding hands. Into Wills’ mind had come the certainty that the currents of war that had thrust him and Clytemnestra together would soon start running in new directions. He should have been relieved that the long ordeal was over. Instead, sore, battered and burned though he was, he felt something approaching sadness.

Miller was singing ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ and hauling in his line, when there was a commotion in the water nearby. A long, dark shape rose against the sky. A voice floated across the water. ‘Any of you chaps called Mallory?’

‘Yes,’ said Mallory.

‘Come on, then. Tea’s brewing.’ Pause. ‘Nasty smell of smoke,’ said the voice.

Mallory’s eyes went back across the water to the hot orange glow that had once been the V4 plant.

There was a clang of boots on a steel pressure hull, the slam of a hatch, the whine of ballast-pumps filling tanks. Then there was silence; silence except for a sound that might have been the fading pant of a single-cylinder diesel, and the great, stirring rumour of the sea.

EPILOGUE

The sun was shining brilliantly on an emerald-green lawn, laid out for croquet. At the end of the lawn stood a small figure in an impeccable tropical uniform: Captain Jensen, a captain no longer, his sleeves and cap incandescent with bullion in the bright noonday. With him were Andrea, Mallory, Miller, and Wills; Wills looking faintly shifty in the presence of so much scrambled egg, the rest gaunt and hollow-eyed, and apprehensive, as if they were waiting for something.

The debriefing was over. The Enigma machine was already in a Hurricane en route for Tangmere, with a large and well-armed escort.

‘Well,’ said Jensen. ‘That’s that, then.’

Mallory said nothing. It would not have been politic to mention Admiral Dixon. Carstairs’ role had already been explained. But Mallory was not feeling politic. Carstairs had been first a liability, then a danger, and finally a traitor. Carstairs had been Admiral Dixon’s idea.

So Mallory said, ‘We’d expected to find Admiral Dixon here.’

Jensen grinned, his alarming tiger’s grin. ‘I bet you had,’ he said, and Mallory, as so often when he was with Jensen, knew that he had been outplayed and outmanoeuvred by a master. ‘By the way,’ said Jensen. ‘It isn’t Admiral Dixon any more. Captain Dixon, RN, Retired.’ He looked down at the bullion on his arm. A broad stripe had joined the narrower gold hoops. ‘Only room for so many admirals in the Service,’ he said.

They looked at him: Andrea, hulking against the sun, Miller with his hands in his pockets, apparently half-asleep, and Mallory, the flesh bitten away from his face by hunger and exhaustion. That was Jensen for you. They had thought they had been playing one game on Kynthos, and they had played it well. But they had been pieces in another game, the game of intrigue and back-stabbing that Jensen had been playing against Dixon –

‘Just one of those things,’ said Jensen. He nodded at Wills. ‘He doesn’t mind, even if you do.’

But Wills was not listening. His mind was back on the submarine, standing in the conning tower, feeling the last pressure of Clytemnestra’s hand on his, watching her steer the boat into the smoke- reeking night, heading for Parmatia. The turbulent currents of war had washed them apart, sure enough. In the smoother flow of peace, though, he would be back …

Jensen was saying something. ‘Well,’ he said, briskly. ‘All’s well that ends well, eh?’

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory.

‘And I am very glad to see you. Very glad. Particularly glad today, as it happens …’

‘Oh, no,’ said Miller, under his breath. ‘No, please.’ Andrea was staring at Jensen, horrified. Mallory opened his mouth to speak, but Jensen put up his hand.

‘… because I have a job for you,’ he said. ‘Just a tiny little job, really. And I thought, since the three of you are here anyway …’

Mallory sighed. ‘We would be fascinated to hear about it,’ he said. ‘But we will need brandy.’

‘Large amounts of brandy,’ said Andrea.

‘Five star,’ said Miller. ‘Roll out the barrel.’

‘Of course,’ said Jensen. ‘And then we will begin.’

Also by Sam Llewellyn

Dead Reckoning

Blood Orange

Death Roll

Dead Eye

Blood Knot

Riptide

Clawhammer

Maelstrom

Hell Bay

The Iron Hotel

Storm Force from Navarone

The Shadow in the Sands

Alistair MacLean was the bestselling author of thirty books, including the world famous The Guns of Navarone and Force 10 from Navarone.

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Characters and Ideas: Devoran Trustees Ltd 1998

Copyright © Text: Devoran Trustees Ltd and Sam Llewellyn 1998

The Author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 00 225712 2

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EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-34783-4

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JOHN DENIS

Alistair MacLean’s UNACO

Hostage Tower

Contents

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

EPILOGUE

By Alistair MacLean

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S HOSTAGE TOWER

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Lorenz van Beck had three hours to kill. For a man to whom killing came easily, it was time enough. But on that fine, pastel-golden Paris day, van Beck had nothing to kill but time.

Van Beck wandered through the leafy shades of the Ile Saint-Louis and basked in the dappled darts of sunlight that sought out his square, unsmiling face beneath its cap of spiked grey hair. He was hatless, and dressed in a dark suit of heavy broadcloth, his waistcoat buttoning high to bunch up the small-knotted, unimpressive tie. He looked, unsurprisingly, like a businessman.

With a muttered sigh, van Beck turned to business, choosing the Musée Rodin and the Musée de Cluny for modern art, porcelain and glass. He noted recent additions, their placings and lighting, their security surveillance. He made jottings in a notebook: enter by this or that window; copy key to door 2, 9, 15; how big, how small, how friendly, the curator’s guards; proximity to sewers, access roads; MO – bombs? Gas?

Occasionally he wrote down a name, one of a thousand – ten thousand – thieves, killers, weapons men, explosives men, biologists, hit-men, stunt-men, drivers, pimps … the freelance employees of Lorenz van Beck, international fence extraordinary. Against a particularly splendid loan collection of Venetian glass he set another name – a well-known name, titled, respected – a lady, you could say, of some quality. Not an employee, but a client.

Van Beck flipped back through the pages of the notebook to the diary section, and checked the client appointment he had fixed that day. He cast an eye at the gold watch chained to his waistcoat, sniffed the expensively musty air of the museum once again – what delicious odours wealth created! – and strolled to the car he had rented under a false name and driving licence at the Gare d’Austerlitz. He retrieved a shabby leather case with an obstinate clasp from the front seat, locked the car, and abandoned it. It would later, he knew, be reported missing, but the matter did not greatly concern van Beck.

He made his way by taxi to another car rental office in the Boulevard Haussmann, where the pretty secretary recognized him as Marcel Louvain, and drove to Rambouillet by way of Versailles, stopping at the palace to sit in the lengthening garden shadows and eat warm bread and rough Ardennes pâté. The Rambouillet bell-tower boomed the first chime of six o’clock as Lorenz van Beck pushed open a creaking internal door and clumped into the darker silence of the church …

The bell notes reverberated through the empty nave. Van Beck peered into the gloom, grunted, and plodded to the second in a group of confessional boxes set in the furthest shadowy corner. He pushed through the dingy red curtain, lowered his bulk on to the chair, cleared his throat, and sniffed in the direction of the confessional grille. A polite cough came from the scarcely discernible figure on the other side.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ van Beck mumbled.

‘In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sanc –’ the priest began, and was rudely interrupted by van Beck’s derisive chuckle.

‘This was your idea, Smith,’ he said, ‘but I’m a sensitive man, and play-acting becomes neither of us. Say what you have to say, and let me go.’

‘I rely, as always, van Beck,’ Smith returned in his dry, precise voice, ‘on your absolute discretion.’

‘And I on your consuming lust for making money illegally.’

The vaguely outlined head nodded agreement. ‘Though you do me a small injustice,’ Smith said. ‘I am fascinated more by crime than by money, as you well know. For me, stealing ten dollars from the coffee fund in the desk of the secretary to the Director of Fort Knox is worth all the jackpots in Las Vegas … in the world.

‘I have made crime my life’s study, my life’s work. It is the ultimate excitement, van Beck. No other physical experience can match it.’

‘Ja, ja,’ the Bavarian sighed, ‘so you have said, so you have said, Mister Smith. So you’re different from me … huh? I can fence anything from the Mona Lisa to a uranium mine. I could find customers for the Taj Mahal or Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. I’ve even sold his own gold back to the Director of Fort Knox. But I’m a peasant. You’re an artist. What do you want?’

‘A team.’

‘To do what?’

‘You know better than that, van Beck,’ Smith rapped.

‘OK, OK.’ Van Beck was silent. ‘How many?’

‘Three,’ Smith replied.

Van Beck wrote the figure in his dog-eared notebook. ‘Any preferences?’ he enquired.

‘None.’

‘So tell me.’

Smith’s urbane voice dropped to a sibilant hiss. ‘One – a weapons expert. The best. Tough … resourceful … professional.’ Van Beck’s blunting pencil stump dug into the cheap paper.

‘Two – a thief. Again, the best. I have to steal two and a half million rivets and somebody’s mother.’ Smith giggled. ‘The best thief you know, van Beck. Daring, totally unafraid.’

‘What’s the going rate for scrap iron and old ladies?’ van Beck enquired.

‘For this collection?’ Smith said. ‘Could be thirty million.’

‘Rivets?’

‘Dollars.’

Van Beck whistled low, unmelodiously. ‘I can get a good team for a slice of that.’

‘Then do it,’ Smith whispered. ‘Do it.’

‘The third one?’

Smith hesitated. ‘Someone … inventive. Incredibly ingenious. Strong, and – again – afraid of nothing. Especially heights.’

Van Beck was thoughtful, rubbing his fleshy, prickly chin.

‘That apply to the other two as well?’ he queried, blandly.

‘What?’

‘The heights,’ the German replied, trying to fit rivets in the sky into a recognizable pattern.

Smith was quiet, dangerously quiet. At length he said. ‘Don’t push me, van Beck. Do what you have to do, but don’t try your luck too hard. It may not last.’

Van Beck swallowed, and shuffled uncomfortably. ‘It will be as you say.’ He made to get up, but Smith’s rasping command froze him.

‘One more thing. There is a new gun, a laser-gun, the Lap-Laser. The Americans have it for their army. I want some. The weapons man must get them. Agreed?’

‘It’ll cost.’

‘I’ll pay.’

‘Sure,’ van Beck grunted. ‘You pay, I’ll supply. That’s business.’

‘Thank you.’ Smith relaxed back in his seat. ‘You may go. Contact me in the usual way. You have a month.’

Van Beck nodded, making no reply. None was needed. He threw aside the curtain on its jangling brass rings, and strode out into the mellow light of evening. He drank white wine, marginally chilled, and cognac at the pavement table of a café, then rejoined his car and took the road to Chartres.

From the church porch, piercing eyes in a hooded face watched him.

Then the heavy door swung open once again, and a bent, shabby little priest joined the home-goers and the evening walkers. He smiled benignly at an old woman dressed, like himself, in rusty black. He reached to pat the head of a passing boy, but missed.

ONE

It was a sheltered place, twenty-eight miles west of Stuttgart: a plateau in wooded country screened from the road by trees, and hardly ever overflown. It made an ideal secret firing range. The US Army used the unfenced fields to test their newest toy, the General Electric Lap-Laser-gun.

The US Army had four Lap-Lasers at Stuttgart. Not very many, they conceded, but still one-third of those known to exist. For the manufacturers had made only twelve so far, and they were as yet in the experimental stage. Since the Army chiefs were confident that neither General Electric’s security nor their own had been breached, they took their time about putting the Lap-Laser through its paces. No one, after all, they reasoned, was going to steal it …

On the day appointed by Smith for the theft of all four guns, a fine but drenching rain speckled the goggles of the Army’s chief weapons instructor as he strained his eyes skywards to pick up the incoming helicopter. The fretful buzz of its motor sounded intermittently out of the heavy clouds. He chewed his gum viciously and spat, a not un-accomplished combined operation.

The helicopter was part of the daily Lap-Laser routine, bringing the precious guns from the big, closely guarded Stuttgart base to the range each morning, and taking them back again in the evening for safe keeping. The guns could not be tested at the base: they were too powerful, too unpredictable.

Apart from that, they needed an enormous power source, and rather than transport huge and unwieldy banks of generators from place to place, the Army preferred the option of an isolated testing ground where they could install a small nuclear power plant.

The colonel glanced back over his shoulder at his sleekly sinister ‘babies’, all four stripped and stacked away, ready to leave on the return trip to the base. He grinned and winked at his second-in-command at his side.

‘They’re really somethin’ aren’t they.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Yeah,’ acknowledged the major, through a stubby cigar that rarely left his stained lips.

There were US Army Generals, plenty of them, who would greet with genuinely blank astonishment any leading question about a laser-gun, and the chief weapons instructor and his 2–IC basked in the realization that they were part of an impressively small band of experts. For example, if put to the trouble, which they rarely were, they would be able to explain that the Lap-Laser was made possible by advances not in ballistics or aero-dynamics, but in the field of optics. That statement in itself was enough to confound most questioners.

The colonel grinned appreciatively at the final touch the laser-gunners had insisted on adding to the already successful day’s tests: at a range of a thousand metres they had drilled ‘USAAF’ through a four-inch plate of sheet steel as cleanly as if it had been stencilled on cartridge-paper.

The Lap-Laser’s guidance system was similar to that of a conventional radar device, except that instead of using radio beams, it reflected beams of light when seeking its target. It could be sensitized to any target within its range, or any kind of target, because the mouse-ear detectors of the Lap-Laser, on either side of its firing mechanism, were tuned to distinguish the properties of a variety of different materials. They could run from a dozen different sorts of metal, to wood, brick, or the human body.

Once the target was located, the Lap-Laser sent out a concentrated ray of appallingly destructive force, which annihilated anything in its direct path.

Its other great advantage was speed. It is the practice in orthodox electronics to work down to a nano-second – one thousandth of a millionth of a second. If even greater speed is required, the only alternative carrier is light, which can be con trolled to a pico-second, or micromicro-second – a millionth of a millionth fraction of time, of such minute duration as to be incomprehensible in human terms.

The Lap-Laser worked to pico-second tolerances, using a processor which General Electric built into the controlling computer specially for the job. To give the optical system the necessary speed to match the sophisticated laser-gun, the processor employed mini-lasers no larger than a grain of salt.

Allied to a power source of massive concentration and force, the lasers combined to produce a weapon that was like a glimpse into a fearful future. Everything ultimately depended on the uses to which the Lap-Laser was put, and on the inviolable guarantee that it could never fall into the wrong hands.

Yet the hands of Mister Smith were among the dirtiest in creation.

And the instrument of his criminal ambition was at that moment speeding down an autobahn in a hired car to keep an appointment with the four deadliest ‘babies’ of all time.

‘AUSGANG-STUTTGART’ the road sign read, and Michael Graham obediently urged the BMW into the stream that peeled off the motorway.

When the price was right, Graham was invariably obedient. Van Beck’s price had been not only right, but generous. The unknown client, the German explained, was prepared to pay for excellence. And Mike Graham, van Beck had known, was awesome in his field of weapons and weapon systems. He had received the kind of training that only the US Army could supply, and had used a privileged position to enlarge his knowledge and raise his performance to a peak of unparalleled capability.

Smith had provided the means, through van Beck, to steal the Lap-Lasers, but the plan was Mike Graham’s, and he turned it over in his mind for the thousandth time.

Using a laser-guided, tripod-mounted electronic surveillance device over a range of more than half a mile, Graham had bugged the US Army base guardroom to obtain the weekly series of passwords that would gain him admittance to the off-limits compound at the right time … when the helicopter touched down on its run back from the firing range.

Graham had also sounded out the other parts of the base’s territory which interested him: the officers’ club, and the living quarters for visiting top brass, whose faces would not be known to the guards. He had selected and marked his target officer, and now had a complete set of forged papers in his new identity. He drove carefully along the public road through the base, away from the off-limits section, and pulled into a cul-de-sac not far from the officers’ quarters, located in a mini-apartment block.

Ten minutes later, a figure in the uniform of a General of the United States Army strode the short distance from the living quarters to the officers’ club. He had a bundle under his arm. He checked his wrist-watch, peered up at the sky, and made his way to a jeep parked at the rear of the club.

The guard corporal dropped his girlie magazine and jumped to his feet as the jeep screeched to a halt outside the guardroom. He joined another soldier at the door, and they peered out into the near-darkness. The harsh whirr of the descending helicopter’s engine sounded loudly in their ears.

A man leapt lithely from the jeep, and the guardroom lights winked on his General’s stars. The corporal tightened his grip on his M–1 carbine.

‘Halt,’ he commanded. Graham did. ‘It’s an emergency, for Christ’s sake, Corporal,’ he shouted. ‘I’m in one hell of a hurry.’

‘Advance and be recognized.’ Snorting with impatience. Graham advanced. The GIs saw a man they did not know, tall and bronzed, with brown hair and moustache, broad-shouldered and thin-faced, looking at them from soft, quick, intelligent eyes. He had a commanding, arrogant manner. But then, the soldiers reasoned, Generals usually did.

‘Hurry it up,’ Graham ordered. The banshee wail of the chopper told him it would soon be settling on the launch-pad in the compound beyond the guard block.

‘Password,’ the corporal rapped.

‘Don’t play games with me,’ Graham snapped. ‘You first – that’s the drill.’

‘Sleepy dog,’ the guard rejoined.

‘Angle-iron,’ said Graham, handing over his papers.

The corporal recollected the name. ‘General Otis T. Brick.’ Visiting brass. Weapons expert. He snapped up a salute. ‘Yessir General,’ he bellowed, while his subordinate pressed the button to raise the barrier to the compound.

Graham vaulted back into the jeep, gunned the motor to speed into the compound and slew to a halt in a spray of gravel near the launch-pad. Three startled soldiers, waiting for the helicopter to come back from the range with the four crated laser-guns on board, jumped like scalded tomcats when Graham screamed, ‘Get away from there – now!’

‘Ten-shun!’ barked the corporal in charge, and all three snapped into rigidity.

Graham saluted, and said, ‘Get your men away from this area. There’s a leak in the nuclear generator shielding out at the range. The radioactivity could have spread to the guns, or even the helicopter. My orders are to take the chopper away.’

‘Who – who are you, s-sir,’ the corporal stammered. Graham had already raced back to the jeep and extricated the anti-radiation suit he had brought with him. Climbing into it, he shouted above the roar of the settling helicopter, ‘General Brick, Third Army Special Weapons Division. Now move it, soldier – move it!’

Graham reached back into the jeep and pulled out a geiger counter, and what looked like a steel brief-case. The helicopter’s rotors were beating the air, and the pilot looked anxiously out at the charade on the tarmac. Graham ducked under the sweeping blades, and wrenched open the door.

‘Out!’ he ordered the pilot. ‘Radiation scare. You could have got a dose. The Emergency Med. Unit’ll be here soon to check you over. I’ll take the chopper away. Don’t switch the motor off.’

The pilot needed no second bidding. He scrambled out of the seat and dropped to the ground, almost colliding with Graham.

‘Will you be all right, sir?’ he screamed.

‘The suit will protect me,’ Graham shouted. ‘I’ll fly the chopper to the far end of the range and quarantine it. Look after yourself, man.’

The blare of a motor-horn from the direction of the guardroom drew the eyes of all four men on the ground away from the helicopter, where Graham was already revving the engine.

Two jeeps packed with men hurtled towards the launch-pad. A burst of machine-gun fire came from the leading vehicle. The three soldiers and the pilot scattered to hit the deck, and the jeeps pulled up short of a stack of gasolene cans a hundred yards from the chopper. Graham throttled viciously, and another spurt of tracer fire arced towards him.

Bullets pinged off the shell of the helicopter, and one tore a track across the shoulder of his anti-radiation suit, but he felt no pain. A third salvo stuttered out, and Graham, who had been about to take off, swore brutally. He snapped open the clasp of his brief-case and drew out a heavy, ugly Schmeisser machine pistol.

He could barely see the two vehicles in the pool of blinding light, so he hit the easier target.

A vast swell of sound erupted as the gasolene cans exploded. The GIs were safe behind their jeeps, but there was now no possibility of stopping Graham.

Behind a concealing wall of smoke and flame, the helicopter rose into the air, taking the false General, and four crated but fully operative Lap-Laser-guns, away to do the bidding of Mister Smith.

The troops on the ground fired madly at the departing plane to ease their frustration, until the officer in charge resignedly flapped his hand in a gesture of dismissal.

‘Who the hell was he, sir?’ asked his sergeant.

‘Christ knows,’ the captain returned wearily, ‘but he sure wasn’t General Brick, because I’ve just been talking to General Brick in the officers’ club. Somebody walked off with his dress uniform, and it wasn’t his batman, so it must’ve been that sonofabitch up there.’

He tipped his peaked cap back on his head, put his hands on his hips, and whistled out a tight-lipped sigh. ‘Can you imagine the crap that’s going to be flying around when the brass find out we’ve lost not just one of their favourite toys, but all four? Jeeze.’ He shook his head, almost admiringly. ‘You gotta hand it to that guy. He sure pulled a neat trick, whoever he is.’

But the Army never did learn Graham’s identity. The BMW was untraceable, and Graham had made no fingerprints. His abandoned clothing was unmarked, and in any case had been bought from a chain store. He might as well have been a ghost for all the clues he left. Or a spook.

He flew the helicopter eastwards for perhaps fifteen minutes on a pre-arranged flight path. Then he brought her in low and skimmed the tree-tops, his eyes combing the ground.

There it was. A winking light in a pool of blackness. He flashed his own landing lights, and three pairs of vehicle headlamps came on in answer.

Mike set the plane down quickly and expertly, forming a square in the deserted field with the big, dark Citröen, the Volkswagen, and the tough little pick-up truck that waited to greet him.

He ran to the larger car, and the driver’s window slid noiselessly down. ‘You have them?’ asked a man in the uniform as a chauffeur.

Mike said, ‘Yep.’

‘Excellent,’ the chauffeur returned briefly. He spoke guttural German. He reached over to the front passenger seat and handed Graham a loosely wrapped parcel and a brief-case of soft matt leather.

‘Clothing, your size,’ he grunted. ‘In the valise – money, and the keys to the Volkswagen. Don’t worry about the lasers. We’ll load them into the truck. You’ll be contacted for Phase Two. For now, disappear.’

Graham opened the brief-case, and raised his eyebrows as he saw the fat bundles of small denomination US dollars. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’ The chauffeur nodded.

Mike tried to peer beyond him to the man whom he could dimly see in the rear offside passenger seat, but a panel of tinted glass blocked his view. The windows were tinted, too. The man had not spoken a word, and sat hunched inside an enveloping overcoat, with a black Homburg pulled down over his brow.

‘Thank you, too,’ Graham said, cheerily. The mystery man stayed silent and unmoving. Mike gave up the struggle and walked away, whistling.

The chauffeur turned and slid back the glass panel. ‘I’ll transfer the guns and take the pick-up to the warehouse, sir,’ he said, respectfully.

‘Do that,’ Smith grunted. ‘I’ll drive the Citröen and see you at the hotel. Don’t make any mistakes. Graham didn’t. He’s good.’

The chauffeur nodded. ‘And the helicopter?’

‘Kill it,’ Smith ordered. ‘With Graham’s uniform and anti-radiation suit in it.’

Mike was a mile away when he heard the ‘crump’ of the explosion, and saw in his rear-view mirror the funeral pyre of the helicopter.

‘You gotta hand it to that guy,’ he murmured, patting the brief-case on the seat beside him. ‘He sure pulls neat tricks, whoever he is.’

TWO

Weesperplein is not one of the great public squares of Amsterdam, like Sophiaplein, Rembrandtplein or Dam Square itself, but its commercial importance is undeniable. That Friday evening, Weesperplein hummed with important traffic and prosperous, stolid people, as the armoured secur ity van nosed its way patiently along to come to a halt outside Number Four.

The uniformed, armed and helmeted driver of the vehicle got out, and slammed the self-locking door. He walked around to the rear of the van, and tapped with his truncheon on the panel. Two men, also in uniform and wearing guns, alighted to stand by him.

The driver glanced at the clock above the heavy double-fronted entrance to Number Four, Weesperplein. The finely wrought gilt hands stood at four minutes to six. ‘Just in time,’ he remarked.

While the driver rang the bell, his colleagues manhandled a wooden crate on to the sidewalk by its carrying handles. The summons was answered by a man of medium height, balding, with mild grey eyes and a nervous manner. He nodded to the driver, who turned to his companions and sang out, ‘OK.’

They heaved the create up between them, and carried it inside. Then they returned and fetched from the van a precisely similar crate, and took that in, too. Both crates were heavy, and sealed.

When all three security men came out, the nervous man stood in the doorway, watching them depart. He shut the front door behind them, and checked that it was fully locked.

The driver glanced up again at the big clock. It gave the time as three minutes after six. ‘Home then,’ he said.

Number Four, Weesperplein, was an impressive, even beautiful, building, and the Gothic-script ornamental letters forming the frieze around the clock described in two succinct words what went on behind the imposing facade. The legend was ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMANTBEUR’.

A brass plate on the wall carried a translation for the benefit of foreigners: ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMOND EXCHANGE’.

Sabrina Carver made her first steal when she was seven.

She lived then – and for the next ten years – in her native town of Fort Dodge, Iowa, county seat of Webster County, as Sabrina learned at an early age, and immediately forgot.

It was also patiently explained to her that Fort Dodge had started life in 1850 as Fort Clarke, but the following year a pressing need arose to honour a certain Colonel Henry Dodge, and the name was changed. The fort was abandoned in 1853, so the tiny settlement, struggling to make ends meet in its uncompromising bed of river clay and gypsum, assumed the name.

‘Good for Colonel Dodge,’ thought Sabrina, and immediately forgot him, too.

The Des Moines River, on which Fort Dodge stands, is still picturesque at that point, though it no longer rings to the cries of marauding Indians and defending settlers. It figured prominently in Sabrina Carver’s young life, though, since it was the scene of that very first theft.

She was on a river trip with family and friends, and she calmly picked a tiny, silvery brooch off the coat of the lady who was sitting next to her, talking animatedly to Sabrina’s own mother. The larceny passed unnoticed for half an hour, until Sabrina’s mother spotted the brooch on her daughter’s dress.

Though she was straightway forgiven by the gushing owner – ‘The poor, innocent little darling doesn’t know, does she’ – Sabrina made no fuss about giving the brooch back.

For this act of mature contrition, she received a quarter from the gushing lady, who petted her like a doll, for Sabrina had appealing dark eyes, long red-blonde hair and a serious, saintly little face. As they were parting from her new-found friend, Sabrina stole the brooch again, and this time made sure her mother didn’t see it.

She sold the bauble to the roughest boy in school for two bucks. It was a gross under-payment, for the brooch had three diamonds set into a silver clasp. But at that time, Sabrina failed to recognize them as diamonds. She thought they were glass.

She never made that mistake again.

From then on, Sabrina stole regularly to brighten her comfortable but tedious middle-class life. She had unearthed a professional fence by the time she was nine, and impressed him with her ability to deliver her dentist father’s instruments, one at a time, over a space of three months. In that ongoing heist, she used a different modus operandi each time. The police were baffled.

All her education, her astonishing physical fitness, her command of sports and special skills, even her flowering beauty, were ruthlessly channelled into serving her over-weening ambition to become one of the great thieves of all time. She chose new clothes, picture shows, books, lectures, holidays, only if they would widen her experience, or add to her prowess, or make the art of stealing easier for her.

Sabrina was, then, supremely dedicated. On her seventeenth birthday she left high school laden with prizes, and clutching a letter from the Principal urging that she go on to Vassar, or at least Bryn Mawr, since she was the brightest student the school had ever known.

Her fence held sixty-seven thousand dollars for Sabrina in his own deposit account. By the end of the following week she had almost doubled her nest-egg with the proceeds of a raid on a Des Moines hotel, which the police said could only have been committed by a small squad of acrobatic commandos.

Sabrina warmly thanked her friend the fence, withdrew every cent of the capital, and disclaimed the current interest. She used the money to set up in business for herself in New York, later establishing branch offices in Paris, Monte Carlo, Rome and Gstaad.

She never once went back to Fort Dodge, Iowa, and had not made the slightest attempt to contact her parents.

Sabrina was a healthy girl and, at the age of twenty-five, almost indecently beautiful. Sex was easy to find, and she frequently found it.

At no time, however, did she allow any ulterior consideration to interfere with what, for Sabrina, was the ruling passion, the most intense pleasure, of her life. Not merely stealing, but stealing diamonds.

At stealing diamonds, Sabrina was indeed internationally acknowledged to be the very best.

There are probably more diamonds in Amsterdam than in any other single place in the world. Diamonds were first discovered in India, but the Dutch – who are inclined to treat anything of value with exaggerated respect – have been cutting and polishing them since the sixteenth century. At factories like Asscher’s, eagle-eyed cutters peer at cleavage panes parallel to the octahedral faces, and divide the fabulous crystals with immense care, skill and courage.

Asscher’s it was who cleft the 2024-carat Cullinan Diamond. Joseph Asscher himself struck the master blow. Had he messed it up, his firm would doubtless have gone bankrupt, and the British Crown Jewels would have a lot of empty spaces in them.

Asscher’s, and other manufacturing plants, are the places where the glamorous work of the diamond trade is done, but for dealing, the centre is the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange. The Exchange, in fact, handles bullion of all kinds, which was why its security manager did not for a moment hesitate to grant a request from an important client, concerning not gems, but a consignment of gold ingots.

‘I would not trouble you,’ the client, Kees van der Goes, had said, ‘except that I owe a favour to this friend of mine. He’s got a big shipment of gold passing through Amsterdam at the weekend … at least, it was supposed to, but the outward journey to London has been delayed. He’s asked me if you’d look after the crates for him until Monday morning. They’ll reach you on Friday night.’

Van der Goes, a well-known diamond and bullion dealer, was a valued customer of the Exchange. The security manager, whose nervousness was endemic, and practically boundless, agreed immediately.

‘We’ll keep the vaults open for the consignment,’ he promised, ‘though if you could possibly arrange for the crates to be delivered by six o’clock, then the time-lock can run its routine, you know.’

Van der Goes said he would try, and the security men backed him to the hilt. They had all, however, reckoned without the dealer’s pedantically fussy agent, who arrived at the Exchange shortly before the shipment, and insisted on examining at least part of the contents of both crates.

They had been carried through to the rear lobby, and there, the massive steel door to the vaults stood open, even though the electric wall clock showed seven minutes after six. The crates stood side by side on the metal floor. The fussy agent had just finished sealing one crate, and was about to open the other.

The nervous security manager’s anxiety increased with each second that passed.

‘Must you check the second crate?’ he pleaded. ‘It’s probably just the same as the first.’

‘I sincerely trust that it is,’ remarked the agent, ‘because it’s supposed to be, after all, isn’t it?’

‘So?’

‘But one must be positive, my dear fellow,’ protested the agent. ‘You would not wish me to do half my job, would you?’ ‘My job is to close the vault.’ ‘And so you shall. All in good time.’ The security manager shot the agent a glance of pure detestation, which was completely ignored. The agent unlocked the seals, and prised off the lid of the second crate. Like the first, it was filled to the brim with shiny gold ingots. As he had done before, however, the agent insisted in lifting up ingots from various places, to check the tier beneath. Finally satisfied, he lowered the lid, and laboriously replaced the clasps and seals.

Mopping his brow, the nervous one pushed home the vault door, spun the locking wheels, dialled the combination, and set the clock for the time-lock. The Amsterdam Exchange vaults would now remain shut, sound-proof and air-tight, until nine o’clock on the following Monday morning.

No human agency except a massive bomb could open the door from the outside.

And no way had yet been devised for performing the operation from the inside.

The stillness within the vault was almost palpable, the air heavy and hot. No sound came, and no living thing stirred.

So the shattering noise as the end panel of one of the crates was violently kicked out, seemed all the more horrendous because of the oppressive silence.

Feet first, a dark figure wriggled into the total blackness of the vault. Despite the increasing warmth (which would eventually come under thermostatic control at 70 degrees Fahrenheit), the intruder shivered, for the place had about it the feel of the tomb.

The beam of a slim torch cut through the Stygian darkness, and illuminated the other crate. With tools from the air-conditioned ‘living space’ in the first box, the burglar levered off the end panel of the second, and drew out more tools, plus battery lights, portable breathing apparatus, a radio, and a plentiful and varied supply of food and drink.

A battery light came on, and the dark form of the thief was revealed, clad from head to foot in the sinister all-black garb and hood of a Ninja Assassin.

Periodically, the hood was lifted to enable the intruder to breathe through a mask attached to an oxygen tank.

Finally, Sabrina Carver pulled the hood off altogether, and released her flowing hair. She switched on the radio, and settled down to a packet of smoked salmon sandwiches and a bottle of excellent Pouilly Fuissé.

It was going to be a long wait until Monday morning, she thought, with only the theft of a small fortune in diamonds to while away the time.

The electric clock controlling the time-lock jumped from two minutes of nine to one minute. The security manager started in sympathy, despite the fact that his Monday morning routine of opening the vaults had not varied since he joined the staff of the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange twelve years before.

The machinery had merely got more sophisticated, and though the clock made no noise as it ticked off the minutes, the security manager, being nervous, acted as if the passage of the long hand was the crack of doom.

He was accompanied by the Deputy Director of the Exchange – again, as normal – and lurking discreetly behind them were two armed and uniformed guards. One kept a wary eye on van der Goes’s fussy little agent.

Nine o’clock.

A white bulb over a switch box next to the vault door blinked on. A plaque in the wall identified the box as the ‘Time Vault Release’. A security guard reached out a long arm and, on the nod of the Deputy Director, pressed down a lever.

The security manager breathed a sigh of heartfelt relief, and stepped forward to turn the large combination dial, and spin the wheels in reverse direction.

The guards lifted their weapons and flanked the two executives.

With a solid metallic ‘clunk’, the bolts inside the vault slid along their tracks, and the mighty door swung soundlessly out.

The security manager looked over his shoulder at his boss, smiling for the first time during the entire weekend.

The five men outside the vault barely had time to register the unbelievable scene … steel deposit boxes lying open, some scattered on the floor, clearly empty, alongside a trio of equally empty wine bottles.

Then the bizarre black hooded figure was on them.

The guards did little more than gape, because the intruder was clear past before they realized there had been anyone in the vault at all.

They were left with one scarcely possible, lunatic impression: of the sound of whirring wheels.

It was only when the hooded figure had gone that one guard turned on his heel, loosed off a departing shot, and shouted, ‘Roller skates! It had roller skates!’

In the outer lobby, secretaries and early arriving businessmen dived for safety as the apparition sped across the marble floor in long, crouching strides. Sabrina saw the far wall looming up, and made a dramatic power leg-over-leg turn.

The racing wheels of the skates fixed to her boots screeched jarringly on the marble as she clipped a corner and shot into a corridor.

The few girl clerks, more soigné secretaries, and portly office managers in her way, scattered in horror and flattened themselves against walls or ducked into open doors to give her a clear passage.

Accelerating all the time, she pumped powerfully and unstoppably down the corridor, and from there to another, hunched forward in racing style, her arms swinging in surging rhythm, her eyes pools of brightness in the dark hood, a black knapsack clipped to her back.

Through a third corridor she rushed and a fourth, navigating a half-open glass door, and with more hair-raising right-angled turns, until she knew she was once more at the rear of the building.

It was an exhibition of breathtaking skill, streaking through knots of terrified people, skimming obstacles, trolleys, file-toting clerks, all the while gaining power and acceleration.

And finally, she was in a cul-de-sac.

She looked steadily ahead, gritting her teeth, bunching her muscles.

The passage ended not in a wall but in a floor-to-ceiling picture window. Sabrina careered towards it, went into an even lower crouch, let loose a yell of exultation, and sprang into the air.

She launched herself at the glass, booted feet and gloved fists leading, and pulped it to smithereens, bursting through into the cool air in a shower of splintered fragments.

Arms wheeling like a ski-jumper, she cleared the sidewalk and a disbelieving pedestrian. She landed fully-balanced in the roadway and, without stopping, leaned into a turn and roared away down the slight gradient.

An areaway, no more than an alley, came up on her right, just where it should have been, just the way she had planned it.

She sped into it, dodging garbage bins, and reached a sheltered open space at the back of an off-centre theatre.

Behind her she heard the wailing of klaxons, and the shouts of guards and police who were belatedly on her track. Sabrina spun to a stop, and slipped off her skates, stowing them in the unclipped haversack. With a key from her belt she let herself into the almost deserted theatre.

The people goggling at the unaccustomed activity in the quiet street, took the dazzlingly lovely girl in the pant suit for an actress, even if only because she had exited from a theatre. She had a large tote-bag slung over her shoulder, and she smiled winningly at the guards tearing past her.

Once in the Weesperplein, Sabrina caught a tram to the Rijksmuseum, spent half an hour there soaking up the Rembrandts, and walked through the pedestrian precinct to the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square.

At the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, the Deputy Director and the security manager were comparing notes with the police.

‘I make it probably four hundred thousand dollars’ worth in the unlocked boxes,’ the Deputy Director said, ruefully. ‘Thank God it was a slack weekend, and there wasn’t more there.’

‘It was enough,’ the security manager intoned. ‘My, oh my, it was enough.’ He breathed out noisily, and shook his head in tragi-comic weariness. ‘Roller skates. I ask you – roller skates.’

‘What about my client’s gold?’ demanded the agent of Kees van der Goes.

‘Nothing leaves here,’ interjected a stern-faced and harassed policeman. ‘Those are the orders.’

‘But the seals,’ the agent bleated, ‘they are untouched. The crates are as they were on Friday evening.’

And they were. With the sole exception of the wine bottles – which she left on the floor out of sheer devilment – Sabrina had stowed everything carefully away in the crates, and repaired the end panels. With luck, they would pass scrutiny.

‘So where, then,’ the policeman inquired icily, ‘did the guy in black spring from? Hey? And where did these bloody bottles come from? Huh?’

For once, the agent had no ready answer.

THREE

Enter the Black Spider-man.

There are times, even at night, when New York City – and particularly the canyons of the great avenues – seems to be made of glass.

Curtain walls of opaque smoothness, rising hundreds of feet into the air, suddenly, from different angles, come on like Christmas Trees, and reflect the whole exotic panorama of skyscraper and strip-bar, cathedral and cat-house.

Generally speaking, the bigger buildings are where the bigger people live, or work, or occasionally love, when they are not too preoccupied with living and working.

The big people like to have the trophies, the spoils, of their rich and rewarding lives around them, if only to remind them how richly rewarded they are. Then they pay other, more talented, people to arrange the trophies in the most aesthetically pleasing ways, and invite yet more people, who are less richly rewarded than they are, to come to their palaces and admire both them and their gewgaws.

The process serves two useful purposes: it teaches the visitors that the deadly sin of envy is a magnificent driving force; and it provides the means for the Pollocks, the Ming jars and the Mayan masks to get the occasional dusting.

There is, though, one drawback: certain small-minded persons are importunate enough to wish to steal the spoils of the moguls. Thus, the trophies have to be guarded with such fanatical zeal that the pretty penthouse palaces become fortresses, or, worse, virtually prisons.

Happily, most of the lairs of the truly rich are well-nigh impregnable, and it must be a source of comfort to the criminal classes that these good citizens can sleep easily in their beds at night. So euphoric do the big people sometimes feel, that they will gladly lend out their treasures for public exhibition so that a great many people may see them, and slaver at the unostentatious plaque that makes it perfectly plain who is doing the lending.

If anything, these public displays are protected with even greater care and devotion than the private gloatings, for while the truly rich may not sincerely appreciate their treasures, they are the very devil when it comes to collecting insurance pay-offs.

When the Black Spider-man gets bored with stealing from the millionaires’ palaces, he will penetrate the public exhibition places with equally contemptuous ease.

In Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue there are many glass mansions, as a latter-day prophet might put it. One stands in the block between 5th and 58th and 59th. A poster tastefully mounted on an easel outside the building says: ‘LOAN EXHIBITION. THE T’ANG TREASURES. 38th FLOOR EXHIBITION HALL’.

Much of the building is in darkness, but the lobby is well-lit, especially the elevators. Two men, both armed and in the livery of security guards, sit and talk and smoke …

Up the steel-beamed glass wall C.W. crept. He was black-clad and black of skin, his bare toes as prehensile as his gloved hands. He did not have far to go. Twenty feet above him sat a window washer’s gondola, attached to the vertical inset steel I-beam by a wheeled device.

C.W. reached it without breaking sweat, and climbed in. Slowly the gondola rose, almost to the peak of the building. C.W. scorned to count the floors: he would know the 38th when he reached it.

He looked down, and from side to side. The avenue, stretching out as far as he could see in one direction, was a ribbon of moving light-specks. The other way lay the dark menace of Central Park.

The 38th floor exhibition suite was not completely darkened. Though the exhibition had closed for the night, the choicest masterpieces of Chinese sculpture and metalwork were perman ently illumined; some gaudily, where they needed it, others hardly touched by fingers of light that picked out salient features of wonderful artistry and delicacy.

C.W. peered through the window, and located the centrepiece – a magnificent T’ang Dynasty Flying Horse. The Black Spider-man drew in his breath. The sculpture was almost too exquisite to handle. But it was his target. He had a commission to steal it, and in any case he would own it for a few brief, precious hours.

C.W. also noted the other form of illumination in the exhibition suite’s main hall. Light-beams, laser-powered, criss-crossed each other like searchlights, seeking out and protecting the exhibits with a sureness that no human guard could match.

An intruder had merely to touch one of the glowing rays, and alarm bells rang out – not just in the exhibition suite and the lobby, and in the apartment of the building’s security chief, but also at Manhattan Central and two other police precincts. The Flying Horse sat there, graceful and elegant, but dramatically charged with the suggestion of enormous, coiled power.

C.W. conceived the loony notion that all he had to do was whistle, and the horse would leap out of its prison into his arms. He tried it, and his warm breath blew back into his face from the window. He thought the horse winked, but he wasn’t sure.

He sighed, and picked up from the floor of the gondola a large rubber suction cup. He clamped the cup to the window, and fixed the cord running from it to the stanchion of the I-beam. Then he took from his belt a diamond-tipped scalpel, and patiently traced a perfect circle around the perimeter of the cup.

He completed the manoeuvre several times, and replaced the scalpel. With the knuckles of both hands, he rapped the area of glass surrounding the suction cup, which was sitting on the skin of the window like a black carbuncle.

The ring of glass broke free, and C.W. carefully caught the suction cup and allowed it and its new glass cap to hang by the cord against the side of the building. He crawled through the circular hole, carefully avoiding a low, slanting light-beam, and stood in the exhibition hall getting his bearings and adjusting his eyes and body to the changed lighting and temperature. He breathed in deeply and evenly, and tensed his muscles for what, at best, could be only a ten-second sprint to the horse, and back out to freedom.

For the Black Spider-man knew that he had not even the remotest chance of stealing the horse and escaping undetected. That might be achieved by an army of electronic experts and technicians, but C.W., as always, was one man, alone. For him, it had to be the hard way.

His sole aids were his pantherish strength, his astonishing nerve, his natural ferocity, and his boundless contempt for danger.

He had one other (for his chosen trade) admirable quality: he was always self-contained, and rarely dealt in violence. Violence against things, or obstacles – yes. Against locks, doors, safes, secur ity devices; but hardly ever against people. C.W. valued people – even the truly rich – almost as much as he valued the beautiful creations they owned.

Drawing breath again, he let it out explosively, and launched himself towards the centre of the room.

When you are baptized Clarence Wilkins Whitlock and your schoolfriends ask you which name you want them to call you by and you say ‘Neither’, then you might have to fight to protect your nominal integrity. Clarence Wilkins Whitlock reached this small crisis early on in life, and established his right to be known simply as ‘C.W.’ over a bloody, but gratifyingly brief, period in one of the less favoured districts of Tallahassee, Florida.

C.W. came from the wrong side of the tracks before the tracks were even laid. He had an innate appreciation of the natural beauty of that part of Northern Florida where Tallahassee sits on its perch high above the sea, in a nest of rolling hills, lakes and streams. When C. W. could get away, this was where he liked to be, sitting by – or more likely in – the little tumbling brooks, sunning himself on the quiet uplands, and climbing the giant magnolia trees and majestic oaks, hung in season with Spanish moss.

For C.W., home was always the haven, not of peace, but of resentment; an island of poverty and bitterness in a sea of plenty. Above all, it was the place where his racism (and C.W. would accept that he qualified as a black racist) was nurtured. His youth had been the time of the awakening of black race consciousness, and that false dawn had a magnetic attraction for him. He did not actively loathe whites, but he was deeply afraid of them; and fear, he decided, was a more powerful emotion altogether than hate.

Only later, when he was beginning to establish himself to an unarguable degree, did C.W. discover that his fear of whites had turned to cautious regard, and then to grudging awareness, and finally to acceptance of them as a necessary aspect of his society. For without them, who would be the negro’s negro? The Jew, perhaps? Polacks? Spics? Dagos? Wops?

Juvenile crime was a way of life for C.W. Whitlock before any alternative path had even been considered. And when, as he grew older, the question arose in his mind of a career, the choice – as it had been for Sabrina Carver – was easy.

For apart from a cool head crowning his lithe body, C.W. possessed one priceless accomplishment: he could climb anything, by day or night, any structure that he had ever been asked to climb, or been forced to. Some in his vicious circle of cronies dubbed him ‘Monkey’, and quickly learned that C.W. did not take kindly to nick-names. Later he secretly revelled in being known to the American Underworld as ‘The Black Spider-man’: that, he felt, was a fitting tribute to an impressive talent.

But in the early days, he concentrated on going from strength to strength – or, more properly, from height to height. He devised ever more complex and daring pathways to robbery, and his gangster acquaintances were not surprised when he quickly outgrew his need for the basic talents of thuggery which were the limits of their collective repertoire.

He kept one friend, and occasional accomplice, Pawnee Michaels, a full-blooded black Red Indian, for God’s sake. He went through Vietnam with Pawnee, and they travelled the road of crime together. But Pawnee was a liability, and knew it. Unadept and clumsy, he tried one day his own caper. C.W watched him fall from the City Bank in Trenton, New Jersey, and turned away because there could be no percentage in claiming what was left of the poor, smashed body.

Since then, he had worked alone. Like Sabrina Carver, he migrated to New York, where the buildings were taller and more challenging. Again like her, he fenced through Lorenz van Beck …

C.W. leapt the light-beams and glided between the statues, betraying no sign of his presence.

He landed on his toes by the central plinth, and froze, controlling his body, steeling his reactions. Then he plunged both hands into the cat’s-cradle of light, and seized the T’ang horse.

The infernal clangour of the alarms cut through the quiet of the building like a bolt of lightning. The security chief jerked awake and smashed the clock from his bedside table. He swore and reached for the telephone.

The lobby guards raced efficiently through their drill, the one haring for the elevator, and the other double-locking the front doors, then returning to bring down the three unused elevators. When they reached the ground floor, they would be immobilized.

He gazed hypnotically as the floor indicator of the occupied lift raced up to thirty-eight. The phone rang. He palmed the receiver and said ‘Check. Check. Right.’ Then he slammed it back on its rest, and crossed to where the three remaining elevators were settling, their doors opening in sequence.

The guard snapped off the operating switches to all three, and grinned. The bastard was trapped. Wherever he was hiding, he could not leave the building.

His security chief paused long enough to drag on his underpants, for he normally slept only in his gun. His apartment was immediately below the exhibition suite, and he made the stairwell in seven seconds.

There was no one on the stairs, either way. Nobody could have been quick enough to get clear, so the guy had still to be up there.

Security chief and guard entered the suite simultaneously from different doors, and came within an ace of killing each other. But they were professionals, with quicksilver reactions.

The chief muttered ‘Shit!’ when he saw the empty podium of the T’ang Flying Horse, and his guard shouted ‘There!’ as he spotted the big hole in the window.

They sprinted over to it, stuck their heads out, and looked down. Down was where the thief must be, should have been … but wasn’t. The security floodlights had been activated by the alarms, and the whole front of the building was clearly visible. They doubted whether even a fly could pass unnoticed on the glass palace.

So it must be up. And both men fired at the trundling gondola, which even now was within a few yards of the top.

‘Get the roof!’ the chief yelled. ‘I’ll send Tommy up, and make sure the police chopper’s airborne.’ He leaned and fired again, and saw the bullets hit the metal frame, but could not be sure that they had penetrated.

C.W. flattened himself against the side of the gondola, and felt it judder to a halt as it reached the end of its track. He had been counting the bullets, and there was still the last of an estimated six to come. But he could delay his flight no longer.

He threw his body frantically upwards, and his questing fingers closed on the rough granite parapet which topped the building. Through the thin fabric of his gloves, he felt tiny chips of stone digging into his finger-tips. His toes clamped on to the smooth surface of the facade like limpets. The last shot came, and ploughed into the granite an inch away from his left hand. Two fingernails split as he tensed his whole frame in mental and physical anguish.

The little cradle bucked under his feet. He gulped another lungful of air and made a last supreme effort to haul himself over the parapet. With a throat-wrenching grunt, he landed on the roof, and raced for the wooden shed housing the head of the ventilation shaft and air-conditioning central station. He knew it could be only a matter of seconds before the security guards got someone up there to seek him out, and he had much to do.

He tore open the parcel he had stowed there a week before, and quickly assembled the contraption that would take him to freedom. As he strapped on the harness, he permitted himself the briefest of sardonic grins. There was no earthly doubt that he would make it, given a lucky break, a few more seconds, now … given that, he was safe.

For C. W. Whitlock was one of the world’s great experts at hang-gliding.

He climbed on to the perch that was to be his launch-pad into thin air: the cover of the ventilation shaft. At that moment, the roof door burst open, and the security guard loosed off a volley of bullets. But he was a fraction of a second too late … C.W. had gone.

The Black Spider-man had never attempted hang-gliding in a city before, and he would have preferred a less spectacular launch than throwing himself into a vertical dive down the wall of a skyscraper. But he had no choice.

It occurred to him with the storeys flashing by and the wind tearing at his flailing body, that nobody else had ever tried hang-gliding in Manhattan, either. Well, aficionados would soon know whether or not it worked.

He had planned the unorthodox technique of gathering tremendous speed for an all-out power glide rather than use the currents of warm air which rose from the city streets. It was to this specific end that he had chosen hang-gliding for his exit: he dared not land in the carriageways, where he would be at the mercy of the traffic and the police. But if he could make the sanctuary of Central Park in one continuous leap …

The slipstream was a dull roar in his ears, and the concrete and glass and marble veneer of the tower merged into a dark-grey blur as he plummeted towards the street. He tried pulling out of the dive, but he was going too fast, and the great, broad bulk of the neighbouring skycraper grew larger by the second.

He yanked the harness into the tightest turn that he dared, and almost wrenched his arms from their sockets. The soaring parallel streaks of light that traced the outline of another building suddenly swivelled through a right angle, and C.W.’s panic-stricken eyes gave his brain the mad message that New York had tilted on its side.

The skyscraper he was trying to avoid seemed for one appalling moment to be directly beneath his feet, so that he could land on it and walk down it like a fly down a post. Then he fought the wind, and straightened out, almost crying aloud his relief as the road slid away from his wingtip, to resume its rightful place in the scheme of gravity.

He looked wildly about him, and saw that he was not yet too low to catch a thermal current, if only he could reach one. Then, mercifully, a thermal found him. Almost immediately, but so imperceptibly that he failed to realise it, he started to rise.

He was now two floors higher than he had been, and still going up. At the moment, he was well out of range of the roof-top security men’s guns in the exhibition building. But if he continued his ascent?

Yet the thermal zephyr was playful and, after lifting him fifty feet or so further, it shot him across the face of the neighbouring skyscraper. He needed no prompting to steer round the corner and reach the end of the block. There, on the opposite side of 59th Street, were the welcoming trees of Central Park.

C.W. waved gleefully at a pair of lovers enjoying a session of palpitating sex in a fourteenth floor apartment. They were so surprised at being spied on by a passing birdman that they pulled apart and fell off the bed. The girl, C.W. spotted, was a lulu. He made a mental note of the position of the flat.

He rode the life-saving thermal across 59th, dropped lower in a controlled dive, and tree-hopped until he found an unobtrusive landing-place. From there he linked with a pick-up driver who had been waiting for him, concealed the hang-glider and the Flying Horse under its false floor, and headed for home, scarcely noticing the minor irritation of the police road-block at the corner of 5th and 59th.

Lorenz van Beck stepped off the Rambouillet bus and walked across the square to a different café from the one he had patronized on his last visit. Today he wore a sports shirt in a violent check, a loosely belted open jacket, sunglasses and jeans. He downed a Dubonnet and made for the church. The church clock welcomed him inside, and as he settled down in the confessional booth, he heard Smith rustling paper on the other side of the grille.

‘Well?’ Smith enquired.

‘Bless me, Father, for I –’

‘Cut it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ van Beck apologized, ‘last time I thought –’

‘Never mind about last time. Now I’m in a hurry. Report.’

Van Beck considered the situation, and how he might make best advantage of it. ‘Well …’ he began, slowly. ‘I – uh – I take it you were satisfied with Mike Graham’s performance? And, of course, you do have the Lap-Lasers – do you not?’

‘We do,’ Smith agreed, ‘and I was. Very satisfied. I want him again, for the big one. Tell him. No details – not that you know the details, anyway – but make it clear he’ll be very well paid.’

‘He already has been,’ van Beck returned.

‘I know,’ said Smith, shortly. ‘When I buy, I buy only the best. My price for extreme skill is high.’

‘It shall be done,’ the German said. Then he fell silent again.

‘Hurry it up,’ Smith snapped. ‘What of the others?’

‘There are two whom I can recommend,’ van Beck continued, ‘because of their, as you so adroitly put it, extreme skills. The trouble is that they’re loners. I just don’t know how they’ll react to working for you. They’ll never have heard of you, of course, since you seem to adopt a different name and disguise for each little – ah – outing. Even I have no idea who you are, or which are the jobs that have been pulled by you, or at your orders.’

‘Good.’

‘For all I know, you could be my best friend.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Oh.’

‘However,’ Smith said, ‘if you are pursuing a devious route towards an increase in your fee, you need not strive so officiously. Ask, and you shall have it.’

‘Aaah,’ van Beck sighed. ‘In that case – there is a jewel-thief, Sabrina Carver, and a cat-man, C.W. Whitlock, both in New York. I think they would suit you admirably.’

‘Sound them out,’ Smith ordered. ‘If they agree, tell both of them, and Graham, that they’ll be getting further instructions very shortly. Plus money and plane tickets.’

‘Airline tickets to – ?’

‘Paris,’ Smith said. ‘From there, of course, it could be anywhere.’

‘As you say,’ the German agreed.

Smith rose to his feet. ‘This time,’ he smiled thinly, ‘you stay and I go.’

‘Unusual,’ van Beck replied, ‘but acceptable.’

Smith walked quietly from the church. He was a taller, immaculately dressed, more confident priest than in his previous incarnation, and he held his manicured hands clasped in front of him, so that even eminently pattable children escaped his attentions.

And, still seated in the confessional box, Lorenz van Beck mused on rivets, heights and Paris. This time, though, he got a definite picture forming, as if he had suddenly joined up a series of dots. It was a very well-known shape indeed that sprang into his mind.

FOUR

There are probably fewer than a dozen nightclubs or discos throughout the civilized world where top-drawer international jet setters will admit to being seen. Il Gattopardo, in Rome, is one of them.

Dawn is a good time to be noticed at Il Gattopardo, though for the highest of swingers, an appearance at that hour will have been a reflex action, rather than a matter of calculation.

For Sabrina Carver, standing outside ‘The Leopard’ waiting for her car, it was merely the end of a less than scintillating night. She distanced herself by about three yards from two quite beautiful young men, scions of top Roman families, close friends both of each other and of Sabrina, who were trying to settle a tactful argument as to which of them should go home with her.

The discussion did not interest Sabrina. She would have been tolerably happy with either, or neither.

Guilio and Roberto had reached a temporary accomodation, based on an apportionment of past rewards for Sabrina’s favours, and future opportunities, when the parking attendant pulled up in Sabrina’s Alfa Romeo. A portly, excitable little man with a waxed moustache and a too-large, braided cap, the attendant jumped out, held the door open for Sabrina, and bowed low over her generous tip. That way, he could also peer into her generous cleavage without seeming forward.

She settled herself into the driving seat, and the attendant leaned in again, adopting the sort of confidential air at which Italian operatic tenors excel. He handed her a small, plain box, tied with pretty white ribbons.

‘Someone left this for you, Signorina Carver,’ he whispered through an effluvium of garlic.

‘Who?’

He shrugged extravagantly, using most of his upper body and the ends of his moustache.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and made with the lire again. The attendant decided not to push his luck with the décolletage, and backed away obsequiously. As Sabrina pulled apart the ribbons, the entente of Guilio and Roberto fractured, and they decided to settle the matter like gentlemen with the toss of a coin.

Signorina Carver’s educated fingers coped busily with the wrapping. The attendant sighed, dramatically. ‘Bella, bellissima,’ he murmured; and with good reason. She was classically, breath-catchingly lovely, with a cascade of hair shaded now to russet-brown, falling on her bare shoulders, framing a face that had more than once peered wistfully out from the front covers of Vogue and Woman’s World. Gone was the saintliness of childhood, but not to give way to artfulness or knowingness. Her brow was deep, her eyes wide-spaced and round, her nose and mouth in exquisite proportion, her chin cheekily dimpled.

How such a flower of Grecian beauty could ever have been the product of that dour, grain-encrusted Middle Western state of Iowa had baffled Fort Dodge. Sabrina had agreed, and settled the matter by leaving. Now her voice, like her face and body, was international, and she kept nothing of her childhood but her name, and her high regard for the stones which, as she could abundantly testify, were indeed a girl’s best friend.

Inside the box, in a bed of cotton wool and wrapped in tissue paper, were five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

She stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as she noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.

A coin was duly borrowed from the parking attendant, and flipped by Roberto, as Sabrina throttled warningly and released the hand-brake. Giulio shouted ‘Ciao’ while the coin was still in the air, hurdled over the back of the growling little car, and landed in the seat next to Sabrina. The Alfa screamed away and Giulio fastened his safety belt. He had never before ridden with Sabrina, but he was aware she had a reputation for a certain nonchalance at the wheel.

Upper Madison Avenue, New York City, like Fifth Avenue, is stacked with discreet, bijou little shops and boutiques catering for expensive and often esoteric tastes. There is also a sprinkling of way-out art galleries on Madison, to take advantage of the carriage trade’s lust for artifacts that no-one else possessed, nor indeed would wish to. ‘PRIMITIVES INC.’, which the elegant and faultlessly dressed black man with the pencil-thin moustache was about to enter, was one such gallery.

‘PRIMITIVES INC.’ dealt, as its name implied, in primitive art. This meant that it engaged agents, who suborned other agents who, in turn, bribed African village headmen, to lean on their tribes to produce badly carved, multi-hued bric-a-brac for half a bowl of gruel, which then sold on Upper Madison Avenue for six hundred bucks apiece.

The receptionist sat at a gleaming steel and glass desk (Stockholm, c. 1978) amid a weird but well-arranged clutter of masks, assegais and fertility symbols.

‘Good morning, Mr Whitlock,’ she smirked.

‘And to you, Mary-Lou,’ C.W. answered. Then he flashed her a brilliant smile and said, ‘Hey, that rhymes.’ Mary-Lou grinned back. He was a dish, she decided; pity he was … well, you know, black. She tried to think of a suitable rhyme for ‘C.W.’, but her intellectual equipment wasn’t up to it.

‘Anything doing, gorgeous?’ C.W. enquired.

‘It so happens,’ Mary-Lou replied coyly, ‘that yes, there is.’

C.W. was rapidly losing patience, but tried not to show it. The dumb white chicks, he mused, were even more of a pain in the ass than the smart ones, of whom there were not all that many.

‘A message, perhaps?’ he suggested.

‘In back,’ she inclined her peroxided head. ‘You know.’

‘Indeedy I do,’ C.W. simpered. He rolled his eyes as he passed her desk and crossed to the door leading to the lavish, semi-private display area behind the main gallery. Here the sculptures staring down at him from lucite shelves were, if even more wildly expensive, at least genuine and finely wrought. The semi-private nature of the rear gallery was required of the owners, because many of the costlier fertility symbols were all too explicitly fertile.

The gallery served (for a fee) as one of C.W.’s collection of New York dead-letter boxes, a facility that chimed in well with his tendency to divide his life into separate, equally secret, compartments. He had this in common with Sabrina Carver, too.

On a splendid oak refectory table sat a large, flat parcel. C.W. twisted the fastening string around his finger, and snapped the twine as if it were cotton. He shuffled aside the decorative paper wrapping, and looked with undisguised pleasure on a fresh wheel of his favourite French cheese, Brie.

C.W. selected a Pathan ornamental dagger from the wall, and cut himself a generous slice. He bit into it. The rind was deliciously crisp, the cheese at a perfect creamy consistency. C.W. munched the remainder of the slice, then set the knife into the far edge of the wheel, and cut the entire cheese precisely in half.

He dipped the blade of the dagger into one segment, and traced a path along it. Puzzled, he repeated the process on the other crescent. The point of the knife encountered an obstruction. C.W. smiled, and hooked it out.

It was a small package, enclosed in rice-paper. He scraped the rice-paper off, and unfolded five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

He stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as he noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.

‘Classy,’ C.W. said, admiringly. ‘Very classy.’ He walked out humming ‘The last time I saw Paris’.

Bureaucracy thrives on paper. Paper demands circulation. In order to facilitate distribution bureaucrats love drawing up lists that squeeze as many people as possible on to them while, in order to save paper, confining them to a single sheet. Thus was born the acronym, an indispensable arm of bureaucracy.

The United Nations is bureaucracy run riot, and acronyms proliferate there like hamsters. Few of them are important. One, in a little-frequented part of the UN Building in New York, scarcely rates a second glance. The sign on the office door says: ‘UNACO’. And below that: ‘Malcolm G. Philpott, Director’. And underneath, ‘Sonya Kolchinsky, Assistant Director’.

This acronym is misleadingly innocent, since ‘UNACO’ stands for ‘United Nations Anti-Crime Organization’, and it is very important indeed.

Sonya Kolchinsky picked up the ornate silver tray and carried it carefully across the room to Philpott’s desk. Philpott’s desk, like Philpott, was invariably tidy; there was plenty of space to set down the tray, which she did, again carefully. It bore a small espresso coffee machine, and cups and saucers in delicate china from a full service. Next to the silver sugar bowl and cream jug stood a cut-glass crystal decanter of brandy.

Sonya poured out a cup of coffee, and added a half spoonful of demerara sugar. She stirred the brew and, without asking Philpott, slipped in a touch, measured almost in droplets, of Remy Martin. She stirred the contents again, then topped it up with cream. Philpott, his eyes still glued to a file on his desk, raised the cup to his lips and sipped.

‘Delicious,’ he remarked, absently.

‘I know,’ she said.

He looked up at her, and grinned, a shade selfconsciously. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Miles away.’

‘You’re forgiven.’ She inclined her head mockingly. She was of above average height, and statuesquely built. She had a round, slightly pug-nosed face, and lightish-brown hair, cut fairly short with a sweeping fringe, then layered back over her shapely head.

Sonya was in her early forties, Czech-born, but now a naturalized American. She was an expert linguist; she had a degree in molecular physics; and her IQ was a few points higher than the man whom now she faced. She had clear, grey eyes that twinkled at Malcolm Gregory Philpott, enjoying his temporary discomfiture.

She sat in a chair at an angle from the desk, and raised her eyebrows quizzically. ‘The list?’ she enquired.

‘By all means,’ Philpott replied. He placed a finger on his intercom buzzer, and a voice rasped, ‘Director?’

‘The list.’

‘Sir.’

In the large and roomy outer office, a young man in a sober suit with a shaving rash and earnest glasses, picked up a message-pad and started across the deep-piled carpet. He passed a wall-to-wall neon map of the world. In front of the map was a practically wall-to-wall inclined counter, a cross between a library reading room desk and a Dickensian office lectern.

Three technicians of differing nationalities sat at the counter in padded swivel chairs. Each wore a pilot-style headset with a tiny cantilevered microphone hovering a measured inch and a half from his mouth. The three were listening-posts to the world. Occasionally they murmured greetings or commands in any one of more than thirty languages, and made notes on sheets of cartridge-paper pinned to the counter. Every time a new call came in, a red light blinked on the map, indicating its origin.

An exact see-through miniature of the map, measuring no more than six inches by nine, rested on Philpott’s uncluttered desk in a handsome frame. A mellow chime from an alarm system warned him when a new call came up, and the lighting pattern of the map was precisely duplicated, down to merest pinpoints from the most unlikely places.

The young man handed the pad to Sonya, who said, ‘Thank you, Basil,’ and began to study the neatly typed summary of the mid-morning traffic …

Traffic in crime, which was the business of UNACO and its staff. Like Mister Smith, Philpott was fascinated by crime. He was, indeed, fascinated by Mister Smith; and there he had a decided advantage over Smith. For whereas Malcolm Philpott knew a great deal about Smith, and his many aliases and driving obsessions, Smith never even suspected the existence of Philpott or his Department.

Philpott had himself suggested the formation of the top-secret group when he was a research professor in a New England University, heading a section sponsored partly by industry – it was highly technical and advanced research – and partly by the CIA, through the US Government. The Government had fallen for the idea, and had even accepted Philpott’s primary and absolute condition that the organization should come under the aegis of the United Nations, where its services would be placed at the disposal of all member states, and where its sources would not feel inhibited by the taint of American self-interest and militarism.

Philpott had not imagined for a second that the Nixon administration would not merely enthusiastically endorse the project, but also fund the donkey work of setting up the Department. He was allowed to select all his staff, and recruit agents, and had never for an instant regretted his first (and only) choice of Assistant Director.

Sonya Kolchinsky and Philpott shared the conviction that international crime, if properly organized, could threaten subversion and chaos on a scale to rival that of even the most belligerent Eastern Bloc state. They devoted (and sometimes risked) their lives and admittedly well-paid careers to fighting serious crime, and they had earned the respect and admiration of the vast majority of UN member nations, including some in the Eastern Bloc.

For UNACO would tackle crime anywhere, and for any reason, provided the threat to stability was critical, and that Philpott was sure the Depart ment was not being used as a pawn in a power-game. He had known from the start that the Nixon administration would try to subvert UNACO, by planting key personnel in the group. He had annulled that threat years ago and now, under a more malleable and far-sighted President, the Department enjoyed the trust and support of the United States Government and the un-stinting co-operation of the CIA, INTERPOL and the FBI.

In fact, Philpott’s personal relationship with the new President of the United States had opened doors to UNACO in America, and throughout the world, which had previously been closed to Philpott, whatever his credentials or reputation. It was a good time for UNACO. Malcolm G. Philpott was determined to keep it that way.

Easily the most persuasive explanation for his current high standing was his astonishing success. And the most important influence on the UNACO hit rate was, without doubt, Philpott’s ability to recruit international criminals to unmask international crime.

He logically put criminals into two principal categories: those who operated on their own account for their own benefit; and those others – such as terrorists of all kinds – whose activities were directed at Governments, nations and social systems.

There was a third kind – a rare breed of criminal dedicated to anarchy, wedded to the abstract concept of crime as a cleansing force; totally amoral and wanting in any respect for human life.

The second and third categories were Philpott’s targets. He occasionally brought in Governments to help his constant war against international terrorism. But the Napoleons of crime, the monsters, he reserved for himself, asking for help only when he needed it.

And he was winning his battles. For the criminals Philpott chose as his weapons were often the match for those he sought to destroy.

Which was why long since, he had recruited the master-criminals Sabrina Carver and C. W. Whitlock to help him rid the world of Mister Smith.

Sonya scanned the message-pad again, and said, ‘Right – here goes.

‘The diamond trail’s moving again, it seems.

Reports indicate that an estimated two million in smuggled uncuts leaked out to Capetown yesterday. Courier unknown. Action?’

‘Is someone tracking the haul?’ Philpott asked.

‘We are.’

‘OK. Code Blue. Give it to INTERPOL, Amsterdam.’

Sonya wrote in a neat hand in the margin opposite the coded entry. Then she resumed, ‘Czechoslovakia forensic has identified the poison in the Branski assassination.’

Philpott grinned. ‘With a little help from you, I imagine. Yes, good. Make it a Yellow, and send the thing to our own lab, for a fast report.’

Sonya made the notation. ‘Gold?’ she said. Philpott nodded. ‘Heavy unloading by the Bombay Irregulars.’

Philpott winced and sighed. ‘That’s a Green.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘And now,’ Sonya announced portentously, having kept the best news for last, ‘we have a Smith affirmative out of Rome.’

Philpott sat back in his chair and slapped the gleaming desk with the palm of his hand. ‘Great!’ he enthused. ‘Sabrina hooked him. Great!’

‘With a little help from us and van Beck,’ Sonya protested.

‘We didn’t help with that Diamond Exchange robbery,’ Philpott said. ‘We can’t do that sort of thing, after all. The Dutch would never forgive us. Neither would INTERPOL.’

‘We can keep our fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong, though, can’t we?’ Sonya asked.

‘And we do,’ Philpott agreed. ‘Mind you, it’s not really necessary with Sabrina. I reckon she could have done it on her head, let alone on roller skates.’

Sonya half rose from her chair. ‘Would you like to speak to her?’

‘Yes,’ Philpott replied, ‘I’d love to – but not just yet.’ Sonya seated herself again and looked at him enquiringly.

‘Well,’ Philpott explained, ‘if Smith’s bitten with Sabrina, then he ought to be doing the same for C.W. Has he called?’

Sonya was about to say ‘No,’ when the chime pealed, and the map on Smith’s desk glowed with a fresh pinpoint of light. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘New York. Now, I wonder who this could be.’ He directed that the call should be put straight through to him.

C.W. reported briefly and succinctly. ‘Excellent,’ beamed Philpott. ‘Three days, eh? Not much time. We’ll be there with you, though, and then we’ll find out what it is. At the moment, it’s enough to know that Smith’s behind it, so it’ll be pretty damned serious and spectacular.’

Philpott cut the line and regarded Sonya steadily. ‘Now,’ he mused, slowly. ‘I wonder what, and precisely where …’

‘Paris, I suppose,’ Sonya put in. ‘Why send them tickets to Paris if the action’s somewhere else.’

‘Ye-e-s,’ Philpott conceded. ‘And it’s true that van Beck’s come up with some absolutely crazy idea that just doesn’t seem to make sense. All the same …’

‘What idea?’ she demanded sharply. Philpott did not normally keep secrets from her, and she had right of access to most UNACO information – unless Philpott considered it might be dangerous for her to know.

He grinned, sheepishly. ‘D’you mind if I don’t tell you at the moment?’ he said. ‘I want to consider it a little further. It’s – way out. And it may mean nothing. Or everything.’

Sonya relaxed. ‘Sure,’ she agreed. She furrowed her brow in thought, bit her lower lip, and ventured. ‘So it’s just the laser-guns we’re not fully up to date with yet?’

Philpott nodded. He stroked the left-hand edge of the bridge of his nose – a favourite trick when he was thinking too hard. His face was lined, but still handsome. He was perhaps ten years older than Sonya, and his hair, though plentiful, was grey and slightly tousled. He had a strong, pointed jaw and skin stretched tautly over high cheek bones. He was lean and fit and, for an ex-academic, scrupulously well dressed. Sonya Kolchinsky was in love with him, and he knew it.

‘The lasers,’ he said. ‘The lasers – yes. Who took them? And why? And for whom?’ He was silent for a while, and Sonya did not disturb his train of thought. Philpott tapped his fingers unevenly on the desk. ‘For Smith, I imagine,’ he argued with himself, ‘and more than likely for this job. As to who took them – it could be anyone.’ He shrugged, and nodded at the file in front of him. ‘We both believe it’s a weapons man, and they’re all in here – all the top suspects. Ex-army, ex-CIA, grudge-holders, suspected agents … It’s just a question of picking the right one. It’s a pity,’ he reflected, ‘that van Beck couldn’t help Smith find a weapons man. Then we’d have all three in our pocket.’

Mike Graham sauntered out of the Munich bierkeller and crossed to the busy square fronting the magnificent cathedral. Anywhere in central Munich was not too far from The Four Seasons Hotel, which was one of the great hotels of Europe, and which at present numbered Graham among its guests.

He walked through the square, and took a short cut to the fruit and vegetable market. Between a pair of enticing vegetable stalls sat an old woman next to a small, trestle-mounted cart. The cart held packeted wienerschitzel, and chestnuts popped on a free-standing brazier.

Graham was wearing jeans, and a leather flying-jacket which had seen better days. A white ’kerchief fluttered at his throat, and he sported an American Legion badge over the top left-hand pocket of the jacket.

‘Guten morgen,’ he said to the woman. Her sharp eyes took in the ’kerchief, the badge, and the face above it.

‘Good morning,’ she replied, in heavily accented English. ‘Would you like some chestnuts for a not too warm day?’

Mike nodded, and said, ‘Ja, bitte.’ The elderly woman took a paper bag from the cart, and picked freshly roasted nuts from the coals with a pair of tongs. ‘They are hot,’ she warned, ‘very hot. Mind your fingers.’

Graham assured her he would. He gingerly extracted one, cracked and peeled it, and popped it into his mouth. It was delicious. ‘Auf wiedersehen,’ he said. ‘Goodbye,’ she replied.

He strolled back down the street, and took a seat at a pavement café for coffee and schnapps. He emptied the chestnuts out on the table to cool. The packet was at the bottom of the bag.

He opened it and, shielding the contents with his other hand, unrolled five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

Graham opened the folded airline ticket. In the top left-hand corner was a poorly executed sketch of a Lap-Laser, accompanied by a terse message: ‘Now I want you to use them’. The message was unsigned. Mike drained his schnapps and ordered a refill.

Giulio was sitting as though bolted into the seat of the Alfa Romeo. They were well south of Rome now, and he had not even bothered to ask Sabrina where they were going. He just fervently wished he was somewhere else.

He had brought it on himself, Giulio freely acknowledged, when he unbuckled his seat belt. Sabrina had been driving with great restraint – for her – when Giulio had sensed that the time was right for one arm to slip around her shoulders, while the other hand skated over, then settled on, her knee. He could not have been more wrong.

She stepped fiercely on the gas pedal, and Giulio’s head shot forward and rapped smartly on the fascia. The Alfa’s engine shrieked, and Giulio dimly saw a road sign saying ‘Roma 170’ – pointing in the opposite direction. He resigned himself to an early grave, and hoped his mother and numerous sisters would cry at his funeral.

Sabrina reached a corner, made a racing change, and screamed round the bend kicking dirt, on what seemed to Giulio to be only one wheel. It was a short road, and another bend was coming up, for they had long since abandoned the autostrada for more taxing sport. Sabrina double-clutched down through the gears, and drifted into a toe-to-heel braking power turn before gearing back up for the straight. The motor protested, but obeyed her feet and her tensed arms.

Giulio’s handsome face shaded to chalk-white, his eyes glazed over, and his bowels turned suddenly to water. He could see a narrow, humpbacked bridge looming up, and he quickly recited what he was certain would be his terminal prayer.

Sabrina turned to bestow a ravishing smile on him, taking her eyes completely off the road while, at the same time, pressing the accelerator pedal down into the floor. Giulio gripped the Alfa’s crash-bar so hard that his knuckles matched the white of his face. He closed his eyes and let out a scream of undiluted horror.

Sabrina gunned the motor, and with a roar of triumph the little car sailed off the bridge and launched itself into the air. It settled on the road again just in time to get into a power drift along another sharp bend. Sabrina was laughing with sheer delight, when a different sound intruded above the squeal of the tyres and the gruff whine of the engine.

It was an insistent and penetrating electronic bleep. As she pulled out of a turn, Sabrina took her foot off the gas and let the car ease down to a modest twenty mph. Guiding the wheel expertly with one hand, she reached under the dashboard and pulled out a radiotelephone mike.

Sabrina spoke into the microphone, ‘Pronto.’

Sonya’s voice came over the line: ‘Is the pasta al dente?’

‘Not yet,’ Sabrina said. Then, ‘Hang on a sec, will you?’

She steered the Alfa Romeo to a halt on the grassy shoulder of the road. Giulio slumped forward on the crash-bar, sobbing piteous thanks to as many saints as he could remember. Sabrina opened the dashboard locker and pushed a code key into the scrambler box fitted there. ‘Scrambled on 8-2-Baker,’ she said into the mike. ‘Do you read me?’

‘I do indeed, my dear,’ Philpott replied. ‘Are you alone?’

‘Why hello, Mr Philpott,’ Sabrina said, ‘what a pleasure to hear from you. No, I’m not exactly alone, but he doesn’t understand a word of English. In fact, at the moment he doesn’t seem to understand much of anything.’ Giulio turned his dazed eyes on her, and leaned back in the seat with his mouth drooping open.

Philpott brought her up to date with the news that C.W. would be joining her on the Smith caper. ‘Oh, great,’ she crowed. ‘Give him a hug for me, and tell him I’ll keep him out of trouble.’

‘And you look after yourself too, young lady,’ Philpott ordered with mock severity. ‘I want you looking your best on Friday, because Sonya and I will be there as well.’

‘Why you sure enough bet I will, Mistah Philpott, Suh,’ Sabrina replied. ‘So for now – ciao, baby.’

‘Sabrina!’ Philpott commanded, ‘don’t go, I haven’t finished. Those diamonds. You’ll have to give them back, you know. I can’t permit members of my organization to commit real crimes while you’re in my service. You see my position, don’t you?’

‘What?’ Sabrina yelled. ‘Hello! Hello, New York, hello? Are you still there, Mr Philpott? Something just terrible seems to be happening to my equipment, you know? Ah well, whatever it was you said, I’m sure it wasn’t all that important. ’Bye now,’ she chirped and broke the link.

‘Wouldn’t you say so, Giulio?’ she enquired of her cataleptic passenger.

‘Glug,’ said Giulio. In Italian.

Philpott chuckled, and flipped a key up on his communications console. ‘That girl,’ he said, ‘will –’

‘– keep you young,’ Sonya supplied.

Philpott winked. ‘No, you do that,’ he whispered. Basil re-entered the room.

‘And call the Secretary General, Mrs Kolchinsky,’ Philpott ordered, brusquely, ‘and see if he can get us a Red priority from the French Government.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sonya said, head buried in message-pad.

‘And get us two seats on the fast one to Paris Friday morning.’

‘Right away, Mr Philpott.’

Basil placed a folder on the desk, and made to leave the room. Philpott lowered his voice conspiratorially and said to Sonya, ‘And make sure we have our usual room at the Ritz.’

‘Of course,’ Sonya whispered, and turned to go.

At the doorway, where they met, Basil winked at her.

FIVE

Steam rose from the softly swirling waters of the Jacuzzi. Smith rode the tingling currents, and thoughtfully patted a whirlpool of bubbles which erupted to the surface, spoiling the sculptured undulations. The vortex subsided, and eddied away.

Smith measured the length of his body on the buoyant waters, and lazily paddled afloat. He heard the clickety-clack of footsteps on the tiles, and smiled a foxy smile. He sniffed and smelled Calèche or Cabochard. It didn’t matter which. The body that wore it was well enough known to him.

A robed arm stretched out, the long, slim fingers curled around the stem of a Venetian air-drop glass. He let the amber liquid stay, admiring the delicate curve of the meniscus. Seconds, a minute, two minutes, passed. Life, and time, were trapped in a cryogenic matrix, the surface of the liqueur still in contrast to the restless pond of the Jacuzzi.

Smith was stoned out of his head.

His eyes drifted together, swivelled apart; then he lay back and breathed a tiny, muted sigh. He focussed on a blob of condensation trickling down the tiled wall, a dribble that transmuted into a cataract, tumbling and foaming until its maddened breakers overwhelmed the room, the gardens, the grounds, the château, all of Orléans, all of France, all that lay beyond.

He hiccupped, and nodded. The glass tipped obediently towards his mouth, and the sparkling fluid slipped down his throat.

Smith was still stoned out of his mind.

He spluttered, and the hand bearing the amazingly proportioned glass withdrew. Leah sat back on her heels, and regarded him with affectionate amusement.

Smith said, ‘I have been thinking, Leah.’

‘Yes, you have, haven’t you.’ She spoke English with him, but in tones overlaid with her native Vienna.

‘Why is it, Leah,’ he murmured scarcely audibly, ‘that with all this money I have … this adorable château, and the other places … the yachts, the ranch, the island … the pictures, the sculpture, the jewellery collection, the books and autograph scores … not to mention you and my other – little friends … everything … everything … I have every thing, Leah … more than any man has a right to dream of owning … well, almost … I don’t have the Great Wall of China – but I could get it.’

‘Yes, you could, my darling.’ She was blonde and Nordic, not too big, but lushly voluptuous; her eyes were greeny-blue, her face and body enticingly rounded, all dips and curves, valleys and delicately swelling mounds. Smith owned her.

‘Why is it, then, that I am cursed with this disease, addiction … pestilence of crime? It’s not even aesthetic. It’s … positively plebeian.’

Leah lifted well-shaped eyebrows and smiled indulgently. ‘Plebeian?’ she queried. ‘The theft of the Black Goyas from the Prado? The substitution of Troy in the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe so that even his owner didn’t spot it? The Liz Taylor ring, straight off her bath tray with a magnetized fishhook? The Inca sunburst smuggled out in a pizza? Plebeian?’

Smith’s mouth pursed into a lazy smirk. ‘Mmm,’ he purred. ‘You’re right, of course. They said the Bloemfontein Krugerrands were untouchable, too, didn’t they? And the Tutankhamen Exhibition that left London laced with pinchbeck. And what about that exploding ping-pong ball of Chairman Mao’s?’

Leah giggled. ‘And the Fabergé eggs!’ Smith laughed. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Melted, didn’t they? Into rather good chocolate, actually.’

Leah stood up. Smith nodded. With a casual oscillation of her body, she shrugged off the robe, and stood naked before him. Her breasts were upturned and expectant. She parted her legs. His eyes travelled down her inviting form to the vee of her thighs. He nodded again, and she stepped into the Jacuzzi.

‘No,’ she breathed, ‘not plebeian, my sweet. You are endlessly inventive, and for you, life, without crime, would be death. You have to have it. And besides, if you didn’t, you’d be so bored … and boring.’

Smith wasn’t absolutely sure he caught what she had said, and granted her the benefit of the doubt. Boring he was not. He stretched out an encircling arm, and Leah floated within it. She moaned softly as their bodies fused with practised ease.

The château stood in its own grounds, stretching several hundred acres, south of Orléans. Its parkland had been laid out and maintained in a state of unnatural and almost geometric perfection.

There were horses in the stable that Smith seldom rode. There were reaches of the garden he had never visited; rooms of the château he had never entered. The château was a possession, and Smith was plagued by possessions.

As he himself had said, he lacked for nothing. He was going to make a cool thirty million dollars from his current enterprise, yet money was the last thing he wanted. True, it brought him power … but who needed power? Smith, who changed his appearance and life-style so often that he had genuinely forgotten what he looked like as a young man, required only sufficient power and influence for the next crime – and the next – and the next.

If people got in the way, or Governments, or nations … then they must be removed. Smith cared nothing for people, for humanity as such; and even less for nations. Where had he been born? Paraguay, was it? Or Samoa? Could have been. Iceland, even. In which language had he first spoken the faltering words of infancy? Did it matter? All tongues were his now; he had but to choose. All peoples were his; he was a citizen of the world, with a hundred names and faces. He demanded nothing from life, and he surely gave nothing to it.

Smith turned, and felt for Leah, knowing she would be there. Someone was always there. It did not matter who it was.

A helicopter descended to the lawns outside the château, and a young man, tall, dark and muscular, with a wicked scar giving an evil cast to an otherwise pleasant face, crossed to the front steps. His name was Claude Légère, and Smith owned him, too.

Smith and Leah lay locked together as Claude knocked at the Jacuzzi room door, and Smith said, ‘Come in.’

Claude stopped short when he saw the couple and stammered, ‘Forgive me. I thought you were alone.’

Smith withdrew from her, and regarded Claude mildly. ‘You know I’m never alone,’ he said. ‘Is everything all right? It must be, or you would not be here. You would not dare to be here.’

‘Of course everything is going well,’ Claude protested. ‘How could it be otherwise?’

‘True,’ Smith conceded. He fondled Leah again, but under the surface of the water. Somehow, it seemed to Claude even more obscene.

‘I – I am going to the airport now,’ he ventured. ‘I’ll pick up our new recruits and bring them here.’

Smith turned to him. ‘Not straight here, obviously,’ he warned. ‘You’ll follow the procedure we agreed.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Claude assured him hastily. ‘Please don’t worry, Mister Smith. Every possible care will be taken to safeguard yourself, your identity, and this place. It will be done as you said. When they arrive, they will not have the slightest idea where they are, or how far they have travelled, or even whether it’s still the same day.’

‘Good, good,’ Smith sighed. ‘Everything on schedule. That’s how I like it. That’s how it should be, Claude.’

‘It is,’ Claude insisted.

Smith turned in the water, and stretched out his legs. Leah followed his movements, then drifted to the edge of the Jacuzzi, hoisted herself up, and sat dripping on the edge.

Smith grinned at Claude. ‘Would you like to join us?’ he offered.

Claude controlled his breathing with difficulty, and tore his eyes away from Leah.

‘Another day, perhaps,’ he said, ‘when I am less occupied. But thank you for asking.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ Smith said. ‘You’re welcome, any time.’

The clouds grudgingly parted, and Sonya, in a window seat of the Concorde, looked down on the futuristic disc of Charles de Gaulle Airport, twelve miles north-east of central Paris on the broad, flat plain of Île-de-France.

A stewardess arrived to collect their empty glasses, still awash with the remains of the ice, and Sonya’s with a twist of lemon. Another stewardess came with a note.

‘It was radioed through from the Élysée Palace,’ she whispered. ‘You must be very important.’

‘I am,’ Sonya whispered back.

‘She means I am,’ Philpott grunted, slumping further down in his seat.

‘Would you sit up, then, please, Mr VIP?’ the stewardess requested, ‘since we shall shortly be landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport.’

‘If we don’t,’ Philpott acknowledged, ‘it will indeed have been a wasted journey.’ The girl grinned and wiggled off.

Sonya opened the slip of paper. ‘From Giscard,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your Red priority.’

Philpott sat bolt upright at this, then folded his arms behind his head, and leaned back in his seat with a complacent smirk on his face, like a cat that’s just cornered the cream market.

The Concorde dipped into its final descent, levelled out, and caressed the runway, its long, pointed nose skimming the tarmac. Philpott – who had a horror of VIP suites – took Sonya through the Concorde gate into one of the seven satellite buildings of Number One Terminal, in the slipstream of executives and pop stars who make up the normal daily cargo of the flagships of Air France.

They joined the ‘travelator’ crush, riding inside totally enclosed glass tubes, to the first nest of three concentric levels in the terminal dish: the Transfer Level, a mezzanine through which all arriving and departing passengers must pass. Philpott kept his eyes skinned, but could see no one he recognized.

They went through passport and Customs controls, and boarded the next travelator up to the Arrival Level – another sub-division into three concentric areas: the inner baggage hall, topped by a ring of Customs control filters, and finally an outer gallery leading to coaches, taxis and the car-park.

They collected their cases, and waited in the outer gallery – for there were many things due to happen shortly in Charles de Gaulle Airport that interested Philpott.

Two passengers they already knew about – Sabrina and C.W., who would arrive on different flights, but near enough at the same time. And Philpott was sure they would be met. He had to know who was meeting them.

But it was the third potential traveller that concerned him most. For if Sabrina and C.W. had been summoned to France to serve Mister Smith that day, then so, too, he reasoned, would the laser-gun thief be similarly called.

Malcolm Philpott was most particularly anxious to see the laser-gun thief. He could be the key to Smith’s destruction or to the defeat of UNACO.

A Pan-Am Boeing 747 followed the Concorde down, and C.W. took the fantastic trip, wary all the time, through the Transfer Level to the Arrival Level. Philpott, seated at a restaurant table on level two, spotted him, but looked quickly away.

Half an hour passed, and then the Munich flight turned up, delayed by some minor industrial action. Michael Graham lounged against a pillar next to the baggage carousel that claimed to be able to produce his case. He spotted it, and made a quick lunge for it. As he did so, the public address tannoy rasped his name. ‘Mr Graham, Mr Michael Graham, passenger from Munich. Will Mr Michael Graham please go to the lost luggage office on level one.’

Graham threaded his way through the green Customs channel, and got directions to level one. There was a small queue at the lost luggage office, and he joined it. He was in no hurry. He identified himself when his turn came, and the clerk placed a small pocket radio on the counter.

‘Yours, I believe?’ the girl asked.

Mike studied the radio. Nothing happened by chance in the dangerous game he was playing, he reasoned, so he said, ‘Yes, it is. Where on earth did you find it?’

The girl laughed. ‘Not on earth, as it happens. You left it on the plane, and the stewardess remembered seeing you with it. She knew your name, so she brought it to us.’

‘Well, thank her for me,’ Mike said.

‘I did,’ the girl replied. ‘We’re only glad you didn’t lose it for good.’

‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘Me too.’

A stewardess caught up with Sabrina Carver on the travelator. ‘You dropped this as you were leaving the Rome plane, Signorina,’ she puffed. ‘A little radio – see?’

‘Hey so I did,’ Sabrina returned. ‘How stupid of me. Thank you very much indeed.’

‘You’re welcome.’

C.W., to whom impatience had more than once been a virtue, got tired of waiting for a contact. He stalked up to the information desk in the Arrival Level, and demanded if there had been a message left for him.

‘Not a message, sir,’ the official said, ‘but apparently you were supposed to collect this.’

He handed C.W. the radio, and C.W. said, ‘Jeeze, so I had to. Guess I forgot all about it. Thanks.’ He looped the radio on to his right shoulder by its carrying-strap.

Sonic bleeps were keyed simultaneously to all three radios at intervals of two seconds until their owners had the sense to switch on the receivers.

‘Good,’ said Claude’s voice. ‘You should all be receiving me now. If you are, acknowledge.’

‘Loud and clear,’ said Graham. ‘Uh-huh,’ from C.W., and ‘Roger, or whatever,’ from Sabrina.

‘Right,’ Claude went on, ‘now please listen carefully. I want you to ride the travelators until I tell you to stop. You will receive instructions during the course of the trip. The passenger from Rome will start from level one, the passenger from New York from level two, and the passenger from Munich from level three. When you arrive at a disembarkation point, you will simply take the next available travelator, in the reverse direction. Understood?’

Affirmative. ‘Munich?’ Sabrina thought wildly. ‘Who the hell’s from Munich?’ C.W. chewed over the unexpected gobbet of information. ‘Three of us, huh? So?’ he mused.

Philpott and Sonya had split up as a security precaution, and Philpott was playing the part of a tired man squatting on a case in the corner of the ground level central arrival area. He looked at his watch occasionally, heaved dramatic sighs, and morosely chewed a choc bar. He watched in bafflement as Sabrina started her weird odyssey in the glass tubes, and sat bolt upright when he saw the object she held clamped to her ear. A radio, was it?

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ Philpott gritted. So there would be no personal contact. Instructions by remote control. ‘Clever bastards.’

Though the ruse did give him one slight edge: he could keep Sabrina and C.W., once located, in plain sight as they rode the steeply ramped, Space-age tubes, criss-crossing each other at dramatic angles.

And all he’d have to do was find another traveller with a radio jammed to his ear, and he had the Third Man. The laser-gun thief.

He scanned the travelators. They were crowded, and it was difficult work. There? No … there! No … just scratching. Ah – C.W. And Sabrina getting off. And back on yet another travelator ending up somewhere else, he supposed … but no Third Man. Where is the bastard, where is he? And what the hell are my two people listening to so intently?

Claude whispered, ‘Stand by for a message from your employer. Again, listen well.’

Claude – who was in a telephone booth nearer to Sonya Kolchinsky at that moment than either of them realized – held a small but efficient tape-recorder next to the microphone of the two-way radio, and clicked on a switch.

Philpott saw C.W. take out a cigarette lighter and palm it in the hand holding the radio. ‘Good boy,’ Philpott breathed, ‘Good boy.’

Smith’s voice carried to the three on the ramps, caught in the tubes like goldfish in elongated bowls.

‘Welcome to Paris,’ he said. C.W. cocked his ear at the cold, emotionless, neutral tones. Familiar? No, he decided.

‘You will call me Mister Smith,’ the voice said. It was an unarguable statement. ‘I am now going to give you the terms of my offer. There is no negotiation. You may accept the offer, or reject it. If you do not wish to co-operate, you will find a return ticket to the place from which you came, waiting for you at the ‘reserved’ section of the ticket desk on the ground level.

‘No immediate sanction will be taken against you if you refuse my offer, but I feel I should warn you that you will never again work for me, or for any organization that I control; and you will discover that my operation is worldwide. If you are prepared to take that chance, then feel free to say “No”. I do not, however, recommend it.’

C.W. remained impassive, but a frisson of alarm crossed Sabrina’s face. Of the three listeners, she alone had heard the name before in a criminal connection. And Sabrina wanted above all to go on working. Mike Graham merely grinned; he took neither the name nor the threat seriously.

Philpott still frantically combed the travelators for the laser-gun thief, and Graham just as obstinately stayed shielded by an enormous African in flowing chieftain’s robes, who seemed to be riding the ramps out of sheer exuberance. Wherever Mike went, the Zulu went; Graham actually began at one point to suspect the giant African, but the expression on his face was so fatuously innocent that Mike correctly diagnosed him as a travelator freak. Some people felt like that about subway escalators, he recalled.

Smith continued, his tone still expressionless. ‘If you accept my terms you will, from that moment, be incommunicado. Further, you will be required to obey me, or my authorized representatives, as soldiers obey their commanding officers. Any breach of discipline will be treated with the utmost severity. The punishment for treachery is death.’ C.W.’s eyebrows lifted, and Sabrina’s mouth set in a hard line. Philpott kept his eyes on her. She was more responsive than the taciturn black.

‘However,’ Smith went on, ‘I do not intend serious injury to anyone during this operation, least of all to one of you three. On the other hand, should it be necessary, I may require you to carry out an order to kill. It is doubtful, but it could happen, so I have made it a condition of your acceptance.’

This time it was Mike Graham who registered surprise, although of the two killers in the group (C.W.’s victims had been in the line of duty in Vietnam) Graham was the more accomplished assassin.

‘In exchange for your acceptance of these terms,’ Smith said after a slight pause, ‘I shall pay you the sum of one million dollars – each. You will receive this fee whether or not the operation is successful. You have ten seconds in which to consider your reply.’

The three moving faces on the travelators registered emotions from delight to incredulity. For C.W. and Sabrina there was, in any case; no choice: their agreement would be automatic. And from Graham, there was never an instant’s hesitation. It was an awful lot of money.

Claude snapped off the tape-recorder, and said into the two-way radio, ‘Mister Smith will have your answers – now.’

There was a heart-beat’s delay, then C.W. drawled ‘Tell him, yes.’ Sabrina said, ‘I’m in.’ And from Mike Graham, ‘Sure. Why not?’ Claude seemed satisfied, and gave all three fresh instructions.

Philpott saw that C.W. and Sabrina were now heading by a ‘down’ travelator to the ground floor level, and he guessed correctly that the electronic conference was over. That meant that his chance of spotting the laser man had gone. He signalled to Sonya, and moved out into the centre of the busy concourse.

Sonya marched furiously up to Philpott and gave him a good old-fashioned dressing-down in tart, idiomatic French. Where had he been? she demanded. Why had he left her? What the hell did he think he was doing?

Philpott replied in kind, in fact going several better, and Sonya turned majestically on her heel to leave him standing there, throwing one final insult to his manhood over her shoulder. It was then that she collided with a well-dressed young black man, who was about to light a cigarette with an expensive-looking lighter.

The man lost his balance, and dropped his lighter to the ground. He stooped, a little slowly, to retrieve it. Sonya mouthed a confused apology and joined him, getting to the lighter fractionally before C.W. She handed him the lighter, smiled, and he walked away.

Sonya then walked back to Philpott, apparently contrite, even affectionate, and lay her head on his shoulder. ‘Did you make the switch?’ he whispered. ‘Of course,’ she replied, pressing C.W.’s lighter into his hand.

Philpott slung his arm around Sonya’s shoulders, picked up his bag, started to manoeuvre her towards a SORTIE sign – and suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. He pushed Sonya behind the corner of the information desk, and turned towards her, so that his face was hidden from the main body of travellers.

‘What’s wrong?’ she hissed.

‘There’s a man walking towards the exits,’ Philpott whispered, urgently, ‘tall, brown hair, no hat, leather flying-jacket, dark jeans. See him?’ She nodded.

‘The one with the radio slung over his shoulder?’ she said.

‘Radio?’ Philpott echoed. ‘Fantastic! I didn’t spot that. Then it must be him.’

‘Him?’ she queried. ‘The laser-gun thief?’

‘Yes. I know him – or at least I know of him. And I’ve met him a couple of times. I can’t understand why he wasn’t in my file … he fits the bill so perfectly. His name’s Michael Graham, and he’s ex-CIA.’

‘Ex?’

Philpott nodded. ‘Yes. Three years ago he had a breakdown of sorts. I don’t know what caused it, but he upped and left the Company. Since then, I believe, he’s been thought of as a renegade. Certainly he’s violent and unstable. He could be extremely dangerous.’

‘Is he good?’ Sonya asked, trying not to look too closely at the retreating figure.

‘The best,’ Philpott answered. ‘Grade “A” weapons and weapons systems. Fabulous opera tor. Knows lasers inside out. In fact –’ his brow furrowed, ‘I’ve got an idea …’

‘What?’ she pressed.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Philpott said slowly, ‘that the reason why he isn’t in my file must be that someone took him out, to throw me off the track, because he would surely have been included in any list of potential laser-gunners. It can only mean Smith has a CIA plant.’

Sonya gasped, ‘That could be critical.’

Philpott said, ‘It could. Also – there’s … something else about Graham that’s at the back of my mind, but what it is I can’t for the life of me think at the moment. I know it’s important, though … Ah well,’ he shrugged, ‘no doubt it’ll come back. Anyway, first things first: we’ve got to follow them and find out what they’re up to.’

They had lost Graham, but C.W hung back on the pretext of buying a carton of Lucky Strike, and made it easy for them to trail him. He increased his speed, curious to meet at last the man from Munich, the third conspirator in the Smith caper, whose special skills neither he nor Sabrina had been able to guess.

C.W., who knew the location of his next destination from previous visits to Charles de Gaulle Airport, got to the helipad a minute before Sabrina. Claude was there, and identified himself as the radio voice. They would meet Smith later, he promised.

Sabrina arrived, looking breathless and devastating, and C.W. shook hands with her courteously when they were introduced by Claude. ‘How nice to be working with such a beautiful lady,’ he gushed, but managed to make it sound sincere. They accompanied Claude into the helicopter standing on the launch-pad.

Philpott and Sonya, hanging back at a safe distance, and peering around the corner of a cargo hangar, stared at each other in consternation. ‘That,’ Philpott remarked heavily, ‘has torn it. Smith has been too crafty for us again. Almost as if he knows every move we’re making, and is laughing up his sleeve when we get hung up at each turn.’

‘You’re right,’ Sonya agreed. ‘How the hell can we follow them in a helicopter?’

‘We can’t. It’s my fault. Bad planning. I should have had something laid on in case of an eventuality like this.’

‘With a Red priority,’ Sonya pointed out, ‘you still could.’ Philpott shook his head. ‘Good idea,’ he said, ‘but it’s too late They’ll be off immediately. No point in their hanging about. The best I can do is get their flight plan, if they’ve filed one, which I doubt. In any case, what’s to make them stick to it?’

What could they do? Sonya asked. They’d have to make the best of it, Philpott answered. ‘Sabrina’s good, C.W.’s very good, in a corner like this. It’s up to them now. They’ll get in touch if they can. I only hope that bastard doesn’t foul things up for them.’

She followed the direction of his outstretched finger. Mike Graham, who’d been re-oriented by a helpful airport employee, hurried to join the aircraft. The door swung open to admit him, the motor exploded into life, and the giant rotors started to turn.

Sabrina and C.W. were on their own …

Graham counted six people in the large chopper. He knew none of them, from the brief glances he’d had at their faces. One was a doctor, white-coated, and with a stethoscope hanging around his neck. Four of the others lay on stretcher bunks lining the sides of the aircraft. Mike reasoned that the only other man standing must be the one in charge; he nodded at Claude and said, ‘Mike Graham.’ Claude shook his hand.

Sabrina, who had been studying him covertly from her stretcher, turned her head quickly and faced the helicopter’s curving internal wall. First the face, she thought … now the name! She knew him. And she knew what he was – or what he had once been. For what she had heard about him since they last met had not been good news.

‘Meet the others later,’ Claude said to Graham. Mike noted that one of his colleagues was a sassy-looking black, another a woman, the third a seemingly short, beefy, bull-necked man, and the last one an Asian of some kind. The doctor was – a doctor; and Claude, the scar-faced man, was clearly French. When Claude motioned him to a bunk, he sank on to it without argument.

He closed his eyes, since everyone else seemed to have, but a sinister hissing sound made his eyelids spring open. The doctor was bending over the bulky thug, holding an anaesthetic to his face.

Mike guessed it was Smith’s idea of total security, and made no objection when the doctor crossed to his stretcher, hovered low, and administered the gas. In fact, he welcomed it. The doctor had bad breath.

Philpott and Sonya listened in stony silence to the recording C.W. had made of Smith’s tape on his cigarette lighter – a bugging device of great sophisti cation and accuracy, invented by UNACO, and plugged now into the stereo system of the chauffeured limousine placed at their disposal by the French Government.

‘… if you accept my terms you will, from that moment, be incommunicado … punishment for treachery is death … carry out an order to kill … one million dollars – each.’

Sonya whistled, and Philpott grimaced. ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘that I can rely on the loyalty of C.W. and Sabrina, because that’s a great deal of temptation. But they’re too well trained to fall for it … I hope.’

The radiotelephone in the car sounded a warning bleep. Sonya picked it up – and as she did so, Philpott lifted his hand and smacked it down on his thigh. ‘That’s it!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got it! Training! Of course. That’s where it was.’

Sonya was speaking urgently into the mouthpiece, and making notes on her ubiquitous message-pad. She finished, cradled the receiver, tore the top sheet of paper off the block, and handed it to Philpott. He studied it intently, and nodded, grimly.

‘It’s him all right,’ Sonya said. ‘Dismissed from the service January 14 1977, after a severe breakdown. Erratic behaviour ever since. And that –’ her lacquered fingernail tapped the page ‘– is what you couldn’t remember, isn’t it, Malcolm?’

‘I just did,’ Philpott replied, closing his eyes and letting his head slump back on the expensive upholstery. The tinted-windowed car pulled up outside the Ritz.

‘He was their best weapons man, and it was only natural that he should turn up occasionally at training courses for CIA and invited outside personnel, as guest lecturer. It’s just our luck – or Smith’s – that Graham should have been specialist demonstrator on the CIA course we fixed up for Sabrina just after she joined us.’

Sonya reached for his hand. ‘A teacher doesn’t always remember every student he’s ever lectured to,’ she said softly.

Philpott opened his eyes, and flashed her a grateful smile. ‘Honey,’ he said, ‘if you were a man, would you remember Sabrina Carver?’

Sonya blinked. ‘I see what you mean.’

Philpott opened his eyes again, and sank back into the cushions. ‘What I mean is precisely this,’ he murmured. ‘If Mike Graham does remember her – as I believe he will – he will almost certainly denounce her as a spook plant to Smith.’

‘And?’ Sonya said, not wanting to hear the answer.

‘And Smith will kill her. Don’t you recall what he said? “The punishment for treachery is death”.’

SIX

Claude stood at the doctor’s shoulder as he leaned solicitously over Sabrina’s inert form. The doctor peeled back a dark-fringed eyelid, and exposed the milky-blue white of her eye and the tremendously dilated pupil.

‘Is she OK?’ Claude wondered, anxiously.

The doctor rounded on him. ‘Of course she is,’ he snapped, ‘why shouldn’t she be?’ Claude began, ‘Well –’ but the peppery little medico bridled and started a tirade of medical inconsequence. Claude held up his hands, and backed off.

‘It’s all right, I’m not criticising you,’ he assured the doctor. ‘It’s just that … well, Mister Smith said … you know –’

‘I am perfectly aware,’ the doctor announced pompously, ‘what Mister Smith said. Let me remind you that I am the medical authority here, and while these people are in my care, and provided ignorant outsiders do not attempt to interfere, no harm will come to them. Of course, if you want me to tell Mister Smith that you made a thorough nuisance of yourself and got under my feet –’ he let the proposal hang in the air.

‘No, no,’ Claude protested, the panic rising in his throat. ‘You’re in charge. I just wanted to be absolutely certain that nothing was going – sort of – wrong.’

‘Wrong?’ the doctor thundered. ‘This young lady’s pulse, blood pressure, respiration, heart and lungs, and for all I know her pelvic girdle and her big toe, are in excellent condition. She is as fit as a Stradivarius, and has a better colour than you do. I am about to examine my other patients – if you would be so kind as to get out of my way.’

Claude slid aside, and took himself forward to plague the pilot. He looked moodily out of the window, but even the mellow beauty of a perfect early Autumn day failed to cheer him. The helicopter chased and followed its own shadow across a succession of emerald green fields, great pastures of corn and barley, tidy little farms, and ruminative Charolais cows. They were barely an hour out of Paris, but Claude, a blinkered Metropolitan Parisian, was already homesick for the city. He mistrusted the countryside, and everyone in it.

He peered more closely at the incoming horizon. The château grew larger in the vision frame.

‘Piss off, Claude, there’s a good chap,’ the pilot said. ‘You make me nervous.’

Claude threw up his hands, and returned to the main cabin, where the doctor was completing the examination of his last patient.

‘Are they clean, doc?’ Claude enquired, respectfully. All five unconscious passengers had their clothing loosened or removed. The doctor sighed, but good humouredly. ‘They have no obvious diseases, they do not take drugs intravenously, and, with varying degrees of proficiency, they have washed today. Also, which is what I imagine you are seeking to establish, none has a concealed weapon. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Claude, flashing him a conciliatory grin. He knelt on an unoccupied bunk, and looked out of a side port-hole. The château was close now, and Claude was at last moved, if not to wonder, then at least to admiration.

It was one of the thirty or so great châteaux of the Loire Valley, which span in age a period of more than five hundred years. It lacked, perhaps, the glamour and renown of the fabulous Blois trio of Chambord, Chaumont and Cheverny, or the royal palace of Blois itself. Nor was it a massive fortified keep like Sully-sur-Loire or Château Angers, with its seventeen round towers.

It was not garishly splendid, like Jacques Coeur’s renaissance palace at Bourges, nor conspicuously gracious, like Talleyrand’s Château Valençay. But Mister Smith’s Château Clérignault was secluded, immensely comfortable and stylish, and probably housed more art treasures than most of the other castles combined. It was indecently sybaritic, and truly beautiful.

Its roof was crowned by a great bronze eagle, surmounting a forest of spires, bell-turrets (in working order), gilded weather-vanes and tall, noble chimneys. Three fantastically contrived towers formed a triangle at either end, and bisected the rear stabled quadrangles. Narrow dormers near the eaves gave way to windows of majestic proportions moving further down the ivy-mantled front elevation. Steps, lined with statues, rose from the lawns to the great double doors, which were flanked by naked caryatids supporting a huge crenellated shell.

Outside, the gardens rivalled the landscape park in glory and inventiveness, from the high, mirrored surface of the water garden, down to the ornamental garden and the Italian garden, and the vegetable and herb gardens, surrounded by box trees. Hornbeams and fountains stood where the myriad paths crossed, and there were trysting bowers everywhere, which in past years had shivered to the sighs of adulterous love. Smith preferred his Jacuzzi or his king-sized round bed with wall-to-wall mirrors.

‘Give them their wake-up juice, will you, please?’ Claude requested. The doctor set to work cheerfully with a hypodermic.

Ten minutes later, the helicopter banked over the magnificent park, and settled decorously on the lawn immediately in front of Smith’s castle.

Leah waited for the rotors to stop. The door opened for her, and she climbed gracefully enough into the cabin. Smith’s new recruits had by then recovered consciousness, and Sabrina was leaning forward at the window marvelling at the splendour of the château.

She turned round when Leah spoke. ‘Welcome to Château Clérignault,’ the Austrian woman said. ‘My name is Leah Fischer, and I am Mister Smith’s personal assistant. I hope you’ve had a pleasant journey, and are suffering no unsettling aftereffects from the anaesthetic. Do you have any immediate questions?’

‘I do,’ said Graham. He held up a finger and rubbed it along one of the windows. A colourless grease mark was deposited on the glass. ‘Why was I fingerprinted when I was knocked out?’ he demanded.

‘You all were,’ Leah remarked, pleasantly. ‘Clearly we have to confirm your identities against our files. When that’s been done, both you and we can sleep more easily in the knowledge that we’re among friends.’

Mike relaxed, looked across at Sabrina, and grinned. She smiled back, trying to disguise the rising tension and uneasiness she felt.

Never by any word or sign or hint had Mike Graham betrayed that he even recognized her, let alone knew her for what she was. Was he merely biding his time for a dramatic denouncement? she wondered. Did he want to betray her to Smith in person, perhaps to earn part of her million dollar share as well as his own? Or could it be that he had failed to spot her, even though she instantly knew him? Sabrina thought not; she had no false illusions about herself; she was convinced that to a man like Graham, she was nothing if not memorable.

Her grin became rather fixed, and as she looked away she saw that his still appeared genuine, unforced, and guileless. It was the kind of smile a man might try on a pretty girl whom he didn’t know at all … or no one he remembered all too well.

‘Follow me, please,’ Claude instructed them. C.W., nearest the door, jumped out first, and turned to help Sabrina. She held his arm for balance, and he guided her down.

‘My, but you’re polite, fella,’ Graham sneered. C.W. turned, and met Graham’s cold, disdainful eyes with his own challenging gaze. Mike grinned, and said, ‘D’you mind moving now – unless you’re going to help me down too?’ C.W. spun on his heel, and stalked away.

‘Watch yourself, Graham,’ cautioned Leah. ‘Mister Smith doesn’t like friction, and he may decide that Whitlock or Sabrina are more important to the operation than you are. Now that you’re committed, that would not be pleasant for you. Nobody leaves a Smith project once begun, unless it’s in a box.’

‘Well, Mister Smith may be due for a surprise,’ Graham said, ‘Meanwhile, it’s kind of you to mention it. I’m grateful.’

‘I’m so glad,’ said Leah, levelly.

Leah, clad in a rough-spun one-piece jump suit, but still managing to look decorative, led the way – not into the imposing entrance of Château Clérignault, but to the rear of the house, skirting the kitchen gardens. They came to a stable yard, where half a dozen men, dressed as Leah was, sat hunched round a weapons demonstrator. A large target in the form of a fresco of four running figures spanned the far end of the yard.

Leah held up a hand, and the file halted. The demonstrator swivelled the powerful heavy-calibre machine-gun on its tripod to face the target, a hundred yards away. She shouted a command, and the figures began to move: down until they almost disappeared, darting up again, lurching from side to side, all at bewildering speed.

Casually, with crisp, economic bursts of fire, the gunman cut them to pieces, one by one. As far as Graham could tell, not a single bullet was wasted. He concentrated on just one cut-out dummy – a sideways-on, crouching commando. The head went first; then a projecting arm was slashed off; the torso was neatly bisected; and finally each leg was separated at the kneecap. It was an impressive performance, and Mike got the feeling it had been laid on specifically for his benefit.

‘Are these guys part of our operation?’ C.W. enquired. ‘Not necessarily,’ Leah replied. ‘Mister Smith has many little – exercises – in train in various parts of the world, under different field commanders. Yours, however, will have his individual attention.’

‘We’re honoured,’ Graham ventured. Leah ignored him, and then led the way to the stable block. They passed through a tunnel into another, smaller yard, where a massive black stallion was coupling with a whinnying mare. Further bursts of gunfire, and the brutal lunging of the impatient horse, lent the graciously proportioned buildings an unwanted air of animal savagery.

Claude nervously gave the rutting stallion a wide berth, and passed with Leah into the long, pine-panelled gun-room. There, a cold table had been laid out, with chilled manzanilla sherry and aperitif wines flanking a quadrille of lobsters, crabs and choice hams.

‘Mister Smith thought you might prefer to lunch here, and get to know each other properly, since you’re going to be thrown together rather a lot in the days to come. So … enjoy each other’s company. Mike, Sabrina and C.W. – you haven’t in any case met Pei and Tote properly.

‘Pei’s from – Indonesia, is it?’ – the happy little Asian nodded, and grinned even more spectacularly – ‘and Tote here is Finnish. We’ve never been able to spell his name, let alone pronounce it. but he’s quite happy to be known as Tote.’ The immensely broad and squat gorilla looked as though happiness was a condition entirely foreign to him, but he twisted his lips into what he clearly imagined to be a pleasant expression, though the effect on the three Americans lay somewhere between a snarl and a snake-bite. Pei, however, seemed to approve, and slapped Tote smartly on the back.

‘Shall we be seeing Mister Smith soon?’ Sabrina asked. She was curious to get her first sight of the man who, she had inferred from snatches of conversation with Philpott, was capable of causing untold harm to UNACO – and the world.

‘No,’ Leah said. ‘In fact, you won’t see him today at all. You’ll meet him tomorrow morning, though. When we’ve finished lunch, I’ll take you to your rooms, and you can settle in. Later, we’ll go on a quick tour of the château and the training grounds. May I caution you once more that you are not in any way to seek to communicate with, shall we say, the outside world. The telephones here are not for your use. Members of the staff will not carry messages for you. Even an attempt to make contact with anyone, no matter whom, will be construed as treachery. And you know the penalty for treachery.’

Their rooms at the château were self-contained suites, named after people, places or periods of French history, and decorated appropriately. Sabrina felt specially honoured to be Le Roi Soleil, while Pei and Tote, who insisted on sharing Thermidor, were entirely ignorant of the French Revolutionary Calendar, but liked the working models of guillotines. Louis Seize was over-stylized for C.W., while Graham found Napoleon stark, but militarily compulsive.

As soon as she could, Sabrina slipped along to Louis Seize, and found C.W. in the king-sized bath, decently camouflaged with foam. She perched on the toilet seat, as C.W. groaned and slid even further down into the water. ‘I know I’m madly attractive,’ he said, ‘but couldn’t you even wait for me to scrub off?’

‘It’s not your body I want, C.W.’ she grinned. ‘Not this time, anyway. It’s Mike Graham.’

‘Well why don’t you go and sit on his can, then?’ C.W. complained, not unreasonably.

Sabrina laughed, and said, ‘This is serious. Can you stand a drop more water?’ He nodded. She turned both taps on, and pulled the toilet flush. Above the noise, she said, ‘Graham used to be a top man in the CIA. Now he’s a defector. He taught me on a weapons course once. He’s bound to have recognized me. We could be sunk, finished.’

C.W. said, ‘Oh. Jeeze, I see what you mean.’ He sat up in the rapidly overflowing tub, and told her he had previously checked the bathroom for bugs, and found none. ‘So kill the plumbing, will you? Apart from anything else, you’ve diluted my sarong.’ Sabrina looked down into the water and said, ‘So I have. Hey – cute.’

She turned off the taps, and asked. ‘What do we do?’

C.W. made a circular motion with his hand, and she obediently averted her gaze. ‘OK,’ he ordered. She looked back. He was in a white terry-cloth robe, patting dry his glowing black skin.

‘Has Graham given any sign, anything, that he knows you?’ Sabrina shook her head. ‘But I don’t see how he can have failed to recognize me,’ she insisted.

‘OK,’ C.W. said. ‘You’re probably right. But there’s nothing else we can do except play it by ear. If he drops the word to Smith, publicly or privately, we’ll know about it soon enough when somebody takes us out to the stables and uses us for target practice. If he doesn’t tell Smith, then either you’re wrong, and he hasn’t spotted you, or he’s up to some devious little game of his own. In which case we keep cool until we find out what it is. Check?’

‘Check. If it’s target practice, though, I don’t intend to go quietly.’

‘You’re on,’ C.W. said approvingly. ‘If I have to go, I’ll take Smith with me.’

The castle library was a sumptuous room, panelled in rosewood, with marvellously embossed cornices and a delicately tinted ceiling. An enormous Indian carpet covered the central well, and there were steps leading to the bookshelves, with trolley-ladders to reach to the highest. Reading-desks lit by anglepoise lamps stood in the well, and around them a series of delicate little occasional tables, veneered in rosewood and overlaid with marquetry, sat expectantly before long, cushioned sofas in maroon leather. Drinks and savouries were laid out, and the new arrivals waited with Leah and Claude for the Seigneur of Château Clérignault.

As always when Smith was due to appear, Claude prowled the room, checking everything, suspecting everyone, trusting no one. Mike Graham lounged on a chesterfield, sipping white port and munching cheese-biscuits topped with Beluga caviare. Sabrina sat as far from him as she could get without arousing suspicion; Pei and Tote inspected the room together, and chuckled over a volume of oriental erotica. C.W. noted with amusement a pamphlet title that read: ‘TOP SECRET. US ARMY ORDNANCE. BAT GUIDANCE SYSTEM’. He picked it up and scanned it. It was genuine.

Smith walked through the open door. He had changed his appearance since Leah last saw him – in the Jacuzzi that morning – and Claude failed to recognize him at first. His hair was now dark-brown, his face slightly fuller. He looked taller, younger, more commanding. He was dressed in superbly cut riding clothes, with ludicrously polished boots. He held a riding crop in one hand, methodically tapping the other with the fringed end, and when he spoke it was in the accents of the English upper classes. The white stock at his throat was held in place by a black pearl stickpin.

‘Good day to you,’ he said, ‘and to those of you whom I have not met before – welcome. I am Mister Smith. Not a strikingly original name, I grant you. Merely the latest, and most adequate for my purposes.’

He looked intently from face to face, studying the features, marking their expressions. His gaze lingered on Sabrina, and Leah’s lips tightened fractionally. But living with Smith induced chronic fatalism, and she knew that if she had to resign her place in Smith’s bed to the ravishing newcomer, she would do so with as good a grace as she could muster, and wait her time.

Only Pei and Tote looked uncomfortable under Smith’s prolonged scrutiny. Graham stared nonchalantly back at his host, while C.W. grinned amiably and said, ‘Hi, there.’

‘Excellent,’ Smith beamed – then added to C.W., ‘Except that when you speak to me, you will always address me as “Mister Smith”. That rule is invariable. Understood?’

‘Sure,’ C.W. acknowledged. He let fifteen seconds pass, and said, ‘Uh – Mister Smith.’

Smith gave the slightest of bows. ‘You will be pleased to learn, I am sure, that your identity checks and backgrounds have emerged unsullied from our computers. You are whom you claim to be, and you are the people I want for the little scheme I have in mind. However, it is – though important – of little use that I am satisfied with you if, on the other hand, you are dissatisfied with each other, or with me for that matter. Does any of you know, or suspect, something concerning one of the others which you believe could jeopardize my plans? If you do, now is the time to speak.’

C.W. tensed his body, and his brain grew ice-cold. Now, he thought; it’s now, or never. He checked the position of Claude, whom he calculated was the only armed man in the room. His eyes flickered beyond the library door. The stable yard weapons instructor stood in the hall, arms folded, his back turned to them, a sub-machine gun slung carelessly on his shoulder, finger hovering near the trigger guard.

C.W. let his gaze sweep the room, and saw things he had missed before. The cornice corner mouldings concealed television cameras. One of the ceiling bosses was surely a machine-gun snout. Or was he getting paranoiac? Graham was taking his time, he thought; sadistic bastard.

Mike Graham looked Sabrina full in the eyes. Hers were cast down, but the knowledge that Graham’s piercing stare was transfixing her, compelled her to jerk her head up and let her eyes meet his. He gave a half-smile of acknowledgement – and sat back and laced his fingers together meditatively.

Sabrina felt the breath pumping from her lungs. C.W. shifted uncomfortably on his aching feet, poised for what had seemed an eternity to take his flying body at Claude’s gun, to give them some sort of chance. Mike Graham spoke not a single word. Neither did any other person in the room.

‘Again,’ Smith said, ‘excellent. We all trust each other. We may even like each other. That helps, I find. No close attachments of course –’ his gaze wandered to Pei and Tote. ‘But friendships, yes.’

The tension drained from the room, and Sabrina wondered whether her face had registered the panic which had come so near to erupting when Graham’s eyes had pierced her like accusing daggers. Smith spoke again.

‘Incidentally, is anyone afraid of heights?’ They looked at each other, and shook their heads like marionettes. ‘Good,’ Smith went on. ‘And – C.W. would you have any trouble impersonating a French chef to a French chef? There are black chefs here – I’ve checked.’

C.W. grinned and shook his head afresh. ‘Un morceau de gâteau,’ he replied. Smith laughed, and said to Sabrina, ‘There’s one more pairing which requires specialized skills, that you and Tote possess. It’s welding. You’ll work together.’ Sabrina nodded at Tote, who blinked twice.

‘I think that takes care of the preliminaries, then,’ Smith announced, rapping his gloved hand sharply with the riding crop. ‘More details later, of course. Target, dates, and so on. But for the moment, there’s one important piece of information you should have. Indeed, I need it, too. Mr Graham? Perhaps you would care to tell us what a Lap-Laser is.’

Mike sat up and said, ‘Of course. The Lap-Laser is a tactical self-searching field weapon, laser-armed, auto-recharging – stop me if I’m getting too technical … No? OK. It’s lethal to a thousand metres, and it uses a guidance system known as BAT.

‘Russia and America have been racing to perfect the gun for years,’ Mike went on, ‘but neither had any success until the Americans tried a new element in the guidance system. They discarded the original radar, and substituted lasers to control the gun as well as power it. Now, it really works. It’s still a little unstable and – shall we say – indiscriminate. But, my God, it works.

‘A month ago, the General Electric Corporation of Buffalo, New York State, shipped twelve prototype Lap-Lasers to selected US Army test sites, including one in Europe. The four which were being tested at a secret range near the base at Stuttgart were, unfortunately, stolen. The Army have kept the lid on the theft, and their investigation has been highly confidential, you could say.

‘Luckily for us, they were stolen by me. I would imagine they are now here.’ He looked questioningly at Smith, who nodded. ‘Great,’ said Mike. ‘In that case, whatever our target, however difficult the going is made for us, we have a fantastic edge on anyone trying to stop us. These guns are really something else. They draw enough power to run a small city, and they are so phenomenally destructive that they make the average rocket gun seem like a pea-shooter. With four of them, we could take on an army.’

Smith chuckled. ‘Funny you should say that,’ he mused. ‘Because we may have to.’

Sabrina and C.W. looked startled. The ponderous Tote cracked his knuckles and beamed.

Despite his promise, Smith decided not to reveal the details of his operation until they had finished what he termed ‘a short period of training and relocation’. Sabrina and C.W. were not too downhearted; there was no possibility, in any case, of getting the information out to Philpott. It troubled them that he almost certainly didn’t know where they were, but there was nothing they could do about that, either.

In fact, they were wrong. Philpott knew exactly where they were. Using an Air Force ‘Blackbird’ Mach III spy plane, he had tracked the chopper to the château. Now he was even able to recognize their faces, and photograph them, and Smith and his cohorts. He had seen more of the weaponry at Château Clérignault than C.W. and Sabrina had, and he hadn’t liked what he saw. What he didn’t know was the final plan and venue. And he could think of no way of obtaining that intelligence. He and Sonya Kolchinsky waited – in some comfort – at the Ritz, for Smith to make his move. They dared not risk French or American troops against the laser-gun in an assault on the château. They had no option but to play the waiting – and watching – game.

The time passed swiftly enough for Smith’s team. The following night, after a tour of the vast estate, Smith assembled them once more in the enclosed stable yard. Claude was relieved to see that the big stallion had slaked his lust and gone to bed.

The evening had been soft and balmy, and all round them was silence. Smith soon stopped that. He gave an airy wave of his hand, the stable doors opened, and the night was filled with deafening noise. The scene was bathed in light from arc-lamps on the roofs, and strung to poles overlooking the yard. Smith gestured towards the interior of the stables.

Three monster generator trucks were lined up side by side, under constant cover from ground or aerial surveillance, thick wedges of cable looping from vehicle to vehicle. Further along, banks of turbine generators hummed and flickered with suppressed power. From the last truck, a bunch of cables ran to a wooden platform which had been put up in the yard. The words ‘RESTAURANT LAROUSSE’ were stencilled on the sides of all three trucks.

Smith had assembled practically a hundred other trainees dressed, like his top team, in jump suits, to watch the operation. He waved both arms energetically at the truck drivers, and they cut their engines. ‘This is a fairly simple but, I feel, impressive demonstration. It is not designed to demonstrate the destructive power of the Lap-Laser-guns. If I did that, my beautiful castle would almost certainly be razed to the ground.’ There was a titter of appreciation, or sympathy, or whatever.

‘No. I merely want to show you how the Lap-Laser can combine speed with accuracy and total efficiency. Proceed.’

On came the engines again. On the wooden platform, Graham stood at a control panel, all flashing lights and important-looking levers. Three feet away from him, resting on its mounting, black-snouted and menacing, with its mouse-ear detectors ranging edgily, was a Lap-Laser-gun. All eyes were fixed on it. Behind Mike, Pei and C.W. worked at a computer console, monitoring the hit. Tote and Sabrina stood by, engrossed in what they saw.

Graham stood back, patted the Lap-Laser on its stock, and gave a thumbs up sign to Smith. Smith nodded at Claude, and Claude pressed a remote-control switch activating a signal-bulb at the far end of the yard. There, behind a shield of impenetrable lead, four men lifted Russian Kalashnikov AK 47 rifles, and fired automatic tracers at orthodox targets in the same area of range that was used the day before.

Simultaneously, Graham flicked a set of switches on the panel and a light-beam shot out from the Lap-Lasers. The tracer rounds screamed across the yard in front of the laser-gun – and disappeared. Working at unbelievable speed, the Lap-Laser made minute course and trajectory adjustments, and each time it blinked – to swiftly that the human eye could not detect any break in the ray – it selected and destroyed an individual bullet.

It was a dazzling display of pyrotechnics, and a shattering experience for the spectators. Smith called for quiet again, and strolled unconcernedly over to the targets. This time he held a little hand microphone with a trailing lead.

‘Not a single round found its mark,’ he announced in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘The Lap-Laser destroyed every one of them. With four of these to protect us, and to mount assaults on selected targets, we shall be invulnerable.’

Graham manipulated the controls, and the Lap-Laser subsided. The air was thick with gun-smoke; Mike was pleased with the outcome of the test. Smith walked across to the platform and said, ‘Well done, and thank you.’

‘Nothing to it,’ said Graham. Smith asked C.W., ‘Have you worked out the safety coding yet?’ C.W. replied, ‘I think so.’ He glanced at Sabrina, who had joined Pei and himself at the computer. Sabrina said, ‘We think it’s tuned to this at the moment.’ She indicated a metal tag that C.W. held in his hand. Graham regarded it curiously.

‘Presumably,’ C.W. said, ‘it can be set to any metal alloy for protection, just as it can sniff out and destroy any predetermined target. But if you don’t want it to harm something, you merely feed into the computer a description and formula of the particular element or alloy to be avoided. The object – or person – to be protected then wears a specimen of the embargoed metal, and the Lap-Laser doesn’t function. It will simply miss out that part of the target altogether.’

‘Are you sure of this?’ Smith enquired.

C.W. nodded, emphatically. ‘I’d bet my life on it.’

‘Then why don’t you?’ drawled Mike Graham.

C. W. smiled, slowly. For a while he made no reply. Then he said, ‘Do I hear you right, man?’ His voice was dangerously low and silky.

‘If you didn’t,’ Mike pronounced deliberately, ‘what I said was: why don’t you bet your life on that metal tag?’

C.W. bounced the shiny strip of alloy thoughtfully around his hand. ‘Why don’t I?’ he murmured. Then to Graham, ‘Let’s go – fella.’

Smith signalled to the truck drivers, and they restarted their engines. Graham manned the control panel, Pei monitored the computer alone. C.W. clipped the metal tag to his breast pocket, and walked the length of the yard to the screen of lead. He waited there, head bowed, until the light blinked fussily above his head.

His step never faltered, but his blood ran ice-cold as he saw Graham trip the Lap-Laser switches. C.W. walked closer, and closer, to the target area. He felt the hairs of his neck grow individually erect when the barrel of the laser-gun turned in his direction. The mouse-ears twitched, picked him up, and locked on to him.

Even above the noise, Sabrina, standing right by the Lap-Laser, heard a dull click as the gun’s firing mechanism operated. But there was no fierce glow at the mouth of the tube. No death ray leapt out to reduce the black man to ashes.

‘A malfunction?’ Smith suggested.

Mike grinned sardonically. He pressed another lever on the panel, and a target silhouette trundled out on the electric pulley until it was bearing down on the area swept by the Lap-Laser. C.W. stopped, looked back and watched.

The Lap-Laser tracked its new target, discovered no inhibition to firing, and carried out its allotted task. The tube-end glowed, the beam flashed once, and the silhouette disintegrated. The trucks were silenced. C.W. turned, and continued his steady march to the platform. He stopped beneath the laser-gun, and tossed the safety tag at Graham’s feet.

‘Don’t ever,’ he hissed, ‘don’t you ever put me on again, boy.’ He glared at Graham through slit eyes, and Graham looked contemptuously back. C.W.’s fists balled, and his eyes opened wide, flaring. He stepped aside and commanded, ‘You! Down here!’

Mike made to move, but Smith’s voice cut through their anger. ‘Stop! Now!’ There could be no argument; they backed off, glowering. ‘I have watched your childish exhibition with some interest, not because I particularly care what happens to either of you, but because it did serve the purpose of illustrating something else which it is just as well you should all know.

‘You have now had it amply proven that while the Lap-Laser will destroy indiscriminately what you wish it to destroy, it will miss any target protected by a safety device fed into the computer … in this case, a metal tag.’ He picked the tag up from the platform, and stowed it in his pocket.

‘I have a supply of these tags,’ Smith continued, ‘under lock and key. They will remain there. I have also mounted a Lap-Laser on the roof of this castle. The way I see it now is – no unauthorized person can get into the château. And by the same token, no one can leave. Good night to you.’

The following morning, trucks took the main team and a company of other ranks to a secluded area in the castle park. They lined up in military formation by a lily pond. Rising thirty feet above the pond was a tower constructed mostly of wooden scaffolding poles.

Claude blew a whistle, and the trainees swarmed like monkeys over the tower; on the bars, through them, inside and out, some acrobats clinging to the cross-beams by hands and feet, inching their way along like giant sloths. Others tight-rope walked on connected pipes, or moved hand over hand from one side to the other. It looked like a giant jungle-gymnasium for adults, which was precisely what it was.

Smith appeared, and motioned to C.W. and Graham. He held a stop-watch in his hand, and he thumbed it dramatically. At the top of the tower the beams were of metal, and Sabrina and Tote sat astride a cross-pole, welding mounts to the iron.

A rope snaked down to drop its end at C.W.’s feet. He shinned up it and joined Sabrina on the beam. Below, Graham fastened the end of the rope to a Lap-Laser. Tote and C.W. hoisted the gun up the tower, and mounted it on the cross-beam. Then they repeated the operation with a second Lap-Laser, which Graham followed until all four trainees were perched on the tower with the two guns. Smith pressed the stop-watch again.

He walked to the foot of the tower and shouted, ‘Bravo. The best yet. You’re improving. It must be the food.’

That night in the stable yard, Pei and two other recruits worked under floodlights at the thick bundles of cable. Pei and one of the men wore electricity linemen’s heavy duty gloves. The generators boomed out, and they worked with exaggerated care. Each of the cables bore a lightning bolt label, and the simple warning, ‘2000 volts’.

The gloved trainee, under Pei’s watchful gaze, made a long cut in the insulation of the cable. He prised the incision apart with insulated shears, and exposed a section of gleaming copper wire. The second man, who had discarded his gloves, leaned in, and opened a huge clamp. It, too, had insulation over its handle and operating nut.

The trainee slid the clamp over the ruptured cable. He was trembling, and his face ran with sweat. Inevitably, his hand slipped, and touched the metal of the clamp, which dropped on the exposed cable. A violent blue arc of electricity streaked from the copper wire into the clamp and passed into the body of the unlucky ex-recruit. Pei watched impassively. Then he turned to the other man, and said, ‘Keep your gloves on. Switch off the current, and get rid of him. And in future, remember: when I say take care, I mean take care.’

When the corpse had been removed, and the stench of burning flesh had abated, Pei repeated the manoeuvre with the clamp – but he made no mistake. He lowered the tool until it barely rested on the copper strands. There was a tiny crackle of current. Nothing more.

So another week of training passed, an endless procession of exercises, weapons practice, written and oral examinations, foot-slogging, fighting; until, bone-weary, the team came to what they had been told would be the final day.

They gathered at the lily-pond tower. Graham alone, and again under the tyranny of the stopwatch, approached the scaffolding. Swiftly, he set lumps of plastique and detonators at all four corner supports. He ran back, and peered over Smith’s shoulder at the stop-watch. The hand moved to zero. The four small explosions flared up, and the tower collapsed, crashing to the ground in an unruly tangle of bent piping and broken wooden beams.

Smith was delighted, but didn’t explain why.

That night, after dinner in the Great Hall under a glowing crystal chandelier, and eating off silver plates, waited on like maharajahs, the five newest recruits in Mister Smith’s organization saw him rise to his feet and clap for silence.

‘You have done a fine job during your ten days here,’ he said, ‘and I am proud of you. You have mastered every technique necessary for our operation, and you are now at your peak. It would be pointlessly cruel to keep from you any longer the details of the project I wish you to undertake, and which I am confident you will discharge with every success.’

So Smith unveiled the master plan. Every detail of it; coldly, logically, and with great clarity. They listened in absolute silence as he opened his warped brain to them, and the appalling lunacies came tumbling out.

‘He is mad,’ C.W. whispered to Sabrina. ‘God Almighty, he really is.’

Mad, perhaps, but not stupid. When Sabrina tentatively peeped outside her bedroom door just after 1.30 a.m., she saw two armed guards seated in adjoining chairs midway along the stretch of corridor between her room and C.W.’s. With the secret plan now the common property of all five new recruits, Smith was clearly taking no chances that any of them might be foolish enough to consider passing on their knowledge to the outside.

‘Yet somehow,’ Sabrina murmured furiously, ‘I’ve got to get word to Philpott.’ She knew he would still be watching the château – that he would have seen the laser-guns and, knowing what he did of their enormous power, would have ruled out a frontal attack. He could not have spotted the Restaurant Larousse trucks, which had always been concealed. He could also know nothing of the target, or the timing of Smith’s scheme. Either she or C.W. must pass that information to him if there was to be any even remote chance of stopping Smith.

She was sure the guards had not spotted her, but equally aware that she could not get past them undetected. So it would have to be the window. She switched off her bedroom light, leaving the bathroom illuminated so that from the outside it would appear she was taking a late shower. She pulled aside the thick drapes … as she expected, searchlights positioned on the crenellated roof coping swept the lawns, gardens and approach roads. The façade of the château itself was bathed in floodlighting. She could see commandos leashed to tracker dogs patrolling the grounds.

Sabrina sighed. It would be suicidal to risk flashing a message from her window: one of the patrolling commandos would be bound to see it, and she would be unmasked. She opened the window, and peered upwards. Thick, leafy creepers dropped from the eaves to fall down the château walls between the windows.

The searchlights at either end weaved continuously over the manicured lawns and landscaped parkland, but two beams of light from a central point on the roof stayed fixed, trained on the approach road to the château, converging at a distant spot. Sabrina calculated that if she could climb up to the roof unseen, and use one of the fixed lights for signalling, there was a fair chance she would not be spotted from the ground. From the air, though, the message flashed through the intermittently broken beam would be recorded on video-tape.

She changed into tight black jeans and a black sweater, and coated her face and hands with mud from the guttering above her dormer window. She glanced to her left: the wall of enveloping creepers was about six feet away. She eased her body over the window-sill, stood upright, pressing her face to the rough, hard stone of the wall, and crab-walked the ledge until she reached the shelter of the ivy and Virginia creeper.

She burrowed into the dusty, spider-webbed area behind the impenetrable waterfall of green and red leaves, and used the cover to climb up to the battlemented roof coping. She scaled the wall linking the two turrets, and lay panting in the fork between the battlements and the sloping roof. To either side of her, the big end-mounted searchlights kept up their sweeping pattern. The two smaller, fixed lights were on the apex of the roof between nests of chimneys, a little to her right.

Sabrina marvelled at the fantastic towers and turrets strewn across the roof and battlements, darker than the house below them but still sufficiently lit to throw grotesque shadows on the tiles. She squirmed along to a patch of deeper shadow and, inch by inch, started the long crawl up the roof.

Small, twin campaniles stood at either end of the roof, and from the open spaces above the bell mountings, eight bright and beady eyes looked out between the slim stone pillars and monitored her progress …

Sabrina froze as she felt the beating of wings on the air, terrifyingly close to her face. The pair of shaheen peregrine falcons, one an eyas, trained from the nest, the other haggard, caught wild, had taken to the air fractionally before the matched pair of Greenland gerfalcons from the opposite bell-tower. They were both eyasses, and, like the peregrines, females. The female hunting hawk is a third larger than the tiercel, or male, and the gerfalcon is the biggest of the game-taking hawks.

The peregrines soared high above the château, and the eyas made the first dive, dropping almost perpendicularly, then flattening out in a swooping dive that took her unsheathed claws to within eighteen inches of Sabrina’s disbelieving eyes. The haggard peregrine followed her, legs and claws extended, beak open in an eldritch screech, her whole body aimed like a deadly live projectile. Sabrina choked back a scream as the hawk’s mottled belly flashed before her face, and one of the tufted wing-tips brushed her hair.

She jerked up her head and saw, with relief, the two hunting birds climbing away in a high arc above her. Then a second throaty squawk assailed her from the right, and the first of the monstrous, white-plumed gerfalcons bore down on her from the night sky. She rolled over, and the gerfalcon’s claws scraped the tiles where her face had been.

Terror overwhelmed her mind, and she slipped and bumped her way down the eight feet of roof she had climbed to lay hunched in the angle of the battlements. Even so, she was not quick enough for the second gerfalcon, which altered course at the last moment and, as Sabrina upended herself in her tumbling flight, took a quarter-inch strip of flesh away from her left ankle.

She could see all four hawks now, circling overhead to dive for what she suspected would be a concerted attack. Worse, shouts from below told her that Smith’s airborne guard-dogs had been spotted by a patrol.

Sabrina guessed she had one chance left: if the attention of the armed commandos was fixed on the hawks, she might be able to squeeze unobserved between the fortified battlements and drop to the creepers.

A third grating screech was all the warning she needed. As the haggard peregrine started its dive, Sabrina slithered over the eaves and dropped head first into the nest of creepers.

Her clutching hands found thick bundles of liana, and she broke her fall, twisted round, and prayed that the creepers would support her weight. Dust flew, wall-roots tore apart and the spiders danced unaccustomed nocturnal capers – but the creepers held. Sabrina got her breath back, and hauled herself up to the ledge.

She looked out between the leaves, and saw with a sinking heart that she was still far away from her own window, which she had left unobtrusively ajar. Then the window nearest her squeaked open, and C.W. hissed, ‘Swing over here, you silly cow!’

Sabrina grasped a bunch of ivy and wooded liana and launched herself into space. She landed in C.W.’s arms feet first, and he grabbed her body and hauled her into his darkened bathroom. He slammed the window shut, and said to her brusquely, ‘Strip.’

Meekly, Sabrina did as she was told …

Ten minutes later, bathed and coiffured, Sabrina sat demurely on a chaise-longue in the Louis Seize suite. C.W. answered the peremptory knock at the door.

Smith stood there, flanked by armed guards. His eyes took in the nonchalant black, clearly naked under the terry-robe; they shifted to Sabrina who, equally clearly, was wearing only a bath towel.

‘My guards tell me,’ Smith began, ‘that the hawks have been active. They believe someone came into a room on this floor, possibly from the roof. Could it have been either of you?’ He let the question hang dangerously in the air.

‘It could have been,’ C.W. shrugged; then adding, seemingly as an afterthought. ‘Sir.’

‘In fact, it was,’ Sabrina put in. Smith raised his eyebrows in her direction.

She went on calmly, ‘Since you chose, for reasons of your own, Mister Smith, to make us prisoners, I took it as a challenge, a point of honour almost, to sneak along the ledge outside my room and see my friend C.W.’

‘For what purpose, may I ask?’ Smith enquired.

Sabrina simpered. ‘When I’m dressed like this?’ she said, letting the towel slip further down her shoulders. ‘Really, Mister Smith, you either have very little imagination or you lead an abnormally sheltered life here.’

Smith looked steadily at her, weighing the evidence. ‘My guards didn’t see you,’ he pointed out.

‘The wall was completely lit up,’ Sabrina countered, ‘bathed, you could say, in white light.’

‘So?’

‘So I was naked. Camouflage – n’est-ce-pas?’

Smith’s stony face relaxed into a grin. ‘Now that’s the kind of audacity I admire. Well, assuming you have finished what you came here to do, Sabrina –’ she nodded, and C.W. winked. ‘Good,’ Smith went on, ‘in that case, let me escort you back to your own room by a route considerably less arduous and dangerous than the one you selected for the outward trip.’

She rose to her feet, and let the towel drop to the floor. ‘Thanks C.W. – for everything,’ she said.

Smith’s eyes combed her naked body. ‘I trust my little falcons didn’t treat you too badly, Sabrina,’ he said.

She showed him her blood-spotted ankle. ‘Hardly anything,’ she replied.

Smith tutted solicitously. ‘Dear, dear,’ he murmured, ‘I hope they don’t get a taste for human flesh.’

SEVEN

Sonya Kolchinsky rose early and walked from the most celebrated and luxurious hotel in Paris, into the most harmonious square in that city of beautiful proportions, Place Vendôme. She strolled through the markets, and then embarked on a determined window-shopping spree, from the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré through Rue Castiglione, crossing to Boulevard Haussmann, and on through Boulevard Batignolles and Boulevard Courcelles to the Arc de Triomphe.

She took the bus down Avenue Kleber to the Palais de Chaillot, and trekked back across the river, past the Eiffel Tower, to the Boulevard Garibaldi. She checked her watch: it was still only eight-fifteen.

Sonya found the side street at the rear of the École Militaire, and saw the unsalubrious little workmen’s café. It was three-quarters full. The atmosphere was compounded about equally of coffee, croissants, Disque Bleue and Caporal. Two sweat-shirted labourers sat at the corner table, and it was there that she headed.

Sonya approached the table uncertainly. One workman was eyeing his cognac with practised relish; the other had his face plunged into a newspaper. She peered over the top of the paper. This man also had a cognac in front of him. He wore a greasy cap, and printed on his T-shirt was the legend, ‘APRÈS MOI LE DÉLUGE’. ‘Sit down, then,’ Philpott said. She lowered herself into the spare seat, and was made embarrassingly aware that she was dressed a shade formally for ‘La Chatte qui siffle’ on a busy September midweek morning.

‘Cats,’ she said tartly to Philpott, ‘do not whistle.’ Without looking up from his newspaper, Philpott drawled, ‘In here, baby, they do as they’re told.’ Their neighbour got up to leave, and wished them ‘bon appétit’ with a knowing leer. Sonya tossed her well-groomed head and ordered coffee and croissants. They were, as she suspected, delicious.

Philpott laid down the paper. ‘To business,’ he said. ‘I didn’t wake you last night, but I had a call at about 2 a.m. They’re on the move. Or, at least, the chopper and half a dozen trucks left in the small hours. And that is a Lap-Laser on the roof of the château, or rather, was. It’s gone now. The game, as Holmes probably never said, is afoot.’

‘And still nothing from Sabrina or C.W.’, Sonya said, bitterly.

‘You’ve checked?’ Philpott asked. She nodded.

‘On the way here, and back at the Ritz. The stations, the Élysée – everywhere. Not a single word. We don’t even know if they’re alive.’

‘If Graham has denounced Sabrina, then she’ll certainly be dead,’ Philpott muttered, grimly, ‘and I can’t see C.W. letting that happen, without getting involved. So … we must be prepared for the worst.’

Sonya drained her first cup of coffee, and set the cup down with a nervous clatter. ‘And we still don’t know his target, where he’s going to strike, or when. Or anything, really.’ She looked beseechingly into Philpott’s eyes. ‘Have we lost, Malcolm – lost out to Smith? And sacrificed C.W. and Sabrina into the bargain? Has it all been for nothing?’

Philpott placed his hand over hers. He shook his head. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘We haven’t lost yet. We’re some way down, but we’re far from out.’ He rose to his feet and put two ten-franc bills on the table. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’m fed up with slumming. Let’s go back to the hotel. At least we’ll be in touch there.’

Sonya got up. ‘I never did find out why you picked this place for a meeting at this ungodly hour,’ she remarked.

‘I’ll tell you back at the hotel,’ he promised.

They turned into Boulevard Garibaldi, and right again past the École Militaire into the Champ de Mars. Philpott stopped to light a pleasant-smelling cheroot, and glanced upwards.

The trite and infuriatingly ugly bulk of the Eiffel Tower completely filled his vision.

Tote and Pei left the table they had been occupying by the door of ‘La Chatte qui siffle’, and took the same path Philpott and Sonya had taken a few minutes before. They, too, looked up at the Eiffel Tower, and Pei grinned happily at Tote. They traversed the Champ de Mars, and crossed the busy intersection to reach the foot of the tower.

It is difficult to imagine any construction as crass as the Eiffel Tower being erected to mark the dawn of the age of technology, but that indeed was the driving force behind the eccentric French engineer, Gustave Alexandre Eiffel, in the late 1880s. Eiffel greatly admired the American inventors Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and worked for two years to design possibly the ugliest, but most charming, commemorative monument in history.

Eiffel used five thousand yard-square sheets of paper for his full-scale plan of the tower, but at least by the time he had finished there could be only one answer to the ludicrous question: what’s made of two and a half million rivets and twelve thousand pieces of metal, weighs fifteen million pounds, stands nearly a thousand feet tall, and looks like a giraffe?

The tower was inaugurated on June 10 1889, by Prince Bertie of England, later King Edward VII, who, it was doubtless said at the time, should have known better. Later, though, when successful wireless experiments were carried out between the tower and the Panthéon, Eiffel’s éléphant blanc was used as a radio broadcasting tower.

Gustave Eiffel could not have foreseen it, but would doubtless have been pleased, that the tower now doubles as a television transmitter. At the moment it is 984 ft 6 ins high, but with the Eiffel Tower, you never can tell. The German occupying forces in Paris during World War II considered requisitioning the tower and turning it, presumably, into tanks, but in the end the plan proved to be either sacrilegious or too much trouble.

Apart from the fact that the face of Paris would today be unthinkable without the tower, its undeniably most useful function is one that probably never occurred to Eiffel: the peak provides one of the most astonishing views on Earth.

From the quaint little all-round balcony at the top, the day-time shadow falls across the Champ de Mars (where Napoleon used to review his troops) and the École Militaire. The military school was the creation of an unlikely trio: the financier, Paris-Duverney; Madame Pompadour; and the playwright, Beaumarchais. Below the tower is the River Seine, behind it the superb Palais de Chaillot, with its gardens and ornamental fountains. The feet of the tower plunge into the woodland, spanned by the access road. There are fountains in the foreground, too, and everywhere broad, sweeping avenues of tarmac and grass; theatres, museums, palaces … Paris.

Pei and Tote skirted the balloon-seller, and passed through the light morning crowd to the entrance of the tower. The balloon-man was doing a fair trade – some tribute, no doubt, to the fact that Michael Graham had filled balloons before, and was used to handling gas. He put a shot of hydrogen into a long, knobbly, purple job, and handed it to an ecstatic little Dutch girl.

‘Whirrrrr-click!’ went the automatic shutter of an expensive camera round the neck of a tourist. Smith was dressed in a well-cut lightweight suit with matching tie and pocket handkerchief, and sensible brogues; to avoid confusing his troops, he had kept the same face.

Smith took another picture, sighting through the central arch of the tower towards the Palais de Chaillot. He strolled unconcernedly to the waiting elevator. He boarded it, and as it soared upwards, he stood gazing vacantly into space, with an imbecilic expression on his face, as tourists often do. On the far side of the elevator, Sabrina and Claude chatted animatedly about nothing in particular.

The elevator reached the first, and widest, landing, and Smith got out. Another, less expensive, camera clicked. Leah Fischer, elbows balancing on the rail, squinted through the eyepiece and took a second meaningless snap. She ignored Smith when he brushed against her as he passed. Pei and another member of the commando team, dressed in business suits, rounded the gallery; Pei was deep into a clipboard of technical papers; his companion pointed occasionally, and made helpful comments.

The elevator reached the first landing again on its way down. A burly, powerful workman got out; he was in overalls, with oil-stained hands. He was on his morning coffee break – rather ahead of time, considering – and he walked to the rail next to Leah.

‘It’s OK,’ Tote grunted. ‘We’re ready.’ And he nodded in the direction of the private, commercial access road to the Eiffel Tower.

The three ‘RESTAURANT LAROUSSE’ generator trucks trundled to the foot of the tower, and moved into position near a service elevator. A white-coated chef climbed stiffly from the cab of the leading vehicle, stretched prodigously, and winked at the balloon-seller. ‘Sassy idiot,’ Graham muttered, but C.W. was too far away to hear.

One of the tower guards stepped from his office and spoke to the tall-hatted black chef. A pantechnicon and a smaller lorry had joined the generator trucks. A team of workmen busily, and very swiftly, unloaded crates, steam-boxes, brightly coloured beer tanks, portable stoves and microwave ovens – a bewildering mass of equipment.

The guard surveyed the mountain range of boxes. ‘Open the crates, please,’ he directed the chef, who had presented a perfect set of documents explaining everything.

‘Open the crates!’ C.W. expostulated. ‘The steam-boxes, the sealed containers? You want me to ruin my soufflés? You want dust in my sauces? You want my bombe surprise to melt? That is either a joke in extremely bad taste, Monsieur, or you are irretrievably unhinged.’

Ignoring him, the guard prised off the lid of a steam-box. C.W. closed his eyes, and muttered a prayer to the patron saint of haute cuisine. Neat rows of unbaked bread, flûte alternating with baguette, stared up at the custodian.

‘Don’t even breathe,’ C.W. snarled, gently closing the case. ‘They must rest – like innocent children. Their labours are barely begun – while yours, Monsieur, may be coming to an untimely but completely justified end!’

Graham regarded the scene with amusement, tinged with reluctant admiration. C.W. again caught his eye. Mike looked away, clutched the balloon strings in his hand more tightly, then leapt up in frustration as a yellow balloon escaped and floated into the air. He shook his free fist at it, and cursed volubly, but in fairly restrained language. C.W. wasn’t the only one who could put on a convincing act, he thought smugly.

The guard surveyed the hopelessness of his task. He couldn’t possibly open every one of the bound crates, and the chef was becoming too overbearing for words, stamping around him in a circle and heaping culinary curses on his undeserving head.

‘Eh bien – allez!’ he said, resignedly. C.W. triumphantly gathered his team and trophies around him, and they commenced loading the service lift.

At the rail of the lower gallery, Smith had swapped his camera for a pair of binoculars, and panned over the view below. He locked on to the yellow balloon as it rose skywards against the glorious panorama of Paris. He took the binoculars from his eyes, and a half-smile played on his lips.

Then he raised the glasses once more, his gaze wandering further out, to the river. He ranged over the Bateaux Mouches, the sight-seeing boats of the Seine that ply up and down the river between April and October, on hour-long trips. He picked up, too, a flotilla of Tour Eiffel Vedettes, the smaller, eighty-two seater, glass-topped motor boats, which started from the Pont d’Iéna, near the tower, or the Quai Montebello. The Bateaux Mouches leave from the Right Bank, at the Pont de l’Alma.

Smith fixed the precise location of the particular Bateau Mouche for which he had been searching, and once more grinned his satisfaction.

The service elevator drew up at the gallery. C.W. stepped importantly out, chef’s hat aquiver, and stood with arms folded, casing the scene. He directed that his mass of equipment, now borne on stout-wheeled trolleys, should be taken into the restaurant kitchen facing him. A brace of commandos jumped forward to hold open the swing doors. Inside the restaurant itself, C.W. could see a French television crew, from RTF, setting up cameras and lights to cover a news event.

Smith, still at the rail, but standing now next to Leah as the crowds on the tower began to thicken, peered through the binoculars at the press of people swarming round the tower entrance. Claude, who had descended some time before, was waiting to come back up. Smith spotted other commandos in the crowd, dressed as tourists, workmen, waitresses (for Sabrina Carver was by far from being the only woman on the team) and other employees of the tower.

Mister Smith murmured to Leah, ‘Let me know when everyone’s up here.’ Perhaps three minutes later, she touched his arm tentatively, and whispered, ‘All present and correct, sir.’

The urgent wail of a police-car klaxon penetrated the hubbub. Smith swung round at the rail, and brought the glasses to his eyes. A limousine, one of the largest and grandest at the disposal of the French Government, turned into the tower access road. It was preceded by two armed motorcycle outriders, flanked by two more and trailed by a further pair. The Doppler effect scaled the siren down an octave, and the noise stopped altogether as the car drew to a halt.

A man stepped out, and shut the car door behind him. Even from the gallery perch, Smith could see the bulge of the gun in the visitor’s left armpit. The Secret Service agent looked carefully around him, then up at the tower, then down again, his eyes hunting the scattering of people, his hands and shoulders twitching.

From the other side of the car, a second agent got out, slammed the door, and repeated the scrutiny his colleague had already made. They glanced at each other and, on a nod from the first agent, the second opened the car door on his side, and politely ushered out a tall, handsome woman in her late sixties or early seventies.

The four men in the official welcoming committee detached themselves from the tower entrance, and hurried forward. In the van was a small, round, flustered type, in morning coat and striped trousers, bare-headed. He beamed distractedly (he always beamed distractedly) at the dignified lady, and said, ‘My dear Mrs Wheeler. What an honour for us! What a great pleasure and privilege! What a truly glorious day this is for the Eiffel Tower, for the Children’s Relief Fund, for France, for –’

‘Monsieur Verner, how very nice to see you again.’ Adela Wheeler cut in. ‘On the contrary, it was kind of you to invite me, and I’m glad to be here.’

Bertrand Verner stammered his profuse thanks, and introduced her to the other dignitaries of the tower and of the International Children’s Relief Fund. She met them graciously, her strong, mellifluous voice speaking in scarcely-accented French or, when prompted, in Western seaboard American, but so unassumingly upper crust that it could have been Bostonian or Southern Standard English.

French security men stood in a discreet ring behind the official party, and they divided to let through Mrs Wheeler and her guards, who were guided into the elevator to make the trip alone to the first floor. True to form, the Secret Service calculated that the fewer people close to their charge at any one time, the better.

In the kitchen of the tower restaurant, where the lunchtime fund-raising banquet was to be held, all was controlled chaos under the regular chef, Albert. The last thing Albert wanted was for the doors to burst open, and a rival chef enter, pursued by seemingly dozens of assistant chefs and commis waiters bearing impossible cargoes of equipment. But Albert had been prepared for the intrusion of the Restaurant Larousse, specialists in outside catering, though he still regarded C.W.’s presence with resentment and hostility.

Albert watched in silence as C.W. commandeered his kitchen, and muttered at one point, ‘Tiens! Warmed-up food. Pffft!’

C.W. spun round on him. ‘Warmed up? WARMED UP? Here, my peasant friend,’ he indicated a stack of steaming boxes, ‘here are cooking, not warming, cooking, fifty and more light and incomparable Soufflés aux Crevettes démoulent in modulated microwaves. Here, idiot, are braising truffles in Sauce Brune aux Fines Herbes. Do you call that warming up? Hein?’

Albert shrugged, and made as if to open a case. C.W. administered a hefty slap to his wrist and snapped, ‘Ne touchez pas,’ like to a naughty child.

Inside the restaurant, the also-rans were waiting to welcome their undisputed guest of honour. Smith whispered to Claude, who sidled out to the corridor and sent the service elevator back down. Beneath the fork of the tower, an ice-cream vendor opened his ice-box and produced two machine pistols. He handed one to Mike Graham, who barged into the tower guard’s office.

The guard saw Mike’s gun, and made for his own. Graham caught him by the front of his uniform, dragged him over the guardroom counter, and brutally pistol-whipped him. Then he herded the guard and the elevator operator into the service elevator and took it up.

The main elevator now stopped at the restaurant level, the operator opened the gate, and Mrs Wheeler’s two Secret Service agents led her into the corridor. Claude’s ambush was sudden and appallingly savage.

He felled the first agent with a vicious groin kick. The second man was going for his weapon, but his arm was seized by another commando, and Claude, in a movement that was purely balletic, whirled and lashed out another kick from the rear. It caught the agent in the gut, and a swing with a lead-tipped truncheon from a commando ended his interest in the affair.

Back in the kitchen, C.W. rounded once more on Albert, and snorted, ‘Now, my fine friend, I will show you – my pièce de résistance.’ He tapped the lid of a formidably large catering case. Albert’s eyes followed the movement.

The lid of the case flew up, and C.W. calmly handed out to his team a succession of wicked-looking MA-28 Meisner machine pistols and Thompson machine-guns. C.W. waved at Albert with the snout of a gun. ‘Up,’ he commanded. The chef and his entire staff shot their arms into the air, and stood rigid as statues. C.W. chuckled. ‘I bet this is the craziest entrée you’ve ever seen, Albert, old son,’ he said in English. Albert goggled.

C.W.’s men were already pushing napkin-draped trolleys into the restaurant, and peeling off the cloths to reveal an assortment of dangerous hardware, when Smith walked up to Mrs Wheeler and announced, in a pleasant and neutral voice, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wheeler. I am Mister Smith. I regret to tell you that you are my prisoner. If you will accompany this young lady –’ he indicated Leah ‘– without too much trouble, I guarantee that you will come to no harm whatsoever.’

Adela Wheeler gazed steadily at him. ‘I presume,’ she said, ‘that you know who I am.’

Smith nodded acquiescence. ‘If I did not,’ he pointed out, ‘I would hardly have gone to all the trouble of kidnapping you.’

Adela Wheeler still regarded him stonily. ‘You cannot, of course, hope to get away with this foolish and disastrous crime. You will be made to pay for it; of that you can be certain.’ Smith looked at her admiringly; she was dignity personified, exquisitely gowned, her grey hair piled in bouffant waves, her face imperious and haughty, unafraid, scornful.

‘Please,’ Smith gestured towards Leah. ‘You will be comfortable, and unmolested, in the VIP room.’

‘I know the room well,’ Mrs Wheeler rejoined, ‘whereas I honestly doubt whether you have ever been inside it – or would be welcomed there if you did.’ She turned on her heel, brushed Leah aside, and walked firmly out of the restaurant.

The dining-room commandos spread out and herded the guests into a corner at gun-point. Graham and his ice-cream vendor arrived, with members of the tower staff under guard. On the second landing, far above their heads, other commandos poured out of the elevators and trained their guns on the trippers. A guard rushed to an alarm button, but was cut down by a burst of fire from a Kalashnikov.

Pei shouted through a loud-hailer. ‘No one is to move. Stand absolutely still. Do not try to be heroes. You will die if you do.’

The elevator continued its deadly journey. The top observation platform, at the very summit of the tower below the television mast, was only lightly peopled. The assault team took it with ease, disarming and trussing up the defeated guards.

In the first-level restaurant, C.W. unlocked a catering crate marked ‘Microwave Oven P769/521 COOKFAST’. He called Mike Graham over, and together they tenderly lifted out a darkly gleaming Lap-Laser. Up aloft by the rail of the second gallery, three men just as carefully hoisted Sabrina Carver over the side of the tower. She wore a welding mask, and someone handed to her an acetylene torch and a stout iron bracket. Sabrina got to work … and she was a fast worker.

Mrs Wheeler sat in a comfortable chair in the VIP room, hands clasped to stop them trembling. She had resolutely refused to speak to Leah who had locked the door and left. She had no idea what Mister Smith required of her – apart from the obvious ransom for her release. She suspected, though, that he had chosen the location badly. If she was trapped on the Eiffel Tower, then so was he. She had a premonition – which, surprisingly, was not too distasteful – that she would not survive the day.

Tourists arrived in their droves from above, and huddled together on the gallery, and in the open spaces and restaurant, as Smith took a loud-hailer and addressed them. ‘All visitors and tower personnel, listen to me. You will be released safe and unharmed if you do not panic, and if you do precisely as you are instructed. You will shortly enter the elevators in small groups, as directed by my staff. Once on the ground, please leave the area of the tower immediately. If you do not, you will place yourselves in very grave danger indeed. Now – get to the elevators, and wait your turn as my men tell you.’

Sabrina, perched precariously on the scaffolding of the tower midway between the first and second levels, put the finishing touches to her bracket welding. From the landing below, Mike peeped out and saw her. He signalled to C.W., who ran to join him. ‘There she goes,’ Mike said, and he and the black man took the Lap-Laser over the rail and knotted the rope round it. A commando team from above began to haul it on its long trip up the side of the tower.

Police and bystanders stood in anxious groups watching with mounting curiosity as the slim black gun rose into the air, hugging the girders. Sabrina looked down on the swaying Lap-Laser with equal concern. She knew what the crowd didn’t know: that any hard knock from the metal struts to the delicate firing mechanism – particularly to the circular, side-mounted radar detectors – could put the wonder-weapon out of commission. Sabrina muttered a silent prayer that if it was going to happen, it should happen quickly – before the need arose for her to fumble the bolting of the laser-gun to its bracket.

For that was the plan she had in mind: a last, desperate bid to immobilize at least one of Smith’s toys and even up the odds for Philpott.

But the gun reached Sabrina safely, and as the commandos detached it from its sling, she steeled herself to drop it back down the tower. Then Smith’s voice floated down to her. ‘No slips now, Sabrina. I shall hold you personally responsible if anything happens to that gun.’

In the maintenance areas, Pei and his band of electronic specialists were tapping into the main power cables supplying the tower, as Pei had shown them in the practice sessions at the Château Clérignault. This time, there were no accidents, and within minutes, stewardship of the electricity supply to the entire tower and its environs had passed into Pei’s capable hands.

The first trippers were leaving the tower. They streamed away, ignoring the incoming policemen brought there by the sudden lack of communication with the tower, by isolated bursts of gunfire, and by the fact that the security men augmenting Mrs Wheeler’s guards had failed to report. Women in the crowd sobbed as they tried to cope with hysterical children. Men looked back grimly, and talked excitedly among themselves of their good fortune in getting away. The policemen pushed impatiently at the elevator buttons, but there was no response. Pei had seen to that. He was now the Eiffel Tower’s sole liftman.

The steel-helmeted Riot Police arrived, all shields, blast-guns and machismo. They listened to the tragic tales of the common flics, then grouped in a spear-head at the entrance to the tower, and rushed the stairs. Their shields, however, proved not to be impervious to high-velocity, armour piercing bullets, and they retreated in disorder, leaving dead and wounded littering the steps.

Smith heard the shooting as he descended to his command position near the first landing elevators. ‘Keep it to the minimum,’ he yelled through the loud-hailer to the group manning the stairs. ‘Tell that to the Riot Cops,’ called out a commando.

Smith turned inquiringly to one of his principal lieutenants, who supplied the commando’s name. ‘He did not address me correctly,’ Smith said, in a voice so urbane that it chilled his subordinate, ‘and he was impertinent. When the operation is concluded, shoot him. Through the spine. Make sure he lives.’

The tower was clearing fast now. The only people Smith kept there under lock and key were the more daring among the guards – those who still lived, that is – and the security men of both nationalities, who were beaten senseless as a precaution.

On the rusty-red iron scaffolding members, Sabrina Carver and C.W. Whitlock clamped a third Lap-Laser-gun into place. Another team, led by Pei, handled the fourth and last dreaded super-weapon on the opposite flank. Smith assembled his entire task force on ‘level one’, and handed over temporarily to Leah. She took a large bundle of metal tags from a box.

‘You all know what these are,’ Leah said. ‘They’re laser safety tags. Wear them at all times, please. It’s probably unnecessary to caution you about this, since you all know what will happen to you if you don’t wear them. We’ll be arming the Lap-Lasers in a very few moments. In case you have any remaining doubts about their powers, let me assure you that they will automatically destroy anything that moves on this tower, or near it, which doesn’t have one of these metal protective code-tags. I’ll hand out the tags now. After that, it’s up to you.’

‘Thank you, Leah,’ said Smith, taking the tag she offered him, and pinning it ostentatiously to his breast on the lapel of his suit. ‘I’ll see you in the restaurant when we’ve set up?’

‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Mister Smith,’ she replied.

The last load of trippers left the tower, and scampered away to join the crowd, now held in check by a police cordon at a respectful distance. On his way back to the restaurant, Smith peered over the side cautiously. He had instructed his commandos to keep well out of sniping range; once the laser-guns were operative, they would, of course, have no need to observe such caution.

The scene was bizarre, looking upwards or downwards. Going up, the sole occupants of the Eiffel Tower above the first level were pigeons, gulls and smaller birds. They wheeled in and out of the stanchions and cross-members, and buzzed the top observation platform like Macbeth’s temple-haunting martlets.

Below, there was a cordon sanitaire around the tower. Nothing inside it moved. Traffic had been halted, the access roads and main junction were sealed off, the walkways from the Champ de Mars and the Palais de Chaillot cleared, even of animals. The fountains were stilled, and every eye in the vast and growing crowd turned upwards in tribute, Smith’s mad brain told him, to his remarkable genius.

He withdrew, and walked towards the restaurant. As he reached the door, Pei stepped forward and delivered the crucial message. ‘The Lap-Lasers are fully armed and functioning, Mister Smith.’ Smith replied, ‘Excellent, Pei, excellent.’

The central command post had been set up in the restaurant, and apart from the busy commando leaders, probably the most valued people there were the French television crew, who were destined to play in the drama a role of which none of them had dreamed when they left that morning on a routine assignment.

Under Pei’s direction, and to Mike Graham’s secret amusement, cables had been dragged in bunches into the cleared dining area, and the little bandstand was now the setting for a bank of TV monitors, covering every aspect around the tower. A group of three colour monitors stood to one side, showing, for the moment, RTF test cards. Smith looked appraisingly at the scene, occasionally glancing at his stop-watch.

Finally, he summoned the French TV cameraman who, like most continental network operators, used a small, portable ENG (Electronic News Gathering) camera, rather than the unwieldy Arrieflexes and other film cameras of old.

‘You will operate the ENG camera at my direction, and inject straight into the network, as you have been instructed?’ Smith asked.

‘Oui, Monsieur,’ the man replied.

‘If you do not,’ Smith warned, ‘or if in any way you attempt to cross me … I have no need, I am sure, to tell you what will happen to you.’

The cameraman assured him hastily that he would do as he was told. ‘No tricks, Monsieur,’ he added, ‘I have a wife and kids, and RTF does not pay me enough to die for them.’

‘Good,’ Smith returned. ‘Then make the preparations.’

‘What exactly is it you wish me to do, Monsieur?’ queried the technician.

‘That’s simple,’ Smith said. ‘I want to make a broadcast to the world. I want to tell them that I have stolen the Eiffel Tower, and that I am holding as my prisoner the mother of the President of the United States of America.’

EIGHT

Sonya ordered lunch to be sent up to Suite 701, and the Ritz’s room service obliged with omelettes, side salads, light desserts and a bottle of Chablis. Neither she nor Philpott were in the mood to sample the celebrated déjeuner mondain or the delights of the Espadon Grill.

They had not been idle during the morning. Philpott maintained a steady contact with the message drop points in Paris, with INTERPOL and the Sûreté, with the Élysée Palace, and with the CIA and the duty monitor at UNACO. So far, they had drawn blanks.

As he forked the first slice of omelette into his mouth, the telephone rang again. ‘Always happens,’ he grunted, ‘usually when I’m in the shower.’

Philpott picked up the receiver, announced himself, and listened for perhaps three minutes in total silence.

Then he said, ‘God in Heaven, François, I expected it to be bad, but nothing like this. Hang on a sec.’ He gestured towards the corner of the lavishly decorated room, where vast windows offered breath-taking views of Paris. ‘Sonya, switch on the television set,’ he said, urgently. Then back to the telephone. ‘Go on please, François.’

Philpott listened again, fired a couple of quick questions, made notes on a scribbling-pad next to the telephone, and finally said, ‘Me? I’ll get hold of the Ambassador straight away. I know more about Smith than probably anyone else alive. I shall be pleased to help. Indeed, I insist on offering my services. Thank you, Au revoir.’

He replaced the telephone as the colour TV screen flickered into life. ‘For God’s sake, Malcolm, tell me what’s happened,’ Sonya cried in exasperation. ‘The worst,’ Philpott answered. ‘The very worst. Smith, would you believe, has hi-jacked the Eiffel Tower – or so the police say … that was François LeMaitre, from the Sûreté.’

‘Hi-jacked the Eiffel Tower?’ Sonya echoed, incredulously.

‘Taken it with an armed force. But that’s not all. By Christ, that’s in no sense everything.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s got a hostage, Sonya, and I have no doubt whatsoever that in his insanity, he will not hesitate to sacrifice the hostage if things go against him.’

‘Who is it, Malcolm?’

‘Someone whose life we cannot afford to hazard,’ Philpott said, dully. ‘It’s Warren’s mother, Sonya. Adela Wheeler, mother of Warren G. Wheeler, President of the United States of America.’

The colour drained from her face. ‘Wh-what – what –’

‘What’s she doing here?’ Philpott supplied. ‘She’s over on invitation from the International Children’s Relief Fund – you know, it’s her pet charity. There’s a beano, a fund-raising lunch, at the Eiffel Tower – today.

‘God –’ he smashed his fist into his palm, ‘– how could I have overlooked that? How could I have been so stupid as not to check that, when Lorenz van Beck as good as told me it was the Eiffel Tower?’

‘Van Beck did?’ Sonya queried.

Philpott nodded, and ran his fingers through his hair. He wrenched open his top collar button and pulled down his tie. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured, disconsolately. ‘As van Beck said: what else has two and a half million rivets? I believed him, of course … that’s why we went to that little café this morning – just on the offchance that I might see something, or someone, which would give us a lead. But some hopes,’ he snorted in self-disgust. ‘Even if I’d tripped over Smith himself, I would probably have dusted him down and bought him a beer.’

Sonya rose and went to him. ‘Quitting?’ she asked. ‘Self-pity’s not your line, Philpott. Fight back, or we’re lost. Please?’ She straightened his tie, and smoothed back his hair. Then she noticed, past his shoulder as he held her and kissed her cheek, the TV set purring away in the corner.

Over the domestic tribulations of a particularly involved French soap opera a message repeatedly flashed: ‘EMERGENCY INTERRUPT.’ Sonya broke free with a start. ‘Look, Malcolm,’ she said, ‘something’s coming on TV about it, I think.’

Philpott turned, and studied the set. Then he crossed the room and sat on a chaise-longue within comfortable distance. ‘It’s Smith,’ he explained to Sonya. ‘Apparently he’s got himself a link straight into RTF from the tower. His communications boys have arranged it so that the Post Office can’t stop him, even if they wanted to. And at the moment, the French Government doesn’t want to stop him. Let’s hear what he’s got to say.’

Sonya joined him. The emergency signal became a permanent fixture as the trivial soap opera faded. After a minute the stark message blinked out, and the screen cleared. The next image on French and Continental Western European television was the face of Mister Smith.

‘I am sorry,’ Smith began, ‘to interrupt your normal television fare, but, as compensation, I bring you a real-life drama which I hope you will find even more absorbing.’ He spoke in faultless French, and repeated the sentence in English.

He continued, ‘My name is Mister Smith, and I have just stolen the Eiffel Tower. No, I’m not joking. See for yourselves.’

The screen cut to another camera, which roamed the tower, concentrating on the first level, seeking out the armed guards, then wandering below, to the cordon of frustrated police, and the seething crowd. It avoided the laser-guns, and for a moment Philpott’s heart leapt: perhaps something had gone wrong. Perhaps C.W. and Sabrina had managed to immobilize the Lap-Lasers, to give the authorities at least a fighting chance … But then he reflected, ‘No, the bastard’s just playing with us.’

‘You see now, do you?’ Smith said, triumphantly. ‘I am speaking the truth. And that is not all. I have a prisoner here on the tower – a hostage, if you like, although I want to emphasize that she is in no danger. Provided, of course, that the French Government complies with my demands.’

The scene switched again. A hand-held ENG camera danced up to the VIP room. Adela Wheeler sat straight-backed and proud in her chair, her eyes downcast. The cameraman tapped on the glass door. She raised her head, and the camera caught her face, zoomed in on it, and held the shot.

‘Yes,’ Smith said, ‘it is Mrs Adela Wheeler, whom I dare say many among you will recognize as the mother of the American President. But to more pleasant considerations – for me, that is.’ The camera returned to Smith.

‘As you see – and I assure you that nothing you have witnessed is faked – I and my associates are in complete command of this structure, in a way which I shall demonstrate in a moment. We shall retain control of the Eiffel Tower until I receive what I consider to be a fair ransom for it – and naturally, for the life of Mrs Wheeler.

‘I am given to understand that the tower cost in the region of one million, six hundred thousand US dollars to build. I have calculated that today’s replacement value would be, say, sixty-eight million dollars.

‘Therefore, I propose to return the tower to the people of France, in the same excellent order in which I found it, for the bargain price of thirty million dollars. That, I think you will agree, is not profiteering. The presence of Mrs Wheeler should serve as sufficient – how shall I put it – inducement?’

Smith was clearly enjoying himself; Philpott sat dejectedly on the chaise-longue, waiting for the knockout blow. The telephone rang, and Sonya sprang to answer it. ‘Give him a moment, please, Mr Ambassador,’ she requested, ‘he wants to see the end of the Smith telecast.’

Smith said, ‘Now observe closely. I want to show you why retaliation against me, the use of any force, military or civil, from the land or from the air, is completely useless.’

Once more his face left the screen, and the exterior camera caught the outer edge of the tower, and rose dramatically towards the second gallery level. It found one of the Lap-Lasers, and halted. The evil black snout came into centre-frame, and no one seeing it could doubt for a moment that it was a new and sophisticated weapon.

‘What you are seeing now,’ Smith continued smoothly, ‘is one of four laser-guns which guard the Eiffel Tower, its perimeter, and the immediate area. Also, naturally, the skies above it.’

A curious double vocal effect began to creep in as the outside camera lingered on the Lap-Laser. Smith’s message was being simultaneously piped through the tower’s broadcast system. Monstrously amplified, it boomed out over the silent crowds. The ENG’s sound camera picked it up and transmitted it, along with the clean feed from Smith’s ‘studio’.

From the telephone, Sonya said, ‘It’s Richard Ravensberg. I’ve asked him to wait.’ Philpott signalled ‘message received’. Smith’s message was indeed being received, all over Paris, all over France, and in Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg, all countries which can tune into French television channels.

‘Let me tell you a little about these guns, or Lap-Lasers, as they are known,’ Smith went on. ‘I borrowed them, as it were, from the United States Army, who were testing them at a base near Stuttgart. They are possibly the most destructive weapons, on a small scale, ever devised. Of course, they cannot rival a hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb – but then nobody profits from the use of nuclear weapons. No – what the laser-gun will do, fully armed as these are, is track and destroy, destroy utterly, anything entering the perimeter area of the Eiffel Tower, whether on the ground or in the air.’ Smith leaned forward, his expression solemn and concerned.

‘I would advise the people gathered here, and the police, and the French Army, not to attempt to challenge these weapons, which are operating now on the face of the tower. That is all I have to say for the moment. I shall broadcast again in one hour. Au revoir.’

The screen blanked out, and in Government offices, in bars, homes and shops throughout Paris, the reaction was one of numbed, fearful, enormous shock.

In Washington and London, Moscow and Peking. Cairo and Brussels. Presidents and pressmen scanned incoming telexes and panic-stricken diplomatic cables with mounting incredulity.

Philpott raced to the ’phone. ‘Roger,’ he rapped, ‘did you see it? All of it? Good. Now what I want you to do is this: I know Smith – his methods, his persona. I’ve studied him. Also I know a lot about these Lap-Lasers – because they’re the really import ant factor, you realize? Without the lasers there, we might have a chance, although obviously we couldn’t risk Adela’s life. But with Smith in possession of the lasers, the authorities are – completely – totally – powerless. Clear?

‘OK. Well, it’s just possible I and my people may be able to tip the balance. Strictly for your ears alone – and I mean this, Roger … it must go no further. Your word? Done. Well … I have two operatives on the inside – in the tower. Now I want you to fix it with the French Government – and you must know by now that I have Giscard’s Red priority, anyway – fix it for Sonya and me and UNACO to get in on the act. Like now. OK? Good. ’Phone me back.’ He slammed the receiver down, and said to Sonya. ‘We wait.’

Less than a minute later, the telephone sounded again. Philpott snatched it up and said, ‘Roger? Who? Oh … oh, I see. No, of course. I’ll hold.’ He looked at Sonya and shook his head, slowly, but not in defeat; in sympathy.

Then he put the receiver to his ear once more. ‘Yes, Mr President,’ he said. ‘It’s Malcolm. I know, sir, I know … I hope to give us an edge. Of course, of course – anything that could possibly cause even a hint of danger to Mrs Wheeler is clearly out of the question.

‘No, sir, no,’ he went on, ‘you have my absolute promise on that. Sure, I’ll calm things down, and I’ll be honoured to act as your personal re presentative, interpreting your wishes. Please don’t worry about that, Mr President. And – Warren. Have faith. OK, I’ll keep in touch.’ He cradled the machine, and it rang again almost at once.

It was the American Ambassador. UNACO were more than acceptable to the incident team Ravensberg said. In fact – Philpott could consider himself as being virtually in charge of the operation. ‘And Malcolm – make sure the right side wins. The world is watching us – and the President considers Smith to be an appalling threat to international security.’

At last Philpott smiled, albeit ruefully. Then he snapped into action. ‘Come on,’ he said to Sonya. ‘First stop, the French Ministry of the Interior. We have a hell of a lot to do. Pray God we’re in time.’

Whatever the spectacle, people have the sometimes dangerous habit of pushing small children to the front of a crowd, so that they can get a full view of the proceedings. The Eiffel Tower crowd was no exception.

A little girl of perhaps seven, blonde hair caught up in bunches and held with ribbon, stood between two policemen, open-mouthed, clutching a large chequered ball.

Her mother held her by the shoulder, but her own attention was fixed unswervingly on the tower, although she could see nothing that mattered. The child, from sudden, frustrated boredom, bounced the chequered ball and failed to catch it. Worse, in her attempt to hold on to it, she hit it with her knee, and it rolled out across the road … and trickled towards the chalk-marked perimeter area of the tower.

With an annoyed squeal, the girl broke from her mother’s grasp and ran for the ball.

Her mother screamed, and started after the child, but the police cordon held her in check. Some twenty feet along the fringe of the straining mass of people, a burly young man swept a policeman aside and streaked frantically in the wake of the little girl.

On the tower, a Lap-Laser moved fractionally to the left. The mouse-ear antennae pricked up, then started tracking the running figures. The computer picked the smaller target first, and the generator trucks beneath the tower sent power surging into the gun.

The running man dived just as the child reached her obstinately trickling toy. He scooped her up inches short of the chalk line, whose delineation had been dictated by Smith.

The ball rolled over the line. The laser-gun moved at lightning speed. Its tube gleamed brilliant white. The outline of the ball glowed incandescently … And there was nothing. The ball simply disappeared. All that was left to show where it had been was a puff of smoke curling up from the tarmac.

The little girl’s mother clutched her fiercely to her body, sobbing and rocking the child. There was total silence in the crowd around her. They stared at the smoke whiff in stunned, unbelieving horror.

Their limousine pulled up at the French Interior Ministry, and Philpott and Sonya got out and ran inside. Still the most notable feature of the skyline was the implacable giraffe of the Eiffel Tower.

Without ceremony, they were taken straight to the lofty conference room, where Guillaume Ducret, the Minister, was meeting representatives of the police, Army and Civil Defence forces. Ducret held out his hand in manifest relief and said, ‘Mr Philpott. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.’ He introduced them all round.

Ducret, a handsome and aristocratic French politician of the Giscard-Malraux school, started to quiz Philpott when the door burst open again, and Police Commissioner August Poupon threw himself through it. He was all nervous energy, Poupon, but effective in a crisis. He was followed in quick order by Roger Ravensberg, trailing a brace of four-star US Army generals – Holmwood and Hornbecker – plus aides, and then by French military and industrial chiefs.

General Hornbecker and General Jaubert fell to discussing who could cause the most earth-shattering cataclysm in the shortest time. Jaubert declared, ‘I have a squadron of Mirage bombers in the air right now. They could be on the way in seconds.’

Hornbecker replied, scornfully, ‘The Lap-Lasers will take them out in seconds! Now we could pick the lasers off with some very special missiles we have …’

‘Which would blow the Eiffel Tower, and Mrs Wheeler, and half of Paris sky-high,’ Philpott put in cuttingly. ‘No, gentlemen. Monsieur Ducret and I have been placed in command of this operation. If we need your assistance, we will call on it; and we probably shall – but on our terms. Until we do, I shall be obliged if, unless you have anything truly helpful to contribute, you remain silent.’ It was rough, but effective: in the last analysis, the only way to treat generals.

Ducret coughed, and broke the embarrassed silence. Jaubert and Hornbecker, united at last, glared their collective loathing at Philpott. Ducret said, ‘May I suggest that our priority should be to learn all we can about the man who has committed this monstrous crime – the criminal who calls himself Mister Smith. Mr Philpott? You can help us there, I believe.’

Philpott cleared his throat and frowned. ‘Smith is one of the world’s most extraordinary criminals, that’s true, Minister,’ he said. ‘He’s fantastically rich, but he has this dreadful urge … compulsion, to commit outlandish crimes. Freudian, possibly, but I believe he gets his kicks that way. No interest in politics or people; only crime … exalts him. So every year or so, he organizes a complex, brilliant, and normally successful criminal operation. He seems to be invulnerable. He thinks he is, anyway, which could be even more dangerous.’

Ducret inquired, ‘Do we know anything that we are sure he’s been responsible for?’

Philpott turned to Sonya. ‘Mrs Kolchinsky? She – she will tell you, gentlemen. She has the facts.’

Sonya itemized Smith’s catalogue of atrocity. ‘It was he,’ she said, ‘who stole sixty kilos of fission-grade Uranium U-235 from the Nuclear Fuel Fabrication plant at Blythe, Wyoming, in 1963. You remember? He held San Diego successfully to ransom for ten million dollars? Twenty dead in the panic.

‘Two. In 1976, he sold a load of stolen Russian hand weapons – super-advanced equipment from their experimental test ground in Nevyansk – to terrorists in Libya. They turned up all over the place. A hundred and fifty dead in Manchester, England; two hundred in Tokyo; that air liner over Haifa; the Darmstadt massacre. Not Smith, I grant you – but Smith was the catalyst.’

Sonya looked from face to face. ‘Do you want me to go on? The Channel Islands bank heist? Remember? Hell, he practically hi-jacked Jersey; commandos all over the island.’ She started to tick off another, but Ducret intervened. ‘No, Mrs Kolchinsky, that will be enough, thank you. But why have I, any of us, never heard of a man like this? A man who actually lives in a Loire château, and apparently spends enormous sums of money here in my country.’

Philpott explained. ‘He always disguises his identity. I hate to use the phrase, but he is a master of disguise. He can change his appearance so completely that his closest associates will fail to recognize him. Five years ago in Tokyo he appeared as a German: he speaks God knows how many languages. He was a Spaniard in Johannesburg two years back. But the main point about him, which I feel you have yet failed to appreciate, is that: whatever identity he assumes, when Smith issues a demand, it is axiomatic that he will make it as difficult as possible to avoid compliance.’

‘You’re saying he will give us no room to manoeuvre,’ Ravensberg put in.

‘Exactly,’ Philpott replied. ‘Absolutely none. However, we’ve managed to make some room for ourselves. Gentlemen,’ Philpott sighed heavily, ‘there is no time for me to extract promises from you not to broadcast around what I’m going to tell you, so I’ll take it on trust that you won’t. My organization, UNACO, has planted two agents in Smith’s team on the Eiffel Tower.’

The response was gratifying, although muted by the realization that, as Philpott said, ‘Whatever advantage it gives us, we can’t capitalize on it for the moment, because we’re out of touch with our people. So, not to gloss over the matter, we still know damn-all about what’s going on up there.’ He pointed out of the window at the tower.

Mike Graham looked keenly at the group gathered around him in the kitchen. Sabrina’s special talent made her the leader; the other three commandos were make-weight, but would obey orders. A plan of the tower lay before them on the table, held down incongruously by four bulky explosive charges.

Graham’s finger jabbed at the plan. ‘Here, here, here and here – the stress points. That’s where I calculate the tower is at its weakest – the fulcrums, so to speak. Hit them – and whoompf.’ He spread his hands wide, palm downwards. ‘No more Eiffel Tower.’

‘At each point?’ Sabrina asked. ‘A full charge?’

Mike nodded. ‘Uh-huh. A twenty-five pounder.’ He picked up a detonator from a steel box. ‘And one of these. This is a radioactivated detonator. It’s completely safe until activated by a radio signal. But once the command to arm has been delivered, it cannot be countermanded. However long the fuse duration is – that’s the time you’ve got to get clear. If you can.’

As it happened two of the commandos weren’t even good ballast; they were scared stiff of heights. Tote contemptuously elbowed one out of the way and roughly hauled the other from the harness perched on the gallery rail. He took the quaking man’s place, jumped down the side of the tower, and fitted two charges of moulded explosive. Sabrina and the third commando did the others. Like Tote, she scorned the use of the restraining harness.

She worked, as always, quickly and with a seemingly inborn skill, swinging surely out on the angled iron struts, taping the rolls of pliable greyish-pink plastique into the girder-beds, and pressing home the detonators. At the end of it, the bombs, mocking the innocence of their classroom plasticine substance, sat snugly like sinister bird’s nests in the branches of the tower.

Sabrina flashed the uneasy commando above her a grateful smile. He may be scared, she thought, but at least he’s competent. The commando offered her a hand to help her up, but she waved it impatiently away. ‘Look after yourself,’ she instructed, ‘you’re in more danger than I am.’

The man shrugged, and balanced nonchalantly astride a cross-beam intended to take him to the safety of the spiral staircase. He lunged for the guard rail – and missed. His scream rang out on the air as he swivelled on the beam and tried to hook his legs around it.

The iron cut into the backs of his knees, and the pain reflexes straightened his legs. With a second wild, throaty cry, he fell from the beam. His body cannoned off an angle strut, and passed Sabrina close enough for her to feel the wind of its passage and the agony of his despair.

She anchored herself securely to an upright, and shot out a rigid arm and hand to grasp his own flailing fingers. It fastened on his hand, nails digging into the flesh, the grip moving to enclose his wrist like an iron band. The wrench on her corded muscles as she took the full strain of his body almost dislocated her shoulder, but she gasped with the numbing pain and gritted her teeth, trying to control the ugly rasp of the breath forced from her heaving chest.

Tote, from the opposite side of the tower, shouted, ‘Hang on! Hold him!’ What, Sabrina thought wildly, does he think I’m trying to do?

‘Get your feet on a girder!’ she screamed, as the squirming man on the end of her arm kicked aimlessly out into space. Even Sabrina’s strength was fast giving out, and she knew it would be a matter only of seconds before she must release him or join him in his death fall.

‘For Christ’s sake, I can’t hold you!’ she yelled. The girder she was clinging to bit into her muscles and sent waves of pain coursing through her body. Her fingers started to slip from the ironwork, her toes curled to ease the intolerable pressure, and she felt herself bowing and slumping down the beam. A sobbing moan of terror and frustration escaped from her clenched teeth.

Then it was over. The tension relaxed so suddenly as Tote, from below, swung across to catch the commando in a crushing hug, that Sabrina almost let go of the upright. She caught herself in time, and her body snapped back to embrace the girder, spacing her legs and arms away from the metal edges that were denting and ridging her flesh.

She heaved herself gratefully up to the gallery, and lay on the floor, blinking back tears of relief, and at last breathing deeply and evenly. Tote dumped the commando unceremoniously next to her. She turned to the man. ‘You all right?’ she whispered. Dumbly, he nodded. ‘Yeah, thanks,’ he replied. Then he gasped and retched as Tote’s booted foot caught him in the side.

‘I’ll say you’re all right,’ the Finn growled. ‘You one lucky sonofabitch, your hear me, man? Me, I’d have dropped you. You hear that?’ He kicked the commando again. The man grunted and coughed a spray of blood.

‘Worse t’ing you do,’ Tote continued remorselessly, ‘is you nearly kill her. You, we can do without. She’s worth ten of you – a hundred. You hear? I ever see you again, I kick you off the – tower myself.’

Beneath the tower, the area was all bustle and activity. The Larousse trucks formed a circle like settler’s wagons against marauding Indians. Inside the enclosure, Claude and C.W. led a team unspooling massive lengths of cable from a truck, and transporting them to an underground chamber.

They clamped the cables on to the tower’s main power line. Other members of the crew brought in several small cartons, which they stacked against the wall as company for a couple of beer tanks.

As before, the cable-linking was a nerve-racking job, and when it was done, C.W. stepped back from the bench and mopped the sweat from his brow. He looked for a freshener, and his eye fell on the beer tanks. He loped over to them, hunkered down, put his mouth under the spigot, and turned the valve.

Nothing came from the nozzle but the hiss of compressed air. ‘Jeeze,’ C.W. complained, ‘there’s an awful lot of bubbles in your beer, Claude.’ Claude whipped round and barked, ‘Don’t touch that. If you want a drink, wait until you get upstairs.’

C.W. rose to his feet and shrugged. The drink he could do without … but the knowledge that at least some of Smith’s beer tanks were filled with oxygen might come in handy.

Not for the first time, the black man cudgelled his agile brain for some way of getting the priceless information he had off the tower and into Philpott’s hands. Here, in the basement, on the ground, he was so close to safety. All he had to do was cut and run. Except, he thought ruefully, that Claude would blast his head off before he’d taken half a dozen steps …

The activity at the Interior Ministry was more controlled now. Philpott and Ducret kept useless talk down to the minimum, and concentrated on getting the best scientific and military advice on how to deal with the lasers.

At one stage it seemed as if they might have achieved a break-through, when a tall, gangling, humourless French boffin came up with a startingly obvious solution.

‘The guns operate on light-beams,’ he explained earnestly, ‘so all you have to do is reflect the – how you say? – death ray back at the Lap-Laser.’

Philpott leapt to his feet. ‘Mirrors, by God!’ he exploded. ‘That’s it! Big mirrors! Catch the beam, and bend it back. Why didn’t we think of that before?’

He set the scientific team to work, but they mournfully reported half an hour later that if the angle of refraction wasn’t absolutely correct, the bouncing beam could shear off large sections of the Eiffel Tower and miss the lasers altogether.

‘Can’t you fix the angle of refraction and keep it fixed?’ Philpott pleaded, desperately. ‘When you’re running with a damned great looking-glass?’ the tall boffin moaned. ‘Or when all they have to do is alter the angle of the laser anyway, and you’re in even deeper trouble than before?’

Philpott reluctantly conceded defeat. He scowled when Ravensberg, in some trepidation, reported that both Capitol Hill and the Élysée Palace wanted action – fast. ‘Tell ’em they’ll get it when I think fit, and not before,’ Philpott snarled. ‘Tell Washington I’ll save Mrs Wheeler even if I have to pay Smith his thirty million bucks. Tell Paris I’ll save their money even if I have to endanger Mrs Wheeler’s life. Above all, make it clear that I’m in command. Tell anyone you meet that I can be a real bastard if I’m crossed.’

Ducret glanced across at him sympathetically. ‘You appreciate what’s happening, my friend,’ he ventured. ‘Only too well,’ Philpott replied, ‘but tell me, anyway.’

Ducret studied his exquisitely tidy hands. ‘From the French viewpoint,’ he said, ‘our President is delighted that you’re in command, as you say, because you are an American, and if you fail it will be an American failure. If one girder of the Eiffel Tower falls, you and your country will be held to account. If one American dollar passes from our Treasury to Mister Smith, it will be your fault, not ours.’

Philpott nodded, gloomily. ‘It’s the same on my side,’ he admitted. ‘Should anything happen to the President’s mother, I have no doubt whatsoever that, despite my long-standing friendship with Warren Wheeler, my department will close down virtually overnight. I shall be lucky if I can get a job teaching woodwork in a ghetto junior school.’

‘What will you do, then?’

‘Politically? Play one off against the other until I get what I want. When you’re part of the United Nations, Ducret, you get used to walking on razor-blades. With me, it’s a way of life. But I normally do get what I want.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Smith,’ Philpott replied unhesitatingly. ‘That’s what I want – Smith. I want to take him out, Ducret. And by God I will.’

‘You’re willing to stake your department, your career, on it?’ Ducret inquired.

‘I am. Perhaps even my life.’

Ducret sighed. ‘Then I can only hope that the decisions you make in the next few hours are the right ones.’

Philpott grinned. ‘Or that I can persuade Giscard and Wheeler that they’re the right ones,’ he mused.

So the scheming and counter-scheming went on, and the hot line between the two Presidents, Warren G. Wheeler and Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, buzzed with traffic. Eventually, they were compelled to consider paying Smith off, though neither realized that they had been cunningly manipulated to this conclusion by Malcolm G. Philpott.

Marcel Le Grain, the Finance Minister, was called into the conference room. ‘Let me make my position quite clear from the outset,’ the burly, pugnacious ex-Rugby football forward stated. ‘If you give in to this bandit, I shall resign and take the key of the Treasury with me.

‘You cannot, and you must not, encourage the forces of anarchy that threaten the very foundation of our economic well-being. I say we grind this Monsieur Smith into the ground like an insect.’ He demonstrated by gouging his heel deeply into the carpet. Ducret winced, and added, ‘Splendid, Marcel. And of course, none of us will overlook the fact that, apart from anything else, it is also election year.’

Philpott chuckled, and Le Grain was about to frame a barbed response when an aide tactfully buttonholed Ducret and pointed to the TV screen. ‘Our newest star is about to go nova again,’ he said.

They clustered around the set. Smith graciously allowed a commercial to wind up, then removed RTF from service and brought in the tower.

He looked grim. ‘It is now,’ he announced, ‘1 p.m. If the thirty million dollars I have requested is not in my hands within twelve hours, I and my associates will leave the tower – under the protection of our laser-guns. Shortly thereafter, four simultaneous explosions will reduce the Eiffel Tower to a scrap heap.

‘I am sure,’ Smith continued, ‘that you would not wish that to happen. I am equally convinced that President Wheeler will not relish the thought that his mother will be in the tower when it goes up – because she will not, I regret to say, be accompanying us.’

Smith allowed a few moments for the information to sink in, then produced an emotive trump card. ‘But why not let the lady speak for herself?’ he suggested. The camera panned slowly to the left. Adela Wheeler sat at Smith’s side.

‘Do you expect me to plead for you, Mister Smith? Or for my life?’ she demanded, bitingly.

‘It is of small concern to me what you do, Mrs Wheeler.’ Smith replied, and walked out of camera shot.

Adela Wheeler turned to face the camera. No American watching her could fail to have swelled with pride. She might have been a frontierswoman daring Geronimo or Santa Anna to do their worst. To Philpott, she seemed like the Statue of Liberty come to life.

‘That is a silly, greedy man,’ Mrs Wheeler sneered. ‘If anyone out there wishes to ransom the Eiffel Tower, then that is their business. But do not, I beg you, take my presence here into account. Like the Eiffel Tower, I have been around a long time. It could be that both of us have outlived our usefulness.

‘That I should join this extraordinary tower on the auction block to satisfy a lunatic megalomaniac at my time of life is unthinkable – obscene. Do not give in to him. Destroy him. His kind are not fit to breathe the same air as we do. If you want to part with your hard-earned francs, then send it to the International Children’s Relief Fund. They need it. Smith doesn’t.’

Ravensberg jumped to his feet. ‘That’s my girl!’ he chanted. ‘Sock it to him, Adela, hot and strong.’ Ducret murmured, ‘Hear, hear – although I do not think Mister Smith will like it.’

The camera came off Mrs Wheeler and slid hurriedly back to Smith. His rage was barely controllable. ‘Whatever this gallant but foolish old woman says – you have twelve hours. That is all!’

NINE

Smith prowled around the tower restaurant, frustration gnawing at his patience. This was the part of every operation that he loathed … the waiting game, while the fools on the other side debated how they could vanquish him and save their precious money.

He snorted in derision. If only they knew how little he cared about their money! He wanted only their pride and their will-power laid in shreds at his feet. He wanted them grovelling, and acknow ledging him as master. He desired the unsurpassable thrill of danger, and of victory. Defeat Mister Smith? The very notion was absurd! He had never been defeated. He never would be. He was truly invulnerable – the greatest brain in criminal history.

Smith sneered as he imagined the cohorts of politicos, generals and policemen scheming assault after assault on the tower, then drawing back as they remembered the all-powerful lasers. The city officials would announce grandly that they had the solution: cut off the electricity supply, and render the lasers harmless.

Then they would hear the constant, jeering rumble of his generator trucks, and realize that he didn’t need their power – he had his own. Smith chuckled. Someone might even come up with the ridiculous suggestion that you could reflect the laser beams with mirrors. Let them try, he thought. It would be the grandest firework display of all.

He poured himself a cognac, drank it at a gulp, and motioned to Claude. ‘It’s time we took some more – ummm – precautionary measures, I think? What do you say, Claude?’ Claude glanced at the top team and the other commandos draped around the room, dozing, playing cards, or chatting desultorily. ‘The guns?’ he queried. Smith nodded. ‘Tactfully, Claude, tactfully.’

Claude made the diplomatic announcement: all personnel to report to the command post, with their weapons. Smith was there to receive his forces.

‘I dislike bloodshed,’ he began, pompously, ‘and most of all, I abhor unnecessary accidents. While you are armed, but not conspicuously alert, accidents could occur leading perhaps to bloodshed. I propose to remove the risk by requisitioning your weapons.’

There was a murmur of alarm from the group; Tote, particularly, did not favour the idea. Graham and C.W. looked immensely suspicious, and smelled a giant-sized rat. But, one by one, under the watchful gaze of Smith, and the cradled guns of Claude and Leah, they complied.

‘Could this also imply a certain lack of trust?’ Sabrina asked, as she filed past the dais and surrendered her AK 47 automatic rifle and MA 28 Meisner machine pistol. ‘Not at all, my dear,’ Smith assured her, ‘what absolute nonsense. It’s merely, as I said, to avoid the possibility of errors.’

Graham said, pointedly, ‘Are you and Claude and Leah going to avoid the possibility of errors happening too, Mister Smith?’

Smith looked at him sharply. ‘Someone has to be armed, Mike,’ he replied. ‘Naturally, it will be myself and my closest associates.’

Graham and C.W. were on the point of launching a combined protest, when the telephone rang. Pei picked it up, and waved excitedly to Smith. ‘It is the Minister of the Interior, Monsieur Ducret, sir.’

Smith grinned smugly. ‘As I forecast,’ he said. ‘A little ahead of time, but they have come to their senses.’ He crossed to the ’phone.

Ducret made it plain that he was not in the mood to haggle over Smith’s demands. ‘Excellent,’ Smith purred. ‘Neither am I. What, then, can I do for you, Minister?’

Ducret cleared his throat. ‘The Finance Minister,’ he said, ‘tells me that to amass and count the staggering sum you require cannot be accomplished in the time you have allowed us. He requests that you extend the deadline until 10 a.m. tomorrow.’

Smith’s complacent smile slipped away. ‘That is out of the question,’ he declared flatly. ‘We shall quit the tower and detonate the explosives at precisely one o’clock in the morning, unless by that time I have thirty million dollars, in unmarked bills, in my hands. When you get the money, and not before, contact me again, and I will arrange a safety procedure for the men bringing it to the tower. That will not, by the way, involve immobilizing my laser-guns.’

The conversation was being relayed on loudspeakers throughout the Ministry conference room. Ducret raised his eyebrows to Philpott and Poupon, who were now the prime movers on their side. Philpott scribbled furiously on a pad, and handed the note to Poupon, who passed it to Ducret.

The Minister continued, ‘I’m afraid it simply is not possible, Mister Smith. You’re a highly intelligent man, and I am sure you must appreciate that the task is beyond us. However, I have been authorized to offer you half the sum, fifteen million dollars, by ten o’clock this evening. That’s all the US currency we have in the country, as far as we can trace. The rest we’re getting from Switzerland and Luxembourg – but it takes time.’

There was a pause from the tower; then Smith conceded the point. ‘Very well, Ducret,’ he said, ‘fifteen million dollars by ten o’clock tonight. But I am not giving you a further twelve hours to get the rest. You must place it in my hands by 4 a.m. at the latest. That is my final concession. Agreed?’

Ducret replied, ‘A moment, Mister Smith. I’ll put you on “hold”. I must confer with my colleagues.’

He looked at Philpott. ‘Well? Why is time so urgent to him? And what do I say now?’

Philpott guessed aloud that Smith wished to be paid before daylight; or perhaps his generators were due to run out at dawn, or thereabouts. Then a thought struck him. ‘Of course, there’s one thing we haven’t discussed generally, although Commissioner Poupon and I have considered it.’

‘And what is that?’

‘How in God’s name Smith plans to get safely off the tower once he has the ransom, and the lasers are presumably switched off.’

Ducret considered the point. ‘If you have no ideas,’ he confessed, ‘then neither have I. So I suppose we have little choice but to agree.’

He reopened the tower line. ‘I am waiting, Monsieur Ducret,’ Smith said acidly, ‘but my patience is not inexhaustible. Do I get what I want?’

Ducret replied, ‘Yes, Mister Smith. You do.’ And he put down the ’phone.

Sabrina wandered by the railed gallery, seeking a breath of fresh air. Graham approached her from the opposite direction, and they leaned on the rail together. He lit a cigarette, and said to her, quietly, ‘You’re extremely elegant for a thief, Sabrina.’

Sabrina’s heart pumped; was he still teasing her? Was the crunch coming now? While it was still not too late for Smith to dispose of her – but leaving no chance for her to contact Philpott?

She forced herself to smile – languidly, she hoped. ‘Why, thank you, Mike,’ she said lightly. ‘Of course, it’s not my only hobby.’

Graham grinned, ‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ he said. He smoked lazily, and they both looked out over the city. ‘Funny thing,’ he drawled, ‘I – uh –’ the words tailed off.

‘You what, Mike?’ she asked.

‘Oh – just one of those feelings. I’ve had it ever since we met, and I can’t shake it.’

‘What is it?’ Careful, she thought, careful; play it for all you’re worth.

Graham looked at her, smiling. ‘I just believe I’ve seen you before, somewhere,’ he drawled, ‘some time or other. Simple as that. Nothing serious – huh?’

‘No, no,’ she said a little too quickly, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘It’s entirely possible that you have seen me before – although I honestly don’t think we’ve met. But you see, once upon a time I was a model, a cover girl, that sort of thing. My picture got around a bit. It was all very boring.’

There was silence from Graham. He drew deeply on his cigarette, then blew out the smoke in his lungs and admitted, ‘Yeah, that could be it. A bit dangerous for you, though, I’d have thought, getting your face on the front of Vogue.’

She nodded enthusiastically. ‘It was. That was why I gave it up.’

He said, ‘Oh, sure. I agree that we can’t have actually met.’ He looked at her, his eyes shrewdly appraising. ‘I certainly would never forget a gorgeous chick like you if we’d even said hello, let alone held hands.’

Sabrina flushed. ‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she simpered. Graham’s eyes held her own; then his gaze moved out again and he sprang to alertness.

‘Hey,’ he whispered, pointing to the parkland beyond the tower perimeter, ‘looks like the marines have landed.’

She followed his finger. Military vehicles were jockeying into position, and impressive numbers of well-armed foot soldiers poured out of them.

Sabrina said, ‘Is it serious, d’you think?’

Mike shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, and after a moment added, ‘let’s see if we’re still repelling boarders.’

He flicked the cigarette far out on to the cool breeze. It travelled about ten yards, and started to spiral earthwards, when there was a brilliant white flash from above. The cigarette incinerated.

Claude had crept up softly behind them; he was an inveterate eavesdropper. He touched Graham on the shoulder, and Mike spun round. ‘You should watch your smoking,’ the scar-faced Frenchman advised. ‘It could be bad for your health.’

As the sun started to sink, bathing the tower in a rosy haze, the military activity in the parkland of the Palais de Chaillot skirting the tower intensified. In the intervening hours, a low barrier had been erected most of the way round the tower. It marked precisely the thousand metre line from the centre of the tower, and it was all the generals could think of doing.

They had established a No-man’s-land between the barrier and the line of troops and military trucks – a gap of about a hundred feet. The only vehicle inside the no-go area was a police communications van.

The van had been rigged up as a complete communications centre, putting Philpott and Commis sioner Poupon in constant touch with anyone they wished – including the tower and the US President. The transfer of the command post had been Philpott’s idea. Fed up with inactivity, he had decided to come marginally out into the open, and convey somehow to Sabrina and C.W. that an urgent contact was needed.

‘It was Smith who supplied the motive power,’ he explained to Poupon. ‘That crack he made about a safety procedure for the people bringing the money up to the tower. I had assumed, obviously, that the people in the tower must have some sort of protective machinery, otherwise the lasers would find them and burn them whenever they so much as came near the railing.

‘Smith confirmed it. So I must assume that C.W., in particular, will try to get away, or at least make contact with us. If he’s safe, C.W. can get down that tower in two minutes flat, and avoid ending up like they did –’ he gestured towards the corpses of birds, literally fried, which had flown within the arc of the deadly lasers.

‘But surely,’ Poupon objected, ‘they’ll shoot him from the tower.’

Philpott grinned crookedly. ‘Not unless the lasers are turned off,’ he said. ‘They can gobble up bullets just as easily as birds. And Smith daren’t kill the lasers. We’d be in there like a shot if he did.’

Poupon nodded. ‘Of course. Well, it’s a chance, even if it’s a slim one. But as you say, it’s better than sitting on one’s derrière at the Ministry, hein?’

Philpott chuckled, and added, ‘Don’t expect anything until sundown. C.W. will want the cover of darkness, even though he doesn’t need as much of it as Sabrina would.’

Poupon was mystified. ‘Why ever not?’ he asked.

Philpott chuckled again. ‘He’s as black as the ace of spades,’ he replied. ‘In fact – but for God’s sake don’t tell him I said so – in many ways C. W. Whitlock is the ace of spades.’

A senior police officer knocked respectfully on the door of the van, and ushered in a superintendent from the Paris City Engineer’s Department. Soon, all three were pouring over detailed plans of the Eiffel Tower.

The sun set, reluctantly it seemed, and as the last golden fingers of light caught the tower, a dark shadow moved behind a staircase linking two sections of spidery, criss-cross ironwork, far up the side of the structure. A sound, of some object dropping and striking the frame, echoed faintly, and C.W. froze to the girders.

At the communications van, Sonya, Philpott and Poupon took advantage of the remaining light to train binoculars on the tower. ‘Any luck?’ Philpott grunted. ‘Nothing,’ Sonya replied. ‘There are miles of ironwork there. It’s like – well, you know.’

‘I know,’ Philpott sighed. ‘The light’ll be gone in a few moments,’ Poupon chipped in helpfully.

‘Thanks a million,’ Philpott said sourly. He concentrated on scanning the tower, and muttered, ‘Come on C.W., come on baby.’

The black man felt it was safe to move again. He swung out and shinned across the frame until he was pressed against the girders facing Philpott’s van. He had long since spotted Philpott, although neither he nor Sabrina had needed any prompting to make contact. The trick had been getting away from the restaurant and the ever-vigilant Claude. C.W. had pleaded a call of nature, and slipped through the toilet window. It had been as easy as hanging off an iron tower from your finger-tips.

Now he unclipped the metal tag on his chest, and held it out in front of him. There was still the odd ray of sunlight streaming through the gather ing clouds, and C.W. twisted the metal strip back and forwards, this way and that, praying that a light beam would strike the tag.

Sonya spotted the brief flash, and screamed out, ‘There it is! Just below the second landing. A flash of light! C.W.’s signalling to us. I can even see him, just about.’

Philpott and Poupon swivelled their binoculars. ‘Where?’ Philpott demanded. ‘Opposite that little staircase, right by the support beam.’ Sonya pointed.

‘Got him,’ Philpott breathed. Then, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s using sign language. Sonya, get a pad!’ C.W.’s fingers moved with amazing dexterity, and Philpott translated just as fluently.

‘Take this down,’ he ordered. ‘… incredible – security – precautions … shit, missed that one. Wait … Mrs – Wheeler – OK – so – far. All – personnel – disarmed – except – Smith – and – lieutenants.’

The light had held long enough for C.W. to complete his report. Sonya read it out breathlessly: ‘Smith hasn’t told us escape plan, but training included everything from aqualungs to high wire. Also they have six-berth helicopter at Château Clérignault, in Loire –’ she stopped.

‘What’s next?’ Philpott demanded.

‘Nothing,’ Sonya replied, ‘that’s all. It ended there.’

Philpott rubbed his jaw. ‘A bit abruptly,’ he mused. ‘Could anything have happened to C.W.?’

A hand clamped over C.W.’s mouth and jerked him back into the shadows behind a girder. Graham whispered into his ear, ‘Don’t make a sound.’

C.W.’s eyes snapped upwards. Claude was descending the staircase, a torch in his hand. He paused within feet of C.W. and Graham, and stared fixedly out at the communications van. The light had failed totally now, and Claude whistled under his breath. He shrugged, and climbed back up the staircase to the second level, and took the elevator down to the restaurant. He was still troubled by C.W.’s absence, and it occurred to him that he had not seen Mike Graham, either, in the past ten minutes or so. Or Sabrina Carver.

Mike eased his hand off C.W.’s mouth and hissed, ‘Your fairy godmother has just saved your hide.’ At that instant, a vicious judo chop landed on the side of his neck. He grunted and staggered, his knees buckled, and Sabrina, standing over him, prepared to chop him again.

C.W. caught her descending hand. ‘Not him! He just saved my life.’

Sabrina breathed out. ‘So, you’re even, because you’ve just saved his.’

Graham rubbed his neck ruefully and remarked, ‘You’re a lot tougher now than you were the first time we met. That unarmed combat course you took after I left must have taught you a hell of a lot.’

‘So you did recognize me,’ she gasped. Mike grinned amiably. ‘Once seen, baby …’ he said. ‘Could I forget a form like yours?’ Sabrina sulked.

‘And whose side are you on these days, Mike?’ C.W. enquired.

‘Mine,’ Graham replied, ‘and the CIA’s. Undercover. Effectively, I’ve been working with you.’

‘Then why have you been such a miserable, moody …’ Sabrina burst out.

‘So that, if the pair of you goofed, and got yourselves dead, you wouldn’t take me with you,’ Graham returned. He asked if Philpott had been able to reply to C.W.’s message, and the UNACO agent explained that there had been no time.

‘Pity,’ Mike said. ‘We’ll have to go it alone, then.’

‘You have a plan?’ Sabrina asked.

‘Sort of,’ Mike answered. ‘We’ll have to busk it through … ad lib, if you get my meaning. I’ll tell you what I’ve got in mind, and then we’d better beat it back to the restaurant by separate routes before Claude goes bananas.’

Apart from a suspicious glare from Claude – who, fortunately, had not confided his uneasiness to Smith – their return to the first landing aroused no interest. They drifted in one by one, Graham to resume a hand of cards with Tote and Pei, Sabrina to chat with two pretty Japanese girls who, for Red Army commandos, were well up in Western fashion trends. C.W. slumped in an arm-chair, feigning sleep. Half an hour passed, during which Smith talked briefly with Claude and Leah, and left the room. Ten minutes later, C.W. dragged himself to his feet and announced he was going off to find something that more closely resembled a bed. Nobody appeared to mind.

C.W. took the elevator up, and passed the routine second landing gallery patrol of two men, disarmed now but still under orders to be watchful and report regularly. C.W. calculated it would be three minutes before they reached that spot again.

The sentries returned on time: when you have nothing to do but walk round in circles, it becomes a matter of pride to do it well. Directly they had passed, a coil of rope smuggled on to the tower by C.W. in a cold box, snaked down from above, and dropped clear to the first level. The rope lay in the hollow of a box girder and, but for the projection of the rail, which it loosely rounded, would not be noticed by anyone from the tower – unless they were leaning out. C.W. shinned down the rope, and glided past the landing to the primary level.

The first – and most important – part of Mike Graham’s plan was to get Mrs Wheeler off the tower. If that could be accomplished, they would only have fifteen million pounds of badly-organized metal to worry about. C.W. hung suspended from the dark thread of the slim nylon rope, and inched his way down to the VIP room.

He drew level with the window. Mrs Wheeler, as expected, was there, sitting grim-faced in her chair, staring directly across the room, away from the window. C.W. was on the point of tapping the glass to attract her attention, when she opened her mouth and spoke – apparently to no one.

Right on cue. Smith came into the picture, walking in the direction of the window – but looking at Mrs Wheeler. C.W. froze and made to take himself and the rope out of sight. As he moved carefully across the face of the tower, Mrs Wheeler’s eyes shifted towards the window and locked on to C.W.’s. She gave not the slightest flicker of a response, but looked back at Smith, and held his gaze with hers.

‘I wish I could convince you, Mrs Wheeler,’ Smith was saying, ‘that a heartfelt appeal from you to the authorities would speed up the entire process, avoid possible bloodshed, even loss of life, and totally ensure your own freedom. I do not wish you to betray anyone, least of all yourself; merely to appear on television once again, or speak on the telephone.’

Mrs Wheeler drew herself up grandly. ‘I find the idea that I should plead for my life utterly repulsive, Mister Smith,’ she said. ‘I am a grandmother, I have brought up a man who is now President of the United States, and I will not demean myself by appearing to toady to a barbarian like you. If you want your money, you’re going to have to get it without my help. That is my last word on the subject.’

Smith replied, slyly, ‘I can be very insistent when I wish to be.’

Adela Wheeler laughed, genuinely amused. ‘Thumbscrews?’ she jeered. ‘The Iron Maiden, the Chinese boot, water torture? Perhaps the strappado? Really, Mister Smith, I’m too old and too obstinate for that sort of childish twaddle. Now run along and threaten someone your own age.’

C.W. had braced himself against the girders to ease the pressure on his arms. His hold on the rope relaxed. What he had not reckoned on was that the wind would pick up – had, indeed, been threatening to do so since sun-down, but he had been too preoccupied to notice. The rope was caught by a gust, and flapped against the external metal wall of the room.

Smith’s head whipped round, like a striking snake’s. Quickly Adela Wheeler boomed, in her most formidable voice, ‘Mister Smith! I have asked you to leave. Surely even a prisoner has the right not to be bored by her jailer. Now please go! We have no more to say to each other.’

Smith evidently decided that the noise outside meant nothing. He returned Mrs Wheeler’s challenging stare, and gave her a mocking bow. ‘Madame,’ he said, courteously, ‘I can well see how you came to be the mother of a great president – and how President Wheeler came to be the man he is. For the moment, goodbye.’ He wheeled and left the room, locking the door behind him. Mrs Wheeler remained motionless for a long, long two minutes, hoping that the man outside the window would do the same.

Her innately suspicious mind reaped its reward. Smith crept noiselessly back to the room, and peered through the glass panel – first at Mrs Wheeler, then at the window. Adela felt his gaze burning into her, but did not deign to acknowledge him. She leaned back in her chair, composed her interlinked fingers on her lap, and closed her eyes. Smith’s never left the window. For another full minute and a half he stood there. Then, satisfied, he walked away.

C.W., who had been on the point of swinging back to contact Mrs Wheeler, saw Smith’s face reflected in a vanity mirror hanging on the wall behind her chair. He jerked the rope tight, and pressed himself into the ironwork until he felt he was becoming part of the fabric of the tower. It was excruciating, but it worked.

Adela breathed a sigh, and swiftly crossed to the window and opened it. ‘It’s all right,’ she called. ‘The wretched man is gone.’ C.W. hoisted himself on to the window-sill, tucked the rope back into the girder, and climbed into the VIP room.

The iron staircase, which spiralled at intervals, and broke on to platform landings of its own, actually connected the first and second levels of the tower. Claude, restless as always, and not being able to locate the supposedly sleeping black commando, had taken the elevator once more to the second level to check on things up there. He had his Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder.

He walked round the gallery, met and chatted with the patrol, and told them, unnecessarily, to keep their eyes peeled. When they left to resume their beat, Claude stepped to the rail and peered over. All was in darkness but for the lights from the first level, and the arc-lamps mounted on poles at the sizeable military encampment across in the palace gardens. The crowd appeared at last to have drifted away. The thousand-metre perimeter at that point was now marked by a series of road lamps and a hastily contrived electric fence, guarded by lines of police.

Claude grinned, and experienced a feeling of great well-being. His composure shattered when he heard the distinct slap of C.W.’s rope, caught once more by the rising wind, against the ironwork. Claude unslung his rifle, flipped off the safety-catch, and cautiously descended the stairway.

Mike Graham sensed his coming, then heard it. Graham was himself on the stairs, half-way between levels. He slid off the steps and outside the frame of the tower, wishing he had a gun – a knife – anything. Claude passed him. Soundlessly, Mike crept back on to the iron platform.

Claude felt his way down the steps, cursing his lack of foresight in not bringing a torch. Then he saw the rope, quite clearly. It had slipped from its mooring, and was pulling away from, and thudding back on to, the girder, as the wind raced and moaned through the latticework of the tower. Claude stepped on to a cross-beam, and peered downwards. He thought he saw something at the end of the rope. He lifted his rifle, and sighted on it, his finger curling round the trigger.

Graham’s full weight crashed down on his shoulders in a flying leap from the stairway. Claude screamed, and the rifle slipped from his grasp.

It struck a girder, and bounced off into the crisp night air on the still rising breeze. From overhead, a Lap-Laser tracked it, glowed white, and sent a beam of blinding light after it. The Kalashnikov, metal and all, was reduced to ashes in half a second.

Claude rose savagely to his feet, and tackled the man who had dive-bombed him They were matched for strength, and they clutched and fought in silence, to the howling of the wind.

Mike got a neck-hold on him, but the Frenchman suddenly relaxed his entire body. Mike’s grip loosened momentarily and Claude wriggled free. He jumped down to the next platform, which linked with a catwalk taking a path across the tower to the head of the next stairway … the last flight before the restaurant level.

There, Claude turned on Graham and snarled his defiance. He adopted a savate stance, and beckoned to Mike. ‘Venez, venez,’ he hissed. ‘Come, little one. I will take you to pieces.’

Mike reached the platform, but went no further. He had seen Claude demonstrate his skill at French foot-fighting. At that, and at the Chinese martial arts, Claude was without peer in France.

He had to land but one vital kick, and he would send Graham hurtling down the tower to his death.

TEN

On tip-toe, but with his feet well spaced for balance, Claude advanced along the catwalk towards Graham. Mike was half-crouching, side on to Claude, in a classic judo stance to present as small a target as possible. Claude stood ramrod straight, hands sloping downwards at thirty degrees from his body, fingers extended, his poise and strength going into the preparation needed for the jump-kick which is the hallmark of the savate fighter.

All the light they had was the dim glow from the first level, the moon, and the phosphorescent haze that every city throws up. The first stabbing kick came from nowhere, too fast for Mike even to sense, though he ducked in anticipation. It landed on the upper part of his right arm, and Graham felt like he’d been injected with a road drill.

He hissed out his pain and leapt back on to the platform. The wind rose to mock him, whipping his hair over his eyes, and causing him to raise both arms as if he were fending off demons attacking him from every direction. But there was only one demon, and he was right in front of Graham, dancing in again, seeking for the one solid death kick that would put the contest beyond argument.

Mike nursed his right arm, knowing that he had been lucky the first time: Claude had tried for his belly, and Graham had unknowingly lurched too soon into a lower crouch.

Claude aimed next for the knee – the part of Graham nearest to him as Mike resumed his defensive hunch. Claude folded his own wiry body into a question mark, left the catwalk nine inches under his feet, snapped his frame back almost to the horizontal, and lashed out.

This time Graham was ready. He guessed where Claude would strike, skipped to one side and threw himself forward, chopping down viciously with his hand at the Frenchman’s extended leg.

But Claude’s leg was no longer there. He had executed a mid-air pirouette, and was now shooting out his other deadly foot backwards. This kick, too, found its mark: on Graham’s shin. But it lacked the power even of the first assault, and did no more than raise an ugly welt on the American’s leg.

Claude twisted his body again and, like a gymnast, landed perfectly balanced at the crouch, heels together, arms out-flung. Graham charged at him now in frustration and sheer rage, and aimed a kick at Claude’s apparently unprotected body. Claude laughed, and threw himself into a backwards somersault on the catwalk – jogging into an upright-striking stance.

Mike pounced once more – sure that his superior weight and reach must give him an irresistible momentum … it was the chance for which Claude had been waiting.

He crowed in delight, and left the metal floor in the kick that would be the coup-de-grâce, the terminal move in an unequal struggle.

And the realization of the terrible danger into which he was rushing pell-mell, rampaged through Graham’s brain and brought his headlong charge to a sudden, numbing halt. Claude had already embarked on the movement that was to guarantee him a crushing victory – a kick that would strike with appalling force at Mike’s heart, killing him instantly, and sending his corpse tumbling through the spider’s web of metal struts to break itself on the concrete far below.

His aim was precise, the strength he summoned into his leg was more than sufficient to deliver the death-blow – but he was three inches short. Graham just wasn’t where his impetuous leap should have taken him.

Claude landed flat on his back, his hands taking most of the weight of the jarring fall. Stars swam before his eyes, and his next conscious feeling was of Graham descending on him like a maddened bear, no science or finesse, just a blind lunge that brought Mike where he most wanted to be – at close quarters with Claude, and out of reach of those damaging feet.

Mike’s knees drove into Claude’s stomach, and knocked the wind from him. Graham hauled the Frenchman to his feet, and smashed his fist into Claude’s face. Claude staggered back into a stout cross-girder – then grabbed on to it with both hands, and grinned again as Mike stampeded within kicking distance.

But Claude had nothing like the perfect balance his craft demanded. The girder pressed into the small of his back, and he was almost see-sawing on it, his head and upper torso well outside the frame of the tower as he aimed his right foot as far up Mike’s body as he could get it.

Graham took the kick in the stomach almost with contempt – and Claude’s armoury counted suddenly for nothing. Mike jinked inside his other foot, and brute force took him into a wrestling crouch over Claude’s body, now bent agonizingly back over the iron bar.

With studied deliberation, Graham reached out his free hand, and coolly ripped away from Claude’s chest the electronic metal safety tag.

Claude had been expecting anything but that. His body froze, and all movement ceased in him as the moonlight fell on the weaving laser-gun fifty feet above him. The mouse-ears searched out and found this unprotected foreign body in its territory, and sent a beam of blinding white light lancing through the Frenchman’s heart.

In the restaurant, Smith was standing with Pei at the computer console. Pei reported that a Lap-Laser had fired. He used the evidence of his eyes: he had seen the series of glowing lights crossing the screen of the console – a sure sign that one of the guns had operated.

Smith scanned the console intently … it could have been a bird – or it might mean something infinitely more dangerous to him. Then for a second time the screen pulsed with light, registering the death of Claude Légère.

‘There it is again!’ Pei shouted. ‘It’s fired twice.’

‘Give me the position,’ Smith ordered. ‘The exact position.’

He strode from the little stage, fuming, to gather his closest lieutenants around him. He couldn’t see Claude in the restaurant, and was hurrying out to the railed gallery when he almost collided with Leah coming in.

‘Where is Claude?’ Smith demanded. Leah replied that she thought Claude had been with Smith in the restaurant.

‘If he was in there I wouldn’t be asking for him!’ Smith shouted. ‘Now if you can’t be more helpful than that, call him on the bleeper.’

Leah hurried to the radio, and sent out a signal which would activate Claude’s personally-coded communicator. There was a pause, and she signalled again. Smith paced over to the desk and pushed her roughly aside. He operated the keys himself.

‘Why isn’t he answering?’ he gritted.

‘Maybe …’

‘Maybe what?’

‘Maybe he – can’t,’ Leah whispered.

Sabrina scuttled over the face of the tower like a human fly. A rope was looped around her body, and she dropped lightly on to the platform where she was to have met Graham, to see him dragging Claude’s body back along the catwalk.

She gasped, ‘What’s happened? Are you all right?’

Mike looked up, and whistled in relief. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you’re a sight for sore eyes. I ran into trouble with Claude, and I had to administer a rather drastic remedy to stop him kicking me silly.’

Sabrina looked at him questioningly, and Mike opened his hand and showed her the metal tag. She caught her breath, and shone her torch on Claude’s face … then brought it slowly down his body. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said.

‘Don’t feel sorry for him,’ Mike whispered. ‘He was trying to kill me. Just help me get rid of him.’

Sabrina said, ‘Where’s C.W.?’

‘Still in the VIP room with Mrs. Wheeler, I guess,’ Mike answered. ‘Why?’

Sabrina unslung the rope from her shapely frame. ‘Let’s send him a present.’ Mike grinned, and pinned the metal tag back on Claude’s body. They tied the rope round his waist, balanced him once more on the cross-strut, and lowered him gently down the side of the tower. Mike peered at the splash of light coming from the window of the VIP room, and said, ‘A few more feet, perhaps.’ They paid out more line carefully, until Graham ordered, ‘Halt. That should just about do it.’

Adela Wheeler’s hand flew to her mouth when she caught sight of the dangling corpse. ‘Dear God,’ she cried, ‘what now?’

C.W.’s eyes darted to the window, and he said, ‘Oh, oh. Somebody’s been having trouble.’

He crossed the room and peered closer. ‘But nothing compared with the trouble poor old Claude’s been having,’ he murmured. He gestured to Mrs Wheeler. ‘Watch the door, sweetie. We have an uninvited guest.’ C.W. opened the window and hauled the body inside.

At that moment, Smith’s voice echoed around the tower through the loud-hailer. ‘This is Mister Smith. All personnel come to the restaurant now.’

Sabrina dropped the rope over the side, and she and Mike flattened themselves in the shadows of I-beams as the second level patrol scorned using the elevator, and clattered down the staircase to the first landing. After a suitable interval, Mike and Sabrina followed them.

The entire commando crew were lined up by Smith, and Sabrina and Graham made up the numbers. Smith did a quick head-count.

‘Right,’ he snapped, ‘has anyone seen Claude Légère in the past fifteen minutes?’ There were blank looks or head-shakes up and down the line.

‘Or C.W.?’ Again, negative. Smith’s eyes darted from man to man, woman to woman. They rested longest on Graham and Sabrina.

‘There is nowhere on this tower,’ he said slowly, ‘that they could possibly be, where they would have been unable to hear the announcement I made just now, and which all of you plainly heard. So, either they are off the tower – which is inconceivable – or something has happened to one, or the other, or both. I want them found. I want them found now.’

Smith allocated various commandos to search appointed sectors of the tower, and directed his last command at Graham: they would go together to the VIP room to check on Mrs Wheeler. Leah trailed dutifully in Graham’s wake, and Sabrina, whose search area included the block where the VIP room lay, followed some distance behind. It meant circumnavigating the first level gallery, and they arrived to find Tote standing guard.

‘Why did you not answer my summons?’ Smith snapped. ‘And leave my post?’ Tote queried, with a touch of studied insolence. Smith bristled, but chose to ignore both the insolence and the improper form of address. Privately, he admitted that his troops had become more and more informal the longer the operation lasted, and this tended to make him lose his iron control. Nonetheless, Tote had been correct to stay.

‘Is everything all right, then?’ he enquired. ‘Nobody’s been near here,’ Tote grunted, ‘not while I’ve stood guard.’ Smith instructed him to unlock the door.

Adela Wheeler’s chair was facing three-quarters to the window. They could see her hands folded in her lap, and the shapely ankles, and her feet in their high court shoes. Her face and hair were hidden, both enveloped in the big, soft cushion. She was clearly asleep, and, irrationally, this infuriated Smith.

‘Stay by the door, Graham,’ Smith ordered. ‘Leah – wake her. I find the sight of her offensive.’

Mike stood at the open door, hands clasped behind his back. His muscles clenched and his eyes widened as the door moved of its own volition, the handle coming to rest neatly in his hand. He pressed back tentatively on the door – and met solid resistance.

Leah could still not see Mrs Wheeler’s face. She said, ‘Are you awake?’ When she got no response, she repeated, more loudly, ‘Mrs Wheeler – are you awake, I said?’

She bent down slightly, and shook the velvet cushion. It dropped to the seat of the chair past the drooping figure’s arms. With its support gone, the head lurched sideways – and Claude’s dead, agony-filled eyes stared back at her.

Leah screamed, and screamed again. The sight of the corpse grotesquely dressed in the party gown, stockings and fashion shoes of an elderly woman completely unnerved her. Even Tote, at her shoulder, hissed and swore.

Smith rushed forward, beads of sweat starting along his forehead. His eyes took in the body, and then flew to the window. Leah screamed once more, and Smith struck her with uncaring strength across the face with the back of his hand.

‘Now!’ Graham hissed, and moved away from the door.

‘Obliged, buddy,’ C.W. whispered. He and Mrs Wheeler – she now wore Claude’s clothes, and shoes, and his metal safety tag – slipped out of the room.

‘Shut up, you fool,’ Smith shouted, and Leah subsided to a whimper. Smith crossed to the window, Tote at his elbow. Tote pointed, and Smith peered into the night. There was a rope, running up to an I-beam. Smith jerked the window open, and poked his head out. As far up the tower as he could see, nothing was there that shouldn’t have been there. No movement, no tell-tale flash of light; he strained his ears … no instrusive footsteps rang out on the metal treads.

He turned back to Graham. Smith was sweating freely now, and spittle started to form at the corners of his mouth. His eyes ranged wildly from Leah to Graham to Tote, and back down to Claude. It was simply not even remotely possible that one of his projects could go wrong. ‘Do you hear, whoever you are?’ he muttered. ‘It is not possible.’

Graham raised his eyebrows at Smith, and Smith’s control snapped. ‘Search!’ he screeched. ‘Search, damn you! Search everywhere, everything!’

He turned on Tote, and grasped his shirt-front. ‘You say no one came came in, or out, while you were here?’ Tote nodded, dumbly. ‘Then how did she get out of the room?’ Smith asked, icily. Tote pointed towards the window.

‘It’s impossible,’ Leah said. ‘At her age? She isn’t a mountaineer, for God’s sake.’

‘No, but C.W. is,’ Tote said. ‘He can climb anything, up or down.’

Smith swore, in a language he was confident none of them recognized. He charged across the room to a sofa, and ripped the cushions off. ‘There must be something here, there must!’ he shouted. He ran to a closet, pulled open the door, and yanked out towels, table-cloths and napkins. The other three stood rooted to the spot as Smith lost his cool. Then Leah went to him, and put her hand on his arm. ‘Liebchen,’ she said, ‘stay calm. This is not you. Be still, and think. We depend on you – only you.’

The flattery was therapeutic. Smith breathed hard and deeply, and slowly the fury left his eyes. He licked his lips, and almost visibly pulled himself together, his chest rising and settling, his shoulders squaring.

‘You’re right, Leah,’ he said, ‘this is no time for hysteria. We have to be methodical. They are still on the tower. We shall find them. Graham, Tote … at the first sight of Whitlock – kill him, instantly. I have no wish to know for whom he is working. I want him dead.

‘Do not, however,’ he cautioned, ‘make a mistake. Mrs Wheeler is presumably wearing Claude’s clothing. In the dark, she could be taken for the negro. Be careful. Now go! And get help. Everyone is to search for them!’

Graham and Tote hurried from the room – Graham to try to locate C.W., Tote to link up with Pei, who had been left on duty by the telephone. On the far side of the landing, a shadowy figure in battle-dress came out of the shadows. Smith stopped in the doorway, and levelled his machine pistol.

‘Who is that?’ he demanded. ‘Advance, or I’ll fire. The lasers can’t stop bullets here, as you must know.’

Sabrina stepped into the light, holding a metal object in her hand. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she said, ‘but I found this over there by the railing,’ she nodded her head behind her. She offered the slim steel box to Smith. It was Claude’s communicator.

Graham had covered no more than three yards when C.W.’s voice reached him from the shadow of an open door next to the VIP room. ‘So what now?’ C.W. said.

Mike turned on his heel, to see Smith and Leah engrossed in the examination of Claude’s communicator, as if it could speak to reveal some hidden secret of how the Frenchman had met his death. ‘Come,’ Graham replied, ‘and hurry.’

C.W. and Adela Wheeler followed him, and Mike’s body effectively masked their return to the VIP room from the group standing at the railing. Once inside, C.W. switched off the light. Mike locked the door, and immediately regretted it. It should have been locked from the inside, with C.W. in charge of the key.

He made a second move towards the door, but Smith strode suddenly from the railing to stand beside him. ‘You’ve locked it?’ he said. Mike nodded. ‘Good,’ Smith remarked, pulling the key from the lock.

‘We know for an absolute certainty that Mrs Wheeler is not in there,’ he said. ‘Every other inch of this tower will be searched until we find her, even if you have to pull the rivets apart with your bare hands.’

Mike gulped and darted a sidelong glance at the VIP room. ‘What are you waiting for?’ Smith snarled. ‘Get on with it.’

Graham turned away in despair, and trotted back to the restaurant. There was little he could do about it now, except hope to relieve Smith of the key later on.

Until then, C.W. and Adela Wheeler were trapped.

The President’s mother and the black agent of UNACO crouched behind the sofa that Smith had assaulted, away from prying eyes at the glass door. ‘Do you have any ideas, Mr Whitlock?’ Mrs Wheeler asked gently.

‘One,’ C.W. replied. ‘While we’re still undisturbed, I’ll get in touch with my boss.’

He swathed a three-quarter shield around the light-bulb, and crossed to turn on the light. Just a chink of light from the bulb was all that was visible … but it was pointing out of the window. And C.W. knew that Philpott would be watching for it.

Sonya Kolchinsky lay flat on top of the communications van command centre, trying to adjust to a more comfortable position. She took her weight on her elbows, and fixed the binoculars to her eyes. She let out an exclamation, and Philpott, from inside the van, shouted, ‘What is it?’

‘A light flashing from the tower,’ she answered. ‘It must be a code … yes, it is. And it’s C.W.’

Philpott and Poupon hurried out, and looked anxiously up at her, ‘Well, what’s he got to say?’ Philpott asked.

‘Hang on …’ Sonya replied, ‘he’s repeating it. ‘We – have – a – new – recruit. Gray? No – Graham. It’s Mike Graham,’ Sonya burst out excitedly, ‘he’s on our side after all.’

Philpott breathed a huge sigh of relief. ‘Then Sabrina’s still OK,’ he grinned at Poupon, ‘and we’ve got a real team working in there. We can still win, Poupon old bean. We can still do it.’

‘There’s more,’ Sonya said. ‘“We – are – going – to – try – to – bring – Mrs – Wheeler – out,”’ she pronounced slowly. ‘He’s going on: “Can – you – arrange – diversion – now – question mark. Suggest – paying – first – half – of – ransom. Is – possible – question mark.”’

Philpott turned urgently to the Commissioner. ‘Is it possible? It’s got to be. It might be the only chance we have of saving Mrs Wheeler. And if anyone can get her off that damned tower, it’s C.W. Make it possible, Poupon. Don’t take no for an answer.’

Poupon reached for the phone. ‘Do not worry, my friend,’ he assured Philpott. ‘When Poupon says “jump”, they go up a long, long way. Allo, allo. Conference room? Get me the Finance Minister. I’ll give you ten seconds.’

Smith paced the restaurant floor, a walkie-talkie clasped in his fist, the riding crop (which someone had brought from the château) incongruously dangling from the other hand. Smith seemed to draw comfort from it, and occasionally lashed a table top or chair-back. Graham was receiving a ’phone report, and Sabrina and Leah Fischer manned walkie-talkies, making notes on jotting pads.

‘Has anyone found anything?’ Smith asked querulously. Mike shook his head; Leah lifted her finger from the communicator button, and did likewise.

‘How could C.W. have slipped through all our checks?’ Smith mused, agitatedly. ‘He’s a thief, an international thief – a master criminal. Who could he be working for? Who could possibly pay him more than I’m paying him? Unless –’

‘Unless what?’ Leah said.

‘Unless he’s not C. W. Whitlock, but some other black,’ Smith supplied.

‘No,’ Leah stated, positively. ‘Fingerprints, voice-print, pictures … everything checked. I don’t know why he’s doing what he’s doing, but he’s Whitlock. I’d bet my life on it.’

Smith grinned, evilly. ‘You may yet find that you have, Leah. Whitlock was willing to take the chance when Graham made the same arrangement with him over the Lap-Laser tag. Shall we find a test for you to take, my dear?’

Leah felt the blood drain from her face. She, and not Smith, had okayed all five new members of the team. The computer had been specific: they were whom they claimed to be … but the computer could not read their minds. What if any of them – all of them – were agents of some intelligence power, as well as the criminals they were clearly identified as being? It was a frightening thought, and she dismissed it.

‘You know you can rely on me, sir,’ she whispered huskily. ‘I have never let you down, have I? Ever?’

Smith shook his head. ‘But those who serve me, Leah, can afford only one mistake,’ he replied. ‘You might have made yours. We shall see. We shall see.’

He stepped down from the little platform on to the floor of the restaurant, walking casually from Leah to Sabrina, Sabrina to Graham, Graham to Leah – to Sabrina.

‘You were – how shall I put it? – friendly with C.W., were you not, Sabrina? Perhaps a little – too “friendly”. Would you think too friendly, my sweet?’ He touched her face gently, caressing her with the thong of the riding crop, trailing the leather loop down her cheek, across her mouth, up her other cheek, then tracing the straight line of her nose, and coming to rest in the dimple of her chin.

It was a disturbing experience. Sabrina was mesmerized, like a rabbit trapped in the coruscating jewels of a snake’s eyes. She breathed, ‘Please don’t touch me like that. I have done nothing to betray you. You have my word.’

Smith drew the whip away. The girl’s lips parted, and the relief oozed uncertainly from her mouth.

‘Mister Smith,’ Graham put in. Smith turned to him. ‘I thought the same thing,’ Mike explained, ‘about Sabrina and C.W. After you said close contacts could be unwise. I’ve been following her like a shadow ever since, just watching. She’s clean. Tough luck, but she is.’

Smith turned away from Sabrina, and paced the floor again. ‘Maybe … maybe …’ he muttered. Then he spun on his heel and brought the riding whip cracking down on a glass table top. Leah jumped; Sabrina started involuntarily. Even Graham blinked.

‘Find them!’ Smith shouted. ‘We’ve got to find them!’

Poupon turned in triumph to Philpott, ‘Alors,’ he pointed to the phone, ‘it was too easy, mon ami. They’ll make the first payment in five minutes from now. They’re calling Smith this very moment.’

Philpott poked his head out of the van. ‘Did you hear that, Sonya?’ he asked.

‘Got it,’ she said.

‘Send it off to C.W.,’ Philpott ordered. ‘And tell him to welcome Graham to the organization.’

‘Check,’ Sonya replied. She worked the telegraph key, and the reflector sent out a series of winking flashes.

Poupon sat back in his chair, and lit up a foul-smelling pipe which had been banned from the conference room; Philpott, though, was more tolerant. ‘One feels,’ Poupon puffed, matches flying like kindling chips, ‘one feels we are entering the final phase. Yet we have no idea in the world how Smith can possibly get off that tower without us locating him.’

Philpott nodded moodily. He crossed the van to a table in the corner, where the City Engineer’s superintendent was still poring over his maps of dark and submerged places known only to a few specialist moles with circles under their eyes, whose company decent citizens normally shunned.

‘Are you absolutely certain,’ Philpott asked for at least the tenth time, ‘that there aren’t any underground connections – passages, that sort of thing – from the tower to the subways, the metro, the sewers … anywhere?’

‘I have told you, sir,’ the superintendent answered, containing his patience masterfully, ‘there are none – at least, none that are marked on the maps.

‘The bases of the tower’s four feet are self-contained. You see – here, there, there, and here. Yes, there is an electrical inspection chamber. We know they got into that, because we saw them unloading cable and take it in. But apart from that, there are no tunnels, open sewers, metro connections, no catacombs, priest-holes, potholes, lost Egyptian tombs … beneath the tower there is nothing but what should be there: power lines, water-mains, pneumatics and hydraulics. All of them, naturellement, are “live”.’

‘Maintenance crawlways, then,’ Philpott persisted, hopefully.

The superintendent shook his delicately greying head. ‘Non, monsieur. Rien.’

Philpott sighed his exasperation. Poupon suggested, ‘We know they have a helicopter, but of course they can’t use it. The Air Force would blast it out of the skies.’

‘They would,’ Philpott agreed. ‘Once the lasers were off, anything that came near the tower would be scrap within minutes.’ He gnawed his lip, and said to Sonya, ‘I believe we’re still missing something obvious. Read me back C.W.’s first message, would you, please?’ he directed. ‘The bit about the techniques they practised in training. I’m sure there was something there I overlooked.’

Sonya started the transcription – but Philpott interrupted her with an urgent snap of his fingers. ‘Poupon!’ he exclaimed. ‘Maybe you have it. The helicopter! If the helicopter is to be involved at all, the pilot will know precisely where and when he’s supposed to pick up Smith.’

He grew more excited. ‘Look – it’s about time we broke up Smith’s cosy little nest in the Loire Valley. Get the police in there – the Army, too. Don’t smash up the place – not that you’d be allowed to. But find me that pilot, Poupon, and wring him dry. I want him singing like a bird by midnight.’

Poupon inclined his head. ‘Consider it done, Monsieur.’

Pei was on telephone duty in the restaurant again, and picked up the receiver when the bell chimed. He answered the call, and listened in silence. ‘A moment, please,’ he requested, ‘I shall contact Mister Smith.’

He cradled the phone lengthways, and ran to the gallery. Smith was approaching with a search party, empty-handed. ‘The first payment, sir,’ Pei chattered, ‘it’s ready; it’s on the way. Fifteen million dollars. They’ve called – they’re still on now – to confirm our readiness to receive it.’

‘Ahhhh,’ Smith beamed. ‘Max,’ he ordered a senior crewman, ‘train a searchlight on the front entrance. Pick up whoever’s approaching the perimeter. Make sure there are no tricks. Then send two men down to get the money. Gentlemen, the bastards are crumbling. With any luck, we may be able to forget about Mrs Wheeler.’

Where the Pont d’Iéna bisects the Quai Branly on the river side of the tower, a heavily armoured military truck pulled into the area of No-man’s-land. Headlights blazing, the truck crossed to the Quai Branly perimeter, and a section of the barricade peeled away. Eight French paras got out of the back to join their young officer, who had travelled in the passenger seat.

Where the barricade had lain, one of the paras sketched a precise line in luminous paint. The officer chirped an order. The paras returned to the truck, and hauled out four aluminium suitcases. The lieutenant directed that they be placed in a group three feet short of the glowing boundary.

The powerful searchlight from the tower illuminated the pantomime, and also picked up two dark, hooded figures leaving the sanctuary of the tower base. They walked beneath the four great arches of its legs towards the perimeter. Each of the eight paras stood tensed and ready, weapons at the port, fingers on trigger-guards. They were the tough men, the hard ones, the élite of the French Army; ruthless, dare-devil fighters who had taken on the best in the world, and (sometimes) won.

Two men from the tower, their metal tags winking in the headlamp beam, stopped short. One whispered into a communicator. Smith, on the tower, brought his binoculars to a sharper focus, and rapped an order into his walkie-talkie.

One of the two detached himself and advanced to within a couple of feet of the painted line. He pointed at the suitcases and said, ‘Mister Smith wants them touching the line.’

‘Whereas my orders,’ the young officer replied, ‘are that they should stay where they are. If you want them, you will have to come and get them.’

The commando blinked behind his mask, and measured the distance from the line to the cases. With eight trigger-happy paras there, whoever crossed the line to retrieve the cases was dead. He retreated to join his companion, and once more made contact with Smith.

Then both men came to within spitting distance of the line, and the commando spokesman said, firmly, ‘Put them on the line. If you do not, Mister Smith says he will not be responsible for the consequences.’

The lieutenant shook his head. ‘I do not,’ he said, ‘take my orders from Mister Smith. Mine come from General Jaubert. Those are the orders I obey.’

‘On the contrary,’ spoke a new voice from behind the Saracen truck, ‘you will do as Mister Smith says.’ Philpott walked out and stood squarely facing the young lieutenant, in the glare of the lights. ‘Put the suitcases on the line,’ he directed.

‘I do not know you, Monsieur,’ the officer replied.

‘My name is Malcolm Philpott, and I have with me the Red priority directive of President Giscard D’Estaing.’ He thrust the affidavit before the lieuten ant’s eyes. ‘I am in charge of this operation, Lieutenant,’ Philpott went on, calmly.

‘I have told General Jaubert once today already, that when I wish him to take an initiative, I will give him leave to do so. He has disobeyed my orders, and he will be held to account for it. Now –’ his voice grew sharper, ‘put the suitcases on the line.’

The lieutenant shuffled uncomfortably, and said, ‘One moment. I will check.’ He rounded the truck to the driver’s seat, and picked up a walkie-talkie. Two minutes later he was back. ‘It will be as you say, Monsieur,’ he muttered. He gestured towards the cases, and two burly paras moved them carefully up to the phosphorescent marker, with their bases touching the gleaming paint.

Philpott barked, ‘You two – get what you came for.’ The commandos grinned, picked up a suitcase in each hand, and walked back to the tower.

They reported to Smith in the restaurant, where a team had been assembled to make a rough count of the fifteen million dollars. Smith listened in silence, and when the commando had finished, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Describe Philpott,’ he ordered, ‘describe him minutely.’

Both men obliged, and Smith ordered Leah to contact the château and run Malcolm Philpott through the master computer. It took the computer less than five minutes to deliver details of a man and an organization of which Smith had known next to nothing.

‘UNACO?’ he mused, incredulously. ‘Not the CIA, nor INTERPOL, nor the FBI? Not the US Army, or NATO? UNACO? Malcolm Philpott can afford to pay C.W. more than I can? I am opposed by a toothless professor, a bunch of civil servants and a few crank scientists? And I was getting worried?’

Smith laughed an ugly, barking laugh. He caught Leah by the arms and drew her to him. ‘Now I can afford to relax,’ he whispered. ‘I have been too long without your body. We will celebrate.’

She smiled up at him. ‘Then let us drink first,’ she suggested.

‘Capital,’ Smith agreed. He called for champagne, and he and Leah, joined by Sabrina and Mike Graham, drank a toast, jubilantly proposed by Smith.

‘To the United Nations Anti-Crime Organization – and Malcolm Gregory Philpott.’

Graham looked across at Sabrina, and treated her to a long, slow wink.

C.W. crouched on the window-sill of the VIP room. The sole illumination came still from the chink of light peeping through the shield around the bulb. The black agent reached out, grabbed the nylon rope, hauled its trailing end up, and pulled it into the room.

C.W. looped the strong thread around him in mountaineer style, and paid out the spare line. He turned to Adela Wheeler and said, ‘We’re stuck in here, and it gives me bad vibes. I want out.’

‘I do, too,’ she replied, gamely.

‘OK,’ C.W. nodded. ‘So how do you feel about heights?’

‘They terrify me,’ she admitted.

C.W. nodded again. ‘That figures,’ he grunted. ‘Then close your eyes.’

The count in the restaurant was going well. Two of Smith’s commandos were trained in the so-called ‘banker’s flip’, and their moistened fingers flew at extraordinary speed through the neatly wrapped bundles of tens, hundreds, and thousands. Smith had left the menial work to his staff. He and Leah were now languorously joined, on a mattress in a room right next door to the VIP room.

Graham and Sabrina stood on the fringe of the counting group, hunched over a table in the centre of the café. Occasionally, Sabrina let her attention wander. She never appreciated seeing other people’s money, unless she had stolen it.

A vague flash of movement outside the restaurant window crept into the corner of her eye. She looked – and hissed a warning to Graham.

Clearly visible through the patchwork of girders, they saw C.W. sliding down the rope. Riding him piggy-back, clutching his neck for dear life, her eyes tightly shut, was Adela Wheeler, in dark, bloodstained combat fatigues.

They disappeared from view, and the tautened rope slipped back into its box-girder shell.

C.W. eased the rope out through clawed hands. Sweat ran down his face, and the wind blew Adela’s thick, lustrous grey hair across his eyes. He stopped his descent, balanced on a cross-strut, and moved so that she could stand alongside him, with his arm about her waist. C.W. cleared his brow on his sleeve. Adela was breathing heavily. ‘How much further?’ she gasped, and made to look down at the ground.

C.W. caught her by the chin. ‘Don’t even think of it,’ he commanded, fiercely. ‘Just remember, you’re safe with me. I’m the best there is.’ She nodded mutely. C.W. helped her on to his back again, and muttered, ‘Not far to go, love. Not far now.’

He swung out and inched down the face of the tower, his hands paying out rope, his bare feet caressing the struts. He drew in close again as he thought he heard movement from above. He looked up. Mike Graham and Sabrina, crouched by the gallery railing, waved and urged him on.

C.W. smiled, and started the downward haul. And a protruding rivet caught a button of his combat safari jacket.

There was a soft ripping sound. C.W. froze, and looked about him. He dropped a few inches lower – and the ripping noise intensified. This time C.W. felt the tug on his clothing. He tried feeling his way back up but the snagged cloth would not release him.

The rivet now rested on the part of his jacket where the metal safety tag was pinned. Sabrina, on the gallery, gasped in horror, and Graham muttered a meaningless prayer.

C.W. said, ‘Hold tight, Adela. We’re caught up on something.’ She got his neck in a vicious lock, and he allowed them to fall another foot down the rope.

With a final, ugly tearing sound that invaded the black man’s brain like a death knell, C.W.’s safety tag pulled free in its square of cloth.

It glided away into the darkness, lost amongst the tangle of ironwork.

C.W. was now defenceless against the laser-guns, though Adela still wore Claude’s metal tag on her breast.

ELEVEN

Commissioner Poupon put the telephone down, and leaned back in his fragile, canvas-framed chair with an expression of beatific contentment across his pugnacious face. ‘So, my friend,’ he murmured to Philpott, ‘at last, action.’

There was no reply. Poupon glanced over at his colleague: Philpott had slumped into a corner of the van, his head sunk on his chest. Poupon regarded him gravely, then rose, crossed the floor, and gently shook the sleeping man’s shoulder.

Philpott jerked awake, looked up into Poupon’s face, and rubbed his eyes. ‘Christ,’ he murmured, ‘that’s a fine time for a cat-nap.’ He yawned, shook his head to clear the cobwebs, and asked the Commissioner if there had been any news.

Poupon indicated that there had. ‘We parachuted a hundred soldiers into the château,’ he said proudly. ‘It was all over in less than half an hour. The Château Clérignault still stands, as glorious as ever, but now it’s in our hands.’

Philpott climbed groggily to his feet. ‘Fantastic,’ he grinned. ‘And the chopper pilot? Did you get him?’

Poupon nodded. ‘Well?’ Philpott demanded.

‘His instructions,’ Poupon answered carefully, ‘are to pick up Smith at a particular point – on the River Seine.’

‘On the river?’ Philpott exploded. ‘Where, for God’s sake?’

‘Well down from the Tour Eiffel,’ Poupon explained. ‘Between the Statue de la Liberté and the church of Notre Dame D’Auteuil – a kilometre and a half, perhaps.’

Philpott jammed a fist petulantly into the palm of his hand. ‘Then how’s he getting there?’ he wondered. ‘It’s a fair step from the tower to the river – all of it across open ground, most of it outside the laser perimeter. Even if he leaves the lasers on, he’s vulnerable as soon as he’s out of their range. It doesn’t make sense, Poupon. It’s crazy … no tunnels, no passages, no sewers. Is he going to burrow like a gopher?’

Poupon shrugged. ‘Je ne sais pas, Monsieur … we shall wait and see. But we have more urgent matters to consider, n’est-ce pas? Mrs Wheeler, for example. Not to mention your agent – if he’s still alive.’

Philpott grimaced wearily. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘No word from C.W. for half an hour, at least. What the hell’s happening up there?’ Philpott punched the van wall, and rubbed his knuckles in frustrated rage.

C.W.’s rope ran out while he was still forty-odd feet from the ground. He shifted the burden of the woman on his back, adjusted her hold on his neck to a less suffocating angle, and muttered, ‘Hold on real tight now, baby. From here, it’s the hard way. I may have to fly a little. But remember – you’re safe. It’ll be just like taking a bumpy elevator ride.’

Adela Wheeler gave a scarcely audible squeaking reply, and C.W. committed their souls to providence and the formidable strength of his arms and legs.

Up aloft, the mouse-ear detectors sniffed the air and sought out the strange, moving mass descending the tower like a hunch-backed tarantula.

C.W. blinked the sweat out of his eyes, sniffed, and measured a cross-strut until he found a diagonal. He curled his toes around it, bent his body into a bow, and slid down to the next horizontal. Then he repeated the process.

Another Lap-Laser joined the gun monitoring their progress. It, too, twitched and stirred. Inside the computer, lying unwatched in the restaurant command post, a helix of silicon chips and wheels tried to sort out what was happening.

C.W. was tiring fast. His arms were straining from their sockets. His heart pumped blood around his body with a thud that he felt must penetrate even to Smith’s lair. He knew he must rest … yet he could not be separated from Adela Wheeler. To do so was certain death – for both of them.

Unprotected, the lasers would seek him out for sure. And Adela Wheeler had no earthly hope of getting down by herself. She would stay rooted to the ironwork until fatigue claimed her body. And she would be grateful for the last despairing plunge into oblivion.

He gritted his teeth and swore fiercely, repeating one four letter word over and over again. Mrs Wheeler moaned through her pain. ‘I trust it’s not me you want, Mr Whitlock. And if it is, I only pray to God that you can wait for a more suitable time and place.’

It was too much for C.W. He guffawed, and swung her off to stand by him, being careful to hold her close. He planted a big, smacking kiss on her lips. ‘You know, Mrs W.,’ he said, ‘you’re some doll. And a widow, too. And rich! I could do a great deal worse.’

Adela smiled, and kissed him back on the cheek. ‘You’re a naughty boy, C.W.,’ she murmured, ‘and I’d have been proud, proud and privileged, to have had you as a son, as well as Warren. You’re my kind of man, and if you don’t watch out, I’ll ignore the forty years between our ages and show you a thing or two.’

C.W. rolled his eyes, and did a passable imitation of a rampant stallion. Adela giggled, and C.W. said, ‘OK now. Back up. Hold on real well. The last bit’s going to be a picnic.’

At the first level gallery rail, Mike grinned his relief. He had sent Sabrina back into the restaurant to cluster with the gloaters. Now he made to rejoin them himself. He ran into Smith and Leah, still flushed from their love-making.

‘Taking the air, Mike?’ Smith enquired.

‘Money bores me, Mister Smith,’ Graham replied. ‘It’s only spending it that I like.’

‘Then you’ll enjoy the – uh – aftermath of this splendid little caper,’ Smith promised. Mike thought he heard the grunt of C.W.’s exertions below, and coughed to cover the tiny sound.

‘Shall we go in with the others?’ he suggested. Smith stood by and ushered first Leah, and then Graham, into the brightly lit café. He stayed for a second on the gallery, head cocked to one side, trying to make sense of the melange of buffeting wind and noises of the city and the night. Then he, too, walked into the restaurant …

Although his rest, and the exchange with Mrs Wheeler, had re-charged his batteries, C.W. knew with total certainty that he could not face a prolonged, slow descent of the tower.

He gambled everything on his enormous strength. Grasping a horizontal, he bowed his body again and searched for the next cross-beam, perhaps eight feet away.

‘Fasten your safety belt,’ he shouted to Adela above the wind. The pressure on his throat and chest increased. He gritted his teeth, and launched himself into thin air down the concave curve of the tower. His grasping hands clutched the cold beam, and he let out a shriek as the tremendous inertia cruelly racked his biceps and shoulder muscles.

‘Are you going to do that again, C.W.?’ Adela whispered.

‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘And again, and again – and again.’ As the last word left his mouth he threw himself out once more, and dropped like a stone to the next horizontal strut.

Two to go … He half-shinned, half-slid down one, and triumphantly dropped the last few feet to the tarmac, with Mrs Wheeler still desperately leeched to his back. C.W. took most of the impact, but the President’s mother came in for her share, and she almost shouted as the breath was forced from her lungs.

C.W. said, ‘Whatever else you do, don’t let go of me. We’re on the ground, and the difficult part could begin right now.’

‘Are we really there?’ she asked, plaintively. ‘Did we climb down all that way – you with me on your back?’

‘We sure did, Ma’am,’ C.W. grinned. ‘We sure did – though when we tell people about it, they’ll never believe us.’ C.W. felt like singing, but wisely resisted the impulse. Adela Wheeler kept a tight hold on him, and he turned in her arms to face her.

She saw the unimaginable strain in his face and said ‘Did I hurt you?’ solicitously.

‘Strangled would be nearer the mark,’ C.W. winced. ‘Now, though, we have a problem.’

He explained that he had lost his safety tag, and although the laser-guns had not interfered with them when they were glued to the tower, it could be vastly different for the trip in open territory from the base to the perimeter.

‘We’ve got just one tag between us,’ he said. ‘The one you’re wearing – that Mike took from Claude. Now I don’t know whether one safety strip held between two people is going to work or not. But we’ve got to try it. Having come this far, it’d be silly to stay here and get caught like rats in a trap whenever Smith decided to send somebody below. What do you say?’

Adela composed herself. ‘As I said on that dreadful man’s television broadcast – and incidentally that was quite the worst I’ve ever made – I’m too ancient to start worrying about death now. If those – those things up there are going to kill us … then let them. I’ll be dying with a man I admire – and that means a lot to a silly old woman like me. And in a good cause: the destruction of Smith. So – let’s go, shall we?’

They started out, arms linked around each other, the safety tag held up by C.W. between their heads, his dark, tight curls resting on her soft but now straggling hair.

As they left the safety of the tower’s bulk, C.W. glanced up, and could have sworn he saw the Lap-Laser start to quiver.

Pei, back at the computer key-board, shouted to Smith, ‘The lasers are tracking something! It’s on the ground. It’s got to be human. Moving erratically, but going away from the tower. A big blob!’

Smith rushed to the console, and cased the flickering screen. Then he shouted ‘Searchlight!’ and ran out to the gallery rail.

Adela Wheeler and C.W. walked slowly but purposefully, measuring each other’s paces, keeping their feet carefully aligned. C.W. felt his neck-hairs rise in the sights of the Lap-Lasers.

And although he did not look round, he was right. Both laser-guns had locked on to the shuffling pair. Both were now sending messages to the computer: does one tag cover two human beings?

Suddenly the man and woman were bathed in light from above. They could hear Smith snarl, ‘It’s the black. He’s got Mrs Wheeler. Damn him. Oh, damn him.’

Light came from the perimeter, too. Philpott danced in ecstasy. ‘You can make it, C.W., you can make it, sweetheart. Just a few more steps, you lovely guy. Just a few more.’

C.W. grinned and shouted, ‘Would you shut the hell up. It’s awkward enough without you capering around like a lunatic.’

On the gallery, Smith bellowed, ‘Why aren’t the guns firing, Godammit?’ Pei replied, ‘They’ve got a tag, sir. Whitlock’s holding it above them. Claude’s, I guess.’

Tote uttered a roar of fury, and snatched a Kalashnikov from the man nearest him. He brought it to his shoulder and, before Smith could stop him, let off a stream of bullets at the sluggishly moving pair.

The tracer rounds followed the direct path on to which the Lap-Lasers had already locked, and gleefully the guns recognized a viable target. Both barrels glowed, and the light-beams cut the bullets from the air like fireflies snuffed out by marauding wasps.

Smith said, savagely, ‘That only makes us look foolish. We’ve lost them. Save your energy, and your ammunition. Cut the lights and come back inside, everyone. We still have work to do – and it’s getting late.’

Graham and Sabrina, standing next to Leah at the railing, exchanged glances. Graham found Sabrina’s hand and squeezed it. She looked steadily at him and, not for the first time, liked very much what she saw. ‘First round to us,’ Mike whispered. She sniffed, cautiously. It was an eloquent reply.

As children would in a three-legged race, the President’s mother and the Black Spider-man alternated their steps, and crossed the still shining line of the perimeter, to be engulfed in a wildly excited throng. Adela Wheeler chose, however, to stay with her arms around C.W.’s neck, hugging him closely, sobbing at last, deeply and pathetically.

Then she released him, blinked back her tears, and surrendered to Philpott’s welcoming embrace, while Sonya cuddled C.W. and told him how marvellous he was.

‘Malcolm,’ said Adela, ‘I am grateful to you for arranging my release, and I am more than grateful to this wonderful boy here for carrying me down that tower, even though he treats me like a sack of potatoes.’

Philpott chuckled, and said, ‘As long as you’re safe, Adela – that’s all that matters.’

‘But it’s not,’ she insisted. ‘I meant what I said on television. I wouldn’t have cared what happened to me. The important thing is to stop that atrocious man Smith. He’s not human, Malcolm. He deserves to die.’

‘He’ll be stopped, Adela,’ Philpott assured her. ‘Is there anything we can do for you now?’

‘A bath,’ she considered, ‘something to eat, a stiff drink … that’s enough to be going on with. But first, I want to talk to Warren.’

‘He’s holding on for you now,’ Philpott replied. ‘He’s over the moon.’ And he led her to the communications van, where she picked up the telephone receiver and talked in gentle, stumbling tones to the President of the United States.

Philpott had installed a large colour television set in the corner of the command van, and the unending banality of the fare, even with the sound turned down, was weighing on his nerves. But it had to be kept on; with his hostage plans thwarted, Smith, they felt, would need to re-establish his superiority in his customarily dramatic way.

There was a rap at the van door, and General Jaubert stumped in without waiting for an invitation. Ducret stood behind him, with a shrug for greeting. ‘Now, Monsieur Philpott, may I attack the tower?’ the General demanded peremptorily.

Philpott looked up from the river plan he had been studying. ‘Ah, nice to see you, General,’ he observed. ‘I am pleased that you managed to curb the – ahem – laudable impetuosity of your renowned paras earlier this evening. If they had been permitted to proceed with their lunatic murder of Smith’s commandos, I have no doubt whatsoever that Mrs Wheeler would not be safe and well among us now.

‘In answer to your question – no,’ Philpott went on firmly, ‘you may not attack the tower. I still believe that we can bring this operation to a successful conclusion without damaging either the Eiffel Tower or too many of the people in it. So please – withdraw to base. War, as somebody awfully clever once said, is too serious a business to be left to generals. We are at war with Smith. Should another delivery of money be planned, I shall be grateful if you do not interfere with it.’

‘But then, Monsieur,’ Jaubert put in cuttingly, ‘it is not your money, is it?’

Philpott considered the proposition. ‘That,’ he conceded, ‘is a fair point. However, if we are to save any of it, I must insist we do it my way – and President Giscard D’Estaing agrees with me.’

‘Another politician,’ Jaubert snorted. Philpott was about to frame a barbed response when Poupon raised his hand for silence, and jumped to the TV set. As he turned up the sound, Smith’s face appeared, replacing a young girl singer with a deeply-cleft bosom and frizzy green hair, whom the Commissioner secretly admired. Smith was as relaxed and urbane as ever.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of France,’ he began. ‘Once more, I have to apologize to you for breaking so rudely into your evening’s enjoyment of television, but I have some news for you. I also wish to address a few remarks to Interior Minister Ducret – and to the United Nations Anti-Crime Organization and its commander, Malcolm Philpott.’

There was only one place, Smith knew, where that bombshell would explode – and he was right. The atmosphere inside the command post was electric. Philpott faltered and turned appealingly to Poupon – then the frown left his face. His gaze, bitter and resentful, switched to Jaubert. ‘Of course,’ he gritted. ‘I had to unmask myself in dealing with your bloody paras. Obviously Smith’s man took the word back to him. Now the whole world knows about us.’

‘Do not worry, mon ami,’ cautioned Poupon softly. ‘People forget these things. They’ve probably forgotten already.’ Jaubert, for once, was suitably cowed.

Smith went on,’ I wish to thank Minister Ducret, Finance Minister Le Grain, and indeed the entire French Government, for the fifteen million US dollars you have so kindly donated to my worthy cause. Many of you watching me may not yet be aware that my hostage, Mrs Adela Wheeler, has elected to leave the tower. I had always intended that she should go from here unharmed, but I would have chosen a safer and less painful mode of exit for her.

‘And incidentally, Mr Philpott, I’m glad your agent, Whitlock, got back to you. Your other people here may not be so lucky.’

It was a pure guess – inspired intuition from a master of deception. Philpott leapt to his feet, swearing. Poupon rose swiftly and caught his arm. ‘He’s probably bluffing, Monsieur,’ the Commissioner urged. ‘I can see you’re not a poker player.’

Philpott breathed deeply and nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘he could be. And you’re right about me; I don’t play poker. University professors seldom do.’

‘Then relax,’ Poupon advised. ‘Smith hasn’t finished with us yet.’

Smith had a condescending sneer on his face. ‘Don’t take it too hard, Philpott,’ he continued. ‘You have never crossed swords with someone of my calibre before. Maybe this will teach you a salutary lesson.’

Philpott mumbled, ‘Christ, if he’s not bluffing, then I’ve sacrificed two very fine people.’

Ducret shook his head. ‘No, Malcolm,’ he said, they’ve sacrificed themselves. As you yourself put it, this is war. Your people are soldiers. They are expected to know the odds, and to take the risks. I am sorry, but soldiers are expendable. It was ever so, and it always will be.’

Philpott grinned, wryly. ‘Perhaps I’m in the wrong job,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Ducret rejoined, ‘I really don’t think so.’

Their attention returned to the television set. Smith was saying, ‘This – uh – turn of events has, however, forced a change in my plans. As I said, I have received half of my thirty million dollar ransom. Well, I am not a vindictive man, nor a particularly greedy one, despite what the lately departed Mrs Wheeler said about me earlier.

‘The fact is, the French authorities are growing increasingly devious. Given a few more hours,’ he smiled patronisingly, ‘and Heaven know’s what mischief they’d get up to. In effect, I do not choose to wait around and find out.

‘I and my followers will leave the Eiffel Tower in –’ he glanced at his watch ‘– in about fifteen minutes. I have observed that there are television outside broadcast units here. I have little doubt that they will take out the scheduled programme, and keep you tuned to our escape. It will, I assure you, be worth the effort. It will also, from my point of view, be entirely successful.

‘So, for the last time, I bid you good night, and thank you for your immensely kind co-operation. I shall miss my beautiful Loire château – which I bequeath to the nation. Au revoir, mes amis.’ And he was gone.

Jaubert groaned theatrically, and Philpott muttered, ‘Fifteen minutes. It’s not long.’ To Sonya he said, ‘Get C.W. Let’s think this thing through properly.’

Smith rose from the chair before the television camera, and said to the French crew. ‘Your usefulness is at an end. Thank you for what you have done.’ The cameraman looked pale; his sound-man hid his face in his hands. Smith smiled crookedly, and motioned to Leah. ‘It is time.’ he said. ‘I slipped a coded message into the TV script to bring the helicopter in ahead of time. So now – I must go.’

‘Be careful, then,’ she warned.

‘Am I not always careful?’ Smith quizzed her. She nodded her head slowly. ‘Of course. Shall I see you below?’

‘You go ahead,’ Smith ordered, ‘I will join you down there. Use the stairs; they’re lit now.’

With a thoughtful, even regretful, expression on his face, he watched her body sway down the iron steps …

C.W. elbowed his way past a press of soldiers and climbed into the communications van. ‘Mrs W.’s OK,’ he announced. ‘She’s resting. Say, she’s really something.’

‘So are you, according to her,’ Philpott grinned. ‘But we’ve got more important things to attend to.’ He filled the black agent in on the latest developments arising from Smith’s telecast. C.W. whistled. ‘Jeeze, that barely leaves us time to come up with something.’

‘Think, then, C.W.,’ Philpott urged. ‘We know he’s being lifted up from the river by the helicopter: but how in God’s name is he getting to the river? Think, man, think.’

C.W. protested, ‘I am, for Christ’s sake, I am.’ He pulled a face, scratched his woolly head, and spat out a shred of tobacco.

‘He can’t just disappear,’ Philpott persisted. ‘There has to be a clue, somewhere. Something we’ve all overlooked. Now what is it, C.W.? Huh?’

C.W. swore and ran his hands over his aching head. ‘He’s – he’s been a step ahead of us all the time,’ he ventured hesitantly. ‘We haven’t really known what he’s been up to at all.’ He looked at Philpott, Sonya and Poupon anxiously. ‘There was only one thing that I found out which I honestly felt I wasn’t meant to learn. I don’t know, though. It may mean nothing – you know, it could be a wild goose chase, and while we’re on it, Smith could be getting clean away by some other means.’

‘What is it?’ Philpott demanded. ‘Tell us, C.W. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, because it’s the only thing we’ve got to go on.’

‘W-e-l-l,’ the agent began, with infuriating slowness. ‘it’s this: I stumbled into something curious in the basement inspection chamber. You know, the power lines are there. We were lacing cable into the mains supply; it was thirsty work, and I wanted a beer.’ He stopped. They waited. ‘Well?’ Philpott spluttered.

‘I spotted a couple of beer tanks – cylinders with taps. They came in with the caterers. They were standing in the corner of the inspection chamber. I went to one and stuck my head under it. I turned the spigot – but nothing came out. Just – air.’

‘Air?’

C.W. nodded. ‘Compressed air. Oxygen.’

Philpott’s mouth opened and closed. He gnawed a fingernail; Poupon looked totally perplexed. Then Philpott snapped his fingers, and a look of sheer delight possessed his face.

‘Oxygen cylinders!’ he roared. ‘That’s it! By George, C.W., that’s it.’ He rushed to the table and yanked the distinguished-looking City Engineer’s superintendent out of his chair. Philpott thumbed through the maps, plans and sketches, and found the tower base section.

‘There!’ he speared the lattice-work of cables and pipes. ‘See? Water-mains. He’s going to get out through a water-main! That’s why he wants oxygen cylinders. The mains have got inspection and repair hatches, haven’t they?’ he barked at the public health man.

‘They have,’ the superintendent agreed. ‘There is one right here.’ He traced with the tip of his pencil a dotted-line section of the pipe passing through the Eiffel Tower’s basement chamber.

‘Where can he come out?’

‘Anywhere he pleases, if he’s got the right equipment,’ the superintendent said, fetching over a sewage and water system plan.

‘In the Seine?’ Poupon cut in.

The superintendent spread his hands eloquently. ‘Of course. The pipes empty straight into the river – the big main pipes, that is. It is much easier for a diver to examine them there than to dig up a length of road or install an inspection hatch under a manhole.’

Philpott scratched his head, and his eyes lit up once more. ‘Is there an outlet,’ he asked, eager but reluctant to hear the answer, ‘anywhere near the Bateaux Mouches out there on the river?’

The superintendent again consulted the plan. ‘Indeed there is,’ he announced. They drew back, and looked questioningly at each other.

‘Worth the risk?’ Philpott put to Poupon and C.W.

Poupon replied, ‘It’s your decision, Monsieur.’

Philpott duly debated it with himself for a full minute. ‘Then it’s worth it,’ he announced. ‘This is what we do …’

As he started to outline the plan forming in his mind, a great shout went up from the crowd outside, lining the perimeter now in ever-growing numbers since the TV outside broadcasts began. Sonya pushed her way to the door of the van, and gasped.

C.W. stood at her elbow, and gazed in astonishment at the tower. He whistled admiringly and muttered, ‘Will you look at that now? The crazy bastard’s started a fireworks display. Real fireworks.’

Poupon chuckled. ‘Smith must be French,’ he reflected. ‘He may be mad – but he has a truly Gallic sense of style.’

Expert pyro-technicians in Smith’s crew had arranged the display in the little top gallery. It was one of the most dazzling ever seen in Paris – like Bastille Day, the Fifth of November and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.

Stunning rainbow bursts erupted from the tower to bathe the night sky in vivid washes of spectral colours. Stars rained over the enthralled crowds, and mighty explosions sent jet-streams of gold and silver, green and blue, and garish orange soaring up to fizz and crackle, to subdivide, and eventually to die in cascades of glowing embers.

The watching people actually cheered themselves hoarse at the finale. Thin, strong poles projecting invisibly from the foot of the television mast supported a scale model, picked out in tiny Catherine wheels and modest little colour showers, of – the Eiffel Tower. For accompaniment, Roman Candles sent charges of silver diamonds and golden sunbursts climbing ever higher into the wind, and the tower’s public address system played the Marseillaise.

Poupon stood at attention until Philpott jogged his arm and said, ‘It’s probably only a cover for something spectacularly nasty.’

On the first landing. Smith looked out over the rolling parkland at the sea of upturned faces. ‘Adieu,’ he whispered, ‘you have given me a fitting salute to my victory. I shall remember you … and you will remember me.’

The commandos and remaining hostages poured into the elevator on Smith’s instructions. He took a key from his pocket and handed it to Pei.

The Asian inserted it into a keyhole in a red box bearing a DANGER! stamp. Next to the key sat an innocent-looking black button. Smith nodded briskly and said, ‘Arm it.’

Pei pressed the button. ‘The – the – d-detonators are now fully armed. Mister Smith,’ he stammered. ‘We have ten minutes. And there is, I’m afraid, no way you can change your mind.’

Smith replied, ‘I am not in the habit of changing my mind.’

He glanced at the set of stout canvas bags leaning against the railing. Pei stood over them, and looked up at Smith. ‘Shall I put them in the elevator?’ he asked.

Smith grinned – a knowing, sinister smile. ‘No, Pei,’ he said, ‘I’ll take charge of the money now. You get into the elevator with the others.’

There was a mutter of alarm from the lift. Smith stalked to the rail and stood with his back to it. His machine pistol was levelled at the crew. ‘Pei,’ he waved the gun at the Asian, ‘do as you were told.’

Pei squeezed into the elevator next to Graham and Sabrina, and Smith rapped at the newly released liftman, ‘Close the gates.’

The heavy iron gates crashed into position. ‘Gentlemen, and Miss Carver,’ Smith sneered, ‘you have all performed magnificently. However, from this point I no longer have any need for your services. I thank you warmly for what you have done for me, and I sincerely wish you were able to enjoy the successful conclusion as much as I shall.

‘But that cannot be,’ he went on, as a paralysing fear overcame the commandos in the elevator. ‘Since I am leaving with only half the ransom I claimed, you are – how shall I put it? – ah … an unwarrantable expense. I simply cannot afford the luxury of paying you. Goodbye – and God speed.’

He chuckled, and shouted ‘Down!’ at the petrified lift operator. The man pressed the button as a reflex action, and the elevator sank complainingly out of sight.

Smith fingered the transmit button of his walkie-talkie and said to Leah, ‘Are you ready?’ From the small red box came the steady, relentless tick of the metronome timer. Leah replied that she was. ‘Then proceed, please,’ Smith ordered.

Leah’s hand hovered over a lever on the wall – the isolator to the mains power supply to the tower, though not affecting the secondary generators which powered the lasers. She threw the switch, and Smith, peering into the lift shaft, watched with satisfaction as the elevator shuddered to a halt.

The ransom bags were linked at their necks by a leather thong, and Smith took a nickel pro tection tag from his pocket and clipped it to the strap. Then he stooped, hoisted up the bags, and heaved them over the side.

The two west facing laser-guns followed the same path as Smith’s eyes in tracking the bags to the ground. The mouse-ears moved, but the guns obeyed the metal tag.

Smith moved further along the railing to a coil of rope already looped around it and fastened tightly. The rope led to one of the four massive arches between the legs of the tower. He shinned down it and dropped to the ground. He smiled at the thought that his descent had been a great deal easier than C.W.’s … the black agent had had to drop through the structure of the tower, carrying a burden which, Smith admitted, most men would have found insupportable.

With the generators roaring defiantly at the massed troops and guns, and still in the circle of protection afforded by his trucks, Smith made for the electrical inspection chamber on the last lap of his escape from the hostage tower.

On the way, almost as an afterthought, he scooped up fifteen million dollars that someone had left lying around …

Panic spread like a forest fire through the elevator. Graham clutched Pei’s arm and gritted, ‘The charges? Are they armed?’ Dumbly, Pei nodded. He sought Tote, and rested his head on the big man’s shoulder.

Mike pounded the glass side of the lift in rage and fear. ‘That bastard!’ he shouted, ‘Oh, that – bastard.’ Then his eye fell on the metal bench that formed the only seating in the lift.

‘Give me a hand,’ he shouted to Pei. The Indonesian leapt to the other end of the bench and grasped it. Together they lifted it up, and used it as a battering-ram to smash one of the windows of the elevator.

There was a mad scramble to get to the shattered window, but the opening was too small. ‘Again!’ Mike screamed, ‘again!’ They backed a few paces, and charged once more at the windows. Another went under the hammer-blows – and another; and a central strut.

It was enough, and Sabrina was brutally felled to the floor in the heedless stampede. Graham helped her to her feet, and said swiftly, ‘You realize what you have to do.’ He jerked his head aloft. She said, ‘Yes … if there’s time.’

‘There’s got to be,’ Mike returned. ‘At least we have to try. You know that, Sabrina.’ She blinked and said, ‘OK, Mike. And you?’

‘I’m going after Smith,’ he said grimly. She turned to scale the cab and the tower, and Graham called softly, ‘Sabrina.’ She looked back. ‘Good luck, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘And take care. Please?’ She nodded. ‘And you, Mike.’ He thought she had never looked lovelier – or more terrified.

Graham perched on a cross-beam and saw Smith’s escape rope swaying just out of reach in the wind. He clasped an upright and leaned out. His finger-tips barely touched the hempen strands, and as they did the rope moved tantalizingly away again.

Mike breathed a heartfelt sigh and muttered, ‘C.W., C.W., where are you?’

Then he took a firm, balanced stance on the cross-beam, lowered his body into a crouch, cursed Malcolm Philpott quite vilely, and sprang into the night. His fingers clutched frantically for the rope – and found it. He shed some skin from his burning hands as he slithered at least eight feet, but then he caught the rope in a firmer grasp, and slid to the foot of the tower, searching in vain for any trace of the vanished Smith …

Sabrina sighted her target – the nearest explosive charge – ten feet above her head.

She estimated she had probably six minutes in which to disarm not one, but four, bombs.

Dangling outside the ribs of the tower she spotted Smith’s rope, which Graham had just abandoned. She calculated she could reach two charges on the rope, which would save her precious climbing time. She made for it, caught it more easily than Mike had done, and swarmed up the tower to the bomb that, on the west-facing side, was furthest away from her.

Sabrina planted her feet on a cross-strut, anchoring the rope between her legs. She studied the plastique charge, wedged into the hollow of the box girder. Deep inside the cloying, deadly putty was the live detonator. Cautiously, she reached out a hand, fingers trembling, her teeth trapping her full bottom lip.

A hurricane gust of wind rose up behind her and howled through the tower. She was literally blown into the girder, her face no more than six inches from the bomb, her questing fingers splayed out over the plastique, yet not touching the wired detonator. She clung there, knuckles white, eyes rounded in horror.

The timer in the little red box ticked round to 5.15, 5.14, 5.13 …

Graham combed the vault beneath the tower, but Smith had left no trace of his presence. ‘Where in hell’s he gone?’ Mike queried to himself.

The smallest of sounds came from behind him, and Graham whirled round, alarm on his face but savage power in the set of his body and the menace of his arms and hands. C.W. sauntered out past a generator truck and drawled, ‘Hi.’ He still wore Claude’s safety tag.

Mike relaxed. ‘Smith?’ he asked. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Sho’ has, boss,’ C.W. replied, then dropped his bantering tone. ‘He’s in the inspection chamber in the basement. We figure he’s getting out through a water-main.’

‘A water-main!’ Mike groaned. ‘Christ alive, of course. That’d be the only thing that makes sense.’

‘Where’s Sabrina?’ C.W. put in.

Graham pointed upwards. ‘She’s got her hands full,’ he said. ‘Five minutes or so to disarm four bloody great bombs – or “bingo”, and up she goes.’

‘Shit,’ said C.W. ‘OK, I’m on my way.’

He jumped for the rope, and made it to the first level almost as quickly as Mike had climbed down …

Leah Fischer lifted a red ‘beer tank’ and settled it on Mister Smith’s back, alongside a bulky pack. The tank now had straps fixed to it, and tubes ran from the top. She turned a tap.

As C.W. had discovered, the tanks contained not beer, but oxygen. For Leah and Smith, they served as aqualungs.

Smith winked at Leah behind his face mask. Like her, he had a breathing tube clamped between his teeth.

Smith had already removed a manhole-sized inspection plate from one of the huge conduits carrying water power beneath the streets of Paris. He peered into the hole. The pipe had a diameter of four feet, and foaming water raced through it under pressure.

He had hooked the loop of a nylon line over one of the rusting bolt-heads. The end of the line disappeared into the rushing torrent …

Hundreds of feet above them, on the wind-battered Eiffel Tower, Sabrina Carver’s slim fingers reached out once more to stop tentatively a centimetre short of the embedded detonator.

The timer ticked remorselessly on. 4.22. 4.21. 4.20.

TWELVE

Smith motioned to Leah to turn off his oxygen tap. He pushed up the rubber mask, and let the breathing pipe drop from his mouth.

She looked at him, an unspoken query on her face. He gently lifted her mask off and teased the tube out from between her strong white teeth.

Leah had a sudden premonition, yet dared not give voice to it. But she knew Mister Smith … better than he imagined.

Smith’s voice was like an evil caress, a touch from the grave: like the breath of Satan.

‘Leah, you have always pleased me greatly,’ he purred. ‘I could not have asked for a better companion. You have been loyal, inventive, daring; you share my glorious vision of crime as a redeeming force, a power that can cleanse the soul and uplift the spirit.

‘But Leah … dear, faithful Leah; my brave passionate friend.’

Leah’s mouth was dry with the sour taste of fear. Smith saw burgeoning panic in her eyes, those blue-green eyes that regarded him normally with such undiscriminating adoration. He touched her face, stroked the rounded cheek; he let his finger trace the curve of her eyebrow, and smiled understandingly as she tried to speak but couldn’t, the words lodged in her throat like uninvited guests.

‘It’s simply that … I’m tired of you, Leah.’ The fingers wandered down the other cheek, trailing over her ear, and settling on her smooth neck.

‘I need a change, my pet. Besides, you will be an encumbrance on the journey I am planning to take. You will slow me down, Leah. I cannot permit that to happen. You are, I regret to say, dispensable. Superfluous.’

Leah found the words at last, and they came tumbling out: declarations of love, protestations of faith, words of pleading … begging.

Smith’s manicured hand still rested on her neck. ‘Of course, of course, Leah, of course I understand. And we shall meet again, as you say. One day. Who knows? But for now, sweet Leah, this is –’ he paused and chuckled as the thought occurred to him ‘– this is one bath I shall be taking alone.’

He laughed, found the pressure point in her neck, dug his finger into it, and carefully caught her as she slumped unconscious to the concrete floor.

‘We can’t have you damaged now, can we?’ he murmured. ‘I don’t like pretty things to be hurt – and you are a pretty little thing, Leah.’ Her unseeing eyes looked up at him.

‘Yet I believe,’ Smith went on, as though she could hear him, ‘that I actually heard you say one day that I was “boring”, was it? Did you think I’d forgotten that, Leah? Oh no, my dear. Mister Smith never forgets anything.’

He had cradled her head, and now he let it fall on to the stonework. Her mouth gaped open, and only the rise and fall of her breasts showed that she was still alive.

Smith readjusted his mask and tube, and set the aqualung tap once more to ‘on’. He shook his head sadly, and lowered himself into the water-main. His hand holding the rim of the inspection hatch, he uncoupled the nylon thread from the bolt, and pulled on it.

Three blue rubberized diver’s bags swam into view. They were linked together, fat, bulbous cylinders, like monstrous sausages.

Smith smiled and released them, keeping hold of the end of the line.

The king-sized dollar frankfurters and the swiftly moving current pulled him to the Seine.

Sabrina’s tremulous fingers touched the detonator. Holding her breath, she hooked her thumbnail and fingernail around the live wire.

Millimetre by millimetre, with sticky globules of plastique clinging to it, the detonator slid out. It freed itself from its vicious mooring with an obscene ‘plop’.

Sabrina groaned and murmured a long, drawn-out ‘H-e-e-e-y.’ She let the detonator fall from her hand, and it plummeted to earth.

‘One down,’ she breathed. ‘Three to go. Ah well –’

The clock dial on the red box showed 3.52. 3.51. 3.50. 3.49 …

Graham launched himself furiously against the door of the inspection chamber. It splintered under his charge, and he burst into the room at the crouch, prepared to sell his unprotected life dearly.

He pulled up short, taking in the open water-main, the unconscious woman – and the line of bubbles leading out to the river.

Without a second’s hesitation he bent down, ripped the mask and tube from Leah’s front and the tank from her back, donned them swiftly, and dropped into the fast-flowing stream …

Sabrina squirmed down the flailing rope, and pulled up short, jamming her feet against the tower struts, opposite the next charge. Her head told her to get on with the job: to disarm the second, the third, the fourth bombs.

Her heart told her there just wasn’t time. When the mighty tower buckled and plunged to the ground in a tangle of twisted iron, she would still be on it. She sniffed, and approached the muddy-grey mess of plastique.

Crew members and hostages jumped off the tower to freedom or arrest as C.W. clambered up the spidery frame and snapped on a torch to locate Sabrina. He spotted her with her hand easing into the heart of a girder, and he wisely kept silent.

Then he saw her holding a detonator, clinging to the swaying rope and wiping her streaming brow on the shoulder-piece of her combat jacket.

‘Sabrina – it’s me. How many have you got?’

She followed the beam of light to its source. ‘Oh, thank God you’re here, C.W. We may have a chance now. Not a big one, but at least a chance. This is my second –’ she tossed the detonator into the wind. ‘I’ve done the west and south pillars. I haven’t touched east or north. Take whichever you like.’

C.W. galvanized his weary body into action, and scrambled over the tower as if his life depended on it.

Which it did.

The timer clicked on. 2.48. 2.47. 2.46. 2.45 …

Arc-lamps were now trained on the tower from all sides. At the communications van, Ducret and Poupon followed through binoculars every agonizing second of the battle to save their preposterous tower.

‘How much time left?’ Ducret muttered.

‘We don’t know precisely when the charges were armed,’ Poupon replied, puffing his pipe into Ducret’s face, ‘but there can’t be more than three of Smith’s fifteen minutes remaining. So –’ he shrugged expansively.

‘I hope to God Philpott knows what he’s doing,’ Ducret commented. ‘Presumably there’s been no sign of Smith among the men we captured?’

Poupon shook his grizzled head. ‘Nothing. But I think Philpott knows what he’s doing, Monsieur le Ministre. And I hope to God that those two on the tower do, as well.’

2.01. 2.00 1.59 …

C.W. strained out over the spiral section of staircase and lunged for the playful rope. The wind gusted again, but this time it favoured the good. The rope flew to his hand.

He grabbed it thankfully, and launched himself into space, swinging out in a wide arc, and surging back towards the east pillar at a dangerous speed. At the girder junction, C.W. took one hand off the rope and clawed for a cross-beam. His fingers connected, but the strut was slick with evening dew, and it slipped from his grasp.

C.W.’s body slammed into the pillar and bounced off. He shouted and swore, and kicked himself away to come in again at a less acute angle. With a plummy slap, his hand found the cross-beam, and locked on to it.

He trapped the precious rope and, as Sabrina had twice done, wedged it safe as he faced the east pillar bomb.

His hand snaked out – but his naked foot, curled on the lower cross-strut, skidded off. He grunted and made a wild sweep for the girder, hooking his heel painfully on to the horizontal.

‘Cool, baby, cool,’ he breathed. ‘Play it like diamonds – or that gorgeous Chinese horse.’

Summoning all his nerve and skill, C.W. throttled down, and carefully drew out the detonator.

He looked around wildly, and saw Sabrina making her way as best she could towards the north flank.

The dial on the concealed timing device pipped under the minute mark.

‘Leave it, honey!’ he screamed, and set off across the tower like a demented acrobat. Again – as he had with Adela Wheeler on his back – C.W. chose the hard way. He abandoned climbing when he reached a point he thought was level with the charge, swung himself up to a horizontal I-beam, and ran across it at full tilt, unseeing and uncaring.

The timer marked off the vanishing seconds. 23. 22. 21 …

Sabrina had also lost all sense of fear. Reckless of the danger, she unknowingly raced C.W. from the opposite side of the tower, and they collided in a tangle of arms and legs at the north pillar junction. The timer stood at nine seconds – and counting.

‘Where the – is it?’ C.W. gasped, feeling in the box of the girder.

‘Oh my God,’ Sabrina cried, ‘we’re too low. It’s up there!’ She pointed above their heads. The blob of plastic with its wired catalyst rested out of their reach.

Four seconds.

‘Up!’ C.W. screamed, making a cradle. Frantically, she hooked her foot into his clenched hands and he levered her into the air.

It was no time for finesse. No time for anything.

Two seconds.

She dipped her fingers into the plastic, drew out the detonator, and tossed it back over her head.

One second. Zero. Ignition!

The detonator exploded in mid-air. Simultaneously, the three from the other pillars fired where they lay on the ground.

Sabrina Carver locked her ankles around the neck of C. W. Whitlock and her arms around the cold iron column and cried into the wind.

But the Eiffel Tower was safe.

The wide mouth of the water-main opened on the bank of the Seine, and coughed up three plump sausages and a man in a black wet-suit.

Smith surfaced, peered through his mask in every direction, and kicked strongly for the rubberized ransom bags. He collected them, hauled his body on to the leading bag, and struck out down river towards an anchored Bateau Mouche.

Two minutes later, a second black-suited, aqualunged figure shot from the pipe in the powerful current and was tossed head over heels into the river. Graham flapped like an ungainly, paddling dog, clawed his way to the surface, and trod water.

He, too, looked this way and that. Light flooded on to the Seine from behind him, and from the glow of street lamps. He saw his fast-crawling quarry on the buoyant raft, and noiselessly set out after him.

Smith reached the Bateau Mouche, grasped the ladder, and pulled himself up on deck. He had tied the nylon thread around his waist, and he reached down to tug the bags to the side of the boat and drag them in.

Mike abandoned his churning crawl, and settled into a quieter breast-stroke. His passage through the even surface of the water created hardly a ripple.

Smith stowed the ransom bags away, and padded over to the helm of the Bateau Mouche. He started the engine. It came to life with a sudden roar.

Smith ran forward and cast off the bowline, leaving it trailing. He was doubling back the length of the boat to cast off the sternline, when he spotted the dark shape angling in towards the stern.

Smith had no gun with him. Nor was there one on the boat. Nonetheless, he was not completely unarmed. Smith was never completely unarmed.

But he chose not to tangle with the newcomer. Instead, he threw off the sternline, and felt the Bateau Mouche drift slowly away on the current. He sped forward again, to take his place at the helm. A smile played on his lips.

His hands closed on the gear-shift levers, and Smith threw both engines into reverse. Then he jammed the throttles up to full-speed.

The river foamed and boiled under the plunging boat, and Smith, standing at the door of the wheelhouse, peered into the spume passing the bow.

His smile changed to a broad grin as a solitary aqualung, its straps torn and hanging loose, floated by.

Smith turned and re-entered the wheelhouse. He eased the throttles back, and levered the gearshift to forward.

The Bateau Mouche chugged amiably down the Seine, different from the other boats taking the night air only in the respect that it sported minimal lights. Leisurely, Smith changed back into the clothes he’d brought with him from the tower.

He whistled, and occasionally looked out through the window above the helm. He scanned the sky, fell silent, looked out again – and, once more, fell to whistling. It was a jaunty little sea shanty. English, Smith thought. Great seafaring race, the English.

Large rubber tyres formed a waterline frieze along the side of the Bateau Mouche, and Mike Graham clung groggily to the last in line. He dragged himself up the side of the boat, and slithered over the rail to land in a wet heap on deck.

Mike lay there for a few moments getting his breath and his senses back. Then he climbed to his feet, and crept past the benches under their striped awning towards the bow. He sidled up to the wheelhouse, and peeped through the glass door.

He met Smith eyeball to eyeball.

Smith throttled back, and put his engine in neutral. He leaned down, as if he had all the time in the world, and casually drew a long-bladed knife from a sheath at his right leg.

Graham saw light winking on the metal, and backed away. Smith jerked open the door and moved in eerie silence out on to the slippery deck.

Warily, they circled, Smith’s keen eyes ranging over Graham from head to foot. He registered no surprise when he saw who it was. The fact that the Eiffel Tower had not blown didn’t particularly distress him. He had his ransom, and the escape path was clear. Well, almost. And if anyone among his crew was to survive and elude capture, Smith would have bet on Mike Graham.

Smith was finally satisfied that Graham was not armed. He danced in like the practised knife-fighter he was, arm held low, the knife sitting easily in his upturned hand, twisting and turning, perfectly balanced.

But Mike Graham, too, was a master of many forms of combat. He knew knife-men well, and had long since diagnosed their strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses he had found many ways of exploiting: and the strengths he was adept at turning against the man with the dagger.

Although Smith kept his body and skills in trim, he rarely had to use them in earnest. Smith fought like he fenced – elegantly, correctly, as a gentleman should, obeying the rules.

Mike Graham was no gentleman. For him, the rule book didn’t exist.

Graham started to close, looking over-confident. Smith took half a pace back, as if in fear – then whipped his lithe body forward and down, his knife arm shooting out, the blade as rigid as a natural extension of his hand, striking straight and true for Graham’s heart.

But Mike’s whole move had been a feint to trap Smith into a committed lunge. He leaned his torso to the right like a bullfighter, and lashed out his foot at Smith’s leading leg.

The kick caught Smith right on target – just below the kneecap. He hardly had time to squeal with pain when the second heel kick landed in his groin. Two inches to the left and he would have been Miss Smith.

He was still in a half-crouch, and Graham closed again. Well supported now on his left leg, he brought his right knee in and uppercut Smith on the point of his smoothly shaven chin.

The blow loosened four of Smith’s bottom teeth, and shook his individual vertebrae to a point half way down his back. His head swam, his eyes shot out of focus, and Graham jerked his unresisting knife-arm.

Mike caught the wrist in a cruel grip with his left hand, and locked his right arm around Smith’s in a twisting judo hold. Smith winced and squealed again, and the knife left his unclenched fingers to clatter on the deck.

Graham beat him to the dagger, and turned on Smith with ugly triumph in his eyes. But Smith had scampered away. He headed for the wheel-house, jumped on a barrel, and vaulted up to the roof of the Bateau Mouche.

Mike followed him by another route, and was facing him on the flat, scoured planks before Smith could take any preventative stance. They measured each other, shivering inside their wet-suits, panting and angry. Smith conceded that Graham was more than a match for him in a dirty fight; he also conceded that there was no way Mike was going to fight cleanly.

He judged that Graham could very easily use the knife on him, with little provocation. He decided to compromise by talking his way out of trouble. Smith had done that more than once; his natural bent for treachery made conversation, for him, almost as deadly a weapon as a knife or a sword.

His decision was influenced by a sound that was music to his ears: the hum of an approaching helicopter. It was low at first, though unmistakable. Now it rose in intensity.

‘Well, Graham,’ Smith began, ‘so the day goes to you. Congratulations.’

Mike ignored him.

‘I imagine you also put my laser-guns out of commission?’

Graham shook his head, and said ‘No.’

Smith raised his eyebrows. ‘Whitlock?’ he enquired.

Again, Mike replied, ‘No.’

‘Then who?’

Graham smiled. ‘Sabrina Carver. At least, I told her to.’

Smith’s face clouded. ‘She was in it, too,’ he mused. ‘A pity. I rather liked her. I was contemplating offering her a – mmm – position, in my organization. How fortunate that I resisted the temptation.’

Graham nodded. Smith rubbed his aching jaw. The noise of the helicopter grew louder.

Smith said. ‘She and C.W. are with Philpott, I imagine.’

‘Indeed,’ Mike remarked.

Smith raised his voice and suggested a division of the spoils. ‘Is that what you have in mind, Mike?’ he asked. ‘Surely it must be, now that you have the whip hand.’

Graham shook his head, slowly but decisively.

‘Money on this scale doesn’t attract you?’ Smith queried acidly.

Graham said. ‘It’s not what I want, Smith.’

‘And what do you want? Me?’

Mike looked steadily at him. The helicopter seemed to be circling overhead now, but Graham was concentrating his whole attention on Smith.

‘Libya,’ he shouted, ‘four years ago. Remember? You sold Russian weapons to a group of crazy terrorists. You couldn’t forget that, Smith, could you?’

Smith inclined his head superciliously. ‘It strikes,’ he admitted, ‘a familiar note.’

‘A CIA agent was on to you,’ Mike persisted. ‘You booby-trapped his car. Do you remember that, Smith?’

The other man shrugged. ‘It’s all in the game. Sometimes one has to order retaliatory actions which one finds personally distasteful.’

‘Distasteful!’ Graham echoed. ‘Yes, it was. Because, you see, you didn’t kill the CIA man. You killed his wife. She was pregnant, with their only child.’

The sneer left Smith’s face. He swallowed, though it was difficult for him. ‘Your … wife?’ he ventured.

Mike nodded. His hate-filled eyes were slits now, his muscles bunched, his teeth bared. ‘And since then, Smith,’ he snarled, ‘there hasn’t been one second of any day or night that I haven’t been on your trail.’

He started forward, the knife held before him, glinting ominously, the instrument of his revenge.

‘For you, Mister Smith,’ he hissed, ‘it’s the end of the line.’

Suddenly they were bathed in light from the helicopter, coming down out of the night sky like a stone. Mike looked up, and was blinded by the dazzling beam. Smith shielded his eyes, dived for the side of the roof, and snatched up a heavy iron boat-hook.

Mike recovered, and whirled to face him again. Smith hurled the boat-hook at him, and it smashed into the side of Graham’s head. Mike staggered and fell to one knee, then slumped to the floor. His knife flew from his hand, skidded along the wet planks – and slipped over the edge into the Seine.

The helicopter pilot waved at Smith, and made an urgent motion of summons with his hand. From the side of the machine, a winch-operated cable dropped to the wheelhouse roof and landed with a clang. Smith ran to it, and dragged it down with him to the main deck of the Bateau Mouche. He wrenched open the hatch-cover of a small hold, and hooked the cable to a metal ring at the end of his trio of ransom bags.

Smith pulled frantically on the rope, and the winch brought the garish blue sausages up into the chopper’s belly.

Mike Graham started to come round, lurching painfully to his feet, as the cable and hook descended once more.

Smith grabbed the hook with both hands, and yanked it twice. He gave a fierce yell of exult ation as he left the deck.

Graham’s desperate shout followed Smith’s on the wind. Mike launched a furious charge that took him in one jarring bound on to the deck below and, without pausing, into a flying leap for Smith’s trailing foot.

His hand grasped Smith’s ankle, fingers digging into the bone. The other hand came up and found the toe-cap of a sensible brogue.

Smith hacked savagely with his free foot at Graham’s hands, crunching down on unprotected fingers time and time again with shocking force.

Mike felt the flesh torn from his hands, and his last sensation before he slipped despairingly into the river was the ‘snap’ of his little finger breaking.

Smith chanted ‘Come on! Faster! Faster!’ as the helicopter zoomed away and he drew nearer to its welcoming embrace.

Graham came up for the second time, and lashed the water in ungovernable fury when he saw the man he hated disappear into the ’plane that would take him to freedom.

Smith clamped his hands on the landing skids, and pulled himself into the chopper’s hold. Other hands reached to help him, to guide him safely away from the sliding door, and to shut it behind him.

The exhausted man staggered across the helicopter and collapsed over his king’s ransom for the hostage tower.

He rested his face on the wet, cold rubber, and tears of joy and relief started from his eyes. He pressed his lips to the blue bag, tasting its substance, smelling its brackish scent.

He had done it! He had won! The perfect crime, fashioned at the hands of the perfect criminal. The feeling that coursed through his body was almost orgasmic.

He was invincible! The Great Khan of crime, the most audacious adventurer in history!

No one could halt his relentless progress – nobody could stand against him. Not governments, nor agencies, nor armies. There was nothing – nothing – he could not achieve.

He was the indomitable, unconquerable criminal colossus of the world!

‘Welcome aboard, Mister Smith,’ Malcolm Philpott said from the co-pilot’s seat. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

Smith’s head turned slowly in the direction of the voice. His eyes rested on the man who had spoken, and on the woman crouching beside him.

He panned along the whole length of the helicopter. Three grinning paras rocked on their heels in the swaying plane, machine-guns pointed at his head and heart.

He sighed and looked back at the man in the co-pilot’s seat.

Mister Smith smiled, fleetingly and resignedly, and said, ‘Touché, Mr Philpott. Touché.’

EPILOGUE

In a stunted butt-end of street between the Avenue Émile Deschamel and the Allé Adriènne Lecouvreur is a restaurant infinitely more salubrious than ‘La Chatte qui siffle’. On the day after Smith was taken into the unfriendly custody of the French police (and a traditionalist Examining Magistrate), Malcolm Philpott hosted a luncheon party for six – himself and Sonya Kolchinsky, C. W. and Sabrina, Mike Graham, and Commissioner Poupon.

On the way to the restaurant, Sonya had insisted on taking group photographs twice – against the backdrop of the middle pavilion dome at the École Militaire (where, as Poupon pointed out, Napoleon himself had been a cadet) and again by the equestrian statue of the Marne hero, Maréchal Joffre. They were in a mood to do full justice to a Lucullan meal, washed down with château wine at forty dollars a bottle.

Throughout the lunch, Philpott had deliberately kept the conversation light. He did not favour post mortems, and he was adept at steering the talk away from himself, Sonya, and UNACO. Philpott rightly considered that the less anyone knew about his organization – even his own agents – the better for the future of the department.

He was genuinely but shyly pleased to see a relationship growing between Graham and Sabrina. Mike’s injured hands were still strapped and bandaged, and Sabrina carefully cut the Châteaubriand she was sharing with him into manageable pieces, and even speared the odd segment of meat for him, greatly to his embarrassment.

C.W., seated next to Sabrina, amused himself by eavesdropping on Graham’s attempts to persuade her to take a brief holiday with him in the South of France. Mike owned a hillside villa near Carcassonne, in Languedoc, and he spent a great deal of time extolling its virtues of beauty and solitude.

C.W. had observed the two of them easing naturally together on the tower. He knew a little of Graham’s background, and much of Sabrina’s, and he was not quite cynical enough not to hope that they’d make it.

‘I’ll think about it, Mike,’ Sabrina said. ‘I have a lot I want to do just at the moment, and I may take a raincheck on it … but really I would love to come.’

‘Nothing of these things you wish to do is of a criminal nature, I trust,’ Philpott teased.

‘Why of course not, sir,’ she replied, fluttering her thick eye-lashes at him. ‘How could you even suggest such a thing?’

‘How indeed?’ Philpott rejoined.

Graham coughed expertly to wean the subject away from crime. ‘There wouldn’t, of course,’ he insisted, ‘be any strings. You’d be absolutely free to do anything you liked, with anyone you liked.’

‘Of course,’ she assented.

‘Hon,’ C.W. leered, ‘if you believe that, you’d believe anything, as the Duke of Wellington said.’ Sabrina blushed, and Graham turned a look of mock fury on the sardonic black.

C.W. winked at him and said, ‘Only kidding, Mike. But it seemed to me from the way you described the place that there just wouldn’t be anyone else within a hundred or so miles of it except good ole’ Mike Graham. Huh?’

It was Philpott’s turn to cough, not as expertly as Graham, but well enough. ‘Now I have a toast,’ he announced. ‘To all of us, for an operation well done. We may not have been on top all the time, but by George we sure caught up in the end.’

They drank, and Philpott added, ‘And a special toast to you, Mike. It would have been impossible without you. You have our grateful thanks.’

Mike flushed and said, ‘Aw, shucks,’ and Philpott got in quickly. ‘If you ever consider rejoining the Intelligence community, Mike, you might contact me. I think you’d find UNACO a little less, shall we say, orthodox than the CIA.’

‘Sure thing,’ C.W. supplemented, ‘unorthodox is the word. What do you say, Mike?’

Mike hesitated, and Sabrina laid her hand over his and said, ‘We did work well together, didn’t we?’

Graham looked at each of the UNACO people in turn, his gaze resting longest on Sabrina. ‘Well,’ he replied slowly, ‘as someone once said to me when I invited her on an idyllic holiday in the South of France … I’ll think about it.’

Philpott beamed and said, ‘Any time, Mike. You’ll be welcome any time.’ He then excused himself from the coffee and liqueurs. ‘There’s something I have to do,’ he explained to Sonya. ‘It’s a kind of tidying-up. A few loose ends, you know. Just for the record – and your files. I’ll see you back at the Ritz: and don’t forget we’re painting the Moulin Rouge red tonight.’

‘Think they’d mind a little black as well?’ C.W. enquired innocently.

Lorenz van Beck had two hours to kill. But being a peaceable man, he decided to spend them more profitably.

This time he chose the Musée d’Art Moderne in the Avenue du President Wilson, and the Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries, Place de la Concorde, both for their superb modern French art. On reflection, he threw in the Centre Culturel Georges Pompidou, on the valid assumption that any construction of such an outré design would be unlikely to have provided for maximum security.

He rented a Peugeot estate car in the name of Maurice T. Randall – or so his British passport said – and drove to Rambouillet by a route so circuitous that it confounded him, let alone a possible tail.

Van Beck arrived at the church on the stroke of six o’clock, and poked his head around the door. The evening sun peeped weakly through the assembled stars and shepherds in the circular west window of sumptuously coloured stained glass. There was enough light to see that he was alone, apart from a bald and shuffling sacristan, illogically moving sacred vessels from end to end of the altar at a commendably sluggish pace. Van Beck calculated he must be on overtime.

Van Beck tramped to the confessional boxes in his Church’s shoes, that went rather well with the slim-fit Savile Row suit and Jermyn Street shirt and tie. He was well pleased with himself.

For good measure, and to make his day even more rewarding, he had visited the 14th-century Medici château at Rambouillet before keeping his ecclesiastical appointment. The château is nominally reserved for the President of the Republic, but van Beck didn’t see how that automatically excluded him. Someone with talent, he thought, like – say – Sabrina Carver, could have a splendid time there. With or without the President.

The German drew back the stiff red curtain and sat on the penitent’s seat. The figure behind the metal grille, head bowed, lips moving in silent prayer, said, ‘My son?’

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ van Beck mumbled.

‘And how,’ Philpott replied. ‘For one thing, you’ve lied to me.’

‘I never lie,’ van Beck said matter-of-factly, ‘especially to clients.’

‘Then you didn’t tell me the whole truth,’ Philpott persisted.

‘Ah,’ Lorenz van Beck conceded, ‘that is an entirely different thing, Mr Philpott. To which tactical omission are you referring?’

Philpott chuckled. ‘I like that, van Beck. Let me tell you then: when I de-briefed Michael Graham, I was dismayed to learn that you had recommended not just Sabrina and C.W. to Smith, but Graham as well. It that so?’

Van Beck admitted that it was. Philpott pondered the information. ‘Neither did you tell me,’ he went on, ‘that Graham had stolen the laser-guns and handed them over to Smith – did you?’

That too, van Beck allowed, was true. ‘Nor that Smith had the lasers at his château in the Loire Valley,’ Philpott persisted.

‘I had to leave you to find out something for yourself,’ the German complained, ‘and I had no possible doubt that with your Red priority enabling you to put a Lockheed SR 71 long-range reconnaissance ’plane into French air space, you would very quickly learn the location of Smith’s little hideout. Which, after all, you did.’

‘True,’ Philpott said, disconcerted by van Beck’s intimate knowledge of the ‘Blackbird’ spy plane.

‘I am given to understand,’ van Beck continued, ‘that this versatile aircraft can fly at a height of more than eighty thousand square feet, and survey an area of sixty thousand square miles of territory in one hour. In addition to sophisticated radar and photographic equipment, it carries infrared sensors capable of detecting the heat generated by the human body even when under cover. It that not the case?’

‘It is,’ said Philpott crossly.

‘In effect,’ van Beck pressed on, ‘it could have taken an X-ray picture of Sabrina Carver in bed, which would indeed have been a notable achievement. Nein?’

‘Ja,’ replied Philpott tersely, ‘and cut out the small talk. I want answers, and I want them now.’ The bald sacristan shuffled past the confessional boxes singing a Gregorian chant off key.

Van Beck sighed heavily. ‘Very well, Mr Philpott. I owe you that, at least. In any case, I was going to tell you.’ Philpott grunted, unconvinced.

‘The first thing I would have you understand,’ van Beck began, ‘is that business is business. I work for whom I please, at any time I please. If I am employed by you and Smith simultaneously, I would be a fool to confess everything I learn to each of you. And I am not a fool, Mr Philpott.

‘The reason why I did not inform you about Graham is deeply personal,’ he went on. ‘I must have your assurance that what I am about to reveal will go no further.’ Philpott gave it.

Van Beck pursed his lips and coughed gently. ‘Did Graham tell you he had been hunting Smith because Smith was responsible for killing his wife?’

‘Yes, he did. It was a dreadful story. I can appreciate that he had to leave the CIA to do that, although continuing to work for them unofficially, and under cover.’

Van Beck nodded, and sighed again. ‘He didn’t tell you the name of his wife, did he?’ Philpott shook his head.

‘But you do concede that Graham had good reason to go after Smith?’

‘Of course,’ Philpott said, ‘any man would have done. He must have been half-crazed with grief.’

Van Beck said, ‘He was.’

Philpott looked sharply at him through the grille. ‘How do you know?’ he demanded.

Van Beck said, ‘His wife’s name was Sieglinde. He called her “Ziggy”. She was twenty-five when she died. Before her marriage to Michael Graham, she was Anneliese Sieglinde van Beck.

‘She was my only child, Mr Philpott, and the unborn baby that was lost in her womb when Smith blew her to pieces would have been my grandchild.’

Philpott was stunned, and kept silent. Van Beck held his head in his hands, and Philpott heard a stifled sob come from him.

‘I’m sorry, Lorenz,’ he said gently, ‘I didn’t know.’

Van Beck sniffed and replied, ‘Of course not. How could you? But you see, Mr Philpott, I had to make certain that Michael Graham – who is a fine young man – was the only weapons expert infiltrated into Smith’s organization.

‘And once I had done that, I resolved to do nothing to put his cover at risk. The CIA had hushed up the story of his wife’s death, making it seem natural causes. It isn’t even on his file. They fabricated a mental breakdown, and released him for the one purpose of taking Smith. I do not work for the CIA, Mr Philpott, but I would gladly do again what I did to revenge myself on a monster like Smith.’

Philpott replied, ‘I see that now. And of course you acted rightly.’

‘In other ways, too, Mr Philpott,’ van Beck went on. ‘Tell me, who gave you the tip-off that Smith was planning another big job?’

‘As far as I was concerned, INTERPOL.’

‘And who told INTERPOL – under a veil of secrecy, and on condition that they passed the intelligence to you?’

Philpott smiled. ‘Obviously, you did.’ Van Beck nodded. ‘I believed the CIA or INTERPOL would bungle the job,’ he whispered, ‘and I was confident that UNACO would not.’

Philpott said wryly, ‘Thanks for that, anyway. OK, van Beck, that’s cleared the air. I hope our association will be as fruitful in the future as it has been in the past.’

Van Beck grunted and rose from his chair. ‘Then I may go?’ Philpott nodded; but held up a hand as the German made to leave.

‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘It’s fairly important. What happened,’ he asked carefully, ‘to the proceeds of Sabrina’s admirably executed robbery in the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, for which I imagine you were also responsible?’

Van Beck smiled a crooked smile. ‘The diamonds were passed on to me, and I have already disposed of them. Miss Carver has been paid, and I shall consider my commission a suitable reward for information leading to the return of four extremely dangerous and secret laser-guns. No? Business, after all, as I keep telling you, Mr Philpott, is always business.’

Philpott chuckled, and said, ‘You win, then. Auf wiedersehen, Lorenz.’

‘Goodbye,’ van Beck replied. ‘Until the next time.’

Philpott heard the church door slam behind him, then got to his feet and made his own way out, pausing to bestow a blessing on the sacristan. He took off his priestly vestments and hung them on the cloakroom peg where he had found them.

He passed through the porch and out into the balmy twilight. The air was good. He filled his lungs and stretched.

Yes, he thought, the next time. With Sonya, Sabrina and C.W. on his team – and, possibly, Mike Graham too – Philpott was keenly looking forward to whatever might come UNACO’s way.

Who, though, would it be the next time? It was a comforting problem to take with him back to the Ritz.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

By Sam Llewellyn

Storm Force from Navarone

Thunderbolt from Navarone

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s

Rendezvous

THE UNACO SERIES

By John Denis

Alistair MacLean’s

Hostage Tower

Alistair MacLean’s

Air Force One is Down

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s

Death Train

Alistair MacLean’s

Night Watch

Alistair MacLean’s

Red Alert

Alistair MacLean’s

Time of the Assassins

Alistair MacLean’s

Dead Halt

Alistair MacLean’s

Code Breaker

By Hugh Miller

Alistair MacLean’s

Borrowed Time

Alistair MacLean’s

Prime Target

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S HOSTAGE TOWER

Alistair MacLean, who died on 2 February 1987, was the international bestselling author of thirty books, including world famous novels such as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. In 1977 he was commissioned by an American film company to write a number of story outlines that could be adapted into a series of movies; two, Hostage Tower and Air Force One is Down, were, with Alistair MacLean’s approval, published as novels by John Denis; these were followed with six by Alastair MacNeill, the highly successful Death Train, Night Watch, Red Alert, Time of the Assassins, Dead Halt and Code Breaker, and two, Borrowed Time and Prime Target by Hugh Miller.

Writing at the time, MacLean said: ‘I duly prepared eight outlines dealing with the activities of five members of a fictional group, which I named “The United Nations Anti-Crime Organization”, or for short, “UNACO”. Hostage Tower is the first of these stories to be filmed. My publisher suggested that I might like to write a novel based on the film. I declined because the timing didn’t suit me – I was in the middle of completing my novel Athabasca. Fortunately they were able to persuade John Denis to undertake the task – and you will soon discover what an excellent job he had made of it.’

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2010

1

First Published in Great Britain by

Fontana Books 1980

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers and John Denis 1980

John Denis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

UNACO is a registered trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-0-00-616084-7

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-34885-5

About the Publisher

Australia

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United Kingdom

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United States

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http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

JOHN DENIS

Alistair MacLean’s UNACO

Air Force One Is Down

HARPER

Contents

Cover

Title Page

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

By Alistair MacLean

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S AIR FORCE ONE IS DOWN

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Mister Smith’s watch had long since been taken from him, so he logged the passing seconds in his head. Not all of them, but enough to keep him in touch with reality.

No natural light penetrated the cell, for he was a Category ‘A’ convict, rating a top-security tomb. No everyday sounds of the world outside reached his ears through the solid old walls of Fresnes Prison.

In three years, even during his twice-daily canters round the exercise yard, not a single aeroplane engine had Smith heard, nor the dying snarl of a lorry, nor the aimless twittering of a sparrow.

His hearing had become abnormally and selectively acute, sifting the mélange of man-made, purposeful noises for the odd accidental one to disturb the relentless pattern of normality. But these were few, scattered like grace notes through an otherwise pedestrian score. Yet still, and obsessively, Smith listened – for the catch in the footfalls of his guards that meant a broken step, for the clang of a dropped key and the curse that always followed it, for the scraping of a match as a warder unknowingly bestowed on Smith the priceless gift of lighting a cigarette outside his cell.

These sounds, after a while, slotted subliminally into his mind, and were used by Smith to fuel his determination to avoid mental stagnation in his solitary confinement. He owned one of the truly original criminal minds of the century, and had no intention of letting it rust into disuse.

He exercised his body ruthlessly to keep his muscles finely toned, and drilled his brain no less fanatically with complex chess and bridge problems committed to memory. And when he had dispatched these, he would reconstruct in perfect detail the greatest achievements of his long career, and go on to plan those yet to happen.

That they would happen, Smith never doubted. He had known with a cold certainty on the day that the forces of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation defeated his commando army on the Eiffel Tower, that no prison could hold him beyond his calculated tolerance.

Now he had tolerated Fresnes Prison for long enough. Smith had rarely spoken, still more rarely smiled, during his incarceration. But as he sat on his bunk and squinted at the naked light-bulb which he had come to think of as a trusted friend, the ghost of a grin touched his lips.

While his brain schemed at a feverish pitch, he dropped his eyes and absent-mindedly sketched with a fingernail on the palm of his hand the ragged outline of an aeroplane. And he whispered a name.

‘Dunkels.’

Dunkels was Smith’s creature, dragged from the gutters of Berlin. Smith had made Dunkels rich, and fear of Smith kept the German loyal. The time had come for Dunkels to repay his master, to be the catalyst of Smith’s freedom, and of the crime he would perpetrate and which would rock the Western world.

‘Dunkels,’ Smith breathed again, drawing comfort from the sound, for sounds were precious to him. Dunkels would not let Mister Smith down. No one ever did that.

The Swissair DC-9 started its lazy descent into Zurich airport. The ‘No Smoking’ sign came on in the first-class compartment, and Siegfried Dunkels obediently mashed his cigarette into pulp with elegantly powerful fingers.

He teased a flake of ash from the crease of his blue mohair trousers and glanced out of the cabin window. White puffs of cumulus danced on the snow-topped Alpine peaks, basking in their Christmas card complacency under an otherwise china-blue sky. His thin lips twisted. Dunkels detested the smug Swiss, but envied and feared them, too, for their effortless success and smooth financial brigandry. He had been bested, cheated, by Swiss money-men in the past; it would not, he vowed, happen again.

No Zurich gnome had ever beaten Mister Smith, Dunkels mused; and he was in Switzerland on Mister Smith’s business. Nothing must go wrong. On Dunkels’ life, nothing must go wrong.

A pert stewardess, confidently pretty, stopped by his seat and glanced meaningfully at his lap through lowered lids. She was merely checking that his seat-belt was fastened, yet she made it seem like an invitation.

‘I trust,’ Dunkels said in German, ‘that your Swiss doctors are more amenable than your bankers.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said the girl.

‘You have it,’ Dunkels rejoined, stretching his mouth into a smile.

Fawn-coloured sunlight flooded into the aircraft as the pilot turned on to his final approach. A priest in the window seat struggled with the mini-blind, and Dunkels reached across him to flick it expertly down and mask the sudden glare. The priest bowed his thanks. Men of God, Dunkels thought, should not travel first class. It did not demonstrate a proper humility, though he doubted whether one such as his companion, clearly a bishop, would even bother to affect an attitude of humility.

The tension of the landing mounted in the cabin, and was reflected by seasoned travellers like Dunkels who steeled themselves for the touch-down. A sigh of relief escaped from the bishop when the DC-9’s wheels rode safely on to the tarmac. The prelate crossed himself, and started to say something to Dunkels, who pretended, with an exaggerated pantomime, to be deaf.

Later, Dunkels hefted his alligator-skin case from the baggage-carousel and strolled past the deferential Swiss douaniers to the automatic exit doors. A uniformed chauffeur standing by a black Mercedes signalled to him with a gloved hand. The driver indicated the front passenger seat, but Dunkels pointedly waited for the rear door to be opened. Just as pointedly, he insulated himself from the possibility of small-talk on the journey by leaving the limousine’s plate-glass partition closed.

Dunkels did not look through the tinted window at the breathtaking scenery, but into it at his own reflection. He saw, and admired, a square-jawed, firmly fleshed face with a slightly kinked nose jutting aggressively under his deceptively mild brown eyes. The chin was adequately cleft and the forehead broad and bland. His eyebrows, like his hair, were ash-blond. The hair was kept short and sculpted by an Italian barber who was an artist with a razor. Dunkels drew a comb from his pocket and ran it across his scalp. In its wake, the individual hair follicles snapped smartly back into place like Prussian guardsmen.

A fleeting shadow intruded on his self-absorption. Dunkels frowned and peered more closely. Then he grinned. It was an aeroplane. A Boeing 707.

The undulating silhouette was not unlike the shape Smith had traced on his hand in the Fresnes Prison.

The dignified italic script on the sign said ‘Edelweiss Clinic’ in English, and Dunkels mentally switched to English for the period he was to stay there; a short time, he hoped. Like Smith, Dunkels was an accomplished linguist – though without Smith’s encyclopaedic command of esoteric tongues. Dunkels had known Smith to range languidly through the alphabet from Albanian to Xhosa purely for mental stimulus.

Gravel crackled beneath the wheels of the Mercedes when it left the main road and turned into the clinic’s long drive. Edelweiss, Dunkels assumed, would be an unwelcome intruder into the probably regimented sterility of the clinic, which at last came into view through the front window. It was a newish, chalet-style complex nestling in a fold of the mountain, and built out from it to overlook the vertiginous drop to a rock-strewn valley. Patients of Doctor Richard Stein who were unable to afford his treatment, or failed to benefit from it, could solve their problems simply by walking off his expensive terracing, Dunkels thought. He spread his long, spare body over the rear seat of the Mercedes and waited for the chauffeur to release him. A white-coated figure came out through the swing-doors and descended the steps towards him.

Doctor Richard Stein looked old for his years. He was an acknowledged front-runner in the treatment of rheumatoid-arthritic complaints among the elderly and rich, as well as a gifted psychiatrist. He was also (but less acknowledged) probably the most skilful plastic surgeon in Switzerland. It was a fortunate aptitude to possess in a land where a secret access of fortune often demanded a consequential change in appearance.

Richard Stein oiled rusting joints, cleared cobwebbed minds, and restructured dangerous faces with the same impartial expertise. He was small, dark and frail-seeming, with a prominent aquiline nose. His shoulders were bent, and Dunkels, who towered over him, saw the permanently crooked upper half of his body swivel from the waist as Stein extended a bony hand in greeting. ‘Physician, heal thyself,’ Dunkels murmured indelicately.

‘Mr Dunkels, I presume,’ Stein said in German.

Dunkels ran his tongue along his strong, square teeth and grinned. ‘There’s an answer to that, I believe,’ he replied in English, ‘though I never learned what it was. Doctor Stein: it’s good to meet you at last.’ He gripped Stein’s hand with careless strength, but released it when the Swiss grimaced in pain. ‘Sorry,’ Dunkels said, ‘I wouldn’t hurt your hands for all the money in Zurich.’

‘Even with all the money in Zurich, I doubt that you’d be able to buy their equal,’ Stein remarked, in excellent, though accented, English. He rubbed his abused fingers ruefully and added, ‘I’ll lead the way, then,’ turning as fluidly as a man afflicted with apparent arthritic curvature of the spine can rotate.

The Mercedes slid away, and Dunkels followed the little Swiss doctor along two uniformly pristine corridors until they came to an oak-panelled door bearing the single word ‘Director’. Stein’s office was functional G-plan, with a picture-window framing the valley and mountains like an adjustable holiday-snap. Stein settled himself behind the desk and seemed to grow in stature now that he was exercising his own territorial imperative. He waved Dunkels into a comfortable low hide chair.

‘You have the photographs and the anatomically detailed descriptions?’ Stein asked, breaking the silence.

Dunkels nodded. ‘You have the candidate?’

Stein nodded. Dunkels waited for the exposition, but none came. Finally he sniffed loudly and said, ‘Name?’

Stein linked his fingers and laid them on the desk, leaning forward and gazing intently at Dunkels as if he were on the point of revealing a state secret. ‘Jagger. Cody Jagger.’

Dunkels pursed his lips. ‘It has a somewhat theatrical ring,’ he mused.

‘It’s his real name,’ Stein supplied confidentially.

Dunkels sat up and leaned in towards Stein. ‘He’s here now?’

Stein inclined his impressive head. ‘Would you like to see his picture?’ Dunkels indicated that he would.

It was an ordinary enough face gazing out at him from the first page of the manilla folder which Stein shot across the polished mahogany desk. The ordinariness, Dunkels knew, was a bonus. It was also a strangely pliable-looking face … no highlights or promontories, no points of interest or focus; it could have been moulded from plasticine for all the definition it carried. Another bonus. Dunkels stared hard at the face, then closed his eyes and tried to visualise its contours; and failed. He grinned, and smacked his lips approvingly.

Stein smiled too. ‘I knew you’d like him. Good basic building-material. There are, additionally, certain similarities already between Jagger and the subject, and for total conversion … well, at the very least Jagger’s physiognomy creates no obstacles, as you can see. The colouring, incidentally, is identical, and his height and weight match the subject’s almost exactly.’

‘Almost?’

‘Each man is six feet two inches tall, but Jagger is eight pounds heavier than the subject. This is not a problem, since my clinic specialises in reducing-diets.’

‘Among other things.’

‘As you say,’ Stein acknowledged, ‘among other things.’

Dunkels flipped through the remaining pages of the Jagger file, and grunted in amusement. Stein regarded him questioningly. Dunkels snapped the file shut and remarked, ‘Not exactly a model citizen, our Cody, is he?’

Stein replied, ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted a circuit preacher.’ Dunkels grinned. ‘It makes no difference what he is,’ he conceded, ‘as long as he is the man he claims to be. If he checks out, he’ll do.’

‘He will.’

‘He’ll have to,’ Dunkels said, leaving the implicit warning unstated.

Stein unlaced his fingers and spread them wide in apparent consternation. ‘I’ve never let Smith down before, have I?’ he demanded.

‘Mister Smith,’ Dunkels corrected icily.

‘Mister Smith, I’m sorry,’ Stein apologised. ‘But all the same, I’ve always delivered. Even when it was Mister Smith’s own face. I made him Javanese, if you recall. And Swedish – and Peruvian. No complaints? No.’ Stein’s fingertips agitated like the hands of a blue-rinse matron drying a full house of painted nails.

‘I gave him his present face,’ he protested, ‘the aristocratic look, that’s what he wanted – top-drawer English. And that’s what he got. He could pass for a Duke at Buckingham Palace.’

‘He did,’ Dunkels interposed drily.

‘There you are, then,’ Stein exclaimed, ‘though of course Mister Smith’s face is marvellously – eh – malleable. And unmemorable, too. He tells me he’s quite forgotten what he originally looked like.’

That, Dunkels admitted, rising from the hide chair, was true. ‘OK, Stein,’ he said brusquely, ‘I’ll put Jagger through the mincer, and if he comes out kosher, he’s it.’ Dunkels prided himself on his idiomatic English.

They lunched expansively in Stein’s penthouse, which afforded an even more staggering panorama of Switzerland’s greatest natural asset. When they had finished eating, Stein inquired tentatively whether Dunkels really thought they could get away with the impersonation.

‘What do you think?’ Dunkels replied. ‘You’re doing the important part.’

Stein explained that the assumption of the subject’s physical identity was not difficult. He had made people into other people before. ‘Naturally,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be able to offer a more qualified opinion on Jagger’s chances when you tell me a little more about our subject. At present, all you’ve given me is his face in six different poses, for which I’m grateful, plus the information that he’s connected with the American forces, though which branch I don’t know.’

Dunkels cracked his knuckles and drew a baleful glance from Stein. ‘His name is Joe McCafferty,’ Dunkels said slowly, as if grudging every word. ‘He’s on secondment from the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation – UNACO – to the elite Secret Service Corps forming the American President’s bodyguard.

Currently, McCafferty has been reseconded to head the security force aboard Air Force One, which is, as you know—’

‘Yes,’ Stein interrupted, ‘I know what Air Force One is. The Boeing – 707, isn’t it? – used by the President as a sort of aerial White House. So …’ he dragged the conjunction out admiringly, and whistled, ‘so McCafferty’s an important man.’

‘He is.’

‘Then you’d better come along and see him,’ Stein twinkled. ‘I mean, of course, his potential doppelgänger, his look-alike, his – other self.’ Stein paused and added, half to himself, ‘How unpleasant it will be for McCafferty to discover that he has suddenly become two people.’

Smith’s computer ‘mincer’, located thirty miles north of the Brazilian city of São Paolo, was extraordinarily swift and adept. It placed its imprimatur on Jagger’s credentials while Dunkels was still waiting for his coffee to arrive. A courteous waiter handed him the telex, and Dunkels himself took the good news to Jagger, who was billeted in a room at the end of a wing that was private even by the reclusive character of the Edelweiss Clinic.

He introduced himself and told Jagger, ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of me from now on.’ The ringer stood up and clasped Dunkels’ hand. He grinned crookedly and said, ‘Cody Jagger – and this is probably the last you’ll ever see of me as I look now.’

Four hours later, Dunkels left the clinic in the same Mercedes that had brought him there. His close interrogation of Jagger had endorsed the computer’s verdict: that Cody Jagger was indeed Cody Jagger. Dunkels was also satisfied, by his own and Smith’s high standards, that Jagger was psychologically as well as physiologically adjusted to becoming one Joseph Eamonn Pearse McCafferty, Colonel USAF, presently Head of Security Operations, Air Force One, and seconded to the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, USA.

The Alpine peaks were almost purple in the waning light when Stein knocked at Jagger’s door, and entered without an invitation. The ringer, who was standing before a back-lit shaving mirror saying goodbye to his face, remarked tersely, ‘He’s hooked.’

‘Excellent,’ Stein beamed. ‘So Smith will be hooked too. Moscow should be very, very pleased.’

‘So they ought to be,’ Jagger retorted. ‘This thing could be bigger than either we or they thought.’ He lapsed into silence, then added, ‘Are you sure Smith will buy it?’

‘Tut, tut, tut,’ Stein said, waving an admonitory finger at him, ‘Mister Smith if you don’t mind. That, Jagger, is your first lesson.’

Smith listened to the days going by. Dunkels’ last message had been affirmative. The ringer was perfect. The caper was on. His freedom lay barely a week away; then the world of sound, sight and scent would assume its normal proportions.

But strangely, that mattered less and less to Smith as the elongated hours passed. What was important was the crime he had planned to celebrate his return to life – the big one, which would destroy the credibility of UNACO and its commander, Malcolm Philpott. Smith deeply hated the man who had condemned him to the scarcely endurable catalepsy of imprisonment – but this time he would triumph and UNACO would fall.

Dunkels would not let him down. Nor would Jagger; nor would Stein. Failure, as always with Mister Smith, was unthinkable. He had felt President Warren G. Wheeler squirming in his hands once before; and he would do so again.

Smith’s mind conjured up anew the vision of the converted Boeing 707 that was, to Warren G. Wheeler, Air Force One. ‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, ‘has the nasty man taken your toy away?’

And for the first time in three years, four months and eighteen days, genuine, unforced laughter filled the lonely prison cell, so near to his beloved Paris that Smith could almost smell the drains.

TWO

Over the next four days, Cody Jagger survived the mental and physical agony of losing his persona.

He could not, though, have been in more skilful or patient hands. Stein’s operating theatre, in which he was joined by only two members of his staff, wholly dependent on him for money and drugs, was set out like a society photographer’s salon.

Every inch of wall space was given over to huge blow-up pictures of McCafferty’s face taken from six different angles, including a shot of the back of his neck, showing the precise set of his flat, trim ears.

The operating table was surrounded by a forest of tripods bearing multi-bracketed floodlights, adjustable vertically and in their angles of concentration. Stein, bent over the table which glowed under its own bank of arc-lamps, constantly barked instructions to his minions to sharpen or illuminate particular features of the subject.

Then, squinting fiercely at the pictures that charted McCafferty’s face with the fine detail of an Ordnance Survey Map, Stein wielded his scalpel on the unconscious Jagger to trade cheek for cheek, jowl for jowl, nose for nose.

With total detachment, and a square centimetre at a time, Stein sliced away slivers of Cody Jagger and moulded them into jigsaw pieces of Joe McCafferty, like Lego bricks of flesh, the common denominators of a man which the surgeon simply rearranged in the shape of a different man.

Finally it was done, the stitches out, the scars pink and fresh. It was 0330 on the morning of the fifth day, and Stein, slumped cross-legged on the floor studying his handiwork in an enlarging mirror set into the ceiling, reflected sourly that in only a day and a half more, the God of Abraham and Isaac had created an entire world. ‘Probably had better hired help than me,’ Stein chuckled malevolently. He had never felt so enervated, so completely exhausted.

He looked at the taped and bandaged head. If there was no tissue infection, the bulk of the hard work was over. But Stein had sensed from the mounting urgency in Dunkels’ voice on the phone that Smith’s plans were coming to a head.

Stein knew he could delay no further in contacting Karilian.

The Mercedes drew up once more at the Edelweiss Clinic, midway through the evening of the same day. Stein, who had spent the intervening hours sleeping, crabbed down the steps to greet the large, square-faced man who had elbowed the respectful chauffeur impatiently aside.

The driver, by inclination a gregarious type, was rapidly tiring of ferrying rude and uncommunicative foreigners to his employer.

Axel Karilian, KGB controller, Switzerland, ignored Stein’s outstretched hand, grasping him instead roughly by the elbow and pivoting him around to face back up the steps. ‘Show me,’ he commanded, propelling the little Swiss doctor through the entry doors.

As a high-ranking and, by definition, high-risk criminal, Smith was customarily fed in his cell, keeping him away from contact with other prisoners. So when his evening meal-tray was removed, and the others in his block (Smith subconsciously counted them, identifying the cells solely by the sounds of their doors closing and the number of steps it took to reach them), he knew that it would be half an hour to the guard’s final round of the day, a further twenty minutes to complete the tour, and an additional fifteen minutes to ‘lights out’. The regimen never varied. Smith would have been distressed if it had.

That evening, while Doctor Richard Stein was entertaining Axel Karilian in the Edelweiss Clinic’s penthouse, Mister Smith ate his dinner in the prison’s isolation wing with more than usual relish.

He was aware that it would be the last meal he would ever take there. He lay back on his bunk and considered the immediate and more distant future, while his mind automatically catalogued the jail’s grinding routine, cell by cell, tray by tray, door by door, step by squeaky-booted step (a squeaking boot! Not two, but one! A pleasing paradox to take out with him).

Smith chuckled his delight, and in his brain the nagging metronome that kept time for him ticked remorselessly on. He fell asleep, but even as he awoke hours later his first conscious impression was of the metronome taking over again, so that he knew for an indisputable fact that the hour was drawing near.

The prison ‘trusty’ bribed to be the prime mover in springing Smith from jail licked his lips and tried to stop his eyes from darting repeatedly to the wall clock in the maintenance block. The second hand clicked over from 0359 to 0400, and the convict jammed the flat of his hand down on the plunger-key of the detonator device that had been smuggled in to him.

In the isolation wing, two hundred yards away, an electric spark leapt out from a junction box to join a trail of black powder. The powder spluttered into flame, and eleven seconds later a can of gasoline exploded in a bedding store at the end of Smith’s corridor. Soon the store and its adjoining rooms were well alight, and the prison staff, squeaky-boot among them, rushed to the scene. That was when Smith’s cell light came on.

The alarm from the prison to the local fire-station was automatic on the location of any uncontrolled outbreak, but still the fire-officers tended to wait for a confirmatory phone call. When it came, six fire appliances – two turntable ladder-wagons, a control vehicle and three water/foam-tenders – roared out at a reckless speed into the night.

The fire spread quickly, yet the prison governor, and the deputy governor and the chief warder, all had to be roused and mobilised before the order to evacuate the threatened areas could be given. The guards drew rifles and riot guns from the armoury, and a nervous police commissioner turned out a cadre of the local CRS detachment, the riot police.

Arc-lamps and sweep-lights illuminated every cranny of the gaunt building, and Smith sat up and then leaned back on his elbows when his cell door burst open.

‘Out!’ the armed guard ordered. ‘There’s a fire. We’re clearing the block. Out!’

‘Where to?’ Smith asked, putting on a show of sudden panic.

‘The main yard. Join the queue. Hurry!’

Mister Smith left the place which had been his home for more than three years without so much as a backward glance.

The fire-engine convoy wailed and clanged its way through the dark streets, to be joined at an intersection by police cars and outriders, adding still more manic noise to the already insane cacophony. At the prison, shouting guards urged streams of convicts from five different directions into the large central yard, herding them into resentful chains to feed water and sand to the flames. The keening of sirens and screeching of tyres announced the arrival of the police, who did little apart from get in each other’s way until the firemen came.

The fire had now spread to the stretch of buildings nearest the high perimeter-wall, and the two big turntable appliances straight away hoisted up their ladders above the wall. Firemen scrambled along them like mountain goats, and trained their hoses on the flames.

Unnoticed by the firemen, but ushered smartly to the wall by the police, a third turntable engine coming from the opposite direction from the main force, also shot its ladder up over the wall. The chief fire-officer in overall charge of operations in the control vehicle screamed directions at the crew for concentrating their water and foam.

The message was passed up the ladder to the man at the top, Leading Fireman Siegfried Dunkels, who acknowledged with a capable wave. Then he waved again, using both arms and trapping his hose between his knees. This time Smith saw him.

The yard was filled with smoke, clamour and confusion, and it was easy for Smith to clutch at his throat, retch noisily, and stumble out of the crocodile, which automatically closed ranks to fill his place.

Smith fell to his knees, apparently choking, then got up and lurched towards a patch of clearer air. It was covered by the harsh white glare of a searchlight, so the prison officer he bumped into en route did not trouble to turn him away from an area that would normally be strictly out-of-bounds to convicts: the foot of the wall.

Dunkels’ ladder, and the hoses of his men, were pointed at the heart of the fire, but gradually the ladder began swinging away from the blaze and towards the yard until it centred over the crumpled figure of Mister Smith. Dunkels dropped a weighted nylon rope-ladder smack into his lap. Smith grasped it and started to scale the wall.

A guard – primed, like his colleagues, to watch for signs of a break-out – caught the unnatural movement of the human fly in the corner of his vision, and shouted a warning. As he charged over to the gyrating figure he saw the rope-ladder, and leapt for its trailing end. But Dunkels had already jerked his hose away from the flames and was swivelling it downwards. Carefully avoiding Smith, he aimed the hose, and the high-pressure jet of water took the guard full in the chest, slamming him to the ground and pinning him there like a butterfly in a specimen case.

Smith reached the top of the wall and clutched the turntable ladder, which retracted, dropped its angle, and deposited him on the ground by the fire-engine. The hard-pressed fire chief also had the bad luck to notice Smith’s escape. He ran in the direction of the third appliance, the presence of which had been bothering him for some little while.

Dunkels, in the still-retracting ladder, gave him the full treatment, bowling him over like a ninepin and then worrying him until he crawled back to his control wagon, where sympathetic hands hauled him inside.

Smith jumped into the cab, and the driver gunned the motor and moved the appliance away at top speed, sirens blaring. Dunkels, perched on the end of the now horizontal ladder, used his hose like a tail-gunner to deadly effect, scattering startled firemen and CRS toughies who tried vainly to stop them.

The madly racing fire-engine left the city limits at an impossible speed five minutes later. In a quiet country road, the appliance stopped. The crew got out, peeled off their uniforms, and six of them piled into a neutral-coloured van which matched the name on their early-shift construction workers’ overalls.

Smith, Dunkels and the remaining three boarded a pair of Citroën cars, where changes of clothing were waiting for them. The limousines moved off together, and Smith heaved a sigh of profound relief.

‘Excellent, Dunkels,’ he said, ‘truly excellent. Now – get me a safe-house and a woman, in that order.’

Dunkels grinned. ‘Should you wish to reverse the order, sir,’ he said, ‘there’s a woman in the back of the other car.’

Karilian had reluctantly allowed Stein to take the lead when the surgeon ordered him to be gloved, masked and gowned, then demonstrated beyond doubt that Jagger was no longer in the operating theatre.

They reached Jagger’s off-limits suite, and Stein kept the bad news from him until they had tiptoed across to Jagger’s bedside. ‘What the hell’s this?’ Karilian burst out, jabbing a stubby finger at the bandaged head. ‘I want to see his face. That’s why I’m here, remember?’

‘Shhh,’ Stein soothed him. ‘Keep the noise down, I beg you. I don’t want him suddenly awoken. He’s still under sedation and mustn’t move quickly.’

Without dropping his voice, Karilian demanded when he could see Jagger properly. Stein had assured him that Jagger would wake naturally in the early hours, when the sedatives and antibiotics had worked through his system. But while there was still the risk of tissue infection, or even rejection, the ringer must remain unconscious. ‘Please do as I ask,’ he entreated Karilian. ‘Come and dine with me upstairs. I have some excellent vodka and Beluga caviare.’

Karilian looked thunderously at him from beneath his shaggy brows, the hard, flinty grey eyes contemptuous and unblinking. Then he gave a half-grunting, half-snorting bark and growled, ‘Make it Glenfiddich, Dom Perignon and a T-bone steak, and I might consider it.’

Stein also relaxed, his body subsiding from warped tension into its normal question mark shape. ‘But I do want to see him – tonight,’ Karilian warned him.

‘So you shall,’ Stein promised, ‘so you shall.’

The little doctor invariably won their minor skirmishes. Richard Stein, who had started life in Switzerland with the less acceptable name, in those days, of Scholomo Asher Silberstein, had known Axel Karilian for thirty-five years. Stein, then a gifted young medical student, had been trapped in Poland at the outbreak of war, and was sent to the nearest concentration camp with his fellow Jews. Luckily, it was a small and indifferently run camp under a weak but perverted commandant. Stein had wheedled his way into the camp’s medical unit, and the commandant’s confidence, and used the stepping-stones to Himmler’s Final Solution to advance himself into a position of power.

Stein pandered grossly to the commandant’s twisted mind (and improved his own knowledge of surgical techniques) by performing ghastly and obscene experimental operations on the inmates. His greatest medical triumph had been grafting organs from a large, fully-grown man on to the body of a seven-year-old girl. The child had lived for six weeks until the poisons trapped inside her literally erupted.

The Red Army surged swiftly through Poland on its way to Germany, and the commandant and his staff were unprepared for the sudden onslaught on the camp. The major in charge of the Soviet force lined up the Germans and shot them out of hand. He did the same with the weakest and most ailing of the Jews.

But Stein, neither sickly nor weak, was handed over to a young Ukrainian Intelligence captain who had just been posted to the advance armies, and so began the long friendship between Axel Karilian and the soon-to-be Richard Stein.

Stein was spirited away when the Ukrainian learned of his special abilities, and to protect him from Jewish revenge, Karilian took him to Odessa, where the Swiss Jew passed on enough of his hideously acquired skill in plastic surgery and skin-grafting to enable local doctors to change his face.

Stein did not stop at that, though; he wanted his shape changed as well. And he told the orthopaedic surgeons how to do it. It was an operation he had performed many times on unanaesthetised Jewish children, with more pliable bones than his, transforming them from human beings into grotesque monsters. Stein laid out every step of the operation for the Russians, endured the agony and, like Jagger, survived.

Richard Stein was no hapless victim of rheumatoid-arthritis. He was a self-made question mark.

After the war the KGB set him up in the Edelweiss Clinic, and Karilian joined him in Switzerland as the Geneva-based controller. It frequently amused Stein, as he amassed considerable wealth with the success of the clinic, that many of his best customers now were even wealthier Jews. On them, of course, he operated with the utmost care and skill. And never forgot the anaesthetic.

Cody Jagger’s path to the embrace of the KGB was equally painful, and was also to involve Axel Karilian.

After a boyhood of petty offences and a brace of unhelpful prison terms when he graduated from a more serious school of crime, Jagger made PFC in the Army and was captured early on in the Vietnam war, waging a bloody and highly personal counter-offensive north of Hué.

He was tough, truculent, a born bully, and no trouble at all to the Viet Cong torture squads, who broke him inside a month.

Jagger was selected for training by a travelling KGB recruiting officer, but far from easing his lot the new status turned Cody’s life into a living hell. Physical torment and mental assault alternated in a pattern of treatment which took him to the very borders of his sanity. Only afterwards did he dimly appreciate that turncoat material was of no use to the Soviet intelligence machine. He had given in too easily to the Viet Cong; therefore, the KGB reasoned, he could just as easily revert back to the Americans. They could not afford that kind of risk, so they handed Jagger over to Axel Karilian, who had picked up any number of useful tips in his fruitful association with Richard Stein.

Karilian’s programme for Jagger was typical in its uncomplicated logic: the American must be cowed and brutalised into abject, unquestioning submission until he became a safe prospect.

It took Jagger three years to realise what was happening. When he did, he submitted – and meant it. Moscow sent him back to Hanoi, where the torture was increased daily for two months, to the point where Jagger lived every waking moment in constant, gibbering terror.

Only then had Karilian been satisfied. Thereafter, the KGB ruled Jagger by fear and fear alone.

He performed well enough for them as an agent in the States, but at a purely basic level, so that when Smith instructed Stein to find ringer-material for him, and Stein had passed on the news to Karilian, even the Ukrainian had been reluctant to use Jagger. But when he reconsidered the proposition, Karilian knew that Jagger must be the perfect candidate, though Stein still had misgivings.

Stein and Karilian entered once more the bedroom of the now restlessly stirring man. Jagger’s eyes opened and regarded them through the slits in his bandages. ‘How is he?’ Stein inquired of the nurse sitting by the bed.

‘Much better,’ she replied. ‘Doctor Grühner had a look at him just now. He says all the tissue has taken well, and there’s no sign of infection. The scars are healing nicely.’

‘Have you seen his face?’ Karilian asked her brusquely. The nurse shook her head. Karilian motioned towards the door with his hand. ‘Out,’ he ordered.

Stein lifted the bandages carefully away, and was arranging them on a metal trolley when the telephone rang. The call was for Karilian.

The Ukrainian spoke only his name, listened, grunted twice and slammed the receiver back in its cradle. ‘That was Paris,’ he said, ‘there’s been a fire at Fresnes Prison. One inmate made a daring escape. Guess who.’

Stein’s eyes lit up. ‘Then it’s about to start?’

Karilian nodded. ‘Your waxwork doll there will be needed sooner than we thought. Well – let’s take a look at him.’

Jagger murmured in distress as Karilian loomed menacingly over the bed. Cody was conditioned to tremble at Russians, and at Karilian in particular. The Ukrainian took photographs from Stein’s folder on the trolley and leaned in closer, holding a 12 x 10 enlargement next to Jagger’s new pink ear. He rose and turned to Stein. ‘Good enough,’ he conceded.

‘Good enough?’ Stein bridled. ‘He would fool Joe McCafferty’s own mother.’

The telephone rang again. Stein picked it up, announced himself, and listened, also in silence. Then he said, ‘Have no fear, he’ll be ready. Yes. Until next week then. Au revoir.’

‘Dunkels,’ Stein said when Karilian raised an inquiring eyebrow. Smith would be at the clinic in a week, he explained, and he wanted the ringer to be fit, unscarred and word-perfect within a further five weeks.

Karilian smiled, with no trace of mirth. ‘Then so do I, my dear Richard. You’d better see to it, hadn’t you?’

Stein promised it would be accomplished. They had tapes of McCafferty’s voice and an elocution expert as back-up, plus mute and sound film of his walk, gestures and mannerisms. Stein had a copy of Smith’s dossier on the UNACO man, which was formidably comprehensive. His background, education, love affairs, close friendships, likes and dislikes … all were documented in detail. Psychiatric assessments and physical reports were attached, together with medical histories and dental records. McCafferty’s relations with his brother officers were charted, and the file also included thumbnail pictures and mini-dossiers of the people closest to him at work, who would clearly expect instant recognition from McCafferty.

One factor was in Jagger’s favour: McCafferty commanded his own unit, so he didn’t have to be too unctuously friendly with anyone, superior or subordinate. Aloofness could be used to cover a temporary lapse. Nonetheless, the ringer would have to memorise not merely the faces, but the backgrounds as well, of all those men and women in McCafferty’s immediate family and circle, especially the officers he had served with on his way up through the ranks. Each of them would have similar combat stories to which the ringer must unhesitatingly respond – and get the details right.

The women in McCafferty’s life, Stein reasoned, could present the major problem. Affairs they knew about were fully outlined, with portraits, curricula vitae, favourite food, music, authors and suchlike, of the leading contenders. Sexual accomplishments and/or deviations were listed where possible, but it would be in bed that Jagger could betray himself. Several authorities rated McCafferty as a considerate and expert lover – whereas Jagger was, at best, an unfeeling rapist, with a conviction to prove it.

Fortunately, Stein had partially solved the problem by circumcising Jagger to match McCafferty, so it would be some time before the ringer could use himself without pain. But as a general rule he would be ordered to avoid sexual contacts, pleading recurrent hepatitis, or a mild case of a social disease, or any other plausible excuse.

Again Stein asked Karilian, as they stood looking down on the scarred ringer, how good their chances were of getting away with it for any length of time.

‘Can Jagger really manage it?’ he insisted. ‘Is he that bright, that adaptable? It needs a considerable actor, you know, Axel, to carry off this part.’

Karilian told him to stop worrying. ‘He’ll do it all right,’ he said grimly, ‘and he’ll do it well. I don’t know why Smith wants him on Air Force One, but it’s got to be something very, very big for an operator like him to go to all this expense and preparation. And for his man to be our man as well, unknown either to Smith or people like UNACO, who’ll be involved now that Smith is free, is a master-stroke. Moscow’s in raptures at the prospect.’

Stein grinned at Karilian’s obvious relish, but suggested that the more Jagger was exposed as McCafferty the greater his vulnerability might become. Karilian shook his huge head. ‘You’re wrong,’ he replied, ‘the more he plays the role the better he’ll get at playing it – that surely follows.’

‘I don’t know,’ Stein muttered, ‘I just don’t know. How can you be so certain?’

‘How? Simple. I know Jagger. He’s terrified of what will happen to him if he doesn’t do it. Something a hundred – a thousand – times worse than death. Can you imagine the depth of his fear, Doctor, a fate as monstrous as that which Jagger believes could be his? But how silly of me; of course you can. You, after all, are an acknowledged expert in pain and terror. For example, you would only have to threaten to “rearrange” him again, but without the anaesthetic. It would not be the first time, would it?’

Stein flushed angrily, but could not look Karilian in the eyes. ‘What about the real McCafferty?’ he muttered. ‘What happens to him?’

Karilian laughed. ‘If Smith doesn’t kill him,’ he said, ‘then of course I will.’

THREE

Basil Swann, a young man with spots, hornrimmed glasses and a string of honours from three universities, bustled into the office of Malcolm G. Philpott, Director of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation. The bureau was located in the UN Building in New York City, and Basil was childishly proud to work there, although he would not have dreamed of showing it. He had a predictably sound future with UNACO – provided that UNACO itself had one.

The bureau had never been – and, Philpott feared, never would be – a totally secure operation, free from political pressure and financial stress. Philpott himself had proposed the formation of the top-secret group when he was a research professor at a New England college.

His specialist subjects had been behavioural sciences, but Philpott’s deepest interest lay in the motivation and machination of the criminal mind. He had lobbied furiously to gain UN approval, and won it only because the US government of the day had funded the initial outlay. Philpott resisted the American patronage, and ever since then had fought successive Administrations to keep UNACO independent of the American, or any other, state. The bureau must, he insisted, be at the disposal of all UN member countries, from whichever power-bloc. An enlightened UN secretariat finally saw the point.

Philpott’s other problem – easily foreseen but difficult to resolve – was infiltration by the UN states who were picking up the bills. Philpott fought off patently obvious attempts at penetration by both the CIA and the KGB, but the French, Israeli, British and South African plants were sometimes trickier to uncover. Gradually, the Director established his right to a cordon sanitaire as the only effective means of guaranteeing UNACO’s neutrality and disinterestedness. He managed to cope with the naturally divided feelings of his American-born operatives, who had constantly to fend off appeals to their native patriotism, and relied heavily on his Assistant Director, Sonya Kolchinsky, a Czech national, for ammunition against Warsaw Pact interests.

Lastly, Philpott had to persuade all his clients that UNACO was not in business to play politics … that the American de-stabilisation of Chile and Jamaica, or the Soviet Union’s ruthless repression of Czechoslovakia and Poland, were not international crimes in the accepted sense; deplorable, but not actionable. UNACO’s enemies were criminals who challenged the security of nations and the stability of social order; and of those known to Philpott, Mister Smith came near the top of the list.

An unwanted complication for the UNACO Director was the depth of his personal relationship with the US President, Warren G. Wheeler, a close friend since college days. Wheeler had to be treated as impartially as any other UN head of state, but it created a difficult tight-rope for Philpott to walk. If he leaned too far in either direction, he would fall, and UNACO with him. But then, Malcolm Gregory Philpott had been trained for the risk business. And anyway, it made life interesting.

Now approaching his mid-fifties, Philpott was still a lean, trim and handsome man, though his abundant hair was iron-grey and his sharp, intelligent face was seamed, more from responsibility than age. The principal emotions showing on it as Swann walked into his office were tension and concern, rather belying Philpott’s reputation as a cunning poker player.

The large room through which Swann had passed on his way to see the Director housed the UNACO master computer, plus an electronically operated wall map of the world and a staff of multi-lingual monitors, whose continuous task was to tap listening-posts in a hundred and thirty countries.

Each time a new contact was made, a red light flickered on the wall map, indicating its point of origin. An exact see-through miniature of the map rested on Philpott’s uncluttered desk. Basil Swann approached the desk, stood in silence, coughed discreetly, and handed the Director a computer print-out. It was a brief list, no more than five lines.

USSR : Gold bullion shipment – Klvost to Moscow.

EEC : Brussels. Quarterly NATO conference.

MIDDLE EAST : Bahrain. OPEC ministers to Washington.

: Cairo. Israeli–Egyptian defence talks.

SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE : Cape Town. Diamonds in transit to Amsterdam.

Philpott quickly scanned the entries and accompanying estimate of dates, and then read it over, more slowly. ‘Is this everything?’ he inquired.

‘It is a complete catalogue of the likeliest events within the next three months in which the computer considers our friend might conceivably display a criminal interest,’ Swann replied ponderously.

‘Which friend?’ called a voice from the doorway, ‘and furthermore, what do you mean by bleeping me at the hairdresser’s? You know how sensitive Pepito is. It’d better be important.’

‘It is, Sonya,’ Philpott answered as his Assistant Director, newly and radiantly coiffured, sailed into the room, and sank into a chair proffered by Swann. Sonya Kolchinsky was sumptuously fashioned and of above-average height, with a round face, soft grey eyes and short brown hair, elegantly moulded to her shapely head. She was a good ten years younger than Philpott, but saw no reason to permit minor considerations like age difference or their positions in UNACO to interfere with the affair they had both conducted, guiltlessly and joyfully, ever since she had become part of UNACO and of Philpott’s life.

‘It’s very important,’ Philpott added gravely. ‘Smith’s got out of jail.’

‘O-h-h,’ she breathed, ‘that friend.’

‘That friend.’

Sonya pondered the news. ‘He hadn’t long to serve, had he?’ she said. ‘I remember he bribed his way to a lenient sentence after the Eiffel Tower snatch. It could have had only a few more months to run.’ Philpott nodded his agreement. ‘In which case,’ Sonya pressed, ‘wasn’t it rather foolish of him to break out now?’

‘Maybe,’ Philpott conceded, ‘– or maybe not.’

‘Why “maybe not”?’

‘Because, my pet, it could be he’s planning something so important that only he personally can mastermind it. Ergo, he wanted out of Fresnes.’

Sonya frowned. ‘So – we’re looking for the big one, are we?’ Philpott nodded, and handed her the print-out.

‘The computer’s come up with these,’ he explained, concern in his voice. ‘It could be any of them. They’re all his style, although a couple are more overtly political than usual for Smith.’

A single glance confirmed the impression for Sonya, and she provisionally eliminated the Brussels conference and the Cairo talks. Like Malcolm Philpott, she had become obsessed with Mister Smith when UNACO finally got to grips with him and succeeded in putting him away. Smith was arguably the most enigmatic force in world crime, a rare breed of criminal: dedicated to anarchy, and totally amoral. Perhaps even worse, he was wedded to the abstract concept of crime for its own sake, as a cleansing agent in a second-rate world.

Financial gain seemed hardly to matter to him; he craved solely the power and influence to commit more astounding and more atrocious assaults on people, on governments, institutions and social systems.

Smith did not seek to become the Napoleon, the Alexander or the Tamburlane of crime; in his warped mind, he already was. No one – not those closest to him, even – knew where he had come from, what he had originally looked like (he altered his appearance like other people changed their clothing), or the precise nature of the obsessional paranoia that drove him. He was fabulously rich, well-connected, young for his age (whatever that was), and a man of almost limitless accomplishment, who could have been outstanding in any area of human activity he chose. Yet Mister Smith had chosen one of the lowest forms of human activity and, unfortunately for the world, he had elevated it to an art form.

As Director of UNACO, Philpott had recruited, and still used, international criminals, poachers turned gamekeepers, to fight Smith. They had been successful once, and Philpott was convinced that only UNACO could stop him again.

But if they could not, then whatever the chosen battleground, Philpott had an uneasy foreboding that UNACO, directly or indirectly, would be right in the firing line. Together with its Director and Assistant Director.

‘Right,’ said Philpott, handing the print-out back to Swann, ‘plant agents in sensitive areas of all the operations I’ve marked – including Cairo and Brussels.’

‘But not Bahrain?’ Basil protested.

Philpott cupped his chin in his hand and pursed his lips. ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘not Bahrain. The transport of the OPEC ministers to Washington at, I believe, the end of next month, is being done in Air Force One, and we already have Joe McCafferty on secondment there as Head of Security. We couldn’t possibly have anyone safer in such a sensitive area.’

‘Right, sir,’ said Swann, and was half-way to leaving the room when Sonya called him back. Philpott looked up at her inquiringly.

‘I’m not so sure …’ she said, appearing deep in thought. Philpott cocked a quizzical eyebrow.

It went back, she explained, to their joint suspicion that Smith could be planning some form of revenge upon UNACO, even if only as a by-product of the larger operation. If that were so, might he not select the Bahrain gathering and go for Air Force One because UNACO’s man was seconded to the plane as Head of Security?

‘Deliberately bracket us in the target, you mean,’ said Philpott, pensively.

‘Yes, deliberately. After all, what would destroy our credibility more effectively than that something awful should happen to the US President’s private aircraft, with one of UNACO’s top men in charge?’

Philpott stroked the bridge of his nose, then removed his spectacles and chewed the ear-piece reflectively. It was, he thought, a hell of a position to be in, having to compromise one of their own leading field operatives on secondment by planting a check agent on him; but Sonya had advanced a persuasive argument.

‘He’s so unpredictable,’ she pressed. ‘The big one could be any of these – or none of them.’

‘OK, Basil,’ Philpott conceded, ‘we’ll cover all the options, including Bahrain. I’ll contact McCafferty in general terms and warn him to be especially vigilant on the OPEC trip, and you assign an operative to Air Force One.’

‘With McCafferty’s knowledge and permission?’ Swann inquired.

‘Without it, Basil,’ Philpott said firmly, ‘most definitely without it. Clearly, it must be someone Joe hasn’t served with previously, has never met, and doesn’t even know works for us. We’ve done it before.’

‘Not to top cats like McCafferty,’ Swann persisted. Philpott grinned and said, ‘There’s always a first time for everyone. With Smith, we can’t afford to take chances.’

Basil left, and Sonya regarded Philpott shrewdly. ‘Why the anonymous back-up?’ she inquired. It had not been part of her thinking. She had merely wished to strengthen McCafferty’s hand.

Philpott looked back at her levelly, and liked what he saw. He liked her thought processes, too; they had played seven card draw poker a couple of times in bed, where she had him at a constant and embarrassing disadvantage. ‘Merely covering the options,’ he replied.

She grinned. ‘Or playing both ends against the middle?’

Philpott winked at her. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘you and Smith aren’t the only clever bastards in this little game.’

The weather was once again a splendid advertisement for Switzerland, with the air as clear and bracing as Stein’s brochure claimed. The Mercedes driver was in excellent humour, too; for once he had a communicative passenger. To Dunkels’ astonishment, Smith had insisted on keeping up a flow of spirited conversation throughout the journey to the Edelweiss Clinic. Dunkels guessed that he might be doing no more than testing out his new accent and persona – aristocratic Boston Irish, with long Harvard vowel-sounds to match his Ivy League suit. The chauffeur, though, had been impressed, not least by Smith’s courtesy in explaining his more obscure witticisms in faultless Swiss patois.

Stein met them at the door and took them straight round to the landscaped gardens at the rear of the clinic, which reached back to the sheer wall of the mountain. Jagger sat in a wheelchair in a far corner, talking to a blonde nurse, recently hired to replace the previous one who had been sacked on Karilian’s orders. The fewer people who knew that Jagger and the plastic surgery case from the private wing were one and the same man, the better, Karilian reasoned.

Before Stein could call out to Jagger, Smith shouted, ‘Colonel McCafferty. Visitors.’

The wheelchair swung about, and Jagger, in what even at that early stage was a passable imitation of McCafferty’s voice, said, ‘I don’t believe we’ve met, have we?’

‘Good, Jagger, good,’ Smith exulted. ‘I have not had the honour of Colonel McCafferty’s acquaintance, and it’s my intention to keep it that way. You’ve done well. Already, you’ve exceeded my expectations.’

He turned to Stein and pressed congratulations on him, too, which the little doctor was compelled modestly to accept. The transformation had, in all truth, been a miracle of plastic surgery.

Stein then mentioned that Jagger was curious about the nature of the assignment he was to carry out as McCafferty, but Smith advised Jagger not to worry; he would be told all in a few weeks. Meanwhile, he was to immerse himself in the role, for he would periodically be examined in his mastery of it by Dunkels. ‘I need hardly have to explain,’ Smith purred, ‘that I shall be most displeased if all the hard work and expense I have gone to proves to be wasted. If you are found ultimately incapable of performing this task, I assure you that you will not survive long enough to ponder your failure.’

Jagger flushed as far as the stretched pink tissue of McCafferty’s face would permit, and made as if to rise from the wheelchair, but Stein and the nurse eased him back down. Stein protested that Smith was being unfair, and could unsettle Jagger’s psychological acceptance of the permanent loss of his identity.

Smith dismissed the possibility with an airy wave of his hand, and reassured Jagger of his confidence in the ringer’s powers. He repeated that Jagger would learn everything he needed to know before long. ‘You, on the other hand, my dear Doctor,’ Smith said to Stein, ‘will not be told the details of the plan. When it becomes a fait accompli, the whole world will know. In the meantime, I am paying as much for your silence as for your undoubted medical skill.’

Stein smiled and inclined his head. Smith need have no fears for his discretion, Stein promised, nor would he seek information from Jagger when the ringer was in full possession of the facts. ‘Then we understand each other, Doctor,’ Smith replied, a satisfied smile on his face.

Stein beamed back at him. Probably no other man alive, he reflected, had ever double-crossed Mister Smith and collected a large fee from him at the same time.

No other man, true. But a woman had …

… and her name was Sabrina Carver.

She had been a member of Smith’s Eiffel Tower commando team, but in reality (and undetected by Smith) had helped bring about his destruction there, for she was also a valued agent of UNACO. Sabrina knew the identity of only one other UNACO field operative – and it was not Joe McCafferty.

Philpott had made it a corner of UNACO’s game-plan to keep his agents anonymous and apart. It protected the agents, and it shielded UNACO, since a captured operative could denounce only himself or herself, or the headquarters staff. And everyone knew who the headquarters staff were; their names were published in official UN documents. Philpott’s only truly secret weapons were his agents, which he employed in every UN member state. A full roster of their names would make a priceless intelligence weapon, and surprising reading, especially to the agents themselves.

When circumstances absolutely required it, Philpott paired agents into a team for a ‘need to know’ one-to-one relationship. Sometimes, teams stayed together – if both members survived. Certain operatives were never twinned, either from disinclination, or because they were politically or strategically sensitive. McCafferty was in the strategically sensitive category.

Philpott drew his field staff from all classes, colours and creeds, and if he had to pair an agent, he took what sometimes seemed to Sonya Kolchinsky to be an almost perverse delight in matching polar opposites.

For example, Joe McCafferty, who now had to be twinned, was an honest and straightforward career airman, a fiercely patriotic American and a high-ranking officer with an outstanding reputation, both in the Pentagon and in the American Secret Service.

Whereas Sabrina Carver, whom Philpott had selected as McCafferty’s partner, was an international jewel thief.

Her fee for the Eiffel Tower job (reluctantly agreed by Philpott) had been the proceeds of an astonishing raid on the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, which she had carried out to impress Smith into hiring her for his team. Philpott’s ruthless efficiency, and proven success with UNACO, frequently collided head-on with his conscience when the delicate question arose of the head of an anti-crime squad actually aiding and abetting his own pet criminals. Luckily, his conscience invariably fell at the first fence.

UNACO’s finances, never more than grudgingly yielded by the UN member countries, depended on results, and there was very little that Malcolm Philpott would not do to obtain those results. Particularly when he was forced to deal with criminal monsters like Smith.

Philpott gave Swann his instructions on Sabrina’s role of shadow to Joe McCafferty. ‘There’s to be only a one-way “need to know” this time,’ he emphasised. ‘Sabrina must know about McCafferty, but he is not to know about her, unless I expressly order it. Clear?’

Swann left to bring in Sabrina for briefing, and Sonya complained that the situation was still far from clear to her, even if Swann understood it. ‘He doesn’t,’ Philpott declared, ‘but he’ll do as he’s told. The point is that Joe will be a front-line target and won’t want to be bothered with looking after a “twin”. At the same time, he won’t appreciate feeling that we’ve set someone to watch him.

‘But I reckon that if Smith does have designs on Air Force One, then Joe will be able to use all the help he can get, and I’ll deal with his outraged manhood when the whole thing’s over.’

Philpott looked gravely at Sonya, and ventured a weary smile. ‘It could be bad,’ he said slowly. ‘The worst we’ve ever had to face. If Smith launches an action against Air Force One and half a dozen oil sheikhs, I don’t have to tell you that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, anyone except our people aboard that Boeing can do about it.’

As the long-serving and respected correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Isvestia in Central Europe, Axel Karilian enjoyed an enviably high standard of living in a luxury apartment block near the centre of Geneva. He had resisted all attempts by the Swiss to plant domestic staff in his flat to spy on him, so it was Karilian himself who answered the imperious ring at his doorbell in the early hours of the morning. He recognised his visitor as medium- to top-ranking in the KGB.

‘They did not tell me you were coming,’ Karilian said in greeting.

‘I did not tell them I was going,’ his visitor said coldly. Karilian revised his estimate; there had clearly been a purge in the Gorski Prospekt, and his uninvited caller, code-named Myshkin, was now indisputably top-rank. Karilian produced whisky and cigars, vodka and cigarettes being reserved strictly for lower-order guests.

‘This man Smith,’ the KGB high-flier said, ‘interests us. So does his project, whatever it may turn out to be. We will refer to it in vague terms, please, since –’ he pantomimed a listening device ‘– we cannot be too careful.’

Karilian protested, in suitably oblique language, that the apartment was ‘clean’, but Myshkin waved him to silence. ‘It will be as I say,’ he ordered. Karilian shrugged and nodded.

‘We consider the project,’ Myshkin went on, ‘to be of the utmost significance to us.’ Karilian suddenly felt a thrill of unease steal over him; despite Myshkin’s denial, Moscow had obviously penetrated Smith’s security; they knew his target.

‘An international incident of extreme gravity can be created from the Smith project,’ Myshkin was saying, ‘one which will cause maximum embarrassment to a certain person who is not precisely our closest friend.’

Karilian inclined his head at the blatant clue, while excitement gripped his innards. The reference must be to Warren G. Wheeler, President of the United States of America – and Karilian had found out sufficient details of Air Force One’s future schedule to be certain now that Smith’s target was the OPEC ministers. Nothing else fitted the facts. Only by maximising an incident involving the oil sheikhs could Moscow conceivably create an international situation of ‘extreme gravity’ for the USA and UNACO, and cause the American President supreme embarrassment.

‘You are with me?’ Myshkin inquired. Karilian gravely nodded his head.

‘Good. The plan will succeed. It will not be permitted to fail. The doppelgänger will be everything he purports to be. Do I make myself clear?’

Without waiting for a reply, Myshkin remarked that if all went well, Moscow would be under a deep obligation to Karilian for involving the KGB in Smith’s project. Karilian swallowed, with difficulty.

Not too pleased with me, he prayed silently; not pleased enough to bring me back to Moscow.

As if reading his innermost thoughts, Myshkin grinned slyly and sat forward in his chair. The light from the anglepoise lamp illuminated his sharp, knowing features, from the sheen on his dark hair to the point of his pomaded chin.

He made Karilian feel gross. And afraid. ‘What I mean is that you could be promoted to a posting of your own choice … outside Russia.’

Karilian tried desperately hard not to show his relief.

‘But of course, should Mister Smith’s little venture end in failure, there will nonetheless be a welcome awaiting you in Moscow. On the whole, though, I would advise against failure,’ Myshkin said sympathetically. ‘You know how – eh – warm our welcomes can sometimes be, my dear Axel, don’t you?’

FOUR

Hawley Hemmingsway III stretched his big, well-covered frame in the Sheikh of Bahrain’s bath and paddled the foaming water to make the scents rise. The bath had been prepared for him by a maid, but Hemmingsway guessed that at least three exotic oils had been used to perfume his ablutions, one of them attar of roses. ‘Something about me that even my best Arabian friends won’t confide?’ he mused.

Hemmingsway chuckled in his deep and melodious voice. Only one aspect of an American Energy Secretary could conceivably get up an Arab’s nose, and Hawley had no trouble in that direction. He chortled again as he recalled Warren Wheeler’s acute embarrassment at the White House luncheon party where Hemmingsway was offered the job.

‘You’re absolutely certain, now, Hawley,’ the President had persisted, the anxiety showing in the fork of frown-lines etched into the fingertip of flesh between his eyes. ‘Even three, four generations back – you’re sure, are you? Not a single drop of Hebrew blood anywhere? God knows – and I’m sure you do – that I’m no racist,’ Wheeler had interjected quickly, ‘but I simply cannot afford to annoy these OPEC guys, and one way to get them foaming at the mouth and biting their Persian carpets would be to appoint even a quarter-Jewish Energy Secretary.’

Hemmingsway had assured the President that he was New England WASP clear back to the Pilgrim Fathers. With a sly grin he added, ‘As a matter of fact, the Hemmingsways were playing croquet with the Cabots and the Adamses and the Lodges while the Wheelers were still skinning beaver and raccoon to make a dress for Pocahontas.’

The jibe had gone unremarked but for a slight lift of the President’s eyebrows; Hemmingsway knew his man, however, and had walked away from the West Wing with the Energy portfolio safely in his pocket. His credentials duly passed the scrutiny of the Arabs, and when the OPEC ministers met in Bahrain for talks on a possible East–West oil accord, Hemmingsway had been invited to join them as the house guest of the Ruler. One of the Sheikh’s fleet of Cadillacs was put at his disposal, and Hemmingsway derived satisfaction from roaring unnoticed around the island at the sort of gas-gulping speeds that were firmly outlawed in the States by his own energy conservation programme.

The talks were going well, too, justifying President Wheeler’s decision not only to send Hemmingsway to Bahrain, but also to lay on his personal aeroplane, Air Force One, for the journey via Geneva to Washington, where the second stage of the negotiations would take place.

Hemmingsway drew himself out of the huge round bath, walked to the shower where he sluiced off the oily water, and from there straight into a towelling robe held aloft by the maid, teeth gleaming beneath her yashmak, eyes decorously averted. Hawley grinned and thanked her in Arabic. He was an extremely conscientious Energy Secretary.

Strictly speaking, Air Force One is not Air Force One at all unless the President of the United States is on board. Ferrying the Secretary of State, for example, it becomes Air Force Two, but it is still the same plane – what the USAF called a VC-137C stratoliner, which is their term for a Boeing 707 commercial long-distance airliner. And if the President chose to loan it out as Air Force One, that was his prerogative. The plane was his, together with the name, current since 1962 but now universally known.

The Boeing was converted to include an office and living-suite for the President between the forward and centre passenger compartments. Visitors were not invited to occupy the ‘apartment’, but there was plenty of comfortable and roomy seating in the three passenger areas, flanked by front and rear galleys and rest rooms. Externally, Air Force One carried the streaming legend ‘United States of America’, and the Presidential insignia. She was crewed, always, by personnel of the USAF’s 89th Military Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Washington DC.

The sun winked blindingly on her fuselage and gleaming wings as the liner turned on to the heading for Muharraq Airport, Bahrain. Major Patrick Latimer brought the big plane down to skim over the threshold; then he ran it to the taxi-way leading to the hardstand. Latimer, though officially designated the pilot, sat in the co-pilot’s seat to the right of the controls. On his left, in the pilot’s seat, was the Commander of Air Force One, Colonel Tom Fairman. Behind them sat the navigator, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kowalski, and next to him crouched one of the flight’s two engineers, Master Sergeant Chuck Allen. They completed the closing-down procedures, and Sergeant Allen operated the Boeing’s hatch.

Another man – a member of the crew, but with no aeronautical purpose to fulfil – waited for the airport staff to position the moving steps just below the hatch. He was always the first man to leave the plane, the last to board it. He stood by the open hatch, revolver drawn, peering out into the strong, clear sunlight.

Just as it was Colonel Thomas D. Fairman’s task to supervise the flight of Air Force One, so the job of guaranteeing the safety of the Boeing, its crew and occupants, was ultimately the responsibility of only one man: the Head of Security, Colonel Joe McCafferty.

The entire crew filed to the hatch and waited patiently while McCafferty completed his surveillance. Then Mac holstered his gun and walked down the stairway, followed by Fairman, Latimer and the other airmen. Last out of the plane was Bert Cooligan, agent of the US Secret Service, and the only other armed man on the flight.

Fairman increased his stride and came abreast of McCafferty. ‘Seeing the Manama sights before we leave, Mac?’ he inquired. McCafferty treated him to a flinty grin. ‘Your job may be over, Tom,’ he returned, ‘but mine’s just beginning. Not that the vibrant and sinful capital of Bahrain doesn’t hold its attractions for me, but I think I’ll check around a bit and then retire to the hotel with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a good security schedule.’

Fairman grinned. ‘Not even a Gideon Bible?’

‘Here? No, it’s either the Koran or my smuggled copy of Playboy – not to be left laying around for the natives to read. Gives them a bad impression of the flower of American womanhood.’

Both men laughed, and the Arab watching them from the terminal building’s balcony through binoculars minutely adjusted the focus.

Since the age of seven in her native town of Fort Dodge, Iowa, Sabrina Carver had been a thief. She started with a tiny brooch stolen from a fellow passenger on a trip down the Des Moines River. She got two dollars for it, which was a rip-off, for the brooch had three diamonds set into a silver clasp. Sabrina failed to recognise the stones as diamonds; it was a mistake she would not make again.

Ten years later she left her home and Fort Dodge and, as far as she could see, would never need to return to either. She had seventy thousand dollars in a bank account kept for her by an admiring professional fence, and on her eighteenth birthday doubled her nest-egg with a hotel raid that the police said could only have been committed by a squad of acrobatic commandos.

For that was Sabrina Carver’s forte: she channelled her astonishing physical fitness, her sporting prowess, even her beauty and considerable intellect, into becoming one of the greatest cat-burglars ever known. And she used her skill to equip herself, perhaps uniquely, for her ruling passion: not just stealing, but stealing diamonds.

Philpott, who had his finger clamped firmly on the pulse of international crime, became aware of the swiftly rising star (she was still only twenty-seven) and watched her subsequent career with interest and not a little pleasure. He waited for her first mistake, and when she made it in Gstaad, trusting a greedy lover, Philpott had snatched her from the Swiss police and enrolled her as a part-time agent of UNACO.

Philpott paid her lavishly enough for her not to have to steal again, but, as he freely acknowledged, a girl with Sabrina’s brains and stunning beauty had never actually needed to be a thief; she simply enjoyed it. Stealing was what she did best, and neither Philpott nor her position as a UNACO field operative would prevent her from doing it. That was why she was a part-time agent.

She sat in the foyer of Manama’s most splendid hotel and quickly adjusted to the idea that most of the diamonds in Bahrain would be worn by men. She was idly sketching in her mind a plan to penetrate the Sheikh’s palace when she was forced to relinquish pleasure and get back to reality – Joe McCafferty strode in through the ornate revolving doors.

McCafferty spotted her immediately, for she was wearing the uniform of Airman First Class in the USAF. He had been heading for the reception desk, but changed direction when he saw Sabrina. As he got closer his stride faltered and he blinked. Sabrina Carver had that effect on men; she was breathcatchingly lovely, with a cascade of dark brown hair falling to her shoulders, framing a face elliptical in its contours, from the central hair parting high on her forehead to the dimple in her chin. Her brow was deep, her eyes wide-spaced and large, and her nose and mouth were set in exquisite classical proportion.

McCafferty completed the journey with outstretched hand and slightly glazed eyes. ‘You’re Prewett’s replacement, I expect,’ he said. A Flight Traffic Specialist (the equivalent of a stewardess on a civil airline) had dropped out at the last moment, and he had been warned by radio that a substitute would meet Air Force One in Bahrain. Fairman was able to make the outward trip with only one stewardess, but he needed two for the passenger-run to Washington. As always with the President’s jet, all new attachees to the crew reported in the first instance to the Head of Security. Sabrina stood up, saluted and handed over her identification documents, as she had been briefed to do by Basil Swann after Philpott had fixed the Pentagon.

She took McCafferty’s hand and felt his strong fingers enclose her own. She was careful not to return equal pressure, though her hands were undoubtedly a good deal more adaptable and educated even than his. ‘AIC Carver, sir,’ she said, ‘reporting as directed to Air Force One. You’re Colonel McCafferty, sir?’ Mac confirmed the introduction; he was still faintly dizzy from the impact she made on him. ‘Right then, C–Carver,’ he stammered, ‘or may I call you whatever it is, since we’re off duty?’

She smiled winningly and replied, ‘It’s Sabrina – strictly while we’re off duty. Do I keep calling you “sir”, sir? Only for off-duty, that is?’

‘Ah – no. My name’s Joe, but most of my friends call me Mac.’

‘Which do you prefer?’

‘I’ll leave the choice to you.’

‘Well, since we’re apparently going to be friends, perhaps I’d better make it “Mac”,’ Sabrina rejoined with not a trace of coyness. McCafferty smiled a shade awkwardly and she decided that the file photographs of him which Basil Swann had shown her did not do the Colonel justice. He was decidedly handsome in an aggressive and somehow unflattering way, with a hint of pugnacity, or perhaps cruelty, in the determined set of his mouth and chin; his nose was long, wide and straight, and his eyes coloured a piercing blue.

She questioned him about their schedule, and McCafferty explained that they intended making a convenience refuelling stop in Geneva while picking up stores which were not easily obtainable in Bahrain. They would stay in Switzerland overnight. Take-off from Manama (he consulted his watch) was in four hours.

‘Do you have a room here?’ McCafferty asked innocently, then blushed as he realised how his question could be taken. ‘I – I didn’t mean – for God’s sake – well, you know – I’m not that fast a worker. Wh–what I meant was—’

‘What you meant,’ Sabrina replied, enjoying his discomfiture and liking him for it, ‘at least what I hope you meant, was do I, like the rest of the crew, have a room at the hotel where I can freshen up before the trip.’

McCafferty breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thanks for letting me off so easily. I’m not really that sort of guy – despite anything you may have heard to the contrary.’

Mac groaned when he saw how deeply he had landed both feet in it this time, and sent up his hands to cover the flush that threatened to suffuse his entire face. Sabrina burst out laughing, but quickly apologised to save him from even more acute distress. He could not, after all, possibly know that she was able to recite the names of every woman Mac had slept with over the past five years, as well as their assessments of his capabilities – in and out of bed.

‘I really don’t have that sort of reputation,’ Mac protested earnestly.

‘I’m sure you don’t, Colonel – sorry, “Mac” – but since you’ve given me the impression that you do, maybe I should think twice about accepting that dinner-date in Geneva you were on the point of offering me.’

Mac looked at her in amazement. ‘How did you know I was planning to buy you dinner in Geneva tonight?’ he exploded. ‘I hadn’t even got around to the preliminary – uh—’

‘Preliminary seduction moves?’ she whispered, wide-eyed and girlish. ‘Gosh, gee and golly, I’ve never been seduced by an expert before, by a famous Lothario like the great Joe McCafferty—’

‘Now you’re toying with my emotions,’ Mac protested, drawing himself up sternly. ‘In my capacity as Head of Security on Air Force One, and as the first crew member to set eyes on you, I consider it my military duty to protect you from that crowd of rampant wolves by ordering you, AIC Carver, to dine with me this evening in Geneva. Is that understood?’

‘Aye aye, Colonel,’ she responded, throwing him a second smart salute, ‘as long as it’s purely in the interests of protective discipline, of course.’

It was Mac’s turn to smile. ‘I don’t normally beat the crew,’ he said, ‘but I could always make an exception of you, if that’s what turns you on.’ Sabrina reddened prettily and gulped. ‘I think we’d better end this conversation and continue our “on duty” relationship, sir,’ she said.

‘But you’ll make it for dinner tonight?’ Mac pleaded.

‘You bet.’

They parted, and the Arab sipping an ice-cream soda in the screened-off bar area to their left, laid his binoculars case on the table and jotted an entry in a slim blue notebook.

Sabrina received a message from a man who announced himself as Chief Steward Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski from Air Force One. The Commander, he said, had ordered a crew muster in the hotel lobby. She saw the group at the far end away from the bar as she left the elevator. McCafferty was not with them, and she felt unreasonably disappointed. She saluted Colonel Fairman and met the crew, each of whom looked at her perhaps a little too much, to Fairman’s evident amusement.

‘I can see you’re going to enjoy it with us, Carver,’ he grinned. ‘Even if you don’t, the rest of the crew obviously will.’

Sabrina smiled back and inquired for McCafferty’s whereabouts. ‘Aah,’ moaned the delicately structured, poetic looking Latimer theatrically, ‘already smitten with our dashing Head of Security, I can tell. Swashes his buckle at anything female that moves aboard the plane, does Mac, although I have to admit that this time, for once, he has shown excellent taste.’

‘Stow it, Pat,’ said Fairman, ‘AIC Carver’s a member of this crew, and I do not want her position made any more – eh – difficult than it is at the moment. She’s with Air Force One to work, and I want nothing to interfere with that. To answer your question, Carver, Colonel McCafferty’s gone out to the airport with Agent Cooligan via the route the OPEC ministers will use. Then, if I know Mac, he’ll check, double-check and recheck the plane, the police, the airport guards, the luggage hold, and even look for cracks in the runway. Colonel McCafferty’s damned good at what he does. I only wish that went for the rest of my so-called crew.’

The Commander chuckled easily along with the rest of the flight staff, then returned once more to business, asking Sergeant Wynanski if he was all fixed for provisions. Wynanski replied that he had been furnished by the White House with a list of the ministers’ dietary requirements, which he had augmented through discreet inquiries at the hotel and at the palace. He still had to pick up a few items from the markets in Manama.

‘Good work, Sergeant,’ Fairman commended him, ‘you have about an hour. That applies to everyone. I’ll want cabin personnel aboard by 1600 hours. Flying crew to Ops by 1650. You’ll find minibuses outside this hotel half an hour before reporting times. Roll-out’s at 1805.’

Wynanski and his staff and most of the flying crew drifted away; Fairman stayed to take Sabrina on one side. As a new crew member, she got the Commander’s introduction to Air Force One at full strength on the patriotism scale. Fairman also impressed her with the importance of their current assignment.

‘This isn’t going to be just a milk run,’ the Colonel said gravely. ‘We’re using Air Force One mainly because our own Energy Secretary, Mr Hemmingsway, will be on board – but let me assure you that we do wish to impress the OPEC ministers; we want to make them feel good. I need hardly tell you, if you’ve been keeping up with the news, that if they don’t come in with us on this oil deal, then they’re likely to cut back production so far that we’ll be riding bicycles and reading by candlelight back in the States for years to come. Nothing, but nothing, must go wrong on this trip, Carver; so – be alert, polite and efficient at all times. A good stewardess can make the world of difference to a military flight. Chief Steward Wynanski’s something of a martinet, but I guess you’ll have him eating out of your hand in no time, just like the rest of us.’

Sabrina felt herself going hot and was framing a suitably tart reply when Fairman held up a warning hand. ‘Just teasing, honey, just teasing,’ he assured her.

‘So was Major Latimer, sir,’ she replied sweetly, ‘and, as I recall, you hauled out his ass for it.’

Fairman regarded her appraisingly, and grinned. ‘Somehow I don’t think you really need any advice from me, Carver,’ he said.

Axel Karilian paced the floor of his Geneva apartment and bayed into the telephone. ‘It is important – vital – that Jagger contacts me here as soon as possible,’ he roared. ‘Do you understand that, Stein?’ Karilian sneaked a sideways glance at the menacingly imperturbable Myshkin, lounging on a sofa nursing a generous Chivas Regal.

‘It’s not long to zero-hour there,’ Stein protested. ‘For God’s sake, Axel, Jagger will be very busy, with Smith and Dunkels breathing down his neck the whole time. It’ll be very difficult to contact him.’

‘You must!’ Karilian insisted. ‘There has to be a way.’

Modesty, a strong suit with Doctor Stein, veiled the slyness with which the little Swiss produced his trump card, mostly for the benefit of Myshkin, whom he correctly guessed was in Karilian’s apartment. ‘Of course,’ Stein said smoothly, ‘Jagger can

be contacted discreetly. I have, as it were, an open channel to him.’

‘Then use it! Jagger must call. There are new instructions to be passed to him, which alter the entire picture of the operation. Hot from Moscow, Stein – and they have to be obeyed. Get on with it.’ He banged the telephone down and was uncomfortably aware of Myshkin’s gaze, directed at him through barely-raised eyelids.

It took Jagger half an hour from receiving Stein’s message before he could elude Dunkels for long enough to make a telephone call. The ringer’s blood chilled when the cold, precise voice of Myshkin talked to him first in Russian and then repeated his orders in English to establish absolute clarity.

‘As I understand it, Jagger,’ Myshkin said, ‘Mister Smith’s plan is to – ah – interfere, shall we say, with the operation of Air Force One sufficiently to enable him to make a financial gain from the situation in which the OPEC ministers will consequently be placed. I do not wish to go into further detail on an open line.’

Jagger confirmed the details. Karilian nervously pressed together the damp palms of his hands, and Myshkin continued, ‘Up to a point that is still satisfactory, but we feel that greater advantage can be gained by us if the affair concludes in a more – ah – drastic way. Do you follow me?’

‘I – I don’t, I’m afraid,’ Jagger replied uncertainly.

Myshkin gave an exasperated grunt. ‘I can see I shall have to be more specific,’ he said caustically.

‘It is of crucial importance to us, Jagger, that America comes badly out of this episode – as badly as can possibly be imagined. And there is surely one way to persuade the OPEC states not merely to refuse to sign the oil accord, but actually to sever relations of any kind with the United States.’ Both sides of the conversation were in English now; Myshkin had to make absolutely sure that Jagger understood him.

The ringer gasped in disbelief. ‘You can’t mean – you can’t—’

‘But I do,’ Myshkin said. ‘That is precisely what I mean. You will kill the OPEC ministers, and the surviving crew members of Air Force One. You may leave us to deal with the genuine McCafferty.

‘How you do it, Jagger, is your business. But do not fail me. Whatever happens, do not fail. Even if you are the only person alive on Air Force One when it is finished, that will be acceptable. But you must accomplish this task.’

Jagger put down the receiver in his Bahrain hotel and took the elevator to the ground floor. As he stepped on to the ground floor, Dunkels hurried forward and grabbed his arm.

‘Get into uniform,’ the German snapped brusquely. ‘We leave in five minutes. Achmed’s reported that the pigeon is sitting up begging to be plucked.’

McCafferty and Bert Cooligan came down the steps of Air Force One to meet the advancing posse of uniformed senior Bahraini policemen, all armed to their splendidly white teeth. McCafferty stopped and scuffed one of his shoes over a mark on the hardstand. Cooligan grinned. ‘That is not, sir,’ he whispered, ‘a crack, and even if it were, it’s not on the runway.’

Mac then met the police – who had tactfully placed themselves under his orders – and handed them copies of the security schedule. After their brief exchange, he and Cooligan walked on to the terminal building, where an Arab toyed with the strap of his binoculars case and decided to visit the men’s room. McCafferty looked up at the roof of the terminal, and saw three machine-gunners placed strategically along the parapet.

‘Check those guys out, Bert,’ he murmured. ‘Make sure they know that they’re to fire indiscriminately at any, and I mean any, unauthorised person getting within fifty yards of the Air Force One steps. Give ’em copies of the programme, too; I don’t want to be shot when I lead in the convoy. I’m going back to the hotel. I need a shower and a drink and another chat with Hemmingsway before we get the motorcade under way. OK?’

Cooligan said ‘Ciao,’ and Mac went through the terminal out into the street, in the wake of a tall, well-groomed young Arab in a Savile Row suit, who had a leather binoculars case swinging from his shoulder.

Mac carefully surveyed the front of the airport, where the police detachments were manoeuvring into their positions, and so missed the barely perceptible signal which the Arab, known as Achmed Fayeed, made to a cab-driver who was separated from the main gossiping bunch at the head of the taxi rank. The driver, who had been leaning casually against the side of a car, arms folded, unwound himself and got into the first cab.

As McCafferty lifted his arm to wave, the cab peeled off the rank and screeched to a halt about six inches from the American’s leading foot. Mac yanked open the door, jumped in and gave the name of his hotel. On the route out of the airport, they passed a by-road leading up to the cargo-sheds. A short way along the by-road, its engine revving, sat a shiny black Cadillac. Achmed Fayeed spun the wheel, and cruised out after the cab.

Once he had settled in his seat, Mac returned to his security schedules for Geneva as well as those for Bahrain. Even if he noticed the following Cadillac, it did not register on his mind. Cadillacs – mostly in the Ruler’s fleet – were common enough in Bahrain, and throughout the Gulf States. His driver watched the American carefully in the rear-view mirror.

A causeway links the airport at Muharraq with the main island of Bahrain, and when McCafferty glanced up and saw the road stretching out before him and the sunlight glistening on the water to either side, he dropped his eyes once more to the intricate details of his assignment. He was relaxed, and totally unprepared for the savage wrench at the wheel which took the taxi off the tarmac highway and on to a rutted dirt track that veered off to the right just before the water-crossing.

The track led to a cluster of tiny buildings known to the Bahrainis as borrastis, mean little huts made from palm fronds and mud into wattle beehives. Mac saw none of this. He went instinctively for his gun, but he was fractionally too late. The driver, a handkerchief clamped to his nose and mouth, aimed an aerosol spray over his shoulder, and it took the American full in the face.

McCafferty actually had his revolver in his hand, but it dropped from his unfeeling fingers. He slumped forward against the back of the driver’s seat, and blackness descended on him.

Achmed Fayeed’s car pulled up on the rough ground alongside the taxi, and the Arab pointed in the direction of the borrasti huts, which were hidden from the main road and the perimeter-buildings of the airport by a fringe of palm trees. Both vehicles shot away and were soon lost in the oasis.

Achmed opened the rear door of the taxi and yanked out McCafferty’s body. Dunkels strolled from the hut, looking down at the security chief. Then he turned and regarded a second man emerging from the borrasti. The likeness between the two was staggering, perfect in every detail.

Dunkels ordered Achmed to retrieve Mac’s personal effects, ticking them off on his fingers:

wallet, gun, security shield, documentation, money, pen, handkerchief, lighter (if any). The Arab ransacked the American’s body and handed the articles to Jagger, who stowed them away, checking at the same time that his uniform matched the security chief’s exactly. ‘Take him inside now,’ Dunkels said, ‘and bring him round. There are things we need to know that only he can tell us.’

‘And if he won’t?’ Jagger asked. Dunkels shrugged. ‘He’s going to die anyway. He might as well make it easy for himself.’

‘Not too easy,’ Jagger sneered, and got into the cab. The driver reversed his vehicle in a swirl of dust and took off back down the potholed track towards the causeway. There he turned on to the road-bridge and sped away to Manama.

He was in a hurry but drove with studied care. After all, he carried an important passenger: the Head of Security of Air Force One.

FIVE

Air Force One is a standard-frame Boeing intercontinental jet airliner, 153 feet long and almost as wide with a wingspan of 145 feet, 9 inches. She has four engines – Pratt and Whitney turbojets – which are capable of lifting a maximum take-off weight of more than 150 tons.

With a range of over seven thousand miles, she can land on less than five thousand feet of runway. No pilot with fewer than four thousand flying hours under his belt can sit at her controls – the motto of the 89th Military Aircraft Wing, Special Missions (MAC), which provides the Boeing’s crew, is ‘Experto Crede’ (Trust one who has experience). Many times the President and people of the United States of America have had cause to be grateful to the people who fly Air Force One, and doubtless will have cause again.

The plane has a flight-ceiling of more than forty thousand feet, and never carries less than ten in her crew. The Boeing’s economic cruising speed is 550 mph, and she is unique in American aviation in carrying a Lieutenant Colonel as navigator. Air Force One flight crewmen wear blue uniforms, and the stewards maroon blazers with blue trousers or skirts, each uniform sporting the coveted Presidential Service Badge.

More by accident than design, the President’s aircraft has become something of a cottage industry in its own right. The tableware and accoutrements are purpose-made and supplied gratis by manufacturers eager for the First Citizen’s approval. Since all the articles, from silverware, crystal glasses, dinner plates, cups and saucers, down to ash-trays, match-books and dinner napkins, bear the Presidential seal, they are eagerly sought by souvenir hunters.

Given the thriving black market in Air Force One artifacts, it is axiomatic that those who travel on her will yield to temptation and appropriate the portable items among the plane’s equipment. These are highly prized, and have even been used as a kind of ersatz currency, rather like schoolboys doing ‘swaps’.

The 89th (located, in fact, in Maryland, though the address of Andrews AFB is always given as Washington DC) would prefer to equip their flagship through the orthodox channels of paying for their own supplies and prosecuting people who steal from the plane, but the traditions of patronage and perks are deeply ingrained into American politics.

She had been cleaned, waxed and polished in preparation for the OPEC trip, and her tyres given a wash and brush-up, and she stood now on the runway at Muharraq, proud and gleaming and lovely in the yellowing rays of the sun, waiting for yet another manifest of passengers to board her who would never be charged for their journey.

The starboard engines, three and four, were already running to supply power and air-conditioning and to prepare the Boeing for a rapid start. The stores and spares inventories had been minutely examined and approved and, together with the baggage of the OPEC ministers, sent on ahead. On the flight deck the crew were at their posts for the necessary pre-flight procedures.

Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski, Chief Steward, handed ‘Airman’ Sabrina Carver a print-out of the guest-list. ‘Study it,’ he snapped, ‘because this ain’t a Bunny Dip for Hollywood moguls. These oil ministers are not just VIPs – they’re EDPs.’

‘They’re what?’

‘They’re what – “Sergeant”.’

‘Sorry. They’re what – Sergeant?’

‘EDPs. Exceptionally Distinguished Passengers. I don’t want any of ’em sloshing around in wet socks because you spilled drinks over them. ’Kay?’

‘Completely, chief. Uh – Sergeant,’ Sabrina replied. Master Sergeant Wynanski seemed to be the only crew member with an absolute zero-response to her gorgeous body, and he, she reflected ruefully, had to be the one she picked as her boss. ‘There ain’t no justice,’ she mused.

‘Yerright,’ snapped Wynanski, ‘there ain’t. Now – dooties. You’re drinks. Airman Fenstermaker here –’ (indicating a honey-blonde with tinted glasses and an enormous bosom standing alongside Sabrina) ‘– you’re snacks. ’Kay? You may have to swap later. Depends. ’Kay?’

‘Right, Sergeant,’ they chorused, though Sabrina’s brow was furrowed as her eyes ran down the Arab names. ‘’S’matter, Carver?’ Wynanski grunted.

‘Well, you said I was drinks, but it looks as if most of them will be sticking to tea,’ Sabrina explained.

‘Look, Carver, fer Chrissakes,’ Wynanski moaned. He had once been a waiter on the Staten Island ferry and had seen life. ‘You gotta unnerstan’ – these guys are Ayrabs. Moslems. Goddit?’

‘Uh-uh,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘They ain’t supposed to like booze,’ Wynanski said, patiently, ‘but from time to time, and especially when they’re out of Ayrabia, they – well – indulge, if you get me. But still they can’t appear to, and they don’t like you to know it, nor anybody else. Right? So. Read down the list again – out loud, so Fenstermaker don’t make a tit outa herself as well. Sorry, Fenstermaker. Nothin’ personal about yah boobs.’

Sabrina spluttered, but regained control and recited from the print-out.

‘Tea with milk and sugar.’

‘That’s straight tea – real tea, from leaves; with milk and sugar, like it says,’ Wynanski pronounced.

‘Tea with sugar but no milk,’ Sabrina intoned.

‘Scotch,’ said Wynanski firmly, ‘on the rocks, no water.’

Sabrina’s mouth dropped open. ‘Ohhh,’ she breathed.

‘’Bout time, too,’ Wynanski snarled. ‘Continue.’

‘Tea with lemon.’

‘Vodka. Ice. Lime juice.’ Sabrina made tiny notations.

‘Black coffee, no sugar.’

‘Cognac, neat,’ Wynanski supplied.

‘Tea – no sugar, no milk,’ Sabrina read. Wynanski looked puzzled. ‘Gimme that,’ he ordered, and scanned the list. Then his brow cleared, and a beatific smile illumined his battered face. ‘How about that?’ he whispered, ‘one o’ these guys got the hots fer Jack Daniels. Whooppee!’

Through the open hatch of the Boeing, the far-off wail of police-car sirens reached Sabrina’s ears. The motorcade, she calculated, must be on the causeway by now.

She found herself keenly anticipating the flight, whatever dangers it might hold. Especially, she was looking forward to seeing McCafferty again. He had made, she decided, quite an impression on her.

Philpott gazed meditatively for the umpteenth time at the computer print-out, dog-eared now, which was pinned to the front of Smith’s UNACO file. ‘Two down,’ he said, ‘three to go.’ He darted an exasperated glance at the ominous barrage of clocks, adjusted for time-zones and the individual preferences of more than a score of countries, sitting atop the electronic mural in the bureau’s nerve-centre, naggingly pushing forward the time for action. ‘And one just about coming up.’

‘Sir?’ Basil Swann inquired.

‘Just thinking out loud,’ Philpott returned. ‘All set for Bahrain?’

Swann replied with a trendy ‘Affirmative’. Air Force One, he supplied, would take off inside half an hour, on schedule. Sabrina Carver – ‘Airman First Class Carver’ – was already on board the Boeing, and Colonel Joe McCafferty, according to his invariable procedure, would board last of all, after delivering the OPEC emissaries.

‘No gremlins in the tracker-bug?’ Philpott asked. None, Basil assured him. Philpott chewed his lip, and refused to notice the Gulf time-zone clock, which had advanced by no more than a minute since he had last fixed it with a baleful glare. The tension got straight to his stomach, and he eased out a muted burp. Sonya Kolchinsky, from the neighbouring swivel-armchair, gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.

Of the original five events which the UNACO computer had linked to Smith’s escape, two were already safely dispatched: the gold bullion run to Moscow, and the Middle East defence talks in Cairo.

The bureau’s resident agents – one a Soviet Army physical training instructor, the other sous-chef in a Cairo hotel – had slotted into the operations, and both incidents were accomplished interference-free in their varying ways; but assuredly with no sign of criminal activity, from Smith or anyone else. The third event, chronologically speaking, on the master-list, was the journey Air Force One was about to commence, air-lifting the Arabian oil titans to Washington DC, via Geneva, Switzerland.

Philpott, for reasons he could not isolate, had a stronger feeling of apprehension about this one than the first two, or even the remaining pair. The fatal joker in the Air Force One pack had always been clear to him: the operation could not be controlled from the ground.

Despite the presence of McCafferty, unknowingly backed up by Sabrina Carver, a swift and audacious strike by Smith at the President’s Boeing could succeed, immobilising both agents – or killing them. And Philpott would be powerless to prevent it, or to control the action thereafter. He had insisted as a minimum precaution on a monitoring capacity for UNACO to track the flight. It was impossible, though, to pick up a duplicate radar-trace, so Basil Swann simply arranged a feed of the signal relayed through a communications satellite to the Pentagon.

The signal came from the Boeing’s inertial navigation system, and Swann – against the odds, for it was a closely guarded secret – had discovered the frequency on which it was relayed. The signal was then decoded by the bureau’s computer, which obligingly translated it into a visual display on the vast wall map.

At present it was no more than a pin-point, throbbing expectantly on the island of Bahrain like an unleashed terrier.

But when the plane got airborne, the tracker-bug signal would snake out in a green line across the Middle East, the Near East and the Mediterranean, following whichever course Colonel Tom Fairman had selected to take the Boeing to Geneva.

While the President’s plane was in the skies, doing what it was supposed to do, going where it ought to go, the green tracker-line would continue crawling over the map. But should anything happen to the Boeing, the marker trail would vanish.

At all times, Malcolm Philpott would know the exact position and course of the aircraft – unless, by some inconceivable means, Mister Smith launched an attack, overwhelming even UNACO’s redoubtable agents, Carver and McCafferty. ‘And by then, of course,’ Philpott murmured, ‘we shan’t be able to do a damned thing about it.’

‘Hi,’ said the disembodied voice, ‘finished?’

Cody Jagger stared wildly at the telephone in his hand, and fleetingly cursed himself for not taking it off the hook in his (McCafferty’s, rather) bedroom.

Cody had not wanted his first test to come in this fashion. Given an even chance and brought face to face with anybody high enough in McCafferty’s circle, he reckoned he was good enough to pass. But trapped on the end of a phone with someone close enough to Mac not to feel it necessary to announce his name … the odds were that Jagger would fail. And he had. Stein had played him tapes, over and over again, of the voices of some of the UNACO man’s friends, and Jagger had absorbed them. But he had never before heard the voice that had just spoken to him; of that Cody was sure.

He kept silent, seeking a clue, willing the caller to identify himself. Jagger controlled his breathing; his forehead was beaded in sweat. At least he had remembered Stein’s instruction for telephone calls: never be the first one to speak; it would give him time to think; it would disconcert the caller, Stein had urged; and it would allow Jagger, in the last eventuality, to feign a wrong number in another assumed voice, and hang up.

He had almost made up his mind to cradle the receiver when the voice said, ‘That is you, Colonel, is it?’

‘Colonel’ – Jagger’s mind raced to cope with the import of the formal address. A friend, but not too close a friend, then. Precise with the use of the title, so more than probably military; Army or Air Force. Possibly a crew member? Not flight crew, though, or engineers; nor maintenance, technicians or stewards. None of these would have sufficient reason to disturb the security chief in his hotel bedroom.

Only one other man aboard Air Force One would actually have business with McCafferty. Jagger decided to take a chance. He could only fail a second time, and he might be able to bluff his way out of trouble.

‘Sorry, Bert,’ he chuckled, ‘I was miles away.’

‘You can say that again,’ Cooligan replied in an aggrieved tone. ‘Now, to return to the point – have you or have you not finished?’

Once more Jagger waited, but this time deliberately, even allowing himself a small, judicious cough. The sweat was still spangling his eyebrows, yet his confidence was returning; he had, after all, won the first round. He had deduced Bert Cooligan – and he had been right.

Now it was Cooligan who was unwilling to break the silence. Could he be getting suspicious? Jagger wondered, the panic raising prickles of fear on his exposed skin.

Finally, Cooligan could stand it no longer. ‘Look, Colonel,’ he said patiently, ‘if you don’t want to talk to me, for Christ’s sake say so. But do me the favour of coming back from wherever it is that you are, because you sure aren’t in your room talking to me on the phone.

‘Now just for the record, you told me at the airport – and I say this again – you told me you were coming back to the hotel to shower and have a drink. So – if you haven’t finished the shower bit, shall I come up to your room and leer at your magnificent body while you don clean drawers and best Air Force One blues? Or do I wait down here in the bar for you? Or do you wish me to have drinks sent up? Or you want I should go throw myself under a camel? Or like – what?’

Jagger started to say ‘Sure, Bert’ to one of the propositions when Cooligan interrupted him. ‘Boy, am I dumb, chief! ’Course – you got company. Huh? Tricky bastard.’

Cody laughed and assured Cooligan that he was (a) alone, and (b) with him again in body, mind and spirit. What was he to do now though? Jagger mused. Face the music? He made up his mind.

‘Sure, come on up, Bert,’ he said easily. ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll promise to dress before you get here so’s not to put you to shame, on condition that you’re accompanied by a bottle of malt Scotch, a crowded ice-pail, four glasses and – since you’ve given me the taste – two dusky harlots.’

‘Tush, Colonel, not while we’re on duty,’ Cooligan admonished.

‘You’re right, Agent Cooligan,’ Jagger conceded, ‘forget the ice.’ Cooligan chortled and said, ‘That’s better, Mac. You had me worried there for a moment. See you soon.’

Jagger mopped his forehead and then snapped his fingers in annoyance. He tore off his uniform and sprinted for the shower, taking the jets of water barely lukewarm. He towelled himself down, slipped on clean underpants, and was lounging on the balcony in a bathrobe when Cooligan appeared.

The Secret Service agent was followed by a waiter pushing a trolley laden in the manner prescribed, and bearing a bonus of sandwiches. There seemed to be a world shortage of harlots, fuliginous or otherwise.

‘I checked the airport guards like you said,’ Bert began when they were settled in easy-chairs nursing a double Laphroaig apiece. ‘Their officers know what they’re doing, and the guys themselves seem keen enough, if not a shade trigger-happy. No one’s been within stone-chucking distance of the Big Bird since the Bahrainis took over. I’ve briefed them, and I’ve had a word with the police outside. There’ll be no trouble.’

‘For this relief, much thanks,’ Jagger sighed, choosing a quotation which he knew McCafferty might employ, ‘though it wasn’t crowd scares I was anxious about.’

‘Huh?’

Jagger explained that, on the face of it, the trip could present a golden opportunity for Israeli irregulars, or even for a black propaganda PLO coup, zapping the plane and blaming it on Mossad or the Jews in general.

‘Cautious old Mac,’ Bert grinned, lifting his glass in salute. ‘You don’t change, do you?’

‘You’d be disappointed if I did, wouldn’t you?’ Jagger said.

‘I would,’ Cooligan admitted, ‘and so, no doubt, would that rather gorgeous stewardess Latimer tells me you’re dating in Geneva tonight.’

Jagger forced a grin as alarms probed sharply at his mind. He nearly bit his tongue to stop himself saying ‘I am?’

Gradually the rain of stinging blows on his cheeks and the shock of the water dashed into his face from an earthenware pitcher brought McCafferty round. Achmed, crouched on his haunches over the American on the mud floor of the borrasti, shouted to Dunkels. The German examined their prisoner and complained that Achmed had been unnecessarily rough. A second Arab standing by Achmed grinned and drove his booted foot into Mac’s ribs. The breath left the American’s body in a rush, and a cry of pain came from his bruised lips.

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ Achmed Fayeed apologised, ‘his foot slipped.’ Dunkels laughed, and asked McCafferty if he was feeling co-operative. Mac shook his head to clear away the fog and focus his eyes.

‘Does he mean he isn’t going to co-operate?’ Achmed asked, round-eyed. McCafferty looked at him dully; then, deliberately, he filled his mouth and spat a gobbet of blood-streaked saliva into Achmed’s face. Fayeed fastidiously wiped the mess from his chin, studied it on his handkerchief, and nodded casually to the other Arab, his servant, Selim. Selim stepped over the American’s body and back-heeled him viciously, turning in one fluid movement and crashing his other foot into the side of McCafferty’s head, whipping it round to meet Achmed’s fist from the other direction. In case the American hadn’t got the point, they gave a repeat performance. Then Siegfried Dunkels held up his hand.

‘That’s enough,’ he ordered. ‘I want him to talk. Much more of that and he won’t be able to even if he’s willing.’ Achmed leaned forward, grabbed McCafferty by the shirt-front, and hauled him to a sitting position. Dunkels sprayed him with water again, and yanked up his head with a handful of hair. ‘Well, Colonel?’ he said pleasantly.

‘Whoever you are,’ Mac replied thickly, his tongue feeling unnaturally big inside his swollen mouth, ‘whoever you are, you’re trying something you can’t possibly get away with. Let me go, release me, and I’ll see that it goes down as a robbery; the police won’t take any action.

‘But keep me here, for whatever reason, and I promise you that every soldier in the Bahraini Army and every policeman on this island will be looking for me. Air Force One can’t leave without me, and they’ll find me – you’d better believe it. They’ll have the backing of the President of the United States of America, and I wouldn’t want to be where you are when all this blows up.’

‘What makes you think it isn’t just a robbery?’

Mac grinned crookedly and painfully. ‘No mugger would strip me as clean as you have,’ he replied. ‘I don’t seem to have a thing on me anywhere now to prove that I even exist. So clearly I was a target – and apart from that, you know who I am.’

Dunkels threw back his head and laughed. ‘We do, Colonel,’ he spluttered. ‘Oh, we do.’ Then he stopped, and his mouth set into a sneer. ‘And we think, too, that you may be, shall we say, overrating your importance? You say that Air Force One couldn’t leave without you.’ He shook his head, bent down and whispered, ‘To the contrary, Colonel, your absence will hardly be noticed.’

Mac stared at him. ‘What the hell d’you mean?’ he exploded. ‘If I’m not on that aircraft—’

‘If you’re not on the plane,’ Dunkels interrupted smoothly, ‘no doubt there would be some speculation for a short while on the flight deck, yes. Colonel – Fairman, is it? – yes, Colonel Fairman, I think … he might well express concern to Major Latimer, the pilot is he not? Or Lieutenant Colonel Kowalski, the navigator, could pass some sort of comment to Master Sergeant Allen, the engineer. But I dare say that’s as far as it would go. What do you think, Colonel?’

The cobwebs were still playing paper streamers in the American’s mind. He shook his head again, in disbelief. The world was going crazy; this suave European and the murderous Arabs were unbalanced. What they said just didn’t make sense. ‘You have to be joking,’ he grated, ‘Washington would hear of it, and when they do—’

‘Ah, you mean they’d monitor the flight deck conversation on the open line to Andrews Air Force Base. Of course—’

‘That can’t be done,’ Mac flung at him savagely, ‘as you must know. But it won’t take Tom Fairman two seconds to get them on the radio, and Pat Latimer would not, I repeat not, take off without me.’

Dunkels stood up and roared with delight. ‘Jeeze, Mac,’ he said, ‘that’s some bull’s eye. That sure is a hole in one. Achmed – see that you-know-who gets the information: Latimer’s known as “Pat”, not Patrick or Paddy, and Andrews Base have no facility to eavesdrop on the Air Force One flight deck. They can only communicate through the radio. Got that?’

The Arab rose to his feet, smiling broadly. Then he looked at his watch and said, ‘I’ll make the calls on the way back to Manama. I’m overdue already. My master will not be pleased.’

‘Screw him,’ Dunkels said shortly.

‘Now, now,’ Achmed chided, ‘not all we Arabs are pederasts, although they do say—’

Dunkels gestured at him impatiently. ‘I don’t have the time for you to tell me what they say, Achmed. As you mentioned, you’re late. On your way.’

Fayeed strode from the borrasti, but turned at Dunkels’ command. ‘The key,’ the German said.

Achmed fished in his pocket and tossed Dunkels a small bunch of keys, incongruously suspended on a thin gold chain. ‘The small one fits the cocktail bar,’ he said, and waved from the door.

The German turned once more to McCafferty, who was tentatively feeling his battered face and body, the point of Selim’s machine-gun following every movement, never more than six inches away. Dunkels chuckled and said, ‘You don’t know how helpful you’ve been to us, Colonel … or perhaps you do. Anyway,’ he added briskly, ‘we must get you looking decent. Selim—’ he snapped his fingers at the grinning Arab.

They stripped the American, who was still as weak as a kitten, to his shirt and underclothing. Selim tugged baggy Oriental trousers over his shoes and up to his waist, fastening them with a leather belt. Then Dunkels pulled over Mac’s head a full-length, wide-sleeved cloak, and Selim drew up the hood to hide his face.

Mac leaned heavily on Selim as the two men guided him out to another car concealed behind the mud hut, and pushed him into the rear seat. Dunkels got in beside him, and jammed the barrel of a Walther 9mm pistol roughly into McCafferty’s injured side. ‘Just to remind you, Colonel,’ the German said, ‘no tricks. That would be very foolish.’

McCafferty regarded him through puffy eyelids. ‘I don’t know who you work for, or even what you are trying to do. But I’ll tell you once again – you can’t get away with it.

‘Air Force One is due to take off in less than half an hour. If I’m not on it, there’ll be the biggest man-hunt in the history of the Persian Gulf.’

Dunkels replied with a high-pitched whinny, like a knowing hyena. ‘But don’t you see, Colonel, you will be on the plane.’

Mac looked at him blankly. ‘You – you mean … you’re going to let me go?’

The German snickered again. ‘Not precisely, but you’ll be there all right. There’s no harm in telling you now. As you say, we haven’t long to go, and in any case there would seem to be nothing you can do about it.

‘You see, it won’t be you on board Air Force One as Head of Security, Colonel. But someone will be there; somebody remarkably like you. So much so that he’ll fool Tom and Pat and Paul and Chuck and Bert, and anyone else who knows you or is likely to meet you in the near future, including Mr Malcolm Philpott and the President of the United States of America.’

The realisation sunk slowly into Mac’s fuddled brain. He squinted at the jubilant Dunkels and breathed, ‘You have to be loco if you think you can bring that off. Bananas.’

The German shook his blond head vigorously. ‘No, McCafferty, we’re not,’ he replied, ‘neither me nor the man behind me, the man who is going to bring down UNACO, and who doesn’t care if the American Administration falls with it. It’s someone not entirely unknown to you, I believe.’

Mac’s eyes widened, and he muttered, half to himself, ‘Of course. Smith. It’s got to be …’

Dunkels drove the Walther a second time into the American’s ribs. ‘Mister Smith to you, Colonel,’ he replied.

Jagger took Achmed’s call in the hotel lobby just as he was leaving the hotel with Cooligan to pick up the EDP convoy. He excused himself and crossed to the reception desk. The clerk handed him the telephone. Jagger digested the information, and put the phone down.

Smith received the news thousands of miles to the north of Bahrain in a darkening room set high up in a once impregnable fortress. Smith’s teeth gleamed and he purred to Achmed, ‘You have done well, my friend. I’ll wish you “bon voyage”, and please present my greetings to your esteemed father.’ He tut-tutted at Fayeed’s unfilial reply.

Smith had forsaken his Brooks Brothers shirt and clerical grey suit for a light-weight, stone-coloured sweater and dark brown slacks. He picked up a tiny bronze bell and rang it. A girl came in, wearing a dirndl apron over a long green velveteen skirt, and a scarcely opaque blouse, unnecessarily open to the midriff. The blouse was of gossamer-thin, wispy material, and it lay off her shoulders and bisected the mounds of her breasts. In her native tongue, Smith ordered Krug champagne, and invited her to join him.

‘But I am your servant,’ she objected.

‘And you will serve me,’ Smith replied.

Then he, too, made a telephone call and spoke swiftly in yet another language. The man to whom he gave his brief report thanked him courteously and made his farewells. He also accepted a drink – a fine, dry German wine – but not from the hand of the nubile serving girl.

It was given to him by Axel Karilian, who lowered his bulk cautiously on to the sofa next to him and said, ‘May I take it that all is well?’

Myshkin nodded. ‘You may.’

SIX

The VC-137C stratoliner called Air Force One trembled on the hardstand at Muharraq Airport.

Klaxons baying, the motorcade sped into a ‘no entry’ road to the airport – the quickest and, therefore, safest route – and the leading outriders slithered to an unscheduled halt, under the watchful and alarmed eyes of perhaps two hundred Bahraini soldiers and policemen.

Jagger-McCafferty leapt from the last limousine in the convoy while it was still slowing down. He had seen film of an airport arrival by the presidential entourage, and Mac had done the same thing on that occasion. It was now almost a trademark with him – and Jagger didn’t want to disappoint any of McCafferty’s fans.

On board the Boeing, the crew went through their pre-flight procedure, Wynanski fussing like a mother hen over canapés, table linen and sparkling crystal glasses. The Commander was tense and edgy, as he always was before a trip. Latimer was his customary debonair and nonchalant self. Kowalski allowed his eyes to flicker across the charted flight plan. Kowalski doubled for the navigation aids, but he was a human being instead of a machine relying on electronics to function. Apart from that, he was a resourceful and experienced navigator – and what the hell, Air Force One carried an inertial guidance system anyway.

Outside the airport, a crowd had gathered to goggle at the flashy black cars and their VIP passengers. They were effectively blocking the route the motorcade was taking – not into the normal departure hall, but through a side road leading straight into the runway area. ‘Clear the road!’ Jagger screamed. ‘Get those people away!’

Soliders pressed in upon the spectators and jostled them out of the convoy’s path. The access-gate barring the road swung open and the cars motored smoothly behind the motor-cyclists on to the hard-stand, coming to a halt directly opposite the steps leading up to the main hatch (or doorway) of Air Force One.

As Chief Steward, it fell to Wynanski to welcome his eminent guests. He shimmied up to the leading limo and pulled open the door, fixing the Oil Minister for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Doctor Ibrahim Hamady, with a fierce, toothy grin. Dr Hamady nodded graciously enough, and climbed the steps to the plane. Hamady would be the only one of the OPEC tycoons to wear, at all times, full Arab dress, beautifully cut for him by a Riyadh tailor of exceptional skill.

The second car flew the Libyan flag, and the routine for Wynanski was similar. Sheikh Mohammed Khalid Dorani, a handsome man in his early forties, with bouffant grey hair and a luxuriant moustache, shook the Master Sergeant’s hand and made for the Boeing, a porter, weighed down with hand-luggage, shuffling behind.

The next arrival, the nondescript Sheikh Zayed bin Arbeid, of Iraq, was duly decanted, and another limousine left the hardstand. Then came Hemmingsway, who was politely applauded, and in the last car, flying the Bahraini national emblem and getting a special cheer from the home crowd, was a passenger who could have presented Wynanski with logistical problems, if the Chief Steward had not had the foresight to study his brief with special care.

Sheikh Zayed Farouk Zeidan, wearing Western clothes with an Arab headdress, had a proud curving beak of a nose and magnetic black eyes. He was big, with immense shoulders and hands; he was also quite obviously crippled, his left leg hanging useless and wasted. Now sixty-five, Zeidan was accompanied by his twelve-year-old grandson, Feisal, who was on his way back to school in Switzerland. An Arab aide jumped from the other side of the car, jerked open the trunk, and fetched out a collapsible wheelchair. He assembled it swiftly, and wheeled it round to Zeidan.

‘Thank you, Achmed,’ Zeidan said, as the man and the boy helped him into the chair. Fayeed bowed, respectfully but not unctuously, and indicated the ramp which Wynanski’s ground staff had pushed over to replace the steps. Achmed scorned offers of help, and took the wheelchair backwards up the ramp and into the plane.

Feisal followed his grandfather, and was succeeded by Bert Cooligan. Wynanski ticked off the list on his clip-board: one Energy Secretary, American; four ministers, all Ayrab; plus one snot-nosed kid, ditto. Iran and Venezuela, he reflected, would have made a full pack of six for OPEC, but they were unavoidably absent.

Last of all to the aeroplane came Cody Jagger, looking to neither left nor right, his unholstered gun visible to anyone watching. The hatch closed behind him and the steps were removed.

Basil Swann handed the receiver to Philpott. ‘The Pentagon, sir,’ he intoned gravely, like a restrained muezzin. ‘General Morwood.’

‘George,’ Philpott barked, ‘what reports are you getting from Bahrain?’

‘What reports should we be getting from Bahrain?’ Morwood grumbled. ‘Weather reports, perhaps?’

‘No, damn it,’ Philpott cursed, ‘you know what I mean. Is everything all right there? No hitches?’

Morwood sighed and put on an excessively bored and regimental voice. ‘We’re in direct communication with the Commander and pilot of Air Force One, Malcolm. All systems are in order, and all of the personnel are who they’re supposed to be and where they’re supposed to be. The passengers are even now being conducted to their seats by your agent, Sabrina Carver, masquerading as a member of the United States Air Force, under the impeccable scrutiny of your other agent, Colonel Joe McCafferty. And if UNACO has any more agents aboard, which wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest – maybe the entire crew are UNACO staff, I don’t know, because nobody ever tells the Pentagon any damned thing, you least of all, Philpott – if, as I said, you have any residual operatives littered about the place disguised as armchairs or engine-cowlings, then I have no doubt that they are also fulfilling their necessary functions, which is what I’m trying to do, if only you’d get off the damned line and stop pestering me.’

Philpott grinned sympathetically. ‘Far be it from me to come between a man and his necessary functions, George,’ he drawled. ‘Hey – you’ve got the radar-plot, haven’t you, as well?’ Morwood agreed; they did have the radar-plot; he explained the process with massive patience, as he would to a six-year-old boy young for his age. Philpott held the receiver away from his ear and let the discourse roll. ‘Satisfied?’ the eminent soldier inquired icily.

‘Sure,’ Philpott replied – then confessed, with a shade of genuine contrition, that UNACO, too, had secured an unauthorised trace on the Boeing’s course. ‘Just thought I’d let you know, George,’ he explained, waiting for the explosion.

But there wasn’t one. Morwood chuckled throatily and sneered, ‘My dear Malcolm, did you really think you’d put one over on us with the tap into the inertial guidance system monitoring? We knew what you were up to, and our boys at Andrews AFB had instructions to look the other way. We weren’t born yesterday you know, Sherlock. You keep track, we keep track. That way, everybody’s happy.’

Philpott gulped, duly chastened. ‘OK, George, strike one to the Pentagon. But seriously, you will let me know the instant anything goes wrong with the radar-plot, won’t you?’

Morwood assured him that nothing could go wrong. The Boeing was scheduled to fly at a comfortable height, her range was more than sufficient for the first leg of the journey, she had ample fuel reserves, and she was in excellent working order.

‘All the same,’ Philpott pressed.

Morwood sighed. ‘Malcolm,’ he said, ‘if it makes you happy, I’ll give you a progress report on how the toilets are flushing and what goes down them.’

He hung up, and Philpott glanced at the Gulf zone clock. Take-off in two minutes …

The principal stateroom on Air Force One provided for its guests capacious armchairs built on tracks, with levers for moving or reclining the chairs, like in the better class of car. The chairs were grouped in fours, the pairs facing each other across tables. Sabrina pasted on a brilliant smile and showed the oil moguls to their seats. She warmed to the young Feisal immediately, but drew off when he treated her with something approaching aloof disdain.

On the flight deck the intercom buzzed and Fairman snapped, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Wynanski, sir,’ came the reply, ‘they’re all aboard and settled.’

‘Strapped in?’

A pause, and Wynanski replied, ‘Affirmative, Colonel.’

Fairman grunted, and spoke into a microphone. ‘Clear to start one and two?’ A member of the ground crew checked the area around the port engines. ‘Clear on both,’ he replied.

‘Start two,’ the Commander ordered. Latimer depressed a switch. ‘Starting two,’ he said. The mighty plane shuddered as the engine caught. ‘Two steady,’ Latimer added.

‘Start one.’

‘Starting one.’ Another rumble of elemental power went through the shivering airframe. ‘One steady. Rotation one and two.’

‘Move it,’ the Commander said.

Latimer sent the Boeing forward, reported ‘Taxiing power,’ and left the hardstand for the allocated runway at Muharraq Airport. The liner completed a half-turn and sat at the end of the runway. Fairman operated the throttle and the engine-note rose to a banshee whine. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. The speed of Air Force One increased.

‘Rolling,’ Latimer answered laconically.

Fairman took over the controls at a hundred knots, and when the pilot said ‘V-one’ the Commander repeated the code – the fail-safe point for commitment to lifting the plane from the ground. If he accepted it – as he had – there could be no going back on his decision. The plane must take off.

‘V-two.’

‘Rotate.’

‘Rotating.’ Fairman eased the control yoke back, and the President’s aeroplane surged into the clear blue sky …

Jagger had gone straight to the rear toilet when he boarded the Boeing, seeing no one but Chuck Allen, whose greeting he acknowledged with a curt nod. Locking the door, he took from the pocket of his flying jacket a smaller version of the aerosol spray can which had been used on McCafferty in the taxi. Jagger opened the door of one of the wall cabinets and placed the can unobtrusively at the back among a selection of toilet articles.

He left the facilities area, and in the rear passenger compartment was confronted by not one, but two, stewardesses. His second test – crisis, perhaps – was unavoidable, staring him in the face. He had reckoned on coping with only one girl at a time, but now he had no choice. So which one was he supposed to have dated?

Cody Jagger may have assumed McCafferty’s form and face, but he retained his own taste in women. Not even Stein’s genius could erase that. Jagger had rarely enjoyed success with truly beautiful and desirable women. His technique was to grab what he wanted and conquer it by sheer animal force. Of all the women Cody had known, his favourites were blondes built for comfort.

Sabrina Carver was dark, spectacular and, even in her uniform, expensive. Jeanie Fenstermaker was blonde, and a big, sexy girl behind her tinted shades.

Reverting to type, Cody grinned crookedly at Fenstermaker and said, ‘Don’t forget our dinner-date, Airman.’

McCafferty’s last conscious impression came at the outskirts of Manama, when Dunkels’ free hand advanced towards his face holding the same canister of knockout gas which had been used on him by the cab-driver.

The American awoke in a darkened room which, he later discovered, was in a house belonging to Achmed. For the mysterious Fayeed was not merely private secretary and principal aide to the Oil Minister of his native Bahrain; he was also distantly connected to Zeidan’s family, standing high enough in his favour to rate a rent-free villa inside the enormous grounds of the Sheikh’s home. As Achmed smugly described it to Dunkels, there could be few safer safe-houses throughout the length and breadth of the island.

To Mac’s astonishment, he had not been shackled, nor even tied, though he soon learned that this apparent oversight (or contemptuous neglect?) made no difference to his situation. The metal-framed window had been welded shut behind stout iron bars. A small window set high up on the wall had been jammed open to the extent of no more than three-quarters of an inch. There was no other ventilation, and just one entrance to the room; a closet door was set into the wall opposite the bed.

Mac pulled back the heavy curtain and peeped out. Through the violently hued scented blossoms trailing down the wall, a guard grinned up at him and waved a Kalashnikov rifle. McCafferty dropped the curtain back into place, then once more drew it carefully aside. The guard was still there. The gun was a Kalashnikov – a Russian infantry weapon, though freely available on the black market. And the man was not an Arab.

He heard the sound of someone opening the double-locked door. A strong beam of light swept the room, raking the empty bed, locating the only other furniture – a table, chair and wash-basin – and finding the prisoner standing before the window, shielding his eyes against the glare. Dunkels stepped in behind the torch, which Mac could now see was held by another man. The German snapped on the light-switch and ordered the guard, in a language unfamiliar to the American, to kill the torch. A third guard (armed, like Dunkels and the first man) sidled in and kicked the door shut with his heel.

‘We heard you moving,’ Dunkels said. ‘I see you’re none the worse for your – uh – experience. You may not believe it, but that actually pleases me.’

McCafferty spat out a globule of blood and made no reply. Dunkels laughed, and suggested that Mac might get used to the idea that he was worth more alive than dead. He could also speak freely in front of the guards, the German added. They did not understand English.

‘Worth more alive to Smith?’ Mac sneered. ‘If I am, you sure had a funny way of showing it back in the hut.’

Dunkels spread his hands wide in an elaborate shrug. ‘You’re still here, aren’t you? In one piece? Doesn’t that speak for itself?’

Mac grinned painfully. ‘It tells me only that you’re keeping me intact for reasons that suit you rather than me.’

‘Such as?’

To learn more from him about his role with UNACO, or on Air Force One, Mac hazarded. Or until whatever mad scheme Smith had hatched up for the President’s plane had come to its logical end – disaster. Or just to prolong the agony because Smith and Dunkels were grade ‘A’ bastards. ‘Any one of those reasons,’ Mac added, ‘or all three.’

Dunkels chuckled again. ‘Normally I’d agree,’ he countered, ‘because normally you’d be right.’

‘Not this time?’

The German shook his leonine head. ‘No, somebody else wants you alive. They’d like a chat with you too. In fact, they asked me to tell you.’

‘Did they? And afterwards? After they’ve finished their – chat?’

Dunkels shrugged again. ‘Who knows? You’re obviously valuable to them. They might get to like you.’

McCafferty looked long and hard at the sentries. He had been covertly observing them during his exchange with the German. He thought Dunkels might be telling the truth; they appeared to follow nothing that was being said. True, they had both laughed at times – but only when Dunkels laughed; and, comparatively speaking, a long time after they should have.

He returned his gaze to Dunkels. ‘So who are my newfound friends,’ he inquired acidly, ‘the ones who want so badly to chat to me?’

The German smirked. ‘Would you believe – the Soviets?’

Mac blinked and raised an eyebrow. Dunkels nodded enthusiastically. ‘Does Smith know?’ Mac asked. Dunkels smiled, very slowly. Obviously not, Mac thought. ‘And what’s in it for you?’ he pressed. Dunkels opened a hand and made scratching motions across the palm with his fingernails.

‘So you deliver me to them and cheat on Smith and they pay you lots of lovely dough?’

Dunkels nodded again. ‘You catch on, buddy,’ he grinned. He explained that, totally unexpectedly, the Russians had contacted him through an emissary at his hotel. He had already been paid sufficient money – in dollars – to persuade him that the Soviet offer was genuine.

‘It’s they who want to interrogate you, not me or Smith,’ he stressed. ‘You want to stay alive – play ball. You don’t have a choice, McCafferty. Get wise.’

He spun on his heel and left the room, the two armed men backing out after him. As the door was re-locked, Mac reflected on the two pieces of important knowledge he had gained … one of them horrifying in its implications.

If the false McCafferty was now controlled not by Smith but by the KGB, were they planning to use the ringer to double-cross Smith? And if so, could they then afford to leave the hostages alive?

McCafferty bit his lip and shook his head angrily at the sheer impotence of his position. He had priceless information within his grasp – yet he was locked up as tight as he would be if he’d been court-martialled and pulled five to ten in Fort Leavenworth.

That brought him to consideration of the second piece of intelligence Dunkels had unwittingly shown him. Not only could his guards speak no English; but, like the man he had seen outside his window, they were not Arabs.

What nationality were they, then? Mac wondered. And if he found out where they came from, could he use the knowledge?

Once again Jagger was helped by a twist of fate which he had first diagnosed as malign: yet the fact that he had encountered both stewardesses together, so forcing his hand, had actually saved him. They were standing close to each other, and as soon as the words were out and he saw Jeanie Fenstermaker’s generous mouth start to open in perplexity, Jagger switched his gaze to Sabrina Carver and repeated the injunction, ‘As I said, don’t forget our dinner-date, Airman.’

Now it was Sabrina’s turn to look bewildered. ‘You may have said it to me,’ she pointed out, ‘but you were looking at Jeanie. At least, the first time you were.’

Jagger stared at her. ‘I was?’ he queried incredulously. ‘Are you sure? Gee, I’m sorry – eh – Airman. It’s the tension of the job – you know? The spy business gets to you in funny ways. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be straightforward.’

Sabrina gave him a doubtful look and asked him if he would be fully recovered by the evening; just so that she could be sure she was still supposed to be going out with him. Jagger grinned easily and affirmed that he would be his old self again by the time they got to Geneva. He smiled even more broadly as he appreciated what he had said. ‘See you both later, then,’ he added, ending the encounter as speedily as politeness would permit.

He walked quickly towards the front of the plane, still in something of a quandary. Since meeting Sabrina, he had rerun the McCafferty amours through his finely trained mind, and he was certain that her face had not appeared among the thumbnail sketches. So she must be someone McCafferty had literally only just met – and for whom he had formed an instant attraction. The trouble with that was that Jagger didn’t even know her name.

He reached the flight deck and casually leafed through his own security files until he came to the copy of Wynanski’s crew and passengers manifest. If the big blonde, whom the other had referred to as ‘Jeanie’, was Airman First Class Fenstermaker, Jean, then his date – less desirable because more inaccessible – must be Airman First Class Carver, Sabrina. Problem solved.

Not that it mattered, Jagger thought with a fleeting sneer. Neither of the girls would reach Geneva alive. Pity to waste Fenstermaker, though, he grinned to himself. She showed promise.

‘Private joke, chief?’ Cooligan inquired, spotting the sly smile.

Jagger pulled himself together. ‘Sorry again, Bert,’ he said, ‘I was looking forward to my date tonight.’

‘Ah, la belle Carver,’ Cooligan replied with relish. ‘You’ll give me a full report, of course.’

‘If you don’t see me at breakfast,’ he rejoined, ‘you won’t need a report. You can just use your imagination.’

Sabrina and Fenstermaker passed through to the stateroom at the exact moment that Sonya Kolchinsky, in the UNACO control room, saw the green dot of Air Force One shoot out a hesitant tendril on the wall map. ‘She’s away, sir,’ Sonya sang out to Philpott, nudging him gently. Philpott raised his eyes and heaved a huge sigh of relief.

‘Then drinks are in order, Sonya, my dear,’ he declared, ‘because for the moment we’re safe. Smith didn’t make his strike on the ground, where I expected him to, and if he’s going to do it while she’s airborne it’ll have to be some plan to beat the team we’ve got on board. So, for a while – let’s relax, shall we?’

He stood up and led the way into his office, turning only to remind Basil Swann that the inertial navigation system trace on the Boeing must be monitored at all times. ‘And keep in touch with General Morwood at the Pentagon,’ Philpott continued. ‘He’s cued into the actual radar-track through the radio link to Naples. That’s our double-check. Call me the moment you have even the slightest feeling of unease about anything. I don’t care if it turns out to be wrong. We have to watch this one like the proverbial hawk; there’s a great deal riding on it for UNACO.’

He and Sonya sank into deep armchairs, hers in the far corner of the room by the window, Philpott’s midway along the wall facing his desk. He sipped a Plymouth gin, with ice and water and a tiny white cocktail onion bobbing on the surface; it was an affectation he had borrowed from a very senior British sailor. Sonya drank a dry martini.

‘I wonder if we’ve been worrying too much about this one,’ Philpott mused. Sonya wrinkled her brow and made a fetching moue. ‘No,’ she decided, and took a longish pull at her drink. ‘As we agreed at the beginning, it’s got all the hallmarks of the big one for Smith. Unlike you, though, I didn’t favour a strike at Bahrain.’

Philpott stretched out his legs, regarded his gleaming black toecaps, and saluted her with his glass. ‘Geneva?’ Sonya nodded.

‘Well, we’ve taken every precaution,’ Philpott contended. ‘McCafferty’s been instructed to exercise special care right from the very instant of the approach to touch-down. The Swiss, like good little UNACO members, have been exceptionally co-operative, both in allowing our people access and giving them effective back-up – the airport, the drive to town, the hotel, the private dinnerparty – everything’s covered.

‘Every inch of the way has been vetted and will be under surveillance. Anyone scheduled to come into contact with our guests at any level has been scrutinised and passed – or otherwise; in which case they’ve been replaced. I honestly believe we have Geneva wrapped up,’ he ended, a complacent smile on his lips. He raised his glass again and toasted her impishly.

‘Always provided,’ Sonya said, ‘that Air Force One ever gets to Geneva.’

Philpott chuckled. ‘God damn it, Kolchinsky,’ he exclaimed, ‘I was just about feeling good on this one, and now you go and spoil things.’ He helped himself to another long gin, and flashed her a broad wink.

In the Boeing’s stateroom, Stewardess Carver made clear notes on her pad of the precise form of drink requested by each passenger. She ended up with Scotch narrowly winning over vodka, plus a pair of Jack Daniels and a genuine tea without milk or sugar. This would normally have represented another Jack Daniels, but Sheikh Zeidan ordered it for the twelve-year-old Feisal, so it really had to be tea.

‘OK,’ she said, smiling at the boy. As an afterthought she fished from her pocket a bar of chocolate which she offered to Feisal. ‘Helps to pass the time,’ she said brightly. The slim brown fingers of the solemn-faced little Arab boy remained daintily laced in his lap, and he looked neither at her nor at the chocolate. Then he said, ‘I regret that my medical advisers do not permit me to eat such things. But you could not have known that. You may leave.’ He spoke in perfect Southern Standard English, like a candidate for a job as a BBC announcer.

His grandfather, who was playing chess with Hemmingsway, leaned over and spoke softly to the boy in Arabic. Then he smiled apologetically at Sabrina. ‘At his age, young lady,’ he said in his rich, dark voice, ‘life is earnest indeed, not to be frittered away in mere living. Dignity is all when you are twelve. Nonetheless, what he said is true, though I cannot defend the way he said it. But my grandson does have a diabetic condition and so, naturally, cannot enjoy chocolate as other children do. It is a cross – if you’ll forgive the Christian allusion – which he has to bear.’

Sabrina flushed, momentarily unsettled. ‘I – I’m so sorry,’ she stammered. ‘Naturally I wouldn’t have suggested—’

Zeidan waved his hand in a gesture of tolerance and forgiveness, spiced with a soupçon of deprecation. ‘Please, of course not. But as Feisal said, you could not have been aware of his condition.’ He hesitated, and then ventured, ‘There is something, however, that you might be able to do for me.’

Sabrina assured him of her willingness, and Zeidan inquired if the aircraft carried a physician. Sabrina shook her head. ‘When the President’s on board, his doctor would normally travel with him, but this is a relatively short flight – so … Anyway, don’t worry about it. I am a qualified paramedic. If Feisal should need something, I’ll be glad to help.’

Zeidan smiled his thanks and said, ‘Perhaps, then, you would care to take charge of this.’ He picked up from the table before him a small tooled leather case and handed it to her. Sabrina opened its clasp, and saw the hypodermic syringes and insulin capsules. ‘I’ll be glad to, sir,’ she replied.

The ‘tea’ was served from genuine Chinese teapots – for appearances, as Wynanski explained – which were part of a set taken on at Bahrain. The ministers, Hemmingsway included, drank from delicate, paper-thin china cups, rattling now with unaccustomed chunks of ice, which had been diced into smaller, more manageable lumps by the acute Chief Steward.

The moguls, supplied with acceptable snacks by Airman Fenstermaker, whose superstructure earned admiring glances, settled down to talk oil. Jagger walked through the stateroom on one of his seemingly compulsive tours of the plane, and Sabrina gazed thoughtfully after him.

Unlike her colleague, she had not been wholly convinced by the attempts of the man whom she unhesitatingly accepted as Joe McCafferty to cover up his memory lapse in the rear passenger area. His explanation – the tension of the flight, the pressures of security – might excuse the faulty recognition, but Sabrina did not altogether accept it. She was not extraordinarily vain but, try as she might, she could not for the life of her see how anyone could confuse Jeanie Fenstermaker with Sabrina Carver.

She had casually quizzed Wynanski about McCafferty, asking if the security chief was normally moody at take-off times. ‘No more than most,’ Wynanski replied, ‘but one thing’s for sure: when he’s on duty, Mac’s all business. No time for women – even one like you, the sap.’

Sabrina stood in a corner of the stateroom, a puzzled frown still clouding her face. She did not hear the soft step on the carpeted floor. Then a hand fell upon her shoulder. She jumped and wheeled round. ‘Penny for them,’ Cooligan said. She stammered an apology and confessed that she had been miles away.

Bert looked at her curiously, rubbing his chin. ‘Yeah,’ he drawled, ‘there’s a lot of it around. Seems to be an occupational hazard on this trip especially.’

‘What on earth d’you mean?’ Sabrina asked. Cooligan gave an embarrassed chuckle; ‘it was nothing really,’ he muttered, trying to play it down. Sabrina persisted, sensing something that could be important to her. Finally Bert confessed, ‘It’s just that I had much the same sort of trouble with my boss, Colonel McCafferty, on the telephone back in Manama.’

Sabrina felt the skin of her cheeks and forehead tighten. ‘On the phone? What – eh – what kind of trouble?’ Cooligan replied that it had not been anything serious. ‘I feel kind of silly talking about it now, but at the time it seemed, well, strange. He was so immersed in his thoughts that I might just as well have been talking to a brick wall.’

Sabrina weighed her words carefully. ‘Did he, by any chance, not quite – sort of – recognise you?’

Cooligan looked at her in surprise, then nodded. ‘That’s right. For a moment, it was like he didn’t know who he was talking to …’

On the flight deck, Colonel Fairman sat back in his seat and ordered Latimer to radio Naples for a position. The pilot spoke into his microphone. ‘Naples Control. Air Force One calling Naples Control. We are crossing 24 degrees East at flight-level 280 and estimating 22 degrees East at 31.’

The voice of the controller at the Naples base came cradling back to them in measured, stilted English. ‘Rover, Air Force One, I have you on my screen. Call at 22 degrees East.’

A few hundred miles away, another aeroplane sat at the furthest edge of a runway which pointed like a finger at the Adriatic Sea.

All was dark around the unlit bulk of the plane, made darker by lowering clouds. The aircraft was little more than the suggestion of a shadow on the ground.

Suddenly the lights of a dozen motor-vehicles – cars, jeeps and a small pick-up lorry – flooded the scarred runway with radiance, picking out the gravel and dust motes dancing lightly among the weeds in the stiff breeze.

The aircraft’s engines boomed into life, and the Boeing taxied out into the pool of illumination.

SEVEN

There could be no mistaking the size, the conformation, the livery of the plane – the stars and stripes on the flag, the Presidential insignia, the ‘United States of America’ legend – nor the white fuselage, the blue-black nose and pale-blue underbelly and engine-cowlings, perched on the silver wings.

It was Air Force One. Or at least, as with Jagger’s resemblance to Joe McCafferty, to all intents and purposes it was Air Force One.

Which was good enough for Mister Smith, seated in his car at the seaward end of the runway, watching the mighty liner speed towards him preparing to take off.

Finding the airstrip – miraculously built in 1944 to a length of 4500-plus feet for the newly launched German ME262 jet-fighters – had been the first vital contribution of the Russians when Smith had invited the KGB into a tenuous partnership. For the airstrip – long since abandoned and overgrown – was on the flat, low-lying Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia between Zadar and Sibenik, and Smith had become convinced early on in his planning that the theft of the President’s Boeing could only be achieved from an Eastern bloc state. And even post-Tito Yugoslavia was closed territory to Smith.

But not to the Russians. They had been able both to locate the sort of runway he needed, and to provide the help he would require to clear it and man it. The vehicles on the runway, and the men in their driving-seats, plus the sentries who even now guarded the real Joe McCafferty in Bahrain – they were all recruited from the same ultra-Left partisan group whose headquarters were in the nearby mountains.

Set up and funded by the KGB, they were pledged to return Yugoslavia to the orthodox Communist fold. By infiltration, acts of terrorism and agit-prop, and intimidation in the classic pattern, they were some way along the road to success. They would also provide the troops Mister Smith would use to keep authority at bay while he carried out the final phase of his plan – the collection of the ransom for the OPEC ministers. Though there had been precious few signs of interference from the authorities so far, Smith thought. The KGB again?

The aircraft had been obtained by Smith legally. It was indeed a Boeing 707, but not what the USAF would call a stratoliner. Instead, he had searched for, and found, an old cargo-freighter, its useful life now almost at an end. She suited Smith’s purpose to perfection; he had bought the plane cheaply, and had her resprayed and painted, though not restructured.

The Boeing passed Smith’s car dragging its gigantic shadow in its wake. The noise was horrendous, starting as a raucous whine and rising through a crescendo to a staccato rattle, then dying out over the water in a series of massive, reverberant booms as the liner left the ground and soared into the night.

Mister Smith stroked the knee of the girl beside him, his willing servant from the castle. ‘Now,’ he said in English, ‘it’s up to the Russians and their clever little friends in Italy. Why don’t we return and await developments, my sweet Branka?’

Apart from her name, the girl hadn’t understood a single word, but she smiled and covered his hand with hers. His intentions were plain enough, anyway …

The man code-named Myshkin paced the radio room in the Soviet Union’s Zurich embassy, listening intently to the running commentary from the operator, headphones clasped to his ears, who was translating from the Serbo-Croat of his informant in Belgrade.

Myshkin looked at his watch, and then met the eye of Axel Karilian, who had been bending over the radio operator, making notes on a pad. Karilian’s thick lips parted in a vulpine smile. ‘Congratulations, Comrade,’ he said, ‘everything is going according to plan … our plan, that is, though Mister Smith is still convinced it’s his.’

Myshkin’s eyelids in their slightly epicanthic folds quivered in agreement. It was a gesture, Karilian had noted, that often passed for extreme enthusiasm in Myshkin. Where other men might practically dislocate their necks in nodding vigorous approval, Myshkin would merely compress his prissy lips and flutter his eyelids. It was an oddly menacing habit; not feminine, as it might sound, but serpentine and secretive.

‘I must confess,’ Karilian admitted, ‘that I don’t much relish the idea of McCafferty being around a minute longer than is necessary for our purposes. He’s a constant threat to us. His capacity for danger will cease only when he is dead.’

Myshkin frowned. ‘I’m half inclined to agree with you,’ he said, ‘but McCafferty knows things which are important to us, both about UNACO, whom we can never really trust though we help support them, and most of all concerning the USAF, the Pentagon and Air Force One.

‘Do you realise what we have done, Axel?’ Myshkin said, his voice rising by a carefully adjusted semi-tone in something dangerously close to excitement. ‘We have captured a full Colonel of the United States Air Force without their actually realising it. We can hold him and milk him dry, and they may never even know we have had him.

‘After all, why should they? He’ll still be with them, effectively, as the sole survivor and undoubted hero of the Air Force One hijack – the man who defeated the master criminal that UNACO couldn’t catch.’

Karilian raised his bushy eyebrows at this. ‘Huh?’ he grunted. ‘Since when did that become part of the plan?’

Myshkin smiled, and not for the first time Karilian felt prickles of fear probing his body like acupuncture needles.

‘Moscow considers it advisable,’ he replied. ‘And why not? Should Smith get in our way, or prove to be an embarrassment, who says he necessarily has to survive? We don’t need him,’ Myshkin went on softly.

‘Jagger will have plenty of assistance, provided by us and responsive to our direction, so that when Smith least expects treachery – at the moment of his seemingly complete triumph – how easy it will be for Jagger to – um – dispose of him, and hand over the ransom to us. I’m sure the KGB will find equally practical uses for it – wouldn’t you say, Axel?’

Axel would. He chuckled warmly. Not because he wanted to, but because he felt he had to.

During the hours he spent in the darkened room, McCafferty had been allowed out only twice: once to relieve himself, and again, as night fell, to walk in the garden, always under heavy escort. Not just human escort, either: the Arab Selim kept an unkempt, savage Alsatian on a thick chain, long enough to wind several times round the man’s waist before clipping on to the collar of the fierce dog.

The villa, Mac saw, was a two-storey house set in its own defined plot of land within the palace grounds. Traffic noise indicated that it must be near a road, and he calculated that the high wall at the end of the garden formed the perimeter both of the villa and of the royal residence. His room – the only one with a barred window – was on the first floor, facing front.

McCafferty had spotted three other bedrooms and two bathrooms, and imagined the usual reception suite on the ground floor. The accommodation fitted the number of men guarding him: one on patrol in the garden, one outside his door – these were both as yet unidentified foreigners – plus Selim and his evil dog, and Dunkels. The guards, Mac thought, probably bunked in together.

However hard he tried, the American could see no way of escape. There were no unplugged loopholes, no weak links. Wearily, despondently, still nursing his cuts and bruises, Mac returned from his second excursion and heard the door of his room double-locked behind him.

Then came another sound – a familiar one but not, he was positive, previously heard by him since his arrival at the villa. The telephone rang in the hall downstairs.

After a few moments, the key grated in the lock and the door swung open. Dunkels followed the same routine as before, allowing the guard’s torch to locate McCafferty, and then turning on the shaded light-bulb from the wall switch. Mac, for what the German called ‘security reasons’, was forbidden to touch the switch. He deduced that the house could be seen from the road, and Dunkels would not risk the chance that the American could use the light to flash an appeal in Morse.

Dunkels seemed in good fettle. ‘I have news for you, McCafferty,’ he announced. ‘You’ll be getting out of here shortly. Some – uh – “friends” of mine will come to take you away, by sea I gather, to a place which is, shall we say, more compatible to their interests. Also you’re to lose a couple of your faithful attendants. I’m told by Mister Smith that they’re needed back in – eh – back at our operational base, where someone’s shorthanded.’

With a sweep of his hand, Dunkels indicated the two guards, who grinned uncomprehendingly. McCafferty replied, in Russian, that he would be glad to see the back of them, since they stank like pigs and put him off his food.

Before Dunkels could stop him, the younger of the two guards sprang forward, bawled obscenities at Mac in his native tongue, and crashed his rifle butt into the American’s face.

Dunkels grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him away roughly. Mac had swivelled his head at the last moment and the Kalashnikov caught him only a glancing blow, but it was enough to raise fresh blood from an old wound and set his head ringing with pain. Stars exploded before his eyes, and he dabbed at his raw cheek with a soiled handkerchief.

He grinned crookedly but triumphantly behind the rag, though, for his gamble had paid off. He had banked on the sentries understanding either Russian or German since, from their speech and appearance, they seemed more likely to be Central European than to belong to any more remote ethnic group. And while McCafferty was nowhere near even Dunkels’ class as a linguist, he had long ago learned to swear succinctly in something like fifteen languages. For a constant world-traveller, it was convenient to know when foreigners were displeased with you.

The guard had played straight into his hands: the richly obscene oaths hurled at Mac were the only half-dozen words of Serbo-Croat the American knew, but now he could be certain of a Yugoslav connection.

Yugoslavia fitted the Boeing’s schedule, too, lying just off-course of the safest route Fairman would choose for Switzerland: overflying the friendlier states of Arabia into the Mediterranean, and up one side or the other of Italy to cross the Alps. If Smith wanted to snatch the President’s plane, McCafferty reasoned, then Yugoslavia, with its crypto-Soviet presence, would make an ideal launch-pad for the hijack.

Dunkels smoothed the ruffled feelings of the guards and turned back to the American, his face a mask of barely controlled anger. ‘That was smart, McCafferty,’ he hissed, ‘but whatever you’ve learned, the knowledge will do you no good. There’s still no escape from here and, as I said, you’ll be gone before long in any case.

‘However, since you appear to want to play games, we’ll leave you someone to play with. He’s very friendly, I’m told – as long as you don’t upset him.’

While Selim slowly unwound the heavy chain from his waist, one of the guards hammered a six-inch staple into the jamb of the door. Selim clipped the Alsatian’s collar to the hook, and leered at McCafferty. ‘The chain’s long enough for him to reach all over the room,’ the Arab said. ‘I wouldn’t move, if I were you. It’s long past his dinner-time, and we don’t seem to have any dog food left. I’ll leave the light on; then at least you’ll be able to see him coming.’

He slammed the door and locked it. The dog stood glowering at Mac, who lay rigid on his bed, fixing the animal with an unwavering stare. Finally the dog gave in, yawned prodigiously, and settled down on its stomach, chin resting on paws. Its eyes stayed open, and its tongue roamed over its sharp white teeth.

Mac heard the front door shut and a car start up. Dunkels’ voice came to him through the little fanlight. ‘Keep an eye on him, Selim,’ the German said, ‘I’ll take these two to the airport, and be back in half an hour or so.’

One guard remained, then, Mac reflected: the Arab. And his friend the Alsatian. He stirred restlessly, and the dog was on its feet in a flash, baring its teeth in a warning snarl.

If Mac was going to make a bid for freedom, he had half an hour – no more. And first he must deal with Selim’s dog.

Fairman fussed and fumed as the aircraft wound its undulating route to the west, following a wiggling snake trail which was anything but the arrow-straight path the Commander would have wished.

The Boeing was never forced to deviate outrageously, but when Fairman filed the flight plan he had been uncomfortably aware that he was permitted to overfly certain territories solely because of the passengers he carried, and denied others because of the plane he was flying. Indeed, if it had been merely the President of the United States on board, Air Force One would have had to follow a vastly different and even more complicated course.

The Boeing’s Commander swore mildly in sheer relief as the plane crossed the frontier into friendly Egypt. Latimer, the pilot, let the sardonic smile which had been marring his Italianate Renaissance good looks since take-off, stay on his face. He adjusted course for Suez, spanned the Canal keeping Port Said to starboard and Cairo to port, and sailed out into the Mediterranean over Alexandria.

He saw the waters gleaming darkly below him, and heard Fairman broadcast a brief scene-set to the EDPs in the stateroom, who seemed to be drinking tea like it was going out of fashion.

Latimer spotted Crete looming up to starboard, and altered direction to follow the flight plan: proceeding not up the Adriatic past the Balkan states, but flying over Sicily and taking the Mediterranean sea-route all the way up the coast of Italy, entering Italian air-space at Genoa and traversing Piedmont to begin the descent to Geneva.

The ‘identikit’ Air Force One, meanwhile, also had the hazy blur of Crete roughly in its sights to port as it sped down the Adriatic below the radar screen, on a course which would only briefly parallel that of the President’s Boeing – but it would be long enough for Smith’s master plan to work.

In a rest room cabin behind the flight deck of the genuine AF One, next to the forward galley on the starboard side of the plane, Cooligan, a brace of engineers and Jagger played five card draw poker for modest stakes. It was not something which McCafferty normally encouraged, yet – as Cooligan noted with surprise – the security chief himself had suggested the game. Another instance of untypical procedure by the Colonel to nag at the Secret Service agent’s mind … still, what the hell, he thought; anyone can have an off day.

Jagger got to his feet on a winning streak, and excused himself from the next hand. ‘Problems?’ Bert asked sympathetically. ‘Want me to join you?’

Jagger shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘just count me out. I don’t feel too easy about this one …’ (a ploy which he hoped would cover up what he knew had been erratic behaviour on his part) ‘… I know nothing can go wrong, but I think I’ll take a walk around, just to check up.’

‘Looking for stowaways, Colonel?’ ventured one of the engineers. The other comedian added, ‘Perhaps somebody got on while we were over Saudi Arabia – or was it Syria? They all look the same to me.’

The four men laughed, and Jagger easily strolled out, not quickening his pace when he reached the stateroom, nodding affably to an aide, and arriving at the rest room complex at the rear of the Boeing without encountering any other crew member except Jeanie Fenstermaker. She was en route for the EDP lounge with smoked salmon and asparagus twists, encased in thinly sliced overcoats of fresh brown bread and butter. Jagger took one and ate it.

He locked himself in the tail-end toilet and stayed for five minutes for the sake of appearances, should he encounter Fenstermaker again too quickly. He slid the aerosol can into his pocket, flushed the toilet-bowl, washed his hands and stepped out through the door, almost cannoning off the busty blonde as she was making her way back to the rear galley, her tray empty.

‘Big appetites, huh?’ he grunted.

‘Seems so, Colonel,’ she responded. ‘Mind you –’ blushing becomingly ‘– I think they also like sort of seeing Sabrina and me as well. And there’s an awful lot of “tea” being served, Colonel. Sergeant Wynanski can hardly keep up with demand.’

‘Where’s Wynanski?’ Jagger asked casually.

Jeanie pointed behind her at the galley. ‘In back, as always, slaving over a hot canapé.’

Jagger grinned, glanced at his watch, and said, ‘Off you go then, Airman. Won’t do to keep the Ayrabs waiting, will it? Could flunk your chance of marrying a sheikh – or at least of joining a harem.’

‘Huh,’ Fenstermaker pouted, adding a disapproving sniff. Jagger waited for her to close the door, then tapped on it and said in a loud voice, ‘Pete! You in there?’

‘Who’s that?’ Wynanski queried. He shuffled over to the door and jerked it open, Jeanie at his elbow.

Jagger smiled with his teeth and said, ‘Got a present for you.’ Fenstermaker’s mouth was already opening in anticipation, so she collected a deep lungful of the knockout gas spray, and slumped to join Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski on the floor.

McCafferty moved his head to steal a glance at his watch, and the dog squirmed threateningly on its belly. Eight minutes had passed. Mac could wait no longer; if he was to act at all, it must be soon.

He sat up on the bed, and the dog rose with him, neck hair bristling, mouth open, wet lips pressed back over its teeth.

Mac swung his legs to the floor and, in one continuous movement, stood with his back to the closet door, fingers groping behind him for the handle. The Alsatian padded noiselessly towards him, trailing its chain. The powerful body swayed fractionally from side to side like a suspension-bridge in a high wind. Its flecked eyes never left the man’s face.

McCafferty found the knob handle of the closet and yanked hard on it. The door shot open and struck him on the shoulder-blade. His fingers traced the fastening: it was a ball catch connecting to a socket in the jamb, and disuse had made it a pretty stiff fit.

He stepped aside and pulled the door ajar, praying that the closet was big enough to enter. His luck held: it was a walk-in, lined with empty shelves.

The dog followed him into the closet.

Mac stepped out again, more quickly. The Alsatian came after him, chain rattling, the dog panting, exuding a strong odour.

McCafferty backed once more into the closet, the dog at his heels.

The American jumped out this time. So did the dog, but turning in its own length, whereas Mac used one long stride, backwards and forwards.

In again. The dog spun round, brushing his leg.

And Mac leapt clear over its body, slamming the door on its muzzle just as the dog turned to follow him.

The Alsatian threw itself in fury against the door, but the rusty catch held. McCafferty dragged the bed in front of the closet and jammed it close to the wall.

Then he raced to the locked door of the room, and jerked frantically at the chain embedded in the woodwork. Already he could hear Selim pounding up the stairs to the landing and along the corridor, attracted by the hysterical baying of the Alsatian from its dark prison.

Sweat poured from Mac’s brow as he leaned his muscles against the chain. With a rending screech the staple came loose. He wrenched out the collar fastener, tore over to the closet and stabbed the hook into the door over the catch, lifting his bunk and using the bed end to hammer the metal into the wood.

Selim was already at the door. Mac snapped off the light-switch and stood behind the door, holding the slack length of chain in his hands.

Expecting the light still to be on, Selim switched his gun to his left hand and jabbed the button of his torch with his thumb, directing the beam towards the source of the noise.

McCafferty’s vicious kick broke Selim’s wrist. He dropped the gun and howled in a discordant counterpoint to the ululation of the dog. Mac jumped him and looped the chain around his neck.

Gradually the American brought the Arab to his knees, trapping the man’s body with his legs. Selim coughed and gagged, and the scream died in his throat as McCafferty choked his life away.

Unbelievably, the dog had forced the closet door, and Mac saw the bed slide out into the room as the huge brute urged its body into the widening gap.

Then the Alsatian was clear, and its desperate barking changed to a snarl of rage. In the light of the torch, still incongruously gripped in Selim’s dead hand, McCafferty saw the dog spring, streamers of foam hanging from its extended jaws.

He dropped to the floor, rolled over, grabbed Selim’s Walther pistol and poured shot after shot into the flying body of the killer Alsatian. The dog crashed into the partly open door, whinnied, then lay still beside him, panting. Mac turned his head and forced himself to look into its dying eyes. The saliva congealed on its tongue and the rasping breath stopped.

He was free.

He staggered down the stairs and out into the night, dragging in great gulps of cool air. Then he collected his wits and searched for a second car.

He found one at the rear of the villa, but the vehicle was locked and there was no key in the ignition. Mac ran into the house and up the stairs. He kicked Selim’s corpse on to its back, and snatched a bunch of keys from the trousers pocket.

It was only when he was well on his way to the American consulate at the wheel of the car that he fully appreciated the difficulties that still confronted him.

As he had half-jokingly reminded Dunkels an eternity ago, McCafferty had no means of proving his identity. He had been stripped of everything – wallet, credit cards, security passes, money. He owned nothing more than the clothes he stood up in: a pair of baggy pantaloons and a torn, soiled, blood-soaked djellaba.

Worse even than that, he must now try to convince a sceptical consul that he was in reality a man whom the consul himself had seen with his own eyes boarding the personal aircraft of the President of the United States not three hours before.

EIGHT

The three-handed draw game was still in progress when Jagger returned to the rest room cabin. He bent over the table and said to Cooligan, ‘How’s it going, Bert?’

Jagger drew out a handkerchief to dab at his face as Cooligan replied, ‘Fine – since you left. Your going brought me luck.’

‘Yeah?’ Jagger queried. ‘Is that a fact? Well, see what this brings you, then.’ He clamped the linen square over his nose and mouth and sprayed all three men. One by one, the cards fell from their nerveless fingers and their heads slumped on to the green baize. The flimsy little table almost overturned, but Jagger caught it in time, steadying it and holding it upright. He could not afford too much noise penetrating in either direction.

Jagger relieved Cooligan of his gun and murmured, ‘Sweet dreams.’

Next, the flight deck. Kowalski was saying to the Commander, ‘There’s a hell of a lot of mush up ahead on the screen. Think we ought to contact Naples?’ Fairman turned to view the radar, and grunted noncommittally. Then he ordered Latimer to make the link with the control station.

‘Naples Control, Air Force One to Naples Control,’ the pilot intoned. Naples replied; still the same formal, robotic voice. ‘There’s a heavy radar return building up ahead, Naples,’ Latimer continued. ‘Request change in routing to Geneva.’

Naples considered the question, and radioed back, ‘Roger, Air Force One. Change to a heading of two-seven-six. Do you copy?’

Naples got an affirmative, and Latimer signed off …

Bartolomeo Volpe had tucked his student books into his battered document case in the social sciences lecture theatre at the University of Bologna and left early with the permission of his tutor who, like Bartolomeo, was a cadre chieftain in the Red Brigades. At about the same time, Christina Patakeminos leaned back in her chair in the social sciences lecture theatre at the University of Athens, closed her eyes, and waited impatiently for the mid-morning break.

Bartolomeo boarded a plane heading south, and arrived in Naples at the precise scheduled time passed on to him in the instructions from his local Communist cell. He queued for a bus to take him out of the city, and checked his watch and grinned as he imagined the dark-eyed Christina doing much the same thing from Athens’ Egypt Square.

Neither the boy nor the girl – who had become lovers at a youth seminar in Sofia a bare six weeks earlier – knew from whom the Athens and Bologna Communists received their orders. The ignorance did not bother them; they bombed when and where they were told to bomb; killed whomever they were told to kill. They were admirable products of international terrorism.

No killing on this one, the Italian thought regretfully as the bus dropped him at the appointed spot on the coast road. Important, though, the cell had said: a strike at the very roots of capitalism.

The electricity cables feeding Naples Control radar station skirted the sea cliffs in a dark gully away from the main road. The supply to Athens Control was also strategically hidden near the cliffs dropping down to the Aegean Sea from the Plain of Marathon. Bartolomeo checked the time again, his eyes almost crossing on the second hand as it swept round to zero-minute.

He levered the lid off a junction box and clamped a small magnetic timing device to its metal side. Then he clipped through a pair of wires laid bare in the cable, and twisted their ends on to the twin terminals of the timer. The clock hands were set for thirty-five minutes.

Hundreds of miles away, Christina Patakeminos followed the same drill-sequence down to the last letter, smiling to herself as she thought of Bartolomeo duplicating her movements south of Naples. They pressed the switches on their timers barely half a second apart.

Bartolomeo screwed down the lid of the junction box, shinned off the pylon and walked away into the night, whistling an aria from Verdi’s Luisa Miller. Christina hummed a catchy little number by Theodorakis and hitched a lift back to Athens …

Jagger was surprised to meet Sabrina Carver on his way to the flight deck of Air Force One. ‘Trouble, Airman?’ he queried.

Sabrina shook her head, and her mane of dark hair lifted off her shoulders and settled again. ‘Just being diplomatic,’ she replied. ‘Feisal – you know, the Arab boy – wanted to see the works. Colonel Fairman said it’d be all right.’

Jagger nodded and brushed past her, scarcely noticing the contact, fingering the strap on the holster of his gun. Sabrina shrugged and murmured, ‘Mac, you sure are one business-like fella.’

Jagger rapped on the locked door of the flight deck and was admitted at the same instant as the Naples Controller said ‘Christ Almighty!’ when his radar screen blanked out.

‘Hey, what the—?’ exclaimed an operator.

‘Where’s everything gone?’ screeched a supervisor.

‘Everything including us, Athens and Air Force One,’ the Controller returned grimly. He blinked rapidly and snorted his disbelief.

‘Tried the hot line?’ the supervisor asked.

‘Dead.’

‘Shee–it.’

‘Quite.’

General Morwood, in the Pentagon Operations Room, was almost as tersely expressive when he took the call from Naples. ‘Lost them?’ His eyes went to the wall map, smaller than UNACO’s but still showing the Boeing’s tracer. ‘How can you have lost them?’ he demanded. ‘We still have them on the inertial guidance track.’

‘I mean we’ve lost all our radar, sir,’ the Naples Controller said a shade desperately, ‘and so have Athens. As far as we know, Air Force One is still there. And of course, General, if you say it is … well, that’s good enough for me.’

Morwood motioned to his closest aide, a full Colonel. ‘Tell Philpott at UNACO what’s happening,’ he whispered, covering the mouthpiece, ‘then listen in here. I’m gonna tear the heads off Naples and Athens.’

‘Hi there, Mac,’ carolled Latimer as Jagger climbed into the flight deck, ‘getting bored back there?’ Fairman added a greeting and Kowalski gave the security chief a wry grin. Feisal’s eyes were widening as he studied the instrumentation.

‘Yeah,’ Jagger returned, ‘I thought you guys might need livening up a bit. Eh, sonny,’ he drawled to the Arab boy, ‘maybe you’d better get back to your seat, huh? You can come up here again later.’

Jagger’s tone was light and casual, but Fairman looked at the security man’s eyes and whispered, ‘Something up?’ Jagger nodded. Feisal hesitated, and appealed mutely to the Commander. Fairman patted his shoulder and said, ‘Scoot, kid. Like the Colonel says, you can be our guest another time.’ Reluctantly, the boy edged out through the door.

Fairman waited until the door closed, and then inquired, ‘What the hell’s wrong, Mac? Do you have problems we don’t know about?’

Jagger grinned crookedly, shaking his head. ‘Not exactly, Tom,’ he said, ‘it’s you who have the problems.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like this.’ Jagger pulled out his gun and rammed it into the back of the first flight engineer’s neck. ‘All of you,’ he commanded, ‘freeze.’

Basil Swann stuttered out the news that Morwood’s operations room had reported radar blackouts from Naples and Athens.

Philpott slammed down his glass on the table, rose to his feet and crossed to the office door, Sonya just behind him. He strode into the UNACO Ops centre and stared at the map. The green snake was still inching across the Mediterranean.

‘I was about to add, sir,’ Swann said, ‘that General Morwood said not to panic, because his trace still shows AF One, and so does ours. He says it must be purely a localised fault.’

Philpott stared at him in amazement. ‘Two localised faults?’ he inquired acidly. ‘Naples and Athens going out at the same time is sheer coincidence? Nothing to worry about?’ His face started to go red until Sonya squeezed his arm.

‘We are not panicking, Basil,’ she said, ‘but we are concerned.’

‘Too damned right we are,’ Philpott snorted. ‘Even if Morwood can convince himself that something like a widespread electrical storm can simultaneously knock out a pair of radar dishes hundreds of miles apart, he can’t convince me.’

Swann gulped with difficulty and asked for instructions. Philpott pounded his fist with his palm, and his brow creased in concentration. ‘It’s got to be Smith,’ he muttered, ‘and even then he’d need some help.’

‘Sir?’ Swann inquired.

‘Get this, Basil,’ Philpott replied, pointing a rocksteady finger. ‘I want a squadron of fighters from Naples Command scrambled. Do it now – and I mean NOW – and tell them to stand by. I want no questions from them, no arguments, just action.’

Swann nodded. ‘And their orders, sir?’

‘No direct orders yet. Get them on stand-by; instant readiness. Use my Red Priority; that should persuade them I’m serious.’ He swore and slumped into a monitor’s chair.

Basil Swann blinked behind the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses and took small, neat steps to the console of UNACO’s master computer …

Fairman’s iron control stilled all thoughts of panic among the Air Force One flight crew. ‘If this is a joke, Colonel,’ he said slowly to Jagger, ‘I’ll have your ass for it.’

‘No joke, Colonel,’ Cody replied. ‘It’s a stickup – for real.’

Fairman looked steadily at him, but could see no humour in his eyes, no smile on his lips. Nothing but the ugly snout of the gun denting the flesh of the engineer’s shaven neck. ‘You’ve been … you have been bought?’ he asked, soft-voiced, incredulously.

‘Sort of,’ Jagger gritted, ‘but don’t let it worry you. Just bear in mind that I’m a qualified and experienced pilot; that I know every alarm system and button in the plane. Reach for one and I blow Chuck’s head off. And that’s for real, too: soft-coned bullets, low-calibre, dum-dum variants. Used like this at close range, there’s no damage to the fabric, no depressurising. No damage to anything or anyone but Chuck. And he’ll be dead. You’re next, Tom. So behave.’

The stunned crew heard another voice filtered through Latimer’s headphones. ‘Naples Control calling Air Force One! Report your position! Report your position! Do you read?’

‘No,’ Jagger ordered, reaching out and jerking off the headset, ‘you don’t copy, Pat. Everybody, unplug.’ They remained mute, not moving. Jagger pressed the muzzle of his gun more firmly still into the engineer’s flesh and said quietly, ‘Unplug, guys. Don’t play heroes – just do it.’

Tom Fairman’s unwavering stare met Jagger’s cold, flinty eyes. The Commander reached forward and ripped the plug of his headset from the control panel. Numbly, the other crew members followed suit …

Although Fairman had initially cursed his flight plan because of the need to avoid sensitive airspace, he had in fact been permitted to take the orthodox ‘Great Circle’ route from the Persian Gulf to Switzerland, overflying Saudi Arabia and Egypt to emerge from Africa over the Mediterranean, and leaving Sicily to his left and the Italian coast to starboard as he made his way up to Genoa and across the Alps. That, anyway, was the original plan. It would have covered a distance of about 2600 miles in a flying time in the order of five hours, which was less than half of the Boeing 707’s full endurance.

Air Force One had flown 1950 miles in three hours forty-five minutes when Jagger entered the flight deck just as Fairman was pointing out to Feisal the retreating blob of Crete and the still-distant coast of Greece.

Mister Smith’s ‘identikit’ Boeing freighter, now wearing the livery of the President’s plane, had taken off from its abandoned wartime airstrip on the coastal belt of Yugoslavia. Its target – the rendezvous point with the real Air Force One – lay four hundred miles to the south at latitude 37 degrees North and 19 degrees 15 minutes East, on the lower fringe of the Ionian Sea. Gradually, the two great aircraft began to converge …

The Air Force One navigator, Kowalski, studied the new course ordered by Jagger with an amused sneer on his lips. ‘I see it,’ he murmured, ‘but I don’t believe it. Where the hell are we supposed to be going? And why, for the love of God, do we have to go down from 28,000 feet to 250 feet in what I reckon to be no more than, say, ten minutes? It sure is going to stir things up behind.’

Jagger leaned forward and transferred the gun to a point somewhere between Kowalski’s eyes. ‘Then the quicker you set about it,’ he whispered, ‘the sooner their discomfort will be over.’

He straightened up. Latimer mouthed an obscenity and fiddled moodily with the controls just as the crew of the fake Boeing – a pilot and co-pilot, mercenary fliers fresh out of Mozambique – started climbing at the rate of 2900 feet a minute. …

‘Repeat your new projected course,’ Jagger ordered, and Latimer intoned, ‘We’ll be heading 350 degrees, diving to 250 feet. Bang up the middle of the Strait of Otranto, as requested, sir.’

Jagger ignored the sarcasm and turned his attention to the bank of circuit breakers controlling the wireless and navigation aids of the aeroplane. ‘Take ’em out – all of ’em,’ he rapped to the flight engineer, who glanced at Fairman for approval.

The Commander pursed his lips and sighed. ‘He’s got the gun,’ Fairman snarled, ‘so do as he says.’

Jagger congratulated him on his common sense. Fairman looked balefully at the man he supposed to be his friend Joe McCafferty. ‘I hope to Christ you know what you’re doing, Mister,’ he said, ‘because when you wipe out that lot you leave us about as well equipped as the Wright brothers were on their first flight, and they weren’t flying over water in darkness. You might as well ask me to crash this bird into the sea right now.’

Jagger switched the point of the gun to Fairman, but the Commander didn’t flinch. ‘I mean it, Mac …’ he added, ‘you know that, for God’s sake. I don’t have to tell you. You’re a pilot yourself. We have to have eyes. Don’t leave us blind, or we won’t make it.’

‘So you need … what?’ Jagger asked, unsure of himself now. The sketchy introduction to basic flying in his briefing had in no sense prepared him for this; Smith’s orders had been to take off McCafferty, not match his knowledge built from a lifetime’s career.

‘You know damned well what I need!’ Fairman exploded. ‘I want the radio altimeters, the weather radar and the flight system. That way we might just – and I mean just – get wherever you want to go, though landing will be something else – but something else, I promise you. Keep the communications locked up, OK, but give me eyes.’

Jagger’s gaze ranged from face to face as though seeking confirmation of Fairman’s words. The flight engineer – they were all now under the spell of the weaving gun – had paused within range of the circuit breakers which would cut the liner’s communications – or most of them. But now he tripped the switches, and then made the mistake of letting his eyes flicker nervously to a metal box fixed to the bulkhead.

‘What’s in there?’ Jagger rapped, following the man’s eye-line. ‘Just some more circuit breakers,’ the engineer replied in a tone which was a little too casual to be credible.

‘Open it,’ Jagger commanded, and the engineer rummaged in his bag for a screwdriver. ‘You, Colonel,’ Cody said turning to Fairman, ‘can have your eyes, but get this aircraft down to sea-level.’

Fairman ordered Latimer to illuminate the ‘fasten seat-belts’ sign, and then he set the new heading. Latimer confirmed that he had carried out the necessary checklist of procedures for the descent, and the flight system put the Boeing into a slow right-hand turn on to the course Jagger had directed.

Cody kept an eye on Latimer until his attention was distracted by a screw falling from the cover-plate of the mysterious box on the bulkhead. The engineer lifted the plate off to reveal more circuit breakers.

The hijacker gestured with his revolver. ‘Those too,’ he said, ‘trip them.’

The flight engineer looked helplessly in Fairman’s direction, but Jagger transferred the gun to within six inches of his face and said, ‘Now!’

Reaching up with a trembling hand, the engineer obeyed. The green light on Philpott’s wall display twinkled out.

Philpott rubbed his eyes. He turned to Sonya, who said, ‘My God, it’s gone.’

The green snake was still somehow imprinted on Philpott’s retina. He closed his eyes and creases gathered at the bridge of his nose. ‘It was – turning,’ he said slowly. ‘Just before the track went out, the plane was definitely turning.’ He opened his eyelids and glared at the wall map, as if willing the green trace to return. ‘It was turning maybe forty-five degrees.’

Swann’s voice, small but oddly consoling, came from the computer console. ‘I can confirm that, sir,’ he said, ‘it appeared to be changing course to take it up the Adriatic Sea instead of the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian Sea.’

‘But why?’ Philpott murmured. ‘And why have we lost the trace? Or is this just another “localised difficulty”?’

The telephone rang, and Sonya, who was nearest the receiver, snatched it from its cradle. She identified herself and listened in silence, then said to Philpott, ‘It’s General Morwood, Malcolm. They’ve lost the trace as well.’

Philpott jumped to his feet. ‘Tell him I’ll be back to him shortly,’ he said brusquely. ‘Basil – those fighters. I want them airborne like thirty seconds ago, and out on the track of Air Force One.’ Swann bent his head to the console and flexed his fingers. Then Sonya Kolchinsky shouted, ‘Wait.’

Philpott turned to see her with a hand raised, listening intently to Morwood’s operations centre. She covered the mouthpiece and said quickly, ‘Morwood says Gibraltar Radar reports that AF One is still, repeat still, on track. They’ve picked her up on the fringe of their area, and they’re certain of their identification. There’s no other comparable traffic.’

The UNACO director cursed under his breath, and snapped, ‘Basil, do as I said. Get the fighters off. I don’t care what the Pentagon says, or Gibraltar Radar. Something’s wrong out there, and it’s not happening by accident. It’s Smith. I know it’s Smith.’

Sonya waved at him and pointed to the telephone. ‘General Morwood,’ she whispered, handing him the receiver.

‘What the blue bloody blazes is happening, Philpott?’ Morwood shouted. ‘First we lose the track and then Gibraltar say they’ve got her all safe and sound. What does it mean, for God’s sake?’

‘It means that I’ve requisitioned an Eagle flight from Naples Command,’ Philpott replied tersely. ‘It means that I’m convinced something has gone wrong with the President’s plane, and I’m not taking any chances.’

‘You’ve done WHAT?’ the General roared.

‘You heard.’

Silence reigned in the Pentagon operations room. Then, from Morwood, ‘Good thinking, Malcolm. I should have done it myself. Keep me posted. I’ll ring you if anything comes up at this end.’

‘There is, of course, one thing you can do, George,’ Philpott continued airily. ‘Raise Air Force One through Andrews and get them to check that everything’s A-OK on board. Tell them to confirm without any possibility of doubt that things are absolutely normal there, and as they should be.’

Morwood grunted, and snarled an order to his aide. The false Air Force One had long since finished her steep climb and was giving a passable imitation of an on-course flight to Gibraltar Radar when Andrews AFB finally raised the flight deck. Her speed had dropped to barely 150 miles per hour, and she was stealthily losing altitude as well.

‘What’s going on there?’ Andrews demanded. ‘Naples and Athens said they lost you, and your own communications are on the blink. The inertial guidance track has gone, too. Do you read?’

‘Systems malfunctions at both ends, I suppose,’ the skipper replied in a more than adequate imitation of Latimer’s languid drawl, filtered to an indistinguishable metallic rasp by the communications equipment.

‘Is that you, Pat?’ Andrews asked.

‘Who else?’

‘Is Tom there?’ Andrews pressed.

‘Fairman here,’ the co-pilot replied. ‘What’s all this about? We are on schedule and raring to make Geneva. McCafferty sends his love. Got something special lined up for tonight, I think.’

Andrews probed gently at other openings, but eventually retired satisfied. They passed the good news to Morwood, and Morwood informed Philpott, whose Eagle flight was by now airborne and beyond recall … even if Philpott had any intention of summoning them back to base, which he hadn’t.

The skipper of the ‘identikit’ Boeing checked his precisely calculated schedule and suggested to his co-pilot that it was time they were gone. They strapped on parachutes and made for the emergency exit. The plane was on autopilot, and at their greatly reduced speed and height, the two men would easily clear the freighter’s slip-stream.

The skipper kept an ear cocked to the radio desk, waiting for a particular signal to pierce the fuzzy sound. It came, transmitted from a ship in the Mediterranean two miles below them. He turned to his colleague with a ‘thumbs up’ sign, and crossed to join him at the exit door.

Then he reached up a hand, slid off the top of a black plastic box wired to the emergency exit sign, and pressed a switch.

The aircraft was plunged into darkness, and the two men jumped out into the swirling breeze …

In the stateroom of the real Air Force One, Sabrina saw the ‘fasten seat-belts’ sign flash on, and felt the liner dip as it banked to starboard. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, and then gave an experimental cough and tried again, a little more loudly. Heads turned and inquiring eyes fastened on her.

Sabrina indicated the sign and said, ‘The Commander requests you to put on your seat-belts, please.’ Hemmingsway looked at the electric wall clock and pointed out that they were still the better part of a thousand miles short of their destination.

‘Probably a little turbulence?’ Sheikh Dorani, the Libyan, asked.

‘Something of the sort,’ Sabrina replied.

‘We appear to be going downwards,’ Sheikh Zayed Farouk Zeidan observed.

‘We are,’ his grandson Feisal confirmed, ‘at a rate of perhaps fifty feet a second, or thereabouts.’ The news, coming as it did from a boy of twelve in precise and clipped Oxford English, sounded so incongruous that Hemmingsway started giggling.

He fell silent when the Iraqi, Sheikh Arbeid, addressing the room at large for the first time, since he was not gifted with the capacity for smalltalk, said, ‘The young one is correct. We are diving.’

Eyes turned again on Sabrina, who flushed and said, ‘I’ll – uh – I’ll try to find out what’s happening. No doubt we’re just getting under some bad weather or something.’

‘No doubt,’ Sheikh Zeidan commented urbanely.

‘Unlikely, though,’ Feisal ventured.

‘Why?’ Hemmingsway asked, curious, and then cursing himself for seeking an opinion on aeronautical practice from a lad younger than his own children, whose knowledge of anything beyond sex and pop music could be safely abandoned to the back of a small postage stamp.

‘We would not need to dive as steeply,’ Feisal replied, ‘and we do not seem to be encountering turbulence or an airpocket. We are, simply, descending.’

Hemmingsway pulled himself together. ‘Now look here,’ he said, ‘I am your host aboard this aircraft in the absence of the President of the United States, and while I’m sure the opinions of our young friend are of consuming interest, I see no reason why we should not be told what is occurring, rather than having to guess. Airman,’ he said to Sabrina, ‘we will follow the Commander’s orders and keep our seat-belts fastened. You will get a member of the flight crew to come out here now, and give us an explanation.’

Sabrina started to obey when the Boeing gave a sudden, violent lurch. Sheikh Dorani clutched the arms of his seat. Doctor Ibrahim Hamady, of Saudi Arabia, leaned forward to rescue a cup that was skating off the table, and Sabrina heard a noise from the rear of the plane, which she correctly identified as kettles and pots crashing to the floor. Sheikh Zeidan’s imposing face registered startled apprehension when a gasping, retching sound came from the seat beside him. He bent over the boy, who was battling for breath, taking in huge gulps of air.

The Bahraini turned to Sabrina and snapped his fingers imperiously. ‘His medication. Quickly, young lady,’ he urged.

Fighting the angle of the aircraft to stay upright, Sabrina started for the rear galley where she had left the syringe and insulin capsules.

She encountered no one else along the route, which for some reason that she could not pinpoint worried her more than it should have done, and reached the galley. She jerked open the door, and her astonished gaze fell on the bodies of Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski and Airman Jeanie Fenstermaker …

One at each side, the two leading fighters in the Eagle flight drew abreast of the dark and sinister shape of the Boeing. The Eagle leader called the plane, but his only reply was an impenetrable buzz of static.

‘There’s not a single light showing on her,’ the pilot of the second fighter reported. ‘Anything visible your side?’

‘Nothing,’ Eagle leader replied. ‘Drop back a bit, will you? Get as close in as you can. See if you can spot anything – anything. A movement, the flicker of a match. Any Goddamned thing you can see to convince me and Naples Control and UNACO that this isn’t just a ghost, because that’s how it looks to me, and I can’t make a report like that without getting a free pass to the funny farm.’

The second plane peeled away and came up behind the Boeing again, adjusting his speed to that of the huge grey shape. The pilot, insofar as he was able, examined every inch of the liner, checking the external markings and scrutinising each window along the fuselage as the moonlight briefly caught her. He speeded up and peered into the darkened, empty flight deck.

The pilot dived and resumed a course parallel with his leader. ‘Nothing,’ he confirmed, ‘absolutely one big fat zero. Not a sign of life anywhere. Something God-awful, unimaginable, must have happened. She’s just been abandoned – crew, passengers, everybody.’

‘Zilch!’ his leader retorted, and then, more graphically, ‘Balls! that’s Air Force One there, baby, not some mystery joy-rider – and not the Marie Celeste, either. The crew of AF One don’t just chuck the passengers overboard and jump out of a ship that’s to all intents and purposes flying perfectly normally. Are you sure you didn’t spot something, overlook something? It could have seemed unimportant, but it may be the clue we’re after.’

There was silence, except for the crackle of static, and then the second pilot’s voice, hesitant and confused, came over again. ‘There was something – yeah … you know, that didn’t seem quite, sort of, right, kosher. But I thought I was just seeing things – or not seeing them, even.’

‘What was it?’ Eagle leader demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, tell me!’

‘Well, it was the—’

The sky was lit by a blinding flash and a glare of orange, then crimson, light, shading to a fierce yellow. The shock-wave reached the two fighters fractionally before the huge blast of sound boomed in their ears. The two little planes bucked and leapt through the wispy clouds and screamed away to right and left, each performing tight circles to come round again and dive towards the wreckage of the Boeing as it dropped from the night sky.

The fiery cigar shape of the Boeing’s fuselage was now starkly illuminated as the fighters chased it down to the sea. Eagle leader made his panic-stricken report to Naples base, where it was received with uncomprehending horror.

‘Shot down?’ Naples queried.

‘No!’ Eagle leader roared, ‘not shot down. It just – exploded. There was no missile. It must have been a bomb. A bomb – on an empty aircraft.’

‘Empty?’ from Naples.

‘Positive. Empty, and in total darkness.’

‘And it was Air Force One,’ Naples pressed.

‘Affirmative.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘No.’

There was silence from Naples, then the robot voice said, ‘Who was that?’

‘Eagle Two,’ the pilot of the second fighter confirmed.

‘And you’re saying—’ the Controller left the question hanging in the air.

‘I’m saying I don’t think it was Air Force One,’ the airman rejoined.

This time Naples refused to break the silence, and the USAF pilot said, ‘First, some information. What kind of main hatch, you know, the actual door, did Air Force One have?’

‘What kind of door?’ Naples echoed in bafflement. ‘An ordinary one, as far as we know.’

‘Dimension, say, four feet?’

A busy, almost frenetic, silence occupied Naples now. Then the Controller came back. ‘We have the specification of the Boeing in front of us. It had a normal-sized hatch, built for average height and weight passengers. Why do you ask, Eagle Two?’

‘Because this bird didn’t,’ the fighter pilot crowed triumphantly. ‘I checked it in the air on the level, and again on the way down. This Air Force One’s door measured all of seven feet wide.’

‘Then it was—’ began Eagle leader.

‘Then it couldn’t have—’ put in Naples Control.

‘No,’ replied Eagle Two, ‘it wasn’t a VC-137C stratoliner nor any other kind of Boeing 707-320B airliner. My guess is that it was some old freighter tarted up to look like Air Force One …’

‘… My guess, too,’ murmured Malcolm Philpott, who had been patched through to the three-way conversation. ‘And what’s more, I know who did it.’

Sonya Kolchinsky burst into his office, her face alive with strain and concern. ‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘General Morwood says Air Force One has been shot down or bombed. Is it true?’

Philpott turned in his chair and chuckled up at her. ‘Oh yes, it’s true, my pet. But tell General Morwood not to worry: we’ve got another one.’

NINE

A crumbling outcrop of wartime ruins framed against the night sky above the remains of a concrete bunker lay just to the right of the runway where it ended in a sudden crevasse. Dirt ramps had been banked up to mark the very limit of usable track, but they would be frighteningly ineffective against the weight of a plunging jet.

Paraffin lamps, spluttering noisily, their flames dancing and weaving, paralleled each other down the entire length of the runway, with a battery of them at the end, but there was no disguising the fact that Mister Smith’s Kosgo airstrip had not been designed to take a Boeing 707.

Smith lounged against a low concrete wall, directing the placement of the forty-strong reception committee – all in rough battle fatigues, all heavily armed.

‘Why are we here?’ the girl asked. Her elfin face peeped out from the hood of a sable fur coat;

her hands were encased in a matching muff, and her feet in sable-lined grey leather boots.

‘We wait,’ Smith replied in Serbo-Croat.

‘For what?’

Smith raised a finger to her lips and said, ‘Hush, little one.’ She followed his gaze as he peered into the sky.

Barely audible on the breeze, the throaty growl of a jet engine cut like an idling bandsaw through the thick, low cloud. Smith ran his fingers over the girl’s lips and she licked the tip of each one …

‘How long?’ Fairman rasped.

‘Most of five thousand feet,’ Jagger confirmed.

‘Most?’

‘Uh-huh. The strip was built for jets, but not very big ones.’

‘It’s impossible,’ Fairman protested.

Jagger shook his head. ‘Good, old-fashioned airmanship, Tom. But mind the gully at the far end.’

‘Gully!’

‘Yeah. The runway sort of – well, peters out. It’s quite a deep drop.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

Jagger smiled and said, ‘Maybe a prayer would help.’

Kowalski remarked that there was an island coming up to port.

‘Well don’t tell us,’ Latimer remarked peevishly, ‘you’re the navigator. What is it?’

If they were on course, Kowalski explained, it would be the island of Vis. ‘See any others?’ he asked.

‘To where?’

‘Starboard.’

Latimer probed the blackness, and identified two shapes looming on the right. He passed the news to the navigator. ‘Spot on,’ Kowalski said, ‘the first one’s Hvar and the second Brac. It’s dead straight now until landfall.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ Fairman said.

The Commander requested further details from Jagger of the landing strip. The runway itself, the ringer told him, would be marked by paraffin flares. Fairman’s jaw dropped. ‘You did say paraffin flares?’

‘Sure. They’re very effective in fog.’

‘It isn’t foggy,’ Latimer pointed out.

‘Don’t bet on it,’ Jagger replied, ‘they get funny weather around here.’

Fairman sighed and said, ‘Go on.’

Jagger grinned and assured the Commander that the worst of the bad news was over. ‘That was the primitive aspect,’ he added. ‘Beyond that they’re quite well equipped. They have a transponder there which operates on your radar frequency, so you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact position.

‘They’ve also got VHF radio – battery-powered, naturally – and they’ll use that to keep you abreast of conditions on the ground.’

‘They speak English, then,’ Fairman inquired acidly, ‘not ancient Sumerian or Stone Age grunt language?’

‘One of them almost certainly speaks all three.’

Latimer asked if, assuming they were almost there, the plane could have back its VHF radio for tuning to the correct frequency. ‘Sure, Pat,’ Jagger replied, ‘you can have the radio, but I’ll do the tuning. The less you know the better.’

Holding a headset to his ear with his free hand, Jagger adjusted the frequency to 118.1 and made contact with the Kosgo base. He handed the communicator to Fairman. The Commander heard a precise and cultured English voice recite all the details he needed to know: the runway-heading, atmospheric pressure reading at aerodrome level, and the wind speed and direction.

‘Do call again,’ Smith added, ‘when the transponder blip indicating the exact position of the airfield appears on your screen.’ Fairman grunted and surrendered the headphones to Jagger, who signed off.

‘Happier?’ the ringer said.

Fairman ignored him and told Latimer, ‘We’ll drag her in low and slow. When the blip comes on I’ll take the controls and try it at about 110 knots. Then we’ll coast in and snatch it back to manual if – or, I hope, when – we spot the lights.’

The Boeing ran for a further twenty miles at 250 feet, straight as a die to Kowalski’s immense satisfaction, when the green spot started glowing on the weather radar screen.

‘Tell your friends we have them on visual,’ Fairman instructed Jagger, unconsciously treating him as part of the normal complement of Air Force One – which indeed, as far as Fairman was concerned, he was, although not on the flight deck. When Jagger had passed on the intelligence, Fairman added, without turning to look at the ringer, ‘If you know what you’re doing, you’ll keep out of the way for the next ten, fifteen minutes.’

Jagger held on to the back of Fairman’s seat as the plane bucked, and moved the point of his gun until the short hairs on the back of the Commander’s neck erected of their own volition, though the metal had not touched him. ‘Listen, Tom,’ Jagger purred, ‘if you don’t land this aircraft, I will.’

‘That,’ said Latimer, ‘I should like to see.’

‘But you wouldn’t see it, Pat, that’s the point,’ Jagger replied smoothly. ‘You’d all be dead.’

Silence fell on the crew and they concentrated perhaps too minutely on the task in hand. Jagger had rammed the message home, and not one among them doubted that he meant what he said …

Sabrina closed the door of the galley after slipping the catch of the lock. At least Wynanski and Jeanie were still alive, though she calculated they would not regain consciousness for some time. But who had done it? And why? And what could she do about it?

Clutching every support – walls, furniture – that came to hand, she struggled back to the stateroom with the tooled leather first-aid kit in her hand. Dr Hamady, who had unbuckled his seat-belt and was crouching solicitously over the crippled Zeidan and his grandson, leapt to help her as she lost her balance and crashed against a table. They remained precariously rooted to the floor, until Hamady realised that they were no longer bending over to compensate for the steeply-inclined angle of the plane.

Sabrina straightened and gasped with relief. ‘So,’ said Dorani from his seat, ‘we have ceased to dive.’

Sheikh Arbeid, the taciturn Iraqi, placed a cup on the polished surface of the table before him. It rattled slightly, but stayed in position. He grunted confirmation.

Sabrina hurried to Sheikh Zeidan and gently released his hold on the boy, who was now almost unconscious. She loosened his seat-belt, then unzipped the trousers of Feisal’s immaculate grey suit. Zeidan gripped the arm of his wheelchair with his left hand, and with the other took the boy’s legs on his lap until he was fully stretched. Sabrina pulled down his trousers and underpants, pinched and swabbed a patch of flesh on the boy’s small, taut buttock, and injected a dose of insulin.

Almost immediately, Feisal’s feverish mutterings ceased and his breathing became calmer. Zeidan carefully patted the beads of perspiration from his grandson’s face, and whispered in Arabic, ‘Sleep, my jewel, my prince.’

All the OPEC ministers and their aides had now resumed their seats, and Hamady, who had courteously waited for the medication to be finished, fixed Hawley Hemmingsway with an angry glare.

‘You mentioned some time ago, Minister,’ he said, ‘that you would endeavour to discover why we have been put to this considerable danger, let alone discomfort. If you do not accept that we have been placed in peril, I would urge you to consider that His Excellency Sheikh Zeidan’s grandson could still become gravely ill. I think you owe us an apology and a full explanation.

‘I can speak only for the Monarch and Government of Saudi Arabia, but for my part I assure you that we shall feel inclined to accept neither the apology nor the explanation unless they are completely satisfactory, and the situation is restored immediately to normality. As for the oil accord, in the service of which we have undergone this humiliating experience … well, I leave that to your imagination, Mr Hemmingsway.’

The American Energy Secretary sat stunned and silent. Then he breathed a sigh and nodded his head slowly. ‘Clearly, Dr Hamady, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have no more idea than you do what is going on. I now propose to find out.’

He rose from the seat, and his eyes met Sabrina Carver’s. He read in them the clear message of warning and danger, reserved at the moment for him alone, though Zeidan, watchful as ever, had caught the interchange. ‘Come with me, young lady,’ Hemmingsway growled, and led the way towards the flight deck …

‘Lights up ahead, I think,’ Latimer exclaimed.

‘Coastal lights,’ Kowalski cautioned. ‘We’re approaching land now. Could be anything.’

The Commander called for flaps, and Latimer reached out his left hand to operate the lever mounted in the centre console. Position indicators on the right of the instrument panel registered his actions, which were monitored by Fairman and Kowalski – and, above all, by Jagger.

The aircraft’s speed died rapidly and Fairman demanded more. Then he ordered the landing gear to be lowered. Latimer obeyed like an automaton, the tension and strain mirrored on his handsome face. A distant rumbling beneath the aircraft signalled the dropping of the landing gear. With the mild thump that always accompanies the final locking of the undercarriage, the jarring motion communicating itself through the floor to the soles of Jagger’s feet, three green lights flashed on above the operating lever on Latimer’s side of the flight deck.

The flight system was still controlling the aircraft, but the Boeing showed a tendency now to pitch and wallow, as all airliners do when they are operating close to their stalling speed. The eddies and currents and warm air thermals coming from the sea and the liberal scattering of tiny islands did nothing to help steady her progress …

With the stateroom door firmly closed behind them, Hemmingsway grabbed Sabrina’s arm and whispered hoarsely, ‘What the hell’s going on here, Airman? You know something, don’t you? Well, tell me!’

Sabrina wrenched her arm away and said, ‘You’re hurting me, sir. You have no need to. I’ll tell you what I know – and I’d better warn you, it’s all bad.’

The colour left Hemmingsway’s big, florid face as Sabrina filled him in on the scene in the rear galley. He wanted to speak, but the words refused to come.

‘If you’re trying to ask me if we’ve been hijacked, sir,’ Sabrina said, ‘the answer is: yes, I believe we have. Whatever’s happening to us is being master-minded from the flight deck, which I’m sure will be locked against us. But I think there’s a way to get more evidence that should convince everyone back there.’

She led the way to the rest room cabin, and pushed at the door. It met an immediate obstacle, giving them no more than a two-inch-wide aperture into the room. Hemmingsway lent his weight to hers, and the body of the fallen engineer rolled across the carpeted floor and folded itself around a leg of the card-table.

Sabrina’s mouth set into a grim line. ‘I was afraid of this most of all,’ she said, indicating one of the three men.

‘Who’s that?’ Hemmingsway asked.

‘The Secret Service agent, Bert Cooligan. And his gun’s been taken,’ she replied.

‘And that means what?’

‘It means,’ Sabrina said, ‘that the security chief, Colonel McCafferty, must be up there –’ jerking her head towards the nose of the plane ‘– under arrest like the flight deck crew. We don’t have anybody else who can help.’

Hemmingsway looked shrewdly into her eyes. ‘Not even you, I suspect, young lady, because you’re no ordinary stewardess, are you?’

Sabrina smiled and said, ‘No, I’m not, but I’m on your side, like Joe McCafferty. But the point is – I’m not armed, so we’re still back where we were.’

Hemmingsway’s tall frame had slumped as he realised the gravity of their position, then he pulled himself up with a visible effort. ‘I’m not taking this lying down, Airman,’ he snapped. ‘I’m going up front now. I’m going to find out who’s kidnapped us, why, and where they’re taking us.’

‘I wouldn’t advise that, sir,’ Sabrina returned anxiously. Hemmingsway fixed her with a fierce, but controlled stare. ‘In a real sense, Airman,’ he continued, ‘it’s my plane, my responsibility, my job to do something about it. And I don’t shirk my responsibilities. Ever.’

He led the way from the rest room cabin and halted before the flight deck, Sabrina at his elbow. Hemmingsway raised his hand to rap on the locked door, but a voice, sharp and incisive, came behind them.

‘Freeze,’ said Achmed Fayeed. They turned and saw the gun, pointing at the left lapel of Sabrina’s blazer. Achmed stepped backwards and motioned them to follow. Hemmingsway opened the door and let Sabrina precede him into the stateroom, then stumbled through himself as the Arab brutally shoulder-charged him. Hemmingsway lurched into a table and fell to the floor, his head resting against the base of Zeidan’s wheelchair.

Zeidan’s piercing eyes fixed on the face of his aide, and he said, ‘What is the meaning of this outrage, Achmed?’

Fayeed straightened up and sneered, ‘Surely, you can see for yourself, cousin. This aircraft has been commandeered under my orders, and is now being flown to a place designated by myself and my friends.’

‘And what happens next?’ Dorani inquired, completely unruffled, like the other Arabs.

‘You will be told that at the right time,’ Achmed returned. ‘For the moment, you are my prisoners. Remain in your seats, and fasten the belts.’

Hemmingsway climbed to his feet, breathing almost as heavily as Feisal had been a few moments before. ‘You won’t get away with it, damn you,’ he hissed, ‘this plane belongs to the Presid—’

‘I am aware,’ Achmed cut in, ‘who the aircraft belongs to. That is why we have stolen it. And you are wrong, Mr Hemmingsway, in any case. We have already got away with it. You are powerless to prevent us from accomplishing our purpose, and your people back in Washington, and yours, and yours –’ ranging around the room ‘– do not, in fact, know what is happening, and would not believe it if they did.’

‘Why not?’ Zeidan asked curiously.

‘Because they think you are dead,’ Achmed replied.

Sabrina paled and clutched at the head of Arbeid’s seat. Achmed said to her, ‘Your assistance as a stewardess is no longer needed, and your function as a secret agent has been nullified. Sit down with the rest, and fasten your seat-belt.’

Dumbly, Sabrina complied. Philpott’s worst fears had been realised: a strike in the air had been launched at the President’s Boeing.

And his words came back to her: ‘If that happens, nobody can help you. You’re on your own … ’

Fairman was sweating, and he knew Latimer had spotted it. The Commander was finding it difficult to do no more than rest his hands and feet lightly on the controls, following the effect of the pulses sent out from the computer brain that was really flying the machine. His eyes kept flickering to the airspeed indicator, resolutely steady at 110 knots.

‘Three miles or so, I reckon,’ Latimer said. ‘See anything?’

‘Not a thing,’ Fairman replied. His next words were cut short by Jagger.

‘There!’ Cody yelled, pointing ahead. They strained their eyes through the clouded night and saw, dimly, a signalling light a short distance away.

‘Altimeter setting,’ Fairman snapped.

‘One-zero-zero-nine,’ Jagger answered. ‘Wind, three-seven-oh degrees at one-six.’

‘Right on the nose, baby,’ Fairman continued. ‘OK, I have control.’ As he spoke, he flicked the switch on the left of his control column to cancel the automatic system, and settled down to pilot the Boeing manually.

The aircraft juddered as they hit a patch of turbulence, and the starboard wing dropped sharply. Fairman righted it again in what was really a reflex action. The runway, picked out by the flickering dots of the paraffin lamps, was in sight. Fairman eased his hands forward to start the landing.

He muttered to himself, not caring whether anyone else heard, that it was like being back at flying school. When the end of the runway slid down the windshield, you were too high. When it slid up, too damned low. So far it remained dead centre, and Fairman hoped, prayed, that it would stay there.

It was a long, dangerously slow, descent. Air Force One shot out the searching beams of its own landing lights, and a hundred tons of aeroplane followed the twin rays as they raked the pitted track between the smoking paraffin lamps.

Fairman completed the run in, and the great silver airliner burst on to the runway in a squeal of tyres. Fairman’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the steering column and fought to keep it under control.

‘Reverse thrust!’ he yelled. Latimer obeyed. The noise of the jets rose in an ear-splitting boom to a crescendo as all seventy-six thousand pounds of thrust were diverted to slow the liner’s progress along the absurdly short landing strip.

Air Force One rattled and shook, and the plane’s speed fell dramatically, throwing the stateroom passengers violently against their restraining belts. Crockery, personal articles, document cases, all flew off the tables and smashed against the bulkhead.

Outside, the girl’s hand flew to her mouth and cut off a shriek of terror as the huge shape bore down on them. She pulled at Smith’s arm, and he allowed himself to be dragged back behind the low wall, as if that afforded any ultimate protection from the racing jetliner.

Fairman watched the faint, flickering bank of lights at the end of the strip draw closer and closer. Then, suddenly, there was nothing in the windscreen but blackness.

Latimer, Kowalski and Jagger held on to anything that wouldn’t move, and the Boeing slewed into a hard right turn, its tyres smoking. It came to rest nearly at a right angle to the gully, its port wing hanging out over the deep gash of the crevasse. Latimer licked his dry lips and said, ‘Hairy.’ ‘Cut engines,’ Fairman breathed. The pilot chopped the switches and the whining jets died to a whimper.

‘Excellent,’ Smith purred. ‘You see, my lovely Branka,’ he said to the girl, ‘you can always rely on the United States Air Force in an emergency.’

Two Air Force Ones? Morwood queried. Definitely, Philpott explained: one hijacked and diverted, the other taking its place until the radar picked up the scent again. Then it would be seen cruising along the correct course at the correct altitude, and its crew would bail out at the appropriate time, probably when a ship was waiting at a prearranged signal to pick them up. The bomb on board the plane would throw the Pentagon and UNACO into total confusion while the real AF One was spirited away.

‘Like where?’ Morwood demanded.

The angle of turn before the liner disappeared from the inertial guidance system trace would indicate Greece or Yugoslavia, Philpott surmised.

‘No closer than that?’ Morwood persisted.

‘If you want me to guess,’ Philpott replied, ‘I’d say Yugoslavia. If it’s Smith and he has help, which I believe he may, then it’ll be Yugoslavia, because he could not operate with complete freedom in Greece, and neither could the sort of assistance I think he’s getting.’

‘Which is?’

‘The KGB.’

Morwood digested this information, and was tempted metaphorically to spit it out as inedible. Philpott broke the ensuing silence to round out the picture of Smith which was already forming in the General’s shrewd mind. In the end, the catalogue of Smith’s known previous crimes against humanity, against social systems and conventions, against established order and security, convinced the Pentagon that Smith must indeed be the man behind the hijack of the President’s plane. And if Philpott said the criminal must have Soviet help, then Morwood accepted that as a running hypothesis.

‘Makes it difficult for us, though, Malcolm,’ he added.

‘I get the point,’ Philpott conceded. ‘It’s impossible for the USA to act in any role on Yugoslav soil. You might have got away with a presence in Greece, but not in Yugoslavia. I accept that. I also accept the unstated corollary to your premise: it’s UNACO’s baby. It can’t be anyone else’s.’

Morwood chuckled drily. So America was, for once, on the sidelines – and the opposition already had a head start on UNACO.

‘How so?’ Philpott asked.

Morwood’s chuckle deepened to a belly laugh.

‘Haven’t you seen the latest tape from the United Nations? There’s a special emergency debate on the assumed hijack, and the Russians are already stirring it for you to the limit of their capacity for troublemaking; which I assure you is considerable. You’re practically on a no-win streak even before you get your first shots off, old boy. Let’s see you wriggle out of this one.’

Philpott cursed his own forgetfulness in failing to keep a weather eye on his employers, and ordered Swann to cue in the General Assembly on the video. It became speedily apparent that, if anything, Morwood had understated the seriousness of UNACO’s position.

Saudi Arabia had followed Iraq, Bahrain, Iran and every other combination of outraged OPEC dignity in attacking first the Americans, and then UNACO, for allowing terrorism to erupt under their very noses in the US President’s personal and supposedly ultra-secure aeroplane.

‘Are the lives of our leading citizens of so little consequence to our supposed allies that they are unable to ensure their safety on a five-hour plane trip?’ thundered Libya.

‘Never before have even the imperialist bandits of the Western world manifested so patent and brutal a contempt for the servants of Islam,’ Iran echoed. ‘Are we such dirt beneath their feet that we are to be trussed up and handed to the first criminal dog that comes along, yapping to do his masters’ bidding and lining his pockets with a ransom which the Americans are clearly confident they will not have to furnish?’

Philpott winced before the TV monitors, knowing that worse was to come.

‘And this pallid lackey of the United States, this “UNACO” –’ (the Bahraini ambassador invested the acronym with such withering scorn that Philpott feared the characters would melt on his office door) ‘– this crypto-capitalist sore in the UN body politic, whose salaries we pay, whose staff we keep in sybaritic idleness, who actually made the security of this flight their particular responsibility … is it too invidious to suggest that doors may have been left open for this aerial highwayman, that palms were greased, souls corrupted – that Malcolm Gregory Philpott, defender of our freedoms, pillar of international rectitude, doughty champion of the oppressed and opponent of the malefactor … is it so unimaginable that Philpott himself might have a share in the complicity of this foul and dastardly act?’

Philpott reached for the switch, and before the monitor pictures faded he saw the Russian delegation unravel their folded arms and bang the table in cynical approbation …

Smith’s guerillas coupled a tractor to Air Force One and towed her to the shelter of a dilapidated but roomy hangar. There, a busy little crane covered every visible inch of the Boeing in tarpaulin sheets, leaving only the main hatch uncovered. A flight of steps was wheeled up and Achmed Fayeed opened the door. Smith stalked into the building and stood at the foot of the stairway tapping a gloved hand with a silver-topped ebony stick. He was ringed by swarthy lieutenants, sub machine-guns at the port.

Achmed led the way, and stood before Smith, grinning widely, twirling the pistol on his finger, cowboy-style. Smith said nothing, but reached out his hand and placed it on the young Arab’s left shoulder in an unmistakable gesture of approval and comradeship.

The hostages and crew members filed or were carried down the steps, Hemmingsway following the OPEC ministers, with Sabrina Carver behind him. To Sabrina’s bewilderment, there was no sign of McCafferty, and hope sprang in her breast that even now he might still be at liberty, waiting for the right moment to gain the upper hand and free the prisoners. She also calculated that her Air Force One uniform and obvious anonymity would conceal her own identity, but she was wrong.

Smith’s face now wore a smile of clear amusement as she tried to use Hemmingsway as a shield. ‘I must admit,’ he said slowly, ‘that I did not expect to find you on board this aircraft. But why play the shrinking violet, my dear Sabrina? Modesty never suited you, as I recall from our brief sojourn at my château before the ill-fated venture on the Eiffel Tower.

‘Can you conceivably, I wonder, have changed your vocation after – what is it – three and a half years? No longer the international jewel thief extraordinary, but abandoned to the monastic womb of Service life? It seems unlikely. Perhaps you would care to offer an explanation of your presence here.’

Achmed cut in, ‘No need, Mister Smith. I can tell you about her. She’s with UNACO.’

‘Aaah,’ Smith drawled, ‘so … one of Mr Philpott’s eager little beaveresses. Doubtless you were prostituting yourself for him on our previous encounter, too? Yes, your silence and evident shame indicate that to be the case. Well, now, Miss Sabrina Carver, clearly I underestimated you then. Be assured that I shall not make the same mistake again. Achmed, I give her into your personal and special care. Do what you will with her – only make sure that she suffers … Make very sure of that, Achmed.’

Fayeed caught her wrist and pulled her to him, and Sabrina had to restrain herself from retaliation, but now was not the time, she told herself; she had to learn their location and get word to Philpott. And look after the boy, Feisal. Achmed could wait.

Smith continued, ‘And one still not with us? Could he also be suffering from unaccustomed shyness?’

‘No chance, Mister Smith,’ Jagger called from the doorway of the plane.

‘My dear Colonel,’ Smith crowed, ‘join us, please, and complete our pleasure.’

All eyes were on him as he descended the steps – on him, and on the gun which he still carried in his hand.

‘Oh, my God, no,’ Sabrina breathed, ‘not you, Mac. Not you.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Mister Smith sneered. ‘Indeed, I don’t know how we should have managed without Colonel McCafferty’s all-too-willing assistance.’

TEN

The US consul in Bahrain was neat, pedantic and obstinate, and called Mackie-Belton. He had been immediately prejudiced against the grimy, blood-streaked figure who had forcibly invaded his privacy and interrupted his dinner with an Arabian lady of enormous discretion but small reserves of patience. Now Mackie-Belton’s own tolerance was approaching the end of its tether.

‘Put yourself in my position,’ he insisted, not for the first time, ‘and give me one reason – not half a dozen or twenty – just one reason why I should believe you. You come bursting in here uninvited, wearing filthy Arab clothing and a USAF shirt, underwear and socks, obviously having fought your way out of some seedy drinking party, and without a shred of either evidence or identification to back you up, you insist you’re someone whom I know from my own experience you cannot possibly be.

‘When I clearly do not accept your story, you insult me, threaten me, bully me, try to cajole me into telephoning the Director of UNACO and the operations room at the Pentagon – and then you are outraged when I propose calling the police. Let me tell you – and do not come any closer, please – let me tell you that the only reason you are still here and the police are not, is that your story is so incredible, so fantastic, that it just might have a grain of truth in it.’

Mac sighed and slumped into a lumpy armchair, his legs outstretched, his fingers plucking disconsolately at the beading on the upholstery. He lifted his eyes wearily to Mackie-Belton, and saw scarcely a chink in the implacable hostility of the plump little man in the white tuxedo, thinning brown hair plastered down to cover his scalp, buck teeth gleaming in the tight mouth. The consul’s bi-focals were suspended by the ear-pieces from a thin gold chain looped around the back of his neck, and falling to rest on his pleated white dinner-shirt like some extravagant Order from a Middle Eastern potentate.

‘So what will you do, Mr Belton?’ he muttered.

‘Mackie-Belton, if you don’t mind. Well, for a start, I will not contact either the Pentagon or UNACO, but I will endeavour to find someone on this island who might know you and could confirm that you bear at least a passing resemblance to Colonel Joseph McCafferty whom we know to be aboard Air Force One – which, by the way, in my opinion, you do not, although I have met the gentleman only once.’

Mac groaned and passed his hand over his face – then snatched it away and sat bolt upright in the chair, his blazing eyes and harsh breathing unsettling Mackie-Belton even more.

‘Of course!’ he hooted triumphantly, and Mackie-Belton winced anew, ‘you’re right, of course! Now shut up and listen, because I’m going to tell you something which you will believe!

‘Ankara, wasn’t it? Don’t interrupt, don’t move, don’t even breathe … Ankara, yeah, three – no, four – years ago. I’d had my wallet stolen and I was strapped for money. I came to you –’ his brow furrowed with the effort of remembrance ‘– I came to you in a little green office …’ (he shut his eyes and clenched his fists) ‘… with a damned great palm tree in the corner. The door was marked “Consulate: Documentation and Credit”, or something like that.

‘You let me have five hundred dollars, didn’t you? Reluctantly, as I recall, but you were able to check my papers and everything figured. I sent it back by money order as soon as I got to London. For Christ’s sake, there were only two of us in the room, Mr Mackie-Belton. No secretary, no aide. I couldn’t possibly know this unless I’d been there. I even remember your last words: you said “Give my respects to Fortnum and Mason,” and I replied that Selfridge’s Food Hall was nearer my mark, which didn’t seem to please you at all.

‘Now then. God damn it – am I right? And if so, who am I?’

Mackie-Belton frowned, lifted the gold-rimmed bi-focals on their slim chain, breathed first on one lens, then the other, extracted a crisply folded white handkerchief from his top pocket and polished the glass with fastidious deliberation, then replied slowly, ‘You are Colonel Joseph McCafferty.’

Mac leaned back in the chair, crossed his legs, grinned and said, ‘Olé and yippee. So – can we go to work? Because time, Mr Mackie-Belton, is of the essence. It’s Air Force One I’m talking about – a hijack plot, OK? It’s happening, Consul.’ He rose to his feet, towering over his unwilling but benign host. ‘Even now, it could be happening.’

For the next half-hour, McCafferty fretted, fumed and boiled while Mackie-Belton contacted the American embassies in Ankara and London, then Andrews Air Force Base, then his brother at Princeton University and finally, when he was convinced that he had enough personal cover to preserve his own career if Mac turned out to be an extremely gifted lunatic, slotted through a call to Basil Swann – who didn’t believe him.

Mackie-Belton chewed his lip, hummed off-key and raised his plucked eyebrows as he handed the receiver to McCafferty, making a careful note of the duration of each call for the telephone bill which he would inevitably pass to UNACO. But if Mac had found the consul stubborn, the diplomat wasn’t even in the same league as Basil Swann. He struggled in vain against Basil’s adamantine logic, then changed his tack and switched to the form of personal recollection which had eventually persuaded Mackie-Belton.

Gradually, the doubt crept into Swann’s voice, and Mac seized the opportunity to demand – in tones which Basil (who had had brushes with McCafferty before) could not fail to recognise – that he should be connected to Philpott.

An hour and fifty minutes after barging into the consul’s thankfully secluded villa, where the Arabian lady’s unstoical forbearance had passed breaking point, Mac talked at last to his chief. They pieced the story together from fragments of each other’s intelligence or inspired guesswork: Mac had no direct knowledge of Smith’s involvement, but was able to supply Dunkels, Achmed and the Yugoslav connection; Philpott knew nothing of the Bahrainian assault, but papered over the cracks with the radar incidents and the elimination of AF One’s inertial guidance track, together with the explosion of the fake Boeing.

Philpott, at least, made his decision swiftly. While acknowledging that McCafferty’s tale verged on the unbelievable, the two men were agreed that (a) the President’s plane had been hijacked with the real or false McCafferty on board; and (b) that Smith was behind it, luring the aircraft by some means and for some as yet undisclosed purpose to Yugoslavia, where a Russian (almost certainly KGB) nexus had been established.

‘Right,’ Philpott said, ‘we move – though not, I fear, to Yugoslavia. We have to play our cards very cleverly, Mac. Anything to do with that place, or any other member or of the Red camp, is such sensitive territory it’s just not true. UNACO members they may be, but they spit like tigers if I suggest one of them may be directly implicated in something, even if it’s unintentional.’

‘So where do we go, and what do we do?’ McCafferty asked.

‘We go to Rome,’ Philpott replied, ‘and start from there. It’s the best staging post in Europe, as you know. They’re a joy to work with, the Italians; they’re so used to duplicity they regularly double-cross themselves.’

‘And what shall we do when we get there?’

‘With any luck, we’ll pick up this guy Dunkels and hope he’ll lead us to Air Force One.’

‘Which is in Yugoslavia,’ Mac pointed out reasonably.

‘By then,’ Philpott said warily, ‘I’ll have persuaded the Yugoslav Government to offer strictly limited co-operation to a strictly limited UNACO force.’

‘You and me?’

‘Right. Oh, eh, plus Sabrina Carver, who’s on the plane.’

There was a pregnant silence from McCafferty’s end. Then, with suspicion and something like anger slowly rising in him, he said, ‘I didn’t know Sabrina Carver was one of us, sir.’

‘No,’ Philpott agreed, ‘you didn’t, did you?’

To the right of the stone door-frame a tapestry dropped fully six feet to the floor. Like the dark, richly-coloured oil painting next to it, starting level with its top and running for about the same distance along the wall, the tapestry portrayed a hunting scene. Its frayed canvas showed, in dull browns, greens and blues, the sticking of a wild boar by a small army of hunters; it was an unequal battle, though the boar had matched tusk for spear to some effect. The oil painting was of a more usual scenario, a stag at bay in a glen, standing off the snarling dogs who were being encouraged by mounted huntsmen, bloodlust contorting their features. Only the stag retained a shred of dignity, its great brown eyes registering bewilderment rather than fear.

From the picture, the eye travelled almost by compulsion to the set piece which dominated the long, white-walled room: the head of a ‘royal’ or ‘imperial’ stag, mirror-image of the doomed giant in the oil painting, its twelve-point antlers casting shifting, spiky shadows on the wall in the lamplight. Below the deer king, but still above the door, processing around the room in a mournful frieze of sudden death, were smaller stags, an eagle or two, a peregrine falcon, a grimacing boar, some barn owls, a brace of obligatory foxes and a few pet hounds, interspersed with the brass funnels of hunting horns and non-functional guns by the rackful.

The furniture was of heavy, pitted wood, and the windows were cross-hatched with ironwork. The light, from two oil lanterns, was feeble, creating pools of shade, recesses, and places of uncertain passage. Sabrina thought it fitting that Mister Smith should immure his hostages in his trophy room. So, too, as it happened, did Smith.

The terror and desperation reflected by the mounted heads and corpses communicated themselves to Smith’s captives. The crew members talked, aimlessly for the most part, in whispers, Jeanie Fenstermaker holding a handkerchief to her eyes and being comforted by the diminutive Wynanski; Cooligan lolling against a table apart from the engineers, tight-lipped and coldly enraged by McCafferty’s treachery; Fairman, Kowalski and Latimer conversed in low tones about likely locations, for although they knew roughly whereabouts in Yugoslavia the airstrip lay, they had been blindfolded for the trip to the castle. Of the oil titans, Dorani endlessly smoked cheroots, to the disapproval of Hamady, who was discussing ransoms with him; and Hemmingsway poured words into the uncaring ear of Sheikh Arbeid. Only Zeidan, like the mighty stag, was impassive and alert, his smouldering eyes probing the furthest reaches of the room, seeking weaknesses, disadvantages …

The minibus, its windows darkened, had driven to a halt outside the hangar at Kosgo where Sheikh Zeidan asked the one question which Smith had permitted the hostages.

‘Who are you, dog?’ said the old Arab. Smith’s fingers caressed the silver point of his cane, and he took three steps to stand over the crippled sheikh, his eyes narrowed, his mouth like a closed man-trap. Zeidan had not troubled even to meet his gaze.

‘You may call me Mister Smith.’

‘May I – Smith?’

Achmed bounded to the wheelchair and turned it roughly so that Zeidan faced him. ‘Mister Smith, cousin,’ he grated, ‘do not forget that.’

Zeidan regarded him with intense distaste. ‘I speak with the master, scum,’ he replied contemptuously, ‘not to his lick-spittle hyena.’

Achmed wrenched the chair round again, and Feisal leaped in to catch it. The boy steadied the chair, and said, low-voiced so that no one but Achmed and Zeidan could hear, ‘You serpent. All of these curs will die, but for you I will reserve a death so terrible that the maggot you call your brain will be unable to encompass it.’

Achmed started to laugh, but then his lips stretched into a snarl and he back-handed Feisal across the face into Sabrina’s waiting arms. ‘What have I to fear from a senile cripple and a diabetic brat?’ he yelled. ‘It is you who will—’

‘Shut your mouth!’ Smith commanded, his voice ripping through the young Arab’s bravado like a chain-saw. ‘All of you – keep silent! I will tell you when you can speak, and it is not now! You –’ he gestured to the man in battle fatigues who had descended from the minibus ‘– get them under way. No more delays!’

Smith grasped Branka’s arm and yanked her off towards his car. Fayeed, still furious, mimed to the guerillas to bind and blindfold the captives, and the hostages were pushed, reeling and helpless, to their transport.

The bus cut inland on the main road from Zadar on the coast as far as Masienica, then turned off on a minor route for Knin, and started the steep climb into the Dinaric Alps. The captives, frustrated in their blindness, could not see the countryside getting wilder and more rugged in the bright moonlight. The road wound up into the mountains, then gave way to a rougher track until they reached a stretch of level ground where the surface improved.

Flanked by a low, thick stone wall, the route hugged the side of a hill, which gradually fell away and flattened into a crater, a sculpted bowl in the ribs of the mountain. And in that hollow lay the castle of Windischgraetz.

It was an extraordinary sight by day, the road twisting and turning until the final lap, and suddenly the castle was there, grafted on to the mountainside like a lump of coal in a snowman’s face. The narrow track widened to form a quadrangle and car-park, and facing Smith’s visitors was a drawbridge over a leafy chasm. This led to a corridor and entrance hall, shut off from the world outside by a huge, arched doorway and carved double doors. The drawbridge and entrance portal occupied much of the width of that end-facing wall, for Castle Windischgraetz was long but slim of girth, bent round to fit the contours of the cliff.

The lofty walls supported peaked slate roofs, also built on to the rock face. The wooded cliff towered above the castle and, most impressive of all, outlined it against the gaping maw of a cave reaching into the heart of the mountain, its mouth curving like a black halo over the tallest point of the building. The roof slates rose in pyramid turrets, and under them sat rows of darkened windows in the rough-weathered stone of the walls.

The castle of Windischgraetz stood fifteen hundred feet above sea-level, the eyrie of an eagle, impregnable, almost unapproachable, since the days of Charlemagne.

Smith’s hostages were marshalled across the drawbridge and into an interior courtyard where twin cannon guarded another stone entranceway. There Smith ordered the blindfolds and bonds removed, and the captives taken to the trophy room. Sheikh Zeidan was carried up the stairs by two burly crewmen, and his wheelchair slung in after him.

Smith stood outside with the big iron key in his hand. ‘Go to the radio room,’ he instructed Fayeed, ‘and wait for a contact from Dunkels. He should be on his way by now. I’ll entertain our guests for a while, but let me know as soon as you hear word of his movements.’

Achmed hurried away and Smith turned the key noiselessly in the lock. Two guards came up behind him, sub machine-guns once more at the port.

Hemmingsway remarked sourly that he hoped Smith had come to state his terms. Assuredly, Smith said, he had. Fairman asked how long Smith planned to hold them, and Smith assumed they would be freed once the ransom for their release was in his hands.

‘Ah,’ Hamady breathed, ‘so it is a ransom.’

‘Naturally,’ Smith said. ‘Did you think I had you kidnapped merely for the pleasure of sharing your company?’

‘We were wondering, perhaps,’ Zeidan observed heavily, ‘whether it might not have something to do with our status as OPEC emissaries. That your motives could be, shall I say, more overtly political than merely mercenary.’

Smith, who was enjoying himself, took the insult without flinching. ‘Your exalted positions, Sheikh, bear only commercial value for me,’ he sneered. ‘In some ways I detest what you stand for, your stranglehold over our Western oil supplies, your greed and primitive cruelty to your peoples … but I am neither politician nor moralist, Your Excellency. I regard you as medieval robber barons, ripe for plucking. That you should be relieved of some of your enormous wealth is, I

suggest, long overdue. I regret the presence of a blameless American among you, and I regard the crew members of the President’s toy as no more than passing nuisances. I have other plans for Miss Carver. From you gentlemen,’ indicating the seated Arabs, ‘I require nothing but money – in kind.’

‘What kind of money in what kind of kind?’ Hemmingsway demanded.

Smith studied him in surprise. ‘Perhaps you do wish to speak for them – haggle for them, Mr Hemmingsway. So be it. The ransom is fifty million dollars.’

Hemmingsway swallowed with difficulty and licked his dry lips. ‘And in what form?’

‘In cut diamonds,’ Smith replied firmly. ‘They are so pretty – and so eminently negotiable, don’t you think?’

Mackie-Belton prevailed upon a high-ranking and discreet Bahraini police officer to provide McCafferty with clothing suitable for what the American would only describe as ‘a somewhat colder climate’. Swann phoned with the message that a jet was already en route for the Gulf island to pick him up and take him to Rome. ‘With a few extras,’ Basil explained. ‘Passport, documentation; armaments for you and Miss Carver and the agent, Cooligan; field glasses, communicators – that sort of thing. Everything’ll be stowed in a haversack on board the plane. All you have to do is walk off with it at Leonardo da Vinci, Rome. The jet’ll be in Bahrain well before dawn. Good luck, Mac.’

‘Thanks, Basil,’ McCafferty replied, and before Swann could hang up slipped in a request for money. ‘Cleaned out, you see,’ he explained.

Rarely for him, Swann chuckled. ‘Why not try the consul?’ he suggested, and broke the connection.

‘This,’ said Mackie-Belton later, returning from another ego-bruising session with the Arabian lady and brandishing five hundred dollars, ‘is getting to be a nasty habit.’

At 0300, the consul ruefully said goodbye to the Arabian lady, and at 0330 McCafferty received a call from the Bahraini police captain telling him that Siegfried Dunkels had left the island.

‘Going where?’ Mac asked hopefully.

He could almost hear the policeman smirk. ‘First stop Athens – then Zagreb.’

Just at that time, Philpott was unavailable to give instructions, having received a summons to a distinctly acid meeting with the UN’s dour and heavy-humoured Secretary General, so Mac was airborne when the order came from UNACO to divert his aircraft to Yugoslavia and lie in wait for the German …

When Smith next visited the hostages, he brought armed guards with him again, and three more guerillas hauling tripods and a large electric battery. ‘I thought you needed a little more illumination,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and even if you don’t, I do.’

The men rigged up the equipment, and poured photo-floodlight into the room. Fayeed sidled in behind them with a Polaroid camera, and Smith posed the hostages, OPEC men in front, crew members behind, against a totally neutral section of wall, removing trophies, pictures, furniture … anything which could lead to an identification of the locale.

After checking that no member of the group was making an unauthorised signal with fingers or eyes, Smith nodded to Achmed, who clicked away and produced several reasonable prints. Smith approved four pictures, and instructed Achmed to send them immediately by courier to Trieste and Dubrovnik. ‘They must catch the first editions of the morning newspapers,’ he emphasised, ‘– together with details of the ransom demands. And don’t forget – one to the Associated Press agency as well. I want this to hit the States, too. It is, after all, their aeroplane.’

Fairman muttered something at this sally, and Smith inclined his ear with a sympathetic smile. ‘If I caught what you said correctly, Colonel,’ he said pleasantly, ‘you were offering your opinion that Air Force One could be located by satellite sensing-devices. Am I right?’ Fairman nodded grudgingly.

‘I thought so,’ Smith continued, ‘and I’m sorry to disappoint you. The engines were covered in dry ice as soon as the tarpaulins were laid. They cooled off within a few moments. The aircraft cannot, I regret to say, be detected. Now –’ addressing all of them ‘– you will doubtless be relieved to hear that I have no intention of compelling you to spend the night in these uncomfortable surroundings.

‘Achmed will show you to the quarters which have been prepared for you. I am afraid some of you will be doubling up; I can only hope that the partners allocated to you are acceptable. Achmed?’

Once more the hostages were led out, and the only trouble Achmed encountered was when he tried to separate Sabrina and Feisal. He had wanted her for himself; the fate of the boy did not concern him.

‘I must stay with him,’ Sabrina appealed to Smith. ‘He’s ill. You surely can’t want anything to happen to him. He isn’t even on the ransom list.’

Zeidan reinforced her plea by pointing out that if Feisal suffered another attack, Sabrina alone could administer his medication. To Achmed’s evident annoyance, Smith agreed, and Sabrina and Feisal were led up another flight of steps to a room which looked as if it had been hastily adapted for accommodation, containing as it did nothing but two beds, a table and a wash-basin, with an adjoining toilet. Its most conspicuous feature, however, was the long slit running the full length of the external wall, protected from the worst effects of the weather by an overhanging eave, jutting out like a peaked cap.

The vent was panelled in glass now, but Sabrina guessed that it had once been a lookout position, a sentry-room, affording as it must a panorama of the entire area, assuming they were up as high as the definite chill in the room suggested. There was no lighting in their cell, so they undressed, and Sabrina had just snuggled down into her bed when they heard the sound of a motor-cycle starting up in the courtyard below.

Pulling the bedspread off to wrap around her nakedness, Sabrina hurried to the slit window, and was joined by Feisal. A loud ‘clunk’ came from somewhere to their left, and Feisal whispered, ‘Must be a drawbridge.’

‘Good thinking,’ Sabrina said, shivering as the cold nipped at her body. The motor-cyclist roared away, and from their perch they were able to follow his lights for what seemed miles down the twisting road.

‘That was a Honda,’ Sabrina said smugly. She knew motor-bikes almost as well as she knew cars, and was adept at driving both.

Feisal nodded in agreement. ‘Hondamatic 400,’ he confirmed. Sabrina stared at him. ‘How could you tell that?’ she asked.

This time Feisal snickered. ‘He went for at least two hundred yards without changing gear. On a Hondamatic 400 you don’t have to change up until you hit 55 mph.’

Sabrina’s eyes widened. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she ventured.

‘I am not at all surprised,’ Feisal remarked.

‘There would be no reason for a woman to possess such knowledge.’

Sabrina tried to hide her grin. ‘Listen, you smart-alick, know-all kid—’ she began, but Feisal cut her off.

‘That’s what everyone says,’ he assured her airily. ‘And incidentally, your somewhat inadequate garment has slipped. May I be permitted to congratulate you on your magnificent breasts?’

He jumped back into bed and was fast asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow.

McCafferty’s executive jet streamed through the night sky and deposited him at Zagreb well before the sun was high in the east. He passed easily enough through customs with his back-pack, which had been covered by UNACO’s diplomatic immunity on a hastily forged laissez-passer that Mac had found, on Swann’s instructions, among the aircraft’s store of useful documents. The Yugoslav guards examined the form and cast suspicious eyes at the pack, but waved him on.

He used his newly acquired credit cards to hire a car, a small but powerful Polski Fiat with a formidable top speed on the speedometer. He didn’t have long to wait. Dunkels’ flight arrived on time and Mac, huddled down in the rear seat of his car, saw the German enact the same performance at the Avis desk. Just as Dunkels was completing the formalities, however, he was hailed from the roadside.

He turned, and both he and McCafferty saw a black Mercedes – with Swiss plates – moored at the kerb, Dr Stein’s talkative chauffeur grinning at Dunkels’ evident surprise. The German jumped into the front seat and the Mercedes pulled away – with the Fiat following at a discreet distance. McCafferty gritted his teeth as he stamped on the car’s accelerator. He had a score to settle with Dunkels. And with Smith. He sensed that their chase marked the start of the last lap.

ELEVEN

Dunkels headed south from Zagreb on the M12a, which was signposted for Busevec, Lekenik and Zazina. The road was fairly deserted, and Mac had to keep the little Fiat well back to escape detection. After about nineteen miles, Dunkels’ car swung to the right for Gora, and then turned left into a small private airfield. It was hardly more than a large stretch of grass, permitting a clear run of barely fifteen hundred feet in any direction. Standing near the group of rusty, corrugated iron sheds which passed for hangars was a Russian-built Kamov helicopter.

The helicopter’s contra-rotating blades were already revolving for take-off, and the Mercedes drove straight up to it. Moments later McCafferty caught sight of Dunkels running crouched beneath the rotors to get on board. The door had not even closed when the engine revolutions started to rise, and a low, loud pulsating roar of sound heralded the Kamov’s departure.

Mac cursed under his breath. He should have foreseen something of the kind, or waited for backup. Now he was powerless to keep on the German’s tail. He parked the Fiat on a grass verge behind a rubbish-filled metal skip as the Mercedes shot out of the airfield and skidded into a turn. Mac pulled up the hood of his anorak to hide his face but the chauffeur passed him without even a first look.

Then the Kamov’s engine noise rose to a howl, and the helicopter passed over his head, its down-draught tearing the leaves from the trees and flattening the grass.

The American moodily started his own engine and drove up the narrow road just past the field, intending to reverse into its entrance for the trip back to Zagreb. He was looking over his shoulder to get the proper sighting when his eye fell on a small gaggle of light aircraft parked near the sheds. He whistled and said, ‘Hey. Suddenly it’s Christmas.’

Mac reversed all the way into the airfield and put the Fiat in the space between two of the sheds; then he got out to examine his unexpected presents. There was a twin-engined Cessna, an old Piper Tripacer, an Italian Marchetti, and what appeared to be several versions of the Yugoslav UTVA. He checked that no one else was about, and inspected the three leading Yugoslavian planes. He had never flown one, but he kept up to date with the technical journals, and knew that the UTVA had a low stalling speed, good short-field performance and, unusually, a surprising turn of speed.

McCafferty rubbed his chin and slipped a stick of chewing-gum into his mouth. ‘I’d say, at a rough guess, forty … forty-five miles an hour faster than the Kamov,’ he mused. Another thought struck him: the UTVA could probably fly at least seven thousand feet higher than the helicopter. A grin split his face and he said, out loud, ‘Now then. Let’s see if someone has been careless enough to leave the keys in one of these babies.’

He chose the aircraft parked alongside the end of the first hangar, and immediately struck gold: the keys were there. He strolled casually back to the Fiat, still keeping his eyes peeled for signs of life. Mac took his haversack out of the car and locked the door. Then he scuttled back to the UTVA and threw himself into the cockpit, keeping his body below the window line while he carried out the pre-take-off checks.

Mac tested the master-switch, and the indicator showed he had a full tank of fuel. He checked that the electrical system was functioning, and then moved the stick and rudder pedals to ensure that there were no control locks on. Whispering a ‘good luck’ message to himself, he operated the start-control.

This was the most crucial stage of the operation, because the engine noise would be a dead giveaway – though with any luck it would be too late by then to stop him. The engine fired at once, and his luck held: he looked out of the window, careless now whether anyone saw him or not.

Mac had a gun in his hand and was prepared to make an issue of it … but still he had the field to himself. He shrugged, took a chance in opening the throttle wide (which was far from standard practice), and pointed the nose in the direction which seemed to give him the longest take-off run.

Within a hundred yards the tail had responded to the gentle forward pressure on the stick. Mac’s view improved as the nose of the rather old-fashioned aircraft levelled, and fifty yards further on the airspeed indicator was showing forty-five knots. He wound the elevator trim to prepare for flight, and found himself smoothly airborne, and climbing steeply, without any conscious effort.

When he crossed the perimeter of the little airfield, the altimeter was already showing two hundred feet. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned back over the field to fly south after Dunkels. As he passed the group of rusting sheds, he peered out and again saw no one moving around. ‘Where the hell’s the resident mechanic?’ he thought. ‘There must be one. You can’t leave the entire place unattended with all these planes lying about.’ Then the penny dropped: Smith must have nobbled the mechanic to leave Dunkels a clear field for take-off.

McCafferty turned his attention back to Dunkels, estimating the Kamov’s course at about 190 degrees. Setting the same course for himself, he climbed four thousand feet to enlarge his view and compensate for the start the German had on him. He figured he could make up the leeway with the superior performance of the UTVA – particularly if he pushed it slightly beyond the recommended limit. He scanned the area below him on both sides, every inch of land and sky, not seeing the beauty of the rolling countryside nor the sunlit, tree-lined slopes … he looked only for the tell-tale signs which would betray the elusive helicopter: the glint of reflected light from the whirring blades; the fly-sized black speck against the bright blue; the dark shadow stealing across a green meadow.

A road, a river and a railway line passed beneath his gaze. To his left a small town nestled in a fold of the gentle hills. Mac fumbled for a crumpled, dog-eared chart left in the cockpit, and identified the town as Glina. He peered more closely at the chart: next stop, Topusko – to starboard.

He leaned to his right, looking out, searching for Topusko, and there was the Kamov, flying so low that it appeared for one ludicrous moment to be covering the ground like a car. McCafferty chuckled and spat out the chewing-gum, which in any case had lost its flavour …

While rerouting McCafferty to Yugoslavia, Philpott decided that Sonya and he should stick to their original plan and make for Rome. Whisked through customs at Fiumicino as VIPs, they left the airport with their minimal luggage untouched, ignored the thieving con-men operating as unlicensed taxi-drivers, and the yellow cabs themselves, and made for a NATO staff-car sitting by the ‘No Parking’ sign. The jaded high-ranking officer in British Army uniform standing by the car unlaced his arms and pasted on a welcoming beam.

The officer – tall, greying and keen-eyed, with a toothbrush moustache that ended precisely at the corners of his mouth – threw up a salute that was somewhere between a wave and a semaphore signal. ‘Morning. Tomlin. Brigadier.’

Philpott replied, ‘Morning. Philpott. UNACO.’

Tomlin said, ‘I’m NATO. Naples. In charge of the local end.’

Philpott said, ‘My associate, Mrs Kolchinsky. We’re in charge of both ends.’ He nodded towards Sonya and then they both shook hands with the soldier.

‘We don’t usually meet – ah – visiting firemen,’ Tomlin continued earnestly, ignoring Philpott’s darkening brow. ‘However, I’ve been ordered to this time, so you must be pretty important.’

‘Not really,’ Philpott responded off-handedly, ‘just an ordinary chap with some ordinary questions, Brigadier.’

‘Oh, splendid,’ Tomlin said, conducting them into the car and seating himself in a jump-seat. ‘Jolly good show. Well then, fire away.’

Sonya’s firm grip on his wrist was helping Philpott control his rising temper, though he found it difficult to fuel his anger in the face of Tomlin’s complete insouciance. ‘Well, to start with, is there any word on the wreckage of Air Force One?’ he inquired.

‘Ah,’ Tomlin said, leaning forward conspiratorially, ‘yes, there is.’ He instructed the corporal at the wheel of the car to drive them away, then confided to Philpott that the wreckage of the plane had been located.

‘But—’ he added, and gaped when Philpott supplied, ‘But it’s not Air Force One.’

‘Quite right,’ Tomlin confirmed. ‘But how on earth did you know?’

Philpott tapped the side of his nose. ‘Fireman’s secret,’ he whispered. ‘It was a Boeing 707, I take it?’

It was, Tomlin conceded, though as far as they could make out from the debris, it was a freighter, not an airliner. There was no registration mark, so the plane could take days to trace.

Philpott digested the news; he had hoped to link Smith definitively with the hijack through an instant identification of the ‘look-alike’ Boeing, but it seemed he would have to wait for his affirmative evidence. Not, though, for long.

A squawk from the front of the vehicle announced a radio message. Tomlin shot back the dividing partition and rapped, ‘What did they say, Corporal?’

‘Headquarters, sir,’ the NCO replied. ‘Ransom demand for the OPEC ministers received in Trieste and, I think, Dubrovnik. Something’s gone out on one of the American news agencies, too.’

The Brigadier was all business now. ‘HQ then, and step on it.’ He preened himself as though he had been personally responsible for the invention of radio, and said to Philpott, ‘Bit of a turn-up, no?’

‘No,’ Philpott said, ‘I was expecting it.’ The soldier arched an expressive eyebrow, but said nothing. Philpott moved in smoothly for the kill. ‘What’s more, Brigadier,’ he said slyly, ‘one gets you ten that the guy behind the ransom demand is called Smith.’

Tomlin sniffed. ‘Bit, eh, sort of – commonplace, isn’t it?’

Philpott chuckled. ‘The name, maybe; not the man.’

In the operations room at NATO HQ, Philpott and Sonya studied blow-ups of the Polaroid pictures wired over on request from Trieste and from the AP bureau in Belgrade. Tomlin shot one of the prints under a desk magnifier and the image was thrown on to a wall screen. ‘All present and correct, sir?’ he inquired, suitably chastened since his discovery that the hijacker was indeed named as Mister Smith.

Philpott and Sonya mentally ticked off ministers and crew members, all of whose faces were on record at UNACO. Unobtrusively, they were intently scanning just one among the dozen or so faces – for Jagger, naturally, was in the group of captives.

‘Unbelievable,’ Philpott murmured. ‘Uncanny,’

Sonya said. ‘It’s the greatest surgery I’ve ever seen. Everything … even Mac’s mother would swear—’

‘Brigadier –’ Philpott cut her off with a peremptory, though not unkind, gesture, ‘have you formed any opinion about the background to the snapshot?’

The Brigadier said without hesitation that it was a castle. ‘Flagstone floor,’ he explained airily, ‘roughcast walls. We’ve got a few of ’em in England, you know.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Philpott interestedly, ‘you must tell me some time.’

The sarcasm was lost on Tomlin, who merely nodded sagely and repeated, ‘No doubt of it. A castle.’

Philpott agreed, and asked the Brigadier if he knew of any castles in Yugoslavia.

‘Is that where it’s supposed to be?’ Tomlin bleated. Philpott nodded. The Brigadier shrugged: ‘Hundreds?’

‘Probably not,’ Philpott said. ‘But there are certainly enough to make the right one difficult to find without any other identification.’

A clerk brought in copies of the ransom note and, like Hemmingsway had done, Philpott whistled when he saw Smith’s demand for fifty million dollars’ worth of cut diamonds. ‘It’s a helluva lot of money,’ he mused.

‘What about the rest?’ Tomlin said shakily.

‘Rest?’ Philpott echoed.

Tomlin flourished the Associated Press tape, giving the full story, unlike the UNACO report, which had been split up into paragraphs with analysis, of which Philpott had only the first.

Tomlin paraphrased, ‘Unless the Arab nations – or someone … UNACO’s mentioned – meet Smith’s demands, he’ll kill one minister every three hours.’

‘My God,’ Tomlin whispered, ‘he must be mad. Do you think he means it?’

Philpott looked up from the UNACO report. ‘Oh, he’s serious all right,’ he said gravely. ‘And he may also be mad enough to carry it out.’

Sonya Kolchinsky compressed her lips into a line. ‘Is there a deadline, Brigadier?’

Tomlin glanced back down at the paper in his hand. ‘There is,’ he verified. ‘It’s one hour from—’ he looked at his watch ‘—about now. UNACO’s acceptance of Smith’s terms must be broadcast on the American Forces’ Network from Rome at precisely 1000 hours, local time.’ He looked levelly at Philpott. ‘Over to you, sir,’ he added.

Philpott drew a large breath and vented it as a sigh compounded as much of resignation as of frustration. ‘An hour …’ he muttered, ‘… just one hour and we could lose Hawley Hemmingsway.’

‘Why Hemmingsway?’ Sonya inquired.

Philpott smiled. ‘Can you see Smith executing a valuable Arab before a non-negotiable American?’

A stiff breeze ruffled Philpott’s hair, and the warm sunlight filling the Piazza Barberini caused him to shade his eyes and squint up at the waiter.

‘Signore?’ the waiter asked.

‘Eh – capuccino,’ Philpott replied. Then he caught sight of the figure of a man crossing the road from the Metro station.

‘Signore!’ he called after the retreating waiter. The waiter turned, his newly-pressed white smock bristling with anticipation. ‘Due capuccine,’ Philpott ordered. The waiter echoed ‘Due. Prego, Signore,’ and scuttled off. The man from the Metro advanced and sat, uninvited and unsmiling, at Philpott’s table …

UNACO’s first priority after examining every aspect of the ransom demand had been to plan how to stall for time. Secondly, the ransom must be assembled. This had been the easier option. Sonya put through telephone calls at Philpott’s direction to the Johannesburg and Amsterdam Diamond Exchanges and to the chief executive of De Beers. On UNACO’s credit the sum was promised. Delivery of the equivalent in cut diamonds would be made from Amsterdam by the next flight from Schipol to Fiumicino.

Meanwhile, Philpott had anxiously probed the situation from every angle. ‘I must have time to find Smith,’ Philpott demanded, slapping the table in the NATO Ops room with his open palm. ‘He cannot be allowed to take command. Once we broadcast our agreement to his terms, he’ll follow up with the location of the ransom dropping point in double-quick time, and before we know it he’ll have got away with it.’

‘But you will make the broadcast?’ Tomlin asked cautiously. ‘I know it goes against the grain, sir, but I think you’ll agree that we dare not risk the lives of any of the OPEC ministers. Unless you feel Smith is simply bluffing.’

Philpott slowly passed a hand across his forehead and allowed the fingers to slide down his face. He looked out of the window and stared at the silent maelstrom of Rome’s traffic far below. ‘He may be bluffing in the sense that I don’t believe he will himself kill a minister,’ he finally replied. ‘Killing’s not Smith’s style. On the other hand, there will be by the nature of things unstable people with him … I have a sketchy outline of two of them. And apart from that, Smith is certainly not above staging an execution convincingly enough to persuade one of the other hostages to pass it on to us as a fact. I’ve no doubt Smith has radio facilities – and will use them to blackmail us, broadcasting in short bursts so that we are unable to track down the frequency.’

Tomlin nodded gloomily. ‘We wouldn’t know whether it was true or not,’ he agreed. ‘We would have to assume it had actually happened. It would be a bluff we could not call.’

The two men sat for a minute immersed in their separate thoughts, and then Philpott jerkily shifted to the front of his seat and scribbled on the notepad before him. He tore off the first page and handed it to Tomlin.

The Brigadier studied it and smiled bemusedly.

‘As easy as that?’ he inquired. Philpott shrugged. ‘We have to buy time.’

‘But you have no idea how to contact Smith because we don’t know where he is,’ the Brigadier objected.

‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ Philpott replied. ‘I must smoke him out. Have that message broadcast on AFN at nine-thirty, and again at ten, and Smith, I guarantee, will be in touch. By then, I’ll have found out the way to get through to him.’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘If I don’t, we lose Hemmingsway.’

Tomlin pursed his lips ruefully and said, ‘I’m glad it’s not me taking that kind of chance. Your President would not be best pleased at losing a friend as well as an aeroplane, if you’ll excuse the levity, sir.’

Philpott inclined his head. ‘We have to grab our chances where we can with Smith, Brigadier,’ he continued. ‘And rest easy,’ he assured Tomlin, ‘I have no intention of needlessly sacrificing Hawley Hemmingsway or any other oil minister, as President Wheeler knows full well. I think I can pull this off, but it’ll take time – and time is something we don’t have. Now if you could give me a couple of minutes?’

Tomlin nodded and walked to the far end of the operations centre. Philpott picked up the telephone and replied in Russian when the man at the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics said, ‘Buon giorno, Signore.’

Philpott was playing a hunch which, if he was wrong, not only would put them completely at Smith’s mercy, but also could lead to the murder of an American Secretary of State. He swallowed the touch of bile which had risen to his mouth, and said, ‘I wish to speak to General Alexis Nesterenko.’

There was the expected silence before the man gave the expected answer: there was no General Alexis Nesterenko at the embassy. Philpott continued smoothly, ‘You may know him better by his code-name: Myshkin.’ He could hear the click as the resident KGB station commander cued in to the call.

‘We know of no one of that name, and we do not understand what you mean when you refer to a code-name,’ the operator said stolidly.

‘Very well,’ Philpott said, ‘I will have to assume that you do not wish to communicate to your superiors some information which it is crucial to their plans that they should receive. I will bid you goodbye, then.’

‘Eh, wait for just one moment, Signore,’ the operator broke in, switching to Italian. ‘You – you did not –’ he was obviously trying to interpret instructions whispered to him across another line ‘– you did not give us your name.’

‘My name is Malcolm Philpott, and I am the Director of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation. I fail to see how that can interest you, since you claim to have no knowledge of the man to whom I wish to pass this information.’

Another delay, and Philpott could hear clicks multiplying on the line like mating grasshoppers. Then the operator came back on. ‘It is as you say, Mr Philpott, we do not know the man you have spoken of, nor indeed the other name which you used. It might, however, be helpful if you could tell us your immediate movements.’

‘For what purpose?’ Philpott inquired innocently.

The operator had stumbled again over his words, then managed to get out the lame excuse that it could be of assistance to the matter in hand.

Philpott toyed with him for another minute, then said, with a touch of asperity, ‘Oh, very well. I shall be in the Ristorante Aurelio in Piazza Barberini in precisely ten minutes from now. I’ll be drinking coffee at a sidewalk table. I may well enjoy a cigar as well. No doubt I shall insult the waiter and refuse to pay the bill. Piazza Barberini, as you may know, is quite close to the American Embassy in the Via Veneto.’

‘We know where the American Embassy is, Signore,’ the operator replied stiffly, and broke the connection.

‘You must have been expecting my call,’ Philpott observed pleasantly as the coffee arrived. Myshkin sniffed disapprovingly and changed the order for himself to caff è negro. Philpott apologised and slid the second cup of cappuccino to his own side of the table.

‘Say what you have to say, and please be quick about it,’ Myshkin pronounced tartly.

‘Aren’t you interested in learning how I knew you were involved, or even that you were in Rome?’ Philpott asked.

‘You didn’t,’ Myshkin rejoined. ‘It was a blind guess. You can also have no certain knowledge of any implication of myself or my country in the affair which at present occupies your attention.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Philpott pressed gently. He could not risk frightening off the Russian, though he surmised correctly that Myshkin had no intention of being intimidated.

Myshkin allowed an inchoate smile to illumine his wintry face. ‘Curiosity, Mr Philpott, nothing more. Clearly my – eh – swift accession to a position of power in the Politburo has interested not merely the Western secret services but also UNACO, otherwise you would not be familiar with even my real name, let alone my code-name. Also, there …’ he hesitated as if reluctant to admit a weakness, ‘… there may be ways in which we can help each other.’

‘In too deep, Myshkin?’ Philpott inquired ironically.

‘By no means,’ Myshkin protested. He lit a vile-smelling cigarette with a Dupont lighter and sipped his coffee. Then he examined his fingernails and glanced out appreciatively into the square; a party of four girls, beautiful and freshly groomed, young and enticing, was bound for the Via Veneto. ‘An illicit rendezvous?’ he whispered to Philpott. ‘Meeting sugar daddies at one of those ruinously expensive hotels?’

‘At this time of day?’ Philpott queried, enjoying the Russian’s dilemma. Then he glanced at his watch and realised that the charade must soon end. The KGB clearly could not take the initiative; so UNACO must.

He began slowly, after lighting a cigar and breathing a speculative wreath of smoke Myshkin’s way, ‘Since you mentioned the matter which is at present occupying my attention, as I believe you phrased it, would you consider it discourteous or outré if I referred to it directly?’ Myshkin affected not to have heard him. Philpott grinned and tapped a corrosion of ash on to the pavement.

‘UNACO’s involvement is obvious,’ Philpott went on. ‘An attack on the personal aircraft of the US President is bad enough, but when the passengers include the leading lights of OPEC, this is something which surely the whole world must deprecate – or at least which it cannot ignore. The criminal Smith, whose name may not be unknown to you –’ Myshkin considered the point, then shook his head ‘– this man Smith stands vilified at the bar of global opinion, from every quarter. It is an act of cynical brigandry, and must be condemned with all the force at the command of right-thinking nations with the security of civilised behaviour at heart.’

Myshkin nodded gravely and methodically stubbed out his cigarette. He looked inquiringly at Philpott and accepted a cigar from the American’s handsome leather case, inscribed in ornate gold letters, ‘With affection and respect: Leonid Brezhnev’.

‘Naturally,’ Philpott said, ‘Smith must be acting alone, since it would be unthinkable that any nation – even more so, should that state happen to be a client of UNACO’s – might offer such a creature solace, let alone help.’

‘Naturally,’ Myshkin agreed.

‘Such a nation, if it exists, would earn the enmity of every member of the UN, especially those countries with influence in sensitive areas such as the Middle East, places which could be crucially important to the state which was unwise enough to support a pirate like Smith, who has no political affiliation nor any conscience.’

‘Indeed,’ Myshkin commented, reading the bill for the coffee with studied concern. ‘These fashionable ristoranti are not cheap, Mr Philpott.’

‘Neither is international respect, General Nesterenko,’ Philpott rejoined. ‘To return to the subject under discussion – such a nation could be gravely mistaken if it assumed that America would take the entire blame for this unfortunate incident, which may well result in the deaths of one or more of the OPEC ministers.’

Myshkin looked sharply at him. ‘What makes you say that?’ he inquired brusquely. Philpott explained the terms of Smith’s ransom demand and the threat that accompanied it.

‘It looks very much as though America, at the moment anyway, is bearing the brunt of international excoriation,’ the Russian observed.

‘But that,’ Philpott replied earnestly, ‘will last only as long as the world doesn’t know the identity of the nation which helped Smith to set up this hijacking. And once it is established that Smith has received active encouragement and assistance, even down to providing men and armaments for him and smoothing his passage in a hostile environment, the contempt of the injured nations will, without a shadow of doubt, be turned on the country which has made all this possible.’

The Russian grinned, almost admiringly. ‘Your diet must be exclusively founded on carrots and fish, Mr Philpott,’ he said drily. ‘You are consummately adept at shooting in the dark.’

Philpott called the waiter over and paid the bill with a five thousand lire note, neither expecting nor receiving the change due to him. He laid a copy of the newspaper Il Messaggero carefully on the table between himself and the Russian.

‘I know your countrymen pride themselves in keeping up to date with political thought in Italy,’ he said. ‘Tucked into the leader page is the text of a message which will be broadcast on the American Forces’ Network in roughly three minutes from now. It will be repeated at 1000 hours. It is not the news Smith was expecting.

‘It asks for a two-hour delay. As Director of UNACO I shall appreciate it, indeed I would consider it a favour, if some pressure can be brought upon Smith to accede to this request. Obviously, should any harm befall a minister, Smith will be hunted to the ends of the earth. Perhaps you would care to ponder, my dear Myshkin, as to how best this information can be passed to Mister Smith.’

Myshkin looked up at him benignly. ‘I, Mr Philpott? What could conceivably persuade you that I might have some channel of contact with this monster?’

Philpott bowed his head. ‘If I have conveyed that impression to you, General, you have my deepest apologies. No doubt we shall meet again soon.’

He stepped out into the Piazza Barberini, and a long, dark blue NATO staff-car, a flag fluttering from the apex of its bonnet, drew up alongside him. Philpott got in, and the car pulled away.

Myshkin took another careful pull at the Cuban cigar, deprived it of its nose-cone of ash, then dropped the still-light butt to the ground, and stepped on it as he walked out into the square. A black Zil limousine, Soviet flag fluttering at the apex of its bonnet, purred at his heels. He turned, and the door swung open …

At five minutes after ten, the telephone rang in the NATO Ops room, and Smith said, ‘Two hours, Mr Philpott, not a second more.’

‘You have my word,’ Philpott replied, careful not to identify the caller with Tomlin at his shoulder. ‘It merely allows for certain formalities to be completed.’

‘No tricks, Philpott,’ Smith warned. ‘Not only the Americans and Arabs, but your estimable Sabrina Carver, are at my mercy, remember.’

‘True,’ Philpott conceded, ‘though I am confident you will not harm them. You must know by now – from Dunkels, I imagine – that my friend the erstwhile security chief of Air Force One has escaped from custody in Bahrain. He was the only card in your hand in which the Russians could be remotely interested. They will not, I know, look with any enthusiasm on your failure to hold him for their interrogators. No doubt you have concocted some story to mollify them in the meantime, but they would believe me if I told them he had escaped, Smith. I don’t think you would wish them to know that.’

‘Hence my agreement to your request for a delay,’ Smith answered. ‘Use the time wisely, Mr Director.’

‘I intend to,’ Philpott said, glancing up at Tomlin.

TWELVE

As far as McCafferty could judge, the Kamov pilot must be following orders in flying low to escape radar detection. Mac throttled back so he could more sensibly use his high vantage-point to monitor Dunkels’ progress. Clearly, the helicopter was also intent on avoiding even the smallest village, let alone any larger centre of human habitation.

The American decided that, given all the precautions the Kamov pilot was taking, he would also be aware that the only source of danger to him must come from above, and would be keeping his eyes peeled. The place for anyone intent on secret pursuit was behind and below the helicopter, Mac thought.

Chopping the power in his own machine, Mac put on a bootful of rudder, pulled the stick over, and side-slipped towards the ground. He took up straight and level flight again at about fifty feet, and some quarter of a mile behind the little Kamov, which was literally skimming the treetops.

For the next hundred miles or so, McCafferty effectively saw nothing save the series of greens and browns which flashed across the periphery of his vision. He was concentrating on the steel-grey body of the Kamov as it flew up shallow valleys, danced over hilltops, flirted with the crests of tall forest trees, and buzzed the surfaces of a dozen sapphire-blue lakes.

An hour and a half went by with McCafferty fighting to balance elevator, rudder and aileron, opening and closing the throttle a thousand times in an effort to stay hidden while keeping contact with a target whose speed fluctuated between ninety miles per hour (which was easy for Mac to parallel) right down to under fifty miles per hour. This was a trickier proposition, for it brought the UTVA to the point of stall, where she wallowed with slack controls and insufficient height to recover from the effect of even a slight mistake by her pilot. The sweat coursed down his face, and his language matched the blue of the sky and waters.

Suddenly the ground started to rise steeply. Mac’s altimeter showed twelve hundred feet more than the zero which he had set before his departure from the low-lying airfield near Gora. He looked anxiously ahead. Still in front of him were mountain peaks that seemed fifteen or sixteen hundred feet higher. He snatched a quick peep at the map crumpled over in front of him and identified the Dinaric Alps.

When he looked back the Kamov had vanished.

McCafferty fought his momentary panic and quelled it. The helicopter, he reasoned, couldn’t simply have disappeared from view, or sunk out of sight into the ground. His first instinct was to slam the throttle open and surge forward as fast as possible, but instinct and caution held him back. The Kamov was still there somewhere, he told himself; Mac’s problem was that he couldn’t see it.

He wound the UTVA into a steep, spiralling climb to overfly the ground before him without attracting attention. Four thousand feet of extra height registered on the dial in a little over three minutes, and then Mac resumed his original course. He peered to starboard, his eyes exploring the rocky terrain. Then he grinned and said, ‘Hot diggety.’

The mystery was solved. The helicopter had vaulted the edge of a natural glacier-formation and slipped into the steep valley below it. The valley was a thumbprint amid the sharp, pointed mountains, and there was a grassy tree-fringed platform set into the hillside at the top of a winding road.

Facing this natural ledge, which started off as barely a smudge but grew to respectable proportions in Mac’s view, was a castle, perched precariously against a dent in the mountain.

At a slightly lower level, a flat area had been gouged out of the rock and smoothed over. The Kamov rested on it, the rotor blades turning at no more than walking pace.

Siegfried Dunkels had arrived at his destination …

An aide bustled into the NATO computer complex and asked for Philpott. Directed with an irritable wave by a red-haired American major, the courier whispered to the UNACO chief that transport was waiting to take him to Leonardo da Vinci for the Zagreb flight. Philpott was busy receiving Sonya’s assurances that the diamonds were being assembled and dispatched in the care of a leading member of the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, and at the same time coping with Tomlin’s obvious keenness to impress UNACO with his obvious keenness.

‘I’ve also scrambled a squadron of P-90s to square-search beaches, salt flats – any open ground that could take a 707,’ the Brigadier expatiated.

‘Yugoslavian beaches?’ Philpott asked in astonishment. ‘She’s not a member of NATO, you know, Brigadier.’

Tomlin glared like a cornered schoolboy coming out of a strip club. ‘I am aware of that, sir,’ he snapped, ‘and although we appear merely to be including Yugoslavia in the search area on a casual basis – taking it in along with Italy, Sicily, Greece and the islands, Corfu and the Albanian coast – I have at least established contact with the Yugoslav authorities and explained the problem, of which, naturally, they are aware since the news broke in their own country. They also suspect that Air Force One and its captives are in Yugoslavia, and—’

‘And so they think you’re just wasting aviation fuel looking anywhere else, but at the same time they’re not inviting you in. That it, Brigadier?’

‘Something like that, sir,’ Tomlin mumbled.

‘So that’s why I’m going to Zagreb,’ Philpott supplied, ‘because whereas they don’t want NATO trampling all over their beautiful country, they’ll accept – they’re bound to, by their membership – a small UNACO contingent.’

Tomlin then confessed, with a sheepish grin, that his pilots had been instructed not to be over-conscientious in their search of areas outside Yugoslav air-space. ‘We shan’t be wasting too much fuel, sir,’ he added, ‘if only because we’ve no real idea where you could hide an aircraft that big.’

Philpott stopped putting papers into a brief-case and favoured the soldier with a sympathetic but knowing look. ‘You won’t find it, Brigadier. It can’t be camouflaged, so Smith will have hidden it, and removed any possibility of tracing it with heat sensors by cooling it down, or something like that. If I know him, the plane’ll be under cover and wrapped in tarpaulins by now.’

Tomlin nodded. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll call off the hounds. Incidentally,’ he added, ‘there’s something else that’s been bothering me.’ He waited for an encouraging inclination of the head from the UNACO man, then said, ‘It’s just that Trieste is well outside our radius. Why do you suppose Smith sent the ransom demand there?’

Philpott considered the question. ‘You have a point there, Brigadier; a good point.’ Tomlin flushed with gratification. ‘I can only assume,’ Philpott went on, ‘that it was intended to throw us off the scent. Now that you mention it, I’m inclined more and more to the opinion that Dubrovnik is nearer to our presumed centre of activity, so Zagreb will be a good place to start from. Keep thinking. You’re actually very good at it, Brigadier.’

With that, Philpott leaned over to kiss Sonya, causing Tomlin’s blush to deepen, and left the room trailing a covey of uniformed acolytes.

Three minutes after his flight was airborne, the telephone rang on Sonya Kolchinsky’s desk, and a breathless voice said, ‘Is the Chief there, Sonya? I’ve got to speak to him. It’s Joe McCafferty. I’ve found Smith.’

Sonya crooked her finger at the red-haired major, who bounced over and skidded to a halt in front of her chair. ‘I don’t care what it costs or how difficult it is,’ she said, ‘but I want the call on this line –’ she pointed at the receiver in her hand ‘– patched through to Mr Philpott’s plane. And I want it done now.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the major replied, ‘oh yes, ma’am.’ He shot off to the communications room as though preventing World War Three depended on it …

Sabrina and Feisal had refused breakfast, but Feisal had to have food at stated times, so they started toying with a mid-morning snack that Smith sent up to the attic room. It was a gruel of some kind, larded with greasy croutons, and they quickly found it unpalatable. ‘I had no idea Yugoslav food was so bad,’ Sabrina began, regretting it when Feisal launched into a dissertation on Central European culinary traditions.

Feisal dropped the subject when she raised her eyes to heaven in mock horror; and he followed her gaze when it stayed up, instead of coming back down. She had spotted something they had not noticed before – a small opening in the ceiling where it joined the bare rock of the mountain wall. Sabrina crossed to the corner and squinted into the hole. ‘Hey,’ she exclaimed, ‘I can see daylight, Feisal.’

The Arab boy joined her and they ran their fingers over the rock wall. The junction was in fact a shallow fissure, going beyond the ceiling and showing, as Sabrina had remarked, a small chink of light at its very top.

‘I don’t think it’s wide enough for me,’ Sabrina said doubtfully, measuring the fissure against her body.

‘All right for me, though,’ Feisal insisted. ‘We Arabs look after our bodies. It’s our diet, you see.’

‘Yeah, I get it,’ Sabrina said hurriedly. ‘Look, I know you mean well, Feisal, but I’m not sure I ought to let you take risks like going up that hole. Your grandfather would be furious with me if—’

‘And he would be furious with me if I did not go,’ Feisal bristled, ‘so that is settled. Now, if you would be so kind as to hoist me up there …’

As Sabrina stooped for him to climb on her back, they heard the scrape of the iron key in the lock. They were seated at the table when the door was flung open and Bert Cooligan stumbled into the room.

‘He was foolish enough to make a run for it,’ Achmed Fayeed, who appeared behind the agent, said. ‘As you must all be aware, escape from the castle of Windischgraetz is not possible. For his pains, Mr Cooligan will join you up here.’

Cooligan sat on the bed and rubbed his bruised limbs. He had slipped his guard on a toilet visit, he told them, and managed to get as far as the courtyard, but Fayeed had raised the drawbridge in his face.

‘It was brave of you, Bert,’ Sabrina consoled him, ‘but I think it really is useless, like that man said.’

Cooligan looked at them slyly. ‘Don’t you believe it, honey,’ he whispered. ‘Having tried to escape once and been recaptured, I’m the last guy they’d expect to try again. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: try again.’

‘Well done,’ Feisal commended him, ‘be assured that I shall offer you every assistance.’

Cooligan goggled at the boy and gasped, ‘You don’t say.’

Sabrina grinned. ‘He does say, I’m afraid,’ she remarked, ‘over and over again, all the time. But he has a point.’ And she indicated the gap in the corner of the room.

The agent joined them, nodding approvingly and picking up Feisal all in one movement. At the full extent of his reach, he pushed the boy up into the hole. ‘Room enough?’ he called out.

‘More than sufficient,’ Feisal called back, and squirmed up the fissure until he blotted out the tiny patch of light …

Mac sheered off and gave the castle a wide berth. He flew on down the valley, noting the rough, unmade track which served as a road. There didn’t seem to be any other inhabited area, as the valley, deceptively small from the air, wound through a gorge and meandered out into a flat plain. From his new high altitude, the American could see as far as the Adriatic, with its shoals of tiny islands swimming off the coast.

His plan of action was comfortably clear: he must land the aircraft and make contact with Philpott, for he had no doubt whatsoever that he had located Smith’s headquarters and the hostages’ prison. The frying-pan-shaped area, Mac realised, was the valley’s mouth, and he spotted just the sort of situation he had been seeking: a ruined house, the traces of its once fine and spacious formal gardens still visible from the air. Sheep and goats grazed where the great lawn had been, but it would suit his purpose, for it looked reasonably flat and smooth, and was all of three hundred yards long.

Mac completed his descent and made one quick pass at low level to check the surface and frighten the animals up to one end of the pasture. Then he turned tightly and prepared to land. The UTVA slipped over the crumbling stone boundary-wall at exactly forty-five knots, and the pilot made a perfect three-point touch-down, braking gently to a halt after using only two-thirds of the available space.

Seeing a large open barn next to a clump of tall trees near the ruin of the house, the American opened his throttle again and taxied towards it. The barn, though it looked dilapidated and sported a few holes in its roof, swallowed the little aeroplane without difficulty.

Moments later McCafferty, who had seen a village which, from the air, looked to be not too far away, was strolling along the rudimentary path, looking like a purposeful tourist off the beaten track. He wore the back-pack, his anorak was slung over his shoulder and he whistled, rather selfconsciously, The Happy Wanderer.

He traded dollars for dinars from Mackie-Belton’s pile at a huge loss, tossed back a couple of beers at a café, and bribed his way into the village post office which, as far as he could ascertain, housed the only telephone for miles around.

A fairly agonising twenty minutes later, using the postman’s sixteen-year-old daughter as an interpreter, Mac found himself magically connected with Philpott, cruising five miles overhead.

He gave the UNACO director the location of the castle – which he had learned from his new friends was called Castle Windischgraetz – and supplied directions to his village of Luka. Philpott set the time for their rendezvous in the early evening.

‘I’ll probably come alone,’ Philpott warned him. ‘I still have to case the scene in Yugoslavia. I’ve no idea what help or co-operation I’ll get from the authorities, so I’d better not promise you an army of deliverance. The chances are it’ll be just you and me, Joe.’

‘You’d better be in good form, then,’ Mac returned cheerfully, though he felt far from confident at the prospect ahead of them.

Philpott signed off, and while McCafferty set out by donkey and on foot to reconnoitre the castle of Windischgraetz, the UNACO director’s plane commenced its descent to Zagreb …

Feisal eased his slim body out of the hole and found himself looking down the sheer side of the mountain. He gulped and withdrew his head, then glanced up, and to both sides. The fissure ran out in the mouth of the cave above the castle, and the boy scaled the remaining distance easily. He was now virtually on the castle roof, and he stepped gingerly on to one of the pyramid towers, from where he could see the cliff, the road and the valley beyond, and just caught sight of the sloping eave in front of the sentry-slit in his own room.

He edged round the other face of the pyramid and descended to a flatter part of the roof. Looking up, he saw a flag-pole projecting from the top of the tower, its fastening rope trailing from the bare stem.

The boy smiled, and was about to remount the tower when the sound of voices reached him from below. Feisal knelt and crept to the very rim of the castle. The voices came from a ventilation-port set high into the wall of what he judged to be the trophy room, where the hostages were imprisoned. Mister Smith was speaking.

‘… so it would appear, gentlemen, that your respective governments care less for your lives than for the comparatively trifling sum it will cost to save them. At any rate, I can place no other construction on their request for a two-hour delay. I cannot believe they would be so foolish as to contemplate tracking us down at this place, since by so doing they will inevitably sacrifice all of you. Therefore, I repeat, I can only assume they are weighing your lives in the balance against a mere fifty million dollars in diamonds.’

Smith had separated the ministers from the crew, who were valueless to him. He had Dunkels at one shoulder, Jagger at the other, both armed with Schmeisser machine-pistols, and Fayeed leading a guerilla group which commanded the rest of the trophy room.

Hawley Hemmingsway, easily the tallest and strongest man in the room, folded his arms and said, with a disdainful sneer, ‘Maybe they just don’t relish having to deal with scum like you, Smith. That would at least be understandable.’

Smith regarded him with tolerant amusement, but the shaft had struck home. Smith never suffered criticism easily; it was part of the megalomaniac’s armour that he must always be supremely right, above reproach, fêted and admired for the aesthetic beauty of his crimes. Above all, though, he prided himself on his iron control, which rarely deserted him and which was needed now to suppress his rising anger. He was framing a suitably tart reply when Sheikh Zeidan saved him the trouble.

The old Arab raised a cautionary hand and growled to Hemmingsway, ‘Easy, my friend, easy. Patience. You would not, would you, trade insults with a rabid dog? No, you keep your counsel and remove yourself from his solitary path.’

Smith’s teeth clenched and his eyes bored into Zeidan’s, but he could not hold the cripple’s burning, scornful gaze. But Hemmingsway, the Boston aristocrat with six centuries of traceable English and colonial blood in his veins, had never needed to curb his temper with such creatures as he saw before him.

He unfolded his arms and let them swing easily at his side, breathing noisily through parted lips, his eyes wild, the very marrow of his culture and civilisation affronted. ‘I thank you for your advice, Your Excellency,’ he said, ‘but I have spent large portions of my life dealing with vermin such as these at various levels in war and politics. It is as well to make them completely aware that men such as you and I and your colleagues cannot, will not, be intimidated. We cannot and will not be used as pawns in the games of these sordid mercenaries, sold over their sleazy counter as merchandise to provide money for prolonging their disgusting lives, to give them—’

‘Why don’t you just button your lip, like the man says.’ The dry, softly-spoken words from Cody Jagger, cut through Hemmingsway’s outburst and laid an aura of menace over the room which had not been there before. Dr Hamady looked for the source of the sound and visibly quailed when he met Jagger’s cold stare. Dorani plucked nervously at Hemmingsway’s sleeve, but the American shook him off. Sheikh Arbeid tore his gaze away from Jagger’s, then met other eyes everywhere he looked … dead eyes, of eagles, deer, boars, great fierce dogs; accusing and unforgiving eyes.

It was breaking-point for Hemmingsway, though. Where Smith possessed at least the responsibility and lustre of command, Jagger, the renegade American, the traitor for gain, was so far beneath Hemmingsway’s contempt that what little control that was left to him snapped.

‘You, McCafferty,’ he breathed, ‘you … without you none of this would have been possible. You sold yourself and your country and your honour to this pack of lice to line your pockets and crawl away into whatever sewer will have you.’ Flecks of foam appeared at the corners of his mouth and he took one, two steps towards Jagger, until they were separated by no more than ten feet.

‘Come back, Hemmingsway,’ Dr Hamady pleaded.

‘No nearer, pal,’ Jagger said. ‘I’m telling you.’ But Hemmingsway did not even hear them. He was shaking now with fury, and his eyes and senses could only encompass the man standing before him.

‘That you should presume even to speak to me is so loathsome to me that I could vomit at the mere thought of you,’ he stormed. ‘Compared with you, Smith is a knight in shining armour. If it’s the last thing I do, McCafferty, I will see that you suffer for your treachery. I will ensure that you pay for soiling the uniform you still wear. Because do you hear, you filth, you trash … do you? I’m going to tear your body apart with my own hands –’ another step forward, ‘I’m going to rip—’

Without aiming, without even moving, Jagger tightened his finger on the trigger of the machine-pistol and sent a stream of slugs into Hemmingsway, who was still coming at him, arms outstretched. One of the hands flew off, severed at the wrist; Hemmingsway’s face disappeared, its contours and definition merging into a mash of blood and bone; his trunk was almost bisected as the bullets cut through him and the clamour and gunsmoke assaulted the senses of every man in the room.

Smith had made a feeble attempt to restrain his ringer, but it would have been unavailing, for Cody Jagger was a man of the jungle; he had no conscience, no finesse, no scruples. And no control, since he had never needed to exercise any. Hemmingsway had genuinely believed he had dealt with the worst kinds of men, but he had never encountered Jagger’s type, the totally amoral creature of the twilight underworld.

When it was over, Smith laid his hand on Jagger’s arm and kept it there, looking into the ringer’s face with a calm, level gaze until the killing-light died in Cody’s eyes.

‘So, gentlemen,’ Smith said gravely, turning his false and handsome face back to the Arabs, ‘it has come to this. You have insulted my honour, and that of my men. I am, though you will not accept it, a man of honour. I did not plan this … you can have no conceivable doubt of that. Yet maybe it will serve as an indelible warning to you and to those governments who have so little regard for you that they have failed to take me seriously.

‘As I have told you –’ and his voice dropped so that they had to strain to hear him ‘– as I told you I am a man of honour. I keep my word. I gave my pledge to Malcolm Philpott of UNACO that if your nations did not find the ransom due to me immediately and inform me of it, I would execute one of you every three hours.

‘I should, perhaps, tell you now that it had been my intention to dispose of Mr Hawley Hemmingsway precisely at noon. By his own actions he has deprived himself of an hour of life. Such men are fools. You, I believe, are not.’

Smith swung on his heel and walked out leaving the hostages frozen in their horror like a ballet tableau trapped in ice.

Feisal clung to his tower and fought back the tears as the enormity of what was happening in the trophy room floated up to him on the light breeze. Then he completed his mission and used elbows, arms and hands to ease himself back down the fissure.

His legs appeared through the gap in the ceiling, and Cooligan shouted, ‘Drop, sonny. I’ll catch you.’ Feisal did as he was told. Bert carried him to the bed, and Sabrina bent over him anxiously. The boy’s colour was high, and sweat dewed his brow. Sabrina gave him a further injection and forced him to eat some gruel and black bread. Gradually, as before, the fever subsided.

Cooligan had been waiting patiently for the boy to recover, for both he and Sabrina had heard the shooting, and guessed that Feisal might be able to fill in the details. The Arab gasped as he choked on the food, and Sabrina patted his back and wiped his mouth. ‘Tell us, Feisal, if you can,’ she said gently.

He sat up, holding on to Sabrina’s arm. ‘They killed him, Sabrina, they killed him,’ he sobbed.

‘Who?’ asked Cooligan.

‘Mr Hemmingsway, the American gentleman.

There was a terrible quarrel between Mr Hemmingsway and Mister Smith, and Grandfather told Mr Hemmingsway to be quiet, and then someone else spoke, and Mr Hemmingsway t–turned on him, too, and called him things, and—’ his voice trailed off.

‘And what?’ Sabrina pressed.

‘And – and the other man shot him. He must be dead, I know. There were a lot of bullets. It went on for so long, and there was a time when nobody spoke, and then Mister Smith said he had been going to kill Mr Hemmingsway anyway, but not y-yet.’

Cooligan let the boy lapse into snuffles in Sabrina’s arms. Feisal sniffed and blinked and said, ‘I know what you want me to tell you, Mr Cooligan. And I will, as far as I can. The man who killed Mr Hemmingsway was, I believe, Colonel McCafferty. I cannot be certain, but that’s the way it came to me up there on t-top of the castle.’

The agent straightened up. ‘It doesn’t … it just doesn’t … feel right. I know Mac’s sold himself out, but God he’s no killer; not from anger or revenge. It – it doesn’t gel. Could you have been mistaken, Feisal?’ The Arab boy shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

Cooligan pursed his lips and stroked his chin. ‘That settles it then,’ he continued slowly, ‘when I get out of here, the first thing I’m going to do is put that hellhound where he belongs … six feet under with the man he murdered.’

Only then did Sabrina, still cradling Feisal in her arms, feel the rope coiled tightly around his body. She fingered it wonderingly, and he allowed her to unloose it.

Cooligan dashed to the bed and grabbed the rope. ‘Where did you find it?’

Feisal explained that it had been attached to the flag-pole. He considered the rope would be long enough to permit Cooligan to drop to a lower level and make his escape. ‘You can get through the viewing slit—’ he pointed at the external wall. ‘They have put no iron bars on the window here because they did not contemplate anyone being foolish enough to risk climbing out. But of course, if you have a rope?’ Feisal had clearly recovered some of his aplomb, and was feeling in a didactic mood. Cooligan needed no second bidding.

He crossed to the wall-length window-slit. ‘No time like the present,’ he muttered, casting around for something to use to break the glass …

At Zagreb Airport, Philpott was met by a cadre of anxious Yugoslav officials led by the Deputy Minister of the Interior. ‘My government,’ the politician announced, ‘wishes to do everything in its power to bring this matter to a satisfactory conclusion. As a loyal member nation of UNACO, we are dedicated root-and-branch to the extermination of criminals such as this Smith, and the extinction of international terrorism.’

‘Very decent of you, Minister,’ Philpott replied, guessing that Myshkin had already been busy. ‘I assume, then, that you will be prepared to offer me all the facilities I need to take Smith’s stronghold by storm?’

‘Eh – do you know where he is, Mr Philpott?’ Philpott confirmed that he did. The Minister queried whether a large assault-force would be wise.

Philpott grinned, guessing that the Deputy Minister did not really wish to involve the Yugoslav armed forces in an action where they might possibly encounter Russians. He assured the politician that he, too, considered a small UNACO force would be able to penetrate Smith’s lair while keeping a lower profile than a frontal-attack group could. ‘May I have transportation, though?’ he pressed.

‘But assuredly,’ the Deputy Minister cried, ‘one of our most reliable helicopters is waiting for you at this very airport. It is yours to do with as you will.’

He pointed to a far corner of the field, where a reliable helicopter sat preening itself. Philpott learned that the pilot would have charts to cover the area of Smith’s hideaway – wherever that might be – and any other location. Philpott expressed his thanks and began to make his way to the aircraft when he heard his name called. UNACO were on the telephone, the Deputy Minister said, with an urgent message.

As soon as Sonya came on the line, Philpott knew from the tone of her voice that she had unpleasant news. ‘Smith’s issued his instructions for the ransom collection,’ she said when he had established his identity. ‘I’ll give them to you now, shall I?’

‘No,’ Philpott returned, ‘let’s have the bad news first.’

‘Bad news?’ she echoed. ‘Well, yes … there is some … Malcolm, he’s killed Hawley Hemmingsway.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Philpott groaned, ‘I never thought he would actually do it. It’s my fault, Sonya; I gambled with poor Hawley’s life.’

She reproached him for blaming himself, making it clear that Hemmingsway had not been executed according to Smith’s announced plan. ‘He didn’t do it personally. His radio message said Hemmingsway had been shot for being uncooperative and insulting Smith’s integrity.’

‘Who did the shooting?’

‘They didn’t reveal that.’

Philpott sighed grimly. ‘Then Smith let it happen,’ he pronounced, ‘because I’m still willing to bet it was part of his scheme. He may not have been able to prevent it, but I doubt if he tried very hard. It must have fallen very nicely for him that one of his men went ape.’

Sonya let the comforting silence go on, then broke it to tell Philpott that Smith had now promised to kill all the hostages, Arabs and AF One crew members, if any rescue attempt was launched.

‘I think he means it, Malcolm,’ Sonya whispered. ‘I think he knows somehow that we may be closing in on him. He’s been told of McCafferty’s escape from Bahrain, and he must suspect the truth: that Mac followed the German – Dunkels, is it? – to the castle. He knows you’re in Zagreb – the Russians must have let on – and he probably imagines you’re on your way to the castle with a large force. I believe he’d rather everyone died, himself included, before he’d consider surrendering.’

Philpott chuckled drily, without a trace of humour. ‘Large force,’ he muttered. ‘A middle-aged has-been and a knocked-about flier. I ask you!’

THIRTEEN

Branches flailed at the head of Philpott’s knocked-about flier as he cursed for the hundredth time after falling for what seemed to be the thousandth time. If McCafferty had not been too drastically knocked about before, he was now receiving more than his fair share.

His plan, which he still followed, had been to approach the castle not from below or from the level of the road, but from above. As Mac had ruefully admitted to himself, bidding farewell to his sad-eyed donkey, that meant climbing the mountain. He had taken the lugubrious animal up as far as he dared if he was to avoid either being spotted from the castle or thrown off the donkey’s back, for by now they were struggling up near-vertical slopes.

Finally the donkey snorted and brayed his refusal to go any further, and McCafferty could not altogether blame him. He watched the donkey slide and plunge back down the mountainside and hoped the animal would still be around when he needed it later for his rendezvous with Philpott. He was not burdened with his back-pack either, though he trusted that the now positively wealthy postman’s daughter would not yield to temptation and search it.

So he had continued on foot, hanging for dear life on to the stunted shrubs, wiping dust motes from his streaming eyes, and being slowly flayed by the trees. He had brought a pair of two-way radios and selected and assembled for armament, a sub machine-gun with a leather sling and as he climbed it began to weigh on his back like a Howitzer. At last he reached a ledge wide enough to allow him to lie at full length and get his breath back. He sat up, soothed his aching muscles, zipped his anorak against the sharper chill of the air, and looked down upon Castle Windischgraetz.

The castle was even more spectacular from his lofty perch, which gave a true bird’s-eye view of it. He noted the twin courtyards and the chasm which the drawbridge would normally span, and the wooded country over to his left, the trees clustered thickly at the point where the hillside rose shallowly from the track, then thinning out a few hundred yards higher until, at his level, they were practically non-existent.

Mac found that his ledge circumvented almost the entire mountain, and he decided to take the opportunity and oversee the castle and all its grounds. He followed the curve of the castle as it hugged the convex bulge of the mountain, and noted the Kamov still sitting on the jerry-built launch-pad, its rotors spinning. To the left of the castle from the American’s viewpoint lay a large car-park reaching back to the mountainside. It was tree-shaded, and the trees then wandered up the gentle slope. It was there that McCafferty first saw the running man.

He adjusted his field glasses and was so intent on focusing on the darting, crouching figure that the significance of the Kamov’s whirling blades didn’t strike him until the little helicopter had actually taken off and started to buzz the inclined woodland. At the same time, Mac became aware – and cursed himself fluently for not noticing before – that men were searching the lower slopes of the hill below the castle, with the helicopter snarling over them like an angry gnat.

But their quarry – and who could it be but the running man? – was above the castle. One up to the escapee, Mac thought, for the man must have got free from the castle … and now the hunt was up. McCafferty at last trained his binoculars on the fugitive, but even before identification became certain, he knew it was going to be Bert Cooligan …

The agent had tied the rope securely to the kingpost of the eave and lowered himself to the next level – a balcony outside an unoccupied room. He signalled to Sabrina and she unhooked the line and threw it down to him.

Cooligan smashed another window and repeated the trick until he dropped even lower, but still he was a full ten feet from the ground, and every second he remained visible on the castle wall he was in acute danger. He scanned the terrain beneath him, but could see nothing except, directly below, a tarpaulin shrouding a shape which seemed vaguely familiar.

Cooligan abandoned the rope and used footholds in the rock to make his final descent … and froze as an armed guard wandered out and dragged the covering from the courier’s motorcycle. Had he raised his eyes by even six inches he must have seen the agent, clinging motionless over his head. Bert hardly dared to breathe; he couldn’t believe his luck would hold, and no one else would come.

But the sentry remained a lone voyeur until, shaking his head – for he would never be able to afford such a bike – he wandered off and took up his post at the main gate.

Cooligan dropped the last couple of yards, landing almost on the motor-cycle, and then he heard, coming from the eyrie above, the last sound he wanted to hear: a shout of warning.

He was protected to a degree by the natural bulge of the castle wall and the slight overhang at first floor level, which was why he hadn’t spotted the bike at once. Bert got astride the machine, switched on the ignition and twisted the throttle until the engine roared its defiance at Achmed, who had discovered his absence from the attic room.

The Arab didn’t have a clear sighting, only the noise of the motor-cycle giving him a sense of direction, but he loosed off a volley of bullets from his machine-pistol. They served to alert the guard at the entry arch, but by that time Bert had already passed through the inner courtyard, and was driving hell-bent for freedom.

The guard made the mistake of aiming his rifle at the swerving target and firing two single shots. He realised in time that he had no chance of hitting Cooligan, so he threw down the rifle and started to raise the drawbridge.

Bert could see the handle turning, and the thick slab of oak lurch off the ground on its rusty chains. He could hear, even above the engine noise, the aggrieved squeal of the mechanism, and when he passed the guard the drawbridge was already three feet up. But for Cooligan there could be no stopping.

As the Honda hit the drawbridge the guard let go of the wheel, and the bridge started an even more raucous and protesting descent. The motorcycle shot off the end and bounced perhaps a dozen feet clear at the other side. Bert yelled and gunned the motor as he sped away from the castle under a hail of bullets from Fayeed, still at the smashed slit window, and from two more guards at the bridge. Cooligan swerved and then caught sight of the guard up ahead at the closed steel road barrier.

At the moment he spotted the guard, Bert was swaying to the right, and that was the way he elected to go, taking the air once more as the bike left the road and crashed through a screen of trees and shrubs. The guard at the barrier was still two hundred yards short of him, the bridge sentries the same distance behind him – but everyone had seen the direction he had taken.

He fleetingly considered using the machine as a scramble bike and taking it to the floor of the valley, but twisting to avoid a pair of saplings, he crashed full-pelt into a rotting tree stump.

Bert was catapulted off into a bush, but clawed himself clear and began to run along the side of the hill. He figured that if he could get beyond the barrier he might stand a chance of crossing the road and taking to the higher ground, which could throw off his pursuers.

He made it undetected, and was still running for cover when McCafferty saw him …

Sipping a long Scotch on the rocks, Philpott again scanned the notes he had taken at Sonya’s dictation of Smith’s plans to collect the ransom. He was waiting now for a picture to be wired from Rome to Zagreb, which the Yugoslav minister had promised would be brought straight out to the airport by dispatch rider, but first there was another visitor. The man carried a bulky bag of soft chamois leather and juggled meaningfully with it.

‘I have brought what you want, Mr Philpott,’

said the diamond merchant. He handed the bag to Philpott, who didn’t even check its contents. A member of the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange was entirely trustworthy.

The dispatch rider was admitted with the wire photo, and Philpott studied the Polaroid with a magnifying glass. The picture showed a tiny island – Saucer Island, the caption said – accompanied by a map reference. The island appeared to jut no more than a few feet above sea-level; the map reference identified it as lying off the Dalmatian coast. The rock could have been anything from fifty to five hundred metres wide and looked flat and bare, except for the pole and cross-bar like a hangman’s gibbet someone had constructed at its very tip.

‘Is that a gibbet?’ Philpott asked doubtfully.

The Deputy Minister bent over the picture. ‘It looks like a gibbet, but logic dictates that it cannot possibly be that,’ he said. ‘Why bother to take someone all the way out there to hang him when you can shoot him comfortably in a prisonyard?’

The vertical post with the supported arm protruding out over the water was fastened to the island by a guy-rope attached to a bolt which had been driven firmly into the rock.

‘“Place the diamonds into a canvas sack secured at the top, and bearing at its fastening a steel ring precisely six inches in diameter,”’ Philpott read out Smith’s instructions disbelievingly. ‘“Loop the ring over the projecting arm.”’

‘Is that all?’ the Deputy Minister asked.

‘No,’ Philpott replied. ‘He goes on: “Do not set foot on the island. The operation must be carried out from a boat. Be warned that the island is mined. The ransom must be in position by 2000 hours this evening, or another life will immediately be forfeit. And heed well this injunction: any rescue bid will be met with fire, and the deaths of all, repeat all, captives.”’

‘Curious indeed,’ commented the politician, inquiring what Philpott wished them to do.

‘Do precisely as Smith says,’ Philpott returned. ‘Take a boat to the island, don’t land on it, merely place the diamonds on the projecting arm of the whatever it is, exactly as per instructions. No tricks; no substitute package. I want fifty million dollars’ worth of cut stones in that bag, and I want it to be where Smith expects it to be at the time he cites. I’ll be able to give you further directions later, I trust.’

The Minister bowed. ‘You are, sir, as I believe I have pointed out, in full charge of the operation. So that, should it go wrong …’ he let the possible consequences hang in the air.

‘I take the point,’ Philpott said grimly.

‘How do you think Smith is going to take possession of the diamonds?’ the politician asked, halting Philpott’s exit to the helicopter.

Philpott turned and said, ‘If I knew that I’d know how to stop him. But I don’t.’ He stalked out to the airport’s apron and made his way to the helicopter …

The sun cast a deep shadow on the mountainside, and McCafferty used the camouflage to sneak further along the ledge until he was above Cooligan. He risked a slow, careful descent, wishing neither to alarm Cooligan nor attract the attention of the helicopter pilot. When he was only a few yards short of the agent, he called out in an urgent voice, ‘Bert! It’s me. Mac!’

Cooligan spun round, and did the last thing McCafferty expected: his face darkened with fury, and he launched himself at his would-be rescuer.

Mac could have used the machine-gun to hold off the maddened agent, but he was so taken aback that he allowed Cooligan to close with him.

‘Now, you filthy bastard, now here’s where you get yours like you gave it to Hemmingsway!’ Cooligan gasped, as his hands reached out for McCafferty’s throat. Mac staggered, still unwilling to use either force or his own weapon against his friend.

‘For Christ’s sake, Bert, what the hell are you saying?’ he hissed. ‘And keep the noise down or we’ll both be caught.’

They grappled, and Cooligan fought like a berserk Viking, possessed with fury and hatred. He hit out blindly at Mac’s face, and caught him a glancing blow on the cheek-bone. Mac stumbled backwards, then his foot caught in a tree root and he toppled to the ground. Cooligan’s eyes blazed as he leapt forward to dash his booted foot into McCafferty’s face. Mac rolled desperately to one side, babbling all the while that Cooligan was making a dreadful mistake, that he was his friend, the old Mac – that the other man was a ringer!

Cooligan missed him with the first onslaught, but spun on his heel and lashed out again with his other foot. Still refusing to unsling his gun, McCafferty caught the flying boot inches from his mouth, and twisted cruelly on it. With a cry of fear, Cooligan pivoted, trying to keep his balance with outflung arms, and failing. He fell awkwardly to land on his front, and the wind driven from his lungs. It was the chance Mac needed: he bunched his muscles and jumped from the ground to fall squarely on Cooligan’s back. He twisted one of the agent’s arms, and held it pressed between his shoulder-blades.

‘Now will you listen! Say nothing – just listen! There are two of us, dummy! Two of us! That’s how Smith managed to pull the trick on board AF One. They used a ringer – and he’s out looking for you now! I got away from them in Bahrain and I’m here under Philpott’s orders. I’m to meet him shortly down the valley! Now will you for Christ’s sake stop fighting me and let me rescue you, asshole!’

All Cooligan’s fury was spent in the struggle to get free. He lay on his face, exhausted, and for the first time heard what McCafferty was saying. ‘Two of you?’ he panted. ‘Then you’re – you’re—’

‘I’m Joe McCafferty, Bert. He’s – I don’t know, someone else. Someone Smith tricked up with plastic surgery to look like me, talk like me, act like me … well enough to fool everyone on board the plane and pull off this hijack. What we have to do now, Bert, is stop him. And I think I’ve an idea how we can make a start.’

He rolled off Cooligan but, to be absolutely safe, held him at gunpoint. Cooligan sat up and eyed the weapon suspiciously. ‘I guess – I guess I have to believe you, Mac,’ he said slowly. ‘There seemed to be something not quite right about you – I mean him – at the hotel and on the aircraft, and I knew all along that, even if you’d sold out, you couldn’t have done what they said you’d done back there.’

He related the details of Hemmingsway’s murder, and McCafferty shook his head in grief; he had known Hemmingsway, and liked him for his unaffectedness and determination. Cooligan asked for the plan of action, and McCafferty inquired if the ringer was still wearing AF One uniform. Bert confirmed that he was.

‘Then change clothes with me,’ Mac urged. ‘I’ll go down the hill as the ringer, and tell them to call off the hunt. That’ll take the heat away and give us time to think.’

They swapped clothing swiftly, and McCafferty, keeping a wary eye open for his double in case the ringer had also joined the search, made contact with the guerillas and ordered them back to the castle. He separated from the taskforce on a hastily contrived pretext, and had just rejoined Cooligan when their attention was distracted by a loud thump from below.

‘That’s the drawbridge,’ Cooligan said, ‘something must be coming out.’

As they watched, the minibus clattered across the wooden bridge and took off down the road, followed by a lorry-load of men and two jeeps. McCafferty clapped the field glasses to his eyes, and counted off the passengers in the bus.

He turned to Cooligan. ‘It’s Smith and the hostages,’ he said, ‘I think they’re all in the bus, except maybe one.’

‘Which one?’ Bert demanded.

Mac hesitated. ‘I don’t know if she was even among them, but she was supposed to join the flight.’

‘Do you mean Sabrina Carver?’ Bert asked.

‘Yes. They were all there but for her.’

‘Then she must still be back at the castle,’ Cooligan said, ‘and Mac – there’s something you don’t know. She’s not just AF One crew: she’s an agent of UNACO, your people. She’ll be in deadly danger.’

‘I do know, Bert,’ McCafferty said, ‘and that’s why I’m going to get her out.’

McCafferty left one of the communicators with Cooligan and instructed him to stay under cover. ‘I’ve got a plan,’ he explained. ‘It’s worked once already, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t come good again. I’ll keep your uniform on for the moment, if you don’t mind.’

He trotted back to the castle, the gun still slung over his shoulder, and was challenged by the guards. McCafferty, who was now in the curious position of playing himself in the mad scenario mapped out by Smith, curtly told the sentries that one of the jeeps escorting the hostages’ bus had broken down. Mac noted that many of the guerillas had already left the castle, and seized the opportunity to get rid of a few more to even up the odds. He ordered three sentries to help with the repairs to the jeep or, if it couldn’t be fixed, to get it off the road.

The remaining two guerillas guarded the main entrance, and Mac left them as he made his way to the attic room where Sabrina was being held, following directions supplied by Bert Cooligan. He mounted the narrow steps and rapped on the door, expecting Sabrina to reply, but it was a man’s voice that he heard, raised in a hoarse and chilling shout of triumph …

Sabrina had first of all feared that Cooligan would be captured or killed before he even reached the ground, so quickly was his escape discovered. It was sheer bad luck that Achmed Fayeed, inflamed by the brutal murder of Hemmingsway, had determined to follow Smith’s suggestion that Sabrina Carver should be made to suffer for her deception aboard Air Force One: and suffer she would.

Achmed had brooded on the beautiful girl in the room at the top of the castle, and eventually reached a decision. He ran up the stairway, intending to isolate Sabrina and make her submit to him. He unlocked the door and threw it open; Sabrina and Feisal were still at the window monitoring Cooligan’s progress. Achmed, who had himself imprisoned the Secret Service agent in the attic, realised immediately what had happened. He called for a guard to join him and ran to the window, smashing the glass with the butt of his machine-pistol and loosing off a volley of shots at the hastily-glimpsed target.

Fayeed cursed when he saw Cooligan shoot the drawbridge on the stolen Honda. He shouted at the guerilla who answered his summons to take Feisal to the trophy room and inform either Smith or Dunkels that the agent had escaped. Sabrina was about to follow Feisal, but Achmed caught her arm and pulled her roughly back into the room. He backhanded her and she fell to the bed, her head ringing from the force of the blow.

The Arab kept his gun on Sabrina as the door closed behind the guerilla and the terrified boy. Achmed said, ‘You have crossed us for the last time. I do not think Mister Smith will care too much what happens to you, and I know he shares my opinion that it would be a pity to waste your obvious talents, by killing you too quickly.

‘You owe me your body, you Yankee bitch, and you’re going to pay up. If you haven’t known an Arab before, I can assure you that we’re experts in our treatment of women. You’ll never have another experience like it.’ He laughed, but it was an ugly sound. ‘You won’t, in any case, but your last love-making might just as well be your best.’

Achmed cradled the machine-pistol in the crook of his arm, leaving his other hand free to loosen the broad leather belt on his battledress trousers. ‘Get your clothes off, slut,’ he commanded, and when she stayed unmoving he drew from a sheath at his belt a long-bladed knife. ‘I said undress, or I’ll cut you naked with this, and I don’t care whether it’s the clothes or your lovely fair skin that comes away.’

Sabrina continued to look at him with utter contempt in her blue eyes. Achmed stole towards her, his belt half-undone, the gun in one hand, the knife in the other. ‘Which is it to be?’ he whispered. ‘Easy – or hard? Pleasure – or pain? I’m going to have you whether you like it or not, whether you’re willing or not, whether you fight me or not. I don’t give a damn what state you’re in when I finally get your legs open. I can use you just as well dead as alive.’

Sabrina’s flesh crawled with fear and disgust as she saw how unmistakably ready he was for her, even beneath the rough material of his uniform. She had hoped her refusal even to answer him might infuriate him, goad him into hasty action; but he held the knife like a trained fighter, and the pistol pointed unwaveringly at her face.

Still with her lips compressed and her eyes blazing with hatred, she knelt on the bed and shrugged off her AF One blazer. Her fingers flicked through the buttons on her blouse, and unhooked the fastener of her skirt. She rose from her knees to her feet without using her hands for support, and towered over him on the bed. The sounds of vehicles leaving the castle nagged at the edges of her mind, but she ignored them. She slipped out of the blouse and pulled down the zip of the skirt. The garment fell to the counterpane, and she stepped away from it.

As a strip routine, it lacked even a scant suggestion of style or titillation. Hers were the actions of a woman who was about to be raped; her eyes never left his, and her teeth clenched in defiance. She would never, she swore to herself, go willingly to him; and Achmed would swiftly discover that Sabrina Carver had ways of defeating him even in the height of his lust.

Sabrina kicked the blouse and skirt off the bed, and stood looking down at him, her fingers laced before her, resting on her lightly tanned belly. ‘The rest,’ Achmed muttered hoarsely, ‘take off the rest.’

She made no move to obey. ‘Kneel!’ he ordered, and she allowed her body to sag and fold until it slumped before him. ‘The rest,’ he said, gesturing again at her brassiere and briefs with the point of the machine-pistol.

More quickly than his eyes could follow, her hand came up and wrenched at the barrel of the gun, twisting his finger in the trigger-guard until he gave a howl of pain and yanked it out of her grasp. ‘You will pay for that,’ he panted, ‘by God you will pay for that.’

Sabrina’s eyes were on the snout of the gun, and she did not see the knife as its point came up to slit through the front of her brassiere and hook it off her body, leaving a faint line of blood welling on the creamy skin of her naked breasts. Her hands flew to cover them, and Fayeed hooked two fingers in her silken briefs and ripped the wisp of cloth from her groin. She could not suppress the cry of pain and outrage, and now fear, that was the only sound so far to leave her lips.

Sabrina fell backwards and her legs parted. The Arab saw her open and unprotected, and tore off his belt to bare his own body. He spun the knife to lodge it quivering in a floorboard, and dropped the machine-pistol to the ground. He bellowed in his native tongue a cry of victory compounded with lust, knelt on the bed in front of her, spread her legs wide … and slumped sideways over her as McCafferty crashed the butt of his sub machine-gun into the back of his head.

Mac dragged the Arab off the bed and threw him to the floor, and Sabrina reached down for her clothing to hide her shame and humiliation, even greater revulsion flashing from her eyes.

‘That’s not a nice way to look at someone who’s just saved you from a fate worse than death – and most probably death as well,’ McCafferty said. ‘You don’t have to say “Thank you”, but at least you needn’t make me feel you’d rather I was down there on the floor and he was back on the bed having his evil way with you.’

‘In some ways,’ Sabrina spat at him, ‘I’d prefer Achmed to you, if it’s got to happen. He may have been an animal, but it was honest lust from a straightforward lecher. You’re so tricky, Mister, so – polluted, I think I’d rather die than know you’ve touched me.’

Mac sighed. ‘Jesus, this guy really made a mess of my life without knowing the slightest damned thing about me.’

Sabrina pulled the bedclothes up to cover herself, as much against the chill in the air as to cloak her nakedness. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Who are you talking about.’

McCafferty explained. Unsurprisingly, like Basil Swann and Bert Cooligan, she didn’t believe him. But, again like her two colleagues, she came to be convinced, and was still avidly questioning him when Achmed seized the knife from the floor and struck at the American’s stomach. Sabrina’s warning half-scream alerted him, and he stepped back far enough to let the point of the blade pass through his shirt-front and scrape the skin.

Mac swung the machine-gun again, and Achmed, who had risen to his knees and was lunging forward once more with the knife, felt the gun barrel rake his face. He spat and sprang to his feet, blood leaking from his mouth. He sensed that Mac dared not fire the gun for fear of alerting a guard, and leapt at the American with the knife held high. Mac smashed the gun into the Arab’s wrist and the blade flew across the room.

Mac’s foot shot out and hooked around Achmed’s bare leg. Fayeed swivelled and started to fall, and McCafferty, holding the sub machine-gun now in both hands, looped the sling around the Arab’s neck twisting the gun until the knot was tight. Using the weapon like a straight arm in a Chinese stranglehold, he imprisoned the Arab’s head and rammed his knee into the small of Achmed’s back, the rifle a rigid bar on the Arab’s throat. No other noise came from Achmed Fayeed, pseudo-princeling of Bahrain, and he died in less than a minute, his face suffused, his sight masked by bursting blood vessels, his mouth engorged by the swollen tongue.

FOURTEEN

Slinging the sub machine-gun once more across his back, and partially concealing it with his anorak in case anyone spotted it as American issue, McCafferty escorted Sabrina downstairs under cover of Fayeed’s machine-pistol. He had noticed another jeep in the interior courtyard, loaded with supplies, and three more in the car-park.

The castle seemed empty, but Mac was treading warily in the event that the ringer was still around, for he had not been among the passengers. Neither could he chance meeting a guard who might be on first-name terms with the ringer. When he reached the courtyard, an orderly was packing the last of the supplies on the jeep. He glanced curiously at McCafferty and the girl, but made no comment.

Sabrina whispered, ‘Where is everybody, for God’s sake?’

‘Gone,’ Mac replied tersely. ‘They left in a bus. Where to, I don’t know. I only wish I did. What’s more, I’ve no idea how we’re going to find them.’

‘The boy, Feisal, too,’ Sabrina said, ‘was he with them? I’ve got to know, because he’s ill, and I’m the only one who can treat him.’ Mac confirmed, low-voiced, that Feisal had been on the bus.

They made their way across the drawbridge, passing what seemed to be the only three remaining guards. One, who had been leaning against an entrance pillar, came upright and alert when he saw McCafferty. ‘Back so soon?’ he inquired in thick, heavily-accented English.

‘Orders,’ Mac said. The guard’s round, pockmarked face took on a puzzled expression, and he murmured something in Serbo-Croat to one of the others. Then he fixed his eyes on Mac again and said, carefully, ‘Orders from where? Mister Smith left long before you did.’

McCafferty glanced at the car-park and saw only two jeeps: the ringer must have used one to join the main party at wherever it was the hostages had been taken. He plucked the communicator from his belt and sneered, ‘There are other ways of receiving orders than having somebody shout them at you, dummy. If you want to know, I was sent back to get her—’ indicating Sabrina.

‘Isn’t the Arab looking after her?’ the guerilla asked with a suggestive leer.

Mac grinned. ‘He was. Now he’s recovering.’

The guard laughed and translated for his friends. McCafferty said he had been told by Smith to bring Sabrina in immediately. Achmed and the other sentries were to wait a further half-hour, and follow in the last jeep.

‘And the supply-truck?’ the guerilla inquired, waving his machine-gun towards the internal yard.

‘It’s to go as soon as it’s ready,’ Mac ordered.

‘To the caves?’

‘Where else?’

Mac prodded Sabrina towards the nearest jeep, and she drove it out of the car-park on to the road. ‘Caves?’ she mused.

‘Seems like it. Anyway, it’s the only clue we have. What we must do now is get behind the supply-truck and follow it, and we’ve got only this one vehicle. As I need it myself, I don’t quite see how we’re going to manage.’

They rounded a bend in the road and Mac could see in the distance the red and white cross-bar of the road barrier. A guerilla lounged indolently beside the weighted end.

‘Damn it,’ McCafferty cursed, ‘I was afraid of this. We have to pick up Bert Cooligan at some stage, and I wanted everyone from the castle to think we’d gone straight to the caves.’

‘What will you do?’

‘What I have to.’

He motioned to her to stop by the barrier, and got out of the jeep just as the sentry started to press down on the leaded fulcrum. ‘Speak English?’ Mac asked the guerilla.

‘A little,’ the man replied unsurely.

Mac pointed at the guard’s chest, and then in the direction of the castle. ‘You – go back there,’ he instructed.

The Yugoslav nodded cheerfully, slung his rifle, and turned to leave. As he did so, McCafferty threw an arm around his throat and drove Achmed Fayeed’s knife into his back. The sentry slumped to the ground without a cry, and Mac dragged him to the downward slope and rolled the body into a patch of undergrowth.

‘Now what?’ Sabrina asked. McCafferty ditched the knife and said, ‘I’ve just remembered that we do have more than one vehicle.’

‘That’s right,’ Sabrina put in excitedly, ‘Bert got away on a motor-cycle.’

Mac nodded. ‘You take the jeep and follow the supply-truck, and I’ll recover the bike and use it to link up with Philpott.’

‘Why not the other way round?’ she returned. ‘I’d be less noticeable on the bike, with a crash-helmet, and Mr Philpott would have a more comfortable ride in the jeep.’

McCafferty shook his head wonderingly and replied, ‘I might have known it. I suppose you were the High School scramble champion?’

Sabrina winked at him. ‘Not quite, but I made him teach me how to ride.’

They squared the ground where Mac thought the motorcycle might be, and Sabrina found it. ‘It’s in one piece,’ she shouted triumphantly, hauling it upright and jumping on the starter. ‘And what’s more it works.’ They wheeled the Honda back up to the road, and concealed it and themselves behind a clump of trees. Presently the sound of an approaching vehicle caught their ears. Sabrina mounted the Honda, with Mac holding it upright, and started the engine.

The jeep, its swaying load tied down with ropes, passed them. Sabrina counted to ten, opened the throttle, and roared out on to the road. She had McCafferty’s communicator in her belt, and banked on Bert Cooligan staying on high ground to receive her message when she had located Smith’s new hideout. She had not, though, been able to find a crash-helmet.

McCafferty rejoined Cooligan up the mountain and gave him the details of the plan. They decided that when the coast was clear, Bert should return to the castle and await Sabrina’s contact from there. He armed the agent with the dead sentry’s rifle.

‘Has Sabrina got a gun, too?’ Cooligan asked, his voice worried.

Mac hesitated, then nodded. ‘The Arab, Achmed, tried to rape her. I managed to stop him, but I had to kill him. She’s got his machine-pistol. In any case, I’ve more guns back in the valley for when I pick up Philpott. We’ll be a regular little army, huh?’

Cooligan grinned and wished McCafferty luck as he left to take the jeep down the hill into the village. The Secret Service agent squatted on his haunches holding the rifle, butt first, on the ground before him, and saw the still-tenanted castle bathed in the amber glow of the late afternoon sun. He settled down to wait.

The track straggled off the mountain to the town of Knin, where four major roads converged. Sabrina kept the guards’ jeep in clear sight until the terrain flattened out on the coastal plain of Hrvatska. She thought the jeep might be bound for the resort of Sibenik, but from Knin it diverted on to a minor road heading for Benkovac and the coast, and then threaded through a maze of tracks until it reached a spot which she judged must be twenty to twenty-five kilometres from the castle, and about ten inland. What was more, she was back in hill country again, though it was no match for the Dinaric Alps.

She had now to exercise greater care, for they had the road more or less to themselves. Luckily it was as winding as the castle track had been, so she was able to lurk out of sight around bends, and then sprint to catch up with the receding jeep. The sun was only a blazing segment to the west, and Sabrina mentally crossed her fingers that they would find the caves before the light failed.

The jeep started to slow down, so Sabrina eased the Honda off the track into the shelter of a scattering of boulders. The jeep swung right and began climbing the rock-strewn hillside. Sabrina switched her gaze to higher ground, and saw a barred gate fronting a vast concrete abutment set into the flank of the hill. The jeep stopped at the gate, and an armed guerilla materialised to check the visitor. Behind the concrete slab she could just pick out the dark mouth of a cave.

Sabrina propped the Honda against a rock and scaled the hill at an oblique angle to take her above the cave entrance. Leaning out perilously far, she saw that the concrete deck was wide and deep enough to take the minibus and several more vehicles, while still leaving a large unfilled space. She shifted her position, and craned her neck even further to look into the cave itself. A battered signpost, uprooted and reclining forlornly against the entrance wall, bore a skull and crossbones and the German warning, ‘Achtung!’ alongside a device that suggested explosives. A wartime ammunition dump? she wondered. It would have made an ideal site. She spotted the points of stalactites hanging from the vaulted roof of the cavern, but could make out nothing beyond that, though the space was well lit by electricity supplied from a generator humming away in the background.

Sabrina grimaced, and pulled back. She needed to know more of the geography of the caves and, if possible, the exact location of the captives.

Carefully, for the sentry was still at his post, she climbed on up the hill until she reached the crest. She could see now that the caves must extend further than she had imagined – and that they were divided by a natural break.

The cavern which formed the entrance to the caves opened out on to a deep gorge over an unseen but audible river. A narrow bridge spanned the gorge, and the pathway at the other side disappeared into the mouth of yet another cave. The suspension-bridge was railed, but appeared none too safe. Sabrina grinned: she was sure she had located the hostages’ hiding-place, for Smith would not neglect such a splendid opportunity to make either escape or rescue as difficult as possible.

She activated her two-way communicator, and within a few seconds was talking earnestly to Bert Cooligan at Castle Windischgraetz …

When the minibus arrived at the caves, Smith himself had unlocked the gate. The hostages were shooed unceremoniously off the bus, Feisal holding tightly to Zeidan’s hand as the crippled sheikh was loaded into his wheelchair. A chatter of engine noise from above announced the arrival of Dunkels in the Kamov helicopter. One of Smith’s guerillas activated the generator and pressed a switch to flood the gloomy cavern with light. The multi-hued limestone formations from ceiling and floor brought a gasp of admiration from Feisal.

Guards shepherded the captives through the cavern, and once more Sheikh Zeidan was hauled from the wheelchair when they reached the flimsy bridge. Dr Hamady took the first nervous step on to the bridge, clutching the rails and allowing himself to be led over with his eyes closed. Zeidan was next, chaired by two sentries and watched anxiously by Feisal in his wake. Dorani and Arbeid followed, with Fairman and Latimer heading the crocodile of Air Force One crew members.

Smith brought up the rear, but before commencing his crossing he ordered Dunkels to establish radio-contact with the castle. ‘Check with Jagger whether they’ve caught Cooligan yet. If they haven’t, get airborne again and give them a hand. At any event, I want the castle personnel here as soon as they’ve left everything safe. Tell Fayeed to get rid of the girl Carver – any way he pleases.’

Dunkels hurried off, and Smith traversed the gorge to join the hostages, who were perched on an outcrop surrounded on three sides by a drop of a hundred feet, and under the watchful eyes of a pair of guards. Steps cut into the side of the cave descended to the ledge, and Smith negotiated them cautiously to stand before his captives. ‘Not quite the Ritz,’ he apologised, ‘but at least you’re under cover.’

Sheikh Dorani regarded him under beetling brows. ‘When do you propose to release us?’ he demanded.

‘As soon as the ransom is in my possession,’ Smith returned affably.

‘And when will that be?’ Zeidan growled.

Smith consulted his watch. ‘By nightfall,’ he said reflectively. ‘Fifty million dollars in diamonds. The largest ransom in history, I believe.’

‘Kidnappers are notorious not for the size of their unlawful gains but the heinous nature of their crimes,’ Zeidan intoned. ‘If you are remembered at all, Smith, it will be as the common criminal you undoubtedly are.’

Smith turned to face the old Arab, who leaned back in his wheelchair as if it were a golden throne, and regarded his captor with abhorrence. Zeidan knew that of all the hostages, he alone possessed the ability to unsettle Smith’s composure; it was a weapon he used sparingly, and always to great effect. Zeidan gambled that in these infrequent outbursts, when his dignity was affronted, Smith was inclined to tell the truth. That was what the sheikh was seeking now to learn.

Smith’s voice was a silky threat. ‘Would you rather I be remembered as a mass murderer, Your Excellency?’

‘That is your prerogative,’ Zeidan grunted, ‘and could well be your epitaph.’

‘If it is my epitaph, Sheikh Zeidan, I can promise you it will also be yours and that of your grandson.’

Latimer snapped from the darkening lip of the ledge, ‘You must be certifiable, Smith, if you think you can get away with killing all of us, because that’s what you’ll have to do, and take the ransom as well.’

Smith looked across at him, his good humour and confidence restored. ‘Fortunately for you, Major, I am neither insane nor an instinctual killer. But … if you provoke me too much, any of you, or if you should attempt to escape, you have my promise that you will not leave this place alive.’ He turned and remounted the stone steps, and left silence, doubt and terror behind him …

McCafferty had just been able to make out Sabrina’s Honda in the distance as he spun the wheel of the jeep to take the opposite direction for his appointment with Philpott. He reached the village without meeting another vehicle, recovered his pack from the postman’s daughter, and fortified himself with a few beers to while away the time. He didn’t have long to wait: he saw the helicopter before its engine noise reached him, and made a bet with himself, which he won, that the pilot would land in the same field where he himself had parked the UTVA. Mac saw Philpott stoop unnecessarily as he ran under the rotors, and appreciated how truly alone they were when the helicopter promptly took off again.

Philpott listened to McCafferty’s account, and questioned him closely on key points. When Mac had finished, Philpott said grimly, ‘So we still don’t know exactly where the hostages are, and we can’t find out until we make contact with Cooligan.’

‘That’s the size of it,’ Mac conceded.

‘Or what Sabrina’s doing, or whether she’s in danger.’

‘That, I must admit, is the part that worries me most,’ McCafferty replied.

She was at that moment squirming back down the hillside, mostly on her bottom, to repossess the Honda. She got to it undetected, kicked the motor into life, and was wheeling the machine on to the track to take the same route back to the castle, when she looked up and saw the helicopter bearing down upon her.

Dunkels had been airborne before Sabrina arrived at the caves. His radio link with the castle had revealed not only that Cooligan had not been recaptured, but also that Fayeed had been strangled, and that Sabrina Carver was missing. The German had analysed the confused message about the mysterious reappearance of Jagger at a time when the ringer ought to have been at the caves with Smith and the hostages.

He reported to Smith, who quickly grasped that the genuine McCafferty was back on the scene to ring the changes on his alter ego by posing as himself.

‘How can you be sure?’ Dunkels asked.

Smith rounded on him, his control slipping, fury twisting his features. ‘Jagger was here!’ he screamed, ‘so he couldn’t have been up there, idiot. He’s still here. Take the helicopter – now! Find Carver and bring her to me – alive. I must know Philpott’s movements. Look for a motorcycle … they’ll have abandoned the jeep.

‘McCafferty will have gone by now to join Philpott’s force, but Carver will be around here somewhere, on the motorcycle Cooligan used. Get her, Dunkels.’

‘How d’you know she’ll be around here?’ Dunkels asked unwisely as he turned to leave.

‘Because she’ll have followed the supply-jeep here,’ Smith sneered, almost frantic with rage now. ‘The timing fits, you fool. Get out! Now! And do not return without her.’

Sabrina ducked off the road and skidded to a halt under a sturdy beech tree. She could hear the Kamov circling overhead, and peered up into the branches. The sun was leaving the sky now, but the twilight air was crisp and clear, and she saw Dunkels at the controls ease the helicopter lower and lower until its blades threatened to decapitate her tree.

She unclipped the machine-pistol, took careful aim, and fired a burst through the foliage at the grey, swooping shape. Dunkels jerked back on the stick as a stray bullet ricocheted off the fuselage of the Kamov. He rose above the little copse and flew out of range, then buzzed her hiding-place like an angry wasp. He sighted a clear space to his left, and gained height again, banking sharply at the end of his spiral to signal his obvious intention of landing.

Sabrina took the bait. While the Kamov hovered a few feet from the ground she remounted the Honda, throttled up and roared away from the concealment of the trees. It was only when she heard the rising engine whine of the helicopter that she realised she had been tricked: Dunkels had merely made a landing feint to flush her out of cover.

She swore fluently and skirted a tufted hillock to crash through a hedge which she hoped might lead to another coppice, only to find herself in an even bigger field. There was a wood at the other side, though, and she was streaking towards it when Dunkels caught up with her again. The first bullets from his own machine-gun tore red divots out of the bumpy ground.

The German played cat-and-mouse with her, and she could see him through the perspex awning of the cockpit, laughing as he brought the helicopter down to block her path and force her to swerve dangerously away. Then he backed off and she resumed her course, but wrenched at the handlebars again as the rushing blades of the Kamov fanned the air only a few yards from her face. Dunkels chased her this time, forcing her back the way she had come until she spun the Honda round and, ducking low in the saddle, drove it straight under his wheels.

But she had neither the speed nor the manoeuvrability to elude him, and the end was inevitable, for Dunkels had noticed something she could not have seen: between the field and the copse that was her target lay a small pond, sunk into a dip in the ground, and not visible from her vantage-point.

As a sheepdog would, he herded her across the pasture, and like a rabbit fleeing the teeth of a snapping hound, Sabrina scuttled in the direction he wanted her to go, lurching and weaving to avoid the helicopter and the constant stream of bullets. She had hated being chased as a child, and when she was cornered, her resolve to fight always gave way to hysteria. She was sobbing now, and close to total panic when the Honda left the ground and back-flipped her off to dump both of them in the middle of the pond.

Sabrina lay stunned and half-drowning in the murky water. She came to as Dunkels gripped her by the collar and hauled her to the muddy bank. He stood astride her, letting her lay there in her misery. Then he leaned down, grasped her hair, pulled up her head and smashed his fist into her face.

For the second time she lost consciousness, and when her brain again struggled through the mists of returning awareness, the noise of the Kamov’s engine completed her disorientation. She collected her thoughts and flexed her arms and legs. Dunkels had not even considered it necessary to tie her.

Above the roar of the helicopter, Bert Cooligan caught the few words she managed to get out before Dunkels shot Sabrina’s communicator to pieces.

‘Bert!’ she screamed, ‘they’ve got me! They’re taking me to the caves!’

Sonya Kolchinsky felt oddly comforted by the presence of Brigadier Tomlin standing beside her in the prow of the motor launch, cutting through the Adriatic off the coast of Dalmatia. Since Philpott had been told he was in complete charge of the operation, Sonya had used UNACO’s authority to browbeat the Yugoslavians into yielding every ounce of assistance she could squeeze from them. With a fair-sized naval task-force at her disposal, she had bludgeoned the Deputy Minister of the Interior into conceding a NATO commanding officer. Tomlin had needed no second bidding, and jetted over from Naples almost before the words were out of the politician’s mouth.

Now he looked gloomily over his shoulder at the waning light, and snapped on his torch to study a sea-chart of the myriad of islands sprinkled around like seaweed between their embarkation port of Split and the Italian peninsula of Venezia Giulia.

Sonya sighed and looked for reassurance from the lights of Sibenik winking at them from the shoreline. The lights of the next coastal town of any size, Zadar, were more distant. She had been confident, based on the geographical relationship of the landing strip to the castle to the presumed location of the hostage caves, that Smith’s ransom island would lie somewhere between Sibenik and Zadar, which tied in with his necessarily generalised map reference. But they had covered the territory once, and it was coming up to seven o’clock, only an hour away from Smith’s deadline for placing the diamonds on the gibbet.

‘We obviously missed it first time,’ Tomlin declared. ‘We’ll have another look.’

‘But it’s almost dark now,’ she protested.

‘Nonetheless, we go on searching,’ Tomlin pronounced firmly. There were three other boats in his flotilla, and he was in touch with English speakers aboard each of them. ‘Quarter the area again,’ the brigadier ordered, ‘and bear in mind that the island could be a hell of a lot smaller than it looks in the photograph. What we’re seeking may not be an island at all – just a rock.’

Tomlin returned to his chart. They rounded the island of Kakan with Kaprije to starboard and the larger bulk of Kornati to port. Murter passed to starboard and Zut to port, and ahead of them, lying off the seaward coast of Pasman Island, was another islet which Tomlin immediately identified. He stabbed his finger on the chart and said ‘Lighthouse,’ with immense satisfaction. Just then the beam of the light flashed on and swept the sea before them. Sonya stammered ‘It’s th–there! Over there!’

On its return trip the light confirmed the fleeting impression she had gained. It picked out the flat bulge of Saucer Island, lying like an upturned dinner plate in the sea and washed by breakers. On the starboard rim of the island stood the gibbet.

The helmsman of their launch followed her pointing finger and steered the vessel through the chunky waves towards the little island. Tomlin held up the Polaroid and glanced from the snapshot to the islet, now transfixed in their lights and those of two other vessels in their fleet. ‘Spot on,’

he said, ‘well done, Mrs Kolchinsky. First-class piece of observation.’

The launch made a complete circuit of the island before drawing up and backing in to take position next to the curious pole with the horizontal arm.

‘Don’t get too close,’ Tomlin warned the cutter’s crew, ‘and no one, but no none, must make any attempt to land on the island. I don’t want anybody slinging hooks near that pole or prodding it with guns or anything else. We don’t want to berth there; we just want to get far enough in to let me drop this bag over that projecting arm, and we can do that while we’re still on the move. If we miss, we’ll try until we succeed.’

As it turned out, they needed three passes before Tomlin found his range and encircled the arm with the metal ring. He rubbed his hands together briskly and his teeth gleamed under the pencil moustache as he favoured her with a glowing smile. ‘Excellent,’ he pronounced. ‘Now we lay off and take posts.’

‘Where do you suggest we go?’ Sonya inquired, and Tomlin jerked his head at the neighbouring island. ‘No sense in staying out here in the cold when we can be sitting down over a steaming mug of cocoa,’ he chortled.

‘Cocoa?’ she echoed blankly.

‘Quite so,’ Tomlin replied. ‘Never knew a lighthouse-keeper yet who didn’t make jolly good cocoa. That’ll be our headquarters, ma’am, if you agree.’

Sonya grinned at him appreciatively and said, ‘Spot on, Brigadier. With you all the way. Cocoa it is.’

Tomlin barked into his communicator, ‘All units. Calling all units. Proceed to designated stations forthwith. Flagship will moor at the island 30 degrees to starboard, and the command post, offering a full view of the rock at all times, will be the lighthouse. If you read me, please acknowledge.’

Three Aldis lamps blinked in acquiescence, and Tomlin ordered his crew to proceed to the lighthouse while the flotilla, manned by armed marines, ringed Saucer Island and sat a quarter of a mile off like sharks waiting for dinner-time.

Smith received Sabrina with icy politeness, trusting she was none the worse for her encounters with Achmed at the castle and Dunkels in the helicopter.

‘Not at all,’ she said sweetly, ‘they behaved like the perfect gentlemen they obviously are.’

‘Or were, in Achmed’s case,’ Smith pointed out. Sabrina tried to conceal her alarm at the news that he had learned of Fayeed’s death.

Smith, however, forestalled any lies she might have invented. ‘Of course I know Achmed is dead,’ he said, ‘and what is more I am aware that he was killed by Colonel McCafferty – the real Colonel McCafferty, if you follow me, not our ersatz and somewhat shop-soiled model.’

Again she wished she had a poker face, but what nature had not given her she found it impossible to assume. So she replied, evenly, ‘All of which indicates that you’re on the point of losing, doesn’t it, Mister Smith?’

‘To the contrary,’ Smith beamed, ‘Philpott will be able to do nothing to prevent me from picking up the ransom, and I have prepared a little surprise to guard my back. I am beginning to find these Arabs decidedly tiresome. No, Sabrina, I have not lost; neither shall I. All Philpott is doing sitting off my island with a—’

‘If you think that—’ she began, and bit her lip in anger.

‘I didn’t really,’ Smith purred. ‘Indeed, I imagine him to be much closer to my castle than to the seashore, since of course you were kind enough to supply him with the location of these caves through your communicator, and he would hardly have had time to get here yet, would he? No doubt he and Colonel McCafferty are at this very moment linking up with the agent Cooligan to plan how they can best launch their assault force on this stronghold.’

Once more she tried to keep her expression neutral, and for the third time failed. Smith laughed in genuine amusement.

‘My dear Sabrina,’ he chuckled, ‘there really is no point in submitting you to persuasion, when all one has to do is study your lovely face and get all the answers one needs. I have now learned that Philpott, possibly with McCafferty and Cooligan, are at or near my castle, and that far from possessing an army capable of defeating me, they may well be acting entirely alone. Probably they have some assistance at sea, where I would guess that the estimable Mrs Kolchinsky is holding the fort—’

Sabrina flushed and her lower lip quivered. ‘Bull’s eye again,’ Smith chuckled. ‘There we are, then, the complete picture.’ He beckoned to the grinning Dunkels. ‘Siegfried, give our beauteous “Brünhilde” some hot food, then take her to join the others, that they may all meet their Götterdämmerung together.’

He laughed full-bellied, and strode into the main cavern …

Philpott groaned and swore when Cooligan brought him and McCafferty up to date with the news of Sabrina’s capture.

‘How long ago did you get her message?’ he rapped.

‘Not ten minutes,’ Cooligan replied.

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ Philpott said, with feeling.

‘Why so gloomy, Chief?’ McCafferty asked. ‘Sabrina’s a tough cookie, isn’t she? Surely she’ll be able to take care of herself?’

Philpott’s response was a resigned sigh. ‘It isn’t that, Mac,’ he admitted, ‘it’s just that we’ll now have to assume that Smith knows everything, and act accordingly.’

‘How so?’ Cooligan frowned, as mystified as McCafferty.

Philpott grinned ruefully. ‘Sabrina never could lie with a straight face,’ he explained. ‘She’s like an open book: plenty of guts, plenty of brains, but not a shred of guile.

‘No – Smith will have found out as much as he needs by now. I was going to hold off trying for the caves until Smith had picked up the ransom, so as not to endanger the hostages unnecessarily; but all that’s changed. We must strike at the caves first, and quickly. I have a suspicion that the hostages’ lives may not be worth a row of beans after Smith’s got his hands on the diamonds.’

McCafferty objected, ‘But I thought you said he wasn’t a murderer by design.’

Philpott shook his head wearily. ‘I know, Mac,’ he replied, ‘but this operation seems to be different. He’s already allowed Hawley Hemmingsway to die, and since he knows we’re hot on his tail he may be starting to feel threatened. And we all know what rats do when they’re cornered. I fancy I’ve always assumed that Mister Smith is some sort of gentleman bastard … but I’ve never seen his evil side, Mac. For everyone’s sake, Sabrina’s included, we must tread very prudently from now on.’

As the ‘assault force’ boarded the jeep to take them to the caves, Smith stood, arms folded, alongside Jagger at the side of the suspension-bridge nearer to the captives on their cold, cramped ledge.

Smith looked approvingly, and Jagger grinned, the light from his torch picking out the guerilla who was placing a plastic explosives charge into a hole in the wall of the cave above the ledge.

Unseen by the hostages below, the man wired a detonator to the plastique, and rolled the coil of bright yellow cable across to Jagger. The ringer scooped it up and spliced the loose end into a reel. He backed across the bridge unwinding the cable, and Smith followed him, meticulously avoiding the wire snake.

FIFTEEN

Sabrina sat on a rock eating a peppery goulash and pondered the meaning of Smith’s last remark. The connection she did make – the Wagnerian one between ‘Siegfried’, ‘Brünhilde’ and Götterdämmerung – was not reassuring, since the ‘Twilight of the Gods’ implied the destruction of practically everyone in sight.

At the end of Dunkels’ gun she was conducted to the bridge over the river chasm, where they had to give way to Smith and Jagger returning from the hostage cave and sharing some secret diversion. Her eyes met the ringer’s, and for an instant she knew the sensation of cold steel in her heart.

The fleeting insight of Jagger’s gaze boring into her own made her now unswervingly sure of something she had merely suspected: that whatever fate Smith had planned for the captives, Jagger intended killing every last one of them.

She read the message unmistakably in the ringer’s eyes as clearly as if he had spoken the words. And he did not hide the pitiless loathing he felt for her, for he knew that he would never see her again.

The realisation brought her to a halt on the swaying bridge, and she felt the barrel of Dunkels’ machine-pistol drill into the small of her back. She looked wildly round at him, and down at the slatted wood under her feet, then back at the entrance cavern, and stumbled as she tried to move. Dunkels’ arm shot out and supported her as she half fell – but before he pushed her roughly ahead she caught the barest glimpse (and again – and there, again!) of the yellow cable tacked to the side-runner of the bridge.

Anger swiftly replaced the fear in her, and she strode off the bridge barely acknowledging the bomb which she could see clearly in its nest of rock. Dunkels propelled her down the steps, where Feisal ran to her, and she caught the boy in her arms.

‘Don’t let her out of your sight,’ Dunkels said in Serbo-Croat to the single remaining guard, ‘and keep away from her yourself. She’s dangerous. She may not look it, but she is.’ The guard nodded curtly, and Dunkels backed up the flight of steps and disappeared.

Sabrina eased the boy from her embrace, but allowed him to lead her to his grandfather. She guessed that neither Sheikh Zeidan nor any of the other hostages knew that Smith had given Jagger the means to kill them all, and she preferred to tell Zeidan first and seek his counsel.

The old Arab heard her out in silence, and allowed his eyes to stray only once to the point high on the wall of the cave where Sabrina indicated the explosives were placed. Feisal followed his gaze, then turned his head back and looked steadily at Sabrina.

‘If you recall,’ the boy said softly, ‘I am rather good at climbing. Should you or someone else be successful in persuading the guard not to look, I believe I could get up there and defuse that bomb.’

Sabrina gasped and shook her head violently. ‘No!’ she whispered. ‘Never! I couldn’t forgive myself if anything happened to you.’

Sheikh Zeidan’s hand fell on her wrist and he tugged it gently. ‘The decision would not be yours to make, Miss Carver,’ he said. ‘Nor indeed would it be mine. Feisal is of royal blood, my blood, going back untraceable numbers of centuries. He is brave like the desert lion and as fearless as a hunting falcon. If he wishes to do this thing, then he shall. Besides,’ Zeidan added with a twinkling smile, ‘he does know about chemistry.’

‘He does?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Feisal, ‘I have dealt with explosives before.’

Philpott sniffed the air again. ‘Still smells like goulash to me,’ he said.

‘Whatever it is,’ McCafferty replied, ‘we’ve found the place.’

With Cooligan, they had driven to the approximate area of the hostage caves indicated by Sabrina’s directions, and spent a fruitless twenty minutes exploring the locale with shaded torches, until Philpott caught the odour of home-cooking.

‘You stay here, Chief,’ Mac directed. ‘Bert – over to the other side of that concrete outcrop there; it’s obviously the front door. I’ll get above them and flash you: once for all clear, twice for guards. Don’t reply.’

They were scarcely in position when all doubt was removed. The entrance cavern was flooded with light, the two sentries came to attention, and out walked Mister Smith into what McCafferty could now see was a car-park for the minibus, a collection of jeeps, and Dunkels’ Kamov helicopter.

Smith halted before the bus, then turned and beckoned towards the mouth of the cave. Jagger came to join him.

From above and below, Joe McCafferty and Malcolm Philpott got their first in-the-flesh sighting of the ringer, and each man experienced a thrill of dread as they realised how appallingly difficult it would have been for AF One crew members – or anyone else who had known McCafferty – to tell the ringer from the real thing.

Smith’s voice wafted down to Philpott. ‘As soon as the diamonds are in my hands,’ he told Jagger, ‘I’ll signal you. Then you can clear out and leave the hostages. I’ll make sure Philpott knows where they are.’

‘Do you have your insurance with you?’ Jagger asked.

Smith held up his hand and revealed a small flat box fitted with a switch and an inset timing device. ‘I have it. Any trouble with the ransom and I’ll use it. I’ll warn you first, though, so that you get our people out of the way.’

‘Will the signal be strong enough to detonate the bomb from somewhere out at sea?’ Jagger queried.

Smith grinned and replied, ‘Plenty strong enough. I made it myself.’

While they were talking, Philpott had been inching through the rocks under the cave’s mouth, and was now hauling himself up to the car-park. He crouched behind the minibus as Smith bade the ringer farewell and boarded the bus. Smith was talking earnestly to the driver and so missed seeing the next thing Jagger did. But Philpott saw it.

The ringer pulled from his pocket a small flat box identical to Smith’s, glanced at it, and stowed it away again.

The engine of the minibus stuttered into life, and when the vehicle negotiated the steep declivity to the road, Malcolm Philpott was clinging for dear life to the rear luggage rack …

One of the guerillas commanding the entrance to the caves relieved himself noisily against the rock wall, called out something undistinguishable to his friend, and disappeared inside. The other guard pulled the gate shut after Smith’s bus had left, and locked it. He was strolling back to his post when McCafferty dropped from an overhanging boulder and flattened him. The guerilla squealed as the breath left his body, and Mac chopped him crisply behind the right ear. The American whistled, and Cooligan ran to join him. Together they trussed and gagged the guard. Cooligan pulled the body into the car-park and lodged it under a lorry.

‘Now for Sabrina,’ Mac whispered, for the second time that night; Miss Carver, he thought, was getting to be a problem.

‘Yeah, I wonder what she’s up to?’ Cooligan echoed.

Seduction, that was what she was up to. She sauntered over to the Yugoslav sentry who unslung the machine-pistol from his arm and presented it to her barrel first so that she could see the rifling. His finger was on the trigger, and he said something to her in Serbo-Croat which, from the tone he used, Sabrina judged to be most unpleasant.

‘That’s not friendly,’ she murmured, ‘I was only trying to get acquainted. It’s pretty boring here, you know.’

His eyes showed he had not understood a word she was saying so she continued, in the same conversational tone, ‘Up you go then, Feisal. This guy’s so intent on keeping me under close surveillance that I think we could smuggle in a troupe of performing elephants and he wouldn’t notice.’

Feisal slipped from behind his grandfather’s wheelchair and used the other Arabs as a screen to get out of the sentry’s line of vision. At the wall, Fairman hoisted the boy up the first few feet and enabled him to get a toe-hold.

Sabrina moved closer to the guerilla until the gunpoint lodged in the valley between her breasts. She licked her lips and purred, ‘Is that the best you can do?’

The guard flushed and backed away, but his eyes still held hers as, fleet and silent, Feisal gained height. The Yugoslav waved at her impatiently with the gun to keep her distance, and Sabrina pulled a face at him and wiggled over to the rim of the ledge. She stooped down – and the sentry’s gun followed her. She looked back over her shoulder at him, grinned, and picked up a handful of pebbles.

She stood at the very edge of the rock face and peered down into the dark pit. Attractively oscillating her rear end, she tossed the stones, one at a time, into the void …

From his windy perch, Philpott saw the indicator-light of the minibus wink left, and as the bus pulled off the road and slowed to a halt, he dropped off and rolled behind a handy bush. He peered into the darkness, heard the crash of waves, and smelt the sea. Smith instructed the driver to take the bus back to Castle Windischgraetz, and in a moment he was alone with the noises of the night and the waters and the soughing breeze … and Malcolm Philpott.

Philpott cautiously raised his head and saw a lone cyclist pass Smith, respond warmly to a greeting in the local dialect, and continue on his way. Smith crossed the road and stood for a moment framed against the skyline in the bright light of the moon. Then he disappeared from view. Philpott rose stiffly to his feet and gave chase. From the opposite side he heard the sound of Smith scrambling down an incline. Philpott waited until he reached the bottom, then followed him.

A standing lantern came on, and Philpott shrank into the shade of a stunted tree. He saw Smith haul from a hiding-place under a rock an Avon dinghy with an outboard motor at its stern. Smith carefully emptied the boat of sand and fragments of brushwood, then unscrewed the lid of the petrol tank and topped up the fuel-supply from a small can of gasoline. He pushed back the sleeve of his brand new anorak and glanced at the illuminated face of his watch. The deadline for the placing of the ransom had passed by a good half-hour, but Mister Smith was in no unseemly hurry. He smiled a satisfied smile, and looked calmly out to sea.

Ten minutes went by, and Philpott fidgeted uneasily, fighting the cramp that was stealing into his muscles. He held a gun in his left hand and clasped the tree with his right arm, but he was fast tiring of the crouching position he’d been forced to adopt.

Then Smith moved. He stooped and picked up from the sand a rope-line which Philpott hadn’t spotted. He tugged on the line, and a row of bubbles erupted on the surface of the water and followed a straight course out from the shore.

Philpott half straightened and leaned forward to get a better view. The crumbling shale beneath his feet gave way, and with a manic shriek he pitched down the bank to fall practically at Smith’s feet.

The gun flew from his grasp, and Philpott scuttled crabwise to retrieve it until Smith planted a boot firmly on his outstretched hand.

Sabrina dropped the last pebble into the abyss and turned her head to wink at the Yugoslav, who couldn’t take his eyes off her. That was the moment of secondary sexual communication which Feisal chose to shatter by losing his hand-grip on a sharp splinter of rock. He gave an involuntary cry and slithered down the rock face until he was suspended ten feet over the guard’s head.

As the guard looked sharply up at the boy, Sabrina dived at the man’s legs and tackled him. He lurched backwards and fell to the ground, but his finger still curled about the catch of the machine-pistol, and when Sabrina dived after him and grabbed the barrel, the sentry pressed down on the trigger.

A spray of bullets spattered against the wall and bounced around the cave like demented fireflies. Sheikh Dorani howled as a stray shot clipped his shoulder-bone, and Sabrina strove mightily to bend the pistol back against the guard’s hand.

With the fingers of her other hand she clawed at the man’s face and drew blood, but he closed his eyes to avert the worst of the damage. He brought his knee up into her crutch, and she gasped and heaved. The Air Force One crewmen stood by helpless, not daring to intervene while the Yugoslav held on to the gun. Finally, with a massive effort, the guard drove his elbow into her face and pulled himself to his feet, with Sabrina still clinging to the pistol.

The guerilla punched her savagely again and tore the gun from her grasp, then bellowed in pain and surprise as Feisal landed heavily on his back.

The man and the boy crashed to the rock floor together, and once more the machine-pistol stuttered and coughed. But it was Feisal who rose with his hands and shirt-front drenched in blood. The Yugoslav lay on his back, his face, throat and chest shot away, one sightless eye staring at the crystal mouldings on the roof of the cavern.

Sabrina threw her arms round the sobbing child and kissed his cheeks. Then she surrendered him to Dr Hamady and ordered Fairman to get to his knees. She clambered on his back and gritted her teeth and she began to scale the rock face, for the bomb had still to be neutralised …

Jagger and Dunkels heard the burst of firing while they were supervising the clear-up operation in the main cavern. Most of the guerillas had already left, deploying to their secret mountain bases. Jagger swore and grabbed a sub machine-gun, ordered Dunkels to guard the approach to the bridge, and ran to investigate.

Cooligan and McCafferty were lying low in the entrance cave planning their next move when the sound of the shooting reached them. Cooligan immediately drew the wrong conclusion. ‘He’s done it, the bastard,’ Bert choked, and started for the tunnel leading to the bridge. McCafferty grabbed his arm and pulled him back, explaining that the ringer was unlikely to launch a shooting massacre when all he had to do was explode the bomb.

The two agents used rock-cover to get them to the tunnel, and it was sheer bad luck that Dunkels turned to look behind him just at the instant when a shaft of light glinted on the stock of McCafferty’s gun …

Sabrina looked long and hard at the bomb. The detonator was wedged firmly into a crevice in the rock, and the wires, sunk into the viscous mass of pink plastique, might be delicately poised to resist dismantling. She dared not risk setting the explosives off accidentally, so she tried to saw through the trailing yellow cable against a sharp edge of rock. Her head was bent to the task when Jagger’s gun tickled the soft hairs behind her left ear and his voice said ‘Drop the wire.’

She froze, and the cable slipped out of her hand. The ringer plucked the machine-pistol from her belt and motioned her inside.

Then Jagger himself froze as another fusillade of bullets crashed into the wall at his side. He spun round to see Siegfried Dunkels stagger out of the tunnel on to the bridge, clutching his torn stomach. Slowly, almost balletically, Dunkels folded and draped across the suspension-cable. He tried to right himself, but his head fell forward as he died, and his body toppled into the chasm.

McCafferty hurdled the corpse of the guard, brought down in the same burst as that which killed Dunkels, and at last came face to face with his other half – himself! – across twenty feet of rickety bridge.

Mac raised his machine-pistol and caught his trigger-finger just in time when he saw, in the dim lighting of the second cave, that the ringer was using Sabrina Carver as a shield.

‘Back, McCafferty,’ Jagger shouted, ‘or she gets it. You too, Cooligan.’

Mac waved Bert away and retreated himself, still keeping the ringer in his line of vision. Somehow, Jagger knew that the odds were stacked against him, and played his last lunatic card. Fear of the Russians, of Karilian, of what they could do to him if he failed to carry out their orders, governed his life to the last. He groped in his pocket and brought out the detonator.

‘Three minutes,’ he breathed, and pressed the time switch. ‘Three minutes and you’re all dead.’

He shoved Sabrina ahead of him to re-cross the bridge, and saw McCafferty and Cooligan withdraw further into the tunnel. When she and Jagger reached the other side, Sabrina rounded on Cody savagely and yelled, ‘You can’t, you mustn’t, kill those people. They’ve done nothing to harm you. What kind of animal are you, Mister No-Name?’

The ringer exploded and lashed at her face. She took the blow on the chin and crumpled to the ground, striking her head on a rock. ‘The name is Cody Jagger – do you hear?’ he screamed at her senseless body. ‘Do you hear, McCafferty? I’m Cody Jagger, and I’m going to kill you and everyone else here!’

Mac’s answer was a burst of pistol fire which sent Jagger reeling back unhurt into the darkness of the bridge. He snarled an obscenity when he saw that the detonator had fallen from his hand and was lying a yard from Sabrina’s head. The timer showed two minutes before the bomb would explode.

Jagger began to crawl towards the detonator, but McCafferty had him in clear view now. ‘You’re covered, Jagger,’ he shouted, ‘drop the gun.’

Cody rose and loosed off another salvo until the firing-mechanism jangled on the empty chamber.

The detonator’s timing device clicked round to one minute.

Jagger threw the useless gun away and jerked out the machine-pistol he had taken from Sabrina. He never got to press the trigger: McCafferty shot him twice through the hand, and the gun clattered on to the bridge.

Mac advanced, and his eyes flickered to the ticking remote-control box, then back to Jagger’s face … his own face, warped with hatred, licking the blood from his hand.

‘You son of a bitch, McCafferty, I should have killed you back in Bahrain, but the Russians wanted you alive.’

‘The Russians?’ Mac cried. ‘You work for—’

Sabrina chose that second to moan and stir, and McCafferty’s eyes left Jagger’s long enough to search for her face. Cody heaved himself at the American and kicked out at his groin.

The electronic timer showed thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty seconds.

Mac took the kick on his thigh and rocked back as Jagger caught the gun in his wounded hand and crashed the other into Mac’s face. But Jagger couldn’t retain his hold on the pistol. Blood was pumping from his hand, and his fingers fell away. He tried to defend himself one-handed. Then McCafferty got a lock on him and splintered his cheek-bone with the butt of the gun.

Cody’s head came up, his lips slid away from his teeth, and his eyes glazed over. Mac used the gun butt on him again, and Jagger keeled over against the rail. It broke under his weight, and his dying shriek lasted until his body hit the pointed rocks of the river-bed.

Sabrina screamed when Mac turned to her. Her mind strove to cope with the man standing before her. Who was he? Who had won the fight? She clasped her hands to her pounding head, then reached for the machine-pistol, and McCafferty cried, ‘It’s me, you silly bitch.’

She let the gun go, and in the hiatus that followed they heard the remorseless ticking of the timer. They both dived for it, and she was nearer.

When she switched off the detonator, and disconnected the battery wires, the clock face showed two seconds to blast-off.

‘You’re not quite the last man in the world I expected to see, Philpott,’ Smith remarked urbanely, ‘but I honestly didn’t imagine you’d suddenly drop in out of the blue in that vulgar manner.’

Smith removed his boot from Philpott’s hand, and kicked the gun into the sea. ‘Get up,’ he commanded. Philpott tried, but fell back grimacing with pain.

‘I think I’ve hurt my foot,’ he apologised.

‘Serves you right,’ said Smith. ‘You must have had a pretty rough journey, too. I suppose you rode on top of the bus.’

‘Something like that,’ Philpott admitted.

Smith’s eyes gleamed and he smiled broadly. ‘Then you’re alone. How convenient – for me. If you can make yourself comfortable on the sand, I would advise you to do so. You will not have long to wait, and I can promise you that what you see will be of consuming interest to you.’

Philpott moaned and lay back, clasping his hands behind his head. ‘What were you doing,’ he asked, ‘when I inflicted myself upon you so rudely?’

Smith put a finger to his lips. ‘Patience,’ he said, ‘and all will be revealed.’ He took from his anorak pocket a small flat metal box.

Philpott recoiled in horror. ‘Don’t, Smith,’ he pleaded, ‘for God’s sake don’t do it. Those people are innocent. You’ll get your ransom. They don’t deserve to die.’

Smith smiled and juggled dexterously with the little box. ‘As I thought,’ he mused, ‘you know far more than is good for you. But on this occasion, Philpott, you’re wrong. This box –’ pointing to the one in his hand ‘– is not the detonator for the explosives at the cave.’

He pulled another, seemingly identical, box from the same pocket. ‘This one is.’

Philpott regarded him in amazement. ‘Two detonators for the same job? Or rather – three?’

‘Three?’ Smith repeated. ‘What are you talking about?’

It was Philpott’s turn to smirk. ‘Now there’s something you don’t know about, Mister Smith.

Your pet doppelgänger has one just like that,’ he said, indicating the bomb timer.

Smith looked apprehensive, and impressed. ‘How clever of you to find that out, Mr Philpott,’ he murmured. ‘So our Colonel McCafferty – whose name, incidentally, used to be Cody Jagger – has designs on the hostages too, has he?’ He remained in silent thought for perhaps a minute, then turned his blank grey eyes on the UNACO chief.

‘I would only have considered killing the captives in the event of the direst emergency, Philpott. I think you believe that. Jagger, on the other hand … Jagger is all beast. Clearly I must waste no more time.’

He dropped the detonator timer back into his pocket, and pressed a button on the second device. ‘Look!’ he directed, pointing dramatically out to sea.

Philpott followed his arm. In a blaze of fiery sparks, a rocket scorched into the air from Saucer Island and drew a comet’s tail track in the night-sky.

SIXTEEN

Brigadier Tomlin stalked over to the tripod in the light room and jammed his eyes for the hundredth time into the socket of the telescope. ‘This is getting ridiculous,’ he barked, ‘nothing’s happening at all.’

‘It’s less than an hour since the deadline,’ Sonya Kolchinsky pointed out reasonably, ‘and Smith didn’t guarantee to act immediately. Anyway, with all this hardware around, we may have succeeded merely in frightening him off. He’s not to know, after all, that we’re only here to have a look-see.’

Tomlin straightened up and bristled at her. ‘It’s not my job, ma’am,’ he said, ‘to make life easier for a bounder like Smith.’

She was about to frame a suitably barbed reply when the lighthouse-keeper drew their attention to the rocket, which neither of them had seen leave the island, being too occupied in glaring at each other.

‘Damn and blast it!’ Tomlin roared, ‘so that’s how he’s doing it.’

He snatched a communicator from the table and snapped, ‘All units, repeat, all units. Track that rocket. Don’t lose sight of it. Mark where it falls and recover it. Move!’

Smith watched the performance through powerful binoculars and chuckled as the watchdog ships peeled away. ‘So splendidly predictable, the military,’ he mused. ‘Do you not agree, Mr Philpott?’

‘I take it that the little fireworks display had nothing to do with the collection of the ransom,’ Philpott observed.

Smith wagged his head, and tut-tutted. ‘But there you would be wrong, my dear fellow. True, it served admirably as a divertissement, but its principal objective is important, indeed crucial, to my plan for picking up the diamonds.’

Sonya Kolchinsky wasn’t fooled, either. ‘We’re going to the island, Brigadier,’ she announced firmly.

‘We are not, Mrs Kolchinsky,’ Tomlin replied, equally firmly.

Sonya bridled. ‘You have more than sufficient units tracking that Roman Candle. We will take the command boat – the flagship, as I believe you call her – to the island.’

‘And why, pray?’

‘Mainly because I say so. I shouldn’t need to remind you, Brigadier, that you are under UNACO command. I don’t believe for a moment that the rocket has been magically oriented to pick up our bag of diamonds and transport them to Smith’s current lair. We will investigate.’

Tomlin heaved a theatrical sigh and muttered, ‘As you wish, ma’am.’

When the launch slowed to a halt at the gibbet end of the island, Tomlin pointed to where the pole had been and proclaimed, ‘There! I told you – it’s gone!’

Sonya frowned, then peered into the water where the strong searchlights of the boat were playing. ‘It hasn’t, Brigadier,’ she cried, ‘it’s still there.’

Before Tomlin could prevent her, she stepped from the prow of the cutter and jumped on to the island. Tomlin shouted, ‘It’s mined! For God’s sake, be careful!’

Sonya turned to him and waved. ‘Don’t be silly, of course it’s not mined,’ she called out. She trotted over to the centre of the rock slab and found the tube from which the rocket had been launched. A length of singed cord lay half out of the hole, and she examined it curiously. Then she returned to the edge of the island and searched for the pole – which, as she had reported to Tomlin, was indeed still there, only now it was lying horizontally on the surface of the sea, with the cross-bar projecting down into the water.

Tomlin followed her gaze. ‘By Jove,’ he mumbled incredulously, ‘the bag is still there, too. Shall I have it recovered, ma’am?’

‘Please, Brigadier,’ Sonya replied.

But as a crewman with a boathook leaned over to scoop up the leather bag, a dark, ghostly shape cleaved the water past the launch. Its nose speared the six-inch metal ring which Smith had insisted must be fastened to the end of the bag. The grey shadow swam away, and with it went fifty million dollars in cut diamonds.

Tomlin’s eyes almost left his head. ‘What – what the blue b—bloody blazes was that?’ he spluttered.

Almost in a dream, and half to herself, Sonya Kolchinsky murmured, ‘God Almighty, you’ve got to hand it to Smith, haven’t you.’

‘What was it?’ Tomlin demanded, his puce countenance turning purple in the garish light.

Sonya pulled herself together. ‘What was it, Brigadier? A dolphin, of course. What on earth did you think it was – a submarine?’

McCafferty finished prodding the bruise on Sabrina’s head and remarked, unfeelingly, ‘I think you’ll live.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Are we ready, then?’ McCafferty bowed and conducted her into the cramped seat of the Kamov helicopter. ‘Your carriage awaits, m’lady,’ he joked.

They had collected the hostages and sent them back under Cooligan to the Kosgo airstrip, located for them by the Yugoslav Air Force. Mac suggested that the AF One crew should recover their aircraft and prepare it for take-off. If all turned out well, and Smith was either captured or at least prevented from snatching the diamonds, Philpott’s party would join them later for the trip to Geneva. ‘Anyway, Bert, I’ll see you’re kept informed,’ he promised, as the small convoy pulled out of the car-park and descended to the floor of the hostage-cave valley.

‘Which way, skip?’ Sabrina inquired as they took off.

‘The coast,’ McCafferty answered matter-of-factly. ‘That’s where the ransom-drop is taking place.’ They zoomed up into the starlit sky and Mac banked the Kamov sharply to bring it round for a nose-down straight run to the Adriatic …

‘A what?’ Philpott echoed faintly.

‘A dolphin,’ Smith said. ‘That’s what I was doing when I pulled on the rope-line just now. It released the end-wall of the dolphin’s cage, and it was also the signal for her to start swimming.

‘She needed to keep going for only three or four minutes, homing in on an ultrasonic direction-beacon built into the pole of what you called the gibbet, which your considerable armada was frightened to examine in case the apparatus, or indeed the entire island, was mined.’

‘Which of course it wasn’t,’ Philpott supplied drily.

‘Which of course it wasn’t,’ Smith confirmed. He then explained at length how the dolphin had been purchased and trained at a dolphinarium in America until she could have made the pick-up blindfolded. The rocket also operated a device linked to a cord which uprooted the guy-rope supporting the pole, and tilted the gibbet down to sea-level, Smith added.

Philpott listened in silence, then drew a deep breath and exhaled in a frustrated sigh. ‘I hate to admit it, Mister Smith,’ he said, ‘but it’s impossible not to admire your style, if not your actual objectives or methods.’

‘Why thank you,’ Smith beamed, and gave the UNACO director a mocking bow. He looked out to sea again when Philpott observed, ‘Your talented lady mammal has come back to daddy.’ The row of bubbles, effervescing more furiously than ever, had reappeared.

Smith picked up the rope again and waded into the water for perhaps ten yards. He hauled on the line, and the caged dolphin gradually emerged from the waves. ‘Well done, my angel,’ Smith boomed approvingly, patting the dolphin’s snout and removing the ransom bag in one smooth gesture. ‘I may never see you again, but believe me, I am eternally grateful to you.’

He turned and walked back, the chamois bag slung over his shoulder. ‘I’ll leave you now, Philpott,’ he announced, ‘but let me add one cautionary word: should you feel that you can still prevent me from escaping, remember that I have another electronic device still in my possession. This one.’

He pulled a metal box from his anorak, and Philpott had no doubt whatsoever that it was the detonator for the bomb which could destroy the Arab and American captives – provided, that is, that Jagger had not already murdered them.

Glumly, Philpott watched in silence as the dinghy pulled away from the beach. He dug both hands into the sand beside him, picked up fistfuls of watery gravel, and threw them after Smith, as though he could stop him by a display of sheer bad temper.

The Kamov cleared the coastline and spanned the necklace of tiny islands, seeing the activity aboard the three naval cutters milling about looking for traces of a long-dead rocket, and spotting Sonya arguing with a tall, red-faced soldier – English, Sabrina thought – on another launch, moored next to an island which was hardly more than a rocky platform.

‘Perhaps Smith’s already cleared off,’ Sabrina shouted above the roar of the helicopter’s engine.

McCafferty nodded, and jabbed his finger repeatedly at the little island. ‘Shall we land and try to find out what’s going on?’ he cried, miming the action in case she hadn’t caught the words.

‘What do you think?’ Sabrina yelled above the helicopter noise. Mac thought for a moment, then shook his head. He indicated that they should return and search for Philpott. ‘He may actually be on to something.’

They dropped until they were practically brushing the waves, and when they reached the shoreline, McCafferty guided the Kamov in a futile patrol of every promising cove, inlet and cliff. Each time they drew a blank – until Sabrina spotted a signal fire.

Mac gave a jubilant whoop and spun into a tight turn. ‘It’s him!’ Sabrina yelled as they buzzed the beach. ‘He’s still piling brushwood on the fire, and there’s a gasoline can lying beside it. Smith must have left it behind.’

McCafferty manoeuvred the Kamov into the likeliest-looking stretch of firm sand on the small inlet, and set her down near Philpott’s fire. He and Sabrina piled out, and quickly found that the UNACO chief was suffering from outraged dignity and a nasty ankle-sprain. Sabrina soothed him with a résumé of the latest developments, and a cold compress.

Philpott had struggled to his feet, supported by McCafferty, when Sabrina reached the description of the killing of Jagger and the neutralising of the bomb. He swore viciously and almost overbalanced. Sabrina rushed to help, but Mac was able to keep him upright.

‘Well, what are you waiting around here for?’ Philpott demanded excitedly. ‘Get after Smith! The only thing holding me back from having a go at him myself was that damned remote-control detonator, and this damned ankle. Naturally I couldn’t afford to risk harming all of you, though I guessed when I saw you’d escaped that Mac had been able to pull something out of the hat.

‘But now we can’t afford to lose a second. He’s out there, in that blasted dinghy. Where he’s heading, I don’t know, but it’s my opinion he’s sailing off to join a larger boat, or taking his loot and landing it further up the coast. He’ll have a vehicle stashed away somewhere. Anyway, that’s the direction he took. After him, damn it! I can look after myself!’

They jumped back into the helicopter after promising to radio Sonya with Philpott’s location. McCafferty spotted the Avon dinghy less than twenty miles away, weaving a path round the island of Pag to enter the Velibitski Kanal, a treacherous strip of coastal water strewn with half-submerged rocks and other traps for the unwary mariner.

Mac banked the helicopter again and motioned to Sabrina to take charge of both guns. ‘Shoot the bastard out of the sea,’ he yelled as hard as he could. ‘We’ll worry about the ransom afterwards.’

Smith was within five hundred yards of the shoreline, one hand gripping the wheel of the dinghy, the other resting lightly on the ransom sack. He wore a happy, even insane, smile, and the spray whiplashed his face and the wind tore at his hair; but Mister Smith was past caring. He had won, as he always knew he would! He was truly invincible, invulnerable. None could stand against him – not even the great Malcolm Philpott and all the resources of UNACO!

‘I’m going to head him on to the beach, or crash him into the rocks,’ McCafferty shouted. ‘As soon as I get close enough, start shooting. Kill him if you can, but most of all I want him good and scared.’

Sabrina shivered as she checked the guns. She was remembering another helicopter chase, when she had been the quarry. She did not believe she could ever expunge from her mind the horror and despair of being hunted by that huge fast bird, cleverer and more ruthless than any of nature’s winged predators. She could almost feel sorry for Smith; but when she got him in her sights and emptied half a magazine of tracer-rounds at the jinking boat, her hatred of him returned and she was a cold, calculating special agent again.

The idiot grin vanished from Smith’s face as the bullets whipped the foam piling up on either side of the dinghy. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the Kamov. At first he thought it must be Dunkels and that he had only imagined the shooting, but then Sabrina opened up again, and he spied her face in the helicopter searchlight, and the mane of brown hair streaming over her shoulders.

McCafferty dived as near to the dinghy as he dared and dropped speed, zipping over Smith’s head and throwing Sabrina’s aim. Smith opened the throttle and changed course. The helicopter banked and darted in for another searingly-close pass. This time Smith was forced to wrench the wheel to starboard and turn the boat for the shore.

Mac bayed his triumph and settled on Smith’s tail. ‘Take him while he’s going straight,’ he shouted to Sabrina. She sighted on the hunched figure, but some instinct raised the short hairs on the back of Smith’s neck, and as she pressed the trigger he was already selling a dummy to port and bringing the craft into an agonising right-hand bend.

The helicopter once more overshot its mark and Smith resumed his course parallel to the coast. For the third time Mac brought the Kamov in, then charged across Smith’s bow, whipping up spouts of water and spray. Smith shut his eyes, hunched down even further, drew the sleeve of his anorak across his face and doggedly held his line, dropping and increasing speed, twisting and tacking, handling the dinghy like a master to shake off the accursed helicopter – or to force McCafferty into a fatal error.

Sabrina pantomimed a lay-off position above the dinghy and matched Smith’s speed, so that she could get a good, steady shot at him. Mac obediently held an escort station, and Sabrina riddled the side of the dinghy with bullets, but Smith, who had dived to the bottom of the boat, steering blind, rose unhurt.

Mac kept the position at Sabrina’s insistence, and immediately regretted it, for Smith, holding the wheel with one hand and the leather bag between his knees, fired a machine-gun from the hip. McCafferty throttled back and screamed away as the shots ricocheted off his undercarriage.

‘You’ve annoyed him now, my pet,’ he said to Sabrina, who shouted back, ‘So what!’

‘Leave it to me,’ McCafferty insisted at the top of his voice, ‘I’ve got an idea that can’t miss. Start shooting again when I tell you.’

He brought the Kamov in carefully to starboard of the boat, then opened up and dipped to the seaward side, yelling ‘Now!’ Sabrina pressed the trigger of the machine-pistol and kept her finger down until the gun was belching nothing but hot air.

Distracted, Smith yanked the wheel over and ploughed into a course for the shore. He fired back over his shoulder but his aim was erratic, and McCafferty, instead of beating a hasty retreat, managed to close until he was flying directly above the dinghy, knot for knot at Smith’s speed.

Try as he might, Smith couldn’t shake the Kamov loose, and Mac dropped the aircraft down until he was no more than a few feet over Smith’s head. Lower and still lower he sank, while the down-draught from the helicopter’s flailing rotors grew more violent.

Sheets of water strafed the boat, buffeting and blinding its driver. He could no longer use the gun, for he could not sight a target. He could no longer steer the dinghy, for he could not see where he was going.

He tugged and twisted the wheel this way and that, and each time he abandoned his course he somehow strayed back to it. He was an experienced sailor, but this was worse than the most awesome typhoon he had ever known. Smith shrieked his fury at the wind and the waves – and all the time, though he did not know it, he was sailing closer and closer to the rocky shore.

McCafferty looked ahead, peering through the spray, and saw the coastline looming up, now less than fifty yards away. Grimly he kept the Kamov at its post, tossed like a cork though it was in its own down-draught. At the last possible moment he pulled up and away and Smith could see – but it was too late. He spun the wheel frantically to avoid a rock, and instead struck a floating log a few feet offshore.

The sodden, splintering wood acted as a launching ramp, and Smith’s dinghy took to the air. It spun like a dart and thudded into the beach. Smith was catapulted through the windscreen and flung to the wet sand like a rag doll. Fairy lights exploded before his eyes, and he was glad the torture was over. McCafferty spread the flats of both hands wide in a repeated sweeping gesture, and Sabrina got the message: there was no room to land the helicopter on Smith’s beach. She jabbed her own finger towards his recumbent form on the sand, and Mac nodded vehemently. Sabrina checked that she had a full clip in the machine-pistol, slung it over her shoulder, and heaved herself out of the Kamov. Her feet found the landing skids, and she vaulted lightly to earth, sending Mac off with a cheery wave to find another landing place.

She bent over Smith’s body: he was starting to come round. Mischievously, Sabrina picked up the ransom sack and put it under his head as a pillow. Then she checked the shattered Avon dinghy, retrieved Smith’s gun, unloaded it and threw the magazine away. The lantern he had brought with him still worked, so she propped it on a rock and switched it on.

Smith opened his eyes, and saw her pale face, framed by the now quiescent halo of hair, cast in the light of the full moon and the rays of the red metal lamp. His gaze fell to the gun she held trained on him. She was kneeling about four feet from him, and when he levered himself up to support his body on his elbows, she relaxed and sat back on her heels.

‘Game’s up, Mister Smith,’ Sabrina said laconically. ‘Too bad. You’re quite a guy in your own weird, perverted way.’

His head darted from side to side like a cobra’s as he searched the beach for the bag of diamonds. Sabrina grinned and remarked, ‘Maybe you’re not so smart, huh?’

‘What have you done with them?’ Smith asked.

‘Taken them back to Philpott? I can’t believe you’d do that, Sabrina … you of all people. Your body would look so – exquisite – picked out in diamonds.’

Sabrina gave an ironic chuckle. ‘Mister,’ she said. ‘I’ve stolen more diamonds than you’ve had Lobster Thermidors. What’s so special about these?’

‘They’re mine,’ Smith replied, ‘by right of conquest, planning, superb execution. They’re mine, and I want them … but I will share them with you. Fifty-fifty?’

She shook her head. ‘It’d be no fun that way,’ she mused. ‘I get my kicks from stealing diamonds, not by being made a present of them. Besides, where would I spend them? I don’t have your contacts, and Mr Philpott would be very displeased.’

Smith sat up, shaking off the last effects of his ordeal. ‘Then come with me,’ he urged. ‘I don’t have to tell you we’d make a superb team. I’ll share everything with you, Sabrina … and I have so much. Great houses, châteaux, a ranch, an island in Micronesia—’

‘Only one?’

Smith grinned. ‘I know you’re mocking me now, but just use that agile brain of yours and think. You’re still young and quite appallingly beautiful. Do you want to waste your substance running from the police of a dozen countries, or risking your life for Malcolm Philpott’s gratification?

‘You’re an odd girl, you know; very odd. You’re quite splendidly amoral on one side of your existence, and I deeply admire you for your remarkable accomplishment as a jewel thief. And yet there’s this grotesque puritanical streak in you that seemingly makes you want to deny to other people the pleasure you yourself derive from criminal activities. It’s a disturbing mixture; and I am not sure I could easily accommodate to it.’

‘That’s that then,’ Sabrina returned briskly. ‘I told you we’d never make it. Apart from anything else, what do I really know about you, Mister Smith? What does anyone know – you, even? Who are you, where are you from, what do you really look like? Oh, I know the face you’ve got now, but that’s different from the one you wore when we last met. No – on reflection, I don’t think I could ever “accommodate”, as you put it, someone so desperately anonymous as you, Mister Smith. Master criminal you may be, but you’re not a person in the accepted sense. You’re a kind of – kaleidoscope. And colour patterns bore me, buddy. I like cool, glittering sparkles – lots of them.’

Smith surveyed her with a sardonic grin. ‘Too bad. But at least tell me what you’ve done with the ransom sack.’

She pointed behind him. ‘The metal ring which you were so insistent we fastened to it, is at this moment about an inch and a half from the back of your right hand.’

Smith jerked his eyes down and murmured, ‘Delightful, my pet. You are truly capricious. I like that.’

She waved the gun at him. ‘That’s as close as you’re going to get to them, sweetheart. When McCafferty comes back, you return to the cooler, and the rocks, unfortunately, to the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange. In fact, I think I hear Mac’s engine now.’

Smith cocked his ear and observed that she was probably right. Then he started a stream of aimless chatter, probing her about minor irrelevancies, praising her, praising Philpott, McCafferty, UNACO, the Savoy Hotel Grill Room … and by the time her suspicion that he was trying to distract her hardened into certainty, a boat had drawn up on the beach. A man clad in a black wet suit, holding a large torch in one hand and a gun in the other, stood behind her.

‘You,’ the man said in guttural English, ‘the girl. You. Up.’ Sabrina straightened and swivelled on her knees to look into the barrel of his gun and seven others. A silent ring of men, wet-suited and anonymous, made it abundantly clear that if she fought them, she would die.

She climbed to her feet and tossed the machine-pistol into a bush.

‘Good,’ said the man, and turned to Smith. ‘You – into the boat.’

‘My friend,’ Smith cried. ‘I don’t know who you are, but you’ve come at the right moment. I want to—’

He reeled back as the leader of the group cuffed him sharply on the mouth. Blood dribbled from his split lip, and Smith’s eyes grew large and frightened.

‘Into the boat. No time for talk.’

Smith recovered some of his composure. ‘Of course, of course,’ he soothed. ‘I take your point utterly.’ He bent triumphantly to Sabrina. ‘Well, my sweet,’ he crowed, ‘it appears that, after all, you have lost and I have won. It’s a great pity you did not accept my offer. It is, of course, unrepeatable.’

‘I’ll live with the disappointment,’ Sabrina said drily, although she was inwardly boiling with rage and frustration. How could she have been so dumb as to mistake the noise of the launch for McCafferty’s helicopter? And where the hell was Mac, anyway?

Smith bowed – then his eyes flashed again as two men roughly seized his arms and propelled him towards the boat. He protested loudly, but they picked him up and dumped him over the side, still clutching the ransom bag.

The launch revved, the sea churned in its wake, and the wind rose, and above the noise Sabrina could hear Smith’s voice, screaming, pleading, commanding.

As the boat pulled away from the shore with its passenger and wordless sentinels, a dark object flew through the air in a graceful arc and landed at her feet.

She picked it up by the metal ring and opened the chamois leather bag.

Fifty million dollars in cut diamonds glinted warmly in her eyes.

Philpott had fashioned himself a rude crutch and was now stoking his fire more for the comfort it provided against the chill night air than for its value as a beacon. He was engrossed in the task, but his keen ears caught the soft footfall behind him. His senses flared and he looked for the gun McCafferty had left him. It was lying by the fire, after he had used it as a poker.

‘You won’t need the weapon, Mr Philpott,’ came Myshkin’s soft, sinister voice. ‘I am sorry to see that you are hurt. It is, I trust, nothing serious.’

Philpott turned to greet his visitor, the flames dancing merrily behind his head. ‘Not too serious, General,’ he replied. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?’

Myshkin’s lips tightened into a smile. ‘Merely that I wished to offer you my congratulations, Mr Philpott. You have won at least half of your battle.’

‘Won? What are you talking about?’ Philpott gabbled.

Myshkin’s mouth actually relaxed. ‘You will soon learn everything, I am sure. Suffice it for the moment to say that your charming agent Miss Carver is in possession of the ransom money. Intact. No deductions for expenses.’

Philpott gaped at him. ‘And Smith?’

Myshkin shrugged and spread his hands apologetically. ‘There, I’m afraid, is the half of the battle you lost. Mister Smith has been, shall we say, removed from the scene for a while. If he had been captured by your forces, you would have put him back into prison, and that, my dear Philpott, would have been a criminal waste of an extraordinary criminal mind.’

Philpott let out a cynical chuckle. ‘You mean you have him, General, and of course you want to make sure he keeps quiet about your own questionable role in this affair.’

Myshkin shrugged again, and observed that Smith would probably keep a low profile for an acceptably long period of time. ‘Then – who knows?’

‘Who indeed?’ Philpott retorted. ‘And when, pray, did all these miracles happen, Myshkin?’

The KGB man studied his watch and said, ‘I think you will find my intelligence is accurate, Mr Philpott.’

Philpott inclined his head. ‘It’s good to see you acting in the capacity of a loyal and upright UNACO member state, General.’

Myshkin loosed an oily grin again. ‘I thought you’d take that view, Mr Philpott. May I offer you a cigar?’

‘You may.’

Myshkin produced a handsome leather cigar case inscribed, in ornate gold letters, ‘With affection and respect: Warren G. Wheeler.’ Philpott accepted a Havana-Havana and a light, and drew the smoke gratefully into his lungs.

‘Isn’t that your transport?’ Myshkin asked suddenly, pointing at the skyline. Philpott peered after his finger, and picked out the winking lights of a helicopter.

‘It is,’ he confirmed, ‘and Mac’s guiding one of our launches in so that I can get a more comfortable ride.’

He turned back and began, ‘Well, I must say, General, I’m greatly impressed—’

But he stopped in mid-sentence, for Myshkin had melted away into the night …

Philpott sat at a table in Air Force One, supporting his sprained ankle on a cushioned seat. He glowed expansively as Dr Hamady said, ‘Naturally, I can only speak for the sovereign state of Saudi Arabia, but I think it likely; if only as a tribute to our departed and lamented colleague, Hawley Hemmingsway, that we shall consider the oil accord to bear every chance of success. What do you say, Your Excellency?’ he asked of Sheikh Arbeid.

The Iraqi grunted agreement. The Libyan, Sheikh Dorani, followed suit. The Bahraini, Sheikh Zeidan, smiled gravely, and Feisal nodded enthusiastically.

‘I am sure the American Government will be most grateful to you, gentlemen,’ Philpott beamed.

‘They should be grateful to you, and of course to UNACO and its agents,’ Zeidan put in. ‘Without you we should not have been saved, and neither would the ransom, although that is of small consequence.’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Philpott.

Zeidan leaned forward and whispered into Philpott’s ear, ‘Ought our gratitude not to be extended in perhaps another direction, too?’

‘What do you mean?’ Philpott whispered back.

Zeidan smiled knowingly. ‘Do not imagine for a moment,’ he continued, ‘that I, for one, believe Mister Smith could have mounted an operation on that scale without benevolent assistance, shall we say. His very presence in Yugoslavia, his access to men, armaments, machines, would have been impossible unless …’

‘Unless?’

‘Unless he had the help of – a big brother? A big red brother? In any case, where is Smith? You don’t have him? Shall we ever see him again, Mr Philpott?’

‘I suspect, Your Excellency,’ Philpott replied glumly, ‘that we shall.’ And he gave Sheikh Zeidan a broad wink.

Sabrina Carver arrived at the table with a teapotful of Scotch and the promise of an interesting night ahead with Joe McCafferty in Geneva.

‘Now then, Your Excellency,’ she said to Sheikh Arbeid, ‘was that tea with milk and sugar, or coffee with cream and no sugar, or tea with cream and—’

Chief Steward Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski groaned on the sidelines. ‘That dame,’ he confided to McCafferty, ‘will never be anything but useless.’

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

By Sam Llewellyn

Storm Force from Navarone

Thunderbolt from Navarone

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s

Rendezvous

THE UNACO SERIES

By John Denis

Alistair MacLean’s

Hostage Tower

Alistair MacLean’s

Air Force One Is Down

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s

Death Train

Alistair MacLean’s

Night Watch

Alistair MacLean’s Red Alert

Alistair MacLean’s

Time of the Assassins

Alistair MacLean’s

Dead Halt

Alistair MacLean’s

Code Breaker

By Hugh Miller

Alistair MacLean’s

Borrowed Time

Alistair MacLean’s

Prime Target

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S AIR FORCE ONE IS DOWN

Alistair MacLean, who died on 2 February 1987, was the international bestselling author of thirty books, including world-famous novels such as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. In 1977 he was commissioned by an American film company to write a number of story outlines that could be adapted into a series of movies; two, Hostage Tower and Air Force One Is Down, were, with Alistair MacLean’s approval, published as novels by John Denis; these were followed by six by Alastair MacNeill, the highly successful Death Train, Night Watch, Red Alert, Time of the Assassins, Dead Halt and Code Breaker, and two, Borrowed Time and Prime Target by Hugh Miller.

Writing at the time, MacLean said: ‘I was very happy for John Denis to write the novel of Hostage Tower, the first of the series to be filmed, because I was completing my novel Athabasca at the time. I believe that John Denis made such a good job of Hostage Tower that he should also write the novel of Air Force One is Down. Why change a winning team? This is after all a series of stories based on the doings of the same group of characters, and continuity is all-important.’

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2010 1

First published in Great Britain by Fontana Paperbacks 1981

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers and John Denis 1981

John Denis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

UNACO is a registered trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-00-616335-0

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-34888-6

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HARPER

About the Publisher

Australia

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http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

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United Kingdom

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http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

HUGH MILLER

Alistair MacLean’s UNACO

Prime Target

HARPER

To Nettie

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Berlin, 24 April 1945

General Albers ran up the last few steps from the bunker to ground level and had to stand for a moment at the top, catching his breath. It was his habit to do everything at the double, but a spinal injury and chronic emphysema made that kind of behaviour unwise nowadays.

‘One moment,’ he panted, ‘I’ll take a look…’

He pushed aside a camouflage screen of metal and splintered planks and peered outside, craning his thin neck. All he could see in the immediate area was rubble and a scatter of uprooted shrubs.

‘All clear,’ he said, turning back to the stairs and holding out his hand.

Hitler declined to take it. He braced himself against the side of the stairwell and climbed into the open without help. The young soldier assigned to guard him came clattering up behind, clutching his sub-machine-gun.

‘Please wait, Führer,’ Albers said.

He crossed the rubble-strewn garden, smelling cordite and the damp sourness of the earth. A large hole had appeared near the gateway to the street. He detoured around it, turning up the collar of his greatcoat against the rain. He strode out into the middle of the road and stopped, looking both ways. Twenty metres to his left an officer of the Leibstandarte, nearly invisible in his black SS uniform, raised his arm to attract the general’s attention. Albers waved back and glanced over his shoulder at the Chancellery.

For a moment he was transfixed, shocked by the level of damage. This was his first time out of the Führerbunker in three days. When he had gone in by the stairs where Hitler and his guard now waited, the back of the Chancellery had been intact. Now, caught by the sideward impact of Soviet artillery closing on the rail junction at Spandau, huge stretches of stonework had been gouged out. Interior support walls had split and the second and third storeys had collapsed on to the crossbeams of the ground floor.

Albers started back the way he had come and felt a sudden pressure on his ears. The ground shook and there was a salvo of heavy gunfire to the west. He dropped to his knees as a pediment on the Chancellery roof flew apart with a loud crack and hurtled down in a shower of fragmented black marble. He crouched and put his hands over his head, feeling shards strike his back and arms.

He stood up again and saw the SS officer leading a string of young boys from a burned-out government building across the road. Over at the Chancellery Joseph Goebbels had come up the steps from the bunker. He spoke for a moment to the Führer, then came limping across the garden.

‘Are they ready?’ he asked Albers.

‘They are being brought now, Minister.’ Albers pointed to the straggle of children lining up by the wall on the other side of the road. ‘We couldn’t get proper uniforms, but in the circumstances I don’t think they look too bad.’

The boys wore identical black jerkins, buttoned to the neck, and black forage caps. The youngest, who was eight, was frightened by the gunfire and had begun to cry. He was being comforted by the oldest in the group, a lad of fourteen.

‘I’ll speak to them and prepare them,’ Goebbels said. ‘I will take two minutes, then I’ll come for the Führer.’

Albers went back to the stairs, brushing at his coat sleeves, noticing that black marble-dust mingled with rain resembled smears of oil. He looked at the soldier beside the Führer and saw how scared he was. Everyone had been against holding this ceremony outside. Hitler had been warned it was suicidal, but he had insisted. An induction as important as this had to be performed in the open air under German skies. Even if the skies were black with the smoke of a dying Berlin.

‘The Minister is addressing the boys, Führer.’

Hitler nodded and appeared to shiver. He looked weak, Albers observed, and incredibly old. Four days ago he had turned fifty-six, but today he looked nearer seventy. He was stooped and weary, one side of his body in a perpetual tremor, his light-starved skin the colour of putty. Earlier in the day he had been taken ill and could not stop vomiting. His valet, Heinz Linge, summoned the doctor who administered the usual, an intravenous narcotic that drained the residue of colour from the Führer’s face and put a very unnatural glint in his eyes. But afterwards he was no longer so desperately sick, he didn’t shake so obviously, and he had even managed to display a little pleasure at the prospect of this ceremony.

Goebbels had finished talking. He came hobbling across the broken ground, smiling cautiously as he always did.

‘Everything is ready, Führer.’

‘Good, good.’ Hitler rubbed one blue-fingered hand on the back of the other, an attempt at vigour. ‘So we have thirty boys, yes?’

‘That is correct.’ Goebbels fished a sheet of paper from his coat pocket and unfolded it. ‘I have prepared a summary of the arrangements which have been made for them, if you would care to read it. Everything is precisely as we planned, of course…’

‘Just give me the main points again, if you will,’ Hitler said.

Goebbels began to speak and a shell exploded a kilometre away, throwing a plume of black and yellow smoke into the sky. The four men moved closer to the Chancellery wall. Goebbels started again.

‘This evening, as soon as it is dark, the boys will be taken from Berlin by military transport to a covert SS airfield six kilometres south-west of Tempelhof. At ten o’clock an air-freighter, flying in the livery of the Red Cross -’

‘Will this be a genuine Red Cross plane?’

‘No, Führer,’ Goebbels said patiently. ‘It is a Wehrmacht troop-supplies aircraft, suitably disguised for its mission. It will take the boys directly to Zürich, where secure short-term accommodation has been arranged in a converted pavilion in the sheltered grounds of a hospital.’

‘Which hospital?’ Hitler demanded, as if it mattered. He had a habit of using questions to break the flow of others’ speech.

‘The Schwesterhaus von Roten Kreuz, Führer. The cost of caring for the boys, and of all their material needs, will be met from the fund set up on your instructions by Secretary Bormann. No outside help will be sought, since none will be needed.’

‘The boys will be completely safe in that place?’

‘Perfectly safe, Führer. They will be moved to more permanent quarters within the month.’

‘Where will that be?’

‘A fine location on the outskirts of Bern. It is a large house on a truly vast estate. It will be their home, a place where they will grow together in an environment of wholesomeness and good fellowship.’

The man spoke like a prospectus, Albers thought.

‘They will become brothers in every practical sense, and always, always, they will be shielded from harmful and corruptive influences. In every particular, they will be educated and nurtured according to the precepts and guidelines you have set down, Führer. In the fullness of time, they will return to Germany and mount the definitive onslaught against the infestation of Judaism.’

‘I think we should get started,’ Albers said. ‘The children will be getting cold.’

Hitler nodded. Albers led the way round the edge of the garden and out on to the street. The wind had dropped but the rain was heavier now, falling in ice-cold sheets that numbed the skin. Hitler walked between Goebbels and the guard, his hands tucked in the pockets of his greatcoat, the peak of his cap pulled close to his eyes. As they reached the edge of the road a shell exploded three streets away. The others broke step but Hitler kept walking as if he hadn’t heard.

Drawing near the line of boys, who all looked thoroughly miserable, the Führer took his hands from his pockets and straightened his shoulders. Immediately he appeared to grow a couple of inches. He raised his head and thrust forward his jaw, making it taut. He fixed his famous stare on the boys and smiled.

At a nod from Goebbels, thirty arms shot out in the Nazi salute. ‘Heil, Hitler!’ the boys chorused. The sound of it echoed through the hollowed-out buildings behind them.

Hitler stood on the pitted road before them and returned the salute. The SS officer raised a battered Leica camera to his eye and pressed the shutter, recording the moment. Goebbels nodded again and the boys stood at ease. General Albers cleared his throat and stepped forward.

‘Führer, I have the honour of presenting to you the most recent and final group of inductees to the Hitler Youth. This is a very special body, made up of thirty appropriately special young men. They are orphans, every one, and each is the son of a hero of the Third Reich.’

Albers walked to one end of the line with a sheaf of notes in his hand. He waited for Hitler to join him, then he introduced the boys one by one.

‘Erich Bahr, aged twelve years, son of Area Commandant Konrad Bahr, killed with his wife Frieda in the bombing of Dresden in February. Klaus Garlan, aged ten years, son of Panzer Commander Gregor Garlan, killed in the Western Desert in 1944, mother Louisa Garlan killed in a bombing raid on north-west Berlin in January 1945. Albrecht Schröder, aged twelve years, son of Otto Schröder…’

Hitler listened attentively and shook each boy’s hand before moving on to the next. By the time he reached the end of the line the rain had soaked right through his clothing and he was stooping again, his head jutting forward from hunched shoulders. He continued to smile nevertheless, as if sunshine blessed their little ceremony.

As he moved to the centre of the road to address the boys two shells landed nearby within a split second of each other. The shockwave struck Hitler obliquely, making him stumble. Five of the remaining Chancellery windows blew out in a cascade of glass and metal and stone. Hitler watched clouds of glittering dust rise around the base of the building.

‘A Jewish-Bolshevik reprisal for Kristallnacht, perhaps,’ he said, trying to revive his smile.

He turned, straightening his cap, pulling the lapels of his sopping greatcoat closer to his ears. When he spoke his voice was firm.

‘I am told that tomorrow, or at the latest the day after, American and Soviet tanks will meet on the Elbe at Torgau. My dear boys, in that dark moment the Germany I dreamed of, the Fatherland I fought with all my heart and strength to build into a living reality, will be dead. It will have been killed. It will have been murdered by barbarians at the incitement of the International Jew.’

He paused and took a long deep breath.

‘All that we love most dearly will be turned to smoke, and the smoke will disperse on the wind. Yet I tell you, my young friends, in this moment as I look at you, my heart swells with hope…’

Hitler let his gaze travel along the line, pausing a moment on each young face.

‘I look at you and I see the essence of my Jugend, my ideal of the Aryan spirit. I see it in every one of you, the bright promise of a race and nation, the natural enemy of those who lay waste to our beloved land.’

General Albers moved a fraction closer, just to be sure: he took a swift hard look at the Führer’s face and yes, he could see, there were tears welling in his eyes.

‘In your maturity you will bear many duties,’ Hitler said, his voice rising above the rumble and crash of gunfire. ‘The most important of them, the most sacred, will be to uphold and keep alive the spirit of the Reich, and to eliminate its darkest enemy, with no thought of mercy. This is a precious charge. You boys, as its bearers, are no less precious.’

He paused and looked along the line again.

‘You are the young, pounding heart of Germany,’ he said. ‘You are the embodiment of Siegfried, the strength and hope of your race. You are the future.’

Several boys were smothering tears. Another shell went off, bringing down rubble at the end of the street.

General Albers sidled up to Hitler and spoke in a sharp whisper. ‘We should get back to the bunker, Führer, as much for the sake of the boys as for ourselves. The chances of us all leaving here undamaged must be slim by now.’

Hitler nodded slowly and turned away. Albers and Goebbels fell in behind him. The guard led the way back across the Chancellery garden, the sodden earth sucking under their boots. At the top of the bunker steps Hitler stopped and looked back at the street. The SS officer was shepherding the boys back into the gutted office building. Hitler shook his head.

‘What a thing it would be,’ he said.

Albers and Goebbels looked at each other, mystified.

‘To be young again,’ Hitler said. ‘That young, with everything still to happen.’

Later, as General Albers sat in his quarters, recording the day’s events in his diary, he looked up at the agonized Christ on a large wood-and-ivory crucifix by his bed.

‘Not long now,’ he said quietly. ‘A week at most, with luck.’

The realism of the crucifix sometimes struck him as grotesque, but he kept it by him. It was the only memento of his wife, the one item to survive the inferno of their cottage after a British bomb reduced everything else, Greta included, to ash and vapour.

‘Perhaps, Lord,’ he said, ‘you will arrange it so I can surrender to someone with a sense of irony, and no great desire to punish.’

He looked at the diary again and thought for a moment before finishing the page. The small, special brotherhood is established, he wrote. If the meticulous plans of Secretary Bormann and Minister Goebbels unfold in the way they are intended, the remaining Jews in Germany will one day feel the Führer’s throttling grip from beyond the grave.

He put down the pen and rubbed his hands together. The room was cold and damp. He pushed back the chair, got down on his knees and peered under the bed. There was probably enough schnapps under there to ease the chill. He pulled out the bottle and held it up. Three good drinks, maybe four.

‘Enough for now.’

He stood up, took the tumbler from the night-stand and poured a measure. With the glass held out before him he felt an impulse to toast the future of the thirty bedraggled orphans. They had looked so downcast. Just pathetic, frightened, parentless children.

That was now. But years from now…

‘God,’ he groaned, ‘all the black tomorrows.’

He looked at his row of treasured books on the shelf above the bed; at the framed snapshot of himself and his brother as children; at the ivory face of Christ hanging there, twisted with pain and despair.

‘Why should I wish more calamity on the world?’

Outside in the passage there was the sound of shouting. The wise men in the map room were being outraged again, berating absent commanders for the failure of crazy stratagems to rescue the Nazi dream. Albers sighed and raised his glass to the crucifix.

‘Shalom,’ he whispered.

1

A policeman on New Bond Street pointed towards the corner of Clifford Street. ‘Along there,’ he told the attractive American woman, ‘and it’s the first turning on your right.’

She thanked him.

‘First visit?’ he said.

‘Oh no, not at all. I’ve been coming here since I was in college. But I still manage to lose myself in May fair.’

She thanked him again and moved on, turning along Clifford Street and into Cork Street. At the first gallery she stopped, caught by the sight of a solitary canvas on an easel in the middle of the window.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ a man said.

She nodded, coolly enough to stay aloof, not so much as to appear rude. She had reached a stage in her life where the ability to draw men’s attention, without trying, was no longer a particular pleasure.

‘Probably a fake, mind you,’ he grunted, moving off.

She could see it was no fake. It was an untitled George Stubbs, another of his horse paintings, this one a grey stallion hedged around with menacing shadows, rearing back from an unseen threat beyond the edge of the picture. The fear in the animal’s eyes was painfully authentic, a primal terror more vivid than a photograph could convey. She turned away and walked on, blinking against the cold wind, wondering how a person could live with such an unsettling picture.

Outside the Lancer Gallery she stopped and glanced at her watch. She had dawdled over lunch and hadn’t intended to get here so late. If she went in now, she would have to make it a swift visit. Too swift, probably, to enjoy it. If she waited until tomorrow she would have more time to browse. On the other hand, her London schedule was tight; a visit tomorrow could only be a maybe.

She stood facing the window, not sure what to do. As she raised her arm to look at her watch again, a man on the other side of the street drew a pistol from his pocket and fired a bullet into her spine. The impact threw her against the window. The second shot hit the back of her skull and came out through her forehead, smashing the plate glass.

Her body jerked and twisted, a grotesque puppet in a hail of falling glass. Abruptly she dropped to her knees. A single glass shard slid into her chin and pinned her to the edge of the window frame. She stopped twitching and became still.

The gunman made off along Cork Street into Burlington Gardens. He ran past witnesses too startled to do anything but stare at the glass and the blood and the blonde-headed corpse, spiked on the edge of the window.

The policeman who had given the woman directions appeared at the corner of the street. He stood for several seconds, staring like the others, taking in the scene, then he turned aside and muttered urgently to his radio.

The Arab came out of Sloane Street station with his eyes turned to the ground, walking purposefully, not quite hurrying. He stood in a knot of tourists by the crossing opposite the station entrance and waited for the green man.

‘Do you know the way to Oakley Gardens, at all?’ a small woman said. ‘I have this map but it’s very confusing.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He kept his face averted, as if he was watching for someone. ‘I’m a stranger here.’ He saw her push the map forward and stalled the next request. ‘I need glasses to read small print,’ he said. ‘I don’t have them with me. Sorry.’

He pulled up the collar of his windcheater, hiding half his face without obviously obscuring his identity. He breathed deeply, telling himself over and over to be calm and take care to make no eye contact. He forced his mind to stay on the primary need, which was to get to his rented room as fast as he could without arousing interest along the way.

The green man came on and he stepped into the road, moving fast but no faster than the others, his hands deep in his slit pockets. His right fingers were curled around his gun. The barrel was still warm.

Hurrying past W.H. Smith’s he could see the pedestrian light at Cheltenham Terrace was green, which meant it would be red before he got to the corner. He put on a spurt, just short of running, and cursed as the light changed. People bunched on the edge of the pavement. He eased in among them.

‘Bloody traffic,’ a man next to him said.

‘Right.’

‘It’s no pleasure walking any place these days.’

‘Yeah, right.’

The light changed. He tightened his grip on the gun, holding on to it like a mascot, and let himself move along at the centre of a group.

On the opposite pavement he accelerated again, striding smartly, turning left down Walpole Street and right on to St Leonard’s Terrace. One of his many superstitions dictated that if he took the same route back to base on consecutive nights, something bad would happen. Last night he went straight down the King’s Road and got to his digs via Smith Street. It was much quicker than this way, but what was a gain in speed alongside the chance of bad fortune?

Approaching the bottom of Royal Avenue he looked up and saw two policemen walking towards him. They were 15 metres away but he was sure they were looking at him. He checked his watch. It was twenty minutes since he did the job, long enough for a description to be circulated. He reminded himself his face had been half covered, as it was now.

But what if they were looking for an Arabic type with half his face covered?

He decided to go up Royal Avenue. He turned right sharply and bumped into a woman. He hadn’t even seen her. His foot came down on hers and she yelped. He glanced at the policemen. They were definitely looking at him now.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to the woman. ‘Please forgive me for being so clumsy -’

‘Stupid idiot!’

He tried to move past her and she swung her folded umbrella at him, hitting his shoulder. He smelled whisky. Of all the people to walk into, he had to pick a belligerent drunk. He pushed her away, but she resisted and tried to hit him again. He stepped aside and she stumbled, swinging wildly. She missed and fell over with a heavy bump, howling as the contents of her shopper scattered across the pavement.

‘Hoi! You!’

It was one of the policemen.

‘I have done nothing,’ the Arab called. ‘She slipped and fell, that is all.’

‘Just stay where you are, mate. Stay put.’

They were coming for him. His heart began to race. He jumped over the flailing woman and sprinted along Royal Avenue. Leafy branches of garden shrubs slapped his face as he ran.

‘Stop! Come back here!’

He put his head down and pumped his legs furiously, hearing the voice of Ahmad Shawqi: ‘Never be taken by the police,’ he always warned. ‘Avoid all police in all countries. There is no worse mis-fortune than to be taken.’

It was one of his superstitions, anyway. If the police ever took him, eternal bad fortune would befall himself and his family. As he ran it occurred to him that last night he had gone back to his digs by the route he had just taken; it was the day before that he had gone straight down the King’s Road…

‘Right, pal, hold it right there.’

Impossibly, one of the policemen was standing ahead of him, arms spread, clutching his baton. The Arab stiffened his legs, frantically slowing himself as he realized they must have split up and this one had cut through a garden to get in front.

‘Don’t do anything silly, now -’

The Arab ran off the pavement into the traffic, narrowly missing the front of a taxi. He spun away from the near-impact and found himself with his hands flat on the bonnet of a police car. As the blunder registered, the driver and his partner were out and coming for him.

He turned to run and saw the first pair of constables heading straight towards him. He turned back, ran, and slammed into the side of a removals van.

‘Right!’ a constable shouted, grabbing him. ‘Don’t move a muscle!’

A strong hand took his shoulder, the other twisted his left arm up his back. He plunged his free hand into his pocket and grabbed the gun. There were four policemen and they were all close. Even if he worked at his fastest, he knew he could never get them all before they took him. There was only one possible course of action.

‘Shit! He’s got a gun!’

He saw frantic hands coming at him, fingers hooked to drag him down. In an instant the muzzle of the gun was in his mouth. He tried to think of something noble, an image that would define his life.

Nothing came.

He shut his eyes and pulled the trigger.

‘It is Tuesday 27th February, 1996,’ the fat pathologist wheezed into the tape recorder hanging on his chest. ‘The time is sixteen-thirty-three hours. I am Doctor Sidney Lewis and I am conducting a preliminary examination on the body of an unidentified male. The body was brought to the coroner’s mortuary at Fulham by ambulance from St Agnes’ hospital, where the subject was declared dead on arrival at sixteen-oh-eight hours, this date.’

Dr Lewis switched off the recorder and waited as an attendant led two constables and a plainclothes policeman into the autopsy room.

‘I’m DI Latham,’ the plainclothes man said. ‘These are Constables Bryant and Dempsey. They were in pursuit of the dead man shortly before he died.’

Lewis looked at them. ‘You’re the two who were chasing him when he panicked and shot himself?’

‘If you care to put it that way,’ the taller one, Dempsey, said coldly.

‘And why have you come here?’

‘I wanted them to look at the body and tell me it’s the man they chased,’ Latham said. ‘There can be identity problems with Middle Eastern types, and since this case could turn messy, I want basic facts established before everything gets obscured by jargon.’

Dr Lewis waved a hand at the corpse. ‘Well, then, gentlemen, is this the man in question?’

‘That’s him all right,’ Dempsey said. Bryant nodded.

‘Fine.’ Lewis grasped the handle at the top end of the tray holding the body. ‘Now, tell me before we go any further, are there any mysteries here? I mean, do we know how he died, for sure? Was it the way I’ve been told? He took his own life, without a shadow of doubt?’

‘That’s clearly established,’ Latham said. ‘But there’s plenty of mystery, just the same. We don’t know who he is, we don’t know why the gun, or why he shot himself with it.’

‘Shortly after shooting a woman in Mayfair,’ Constable Dempsey added.

‘Not yet confirmed,’ Latham snapped. ‘But that’s likely,’ he told Dr Lewis. ‘He appears to have shot and killed a woman as she looked in a gallery window on Cork Street.’

‘Who was she?’

‘We don’t know that yet, either. All very confused at this stage. There’s a diplomatic angle. American. We’ll know more in an hour or so.‘

‘I see what you mean by messy,’ Lewis said. ‘Never mind, in the meantime we can generate paperwork.’ He switched on a bright striplight above the autopsy table. ‘I don’t think we’re going to find much that isn’t obvious already. If one or both of you constables would help me with the clothing, it will speed matters.’

He saw Bryant scowl and watched Dempsey work up a look of affront.

‘Is there a problem?’

Bryant shrugged sullenly.

Dempsey said, ‘I don’t remember signing up for anything like this.’

‘Blame your own bad timing,’ Lewis said. ‘You drove this poor soul to kill himself at approximately the same time a debt collector in Parsons Green pushed two of his targets against the plate-glass window of a betting shop with rather too much force. The glass gave way and the debtors were cut almost in half. They’re through in the other room being stripped at this moment by my only assistant - the bloodstained one who showed you in.’

‘I don’t think you have the right to say we drove this man to -’

‘It was a joke, for God’s sake!’ Lewis said. ‘A bloody joke, of which we need plenty in this charnel house.’ He shook his head at DI Latham. ‘A sense of humour should be a prerequisite for the job.’

The body was stripped and the clothes bagged for examination at the police forensic laboratory. The big tray with the body still on board was then transferred to the roll-on scales. Dr Lewis read off the weight, hooked a measuring pole over one foot and read the height at the point where the pole touched the head. That done, he moved the body back under the light, switched on his recorder and proceeded with the preliminary examination.

‘The body is that of a well-nourished man of Middle Eastern appearance, between twenty-five and thirty years old. He weighs seven-nine-point-three kilograms and measures one-eight-five-point-two centimetres, from crown to sole. The hair on the scalp is black and wiry with a natural curl. The sclerae and conjunctivae are unexceptional, the irises appear light brown and the pupils are dilated and fixed. Hairline scars under the ears and on either side of the nose suggest extensive and skilful cosmetic surgery. Apart from considerable damage to the head, to be described below, there are no other apparent injuries.’

Dr Lewis picked up a length of wire and pushed it into the dead man’s mouth. The end appeared from the back of the head with a grape-sized clot of blood attached. Lewis withdrew the wire and spoke to his recorder again.

‘The head is normocephalic, with extensive traumatic damage. A visible bullet-entry wound to the rear of the hard palate connects, on probing, to a gaping area of parieto-occipital bone loss, approximately ninety millimetres by sixty, with significant absence of intervening brain tissue.’

He switched off the recorder and looked at DI Latham. ‘That does it for the preliminary. Nothing more until we have an order for a post-mortem.’ He put a finger into the dead man’s mouth and felt around the edge of the bullet wound. ‘What kind of gun did he have?’

‘Austrian Glock automatic.’

‘Nine millimetre?’

‘Correct.’

‘Registered?’

‘Not in this country.’

‘Foolish of me to ask. You’ve no idea at all who he is?’

‘We fingerprinted him at the hospital and got several mug shots. The PNC is working on it, so is Interpol, and we’ll be uploading all the details to ICON this evening. But the short answer is no, we haven’t a clue who he is.’

The blood-smirched attendant appeared in the doorway and said there was a phone call for Detective Inspector Latham. Latham went to the office and was back in less than two minutes.

‘Apart from some money and the gun,’ he told Dr Lewis, ‘the only thing the dead man had on him was a snapshot, a picture of two women sitting in a bar. Somebody has just noticed one of the women in the picture is the woman who was shot in Mayfair this afternoon.’

‘Why do you think there’s a hold-up on identifying her?’

‘The American Embassy is involved. They probably know all about her, and no doubt so do our top brass, but they have an agreed process whereby information trickles down slowly from the top, and we can’t rush them. Not if we know what’s good for us.’

‘Intriguing.’ Lewis was examining the body again. ‘He’s very muscular.’ He lifted an arm, hefting it, pinching the flesh. ‘He probably worked-out a lot, or he’s recently been in the army.’

He hoisted the arm higher and stared.

‘What is it?’

‘Abdul has a tattoo. It’s just visible through the undergrowth in his armpit. Look.’

The pattern was indistinct. Lewis picked up a knife with a straight blade and used it to shave away the armpit hair.

‘What would you say it is, Doc?’

‘It’s nearly spherical, it’s orange and brown and yellow with a sharp blue border. It could be some kind of Egyptian talisman, for all I know.’

‘Or a Muslim symbol,’ Latham suggested.

Constable Bryant was standing at the top end of the table. ‘If you look at it from here, it’s not too mysterious,’ he said.

Lewis tilted his head and inched around the table. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said.

Latham was still frowning at the mark. ‘What is it?’

‘The face of a cat,’ Lewis said. ‘And it’s smiling, in a ghastly kind of way.’

2

On Wednesday 28 February at 10.10 a.m. Eastern time, thirteen hours after the Arab had been declared dead at a London hospital, a startlingly clear image of a cat-face tattoo appeared on the ICON information screen in the UNACO Command Centre at UN headquarters in New York. It accompanied a case summary with a picture of the dead Arab male, complete with an investigative précis and inset shots of the dead man’s property. Tom Gilbert, the duty Newsline Monitor, made high-definition printouts and spent another twenty minutes gathering peripheral information. He then took everything to the office of the Director of UNACO.

That morning was as busy as any other in the complex of offices and technical suites that made up UNACO’s headquarters. UNACO - the United Nations Anti-Crime Organization - occupied an entire floor of the Secretariat building which dominated the UN’s East River site. More than two hundred employees, many of them highly trained specialists, handled the administration of the world’s most efficient crime-fighting body. Thirty prime-rated field agents, drawn from police and intelligence agencies around the world, formed the core of ten teams known as strike forces which, by agreement among the majority of nations, were able to cross national boundaries freely. They could also bypass police administrations and, where necessary, override laws and the diplomatic process. The organization’s avowed aim was to counter crime at the international level, using personnel and resources funded by the UN member nations. UNACO was not a secret body. On the other hand it did not publicize itself. Its offices were unmarked, all telephone numbers were unlisted and agents and employees never openly acknowledged their affiliation. The Director of UNACO, Malcolm Philpott, was accountable only to the Head of the Security Council and to the Secretary General of the United Nations.

As Tom Gilbert entered the office, Philpott was staring at a letter printed on CIA notepaper.

‘Hope I’m not intruding, sir.’ Gilbert crossed the big room, his feet soundless on the carpet. He put the folder on Philpott’s desk. ‘This could be relevant.’

‘So could this.’ Philpott tapped the letter. ‘Remember Tony Prine and his one-man mission to Bolívar?’

‘Prine?’ Gilbert thought for a moment. ‘Specialist in industrial sabotage - that Prine?’

‘The same. A highly resourceful chap. He’s been trying to uncover a solvent-manufacturing plant, crucial to the production of cocaine, located somewhere in the region of Cartagena. Well, a satellite surveillance officer at Langley has spotted a big bang in the heart of the Bolívar region. He says if it’s got anything to do with us, we should tell the people upstairs to get ready to counter complaints from the Colombian government about unscheduled anti-drug activity on their urban turf.’

‘Looks like Prine found his target.’

‘Let me know as soon as he makes contact. Some kind of pat on the back will be in order.’

At that hour Philpott still looked puffy, a side-effect of the beta-blockers he now had to take for his heart condition. Otherwise, he looked fit and alert. He pointed to a mini espresso machine on a table at the side.

‘Help yourself to Milanese blend, Tom. Bad for the heart so early in the morning, but it does wonders for the soul.’

Gilbert poured himself a cup and sat down to wait. Philpott looked at the pictures he had brought and read the sketchy case details. He looked up.

‘No identification on the Arab?’

‘Not at present. He’s had recent plastic surgery to alter vertical and horizontal facial alignment.’

‘Perhaps a seriously wanted man then. Is there anything more than you’ve given me?’

‘The woman the Arab is believed to have killed -’

‘She’s the one on the left in the picture he was carrying. I read that and I’ve looked at the picture.’

‘Don’t you recognize her?’

Philpott held the print under the desk lamp. The woman had a pallid, delicate face, small-featured and framed by soft-curled blonde hair. Her companion, no less attractive, had a strong face and rich dark hair.

‘You must have met her,’ Gilbert said.

‘Really?’ Philpott shook his head. ‘I meet a lot of good-looking females. Nowadays it’s never a memorable frisson.’ He sighed. ‘Her jacket is a Donna Karan, I believe, but I don’t know the wearer at all.’

‘She’s Emily Selby,’ Gilbert said.

Philpott thought for a moment. ‘Political analyst on the White House press team. Yes?’

Gilbert nodded. ‘Her areas of expertise are listed as Central and South-west Asia.’

‘God almighty, I believe I spoke to her at a reception not long ago.’ Philpott groaned. ‘Maybe I’m losing it.’ He read the details again. ‘So, yesterday afternoon, right in front of the Lancer Gallery in Mayfair, Emily was shot through the spine and the back of the head with bullets from a Glock 17, identified as the gun found on the dead man. What was she doing in London?’

‘According to a Reuter’s bulletin, she was taking a month of her annual leave in Europe.’

‘Do we know who this other woman is?’

‘Yes, I got her identity on FaceBase.’

‘Did you, indeed. How long did that take?’

‘Three minutes.’ FaceBase was a feature-comparator capable of identifying photographs from a database of three million images. ‘It never takes much longer than that,’ Gilbert added.

Philpott stared at him. ‘Do I detect a certain smugness?’

‘Well, it does seem to work every time, and I did argue strenuously for the installation of the system, even though certain people -’

‘Certain people. You mean even though I, alone, reckoned it was going to be a waste of money and floor space.’ Philpott shrugged. ‘I was wrong.’

‘It’s magnanimous of you to say so, sir.’

‘Tom, when you’re right as often as I am, you have to be wrong some of the time or you start to look infallible. That would never do.’

‘The woman’s name is Erika Stramm,’ Gilbert said. ‘She’s German, a freelance political journalist with vague terrorist affiliations. She’s twice been refused a US visa.’

‘But we can’t define the link between her and Emily Selby.’

‘Not yet.’

Philpott got up and stood by the window, looking down at the array of national flags fluttering on their masts in front of the complex. The office was on the twenty-second floor. From that height everything looked reassuringly tidy.

‘So,’ Philpott said, ‘the bald fact is that a man of Middle Eastern origin has murdered a US government employee in the heart of London. I think that until we know more about the gunman and his motive, we should regard this as a matter for low-level UNACO involvement. I’ll have the Political Intelligence office hunt for possible leads.’ He turned from the window and smiled tightly. ‘Thanks for bringing this to my attention.’

Gilbert caught the dismissal. He stood up and drained his coffee cup.

‘What about the dead man’s fingerprints?’

‘They were transmitted on the ICON file, sir. Did you want to have them?’

‘Pass them to Mike Graham, with the rest of the stuff. Tell him I’d like a detailed work-up as soon as he can manage one. You’ll find him in the Interview Suite writing case notes. He’ll be glad of the diversion.’

When Gilbert had gone, Philpott picked up the phone and told the UNACO operator to find the number for Riot City in Hounslow, England, and to give them a call.

‘Sounds like a fun place,’ Ms Redway said.

‘If you don’t find it listed as that, its real name is the Public Order Training Centre,’ Philpott told her, ‘and its bureaucratic handle is TO18. It’s a fantasy violence environment for police officers. I’m not sure I entirely approve, but their crowd-control training is the best.’

‘They probably won’t be open for business for three hours yet.’

‘I know. Tell the security person who answers the phone that Sabrina Carver should call her uncle as soon as she gets to Hounslow.’

The six o’clock forecast had said it would be a cold day, but sunny. On the drive out through Chiswick and Brentford it was still foggy, and on the approach to Hounslow the fog thickened. Slowing down to negotiate the narrow streets on the outskirts of town, Sabrina Carver switched on the car radio to catch the 8.30 news bulletin.

The announcer was annoyingly upbeat for the time of day. He reported that Sinn Fein were to be promised seats at peace talks if they could persuade the IRA to renew their recently-ended ceasefire; a woman shot dead in Mayfair was believed to be an American tourist, but no details of her identity had yet been released; five students had died in a car crash at Milton Keynes; a serial killer had been given three life sentences at a Crown Court in Yorkshire; a British-led team of scientists was on its way to Pisa to help stop the tilt of the leaning tower.

That was it. No news from the States. For the third or fourth time since she arrived in England, Sabrina promised herself she would try again to tune her Sony to Voice of America. Some weird signal-screening in her quarters at the police hostel played hell with shortwave reception.

She stopped by the Riot City barrier and smiled at the constable in the security box, He waved as usual, but this morning it was different. Sabrina realized he was beckoning her. She got out and put her head inside the tiny office.

‘Morning, Terry. What’s up?’

‘You’ve to phone your uncle,’ he told her. ‘Soon as possible.’

‘Yeah. Right.’ It took a second to sink in. Until two weeks ago, the alias had been Cousin Malcolm.

‘You can use this phone if you want.’

Sabrina knew that would be breaking Riot City rules. She also knew Terry was happy to make that kind of gesture if it would gain him points with a hard-bodied blonde his own height. Over tea and biscuits in the canteen, he had told her she was wasting her time being a cop; she should be in pictures.

‘It’s OK,’ Sabrina said now, ‘I’ll get to him later. I don’t want to be late. If Uncle rings again, would you tell him I’ll call back as soon as I can?’

Terry said he would. Sabrina got back in the car, drove on until she was behind the administration block and stopped. She took her cellular phone from her bag and tapped in three digits. There was a scattering of satellite noise, then a ringing tone. Philpott answered on the fourth ring.

‘I got your message, sir.’

‘Fine. It’s nice to hear your voice, my dear. I’ve been looking over your team leader’s evaluation of your progress over there. He believes his notes are for the eyes of his London chief alone, of course, so there are one or two racist, sexist comments about pushy Yank feminist tactics and so on, but on the whole you’ve impressed him. He says that your, er, what is it now…’ paper rustled, ‘your capacity for total focus in a Level One TSG situation was especially to be commended. I assume that’s good?’

‘Level One is the ultimate stage of public order training, sir. A TSG is a Territorial Support Group.’

‘So what have you been doing in your TSG?’

‘All kinds of things connected with crowd handling and public order control. Yesterday we did gasoline-bomb training on a simulated Battersea street. At one stage I caught fire, but a couple of nice Inspectors patted the flames out.’

‘And do they buy your cover?’

‘Sure, they think I’m a New York cop. I chew plenty of gum and I swear a lot. It’s not the hardest cover to maintain. But I’m sure you didn’t get me to call just so we could engage in chit-chat.’

‘No, indeed. There’s a little job I want you to do, while you’re in the area.’ Philpott explained about the Emily Selby shooting and the possibility of the case being taken up by UNACO. ‘You know the kinds of fears a case like this can raise. Apart from the possibility that Emily Selby was a spy, there are other worries. The gunman could have been an irate Palestinian.’

‘Was Emily Jewish?’

‘She was. Think of the possibilities: a Jewish employee of the US government gunned down by a man of Arabic appearance.’

‘It raises a lot of scenarios.’

‘Well, for the moment it’s enough to be aware of them,’ Philpott said. ‘Emily had a small suite at the Knightsbridge Lawn Hotel, and unless intergovernmental procedure has changed wildly in the past year or two, the rooms will be sealed off for a few days until it’s decided who has the right to nose around in the dead woman’s property.’

‘You want me to pre-empt the search.’

‘If you would.’

‘Any idea what I might be looking for?’

‘A journal, perhaps, cryptic notes, any item in her possessions that doesn’t chime with the rest. Try to find out if Emily was less of a credit to her job than anyone suspected.’

Sabrina looked at the clock on the side of the main building. If she was going to get coffee before people started throwing bricks at her, she would have to go now.

‘Should I do the job tonight, sir?’

‘Not any later.’

‘In that case I’ll have to do some manoeuvring.’

‘Why so?’

‘There’s a full-scale military-style kit inspection tomorrow morning. My stuff’s in a foul state. Getting it ready will be a three-hour job, at the tightest.’

‘You’re an agent of UNACO, my dear, which means you count resourcefulness among your many qualities. I’m sure you’ll manage. How much longer will you be at Hounslow?’

‘I finish tomorrow.’

‘Lord, time flies.’

‘I hope to be back in New York Saturday.’

‘By which time, I’ve no doubt, you’ll be an even more finely-honed and efficient emissary of justice than you were before you left us.’

‘Are you being serious, sir?’

‘Not particularly,’ Philpott said. ‘Take care, Sabrina.’

‘As ever,’ she promised.

When she walked into the canteen three minutes later, the usual silence fell. It was momentary, a one-beat cessation of talk and rattling as the sixty-two men and four women in the place stopped everything to register her arrival.

Sabrina was not embarrassed or discomfited. She had been attracting overt interest since a few months past puberty; also, at Hounslow there was the added professional factor. The blonde was an American cop - or so they believed - and since all dreams of slick law enforcement centre on the US police image, Sabrina realized she was as much a focus of envy as anything else.

‘It’s coffee, black, no sugar, right?’ Plump Inspector Lowther was on his feet, pointing to the chair opposite his own at the table nearest the door. ‘I was on my way to get seconds anyway. Sit down, I’ll only be a minute.’

‘Thanks.’

As she pulled out the chair a young officer at the next table said, ‘Hey, settle an argument, will you?’ He pointed to her black cotton coverall suit. ‘You had that made special, didn’t you?’

‘Nope.’ Sabrina patted the gold-and-blue embroidered badge on her sleeve. ‘It’s standard NYPD issue.’

‘Really? Has it got special deep pockets for the bribes?’

Sabrina smiled back. ‘You must watch an awful lot of bad movies. Get out more often in the real world. Bribe a girl to go with you.’

He blushed, and the jeering laughter of his companions obviously stung. He looked away and said no more.

‘Here we go…’ Inspector Lowther put a cup of coffee in front of her and sat down with his tea and a jam doughnut. ‘I hope it’s hot enough.’

‘It’s fine, thank you.’

He was a sweet soul, and even though he was on the make Sabrina found the attentiveness endearing. He had latched on to her from the start and had helped her over the early hurdles without once making a move on her. But she could tell the hope was there. When she left England she would not miss Lowther, but at least she wouldn’t remember him with distaste.

‘So,’ she said, making small talk, ‘today’s the grand finale, huh?’

He nodded. ‘Rocks, bottles, firebombs, burning buildings, the lot. Nervous?’

‘Very,’ she lied. ‘How about you? Have you ever been in a real-life situation like this one? People throwing stuff, hating you, too far gone to hear reason?’

‘I got a taste of it in 1990, at the Poll Tax riot in Trafalgar Square. A man with a broken chair leg and a hatred of the police put me in hospital for ten days.’

‘Wow.’

‘But you must get into some vicious scrapes in New York.’

‘I never faced a mob.’

‘Ever had to shoot anyone?’

‘No,’ she lied again, thinking, More people than you’d believe. ‘Up to now I’ve dealt mostly with traffic violations.’

‘Well, at least you have an exciting working environment.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Frantic’s a better word.’

And then, without any lead-up or warning, Lowther leaned forward and said, ‘Would you have dinner with me tonight, Sabrina?’

That look, she thought: the wistful smile, the eyes telling her he’d be devastated if she said no. It never worked, she always saw it as emotional blackmail, something else about men to despise. On this man, however, it simply looked pathetic.

‘I have an engagement already this evening,’ she said, simultaneously spotting an opportunity.

‘Oh.’ He shrugged.

‘But I’ll tell you what - we finish at noon tomorrow, right? How about lunch somewhere in the West End? My treat. I’d have loved to make it dinner, but I have to catch an overnight flight to New York.’

She watched the flicker of changes in his expression, all desperately transparent. This was less than he’d had in mind; she had side-stepped the proposition, but it was better than rejection; what she suggested still wasn’t dinner, it was unromantic daytime stuff, but it still wasn’t rejection…

‘Well, that would be great,’ he said. ‘But I can’t let you pay.’

‘NYPD pays,’ Sabrina said. ‘They’re covering me for two goodwill entertainments and I haven’t done one yet, so we can have a splash.’ She gave him her friendliest smile. ‘Is it a date?’

He nodded, thoroughly charmed.

‘Oh, and by the way, I was going to ask you, it’s presumptuous of me, I know…’

“Go ahead,’ he said generously, ‘anything at all.’

‘Well.’ She made an uneasy face. ‘It’s the passing-out kit inspection tomorrow morning. It’s obvious they take it seriously. I wouldn’t want to lose the points, but I’ll be squeezed for time, because I have to go to this woman’s place -’

‘You want me to get your kit ready?’

‘Oh, no! God, no, I wouldn’t dream of imposing. I thought maybe you could find me somebody who would take on the job for a consideration.’

‘I’ll do it for you myself.’

‘Really?’

‘Consider it done.’

‘But that’s so -’

‘Look, Sabrina, don’t mention it. It’ll be a pleasure.’

She touched his hand. ‘You’re a real friend.’ His gratitude was something to see.

3

When Philpott stepped into the semi-darkness of the Secure Communications Suite he found Mike Graham hunched in front of six computer screens, three on three.

‘I know you said another hour.’ The padded walls and ceiling muffled Philpott’s voice. ‘But I got fidgety.’

‘I’m antsy myself, now,’ Mike said. ‘One damned detail has bugged me for twenty minutes. I’m getting nowhere with it.’

He leaned back and stretched. He was a lithe man, conventionally handsome with even features and an easy way of smiling. Philpott, never keen to admit that anything or anyone was without major flaw, often remarked that Mike’s hair was too long.

‘When will you have results worth examining?’

‘I’ve got them now.’

‘Excellent.’ Philpott took the swivel chair next to Mike’s. ‘Do you have a tentative verdict?’

‘Well this could certainly be UNACO’s kind of case, because the dead man had a terrorist pedigree. His real name was Yaqub Hisham, and he was Arabic, as everybody thought. He was registered with the Department of Social Security in London as Kamul Haidar, twenty-six years old, living in rented accommodation in Chelsea, with a home address in Morocco. He’d been in London a month, allegedly studying history and English at the Monkfield Institute.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Scotland Yard’s SO11 gave it the once-over. It’s a couple of rented rooms off the Edgware Road, run as a school by a retired teacher. Plenty of students are registered with the Institute, but nobody seems to show up for classes.’

‘Another dismal racket,’ Philpott sighed. ‘Something in the atmosphere of England nurtures seedy hustlers.’

‘Aside from his scholastic work, our man was a part-time porter at the Wimcote House Hotel in Paddington.’

‘But in spite of that, he could afford digs in Chelsea. All of this was a cover, I presume.’

‘Oh sure.’ Mike tapped a button on the console and a Mossad Criminal Data card appeared on the third screen of the top row. The Arab’s picture was at the left with his fingerprints at right and a summary of his criminal record below. ‘No information at Scotland Yard or Interpol, but the Israelis have the goods on him. The picture was taken a month after he had his face changed. His prints were altered too, acid and pumice powder they reckon. Mossad’s fingerprint boys used a latency comparator on smudgy dabs they picked up in Hebron, and the comparator turned up this guy’s original set of prints.’

Philpott peered at the text on the screen. ‘It’s in Hebrew.’

‘I got a translation.’ Mike held up a printout sheet. ‘Courtesy of Mossad Criminal Records.’

‘I’m impressed. You have better connections every time I see you.’

Mike ran a finger down the sheet. ‘Hisham had sixteen listed aliases and was a known terrorist from the age of eleven. During his middle and late teen years he managed to study history as well as sedition and anarchy. He was a prominent graduate of the Jezzine terrorist movement in Lebanon. Known to be energetic, technically skilled, resourceful and, unusually, the guy was multi-lingual. He wasn’t strong on ideology, but he got by on plain hatred of the Jews. He was made an honorary member of the Brotherhood of the Civet when he was eighteen.’

‘Brotherhood of the what?’

‘Civet. It’s a kind of cat. The brotherhood are sworn to do harm to Jews in any way they can, which doesn’t make them unique, but they are customized. They have a tattoo of a civet’s head in the right armpit. The animal’s supposed to be lucky and to ward off danger.’

‘Every day,’ Philpott said, ‘I learn a little more…’

‘In June 1994 the Israelis bombed a Hezbollah training camp in southern Lebanon and killed forty guerrillas. Six people survived. Yaqub Hisham was one of them.’

‘He was with Hezbollah?’

‘The Israelis believe he was training them. For a while after the bombing he was treated like a living martyr, and he made a public declaration that he would double his efforts against Jews. Three weeks after that he ambushed three officers of Shin Bet at a checkpoint in the Bekáa Valley and butchered them. Mossad’s been on his tail ever since. He was believed to be holed-up in Tetuán, Morocco, which isn’t an easy place for Israelis to go looking for somebody. Mossad are very surprised that he showed up in England.’

‘Indeed. What was he doing in London, shooting a political analyst from the White House? I mean, why him? Why a seasoned, Jew-hating Middle Eastern terrorist?’

‘Emily Selby was Jewish.’

‘Not the kind of Jew that Arab terrorists travel all the way to Europe to assassinate, surely?’

‘If we knew the link between Emily and the other woman in the picture, Erika Stramm, I’m sure we would be standing in a brighter light.’

Philpott looked at the screens. ‘What’s the loose end you’re chasing?’

‘Yaqub’s gun. I checked the serial number with the makers at Deutsch-Wagram, and they say it’s from a batch of fifty bought in Vienna last July for export to the USA. Buyer’s name was Albert Torrance of Denver, Colorado, which turns out to be a fake ID. But the guns did clear US Customs. I have the other weapon numbers from the consignment and I’ve been flagging law-enforcement nodes on ICON, but nobody has a thing on Glock 17s.’

‘Am I right in thinking the Glock 17 is the gun people were making so much noise about at one time? The gun that panic-merchants thought could escape airport X-ray detection?’

Mike nodded. ‘There’s a lot of plastic in its construction. But there’s enough steel to show up on X-rays. What really grabs the enthusiasts is the seventeen-shot magazine.’

Mike tapped a picture of the Glock 17 up on to a screen.

‘There’s a lot going for it. It’s hefty, it’s accurate, and it’s got enough rounds to let you do shot-clustering if that’s what a job calls for.’ Mike looked at Philpott. ‘I’m just intrigued to know how the weapon got from the States to Yaqub Hisham.’

‘And I’m intrigued to know why he shoved it in his mouth and took the back off his head just because four London bobbies were chasing him.’

‘He probably didn’t want to be arrested,’ Mike said. ‘Superstition and obsession are primary components of a fanatic’s mental structure. They’re also the elements that can undermine him. In my experience, a terrorist’s superstition and fear often take the form of an abhorrence of being captured, of being contained on somebody else’s terms. Remember in Rome, three years ago? I cornered a bullion hijacker, a Lebanese guy -’

‘Shofar,’ Philpott said.

‘Shofar. I had the drop on him, he could do nothing but submit and get taken away. Except he was a fanatic. He didn’t want to be arrested, not at any price. So before I knew it he’d shoved his wristwatch in his mouth and rammed it into his gullet. A heavy-duty Seiko with a steel bracelet and a casing four centimetres across. And boy did it wedge. He went blue and he was dead in less than a minute. All because somebody wanted to restrict his movement.’

Mike stood up slowly, rubbing his eyes.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think I should get out of here soon. I’m starting to like the cloistered feel of the place, and I’m getting sleepy.’

‘A refreshment break, that’s the thing.’ Philpott took a tiny cellular phone from his pocket and tapped a button. ‘Then you can get on with tracking that gun. I’m sure it’s important.’ He put the phone to his ear. ‘Miss Wellington? I wonder if you could bring something to sustain Mr Graham and myself? We’re in SCS-One. Thank you.’ Five minutes later, as Philpott was pouring coffee, he noticed a strip of surgical tape across Mike Graham’s knuckles.

‘Have you been punching something harder than yourself?’

Mike flexed the hand. ‘I took a corner too fast and had to correct in a hurry. My hand brushed a projecting stone.’

‘You really shouldn’t go tearing about on motorbikes the way you do.’

It was something appropriate to say, and it was said with little enough emphasis to be easily ignored, if Mike chose.

‘I don’t tear about, sir. You know that.’

‘Do I? I must have forgotten.’

‘Even when I’m in a race I strive for the spiritual dimension,’ Mike said, deadpan.

‘Ah…’

‘My goal is oneness with the machine, so that I can be part of the transcendental fact of its speed.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s art. What’s a little lost skin in pursuit of art? I mean, let’s face it, when I’m on my bike I’m expressing my deepest urges and polishing my karma at the same time.’

‘Michael. It was foolish of me not to realize all that.’

They laughed. Philpott handed Mike his coffee. For just a moment an edge of stiffness intruded. At sociable moments silences between them were awkward, because matters which stayed unmentioned were nevertheless always there.

‘Still enjoying the serenity of Vermont on the weekends?’

‘More and more,’ Mike said.

‘And you still like being on your own?’

‘Yep. Just me, my TV for company, my pickup for transport, and my bike for death-defying art.’

Some years before, Mike’s wife and son had been murdered by terrorists. He had been devastated, and the grief of his loss damaged him brutally. For a long time he was beyond consolation. Finally, when grief had run its course, he moved from New York to Vermont, and there he took up the solitary domestic life. With time he had gained a measure of tranquillity, though some women liked to think they still saw pain in those dark blue eyes.

The agony of Mike’s loss was now a thing entirely of the past, but he was changed, and serious risk-taking was a feature of that change. Philpott privately believed that it was therapy: any ex-policeman knew that jeopardy wiped out restlessness.

‘What’s your instinct on this case?’ Mike pointed at the screens. ‘Do you get think we could see some action?’

‘Paperwork action, maybe. A ground-covering investigation, with plenty of interviews, then a long, detailed report to tidy the whole thing up.’

Mike stared at him. ‘You certainly know how to lift a guy’s spirits.’

‘On the other hand it could be a thrill-a-minute caper.’ Philpott sipped his coffee. ‘Let’s see what Sabrina turns up. I just have a gut feeling this might be much bigger than we realize.’

4

The receptionist had the kind of relentless smile that would weather any opposition. ‘I assure you, Madame Reverdy, there is not a problem.’ She pushed a registration card and a pen across the mahogany desktop. ‘If you would care to fill this in, I’ll get a porter to take your bag.’

Where the card asked for the guest’s name Sabrina wrote Louise Reverdy, the maiden name of her maternal grandmother. She put her address as 28 Rue de la Grand Armée, Paris 75017, France.

The receptionist came back with a small, thin, green-uniformed man who took up a protective stance beside Sabrina’s suitcase. He smiled and bowed.

Sabrina pushed back the registration card and took the key from the receptionist.

‘Thank you so much,’ she said, revelling in the way she could impersonate her mother’s accent, ‘and let me say again, although you insist it is no trouble, I am deeply grateful for the way you have accommodated me at such short notice.’

‘Not at all, Madame. I hope everything is to your satisfaction.’

The porter took Sabrina up in the lift to the third floor. He led the way along a passage carpeted in deep green Wilton. Outside her room he made a flourish with the key, turned it smoothly in the lock and pushed the door open.

‘Après vous, Madame,’ he said.

Sabrina looked surprised. ‘Vous-êtes Français, m’sieur?’

‘No,’ he said, following her into the room, “fraid not. But I was good at French at school, and now and again I can’t help trying it out. Sounded authentic, did it?’

‘Absolument! Top marks.’

He beamed with pleasure. Sabrina handed him a five-pound note and watched one small pleasure overlap another. Priming him had been easier than she imagined.

‘Tell me,’ she said as he turned to go, ‘yesterday a friend passed this way in a taxi, and she tells me she saw police officers. Has there been trouble?’

The little man’s features seemed to clench as he came back, head tilted confidentially. ‘One of the guests,’ he said, pointing upward. ‘An American lady. She was the victim of a shooting. Nasty business.’

‘She was shot here?’ Sabrina managed a note of alarm without having to screech. ‘In this hotel?’

‘Oh no, no, ma’am, it happened over in Mayfair. But she was a guest here at the time.’

‘Oh, how terrible. There will not be police marching about the place all night, I hope? I am such a light sleeper…’

‘Not to worry,’ the porter said, ‘they’ve sealed the room and for the time being everything’s quiet.’ He made his little bow again. ‘Have a peaceful night.’

‘Thank you so much.’

When he had gone she kicked off her shoes and sat on the edge of the bed. She checked her watch: 10.28.

The minibar looked tempting, but she decided to wait until work was over.

Getting here had been a struggle. Nobody had warned her the last operational day at Hounslow could run into the evening. She had come out of a hostage-taking scenario at eight o’clock and got back to her room at the hostel a few minutes before nine. Since then it had been breakneck all the way. First she had transformed herself from tousled squalor to the simulation of a chic Frenchwoman visiting London. In the circumstances a disguise had not been strictly necessary, but she enjoyed changes of personality, and tried always to conduct herself according to Philpott’s Rule One of Subterfuge, which he confided to her one tipsy evening at a UN reception: ‘Be somebody else whenever you can, my dear, and always tell a lie even if the truth would sound better.’

Transformed to her own liking, she drove across town, put the car in an all-night car park, hailed a cab and presented herself at the hotel, looking as if the most strenuous thing she had done all day was sign Amex slips.

She looked around her. This was a nice place. And it should be, since the tariff for one night was the same as a week’s rent for a cottage in the Cotswolds. She had called the hotel before leaving Hounslow - delayed flight, staying one more night - and the receptionist promised to hold the one remaining room until eleven at the latest. It happened also to be a double room and there was no concession for single occupancy. Philpott would bleat about that.

She patted the mattress. What she wanted to do, more than anything, was sleep for eight hours solid. But she was here to work. She yawned and made herself stand up.

By the wardrobe she slipped off her dark blue jacket and hipsters, put them on a hanger and opened the suitcase. Inside was one other change of clothes, her NYPD worksuit and three bath towels to make up the weight. She put on the worksuit and a pair of black Nikes.

From the lid pocket of the suitcase she took a tool roll, a fibre optic torch, a plastic box with FIELD KEYMAKER stamped on the side, a Polaroid camera and a pair of thin latex gloves. She put the tool roll, the box and the camera on the bedside table and slipped the torch and gloves into her pocket. She closed the suitcase.

‘Two hours twenty,’ she said aloud as she lay down on the bed. She put her arms straight by her sides and let her hands lie open, palm upwards. She closed her eyes. ‘Two hours twenty,’ she said again, then fell asleep almost at once.

She woke up in rapid stages, first clambering out of a dream about being pawed by a policeman with sugar on his fingers; then she was entering an ante room just behind her own eyelids. Consciousness came and she was aware of pink translucence. She opened her eyes and brought up her wrist, peering at her watch. Five minutes to one. Not bad.

In the bathroom she splashed water on her face, patted it dry and went back to the bedroom. She put the tool roll and the box in her side pockets and looped the thong of the torch around her wrist.

Before she opened the door she put out the light. She stood for a minute just inside the doorway, listening. The place was quiet and dark. This was a hotel with a special reputation, an establishment where ladies could stay on their own. By now all the guests would be in bed; when Sabrina arrived, she noticed the bar was already deserted.

She closed her room door and walked soundlessly to the staircase at the end of the passage. The porter had pointed upwards when he talked about the shooting; there were six floors so she only had two to reconnoitre, at most. That was one blessing. The other was the kind of door locks they used.

The sealed room was on the sixth floor, and the sealing was figurative. There was a strip of yellow-and-black adhesive tape across the top of the door, another at the bottom, and a notice warning it would be a criminal offence for anyone to open the door, or attempt to open it, without the express permission of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Sabrina went to the switchbox by the stairs and turned off the dim night lights along the passage. If she was disturbed and had to run for it, at least no one would see her face. She went back to the sealed room and shone the narrow torch beam on the lock. It was exactly like the others, a straightforward Yale, and the police had added no locks of their own.

She unfurled her tool roll on the carpet and took out a tiny pick and a torque wrench. The key-making kit in the box might still be needed if the dead woman’s luggage turned out to have fancy locking arrangements.

Sabrina pocketed the tool roll and stood close to the door. She slid the torque wrench into the bottom of the key slot and with the other hand she inserted the pick, prong upwards, sliding it all the way to the back of the lock. She slowly withdrew it again, getting the feel of resistance from the springs pressing down on the pins.

Now she turned the wrench a fraction to the right and put the pick back in the lock, pushing it in all the way, not letting it touch the pins. Then she began pulling it out, applying steady upward force to the pins. The correct pressure had to be only a shade greater than the minimum needed to overcome the force of each spring. She stroked the pick over the farthest of the five pins, increasing the pressure on the wrench until the pin stuck. She brought the pick forward to the next pin and did the same. She repeated the manoeuvre with the third pin.

There was a sound along the corridor, a creak like boot leather. Or like an old door shrinking in the night air. Or like a million possible things. Sabrina remained frozen by the door, counting to a hundred before she moved again.

The next pin would not stay up when she probed it. This was not unusual: the pins at the front of a lock were often bevelled at the edges from simple wear. Sabrina kept the torque pressure fixed and began sliding the pick back and forward over the remaining two pins, scrubbing, as professionals called it. As the pick moved over the pins Sabrina gradually increased the upward pressure of the prong. Suddenly both pins slid upwards and stuck. She turned the wrench another fraction and the door slid open, tearing softly away from the adhesive tape.

Sabrina pulled out the picking tools and pocketed them as she stepped into the room. She made sure the door was locked behind her, then she closed the heavy curtains and put on the overhead light.

There was always an eeriness about a room a person had planned to return to, but never did. Clothes had been laid out for the evening, bottles and jars were lined up in the bathroom, shoes stood in a row in the bottom of an open closet.

Sabrina assumed the police had touched nothing. It was also safe to assume they knew where everything was. She took out the Polaroid camera and photographed the room from several angles. She took close-ups of the distribution of items on the dressing table, the bathroom ledge and the closet shelves.

When she had leaned the pictures in a row along the top of the washbasin to dry, she pulled on the latex gloves and set to work.

Any search, to be effective, had to be strictly methodical, and no improbability had to be rejected. Sabrina had trained with an FBI Search Unit, people so skilled and so downright suspicious of human deviancy that nothing could be hidden from them. She began at the front of the room, by the door, and worked backwards to an imagined three-dimensional grid pattern.

In the course of an hour she learned several things about Emily Selby. For a start, she had had a mild but distinct case of obsessional neurosis. Her shoes in the closet were not only lined up neatly, they were positioned with their toes a precise distance from the back of the closet. Prior to noticing this, Sabrina had found a small cut-off piece of a plastic ruler carefully wrapped in tissue. It was 10 millimetres long, the precise distance of each well-polished toe from the wooden back panel of the closet.

Emily had also been an enthusiastic botanist, and in her notebook she had prepared a detailed itinerary for herself around Kew Gardens, which she had planned to visit on Friday.

Most fascinating of all, for Sabrina, was the fact Emily had been writing a traveller’s guide to Israel. Two hundred pages of the hand-written manuscript were in her suitcase, together with working notes and a letter of encouragement from her publisher.

For ten minutes Sabrina speed-read the pages, looking for further insights on Emily. She picked up interesting facts about places like Ashdod, Gedera, Giv’atayim, Migdal and Nazareth, but none of it was likely to throw light on why the bookish, seemingly repressed political analyst had been murdered.

Sabrina was drawn back to the closet. Something there was wrong, the smallest thing perhaps…

She stood back and looked at the row of clothes, the jackets, skirts and slacks on their hangers, the lower edges aligned, the spacing between hangers just so, a monument to obsessive compulsion. Manically precise, a little masterpiece of symmetry. But yes, something was wrong. A beige jacket, squared and creaseless on its hanger, hung a fraction low on the near side. What was more, when Sabrina bent and peered at it, she saw a clear centimetre of loose thread at the hem of the jacket, just where it hung low.

She touched the hem and felt something hard. She took out the jacket and fingered the object. It was a key. It had been sewn into the hem.

Carefully, stitch by stitch, she unpicked the hem enough to fish out the key. It was made of brass with a toughened plastic top, the kind used to open high-security lockers and strongboxes. Sabrina slipped it into her pocket.

By 2.15 she believed she had made a thorough search of the room. She stood by the door, letting her eyes do a slow pan, left to right, up and down. No area had been missed. She walked slowly round the place again, looked in the closets, drawers, bathroom cabinets and under the bed.

Still on her knees she paused and looked under the bed again. She saw something, paper, folded and tucked under a canvas strap supporting the mattress near the foot of the bed. Only one folded edge was showing, but she knew she should have seen it first time.

‘For that,’ she told herself, reaching for the paper, ‘you get one drink instead of two.’

It was a sheet of computer printout paper with perforated sides, folded in four. She opened it and spread it flat on the carpet. There was a vertical row of printed names, with an address opposite each. At first sight the names appeared to be all male, and all German. At the bottom were a couple of pencilled lines in tidy handwriting she recognized from the manuscript: Journal note: list completed 2/15/96, passed to ES, 2/24/96.

Sabrina looked at the names again. They meant nothing to her. She folded the list and put it in her pocket. As an additional act of penance for missing the paper the first time, she made one more trawl of the room, swift but detailed. She found nothing new.

Finally she put everything back as it was, using the Polaroids to guide her. She put out the light, opened the curtains and left, locking the door behind her.

Ten minutes later, back in her room with a drink and the list beside her, she called Philpott on her mobile, using the scrambled satellite line. It was after ten o’clock in New York, but he was still at his desk.

‘I assumed you’d like a progress bulletin on the Emily Selby case,’ Sabrina said. ‘I got into her room and picked up a couple of things.’

‘Specifically?’

‘A key and a list of names. Men, all German I think.’

‘Do you have the list there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Read out a few of the names.’

They’re not in alphabetical order - looking at the addresses, I’d guess they’re graded in order of their proximity to Berlin. Here goes. Gunther Blascher, Walter Höllerer, Johann Boumann, Andreas Wolff, Friedrich Schadow, Albrecht Schröder, Kurt Ditscher, Karl Schinkel -’

‘That’ll do. Fax it to my secure number.’

‘Do the names mean anything?’

‘We’ll discuss it when you get back.’ A phone was ringing. ‘I’ll talk to you soon. Just get that list to me.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Sabrina thumbed the red button and put down the phone. She looked at her watch. There was hardly any night left. For a while she stood there, wondering if she should get in the tub or go straight to bed.

Tub, she decided. And no bed. At a pinch, a long hot soak could do the work of six hours’ sleep. She could get herself dressed and ready for the day at a comfortable pace, take an early breakfast, read the morning paper and still be out on the street by 7.30.

She ran a hot bath and undressed as it filled. As she climbed in and sank up to her neck, the heat seeped smoothly into her muscles. She closed her eyes and her mind drifted. She thought of home, the reassurance and comfort of her own apartment in New York, her favourite weekend restaurant…

Abruptly she thought of lunch. Today. Her eyes opened. She had forgotten. Lunch with gooey-eyed Inspector Lowther.

‘Merde,’ she groaned, in a perfect replica of her mother’s voice.

5

At 9.10 a.m. on Monday, C.W. Whitlock downloaded the final piece of information to expand the details of the list Philpott had given him on Friday morning. The job had been painstaking, frustrating and exhausting. Worse than that, the expenditure of a whole weekend on the work had put a strain on Whitlock’s private life. Following a hurried and stressful cancellation of a Saturday-night dinner party, his wife was no longer communicating.

After the fourth attempt to reach her that morning he put down the telephone and saw the final lines of text scroll up on the computer screen. He sat back and yawned. Feeling old, he decided, was a matter of how much hope you abandoned. For twenty-four hours he had felt rundown and sinking, aware of no clear end. Seeing the long job finished did not quite lift his spirits, but there was a measure of relief. Relief, in turn, fired a tiny hope: things between himself and Carmen might work out with a minimum of fighting. ‘And a pig will go flapping over the UN complex any minute,’ he said aloud.

Whitlock was a man people tended to like on sight, a native Kenyan with skin a girl once called light umber, and gold-brown eyes his mother swore would break many hearts. His skin colour was part of a legacy from his grandfather, a white British Army officer, whose genes had also conferred a strong jaw and a firm mouth, which C.W. softened with a moustache.

He leaned forward, tapped the PRINT button and checked the clock. He was up against the deadline. Too often, it seemed, he was handed jobs with no slack in the schedule. He picked up the internal telephone and dialled 3 for Security.

‘Calvin? Has Mr Philpott arrived yet?’

‘He signed in five minutes ago.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sorry to dash your hopes.’

‘That’s all right, Calvin. The day he does turn up late, I’ll buy you lunch.’ He put down the phone. ‘This,’ he sighed, ‘is no life for a sensitive boy.’

He was Oxford-educated, a former soldier with wide experience as an officer in the Kenya Intelligence Corps. He had been recruited into UNACO by Philpott himself, and was now the longest serving member of Task Force Three. On two occasions Philpott had openly acknowledged that Whitlock was the most versatile and well-informed of his active agents - a distinction, Whitlock believed, that invited abuse.

As the last piece of information came off the printer he signalled Interpol’s National Central Bureau in Berlin and switched momentarily to voice contact. He thanked the duty information controller for his help and expressed the hope that he could return the favour.

Two minutes later he walked into the washroom with the accumulated data in a manila folder under his arm. Mike Graham was there, standing by the basins, bending to see himself in the mirror as he combed his hair. His reflection nodded at Whitlock, who looked grim.

‘Morning, C.W. Nice to see a guy who can start the week with a grin.’

Whitlock put down his folder and rolled back his shirtsleeves. He washed his hands and face, re-tied his tie and buffed his toecaps at the polisher. He came back to the basins and leaned close to the mirror, pulling up one eyelid, then the other.

‘I can’t decide if I’m anaemic, or if clinical depression has crept in.’

‘I hear you’ve been on all weekend.’

‘The Selby case. I did a workup on a list of German citizens, most of them hard to nail. Not a criminal record among them, so I had to trespass on a lot of legitimate secrecy.’

‘Nobody does it better.’

‘Go ahead,’ Whitlock sighed, ‘patronize me. I thrive on that.’

Mike put on his jacket as he went to the door. ‘Meeting in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Don’t be late.’

‘I’m moving as fast as I can…’

Three sides of UNACO’s briefing room were panelled in dark shiny wood. The fourth was a ceiling-to-floor window looking out on the East River. The centrepiece of the room was a long polished table with three chairs at each side and one at the end near the window. On the table were notepads, pencils, glasses and two water pitchers. A long ebony sideboard against the right-hand wall had a steel tray with coffee, tea and a Thermos jug of chilled Coke.

Philpott was already there when Mike Graham and C.W. Whitlock walked in. He stood by the window reading a fax. Lucy Dow sat at the end of the table nearest the door. Lucy was a tall, solemn-faced young woman, an authority on Arab affairs with three years experience in Lebanon as a field operative. Sabrina was there too, pouring coffee.

‘Welcome home,’ Mike said. ‘How was England?’

‘Strenuous.’

‘Did you remember my Bath Olivers?’ Whitlock said. ‘Or did they get forgotten in the whirl of events?’

Sabrina pointed to a Fortnum and Mason’s bag on the sideboard. ‘Six packets. Enough to turn up the flame of nostalgia till it hurts.’

‘Bless you.’ Whitlock pecked Sabrina’s cheek. ‘Those biscuits are all I really miss about my student days.’

‘You must have really lived it up,’ Mike said. ‘What did you do - crumble them into a chillum and smoke them?’

‘Right.’ Philpott looked up from his fax and pointed at the table. ‘Sit down, will you? I’ve a busy day so we must keep this brief.’

Whitlock and Mike brought coffee to the table and sat opposite each other as they always did. Sabrina sat somewhere different every time. She did that in case anyone imagined there was significance in the way the only permanent female member of the unit sat in relation to the other two operatives and to the chief. Today she sat at the top of the table on the same side as Whitlock, adjacent to Philpott.

‘You’re all familiar with the superficial details of the Emily Selby shooting,’ Philpott said, opening a folder in front of him. ‘Lucy is here this morning to add anything that might help in formulating at least the nucleus of a procedure. I can add to what you all know about the case by telling you that early on Saturday, a call was received here at the UN from Colonel Wolrich of Security Liaison, working out of the US Embassy in London. He talked about the case with the Deputy Secretary General of the Security Council. As a result of their discussion, the Selby inquiry has been made our business.’

‘So my weekend wasn’t a complete waste,’ Whitlock said.

‘Why did they pass it straight to UNACO?’ Lucy asked.

‘Well, there’s the hard evidence the gunman was a trained assassin, and a high-profile one at that. There’s the fact that he travelled West to kill an American who happened to be a Jew, and who happened to be working for the government, right inside the White House. That bare-bones synopsis alone makes this our kind of case. We have a strong enough indication of international crime, with the attendant danger of escalation, to warrant UNACO intervention.’

‘I can vouch for the killer’s prominent profile,’ Lucy said, crossing and uncrossing her long legs as she spoke. ‘They were very proud of Yaqub Hisham in the Lebanon.’

‘Ever meet him?’ Sabrina said.

‘He wasn’t a social animal, but yes, I was in the same big tent as him one time, along with maybe fifty others, while I was doing a hill-gypsy routine for cover. He was nothing unusual as terrorists go, except he was maybe luckier than most, or more foolhardy. Until he got too hot a target for the Israelis, he was really the main man. Scourge of the Jews, they called him. When things warmed up and Mossad started closing in, it was a top Arab surgeon that volunteered to change Yaqub’s face. A big freebie, carried out in one of the finest hospitals in Egypt.’

‘Was it business as usual after the face-change?’ Philpott said.

Lucy shook her head. ‘Mossad got leaked a picture of him. From Yaqub’s point of view it was a waste of time. He ended up with a face he thought wasn’t nearly as pretty as his real one, and the way things turned out he might as well have hung on to the old face. He had to get back into hiding. That’s why he went to Morocco. Hard for the avenging Israelis to get at him there.’

Philpott looked at Mike. ‘Fill us in on what you learned.’

Mike gave them a summary on the Arab’s un-exceptional stay in London, up to the time he killed Emily Selby and then shot himself. ‘Lucy could tell us more, but the things we most need to know are his reason for killing Emily Selby, and the source of the gun he used. So far, those things remain a mystery.’

‘Sabrina?’

Sabrina explained how she got into Emily Selby’s hotel room, and what she found during her search. ‘For a tourist Emily carried a lot of stuff, but the key and the list were the only items out of the ordinary. The key wouldn’t be half so interesting if it hadn’t been stitched into her jacket.’

‘What impressions did you get about the woman herself?’ Philpott asked.

‘Tidy and well organized, though perhaps to a pathological extent.’ Sabrina explained about the piece of ruler she had found, and about clothes stored by colour, bottles in the bathroom regimented by size. ‘The kind of clothes she wore indicated she had good fashion sense, but she was also reticent, modest probably, because she had what I call an extravagance-shut-off. She had limits and barriers, she showed flair but with enough of a conservative streak to stop herself from being flamboyant.’

‘Overall impression?’ Philpott said.

‘That she was intelligent, gifted and inquisitive, with a tragedy at the centre of her life, supported by the evidence of her compulsive neurosis,’ Sabrina said. ‘Compulsive rituals, notably in the behaviour patterns of intelligent people, indicate that they use rigid and complicated routines to divert their minds from areas of pain.’

C.W. was nodding. So was Lucy.

‘Emily Selby’s history supports that interpretation,’ Sabrina went on. ‘Her employment record, which I read as soon as I got here this morning, shows she was widowed three years ago. She suffered a compound tragedy, because her husband and father died at the same time and in the same place.’

Philpott tapped the photocopy in front of him. ‘Lake Cayuga, Ithaca, New York State,’ he said. ‘A fishing accident. Verdict of drowning on both men. We will look into the details. Now, Sabrina, did you find anything at all to link Emily Selby with Erika Stramm, the woman with her in the picture?’

‘I’m assuming the pencilled initials ES at the bottom of the list stand for Erika Stramm. But that’s all I have. I’m still working on a connection.’

Philpott looked at Whitlock. ‘Tell us how you fared with the list.’

Whitlock had his folder open, the sheets of information spread out before him. ‘It’s a list of thirty German names and addresses, and all the names are male,’ he said. ‘I sifted the criminal records first, but there was nothing. Whatever else they are, these are law-abiding citizens. Then I had to go the slow route, with the help of Interpol. Everybody was very helpful, and eventually I got expansion -as much as is known - on every name on the list.’

‘What’s their connection?’ Mike said.

‘Nothing worthy of the name. They don’t appear to be related by blood or commercial ties. They’re apparently prospering in various quiet ways, but that’s all they seem to have in common. Well, except for one factor. We know that fifteen of the men on the list were adopted. They were war orphans.’

‘And the others?’ Philpott said.

‘No childhood records extant. Destroyed by enemy action. The bombing of Dresden and Berlin and countless other communities wiped out millions of official histories. It simultaneously provided a blank slate for the creation of others.’ C.W. spread his hands. ‘About two-thirds of the population records collated in Germany during the immediate post-war years are just not reliable, from an investigative standpoint.’

‘What’s the men’s professional range?’ Sabrina asked.

‘Everything from bookbinding and carpet-tile manufacture to medicine and law - there are two doctors and two lawyers - the rest are one-offs. Interpol tried a few test searches with the records of marriages but no links showed up.’

Mike asked if they were all about the same age.

‘It’s tight, between fifty-nine and sixty-five years old.’

‘I think there might be something in the fact there are so many orphans,’ Sabrina said. She saw Mike shake his head. ‘At least I won’t close my mind to the possibility,’ she added, giving it an edge.

‘And in the meantime,’ Philpott said, ‘I won’t make any wild guesses about the significance of this list. However…’ He pushed forward a copy of the list and pointed to a name halfway down the page. ‘I’m concerned that this man’s name appears on it.’

The others turned their heads to peer at the list.

‘His name is Andreas Wolff. He’s an Austrian computer systems engineer and program designer.’

‘I can see his face now,’ Mike said.

The others looked at him.

‘Youthful middle-aged, short salt-and-pepper haircut, steel-framed glasses and a great smile.’

Philpott nodded slowly. ‘What are you trying to tell us, Michael?’

‘His picture’s on the boxes of a very expensive series of computer games. They’re on sale all over the place.’

‘Mike spends a lot of time in toy shops,’ Sabrina said.

‘This guy is a king of contemporary games design. He specializes in hybrids: dungeons and dragons, arcade stuff and straight crime detection rolled into one. It must be a great formula, the games sell fast and they ain’t cheap.’

‘Andreas Wolff is certainly well known for his recreational software,’ Philpott said dryly. ‘However, in security and law-enforcement circles, which is to say serious circles, he’s also an eminent individual. He created the software that protects all the data carried by ICON.’

ICON - the International Criminal Observation Network - was the main criminal intelligence service in the West. Criminal records, fingerprint files, modus operandi profiles and databases, plus details of hundreds of current and impending police operations were carried and interchanged on the ICON network. With appropriate clearance and the necessary keyboard skills, an operator could call up the details of virtually any crime, any criminal or any current police record in a matter of seconds.

‘The man on the list is definitely the same Andreas Wolff?’ Sabrina said.

The address is the same,’ Philpott said, ‘and I see from C.W.’s information that the age is right, too. Wolff is fifty-eight. I repeat, I won’t make wild guesses about the significance of the list, but it’s worrying that Wolff’s name comes up in a mysterious context at a time like this.’

‘Like what?’ Sabrina said.

‘Well, as you know, the complexities of ICON have multiplied in the past year. What you don’t know is that as more law-enforcement agencies have committed their data to the network, Andreas Wolff has become indispensable. ICON’S continued existence depends on his expertise.’

‘You mean,’ Mike said, ‘that half the world’s police and national security organizations have been silly enough to put all their eggs in one basket? How come?’

‘It’s not an ideal state of affairs,’ Philpott said, ‘and nobody planned it that way. Wolff has become so closely linked to the system, and to determining its rate of development, that he’s pulled ahead of others in the field. No one else understands his programming routines or his security protocols.’

‘So if anything were to happen to Wolff,’ Whitlock said, ‘archive security could stagnate and the files would soon be vulnerable.’

‘That’s precisely what I’m saying. The potential gain from hacking into ICON is vast. It’s inestimable. And it pains me to tell you that the possibility of getting inside ICON is the driving force behind a lot of developments in electronic crime.’

‘Do hackers stand a serious chance?’ Lucy said.

‘Oh, yes, they have a chance and they’ve taken it. ICON’S security has already been breached.’

Lucy looked startled. So did Sabrina.

‘Twice in three weeks,’ Philpott said. ‘Each time it was open for only a microsecond before alternative encryption routines cut in, but the warning is clear enough. The current generation of safeguards is being eroded, and we’re not over-stocked with alternatives.’

‘Who’s doing it?’ Lucy said.

‘Lord knows who. I shouldn’t think it’s any one group. It suits criminal organizations anywhere in the world to have a hole knocked in law enforcement. Hackers try all the time, and they’re fed big financial inducements to keep trying.’

‘So what’s being done?’ Mike said.

‘For the moment, Andreas Wolff provides emergency ICON security by changing the custodian routines at twelve-hour intervals. He will do this until his new generation of self-enhancing safeguards are test-run and installed.’

‘So if Wolff leaves the picture for any reason,’ Sabrina said, ‘the whole of ICON security collapses?’

‘It could be that extreme,’ Philpott said. ‘We could shut down ICON temporarily in an emergency, but the disruption would be catastrophic. It would be nearly as bad as having the system broken into. The new security arrangements will change everything. ICON will in effect become auto-secure. But until then we remain at serious risk. Without Wolff’s support, records and operational strategies could be uncloaked long enough to bring this organization’s security to its knees.’

Philpott stopped abruptly and looked at his watch.

‘Right.’ He stood. ‘That’s it. I have to go. Compare notes. Make sure you all know the same amount about the case. The facts as they stand present us with a paradox, but in theory the way forward is simple. Find out what links the names on that list and you will have a line on why Emily Selby was killed. When you know that, you’ll know what you’re up against. Lucy, thanks for your input.’

Halfway to the door he stopped. ‘I may change my mind later, but in the meantime I think Sabrina should dig up the whole story on Emily Selby, with special reference to her association with Erika Stramm.’

‘Shouldn’t we maybe get somebody to interview Stramm right away?’ Whitlock said.

‘No. I want us to know something about the relationship before she feeds us her version. Mike, I want you to get to work on that key Sabrina found. C.W., keep trying for a linking factor between the names on the list.’

Philpott strode to the door and pulled it open.

‘In order to proceed we need a picture, something with shape and features we can identify. Do your best for me on this one.’

Mike and C.W. muttered assurances. Sabrina nodded.

‘I deserve it, after all,’ Philpott said, and left.

6

‘Now, tell me honestly, what did you think? Were you bored? Or did you enjoy the visit as much as you told the guide you did?’

Karl Sonnemann, one week off his sixty-fourth birthday, stood smiling like a boy on the street outside Goethe’s birthplace in Frankfurt. His hands rested on the shoulders of Charlotte Gustl, a slender, shapely Münster girl with hair the colour of butter. Charlotte was twenty-two, one of Karl’s literature students at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University. As of last night she was technically his mistress, too.

‘I truly, truly loved the place,’ Charlotte said. ‘I’m sure I shall dream about it.’

‘I did feel that a visit to the birthplace might touch a chord in you,’ Karl said.

‘Seeing that little room where he slept. Where he had his dreams, oh…’ Charlotte clasped her hands under her chin. ‘I could feel, or I imagined I could feel, the surge of the forces that empowered him. This has given me a new perspective on Goethe, Professor.’

‘Karl,’ he said, beaming at her. ‘I told you, call me Karl.’

‘Very well.’ She coloured a little as he slid his arm through hers. ‘I seem to have moved forward years in the space of twenty-four hours.’

‘As they walked towards the taxi rank he squeezed her arm, thinking how alike they all were, the girls he picked to be his special blossoms for a term or two. How much alike in the way they looked, in what they said, in how they gave their bodies to him, season after season…

How much alike, yet he never tired of them, and he found each one breathtakingly new. When he turned fifty a friend had winked at him and asked him how long now, how long before he would have to defer to his years and abandon his little hobby. At the time, Karl had said he would never cease, not until he died, and he said it wishing it were true. Now he felt it might indeed be true; he would simply never stop. The girls showed no more resistance as time passed, he still managed to charm them and, just as important, he could identify the ones he had charmed the most, and so take advantage.

‘I thought we would have a leisurely lunch at Alexander’s,’ he said, ‘and then go back to the university, where my only tutorial of the day is with a Fräulein Charlotte Gustl, if I’m not mistaken.’

She chuckled. It was a moist throaty sound, a variation of the sounds she made against his ear in the night, under crisp sheets at the Excelsior Hotel. For a moment Karl found himself overcome by the swiftness of one sound conjuring up another, and by the sharp, tactile memory of her warmth and closeness…

‘There’s that young man again,’ Charlotte said.

‘Which one?’

‘The one I said was watching you at the birthplace.’

Karl turned. The young man was looking in a shop window a few metres away. Karl had noticed him as they went into Goethe’s house, standing by the edge of the pavement, looking aimless, or trying to. For a terrible moment Karl considered the possibility that the young man, for all his fair-haired, clear-eyed wholesomeness, was a detective. What if Ursula, after so many years, had begun to suspect, and had set this snooper to find out for sure?

Karl turned away, smiling at the wildness of his imagination. ‘I think he has taken your fancy, that young man. You seem to be tracing his movements.’

‘Oh! That’s not true!’ Charlotte looked genuinely offended. ‘How could you think such a thing?’

She stopped talking abruptly and started over Karl’s shoulder. He turned and saw the young man had stepped over beside them. His face was very serious and purposeful. He glanced beyond them to the taxi rank, then looked directly at Karl.

‘You are Professor Sonnemann, is that correct?’

‘Why do you ask?’ Karl said stiffly.

‘Well, I was sure, actually,’ the young man said, blinking rapidly, gesturing with one hand, the other buried in his jacket pocket. ‘But mistakes cannot be rectified afterwards, as they say in the supermarkets.’

‘What do you want with us?’

‘You are Professor Sonnemann? Professor Karl Sonnemann?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Karl snapped. ‘So what of it?’

‘I have a message,’ the young man said.

His face became very grave. He took his hand from his pocket. He was holding a long, straight butcher’s trussing needle.

‘This is for Yitzhak Brenner.’

He thrust the needle deep into the side of Karl’s neck. Charlotte screamed. Karl felt nothing. He was only aware that suddenly his control of himself was gone. Charlotte pulled her arm free of Karl’s and ran to the taxi rank.

The young man did not follow. He stood staring into Karl’s shocked face. The eyes were already glassy. His whole frame trembled as arterial blood left his body in a surge, draining him of life. He let out a rasping breath, his mouth foaming as blood surged from his neck down over his fine woollen overcoat.

Charlotte was at the rank, howling and pleading. Karl sank to his knees, coughing blood. His face looked waxen and artificial.

Two taxi drivers were coming, both of them running. The young man wiped his fingers on the shoulder of Karl’s coat. He turned, pressed his elbows to his sides and started to run. He ducked round a corner and disappeared into a throng of pedestrians.

One taxi driver tried to follow him. The other knelt by Karl. He was on his back on the pavement, completely still, the big needle jutting from his throat.

7

The following morning Sabrina Carver took an early flight to Washington DC. It was her intention to interview, as casually as possible, the known friends and associates of Emily Selby, with a view to gaining the kind of insight the records didn’t show. Ahead of her visit UNACO administration made an appointment for her at the White House, where she hoped to talk to Emily’s former colleagues under the guise of a police investigator. Her laminated ID card, exquisitely printed in muted, solemn colours, identified her as an officer of the United States National Central Bureau of the International Criminal Police Commission. It was the stiff-necked official way of declaring she was an agent of Interpol. At White House Reception she was met by a brisk young woman who showed her to a visitors’ waiting room. There, after a few minutes, she was joined by the Information Officer’s number-two assistant, Kevin Riley. He was a firm man, entrenched in his procedures.

‘White House security regulations demand that you stay in this room at all times during your visit,’ he told Sabrina. ‘If you leave the room for any reason whatsoever, you must be accompanied by a member of White House Security. Of course, we will do all we can to accommodate you within the rules governing your visit here.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Since your people emphasized you’re not here on official investigative business, we’ve let people make up their own minds whether they want to be interviewed or not. Three colleagues of Mrs Selby have shown a willingness to talk to you. The first should be along shortly. Naturally, we want to do all we can to clear Emily’s name of any shadow.’

The first to arrive was Janice Cleary, a short, overweight woman in her forties. Janice wore the kind of perfume that surrounded her with a cloying miasma. She wheezed as she sat down and took a moment to rearrange her voluminous clothing. When she spoke, her voice had a high, childish register.

‘I was probably Emily’s closest friend, professionally,’ she told Sabrina. ‘Four years ago we worked on the Herzog project together. I think our friendship cemented around that time.’

‘What was the Herzog project?’

‘It was named after the President of Israel at that time, Chaim Herzog. He was looking for a solid basis for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, and the feeling here was that he could use a shade more support from the USA, which wasn’t officially all that cosy with Israel at the time. Emily and me, we did what we could to high-profile non-political areas of common ground between the two nations.’

‘How did you do that, exactly?’

‘We used press and radio outlets to boost awareness of cultural exchange programmes, we got an information booklet together showing how alike many of the American and Israeli down-home aspirations were. The aim, overall, was to pass on the message, to both nations, that, political differences aside, we were really natural friends. Emily really put her heart into that programme and, as I said, we became real close.’

‘Tell me about Emily as a person,’ Sabrina said. ‘Did she socialize much? Go to parties, the theatre, concerts?’

‘Not after Desmond died,’ Janice said. ‘Not too much before that either, I don’t think…’

‘She took it badly, her husband dying?’

‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

‘Was she a long time getting over it?’

‘She never got over it.’

‘She told you that.’

‘No need. I could tell. The change in her. She became withdrawn. Reclusive. She developed little daily rituals of work that involved only herself, which is easy to do in this line. It’s how you get to be a specialist, and Emily was our shiniest specialist of all. On the ball, always.’

Sabrina was sure Janice had never been as close to Emily Selby as she thought; crass people often mistake politeness for friendliness. They talked for a few more minutes, long enough for Sabrina to be sure that whatever the extent of Emily’s social life, Janice Cleary knew nothing about it. Sabrina thanked her and apologized for taking her away from work.

A minute after Janice left, a young man came in. He was tall, with a narrow mouth that looked incapable of smiling. He looked at Sabrina cautiously from pale sunken eyes. He was Joe Dexter. For five years, he said, he had been a research assistant working for three senior political analysts, and Emily Selby had been one of them.

He talked for ten minutes about Emily, without once needing to be prompted. He described her working methods, her talent for organization, her patience with other people, her unending devotion to her job. He thought the world of her, he said.

As he continued to talk, Sabrina realized he meant that literally: he thought the world of Emily Selby, and although it appeared Emily had regarded him as no more than a valued assistant, he had obviously been obsessed with her. But he had said nothing, he had never betrayed to Emily any sign of his emotional response to her. It would have been unprofessional to do that, he said.

Just like me and Mike, Sabrina thought, startling herself. She had confronted a buried truth, not for the first time, but, as always, she was inclined to shy away. She bowed her head over her notepad and closed her eyes for a moment.

Just like me and Mike.

Nothing had ever been declared, or demonstrated. Usually, it was the opposite of affection that prevailed. They were rivals on the same team, antagonists in a single cause. At times there was a strength of antipathy that felt like hatred, at least on her side. Yet she knew she kept the lid on a richness of feeling that would have engulfed him, smothered him. And she suspected, without having examined the suspicion, that he kept something suppressed, too.

Joe Dexter fell silent, and Sabrina thanked him for his time. He left without another word.

She gazed at her notebook. Again, she had been told nothing that threw any real light on Emily Selby. She accepted that she might be going back to New York empty-handed. It would be best to get used to the idea now and work on her defence against Philpott’s displeasure.

And then the telephone beside her rang. A woman introduced herself as Dilys Craig. She was a former colleague of Emily’s, she said, and she would love to talk to Sabrina about her, but right now she was tied up.

‘It’s an unexpected job, something I can’t get out of,’ she said. ‘How about we meet outside later today? For coffee, say?’

‘That would be fine,’ Sabrina said, ‘if it’s no trouble. Where will I meet you?’

‘Harvey and Hannah’s,’ Dilys said. ‘Go down Pennsylvania Avenue till you come to the Willard Hotel complex, look for the Occidental Grill, and it’s right alongside. Four-thirty. Does that suit?’

‘Perfectly,’ Sabrina said.

At 4.32 Dilys Craig walked into the coffee shop, looking stunning in a checked Escada jacket and grey pencil skirt. She came straight to the table where Sabrina sat. She was tall with large hazel eyes and skin smoothed to perfection by cosmetics. Her hair was cut short and had been tinted a shade somewhere between chestnut and auburn. She was not young, tiny crow’s-feet were visible at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but she had impressive poise and energy.

‘I got you coffee,’ Sabrina said, pointing to the cup opposite hers. ‘The woman seemed to know what you like.’

‘She’s a doll,’ Dilys said, sitting down, crossing elegant sheened legs. ‘Nice to meet you, Sabrina.’ She took a sip of coffee. ‘Shall we get right to it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, let me tell you right off, I was as close to being friendly with Emily as you could get. But that wasn’t very close. She was good at keeping the world at a distance.’ Dilys took out a matt black cigarette case. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘I don’t mind, no, but I thought -’

‘It’s banned in here? Right. That makes me enjoy it all the more. I can smoke so long as there are no other customers.’ She lit up, and sighed. ‘This all seems so unreal, I still can’t quite believe that she’s gone. But I obviously want to help your investigation in any way I can.’

‘I’m trying to get background on Emily’s off-duty life,’ Sabrina said. ‘Did you ever meet her socially?’

‘Oh, yes, often. That was when Desmond was around, of course. He lived in Ithaca teaching at Cornell during the week of course, but would come down to Washington on week-ends. Or Emily would go up there. Anyway, they used to go to functions here in DC and so did I, usually with whoever I was seeing at the time, so we met outside office hours on a fairly regular basis.’

‘Did you meet any of her friends, anyone not associated with her work here?’

‘No,’ Dilys shook her head. ‘I don’t think they had friends, not in the sense of relationships with people they saw regularly, nothing like that. They had each other, you see, and that seemed to be enough. And of course there was Emily’s father, whom Desmond lived with on the campus at Cornell. I know she was deeply fond of her father.’

‘Did she ever mention a woman called Erika?’

‘Erika Stramm?’ Dilys smiled, catching the look of surprise cross Sabrina’s face. ‘She was her cousin.’

‘Cousin?’

‘Well, second cousin, actually.’

Sabrina wondered how the resources of UNACO hadn’t managed to determine that Emily and Erika were blood relations.

‘Emily’s father was born Johannes Stramm,’ Dilys said. ‘But he changed his name in the concentration camp where he spent three years of the war. He did it to lose his identity and save his life. When he came to America he kept the assumed name. He was known here as Johannes Lustig, so Lustig was Emily’s maiden name. Erika is his cousin’s daughter. I knew about Erika, sure. So did some of the White House administration. It wasn’t really a black mark, having a semi-violent lefty for a relative - not if you were someone as universally respected as Emily. It certainly isn’t the kind of fact that gets entered on a person’s record these days. Too tackily McCarthy-ish, you know?’

Sabrina noted with interest Erika Stramm’s established reputation as an active leftist terrorist. ‘Do you know anything about the people Emily associated with after her husband died?’

Dilys shrugged elegantly with one shoulder. ‘She was very close about that. I had the feeling her circle of acquaintances shrank to near nothing. That happens a lot to widows.’

‘I guess so. Tell me more about her as a person.’

Dilys sucked on the cigarette and peered at the tiny Gucci watch on her wrist. ‘One thing that needs saying about Emily is, she was selfless. We’ve all heard of it. Selflessness. But Emily was the only person I actually met who had it. If two sets of interests were at issue, she would always disregard her own.’

‘I get the impression she was something of a saint.’

‘Jeez, no.’ Dilys made a face. ‘Who said she was a saint, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Nobody did. But what I’ve been told about her adds up to a picture of an unusually good person.’

‘She had some of the characteristics, I suppose, but she didn’t have the sickly bits that would qualify her for sainthood. What she was, I suppose, was a good scout. She was withdrawn but she was never remote, she was always there for you, and she would really put herself out. She was shy, too, but she never tried to play it like she was mysterious. Do you see what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

Sabrina watched the woman behind the counter make a cappuccino with a head on it an inch high. It was fluffy but firm at the same time. She wished she could do that. Whatever she did wrong, the head always came out nice and creamy, but also flat as a pancake.

‘Dilys, do you have any theory about why she was killed?’

‘I was getting around to asking you that.’

‘We only know how. We haven’t a clue why.’

‘Well. Given the way she was - good-hearted, generous, also a woman who kept pretty much to herself…’ Dilys did her one-shoulder shrug. ‘I’d say it was either a bad mistake on the part of the killer, or it had something to do with her cousin.’

‘Erika Stramm.’

‘Right.’

‘Do you know if they saw much of each other?’

‘In recent times they corresponded a lot. And it was serious business.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘I don’t know. But Joe Dexter - you spoke to him, right? - he used to be the mailman.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Joe has a kind of quiet life. He lives alone, doesn’t know enough about human nature to tussle with it, so he gets his fulfilment being a sysop.’

‘I should know what that is.’

‘System operator,’ Dilys said. ‘On a dial-up bulletin board service. He sits by his board most evenings. The board is a computer with a whole clutch of information that people can download or add to, and sections where members can have written discussions with each other. The sysop’s the bulletin board manager.’

‘How does someone communicate with the board?’

‘It’s reached with a phone and a modem. The thing is, Joe can receive e-mail on his bulletin board from anywhere in the world, via the Internet. So he received e-mail for Emily from Erika, and Emily would send stuff through Joe to Erika’s electronic mailbox, wherever it is.’

‘She talked to you about that?’

‘No, and I didn’t ask her,’ Dilys said. ‘But if you want to see the irregularities in a pattern all you have to do is stare long enough, right? About six, seven months ago, I began to think Joe was no longer just researching for Emily. So I watched. There were definitely new and much more frequent transactions between them. That was the change in the pattern.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I cornered Joe and pumped him. He admitted he carried mail back and forward, but he had no idea what it was. The messages were coded, and he never tried to jemmy the code.’

‘I can believe it.’

‘Sure. He had too much respect for Emily to do anything like that. I think he was in love with her.’

‘Do you think he suspected he was doing something wrong?’

‘No, not at all. He believed what he was doing was confidential, just plain private. He didn’t even think he had been secretive the way he handled the e-mail traffic. How he looked at it was, he had just been discreet.’

Dilys drained her cup and stood up. ‘Listen,’ she said, nodding in the direction of two customers who had taken a table nearby, ‘I’ll get us more coffee, but do you mind if we go out on the little veranda there to drink it?’

‘You need a smoke?’

‘Have pity. I’m an addict.’

‘No problem.’

They took their fresh coffee to a small table at the end of the veranda, beside a canvas sheet tied between two uprights to make a windbreak.

Dilys said, ‘When I stop to think about this, it makes me laugh.’ She cupped her hand around the lighter and puffed several times, sending up a big flame on the last drag. She sat back and exhaled slowly. ‘The ironies. As you get older they accumulate like luggage. Every day, at some point, I will do this. I will go out in the fresh air, so I can have an opportunity to fill my lungs with smoke.’

Sabrina tasted her coffee, waiting for Dilys to volunteer whatever she still wanted to say about Emily Selby.

‘Have you ever been married, Sabrina?’

‘Never.’

‘I have. Twice. And divorced twice. Each breakup was a wrench, even though I was at the point of hatred in one case and disgust in the other. I was a long time recovering, both times. I thought of that when I tried to imagine what Emily went through, with her husband actually dead, the man who happened to be what she loved most in the world. God…’

‘Her father, too.’

‘She talked to me about it.’

‘About her father?’

‘About the two men dying.’ Dilys drew on the cigarette and blew smoke out over the veranda. ‘She also asked me not to say anything to anybody.’ Dilys looked straight at Sabrina. ‘Maybe it’s important now that I do.’

Sabrina waited.

‘I think she talked to me because she had to spill it to somebody. It seemed like a straightforward tragedy. Her husband Desmond and her father were out fishing on Lake Cayuga, which is inside the campus at Cornell, and within view of the house Desmond and Emily’s father lived in. Emily was taking a week’s vacation up there at the time. On the afternoon it happened, she came back from the university library with a stack of references for a book she was working on, and from the sitting-room window she could see the empty boat out on the lake. Her first thought, she told me, was that it had drifted. Des and Dad, she assumed, were having a couple of quiet ones at the tavern, like they sometimes did at that time of day.

‘But it dawned on Emily there were no signs in the house that the men had come back from the trip. She looked everywhere. Finally, when she got frightened and was frantic with worry, she called the police. They mounted a search straight away and they found the bodies around sunset.’

‘It happens,’ Sabrina said. ‘I had a school friend died the same way.’

‘Me too, a cousin. The boat capsized, he was in heavy fishing clothes and couldn’t swim as far as the shore.’

‘But the accident wasn’t what Emily asked you to keep quiet about, was it?’

‘No.’ Dilys flipped away her cigarette and lit another. ‘After it happened Emily’s neighbours, her colleagues, the authorities at Cornell and the police were all saying the same thing. It was what we just said - it was the kind of accident that’s always happening. But Emily didn’t believe it was an accident at all.’

‘Did she have any reason?’

‘The pathologist who did the autopsies gave her one. His evidence was skimmed at the inquest. There was pressure on the system, cases were backed up, so it was more like a rubber-stamping than a hearing. Cause of death, drowning. No evidence was brought to show that the deaths could have been anything but a mishap. But the pathologist tried to object, he had misgivings and he wanted to air them. No dice. Emily heard him complain to a police officer that the inquest had been rushed, and she went to see him.’

Dilys broke off and pointed to her cup. ‘Look, I know I’m a sad old thing, but the truth is I’m also addicted to caffeine. If you wouldn’t mind hanging on…’

She made to get up but Sabrina insisted it was her turn. She went inside and asked for two more coffees. Before she returned to the veranda she went to the rest room and put through a call to UNACO on her mobile. Philpott’s secretary came on. Sabrina gave her the names and rough date of the Selby-Stramm boating accident, and asked her to get a printout of the autopsy report.

She walked slowly back with the brimming cups and sat down opposite Dilys.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

Dilys explained that Emily had gone to the hospital where the pathologist worked as a teaching consultant. At first he had been reluctant to speak to her, because in his view, as an accredited Medical Examiner for the State of New York, he would be committing a breach of ethics if he expressed a controversial opinion of any case to an interested party.

‘But she had no trouble wearing him down,’ Dilys said. ‘He was miffed at the way the court steam-rollered him when he tried to raise a few points. His sense of justice was injured and his pride was, too. So in the end he told Emily about his uncertainties.’

There was no doubt, the pathologist had said, that both Emily’s husband and her father had died of drowning. But he was not at all sure they had simply fallen out of their boat when it capsized.

‘Both bodies showed signs of trauma,’ Dilys said, ‘things like bruising on the neck, a gash on Desmond’s forehead and one on the old man’s scalp. There were grazes, contusions around the eyes and even a sign of hip dislocation in Desmond’s case. The pathologist said the marks and injuries were not the kind he would associate with an accident of that sort. These looked like the signs of assault and serious struggle with an assailant.’

‘What did Emily do about that?’

‘She told me she tried to get the case re-opened, but the authorities brushed her off. For a while the pathologist tried to help her. He made representations to the police. He prepared a long statement explaining that in addition to the unusual marks on the bodies, the men also showed strange internal signs, the kind of thing that just didn’t chime with what was supposed to have happened to them. But he was up against a wall, same as Emily, and a month after he started lending her his support, he was diagnosed as having some kind of cancer. She called it by initials, NLH, something like that.’

‘NHL,’ Sabrina said. ‘Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’

‘Whatever. He died soon after. So Emily’s one and only ally was gone. She was bitter then, but she went quiet and I never found out any more. After the pathologist died, though, I don’t think she tried to get the case re-opened.’

‘Do you think she knew of a reason why somebody would kill her husband and father?’

‘I’m sure she had suspicions,’ Dilys said. ‘I mean, she found the suggestion of foul play easy to accept, didn’t she? The one thing she mentioned to me on that angle was about her husband’s death. She said she believed he died because he got in the way of a person or persons sent to kill her father.’

‘She actually said that?’

‘Once only. Afterwards, she seemed to regret it, and she wouldn’t discuss it any more.’

They sat in silence for a minute, drinking their coffee. Finally Dilys looked at the clock and said she had to rush.

‘I’ve got a date, and at my time of life I take such an event very seriously. I go to extravagant lengths to look right. I’m at the stage where it takes me an hour just to prepare the ground.’

‘Don’t sell yourself short,’ Sabrina said. ‘You look great.’

‘If I looked even a tenth as good as you, honey, I’d let up on myself.’

They made their way back through the coffee shop. At the door Sabrina held out her hand.

‘Thanks for your time, Dilys.’

‘It was a pleasure. Have I been any help?’

‘A great help. I’ve got a clearer picture of Emily now, and you gave me some avenues to explore.’

‘Well, that’s something, huh?’

‘It’s more than I expected,’ Sabrina told her.

8

At approximately the time Sabrina Carver was leaving the White House, Peter Leder was finishing dinner at Alfons, in Blisse Strasse in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. It was almost 10.20 in the evening, and Leder always tried to be in bed by eleven. He decided he had had enough pudding and put down his spoon.

‘That was excellent,’ he said. ‘This is the only restaurant I know where they put vanilla in the zabaglione.’

In 1969, at the age of thirty-four, Peter had undergone an emergency gastrectomy operation following the rupture of a duodenal ulcer. He almost died of the haemorrhage, but the operation was a success and after a long period of recuperation he was restored to health.

After the operation Peter’s stomach was smaller than a tennis ball. He had to eat very small meals for the rest of his life. If he ate too much at one time the results were distressing, and by the time he was forty he had learned never to swallow another morsel, or drink another drop, once the pressure in his gut told him he had touched his limit.

‘This has not meant I can’t enjoy my food and my wine,’ he said now, after explaining to his dinner companion why he had such tiny portions, and why he took so long to eat them. ‘I simply have to be prudent, and rely on the patience of those unfortunate enough to be dining with me.’

His guest, Stefan Fliegel, said he had hardly noticed anything unusual. It was obvious that could not be true, since the host had gagged, spluttered and hiccuped his way through the entire meal. But Fliegel knew that Peter Leder was susceptible to boot-licking. It had helped engineer this meeting, and Fliegel saw no reason to abandon the tactic.

‘My only regret,’ Leder said, ‘is that my condition has aged me in a number of ways. Doctors have explained that it is a nutritive defect, a failure of the body to take in nourishment at the rate I need it. My reliance on food supplements, while sustaining me, has meant my tissues have aged ahead of their time.’

‘You don’t look any older than your years,’ Fliegel said smoothly. ‘I happen to know you’re sixty-one, which is a year younger than I am.’

‘There you are, then!’ Fliegel said, fluttering his napkin. ‘Look at the difference in us.’

‘I was about to say, Herr Leder, that I observed no apparent age difference at all.’

The truth was that Stefan Fliegel could have been mistaken for Peter Leder’s son. Leder looked twenty years older than his age, while Fliegel, who spent a portion of every year bronzing himself at the Italian lakes, looked like a man of fifty. Fliegel was also good-looking and moderately athletic in his build. Leder was stooped and pot-bellied; he had blotchy skin, his face was deeply lined, and his teeth were discoloured by years of drinking iron tonic.

‘Ahem.’ Leder dabbed his mouth with his napkin, heralding a change of subject. ‘I see no need to delay telling you this any further - I have decided that your application for funding should be approved.’

‘Oh…’ Fliegel sat back, mouth slightly open.

‘The fact that I asked you to dinner was no indication of my approval, as I warned you when I issued the invitation.’

‘I understand that, Herr Leder,’ Fliegel beamed.

‘I have frequently entertained men to dinner on occasions when I have had to decline their applications. I simply feel that the dinner table is an excellent place to conclude an item of business, one way or the other.’

‘I’m very grateful you’ve seen fit to help our foundation, sir.’

‘Well now, any properly-run organization aimed at improving the quality of life and outlook for disadvantaged young Germans is bound to have the support of myself and my directors.’

‘It is through the foresight and generosity of people such as yourself that we are able to carry on our work.’

Fliegel was proud of the way he could match Leder’s stuffy manner of speech. He also sat forward when Leder sat forward, and folded his hands when Leder did. Mirroring, he had learned, was a way to lower the other fellow’s guard.

‘Your record of accomplishment is most impressive,’ Leder said. ‘I was interested to note you contribute a sizeable proportion of your time as well as a percentage of your income to the work.’

‘Indeed.’ Fliegel nodded, lowering his eyes with rehearsed modesty. ‘There is a large measure of vocation in what we do. I would feel my week had been wasted if I didn’t contribute at least ten hours to the work of the foundation.’

The waiter had been hovering. Now he came forward as Fliegel sat back and reached for his wine glass. It was not the same waiter as before. This one was taller. He had a face with the serene gravity of a graveyard angel’s, Fliegel thought, and he was attractively lean and wiry. This was the kind of young man who could break Fliegel’s heart, given half a chance. Fliegel smiled at him.

‘Did you enjoy the meal, sir?’

Fliegel nodded. The waiter watched as he drank a little wine and put down the glass.

‘Will there be anything else?’

‘Well…’

Fliegel would have liked a cognac. But for the moment he was confused, diverted. For one thing, Leder was obviously offended that the waiter was ignoring him; for another, the head waiter was standing in the middle of the restaurant staring at them, frowning as if something was wrong. Fliegel was aware, too, that this waiter didn’t quite have the aura for the job. In fact, he was distinctly unwaiterly in his lack of deference, and in the bold way he stared.

‘Nothing more then, sir?’ The blue eyes were fixed on Fliegel’s, disturbing him. ‘Perhaps it’s time to make final settlement,’ the waiter said.

That jarred Fliegel. ‘I’m sorry?’

The head waiter was approaching, weaving carefully between the tables. The waiter looked over his shoulder, saw the man and nodded, smiling.

‘Oberkellner,’ he muttered, nodding again.

The head waiter glared at him. He kept coming, bumping a woman’s shoulder and stopping to apologize.

‘Yes, the settlement, I think,’ the waiter said, looking at Fliegel again.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

The waiter reached inside his jacket and brought out a pistol. To Fliegel the world suddenly became unreal. This was not happening. It was a recollection, or he imagined it, or…

He heard his pulse thump in his ears and felt himself rise out of the chair as the waiter pointed the gun at his face. Fliegel had an intuition of magnetism, of somehow compelling the barrel of the gun to follow his movements. He felt his foot catch on the chair leg and grasped the table to keep his balance.

‘Settlement for Nathan Barash,’ the waiter said.

Fliegel heard the gun make a tiny metallic sound, then there was a rushing redness and noise like hollow boxes falling, then there was nothing.

A man two tables away had been combing his fingers through his hair when the gun went off. Now, bewildered by the noise and the screaming of women, the man looked at his hand where something had landed, warm and wet. He stared, uncomprehending, at the lumpy emulsion of blood and brain sticking to his fingertips.

‘Stop that man!’ the head waiter yelled.

Peter Leder stared at the body of Stefan Fliegel, sprawled back in the chair, one eye and half his forehead gone. The noise of the shot still rang in Leder’s ears, but he heard glass breaking and looked up. The waiter, still brandishing the pistol, had jumped clean through the restaurant window. He was running across the lanes of traffic, away from the restaurant, into the dark.

9

Mike spent the morning in the UNACO technical library scanning the records of keys and locks. After two hours of blind alleys he turned to Security Overviews, a classified listing of 10,000 key-and-lock combinations in use by American banks and security institutions. The entry he wanted was on the third from last page:

Lock series BL 921773 to BL 921872:

Sanders Lowe Inc. for Luckham Depositories

One hundred keys and locks of the same series, probably all in the same place. Emily Selby’s key was number BL 921786. It was a one-off no-copy device, high tungsten, with advanced precision in the cutting and grooving. It was a key which must have cost as much as a good strong-box. Mike decided it would be best to look for the matching lock at one of Luckham’s top three security operations.

To track down the lock he had to go to the communications suite, fire up a computer and enter a code word. His word was licet, Latin for ‘it is allowed’. After a second a menu appeared on screen. He clicked the box next to the entry CSC.

A number of facilities at UNACO took no account of the law. The CSC - Company Scrutiny Corpus - was one of them. It was a substantial collection of data that violated several important laws and business regulations covering privacy and the rights of groups and individuals. In addition, the greater part of the information had been obtained by illegal means.

But CSC was a priceless tool. The search for the lock to accommodate Emily Selby’s key could have taken days, and would have cost hundreds of dollars in bribes; using CSC, Mike completed the search in eight minutes.

He began by calling up a full list of depositories owned by Luckham, then began the search with the most secure depository. He found a listing of all lock numbers on the boxes, even a recently updated list of depositors. The lock numbers were not of the BL series so he moved to the next depository down the list, 400 dollars a month cheaper than the one above, and there he found the entry he wanted:

Sanders Lowe Lock numbers BL 921773 to BL 921872, fitted in Coverley Titanic-grade fire-resistant deed boxes, fossil-cell filled cavity, 5 millimetre sheet steel, cold bent. Boxes in rows of ten, ten rows high, protected out of hours by 8 laseroptic alarms.

The depository was on the eighth floor of the Okasaki Bank building at Mount Vernon in Washington, DC. Mike noted the address, spent five minutes on the internal phone explaining to C.W. Whitlock what he planned to do, then shut down the computer and went straight to Kitting and Outfitting.

‘I need to be smoothed and enriched,’ he told Theresa, the stony-faced woman in charge of wardrobe.

‘Which means?’

‘Dark silk floral Dior tie?’ he suggested. ‘Mid-blue Turnbull and Asser cotton shirt - and how about the petrol-blue Armani suit?’

‘The one you got gazpacho on.’ Theresa’s voice was tight.

He blinked at her innocently. ‘I did? Are you sure about that?’

‘There were witnesses.’

‘Well, there you go, how soon we forget things. Is there a problem?’

‘For a dry-cleaner, gazpacho is always a problem. Remove the stain completely, you leave a cleaning mark behind. Take out the stain so you don’t leave a mark, the smell of garlic stays. What’s a person to do?’

‘Theresa, I’m in a hurry here. Is the suit available or what?’

‘In Armani you’ve a choice of navy or light grey. Petrol blue is still on the critical list.’

He chose the navy. While it was being freshened with the steamer he took off his jeans and sweatshirt and put on a robe. Coming out of the changing cubicle he collided with a haggard-looking repair man in overalls and a wool cap. He smiled at Mike and nodded.

‘Hi,’ Mike said, turning away.

‘You don’t know me,’ the man said flatly. ‘These people are good, aren’t they?’

Mike turned and looked at him again. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Less than a month ago, when I overdid the jollity at Nancy Blair’s farewell party, you helped me home and put me to bed. You were a real pal. Today I’m someone you walk past with a hi. What’s the truth here, Mike? Do you really not recognize me, or did I do something that makes you want to be a stranger?’

Mike looked really closely. ‘You’re Jackie Lloyd?’

‘None other.’

‘They did a great job on you. The false nose works, but I don’t think it’s too realistic.’

‘Oh, funny, funny.’ Lloyd put his fingers under the artificial sagging on his cheeks. ‘I thought I’d keep the jowls and the red-rimmed eyes for a while, use them to play the pity card with my ex-wife. I could show her the alimony is killing me.’

‘I truly didn’t know you,’ Mike said. ‘We do strange things for a living, Jackie.’

‘Aw, come on, it’s no worse than living off immoral earnings.’ Lloyd pointed towards the sound of the steamer. ‘I’ve got to explain the oil on the boots and overalls. Theresa is going to do terrible things to me. I’ll see you around, Mike.’

‘Take care, Jackie.’

Mike went through an adjoining door to the domain of Imogen Kelly.

‘Why, Mr Graham.’ Imogen was the hairdresser and make-up person. She grinned at him. ‘You got here just in time, by the look of things. At first glance I thought a sheepdog had come to see me.’

Imogen had entered the UN as a mail clerk, but had been enticed away by UNACO when word of her natural talent for hair and cosmetics got around. As far as her friends and her former colleagues downstairs were concerned, Imogen worked in a tiny department handling specialized semi-classified mail. In fact she had the run of a superbly equipped salon where she passed her days repairing, improving or altering the appearance of UNACO agents.

‘I need to look like a front-edge businessman,’ Mike told her. ‘East Coast rather than West. I need it to happen in as short a time as you can manage.’

Theresa told him to sit down in the barber’s chair, which looked more like an airline pilot’s seat. She switched on a number of overhead lamps, creating shadowless illumination around his head and face.

‘Here.’ She threw a copy of GQ into his lap. ‘Pick an Adonis. I’ll tell you if it can be done, or if you’re just being silly.’

He leafed through the glossy pages and settled on a young man with longish hair waved smoothly on either side of a soft centre parting.

‘Is it possible to get that look without it blowing all over my face at the first puff of wind?’

‘Sure.’ Imogen threw a white sheet over him and tucked it into the collar of his robe. ‘I’ll adjust the shape and the length a little, then I’ll wash it. Then, before I blow it dry, I’ll douse you with this new stuff.’ She held up a black plastic bottle. ‘It gives your hair thermal protection, so I can work fast and really blast it with the dryer to give you the kind of burned-on shape a bomb won’t shift.’

The makeover took fifteen minutes, and at the end of it Mike’s hair looked very much like the man’s in the picture.

‘Marvellous.’ He turned his head from side to side in front of the mirror. ‘I didn’t know you could get results like this so fast.’

‘There’s a downside I didn’t mention,’ Imogen said. She took away the sheet and brushed the back of his neck, ‘After three days it all falls out. But you can’t have everything, right? Make the most of it.’

At five minutes past three, looking every inch a Wall Street high-roller, with a black Gucci briefcase jammed between his ankles, Mike belted himself in beside the pilot of a UN heli-courier. It was raining as they took off, but the pilot promised Mike they would be flying into better weather.

‘That’s a blessing,’ Mike shouted above the noise of the rotor. ‘If I get a mark on this jacket, I don’t think I can go back to the UN ever again.’

It was breezy and dry as Mike stood in front of the Okasaki Bank in Mount Vernon, Washington, one hour before closing time. He patted his wallet, feeling the potent bulk of his new identity, then marched in through the smoked-glass door. The elevator took him to the eighth floor.

The first barrier he encountered was a wall of armoured glass panels mounted into a shiny steel framework. He stood before it, looking for a door. A voice spoke somewhere above eye-level. ‘Good afternoon, sir. How can we help you?’ ‘I want to talk to somebody about renting a safe-deposit box.’

‘Certainly. Please come in and take a seat.’ A panel slid aside and he stepped into a room with walls covered in a dark green, heavily textured cloth. There was a narrow vertical strip of window at one end with two low leather chairs nearby, fronted by a small table. As he sat down the panel slid back into place and another one opened. A middle-aged man with a suit nearly as good as Mike’s came in. He had the clipped, grey-templed grooming of a federal judge. He smiled carefully as he approached.

‘I’m Dan Conway.’ He held out his hand as Mike stood. ‘I hope we can be of service, Mr ah…’

‘Lewis. Brett Lewis.’

Conway put a leather folder on the table and sat down. He opened it and Mike saw an application blank. The kind of thing he wanted to bypass. Written applications meant delay.

‘Could you give me some idea of the kind of facility you require, Mr Lewis? It saves time at the start if we discover you should be at one of our other branches.’

That was another tiny hazard. Mike had to be the right customer for the facilities on offer at this branch.

‘Document storage,’ he said. ‘That and some small valuables.’

‘Nothing bigger than fourteen by eleven inches, by seven deep?’

‘Oh no. In fact that sounds an ideal size. I have to tell you, there’s some urgency about this. I have documents relating to a sensitive and eventually high-profile buyout that has to stay absolutely secret for the time being. The papers have been prepared by hand, there are no copies and they need to be held in a place I know is perfectly safe.’

‘Well, first of all,’ Conway said, ‘let me give you the details of what we offer, and what we expect in exchange from our clients.’

Total anonymity was guaranteed, he said, and Mike would have liked to laugh. Back at UNACO they had the names of every depositor at every one of Luckham’s branches. Security was also guaranteed, first by the unequalled rigidity and fire-resistance of the storage medium, secondly by the intricate locking system, and third, by a series of laseroptic alarms linked to automatic door locks and to alarms in three police stations. There was also extensive insurance cover.

‘What we need from you, Mr Lewis, is a bank’s guarantee that you are good for the seven-hundred dollars monthly rental. We also need three good business references, and your permission to check that you have no criminal record or criminal affiliations - you appreciate this last is a formality which is insisted upon by our insurers.’

‘Well, fine, but there’s a snag in there,’ Mike said, and he saw Conway’s eyes harden a fraction. ‘I need your protection now, I mean right now, this very day. Early this evening I have to fly to Asia on business, and I must know these -’ he patted the briefcase, ‘are completely safe in my absence.’

Conway cleared his throat delicately. ‘It would take exceptional measures to secure a box for you today, sir.’

‘But is it possible?’

‘I can’t say I would hold out much hope.’

‘Can I short-circuit this?’ Mike said. ‘I believe you have a regularly adjusted and updated record of safe bets, isn’t that so? A confidential list, two hundred men and women in commerce who can be trusted no matter what. Am I right?’

This was shaky. Depending on how Conway stood on confidentiality, he might deny the existence of the list.

‘Well, now.’ Conway cleared his throat again. ‘The list you refer to is intended to be a record of guarantors and referees whose opinion of others we would accept without question. Are you saying that you wish to cite someone on the list as a character referee?’

‘Yes, I do. But I also want to point out that I’m on the list myself. Or so I believe.’

‘Frankly, Mr Lewis, I don’t see how you could know such a thing.’

‘Please accept that no one deliberately told me,’ Mike said. ‘In business, at the level of sensitivity where I operate, important secrets occasionally become transparent by sheer accident.’

Conway got to his feet. ‘If you will excuse me for a few minutes, Mr Lewis…’ He turned to go, then turned back. ‘Could you give me the name of the other person, the one you wish to cite as referee?’

‘Kenneth Ross.’

Conway noted the name and went away. Mike waited, imagining what was happening. Conway would go to a secure computer. He would open the special database of 200 names, initiate a search, and lo, under the name of Brett Lewis, there would be a picture of Mike. Attached to it would be a glittering business pedigree; appropriate electronic signatures would appear on a short status profile declaring him to be a man of solid-gold probity.

The search of Kenneth Ross’s name would bring up a picture of Alan Flint, a character actor whose talent for faces was in regular demand at UNACO. The fictitious Ross, like Lewis, would have a shining business lineage, hybridized from several genuine histories. The work had still been underway as Mike left the UN Secretariat building.

When Mr Conway called the number on the secret file to check Brett Lewis’s credentials - a formality, but Mike would bet he’d do it anyway - the Kenneth Ross who would come on the line would be C.W. Whitlock himself, ready and able to spin a line that would charm the keys off a jailer.

Conway was back in five minutes. His respectful manner now had a much clearer streak of deference.

‘Mr Lewis,’ he breathed, ‘I’m sorry to have kept you. I am happy to tell you that Luckham would be glad to offer you whatever facilities they can, whenever you need them.’

Ten minutes later Mike was alone in a small humidified vault with the ten-by-ten battery of deed boxes. He had been rented number 8, after scribbling his signature on a commitment to rent it for a minimum period of one month. His privacy in the chamber, Conway had assured him, was total. Mike believed that.

As soon as the door was shut he took a pen torch from his pocket and walked along the rows of boxes, shining the torch obliquely on each escutcheon plate, making the engraved numbers stand out.

Emily Selby’s number was on box 29. He slid the box from its nest, put it on the table and unlocked it. He raised the lid slowly, as if something was coiled in there, ready to jump.

He had come with no preconception, but there was less in the box than he had expected. Furthermore, it looked like the kind of stuff that would be found in a shoebox on the top shelf of a closet, not in a high-security deed box. There were old holiday snapshots of Emily and her husband, an early picture of her father and mother with their names engraved on the gilt frame, several small books of children’s stories with the name Emily Lustig written in a childish hand on the flyleaf of each; there were birth and marriage documents, one or two defunct insurance policies, and a sealed white envelope. Mike opened it.

Inside was a photograph of ten people, men and women, sitting in two solemn-faced rows, stiff-backed, under a banner embroidered with the initials JZ, and underneath the initials the legend Gründed 1994. The only other item in the envelope was a cheap notebook with one scribbled entry: 17a Scharweber Strasse, Berlin.

Mike removed most of the articles, apart from the framed picture and the children’s books, and put them in his briefcase. The notebook and the group photograph he put in his inside jacket pocket. There was nothing like being thorough, but he knew the only significant items were the picture and the address in the notebook.

He locked Emily’s box and slid it back into its nest. He took down his own box, opened it, and put in a bundle of newspapers. He had brought the papers for padding, so the briefcase would look the same going out as it did coming in - not that anyone here would suspect a man like Brett Lewis of doing anything underhanded.

As he left the depository Mr Conway appeared from behind his glass panel and walked with him to the elevator.

‘I hope we continue to be of service to you, Mr Lewis.’

Mike smiled and nodded.

‘I think I can safely say,’ Conway beamed, ‘your property could not be safer anywhere.’

‘Thanks for your help,’ Mike said as the doors opened. ‘Good day, Mr Conway.’

As the elevator plummeted, he reflected that one place safer than Luckham’s he could think of, straight away, was his locker back at UNACO. Nobody, so far as he knew, would ever dare open it without authorization, and the contents, if trivial, were still completely private.

10

Philpott had left messages for Sabrina, Mike and C.W. to gather for a meeting at three o’clock. By 2.55 they were all in the UNACO briefing room. C.W. and Mike sat opposite each other. Again Sabrina had taken the seat adjacent to Philpott’s, but this time on the opposite side of the table. Philpott leaned by the window, leafing through computer printouts. As Sabrina sat down he looked at the clock.

‘So let’s begin.’ He came and sat at the table. ‘This case is taking on an air of urgency, of which more in a few minutes. First we’ll update. Sabrina, tell us what you’ve gleaned on Emily Selby.’

Sabrina summarized what she had learned from talking to Emily’s three former colleagues, especially Dilys Craig.

‘The death on July 20th, 1993, of Emily’s husband and her father, who were her only family, affected her severely. She had cause to believe that the two men died in suspicious circumstances.’

Sabrina read an extract of the autopsy report, which indicated both men had suffered trauma not usually associated with drowning cases.

‘Moving on from that matter for the moment,’ Sabrina said, ‘I can now tell you I’ve found a connection between Emily Selby and Erika Stramm.’

She explained how the women were related, and added that in recent times they appeared to have been in regular correspondence.

‘What’s known about Emily’s husband?’ Philpott said.

‘I dug through the press files and professional directories for information on both men.’ Sabrina took out another sheet. ‘Nothing exceptional on Desmond Selby. He was forty-three, an assistant professor of Eastern Studies at Cornell. He and Emily met in Baghdad when they went there on separate research projects. Selby was Jewish, but like his wife he had no known affiliations to Jewish organizations here or abroad. By all accounts, Desmond Selby was a fine academic and a model citizen. For what it’s worth, Emily believed he was killed because he just happened to be where her father was at the time the executioner or executioners showed up.’

‘The old man?’ Philpott said.

Sabrina found the notes. ‘He was born Johannes Georg Hofmannsthal Stramm,’ she said, ‘born in 1923 in Munich, educated there and in Berlin. In 1941, when he was eighteen, he was ousted by the Nazis, along with several others, from the college where he had been studying. He wasn’t allowed to work and so he tried several times, unsuccessfully, to leave Germany. He was caught in a round-up of Jews in 1942 and was transported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He changed identities with a dead inmate, Johannes Lustig, and by various means he managed to survive. When the camp was liberated he applied for permission to travel to the USA and was accepted. He eventually took American citizenship and distinguished himself as a scholar.

‘Johannes Lustig was a supporter of the Zionist cause and was present among the spectators when David Ben-Gurion announced the birth of the state of Israel in 1948. He had a doctorate in Hebraic Studies, another in pure philosophy, and he held a professorship of European History at Cornell; he wrote four books about the Russian pogroms and a number of pamphlets on the Holocaust.’

‘Was he any kind of agitator?’

‘I’ve no evidence of that,’ Sabrina said. ‘He wrote angry letters to the press from time to time, and one or two of his pamphlets came down hard on what he saw as fascist tendencies in certain aspects of US domestic policy. But that was it.’

Notes were made.

‘Your turn, Mike,’ Philpott said.

Mike gave them a summary of his break-in at the depository. ‘Emily placed high value on simple things,’ he said. ‘The strong-box was full of items with no commercial value. I have to say it was kind of touching.’

He passed copies of the notebook entry and the group photograph to Sabrina and C.W.

‘The address has been checked,’ Philpott said. ‘It’s in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, a racially tense area with a fair bit of crime and sundry inner-city unpleasantness. The address is a high-security apartment, one of those places with no windows, metal-clad doors, alarms and a couple of surveillance cameras. It’s owned by Herschell and Grosz, a large firm of property renters and developers. They won’t say who the tenant is.’

‘Any bets it’s Erika Stramm?’ Whitlock said.

‘Well, she has no listed home address,’ Philpott said, ‘all we have is an e-mail location.’

More notes were taken, then Sabrina, Mike and C.W. sat back and looked at Philpott, who obviously had something important to say. Several times in the past few minutes he had centred his tie and shot his cuffs. It was a sign: substantial news was imminent.

‘These are details of two recent murders in Germany.’ Philpott handed out information sheets. ‘Karl Sonnemann, sixty-three, a university professor, was killed in Frankfurt. Stefan Fliegel, sixty-two, a businessman, died in Berlin. The names of both these men appear on the list Sabrina found in Emily Selby’s hotel room. So, whatever else that document might be, it’s a hit-list, and the killings have begun.’

‘Do we have a line on the killer or killers?’ Mike said.

‘In both cases the perpetrator was described as a young man, no older than twenty-five, approximately six feet two inches tall, fair hair, blue eyes…’

‘Finding him will be a cinch, then,’ Mike said. ‘A guy like that will really stand out in Germany.’

‘He may not be a German,’ Philpott said. ‘A witness who was with Professor Sonnemann said the young man spoke German with a peculiar accent. She couldn’t be any more specific about it.’

‘What’s being done to shield Andreas Wolff?’ Whitlock said. ‘I presume you are making his safety a priority?’

‘He has been given an armed guard,’ Philpott said, ‘and there is round-the-clock surveillance on his Tiergarten apartment.’

Sabrina asked if anything was being done to safeguard the others on the list.

‘Not at present,’ Philpott said. ‘The decision not to alert them may be seen as callous, but for the present we are anxious to know what connects these men, and our efforts in that direction might be harmed if we approached them.’

Sabrina said no more on the point. She wasn’t paid to argue.

‘We still have no depth in this picture,’ Philpott said. ‘I want you to go to Morocco, Sabrina. Find out about the man who killed Emily Selby, get hold of everything there is to know. Chances are he didn’t act on his own initiative, so if he was put up to it we want to know who did the putting up.’

‘Are we sure Morocco’s where he came from?’ Sabrina said. ‘Most recently, I mean?’

‘Mossad local intelligence in Rabat have checked out his movements and they’re sure he was resident in Tetuán. You’ll have a briefing docket before you leave and details of the approximate area of habitation will be in there, with a map.’

‘Fine.’

Philpott turned to Mike. ‘I want you to get inside that secure apartment in Berlin and find out what Erika Stramm is up to.’

‘Shouldn’t we maybe do this the other way around?’ Mike said. ‘Me go to Morocco, Sabrina take Germany.’

‘Are you displaying chivalrous concern?’ Philpott said.

‘Morocco can be very dicey,’ Mike said. ‘I’ve some experience there and -’

‘Thanks for your concern, Mike, but I think I’ll manage,’ Sabrina said coldly.

‘My decision to assign Sabrina to Morocco,’ Philpott said, ‘is based on the belief that, as a woman, she won’t be perceived as a threat. More fools them, I might add. By not encountering as much resistance as a man would, she will potentially be the most efficient.’

Mike shrugged.

‘Besides,’ Philpott went on, ‘she won’t be going alone. Lucy Dow will be there, in position, ready to act as cover, diversion, or guide.’

‘Why the two of them?’ Mike said.

‘Lucy is there anyway, keeping a weather eye on a Sendero Luminoso splinter group hiding out in the area. Lucy knows the territory and customs, she can help Sabrina find her way around. She may even come in handy for back-up.’ Philpott paused. ‘Do you have a problem with that, Mike?’

‘None at all,’ Mike snapped.

‘So.’ Philpott turned to Sabrina. ‘You will present yourself at the Briefing Suite at 17.30 hours today and they will provide what you need. In Morocco I want you to travel light, look like a typical tourist.’

Philpott stood, picked up his papers and tamped them on the desk. ‘That’s it. Time to disperse and perform good works. I’ll be waiting for you to report back. Remember, the clock is now running. You must take all necessary steps to evaluate the problem, contain it and neutralize it.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ Mike murmured as he walked away from the table.

He waited outside the briefing room for Sabrina.

‘Hey,’ he said as she came out, ‘no hard feelings. I just thought the job in Berlin would be more your style, that’s all.’

‘I’ll take my chances with what I’ve been assigned,’ Sabrina said. ‘The way I always do.’

‘I didn’t think you wouldn’t. I was trying to be helpful.’

‘There’s no need. In fact, I’d take it kindly if you’d smother the impulse to help me any time it comes up.’

‘Why?’ Sabrina started to walk away and Mike followed her. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because some offers of help affect me the same way that setbacks do.’

As she hurried away from him Mike noticed red spots had appeared on her cheeks. It was a sign she was angry. He often made that happen. It was, he decided, one of his more depressing talents.

Back in the briefing room Philpott talked to C.W. Whitlock about the two men who had died. In spite of extensive background searches by the German police, not a thread of a connection could be found between the victims.

‘All they appear to have in common is their killer, and the fact that they are both on the list.’

Philpott’s years at Scotland Yard had ingrained an old cops’ motto that a lack of evidence was usually the fault of the investigator - until it could be proved there was another cause.

‘Two men on a mystery list get mysteriously murdered. There’s a link all right, and if we don’t find it soon there’ll be more dead Germans on our plate.’

‘More information is emerging,’ Whitlock said. ‘The danger is that we may start seeing connections that don’t mean anything, similarities that aren’t connections at all. We now know that during the past fifteen years, nine of the men on the list have taken holidays in South America. Eleven are known to have Swiss bank accounts. Then there’s the fact that so many of them are orphans, and several of the others now appear to have been adopted. The gaps and inconsistencies in the German records system don’t help, but I’ll make the most of what we turn up. Rely on that.’

‘I already do,’ Philpott said.

Whitlock knew he would be expected to see connections where others saw none. Philpott believed C.W. had a peculiarly analytical brain which suited him to that kind of task. Whitlock believed Philpott missed the point. He was not especially gifted in the analytical department, but he was extremely patient - to the extent that he would dwell on a problem for days if necessary, familiarizing himself with it, piece by minuscule piece until familiarity equalled transparency and it was solved. Patience was the secret of many kinds of success, but patience was one of the inborn tools people didn’t use much any more. Which, Whitlock thought, was just too bad for people.

‘What’s known about the victims?’ he asked Philpott.

‘The usual bland stuff. Sonnemann, the professor, had a long, distinguished career as an academic. Only known weak point was for young women, which is almost grounds for canonization these days. The other one, Fliegel, was nearly as respectable, except his sexual enthusiasm was for males. Neither man was ever in trouble with the law. They lived in different parts of Germany and there is no traceable reason to believe they knew each other, or had ever met.’

‘Will I be sent copies of the police reports?’

‘You should have them within the hour.’

‘As soon as I have the paperwork I’ll get out the runes and the tarot pack and see what comes up.’

Philpott went off to a meeting to discuss the failing credibility of the International Court of Justice. Whitlock crossed the corridor to the UNACO Command Centre and looked into the office of the duty Newsline Monitor. No one was around. For a while he watched the bulletins flash up on the screens, then decided he should be a man and face at least one of his terrors.

He picked up a phone and dialled the number of his wife’s mobile. Carmen answered at once.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘About last night, and the night before, for that matter…’

‘Sorry?’

‘When I tried to apologize, and you turned it into something else both times -’

‘I’m working, C.W. Is there any point to this call?’

He wondered if she was ever this way with colleagues. Carmen was a consultant paediatrician, established in a good private practice, and putting in a conscience-cleansing ten hours a week in the Emergency Room of a city hospital - ‘the kind listed in blue pages, not yellow pages,’ C.W. would point out to friends, proud of Carmen’s work among poorer people.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘What exactly do you want?’

‘To say I really am sorry, I suppose.’

‘Saying sorry doesn’t cut it.’

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘What’s the good of you doing anything if I’ve to tell you to do it first?’

Now he wondered if maybe she was this hard with patients too. Poor kids.

‘Carmen, make one thing clear.’

‘What?’

‘Are you going to let up on me before I’m too old to enjoy making up?’

‘Now you’re being flippant.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said, feeling his temper rise. ‘And what kind of woman does that make you, sharing your life with somebody as flippant and superficial as I am?’

He threw down the receiver.

‘Trouble?’ a voice said behind him.

He turned and saw Caroline, the duty Line Monitor for the afternoon.

‘I have a habit of walking into knives,’ C.W. told her. ‘Then I try to lay the blame for my carelessness on the knives themselves, if you follow me.’

‘Oh, sure,’ Caroline put down her fresh cup of coffee. ‘It doesn’t sound very original, as dumb streaks go.’

She swiped a smart card across a slot in the drawer under the computer console. The drawer slid open. She took out a big brown envelope.

‘This came for you about ten minutes ago.’

C.W. took it. He pulled back the flap and looked inside. It was from the Berlin police, preliminary investigative reports on the murders of Karl Sonnemann and Stefan Fliegel.

‘Work,’ he said, glad of the distraction.

‘Work is the only practical consolation for being born, someone great once said. Miguel de Unamuno, if I’m not mistaken,’ said Caroline.

‘Thank you, Caroline, you do a lot to push back the boundaries of my ignorance.’

Whitlock stuck the envelope under his arm and left. As he walked along the passage he repeated the words in his head: Work is the only practical consolation for being born.

There were times, times like now, when a line like that seemed perfectly apt.

11

As Sabrina stepped off the plane at Tangier she felt she was breathing steam. The sun blazed from a cloudless sky, but ten minutes earlier it had rained, and now great pools of water on the tarmac were evaporating, making the air heavy with moisture.

She had deliberately dressed down for the trip, wearing a brown check shirt, soft brown chinos and loafers. Her hair was tied back in a dark gold ribbon and she wore no make-up. Even so, she attracted the attention of a red-faced businessman who fell in behind her at immigration control. She felt his fingertips make light contact with her hip.

‘I don’t know if you’ve been here before,’ he said, ‘but these guys will try to use any excuse at all to make you submit to a body-search. They’re apes, believe me. Just be careful how you answer their questions.’

The immigration officers looked perfectly civilized to Sabrina. The only ape-like creature in sight was the one breathing on her, the whisky on his breath emphasized by the damp air. He had the bug-eyed, snaggle-toothed look, Sabrina thought, of the one and only child molester she had ever seen. On the other hand, the heat and the fact she had a slight headache could be tilting her judgement.

‘I’ll watch it,’ she told the man.

‘It’s not that they want to humiliate you,’ he went on, winking at her. ‘They don’t make much money, so they go after any bonuses they can pick up, like handling an American woman.’

‘I hear what you say.’

‘Here on business, are you?’ He was now standing beside her, even though the sign at the door emphasized they should stay in single file. ‘I don’t get the impression you’ve come here searching for fun.’

‘It’s business,’ Sabrina said, not looking at him.

‘Harvey Bristow’s my name.’

‘Fine.’

‘So who are you?’

Sabrina saw a vacant desk and the officer behind it beckoning to her. She strode across the tiled floor and handed over her passport, aware that Bristow was plodding after her.

‘Remember what I told you,’ he muttered, too close to her ear.

The immigration officer smiled at Sabrina. He was tall and dapper and cool in his light cotton uniform. He opened her passport, looked hard at her face, smiled again and stamped a blank page. He handed back the passport, still smiling.

Sabrina thanked him and legged it across the concourse, looking for the baggage carousel. Two things happened almost at once. She heard the pest running to catch up, and a familiar Japanese voice rang out from a Hertz desk to her right.

‘Kogatasha o karitai no desu ga.’

She turned and saw Nat Takahashi of the UN Economic and Social Council. He was a short, lean, very brisk man in his late thirties. In spite of the heat he was wearing a dark wool business suit and his customary white shirt and dark-blue tie. He looked pleased that the clerk at the desk understood Japanese.

‘Isshuukan karitai no desu ga…’

Sabrina’s Japanese wasn’t strong, but she believed he was saying he wanted to hire a small car for a week.

‘The carousels are over there,’ Bristow said, panting with the effort to catch up to her. This time he put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a hand with your bags.’

‘Nat!’ Sabrina called out.

Takahashi turned, frowning, looking for the source of the sound. He saw her and beamed.

‘Hey! Sabrina! You following me or what?’

She made eye signals, telegraphing displeasure at the sweaty presence with his hand on her shoulder.

‘Stay right there.’ Nat had caught on. ‘I’ll just finish this item of business.’

Bristow looked put out. ‘The guy is a friend of yours?’

‘He sure is.’

Together they watched Nat take back his credit card, his hire documents and a set of car keys. He put everything carefully in his pockets, then he turned and walked to where Sabrina stood. He was not smiling now. His face was impassive, the eyes fixed on Bristow.

‘Is this gentleman bothering you?’

‘Hey now, hang on.’ Bristow let out a nervous chuckle. ‘I was just talking to the lady here…’

‘Take a hike.’

Bristow looked stunned. He swallowed. ‘There’s no call to go taking that tone, now -’

‘You deaf, or what?’ Nat’s harsh New York delivery clashed with his oriental looks and conservative dress. Bristow could have been told that this was a Japanese gangster and he would have believed it. ‘This lady does not need your attentions, OK?’

‘Jesus, what did I do here?’

‘Just turn and go about your business,’ Nat told him. ‘Otherwise you could be going back to base with your windpipe in your pocket.’

Bristow snatched up his hand baggage and stamped away, face redder than ever, his mouth churning. Sabrina looked at Nat wide-eyed.

‘I only wanted an excuse to shake him off.’

‘Well…’ Nat shrugged. ‘If you’re going to do a job, why not do it thoroughly?’

He took her arm and led the way to the carousel.

‘I know there’s no sense asking you why you’re here, Sabrina, because you’ll only hand me a pack of lies, but you can tell me if this is your first time in Tangier.’

‘It is. But my destination’s Tetuán.’

‘Good. I’m heading for a town called Martil, which lies a few miles beyond the place you’re going. Let’s get our bags, then I can give you a lift to your hotel.’

‘That’s great.’

‘Don’t be too sure. I love showing off my local knowledge, and even if you yawn a lot it won’t stop me. By the time we get to Tetuán you might wish you’d stuck with the bleary guy.’

In a little red Peugeot with the windows wound down, Nat Takahashi drove through Tangier with the kind of reckless unconcern Sabrina had seen only once before, in Saigon, where they drove with what seemed to be a total dependence on Providence. Every few yards Nat would bang on the horn, making people scatter.

‘To civilized people forced to spend time in this part of the world,’ he told Sabrina, ‘the horn is known as the Arab foot-brake. Once you get the hang of the technique, it has a certain charming logic.’

So that Sabrina could see a few of the sights of Tangier, Nat drove out of the city by a meandering route, taking them across a network of streets lined with restaurants, bars and nightclubs.

‘This used to be a really international city,’ he said. ‘Exciting. Dangerous. You had smugglers, spies, all kinds of exiles. It was a heady kind of place.’

‘Were you here in those days?’

‘I wasn’t even born in those days. But I’ve heard the stories, talked to some of the veterans. If you want a taste of the exotic seediness they had in the thirties, try spending some time in the old town. It’s a maze of alleys and narrow little streets and shady doorways. I do it from time to time. It’s fascinating.’

Sabrina tried to imagine the reactions of the Arabs in the old town to a smart-suited Japanese nosing round their territory.

‘What brings you here, Nat?’

‘The usual.’ He stopped talking to concentrate as he eased the car round a corner on to the long stretch of Rue de la Liberté from Place de France. ‘I have to make plans to initiate UN activities in Morocco, things related to development, trade, economic mobilization, economic use of resources - even population control. Anything, in fact, that fits with the policies we chase under the authority of the General Assembly.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘I’ve been doing it so long it feels like I do nothing. I haven’t faced a real challenge in years. I should join UNACO and get my responses tightened up.’

Like most UN officials and employees, Nat knew of UNACO’s existence and its aims, but he had no clear idea who were the agents and who were the administrative staff. He didn’t really know, either, what a UNACO agent might be called upon to do. Occasionally an agent would die in circumstances never specified, and the others at the UN would become aware, for a while, that there were people in their midst who did incredibly dangerous things in the line of duty.

‘You’d probably get bored anywhere you worked,’ Sabrina said, getting off the topic of UNACO. ‘Check out your ancestry and you’ll find you’re descended from warriors. Samurai. People like that never feel the challenges of modern life are worthwhile.’

‘I’m descended from accountants of one kind and another,’ Nat said. ‘No warriors anywhere in my history. Even during the war, my grandfather was an army pay clerk in Kobe.’ Nat leaned forward, his forehead nearly touching the windshield. ‘There you are, Sabrina. Take a look at it. The Grand Socco - the great market.’

Long rows and clusters of stalls were tended by women - Nat said they were farmers’ wives - in wide-brimmed pompom hats, selling fruit and vegetables of every kind.

‘Marvellous,’ Sabrina said, meaning it. ‘Simply marvellous.’

The mingle of voices and rich aromas entering the car worked on her like a drug. One of her first priorities, anywhere she went, was to catch what she imagined to be the essence of a place, to savour it and take it into herself, until she felt she was involved and no longer a simple observer. It had been that way with her since childhood, and now, with a pang as strong as any she had ever felt, she knew that the spirit of Morocco was reaching her. She would never say anything so corny out loud, but she knew that it was true. She was suddenly aware that Nat was watching her, taking in her rapturous expression.

‘I like this place,’ she told him.

‘I hoped you would. Personally, I adore it.’

He slowed the car, so she could see a gnarled old artisan beating a copper bowl into shape, using only a stone and a cloth-covered hammer to fashion the elegant curves of the vessel’s sides. At Nat’s window a child put in her head and smiled at him. He smiled back.

‘Enchanting,’ Sabrina said.

‘Right.’ Nat ruffled the child’s hair and eased the car forward. ‘But you should be careful not to get too hooked on all this. It gets into your blood.’ Nat looked at Sabrina and his face was serious. ‘I’ll tell you something. I couldn’t go on doing my Job if I didn’t get my regular fixes of Morocco.’ He laughed. ‘There. It’s out. My unspoken passion. Now you can blackmail the hell out of me.’

They left Tangier on a wide dusty road, heading south-east to Tetuán, 57 kilometres away. Nat gunned the car forward, winding up his window against the dust.

‘I promise I won’t try to pry into your business,’ he said, ‘but tell me this, do you plan to have dealings with people in Tetuán who could loosely - or tightly - be classed as, um, not entirely law-abiding?’

Sabrina nodded. ‘It’s very likely,’ she said.

‘Well, my second promise is I won’t underestimate your ability to look after yourself. But be careful. The old criminal element here was never restrained in the way it defended itself, but, even so, there were rules and barriers. But now things have changed.’

‘What, recently, you mean?’

‘In the past year or so.’

‘Care to tell me about it?’

‘It’s to do with a new kind of contamination,’ Nat said. ‘Extremism used to be breaking somebody’s arm to steal five dollars off him. Nowadays extremism is killing as many people as you can, not because you want anything from them, or because they’ve harmed you, but because killing them draws attention to your political posture.’

‘You said contamination.’

‘Right. Politics has contaminated the criminal impulse. And the results are catastrophic. Political causes, so-called, attract people with violent instincts. Cheap political messages give their brutality a focus. It becomes noble, too. Blowing up a main street full of innocent human beings is now termed an act of political extremism, when in fact we know it’s nothing more than the behaviour of moral midgets with psychopathic compulsions.’

‘How do you reckon this could touch me?’ Sabrina said, although she guessed she was slightly ahead of Nat.

‘Anything goes,’ he said. ‘Two years ago, you might have got a sock on the nose for snooping around the wrong places in Tetuán. Today they’d just as soon kill you. The restraints are gone. Blame political contamination.’

‘I’ll stay on my guard.’

‘Do more than that,’ Nat said. He took his eyes off the road for a second to stare at Sabrina. ‘Let no circumstance put you at a physical disadvantage, no matter how slight or unimportant it might seem. Watch your back. The rule with certain factions is, when in doubt, eliminate. Life is cheap and too many people know it.’

When they arrived in Tetuán Nat drove straight to the district of Bab Ceuta. They got out of the car and looked out over a Muslim cemetery to the old Jewish quarter beyond.

‘It’s absolutely beautiful,’ Sabrina said.

‘Yes it is, and this is just the time of day to see this part of town. Look at it, soak up the beauty, and try to make yourself remember that, for the likes of us, it’s seething with danger. Never let the loveliness of the place lull you.’

If Philpott ever resigned, Sabrina thought, they could do worse than move Nat Takahashi into the job. He had the technique for labouring a point, he could be something of an old woman, and he knew how to drill a warning into a person’s skull. Sabrina wondered if he really believed she could look after herself. Few men did, it seemed.

‘Where are you staying?’ Nat said.

‘A place called the National. It’s got one star. Do you know it?’

‘Sure. It’s over that way.’ He swung his arm to the left. ‘On the Rue Mohammed Ben Larbi Torres. It’s an old hotel, it’s quiet and it has a really peaceful internal courtyard.’

‘And is it a safe place?’

‘I’d say so. But try not to assume anywhere is safe.’ He touched her arm. ‘Come on, I’ll drive you to the hotel.’

12

‘This news has made me sad, Viktor.’

The big American underlined his sorrow by putting a hand to his fat chest, close to the region of his heart. With his other hand he pushed back his grey Stetson. He let out a long sigh.

‘Stefan Fliegel and Karl Sonnemann were good people. Their passing will leave a gap.’

Viktor’s mouth tightened for a moment. ‘An adequate reprisal would go some way to repairing the damage.’

‘But you don’t know who did it, do you?’ ‘We will find out. In any case, we know the general source of the attacks, if not the attacker.’ The American was Harold Gibson of Waxahachie, Texas, newly arrived at Tegel airport, Berlin. His companion was Viktor Kretzer, a German architect, who was completely bald and wore a brown wig which emphasized the fact. Kretzer had come to the airport to greet Gibson and to bring him news of the two deaths. They sat together in the airport coffee lounge, sipping Kenyan blend, looking balefully at travellers heading for check-in.

‘It was JZ, of course?’ Gibson said.

‘It’s their avowed intention to eliminate us all, and that’s what they have begun to do. One thing we have learned about the Jews: they are as serious about their threats as they are about their money.’

‘Do the others know the position? Nobody’s in the dark and off guard?’

‘Everyone has been alerted and they are all taking precautions. But we need more than that.’ Kretzer touched his wig. ‘It is bad tactics to remain passive in the teeth of specific aggression. We must hit back.’

‘Well, we’ve taken steps already, as you know. They’ve been hit hard, right at their heart…’

‘That stopped nothing. It pales to no more than a gesture in the light of what has happened.’

‘Oh, come now, I’d say it was more than that.’

‘The death of the Selby woman was meant to stop an unwanted investigation, as well as being aimed at buckling the will of JZ in general. She died before either Stefan or Karl. In that regard it clearly failed. In fact, if what I hear is true, it stopped short of backfiring into disaster. No attempt was made on the second woman, who is by far the more serious irritant. Your man killed himself before reaching that part of his programme.’

Kretzer had spoken impatiently and now appeared to realize that. ‘Forgive me, Harold. I have taken this badly.’

‘As well you might, old friend.’ Gibson fingered a silver ornament on the clasp of his briefcase. ‘Do you have plans for retaliation, or is it too soon to ask that?’

‘We need a target that occasionally stops moving.’

‘Well, any way we can be of help, just say the word. This has to be straightened out.’

‘I think the help you bring us today,’ Kretzer said, ‘will go some way to establishing a solution. The business of eliminating Red Sea pedestrians has always been costly. Your moral and financial support are twin buttresses. I never tire of saying so. Without them we would not have achieved as much as we have. But now we have to change our focus, we must redirect our resources and find a way to destroy JZ at its core.’

‘I never imagined,’ Gibson said, ‘when we arranged a certain boating accident, that knowledge of the Jugend would pass into the hands of the daughter, and the other…’

‘Small wonder that I get depressed,’ Kretzer said. ‘Think of the lives we lead, think of the endless furtiveness, never openly acknowledging each other, always communicating by routes that would make a juggler dizzy - it tells on the spirit. And now, at a time when we should be feeling some pleasure in our achievements, we are instead fearful for our lives, because we are being picked off one by one -’

‘Ssh…’

‘I’m sorry, my friend. I am despondent. In such a state I should keep my mouth shut.’

‘Just hold a few good thoughts,’ Gibson said. ‘In the fifty years of your existence, you’ve carried out the work the Führer passed on. Be proud. Leave despondency for the kind who deserve it.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Kretzer said. ‘We should count our blessings.’

‘And try to remember that JZ is small and narrow. They’re fragile at bottom. They’ve just been lucky, that’s all.’ Gibson patted Kretzer’s hand. ‘Now I’ve got to go, I have to be at the bank at eleven sharp. Everything should be waiting ready for my signature. Where will we meet?’

Kretzer smiled thinly. ‘Today, I thought we would meet at the International Congress Centre.’

‘I think I know the way.’

‘Between the Messedamm and the S-Bahn. You can get there on the Avus motorway, there is plenty of parking space.’

‘As I recall, it’s a big development, Viktor.’

‘Yes, so I have decided on a precise spot for us to meet. Shall we say twelve-thirty?’

‘Where?’

‘Outside the Jewish Community House. It’s a double irony, Harold. The place was designed by architects I particularly despise.’

They stood and Kretzer handed Gibson a set of Mercedes keys. ‘It’s in the west-side car park. Drive carefully.’

They parted at the door to the concourse. Gibson went straight to the parking area, navigated the neat system of paths to the west section and stood by the first row of cars. He pressed the button on the ignition key. Halfway along the second row the lights of a blue Mercedes saloon flashed.

He squeezed his bulk between two cars, strode to the Mercedes and put his bags in the boot. He got in, started up, and fumbled in his pocket for his cassette. He found it and popped it into the player.

As he pulled out to the airport perimeter road Andy Williams began singing ‘Home Lovin’ Man’. Gibson turned up the volume. This was his favourite album of all time, he never went anywhere without it. He had told his wife till she was probably sick of hearing him say it, they could keep the simpering crooners they called singers nowadays. This was proper ballad singing by a man with a man’s voice, singing about a man’s emotions. And the music had a tune.

He reached the bank at three minutes to eleven. The submanager recognized him and beckoned him to a side room. Without a word Gibson was seated at a table and given a pen. He signed three identical withdrawal documents, declined a cup of coffee, and stood again to receive a black leather attaché case, brought by the sub-manager from the secure area at the rear of the banking hall.

‘A pleasure, as always, Herr Gibson,’ the submanager said.

‘Nice to see you again.’

Gibson slapped the little man’s shoulder and left.

The car was parked across the street. He skipped through the traffic, panting with the effort, and got in. As he pulled the seatbelt across his chest he saw a young man at the corner watching him.

Or it looked as if he was watching.

Gibson sat still for a minute. The watcher had gone now, vanished round the corner. But he had been watching, Gibson was sure of it now. Maybe he should make different arrangements for receiving the cash next time.

Gibson fumbled the ignition key into the lock. He did not see there was something extra on the dashboard now, a small metal prong attached to a stick-on circuit board the size of a shirt button.

He turned the key. The surge of ignition put micro-power through the tiny device on the dashboard. It transmitted a signal a distance of 90 centimetres to a receiver in a plastic bottle under the front passenger seat. In response to the signal, the receiver was configured to produce a spark. The spark ignited 2 litres of aircraft fuel, also in the bottle. The chain of events, from transmission of the signal to ignition of the fuel, took a two-hundredth of a second.

The car exploded. Windows and glass doors along the street shattered. Burning debris and showering flames set fire to two shops and a telephone kiosk. For five minutes the heat from the burning car was too intense to allow any approach.

When firemen were finally able to get close and douse the wreck with foam, a charred body was seen arched backwards across the driver’s seat. Beside it lay the blackened remains of an attaché case.

13

Sabrina had been warned she should go to the tourist office at Avenue Mohammed V, where a few dollars would buy her the services of a guide to show her round the old town.

‘You will become lost if you go alone,’ the man at the hotel reception warned her. He was a tall stooping Indian, with a look of bottomless grievance, as if some wrong had been done to him for which there was no remedy. He held up a finger as Sabrina moved away from the desk. ‘Even if you do not become lost,’ he said, ‘you may see only a small proportion of what might have been revealed to you with the help of a guide.’ He made that possibility sound like a tragedy.

Sabrina promised him she would be fine on her own, and left the hotel. At the end of the road she hailed a battered replica of a Yellow Cab and showed the driver the scribbled address she had for Lucy Dow. The man screwed up his eyes at the paper, as if it caused him pain.

‘Is small place,’ he said, holding up his hands, the palms an inch apart. ‘I drive you near, is all.’

‘Do what you can,’ Sabrina told him.

It took twenty minutes through narrower and narrower streets, until finally they were in a passage-way only a couple of metres wider than the car. The driver stopped and pointed up ahead to a narrow gap between two tall buildings.

‘Is place,’ he said, and held out his hand for the fare.

When he drove off Sabrina walked slowly towards the alley. She had expected a populated spot, but this place was deserted. The stillness was weird. It was the kind of silence that made her imagine dozens of people holding their breath. The houses around looked empty, but she could imagine people were there, tucked back into the shadows, watching.

‘I’m only paranoid because the whole world is out to get me…’

At the mouth of the alley she stopped and looked at her piece of paper again. The single word KABILA was pencilled above the street address. She looked up and saw it again, painted on a piece of lath pointing along the alley.

She moved into the gloom, smelling dampness and cats. On her right, 10 metres along, there was a solitary doorway. She went in and saw thin beams of daylight from high up, dappling a splintered staircase.

‘Nice little pied-à-terre, Lucy.’

She climbed the stairs, feeling them move with her weight. At the top was a room with no door. A heavy curtain was slung across the gap. She pushed it aside. The room beyond was clean and bright. The floor was tiled and shiny, with a rug at the centre. And Lucy was there, sitting in a winged cane armchair facing the window.

‘Surprise, surprise!’

Sabrina took three steps into the room and knew everything was wrong. Lucy continued to stare out of the window. No living person was ever that still.

‘Oh God, oh God, my poor Lucy…’

They had not known each other well, but they had got on. That was closeness enough to put a pang through Sabrina’s heart. She stepped close to the chair. Lucy’s hands were tied in front of her. Her throat had been opened. Flies clustered on the edge of the wound and across the caked blood in her lap.

Sabrina looked around the room. If there had been anything there belonging to Lucy it had been taken. Her body was all they had left.

Sabrina looked at the filmed, half-lidded eyes. Lucy had died some hours ago. Already the tan of her skin was turning deeper brown at the hairline; the sweetish smell of early decay hung in the room. She put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder briefly, as a farewell gesture, then slipped out of the room. If whoever had done this was coming back, she didn’t want to be there when they did.

Sabrina went quickly back down to the alley. She walked to the far end and found a quiet, private space. She fished out her mobile and tapped three digits. C.W. Whitlock came on the line. She told him what had happened in a calm voice that didn’t betray her churning emotions.

‘Go back to your hotel and have a strong drink,’ he told her. ‘The proper authorities will be alerted. They’ll deal with it.’

‘Do you think this had anything to do with Yaqub Hisham and my investigation? This would be a fairly strong signal that they don’t want anyone poking around.’

‘No. This was the boys from Peru, I’d say. She believed they were on to her. She also believed she could handle it. She obviously got it wrong.’

‘Are they holed up in this area?’

‘Never you mind, Sabrina. This isn’t your turf. It’s a matter for Task Force Six.’

‘Sure.’

‘Sabrina? You listening?’

‘It’s all right, I got the message. You can’t blame me for feeling enraged.’

‘Don’t you mean vengeful? That particular itch will be scratched. We’ll bring them to justice, I promise. Now listen, Sabrina, wait for back-up if the situation heats up too much. I would rather have you slow and alive, than quick and dead. Take care out there, OK?’

‘If I don’t, it won’t be for want of warnings.’

‘Keep in touch.’

‘Right.’

It had happened before and - God help me, she thought - it would happen again. At the hotel she bathed, changed her clothes and put Lucy Dow firmly from her mind. Then she set out to find Yaqub Hisham’s cronies on her own.

She took the map that had been provided with the briefing docket. Her destination, the place where Mossad believed Emily Selby’s killer had lived, was called Rouelle Nador. She memorized the name and pictured the words in her head, ready and waiting for a match. But after two hours of tramping the narrow streets, retracing her steps at several points, she admitted that she was lost.

Part of the problem was that only some of the streets had names, so there was no logical way to progress from one to the other, in spite of what the map appeared to suggest. Another snag was that some names were duplicated, because little signs with pointers had been tacked up to help tourists find certain locations, and in many cases the pointers had fallen off and now only the names remained, misleading anybody trying to use names as a guide.

On top of that, she was making people curious about her. Once again she had tried to dress down, in a dark bronze-and-mustard ankle-length skirt and a matching peasant top, but she was American and she was blonde and that undid most of the effort. People were watching as she passed, and they were muttering.

Towards noon Sabrina considered giving up and going back to the hotel to rethink her tactics. She had assumed that Lucy would take her to within spitting distance of the place she wanted to go. Bereft of that guidance, she had trudged through streets crammed with mosques and townhouses - some of them highly elegant -and had bowed her head to pass through countless arches and follow the alleys beyond. Around the walled perimeter of the old town were dozens of gates, some of them locked, most of them imposingly built from oak with iron and copper banding. They seemed not to lead outside of the old town, but into other shadowy areas not shown on her map. As an experience, that part of Tetuán was unforgettable. But trying to find an address was hell.

She asked no one the way. An American woman visiting that area with a destination in mind would go beyond being a curiosity and become an object of suspicion. She simply kept wandering, sure that by now she looked lost and faintly dazed without having to strain for the effect.

Outside a café she stopped, took a deep breath of the coffee aroma and dropped into a chair. The street was no more than 3 metres wide and an overhanging balcony cast an oblong of shade where she sat. The scent of coffee was delicious but she ordered iced tea. For the moment it was sheer pleasure just to sit there dabbing her face and neck with a handkerchief, feeling a gentle draught from a passageway opposite.

She looked up as the tea was brought. Over the waiter’s shoulder she saw a sign: Rouelle Nador.

‘Goddamn it!’

‘Mam’selle?’ The waiter looked startled.

‘That looks wonderful,’ she said, switching on a bright smile. She picked up the tall glass in its silver holder. ‘Really wonderful.’

The waiter went away, confused.

Sabrina took her time over the tea, watching the pedestrian traffic to and from Rouelle Nador. It was a long street, narrower than most of the others and very drab. Raucous Arab music blared from a couple of upstairs windows, and that was unusual. Most of the music playing from shops and from the open doorways of houses was subdued and melodious, western in tone with a distinct French bias.

The people going down Rouelle Nador and those coming out were unmistakably a ghetto breed, she decided. They had the look of the community’s bad guys. They displayed a sullen, automatic dislike of the scene around them, just like the thugs of the esquadrones muertes, the death-squad men she had seen hanging around the beach bars of La Libertad in EL Salvador.

There was no sense in trying to kid herself; the people around Rouelle Nador made her nervous. She took a deep breath and silently admitted it. She knew why it was happening, too: she associated these characters with what had happened to Lucy Dow.

Abruptly, like a dose of the right medicine at precisely the right moment, she had a sudden recollection of Mike Graham offering to take this job and let her go to Germany.

That shifted her focus. She straightened her shoulders, threw back her head and drained the glass. She put a handful of Moroccan francs on the table, got up and made her way into Rouelle Nador.

There were no shops or cafés, no mosques or elegant houses. None of the odours escaping on to the street inspired exotic sensations. Mostly it was staleness and decay she smelled, with the occasional whiff of hashish. Definitely a ghetto, a concentration of self-segregated nastiness at the centre of other people’s domestic lives.

A man standing in a doorway stared at her as she went past. He was dressed in flip-flops, cutoff jeans and a green Day-Glo undershirt. His eyes followed her and as she turned to stare back at him he stopped chewing the matchstick jutting from the side of his mouth.

‘Do you speak English?’ she said.

He hesitated, then nodded.

‘I’m trying to find the family or the friends of Yaqub Hisham,’ she said.

The man shook his head.

‘You don’t know him?’

He shook his head again and resumed chewing the match.

Sabrina walked on. She counted to ten, then turned and looked back. He had gone from the doorway. Word would now be travelling. She wiggled her shoulders to dispel a sudden tingling along her back. She began walking again.

After a minute she heard someone running behind her, the sound getting rapidly closer. The feet sounded light, not at all threatening, and when she turned she saw a small boy no more than five or six years old.

‘Missy go that place,’ he said breathlessly, pointing. ‘Go Maruf-al-Hakim.’

‘Whoa, there.’ Sabrina knelt by the boy and put her hand on his skinny shoulder. ‘Say it again, slowly.’

He frowned at her, not understanding. She realized he had been told exactly what to say. He didn’t speak English.

‘I go there?’ Sabrina pointed to a door on the corner of two alleys, dead ahead. ‘That place?’

The boy nodded rapidly. ‘Missy go that place. Go Maruf-al-Hakim.’

‘Maruf-al-Hakim.’

He nodded again. Sabrina fumbled in her pocket for change to give him, but he turned and ran back the way he had come.

Sabrina went to the door and knocked. Where so much was unknown it was best to improvise her story, because a fresh ad hoc lie worked better than the stale, all-purpose variety. With no certainty of what she would find, she had no concrete plan to execute after she delivered her opener. But she was ready for the worst.

The door opened a crack. A girl of fifteen or sixteen put her face in the opening.

‘Can I speak to Maruf-al-Hakim?’

The girl shut the door. It opened again a moment later, wide this time. A man stood there, tall and bearded, barrel-chested, dressed in US Army fatigue pants and a dirty green polo shirt. He was barefoot.

‘Are you Maruf-al-Hakim?’

‘That is my name.’

No toothbrush, Sabrina would swear, had ever been near the mouth that lurked behind the fringes of Maruf-al-Hakim’s moustache. She recalled Philpott’s description of teeth like that: If one of them was white he’d have a snooker set.

‘Could I talk to you about Yaqub Hisham?’ Sabrina said.

Maruf shrugged. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Mary Smith. Is Yaqub a friend of yours?’

‘We are brothers.’

‘Oh, I see -’

‘We are all brothers.’

She saw a poster on the wall behind him. It depicted a bunch of incredibly healthy-looking Arabs brandishing guns above their heads, the sun blazing behind them as they marched forward with a scarlet-lettered Arabic slogan at their feet.

‘That’s your brotherhood?’ Sabrina said, pointing.

‘What business do you have with us?’ Maruf demanded. He folded his arms, suggesting a stand-off.

‘I know about Yaqub’s business in London,’ she said.

Maruf shook his head firmly. ‘Not possible. Yaqub is in Palestine.’

‘No, he was in London all right. He didn’t use his real name. He was calling himself Kamul Haidar.’

Maruf’s eyes went down to slits. He tilted his head one way then the other. ‘I ask again, what is your business here?’

‘I need to know why Yaqub went to London.’

She was sure these people knew Yaqub Hisham was dead. If they ran true to type, they would have plans for her already. Which was fine. She wanted that. She wanted their full belligerent attention, for that way she would get to know things. Quickly.

‘I see,’ Maruf said.

The hair around his mouth was so dense it was hard to see how he was responding, but as he stepped back now he seemed to smile.

‘You will take mint tea with us.’

‘Thank you, but I don’t feel it’s proper to enter a stranger’s house without a chaperone.’ She watched him scowl. They just hated a woman to show any determination. ‘Can I invite you perhaps to join me for tea or a soft drink at a café?’

Maruf appeared to think about it. ‘One moment,’ he said, and disappeared, pushing the door almost shut.

Sabrina waited, watching the gap in the door. She thought she heard music. Then she heard footsteps and turned sharply because they were behind her suddenly. She felt pain and saw a flash of bright, blinding light as something hard struck the side of her head. She fell back into churning darkness.

She came round with a stink like rotting fish in her nostrils. The pain in her head was so bad she was sure her skull was fractured. When she tried to touch her head something kept her hand from moving.

It was a long time before she opened her eyes. When she did the faint light penetrated like knives, sending a shaft of pain across the back of her head. She shut her eyes, waited a while, then slowly opened them again. This time the pain was only a throb.

She was lying in a filthy little room with broken floorboards and cracked, pock-marked plaster on the walls. It was intensely hot. Beams of light poked through gaps in the boards across the window, illuminating floating particles of dust. When she moved her head even a fraction it hurt, so she took several minutes to understand her position in the room.

It came to her a piece at a time. She was on the floor. She was half sitting, her shoulders against a wall. The smell came from a cracked waste-pipe beside her. Her wrists were held in handcuffs, which were looped through the waste-pipe, which was under a sink.

She was desperately thirsty.

After a few more minutes her training asserted itself. She had to accept her situation calmly. Emotional calm was the only route to a productive frame of mind. She had to put herself in a state of alertness where she could make the most of the slightest advantage.

So she faced facts. Her situation was serious. Probably grave. This was the case because she had failed to take adequate precautions. However, regret for past actions was inappropriate. It was a squandering of spirit. She must concentrate on setting matters right.

If she was left like this for too long she would die of dehydration. If she called out somebody might come, but whoever came could possibly kill her. On the other hand, only another human presence would provide the opportunity to reverse her position.

Sabrina tried out her larynx. As she had suspected, it was so dry she could only croak.

She began moving her legs and flexing her calf muscles. That would stimulate the movement of blood and enliven her lymphatic system, which would in turn create a little moisture in her mouth. With a moist throat she could swallow and, after that, perhaps she would be able to call for help.

14

The telephone on Philpott’s desk rang as he was preparing to leave the office. He finished buttoning his overcoat and picked up the receiver.

‘Philpott.’

He heard the electronic burble as the scrambler circuit cut in.

‘Glad I caught you,’ Mike Graham said.

‘Only just. I have a Trusteeship Council reception this evening.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘One of the penalties of high office, Michael. Where are you?’

‘Berlin. The apartment on Husemannstrasse. I got here two hours ago. I’m just calling to touch base.’

‘Fine. Can I just mention - something interesting happened this morning, not far from where you are. An American citizen was barbecued in his hire car minutes after he completed a transaction at a nearby bank.’

‘I was going to tell you that,’ Mike said. ‘The man was Harold Gibson of Waxahachie. He was oil-rich and real-estate-rich, and five years ago he inherited six thousand acres of prime land around Lake Texoma, about sixty miles north of Dallas. This was a seriously wealthy man.’

‘But it didn’t make him fireproof. How do you know so much about him?’

‘It’s an interesting coincidence. I researched him two years ago, after the Fossil Rim killing. Actually interviewed him, too.’

The murder of a black police officer at the wildlife centre at Glenrose, south of Fort Worth, had been faked to look like an animal attack. Mexican grey wolves were blamed but careful investigation by C.W. Whitlock, and follow-up work by Mike Graham, proved that the killing was carried out by white supremacists and was linked to a number of other murders in the vicinity of Dallas–Fort Worth over a six-year period. No one was ever charged with the Fossil Rim killing.

‘One of the police officers on the case had bad feelings about Gibson and his chums, and the bad feelings worked their way back to UNACO.’

‘What did you find out?’ Philpott said.

‘Well, it was a while ago, but I remember Gibson was a worshipper of all things fascist. He made no secret about it. I introduced myself as a journalist doing a series on rich men of principle. He was flattered to pieces. Told me about his possessions, his business coups, his skill at making things happen. He also told me about the promotional effort he put into republishing Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent articles about the International Jew.’

‘Saints above,’ Philpott groaned, ‘have you ever read that stuff?’

‘No, sir, I never felt inclined. Always thought it would depress me.’

‘I’ll tell you something really depressing. Adolf Hitler acknowledged that the Ford articles were an influence on the arguments he put forward in Mein Kampf.’

‘I’ll bet Harold Gibson knew that. He thought Hitler was the hottest visionary since John the Baptist. He had a little framed picture of Adolf on the wall in his den.’

‘Intriguing.’

‘On the last news bulletin I heard,’ Mike said, ‘they reported that forensic examiners found the incinerated remains of two hundred thousand dollars lying on the car seat next to Gibson’s body.’

‘I think the matter could merit some attention. Before you ring off, there’s one piece of sad news from this end.’ He told Mike about Lucy Dow. ‘It’s part and parcel of our business, of course, but it’s no less unfortunate for that.’ Philpott looked at his watch. ‘I must go, Michael. Thank you for calling. Get back to me as soon as you have anything on the Stramm woman.’

Philpott’s evening was frenetic. Over a period of five hours he spoke to a lot of people and gave his attention to numerous issues. At 11 p.m. he was back in his office, going through classified status files on the computer.

‘Don’t tell me,’ C.W. Whitlock said from the doorway. ‘You couldn’t stand the idea of wasting hours and hours doing nothing but lying unconscious in your bed.’

Philpott turned. ‘You too?’

‘That’s right.’

Philpott looked at him levelly. ‘Domestic trouble, is it?’

‘More than I need.’ Whitlock came in and closed the door.

‘Is it because of your work?’

‘Part of it is.’ Whitlock poured himself a cup of coffee.

‘Well, it’s customary for someone standing where I do to say it’s no business of mine, and of course it isn’t. But I’ll interfere to the extent of expressing one opinion. In our trade, a man who can live with an unstable domestic background is better at his work than one who enjoys a life of wedded bliss.’ Philpott smiled. ‘It’s a peculiarity that gets stimulated by the nature of our work, I think.’

Whitlock was nodding. ‘It’s the same in the police.’

‘That’s where I first noticed it.’

Whitlock’s discomfort was showing. To change the subject, he asked if Philpott was doing anything he could help with. Philpott explained he was researching a Texan right-winger called Harold Gibson.

‘I had a rummage through the status files and turned up a couple of interesting things. Two months ago, at a garden party in the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, a field agent of the FBI overheard Harold Gibson tell a lady guest that he counted himself blessed, because he had shaken the hands of several men who had shaken the hand of Adolf Hitler. It also appears that twice a year, since 1989, Harold made trips to Berlin. That’s about as much as I’ve found.’

‘I could have a flip through the bigot book if you like,’ Whitlock said. ‘There may be something in there.’

‘A very sound idea.’ Philpott vacated the chair by the computer. ‘Be my guest.’

Whitlock’s bigot book was an assemblage of data on fanatics, dogmatists and racists, randomly gathered, fed to the computer and organized into categories. The information was encoded by software that Whitlock had helped to design, and there was agreement within UNACO that only he should be able to access the files.

The computer began to click softly and purr as it conducted searches and file-collections based around the name Harold Gibson.

‘I get the feeling the man’s well represented,’ Whitlock said. He glanced over his shoulder. Philpott was behind his desk, drumming his fingers softly on the blotter. ‘I can do this on my own if you want to go home.’

‘No - I’ll need to make a decision shortly,’ Philpott said. ‘It will involve you.’

A photograph appeared on the computer screen. Philpott saw it and came to the table. It was a shot of a middle-aged man with a grey crew-cut and an ornament on a cord around his neck in place of a necktie. He was fat and he was laughing heartily.

‘Is that him?’

‘Harold Gibson, sixty years old, resident of Waxahachie, chairman and managing director of Munro, Davis and Gibson, realtors, of North Main Street, Fort Worth.’ Whitlock ran his finger down the column of close-printed details. ‘Here we go. In 1960 he was listed among the members of the US Nazi Party, founded by George Lincoln Rockwell. In ‘62 he was present in London as a member of Rockwell’s entourage when Rockwell was ordered to leave Britain after attempting to disseminate Nazi propaganda. In August ‘67, following Rockwell’s assassination by a sniper, Gibson was a principal mourner at the funeral and later gave an address to followers, in which he praised the dead Nazi and pledged himself to carry on what he called the noble fight.’

‘Did he have a sheet?’

‘Nothing criminal. A couple of cautions for inflammatory behaviour at rallies, and a civil action for obstruction when he did a protest sit-in on the proposed site of a synagogue.’

‘Anything on fund-raising?’

Whitlock scrolled the text. ‘Indeed, indeed. Together with Don Chadwick and Emerett Pearce, listed here as entrepreneurs of Fort Davis and Brownsville respectively, he formed the Lone Star Patriots.’

Whitlock was silent for a moment, scrolling the dense text. ‘Well now. The Lone Star Patriots isn’t quite the localized hick-racist outfit it sounds. They’re shown to have links with long-term Swiss-based eugenics research, aimed at proving the intellectual inferiority of the non-Caucasian races. Three Washington sub-committees have studied evidence implicating the Patriots in financing the protection of Nazi fugitives in South America. There is strong evidence that their propaganda teams have infiltrated university campuses and the boardrooms of major corporations. They are also known to provide funding for three extreme right-wing senatorial hopefuls. Three years ago Gibson personally put up half the defence money at the trial of a Nazi war criminal in Kraków.’

‘I don’t think we need to know any more.’ Philpott sat down again. ‘The man whose works you’ve been describing died less than twenty-four hours ago in Berlin. He appears to have died as a result of possible bomb-planting, and he perished in the company of a lot of money. Do you sense a connection there to matters that have taken our attention lately? Or at least a possibility of one?’

‘It warrants digging into.’

‘So you think we should go to Texas?’

Whitlock stared.

‘The European and North African aspects of the case are in competent hands,’ Philpott said, ‘or so I’ll assume until I hear anything to the contrary. The possibility of an American side merits attention.’

‘So when you say we…’

‘You and me.’ Philpott studied Whitlock’s face. ‘You think perhaps I’m not up to field work?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘I’ve been considering this move since I left the reception this evening, but at that point my first instinct was to send Geoff Prentice. But I learn he’s laid up in the Punjab with a touch of Delhi-belly. A second choice would have been Timothy Osborne, but new intrigues in Bosnia are exercising a powerful draw on him right now.’ Philpott shrugged. ‘So then I thought, why not go myself? I’m an old cop, after all, an old conniver, and frankly I spend too much time behind this desk. The change will do me good. My secretaries can earn their keep for a change and front for me while we’re away.’

‘The trip could all be a big mistake, of course,’ Whitlock said. ‘But I suppose wild goose chases are OK now and then.’

‘Of course.’ Philpott’s eyelid dropped a fraction, as near as he ever came to winking. ‘Time away from New York could work wonders for your domestic situation.’ He stood and stretched carefully. ‘If I don’t sleep soon, I’m going to collapse.’

‘Don’t for pity’s sake do that.’ Whitlock had been with Philpott when he suffered a myocardial infarction, two years before. ‘I’m under enough stress already.’

‘So the decision is taken?’ Philpott got his coat. ‘We go to Texas and we do some prospecting.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘I thought you might have put up some resistance.’

‘At another time, in different circumstances, maybe.’ Whitlock switched off the computer and came to the door. ‘Right now it seems like a good plan. Besides, I couldn’t really trust anyone else to keep an eye on you.’

15

Dusty beams of light had moved from high on the wall on Sabrina’s right to low on the wall to her left. She had long since lost the power to shout. For a while she must have slept, though she could not be sure. It had grown hotter in the room but, ominously, she no longer felt thirsty. The handcuffs had chafed away the skin on both her wrists, and she was aware that her hip and buttock had gone completely numb where they touched the floor.

She tried to move now, and found that her body seemed too heavy to shift.

I’ve lost my strength.

Water was the answer. Even in near-death situations, a few ounces of water could revive a human being and trigger the faculties.

Water.

She looked up at the cracked and grimed sink above her head. It looked as if it hadn’t held water in years, it was a derelict like the rest of the place. Sabrina had realized, after the first hour of consciousness, that this was not the place where she had spoken to Maruf-al-Hakim. That had been a house and gave off a smell of habitation. This place smelled of decay. It was a neglected hovel.

She had heard no human sound here. Not even distant voices, or the shuffle of feet on a street. Once a rat had scuttled across the floor, but that was it; that was all the living nearness she had experienced.

Her knees were skinned, and so was the top of her left foot - the sandal thongs on that foot were scuffed, too. She had been dragged, roughly; some of the pain in her head felt displaced from the point where she had been hit. She could picture herself being unceremoniously dragged along a stinking alley and dumped in here to die.

Except they didn’t want her to die. Not yet, or they would have killed her by now. They wanted her weak and despairing before they questioned her - with torture, she would bet -so they could find out what she knew about Yaqub Hisham’s death.

The scenario wasn’t new, although it was the first time for Sabrina. She had never been treated like this in the past, never made so weak. Before, people had simply tried to kill her. It was a dis-piriting thought that she had been jumped upon by more men trying to kill her than by men trying to make love to her.

She began to sink into a delirious slumber, then she heard a sound and felt her skin prickle. A chain rattled and a bolt slid. The door swung open.

A man came in. It was not Maruf. This one was shorter and thinner. As he came nearer Sabrina saw that although he was not old, his lack of teeth and his wispy hair gave him a seedy, crabbed look. She stared at him and mustered her loathing. In her position any chance for survival relied, among other things, on a clean wellspring of focused hatred.

The man carried an enamel jug and a plastic tumbler.

‘You wish water?’

‘Please,’ she croaked.

He knelt beside her and poured water into the tumbler. It was fresh and she smelled its coldness. He put the tumbler to her lips and the small cool wave washed over her tongue. Her throat seemed to swell when she tried to swallow and the man drew back the tumbler. He knew what to expect. Sabrina coughed weakly, then he put the tumbler to her mouth again and she was able to take another sip. As the water went down it felt hard and sharp.

The man withdrew the tumbler and looked at her. ‘You must wait a few minutes,’ he said. ‘Then you can drink more.’ His English was accented, but perfectly distinct.

‘Why is this happening to me?’

‘Do not talk.’

‘But I’m afraid.’ She managed a tremor in her lip. ‘Please tell me what’s happening.’

‘I do not know anything.’ He looked at her dis-passionately. ‘I am following instructions. Orders. You understand?’

‘But please…’ She took a deep shaky breath and produced a semblance of tears. ‘I haven’t done any harm. Can’t you tell me anything?’

‘I can tell you my guess.’

Sabrina stared at him, looking pitiful.

‘I can guess that before tomorrow is over,’ he said, ‘you will be found in the rubbish at the Guersa el Kebir market, with no hands and no head.’

She shuddered. ‘Can I have more water, please?’

‘Drink it slowly, then.’

When the cup touched her lip she sucked in water and swilled it around her mouth.

Focus, she thought.

She let the water pass over her throat in tiny trickles, while with her lips she pretended to sip.

Focus.

When she had swallowed all the water in her mouth she deliberately coughed against the rim of the cup, pretending she was choking.

‘Please…’ She whimpered as the cup was withdrawn. ‘Please, let me have one hand free, I can’t swallow properly when you hold the cup.’

The Arab grunted but made no move.

‘Just for a moment,’ Sabrina whined. ‘I’m so very thirsty.’

He grunted again and stood up. He fumbled in the pocket of his voluminous trousers and pulled out a bunch of keys on a chain anchored to his belt. He found a small shiny key and squatted beside Sabrina. The smell of his breath and his sweaty clothes assailed her. He undid the right bracelet then locked it round the waste-pipe.

Sabrina flexed her fingers, feeling them tingle as blood surged to her fingertips. She made a sad, grateful face.

Focus.

She held the man’s eyes with hers as he handed her the cup. He is between you and your freedom.

‘Thanks.’

She put the cup to her lips and revolved her wrist sharply forward, throwing the water in his eyes. As his hand came up to his face she caught his thumb, jerked it back and down, breaking it.

He screamed.

Still twisting the thumb, Sabrina lowered her head and butted him twice on the nose. He fell against her, howling, blood running from his nostrils. Sabrina wrapped her legs round his waist.

‘Cut the noise,’ she said close to his ear.

He howled louder. She tightened the grip of her legs, pinching his kidneys. As he began to roar she thrust her head forward again, splitting his lips.

He stopped howling and began to gasp. Still holding him with her legs, Sabrina slid her hand quickly from his thumb to halfway along his hand. She took a tight grip, compressed her strength in her shoulder and twisted his wrist past its limit, tearing the flexor tendons.

The man passed out.

She pushed him on to his back, got his keys and freed her left hand. She removed the cuffs from the waste-pipe, rolled him on his face, cuffed his hands behind him and rolled him on to his back again. Blood still trickled from his nose.

She stood up, stretching her legs carefully, flexing them, then she slowly raised her arms and stretched them above her head.

She stood in the middle of the floor, fingering the bump on her head as she slowly rotated her pelvis, feeling the bones of her spine line up. She shuffled round the room a few times until her circulation stabilized, then she drank more water.

It was getting dark, the sunlight turning deep gold. She peered through the slats at the window and saw a path leading away from the building, up past a stand of dusty trees that screened the place from the road. Fifty metres beyond the trees she could see the front end of an old Citroën 2CV.

She turned her attention to the man. He was still unconscious and breathing erratically. Blood oozed from his nose and down over his cheek, making a pool on the floor at the side of his head. She picked up the jug and threw the remaining water in his face.

He came round coughing and spitting, jerking his head from side to side. Sabrina watched as the pain reasserted itself. His eyes opened wide.

‘How’re you feeling, pal?’

‘Let me up!’ he hissed at her.

‘Maybe.’

‘I will kill you!’

‘Not shackled like that, you won’t.’

He shouted something in Arabic.

‘Was that an insult?’

‘My hand is injured! You must let me up! The pain is unbearable!’

Sabrina knelt and rolled him on his side. ‘Curl your knees, that’ll stop you rolling over again.’

His relief was visible. Even so, Sabrina thought, the pain must still be severe, judging from the way his hand had swollen and the thumb hung down.

‘Tell me your name,’ she said, bunching her skirt, cushioning her knees from the floorboards.

‘I am called Sayed.’

‘Well Sayed, I want to know all about Yaqub Hisham.’

‘I do not know the name.’

Sabrina reached out and jerked his arm. He roared with pain.

‘A brief word about me, Sayed.’ She waited until his noise died to a groan. ‘I’m not the kind of woman you’re familiar with. I’m not subservient. I don’t find your maleness daunting. More to the point, I’m vindictive, irritable, pushy and given to excessive violence.’ She leaned close for emphasis. ‘Just so you understand the scale of things, I’ll warn you I haven’t started to hurt you yet.’

She sat back on her heels. ‘Now. One more time. Tell me about Yaqub Hisham.’

Sayed coughed, blowing a puff of dust across the floor. ‘He was a freedom fighter.’

‘A terrorist. I know that. Why did he go to England? Who was he working for?’

‘I am only a messenger, I do not know these things.’

‘Do you swear that?’

‘I swear.’

Sabrina took hold of his elbow and jiggled his arm up and down. He howled again and this time a tear ran along his cheek.

‘Do you still swear?’

‘He … he was here, in Tetuán. He had to hide, you see. Then a man came looking for him. An American.’

‘What was the American’s name?’

‘I don’t know. I swear it,’ Sayed added hastily. ‘I never heard his name. But he had a letter of introduction from a senior officer of Hezbollah.’

‘Now tell me how you know that.’

‘I am a member of a freedom movement which Yaqub Hisham supported.’

‘He trained you, did he?’

‘Yes.’ Sayed paused and took a painful breath. ‘He was our teacher, and also our cousin. We are a movement amassed from his family.’

‘Amassed? How many?’

‘Thirty, perhaps more. We are small, but our determination is great.’ For a moment he looked defiant, turning his head to look up at Sabrina. ‘The strength of our will overcomes any oppression.’

‘Whatever gets you through the day, Sayed. Go ahead with the story. What did the American want with Yaqub?’

‘He wished to give him a professional commission. In England. Yaqub had strong doubts, but he needed money.’

‘And what was the commission?’

‘I swear, I do not know the details.’

Sabrina looked at him. ‘Sayed, that’s not completely true, is it?’ She moved his arm the smallest fraction. ‘Is it?’

‘The commission was to eliminate certain members of an organizaiton.’

Sabrina waited. ‘Well?’

‘I have told you.’

‘What organization?’

‘The name was difficult, I do not -’

He cut off and clamped his mouth shut as Sabrina reached for his arm. She saw he was determined to stay quiet on this one. Using both hands she pushed him sharply on to his back, making him groan. She held his head steady with one hand, leaning her weight on his forehead. She pushed the forefinger of the other hand in under his eyelid. He whimpered and tried to twist away.

‘Bank on what I tell you, Sayed. If I don’t get a believable answer in the next five seconds, I will pull your eye out.’ She pressed hard against the eyeball, making him gasp with pain. ‘If that isn’t enough, then I’ll take out the other eye. Now again, what’s the name of the organization Yaqub was gunning for?’

‘It… it is an emerging Jewish group, based in Germany. They are called Juli Zwanzig. It means July twentieth.’

Sabrina remembered the photograph from the strong-box, the initials JZ on the banner. She withdrew her finger from his eye and sat back. He blinked furiously.

‘Yaqub was given a - what is it called? - a paper with events he had to observe.’

‘A timetable.’

‘Timetable, yes. And first he had to go to London, and there he would stay for a time, and he would use credentials supplied by the American.’

‘So that’s when Yaqub became Kamul Haidar?’

‘He had passport, visa, all necessary identifications. He was supplied with a gun, special model, easy to smuggle.’ Sayed raised his head from the floor. ‘Can I turn on my side? My hand hurts like fire.’

Sabrina rolled him on to his side and stood up.

‘One more question. How many people was Yaqub supposed to kill?’

‘I swear by Allah, I do not know.’

‘Two? More than two?’

‘Yaqub was not told. The American would only say that leading members of Juli Zwanzig were to be his target. He would learn more when he reached England.’ Sayed rolled his eyes sideways, trying to see Sabrina’s face. ‘He believed the visit to Europe was bad luck.’

‘He was right on that one.’ Sabrina rattled through the bunch of keys she had taken from Sayed and found one for a Citroën. I’ll be leaving now.’

‘But you must release me!’

‘I don’t must do anything. Just you lie still and try to feel lucky I didn’t kill you.’ She stood up. ‘One piece of advice before I go, Sayed. Next time you eat a skunk, try peeling it first.’

As she hurried out through the outer room a man coming in from outside nearly collided with her. He stared, leaped back and pulled a curved knife from his belt.

‘Don’t do this,’ Sabrina said, crouching, spreading her arms, getting the car key positioned in her fist like a spike. ‘Just back off.’

The man lunged with the knife. Sabrina jumped aside then leaped forward as the knife swung past her face. She jerked out her fist and felt the key penetrate his cheek. He screamed. She drew her fist back. As he swung the knife again she jabbed the key into the space between his collarbones, splitting the cartilage between his larynx and his windpipe. He dropped the knife and fell back, clutching his neck. Sabrina kicked open the door and ran for the car.

She was back at the National by nine o’clock. The drive across dusty roads filmed her skin with fine sand the colour of terracotta. At reception the old Indian told her a visitor was waiting. He did not look as if he approved.

She went to the tiny bar and found Nat Takahashi sitting in the corner reading a copy of the local evening paper. When he saw her he looked shocked.

‘What happened? Did a bus hit you, or what?’

‘Just everyday UNACO business. We don’t mind getting our hands and all our other bits dirty. What brings you here, Nat?’

‘I thought I’d buy you dinner before you went back.’

‘You’re an angel,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything nicer.’

‘But promise me you’ll clean yourself up first. I have a reputation to look after.’

‘Twenty minutes,’ she promised, going to the stairs. ‘You won’t believe the change.’

Nat sat down to finish reading a late news item, printed in red on the back page, about two Peruvians being fished dead from a well in the Medina quarter that afternoon.

Upstairs Sabrina entered her room, thinking how good it would be to talk to Nat about what had happened since the last time she saw him. But that was out of the question. Rules were rules, her lips were sealed.

‘He wouldn’t believe a word of it, anyway,’ she said, heading for the bathroom.

16

By 7.00 a.m., one hour after Sabrina had boarded her early flight out of Tangier, Mike Graham was in the bushes on the fringe of a public park in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. He was positioned directly opposite a squat, black-walled block of high-security apartments at Scharweber Strasse. The front door of number 17a was angled fractionally towards his vantage point, and the view was unobstructed.

The official start of spring was only a few days off, but it was a cold morning nevertheless, and since dawn it had been raining. Mike wore the latest in lightweight, one-piece, low-reflectance thermal suits, and he had brought a flask of coffee, but by 8.30 he felt distinctly chilled.

Beside him in the bushes, mounted on top of a garden cane stuck in the ground, was a high-frequency sound assimilator with its viewfinder fixed on the lock panel at number 17a. He had prepared for this morning’s work with a drive-by the previous day; a quick look had told him the door lock was sonic, with a deadlock back-up. In addition to the assimilator, he had brought a selection of deadlock skeletons plus a keyform profiler, with two blanks and a selection of carbon steel files, in case the deadlock was cleverer than it looked.

At 9.10 a woman wearing a fashionable variation of a duffel coat came out of the apartment, pulling up her hood before Mike got his monocular to his eye. She closed the door, turned and pointed her sonic key at the panel. Mike pressed the button on top of the assimilator and heard it peep softly to confirm it had collected the signal.

The woman pocketed the key, turned and went down the steps. All Mike saw of her face was a firm mouth with bright lipstick, before she turned at the foot of the steps and walked away from him. He pulled the assimilator off the cane and put it in his pocket.

He waited and watched. On a basis of averages, it was safe to assume the flat was now empty, but waiting did no harm, except to his hands and feet, which appeared to have been isolated from his circulation.

At ten o’clock he crossed the road and went up the steps to number 17a. It was raining heavily now and no one was about. He looked right and left, keeping his chin tucked in and leading with the top of his head so the camera above the door wouldn’t identify him. He brought out the assimilator, pointed it at the lock panel on the door and pushed the TRANSMIT button. The machine emitted a crisp beep, a duplicate of the sound the woman had used to lock the door. He was pleased she hadn’t troubled to use the deadlock key. A light push and the door opened.

He slipped inside and shut the door behind him. For a minute he stood still, eyes shut, conditioning them to the dark. In secure premises without windows the lights were often wired to alarm systems. If an intruder switched them on, a signal was sent to the local police station. It was best to move around in the dark, using a torch any time a strong light was needed.

When he opened his eyes he saw a dim red night light above the front door. He could see across the hall and part of the way into the room opposite, which looked like the sitting room. He went in there and switched on his little MagLite torch.

The place was furnished with heavy modern pieces, mostly finished in black lacquer, the up-holstery covered in black and dark-blue canvas. Above the fake fireplace was a painting in a frame with a dim picture light above it. He stepped forward and looked. The painting was not good, but it was a true enough likeness for him to identify the subject as Erika Stramm.

A sideboard along the wall opposite the door had a cupboard at one end and drawers at the other. He put the torch between his teeth and slid open the bottom drawer. It was crammed with books, perhaps a hundred of them, all paperbacks, all new, all in English, and only two titles: Armageddon in the East and The Abuses of Power, both by Erika Stramm. The drawer above held a drawing board, professional-looking drawing instruments and several dozen sheets of self-adhesive lettering.

The top drawer looked more interesting. The torch beam picked out a stack of notebooks at the back, all well thumbed, held together with a rubber band. He put them on top of the sideboard for further examination. He also took out a ledger and a ring-binder full of invoices.

As he probed the back of the drawer, carefully sliding a sheaf of papers past a stapler and a bottle of ink, he failed to hear a man come out of a bedroom adjoining the sitting room. He approached Mike slowly from behind, raising a walking stick in the air above his head.

The stick came down and Mike dropped to his knees and rolled sideways. The move was instinctive, triggered every time he heard the whoosh of a blunt object moving fast. The walking stick crashed on the top of the sideboard. Simultaneously Mike kicked the feet from his assailant, knocking him on his back.

‘Kak eto nazy -’

There was a scrambling, a thud as a heavy chair went over, and suddenly a terrible weight landed on Mike’s chest. Hands gripped his neck, trying to strangle him. He smelled good cologne and a trace of stale brandy.

‘Take it easy…’

They wrestled in the dark, rolling across the floor until the open door stopped them. Mike’s head cracked on the other man’s cheek, making him howl and let go. Mike jumped to his feet, feeling his leg grabbed. He kicked out with the other foot. While it was still travelling his static foot was jerked forward and he landed on his back. His head struck something hard and for a moment his senses swam.

He was aware the other man was up on his knees now and punching. Mike forced himself up, taking the blows, feeling the impact on his face and ribs. With an effort he drove himself to his feet, grabbed the man’s hair and with the other hand jabbed him in the gut. The man folded, groaning.

Mike turned, looking for the door. He saw it but never took the first step towards it. A bunched fist hit the back of his skull and put him on his knees. He was hoisted, punched again, dumped into a chair and felt himself being tied there. There was no longer any strength in his arms to resist.

The light came on. Mike raised his head slowly and saw the man he had fought. He was big, very big, with a shaved head and a nose that must have been broken at least three times. He wore a blue athletic singlet and tracksuit bottoms. He was standing by the settee, looking at Mike as if he would like to hit him again.

‘Hi,’ Mike said.

The man turned and walked out of the room. A moment later, Mike heard a telephone being lifted and a number tapped in.

The dove-grey Lear jet taxied off the apron and waited to line up with the runway take-off lights. Malcolm Philpott and C.W. Whitlock were the only passengers on board.

‘I find executive flights soothing,’ Philpott said. He squirmed his shoulders against the sculpted padding of the seat. ‘Lots of leg-room, every convenience within reach…’ He pointed at the panel beside them. ‘Video, reading light - a really good reading light - window shades, music, even a direct line to the pilot. When you eat it’s individual attention, as enriching an experience as you’ll have in any restaurant.’

‘You like being pampered,’ Whitlock said.

‘Of course I do.’

‘It’s good of you to let me share your just desserts.’

They were flying to Dallas-Fort Worth International airport, one of the busiest in the world, where Philpott was sure their arrival would pass unnoticed.

‘It would have been nice if we’d been able to stay at the same hotel,’ Philpott said. ‘But the scenario hardly permits that.’

Whitlock took a slip of paper from his pocket and read it. ‘I’m boarded somewhere off the LBJ Freeway. How far does that put me from you?’

‘Not far. I’m at the Fairmont on North Ackard Street - the number’s at the bottom of your bit of paper.’

‘And you’re Mr Beamish.’

‘That’s correct, Mr Tait.’

There was a sudden roar, blanking out every other sound. The plane surged forward and bumped across the runway seams, each one shaking the cabin, and then the speed increased and they were sailing down the runway. After only a few seconds they were airborne and the noise in the cabin settled to a hum.

‘I’m still nervous about doing this ahead of any word from Sabrina or Mike,’ Whitlock said. ‘It’s like going on stage without any lines.’

‘Improvisation is supposed to be one of our talents.’

‘Sure. But we don’t know the score with these people, do we? An improvisation has to fit or it’s not worth doing.’

‘We’ll soon know the score. Whatever Mike and Sabrina uncover, whether it’s connected or un-connected with Harold Gibson’s cohorts, we can adjust our approach accordingly. Meanwhile, we will be wasting no time getting the first-hand low-down on the Texas connection.’

‘Assuming there is one.’

‘I’m sure there’s one,’ Philpott said. ‘And if there isn’t, I have to tell you it won’t matter. Last night I thought over the whole nasty, sprawling picture you painted from the notes in the bigot book. It’s time something positive was done about the Patriots, wouldn’t you say?’

‘If you mean do I think passive surveillance is no way to curtail the activities of thugs, well yes, I think a new tack would be in order.’

‘And there’s just enough of the agitator left in me to fight them with their own weapon.’

‘Which is?’

‘Bullying. Dressed to look like something else, of course. But.’ Philpott slapped the armrest. ‘I don’t want to muddle our thinking at this stage. My gut feeling is, there’s a connection between Gibson’s crowd, Emily Selby’s murder and Emily’s German hit-list. If the connection is there, we need to discover its nature and its dimensions. And, as I already pointed out, there may well be some advantage in getting to Texas in time for Gibson’s funeral.’

Whitlock smiled. ‘You’re really set on doing serious harm to these people, aren’t you?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The speed. The way you got up and running. You hardly stopped to plan this trip.’

‘I’ll admit to a certain grim enthusiasm for the project.’ Philpott looked out of the window, seeing the matrix of New York City below them. ‘I have the conviction, too, that this is a job for men who are not entirely conditioned to a politically structured way of doing things.’

Seven years as a detective chief superintendent, and another six as joint chief of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, had given Philpott a firm point of view on the operational limitations of government security services. The G-men were better at gathering and analysing intelligence, and better at presenting their results. But they lacked a policeman’s understanding of criminals and a soldier’s iron discipline in putting his duty above every other consideration. Cops and soldiers were better at keeping in mind the rigorous requirements of the law, especially in the way evidence had to be gathered. They were unequalled, also, at handing out punishment of their own devising when the authorities’ hands were tied.

‘The idea of Nazism is a particular pain for me,’ Philpott said. ‘I lost members of my family in the Blitz, and later I grew up through a period when my country had to recover from the most appalling setbacks - industrial, social, domestic. People had to rebuild their lives against a backdrop of unrelieved dreariness and hardship. That was all down to the Nazis. Then when I was older I visited Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau and I learned about the true scale and scope of what they did.’ He looked at Whitlock. ‘Any day I do something to damage a Nazi-sympathizer has got to be a day well spent.’

They landed at Dallas-Fort Worth at noon. Philpott took a cab straight to his hotel. Whitlock rented a Ford sedan at the Hertz desk and drove out to the Comfort Inn on West Kingsley.

When he had checked in he changed into a sports shirt and lightweight slacks and took a drink out to the balcony. There was a heated pool and for a while he sat in the hazy sunlight watching people swim. The drink and the warm air relaxed him. He had another drink, and by the time it was gone he was ready to call Carmen.

He tapped button 4 on his mobile, her office number. After two rings the answering machine told him she would not be in the office until tomorrow. He tried calling home, but she wasn’t there either. He was still trying to decide what to do next when the telephone in his room warbled. He went in and picked it up.

‘Tait speaking,’ he said.

‘You liar.’

Whitlock waited, then once again he identified himself as Tait.

‘And I said that’s a lie.’ The man at the other end laughed. ‘How’re you doing, C.W.?’

Suddenly Whitlock recognized the voice. ‘Grundy? Is that Russ Grundy?’

‘Yep.’

Grundy was a senior UNACO multi-tasker, an agent with a range of skills and hardware at his disposal that enabled him to provide short-notice auxiliary services for Task Force personnel in the field. Grundy’s services included night-time surveillance photography, ad hoc telecommunications, wire-tapping, hi-tech burglary and sabotage. Like UNACO’s four other multi-taskers, Russ Grundy was permanently in the field. Over the years he and Whitlock had collaborated on dozens of assignments.

‘How did you know I was here?’ Whitlock said.

‘The eyes of Texas are upon you. I saw you and Mr Philpott at the airport.’

‘And we thought nobody would notice.’

‘There’s always somebody, C.W. What are you doing in Dallas?’

‘I was going to ask you that.’

‘I’m shadowing a money-laundering outfit on behalf of the Fraud Commission at the Security Council. It’s international stuff - yen turning into dollars, dollars being transformed to pounds and marks…’

‘Interesting,’ Whitlock said.

‘Well, no, actually. It’s dull. These guys are so predictable. And right now they’re lying low, or they think they are, so nothing is happening. Are you going to tell me now why you’re here?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Russ. It’s up to the boss to do that. If he wants to.’

‘Well, why not suggest to him we all three have a drink together tonight,’ Grundy said. ‘I know a couple of really discreet spots. Then Philpott can tell me what you’re doing, if he wants to, and I can remind him I always enjoy getting roped into a tasty caper. That way, my stay in Dallas might turn out interesting after all.’

‘Consider it done. I’ll call the old man now. How do I get back to you?’

‘Try waving from the balcony. I’m sitting by the pool.’

17

‘I take it your friend doesn’t speak English,’ Mike said, addressing the woman in the duffel coat. He assumed she had come back in response to the phone call.

‘He only has a few words.’ Her German accent was very slight. ‘But he does tend to assume other people speak Russian. I, on the other hand, probably speak English better than you do.’

She was standing in the sitting-room doorway, removing the coat. She was a handsome woman with small, firmly defined features. Her lipstick looked even brighter in artificial light.

‘You’ll be Erika Stramm,’ Mike said.

Pain sliced through his jaw when he moved it. He checked his teeth with his tongue. They were all there. He tried to smile.

‘You have me at a disadvantage,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t feel that way.’

‘I gather your restraints were necessary.’ She came into the room and walked once round the chair, stopping in front of Mike. ‘You don’t look like a fascist.’

‘That’s because I’m not one. My name is Desmond Miles. I’m a US citizen and I’m in the same business you are.’

‘What business is that?’

‘Journalism. I’m a political stringer for three West Coast papers.’

‘You’re not a journalist.’ Erika pointed to the assimilator where it lay on the sideboard with his other belongings. ‘Journalists don’t know about things like that.’

‘You seem to.’

‘I’m different.’ She smiled coldly. ‘Why did you break into my apartment?’

‘I wanted to find out about you.’

‘You’ll have to enlarge on that.’ Erika glanced at the other man. ‘If you don’t, I’ll set Gregor on you again. He’s from Sverdlovsk, you know. They’re savages, if they have to be.’

‘I came here,’ Mike said, ‘because I needed to know about your connection to an outfit that calls itself JZ.’ He watched her face but she didn’t waver. ‘It’s very important. I think it could be a matter of life or death.’

‘Whose death?’

‘Yours,’ Mike said.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You never heard of JZ?’

‘Never. It sounds like another lame made-up yarn.’

‘You never heard of Emily Selby?’

Erika’s smile shrank. ‘What about her?’

‘You admit you know her?’

‘Look…’ Suddenly she was edgy. ‘Say what you have to say. Stop all this screwing around.’

‘Emily Selby is dead. Did you know that?’

She stared at him. ‘You’re a liar!’

He had wondered how much truth leaked through the published facts. Hardly any, it seemed. The English papers reported that an American visitor had been shot. No name was given. By the following day diplomatic pressure had put the story into two inches on an inside page, and into limbo the day after that.

‘Emily was shot dead several days ago in London,’ Mike said. ‘The gunman was Arabic. He killed himself shortly after.’

An interesting thing happened then. For no apparent reason Erika looked across the room; it was only for a moment, but to do it she turned her head at right angles to the spot where she stood. It was an awkward thing to do, yet it appeared involuntary. Mike guessed she was looking at something related to what he had told her. He looked too, but he saw only a compact hi-fi speaker, fixed to the wall, and a plain black chair beneath it.

‘It would be easy to check this,’ Erika said.

‘Go ahead.’

She marched out of the room. Gregor stayed where he was, scowling at Mike. From another room there was the sound of a modem making a connection. After a couple of minutes Erika came back. She looked ill.

‘Emily is dead,’ she said quietly. ‘I hadn’t heard a thing about it.’ She looked at Mike. ‘You said he was an Arab?’

‘Apparently.’

‘How did you make the connection between me and Emily?’

‘Sources. I can’t divulge.’

‘I could make you divulge,’ Erika said, but she sounded too dispirited to try. ‘Why did you ask about the initials thing?’

‘JZ. There was a picture of a group of people in front of a banner with JZ on it. It was in Emily’s bag.’

‘How could you know that?’ she demanded.

‘I just know. How did you come to know her?’

‘We were friends, she and I.’

Erika massaged her temples. She muttered something in Russian to Gregor. He stood away from the couch, gave Mike a hard look, then left the room.

‘So you came here looking for a story,’ Erika said.

‘Your story. I want to know about you, your connections, your possible connection to the fact Emily was murdered.’

Erika stood staring at the floor for a minute. She looked up at Mike. ‘I could have you minced in a garbage truck within the hour. By tonight you’d be gull food.’

‘I believe you.’

She came to the chair and stood before him. ‘There could have been many worse ways for me to learn of Emily’s death.’ She began untying the rope that held Mike’s arms. ‘I don’t forgive you for the break-in, I simply don’t feel vindictive now.’ Her hands paused. ‘Take warning, please - that is not like me. I don’t forgive you for the matter-of-life-and-death bullshit, either.’

‘That could be true,’ Mike said.

‘Whether it is or not, you don’t care. The story is your only concern. I checked your credentials. You have the pedigree of a seasoned vulture.’

For a moment he was puzzled, then it clicked. The modem. She had done an Internet check on his listing. UNACO kept it updated and always in the appropriate place, complete with a photograph. His medical credentials were up there too, so was his accreditation as a lawyer, his status as an inspector with the Department of the Treasury and four other finely detailed aliases.

‘There.’ Erika uncoiled the rope and let him stand up. ‘Count yourself incredibly lucky, Mr Miles.’ She picked up his torch, the key kit and the sound assimilator. ‘I’ve purged my door’s frequency code from your little machine, but I haven’t damaged it. I respect nice technology, even when it’s used against me.’

‘Thanks.’

Erika walked with Mike to the door. ‘There is no story here. Not the one you were hoping to find.’

‘You could still be in danger,’ he said as she opened the door. ‘I know you don’t believe I’m concerned, but I promise you I get very troubled when Arabs with guns arrive on the scene.’

‘Whatever the truth of Emily’s murder, it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’m sure of that.’ Erika was trying to sound detached, but she still looked pale and shaken. ‘Good luck with your next story, and take serious warning: if you ever interfere in my affairs again, you won’t get off so lightly. In fact, you won’t get off at all.’

Mike went down the steps. At the side of the road he looked back. She was still there. He waved and began walking.

When he had covered half a kilometre he crossed the road and went into the park again. Keeping to the far side of the trees and bushes he walked back towards Scharweber Strasse. He located the cane where he had left it sticking in the ground and re-mounted the assimilator, positioning its viewfinder on the lock plate of the door at number 17a. Then he sat down to wait.

At 5.00 a.m. Central time, C.W. Whitlock rose, showered and shaved, then got dressed. Breakfast came to his room at 5.45.

When he had eaten he set up his Macintosh PowerBook on a writing table by the balcony window. He plugged the cord from the internal communications card into the telephone socket on the wall. When he had dialled the UN server number and tapped in the UNACO password for Mailbox Access, the screen showed him a picture of a padlocked box. He put in his personal access code and the lid of the box opened. An information balloon appeared and told him there were two messages. He opened the first one. A facsimile of a note on FBI notepaper came up on the screen. It was from Special Agent Tim Webster, confirming that business and social links between Harold Gibson, Don Chadwick and Emerett Pearce were being exhaustively researched as a matter of priority; all relevant information would be posted to that address no later than forty-eight hours from the date and time of the note.

The second note was from ICON Administration in Zürich, Switzerland. It was addressed to All Agencies Concerned:

A third breach of ICON data protection has been reported. Clocked records show that a break-in occurred at 4.17 p.m. Mid-European time on 21st March, 1996. The files were uncloaked for only a microsecond before alternative encryption routines cut in. It is clear that although the unprotected period is small, it is possible for an intruder to make substantial transfers of data with the aid of ultra-speed electronic-capture apparatus recently developed and soon to be marketed by Preceptor Systems of California.

It is estimated that Andreas Wolff will complete testing of the new generation of safeguard modules for ICON within a few days, a week at most. When the new safeguards are in place, the system will be secure for the foreseeable future.

Whitlock picked up his mobile, switched on the scrambler circuit and called Philpott at the Fairmont. He came on the line at once.

‘You sound fresh for the time of day,’ Whitlock said.

‘Texas air. It’s full of fizz. I could never live out here full time. I’d burn myself out in a year. What’s up?’

Whitlock read him the note from Zürich.

‘We do have a responsibility there,’ Philpott said. ‘I can’t begin to imagine the ramifications if ICON falls down. Can you get a signal to Mike?’

‘If he’s operational his phone will be off. I could leave something for him in the skyhigh mailbox. He checks it twice a day, when he can get to a terminal.’

‘Let him know what’s happened. Tell him that when he’s finished in Berlin he’s to go to Vienna, post haste, and make a personal evaluation of Andreas Wolff’s security.’

‘Vienna?’

‘Wolff’s staying there to work on the ICON software. It’s a superstitious thing - Vienna is where he devised the secure systems in the first place. The address is on my Rolodex. Call my office and they’ll give it to you.’

‘Who’s laying on Wolff’s security?’

‘The Austrian police, of all people.’ Philpott sighed. ‘He’s an Austrian national, he’s one of their treasures, and what with one thing and another, they insist it’s their duty as well as their privilege to look after him. The thing is, they’re not too hot on anti-terrorist stuff, although they seem to think they are.’

‘We could override them.’

‘I know, but we should try diplomacy first. I don’t want to tread on any Austrian feet unless there’s a clear indication that Wolff is at serious risk. So get Mike on to it. Tell him he has carte blanche to sniff around, and if there’s any comeback I’ll handle it.’ He paused. ‘Or you will, if I’m otherwise engaged.’

‘Very good.’

‘Anything else to report?’

‘Nothing important. The FBI have prioritized a detailed search on Gibson, Chadwick and Pearce. And I have a headache. I think it was the beer in that place Russ Grundy took us last night.’

‘Can’t say I feel a thing. Take an aspirin, do all the little things you have to do, then get yourself ready for the big performance.’

Whitlock thought for a moment. ‘The funeral,’ he said. ‘I was up so early, I was thinking it was tomorrow.’

‘You haven’t forgotten what to do?’

‘Of course not.’ Whitlock looked at his black tie and Nikon camera hanging on a chairback by the balcony door. ‘I’ve got the props, I’ve got the motivation. If I need anything else I’ll let you know.’

‘Jolly good. I’ll catch up with you later in the day. Best of luck.’

‘Thanks,’ Whitlock said. ‘Pray I don’t get lynched, won’t you?’

It was after one o’clock before the door at 17a Scharweber Strasse opened and Erika Stramm came out. This time Gregor was with her. She locked the door with the sonic key and they moved off, heading northwards on foot.

Mike waited five minutes then stood up, brushed the wet from his thermal suit, snatched the assimilator off the cane and crossed the road with it. This time when he entered the apartment he put on the lights straight away and went directly to the sitting room.

The speaker attached to the wall at the place where Erika had looked was screwed tightly into the plaster and brick. The front grille was not the removable kind and there was no gap between the casing and the wall. He put his hands on either side of the case and tried gently to shake it. The speaker was firm as a rock.

He took out his torch, tipped out the batteries and gave the case an extra hard shake. A stubby ultrasound unit fell out on his palm. He stood back, pointing it in the general direction of the speaker and the chair. After a moment it produced a note, a steady whine. He moved it nearer the speaker and the note rose. Near the back of the chair it dropped. The shift between the metal of the speaker and the wood and cloth of the chair produced exactly the transitional note he expected. There was no blip, no intermediate signal to indicate something unseen.

He dropped to his knees and put the ultrasound unit at floor level. Keeping it pointing forward, he slowly raised it from the floor. When it was level with the seat of the chair there was a blip, a distinct moment of very high pitch. He edged closer and moved the unit upwards in a straight line again. Once more it blipped. A third attempt, inches from the front of the chair, produced the sharpest blip yet. Something unusual was hidden there, somewhere in the area of the padded seat.

He felt the seat, prodded sides and back, felt underneath.

‘Ah…’

Something slender with hard corners. He slid his fingertips around the underside of the cushion and found a stud fastener. He opened it and the object dropped on to the carpet. It was a computer floppy disk.

The computer set-up was in a small office next to the bathroom, and the computer had been left switched on. Mike sat down and put in the disk. After a moment a message appeared on the screen:

ARCHIVE OPEN.

Erika Stramm was hot for electronic keys. The floppy was for unlocking the files section of the hard disk. He clicked on the archive symbol and it opened on to a row of ten different-coloured labels. One jumped up at him: JZ: Verfassung und Zielen.

He opened it. The file was only ten pages long. He closed it again and searched the hard disk for a compression program. He found one, made a drag-copy of the file and compressed it.

He closed the archive, removed the floppy key and tapped in the UN server number. At the prompt he entered the UNACO password for Mailbox Access. The picture of a padlocked box came up and he typed his personal access code. The lid of the box popped open and the information balloon told him he had a message waiting.

He addressed the compressed JZ file to C.W. Whitlock and uploaded it. The transfer took less than twenty seconds. Next he downloaded the waiting message. It was from Whitlock. Mike read it, groaned, read it again and memorized the address given at the end.

He scrapped the open message together with the copy of the compressed file that remained on the screen. When he had emptied the electronic trash the computer was just as he had found it. Before he left the apartment he put the floppy disk back inside the chair and switched off the lights.

At the door he paused, feeling a powerful impulse to leave some sign of his visit. As always he resisted, and left.

18

The Lodge Hill Burial Ground was landscaped like a golf course. Oaks, mature cypresses and willows were grouped at careful intervals across five undulating acres lined with row upon row of headstones in marble, sandstone and granite. Dark red cinder footpaths criss-crossed the lawn-smooth terrain, with broader, shiny blacktop roadways for funeral traffic.

The burial service for Harold Gibson took place on Sector 9 in the south-west of the cemetery, close to a resplendent lone willow planted by his own subscription twenty years before. More than sixty mourners were in attendance, making a dark cluster around the chrome-and-black catafalque on which the coffin sat beside the open grave.

‘For man walketh in a vain shadow,’ the minister said, reading from a prayer book with purple-edged pages, ‘and disquieteth himself in vain. He heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what is my hope? Truly my hope is even in thee.’

The widow, Ginny, a small plump woman with bright orange-red hair, stood with a handkerchief pressed against her mouth, her black silk coat flapping in the warm breeze. Around her, standing apart from the main gathering of mourners, a group of eight or nine grim-faced men stared at the coffin as if it might tell them something. Behind them a clutch of obvious henchmen stood in tight formation, heads bobbing as they continually looked around them, daring trouble to show itself, thick necks straining against tight white collars.

One member of the group, Don Chadwick, a squat, wide-bodied man with small eyes, nudged the taller man beside him.

‘Who’s that?’

Emerett Pearce looked cautiously around him. ‘Where?’

‘There, over there on the right,’ Pearce said.

Pearce watched as Malcolm Philpott, wearing a black suit, edged into the group and moved nearer Ginny Gibson.

Pearce stiffened his lips so they wouldn’t move when he spoke. ‘How should I know who he is?’

‘He’s not a friend of the family, that’s for sure.’

‘Keep your voice down.’

The minister was nearing the end of the main part of the service, prior to the body being moved into position for burial. He raised his voice, taking advantage of the fine resonance obtainable at this part of the cemetery, as long as the sound was loud enough.

In a pause the sound of a camera motordrive could be clearly heard. People began to look in the direction of the sound, a hillock some distance behind the spot where the minister stood. C.W. Whitlock was standing there, wearing a sober grey suit and a black necktie. He was taking photographs of the funeral group, panning the camera as he kept his finger jammed on the shutter release.

‘He is seriously annoying me,’ Don Chadwick finally announced. ‘Soon as this is over, I’m going to find out what the hell he thinks he’s doing.’

Other people were muttering. Men looked at each other, frowning, shaking their heads. Malcolm Philpott sidled alongside Don Chadwick.

‘Mr Chadwick?’ he whispered.

Chadwick glared at him.

‘Forgive me for butting in like this…’

‘What is it?’

‘My name is Beamish, I’ll introduce myself properly after the service. I just wanted to say, I overheard what you said and I understand your concern. I can tell you about that man over there.’ He pointed to Whitlock, who was still shooting. ‘He is a journalist. He has taken it upon himself to expose what he calls the machinations behind Harold Gibson’s death.’

‘Yeah?’

‘If I were you, I wouldn’t approach him in public. A suggestion only, of course, but it’s based on my own experience of the man.’

‘I see.’

Philpott slipped back into the group behind Chadwick.

The minister had paused to clear his throat. He raised his hand towards the sky before continuing. ‘Oh spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence and be no more seen.’

The widow emitted a tiny squeak and dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief.

‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.’

The undertaker’s men, frock-coated and wearing black leather gloves, stepped forward and expertly manoeuvred shiny struts at the side of the catafalque. The coffin swung slowly and gracefully away from the structure on a slender framework and settled on the lip of the grave. Ginny Gibson howled.

Whitlock stopped taking pictures and slowly unhooked the camera strap from around his neck. He put the camera on his shoulder, stood looking at the group by the graveside for a minute, then turned and walked away up the hill towards the trees bordering the eastern sector of the cemetery.

Chadwick watched him go. He turned and looked at Philpott, who had his eyes closed and his hands clasped as the minister spoke.

‘Saviour, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’

The coffin shuddered a second then slowly descended into the grave. Ginny began to sob into her soaked handkerchief. Another woman standing nearby put out a hand to touch her shoulder and had it violently shaken off. Ginny moved to the graveside and watched until the coffin touched bottom. Then she turned to the minister, her face anguished.

‘What will I do without him?’

The minister didn’t appear to know. He took a handful of earth from a shovel brought by an attendant and threw it into the grave. It hit the coffin with a hollow drumming sound. He read again from his prayer book.

‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground.’

‘Cremated and buried,’ Don Chadwick whispered, grinning stiffly. ‘Harold was always the extravagant one.’

When the service was over the mourners fanned out, heading for their cars. Don Chadwick and Emerett Pearce crossed the cinder path and took a short cut through the trees to the wide central road, where Chadwick’s Bentley was parked. The Puerto Rican chauffeur opened the door as they approached. Chadwick let Pearce go first and paused with one foot inside.

‘What is it?’ Chadwick was looking along the road behind the car. Pearce looked out the back window. ‘That’s him, isn’t it? The guy that spoke to you?’

‘Uhuh.’ Chadwick waited until Philpott was within earshot then he called to him, ‘Could you use a lift?’

Philpott quickened his stride and reached Chadwick out of breath.

‘Most kind,’ he panted. ‘I was hoping I would catch you before you left.’

‘Are you going back to the Gibson place?’

‘Well, I’m not sure it would be proper.’

‘Ginny’s holding one of those embarrassing wake affairs, with drinks and finger food.’

‘I suppose I could call briefly and pay my respects.’

‘She’ll appreciate that,’ Chadwick said, standing back from the car. ‘After you.’

The three of them settled in the back seat. For a couple of minutes they travelled in silence. Philpott made a show of catching his breath, the other two tried to look casual as they stared out of the windows, exchanging occasional glances. Finally, when Philpott appeared to be in control of his breathing, Chadwick pressed a button in the armrest and closed the glass partition behind the driver.

‘So, Mister, ah…’

‘Beamish,’ Philpott said, ‘Derek Beamish.’

Chadwick introduced Emerett Pearce. When the handshaking was over Chadwick sat back, folding his hands on the hummock of his belly.

‘Can I ask you straight away, Mr Beamish, how you come to know who I am.’

‘I know you by repute,’ Philpott said. ‘Your land-dealing strategies have many imitators in Europe. I’m sure you know that.’

Chadwick smiled. ‘I’d heard.’

‘And of course your monograph on small company structures, Survival Through Strength, is a landmark in business writing.’

‘It’s good of you to say so.’ Chadwick had relaxed visibly. ‘And what business are you in, Mr Beamish?’

‘Oh…’ Philpott made a dismissive gesture. ‘I’m on the boards of a few companies in England and over here. I have a reasonably useful fund of experience, and a range of contacts I gained from my years in politics. I put these at the disposal of the companies I serve.’

‘Politics?’ Chadwick sounded the word cautiously. ‘You mean you were a professional politician?’

‘A Member of Parliament, yes.’

Chadwick and Pearce looked impressed.

‘Might I ask,’ Pearce said, ‘what party you were in?’

‘Oh, the Conservatives. I’ve been a Conservative all my life. Although I have to say the party’s slide leftward in recent years has saddened me.’ Philpott smiled sourly. ‘I nearly didn’t vote at all, last election.’

‘I take it you knew Harold Gibson?’

‘Again, by repute. We had interests in common, shall we say. His views on certain social issues touched my own at many points.’

‘He was a fine man,’ Emerett Pearce said. ‘And I don’t just say that because he was a business partner of Don’s and mine. Harold Gibson had vision, and he had the courage to turn his insights into realities.’

‘He will be missed,’ Philpott said.

‘So.’ Chadwick jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘The guy back there with the camera, who is he?’

Now Philpott looked as if he had been asked something distasteful. ‘His name is Jonah Tait,’ he said. ‘He’s a journalist and publisher from New York.’

‘What kind of publisher?’

‘Books and a magazine or two. Something of a crank, some might say, but he undoubtedly has a following.’

The car turned smoothly into a long rising driveway. The chauffeur dropped the speed and manoeuvred past a group of cars parked irregularly at the front of a large pink-and-white house. Chadwick pressed his button again and the screen moved back.

‘Put it over by the trees,’ he told the driver. ‘I don’t want any of these hot-rodders putting marks on the paintwork.’

They got out and followed another group of new arrivals into the house. In a long reception room with a sky-blue carpet, upwards of seventy people were standing in small clusters, murmuring and nodding and helping themselves to food and drink from a table running the length of the room. Waiters moved soundlessly among the guests taking empty glasses and providing replacements.

Philpott approached the widow, who was regally ensconced in a huge chair at the farthest corner of the room, surrounded by several other weepy-eyed women.

‘Mrs Gibson.’ Philpott approached with folded hands, his eyes sorrowful. ‘My name is Derek Beamish, you have no reason to know who I am. I won’t intrude any further on your grief than to say how sorry I am for your loss.’

Ginny thanked him in a whisper. She reached out and touched his hand. He closed his other hand over hers, then withdrew and found a drink. Chadwick and Pearce were beside him before he took the second sip.

‘You were saying,’ Chadwick said, ‘about the journalist…’

‘Jonah Tait.’

‘He’s doing something on Harold’s death?’

‘Well.’ Philpott frowned. ‘I gather he plans to produce a book, no less. An exposé. He wants to use the murder as the basis for an examination of Mr Gibson’s way of life, his business practices, his relationships with other businessmen, and his financial connections with certain organizations unsympathetic to the Jew and other irritant minorities. Mr Tait has said his book will offer society a remedy to the likes of Harold Gibson.’

‘Remedy.’ Pearce seemed to stiffen at that. He leaned forward so he could look straight at Philpott. ‘How remedy? What’s he advocating?’

‘The usual dreary socialist panaceas, inflated with topical hot air.’

‘But you believe he’s dangerous, even so?’

‘Dangerous enough, because, as I say, he has followers. And I wouldn’t underestimate his ability to argue or make a point. He is a rather gifted man, in a crowd-pleasing way.’

‘You’re surely not an admirer of his?’ Pearce said.

‘Quite the opposite. But it pays to have a balanced evaluation of the enemy. He’s currently setting up a campaign. A friend of mine heard him discuss it at a reception in New York only last week.’ Philpott looked across the room for a moment. ‘I’ll be frank with you. Jonah Tait’s campaign is partly the reason I came to Texas.’

‘Did you know he’d be at the cemetery?’ Chadwick said.

‘I didn’t expect to see him, no, but it didn’t surprise me, either.’

‘Why did you warn me not to tangle with him?’

‘He has a knack of making a legitimate confrontation turn into a racist attack.’

‘So what’s this campaign?’

‘He believes in the heavy advance sell. He’ll go back to New York with whatever he can pick up here. When he has manipulated his material to serve his arguments, he’ll use it to promote his forthcoming book.’

‘Dangerous, indeed,’ Pearce said.

For a minute the three men stood tasting their drinks, looking at each other.

Chadwick finally spoke. ‘Tell us more about this, Mr Beamish.’

‘Whatever I can.’

‘And while you’re at it, maybe you’ll explain why your interest in Tait’s project has brought you to Texas.’

‘I’ll be glad to,’ Philpott said. ‘But please, call me Derek. It’s always Derek to my friends.’

19

Whitlock rapped twice on the hotel room door and Philpott let him in.

‘You weren’t seen?’

‘I’m disappointed you have to ask.’ Whitlock took off his sunglasses. ‘I’ve been all over the hotel, in and out of shops, I even had a Coke in the bar. No one followed me. How did it go at the wake?’

‘Wheels are turning.’

They sat down in easy chairs at opposite sides of the marble-topped coffee table. Whitlock took a sheaf of papers from his pocket and put them down.

‘When I got back from the cemetery this afternoon,’ Whitlock said, ‘there was e-mail waiting. Two items. One was a report from Sabrina via your secretary, who doesn’t seem to know where you are.’

‘I told my staff they should route any important communiqués directly to you. To make sure they did, I left no address for myself.’ Philpott swirled his drink. ‘Of course you may choose to read that as an admission that I don’t want to handle any more responsibility than I can avoid.’

‘As if I’d think that.’ Whitlock took out his notebook and opened it at the marker. ‘Sabrina has done a good job. In essence, her report tells us that JZ stands for Juli Zwanzig. I’ll get to that in a moment. She also established that an American, probably Harold Gibson, recruited the gunman, Yaqub Hisham, to murder Emily Selby.’ Whitlock tapped the papers lying on the table. ‘A full printout is in there.’

‘So a man who hates Arabs almost as much as he hates blacks and Jews went and hired an Arab to do his killing for him?’

‘That seems to be the case, yes.’

‘Item two?’

‘A German computer file from Mike Graham. I’ve given you a rough translation. Sabrina could have translated it more stylishly but you’ve got all the facts. He struck gold.’

‘Give me a summary.’

‘The computer file contains the constitution and objectives of Juli Zwanzig.’

‘That’s July twentieth, right?’

‘Very good. The group consists of men and women, all of them Jews, whose objective is to dismantle a highly secret Nazi outfit called Jugend von Siegfried - the Siegfried Youth. I checked with records at Central Intelligence, there’s no file on any such organization, so we’re talking about a seriously secret outfit.’

‘How young are the Siegfried Youth?’

‘Not young at all. Not any more. They were the very last squad of the Hitler Youth, inducted by the Führer himself a few days before Berlin collapsed. Apparently when Hitler addressed the boys in the street at the back of the bunker, he told them they were the embodiment of Siegfried, and years later they adopted the name.’

‘And the men on Emily’s list are the survivors of the group.’

‘Right again. She threw a lot of her life into getting that list together. The men on it are sworn to preserve the memory of Adolf Hitler and to suppress Jews by any and all means. A series of funds and other financial arrangements were used to keep the boys together during the formative years.’

‘And they managed to slip through the mid-part of the twentieth century without picking up tracers. That shows remarkable forward planning.’

‘There was a lot of smoke-screening,’ Whitlock said. ‘Several of the mechanics of the old Nazi escape routes were the very people who kept the Jugend von Siegfried shielded from any kind of public scrutiny. They were brought up and educated together - again, very secretly, at various locations in Switzerland.’

‘They were always kept together?’

‘Yes, and their bonding persisted into adult life, as Hitler intended. But on official records there’s no hint of that. Like any cross-section of Germans who were kids during the war, some of these men have early records, some have none. Some appear to have been adopted, others apparently grew up with foster parents - but it’s all meticulously fabricated bunkum. They stayed together until the time came to leak them into society, mostly into prearranged career paths.’

‘Have they lived up to Hitler’s hopes?’

‘According to the file Mike sent, the Siegfried Youth is nowadays a well-established covert organization which systematically eliminates Jews and Jewish enterprises.’

‘And JZ, I suppose, is dedicated to wiping out the Siegfried Youth.’

‘They certainly are. They’re a small amateur band, but they’re dedicated.’

‘What’s the connection with Emily Selby?’

‘Her father. Johannes Lustig. The organization was formed at his posthumous prompting. He was a scholar and an ardent Zionist, and he spent eleven years compiling a history of what he called “Hitler’s other monsters”, the villains we don’t hear so much about. During the war there were the Kultur Büroangestellter, among others. They were the culture clerks, the SS minions who went around evaluating antiques, pictures, sculpture - anything of value and artistic merit owned by Jews. They would catalogue the stuff then they would con-fiscate it. They ruined Lustig’s own father, a couple of years before he was taken away to Buchenwald.’

‘Was the history ever published?’

‘Apparently not. Which is a pity, because wider dissemination of the material would have alerted more people to the existence of the Jugend von Siegfried, who are apparently hinted at here and there. Lustig himself got the details of the group’s beginnings from a diary kept by one of Hitler’s aides, a General Albers. He gleaned the rest by combing police records and interviewing retired Swiss nationals who looked after the boys in the early years.’

‘So how did Lustig persuade people to set up the JZ?’

‘In his last will and testament he directed that money be set aside, quote…’ Whitlock consulted his notebook, ‘“to create a fellowship in remembrance of those spirits and lives which were dismantled; a fellowship with the central purpose of avenging the wrongs done by the Jugend von Siegfried; a fellowship to apply vengeance in full measure and assuage the torment of our beloved dead.”’

‘What about the group’s name? Where does that come from?’

‘The twentieth of July was the date when Johannes Lustig and his son-in-law died in Lake Cayuga. Lustig’s followers see symbolism in the fact that it was on the same date, in 1944, that the chief of staff to General Fromm, Claus von Stauffenberg, tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb under a map table.’

‘That attempt failed.’

‘I know, but I suppose the symbol’s the thing, the defiance. You’ll find a membership list among the papers - Erika Stramm did the recruiting, and she didn’t seem to have any trouble getting top people on her team.’

‘Do we know who JZ uses as executioner?’

‘There’s no mention of a name.’

Philpott was frowning at his glass. ‘I find it hard to believe our computer man, Andreas Wolff, is a member of a latter-day Nazi death-squad.’

‘You’ve met him?’

‘Several times. I’ve also met quite a few racist fanatics. The two impressions don’t gel. Wolff is a head-in-the-clouds kind of man, a greying hippie. His professional brilliance is a side issue with him. He is at his happiest using science to firm up his fantasies, his computer games, which all involve adventurer kings and distressed maidens and dragons and all that other mystical nonsense. He is bored by politics, bored by reality in general. Wolff is not bigot material.’

‘I’ll get Mike to look into it.’

Whitlock rose and Philpott went with him to the door.

‘If you hear anything important from Mike, call me,’ Philpott said. ‘Impress on him how necessary it is that we put a brake on JZ before things escalate. He has to find out who the blue-eyed executioner is.’

‘Maybe Sabrina could do us some good in Berlin.’

‘Maybe she could.’ Philpott opened the door. ‘Remember to hold the good thought.’

‘Which one is that?’

‘We are here to create havoc.’

‘I was maybe ten seconds away from switching off the phone,’ Mike Graham said. ‘If this is something that can wait until tomorrow, I’d rather it did.’

‘It won’t take long, Mike.’ Whitlock was on his balcony, watching the sun go down. ‘I want to update you on a couple of things. Where are you right now?’

‘In bed, in the Hotel Zipser. It’s the middle of the night here.’

‘I’m sorry, I forgot -’

‘I was reading,’ Mike said. ‘Lately I can’t sleep. I have to wait until it lands on me all at once.’

‘We’re in Texas.’

‘We?’

‘I’m with the old man. Maybe I’ll explain later, if I survive this junket. Tell me, have you seen Andreas Wolff yet?’

‘Tomorrow, first thing. I used the formal approach and made an appointment. I figured it would be best to start out civilized.’

‘Philpott wants you to check something else while you’re there.’

Whitlock explained what they had learned about Juli Zwanzig from Erika Stramm’s computer file, and how Philpott had strong doubts about Wolff’s legitimacy as a candidate for assassination. ‘I’m sure you’ll think of some way to broach it.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Erika Stramm. Is she pliant?’

‘Um… The short answer is no.’

‘We need to know who the JZ executioner is. Stramm is the one to tell us.’

‘She’d never tell me. She wouldn’t even admit she knows what JZ is. She also claimed she and Emily Selby were just friends.’

‘There’s no chance she would relent and talk to you?’

‘If I got close enough to put a question to her, my suspicion is she’d put me in traction before I got my mouth open.’

‘I’ll drop that one back in Philpott’s lap.’

‘Good. Now I think I’ll hang up, C.W. Suddenly I’m getting sleepy.’

‘Don’t you want to know what Sabrina found out about the Arab shooter?’

‘Another time. If I miss my sleep on this cycle, I may have to wait twelve hours before I’m ready again.’

Sabrina was in the pale blue kitchen of her apartment on East 93rd Street, standing at the big butcher’s-block counter that divided the room. She had made coffee and was pouring it into a dark green porcelain cup.

‘This sensation is not loneliness,’ she told herself firmly, ‘I’m just out of time-whack.’

She had been feeling like this since she got back from Morocco. The expected pleasure of returning to her own home had not crystallized. She had the distinct feeling, at that very moment, that all of life was happening elsewhere, and she had somehow landed in a pocket of limbo.

She took her coffee to the couch and sat down. She picked up the TV remote and switched on the set. As soon as the picture appeared she began clicking. Women, she had read, were not so prone to channel-hopping as men. Sabrina could hop with the best of them.

None of the images that flashed past appealed strongly enough to make her want to stop and watch. She switched off the set and sat back, inhaling the aroma of the coffee, staring at the dark night sky beyond her windows.

She tried to imagine how different her life would be if she had gone into teaching. She had wanted to teach, once, but opportunity was a powerful side-tracker. After some postgraduate time at the Sorbonne she travelled in Europe for a couple of years, and on her return to the USA she was recruited by the FBI. That had something to do with her father: George Carver was a man with a lifelong career in politics (‘… in the machinery of political life,’ was how he described his work) who had perhaps wanted a son. Sabrina took the job because it smacked of adventure, something she felt her life might need now she had decided to come home. While she was at the FBI she discovered she had a talent with firearms. She also learned she was good at martial arts. Gradually the thoughts of a life in teaching were submerged. By the time she was gently head-hunted and won over by UNACO, Sabrina was decidedly a woman of action, with a robust, well-preserved spare-time passion for languages and European literature. Now, the thought of tenure at a small, picturesque campus seemed very attractive.

She drained her cup and took it back to the kitchen. She washed up, put out the lights and went to the bedroom. Now that she faced it, she felt desperately tired. Her shoulders ached and her legs still felt sluggish, a hangover from the time she spent cramped and dehydrated in the stinking room in Morocco. Sleep and rest for her poor muscles, she thought, would put a whole new shine on her outlook.

She sat on the side of the bed and smiled at the picture of her mother and father on the night table. George and Jeanne Carver lived in Florida now, she hardly ever saw them since George retired. Occasionally they would come and stay for a few days, so Jeanne could have an opportunity to see the shows and George could mingle with his old friends for a while. But they didn’t come often enough, and when they did they always believed they were intruding on her life.

‘If only you would,’ she told the picture.

What she felt now was a familiar sensation she privately called her amputee state: not belonging with anyone and not wanting to belong, but feeling cut off nevertheless. Or it was simpler than that: she was merely sorry for herself.

‘Self-pity is a crime against your person,’ she said firmly, and stood up. ‘Snap out of it.’

All the same, she found it hard not to feel melancholy as she got undressed and put on her nightdress. Emotionally, she made a habit of keeping the wick turned low. Early in her career at the FBI she had had an affair with a sub-controller who turned ugly when she showed signs of falling in love with him. In the end he set his wife on her. Nowadays, beyond superficial friendship, she was wary of men, and she made a point of avoiding the ones who were not entirely free from other attachments - which was difficult to do, because they always said they were.

The telephone rang. She picked it up.

‘Sabrina,’ Whitlock said. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you.’

‘Nice try, C.W., but no. You should have waited another twenty minutes.’

‘You know I wouldn’t call at this hour unless it was important.’ Sabrina’s other line started ringing, then the fax machine cut in. ‘I can hear that,’ Whitlock said. ‘It’s from me. A summary of what Mike found out when he visited Erika Stramm’s apartment. Read and digest.’

‘Why am I getting all this attention so late at night?’

‘Because there’s a problem. It needs handling and Philpott thinks you’re the very person to do the job.’

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘Erika’s response to Mike’s break-in was hostile.’

‘No kidding. Are you saying she caught him?’

‘Apparently. Anyway, Mike did manage to purloin a computer file with the stuff I’ve just faxed to you, but there’s a crucial gap in the information.’

‘And crucial gaps are my specialty.’

‘We don’t know who the killer is, the executioner, the one who’s behind two murders that we know of. As things stand between Mike and Erika Stramm, there’s not a chance she’ll tell him anything.’

‘But you believe she’ll tell me?’

‘Well the chief thinks so.’ Whitlock paused. ‘And yes, I think so, too. I’ve always admired your, how shall I put it, delicate powers of persuasion.’

Sabrina took a moment to consider what he had said, then asked simply, ‘When do I get the travel details?’

‘You have them already. They’re at the end of the fax. Keep in touch. And be careful.’

‘Sure. You too.’

Sabrina put down the phone. She smiled again at the picture of her parents. It was odd the way events worked on her moods. She had just been told she had to get out there and risk her neck again. Because of that, she no longer felt cut off from anything.

20

Russ Grundy, stout and ruddy-featured, was squeezed into a corner in the back of a big white van with BENTINCK’S WINDSHIELD REPLACEMENTS painted in blue on the side. It was parked in the street behind the offices of the Transit Authority building in downtown Fort Worth, next to the bus station.

‘It’s busy along here, which is good cover, and the traffic doesn’t affect the equipment,’ Russ told C.W. Whitlock. ‘I’m within a mile of Chadwick’s house, which is perfect, and if I need to move closer for any reason nobody is going to notice or care.’

Whitlock had arrived by bus, which he believed was still the best way to travel when a low profile was important. He had entered the van by walking through the bus station from front to back and climbing in as if he owned the vehicle. He sat now on a tiny swivel stool at the opposite end of the van from Grundy. Both sides of the interior were packed with electronic equipment. Where Grundy sat was a small bench with tuning gear, speakers, tape machines and headphones.

‘I’m really grateful to you and Mr Philpott for this little diversion, C.W.’

‘Glad we can all help each other. How are you working this surveillance, exactly?’

‘Most of it’s way beyond you - no offence - but putting it simply, I’m aligned with a tight information band set up between this van and the target. The ventilators out on the roof are my focusing receivers. This baby,’ he patted an oblong black-and-red box beside him, ‘collects and co-ordinates. It picks up from two bugs in Chadwick’s house, and a third one in his office, another mile out beyond the house. So far, he hasn’t been near the office.’

‘How did you get the bugs in place?’

‘Respect my secrets, C.W., and that way I’ll respect yours.’

‘You remembered it’s telephone calls we’re interested in?’

‘Of course I did. So that we don’t have to record every sound that gets made in the place every minute of the day, the recording equipment is triggered by the first dialling tone each time a call is made, and it switches off again when the line-cancel tone sounds. This is really sensitive equipment, C.W.’

‘Can you tell what numbers are being called?’

Grundy put on a pitying face. ‘I could do that before any of this stuff was invented. Some guys can do it just by listening near the phone. The tones tell you the country and area codes, and the numbers. They get logged separately.’ He pointed to a cassette deck. ‘Chadwick’s dialled quite a few in the last, ah…’ he looked at his watch, ‘nine hours.’

‘Can you transcribe them for me?’

‘Sure. This thing makes a printout.’ Grundy flipped a switch on the front panel. A moment later a strip of cash-register paper began to appear from under the machine. ‘How long have you got, C.W.?’

‘I get a return trip on the same bus I came in on. A couple of hours yet.’

‘You’ll have time to listen to some of this.’ Grundy put a small DAT tape player in front of Whitlock and inserted a tape. ‘Plug in the headphones at the side.’

Whitlock listened. For a time it was fascinating, hearing Chadwick in his own home, believing he was alone, talking business on the telephone. But it was dull stuff, business talk of a kind that conveyed nothing beyond its own narrow content. After twenty minutes Whitlock decided he would switch off, make his apologies and leave with the tape player and the other three tapes. Then the tape suddenly began to hiss and squeak. He put the machine on pause and pulled off the headphones.

‘It’s gone strange,’ he told Grundy.

‘Let me listen.’

Grundy squeezed his way along the van, wedging himself in beside Whitlock. He put on the headphones, activated the tape and sat frowning. Then he paused the tape again.

‘Son of a gun,’ he said. ‘He’s masking the call.’

‘Masking it?’

‘The old-fashioned way. Running water. He probably took the phone into the bathroom and turned on the taps.’

‘You think he knows about the bugs?’

‘No. He’s just leery, like every sharp crook that ever was. They don’t trust their own shadows.’

‘So we don’t get to know why he thought this call important enough to screen?’

‘Who says?’

Grundy removed the tape from the player and took it to the other end of the van. He put it into an elaborate-looking cassette deck with six circular dials above the tape compartment. He rewound a few inches of tape, played it, and made adjustments to scales underneath the dials.

‘I’m screening out the frequency of running water, which should leave only the voice sounds.’

He rewound the tape again, adjusted three of the six scales, and switched on. The tape went through the machine silently.

‘Why can’t we hear anything?’ Whitlock said.

‘I’m in scouring mode. You’ll hear it in a minute. The rig knows now what to listen for, so it’ll stop the tape automatically at the end of the overlay sound.’

After a timed three minutes and forty seconds the tape stopped. Grundy rewound it to the point where the hissing noise had started.

‘Now listen to the difference.’

He switched on. Music poured from the speaker. It was an instrumental of ‘Fool on the Hill’.

Grundy slapped his forehead.

‘He used music, too?’ Whitlock said.

‘Yep. This Chadwick isn’t your average paranoiac, C.W. He’s up there with the wild-eyed conspiracy-theory crowd.’

‘Can you eliminate the music?’

‘Yes,’ Grundy said.

Whitlock looked at him. ‘But?’

‘But the speech could disappear with it. It depends how much variance there is between Chadwick’s voice and the notes and harmonic combinations that make up the music.’ Grundy looked at his watch. ‘This could be a long job, without any guarantee of success.’

‘How long?’

‘Well, with music I have to do things manually, grading out the music by fine stages until I get down to the vocal range. And I’ll have to work from copies, because the technique rules out error-free procedure. Two hours, maybe.’

Whitlock sighed. ‘OK. Go ahead. I’ll wait.’

‘Remember, no guarantees. I may come up with nothing.’

‘We’ll get nothing unless you try.’

That evening Whitlock called Philpott on the scrambler line. He explained about the masked recording.

‘It took two and a half hours to clear off the music.’

‘What did it leave?’

‘Chadwick calling an architect in Berlin. Viktor Kretzer.’

‘Really? Kretzer’s on Emily’s list.’

‘I know. We have a clear recording of Chadwick telling Kretzer not to communicate until further notice.’

‘Marvellous.’

‘But better still,’ Whitlock said, ‘we have a little nugget at the end of the call. Chadwick tells Kretzer that some armaments are due to complete the round trip and come back to Germany, where they were born. The consignment is one item short of the batch Mr Gibson originally purchased, he says, because the Arab was given the gun to use on the job in London. How’s that for serendipity?’

‘To quote the psalmist,’ Philpott said, ‘my cup runneth over. You realize that apart from this being Grade A evidence, it means I won’t have to do any blind bluffing with Chadwick and Pearce?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll pass on my thanks to Grundy in person. Meantime I’ve skulduggery to get on with. And, indeed, so have you.’ He laughed softly. ‘Don’t you just love it, C.W., when fate takes its foot off your neck and lets you score the occasional goal?’

Chadwick had reserved a table at the Casa de Oro at Fairmont in North-west Dallas. When Philpott arrived, Chadwick and Pearce were already seated. He saw them watch him as he came across the blue-and-amber-lit dining room. There was tension in the way they sat, square-shouldered, necks stiff.

‘Gentlemen…’ They stood and Philpott shook their hands. ‘I hope I’m not late.’

‘Not at all.’ Chadwick waved to the chair opposite. ‘Sit down, Mr Beamish.’

‘Derek.’

‘Derek. Sit down and we’ll get you a drink. I hope you like Tex-Mex cooking.’

‘I adore it,’ Philpott lied, smiling. He reached for the leather-covered menu. ‘I wonder, do they do blue corn enchiladas?’

‘Why, yes, I believe they do,’ Pearce said. ‘You’ve some experience of this kind of food?’

‘I travel in Latin America.’ Philpott threw them a meaningful look. ‘One soon develops a taste for the culinary styles of such regions.’

They talked about food and drink and other superficial matters until the waiter came and took their order. Then Chadwick waded in with business.

‘We’ve had time to think about what you told us,’ he said, ‘time to get it into some kind of perspective. Now we need to know the level of nuisance we’re likely to be dealing with. This Jonah Tait, is he what you would call the persistent kind?’

‘In what sense?’

‘I mean, in your knowledge of him, does he frighten easily?’

‘I suspect he doesn’t frighten at all.’

‘But has he been tested?’

‘A man like him is constantly up against opposition in New York. He doesn’t back off.’

‘So we can’t just lean on him and hope to get results.’

‘I wouldn’t say so.’ Philpott sipped his wine. ‘It’s the kind of situation where a man like Harold Gibson would have known what to do.’

The risk in saying that had been calculated. Chadwick and Pearce could easily be offended and even alienated. It was more likely, Philpott believed, that they would agree with what he implied, that Gibson had been the action man in their outfit.

‘He always knew the remedy that would fit the case,’ Chadwick said. ‘I have to hand him that.’

‘Part of my reason for coming to Texas, as you know, was to shadow Mr Tait,’ Philpott said. ‘I was not sure what I would do to obstruct him, but I did know I had to be on hand to try something, should he get out of hand.’

‘So what’s he doing right now?’ Pearce said. ‘We know he’s staying out at the Comfort Inn on West Kingsley, but his movements are pretty low-key.’

‘He’s putting the finishing touches to his book. He’s got your pictures, he’s got the names of local institutions and individuals, he has details of times and dates he needed to fill out the text.’

Chadwick sat back, absently massaging his stomach. ‘This book, could it harm the reputation of anybody besides Harold Gibson?’

‘It could hurt all of Mr Gibson’s associates, and not just their reputations,’ Philpott said. ‘If I may be blunt…’ He paused, waiting for their assent.

‘Go ahead,’ Chadwick said.

‘I happen to know of Mr Gibson’s connection with the Jugend von Siegfried -’

Pearce slapped the table. ‘I told you.’ He looked at Chadwick. ‘People were bound to find out.’

‘Shut it, Emerett.’

‘Harold was the business,’ Pearce said, ‘but he wasn’t such a whizz when it came to keeping a lid on. Not a week before he got killed, I said the same thing I’m saying now.’

‘People don’t know,’ Philpott said. ‘I promise you that. I know because I am first of all a sympathizer, also because I have access to levels of, shall we say, power play, which are shut off from even the average diplomat.’

‘You were going to be blunt about something,’ Chadwick said.

Philpott leaned forward. ‘A record of payments made to the Siegfried people has fallen into Tait’s hands. He intends to use it. I am also reliably informed that he intends to name you both as accessories to the killing of Emily Selby, a White House employee who was shot recently in London by a -’

‘By a hired gun that Gibson should never have gone anywhere near,’ Pearce said. ‘Hell, I knew this would all blow back in our faces. The un-expected choice was Gibson’s idea of covering his tracks. Looks like it didn’t work.’

The food arrived. For ten minutes business was suspended and inconsequential talk was permitted to intervene. They chewed, enthused and reminisced. Chadwick had a long-standing love of down-home Mexican food such as fajitas, ceviche and carne asada; Pearce said he liked to eat at Mia’s, where he could get the best chiles rellenos in town. Philpott confessed to a weakness for French cuisine, particularly foie gras, shaved black truffles, veal with artichokes, and just occasionally, pepper-edged rack of lamb.

None of them finished his main course.

Chadwick was last to lay down his knife and fork. Abruptly, Jonah Tait was back on the agenda. Chadwick wanted to know, for his peace of mind, how Derek Beamish came to know so much about Tait’s movements.

‘Every politician knows,’ Philpott said, ‘that if a man’s life encroaches on other people’s lives, then that man’s life has no real secrets. Finding out the important things, the key facts, takes skill, but it really all boils down to keeping a wide range of contacts, and keeping them sweet.’ He held up a hand and counted off the fingers. ‘I know Tait’s bankers, his printers, the firm of lawyers representing his interests, and the landlord of the property he occupies in Greenwich Village. Collectively they let me know, without knowing they do it, about everything he does and most things he plans.’

Chadwick’s head was tilted to one side, as if he was trying to see something on Philpott’s face not visible at any other angle. ‘You haven’t said so, Mr Beamish, but would I be right in assuming this Tait fellow could hurt you as much as anybody?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re convinced he plans to hurt us, too?’

‘I told you. He could have you facing serious criminal charges.’

‘Well, maybe. We have decent lawyers hereabout, and the best of them represent me and mine whenever they’re needed.’

‘I took that for granted,’ Philpott said. ‘I still think Tait can do you harm. Try to see it coldly. First he destroys your reputation, then he goes on the legal tack, citing your financial support for organizations engaged in criminal activity - outfits like the Jugend von Siegfried, for one. He produces whatever evidence he has about the Emily Selby killing. And of course that starts the police digging, and you know what happens when they do that, they will always come up with more dirt, more long-buried skeletons. Something would be bound to stick, however good your lawyers may be.’

Pearce said, ‘When we talked to you before, you kind of hinted you would be prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to put a brake on this man. Were you serious about that?’

‘Of course.’

Chadwick said, ‘See, we don’t have your freedom to move. We’re businessmen. We occupy a marked spot on the map, we come under all kinds of scrutiny, most of it friendly, but it’s scrutiny all the same and if we change our patterns or make wrong moves, well, people notice. You, on the other hand, you’ve kept yourself close, you move around the globe, nobody has tracers on you.’

‘Tait has.’

‘Tait, he’s different, and what I’m saying is, you’re in a better position to do something about him than we are. You can take action without being watched while you do it.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘What would it take to stop Jonah Tait?’ Pear ce said.

‘Well…’ Philpott pursed his lips. ‘Something extreme, I’m sure.’

‘Mother of God,’ Chadwick said. He was staring across the restaurant. ‘It’s him.’

Philpott nearly smiled at the timing. C.W. Whitlock was striding across the room, heading straight for their table. He wore a black leather jacket and a black crew-neck sweater. His expression was blank, but his eyes looked angry.

‘Hi there,’ he said, stopping at the table. He rested his fingertips on the stiff white cloth. ‘Pardon the interruption, I’ll only detain you gentlemen a moment.’

‘What do you want?’ Pearce snapped.

Whitlock smiled at him. ‘I’m leaving this fair city tomorrow and I thought I should stop by and thank you in person.’

‘For what?’

‘Copy. An embarrassment of copy. More, maybe, than I can use.’

‘I think I speak for the others as well as myself,’ Philpott drawled, ‘when I say I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about.’

‘Yes you do, Mr Beamish.’ Whitlock flashed his smile again. ‘You all do. I came here to put the finishing touches to a book about a profoundly bad man, and I have to tell you I got everything I came for. Rest assured, all three of you have a place in the text that should guarantee you some kind of immortality.’

‘Just you back off,’ Pearce snarled.

Whitlock shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you something. There was a point when I was two-thirds the way into the book and I thought, maybe I’m being way too hard on these guys. But now I see you here, and I catch the rancid atmosphere of bigotry and graft, I’m glad I checked every fact and put down every word.’

‘Just go away, will you?’ Philpott said.

Whitlock stepped back and nodded to all three. ‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘Let me remember you like this.’ He laughed and walked away.

For a couple of minutes nobody spoke. Chadwick filled their glasses with wine, snatched up his own and drank it in three gulps. Philpott took a sip from his glass. Pearce had his hands over his face. When he brought them down he was staring at Philpott.

‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘Urgently.’

Two hours later Whitlock had a telephone call at his hotel.

‘Me and the boys talked it over,’ Philpott told him. ‘We reached a decision.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m going to kill you.’

‘Well, you’re the boss. I’ll put my affairs in order.’

‘I think they would sooner have had their own man do the job, but I couldn’t let them loose on you, could I? Besides, they’re pretty scared of anyone looking in their direction just at the moment, and in the end they even agreed to defray my considerable expenses for the job. I promised them something clean, with no reverberations.’

‘When should I clear out?’

‘I suggest you get back to New York overnight and do some co-ordinating on my behalf. As of some time early tomorrow, you cease to exist.’

‘Anything you need?’

‘Some penta-methylenediamine. Street-name cadaverine.’

Whitlock thought for a moment. ‘Grundy could get you some. Should I call him?’

‘No need, I’ll talk to him myself. I have another job for him.’

‘A word of warning about the cadaverine,’ Whitlock said. ‘Don’t even open it until you need it. And don’t open it in the hotel under any circumstances. Is there anything else?’

‘Nothing at all. I’ll just say goodbye and RIP, old chap. Bang goes another alias, eh?’

‘Plenty more where that came from,’ Whitlock said.

21

Andreas Wolff lived in a top-floor apartment in an elegant eighteenth-century building which overlooked the Hermann Gmeiner park in the Freyung district of Vienna.

‘From my work table,’ he told Mike Graham, ‘I can look into the park and see the children playing in the Wendy houses and gambolling around the nice green open spaces over there. Gmeiner worked most of his life in the service of orphans, you know. He was quite a guy.’

Mike’s initial impression was that Wolff himself was a pretty extraordinary person. He was a robustly middle-aged man who exuded compact, restless energy. He had wiry grey-black hair above a wide, furrowed brow; when he spoke his eyes moved incessantly behind the lenses of his glasses, and when he described something his long-fingered hands made shapes in the air. He insisted Mike call him by his first name, and showed no surprise when Mike explained he was an undercover agent attached to the United Nations. ‘I already have two murderous-looking police marksmen in residence, so a murderous secret agent will fit the setting very well.’

From that point on, it had been difficult to get Wolff to address the matter of his security. After a conducted tour of the sprawling apartment he insisted Mike try out one of his prototype computer games. After that he decided it was time for coffee. They took their cups to the spacious sitting room where the police bodyguard sat in easy chairs, looking uncomfortable as they pretended to read newspapers with their machine pistols on the floor at their feet. At Mike’s request they had been told he was an American computer engineer engaged on collaborative work with Andreas Wolff. When he arrived they had inspected his ID which backed the impersonation.

‘Life is so damned short,’ Wolff said now. His words were clipped and meticulously delivered. He stood by a tall window, watching the traffic down on the Börseplatz. ‘I could use three lifetimes, no problem, just turning my games from wild ideas into software. And in between I could maybe use up another couple of seventy-five-year spans to deal with the serious stuff.’

‘ICON,’ Mike said.

Wolff made a sour mouth. ‘I sometimes wish I’d never gone near the thing. You can’t imagine how those security codes disrupt my sleep.’

‘I’d assume they command a lot of brain space.’

‘They sprawl. And apart from that, they constitute a severe discipline. One I did not seek. I am tied to it now of course, and in many ways I find it fulfilling. The new protocols are moving towards a kind of digital perfection. I can sense it. I can even visualize the completed project before I have written the finalizing code.’

‘You’re saying the protocols aren’t finished? I thought they were at the testing stage.’

‘They are being tested, that is true,’ Wolff said, ‘but the test stage is a period with a lot of ruthless chopping. More code has to be written, and that has to be seamlessly incorporated into the body of software which has just undergone merciless surgery.’ Wolff jerked his arms upwards, slopping coffee on the back of his hand. ‘I take some measure of Frohsinn from the effort - glee, you understand?’

‘From facing the challenge?’

‘Quite so. It is good to take on such substantial difficulties, such threats to the symmetry of my reasoning processes. And it is a deep pleasure to overcome them, to win. But I feel it is endless work. As one challenge is cancelled another springs up.’ Wolff turned from the window and grinned at Mike, showing large even teeth. ‘Worst of all are the occasions, late at night, when I realize how much of my precious time is being eroded.’

Mike looked at his watch.

‘And your precious time, too,’ Wolff said, ‘is being eaten away. I’m sorry, I respond to visitors the way children do. With a kind of excitement that travels in all directions. Come, let’s sit down and we can discuss your business. I assure you again, the sharpshooters don’t have a word of English.’ As they sat at a table by the window Wolff added, ‘Their German isn’t much good, either.’

Mike explained his masters’ anxiety that Wolff’s security might not be good enough. ‘The possible threat to your life has gotten more serious, too.’

‘You mean it’s not just the possibility of criminals eliminating me, to make sure they have the time to break open ICON once and for all?’

‘Well, no.’

‘I must say I find that threat a trifle hard to take seriously. It’s the kind of thing criminals might talk about doing, but going to the trouble of doing it means stepping beyond whatever safety they’ve created for themselves. I think perhaps the criminals are not so organized and not so well informed that they would consider killing me a worthwhile risk.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Listen, Mr Graham, I have fathered a few rumours about a computer genius who is even now overtaking me in the field of computer data security. A lot of people already believe that no matter what happens to me, the future of ICON is going to be in very safe hands.’

‘There will be plenty of people who won’t believe a word of it,’ Mike said. ‘They’re the ones who take the trouble to dig down to the truth, which means they’re also likely to take the trouble to blow your head off.’

Wolff shrugged. He was obviously not convinced.

‘Anyway,’ Mike said, ‘the new threat is something different.’ He took out a sheet of paper and unfolded it. ‘You’ll see your own name on that list. Do you know any of the other men?’

Wolff took the list and frowned at it. ‘Him,’ he said, jabbing the paper with a long finger. ‘Rudolf Altenberg. I don’t know any of the others.’

‘How do you know Altenberg?’

‘Against my better judgement, and under pressure from my ex-wife who is a friend of Altenberg’s wife, I devised a computer system for him and I personally installed it in his home. A very sophisticated system, I might say. It’s better than anything I’ve got myself.’

‘Have you mingled socially with Altenberg?’

‘Now why do you ask that?’

‘To be blunt, the men on that list are Nazis.’

‘Except for me.’

‘Well…’

‘I’m not surprised Altenberg’s a Nazi. He’s a very unpleasant man with terrible taste in books and music. So why do you suppose I am on that list?’

‘Somebody thinks you’re a Nazi, I guess.’

‘And why is there a list at all?’

‘It’s a hit-list. Two people on it are already dead.’

‘That is gloomy news, Mr Graham.’ Wolff looked towards the window. ‘Somebody could really be after me, then.’

‘It wouldn’t be wise to doubt it. Tell me, why would anybody get the impression you’re a Nazi?’

‘Because of my association with Altenberg?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I would assume so,’ Wolff said. ‘We attended social gatherings together. He insisted on a couple of visits to functions, he wanted to introduce me to people he said were now beneficiaries of the computer system I had designed for him. He was really just showing me off, of course, because I’m rather famous. Tiresome, very tiresome.’

Mike wasn’t sure if he detected evasiveness. Wolff seemed to want to dismiss the topic and move on.

‘You can’t think of any other reason why somebody might think you’re a Nazi?’

Wolff’s eyes hardened. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just try to accept that.’ He looked away.

‘I think we should tighten your security, anyway,’ Mike said.

‘I don’t agree.’

‘It can’t hurt.’

‘What I have is adequate. I am hampered enough, I don’t want any more restraints.’

‘These guys are not adequate. They would be halfway out of their chairs and reaching for their guns at the point when a competent assassin would blow them away.’

‘Is that the threat I face? A trained killer?’

‘It seems so. We have a description and we’re trying to track him down, but until we do, you definitely need to be shielded better than you are. I know it means offending the local flatfoot tribe, but we can’t take feelings into account.’

Wolff stood and walked to the window again. ‘Come and look,’ he said, pointing. ‘That building over there, on the far side of the park, is the stock exchange. A busy place, every room occupied by clerks and other functionaries. A sniper operating over there is outside the bounds of likelihood. And that is the only building which looks directly towards this one.’

‘Even so -’

‘Downstairs, as you know, is a team of very fastidious security people who have emergency switches that can barricade stairways and disable elevators. Nobody who is even faintly suspicious is going to get up here, and security always check with me first, even when it’s my old mother who calls.’

‘I got past them with a phoney ID,’ Mike said.

‘But first they showed me your face on the security monitor, didn’t they?’

‘And you thought I looked honest, and you let me come up. I could have been an assassin.’

‘I let you come up because I know perfectly well who you are.’

Mike blinked at him. ‘What - because I made an appointment?’

‘No.’ Wolff smiled. ‘Use your imagination. If you were a layman, as I am, with occasional access to classified UN files, as I have, wouldn’t you take a look now and again?’

‘Oh.’

‘So,’ Wolff continued, ‘in the extremely unlikely event of somebody making it to my apartment door, I think there’s just enough vigour in those two to make holes in him, should such a thing become necessary.’

Mike thought it over. Finally he nodded. ‘I’ll pass on what you say. In the meantime, be careful. Don’t go out alone. If you plan to move around let us know, we’ll get you a shadow. Two shadows if we think you need them.’

Mike turned from the window. One of the marksmen was staring at him. It was the same look, he thought - half curious, half absent - that cows gave passers-by.

‘Remember what I told you, Andreas. Don’t rely on your troops. Stay alert.’

An hour after sunrise, two men in a black Ford pickup were parked 180 metres from the service yard of the Comfort Inn in Dallas. They were a fat man called Chuck and a thinner, younger one called Billy. Both were employees of Don Chadwick. For this surveillance job they had been equipped with high magnification monoculars, through which they watched a borrowed station wagon with false plates parked near the service elevator of the hotel.

‘Here we go,’ Chuck murmured.

They watched as Philpott got out of the elevator, opened the station wagon tailgate and stepped back into the elevator. He bent over and hoisted one end of a rolled carpet and began dragging it towards the vehicle.

‘Lord save us,’ Billy said. ‘No real puzzle about what he’s totin’ there.’

The carpet was obviously heavy and unwieldy. They could see sweat shine on Philpott’s face. He dragged the roll between his arms until the midpoint touched the edge of the tailgate, then he let go. The carpet dropped with a bump that Chuck and Billy could hear. Philpott bent again, picked the other end of the carpet up off the ground, readied himself behind it with spread feet, and pushed. The roll slid into the station wagon. Philpott folded it over, shut the tailgate and got in behind the steering wheel.

‘Just leave a good space behind him,’ Chuck said as Billy started the engine. ‘There won’t be too much traffic on the road this time of day.’

Philpott drove out on to West Kingsley and turned right, travelling south. At the first major dip in the road he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the black Ford pickup hanging back, a couple of hundred metres behind. As he took the turning for Trinity River and the Greenbelt Park, the mobile telephone in his pocket beeped twice. He took it out, thumbed the green button and put the phone to his ear.

‘Is it all right to speak?’ a voice said. It was C.W. Whitlock.

‘How are you doing that?’ Philpott demanded.

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re dead and rolled up in a carpet in the back of this vehicle I’m driving.’

‘You’re on your way, then?’

‘Bowling along, some distance ahead of a not-so-subtle tail.’

‘I wanted to be sure things were going as expected.’

‘As hoped, not as expected. I’m too steeped in wariness ever to expect much. Is anything happening there that I should know about?’

‘There’s a message from Sabrina.’

‘Any developments?’

‘Nothing yet. She’s in Berlin. Observation convinces her that Erika Stramm goes nowhere without her bear-like escort.’

‘Keep me posted on her chosen line of action. I trust her judgement.’

‘Very well.’

‘I’ll turn the phone off in another hour or so. If you’ve anything urgent to communicate after that, it’ll have to wait. Oh, and by the way, Chadwick paid cash. We now have a fat anonymous donation for whatever charity comes out of the hat.’

‘Well done,’ Whitlock said.

‘I’ll be in touch as soon as matters here are concluded.’

‘Right. And if I could just ask…’

‘Yes?’

‘When you dispose of the remains, be gentle with me.’

22

At three in the afternoon Erika Stramm and her companion, Gregor Bryusov, returned home from a luncheon appointment. It was a good lunch and they had both taken a lot of wine. They had been the guests of a magazine publisher with a flair for mingling business and pleasure, and in the course of the meal a deal had been struck. Erika would write a series for the intellectual monthly Deutsch Herzfeuer, a ten-part study of the transforming effect of socialism upon the arts in Germany since 1946. A commission like that, she told Gregor in the taxi home, was like being paid to play with her favourite toys.

They talked intensely as they entered the apartment, each overlapping what the other said, but in the gloom of the hallway Gregor suddenly stopped talking. He pointed to the strip of carpet between the hall and the door to the sitting room. A single nylon thread lay coiled against the dark fibre, glinting in the dim overhead light. Since the American journalist broke in, Gregor had taken to fixing a thread across the sitting-room doorway each time they went out.

Erika kept talking, her face serious now as she watched Gregor step carefully into the sitting room. He switched on the light, walked to the centre of the room and stood there, looking slowly round.

The bedroom door off the sitting room was half open. It had been closed when they left. Gregor took a leather cosh from his pocket, hooked his thumb through the thong and silently wrapped it around his wrist. He crossed the room and kicked open the bedroom door. It flew in against the wall with a bang and swung back.

Erika came into the sitting room. She saw Gregor step through the bedroom doorway. He moved out of sight, towards the fitted wardrobes along the left wall. She heard him open a door. He grunted, just once, then there was the unmistakable sound of a body falling.

‘Gregor?’

She went to the bedroom door. There was no sound. She put one foot forward, using her leg as a prop, and leaned into the room. Gregor was lying face-down in front of the wardrobes. Erika turned her head to look behind the door.

‘Can we do this peacefully?’ Sabrina said.

She came forward, her arms extended to the sides. She was in her black worksuit and rubber-soled boots, her hair clipped tightly behind her head. Erika moved back a pace, tensing herself.

‘I only want to ask questions. They are important, and answering them will not hurt you or impinge on your liberty.’

Erika looked at Gregor’s motionless body. She could see he was handcuffed.

‘I don’t have to talk to you.’

‘Well maybe you do.’

Abruptly Erika jumped back, pulling a knife from the pocket of her jeans. The blade flicked open, long and thin.

‘Any questions that get asked,’ she said, ‘you’ll be answering them.’ She jerked her head at the sitting room. ‘Get in there. Now!’

For an instant Erika looked down at the knife, positioning it in front of her. When she looked up Sabrina’s fist was an inch from her nose, moving fast. It hit her with a snapping sound. She fell. Sabrina stepped out from behind the door and kicked her twice, hard, in the ribs. Erika tried to scream but she had no breath. She began to gulp, trying to suck air into her stricken chest.

Sabrina shook the knife from her hand, took her by the ankles and dragged her into the sitting room. Erika pulled back her leg, trying to aim a kick. Sabrina let the leg drop and jumped on it with both feet. Now Erika did scream. She doubled over on the floor with her knees curled to her chin, clutching her injured calf.

‘Right then, ups-a-daisy.’

Sabrina got behind Erika and took her by the armpits. She hoisted her into a straight-backed chair, pushed her hands through the slats and slipped on a pair of handcuffs.

‘There.’ Sabrina came round in front, wiping her hands on the legs of her worksuit. ‘You and the boyfriend are a matching set now. You were both a lot easier than I expected.’

‘You won’t get away with this,’ Erika panted. ‘You or the other one, Miles or whatever he calls himself.’

‘Please, spare me that.’ Sabrina tucked a loose strand of hair into the clasp at the back of her head. ‘I just did get away with it. Didn’t I?’

‘That’s what you’ll pay for,’ Erika said. The pain of Sabrina landing full-weight on her shin had brought tears to her eyes; they had flowed freely down her cheeks, taking a quantity of mascara with them. ‘I’m talking about later.’

‘Do you want me to make it rougher still?’

‘You wouldn’t dare harm me.’

‘I’ve already harmed you. And your friend.’

‘What did you do to him?’

‘Given the difference between his weight and mine, and given the fact I knew I had to deal with two of you, I played dirty pool, Erika.’

‘What did you do to him?’

‘Knocked him out with a blast of CS.’ Sabrina held up the silver canister, then dropped it back in her pocket. ‘He went down like he’d been shot. In a couple of minutes he’ll come round and he’ll be fine. For the time being. If you don’t answer my questions, I’ll take it out on him.’ She went into her pocket again and brought out a hypodermic syringe, the needle capped and in position. ‘Pentothal, Erika.’

Erika looked shocked.

‘And don’t tell me I wouldn’t dare.’ Sabrina nodded at the syringe, which contained yellow-tinted water. ‘There’s a big overdose in there.’

‘You’re a crazy woman!’

‘Well, you obviously know that when the subject’s heart is really pounding, a big dose can bring on a spectacular brain seizure.’

‘You could kill him!’

‘Yes, I could.’ Sabrina moved close. She bent down, putting her face level with Erika’s. ‘Shall we talk?’

‘What the hell do you want with me? I don’t know anything.’

‘You have information I need. Please don’t wear down my temper by denying it. Listen - I won’t come to harm for any of this. But your boyfriend could. Don’t doubt me, that would be a bad mistake.’

‘What do you want, for God’s sake?’

‘The name, address and timetable of your assassin.’

Erika said nothing. She lowered her head.

‘Am I to take it you’re refusing?’

‘Why do you want to know this?’

‘I work for an organization that has to stop what you’re doing to the men on Emily Selby’s list.’

‘What organization?’

‘I can’t tell you. But in spite of what you think is evidence to the contrary, we are on the side of the angels.’

‘A Nazi would have no difficulty saying that.’

‘Erika, I don’t like Nazis. Did you ever hear of a neo-fascist called Klaus Schneider?’

Erika nodded. ‘I heard of him. Was he a friend of yours?’

‘I brought him in.’

Erika stared. ‘That’s easy to say.’

‘The details of how he was caught were never made public,’ Sabrina said. ‘But I bet you know what happened.’

‘Perhaps I do.’

‘So. Schneider was on a bench at Unter den Linden on a warm night in August 1992. He was waiting for a consignment of stolen heroin which he planned to sell below the going price. It was one of his ways of raising funds for the cause. At the appointed time a young woman arrived and he followed her into the bushes to make the exchange. Except she turned on him, beat him up, stripped off his clothes and tied him to a tree. Then she took a Polaroid and sent it to his compadres, those who thought he was the new Führer. They got the picture with a note saying the same would happen to them. Dispersal of the group was my mission. It worked.’

Erika shrugged. ‘The details are correct, but you can’t prove you were the woman.’

‘I swear on my mother’s life, I was.’

‘Then why object when we take serious action against the fascists?’

‘Because you’re into wholesale slaughter, and there’s no obvious proof that you’re targeting the right people.’

‘But we are.’

‘To say that, you must have substantial proof, or at least enough to get a legitimate investigation going. Why not hand over your evidence to the police?’

‘Conventional investigations are too polite and too prone to end in flabby liberal leniency. Our way is better.’

‘Erika,’ Sabrina leaned close again. ‘I can’t spend any more time arguing. I have a job to do. I need to know who your hatchet man is. I’m prepared to do what it takes to get an answer. I wasn’t kidding about the Pentothal.’

Erika was staring into the bedroom. Gregor had come round. He lay coughing feebly against the carpet.

‘I don’t want you to hurt him,’ she said, the hardness gone from her voice.

‘Then talk to me.’

For a long moment Erika stared at Sabrina. Then she nodded. ‘Take the cuffs off him. Give him water. Then I’ll talk to you.’

‘You want me to let him loose before you’ve talked?’ Sabrina shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not until -’

‘It’s a promise!’ Erika whispered hoarsely. ‘A promise. I never go back on a promise! Now in the name of God help Gregor. Help him!’

The black pickup was parked on a rocky bluff high over a stretch of open land between two dense clumps of woodland. The sun was high and the temperature inside the pickup, in spite of the windows being open, was 92 degrees Fahrenheit.

For more than two hours Chuck and Billy had sat behind the dusty windshield, observing Chadwick’s station wagon parked on the open ground below them, its grey-and-blue paintwork baking in the heat.

‘All that time in a wagon in this heat with a dead man,’ Chuck said. ‘That guy ain’t natural. What kind of man could put up with that?’

‘He’s English, don’t forget.’

Since parking the station wagon Mr Beamish did not appear to have moved. He had simply stopped on the dirt road linking the clumps of woodland, the same dirt road that led right through that sector of the Greenbelt Park. When he stopped he switched off the engine, sat back behind the wheel and folded his arms.

‘He does have air-conditioning in there,’ Billy said. ‘But I don’t think that would give him too much protection, not after all this time.’ He groaned. ‘I promised Mr Chadwick I’d clean the inside of that wagon after this character’s done with it.’

At that moment Malcolm Philpott, sitting in the station wagon, could see what the two men in the pickup would have to use their scopes to identify, a small bulk-liquid transporter with a fat blue chemical tank on its back. It approached along a branch road and came slowly down the hillside to the spot where Philpott was parked.

The driver was Russ Grundy. ‘Mr Beamish?’ he called.

‘That’s right.’

‘Are we being watched?’

‘Yes we are. Get into your part, Russ. You have a keen-eyed audience up on the hill over there behind me. Please don’t look in that direction.’

Grundy got out. He was dressed in the uniform of a US State Trooper. He came across to the station wagon and held the door as Philpott got out.

‘What do I have to do now?’

Philpott pointed to the back of the station wagon. ‘There’s a roll of carpet in there. In the interests of verisimilitude, there are two half-filled plastic sacks of water taped to the centre of the roll. I want you to help me carry that carpet over to your empty tanker and poke it in through the lid on top, which of course you will first open.’

‘Can you tell me why I’m dressed like a lawman?’

‘Why do you ask? Do you need to know what your motivation is?’

‘No. I’m just eaten up with curiosity.’

‘In my experience,’ Philpott said, ‘it’s the really baffling visible evidence that burrows deep into people’s credulity. I mean, what in heaven’s name is a state trooper doing driving a tanker? And what’s he going to do with the carpet-wrapped corpse he’s loaded into the tank?’

‘It’s bizarre, I’ll give you that.’

‘Thank you.’

From the pickup high on the bluff Chuck and Billy watched through their scopes as the ominous roll of carpet was manhandled on to the pickup and slid, after some struggling, down into the tank. They watched the trooper close the lid, get down, shake hands with Beamish, and drive away. After a couple of minutes Beamish drove off in the opposite direction.

‘I’ll be real glad when this day is over,’ Billy said to Chuck.

Back in Dallas Philpott parked the station wagon at a quiet spot near his hotel, as arranged with Chadwick. Before he closed and locked the door, he sprinkled three drops from the phial of cadav-erine Grundy had obtained for him. Within seconds the unmistakable odour of decaying human flesh began to fill the interior of the station wagon. He shut the door quickly.

‘Mission accomplished,’ he whispered with satisfaction. He’d enjoyed this little jaunt. It felt good to be back in the field again. As he walked back to the hotel he whistled softly, thinking ahead to a hot bath, a fine dinner, then a late flight back to New York.

23

‘Memories threaten me,’ Uli Jürgen said. ‘I hate the way they invade my present.’

‘Really? How strange.’

Marianne Edel was on a high-legged stool in the centre of the bare-floored studio, her face and her uncovered shoulders mercilessly sunlit by tall windows and wide fanlights. When she spoke she tried not to move.

‘How else would you make contact with memories?’ she said. ‘They have to invade the present before you become aware of them.’

‘They always seem to challenge my safety. So I try to leave the past undisturbed.’

Jürgen stepped back from his easel and put down the brush he had been using. He smiled at the canvas, being careful to frown at the same time, so he would look self-critical. The picture pleased him. It gave him a secure, competent feeling. All his good commercial work did that.

‘I think we are finished, Frau Edel.’

At six sittings over four weeks he had painted a perfect likeness of his sitter, which any half-adequate portraitist could have done. But he was Uli Jürgen, so his picture was much more than a likeness. He had been described as an artist who could invest a portrait with the spirituality of its subject. The picture of Marianne Edel was a true likeness invested with a dozen ingenious falsehoods - at the eyes, the mouth, the jawline, the neck. Her skin sagged and wrinkled in exactly the places it did in reality, but in the picture the sagging and the furrows were softer-edged and looked more like silken drapery than tired epidermis.

‘May I look at it now?’

‘Well…’

Individually the falsehoods were unremarkable, but the collective effect was to flatter Marianne Edel shamelessly, and brilliantly. A stranger looking at the picture would see a convincing harmony of line and tone and colour which suggested, powerfully, that the vigour and sexuality in the image must be a true reflection of those qualities in the sitter. Uli Jürgen had known Marianne Edel only a little over a month, but he doubted she had ever looked half as good as his creation.

‘Yes, come and look,’ he said.

She stepped down carefully from the stool and stood beside him. For a minute they were silent, he thinking about his meeting later with his accountant, she bedazzled by a talent that could make her resemble so strongly her own idea of herself.

‘You are a genius,’ she said.

‘Oh, come now.’

He cringed within himself as she impulsively threw her arms round his neck and kissed him on the mouth.

‘You darling!’ she exclaimed, and kissed him again.

Jürgen held his breath and waited for it to be over. The woman was fifty, heavy for her size and not well preserved. Facially she bore an unflattering resemblance to the actor Jon Voight. She had stale breath and bad taste in perfume. But she was rich, and Jürgen never repulsed money or anyone who came bearing it, however objectionable.

‘You think your husband will like it, then?’ he said as she released him.

‘He will adore it. When can I take it home?’

‘It should remain here another ten days, at least. But if you are really impatient to remove it to your home, I can have it taken there two or three days from now by someone who knows how to handle freshly-finished canvases. He can hang it for you, too.’

‘That would be splendid. Can you arrange that for me?’

‘Horst will be here later to pick up some other work. I will organize everything with him then, and call you to confirm.’

Marianne Edel took her coat from the stand by the window. Jürgen helped her put it on.

‘You are so well organized for an artist,’ she said. ‘And more of a thinker than I would have expected.’

‘A thinker?’ Jürgen smiled cautiously. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘You’ve told me so many interesting things on my visits here. And what you were saying just now, about memories, that is so haunting.’

If she had not been a client he would have laughed. In the circumstances he stared neutrally into his coffee cup. The observation about memories was entirely for effect. He had read some of it somewhere and made up the rest.

‘My husband says you’re the living image of Freud, you know.’

Jürgen looked at Frau Edel. ‘Freud?’

‘Your beard, the broad forehead - and the way you hold a paintbrush when you look at the canvas, it’s just the way Freud held a cigar.’

It was the first time he had been told he looked like a Jew, and it stung. He looked pointedly at his watch.

‘I must go,’ said Frau Edel. He accompanied her to the door. ‘Do call me as soon as you have made arrangements to have the portrait delivered.’

‘Of course.’

She kissed his cheek one more time before she left. He closed the door softly behind her, making a sour face at the panels.

‘Freud, indeed.’

The telephone rang. He hurried across and picked it up. It was his accountant’s secretary, reminding him of his appointment.

‘Tell him not to worry,’ he said, ‘I haven’t forgotten. ‘I’ll get there on time, I always do.’

There was a sharp tap on the door. Horst, he thought, or the Edel woman had forgotten something.

He crossed the studio and opened the door. A stranger was there, tall, blue-eyed, with very fair hair. He had a confident smile.

‘Herr Jürgen? I came for the package.’

‘I’m sorry? The package? There must be a mistake.’

‘That’s it.’ The young man pointed to a cardboard box halfway across the room.

‘No, it isn’t, I -’

The young man pushed past Jürgen and entered the studio. He stopped in front of the portrait of Marianne Edel, staring at it.

Jürgen came away from the door, frowning, confused.

‘That is rubbish,’ the young man said, still smiling.

‘Get out of here,’ Jürgen said. He took the young man by the arm. ‘Right this minute, or I call the police.’

The young man pulled his arm free and slipped the other hand into the pocket of his tweed jacket. He pulled out a black snub-nosed revolver.

‘Here is a fact, Uli Jürgen. In 1942 the painter Samuel Weiss was kicked out of his Berlin studio, two streets away from this spot, and his canvases and paints were thrown out of the windows on to the road. Weiss was then made to wear a placard listing his alleged crimes against humanity, and while he was paraded around the little park near his studio, the Nazis made a bonfire of all his paintings.’

The young man waved the gun at Jürgen, making him stand in front of the portrait of Marianne Edel.

‘Another fact. Samuel Weiss was estimated to be one of the foremost experimental painters of the thirties. His name was mentioned alongside those of Schwitters, Hodler and Kandinsky. He illuminated the world with his vision. You, on the other hand, call yourself a painter, an artist, and yet you have never displayed a talent for producing anything more elevated than sophisticated posters.’

‘What is your point?’ Jürgen demanded. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘Weiss finally died after being blinded and having his hands and his spirit broken in Belsen. That was his fate, after having lived his entire life in poverty. You, an ungifted hack, have brought no light into the world, have never been poor, and are about to die rich. My point, sir, is that everyday life bulges with sickening ironies.’

Jürgen had turned white.

‘Suppose you at least try to die the death of a true artist,’ the young man said.

‘I warn you,’ Jürgen said, ‘you will find yourself in great trouble.’

‘Not me, sir. I am not about to suffer like so many people have suffered at the hands of you and yours, your sidekicks, the brotherhood with its benighted faith in the power of thickheaded bullies to prevail.’

Jürgen felt his bowels loosen. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat. He remembered the telephone call from Viktor Kretzer, warning him to be on his guard.

‘Here is your chance of redemption, Uli Jürgen.’

The young man extended his arm suddenly, pointing the gun at a downward angle. He fired. Jürgen stood where he was, half-deafened. His right arm was numb and felt incredibly heavy. He looked down and saw half his hand was gone. Blood trickled freely on to the floorboards.

‘You are an artist,’ the young man said. ‘Try to think like one. This context is unbearable, yes? You paint with your right hand, it is the instrument of your expression. But it is gone. It cannot be used so your art is effectively silenced.’

‘You bastard,’ Jürgen said weakly.

‘Enmeshed in such catastrophe, what does the true artist wish for at once, as a matter of reaction?’

Jürgen stared at the bright intelligent eyes, the fixed smile, trying to read salvation from this nightmare. Pain suddenly surged along his arm and his stomach lurched. He doubled over and vomited.

‘So what does the true artist do? What can he want now, bereft of his raison d’être?’ The young man snapped his fingers. ‘If he is a determined artist who would wish to express himself in spite of the most major of setbacks, he would say, to hell with this, I will teach myself to paint with my other hand.’

In an instant his arm was outstretched and the gun pointing downwards. He fired a second time, blowing off the thumb and first two fingers of Jürgen’s left hand. Jürgen staggered back, reeled for a moment, then dropped to his knees in the puddle of his vomit.

‘Now we have the position of ultimate despair. Discount any deranged impulses to learn to paint with the feet or the mouth. You have lost the ability to express yourself. Can you feel that, the sense of loss, the black hole of despair?’

Jürgen tried to say something but managed only a grunt. Shock had put his body into tremor. Blood gathered in pools on the floor on either side of him.

‘You want to die. Am I right? You know life holds nothing for you any more. Tell me, Uli Jürgen, have I made you feel that?’

Jürgen looked at the end of the barrel, thinking how small it was, how insignificant for something so terrible.

‘Do you feel the way poor old Samuel Weiss must have felt, after they had taken away his vision

and his means of expression?’

The young man pulled Jürgen to his feet and

stood him in front of the easel again. He raised

the gun.

‘In the end he must have longed for death.’ The young man fired the gun into Jürgen’s face.

24

Sabrina poured a large cognac and handed it to Erika as she came out of the bedroom. Erika drank it in two swallows. Sabrina poured another. This time Erika sipped.

‘He’s asleep,’ she said.

Gregor had gone to bed. The CS gas had made him sick. Erika had overcome his apparent desire to fight, and told him firmly that he needed rest. In the end he felt too ill to resist.

‘I didn’t realize how attached I had become,’ Erika said.

‘It can be a surprise.’

‘I thought, if he dies, I’m going to die too.’ She looked at Sabrina.

‘I need you to keep your promise, Erika.’

‘Go to the kitchen, we can spread things out in there.’

Sabrina prepared coffee while Erika made a telephone call. By the time the coffee was ready, a motorcycle courier was at the door with a satchel. Erika brought it to the kitchen and put the contents on the broad worktop. There was a thick book bound in black leather, a photograph album, and hand-written notes on hundreds of sheets of paper, stapled together in batches.

‘This material is kept at the home of a magistrate,’ Erika said. ‘This is the first time it has been out of that place since it was gathered together.’

Sabrina touched the hard leather cover of the big book.

‘That is a catalogue of crimes committed by the Jugend von Siegfried. It’s the accumulated records of more than two thousand acts of brutality, robbery, fraud, coercion and murder, committed over a thirty-five-year period.’

‘These are their own records?’

‘Copies, yes. Hard won, I promise you. It has cost time, money and labour, and at least one cooperative lawyer’s clerk was killed for helping us.’

‘What are the pictures?’

‘The guilty men and mementoes of some of their victims. The collection means very little, unless your own heart is caught up in what they did, and what they still do.’

‘And the bundles of notes?’

‘Interview material, mostly the testimony of victims.’

‘It looks like a labour of love. Or hate.’

‘What astonishes me, even now,’ Erika said, ‘is that the records exist. They are so damning. Nazis have this self-destructive compulsion to record everything they do. They can’t make a move without making a record of it. They have to leave their mark, like dogs at lamp-posts. During the war, they spent fortunes in time, money and manpower just keeping their records straight - the very records that hanged dozens of them.’

‘It looks like a well organized collection.’

‘It is brilliantly done. The method of accumulation and cataloguing was devised by Emily Selby’s father, Johannes Lustig.’

‘Your father’s cousin.’

‘Yes. To me he was Uncle Johannes. He also carried out the early research work. As time passed and we became more organized, the research was co-ordinated by myself and the other members of Juli Zwanzig. We only became a group with a name after Uncle Johannes died. It was his wish.’

‘I know.’

Erika sighed. ‘I suppose I should have guessed.’

‘Are you all activists? Or are you mainly fundraisers and co-ordinators?’

‘I am an activist against Nazis in general,’ Erika said. ‘Journalism is my chosen means of attack. The others raise money, as you surmised. They fund lectures and publications to keep alive the truth of what happened to whole generations of Jews, and they do what they individually can to give our movement shape and spirit. But at the core, Juli Zwanzig has physical aims -’

‘To kill off the surviving members of the Jugend von Siegfried.’

‘That is correct. Uncle Johannes insisted nothing less would do. We lacked the stomach, individually and collectively, for such a course of action, but that didn’t mean it was wrong. We needed to find a person who could consummate our aims.’

‘You had no moral problem with that? Hiring a killer?’

‘No problem at all,’ she said defiantly. ‘Just remember, we live with the knowledge that year in, year out, the Jugend von Siegfried systematically undermine, sabotage and actually kill Jews as a matter of policy. They do it subtly, without even communicating directly with each other. Unopposed, they would never stop. Somebody has to stop them, somebody has to punish their iniquity.’

‘They’re not bomb-proof. You have evidence here that the police can use against them.’

‘Uncle Johannes did not want them handed over to the law. To extract the kind of justice he called for, we needed someone who hated the Nazis as much as we do, and who was capable of killing.’

‘So who does that? Who’s the mysterious young man with fair hair and blue eyes?’

For a moment Erika looked as if she would not say. But the understanding between them was clear, and she had given her word. Sabrina watched her head bow a fraction, the only sign that this was capitulation.

‘He is Einar Ahlin. A Norwegian.’

‘Why him?’

‘Two years ago he came to Germany vaguely intending to do harm to the new Nazis. We diverted his attention to the old Nazis instead.’

‘Norwegians have no fond memories of the Third Reich.’

‘This Norwegian especially. Einar has a troubled history. Very troubled. He is an epileptic with personality problems who just happened to be born into a family touched by tragedy. His grandparents were tortured to death by the occupying Germans in Oslo during the war. Their daughter’s life, as a consequence, was shadowed until the day she died.’

‘Einar’s mother.’

Erika nodded. ‘She committed suicide in 1989. For nearly fifty years she kept her hatred of the Nazis burning and the fire passed into Einar at an early age. Many people would regard his obsession with punishing Nazis as pathological.’

‘But you found it convenient.’

‘Read the facts any way you wish,’ Erika said. ‘He believes in what he does. I believe in it too. I am happy to fund work which achieves an end we both passionately seek.’

‘These records could probably put the remaining Siegfried boys in jail for the rest of their lives,’ Sabrina said.

‘You think that now I should hand them over to the police?’

‘It would be the civilized thing to do.’

‘That brings us back to retribution,’ Erika said. ‘Is a desire for proper redress so uncivilized? Justice on the biblical scale is the only real kind. These bastards have spent their lives from childhood working against Jews. They have wreaked misery, calamity and death on people they did not know. They have to pay for that. The enlightened liberal answer, life imprisonment, does not meet the bill. They have to pay with their lives.’

Sabrina noticed that the passion was gone from Erika’s voice. She was spouting the words, but now there was no force of conviction behind them.

‘Where is Einar Ahlin?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ A spark of defiance still flared, demonstrating once more the passion of Erika’s commitment to her cause.

‘Come on, Erika.’

‘I promised to co-operate, I didn’t promise to deliver anyone’s head on a plate. Besides, it’s true, I don’t know where he lives. When we meet it’s on neutral ground. He works from an address list Emily put together, and picks his targets from the order they appear in the picture.’

‘What picture?’

Erika opened the album and pressed it flat at a ten-by-eight sepia-toned enlargement. It showed Adolf Hitler, standing on a rain-swept, bombed-out street, saluting a group of young boys.

‘The Jugend von Siegfried,’ Erika said. ‘Photographed in 1945, on the very day they were inaugurated.’

Names had been entered in white ink next to everyone in the picture. The first boy on the left was Karl Sonnemann. The next one was Stefan Fliegel; beside him was Uli Jürgen.

‘Einar broke the pattern when the American showed up.’

‘Harold Gibson?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did he know about him?’

‘Emily sent me e-mail about the man and his organization, all gathered from notes she’d found - they were for a paper Uncle Johannes had been preparing at the time of his death, about Americans providing financial support to a Nazi organization in Berlin.’

‘And you showed the e-mail to Einar?’

Erika nodded. ‘He is like a ferret with anything like that. He took the information to himself, worked on his own research.’

‘Did you know he was planning to eliminate Harold Gibson?’

Erika shook her head.

‘You don’t have any control over this guy at all, do you?’ Sabrina said.

Erika said nothing. Sabrina looked at the picture again. ‘Uli Jürgen,’ she said. ‘That name rings a bell.’

Erika nodded. She pointed to the radio on the corner of the worktop. ‘Uli Jürgen. There was a bulletin. He was found dead earlier today.’

Sabrina caught Erika’s gaze and held it, trying to communicate to her the seriousness of the situation. ‘Listen, Erika, I want you to understand something. This situation that you have created has got much bigger than just your personal vendetta. Other people’s lives are at risk and that could have serious implications for world security. So I’m going to ask you again, and I want a straight answer this time: what do you do if you need to contact Einar Ahlin?’

Erika paused, searching Sabrina’s face. Apparently impressed with her gravity, she said reluctantly, ‘He has a girlfriend. She passes messages between us, both ways.’

‘What’s her address?’

Erika took down a pad and pencil from a shelf above the worktop. ‘Her name is Magda Schaeffer.’

‘Remember,’ Sabrina said, ‘if the address is wrong, I’ll be back.’

‘It’s correct, you have my word.’ Erika scribbled an address in Oranienstrasse. ‘It’s a one-room flat above a little nightclub. Magda works there, she’s a stripper.’

Sabrina put the paper in her pocket. She looked at the photograph again. The name of the boy standing next to Uli Jürgen was Andreas Wolff.

‘Do you have a scanner?’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘For these records.’ Sabrina slapped the book. ‘I want copies. Quickly.’

‘I don’t think that’s any part of our deal.’

Again there was no conviction. Sabrina felt the protest was a token.

‘Why did you let me know they exist, Erika? Why did you have them brought here?’

‘I wanted you to see them, to understand their part in what we do.’

Sabrina shook her head. ‘You wanted me to force an issue. You still want the Siegfried gang attacked, but you know damn well Einar’s going to get caught long before he gets around to killing them all. And your chances of finding another Einar must be one in a million.’

‘I know nothing of the sort.’

‘Please, Erika, credit me with a little intelligence. Your killer is an extrovert, he puts on the high profile every time he makes a hit. He’ll get taken out before he’s halfway through Emily’s list.’

‘We have a mission -’

‘You know that pretty soon your only hope will be to let the law do the job for you, because your assassin will be a goner. And I think that after the fright you got today with Gregor, you want to draw back from the physical stuff sooner rather than later.’

Erika was silent for a moment, then jerked a thumb at the door. ‘There is a scanner in my office along the hall.’

‘Come and help me.’

Erika set up a word-processing program on the computer and Sabrina used the flatbed scanner to transfer copies of the book pages on to the screen. The completed copy file was very large.

‘How do you plan to get all that on to a disk?’ Erika said. ‘The high-capacity removable drive is broken.’

‘I won’t take a copy away with me,’ Sabrina said. ‘I’ll send it to a safe box. Let me use the keyboard.’

She called up the modem, made contact with her communications area and tapped in her UNACO password for Mailbox Access. The padlocked box came up. She put in her personal access code. The lid of the box opened. She addressed the Jugend von Siegfried file to C.W. Whitlock and uploaded it. The transfer took three minutes. When it was complete, she typed out a terse note, labelled it MOST URGENT, and addressed it also to Whitlock.

‘And now I get out of your life,’ she said.

‘Can you guarantee that?’

‘No. But I’ve no desire to have anything more to do with you. Barring any sidewash, we’re through with each other.’

At the door she said, ‘I understand your mission, Erika. But you haven’t been cheated out of anything. It’s true what I said, your executioner’s luck can’t hold.’

Erika flapped her hand, perhaps accepting that. ‘My feelings about what has happened are -’ She hesitated. ‘They’re complex. Mingled. To know how I feel, maybe you would have to be a German

Jew.’

C.W. Whitlock was in the corridor outside UNACO’s copy room. As he punched the red button on his mobile and dropped it in his pocket Philpott stepped up behind him.

‘There’s a communication for you from Berlin,’ Philpott said, pointing to the door of the Secure Communications Suite. ‘Shall we look at it?’

They went in and Whitlock sat down by the console. When he had ascertained the Mailbox file was from Sabrina, he punched in DIRECT PRINT and stood by to wait for the printout.

‘Can you give me a running translation of the stuff coming out of the printer?’ Philpott asked.

Whitlock nodded. For ten minutes without pause, he sight-translated from the sheet of paper unreeling on to the carpet. He read summaries of fraudulent transactions which had resulted in Jewish businessmen being ruined. He read gloating descriptions of evictions, midnight batterings, a gang rape of a Jewish woman and two murders. After the description of the second killing, Whitlock stopped.

‘I think I want to take this stuff in smaller doses from here on,’ he said.

‘Quite.’ Philpott started rolling up the ribbon of paper. ‘Our dear girl has struck gold of a particularly nauseating yellow. Let’s get translators down here to deal with this. I’ll fix a meet with the Federal German Legation.’

He glanced at the monitor. ‘Why is that blinking, C.W.?’

Whitlock looked up. ‘Damn.’ He hit the button marked READ. ‘It’s a separate communiqué. She probably meant us to read it first.’

Sabrina’s message flashed on to the screen, short and to the point: Wolff may be next on the list.

‘Talk to her as soon as you can,’ Philpott said. ‘Then alert Mike.’

25

‘Uli Jürgen,’ Wolff said, repeating the name, his voice husky on the telephone. ‘I heard about the murder on the radio, and the name rang a bell then. Now you mention it, I believe a member of a group I met at a restaurant on Leipziger Strasse was called that. It was one of those occasions I was being shown off by Rudolf Altenberg. Jürgen was talkative, something of a showman as I recall.’

‘He was on the list,’ Mike said. ‘He was also standing next to someone with your name on an old photograph that the assassin works with. That’s what I called to tell you. It’s a picture of all the people on the list taken when they were boys.’

‘It occurs to me,’ Wolff said, ‘that maybe that group I met were the people on this list. All about the same age as myself, all acting as if they weren’t a group. They didn’t sit together, and they said nothing about being connected in any way, but at the same time they acted as if they hadn’t seen each other in ages and were having trouble concealing their pleasure. It’s odd how a thing like that shows.’

‘Do you remember anything else?’

‘Lots of photographs were taken. It was a charity affair, I think.’ Wolff paused. ‘My God.’ He snapped his fingers, making a cracking sound on the line. ‘I had forgotten it completely…’

‘What?’

‘Two different people, members of that coterie - if it was a coterie - told me I had the same name as a boyhood friend of theirs, now sadly dead.’

Mike groaned. ‘Good old mistaken identity.’

‘Oh no, they didn’t think I was their friend.’

‘No, but the person who made up the list did.’ Mike had no doubt Wolff was telling the truth. ‘You’re the right age to have been in the Hitler Youth.’

‘Only just.’

‘These men were the last of the chosen,’ Mike said. ‘You’ve been seen in their company and by a nasty coincidence you’ve got yourself lumped with them. That’s bad for your reputation, but it’s worse for your long-term prospects.’

‘I find it hard, accepting that I am at risk.’

‘Well, you’ll have to. You could be high on the list by now. I want you to stay put and don’t move far from the guys looking after you.’

‘Whatever you say.’

Mike rang off, then he put through a call to Philpott in New York and told him about his conversation with Wolff.

‘We’ve been digging in the news archives since we got the records from Sabrina,’ Philpott said. ‘We found that a Berlin businessman called Andreas Wolff, born in Munich in 1934, died in a motoring accident in 1982. Significantly, a newspaper account of his funeral reported that among the pallbearers were Erich Bahr and Klaus Garlan.’

‘Who are both on the list.’

‘So the real Wolff is dead and our man is being mistaken for him.’ Mike heard muffled voices in the background. ‘C.W. is in the process of suggesting to the Austrian police that they double their efforts to protect Wolff,’ Philpott said. ‘Have you contacted Sabrina yet - I assume you are in Berlin?’

‘I’m in Berlin, but I haven’t been in touch with Sabrina. I’m about to do that.’

‘As soon as anything happens, for good or ill, let me know.’

Mike went directly to a bar off Kantstrasse, near the Kurfürstendamm. Sabrina was waiting, sitting alone at a table by the door. Her hair was combed down, touching her shoulders. She wore a dark blue linen dress with a flared skirt; around her shoulders she wore a silk shawl.

‘Going somewhere special?’ Mike said, sitting down.

‘I made an effort to look civilized, that’s all.’ Sabrina poured him a glass of wine from the carafe on the table. ‘That’s Scheurebe Kabinett. Not bad.’

‘Why did they want you to stay in Berlin?’ he said. ‘Did somebody think maybe I couldn’t cope on my own?’

‘Keeping me here is like parking a car handy to where you might need it. C.W. thinks Philpott wants the case resolved within the next twenty-four hours. If it comes to a showdown rather than a routine arresting of guilty parties, I suppose it makes sense to have us both where the action’s likely to break out.’ She sipped her wine. ‘Care to bring me up to speed?’

Mike told her about his conversation with Wolff. ‘What’s the lead you have on the assassin?’

‘It’s his girlfriend. Magda Schaeffer. She’s a stripper at a club in Oranienstrasse. I’ve bought you temporary membership. The show doesn’t start until eleven.’

‘Even if we corner this guy, he isn’t going to throw up his hands and tell us we’ve got him fair and square,’ Mike said. ‘That’s way too low key. If he goes down, he’ll be fighting all the way.’

‘He won’t be the first one.’

‘I had a dream about him,’ Mike said. ‘It was jumbled, but he had just blown away somebody, in a fairground. I was going right up to him and he was standing there with the gun still smoking in his hand. I was getting ready to put an armlock on him. He turned and he had this terrific smile. I smiled back, completely won over in spite of myself, and he brought up the gun and shot me in the heart. The pain woke me up.’

‘This is no time to talk about death-dreams,’ Sabrina said.

‘Are there good and bad times?’

‘It’s what my friend Pratash believes.’

‘Pratash. I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.’

‘He’s a mystic. Or I think he is. I met him in Calcutta. He told me he was drawn to my emanations.’

‘Which always look nice when you wear light clothing.’

‘He wasn’t coming on to me, he was serious. A little, old, deeply serious man. He believes the world is a great big mistake and that the Creator will one day realize this and start it all over again from scratch. In the meantime, we should keep our heads below the parapet. One way of doing that, he told me, is never to think of danger, or dwell on dreams of jeopardy or death, at a time when real danger is likely to occur. He says such behaviour stimulates disaster.’

‘I suppose we all have our spiritual authority,’ Mike said. ‘I haven’t settled on mine yet, but Ralph Waldo Emerson might just fit the throne. Here’s an example. You know I love speed.’

‘Real speed. Not chemical speed.’

‘Real speed. I use speed as recreation, but I also use it to tune myself for challenges that come up in the job. I believe that life rewards those who move fastest, and that speed is sometimes a kind of magical cloak. Emerson said, “In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.” Now how’s that for a guru tuned to my own needs, huh?’

‘I’m sure he’ll serve you well.’ Sabrina held up her glass. ‘To Ralph Waldo.’

Mike picked up his. ‘And to Pratash.’

They drank, watching each other over the rims of their glasses. Sabrina was caught by the moment’s warmth, the clarity of good feeling between them.

‘Tell me something honestly,’ she said. ‘Are we really friends? At heart, beneath all the top show?’

‘I would say so, yes.’

Sabrina could not bring herself to ask any more.

‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ Mike said. ‘Just this one time. The past hasn’t finished with me yet. But one day it will. I’ll be liberated, if that’s the word. And when that happens, maybe you’ll detect a change or two.’

‘You mean that one day we won’t automatically bunch our fists at the sight of each other?’

‘Something like that,’ Mike said.

They smiled again. So did the woman behind the counter.

In theatrical terms, the on-stage act performed by Magda Schaeffer contained plenty of conflict and a good measure of tension, but it was entirely lacking in imagination.

Magda swayed and splayed to electronic music on a tiny area of spotlit floor. At appropriate intervals, with apparent reluctance, she lost parts of her costume. As each item fell away from her body, her own excitement seemed to increase. As the minutes passed, however, her timing deteriorated and the pretence of sensuality gave way to vulgar posturing. In the end, what began as an apparent attempt at improvisational, sensual dance, ended up as old-fashioned downmarket striptease, with the audience roaring for her to take off the final wisp of material. When she did, it was to a scattering of applause from a crowd already losing interest.

Mike saw no need to waste time on niceties. Ten dollars bought him the complete co-operation of the bar-tender who promised that as soon as Magda was decent, he would arrange for her to join Mike at his table in the corner.

Less than five minutes after her act concluded she slid into the chair opposite Mike’s. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans and carried a small grab-bag which he assumed contained her costume.

‘I hope you liked the show, Mister -’ She fluttered heavily darkened eyelashes at him. ‘What should I call you? My name is Magda, by the way.’

‘And I’m Mike.’ He tried to guess her age. Twenty at most, he decided, but already raddled and weary-looking. ‘And, yes, I enjoyed the show. You have a very lovely body.’

‘Thank you.’

He watched her lower her eyes. It amused him how women in the skin trade always came on so fluffy and demure, as if anything indelicate might cause them to blow away on a wave of affronted modesty.

‘Was that your only performance for the evening?’

‘My only one here,’ she said. ‘Two nights out of six I do a speciality act at the Saucy Sailor, across the road.’

‘Speciality act?’

‘That’s right.’ Again, she lowered her eyes demurely. ‘It’s different to what I do here, and it costs more to see. But customers say it is worth the extra.’

‘So you’ll be going there now?’

‘As soon as I’ve had a drink.’

Mike took the cue and waggled a finger at the barman, who had been waiting for a sign. He had the drink poured ready. When he brought it across Mike saw him wink at Magda - a sign of confirmation, Mike assumed, that here was another soft mark.

‘Cheers, Mike,’ she said, and swallowed the whisky as if it was a thirst quencher. She leaned across the table. ‘If you want, I can see you after I finish across the road.’

‘That would be nice. But I’m an impatient person, Magda. What if I made it worth your while to cancel your show at the Saucy Sailor, just for tonight?’

She frowned at that, but the frown looked as counterfeit as her smile. ‘I would lose my pay for the evening…’

‘As I said, I would make it worth your while.’

‘I would also have to provide a substitute act. Otherwise I would no longer be a friend of the management, you understand?’

‘How much for your stand-in?’

‘Dollars?’

He nodded.

‘Fifty.’

He produced a wad, peeled off five twenties and put them on the table. ‘That takes care of you both.’ He pushed the notes towards her. ‘For the moment,’ he added, making her flutter her eyes again.

Arrangements for Magda’s deputy were made through the barman, who did not appear to find the transaction unusual. Magda had another drink, then coyly suggested they go upstairs to her place, where it was quieter.

It was certainly quiet, Mike observed as he followed her into the tiny room. It was also airless and incredibly shabby. He had been in poorly furnished rooms that nevertheless said something good about their occupants; this room, with its litter of empty food containers, grubby glasses and full ashtrays, simply said that Magda Schaeffer was precisely the charmless slut she had appeared to be the moment the spotlight came on.

‘Sit down,’ she told Mike. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

He sank into a dusty old armchair that creaked under his weight. Magda disappeared behind a curtain hung across one end of the room. When she emerged she had two drinks in her hand.

‘I hope you don’t think I do this often. I only let you come up here because I like you.’

‘I’m flattered.’

She drew a nail-bitten fingertip along the rim of his ear. ‘What would you like me to do?’

He smiled. ‘Stand up,’ he whispered.

She eased away from him and stood back, watching him from behind lowered eyelids. Mike got to his feet. He reached under his jacket and pulled out his revolver. He pointed it at Magda’s throat. She gasped and backed away.

‘I don’t do sick stuff,’ she said.

‘But I do.’

‘I’ll scream!’

‘Do that, and a second later you’re dead.’

‘Please, don’t hurt me.’

‘I have to say I’m shocked, Magda.’ Mike backed off a little, keeping the gun levelled on her. ‘This is no way to treat your boyfriend, is it? Entertaining strange men for money.’

‘I have no boyfriend.’

‘He’s called Einar. Einar Ahlin.’

She stared at him, her mouth moving uncertainly. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Mike, remember? I was asking you how you square this kind of behaviour with your boyfriend.’

‘Einar doesn’t mind.’

‘Hard to believe, Magda.’

‘I’m his girl, but we don’t…’ She shrugged.

‘I hold him in my arms sometimes. When he cries. That’s all. We are not physical.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know that.’

‘Tell me where he is.’ Mike wagged the gun at her.

‘I swear I don’t know. He tells nobody. He comes here a lot, but I don’t know where he goes.’

‘Do you know what he does?’

She swallowed.

‘Magda?’

‘He kills people.’

‘He told you?’

‘He always tells me.’

‘You must have some idea where he is when he isn’t here.’

‘I don’t know where he goes. All I know for now is that he is away on work. Professional work.’

Magda glanced at the tiny fireplace. ‘He has a safe, in there.’ She pointed to a metal plate with a small door at its centre, set into the firebricks at the back. ‘He put that there, he keeps the key for it on a chain round his neck.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘His schedule, he calls it. He likes to take one week for each job. He puts a single name on each week of the diary.’

‘A week for each killing?’

She nodded. ‘He has a diary with seven days printed on every page, and on each page he writes a name from a list he keeps.’

‘Why does he keep the diary in the safe?’

‘It’s his only private space in Berlin. That’s what he said. He said he’d make a private space, and he did, and when it was made he put his diary in it. He says it is something orderly. The pages are his life’s schedule, he said. They are sacred to him, so he keeps them apart from the world.’

Mike knelt before the empty fireplace. He picked up the small steel poker by the hearth and pushed it under the lower edge of the metal plate. He jerked the poker backwards and particles of brick fell away from the edges. Two more hard tugs on the poker and the plate sprang loose. He reached up under the edge and felt a book. He pulled it out and took it to the coffee table.

‘This is the schedule?’

‘Yes.’

Mike riffled through the pages, looking for the one for the current week. When he found it he saw a single name written diagonally across the page. It confirmed what he had feared.

The name was Andreas Wolff.

26

‘The big companies are all turning to outsourcing,’ Don Chadwick said. ‘The little outfits are fast becoming the well-head for new jobs and opportunities.’

His luncheon guest, a plastic-casings manufacturer called George Winship, was nodding steadily, but his attention was elsewhere. They were at a table on the roof restaurant at Don Giorgio’s, a mile south of Waxahachie.

‘The small man like yourself has a lot to offer in terms of employment and direct creation of cash. It’s just a pity you’re so vulnerable.’

‘Mr Chadwick, forgive me interrupting, but I’ve been looking out over the parking lot there, and I’m sure somebody is paying uncommon attention to your car.’

Chadwick stood up, shielding his eyes against the sun. He had come in his classic MGB, one of his extensive collection of British cars.

‘It’s a fraction to the right of the ticket machine over there,’ Winship said, pointing.

‘Oh, yeah.’

Two men were standing in front of the car. One was writing in a notebook. Chadwick reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out his mini-scope.

‘You always carry one of those?’

‘Yep.’

‘I heard of people being arrested with things like that on them,’ Winship said.

Chadwick put the scope to his eye and turned the focus ring. He saw the two men looking into his car. He could clearly see their faces, their frowning expressions. He moved the scope down. They wore good shiny shoes and they had briefcases standing beside them. They didn’t look at all like thieves.

‘Want to call the law?’ Winship said. ‘I got my mobile.’

‘No, I think we’ll just hold on a second before we do anything.’

‘Looks like they’re coming across,’ Winship said.

‘What?’

‘Those guys that were nosing into your car. They’re coming this way.’

Chadwick watched as they approached the restaurant. They stopped a short distance in front of the awning and spoke to a waiter. He nodded several times and pointed to the roof without looking up. The men disappeared under the awning.

‘We’ll soon see what this is all about,’ Chadwick said.

He tried to smile at Winship but found he couldn’t. Anxiety had gripped him so quickly he hadn’t gauged how severe it was. He cleared his throat, took out his handkerchief and dabbed his brow just as the two men appeared. They spoke to the waiter at the desk and he pointed to Chadwick. They came across. Up close they seemed very tall. They had the kind of serious, no-nonsense faces that appeared never to have been touched by smiles.

‘Donald Chadwick?’ the taller one said.

‘That’s me. How can I help you, gentlemen?’

The tall one produced a small black leather folder and flipped it open. On one side was an ID card with his picture; on the other side a badge glittered.

‘I’m FBI Special Agent Louis Cole. This is Agent Hubert Mullins. Could we speak privately, Mr Chadwick?’

‘I’ll be down in the bar,’ Winship said, out of his chair already. ‘If anybody wants me, just call.’

When he had gone the FBI men sat down. Agent Mullins was obviously used to being silent. He sat back, visibly withdrawing from the confrontation, becoming atmosphere.

Louis Cole folded his hands on the table and looked squarely at Chadwick. He was blond and broad-shouldered, not at all the kind of wimp Chadwick had heard the FBI recruited.

‘Do you have any idea why we want to talk to you, Mr Chadwick?’

‘None at all.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you straight off. Two days ago certain documents came into the possession of the FBI. They paint a detailed picture of your involvement in the financial affairs of the late Harold Gibson of Dallas.’

‘Harold was a dear friend,’ Chadwick said, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘We did business together over a period of years, and Harold was a board member of several companies within which I have executive standing.’

‘The financial matters detailed in the documents refer to money raised in this country and gifted to an illegal organization in Germany.’

‘I know nothing about that.’

‘I have to tell you, Mr Chadwick, that as a result of other matters raised in the documents, we have already impounded files, ledgers and diaries relevant to the company trading as Lone Star Realties and another called Chadwick, Pearce Associates.’

Chadwick looked astonished. ‘How did you get those papers? They’re private, they’re locked away.’

‘We have special powers under the Constitution, Mr Chadwick. The three banks and the firm of accountants involved were all very co-operative, as the law requires them to be.’

Chadwick’s mouth had gone terribly dry. ‘What - what about my associate, Mr Pearce…’

‘He is already co-operating with us, as of ten o’clock this morning.’

Chadwick wet his lips. ‘I think I want to have my lawyer with me before I say anything more.’

‘That is your right. Now we’d like you to accompany us to the Bolton Rooms Hotel in Dallas. You can call your lawyer from there. We have an operations room set up in the hotel and a couple of my superiors would like to ask you some questions.’

Superiors. His superiors. There were men on the case loftier and more nerve-rattling than this one.

They stood up. Chadwick took a wad of bills from his pocket and peeled off three. He put them under a water glass. ‘Off the record, Agent Cole, would you say my position is serious, at all?’

‘I would say so, yes.’

As they went down the stairs Agent Mullins spoke. His voice was soft and so close that Chadwick felt its warmth on his ear.

‘You’re looking at a real long stretch,’ he said.

Philpott sounded rattled. The call had brought him awake too suddenly. As a result of that, he informed Mike Graham, he would probably never get back to sleep.

‘The position with Andreas Wolff is critical,’ Mike said. ‘He’s due to turn up here in Berlin at ten o’clock this morning as a celebrity guest at a computer games fair. That’s in two hours time, and the minute he shows he’s going to be a wide open target for Juli Zwanzig’s hit man.’

‘You haven’t been able to trace this Einar Ahlin?’

‘We’ve nothing to go on. Apart from his dippy girlfriend, nobody knows him. He has no buddies, there are no places he hangs out - we don’t even have an address where he puts down his head at night. The girlfriend doesn’t expect him to show up at her place for at least another two days. We’re clueless.’

‘Then Andreas Wolff must not be allowed to appear in public. He must be made aware he is this lunatic’s prime target.’

Mike ran his gaze around the hotel room, breathing steadily, holding down the temptation to start shouting.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘that issue is what prompted this call in the first place. It’s the very matter I raised when you picked up your phone. Wolff won’t play ball. I just spent ten minutes on the phone trying to convince him of the risk he’d be taking. When I spoke to him the time before, he got the picture, he could see the kind of danger he was in. But now he’s had time to sit and think about it and he believes as long as he’s surrounded by people, he’ll be safe.’

‘What makes him think that?’

‘He believes the assassin is a fastidious type. He only harms his targets, he won’t risk other people’s lives.’

‘That’s rubbish.’

‘I told him about the car bomb, but he said that had been timed to go off when no one else was around. I said I knew different, but he wouldn’t listen. The fact is, Wolff just won’t duck down out of view. Especially when ducking down means cancelling a public appearance at a computer fair. Events like that are his idea of the big time.’

‘What about the Stramm woman? Wasn’t Sabrina able to alert her that Wolff is a wrong target?’

‘Erika Stramm is missing from home. Not been seen since early yesterday, and her only close contact, the Russian guy Gregor, is mystified.’

‘There’s one slim hope,’ Philpott said. ‘We managed to get both main Berlin daily papers to run stories about Wolff in connection with the computer show. Both pieces cover his parentage, his background, there’s even a few childhood pictures. Maybe Ahlin will see a paper and get the message.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I presume Wolff will have a proper team of marksmen covering him while he’s in Berlin?’

‘Afraid not,’ Mike said. ‘The Austrian clodhoppers are coming with him. National pride, all that stuff.’

‘Then you’d better cover him yourself, Mike. Get Sabrina on the job and as many sharpshooters from the Berlin police as you can persuade to do us an unofficial favour.’

‘Believe me, sir, I’ll do all I can to protect Wolff.’

‘I don’t want him coming to any harm. God, it’s unthinkable.’

Mike was about to say ‘trust me’, but he lacked the confidence to back reassurance on that level. ‘I’ll keep you informed, sir. Sorry I broke into your sleep time.’

Philpott mumbled something and hung up. Mike finished dressing, decided to skip breakfast and got reception to call him a taxi. Before he left his room he strapped on a shoulder holster and loaded up his Harrington and Richardson Defender, a five-shot .38 he kept as a memento of his days with Delta. Apart from its sentimental associations, the weapon had a 3-inch barrel, which gave reassuring accuracy over medium-to-long range.

Half a kilometre from the place Mike was staying, Sabrina Carver emerged from her hotel at one minute after nine and got into her taxi. Twenty seconds later, as the cab pulled away, an inconspicuous grey Opel across the street started up and slipped into the stream of traffic three vehicles behind Sabrina’s car. The driver of the Opel was Einar Ahlin. Beside him, tightly belted in and angry, was Erika Stramm.

‘There is no need for this,’ she said as they clipped a red light to stay close to Sabrina’s taxi. ‘I’ve told you, keep the money. I’ll even give you a generous laying-off bonus.’

‘Not the point,’ Ahlin snapped.

Erika stared at him. It was ironical that he looked so much like the ideal of the people he hated. Today, wearing a black leather jacket and black polo shirt, he reminded her of a photograph she had seen of the arch-Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, relaxing with Hitler and Eva at a lodge by the Baltic.

‘I think you have forgotten the basis of our relationship,’ Erika said. ‘I employ and specify, you carry out my instructions and get paid for doing so.’

‘I think perhaps you have not properly understood the relationship in the first place,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the traffic. ‘You gave me the opportunity to embark on a mission against specific vermin. I was grateful for that, I am still grateful. But you cannot expect me to dismantle my determination.’ He glanced at her, his eyes wide. ‘You can’t expect me to chop the legs off my will. I am on a set course and that is that.’

She had never seen him like this. Before, he had displayed an easy-going temperament, a smoothness of style that added a fine sinister edge to his desire to slaughter Nazis. Now he looked like a bare-fanged fanatic.

‘Why am I being treated like a prisoner, Einar?’

‘You are not a prisoner,’ he said curtly.

‘You won’t let me do what I want. You’ve insisted I be here with you today. You’ve curbed my freedom and I call that being treated like a prisoner.’

‘You’re here with me because I want you to be close when the subject is hit. I want you to experience the zest of the event, the rightness of what I do. Then perhaps you will understand that I must carry on, and that it is in your interests as well as mine that I do.’

‘You read that article in the paper, for heaven’s sake. This man Wolff is not a target. He’s nothing to do with the Jugend von Siegfried. Anybody can see that.’

‘Any idiot might believe it, Erika, but it doesn’t fool me. That stuff is just more snow, more cover for a Nazi as rotten as the rest of them.’

The previous day Einar had come to the bar where they met once a month to perform the small ritual of lunch and the handing over of a cheque for his services. When Erika told him she had decided to let the authorities deal with the remaining members of the Jugend von Siegfried, he had gone very quiet. He would not eat lunch and, when finally she announced she was leaving, he would not let her go. He had used no violence against her, but she knew it would come to that if she tried to get away.

‘You should learn to absorb the messages and the lessons of omens,’ Ahlin said now.

‘I don’t understand that kind of talk.’

The previous evening, as they left the place where they had met, Erika saw Sabrina. She told Ahlin who she was, and felt compelled to spill it all, the coercion, the acceleration of what was probably inevitable. Ahlin had driven slowly along the street, following Sabrina until he found out where she lived. He had then booked a double room in a cold-water hotel opposite the much nicer place where Sabrina stayed. They had spent the night there, taking turns at watching the front of the hotel.

‘The police will be on the case very soon,’ Erika said. ‘You should pull out before that happens, before they’re swarming all over the Nazis.’

Ahlin expelled air between his teeth. ‘I might as well have said nothing to you,’ he said. ‘Try to get it into your skull, I don’t care about the police or anybody else. I have a job, a God-sent job, and I’m going to carry it through.’

‘Then do it without me.’

‘You stay and you witness this one hit. That is important, I told you why.’

‘I want to go home and see Gregor.’

‘He will wait. This won’t.’

He swung the car round a corner by a wide-fronted conference centre and parked it at the side of the road.

‘This is the place.’

He pointed behind them. Erika looked and saw Sabrina get out of her taxi and enter the building.

‘Didn’t I say so, when you wanted to argue during the night? Didn’t I say this woman would attach herself to the man Wolff? They are all part of a whole, don’t you see?’

‘Why follow her? You were coming here anyway, it was in the paper where he would be today.’

Ahlin gently eased Erika’s fingers away from the buckle of her seatbelt. ‘We are not going in there.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too many people, too much protection around Herr Wolff. I only ever tempt fate so far, and no further. We will follow him when he leaves.’

‘How will you see him in among the crowd?’

‘He is a protected person. He will come out while the show is busy. It will be quiet out here.’ Ahlin smiled thinly. ‘Rely on my judgement, Erika.’

‘You still haven’t told me why we followed the girl.’

‘I wanted to see if my instinct was right,’ he said. ‘And it was. She is part of what we oppose, she is integrated, whatever her motives.’

‘So?’

‘So I will break my working rule.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I will kill both Wolff and the girl.’

Wolff left the exhibition centre at one o’clock. An armoured Mercedes Benz saloon, property of the Viennese police, was driven up to the front door and he came out with his two lumbering bodyguards behind him. Mike and Sabrina hung back, watching his flanks, guns cocked and ready under their coats. Another two marksmen were at windows on the second floor.

As soon as Wolff was in the Mercedes Mike and Sabrina got into a police Volkswagen which had been hastily rented, together with its driver, after tight bargaining in the refreshment room. Five hundred dollars to the police widows’ fund would let them have the car, driver and the use of a long-range rifle for six hours. Anything after that would be subject to fresh negotiation.

‘Where are they taking him?’ Sabrina asked as they raced along back streets towards the north of the city.

‘A hotel in the Mühlenbeck district,’ Mike said. ‘It’s out of the way, on a quiet street. He has offered to work on finishing the ICON security programs while he’s in Berlin, and he’s had a load of computer equipment installed in a top-floor suite at the hotel. I suppose we should be grateful for that.’

‘What’s security going to be like?’

‘The Austrians have agreed to two extra marksmen in the building with him. They’re from the Berlin police, both hotshots.’ Mike patted the heavy rifle on the seat beside him. ‘I’ll be in the next building with this baby.’

‘And I’ll be watching the door, as usual.’

‘Don’t be bitter, Sabrina.’

When they reached the hotel the Mercedes drew up close to the door and Wolff was hurried inside. Sabrina moved into the front passenger seat beside the police driver. Mike went to the warehouse next door to the hotel, where police had arranged that he should have a window seat looking directly into Wolff’s suite.

He called Sabrina on the mobile and confirmed he was in position. ‘It’s tidy,’ he said. ‘The goons are sitting at either end of Wolff’s work table, watching him do his stuff. The extra marksmen should be here in a few minutes. I’m ready to go ballistic if anything irregular happens.’

‘And I’m striking up a friendship with a nice German boy in the front seat of a cop car,’ Sabrina said. ‘What happens after today? Is Wolff going back to Austria?’

‘He stays here until blue eyes is in custody. The wheels are turning. The police will be looking for him soon, so it won’t be long.’

A hundred metres from the hotel, Einar Ahlin was standing by his Opel, using a foot-pump to inflate a tyre he had manually deflated as soon as he stopped.

Erika sat in the front of the car, behind the steering wheel, coping with a new level of stress. On the way across the city, tailing the Mercedes through heavy traffic and along narrow back turnings, Ahlin said he had decided she could no longer simply pay for his services, she had to be practical in her condemnation of the Jugend von Siegfried. She must stick with him.

She wound down the window. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘Wait to be inspired,’ he said, watching the hotel. ‘I think we can move closer.’

He finished inflating the tyre, put the pump in the boot and got in beside Erika. She drove along past the front of the hotel. There was no sign of the big Mercedes.

‘God,’ Erika said suddenly. ‘It’s her.’

Ahlin looked at the car they were passing. Sabrina was perfectly visible, sitting in the front with the police driver.

‘Now do you understand about omens?’ Ahlin said. ‘Stop the car!’

Erika drew in to the side and braked. Ahlin jumped out and walked back to the police car. Erika watched him in the rearview mirror.

‘Lunatic,’ she murmured.

There was a strong impulse to run, but she knew it would never work. He would find her, and she didn’t want to think what he would do then.

‘Out!’ Ahlin snapped, jerking open the driver’s door of the police car. ‘Out now! Out!’

The young officer scrambled out and as he straightened up by the open door Ahlin hit him on the side of the head with the barrel of his revolver. The officer dropped without a sound. Sabrina had the other door open when she felt the pressure of the gun in her back.

‘Come out slowly,’ Ahlin said. ‘Very slowly.’

She slid across the seats and got out. As she did, a police armoured vehicle appeared and drew in at the side of the hotel, near the entrance to an alley running behind the building. Two men carrying rifles and wearing dark combat suits got out. Almost at once the vehicle moved off and disappeared round the corner.

‘Who are they?’ Ahlin said. ‘Tell me or I’ll shoot you.’

Sabrina told him they were the reinforcement guard for Andreas Wolff.

‘Go across. Speak to them. Improvise. Understand?’

Sabrina brought up her arm sharply, almost knocking the gun from Ahlin’s grip. He held on to it and simultaneously grabbed her hair. He tugged once, hard, making her yelp.

‘Try anything like that again,’ he muttered, ‘and I won’t bother with warnings, I’ll shoot you. Now speak to those men, and remember I’m right at your back.’

She crossed the road, waving to the marksmen. Ahlin walked three paces behind her.

‘Are you going up to Herr Wolff’s suite?’ Sabrina asked the marksmen in German. ‘Perhaps I can show you the way.’

They stared at her, scowling, puzzled.

‘You must forgive her,’ Ahlin said, pushing her ahead of him, smiling, emanating charm. ‘She talks without thinking.’

When he was close enough he shoved Sabrina aside, knocking her down. He brought forward his revolver, pushing it in a marksman’s face.

‘Drop your guns,’ he hissed. ‘Do it now!’

They dropped the weapons. In a single sweep Ahlin hit one man in the face with his revolver, breaking his cheekbone, and swiped the other across the chin with the butt. Both men went down. Almost casually, watching Sabrina scramble to her feet, Ahlin crouched and hit each man on the temple with the chamber of the revolver.

‘Help me,’ he told Sabrina, waving the gun.

He stood by, keeping the gun trained on her as she dragged one unconscious man then the other into the alley behind the hotel.

‘Now I’m going to become a police sureshot,’ Ahlin said. ‘And you’re going to be my pretty helper, yes?’ He pointed to one of the marksmen. ‘Strip off his combat suit.’

Eight minutes later, as Mike sat watching through his peep sight, he saw the main door of Wolff’s suite swing open and a police marksman come in. Only one.

‘Better than none…’

He continued to watch as the marksman said something. The others in the room, Wolff and his two bodyguards, turned and stared at him.

Several things happened in rapid order. The two Austrians were on their feet, reaching for their guns. Wolff leaned across his work table, picked up three or four optical storage disks and pushed them down the front of his trousers. The police marksman levelled his sub-machine-gun and shot the two bodyguards. As they fell, one of them smearing the wallpaper with his blood, the marksman grabbed Andreas Wolff by the shoulders and head-butted him in the face. Dazed, Wolff let himself be dragged to the door.

Mike couldn’t get a clear shot in. He grabbed the rifle and ran, taking the stairs to the ground floor three at a time. He got outside in time to see the police Volkswagen scream away from the kerb. A woman was at the wheel. In the back Einar Ahlin was just visible. He appeared to be tying Andreas Wolff’s hands.

Sabrina called out. Mike turned and saw her kneeling on the pavement at the side of the hotel. Her hands were bound behind her back. Blood ran from a wound on her arm.

Mike eased her to her feet and undid the cord on her wrists. ‘He shot me when he came out,’ she panted. ‘Nearly missed. I never knew I could roll so fast.’

Mike held her close. ‘I don’t want to sound callous,’ he said, ‘or uncaring, but there’s no time to pamper you right now.’ He looked up and down the quiet street. ‘I didn’t expect him to kidnap Wolff. I have to get after them.’

‘Do something for my arm and I’ll come with you.’

Mike took a handkerchief from his pocket and folded it in a strip. He wrapped it round her arm, tied a secure knot, patted her shoulder and pronounced her cured.

‘Or as good as.’ He shouldered the rifle. ‘Now come on. We’ve got to steal something faster than a police Volkswagen.’

27

For an hour after clearing the Berlin city limits Erika Stramm drove steadily north-east, keeping to main roads, only making diversions when the traffic became heavy and slowed her down.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ she told Einar Ahlin. ‘The police could pull us over any time.’

‘The police will be looking for this car in the city,’ Ahlin said. He was still in the back seat, sprawled beside Andreas Wolff, who sat awkwardly, his hands taped behind him. ‘That is why I showed you the fast route out. The police would presumably throw up road blocks, but I’ve timed measures of that kind in a number of cities, Erika. It takes a minimum thirty minutes just to get three blocks in place. We were out in eighteen minutes. Ergo, the police are wasting their time, which is always a soothing thought.’

‘They won’t just be looking for us in Berlin,’ Andreas Wolff said. ‘This little kidnap merits a nationwide alert.’

‘Again, an unwieldy thing to implement,’ Ahlin said. ‘But facts and figures have no place in this. My instincts are what matter. My instincts and the way I use them to sustain my run of fortune.’

‘In my view,’ Wolff said, ‘you should put yourself in the hands of a competent psychiatrist.’

Ahlin sat forward. ‘It is stupid to confuse mental hyper-acuity with mental disorder,’ he said.

‘I never do that,’ Wolff said. ‘You’re mentally disordered. There’s no doubt about it.’

Ahlin punched Wolff on the mouth. The impact jerked Wolff’s head sideways against the door pillar. As he straightened up Ahlin punched him again. Wolff grunted, pursing his lips to stem the rush of blood from his mouth.

‘Don’t speak again,’ Ahlin told him. He looked over Erika’s shoulder at the road ahead. ‘What did the last sign say?’

‘Gristow, eighty-two kilometres.’

‘In that case I think you should drive a little faster.’

It began to rain, big drops exploding on the windshield.

‘You’re sure about this boat?’ Erika said, putting her foot down a fraction, making the car surge forward. ‘How do you know you’ll be able to use it?’

‘It is mine, so I am sure I can use it.’

Erika said nothing. Ahlin interpreted her silence as disbelief.

‘I stole it, you see. I decided that my destiny, if I had any, would be in this country, and as I have been a good sailor since childhood, I decided I would travel here on the water. I picked the nicest launch I could find at Arendal, in south-east Norway. It was stocked with fuel and food, it had the latest navigation equipment. It even had an armed guard.’ Ahlin laughed softly. ‘He was the first man I ever killed. I knew I had to do that. My fitness to fulfil my destiny was being tested.’

‘And nobody came after you?’

‘Probably somebody did. But they would have been looking for a white launch registered in Oslo. After I crossed the Skagerrak, and before I made it down the Kattegat to the north coast of Germany, I stopped at a rundown Swedish yard and for a small price they changed the registration and identity of my launch, which is now an attractive sea-green.’

‘How can you be sure it’s still where you left it?’

‘Because I see it quite often, Erika. I live on it. I like to stay at a distance from cities. I regularly hitch rides out of Berlin so I can sleep in my own little bunk. I can usually be in Gristow in two or three hours. Hitching in the other direction is even quicker.’

‘What are we going to do when we get there?’

‘You asked me that already,’ Ahlin said.

‘I’m asking you again. I have a life and I’m concerned about the turn it’s taking.’

Ahlin picked up a rag from the floor. It was oily, the kind of rag that might have been used to wipe the spark plugs. He dabbed it to Andreas Wolff’s bleeding mouth.

‘We will walk the last kilometre to where the launch is berthed,’ he said. ‘That will be after we have ditched this car.’ He leaned forward and spoke close to Erika’s ear. ‘Before we lose the car, you’re going to use its radio to transmit a very important message.’

For more than an hour Mike had driven a stolen motorcycle a full 50 metres behind the police Volkswagen. Earlier, gridlocked traffic had slowed the Volkswagen’s approach to the fast northern route out of the city, giving Mike time to spot the car break away from the herd and take a sudden detour the wrong way down a one-way alley. He followed and had been behind the Volkswagen ever since.

The bike was a big Kawasaki, a courier’s machine, scarred and battered, with a 500cc engine and enough poke in the acceleration to make it easy to manoeuvre. The crash helmet, on the other hand, was half a size too big. Mike had jammed a folded newspaper up the back to make it fit. Sabrina was on the pillion seat, her Burberry trenchcoat buttoned to the top, her head tucked down to conceal the fact she had no helmet.

Once he was used to the machine’s handling Mike drove steadily, keeping himself behind other vehicles on the straight, weaving forward or dropping back to keep the space between them constant. The first few times Erika detoured he did the same, until he realized she was following a main route north-east. After that he timed his speed to dovetail close behind her each time she rejoined the major highway.

‘All right back there?’ he shouted as the rain began to lash them.

Sabrina inched closer, getting her face near the gap at the bottom of his helmet. ‘I’m fine, but I noticed we’ve been skidding. Is everything OK?’

‘The tyres are worn from too much heavy cornering. Try to ignore it.’

As they passed the 50 kilometre signpost to Gristow the traffic became noticeably thinner. Mike dropped his speed, letting the Volkswagen get a good 200 metres ahead of him. Two minutes past the 30 kilometre marker a thunderstorm broke. Lightning flashed and danced over the highway. Even above the roar of the bike’s engine the thunder was a thudding rumble, like blows on the ears and ribs. A couple of times the bike lost its purchase on the road and sailed towards the shoulder. Each time Mike corrected and regained control, grateful that Sabrina knew to sit motionless and let him do everything.

A kilometre outside Gristow the Volkswagen left the road. It turned sharply along a rutted farm path towards the north-west shoreline, 3 kilometres away. Mike slowed until the car dipped out of sight, then he followed, chugging along at a trotting pace, listening to Sabrina mumbling with relief as the circulation came back to her hands.

At the top of an incline Mike stopped and straddled the bike, holding it upright. He took off the helmet.

‘They’re heading for somewhere on the shore,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘What time do you make it?’

‘Three-twenty.’

‘We still have satellite time.’

Mike kicked down the bike’s support and climbed off. Sabrina swung her legs to the side and flexed her ankles vigorously before she risked putting her weight on her feet.

‘Such fun, a biker’s life,’ she muttered, rubbing her hands.

Mike took the heavy rifle from his right shoulder and transferred it to his left. He shook the loose water from his hands, took out his mobile and tapped in the satellite code. At the contact signal he thumbed the automatic dial code for UNACO and pressed the phone close to his ear. After ten seconds of whistles and pops he heard the faint but undistorted voice of C.W. Whitlock.

‘It’s me, C.W. Mike. I thought the old man would appreciate a rundown.’

‘He already has one,’ C.W. said. ‘The Berlin police have worked out what happened. One of the Austrian bodyguards lived long enough to give them the meat of the story. A number of small assumptions have taken care of the rest - including one about a messenger’s bike that went missing from outside a café just after the shooting. Did you take it?’

‘Would I do a thing like that?’

‘Is Sabrina with you?’

‘She is. I have to tell you C.W., we have no idea what Einar Ahlin is up to. As far as I can tell, he’s got Erika Stramm driving the stolen police car with himself and Andreas Wolff in the back, and they’re heading for the shoreline at Gristow.’

‘Hang on, Mike…’

‘Don’t be long. Satellite time’s tight.’

‘What’s happening?’ Sabrina said. She was mopping her hair with her scarf.

‘No idea.’ Mike looked at the sky. ‘The rain’s stopping. On the other hand…’ He looked off towards the east. ‘There’s more thunder and lightning on the way.’

‘Terrific.’

‘How’s your arm?’

‘Sore.’

Mike laughed.

‘What’s funny?’

‘You look like a half-drowned refugee in an expensive raincoat.’

Whitlock came back on the line. ‘Erika Stramm has used the radio in the stolen police car to issue an ultimatum,’ he said. ‘It was routed to Interpol and they just channelled it to us. We got it while she was still talking.’

‘What does she want?’

‘I have a transcript.’ Whitlock cleared his throat. ‘Statement begins, “Juli Zwanzig gives notice that in three hours’ time the man Andreas Wolff will die, and the German Navy’s experimental station at Stettiner Haff will be blown up, unless one million US dollars is handed over in direct exchange for Wolff at a place and time to be specified in one hour, by which time the authorities should have been able to make the funds ready for transfer. This demand is modest, un-motivated by greed, and is generated purely by the need of Juli Zwanzig to continue its mission.” End of statement.’

‘We’re probably no further than a mile or two from where they are at this minute,’ Mike said. ‘We’ll go after them, but reinforcements at some stage would be a comfort.’

‘The German authorities already got a rough fix on the radio signal,’ Whitlock said. ‘We can pass on something more precise. Hold down the hash mark and the star buttons simultaneously for a count of ten. I’ll take a fix on your position.’

Mike did as he said. At the end of ten seconds he heard the phone beep.

‘That’s recorded and on its way to the proper authorities,’ Whitlock said. ‘Now, while your skin and Sabrina’s are precious to us, you understand it’s Wolff we’re most concerned about at present.’

Mike said, ‘When the shooting started back at the hotel, I saw him grab some optical disks and stick them down his pants.’

‘The ICON protocols,’ Whitlock groaned.

‘It might have been better for ICON if he’d left them,’ Mike said. ‘If Ahlin realizes what he has in his hands, it could be worse than cata-strophic.’

‘I don’t even want to visualize that,’ Whitlock said.

‘We’d better get moving, C.W.’

‘Keep in touch.’

Mike pocketed the phone and told Sabrina what Erika had said.

‘Her voice,’ she said, ‘but Einar’s words, I’ll bet.’

Mike started the bike. ‘I have to admit, I have the worst kind of gut feeling about Ahlin.’

‘Me too.’ Sabrina waited until he righted the bike then she climbed on. ‘The way I feel about him,’ she said, ‘is like the sensation you get when you see a terrorist turn and look at you, and you realize your gun is back at the hotel.’

‘I know that sensation,’ Mike said. ‘There’s a technical term for it.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Blind terror.’

The sky turned steadily darker as they drew near the shoreline. Mike eased the bike along rutted tracks and over increasingly stony hillocks, watching all the time for a sign of the Volkswagen. The rain was starting up again when Sabrina slapped his shoulder.

‘There,’ she said, pointing out to sea.

Ten metres beyond the end of a jetty the boot and part of the rear end of the car’s roof were visible above the water.

‘I hope he didn’t leave anybody in there,’ Mike said.

He drove on for another five minutes, picking up speed as the shingled road became smoother. A number of small boats lay at anchor along the way, covered with tarpaulins, abandoned until the city sailors arrived at the weekend.

Sabrina slapped Mike again. ‘That boat along there. The big green one. There are lights on board.’

The launch was moored against the side of a flimsy one-lane jetty. Down in the state room Andreas Wolff was propped in the curve of a padded couch facing aft. At the dining table Einar Ahlin sat opposite Erika Stramm. He explained their position as if it had been ordained long ago.

‘They will know where we are, or roughly where, because they will have taken a lock on the broadcast signal. Police radios permit that kind of trace, which was the only reason we used it. Delay, when it comes time for the exchange, will be minimal.’ He took a cellular telephone from his pocket. ‘When you talk to them again, you will use this.’

‘So you want them to come here,’ Erika said.

‘I want them to see Wolff,’ Ahlin sat back and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘We will be some way out by then, but they will be able to satisfy themselves it is him. They will then float out the money in the small boat they will find by the jetty, and when it reaches us, we release Herr Wolff. They will rejoice and give great sighs of relief as they help him out of the boat in which he will be returned to the shore. He will still have his hands bound, of course, and his mouth will be taped.’

‘Why?’

‘So he cannot warn them he is sitting on a bomb.’

Ahlin pointed to a grey metal box on a shelf by the door. It was a 15-centimetre cube; a stemmed handle stuck up from the top. The handle was broad and flat-topped.

‘Pushing down the plunger does nothing. Releasing it again does. Boom!’ Ahlin threw his arms in the air and laughed. ‘I built that myself. Originally I intended to use it to despatch Mr Gibson, the American. But I decided it would be better if something so potent and - I confess it, so unstable - did not travel too far before it was used.’

He leaned across and patted the side of the bomb casing. Erika stared at Andreas Wolff. His eyes looked sunken with despair.

‘What about the threat to blow up the naval yard?’

‘Sheer nonsense,’ Ahlin said. ‘But they must take a threat like that seriously.’ He nodded at Wolff. ‘People are valued, of course, especially clever ones like him, but property and investment and secrets - oh, they must be protected above and beyond all else. The threat to blow up the yard guarantees delivery of the million dollars. A side benefit will be that a pleasing number of police and security forces will be deployed at the naval yard to no good end.’

Ahlin reached out and touched the bomb again, stroking it this time. ‘It is a big charge,’ he said, ‘a huge one really, so when Herr Wolff stands up, there will be a lot of damage, many casualties, and an overriding confusion, during which we will speed away.’

Erika looked ill. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to see Gregor. I want to be with him more than anything.’

‘First you must come with me.’

‘Where? Norway?’

‘I’m sure that is what the authorities will think. But no. We will just go round the corner, geographically speaking. Remember, we have a job to finish in Germany. So we will creep back while the forces of law and order are looking for us everywhere but Germany, and we will complete the grand mission. After that…’ Ahlin shrugged. ‘After that I don’t know. Maybe by then I will have devised another mission.’

Erika looked at Wolff again. He was very pale. He sat staring at the floor.

‘I’m scared,’ Erika said. ‘You’ll get us killed.’

Outside, Mike and Sabrina had inched their way on deck, leaning along the rail, setting up a minimum of movement. Mike tiptoed to the forward state-room porthole and put his eye to the edge. He turned to Sabrina and nodded. He eased the rifle off his shoulder and readied it. Sabrina pulled out her pistol and thumbed off the safety. They went down the six steps to the stateroom door on their toes.

Mike looked at Sabrina. He gently grasped the handle of the door and began to mouth a countdown from five. Sabrina nodded on each count. On two Mike eased the door open a fraction. On one he kicked it hard.

The door burst open with a crash.

Ahlin jumped back, nearly falling. Erika screamed and Andreas Wolff jumped to his feet. Mike leaped into the room holding the rifle at waist height. Sabrina was two paces behind him, standing on the bottom step, her pistol aimed at Ahlin’s head.

‘Freezel’ Mike yelled. ‘Don’t move! Not a muscle!’

Ahlin’s eyes rolled. He swayed, looking as if he might faint. He sank slowly to his knees. Mike was three paces away as Ahlin went down. When his shoulder hit the floor his hand snaked into his jacket pocket and pulled out a shiny silver pistol.

‘Watch it!’ Sabrina yelled.

Ahlin fired at Andreas Wolff before Mike got to him. The bullet hit Wolff in the middle with a splintering sound and he fell back across the couch.

Mike’s rifle butt clipped Ahlin on the chin. He landed unconscious in the corner. Mike snatched the pistol and pocketed it.

‘Let’s go!’ he yelled, pushing Erika towards the door. ‘Move!’

He took Wolff by the arms and pulled him to a sitting position. Wolff’s eyes opened and he winced.

‘I don’t think the bullet went into you,’ Mike told him. ‘How do you feel? Can you stand up?’

Wolff nodded, gasping to pull in air, pointing to the waistband of his trousers.

‘The disks,’ Mike said. ‘I know.’ He pulled Wolff to his feet and pushed him through the state-room door. ‘Help him walk,’ he told Erika.

‘Watch that box,’ Erika called back out as Sabrina led them out on to the jetty. ‘It’s a bomb. Reflex detonator, I think.’

Mike hoisted Ahlin off the floor by the armpits and leaned him against the wall. He pat-searched him then slapped his face until he came round. When the blue eyes fluttered open Mike spun him away from the wall and out on to the stairs.

‘He’s coming up, Sabrina,’ he shouted. ‘Keep the gun on him and shoot him if he puts one foot wrong.’

Mike shouldered the rifle and picked up the bomb. He carried it up on deck and set it carefully in the prow. As he straightened, Sabrina cried out. He saw her stumble aside, then he was pushed violently from behind.

‘Move aside, Mr Yankee Hero,’ Ahlin rasped, staggering past Mike.

He turned and before Mike could grab him he sat on the bomb. The plunger went down with a grating sound as it took his weight.

‘Now then,’ he said, swaying, touching the side of the hull for support. ‘I think you and I should stay right here.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Mike said. He turned. ‘Get on shore, Sabrina. Run!’

‘If I stand up,’ Ahlin said, ‘you’ll come to paradise with me. Nobody can run fast enough to dodge this touch of nemesis.’ He slapped the bomb beneath him. ‘Care to take me up on that?’

Mike said nothing. He looked at the others, at the far end of the jetty now, edging on to the path. Wolff moved slowly, staggering as Sabrina and Erika urged him to walk faster. They were still too close.

‘If you try anything, I’ll stand up at once.’ Ahlin clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Tell me now, does this seem oddly relaxed?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘It does look laid-back, no? But in fact it has a purpose.’ Ahlin brought his hands away from his neck. The right hand held a revolver, identical to the one he used to shoot Wolff. ‘A jacket collar pocket. You have encountered it before, surely?’

He laughed and raised both arms above his head. Mike made a grab for the pistol. Ahlin threw it from one hand to the other.

‘Erika!’ he shouted.

She turned. Ahlin fired the pistol at her. She dropped at Sabrina’s feet.

‘For treachery!’ Ahlin shouted, wincing as Mike tore the gun from his hand.

Sabrina knelt and touched Erika’s neck. She looked up and shook her head.

‘You killed her,’ Mike said.

‘She deserved it. So do you, Yank. Don’t fret, it won’t be long.’

Mike sighed. He eased the rifle up on his shoulder. ‘You’re a savage. Einar. I’d like to break all your fingers, one after the other. But that would put me too close to your league.’

‘So what will you do?’

Mike reached out and put his hand flat on Ahlin’s head, pressing down hard, keeping him seated. He pushed him back sharply. He was leaning on the hull, supported on either side by boxes.

‘A little anaesthetic.’

Mike slid his hand down off Ahlin’s head and along the side of his neck. Ahlin’s hands came up to defend himself but Mike’s arm wouldn’t be deflected. His fingers went under the collar of Ahlin’s shirt and found the brachial plexus. He squeezed. Ahlin’s head dropped forward. Mike stood back a second, then turned smartly and crossed the deck. He leapt on to the jetty and ran to the others.

‘Ten minutes, I’d say, before he comes round. How are you doing, Andreas?’

‘I could be much worse,’ Wolff croaked. ‘I also could have had more luck.’ He looked at Erika lying by the jetty. ‘Perhaps we all could.’

‘It’s been one of those days.’ Mike crouched to pick up Erika’s body. ‘Help Andreas up the hill, will you, Sabrina? While there’s a lull, I think we should get ourselves to a safe vantage point.’

Four minutes later a police firearms unit arrived. They brought with them a senior officer, who carried an attaché case with a million dollars in used bills.

Mike explained the situation. The tension among the policemen ebbed.

‘There’s nothing to do but wait,’ Mike said.

Erika’s body was put on a stretcher, covered with a blanket and placed in the back of the police wagon. The marksmen took up positions on the hill overlooking the jetty, their tele-sights trained on the unconscious man in the launch. Mike sat on the grass talking quietly to Andreas Wolff, who was feeling sick.

As the minutes ticked away Sabrina realized some of the men were moving further down the hill.

‘Stay back!’ she warned. ‘That’s a big charge he’s sitting on!’

Some of them took notice. Others froze where they were, re-positioning their guns, re-focusing their sights.

From where Sabrina stood she could see the launch clearly. She didn’t want a close-up. She could make out Einar Ahlin’s shape in the prow. She could see him moving. Ahlin’s neck straightened, he rubbed the back of his head, then cupped both hands over his eyes. As his hands dropped away he looked up at the hillside.

‘He doesn’t understand what’s happening,’ a policeman said. ‘He’s dazed.’

‘I hope he stays that way,’ Sabrina said.

She saw Ahlin rub his eyes, as if he might sink back and go to sleep again. Then abruptly he stood up.

Everybody seemed to stop breathing. Ahlin stood motionless, looking round at where he had been sitting. He stiffened visibly, then took a step away from the prow.

The bomb went off with a blinding gold flash. A second later the roar travelled up the hillside and behind it the shockwave, bending bushes, knocking over a gun tripod and whipping off hats and spectacles.

Debris began to land like rain. The air was filled with cloudy vapour. Some of that, Sabrina thought, was Einar Ahlin. He was now what explosives experts referred to as pink mist.

‘So it’s over,’ Andreas Wolff said. ‘One less lunatic, making space for one more.’

28

‘The police are here, so are the medical services, and there are one or two people I suspect are Federal German Security,’ Sabrina told Philpott over the mobile phone. ‘It’s a circus. Thanks to Mike’s touch of ingenuity with Einar Ahlin, it’s a very grisly circus. There’s nothing left of the boat, apart from flotsam.’

Philpott asked how badly Wolff was hurt.

‘The bullet hit him right in the software, sir. Four metal-and-plastic laminated disks of it. Didn’t even break his skin, but I think he’s going to have a badly bruised abdomen.’

‘Did those four disks represent all of the security protocols?’ Philpott said. He sounded grim.

‘I haven’t asked yet. But considering the amount of data even one of those disks can hold, I would imagine he’d get everything on to four of them.’

‘Maybe he had back-ups.’

‘Opticals are pretty secure. People don’t tend to make extra copies.’

‘Well thank you for poking those rays of golden light into my day,’ Philpott said. ‘Call me back when you have more to report.’

‘I certainly will.’

‘Next time we speak I’ll have details of your next mission.’

‘It’s cooking already?’

‘C.W. is on the case. You know what they say about there being no rest for the wicked.’

‘Why should that apply to a virtuous soul like me?’

Philpott grunted. ‘Any other time I’d enjoy this light-hearted blather, Sabrina, but in view of what’s likely to happen to ICON, you’ll pardon me if I remain grumpy. Call me soon.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Sabrina put away the mobile and went to kneel beside Wolff, who was still sitting on the grass.

‘I hope you won’t mind me raising something like this so soon after your ordeal,’ she said. She looked quickly at Mike, who rolled his eyes but said nothing. ‘It’s about the software you had tucked under your belt. Was that all of the work you were doing? I mean, was everything on those four disks?’

Wolff nodded. ‘Frankly, that is why I feel so sick.’

He pushed his fingers down the top of his trousers and fished out a few shards of the broken disks the medics had missed.

‘All gone,’ he sighed. ‘All gone.’

‘The grim truth,’ Mike said, ‘is that your life was saved at the expense of ICON’s next generation of security.’

Wolff stared at him. He looked puzzled.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t follow…’

‘I just said that ICON security has perished in the process of -’

‘Perished?’ Wolff stared at Mike wide-eyed. ‘ICON security? Never. Not a chance of it. Not as long as I breathe.’

Mike and Sabrina looked at each other. Mike looked at Wolff.

‘I don’t understand, Andreas. Those disks, weren’t they the upgrade security files, the ones you’ve been working on so hard?’

‘Tcha!’ Wolff looked at Mike as if he was an idiot. ‘The security codes are my discipline,’ he said, tapping the side of his head. ‘I make notes, sure, but the programs, the routines, they evolve all the time, and because they do they require volatile storage.’ He tapped his head again, more forcibly. ‘They were generated in my skull, and they will stay there until they are perfected and transferred to the network.’ Wolff pulled a few more particles of plastic from the waistband of his trousers. ‘These disks contained my new masterpieces,’ he said. His voice was hollow and sad.

Mike frowned. ‘You mean games?’

Wolff nodded. ‘Four of them. All beauties. All gone.’ Wolff looked at Sabrina with agony in his eyes. ‘I spent three years working on them. They were my creations, my children.’ He shook his head, desolated beyond comforting. ‘Three years of dedication. Three years of my life, for God’s sake.’

Mike did his best to commiserate.

Sabrina turned away.

It had been a hell of a day.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Philip Brent for information about satellite networks, Nick Carpenter for advice on firearms and incendiaries, Edwin Moss for Moroccan intelligence and Rosa Barlach for the low-down on urban biking.

Especial thanks to Fiona Stewart, my editor at HarperCollins, whose vigilance and overall savvy did my manuscript no end of good.

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, who died on 2 February 1987, was the international bestselling author of thirty books, including world-famous novels such as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. In 1977 he was commissioned by an American film company to write a number of story outlines that could be adapted into a series of movies; two, Hostage Tower and Air Force One is Down, were, with Alistair MacLean’s approval, published as novels by John Denis; these were followed with six by Alastair MacNeill, the highly successful Death Train, Night Watch, Red Alert, Time of the Assassins, Dead Halt and Code Breaker, and two, Borrowed Time and Prime Target by Hugh Miller.

Hugh Miller was born in Scotland but now lives in Warwick. He is the author of the bestseller Ambulance, as well as the highly acclaimed Mike Fletcher crime novels. He is an acknowledged expert on forensic medicine and has numerous TV credits.

Prime Target is the ninth title in the UNACO series.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

By Sam Llewellyn

Storm Force from Navarone

Thunderbolt from Navarone

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s

Rendezvous

THE UNACO SERIES

By John Denis

Alistair MacLean’s Hostage

Tower

Alistair MacLean’s Air Force

One is Down

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s Death

Train

Alistair MacLean’s Night

Watch

Alistair MacLean’s Red Alert

Alistair MacLean’s Time of the

Assassins

Alistair MacLean’s Dead Halt

Alistair MacLean’s Code

Breaker

By Hugh Miller

Alistair MacLean’s Borrowed

Time

Alistair MacLean’s Prime

Target

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2010

1

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

Copyright © Characters and settings: HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

Copyright © Text: HarperCollinsPublishers and Hugh Miller 1996

Hugh Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-00-649934-3

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-34903-6

HARPER

About the Publisher

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http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

HUGH MILLER

Alistair MacLean’s UNACO

Borrowed Time

HARPER

To Nettie,

and to both generations of her kids

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S BORROWED TIME

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Malcolm Philpott’s attention was fixed on the television screen. He stared, unblinking, as the CNN camera panned across a pocket of hand-to-hand fighting and showed a mercenary sticking a knife in the chest of a Bosnian rebel. Over by the door behind Philpott, Secretary Crane gasped.

‘Brainless carnage,’ he hissed.

They were in the semi-dark of Philpott’s office, watching a video Philpott had switched on a moment before Crane entered. He had come in soundlessly, without knocking. He was known throughout the Secretariat building as Creeper Crane.

‘The footage is sixteen hours old,’ Philpott said. ‘An orchestrated local outburst we’d been expecting.’

‘Where?’

‘South of Banja Luka. The men in grey battle-dress are our people, Task Force Four.’

Desmond Crane stood with his back almost touching the door. His sallow skin looked tanned in the half-light from the shaded window. He winced as a TF4 man side-stepped a rifle-swipe and spun sharply, kicking his attacker in the ribs. Behind them another UNACO operative head-butted a mercenary who fell in the churned mud of the roadway.

‘Do you watch much of this stuff?’ Crane said, his words clipped, conveying censure.

‘Only what I have to. It pays to keep in touch. You weren’t suggesting,’ Philpott added coldly, ‘that I would watch combat footage for recreation?’

‘Heavens, no.’ Crane smiled, but his eyes stayed reproachful.

Philpott tapped his handset and the screen went blank. He pointed the remote at the window and touched another button. The vertical slats of the blind turned smoothly inward and the room brightened.

‘So.’ Philpott got behind his desk. ‘How can I help Policy Control?’

Crane laid a photograph face up on the desk in front of Philpott. It was a snapshot, black and white, and it showed Philpott himself, walking on a Manhattan street.

‘This must have been taken at least three years ago.’ Philpott picked it up and studied it. ‘That’s the amount of hair I still had in 1994, and the chalk-stripe suit went to the Salvation Army shop when I changed apartments a month before Christmas that year.’ He looked up at Crane. ‘What’s the significance?’

‘The picture was found by an NYPD detective among the possessions of a man called Arno Skuttnik who died last night.’

‘How did he die?’

‘Of a heart attack, in his one-room apartment at Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. You knew him, perhaps?’

‘The name isn’t familiar.’

‘Look at the writing on the back of the picture.’

Philpott turned it over. In smudged, pencilled longhand it said: Malcolm Philpott, Director of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organization (UNACO).

‘So he knew who I am.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Who was he?’

‘A seventy-year-old porter at the Washington Square Hotel. An immigrant who came to New York in 1964. Nothing exceptional is known about him — then again, nothing much at all is known about him.’

Philpott nodded patiently. ‘Do you think maybe he was engaged in espionage?’

‘Not at all. We’re pretty sure he never broke the law once in the thirty-three years he lived in New York.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

Crane stared. ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

Philpott stared back. Crane was a man of middle years, roughly the same age as himself, but he possessed none of Philpott’s natural authority. Crane always had to reach for an effect. The reaching put him under strain, and it never failed to show.

‘Don’t you find it extraordinary, and a trifle alarming,’ he said, ‘that a porter in a Greenwich Village hotel had in his possession a photograph that identifies you as the Director of UNACO?’

‘Well, no …’

Crane’s mouth twisted. It was meant to be scornful, but again it was mainly strain that showed.

‘UNACO is not a secret organization,’ Philpott said. ‘True, we don’t advertise our existence. Our offices are unmarked, our phone numbers are not listed, and our agents and employees never acknowledge their affiliation. Our profile is minimal, but secret we are not.’

‘Yet this man, this porter, found out who you are.’

Philpott shrugged. ‘I have no theories about how he did that. But it wouldn’t have been too difficult, if he was determined.’

‘And why did he want to know about you?’

‘I have no theories about that, either.’

‘The department is very unhappy with this, Mr Philpott …’

‘The department?’

‘Policy Control. We can’t accept a situation where a senior officer of a sensitive department in the United Nations is so … so careless in his conduct of his affairs that any riffraff can find out what his job is and even take pictures of him on the street.’

Philpott stood up and came around the desk. He was smiling one-sidedly, a clear sign of displeasure.

‘I don’t really care how Policy Control feels about the way I run my life. To be frank, in my day-to-day awareness of this vast environment we share, your department seems scarcely to exist.’

Crane looked as if he had been punched. ‘I think it would be easy enough,’ he blustered, ‘to demonstrate Policy Control’s existence, and the way in which it enforces revisions of departmental procedure within the UN structure. That includes departments which grandly imagine themselves to be above any form of restraint or governance.’

‘Mr Crane, I am accountable only to two people. They are the Head of the Security Council, and the Secretary General of the United Nations. That’s it. I explain myself to no others. Now if you’ll excuse me …’ Philpott pointed to the door. ‘I’ve got real work to do.’

Crane stumped to the door and jerked it open. ‘I’ll tell my director what you said, and that you show no willingness to co-operate.’

Philpott nodded, going back behind the desk. ‘You can also tell your director that I made a suggestion.’

‘Which is?’ Crane demanded.

‘That you whistle Dixie through any orifice of your choice.’

Crane jumped aside as C.W. Whitlock strode into the office.

‘Morning, gentlemen,’ he said breezily.

Crane went out and slammed the door.

Whitlock put a folder on Philpott’s desk. ‘What’s wrong with The Creeper?’

‘There’s a leak in his self-importance. What have you got?’

‘A heartfelt letter from a missionary in the Vale of Kashmir.’ Whitlock flipped open the folder.

‘Not another one of your cries for help?’

‘Smart of you to guess, sir.’

Whitlock was an instantly likeable man, in nature and appearance. He was a native Kenyan whose white grandfather’s genes had bestowed a light umber skin, a strong jaw and a firm mouth, which Whitlock softened with a moustache.

‘The letter was sent to the Security Council, they passed it along to us. Do you want to read it?’

‘Later, perhaps,’ Philpott said. ‘Summarize for me.’

Whitlock leafed down through the documents to find the letter and his notes. Philpott couldn’t help watching him. He was incredibly fastidious in his movements, a man who had been described by a former Secretary General as fitting his role so well that it might have been moulded around him. He breathed aptitude.

‘Here it is.’ Whitlock put the letter on the desk with the notes alongside. ‘It’s from the Reverend Alex Young, a Church of England priest. He runs a medical and teaching mission at Shahdara, a village near the town of Tangmarg in the Vale of Kashmir.’

‘What does he want?’

‘He’s asking the UN to do something to curb the growing violence of the Muslim separatists, and the increasing influence of drug peddlers in the region. In a recent flare-up a local doctor’s gardener was killed. The doctor in question is Simon Arberry, an American, who’s doing big things with his public medical centres.’

‘There was something in Scientific American …’

‘Currently the Arberry Foundation is setting up a free hospital for the people of the region,’ Whitlock said. ‘Anyway, among Reverend Young’s other concerns, he seems worried that the unrest and physical danger might drive the good Dr Arberry out of the area, which would set the public care programmes back a long way.’

Philpott picked up the top page of the letter. ‘“This is one of the most serenely beautiful places in the world”,’ he read aloud. ‘“It is a perfect spot to live, but the increase in drug trafficking and the disruptive influence of the extremists, fomenting ill feeling between Indian and Pakistani elements, threaten to plunge the region into bloody war.”’

He put the page back. ‘That’s hardly news to the UN,’ he said. ‘Most of our observers know the root of the trouble lies west of Kashmir.’

‘Afghanistan.’ Whitlock nodded. ‘I gather it all started for real when the Russians left.’

‘The last Soviet troops pulled out of Kabul in 1989, and since then Afghanistan’s turned into a breeding ground for Islamic activist groups. Nobody’s clear on the details of the various schisms and squabbles, but they do involve territorial ambition, much of it centring on Kashmir.’

Whitlock looked at his notes. ‘A number of activist-terrorist groups are keen to extend the Pakistani-held Azad region of Kashmir to absorb the Indian-held areas. Some of them even want to take away the north-eastern territory, which has been occupied by China since 1962.’

‘Lord,’ Philpott breathed. ‘Can you imagine what that might lead to?’

Whitlock rummaged in his notes. ‘I have a status bulletin filed with the Security Council in August 1996.’

There was a tap on the door. It opened and Mike Graham put his head round the side. He looked troubled.

‘How’s the report coming?’ Philpott asked him.

‘There’s been a serious emergency,’ Mike said.

Philpott and Whitlock stared at him, waiting. Mike came into the room and closed the door. He wore jeans, cowboy boots and a black cotton shirt. He pushed the fingers of both hands through his dark hair.

‘My coffee machine broke down,’ he said.

Philpott grunted and waved at his miniature Gaggia machine on the long sideboard. ‘Help yourself.’

Whitlock found the Security Council status bulletin.

‘The meat of it is, in the summer of ‘96 a number of Islamic extremists, trained in Afghan terrorist camps, were infiltrating the Pakistani and Indian regions of Kashmir, rousing the rabble, spreading the message that Kashmir is rightly the territory of Muslim Pakistan.’

He ran his finger down the sheet and read out a section. ‘“Also, by sporadic acts of assassination and sabotage, they cause civil unrest and increasing disquiet among beleaguered minorities. The authorities in India and China, meanwhile, fear the loss of control.”’

Mike Graham came across with his cup of coffee. ‘Do I smell work?’

‘Too early to say.’ Philpott looked at Whitlock again. ‘Any conclusions in the bulletin?’

‘They said the problem still wasn’t serious, but events had to be watched closely. Any corrective steps taken by the Indian or Chinese authorities, or by both, could result in widespread conflict.’

‘This is the Islamic campaign in Kashmir you’re talking about?’ Mike said.

‘Well spotted, Michael,’ Philpott said. ‘So you don’t just read motorbike magazines all the time.’

‘Sure I do. But I have my radio on a lot and things filter through. What’s the pitch?’

As group leader of UNACO Task Force Three, Mike was entitled to know. Whitlock told him about the letter from Reverend Young.

‘Could I study a copy?’

‘Oh, use the photocopier, too, while you’re here,’ Philpott said. ‘And if you can spare the time, I’ve got a new shoe-polisher that might divert you for a while.’

‘What do you think?’ Mike said. ‘Is this a case for us?’

Philpott wasn’t sure. ‘We are an anti-crime organization. The crimes cited here are big enough to be classified as aggressive political activity, and that’s not our bag.’

Whitlock nodded. ‘Pretty much what I thought.’

‘But, as ever,’ Philpott said, ‘I’ll consider the matter, I’ll think long and hard about it, and I’ll issue a decision before the end of the week.’

Mike brought back the letter from the photocopier and handed it to Whitlock.

‘Have you any special interest in Kashmir?’ Philpott asked.

‘Not really.’ Like Whitlock, Mike radiated an amiable charm which he often used to deflect other people’s curiosity. He did that now. He smiled and shrugged. ‘You know me, sir. I like to keep up to speed on what’s being thrown our way.’

‘Fine,’ Philpott said, ‘as long as it doesn’t interfere with the speed of your report.’

As Mike left the office Philpott told Whitlock he had a favour to ask. ‘I want a thorough, confidential investigation into the background of a man called Arno Skuttnik who died, apparently of natural causes, at his lodgings in the Village last night. Make use of any resources you need. Keep all the details of your enquiry strictly off-record.’

‘Can I ask what it’s about?’

Philpott frowned for a moment. ‘Yes, all right.’

He told Whitlock about the snapshot, and how Secretary Crane was intent on using it as a lever to apply restrictive legislation against UNACO. ‘It’s a tiny problem at present, but soon enough we may need all the help we can get.’

Whitlock picked up his folder. ‘I’ll see what I can do, sir.’

2

Inside UNACO Mike Graham was known to be a fiercely practical operator, a man of action. A top-level UN communiqué of November 1996 described him as ‘a swift, focused instrument of international law and order’. He was a man who would have attracted medals had he served in a conventional army. His superiors and his colleagues knew all that, but what they remembered most about Mike Graham was that, years ago, terrorists had murdered his wife and baby son.

The drawn-out agony of his loss damaged Mike brutally, and for months afterwards he was beyond consolation. When grief had finally run its course he moved from New York to Vermont and there he took up a solitary off-duty existence — tranquil, controlled, relatively happy. That outcome was achieved, in great part, by the patient friendship of Lenny Trent, an agent of Drugwatch International. Now, an hour after reading the letter from Reverend Young in Kashmir, Mike was suddenly reminded of his old friend.

The clergyman’s letter had stirred a buried ache. On a computer in the Secure Communications Suite, Mike called up the UNACO records archive. A quick title-search produced a memo from the World Health Organization — known internally as WHO — which gave details of a haul of highly refined drugs taken from a farm worker travelling to south China from the Vale of Kashmir. The drug courier had killed himself before he could be interrogated.

Mike prompted the system for more details, and up popped the name of his buddy, Lenny Trent. It was at the top of a telex from Drugwatch International marked for the attention of the Secretary General, WHO:

Origination Date — 28 December 1996. Source — agent Lenny Trent. Message reads:

Two heroin mules arrested today at the border of Burma and Thailand were from the Vale of Kashmir. Both were first-time offenders, carrying exceptionally fine H. While detained pending interrogation both swallowed potassium cyanide. Trail now as dead as they are.

Mike checked with Drugwatch International, a UN affiliated body, and learned that Trent was currently in Seattle, preparing a case against a Chilean drug runner caught importing cocaine inside hundreds of fish destined for the Pike Place Market.

Mike called Seattle; Lenny’s assistant got a message to her boss, who was interrogating a courier; Lenny sent back word that if Mike could get to Seattle for ten the next morning, he would have an hour free. A rendezvous was set up.

Next morning Mike boarded a Washington-bound heli-shuttle on the roof of the UN Secretariat building. He was in Seattle by 9:45, and at two minutes to ten a taxi delivered him to the Seattle Art Museum on University Street. He entered the building, made his way to the café, and found Lenny Trent waiting at a table on the far side of the room.

‘I got you coffee,’ Lenny said, standing, spreading his arms wide. ‘Let people talk. Gimme a hug.’

They embraced, slapping each other on the back. ‘You never write,’ Lenny said as they sat down. ‘You never phone …’

‘I keep meaning to. And yesterday I did.’

‘Because you need to know something, or you want a favour.’

‘Yeah. Well.’ Mike tasted his coffee and shrugged.

Lenny grinned. He was short, wiry, with big grey eyes behind Armani steel-framed glasses. His hair, exposed for most of each year to tropical and subtropical sun, was lighter on top than at the sides.

‘One question before we hit business,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Truly? Where it matters?’

‘Truly. I miss my wife and my son every day of my life. They are my last thought before I sleep, always. But that’s as it should be. I’m OK. I function, I can entertain hope, and I’ve a strong impulse to survive.’

‘Even though you’re in a suicidal occupation.’

‘Even though.’

‘Good. I needed to know that.’

‘And you?’

‘Still divorced. Still drinking. Still hoping for a change, and still working too hard to do anything but go with the current.’ Lenny slapped the table gently. ‘To business. How can I help you?’

‘I have to tell you a story first,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll try and keep it interesting. It’s about a bully-boy called Paul Seaton. You remember in 1984, when the US began to help the mujahedin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? One of the key figures in that operation was Paul Seaton, a New Yorker from the Lower East Side. A very, very tough character. He was dropped into Kandahar to train Afghan rebels in the use of advanced weapons.’

‘I’ve a fuzzy recollection,’ Lenny said, flapping his fingers at the side of his head. ‘Was there a CIA connection somewhere?’

‘I’ll get to that. Paul Seaton was a hard instructor, even by mujahedin standards. To graduate from the first stage of his combat course you had to shoot down a Russian helicopter with a ground-to-air Stinger missile. If the pilot survived, you had to kill him with your bare hands.’

‘I heard about that. The Reagan administration sat on the details, but George Bush’s boys finally blew the whistle about what went on out there in the name of democracy.’

‘Seaton was unquestionably a talent,’ Mike said. ‘He had a genius for subversion, but he had never been stable. In 1986 he was known to be turning to Islam, and in 1987 he went native. He vanished into the hills with his own murderous little group of fundamentalists. At that time he declared he was a sworn enemy of the government of Afghanistan and the mujahedin movement. And that was the last official news of him.’

Mike paused to take a mouthful of coffee.

‘Two years ago, however, on a satellite picture taken on a routine pass over Amritsar in northern India, somebody looking a lot like Paul Seaton showed up at the head of a drug convoy travelling through the hills north of the city.’

‘Well, well.’ Lenny was suddenly more alert. He pushed his spectacles along his nose. ‘For a long time our people in India and Pakistan have been catching rumours about an American who runs drug convoys. His main route, allegedly, is along the border with Pakistan and Kashmir, then down the western territories of India as far as Firozpur in the Punjab. Until now, I was inclined to dismiss the stories as myth.’

‘Seaton’s real, no mistake. And I’ve studied the satellite picture enough times to be sure it’s him leading the horse convoy.’

‘So,’ Lenny said, ‘apart from a professional curiosity about criminal developments, what’s your special interest in Seaton?’

Mike made an effort to look blank. ‘It’s nothing I’d call special.’

‘Aw, come on …’ Lenny was openly sceptical. ‘I know you, remember? I know your different kinds of intensity. And I could do a monograph on your grades of determination. Tell me straight — are you harbouring one of those fashionable private agendas? Or a plain old personal grudge?’

‘I might be. Let’s just say Paul Seaton is owed a comeuppance. It’s been owed a long time, but certain recent events mean there’s an outside chance I can maybe do something about it.’

‘Even up the score?’

‘Something like that.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Find out all you can about Seaton. If he’s in the drug trade, you’re the man to find out more.’

‘I’ll do what I can. Leave it with me.’ Lenny looked at his watch. ‘Let’s have some more coffee. Then we can swap gossip until it’s time for me to go back and terrorize another dope courier.’

UNACO occupied an entire floor of the Secretariat building on the UN’s East River site. Two hundred and sixty employees, eighty of them specialists, handled the daily administration of the world’s most efficient crime-fighting body. Thirty prime-rated field agents, recruited from international police and intelligence agencies, formed the core of the ten Strike Forces, and each Strike Force had its own suite of rooms within the network of UNACO departments. On his return from Seattle, Mike went directly to Strike Force Three’s ‘withdrawing rooms’, as Philpott called them.

To get there he had to pass through General Communications, a big, buzzing room filled with computers, telex machines, printers and satellite TV receivers. The department was staffed by twenty multilingual operators and twenty-three communications technologists, all of them women.

As Mike passed through, nodding and smiling from one desk to another, he saw what he was used to seeing: polite curiosity behind the warm smiles, a subtle prying as one individual after another looked for signs of pain still burning in him.

Behind the mahogany door with TF3 lettered on it, Mike sat down at one of the computers. He took a Zip disk from his shirt pocket and inserted it into the drive slot. A copy of Reverend Alex Young’s letter came up on the screen. Mike read it again, picturing the scenario, trying to view it from the standpoint of a priest dedicated to the nurture of a place and its people:

I risk repeating myself, Reverend Young wrote, when I say the Vale of Kashmir is an area of exceptional beauty, both physical and ethereal, a centre of harmony and growth, and it breaks my heart to foresee what the signs make plain — this wonderful place being sundered and ultimately destroyed by the incursions of greed, corruption, and brute violence.

Mike sat back. He pictured Paul Seaton somewhere near the centre of that avarice and graft and brutality. The picture was easy to conjure.

He took out the Zip disk and tapped a command key marked SECURE CONFERENCING. A box appeared onscreen and invited him to enter a telephone number; simultaneously a tiny red light mounted on the camera atop the screen lit up.

Mike entered the number of CIA Records at Langley, Virginia. After a moment a screen announcement told him he was connected; who did he wish to talk to? Mike entered the name Joshua Flynn. A pause, then a white square appeared onscreen, which turned quickly to a live colour picture of a thin-faced, exceptionally gloomy-looking man. The dolour vanished and he smiled widely as two-way visual contact was established.

‘Mike!’ The voice was alarmingly realistic over the computer’s sound system. ‘Where have you been? It’s so long since we spoke, I thought you must have defected.’

‘There’s no place left to run, Josh. How’re you doing?’

‘In spite of the wishes of my contemporaries, I must say I’ve thrived.’ Flynn waved an arm at the shelves and machinery ranged behind him. ‘I’m in charge these days. I’m one of only three men at Langley with all-level access to the files. If you forget how many lumps of sugar you take in your coffee, give me a call, we’ll have a record of it here somewhere.’

‘I’m chasing a favour, Josh.’

‘I can’t imagine any other reason why you’d call.’

‘A man by the name of Paul Seaton. He was —’

‘An employee of this agency,’ Josh cut in. ‘I knew him reasonably well, for a time. What do you need to know?’

‘Background stuff, leading up to the time he took off and became a bandit.’

‘You on to him for something?’

‘I could be, with luck. Just in case the luck holds, I’d like to know as much about him as I can.’

‘I could tell you most of it from memory,’ Flynn said, ‘but let’s be professional about this, right? I’ll call up the file. One second, Mike.’

It took four seconds. Flynn studied the printout, nodding.

‘OK. A summary of the known career of Paul Elliot Seaton, who will now be forty-three years old.’ Flynn put down the summary and looked directly out of the screen at Mike. ‘From the time Seaton left college he put himself at the disposal of people with power, the kind of power he knew he could never generate himself. He was open about his technique — he once told me his motto for getting on in life was “Find the engine you need and hitch a ride”. Anyway, Paul was preeminently physical, he wasn’t hampered by a conscience. He worked as errand-boy and muscle for several small and medium-sized politicians until an opportunity came along to join the CIA.’

‘Who gave him the opportunity?’

‘It was a recommendation from a grateful relative of our first director, Allen Welsh Dulles.’

‘He did somebody a big muscular favour.’

‘I’d guess so,’ Flynn said. ‘The job he got here carried no guarantee or likelihood of promotion, but Paul Seaton got to do harm, and he got to carry a prestigious ID that showed he was a legitimate employee of the Agency. For three years he was a happy young man. Then in 1977 Jimmy Carter arrived, and he directed a fresh administration to put tight controls on the clandestine activities of the CIA. A month later Paul Seaton was out of a job.’

‘How did he get involved with the mujahedin initiative in Afghanistan?’

‘Well, he wasn’t a lot more than a dogsbody around here,’ Flynn said, ‘but one or two people at the Pentagon kept records of those boys from Langley who’d distinguished themselves in situations calling for, quote, effective physical action, unquote. Seaton had drawn attention to himself for some of the things he got up to in Cuba and Chile, and so, within a month of getting his can kicked out of the CIA, the former gofer-bodyguard-enforcer-saboteur had himself a new job with the military.’

‘Did you see him at that time?’

‘Once. While he was doing his three-month training at a government facility in the Ozarks. I went there with a pair of our covert operations people for a briefing on Project Kandahar, as they called it. I spoke to Seaton for a couple of minutes. He was full of himself, full of the mission ahead. He was mustard-keen to get over there and start teaching bodily assault and slaughter.’

‘He was the man for the job,’ Mike said, then quickly added, ‘or so I gather.’

‘Yeah. When I asked the fellow in charge just what it was that Seaton and the others were training to do, he said, “They’re gonna teach one group of Neanderthals how to exterminate another group of Neanderthals, in the interest of maintaining a balance of power consonant with the needs and purposes of the United States.”’

‘But Seaton didn’t shape up the way they imagined he would, right?’

‘He’d been in Afghanistan only three or four months,’ Flynn said, ‘when he discovered an inborn leaning to fanaticism. He also found he had an aptitude for the life of a brigand. After the end of his tenth month in Kandahar, he severed all contact with the military.’

‘And what do you know about his present activities?’

‘Nothing. There have been rumours he’s into drug running, hill banditry, kidnapping, all the usual stuff villains get up to in the stretch of territory from Kabul to Chittagong. Nothing has ever been substantiated, and frankly he doesn’t fall within our sphere of interest.’

‘Well, you’ve been a help, Josh. I owe you one.’

‘Now I’m boss I can let you run it up to three you owe me. Then you have to pay it off in wine. Let me know if you get anything new on Seaton.’

Mike promised he would. He closed the conference connection. At the top of the notebook page he had filled while Flynn was talking he scribbled P. Seaton — background.

Soon, he thought, pocketing the notebook. Soon, you heap of garbage.

3

The following morning at 9:15 a message went out to all personnel of Task Force Three to attend a meeting in UNACO’s briefing room. Mike Graham was in a diner with coffee and the Washington Post when the pager vibrated against his chest. C.W. Whitlock got the message as he sat in his car in a street off Times Square, talking to a private detective he occasionally employed. Sabrina Carver heard the buzz of the pager where she had left it, resting on the ledge above her bathroom washbasin. She abruptly ended her telephone conversation with her mother, ran to the bathroom and read the terse message.

‘Bang goes the gym,’ she said, shutting off the last word, realizing she had started to talk to herself again. She had always believed the habit was harmless enough when she was at home, but lately she worried that it could spread to other places, or go really malignant and turn into a compulsion. She feared ending up like people she sometimes saw on the street and in stores, in deep conversation with themselves, detached and strange.

Bang went the gym, anyway. She had planned to go there at ten, do an hour, come back, shower, spend plenty of time getting dressed and made up, then have a long gossipy lunch with a school friend who was in town.

She could always go to the gym in the afternoon or the evening, so it was no disruption of the day, except that on a day when she was lunching out she liked to visit the gym in the morning, for then it felt like less of a misdemeanour to have dessert with her meal.

She got ready quickly and checked herself in the mirror. The dark gold Joseph Janard jersey suit was an extravagance she had been saving for the spring; it was still only February, a grey New York day, but she felt sunny enough to carry it. Her mother, born and raised in Paris, had told her never to forget that because she was blonde, relatively tall, and had a lot of French in her DNA, she could get away with clothes that would make most other New York women look downright silly.

A Cartier watch and a light brown Elégance wool coat across her shoulders completed the ensemble. She slipped her SIG P220 pistol into her purse and left for the UN.

As she came out of the elevator opposite the UNACO main entrance she saw Mike Graham ahead of her. She hurried and caught up.

‘What’s the meeting about?’

‘No idea,’ he told her. ‘But I hope it isn’t something that needs all of us.’

Sabrina waited for more, but that was all he said.

When they stepped into the briefing room Philpott and C.W. Whitlock were already there. Philpott was by the big ceiling-to-floor window that overlooked the East River. He was muttering testily to his mobile phone. Whitlock leaned patiently against the shiny panelled wall, arms folded.

“Morning, kids,’ he muttered.

Whitlock was the most versatile of all the UNACO agents, and the one most readily consulted by Philpott. He was a graduate of Oxford and a one-time officer in the Kenya Intelligence Corps. Philpott had personally recruited him into UNACO. They were often to be found together, although their closeness created no jealousy. Everybody knew Philpott was too much of a loner to have favourites.

‘You look stunning, Sabrina,’ Whitlock observed as she hung up her coat.

‘That’s what I was aiming for. I’m going straight to lunch after the meeting.’

‘You’re kind of overdressed for McDonald’s,’ Mike said. He sat down at the long central table and stared pointedly at Philpott, who was trying to terminate his call.

‘We’re going to the Arcadia,’ Sabrina said, sliding into the chair opposite Mike. ‘Special occasion. Me and Tania, an old friend from school. The last time we met she was very pretty, but I haven’t seen her in ten years so I have to assume the worst — she could be stunning. The haute couture is my best defence.’

Philpott ended the phone call and slammed the mobile down on the table. ‘That was the Secretary General’s office,’ he said. ‘UNACO is to be the subject of a techniques-and-procedures review. I resisted, but it would seem that somebody in Policy Control has a persuasive turn of argument — either that, or they’re blackmailing one of the under secretaries.’

‘They want to change the way we do things?’ Mike said.

‘At the administrative level,’ Philpott nodded. ‘It’s aimed at me. It’s personal. Just because I won’t play the good doggie every time Secretary Crane or one of his lesser vermin set foot in the place. However.’

Philpott sat down at the end of the table and opened his leather document case. ‘I want to brief you on the ground tactics and preliminary arrangements for an upcoming assignment.’

Mike raised his hand. ‘If I might say something, sir, before you start.’

Philpott sighed. ‘Hurry up, then.’

‘I want to take a couple of weeks of my outstanding leave to nose around the situation in the Vale of Kashmir. You know, the troubles the clergyman wrote to the Security Council about.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’

Mike adjusted his body language to look candid and open. ‘I thought that if a small fuse were stepped on now, it would prevent major explosions later.’

‘No,’ Philpott said. ‘I can’t agree. Out there, stepping on a small fuse could mean simultaneously putting your foot on a land mine. It’s not a place for one-man campaigns.’

Mike stared at Philpott for a long moment. ‘I’m disappointed you feel that way.’

‘No need to be,’ Philpott said. ‘There is time we can borrow.’

‘Huh?’

‘The ballistics-update course that you and the other members of Task Force Three should be attending from Tuesday next — it’s been put back two weeks.’

Mike looked at Whitlock, who was now sitting beside him. He looked back at Philpott. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘As I promised I would, I gave extended consideration to Reverend Young’s plea. I also spoke to Sufi Gopal in our Delhi office. He spoke without the clergyman’s passion, but his calm words were a good deal more chilling. I’ve decided there is enough criminal rumbling in Kashmir to justify organized UNACO intrusion.’

Mike stared. ‘Really?’

‘It’s what I called the three of you here to discuss. It’s a genuinely worrying picture. There is escalating terrorism, there is drug running, there is the calculated disruption of peaceful development, and there’s the possibility that even a small increase in friction could spark off fighting that would involve Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and China.’

Mike was still bewildered at the turn of events. He had been sure Philpott had thrown this one out. ‘You’re saying we can go in as a team?’

‘Indeed,’ Philpott said. ‘I believe a little collective defusing would be in order.’ He passed three clipped documents along the table. ‘These are preliminary strategic manoeuvres worked out between Sufi Gopal and myself. Let me have your comments and any suggested revisions of strategy by this time tomorrow.’

Sabrina frowned. ‘Is that it? Is the meeting over?’

Philpott nodded. They all stood.

‘That means I’ve got to hang about in these clothes for another two hours and still turn up at the Arcadia looking glitzy and fresh.’

‘Go home and take them off,’ Whitlock said.

‘I can’t do that. I can’t take clothes off, then put them on again in a couple of hours. I’d feel like I was wearing stuff that should be in the cleaner’s. And if I feel that way, I’ll look that way. In front of her.’

‘Go shopping,’ Mike said. ‘That’ll keep you on your feet for two hours without noticing it, and you won’t get your duds creased.’

Sabrina beamed at him. ‘Great idea,’ she said.

Whitlock stayed behind when Sabrina and Mike had gone. ‘I spoke to Carl Grubb earlier,’ he told Philpott.

‘The private investigator?’

‘I asked him to keep a watch on the funeral home where they’re holding Arno Skuttnik’s body. Quite a few people have shown up to pay their respects. Other staff from the hotel where he worked, his neighbours …’

Philpott was drumming the table softly. ‘C.W.,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t have volunteered this information if it had been devoid of relevance, am I correct?’

‘I was working up to it, the relevant bit.’

‘Just skip the presentation. What’s the story?’

‘Adam Korwin showed up.’

‘What?’ Philpott’s eyes grew wide. ‘To look at the body?’

‘Grubb was watching from an adjoining room. He said the way Korwin looked at the corpse, he was there to satisfy himself it was who people said it was.’

Philpott shook his head slowly. ‘Can we be sure it was Korwin?’

‘I have the Polaroids. It was him, all right.’

‘I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about this.’

‘It’s intriguing,’ Whitlock said. ‘An old immigrant with no family, no skills, no interesting history, no status you could measure, dies suddenly, and who shows up to run an eye over the body?’

‘Adam Korwin,’ Philpott breathed. ‘Surprise, surprise …’

Korwin was the doyen of US East Coast spy-masters. During the cold war his name had been cited by three Kremlin defectors, and his status as a principal Russian spy-handler had been confirmed by highly-placed Eastern Bloc sources. But Korwin was so good at his job that he had worked for thirty years under the noses of the FBI and CIA without once doing anything even remotely suspicious. To all appearances he was a harmless self-employed upholsterer, and no one could muster enough on him to work up a believable extradition order.

‘What the hell was his connection with Skuttnik?’ Philpott said.

‘That’s my next avenue of enquiry. Assuming you want me to take this further.’

‘I’ll say I do.’

‘It’ll take time. What about Kashmir?’

‘With a touch of re-jigging and enough local help, that’s a job Mike and Sabrina can tackle. Don’t worry about it. Concentrate on the link between the late Arno Skuttnik and the boys from Red Square.’

Lenny Trent called that afternoon while Mike was in the TF3 suite, boning up on the geography of northern India and Kashmir. Maps and books were spread across two tables and a gazetteer lay open on the carpet. When the phone rang he had to dig it out from under the concertina folds of a Delhi street directory.

‘Mike. It’s Lenny. You still interested in pin-pointing the whereabouts of Paul Seaton?’

‘It’s only been one day, Lenny. Of course I’m still interested. I’m flying out to India before the end of the week, so you could say I’m really anxious to get a line on him.’

‘I may have something for you.’

‘So soon?’

‘Idle conversation can be a golden shovel, Mike. You never know what it’ll turn up.’

‘I’ll put that on the cork board.’

‘At lunch today I talked to my colleagues in general terms about what you and I discussed yesterday — the Afghanistan initiative, the way terrorist groups and drug routes have blossomed since the Russkies moved out — and I asked if anybody had ever had confirmation of the alleged drug convoys running from Kashmir down the western territories into the Punjab. Louise, who is in liaison with our north-west Indian contacts all year round, said she’d heard the convoys had stopped. Pakistani Army hotshots on the border had made it too dangerous.’

‘Oh, well…’

‘Hang on,’ Lenny said. ‘Louise then told me she’d heard from a good source that the American guy who led the big convoy was running another one now.’

‘Did she say where?’

‘From up near the Wular Lake region in northwest Kashmir, down the western territories to a destination unknown. It could be Batala or Kangra — they’re places where you’ll find run-on links for any kind of contraband.’

‘Fascinating, Lenny. But it still sounds like hearsay.’

‘You’re not letting me unfold this the way I want,’ Lenny complained. ‘Just listen. When Louise told us about the new convoy route, up pipes Jonathan, our satellite communications guy. He said he visited the Aerial Defence Department’s tracking and reconnaissance centre at Arlington six weeks ago, and they showed him some high-definition photographs, computer enhanced, taken from three miles up. He was impressed, especially by one that showed a suspected bandit convoy in the Pirpanjal Mountains in western Kashmir.’

‘That sounds more promising.’

‘Let me finish. The faces of several of the men in the horse convoy were clearly visible, so Jonathan says. I asked him if the leader’s face was showing but he wasn’t sure, he just recalled they were great pictures.’

‘Lenny, you just made my day. I’m really grateful.’

‘What are you gonna do? Get hold of the pictures?’

‘Not easy, but yes, that’s what I plan to do,’ Mike said.

‘Don’t mention me or my people, will you? Jonathan was shown the stuff as a favour, and because I suppose the Aerial Defence guys couldn’t help showing off. It was classified material and Jonathan was warned not to talk about any of it outside his professional circle.’

‘And he didn’t.’

‘But I did. So keep shtum, unless you want Customs at Delhi to find an embarrassment of heroin in your baggage.’

‘Noted. Thanks again, Lenny. You’re a sweetheart.’

It took twenty minutes to raise anyone at Aerial Defence in Arlington who would speak to Mike. When he finally located a USAF lieutenant attached to Satellite Reconnaissance, the man was not keen to route the call to anyone with more authority.

‘Lieutenant Ross, I need to discuss access to possibly classified aerial photographs,’ Mike said, setting out his case all over again. ‘I have Level One security clearance, you can make an integrity check with your own central computer right now. My security rating, plus my connection with the UN Security Council, permits me access to individuals and to data at the most sensitive levels.’

‘I daresay all that is correct, Mr Graham, but I have no authorization to connect you with any other person at this facility.’

‘Then who can patch me through to where I need to go?’

‘Certainly not me,’ Ross said coldly. ‘And even if I knew of such an individual, I haven’t the authorization to connect you with him in order that he might help you.’

‘This is crazy.’

‘You’re entitled to your interpretation, sir.’

Mike put down the phone to kill the connection, then picked it up again. He tapped in the number of C.W. Whitlock’s mobile. When Whitlock answered, Mike explained the Catch-22 conversation he’d had with the man at Aerial Defence.

‘You went by the wrong route,’ Whitlock said. ‘They don’t talk to anybody they don’t know. The officer who froze you out, he would have checked the list of known characters. The short of it is, unless you’ve first of all been on face-to-face terms with someone up there, they won’t give you the time of day by phone or fax.’

‘Do they know you?’

‘Of course they do,’ Whitlock said smoothly.

Mike explained what he was trying to get. He added that he would deem it a favour if Whitlock said nothing to Philpott about the matter.

‘What have you got going there?’ Whitlock demanded. ‘A vendetta?’

‘Something of the kind,’ Mike said; he knew an outright lie wouldn’t work. ‘It’s a long story.’ He paused. ‘Well, no, it isn’t really, but this is not the time …’

‘Tell you what,’ Whitlock said. ‘If I get hold of what you’re after, you’ll tell me what’s behind it. Deal?’

‘For Pete’s sake, C. W…’

‘Deal?’

Mike nodded at the receiver. ‘Deal.’

4

Next morning the plans for the Kashmir assignment were firmed up and finalized in the briefing suite. It was agreed that Mike would be flown directly to Delhi, then taken north by helicopter to the mountains north-west of the Vale of Kashmir. There he would receive an intensive introduction to the region from a Kashmiri Indian, Ram Jarwal, who was a UN Area Observer stationed near Srinagar, in the west of the Indian-administered territory of Kashmir.

Sabrina would spend a single day being briefed by a team of WHO specialists before she travelled to a US-operated commercial airfield at Dehra Dun, eighty kilometres north-west of Delhi. From there she would be spirited northward and would finally become fully visible driving a car into the town of Kulu, in the Pradesh region, 160 kilometres south of the Kashmir border.

‘As ever with agents collecting peripheral intelligence,’ Philpott said, ‘we want Sabrina to appear to have been around for a while, without anyone being able to pinpoint the place or time she arrived. The rule here is always worth remembering — a reassuring presence and a hazy history make for convincing cover.’

On her journey northward, Sabrina would carry the credentials of a WHO Ecology Monitor.

‘Since you will both arrive in the Vale of Kashmir by different means and at different rates of progress,’ Philpott continued, ‘it’s to be hoped you’ll pick up widely different intelligence in the early stages of your assignment. What we need to know, principally, is the severity of criminal activity — of recent origin, remember — in the target region. Long-standing problems are already accommodated by a number of means; we need to know what’s being added to make the pot boil over, as it were. The causes could be far more widespread than Reverend Young or our observers think. The short version is, we badly need hard intelligence.’

‘Nothing to be taken for granted,’ Sabrina murmured, scribbling.

‘Quite so,’ Philpott said. ‘We need to know the nature of the beast, where it’s from and how far it sprawls. In more realistic terms, we need to find out how best to counter and prevent a series of political reactions which could result in an Indo-Chinese bloodbath.’

Mike wanted to know if current intelligence still indicated that the main troubles were orchestrated by one or two terrorist groups.

‘That is still the view of our best-informed observers,’ Philpott said. ‘You may find differently once you get past the various façades, of course. If you do discover you’re up against something that calls for a small army rather than a couple of smart saboteurs, then don’t indulge in heroics. Evaluate the position, report to me, then clear out.’

Before dismissing them Philpott issued a caution. ‘At all times, remain aware that UNACO’s function is to combat and neutralize crime without impinging on local politics or customs. In this case it won’t be easy to avoid trespassing on sensitive ground, so damage-limitation must be a priority. Making matters worse will be a lot easier than making them better.’

In the corridor outside, Mike and Sabrina wished each other luck. Sabrina even put a peck on Mike’s cheek before they parted.

‘My, but that was cordial and civilized,’ Whitlock observed, stepping out of the recessed doorway of the briefing room. ‘Not like you two at all.’

‘Truces come and go,’ Mike said. ‘For a while now it’s been OK between us.’

‘Because you haven’t been working closely with one another.’

‘Precisely, C.W. The peace can’t hold. Sooner or later we’ll find ourselves sharing a predicament, and then she’ll try to assert what she feels is her natural authority —’

‘Over what you know to be yours.’ Whitlock held up his attaché case and tapped the side. ‘I’ve got something for you. Let’s go to Secure Comms.’

Mike had expected photographs, but what C.W. took out of the case was a mini CD.

‘This was the only way to do it.’ He powered up a graphics computer on a steel table in the middle of the floor. ‘Photographic prints at Aerial Defence are numbered and accounted for. They are also magnetically tagged through a ferrous component in the paper emulsion, so there was no way anybody was going to get one out of there. However, I have a resourceful friend on the strength, and he knows the code that unlocks the negative disks.’

‘Negative disks?’

‘The negatives aren’t on film. They’re electronic and they’re stored on hard disks. So my compadre unlocked the negs and transferred identical copies to this minidisk.’

Whitlock opened a zippered pouch and took out a Sony MZ-R3 minidisk recorder. He plugged one end of a transfer cord into the tiny silver machine and put the other end into a socket in the back of the computer. He put the CD into the Sony and a moment later a picture began to appear on the screen. It built slowly at first, then accelerated until the whole screen was filled with a sharp photographic image of eleven turbaned men on horses travelling through mountainous countryside. No faces were visible.

‘That’s no good,’ Mike said. ‘I was told they could be identified …’

‘There are over twenty still to go,’ Whitlock said. ‘Be patient, can’t you?’

He began tapping a button on top of the Sony. With each tap the picture on the screen changed.

‘Stop!’ Mike pointed as the eighth picture came up. ‘Stop right there!’

The image was a closer view and a different angle from the ones before. The faces of three men were visible. One was the leader, but he had moved his head at the moment of exposure and the features were blurred.

‘Damn!’ Mike growled.

Whitlock brought up the next shot. The same three faces were visible, but this time the leader gazed straight ahead, caught full face and pin sharp.

‘My God.’

Whitlock watched Mike. He had the look of a man who had been searching for something under a stone and had found it; fascinated repulsion was the description that came to mind.

‘That’s the man?’

‘That’s him.’

Mike took in the wide clear eyes, the firm arrogant set of the mouth; the nose, once straight, had gone through a few changes of shape since boyhood. It had even changed since Mike last saw it.

‘Ugly, isn’t he?’

Whitlock frowned at the picture. ‘He looks normal to me. Quite handsome, even.’

‘OK. I’m prejudiced.’

‘Tell me about him.’

Mike made a face.

‘You promised.’

Mike got two Styrofoam cups of coffee from the machine by the door and brought them to the table. They sat down in front of the big monitor.

‘Lenny Trent asked me if I had a private agenda where this man is concerned,’ Mike said. ‘You asked me if it was a vendetta. Well, yes to both questions. The agenda is bedded in a time long ago, when I was a kid. When I was, to be precise, a rookie quarterback for the New York Giants.’

‘If this is a football story I may fall asleep.’

‘Stay with me, you’ll be all right. During my second week with the team one of the star players, Lou Kelly, got his career ended abruptly in the parking lot behind the ball park. He was beaten half to death. At that time I had never seen anyone injured so badly. He lost an eye and had his left arm broken in so many places it had to be amputated below the elbow.’

‘How come?’

‘I didn’t get the full story until years later. A certain senator had offered Lou Kelly money to perform badly in a crucial game. He only had to play badly enough to give the other team the edge, that was all they needed. Lou Kelly refused and he was promptly offered twice as much money. He still refused. So a man was sent to punish him for being so intractable.’

‘A contract beating.’

‘Yeah. It turned out worse than a killing for Lou. I still remember seeing the man waiting for him outside the players’ exit and thinking, that guy is bad news. It was a long time ago and everybody was much younger then, but I’ve got no doubts. The man who destroyed Lou Kelly’s career that night was Paul Seaton.’

They were silent for a minute, drinking coffee, staring at the picture on the screen.

‘According to my contact at Aerial Defence,’ Whitlock said, ‘Seaton and his bandits are a bunch of crazies. They don’t limit their activities to running drugs. They’re into fundamentalist agitation, sabotage, even random murder. They could be a part of Reverend Young’s local problem.’

‘How much intelligence does Aerial Defence have on the bandits?’

‘I just gave you all of it. The one other thing they know for sure is that nobody offers the bandits any resistance. People are too scared. Look over your shoulder at these guys, you won’t survive past sunset.’

Mike leaned forward and touched the PRINT button on the computer keyboard. When the menu came up he clicked the High Resolution option. The printer started up.

‘I’ll take copies to Kashmir with me.’

‘Just don’t say where you got them,’ Whitlock said.

Mike crossed his heart and finished his coffee.

At one o’clock Whitlock took a cab to an address on West 3rd Street. He checked a name in his notebook, then descended carefully on narrow steps from street level to a shadowy basement door. A neon sign outside said TIME OFF in letters that alternated buzzily between green and red.

There was a weary woman at a desk by the door. ‘Five bucks,’ she announced.

Whitlock gave her a five. She dropped it in the drawer and stared glassily past him.

‘I’m looking for a man called Clancy Spencer,’ Whitlock said.

‘He’s working.’

On the platform at the far end of the club a grizzled black man was singing croakily into a microphone. He was accompanied on piano, sax and drums by men who looked nearly as old as he was. They were doing ‘Malted Milk’, after a fashion.

‘How do I get to speak to him when he’s done?’

The woman glanced at Whitlock for a split second. ‘Just let him see you got a drink for him, he’ll come soon enough.’

At the bar Whitlock got a Coke for himself and a large scotch for Spencer. He took the drinks to a table near the platform. As he sat down he held up the whisky in one hand and pointed to the singer with the other. Spencer caught on straight away and nodded, still croaking into the mike.

There were no more than twenty other customers in the place. Their applause when Spencer and the combo finished was a thin rattle around the smoky room, a sound like twigs snapping. A moment later Spencer sat down opposite Whitlock.

‘Nice meetin’ you.’ He reached across and shook Whitlock’s hand. ‘Call me Spence. What’s your handle?’

‘People call me C.W.’

Spence had the worst-fitting set of dentures Whitlock had ever seen. They were loose and they moved when he spoke, giving the impression that his mouth was out of sync with his speech.

‘Well then, C.W., this is mighty nice of you.’ Spence picked up the glass with finger and thumb, toasted Whitlock with a little swing of the glass, then swallowed half the whisky in one go.

‘How long have you been doing this, Spence?’

‘Singing in jazz dives? Since I was a kid.’

‘Never done anything else?’

‘I’d three years off to go to the war. Then I got married for a while and tried to make a go of a regular job. But it didn’t work out.’ He laughed throatily, making the dentures click. ‘Most of my life it’s been the way it is. Of course I ain’t what I was. Used to be a regular Eckstine. Now I’m just a broken singer of mostly broken songs.’

‘I thought that was Randy Newman.’

‘He stole the line off me.’ Spence laughed again. He finished the scotch and put down the glass, stared at it pointedly.

Whitlock got him another. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions, Spence?’

‘You a cop?’

‘No. I’m not anyone who means you harm.’

‘Easy to say.’ Spence picked up the fresh glass and sipped this time. ‘What kind of questions?’

‘About your friend who passed away the other day.’

‘Arno?’ Spence put down the glass. ‘You sure you ain’t a cop?’

‘I’m just a man who needs to know more than I do. Did the law give Arno any kind of trouble?’

‘Couldn’t say.’ Spence made a vague shape in the air with his hands. ‘Him and me, we got along because we didn’t pry in each other’s back yards. We could sit and drink ourselves motionless without having to communicate. But I knew Arno steered clear of policemen. He used to call them Cossacks. That’s what he’d mutter when he’d see one — Cossacks!’

The private investigator, Grubb, had told Whitlock that Spence had wept when he went to the funeral home to view Arno Skuttnik’s remains. He also said Spence told the duty undertaker that he and Arno had been friends for thirty years.

‘So what was it that made you buddies?’ Whitlock said. ‘Was Arno a jazz fan?’

‘Not that you’d notice. I think what it was, we were both the kind of loners that like to have a friend, y’know? You maybe think it’s strange in a man that sings for his livin’, but I ain’t really an outgoin’ fellow. I never in my life had more than two, three real friends at any one time. Arno was the same, and they were like him, they kept themselves in the shade.’

‘Do you know who they were, the others?’

Spence took a long pull on the whisky, studying Whitlock over the rim of the glass. When he put it down he smacked his lips. Whitlock could see he was making up his mind.

‘I’m no good with names, and far as I recall, Arno never gave any, anyway. But there’s a picture …’ Spence fished a plastic wallet from his inside jacket pocket and opened it on the table. He pulled out a coloured snapshot and handed it to Whitlock.

‘That was taken in here on Arno’s last birthday, six or seven months ago. Harry the barman took it. Those two people had dropped by to pass on their good wishes and leave a bottle of gin for Arno. He loved gin.’

The picture showed Spence and Arno side by side on the padded bench along the wall beside the bar. A man was leaning down, saying something to Arno; he was in profile and he wore a hat, but Whitlock could see it was Adam Korwin. The other person in the picture was a woman. She was turned away from the camera, her shoulder hunched defensively.

‘The lady didn’t want her picture took,’ Spence said. ‘She looked kind of mad that Harry did it.’

Whitlock could make out her left eye, the shape of her nose, the general style of her short hair, and he could see the rings on her left hand. She also wore a distinctive checked coat.

‘May I borrow this?’

‘If you promise I’ll get it back.’

‘You will.’ Whitlock finished his Coke and pushed back his chair. He didn’t want to pressure the old man any more than he had to. As he stood up he pointed to Spence’s glass. ‘I’ll leave you one at the bar.’ He put the picture in his pocket and turned to leave. Then he remembered something. ‘Spence. Do you know if Arno kept a diary, a journal, any kind of record of events?’

Spence shook his head. ‘It don’t sound like him. Besides, if he kept a diary, we’d none of us be able to read it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Arno never learned to write English.’

‘Not at all? How did he get by?’

‘People helped him out, I guess. Arno spoke English real well, but the writing was something he never got around to. He regretted that.’

Whitlock nodded and walked away. At the bar he paid for another large scotch and went outside. Upstairs, waiting for a cab to appear, he took out his notebook and scribbled a reminder to get the picture electronically copied and enhanced.

At the bottom of the page he put another entry in capitals: WHOSE WRITING ON THE PICTURE OF M. PHILPOTT?

5

Two days later Mike Graham landed in a Boeing 747 at Delhi and transferred at once to a black unmarked Sikorsky helicopter, the property of the New Delhi division of United Nations Information and Services. He was flown 500 kilometres north and set down on a patch of beaten earth in front of a large, shabby-looking cabin, set into a hillside above the northern boundary of Srinagar in north-western Kashmir.

It was almost dark when they landed. The setting sun was leaving streamers of red and purple above the mountains on the Pakistani border.

‘This is where I abandon you,’ the pilot called as Mike jumped out. ‘Bonne chance!’

As the helicopter took off again and Mike stood doubled over, his eyes shut tight against the dust storm, a tall Indian emerged from the cabin. He wore Levi’s and a checked lumberjack shirt. He smiled and waved.

‘Hi,’ he shouted, coming across. ‘I’m Ram Jarwal.’

He took one of Mike’s bags and led the way up to the cabin. When they went in, Mike stood in the living-room doorway and whistled softly.

‘The dilapidated exterior is designed to deflect envy and avarice,’ Ram said. ‘Inside, we UN hill-dwellers like to have our comforts.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

Mike stepped in and put down his bags. There was a big console television in the corner, showing CNN News with the sound turned down. In the middle of the floor was a deep beige Indian rug with a sinuous pattern worked in dark and light shades of green and gold. Packed bookshelves covered two walls from the floor nearly to the ceiling, with bracketed sconces at intervals above them, giving the room an amber glow. A couple of shaded lamps, with bases made from many-coloured porcelain vases, stood on black tables at opposite corners, spilling light across the polished floorboards.

‘Sit down.’ Ram pointed to one of the three armchairs. ‘I’ll get us a drink. You like Jim Beam, right?’

‘They sent my CV on ahead,’ Mike said, smiling. ‘How civilized. Jim Beam will be just fine, with a little water.’

Ram brought the drinks and sat down with his own. He had the look of a successful businessman who spent time in the gym. His dark hair was slicked back over his ears; his umber skin, incredibly smooth, was wrinkled around the eyes and at the corners of the mouth, the only signs that he might be capable of ageing. When he looked up he had the eyes, Mike thought, of an interrogator.

‘I’ve got instructions to crash-course you on the layout and culture and customs of the Vale of Kashmir,’ he said. ‘I don’t have long, even by crash-course standards, so if you don’t mind we’ll start early tomorrow.’

‘Does it involve anything painful?’

‘Walking, mainly. If you tread the territory and use your eyes, you’ll catch the tone and temper of the place faster than any other way. After that, we can get down to particulars — like studying the dope trails, pinpointing fundamentalist hotspots and identifying known and probable villains in the region.’

‘What can you tell me about Reverend Alex Young?’

‘We’ve met several times,’ Ram said. ‘He’s a sincere man, a shade humourless for somebody so young, but his heart’s where it should be. He runs a good little medical centre for the poorer people and he has a three-Rs infants’ school operating two hours a day, Monday to Thursday. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like him.’

‘I suppose he got in touch with the Security Council because he didn’t know there’s a UN man in the vicinity.’

‘That’s right. He doesn’t know what my job is — nobody here does. I function as regional eyes and ears for the UN, so I have to work behind a cover. Reverend Young, like everybody else, thinks I’m a civil servant. As far as they’re concerned I’m beavering away in my scabby cabin, engaged on a long-term proposal for improving rice production in the Vale.’

‘And I’m to be — what?’

‘A UN fact-finder. Sent in response to local uneasiness about the banditry and political shenanigans.’

Mike nodded. ‘What do you make of the troubles?’

‘They’re all rooted in greed.’ Ram ticked off his fingers. ‘Territorial greed, because this is a very lush and desirable place to live; commercial greed, since it would take a thousand years of pesticide spraying to choke the fertility of this region; raw financial greed, because some of the most cunningly developed, efficient and profitable drug routes in Asia pass through or near this area.’

‘And what would you say are the chances of bringing the violence and unrest under control?’

‘If what we guess is true,’ Ram said, ‘that only a few really bad guys are at the heart of it all, then I think a UNACO team could swing it and put things back the way they were ten years ago — still not perfect, but less likely to blow up into something international.’

‘Your guess could be wrong.’

‘Sure it could. People say there are unknown hands operating in the Vale, ruthless hands representing big national interests. And of course there’s the question of time. Even small random fires can set off powder kegs by accident. If that happens, there’ll be no low-key way to put things right.’

Mike finished his drink and stood up. ‘If we’ve got a really tough day ahead of us,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to shower and hit the sack. Before I do I have to touch base. Do we have a satellite window?’

Ram looked at the clock. ‘Half an hour left.’

Mike went outside and stood for a minute, listening to the insect noises, gazing up at the canopy of stars. He took a deep breath and caught the fragrance of flowers and grass and warm tree bark. It was like being at home in Vermont in the summer, with all the sensations multiplied by ten.

He took out his mobile and flipped on the illuminator. An insect landed on the status window as soon as the light came on. Mike tapped three buttons and put the phone to his ear. The scrambler noises cut in and went away again. Philpott spoke.

‘It’s Mike, sir. I’m in position. After a scrub and a snooze I’ll be ready to go.’

Philpott asked if he had heard anything from Sabrina.

‘No, but I wasn’t expecting to.’

Philpott said she had arrived at Dehra Dun and had been moved north from there as scheduled, but now he had lost touch with her. ‘She should have called in more than two hours ago.’

‘I’ll keep my unit switched on all night,’ Mike said.

‘And I’ll do the same with mine. Keep me posted, Michael.’

As Mike began to fall asleep in his room at the cabin an hour later, less than a kilometre away a man called Ahmed Faiz was running for his life.

Ahmed had run for more than twenty minutes, through woods and thickets, down a ravine and across a rocky outcrop that tore the skin on his knees and hands. He was young, but the running and the fear had drained him, making his heart pound and his limbs drag like lead. He longed to stop and catch his breath, but to stop was to die.

‘Muhammad be praised,’ he panted, ‘Muhammad is good. Muhammad be praised, Muhammad is good. Muhammad be praised …’

Whenever he felt himself flagging, when his feet slowed and threatened to stumble to a stop, he thought of his wife and his three small children. He saw their faces and the image put strength in him.

‘Muhammad is good …’

He had to get back to where he came from, to the safety and enclosing love of his family. He had no idea how far he must still run until he was safe, he only knew he ran in the right direction; long ago, his father had taught him to read the stars. He drove himself to the west, the west and the border. Beyond the border lay Islamabad and the safety of his home.

‘Well now, Ahmed!’

He stopped and felt himself falling, losing his balance. He tumbled into the coarse grass and felt twigs tear his face. How had this happened? How did Iqbal get in front of him?

‘Up, little man! Up!’

He was hoisted like a doll and shoved against a tree. A torch came on, right in his eyes, the light painful as a knife. Ahmed shut his eyes, squirmed and felt another pair of hands take hold of him from behind the tree.

‘You were told, were you not, that there were severe penalties for stealing? You were told, also, that to flee would be senseless. There is no escape.’

Ahmed was panting too hard to reply. A heavy fist slammed into his stomach. Now he couldn’t inhale. The pain flared into his chest and he thought he would faint. Through the pounding in his ears he heard Iqbal, his mouth close, the breath warm on his ear.

‘There are no exemptions, Ahmed. You were well paid to do your simple job. You were given money to support your family. Yet you abused your master’s generosity. You stole.’

‘Twenty rupees!’ Ahmed gasped. ‘It was only twenty rupees! And I found it!’

‘You cannot find what is not lost, little man.’

‘It was lying on a bench!’

‘It was not yours. It was a simple test of your loyalty.’

Ahmed’s arms were gripped tighter. The torch was held higher as Iqbal stepped back. Ahmed heard the knife slide from under Iqbal’s sash.

‘Please! Please, I beg you! My wife and my children need me! I gave back the money, there is no need for this!’

‘There are rules, Ahmed. To break them is to commit a grave insult to your master. You knew that. You were not kept in ignorance of what would happen if you transgressed.’

‘Iqbal! No! I beg you!’

The kukri made a swift arc from right to left, slicing through Ahmed’s throat as if it was not there. It swung again from left to right and severed his head clean from his body.

Ram Jarwal woke Mike at six o’clock with a cup of coffee and told him he should be ready to leave in twenty minutes. Mike drank the coffee while he dressed. By the time he was ready, Ram was outside, tightening the laces on his walking boots.

It was a glorious morning. The sun shimmered through a light high mist and the air was fragrant and moist. Mike watched Ram do up the bolts and double-lock the cabin door.

‘It’s hard to imagine anyone would take the trouble to come all the way up here to burgle a cabin,’ Mike said. He had been gazing down the sides of the valley, which seemed incredibly steep. ‘On the other hand, some people might see it as a challenge.’

‘Some people might see it as an opportunity to get inside and wait for whoever lives here,’ Ram said. ‘Homicide robberies are not uncommon. The best you can do is make sure there’s no place for someone to hide. Before I moved in, I had all the trees within fifty metres cut down.’

Mike stood for a moment looking down into the valley. He pointed to a dark cluster beside a green thicket a hundred metres below them. ‘What’s that — the black patch? It looks like it’s moving.’

‘Vultures,’ Ram said. ‘They’re waiting for the police to leave.’

‘Police?’

‘There was a bulletin on VHF at five o’clock. A murder can’t stay hidden here for long. Vultures were spotted on the hillside. The police came up and found the body of a young man, they think he might be a Pakistani. Decapitated.’ Ram shrugged. ‘Another sadly frequent event.’

They set off walking south-east. They crossed sloping farmland and dusty roads, cutting across the natural lines and divisions of the land, taking shortcuts through woods and across gullies to a stretch of natural road. It was solid rock, the blunt edge of a ridge from which they could see terraced rice fields laid out like patchwork, every shade of green and yellow. A looming backdrop of dark hills to the north and east intensified the colours and provided a windbreak for hundreds of acres of cultivated land.

‘The pictorial view of Kashmir,’ Ram said. ‘From a distance everything is so orderly.’

After an hour the mist cleared, and even though they were high in the hills Mike and Ram began to sweat. They stopped to take water.

‘It’s a beautiful place,’ Mike said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I didn’t imagine it was anything like this.’ He pointed ahead of them, to a cluster of houses with a larger building at their centre. ‘Have we come to a community?’

‘Bahadur. The white cube bigger than the others is Reverend Young’s medical centre. The school is inside his mission, which is farther down the slope.’

‘This is where I do my UN fact-finder bit, is it?’

‘With a minimum of acting required,’ Ram said. ‘This morning we simply introduce you. Discussions can come later. Reverend Young is expecting us, so there should be something cool waiting — he makes an admirable lemonade.’

They walked down the slope to Bahadur. Ram led the way through narrow twisting streets to the mission. As they approached he looked puzzled.

‘I’ve never seen the door shut before.’

He went up the two little steps and knocked on the door, waited, then pushed it. It opened. He went in, took three steps across the tiny entry hall and turned.

‘Come in, quick,’ he told Mike. ‘Close the door.’

Mike pushed the door shut and caught the smell at once, heavy on the warm air. It was unmistakable, the odour of decomposing human flesh.

Ram went into the room beyond. Mike heard him groan.

‘What is it?’

Mike went through. It was a bare white room with two small windows high on opposite walls. On a wheeled examination table in the centre of the room lay the body of a priest, stretched out, the arms tied together under the table. The black vestments were covered with blood. The face had been beaten to a pulp. Shards of white skull bone stuck up from the scarlet mass, catching the light.

‘Is it Reverend Young?’

‘I assume it is,’ Ram said. ‘I recognize the ring on his hand.’ He touched the mangled head with a fingertip and drew it back. ‘Not more than a couple of hours dead. Another hour and the stench will be unbearable.’

They went outside. Ram fished out his mobile phone. ‘I’ll get the police down here. Nobody will have seen a thing, of course. There are never ever any witnesses. Not even if it was done in broad daylight in the middle of the street.’

Ram spoke for a minute to the phone, then switched it off and dropped it back in his rucksack. ‘The police will take care of everything,’ he said. ‘We can go. And it’s best we do, before the locals take it into their heads that you brought bad luck with you.’

As they walked back up the slope Mike felt they were being watched, but he saw no one. ‘Have you any idea who could have done it?’ he said.

‘Plenty of cut-throats to choose from,’ Ram said. ‘But I couldn’t narrow it down to one or even a dozen. As I said, I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Reverend Young.’

6

Sabrina arrived at Kulu on time, and the first stage of her planned transformation to a WHO official went to schedule. Wearing a shalwar kameez- traditional tunic and trousers — and a scarf over her head, she went directly to a lockup garage in an underpopulated suburb north of the town and let herself in with a key she had been given at Dehra Dun.

The car waiting for her was a ten-year-old two-door Peugeot 205, metallic blue with dabs of rust on the roof and the lower edges of the doors. The engine had been reconditioned and made reliable, there were new tyres and secure locks. A creative after-touch was the attachment of a loose aluminium plate to the underside of the engine mounting, which rattled and vibrated and made the car sound frail and barely roadworthy.

Sabrina’s change of clothes was in a holdall in the boot of the car. Staying low-key was always difficult, given her height, her figure and her looks, but UNACO Kitting and Outfitting had made the best selection they could: billowy blouses, long flowing skirts and baggy trousers in brown and ochre shades, stout boots and a couple of shapeless canvas jackets.

She took only a minute to change. Looking every inch the overseas social worker in her flapping shirt and sturdy footwear, her long hair done up in a bun and tucked into the brim of a floppy sun hat, she opened the garage door, got behind the wheel of the Peugeot and drove out into the sunlight of Kulu.

What happened next, she later decided, was an unprofessional lapse of a kind she could never let happen again. She stopped the car a few metres along the dusty road from the garage, went back and locked the garage door. She came back to find that her shoulder bag had gone from the front passenger seat.

She stood for a moment and stared at the empty seat, forcing herself to be calm, trying to raise a clear memory of how things had looked before she turned away from the car and went back the few steps to lock the garage door.

Anger and anxiety obscured her memory. She was mad at herself for being so careless, and she was seriously worried because her documentation, her gun and her folding money were all in the vanished bag — to say nothing of her Swiss Army knife. She forced her mind away from consequences and told herself firmly to think only along positive lines. Even so, she couldn’t help visualizing Philpott, seeing him turn puce as he learned that one of his so-called prime agents had behaved like the worst kind of amateur.

She leaned both hands on the bonnet of the car and closed her eyes. She could see herself driving out into the light, feeling sudden warmth through the windscreen. She had braked, put the engine in neutral and got out, leaving the door open. She had no recollection of anyone else being near.

She opened her eyes, starting to feel desperate. She recalled something Philpott had told her, something she had subsequently written down. It was one of the chunks of advice he only ever imparted when he had taken a drink:

If ever you find yourself in a position where it seems possible you will damage UNACO, remember that it is worth any amount of effort, any measure of pain, and all the resourcefulness you can marshal to make sure that you deflect the harm away from UNACO, or undo the source of harm entirely.

Black marks against an agent were seldom erased. Sabrina had so far collected none. She had no intention of starting.

She shut her eyes tightly and tried again. She thought back further, saw the approach to the garage, the key in her hand extending to open the padlock.

She experienced a jolt now, realizing there had been something peripheral, something at the edge of her vision that should now register. She tried to freeze the image of her hand going forward to the lock and saw it slow down. Simultaneously she was aware of movement in herself, in her neck, the beginning of a reflex action.

Of course!

She had looked over her shoulder. She shut her eyes tighter and concentrated, inching through the recollection, aware that she had missed something, or at least she had taken no account of it. She saw again the shrubs and stunted trees at the side of the garage, with the yellow clay of the road dusted halfway up their trunks and stems.

A woman!

She had seen a woman on the other side of the trees, looking through a gap, her face impassive. She had simply been watching, doing nothing to raise the kind of curiosity that would get her remembered.

‘Yes, yes, yesss!’

Now that the image of the woman had been raised Sabrina could hold it and stare at it. In her early training with the FBI, she had learned that even if she did not consciously see something that appeared in her line of vision, it would be printed on her memory. Raising such memories was now something she could do five times out of ten. She put the image to the centre of her mind and worked at enhancing it.

The woman was young, perhaps twenty, with typically dark eyes and black hair; she wore a silver chain around her neck and she …

The recollection stalled there. Something needed to be noticed.

‘Come on, come on!’

There was an irregularity about the neck. A scar! There was a vertical scar, running down the midline of the larynx. It was an operation scar, perhaps an old tracheotomy, the thickened tissue raised and almost white against the surrounding brown skin.

The effort of finding a telltale sign had been so extreme that Sabrina heard herself pant. She kept her eyes shut and pictured the face again, imprinting it, making it a clear feature of fresh memory: small chin, wide upper lip, prominent cheekbones, rounded and deep-set dark amber eyes, hair combed back behind the ears.

Sabrina opened her eyes. She felt as if she had done a day’s work. She looked at the empty seat again. The thought of her bag being somewhere else right now, in other hands that might do unthinkable mischief, was like a goad behind her, prodding, shoving.

She jumped in behind the wheel, banged the door shut and threw the engine into gear. As she tore away along the road she had no idea where she was going, beyond knowing she had to start her search in the town.

People were staring. Women had their hands over their mouths, others drew their veils protectively across their eyes. The whole market had stopped to watch the commotion at the vegetable stall.

‘I do not speak English!’ the stallholder howled. He was an old man, and Sabrina had him by the front of his shirt. She held on with both hands and looked determined enough to pick him up and throw him across the market. ‘No English! I speak no English!’

‘You just spoke it!’ Sabrina rasped; falling into the character imposed by her unflattering clothes. ‘Now you’re going to rack your brains and answer my question or I’m going to drag your spindly old carcass down to the local clink!’

She had started out her enquiry much more gently, stopping by the old man’s stall, asking him if he knew of a young woman with a scar at her throat, a good-looking young woman that Sabrina was anxious to find. Then she noticed that the old trader had his hand in her jacket pocket. She caught him by the wrist, twisted his arm up his back and pushed his face into a pile of green chillies. She let him stay that way, howling, his mouth half stoppered with his produce, while she did a good enough impression of a crazy woman to keep the other traders at a respectful distance. When she finally released the man and grabbed him by the collar, she guessed he was scared enough to rat on his mother.

‘Are you going to tell me?’ she demanded. ‘Huh? Or do I beat you up and haul you off to the police?’

‘Please, no, do not hurt me, I beg you …’

‘Talk, then.’

‘You are looking for a woman called Phoolan Sena …’

‘Where do I find her?’

‘She lives with her son over there.’ He pointed to a clutch of small houses beyond the perimeter of the market. ‘Her house has a blue door.’

‘And you’ll have a black eye if I go over there and find out you’re lying to me.’

Sabrina let the man go and marched away. She pushed her way through the narrow lanes between the rickety barrows, past staring stallholders and their cringing customers.

Out on the bare ground at the rear of the market she paused and looked back, just able to see her car at the top of the narrow street where she had parked it. If the locks were as good as she had been told, it should be all right, although the way today had gone, she could not invest much faith in anything.

She found the house with the blue door and rapped on it, seeing paint fly off in little flakes under the impact of her knuckles. Feet shuffled beyond the door, then it swung open. For a split second the woman with the scar on her neck just stared. Then her memory kicked in and she jumped back, half turning as she leapt, getting ready to run for the back door.

‘Hold it!’

Sabrina caught her by the hair and tugged. The woman yelled. Pulled hair, like a kicked shin, can immobilize a person long enough for an attacker to get the upper hand. Sabrina swept her leg behind the woman’s knees and put her flat on her back.

‘You’re Phoolan, right?’ Sabrina knelt beside her. ‘Where is my bag, Phoolan?’

The woman looked hurt and frightened and surprised all at once.

‘I have a memory for faces,’ Sabrina told her, ‘even ones I haven’t really seen. So don’t give me any stories about you being the wrong woman. You do speak English, by the way?’

The woman’s stare was too mystified, too blank. She didn’t know what Sabrina was saying. She knew who she was, though. Sabrina stood up and pointed a warning finger. ‘Stay.’

The room was sparsely furnished; Sabrina could see at a glance that her bag wasn’t there. She went into the other room, much smaller, and found a little boy sitting on the side of a truckle bed. He was five or six years old and incredibly thin, with eyes that looked too big for his head. Sabrina’s bag lay behind him on the bed.

‘Hi, there,’ Sabrina said, making her voice soft. ‘How you doing?’

The boy looked wary but he stayed where he was. Sabrina ruffled his hair. She reached past him and picked up the bag. She pulled open the drawstring at the top and checked the wallet first. The cards were there, her WHO ID and papers of accreditation were there, but the money, five hundred dollars, was gone.

She looked at the thin little kid again and decided she wouldn’t make a noise about the cash. She pulled back the tab on the false bottom and there was the pistol. All in all, she could say she was in luck.

‘I hope your mom uses the cash to do you both some good.’

Sabrina turned away, running her fingers through the stuff in the bag, aware that something else was missing.

Then a terrible pain hit her. She dropped to her knees and rolled on her side, gasping. The boy was standing, one empty hand outstretched, staring down at her. As he turned and ran, Sabrina reached behind her, clenched her teeth and pulled the Swiss Army knife from the back of her thigh.

‘Aah! God! Aaow!’

She pushed herself up and turned at a commotion in the other room. She saw the feet scamper out the front door, the boy and his mother. They were off like the wind, with enough money to stay away for a while, or to just go and live somewhere else for good.

Sabrina stood up, grunting, feeling the stiffness in her leg. She got a field dressing and an ampoule of wound wash from the zippered pocket in the bag.

‘I used to call it my lucky Swiss Army knife,’ she grunted.

The kid had used the longest, sharpest blade. Judging by the margin of blood on the polished steel, it had gone in three full centimetres. It felt like he had used a bayonet, but on the plus side there wasn’t much bleeding. Sabrina pulled up her skirt and squirted the antibacterial on to the wound.

‘Oh hell, hell, hell!’ A fresh agony hit her. ‘Son of a bitch!’

It burned like a blowtorch. She distracted herself by tearing open the dressing wrapper with her teeth, and as the pain diffused away and left behind only the nagging throb of punctured muscle, she tried once again to tell herself that, on balance, she had been pretty lucky.

Philpott picked up the red phone on the second ring and waited for the scrambler noise to subside.

‘Sabrina? Where in God’s name have you been?’

‘There was a hitch, sir. I’m truly sorry, I would have been in touch sooner if it had been possible.’

‘Something wrong with the phone, is there? We can always get a replacement to you if you think you need one.’

‘The phone’s fine, sir. I just encountered a little setback, and what with one thing and another, my call-in got delayed. I’ve already smacked my wrist on your behalf.’

‘Quite right. Are your problems sorted out now? Can I rely on you sticking to our agreed schedule from here on?’

‘Yes, sir, you can.’

‘Fine. Be careful.’

He put down the phone and immediately the black one beside it warbled. He picked it up, glancing at the clock. He had planned to leave half an hour ago.

‘Philpott.’

‘Thomas Lubbock.’

Philpott’s eyes narrowed. A call direct from the Director of Policy Control could only mean the pressure was being turned up.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Pencil a date in your diary.’ Lubbock’s voice was cold and offhand, a model of rehearsed detachment. ‘Wednesday, March twelfth. Techniques-and-procedures review.’

‘I don’t think I can manage that date,’ Philpott said.

‘I wasn’t offering you an option.’

‘Of course you weren’t,’ Philpott said smoothly. ‘You haven’t the authority to do anything like that.’

‘I …’ Philpott listened, relishing the break in Lubbock’s flow, the crack in his composure. ‘I would point out that the Secretary General has agreed the date —’

‘You’ve spoken to him?’ Philpott injected a note of surprise.

‘I have spoken with one of his staff …’

‘Ah.’ Philpott let that hang in the air. ‘Look here, this is what we’ll do. I’ll speak to the SG in person and let him know that I’d favour another date. He can then convey the message to his staff, one of whom will no doubt get back to you. If your revised date doesn’t suit me either, maybe I should suggest to the SG that I decide on a date and time myself.’

Lubbock was silent for five seconds. When he finally spoke it was clear he had trouble controlling his voice. ‘I’m sure you enjoy this, Philpott,’ he said. ‘I can tell you’re the type that likes games. But I would suggest — and you’d do well to note — that you’re about to discover that a frivolous administration cannot survive in this organization.’

‘Good of you to call.’ Philpott hung up. He picked up the receiver again and tapped in Whitlock’s extension number. ‘Come in, C.W. I need to have a word.’

Whitlock appeared at once.

‘The Arno Skuttnik enquiry,’ Philpott said. ‘Is it a solid one, or are we chasing bubbles?’

‘It has promise.’ Whitlock updated Philpott on the photograph, the mysterious woman, the growing mystery of the dead porter’s connection with Adam Korwin, and the question of the handwriting on the picture. ‘It could work against us, of course,’ he added. ‘At this stage who can say?’

‘You think, nevertheless, that it could be something of substance, either way?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Then follow it. But now I want you to make it a priority. Lubbock is starting to lean. Or he’s trying to. Sooner or later I’ll have to accede to a techniques-and-procedures review. When I do, I don’t want to go in there on the defensive.’

Whitlock nodded. ‘If there’s ammunition to be found, I’ll do all I can to find it. But…’

‘What?’

‘Fingers crossed I don’t find a booby trap instead.’

7

It had been a long and eventful day, but not the kind Mike favoured. He had ended up tired, footsore and dejected, and he had gained nothing. He had come back to base with more questions than answers, and that was not the way things were supposed to work.

He sat swirling his drink, watching Ram Jarwal read the faxes that had accumulated while they were out.

‘It’s depressing to think,’ Mike said, ‘that the death of the man they found down the slope this morning, and the death of Reverend Young, are everyday statistics by now. Just records on paper, with nothing being done about them.’

‘Containment is beyond the police now, never mind catching villains,’ Ram said, turning from the fax machine. ‘They tidy up the consequences of crime and administer the paperwork.’

‘Reverend Young seemed to think this was still a pretty civilized and well ordered area.’

‘He worried that the troubles in the region would soon make it as bad as the rest of Kashmir,’ Ram said. ‘The fact is, in the space of a year things deteriorated a lot more than he realized. The only difference here, right here on the west side of the Vale, is they have community spirit, and that gives them the backbone to maintain something like independence.’

‘Independence is hard to lick.’

‘Sure,’ Ram said, ‘but criminals and the political agitators are on the case. They’re wearing away the stability, erasing the civilizing factors …’

‘Factors like Reverend Young.’ Mike shook his head. ‘Philpott should be out here seeing the situation for himself. This stuff would chivvy him into action. He’s all for pulling out major stops when he thinks civilization is under threat from the barbarians.’

‘I’ve heard about Philpott.’ Ram brought the bottle of Jim Beam and topped up Mike’s glass. ‘English, isn’t he? Used to be at Scotland Yard.’

‘Technically Scottish, I believe. He had several years as a Detective Chief Superintendent and Joint Chief of the Special Branch. That gave him a solid point of view on the subject of government security.’

‘An old school disciplinarian?’

Mike shook his head. ‘He’s nothing you can hang a label on. He’s a champion of democratic government, but he feels democracy hasn’t been correctly defined or formulated. It needs to lean towards benign dictatorship.’

‘So he’s kind of right-wing.’

‘Kind of,’ Mike said. ‘But like I told you, it’s hard to label him. He’s an individualist. He believes, for example, that a man or woman with a cop’s background is better at gathering results and evaluating them than even the best government man.’

‘I thought the training was much the same for police and government law enforcers.’

‘Philpott believes people trained in government agencies lack the policeman’s out-on-the-street understanding of criminals. Cops are also better at keeping in mind the requirements of the law, especially in the way evidence has to be gathered and how it’s put before the courts.’

‘You think he’s right about that?’

‘Essentially, yes. On the other hand, Philpott occasionally uses the kind of undisciplined guerrilla tactics that no cop or G-man would get away with.’

‘So he’s a walking set of contradictions.’

Mike nodded. ‘That’s one label you could pin on him.’

Ram had gone to the window. He stood there listening.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘You’ll find out in a minute.’ He went back to the fax machine. ‘Philpott’s certainly got interesting impulses.’ He held up a sheet of paper. ‘This is a communiqué from UN Information and Services in New Delhi. It tells me that as a result of a snap decision by Director Philpott of UNACO, followed by rapid interdepartmental negotiations earlier today, we are due to have another visit from the Sikorsky.’

‘When?’

‘Any minute now.’

‘What’s it about?’

Ram winked. ‘I’m sure you’d prefer a surprise.’

Mike stood up and drained his glass. As he put it down Ram held up a finger. ‘I hear it. Let’s get outside and shut the door before the dust covers everything.’

It was a cold, starry night with a crescent moon almost directly overhead. Mike and Ram stood with their backs against the front wall of the cabin, hugging themselves against the icy breeze as the black helicopter descended, deafening them with its noise, throwing up a whirlwind as first one wheel touched down, then the other.

The door swung open and a bag was thrown out. Mike peered past his shielding hand to see who had arrived. He saw boots, a flapping black coat and the top of a man’s head bent low as he stepped out and snatched up the bag.

The helicopter door closed and a second later it was rising again, powering away from them, turning in a wide arc southward. The new arrival walked right up to Mike, who still couldn’t see him for the wind and the dust.

‘This is getting monotonous, Michael.’

Mike blinked a couple of times and saw the grinning face of Lenny Trent.

‘Lenny! What the —’

‘Amazing, isn’t it? For years I see nothing of you, then we start bumping into each other all over the place.’

As the dust settled Ram opened the cabin door and beckoned them in. Lenny stood in the living room, flushed, combing his fingers through his hair.

‘Somebody tell me what’s happening,’ Mike said.

‘Be glad to.’ Lenny took off his coat and dropped it on the back of an easy chair. He removed his steel-framed glasses, wiped them with his scarf, put them on again. ‘Just as soon as there’s a drink working itself into my bloodstream.’

Ram handed him a jigger glass half full of bourbon.

‘You have a fine memory there, old buddy.’

‘You two know each other?’ Mike said.

‘Ten years,’ Ram said, ‘give or take.’

‘I have been known to wander these fragrant slopes,’ Lenny said.

‘So why are you here now?’

‘Mr Philpott called me in Seattle with a couple of questions about the possible location of drug routes through the Vale of Kashmir. I accommodated him, and I added that you and I had just talked about the same thing. He was intrigued to learn how far back we went, and right there and then, while he was on the line, he did some out-loud thinking.’

‘Another idiosyncrasy,’ Mike told Ram.

‘In a nutshell,’ Lenny said, ‘he explained that he needed police liaison on this job, and normally he would have sent out C.W. Whitlock as part of the team. But he’s got C.W. on something important in New York, so he wondered if I would consider secondment — without loss of status, of course-to this here mission.’

‘Did he give you time to think about it?’ Mike said.

‘Oh, sure. He gave me from then until he was ready to hang up. I told him I was almost through with the job in Seattle, which would now be handled through the courts by the police and the DA’s office, but I added I would have to clear things with my own immediate superiors.’

Mike was nodding. ‘He told you not to worry about that, he would fix it.’

‘Right. And he did. And here I am. I’ve an appointment the day after tomorrow with the Chief of Police at Srinagar. He’ll give me an overview of developments in local drug shipping, and I’ll swap him a few names he could use, and we should get along just fine.’

‘That’s going to be your job here? Police liaison?’

‘Among much else, Mike. I don’t like staying too narrow. Linking and co-ordination are the things I do best out here, so that’s what I’ll concentrate on.’ Lenny took a gulp of bourbon. ‘Is there a schedule of events I can fall in with between now and when I visit the police?’

‘We’ve a dinner date,’ Ram said, holding up another fax. ‘Dr Arberry. He’s an American who settled here a couple of years ago.’

‘He’s doing big things with his public medical centres,’ Mike told Lenny. ‘Right now his foundation is setting up a free hospital for the disadvantaged people of the region. Reverend Young thought highly of him.’

‘They told me what happened to Alex Young,’ Lenny said. ‘I met him a time or two. Nice guy.’ He turned to Ram. ‘So why do you think Dr Arberry has sent out a dinner invite?’

‘He heard about the arrival of a UN fact-finder,’ Ram said.

‘That would do it. If I were in his place I’d want all the UN and Interpol contacts I could make.’

‘He wants us to join him tomorrow at eight. I’m sure he’d be happy to have another guest along. What’s your cover, Lenny?’

‘Intelligence co-ordinator to the Security Council.’ Lenny smiled. ‘Sounds glossy, huh? The Council approved it, too. What plans do you have for tomorrow daytime?’

‘More damned walking, probably,’ Mike said.

‘We’ve been on recon,’ Ram explained. ‘Getting Mike au fait with the terain.’

‘And the patterns of casual murder,’ Mike added.

‘I can show you some probable drug routes, if you like,’ Lenny offered.

‘Would Paul Seaton be likely to use any of them?’

‘Who can say? Maybe I’ll know more about that when I’ve talked with the police.’

‘Paul Seaton?’ Ram said.

Lenny sighed. ‘It’s a long story. But I’m sure that won’t stop Mike telling it.’

After an overnight stay in the town of Manali, at a boarding house run by a couple from Yorkshire, Sabrina drove directly north, through scrub land and flat farm country, along roads scarcely wider than the car’s wheelbase. Sticking to her brief, she stopped wherever she saw a community and asked directions, all the time evaluating the people and the social divisions. It wasn’t easy to distinguish signs of criminal infiltration and political coercion in territory where all of the people appeared equally poor, but Sabrina had her orders.

Late in the afternoon she arrived at Palanjal, fifteen kilometres south of the Kashmir border, and there she began to see a difference. Palanjal was a medium-sized town with a population of perhaps twenty thousand. The difference here was that social divisions were visible. Some people were better dressed than others; better nourished, too; and on the sidewalks there appeared to be a rule of precedence, the poorer, shabbier citizens automatically making way for the others.

Sabrina stopped for petrol at a wayside station. The attendant spoke English, but he was not keen to engage in conversation. Sabrina persevered. She explained that she was doing a survey in the area, estimating the cumulative effects of weather and pollution on the environment.

‘I have to report back to my people, that’s the World Health Organization, maybe you’ve heard of them? On the basis of my findings, as well as those of maybe a hundred other ecology monitors, revised cultivation and crop-planting regimes will be devised, and it’s hoped that communities such as this one will see real benefits in the years to come.’

The man on the pumps nodded, took the money for the petrol and disappeared indoors.

Ten minutes later, as Sabrina walked through the local market and spoke to people, the same thing kept happening. She was not directly shunned, but people wanted no prolonged contact with her. It could have been a local trait, but she didn’t believe that. Sabrina knew when people were scared of saying too much, or were frightened by the consequences of being seen in certain company. She had experienced identical behaviour in Sicily before the Mafia trials, she had seen it in Guatemala, too, and in Chile and Bosnia.

She tried to get lodgings for the night in Palanjal, but no one had rooms. There was a hotel, empty-looking, but the clerk said sorry, they had no accommodation available now, or for the foreseeable future.

‘Maybe you could recommend some place else?’

The clerk shook his head. ‘There is nowhere else, I assure you.’

‘Then I guess I’ll have to sleep in the car.’

‘There is time to move on to another town,’ the clerk said. ‘It is not advisable to stay here without proper accommodation.’

‘I see.’

She left the hotel and got in the car. It was four in the afternoon. She decided to head for the next town, which according to her map was Jullaspur. If she couldn’t get to the bottom of what troubled the people in this town, at least she could make a comparison with the way visitors were treated at the next place.

As she drove to the end of the main street, following the sign pointing to Jullaspur, a man stepped out in front of the car. Sabrina had to brake hard to keep from hitting him. He stood in the roadway with his hands on his hips, staring at her through the windscreen, his bearded face expressionless.

Sabrina sat tight, waiting, avoiding conclusions. The man, she noticed, was wearing western clothes: leather trousers, a striped collarless shirt, shiny black leather boots. He also wore a gun and a bandolier of ammunition across his chest.

Sabrina’s door jerked open. Another man was there. He was clean-shaven and looked more Arab than Indian. He wore one silver earring and had a deep scar from the side of his nose across his cheek to his left ear, from which the lobe was missing.

‘Out, please,’ he said.

‘Get away from me,’ Sabrina said.

He took hold of her arm and pulled sharply, jerking her out on to the road. She landed on her back. He put his foot firmly on her stomach and snapped his fingers at the man standing in front of the car. He came and between them they put Sabrina on her feet and frog-marched her across the road to a battered Mitsubishi pickup. Sabrina made a show of squirming resistance, but she was careful to do nothing to show she could handle herself in a situation like this.

‘You will lie still in the bottom,’ the cleanshaven one said as they hoisted her into the back of the pickup. ‘This man will sit near you. If you try to escape, he has orders to shoot you in the knees. Do you understand?’

Sabrina nodded, looking terrified, choking back a whimper. She was dumped without ceremony into the hard metal bottom of the pickup trailer. The hairy-faced man got in beside her. When the engine started she closed her eyes and curled over on her side.

‘Listen!’ the man said harshly. ‘You listen and remember!’

She nodded, her lower lip between her teeth.

‘You move and I shoot.’

No worries, she thought. Escape was the last thing she planned. This might be dangerous, it might be fatal, but it was progress. In her job progress was always the option of choice, wherever it led.

8

C.W. Whitlock stood in a small, tidy laboratory two doors away from the TF3 suite in the UN Secretariat building, listening to a recital of complaints from Luther Flint. Luther was head of Scientific Resources, a subdivision of UNACO Clandestine Enterprises. He was also, in the view of many, a borderline clinical paranoid.

Today he had chosen Whitlock as the target for what Philpott called a ‘querimonius diatribe’.

‘I don’t know how you people expect us to function, C.W. Time and again — you’d think it was deliberate, a matter of policy — you give us the scantiest, lowest quality material to work with, and expect us to turn in results of shimmering, incandescent excellence. And if the results of our exertions are disappointing, if they’re less than you wanted, you put the word about that we just aren’t up to the job we were hired to do.’

‘That just isn’t true —’

‘Now you’re calling me a liar.’

‘I’m saying you’re mistaken when you say people criticize you or evaluate your work in a negative way.’ Whitlock knew there was no way to placate Luther. The best he could do was get him on a low simmer. ‘Speaking for myself, I’ve nothing but admiration for the job you do. I appreciate that your consistently splendid results are all the more impressive considered alongside the downright cruddy source materials you often have to work with.’

‘Well,’ Luther grunted, ‘just so long as you know the conditions imposed on us aren’t ideal. The fact is, they’re not even reasonable.’

‘Sure, sure.’ Whitlock pointed to the coloured snapshot mounted on a copy easel on the bench beside them. It was the picture he had borrowed from Clancy Spencer. ‘I’m not asking you to do the impossible here, truly I’m not. I just want you to make the best copy and the best blow-up you can, then scan the blow-up into your computer, enhance it, print it out at roughly fifteen hundred dpi and do another blow-up from that.’

‘And of course you wouldn’t be trying to tell me how to do my job, would you?’

‘What?’

‘All you have to do,’ Luther said, ‘is tell me you want the best quality-enhanced blow-up I can make. No need to tell me the way I should achieve that. I’m a professional, remember. It’s part of my job to know how to do whatever you ask.’

Whitlock was tempted to pull the picture off the easel, march out of there and do the job himself. But he held on to his composure; Luther, after all, did the best job of anyone in his field.

‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘I accept it maybe wasn’t intentional.’ Luther shook back a strand of white hair and adjusted his horn-rims. ‘How soon do you want the print?’

‘Tomorrow?’ Whitlock ventured.

‘Sweet God.’ Luther glared at him. ‘This isn’t the only work I have to do, you know.’

‘I appreciate that, but this is kind of pressing …’

Luther sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Whitlock left the laboratory without another word. He went straight to the Secure Communications Suite and sat down at one of the computers. For a few seconds he was motionless, letting the padded, dimly-lit interior of the room work its soothing effect on him. He closed his eyes and sat back in the chair, feeling the reassuring support on his shoulders.

It had been a bad twenty-four hours. The pressure for once had not been professional — although there was plenty of that — but domestic. His wife had finally moved out. She had gone because his work received more of him than she did, and because she had found another man who was keen to devote himself to her and to the life they would build together. Instead of her absence creating a gap in Whitlock’s life, he was finding that it was more like a disheartening presence, something solid, a wall perhaps, that separated him from the life he would have preferred. On the other hand, he could never have come up to his wife’s expectations, so there was a measure of relief in his gloom.

He opened his eyes and shook himself. He had almost fallen asleep. He tapped a code on the keyboard and a moment later he was connected to the Kremlin Archive, the third biggest database in Europe. The archive, consisting of millions of items of classified matter hijacked by US agents from a KGB hideaway in 1993, was maintained by technical staff of the US Embassy in Rome. The embassy boasted a state-of-the-art computer-communications installation among its other attractions, and in recent months UNACO had been granted unrestricted access to the archive.

Whitlock entered a request to review the picture files, and was asked what kind of pictures. He ticked PERSONNEL: ESPIONAGE. He entered the name Adam Korwin. A pause, then three pictures came up on the screen side by side. The first showed Korwin as a young man, photographed with the onion-domes of St Basil’s in the background. In the second his head had been shaved and he wore a moustache. The third picture showed him as he looked in Clancy Spencer’s snapshot, although the date on this picture was 1989.

Whitlock downloaded the third picture to the printer, and requested that a summary of Korwin’s KGB service record be attached. In a couple of minutes he had a twelve-page dossier, most of it in summary, but impressive enough to put before a techniques-and-procedures review.

Next Whitlock entered a search under the name of Arno Skuttnik. It was a long shot and, as he expected, the archive found no match for that name. One Skuttnik was listed, but his first name was Tibor. Whitlock called for a picture and up came a grainy shot of a young man in a flat cap. The caption said: Tibor Skuttnik, discipline officer to Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Dyel (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) Moscow, 1938: subsequently appointed to Stalin’s private staff-See file under Skuttnik, T.

Whitlock was inclined to leave it there. This was not his man. On the other hand, a look at the file couldn’t hurt. He called it up and a single page appeared onscreen. If non-military medals were any guide, Skuttnik had been a good and loyal servant to Stalin; he had worked in the capacity of an enforcer, personally dealing with people who tried to approach their leader at public gatherings, also inflicting summary punishment on any of the domestic staff who fell short of requirements.

Skuttnik had been rewarded in 1948 with an appointment to the Leningrad Intelligence School, a training centre for spies, where he taught unarmed combat.

In the final paragraph the report became vague. Skuttnik, it said, was believed to have been posted as a sleeper to the United States, but confirmation of this was not contained in the archive; it was only mentioned in letters between other Kremlin employees of the time.

Whitlock thought about that. The fact was, a lot of Russian agents were sent to the United States during the fifties and sixties. It would be unprofessional to read anything significant into the last paragraph of the report.

‘We still don’t know who you were, Arno …’

Then, for the first time, Whitlock looked at the caption at the top of the page. It said: Kremlin Service Record — Tibor Arno Skuttnik.

After a bumpy trip — Sabrina estimated it took twenty minutes — the pickup turned off the rough country track and into a wooded hollow between two hills. She was hoisted from the truck by her abductors and frog-marched again, this time into a building that looked like a miniature temple.

Inside someone had been cooking. Analytical as always, Sabrina identified the smells of boiled rice, overcooked green vegetables and dhal. She also identified the man sitting at the far end of the tall central room. It was something of a shock, but she didn’t let the recognition show. Instead, she went on looking scared.

Her captors marched her up to the throne-like chair where the man sat with one leg slung over the arm rest. He had a coarse, once-handsome face, with pads of fat at the temples and under the chin. His hair had receded until the hairline was halfway across the top of his scalp; to compensate, the remaining hair was long and tied back in a ponytail. He wore western clothes like the other two, although his looked much finer.

‘I am Hafi,’ he announced in English.

Hafi Bal Mardekhar, Sabrina recalled, leader of the Khalq faction. He was known to UNACO as a murdering Pakistani bandit with Afghan affiliations, who randomly terrorized towns and villages in northern India and south Kashmir. Like many self-styled warlords he had long ago swallowed his own propaganda and believed himself to be supremely charismatic and a politically important figure.

‘Do you have a name?’ he demanded.

‘I’m — yes — I’m Susan,’ Sabrina faltered. ‘Susan Duke.’

‘Oh.’ Hafi’s stiff face tried to look mocking. ‘Not Nikita, then? Or Petrushka?’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘You are a Russian infiltrator!’ Hafi shouted. ‘You were trying to mislead us by taking the long route to Pakistan!’

Sabrina fished in her jacket pocket and produced her WHO identification. ‘I work for the World Health Organization. I’m an American.’

‘Paper will take on anything,’ Hafi waved the document away. ‘Besides, I know an infiltrator when I see one.’

‘I promise you, I’m not a Russian,’ Sabrina said, simultaneously thinking what an idiot he was. ‘And anyway,’ she added, ‘what possible reason could Russia have for wanting to infiltrate or invade Pakistan now?’

‘Russia has old scores to settle. Old ambitions to fulfil. Many times they have sent minions to mingle with the people and spread propaganda.’ Hafi leaned forward. ‘They try to establish a base of operations by cunning.’

‘You’ve got me completely wrong, I assure you –’

‘If I thought your masters would listen,’ Hafi interrupted, ‘I would let you go and you could tell them they are wasting their time.’ He smiled in a way that suggested he was trying to look evil. ‘Of course, they wouldn’t listen.’

‘I am a citizen of the United States,’ Sabrina said. ‘I am in India under the terms of an international agreement that protects me from being impeded or molested. I —’

‘You speak good English for a Russian,’ Hafi said. He waved his arm. ‘Take her away.’

She was marched to the back of the tall room, along a short passage and through a narrow doorway to a smaller room, much darker than the other. In the gloom she was aware of other people. There was an unmistakable smell of blood, musty and dried, and an overall odour of decay.

The men pushed her into a corner and went out. The door slammed shut and she heard the key turn.

‘Are you English?’ A woman’s voice whispered.

Sabrina said nothing for the moment. She shut her eyes and counted to a hundred, letting her retinas sensitize and her pupils dilate.

She opened her eyes. The room looked brighter now. There were three other people. One was a man, young and very thin, asleep in a corner. An old woman was huddled on a stained mattress in the opposite corner, her head down and resting on her knees. The third person, a young woman in a blue sari, sat close to Sabrina.

‘Are you?’ she said. ‘English?’

‘American. How long have you been here? What’s going on?’

‘They brought me here yesterday. I am called Deena. I was at work in Chaudhuri, two hours’ travelling from here. I work in a laundry. I was wheeling a basket of sheets across the yard at the back of the laundry when two men came in, grabbed me and put me in a truck. I was brought here and told nothing. But I know who they are. I know it is Hafi and the Khalq.’

‘You speak very good English,’ Sabrina said.

‘I worked in London for three years. Battersea. My visa was withdrawn when my cousin, who sponsored me, was arrested and convicted of selling cannabis.’

‘You seem very calm about all this, Deena. Aren’t you scared?’

‘I was when they brought me here. Then they put this bowl in the room.’

Sabrina looked. It was a willow pattern soup bowl, half full of chopped leaves. ‘Bhang?’

‘I chew enough to keep from being afraid.’

Sabrina had heard of that. There were people in Latin America who did it all the time, they chewed tiny pieces of marijuana leaf, and left just enough time between chews to maintain a near-normal existence, minus the anxieties.

‘The old woman and the boy took so much they have been asleep all day,’ Deena said.

‘How long have they been here?’

‘Since the day before yesterday, both of them. Hafi brought them when he took over this place. The boy was taken from the place where he worked, a field ten kilometres from here. The woman was asleep on a back porch in Jallapur when they snatched her. They brought her here and for several hours she was kept out in the main part of the building. This is a temple, very special, a private family place of worship.’

‘And the bandits just took it over?’

‘They killed the family, the old woman said. They were out there worshipping, men, women and children, and Hafi simply walked in and shot them. The bodies were kept in this room until it was dark.’

That explained the stink of blood and corruption, Sabrina thought.

‘Then they were taken away and the old woman and the boy were thrown in here.’ Deena leaned closer to Sabrina. ‘Don’t you wonder what they plan to do with us?’

‘I was getting up the courage to ask. Hafi thinks I’m a spy, or he says he does. Does that mean I get treated any worse than anybody else?’

‘Hafi treats all his captives the same,’ Deena said. ‘Everyone in this part of the country knows what to expect when they see him draw up in town in his big red jeep. He wants money. All the money a town can raise.’

‘How are they persuaded to hand it over?’

‘He brings persuasion with him. Always it is one of his captives, and always a person who does not come from the town Hafi wishes to rob. Hafi tells the people, “Look, nobody in your town has been hurt. Not yet. But see what will happen if I do not have the money I demand in one hour’s time.” And he puts the captive in the middle of the road and shoots him or her through the head.’

Sabrina was already framing plans to get out of there. Scope was limited by the certainty that she couldn’t leave these others behind.

‘Do you want a piece of bhang?’ Deena said.

‘No, thanks. What I need is a cup of coffee. I always think better with a cappuccino beside me.’

Two-thirds of the complication was removed an hour later, when the henchmen who abducted Sabrina came into the room and took away the old woman and the young man.

‘They will be robbing two towns,’ Deena said, chewing slowly on a chunk of leaf.

For a time Sabrina was shocked and distracted by the heartlessness of it, the shameful squandering of life. After a while her sense of self-preservation reasserted itself.

‘Deena, do you know how many men are here with Hafi?’

‘Only those two. His gang is very big, so big he calls it a movement. But when he’s out raising money, it is just him and those two.’

‘So you and I are here alone.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Right. Do me a favour.’

‘Mm?’

‘Lay off the leaf. We’ll have work to do.’

9

Dr Arberry sent a Land-Rover to pick up Mike, Ram and Lenny. The driver was Nisar, an old man with thick-lensed spectacles who drove with his face pushed over the wheel, as if he needed to be as close to the windscreen as possible. Nisar drove erratically but he appeared to be comfortable with the narrow, twisting roads. He swung the vehicle around blind bends with the certainty of a man who knew exactly what to expect.

‘Back to first things,’ Lenny said in the rumbling darkness, watching the cones of the headlights cut into the night. He was squeezed between Mike and Ram, holding on to the back of the front seats for support. ‘This was my life at the start of my career.’

‘Who with?’ Ram said.

‘The DEA. Riding around Colombia in jeeps and jalopies at dead of night, watching out for bad guys.’

‘Except you didn’t use headlights,’ Mike said.

‘Right. We had night-vision helmets. Blanketed engines, too. The element of surprise. We ran over more druggies than we arrested.’

‘Around here,’ Ram said, ‘the bandits operating the drug convoys are the people with the hi-tech. The police caught a straggler off the end of a convoy last month and when they searched his saddlebags he had a night scope, laser-sighted pistol, secure-band radio and a Walkman.’

Nisar turned sharply down a gravelled road flanked by tall mature trees draped with moss. A hundred metres along there was an ornamental iron fence with a cultivated lawn behind it. In the distance they could see the house, a replica of a Southern plantation mansion, pure white, with a tall pillared porch and curved wings on either side.

‘I get the impression Dr Arberry is made of money,’ Lenny said. ‘Do you know him, Ram?’

‘We’re acquainted. He’s loaned me books from time to time. He’s direct, balanced, incredibly focused on his work. He even looks right for the part, like Gregory Peck maybe thirty years ago.’

They passed through tall electrically-operated gates and the driver accelerated up the wide, red-chip drive to the front of the floodlit house. He braked as if it was an emergency, throwing his passengers forward. As they scrambled out, a deep, Boston-tinted voice greeted them.

‘Gentlemen. You survived the journey. Magnificent.’

Simon Arberry stepped to the front of the porch. He was tall and lean, with clipped sandy hair that looked nearly blond against his tan. The impression of healthy middle age was enhanced by his white linen suit and pale blue open-necked shirt. Ram was dead right, Mike thought. It was like meeting a fiftyish Gregory Peck.

Ram made the introductions and Arberry led them inside. The hallway resembled the foyer of a good hotel: small black and white chequerboard tiles on the floor, dark green silk and hessian drapes, oak-panelled doors with brass fittings. There was even an ebony reproduction of Praxiteles’ Wrestlers, mounted on a plinth by the door to the drawing room.

‘This is where I fire up my enthusiasms,’ Arberry said, showing them in. ‘It’s also my communications centre.’

The room was big enough to accommodate an ordinary bungalow, chimneys and all. One wall was fitted from floor to ceiling with bookshelves; on the opposite side of the room, on either side of the Adam-style fireplace, fine rosewood tables and cedar shelves held a range of electronic equipment — radio transmitters, receivers, DAT and reel-to-reel recorders and twin CD burners — all apparently on standby. There were also two satellite-tuned TV sets with the sound turned down.

With glasses of dry sherry, poured by an Indian in immaculate English butler’s livery, the visitors listened as Simon Arberry bemoaned the death of his friend, Reverend Alex Young.

‘He called me a visionary,’ Arberry said, ‘but I’ll tell you something, I never had a tenth his insight or his dedication to these people. With anything he could scrape together, any meagre sums of money or threadbare resources, he would conjure a way of benefiting his flock. Time and again I watched him put together improvements to existing resources with his bare hands. And he was eternally involved, he never stood back.’

‘Your own commitment to community health and welfare can’t be played down,’ Ram said. ‘Reverend Young talked a great deal about your schemes, the facilities you’ve set in place, the plans you have …’

‘My own dedication is to meeting God-awful challenges,’ Arberry said. ‘I am to an extent a humanitarian. My need to achieve things lies in the general direction of downtrodden and disadvantaged people. But first and foremost, what I relish is the provocation of an obstacle.’

When the butler announced that dinner was served they crossed the hall to the dining room. It was long and deep-carpeted, with a French crystal chandelier, gold silk window drapes and a table capable of seating thirty. For this occasion the large table had been put against the wall and another, two metres square, was set up in the centre of the room.

‘You’ll have noticed,’ Arberry said as they sat down, ‘that there are few if any Indian touches about my home. That’s because I find it pretentious for a man of an entirely different culture to pretend he’s at home with the styles and traditional trappings of a place he never saw until he was thirty. It’s one thing to love the country, quite another to absorb its natives’ cultural instincts.’

‘Like a guy from California trying to feel at ease in a New York apartment,’ Lenny said.

Arberry laughed. ‘Something like that happened to me, come to think of it. I grew up in Boston, went to Harvard, did most of the Boston things right through my formative years. Then when I graduated med school I got an internship in a San Francisco hospital. The different way of life nearly finished me.’

The food was wheeled in on two trolleys by the butler and an Indian maid in a blue and silver sari.

‘The point I was going to make,’ Arberry said as the dishes were lined up on the sideboard, ‘is that there may be none of the local cultural or decorative touches in the house, but the odour of Indian cooking sure as hell permeates the corridors. I adore the stuff.’

Mike had been warned that the food served in Kashmir was usually disappointing to anyone who had eaten Indian cuisine in the West. That may have been the case in the restaurants of Srinagar and Pahalgam, but not in Simon Arberry’s house.

‘This is the best Indian cooking I ever ate,’ Mike declared.

Lenny nodded. So did Ram, both their mouths too full to speak. They were served dishes that even Ram had never seen or heard of before-sada pilau, kutchi biriani, aaloo tariwale — with a superb, bewildering selection of sauces and side dishes, and carafes of red, white, and rosé wine. Throughout the meal, Arberry managed to eat as fast as anyone, at the same time delivering a monologue about his plans for the region.

‘In eighteen months’ time I’ll open a treatment centre, right at the heart of the Vale, staffed by doctors and nurses specializing in tropical medicine. I have two district outpatient clinics already open, a regional surgical centre just up the hill from here, and the new nurses’ school will train girls from the local towns and villages and qualify them to a standard acceptable anywhere in the world.’

‘I can see that your motivation and belief in your work could get some amazing things done,’ Mike said. ‘But where does the money come from?’

‘I’m kept afloat by two things,’ Arberry said. ‘One is the approval of the authorities, the other is cash from large organizations throughout the world.’

‘How do you get them to part with it?’

‘I’m good at badgering.’

Over brandy and coffee Arberry tried to correct the one-sided bias he had imposed on the conversation. He asked Ram how his research into agricultural practices was going.

Ram improvised smoothly, turning the topic around and making it an overview of the Vale of Kashmir through the eyes of one whose job it was to study the territory.

‘Everything about this region is romantic. Did you know, Doctor, that the Vale is an ancient lake basin?’

Arberry shook his head.

‘For hundreds of years it was full of water.’

‘How long is the Vale?’ Lenny asked.

‘A hundred and forty kilometres,’ Ram said. ‘That’s eighty-five miles. It’s twenty miles wide. The mountains around the Vale are between twelve and sixteen thousand feet high. They shelter the area from the south-west monsoon. It’s as if…’ Ram held his hands out, palms vertical, facing each other; ‘as if somebody had designed it all, laid it out and said, well now, it needs to be fertile, and because it’s to be a centre for population, it has to be beautiful and also sheltered from the worst of the elements in the surrounding country.’

‘And of course, any good Hindu will tell you it was designed,’ Arberry said. ‘By the god Brahma. Ask anybody at all, they’ll tell you.’

‘And the next peasant is likely to tell you it was Vishnu,’ said Ram, ‘and the one after him will swear it was Siva.’

‘You lost me,’ Mike said.

‘Think of the Hindu gods this way,’ Ram said. ‘There is only one omnipresent god, but he has three physical forms to match his principal facets — he is Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, the destroyer and reproducer. In a way they all share characteristics of each other, which is because they’re all really the same being.’

‘The theology’s all very well,’ Lenny said, red-faced from the spices and the wine, ‘but what I want to know is, why do official sources always call the country Kashmir-and-Jammu?’ He knew the answer, but it did no harm to stick to his cover in a positive way, now and again.

‘That’s the official name,’ Ram said. ‘If you need the full historical and political picture, I’ll lend you a book. It’s enough to know, for now, that half the population of the state of Jammu and Kashmir lives here in the Vale, and we have two capitals — Srinagar in summer, Jammu in winter.’

‘And it’s as well to bear in mind the message of my dear dead friend Alex Young,’ Arberry said. ‘In a state troubled with conflicts of a dozen kinds, we in the Vale have the best of it. We are the stable centre.’

‘But enough unrest here could plunge the whole of Kashmir into terrible, bloody war,’ Ram said.

‘Do you think that’s a danger, Doctor?’ Mike said.

‘I certainly do. And I know how it is most likely to come about. If our society here ever breaks apart, it will be because of the bandits. The bandits, more than anyone else, are the ones dedicated to overthrowing the stability and the way of life we enjoy here. If something isn’t done to stop them, soon, they will hack apart the unity of the region, they will lay waste to it, and they will spread such fear, such corruption, that nothing will stop them turning the Vale into a smoking wilderness.’

‘And then the land grabbing will start,’ Ram said.

Lenny nodded. ‘And the empire building.’

‘But with the right help none of it need happen.’ Arberry held up his glass. ‘A toast. To the Vale of Kashmir, and to its continued existence as one of the most beautiful, most magical places on earth.’

Later, Arberry led his guests up the hill to his new surgical centre, a long concrete building housing three operating theatres and two recovery wards. He took them through the anaesthetic preparation rooms, showed them a roving head scanner, the latest mobile X-ray machines, and a battery of examination instruments linked to a central computer equipped with a diagnostic database.

‘A surgical unit any community could be proud of,’ Ram said.

‘But so small,’ Arberry pointed out. ‘We have an enormous waiting list. To double the size of this place wouldn’t cut the problem in half, it doesn’t work that way. But two more of these units, equally spaced from this one in a two-hundred-square-mile area, would cut the challenge to a third.’ He smiled. ‘You can see why Alex Young’s little medical facility was so valuable, and why it’ll be such a loss until somebody gets it up and running again. Our people need all the help they can get.’

Before Mike, Ram and Lenny got back in the Land-Rover with old Nisar, Arberry led them down a steep stairway at the foot of the lawn behind the house. It took them a hundred metres underground. At the pitch-dark bottom of the stairs Arberry told them to stop, then he threw a switch.

‘My God,’ Mike breathed. ‘That’s amazing.’

They were in a natural subterranean cave lit by dozens of concealed spots and floodlamps.

‘I call it the Golden Cavern,’ Arberry said. ‘That isn’t very imaginative of me, but I think you’ll agree the name fits.’

‘It’s like a dream,’ Lenny said.

The craggy walls and high ceiling were covered in gold. The light thrown back was so bright, so sparkling, that Ram had to shield his eyes.

‘It’s actually not gold at all,’ Arberry said. ‘It’s iron pyrites, but in this setting it’s as beautiful as any real gold. And nature put it there all by herself.’

Before they left, he gave each of his visitors a fat wallet of papers. ‘Facts and figures,’ he said, ‘my observations concerning crime in this area. Perhaps, if you take the information to heart, you may bring collective pressure on your people to do something to help us.’

‘He’s a charismatic guy,’ Lenny said on the way back. ‘I meant to ask what made him come here in the first place. I can imagine him being a lot more at home in good ol’ gregarious Manhattan.’

‘It’s a sad story,’ Ram said. ‘He was in private surgical practice in Massachusetts, quietly going places, and he came out here on a holiday with his wife.’

‘When?’ Lenny asked.

‘Fifteen years ago. It was at the time they advertised the Vale of Kashmir as the Switzerland of India. Mrs Arberry was so in love with the place she persuaded the doc to buy a plot of land, so they could have a house to go to on holidays. But breast cancer killed her before she ever got a chance to come back.’

‘I wondered about a wife,’ Lenny said. ‘Men like that don’t usually live alone.’

‘He told me her death changed him,’ Ram said. ‘He felt her spirit was where the plot of land was, so he moved here and bought acres around the spot. He built the mansion and since then he’s devoted himself to improving the area his wife fell in love with.’

‘Reverend Young was afraid the troubles might drive Dr Arberry out,’ Mike said. ‘The way it sounds to me, he would take some budging.’

‘But I bet he knows they could do it,’ Lenny said. ‘He’s civilized, remember. Civilized people don’t stand a chance against the bears. He’s certainly keen that the UN should find some way to run the bad guys off the territory.’

‘I only had a quick skim through this,’ Mike said, patting the wallet of papers on his knee, ‘but it looks like a better dossier on the killing and the sabotage and the drug-running activities around here than you guys on Drugwatch International ever put together.’

Lenny stared at him in the dim yellow glow of the overhead light. ‘You really know how to wound a person.’

‘Nothing personal.’

‘It’s the doc’s drive that makes him so capable,’ Ram said. ‘I’ve watched him. He won’t settle for less than excellence. Everything he does is a masterpiece of its kind.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a smidgen of that drive,’ Lenny said.

‘The secret’s in his sense of impermanence,’ Ram said.

Lenny looked at him. ‘You going philosophical on us?’

‘I’m talking about the way he’s convinced that even the best, the most seemingly everlasting, can be taken from us. It began with his wife. Now he sees something he loves with as much intensity coming under threat. And that makes him want to hang on harder. He lives every day with the pain of the threat, and the pain makes him want to prevail at all costs.’

‘He said the whole thing when he was seeing us off just a few minutes ago,’ Mike said. ‘Remember?’

The other two nodded. Standing with them on the steps in front of the white porch Dr Arberry had said, ‘What hurts me most, what pains me to my soul, is to see mindless thuggery reduce beauty and progress to ashes.’

10

Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, is a noisy, colourful, bustling city with its own distinct look and atmosphere. Each time Lenny Trent went there, he could not shake the feeling that he was much further east. The people even looked different, and he had heard businessmen, preparing to return south, say they were going back to India.

Nowadays Srinagar looked like occupied territory. Everywhere there were roadblocks; armed soldiers sat in bunkers on all the major street corners. An after-dark curfew was in operation and most nights there was fighting, most of it in the old city.

‘It resembles Beirut over there,’ Commissioner Jabar Mantur told Lenny. He pointed from the barred window of his second-storey office towards the craggy skyline of the old quarter. ‘So many factions it’s hard to keep track. New movements spring up overnight, every weekend old ones get wiped out.’

Commissioner Mantur was the second most senior police officer in Kashmir. He was a short, thickset man with iron grey hair that swept down each cheek in wiry sideburns, almost touching the ends of his moustache. He wore a lightweight grey business suit, a stark white shirt and a red tie. As he spoke he smiled a great deal and shook his head, as if it were necessary to disparage most of his own remarks.

‘You will have noticed,’ he said, ‘that our police station here is more like a fortress. Twice in three months we had a bomb thrown into the reception area, and a grenade which was lobbed through the canteen window wounded ten of my officers. I was under pressure to do something about our security, so I took my lead from Northern Ireland.’

Lenny noted the benevolent eyes and the affable smile, and realized he was in the presence of a born diplomat. This wry, civilized administrator had a reputation for operational toughness that made Norman Schwartzkopf look effete. Confidential records at the HQ of Drugwatch International revealed that less than a month ago, Mantur had personally broken into a drug laboratory, shot the three guards dead and beaten up four chemists who were free-basing cocaine with industrial solvents. A note from a field agent formerly based in Kashmir described Mantur as ‘a hands-on police chief who can’t keep his hands off criminals’.

‘I have a Security Council memo telling me I should co-operate with you, Mr Trent. You must be an important man.’

‘I’m a reliable functionary, Commissioner. I’m a good bridge between sources of information and the people who have to act on it. Important is something I’m not.’

‘To be reliable is more satisfying, anyway,’ Mantur said. He went behind his desk and unlocked a drawer. ‘These maps I will give you, they do not officially exist. They contain information which my masters in government would call speculative. They would call it that because nowhere on the maps, or in the accompanying notes, have I indicated how I obtained any of the information, nor do I offer anything else by way of corroboration.’

He put a sheaf of folded maps on the desk. Lenny picked up the top one, unfolded it and stood with his arms spread wide, marvelling at the scale and the detail.

‘I can see this is done by hand, Commissioner, but it looks like the work of an artist …’

‘The work of a jailed cartographer, as a matter of fact. I managed to, um, how do you say — cut a deal for him with the Justice Department on condition he would co-operate on the project. He would have co-operated anyway, you understand, but because I made it seem that his eventual early release would depend very much on the quality of the work, he turned out the best stuff he’s ever done in his life.’

‘The red lines are — what? Drug convoy routes?’

‘Correct.’

‘And the blue ones?’

‘Dead routes. They indicate trails that have gone inactive as a result of police or military action. You could say each blue line represents a dead drug caravan.’

Lenny looked at the Commissioner over the top of the map. ‘Dead?’

‘Literally. There is no point in arresting bandits and trying to interrogate them. They might as well be a different species for all the help they provide. So they are eliminated as they are encountered. It’s tidy.’ Mantur smiled delicately. ‘It’s also confidential.’

Lenny refolded the map. ‘You stand by this information, then. The red lines are active drug convoy routes.’

‘It cost a lot of time, sweat and called-in favours to make sure the maps are accurate, Mr Trent.’

‘Then I have to ask you, sir — why haven’t you acted on this intelligence, if it’s so reliable?’

‘Manpower, that’s the first obstacle. I don’t have the men. Every time I mount an offensive against drug peddling I have to borrow officers from other regions. I have to justify the expense to my masters. I even have to give one month’s notice of my intentions — which, of course, gives the peddlers roughly three weeks’ warning that I’m on my way.’ Mantur spread his hands. ‘All I can do, to be effective in any measure, is to keep my intelligence updated in the hope I can use it from time to time.’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘I concentrate my main efforts on the kind of local drug manufacturing outfits whose liquidation does not rely on the deployment of large numbers of police officers.’

Lenny started to say something, then realized Mantur had only stopped for breath.

‘The other obstacle is disloyalty. Most of my officers are straight and honest men, Mr Trent. But there are a few, an unidentified few, who keep the criminals informed of our planned movements. On balance this would not mean that every assault on drug convoys would be fruitless, but because my masters know there is a problem with disloyalty, they are even less inclined to support my efforts.’ Mantur smiled again. ‘Can I take it that your people are planning some kind of major assault on the drug people?’

‘Nothing’s planned,’ Lenny said. ‘First we’re getting acquainted with the situation, as fast as we can. Then when we know the scale of the sickness, we’ll try to formulate a remedy.’

‘The drug problem is not a new one, Mr Trent. Nor will it ever be stamped out. Sources of supply are remote and beyond our reach, so as long as someone is prepared to pay poor men and hardened criminals to transport the poison, the trade will survive. I hope you don’t think you can wipe it out.’

‘Our concern is a specific area of trade, Commissioner. There’s been an escalation of violence, political agitation and drug running in a previously stable territory, in the west of the Vale of Kashmir …’

‘Yes, yes,’ Mantur said. ‘I hoped that would at least figure in your schedule of matters requiring attention. In fact it’s my biggest concern. The old drug trade has at least discernible limits and predictable features. To some extent it can be contained. Most importantly, it doesn’t carry the threat of all-out chaos.’

‘But the troubles in the Vale do?’

‘At the centre of those troubles is the traffic in drugs. We are dealing there with a brand new line of supply, and it passes right through that territory. I am aware also that some of the drug couriers are recruited from local communities.’

‘And this traffic is well organized?’

‘Dishearteningly so. And it is a new style of drug trade. The merchandise includes exceptionally refined cannabis oil, very very fine heroin, top grade cocaine and even quantities of crack. It is a more profitable trade area than the others and it is operated more ruthlessly.’

‘Who are the main customers?’

‘Moneyed intermediaries and end-users in South China and Thailand.’

Even the exhaustive data supplied by Dr Arberry hadn’t mentioned a new kind of trade, or what was being peddled. ‘I’d appreciate anything you can tell me about this, Commissioner.’

‘I have notes, I will give them to you. But briefly, the drug couriers, or mules as they’re called, are recruited from peasant areas. They work one time only, and they are paid very highly for their single trip. The drawback is that if they are caught, they must poison themselves. They are supplied with capsules of potassium cyanide for the purpose. If they do not kill themselves, or if they try in any way to renege on the deal, their families will be tortured and killed.’

‘Do you have much intelligence on the line of supply?’

‘Information is thin, because no one will talk. They would sooner rot in one of our stinking jails than say anything.’

Mantur took three slim school exercise books from the desk drawer and put them on top of the maps. ‘My notes on the new trade. There is much speculation in there, Mr Trent. For the present, it can’t be any other way.’ Mantur spread his hands and shrugged. ‘Manpower.’

‘Do you happen to know anything about a bandit leader alleged to be active in Kashmir, an American, name of Paul Seaton?’

Mantur rolled his eyes. ‘I have heard of him, yes. He has a number of names, but I must say Paul Seaton is one that is used more than most. Again, Mr Trent, it’s speculation. Lots of people have heard lots of things, others know people who know people, who have seen this and that. Personally, I happen to believe there is never this amount of smoke without there being a fire somewhere. And I suspect Mr Seaton may be an active element of the new trade through the Vale.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘He moves around a good deal, or so the story goes, and his brand of savagery, what we know of it, seems to fit the general characteristics of the new trade operators.’

Lenny looked at the maps and the notes. Information wasn’t going to be in short supply, he thought. But organizing it would be hard.

‘You said you hoped we would be interested in this particular area of drug traffic, Commissioner. Is that because it’s likely to cause dangerous instability right at the heart of the state?’

‘Certainly, but foremost in my mind is the certainty — the uninformed certainty — that for once, there may be a chance of finding the manufacturers. For once, we can look at the possibility of wiping out a line of trade all the way, with nothing left over to grow again.’

‘What makes you so certain?’

‘A small thing,’ Mantur said. ‘We have confiscated drugs from maybe ten, eleven peddlers on this new route. All of those peddlers, I may say, are dead.’

‘Suicide?’

‘Exactly. They died in accordance with their terms of employment. But it was their merchandise that made me sure the stuff is manufactured not far from the western territory of the Vale. It was so fresh-looking, Mr Trent. The packaging, the wrappers and bags and phials and capsules — they simply had not travelled very far when we intercepted them.’

The possibility of drugs actually being manufactured in the Vale of Kashmir put a new light on the project. Lenny looked at the Commissioner. ‘Neat observation,’ he said.

‘Yes, I thought so.’ Mantur smiled broadly. ‘I would stake my chequered reputation that we made those busts — that’s the phrase, yes? — very close to home base.’

Daylight burglary was a very unnatural activity, C.W. Whitlock decided. The whole business of theft from property, all the way from breaking and entering to going through drawers and cupboards and then sneaking out again, was an activity that screamed for the cover of darkness.

Adequate forward planning was something else he should have considered: maintenance plans of the twenty-sixth floor of the UN Secretariat building were comprehensive when it came to showing where everything was, but they didn’t reveal — to take the case in point — that the air shaft above the office of the Secretary of Policy Control narrowed to a width of forty-five centimetres at the grille opening.

Whitlock lay with his arms doubled under him, his elbows pressing on the sides of the shaft. He was pretty sure the office below him was empty, because Secretary Crane was a creature of habit, and he always went to lunch at 12:30. It was now 12:38. Nevertheless, having come this far, and at the expense of so much trouble and discomfort, Whitlock wasn’t going to take any unnecessary chances.

He eased his hands forward and seized the grille by its two handles. He pushed gently and felt the resistance go as the grille detached smoothly. He turned it sideways, pulled it into the shaft and used his knees to inch himself forward far enough to look down into the room.

A second before he poked his head through the opening he heard Crane’s voice and jerked back into the shaft.

Crane was down there! He was in the office using the telephone!

‘Issues in that category are always the province of the Director,’ Crane said, his voice sounding curiously close in the metal confines of the air duct. ‘I’ll be happy to pass your concerns along to him on your behalf, but that won’t be possible until he gets back from lunch. As a matter of fact it won’t be possible until I get back from lunch, and the longer we keep this conversation going, the later that will be.’ A pause. ‘Not at all. Goodbye.’

Whitlock lay there, listening. Crane had made one break with custom so he could make another. The office door opened, then closed. The key turned. At no point had there been the soft beep of the movement-detector being switched on. Crane probably considered himself thorough but not obsessive: who was going to break into his office in broad daylight?

Whitlock turned over on his back and slowly, painfully inched his arms up on to his chest. Reaching downward with the fingertips of both hands he pulled the coiled nylon ladder from the top of his overalls and let it uncoil out through the end of the duct and dangle down into the office.

Holding the end of the ladder with one hand, he eased out a telescopic brace from his breast pocket and pushed it through the looped end of the ladder. He then placed the brace lengthways at the edge of the duct opening and squeezed the spring release on the brace. It sprang out at both ends, its rubber stops clamping to the sides of the duct.

To get down the ladder he had to slide back along the air duct the way he had come, until he reached a four-way junction. He turned around and inched himself back to the opening, feet first.

He had never before used a ladder made entirely from nylon. His feet skidded uncontrollably on the first two rungs and he had to freeze all movement and wait for the ladder to stop swinging before he eased himself down any further. He began taking the rungs slowly, letting his weight settle on the centre of each one, waiting until the ladder was stable before going down another rung.

When he was finally on the floor he stood by the desk and let his gaze travel around the fastidious tidiness of the place. He could not even be sure the snapshot of Philpott was here. But it was likely to be.

He began with the filing cabinet, a six-drawer unit with a single lock at the top. A U-shaped piece of piano wire had the lock open in three seconds. In six minutes he went through every file in the cabinet. He found no snapshots, but he did come across a folder marked UNACO Hearing — Notes Towards Structured Argument.

He laid the folder on the desk, took out his Minox 16mm camera and photographed the four pages in the file, using the desk lamp for illumination. He put back the folder and locked the filing cabinet.

The desk drawers were locked but they were as easy to open as the cabinet. Whitlock found a whole range of unused desk equipment — stapler, paperclips, tape dispenser, paperknife — all in their original packets. There was also a book of personal telephone numbers, a dictation machine, tapes, personalized notepaper and envelopes, a loaded Mauser 7.65mm pistol, a Nikon F501 camera, handsome Pentax binoculars and a plastic wallet marked EVIDENTIAL. It contained ticket stubs, bills of sale and expense sheets relevant to departmental investigations; among the papers at the back of the folder was the photograph of Philpott.

Whitlock put it face down under the desk lamp and centred the pencilled writing carefully in his Minox viewfinder. A moment before he took the picture he detected a bell ringing in some shadowy corner of his memory. He took a second shot, closer this time, then put away the camera and returned the picture to the wallet.

He put everything back where it had been and looked round the room to make sure nothing was out of place. Satisfied, he turned and heard the bell ring again, a tiny irritation, nothing he could pinpoint or even narrow down.

‘Time to get back up the ladder,’ he whispered.

As he stepped on the first rung and began to sway, the words on the back of the picture came back to him. He could see them, the smudged curves, the way the letters looped and slanted.

It occurred to him suddenly why the bell had rung. He had seen that handwriting before. He didn’t know where, but he had definitely seen it.

11

‘This temple,’ Deena said, ‘is dedicated to the worship of Ganesh.’

Sabrina smiled in the gloom. The faint light that seeped into the room through a high slit in the wall was growing now. For long hours they had been in darkness and for a while Deena had slept. Their preparations were made and now they simply waited. There was nothing else to do. Sabrina could scarcely see Deena’s face, but she knew from the way the girl talked, from her nervousness and her growing animation, that the effects of the marijuana leaves had all but worn off.

‘How can you tell, Deena?’

‘From the symbols and pictures painted on the walls. Also from the images on the coloured window at the far end.’

‘You remembered all that, even though you were so frightened?’

‘It is long afterwards that I remember things.’

‘And who is Ganesh?’

‘The child of Siva and his consort Parvati, the beautiful. Ganesh is the god of prosperity and wisdom. He has an elephant’s head.’

‘Why is that?’

‘The story is that one day, coming back from a long journey, Siva saw Parvati in her private quarters with a young man. Siva forgot that in his absence, his son would have grown. So he mistook Ganesh for Parvati’s lover and cut off his head. Parvati was furious, she made Siva understand what he had done and demanded that he bring their son back to life. Siva could only do so by giving Ganesh the head of the first living thing he saw, which happened to be an elephant.’

At another time Sabrina would have been enchanted. Now she was too alert to sounds beyond the room, too focused on the need to be ready. Two hours earlier she had nearly fallen asleep. When she caught herself nodding she stood up, marched up and down for ten minutes to re-oxygenate her blood, then sat down and began declining Latin verbs in her head. It was tough work, but it kept her awake.

‘Our companions will be dead by now,’ Deena said. Her voice trembled. Her fear was gaining control.

‘You mustn’t think about that. You have to concentrate on one thought: there is a world of freedom outside. It is only the thickness of a wall away. Think of a straight line between you and the outside world. Think of nothing being able to stop you travelling along that line.’

‘I don’t think I can.’

‘When the time comes, do what I told you,’ Sabrina said. ‘Do what we’ve gone over and over. I’ll lead the way, all you have to do is follow, and have faith.’

Deena nodded and took a deep shaky breath. ‘I am very afraid. I can’t help that. I’m sorry.’

‘Afraid is better than too confident.’ Sabrina squeezed Deena’s arm. ‘Afraid is cautious and alert.’

Throughout the night there had been sounds in the temple, distant creaks and clicks, the sounds of shrinkage in wood, cooling in glass and in stone. Now there was a different sound, harder, louder. It grew and there was a sudden bump from the direction of the temple door.

‘They’re back,’ Sabrina whispered.

Deena let out a whimper and clamped her hand over her mouth.

‘Act drowsy, as if you’ve chewed up all the bhang.’

The sounds of boots on the tiled floor shuffled and bumped at random. The men muttered and once or twice they laughed. The two women sat side by side on a blanket, scarcely breathing. Their heads were bowed, making them look obsequious and small, the very opposite of a threat.

‘They are coming,’ Deena whispered.

‘Sit tight. Just be ready. Your wits’ll do the rest.’

Feet approached along the passage outside and a key clattered in the lock. The door swung open, letting in bright morning light. Sabrina kept her head down on her chest. Deena did the same. From under lowered eyelids Sabrina saw two pairs of boots, standing two metres away. A moment later tin plates were placed on the floor, each with a pile of yellow rice and chopped vegetables. Another dish of marijuana leaves was put beside them.

One of the men clapped his hands. Sabrina pretended to wake up. Her hand slid under the blanket.

The man leaned down and pushed the plate towards her. Sabrina’s hand swung out from under the blanket clutching a chair leg. It went up at speed, hitting the man on the jaw, and came down faster, cracking him behind the ear.

As he fell Sabrina sprang to her feet. The second man drew a knife and lunged at her. Deena threw herself at him and wrapped her arms round his legs. He toppled and Sabrina swiped him savagely across the throat with the chair leg, cutting off his voice before he could shout.

Deena rolled away as the man landed on his back. She jumped to her feet. Sabrina stooped over him. She pocketed his knife as she put her index and middle finger on the side of his neck.

‘What is it?’ Deena was wide-eyed, shaking violently. ‘What is it?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘But he can’t be!’

‘It’s called vagal inhibition. It takes too long to explain.’

Sabrina took the pistol from the waist of the dead man’s trousers and shoved it in the baggy pocket of her jacket.

‘See if the other one has a gun, Deena. Hurry!’

Deena dropped to her knees and searched the man. ‘Nothing. No gun, no knife.’

‘Come on.’ Sabrina pulled the door wide and saw Deena was staring at the dead man. ‘It’s them or us, Deena! Now come on! Hurry!’

They ran along the passage on their toes, making no sound, Sabrina clutching the chair leg, straining her ears, trying to pick up sounds as they approached the door to the temple.

There was a small oval window in the door. Sabrina peered through it. The temple looked empty. She squinted the other way. The main door was half open. Beyond it she saw golden loamy earth and trees. She took the gun from her pocket and elbowed open the door.

‘Stick close, Deena.’

They slid into the temple. Five metres in, Sabrina put a finger to her lips and paused. She looked all around her. The place was silent and empty. She pointed at the main door. They made their way steadily towards it, keeping to the wall, Deena panting softly.

Three metres from the door Sabrina saw a rifle leaning against a pillar. She ran across the tiles to get it. Halfway there she froze at a sound behind her. She spun and saw Hafi in the open doorway of an anteroom. He had his arm around Deena’s waist. His other hand held a long pointed knife at her throat.

‘Put down the gun and I will not kill her.’

Sabrina knew that was nonsense. He would cut Deena’s throat whether she put down the gun or not. To avoid a catastrophe Sabrina needed time, a few seconds at least.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘all right, I’m putting the gun down. Don’t harm her. I’m putting it down.’

Sabrina crouched slowly, her arm outstretched as she put the gun on the floor. As it touched the tiles she watched Hafi’s eyes. She stood up again, still watching him, waiting for the movement in his eyes, the split-second signal.

It came and an instant later the point of the knife moved. Sabrina threw the chair leg. It struck Hafi’s wrist with a crack. He howled and dropped the knife. Deena whirled away from him.

A bound and a jump put Sabrina on top of Hafi, shoving him backwards, ruining his balance. She kicked his right foot clear of the floor as her weight carried him down. As he hit the floor he twisted sideways, holding on to Sabrina’s arms, putting her under him. She tried to lift herself. Hafi banged her in the mouth with his elbow, stretched out his arm and snatched up his knife from the floor.

‘Get off me!’

Sabrina punched him in the neck. She drew back her fist for a second shot and felt the point of the knife against her cheek. She let her arm drop to the floor.

Panting hard, his breath hot on Sabrina’s face, Hafi let all his weight settle on her. He shifted the knife from her cheek to the tip of her nose. He inched the pointed end of the blade down the entrance to her nostril. Sabrina tried not to move her head. Her hand slid to her pocket.

‘Let me tell you what I will do now, Petrushka,’ Hafi grunted. ‘I will split your nose to the eyebrows, then I will fillet your face. Have you heard of such a thing? Have you?’

She had. She had seen it, too. Her fingers closed round the handle of the knife in her pocket. She drew it out slowly.

‘Please don’t do that to me,’ she said.

‘Aw.’ The knife edge touched the margin of her nostril. ‘A big tough Russian girl like you is frightened? Surely not. I would have thought —’

Hafi stopped talking. He stiffened and jerked back. His eyes went wide. He sucked air with a rasping noise as the knife in Sabrina’s hand sliced upward between his ribs and punctured his heart.

Sabrina pushed him off her and jumped to her feet. Deena was crouched by the wall, whimpering into her cupped hands. Hafi lay in a frozen, buckled spasm. Blood flowed from his mouth. As brain function disintegrated, his body twitched and jerked, the knife sticking hideously from his chest, his boots and belt making scratching noises that echoed through the temple.

Deena yelped. Sabrina turned and saw the man whose knife she had taken. He had snatched up the rifle from against the pillar and was pointing it at her.

She didn’t hesitate. She dropped to her knees, forcing him to adjust the angle of the gun. Her left hand found the pistol she had put on the floor. It was in her hand and pointing at the bandit as his finger tightened on the rifle trigger. Sabrina fired three times and put three holes in his face. He jerked backwards and fell across a marble table. The rifle fell from his hand without firing.

Sabrina got up, pocketed the gun and went to Deena. She was trembling so hard she couldn’t make herself speak.

‘Listen to me,’ Sabrina said. ‘What has happened here will make a miniature earthquake. It will mean a huge change in the balance of criminal power in these parts. Hafi’s followers will be really sore about that. So I have to get well away from here, and so do you.’

Among the bags of money by the altar Sabrina found her own shoulder bag. She checked and was again grateful to find that everything she valued was intact — even her gun, snug below the false bottom. She snatched up a leather folder full of papers and stuffed it into her bag.

‘Help me carry the money, Deena.’

They made their way out to the daylight. Deena stumbled as she walked, still shaking and dazed.

‘Oh, glory!’ Sabrina pointed. At the edge of a stand of trees her car was parked. Branches had been thrown over it in a casual attempt at camouflage.

Sabrina ran to it, pulled off the branches and opened the passenger door. ‘Put the money on the back seat, Deena.’

‘Will you keep it?’

‘I hadn’t planned to.’ As they put the last bag in the back Sabrina pointed to the writing on the sides. ‘What does that say?’

‘They are the names of towns. They are not far away.’

‘I’ll find them on the map, then I’ll drop the money outside the police station in each place. First, though, I’m taking you home.’

‘Will that not cause you inconvenience? It is two hours away.’

‘If you get back to where you came from without being seen around here, and say nothing about being taken away, then no one will connect you with what happened to Hafi.’

Deena understood. She slipped into the front passenger seat. Sabrina got behind the wheel and started the engine. ‘The sooner you’re home, the sooner I’ll do the Robin Hood bit, and the sooner I’ll be on track again.’ She glanced at Deena. ‘You maybe find it hard to believe, but I have a serious job to get back to.’

Philpott was on the telephone. ‘Speak to me, Michael,’ he said, ‘and try to keep it informative. I’m pressed for time, as ever.’

‘I wanted to go on record as saying it was a great idea of yours to draw Lenny Trent into our act. He’s an ace co-ordinator.’

‘I had to weigh his obvious merits against the probability that the two of you would put your friendship before your function as colleagues on a mission.’

‘We both have a sense of professional balance, sir. With respect, I think you sometimes oversimplify things.’

‘And for my part I think you occasionally evaluate my motives in a childlike way,’ Philpott said coolly. ‘Which is all beside the point. Tell me how things are shaping.’

‘You know about Reverend Young being murdered, and I told you about our visit to Dr Arberry. No headway has been made on the murder and there’s not likely to be any. As for Arberry, I’ve now had time to read his notes. His suspicions about bandit activity, especially the drug-running kind, tend to be supported by several things Commissioner Mantur told Lenny.’

‘I gather, from Trent’s comments in his last report, that there is suspicion of a new kind of trade in top-quality drugs, with rich clients and dealers waiting to collect. Do you go along with that?’

‘I do,’ Mike said. ‘I also find it credible that the source of supply for the new trade is right here in the Vale of Kashmir.’

‘In that case,’ Philpott said, ‘I think you should be formulating a plan to seek and destroy.’

‘That’s what we’ll be doing, as soon as we’ve some idea of where our target is. First off, I’m setting up a local agent of Drugwatch International to make himself available for mule duty. Then I plan on getting myself up into the hills and sniffing around a convoy or two.’

‘With a view to what?’

‘Thrashing them at their own game, sir.’

‘Splendid.’

‘Any news of Sabrina?’

‘I spoke to her an hour ago,’ Philpott said. ‘She’s suffered another setback, but she’s on the road again, moving up towards you and learning about India the hard way.’

‘What happened to her this time?’

‘I’ll leave her to tell you herself. It’ll make colourful after-dinner talk.’

‘How’s the review of techniques and procedures coming?’

‘You mean,’ Philpott said icily, ‘the bureaucratic plot to bring me to heel? We’re trying to mount a counter-attack, we being myself and Whitlock.’

‘Do they stand a chance of nailing you?’

‘I pray not, Michael. I’ll know better what I’m up against after lunch tomorrow. I’m meeting an old friend whose ear is tuned to the rumblings of the disturbed creatures who run Policy Control.’

‘Best of luck, anyway,’ Mike said.

‘Luck be damned,’ Philpott snapped. ‘If I win this one, it’ll be on the strength of the combined talents of Whitlock and myself. Luck’s for people with no resources of their own.’

12

‘This is Amrit Datta,’ Mike told Commissioner Mantur. ‘We have high hopes for him.’

Mantur winked at the young Indian. ‘They say they have high hopes, Amrit, yet they want you to take a risk similar to marching blindfold across a Delhi street at rush hour.’

‘Such is my destiny, Commissioner,’ Amrit smiled. ‘I was born to be put upon.’

He was twenty-seven, a slim Kashmiri with fine, regular features and a boyish quiff of sleek black hair. He had a look of innocence that suited him for his job. The last thing he resembled was an enforcement officer, but in two years with Drugwatch International he had helped dismantle major trafficking operations in three Indian cities.

‘I can’t say I have a pleasant morning organized for you,’ Commissioner Mantur said. ‘Mr Graham here selected the illustrative material, so blame him. Not many laughs, but it will be instructive.’

The Department of Records at Srinagar Police HQ was in the cellar, a green-and-cream painted room with fungus on the walls and a smell like wet livestock. An early model Kodak Carousel slide projector was set up on the table, its lens pointing at an old projection screen on a rusty stand. The Commissioner, Mike and Amrit sat down in canvas chairs and the clerk in charge of records doused the lights.

The first slide on the screen showed a young Indian woman smiling stiffly at the camera. She was ordinary looking, a healthy enough person whose clothes indicated she was quite poor.

‘Kadija was recruited as a mule six months ago by a man who stopped to buy a paper at her father’s corner news stand in Allahabad. She swore to tell no one about the offer, but of course she told her best friend, since best friends are not other people, they are extensions of ourselves. The best friend told us Kadija thought about the proposition for a week, at which time the man returned for her answer. She said yes.’ Mantur shrugged. ‘It was an extremely tempting offer. Ten thousand rupees for one job. In English money that would be about two hundred pounds, Mr Graham. A fortune for a peasant girl trying to scrape a living in the city.’

Another picture came on the screen. It was the same girl. This time she was not smiling. Her eyes were half closed and her tongue protruded at one side of her mouth.

‘She paid the penalty for being caught,’ Mantur said. ‘Police on the Chinese border stopped her and found two kilos of heroin. She was put in a detention cell, where she took a capsule of cyanide from her navel and swallowed it.’

The next slide was of a man in a business suit, complete with club tie and a dark yellow silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.

‘You’re not saying he was a mule?’ Amrit said.

Mike nodded. ‘That’s what we’re saying.’

‘What tempted a man like that? He looks like he doesn’t need money.’

‘Come on, Amrit, everybody needs dough. The point the picture demonstrates is that no one knows for sure what he’s looking at. Keep it in mind. The trick of selling yourself as something you’re not is to conceal by display.’

Amrit pursed his mouth politely. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

‘I mean you can best hide something about yourself by covering it with something that says more, or says otherwise. Any seasoned undercover police officer will tell you — when you’re pretending to be what you’re not, make sure you throw in a percentage of exaggeration, just to hide the fact that you are hiding something.’

‘So what if I want to look poor?’

‘Then lay it on with a trowel. Look poorer than poor, look like poor is what you’ve always been, like it’s what you can’t help being.’ Mike pointed at the screen. ‘Do what he was doing. Exaggerate, submerge yourself in the falsehood.’

‘What was he?’

‘A street sweeper.’

Amrit stared at the picture. ‘Him?’

‘Nearly impossible to believe. It’s true, though. And he’s a success story. That shot was taken as he boarded a plane out of India for ever. He made a stack by taking on three deliveries at one time.’

‘The money for that kind of deal isn’t triple,’ Commissioner Mantur said. ‘Because it’s possible to move a lot of product at one time, the value of the deal goes way, way up. A hundred thousand rupees, plus a ticket and a work permit to the USA.’

‘He was the perfect mule,’ Mike said. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping a guy like that.’

‘The only reason we found out about him,’ Mantur said, ‘was because he likes sailing close to the wind — which was probably why he became a mule in the first place, and why he took the risk of carrying such a big load.’

‘How did you find out about him?’ Amrit said.

‘He told us about himself.’ Mantur nodded at the screen. ‘Sent us that picture. Gave us the whole story.’

‘Was he extradited from the States?’

‘It wouldn’t be likely, even if we could have found him,’ Mike said. ‘By the time he revealed how the scam had worked — how he had made the big delivery using so many disguises along the way that nobody could keep track of him-he was already somebody else in the USA. Adopting new personas and new appearances to match them appears to be either a vice or a compulsive game with this man. But bear in mind what I said, Amrit. What he did and the way he did it, that’s how to pass yourself off to the drug people, or to anyone else you need to impress with a lie.’

They looked at pictures of another thirty mules, mostly before-and-after sets, with Mike supplying some of the commentary and Mantur providing the rest. When it was over the three of them moved out of the police HQ to a sidewalk café a block away.

‘The concentration of carbon monoxide in the air at this spot,’ Mantur said, ‘is marginally less harmful than the mould spores in our basement. I hope you learned something from the exercise, Amrit.’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Then tell Mr Graham and me what you learned.’

Amrit frowned. ‘I learned what makes a winner and what doesn’t. If I want to pass myself off as a candidate for mule work, I need to look helpless but not stupid, poor but hopeful, and worn-down enough by poverty to jump at any chance of decent money that I’m offered.’

Mike took his wallet from his pocket and slipped something from inside. ‘I brought this as a clincher. It’s to show you how important it is to convince drug people you’re who and what you say you are.’

He passed a postcard-size photograph to Amrit. He looked at it and winced. The man in the picture wore a T-shirt with the Nike logo, and his jeans were good-but-ancient Levi’s. His haircut looked expensive. His face was not recognizable, because someone had fired a gun into it at zero range.

‘John Lenehan Patel,’ Mike said. ‘He was half American, half Indian. Spoke Gujarati like a native. He came over here to work undercover for the UN in 1992. He managed to get himself recruited as a mule, with a six-job commission, doing back and forward flights to New York carrying heroin and prime Indian cocaine.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He wasn’t a good enough actor,’ Mike said. ‘He fooled some of the people, but not all of them. Somebody got suspicious of the sophisticated and clearly expensive work he got done on his hair. And there were mannerisms that didn’t fit a downtrodden person. And the general glow of health, the kind never seen in a person who has gone hungry more times than not.’

Amrit stared at the picture. ‘Did he know they were on to him?’

‘I don’t think he had a clue. He was a good operator. But that wasn’t enough.’

‘It’s like Mike says,’ Mantur said. ‘Learn to act, learn to put on a thick coat of who you are not, right on top of who you are.’

‘And always remember,’ Mike added, ‘for someone like you, working undercover on the side of the angels, it’s not the rigours of the law you have to worry about. It’s the viciousness of the people you try to fool. If they ever catch on to you, you’re a goner. Now have you got all that?’

‘I hope so,’ Amrit said. He sighed. ‘I think I could use another coffee.’

‘In the end it comes down to whether you want to be sure you survive, or whether you accept a few serious risks with a view to making progress.’

Lenny Trent was lying at the foot of a tree on a sloping hillside ten kilometres south-east of Srinagar. The tree was one of a cluster growing five metres below a narrow road that ran from Parbor, a kilometre north of Srinagar, all the way south-east to the Chinese border.

‘Those options apply to any job,’ Mike Graham said. He lay at the foot of an adjacent tree, peering up at the road through a night-vision scope.

‘Except that when people like you and me use the term “serious risk”, it’s death we’re talking about.’

The road they were watching had been selected from eight probable drug-traffic routes on the maps provided by Commissioner Mantur. Lenny knew the road and had suspected it himself, although surveillance, until now, had never been seriously proposed. For one thing the road was hard to see unless an observer moved dangerously close; it was also impossible to organize a confrontation or an ambush because there was not enough flat ground to deploy men in useful numbers. Tonight Mike and Lenny had decided to go on watch because it was Tuesday, and Tuesday, according to Mantur’s notes, was a day when drug convoys passed through the Vale of Kashmir.

‘The worrying thing about the risks,’ Lenny said, ‘is I get to need them.’

‘Old story.’

‘But I never thought it would apply to me. I visualized work as something I did, not something that would turn into a major part of what I am. When I take a risk and it pays off and I come out without a scratch or with only a couple, I’m up for days. My feet skim the ground. But the time comes round when I’m edgy again, strung out, needing my fix. Do you get that way?’

‘I play it differently,’ Mike said. ‘I take elaborate precautions, I keep myself ready for anything that might turn up —’

‘But you don’t avoid trouble.’

‘Uh-uh.’

‘You run at it.’

‘Well …’

‘It’s true,’ Lenny said. ‘You get the machine all oiled and battle-ready, but then you got to test it. No sense leaving it in the garage, all sleek and capable and full of potential it’ll never achieve. It’s not that kind of machine, is it?’

‘I think what we’re doing here is, we’re dressing up the fact we’re both kind of suicidal.’

Lenny raised his hand at a sound from the road. They put their night scopes to their eyes and watched. Above them to the right a horseman had appeared, ghostly green and white in the flickering artificial brightness of the viewfinder image. As he moved nearer, another horse was visible, then another and another. As they passed above Mike and Larry, loose dirt and stones rattled down among the trees.

‘A full-blown convoy,’ Lenny whispered. ‘Twelve or fourteen horses carrying big panniers.’

Mike watched as the last horseman stopped and dismounted. He called something ahead, another voice acknowledged, and he crouched beside the horse. Mike could see that a pannier strap had snapped. The man unwound a length of twine from his pocket and began looping it through holes in the strap above and below the break, drawing the twine tight, uniting the broken ends.

‘Do the clothes tell you anything?’ Mike whispered.

‘Nothing.’ The man wore a heavy dark cloak, a turban and a swathe of cloth across the lower half of his face. ‘He looks like any other hill bandit. Probably smells the same, too.’

Mike watched the rest of the convoy disappear round the bend. He lowered his scope. ‘I know we’re only here to watch and digest — but what do you say? Do we go for this?’

‘I’d say it fell in our laps.’

They crept up the hill side by side and moved apart as they neared the road. Lenny waited for a signal from Mike, who was crouched two metres behind the horse. When the signal came, Lenny stood up, right on the edge of the road.

‘A fine evening for a spot of smuggling!’ he said.

The horseman leapt back at the sound. Mike grabbed him by the back of his cloak and swung him face down on the ground.

‘Don’t go being gentle, now,’ Lenny warned. ‘There’s no point with these characters.’

‘As if I would.’

Mike punched the man behind the ear and stood up. The man groaned but didn’t move. Lenny had opened one of the panniers and was pulling out the contents. Mike opened the other one and did the same. When they were finished they had piled up twenty-four two-kilo plastic sacks of powder.

‘We better move back down the hill,’ Lenny said. ‘Somebody will be back to look for this guy.’

Mike tied up the horseman, who was still unconscious, while Lenny led the horse up the slope on the far side of the road. At the top of the slope there was a narrow wind-blasted ridge with gnarled remnants of trees sticking up. Lenny tied the horse to one of them and went back to help Mike push the sacks down the hillside.

In less than five minutes they had transferred the sacks and the horseman to the shelter of the cluster of trees. The man was conscious now, sitting against a tree with his hands tied behind his back. In the shielded torchlight he looked profoundly menacing, although so far he hadn’t even struggled. He sat staring at the pile of sacks as Lenny split one open and tasted the powder.

‘Heroin.’

‘Good quality?’

‘Incredibly bad,’ Lenny said. ‘It’s already been cut with something, chalk maybe, and there’s husks and dirt in it.’

‘So this guy doesn’t work for the upmarket peddlers.’

The man moved suddenly, lashing out his foot as Mike eased past him.

‘Steady, my friend.’ Mike held up his pistol and waggled it. The man spat.

‘Like I said a while ago,’ Lenny murmured. ‘No point being subtle. If you want to impress him with the gun, smack him on the nose with it.’

Mike stared at the hillock of sacks. ‘We should start getting this down to the wagon.’ Their jeep was parked in bushes half a kilometre away. ‘We can drop it off at police HQ in Srinagar, together with old grouchy here.’

Lenny stood and held out his arms. Mike began piling on the sacks. ‘Six is just fine,’ Lenny said, grunting. ‘Hernia’s a treat I’d like to save for old age.’

Mike bent to pick up the sixth sack and heard the man make a gulping sound. Mike turned and the man was still staring, looking into the torchlight.

‘What the hell …’

The stare was different. Glazed.

‘God almighty.’ Lenny put down the sacks and knelt beside the man. ‘He’s dead.’ He felt for a carotid pulse. ‘Stone dead.’

‘How?’

Lenny was running his fingers along the man’s neck. He forced open the mouth and shone the torch inside. ‘He swallowed his tongue.’

Mike looked, saw the thick, mauve blob at the back of the man’s throat. ‘I always thought that was a myth.’

Lenny put down the torch. ‘He must have done it a minute ago, when we were distracted. It’s a thuggee technique. Death before dishonour.’

They stared at the motionless face, the eyes half closed now, drowsy looking.

‘Every day I learn something new,’ Mike said. ‘I only wish, now and then, it would be something nice.’

13

‘Malcolm, I picked up an amazing book in Barnes and Noble’s annexe a couple of months ago,’ Harry Lewis said. ‘I should have brought it to let you see. It’s called Scotland Yard, Bastion of Justice, and there’s a picture of you and me in it.’

Philpott stared at him. ‘Really? How long ago was it taken?’

‘The book was published in 1970, so it was a while ago. But there we are, all young and keen, coming out of a house in Shepherd’s Bush where some people had got themselves murdered.’

‘You must bring it and let me see. I half hate looking at old pictures of myself, but the other half’s fascination, I — ah, here’s the waiter.’

They were in Il Mulino in Greenwich Village, a restaurant Philpott favoured for lunch because, quite apart from the excellent food they served, the place had a stylishly spartan air — exposed brick, bentwood chairs — that made him feel he wasn’t being too self-indulgent.

‘Maybe I should have resisted the lagniappe,’ Lewis said. ‘Fried courgettes are delicious, but they also make me feel I’m halfway through my lunch already.’

He settled on a scaloppina alla valdostana and Philpott ordered osso bucco. The waiter poured the Chianti and they toasted each other in silence.

Aeons ago, it seemed to Philpott, they had been detectives together at Scotland Yard. They had both followed a rapid-promotion path but Harry Lewis was the one the reporters always latched on to for scene-of-crime statements, because Harry was the one they wanted pictures of; he had been strikingly handsome, a moviegoer’s idea of a detective, and he had a good presentational style, firm but always affable, even under the worst kinds of pressure. Philpott, on the other hand, had always been consulted by criminologists, politicians and the more serious, less well-known journalists.

Lewis was still a fine-looking man, Philpott supposed, and his special skills in crime detection and public relations had served him well: for eight years now he had been an Investigative Director with the World Health Organization.

‘Before our food comes, Harry, I want you to tell me the worst.’

‘You mean the scuttlebutt from Policy Control?’

‘That’s what I mean, yes. Don’t make me have to say it.’

‘When there’s a back-stabbing afoot,’ Lewis said, ‘they have a tendency to talk behind hands and with averted heads. Working from that criterion, I’d say they’re determined you should face the music.’

‘I guessed that anyway.’

‘Well, if you want specifics, there’s been a memo from the Director of Policy Control, Tom Lubbock, and the Secretary, Desmond Crane —’

‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee …’

‘Quite. The memo was sent to the Director General. It says that in view of procedural irregularities and a general lack of harmony with other elements within the UN organization, the administration of UNACO should be subjected to a policy scrutiny, with a view to tightening rules and guidelines.’

‘Well again, Harry, I guessed —’

‘Let me finish, Malcolm. They add that if it takes a change of Director to ensure the implementation of more satisfactory working methods, then no one should baulk at taking steps to appoint a replacement.’

Philpott stared at his wine glass for a moment. He looked up at Lewis. ‘So they don’t just want to put me on a leash. They want to get rid of me.’

‘That appears to be the thinking. They’re currently planting the notion among heads of departments that whatever is suggested to improve UNACO’s, um …’

‘Obedience?’

‘… whatever is suggested, however liberal, you will reject it out of hand. In the words of Secretary Crane, you are a man with scant respect for discipline and even less for authority.’

Philpott sighed. ‘We used to work with people like that, didn’t we?’

‘Everywhere you go in life you work with or near people like that,’ Lewis said. ‘They’re a law of the workplace, something you have to put up with.’

‘Like viruses.’

‘And bilious attacks.’

The food came. Philpott attacked his and didn’t speak again until he had finished. He sat back and watched Lewis toy with the last triangle of his veal.

‘I don’t want to talk any more about Policy Control, Harry.’

‘Then talk to me about work. What’s holding your attention at the moment?’

Philpott outlined a job being handled by Task Force One in Tirana, where criminal elements from former Eastern Bloc countries were taking advantage of the Albanian crisis to set up black market operations and spurious money-for-land deals.

‘We also have a team out in Zaire. Rebels have taken hold of the Kinsangani, in the east, and they’re posing a threat to the diamond mines there. The economy would go downhill without the diamonds, so we’re keeping a watching brief at present, waiting for the usual band of international gem barons to step in and try to rob the country blind. Elsewhere, Task Force Three are investigating a crime-based upheaval in Kashmir that might boil over into big trouble if it’s not defused.’

‘Have they come across Dr Simon Arberry, by any chance?’

‘Graham and Jarwal, an Area Observer, had dinner with him the other evening.’

‘Arberry’s an incredible chap. Brains and drive in equal measure. He’d be a godsend in our Third World aid programmes.’

‘Why so?’

‘He’s a born organizer, and he’s a magnificent persuader.’

‘So your foreign aid work’s suffering?’

‘It’s being undermined.’

Philpott looked interested. ‘By politicians? Criminals?’

‘Today, Malcolm, corruption eats into the heart of every charitable venture. Red Cross aid is stolen and sold in street markets to people with the money to buy luxuries like condensed milk, white sugar and aspirin tablets.’

‘What’s the scale of the loss?’

‘In some areas criminal co-operatives absorb eighty, eighty-five per cent of all material aid from the West.’

‘You’re the Investigative Director, aren’t you?’ Philpott said. ‘What are you doing about it?’

‘I have good, detailed evidence on the worldwide black marketing of charity aid. But I don’t have the resources it would take to root it out.’

Philpott was drumming the table now, thinking. ‘Send me round some details on this, would you?’

‘You mean you’ve never heard about how rotten everything’s gone lately?’

‘I didn’t realize the scale.’

‘I’ll send you the full depressing details, then.’

‘And maybe I’ll find some small way in which I can help.’ Philpott smiled tightly. ‘That’s enough about work. Let’s talk about something else.’

‘Anything you say. You’re buying, after all.’

‘I’ll tell you something about that,’ Philpott said. ‘I just worked it out. The ten per cent tip I’ll leave here today is about fifteen per cent more than I used to spend on a three-course lunch for the two of us in a Fleet Street pub.’

Sabrina crossed the border into Kashmir at Dalhousie, forty kilometres south-west of Jammu. The guard at the border post, after scowling at her and demanding to see her documentation, became suddenly deferential when he saw the UN symbol on her WHO accreditation. He stamped the appropriate blank page with a flourish and waved her through.

It was late afternoon and she had driven since dawn. Assuming her maps were reliable, she estimated that if she drove till dusk, rested and made an early start, she could be in Srinagar by noon the next day.

On a wide stretch of road to the west of Jammu she pulled over, took half a dozen items from her shoulder bag and laid them out on the seat beside her. They were a mirror in a rigid folding case, a comb, a rectangular powder compact, a dog-eared paperback of Jane Eyre, a ballpoint pen and a small pair of opera glasses.

‘Begin with the mirror,’ she muttered, recalling the training session where she had finally managed to work this conversion without looking. That had been two months ago; there was no one here to impress, so on this occasion she would watch what she was doing.

When the mirror case was held open with the hinge pointing upward, the mirror tipped out of its housing and hung down. Sabrina reached behind it and folded out a thin circuit board; from behind that she folded out another. With the mirror and the two boards in place, she was holding a ten-centimetre cube with one open side.

She put down the cube and opened the paperback. The first eighty pages were real but after that it was a box. She took out a flat ten-centimetre panel with a circular hole in the centre and laid it on one side of the cube. By dismantling the opera glasses she produced a neat zoom lens with a ratio of 60 to 1; she added a manual operating ring by combining the ridged bezels of the binoculars. She screwed the lens into the hole in the square panel, put it down and stared. For a moment she was lost.

‘Viewfinder, ‘ she said, remembering.

She opened the compact, carefully removed the powder tray and took out a plastic bag containing a flattened, hinged housing and the four glass viewfinder components. She fitted them together and clipped the unit to the top of the cube. The back of the comb came off and gave access to a slender titanium antenna with a miniature powered booster above its socket plug.

The main power source and electronic storage medium were in the book; she fitted them into slots inside the cube, tipped six screws and a tiny screwdriver from the barrel of the ballpoint pen and used them to stabilize the instrument. Finally she teased a laminated cover from the pen, unrolled it and fixed it with adhesive tape around the body of the cube.

‘Et voilà.’

The neat finished instrument she held between her hands was the EVC12A, designed, refined and perfected at a cost of six million dollars. It was a camera capable of taking and electronically storing twenty colour pictures, which it could transmit in digital form to a satellite, via its boosted antenna.

‘After all that, let’s hope I get a chance to use it.’

Philpott had told her he wanted broad-scale input, which meant he wanted alert observation, creative snooping and, if necessary, selective theft. It also meant pictures. No mission was a failure if it could be reinforced by random intelligence, and although Sabrina had the sheaf of papers she took from Hafi, she didn’t know if they would be any help to anyone. Even if they were, even if they turned out to be solid gold, it would still be marvellous, on top of all that, to knock out the old man’s eye with some top-rate photographic intelligence.

She put the camera carefully in the glove box. Juan Pereda, chief designer on the camera project, had warned her, again and again, that such an instrument would be prized by any foreign power without the resources to spend on advanced electronic development.

‘This is breakthrough technology,’ he told her in his thick Mexican accent. ‘Cutting-edge kit, you understand? You must not expose the camera to jeopardy, señorita.’

Philpott said the best way to safeguard the camera was not to assemble it until she knew she was in relatively safe surroundings.

‘Another way to make sure you don’t let any harm befall the instrument,’ he added, ‘is to bear in mind that if it gets damaged or lost, Juan might just get mad enough to insist a replacement be paid for from my budget. If that were to happen, your salary would be the first indirect casualty.’

This place looked safe. Sabrina had not stopped at any communities since crossing the border, but she guessed the bandits had as tight a grip on populations here as they had further south. The big difference was, this was open country. In the spaces between towns and villages she did not find herself on roads with blind corners or ominously close woodland or menacing overhangs. This was territory where she could see who was coming in any direction, and be ready for them.

A sharp rap on the window made her jump. Her first thought was, Thank God I kept the windows shut. It was possible to drive around all day with them closed: a concealed feature of the car, operated by a foot switch behind the brake pedal, was its air-conditioning unit, which kept the sealed-up interior at a steady 16 degrees Celsius.

Sabrina took a loose grip on the pistol tucked between the front seats. She turned her head slowly and looked.

‘Jeez …’

The man at the window looked horrible. He wore a voluminous yellow turban which emphasized the bony sparseness of his face, like a skull with eyes. His teeth protruded evilly, yellow and crooked, and as Sabrina stared at him his purple tongue snaked out and ran along his lips.

‘What do you want?’ she shouted, simultaneously thinking, so much for seeing them coming.

The man said something. She couldn’t hear. She watched his eyes go narrow. Her fingers tightened on the gun, her thumb eased off the safety. She looked to right and left. There was no sign of anybody else, but that went for nothing.

‘Speak up!’ she shouted.

The man’s expression changed. His eyes wrinkled at the corners and he made a helpless gesture with his hand. Now he didn’t look so menacing. Sabrina wound down the window a couple of inches, bringing the gun out from between the seats and letting it lie alongside her leg.

The first thing she noticed as the window came down was the scent of jasmine. The man was wearing cologne. She was so conditioned to bandits smelling bad that his scent disconcerted her.

‘You are English?’ he said. His voice was surprisingly soft, entirely lacking the harsh edge she expected.

‘American. How can I help you?’

‘First of all let me apologize for disturbing you,’ he said. ‘I do not make a practice of encroaching on privacy or solitude.’

‘Um, that’s OK.’

The man sounded like an actor, she thought. His voice was finely modulated; his one-handed gestures rhythmically underscored his words.

‘I thought it a duty, no less, to warn you that the rear left side light of your motor is broken.’

‘Oh.’ Sabrina felt deflated, and a little charmed. ‘Well thank you …’

‘My name is Aziz,’ the man said, making a little bow. ‘I am a teacher in the village three kilometres from here.’

‘Well, Aziz, I’ll have the light fixed first chance I get. Thanks again.’

As he stepped back Sabrina saw he leaned heavily on a walking stick. He nodded and began hobbling away. Sabrina considered her position for a moment, and decided her humanity needed more exercise than her caution.

‘Can I offer you a lift, Aziz?’

He stopped and turned. ‘That is most generous.’

‘Not at all.’ Sabrina opened the passenger door and slid the gun back down into its hiding place. ‘It won’t be the smoothest ride, I’m afraid. The suspension’s kind of stiff.’

She was surprised at herself. A minute ago she was reading a life of dissipation and crime into the old man’s appearance. Now as he clambered in beside her she saw nothing but frail gentility and kindly warmth in his eyes.

‘We’ll have you home in no time.’ She started up the engine. ‘Have you lived here all your life?’

‘For seventy-six of my seventy-seven years,’ Aziz said. ‘I am technically an outsider. My parents moved here to live when I was just over a year old.’

‘And you still work as a teacher?’

‘Oh yes.’ He grasped the handle above the door as the car pulled away. ‘Teaching children is my purpose, so I will do it until I drop.’

Sabrina looked across the scrubby open land to the east, noticing how it gradually sloped towards the foothills of the mountains.

‘Is life pretty quiet around here, Aziz?’

He nodded. ‘On the surface. And it is quiet enough for a man if he does not make himself prominent, you understand?’

‘What happens if he makes himself prominent?’

‘He attracts the attention of the bandits.’ Aziz pointed at the mountains. ‘There are many bandits up there.’

‘Really?’ Sabrina sat up in her seat. ‘Many of them, you say?’

‘Enough to make great trouble, when they choose.’

‘That’s fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.’ Sabrina hoped she looked like the intrigued tourist she was trying to be. ‘Do tell me more.’

14

‘If you don’t mind, Mr Graham, I’d like to get on with it,’ Amrit Datta said. ‘More rehearsal won’t do anything but make me less believable.’

‘It’s your call,’ Mike said. ‘But remember, you’ll be on your own. You’ll have to be good, there’s nobody to save you if you’re not.’

They were in the Drugwatch International office at Srinagar, a couple of shabby rooms fronting as a motorcycle courier agency; when prospective customers called, which they rarely did, there were never any couriers available. Mike stood by the window, looking out at the smoky traffic churning dust into the air. Amrit Datta sat on the edge of the plywood desk with his arms folded.

‘I know you’re concerned I’m rushing things,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think I am. In all the time I’ve been with this outfit, I’ve never once behaved like myself on the street. It’s always an act, I’m permanently behind a fake identity and a counter-feit personality. This is nothing new.’

‘The penalties in the mule racket are higher, that’s the difference,’ Mike said. ‘And there are precious few escape routes if things go wrong.’

‘I won’t forget that.’

Mike opened the package he had brought. ‘You’re on secondment to UNACO, so you get UNACO issue.’ He took a gun from the big brown envelope and handed it to Amrit, together with a box of ammunition. ‘SIG Sauer P230, your dearest pal if you get into a corner. Trust it more than the silly little Stenda you carry around.’

He pulled a greasy, worn brown leather wallet from the envelope and opened it flat on the table.

‘This is your history. They will look at it, whether you know it or not. And if your act’s a good one, this will corroborate it. The whole thing was put together by people who specialize in manufacturing identities.’

Inside the wallet was a picture of Amrit taken two days ago. Now it looked as if it had been behind the glassine window for a year at least. He was shown as part of a smiling group — a wife and three children, none of whom he had ever met. In a pocket of the wallet was a crumpled birth certificate identifying the owner as Opu Hikmet. Other documents — letters, a folded picture postcard, more snapshots — bulged the sides of the wallet, which had been sprayed with the authentic odour of artisan sweat.

‘Now this,’ Mike said, taking a chunky amulet from the bag, ‘is a very important piece of gear.’ He handed it to Amrit. ‘What do you make of it?’

Amrit hefted it, turned it over in his hands, shook it and finally took it to the window to examine it in full light.

‘It’s an oval disc, wooden, about four centimetres by two-point-five centimetres at its widest point, and maybe fifteen millimetres thick. It has a metal loop at one end with a thin leather cord through it, which I suppose is for hanging the disc around the neck. The disc is smooth on one face, on the other it is carved with a representation of the face of Narsingh, the man-lion incarnation of Vishnu.’ Amrit looked at Mike. ‘Did I miss anything?’

‘I’m pleased to say you did.’

Mike took the amulet and pressed down hard on the metal loop at the top. The centre of the front panel dropped inwards and glided aside. In the gap a small lens could be seen gleaming.

‘Oh, boy’ Amrit said, shaking his head. ‘It’s a camera.’

Mike pressed a high spot on the grooved edge of the disc and the back panel opened. It had a spring-loaded carrier for a flat circular film cartridge.

‘It’s sixteen mil,’ Mike said, ‘it takes twenty shots per cartridge, and it works in low light. It’s auto-focus, so all you have to worry about is getting it pointed the right way so it catches what you happen to be looking at.’

‘How does it fire?’

‘Press on the point of Narsingh’s chin. Like this.’

Amrit watched. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Right. It’s good, isn’t it?’

The final item out of the bag was a slim gold finger ring with a single cheap-looking stone set into it.

‘It should fit the little finger,’ Mike said.

Amrit tried it on. It fitted perfectly. ‘Not the kind of thing I would have chosen,’ he said.

‘Yes, it’s pretty tacky. But it’ll find you if we ever lose visual contact.’

‘A tracer?’

‘The stone is the beacon,’ Mike said. ‘Wear it in health.’

Mike crumpled the empty bag and put it in the trash basket. ‘So tell me,’ he said, ‘what makes you so anxious to get under way?’

‘They’re recruiting again,’ Amrit said. ‘It happens in waves. Moving around the city every day, you’re aware of a pattern of faces, people you barely look at but you know they’re there, working in the markets or running errands or just hanging around street corners. Then all of a sudden two or three of them are gone, and you know they’ve been pulled into the mule game.’

‘So you want to get on to the streets while there’s a chance of being spotted.’

‘That’s it, Mr Graham.’

‘Call me Mike. Listen, I’ll tell Lenny Trent what you just told me, and we’ll line up one last rehearsal session for later today.’

‘If you think it’s necessary.’

‘I know you’re impatient, but please give the rehearsal all you’ve got.’

‘Of course I will.’ Amrit paused. ‘Mike.’

Old Aziz had given Sabrina tea in gratitude for the lift home, and as they sat on his ramshackle veranda and talked, he had turned out to be a gold mine. After several minutes of polite inconsequential chat, he stood up and pointed to all the places on the lower slopes of the mountains where he regularly saw bandit convoys.

‘Who knows what they carry,’ he said. ‘I know it is not always contraband. Often they are moving their dwellings, their entire communities, every stick, from one place to another. That way they avoid conflict with the authorities, and with each other. Much of the time, though, they carry illegal merchandise.’

Then Aziz had fetched an ancient pair of British Army binoculars, which had been given to him by a soldier in 1944. He handed them to Sabrina and showed her how to point them, until she saw an area of mountainside Aziz called the bronze pass.

‘A fanciful title,’ he said, ‘but you will see, in the late sunlight, how the path glows a rich bronze. It is a combination of colours in the rock stratum and the sandy earth at that level.’

Sabrina saw it, like a long, undulating red-brown strand along the side of the mountain.

‘That is where the truly bad men travel,’ Aziz said. ‘Once every week, at dusk, they pass within the reach of my binoculars. They carry heavy loads, and they eliminate whatever is in their path. Twice they have killed men whose curiosity has taken them up there to take a closer look. Twice, also, they have come down to this village and demanded water for their horses and food for themselves. They did not treat people cruelly, as some might, but they were strangers to sympathy and compassion, nevertheless.’

‘How often do they appear?’ Sabrina said.

‘Twice a week. They will pass that way tonight.’

Sabrina tried to blank any sign of excitement. She swallowed what was left in her cup, then got up to go. She thanked Aziz for the tea and for the information. He shook her hand as she left and wished her well on her journey through Kashmir.

Twenty minutes later she was parked in a shadowed cleft in the foothills, elbows braced on the bonnet of the car as she pointed the EVC12A up at the mountainside. Dead in the centre of the viewfinder she had a convoy of twelve heavily-laden horses, moving obliquely towards her, the faces of the riders visible in the late golden sunlight.

She took twelve pictures before the convoy moved along out of sight. Then she got back in the car, pulled up the rubber mat at the driver’s side and snapped open a metal flap in the floor. She took out a modified cellular phone, set to call one number only. She went outside again, the phone in one hand, the camera in the other. She pulled up the phone’s antenna with her teeth, thumbed the green button and put the phone to her ear.

‘Secure Communications,’ a woman’s voice said.

‘I have a P-I-G transmission,’ Sabrina said. The initials stood for Peripheral Information Gathering.

‘What hardware are you using?’

‘The EVC12A. I have twelve shots total.’

‘Raise the antenna on the camera and set it to send.’

Sabrina put the camera on the car bonnet, pulled up the titanium antenna, and pushed the SEND button.

‘We are homing on the equipment,’ the woman said. ‘Please confirm when the contact signal shows.’

Sabrina watched the camera, holding her breath. A tiny green lamp winked.

‘Contact,’ she said.

There was a long pause, then the woman said, ‘Twelve pictures received. Closing communication.’

The phone went dead. Sabrina dropped it in her pocket. She pushed down the camera’s antenna and put the whole unit into her shoulder bag. As she got back in the car the telephone in her pocket rang.

She shut the door, fished out the phone. ‘Yes?’

‘Sabrina!’ Philpott said. ‘What a good girl you are! I was in Secure Comms when your pictures came through. Magnificent quality, my dear. Who are those people, exactly?’

‘I don’t know, sir, beyond the fact they’re bandits with a pretty bad reputation among people who live near the foothills.’

‘Can you get the location co-ordinates, at all?’

‘Well I’m still there. Will I use the phone?’

‘By all means.’

Sabrina wound down the window, held the phone out through the gap and pressed her thumb firmly on a blue button on the side. Ten seconds later the phone beeped and she pulled it in again.

‘Got it,’ Philpott said. ‘I gather from this that you’re quite close to Srinagar.’

‘I’ll be there tomorrow, with luck.’

‘And I’m sure that Mike and the others will be glad to see you. In the meantime I’ll send them printouts of the pictures, along with the co-ordinates. Good work, Sabrina.’

‘Thank you sir.’

‘Keep in touch.’

As Philpott came out of the Secure Communications Suite he saw Whitlock, who immediately waved a folder at him.

‘And what would that be?’

‘My notes on the life and later career of Arno Skuttnik. I just picked up another snippet.’

They went into Philpott’s office. Whitlock pointed at the coffee machine. ‘May I?’

‘Pour me one, too.’

Philpott sat down to wait. Whitlock poured two black coffees and brought them to the desk.

‘This whole thing,’ he said, opening the folder, ‘makes me wonder how much buried history gets overlooked in any investigation.’

‘It depends who’s digging,’ Philpott said.

‘And how desperate they are to find something, anything. We set out with zilch on Skuttnik. He was a nobody immigrant with a history hardly worth the name. Now his story’s fattening into the material of a pretty good mini series.’

‘What’s the latest?’

‘He was married.’

‘After he came to the United States?’

‘Six years after.’

‘How did you pick that up?’

‘When I fed his social security number through Public Records it came up blank. No marriage, no criminal record, no unpaid taxes. So then I fed his immigration number through the same channels. Still no criminal record, no civil mis-demeanours. But the marriage showed up. It turns out the people who registered the wedding were so keen to get Skuttnik’s immigration status right, they completely forgot the social security notation.’

‘So now you’re following up on the marriage?’

‘I’ve got tracers going right now.’

‘I don’t want this turning into a saga, C.W. Especially if it isn’t going to produce anything we can use as a defence.’

‘Or as a counter-attack,’ Whitlock said.

Philpott looked at him. ‘Do you know something you’re not telling?’

‘When I know everything, I’ll give it to you whole, sir.’

‘So you still feel this is worth pursuing?’

‘More so than ever.’

Philpott tasted his coffee. He pointed to a typewritten document on the desk in front of him. ‘While you’re here, I’d like your opinion on something. This is a summary of investigations into the widespread theft of charity aid around the world. It was supplied by my old friend Harry Lewis at the World Health Organization.’

Philpott opened the document to the third page. He held it up for Whitlock to see. A short paragraph had been circled in red and alongside was written, ‘What a coincidence.’

‘The paragraph covers a piece of intelligence supplied over a year ago, but so far uncorroborated,’ Philpott said. ‘It’s about an alleged black market operation centred on a farm eighty kilometres east of Srinagar.’

‘Maybe a coincidence, but it’s hardly a surprise. The hill bandits have transportation and supply sewn up. Farms make perfect way-stations.’

‘I was thinking of looking into this one myself.’

Whitlock saw that Philpott was waiting for his reaction. ‘Why?’

‘Because some all-round balance-correction in that area of the world wouldn’t go amiss, and this particular piece of suspected villainy suits my sneaky style.’

‘Softly, softly.’

‘If you want to call it that. Anything I might do would be an adjunct to the work the others are engaged upon, I suppose. But the overall effect would be a comprehensive defusing of villainy in the region, wouldn’t you say?’

Whitlock smiled. ‘Do you want me to say I think it’s a good idea for you to go to Kashmir?’

‘Only if you mean it.’

‘Well…’ Whitlock scratched the tip of his nose. ‘While you’re not here, the people at Policy Control can’t pull any fast ones, like getting a review date called before I’ve built a case.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Are you kidding me, sir?’

‘Well…’ Philpott shrugged. ‘It crossed my mind.’

‘All things considered,’ Whitlock said, ‘I guess it’d be a really good thing if you high-tailed it to Kashmir, fast as you can.’

‘Thanks, C.W.’ Philpott smiled. ‘I always value your judgement in these matters.’

15

‘I have not seen you here before,’ the fat man said. He peered at Amrit Datta’s face as he spoke, ready to catch a lie before it could take off. ‘You are not from this area, are you?’

‘For two years I have worked in there.’ Amrit pointed to a warehouse behind the market where he was sweeping up. ‘Two years of moving sacks and boxes, emptying drums, filling bottles. For two years I didn’t see daylight except in the morning when I came to work.’

‘And why did you leave the warehouse?’

‘Why are you asking me these things?’

The man frowned. ‘Don’t you want to do yourself some good?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then answer me, and something good may come of it.’

Amrit wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It was hot and he was sweating freely. He wore a drab grey T-shirt and cheap baggy cotton trousers. His feet were bare and he had dark lines of carefully-applied dirt under his fingernails.

‘I kept asking the foreman to let me work in the open, or at least do work that brought me outside for a little time each day. Eventually he paid attention to what I asked. He told me that if I wanted to spend my days out in the open air, I was now free to do that.’

‘He sacked you?’

‘Yes, he did. And when I begged him to let me have my job back, he told me I should have considered just how valuable the job was before I threw it away so carelessly.’

‘So now you sweep up in the market.’

‘It is hard work and it pays less than one-third of the wage I made in the warehouse.’

The fat man patted his belly thoughtfully. ‘I like to help people like yourself whenever I can,’ he said.

‘I would be grateful for any work,’ Amrit said. ‘Real work,’ he added, ‘not anything like this.’

‘What family do you have?’

‘A wife and three children. The children are still small.’

‘So you must provide for them, too.’ The fat man sighed, as if he was full of sympathy. ‘What would you say to a little job, nothing too difficult, which would earn you enough money to take it easy for a while, or to travel south where the work is more plentiful and the wages are higher?’

Amrit looked suspicious. ‘What kind of work would that be?’

‘Courier work. Delivery work. You would deliver one consignment of merchandise, and for that one delivery you would be paid in advance —’

‘In advance?’ Amrit looked astonished. ‘You are saying you would give me my wages before I even did the job?’

‘That is correct.’

Amrit scowled suddenly. ‘It is a joke, isn’t it? You are having fun with me.’

‘It is no joke, uh, what is your name?’

‘I am called Opu Hikmet.’

‘Well, it’s the truth I tell you, Opu. I offer you the work because you look like a strong and decent young man who deserves a helping hand at this stage in his life.’

‘What do I have to do?’

‘Simply tell me you accept my offer.’

‘Oh I do, I do.’

‘Then I will come and see you in a few days’ time.’

‘I will be here, sir.’

The fat man walked away and was soon lost in the crowd. Amrit patted the amulet hanging on his chest. He had taken three shots. He hoped at least one of them would come out.

Ram Jarwal was alone in the cabin. Mike Graham and Lenny Trent were at police HQ in Srinagar, going through mug shots to try to identify the dead bandit from the drug convoy.

Ram enjoyed having his solitude back, however briefly. Mike and Lenny were excellent company, they were diverting and their professionalism was endlessly fascinating; but they had filled the cabin with human sounds and movement, they had upset the gentle daily routines of a man who led a distinctly quiet life.

Tonight was a bonus. Ram sat back with a beer and his feet up on the couch, watching CNN News with the sound barely audible. As he watched he thought he heard the sound of an engine outside, then he decided it was the stereo output from the TV misleading him.

A banging on the door made him jump so hard he spilled his beer. He leapt to his feet, wiping himself. The door was hammered again before he got it open.

‘Thank God you’re here!’ It was Dr Arberry. Ram had never seen him so dishevelled or so upset. ‘I was going to call the police, but my lines have been cut — then I remembered your guests …’

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘Mr Graham and Mr Trent, are they here?’

‘I’m afraid not. They have business in Srinagar.’

‘Will you come then, Ram? Something awful has happened. I have to …’ Arberry put his hands over his face for a moment. ‘I have to make contact with someone who can influence outside help. I — I am frankly distraught.’

Ram told him to wait in the car. He went back inside. He called Mike at police HQ and explained.

‘I’m going with him now. No, he hasn’t said. He’s too agitated to give explanations. Maybe you and Lenny should meet up with us at his place. Move fast and you could be there first.’

Mike and Lenny got to the Arberry estate in a police car a full three minutes before Ram and the doctor arrived in Arberry’s black Mercedes.

‘We didn’t see any signs of activity so we sat tight,’ Mike said. ‘What is it, Doctor?’

‘Please follow me.’

Arberry led them along the side of the mansion and around to the back. There was a sloping floodlit lawn. The butler and the maid stood by a dark bundle lying ten metres from the back of the house.

‘I heard a sound like nothing I can describe,’ Arberry said, striding ahead, combing the fingers of both hands through his hair. ‘It was hideous. Then I came out and found this.’

They stopped where the butler and maid stood with their backs to the bundle. Mike crouched, confused by the shadows, reaching for his torch. He flicked it on and saw that the bundle was a boy, his head protruding from the folds of a dark garment, his tousled hair moving gently in the breeze. He was obviously dead.

‘Any idea what happened?’ Lenny said. ‘Who is he, anyway?’

‘What happened was an act of unbelievable savagery,’ Arberry said. ‘I know nothing more about it than that. The boy worked for me, I employed him as a general servant in the household.’ Arberry stared at the waxen face. ‘He was a fine young man.’

Mike pulled back the collar of the garment and began to see what had happened. The boy’s head was not attached to his body. Neither were his arms or legs. They lay in a loose pile on his abdomen. The head rested on the grass where it had fallen.

‘My butler threw the cloak over the remains,’ Arberry said.

Mike stood up. ‘Whoever did it used a machete,’ he told Lenny. He turned to Dr Arberry. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve any idea —’

‘The bandits!’ Arberry said. ‘The damned bandits, that’s who! They’re not content to ply their squalid trade, they have to live up to type. They have to disrupt and terrorize and destroy …’

‘Would there be any reason in this case?’ Lenny said. ‘Any specific reason, that is?’

‘The same old reason, the one that’s behind this escalating campaign that’s costing good decent lives!’

Nobody said anything. They waited for the doctor to get control of himself.

‘They want me out of the Vale of Kashmir.’ Arberry was staring off into the darkness beyond the lower slope of the lawn. ‘I’m a unifying influence, you see. People like me give law and order a foothold. The bandits hate that.’ He turned and looked at Mike. ‘What can be done? Are we simply to give in to the barbarians? Do we move aside and let them have this place for themselves?’

‘I think we may be close to effecting a solution,’ Lenny said carefully. ‘I can’t go into details, not yet. But we have hopes.’

‘And we’re staying on the case,’ Mike added.

Ram, feeling as inadequate as the other two, came forward and said he had told the police driver to radio for the detectives.

‘They will come and they will go through the motions,’ Arberry said wearily. ‘Now every minute that passes without something being done, I will be reminded that by just staying here, I’m putting other lives at risk.’

‘You’re an asset to this place, Dr Arberry,’ Mike said. ‘It would be a borderline tragedy if you left. I promise you, whatever action is possible, we’ll make sure it gets done. And soon.’

Ram, Mike and Lenny travelled back to the cabin in the police car. As the headlights cut over the rim of the final rise, bringing them round on to the flat ground at the front, they saw another car parked by the door. It was a beat-up Peugeot.

As Mike stepped from the police car the Peugeot’s door opened and Sabrina got out. For a moment he didn’t recognize her in the baggy clothes and straw hat.

‘Well, and aren’t you a sight,’ he said, pecking her cheek. ‘What kept you?’

‘Devotion to duty. If you don’t have it naturally, it’s a hard concept to explain.’

Mike wrinkled his nose at her. ‘This is Ram, and I think you know Lenny.’

‘Nice to meet you, Ram.’ Sabrina shook his hand. ‘And hello again, Lenny. It was Colombia last time, I think.’

Lenny nodded. ‘Barranquilla. It was the only time I ever saw a woman beat up a Caribbean dope pusher and take his gun off him.’

‘Memories,’ Sabrina sighed, ‘memories …’

They watched the police car leave, then Ram unlocked the cabin and they went inside.

‘You must be hungry after your journey,’ he said.

‘Hungry and weary,’ Sabrina admitted. ‘I got lost a couple of times or I’d have been here sooner.’

‘I’ll rustle you up something.’ Ram paused in the kitchen doorway. ‘Scrambled eggs, melba toast, coffee?’

‘Magnificent,’ Sabrina said. ‘You’ve made a dusty, poorly-dressed woman very happy.’ She turned to Mike. ‘Did you get the pictures?’

‘What pictures?’

‘They came through after you left,’ Ram shouted. He came to the kitchen door again. ‘There was a note on the cover sheet. It said you were due for a surprise, so watch out. Signed Uncle.’

Mike looked at Sabrina. ‘What’s he up to now?’

16

Amrit Datta was taken in the back of a small covered truck to a place in the countryside southeast of Srinagar. Two others travelled in the van with him, both young men, both warned like himself to say nothing on the journey.

‘You will wait here until someone comes for you,’ the fat man told Amrit as he pushed him into a small hut with a wooden bench along one wall. The other two, he noticed, were led to separate little huts.

It was obvious they didn’t want the recruits to talk to each other on any account. No comparing of notes, no knowledge of one another. It made sense. In the van, they would have had to shout above the noise of the engine to make themselves heard and any communication between them would have been detected at once. In a hut together they could have whispered; hence, Amrit thought, separate quarters.

He put his face to the side of the hut and was able to see through the slats. Although it was night there was a bright moon. He could see he was on a small farm, one of the dozens that dotted the countryside in that region. Chickens were wandering around and he had heard goats as he was shown into the hut. There was no way to establish his co-ordinates; it would be too risky to carry anything electronic since they were bound to search him. He had seen the town lights briefly as he got out of the truck and he knew he was looking at Srinagar from the south-east. That was something.

He patted the front of his thin shirt and realized he had made a reflex action. Countless times a day, most days, he checked to be sure his gun and his ID were still there. Now he had nothing on him, nothing at all. There were only his habitual reactions to give him away.

He remembered what Mike Graham had said: ‘Assume you’re being watched at all times, for you won’t know when they’re not watching. You can’t carry two amulets, so a freshly loaded camera and a gun will be delivered to you after you’ve been declared clean. Remember, give no sign that you’re anything but what your appearance suggests — a shambling untouchable.’

Amrit gave himself a sharp reprimand about the body-patting and sat back with his head against the wall, waiting.

Half an hour passed before the fat man came for him.

‘Look lively now, hurry up. You mustn’t keep people waiting.’

The tone of his approach had changed now, and he no longer smiled the way he had. He was brusque, pushing Amrit ahead of him towards the little house at the centre of the farm, warning him to behave when he was inside and only to speak when he was asked a question.

In the cottage he was shown along a short passage and into a smoky room with a low ceiling. Two men were in there: one was old, stooped and stony-faced, with one eye so watery it appeared to be dissolving; the other man was much younger, broad-shouldered and so tall that his head nearly touched the ceiling. The old one pointed to a chair by a small table in the centre of the room. Amrit sat down.

‘What is your name?’ the big man said.

‘Opu Hikmet, sir.’

‘Can you read?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Can you remember things you are told?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The old man came forward and handed Amrit a folded sheet of linen paper. ‘This is your map,’ he said, his voice gravelly. ‘You must follow it exactly. You must take no shortcuts, you must not try to change the route in any way. The journey will take you three or maybe four days. At night you will rest where it is safe, because you will be carrying valuable merchandise.’

The big man pointed to a burlap sack on the table. ‘Pick it up with one hand,’ he said.

Amrit reached forward and lifted the sack. It weighed roughly ten kilos. He put it down again.

‘Will you have difficulty carrying that? It will be a long journey, remember, and you must travel on foot.’

‘No, sir, I will have no difficulty.’

‘It must stay with you at all times,’ the old man said. He produced another folded piece of linen paper. ‘Three men will approach you when you have crossed the border and gone to the place described here and marked with red on the map. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘When each man says the phrase that is written, and when you reply with the other phrase that is written, you will give each man one bag from the sack.’

Both men were silent now, looking at Amrit. For a moment he wondered if a reaction was expected. It dawned on him that they were watching for signs of uncertainty.

‘Repeat what you have been told,’ the big man snapped.

‘I have to carry the sack with me at all times and at night I must sleep only where it is safe, for the merchandise is valuable. I must follow the map and must not take any other route. When I cross the border and go to the place marked in red I must wait for three men.’

‘And when they make themselves known to you?’ the big man said.

‘I must reply with the second phrase that is written, and give each of them one bag from the sack.’

The old man nodded curtly. ‘Now I will give you two more things.’ From a drawer in the table he took a thick bundle of banknotes and a small envelope. He handed the money to Amrit. ‘That is yours. It is payment for the one and only delivery you will make for us.’

Amrit tried to imagine it was the most money he had ever seen at one time. He put on a face of restrained rapture.

‘You may do with the money as you wish,’ the old man said, without a glimmer of a smile. He held up the small envelope. ‘This is something else you must keep with you at all times.’

He opened the end of the envelope and tipped a black capsule on to his palm. Amrit stared at it, knowing what it was, feigning bafflement.

‘If anything should happen to make the plan go wrong, if you should lose your merchandise, if you are arrested by the police, or if for any other reason you do not deliver the merchandise to the three men named on the second piece of paper, then you must not hesitate to swallow this. Keep it hidden about your body, somewhere that it will not be found but somewhere you can reach it if you need it suddenly.’

Amrit looked at the old man, then at the other one. ‘What is it, please?’

‘It will make you die very quickly,’ the big man said.

Amrit gulped softly. His fingers tightened around the money.

‘That is our bargain, our agreement,’ the old man said. ‘You do what we have told you to do, and if you cannot do it you swallow the potion. You must do it at once, you must do it without talking to anyone or answering any questions.’

Amrit watched the old man drop the capsule back into the envelope.

‘If anything goes wrong, and yet you do not take the potion,’ the big man said, ‘then your family will suffer.’

The old man held up a sheet of paper. It was a rural census sheet, the kind kept in district registries. It had pictures of Amrit and his fictitious wife and children. These people had been thorough, Amrit thought; but so had UNACO.

‘They will suffer in ways you cannot imagine,’ the big man said. He looked grim now, like a policeman issuing a warning. ‘There will be no pity. You may be tempted to think you could run away with our money and our merchandise, but if you do your wife and your three fine children will be seized at once. They will be taken to a place where their arms and legs will be broken, and then while they still scream with pain they will be put into a pottery furnace and burned to death.’

It took no effort for Amrit to look sick.

‘You can change your mind still, if you wish,’ the old man said.

Amrit looked at the money, ten centimetres thick in his hand. He looked up at the old man. ‘I will make the delivery,’ he said.

The old man nodded and handed him the envelope with the capsule.

Sabrina stood under the shower in the neat little bathroom at the cabin. For five whole minutes she had let the hot water sting her and revive her sense of wellbeing. Now as she killed the flow, she felt the throb in her leg start up again.

She pushed back the shower curtain and took a shaving mirror from the window ledge. Twisting round, with the mirror positioned at the back of her thigh, she was able to see the knife wound. In spite of the immediate treatment she had applied, and subsequent fresh dressings, the edges looked raw and angry.

She got out, dried herself, then fumbled in her bag. From the zippered emergency pouch she took a flexible ampoule of penicillin powder. She broke off the top and squirted the contents in a white stream on to the wound, moving the jet of powder up and down until it was exhausted. She put on a fresh dressing, told herself that would fix it, and got on with preparing herself for the day.

Ten minutes later, wearing jeans, sneakers and a OuiSet denim shirt, she joined Mike and Larry in the kitchen. They had pushed the used breakfast things to one end of the table and had her photographs of the hill bandits spread out in two rows.

‘Great shots, Sabrina,’ Mike said.

‘Thanks, but the EVC12A deserves most of the credit.’

‘That’s no way to get yourself a reputation,’ Lenny told her. ‘Never praise the equipment — in fact never praise anything that can’t argue.’

‘They’re a lot better than I expected,’ Sabrina said. She picked up a print and peered at the detail. The pictures had been sent directly to the cabin through the high-definition laserfax, and they looked like lab-printed glossies. ‘You can see all the faces,’ she said. ‘Pretty grim faces, at that.’ She looked at Mike. ‘Have you gained anything from them?’

‘The man at the front, the leader, is definitely Paul Seaton,’ he said.

‘Who’s he?’

Mike gave her a summary of Seaton’s career.

‘And what’s your special interest in him?’

Mike blinked. ‘Did I say I had a special interest?’

‘You didn’t have to. When I came in just now you were staring at this picture with your teeth gritted. You do that when something you’re chasing turns up in your sights.’

‘You’re imagining things,’ Mike said.

‘Am I imagining things, Lenny?’ Sabrina said.

Lenny grinned and looked away. Ram came in through the back door wearing a tracksuit and trainers. He was panting.

‘Ram, I’ve something I want you to look at,’ Sabrina said. She went to her room and dug out the papers she had taken from Hafi. She brought them to Ram. ‘I wondered if anything here might be relevant. I majored in languages, but this is beyond me.’

Ram went through the papers, reading a little of each. ‘It’s mostly correspondence to this Hafi character from other men who call themselves Unit Commanders.’

‘Hafi was a bandit,’ Sabrina explained. ‘I understand he had a lot of satellite outfits.’

‘Was a bandit?’

‘I’ll tell you about it some time.’ Sabrina nodded at the letters. ‘What do you think?’

‘It looks mostly like bragging and gossip,’ Ram said. ‘I’ll go through them in more detail once I’ve made you breakfast.’

‘You’ll spoil me.’

‘That’s my brief.’

While Ram grilled bacon and fried eggs Sabrina sat down and studied the pictures with Mike and Lenny. ‘So what is it?’ she said. ‘A private vendetta?’

Mike looked at her. ‘Why does it have to be anything like that?’

‘Vendettas and grudges bring out that atavistic glint you get now and then. What happened?’

‘God, you’re persistent.’

‘So tell me and I’ll stop being such an aggravation.’

He told her about the wrecking of a sportsman’s career, and the casual savagery that had been the stock in trade of Seaton back in the days before he took to the Indian hills.

‘In that case I believe you’ve every right to catch him and do your worst,’ Sabrina said. ‘Just remember he’s not likely to be a sitting duck.’

‘Breakfast,’ Ram announced, putting a plateful of eggs, bacon and toast in front of Sabrina. ‘Eat.’

She was starving and she ploughed through the food with a minimum of decorum. As she dropped her knife and fork and grabbed her mug of coffee, Ram came over from the window, where he had been reading Hafi’s papers.

‘This is interesting, in a grim kind of way.’ He held up a sheet of yellow paper with tiny writing on it. ‘It’s from a Unit Commander called Sadjit. He reports that on a scouting mission in the Vale of Kashmir, one of the men in the unit caught a recruiting officer …’

‘What kind of recruiting officer?’ Mike said.

‘A man who recruited mules. This Sadjit and one of his lieutenants tortured the man to get information from him. They were too zealous, and the man died before they were able to learn very much, but before he expired they were able to learn that the upmarket drugs are manufactured in the Grotto of Moksha.’

‘Never heard of it,’ Lenny said.

Sabrina asked what moksha was.

‘A Hindu concept,’ Ram said. ‘It is taught that all people go through a series of reincarnations that eventually lead to moksha. Moksha is the spiritual salvation that frees a person from the cycle of rebirths.’

‘That’s when a person’s karma gets all straightened out, is it?’ Mike said.

‘That’s right.’

‘In that case it’ll be a few centuries before Mike gets a glimpse of moksha,’ Sabrina said. She saw Mike scowl. ‘Same goes for me,’ she added quickly.

17

Amrit set off before first light. By the time the sun was up and he could feel its warmth on his face he had gone fifteen kilometres. The dirty, nondescript sack swung from his shoulder and his sandals kicked up dust as he strode along at a marching pace.

Eventually he would travel without surveillance, but for probably the first third of his journey, there was no way to tell if he was being watched. Mike had told him to presume someone was watching all the time. Amrit sensibly mistrusted everyone he saw along the way. A large percentage of the surveillance provided to criminal institutions came from casual informers and paid hangers-on, the slurry of society who could whisper to lethal effect. Every tramp and low-life was a potential seeing-eye that led all the way back to the men with the power.

Amrit had been walking for three hours when he spotted a beggar he had been watching for. The man was tall and stooping, with a small red patch on his filthy grey turban. He stood by the roadside coughing against the palm of one hand while he held out the other to passers-by.

Amrit fished in his pocket as he approached the beggar and pulled out a crumpled banknote. He tossed it to the man, who caught it, brought his hands together with the fingertips touching his chin and bowed, muttering elaborate thanks.

When Amrit had gone past the beggar stood there a while longer, still coughing fitfully, still putting out his hand to everyone who passed. Finally he glanced up at the sun, mopped his forehead with his arm and began walking in the direction of Srinagar.

Hours later he reached the town and made his way through a network of back streets, several times doubling back and stopping to cough. Finally, when he had spent twenty minutes threading through variations of a route around the same seven little streets, he slipped suddenly into a darkened doorway with a sign above it advertising a motorbike courier service. He pushed open the door beyond and threw himself into a chair in front of a desk.

‘The things I do for authenticity,’ he groaned. ‘Tea, for the love of God …’

There was a rattle of cups in the tiny kitchen off the main office. A moment later Mike Graham brought in a steaming mug. He put it in front of the beggar, who pulled off his turban and revealed himself to be Ram Jarwal.

‘Mission accomplished, I hope.’ He took a gulp of tea. ‘Lord, that’s just in time. Another minute and I’d have expired.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his pantaloons and threw the crumpled banknote on the desk.

Mike opened it and spread it out flat. ‘That’s great. Hey, Lenny!’

Lenny Trent was in a small room at the back, viewing videotape of a suspected heroin peddler operating in one of the town markets. He switched off the VCR and went through to the office.

‘Your boy has done us proud,’ Mike said.

He pointed at the smoothed banknote. Stuck to its surface was a white label on which Amrit had scrawled a summary of his route to the Chinese border, with details of a rendezvous at a town called Boyding.

‘I hope nobody saw him do that,’ Ram said.

‘They wouldn’t,’ Lenny said. ‘We rehearsed that one till he had it oil smooth. The drill is first, he memorizes the details of where, what, and when, then when he’s off and walking, he slides his hand into his pocket and flattens the banknote against his leg. He pauses for a minute to get something out of his eye with one hand and uses the other hand to scribble out the message with an old stub of pencil he has in his pocket.’ Lenny winked. ‘He’s a talented fellow.’

Later, back at the cabin, Mike, Sabrina and Lenny sat round the big table in the sitting room, mapping out a plan of assault against Paul Seaton and his bandits. Ram snored quietly on the couch.

Lenny asked if they were agreed on their objective.

‘If we can be sure Mike keeps his personal feelings under control,’ Sabrina said.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Mike snapped. ‘The objective is direct and uncomplicated. We grab Seaton and bring him in for questioning.’

‘You definitely believe he’s involved in the upmarket drug trade?’ Sabrina said.

‘It’s practically tailor-made for a man like him. High-risk, high-profit. The elements of disruption and sedition running alongside — they’re his mark, too.’ Mike nodded firmly. ‘I’d put money on it. Seaton’s our guy. Or he’s one of them. Catch him and we’re halfway to getting a handle on the big-bucks trade and wrecking it.’

A number of ideas had been formulated, talked over and discarded. One that kept coming up without really being rejected was that they use a team of police marksmen for cover and fire-power while they separate Seaton from his men. The plan had two areas of difficulty that tended to make it look like a non-starter: for one thing, police marksmen were in critically short supply in Srinagar; for another, it would take a helicopter to transport the team to the target area, and the local UN machine would not be available for three days at the earliest.

‘We could always try asking Commissioner Mantur,’ Mike said. ‘When he refuses we’ll at least know that road is completely shut off and we can stop considering it.’

On the third attempt Mike got through to the Commissioner. He explained the plan and the predicament, as he saw it.

‘Then let me tell it to you as I see it, Mr Graham,’ Mantur said. ‘It is not only numbers of men that I lack, but numbers of bullets for them to fire, on those rare occasions when they can put up a concerted show of belligerence against the villainy which envelopes us in these parts. As for transport, well you are right, you couldn’t expect us to provide that. However, perhaps there is another way of looking at all this.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘The various departments of the UN have provision in their budgeting for ad hoc ventures, am I not correct?’

‘Well yes, I believe so.’

‘Well why don’t you get in touch with your people and suggest an ad hoc assault on these bandits you are so keen to intercept, and talk over with them the matter of ad hoc finance.’

Mike thought about it.

‘OK, I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘What kind of figure should I mention?’

Mantur was silent for a moment. ‘In US dollars,’ he said finally, ‘if we are talking about the hire for half a day of ten marksmen, plus the hire, fuel and pilot fee for a helicopter, I think we would be talking in the region of fifteen thousand US dollars.’

Mike thought about it. ‘I can try,’ he said.

Philpott was not available. Mike spoke to C.W. Whitlock, who seemed preoccupied. ‘I need authorization to hire the marksmen and the helicopter,’ Mike pressed him. ‘Can you get it for me? This is just a tiny bit urgent.’

UNACO did not have a Deputy Director. All major decisions were taken by the Director; in his absence, decisions waited.

‘I don’t see what I can do, Mike,’ Whitlock said. ‘Anything over five thou has to be given the all-clear by Philpott.’

‘Try to get him, then.’

‘I can’t just —’

‘C.W., this is my chance to get my hands round the neck of Paul Seaton. Think about it. Call Philpott.’

Whitlock was silent for a moment. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

Mike went back to the planning table. ‘Just in case Uncle says no,’ he said, ‘can we bolt a decent alternative together?’

All the alternatives were hazardous and carried such a high possibility of disaster that they could scarcely be considered alternatives at all. Any way they angled it, they would be outnumbered and easily outflanked.

‘There’s still a probable gain in being outnumbered if the guys doing the outnumbering are everyday mercenaries,’ Mike said. ‘But I’m not going to be stupid enough to let a horde of hill bandits with a psychopath at their head outnumber me.’

‘Then you might lose Seaton,’ Lenny pointed out.

‘Don’t rub it in. Think of something else.’

The phone rang. It was Whitlock. ‘Go ahead,’ he told Mike.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘No, I’m making it up because I secretly want to see you foul up and get blown out of the service.’

‘How come the old man agreed?’

‘He’s like me,’ Whitlock said. ‘He has other priorities right now. Be grateful for that. The confirmation will be faxed to you within the hour.’

Mike put down the phone and turned to the others. ‘We’re in business,’ he said, and couldn’t resist rubbing his hands together.

By late afternoon Amrit was beginning to understand how tough a man had to be in order to walk all over Kashmir wearing nothing on his feet but flimsy sandals. He was once or twice tempted to stop at a market and buy himself sports socks and a good pair of trainers. But he resisted. An impoverished mule, after all, would be used to going everywhere in sandals or bare feet, and when it came to spending any of his sudden fortune, he certainly wouldn’t lay it out on flippant non-essentials like decent footwear.

At a town called Muraka, Amrit decided he could stop and eat his evening meal. He thought of the food at his favourite Srinagar restaurant: plump grilled chicken, properly steamed vegetables and fluffy rice, washed down with a German beer. In Muraka he would have to settle for a good deal less, so he was grateful to be hungry enough, right then, to eat just about anything.

He found a dingy little café called The John Boy. All over India, there were these bars and hostelries named after characters from long-defunct American TV series. The bar two doors away from The John Boy was called Starsky’s Hutch.

At the counter he ordered an omelette and strong tea. He sat down at a table near the door and put the sack at his feet. He knew he mustn’t fall asleep, but in spite of himself he began to drowse.

He woke with a jump when he felt the sack move. A youth had sat down opposite. He was staring at Amrit, openly hostile, waiting to be asked why he was steadily kicking the sack.

Amrit sat up in his chair, seeing another youth just beyond his left shoulder. He leaned forward and put his arms on the table. He said nothing.

‘What’s in the bag?’ the youth opposite said.

‘Nothing that concerns you.’

‘I’ll ask you again.’ The foot stopped kicking the sack and kicked Amrit’s foot instead. ‘What’s in it?’

‘Same answer.’

‘I’ll have a look for myself, then.’

The youth put his head down to duck under the table. Amrit bunched his toes, brought up his foot and kicked him in the mouth. The youth roared and jerked back, banging his head on the metal table.

Amrit grabbed the pepper pot and was on his feet before the other one had a chance to react. He spun off the cap and threw a wad of pepper in the youth’s eyes. The youth screamed and dropped to the floor, clutching his face.

As the first one came up from under the table Amrit saw he had the sack in his hand. He ran for the door and by the time Amrit got there he had vanished.

Amrit leaned on the wall, thinking. He quashed an impulse to run around unfamiliar streets while his quarry simply disappeared.

He pushed himself away from the wall, went back into the café and grabbed the youth on the floor. He hoisted him to his feet by the hair, picked up a water carafe and threw the contents in his eyes.

‘There. Medicine. Now you’re all better. Tell me where your friend is or this time I’ll really blind you. And that’ll be for starters.’

The youth was hyperventilating, overwhelmed by pain, shock and fright. Amrit slapped him hard on both cheeks. When the youth tried to retaliate, Amrit tightened his grip on his hair, gathering it into his fingers, putting agonizing stress on the roots. The youth screamed once, loud and sharp.

‘One more time before I do you terrible harm. Where is your friend?’

The youth jerked his thumb at the door. They walked four metres along the pavement outside, then he stopped and pointed to a stairway.

Amrit frowned at him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I swear it…’

Amrit let go his grip on the youth. He climbed the stairs two at a time, silently, tensed for trouble.

On the first landing he found the sack. He picked it up and looked inside. Nothing had been taken. He heard a sound and looked in the corner. The youth he had kicked was lying in a heap. Amrit turned him over. His face was torn and bloody.

‘What did you do to yourself, you idiot?’

The youth whimpered and slid to the floor again when Amrit released him.

‘He did nothing to himself,’ a voice said. ‘I did it.’ A man stepped forward. He was short and stocky. He held up a baseball bat with blood on the thick end. ‘They are thieves. They stole from you, yes?’

Amrit nodded.

‘For weeks now they have used this place as a getaway, you understand? They rob down on the street, then run here to hide until the commotion is over. Well not any longer. This is where I live. I do not want this.’

Amrit nodded again. He took his sack and went back downstairs. He told the youth waiting at the bottom that he’d better clear off, or he would be in line for more pain before the day was over.

Walking back to the café, Amrit wondered at the tiny shifts of circumstance that could make such gigantic changes in a life. If he had been an ordinary mule, the loss of the sack would have been a disaster. He would have been doomed.

If he had been an ordinary mule and the stocky little man had intervened, as he just did, could that man have imagined how with one blow of a stick, he had saved another human being from sudden and painful death — or a whole family from brutal murder?

‘Forget the omelette,’ Amrit told the man in the café. ‘I’ll just have the tea.’

18

Sabrina left the cabin before dawn, driving a super-tuned green Range-Rover supplied by Commissioner Mantur. He had put the vehicle at the disposal of Lenny Trent with the added promise of a driver and limited additional manpower should the need arise.

‘A small act of thanks,’ he told Lenny. ‘It is not often we are done the honour of being paid in dollars for an assignment.’

The plan was that, by mid-afternoon, Sabrina should be back in the region where she photographed the bandits. She would conceal the Land-Rover in dense hill forest a kilometre west of the spot where she hid to take her shots, and she would keep Mike and Lenny informed of the situation in the region right up to the time they were due to fly south.

‘Any snags,’ Mike reminded her before she left, ‘any sign at all that our arrival could be monitored, let us know and we’ll abort.’

With decent maps and a solid all-terrain vehicle to drive, Sabrina made good time. She took a direct route to the northern perimeter of the village where Aziz lived, then drove the Range-Rover up into the foothills. She kept to the rough, following ravines and rock fissures until she reached the twisting mountain road used by Seaton and his bandits.

Staying on the rocky terrain below the road, she travelled north until she came to the forest. It was high and dense, the foliage so thick that only a dim green light penetrated. It looked, Sabrina thought, like a damp, faintly steamy film set with over-done mood lighting.

She drove into the forest for a distance of twenty metres and parked the Range-Rover in a thicket of smaller trees. She switched off the engine, undid her lap strap and opened the door. She stood to get out and her leg gave way. She fell through the open door and landed on her back among dead leaves and debris.

For a moment she did not move, a habit of the job, checking all was well before she risked getting up. As she lay there she felt the throb in the back of her leg. The wound was not responding to treatment, and now it was infected enough to interfere with the interaction of nerve and muscle. She knew she should have seen a doctor by now, but what with one thing and another …

She sat up and pressed the dressing through the thickness of her camouflage trousers. The moment she removed the pressure of her fingers there was a rebound throb. Not a good sign. Toxins from the infected site would be entering her bloodstream.

Carefully she stood up and leaned on the side of the vehicle. The agitation caused by the fall was definitely affecting her chemistry. Her hands shook and she felt a sensation of clamminess on her skin that had nothing to do with the atmosphere in the forest.

‘Mild septicaemia,’ she diagnosed aloud, feeling the density around her absorb the sound, muffling it. ‘All I need.’

Something rustled and moved across her boot. She jumped aside and saw a snake, over a metre long, yellow-and-black-banded. It slithered away under the back wheels.

‘God …’

She had never seen the species before but she knew what it was: a krait, relative of the cobra and highly venomous, capable of killing half the people it bit, whether they had antivenin or not.

‘You’re supposed to be nocturnal,’ she told the retreating reptile. ‘You’re supposed to live in open country, too.’

Her heart was thumping and now she was aware of darkness at the edges of her vision.

‘Not-so-mild septicaemia,’ she muttered.

She sat on the step of the vehicle and put her head between her knees. The blood pounded harder and her temples began to ache, but the shadowing on the perimeter of her sight disappeared.

Slowly she stood up, reached under the driving seat for her rucksack and pulled out the scrambler radio. She pressed the button and waited until a green light showed she had an encoded line.

‘Sabrina to Mike or Lenny, come in.’

A couple of whistles and Mike was on the line. ‘Where are you, Sabrina?’

‘More or less on top of map reference B.’

‘You’re in the forest.’

‘Just far enough in to still see daylight. It’s extremely eerie and a krait just slithered across my foot.’

‘They’re supposed to live in the open.’

‘I told it that.’

‘Is everything as expected?’

‘Tomb-like,’ Sabrina said. ‘I only called to make sure the radio’s working.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘Recce north of here, then south. After that, if it’s all clear, I think I’ll get myself nested into the rocks above the stretch Seaton and his gang were on when I took the pictures. I’ll buzz through every hour until you leave.’

‘Sounds OK to me,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll see you.’

The helicopter took off from a field twenty kilometres north of Srinagar at 3:10 p.m. local time. On board were Mike Graham, Lenny Trent, and ten weapons-and-tactics marksmen drawn from police forces in Srinagar, Anantnāg and Nunkum.

As they flew south across the border, passing over the sprawl of Delhi, Lenny pointed out six or seven areas where he had worked, or had helped co-ordinate offensives against dope peddlers.

‘I look down at them all,’ he said, ‘and I realize that now we’ve moved on, the trade is probably as strong as ever.’

‘You have to keep trying,’ Mike said, shouting above the noise of the rotor.

‘I know, I know. My only regret about the job is that there’s no place for a sense of achievement. Not ever.’

As they drew within a hundred kilometres of the target zone the pilot took a sweeping route south-east. He continued in a wide sweep and came back north-west, avoiding passing over the mountain track. He finally landed in an area southwest of the forest where the Range-Rover was hidden.

From the rounded cleft of two craggy rocks Sabrina watched through binoculars as the police marksmen, led by Mike and Lenny, made their way up the mountainside, heading for the eastern perimeter of the forest.

It was cool up there in the rocks, but Sabrina was sweating. She lowered the binoculars and saw the sheen of perspiration on her arms and on the backs of her hands. A couple of times as she climbed to this eyrie, she had slipped and bumped the injured leg; now the wound was too tender to touch.

She could hear her breathing, shallow and tremulous, and when she shifted her position between the rocks a dull pain seized her stomach, like a cramp. In the space of five seconds the pain went from dull to sharp, and became so intense she had to grit her teeth to keep from crying out.

‘Gastric involvement,’ she whispered, past caring now whether she talked to herself or not. ‘Take counter-measures.’

The rucksack was at her feet. She opened it and unzipped the medical pouch. Among the foil-sealed packets she located six tablets of activated dimethicone with aluminium hydroxide. After some fumbling she managed to break the foil around two tablets and push them into her mouth. She sat chewing them, promising herself she would never again delay seeing a doctor when she knew she needed one.

The stomach pain subsided. Sabrina began to feel calm again, though not entirely in control of herself. She looked to the right suddenly as a scarlet bird landed on the rock less than two metres away. It was an amazing creature, long-legged like a wader, with a similar hooked beak, but it was all in miniature, the entire bird standing no higher than a pigeon.

‘Look at all that red …’

The feathers resembled scarlet velvet, and the eyes were like pale amethysts.

‘What are you, birdie?’ she whispered, trying not to disturb it. ‘I never saw anything like you before.’

There was a sound down near the edge of the forest, a faraway click like one stone shifting against another. Sabrina picked up the binoculars and looked. One of the marksmen had lost his footing and had slid a little way down the mountainside. Two others were helping him back up. Sabrina moved the binoculars to look at Mike. Even at that distance she could see how annoyed he was.

She looked at the bird again. Her heart thumped. It was still there, but now it was green. Bright emerald green with orange eyes. Sabrina touched her forehead and felt the wetness. It was as if someone had doused her with warm water. She was aware that she was having selective hallucinations, the kind that inserted themselves into reality. The pain in her stomach was coming back.

‘More dimethi-whatsit,’ she muttered.

She reached for the tablets, noticing the bird had gone, if it was ever there. She took the packet between both hands and shakily tried to burst the foil blister covering one of the tablets. She pressed too hard and the tablet shot out over the edge of the rock. She tried again. This time the pressure was just right. She slipped the tablet into her mouth and began chewing.

‘One more,’ she panted.

As the plastic bubble split, a hand landed on Sabrina’s shoulder. The tablet fell at her feet. She turned her head and looked at the strong brown fingers pressed into the material of her shirt.

This was real, she decided. She was not imagining it.

The operation to get the marksmen in position along the mountain track took more time than Mike had expected; it was already late in the afternoon by the time they were all tucked down out of sight. They were deployed in two groups of four, with a pair of men wielding long-range rifles stationed to the rear of the others in case of a retreat. Mike and Lenny, armed with revolvers, lay in a natural rain trough facing north, a metre down the mountainside from the road and twenty metres from the nearest marksmen.

‘They’ve all been warned not to put a mark on Seaton,’ Mike said.

‘So you can mark him yourself.’

‘So I get to interrogate him straight away. Men lying in hospital get time to set up their defences. I want him picked up off the road and bundled straight into that helicopter, no delay. I want to keep him off balance all the way back to Srinagar and then I want to grill him until he tells me everything. My customary compassion,’ he added, ‘will not be activated on this occasion.’

Lenny was watching the sun. It had sunk visibly in the ten minutes they had lain there. ‘I’m getting a leery feeling they’re on to us,’ he said.

‘What makes you say that?’ Mike snapped irritably. ‘Is that you playing opposites? Say it ain’t going to be so, which is sure to make it happen? Is that what you’re doing?’

Lenny sighed. ‘Ease up, will you? I know you’re anxious to get your hands on Seaton. I’m just saying I have a feeling —’

‘From where?’ Mike was glaring, unwilling to face the possibility that the bandits wouldn’t show. ‘Have you got some special sixth sense? Or a seventh one to back up the sixth? Huh?’

‘I’m going by the time of day,’ Lenny said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’ll be dark in an hour. Hill bandits are timetable creatures. It’s part superstition, part sticking to what they know works. They’re late. That’s what I’m saying, and on that fact I’m basing my suspicion that they’re not coming.’

‘Let’s just wait and see.’

‘Sure,’ Lenny said. ‘Nothing much else we can do, really.’

Twenty minutes later there was still no sign of bandits. Mike decided to raise Sabrina on the radio. He got no response.

‘It’s not turning out such a swell day,’ Lenny observed.

Mike said nothing.

An hour before dusk, on a hot stretch of road fifteen kilometres from the Kashmir border with China, a man riding a noisy moped jumped off his machine as it stalled and began shouting at it. There were few people around to see him, but those who did were amused. He was a comic-looking figure, white-bearded, dressed in an eccentrically large turban, flowing yellow shirt and blue pantaloons. He was furious, calling his bike an ingrate, a traitor, a worthless assemblage of junk held together with rust.

Then he stopped shouting and wheeled the moped to a patch of rough ground by the roadside. He put the machine on its stand, crouched by the side of it and started pulling off pieces of the engine.

Even at close quarters, nobody would have been able to tell that this was Ram Jarwal, steeped in his latest role, thoroughly enjoying himself as he tore off excess parts of bike engine and peered crazily at each one before he dropped it on the ground.

Several of the bits hitting the ground actually came from a pocket in the folds of Ram’s vast shirt. When he had finally reversed the procedure and put back all the pieces he had pulled off his machine, there was one visible item on the ground that had not been there when he arrived. It was an oval flat stone, like thousands of other littered about the roadside.

At his third attempt to restart the engine it fired and he jumped on. The bike tore off and in less than a minute Ram was out of sight.

It was nearly dark when Amrit Datta came striding along the same stretch of road, his sack dangling from his shoulder. At roughly the spot on the corner where the moped had stopped Amrit began limping.

He stopped and bent down beside an oval stone with a notch chipped cleanly out of its edge. In the gathering darkness he appeared to remove a pebble from his sandal and adjust the strap; in fact he lifted one side of the stone, uncovering a hole in the ground. The hole had been put there by Ram as he fussed with his engine parts and deftly used their natural digging edges — each one time only — to prepare a receptacle in the earth.

It was too dark for Amrit to see what he was taking out of the hole, but he could identify the items easily by touch. There was a replacement amulet for the one he would leave under the stone, and under that was his gun.

As he began walking again a few moments later, he patted the gun where it now lay, in the waistband of his baggy trousers, the metal cool against his skin.

He began to smile, and after a few more minutes he started to whistle. It took so little, he thought, to make him feel really sure of himself again.

19

The bandits didn’t show.

‘You’re entitled to say you knew this would happen,’ Mike told Lenny.

‘You know I don’t do stuff like that.’

‘Yeah. Ignore me, I’m just sore. Very sore.’

A call had come through from Srinagar to the helicopter pilot five minutes earlier. The assistant to Commissioner Mantur told the pilot that he and the marksmen, who were now running into overtime, had to return to base without delay.

As the men began filing silently down the mountainside to the tiny plateau where the helicopter sat, Mike grabbed Lenny’s arm. ‘I’m staying,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘I don’t feel like I’ve tried. Going now is just defeatist.’

‘Staying can’t help that. They won’t be along tonight. It’s getting dark, they’ve obviously changed their schedule. We can come another time.’

‘Now what are the real chances of that happening? Who’s going to give us the leeway after this bummer?’

‘Mike, what are you hoping to do?’ Lenny peered at his face in the dusk, trying to get a pinch of reason past the impulsiveness. ‘It’s going to get very dark soon. You’re all alone up here …’

‘Sabrina’s around somewhere.’

‘You don’t know that. Her radio was out. She probably took off when she realized she couldn’t make contact. That would be the drill, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Mike sighed, ‘that’s the drill.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t care. I’m staying. I’ve no idea what I’ll do, but I know I don’t want to go away from here empty-handed — not without really trying.’

‘You’ve no resources.’

‘I’m good at commandeering. And stealing.’

‘OK,’ Lenny said. ‘I’ll stay, too.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘When you’re back in New York bragging about how you hauled in Paul Seaton single-handed, I don’t want to have to skulk out of the room in case somebody asks me where I was at that moment.’

‘We’ll have to rough it,’ Mike said.

‘That won’t put me off. I bet I’ve roughed it more times, and worse, than you ever did.’

They caught up with the others and explained what they were doing. The pilot, a tall bearded Sikh, told them they were crazy. ‘But I wish you luck, nevertheless. If by some miracle you ever get back to Srinagar, look me up and I’ll buy you a beer. Your story should be worth hearing.’

Mike and Lenny took their padded windcheaters from the helicopter and stepped back, watching the others get on board. They stood and waved as the craft rose vertically for fifty metres and then swung away towards the north.

‘It’s going to be quiet around here with the boys gone,’ Lenny quipped.

Mike was gazing up at the ridge of rocks above the mountain path. ‘I hope Sabrina’s OK,’ he said.

They moved up the incline along the eastern side of the forest and sat down on the edge of the road, facing west.

‘Might as well catch the sunset,’ Lenny said.

They watched orange light fan out across the western horizon. By swift stages it turned to gold, red and purple as the sun dropped halfway below the dark margin of rock and mountain.

‘It never disappoints,’ Mike said.

They both turned at a sound to their right. Coming from the perimeter of the forest were six men, their faces dark amber in the fading blaze of sun. They all carried rifles, all of them pointing at Mike and Lenny.

‘One of us has to run for it,’ Mike said, lips scarcely moving, his voice no more than a whisper.

‘You go,’ Lenny grunted.

It was the rule. If two agents were cornered, and the prospects for survival looked slight, then one agent must try to escape.

‘No. You go.’

‘You’re a top UNACO man, for God’s sake …’

As they stood up, their hands in the air, Mike shoved Lenny violently with his shoulder, knocking him over the edge of the road. Lenny could do nothing but run.

‘Go like the wind!’ Mike yelled.

Lenny ploughed down the mountainside, arms flailing as he galloped over stones, leapt boulders and ran headlong through thickets and under overhanging trees.

Five of the bandits formed a circle around Mike. The sixth man went to the edge of the road and got down on one knee. He steadied his elbow and took aim with his rifle.

‘No!’ Mike yelled at him. ‘No, you bastard!’

A single shot rang out. Mike saw Lenny stumble and fall. The gunman stood up, walked down the mountainside a distance, then fired again. When he came back he gave his companions a thumbs-up.

Mike threw himself at the gunman but didn’t get past the two in front of him. They each hit him once, on the ears with clenched fists, deafening him, making his skull hurt so badly he had to clamp his hands over his head.

He was pushed and pulled towards the forest and marched through the trees in almost total darkness. After five or six minutes he began to see light, and as they marched forward, threading their way, he could hear the hum of a generator.

All at once they were on the edge of a clearing and he could see bright electric lights, mounted high on tubular metal stands. There were tents, cooking fires with spits mounted over them, and horses tethered in a long line by a wooden trough.

As Mike was shoved forward into the wide circle of light he saw a woman tied to a pole near one of the guttering fires. Her head was bowed and he saw blood caked on the front of her shirt. Drawing nearer he realized it was Sabrina. He jerked forward, making the men holding his arms stumble.

‘Sabrina! Sabrina honey! Are you OK?’

Somebody slapped him on the neck. Mike’s head jerked round, ‘You goddamned scum!’

He pulled an arm free and punched the nearest bandit on the chin. As the man fell Mike spun and kicked the one on the other side.

‘Vermin! Woman-beaters! You’re filth! Filth! I’ll kill every last one of you!’

For a moment he was out of their control, free, moving to his own rhythm while they bumped into each other trying to block him. He put his hands on the shoulders of a barrel-shaped man and head-butted him on the nose. The sound of cracking bone gave Mike fresh energy.

‘Get out of my way!’ He slipped his hand under his jacket and pulled out his gun. ‘Back! Get back!’ He thumbed the hammer as men scattered. ‘Sabrina! Wake up!’

He turned to the pole where Sabrina was tied. A bandit behind him waited with his rifle raised until Mike lined himself up. In that split second the rifle butt came down with flashing speed and struck Mike’s head. He stopped moving for a moment, staring at the pole and Sabrina’s sagging body. Then he fell over on his face.

20

His first recollection when he came round was that Lenny Trent was dead. Through his pain and immobility he felt a terrible distress. There was a kaleidoscope of tumbling images, all of Lenny, all the pictures bright, full of energy and laughter.

The images were an assertion: He isn’t dead! The vehemence was a voice inside Mike, his own, chanting over and over to a banging fist, reinforcing his refusal to believe.

The pain in his head intruded but he hung on to the images, knowing they were going to fade, wanting them to stay and wipe out the reality.

‘Stay, buddy, stay …’

How could it be that Lenny Trent no longer existed? In a buzzing, sickening haze, surfacing quickly to full consciousness, Mike saw Lenny’s mobile face again, the eyes so alive behind their lenses. And then he faded away, and Mike accepted the hollow certainty.

Dead and gone.

He opened his eyes and more pain scythed across his skull. He was aware that he was sitting, and that his arms were tied. Another face moved in close to his, hairy and belligerent. It was familiar.

‘Paul Seaton,’ Mike said.

‘Nowadays I am called Memet-Muhammad.’

‘Crap by any other name …’

Seaton stiffened. Not used to people talking back, Mike thought.

‘I have plans for your poisonous tongue,’ Seaton said, ‘once you’ve told me what I want to know.’

The American accent was overlaid with the clipped syllabic delivery of Indian speech. Seaton probably hadn’t spoken English for years.

‘I’m telling you nothing.’ Mike turned his head to one side. There were maybe fifty people moving about in the clearing, a third of them women. ‘So this is where you live.’

‘Astute of you to work that out.’ Seaton grinned. He still had the hard and dangerous manner, but now it had a reckless edge, the bravura of a man who won every fight. ‘It amused me the way you all kept clinging to this forest for cover, hiding from me right under my nose.’

A woman brought a plate with food on it. Seaton took it and began eating with his fingers.

‘Tell me who you are.’

‘No.’

‘Shall I ask the woman instead?’

Sabrina! Mike suddenly remembered. He looked anxiously around and finally saw her. She was still where he had seen her last, still sagging against the pole in the middle of the clearing.

‘If my hands were free,’ Mike said, ‘I’d kill you with them.’

‘Aw, sorry — I have to frustrate you by denying you the chance.’

Seaton reached out with greasy fingers and twisted Mike’s nose. He kept twisting until the pain made Mike cry out.

‘I’ve guessed a thing or two about you and your friends, mostly from the equipment the woman was carrying. But I need to fill in the gaps.’

‘Didn’t she tell you, then?’

Seaton shook his head and popped more food into his mouth. ‘She’s very well trained. Not a word, in spite of everything.’

‘How did it feel, putting your grubby paws on a civilized person?’

‘Civilized! Ha!’ Particles of food flew from Seaton’s mouth. ‘You have no idea what civilization is. You think you are cultured, enlightened, a citizen of an advanced society. What you are, Mister Interloper, what you lamentably are is the feeble instrument of a corrupt western fixation with territory and material wealth.’

‘You reckon?’

‘You and your kind will be swallowed by the wilderness created by your own greed.’

‘Fine ideological words,’ Mike said. ‘They don’t sound so good coming from a crummy bandit who started his career as a lump of mouth-breathing hired muscle.’

‘That tongue of yours,’ Seaton said, wagging a finger.

‘I remember how you once destroyed a good man, Seaton. A man you didn’t even know. You did it without a qualm. You did your harm the way an insect would. And today you killed my friend just as brutally, with as little feeling. You’re not entitled to an opinion or to justice. You’re a barbarian.’

That appeared to sting Seaton. He blinked at Mike a couple of times, then he said, ‘People can be misunderstood.’

‘Not people like you.’

‘Yes. People change, remember.’

‘Oh sure. Time and circumstance, the great changers. Now you’re an Islamic separatist honcho. You’re into laudable pursuits like scaring pathetic drug mules into killing themselves sooner than face your notion of punishment —’

‘Hold on!’ Seaton shouted. ‘I won’t have that!’

‘Too late. I just gave it to you.’

‘No! No! You won’t hang that on me!’

Seaton jumped to his feet. He went to the centre of the clearing, shouting and gesticulating. Mike felt the bonds on his wrists being cut. He dropped his hands in his lap and flexed his fingers. The blood came tingling back. He watched as Sabrina’s ropes were cut and three women put her on a pallet and carried her away to a tent.

Seaton came back, still agitated, waiting while two women put food and water in front of Mike. Mike tasted the meat and found it was succulent chicken. He took a mouthful of water and stared at Seaton.

‘What’s going on?’

Seaton got down on his hunkers. He pointed at the plate. ‘Eat.’

Mike put a chunk of chicken breast in his mouth and chewed. It was as good as anything he had ever tasted.

‘What you said about the mules, being forced to kill themselves, that is what happens to people in the new trade.’

‘New trade? You mean the traffic in highly refined drugs?’

Seaton nodded. ‘Superfine heroin, MDA, pure coke, concentrated cannabis oil, crack — all that stuff is down to somebody else. I’m no part of the trade and I’m no part of the practices. Do you understand that? It’s got nothing to do with us.’

Mike pointed to his plate. ‘Why the sudden generosity?’

‘We’re obviously not so totally on opposite sides as I thought. Or as you thought. For all I knew before, you were an outcrop of the DEA.’

‘I could be. My friend that one of your goons shot for sport — he used to be DEA.’

‘Listen, about your dead friend — he had a gun, he would have shot me or mine given a chance, so let’s not get mired down in recrimination here. Just tell me one thing. Is it any part of your brief to stop the new trade?’

‘It certainly is.’

‘Well now let me tell you about my operation. It’s nothing angelic, but there’s a big difference between what we are and what they are, believe me. First off, we have no part in terrorizing peasant people or poor people of any kind.’

‘What do you do, then?’

‘Fundamentally, we look after ourselves.’ Seaton smiled briefly, showing surprisingly white teeth. ‘That’s what it’s about, survival. To survive we have to do some unpopular things, hard and damaging things, just to keep our status. If we ever softened we would be swamped.’

‘You haven’t really told me what you do.’

‘I operate drug convoys. That’s where the revenue comes from. The life-blood. But in my operation there are no hapless couriers, no victims within the trade. There’s only me, my men and their women and children. The merchandise we transport is traditional low-quality hashish and heroin destined for the usual outlets in the West. Any garbage will do for them.’

‘What’s your exact stance on the new trade?’

‘For months I’ve watched and I’ve searched. I caught one of their mules but he executed himself before he could be questioned. I’ll keep on watching and searching.’

‘And if you get lucky?’ Mike said. ‘What’ll you do?’

‘When I find the people who run the market in refined drugs, I’ll kill them. I don’t care how many there are. They will all die.’

‘That’s one way to deal with the competition, I suppose.’

‘They won’t be eradicated because they are competitors,’ Seaton said. ‘They are the worst kind of parasites, they devour our society. That is why they will die.’

‘You’re not exactly a credit to your society.’

‘We make waves and we make trouble but we do not destroy the fabric of community,’ Seaton insisted. ‘Call me what you like, but nobody can say I ever exploited or harmed the poor or the vulnerable.’

They stared at each other for a tense moment. ‘I made a mistake about you,’ Mike said. ‘I jumped to the conclusion that suited my prejudice. I was wrong.’ He swallowed the last of the chicken and took more water. ‘You’re still a rotten man, though,’ he added. ‘Your principles don’t save you from that.’

Seaton shrugged. He stood up and walked away. A minute later Sabrina was led out of the tent where the women had taken her. She had been bathed and her hair was combed. She looked pale but unharmed.

Two women helped her on to a horse. Mike was nudged and when he turned a man pointed to a horse standing saddled and ready at the edge of the clearing. Mike climbed stiffly into the saddle and coaxed the horse to where Sabrina’s stood.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Better than I expected,’ Sabrina said.

Seaton appeared and pointed to three of his men mounted on horses. ‘They will take you to a main road, and from there you will be able to make your way back to wherever you came from.’

‘What about the Range-Rover?’ Sabrina said.

‘A bonus we can really use,’ Seaton said, ‘for which we’re grateful.’ He looked at Mike. ‘Your friend’s body has been taken to the railway station at the town of Jerrida. Given your obvious resources, I’m sure you’ll be able to arrange its removal to wherever you want.’

Without another word Seaton turned and walked into one of the tents. The three horsemen moved off. Mike and Sabrina followed them.

By the time they reached the main road it was bright daylight. Mike and Sabrina sat on their horses and watched the bandits disappear into the rocks of the mountainside.

‘So here we are,’ Mike said, ‘wherever here is.’

A fresh morning breeze blew Sabrina’s hair out behind her. Mike told her she looked like an ad for shampoo.

‘Death warmed-over is what I feel like.’

‘They treated you pretty badly?’

‘Well, no …’ Sabrina shrugged. ‘It wasn’t like I was tortured or anything. The blood that was on me, I got that falling over a couple of rocks on the way to the forest. What they did was threaten, mostly.’

‘So what’s wrong?’

‘I developed septicaemia over the last few days —’

‘Septicaemia? How —’

‘Knife wound in my leg, it’s a long story. Anyway, I hit the crisis while I was up in the rocks, keeping watch. I can’t help feeling it was my fault it all went the way it did.’

‘You couldn’t have prevented what happened.’

‘I could have been more alert, and if I’d been more alert I might have spotted something going on in the forest.’

‘Forget it,’ Mike said. ‘The hills are Seaton’s territory. We didn’t stand a chance.’

‘I’m sorry about Lenny,’ Sabrina said, stroking her horse’s neck.

‘He was a good, dear friend,’ Mike said. ‘If I talk about him I’ll get maudlin. There’ll be time for that later. First things first. How’s the leg now? Should we try to get medical help?’

‘No need,’ Sabrina said. ‘Back there in the tent the ladies gave me the hill-bandit version of a blanket bath, and when they saw the dressing they had to have a look. Well I don’t know what they did, but they did it with squashed leaves and powder from a leather bag. It stung like hell for maybe three minutes, then they washed it off, bound the wound again and now it feels like it’s healing. The rotten way I feel, that’s just aftermath. The fact is I’m mending fast.’

Mike looked at the sun and pointed along the long dusty stretch of the road. ‘That way’s north. For now, that’s all we need to know.’

Sabrina brought her horse around, getting it to stand beside Mike’s. ‘This has been a terrible setback, hasn’t it?’ she said.

‘You could put it that way. We’re God knows how many miles from where we should be, we’ve wasted time and huge resources on chasing the wrong people, and a fine operator and good friend has been wiped out. It’s all loss, there’s been no gain at all.’

‘So it’s a time for taking one of Philpott’s axioms to heart.’

‘Which one would that be?’

Sabrina recited from memory. ‘“Defeat in a venture should be regarded as a challenge, just as an obstacle should be seen as a disguised opportunity. Adversity should make us even more determined to succeed.”’

‘Hear, hear.’ Mike smiled wearily. ‘Good old Uncle Malcolm. I’ll definitely do that one in cross-stitch when I get a minute.’

They began travelling north, the horses keeping in step, treading the road as if they regularly made that journey.

‘It’s odd,’ Mike said after a while, ‘but we haven’t started fighting yet.’

‘I noticed that.’

‘By now we should have been full of recrimination and blaming each other for all this catastrophe.’

‘Could we be maturing?’ Sabrina said.

‘Nah.’

‘What, then?’

‘I reckon we’re just too low to take the trouble to bicker. Give it time. We’ll revert to type.’

Sabrina was shielding her eyes from the sun, gazing at the winding stretch of road ahead. ‘I’ve no idea where we are,’ she said, ‘but it would be great if we came to the village where old Aziz lives — you know, the man who put me on to the convoy route?’

‘He could help us now, could he?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Sabrina said. ‘But he makes a terrific cup of tea.’

21

Malcolm Philpott’s arrival in India was precisely as low-key as he wanted, and his transfer from Delhi to Jammu was just as discreet. He arrived at the area office of Charity Distribution International in mid-afternoon and was shown into the office of the Senior Co-ordinator for northern India, Sarj Deerpaul.

‘Mr Philpott, your reputation comes before you!’

Deerpaul came around his desk with arms wide and for a second Philpott thought he was going to be hugged. But the rotund little man brought his arms down again, executed a short bow, and reached out his hand. They shook and Deerpaul showed Philpott to a chair.

‘Harry Lewis speaks so highly of you.’ Deerpaul got behind the desk again. ‘I gather you were once colleagues.’

‘Many years ago. But we’ve remained friends. I suppose he told you why I’m here?’

‘Indeed.’ Deerpaul patted the square knot of his yellow silk tie. ‘He tells me you hope to direct your expertise towards a solution, or at least a partial solution, of our biggest problem, the black market in charity aid.’

‘I hope to arrive at an evaluation, at any rate.’ Philpott was reluctant to make extravagant promises before he knew anything. ‘A plan of attack is the first essential.’

‘From our experience, I would say you will find yourself up against some very unpleasant characters, Mr Philpott. In our own probing of the problem we have lost investigators, and not just a handful. Good skilled men and women have died for doing no more than asking casual questions in the wrong quarter.’

Philpott explained he was particularly interested in a farm near Srinagar where aid consignments had appeared to be taken regularly for redistribution.

‘I know of that place,’ Deerpaul said. ‘It looks so vulnerable, so wide open to inspection and so entirely above board. We have not been able to do more than harbour suspicions, however. Two investigations have drawn blanks. Officers conducting a third investigation of the place never came back.’ Deerpaul smiled wincingly. ‘Melodramatic, no? But that is exactly what happened. Two seasoned investigators decided to tackle the owner of the farm — it is really no more than a smallholding — and those officers were never seen again.’

Part of Deerpaul’s trouble, Philpott knew, was that he and his investigators had to respect the laws of any region where they worked. UNACO had to do that too, officially. Unofficially there were agreements, and codicils to agreements, that made sure the law of a territory did not obstruct the work of a Task Force or anyone else connected with UNACO.

‘I would like to visit that farm tonight, if that’s possible, Mr Deerpaul.’

‘Why, yes …’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Well… ahem … I had not expected you to be so avid in your need to get started. Consequently I have no agents available at present who can be assigned to go with you. The day after tomorrow, perhaps —’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Philpott said. ‘Give me a map, provide me with a car, and I’ll take care of the rest myself.’

Deerpaul looked shocked. ‘You would go there alone?’

‘Oh yes,’ Philpott said brightly. ‘I do find that I function better in the field if I don’t have to take anyone else’s presence into account.’

‘But I was thinking of the potential for danger.’

‘Oh, I’m still potentially dangerous, all right.’

Deerpaul laughed dutifully, but he still looked worried. ‘There is the most awful risk attached to visiting such a place as that farm on your own, Mr Philpott. I strongly advise you to wait until someone familiar with the territory can go with you.’

‘I simply don’t have the time.’

Deerpaul began to look very uneasy. ‘This is not right,’ he said. ‘Here you are, prepared to put yourself at hazard on behalf of this organization, and I can be of no help to you at all. Frankly, Mr Philpott, I feel terrible about this.’

‘Then try not to.’

‘Is there anything at all that I can do? After all, you have taken the trouble to come here —’

‘If you could let me have a summary of how much stuff, and what kind, goes through the farm in an average month…’

‘I have those figures to hand,’ Deerpaul beamed.

‘Then that would be a great help.’

‘Thank heavens.’

Deerpaul touched a button on an intercom and asked his secretary to bring in the latest estimates of black market dealing in the Vale of Kashmir.

‘Now you are sure this will help you, Mr Philpott? You are not simply humouring me in order to save my feelings?’

Philpott assured him the figures would be of great assistance. They would help, for a start, in putting Philpott to sleep later on. Nothing worked better on his insomnia than rows and columns of dry official figures.

The car supplied by Deerpaul’s office was mechanically sound and it handled very well on the rough half-formed roads between Jammu and the southern territory of the Vale of Kashmir. The suspension, on the other hand, was the hardest Philpott had ever withstood. At ten minutes to nine in the evening he drew up fifty metres from the perimeter fence of the farm, with an ache in his back that would take his New York chiropractor a month to put right.

He left the car locked up at the roadside and walked across wooded land in the direction of the farm. Deerpaul had provided a powerful MagLite torch but Philpott chose not to use it. Instead, he walked along in almost total darkness, making himself see. When he came out of the woods and was approaching the fence, he could make out the dull sheen of the wire against the surrounding blackness.

He stood by the fence for a while just listening. There were the sounds of animals, the rustle of leaves and grass in the soft breeze, an occasional small sound — bumps, the scraping of a chair on a stone floor — from the cottage at the centre of the farm. Nothing special, no indication of bustle or business. Everything he heard was consistent with a quiet, sleepy farm.

He walked along the fence, feeling for a gate, and eventually found one. It was a high double gate with two heavy padlocks. Philpott paused to consider if it would be worth his while to go over the fence. He decided to do it.

Back where he had first stood listening, there was a broken plastic bottle crate lying in the grass. He went back and found it and stood it on end close to the wire. When he climbed on it the crate dipped under his weight and creaked ominously, but it held.

He paused, licked the tip of his right forefinger and touched it to the top wire of the fence. The shock was severe enough to throw his hand away from the wire. He wet his finger again and touched the next wire. Nothing.

His leather gloves, as always, lay flat in his right inside jacket pocket. He put them on and gripped the top wire of the fence. The manoeuvre he was about to use was not one he would let any of his agents see him employ; it was ungainly and ergonomically unsound, and it would certainly make someone like Mike Graham laugh like a drain. It would make his doctor despair, because ever since Philpott’s heart attack a few years earlier, the old physician regularly complained that he didn’t take his health seriously enough. But the manoeuvre usually worked for Philpott, and for the moment that was all that counted.

He got up on his toes on the crate, then bent his knees sharply, keeping hold of the wire.

‘One.’

He breathed in, flexing his legs, pushing his shoulders as high as they would go.

‘Two.’

He repeated the move, stretching his back as far as he could, getting right up on his toes. He came down again and this time he crouched. He took a deep breath.

‘Three!’

He shot up, aiming himself into the air, pushing with his toes and pulling with his forearms. His body went up in an arc and sailed over the fence. He landed on his feet on the other side and sank to a squatting position.

When he was sure he had raised no alarms, he stood up. He brushed his jacket and began walking towards the dim lights of the cottage.

Halfway across the compound he heard a noise behind him. He turned and saw lights approaching. It was a truck, bumping over the stony ground between the perimeter fence and the road. Philpott dropped to the ground and flattened himself in the grass.

The truck stopped, someone got out to open the gates, then it rumbled through and stopped in front of the cottage. Philpott waited, listening for the sound of the gates being locked again. But no sound came from that direction. He noted that a clear escape route was now available should he need it.

As he lay there he saw someone being helped out of the back of the truck and led into the cottage. It looked as if there were two other people as well.

The cottage door opened, spilling out a fan of yellow light, then closed again. Philpott ran across the grass at a crouch.

He stood to one side of the largest of the three lit windows and peered in at the side. At a table, below an oil lamp dangling from the ceiling, a nervous-looking young man sat with a thick wad of money in front of him. On the other side of the table an old man stood, wagging a finger as he addressed the young man. Lurking back in the shadows were two men with the kind of faces Philpott generally described as being born for the gibbet. On a side table was a bulging sack and on another table beside it, a pile of unmistakable merchandise in telltale plastic bags: heroin, nearly fluorescent in its stark whiteness.

Philpott pulled back from the window. This was an odd happenstance. He had come looking for evidence of a black market in charity goods and stumbled on a drug-running operation.

He stood a moment longer, wondering about a course of action. Finally he decided the best thing was to leave and evaluate the evidence over a large brandy, preferably somewhere quiet and comfortable.

As Philpott made his way through the darkness towards his car, back in New York it was close to noon. C.W. Whitlock was in the Sculpture Garden on top of the twentieth-century wing of the Museum of Modern Art. It was a bright and reasonably warm day, but very few people had ventured out to the garden.

Whitlock pretended to give most of his attention to a bronze head of a girl, while his companion feigned interest in a pencil-slim Giacometti figure beside it.

‘Did it never occur to you, Bridget,’ Whitlock said quietly, ‘that you were bound to get caught in the end?’

The woman shrugged. She was approaching middle age, a small and tidy woman with attractive dark hair streaked with grey. She wore oval glasses with tortoise-shell frames which she kept pushing nervously along her nose.

‘The work, the cause, was everything, you know? Getting caught was a hazard but it was hardly worth considering, since the work had to be done anyway, risk or no risk.’

‘So you never feared for your own future? You never thought about the possibility of being shut away for the rest of your life?’

‘I thought about it late at night. Sometimes. The same way I occasionally think about death, or getting mugged, or finding myself walking down Fifth Avenue with no clothes on — all that insecure stuff was there, but it didn’t hinder me, it didn’t make me draw back from what I had to do.’

‘None of it came to anything,’ Whitlock said. ‘Don’t you find that disheartening?’

‘No. What mattered was my, my …’

‘Subversion?’

‘Sure. Right.’ She pushed the specs back along her nose. ‘I was doing what was right. I thought that then and I think it now. So I admit it was kind of absurd, it was a wrong tack in just about every respect, but it was something carried out in the right spirit.’

‘I think I understand.’ Whitlock moved on to the next sculpture. The woman moved too.

‘You think I’m a real dope, don’t you?’

‘No,’ Whitlock said. ‘I don’t agree with a thing you did, but I don’t condemn you for it, and I don’t think you’re anywhere near being a dope. A starry-eyed idealist, maybe …’

‘So where do I stand?’

‘Looking at the situation one way, it’s kind of grave,’ Whitlock said. ‘Looking at it another — well, no harm’s done…’

‘But there are consequences at law,’ the woman said.

‘If you ever found yourself having to face them.’ Whitlock turned to her. ‘That’s why I suggested we meet up here. Away from people keeping tabs. I’m prepared to let you vanish.’

She stared at him. ‘For real?’

‘Absolutely.’

She went on staring. ‘There’s a price, right?’

He nodded.

‘How much?’

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake.’ Whitlock looked affronted. ‘I don’t mean money.’

‘What, then?’

‘A free and detailed confession.’

‘How detailed?’

‘I’ve written it out already.’ Whitlock took two folded sheets of paper from his pocket and handed them to the woman. ‘Why don’t you go over there, sit down and read it. If you feel you can sign it, then I’ve got a pen with me, too. We can have this whole thing sewn up before we get back to street level.’

‘And what happens then, assuming I sign it?’

‘Well, I happen to know you’re not strapped for money, and you’ve got fast foreign transfer facilities set up already …’

‘You’re thorough, Mr Whitlock.’

‘Frankly, Bridget, there’s nobody to touch me in that department. As I see it, you can take off for anywhere you want. I’m sure you’ve somewhere in mind, a hinterland.’

She nodded. ‘How long have I got?’

‘Forty-eight hours, tops.’

She opened the papers, glanced at them a moment, then said, ‘Give me the pen. I’ll sign now.’

‘Without reading your statement?’

‘You’re an honourable man, right?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Well then. There’s no problem, you won’t have stuck me with anything I didn’t do, and I’m sure my darkest deeds will be presented in the kindest possible light.’

She put the statement on the plinth of the Giacometti and signed and dated both sheets.

‘There.’ She handed it back to Whitlock. ‘Will this do any practical good, do you think? Or is it just an exercise in detection and tidying up?’

‘I hope it’ll do some good,’ Whitlock said.

‘Fine.’ She smiled and turned away. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I should be getting along. I’ve a lot of packing to do.’

22

The first thing Philpott did when he got into his room at the Hotel Jammu Ashok was pour himself a large brandy from a bottle of Remy VSOP he had brought with him. He then settled down to think over the situation. When he reached a decision, he had another large brandy.

Before turning in for the night he put through a call on a scrambler circuit to C.W. Whitlock. There was a delay while the decoder at the US end connected, then Whitlock came on the line.

‘I believe I’ve stumbled on something that will be more than a simple addition to what TF3 are doing out here,’ Philpott told him. ‘But I’ll let you know more later. Has anything important turned up?’

‘Well, yes,’ Whitlock said. ‘It cancels part of your reason for going to Kashmir. Policy Control have sent us a memo.’

‘Yes?’

‘They’ve fixed a date for a techniques-and-procedures review. Two days from now.’

‘What, even though they know I’m not there?’

‘That’s it.’

‘But how can I defend myself if I’m not there?’

‘Strictly speaking,’ Whitlock said, ‘you don’t need to put up a defence, or put in an appearance, since technically you’re not under attack.’

‘In other words they can bulldoze whether I’m there or not.’

‘I’ll be here, sir. And I fully intend to speak up on behalf of our freedom to swing to our own rhythm.’

‘Do we have much of a case?’

‘I’m working on it.’

Philpott paused and swallowed more brandy. ‘What do you really think, C.W.? Can my skin be saved here?’

‘Anything’s possible. And I’ll be trying my hardest.’

Meanwhile, in open country one hundred and sixty kilometres north-west of Philpott’s hotel, Mike and Sabrina, still on horseback, were making their way north with the guidance of the stars. As an exercise in root-level self-sufficiency Mike would have enjoyed it; as a necessity he found it frustratingly limited. He would have felt better about everything, Sabrina told him, if he’d had something to eat.

‘The horses have done a lot better than us,’ she said, her voice echoing eerily in the dark. ‘All that good fresh water, and the fodder — those were nice people.’

Under other circumstances Mike would have found them delightful. But he had been hungry for many hours now, and entering the village he had entertained the hope of a meal, anything at all to cancel his hunger. It was not to be. The people were transients. It was a ghost village, and although there was a good well, and the people carried fodder for their animals, there was no spare food for human beings.

‘It could only happen to us,’ Sabrina said now.

‘What could?’

‘Coming on a band of travelling acrobats and jugglers.’

‘Starving acrobats and jugglers,’ Mike corrected. ‘Who seemed to value their animals’ health above their own, I might add.’

‘They were just honest and kind, Mike. You still find that in India. Decent people who don’t think about themselves all the time.’

‘Whatever. I’m still hungry. I thought it would have passed off by now. It’s supposed to, isn’t it?’

‘Let’s just concentrate on making headway. Maybe when we hit a decent-sized town we can sell the horses and get ourselves some food.’

‘Ssh!’ Mike stopped his horse.

‘What is it?’

‘Ssh!’

They sat in silence. The horses were motionless. There was scarcely a breeze.

‘What did you think you heard?’

‘It was like somebody choking back a cough,’ Mike said.

They listened again.

‘I guess it must have been your turn to hallucinate,’ Sabrina said.

‘Don’t make jokes about it. I’m being cautious, I’m staying alert. It’s part of the job.’

‘Oh, sorry. I forgot myself. I should have been concentrating on learning all I can from you.’

Sabrina couldn’t see Mike’s face but she could imagine his expression.

‘Any little thing, any implied criticism, and you go all defensive,’ he said.

His horse snorted. Sabrina couldn’t help imagining it was a response to what he had said. She laughed.

‘Go ahead,’ Mike said. ‘Laugh. Mock. Mockery’s the gusto of tiny spirits. You know that?’

‘I bet you’re glad you opened that fortune cookie.’

Mike began to say something else but Sabrina never heard it. A hand grabbed the back of her shirt and pulled her off the horse. As she hit the ground she was punched on the ear.

There was sudden light. On both sides of the road kerosene flares were lit and Sabrina saw the turbaned men who held them.

More bandits she thought. This country is all bandits …

She saw Mike. He was rolling away from two men who tried to hold on to him. Sabrina was already into the same manoeuvre. As her shoulders were grabbed she ducked her head and somersaulted, making the hands lose their grip.

Men shouted. Sabrina rolled twice and jumped to her feet. At a sound behind her she shot out her arm and swung left, chopped a man on the upper lip and felt the bone crack.

‘Eight!’ Mike shouted. ‘Eight of them!’

That was something she could learn from him, the ability to calculate while he was defending himself.

‘Check!’ she shouted back.

A man howled as Mike leapt in the air and kicked him in the belly. Another man screamed as the torch he was swinging was pushed in his own face.

‘Two down!’ Mike yelled.

Sabrina ran ten paces, braked and turned, arms extended and fists clenched. She hit two men. One of them dropped to his knees and she chopped him on the throat.

‘Three!’ she shouted.

The other man came at her, waving a knife. She ducked, heard the knife whistle past her ear, clenched one hand around the other and slammed them into his face. He dropped without a sound.

‘Four!’

Mike had commandeered the fallen torch and was swinging it like a fiery claymore. The flames roared in the faces of the remaining four bandits as they tried to consolidate into a phalanx. Sabrina paused to kick a man in the chest as he tried to rise, then threw herself at the four trying to surround Mike.

‘Geronimo!’

She caught one by the ear and ran sideways, pulling him off balance, making him scream and flail his arms. The other three scattered, confused. Mike grabbed one by the arm and twisted it. The shoulder cracked and the man fell, howling.

‘Two left!’ Sabrina shouted.

‘And running!’ Mike yelled.

He picked up a fallen torch and held it above his head. Two bandits were running off into the scrub land. The other six, in various stages of injury and semi-consciousness, were strewn along the road.

Mike looked at Sabrina and grinned. ‘Geronimo?’ he said.

‘It just came out.’

Mike wiped his brow. ‘We showed ‘em. They’ve got a lot to learn about dirty fighting.’

Sabrina threw back her hair and pointed as something glinted in the flickering torchlight. ‘They have transport.’

Mike picked up another torch and handed it to Sabrina. They walked across the scrub and took a look. Parked behind a clump of bushes was a battered Ford truck.

‘Hallelujah,’ Mike said quietly. ‘I can hardly believe it.’

He got behind the wheel, located the key and turned it. The engine started and turned over with a powerful hum. He revved and the note rose to a whine.

‘Hallelujah again. It’s been souped.’

‘It’s vibrating kind of wildly,’ Sabrina said.

‘It’s been abused,’ Mike shouted. ‘What can you expect from bandits? It should hold up for us, if we take it easy.’

Sabrina went back and surveyed the damage. Three men were on their feet. They backed away as she approached. The three on the ground were not moving. Sabrina pointed to the horses. ‘They’re yours,’ she said. The three men backed off some more. ‘Ride them in good fortune.’

From the road she picked up an old Webley.38, a knife and a leather pouch, then went back to the truck. As she got in beside Mike she shook the pouch in his face. It jingled.

‘Currency,’ she said. ‘Breakfast.’

Philpott met Ram Jarwal for lunch in the sunny, fragrant garden of the Tao Café in Srinagar. The food on the menu was mainly Chinese. Both men ordered chow mein, with spring rolls for starters. Ram’s manner seemed subdued; Philpott, who had never met him before, assumed that was how he was.

‘Coming here was something of a snap decision for me,’ Philpott said. He explained that his original intention had been to investigate the black market in charity aid. ‘Then I found myself sidetracked. I had planned to talk it over with Mike, Sabrina and Lenny.’

When they talked on the telephone earlier, Ram had explained that the ambush had failed and that Mike, Lenny and Sabrina had stayed behind after the team of police marksmen had left.

‘I have to bring you up to date,’ Ram said now. ‘I spoke on the phone to Mike less than an hour ago. He and Sabrina are making their way back in a truck they took from a gang of rural bandits …’

‘Life’s an endless adventure for those two.’

‘The sad bit is, Lenny Trent’s dead.’

‘Oh, God …’

‘He was shot. I don’t know any more than that.’

Philpott shook his head. ‘That’s terrible. Terrible. He was such a fine, lively chap …’ He drummed his fingers absently for a moment. ‘What about his remains? Surely we need to make arrangements?’

‘Mike told me the body’s at the railway station in Jerrida,’ Ram said. ‘I’ve already made arrangements through UN Information and Services. They’ll contact Drugwatch International and the body should be flown back to the States within twenty-four hours.’

‘Well.’ Philpott sat back and clasped his hands in his lap. ‘That’s taken the shine off the day.’

‘The whole thing was a fiasco,’ Ram said. ‘The ambush failed, then Mike and Sabrina were taken prisoner by the very bandits they were hoping to ambush, and to top it all, it turns out the American bandit leader isn’t what Mike thought he was.’

‘Even so, Mike had good reason for following the lead,’ Philpott said. ‘I’ve no doubt about that. An agent can’t pass up a possibility just because there’s a chance of it leading nowhere.’

‘That’s like something Lenny Trent said, the night before they left. In his business, he said, failure is part of the motif of success.’

‘Wise words,’ Philpott said. ‘Take a close look at our successes, especially our big ones, and you’ll see they’re bedded in flops and wrong turnings.’

‘So.’ Ram, anxious to lift the gloom, made himself sound brighter. ‘Do you want to talk about your unexpected sidetracking?’

‘Indeed I do.’

Philpott told Ram about the smallholding and how he had gone there looking for signs of black market trading; instead, he appeared to have uncovered part of a drug-trafficking organization.

‘It has to be worth following up,’ he said. ‘It could be a factor in the trade Mike and Sabrina are trying to uncover.’

Ram cleared his throat delicately. ‘We know about the farm, Mr Philpott.’

‘What — the drug-trafficking side of it?’

‘That’s the only part we do know about. If there’s a black market link, we don’t have any intelligence so far to back that up.’

‘So what goes on at the farm?’

‘It’s a place where mules are kitted out and sent on their way. We’ve already sent an agent through there. What he gathers in the way of intelligence could form the basis of a case against the traffickers. It might even help us find out where the trade originates. The problem with the farm is, if we show a heavy-handed interest in that quarter, they’ll simply move the operation somewhere else.’

Philpott was staring at his plate. ‘Well don’t I feel the idiot. I really thought I’d stumbled on to something nobody knew about.’

‘I know a little bit about the black market trade in these parts,’ Ram said. ‘They move their centres of operation whether they’re being investigated or not. They are a different animal. Nothing gets established with them, they don’t believe in laying down patterns.’

‘So if there was a black market operation at the farm a month ago —’

‘It’s highly likely it’s moved on. Black marketeers rent places on very short leases, Mr Philpott.’

‘Please don’t tell me any more,’ Philpott said. ‘If you do, I’m likely to get too depressed to finish my lunch.’

Later that afternoon Philpott called C.W. Whitlock in New York. Whitlock already knew about Lenny Trent and confirmed that the body was being returned to the United States. Philpott told him about the misunderstanding over the farm.

‘I have a feeling the whole black market trade over here needs a thorough, detailed analysis before any offensive is even considered.’

‘Don’t let it get you down,’ Whitlock said. ‘It wasn’t your only reason for going out there anyway, was it?’

‘I suppose not. But I’ve been thinking, I could come back now and defend myself at that damned hearing.’

‘No, don’t do that.’ Whitlock spoke a little too quickly. ‘I’d rather do the defending.’

‘But surely, if I’m there in person —’

‘Take my word for it, sir, it would be better if you stay right where you are. The presentation of our case calls for a dispassionate approach …’

‘And you don’t think I have that?’

‘I just think you should leave it to me.’

23

Eighty kilometres south of Srinagar the Ford began to cough. Mike gunned the engine, hoping to clear an obstruction in the fuel line, but that made the plugs misfire and finally the engine stopped.

‘Terrific.’

He got out, opened the bonnet and stared. Sabrina came round beside him. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think I don’t know a thing about these engines.’

He slammed down the bonnet.

‘It sounded to me like it was dying,’ Sabrina said.

‘You’re really into hi-tech talk, aren’t you?’

‘Seriously, I mean. I was in a cab in Beirut once when it made that noise. The driver couldn’t revive it. The engine had been repaired and patched so many times, it was some kind of miracle of spare-part surgery. But that was the end of the line, there was no saving it. And it sounded just like our engine did a couple of minutes ago.’

Mike tried to start it again, but now the starter motor wouldn’t turn over.

‘So we walk,’ he said.

Where the truck stalled the road had begun to rise. As they walked they found it rose in a gentle gradient for another five kilometres.

‘It’s levelling out,’ Sabrina panted, trudging behind Mike, taking advantage of his shadow.

‘I don’t feel any difference.’

‘I do.’ Sabrina stopped and wiped the dust from her lips. ‘And hey, look at that.’

She pointed down to their right. Since they had begun walking there had been only trees and bushes on the lower ground. Now they were looking at a road. Fifty metres ahead it veered away to the right.

‘There’s a signpost where it turns.’ Mike shielded his eyes and narrowed them. ‘I think it says Srinagar.’

They scrambled down the slope and on to the road. Sabrina took a closer look at the sign.

‘Ten kilometres. We’re nearly there.’

‘If the truck hadn’t broken down,’ Mike said, ‘we’d have missed this road completely.’

‘That’s the way to talk. Keep making us look lucky.’

Mike made to grab Sabrina. She skipped ahead of him and ran along the road. He ran after her, then they both stopped as a station wagon came round a corner sixty metres ahead and roared towards them.

Mike and Sabrina went to the side of the road. They could see the driver was an Indian, big and broad. Behind him sat an Indian woman, her lower face obscured by a veil. She was surrounded by piles of cardboard boxes.

‘That guy doesn’t look pleased to see us,’ Mike said.

The driver was glaring at them, his mouth moving. He braked the car and it slid to a crunching stop in a cloud of dust. He got out, still looking angry, muttering to himself.

‘Hi there,’ Mike said, then jerked back as the driver pulled a gun.

‘Down!’ Sabrina yelled. Mike was flat on the ground already. She landed beside him as the man fired twice, hitting the road inches in front of them.

‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ Mike shouted. ‘Put away the gun, you idiot!’

The man fired again. Mike pulled the Webley .38 from his belt, aiming the gun as it moved. He fired two shots. The first bullet entered the man’s head, the second penetrated his chest. He spluttered and coughed, clutching his chest as blood streamed into his eyes. He dropped to his knees, then fell over on his back.

As Mike and Sabrina stood up, the woman in the back of the car dived into the driver’s seat. She put the big wagon into a screeching turn and roared off.

Mike looked down at the dead man. ‘Why do you suppose he fired at us?’

‘Maybe he didn’t want us to see him and live to talk about it.’

Mike went on staring. ‘I’ve seen him before,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘No idea.’ Mike stooped and felt in the man’s pockets. They were empty. He stood up again. ‘I’ve seen the woman before, too.’

‘You could only see her eyes.’

‘Sure. But they’re unforgettable eyes.’ Mike shrugged. ‘It’ll come to me.’

‘If this works,’ Philpott said to Ram Jarwal, ‘I’ll feel measurably redeemed.’

They sat in Ram’s jeep, watching the little cottage at the centre of the farm. They had been there fifteen minutes and there had been no sign of activity. They were sure someone was inside, because they had been careful to arrive before dusk, and when it began to turn dark, lights went on in the cottage.

Ram looked at his watch. ‘Shall we do it now?’

‘I’m ready if you are.’

They got out of the vehicle and walked to the gate. There was a bell-push suspended at the end of a heavy electric cable. Ram jabbed it three times.

‘Was that imperious enough?’ he said.

‘Perfect.’

The cottage door opened and an old man came out. Philpott recognized the stoop and the jerky movements; it was the man he had seen the night before, talking to the younger man at the table. The man came to the gate, moving carefully, shining a torch ahead of him. At the gate he stopped and shone the torch first on Philpott, then on Ram. He said something in Kashmiri, then in Urdu.

‘Do you speak English?’ Ram said.

‘Well of course.’ The linguistic switch from East to West also produced a lightening of the voice. The old man sounded like a different person. ‘What can I do for you, please?’

‘We are from the Central Government office in Jammu,’ Ram said, keeping his voice smooth, with a firm authoritarian edge. ‘May we come inside?’

The man appeared to consider it. ‘Very well.’

He unpadlocked a smaller gate within one of the main gates and they stepped through.

‘I am Dr Vyas, by the way.’

Ram looked quickly at Philpott. The last thing they had expected was a doctor, even a fake one.

‘I am Annat Dishu,’ Ram said, his delivery calm and plausible, ‘and this is Mr Pilkington of our Bombay liaison office.’

When they were inside, Ram declined a chair and so did Philpott.

‘You will excuse me if I sit,’ Vyas said. ‘My legs are no longer what they were.’ He eased himself down into an old armchair, dabbing at one eye which seemed to be permanently watering. ‘Now, gentlemen, how can I help you?’

‘Perhaps you would care to tell us about yourself first,’ Ram said. His manner was more aggressive now. ‘I would advise you to leave out nothing that you consider to be important.’

‘My name as I told you is Vyas, Jabar Vyas. I hold a PhD degree from the University of New Delhi. My speciality is botany.’

‘And this is your farm?’

‘Yes, although I do not really farm in the accepted sense. What I produce here — eggs, milk, a few vegetables — is solely for my own use. I am self-sufficient. The farm and its flora are my recreation, do you understand? Botany is my life. This is not a profitable venture, if that is what you thought. I don’t believe there is any profit to be made from this land.’

‘That is an interesting story,’ Ram said, unsmiling, his voice a shade harder still. ‘It is well told and indeed almost convincing.’

The old man frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Is it not true, Dr Vyas — if that is your name — that this farm, these very premises, are used for the briefing of drug couriers before they set out to make their deliveries?’

‘I don’t understand …’

‘I said it plainly enough, didn’t I?’

‘Please,’ the old man said, ‘there is no need to raise your voice, I am happy to co-operate with you, but your accusations are so wild, so fantastic —’

‘Don’t play the innocent with me!’

Now the old man looked frightened. Philpott came forward, slipping into his role. He muttered something to Ram, who instantly looked huffy and stepped aside.

‘I apologize for my colleague’s manner,’ Philpott said, laying a hand gently on the old man’s shoulder, ‘and for his crass misapprehension. We will go now without troubling you further, and we will make our report strictly on the basis of what you have told us.’

They hurried outside and across to the gate. Philpott paused, watching for a sign of movement in the cottage.

‘Back to the wagon fast,’ he said. ‘I don’t fancy we’ll have to wait long.’

In the jeep Ram switched on the VHF scanner mounted in the radio slot. He began slowly turning the sensor knob from side to side. After a minute the speaker clicked and there was the sound of pulsed dialling. Ram pressed the LOCK button.

‘He’s using a mobile, and it’s calling another mobile.’

‘How far away?’

‘No way of telling. We can only hope it’s not in another country.’

The old man’s voice came on. He sounded squeaky and agitated. An answering voice kept cutting in, making the old man’s voice go higher each time until he was practically screaming into the phone.

‘What are they saying?’

‘He said that two government snoopers have been to see him, and they’re on to the operation. The other one is telling him all the time to stay calm, it will be fixed, but he says he’s scared and if the government men come back and do a search the whole deal will be in the fire.’

Ram listened again. ‘They’re telling the old man he should have shot us. He says he didn’t get a chance.’

The squabbling continued, then the sound suddenly cut off.

‘The destination phone hung up,’ Ram said. ‘The old man kept saying he didn’t want to be questioned again, they had to get him out, he was scared he would say the wrong thing. The other man said he would fix it, then he cut off communication. ’

‘I thought the old boy was rather convincing,’ Philpott said. ‘Apart from the telltale eye.’

‘The running one?’

‘No, its neighbour. If they’d both been watering he would have been entirely convincing, I think, but the good eye kept jerking to the corner of the shelf behind you.’

‘What was on it?’

‘A pistol. Looked like an old Walther P38 from where I was standing.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Ram said. ‘Wait?’

‘Oh yes. This is drug business, remember. Every aspect, every feature of the drug trade is amplified to many times beyond the normal. These men have a problem, and they will fix it, and they will do their fixing with ridiculous-seeming haste and, no doubt, the most extreme means.’

They waited eight minutes before anything happened. Then a heavy black van came pounding along the road and drove straight through the farm gates, sending them flying and uprooting a row of fence posts.

‘Enter the extreme means,’ Philpott said.

The van stopped in front of the cottage and two men in dark suits got out and went inside. Almost at once they came out again, carrying what looked like file boxes, and put them in the back of the van. They went inside again. When they came out next time they each carried a full sack in one hand and one gigantic sack between them. These were loaded into the van, then one of the men got into the driving seat.

‘They don’t waste any time,’ Philpott said.

‘That other one’s taking out a gun.’

They watched the second man march into the cottage. A moment later a shot rang out. The man left the cottage and jumped into the van. It drove off in the direction it had come.

Ram and Philpott waited three minutes, then ran back to the cottage. Inside, the old man lay on the floor. He was dead. He had been shot between the eyes with a dumdum shell; part of his brain was smeared across the wall.

‘I suppose I better call the police,’ Ram said.

‘No, hang on.’ Philpott produced his own mobile and tapped in a number. He waited. ‘Is that Andrew Hamilton?’ He listened and smiled. ‘Yes, right first time, it’s Philpott. Long time no see. Look, it’s all a bit of a rush, but can I ask a favour?’

Philpott gave the man on the other end the farm’s map references, and asked if the full team could drop in and do a comprehensive sweep. Ram stood by, mystified.

When the call was over Philpott put the phone back in his pocket.

‘Commander Andrew Hamilton,’ he said. ‘Ex-Yard, now a senior Interpol forensic chap. Now and then, so long as we don’t abuse things, we can call on him and ask to use one of his local teams. They do a lovely job, and so quickly.’

‘Where are they based?’

‘New Delhi’s the nearest, at present.’ Philpott winked. ‘Don’t fret, they’ll be here before the deceased starts to ripen.’

The helicopter landed one hour and twenty minutes later. A seven-man, white-suited forensic team moved through the little house from one end to the other. They covered every inch, sifting, taking photographs and collecting samples of hair, fibre, dust and debris. Before they were finished, interim search results were being computed on an analytical bench inside the helicopter. The forensic officer in charge updated Philpott on what they had found, and Philpott passed it along to Ram Jarwal.

‘The tentative verdict is that vast quantities of various high-grade drugs have passed through the house, but there is no evidence of long-term storage.’

‘Then the farm is nothing but a waystage?’ Ram said.

‘Correct. But if there is anything here to provide a link with the source of supply, then these are the men to find it.’

‘And do you believe they will?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Philpott said. ‘Drug people are as devious as we are, they bury their tracks deep. But we’ve agitated them, and they won’t have missed this classy show of intent. They know that we’re trouble, and the worst kind.’

24

The techniques-and-procedures review was called for ten o’clock in the Dag Hammarskjöld room on the third floor of the UN Secretariat building. The Secretary General was in Switzerland; a deputy, Sarah Lawrence, a quietly-dressed young specialist in international law, sat in for him. Also at the long table at the far end of the room was Thomas Lubbock, Director of Policy Control, and beside him Secretary Crane. Three lawyers sat at a smaller table on the right of the room and C.W. Whitlock sat opposite, under the tall window, the sunlight on his back.

‘Every person having business with this review is now present,’ a clerk announced.

Without rising, Thomas Lubbock put the case for the Department of Policy Control.

‘In February this year, a search of a deceased hotel porter’s apartment in Greenwich Village uncovered a photograph of Malcolm Philpott, the Director of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organization.’

The clerk passed the picture to Sarah Lawrence.

‘Written on the back of the picture is Philpott’s name and his title within the UN.’

Lubbock was a pink-faced man with tiny jowls that trembled when he spoke. He turned now to look at Ms Lawrence.

‘To anyone concerned about security standards within the UN,’ he said, ‘it is troubling that such a picture should be found among the property of a humble working man. Humble is an adjective that sits well on the dead man, whose name was Arno Skuttnik. He was an immigrant with no criminal record, a man who kept to himself and roused no special curiosity in all the years he lived in New York. We have no way of knowing how he came by the photograph of Mr Philpott, or what use he intended to make of it, if any. The whole point is, the man was able to get that picture, which underlines the point, made several times in the past by my department, that UNACO has become so loosely controlled that everyday security has broken down.’

Sarah Lawrence nodded. ‘And what does the Department of Policy Control suggest?’

‘Immediate corrective measures,’ Lubbock said.

Ms Lawrence nodded again. ‘Would you specify?’

Lubbock glanced at Whitlock, who was listening attentively. ‘Since its inception, UNACO has enjoyed a measure of autocracy. The Director is answerable only to the Head of the Security Council, and to the Secretary General. UNACO’s various task forces, covert surveillance units, intelligence gathering bodies and its international liaison networks are administered without reference to any other bodies within the tightly unified structure of the UN.’

‘We know that much already,’ Ms Lawrence said.

‘It is our proposal,’ Lubbock continued, ‘that UNACO be brought under the UN’s conventional umbrella of set procedures and accountability. The Director should be answerable in the first instance to myself and should have no direct access to the Head of the Security Council or the Secretary General. Furthermore, UNACO’s activities should be open to scrutiny by my own officers and representatives of departments directly involved in funding, strategy and personnel deployment.’

Sarah Lawrence glanced at her notepad. ‘So let’s get it in a nutshell, Mr Lubbock. You propose that in view of certain evidence of laxity in the running of UNACO, the organization be pulled into line and forfeit its special status as a semi-autonomous body. Does that cover it?’

‘That’s more or less it,’ Lubbock said.

Ms Lawrence looked at the lawyers. They nodded.

‘Well now, Mr Whitlock.’ Sarah Lawrence smiled coolly. ‘I understand you’re appearing here on behalf of Mr Philpott, who is detained in foreign parts.’

‘That’s correct, ma’am.’

‘Your purpose here, as I see it, is to try to dissuade the Secretary General’s Office of the United Nations from actioning the restrictive measures proposed by the Director and Secretary of Policy Control against the organization for which you work, namely UNACO. Is that how you view it?’

‘Indeed it is.’ Whitlock stood up.

Ms Lawrence pointed to the lectern standing three metres from the table where she and the others sat. ‘If you’d like to come forward, I’m all ears.’

Whitlock brought his notes and stood for a moment with his hands on either side of the lectern, looking at each of the people before him in turn.

‘First of all, I want to say that the administration of UNACO does not deny that the photograph of Director Philpott was found in the property of a deceased hotel porter. It is not denied, either, that the finding of the picture could be seen to indicate slackness in UNACO’s security arrangements.’

Secretary Crane looked down with a tight smile. Whitlock did not miss that.

‘UNACO does, however, refute any allegations of laxness or irresponsibility on the part of its administration or its operatives.’

Now it was Lubbock who looked down, shaking his head.

‘We are aware,’ Whitlock went on, ‘that a simple denial is hardly a defence. It will be my purpose, therefore, as briefly as possible, to show that not only is UNACO the world’s premier crime-fighting body, but that its integrity and efficiency far surpass those of lesser outfits who cover their own shortcomings by pointing the finger — in this case, a sadly mistaken finger — at others.’

Lubbock looked as if he had been personally attacked. Crane had turned red.

‘Mr Lubbock has told us something about the dead man who was harbouring the picture of Director Philpott. In fact, Mr Lubbock has told us everything that he and his department could find out about the dead man, which isn’t much. The deceased’s name was Arno Skuttnik, he came to this country in the sixties, he led a quiet, law-abiding life. That’s it.’

‘If I might point out, Ms Lawrence,’ Lubbock cut in, ‘there is nothing else on the record that is of any significance.’ He shot a glance at Whitlock. ‘It isn’t our habit, as it may be with certain others, to pad out our case with inconsequential detail.’

Ms Lawrence waited to see if Lubbock had more to say, but he had withdrawn into tight-lipped staring. She nodded for Whitlock to continue.

‘When Secretary Crane brought the picture and the scanty story surrounding it to the attention of Director Philpott,’ Whitlock said, ‘it was decided that a thorough investigation should be mounted.’

He could see this was news to Lubbock and Crane. They glanced at each other and looked quickly back at their folded hands.

‘In spite of what Mr Lubbock just said, there is a lot of fascinating and significant detail in the history of Arno Skuttnik. With your indulgence, I would like to tell his story.’

Lubbock sighed noisily. ‘Ms Lawrence, is this really necessary?’

‘Mr Whitlock is essaying a rebuttal of what you told us,’ Ms Lawrence said. ‘On the face of it, I’d say it’s important.’ She nodded at C.W. ‘Please go on.’

Whitlock looked at his notes for a moment, then he said, ‘Arno Skuttnik was a spy.’

Ms Lawrence looked at Lubbock, who looked at Crane, who was gaping at Whitlock.

‘He was brought up and educated in Moscow, where his father, a Pole, was an inspector of factories. At the age of nineteen Arno was already a Kremlin discipline officer, which means he beat up political dissidents for a living, and by the time he was twenty-two he was a member of Stalin’s private staff.’

‘Can you prove any of this?’ Crane snapped.

‘Sure,’ Whitlock said.

Lubbock said, ‘How did you come by this information?’

‘I used means that go beyond your need-to-know status. But I can easily demonstrate the authenticity of the data to the Secretary General and his staff.’

Lubbock’s neck was turning purple.

‘And so,’ Whitlock said, ‘we are already in a position where it’s clear that no ordinary — or to use Mr Lubbock’s description, humble - individual, was in possession of Director Philpott’s picture. The man in question was a highly-trained Soviet agent, a ranking member of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, who eventually came to America to spy for the Soviets in 1966.’

‘I don’t believe any of this!’ Crane said. ‘It’s a ridiculous smokescreen!’

Whitlock picked up a folder with a clipped wad of papers inside. ‘Maybe we can dispose of further doubts on the point, Ms Lawrence. These are printout versions of all this information, together with details of sources. Perhaps you’d like to peruse it as I go along.’

‘Thank you, Mr Whitlock.’ The clerk handed the papers across. Ms Lawrence looked along the table. ‘Try to keep your contributions positive, Mr Crane. Petulant outbursts use up time and they’re entirely counter-productive.’ She nodded for Whitlock to continue.

‘Skuttnik’s in-place handler in New York was Adam Korwin, whose standing as a Soviet spy-master is well known among members of our own intelligence community. What is less well known is something I only recently learned: in the mid-seventies Korwin suffered a stroke. At that time Arno Skuttnik was a sleeper, working a six-day week on a garbage disposal truck in Brooklyn.

‘After the stroke Korwin believed he could still control agents and deploy espionage talent, but apparently Russia had by then accepted the obvious. Korwin was a nice old man, good at keeping out of trouble, but as far as spying went, he had lost it. Skuttnik and a few others remained sleepers without guidance, much less motivation. What’s more, Skuttnik began to enjoy the American way of life, although at the same time he longed, in a passive kind of way, to be of some service to the USSR. Korwin kept in touch with him but no assignments were floated.

‘I will summarize the other significant details of Skuttnik’s life as tightly as I can. In 1970 he married a woman who knew nothing of his double life. They had a daughter the following year. The wife died tragically young in 1972; the daughter was brought up by Skuttnik with the active assistance of Korwin, to whom the child became very attached. She was raised on good wholesome food and an ideological diet of Marx and Engels. She grew up a dedicated communist.

‘In time she married a schoolteacher, another communist, who three years into the marriage was fired from his post for spreading communist propaganda among school children. He was hounded by the press and by his neighbours and eventually lost his reason and killed himself. This made his wife regard him as a martyr for the cause, and it toughened her own resolve to fight for the survival of a dying regime.’

Whitlock went on to explain that Skuttnik’s daughter had been identified from a recent photograph taken with her father on the occasion of his birthday. Her face was only partially visible on the picture, but careful blowing up of the image made it possible to identify a jacket she wore; the retailer was also the manufacturer, and he had kept a copy of the bill of sale. The design of one of the rings she wore was also used to identify her. It was her engagement ring, which was tracked down to the Armenian jeweller who had made it. Whitlock made no mention of the clinching handwriting on the photograph, since he’d had no official access to the print.

‘I really must interrupt,’ Lubbock said testily. ‘Does this tale of domestic tragedy and tenacious political conviction lead us anywhere?’

‘Oh, indeed it does,’ Whitlock said. ‘And I may say it only exists as a story because unlike Policy Control, who took the word of the police that Arno Skuttnik was of no consequence, we at UNACO took the entire matter seriously. Instead of firing off accusatory remarks or instigating back-stabbing campaigns, we investigated. In depth.’

Whitlock paused. As if she were taking a cue, Sarah Lawrence said, ‘And what did you find, in the end?’

‘We found that a dossier of photographs and basic job descriptions had been assembled from the entire New York base of the United Nations. It was carefully guarded by Arno Skuttnik, even though by now there was no Soviet Union to make use of such an archive.’

‘Hang on!’ Crane shouted. ‘Are you saying there was more than one photograph? If that’s what you’re saying, I hope you can produce the others, and I hope you can prove they were in the possession of Arno Skuttnik.’

‘There was indeed more than one photograph,’ Whitlock said. ‘The single picture found by the police had somehow escaped from the main batch of several hundred. I can produce them.’ Whitlock held up a concertina file. ‘Here they are. They’re all in here. And yes, they were in Skuttnik’s possession. I have the corroboration of three senior NYPD officers, who stood by while I dug up the floor in his room and retrieved them.’

‘How did you know they were there?’ Ms Lawrence said.

‘The person who put together the archive told me. The same person told me all about Arno Skuttnik’s fallow years as a spy, and his gradual absorption into the American way of life. I’m talking about Arno Skuttnik’s daughter, Bridget. Married name Bridget Jones.’

Crane sat back sharply in his chair. Lubbock gave him a puzzled look.

‘Bridget Jones is a clerical officer here at the UN,’ Whitlock said. ‘She works in personnel records, which as you’re aware, Ms Lawrence, is just packed with photographs of UN employees, including all the members of Policy Control, whose pictures are in the illicit archive along with everybody else’s.’

Ms Lawrence was already mumbling into her mobile phone. She put it down after a moment and looked pointedly at Lubbock. ‘Bridget Jones didn’t show up for work yesterday or today,’ she said coldly. ‘There’s no response from her home number, apparently.’

Whitlock squared his notes. ‘I don’t think I have anything to add, except to point out that Mrs Jones’s appointment to the UN was endorsed by, among others, Mr Crane of Policy Control.’

Whitlock turned away from the lectern, then stopped. He faced the long table again.

‘In defence of UNACO’s present administrative and operational arrangements,’ he said, ‘I would add only this. Our freedom from restriction produces a special quality of planning and of procedure, unhampered by the dulling effects of communal policy-making. The record speaks for the success of the regime. Our system nurtures and develops the flowering of individuality — true individuality, capable of seeing the wood in spite of the trees.’

25

Amrit Datta was less than ten kilometres from the Chinese border when a motorcycle policeman stopped him. The bike had freewheeled from the top of a sloping hillside road and was beside Amrit before he realized anything was happening.

‘Papers.’ The policeman got off the bike.

Amrit nodded several times, too quickly, playing the anxious peasant, examining the man’s uniform as he dug in his pocket for his ID documents. As with a number of border police units, there was a strong American influence here: the officer wore a short-sleeved pale green shirt, darker green riding breeches with knee-high shiny boots, a white helmet with a green stripe, and very dark Ray-Bans.

‘You are Opu Hikmet, is that correct?’ The officer flipped through the papers, frowning as if they offended him.

‘Opu Hikmet, sir. That is correct, sir.’

‘Where are you travelling to?’

Amrit took back the papers. ‘I am looking for work, sir. I am not going anywhere special. As soon as I find work I stop until the work is done, then I move on again.’

The officer pointed at the sack on Amrit’s shoulder. ‘What’s in there?’

‘My few belongings, sir.’

‘Show me.’

Amrit didn’t move. ‘I would rather not.’

The officer took off the Ray-Bans. He had red-rimmed eyes. They were wide and staring. ‘What did you say?’

‘My things are private, sir. I would rather not show them to you.’

The officer kicked Amrit on the shin. The sound of it was like something being snapped. Amrit dropped to one knee, rubbing his shin.

‘Open the bag.’

Amrit stood up slowly. ‘I do not think you have the right to treat me in such a way, officer.’

‘It is not your place to think, guttersnipe!’

The officer kicked him again, on the other leg. This time it was harder and he broke the skin. Blood seeped through the leg of Amrit’s baggy trousers. He set his teeth against the pain and unslung the bag from his shoulder. He handed it to the policeman.

‘Perhaps you have learned that in future, when an officer of the law tells you to do something, you do it at once.’

The policeman opened the sack and looked inside. The plastic bags were unmistakable. His mouth dropped open. He looked up and found himself staring into the barrel of Amrit’s gun.

‘Put down the bag, officer.’ Amrit’s voice was firm now, controlled. The policeman dropped the sack beside the motorbike. ‘Now take off your clothes.’

‘You can’t do this.’

‘I wouldn’t normally do it,’ Amrit said. ‘In the case of a rattle-snake like you, however, I’m prepared to be creative.’

‘You’ll be caught before you get to the next town.’

‘No, I won’t.’

The officer brought up his knee sharply. Amrit moved aside and tapped the end of the gun barrel on the officer’s lip, splitting it. He yelped and staggered back. Blood poured down his chin.

‘Don’t get blood on the shirt,’ Amrit warned as the officer staunched the flow with his handkerchief. ‘Get a move on.’

In five minutes Amrit was dressed in the policeman’s clothes. He took time in the procedure to use the bike’s first-aid kit to patch his leg and put an adhesive dressing on the policeman’s mouth. He put his own clothes in the sack on top of the drugs and put the sack in one of the motorbike’s panniers.

‘In other circumstances I would have done an exchange of clothes with you,’ Amrit said, getting on the bike and positioning the Ray-Bans on the bridge of his nose. ‘But I’ll need my shabby wardrobe later. Besides …’ He stared at the officer in his striped jockey shorts. ‘You could use a lesson in humility.’

Amrit kick-started the machine and drove away.

‘I suppose you could say the Security Council is redoubling its efforts,’ Philpott told Dr Arberry. ‘We never do anything precipitate. Flying off the handle can be spectacular, but it’s seldom ever right. So forgive us if we appear to move slowly, but we like to have all the facts marshalled and verified before we embark on serious action.’

They were in the drawing room at Arberry’s mansion with glasses of sherry in their hands, gazing out at the sunset across the gardens. Philpott had arrived unannounced and introduced himself as yet another Security Council fact-finder. A senior one. He was in the region, he said, to evaluate the findings of Mr Graham and Mr Trent, and thought he would call on the doctor, having heard so much about him.

‘I stand here many an evening,’ Arberry said, ‘and I look out over a scene that doesn’t, I’m sure, fall very short of perfection. And along with the joy that is generated by such beauty, I get the deepest pain.’ He looked at Philpott. ‘All this is being eroded and pulled apart by nothing more than people’s envy.’

‘Envy?’

‘Envy and the need that some of them feel to dominate their environment.’

‘Envy of what, though?’

‘Of me. I’m convinced that’s the root of most of the trouble in this area. Or most of the trouble that’s been visited on me and those who work for me. There are people who envy and lust after what I possess. Their perspective doesn’t let them see that I’m driven by my enthusiasms, they don’t see that what I have, I have made. I didn’t walk in here and take anything for nothing. I built it all. For everything this divine place gives me, I strive to give back ten times, twenty times.’

‘Yet people see you as a menace — would you say that’s accurate? You are perceived as a threat to something?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Arberry said. ‘I’m an undesirable, because what I do, what I achieve, stands in the way of some people’s ambitions.’

‘You mean you’re the equivalent of civilization, yes? And what they need, the others, is the opposite, they need chaos in order to control events and to thrive.’

‘That is exactly right, Mr Philpott.’

Philpott had compared notes with Mike and had simply handed Arberry back his own point of view, dressed as a fact-finder’s assessment.

‘So I take your point about envy,’ Philpott said. ‘But it’s incurable, wouldn’t you say? Envy is ingrained in humanity. There’s a French proverb that says, “People only throw stones at the tree loaded with fruit.”’

Philpott glanced at the clock and decided he should move the talk in the planned direction. He was there on a genuine fact-finding mission: he believed Dr Arberry had probably received personal threats. Two of his people had been killed in an effort to discourage him, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that the man himself had been the focus of some aggression. Philpott believed that careful questioning could turn up a useful line of enquiry.

‘Can I ask you, Doctor, if you’ve been attacked yourself, or have been threatened with violence?’

Arberry frowned. Philpott waited. After a few seconds it seemed the doctor wasn’t planning to say anything.

‘Did I speak out of turn?’ Philpott said.

‘No.’ Arberry hesitated. ‘I don’t like having to be secretive, but I was warned that if I said anything to anyone …’

‘Surely they can’t know what you say in the privacy of your home?’

‘They have breached these secure grounds, Mr Philpott. In spite of elaborate security they have been able to walk in and kill my people. Who knows what they are capable of doing or finding out?’ Arberry shrugged. ‘I’m probably infected with a touch of the superstition of the region. Or I’m just too conscious that people’s lives can hang on what I do or don’t do.’

‘So you have been attacked?’

‘I have been threatened.’ Arberry emptied his glass and looked at Philpott’s. ‘Another?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Then forgive me if I have one.’

Arberry filled his glass at the drinks cabinet and came back to stand by the window. It was almost completely dark now, with only a dim trace of light along the horizon.

‘I was told that if I extend my territorial rapacity — those were the words used on the telephone, territorial rapacity — I would lose the eyes with which I take such pleasure in my works. If I remained after that, I would lose, in addition, the legs with which I walk upon my stolen territory.’

‘And have you any idea at all who made these threats?’

‘A hill bandit,’ Arberry said. ‘Which one I’ve no idea, but they’re the only ones who oppose what I do here. It doesn’t really matter which one made the calls, anyway. They have an alliance. Whatever one of them does, they all do. What one hates, they all hate.’

‘Do you feel different for having told me this?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s always good to unburden oneself, but I can’t say I’m any less anxious than before.’

Philpott was studying the array of recording and communications equipment along one side of the room. ‘I suppose you record all your telephone calls?’ he said.

‘Ordinarily I do. But on both occasions I received telephone threats, the wavelength used to transmit the calls was obscured by noise. When I played back the recordings I got only static.’

‘Perhaps there’s something there, though,’ Philpott said. ‘We have resources nowadays that can pick out slender threads of voice signal from whole skeins of noise.’

‘Oh, I destroyed the tapes in frustration.’ Arberry looked at Philpott rather sheepishly. ‘Which I suppose I shouldn’t have done.’

‘Well …’ Philpott shrugged. ‘No use wasting energy on regrets.’

‘So what is the position now, Mr Philpott? Does the UN hope to mount an offensive against the crime wave in our valley? I had the impression from Mr Graham and Mr Trent that a fightback of serious proportions was being planned.’

‘That is still the intention.’

‘Good. The sooner the better.’ Arberry made a wan smile. ‘Apart from any other consideration, I want to go on enjoying the sight of the sunset, and being able to walk in my gardens when I feel like it.’

Mike and Sabrina returned to the cabin an hour after Philpott had gone to see Arberry. Ram greeted them like long-lost family. He told them to sit down and do nothing. Drinks first, he insisted, then he would prepare them a meal.

‘It was bad, what happened to Lenny,’ Ram said as he dropped the lemon into Sabrina’s gin and tonic. He brought the glasses to the couch where they were flopped out side by side. ‘Dare I ask if you got the ones who did it? When we spoke on the phone, the details were rather sketchy.’

Sabrina looked at Mike. ‘I think you understand what happened better than I do.’

‘It was one of Seaton’s men that shot Lenny,’ Mike said. ‘But no, we didn’t retaliate. And for a while it looked like we would never be in a position to do that.’

Mike recounted his meeting with Seaton, and the turnaround in events when Mike accused him of being involved in the new trade.

‘He let us go,’ Mike said, ‘because he had to underline that he’s not like the new people. Not anywhere near as savage or murderous as they are. He overstated the difference, of course. He’s just another kind of savage, the traditional kind. But he didn’t want me or Sabrina thinking of him in the same terms as the new guys.’

‘And that was all?’ Ram said. ‘He let you go because he didn’t want you to think too badly of him?’

‘There was something else,’ Mike said. ‘Or I should say, I sensed something else. But I don’t know what it was.’

‘That whole episode was doomed,’ Sabrina told Ram. ‘Apart from Lenny’s death, I mean. The ambush flopped, I got septicaemia and even had hallucinations, and after one bad deal and another we came out with what we stood up in. I even managed to lose a police Range-Rover.’

‘I know about that.’ Ram did an eye-roll. ‘Mr Philpott will have something to say, I believe. On top of the cost of the ambush operation, he’s had to sanction a payment for replacement of the vehicle.’

‘We have to put it all behind us,’ Mike said. ‘The answer or answers to our problems are here, right here in the Vale of Kashmir. We have to knuckle down, decipher the answers and take appropriate action.’

‘You make it sound like a straight matter of spit and elbow grease,’ Sabrina said. ‘We don’t even know where to start.’

‘We will, don’t worry.’ Mike tasted his Jim Beam and smacked his lips. ‘Ram, tell us, what’s the boss doing here?’

‘I think he made an error of judgement, too. But he’s working hard to make up for it.’

‘Has there been word from Amrit?’

‘Nothing. But you wouldn’t expect anything, would you? He must be due at the Chinese border any time now.’

‘If he’s made it.’

The fax machine in the corner rang twice, then began to gurgle. A second later the red URGENT light came on and paper rolled from the front of the machine.

Mike got up and looked at the cover sheet. He read it aloud as it fed out on to the tray.

‘“Urgent facsimile message from H. Lewis, World Health Organization, for the attention of M. Philpott.”’

‘What’s it say?’ Sabrina said.

‘You want me to read the boss’s confidential fax?’

Sabrina tilted her head. ‘Is there any way I could stop you?’

Mike was already reading, his eye racing across the type as fast as it came out of the machine. ‘Oh, my,’ he said, and looked up at Sabrina and Ram.

‘What?’ Sabrina demanded. ‘What does it say?’

Mike stared at the fax again. ‘My,’ he said. ‘My oh my …’

26

Amrit Datta stood by a cracked stucco pillar behind a grain store that occupied half the length of the street. It was a pillar marked with a dab of brown paint near its foot. This was where he had been told to stand. Or he believed it was. The store was in the dirtiest part of the border town of Boyding. It was an area where only beggars, burned-out opium zombies and superannuated street prostitutes gathered at this hour of night.

Amrit had taken a while to convince himself this was the spot. The daub of paint was so casual, so accidental-looking, and it was faded, too; it was difficult to believe anyone would designate a mark like that as an identifying characteristic.

But there were other markers, also part of the specified rendezvous point. Opposite the rear of the grain store was a coal brazier that the derelicts gathered round to warm their hands; it was exactly where he had been told it would be. And there was the boarded-up coffee stall, the Chinese laundry — also boarded up — the halfhearted painting of Siva on a wall by a little candle shop. This was the place, all right. Amrit just couldn’t believe he was expected to transfer ownership of 200,000 dollars’-worth of highly refined drugs in such a dump.

After a time he was aware a man was watching him. He was dressed as shabbily as Amrit, which meant nothing, since Amrit was certainly not what he appeared to be. He waited, and after a few minutes the man came across.

‘You want to buy kif?’ he whispered.

Amrit stared at him. That was not the magic phrase. He thought he should give the man another chance; maybe he was nervous, or just forgetful.

‘What did you say?’

‘Kif,’ the man said, producing a waxy brown wad. ‘Very cheap, very best stuff. All the way from Egypt.’

‘Go away,’ Amrit said.

The man looked offended. ‘You can’t afford it, right?’

‘I said go away. Do it now. Go.’

The man waggled his head. ‘Go away. Do it now,’ he mimicked. ‘What are you, beggar boy, some kind of big-shot in disguise?’

Amrit saw that this could get awkward. It could even ruin the set-up. He looked around. No one was paying any attention to them. It had started to rain and people were huddling in doorways and bunching around the coal brazier.

‘Listen …’ Amrit drew his gun from the folds of his shirt. ‘I’m not a big-shot in disguise. I’m a man who’s come out to kill someone, I don’t care who. Do you want to be the one? I don’t mind, I promise.’

He cocked the gun. The man stared at it, his mouth working soundlessly.

‘Disappear, or stay here and check out the afterlife.’

The man turned and ran.

Amrit used his foot to edge his sack into the cover of the overhang and stepped back a pace to keep the worst of the rain off himself. He looked at the Pepsi-Cola clock on the side of the old coffee stall. It was still working, he could see the sweep hand moving. It said ten to midnight. He was supposed to wait between 11:30 and midnight. What happened if nobody showed? What did he do then?

‘Wares from the vale of beauty?’ a sing-song voice said.

Amrit spun, saw nobody for a moment, then realized the man was on the other side of the pillar. He was Chinese in appearance, half turned away from Amrit. He looked, in fact, as if he didn’t even know Amrit was there. But he had used the right phrase.

‘Precisely the wares you desire,’ Amrit said, supplying the other half of the transaction code.

The man turned, came round the pillar and held out an open linen bag. Amrit pulled the first consignment from his sack and dropped it in the bag.

Nothing is happening, he thought, glancing quickly around. There was nothing. Nobody. Another second and this man would be gone. So would the batch of drugs.

The man tucked the bag under his flowing coat and moved away. Amrit felt his heart sink. He watched the man reach the end of the street and turn the corner. He was gone. Amrit stared at the empty street, shiny with rain.

Things had gone badly wrong. He realized that in this situation, he had no idea what he should do. It wasn’t his show, after all. He was the bait, not the angler …

His heart thumped as a police officer appeared at the corner for one fleeting moment, holding up his thumb. He winked at Amrit and vanished again. Amrit swallowed back a grin.

It’s working! God, it’s working!

He realized that in his anxiety and distraction he had wandered out into the full downpour, and now he was soaked. He didn’t care. His heart thrummed in him now. It was working! He was a crucial part of a big-time operation and it was ticking over like clockwork.

Suddenly, in that instant, standing there with rain pouring down over him, he knew that he never wanted to do any other job. The work had its rotten times, its rotten hours and days, but when the brilliant, winning moments came, they wiped the slate clean and he knew there was nothing else in the world he would ever want to do.

‘Wares from the vale of beauty?’ a voice said from the other side of the pillar.

Amrit turned, getting his sack ready. ‘Precisely the wares you desire,’ he replied, and allowed himself one swift, secret, gleeful grin.

When Philpott returned to his car, which was parked a few metres outside the gates of Arberry’s mansion, he found a reception party waiting. Mike and Ram were in the back; Sabrina was in the front passenger seat.

‘Well, well…’ Philpott nodded to them each in turn as he climbed in. He was pliant on sherry and a couple of stiff brandies. He smiled with less restraint than usual. ‘What were you trying to do? Frighten me to death, perhaps? Where’s your transport?’

Sabrina pointed to the jeep on the other side of the avenue.

‘Oh.’ Philpott shut the door. ‘I thought you might have come by Range-Rover.’

‘We came because your buddy Harry Lewis sent you a fax,’ Mike said. ‘We couldn’t be sure where you’d go after seeing Dr Arberry, and since you’re not carrying a mobile…’

‘Sorry,’ Philpott mumbled. ‘A change of climate and scene and my memory deserts me.’

‘Well, since the message was something you should know about straight away, we decided to come and wait for you.’

‘And what is the message?’

‘Harry Lewis carried out a curiosity check on who’s been funding the Arberry Foundation,’ Mike said. ‘And guess what?’

‘What?’

‘Nobody has.’

Philpott took a deep careful breath. ‘What do you mean?’

‘No corporation anywhere in the civilized world has donated money to Dr Arberry, or claimed relief on donations to any such foundation.’

‘But surely —’

‘Lewis has been thorough,’ Mike said. ‘He’s checked with international banks, charitable trusts, finance foundations and the IRS.’

‘The bottom line is this,’ Sabrina said. ‘Dr Arberry runs an ambitious, expensive, multi-faceted medical foundation, but nobody finances it.’

‘One other thing,’ Mike said. ‘The for-your-eyes-only message from Mr Lewis, which we naturally took the liberty of reading in full, points out that Simon Arberry is a doctor all right, but he’s a doctor of pharmacology. He’s a drug designer.’

Philpott peered at Mike in the gloom. ‘What turn are your thoughts taking?’

‘I’ve had time to reflect, sitting here waiting for you,’ Mike said. ‘Now I’m thinking Arberry could be the source and substance of the whole refined drug trade.’

Philpott groaned softly.

‘I’m thinking,’ Mike continued, ‘that he could easily fund his conspicuous good works out of the small change from a trade in top-line drugs. It would be a brilliant cover and terrific PR rolled into one.’

‘His only worry,’ Philpott said, caught up in the unfurling logic, ‘is that other villains, the traditional traffickers of the territory, are getting close to uncovering his game. So he handles that by bumping off an employee or two and appealing — or getting a friend to do the appealing — to the UN to fight off those terrible bandits.’

‘Beautifully devious,’ Sabrina said. She looked at Mike. ‘How do you prove it?’

‘The same way I prove anything. First of all I convince myself. That gives me the thrust to get proof that’ll stand up to scrutiny.’

‘And have you convinced yourself Dr Arberry is our baddie?’

‘You could say so. The driver I shot —’

‘The one we left for the vultures,’ Sabrina said.

‘Yeah, him. Remember I said I’d seen him some place before?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well it came back to me. He answered the door and served at table the night Ram and Lenny and I had dinner at Arberry’s house. The butler. And the woman with the memorable eyes who drove the car away?’

‘Surrounded by all those boxes,’ Sabrina said, ‘just like the kind that high-grade amphetamines are supplied in …’

‘Right. Well she served at table, too. She’s Arberry’s maid.’

‘All this speculation,’ Philpott sighed.

‘No, sir,’ Mike said. ‘Something harder than that.’

‘Where are the drugs manufactured, then?’ Ram said.

‘Arberry has acres of farm and forest land,’ Sabrina said. ‘Growing the necessary crops wouldn’t be a problem. Could he maybe be making the stuff in his clinics and labs and teaching units?’

‘Nah.’ Mike shook his head. ‘I can always spot a man who enjoys a risk. When the doc showed Lenny and Ram and me the gilded cavern, he was really showing off, and maybe at the same time he was showing his skin to the wind — you know, taking a delicious risk. I’d bet anything that cave’s the spot. There, or somewhere damn near there.’

‘What do we do?’ Sabrina said. ‘Go take a look?’

‘Right now,’ Mike said.

Sabrina started to open the door, then turned back to Philpott. ‘Sir, why did you say you thought we might have come by Range-Rover?’

‘I presumed you’d got it back.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The police vehicle you managed to lose. I saw it a few minutes ago, on my way back to the car.’

‘Where?’

‘Parked at the gates there, by the trees.’

‘Must be another one,’ Mike said.

‘What, with police code plate A1? I’m hardly likely to forget that, am I? Especially since I had to write it out on the triplicated cash transfer forms I signed to pay for the ruddy thing.’ Philpott sniffed. ‘Good job I haven’t processed the forms yet.’

‘But sir,’ Sabrina said, ‘we didn’t find the Range-Rover again.’

‘Eh?’

‘We didn’t —’

‘Hell’s teeth!’ Mike threw open the door. ‘Sabrina! Come on!’

27

The Golden Cavern smelled like a slaughterhouse.

The last time Mike had seen it there had been lights shining from every angle, making the pyrite rocks sparkle so brightly that they hurt his eyes. Now a solitary floodlamp threw dark shadows into the craggy lower reaches and highlighted the spreadeagled, mutilated bodies scattered across the rocks.

‘God almighty …’

It took seconds to register. Mike stood with Sabrina at his shoulder, automatically counting the dead: seven, maybe eight. All of them men, all wearing white coats splashed and smeared with their blood. It had only just happened: the fresh warm smell was unmistakable.

‘Look,’ Sabrina breathed.

In a deep, hollowed-out corner of the cave Dr Arberry crouched, hugging himself, staring at a point behind a huge glittering rock. As Mike and Sabrina watched, Paul Seaton stepped into the light. He brandished a long curved sword, its blade clotted with blood and tissue. He turned and nodded slowly to Mike.

‘My timing’s a tad out.’ Seaton pointed the sword at Dr Arberry, who went on staring at him as if he was frozen that way. ‘I had to wait for the doctor’s visitor to leave. Then I brought him along to witness the cancelling of his empire. I was going to add him to the pile. You, or whoever, were supposed to find nothing here but dead people and a wrecked factory.’

‘Who are those men?’ Mike said.

‘The chemists. Some of the cleverest, the brightest and the most cunning. Drawn from around the world, lured by money and attractive working conditions.’ Seaton grinned. ‘It would break some people’s hearts to see all this talent spilt and spattered, lying around like so much chopped liver. But it’s neat. The axe was laid to the root and Arberry’s operation is finished. It took about five minutes, if you’re interested.’ Seaton tilted his head, smiling at Sabrina, raising the sword in a little greeting. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How do you feel now? That leg healing up nicely?’

‘I’m fine,’ Sabrina said. ‘How … What put you on to Arberry?’

‘You did.’

‘Me?’

‘Your papers. They were in the buggy you left us, in a bag in the back.’ Seaton watched her frown as she tried to remember. ‘It was a confused and delirious time for you, wasn’t it? I guess you didn’t know what you were doing with half your stuff. But I was glad you kept ol’ Hafi’s correspondence.’ The smile dropped away. ‘Tell me something, was it you that killed him?’

Sabrina nodded.

‘You did the world a service.’

‘My reasons were more selfish than that.’

‘He had ambitions to kill me, you know,’ Seaton said. ‘He reckoned I had no right to be here, me being from the USA and all. That’s stupid, of course. A man belongs wherever he can hang on.’

‘How did the papers help you settle on Arberry?’ Mike said.

‘The mention of the Grotto of Moksha being the centre of the new trade in drugs.’ Seaton waved the sword in an arc above his head. ‘This is it. This is the Grotto of Moksha. Ten days ago we picked up a big Indian frightener called Iqbal. He was chasing a runaway. On principle we hate people like that — he made a living out of terrorizing and probably killing his own kind. Anyway, there was something about Iqbal told me we should hang on to him. We did, and after I’d read Hafi’s letters I asked him if he knew anything about the Grotto of Moksha, and he told me. He told me everything.’

‘Why did he do that?’ Mike said.

‘Because he thought I was going to kill him. I did kill him, afterwards. He was a big eater, expensive to run. But before the end he told me all about the work he did, and about his boss, who was none other than Simon Arberry, the saviour of Kashmir.’

Seaton turned and looked at Arberry, who still cringed in the hollow, staring up at him.

‘He doesn’t look anything special now, does he? To hear old Iqbal talk, you’d have thought this was a god. He certainly tried to live like one. The Grotto was the first piece of real estate he bought, and later he built his house and his grounds around it.’

‘Why did he want the Grotto?’ Sabrina said.

‘It came with a built-in trick compartment. Behold …’

Seaton leaned on the big rock beside him. Grunting, he levered its side with his knee and it moved suddenly, jerking over by degrees until it was horizontal. A moment later the wall of glimmering rock behind Seaton folded inward, dividing in two. Behind it was a high rectangular space, a windowless room, fitted with benches, cabinets and laboratory equipment. All the equipment appeared to have been smashed.

‘I made the chemists wreck it before I wrecked them,’ Seaton said. He smiled. ‘I have to tell you something. One of the reasons I let you two go was because I realized you were on the trail of this parasite. You told me that catching these people was part of your brief. So I was going to have you watched and followed. The way it turned out, I didn’t have to take that trouble.’ He jerked his head at Arberry. ‘Will you stay for the final touch?’

‘I can’t let you kill him,’ Mike said.

Seaton seemed to consider that. ‘Let? Let? I think there’s a semantic problem here. You’re in no position to let me or not let me do anything.’

‘He’s got to be taken into custody. The law will deal with him.’

‘You talk like a machine, you know that? No feeling, just a tin heart pumping out procedure.’

‘I’d say you’re the inhuman one,’ Mike said.

‘Semantics again, brother. Let’s cut the crap. Arberry’s history. You can stay and witness his transfer or you can go. Please yourselves.’

Mike nudged Sabrina. She threw herself forward and ran across the uneven floor of the cave, dislodging a couple of bodies as she clambered down to where Arberry lay. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up.

‘Come on!’ she yelled. ‘Run!’

Seaton was off balance, as Mike guessed he would be. All the time he was talking he had moved nearer the narrow end of the ledge he stood on. Now he hadn’t the manoeuvring space to turn quickly and get between Sabrina and the stairs. She ran past Mike, dragging the dazed Arberry behind her.

‘Get him outside,’ Mike yelled. He turned to face Seaton.

At the foot of the stairs Sabrina stopped, turned to Arberry and smacked him hard on the face. He jumped back, astonished. She grabbed him again.

‘Now run!’ she shouted. ‘Run or you’ll die!’

It got through. Arberry looked over his shoulder, his eyes wide and terrified. He saw Seaton move towards him and he began running, clinging tight to Sabrina’s hand as he took the stairs two and three at a time.

‘I’m not letting you past,’ Mike told Seaton. He moved until they were facing each other over a five-metre gap.

‘Get out of my way!’ Seaton was panting with the effort of jumping off the ledge and scrambling across the rocky floor. He waved the bloody sword in front of him. ‘One side, or I’ll slice you with this.’

He looked past Mike at the stairs. Arberry and Sabrina were a third of the way to the top.

‘You should never have tangled with me,’ Seaton grunted.

His free hand flashed to his belt and as it came away again something glinted in the air ahead of him. A split second later Mike felt a searing pain in his arm and cried out. A knife was buried for half its length in his shoulder.

The pain was like electricity, raging and disruptive. He couldn’t steady his shuddering. He couldn’t get his fingers round the knife handle.

He heard his own howl of pain and remembered the selfsame noise coming out of Lou Kelly’s throat as they put him on a stretcher in the parking lot behind the ball ground.

He saw Seaton start to run. He was going for the stairs and to do that he had to pass Mike. Mike shut his eyes tight, still hearing that echoing cry, himself and Kelly, both of them victims …

‘Aah!’

Mike roared with agony as he gripped the knife and dragged it out of his shoulder. He brought it up and round, tightening his hold on it, seeing his own blood fly in the air before him. Seaton’s bulk loomed, his feet pounded the rock as he rushed for the stairs.

Mike kept the knife swinging, bringing it down and round, throwing the weight of his body behind it. The blade pointed outward again and met the impact of Seaton’s belly.

He roared and fell sideways, his head striking the rock. Mike stood swaying, watching, the pain like fire in his shoulder. He watched Seaton try to pull the knife out of his stomach, scrabbling at the handle, unable to grip it for the rush of slippery blood.

As Mike watched, the movements became weaker and finally Seaton’s fingers dropped away from the knife. He looked up at Mike as if he might say something, but by the time his mouth opened he was already dead.

28

The following afternoon Philpott called an informal meeting in the living room at the cabin. Mike, Sabrina and Ram were present. Business was on the agenda but the atmosphere was informal. There were platefuls of Indian finger-food and a jug of chilled white wine.

‘Much sifting, sorting and tidying has taken place,’ Philpott announced from his armchair. ‘I have spent the better part of a sleepless night and all of this morning collating the data that’s come to hand. If there are gaps or omissions I’m sorry. I must plead weariness.’ He made a little smile. ‘I’m weary but content. I have to say I’m pleased.’

‘There’ll be a blue moon tonight,’ Mike muttered.

Philpott asked him how his shoulder felt. Mike had been bandaged and stitched at the general hospital in Srinagar.

‘It’s sore, but it’s a wound I’ll wear with a touch of pride.’

‘Well said.’ Philpott sipped his wine and squared the notes on his knees. ‘Information time. First, Dr Arberry is at police HQ in Srinagar. Commissioner Mantur tells me he is still uncommunicative. The shock of seeing his employees and his business empire wiped out in the space of minutes has unhinged certain of his brain’s moving parts, I fear. But I’m sure he’ll recover in time to face the charges against him.

‘Meanwhile, the response to our transmission of Dr Arberry’s fingerprints has produced a voluminous history. He turns out to be a misanthropic, hugely materialistic scoundrel with a well-cloaked history of pharmaceutical villainy.’

‘Is he a real pharmacologist?’ Sabrina said.

‘Yes, he is. With more aliases than some people have teeth. He has great skill at playing the likeable benefactor, usually a wistfully brave widower, although he never married. That talent rises from the same pit of ingenuity which told him Kashmir would grow lucrative drug-producing plants, as well as providing access to a well-heeled customer base.’

‘And there was even a ready-made supply of peasant mules,’ Mike said, ‘with a heart-warming capacity for fear.’

‘This was Arberry’s biggest scam to date,’ Philpott said. ‘I think we can assume it was his last. The important thing is, it’s all over.’ Philpott took another sip of wine and held up a fax sheet. ‘From Harry Lewis at WHO. A note to tell me that the late Reverend Alex Young’s sister is now in New York City to sort out his affairs with his diocesan administrators. She has told Harry that she recalls she was here in Kashmir when Arberry asked her brother to send an appeal to the UN. Arberry said it might appear like some kind of elitist pleading if a man in his position were to send the letter himself.’

Ram asked if Young’s sister knew that Arberry was being charged with her brother’s murder.

‘She will,’ Philpott said. ‘And now, there is one final piece of excellent news. Agent Amrit Datta of Drugwatch International yesterday kept a rendezvous on the Chinese border. He supplied high-grade drugs to three bulk purchasers from Thailand.’

‘I knew that guy was the right stuff,’ Mike said.

‘The buyers were each arrested as they took possession of their consignment. Agent Datta has been slated for a commendation, and he should be back amongst us tonight in time for a celebratory noggin before we leave for the States.’

‘So have we managed to make the authorities happy, too?’ Sabrina said.

‘With Amrit Datta’s help,’ Philpott said. ‘The revelation that an American interloper was behind the new trade in drugs has soothed the Pakistani authorities, who are delighted to learn that no blame attaches to them or their people. India is relieved to have something so ghastly uprooted from the Vale of Kashmir, and the Thai police are delighted that three big-time drug peddlers have been delivered to them on a plate.’

Philpott put aside his glass and his notes. He rose, went to the kitchen, and returned with a tray of filled champagne glasses. He distributed them and took one himself.

‘A toast,’ he said. ‘To the triumph of style and cool common sense over old-maidish philistinism.’

Mike, Ram and Sabrina looked at each other.

‘You’re going to have to explain that one, chief,’ Mike said.

‘I managed to score a triumph in New York without even being there,’ Philpott said. ‘Whitlock reports that our battle with Policy Control ended in victory for UNACO. There will be no changes in the way our show is run.’

‘Brilliant!’ Sabrina said.

‘Isn’t it, though? Secretary Crane of Policy Control has offered his resignation and Director Lubbock is asking to be reassigned. Full details when we get back.’ Philpott raised his glass. ‘To success — and to C.W. Whitlock, who scored this particular goal.’

‘Success and C.W.!’

They emptied their glasses. Sabrina looked enquiringly at Philpott. He nodded towards the kitchen. She went through and came back with a fresh chilled bottle.

‘Quite a catalogue of wins for you,’ she said, pouring the boss more champagne. ‘Has it something to do with the way you surround yourself with reliable people?’

Philpott looked at her resentfully. But he couldn’t hold the look. He gave way and smiled. ‘I suppose it has everything to do with that,’ he said, ‘although I’ll never admit it when I’m sober.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Hasan Mantu and Desmond Hare for all the dope on Kashmir, to Reg Godwin who demystified digital cameras, and to Tamara Drake for explaining covert image transmission.

My thanks also to Sarah Leigh, who worked hard on my behalf and was always kinder than she had to be.

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S BORROWED TIME

Alistair MacLean, who died on 2 February 1987, was the international bestselling author of thirty books, including world-famous novels such as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. In 1977 he was commissioned by an American film company to write a number of story out-lines that could be adapted into a series of movies; two, Hostage Tower and Air Force One is Down, were, with Alistair MacLean’s approval, published as novels by John Denis; these were followed with six by Alastair MacNeill, the highly successful Death Train, Night Watch, Red Alert, Time of the Assassins, Dead Halt and Code Breaker, and two, Borrowed Time and Prime Target by Hugh Miller.

Hugh Miller was born in Scotland but now lives in Warwick. He is the author of the bestseller Ambulance, as well as the highly acclaimed Mike Fletcher crime novels. He is an acknowledged expert on forensic medicine and has numerous TV credits.

Borrowed Time is the ninth title in the UNACO series.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

By Sam Llewellyn

Storm Force from

Navarone

Thunderbolt from

Navarone

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s

Rendezvous

THE UNACO SERIES

By John Denis

Alistair MacLean’s

Hostage Tower

Alistair MacLean’s Air

Force One is Down

By Alastair MacNeill

Alistair MacLean’s

Death Train

Alistair MacLean’s

Night Watch

Alistair MacLean’s Red

Alert

Alistair MacLean’s Time of

the Assassins

Alistair MacLean’s

Dead Halt

Alistair MacLean’s

Code Breaker

By Hugh Miller

Alistair MacLean’s

Borrowed Time

Alistair MacLean’s

Prime Target

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Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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This paperback edition 2010

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First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

Copyright © Characters and settings: HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

Copyright © Text: HarperCollinsPublishers and Hugh Miller 1996

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ISBN: 978-0-00-649933-6

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear Is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear Is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

HMS Ulysses

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First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1955

© 1955 by HarperCollinsPublishers

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identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without prior written permission from the publisher.

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To Gisela

Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

Table of Contents

1 Prelude: Sunday Afternoon

2 Monday Morning

3 Monday Afternoon

4 Monday Night

5 Tuesday

6 Tuesday Night

7 Wednesday Night

8 Thursday Night

9 Friday Morning

10 Friday Afternoon

11 Friday Evening

12 Saturday

13 Saturday Afternoon

14 Saturday Evening I

15 Saturday Evening II

16 Saturday Night

17 Sunday Morning

18 Epilogue

Acknowledgements

ONE

Prelude: Sunday Afternoon

Slowly, deliberately, Starr crushed out the butt of his cigarette. The gesture, Captain Vallery thought, held a curious air of decision and finality. He knew what was coming next, and, just for a moment, the sharp bitterness of defeat cut through that dull ache that never left his forehead nowadays. But it was only for a moment—he was too tired really, far too tired to care.

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, genuinely sorry.’ Starr smiled thinly. ‘Not for the orders, I assure you—the Admiralty decision, I am personally convinced, is the only correct and justifiable one in the circumstances. But I do regret your—ah—inability to see our point of view.’

He paused, proffered his platinum cigarette case to the four men sitting with him round the table in the Rear-Admiral’s day cabin. At the four mute headshakes the smile flickered again. He selected a cigarette, slid the case back into the breast pocket of his double-breasted grey suit. Then he sat back in his chair, the smile quite gone. It was not difficult to visualize, beneath that pin-stripe sleeve, the more accustomed broad band and golden stripes of Vice-Admiral Vincent Starr, Assistant Director of Naval Operations.

‘When I flew north from London this morning,’ he continued evenly, ‘I was annoyed. I was very annoyed. I am—well, I am a fairly busy man. The First Sea Lord, I thought, was wasting my time as well as his own. When I return, I must apologize. Sir Humphrey was right. He usually is … ’

His voice trailed off to a murmur, and the flintwheel of his lighter rasped through the strained silence. He leaned forward on the table and went on softly.

‘Let us be perfectly frank, gentlemen. I expected—I surely had a right to expect—every support and full co-operation from you in settling this unpleasant business with all speed. Unpleasant business?’ He smiled wryly. ‘Mincing words won’t help. Mutiny, gentlemen, is the generally accepted term for it—a capital offence, I need hardly remind you. And yet what do I find?’ His glance travelled slowly round the table.

‘Commissioned officers in His Majesty’s Navy, including a Flag-Officer, sympathising with—if not actually condoning—a lower-deck mutiny!’

He’s overstating it, Vallery thought dully. He’s provoking us. The words, the tone, were a question, a challenge inviting reply.

There was no reply. The four men seemed apathetic, indifferent. Four men, each an individual, each secure in his own personality— yet, at that moment, so strangely alike, their faces heavy and still and deeply lined, their eyes so quiet, so tired, so very old.

‘You are not convinced, gentlemen?’ he went on softly. ‘You find my choice of words a trifle—ah—disagreeable?’ He leaned back. ‘Hm … “mutiny”.’ He savoured the word slowly, compressed his lips, looked round the table again. ‘No, it doesn’t sound too good, does it, gentlemen? You would call it something else again, perhaps?’ He shook his head, bent forward, smoothed out a signal sheet below his fingers.

‘“Returned from strike on Lofotens,”’ he read out: ‘“1545—boom passed: 1610—finished with engines: 1630—provisions, stores lighters alongside, mixed seaman-stoker party detailed unload lubricating drums: 1650—reported to Captain stokers refused to obey CPO Hartley, then successively Chief Stoker Hendry, Lieutenant (E.) Grierson and Commander (E.): ringleaders apparently Stokers Riley and Petersen: 1705—refused to obey Captain: 1715—Master at Arms and Regulating PO assaulted in performance of duties.”’He looked up. ‘What duties? Trying to arrest the ringleaders?’

Vallery nodded silently.

‘“1715—seaman branch stopped work, apparently in sympathy: no violence offered: 1725—broadcast by Captain, warned of consequences: ordered to return to work: order disobeyed: 1730—signal to C-in-C Duke of Cumberland, for assistance.”’

Starr lifted his head again, looked coldly across at Vallery.

‘Why, incidentally, the signal to the Admiral? Surely your own marines—’

‘My orders,’ Tyndall interrupted bluntly. ‘Turn our own marines against men they’ve sailed with for two and half years? Out of the question! There’s no matelot—boot-neck antipathy on this ship, Admiral Starr: they’ve been through far too much together … Anyway,’ he added dryly, ‘it’s wholly possible that the marines would have refused. And don’t forget that if we had used our own men, and they had quelled this—ah—mutiny, the Ulysses would have been finished as a fighting ship.’

Starr looked at him steadily, dropped his eyes to the signal again.

‘“1830—Marine boarding party from Cumberland: no resistance offered to boarding: attempted to arrest, six, eight suspected ringleaders: strong resistance by stokers and seamen, heavy fighting poop-deck, stokers’ mess-deck and engineers’ flat till 1900: no firearms used, but 2 dead, 6 seriously injured, 35-40 minor casualties.”’ Starr finished reading, crumpled the paper in an almost savage gesture. ‘You know, gentlemen, I believe you have a point after all.’ The voice was heavy with irony. ‘“Mutiny” is hardly the term. Fifty dead and injured: “pitched battle” would be much nearer the mark.’

The words, the tone, the lashing bite of the voice provoked no reaction whatsoever. The four men still sat motionless, expressionless, unheeding in a vast indifference.

Admiral Starr’s face hardened.

‘I’m afraid you have things just a little out of focus, gentlemen. You’ve been up here a long time and isolation distorts perspective. Must I remind senior officers that, in wartime, individual feelings, trials and sufferings are of no moment at all? The Navy, the country—they come first, last and all the time.’ He pounded the table softly, the gesture insistent in its restrained urgency. ‘Good God, gentlemen,’ he ground out, ‘the future of the world is at stake—and you, with your selfish, your inexcusable absorption in your own petty affairs, have the colossal effrontery to endanger it!’

Commander Turner smiled sardonically to himself. A pretty speech, Vincent boy, very pretty indeed—although perhaps a touch reminiscent of Victorian melodrama: the clenched teeth act was definitely overdone. Pity he didn’t stand for Parliament—he’d be a terrific asset to any Government Front Bench. Suppose the old boy’s really too honest for that, he thought in vague surprise.

‘The ringleaders will be caught and punished—heavily punished.’ The voice was harsh now, with a biting edge to it. ‘Meantime the 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron will rendezvous at Denmark Strait as arranged, at 1030 Wednesday instead of Tuesday—we radioed Halifax and held up the sailing. You will proceed to sea at 0600 tomorrow.’ He looked across at Rear-Admiral Tyndall. ‘You will please advise all ships under your command at once, Admiral.’

Tyndall—universally known throughout the Fleet as Farmer Giles—said nothing. His ruddy features, usually so cheerful and crinkling, were set and grim: his gaze, heavy-lidded and troubled, rested on Captain Vallery and he wondered just what kind of private hell that kindly and sensitive man was suffering right then. But Vallery’s face, haggard with fatigue, told him nothing: that lean and withdrawn asceticism was the complete foil. Tyndall swore bitterly to himself.

‘I don’t really think there’s more to say, gentlemen,’ Starr went on smoothly. ‘I won’t pretend you’re in for an easy trip—you know yourselves what happened to the last three major convoys—PQ 17, FR 71 and 74. I’m afraid we haven’t yet found the answer to acoustic torpedoes and glider bombs. Further, our intelligence in Bremen and Kiel—and this is substantiated by recent experience in the Atlantic—report that the latest U-boat policy is to get the escorts first … Maybe the weather will save you.’

You vindictive old devil, Tyndall thought dispassionately. Go on, damn you—enjoy yourself.

‘At the risk of seeming rather Victorian and melodramatic’— impatiently Starr waited for Turner to stifle his sudden fit of coughing—‘we may say that the Ulysses is being given the opportunity of—ah—redeeming herself.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘After that, gentlemen, the Med. But first—FR 77 to Murmansk, come hell or high water!’ His voice broke on the last word and lifted into stridency, the anger burring through the thin veneer of suavity. ‘The Ulysses must be made to realize that the Navy will never tolerate disobedience of orders, dereliction of duty, organized revolt and sedition!’

‘Rubbish!’

Starr jerked back in his chair, knuckles whitening on the armrest. His glance whipped round and settled on Surgeon-Commander Brooks, on the unusually vivid blue eyes so strangely hostile now under that magnificent silver mane.

Tyndall, too, saw the angry eyes. He saw, also, the deepening colour in Brooks’s face, and moaned softly to himself. He knew the signs too well—old Socrates was about to blow his Irish top. Tyndall made to speak, then slumped back at a sharp gesture from Starr.

‘What did you say, Commander?’ The Admiral’s voice was very soft and quite toneless.

‘Rubbish,’ repeated Brooks distinctly. ‘Rubbish. That’s what I said. “Let’s be perfectly frank,” you say. Well, sir, I’m being frank. “Dereliction of duty, organized revolt and sedition” my foot! But I suppose you have to call it something, preferably something well within your own field of experience. But God only knows by what strange association and slight-of-hand mental transfer, you equate yesterday’s trouble aboard the Ulysses with the only clearly-cut code of behaviour thoroughly familiar to yourself.’ Brooks paused for a second: in the silence they heard the thin, high wail of a bosun’s pipe—a passing ship, perhaps. ‘Tell me, Admiral Starr,’ he went on quietly, ‘are we to drive out the devils of madness by whipping— a quaint old medieval custom—or maybe, sir, by drowning— remember the Gadarene swine? Or perhaps a month or two in cells, you think, is the best cure for tuberculosis?’

‘What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Brooks?’ Starr demanded angrily. ‘Gadarene swine, tuberculosis—what are you getting at, man? Go on—explain.’ He drummed his fingers impatiently on the table, eyebrows arched high into his furrowed brow. ‘I hope, Brooks,’ he went on silkily, ‘that you can justify this—ah—insolence of yours.’

‘I’m quite sure that Commander Brooks intended no insolence, sir.’ It was Captain Vallery speaking for the first time. ‘He’s only expressing—’ ‘Please, Captain Vallery,’ Starr interrupted. ‘I am quite capable of judging these things for myself, I think.’ His smile was very tight. ‘Well, go on, Brooks.’

Commander Brooks looked at him soberly, speculatively.

‘Justify myself?’ He smiled wearily. ‘No, sir, I don’t think I can.’ The slight inflection of tone, the implications, were not lost on Starr, and he flushed slightly. ‘But I’ll try to explain,’ continued Brooks. ‘It may do some good.’

He sat in silence for a few seconds, elbow on the table, his hand running through the heavy silver hair—a favourite mannerism of his. Then he looked up abruptly.

‘When were you last at sea, Admiral Starr?’ he inquired.

‘Last at sea?’ Starr frowned heavily. ‘What the devil has that got to do with you, Brooks—or with the subject under discussion?’ he asked harshly.

‘A very great deal,’ Brooks retorted. ‘Would you please answer my question, Admiral?’

‘I think you know quite well, Brooks,’ Starr replied evenly, ‘that I’ve been at Naval Operations HQ in London since the outbreak of war. What are you implying, sir?’

‘Nothing. Your personal integrity and courage are not open to question. We all know that. I was merely establishing a fact.’ Brooks hitched himself forward in his chair.

‘I’m a naval doctor, Admiral Starr—I’ve been a doctor for over thirty years now.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Maybe I’m not a very good doctor, perhaps I don’t keep quite so abreast of the latest medical developments as I might, but I believe I can claim to know a great deal about human nature—this is no time for modesty—about how the mind works, about the wonderfully intricate interaction of mind and body.

‘“Isolation distorts perspective”—these were your words, Admiral Starr. “Isolation” implies a cutting off, a detachment from the world, and your implication was partly true. But—and this, sir, is the point—there are more worlds than one. The Northern Seas, the Arctic, the black-out route to Russia—these are another world, a world utterly distinct from yours. It is a world, sir, of which you cannot possibly have any conception. In effect, you are completely isolated from our world.’

Starr grunted, whether in anger or derision it was difficult to say, and cleared his throat to speak, but Brooks went on swiftly.

‘Conditions obtain there without either precedent or parallel in the history of war. The Russian Convoys, sir, are something entirely new and quite unique in the experience of mankind.’

He broke off suddenly, and gazed out through the thick glass of the scuttle at the sleet slanting heavily across the grey waters and dun hills of the Scapa anchorage. No one spoke. The Surgeon-Commander was not finished yet: a tired man takes time to marshal his thoughts.

‘Mankind, of course, can and does adapt itself to new conditions.’ Brooks spoke quietly, almost to himself. ‘Biologically and physically, they have had to do so down the ages, in order to survive. But it takes time, gentlemen, a great deal of time. You can’t compress the natural changes of twenty centuries into a couple of years: neither mind nor body can stand it. You can try, of course, and such is the fantastic resilience and toughness of man that he can tolerate it—for extremely short periods. But the limit, the saturation capacity for adaption is soon reached. Push men beyond that limit and anything can happen. I say “anything” advisedly, because we don’t yet know the precise form the crack-up will take—but crack-up there always is. It may be physical, mental, spiritual—I don’t know. But this I do know, Admiral Starr—the crew of the Ulysses has been pushed to the limit—and clear beyond.’

‘Very interesting, Commander.’ Starr’s voice was dry, sceptical. ‘Very interesting indeed—and most instructive. Unfortunately, your theory—and it’s only that, of course—is quite untenable.’

Brooks eyed him steadily.

‘That, sir, is not even a matter of opinion.’

‘Nonsense, man, nonsense!’ Starr’s face was hard in anger. ‘It’s a matter of fact. Your premises are completely false.’ Starr leaned forward, his forefinger punctuating every word. ‘This vast gulf you claim to lie between the convoys to Russia and normal operational work at sea—it just doesn’t exist. Can you point out any one factor or condition present in these Northern waters which is not to be found somewhere else in the world? Can you, Commander Brooks?’

‘No, sir.’ Brooks was quite unruffled. ‘But I can point out a frequently overlooked fact—that differences of degree and association can be much greater and have far more far-reaching effects than differences in kind. Let me explain what I mean.

‘Fear can destroy a man. Let’s admit it—fear is a natural thing. You get it in every theatre of war—but nowhere, I suggest, so intense, so continual as in the Arctic convoys.

‘Suspense, tension can break a man—any man. I’ve seen it happen too often, far, far too often. And when you’re keyed up to snapping point, sometimes for seventeen days on end, when you have constant daily reminders of what may happen to you in the shape of broken, sinking ships and broken, drowning bodies—well, we’re men, not machines. Something has to go—and does. The Admiral will not be unaware that after the last two trips we shipped nineteen officers and men to sanatoria—mental sanatoria?’

Brooks was on his feet now, his broad, strong fingers splayed over the polished table surface, his eyes boring into Starr’s.

‘Hunger burns out a man’s vitality, Admiral Starr. It saps his strength, slows his reactions, destroys the will to fight, even the will to survive. You are surprised, Admiral Starr? Hunger, you think—surely that’s impossible in the wellprovided ships of today? But it’s not impossible, Admiral Starr. It’s inevitable. You keep on sending us out when the Russian season’s over, when the nights are barely longer than the days, when twenty hours out of the twenty-four are spent on watch or at action stations, and you expect us to feed well!’ He smashed the flat of his hand on the table. ‘How the hell can we, when the cooks spend nearly all their time in the magazines, serving the turrets, or in damage control parties? Only the baker and butcher are excused—and so we live on corned-beef sandwiches. For weeks on end! Corned-beef sandwiches!’ Surgeon-Commander Brooks almost spat in disgust.

Good old Socrates, thought Turner happily, give him hell. Tyndall, too, was nodding his ponderous approval. Only Vallery was uncomfortable—not because of what Brooks was saying, but because Brooks was saying it. He, Vallery, was the captain: the coals of fire were being heaped on the wrong head.

‘Fear, suspense, hunger.’ Brooks’s voice was very low now. ‘These are the things that break a man, that destroy him as surely as fire or steel or pestilence could. These are the killers.

‘But they are nothing, Admiral Starr, just nothing at all. They are only the henchmen, the outriders, you might call them, of the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse—cold, lack of sleep, exhaustion.

‘Do you know what it’s like up there, between Jan Mayen and Bear Island on a February night, Admiral Starr? Of course you don’t. Do you know what it’s like when there’s sixty degrees of frost in the Arctic—and it still doesn’t freeze? Do you know what it’s like when the wind, twenty degrees below zero, comes screaming off the Polar and Greenland ice-caps and slices through the thickest clothing like a scalpel? When there’s five hundred tons of ice on the deck, where five minutes’ direct exposure means frostbite, where the bows crash down into a trough and the spray hits you as solid ice, where even a torch battery dies out in the intense cold? Do you, Admiral Starr, do you?’ Brooks flung the words at him, hammered them at him.

‘And do you know what it’s like to go for days on end without sleep, for weeks with only two or three hours out of the twenty-four? Do you know the sensation, Admiral Starr? That fine-drawn feeling with every nerve in your body and cell in your brain stretched taut to breaking point, pushing you over the screaming edge of madness. Do you know it, Admiral Starr? It’s the most exquisite agony in the world, and you’d sell your friends, your family, your hopes of immortality for the blessed privilege of closing your eyes and just letting go.

‘And then there’s the tiredness, Admiral Starr, the desperate weariness that never leaves you. Partly it’s the debilitating effect of the cold, partly lack of sleep, partly the result of incessantly bad weather. You know yourself how exhausting it can be to brace yourself even for a few hours on a rolling, pitching deck: our boys have been doing it for months—gales are routine on the Arctic run. I can show you a dozen, two dozen old men, not one of them a day over twenty.’

Brooks pushed back his chair and paced restlessly across the cabin. Tyndall and Turner glanced at each other, then over at Vallery, who sat with head and shoulders bowed, eyes resting vacantly on his clasped hands on the table. For the moment, Starr might not have existed.

‘It’s a vicious, murderous circle,’ Brooks went on quickly. He was leaning against the bulkhead now, hands deep in his pockets, gazing out sightlessly through the misted scuttle. ‘The less sleep you have, the tireder you are: the more tired you become, the more you feel cold. And so it goes on. And then, all the time, there’s the hunger and the terrific tension. Everything interacts with everything else: each single factor conspires with the others to crush a man, break him physically and mentally, and lay him wide open to disease. Yes, Admiral—disease.’ He smiled into Starr’s face, and there was no laughter in his smile. ‘Pack men together like herring in a barrel, deprive ’em of every last ounce of resistance, batten ’em below decks for days at a time, and what do you get? TB It’s inevitable.’ He shrugged. ‘Sure, I’ve only isolated a few cases so far—but I know that active pulmonary TB is rife in the lower deck.

‘I saw the break-up coming months ago.’ He lifted his shoulders wearily. ‘I warned the Fleet Surgeon several times. I wrote the Admiralty twice. They were sympathetic—and that’s all. Shortage of ships, shortage of men …

‘The last hundred days did it, sir—on top of the previous months. A hundred days of pure bloody hell and not a single hour’s shore leave. In port only twice—for ammunitioning: all oil and provisions from the carriers at sea. And every day an eternity of cold and hunger and danger and suffering. In the name of God,’ Brooks cried, ‘we’re not machines!’

He levered himself off the wall and walked over to Starr, hands still thrust deep in his pockets.

‘I hate to say this in front of the Captain, but every officer in the ship—except Captain Vallery—knows that the men would have mutinied, as you call it, long ago, but for one thing—Captain Vallery. The intense personal loyalty of the crew to the Captain, the devotion almost to the other side of idolatry is something quite unique in my experience, Admiral Starr.’

Tyndall and Turner both murmured approval. Vallery still sat motionless.

‘But there was a limit even to that. It had to come. And now you talk of punishing, imprisoning these men. Good God above, you might as well hang a man for having leprosy, or send him to penal servitude for developing ulcers!’ Brooks shook his head in despair. ‘Our crew are equally guiltless. They just couldn’t help it. They can’t see right from wrong any more. They can’t think straight. They just want a rest, they just want peace, a few days’ blessed quiet. They’ll give anything in the world for these things and they can’t see beyond them. Can’t you see that Admiral Starr? Can’t you? Can’t you?’

For perhaps thirty seconds there was silence, complete, utter silence, in the Admiral’s cabin. The high, thin whine of the wind, the swish of the hail seemed unnaturally loud. Then Starr was on his feet, his hands stretching out for his gloves: Vallery looked up, for the first time, and he knew that Brooks had failed.

‘Have my barge alongside, Captain Vallery. At once, please.’ Starr was detached, quite emotionless. ‘Complete oiling, provisioning and ammunitioning as soon as possible. Admiral Tyndall, I wish you and your squadron a successful voyage. As for you, Commander Brooks, I quite see the point of your argument—at least, as far as you are concerned.’ His lips parted in a bleak, wintry smile. ‘You are quite obviously overwrought, badly in need of some leave. Your relief will be aboard before midnight. If you will come with me, Captain … ’

He turned to the door and had taken only two steps when Vallery’s voice stopped him dead, poised on one foot.

‘One moment, sir, if you please.’

Starr swung round. Captain Vallery had made no move to rise. He sat still, smiling. It was a smile compounded of deference, of understanding—and of a curious inflexibility. It made Starr feel vaguely uncomfortable.

‘Surgeon-Commander Brooks,’ Vallery said precisely, ‘is a quite exceptional officer. He is invaluable, virtually irreplaceable and the Ulysses needs him badly. I wish to retain his services.’

‘I’ve made my decision, Captain,’ Starr snapped. ‘And it’s final. You know, I think, the powers invested in me by the Admiralty for this investigation.’

‘Quite, sir.’ Vallery was quiet, unmoved. ‘I repeat, however, that we cannot afford to lose an officer of Brooks’s calibre.’

The words, the tone, were polite, respectful; but their significance was unmistakable. Brooks stepped forward, distress in his face, but before he could speak, Turner cut in smoothly, urbanely.

‘I assume I wasn’t invited to this conference for purely decorative purposes.’ He tilted back in his chair, his eyes fixed dreamily on the deckhead. ‘I feel it’s time I said something. I unreservedly endorse old Brooks’s remarks—every word of them.’

Starr, white-mouthed and motionless, looked at Tyndall. ‘And you, Admiral?’

Tyndall looked up quizzically, all the tenseness and worry gone from his face. He looked more like a West Country Farmer Giles than ever. He supposed wryly, that his career was at stake; funny, he thought how suddenly unimportant a career could become.

‘As Officer Commanding, maximum squadron efficiency is my sole concern. Some people are irreplaceable. Captain Vallery suggests Brooks is one of these. I agree.’

‘I see, gentlemen, I see,’ Starr said heavily. Two spots of colour burned high up on his cheekbones. ‘The convoy has sailed from Halifax, and my hands are tied. But you make a great mistake, gentlemen, a great mistake, in pointing pistols at the head of the Admiralty. We have long memories in Whitehall. We shall—ah—discuss the matter at length on your return. Good day, gentlemen, good day.’

Shivering in the sudden chill, Brooks clumped down the ladder to the upper deck and turned for’ard past the galley into the Sick Bay. Johnson, the Leading Sick Bay Attendant, looked out from the dispensary.

‘How are our sick and suffering, Johnson?’ Brooks inquired. ‘Bearing up manfully?’

Johnson surveyed the eight beds and their occupants morosely.

‘Just a lot of bloody chancers, sir. Half of them are a damned sight fitter than I am. Look at Stoker Riley there—him with the broken finger and whacking great pile of Reader’s Digests. Going through all the medical articles, he is, and roaring out for sulph., penicillin and all the latest antibiotics. Can’t pronounce half of them. Thinks he’s dying.’

‘A grievous loss,’ the Surgeon-Commander murmured. He shook his head. ‘What Commander Dodson sees in him I don’t know … What’s the latest from hospital?’

The expression drained out of Johnson’s face.

‘They’re just off the blower, sir,’ he said woodenly. ‘Five minutes ago. Ordinary Seaman Ralston died at three o’clock.’

Brooks nodded heavily. Sending that broken boy to hospital had only been a gesture anyway. Just for a moment he felt tired, beaten. ‘Old Socrates’ they called him, and he was beginning to feel his age these days—and a bit more besides. Maybe a good night’s sleep would help, but he doubted it. He sighed.

‘Don’t feel too good about all this, Johnson, do you?’

‘Eighteen, sir. Exactly eighteen.’ Johnson’s voice was low, bitter. ‘I’ve just been talking to Burgess—that’s him in the next bed. Says Ralston steps out across the bathroom coaming, a towel over his arm. A mob rushes past, then this bloody great ape of a bootneck comes tearing up and bashes him over the skull with his rifle. Never knew what hit him, sir—and he never knew why.’

Brooks smiled faintly.

‘That’s what they call—ah—seditious talk, Johnson,’ he said mildy.

‘Sorry, sir. Suppose I shouldn’t—it’s just that I—’

‘Never mind, Johnson. I asked for it. Can’t stop anyone from thinking. Only, don’t think out loud. It’s—it’s prejudicial to naval discipline … I think your friend Riley wants you. Better get him a dictionary.’

He turned and pushed his way through the surgery curtains. A dark head—all that could be seen behind the dentist’s chair— twisted round. Johnny Nicholls, Acting Surgeon Lieutenant, rose quickly to his feet, a pile of report cards dangling from his left hand.

‘Hallo, sir. Have a pew.’

Brooks grinned.

‘An excellent thing, Lieutenant Nicholls, truly gratifying, to meet these days a junior officer who knows his place. Thank you, thank you.’

He climbed into the chair and sank back with a groan, fiddling with the neck-rest.

‘If you’ll just adjust the foot-rest, my boy … so. Ah—thank you.’ He leaned back luxuriously, eyes closed, head far back on the rest, and groaned again. ‘I’m an old man, Johnny, my boy, just an ancient has-been.’

‘Nonsense, sir,’ Nicholls said briskly. ‘Just a slight malaise. Now, if you’ll let me prescribe a suitable tonic … ’

He turned to a cupboard, fished out two toothglasses and a dark-green, ribbed bottle marked ‘Poison’. He filled the glasses and handed one to Brooks. ‘My personal recommendation. Good health, sir!’

Brooks looked at the amber liquid, then at Nicholls.

‘Heathenish practice they taught you at these Scottish Universities, my boy … Admirable fellers, some of these old heathens. What is it this time, Johnny?’

‘First-class stuff,’ Nicholls grinned. ‘Produce of the Island of Coll.’

The old surgeon looked at him suspiciously.

‘Didn’t know they had any distilleries up there.’

‘They haven’t. I only said it was made in Coll … How did things go up top, sir?’

‘Bloody awful. His nibs threatened to string us all from the yardarm. Took a special dislike to me—said I was to be booted off the ship instanter. Meant it, too.’

‘You!’ Nicholls’s brown eyes, deep-sunk just now and red-rimmed from sleeplessness, opened wide. ‘You’re joking, sir, of course.’

‘I’m not. But it’s all right—I’m not going. Old Giles, the skipper and Turner—the crazy idiots—virtually told Starr that if I went he’d better start looking around for another Admiral, Captain and Commander as well. They shouldn’t have done it, of course—but it shook old Vincent to the core. Departed in high dudgeon, muttering veiled threats … not so veiled, either, come to think of it.’

‘Damned old fool!’ said Nicholls feelingly.

‘He’s not really, Johnny. Actually, he’s a brilliant bloke. You don’t become a DNO for nothing. Master strategist and tactician, Giles tells me, and he’s not really as bad as we’re apt to paint him; to a certain extent we can’t blame old Vincent for sending us out again. Bloke’s up against an insoluble problem. Limited resources at his disposal, terrific demands for ships and men in half a dozen other theatres. Impossible to meet half the claims made on him; half the time he’s operating on little better than a shoe-string. But he’s still an inhuman, impersonal sort of cuss—doesn’t understand men.’

‘And the upshot of it all?’

‘Murmansk again. Sailing at 0600 tomorrow.’

‘What! Again? This bunch of walking zombies?’ Nicholls was openly incredulous. ‘Why, they can’t do that, sir! They—they just can’t!’

‘They’re doing it anyway, my boy. The Ulysses must—ah—redeem itself.’ Brooks opened his eyes. ‘Gad the very thought appals me. If there’s any of that poison left, my boy … ’

Nicholls shoved the depleted bottle back into the cupboard, and jerked a resentful thumb in the direction of the massive battleship clearly visible through the porthole, swinging round her anchor three or four cable-lengths away.

‘Why always us, sir? It’s always us. Why don’t they send that useless floating barracks out once in a while? Swinging round that bloody great anchor, month in, month out—’

‘Just the point,’ Brooks interrupted solemnly. ‘According to the Kapok Kid, the tremendous weight of empty condensed-milk cans and herring-intomato-sauce tins accumulated on the ocean bed over the past twelve months completely defeats all attempts to weigh anchor.’

Nicholls didn’t seem to hear him.

‘Week in, week out, months and months on end, they send the Ulysses out. They change the carriers, they rest the screen destroyers—but never the Ulysses. There’s no let-up. Never, not once. But the Duke of Cumberland—all it’s fit for is sending hulking great brutes of marines on board here to massacre sick men, crippled men, men who’ve done more in a week than—’

‘Easy, boy, easy,’ the Commander chided. ‘You can’t call three dead men and the bunch of wounded heroes lying outside there a massacre. The marines were only doing their job. As for the Cumberland—well, you’ve got to face it. We’re the only ship in the Home Fleet equipped for carrier command.’

Nicholls drained his glass and regarded his superior officer moodily.

‘There are times, sir, when I positively love the Germans.’

‘You and Johnson should get together sometime,’ Brooks advised. ‘Old Starr would have you both clapped in irons for spreading alarm and … Hallo, hallo!’ He straightened up in his chair and leaned forward. ‘Observe the old Duke there, Johnny! Yards of washing going up from the flagdeck and matelots running—actually running—up to the fo’c’sle head. Unmistakable signs of activity. By Gad, this is uncommon surprising! What d’ye make of it, boy?’

‘Probably learned that they’re going on leave,’ Nicholls growled. ‘Nothing else could possibly make that bunch move so fast. And who are we to grudge them the just rewards for their labours? After so long, so arduous, so dangerous a spell of duty in Northern waters … ’

The first shrill blast of a bugle killed the rest of the sentence. Instinctively, their eyes swung round on the crackling, humming loudspeaker, then on each other in sheer, shocked disbelief. And then they were on their feet, tense, expectant: the heart-stopping urgency of the bugle-call to action stations never grows dim.

‘Oh, my God, no!’ Brooks moaned. ‘Oh, no, no! Not again! Not in Scapa Flow!’

‘Oh, God, no! Not again—not in Scapa Flow!’

These were the words in the mouths, the minds, the hearts of 727 exhausted, sleep-haunted, bitter men that bleak winter evening in Scapa Flow. That they thought of, and that only could they think of as the scream of the bugle stopped dead all work on decks and below decks, in engine-rooms and boiler-rooms, on ammunition lighters and fuel tenders, in the galleys and in the offices. And that only could the watch below think of—and that with an even more poignant despair—as the strident blare seared through the bliss of oblivion and brought them back, sick at heart, dazed in mind and stumbling on their feet, to the iron harshness of reality.

It was, in a strangely indefinite way, a moment of decision. It was the moment that could have broken the Ulysses, as a fighting ship, for ever. It was the moment that bitter, exhausted men, relaxed in the comparative safety of a landlocked anchorage, could have chosen to make the inevitable stand against authority, against that wordless, mindless compulsion and merciless insistence which was surely destroying them. If ever there was such a moment, this was it.

The moment came—and passed. It was no more than a fleeting shadow, a shadow that flitted lightly across men’s minds and was gone, lost in the rush of feet pounding to action stations. Perhaps self-preservation was the reason. But that was unlikely—the Ulysses had long since ceased to care. Perhaps it was just naval discipline, or loyalty to the captain, or what the psychologists call conditioned reflex—you hear the scream of brakes and you immediately jump for your life. Or perhaps it was something else again.

Whatever it was, the ship—all except the port watch anchor party—was closed up in two minutes. Unanimous in their disbelief that this could be happening to them in Scapa Flow, men went to their stations silently or vociferously, according to their nature. They went reluctantly, sullenly, resentfully, despairingly. But they went.

Rear-Admiral Tyndall went also. He was not one of those who went silently. He climbed blasphemously up to the bridge, pushed his way through the port gate and clambered into his high-legged armchair in the for’ard port corner of the compass platform. He looked at Vallery.

‘What’s the flap, in heaven’s name, Captain?’ he demanded testily. ‘Everything seems singularly peaceful to me.’

‘Don’t know yet, sir.’ Vallery swept worried eyes over the anchorage. ‘Alarm signal from C-in-C, with orders to get under way immediately.’

‘Get under way! But why, man, why?’

Vallery shook his head.

Tyndall groaned. ‘It’s all a conspiracy, designed to rob old men like myself of their afternoon sleep,’ he declared.

‘More likely a brainwave of Starr’s to shake us up a bit,’ Turner grunted.

‘No.’ Tyndall was decisive. ‘He wouldn’t try that—wouldn’t dare. Besides, by his lights, he’s not a vindictive man.’

Silence fell, a silence broken only by the patter of sleet and hail, and the weird haunting pinging of the Asdic. Vallery suddenly lifted his binoculars.

‘Good lord, sir, look at that! The Duke’s slipped her anchor!’

There was no doubt about it. The shackle-pin had been knocked out and the bows of the great ship were swinging slowly round as it got under way.

‘What in the world—?’ Tyndall broke off and scanned the sky. ‘Not a plane, not a paratrooper in sight, no radar reports, no Asdic contacts, no sign of the German Grand Fleet steaming through the boom—’

‘She’s signalling us, sir!’ It was Bentley speaking, Bentley the Chief Yeoman of Signals. He paused and went on slowly: ‘Proceed to our anchorage at once. Make fast to north buoy.’

‘Ask them to confirm,’ Vallery snapped. He took the fo’c’sle phone from the communication rating.

‘Captain here, Number One. How is she? Up and down? Good.’

He turned to the officer of the watch. ‘Slow ahead both: Starboard 10.’ He looked over at Tyndall’s corner, brows wrinkled in question.

‘Search me,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Could be the latest in parlour games—a sort of nautical musical chairs, you know … Wait a minute, though! Look! The Cumberland—all her 5.25’s are at maximum depression!’

Vallery’s eyes met his.

‘No, it can’t be! Good God, do you think—?’

The blare of the Asdic loudspeaker, from the cabinet immediately abaft of the bridge, gave him his answer. The voice of Leading Asdic Operation Chrysler was clear, unhurried.

‘Asdic—bridge. Asdic—bridge. Echo, Red 30. Repeat, Red 30. Strengthening. Closing.’

The captain’s incredulity leapt and died in the same second.

‘Alert Director Control! Red 30. All AA guns maximum depression. Underwater target. Torps’—this to Lieutenant Marshall, the Canadian Torpedo Officer—“depth charge stations”.’

He turned back to Tyndall.

‘It can’t be, sir—it just can’t! A U-boat—I presume it is—in Scapa Flow. Impossible!’

‘Prien didn’t think so,’ Tyndall grunted.

‘Prien?’

‘Kapitan-Leutnant Prien—gent who scuppered the Royal Oak.’

‘It couldn’t happen again. The new boom defences—’

‘Would keep out any normal submarines,’ Tyndall finished. His voice dropped to a murmur. ‘Remember what we were told last month about our midget two-man subs—the chariots? The ones to be taken over to Norway by Norwegian fishing-boats operating from the Shetlands. Could be that the Germans have hit on the same idea.’

‘Could be,’ Vallery agreed. He nodded sardonically. ‘Just look at the Cumberland go—straight for the boom.’ He paused for a few seconds, his eyes speculative, then looked back at Tyndall. ‘How do you like it, sir?’

‘Like what, Captain?’

‘Playing Aunt Sally at the fair.’ Vallery grinned crookedly. ‘Can’t afford to lose umpteen million pounds worth of capital ship. So the old Duke hares out to sea and safety, while we moor near her anchor berth. You can bet German Naval Intelligence has the bearing of her anchorage down to a couple of inches. These midget subs carry detachable warheads and if there’s going to be any fitted, they’re going to be fitted to us.’

Tyndall looked at him. His face was expressionless. Asdic reports were continuous, reporting steady bearing to port and closing distances.

‘Of course, of course,’ the Admiral murmured. ‘We’re the whipping boy. Gad, it makes me feel bad!’ His mouth twisted and he laughed mirthlessly. ‘Me? This is the final straw for the crew. That hellish last trip, the mutiny, the marine boarding party from the Cumberland, action stations in harbour—and now this! Risking our necks for that—that … ’ He broke off, spluttering, swore in anger, then resumed quietly:

‘What are you going to tell the men, Captain? Good God, it’s fantastic! I feel like mutiny myself … ’ He stopped short, looked inquiringly past Vallery’s shoulder.

The Captain turned round.

‘Yes, Marshall?’

‘Excuse me, sir. This—er—echo.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘A sub, sir—possibly a pretty small one?’ The transatlantic accent was very heavy.

‘Likely enough, Marshall. Why?’

‘Just how Ralston and I figured it, sir.’ He grinned. ‘We have an idea for dealing with it.’

Vallery looked out through the driving sleet, gave helm and engine orders, then turned back to the Torpedo Officer. He was coughing heavily, painfully, as he pointed to the glassed-in anchorage chart.

‘If you’re thinking of depth-charging our stern off in these shallow waters—’

‘No, sir. Doubt whether we could get a shallow enough setting anyway. My idea—Ralston’s to be correct—is that we take out the motor-boat and a few 25-lb. scuttling charges, 18-second fuses and chemical igniters. Not much of a kick from these, I know, but a miniature sub ain’t likely to have helluva—er—very thick hulls. And if the crews are sitting on top of the ruddy things instead of inside— well, it’s curtains for sure. It’ll kipper ‘em.’

Vallery smiled.

‘Not bad at all, Marshall. I think you’ve got the answer there. What do you think, sir?’

‘Worth trying anyway,’ Tyndall agreed. ‘Better than waiting around like a sitting duck.’

‘Go ahead then, Torps.’ Vallery looked at him quizzically. ‘Who are your explosives experts?’

‘I figured on taking Ralston—’

‘Just what I thought. You’re taking nobody, laddie,’ said Vallery firmly. ‘Can’t afford to lose my torpedo officer.’

Marshall looked pained, then shrugged resignedly.

‘The chief TGM and Ralston—he’s the senior LTO. Good men both.’

‘Right. Bentley—detail a man to accompany them in the boat. We’ll signal Asdic bearings from here. Have him take a portable Aldis with him.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Marshall?’

‘Sir?’

‘Ralston’s young brother died in hospital this afternoon.’ He looked across at the Leading Torpedo Operator, a tall, blond, unsmiling figure dressed in faded blue overalls beneath his duffel. ‘Does he know yet?’

The Torpedo Officer stared at Vallery, then looked round slowly at the LTO. He swore, softly, bitterly, fluently.

‘Marshall!’ Vallery’s voice was sharp, imperative, but Marshall ignored him, his face a mask, oblivious alike to the reprimand in the Captain’s voice and the lashing bite of the sleet.

‘No, sir,’ he stated at length, ‘he doesn’t know. But he did receive some news this morning. Croydon was pasted last week. His mother and three sisters live there—lived there. It was a land-mine, sir— there was nothing left.’ He turned abruptly and left the bridge.

Fifteen minutes later it was all over. The starboard whaler and the motor-boat on the port side hit the water with the Ulysses still moving up to the mooring. The whaler, buoy-jumper aboard, made for the buoy, while the motor-boat slid off at a tangent.

Four hundred yards away from the ship, in obedience to the flickering instructions from the bridge, Ralston fished out a pair of pliers from his overalls and crimped the chemical fuse. The Gunner’s Mate stared fixedly at his stop-watch. On the count of twelve the scuttling charge went over the side.

Three more, at different settings, followed it in close succession, while the motor-boat cruised in a tight circle. The first three explosions lifted the stern and jarred the entire length of the boat, viciously—and that was all. But with the fourth, a great gout of air came gushing to the surface, followed by a long stream of viscous bubbles. As the turbulence subsided, a thin slick of oil spread over a hundred square yards of sea …

Men, fallen out from Action Stations, watched with expressionless faces as the motor-boat made it back to the Ulysses and hooked on to the falls just in time: the Hotchkiss steering-gear was badly twisted and she was taking in water fast under the counter.

The Duke of Cumberland was a smudge of smoke over a far headland.

Cap in hand, Ralston sat down opposite the Captain. Vallery looked at him for a long time in silence. He wondered what to say, how best to say it. He hated to have to do this.

Richard Vallery also hated war. He always had hated it and he cursed the day it had dragged him out of his comfortable retirement. At least, ‘dragged’ was how he put it; only Tyndall knew that he had volunteered his services to the Admiralty on 1st September, 1939, and had had them gladly accepted.

But he hated war. Not because it interfered with his lifelong passion for music and literature, on both of which he was a considerable authority, not even because it was a perpetual affront to his aestheticism, to his sense of rightness and fitness. He hated it because he was a deeply religious man, because it grieved him to see in mankind the wild beasts of the primeval jungle, because he thought the cross of life was already burden enough without the gratuitous infliction of the mental and physical agony of war, and, above all, because he saw war all too clearly as the wild and insensate folly it was, as a madness of the mind that settled nothing, proved nothing—except the old, old truth that God was on the side of the big battalions.

But some things he had to do, and Vallery had clearly seen that this war had to be his also. And so he had come back to the service, and had grown older as the bitter years passed, older and frailer, and more kindly and tolerant and understanding. Among Naval Captains, indeed among men, he was unique. In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone. It was a measure of the man’s greatness that this thought never occurred to him.

He sighed. All that troubled him just now was what he ought to say to Ralston. But it was Ralston who spoke first.

‘It’s all right, sir.’ The voice was a level monotone, the face very still. ‘I know. The Torpedo Officer told me.’

Vallery cleared his throat.

‘Words are useless, Ralston, quite useless. Your young brother— and your family at home. All gone. I’m sorry, my boy, terribly sorry about it all.’ He looked up into the expressionless face and smiled wryly. ‘Or maybe you think that these are all words—you know, something formal, just a meaningless formula.’

Suddenly, surprisingly, Ralston smiled briefly.

‘No, sir, I don’t. I can appreciate how you feel, sir. You see, my father—well, he’s a captain too. He tells me he feels the same way.’

Vallery looked at him in astonishment.

‘Your father, Ralston? Did you say—’

‘Yes, sir.’ Vallery could have sworn to a flicker of amusement in the blue eyes, so quiet, so selfpossessed, across the table. ‘In the Merchant Navy, sir—a tanker captain—16,000 tons.’

Vallery said nothing. Ralston went on quietly:

‘And about Billy, sir—my young brother. It’s—it’s just one of these things. It’s nobody’s fault but mine—I asked to have him aboard here. I’m to blame, sir—only me.’ His lean brown hands were round the brim of his hat, twisting it, crushing it. How much worse will it be when the shattering impact of the double blow wears off, Vallery wondered, when the poor kid begins to think straight again?

‘Look, my boy, I think you need a few days’ rest, time to think things over.’ God, Vallery thought, what an inadequate, what a futile thing to say. ‘PRO is making out your travelling warrant just now. You will start fourteen days’ leave as from tonight.’

‘Where is the warrant made out for, sir?’ The hat was crushed now, crumpled between the hands. ‘Croydon?’

‘Of course. Where else—’ Vallery stopped dead; the enormity of the blunder had just hit him.

‘Forgive me, my boy. What a damnably stupid thing to say!’

‘Don’t send me away, sir,’ Ralston pleaded quietly. ‘I know it sounds—well, it sounds corny, selfpitying, but the truth is I’ve nowhere to go I belong here—on the Ulysses. I can do things all the time—I’m busy—working, sleeping—I don’t have to talk about things—I can do things … ’ The self-possession was only the thinnest veneer, taut and frangible, with the quiet desperation immediately below.

‘I can get a chance to help pay ‘em back,’ Ralston hurried on. ‘Like crimping these fuses today—it—well, it was a privilege. It was more than that—it was—oh, I don’t know. I can’t find the words, sir.’

Vallery knew. He felt sad, tired, defenceless. What could he offer this boy in place of this hate, this very human, consuming flame of revenge? Nothing, he knew, nothing that Ralston wouldn’t despise, wouldn’t laugh at. This was not the time for pious platitudes. He sighed again, more heavily this time.

‘Of course you shall remain, Ralston. Go down to the Police Office and tell them to tear up your warrant. If I can be of any help to you at any time—’

‘I understand, sir. Thank you very much. Good night, sir.’

‘Good night, my boy.’

The door closed softly behind him.

TWO

Monday Morning

‘Close all water-tight doors and scuttles. Hands to stations for leaving harbour.’ Impersonally, inexorably, the metallic voice of the broadcast system reached into every farthest corner of the ship.

And from every corner of the ship men came in answer to the call. They were cold men, shivering involuntarily in the icy north wind, sweating pungently as the heavy falling snow drifted under collars and cuffs, as numbed hands stuck to frozen ropes and metal. They were tired men, for fuelling, provisioning and ammunitioning had gone on far into the middle watch: few had had more than three hours’ sleep.

And they were still angry, hostile men. Orders were obeyed, to be sure, with the mechanical efficiency of a highly-trained ship’s company; but obedience was surly, acquiescence resentful, and insolence lay ever close beneath the surface. But Divisional officers and NCOs handled the men with velvet gloves: Vallery had been emphatic about that.

Illogically enough, the highest pitch of resentment had not been caused by the Cumberland’s prudent withdrawal. It had been produced the previous evening by the routine broadcast. ‘Mail will close at 2000 tonight.’ Mail! Those who weren’t working non-stop round the clock were sleeping like the dead with neither the heart nor the will even to think of writing. Leading Seaman Doyle, the doyen of ‘B’ mess-deck and a venerable three-badger (thirteen years’ undiscovered crime, as he modestly explained his good-conduct stripes) had summed up the matter succinctly: ‘If my old Missus was Helen of Troy and Jane Russell rolled into one—and all you blokes wot have seen the old dear’s photo know that the very idea’s a shocking libel on either of them ladies—I still wouldn’t send her even a bleedin’ postcard. You gotta draw a line somewhere. Me, for my scratcher.’ Whereupon he had dragged his hammock from the rack, slung it with millimetric accuracy beneath a hot-air louvre— seniority carries its privileges—and was asleep in two minutes. To a man, the port watch did likewise: the mail bag had gone ashore almost empty …

At 0600, exactly to the minute, the Ulysses slipped her moorings and steamed slowly towards the boom. In the grey half-light, under leaden, lowering clouds, she slid across the anchorage like an insubstantial ghost, more often than not half-hidden from view under sudden, heavy flurries of snow.

Even in the relatively clear spells, she was difficult to locate. She lacked solidity, substance, definition of outline. She had a curious air of impermanence, of volatility. An illusion, of course, but an illusion that accorded well with a legend—for a legend the Ulysses had become in her own brief lifetime. She was known and cherished by merchant seamen, by the men who sailed the bitter seas of the North, from St John’s to Archangel, from the Shetlands to Jan Mayen, from Greenland to far reaches of Spitzbergen, remote on the edge of the world. Where there was danger, where there was death, there you might look to find the Ulysses, materializing wraith-like from a fog-bank, or just miraculously being there when the bleak twilight of an Arctic dawn brought with it only the threat, at times almost the certainty, of never seeing the next.

A ghost-ship, almost, a legend. The Ulysses was also a young ship, but she had grown old in the Russian Convoys and on the Arctic patrols. She had been there from the beginning, and had known no other life. At first she had operated alone, escorting single ships or groups of two or three: later, she had operated without her squadron, the 14th Escort Carrier group.

But the Ulysses had never really sailed alone. Death had been, still was, her constant companion. He laid his finger on a tanker, and there was the erupting hell of a high-octane detonation; on a cargo liner, and she went to the bottom with her load of war supplies, her back broken by a German torpedo; on a destroyer, and she knifed her way into the grey-black depths of the Barents Sea, her still-racing engines her own executioners; on a U-boat, and she surfaced violently to be destroyed by gunfire, or slid down gently to the bottom of the sea, the dazed, shocked crew hoping for a cracked pressure hull and merciful instant extinction, dreading the endless gasping agony of suffocation in their iron tomb on the ocean floor. Where the Ulysses went, there also went death. But death never touched her. She was a lucky ship. A lucky ship and a ghost ship and the Arctic was her home.

Illusion, of course, this ghostliness, but a calculated illusion. The Ulysses was designed specifically for one task, for one ocean, and the camouflage experts had done a marvellous job. The special Arctic camouflage, the broken, slanting diagonals of grey and white and washed-out blues merged beautifully, imperceptibly into the infinite shades of grey and white, the cold, bleak grimness of the barren northern seas.

And the camouflage was only the outward, the superficial indication of her fitness for the north.

Technically, the Ulysses was a light cruiser. She was the only one of her kind, a 5,500-ton modification of the famous Dido type, a forerunner of the Black Prince class. Five hundred and ten feet long, narrow in her fifty-foot beam with a raked stem, square cruiser stern and long fo’c’sle deck extending well abaft the bridge—a distance of over two hundred feet, she looked and was a lean, fast and compact warship, dangerous and durable.

‘Locate: engage: destroy.’ These are the classic requirements of a naval ship in wartime, and to do each, and to do it with maximum speed and efficiency, the Ulysses was superbly equipped.

Location, for instance. The human element, of course, was indispensable, and Vallery was far too experienced and battlewise a captain to underestimate the value of the unceasing vigil of lookouts and signalmen. The human eye was not subject to blackouts, technical hitches or mechanical breakdowns. Radio reports, too, had their place and Asdic, of course, was the only defence against submarines.

But the Ulysses’s greatest strength in location lay elsewhere. She was the first completely equipped radar ship in the world. Night and day, the radar scanners atop the fore and main tripod masts swept ceaselessly in a 360° arc, combing the far horizons, searching, searching. Below, in the radar rooms—eight in all—and in the Fighter Direction rooms, trained eyes, alive to the slightest abnormality, never left the glowing screens. The radar’s efficiency and range were alike fantastic. The makers, optimistically, as they had thought, had claimed a 40-45 mile operating range for their equipment. On the Ulysses’s first trials after her refit for its installation, the radar had located a Condor, subsequently destroyed by a Blenheim, at a range of eighty-five miles.

Engage—that was the next step. Sometimes the enemy came to you, more often you had to go after him. And then, one thing alone mattered—speed.

The Ulysses was tremendously fast. Quadruple screws powered by four great Parsons singlereduction geared turbines—two in the for’ard, two in the after engine-room—developed an unbelievable horsepower that many a battleship, by no means obsolete, could not match. Officially, she was rated at 33.5 knots. Off Arran, in her full-power trials, bows lifting out of the water, stern dug in like a hydroplane, vibrating in every Clyde-built rivet, and with the tortured, seething water boiling whitely ten feet above the level of the poop-deck, she had covered the measured mile at an incredible 39.2 knots—the nautical equivalent of 45 mph. And the ‘Dude’—Engineer-Commander Dobson—had smiled knowingly, said he wasn’t half trying and just wait till the Abdiel or the Manxman came along, and he’d show them something. But as these famous mine-laying cruisers were widely believed to be capable of 44 knots, the wardroom had merely sniffed ‘Professional jealousy’ and ignored him. Secretly, they were as proud of the great engines as Dobson himself.

Locate, engage—and destroy. Destruction. That was the be-all, the end-all. Lay the enemy along the sights and destroy him. The Ulysses was well equipped for that also.

She had four twin gun-turrets, two for’ard, two aft, 5.25 quick- firing and dual-purpose—equally effective against surface targets and aircraft. These were controlled from the Director Towers, the main one for’ard, just above and abaft of the bridge, the auxiliary aft. From these towers, all essential data about bearing, wind-speed, drift, range, own speed, enemy speed, respective angles of course were fed to the giant electronic computing tables in the Transmitting Station, the fighting heart of the ship, situated, curiously enough, in the very bowels of the Ulysses, deep below the water-line, and thence automatically to the turrets as two simple factors—elevation and training. The turrets, of course, could also fight independently.

These were the main armament. The remaining guns were purely AA—the batteries of multiple pompoms, firing two-pounders in rapid succession, not particularly accurate but producing a blanket curtain sufficient to daunt any enemy pilot, and isolated clusters of twin Oerlikons, high-precision, highvelocity weapons, vicious and deadly in trained hands.

Finally, the Ulysses carried her depth-charges and torpedoes—36 charges only, a negligible number compared to that carried by many corvettes and destroyers, and the maximum number that could be dropped in one pattern was six. But one depthcharge carries 450 lethal pounds of Amatol, and the Ulysses had destroyed two U-boats during the preceding winter. The 21-inch torpedoes, each with its 750-pound warhead of TNT, lay sleek and menacing, in the triple tubes on the main deck, one set on either side of the after funnel. These had not yet been blooded.

This, then, was the Ulysses. The complete, the perfect fighting machine, man’s ultimate, so far, in his attempt to weld science and savagery into an instrument of destruction. The perfect fighting machine—but only so long as it was manned and serviced by a perfectly-integrating, smoothlyfunctioning team. A ship—any ship—can never be better than its crew. And the crew of the Ulysses was disintegrating, breaking up: the lid was clamped on the volcano, but the rumblings never ceased.

The first signs of further trouble came within three hours of clearing harbour. As always, minesweepers swept the channel ahead of them, but, as always, Vallery left nothing to chance. It was one of the reasons why he—and the Ulysses—had survived thus far. At 0620 he streamed paravanes—the slender, torpedo-shaped bodies which angled out from the bows, one on either side, on special paravane wire. In theory the wires connecting mines to their moorings on the floor of the sea were deflected away from the ship, guided out to the paravanes themselves and severed by cutters: the mines would then float to the top to be exploded or sunk by small arms.

At 0900, Vallery ordered the paravanes to be recovered. The Ulysses slowed down. The First Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Carrington, went to the fo’c’sle to supervise operations: seamen, winch drivers, and the Subs in charge of either side closed up to their respective stations.

Quickly the recovery booms were freed from their angled crutches, just abaft the port and starboard lights, swung out and rigged with recovery wires. Immediately, the three ton winches on ‘B’ gun-deck took the strain, smoothly, powerfully; the paravanes cleared the water.

Then it happened. It was A.B. Ferry’s fault that it happened. And it was just ill-luck that the port winch was suspect, operating on a power circuit with a defective breaker, just ill-luck that Ralston was the winch-driver, a taciturn, bitter-mouthed Ralston to whom, just then, nothing mattered a damn, least of all what he said and did. But it was Carslake’s responsibility that the affair developed into what it did.

Sub-Lieutenant Carslake’s presence there, on top of the Carley floats, directing the handling of the port wire, represented the culmination of a series of mistakes. A mistake on the part of his father, Rear-Admiral, Rtd, who had seen in his son a man of his own calibre, had dragged him out of Cambridge in 1939 at the advanced age of twenty-six and practically forced him into the Navy: a weakness on the part of his first CO, a corvette captain who had known his father and recommended him as a candidate for a commission: a rare error of judgment on the part of the selection board of the King Alfred, who had granted him his commission; and a temporary lapse on the part of the Commander, who had assigned him to this duty, in spite of Carslake’s known incompetence and inability to handle men.

He had the face of an overbred racehorse, long, lean and narrow, with prominent pale-blue eyes and protruding upper teeth. Below his scanty fair hair, his eyebrows were arched in a perpetual question mark: beneath the long, pointed nose, the supercilious curl of the upper lip formed the perfect complement to the eyebrows. His speech was a shocking caricature of the King’s English: his short vowels were long, his long ones interminable: his grammar was frequently execrable. He resented the Navy, he resented his long overdue promotion to Lieutenant, he resented the way the men resented him. In brief, Sub-Lieutenant Carslake was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system. Vain, superior, uncouth and ill-educated, he was a complete ass.

He was making an ass of himself now. Striving to maintain balance on the rafts, feet dramatically braced at a wide angle, he shouted unceasing, unnecessary commands at his men. CPO Hartley groaned aloud, but kept otherwise silent in the interests of discipline. But AB Ferry felt himself under no such restraints.

‘’Ark at his Lordship,’ he murmured to Ralston. ‘All for the Skipper’s benefit.’ He nodded at where Vallery was leaning over the bridge, twenty feet above Carslake’s head. ‘Impresses him no end, so his nibs reckons.’

‘Just you forget about Carslake and keep your eyes on that wire,’ Ralston advised. ‘And take these damned great gloves off. One of these days—’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Ferry jeered. ‘The wire’s going to snag ‘em and wrap me round the drum.’ He fed in the hawser expertly. ‘Don’t you worry, chum, it’s never going to happen to me.’

But it did. It happened just then. Ralston, watching the swinging paravane closely, flicked a glance inboard. He saw the broken strand inches from Ferry, saw it hook viciously into the gloved hand and drag him towards the spinning drum before Ferry had a chance to cry out.

Ralston’s reaction was immediate. The footbrake was only six inches away—but that was too far. Savagely he spun the control wheel, full ahead to full reverse in a split second. Simultaneoulsy with Ferry’s cry of pain as his forearm crushed against the lip of the drum came a muffled explosion and clouds of acrid smoke from the winch as £500-worth of electric motor burnt out in a searing flash.

Immediately the wire began to run out again, accelerating momentarily under the dead weight of the lunging paravane. Ferry went with it. Twenty feet from the winch the wire passed through a snatch-block on the deck: if Ferry was lucky, he might lose only his hand.

He was less than four feet away when Ralston’s foot stamped viciously on the brake. The racing drum screamed to a shuddering stop, the paravane crashed down into the sea and the wire, weightless now, swung idly to the rolling of the ship.

Carslake scrambled down off the Carley, his sallow face suffused with anger. He strode up to Ralston.

‘You bloody fool!’ he mouthed furiously. ‘You’ve lost us that paravane. By God, LTO, you’d better explain yourself! Who the hell gave you orders to do anything?’

Ralston’s mouth tightened, but he spoke civilly enough.

‘Sorry, sir. Couldn’t help it—it had to be done. Ferry’s arm—’

‘To hell with Ferry’s arm!’ Carslake was almost screaming with rage. ‘I’m in charge here—and I give the orders. Look! Look!’ He pointed to the swinging wire. ‘Your work, Ralston, you—you blundering idiot! It’s gone, gone, do you understand, gone?’

Ralston looked over the side with an air of large surprise.

‘Well, now, so it is.’ The eyes were bleak, the tone provocative, as he looked back at Carslake and patted the winch. ‘And don’t forget this—it’s gone too, and it costs a ruddy sight more than any paravane.’

‘I don’t want any of your damned impertinence!’ Carslake shouted. His mouth was working, his voice shaking with passion. ‘What you need is to have some discipline knocked into you and, by God, I’m going to see you get it, you insolent young bastard!’

Ralston flushed darkly. He took one quick step forward, his fist balled, then relaxed heavily as the powerful hands of CPO Hartley caught his swinging arm. But the damage was done now. There was nothing for it but the bridge.

Vallery listened calmly, patiently, as Carslake made his outraged report. He felt far from patient. God only knew, he thought wearily, he had more than enough to cope with already. But the unruffled professional mask of detachment gave no hint of his feelings.

‘Is this true, Ralston?’ he asked quietly, as Carslake finished his tirade. ‘You disobeyed orders, swore at the Lieutenant and insulted him?’

‘No, sir.’ Ralston sounded as weary as the Captain felt. ‘It’s not true.’ He looked at Carslake, his face expressionless, then turned back to the Captain. ‘I didn’t disobey orders—there were none. Chief Petty Officer Hartley knows that.’ He nodded at the burly impassive figure who had accompanied them to the bridge. ‘I didn’t swear at him. I hate to sound like a sea-lawyer, sir, but there are plenty of witnesses that Sub-Lieutenant Carslake swore at me— several times. And if I insulted him’—he smiled faintly—‘it was pure self-defence.’

‘This is no place for levity, Ralston.’ Vallery’s voice was cold. He was puzzled—the boy baffled him. The bitterness, the brittle composure—he could understand these; but not the flickering humour. ‘As it happens, I saw the entire incident. Your promptness, your resource, saved the rating’s arm, possibly even his life—and against that a lost paravane and wrecked winch are nothing.’ Carslake whitened at the implied rebuke. ‘I’m grateful for that— thank you. As for the rest, Commander’s Defaulters tomorrow morning. Carry on, Ralston.’

Ralston compressed his lips, looked at Vallery for a long moment, then saluted abruptly and left the bridge.

Carslake turned round appealingly.

‘Captain, sir … ’ He stopped at the sight of Vallery’s upraised hand.

‘Not now, Carslake. We’ll discuss it later.’ He made no attempt to conceal the dislike in his voice. ‘You may carry on, Lieutenant. Hartley—a word with you.’

Hartley stepped forward. Forty-four years old, CPO Hartley was the Royal Navy at its best. Very tough, very kindly and very competent, he enjoyed the admiration of all, ranging from the vast awe of the youngest Ordinary Seaman to the warm respect of the Captain himself. They had been together from the beginning.

‘Well, Chief, let’s have it. Between ourselves.’

‘Nothing to it really, sir.’ Hartley shrugged. ‘Ralston did a fine job. Sub-Lieutenant Carslake lost his head. Maybe Ralston was a bit sassy, but he was provoked. He’s only a kid, but he’s a professional— and he doesn’t like being pushed around by amateurs.’ Hartley paused and looked up at the sky. ‘Especially bungling amateurs.’

Vallery smothered a smile.

‘Could that be interpreted as—er—a criticism, Chief?’

‘I suppose so, sir.’ He nodded forward. ‘A few ruffled feathers down there, sir. Men are pretty sore about this. Shall I—?’

‘Thanks, Chief. Play it down as much as possible.’

When Hartley had gone, Vallery turned to Tyndall.

‘Well, you heard it, sir? Another straw in the wind.’

‘A straw?’ Tyndall was acid. ‘Hundreds of straws. More like a bloody great cornstack … Find out who was outside my door last night?’

During the middle watch, Tyndall had heard an unusual scraping noise outside the wardroom entry to his day cabin, had gone to investigate himself: in his hurry to reach the door, he’d knocked a chair over, and seconds later he had heard a clatter and the patter of running feet in the passage outside; but, when he had thrown the door open, the passage had been empty. Nothing there, nothing at all—except a file on the deck, below the case of Navy Colt .445s; the chain on the trigger guards was almost through.

Vallery shook his head.

‘No idea at all, sir.’ His face was heavy with worry. ‘Bad, really bad.’

Tyndall shivered in an ice flurry. He grinned crookedly.

‘Real Captain Teach stuff, eh? Pistols and cutlasses and black eye-patches, storming the bridge … ’

Vallery shook his head impatiently.

‘No, not that. You know it, sir. Defiance, maybe, but—well, no more. The point is, a marine is on guard at the keyboard—just round the corner of that passage. Night and day. Bound to have seen him. He denies—’

‘The rot has gone that far?’ Tyndall whistled softly. ‘A black day, Captain. What does our fireeating young Captain of Marines say to that?’

‘Foster? Pooh-poohs the very idea—and just about twists the ends of his moustache off. Worried to hell. So’s Evans, his Colour-Seargeant.’

‘So am I!’ said Tyndall feelingly. He glared into space. The Officer of the Watch, who happened to be in his direct line of vision, shifted uncomfortably. ‘Wonder what old Socrates thinks of it all, now? Maybe only a pill-roller, but the wisest head we’ve got … Well, speak of the devil!’

The gate had just swung open, and a burly, unhappy-looking figure, duffel-coated, oilskinned and wearing a Russian beaverskin helmet—the total effect was of an elderly grizzly bear caught in a thunderstorm—shuffled across the duckboards of the bridge. He brought up facing the Kent screen—an inset, circular sheet of glass which revolved at high speed and offered a clear view in all weather conditions—rain, hail, snow. For half a minute he peered miserably through this and obviously didn’t like what he saw.

He sniffed loudly and turned away, beating his arms against the cold.

‘Ha! A deck officer on the bridge of HM Cruisers. The romance, the glamour! Ha!’ He hunched his oilskinned shoulders, and looked more miserable than ever. ‘No place this for a civilized man like myself. But you know how it is, gentlemen—the clarion call of duty …’

Tyndall chuckled.

‘Give him plenty of time, Captain. Slow starters, these medics, you know, but—’

Brooks cut in, voice and face suddenly serious.

‘Some more trouble, Captain. Couldn’t tell it over the phone. Don’t know how much it’s worth.’

‘Trouble?’ Vallery broke off, coughed harshly into his handkerchief. ‘Sorry,’ he apologized. ‘Trouble? There’s nothing else, old chap. Just had some ourselves.’

‘That bumptious young fool, Carslake? Oh, I know all right. My spies are everywhere. Bloke’s a bloody menace … However, my story.

‘Young Nicholls was doing some path. work late last night in the dispensary—on TB specimens. Two, three hours in there. Lights out in the bay, and the patients either didn’t know or had forgotten he was there. Heard Stoker Riley—a real trouble-maker, that Riley— and the others planning a locked-door, sit-down strike in the boiler-room when they return to duty. A sit-down strike in a boiler-room. Good lord, it’s fantastic! Anyway, Nicholls let it slide—pretended he hadn’t heard.’

‘What!’ Vallery’s voice was sharp, edged with anger. ‘And Nicholls ignored it, didn’t report it to me! Happened last night, you say. Why wasn’t I told—immediately? Get Nicholls up here—now. No, never mind.’ He reached out to pick up the bridge phone. ‘I’ll get him myself.’

Brooks laid a gauntleted hand on Vallery’s arm.

‘I wouldn’t do that, sir. Nicholls is a smart boy—very smart indeed. He knew that if he let the men know they had been overheard, they would know that he must report it to you. And then you’d have been bound to take action—and open provocation of trouble is the last thing you want. You said so yourself in the wardroom last night.’

Vallery hesitated. ‘Yes, yes, of course I said that, but—well, Doc, this is different. It could be a focal point for spreading the idea to—’

‘I told you, sir,’ Brooks interrupted softly. ‘Johnny Nicholls is a very smart boy. He’s got a big notice, in huge red letters, outside the Sick Bay door: “Keep clear: Suspected scarlet fever infection.” Kills me to watch ‘em. Everybody avoids the place like the plague. Not a hope of communicating with their pals in the Stokers’ Mess.’

Tyndall guffawed at him, and even Vallery smiled slightly.

‘Sounds fine, Doc. Still, I should have been told last night.’

‘Why should you be woken up and told every little thing in the middle of the night?’ Brooks’s voice was brusque. ‘Sheer selfishness on my part, but what of it? When things get bad, you damn well carry this ship on your back—and when we’ve all got to depend on you, we can’t afford to have you anything less than as fit as possible. Agreed, Admiral?’

Tyndall nodded solemnly. ‘Agreed, O Socrates. A very complicated way of saying that you wish the Captain to have a good night’s sleep. But agreed.’

Brooks grinned amiably. ‘Well, that’s all, gentlemen. See you all at the court-martial—I hope.’ He cocked a jaundiced eye over a shoulder, into the thickening snow. ‘Won’t the Med be wonderful, gentlemen?’ He sighed and slid effortlessly into his native Galway brogue. ‘Malta in the spring. The beach at Sliema—with the white houses behind—where we picnicked, a hundred years ago. The soft winds, me darlin’ boys, the warm winds, the blue skies and Chianti under a striped umbrealla—’

‘Off!’ Tyndall roared. ‘Get off this bridge, Brooks, or I’ll—’

‘I’m gone already,’ said Brooks. ‘A sit-down strike in the boiler-room! Ha! First thing you know, there’ll be a rash of male suffragettes chaining themselves to the guardrails!’ The gate clanged shut behind him.

Vallery turned to the Admiral, his face grave.

‘Looks as if you were right about that cornstack, sir.’

Tyndall grunted, non-commitally.

‘Maybe. Trouble is, the men have nothing to do right now except brood and curse and feel bitter about everything. Later on it’ll be all right—perhaps.’

‘When we get—ah—busier, you mean?’

‘Mmm. When you’re fighting for your life, to keep the ship afloat—well, you haven’t much time for plots and pondering over the injustices of fate. Self-preservation is still the first law of nature … Speaking to the men tonight. Captain?’

‘Usual routine broadcast, yes. In the first dog, when we’re all closed up to dusk action stations.’ Vallery smiled briefly. ‘Make sure that they’re all awake.’

‘Good. Lay it on thick and heavy. Give ’em plenty to think about—and, if I’m any judge of Vincent Starr’s hints, we’re going to have plenty to think about this trip. It’ll keep ’em occupied.’

Vallery laughed. The laugh transformed his thin sensitive face. He seemed genuinely amused.

Tyndall lifted an interrogatory eyebrow. Vallery smiled back at him.

‘Just passing thoughts, sir. As Spencer Faggot would have said, things have come to a pretty pass … Things are bad indeed, when only the enemy can save us.’

THREE

Monday Afternoon

All day long the wind blew steadily out of the nor’nor’-west. A strong wind, and blowing stronger. A cold wind, a sharp wind full of little knives, it carried with it snow and ice and the strange dead smell born of the forgotten ice-caps that lie beyond the Barrier. It wasn’t a gusty, blowy wind. It was a settled, steady kind of wind, and it stayed fine on the starboard bow from dawn to dusk. Slowly, stealthily, it was lifting a swell. Men like Carrington, who knew every sea and port in the world, like Vallery and Hartley, looked at it and were troubled and said nothing.

The mercury crept down and the snow lay where it fell. The tripods and yardarms were great, glistening Xmas trees, festooned with woolly stays and halliards. On the mainmast, a brown smear appeared now and then, daubed on by a wisp of smoke from the after funnel, felt rather than seen: in a moment, it would vanish. The snow lay on the deck and drifted. It softened the anchor-cables on the fo’c’sle deck into great, fluffy ropes of cottonwool, and drifted high against the breakwater before ‘A’ turret. It piled up against the turrets and superstructure, swished silently into the bridge and lay there slushily underfoot. It blocked the great eyes of the Director’s range-finder, it crept unseen along passages, it sifted soundlessly down hatches. It sought out the tiniest unprotected chink in metal and wood, and made the mess-decks dank and clammy and uncomfortable: it defied gravity and slid effortlessly up trouser legs, up under the skirts of coats and oilskins, up under duffel hoods, and made men thoroughly miserable. A miserable world, a wet world, but always and predominately a white world of softness and beauty and strangely muffled sound. All day long it fell, this snow, fell steadily and persistently, and the Ulysses slid on silently through the swell, a ghost ship in a ghost world.

But not alone in her world. She never was, these days. She had companionship, a welcome, reassuring companionship, the company of the 14th Aircraft Squadron, a tough, experienced and battle-hardened escort group, almost as legendary now as that fabulous Force 8, which had lately moved South to take over that other suicide run, the Malta convoys.

Like the Ulysses, the squadron steamed NNW all day long. There were no dog-legs, no standard course alterations. Tyndall abhorred the zig-zag, and, except on actual convoy and then only in known U-boat waters, rarely used it. He believed—as many captains did— that the zig-zag was a greater potential source of danger than the enemy. He had seen the Curaçoa, 4,200 tons of cockle-shell cruiser, swinging on a routine zig-zag, being trampled into the grey depths of the Atlantic under the mighty forefoot of the Queen Mary. He never spoke of it, but the memory stayed with him.

The Ulysses was in her usual position—the position dictated by her role of Squadron flagship—as nearly as possible in the centre of the thirteen warships.

Dead ahead steamed the cruiser Stirling. An old Cardiff class cruiser, she was a solid, reliable ship, many years older and many knots slower than the Ulysses, adequately armed with five single six-inch guns, but hardly built to hammer her way through the Arctic gales: in heavy seas, her wetness was proverbial. Her primary role was squadron defence: her secondary, to take over the squadron if the flagship were crippled or sunk.

The carriers—Defender, Invader, Wrestler and Blue Ranger—were in position to port and starboard, the Defender and Wrestler slightly ahead of the Ulysses, the others slightly astern. It seemed de rigeur for these escort carriers to have names ending in -er and the fact that the Navy already had a Wrestler—a Force 8 destroyer (and a Defender, which had been sunk some time previously off Tobruk)— was blithely ignored. These were not the 35,000-ton giants of the regular fleet—ships like the Indefatigable and the Illustrious—but 1520,000 ton auxiliary carriers, irreverently known as banana boats. They were converted merchantmen, American-built: these had been fitted out at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and sailed across the Atlantic by mixed British-American crews.

They were capable of eighteen knots, a relatively high speed for a single-screw ship—the Wrestler had two screws—but some of them had as many as four Busch-Sulzer Diesels geared to the one shaft. Their painfully rectangular flight-decks, 450 feet in length, were built up above the open fo’c’sle—one could see right under the flight-deck for’ard of the bridge—and flew off about thirty fighters—Grummans, Seafires or, most often, Corsairs—or twenty light bombers. They were odd craft, awkward, ungainly and singularly unwarlike; but over the months they had done a magnificent job of providing umbrella cover against air attack, of locating and destroying enemy ships and submarines: their record of kills, above, on and below the water was impressive and frequently disbelieved by the Admiralty.

Nor was the destroyer screen calculated to inspire confidence among the naval strategists at Whitehall. It was a weird hodgepodge, and the term ‘destroyer’ was a purely courtesy one.

One, the Nairn, was a River class frigate of 1,500 tons: another, the Eager, was a Fleet Minesweeper, and a third, the Gannet, better known as Huntley and Palmer, was a rather elderly and very tired Kingfisher corvette, supposedly restricted to coastal duties only. There was no esoteric mystery as to the origin of her nickname—a glance at her silhouette against the sunset was enough. Doubtless her designer had worked within Admiralty specifications: even so, he must have had an off day.

The Vectra and the Viking were twin-screwed, modified ‘V’ and ‘W’ destroyers, in the superannuated class now, lacking in speed and firepower, but tough and durable. The Baliol was a diminutive Hunt class destroyer which had no business in the great waters of the north. The Portpatrick, a skeleton-lean four stacker, was one of the fifty lend-lease World War I destroyers from the United States. No one even dared guess at her age. An intriguing ship at any time, she became the focus of all eyes in the fleet and a source of intense interest whenever the weather broke down. Rumour had it that two of her sister ships had overturned in the Atlantic during a gale; human nature being what it is, everyone wanted a grandstand view whenever weather conditions deteriorated to an extent likely to afford early confirmation of these rumours. What the crew of the Portpatrick thought about it all was difficult to say.

These seven escorts, blurred and softened by the snow, kept their screening stations all day—the frigate and minesweeper ahead, the destroyers at the sides, and the corvette astern. The eight escort, a fast, modern ‘S’ class destroyer, under the command of the Captain (Destroyers), Commander Orr, prowled restlessly around the fleet. Every ship commander in the squadron envied Orr his roving commission, a duty which Tyndall had assigned him in self-defence against Orr’s continual pestering. But no one objected, no one grudged him his privilege: the Sirrus had an uncanny nose for trouble, an almost magnetic affinity for U-boats lying in ambush.

From the warmth of the Ulysses’s wardroom—long, incongruously comfortable, running fifty feet along the starboard side of the fo’c’sle deck—Johnny Nicholls gazed out through the troubled grey and white of the sky. Even the kindly snow, he reflected, blanketing a thousand sins, could do little for these queer craft, so angular, so graceless, so obviously out-dated.

He supposed he ought to feel bitter at My Lords of the Admiralty, with their limousines and armchairs and elevenses, with their big wall-maps and pretty little flags, sending out this raggle-taggle of squadron to cope with the pick of the U-boat packs, while they sat comfortably, luxuriously at home. But the thought died at birth: it was he knew, grotesquely unjust. The Admiralty would have given them a dozen brand-new destroyers—if they had them. Things, he knew were pretty bad, and the demands of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean had first priority.

He supposed, too, he ought to feel cynical, ironic, at the sight of these old and worn-out ships. Strangely, he couldn’t. He knew what they could do, what they had done. If he felt anything at all towards them, it was something uncommonly close to admiration—perhaps even pride. Nicholls stirred uncomfortably and turned away from the porthole. His gaze fell on the somnolent form of the Kapok Kid, flat on his back in an arm-chair, an enormous pair of fur-lined flying-boots perched above the electric fire.

The Kapok Kid, Lieutenant the Honourable Andrew Carpenter, RN, Navigator of the Ulysses and his best friend—he was the one to feel proud, Nicholls thought wryly. The most glorious extrovert Nicholls had ever known, the Kapok Kid was equally at home anywhere—on a dance floor or in the cockpit of a racing yacht at Cowes, at a garden party, on a tennis court or at the wheel of his big crimson Bugatti, windscreen down and the loose ends of a seven-foot scarf streaming out behind him. But appearances were never more deceptive. For the Kapok Kid, the Royal Navy was his whole life, and he lived for that alone. Behind that slightly inane façade lay, besides a first-class brain, a deeply romantic streak, an almost Elizabethan love for sea and ships which he sought, successfully, he imagined, to conceal from all his fellow-officers. It was so patently obvious that no one ever thought it worth the mentioning.

Theirs was a curious friendship, Nicholls mused. An attraction of opposites, if ever there was one. For Carpenter’s hail-fellow ebullience, his natural reserve and reticence were the perfect foil: over against his friend’s near-idolatry of all things naval stood his own thorough-going detestation of all that the Kapok Kid so warmly admired. Perhaps because of that over-developed sense of individuality and independence, that bane of so many highland Scots, Nicholls objected strongly to the thousand and one pin-pricks of discipline, authority and bureaucratic naval stupidity which were a constant affront to his intelligence and self-respect. Even three years ago, when the war had snatched him from the wards of a great Glasgow hospital, his first year’s internship barely completed, he had had his dark suspicions that the degree of compatibility between himself and the Senior Service would prove to be singularly low. And so it had proved. But, in spite of this antipathy—or perhaps because of it and the curse of a Calvinistic conscience— Nicholls had become a first-class officer. But it still disturbed him vaguely to discover in himself something akin to pride in the ships of his squadron.

He sighed. The loudspeaker in the corner of the wardroom had just crackled into life. From bitter experience, he knew that broadcast announcements seldom presaged anything good.

‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there?’ The voice was metallic, impersonal: the Kapok Kid slept on in magnificent oblivion. ‘The Captain will broadcast to the ship’s company at 1730 tonight. Repeat. The Captain will broadcast to the ship’s company at 1730 tonight. That is all.’

Nicholls prodded the Kapok Kid with a heavy toe. ‘On your feet, Vasco. Now’s the time if you want a cuppa char before getting up there and navigating.’ Carpenter stirred, opened a red-rimmed eye: Nicholls smiled down encouragingly. ‘Besides, it’s lovely up top now—sea rising, temperature falling and a young blizzard blowing. Just what you were born for, Andy, boy!’

The Kapok Kid groaned his way back to consciousness, struggled to a sitting position and remained hunched forward, his straight flaxen hair falling over his hands.

‘What’s the matter now?’ His voice was querulous, still slurred with sleep. Then he grinned faintly. ‘Know where I was, Johnny?’ he asked reminiscently. ‘Back on the Thames, at the Grey Goose, just up from Henley. It was summer, Johnny, late in summer, warm and very still. Dressed all in green, she was—’

‘Indigestion,’ Nicholls cut in briskly. ‘Too much easy living … It’s four-thirty, and the old man’s speaking in an hour’s time. Dusk stations at any time—we’d better eat.’

Carpenter shook his head mournfully. ‘The man has no soul, no finer feelings.’ He stood up and stretched himself. As always, he was dressed from head to foot in a one-piece overall of heavy, quilted kapok—the silk fibres encasing the seeds of the Japanese and Malayan silk-cotton tree: there was a great, golden ‘J’ embroidered on the right breast pocket: what it stood for was anyone’s guess. He glanced out through the porthole and shuddered.

‘Wonder what’s the topic for tonight, Johnny?’

‘No idea. I’m curious to see what his attitude, his tone is going to be, how he’s going to handle it. The situation, to say the least, is somewhat—ah—delicate.’ Nicholls grinned, but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. ‘Not to mention the fact that the crew don’t know that they’re off to Murmansk again—although they must have a pretty good idea.’

‘Mmm.’ The Kapok Kid nodded absently. ‘Don’t suppose the old man’ll try to play it down—the hazards of the trip, I mean, or to excuse himself—you know, put the blame where it belongs.’

‘Never.’ Nicholls shook his head decisively. ‘Not the skipper. Just not in his nature. Never excuses himself—and never spares himself.’ He stared into the fire for a long time, then looked up quietly at the Kapok Kid. ‘The skipper’s a very sick man, Andy—very sick indeed.’

‘What!’ The Kapok Kid was genuinely startled. ‘A very sick … Good lord, you’re joking! You must be. Why—’

‘I’m not,’ Nicholls interrupted flatly, his voice very low. Winthrop, the padre, an intense, enthusiastic, very young man with an immense zest for life and granitic convictions on every subject under the sun, was in the far corner of the wardroom. The zest was temporarily in abeyance—he was sunk in exhausted slumber. Nicholls liked him, but preferred that he should not hear—the padre would talk. Winthrop, Nicholls had often thought, would never have made a successful priest—confessional reticence would have been impossible for him.

‘Old Socrates says he’s pretty far through—and he knows,’ Nicholls continued. ‘Old man phoned him to come to his cabin last night. Place was covered in blood and he was coughing his lungs up. Acute attack of hæmoptysis. Brooks has suspected it for a long time, but the Captain would never let him examine him. Brooks says a few more days of this will kill him.’ He broke off, glanced briefly at Winthrop. ‘I talk too much,’ he said abruptly. ‘Getting as bad as the old padre there. Shouldn’t have told you, I suppose—violation of professional confidence and all that. All this under your hat, Andy.’

‘Of course, of course.’ There was a long pause. ‘What you mean is, Johnny—he’s dying?’

‘Just that. Come on, Andy—char.’

Twenty minutes later, Nicholls made his way down to the Sick Bay. The light was beginning to fail and the Ulysses was pitching heavily. Brooks was in the surgery.

‘Evening, sir. Dusk stations any minute now. Mind if I stay in the bay tonight?’

Brooks eyed him speculatively.

‘Regulations,’ he intoned, ‘say that the Action Stations position of the Junior Medical Officer is aft in the Engineer’s Flat. Far be it from me—’

‘Please.’

‘Why? Lonely, lazy or just plain tired?’ The quirk of the eyebrows robbed the words of all offence.

‘No. Curious. I want to observe the reactions of Stoker Riley and his—ah—confederates to the skipper’s speech. Might be most instructive.’

‘Sherlock Nicholls, eh? Right-o, Johnny. Phone the Damage Control Officer aft. Tell him you’re tied up. Major operation, anything you like. Our gullible public and how easily fooled. Shame.’

Nicholls grinned and reached for the phone.

When the bugle blared for dusk Action Stations, Nicholls was sitting in the dispensary. The lights were out, the curtains almost drawn. He could see into every corner of the brightly lit Sick Bay. Five of the men were asleep. Two of the others—Petersen, the giant, slow-spoken stoker, half Norwegian, half Scots, and Burgess, the dark little cockney—were sitting up in bed, talking softly, their eyes turned towards the swarthy, heavily-built patient lying between them. Stoker Riley was holding court.

Alfred O’Hara Riley had, at a very early age indeed, decided upon a career of crime, and beset, though he subsequently was, by innumerable vicissitudes, he had clung to this resolve with an unswerving determination: directed towards almost any other sphere of activity, his resolution would have been praiseworthy, possibly even profitable. But praise and profit had passed Riley by.

Every man is what environment and heredity make him. Riley was no exception, and Nicholls, who knew something of his upbringing, appreciated that life had never really given the big stoker a chance. Born of a drunken, illiterate mother in a filthy, overcrowded and fever-ridden Liverpool slum, he was an outcast from the beginning: allied to that, his hairy, ape-like figure, the heavy prognathous jaw, the twisted mouth, the wide flaring nose, the cunning black eyes squinting out beneath the negligible clearance between hairline and eyebrows that so accurately reflected the mental capacity within, were all admirably adapted to what was to become his chosen vocation. Nicholls looked at him and disapproved without condemning; for a moment, he had an inkling of the tragedy of the inevitable.

Riley was never at any time a very successful criminal—his intelligence barely cleared the moron level. He dimly appreciated his limitations, and had left the higher, more subtle forms of crime severely alone. Robbery—preferably robbery with violence—was his métier. He had been in prison six times, the last time for two years.

His induction into the Navy was a mystery which baffled both Riley and the authorities responsible for his being there. But Riley had accepted this latest misfortune with equanimity, and gone through the bomb-shattered ‘G’ and ‘H’ blocks in the Royal Naval Barracks, Portsmouth, like a high wind through a field of corn, leaving behind him a trail of slashed suitcases and empty wallets. He had been apprehended without much difficulty, done sixty days’ cells, then been drafted to the Ulysses as a stoker.

His career of crime aboard the Ulysses had been brief and painful. His first attempted robbery had been his last—a clumsy and incredibly foolish rifling of a locker in the marine sergeants’ mess. He had been caught red-handed by Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant MacIntosh. They had preferred no charges against him and Riley had spent the next three days in the Sick Bay. He claimed to have tripped on the rung of a ladder and fallen twenty feet to the boiler-room floor. But the actual facts of the case were common knowledge, and Turner had recommended his discharge. To everyone’s astonishment, not least that of Stoker Riley, Dodson, the Engineer Commander, had insisted he be given a last chance, and Riley had been reprieved.

Since that date, four months previously, he had confined his activities to stirring up trouble. Illogically but understandably, his brief encounter with the marines had swept away his apathetic tolerance of the Navy: a smouldering hatred took its place. As an agitator, he had achieved a degree of success denied him as a criminal. Admittedly, he had a fertile field for operations; but credit—if that is the word— was due also to his shrewdness, his animal craft and cunning, his hold over his crew-mates. The husky, intense voice, his earnestness, his deep-set eyes, lent Riley a strangely elemental power—a power he had used to its maximum effect a few days previously when he had precipitated the mutiny which had led to the death of Ralston, the stoker, and the marine—mysteriously dead from a broken neck. Beyond any possible doubt, their deaths lay at Riley’s door; equally beyond doubt, that could never be proved. Nicholls wondered what new devilment was hatching behind these lowering, corrugated brows, wondered how on earth it was that the same Riley was continually in trouble for bringing aboard the Ulysses and devotedly tending every stray kitten, every broken-winged bird he found.

The loudspeaker crackled, cutting through his thoughts, stilling the low voices in the Sick Bay. And not only there, but throughout the ship, in turrets and magazines, in engine-rooms and boiler-rooms, above and below deck everywhere, all conversation ceased. Then there was only the wind, the regular smash of the bows into the deepening troughs, the muffled roar of the great boiler-room intake fans and the hum of a hundred electric motors. Tension lay heavy over the ship, over 730 officers and men, tangible, almost, in its oppression.

‘This is the Captain speaking. Good evening.’ The voice was calm, well modulated, without a sign of strain or exhaustion. ‘As you all know, it is my custom at the beginning of every voyage to inform you as soon as possible of what lies in store for you. I feel that you have a right to know, and that it is my duty. It’s not always a pleasant duty—it never has been during recent months. This time, however, I’m almost glad.’ He paused, and the words came, slow and measured. ‘This is our last operation as a unit of the Home Fleet. In a month’s time, God willing, we will be in the Med.’

Good for you, thought Nicholls. Sweeten the pill, lay it on, thick and heavy. But the Captain had other ideas.

‘But first, gentlemen, the job on hand. It’s the mixture as before—Murmansk again. We rendezvous at 1030 Wednesday, north of Iceland, with a convoy from Halifax. There are eighteen ships in this convoy—big and fast—all fifteen knots and above. Our third Fast Russian convoy, gentlemen—FR77, in case you want to tell your grandchildren about it,’ he added dryly. ‘These ships are carrying tanks, planes, aviation spirit and oil—nothing else.

‘I will not attempt to minimize the dangers. You know how desperate is the state of Russia today, how terribly badly she needs these weapons and fuel. You can also be sure that the Germans know too—and that her Intelligence agents will already have reported the nature of this convoy and the date of sailing.’ He broke off short, and the sound of his harsh, muffled coughing into a handkerchief echoed weirdly through the silent ship. He went on slowly. ‘There are enough fighter planes and petrol in this convoy to alter the whole character of the Russian war. The Nazis will stop at nothing— I repeat, nothing—to stop this convoy from going through to Russia.

‘I have never tried to mislead or deceive you. I will not now. The signs are not good. In our favour we have, firstly, our speed, and secondly—I hope—the element of surprise. We shall try to break through direct for the North Cape.

‘There are four major factors against us. You will all have noticed the steady worsening of the weather. We are, I’m afraid, running into abnormal weather conditions—abnormal even for the Arctic. It may—I repeat “may”—prevent U-boat attacks: on the other hand it may mean losing some of the smaller units of our screen—we have no time to heave to or run before bad weather. FR77 is going straight through … And it almost certainly means that the carriers will be unable to fly off fighter cover.’

Good God, has the skipper lost his senses, Nicholls wondered. He’ll wreck any morale that’s left. Not that there is any left. What in the world—

‘Secondly,’ the voice went on, calm, inexorable, ‘we are taking no rescue ships on this convoy. There will be no time to stop. Besides, you all know what happened to the Stockport and the Zafaaran. You’re safer where you are.[1]

‘Thirdly, two—possibly three—U-boat packs are known to be strung out along latitude seventy degrees and our Northern Norway agents report a heavy mustering of German bombers of all types in their area.

‘Finally, we have reason to believe that the Tirpitz is preparing to move out.’ Again he paused, for an interminable time, it seemed. It was as if he knew the tremendous shock carried in these few words, and wanted to give it time to register. ‘I need not tell you what that means. The Germans may risk her to stop the convoy. The Admiralty hope they will. During the latter part of the voyage, capital units of the Home Fleet, including possibly the aircraft-carriers Victorious and Furious, and three cruisers, will parallel our course at twelve hours’ steaming distance. They have been waiting a long time, and we are the bait to spring the trap …

‘It is possible that things may go wrong. The best-laid plans … or the trap may be late in springing shut. This convoy must still get through. If the carriers cannot fly off cover, the Ulysses must cover the withdrawal of FR77. You will know what that means. I hope this is all perfectly clear.’

There was another long bout of coughing, another long pause, and when he spoke again the tone had completely changed. He was very quiet.

‘I know what I am asking of you. I know how tired, how hopeless, how sick at heart you all feel. I know—no one knows better— what you have been through, how much you need, how much you deserve a rest. Rest you shall have. The entire ship’s company goes on ten days’ leave from Portsmouth on the eighteenth, then for refit in Alexandria.’ The words were casual, as if they carried no significance for him. ‘But before that—well, I know it seems cruel, inhuman—it must seem so to you—to ask you to go through it all again, perhaps worse than you’ve ever gone through before. But I can’t help it— no one can help it.’ Every sentence, now, was punctuated by long silences: it was difficult to catch his words, so low and far away.

‘No one has any right to ask you to do it, I least of all … least of all. I know you will do it. I know you will not let me down. I know you will take the Ulysses through. Good luck. Good luck and God bless you. Good night.’

The loudspeakers clicked off, but the silence lingered on. Nobody spoke and nobody moved. Not even the eyes moved. Those who had been looking at the speakers still gazed on, unseeingly; or stared down at their hands; or down into the glowing butts of forbidden cigarettes, oblivious to the acrid smoke that laced exhausted eyes. It was strangely as if each man wanted to be alone, to look into his own mind, follow his thoughts out for himself, and knew that if his eyes caught another’s he would no longer be alone. A strange hush, a supernatural silence, the wordless understanding that so rarely touches mankind: the veil lifts and drops again and a man can never remember what he has seen but knows that he has seen something and that nothing will ever be quite the same again. Seldom, all too seldom it comes: a sunset of surpassing loveliness, a fragment from some great symphony, the terrible stillness which falls over the huge rings of Madrid and Barcelona as the sword of the greatest of the matadors sinks inevitably home. And the Spaniards have the word for it—‘the moment of truth’.

The Sick Bay clock, unnaturally loud, ticked away one minute, maybe two. With a heavy sigh—it seemed ages since he had breathed last—Nicholls softly pulled to the sliding door behind the curtains and switched on the light. He looked round at Brooks, looked away again.

‘Well, Johnny?’ The voice was soft, almost bantering.

‘I just don’t know, sir, I don’t know at all.’ Nicholls shook his head. ‘At first I thought he was going to—well, make a hash of it. You know, scare the lights out of ’em. And good God!’ he went on wonderingly, ‘that’s exactly what he did do. Piled it on—gales, Tirpitz, hordes of subs—and yet … ’ His voice trailed off.

‘And yet?’ Brooks echoed mockingly. ‘That’s just it. Too much intelligence—that’s the trouble with the young doctors today. I saw you—sitting there like a bogus psychiatrist, analysing away for all you were worth at the probable effect of the speech on the minds of the wounded warriors without, and never giving it a chance to let it register on yourself.’ He paused and went on quietly.

‘It was beautifully done, Johnny. No, that’s the wrong word— there was nothing premeditated about it. But don’t you see? As black a picture as man could paint: points out that this is just a complicated way of committing suicide: no silver lining, no promises, even Alex thrown in as a casual afterthought. Builds ’em up, then lets ’em down. No inducements, no hope, no appeal—and yet the appeal was tremendous … What was it, Johnny?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nicholls was troubled. He lifted his head abruptly, then smiled faintly. ‘Maybe there was no appeal. Listen.’ Noiselessly, he slid the door back, flicked off the lights. The rumble of Riley’s harsh voice, low and intense, was unmistakable.

‘—just a lot of bloody clap-trap. Alex? The Med? Not on your— life, mate. You’ll never see it. You’ll never even see Scapa again. Captain Richard Vallery, DSO! Know what the old bastard wants, boys? Another bar to his DSO. Maybe even a VC. Well, by Christ’s, he’s not going to have it! Not at my expense. Not if I can—well help it. “I know you won’t let me down,”’ he mimicked, his voice high-pitched. ‘Whining old bastard!’ He paused a moment, then rushed on.

‘The Tirpitz! Christ Almighty! The Tirpitz! We’re going to stop it—us! This bloody toy ship! Bait, he says, bait!’ His voice rose. ‘I tell you, mates, nobody gives a damn about us. Direct for the North Cape! They’re throwing us to the bloody wolves! And that old bastard up to—’

‘Shaddap!’ It was Petersen who spoke, his voice a whisper, low and fierce. His hand stretched out, and Brooks and Nicholls in the surgery winced as they heard Riley’s wristbones crack under the tremendous pressure of the giant’s hand. ‘Often I wonder about you, Riley,’ Petersen went on slowly. ‘But not now, not any more. You make me sick!’ He flung Riley’s hand down and turned away.

Riley rubbed his wrist in agony, and turned to Burgess.

‘For God’s sake, what’s the matter with him? What the hell …’ He broke off abruptly. Burgess was looking at him steadily, kept looking for a long time. Slowly, deliberately, he eased himself down in bed, pulled the blankets up to his neck and turned his back on Riley.

Brooks rose quickly to his feet, closed the door and pressed the light switch.

‘Act I, Scene I. Cut! Lights!’ he murmured. ‘See what I mean, Johnny?’

Yes, sir,’ Nicholls nodded slowly. ‘At least, I think so.’

‘Mind you, my boy, it won’t last. At least, not at that intensity.’ He grinned. But maybe it’ll take us the length of Murmansk. You never know.’

‘I hope so, sir. Thanks for the show.’ Nicholls reached up for his duffel-coat. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better make my way aft.’

‘Off you go, then. And, oh—Johnny—’

‘Sir?’

‘That scarlet-fever notice-board of yours. On your way aft you might consign it to the deep. I don’t think we’ll be needing it any more.’ Nicholls grinned and closed the door softly behind him.

1. Rescue ships, whose duties were solely what their name implies, were a feature of many of the earlier convoys. The Zafaaran was lost in one of the war’s worst convoys. The Stockport was torpedoed. She was lost with all hands, including all those survivors rescued from other sunken ships.

FOUR

Monday Night

Dusk Action Stations dragged out its interminable hour and was gone. That night, as on a hundred other nights, it was just another nagging irritation, a pointless precaution that did not even justify its existence, far less its meticulous thoroughness. Or so it seemed. For although at dawn enemy attacks were routine, at sunset they were all but unknown. It was not always so with other ships, indeed it was rarely so, but then, the Ulysses was a lucky ship. Everyone knew that. Even Vallery knew it, but he also knew why. Vigilance was the first article of his sailor’s creed.

Soon after the Captain’s broadcast, radar had reported a contact, closing. That it was an enemy plane was certain: Commander Westcliffe, Senior Air Arm Officer, had before him in the Fighter Direction Room a wall map showing the operational routes of all Coastal and Ferry Command planes, and this was a clear area. But no one paid the slightest attention to the report, other than Tyndall’s order for a 45° course alteration. This was as routine as dusk Action Stations themselves. It was their old friend Charlie coming to pay his respects again.

‘Charlie’—usually a four-engine Focke-Wulf Condor—was an institution on the Russian Convoys. He had become to the seamen on the Murmansk run very much what the albatross had been the previous century to sailing men, far south in the Roaring Forties: a bird of ill-omen, half feared but almost amicably accepted, and immune from destruction—though with Charlie, for a different reason. In the early days, before the advent of cam-ships and escort carriers, Charlie frequently spent the entire day, from first light to last, circling a convoy and radioing to base pin-point reports of its position.[1]

Exchanges of signals between British ships and German reconnaissance planes were not unknown, and apocryphal stories were legion. An exchange of pleasantries about the weather was almost commonplace. On several occasions Charlie had plaintively asked for his position and been given highly-detailed latitude and longitude bearings which usually placed him somewhere in the South Pacific; and, of course, a dozen ships claimed the authorship of the story wherein the convoy Commodore sent the signal, ‘Please fly the other way round. You are making us dizzy,’ and Charlie had courteously acknowledged and turned in his tracks.

Latterly, however, amiability had been markedly absent, and Charlie, grown circumspect with the passing of the months and the appearance of shipborne fighters, rarely appeared except at dusk. His usual practice was to make a single circle of the convoy at a prudent distance and then disappear into the darkness.

That night was no exception. Men caught only fleeting glimpses of the Condor in the driving snow, then quickly lost it in the gathering gloom. Charlie would report the strength, nature and course of the Squadron, although Tyndall had little hope that the German Intelligence would be deceived as to their course. A naval squadron, near the sixty-second degree of latitude, just east of the Faroes, and heading NNE, wouldn’t make sense to them—especially as they almost certainly knew of the departure of the convoy from Halifax. Two and two, far too obviously totted up to four.

No attempt was made to fly off Seafires—the only plane with a chance to overhaul the Condor before it disappeared into the night. To locate the carrier again in almost total darkness, even on a radio beam, was difficult: to land at night, extremely dangerous; and to land, by guess and by God, in the snow and blackness on a pitching, heaving deck, a suicidal impossibility. The least miscalculation, the slightest error of judgment and you had not only a lost plane but a drowned pilot. A ditched Seafire, with its slender, torpedo-shaped fuselage and the tremendous weight of the great Rolls-Royce Merlin in its nose, was a literal deathtrap. When it went down into the sea, it just kept on going.

Back on to course again, the Ulysses pushed blindly into the gathering storm. Hands fell out from Action Stations, and resumed normal Defence Stations—watch and watch, four on, four off. Not a killing routine, one would think: twelve hours on, twelve hours off a day—a man could stand that. And so he could, were that all. But the crew also spent three hours a day at routine Action Stations, every second morning—the forenoon watch—at work (this when they were off-watch) and God only knew how many hours at Action Stations. Beyond all this, all meals—when there were meals—were eaten in their off-duty time. A total of three to four hours’ sleep a day was reckoned unusual: forty-eight hours without sleep hardly called for comment.

Step by step, fraction by menacing fraction, mercury and barograph crept down in a deadly dualism. The waves were higher now, their troughs deeper, their shoulders steeper, and the bonechilling wind lashed the snow into a blinding curtain. A bad night, a sleepless night, both above deck and below, on watch and off.

On the bridge, the First Lieutenant, the Kapok Kid, signalmen, the Searchlight LTO, look-outs and messengers peered out miserably into the white night and wondered what it would be like to be warm again. Jerseys, coats, overcoats, duffels, oilskins, scarves, balaclavas, helmets—they wore them all, completely muffled except for a narrow eye-slit in the woollen cocoon, and still they shivered. They wrapped arms and forearms round, and rested their feet on the steam pipes which circled the bridge, and froze. Pom-pom crews huddled miserably in the shelter of their multiple guns, stamped their feet, swung their arms and swore incessantly. And the lonely Oerlikon gunners, each jammed in his lonely cockpit, leaned against the built-in ‘black’ heaters and fought off the Oerlikon gunner’s most insidious enemy—sleep.

The starboard watch, in the mess-decks below, were little happier. There were no bunks for the crew of the Ulysses, only hammocks, and these were never slung except in harbour. There were good and sufficient reasons for this. Standards of hygiene on a naval warship are high, compared even to the average civilian home: the average matelot would never consider climbing into his hammock fully dressed—and no one in his senses would have dreamed of undressing on the Russian Convoys. Again, to an exhausted man, the prospect and the actual labour of slinging and then lashing a hammock were alike appalling. And the extra seconds it took to climb out of a hammock in an emergency could represent the margin between life and death, while the very existence of a slung hammock was a danger to all, in that it impeded quick movement. And finally, as on that night of a heavy head sea, there could be no more uncomfortable place than a hammock slung fore and aft.

And so the crew slept where it could, fully clothed even to duffel coats and gloves. On tables and under tables, on narrow nine-inch stools, on the floor, in hammock racks—anywhere. The most popular place on the ship was on the warm steel deck-plates in the alleyway outside the galley, at night-time a weird and spectral tunnel, lit only by a garish red light. A popular sleeping billet, made doubly so by the fact that only a screen separated it from the upper-deck, a scant ten feet away. The fear of being trapped below decks in a sinking ship was always there, always in the back of men’s minds.

Even below decks, it was bitterly cold. The hot-air systems operated efficiently only on ‘B’ and ‘C’ mess-decks, and even there the temperature barely cleared freezing point. Deckheads dripped constantly and the condensation on the bulkheads sent a thousand little rivulets to pool on the corticene floor. The atmosphere was dank and airless and terribly chill—the ideal breeding ground for the TB, so feared by Surgeon-Commander Brooks. Such conditions, allied with the constant pitching of the ship and the sudden jarring vibrations which were beginning to develop every time the bows crashed down, made sleep almost impossible, at best a fitful, restless unease.

Almost to a man, the crew slept—or tried to sleep—with heads pillowed on inflated lifebelts. Blown up, bent double then tied with tape, these lifebelts made very tolerable pillows. For this purpose, and for this alone, were these lifebelts employed, although standing orders stated explicitly that lifebelts were to be worn at all times during action and in known enemy waters. These orders were completely ignored, not least of all by those Divisional Officers whose duty it was to enforce them. There was enough air trapped in the voluminous and bulky garments worn in these latitudes to keep a man afloat for at least three minutes. If he wasn’t picked up in that time, he was dead anyway. It was shock that killed, the tremendous shock of a body at 96° F being suddenly plunged into a liquid temperature some 70° lower—for in the Arctic waters, the sea temperature often falls below normal freezing point. Worse still, the sub-zero wind lanced like a thousand stilettos through the saturated clothing of a man who had been submerged in the sea, and the heart, faced with an almost instantaneous 100° change in body temperature, just stopped beating. But it was a quick death, men said, quick and kind and merciful.

At ten minutes to midnight the Commander and Marshall made their way to the bridge. Even at this late hour and in the wicked weather, the Commander was his usual self, imperturbable and cheerful, lean and piratical, a throw-back to the Elizabethan buccaneers, if ever there was one. He had an unflagging zest for life. The duffel hood, as always, lay over his shoulders, the braided peak of this cap was tilted at a magnificent angle. He groped for the handle of the bridge gate, passed through, stood for a minute accustoming his eyes to the dark, located the First Lieutenant and thumped him resoundingly on the back.

‘Well, watchman, and what of the night?’ he boomed cheerfully. ‘Bracing, yes, decidely so. Situation completely out of control as usual, I suppose? Where are all our chickens this lovely evening?’ He peered out into the snow, scanned the horizon briefly, then gave up. ‘All gone to hell and beyond, I suppose.’

‘Not too bad,’ Carrington grinned. An RNR officer and an ex- Merchant Navy captain in whom Vallery reposed complete confidence, Lieutenant-Commander Carrington was normally a taciturn man, grave and unsmiling. But a particular bond lay between him and Turner, the professional bond of respect which two exceptional seamen have for each other. ‘We can see the carriers now and then. Anyway, Bowden and his backroom boys have ’em all pinned to an inch. At least, that’s what they say.’

‘Better not let old Bowden hear you say that,’ Marshall advised. ‘Thinks radar is the only step forward the human race has taken since the first man came down from the trees.’ He shivered uncontrollably and turned his back on the driving wind. ‘Anyway, I wish to God I had his job,’ he added feelingly. ‘This is worse than winter in Alberta!’

‘Nonsense, my boy, stuff and nonsense!’ the Commander roared. ‘Decadent, that’s the trouble with you youngsters nowadays. This is the only life for a self-respecting human being.’ He sniffed the icy air appreciatively and turned to Carrington. ‘Who’s on with you tonight, Number One?’

A dark figure detached itself from the binnacle and approached him.

‘Ah, there you are. Well, well, ’pon my soul, if it isn’t our navigating officer, the Honourable Carpenter, lost as usual and dressed to kill in his natty gent’s suiting. Do you know, Pilot, in that outfit you look like a cross between a deep-sea diver and that advert for Michelin tyres?’

‘Ha!’ said the Kapok Kid aggrievedly. ‘Sniff and scoff while you may, sir.’ He patted his quilted chest affectionately. ‘Just wait till we’re all down there in the drink together, everybody else dragged down or frozen to death, me drifting by warm and dry and comfortable, maybe smoking the odd cigarette—’

‘Enough. Be off. Course, Number One?’

‘Three-twenty, sir. Fifteen knots.’

‘And the Captain?’

‘In the shelter.’ Carrington jerked his head towards the reinforced steel circular casing at the after end of the bridge. This supported the Director Tower, the control circuits to which ran through a central shaft in the casing. A sea-bunk—a spartan, bare settee—was kept there for the Captain’s use. ‘Sleeping, I hope,’ he added, ‘but I very much doubt it. Gave orders to be called at midnight.’

‘Why?’ Turner demanded.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Routine, I suppose. Wants to see how things are.’

‘Cancel the order,’ Turner said briefly. ‘Captain’s got to learn to obey orders like anybody else—especially doctor’s orders. I’ll take full responsibility. Good night, Number One.’

The gate clanged shut and Marshall turned uncertainly towards the Commander.

‘The Captain, sir. Oh, I know it’s none of my business, but’—he hesitated—‘well, is he all right?’

Turner looked quickly around him. His voice was unusually quiet.

‘If Brooks had his way, the old man would be in hospital.’ He was silent for a moment, then added soberly, ‘Even then, it might be too late.’

Marshall said nothing. He moved restlessly around, then went aft to the port searchlight control position. For five minutes, an intermittent rumble of voices drifted up to the Commander. He glanced up curiously on Marshall’s return.

‘That’s Ralston, sir,’ the Torpedo Officer explained. ‘If he’d talk to anybody, I think he’d talk to me.’

‘And does he?’

‘Sure—but only what he wants to talk about. As for the rest, no dice. You can almost see the big notice round his neck—“Private— Keep off”. Very civil, very courteous and completely unapproachable. I don’t know what the hell to do about him.’

‘Leave him be,’ Turner advised. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’ He shook his head. ‘My God, what a lousy break life’s given that boy!’

Silence fell again. The snow was lifting now, but the wind still strengthening. It howled eerily through masts and rigging, blending with a wild and eldritch harmony into the haunting pinging of the Asdic. Weird sounds both, weird and elemental and foreboding, that rasped across the nerves and stirred up nameless, atavistic dreads of a thousand ages past, long buried under the press of civilization. An unholy orchestra, and, over years, men grew to hate it with a deadly hatred.

Half-past twelve came, one o’clock, then half-past one. Turner’s thought turned fondly towards coffee and cocoa. Coffee or cocoa? Cocoa, he decided, a steaming potent brew, thick with melted chocolate and sugar. He turned to Chrysler, the bridge messenger, young brother of the Leading Asdic Operator.

‘WT—Bridge. WT—Bridge.’ The loudspeaker above the Asdic cabinet crackled urgently, the voice hurried, insistent. Turner jumped for the hand transmitter, barked an acknowledgement.

‘Signal from Sirrus. Echoes, port bow, 300, strong, closing. Repeat, echoes, port bow, strong, closing.’

‘Echoes, WT? Did you say “echoes”?’

‘Echoes, sir. I repeat, echoes.’

Even as he spoke, Turner’s hand cut down on the gleaming phosphorescence of the Emergency Action Stations switch.

Of all sounds in this earth, there is none so likely to stay with a man to the end of his days as the EAS. There is no other sound even remotely like it. There is nothing noble or martial or bloodstirring about it. It is simply a whistle, pitched near the upper limit of audio-frequency, alternating, piercing, atonic, alive with a desperate urgency and sense of danger: knife-like, it sears through the most sleep-drugged brain and has a man—no matter how exhausted, how weak, how deeply sunk in oblivion—on his feet in seconds, the pulse-rate already accelerating to meet the latest unknown, the adrenalin already pumping into his blood-stream.

Inside two minutes, the Ulysses was closed up to Action Stations. The Commander had moved aft to the After Director Tower, Vallery and Tyndall were on the bridge.

The Sirrus, two miles away to port, remained in contact for half an hour. The Viking was detached to help her, and, below-deck in the Ulysses, the peculiar, tinny clanging of depth-charging was clearly heard at irregular intervals. Finally, the Sirrus reported. ‘No success: contact lost: trust you have not been disturbed.’ Tyndall ordered the recall of the two destroyers, and the bugle blew the stand-down.

Back on the bridge, again, the Commander sent for his long overdue cocoa. Chrysler departed to the seaman’s for’ard galley— the Commander would have no truck with the wishy-washy liquid concocted for the officers’ mess—and returned with a steaming jug and a string of heavy mugs, their handles threaded on a bent wire. Turner watched with approval the reluctance with which the heavy, viscous liquid poured glutinously over the lip of the jug, and nodded in satisfaction after a preliminary taste. He smacked his lips and sighed contentedly.

‘Excellent, young Chrysler, excellent! You have the gift. Torps, an eye on the ship, if you please. Must see where we are.’

He retired to the chart-room on the port side, just aft of the compass platform, and closed the black-out door. Relaxed in his chair, he put his mug on the chart-table and his feet beside it, drew the first deep inhalation of cigarette smoke into his lungs. Then he was on his feet, cursing: the crackle of the WT loudspeaker was unmistakable.

This time it was the Portpatrick. For one reason and another, her reports were generally treated with a good deal of reserve, but this time she was particularly emphatic. Commander Turner had no option; again he reached for the EAS switch.

Twenty minutes later the stand-down sounded again, but the Commander was to have no cocoa that night. Three times more during the hours of darkness all hands closed up to Action Stations, and only minutes, it seemed, after the last stand-down, the bugle went for dawn stations.

There was no dawn as we know it. There was a vague, imperceptible lightening in the sky, a bleak, chill greyness, as the men dragged themselves wearily back to their action stations. This, then, was war in the northern seas. No death and glory heroics, no roaring guns and spitting Oerlikons, no exaltation of the spirit, no glorious defiance of the enemy: just worn-out sleepless men, numbed with cold and sodden duffels, grey and drawn and stumbling on their feet with weakness and hunger and lack of rest, carrying with them the memories, the tensions, the cumulative physical exhaustion of a hundred such endless nights.

Vallery, as always, was on the bridge. Courteous, kind and considerate as ever, he looked ghastly. His face was haggard, the colour of putty, his bloodshot eyes deep-sunk in hollowed sockets, his lips bloodless. The severe hæmorrhage of the previous night and the sleepless night just gone had taken terrible toll of his slender strength.

In the half-light, the squadron came gradually into view. Miraculously, most of them were still in position. The frigate and minesweeper were together and far ahead of the fleet—during the night they had been understandably reluctant to have their tails tramped on by a heavy cruiser or a carrier. Tyndall appreciated this and said nothing. The Invader had lost position during the night, and lay outside the screen on the port quarter. She received a very testy signal indeed, and came steaming up to resume station, corkscrewing violently in the heavy cross seas.

Stand-down came at 0800. At 0810 the port watch was below, making tea, washing, queueing up at the galley for breakfast trays, when a muffled explosion shook the Ulysses. Towels, soap, cups, plates and trays went flying or were left where they were: blasphemous and bitter, the men were on their way before Vallery’s hand closed on the Emergency switch.

Less than half a mile away the Invader was slewing round in a violent half-circle, her flight-deck tilted over at a crazy angle. It was snowing heavily again now, but not heavily enough to obscure the great gouts of black oily smoke belching up for’ard of the Invader’s bridge. Even as the crew of the Ulysses watched, she came to rest, wallowing dangerously in the troughs between the great waves.

‘The fools, the crazy fools!’ Tyndall was terribly bitter, unreasonably so; even to Vallery, he would not admit how much he was now feeling the burden, the strain of command that sparked off his now almost chronic irritability. ‘This is what happens, Captain, when a ship loses station! And it’s as much my fault as theirs—should have sent a destroyer to escort her back.’ He peered through his binoculars, turned to Vallery. ‘Make a signal please: “Estimate of damage—please inform.” … That damned U-boat must have trailed her from first light, waiting for a line-up.’

Vallery said nothing. He knew how Tyndall must feel to see one of his ships heavily damaged, maybe sinking. The Invader was still lying over at the same unnatural angle, the smoke rising in a steady column now. There was no sign of flames.

‘Going to investigate, sir?’ Vallery inquired.

Tyndall bit his lip thoughtfully and hesitated.

‘Yes, I think we’d better do it ourselves. Order squadron to proceed, same speed, same course. Signal the Baliol and the Nairn to stand by the Invader.’

Vallery, watching the flags fluttering to the yardarm, was aware of someone at his elbow. He half-turned.

‘That was no U-boat, sir.’ The Kapok Kid was very sure of himself. ‘She can’t have been torpedoed.’

Tyndall overheard him. He swung round in his chair, glared at the unfortunate navigator.

‘What the devil do you know about it, sir?’ he growled. When the Admiral addressed his subordinates as ‘sir’, it was time to take to the boats. The Kapok Kid flushed to the roots of his blond hair, but he stood his ground.

‘Well, sir, in the first place the Sirrus is covering the Invader’s port side, though well ahead, ever since your recall signal. She’s been quartering that area for some time. I’m sure Commander Orr would have picked her up. Also, it’s far too rough for any sub to maintain periscope depth, far less line up a firing track. And if the U-boat did fire, it wouldn’t only fire one—six more likely, and, from that firing angle, the rest of the squadron must have been almost a solid wall behind the Invader. But no one else has been hit … I did three years in the trade, sir.’

‘I did ten,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Guesswork, Pilot, just guesswork.’

‘No, sir,’ Carpenter persisted. ‘It’s not. I can’t swear to it’—he had his binoculars to his eyes—‘but I’m almost sure the Invader is going astern. Could only be because her bows—below the waterline, that is—have been damaged or blown off. Must have been a mine, sir, probably acoustic.’

‘Ah, of course, of course!’ Tyndall was very acid. ‘Moored in 6,000 feet of water, no doubt?’

‘A drifting mine, sir,’ the Kapok Kid said patiently. ‘Or an old acoustic torpedo—spent German torpedoes don’t always sink. Probably a mine, though.’

‘Suppose you’ll be telling me next what mark it is and when it was laid,’ Tyndall growled. But he was impressed in spite of himself. And the Invader was going astern, although slowly, without enough speed to give her steerage way. She still wallowed helplessly in the great troughs.

An Aldis clacked acknowledgement to the winking light on the Invader. Bentley tore a sheet off a signal pad, handed it to Vallery.

‘“Invader to Admiral,”’ the Captain read. ‘“Am badly holed, starboard side for’ard, very deep. Suspect drifting mine. Am investigating extent of damage. Will report soon.”’

Tyndall took the signal from him and read it slowly. Then he looked over his shoulder and smiled faintly.

‘You were dead right, my boy, it seems. Please accept an old curmudgeon’s apologies.’

Carpenter murmured something and turned away, brick-red again with embarrassment. Tyndall grinned faintly at the Captain, then became thoughtful.

‘I think we’d better talk to him personally, Captain. Barlow, isn’t it? Make a signal.’

They climbed down two decks to the Fighter Direction room. Westcliffe vacated his chair for the Admiral.

‘Captain Barlow?’ Tyndall spoke into the handpiece.

‘Speaking.’ The sound came from the loudspeaker above his head.

‘Admiral here, Captain. How are things?’

‘We’ll manage, sir. Lost most of our bows, I’m afraid. Several casualties. Oil fires, but under conrol. WT doors all holding, and engineers and damage control parties are shorting up the crossbulkheads.’

‘Can you go ahead at all, Captain?’

‘Could do, sir, but risky—in this, anyway.’

‘Think you could make it back to base?’

‘With this wind and sea behind us, yes. Still take three-four days.’

‘Right-o, then.’ Tyndall’s voice was gruff. ‘Off you go. You’re no good to us without bows! Damned hard luck, Captain Barlow. My commiserations. And oh! I’m giving you the Baliol and Nairn as escorts and radioing for an ocean-going tug to come out to meet you—just in case.’

‘Thank you, sir. We appreciate that. One last thing—permission to empty starboard squadron fuel tanks. We’ve taken a lot of water, can’t get rid of it all—only way to recover our trim.’

Tyndall sighed. ‘Yes, I was expecting that. Can’t be helped and we can’t take it off you in this weather. Good luck, Captain. Goodbye.’

‘Thank you very much, sir. Goodbye.’

Twenty minutes later, the Ulysses was back on station in the squadron. Shortly afterwards, they saw the Invader, not listing quite so heavily now, head slowly round to the southeast, the little Hunt class destroyer and the frigate, one on either side, rolling wickedly as they came round with her. In another ten minutes, watchers on the Ulysses had lost sight of them, buried in a flurrying snow squall. Three gone and eleven left behind; but it was the eleven who now felt so strangely alone.

1. Cam-ships were merchant ships with specially strengthened fo’c’sles. On these were fitted fore-and-aft angled ramps from which fighter planes, such as modified Hurricanes, were catapulted for convoy defence. After breaking off action, the pilot had either to bale out or land in the sea. ‘Hazardous’ is rather an inadequate word to describe the duties of this handful of very gallant pilots: the chances of survival were not high.

FIVE

Tuesday

The Invader and her troubles were soon forgotten. All too soon, the 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron had enough, and more than enough, to worry about on their own account. They had their own troubles to overcome, their own enemy to face—an enemy far more elemental and far more deadly than any mine or U-boat.

Tyndall braced himself more firmly against the pitching, rolling deck and looked over at Vallery. Vallery, he thought for the tenth time that morning, looked desperately ill.

‘What do you make of it, Captain? Prospects aren’t altogether healthy, are they?’

‘We’re for it, sir. It’s really piling up against us. Carrington has spent six years in the West Indies, has gone through a dozen hurricanes. Admits he’s seen a barometer lower, but never one so low with the pressure still falling so fast—not in these latitudes. This is only a curtain-raiser.’

‘This will do me nicely, meantime, thank you.’ Tyndall said dryly. ‘For a curtain-raiser, it’s doing not so badly.’

It was a masterly understatement. For a curtain-raiser, it was a magnificent performance. The wind was fairly steady, about Force 9 on the Beaufort scale, and the snow had stopped. A temporary cessation only, they all knew—far ahead to the north-west the sky was a peculiarly livid colour. It was a dull glaring purple, neither increasing nor fading, faintly luminous and vaguely menacing in its uniformity and permanence. Even to men who had seen everything the Arctic skies had to offer, from pitchy darkness on a summer’s noon, right through the magnificent displays of Northern Lights to that wonderfully washed-out blue that so often smiles down on the stupendous calms of the milk-white seas that lap edge of the Barrier, this was something quite unknown.

But the Admiral’s reference had been to the sea. It had been building up, steadily, inexorably, all during the morning. Now, at noon, it looked uncommonly like an eighteenth-century print of a barque in a storm—serried waves of greenish-grey, straight, regular and marching uniformly along, each decoratively topped with frothing caps of white. Only here, there were 500 feet between crest and crest, and the squadron, heading almost directly into it, was taking hearty punishment.

For the little ships, already burying their bows every fifteen seconds in a creaming smother of cascading white, this was bad enough, but another, a more dangerous and insidious enemy was at work—the cold. The temperature had long sunk below freezing point, and the mercury was still shrinking down, close towards the zero mark.

The cold was now intense: ice formed in cabins and mess-decks: fresh-water systems froze solid: metal contracted, hatch-covers jammed, door hinges locked in frozen immobility, the oil in the searchlight controls gummed up and made them useless. To keep a watch, especially a watch on the bridge was torture: the first shock of that bitter wind seared the lungs, left a man fighting for breath: if he had forgotten to don gloves—first the silk gloves, then the woollen mittens, then the sheepskin gauntlets—and touched a handrail, the palms of the hands seared off, the skin burnt as by white-hot metal: on the bridge; if he forgot to duck when the bows smashed down into a trough, the flying spray, solidified in a second into hurtling slivers of ice, lanced cheek and forehead open to the bone: hands froze, the very marrow of the bones numbed, the deadly chill crept upwards from feet to calves to thighs, nose and chin turned white with frostbite and demanded immediate attention: and then, by far the worst of all, the end of the watch, the return below deck, the writhing, excruciating agony of returning circulation. But, for all this, words are useless things, pale shadows of reality. Some things lie beyond the knowledge and the experience of the majority of mankind, and here imagination finds itself in a world unknown.

But all these things were relatively trifles, personal inconveniences to be shrugged aside. The real danger lay elsewhere. It lay in the fact of ice.

There were over three hundred tons of it already on the decks of the Ulysses, and more forming every minute. It lay in a thick, even coat over the main deck, the fo’c’sle, the gun-decks and the bridges: it hung in long, jagged icicles from coamings and turrets and rails: it trebled the diameter of every wire, stay and halliard, and turned slender masts into monstrous trees, ungainly and improbable. It lay everywhere, a deadly menace, and much of the danger lay in the slippery surface it presented—a problem much more easily overcome on a coalfired merchant ship with clinker and ashes from its boilers, than in the modern, oil-fired warships. On the Ulysses, they spread salt and sand and hoped for the best.

But the real danger of the ice lay in its weight. A ship, to use technical terms, can be either stiff or tender. If she’s stiff, she has a low centre of gravity, rolls easily, but whips back quickly and is extremely stable and safe. If she’s tender, with a high centre of gravity, she rolls reluctantly but comes back even more reluctantly, is unstable and unsafe. And if a ship were tender, and hundreds of tons of ice piled high on its decks, the centre of gravity rose to a dangerous height. It could rise to a fatal height …

The escort carriers and the destroyers, especially the Portpatrick, were vulnerable, terribly so. The carriers, already unstable with the great height and weight of their reinforced flight-decks, provided a huge, smooth, flat surface to the falling snow, ideal conditions for the formation of ice. Earlier on, it had been possible to keep the flight-decks relatively clear—working parties had toiled incessantly with brooms and sledges, salt and steam hoses. But the weather had deteriorated so badly now that to send out a man on that wildly pitching, staggering flight-deck, glassy and infinitely treacherous, would be to send him to his death. The Wrestler and Blue Ranger had modified heating systems under the flight-decks—modified, because, unlike the British ships, these Mississippi carriers had planked flight-decks: in such extreme conditions, they were hopelessly inefficient.

Conditions aboard the destroyers were even worse. They had to contend not only with the ice from the packed snow, but with ice from the sea itself. As regularly as clockwork, huge clouds of spray broke over the destroyers’ fo’c’sles as the bows crashed solidly, shockingly into the trough and rising shoulder of the next wave: the spray froze even as it touched the deck, even before it touched the deck, piling up the solid ice, in places over a foot thick, from the stem aft beyond the breakwater. The tremendous weight of the ice was pushing the little ships down by their heads; deeper, with each successive plunge ever deeper, they buried their noses in the sea, and each time, more and more sluggishly, more and more reluctantly, they staggered laboriously up from the depths. Like the carrier captains, the destroyer skippers could only look down from their bridges, helpless, hoping.

Two hours passed, two hours in which the temperature fell to zero, hesitated, then shrank steadily beyond it, two hours in which the barometer tumbled crazily after it. Curiously, strangely, the snow still held off, the livid sky to the north-west was as far away as ever, and the sky to the south and east had cleared completely. The squadron presented a fantastic picture now, little toy-boats of sugar-icing, dazzling white, gleaming and sparkling in the pale, winter sunshine, pitching crazily through the everlengthening, ever-deepening valleys of grey and green of the cold Norwegian Sea, pushing on towards that far horizon, far and weird and purply glowing, the horizon of another world. It was an incredibly lovely spectacle.

Rear-Admiral Tyndall saw nothing beautiful about it. A man who was wont to claim that he never worried, he was seriously troubled now. He was gruff, to those on the bridge, gruff to the point of discourtesy and the old geniality of the Farmer Giles of even two months ago was all but gone. Ceaselessly his gaze circled the fleet; constantly, uncomfortably, he twisted in his chair. Finally he climbed down, passed through the gate and went into the Captain’s shelter.

Vallery had no light on and the shelter was in semi-darkness. He lay there on his settee, a couple of blankets thrown over him. In the half-light, his face looked ghastly, corpse-like. His right hand clutched a balled handkerchief, spotted and stained: he made no attempt to hide it. With a painful effort, and before Tyndall could stop him, he had swung his legs over the edge of the settee and pulled forward a chair. Tyndall choked off his protest, sank gracefully into the seat.

‘I think your curtain’s just about to go up, Dick … What on earth ever induced me to become a squadron commander?’

Vallery grinned sympathetically. ‘I don’t particularly envy you, sir. What are you going to do now?’

‘What would you do?’ Tyndall countered dolefully.

Vallery laughed. For a moment his face was transformed, boyish almost, then the laugh broke down into a bout of harsh, dry coughing. The stain spread over his handkerchief. Then he looked up and smiled.

‘The penalty for laughing at a superior officer. What would I do? Heave to, sir. Better still, tuck my tail between my legs and run for it.’

Tyndall shook his head.

‘You never were a very convincing liar, Dick.’

Both men sat in silence for a moment, then Vallery looked up.

‘How far to go, exactly, sir?’

‘Young Carpenter makes it 170 miles, more or less.’

‘One hundred and seventy.’ Vallery looked at his watch. ‘Twenty hours to go—in this weather. We must make it!’

Tyndall nodded heavily. ‘Eighteen ships sitting out there— nineteen, counting the sweeper from Hvalfjord—not to mention old Starr’s blood pressure …’

He broke off as a hand rapped on the door and a head looked in.

‘Two signals, Captain, sir.’

‘Just read them out, Bentley, will you?’

‘First is from the Portpatrick: “Sprung bow-plates: making water fast: pumps coming: fear further damage: please advise.”’

Tyndall swore. Vallery said calmly: ‘And the other?’

‘From the Gannet, sir. “Breaking up.”’

‘Yes, yes. And the rest of the message?’

‘Just that, sir. “Breaking up.”’

‘Ha! One of these taciturn characters,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Wait a minute, Chief, will you?’ He sank back in his chair, hand rasping his chin, gazing at his feet, forcing his tired mind to think.

Vallery murmured something in a low voice, and Tyndall looked up, his eyebrows arched.

‘Troubled waters, sir. Perhaps the carriers—’

Tyndall slapped his knee. ‘Two minds with but a single thought. Bentley, make two signals. One to all screen vessels—tell ’em to take position—astern—close astern—of the carriers. Other to the carriers. Oil hose, one each through port and starboard loading ports, about—ah—how much would you say, Captain?’

‘Twenty gallons a minute, sir?’

‘Twenty gallons it is. Understand, Chief? Right-o, get ’em off at once. And Chief—tell the Navigator to bring his chart here.’ Bentley left, and he turned to Vallery. ‘We’ve got to fuel later on, and we can’t do it here. Looks as if this might be the last chance of shelter this side of Murmansk … And if the next twenty-four hours are going to be as bad as Carrington forecasts, I doubt whether some of the little ships could live through it anyway … Ah! Here you are, Pilot. Let’s see where we are. How’s the wind, by the way?’

‘Force 10, sir.’ Bracing himself against the wild lurching of the Ulysses, the Kapok Kid smoothed out the chart on the Captain’s bunk. ‘Backing slightly.’

‘North-west, would you say, Pilot?’ Tyndall rubbed his hands. ‘Excellent. Now, my boy, our position?’

‘12.40 west. 66.15 north,’ said the Kapok Kid precisely. He didn’t even trouble to consult the chart. Tyndall lifted his eyebrows but made no comment.

‘Course?’

‘310, sir.’

‘Now, if it were necessary for us to seek shelter for fuelling—’

‘Course exactly 290, sir. I’ve pencilled it in—there. Four and a half hours’ steaming, approximately.’

‘How the devil—’ Tyndall exploded. ‘Who told you to—to—’ He spluttered into a wrathful silence.

‘I worked it out five minutes ago, sir. It—er—seemed inevitable. 290 would take us a few miles inside the Langanes peninsula. There should be plenty shelter there.’ Carpenter was grave, unsmiling.

‘Seemed inevitable!’ Tyndall roared. ‘Would you listen to him, Captain Vallery? Inevitable! And it’s only just occurred to me! Of all the … Get out! Take yourself and that damned comic-opera fancy dress elsewhere!’

The Kapok Kid said nothing. With an air of injured innocence he gathered up his charts and left. Tyndall’s voice halted him at the door.

‘Pilot!’

‘Sir?’ The Kapok Kid’s eyes were fixed on a point above Tyndall’s head.

‘As soon as the screen vessels have taken up position, tell Bentley to send them the new course.’

‘Yes, sir. Certainly.’ He hesitated, and Tyndall chuckled. ‘All right, all right,’ he said resignedly. ‘I’ll say it again—I’m just a crusty old curmudgeon … and shut that damned door! We’re freezing in here.’

The wind was rising more quickly now and long ribbons of white were beginning to streak the water. Wave troughs were deepening rapidly, their sides steepening, their tops blown off and flattened by the wind. Gradually, but perceptibly to the ear now, the thin, lonely whining in the rigging was climbing steadily up the register. From time to time, large chunks of ice, shaken loose by the increasing vibration, broke off from the masts and stays and spattered on the deck below.

The effect of the long oil-slicks trailing behind the carriers was almost miraculous. The destroyers, curiously mottled with oil now, were still plunging astern, but the surface tension of the fuel held the water and spray from breaking aboard. Tyndall, justifiably, was feeling more than pleased with himself.

Towards half-past four in the afternoon, with shelter still a good fifteen miles away, the elation had completely worn off. There was a whole gale blowing now and Tyndall had been compelled to signal for a reduction in speed.

From deck level, the seas now were more than impressive. They were gigantic, frightening. Nicholls stood with the Kapok Kid, off watch now, on the main deck, under the port whaler, sheltering in the lee of the fo’c’sle deck. Nicholls, clinging to a davit to steady himself, and leaping back now and then to avoid a deluge of spray, looked over to where the Defender, the Vultra and Viking tailing behind, were pitching madly, grotesquely, under that serene blue sky. The blue sky above, the tremendous seas below. There was something almost evil, something literally spine-chilling, in that macabre contrast.

‘They never told me anything about this in the Medical School,’ Nicholls observed at last. ‘My God, Andy,’ he added in awe, ‘have you ever seen anything like this?’

‘Once, just once. We were caught in a typhoon off the Nicobars. I don’t think it was as bad as this. And Number One says this is damn all compared to what’s coming tonight—and he knows. God, I wish I was back in Henley!’

Nicholls looked at him curiously.

‘Can’t say I know the First Lieutenant well. Not a very—ah— approachable customer, is he? But everyone—old Giles, the skipper, the Commander, yourself—they all talk about him with bated breath. What’s so extra special about him? I respect him, mind you—everyone seems to—but dammit to hell, he’s no superman.’

‘Sea’s beginning to break up,’ the Kapok Kid murmured absently. ‘Notice how every now and again we’re beginning to get a wave half as big again as the others? Every seventh wave, the old sailors say. No, Johnny, he’s not a superman. Just the greatest seaman you’ll ever see. Holds two master’s-tickets—square-rigged and steam. He was going round the Horn in Finnish barques when we were still in our prams. Commander could tell you enough stories about him to fill a book.’ He paused then went on quietly.

‘He really is one of the few great seamen of today. Old Blackbeard Turner is no slouch himself, but he’ll tell anyone that he can’t hold a candle to Jimmy … I’m no hero-worshipper, Johnny. You know that. But you can say about Carrington what they used to say about Shackleton—when there’s nothing left and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for him. Believe me, Johnny, I’m damned glad he’s here.’

Nicholls said nothing. Surprise held him silent. For the Kapok Kid, flippancy was a creed, derogation second nature: seriousness was a crime and anything that smacked of adulation bordered on blasphemy. Nicholls wondered what manner of man Carrington must be.

The cold was vicious. The wind was tearing great gouts of water off the wave-tops, driving the atomized spray at bullet speed against fo’c’sle and sides. It was impossible to breathe without turning one’s back, without wrapping layers of wool round mouth and nose. Faces blue and white, shaking violently with the cold, neither suggested, neither even thought of going below. Men hypnotized, men fascinated by the tremendous seas, the towering waves, 1,000, 2,000 feet in length, long, sloping on the lee side, steep-walled and terrifying on the other, pushed up by a sixty knot wind and by some mighty force lying far to the north-west. In these gigantic troughs, a church steeple would be lost for ever.

Both men turned round as they heard the screen door crashing behind them. A duffel-coated figure, cursing fluently, fought to shut the heavy door against the pitching of the Ulysses, finally succeeded in heaving the clips home. It was Leading Seaman Doyle, and even though his beard hid three-quarters of what could be seen of his face, he still looked thoroughly disgusted with life.

Carpenter grinned at him. He and Doyle had served a commission together on the China Station. Doyle was a very privileged person.

‘Well, well, the Ancient Mariner himself! How are things down below, Doyle?’

‘Bloody desperate, sir!’ His voice was as lugubrious as his face. ‘Cold as charity, sir, and everything all over the bloody place. Cups, saucers, plates in smithereens. Half the crew—’

He broke off suddenly, eyes slowly widening in blank disbelief. He was staring out to sea between Nicholls and Carpenter.

‘Well, what about half the crew? … What’s the matter, Doyle?’

‘Christ Almighty!’ Doyle’s voice was slow, stunned: it was almost a prayer. ‘Oh, Christ Almighty!’ The voice rose sharply on the last two syllables.

The two officers twisted quickly round. The Defender was climbing—all 500 feet of her was literally climbing—up the lee side of a wave that staggered the imagination, whose immensity completely defied immediate comprehension. Even as they watched, before shocked minds could grasp the significance of it all, the Defender reached the crest, hesitated, crazily tilted up her stern till screw and rudder were entirely clear of the water, then crashed down, down, down …

Even at two cable-lengths’ distance in that high wind the explosive smash of the plummeting bows came like a thunder-clap. An aeon ticked by, and still the Defender seemed to keep on going under, completely buried now, right back to the bridge island, in a sea of foaming white. How long she remained like that, arrowed down into the depths of the Arctic, no one could afterwards say: then slowly, agonizingly, incredibly, great rivers of water cascaded off her bows, she broke surface again. Broke surface, to present to frankly disbelieving eyes a spectacle entirely without precedent, anywhere, at any time. The tremendous, instantaneous, upthrusting pressure of unknown thousands of tons of water had torn the flight-deck completely off its mountings and bent it backwards, in a great, sweeping ‘U’, almost as far as the bridge. It was a sight to make men doubt their sanity, to leave them stupefied, to leave them speechless—all, that is, except the Kapok Kid. He rose magnificently to the occasion.

‘My word!’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘That is unusual.’

Another such wave, another such shattering impact, and it would have been the end for the Defender. The finest ships, the stoutest, most powerful vessels, are made only of thin, incredibly thin, sheets of metal, and metal, twisted and tortured as was the Defender’s, could never have withstood another such impact.

But there were no more such waves, no more such impacts. It had been a freak wave, one of these massive, inexplicable contortions of the sea which have occurred, with blessed infrequency, from time immemorial, in all the great seas of the world whenever Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is … There were no more such waves and, by five o’clock, although land was still some eight to ten miles away, the squadron had moved into comparative shelter behind the tip of the Langanes peninsula.

From time to time, the captain of the Defender, who seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, sent reassuring messages to the Admiral. He was making a good deal of water, but he was managing nicely, thank you. He thought the latest shape in flight-decks very fashionable, and a vast improvement on the old type; straight flight-decks lacked imagination, he thought, and didn’t the Admiral think so too. The vertical type, he stated, provided excellent protection against wind and weather, and would make a splendid sail with the wind in the right quarter. With his last message, to the effect that he thought that it would be rather difficult to fly off planes, a badly-worried Tyndall lost his temper and sent back such a blistering signal that all communications abruptly ceased.

Shortly before six o’clock, the squadron hove-to under the shelter of Langanes, less than two miles offshore. Langanes is low-lying, and the wind, still climbing the scale, swept over it and into the bay beyond, without a break; but the sea, compared to an hour ago, was mercifully calm, although the ships still rolled heavily. At once the cruisers and the screen vessels—except the Portpatrick and the Gannet—moved alongside the carriers, took oil hoses aboard. Tyndall relucantly and after much heart-searching, had decided that the Portpatrick and Gannet were suspect, a potential liability: they were to escort the crippled carrier back to Scapa.

Exhaustion, an exhaustion almost physical, almost tangible, lay heavily over the mess-decks and the wardroom of the Ulysses. Behind lay another sleepless night, another twenty-four hours with peace unknown and rest impossible. With dull, tired minds, men heard the broadcast that the Defender, the Portpatrick and the Gannet were to return to Scapa when the weather moderated. Six gone now, only eight left—half the carrier force gone. Little wonder that men felt sick at heart, felt as if they were being deserted, as if, in Riley’s phrase, they were being thrown to the wolves.

But there was remarkably little bitterness, a puzzling lack of resentment which, perhaps, sprung only from the sheer passive acceptance. Brooks was aware of it, this inaction of feeling, this unnatural extinction of response, and was lost for a reason to account for it. Perhaps, he thought, this was the nadir, the last extremity when sick men and sick minds cease altogether to function, the last slow-down of all vital processes, both human and animal. Perhaps this was just the final apathy. His intellect told him that was reasonable, more, it was inevitable … And all the time some fugitive intuition, some evanescent insight, was thrusting upon him an awareness, a dim shadowy awareness of something altogether different; but his mind was too tired to grasp it.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t apathy. For a brief moment that evening, a white-hot anger ran through the ship like a flame, then resentment of the injustice which had provoked it. That there had been cause for anger even Vallery admitted; but his hand had been forced.

It had all happened simply enough. During routine evening tests, it had been discovered that the fighting lights on the lower yardarm were not working. Ice was at once suspected as being the cause.

The lower yardarm, on this evening dazzling white and heavily coated with snow and ice, paralleled the deck, sixty feet above it, eighty feet above the waterline. The fighting lights were suspended below the outer tip: to work on these, a man had either to sit on the yardarm—a most uncomfortable position as the heavy steel WT transmission aerial was bolted to its upper length—or in a bosun’s chair suspended from the yardarm. It was a difficult enough task at any time: tonight, it had to be done with the maximum speed, because the repairs would interrupt radio transmission—the 3,000-volt steel ‘Safe-to-Transmit’ boards (which broke the electrical circuits) had to be withdrawn and left in the keeping of the Officer of the Watch during the repair: it had to be done—very precise, finicky work had to be done—in that sub-zero temperature: it had to be done on that slippery, glasssmooth yardarm, with the Ulysses rolling regularly through a thirty-degree arc: the job was more than ordinarily difficult—it was highly dangerous.

Marshall did not feel justified in detailing the duty LTO for the job, especially as that rating was a middle-aged and very much overweight reservist, long past his climbing prime. He asked for volunteers. It was inevitable that he should have picked Ralston, for that was the kind of man Ralston was.

The task took half an hour—twenty minutes to climb the mast, edge out to the yardarm tip, fit the bosun’s chair and lifeline, and ten minutes for the actual repair. Long before he was finished, a hundred, two hundred tired men, robbing themselves of sleep and supper, had come on deck and huddled there in the bitter wind, watching in fascination.

Ralston swung in a great arc across the darkening sky, the gale plucking viciously at his duffel and hood. Twice, wind and wave flung him out, still in his chair, parallel to the yardarm, forcing him to wrap both arms around the yardarm and hang on for his life. On the second occasion he seemed to strike his face against the aerial, for he held his head for a few seconds afterwards, as if he were dazed. It was then that he lost his gauntlets—he must have had them in his lap, while making some delicate adjustment: they dropped down together, disappeared over the side.

A few minutes later, while Vallery and Turner were standing amidships examining the damage the motorboat had suffered in Scapa Flow, a short, stocky figure came hurriedly out of the after screen door, made for the fo’c’sle at an awkward stumbling run. He pulled up abruptly at the sight of the Captain and the Commander: they saw it was Hastings, the Master-at-Arms.

‘What’s the matter, Hastings?’ Vallery asked curtly. He always found it difficult to conceal his dislike for the Master-at-Arms, his dislike for his harshness, his uncalled-for severity.

‘Trouble on the bridge, sir,’ Hastings jerked out breathlessly. Vallery could have sworn to a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. ‘Don’t know exactly what—could hardly hear a thing but the wind on the phone … I think you’d better come, sir.’

They found only three people on the bridge: Etherton, the Gunnery Officer, one hand still clutching a phone, worried, unhappy: Ralston, his hands hanging loosely by his sides, the palms raw and torn, the face ghastly, the chin with the dead pallor of frostbite, the forehead masked in furrowed, frozen blood: and, lying in a corner, Sub-Lieutenant Carslake, moaning in agony, only the whites of his eyes showing, stupidly fingering his smashed mouth, the torn, bleeding gaps in his prominent upper teeth.

‘Good God!’ Vallery ejaculated. ‘Good God above!’ He stood there, his hand on the gate, trying to grasp the significance of the scene before him. Then his mouth clamped shut and he swung round on the Gunnery Officer.

‘What the devil’s happened here, Etherton?’ he demanded harshly. ‘What is all this? Has Carslake—’

‘Ralston hit him, sir.’ Etherton broke in.

‘Don’t be so bloody silly, Guns!’ Turner grunted.

‘Exactly!’ Vallery’s voice was impatient. ‘We can see that. Why?’

‘A WT messenger came up for the “Safe-to-Transmit” boards. Carslake gave them to him—about ten minutes ago, I—I think.’

‘You think! Where were you, Etherton, and why did you permit it? You know very well … ’ Vallery broke off short, remembering the presence of Ralston and the MAA.

Etherton muttered something. His words were inaudible in the gale.

Vallery bent forward. ‘What did you say, Etherton?’

‘I was down below, sir.’ Etherton was looking at the deck. ‘Just— just for a moment, sir.’

‘I see. You were down below.’ Vallery’s voice was controlled now, quiet and even; his eyes held an expression that promised ill for Etherton. He looked round at Turner. ‘Is he badly hurt, Commander?’

‘He’ll survive,’ said Turner briefly. He had Carslake on his feet now, still moaning, his hand covering his smashed mouth.

For the first time, the Captain seemed to notice Ralston. He looked at him for a few seconds—an eternity on that bitter, storm-lashed bridge—then spoke, monosyllabic, ominous, thirty years of command behind the word.

‘Well?’

Ralston’s face was frozen, expressionless. His eyes never left Carslake.

‘Yes, sir. I did it. I hit him—the treacherous, murdering bastard!’

‘Ralston!’ The MAA’s voice was a whiplash.

Suddenly Ralston’s shoulders sagged. With an effort, he looked away from Carslake, looked wearily at Vallery.

‘I’m sorry. I forgot. He’s got a stripe on his arm—only ratings are bastards.’ Vallery winced at the bitterness. ‘But he—’

‘You’ve got frostbite.’

‘Rub your chin, man!’ Turner interrupted sharply.

Slowly, mechanically, Ralston did as he was told. He used the back of his hand. Vallery winced again as he saw the palm of the hand, raw and mutilated, skin and flesh hanging in strips. The agony of that bare-handed descent from the yardarm …

‘He tried to murder me, sir. It was deliberate.’ Ralston sounded tired.

‘Do you realize what you are saying?’ Vallery’s voice was as icy as the wind that swept over Langanes. But he felt the first, faint chill of fear.

‘He tried to murder me, sir,’ Ralston repeated tonelessly. ‘He returned the boards five minutes before I left the yardarm. WT must have started transmitting just as soon as I reached the mast, coming down.’

‘Nonsense, Ralston. How dare you—’

‘He’s right, sir.’ It was Etherton speaking. He was replacing the receiver carefully, his voice unhappy. ‘I’ve just checked.’

The chill of fear settled deeper on Vallery’s mind. Almost desperately he said, ‘Anyone can make a mistake. Ignorance may be culpable, but—’

‘Ignorance!’ The weariness had vanished from Ralston as if it had never been. He took two quick steps forward. ‘Ignorance! I gave him these boards, sir, when I came to the bridge. I asked for the Officer of the Watch and he said he was—I didn’t know the Gunnery Officer was on duty, sir. When I told him that the boards were to be returned only to me, he said: “I don’t want any of your damned insolence, Ralston. I know my job—you stick to yours. Just you get up there and perform your heroics.” He knew, sir.’

Carslake burst from the Commander’s supporting arm, turned and appealed wildly to the Captain. The eyes were white and staring, the whole face working.

‘That’s a lie, sir! It’s a damned, filthy lie!’ He mouthed the words, slurred them through smashed lips. ‘I never said … ’

The words crescendoed into a coughing, choking scream as Ralston’s fist smashed viciously, terribly into the torn, bubbling mouth. He staggered drunkenly through the port gate, crashed into the chart house, slid down to lie on the deck, huddled and white and still. Both Turner and the MAA had at once leapt forward to pinion the LTO’s arms, but he made no attempt to move.

Above and beyond the howl of the wind, the bridge seemed strangely silent. When Vallery spoke, his voice was quite expressionless.

‘Commander, you might phone for a couple of our marines. Have Carslake taken down to his cabin and ask Brooks to have a look at him. Master-at-Arms?’

‘Sir?’

‘Take this rating to the Sick Bay, let him have any necessary treatment. Then put him in cells. With an armed guard. Understand?’

‘I understand, sir.’ There was no mistaking the satisfaction in Hastings’s voice.

Vallery, Turner and the Gunnery Officer stood in silence as Ralston and the MAA left, in silence as two burly marines carried Carslake, still senseless, off the bridge and below. Vallery moved after them, broke step at Etherton’s voice behind him.

‘Sir?’

Vallery did not even turn round. ‘I’ll see you later, Etherton.’

‘No, sir. Please. This is important.’

Something in the Gunnery Officer’s voice held Vallery. He turned back, impatiently.

‘I’m not concerned with excusing myself, sir. There’s no excuse.’ The eyes were fixed steadily on Vallery. ‘I was standing at the Asdic door when Ralston handed the boards to Carslake. I overheard them—every word they said.’

Vallery’s face became very still. He glanced at Turner, saw that he, too, was waiting intently.

‘And Ralston’s version of the conversation?’ In spite of himself, Vallery’s voice was rough, edged with suspense.

‘Completely accurate, sir.’ The words were hardly audible. ‘In every detail. Ralston told the exact truth.’

Vallery closed his eyes for a moment, turned slowly, heavily away. He made no protest as he felt Turner’s hand under his arm, helping him down the steep ladder. Old Socrates had told him a hundred times that he carried the ship on his back. He could feel the weight of it now, the crushing burden of every last ounce of it.

Vallery was at dinner with Tyndall, in the Admiral’s day cabin, when the message arrived. Sunk in private thought, he gazed down at his untouched food as Tyndall smoothed out the signal.

The Admiral cleared his throat.

‘On course. On time. Sea moderate, wind freshening. Expect rendezvous as planned. Commodore 77.’

He laid the signal down. ‘Good God! Seas moderate, fresh wind! Do you reckon he’s in the same damned ocean as us?’

Vallery smiled faintly.

‘This is it, sir.’

‘This is it,’ Tyndall echoed. He turned to the messenger.

‘Make a signal. “You are running into severe storm. Rendezvous unchanged. You may be delayed. Will remain at rendezvous until your arrival.” That clear enough, Captain?’

‘Should be, sir. Radio silence?’

‘Oh, yes. Add “Radio silence. Admiral, 14th ACS.” Get it off at once, will you? Then tell WT to shut down themselves.’

The door shut softly. Tyndall poured himself some coffee, looked across at Vallery.

‘That boy still on your mind, Dick?’

Vallery smiled non-committally, lit a cigarette. At once he began to cough harshly.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he apologized. There was silence for some time, then he looked up quizzically.

‘What mad ambition drove me to become a cruiser captain?’ he asked sadly.

Tyndall grinned. ‘I don’t envy you … I seem to have heard this conversation before. What are you going to do about Ralston, Dick?’

‘What would you do, sir?’ Vallery countered.

‘Keep him locked up till we return from Russia. On a bread-and-water diet, in irons if you like.’

Vallery smiled.

‘You never were a very good liar, John.’

Tyndall laughed. ‘Touché!’ He was warmed, secretly pleased. Rarely did Richard Vallery break through his self-imposed code of formality. ‘A heinous offence, we all know, to clout one of HM commissioned officers, but if Etherton’s story is true, my only regret is that Ralston didn’t give Brooks a really large-scale job of replanning that young swine’s face.’

‘It’s true, all right, I’m afraid,’ said Vallery soberly. ‘What it amounts to is that naval discipline—oh, how old Starr would love this—compels me to punish a would-be murderer’s victim!’ He broke off in a fresh paroxysm of coughing, and Tyndall looked away: he hoped the distress wasn’t showing in his face, the pity and anger he felt that Vallery—that very perfect, gentle knight, the finest gentleman and friend he had ever known—should be coughing his heart out, visibly dying on his feet, because of the blind inhumanity of an SNO in London, two thousand miles away. ‘A Victim,’ Vallery went on at last, ‘who has already lost his mother, brother and three sisters … I believe he has a father at sea somewhere.’

‘And Carslake?’

‘I shall see him tomorrow. I should like you to be there, sir. I will tell him that he will remain an officer of this ship till we return to Scapa, then resign his commission … I don’t think he’d care to appear at a court-martial, even as a witness,’ he finished dryly.

‘Not if he’s sane, which I doubt,’ Tyndall agreed. A sudden thought struck him. ‘Do you think he is sane?’ He frowned.

‘Carslake,’ Vallery hesitated. ‘Yes, I think so, sir. At least, he was. Brooks isn’t so sure. Says he didn’t like the look of him tonight— something queer about him, he thinks, and in these abnormal conditions small provocations are magnified out of all proportion.’ Vallery smiled briefly. ‘Not that Carslake is liable to regard the twin assaults on pride and person as a small provocation.’

Tyndall nodded agreement. ‘He’ll bear watching … Oh, damn! I wish the ship would stay still. Half my coffee on the tablecloth. Young Spicer’—he looked towards the pantry—‘will be as mad as hell. Nineteen years old and a regular tyrant … I thought these would be sheltered waters, Dick?’

‘So they are, compared to what’s waiting for us. Listen!’ He cocked his head to the howling of the wind outside. ‘Let’s see what the weather man has to say about it.’

He reached for the desk phone, asked for the transmitting station. After a brief conversation he replaced the receiver.

‘TS says the anemometer is going crazy. Gusting up to eighty knots. Still north-west. Temperature steady at ten below.’ He shivered. ‘Ten below!’ Then looked consideringly at Tyndall. ‘Barometer almost steady at 27.8.’

‘What!’

‘27.8. That’s what they say. It’s impossible, but that’s what they say.’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Forty-five minutes, sir … This is a very complicated way of committing suicide.’

They were silent for a minute, then Tyndall spoke for both of them, answering the question in both their minds.

‘We must go, Dick. We must. And by the way, our fire-eating young Captain (D), the doughty Orr, wants to accompany us in the Sirrus … We’ll let him tag along a while. He has things to learn, that young man.’

At 2020 all ships had completed oiling. Hove to, they had had the utmost difficulty in keeping position in that great wind; but they were infinitely safer than in the open sea. They were given orders to proceed when the weather moderated, the Defender and escorts to Scapa, the squadron to a position 100 miles ENE of rendezvous. Radio silence was to be strictly observed.

At 2030 the Ulysses and Sirrus got under way to the East. Lights winked after them, messages of good luck. Fluently, Tyndall cursed the squadron for the breach of darken-ship regulations, realized that, barring themselves, there was no one on God’s earth to see the signals anyway, and ordered a courteous acknowledgement.

At 2045, still two miles short of Langanes point, the Sirrus was plunging desperately in mountainous seas, shipping great masses of water over her entire fo’c’sle and main deck, and, in the darkness, looking far less like a destroyer than a porpoising submarine.

At 2050, at reduced speed, she was observed to be moving in close to such slight shelter as the land afforded there. At the same time, her six-inch Aldis flashed her signal: ‘Screen doors stove in: “A” turret not tracking: flooding port boiler-room intake fans.’ And on the Sirrus’s bridge Commander Orr swore in chagrin as he received the Ulysses’s final message: ‘Lesson without words, No 1. Rejoin squadron at once. You can’t come out to play with the big boys.’ But he swallowed his disappointment, signalled: ‘Wilco. Just you wait till I grow up,’ pulled the Sirrus round in a madly swinging half-circle and headed thankfully back for shelter. Aboard the flagship, it was lost to sight almost immediately.

At 2100, the Ulysses moved out into the Denmark Strait.

SIX

Tuesday Night

It was the worst storm of the war. Beyond all doubt, had the records been preserved for Admiralty inspection, that would have proved to be incomparably the greatest storm, the most tremendous convulsion of nature since these recordings began. Living memory aboard the Ulysses that night, a vast accumulation of experience in every corner of the globe, could certainly recall nothing even remotely like it, nothing that would even begin to bear comparison as a parallel or precedent.

At ten o’clock, with all doors and hatches battened shut, with all traffic prohibited on the upper deck, with all crews withdrawn from gun-turrets and magazines and all normal deck watchkeeping stopped for the first time since her commissioning, even the taciturn Carrington admitted that the Caribbean hurricanes of the autumns of ’34 and ’37—when he’d run out of sea-room, been forced to heave-to in the dangerous right-hand quadrant of both these murderous cyclones—had been no worse than this. But the two ships he had taken through these—a 3,000-ton tramp and a superannuated tanker on the New York asphalt run—had not been in the same class for seaworthiness as the Ulysses. He had little doubt as to her ability to survive. But what the First Lieutenant did not know, what nobody had any means of guessing, was that this howling gale was still only the deadly overture. Like some mindless and dreadful beast from an ancient and other world, the Polar monster crouched on its own doorstep, waiting. At 2230, the Ulysses crossed the Arctic Circle. The monster struck.

It struck with a feral ferocity, with an appalling savagery that smashed minds and bodies into a stunned unknowingness. Its claws were hurtling rapiers of ice that slashed across a man’s face and left it welling red: its teeth were that sub-zero wind, gusting over 120 knots, that ripped and tore through the tissue paper of Arctic clothing and sank home to the bone: its voice was the devil’s orchestra, the roar of a great wind mingled with the banshee shrieking of tortured rigging, a requiem for fiends: its weight was the crushing power of the hurricane wind that pinned a man helplessly to a bulkhead, fighting for breath, or flung him off his feet to crash in some distant corner, broken-limbed and senseless. Baulked of prey in its 500-mile sweep across the frozen wastes of the Greenland ice-cap, it goaded the cruel sea into homicidal alliance and flung itself, titanic in its energy, ravenous in its howling upon the cockleshell that was the Ulysses.

The Ulysses should have died then. Nothing built by man could ever have hoped to survive. She should just have been pressed under to destruction, or turned turtle, or had her back broken, or disintegrated under these mighty hammerblows of wind and sea. But she did none of these things.

How she ever survived the insensate fury of that first attack, God only knew. The great wind caught her on the bow and flung her round in a 45° arc and pressed her far over on her side as she fell—literally fell—forty heart-stopping feet over and down the precipitous walls of a giant trough. She crashed into the valley with a tremendous concussion that jarred every plate, every Clyde-built rivet in her hull. The vibration lasted an eternity as overstressed metal fought to re-adjust itself, as steel compressed and stretched far beyond specified breaking loads. Miraculously she held, but the sands were running out. She lay far over on her starboard side, the gunwales dipping: half a mile away, towering high above the mast-top, a great wall of water was roaring down on the helpless ship.

The ‘Dude’ saved the day. The ‘Dude’, alternatively known as ‘Persil’, but officially as Engineer-Commander Dodson, immaculately clad as usual in overalls of the most dazzling white, had been at his control position in the engine-room when that tremendous gust had struck. He had no means of knowing what had happened. He had no means of knowing that the ship was not under command, that no one on the bridge had as yet recovered from that first shattering impact: he had no means of knowing that the quartermaster had been thrown unconscious into a corner of the wheelhouse, that his mate, almost a child in years, was too panic-stricken to dive for the madlyspinning wheel. But he did know that the Ulysses was listing crazily, almost broadside on, and he suspected the cause.

His shouts on the bridge tube brought no reply. He pointed to the port controls, roared ‘Slow’ in the ear of the Engineer WO—then leapt quickly for the starboard wheel.

Fifteen seconds later and it would have been too late. As it was, the accelerating starboard screw brought her round just far enough to take that roaring mountain of water under her bows, to dig her stern in to the level of the depth-charge rails, till forty feet of her airborne keel lay poised above the abyss below. When she plunged down, again that same shuddering vibration enveloped the entire hull. The fo’c’sle disappeared far below the surface, the sea flowing over and past the armoured side of ‘A’ turret. But she was bows on again. At once the ‘Dude’ signalled his WO for more revolutions, cut back the starboard engine.

Below decks, everything was an unspeakable shambles. On the mess-decks, steel lockers in their scores had broken adrift, been thrown in a dozen different directions, bursting hasps, and locks, spilling their contents everywhere. Hammocks had been catapulted from their racks, smashed crockery littered the decks: tables were twisted and smashed, broken stools stuck up at crazy angles, books, papers, teapots, kettles and crockery were scattered in insane profusion. And amidst this jumbled, sliding wreckage, hundreds of shouting, cursing, frightened and exhausted men struggled to their feet, or knelt, or sat, or just lay still.

Surgeon-Commander Brooks and Lieutenant Nicholls, with an inspired, untiring padre as good as a third doctor, were worked off their feet. The veteran Leading SBA Johnson, oddly enough, was almost useless—he was violently sick much of the time, seemed to have lost all heart: no one knew why—it was just one of these things and he had taken all he could.

Men were brought in to the Sick Bay in their dozens, in their scores, a constant trek that continued all night long as the Ulysses fought for her life, a trek that soon overcrowded the meagre space available and turned the wardroom into an emergency hospital. Bruises, cuts, dislocations, concussions, fractures—the exhausted doctors experienced everything that night. Serious injuries were fortunately rare, and inside three hours there were only nine bed-patients in the Sick Bay, including A.B. Ferry, his already mangled arm smashed in two places—a bitterly protesting Riley and his fellow-mutineers had been unceremoniously turfed out to make room for the more seriously injured.

About 2330, Nicholls was called to treat the Kapok Kid. Lurching, falling and staggering in the wildly gyrating ship he finally found the Navigator in his cabin. He looked very unhappy. Nicholls eyed him speculatively, saw the deep, ugly gash on his forehead, the swollen ankle peeping out below the Kapok Kid’s Martian survival suit. Bad enough, but hardly a borderline case, although one wouldn’t have thought so from the miserable, worried expression. Nicholls grinned inwardly.

‘Well, Horatio,’ he said unkindly, ‘what’s supposed to be the matter with you? Been drinking again?’

‘It’s my back, Johnny,’ he muttered. He turned facedown on the bunk. ‘Have a look at it, will you?’

Nicholl’s expression changed. He moved forward, then stopped short.

‘How the hell can I,’ he demanded irritably, ‘when you’re wearing that damned ugly suit of yours?’

‘That’s what I mean,’ said the Kapok Kid anxiously. ‘I was thrown against the searchlight controls—all knobs and nasty, sharp projections. Is it torn? Is it ripped, cut in any way? Are the seams—’

‘Well, for God’s sake! Do you mean to tell me—?’ Nicholls sank back incredulously on a locker.

The Kapok Kid looked at him hopefully.

‘Does that mean it’s all right?’

‘Of course it’s all right! If it’s a blasted tailor you want, why the hell—’

‘Enough!’ The Kapok Kid swung briskly on to the side of his bunk, lifting an admonitory hand. ‘There is work for you, sawbones.’ He touched his bleeding forehead. ‘Stitch this up and waste no time about it. A man of my calibre is urgently needed on the bridge … I’m the only man on this ship who has the faintest idea where we are.’

Busy with a swab, Nicholls grinned. ‘And where are we?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Kapok Kid frankly. ‘That’s what’s so urgent about it … But I do know where I was! Back in Henley. Did I ever tell you … ?’

The Ulysses did not die. Time and again that night, hove to with the wind fine of her starboard bow, as her bows crashed into and under the far shoulder of a trough, it seemed that she could never shake free from the great press of water. But time and again she did just that, shuddering, quivering under the fantastic strain. A thousand times before dawn officers and men blessed the genius of the Clyde ship-yard that had made her: a thousand times they cursed the blind malevolence of that great storm that put the Ulysses on the rack.

Perhaps ‘blind’ was not the right word. The storm wielded its wild hate with an almost human cunning. Shortly after the first onslaught, the wind had veered quickly, incredibly so and in defiance of all the laws, back almost to the north again. The Ulysses was on a lee shore, forced to keep pounding into gigantic seas.

Gigantic—and cunning also. Roaring by the Ulysses, a huge comber would suddenly whip round and crash on deck, smashing a boat to smithereens. Inside an hour, the barge, motor-boat and two whalers were gone, their shattered timbers swept away in the boiling cauldron. Carley rafts were broken off by the sudden hammer-blows of the same cunning waves, swept over the side and gone for ever: four of the Balsa floats went the same way.

But the most cunning attack of all was made right aft on the poop-deck. At the height of the storm a series of heavy explosions, half a dozen in as many seconds, almost lifted the stern out of the water. Panic spread like wildfire in the after mess-decks: practically every light abaft the after engine-room smashed or failed, in the darkness of the mess-decks, above the clamour, high-pitched cries of ‘Torpedoed!’ ‘Mined!’ ‘She’s breaking up!’ galvanized exhausted, injured men, even those—more than half—in various degrees of prostration from seasickness, into frantic stampeding towards doors and hatches, only to find doors and hatches jammed solidly by the intense cold. Here and there, the automatic battery lamps had clicked on when the lighting circuits failed: glowing little pin-points, they played on isolated groups of white, contorted faces, sunken-eyed and straining, as they struggled through the yellow pools of light. Conditions were ripe for disaster when a voice, harsh, mocking, cut cleanly through the bedlam. The voice was Ralston’s: he had been released before nine o’clock, on the Captain’s orders: the cells were in the very forepeak of the ship, and conditions there were impossible in a head sea: even so, Hastings had freed him only with the worst possible grace.

‘It’s our own depth charges! Do you hear me, you bloody fools—it’s our own depth charges!’ It was not so much the words as the biting mockery, that stopped short the panic, halted dazed, unthinking men in their tracks. ‘They’re our depth charges, I tell you! They must have been washed over the side!’

He was right. The entire contents of a rack had broken adrift, lifted from their cradles by some freak wave, and tumbled over the side. Through some oversight, they had been left set at their shallow setting—those put on for the midget submarine in Scapa—and had gone off almost directly under the ship. The damage, it seemed, was only minor.

Up in ‘A’ mess-deck, right for’ard, conditions were even worse. There was more wreckage on the decks and far more seasickness— not the green-faced, slightly ludicrous malaise of the crosschannel steamer, but tearing rendering conversions, dark and heavy with blood—for the bows had been rearing and lunging, rearing and plunging, thirty, forty, fifty feet at a time for endless, hopeless hours; but there was an even more sinister agent at work, rapidly making the mess-deck untenable.

At the for’ard end of the capstan flat, which adjoined the mess-deck, was the battery-room. In here were stored, or on charge, a hundred and one different batteries, ranging from the heavy lead-acid batteries weighing over a hundred pounds to the tiny nickel-calmium cells for the emergency lighting. Here, too, were stored earthenware jars of prepared acid and big, glass carboys of undiluted sulphuric. These last were permanently stored: in heavy weather, the big batteries were lashed down.

No one knew what had happened. It seemed likely—certain, indeed—that acid spilt from the batteries by the tremendous pitching had eaten through the lashings. Then a battery must have broken loose and smashed another, and another, and another, and then the jars and carboys until the entire floor—fortunately of acid-resisting material—was awash to a depth of five or six inches in sulphuric acid.

A young torpedoman, on a routine check, had opened the door and seen the splashing sea of acid inside. Panicking, and recalling vaguely that caustic soda, stored in quantities just outside, was a neutralizer for sulphuric, he had emptied a fortypound carton of it into the battery-room: he was in the Sick Bay now, blinded. The acid fumes saturated the capstan flat, making entry impossible without breathing equipment, and was seeping back, slowly, insidiously, into the mess-deck: more deadly still hundreds of gallons of salt water from sprung deck-plates and broken capstan speaking tubes were surging crazily around the flat: already the air was tainted with the first traces of chlorine gas. On the deck immediately above, Hartley and two seamen, belayed with ropes, had made a brief, hopelessly gallant attempt to plug the gaping holes: all three, battered into near senselessness by the great waves pounding the fo’c’sle, were dragged off within a minute.

For the men below, it was discomfort, danger and desperate physical illness: for the bare handful of men above, the officers and ratings on the bridge, it was pure undiluted hell. But a hell not of our latter-day imagining, a strictly Eastern and Biblical conception, but the hell of our ancient North-European ancestors, of the Vikings, the Danes, the Jutes, of Beowulf and the monsterhaunted meres—the hell of eternal cold.

True, the temperature registered a mere 10° below zero –42° of frost. Men have been known to live, even to work in the open, at far lower temperatures. What is not so well known, what is barely realized at all, is that when freezing point has been passed, every extra mile per hour of wind is equivalent, in terms of pure cold as it reacts on a human being, to a 1° drop in temperature. Not once, but several times that night, before it had finally raced itself to destruction, the anemometer had recorded gusts of over 125 mph, wave-flattening gusts that sundered stays and all but tore the funnels off. For minutes on end, the shrieking, screaming wind held steady at 100 mph and above—the total equivalent, for these numbed, paralysed creatures on the bridge, of something well below 100° below zero.

Five minutes at a time was enough for any man on the bridge, then he had to retire to the Captain’s shelter. Not that manning the bridge was more than a gesture anyway—it was impossible to look into that terrible wind: the cold would have seared the eyeballs blind, the ice would have gouged them out. And it was impossible even to see through the Kent Clear-view windscreens. They still spun at high speed but uselessly: the ice-laden storm, a gigantic sand-blaster, had starred and abraded the plate glass until it was completely opaque.

It was not a dark night. It was possible to see above, abeam and astern. Above, patches of nightblue sky and handfuls of stars could be seen at fleeting intervals, obscured as soon as seen by the scudding, shredded cloud-wrack. Abeam and astern, the sea was an inky black, laced with boiling white. Gone now were the serried ranks of yesterday, gone, too, the decorative white-caps: here now were only massive mountains of water, broken and confused, breaking this way and that, but always tending south. Some of these moving ranges of water—by no stretch of the imagination, only by proxy, could they be called waves—were small, insignificant—in size of a suburban house: others held a million tons of water, towered seventy to eighty feet, looming terrifyingly against the horizon, big enough to drown a cathedral … As the Kapok Kid remarked, the best thing to do with these waves was to look the other way. More often than not, they passed harmlessly by, plunging the Ulysses into the depths: rarely, they curled over and broke their tops into the bridge, soaking the unfortunate Officer of the Watch. He had then to be removed at once or he would literally have frozen solid within a minute.

So far they had survived, far beyond the expectation of any man. But, as they were blind ahead, there was always the worry of what would come next. Would the next sea be normal—for that storm, that was—or some nameless juggernaut that would push them under for ever? The suspense never lifted, a suspense doubled by the fact that when the Ulysses reared and crashed down, it did so soundlessly, sightlessly. They could judge its intensity only by movement and vibration: the sound of the sea, everything, was drowned in the Satanic cacophony of that howling wind in the upper works and rigging.

About two in the morning—it was just after the depth-charge explosions—some of the senior officers had staged their own private mutiny. The Captain, who had been persuaded to go below less than an hour previously, exhausted and shaking uncontrollably with cold, had been wakened by the depth-charging and had returned to the bridge. He found his way barred by the Commander and Commander Westcliffe, who bundled him quietly but firmly into the shelter. Turner heaved the door to, switched on the light. Vallery was more puzzled than angry.

‘What—what in the world does this mean?’ he demanded.

‘Mutiny!’ boomed Turner happily. His face was covered in blood from flying splinters of ice. ‘On the High Seas, is the technical term, I believe. Isn’t that so, Admiral?’

‘Exactly,’ the Admiral agreed. Vallery swung round, startled: Tyndall was lying in state on the bunk. ‘Mind you, I’ve no jurisdiction over a Captain in his own ship; but I can’t see a thing.’ He lay back on the bunk, eyes elaborately closed in seeming exhaustion. Only Tyndall knew that he wasn’t pretending.

Vallery said nothing. He stood there clutching a handrail, his face grey and haggard, his eyes bloodred and drugged with sleep. Turner felt a knife twist inside him as he looked at him. When he spoke, his voice was low and earnest, so unusual for him that he caught and held Vallery’s attention.

‘Sir, this is no night for a naval captain. Danger from any quarter except the sea itself just doesn’t exist. Agreed?’

Vallery nodded silently.

‘It’s a night for a seaman, sir. With all respect, I suggest that neither of us is in the class of Carrington—he’s just a different breed of man.’

‘Nice of you to include yourself, Commander,’ Vallery murmured. ‘And quite unnecessary.’

‘The first Lieutenant will remain on the bridge all night. So will Westcliffe here. So will I.’

‘Me, too,’ grunted Tyndall. ‘But I’m going to sleep.’ He looked almost as tired, as haggard as Vallery.

Turner grinned. ‘Thank you, sir. Well, Captain, I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit overcrowded here tonight … We’ll see you after breakfast.’

‘But—’

‘But me no buts,’ Westcliffe murmured.

‘Please,’ Turner insisted. ‘You will do us a favour.’

Vallery looked at him. ‘As Captain of the Ulysses … ’ His voice tailed off. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘I do,’ said Turner briskly, his hand on Vallery’s elbow. ‘Let’s go below.’

‘Don’t think I can manage by myself, eh?’ Vallery smiled faintly.

‘I do. But I’m taking no chances. Come along, sir.’

‘All right, all right.’ He sighed tiredly. ‘Anything for a quiet life … and a night’s sleep!’

Reluctantly, with a great effort, Lieutenant Nicholls dragged himself up from the mist-fogged depths of exhausted sleep. Slowly, reluctantly, he opened his eyes. The Ulysses, he realized, was still rolling as heavily, plunging as sickeningly as ever. The Kapok Kid, forehead swathed in bandages, the rest of his face pocked with blood, was bending over him. He looked disgustingly cheerful.

‘Hark, hark, the lark, et cetera,’ the Kapok Kid grinned. ‘And how are we this morning?’ he mimicked unctuously. The Hon. Carpenter held the medical profession in low esteem.

Nicholls focused blurred eyes on him.

‘What’s the matter, Andy? Anything wrong?’

‘With Messrs Carrington and Carpenter in charge,’ said the Kapok Kid loftily, ‘nothing could be wrong. Want to come up top, see Carrington do his stuff? He’s going to turn the ship round. In this little lot, it should be worth seeing!’

‘What! Dammit to hell! Have you woken me just—’

‘Brother, when this ship turns, you would wake up anyway— probably on the deck with a broken neck. But as it so happens, Jimmy requires your assistance. At least, he requires one of these heavy plate-glass squares which I happen to know you have in great numbers in the dispensary. But the dispensary’s locked—I tried it,’ he added shamelessly.

‘But what—I mean—plate glass—’ ‘Come and see for yourself,’ the Kapok Kid invited.

It was dawn now, a wild and terrible dawn, fit epilogue for a nightmare. Strange, trailing bands of misty-white vapour swept by barely at mast-top level, but high above the sky was clear. The seas, still gigantic, were shorter now, much shorter, and even steeper: the Ulysses was slowed right down, with barely enough steerage way to keep her head up—and even then, taking severe punishment in the precipitous head seas. The wind had dropped to a steady fifty knots—gale force: even at that, it seared like fire in Nicholls’s lungs as he stepped out on the flap-deck, blinded him with ice and cold. Hastily he wrapped scarves over his entire face, clambered up to the bridge by touch and instinct. The Kapok Kid followed with the glass. As they climbed, they heard the loudspeakers crackling some unintelligible message.

Turner and Carrington were alone on the twilit bridge, swathed like mummies. Not even their eyes were visible—they wore goggles.

‘Morning, Nicholls,’ boomed the Commander. ‘It is Nicholls, isn’t it?’ He pulled off his goggles, his back turned to the bitter wind, threw them away in disgust. ‘Can’t see damn all through these bloody things … Ah, Number One, he’s got the glass.’

Nicholls crouched in the for’ard lee of the compass platform. In a corner, the duckboards were littered with goggles, eye-shields and gas-masks. He jerked his head towards them.

‘What’s this—a clearance sale?’

‘We’re turning round, Doc.’ It was Carrington who answered, his voice calm and precise as ever, without a trace of exhaustion. ‘But we’ve got to see where we’re going, and as the Commander says, all these damn things there are useless—mist up immediately they’re put on—it’s too cold. If you’ll just hold it—so—and if you would wipe it, Andy?’

Nicholls looked at the great seas. He shuddered.

‘Excuse my ignorance, but why turn round at all?’

‘Because it will be impossible very shortly,’ Carrington answered briefly. Then he chuckled. ‘This is going to make me the most unpopular man in the ship. We’ve just broadcast a warning. Ready, sir?’

‘Stand by, engine-room: stand by, wheelhouse. Ready, Number One.’

For thirty seconds, forty-five, a whole minute, Carrington stared steadily, unblinkingly through the glass. Nicholls’s hands froze. The Kapok Kid rubbed industriously. Then:

‘Half-ahead, port!’

‘Half-ahead, port!’ Turner echoed.

‘Starboard 20!’

‘Starboard 20!’

Nicholls risked a glance over his shoulder. In the split second before his eyes blinded, filled with tears, he saw a huge wave bearing down on them, the bows already swinging diagonally away from it. Good God! Why hadn’t Carrington waited until that was past?

The great wave flung the bows up, pushed the Ulysses far over to starboard, then passed under. The Ulysses staggered over the top, corkscrewed wickedly down the other side, her masts, great gleaming tree trunks thick and heavy with ice, swinging in a great arc as she rolled over, burying her port rails in the rising shoulder of the next sea.

‘Full ahead port!’

‘Full ahead port!’

‘Starboard 30!’

‘Starboard 30!’

The next sea, passing beneath, merely straightened the Ulysses up. And then, at last, Nicholls understood. Incredibly, because it had been impossible to see so far ahead, Carrington had known that two opposing wave systems were due to interlock in an area of comparative calm: how he had sensed it, no one knew, would ever know, not even Carrington himself: but he was a great seaman, and he had known. For fifteen, twenty seconds, the sea was a seething white mass of violently disturbed, conflicting waves—of the type usually found, on a small scale, in tidal races and overfalls—and the Ulysses curved gracefully through. And then another great sea, towering almost to bridge height, caught her on the far turn of the quarter circle. It struck the entire length of the Ulysses—for the first time that night—with tremendous weight. It threw her far over on her side, the lee rails vanishing. Nicholls was flung off his feet, crashed heavily into the side of the bridge, the glass shattering. He could have sworn he heard Carrington laughing. He clawed his way back to the middle of the compass platform.

And still the great wave had not passed. It towered high above the trough into which the Ulysses, now heeled far over to 40°, had been so contemptuously flung, bore down remorselessly from above and sought, in a lethal silence and with an almost animistic savagery, to press her under. The inclinometer swung relentlessly over—45°, 50°, 53°, and hung there an eternity, while men stood on the side of the ship, braced with their hands on the deck, numbed minds barely grasping the inevitable. This was the end. The Ulysses could never come back.

A lifetime ticked agonizingly by. Nicholls and Carpenter looked at each other, blank-faced, expressionless. Tilted at that crazy angle, the bridge was sheltered from the wind. Carrington’s voice, calm, conversational, carried with amazing clarity.

‘She’d go to 65° and still come back,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Hang on to your hats, gentlemen. This is going to be interesting.’

Just as he finished, the Ulysses shuddered, then imperceptibly, then slowly, then with vicious speed lurched back and whipped through an arc of 90°, then back again. Once more Nicholls found himself in the corner of the bridge. But the Ulysses was almost round.

The Kapok Kid, grinning with relief, picked himself up and tapped Carrington on the shoulder.

‘Don’t look now, sir, but we have lost our mainmast.’

It was a slight exaggeration, but the top fifteen feet, which had carried the after radar scanner, were undoubtedly gone. That wicked, double whip-lash, with the weight of the ice, had been too much.

‘Slow ahead both! Midships!’

‘Slow ahead both! Midships!’

‘Steady as she goes!’

The Ulysses was round.

The Kapok Kid caught Nicholls’s eye, nodded at the First Lieutenant.

‘See what I mean, Johnny?’

‘Yes,’ Nicholls was very quiet. ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ Then he grinned suddenly. ‘Next time you make a statement, I’ll just take your word for it, if you don’t mind. These demonstrations of proof take too damn much out of a person!’

Running straight before the heavy stern sea, the Ulysses was amazingly steady. The wind, too, was dead astern now, the bridge in magical shelter. The scudding mist overhead had thinned out, was almost gone. Far away to the south-east a dazzling white sun climbed up above a cloudless horizon. The long night was over.

An hour later, with the wind down to thirty knots, radar reported contacts to the west. After another hour, with the wind almost gone and only a heavy swell running, smoke plumes tufted above the horizon. At 1030, in position, on time, the Ulysses rendezvoused with the convoy from Halifax.

SEVEN

Wednesday Night

The convoy came steadily up from the west, rolling heavily in cross seas, a rich argosy, a magnificent prize, for any German wolf-pack. Eighteen ships in this argosy, fifteen big, modern cargo ships, three 16,000-ton tankers, carrying a freight far more valuable, infinitely more vital, than any fleet of quinqueremes or galleons had ever known. Tanks, planes and petrol—what were gold and jewels, silks and the rarest of spices compared to these? £10,000,000, £20,000,000—the total worth of that convoy was difficult to estimate: in any event, its real value was not to be measured in terms of money.

Aboard the merchant ships, crews lined the decks as the Ulysses steamed up between the port and centre lines. Lined the decks and looked and wondered—and thanked their Maker they had been wide of the path of that great storm. The Ulysses, seen from another deck, was a strange sight: broken-masted, stripped of her rafts, with her boat falls hauled taut over empty cradles, she glistened like crystal in the morning light: the great wind had blown away all snow, had abraded and rubbed and polished the ice to a stain-smooth, transparent gloss: but on either side of the bows and before the bridge were huge patches of crimson, where the hurricane sandblaster of that long night had stripped off camouflage and base coats, exposing the red lead below.

The American escort was small—a heavy cruiser with a seaplane for spotting, two destroyers and two near-frigates of the coastguard type. Small, but sufficient: there was no need of escort carriers (although these frequently sailed with the Atlantic convoys) because the Luftwaffe could not operate so far west, and the wolf-packs, in recent months, had moved north and east of Iceland: there, they were not only nearer base—they could more easily lie astride the converging convoy routes to Murmansk.

ENE they sailed in company, freighters, American warships and the Ulysses until, late in the afternoon, the box-like silhouette of an escort carrier bulked high against the horizon. Half an hour later, at 1600, the American escorts slowed, dropped astern and turned, winking farewell messages of good luck. Aboard the Ulysses, men watched them depart with mixed feelings. They knew these ships had to go, that another convoy would already be mustering off the St Lawrence. There was none of the envy, the bitterness one might expect—and had indeed been common enough only a few weeks ago—among these exhausted men who carried the brunt of the war. There was instead a careless acceptance of things as they were, a quasi-cynical bravado, often a queer, high nameless pride that hid itself beneath twisted jests and endless grumbling.

The 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron—or what was left of it—was only two miles away now. Tyndall, coming to the bridge, swore fluently as he saw that a carrier and minesweeper were missing. An angry signal went out to Captain Jeffries of the Stirling, asking why orders had been disobeyed, where the missing ships were.

An Aldis flickered back its reply. Tyndall sat grim-faced and silent as Bentley read out the signal to him. The Wrestler’s steering gear had broken down during the night. Even behind Langanes the weather position had been severe, had worsened about midnight when the wind had veered to the north. The Wrestler, even with two screws, had lost almost all steering command, and, in zero visibility and an effort to maintain position, had gone too far ahead and grounded on the Vejle bank. She had grounded on the top of the tide. She had still been there, with the minesweeper Eager in attendance, when the squadron had sailed shortly after dawn.

Tyndall sat in silence for some minutes. He dictated a WT signal to the Wrestler, hesitated about breaking radio silence, counter-manded the signal, and decided to go to see for himself. After all, it was only three hours’ steaming distance. He signalled the Stirling: ‘Take over squadron command: will rejoin in the morning,’ and ordered Vallery to take the Ulysses back to Langanes.

Vallery nodded unhappily, gave the necessary orders. He was worried, badly so, was trying hard not to show it. The least of his worries was himself, although he knew, but never admitted to anyone, that he was a very sick man. He thought wryly that he didn’t have to admit it anyway—he was amused and touched by the elaborate casualness with which his officers sought to lighten his load, to show their concern for him.

He was worried, too, about his crew—they were in no fit state to do the lightest work, to survive that killing cold, far less sail the ship and fight her through to Russia. He was depressed, also, over the series of misfortunes that had befallen the squadron since leaving Scapa: it augured ill for the future, and he had no illusions as to what lay ahead for the crippled squadron. And always, a gnawing torment at the back of his mind, he worried about Ralston.

Ralston—that tall throwback to his Scandinavian ancestors, with his flaxen hair and still blue eyes. Ralston, whom nobody understood, with whom nobody on the ship had an intimate friendship, who went his own unsmiling, self-possessed way. Ralston, who had nothing left to fight for, except memories, who was one of the most reliable men in the Ulysses, extraordinarily decisive, competent and resourceful in any emergency—and who again found himself under lock and key. And for nothing that any reasonable and just man could call fault of his own.

Under lock and key—that was what hurt. Last night, Vallery had gladly seized the excuse of bad weather to release him, had intended to forget the matter, to let sleeping dogs lie. But Hastings, the Master-At-Arms, had exceeded his duty and returned him to cells during the forenoon watch. Masters-At-Arms—disciplinary Warrant Officers, in effect—had never been particularly noted for a humane, tolerant and ultra-kindly attitude to life in general or the lower deck in particular— they couldn’t afford to be. But even amongst such men, Hastings was an exception—a machinelike, seemingly emotionless creature, expressionless, unbending, strict, fair according to his lights, but utterly devoid of heart and sympathy. If Hastings were not careful, Vallery mused, he might very well go the same way as Lister, until recently the highly unpopular Master-At-Arms of the Blue Ranger. Not, when he came to think of it, that anyone knew what had happened to Lister, except that he had been so misguided as to take a walk on the flight-deck on a dark and starless night …

Vallery sighed. As he had explained to Foster, his hands were tied. Foster, the Captain of Marines, with an aggrieved and incensed Colour-Sergeant Evans standing behind him, had complained bitterly at having his marines withdrawn for guard duty, men who needed every minute of sleep they could snatch. Privately, Vallery had sympathized with Foster, but he couldn’t afford to countermand his original order—not, at least, until he had held a Captain’s Defaulters and placed Ralston under open arrest … He sighed again, sent for Turner and asked him to break out grass lines, a manila and a five-inch wire on the poop. He suspected that they would be needed shortly, and, as it turned out, his preparations were justified.

Darkness had fallen when they moved up to the Vejle bank, but locating the Wrestler was easy—her identification challenge ten minutes ago had given her approximate position, and now her squat bulk loomed high before them, a knife-edged silhouette against the pale afterglow of sunset. Ominously, her flight-deck raked perceptibly towards the stern, where the Eager lay, apparently at anchor. The sea was almost calm here—there was only a gentle swell running.

Aboard the Ulysses, a hooded pin-hole Aldis started to chatter.

‘Congratulations! How are you fast?’

From the Wrestler, a tiny light flickered in answer. Bentley read aloud as the message came.

‘Bows aft 100 feet.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Tyndall bitterly. ‘Just wonderful! Ask him, “How is steering-gear?”’

Back came the answer: ‘Diver down: transverse fracture of post: dockyard job.’

‘My God!’ Tyndall groaned. ‘A dockyard job! That’s handy. Ask him, “What steps have you taken?”’

‘All fuel and water pumped aft. Kedge anchor. Eager towing. Full astern, 1200-1230.’

The turn of the high tide, Tyndall knew. ‘Very successful, very successful indeed,’ he growled. ‘No, you bloody fool, don’t send that. Tell him to prepare to receive towing wire, bring own towing chain aft.’

‘Message understood,’ Bentley read.

‘Ask him, “How much excess squadron fuel have you?”’

‘800 tons.’

‘Get rid of it.’

Bentley read, ‘Please confirm.’

‘Tell him to empty the bloody stuff over the side!’ Tyndall roared.

The light on the Wrestler flickered and died in hurt silence.

At midnight the Eager steamed slowly ahead of the Ulysses, taking up the wire that led back to the cruiser’s fo’c’sle capstan: two minutes later, the Ulysses began to shudder as the four great engines boiled up the shallow water into a seething mudstained cauldron. The chain from the poop-deck to the Wrestler’s stern was a bare fifteen fathoms in length, angling up at 30°. This would force the carrier’s stern down—only a fraction, but in this situation every ounce counted—and give more positive buoyancy to the grounded bows. And much more important—for the racing screws were now aerating the water, developing only a fraction of their potential thrust— the proximity of the two ships helped the Ulysses’s screws reinforce the action of the Wrestler’s in scouring out a channel in the sand and mud beneath the carrier’s keel.

Twenty minutes before high tide, easily, steadily, the Wrestler slid off. At once the blacksmith on the Ulysses’s bows knocked off the shackle securing the Eager’s towing wire, and the Ulysses pulled the carrier, her engines shut down, in a big half-circle to the east.

By one o’clock the Wrestler was gone, the Eager in attendance and ready to pass a head rope for bad weather steering. On the bridge of the Ulysses, Tyndall watched the carrier vanish into the night, zig-zagging as the captain tried to balance the steering on the two screws.

‘No doubt they’ll get the hang of it before they get to Scapa,’ he growled. He felt cold, exhausted and only the way an Admiral can feel when he has lost three-quarters of his carrier force. He sighed wearily and turned to Vallery.

‘When do you reckon we’ll overtake the convoy?’

Vallery hesitated: not so the Kapok Kid.

‘0805,’ he answered readily and precisely. ‘At twenty-seven knots, on the intersection course I’ve just pencilled out.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Tyndall groaned. ‘That stripling again. What did I ever do to deserve him. As it happens, young man, it’s imperative that we overtake before dawn.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The Kapok Kid was imperturbable. ‘I thought so myself. On my alternative course, 33 knots, thirty minutes before dawn.’

‘I thought so myself! Take him away!’ Tyndall raved. ‘Take him away or I’ll wrap his damned dividers round … ’ He broke off, climbed stiffly out of his chair, took Vallery by the arm. ‘Come on, Captain. Let’s go below. What the hell’s the use of a couple of ancient has-beens like us getting in the way of youth?’ He passed out the gate behind the Captain, grinning tiredly to himself.

The Ulysses was at dawn Action Stations as the shadowy shapes of the convoy, a bare mile ahead, lifted out of the greying gloom. The great bulk of the Blue Ranger, on the starboard quarter of the convoy, was unmistakable. There was a moderate swell running, but not enough to be uncomfortable: the breeze was light, from the west, the temperature just below zero, the sky chill and cloudless. The time was exactly 0700.

At 0702, the Blue Ranger was torpedoed. The Ulysses was two cable-lengths away, on her starboard quarter: those on the bridge felt the physical shock of the twin explosions, heard them shattering the stillness of the dawn as they saw two searing columns of flame fingering skywards, high above the Blue Ranger’s bridge and well aft of it. A second later they heard a signalman shouting something unintelligible, saw him pointing forwards and downwards. It was another torpedo, running astern of the carrier, trailing its evil phosphorescent wake across the heels of the convoy, before spending itself in the darkness of the Arctic.

Vallery was shouting down the voice-pipe, pulling round the Ulysses, still doing upwards of twenty knots, in a madly heeling, skidding turn, to avoid collision with the slewing carrier. Three sets of Aldis lamps and the fighting lights were already stuttering out the ‘Maintain Position’ code signal to ships in the convoy. Marshall, on the phone, was giving the stand-by order to the depth-charge LTO: gun barrels were already depressing, peering hungrily into the treacherous sea. The signal to the Sirrus stopped short, unneeded: the destroyer, a half-seen blue in the darkness, was already knifing its way through the convoy, white water piled high at its bows, headed for the estimated position of the U-boat.

The Ulysses sheered by parallel to the burning carrier, less than 150 feet away; travelling so fast, heeling so heavily and at such close range, it was impossible to gather more than a blurred impression, a tangled, confused memory of heavy black smoke laced with roaring columns of flame, appalling in that near-darkness, of a drunkenly listing flight-deck, of Grummans and Corsairs cartwheeling grotesquely over the edge to splash icy clouds of spray in shocked faces, as the cruiser slewed away; and then the Ulysses was round, heading back south for the kill.

Within a minute, the signal-lamp of the Vectra, up front with the convoy, started winking: ‘Contact, Green 70, closing: Contact, Green 70, closing.’

‘Acknowledge,’ Tyndall ordered briefly.

The Aldis had barely begun to clack when the Vectra cut through the signal.

‘Contacts, repeat contacts. Green 90, Green 90. Closing. Very close. Repeat contacts, contacts.’

Tyndall cursed softly.

‘Acknowledge. Investigate.’ He turned to Vallery. ‘Let’s join him, Captain. This is it. Wolf-pack Number One—and in force. No bloody right to be here,’ he added bitterly. ‘So much for Admiralty Intelligence!’

The Ulysses was round again, heading for the Vectra. It should have been growing lighter now, but the Blue Ranger, her squadron fuel tanks on fire, a gigantic torch against the eastern horizon, had the curious effect of throwing the surrounding sea into heavy darkness. She lay almost athwart of the flagship’s course for the Vectra, looming larger every minute. Tyndall had his night glasses to his eyes, kept on muttering: ‘The poor bastards, the poor bastards!’

The Blue Ranger was almost gone. She lay dead in the water, heeled far over to starboard, ammunition and petrol tanks going up in a constant series of crackling reports. Suddenly, a succession of dull, heavy explosions rumbled over the sea: the entire bridge island structure lurched crazily sideways, held, then slowly, ponderously, deliberately, the whole massive body of it toppled majestically into the glacial darkness of the sea. God only knew how many men perished with it, deep down in the Arctic, trapped in its iron walls. They were the lucky ones.

The Vectra, barely two miles ahead now, was pulling round south in a tight circle. Vallery saw her, altered course to intercept. He heard Bentley shouting something unintelligible from the fore corner of the compass platform. Vallery shook his head, heard him shouting again, his voice desperate with some nameless urgency, his arm pointing frantically over the windscreen, and leapt up beside him.

The sea was on fire. Flat, calm, burdened with hundreds of tons of fuel oil, it was a vast carpet of licking, twisting flames. That much, for a second, and that only, Vallery saw: then with heartstopping shock, with physically sickening abruptness, he saw something else again: the burning sea was alive with swimming, struggling men. Not a handful, not even dozens, but literally hundreds, soundlessly screaming, agonizingly dying in the barbarous contrariety of drowning and cremation.

‘Signal from Vectra, sir.’ It was Bentley speaking, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. ‘“Depth-charging. 3, repeat 3 contacts. Request immediate assistance.”’

Tyndall was at Vallery’s side now. He heard Bentley, looked a long second at Vallery, following his sick, fascinated gaze into the sea ahead.

For a man in the sea, oil is an evil thing. It clogs his movements, burns his eyes, sears his lungs and tears away his stomach in uncontrollable paroxysms of retching; but oil on fire is a hellish thing, death by torture, a slow, shrieking death by drowning, by burning, by asphyxiation—for the flames devour all the life-giving oxygen on the surface of the sea. And not even in the bitter Arctic is there the merciful extinction by cold, for the insulation of an oil-soaked body stretches a dying man on the rack for eternity, carefully preserves him for the last excruciating refinement of agony. All this Vallery knew.

He knew, too, that for the Ulysses to stop, starkly outlined against the burning carrier, would have been suicide. And to come sharply round to starboard, even had there been time and room to clear the struggling, dying men in the sea ahead, would have wasted invaluable minutes, time and to spare for the U-boats ahead to line up firing-tracks on the convoy; and the Ulysses’s first responsibility was to the convoy. Again all this Vallery knew. But at that moment, what weighed most heavily with him was common humanity. Fine off the port bow, close in to the Blue Ranger, the oil was heaviest, the flames fiercest, the swimmers thickest: Vallery looked back over his shoulder at the Officer of the Watch.

‘Port 10!’

‘Port 10, sir.’

‘Midships!’

‘Midships, sir.’

‘Steady as she goes!’

For ten, fifteen seconds the Ulysses held her course, arrowing through the burning sea to the spot where some gregariously atavistic instinct for self-preservation held two hundred men knotted together in a writhing, seething mass, gasping out their lives in hideous agony. For a second a great gout of flame leapt up in the centre of the group, like a giant, incandescent magnesium flare, a flame that burnt the picture into the hearts and minds of the men on the bridge with a permanence and searing clarity that no photographic plate could ever have reproduced: men on fire, human torches beating insanely at the flames that licked, scorched and then incinerated clothes, hair and skin: men flinging themselves almost out of the water, backs arched like tautened bows, grotesque in convulsive crucifixion: men lying dead in the water, insignificant, featureless little oil-stained mounds in an oil-soaked plain: and a handful of fear-maddened men, faces inhumanly contorted, who saw the Ulysses and knew what was coming, as they frantically thrashed their way to a safety that offered only a few more brief seconds of unspeakable agony before they gladly died.

‘Starboard 30!’ Vallery’s voice was low, barely a murmur, but it carried clearly through the shocked silence on the bridge.

‘Starboard 30, sir.’

For the third time in ten minutes, the Ulysses slewed crazily round in a racing turn. Turning thus, a ship does not follow through the line of the bows cutting the water; there is a pronounced sideways or lateral motion, and the faster and sharper the turn, the more violent the broadside skidding motion, like a car on ice. The side of the Ulysses, still at an acute angle, caught the edge of the group on the port bow: almost on the instant, the entire length of the swinging hull smashed into the heart of the fire, into the thickest press of dying men.

For most of them, it was just extinction, swift and glad and merciful. The tremendous concussion and pressure waves crushed the life out of them, thrust them deep down into the blessed oblivion of drowning, thrust them down and sucked them back into the thrashing vortex of the four great screws …

On board the Ulysses, men for whom death and destruction had become the stuff of existence, to be accepted with the callousness and jesting indifference that alone kept them sane—these men clenched impotent fists, mouthed meaningless, useless curses over and over again and wept heedlessly like little children. They wept as pitiful, charred faces, turned up towards the Ulysses and alight with joy and hope, petrified into incredulous staring horror, as realization dawned and the water closed over them; as hate-filled men screamed insane invective, both arms raised aloft, shaking fists white-knuckled through the dripping oil as the Ulysses trampled them under: as a couple of young boys were sucked into the maelstrom of the propellers, still giving the thumbs-up sign: as a particularly shocking case, who looked as if he had been barbecued on a spit and had no right to be alive, lifted a scorified hand to the blackened hole that had been his mouth, flung to the bridge a kiss in token of endless gratitude; and wept, oddly, most of all, at the inevitable humorist who lifted his fur cap high above his head and bowed gravely and deeply, his face into the water as he died.

Suddenly, mercifully, the sea was empty. The air was strangely still and quiet, heavy with the sickening stench of charred flesh and burning Diesel, and the Ulysses’s stern was swinging wildly almost under the black pall overhanging the Blue Ranger amidships, when the shells struck her.

The shells—three 3.7s—came from the Blue Ranger. Certainly, no living gun-crews manned these 3.7s—the heat must have ignited the bridge fuses in the cartridge cases. The first shell exploded harmlessly against the armour-plating: the second wrecked the bosun’s store, fortunately empty: the third penetrated No 3 Low Power Room via the deck. There were nine men in there—an officer, seven ratings and Chief-Torpedo Gunner’s Mate Noyes. In that confined space, death was instantaneous.

Only seconds later a heavy rumbling explosion blew out a great hole along the waterline of the Blue Ranger and she fell slowly, wearily right over on her starboard side, her flight-deck vertical to the water, as if content to die now that, dying, she had lashed out at the ship that had destroyed her crew.

On the bridge, Vallery still stood on the yeoman’s platform, leaning over the starred, opaque windscreen. His head hung down, his eyes were shut and he was retching desperately, the gushing blood—arterial blood—ominously bright and scarlet in the erubescent glare of the sinking carrier. Tyndall stood there helplessly beside him, not knowing what to do, his mind numbed and sick. Suddenly, he was brushed unceremoniously aside by the Surgeon-Commander, who pushed a white towel to Vallery’s mouth and led him gently below. Old Brooks, everyone knew, should have been at his Action Stations position in the Sick Bay: no one dared say anything.

Carrington straightened the Ulysses out on course, while he waited for Turner to move up from the after Director tower to take over the bridge. In three minutes the cruiser was up with the Vectra, methodically quartering for a lost contact. Twice the ships regained contact, twice they dropped heavy patterns. A heavy oil slick rose to the surface: possibly a kill, probably a ruse, but in any event, neither ship could remain to investigate further. The convoy was two miles ahead now, and only the Stirling and Viking were there for its protection—a wholly inadequate cover and powerless to save the convoy from any determined attack.

It was the Blue Ranger that saved FR77. In these high latitudes, dawn comes slowly, interminably: even so, it was more than half-light, and the merchant ships, line ahead through that very gentle swell, lifted clear and sharp against a cloudless horizon, a U-boat Commander’s dream—or would have been, had he been able to see them. But, by this time, the convoy was completely obscured from the wolf-pack lying to the south: the light westerly wind carried the heavy black smoke from the blazing carrier along the southern flank of the convoy, at sea level, the perfect smoke-screen, dense, impenetrable. Why the U-boats had departed from their almost invariable practice of launching dawn attacks from the north, so as to have their targets between themselves and the sunrise, could only be guessed. Tactical surprise, probably, but whatever the reason it was the saving of the convoy. Within an hour, the thrashing screws of the convoy had left the wolf-pack far behind—and FR77, having slipped the pack, was far too fast to be overtaken again.

Aboard the flagship, the WT transmitter was chattering out a coded signal to London. There was little point, Tyndall had decided, in maintaining radio silence now; the enemy knew their position to a mile. Tyndall smiled grimly as he thought of the rejoicing in the German Naval High Command at the news that FR77 was without any air cover whatsoever; as a starter, they could expect Charlie within the hour.

The signal read: ‘Admiral, 14 ACS: To DNC, London. Rendezvoused FR77 1030 yesterday. Weather conditions extreme. Severe damage to Carriers: Defender, Wrestler unserviceable, returning base under escort: Blue Ranger torpedoed 0702, sunk 0730 today: Convoy Escorts now Ulysses, Stirling, Sirrus, Vectra, Viking: no minesweepers—Eager to base, minesweeper from Hvalfjord failed rendezvous: Urgently require air support: Can you detach carrier battle squadron: Alternatively, permission return base. Please advise immediately.’

The wording of the message, Tyndall pondered, could have been improved. Especially the bit at the end—probably sounded sufficiently like a threat to infuriate old Starr, who would only see in it pusillanimous confirmation of his conviction of the Ulysses’s—and Tyndall’s—unfitness for the job … Besides, for almost two years now—since long before the sinking of the Hood by the Bismarck—it had been Admiralty policy not to break up the Home Fleet squadrons by detaching capital ships or carriers. Old battleships too slow for modern inter-naval surface action—vessels such as the Ramillies and the Malaya—were used for selected Arctic convoys: with that exception, the official strategy was based on keeping the Home Fleet intact, containing the German Grand Fleet—and risking the convoys … Tyndall took a last look round the convoy, sighed warily and eased himself down to the duckboards. What the hell, he thought, let it go. If it wasted his time sending it, it would also waste old Starr’s time reading it.

He clumped his way heavily down the bridge ladders, eased his bulk through the door of the Captain’s cabin, hard by the FDR. Vallery, partly undressed, was lying in his bunk, between very clean, very white sheets: their knife-edged ironing crease-marks contrasted oddly with the spreading crimson stain. Vallery himself, gaunt-cheeked and cadaverous beneath dark stubble of beard, red eyes sunk deep in great hollow sockets, looked corpse-like, already dead. From one corner of his mouth blood trickled down a parchment cheek. As Tyndall shut the door, Vallery lifted a wasted hand, all ivory knuckles and blue veins, in feeble greeting.

Tyndall closed the door carefully, quietly. He took his time, time and to spare to allow the shock to drain out of his face. When he turned round, his face was composed, but he made no attempt to disguise his concern.

‘Thank God for old Socrates!’ he said feelingly. ‘Only man in the ship who can make you see even a modicum of sense.’ He parked himself on the edge of the bed. ‘How do you feel, Dick?’

Vallery grinned crookedly. There was no humour in his smile.

‘All depends what you mean, sir. Physically or mentally? I feel a bit worn out—not really ill, you know. Doc says he can fix me up—temporarily anyway. He’s going to give me a plasma transfusion—says I’ve lost too much blood.’

‘Plasma?’

‘Plasma. Whole blood would be a better coagulant. But he thinks it may prevent—or minimize—future attacks …’ He paused, wiped some froth off his lips, and smiled again, as mirthlessly as before. ‘It’s not really a doctor and medicine I need, John—it’s a padre—and forgiveness.’ His voice trailed off into silence. The cabin was very quiet.

Tyndall shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat noisily. Rarely had he been so conscious that he was, first and last, a man of action.

‘Forgiveness? What on earth do you mean, Dick?’ He hadn’t meant to speak so loudly, so harshly.

‘You know damn well what I mean,’ Vallery said mildly. He was a man who was rarely heard to swear, to use the most innocuous oath. ‘You were with me on the bridge this morning.’

For perhaps two minutes neither man said a word. Then Vallery broke into a fresh paroxysm of coughing. The towel in his hand grew dark, sodden, and when he leaned back on his pillow Tyndall felt a quick stab of fear. He bent quickly over the sick man, sighed in soundless relief as he heard the quick, shallow breathing.

Vallery spoke again, his eyes still closed.

‘It’s not so much the men who were killed in the Low Power Room.’ He seemed to be talking to himself, his voice a drifting murmur. ‘My fault, I suppose—I took the Ulysses too near the Ranger. Foolish to go near a sinking ship, especially if she’s burning … But just one of these things, just one of the risks … they happen … ’ The rest was a blurred, dying whisper. Tyndall couldn’t catch it.

He rose abruptly to his feet, pulling his gloves on.

‘Sorry, Dick,’ he apologized. ‘Shouldn’t have come—shouldn’t have stayed so long. Old Socrates will give me hell.’

‘It’s the others—the boys in the water.’ Vallery might never have heard him. ‘I hadn’t the right—I mean, perhaps some of them would … ’ Again his voice was lost for a moment, then he went on strongly: ‘Captain Richard Vallery, DSO—judge, jury and executioner. Tell me, John, what am I going to say when my turn comes?’

Tyndall hesitated, heard the authoritative rap on the door and jerked round, his breath escaping in a long, inaudible sigh of thankfulness.

‘Come in,’ he called.

The door opened and Brooks walked in. He stopped short at the sight of the Admiral, turned to the white-coated assistant behind him, a figure weighed down with stands, bottles, tubing and various paraphernalia.

‘Remain outside, Johnson, will you?’ he asked. ‘I’ll call you when I want you.’

He closed the door, crossed the cabin and pulled a chair up to the Captain’s bunk. Vallery’s wrist between his fingers, he looked coldly across at Tyndall. Nicholls, Brooks remembered, was insistent that the Admiral was far from well. He looked tired, certainly, but more unhappy than tired … The pulse was very fast, irregular.

‘You’ve been upsetting him,’ Brooks accused.

‘Me? Good God, no!’ Tyndall was injured. ‘So help me, Doc, I never said—’

‘Not guilty, Doc.’ It was Vallery who spoke, his voice stronger now. ‘He never said a word. I’m the guilty man—guilty as hell.’

Brooks looked at him for a long moment. Then he smiled, smiled in understanding and compassion.

‘Forgiveness, sir. That’s it, isn’t it?’ Tyndall started in surprise, looked at him in wonder.

Vallery opened his eyes. ‘Socrates!’ he murmured. ‘You would know.’

‘Forgiveness,’ Brooks mused. ‘Forgiveness. From whom—the living, the dead—or the Judge?’

Again Tyndall started. ‘Have you—have you been listening outside? How can you—?’

‘From all three, Doc. A tall order, I’m afraid.’

‘From the dead, sir, you are quite right. There would be no forgiveness: only their blessing, for there is nothing to forgive. I’m a doctor, don’t forget—I saw those boys in the water … you sent them home the easy way. As for the Judge—you know, “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord”—the Old Testament conception of the Lord who takes away in His own time and His own way, and to hell with mercy and charity.’ He smiled at Tyndall. ‘Don’t look so shocked, sir. I’m not being blasphemous. If that were the Judge, Captain, neither you nor I—nor the Admiral— would ever want any part of him. But you know, it isn’t so … ’

Vallery smiled faintly, propped himself up on his pillow. ‘You make good medicine, Doctor. It’s a pity you can’t speak for the living also.’

‘Oh, can’t I?’ Brooks smacked his hand on his thigh, guffawed in sudden recollection. ‘Oh, my word, it was magnificent!’ He laughed again in genuine amusement. Tyndall looked at Vallery in mock despair.

‘Sorry,’ Brooks apologized. ‘Just fifteen minutes ago a bunch of sympathetic stokers deposited on the deck of the Sick Bay the prone and extremely unconscious form of one of their shipmates. Guess who? None other than our resident nihilist, our old friend Riley. Slight concussion and assorted facial injuries, but he should be restored to the bosom of his mess-deck by nightfall. Anyway, he insists on it—claims his kittens need him.’

Vallery looked up, amused, curious.

‘Fallen down the stokehold again, I presume?’

‘Exactly the question I put, sir—although it looked more as if he had fallen into a concrete mixer. “No, sir,” says one of the stretcher-bearers. “He tripped over the ship’s cat.” “Ship’s cat?” I says. “What ship’s cat?” So he turns to his oppo and says: “Ain’t we got a ship’s cat, Nobby?” Whereupon the stoker looks at him pityingly and says: “E’s got it all wrong, sir. Poor old Riley just came all over queer— took a weak turn, ’e did. I ’ope ’e ain’t ’urt ’isself?” He sounded quite anxious.’

‘What had happened?’ Tyndall queried.

‘I let it go at that. Young Nicholls took two of them aside, promised no action and had it out of them in a minute flat. Seems that Riley saw in this morning’s affair a magnificent opportunity for provoking trouble. Cursed you for an inhuman, cold-blooded murderer and, I regret to say, cast serious aspersions on your immediate ancestors—and all of this, mind you, where he thought he was safe—among his own friends. His friends half-killed him … You know, sir, I envy you … ’

He broke off, rose abruptly to his feet.

‘Now, sir, if you’ll just lie down and roll up your sleeve … Oh, damn!’

‘Come in.’ It was Tyndall who answered the knock. ‘Ah, for me, young Chrysler. Thank you.’

He looked up at Vallery. ‘From London—in reply to my signal.’ He turned it over in his hand two or three times. ‘I suppose I have to open it some time,’ he said reluctantly.

The Surgeon-Commander half-rose to his feet.

‘Shall I—’

‘No, no, Brooks. Why should you? Besides, it’s from our mutual friend, Admiral Starr. I’m sure you’d like to hear what he’s got to say, wouldn’t you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Brooks was very blunt. ‘I can’t imagine it’ll be anything good.’

Tyndall opened the signal, smoothed it out.

‘DNO to Admiral Commanding 14 ACS,’ he read slowly. ‘Tirpitz reported preparing to move out. Impossible detach Fleet carrier: FR77 vital: proceed Murmansk all speed: good luck: Starr.’ Tyndall paused, his mouth twisted. ‘Good luck! He might have spared us that!’

For a long time the three men looked at each other, silently, without expression. Characteristically, it was Brooks who broke the silence.

‘Speaking of forgiveness,’ he murmured quietly, ‘what I want to know is—who on God’s earth, above or below it, is ever going to forgive that vindictive old bastard?’

EIGHT

Thursday Night

It was still only afternoon, but the grey Arctic twilight was already thickening over the sea as the Ulysses dropped slowly astern. The wind had died away completely; again the snow was falling, steadily, heavily, and visibility was down to a bare cable-length. It was bitterly cold.

In little groups of three and four, officers and men made their way aft to the starboard side of the poop-deck. Exhausted, bone-chilled men, mostly sunk in private and bitter thought, they shuffled wordlessly aft, dragging feet kicking up little puffs of powdery snow. On the poop, they ranged themselves soundlessly behind the Captain or in a line inboard and aft of the long, symmetrical row of snow-covered hummocks that heaved up roundly from the unbroken whiteness of the poop.

The Captain was flanked by three of his officers—Carslake, Etherton and the Surgeon-Commander. Carslake was by the guardrail, the lower half of his face swathed in bandages to the eyes. For the second time in twenty-four hours he had waylaid Vallery, begged him to reconsider the decision to deprive him of his commission. On the first occasion Vallery had been adamant, almost contemptuous: ten minutes ago he had been icy and abrupt, had threatened Carslake with close arrest if he annoyed him again. And now Carslake just stared unseeingly into the snow and gloom, pale-blue eyes darkened and heavy with hate.

Etherton stood just behind Vallery’s left shoulder, shivering uncontrollably. Above the white, jerking line of compressed mouth, cheek and jaw muscles were working incessantly: only his eyes were steady, dulled in sick fascination at the curious mound at his feet. Brooks, too, was tight-lipped, but there the resemblance ended: red of face and wrathful blue of eye, he fumed and seethed as can only a doctor whose orders have been openly flouted by the critically ill. Vallery, as Brooks had told him, forcibly and insubordinately, had no bloody right to be there, was all sorts of a damned fool for leaving his bunk. But, as Vallery had mildly pointed out, somebody had to conduct a funeral service, and that was the Captain’s duty if the padre couldn’t do it. And this day the padre couldn’t do it, for it was the padre who lay dead at his feet … At his feet, and at the feet of Etherton—the man who had surely killed him.

The padre had died four hours ago, just after Charlie had gone. Tyndall had been far out in his estimate. Charlie had not appeared within the hour. Charlie had not appeared until mid-morning, but when he did come he had the company of three of his kind. A long haul indeed from the Norwegian coast to this, the 10th degree west of longitude, but nothing for these giant Condors—Foke-Wulf 200s—who regularly flew the great dawn to dusk half-circle from Trondheim to Occupied France, round the West Coast of the British Isles.

Condors in company always meant trouble, and these were no exception. They flew directly over the convoy, approaching from astern: the barrage from merchant ships and escorts was intense, and the bombing attack was pressed home with a marked lack of enthusiasm: the Condors bombed from a height of 7,000 feet. In that clear, cold morning air the bombs were in view almost from the moment they cleared the bomb-bays: there was time to spare to take avoiding action. Almost at once the Condors had broken off the attack and disappeared to the east impressed, but apparently unharmed, by the warmth of their reception.

In the circumstances, the attack was highly suspicious. Circumspect Charlie might normally be on reconnaissance, but on the rare occasions that he chose to attack he generally did so with courage and determination. The recent sally was just too timorous, the tactics too obviously hopeless. Possibly, of course, recent entrants to the Luftwaffe were given to a discretion so signally lacking in their predecessors, or perhaps they were under strict orders not to risk their valuable craft. But probably, almost certainly, it was thought, that futile attack was only diversionary and the main danger lay elsewhere. The watch over and under the sea was intensified.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed and nothing had happened. Radar and Asdic screens remained obstinately clear. Tyndall finally decided that there was no justification for keeping the entire ship’s company, so desperately in need of rest, at Action Stations for a moment longer and ordered the stand-down to be sounded.

Normal Defence Stations were resumed. All forenoon work had been cancelled, and officers and ratings off watch, almost to a man, went to snatch what brief sleep they could. But not all. Brooks and Nicholls had their patients to attend to: the Navigator returned to the chart-house: Marshall and his Commissioned Gunner, Mr Peters, resumed their interrupted routine rounds: and Etherton, nervous, anxious, over-sensitive and desperately eager to redeem himself for his share in the Carslake-Ralston episode, remained huddled and watchful in the cold, lonely eyrie of the Director Tower.

The sharp, urgent call from the deck outside came to Marshall and Peters as they were talking to the Leading Wireman in charge of No 2 Electrical Shop. The shop was on the port side of the fo’c’sle deck cross-passage which ran athwartships for’ard of the wardroom, curving aft round the trunking of ‘B’ turret. Four quick steps had them out of the shop, through the screen door and peering over the side through the freshly falling snow, following the gesticulating finger of an excited marine. Marshall glanced at the man, recognized him immediately: it was Charteris, the only ranker known personally to every officer in the ship—in port, he doubled as wardroom barman.

‘What is it, Charteris?’ he demanded. ‘What are you seeing? Quickly, man!’

‘There, sir! Look! Out there—no, a bit more to your right! It’s— it’s a sub, sir, a U-boat!’

‘What? What’s that? A U-boat?’ Marshall halfturned as the Rev Winthrop, the padre, squeezed to the rail between himself and Charteris. ‘Where? Where is it? Show me, show me!’

‘Straight ahead, padre. I can see it now—but it’s a damned funny shape for a U-boat—if you’ll excuse the language,’ Marshall added hastily. He caught the war-like, un-Christian gleam in Winthrop’s eye, smothered a laugh and peered through the snow at the strange squat shape which had now drifted almost abreast of them.

High up in the Tower, Etherton’s restless, hunting eyes had already seen it, even before Charteris. Like Charteris, he immediately thought it was a U-boat caught surfacing in a snowstorm—the pay-off of the attack by the Condors: the thought that Asdic or radar would certainly have picked it up never occurred to him. Time, speed—that was the essence, before it vanished. Unthinkingly, he grabbed the phone to the for’ard multiple pom-pom.

‘Director—pom-pom!’ he barked urgently. ‘U-boat, port 60. Range 100 yards, moving aft. Repeat, port 60. Can you see it? … No, no, port 60-70 now!’ he shouted desperately. ‘Oh, good, good! Commence tracking.’

‘On target, sir,’ the receiver crackled in his ear.

‘Open fire—continuous!’

‘Sir—but, sir—Kingston’s not here. He went—’

‘Never mind Kingston!’ Etherton shouted furiously. Kingston, he knew, was Captain of the Gun. ‘Open fire, you fools—now! I’ll take full responsibility.’ He thrust the phone back on the rest, moved across to the observation panel … Then realization, sickening, shocking, fear seared through his mind and he lunged desperately for the phone.

‘Belay the last order!’ he shouted wildly. ‘Cease fire! Cease fire! Oh, my God, my God, my God!’ Through the receiver came the staccato, angry bark of the two-pounder. The receiver dropped from his hand, crashed against the bulkhead. It was too late.

It was too late because he had committed the cardinal sin—he had forgotten to order the removal of the muzzle-covers—the metal plates that sealed off the flash-covers of the guns when not in use. And the shells were fused to explode on contact …

The first shell exploded inside its barrel, killing the trainer and seriously wounding the communication number: the other three smashed through their flimsy covers and exploded within a second of each other, a few feet from the faces of the four watchers on the fo’c’sle deck.

All four were untouched, miraculously untouched by the flying, screaming metal. It flew outwards and downwards, a red-hot iron hail sizzling into the sea. But the blast of the explosion was backwards, and the power of even a few pounds of high explosive detonating at arm’s length is lethal.

The padre died instantly, Peters and Charteris within seconds, and all from the same cause—telescoped occiputs. The blast hurled them backwards off their feet, as if flung by a giant hand, the backs of their heads smashing to an eggshell pulp against the bulkhead. The blood seeped darkly into the snow, was obliterated in a moment.

Marshall was lucky, fantastically so. The explosion—he said afterwards that it was like getting in the way of the driving piston of the Coronation Scot—flung him through the open door behind him, ripped off the heels of both shoes as they caught on the storm-sill: he braked violently in mid-air, described a complete somersault, slithered along the passage and smashed squarely into the trunking of ‘B’ turret, his back framed by the four big spikes of the butterfly nuts securing an inspection hatch. Had he been standing a foot to the right or the left, had his heels been two inches higher as he catapulted through the doorway, had he hit the turret a hair’s-breadth to the left or right—Lieutenant Marshall had no right to be alive. The laws of chance said so, overwhelmingly. As it was, Marshall was now sitting up in the Sick bay, strapped, broken ribs making breathing painful, but otherwise unharmed.

The upturned lifeboat, mute token of some earlier tragedy on the Russian Convoys, had long since vanished into the white twilight.

Captain Vallery’s voice, low and husky, died softly away. He stepped back, closing the Prayer Book, and the forlorn notes of the bugle echoed briefly over the poop and died in the blanketing snow. Men stood silently, unmovingly, as, one by one, the thirteen figures shrouded in weighted canvas, slid down the tipped plank, down from under the Union Flag, splashed heavily into the Arctic and were gone. For long seconds, no one moved. The unreal, hypnotic effect of that ghostly ritual of burial held tired, sluggish minds in unwilling thrall, held men oblivious to cold and discomfort. Even when Etherton half-stepped forward, sighed, crumpled down quietly, unspectacularly in the snow, the trance-like hiatus continued. Some ignored him, others glanced his way, incuriously. It seemed absurd, but it struck Nicholls, standing in the background, that they might have stayed there indefinitely, the minds and the blood of men slowing up, coagulating, freezing, while they turned to pillars of ice. Then suddenly, with exacerbating abruptness, the spell was shattered: the strident scream of the Emergency Stations whistle seared through the gathering gloom.

It took Vallery about three minutes to reach the bridge. He rested often, pausing on every second or third step of the four ladders that reached up to the bridge: even so, the climb drained the last reserves of his frail strength. Brooks had to half-carry him through the gate. Vallery clung to the binnacle, fighting for breath through foam-flecked lips; but his eyes were alive, alert as always, probing through the swirling snow.

‘Contact closing, closing: steady on course, interception course: speed unchanged.’ The radar loudspeaker was muffled, impersonal; but the calm precise tones of Lieutenant Bowden were unmistakable.

‘Good, good! We’ll fox him yet!’ Tyndall, his tired, sagging face lit up in almost beaming anticipation, turned to the Captain. The prospect of action always delighted Tyndall.

‘Something coming up from the SSW, Captain. Good God above, man, what are you doing here?’ He was shocked at Vallery’s appearance. ‘Brooks! Why in heaven’s name—?’

‘Suppose you try talking to him?’ Brooks growled wrathfully. He slammed the gate shut behind him, stalked stiffly off the bridge.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ Tyndall asked of no one in particular. ‘What the hell am I supposed to have done?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ Vallery pacified him. ‘It’s all my fault—disobeying doctor’s orders and what have you. You were saying—?’

‘Ah, yes. Trouble, I’m afraid, Captain.’ Vallery smiled secretly as he saw the satisfaction, the pleased anticipation creep back into the Admiral’s face. ‘Radar reports a surface vessel approaching, big, fast, more or less on interception course for us.’

‘And not ours, of course?’ Vallery murmured. He looked up suddenly. ‘By jove, sir, it couldn’t be—?

‘The Tirpitz?’ Tyndall finished for him. He shook his head in decision. ‘My first thought, too, but no. Admiralty and Air Force are watching her like a broody hen over her eggs. If she moves a foot, we’ll know … Probably some heavy cruiser.’

‘Closing. Closing. Course unaltered.’ Bowden’s voice, clipped, easy, was vaguely reminiscent of a cricket commentator’s. ‘Estimates speed 24, repeat 24 knots.’

His voice crackled into silence as the WT speaker came to life.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge. Signal from convoy: Stirling— Admiral. Understood. Wilco. Out.’

‘Excellent, excellent! From Jeffries,’ Tyndall explained. ‘I sent him a signal ordering the convoy to alter course to NNW. That should take ’em well clear of our approaching friend.’

Vallery nodded. ‘How far ahead is the convoy, sir?’

‘Pilot!’ Tyndall called and leaned back expectantly.

‘Six—six and a half miles.’ The Kapok Kid’s face was expressionless.

‘He’s slipping,’ Tyndall said mournfully. ‘The strain’s telling. A couple of days ago he’d have given us the distance to the nearest yard. Six miles—far enough, Captain. He’ll never pick ’em up. Bowden says he hasn’t even picked us up yet, that the intersection of courses must be pure coincidence … I gather Lieutenant Bowden has a poor opinion of German radar.’

‘I know. I hope he’s right. For the first time the question is of rather more than academic interest.’ Vallery gazed to the South, his binoculars to his eyes: there was only the sea, the thinning snow. ‘Anyway, this came at a good time.’

Tyndall arched a bushy eyebrow.

‘It was strange, down there on the poop.’ Vallery was hesitant. ‘There was something weird, uncanny in the air. I didn’t like it, sir. It was desperately—well, almost frightening. The snow, the silence, the dead men—thirteen dead men—I can only guess how the men felt, about Etherton, about anything. But it wasn’t good—don’t know how it would have ended—’ ‘Five miles,’ the loudspeaker cut in. ‘Repeat, five miles. Course, speed, constant.’

‘Five miles,’ Tyndall repeated in relief. Intangibles bothered him. ‘Time to trail our coats a little, Captain. We’ll soon be in what Bowden reckons is his radar range. Due east, I think—it’ll look as if we’re covering the tail of the convoy and heading for the North Cape.’

‘Starboard 10,’ Vallery ordered. The cruiser came gradually round, met, settled on her new course: engine revolutions were cut down till the Ulysses was cruising along at 26 knots.

One minute, five passed, then the loudspeaker blared again.

‘Radar—bridge. Constant distance, altering on interception course.’

‘Excellent! Really excellent!’ The Admiral was almost purring. ‘We have him, gentlemen. He’s missed the convoy … Commence firing by radar!’

Vallery reached for the Director handset.

‘Director? Ah, it’s you, Courtney … good, good … you just do that.’

Vallery replaced the set, looked across at Tyndall.

‘Smart as a whip, that boy. He’s had “X” and “Y” lined up, tracking for the past ten minutes. Just a matter of pressing a button, he says.’

‘Sounds uncommon like our friends here.’ Tyndall jerked his head in the direction of the Kapok Kid, then looked up in surprise. ‘Courtney? Did you say “Courtney”? Where’s Guns?’

‘In his cabin, as far as I know. Collapsed on the poop. Anyway, he’s in no fit state to do his job … Thank God I’m not in that boy’s shoes. I can imagine … ’

The Ulysses shuddered, and the whip-like crash of ‘X’ turret drowned Vallery’s voice as the 5.25 shells screamed away into the twilight. Seconds later, the ship shook again as the guns of ‘Y’ turret joined in. Thereafter the guns fired alternately, one shell at a time, every half-minute: there was no point in wasting ammunition when the fall of shot could not be observed; but it was probably the bare minimum necessary to infuriate the enemy and distract his attention from everything except the ship ahead.

The snow had thinned away now to a filmy curtain of gauze that blurred, rather than obscured the horizon. To the west, the clouds were lifting, the sky lightening in sunset. Vallery ordered ‘X’ turret to cease fire, to load with star-shell.

Abruptly, the snow was gone and the enemy was there, big and menacing, a black featureless silhouette with the sudden flush of sunset striking incongruous golden gleams from the water creaming high at her bows.

‘Starboard 30!’ Vallery snapped. ‘Full ahead. Smokescreen!’ Tyndall nodded compliance. It was no part of his plan to become embroiled with a German heavy cruiser or pocket battleship … especially at an almost point-blank range of four miles.

On the bridge, half a dozen pairs of binoculars peered aft, trying to identify the enemy. But the fore-and-aft silhouette against the reddening sky was difficult to analyse, exasperatingly vague and ambiguous. Suddenly, as they watched, white gouts of flame lanced out from the heart of the silhouette: simultaneously, the starshell burst high up in the air, directly above the enemy, bathing him in an intense, merciless white glare, so that he appeared strangely naked and defenceless.

An illusory appearance. Everyone ducked low, in reflex instinct, as the shells whistled just over their heads and plunged into the sea ahead. Everyone, that is, except the Kapok Kid. He bent an impassive eye on the Admiral as the latter slowly straightened up.

‘Hipper Class, sir,’ he announced. ‘10,000 tons, 8-inch guns, carries aircraft.’

Tyndall looked at his unsmiling face in long suspicion. He cast around in his mind for a suitably crushing reply, caught sight of the German cruiser’s turrets belching smoke in the sinking glare of the starshell.

‘My oath!’ he exclaimed. ‘Not wasting much time, are they? And damned good shooting!’ he added in professional admiration as the shells hissed into the sea through the Ulysses’s boiling wake, about 150 feet astern. ‘Bracketed in the first two salvoes. They’ll straddle us next time.’

The Ulysses was still heeling round, the black smoke beginning to pour from the after funnel, when Vallery straightened, clapped his binoculars to his eyes. Heavy clouds of smoke were mushrooming from the enemy’s starboard deck, just for’ard of the bridge.

‘Oh, well done, young Courtney!’ he burst out. ‘Well done indeed!’

‘Well done indeed!’ Tyndall echoed. ‘A beauty! Still, I don’t think we’ll stop to argue the point with me … Ah! Just in time, gentlemen! Gad, that was close!’ The stern of the Ulysses, swinging round now almost to the north, disappeared from sight as a salvo crashed into the sea, dead astern, one of the shells exploding in a great eruption of water.

The next salvo—obviously the hit on the enemy cruiser hadn’t affected her fire-power—fell a cable length’s astern. The German was now firing blind. Engineer Commander Dodson was making smoke with a vengeance, the oily, black smoke flattening down on the surface of the sea, rolling, thick, impenetrable. Vallery doubled back on course, then headed east at high speed.

For the next two hours, in the dusk and darkness, they played cat and mouse with the ‘Hipper’ class cruiser, firing occasionally, appearing briefly, tantalizingly, then disappearing behind a smokescreen, hardly needed now in the coming night. All the time, radar was their eyes and their ears and never played them false. Finally, satisfied that all danger to the convoy was gone, Tyndall laid a double screen in a great curving ‘U’, and vanished to the southwest, firing a few final shells, not so much in token of farewell as to indicate direction of depature.

Ninety minutes later, at the end of a giant halfcircle to port, the Ulysses was sitting far to the north, while Bowden and his men tracked the progress of the enemy. He was reported as moving steadily east, then, just before contact was lost, as altering course to the south-east.

Tyndall climbed down from his chair, numbed and stiff. He stretched himself luxuriantly.

‘Not a bad night’s work, Captain, not bad at all. What do you bet our friend spends the night circling to the south and east at high speed, hoping to come up ahead of the convoy in the morning?’ Tyndall felt almost jubilant, in spite of his exhaustion. ‘And by that time FR77 should be 200 miles to the north of him … I suppose, Pilot, you have worked out intersection courses for rejoining the convoy at all speeds up to a hundred knots?’

‘I think we should be able to regain contact without much difficulty,’ said the Kapok Kid politely.

‘It’s when he is at his most modest,’ Tyndall announced, ‘that he sickens me most … Heavens above, I’m froze to death … Oh, damn! Not more trouble, I hope?’

The communication rating behind the compass platform picked up the jangling phone, listened briefly.

‘For you, sir,’ he said to Vallery. ‘The Surgeon Lieutenant.’

‘Just take the message, Chrysler.’

‘Sorry, sir. Insists on speaking to you himself.’ Chrysler handed the receiver into the bridge. Vallery smothered an exclamation of annoyance, lifted the receiver to his ear.

‘Captain, here. Yes, what is it? … What? … What? Oh, God, no! … Why wasn’t I told? … Oh, I see. Thank you, thank you.’

Vallery handed the receiver back, turned heavily to Tyndall. In the darkness, the Admiral felt, rather than saw the sudden weariness; the hunched defeat of the shoulders.

‘That was Nicholls.’ Vallery’s voice was flat, colourless. ‘Lieutenant Etherton shot himself in his cabin, five minutes ago.’

At four o’clock in the morning, in heavy snow, but in a calm sea, the Ulysses rejoined the convoy.

By mid-morning of that next day, a bare six hours later Admiral Tyndall had become an old weary man, haggard, haunted by remorse and bitter self-criticism, close, very close, to despair. Miraculously, in a matter of hours, the chubby cheeks had collapsed in shrunken flaccidity, draining blood had left the florid cheeks a parchment grey, the sunken eyes had dulled in blood and exhaustion. The extent and speed of the change wrought in that tough and jovial sailor, a sailor seemingly impervious to the most deadly vicissitudes of war, was incredible: incredible and disturbing in itself, but infinitely more so in its wholly demoralising effect on the men. To every arch there is but one keystone … or so any man must inevitably think.

Any impartial court of judgment would have cleared Tyndall of all guilt, would have acquitted him without a trial. He had done what he thought right, what any commander would have done in his place. But Tyndall sat before the merciless court of his own conscience. He could not forget that it was he who had re-routed the convoy so far to the north, that it was he who had ignored official orders to break straight for the North Cape, that it was exactly on latitude 70 N—where their Lordships had told him they would be— that FR77 had, on that cold, clear windless dawn, blundered straight into the heart of the heaviest concentration of U-boats encountered in the Arctic during the entire course of the war.

The wolf-pack had struck at its favourite hour—the dawn— and from its favourite position—the north-east, with the dawn in its eyes. It struck cruelly, skilfully and with a calculated ferocity. Admittedly, the era of Kapitan Leutnant Prien—his U-boat long ago sent to the bottom with all hands by the destroyer Wolverine— and his illustrious contemporaries, the hey-day of the great U-boat Commanders, the high noon of individual brilliance and great personal gallantry, was gone. But in its place—and generally acknowledged to be even more dangerous, more deadly—were the concerted, highly integrated mass attacks of the wolf-packs, methodical, machine-like, almost reduced to a formula, under a single directing command.

The Cochella, third vessel in the port line, was the first to go. Sister ship to the Vytura and the Varella, also accompanying her in FR77, the Cochella carried over 3,000,000 gallons of 100-octane petrol. She was hit by at least three torpedoes: the first two broke her almost in half, the third triggered off a stupendous detonation that literally blew her out of existence. One moment she was there, sailing serenely through the limpid twilight of sunrise: the next moment she was gone. Gone, completely, utterly gone, with only a seething ocean, convulsed in boiling white, to show where she had been: gone, while stunned eardrums and stupefied minds struggled vainly to grasp the significance of what had happened: gone, while blind reflex instinct hurled men into whatever shelter offered as a storm of lethal metal swept over the fleet.

Two ships took the full force of the explosion. A huge mass of metal—it might have been a winch—passed clear through the superstructure of the Sirrus, a cable-length away on the starboard: it completely wrecked the radar office. What happened to the other ship immediately astern, the impossibly-named Tennessee Adventurer, was not clear, but almost certainly her wheelhouse and bridge had been severely damaged: she had lost steering control, was not under command.

Tragically, this was not at first understood, simply because it was not apparent. Tyndall, recovering fast from the sheer physical shock of the explosion, broke out the signal for an emergency turn to port. The wolf-pack, obviously, lay on the port hand, and the only action to take to minimize further losses, to counter the enemy strategy, was to head straight towards them. He was reasonably sure that the U-boats would be bunched—generally, they strung out only for the slow convoys. Besides, he had adopted this tactic several times in the past with a high degree of success. Finally, it cut the U-boats’ target to an impossible tenth, forcing on them the alternative of diving or the risk of being trampled under.

With an immaculate precision and co-ordination of Olympic equestrians, the convoy heeled steadily over to starboard, slewed majestically round, trailing curved, white wakes phosphorescently alive in the near-darkness that still clung to the surface of the sea. Too late, it was seen that the Tennessee Adventurer was not under command. Slowly, then with dismaying speed, she came round to the east, angling directly for another merchantman, the Tobacco Planter. There was barely time to think, to appreciate the inevitable: frantically, the Planter’s helm went hard over in an attempt to clear the other astern, but the wildly swinging Adventurer, obviously completely out of control, matched the Planter’s tightening circle, foot by inexorable foot, blind malice at the helm.

She struck the Planter with sickening violence just for’ard of the bridge. The Adventurer’s bows, crumpling as they went, bit deeply into her side, fifteen, twenty feet in a chaos of tearing, rending metal: the stopping power of 10,000 tons deadweight travelling at 15 knots is fantastic. The wound was mortal, and the Planter’s own momentum, carrying her past, wrenched her free from the lethal bows, opening the wound to the hungry sea and hastened her own end. Almost at once she began to fill, to list heavily to starboard. Aboard the Adventurer, someone must have taken over command: her engine stopped, she lay almost motionless alongside the sinking ship, slightly down by the head.

The rest of the convoy cleared the drifting vessels, steadied west by north. Far out on the starboard hand, Commander Orr, in the Sirrus, clawed his damaged destroyer round in a violent turn, headed back towards the crippled freighters. He had gone less than half a mile when he was recalled by a vicious signal from the flagship. Tyndall was under no illusions. The Adventurer, he knew, might remain there all day, unharmed—it was obvious that the Planter would be gone in a matter of minutes—but that would be a guarantee neither of the absence of U-boats nor of the sudden access of misguided enemy chivalry: the enemy would be there, would wait to the last possible second before dark in the hope that some rescue destroyer would heave to alongside the Adventurer.

In that respect, Tyndall was right. The Adventurer was torpedoed just before sunset. Threequarters of the ship’s company escaped in lifeboats, along with twenty survivors picked up from the Planter. A month later the frigate Esher found them, in three lifeboats tied line ahead, off the bitter, iron coast of Bear Island, heading steadily north. The Captain alert and upright, was still sitting in the stern-sheets, empty eye-sockets searching for some lost horizon, a withered claw locked to the tiller. The rest were sitting or lying about the boats, one actually standing, his arm cradled around the mast, and all with shrunken sun-blackened lips drawn back in hideous mirth. The log-book lay beside the Captain, empty: all had frozen to death on that first night. The young frigate commander had cast them adrift, watched them disappear over the northern rim of the world, steering for the Barrier. And the Barrier is the region of the great silence, the seas of incredible peace, so peaceful, so calm, so cold that they may be there yet, the dead who cannot rest. A mean and shabby end for the temple of the spirit … It is not known whether the Admiralty approved the action of the captain of the frigate.

But in the major respect, that of anticipating enemy disposition, the Admiral was utterly wrong. The wolf-pack commander had outguessed him and it was arguable that Tyndall should have foreseen this. His tactic of swinging an entire convoy into the face of a torpedo attack was well known to the enemy: it was also well known that his ship was the Ulysses, and the Ulysses, the only one of her kind, was familiar, by sight or picture silhouette, to every U-boat commander in the German Navy: and it had been reported, of course, that it was the Ulysses that was leading FR77 through to Murmansk. Tyndall should have expected, expected and forestalled the long overdue counter.

For the submarine that had torpedoed the Cochella had been the last, not the first, of the pack. The others had lain to the south of the U-boat that had sprung the trap, and well to the west of the track of FR77—clear beyond the reach of Asdic. And when the convoy wheeled to the west, the U-boats lined up leisurely firing tracks as the ships steamed up to cross their bows at right angles. The sea was calm, calm as a millpond, an extraordinary deep, Mediterranean blue. The snow-squalls of the night had passed away. Far to the south-east a brilliant sun was shouldering itself clear of the horizon, its level rays striking a great band of silver across the Arctic, highlighting the ships, shrouded white in snow, against the darker sea and sky beyond. The conditions were ideal, if one may use the word ‘ideal’ to describe the prologue to a massacre.

Massacre, an almost total destruction there must inevitably have been but for the warning that came almost too late. A warning given neither by radar nor Asdic, nor by any of the magically efficient instruments of modern detection, but simply by the keen eyes of an eighteen-year-old Ordinary Seaman—and the God-sent rays of the rising sun.

‘Captain, sir! Captain, sir!’ It was young Chrysler who shouted. His voice broke in wild excitement, his eyes were glued to the powerful binoculars clamped on the port searchlight control position. ‘There’s something flashing to the south, sir! It flashed twice—there it goes again!’

‘Where, boy?’ Tyndall shouted. ‘Come on, where, where?’ In his agitation, Chrysler had forgotten the golden rule of the reporting look-out—bearing must come first.

‘Port 50, sir—no, port 60 … I’ve lost sight of it now, sir.’

Every pair of glasses on the bridge swung round on the given bearing. There was nothing to be seen, just nothing at all. Tyndall shut his telescope slowly, shrugged his shoulders eloquent in disbelief.

‘Maybe there is something,’ said the Kapok Kid doubtfully. ‘How about the sea catching a periscope making a quick circle sweep?’

Tyndall looked at him, silent, expressionless, looked away, stared straight ahead. To the Kapok Kid he seemed strange, different. His face was set, stonily impassive, the face of a man with twenty ships and 5,000 lives in his keeping, the face of a man who has already made one wrong decision too many.

‘There they go again!’ Chrysler screamed. ‘Two flashes—no, three flashes!’ He was almost beside himself with excitement, literally dancing in an agony of frustration. ‘I did see them, sir, I did. I did. Oh, please, sir, please!’

Tyndall had swung round again. Ten long seconds he gazed at Chrysler, who had left his binoculars, and was gripping the gate in gauntleted hands, shaking it in anguished appeal. Abruptly, Tyndall made up his mind.

‘Hard aport, Captain. Bentley—the signal!’

Slowly, on the unsupported word of an eighteen-year-old, FR77 came round to the south, slowly, just too slowly. Suddenly, the sea was alive with running torpedoes—three, five, ten—Vallery counted thirty in as many seconds. They were running shallow and their bubbling trails, evil, ever-lengthening, rose swiftly to the surface and lay there milkily on the glassy sea, delicately evanescent shafts for arrowheads so lethal. Parallel in the centre, they fanned out to the east and west to embrace the entire convoy. It was a fantastic sight: no man in that convoy had ever seen anything remotely like it.

In a moment the confusion was complete. There was no time for signals. It was every ship for itself in an attempt to avoid wholesale destruction: and confusion was worse confounded by the ships in the centre and outer lines, that had not yet seen the wakes of the streaking torpedoes.

Escape for all was impossible: the torpedoes were far too closely bunched. The cruiser Stirling was the first casualty. Just when she seemed to have cleared all danger—she was far ahead where the torpedoes were thickest—she lurched under some unseen hammer-blow, slewed round crazily and steamed away back to the east, smoke hanging heavily over her poop. The Ulysses, brilliantly handled, heeled over on maximum rudder and under the counter-thrusting of her great screws, slid down an impossibly narrow lane between four torpedoes, two of them racing by a bare boat’s length from either side: she was still a lucky ship. The destroyers, fast, highly manoeuvrable, impeccably handled, bobbed and weaved their way to safety with almost contemptuous ease, straightened up and headed south under maximum power.

The merchant ships, big, clumsy, relatively slow, were less fortunate. Two ships in the port line, a tanker and a freighter, were struck: miraculously, both just staggered under the numbing shock, then kept on coming. Not so the big freighter immediately behind them, her holds crammed with tanks, her decks lined with them. She was torpedoed three times in three seconds: there was no smoke, no fire, no spectacular after-explosion: sieved and ripped from stern to stem, she sank quickly, quietly, still on even keel, dragged down by the sheer weight of metal. No one below decks had even the slightest chance of escaping.

A merchantman in the centre line, the Belle Isle, was torpedoed amidships. There were two separate explosions—probably she had been struck twice—and she was instantly on fire. Within seconds, the list to port was pronounced, increasing momentarily: gradually her rails dipped under, the outslung lifeboats almost touching the surface of the sea. A dozen, fifteen men were seen to be slipping, sliding down the sheering decks and hatch-covers, already half-submerged, towards the nearest lifeboat. Desperately they hacked at bellyband securing ropes, piled into the lifeboat in grotesquely comical haste, pushed it clear of the dipping davits, seized the oars and pulled frantically away. From beginning to end, hardly a minute had elapsed.

Half a dozen powerful strokes had them clear beyond their ship’s counter: two more took them straight under the swinging bows of the Walter A. Baddeley, her companion tankcarrier in the starboard line. The consummate seamanship that had saved the Baddeley could do nothing to save the lifeboat: the little boat crumpled and splintered like a matchwood toy, catapulting screaming men into the icy sea.

As the big, grey hull of the Baddeley slid swiftly by them, they struck out with insane strength that made nothing of their heavy Arctic-clothing. At such times, reason vanishes: the thought that if, by some God-given miracle, they were to escape the guillotine of the Baddeley’s single great screw, they would do so only to die minutes later in the glacial cold of the Arctic, never occurred to them. But, as it happened, death came by neither metal nor cold. They were still struggling, almost abreast the poop, vainly trying to clear the rushing, sucking vortex of water, when the torpedoes struck the Baddeley, close together and simultaneously, just for’ard of the rudder.

For swimming men who have been in the close vicinity of an underwater high explosion there can be no shadow of hope: the effect is inhuman, revolting, shocking beyond conception: in such cases, experienced doctors, pathologists even, can with difficulty bring themselves to look upon what were once human beings … But for these men, as so often in the Arctic, death was kind, for they died unknowing.

The Walter A. Baddeley’s stern had been almost completely blown off. Hundreds of tons of water were already rushing in the gaping hole below the counter, racing through cross-bulkheads fractured by the explosion, smashing open engine-boiler room watertight doors buckled by the blast, pulling her down by the stern, steadily, relentlessly, till her taffrail dipped salute to the waiting Arctic. For a moment, she hung there. Then, in quick succession from deep inside the hull, came a muffled explosion, the ear-shattering, frightening roar of escaping high-pressure steam and the thunderous crash of massive boilers rending away from their stools as the ship upended. Almost immediately the shattered stern lurched heavily, sank lower and lower till the poop was completely gone, till the dripping forefoot was tilted high above the sea. Foot by foot the angle of tilt increased, the stern plunged a hundred, two hundred feet under the surface of the sea, the bows rearing almost as high against the blue of the sky, buoyed up by half a million cubic feet of trapped air.

The ship was exactly four degrees off the vertical when the end came. It was possible to establish this angle precisely, for it was just at that second, half a mile away aboard the Ulysses, that the shutter clicked, the shutter of the camera in Lieutenant Nicholls’s gauntleted hands.

A camera that captured an unforgettable picture—a stark, simple picture of a sinking ship almost vertically upright against a pale-blue sky. A picture with a strange lack of detail, with the exception only of two squat shapes, improbably suspended in mid-air: these were 30-ton tanks, broken loose from their foredeck lashings, caught in midflight as they smashed down on the bridge structure, awash in the sea. In the background was the stern of the Bell Isle, the screw out of the water, the Red Duster trailing idly in the peaceful sea.

Bare seconds after the camera had clicked, the camera was blown from Nicholls’s hands, the case crumpling against a bulkhead, the lens shattering but the film still intact. Panic-stricken the seamen in the lifeboat may have been, but it wasn’t unreasoning panic: in No 2 hold, just for’ard of the fire, the Belle Isle had been carrying over 1,000 tons of tank ammunition … Broken cleanly in two, she was gone inside a minute: the Baddeley’s bows, riddled by the explosion, slide gently down behind her.

The echoes of the explosion were still rolling out over the sea in ululating diminuendo when they were caught up and flung back by a series of muffled reports from the South. Less than two miles away, the Sirrus, Vectra and Viking, dazzling white in the morning sun, were weaving a crazily intricate pattern over the sea, depth-charges cascading from either side of their poop-decks. From time to time, one or other almost disappeared behind towering mush- rooms of erupting water and spray, reappearing magically as the white columns fell back into the sea.

To join in the hunt, to satisfy the flaming, primitive lust for revenge—that was Tyndall’s first impulse. The Kapok Kid looked at him furtively and wondered, wondered at the hunched rigidity, the compressed lipless mouth, the face contorted in white and bitter rage—a bitterness directed not least against himself. Tyndall twisted suddenly in his seat.

‘Bentley! Signal the Sterling—ascertain damage.’ The Stirling was more than a mile astern now, but coming round fast, her speed at least twenty knots.

‘Making water after engine-room,’ Bentley read eventually. ‘Store-rooms flooded, but hull damage slight. Under control. Steering gear jammed. On emergency steering. Am all right.’

‘Thank God for that! Signal, “Take over: proceed east.” Come on, Captain, let’s give Orr a hand to deal with these murdering hounds!’

The Kapok Kid looked at him in sudden dismay.

‘Sir!’

‘Yes, yes, Pilot! What is it?’ Tyndall was curt, impatient.

‘How about that first U-boat?’ Carpenter ventured. ‘Can’t be much more than a mile to the south, sir. Shouldn’t we—?’

‘God Almighty!’ Tyndall swore. His face was suffused with anger. ‘Are you trying to tell me … ?’ He broke off abruptly, stared at Carpenter for a long moment. ‘What did you say, Pilot?’

‘The boat that sunk the tanker, sir,’ the Kapok Kid said carefully. ‘She could have reloaded by now and she’s in a perfect position—’

‘Of course, of course,’ Tyndall muttered. He passed a hand across his eyes, flickered a glance at Vallery. The Captain had his head averted. Again the hand passed across the tired eyes. ‘You’re quite right, Pilot, quite right.’ He paused, then smiled. ‘As usual, damn you!’

The Ulysses found nothing to the north. The U-boat that had sunk the Cochella and sprung the trap had wisely decamped. While they were quartering the area, they heard the sound of gun-fire, saw the smoke erupting from the Sirrus’s 4.7s.

‘Ask him what all the bloody fuss is about,’ Tyndall demanded irritably. The Kapok Kid smiled secretly: the old man had life in him yet.

‘Vectra and Viking damaged, probably destroyed U-boat,’ the message read. ‘Vectra and self sunk surfaced boat. How about you?’

‘How about you!’ Tyndall exploded. ‘Damn his confounded insolence! How about you? He’ll have the oldest, bloody minesweeper in Scapa for his next command … This is all your fault, Pilot!’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Maybe he’s only asking in a spirit of—ah— anxious concern.’

‘How would you like to be his Navigator in his next command?’ said Tyndall dangerously. The Kapok Kid retired to his charthouse.

‘Carrington!’

‘Sir?’ The First Lieutenant was his invariable self, clear-eyed, freshly shaven, competent, alert. The sallow skin—hall-mark of all men who have spent too many years under tropical suns—was unshadowed by fatigue. He hadn’t slept for three days.

‘What do you make of that?’ He pointed to the northwest. Curiously woolly grey clouds were blotting out the horizon; before them the sea dusked to indigo under wandering catspaws from the north.

‘Hard to say, sir,’ Carrington said slowly. ‘Not heavy weather, that’s certain … I’ve seen this before, sir—low, twisting cloud blowing up on a fine morning with a temperature rise. Very common in the Aleutians and the Bering Sea, sir—and there it means fog, heavy mist.’

‘And you, Captain?’

‘No idea, sir.’ Vallery shook his head decisively. The plasma transfusion seemed to have helped him. ‘New to me—never seen it before.’

‘Thought not,’ Tyndall grunted. ‘Neither have I—that’s why I asked Number One first … If you think it’s fog that’s coming up, Number One, let me know, will you? Can’t afford to have convoy and escorts scattered over half the Arctic if the weather closes down. Although, mind you,’ he added bitterly, ‘I think they’d be a damned sight safer without us!’

‘I can tell you now, sir.’ Carrington had that rare gift—the ability to make a confident, quietly unarguable assertion without giving the slightest offence. ‘It’s fog.’

‘Fair enough.’ Tyndall never doubted him. ‘Let’s get the hell out of it. Bentley—signal the destroyers: “Break off engagement. Rejoin convoy.” And Bentley—add the word “Immediate”.’ He turned to Vallery. ‘For Commander Orr’s benefit.’

Within the hour, merchant ships and escorts were on station again, on a north-east course at first to clear any further packs on latitude 70. To the south-east, the sun was still bright: but the first thick, writhing tendrils of the mist, chill and dank, were already swirling round the convoy. Speed had been reduced to six knots: all ships were streaming fog-buoys.

Tyndall shivered, climbed stiffly from his chair as the stand-down sounded. He passed through the gate, stopped in the passage outside. He laid a glove on Chrysler’s shoulder, kept it there as the boy turned round in surprise.

‘Just wanted a squint at these eyes of yours, laddie,’ he smiled. ‘We owe them a lot. Thank you very much—we will not forget.’ He looked a long time into the young face, forgot his own exhaustion and swore softly in sudden compassion as he saw the red-rimmed eyes, the white, maculated cheeks stained with embarrassed pleasure.

‘How old are you, Chrysler?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Eighteen, sir … in two days’ time.’ The soft West Country voice was almost defiant.

‘He’ll be eighteen—in two days’ time!’ Tyndall repeated slowly to himself. ‘Good God! Good God above!’ He dropped his hand, walked wearily aft to the shelter, entered, closed the door behind him.

‘He’ll be eighteen—in two days’ time,’ he repeated, like a man in a daze.

Vallery propped himself up on the settee. ‘Who? Young Chrysler?’

Tyndall nodded unhappily.

‘I know.’ Vallery was very quiet. ‘I know how it is … He did a fine job today.’

Tyndall sagged down in a chair. His mouth twisted in bitterness.

‘The only one … Dear God, what a mess!’ He drew heavily on a cigarette, stared down at the floor. ‘Ten green bottles, hanging on a wall,’ he murmured absently.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Fourteen ships left Scapa, eighteen St John—the two components of FR77,’ Tyndall said softly. ‘Thirty-two ships in all. And now’—he paused—‘now there are seventeen—and three of these damaged. I’m counting the Tennessee Adventurer as a dead duck.’ He swore savagely. ‘Hell’s teeth, how I hate leaving ships like that, sitting targets for any murdering … ’ He stopped short, drew on his cigarette again, deeply. ‘Doing wonderfully, ain’t I?’

‘Ah, nonsense, sir!’ Vallery interrupted, impatient, almost angry. ‘It wasn’t any fault of yours that the carriers had to return.’

‘Meaning that the rest was my fault?’ Tyndall smiled faintly, lifted a hand to silence the automatic protest. ‘Sorry, Dick, I know you didn’t mean that—but it’s true, it’s true. Six merchant boys gone in ten minutes—six! And we shouldn’t have lost one of them.’ Head bent, elbows on knees, he screwed the heels of his palms into exhausted eyes. ‘Rear-Admiral Tyndall, master strategist,’ he went on softly. ‘Alters convoy course to run smack into the biggest wolf-pack I’ve ever known—and just where the Admiralty said they would be … No matter what old Starr does to me when I get back, I’ve no kick coming. Not now, not after this.’

He rose heavily to his feet. The light of the single lamp caught his face. Vallery was shocked at the change.

‘Where to now, sir?’ he asked.

‘The bridge. No, no, stay where you are, Dick.’ He tried to smile, but the smile was a grimace that flickered only to die. ‘Leave me in peace while I ponder my next miscalculation.’

He opened the door; stopped dead as he heard the unmistakable whistling of shells close above, heard the EAS signal screaming urgently through the fog. Tyndall turned his head slowly, looked back into the shelter.

‘It looks,’ he said bitterly, ‘as if I’ve already made it.’

NINE

Friday Morning

The fog, Tyndall saw, was all around them now. Since that last heavy snowfall during the night, the temperature had risen steadily, quickly. But it had beguiled only to deceive: the clammy, ice feathers of the swirling mist now struck doubly chill.

He hurried through the gate, Vallery close behind him. Turner, steel helmet trailing, was just leaving for the After Tower. Tyndall stretched out his hand, stopped him.

‘What is it, Commander?’ he demanded. ‘Who fired? Where? Where did it come from?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Shells came from astern, more or less. But I’ve a damned good idea who it is.’ His eyes rested on the Admiral a long, speculative moment. ‘Our friend of last night is back again.’ He turned abruptly, hurried off the bridge.

Tyndall looked after him, perplexed, uncomprehending. Then he swore, softly, savagely, and jumped for the radar handset.

‘Bridge. Admiral speaking. Lieutenant Bowden at once!’ The loudspeaker crackled into immediate life.

‘Bowden speaking, sir.’

‘What the devil are you doing down there?’ Tyndall’s voice was low, vicious. ‘Asleep, or what? We are being attacked, Lieutenant Bowden. By a surface craft. This may be news to you.’ He broke off, ducked low as another salvo screamed overhead and crashed into the water less than half a mile ahead: the spray cascaded over the decks of a merchantman, glimpsed momentarily in a clear lane between two rolling fog-banks. Tyndall straightened up quickly, snarled into the mouthpiece. ‘He’s got our range, and got it accurately. In God’s name, Bowden, where is he?’

‘Sorry, sir.’ Bowden was cool, unruffled. ‘We can’t seem to pick him up. We still have the Adventurer on our screens, and there appears to be a very slight distortion on his bearing, sir—approximately 300 … I suggest the enemy ship is still screened by the Adventurer or, if she’s closer, is on the Adventurer’s direct bearing.’

‘How near?’ Tyndall barked.

‘Not near, sir. Very close to the Adventurer. We can’t distinguish either by size or distance.’

Tyndall dangled the transmitter from his hand. He turned to Vallery.

‘Does Bowden really expect me to believe that yarn?’ he asked angrily. ‘A million to one coincidence like that—an enemy ship accidentally chose and holds the only possible course to screen her from our radar. Fantastic!’

Vallery looked at him, his face without expression.

‘Well?’ Tyndall was impatient. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘No, sir,’ Vallery answered quietly. ‘It’s not. Not really. And it wasn’t accidental. The U-pack would have radioed her, given our bearing and course. The rest was easy.’

Tyndall gazed at him through a long moment of comprehension, screwed his eyes shut and shook his head in short fierce jerks. It was a gesture compounded of self-criticism, the death of disbelief, the attempt to clear a woolly, exhausted mind. Hell, a six-year-old could have seen that … A shell whistled into the sea a bare fifty yards to port. Tyndall didn’t flinch, might never have seen or heard it.

‘Bowden?’ He had the transmitter to his mouth again.

‘Sir?’

‘Any change in the screen?’

‘No, sir. None.’

‘And are you still of the same opinion?’

‘Yes, sir! Can’t be anything else.’

‘And close to the Adventurer, you say?’

‘Very close, I would say.’

‘But, good God, man, the Adventurer must be ten miles astern by now!’

‘Yes, sir. I know. So is the bandit.’

‘What! Ten miles! But, but—’

‘He’s firing by radar, sir,’ Bowden interrupted. Suddenly the metallic voice sounded tired. ‘He must be. He’s also tracking by radar, which is why he’s keeping himself in line with our bearing on the Adventurer. And he’s extremely accurate … I’m afraid, Admiral, that his radar is at least as good as ours.’

The speaker clicked off. In the sudden strained silence on the bridge, the crash of breaking ebonite sounded unnaturally loud as the transmitter slipped from Tyndall’s hand, fractured in a hundred pieces. The hand groped forward, he clutched at a steam pipe as if to steady himself. Vallery stepped towards him, arms outstretched in concern, but Tyndall brushed by unseeingly. Like an old spent man, like a man from whose ancient bones and muscles all the pith has long since drained, he shuffled slowly across the bridge, oblivious of a dozen mystified eyes, dragged himself up on to his high stool.

You fool, he told himself bitterly, savagely, oh you bloody old fool! He would never forgive himself, never, never, never! All along the line he had been out-thought, out-guessed and outmanoeuvred by the enemy. They had taken him for a ride, made an even bigger bloody fool out of him than his good Maker had ever intended. Radar! Of course, that was it! The blind assumption that German radar had remained the limited, elementary thing that Admiralty and Air Force Intelligence had reported it to be last year! Radar—and as good as the British. As good as the Ulysses’s— and everybody had believed that the Ulysses was incomparably the most efficient—indeed the only efficient—radar ship in the world. As good as our own—probably a damned sight better. But had the thought ever occurred to him? Tyndall writhed in sheer chagrin, in agony of spirit, and knew the bitter taste of self-loathing. And so, this morning, the pay-off: six ships, three hundred men gone to the bottom. May God forgive you, Tyndall, he thought dully, may God forgive you. You sent them there … Radar!

Last night, for instance. When the Ulysses had been laying a false trail to the east, the German cruiser had obligingly tagged behind, the perfect foil to his, Tyndall’s genius. Tyndall groaned in mortification. He tagged behind, firing wildly, erratically each time the Ulysses had disappeared behind a smoke-screen. Had done so to conceal the efficiency of her radar, to conceal the fact that, during the first half-hour at least, she must have been tracking the escaping convoy as it disappeared to the NNW—a process made all the easier by the fact that he, Tyndall, had expressly forbidden the use of the zig-zag!

And then, when the Ulysses had so brilliantly circled, first to the south and then to the north again, the enemy must have had her on his screen—constantly. And later, the biter bit with a vengeance, the faked enemy withdrawal to the south-east. Almost certainly, he, too, had circled to the north again, picked up the disappearing British cruiser on the edge of his screen, worked out her intersection course as a cross check on the convoy’s, and radioed ahead to the wolf-pack, positioning them almost to the foot.

And now, finally, the last galling blow to whatever shattered remnants of his pride were left him. The enemy had opened fire at extreme range, but with extreme accuracy—a dead give-away to the fact that the firing was radar-controlled. And the only reason for it must be the enemy’s conviction that the Ulysses, by this time, must have come to the inevitable conclusion that the enemy was equipped with a highly sensitive radar transmitter. The inevitable conclusion! Tyndall had never even begun to suspect it. Slowly, oblivious to the pain, he pounded his fist on the edge of the windscreen. God, what a blind, crazily stupid fool he’d been! Six ships, three hundred men. Hundreds of tanks and planes, millions of gallons of fuel lost to Russia; how many more thousands of dead Russians, soldiers and civilians, did that represent? And the broken, sorrowing families, he thought incoherently, families throughout the breadth of Britain: the telegram boys cycling to the little houses in the Welsh valleys, along the wooded lanes of Surrey, to the lonely reek of the peat-fire, remote in the Western Isles, to the lime-washed cottages of Donegal and Antrim: the empty homes across the great reaches of the New World, from Newfoundland and Maine to the far slopes of the Pacific. These families would never know that it was he, Tyndall, who had so criminally squandered the lives of husbands, brothers, sons—and that was worse than no consolation at all.

‘Captain Vallery?’ Tyndall’s voice was only a husky whisper. Vallery crossed over, stood beside him, coughing painfully as the swirling fog caught nose and throat, lanciniated inflamed lungs. It was a measure of Tyndall’s distressed preoccupation that Vallery’s obvious suffering quite failed to register.

‘Ah, there you are. Captain, this enemy cruiser must be destroyed.’

Vallery nodded heavily. ‘Yes, sir. How?’

‘How?’ Tyndall’s face, framed in the moisturebeaded hood of his duffel, was haggard and grey: but he managed to raise a ghost of a smile. ‘As well hung for a sheep … I propose to detach the escorts— including ourselves—and nail him.’ He stared out blindly into the fog, his mouth bitter. ‘A simple tactical exercise—maybe within even my limited compass.’ He broke off suddenly, stared over the side then ducked hurriedly: a shell had exploded in the water—a rare thing—only yards away, erupting spray showering down on the bridge.

‘We—the Stirling and ourselves—will take from the south,’ he continued, ‘soak up his fire and radar. Orr and his death-or-glory boys will approach from the north. In this fog, they’ll get very close before releasing their torpedoes. Conditions are all against a single ship—he shouldn’t have much chance.’

‘All the escorts,’ Vallery said blankly. ‘You propose to detach all the escorts?’

‘That’s exactly what I propose to do, Captain.’

‘But—but—perhaps that’s exactly what he wants,’ Vallery protested.

‘Suicide? A glorious death for the Fatherland? Don’t you believe it!’ Tyndall scoffed. ‘That sort of thing went out with Langesdorff and Middelmann.’

‘No, sir!’ Vallery was impatient. ‘He wants to pull us off, to leave the convoy uncovered.’

‘Well, what of it?’ Tyndall demanded. ‘Who’s going to find them in this lot?’ He waved an arm at the rolling, twisting fog-banks. ‘Dammit, man, if it weren’t for their fog-buoys, even our ships couldn’t see each other. So I’m damned sure no one else could either.’

‘No?’ Vallery countered swiftly. ‘How about another German cruiser fitted with radar? Or even another wolf-pack? Either could be in radio contact with our friend astern—and he’s got our course to the nearest minute!’

‘In radio contact? Surely to God our WT is monitoring all the time?’

‘Yes, sir. They are. But I’m told it’s not so easy on the VHF ranges.’

Tyndall grunted non-committally, said nothing. He felt desperately tired and confused; he had neither the will nor the ability to pursue the argument further. But Vallery broke in on the silence, the vertical lines between his eyebrows etched deep with worry.

‘And why’s our friend sitting steadily on our tails, pumping the odd shell among us, unless he’s concentrating on driving us along a particular course? It reduces his chance of a hit by 90 per cent—and cuts out half his guns.’

‘Maybe he’s expecting us to reason like that, to see the obvious.’ Tyndall was forcing himself to think, to fight his way through a mental fog no less nebulous and confusing than the dank mist that swirled around him. ‘Perhaps he’s hoping to panic us into altering course—to the north, of course—where a U-pack may very well be.’

‘Possible, possible,’ Vallery conceded. ‘On the other hand, he may have gone a step further. Maybe he wants us to be too clever for our own good. Perhaps he expects us to see the obvious, to avoid it, to continue on our present course—and so do exactly what he wants us to do … He’s no fool, sir—we know that now.’

What was it that Brooks had said to Starr back in Scapa, a lifetime ago? ‘That fine-drawn feeling … that exquisite agony … every cell in the brain stretched taut to breaking point, pushing you over the screaming edge of madness.’ Tyndall wondered dully how Brooks could have known, could have been so damnably accurate in his description. Anyway, he knew now, knew what it was to stand on the screaming edge … Tyndall appreciated dimly that he was at the limit. That aching, muzzy forehead where to think was to be a blind man wading through a sea of molasses. Vaguely he realized that this must be the first—or was it the last?—symptom of a nervous break- down … God only knew there had been plenty of them aboard the Ulysses during the past months … But he was still the Admiral … He must do something, say something.

‘It’s no good guessing, Dick,’ he said heavily. Vallery looked at him sharply—never before had old Giles called him anything but ‘Captain’ on the bridge. ‘And we’ve got to do something. We’ll leave the Vectra as a sop to our consciences. No more.’ He smiled wanly. ‘We must have at least two destroyers for the dirty work. Bentley— take this signal for WT “To all escort vessels and Commander Fletcher on the Cape Hatteras … ”’

Within ten minutes, the four warships, boring south-east through the impenetrable wall of fog, had halved the distance that lay between them and the enemy. The Stirling, Viking and Sirrus were in constant radio communication with the Ulysses—they had to be for they travelled as blind men in an invidious world of grey and she was their eyes and their ears.

‘Radar—bridge. Radar—bridge.’ Automatically, every eye swung round, riveted on the loudspeaker. ‘Enemy altering course to south: increasing speed.’

‘Too late!’ Tyndall shouted hoarsely. His fists were clenched, his eyes alight with triumph. ‘He’s left it too late!’

Vallery said nothing. The seconds ticked by, the Ulysses knifed her way through cold fog and icy sea. Suddenly, the loudspeaker called again.

‘Enemy 180° turn. Heading south-east. Speed 28 knots.’

‘28 knots? He’s on the run!’ Tyndall seemed to have gained a fresh lease on life. ‘Captain, I propose that the Sirrus and Ulysses proceed south-east at maximum speed, engage and slow the enemy. Ask WT to signal Orr. Ask Radar enemy’s course.’

He broke off, waited impatiently for the answer.

‘Radar—bridge. Course 312. Steady on course. Repeat, steady on course.’

‘Steady on course,’ Tyndall echoed. ‘Captain, commence firing by radar. We have him, we have him!’ he cried exultantly. ‘He’s waited too long! We have him, Captain!’

Again Vallery said nothing. Tyndall looked at him, half in perplexity, half in anger. ‘Well, don’t you agree?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’ Vallery shook his head doubtfully. ‘I don’t know at all. Why did he wait so long? Why didn’t he turn and run the minute we left the convoy?’

‘Too damn sure of himself!’ Tyndall growled.

‘Or too sure of something else,’ Vallery said slowly. ‘Maybe he wanted to make good and sure that we would follow him.’

Tyndall growled again in exasperation, made to speak then lapsed into silence as the Ulysses shuddered from the recoil of ‘A’ turret. For a moment, the billowing fog on the fo’c’sle cleared, atomized by the intense heat and flash generated by the exploding cordite. In seconds, the grey shroud had fallen once more.

Then, magically it was clear again. A heavy fogbank had rolled over them, and through a gap in the next they caught a glimpse of the Sirrus, dead on the beam, a monstrous bone in her teeth, scything to the south-east at something better than 34 knots. The Stirling and the Viking were already lost in the fog astern.

‘He’s too close,’ Tyndall snapped. ‘Why didn’t Bowden tell us? We can’t bracket the enemy this way. Signal the Sirrus: “Steam 317 five minutes.” Captain, same for us, five south, then back on course.’

He had hardly sunk back in his chair, and the Ulysses, mist-shrouded again, was only beginning to answer her helm when the WT loudspeaker switched on.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge—’

The twin 5.25s of ‘B’ turret roared in deafening unison, flame and smoke lancing out through the fog. Simultaneously, a tremendous crash and explosion heaved up the duckboards beneath the feet of the men in the bridge catapulting them all ways, into each other, into flesh-bruising, bonebreaking metal, into the dazed confusion of numbed minds and bodies fighting to reorientate themselves under the crippling handicap of stunning shock, of eardrums rended by the blast, of throat and nostrils stung by acrid fumes, of eyes blinded by dense black smoke. Throughout it all, the calm impersonal voice of the WT transmitter repeated its unintelligible message.

Gradually the smoke cleared away. Tyndall pulled himself drunkenly to his feet by the rectifying arm of the binnacle: the explosion had blown him clean out of his chair into the centre of the compass platform. He shook his head, dazed, uncomprehending. Must be tougher than he’d imagined: all that way—and he couldn’t remember bouncing. And that wrist, now—that lay over at a damned funny angle. His own wrist, he realized with mild surprise. Funny, it didn’t hurt a bit. And Carpenter’s face there, rising up before him: the bandages were blown off, the gash received on the night of the great storm gaping wide again, the face masked with blood … That girl at Henley, the one he was always talking about—Tyndall wondered, inconsequently, what she would say if she saw him now … Why doesn’t the WT transmitter stop that insane yammering? … Suddenly his mind was clear.

‘My God! Oh, God!’ He stared in disbelief at the twisted duckboards, the fractured asphalt beneath his feet. He released his grip on the binnacle, lurched forward into the windscreen: his sense of balance had confirmed what his eyes had rejected: the whole compass platform tilted forward at an angle of 15 degrees.

‘What is it, Pilot?’ His voice was hoarse, strained, foreign even to himself. ‘In God’s name, what’s happened? A breech explosion in “B” turret?’

‘No, sir.’ Carpenter drew his forearm across his eyes: the kapok sleeve came away covered in blood. ‘A direct hit, sir—smack in the superstructure.’

‘He’s right, sir.’ Carrington had hoisted himself far over the windscreen, was peering down intently. Even at that moment, Tyndall marvelled at the man’s calmness, his almost inhuman control. ‘And a heavy one. It’s wrecked the for’ard pom-pom and there’s a hole the size of a door just below us … It must be pretty bad inside, sir.’

Tyndall scarcely heard the last words. He was kneeling over Vallery, cradling his head in his one good arm. The Captain lay crumpled against the gate, barely conscious, his stertorous breathing interrupted by rasping convulsions as he choked on his own blood. His face was deathly white.

‘Get Brooks up here, Chrysler—the Surgeon-Commander, I mean!’ Tyndall shouted. ‘At once!’

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge. Please acknowledge. Please acknowledge.’ The voice was hurried, less impersonal, anxiety evident even in its metallic anonymity.

Chrysler replaced the receiver, looked worriedly at the Admiral.

‘Well?’ Tyndall demanded. ‘Is he on his way?’

‘No reply, sir.’ The boy hesitated. ‘I think the line’s gone.’

‘Hell’s teeth!’ Tyndall roared. ‘What are you doing standing there, then? Go and get him. Take over, Number One, will you? Bentley—have the Commander come to the bridge.’

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge.’ Tyndall glared up at the speaker in exasperation, then froze into immobility as the voice went on. ‘We have been hit aft. Damage Control reports coding-room destroyed. Number 6 and 7 Radar Offices destroyed. Canteen wrecked. After control tower severely damaged.’

‘The After control tower!’ Tyndall swore, pulled off his gloves, wincing at the agony of his broken hand. Carefully, he pillowed Vallery’s head on the gloves, rose slowly to his feet. ‘The After Tower! And Turner’s there! I hope to God …’

He broke off, made for the after end of the bridge at a stumbling run. Once there he steadied himself, his hand on the ladder rail, and peered apprehensively aft.

At first he could see nothing, not even the after funnel and mainmast. The grey, writhing fog was too dense, too maddeningly opaque. Then suddenly, for a mere breath of time, an icy catspaw cleared away the mist, cleared away the dark, convoluted smoke-pall above the after superstructure. Tyndall’s hand tightened convulsively on the rail, the knuckles whitening to ivory.

The after superstructure had disappeared. In its place was a crazy mass of jumbled twisted steel, with ‘X’ turret, normally invisible from the bridge, showing up clearly beyond, apparently unharmed. But the rest was gone—radar offices, coding-room, police office, canteen, probably most of the after galley. Nothing, nobody could have survived there. Miraculously, the truncated mainmast still stood, but immediately aft of it, perched crazily on top of this devil’s scrap-heap, the After Tower, fractured and grotesquely askew, lay over at an impossible angle of 60°, its range-finder gone. And Commander Turner had been in there … Tyndall swayed dangerously on top of the steel ladder, shook his head again to fight off the fog clamping down on his mind. There was a heavy, peculiarly dull ache just behind his forehead, and the fog seemed to be spreading from there … A lucky ship, they called the Ulysses. Twenty months on the worst run and in the worst waters in the world and never a scratch … But Tyndall had always known that some time, some place, her luck would run out.

He heard hurried steps clattering up the steel ladder, forced his blurred eyes to focus themselves. He recognized the dark, lean face at once: it was Leading Signalman Davies, from the flag deck. His face was white, his breathing short and quick. He opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself, his eyes staring at the handrail.

‘Your hand, sir!’ He switched his startled gaze from the rail to Tyndall’s eyes. ‘Your hand! You’ve no gloves on, sir!’

‘No?’ Tyndall looked down as if faintly astonished he had a hand. ‘No, I haven’t, have I? Thank you, Davies.’ He pulled his hand off the smooth frozen steel, glanced incuriously at the raw, bleeding flesh. ‘It doesn’t matter. What is it, boy?’

‘The Fighter Direction Room, sir!’ Davies’s eyes were dark with remembered horror. ‘The shell exploded in there. It’s—it’s just gone, sir. And the Plot above … ’ He stopped short, his jerky voice lost in the crash of the guns of ‘A’ turret. Somehow it seemed strangely unnatural that the main armament still remained effective. ‘I’ve just come from the FDR and the Plot, sir,’ Davies continued, more calmly now. ‘They—well, they never had a chance.’

‘Including Commander Westcliffe?’ Dimly, Tyndall realised the futility of clutching at straws.

‘I don’t know, sir. It’s—it’s just bits and pieces in the FDR, if you follow me. But if he was there—’

‘He would be,’ Tyndall interrupted heavily. ‘He never left it during Action Stations … ’ He stopped abruptly, broken hands clenched involuntarily as the high-pitched scream and impact explosion of HE shells blurred into shattering cacophony, appalling in its closeness.

‘My God!’ Tyndall whispered. ‘That was close! Davies! What the hell … !’

His voice choked off in an agonized grunt, arms flailing wildly at the empty air, as his back crashed against the deck of the bridge, driving every last ounce of breath from his body. Wordlessly, convulsively, propelled by desperately thrusting feet and launched by the powerful back-thrust of arms pivoting on the handrails, Davies had just catapulted himself up the last three steps of the ladder, head and shoulders socketing into the Admiral’s body with irresistible force. And now Davies, too, was down, stretched his length on the deck, spreadeagled across Tyndall’s legs. He lay very still.

Slowly, the cruel breath rasping his tortured lungs, Tyndall surfaced from the black depths of unconsciousness. Blindly, instinctively he struggled to sit up, but his broken hand collapsed under the weight of his body. His legs didn’t seem to be much help either: they were quite powerless, as if he were paralysed from the waist down. The fog was gone now, and blinding flashes of colour, red, green and white were coruscating brilliantly across the darkening sky. Starshells? Was the enemy using a new type of starshell? Dimly, with a great effort of will, he realized that there must be some connection between these dazzling flashes and the now excruciating pain behind his forehead. He reached up the back of his right hand: his eyes were still screwed tightly shut … Then the realization faded and was gone.

‘Are you all right, sir? Don’t move. We’ll soon have you out of this!’ The voice, deep, authoritative, boomed directly above the Admiral’s head. Tyndall shrank back, shook his head in imperceptible despair. It was Turner who was speaking, and Turner, he knew, was gone. Was this, then, what it was like to be dead? he wondered dully. This frightening, confused world of blackness and blinding light at the same time, a darkbright world of pain and powerlessness and voices from the past?

Then suddenly, of their own volition almost, his eyelids flickered and were open. Barely a foot above him were the lean, piratical features of the Commander, who was kneeling anxiously at his side.

‘Turner! Turner?’ A questioning hand reached out in tentative hope, clutched gratefully, oblivious to the pain, at the reassuring solidity of the Commander’s arm. ‘Turner! It is you! I thought—’

‘The After Tower, eh?’ Turner smiled briefly. ‘No, sir—I wasn’t within a mile of it. I was coming here, just climbing up to the fo’c’sle deck, when that first hit threw me back down to the main deck … How are you, sir?’

‘Thank God! Thank God! I don’t know how I am. My legs … What in the name of heaven is that?’

His eyes focusing normally again, widened in baffled disbelief. Just above Turner’s head, angling for’ard and upward to port, a great white treetrunk stretched as far as he could see in either direction. Reaching up, he could just touch the massive bole with his hand.

‘The foremast, sir,’ Turner explained. ‘It was sheared clean off by that last shell, just above the lower yardarm. The back blast flung it on to the bridge. Took most of the AA tower with it, I’m afraid—and caved in the Main Tower. I don’t think young Courtney could have had much chance … Davies saw it coming—I was just below him at the time. He was very quick—’

‘Davies!’ Tyndall’s dazed mind had forgotten all about him. ‘Of course! Davies!’ It must be Davies who was pinioning his legs. He craned his neck forward, saw the huddled figure at his feet, the great weight of the mast lying across his back. ‘For God’s sake, Commander, get him out of that!’

‘Just lie down, sir, till Brooks gets here. Davies is all right.’

‘All right? All right!’ Tyndall was almost screaming, oblivious to the silent figures who were gathering around him. ‘Are you mad, Turner? The poor bastard must be in agony!’ He struggled frantically to rise, but several pairs of hands held him down, firmly, carefully.

‘He’s all right, sir.’ Turner’s voice was surprisingly gentle. ‘Really he is, sir. He’s all right. Davies doesn’t feel a thing. Not any more.’ And all at once the Admiral knew and he fell back limply to the deck, his eyes closed in shocked understanding.

His eyes were still shut when Brooks appeared, doubly welcome in his confidence and competence. Within seconds, almost, the Admiral was on his feet, shocked, badly bruised, but otherwise unharmed. Doggedly, and in open defiance of Brooks, Tyndall demanded that he be assisted back to the bridge. His eyes lit up momentarily as he saw Vallery standing shakily on his feet, a white towel to his mouth. But he said nothing. His head bowed, he hoisted himself painfully into his chair.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge. Please acknowledge signal.’

‘Is that bloody idiot still there?’ Tyndall demanded querulously. ‘Why doesn’t someone—?’

‘You’ve only been gone a couple of minutes, sir,’ the Kapok Kid ventured.

‘Two minutes!’ Tyndall stared at him, lapsed into silence. He glanced down at Brooks, busy bandaging his right hand. ‘Have you nothing better to do, Brooks?’ he asked harshly.

‘No, I haven’t,’ Brooks replied truculently. ‘When shells explode inside four walls, there isn’t much work left for a doctor … except signing death certificates,’ he added brutally. Vallery and Turner exchanged glances. Vallery wondered if Brooks had any idea how far through Tyndall was.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge. Vectra repeats request for instruction. Urgent. Urgent.’

‘The Vectra!’ Vallery glanced at the Admiral, silent now and motionless, and turned to the bridge messenger. ‘Chrysler! Get through to WT Any way you can. Ask them to repeat the first message.’

He looked again at Turner, following the Admiral’s sick gaze over the side. He looked down, recoiled in horror, fighting down the instant nausea. The gunner in the sponson below—just another boy like Chrysler—must have seen the falling mast, must have made a panic-stricken attempt to escape. He had barely cleared his cockpit when the radar screen, a hundred square feet of meshed steel carrying the crushing weight of the mast as it had snapped over the edge of the bridge, had caught him fairly and squarely. He lay still now, mangled, broken, something less than human, spreadeagled in outflung crucifixion across the twin barrels of his Oerlikon.

Vallery turned away, sick in body and mind. God, the craziness, the futile insanity of war. Damn that German cruiser, damn those German gunners, damn them, damn them! … But why should he? They, too, were only doing a job—and doing it terribly well. He gazed sightlessly at the wrecked shambles of his bridge. What damnably accurate gunnery! He wondered, vaguely, if the Ulysses had registered any hits. Probably not, and now, of course, it was impossible. It was impossible now because the Ulysses, still racing southeast through the fog, was completely blind, both radar eyes gone, victims to the weather and the German guns. Worse still, all the Fire Control towers were damaged beyond repair. If this goes on, he thought wryly, all we’ll need is a set of grappling irons and a supply of cutlasses. In terms of modern naval gunnery, even although her main armament was intact, the Ulysses was hopelessly crippled. She just didn’t have a chance. What was it that Stoker Riley was supposed to have said—‘being thrown to the wolves’? Yes, that was it—‘thrown to the wolves’. But only a Nero, he reflected wearily, would have blinded a gladiator before throwing him into the arena.

All firing had ceased. The bridge was deadly quiet. Silence, complete silence, except for the sound of rushing water, the muffled roar of the great engine-room intake fans, the monotonous, nerve-drilling pinging of the Asdic—and these, oddly enough, only served to deepen the great silence.

Every eye, Vallery saw, was on Admiral Tyndall. Old Giles was mumbling something to himself, too faint to catch. His face, shockingly grey, haggard and blotched, still peered over the side. He seemed fascinated by the site of the dead boy. Or was it the smashed Radar screen? Had the full significance of the broken scanner and wrecked Director Towers dawned on him yet? Vallery looked at him for a long moment, then turned away: he knew that it had.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge.’ Everyone on the bridge jumped, swung round in nerve-jangled startlement. Everyone except Tyndall. He had frozen into a graven immobility.

‘Signal from Vectra. First Signal. Received 0952.’ Vallery glanced at his watch. Only six minutes ago! Impossible!

‘Signal reads: Contacts, contacts, 3, repeat 3. Amend to 5. Heavy concentration of U-boats, ahead and abeam. Am engaging.”’

Every eye on the bridge swung back to Tyndall. His, they knew, the responsibility, his the decision—taken alone, against the advice of his senior officer—to leave the convoy almost unguarded. Impersonally, Vallery admired the baiting, the timing, the springing of the trap. How would old Giles react to this, the culmination of a series of disastrous miscalculations—miscalculations for which, in all fairness, he could not justly be blamed … But he would be held accountable. The iron voice of the loudspeaker broke in on his thoughts.

‘Second signal reads: “Close contact. Depthcharging. Depth-charging. One vessel torpedoed, sinking. Tanker torpedoed, damaged, still afloat, under command. Please advise. Please assist. Urgent. Urgent!”’

The speaker clicked off. Again that hushed silence, strained, unnatural. Five seconds it lasted, ten, twenty—then everyone stiffened, looked carefully away.

Tyndall was climbing down from his chair. His movements were stiff, slow with the careful faltering shuffle of the very old. He limped heavily. His right hand, startling white in its snowy sheath of bandage, cradled his broken wrist. There was about him a queer, twisted sort of dignity, and if his face held any expression at all, it was the far-off echo of a smile. When he spoke, he spoke as a man might talk to himself, aloud.

‘I am not well,’ he said. ‘I am going below.’ Chrysler, not too young to have an inkling of the tragedy, held open the gate, caught Tyndall as he stumbled on the step. He glanced back over his shoulder, a quick, pleading look, caught and understood Vallery’s compassionate nod. Side by side, the old and the young, they moved slowly aft. Gradually, the shuffling died away and they were gone.

The shattered bridge was curiously empty now, the men felt strangely alone. Giles, the cheerful, buoyant, indestructible Giles was gone. The speed, the extent of the collapse was not for immediate comprehension: the only sensation at the moment was that of being unprotected and defenceless and alone.

‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings … ’ Inevitably, the first to break the silence was Brooks. ‘Nicholls always maintained that … ’ He stopped short, his head shaking in slow incredulity. ‘I must see what I can do,’ he finished abruptly, and hurried off the bridge.

Vallery watched him go, then turned to Bentley. The Captain’s face, haggard, shadowed with grizzled beard, the colour of death in the weird halflight of the fog, was quite expressionless.

‘Three signals, Chief. First to Vectra. “Steer 360°. Do not disperse. Repeat, do not disperse. Am coming to your assistance.”’ He paused, then went on: ‘Sign it, “Admiral, 14 ACS.” Got it? … Right. No time to code it. Plain language. Send one of your men to the WT at once.’

‘Second: To Stirling, Sirrus and Viking. “Abandon pursuit immediate. Course north-east. Maximum speed.” Plain language also.’ He turned to the Kapok Kid. ‘How’s your forehead, Pilot? Can you carry on?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Thank you, boy. You heard me? Convoy rerouted north—say in a few minutes’ time, at 1015. Six knots. Give me an intersection course as soon as possible.’

‘Third signal, Bentley: To Stirling, Sirrus and Viking: “Radar out of action. Cannot pick you up on screen. Stream fog-buoys. Siren at two-minute intervals.” Have that message coded. All acknowledgements to the bridge at once. Commander!’

‘Sir?’ Turner was at his elbow.

‘Hands to defence stations. It’s my guess the pack will have gone before we get there. Who’ll be off watch?’

‘Lord only knows,’ said Turner frankly. ‘Let’s call it port.’

Vallery smiled faintly. ‘Port it is. Organize two parties. First of port to clear away all loose wreckage: over the side with the lot— keep nothing. You’ll need the blacksmith and his mate, and I’m sure Dodson will provide you with an oxyacetylene crew. Take charge yourself. Second of port as burial party. Nicholls in charge. All bodies recovered to be laid out in the canteen when it’s clear … Perhaps you could give me a full report of casualties and damage inside the hour?’

‘Long before that, sir … Could I have a word with you in private?’

They walked aft. As the shelter door shut behind them, Vallery looked at the Commander curiously, half-humorously. ‘Another mutiny, perhaps, Commander?’

‘No, sir.’ Turner unbuttoned his coat, his hand struggling into the depths of a hip-pocket. He dragged out a flat half-bottle, held it up to the light. ‘Thank the Lord for that!’ he said piously. ‘I was afraid it got smashed when I fell … Rum, sir. Neat. I know you hate the stuff, but never mind. Come on, you need this!’

Vallery’s brows came down in a straight line.

‘Rum. Look here, Commander, do you—?’

‘To hell with KRs and AFOs!’ Turner interrupted rudely. ‘Take it—you need it badly! You’ve been hurt, you’ve lost a lot more blood and you’re almost frozen to death.’ He uncorked it, thrust the bottle into Vallery’s reluctant hands. ‘Face facts. We need you—more than ever now—and you’re almost dead on your feet—and I mean dead on your feet,’ he added brutally. ‘This might keep you going a few more hours.’

‘You put things so nicely,’ Vallery murmured. ‘Very well. Against my better judgement … ’

He paused, the bottle to his mouth.

‘And you give me an idea, Commander. Have the bosun break out the rum. Pipe “Up spirits.” Double ration to each man. They, too, are going to need it.’ He swallowed, pulled the bottle away, and the grimace was not for the rum.

‘Especially,’ he added soberly, ‘the burial party.’

TEN

Friday Afternoon

The switch clicked on and the harsh fluorescent light flooded the darkening surgery. Nicholls woke with a start, one hand coming up automatically to shield exhausted eyes. The light hurt. He screwed his eyes to slits, peered painfully at the hands of his wrist-watch. Four o’clock! Had he been asleep that long? God, it was bitterly cold!

He hoisted himself stiffly forward in the dentist’s chair, twisted his head round. Brooks was standing with his back to the door, snow-covered hood framing his silver hair, numbed fingers fumbling with a packet of cigarettes. Finally he managed to pull one out. He looked up quizzically over a flaring match-head.

‘Hallo, there, Johnny! Sorry to waken you, but the skipper wants you. Plenty of time, though.’ He dipped the cigarette into the dying flame, looked up again. Nicholls, he thought with sudden compassion, looked ill, desperately tired and overstrained; but no point in telling him so. ‘How are you? On second thoughts, don’t tell me! I’m a damned sight worse myself. Have you any of that poison left?’

‘Poison, sir?’ The levity was almost automatic, part of their relationship with each other. ‘Just because you make one wrong diagnosis? The Admiral will be all right—’

‘Gad! The intolerance of the very young—especially on the providentially few occasions that they happen to be right … I was referring to that bottle of bootleg hooch from the Isle of Mull.’

‘Coll,’ Nicholls corrected. ‘Not that it matters—you’ve drunk it all, anyway,’ he added unkindly. He grinned tiredly at the Commander’s crestfallen face, then relented. ‘But we do have a bottle of Talisker left.’ He crossed over to the posion cupboard, unscrewed the top of a bottle marked ‘Lysol’. He heard, rather than saw, the clatter of glass against glass, wondered vaguely, with a kind of clinical detachment, why his hands were shaking so badly.

Brooks drained his glass, sighed in bliss as he felt the grateful warmth sinking down inside him.

‘Thank you, my boy. Thank you. You have the makings of a first-class doctor.’

‘You think so, sir? I don’t. Not any longer. Not after today.’ He winced, remembering. ‘Forty-four of them, sir, over the side in ten minutes, one after the other, like—like so many sacks of rubbish.’

‘Forty-four?’ Brooks looked up. ‘So many, Johnny?’

‘Not really, sir. That was the number of missing. About thirty, rather, and God only knows how many bits and pieces … It was a brush and shovel job in the FDR’ He smiled, mirthlessly. ‘I had no dinner, today. I don’t think anybody else in the burial party had either … I’d better screen that porthole.’

He turned away quickly, walked across the surgery. Low on the horizon, through the thinlyfalling snow, he caught intermittent sight of an evening star. That meant that the fog was gone—the fog that had saved the convoy, had hidden them from the U-boats when it had turned so sharply to the north. He could see the Vectra, her depth-charge racks empty and nothing to show for it. He could see the Vytura, the damaged tanker, close by, almost awash in the water, hanging grimly on to the convoy. He could see four of the Victory ships, big, powerful, reassuring, so pitifully deceptive in their indestructible permanence … He slammed the scuttle, screwed home the last butterfly nut, then swung round abruptly.

‘Why the hell don’t we turn back?’ he burst out. ‘Who does the old man think he’s kidding—us or the Germans? No air cover, nor radar, not the faintest chance of help! The Germans have us pinned down to an inch now—and it’ll be easier still for them as we go on. And there’s a thousand miles to go!’ His voice rose. ‘And every bloody enemy ship, U-boat and plane in the Arctic smacking their lips and waiting to pick us off at their leisure.’ He shook his head in despair. ‘I’ll take my chance with anybody else, sir. You know that. But this is just murder—or suicide. Take your pick, sir. It’s all the same when you’re dead.’

‘Now, Johnny, you’re not—’

‘Why doesn’t he turn back?’ Nicholls hadn’t even heard the interruption. ‘He’s only got to give the order. What does he want? Death or glory? What’s he after? Immortality at my expense, at our expense?’ He swore, bitterly. ‘Maybe Riley was right. Wonderful headlines. “Captain Richard Vallery, DSO, has been posthumously awarded—”’

‘Shut up!’ Brooks’s eye was as chill as the Arctic ice itself, his voice a biting lash.

‘You dare to talk of Captain Vallery like that!’ he said softly. ‘You dare to besmirch the name of the most honourable … ’ He broke off, shook his head in wrathful wonder. He paused to pick his words carefully, his eyes never leaving the other’s white, strained face.

‘He is a good officer, Lieutenant Nicholls, maybe even a great officer: and that just doesn’t matter a damn. What does matter is that he is the finest gentleman—I say “gentleman”—I’ve ever known, that ever walked the face of this graceless, Godforsaken earth. He is not like you or me. He is not like anybody at all. He walks alone, but he is never lonely, for he has company all the way … men like Peter, like Bede, like St Francis of Assisi.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Funny, isn’t it—to hear an old reprobate like myself talk like this? Blasphemy, even, you might call it—except that the truth can never be blasphemy. And I know.’

Nicholls said nothing. His face was like a stone.

‘Death, glory, immortality,’ Brooks went on relentlessly. ‘These were your words, weren’t they? Death?’ He smiled and shook his head again. ‘For Richard Vallery, death doesn’t exist. Glory? Sure, he wants glory, we all want glory, but all the London Gazettes and Buckingham Palaces in the world can’t give him the kind of glory he wants: Captain Vallery is no longer a child, and only children play with toys … As for immortality.’ He laughed, without a trace of rancour now, laid a hand on Nicholls’s shoulder. ‘I ask you, Johnny— wouldn’t it be damned stupid to ask for what he has already?’

Nicholls said nothing. The silence lengthened and deepened, the rush of the air from the ventilation louvre became oppressively loud. Finally, Brooks coughed, looked meaningfully at the ‘Lysol’ bottle.

Nicholls filled the glasses, brought them back. Brooks caught his eyes, held them, and was filled with sudden pity. What was that classical understatement of Cunningham’s during the German invasion of Crete—‘It is inadvisable to drive men beyond a certain point.’ Trite but true. True even for men like Nicholls. Brooks wondered what particular private kind of hell that boy had gone through that morning, digging out the shattered, torn bodies of what had once been men. And, as the doctor in charge, he would have had to examine them all—or all the pieces he could find …

‘Next step up and I’ll be in the gutter.’ Nicholls’s voice was very low. ‘I don’t know what to say, sir. I don’t know what made me say it … I’m sorry.’

‘Me too,’ Brooks said sincerely. ‘Shooting off my mouth like that! And I mean it.’ He lifted his glass, inspected the contents lovingly. ‘To our enemies, Johnny: their downfall and confusion, and don’t forget Admiral Starr.’ He drained the glass at a gulp, set it down, looked at Nicholls for a long moment.

‘I think you should hear the rest, too, Johnny. You know, why Vallery doesn’t turn back.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s not because there are as many of these damned U-boats behind us as there are in front—which there undoubtedly are.’ He lit a fresh cigarette, went on quietly:

‘The Captain radioed London this morning. Gave it as his considered opinion that FR77 would be a goner—“annihilated” was the word he used and, as a word, they don’t come any stronger—long before it reached the North Cape. He asked at least to be allowed to go north about, instead of east for the Cape … Pity there was no sunset tonight, Johnny,’ he added half-humorously. ‘I would have liked to see it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Nicholls was impatient. ‘And the answer?’

‘Eh! Oh, the answer. Vallery expected it immediately.’ Brooks shrugged. ‘It took four hours to come through.’ He smiled, but there was no laughter in the eyes. ‘There’s something big, something on a huge scale brewing up somewhere. It can only be some major invasion—this under your hat, Johnny?’

‘Of course, sir!’

‘What it is I haven’t a clue. Maybe even the long-awaited Second Front. Anyway, the support of the Home Fleet seems to be regarded as vital to success. But the Home Fleet is tied up—by the Tirpitz. And so the orders have gone out—get the Tirpitz. Get it at all costs.’ Brooks smiled, and his face was very cold. ‘We’re big fish, Johnny, we’re important people. We’re the biggest, juiciest bait ever offered up, the biggest, juiciest prize in the world today—although I’m afraid the trap’s a trifle rusty at the hinges … The signal came from the First Sea Lord—and Starr. The decision was taken at Cabinet level. We go on. We go east.’

‘We are the “all costs”,’ said Nicholls flatly. ‘We are expendable.’

‘We are expendable,’ Brooks agreed. The speaker above his head clicked on, and he groaned. ‘Hell’s bells, here we go again!’

He waited until the clamour of the Dusk Action Stations’ bugle had died away, stretched out a hand as Nicholls hurried for the door.

‘Not you, Johnny. Not yet. I told you, the skipper wants you. On the bridge, ten minutes after Stations begin.’

‘What? On the bridge? What the hell for?’

‘Your language is unbecoming to a junior officer,’ said Brooks solemnly. ‘How did the men strike you today?’ he went on inconsequently. ‘You were working with them all morning. Their usual selves?’

Nicholls blinked, then recovered.

‘I suppose so.’ He hesitated. ‘Funny, they seemed a lot better a couple of days ago, but—well, now they’re back to the Scapa stage. Walking zombies. Only more so—they can hardly walk now.’ He shook his head. ‘Five, six men to a stretcher. Kept tripping and falling over things. Asleep on their feet—eyes not focusing, too damned tired to look where they’re going.’

Brooks nodded. ‘I know, Johnny, I know. I’ve seen it myself.’

‘Nothing mutinous, nothing sullen about them any more.’ Nicholls was puzzled, seeking tiredly to reduce nebulous, scattered impressions to a homogeneous coherence. ‘They’ve neither the energy nor the initiative left for a mutiny now, anyway, I suppose, but it’s not that. Kept muttering to themselves in the FDR: “Lucky bastard” “He died easy”—things like that. Or “Old Giles—off his bleedin rocker.” And you can imagine the shake of the head. But no humour, none, not even the grisly variety you usually … ’ He shook his own head. ‘I just don’t know, sir. Apathetic, indifferent, hopeless—call ’em what you like. I’d call ‘em lost.’

Brooks looked at him a long moment, then added gently:

‘Would you now?’ He mused. ‘And do you know, Johnny, I think you’d be right … Anyway,’ he continued briskly, ‘get up there. Captain’s going to make a tour of the ship.’

‘What!’ Nicholls was astounded. ‘During action stations? Leave the bridge?’

‘Just that.’

‘But—but he can’t, sir. It’s—it’s unprecedented!’

‘So’s Captain Vallery. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all evening.’

‘But he’ll kill himself!’ Nicholls protested wildly.

‘That’s what I said,’ Brooks agreed wryly. ‘Clinically, he’s dying. He should be dead. What keeps him going God only knows—literally. It certainly isn’t plasma or drugs … Once in a while, Johnny, it’s salutary for us to appreciate the limits of medicine. Anyway, I talked him into taking you with him … Better not keep him waiting.’

For Lieutenant Nicholls, the next two hours were borrowed from purgatory. Two hours, the Captain took to his inspection, two hours of constant walking, of climbing over storm-sills and tangled wreckage of steel, of squeezing and twisting through impossibly narrow apertures, of climbing and descending a hundred ladders, two hours of exhausting torture in the bitter, heart-sapping cold of a sub-zero temperature. But it was a memory that was to stay with him always, that was never to return without filling him with warmth, with a strange and wonderful gratitude.

They started on the poop—Vallery, Nicholls and Chief Petty Officer Hartley—Vallery would have none of Hastings, the Master-At-Arms, who usually accompanied the Captain on his rounds. There was something oddly reassuring about the big, competent Chief. He worked like a Trojan that night, opening and shutting dozens of watertight doors, lifting and lowering countless, heavy hatches, knocking off and securing the thousand clips that held these doors and hatches in place, and before ten minutes had passed, lending a protesting Vallery the support of his powerful arm.

They climbed down the long, vertical ladder to ‘Y’ magazine, a dim and gloomy dungeon thinly lit with pinpoints of garish light. Here were the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers—the non-specialists in the purely offensive branches. ‘Hostilities only’ ratings, almost to a man, in charge of a trained gunner, they had a cold, dirty and unglamorous job, strangely neglected and forgotten—strangely, because so terribly dangerous. The four-inch armour encasing them offered about as much protection as a sheet of newspaper to an eight-inch armour-piercing shell or a torpedo …

The magazine walls—walls of shells and cartridge cases—were soaking wet, dripping constantly visibly, with icy condensation. Half the crew were leaning or lying against the racks, blue, pinched, shivering with cold, their breath hanging heavily in the chill air: the others were trudging heavily round and round the hoist, feet splashing in pools of water, lurching, stumbling with sheer exhaustion, gloved hands buried in their pockets, drawn, exhausted faces sunk on their chests. Zombies, Nicholls thought wonderingly, just living zombies. Why don’t they lie down?

Gradually, everyone became aware of Vallery’s presence, stopped walking or struggling painfully erect, eyes too tired, minds too spent for either wonder or surprise.

‘As you were, as you were,’ Vallery said quickly. ‘Who’s in charge here?’

‘I am, sir.’ A stocky, overalled figure walked slowly forward, halted in front of Vallery.

‘Ah, yes. Gardiner, isn’t it?’ He gestured to the men circling the hoist. ‘What in the world is all this for, Gardiner?’

‘Ice,’ said Gardiner succinctly. ‘We have to keep the water moving or it’ll freeze in a couple of minutes. We can’t have ice on the magazine floor, sir.’

‘No, no, of course not! But—but the pumps, the draincocks?’

‘Solid!’

‘But surely—this doesn’t go on all the time?’

‘In flat weather—all the time, sir.’

‘Good God!’ Vallery shook his head incredulously, splashed his way to the centre of the group, where a slight, boyish figure was coughing cruelly into a corner of an enormous green and white muffler. Vallery placed a concerned arm across the shaking shoulders.

‘Are you all right, boy?’

‘Yes, sir. ‘Course, Ah am!’ He lifted a thin white face racked with pain. ‘Ah’m fine,’ he said indignantly.

‘What’s your name?’

‘McQuater, sir.’

‘And what’s your job, McQuater?’

‘Assistant cook, sir.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen, sir.’ Merciful heavens, Vallery thought, this isn’t a cruiser I’m running—it’s a nursery!

‘From Glasgow, eh?’ He smiled.

‘Yes, sir.’ Defensively.

‘I see.’ He looked down at the deck, at McQuater’s boots half-covered in water. ‘Why aren’t you wearing your sea-boots?’ he asked abruptly.

‘We don’t get issued with them, sir.’

‘But your feet, man! They must be soaking!’

‘Ah don’t know, sir. Ah think so. Anyway,’ McQuater said simply, ‘it doesna matter. Ah canna feel them.’

Vallery winced. Nicholls, looking at the Captain, wondered if he realized the distressing, pathetic picture he himself presented with his sunken, bloodless face, red, inflamed eyes, his mouth and nose daubed with crimson, the inevitable dark and sodden hand-towel clutched in his left glove. Suddenly unaccountably, Nicholls felt ashamed of himself: that thought, he knew, could never occur to this man.

Vallery smiled down at McQuater.

‘Tell me son, honestly—are you tired?’

‘Ah am that—Ah mean, aye, aye, sir.’

‘Me too,’ Vallery confessed. ‘But—you can carry on a bit longer?’

He felt the frail shoulders straighten under his arm.

‘’Course Ah can, sir!’ The tone was injured, almost truculent.’ ’Course Ah can!’

Vallery’s gaze travelled slowly over the group, his dark eyes glowing as he heard a murmured chorus of assent. He made to speak, broke off in a harsh coughing and bent his head. He looked up again, his eyes wandering once more over the circle of now-anxious faces, then turned abruptly away.

‘We won’t forget you,’ he murmured indistinctly. ‘I promise you, we won’t forget you.’ He splashed quickly away, out of the pool of water, out of the pool of light, into the darkness at the foot of the ladder.

Ten minutes later, they emerged from ‘Y’ turret. The night sky was cloudless now, brilliant with diamantine stars, little chips of frozen fire in the dark velvet of that fathomless floor. The cold was intense. Captain Vallery shivered involuntarily as the turret door slammed behind them.

‘Hartley?’

‘Sir?’

‘I smelt rum in there!’

‘Yes, sir. So did I.’ The Chief was cheerful, unperturbed. ‘Proper stinking with it. Don’t worry about it though, sir. Half the men in the ship bottle their rum ration, keep it for action stations.’

‘Completely forbidden in regulations, Chief. You know that as well as I do!’

‘I know. But there’s no harm, sir. Warms ’em up—and if it gives them Dutch courage, all the better. Remember that night the for’ard pom-pom got two Stukas?’

‘Of course.’

‘Canned to the wide. Never have done it otherwise … And now, sir, they need it.’

‘Suppose you’re right, Chief. They do and I don’t blame them.’ He chuckled. ‘And don’t worry about my knowing—I’ve always known. But it smelled like a saloon bar in there … ’

They climbed up to ‘X’ turret—the marine turret—then down to the magazine. Wherever he went, as in ‘Y’ magazine, Vallery left the men the better for his coming. In personal contact, he had some strange indefinable power that lifted men above themselves, that brought out in them something they had never known to exist. To see dull apathy and hopelessness slowly give way to resolution, albeit a kind of numbed and desperate resolve, was to see something that baffled the understanding. Physically and mentally, Nicholls knew, these men had long since passed the point of no return.

Vaguely, he tried to figure it out, to study the approach and technique. But the approach varied every time, he saw, was no more than a natural reaction to different sets of circumstances as they presented themselves, a reaction utterly lacking in calculation or finesse. There was no technique. Was pity, then, the activating force, pity for the heart-breaking gallantry of a man so clearly dying? Or was it shame—if he can do it, if he can still drive that wasted mockery of a body, if he can kill himself just to come to see if we’re all right—if he can do that and smile—then, by God, we can stick it out, too? That’s it, Nicholls said to himself, that’s what it is, pity and shame, and he hated himself for thinking it, and not because of the thought, but because he knew he lied … He was too tired to think anyway. His mind was woolly, fuzzy round the edges, his thoughts disjointed, uncontrolled. Like everyone else’s. Even Andy Carpenter, the last man you would suspect of it—he felt that way, too, and admitted it … He wondered what the Kapok Kid would have to say to this … The Kid was probably wandering too, but wandering in his own way, back as always on the banks of the Thames. He wondered what the girl in Henley was like. Her name started with ‘J’—Joan, Jean—he didn’t know: the Kapok Kid had a big golden ‘J’ on the right breast of his kapok suit—she had put it there. But what was she like? Blonde and gay, like the Kid himself? Or dark and kind and gentle, like St Francis of Assisi? St Francis of Assisi? Why in the world did he—ah, yes, old Socrates had been talking about him. Wasn’t he the man of whom Axel Munthe …

‘Nicholls! Are you all right?’ Vallery’s voice was sharp with anxiety.

‘Yes, of course, sir.’ Nicholls shook his head, as if to clear it. ‘Just gathering wool. Where to now, sir?’

‘Engineers’ Flat, Damage Control parties, Switchboard, Number 3 Low Power room—no, of course, that’s gone—Noyes was killed there, wasn’t he? … Hartley, I’d appreciate it if you’d let my feet touch the deck occasionally … ’

All these places they visited in turn and a dozen others besides— not even the remotest corner, the most impossible of access, did Vallery pass by, if he knew a man was there, closed up to his action station.

They came at last to the engine and boiler-rooms, to the gulping pressure changes on unaccustomed eardrums as they went through the airlocks, to the antithetically breath-taking blast of heat as they passed inside. In ‘A’ boiler-room, Nicholls insisted on Vallery’s resting for some minutes. He was grey with pain and weakness, his breathing very distressed. Nicholls noticed Hartley talking in a corner, was dimly aware of someone leaving the boiler-room.

Then his eyes caught sight of a burly, swarthy stoker, with bruised cheeks and the remnants of a gorgeous black eye, stalking across the floor. He carried a canvas chair, set it down with a thump behind Vallery.

‘A seat, sir,’ he growled.

‘Thank you, thank you.’ Vallery lowered himself gratefully, then looked up in surprise. ‘Riley?’ he murmured, then switched his glance to Hendry, the Chief Stoker. ‘Doing his duty with a minimum of grace, eh?’

Hendry stirred uncomfortably.

‘He did it off his own bat, sir.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Vallery said sincerely. ‘Forgive me, Riley. Thank you very much.’ He stared after him in puzzled wonder, looked again at Hendry, eyebrows lifted in interrogation.

Hendry shook his head.

‘Search me, sir. I’ve no idea. He’s a queer fish. Does things like that. He’d bend a lead pipe over your skull without batting an eyelid—and he’s got a mania for looking after kittens and lame dogs. Or if you get a bird with a broken wing—Riley’s your man. But he’s got a low opinion of his fellowmen, sir.’

Vallery nodded slowly, without speaking, leaned against the canvas back and closed his eyes in exhaustion. Nicholls bent over him.

‘Look, sir,’ he urged quietly, ‘why not give it up? Frankly, sir, you’re killing yourself. Can’t we finish this some other time?’

‘I’m afraid not, my boy.’ Vallery was very patient. ‘You don’t understand. “Some other time” will be too late.’ He turned to Hendry. ‘So you think you’ll manage all right, Chief?’

‘Don’t you worry about us, sir.’ The soft Devon voice was grim and gentle at the same time. ‘Just you look after yourself. The stokers won’t let you down, sir.’

Vallery rose painfully to his feet, touched him lightly on the arm. ‘Do you know, Chief, I never thought you would … Ready, Hartley?’ He stopped short, seeing a giant duffel-coated figure waiting at the foot of the ladder, the face below the hood dark and sombre. ‘Who’s that? Oh, I know. Never thought stokers got so cold,’ he smiled.

‘Yes, sir, it’s Petersen,’ Hartley said softly. ‘He’s coming with us.’

‘Who said so? And—and Petersen? Wasn’t that—?’

‘Yes, sir. Riley’s—er—lieutenant in the Scapa business … Surgeon Commander’s orders, sir. Petersen’s going to give us a hand.’

‘Us? Me, you mean.’ There was no resentment, no bitterness in Vallery’s voice. ‘Hartley, take my advice—never let yourself get into the hands of the doctors … You think he’s safe?’ he added half-humorously.

‘He’d probably kill the man who looked sideways at you,’ Hartley stated matter-of-factly. ‘He’s a good man, sir. Simple, easily led—but good.’

At the foot of the ladder, Petersen stepped aside to let them pass, but Vallery stopped, looked up at the giant towering six inches above him, into the grave, blue eyes below the flaxen hair.

‘Hallo, Petersen. Hartley tells me you’re coming with us. Do you really want to? You don’t have to, you know.’

‘Please, Captain.’ The speech was slow and precise, the face curiously dignified in unhappiness. ‘I am very sorry for what has happened—’

‘No, no!’ Vallery was instantly contrite. ‘You misunderstand. It’s a bitter night up top. But I would like it very much if you would come. Will you?’

Petersen stared at him, then began slowly to smile, his face darkening with pleasure. As the Captain set foot on the first step, the giant arm came round him. The sensation, as Vallery described it later, was very much like going up in a lift.

From there they visited Engineer Commander Dodson in his engine-room, a cheerful, encouraging, immensely competent Dodson, an engineer to his finger-tips in his single-minded devotion to the great engines under his care. Then aft to the Engineers’ Flat, up the companionway between the wrecked Canteen and the Police Office, out on to the upper deck. After the heat of the boiler-room, the 100° drop in temperature, a drop that strangled breath with the involuntary constriction of the throat and made a skin-crawling mockery of ‘Arctic clothing,’ was almost literally paralysing.

The starboard torpedo tubes—the only ones at the standby—were only four paces away. The crew, huddled in the lee of the wrecked bosun’s store—the one destroyed by the Blue Ranger’s shells—were easily located by the stamping of frozen feet, the uncontrollable chattering of teeth.

Vallery peered into the gloom. ‘LTO there?’

‘Captain, sir?’ Surprise, doubt in the voice.

‘Yes. How are things going?’

‘All right, sir.’ He was still off-balance, hesitant. ‘I think young Smith’s left foot is gone, sir—frostbite.’

‘Take him below—at once. And organize your crew into ten-minute watches: one to keep a telephone watch here, the other four in the Engineers’ Flat. From now on. You understand?’ He hurried away, as if to avoid the embarrassment of thanks, the murmurs of smiling gladness.

They passed the torpedo shop, where the spare torpedoes and compressed air cylinders were stored, climbed the ladder to the boat-deck. Vallery paused a moment, one hand on the boat-winch, the other holding the bloody scarf, already frozen almost solid, to mouth and nose. He could just distinguish the shadowy bulkiness of merchantmen on either side: their masts, though, were oddly visible, swinging lazily, gently against the stars as the ships rolled to a slight swell, just beginning. He shuddered, pulled his scarf higher round his neck. God, it was cold! He moved for’ard, leaning heavily on Petersen’s arm. The snow, three to four inches deep, cushioned his footsteps as he came up behind an Oerlikon gun. Quietly, he laid a hand on the shoulder of the hooded gunner hunched forward in his cockpit.

‘Things all right, gunner?’

No reply. The man appeared to stir, moved forward, then fell still again.

‘I said, “Are you all right?”’ Vallery’s voice had hardened. He shook the gunner by the shoulder, turned impatiently to Hartley.

‘Asleep, Chief! At Action Stations! We’re all dead from lack of sleep, I know—but his mates below are depending on him. There’s no excuse. Take his name!’

‘Take his name!’ Nicholls echoed softly, bent over the cockpit. He shouldn’t speak like this, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Take his name,’ he repeated. ‘What for? His next of kin? This man is dead.’

The snow was beginning to fall again, cold and wet and feathery, the wind lifting a perceptible fraction. Vallery felt the first icy flakes, unseen in the darkness, brushing his cheeks, heard the distant moan of the wind in the rigging, lonely and forlorn. He shivered.

‘His heater’s gone.’ Hartley withdrew an exploratory hand, straightened up. He seemed tired. ‘These Oerlikons have black heaters bolted to the side of the cockpit. The gunners lean against them, sir, for hours at a time … I’m afraid the fuses must have blown. They’ve been warned against this, sir, a thousand times.’

‘Good God! Good God!’ Vallery shook his head slowly. He felt old, terribly tired. ‘What a useless, futile way to die … Have him taken to the Canteen, Hartley.’

‘No good, sir.’ Nicholls straightened up also. ‘It’ll have to wait. What with the cold and the quick onset of rigor mortis—well, it’ll have to wait.’

Vallery nodded assent, turned heavily away. All at once, the deck speaker aft of the winch blared into raucous life, a rude desecration that shattered the chilled hush of the evening.

‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Captain, or notify Captain, to contact bridge immediately, please.’ Three times the message was repeated, then the speaker clicked off.

Quickly Vallery turned to Hartley.

‘Where’s the nearest phone, Chief?’

‘Right here, sir.’ Hartley turned back to the Oerlikon, stripped earphones and chest mouthpiece from the dead man. ‘That is, if the AA tower is still manned?’

‘What’s left of it is.’

‘Tower? Captain to speak to bridge. Put me through.’ He handed the receiver to Vallery. ‘Here you are, sir.’

‘Thank you. Bridge? Yes, speaking … Yes, yes … Very good. Detail the Sirrus … No, Commander, nothing I can do anyway— just maintain position, that’s all.’ He took the handset off, handed it back to Hartley.

‘Asdic contact from Viking,’ he said briefly. ‘Red 90.’ He turned, looked out over the dark sea, realized the futility of his instinctive action, and shrugged. ‘We’ve sent the Sirrus after him. Come on.’

Their tour of the boat-deck gun-sites completed with a visit to the midships’ pom-pom crew, bonechilled and shaking with cold, under the command of the bearded Doyle, respectfully sulphurous in his outspoken comments on the weather, they dropped down to the main deck again. By this time Vallery was making no protest at all, not even of the most token kind, against Petersen’s help and support. He was too glad of them. He blessed Brooks for his foresight and thoughfulness, and was touched by the rare delicacy and consideration that prompted the big Norwegian to withdraw his supporting arm whenever they spoke to or passed an isolated group of men.

Inside the port screen door and just for’ard of the galley, Vallery and Nicholls, waiting as the others knocked the clamps off the hatch leading down to the stokers’ mess, heard the muffled roar of distant depth-charges—there were four in all—felt the pressure waves strike the hull of the Ulysses. At the first report Vallery had stiffened, head cocked in attention, eyes fixed on infinity, in the immemorial manner of a man whose ears are doing the work for all the sense. Hesitated a moment, shrugged, bent his arm to hook a leg over the hatch coaming. There was nothing he could do.

In the centre of the stokers’ mess was another, heavier hatch. This, too, was opened. The ladder led down to the steering position, which, as in most modern warships, was far removed from the bridge, deep in the heart of the ship below the armour-plating. Here, for a couple of minutes, Vallery talked quietly to the quartermaster, while Petersen, working in the confined space just outside, opened the massive hatch—450 lbs of steel, actuated by a counter-balancing pulley weight—which gave access to the hold, to the very bottom of the Ulysses, to the Transmitting Station and No. 2 Low Power Room.

Amazing, confusing mystery of a place, this Low Power Room, confusing to the eye and ear. Round every bulkhead, interspersed with scores of switches, breakers and rheostats, were ranged tiered banks of literally hundreds of fuses, baffling to the untrained eye in their myriad complexity. Baffling, too, was the function of a score or more of low-power generators, nerve-drilling in the frenetic dissonance of their high-pitched hums. Nicholls straightened up at the foot of the ladder and shuddered involuntarily. A bad place, this. How easily could mind and nerves slide over the edge of insanity under the pounding, insistent clamour of the desynchronized cacophony!

Just then there were only two men there—an Electric Artificer and his assistant, bent over the big Sperry master gyro, making some latitude adjustment to the highly complex machinery of the compass. They looked up quickly, tired surprise melting into tired pleasure. Vallery had a few words with them—speech was difficult in that bedlam of sound—then moved over to the door of the TS.

He had his glove on the door handle when he froze to complete stillness. Another pattern had exploded, much closer this time, two cable lengths distant, at most. Depth-charges, they knew, but only because reason and experience told them: deep down in the heart of an armour-plated ship there is no sense of explosion, no roar of eruption from a detonating depth-charge. Instead, there is a tremendous, metallic clang, peculiarly tinny in calibre, as if some giant with a giant sledge had struck the ship’s side and found the armour loose.

The pattern was followed almost immediately by another two explosions, and the Ulysses was still shuddering under the impact of the second when Vallery turned the handle and walked in. The others filed in after the Captain, Petersen closing the door softly behind him. At once the clamour of the electric motors died gratefully away in the hushed silence of the TS

The TS, fighting heart of the ship, lined like the Low Power Room though it was by banks of fuses, was completely dominated by the two huge electronic computing tables occupying almost half the floor space. These, the vital links between the Fire Control Towers and the turrets, were generally the scene of intense, controlled activity: but the almost total destruction of the towers that morning had made them all but useless, and the undermanned TS was strangely quiet. Altogether, there were only eight ratings and an officer manning the tables.

The air in the TS, a TS prominently behung with ‘No Smoking’ notices, was blue with tobacco smoke hanging in a flat, lazily drifting cloud near the deckhead—a cloud which spiralled thinly down to smouldering cigarette ends. For Nicholls there was something oddly reassuring in these burning cigarettes: in the unnatural bow-taut stillness, in the inhuman immobility of the men, it was the only guarantee of life.

He looked, in a kind of detached curiosity, at the rating nearest him. A thin, dark-haired man, he was sitting hunched forward, his elbow on the table, the cigarette clipped between his fingers a bare inch from his half-open mouth. The smoke was curling up, lacing its smarting path across vacant, sightless eyes oblivious to the irritation, the ash on the cigarette, itself almost two inches in length, drooping slightly. Vaguely, Nicholls wondered how long he had been sitting there motionless, utterly motionless … and why?

Expectancy, of course. That was it—expectancy. It was too obvious. Waiting, just waiting. Waiting for what? For the first time it struck Nicholls, struck him with blinding clarity, what it was to wait, to wait with the bowstring of the nerves strung down at inhuman tension, strung down far beyond quivering to the taughtened immobility of snapping point, to wait for the torpedo that would send them crashing into oblivion. For the first time he realized why it was that men who could, invariably it seemed, find something complainingly humorous in any place and every place never joked about the TS. A death trap is not funny. The TS was twenty feet below water level: for’ard of it was ‘B’ magazine, aft of it ‘A’ boiler-room, on either side of it were fuel tanks, and below it was the unprotected bottom, prime target for acoustic mines and torpedoes. They were ringed, surrounded, by the elements, the threat of death, and it needed only a flash, a wandering spark, to trigger off the annihilating reality … And above them, in the one in a thousand chance of survival, was a series of hatches which could all too easily warp and lock, solid under the metal-twisting shock of an explosion. Besides, the primary idea was that the hatches, deliberately heavy in construction, should stay shut in the event of damage, to seal off the flooded compartments below. The men in the TS knew this.

‘Good evening. Everything all right down here?’ Vallery’s voice, quiet and calm as ever, sounded unnaturally loud. Startled faces, white and strained, twisted round, eyes opening in astonishment: the depth-charging, Nicholls realized, had masked their approach.

‘Wouldn’t worry too much about the racket outside,’ Vallery went on reassuringly. ‘A wandering U-boat, and the Sirrus is after him. You can thank your stars you’re here and not in that sub.’

No one else had spoken. Nicholls, watching them, saw their eyes flickering back from Vallery’s face to the forbidden cigarettes, understood their discomfort, their embarrassment at being caught red-handed by the Captain.

‘Any reports from the main tower, Brierley?’ he asked the officer in charge. He seemed unaware of the strain.

‘No, sir. Nothing at all. All quiet above.’

‘Fine!’ Vallery sounded positively cheerful. ‘No news is good news.’ He brought his hand out from his pocket, proffered his cigarette case to Brierley. ‘Smoke? And you, Nicholls?’ He took one himself, replaced the case, absently picked up a box of matches lying in front of the nearest gunner and if he noticed the gunner’s startled disbelief, the slow beginnings of a smile, the tired shoulders slumping fractionally in a long, soundless sigh of relief, he gave no sign.

The thunderous clanging of more depth-charges drowned the rasping of the hatch, drowned Vallery’s harsh, convulsive coughing as the smoke reached his lungs. Only the reddening of the sodden hand-towel betrayed him. As the last vibration died away, he looked up, concern in his eyes.

‘Good God! Does it always sound like that down here?’

Brierley smiled faintly. ‘More or less, sir. Usually more.’

Vallery looked slowly round the men in the TS, nodded for’ard.

‘“B” magazine there, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And nice big fuel tanks all round you?’

Brierley nodded. Every eye was on the captain.

‘I see. Frankly, I’d rather have my own job—wouldn’t have yours for a pension … Nicholls, I think we’ll spend a few minutes down here, have our smoke in peace. Besides’—he grinned—‘think of the increased fervour with which we’ll count our blessings when we get out of here!’

He stayed five minutes, talking quietly to Brierley and his men. Finally, he stubbed out his cigarette, took his leave and started for the door.

‘Sir.’ The voice stopped him on the threshold, the voice of the thin dark gunner whose matches he had borrowed.

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘I thought you might like this.’ He held out a clean, white towel. ‘That one you’ve got is—well, sir, I mean it’s—’

‘Thank you.’ Vallery took the towel without any hesitation. ‘Thank you very much.’

Despite Petersen’s assistance, the long climb up to the upper deck left Vallery very weak. His feet were dragging heavily.

‘Look, sir, this is madness!’ Nicholls was desperately anxious. ‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean that, but—well, come and see Commander Brooks. Please!’

‘Certainly.’ The reply was a husky whisper. ‘Our next port of call anyway.’

Half a dozen paces took them to the door of the Sick Bay. Vallery insisted on seeing Brooks alone. When he came out of the surgery after some time, he seemed curiously refreshed, his step lighter. He was smiling, and so was Brooks. Nicholls lagged behind as the Captain left.

‘Give him anything, sir?’ he asked. ‘Honest to God, he’s killing himself!’

‘He took something, not much.’ Brooks smiled softly. ‘I know he’s killing himself, so does he. But he knows why, and I know why, and he knows I know why. Anyway, he feels better. Not to worry, Johnny!’

Nicholls waited at the top of the ladder outside the Sick Bay, waited for the Captain and others to come up from the telephone exchange and No. I Low Power Room. He stood aside as they climbed the coaming, but Vallery took his arm, walked him slowly for’ard past the Torpedo Office, nodding curtly to Carslake, in nominal charge of a Damage Control party. Carslake, face still swathed in white, looked back with eyes wild and staring and strange, his gaze almost devoid of recognition. Vallery hesitated, shook his head, then turned to Nicholls, smiling.

‘BMA in secret session eh?’ he queried. ‘Never mind, Nicholls, and don’t worry. I’m the one who should be worrying.’

‘Indeed, sir? Why!’

Vallery shook his head again. ‘Rum in the gun turrets, cigarettes in the TS, and now a fine old whisky in a “Lysol” bottle. Though Commander Brooks was going to poison me—and what a glorious death! Excellent stuff, and the Surgeon Commander’s apologies to you for broaching your private supplies.’

Nicholls flushed darkly, began to stammer an apology but Vallery cut him off.

‘Forget it, boy, forget it. What does it matter? But it makes me wonder what we’re going to find next. An opium den in the Capstan Flat, perhaps, or dancing girls in “B” turret?’

But they found nothing in these or any other places, except cold, misery and hunger-haunted exhaustion. As ever, Nicholls saw, they—or rather, Vallery—left the men the better of their coming. But they themselves were now in a pretty bad state, Nicholls realized. His own legs were made of rubber, he was exhausted by continuous shivering: where Vallery found the strength to carry on, he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Even Petersen’s great strength was flagging, not so much from half-carrying Vallery as from the ceaseless hammering of clips frozen solid on doors and hatches.

Leaning against a bulkhead, breathing heavily after the ascent from ‘A’ magazine, Nicholls looked hopefully at the Captain. Vallery saw the look, interpreted it correctly, and shook his head, smiling.

‘Might as well finish it, boy. Only the Capstan Flat. Nobody there anyway, I expect, but we might as well have a look.’

They walked slowly round the heavy machinery in the middle of the Capstan Flat, for’ard past the Battery Room and Sailmaker’s Shop, past the Electrical Workshop and cells to the locked door of the Painter’s Shop, the most for’ard compartment in the ship.

Vallery reached his hand forward, touched the door symbolically, smiled tiredly and turned away. Passing the cell door, he casually flicked open the inspection port, glanced in perfunctorily and moved on. Then he stopped dead, wheeled round and flung open the inspection port again.

‘What in the name of—Ralston! What on earth are you doing here?’ he shouted.

Ralston smiled. Even through the thick plate glass it wasn’t a pleasant smile and it never touched the blue eyes. He gestured to the barred grille, indicating that he could not hear.

Impatiently, Vallery twisted the grille handle.

‘What are you doing here, Ralston?’ he demanded. The brows were drawn down heavily over blazing eyes. ‘In the cells—and at this time! Speak up, man! Tell me!’ Nicholls looked at Vallery in slow surprise. The old man—angry! It was unheard of! Shrewdly, Nicholls decided that he’d rather not be the object of Vallery’s fury.

‘I was locked up here, sir.’ The words were innocuous enough, but their tone said, ‘What a damned silly question.’ Vallery flushed faintly.

‘When?’

‘At 1030 this morning, sir.’

‘And by whom, may I inquire?’

‘By the Master-At-Arms, sir.’

‘On what authority?’ Vallery demanded furiously.

Ralston looked at him a long moment without speaking. His face was expressionless. ‘On yours, sir.’

‘Mine!’ Vallery was incredulous. ‘I didn’t tell him to lock you up!’

‘You never told him not to,’ said Ralston evenly. Vallery winced: the oversight, the lack of consideration was his, and that hurt badly.

‘Where’s your night Action Station?’ he asked sharply.

‘Port tubes, sir.’ That, Vallery realized, explained why only the starboard crew had been closed up.

‘And why—why have you been left here during Action Stations? Don’t you know it’s forbidden, against all regulations?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Again the hint of the wintry smile. ‘I know. But does the Master-At-Arms know?’ He paused a second, smiled again. ‘Or maybe he just forgot,’ he suggested.

‘Hartley!’ Vallery was on balance again, his tone level and grim. ‘The Master-At-Arms here, immediately: see that he brings his keys!’ He broke into a harsh bout of coughing, spat some blood into the towel, looked at Ralston again.

‘I’m sorry about this, my boy,’ he said slowly. ‘Genuinely sorry.’

‘How’s the tanker?’ Ralston asked softly,

‘What? What did you say?’ Vallery was unprepared for the sudden switch. ‘What tanker?’

‘The one that was damaged this morning, sir.’

‘Still with us.’ Vallery was puzzled. ‘Still with us, but low in the water. Any special reason for asking?’

‘Just interested, sir.’ The smile was wry, but this time it was a smile. ‘You see—’

He stopped abruptly as a deep, muffled roar crashed through the silent night, the pressure blast listing the Ulysses sharply to starboard. Vallery lurched, staggered and would have fallen but for Petersen’s sudden arm. He braced himself against the righting roll, looked at Nicholls in sudden dismay. The sound was all too familiar.

Nicholls gazed back at him, sorry to his heart for this fresh burden for a dying man, and nodded slowly, in reluctant agreement with the unspoken thought in Vallery’s eyes.

‘Afraid you’re right, sir. Torpedo. Somebody’s stopped a packet.’

‘Do you hear there!’ The capstan flat speaker was hurried, intense, unnaturally loud in the aftermath of silence. ‘Do you hear there! Captain on the bridge: urgent. Captain on the bridge: urgent. Captain on the bridge: urgent …’

ELEVEN

Friday Evening

Bent almost double, Captain Vallery clutched the handrail of the port ladder leading up to the fo’c’sle deck. Desperately, he tried to look out over the darkened water, but he could see nothing. A mist, a dark and swirling and roaring mist flecked with blood, a mist shot through with dazzling light swam before his eyes and he was blind. His breath came in great whooping gasps that racked his tortured lungs: his lower ribs were clamped in giant pincers, pincers that were surely crushing him. That stumbling, lurching run from the forepeak, he dimly realized, had all but killed him. Close, too damn close, he thought. I must be more careful in future …

Slowly his vision cleared, but the brilliant light remained. Heavens above, Vallery thought, a blind man could have seen all there was to see here. For there was nothing to be seen but the tenebrous silhouette, so faint as to be almost imagined, of a tanker deep, deep in the water—and a great column of flame, hundreds of feet in height, streaking upwards from the heart of the dense mushroom of smoke that obscured the bows of the torpedoed ship. Even at the distance of half a mile, the roaring of the flames was almost intolerable. Vallery watched appalled. Behind him he could hear Nicholls swearing, softly, bitterly, continuously.

Vallery felt Petersen’s hand on his arm. ‘Does the Captain wish to go up to the bridge?’

‘In a moment, Petersen, in a moment. Just hang on.’ His mind was functioning again, his eyes, conditioned by forty years’ training, automatically sweeping the horizon. Funny, he thought, you can hardly see the tanker—the Vytura, it must be—she’s shielded by that thick pall of smoke, probably; but the other ships in the convoy, white, ghost-like, sharply etched against the indigo blue of the sky, were bathed in that deadly glare. Even the stars had died.

He became aware that Nicholls was no longer swearing in repetitious monotony, that he was talking to him.

‘A tanker, isn’t it, sir? Hadn’t we better take shelter? Remember what happened to that other one!’

‘What one?’ Vallery was hardly listening.

‘The Cochella. A few days ago, I think it was. Good God, no! It was only this morning!’

‘When tankers go up, they go up, Nicholls.’ Vallery seemed curiously far away. ‘If they just burn, they may last long enough. Tankers die hard, terribly hard, my boy: they live where any other ship would sink.’

‘But—but she must have a hole the size of a house in her side!’ Nicholls protested.

‘No odds,’ Vallery replied. He seemed to be waiting, watching for something. ‘Tremendous reserve buoyancy in these ships. Maybe 27 sealed tanks, not to mention cofferdams, pump-rooms, engine-rooms … Never heard of the Nelson device for pumping compressed air into a tanker’s oil tanks to give it buoyancy, to keep it afloat? Never heard of Captain Dudley Mason and the Ohio? Never heard of … ’ He broke off suddenly, and when he spoke again the dreaming lethargy of the voice was gone.

‘I thought so!’ he exclaimed, his voice sharp with excitement. ‘I thought so! The Vytura’s still under way, still under command! Good God, she must still be going almost 15 knots! The bridge, quick!’

Vallery’s feet left the deck, barely touched it again till Petersen set him down carefully on the duckboards in front of the startled Commander. Vallery grinned faintly at Turner’s astonishment, at the bushy eyebrows lifting over the dark, lean buccaneer’s face, leaner, more recklessly chiselled than ever in the glare of the blazing tanker. If ever a man was born 400 years too late, Vallery thought inconsequentially; but what a man to have around!

‘It’s all right, Commander.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Brooks thought I needed a Man Friday. That’s Stoker Petersen. Over-enthusiastic, maybe a trifle apt to take orders too literally … But he was a Godsend to me tonight … But never mind me.’ He jerked his thumb towards the tanker, blazing even more whitely now, difficult to look at, almost, as the noonday sun. ‘How about him?’

‘Makes a bloody fine lighthouse for any German ship or plane that happens to be looking for us,’ Turner growled. ‘Might as well send a signal to Trondheim giving our lat and long.’

‘Exactly,’ Vallery nodded. ‘Besides setting up some beautiful targets for the sub that got the Vytura just now. A dangerous fellow, Commander. That was a brilliant piece of work—in almost total darkness, too.’

‘Probably a scuttle somebody forgot to shut. We haven’t the ships to keep checking them all the time. And it wasn’t so damned brilliant, at least not for him … I sent her right away.’

‘Good man!’ Vallery said warmly. He turned to look at the burning tanker, looked back at Turner, his face set. ‘She’ll have to go, Commander.’

Turner nodded slowly. ‘She’ll have to go,’ he echoed.

‘It is the Vytura, isn’t it?’

‘That’s her. Same one that caught it this morning.’

‘Who’s the master?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ Turner confessed. ‘Number One, Pilot? Any idea where the sailing list is?’

‘No, sir.’ The Kapok Kid was hesitant, oddly unsure of himself. ‘Admiral had them, I know. Probably gone, now.’

‘What makes you think that?’ Vallery asked sharply.

‘Spicer, his pantry steward was almost choked with smoke this afternoon, found him making a whacking great fire in his bath,’ the Kapok Kid said miserably. ‘Said he was burning vital documents that must not fall into enemy hands. Old newspapers, mostly, but I think the list must have been among them. It’s nowhere else.’

‘Poor old …’ Turner remembered just in time that he was speaking of the Admiral, broke off, shook his head in compassionate wonder. ‘Shall I send a signal to Fletcher on the Cape Hatteras?’

‘Never mind.’ Vallery was impatient. ‘There’s no time. Bentley— to the master, Vytura: “Please abandon ship immediately: we are going to sink you.”’

Suddenly Vallery stumbled, caught hold of Turner’s arm.

‘Sorry,’ he apologized. ‘I’m afraid my legs are going. Gone, rather.’ He smiled up wryly at the anxious faces. ‘No good pretending any longer, is there? Not when your legs start a mutiny on their own. Oh, dear God, I’m done!’

‘And no bloody wonder!’ Turner swore. ‘I wouldn’t treat a mad dog the way you treat yourself! Come on, sir. Admiral’s chair for you—now. If you don’t, I’ll get Petersen to you,’ he threatened, as Vallery made to protest. The protest died in a smile, and Vallery meekly allowed himself to be helped into a chair. He sighed deeply, relaxed into the God-sent support of the back and arms of the chair. He felt ghastly, powerless, his wasted body a wide sea of pain, and deadly cold; all these things, but also proud and grateful—Turner had never even suggested that he go below.

He heard the gate crash behind him, the murmur of voices, then Turner was at his side.

‘The Master-At-Arms, sir. Did you send for him?’

‘I certainly did.’ Vallery twisted in his chair, his face grim. ‘Come here, Hastings!’

The Master-At-Arms stood at attention before him. As always, his face was a mask, inscrutable, expressionless, almost inhuman in that fierce light.

‘Listen carefully.’ Vallery had to raise his voice above the roar of the flames: the effort even to speak was exhausting. ‘I have no time to talk to you now. I will see you in the morning. Meantime, you will release Leading Seaman Ralston immediately. You will then hand over your duties, your papers and your keys to Regulating Petty Officer Perrat. Twice, now, you have overstepped the limits of your authority: that is insolence, but it can be overlooked. But you have also kept a man locked in cells during Action Stations. The prisoner would have died like a rat in a trap. You are no longer Master-At-Arms of the Ulysses. That is all.’ For a couple of seconds Hastings stood rigidly in shocked unbelieving silence, then the iron discipline snapped. He stepped forward, arms raised in appeal, the mask collapsed in contorted bewilderment.

‘Relieved of my duties? Relieved of my duties! But, sir, you can’t do that! You can’t … ’

His voice broke off in a gasp of pain as Turner’s iron grip closed over his elbow.

‘Don’t say “can’t” to the Captain,’ he whispered silkily in his ear. ‘You heard him? Get off the bridge!’

The gate clicked behind him. Carrington said, conversationally: ‘Somebody’s using his head aboard the Vytura—fitted a red filter to his Aldis. Couldn’t see it otherwise.’

Immediately the tension eased. All eyes were on the winking red light, a hundred feet aft of the flames, and even then barely distinguishable. Suddenly it stopped.

‘What does he say, Bentley?’ Vallery asked quickly.

Bentley coughed apologetically. ‘Message reads: “Are you hell. Try it and I will ram you. Engine intact. We can make it.”’

Vallery closed his eyes for a moment. He was beginning to appreciate how old Giles must have felt. When he looked up again, he made made his decision.

‘Signal: “You are endangering entire convoy. Abandon ship at once. Repeat, at once.”’He turned to the Commander, his mouth bitter. ‘I take off my hat to him. How would you like to sit on top of enough fuel to blow you to Kingdom Come … Must be oil in some of his tanks … God, how I hate to have to threaten a man like that!’

‘I know, sir,’ Turner murmured. ‘I know how it is … Wonder what the Viking’s doing out there? Should be hearing from her now?’

‘Send a signal,’ Vallery ordered. ‘Ask for information.’ He peered aft, searched briefly for the Torpedo Lieutenant. ‘Where’s Marshall?’

‘Marshall?’ Turner was surprised. ‘In the Sick Bay, of course. Still on the injured list, remember—four ribs gone?’

‘Of course, of course!’ Vallery shook his head tiredly, angry with himself. ‘And the Chief Torpedo Gunner’s Mate—Noyes, isn’t it?— he was killed yesterday in Number 3. How about Vickers?’

‘He was in the FDR’

‘In the FDR,’ Vallery repeated slowly. He wondered why his heart didn’t stop beating. He was long past the stage of chilled bone and coagulating blood. His whole body was a great block of ice … He had never known that such cold could exist. It was very strange, he thought, that he was no longer shivering …

‘I’ll do it myself, sir,’ Turner interrupted his wandering. ‘I’ll take over the bridge Torpedo Control—used to be the worst Torps officer on the China Station.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Perhaps the hand has not lost what little cunning it ever possessed!’

‘Thank you.’ Vallery was grateful. ‘You just do that.’

‘We’ll have to take him from starboard,’ Turner reminded him. ‘Port control was smashed this morning—foremast didn’t do it any good … I’ll go check the Dumaresq[1] … Good God!’ His hand gripped Vallery’s shoulder with a strength that made him wince. ‘It’s the Admiral, sir! He’s coming on the bridge!’

Incredulously, Vallery twisted round in his chair. Turner was right. Tyndall was coming through the gate, heading purposefully towards him. In the deep shadow cast by the side of the bridge, he seemed disembodied. The bare head, sparsely covered with thin, straggling wisps of white, the grey, pitifully-shrunken face, the suddenly stooped shoulders, unaccountably thin under black oilskins, all these were thrown into harsh relief by the flames. Below, nothing was visible. Silently, Tyndall padded his way across the bridge, stood waiting at Vallery’s side.

Slowly, leaning on Turner’s ready arm, Vallery climbed down. Unsmiling, Tyndall looked at him, nodded gravely, hoisted himself into his seat. He picked up the binoculars from the ledge before him, slowly quartered the horizon.

It was Turner who noticed it first.

‘Sir! You’ve no gloves on, sir!’

‘What? What did you say?’ Tyndall replaced the glasses, looked incredulously at his bloodstained, bandaged hands. ‘Ah! Do you know, I knew I had forgotten something. That’s the second time. Thank you, Commander.’ He smiled courteously, picked up the binoculars again, resumed his quartering of the horizon. All at once Vallery felt another, deadlier chill pass through him, and it had nothing to do with the bitter chill of the Arctic night.

Turner hesitated helplessly for a second, then turned quickly to the Kapok Kid.

‘Pilot! Haven’t I seen gauntlets hanging in your charthouse?’

‘Yes, sir. Right away!’ The Kapok Kid hurried off the bridge.

Turner looked up at the Admiral again.

‘Your head, sir—you’ve nothing on. Wouldn’t you like a duffel coat, a hood, sir?’

‘A hood?’ Tyndall was amused. ‘What in the world for? I’m not cold … If you’ll excuse me, Commander?’ He turned the binoculars full into the glare of the blazing Vytura. Turner looked at him again, looked at Vallery, hesitated, then walked aft.

Carpenter was on his way back with the gloves when the WT loudspeaker clicked on.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge. Signal from Viking: “Lost contact. Am continuing search.”’

‘Lost contact!’ Vallery exclaimed. Lost contact—the worst possible thing that could have happened! A U-boat out there, loose, unmarked, and the whole of FR77 lit up like a fairground. A fairground, he thought bitterly, clay pipes in a shooting gallery and with about as much chance of hitting back once contact had been lost. Any second now …

He wheeled round, clutched at the binnacle for support. He had forgotten how weak he was, how the tilting of the shattered bridge affected balance.

‘Bentley! No reply form the Vytura yet?’

‘No, sir,’ Bentley was as concerned as the Captain, as aware of the desperate need for speed. ‘Maybe his power’s gone—no, no, no, there he is now, sir!’

‘Captain, sir.’

Vallery looked round. ‘Yes, Commander, what is it? Not more bad news, I hope?’

‘Fraid so, sir. Starboard tubes won’t train—jammed solid.’

‘Won’t train,’ Vallery snapped irritably. ‘That’s nothing new, surely. Ice, frozen snow. Chip it off, use boiling water, blowlamps, any old—’

‘Sorry, sir.’ Turner shook his read regretfully. ‘Not that. Rack and turntable buckled. Must have been either the shell that got the bosun’s store or Number 3 Lower Power Room—immediately below. Anyway—kaput!’

‘Very well, then!’ Vallery was impatient. ‘It’ll have to be the port tubes.’

‘No bridge control left, sir,’ Turner objected. ‘Unless we fire by local control?’

‘No reason why not, is there?’ Vallery demanded. ‘After all, that’s what torpedo crews are trained for. Get on to the port tubes—I assume the communication line there is still intact—tell them to stand by.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And Turner?’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m sorry.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘As old Giles used to say of himself, I’m just a crusty old curmudgeon. Bear with me, will you?’

Turner grinned sympathetically, then sobered quickly. He jerked his head forward.

‘How is he, sir?’

Vallery looked at the Commander for a long second, shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Turner nodded heavily and was gone.

‘Well, Bentley? What does he say?’

‘Bit confused, sir,’ Bentley apologized. ‘Couldn’t get it all. Says he’s going to leave the convoy, proceed on his own. Something like that, sir.’

Proceed on his own! That was no solution, Vallery knew. He might still burn for hours, a dead give-away, even on a different course. But to proceed on his own! An unprotected, crippled, blazing tanker—and a thousand miles to Murmansk, the worst thousand miles in all the world! Vallery closed his eyes. He felt sick to his heart. A man like that, and a ship like that—and he had to destroy them both!

Suddenly Tyndall spoke.

‘Port 30!’ he ordered. His voice was loud, authoritative. Vallery stiffened in dismay. Port 30! They’d turn into the Vytura.

There was a couple of seconds’ silence, then Carrington, Officer of the Watch, bent over the speaking-tube, repeated: ‘Port 30.’ Vallery started forward, stopped short as he saw Carrington gesturing at the speaking-tube. He’d stuffed a gauntlet down the mouthpiece.

‘Midships!’

‘Midships, sir!’

‘Steady! Captain?’

‘Sir?’

‘That light hurts my eyes,’ Tyndall complained. ‘Can’t we put the fire out?’

‘We’ll try, sir.’ Vallery walked across, spoke softly. ‘You look tired, sir. Wouldn’t you like to go below?’

‘What? Go below! Me!’

‘Yes, sir. We’ll send for you if we need you,’ he added persuasively.

Tyndall considered this for a moment, shook his head grimly.

‘Won’t do, Dick. Not fair to you … ’ His voice trailed away and he muttered something that sounded like ‘Admiral Tyndall’, but Vallery couldn’t be sure.

‘Sir? I didn’t catch—’

‘Nothing!’ Tyndall was very abrupt. He looked away towards the Vytura, exclaimed in sudden pain, flung up an arm to protect his eyes. Vallery, too, started back, eyes screwed up to shut out the sudden blinding flash of flame from the Vytura.

The explosion crashed in their ears almost simultaneously, the blast of the pressure wave sent them reeling. The Vytura had been torpedoed again, right aft, close to her engine-room, and was heavily on fire there. Only the bridge island, amidships, was miraculously free from smoke and flames. Even in the moment of shock, Vallery thought, ‘She must go now. She can’t last much longer.’ But he knew he was deluding himself, trying to avoid the inevitable, the decision he must take. Tankers, as he’d told Nicholls, died hard, terribly hard. Poor old Giles, he thought unaccountably, poor old Giles.

He moved aft to the port gate. Turner was shouting angrily into the telephone.

‘You’ll damn well do what you’re told, do you hear? Get them out immediately! Yes, I said “immediately”!’

Vallery touched his arm in surprise. ‘What’s the matter, Commander?’

‘Of all the bloody insolence!’ Turner snorted. ‘Telling me what to do!’

‘Who?’

‘The LTO on the tubes. Your friend Ralston!’ said Turner wrathfully.

‘Ralston! Of course!’ Vallery remembered now. ‘He told me that was his night Action Stations. What’s wrong?’

‘What’s wrong: Says he doesn’t think he can do it. Doesn’t like to, doesn’t wish to do it, if you please. Blasted insubordination!’ Turner fumed.

Vallery blinked at him. ‘Ralston—are you sure? But of course you are … That boy’s been through a very private hell, Turner. Do you think—’

‘I don’t know what to think!’ Turner lifted the phone again. ‘Tubes nine-oh? At last! … What? What did you say? … Why don’t we … Gunfire! Gunfire!’ He hung up the receiver with a crash, swung round on Vallery.

‘Asks me, pleads with me, for gunfire instead of torpedoes! He’s mad, he must be! But mad or not, I’m going down there to knock some sense into that mutinous young devil!’ Turner was angrier than Vallery had ever seen him. ‘Can you get Carrington to man this phone, sir?’

‘Yes, yes, of course!’ Vallery himself had caught up some of Turner’s anger. ‘Whatever his sentiments, this is no time to express them!’ he snapped. ‘Straighten him up … Maybe I’ve been too lenient, too easy, perhaps he thinks we’re in his debt, at some psychological disadvantage, for the shabby treatment he’s received … All right, all right, Commander!’ Turner’s mounting impatience was all to evident. ‘Off you go. Going in to attack in three or four minutes.’ He turned abruptly, passed in to the compass platform.

‘Bentley!’

‘Sir?’

‘Last signal—’

‘Better have a look, sir,’ Carrington interrupted. ‘He’s slowing up.’

Vallery stepped forward, peered over the windscreen. The Vytura, a roaring mass of flames was falling rapidly astern.

‘Clearing the davits, sir!’ the Kapok Kid reported excitedly. ‘I think—yes, yes, I can see the boat coming down!’

‘Thank God for that!’ Vallery whispered. He felt as though he had been granted a new lease of life. Head bowed, he clutched the screen with both hands—reaction had left him desperately weak. After a few seconds he looked up.

‘WT code signal to Sirrus,’ he ordered quietly. ‘“Circle well astern. Pick up survivors from the Vytura’s lifeboat.”’

He caught Carrington’s quick look and shrugged. ‘It’s a better than even risk, Number One, so to hell with Admiralty orders. God,’ he added with sudden bitterness, ‘wouldn’t I love to see a boatload of the “no-survivors-will-be-picked-up” Whitehall warriors drifting about in the Barents Sea!’ He turned away, caught sight of Nicholls and Petersen.

‘Still here, are you, Nicholls? Hadn’t you better get below?’

‘If you wish, sir.’ Nicholls hesitated, nodded forward towards Tyndall.

‘I thought, perhaps—’

‘Perhaps you’re right, perhaps you’re right.’ Vallery shook his head in weary perplexity. ‘We’ll see. Just wait a bit, will you?’ He raised his voice. ‘Pilot!’

‘Sir?’

‘Slow ahead both!’

‘Slow ahead both, sir!’

Gradually, then more quickly, way fell off the Ulysses and she dropped slowly astern of the convoy. Soon, even the last ships in the lines were ahead of her, thrashing their way to the north-east. The snow was falling more thickly now, but still the ships were bathed in that savage glare, frighteningly vulnerable in their naked helplessness. Seething with anger, Turner brought up short at the port torpedoes. The tubes were out, their evil, gaping mouths, highlighted by the great flames, pointing out over the intermittent refulgence of the rolling swell. Ralston, perched high on the unprotected control position above the central tube, caught his eye at once.

‘Ralston!’ Turner’s voice was harsh, imperious. ‘I want to speak to you!’

Ralston turned round quickly, rose, jumped on to the deck. He stood facing the Commander. They were of a height, their eyes on a level, Ralston’s still, blue, troubled, Turner’s dark and stormy with anger.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you, Ralston?’ Turner ground out. ‘Refusing to obey orders, is that it?’

‘No, sir.’ Ralston’s voice was quiet, curiously strained. ‘That’s not true.’

‘Not true!’ Turner’s eyes were narrowed, his fury barely in check. ‘Then what’s all this bloody claptrap about not wanting to man the tubes? Are you thinking of emulating Stoker Riley? Or have you just taken leave of your senses—if any?’

Ralston said nothing.

The silence, a silence all too easily interpreted as dumb insolence, infuriated Turner. His powerful hands reached out, grasped Ralston’s duffel coat. He pulled the rating towards him, thrust his face close to the other’s.

‘I asked a question, Ralston,’ he said softly. ‘I haven’t had an answer. I’m waiting. What is all this?’

‘Nothing, sir.’ Distress in his eyes, perhaps, but no fear. ‘I—I just don’t want to, sir. I hate to do it—to send one of our own ships to the bottom!’ The voice was pleading now, blurred with overtones of desperation: Turner was deaf to them. ‘Why does she have to go, sir!’ he cried. ‘Why? Why? Why?’

‘None of your bloody business—but as it so happens she’s endangering the entire convoy!’ Turner’s face was still within inches of Ralston’s. ‘You’ve got a job to do, orders to obey. Just get up there and obey them! Go on!’ he roared, as Ralston hesitated. ‘Get up there!’ He fairly spat the words out.

Ralston didn’t move.

‘There are other LTOs, sir!’ His arms lifted high in appeal, something in the voice cut through Turner’s blind anger: he realized, almost with shock, that this boy was desperate. ‘Couldn’t they—?’

‘Let someone else do the dirty work, eh? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’ Turner was bitingly contemptuous. ‘Get them to do what you won’t do yourself, you—you contemptible young bastard! Communications Number? Give me your set. I’ll take over from the bridge.’ He took the phone, watched Ralston climb slowly back up and sit hunched forward, head bent over the Dumaresq.

‘Number One? Commander speaking. All set here. Captain there?’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll call him.’ Carrington put down the phone, walked through the gate.

‘Captain, sir. Commander’s on the—’ ‘Just a moment!’ The upraised hand, the tenseness of the voice stopped him. ‘Have a look, No. 1. What do you think?’ Vallery pointed towards the Vytura, past the oil-skinned figure of the Admiral. Tyndall’s head was sunk on his chest, and he was muttering incoherently to himself.

Carrington followed the pointing finger. The lifeboat, dimly visible through the thickening snow, had slipped her falls while the Vytura was still under way. Crammed with men, she was dropping quickly astern under the great twisting column of flame—dropping far too quickly astern as the First Lieutenant suddenly realized. He turned round, found Vallery’s eyes, bleak and tired and old, on his own. Carrington nodded slowly.

‘She’s picking up, sir. Under way, under comand … What are you going to do, sir?

‘God help me, I’ve no choice. Nothing from the Viking, nothing from the Sirrus, nothing from our Asdic—and that U-boat’s still out there … Tell Turner what’s happened. Bentley!’

‘Sir?’

‘Signal the Vytura.’ The mouth, whitely compressed, belied the eyes—eyes dark and filled with pain. ‘“Abandon ship. Torpedoing you in three minutes. Last signal.” Port 20, Pilot!’

‘Port 20 it is, sir.’

The Vytura was breaking off tangentially, heading north. Slowly, the Ulysses came round, almost paralleling her course, now a little astern of her.

‘Half-ahead, Pilot!’

‘Half-ahead it is, sir.’

‘Pilot!’

‘Sir?’

‘What’s Admiral Tyndall saying? Can you make it out?’

Carpenter bent forward, listened, shook his head. Little flurries of snow fell off his fur helmet.

‘Sorry, sir. Can’t make him out—too much noise from the Vytura … I think he’s humming, sir.’

‘Oh, God!’ Vallery bent his head, looked up again, slowly, painfully. Even so slight an effort was labour intolerable.

He looked across to the Vytura, stiffened to attention. The red Aldis was winking again. He tried to read it, but it was too fast: or perhaps his eyes were just too old, or tired: or perhaps he just couldn’t think any more … There was something weirdly hypnotic about that tiny crimson light flickering between these fantastic curtains of flame, curtains sweeping slowly, ominously together, majestic in their inevitability. And then the little red light had died, so unexpectedly, so abruptly, that Bentley’s voice reached him before the realization.

‘Signal from the Vytura, sir.’

Vallery tightened his grip on the binnacle. Bentley guessed the nod, rather than saw it.

‘Message reads: “Why don’t you—off. Nuts to the Senior Service.

Tell him I send all my love.”’ The voice died softly away, and there was only the roaring of the flames, the lost pinging of the Asdic.

‘All my love.’ Vallery shook his head in silent wonderment. ‘All my love! He’s crazy! He must be. “All my love,” and I’m going to destroy him … Number One!’

‘Sir?’

‘Tell the Commander to stand by!’

Turner repeated the message from the bridge, turned to Ralston. ‘Stand by, LTO!’ He looked out over the side, saw that the Vytura was slightly ahead now, that the Ulysses was still angling in on an interception course. ‘About two minutes now, I should say.’ He felt the vibration beneath his feet dying away, knew the Ulysses was slowing down. Any second now, and she’d start slewing away to starboard. The receiver crackled again in his ear, the sound barely audible above the roaring of the flames. He listened, looked up. ‘“X” and “Y” only. Medium settings. Target 11 knots.’ He spoke into the phone. ‘How long?’

‘How long, sir?’ Carrington repeated.

‘Ninety seconds,’ Vallery said huskily. ‘Pilot—starboard 10.’ He jumped, startled, as he heard the crash of falling binoculars, saw the Admiral slump forward, face and neck striking cruelly on the edge of the windscreen, the arms dangling loosely from the shoulders.

‘Pilot!’

But the Kapok Kid was already there. He slipped an arm under Tyndall, took most of the dead weight off the biting edge of the screen.

‘What’s the matter, sir?’ His voice was urgent, blurred with anxiety. ‘What’s wrong?’

Tyndall stirred slightly, his cheek lying along the edge of the screen.

‘Cold, cold, cold,’ he intoned. The quavering tones were those of an old, a very old man.

‘What? What did you say, sir?’ the Kapok Kid begged.

‘Cold. I’m cold. I’m terribly cold! My feet, my feet!’ The old voice wandered away, and the body slipped into a corner of the bridge, the grey face upturned to the falling snow.

Intuition, an intuition amounting to a sudden sick certainty, sent the Kapok Kid plunging to his knees. Vallery heard the muffled exclamation, saw him straighten up and swing round, his face blank with horror.

‘He’s—he’s got nothing on, sir,’ he said unsteadily. ‘He’s barefoot! They’re frozen—frozen solid!’

‘Barefoot?’ Vallery repeated unbelievingly. ‘Barefoot! It’s not possible!’

‘And pyjamas, sir! That’s all he’s wearing!’

Vallery lurched forward, peeling off his gloves. He reached down, felt his stomach turn over in shocked nausea as his fingers closed on ice-chilled skin. Bare feet! And pyjamas! Bare feet—no wonder he’d padded so silently across the duckboards! Numbly, he remembered that the last temperature reading had shown 35° of frost. And Tyndall, feet caked in frozen snow and slush, had been sitting there for almost five minutes! … He felt great hands under his armpits, felt himself rising effortlessly to his feet. Petersen. It could only be Petersen, of course. And Nicholls behind him.

‘Leave this to me, sir. Right, Petersen, take him below.’ Nicholls’s brisk, assured voice, the voice of a man competent in his own element, steadied Vallery, brought him back to the present, and the demands of the present, more surely than anything else could have done. He became aware of Carrington’s clipped, measured voice, reeling off course, speed, directions, saw the Vytura 50° off the port bow, dropping slowly, steadily aft. Even at that distance, the blast of heat was barely tolerable—what in the name of heaven was it like on the bridge of the Vytura?

‘Set course, Number One,’ he called. ‘Local control.’

‘Set course, local control.’ Carrington might have been on a peace-time exercise in the Solent.

‘Local control,’ Turner repeated. He hung up the set, looked round. ‘You’re on your own, Ralston,’ he said softly.

There was no reply. The crouched figure on the control position, immobile as graved stone, gave no sign that he had heard.

‘Thirty seconds!’ Turner said sharply. ‘All lined up?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The figure stirred. ‘All lined up.’ Suddenly, he swung round, in desperate, final appeal. ‘For God’s sake, sir! Is there no other—’

‘Twenty seconds!’ Turner said viciously. ‘Do you want a thousand lives on your lily-livered conscience? And if you miss … ’

Ralston swung slowly back. For a mere breath of time, his face was caught full in the harsh glare of the Vytura: with sudden shock, Turner saw that the eyes were masked with tears. Then he saw the lips move. ‘Don’t worry, sir. I won’t miss.’ The voice was quite toneless, heavy with nameless defeat.

Perplexed, now, rather than angry, and quite uncomprehending, Turner saw the left sleeve come up to brush the eyes, saw the right hand stretch forward, close round the grip of ‘X’ firing lever. Incongruously, there sprang to Turner’s mind the famous line of Chaucer, ‘In goon the spears full sadly in arrest.’ In the closing of that hand there was the same heart-stopping decision, the same irrevocable finality.

Suddenly, so suddenly that Turner started in spite of himself, the hand jerked convulsively back. He heard the click of the tripping lever, the muffled roar in the explosion chamber, the hiss of compressed air, and the torpedo was gone, its evil sleekness gleaming fractionally in the light of the flames before it crashed below the surface of the sea. It was hardly gone before the tubes shuddered again and the second torpedo was on its way.

For five, ten seconds Turner stared out, fascinated, watching the arrowing wakes of bubbles vanish in the distance. A total of 1,500 lbs of Amatol in these warheads—God help the poor bastards aboard the Vytura … The deck speaker clicked on.

‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Take cover immediately! Take cover—immediately!’ Turner stirred, tore his eyes away from the sea, looked up, saw that Ralston was still crouched in his seat.

‘Come down out of there, you young fool!’ he shouted. ‘Want to be riddled when the Vytura goes up? Do you hear me?’

Silence. No word, no movement, only the roaring of the flames.

‘Ralston!’

‘I’m all right, sir.’ Ralston’s voice was muffled: he did not even trouble to turn his head.

Turner swore, leapt up on the tubes, dragged Ralston from his seat, pulled him down to the deck and into shelter. Ralston offered no resistance: he seemed sunk in a vast apathy, an uncaring indifference.

Both torpedoes struck home. The end was swift, curiously unspectacular. Listeners—there were no watchers—on the Ulysses tensed themselves for the shattering detonation, but the detonation never came. Broken-backed and tired of fighting, the Vytura simply collapsed in on her stricken mid-ships, lay gradually, wearily over on her side and was gone.

Three minutes later, Turner opened the door of the Captain’s shelter, pushed Ralston in before him.

‘Here you are, sir,’ he said grimly. Thought you might like to see what a conscientious objector looks like!’

‘I certainly do!’ Vallery laid down the log-book, turned a cold eye on the torpedoman, looked him slowly up and down. ‘A fine job, Ralston, but it doesn’t excuse your conduct. Just a minute, Commander.’

He turned back to the Kapok Kid. ‘Yes, that seems all right, Pilot. It’ll make good reading for their lordships,’ he added bitterly. ‘The ones the Germans don’t get, we finish off for them … Remember to signal the Hatteras in the morning, ask for the name of the master of the Vytura.’

‘He’s dead … You needn’t trouble yourself!’ said Ralston bitterly, then staggered as the Commander’s open hand smashed across his face. Turner was breathing heavily, his eyes dark with anger.

‘You insolent young devil!’ he said softly. ‘That was just a little too much from you.’

Ralston’s hand came up slowly, fingering the reddening weal on his cheek.

‘You misunderstand me, sir.’ There was no anger, the voice was a fading murmur, they had to strain to catch his words. ‘The master of the Vytura—I can tell you his name. It’s Ralston. Captain Michael Ralston. He was my father.’

1. The Dumaresq was a miniature plotting table on which such relevant factors as corresponding speeds and courses were worked out to provide firing tracks for the torpedoes.

TWELVE

Saturday

To all things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn. And so it came for FR77, as grey, as bitter, as hopeless as the night had been long. But it came.

It came to find the convoy some 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle, steaming due east along the 72nd parallel of latitude, halfway between Jan Mayen and the North Cape. 8° 45’ east, the Kapok Kid reckoned, but he couldn’t be sure. In heavy snow and with ten-tenth cloud, he was relying on dead reckoning: he had to, for the shell that had destroyed the FDR had wrecked the Automatic Pilot. But roughly 600 nautical miles to go. 600 miles, 40 hours, and the convoy—or what would be left of it by that time—would be in the Kola Inlet, steaming up-river to Polyarnoe and Murmansk … 40 hours.

It came to find the convoy—14 ships left in all—scattered over three square miles of sea and rolling heavily in the deepening swell from the NNE: 14 ships, for another had gone in the deepest part of the night. Mine, torpedo? Nobody knew, nobody ever would know. The Sirrus had stopped, searched the area for an hour with hooded ten-inch signalling lamps. There had been no survivors. Not that Commander Orr had expected to find any—not with the air temperature 6° below zero.

It came after a sleepless night of never-ending alarms, of continual Asdic contacts, of constant depth-charging that achieved nothing. Nothing, that is, from the escorts’ point of view: but for the enemy, it achieved a double-edged victory. It kept exhausted men at Action Stations all night long, blunting, irreparably perhaps, the last vestiges of the knife-edged vigilance on which the only hope—it was never more—of survival in the Arctic depended. More deadly still, it had emptied the last depth-charge rack in the convoy … It was a measure of the intensity of the attack, of the relentlessness of the persecution, that this had never happened before. But it had happened now. There was not a single depth-charge left—not one. The fangs were drawn, the defences were down. It was only a matter of time before the wolf-packs discovered that they could strike at will …

And with the dawn, of course, came dawn Action Stations, or what would have been dawn stations had the men not already been closed up for fifteen hours, fifteen endless hours of intense cold and suffering, fifteen hours during which the crew of the Ulysses had been sustained by cocoa and one bully-beef sandwich, thin, sliced and stale, for there had been no time to bake the previous day. But dawn stations were profoundly significant in themselves: they prolonged the waiting another interminable two hours—and to a man rocking on his feet from unimaginable fatigue, literally holding convulsively jerking eyelids apart with finger and thumb while a starving brain, which is less a brain than a well of fine-drawn agony, begs him to let go, let go just for a second, just this once and never again, even a minute is brutal eternity: and they were still more important in that they were recognized as the Ithuriel hour of the Russian Convoys, the testing time when every man stood out clearly for what he was. And for the crew of a mutiny ship, for men already tried and condemned, for physically broken and mentally scourged men who neither could nor would ever be the same again in body or mind, the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame. Not all, of course, they were only human; but many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.

For some men, neither precipice nor valley ever existed. Men like Carrington, for instance. Eighteen consecutive hours on the bridge now, he was still his own indestructible self, alert with that relaxed watchfulness that never flagged, a man of infinite endurance, a man who could never crack, who you knew could never crack, for the imagination baulked at the very idea. Why he was what he was, no man could tell. Such, too, were men like Chief Petty Officer Hartley, like Chief Stoker Hendry, like Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant MacIntosh; four men strangely alike, big, tough, kindly, no longer young, steeped in the traditions of the Service. Taciturn, never heard to speak of themselves, they were under no illusions as to their importance: they knew—as any Naval Officer would be the first to admit—that, as the senior NCOs, they, and not any officer, were the backbone of the Royal Navy; and it was from their heavy sense of responsibility that sprung their rock-like stability. And then, of course, there were men—a handful only—like Turner and the Kapok Kid and Dodson, whom dawn found as men above themselves, men revelling in danger and exhaustion, for only thus could they realize themselves, for only this had they been born. And finally, men like Vallery, who had collapsed just after midnight, and was still asleep in the shelter, and Surgeon Commander Brooks: wisdom was their sheet anchor, a clear appreciation of the relative insignificance both of themselves and the fate of FR77, a coldly intellectual appraisal of, married to an infinite compassion for, the follies and suffering of mankind.

At the other end of the scale, dawn found men—a few dozen, perhaps—gone beyond recovery. Gone in selfishness, in self-pity and in fear, like Carslake, gone because their armour, the trappings of authority, had been stripped off them, like Hastings, or gone, like Leading SBA Johnson and a score of others, because they had been pushed too far and had no sheet anchor to hold them.

And between the two extremes were those—the bulk of the men—who had touched zero and found that endurance can be infinite—and found in this realization the springboard for recovery. The other side of the valley could be climbed, but not without a staff. For Nicholls, tired beyond words from a long night standing braced against the operating table in the surgery, the staff was pride and shame. For Leading Seaman Doyle, crouched miserably into the shelter of the for’ard funnel, watching the pinched agony, the perpetual shivering of his young midships pom-pom crew, it was pity; he would, of course, have denied this, blasphemously. For young Spicer, Tyndall’s devoted pantryboy, it was pity, too—pity and a savage grief for the dying man in the Admiral’s cabin. Even with both legs amputated below the knee, Tyndall should not have been dying. But the fight, the resistance was gone, and Brooks knew old Giles would be glad to go. And for scores, perhaps for hundreds, for men like the tubercular-ridden McQuater, chilled to death in sodden clothes, but no longer staggering drunkenly round the hoist in ‘Y’ turret, for the heavy rolling kept the water on the move: like Petersen, recklessly squandering his giant strength in helping his exhausted mates: like Chrysler, whose keen young eyes, invaluable now that Radar was gone, never ceased to scan the horizons: for men like these, the staff was Vallery, the tremendous respect and affection in which he was held, the sure knowledge that they could never let him down.

These, then, were the staffs, the intangible sheet anchors that held the Ulysses together that bleak and bitter dawn—pride, pity, shame, affection, grief—and the basic instinct for self-preservation although the last, by now, was an almost negligible factor. Two things were never taken into the slightest account as the springs of endurance: never mentioned, never even considered, they did not exist for the crew of the Ulysses: two things the sentimentalists at home, the gallant leader writers of the popular press, the propagandizing purveyors of nationalistic claptrap would have had the world believe to be the source of inspiration and endurance—hatred of the enemy, love of kinsfolk and country.

There was no hatred of the enemy. Knowledge is the prelude to hate, and they did not know the enemy. Men cursed the enemy, respected him, feared him and killed him if they could: if they didn’t, the enemy would kill them. Nor did men see themselves as fighting for King and country: they saw the necessity for war, but objected to camouflaging this necessity under a spurious cloak of perfervid patriotism: they were just doing what they were told, and if they didn’t, they would be stuck against a wall and shot. Love of kinsfolk—that had some validity, but not much. It was natural to want to protect your kin, but this was an equation where the validity varied according to the factor of distance. It was a trifle difficult for a man crouched in his ice-coated Oerlikon cockpit off the shores of Bear Island to visualize himself as protecting that rose-covered cottage in the Cotswolds … But for the rest, the synthetic national hatreds and the carefully cherished myth of King and country; these are nothing and less than nothing when mankind stands at the last frontier of hope and endurance: for only the basic, simple human emotions, the positive ones of love and grief and pity and distress, can carry a man across that last frontier.

Noon, and still the convoy, closed up in tight formation now, rolled eastwards in the blinding snow. The alarm halfway through dawn stations had been the last that morning. Thirty-six hours to go, now, only thirty-six hours. And if this weather continued, the strong wind and blinding snow that made flying impossible, the near-zero visibility and heavy seas that would blind any periscope … there was always that chance. Only thirty-six hours.

Admiral John Tyndall died a few minutes after noon. Brooks, who had sat with him all morning, officially entered the cause of death as ‘postoperative shock and exposure.’ The truth was that Giles had died because he no longer wished to live. His professional reputation was gone: his faith, his confidence in himself were gone, and there was only remorse for the hundreds of men who had died: and with both legs gone, the only life he had ever known, the life he had so loved and cherished and to which he had devoted forty-five glad and unsparing years, that life, too, was gone for ever. Giles died gladly, willingly. Just on noon he recovered consciousness, looked at Brooks and Vallery with a smile from which every trace of madness had vanished. Brooks winced at that grey smile, mocking shadow of the famous guffaw of the Giles of another day. Then he closed his eyes and muttered something about his family—Brooks knew he had no family. His eyes opened again, he saw Vallery as if for the first time, rolled his eyes till he saw Spicer. ‘A chair for the Captain, my boy.’ Then he died.

He was buried at two o’clock, in the heart of a blizzard. The Captain’s voice, reading the burial service, was shredded away by snow and wind: the Union flag was flapping emptily on the tilted board before the men knew he was gone: the bugle notes were broken and distant and lost, far away and fading like the horns of Elfland: and then the men, two hundred of them at least, turned silently away and trudged back to their frozen mess-decks.

Barely half an hour later, the blizzard had died, vanished as suddenly as it had come. The wind, too, had eased, and though the sky was still dark and heavy with snow, though the seas were still heavy enough to roll 15,000-ton ships through a 30° arc, it was clear that the deterioration in the weather had stopped. On the bridge, in the turrets, in the mess-decks, men avoided each other’s eyes and said nothing.

Just before 1500, the Vectra picked up an Asdic contact. Vallery received the report, hesitated over his decision. If he sent the Vectra to investigate, and if the Vectra located the U-boat accurately and confined herself, as she would have to do, to describing tight circles above the submarine, the reason for this freedom from depth-charging would occur to the U-boat captain within minutes. And then it would only be a matter of time—until he decided it was safe to surface and use his radio—that every U-boat north of the Circle would know that FR77 could be attacked with impunity. Further, it was unlikely that any torpedo attack would be made under such weather conditions. Not only was periscope observation almost impossible in the heavy seas, but the U-boat itself would be a most unstable firing platform: wave motion is not confined to the surface of the water—the effects can be highly uncomfortable and unstabilizing thirty, forty, fifty feet down—and are appreciable, under extreme conditions, at a depth of almost a hundred feet. On the other hand, the U-boat captain might take a 1,000-1 chance, might strike home with a lucky hit. Vallery ordered the Vectra to investigate.

He was too late. The order would have been too late anyway. The Vectra was still winking acknowledgement of the signal, had not begun to turn, when the rumble of a heavy explosion reached the bridge of the Ulysses. All eyes swept round a full circle of the horizon, searching for smoke and flame, for the canted deck and slewing ship that would show where the torpedo had gone home. They found no sign, none whatsoever, until almost half a minute had passed. Then they noticed, almost casually, that the Electra, leading ship in the starboard line, was slowing up, coming to a powerless stop, already settling in the water on an even keel, with no trace of tilt either for’ard or aft. Almost certainly, she had been holed in the engine-room.

The Aldis on the Sirrus had begun to flash. Bentley read the message, turned to Vallery.

‘Commander Orr requests permission to go alongside, port side, take off survivors.’

‘Port, is it?’ Turner nodded. ‘The sub’s blind side. It’s a fair chance, sir—in a calm sea. As it is … ’ He looked over at the Sirrus, rolling heavily in the beam sea, and shrugged. ‘Won’t do her paintwork any good.’

‘Her cargo?’ Vallery asked. ‘Any idea? Explosive?’ He looked round, saw the mute headshakes, turned to Bentley.

‘Ask Electra if she’s carrying any explosives as cargo.’

Bentley’s Aldis chattered, fell silent. After half a minute, it was clear that there was going to be no reply.

‘Power gone, perhaps, or his Aldis smashed,’ the Kapok Kid ventured. ‘How about one flag for explosive, two for none?’

Vallery nodded in satisfaction. ‘You heard, Bentley?’

He looked over the starboard quarter as the message went out. The Vectra was almost a mile distant, rolling one minute, pitching the next as she came round in a tight circle. She had found the killer—and her depth-charge racks were empty.

Vallery swung back, looked across to the Electra. Still no reply, nothing … Then he saw two flags fluttering up to the yardarm.

‘Signal the Sirrus,’ he ordered. ‘“Go ahead: exercise extreme care.”’

Suddenly he felt Turner’s hand on his arm.

‘Can you hear ’em?’ Turner asked.

‘Hear what?’ Vallery demanded.

‘Lord only knows. It’s the Vectra. Look!’

Vallery followed the pointing finger. At first, he could see nothing, then all at once he saw little geysers of water leaping up in the Vectra’s wake, geysers swiftly extinguished by the heavy seas. Then, faintly, his straining ear caught the faraway murmur of underwater explosions, all but inaudible against the wind.

‘What the devil’s the Vectra doing?’ Vallery demanded. ‘And what’s she using?’

‘Looks like fireworks to me,’ Turner grunted. ‘What do you think, Number One?’

‘Scuttling charges—25-pounders,’ Carrington said briefly.

‘He’s right, sir,’ Turner admitted. ‘Of course that’s what they are. Mind you, he might as well be using fireworks,’ he added disparagingly.

But the Commander was wrong. A scuttling charge has less than a tenth part of the disruptive power of a depth-charge—but one lodged snugly in the conning-tower or exploding alongside a steering plane could be almost as lethal. Turner had hardly finished speaking when a U-boat—the first the Ulysses had seen above water for almost six months—porpoised high above the surface of the sea, hung there for two or three seconds, then crashed down on even keel, wallowing wickedly in the troughs between the waves.

The dramatic abruptness of her appearance—one moment the empty sea, the next a U-boat rolling in full view of the entire convoy—took every ship by surprise—including the Vectra. She was caught on the wrong foot, moving away on the outer leg of a figure-of-eight turn. Her pom-pom opened up immediately, but the pompom, a notoriously inaccurate gun in the best of circumstances, is a hopeless proposition on the rolling, heeling deck of a destroyer making a fast turn in heavy weather: the Oerlikons registered a couple of hits on the conning-tower, twin Lewises peppered the hull with as much effect as a horde of angry hornets; but by the time the Vectra was round, her main armament coming to bear, the U-boat had disappeared slowly under the surface.

In spite of this, the Vectra’s 4.7s opened up, firing into the sea where the U-boat had submerged, but stopping almost immediately when two shells in succession had ricocheted off the water and whistled dangerously through the convoy. She steadied on course, raced over the position of the submerged U-boat: watchers on the Ulysses, binoculars to their eyes, could just distinguish duffel-coated figures on the Vectra’s poop-deck hurling more scuttling charges over the side. Almost at once, the Vectra’s helm went hard over and she clawed her way back south again, guns at maximum depression pointing down over her starboard side.

The U-boat must have been damaged, more severely this time, by either the shells or the last charges. Again she surfaced, even more violently than before, in a seething welter of foam, and again the Vectra was caught on the wrong foot, for the submarine had surfaced off her port bow, three cable-lengths away.

And this time, the U-boat was up to stay. Whatever Captain and crew lacked, it wasn’t courage. The hatch was open, and men were swarming over the side of the conning-tower to man the gun, in a token gesture of defiance against crushing odds.

The first two men over the side never reached the gun—breaking, sweeping waves, waves that towered high above the submarine’s deck, washed them over the side and they were gone. But others flung themselves forward to take their place, frantically training their gun through a 90° arc to bear on the onrushing bows of the Vectra. Incredibly—for the seas were washing over the decks, seas which kept tearing the men from their posts, and the submarine was rolling with impossible speed and violence—their first shell, fired over open sights, smashed squarely into the bridge of the Vectra. The first shell and the last shell, for the crew suddenly crumpled and died, sinking down by the gun or pitching convulsively over the side.

It was a massacre. The Vectra had two Bolton-Paul Defiant night-fighter turrets, quadruple hydraulic turrets complete with astrodome, bolted to her fo’c’sle, and these had opened up simultaneously, firing, between them, something like a fantastic total of 300 shells every ten seconds. That often misused cliché ‘hail of lead’ was completely accurate here. It was impossible for a man to live two seconds on the exposed deck of that U-boat, to hope to escape that lethal storm. Man after man kept flinging himself over the coaming in suicidal gallantry, but none reached the gun.

Afterwards, no one aboard the Ulysses could say when they first realized that the Vectra, pitching steeply through the heavy seas, was going to ram the U-boat. Perhaps her Captain had never intended to do so. Perhaps he had expected the U-boat to submerge, had intended to carry away conning-tower and periscope standard, to make sure that she could not escape again. Perhaps he had been killed when that shell struck the bridge. Or perhaps he had changed his mind at the last second, for the Vectra, which had been arrowing in on the conning-tower, suddenly slewed sharply to starboard.

For an instant, it seemed that she might just clear the U-boat’s bows, but the hope died the second it was born. Plunging heavily down the sheering side of a gaping trough, the Vectra’s forefoot smashed down and through the hull of the submarine, some thirty feet aft of the bows, slicing through the toughened steel of the pressure hull as if it were cardboard. She was still plunging, still driving down, when two shattering explosions, so close together as to be blurred into one giant blast, completely buried both vessels under a skyrocketing mushroom of boiling water and twisted steel. The why of the explosion was pure conjecture; but what had happened was plain enough. Some freak of chance must have triggered off the TNT—normally an extremely stable and inert disruptive—in a warhead in one of the U-boat’s tubes: and then the torpedoes in the storage racks behind and possibly, probably even, the for’ard magazine of the Vectra had gone up in sympathetic detonation.

Slowly, deliberately almost, the great clouds of water fell back into the sea, and the Vectra and the U-boat—or what little was left of them—came abruptly into view. To the watchers on the Ulysses, it was inconceivable that either of them should still be afloat. The U-boat was very deep in the water, seemed to end abruptly just for’ards of the gun platform: the Vectra looked as if some great knife had sheared her athwartships, just for’ard of the bridge. The rest was gone, utterly gone. And throughout the convoy unbelieving minds were still wildly rejecting the evidence of their eyes when the shattered hull of the Vectra lurched into the same trough as the U-boat, rolled heavily, wearily, over on top of her, bridge and mast cradling the conning-tower of the submarine. And then the water closed over them and they were gone, locked together to the bottom of the sea.

The last ships in the convoy were two miles away now, and in the broken seas, at that distance, it was impossible to see whether there were any survivors. It did not seem likely. And if there were, if there were men over there, struggling, swimming, shouting for help in the murderous cold of that glacial sea, they would be dying already. And they would have been dead long before any rescue ship could even have turned round. The convoy streamed on, beating steadily east. All but two, that is—the Electra and the Sirrus.

The Electra lay beam on to the seas, rolling slowly, sluggishly, dead in the water. She had now a list of almost 15° to port. Her decks, fore and aft of the bridge, were lined with waiting men. They had given up their attempt to abandon ship by lifeboat when they had seen the Sirrus rolling up behind them, fine on the port quarter. A boat had been swung out on its davits, and with the listing of the Electra and the rolling of the sea it had proved impossible to recover it. It hung now far out from the ship’s side, swinging wildly at the end of its davits about twenty feet above the sea. On his approach, Orr had twice sent angry signals, asking the falls to be cut. But the lifeboat remained there, a menacing pendulum in the track of the Sirrus: panic, possibly, but more likely winch brakes jammed solid with ice. In either event, there was no time to be lost: another ten minutes and the Electra would be gone.

The Sirrus made two runs past in all—Orr had no intention of stopping alongside, of being trampled under by the 15,000-ton deadweight of a toppling freighter. On his first run he steamed slowly by at five knots, at a distance of twenty feet—the nearest he dared go with the set of the sea rolling both ships towards each other at the same instant.

As the Sirrus’s swinging bows slid up past the bridge of the Electra, the waiting men began to jump. They jumped as the Sirrus’s fo’c’sle reared up level with their deck, they jumped as it plunged down fifteen, twenty feet below. One man carrying a suitcase and Burberry stepped nonchalantly across both sets of guard-rails during the split second that they were relatively motionless to each other: others crashed sickeningly onto the ice-coated steel deck far below, twisting ankles, fracturing legs and thighs, dislocating hip-joints. And two men jumped and missed; above the bedlam of noise, men heard the blood-chilling, bubbling scream of one as the swinging hulls crushed the life out of him, the desperate, terror-stricken cries of the other as the great, iron wall of the Electra guided him into the screws of the Sirrus.

It was just then that it happened and there could be no possible reflection on Commander Orr’s seamanship: he had handled the Sirrus brilliantly. But even his skill was helpless against these two successive freak waves, twice the size of the others. The first flung the Sirrus close in to the Electra, then passing under the Electra, lurched her steeply to port as the second wave heeled the Sirrus far over to starboard. There was a grinding, screeching crash. The Sirrus’s guard-rails and upper side plates buckled and tore along a 150-foot length: simultaneously, the lifeboat smashed endwise into the front of the bridge, shattering into a thousand pieces. Immediately, the telegraphs jangled, the water boiled whitely at the Sirrus’s stern— shocked realization of its imminence and death itself must have been only a merciful hair’s-breadth apart for the unfortunate man in the water—and then the destroyer was clear, sheering sharply away from the Electra.

In five minutes the Sirrus was round again. It was typical of Orr’s ice-cold, calculating nerve and of the luck that never deserted him that he should this time choose to rub the Sirrus’s shattered starboard side along the length of the Electra—she was too low in the water now to fall on him—and that he should do so in a momentary spell of slack water. Willing hands caught men as they jumped, cushioned their fall. Thirty seconds and the destroyer was gone again and the decks of the Electra were deserted. Two minutes later and a muffled roar shook the sinking ship—her boilers going. And then she toppled slowly over on her side: masts and smokestack lay along the surface of the sea, dipped and vanished: the straight-back of bottom and keel gleamed fractionally, blackly, against the grey of sea and sky, and was gone. For a minute, great gouts of air rushed turbulently to the surface. By and by the bubbles grew smaller and smaller and then there were no more.

The Sirrus steadied on course, crowded decks throbbing as she began to pick up speed, to overtake the convoy. Convoy No FR77. The convoy the Royal Navy would always want to forget. Thirty-six ships had left Scapa and St John’s. Now there were only twelve, only twelve. And still almost thirty-two hours to the Kola Inlet …

Moodily, even his tremendous vitality and zest temporarily subdued, Turner watched the Sirrus rolling up astern. Abruptly he turned away, looked furtively, pityingly at Captain Vallery, no more now than a living skeleton driven by God only knew what mysterious force to wrest hour after impossible hour from death. And for Vallery now, death, even the hope of it, Turner suddenly realized, must be infinitely sweet. He looked, and saw the shock and sorrow in that grey mask, and he cursed, bitterly, silently. And then these tired, dull eyes were on him and Turner hurriedly cleared his throat.

‘How many survivors does that make in the Sirrus now?’ he asked.

Vallery lifted weary shoulders in the ghost of a shrug.

‘No idea, Commander. A hundred, possibly more. Why?’

‘A hundred,’ Turner mused. ‘And no-survivors-will-be-picked-up. I’m just wondering what old Orr’s going to say when he dumps that little lot in Admiral Starr’s lap when we get back to Scapa Flow!’

THIRTEEN

Saturday Afternoon

The Sirrus was still a mile astern when her Aldis started flickering. Bentley took the message, turned to Vallery.

‘Signal, sir. “Have 25-30 injured men aboard. Three very serious cases, perhaps dying. Urgently require doctor.”’

‘Acknowledge,’ Vallery said. He hesitated a moment, then: ‘My compliments to Surgeon-Lieutenant Nicholls. Ask him to come to the bridge.’ He turned to the Commander, grinned faintly. ‘I somehow don’t see Brooks at his athletic best in a breeches buoy on a day like this. It’s going to be quite a crossing.’

Turner looked again at the Sirrus, occasionally swinging through a 40° arc as she rolled and crashed her way up from the west.

‘It’ll be no picnic,’ he agreed. ‘Besides, breeches buoys aren’t made to accommodate the likes of our venerable chief surgeon.’ Funny, Turner thought, how matter-of-fact and offhand everyone was: nobody had as much as mentioned the Vectra since she’d rammed the U-boat.

The gate creaked. Vallery turned round slowly, acknowledged Nicholls’s sketchy salute.

‘The Sirrus needs a doctor,’ he said without preamble. ‘How do you fancy it?’

Nicholls steadied himself against the canted bridge and the rolling of the cruiser. Leave the Ulysses—suddenly, he hated the thought, was amazed at himself for his reaction. He, Johnny Nicholls, unique, among the officers anyway, in his thorough-going detestation and intolerance of all things naval—to feel like that! Must be going soft in the head. And just as suddenly he knew that his mind wasn’t slipping, knew why he wanted to stay. It was not a matter of pride or principle or sentiment: it was just that—well, just that he belonged. The feeling of belonging—even to himself he couldn’t put it more accurately, more clearly than that, but it affected him strangely, powerfully. Suddenly he became aware that curious eyes were on him, looked out in confusion over the rolling sea.

‘Well?’ Vallery’s voice was edged with impatience.

‘I don’t fancy it at all,’ Nicholls said frankly. ‘But of course I’ll go, sir. Right now?’

‘As soon as you can get your stuff together,’ Vallery nodded.

‘That’s now. We have an emergency kit packed all the time.’ He cast a jaundiced eye over the heavy sea again. ‘What am I supposed to do, sir—jump?’

‘Perish the thought!’ Turner clamped him on the back with a large and jovial hand. ‘You haven’t a thing to worry about,’ he boomed cheerfully, ‘you positively won’t feel a thing—these, if I recall rightly, were your exact words to me when you extracted that old molar of mine two-three weeks back.’ He winced in painful recollection. ‘Breeches buoy, laddie, breeches buoy!’

‘Breeches buoy!’ Nicholls protested. ‘Haven’t noticed the weather, have you? I’ll be going up and down like a blasted yo-yo!’

‘The ignorance of youth.’ Turner shook his head sadly. ‘We’ll be turning into the sea, of course. It’ll be like a ride in a Rolls, my boy! We’re going to rig it now.’ He turned away. ‘Chrysler—get on to Chief Petty Officer Hartley. Ask him to come up to the bridge.’

Chrysler gave no sign of having heard. He was in his usual favourite position these days—gloved hands on the steam pipes, the top half of his face crushed into the rubber eyepiece of the powerful binoculars on the starboard searchlight control. Every few seconds a hand would drop, revolve the milled training rack a fraction. Then again the complete immobility.

‘Chrysler!’ Turner roared. ‘Are you deaf?’

Three, four, five more seconds passed in silence. Every eye was on Chrysler when he suddenly jerked back, glanced down at the bearing indicator, then swung round. His face was alive with excitement.

‘Green one-double-oh!’ he shouted. ‘Green onedouble-oh! Aircraft. Just on the horizon!’ He fairly flung himself back at his binoculars. ‘Four, seven—no, ten! Ten aircraft!’ he yelled.

‘Green one-double-oh?’ Turner had his glasses to his eyes. ‘Can’t see a thing! Are you sure, boy?’ he called anxiously.

‘Still the same, sir.’ There was no mistaking the agitated conviction in the young voice.

Turner was through the gate and beside him in four swift steps. ‘Let me have a look,’ he ordered. He gazed through the glasses, twisted the training rack once or twice, then stepped back slowly, heavy eyebrows lowering in anger.

‘There’s something bloody funny here, young man!’ he growled. ‘Either your eyesight or your imagination? And if you ask me—’

‘He’s right,’ Carrington interrupted calmly. ‘I’ve got ’em, too.’

‘So have I, sir!’ Bentley shouted.

Turner wheeled back to the mounted glasses, looked through them briefly, stiffened, looked round at Chrysler.

‘Remind me to apologize some day!’ he smiled, and was back on the compass platform before he had finished speaking.

‘Signal to convoy,’ Vallery was saying rapidly. ‘Code H. Full ahead. Number One. Bosun’s mate? Broadcaster: stand by all guns. Commander?’

‘Sir?’

‘Independent targets, independent fire all AA guns? Agreed? And the turrets?

‘Couldn’t say yet … Chrysler, can you make out—’

‘Condors, sir,’ Chrysler anticipated him.

‘Condors!’ Turner stared in disbelief. ‘A dozen Condors! Are you sure that … Oh, all right, all right!’ he broke off hastily. ‘Condors they are.’ He shook his head in wonderment, turned to Vallery. ‘Where’s my bloody tin hat? Condors, he says!’

‘So Condors they are,’ Vallery repeated, smiling. Turner marvelled at the repose, the unruffled calm.

‘Bridge targets, independent fire control for all turrets?’ Vallery went on.

‘I think so, sir.’ Turner looked at the two communication ratings just aft of the compass platform—one each on the group phones to the for’ard and after turrets. ‘Ears pinned back, you two. And hop to it when you get the word.’

Vallery beckoned to Nicholls.

‘Better get below, young man,’ he advised. ‘Sorry your little trip’s been postponed.’

‘I’m not,’ Nicholls said bluntly.

‘No?’ Vallery was smiling. ‘Scared?’

‘No, sir,’ Nicholls smiled back. ‘Not scared. And you know I wasn’t.’

‘I know you weren’t,’ Vallery agreed quietly. ‘I know—and thank you.’

He watched Nicholls walk off the bridge, beckoned to the WT messenger, then turned to the Kapok Kid.

‘When was our last signal to the Admiralty, Pilot? Have a squint at the log.’

‘Noon yesterday,’ said the Kapok Kid readily.

‘Don’t know what I’ll do without you,’ Vallery murmured. ‘Present position?’

‘72.20 north, 13.40 east.’

‘Thank you.’ He looked at Turner. ‘No point in radio silence now, Commander?’

Turner shook his head.

‘Take this message,’ Vallery said quickly. ‘To DNO, London … How are our friends doing, Commander?’

‘Circling well to the west, sir. Usual high altitude, gambit from the stern, I suppose,’ he added morosely. ‘Still,’ he brightened, ‘cloud level’s barely a thousand feet.’

Vallery nodded. ‘“FR77. 1600. 72.20, 13.40. Steady on 090. Force 9, north, heavy swell: Situation desperate. Deeply regret Admiral Tyndall died 1200 today. Tanker Vytura torpedoed last night, sunk by self. Washington State sunk 0145 to-day. Vectra sunk 1515, collision U-boat. Electra sunk 1530. Am being heavily attacked by twelve, minimum twelve, Focke-Wulf 200s.” A reasonable assumption, I think, Commander,’ he said wryly, ‘and it’ll shake their Lordships. They’re of the opinion there aren’t so many Condors in the whole of Norway. “Imperative send help. Air cover essential. Advise immediately.” Get that off at once, will you?’

‘Your nose, sir!’ Turner said sharply.

‘Thank you.’ Vallery rubbed the frostbite, dead white in the haggard grey and blue of his face, gave up after a few seconds: the effort was more trouble than it was worth, drained away too much of his tiny reserves of strength.

Shivering, he pulled himself to his feet, swept his glasses over FR77. Code H was being obeyed. The ships were scattered over the sea apparently at random, broken out from the two lines ahead which would have made things far too simple for bomb-aimers in aircraft attacking from astern. They would have to aim now for individual targets. Scattered, but not too scattered—close enough together to derive mutual benefit from the convoy’s concerted barrage. Vallery nodded to himself in satisfaction and twisted round, his glasses swivelling to the west.

There was no mistaking them now, he thought—they were Condors, all right. Almost dead astern now, massive wingtips dipping, the big four-engined planes banked slowly, ponderously to starboard, then straightened on a 180° overtaking course. And they were climbing, steadily climbing.

Two things were suddenly clear to Vallery, two things the enemy obviously knew. They had known where to find FR77— the Luftwaffe was not given to sending heavy bombers out over the Arctic on random hazard: they hadn’t even bothered to send Charlie on reconnaissance. For a certainty, some submarine had located them earlier on, given their position and course: at any distance at all, their chance of seeing a periscope in that heavy sea had been remote. Further, the German knew that the Ulysses’s radar was gone. The Focke-Wulfs were climbing to gain the low cloud, would break cover only seconds before it was time to bomb. Against radar-controlled fire, at such close range, it would have been near suicide. But they knew it was safe.

Even as he watched, the last of the labouring Condors climbed through the low, heavy ceiling, was completely lost to sight. Vallery shrugged wearily, lowered his binoculars.

‘Bentley?’

‘Sir?’

‘Code R. Immediate.’

The flags fluttered up. For fifteen, twenty seconds—it seemed ten times as long as that to the impatient Captain—nothing happened. And then, like rolling toy marionettes under the hand of a master puppeteer, the bows of every ship in the convoy began to swing round—those to the port of the Ulysses to the north, those to the starboard to the south. When the Condors broke through—two minutes, at the most, Vallery reckoned, they would find beneath them only the empty sea. Empty, that is, except for the Ulysses and the Stirling, ships admirably equipped to take care of themselves. And then the Condors would find themselves under heavy cross-fire from the merchant ships and destroyers, and too late—at that low altitude, much too late—to alter course for fore-and-aft bombing runs on the freighters. Vallery smiled wryly to himself. As a defensive tactic, it was little enough, but the best he could do in the circumstances … He could hear Turner barking orders through the loudspeaker, was more than content to leave the defence of the ship in the Commander’s competent hands. If only he himself didn’t feel so tired …

Ninety seconds passed, a hundred, two minutes—and still no sign of the Condors. A hundred eyes stared out into the cloud-wrack astern: it remained obstinately, tantalizingly grey and featureless.

Two and a half minutes passed. Still there was nothing.

‘Anybody seen anything?’ Vallery asked anxiously. His eyes never left that patch of cloud astern. ‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’ The silence remained oppressive, unbroken.

Three minutes. Three and a half. Four. Vallery looked away to rest his straining eyes, caught Turner looking at him, caught the growing apprehension, the slow dawn and strengthening of surmise in the lean face. Wordlessly, at the same instant, they swung round, staring out into the sky ahead.

‘That’s it!’ Vallery said quickly. ‘You’re right, Commander, you must be!’ He was aware that everyone had turned now, was peering ahead as intently as himself. ‘They’ve by-passed us, they’re going to take us from ahead. Warn the guns! Dear God, they almost had us!’ he whispered softly.

‘Eyes skinned, everyone!’ Turner boomed. The apprehension was gone, the irrepressible joviality, the gratifying anticipation of action was back again. ‘And I mean everyone! We’re all in the same boat together. No joke intended. Fourteen days’ leave to the first man to sight a Condor!’

‘Effective as from when?’ the Kapok Kid asked dryly.

Turner grinned at him. Then the smile died, the head lifted sharply in sudden attention.

‘Can you hear ’em?’ he asked. His voice was soft, almost as if he feared the enemy might be listening. ‘They’re up there, somewhere—damned if I can tell where, though. If only that wind—’

The vicious, urgent thudding of the boat-deck Oerlikons stopped him dead in mid-sentence, had him whirling round and plunging for the broadcast transmitter in one galvanic, concerted movement. But even then he was too late—he would have been too late anyway. The Condors—the first three in line ahead, were already visible— were already through the cloud, 500 feet up and barely half a mile away—dead astern. Astern. The bombers must have circled back to the west as soon as they had reached the clouds, completely fooled them as to their intentions … Six seconds—six seconds is time and to spare for even a heavy bomber to come less than half a mile in a shallow dive. There was barely time for realization, for the first bitter welling of mortification and chagrin when the Condors were on them.

It was almost dusk, now, the weird half-light of the Arctic twilight. Tracers, glowing hot pinpoints of light streaking out through the darkening sky, were clearly seen, at first swinging erratically, fading away to extinction in the far distance, then steadying, miraculously dying in the instant of birth as they sank home into the fuselages of the swooping Condors. But time was too short—the guns were on target for a maximum of two seconds—and these giant Focke-Wulfs had a tremendous capacity for absorbing punishment. The leading Condor levelled out about three hundred feet, its medium 250-kilo bombs momentarily paralleling its line of flight, then arching down lazily towards the Ulysses. At once the Condor pulled its nose up in maximum climb, the four great engines labouring in desynchronized clamour, as it sought the protection of the clouds.

The bombs missed. They missed by about thirty feet, exploding on contact with the water just abaft the bridge. For the men in the TS, engine- and boiler-rooms, the crash and concussion must have been frightful—literally ear-shattering. Waterspouts, twenty feet in diameter at their turbulent bases, streaked up whitely into the twilight, high above the truncated masts, hung there momentarily, then collapsed in drenching cascades on the bridge and boat-deck aft, soaking, saturating, every gunner on the pom-pom and in the open Oerlikon cockpits. The temperature stood at 2° above zero— 30° of frost.

More dangerously, the blinding sheets of water completely unsighted the gunners. Apart from a lone Oerlikon on a sponson below the starboard side of the bridge, the next Condor pressed home its attack against a minimum of resistance. The approach was perfect, dead fore-and-aft on the centre line; but the pilot overshot, probably in his anxiety to hold course. Three bombs this time: for a second, it seemed that they must miss, but the first smashed into the fo’c’sle between the breakwater and the capstan, exploding in the flat below, heaving up the deck in a tangled wreckage of broken steel. Even as the explosion died, the men on the bridge could hear a curious clanking rattle: the explosion must have shattered the fo’c’sle capstan and Blake stopper simultaneously, and sheared the retaining shackle on the anchor cable, and the starboard anchor, completely out of control, was plummeting down to the depths of the Arctic.

The other bombs fell into the sea directly ahead, and from the Stirling, a mile ahead, it seemed that the Ulysses disappeared under the great column of water. But the water subsided, and the Ulysses steamed on, apparently unharmed. From dead ahead, the sweeping lift of the bows hid all damage, and there was neither flame nor smoke—hundreds of gallons of water, falling from the sky and pouring in through the great jagged holes in the deck, had killed any fire there was. The Ulysses was still a lucky ship … And then, at last, after twenty months of the fantastic escapes, the fabulous good fortune that had made her a legend, a byword for immunity throughout all the north, the luck of the Ulysses ran out.

Ironically, the Ulysses brought disaster on herself. The main armament, the 5.25s aft, had opened up now, was pumping its 100-lb shells at the diving bombers, at point-blank range and over equivalent of open sights. The very first shell from ‘X’ turret sheared away the starboard wing of the third Condor between the engines, tore it completely away to spin slowly like a fluttering leaf into the darkly-rolling sea. For a fraction of a second the Folke-Wulf held on course, then abruptly the nose tipped over and the giant plane screamed down in an almost vertical dive, her remaining engines inexplicably accelerating to a deafening crescendo as she hurtled arrowstraight for the deck of the Ulysses.

There was no time to take any avoiding action, no time to think, no time even to hope. A cluster of jettisoned bombs crashed in to the boiling wake—the Ulysses was already doing upwards of thirty knots—and two more crashed through the poop-deck, the first exploding in the after seamen’s mess-deck, the other in the marines’ mess-deck. One second later, with a tremendous roar and in a blinding sheet of gasoline flame, the Condor itself, at a speed of upwards of three hundred mph, crashed squarely into the front of ‘Y’ turret.

Incredibly, that was the last attack on the Ulysses—incredibly, because the Ulysses was defenceless now, wide open to any air attack from astern. ‘Y’ turret was gone, ‘X’ turret, still magically undamaged, was half-buried under the splintered wreckage of the Condor, blinded by the smoke and leaping flame. The boat-deck Oerlikons, too, had fallen silent. The gunners, half-drowned under the deluge of less than a minute ago, were being frantically dragged from their cockpits: a difficult enough task at any time, it was almost impossible with their clothes already frozen solid, their duffels cracking and crackling like splintering matchwood as the men were dragged over the side of their cockpits. With all speed, they were rushed below, thrust into the galley passage to thaw, literally to thaw: agony, excruciating agony, but the only alternative to the quick and certain death which would have come to them in their ice-bound cockpits.

The remaining Condors had pulled away in a slow climbing turn to starboard. They were surrounded, bracketed fore and aft and on either side, by scores of woolly, expanding puffs of exploding AA shells, but they flew straight through these, charmed, unhurt. Already, they were beginning to disappear into the clouds, to settle down on a south-east course for home. Strange, Vallery thought vaguely, one would have expected them to hammer home their initial advantage of surprise, to concentrate on the crippled Ulysses: certainly, thus far the Condor crews had shown no lack of courage … He gave it up, turned his attention to more immediate worries. And there was plenty to worry about.

The Ulysses was heavily on fire aft—a deck and mess-deck fire, admittedly, but potentially fatal for all that—‘X’ and ‘Y’ magazines were directly below. Already, dozens of men from the damage control parties were running aft, stumbling and falling on the rolling ice-covered deck, unwinding the hose drums behind them, occasionally falling flat on their faces as two ice-bound coils locked together, the abruptly tightening hose jerking them off their feet. Others stumbled past them, carrying the big, red foam-extinguishers on their shoulders or under their arms. One unfortunate seaman—A.B. Ferry who had left the Sick Bay in defiance of strict orders—running down the port alley past the shattered Canteen, slipped and fell abreast ‘X’ turret: the port wing of the Condor, even as it had sheared off and plunged into the sea, had torn away the guard-rails here, and Ferry, hands and feet scrabbling frantically at the smooth ice of the deck, his broken arm clawing uselessly at one of the remaining stanchions, slid slowly, inevitably over the side and was gone. For a second, the high-pitched, fear-stricken shriek rose thin and clear above the roaring of the flames, died abruptly as the water closed over him. The propellers were almost immediately below.

The men with the extinguishers were the first into action, as, indeed, they had to be when fighting a petrol fire—water would only have made matters worse, have increased the area of the fire by washing the petrol in all directions, and the petrol, being lighter than water, immiscible and so floating to the top, would have burned as furiously as ever. But the foam-extinguishers were of only limited efficiency, not so much because several release valves had jammed solid in the intense cold as because of the intense white heat which made close approach almost impossible, while the smaller carbon-tet extinguishers, directed against electrical fires below, were shockingly ineffective: these extinguishers had never been in action before and the crew of the Ulysses had known for a long time of the almost magical properties of the extinguisher liquid for removing the most obstinate stains and marks in clothes. You may convince a WT rating of the lethal nature of 2,000 volts: you may convince a gunner of the madness of matches in a magazine: you may convince a torpedoman of the insanity of juggling with fulminate of mercury: but you will never convince any of them of the criminal folly of draining off just a few drops of carbon-tetrachloride … Despite stringent periodical checks, most of the extinguishers were only half-full. Some were completely empty.

The hoses were little more effective. Two were coupled up to the starboard mains and the valves turned: the hoses remained lifeless, empty. The starboard salt-water line had frozen solid—common enough with fresh-water systems, this, but not with salt. A third hose on the port side was coupled up, but the release valve refused to turn: attacked with hammers and crowbars, it sheered off at the base—at extremely low temperatures, molecular changes occur in metals, cut tensile strength to a fraction—the high-pressure water drenching everyone in the vicinity. Spicer, the dead Admiral’s pantry-boy, a stricken-eyed shadow of his former cheerful self, flung away his hammer and wept in anger and frustration. The other port valve worked, but it took an eternity for the water to force its way through the flattened frozen hose.

Gradually, the deck fire was brought under control—less through the efforts of the firefighters than the fact that there was little inflammable material left after the petrol had burnt off. Hoses and extinguishers were then directed through the great jagged rents on the poop to the figures roaring in the mess-deck below, while two asbestos-suited figures clambered over and struggled through the red-hot, jangled mass of smoking wreckage on the poop. Nicholls had one of the suits, Leading Telegraphist Brown, a specialist in rescue work, the other.

Brown was the first on the scene. Picking his way gingerly, he climbed up to the entrance of ‘Y’ turret. Watchers in the port and starboard alleyways saw him pause there, fighting to tie back the heavy steel door—it had been crashing monotonously backwards and forwards with the rolling of the cruiser. Then they saw him step inside. Less than ten seconds later they saw him appear at the door again, on his knees and clutching desperately at the side for support. His entire body was arching convulsively and he was being violently sick into his oxygen mask.

Nicholls saw this, wasted time neither on ‘Y’ turret nor on the charred skeletons still trapped in the incinerated fuselage of the Condor. He climbed quickly up the vertical steel ladders to ‘X’ gun-deck, moved round to the back and tried to open the door. The clips were jammed, immovable—whether from cold or metal distortion he did not know. He looked round for some lever, stepped aside as he saw Doyle, duffel coat smouldering, haggard face set and purposeful under the beard, approaching with a sledge in his hand. A dozen heavy, well-directed blows—the clanging, Nicholls thought, must be almost intolerable inside the hollow amplifier of the turret—and the door was open. Doyle secured it, stepped aside to let Nicholls enter.

Nicholls climbed inside. There had been no need to worry about that racket outside, he thought wryly. Every man in the turret was stone dead. Colour-Sergeant Evans was sitting bolt upright in his seat, rigid and alert in death as he had been in life: beside him lay Foster, the dashing, fiery Captain of Marines, whom death became so ill. The rest were all sitting or lying quietly at their stations, apparently unharmed and quite unmarked except for an occasional tiny trickle of blood from ear and mouth, trickles already coagulated in the intense cold—the speed of the Ulysses had carried the flames aft, away from the turret. The concussion must have been tremendous, death instantaneous. Heavily, Nicholls bent over the communications number, gently detached his headset, and called the bridge.

Vallery himself took the message, turned back to Turner. He looked old, defeated.

‘That was Nicholls,’ he said. Despite all he could do, the shock and sorrow showed clearly in every deeply-etched line in that pitiably wasted face. ‘“Y” turret is gone—no survivors. “X” turret seems intact—but everyone inside is dead. Concussion, he says. Fires in the after mess-deck still not under control … Yes, boy, what is it?’

‘“Y” magazine, sir,’ the seaman said uncertainly. ‘They want to speak to the gunnery officer.’

‘Tell them he’s not available,’ Vallery said shortly. ‘We haven’t time … ’ He broke off, looked up sharply. ‘Did you say “Y” magazine? Here, let me have that phone.’

He took the receiver, pushed back the hood of his duffel coat.

‘Captain speaking, “Y” magazine. What is it? … What? Speak up man, I can’t hear you … Oh, damn!’ He swung round on the bridge LTO ‘Can you switch this receiver on to the relay amplifier? I can’t hear a … Ah, that’s better.’

The amplifier above the chart-house crackled into life—a pecularily throaty, husky life, doubly difficult to understand under the heavy overlay of a slurred Glasgow accent.

‘Can ye hear me now?’ the speaker boomed.

‘I can hear you.’ Vallery’s own voice echoed loudly over the amplifier. ‘McQuater, isn’t it?’

‘Aye, it’s me, sir. How did ye ken?’ Even through the speaker the surprise was unmistakable. Shocked and exhausted though he was, Vallery found himself smiling.

‘Never mind that now, McQuater. Who’s in charge down there— Gardiner, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir. Gardiner.’

‘Put him on, will you?’ There was a pause.

‘Ah canna, sir. Gardiner’s deid.’

‘Dead!’ Vallery was incredulous. ‘Did you say “dead”, McQuater?’

‘Aye, and he’s no’ the only one.’ The voice was almost truculent, but Vallery’s ear caught the faint tremor below. ‘Ah was knocked oot masel’, but Ah’m fine now.’

Vallery paused, waited for the boy’s bout of hoarse, harsh coughing to pass.

‘But—but—what happened?’

‘How should Ah know—Ah mean, Ah dinna ken—Ah don’t know, sir. A helluva bang and then—ach, Ah’m no’ sure whit happened … Gardiner’s mooth’s all blood.’

‘How—how many of you are left?’

‘Just Barker, Williamson and masel’, sir. Naebody else—just us.’

‘And—and they’re all right, McQuater?’

‘Ach, they’re fine. But Barker thinks he’s deein’. He’s in a gey bad wey. Ah think he’s gone clean aff his trolley, sir.’

‘He’s what?’

‘Loony, sir,’ McQuater explained patiently. ‘Daft. Some bluidy nonsense aboot goin’ to meet his Maker, and him wi’ naething behind him but a lifetime o’ swindlin’ his fellowman.’ Vallery heard Turner’s sudden chuckle, remembered that Barker was the canteen manager. ‘Williamson’s busy shovin’ cartridges back into the racks—floor’s littered with the bluidy things.’

‘McQuater!’ Vallery’s voice was sharp, automatic in reproof.

‘Aye, Ah’m sorry, sir. Ah clean forgot … Whit’s to be done, sir?’

‘Done about what?’ Vallery demanded impatiently.

‘This place, sir. “Y” magazine. Is the boat on fire ootside? It’s bilin’ in here—hotter than the hinges o’hell!’

‘What! What did you say?’ Vallery shouted. This time he forgot to reprimand McQuater. ‘Hot, did you say? How hot? Quickly, boy!’

‘Ah canna touch the after bulkheid, sir,’ McQuater answered simply. ‘It ’ud tak ‘the fingers aff me.’

‘But the sprinklers—what’s the matter with them?’ Vallery shouted. ‘Aren’t they working? Good God, boy, the magazine will go up any minute!’

‘Aye.’ McQuater’s voice was noncommittal. ‘Aye, Ah kinna thought that might be the wey o’ it. No, sir, the sprinklers arena workin’—and it’s already 20 degrees above the operatin’ temperature, sir.’

‘Don’t just stand there,’ Vallery said desperately. ‘Turn them on by hand! The water in the sprinklers can’t possibly be frozen if it’s hot as you say it is. Hurry, man, hurry. If the mag goes up, the Ulysses is finished. For God’s sake, hurry!’

‘Ah’ve tried them, sir,’ McQuater said softly. ‘It’s nae bluidy use. They’re solid!’

‘Then break them open! There must be a tommy bar lying about somewhere. Smash them open, man! Hurry!’

‘Aye, richt ye are, sir. But—but if Ah do that, sir, how am Ah to shut the valves aff again?’ There was a note almost of quiet desperation in the boy’s voice—some trick of reproduction in the amplifier, Vallery guessed.

‘You can’t! It’s impossible! But never mind that!’ Vallery said impatiently, his voice ragged with anxiety. ‘We’ll pump it all out later. Hurry, McQuater, hurry!’

There was a brief silence followed by a muffled shout and a soft thud, then they heard a thin metallic clanging echoing through the amplifier, a rapid, staccato succession of strokes. McQuater must have been raining a veritable hail of blows on the valve handles. Abruptly, the noise ceased.

Vallery waited until he heard the phone being picked up, called anxiously: ‘Well, how is it? Sprinklers all right?’

‘Goin’ like the clappers, sir.’ There was a new note in his voice, a note of pride and satisfaction. ‘Ah’ve just crowned Barker wi’ the tommy bar,’ he added cheerfully.

‘You’ve what?’

‘Laid oot old Barker,’ said McQuater distinctly. ‘He tried to stop me. Windy auld bastard … Ach, he’s no’ worth mentionin’ … My they sprinklers are grand things, sir. Ah’ve never seen them working’ before. Place is ankle deep a’ready. And the steam’s fair sizzlin’ aff the bulkheid!’

‘That’s enough!’ Vallery’s voice was sharp. ‘Get out at once—and make sure that you take Barker with you.’

‘Ah saw a picture once. In the Paramount in Glasgow, Ah think. Ah must’ve been flush.’ The tone was almost conversational, pleasurably reminiscent. Vallery exchanged glances with Turner, saw that he too, was fighting off the feeling of unreality. ‘Rain, it was cried. But it wasnae hauf as bad as this. There certainly wisnae hauf as much bluidy steam! Talk aboot the hothouse in the Botanic Gardens!’

‘McQuater!’ Vallery roared. ‘Did you hear me? Leave at once, I say! At once, do you hear?’

‘Up to ma knees a’ready!’ McQuater said admiringly. ‘It’s gey cauld … Did you say somethin’ sir?’

‘I said, “Leave at once!”’ Vallery ground out. ‘Get out!’

‘Aye, Ah see. “Get oot.” Aye. Ah thought that was what ye said. Get oot. Well, it’s no that easy. As a matter o’fact, we canna. Hatchway’s buckled and the hatch-cover, too—jammed deid solid, sir.’

The echo from the speaker boomed softly over the shattered bridge, died away in frozen silence. Unconsciously, Vallery lowered the telephone, his eyes wandering dazedly over the bridge. Turner, Carrington, the Kapok Kid, Bentley, Chrysler and the others—they were all looking at him, all with the same curiously blank intensity blurring imperceptibly into the horror of understanding—and he knew that their eyes and faces only mirrored his own. Just for a second, as if to clear his mind, he screwed his eyes tightly shut, then lifted the phone again.

‘McQuater! McQuater! Are you still there?’

‘Of course Ah’m here!’ Even through the speaker, the voice was peevish, the asperity unmistakable. ‘Where the hell—?’

‘Are you sure it’s jammed, boy?’ Vallery cut in desperately. ‘Maybe if you took a tommy-bar to the clips—’

‘Ah could take a stick o’ dynamite to the bluidy thing and it ’ud make no difference,’ McQuater said matter-of-factly. ‘Onywey, it’s just aboot red-hot a’ready—the hatch, Ah mean. There must be a bluidy great fire directly ootside it.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ Vallery called. He turned round. ‘Commander, have Dodson send a stoker to the main magazine flooding valve aft: stand by to shut off.’

He crossed over to the nearest communication number.

‘Are you on to the poop phone just now? Good! Give it to me … Hallo, Captain here. Is—ah, it’s you, Hartley. Look, give me a report on the state of the mess-deck fires. It’s desperately urgent. There are ratings trapped in “Y” magazine, the sprinklers are on and the hatch-cover’s jammed … Yes, yes, I’ll hold on.’

He waited impatiently for the reply, gloved hand tapping mechanically on top of the phone box. His eyes swept slowly over the convoy, saw the freighters steaming in to take up position again. Suddenly he stiffened, eyes unseeing.

‘Yes, Captain speaking … Yes … Yes. Half an hour, maybe an hour … Oh, God, no! You’re quite certain? … No, that’s all.’

He handed the receiver back, looked up slowly, his face drained of expression.

‘Fire in the seamen’s mess is under control,’ he said dully. ‘The marines’ mess is an inferno—directly on top of “Y” magazine. Hartley says there isn’t a chance of putting it out for an hour at least … I think you’d better get down there, Number One.’

A whole minute passed, a minute during which there was only the pinging of the Asdic, the regular crash of the sea as the Ulysses rolled in the heavy troughs.

‘Maybe the magazine’s cool enough now,’ the Kapok Kid suggested at length. ‘Perhaps we could shut off the water long enough … ’ His voice trailed away uncertainly.

‘Cool enough?’ Turner cleared his throat noisly. ‘How do we know? Only McQuater could tell us … ’ He stopped abruptly, as he realized the implications of what he was saying.

‘We’ll ask him,’ Vallery said heavily. He picked up the phone again. ‘McQuater?’

‘Hallo!’

‘Perhaps we could shut off the sprinklers outside, if it’s safe. Do you think the temperature … ?’

He broke off, unable to complete the sentence. The silence stretched out, taut and tangible, heavy with decision. Vallery wondered numbly what McQuater was thinking, what he himself would have thought in McQuater’s place.

‘Hing on a minute,’ the speaker boomed abruptly. ‘Ah’ll have a look up top.’

Again that silence, again that tense unnatural silence lay heavily over the bridge. Vallery started as the speaker boomed again.

‘Jings, Ah’m b—d. Ah couldna climb that ladder again for twenty-four points in the Treble Chance … Ah’m on the ladder now, but Ah’m thinkin’ Ah’ll no’ be on it much longer.’

‘Never mind … ’ Vallery checked himself, aghast at what he had been about to say. If McQuater fell off, he’d drown like a rat in that flooded magazine.

‘Oh, aye. The magazine.’ In the intervals between the racked bouts of coughing, the voice was strangely composed. ‘The shells up top are just aboot meltin’. Worse than ever, sir.’

‘I see.’ Vallery could think of nothing else to say. His eyes were closed and he knew he was swaying on his feet. With an effort, he spoke again. ‘How’s Williamson?’ It was all he could think of.

‘Near gone. Up to his neck and hangin’ on to the racks.’ McQuater coughed again. ‘Says he’s a message for the Commander and Carslake.’

‘A—a message?’

‘Uh-huh! Tell old Blackbeard to take a turn to himself and lay off the bottle,’ he said with relish. The message for Carslake was unprintable.

Vallery didn’t even feel shocked.

‘And yourself, McQuater?’ he said. ‘No message, nothing you would like … ’ He stopped, conscious of the grotesque inadequacy, the futility of what he was saying.

‘Me? Ach, there’s naething Ah’d like … Well, maybe a transfer to the Spartiate, but Ah’m thinking maybe it’s a wee bit ower late for that.[1] ‘Williamson!’ The voice had risen to a sudden urgent shout.

‘Williamson! Hing on, boy, Ah’m coming!’ They heard the booming clatter in the speaker as McQuater’s phone crashed against metal, and then there was only the silence.

‘McQuater!’ Vallery shouted into the phone. ‘McQuater! Answer me, man. Can you hear me? McQuater!’

But the speaker above him remained dead, finally, irrevocably dead. Vallery shivered in the icy wind. That magazine, that flooded magazine … less than twenty-four hours since he had been there. He could see it now, see it as clearly as he had seen it last night. Only now he saw it dark, cavernous with only the pin-points of emergency lighting, the water welling darkly, slowly up the sides, saw that little, pitifully wasted Scots boy with the thin shoulders and pain-filled eyes, struggling desperately to keep his mate’s head above that icy water, exhausting his tiny reserves of strength with the passing of every second. Even now, the time must be running out and Vallery knew hope was gone. With a sudden clear certainty he knew that when those two went down, they would go down together. McQuater would never let go. Eighteen years old, just eighteen years old. Vallery turned away, stumbling blindly through the gate on to the shattered compass platform. It was beginning to snow again and the darkness was falling all around them.

1. HMS Spartiate was a shore establishment. Naval HQ for the West of Scotland. It was at St Enoch’s Hotel, Glasgow.

FOURTEEN

Saturday Evening I

The Ulysses rolled on through the Arctic twilight. She rolled heavily, awkwardly, in seas of the wrong critical length, a strange and stricken sight with both masts gone, with all boats and rafts gone, with shattered fore-and-aft superstructure, with a crazily tilted bridge and broken, mangled after turret, half-buried in the skeleton of the Condor’s fuselage. But despite all that, despite, too, the great garish patches of red lead and gaping black holes in fo’c’sle and poop—the latter welling with dark smoke laced with flickering lances of flame— she still remained uncannily ghost-like and graceful, a creature of her own element, inevitably at home in the Arctic. Ghost-like, graceful, and infinitely enduring … and still deadly. She still had her guns— and her engines. Above all, she had these great engines, engines strangely blessed with endless immunity. So, at least, it seemed …

Five minutes dragged themselves interminably by, five minutes during which the sky grew steadily darker, during which reports from the poop showed that the firefighters were barely holding their own, five minutes during which Vallery recovered something of his normal composure. But he was now terribly weak.

A bell shrilled, cutting sharply through the silence and the gloom. Chrysler answered it, turned to the bridge.

‘Captain, sir. After engine-room would like to speak to you.’

Turner looked at the Captain, said quickly: ‘Shall I take it, sir?’

‘Thank you.’ Vallery nodded his head gratefully. Turner nodded in turn, crossed to the phone.

‘Commander speaking. Who is it? … Lieutenant Grierson. What is it, Grierson? Couldn’t be good news for a change?’

For almost a minute Turner remained silent. The others on the bridge could hear the faint crackling of the earpiece, sensed rather than saw the taut attention, the tightening of the mouth.

‘Will it hold?’ Turner asked abruptly. ‘Yes, yes, of course … Tell him we’ll do our best up here … Do that. Half-hourly, if you please.’

‘It never rains, et cetera,’ Turner growled, replacing the phone. ‘Engine running rough, temperature hotting up. Distortion in inner starboard shaft. Dodson himself is in the shaft tunnel right now. Bent like a banana, he says.’

Vallery smiled faintly. ‘Knowing Dodson, I suppose that means a couple of thou out of alignment.’

‘Maybe.’ Turner was serious. ‘What does matter is that the main shaft bearing’s damaged and the lubricating line fractured.’

‘As bad as that?’ Vallery asked softly.

‘Dodson is pretty unhappy. Says the damage isn’t recent—thinks it began the night we lost our depthcharges.’ Turner shook his head. ‘Lord knows what stresses that shaft’s undergone since … I suppose tonight’s performance brought it to a head … The bearing will have to be lubricated by hand. Wants engine revs at a minimum or engine shut off altogether. They’ll keep us posted.’

‘And no possibility of repair?’ Vallery asked wryly.

‘No, sir. None.’

‘Very well, then. Convoy speed. And Commander?’ ‘Sir?’

‘Hands to stations all night. You needn’t tell ’em so—but, well, I think it would be wise. I have a feeling—’

‘What’s that!’ Turner shouted. ‘Look! What the hell’s she doing?’ His finger was stabbing towards the last freighter in the starboard line: her guns were blazing away at some unseen target, the tracers lancing whitely through the twilight sky. Even as he dived for the broadcaster, he caught sight of the Viking’s main armament belching smoke and jagged flame.

‘All guns! Green 110! Aircraft! Independent fire, independent targets! Independent fire, independent targets!’ He heard Vallery ordering starboard helm, knew he was going to bring the for’ard turrets to bear.

They were too late. Even as the Ulysses began to answer her helm, the enemy planes were pulling out of their approach dives. Great, clumsy shapes, these planes, forlorn and insubstantial in the murky gloom, but identifiable in a sickening flash by the clamour of suddenly racing engines. Condors, without a shadow of doubt. Condors that had outguessed them again, that gliding approach, throttles cut right back, muted roar of the engines drifting downwind, away from the convoy. Their timing, their judgement of distance, had been superb.

The freighter was bracketed twice, directly hit by at least seven bombs: in the near-darkness, it was impossible to see the bombs going home, but the explosions were unmistakable. And as each plane passed over, the decks were raked by savage bursts of machine-gun fire. Every gun position on the freighter was wide open, lacking all but the most elementary frontal protection: the Dems, Naval Ratings on the LA guns, Royal Marine Artillery-men on the HA weapons, were under no illusions as to their life expectancy when they joined the merchant ships on the Russian run … For such few gunners as survived the bombing, the vicious stuttering of these machine-guns was almost certainly their last sound on earth.

As the bombs plummeted down on the next ship in line, the first freighter was already a brokenbacked mass of licking, twisting flames. Almost certainly, too, her bottom had been torn out: she had listed heavily, and now slowly and smoothly broke apart just aft of the bridge as if both parts were hinged below the water-line, and was gone before the clamour of the last aero engine had died away in the distance.

Tactical surprise had been complete. One ship gone, a second slewing wildly to an uncontrolled stop, deep in the water by the head, and strangely disquieting and ominous in the entire absence of smoke, flame or any movement at all, a third heavily damaged but still under command. Not one Condor had been lost.

Turner ordered the cease-fire—some of the gunners were still firing blindly into the darkness: trigger-happy, perhaps, or just that the imagination plays weird tricks on woolly minds and sunken blood-red eyes that had known no rest for more hours and days than Turner could remember. And then, as the last Oerlikon fell silent, he heard it again—the drone of the heavy aero engines, the sound welling then ebbing again like breakers on a distant shore, as the wind gusted and died.

There was nothing anyone could do about it. The Focke-Wulf, although lost in the low cloud, was making no attempt to conceal its presence: the ominous drone was never lost for long. Clearly, it was circling almost directly above.

‘What do you make of it, sir?’ Turner asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Vallery said slowly. ‘I just don’t know at all. No more visits from the Condors, I’m sure of that. It’s just that little bit too dark—and they know they won’t catch us again. Tailing us, like as not.’

‘Tailing us! It’ll be black as tar in half an hour!’ Turner disagreed. ‘Psychological warfare, if you ask me.’

‘God knows,’ Vallery sighed wearily. ‘All I know is that I’d give all my chances, here and to come, for a couple of Corsairs, or radar, or fog, or another such night as we had in the Denmark Straits.’ He laughed shortly, broke down in a fit of coughing. ‘Did you hear me?’ he whispered. ‘I never thought I’d ask for that again … How long since we left Scapa, Commander?’

Turner thought briefly. ‘Five—six days, sir.’

‘Six days!’ He shook his head unbelievingly. ‘Six days. And—and thirteen ships—we have thirteen ships now.’

‘Twelve,’ Turner corrected quietly. ‘Another’s almost gone. Seven freighters, the tanker and ourselves. Twelve … I wish they’d have a go at the old Stirling once in a while,’ he added morosely.

Vallery shivered in a sudden flurry of snow. He bent forward, head bent against the bitter wind and slanting snow, sunk in unmoving thought. Presently he stirred.

‘We will be off the North Cape at dawn,’ he said absently. ‘Things may be a little difficult, Commander. They’ll throw in everything they’ve got.’

‘We’ve been round there before,’ Turner conceded.

‘Fifty-fifty on our chances.’ Vallery did not seem to have heard him, seemed to be talking to himself ‘Ulysses and the Sirens—“it may be that the gulfs will wash us down.” … I wish you luck, Commander.’

Turner stared at him. ‘What do you mean—?’

‘Oh, myself too.’ Vallery smiled, his head lifting up. ‘I’ll need all the luck, too.’ His voice was very soft.

Turner did what he had never done before, never dreamed he would do. In the near-darkness he bent over the Captain, pulled his face round gently and searched it with troubled eyes. Vallery made no protest, and after a few seconds Turner straightened up.

‘Do me a favour, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘Go below. I can take care of things—and Carrington will be up before long. They’re gaining control aft.’

‘No, not tonight.’ Vallery was smiling, but there was a curious finality about the voice. ‘And it’s no good dispatching one of your minions to summon old Socrates to the bridge. Please, Commander. I want to stay here—I want to see things tonight.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Suddenly, strangely, Turner no longer wished to argue. He turned away. ‘Chrysler! I’ll give you just ten minutes to have a gallon of boiling coffee in the Captain’s shelter … And you’re going to go in there for half an hour,’ he said firmly, turning to Vallery, ‘and drink the damned stuff, or—or—’

‘Delighted!’ Vallery murmured. ‘Laced with your incomparable rum, of course?’

‘Of course! Eh—oh, yes, damn that Williamson!’ Turner growled irritably. He paused, went on slowly: ‘Shouldn’t have said that … Poor bastards, they’ll have had it by this time … ’ He fell silent, then cocked his head listening. ‘I wonder how long old Charlie means to keep stooging around up there,’ he murmured.

Vallery cleared his throat, coughed, and before he could speak the WT broadcaster clicked on.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge. Two messages.’

‘One from the dashing Orr, for a fiver,’ Turner grunted.

‘First from the Sirrus. “Request permission to go alongside, take off survivors. As well hung for a sheep as a lamb.”’

Vallery stared through the thinly falling snow, through the darkness of the night and over the rolling sea.

‘In this sea?’ he murmured. ‘And as near dark as makes no difference. He’ll kill himself!’

‘That’s nothing to what old Starr’s going to do to him when he lays hands on him!’ Turner said cheerfully.

‘He hasn’t a chance. I—I could never ask a man to do that. There’s no justification for such a risk. Besides, the merchantman’s been badly hit. There can’t be many left alive aboard.’

Turner said nothing.

‘Make a signal,’ Vallery said clearly. ‘“Thank you. Permission granted. Good luck.” And tell WT to go ahead.’

There was a short silence, then the speaker crackled again.

‘Second signal from London to Captain. Decoding. Messenger leaving for bridge immediately.’

‘To Officer Commanding, 14 ACS, FR77,’ the speaker boomed after a few seconds. ‘“Deeply distressed at news. Imperative maintain 090. Battle squadron steaming SSE at full speed on interception course. Rendezvous approx 1400 tomorrow. Their Lordships expressly command best wishes Rear-Admiral, repeat Rear-Admiral Vallery. DNO, London.”’

The speaker clicked off and there was only the lost pinging of the Asdic, the throbbing monotony of the prowling Condor’s engines, the lingering memory of the gladness in the broadcaster’s voice.

‘Uncommon civil of their Lordships,’ murmured the Kapok Kid, rising to the occasion as usual. ‘Downright decent, one might almost say.’

‘Bloody long overdue,’ Turner growled. ‘Congratulations, sir,’ he added warmly. ‘Signs of grace at last along the banks of the Thames.’ A murmur of pleasure ran round the bridge: discipline or not, no one made any attempt to hide his satisfaction.

‘Thank you, thank you.’ Vallery was touched, deeply touched. Promise of help at long, long last, a promise which might hold— almost certainly held—for each and every member of his crew the difference between life and death—and they could only think to rejoice in his promotion! Dead men’s shoes, he thought, and thought of saying it, but dismissed the idea immediately: a rebuff, a graceless affront to such genuine pleasure.

‘Thank you very much,’ he repeated. ‘But gentlemen, you appear to have missed the only item of news of any real significance—’

‘Oh, no, we haven’t,’ Turner growled. ‘Battle squadron—ha! Too—late as usual. Oh, to be sure, they’ll be in at the death—or shortly afterwards, anyway. Perhaps in time for a few survivors. I suppose the Illustrious and the Furious will be with them?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’ Vallery shook his head, smiling. ‘Despite my recent—ah—elevation, I am not yet in their Lordships’ confidence. But there’ll be some carriers, and they could fly off a few hours away, give us air cover from dawn.’

‘Oh, no, they won’t,’ said Turner prophetically. ‘The weather will break down, make flying off impossible. See if I’m not right.’

‘Perhaps, Cassandra, perhaps,’ Vallery smiled. ‘We’ll see … What was that, Pilot? I didn’t quite … ’

The Kapok Kid grinned.

‘It’s just occurred to me that tomorrow’s going to be a big day for our junior doctor—he’s convinced that no battleship ever puts out to sea except for a Spithead review in peacetime.’

‘That reminds me,’ Vallery said thoughtfully. ‘Didn’t we promise the Sirrus—?’

‘Young Nicholls is up to his neck in work,’ Turner cut in. ‘Doesn’t love us—the Navy rather—overmuch, but he sure loves his job. Borrowed a fire-fighting suit, and Carrington says he’s already … ’ He broke off, looked up sharply into the thin, driving snow. ‘Hallo! Charlie’s getting damned nosy, don’t you think?’

The roar of the Condor’s engines was increasing every second: the sound rose to a clamouring crescendo as the bomber roared directly overhead, barely a couple of hundred feet above the broken masts, died away to a steady drone as the plane circled round the convoy.

‘WT to escorts!’ Vallery called quickly. ‘Let him go—don’t touch him! No starshells—nothing. he’s trying to draw us out, to have us give away our position … It’s not likely that the merchant ships … Oh, God! The fools, the fools! Too late, too late!’

A merchantman in the port line had opened up—Oerlikons or Bofors, it was difficult to say. They were firing blind, completely blind: and in a high wind, snow and darkness, the chance of locating a plane by sound alone was impossibly remote.

The firing did not last long—ten, fifteen seconds at the outside. But long enough—and the damage was done. Charlie had pulled off, and straining apprehensive ears caught the sudden deepening of the note of the engines as the boosters were cut in for maximum climb.

‘What do you make of it, sir?’ Turner asked abruptly.

‘Trouble.’ Vallery was quiet but certain. ‘This has never happened before—and it’s not psychological warfare, as you call it, Commander: he doesn’t even rob us of our sleep—not when we’re this close to the North Cape. And he can’t hope to trail us long: a couple of quick course alterations and—ah!’ He breathed softly. ‘What did I tell you, Commander?’

With a suddenness that blocked thought, with a dazzling glare that struck whitely, cruelly at singeing eyeballs, night was transformed into day. High above the Ulysses a flare had burst into intense life, a flare which tore apart the falling snow like filmy, transparent gauze. Swinging wildly under its parachute with the gusting of the wind, the flare was drifting slowly seawards, towards a sea no longer invisible but suddenly black as night, towards a sea where every ship, in its glistening sheath of ice and snow, was silhouetted in dazzling whiteness against the inky backdrop of sea and sky.

‘Get that flare!’ Turner was barking into the transmitter. ‘All Oerlikons, all pom-poms, get that flare!’ He replaced the transmitter. ‘Might as well throw empty beer bottles at it with the old girl rolling like this,’ he muttered. ‘Lord, gives you a funny feeling this!’

‘I know,’ the Kapok Kid supplied. ‘Like one of these dreams where you’re walking down a busy street and you suddenly realize that all you’re wearing is a wrist-watch. “Naked and defenceless,” is the accepted term, I believe. For the non-literary, “caught with the pants down”.’ Absently he brushed the snow off the quilted kapok, exposing the embroidered ‘J’ on the breast pocket, while his apprehensive eyes probed into the circle of darkness outside the pool of light. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ he complained.

‘Neither do I.’ Vallery was unhappy. ‘And I don’t like Charlie’s sudden disappearance either.’

‘He hasn’t disappeared,’ Turner said grimly. ‘Listen!’ They listened, ears straining intently, caught the intermittent, distant thunder of the heavy engines. ‘He’s way astern of us, closing.’

Less than a minute later the Condor roared overhead again, higher this time, lost in the clouds. Again he released a flare, higher, much higher than the last, and this time squarely over the heart of the convoy.

Again the roar of the engines died to a distant murmur, again the desynchronized clamour strengthened as the Condor overtook the convoy a second time. Glimpsed only momentarily in the inverted valleys between the scudding clouds, it flew wide, this time, far out on the port hand, riding clear above the pitiless glare of the sinking flares. And, as it thundered by, flares exploded into blazing life— four of them, just below cloud level, at four-second intervals. The northern horizon was alive with light, glowing and pulsating with a fierce flame that threw every tiny detail into the starkest relief. And to the south there was only the blackness: the rim of the pool of light stopped abruptly just beyond the starboard line of ships.

It was Turner who first appreciated the significance, the implications of this. Realization struck at him with the galvanic effect of sheer physical shock. He gave a hoarse cry, fairly flung himself at the broadcast transmitter: there was no time to await permission.

‘“B” turret!’ he roared. ‘Starshells to the south. Green 90, green 90. Urgent! Urgent! Starshells, green 90. Maximum elevation 10. Close settings. Fire when you are ready!’ He looked quickly over his shoulder. ‘Pilot! Can you see—?’

‘“B” turret training, sir.’

‘Good, good!’ He lifted the transmitter again. ‘All guns! All guns! Stand by to repel air attack from starboard. Probable bearing green 90. Hostiles probably torpedo-bombers.’ Even as he spoke, he caught sight of the intermittent flashing of the fighting lights on the lower yardarm: Vallery was sending out an emergency signal to the convoy.

‘You’re right, Commander,’ Vallery whispered. In the gaunt pallor, in the skin taut stretched across the sharp and fleshless bones, his face, in that blinding glare, was a ghastly travesty of humanity; it was a death’s-head, redeemed only by the glow of the deep-sunken eyes, the sudden flicker of bloodless lids as the whip-lash crash of ‘B’ turret shattered the silence. ‘You must be,’ he went on slowly. ‘Every ship silhouetted from the north—and a maximum run-in from the south under cover of darkness.’ He broke off suddenly as the shells exploded in great overlapping globules of light, two miles to the south. ‘You are right,’ he said gently. ‘Here they come.’

They came from the south, wing-tip to wing-tip, flying in three waves with four or five planes in each wave. They were coming in at about 500 feet, and even as the shells burst their noses were already dipping into the plane of the shallow attack dive of the torpedo-bomber. And as they dived, the bombers fanned out, as if in search of individual targets—or what seemed, at first sight, to be individual targets. But within seconds it became obvious that they were concenrating on two ships and two ships alone—the Stirling and the Ulysses. Even the ideal double target of the crippled merchantman and the destroyer Sirrus, almost stopped alongside her, was strictly ignored. They were flying under orders.

‘B’ turret pumped out two more starshells at minimum settings, reloaded with HE. By this time, every gun in the convoy had opened up, the barrage was intense: the torpedo-bombers—curiously difficult to identify, but looking like Heinkels—had to fly through a concentrated lethal curtain of steel and high explosive. The element of surprise was gone: the starshells of the Ulysses had gained a priceless twenty seconds.

Five bombers were coming at the Ulysses now, fanned out to disperse fire, but arrowing in on a central point. They were levelling off, running in on firing tracks almost at wave-top height, when one of them straightened up a fraction too late, brushed lightly against a cresting wave-top, glanced harmlessly off, then catapulted crazily from wave-top to wave-top—they were flying at right angles to the set of the sea—before disappearing in a trough. Misjudgment of distance or the pilot’s windscreen suddenly obscured by a flurry of snow—it was impossible to say.

A second later the leading plane in the middle disintegrated in a searing burst of flame—a direct hit on its torpedo warhead. A third plane, behind and to the west, sheered off violently to the left to avoid the hurtling debris, and the subsequent dropping of its torpedo was no more than an empty gesture. It ran half a cable length behind the Ulysses, spent itelf in the empty sea beyond.

Two bombers left now, pressing home their attack with suicidal courage, weaving violently from side to side to avoid destruction. Two seconds passed, three, four—and still they came on, through the falling snow and intensely heavy fire, miraculous in their immunity. Theoretically, there is no target so easy to hit as a plane approaching directly head on: in practice, it never worked out that way. In the Arctic, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the relative immunity of the torpedo-bombers, the high percentage of successful attacks carried out in the face of almost saturation fire, never failed to confound the experts. Tension, over-anxiety, fear— these were part of the trouble, at least: there are no half measures about a torpedo-bomber—you get him or he gets you. And there is nothing more nerve-racking—always, of course, with the outstanding exception of the screaming, near-vertical power-dive of the gull-winged Stuka dive-bomber—than to see a torpedo-bomber looming hugely, terrifyingly over the open sights of your gun and know that you have just five inexorable seconds to live … And with the Ulysses, of course, the continuous rolling of the cruiser in the heavy cross-sea made accuracy impossible.

These last two bombers came in together, wing-tip to wing-tip. The plane nearer the bows dropped its torpedo less than two hundred yards away, pulled up in a maximum climbing turn to starboard, a fusillade of light cannon and machine-gun shells smashing into the upper works of the bridge: the torpedo hit the water obliquely, porpoised high into the air, then crashed back again nose first into a heavy wave, diving steeply into the sea: it passed under the Ulysses.

But seconds before that the last torpedo-bomber had made its attack—made its attack and failed and died. It had come roaring in less than ten feet above the waves, had come straight on without releasing its torpedo, without gaining an inch in height, until the crosses on the upper sides of the wings could be clearly seen, until it was less than a hundred yards away. Suddenly, desperately, the pilot had begun to climb: it was immediately obvious that the torpedo release mechanism had jammed, either through mechanical failure or icing in the intense cold: obviously, too, the pilot had intended to release the torpedo at the last minute, had banked on the sudden decrease of weight to lift him over the Ulysses.

The nose of the bomber smashed squarely into the for’ard funnel, the starboard wing shearing off like cardboard as it scythed across the after leg of the tripod mast. There was an instantaneous, blinding sheet of gasoline flame, but neither smoke nor explosion. A moment later the crumpled, shattered bomber, no longer a machine but a torn and flaming crucifix, plunged into the hissing sea a dozen yards away. The water had barely closed over it when a gigantic underwater explosion heeled the Ulysses far over to starboard, a vicious hammer-blow that flung men off their feet and shattered the lighting system on the port side of the cruiser.

Commander Turner hoisted himself painfully to his feet, shook his head to clear it of the cordite fumes and the dazed confusion left by cannon shells exploding almost at arm’s length. The shock of the detonating torpedo hadn’t thrown him to the duckboards—he’d hurled himself there five seconds previously as the flaming guns of the other bomber had wrecked the bridge from pointblank range.

His first thought was for Vallery. The Captain was lying on his side, crumpled strangely against the binnacle. Dry-mouthed, cold with a sudden chill that was not of that Polar wind, Turner bent quickly, turned him gently over.

Vallery lay still, motionless, lifeless. No sign of blood, no gaping wound—thank God for that! Turner peeled off a glove, thrust a hand below duffel coat and jacket, thought he detected a faint, a very faint beating of the heart. Gently he lifted the head off the frozen slush, then looked up quickly. The Kapok Kid was standing above him.

‘Get Brooks up here, Pilot,’ he said swiftly. ‘It’s urgent!’

Unsteadily, the Kapok Kid crossed over the bridge. The communication rating was leaning over the gate, telephone in his hand.

‘The Sick Bay, quickly!’ the Kapok Kid ordered. ‘Tell the Surgeon Commander … ’ He stopped suddenly, guessed that the man was still too dazed to understand. ‘Here, give me that phone!’ Impatiently, he stretched out his hand and grabbed the telephone, then stiffened in horror as the man slipped gradually backwards, extended arms trailing stiffly over the top of the gate until they disappeared. Carpenter opened the gate, stared down at the dead man at his feet: there was a hole the size of his gloved fist between the shoulder-blades.

He lay alongside the Asdic cabinet, a cabinet, the Kapok Kid now saw for the first time, riddled and shattered with machine-gun bullets and shells. His first thought was the numbing appreciation that the set must be smashed beyond recovery, that their last defence against the U-boats was gone. Hard on the heels of that came the sickening realization that there had been an Asdic operator inside there … His eyes wandered away, caught sight of Chrysler rising to his feet by the torpedo control. He, too, was staring at the Asdic cabinet, his face drained of expression. Before the Kapok Kid could speak, Chrysler lurched forward, fists battering frantically, blindly at the jammed door of the cabinet. Like a man in a dream, the Kapok Kid heard him sobbing … And then he remembered. The Asdic operator—his name was Chrysler too. Sick to his heart, the Kapok Kid lifted the phone again …

Turner pillowed the Captain’s head, moved across to the starboard corner of the compass platform. Bentley, quiet, unobtrusive as always, was sitting on the deck, his back wedged between two pipes, his head pillowed peacefully on his chest. His hand under Bentley’s chin, Turner gazed down into the sightless eyes, the only recognizable feature of what had once been a human face. Turner swore in savage quiet, tried to prise the dead fingers locked round the hand-grip of the Aldis, then gave up. The barred beam shone eerily across the darkening bridge.

Methodically, Turner searched the bridge-deck for further casualties. He found three others and it was no consolation at all that they must have died unknowing. Five dead men for a three-second burst—a very fair return, he thought bitterly. Standing on the after ladder, his face stilled in unbelief as he realized that he was staring down into the heart of the shattered for’ard funnel. More he could not see: the boat deck was already blurred into featureless anonymity in the dying glare of the last of the flares. He swung on his heel, returned to the compass platform.

At least, he thought grimly, there was no difficulty in seeing the Stirling. What was it that he had said—said less than ten minutes ago? ‘I wish they’d have a go at the Stirling once in a while.’ Something like that. His mouth twisted. They’d had a go, all right. The Stirling, a mile ahead, was slewing away to starboard, to the south-east, her for’ard superstructure enveloped in a writhing cocoon of white flame. He stared through his night glasses, tried to assess the damage; but a solid wall of flame masked the superstructure, from the fo’c’sle deck clear abaft the bridge. He could see nothing there, just nothing—but he could see, even in that heavy swell, that the Stirling was listing to starboard. It was learned later that the Stirling had been struck twice: she had been torpedoed in the for’ard boiler-room, and seconds later a bomber had crashed into the side of her bridge, her torpedo still slung beneath the belly of her fuselage: almost certainly, in the light of the similar occurrence on the Ulysses, severe icing had jammed the release mechanism. Death must have been instantaneous for every man on the bridge and the decks below; among the dead were Captain Jeffries, the First Lieutenant and the Navigator.

The last bomber was hardly lost in the darkness when Carrington replaced the poop phone, turned to Hartley.

‘Think you can manage now, Chief? I’m wanted on the bridge.’

‘I think so, sir.’ Hartley, blackened and stained with smoke and extinguisher foam, passed his sleeve wearily across his face. ‘The worst is over … Where’s Lieutenant Carslake? Shouldn’t he—?’

‘Forget him,’ Carrington interrupted brusquely. ‘I don’t know where he is, nor do I care. There’s no need for us to beat about the bush, Chief—we’re better without him. If he returns, you’re still in charge. Look after things.’

He turned away, walked quickly for’ard along the port alley. On the packed snow and ice, the pad of his rubber seaboots was completely soundless.

He was passing the shattered canteen when he saw a tall, shadowy figure standing in the gap between the snow-covered lip of the outer torpedo tube and the end stanchion of the guard-rails, trying to open a jammed extinguisher valve by striking it against the stanchion. A second later, he saw another blurred form detach itself stealthily from the shadows, creep up stealthily behind the man with the extinguisher, a heavy bludgeon of wood or metal held high above his head.

‘Look out!’ Carrington shouted. ‘Behind you!’

It was all over in two seconds—the sudden, flailing rush of the attacker, the crash as the victim, lightning fast in his reactions, dropped his extinguisher and fell crouched to his knees, the thin piercing scream of anger and terror as the attacker catapulted over the stooping body and through the gap between tubes and rails, the splash—and then the silence.

Carrington ran up to the man on the deck, helped him to his feet. The last flare had not yet died, and it was still light enough for him to see who it was—Ralston, the LTO. Carrington gripped his arms, looked at him anxiously.

‘Are you all right? Did he get you? Good God, who on earth—?’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Ralston was breathing quickly, but his face was almost expressionless again. ‘That was too close! Thank you very much, sir.’

‘But who on earth—?’ Carrington repeated in wonder.

‘Never saw him, sir.’ Ralston was grim. ‘But I know who it was— Sub-Lieutenant Carslake. He’s been following me around all night, never let me out of his sight, not once. Now I know why.’

It took much to disturb the First Lieutenant’s iron equanimity, but now he shook his head in slow disbelief.

‘I knew there was bad blood!’ he murmured. ‘But that it should come to this! What the Captain will say to this I just—’

‘Why tell him?’ Ralston said indifferently. ‘Why tell anyone? Perhaps Carslake had relations. What good will it do to hurt them, to hurt anyone. Let anyone think what they like.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Let them think he died a hero’s death fire-fighting, fell over the side, anything.’ He looked down into the dark, rushing water, then shivered suddenly. ‘Let him go, sir, please. He’s paid.’

For a long second Carrington, too, stared down over the side, looked back at the tall boy before him. Then he clapped his arm, nodded slowly and turned away.

Turner heard the clanging of the gate, lowered the binoculars to find Carrington standing by his side, gazing wordlessly at the burning cruiser. Just then Vallery moaned softly, and Carrington looked down quickly at the prone figure at his feet.

‘My God! The Old Man! Is he hurt badly, sir?’

‘I don’t know, Number One. If not, it’s a bloody miracle,’ he added bitterly. He stooped down, raised the dazed Captain to a sitting position.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Do you—have you been hit?’

Vallery shuddered in a long, exhausting paroxysm of coughing, then shook his head feebly.

‘I’m all right,’ he whispered weakly. He tried to grin, a pitiful, ghastly travesty of a smile in the reflected light from the burning Aldis. ‘I dived for the deck, but I think the binnacle got in my way.’ He rubbed his forehead, already bruised and discoloured. ‘How’s the ship, Commander?’

‘To hell with the ship!’ Turner said roughly. He passed an arm round Vallery, raised him carefully to his feet. ‘How are things aft, Number One?’

‘Under control. Still burning, but under control. I left Hartley in charge.’ He made no mention of Carslake.

‘Good! Take over. Radio Stirling, Sirrus, see how they are. Come on, sir. Shelter for you!’

Vallery protested feebly, a token protest only, for he was too weak to stand. He checked involuntarily as he saw the snow falling whitely through the barred beam of the Aldis, slowly followed the beam back to its source.

‘Bentley?’ he whispered. ‘Don’t tell me … ’ He barely caught the Commander’s wordless nod, turned heavily away. They passed by the dead man stretched outside the gate, then stopped at the Asdic cabinet. A sobbing figure was crouched into the angle between the shelter and the jammed and shattered door of the hut, head pillowed on the forearm resting high against the door. Vallery laid a hand on the shaking shoulder, peered into the averted face.

‘What is it? Oh, it’s you, boy.’ The white face had been lifted towards him. ‘What’s the matter, Chrysler?’

‘The door, sir!’ Chrysler’s voice was muffled, quivering. ‘The door—I can’t open it.’

For the first time, Vallery looked at the cabinet, at the gashed and torn metal. His mind was still dazed, exhausted, and it was almost by a process of association that he suddenly, horrifyingly thought of the gashed and mangled operator that must lie behind that locked door.

‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘The door’s buckled … There’s nothing anyone can do, Chrysler.’ He looked more closely at the grief-dulled eyes. ‘Come on, my boy, there’s no need—’

‘My brother’s in there, sir.’ The words, the hopeless despair, struck Vallery like a blow. Dear God! He had forgotten … Of course— Leading Asdic Operator Chrysler … He stared down at the dead man at his feet, already covered with a thin layer of snow.

‘Have that Aldis unplugged, Commander, will you?’ he asked absently. ‘And Chrysler?’

‘Yes, sir.’ A flat monotone.

‘Go below and bring up some coffee, please.’

‘Coffee, sir!’ He was bewildered, uncomprehending. ‘Coffee! But—but—my—my brother—’

‘I know,’ Vallery said gently. ‘I know. Bring some coffee, will you?’

Chrysler stumbled off. When the shelter door closed behind them, clicking on the light, Vallery turned to the Commander.

‘Cue for moralizing on the glories of war,’ he murmured quietly. ‘Dulce et decorum, and the proud privilege of being the sons of Nelson and Drake. It’s not twenty-four hours since Ralston watched his father die … And now this boy. Perhaps—’

‘I’ll take care of things,’ Turner nodded. He hadn’t yet forgiven himself for what he had said and done to Ralston last night, in spite of Ralston’s quick friendliness, the ready acceptance of his apologies. ‘I’ll keep him busy out of the way till we open up the cabinet … Sit down, sir. Have a swig of this.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Friend Williams having betrayed my guilty secret … Hallo! Company.’

The light clicked off and a burly figure bulked momentarily against the grey oblong of the doorway. The door shut, and Brooks stood blinking in the sudden light, red of face and gasping for breath. He eyes focused on the bottle in Turner’s hand.

‘Ha!’ he said at length. ‘Having a bottle party, are we? All contributions gratefully received, I have no doubt.’ He opened his case on a convenient table, was rummaging inside when someone rapped sharply on the door.

‘Come in,’ Vallery called.

A signalman entered, handed a note to Vallery. ‘From London, sir. Chief says there may be some reply.’

‘Thank you. I’ll phone down.’

The door opened and closed again. Vallery looked up at an empty-handed Turner.

‘Thanks for removing the guilty evidence so quickly,’ he smiled. Then he shook his head. ‘My eyes—they don’t seem so good. Perhaps you would read the signal, Commander?’

‘And perhaps you would like some decent medicine,’ Brooks boomed, ‘instead of that filthy muck of Turner’s.’ He fished in his bag, produced a bottle of amber liquid. ‘With all the resources of modern medicine—well, practically all, anyway—at my disposal, I can find nothing to equal this.’

‘Have you told Nicholls?’ Vallery was stretched out on the settee now, eyes closed, the shadow of a smile on his bloodless lips.

‘Well, no,’ Brooks confessed. ‘But plenty of time. Have some?’

‘Thanks. Let’s have the good news, Turner.’

‘Good news!’ The sudden deadly quiet of the Commanderr’s voice fell chilly over the waiting men. ‘No, sir, it’s not good news.

‘“Rear-Admiral Vallery, Commanding 14 ACS, FR77.”’ The voice was drained of all tone and expression. ‘“Tirpitz, escorting cruisers, destroyers, reported moving out Alta Fjord sunset. Intense activity Alta Fjord airfield. Fear sortie under air cover. All measures avoid useless sacrifice Merchant, Naval ships. DNO, London.”’ With deliberate care Turner folded the paper, laid it on the table. ‘Isn’t that just wonderful,’ he murmured. ‘Whatever next?’

Vallery was sitting bolt upright on the settee, blind to the blood trickling down crookedly from one corner of his mouth. His face was calm, unworried.

‘I think I’ll have that glass, now, Brooks, if you don’t mind,’ he said quietly. The Tirpitz. The Tirpitz. He shook his head tiredly, like a man in a dream. The Tirpitz—the name that no man mentioned without a far-off echo of awe and fear, the name that had completely dominated North Atlantic naval strategy during the past two years. Moving out at last, an armoured Colossus, sister-ship to that other Titan that had destroyed the Hood with one single, savage blow—the Hood, the darling of the Royal Navy, the most powerful ship in the world—or so men had thought. What chance had their tiny cockleshell cruiser … Again he shook his head, angrily this time, forced himself to think of the present.

‘Well, gentlemen, I suppose time bringeth all things—even the Tirpitz. It had to come some day. Just our ill luck—the bait was too close, too tempting.’

‘My young colleague is going to be just delighted,’ Brooks said grimly. ‘A real battleship at long, long last.’

‘Sunset,’ Turner mused. ‘Sunset. My God!’ he said sharply, ‘even allowing for negotiating the fjord they’ll be on us in four hours on this course!’

‘Exactly,’ Vallery nodded. ‘And it’s no good running north. They’d overtake us before we’re within a hundred miles of them.’

‘Them? Our big boys up north?’ Turner scoffed. ‘I hate to sound like a gramophone record, but you’ll recall my earlier statement about them—too—late as usual!’ He paused, swore again. ‘I hope that old bastard Starr’s satisfied at last!’ he finished bitterly.

‘Why all the gloom?’ Vallery looked up quizzically, went on softly. ‘We can still be back, safe and sound in Scapa in forty-eight hours. “Avoid useless sacrifice Merchant, Naval ships,” he said. The Ulysses is probably the fastest ship in the world today. It’s simple, gentlemen.’

‘No, no!’ Brooks moaned. ‘Too much of an anti-climax. I couldn’t stand it!’

‘Do another PQ17?’[1] Turner smiled, but the smile never touched his eyes. ‘The RoyalNavy could never stand it: Captain—Rear-Admiral Vallery would never permit it; and speaking for myself and, I’m fairly certain, this bunch of cut-throat mutineers of ours— well, I don’t think we’d ever sleep so sound o’ nights again.’

‘Gad!’ Brooks murmured. ‘That man’s a poet!’

‘You’re right, Turner.’ Vallery drained his glass, lay back exhausted. ‘We don’t seem to have much option … What if we receive orders for a—ah—high-speed withdrawal?’

‘You can’t read,’ Turner said bluntly. ‘Remember, you just said your eyes are going back on you.’

‘“Souls that have toiled and wrought and fought with me,”’ Vallery quoted softly. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. You make things very easy for me.’ He propped himself on an elbow, his mind made up. He smiled at Turner, and his face was almost boyish again.

‘Inform all merchant ships, all escorts. Tell them to break north.’

Turner stared at him.

‘North? Did you say “north”? But the Admiralty—’

‘North, I said,’ Vallery repeated quietly. ‘The Admiralty can do what they like about it. We’ve played along long enough. We’ve sprung the trap. What more can they want? This way there’s a chance—an almost hopeless chance, perhaps, but a fighting chance. To go east is suicide.’ He smiled again, almost dreamily. ‘The end is not all-important,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t think I’ll have to answer for this. Not now—not ever.’

Turner grinned at him, his face lit up. ‘North, you said.’

‘Inform C-in-C,’ Vallery went on. ‘Ask Pilot for an interception course. Tell the convoy we’ll tag along behind, give ’em as much cover as we can, as long as we can … As long as we can. Let us not delude ourselves. 1,000 to 1 at the outside … Nothing else we can do, Commander?’

‘Pray,’ Turner said succinctly.

‘And sleep,’ Brooks added. ‘Why don’t you have half an hour, sir?’

‘Sleep!’ Vallery seemed genuinely amused. ‘We’ll have all the time in the world to sleep, just by and by.’

‘You have a point,’ Brooks conceded. ‘You are very possibly right.’

1. PQ17, a large mixed convoy—it included over 30 British, American and Panamanian ships—left Iceland for Russia under the escort of half a dozen destroyers and perhaps a dozen smaller craft, with a mixed Anglo-American cruiser and destroyer squadron in immediate support. A shadow covering force—again Anglo-American—comprising one aircraft carrier, two battleships, three cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers, lay to the north. As with FR77, they formed the spring of the trap that closed too late. The time was midsummer, 1942, a suicidal season for the attempt, for in June and July, in these high latitudes, there is no night. About longitude 20° east, the convoy was heavily attacked by U-boats and aircraft. On the same day as the attack began— 4th July—the covering cruiser squadron was radioed that the Tirpitz had just sailed from Alta Fjord. (This was not the case: The Tirpitz did make a brief, abortive sortie on the afternoon of the 5th, but turned back the same evening: rumour had it that she had been damaged by torpedoes from a Russian submarine.) The support squadron and convoy escorts immediately withdrew to the west at high speed, leaving PQ17 to their fate, leaving them to scatter and make their unescorted way to Russia as best they could. The feelings of the crews of the merchant ships at this save-their-own-skins desertion and betrayal by the Royal Navy can be readily imagined. Their fears, too, can be readily imagined, but even their darkest forebodings never conceived the dreadful reality: 23 merchant ships were sent to the bottom—by U-boats and aircraft. The Tirpitz was not seen, never came anywhere near the convoy, but even the threat had driven the naval squadrons to flight. The author does not know all the facts concerning PQ17, nor does he seek to interpret those he does know: still less does he seek to assign blame. Curiously enough, the only definite conclusion is that no blame can be attached to the commander of the squadron, Admiral Hamilton. He had no part of the decision to withdraw—the order came from the Admiralty, and was imperative. But one does not envy him. It was a melancholy and bitter incident, all the more unpalatable in that it ran so directly counter to the traditions of a great Service; one wonders what Sir Philip Sydney would have thought, or, in more modern times, Kennedy of the Rawalpindi or Fegen of the Jervis Bay. But there was no doubt what the Merchant Navy thought. What they still think. From most of the few survivors, there can be no hope of forgiveness. They will, probably, always remember: the Royal Navy would desperately like to forget. It is difficult to blame either.

FIFTEEN

Saturday Evening II

Messages were pouring in to the bridge now, messages from the merchant ships, messages of dismayed unbelief asking for confirmation of the Tirpitz breakout: from the Stirling, replying that the superstructure fire was now under control and that the engine-room watertight bulkheads were holding; and one from Orr of the Sirrus, saying that his ship was making water to the capacity of the pumps—he had been in heavy collision with the sinking merchantman—that they had taken off forty-four survivors, that the Sirrus had already done her share and couldn’t she go home? The signal had arrived after the Sirrus’s receipt of the bad news. Turner grinned to himself: no inducement on earth, he knew, could have persuaded Orr to leave now.

The messages kept pouring in, by visual signal or WT. There was no point in maintaining radio silence to outwit enemy monitor positions; the enemy knew where they were to a mile. Nor was there any need to prohibit light signalling—not with the Stirling still burning furiously enough to illuminate the sea for a mile around. And so the messages kept on coming—messages of fear and dismay and anxiety. But, for Turner, the most disquieting message came neither by lamp nor by radio.

Fully quarter of an hour had elapsed since the end of the attack and the Ulysses was rearing and pitching through the head seas on her new course of 350°, when the gate of the bridge crashed open and a panting, exhausted man stumbled on to the compass platform. Turner, back on the bridge again, peered closely at him in the red glare from the Stirling, recognized him as a stoker. His face was masked in sweat, the sweat already caking to ice in the intense cold. And in spite of that cold, he was hatless, coatless, clad only in a pair of thin dungarees. He was shivering violently, shivering from excitement and not because of the icy wind—he was oblivious to such things.

Turner seized him by the shoulder.

‘What is it, man?’ he demanded anxiously. The stoker was still too breathless to speak. ‘What’s wrong? Quickly!’

‘The TS, sir!’ The breathing was so quick, so agonized, that the words blurred into a gasping exhalation. ‘It’s full of water!’

‘The TS!’ Turner was incredulous. ‘Flooded! When did this happen?’

‘I’m not sure, sir.’ He was still gasping for breath. ‘But there was a bloody awful explosion, sir, just about amid—’

‘I know! I know!’ Turner interrupted impatiently. ‘Bomber carried away the for’ard funnel, exploded in the water, port side. But that was fifteen minutes ago, man! Fifteen minutes! Good God, they would have—’

‘TS switchboard’s gone, sir.’ The stoker was beginning to recover, to huddle against the wind, but frantic at the Commander’s deliberation and delay, he straightened up and grasped Turner’s duffel without realizing what he was doing. The note of the urgency deepened still further. ‘All the power’s gone, sir. And the hatch is jammed! The men can’t get out!’

‘The hatch-cover jammed!’ Turner’s eyes narrowed in concern. ‘What happened?’ he rapped out. ‘Buckled?’

‘The counter-weight’s broken off, sir. It’s on top of the hatch. We can only get it open an inch. You see, sir—’ ‘Number One!’ Turner shouted.

‘Here, sir.’ Carrington was standing just behind him. ‘I heard … Why can’t you open it?’

‘It’s the TS hatch!’ the stoker cried desperately. ‘A quarter of a bloody ton if it’s an ounce, sir. You know—the one below the ladder outside the wheelhouse. Only two men can get at it at the same time. We’ve tried … Hurry, sir. Please.’

‘Just a minute.’ Carrington was calm, unruffled, infuriatingly so. ‘Hartley? No, still fire-fighting. Evans, MacIntosh—dead.’ He was obviously thinking aloud. ‘Bellamy, perhaps?’

‘What is it, Number One?’ Turner burst out. He himself had caught up the anxiety, the impatience of the stoker. ‘What are you trying—?’

‘Hatch-cover plus pulley—1,000 lbs.,’ Carrington murmured. ‘A special man for a special job.’

‘Petersen, sir!’ The stoker had understood immediately. ‘Petersen!’

‘Of course!’ Carrington clapped gloved hands together. ‘We’re on our way, sir. Acetylene? No time! Stoker—crow-bars, sledges … Perhaps if you would ring the engine-room, sir?’

But Turner already had the phone in his hand.

Aft on the poop-deck, the fire was under control, all but in a few odd corners where the flames were fed by a fierce through draught. In the mess-decks, bulkheads, ladders, mess partitions, lockers had been twisted and buckled into strange shapes by the intense heat: on deck, the gasoline-fed flames, incinerating the two and three-quarter inch deck plating and melting the caulking as by some gigantic blow-torch, had cleanly stripped all covering and exposed the steel deck-plates, plates dull red and glowing evilly, plates that hissed and spat as heavy snowflakes drifted down to sibilant extinction.

On and below decks, Hartley and his crews, freezing one moment, reeling in the blast of heat the next, toiled like men insane. Where their wasted, exhausted bodies found the strength God only knew. From the turrets, from the Master-At-Arms’s office, from mess-decks and emergency steering position, they pulled out man after man who had been there when the Condor had crashed: pulled them out, looked at them, swore, wept and plunged back into the aftermath of that holocaust, oblivious of pain and danger, tearing aside wreckage, wreckage still burning, still red-hot, with charred and broken gloves: and when the gloves fell off, they used their naked hands.

As the dead were ranged in the starboard alleyway, Leading Seaman Doyle was waiting for them. Less than half an hour previously, Doyle had been in the for’ard galley passage, rolling in silent agony as frozen body and clothes thawed out after the drenching of his pom-pom. Five minutes later, he had been back on his gun, rock-like, unflinching, as he pumped shell after shell over open sights into the torpedo bombers. And now, steady and enduring as ever, he was on the poop. A man of iron, and a face of iron, too, that night, the bearded leonine head still and impassive as he picked up one dead man after the other, walked to the guard-rail and dropped his burden gently over the side. How many times he repeated that brief journey that night, Doyle never knew: he had lost count after the first twenty or so. He had no right to do this, of course: the navy was very strong on decent burial, and this was not decent burial. But the sailmakers were dead and no man would or could have sewn up these ghastly charred heaps in the weighted and sheeted canvas. The dead don’t care, Doyle thought dispassionately—let them look after themselves. So, too, thought Carrington and Hartley, and they made no move to stop him.

Beneath their feet, the smouldering mess-decks rang with hollow reverberating clangs as Nicholls and Leading Telegraphist Brown, still weirdly garbed in their white asbestos suits, swung heavy sledges against the securing clips of ‘Y’ magazine hatch. In the smoke and gloom and their desperate haste, they could hardly see each other, much less the clips: as often as not they missed their strokes and the hammers went spinning out of numbed hands into the waiting darkness.

Time yet, Nicholls thought desperately, perhaps there is time. The main flooding valve had been turned off five minutes ago: it was possible, barely possible, that the two trapped men inside were clinging to the ladder, above water level.

One clip, one clip only was holding the hatch-cover now. With alternate strokes of their sledges, they struck it with vicious strength. Suddenly, unexpectedly, it sheared off at its base and the hatch-cover crashed open under the explosive up-surge of the compressed air beneath. Brown screamed in agony, a single coughing shout of pain, as the bone-crashing momentum of the swinging hatch crashed into his right hip, then fell to the deck where he lay moaning quietly.

Nicholls did not even spare him a glance. He leant far through the hatch, the powerful beam of his torch stabbing downwards into the gloom. And he could see nothing, nothing at all—not what he wanted to see. All he saw was the water, dark and viscous and evil, water rising and falling, water flooding and ebbing in the eerie oil-bound silence as the Ulysses plunged and lifted in the heavy seas.

‘Below!’ Nicholls called loudly. The voice, a voice, he noted impersonally, cracked and shaken with strain, boomed and echoed terrifyingly down the iron tunnel. ‘Below!’ he shouted again. ‘Is there anybody there?’ He strained his ears for the least sound, for the faintest whisper of an answer, but none came.

‘McQuater!’ He shouted a third time. ‘Williamson! Can you hear me?’ Again he looked, again he listened, but there was only the darkness and the muffled whisper of the oil-slicked water swishing smoothly from side to side. He stared again down the light from the torch, marvelled that any surface could so quickly dissipate and engulf the brilliance of that beam. And beneath that surface … He shivered. The water—even the water seemed to be dead, old and evil and infinitely horrible. In sudden anger, he shook his head to clear it of these stupid, primitive fears: his imagination—he’d have to watch it. He stepped back, straightened up. Gently, carefully, he closed the swinging hatch. The mess-deck echoed as his sledge swung down on the clips, again and again and again.

Engineer-Commander Dodson stirred and moaned. He struggled to open his eyes but his eyelids refused to function. At least, he thought that they did for the blackness around remained as it was, absolute, impenetrable, almost palpable.

He wondered dully what had happened, how long he had been there, what had happened. And the side of his head—just below the ear—that hurt abominably. Slowly, with clumsy deliberation, he peeled off his glove, reached up an exploratory hand. It came away wet and sticky: his hair, he realized with mild surprise, was thickly matted with blood. It must be blood—he could feel it trickling slowly, heavily down the side of his cheek.

And that deep, powerful vibration, a vibration overlain with an indefinable note of strain that set his engineer’s teeth on edge—he could hear it, almost feel it, immediately in front of him. His bare hand reached out, recoiled in instant reflex as it touched something smooth and revolving—and burning hot.

The shaft tunnel! Of course. That’s where he was—the shaft tunnel. They’d discovered fractured lubricating pipes on the port shafts too, and he’d decided to keep this engine turning. He knew they’d been attacked. Down here in the hidden bowels of the ship, sound did not penetrate: he had heard nothing of the aircraft engines: he hadn’t even heard their own guns firing—but there had been no mistaking the jarring shock of the 5.25s surging back on their hydraulic recoils. And then —a torpedo perhaps, or a near miss by a bomb. Thank God he’d been sitting facing inboard when the Ulysses had lurched. The other way round and it would have been curtains for sure when he’d been flung across the shaft coupling and wrapped round …

The shaft! Dear God, the shaft! It was running almost red-hot on dry bearings! Frantically, he pawed around, picked up his emergency lamp and twisted its base. There was no light. He twisted it again with all his strength, reached up, felt the jagged edges of broken screen and bulb, and flung the useless lamp to the deck. He dragged out his pocket torch: that, too, was smashed. Desperate now, he searched blindly around for his oil can: it was lying on its side, the patent spring top beside it. The can was empty.

No oil, none. Heaven only knew how near the over-stressed metal was to the critical limit. He didn’t. He admitted that: even to the best engineers, metal fatigue was an incalculable unknown. But, like all men who had spent a lifetime with machines, he had developed a sixth sense for these things—and, right now, that sixth sense was jabbing at him, mercilessly, insistently. Oil—he would have to get oil. But he knew he was in bad shape, dizzy, weak from shock and loss of blood, and the tunnel was long and slippery and dangerous— and unlighted. One slip, one stumble against or over that merciless shaft … Gingerly, the Engineer-Commander stretched out his hand again, rested his hand for an instant on the shaft, drew back sharply in sudden pain. He lifted his hand to his cheek, knew that it was not friction that had flayed and burnt the skin off the tips of his fingers. There was no choice. Resolutely, he gathered his legs under him, swayed dizzily to his feet, his back bent against the arching convexity of the tunnel.

It was then that he noticed it for the first time—a light, a swinging tiny pinpoint of light, imponderably distant in the converging sides of that dark tunnel, although he knew it could be only yards away. He blinked, closed his eyes and looked again. The light was still there, advancing steadily, and he could hear the shuffling of feet now. All at once he felt weak, light-headed: gratefully he sank down again, his feet safely braced once more against the bearing block.

The man with the light stopped a couple of feet away, hooked the lamp on to an inspection bracket, lowered himself carefully and sat beside Dodson. The rays of the lamp fell full on the dark heavy face, the jagged brows and prognathous jaw: Dodson stiffened in sudden surprise.

‘Riley! Stoker Riley!’ His eyes narrowed in suspicion and conjecture. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

‘I’ve brought a two-gallon drum of lubricating oil,’ Riley growled. He thrust a Thermos flask into the Engineer-Commander’s hands. ‘And here’s some coffee. I’ll ’tend to this—you drink that … Suffering Christ! This bloody bearing’s red-hot!’

Dodson set down the Thermos with a thump.

‘Are you deaf?’ he asked harshly. ‘Why are you here? Who sent you? Your station’s in “B” boiler-room!’

‘Grierson sent me,’ Riley said roughly. His dark face was impassive. ‘Said he couldn’t spare his engine-room men—too bloody valuable … Too much?’ The oil, thick, viscous, was pouring slowly on to the overheated bearing.

‘Lieutenant Grierson!’ Dodson was almost vicious, his voice a whip-lash of icy correction. ‘And that’s a damned lie, Riley! Lieutenant Grierson never sent you: I suppose you told him that somebody else had sent you?’

‘Drink your coffee,’ Riley advised sourly. ‘You’re wanted in the engine-room.’

The Engineer-Commander clenched his fist, restrained himself with difficulty.

‘You damned insolent bastard!’ he burst out. Abruptly, control came back and he said evenly: ‘Commander’s Defaulters in the morning. You’ll pay for this, Riley!’

‘No, I won’t.’ Confound him, Dodson thought furiously, he’s actually grinning, the insolent …

He checked his thought.

‘Why not?’ he demanded dangerously.

‘Because you won’t report me.’ Riley seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.

‘Oh, so that’s it!’ Dodson glanced swiftly round the darkened tunnel, and his lips tightened as he realized for the first time how completely alone they were: in sudden certainty he looked back at Riley, big and hunched and menacing. Smiling yet, but no smile, Dodson thought, could ever transform that ugly brutal face. The smile on the face of the tiger … Fear, exhaustion, never-ending strain—they did terrible things to a man and you couldn’t blame him for what he had become, or for what he was born … But his, Dodson’s, first responsibility was to himself. Grimly, he remembered how Turner had berated him, called him all sorts of a fool for refusing to have Riley sent to prison.

‘So that’s it, eh?’ he repeated softly. He turned himself, feet thrusting solidly against the block. ‘Don’t be so sure, Riley. I can give you twenty-five years, but—’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Riley burst out impatiently. ‘What are you talking about, sir? Drink your coffee—please. You’re wanted in the engineroom, I tell you!’ he repeated impatiently.

Uncertainly, Dodson relaxed, unscrewed the cap of the Thermos. He had a sudden, peculiar feeling of unreality, as if he were a spectator, some bystander in no way involved in this scene, this fantastic scene. His head, he realized, still hurt like hell.

‘Tell me, Riley,’ he asked softly, ‘what makes you so sure I won’t report you?’

‘Oh, you can report me all right.’ Riley was suddenly cheerful again. ‘But I won’t be at the Commander’s table tomorrow morning.’

‘No?’ It was half-challenge, half-question.

‘No,’ Riley grinned. ‘‘Cos there’ll be no Commander and no table tomorrow morning.’ He clasped his hands luxuriously behind his head. ‘In fact, there’ll be no nothin’.’

Something in the voice, rather than in the words, caught and held Dodson’s attention. He knew, with instant conviction, that though Riley might be smiling, he wasn’t joking. Dodson looked at him curiously, but said nothing.

‘Commander’s just finished broadcastin’,’ Riley continued. ‘The Tirpitz is out—we have four hours left.’

The bald, flat statement, the complete lack of histrionics, of playing for effect, left no possible room for doubt. The Tirpitz—out. The Tirpitz—out. Dodson repeated the phrase to himself, over and over again. Four hours, just four hours to go … He was surprised at his own reaction, his apparent lack of concern.

‘Well?’ Riley was anxious now, restive. ‘Are you goin’ or aren’t you? I’m not kiddin’, sir—you’re wanted—urgent!’

‘You’re a liar,’ Dodson said pleasantly. ‘Why did you bring the coffee?’

‘For myself.’ The smile was gone, the face set and sullen. ‘But I thought you needed it—you don’t look so good to me … They’ll fix you up back in the engine-room.’

‘And that’s just where you’re going, right now!’ Dodson said evenly.

Riley gave no sign that he had heard.

‘On your way, Riley,’ Dodson said curtly. ‘That’s an order!’

‘—off!’ Riley growled. ‘I’m stayin’. You don’t require to have three—great gold stripes on your sleeve to handle a bloody oil can,’ he finished derisively.

‘Possibly not.’ Dodson braced against a sudden, violent pitch, but too late to prevent himself lurching into Riley. ‘Sorry, Riley. Weather’s worsening, I’m afraid. Well, we—ah—appear to have reached an impasse.’

‘What’s that?’ Riley asked suspiciously.

‘A dead-end. A no-decision fight … Tell me, Riley,’ he asked quietly. ‘What brought you here?’

‘I told you!’ Riley was aggrieved. ‘Grierson—Lieutenant Grierson sent me.’

‘What brought you here?’ Dodson persisted. It was as if Riley had not spoken.

‘That’s my—business!’ Riley answered savagely.

‘What brought you here?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake leave me alone!’ Riley shouted. His voice echoed loudly along the dark tunnel. Suddenly he turned round full-face, his mouth twisted bitterly. ‘You know bloody well why I came.’

‘To do me in, perhaps?’

Riley looked at him a long second, then turned away. His shoulders were hunched, his head held low.

‘You’re the only bastard in this ship that ever gave me a break,’ he muttered. ‘The only bastard I’ve ever known who ever gave me a chance,’ he amended slowly. ‘Bastard’ Dodson supposed, was Riley’s accolade of friendship, and he felt suddenly shamed of his last remark. ‘If it wasn’t for you,’ Riley went on softly, ‘I’d ’a’ been in cells the first time, in a civvy jail the second. Remember, sir?’

Dodson nodded. ‘You were rather foolish, Riley,’ he admitted.

‘Why did you do it?’ The big stoker was intense, worried. ‘God, everyone knows what I’m like—’

‘Do they? I wonder … I thought you had the makings of a better man than you—’

‘Don’t give me that bull!’ Riley scoffed. ‘I know what I’m like. I know what I am. I’m no—good! Everybody says I’m no—good! And they’re right … ’ He leaned forward. ‘Do you know somethin’? I’m a Catholic. Four hours from now … ’ He broke off. ‘I should be on my knees, shouldn’t I?’ he sneered. ‘Repentance, lookin’ for—what do they call it?’

‘Absolution?’

‘Aye. That’s it. Absolution. And do you know what?’ He spoke slowly, emphatically. ‘I don’t give a single, solitary damn!’

‘Maybe you don’t have to,’ Dodson murmured. ‘For the last time, get back to that engine-room!’

‘No!’

The Engineer-Commander sighed, picked up the Thermos.

‘In that case, perhaps you would care to join me in a cup of coffee?’

Riley looked up, grinned, and when he spoke it was in a very creditable imitation of Colonel Chinstrap of the famous ITMA radio programme.

‘Ectually, I don’t mind if I do!’

Vallery rolled over on his side, his legs doubled up, his hand automatically reaching for the towel. His emaciated body shook violently, and the sound of the harsh, retching cough beat back at him from the iron walls of his shelter. God, he thought, oh, God, it’s never been as bad as this before. Funny, he thought, it doesn’t hurt any more, not even a little bit. The attack eased. He looked at the crimson, sodden towel, flung it in sudden disgust and with what little feeble strength was left him into the darkest corner of the shelter.

‘You carry this damned ship on your back!’ Unbidden, old Socrates’s phrase came into his mind and he smiled faintly. Well, if ever they needed him, it was now. And if he waited any longer, he knew he could never be able to go.

He sat up, sweating with the effort, swung his legs carefully over the side. As his feet touched the deck, the Ulysses pitched suddenly, steeply, and he fell forward against a chair, sliding helplessly to the floor. It took an eternity of time, an infinite effort to drag himself to his feet again: another effort like that, he knew, would surely kill him.

And then there was the door—that heavy, steel door. Somehow he had to open it, and he knew he couldn’t. But he laid hold of the handle and the door opened, and suddenly, miraculously, he was outside, gasping as the cruel, sub-zero wind seared down through his throat and wasted lungs.

He looked fore and aft. The fires were dying, he saw, the fires on the Stirling and on his own poop-deck. Thank God for that at least. Beside him, two men had just finished levering the door off the Asdic cabinet, were flashing a torch inside. But he couldn’t bear to look: he averted his head, staggered with outstretched hands for the gate of the compass platform.

Turner saw him coming, hurried to meet him, helped him slowly to his chair.

‘You’ve no right to be here,’ he said quietly. He looked at Vallery for a long moment. ‘How are you feeling, sir?’

‘I’m a good deal better, now, thanks,’ Vallery replied. He smiled and went on: ‘We Rear-Admirals have our responsibilities, you know, Commander: it’s time I began to earn my princely salary.’

‘Stand back, there!’ Carrington ordered curtly. ‘Into the wheelhouse or up on the ladder—all of you. Let’s have a look at this.’

He looked down at the great, steel hatch-cover. Looking at it, he realized he’d never before appreciated just how solid, how massive that cover was. The hatch-cover, open no more than an inch, was resting on a tommy-bar. He noticed the broken, stranded pulley, the heavy counter-weight lying against the sill of the wheelhouse. So that’s off, he thought: thank the Lord for that, anyway.

‘Have you tried a block and tackle?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Yes, sir,’ the man nearest him replied. He pointed to a tangled heap in a corner. ‘No use, sir. The ladder takes the strain all right, but we can’t get the hook under the hatch, except sideways—and then it slips off all the time.’ He gestured to the hatch. ‘And every clip’s either bent—they were opened by sledges—or at the wrong angle … I think I know how to use a block and tackle, sir.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ Carrington said absently. ‘Here, give me a hand, will you?’

He hooked his fingers under the hatch, took a deep breath. The seaman at one side of the cover—the other side was hard against the after bulkhead—did the same. Together they strained, thighs and backs quivering under the strain. Carrington felt his face turning crimson with effort, heard the blood pounding in his ears, and relaxed. They were only killing themselves and that damned cover hadn’t shifted a fraction—someone had done remarkably well to open it even that far. But even though they were tired and anything but fit, Carrington thought, two men should have been able to raise an edge of that hatch. He suspected that the hinges were jammed—or the deck buckled. If that were so, he mused, even if they could hook on a tackle, it would be of little help. A tackle was of no use when a sudden, immediate application of force was required; it always yielded that fraction before tightening up.

He sank to his knees, put his mouth to the edge of the hatch.

‘Below there!’ he called. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘We can hear you.’ The voice was weak, muffled. ‘For God’s sake get us out of here. We’re trapped like rats!’

‘Is that you, Brierley? Don’t worry—we’ll get you out. How’s the water down there?’

‘Water? More bloody oil than water! There must be a fracture right through the port oil tank. I think the ring main passage must be flooded, too.’

‘How deep is it?’

‘Three-quarters way up already! We’re standing on generators, hanging on to switchboards. One of our boys is gone already—we couldn’t hold him.’ Even muffled by the hatch, the strain, the near-desperation in the voice was all too obvious. ‘For pity’s sake, hurry up!’

‘I said we’d get you out!’ Carrington’s voice was sharp, authoritative. The confidence was in his voice only, but he knew how quickly panic could spread down there. ‘Can you push from below at all?’

‘There’s room for only one on the ladder,’ Brierley shouted. ‘It’s impossible to get any pressure, any leverage upwards.’ There was a sudden silence, then a series of muffled oaths.

‘What’s up?’ Carrington called sharply.

‘It’s difficult to hang on,’ Brierley shouted. ‘There are waves two feet high down there. One of the men was washed off there … I think he’s back again. It’s pitch dark down here.’

Carrington heard the clatter of heavy footsteps above him, and straightened up. It was Petersen. In that narrow space, the blond Norwegian stoker looked gigantic. Carrington looked at him, looked at the immense span of shoulder, the great depth of chest, one enormous hand hanging loosely by his side, the other negligently holding three heavy crowbars and a sledge as if they were so many lengths of cane. Carrington looked at him, looked at the still, grave eyes so startlingly blue under the flaxen hair, and all at once he felt oddly confident, reassured.

‘We can’t open this, Petersen,’ Carrington said baldly. ‘Can you?’

‘I will try, sir.’ He laid down his tools, stooped, caught the end of the tommy-bar projecting beneath the corner of the cover. He straightened quickly, easily: the hatch lifted a fraction, then the bar, putty-like in its apparent malleability, bent over almost to a right angle.

‘I think the hatch is jammed.’ Petersen wasn’t even breathing heavily. ‘It will be the hinges, sir.’

He walked round the hatch, peered closely at the hinges, then grunted in satisfaction. Three times the heavy sledge, swung with accuracy and all the power of these great shoulders behind them, smashed squarely into the face of the outer hinge. On the third stroke the sledge snapped. Petersen threw away the broken shaft in disgust, picked up another, much heavier crowbar.

Again the bar bent, but again the hatch-cover lifted—an inch this time. Petersen picked up the two smaller sledges that had been used to open clips, hammered at the hinges till these sledges, too, were broken and useless.

This time he used the last two crowbars together, thrust under the same corner of the hatch. For five, ten seconds he remained bent over them, motionless. He was breathing deeply, quickly, now, then suddenly the breathing stopped. The sweat began to pour off his face, his whole body to quiver under the titanic strain: then slowly, incredibly, both crowbars began to bend.

Carrington watched, fascinated. He had never seen anything remotely like this before: he was sure no one else had either. Neither of these bars, he would have sworn, would have bent under less than half a ton of pressure. It was fantastic, but it was happening: and as the giant straightened, they were bending more and more. Then suddenly, so unexpectedly that everyone jumped, the hatch sprang open five or six inches and Petersen crashed backwards against the bulkhead, the bars falling from his hand and splashing into the water below.

Petersen flung himself back at the hatch, tigerish in his ferocity. His fingers hooked under the edge, the great muscles of his arms and shoulders lifted and locked as he tugged and pulled at that massive hatch-cover. Three times he heaved, four times, then on the fifth the hatch almost literally leapt up with a screech of tortured metal and smashed shudderingly home into the retaining latch of the vertical stand behind. The hatch was open. Petersen just stood there smiling—no one had seen Petersen smile for a long time—his face bathed in sweat, his great chest rising and falling rapidly as his starved lungs sucked in great draughts of air.

The water level in the Low Power Room was within two feet of the hatch: sometimes, when the Ulysses plunged into a heavy sea, the dark, oily liquid splashed over the hatch coaming into the flat above. Quickly, the trapped men were hauled to safety. Soaked in oil from head to foot, their eyes gummed and blinded, they were men overcome by reaction, utterly spent and on the verge of collapse, so far gone that even their fear could not overcome their exhaustion. Three, in particular, could do no more than cling helplessly to the ladder, would almost certainly have slipped back into the surging blackness below; but Petersen bent over and plucked them clean out of the Low Power Room as if they had been little children.

‘Take these men to the Sick Bay at once!’ Carrington ordered. He watched the dripping, shivering men being helped up the ladder, then turned to the giant stoker with a smile. ‘We’ll all thank you later, Petersen. We’re not finished yet. This hatch must be closed and battened down.’

‘It will be difficult, sir,’ Petersen said gravely.

‘Difficult or not, it must be done.’ Carrington was emphatic. Regularly, now, the water was spilling over the coaming, was lapping the sill of the wheelhouse. ‘The emergency steering position is gone: if the wheelhouse is flooded, we’re finished.’

Petersen said nothing. He lifted the retaining latch, pulled the protesting hatch-cover down a foot. Then he braced his shoulder against the latter, planted his feet on the cover and straightened his back convulsively: the cover screeched down to 45°. He paused, bent his back like a bow, his hands taking his weight on the ladder, then pounded his feet again and again on the edge of the cover. Fifteen inches to go.

‘We need heavy hammers, sir,’ Petersen said urgently.

‘No time!’ Carrington shook his head quickly. ‘Two more minutes and it’ll be impossible to shut the hatch-cover against the water pressure. Hell!’ he said bitterly. ‘If it were only the other way round—closing from below. Even I could lever it shut!’

Again Petersen said nothing. He squatted down by the side of the hatch, gazed into the darkness beneath his feet.

‘I have an idea, sir,’ he said quickly. ‘If two of you would stand on the hatch, push against the ladder. Yes, sir, that way—but you could push harder if you turned your back to me.’

Carrington laid the heels of his hands against the iron steps of the ladder, heaved with all his strength. Suddenly he heard a splash, then a metallic clatter, whirled round just in time to see a crowbar clutched in an enormous hand disappear below the edge of the hatch. There was no sign of Petersen. Like many big, powerful men, he was lithe and cat-like in his movements: he’d gone down over the edge of that hatch without a sound.

‘Petersen!’ Carrington was on his knees by the hatch. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing? Come out of there, you bloody fool! Do you want to drown?’

There was no reply. Complete silence below, a silence deepened by the gentle susurration of the water. Suddenly the quiet was broken by the sound of metal striking against metal, then by a jarring screech as the hatch dropped six inches. Before Carrington had time to think, the hatch-cover dropped farther still. Desperately, the First Lieutenant seized a crowbar, thrust it under the hatch-cover: a split second later the great steel cover thudded down on top of it. Carrington had his mouth to the gap now.

‘In the name of God, Petersen,’ he shouted, ‘are you sane? Open up, open up at once, do you hear?’

‘I can’t.’ The voice came and went as the water surged over the stoker’s head. ‘I won’t. You said yourself … there is no time … this was the only way.’

‘But I never meant—’

‘I know. It does not matter … it is better this way.’ It was almost impossible to make out what he was saying. ‘Tell Captain Vallery that Petersen says he is very sorry … I tried to tell the Captain yesterday.’

‘Sorry! Sorry for what?’ Madly Carrington flung all his strength against the iron bar: the hatchcover did not even quiver.

‘The dead marine in Scapa Flow … I did not mean to kill him, I could never kill any man … But he angered me,’ the big Norwegian said simply. ‘He killed my friend.’

For a second, Carrington stopped straining at the bar. Petersen! Of course—who but Petersen could have snapped a man’s neck like that. Petersen, the big, laughing Scandinavian, who had so suddenly changed overnight into a grave unsmiling giant, who stalked the deck, the mess-decks and alleyways by day and by night, who was never seen to smile or sleep. With a sudden flash of insight, Carrington saw clear through into the tortured mind of that kind and simple man.

‘Listen, Petersen,’ he begged. ‘I don’t give a damn about that. Nobody shall ever know, I promise you. Please Petersen, just—’

‘It is better this way.’ The muffled voice was strangely content. ‘It is not good to kill a man … it is not good to go on living … I know … Please, it is important—you will tell my Captain—Petersen is sorry and filled with shame … I do this for my Captain.’ Without warning, the crowbar was plucked from Carrington’s hand. The cover clanged down in position. For a minute the wheelhouse flat rang to a succession of muffled, metallic blows. Suddenly the clamour ceased and there was only the rippling surge of the water outside the wheelhouse and the creak of the wheel inside as the Ulysses steadied on course.

The clear sweet voice soared high and true above the subdued roar of the engine-room fans, above the whine of a hundred electric motors and the sound of the rushing of the waters. Not even the metallic impersonality of the loudspeakers could detract from the beauty of that singing voice … It was a favourite device of Vallery’s when the need for silence was not paramount, to pass the long, dark hours by coupling up the record-player to the broadcast system.

Almost invariably, the musical repertoire was strictly classical— or what is more often referred to, foolishly and disparagingly, as the popular classics. Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovski, Lehar, Verdi, Delius—these were the favourites. ‘No. I in B flat minor’, ‘Air on a G string’, ‘Moonlight on the Alster’, ‘Claire de Lune’, ‘The Skater’s Waltz’—the crew of the Ulysses could never have enough of these. ‘Ridiculous’, ‘impossible’—it is all too easy to imagine the comments of those who equate the matelot’s taste in music with the popular conception of his ethics and morals; but those same people have never heard the hushed, cathedral silence in the crowded hangar of a great aircraft carrier in Scapa Flow as Yehudi Menuhin’s magic bow sang across the strings of the violin, swept a thousand men away from the harsh urgencies of reality, from the bitter memories of the last patrol or convoy, into the golden land of music.

But now a girl was singing. It was Deanna Durbin, and she was singing ‘Beneath the Lights of Home’, that most heartbreakingly nostalgic of all songs. Below decks and above, bent over the great engines or huddled by their guns, men listened to the lovely voice as it drifted through the darkened ship and the falling snow, and turned their minds inwards and thought of home, thought of the bitter contrast and the morning that would not come. Suddenly, halfway through, the song stopped.

‘Do you hear there?’ the speakers boomed. ‘Do you hear there? This—this is the Commander speaking.’ The voice was deep and grave and hesitant: it caught and held the attention of every man in the ship.

‘I have bad news for you.’ Turner spoke slowly, quietly. ‘I am sorry—I … ’ He broke off, then went on more slowly still. ‘Captain Vallery died five minutes ago.’ For a moment the speaker was silent, then crackled again. ‘He died on the bridge, in his chair. He knew he was dying and I don’t think he suffered at all … He insisted—he insisted that I thank you for the way you all stood by him. “Tell em”—these were his words, as far as I remember—“tell em,” he said, “that I couldn’t have carried on without them, that they are the best crew that God ever gave a Captain.” Then he said—it was the last thing he said: “Give them my apologies. After all they’ve done for me—well, well, tell them I’m terribly sorry to let them down like this.” That was all he said—just “Tell them I’m sorry.”

And then he died.’

SIXTEEN

Saturday Night

Richard Vallery was dead. He died grieving, stricken at the thought that he was abandoning the crew of the Ulysses, leaving them behind, leaderless. But it was only for a short time, and he did not have to wait long. Before the dawn, hundreds more, men in the cruisers, the destroyers and the merchantmen, had died also. And they did not die as he had feared under the guns of the Tirpitz—another grim parallel with PQ17, for the Tirpitz had not left Alta Fjord. They died, primarily, because the weather had changed.

Richard Vallery was dead, and with his death a great change had come over the men of the Ulysses. When Vallery died, other things died also, for he took these things with him. He took with him the courage, the kindliness, the gentleness, the unshakable faith, the infinitely patient and understanding endurance, all these things which had been so peculiarly his own. And now these things were gone and the Ulysses was left without them and it did not matter. The men of the Ulysses no longer needed courage and all the adjuncts of courage, for they were no longer afraid. Vallery was dead and they did not know how much they respected and loved that gentle man until he was gone. But then they knew. They knew that something wonderful, something that had become an enduring part of their minds and memories, something infinitely fine and good, was gone and they would never know it again, and they were mad with grief. And, in war, a grief-stricken man is the most terrible enemy there is. Prudence, caution, fear, pain—for the grief-stricken man these no longer exist. He lives only to lash out blindly at the enemy, to destroy, if he can, the author of his grief. Rightly or wrongly, the Ulysses never thought to blame the Captain’s death on any but the enemy. There was only, for them, the sorrow and the blind hate. Zombies, Nicholls had called them once, and the Ulysses was more than ever a ship manned by living zombies, zombies who prowled restlessly, incessantly, across the snow and ice of the heaving decks, automatons living only for revenge.

The weather changed just before the end of the middle watch. The seas did not change—FR77 was still butting into the heavy, rolling swell from the north, still piling up fresh sheets of glistening ice on their labouring fo’c’sles. But the wind dropped, and almost at once the snowstorm blew itself out, the last banks of dark, heavy cloud drifting away to the south. By four o’clock the sky was completely clear.

There was no moon that night, but the stars were out, keen and sharp and frosty as the icy breeze that blew steadily out of the north.

Then, gradually, the sky began to change. At first there was only a barely perceptible lightening on the northern rim then, slowly, a pulsating flickering band of light began to broaden and deepen and climb steadily above the horizon, climbing higher to the south with the passing of every minute. Soon that pulsating ribbon of light was paralleled by others, streamers in the most delicate pastel shades of blue and green and violet, but always and predominantly white. And always, too, these lanes of multi-coloured light grew higher and stronger and brighter: at the climax, a great band of white stretched high above the convoy, extending from horizon to horizon … These were the Northern Lights, at any time a spectacle of beauty and wonder, and this night surpassing lovely: down below, in ships clearly illumined against the dark and rolling seas, the men of FR77 looked up and hated them.

On the bridge of the Ulysses, Chrysler—Chrysler of the uncanny eyesight and super-sensitive hearing, was the first to hear it. Soon everyone else heard it too, the distant roar, throbbing and intermittent, of a Condor approaching from the south. After a time they became aware that the Condor was no longer approaching, but sudden hope died almost as it was born. There was no mistaking it now—the deeper, heavier note of a Focke-Wulf in maximum climb. The Commander turned wearily to Carrington.

‘It’s Charlie, all right,’ he said grimly. ‘The bastard’s spotted us. He’ll already have radioed Alta Fjord and a hundred to one in anything you like that he’s going to drop a market flare at 10,000 feet or so. It’ll be seen fifty miles away.’

‘Your money’s safe.’ The First Lieutenant was withering. ‘I never bet against dead certs … And then, by and by, maybe a few flares at a couple of thousand?’

‘Exactly!’ Turner nodded. ‘Pilot, how far do you reckon we’re from Alta Fjord—in flying time, I mean?’

‘For a 200-knot plane, just over an hour,’ the Kapok Kid said quietly. His ebullience was gone: he had been silent and dejected since Vallery had died two hours previously.

‘An hour!’ Carrington exclaimed. ‘And they’ll be here. My God, sir,’ he went on wonderingly, ‘they’re really out to get us. We’ve never been bombed nor torpedoed at night before. We’ve never had the Tirpitz after us before. We never—’

‘The Tirpitz,’ Turner interrupted. ‘Just where the hell is that ship? She’s had time to come up with us. Oh, I know it’s dark and we’ve changed course,’ he added, as Carrington made to object, ‘but a fast destroyer screen would have picked us—Preston!’ He broke off, spoke sharply to the Signal Petty Officer. ‘Look alive, man! That ship’s flashing us.’

‘Sorry, sir.’ The signalman, swaying on his feet with exhaustion, raised his Aldis, clacked out an acknowledgement. Again the light on the merchantman began to wink furiously.

‘“Transverse fracture engine bedplate,”’ Preston read out. ‘“Damage serious: shall have to moderate speed.”’

‘Acknowledge,’ said Turner curtly. ‘What ship is that, Preston?’

‘The Ohio Freighter, sir.’

‘The one that stopped a tin fish a couple of days back?’

‘That’s her, sir.’

‘Make a signal. “Essential maintain speed and position.”’ Turner swore. ‘What a time to choose for an engine breakdown … Pilot, when do we rendezvous with the Fleet?’

‘Six hours’ time, sir: exactly.’

‘Six hours.’ Turner compressed his lips. ‘Just six hours—perehaps!’ he added bitterly.

‘Perhaps?’ Carrington murmured.

‘Perhaps,’ Turner affirmed. ‘Depends entirely on the weather. C-in-C won’t risk capital ships so near the coast unless he can fly off fighter cover against air attack. And, if you ask me, that’s why the Tirpitz hasn’t turned up yet—some wandering U-boat’s tipped him off that our Fleet Carriers are steaming south. He’ll be waiting on the weather … What’s he saying now, Preston?’ The Ohio’s signal lamp had flashed briefly, then died.

‘“Imperative slow down,”’ Preston repeated. ‘“Damage severe. Am slowing down.”’

‘He is, too,’ Carrington said quietly. He looked up at Turner, at the set face and dark eyes, and knew the same thought was in the Commander’s mind as was in his own. ‘He’s a goner, sir, a dead duck. He hasn’t a chance. Not unless—’

‘Unless what?’ Turner asked harshly. ‘Unless we leave him an escort? Leave what escort, Number One? The Viking—the only effective unit we’ve left?’ He shook his head in slow decision. ‘The greatest good of the greatest number: that’s how it has to be. They’ll know that. Preston, send “Regret cannot leave you standby. How long to effect repairs?”’

The flare burst even before Preston’s hand could close on the trigger. It burst directly over FR77. It was difficult to estimate the height—probably six to eight thousand feet—but at that altitude it was no more than an incandescent pinpoint against the great band of the Northern Lights arching majestically above. But it was falling quickly, glowing more brightly by the sound: the parachute, if any, could have been only a steadying drogue.

The crackling of the WT speaker broke through the stuttering chatter of the Aldis.

‘WT—bridge. WT—bridge. Message from Sirrus: “Three survivors dead. Many dying or seriously wounded. Medical assistance urgent, repeat urgent.”’ The speaker died, just as the Ohio started flickering her reply.

‘Send for Lieutenant Nicholls,’ Turner ordered briefly. ‘Ask him to come up to the bridge at once.’

Carrington stared down at the dark broad seas, seas flecked with milky foam: the bows of the Ulysses were crashing down heavily, continuously.

‘You’re going to risk it, sir?’

‘I must. You’d do the same, Number One … What does the Ohio say, Preston?’

‘“I understand. Too busy to look after the Royal Navy anyway. We will make up on you. Au revoir!”’

‘We will make up on you. Au revoir.’ Turner repeated softly. ‘He lies in his teeth, and he knows it. By God!’ he burst out. ‘If anyone ever tells me the Yankee sailors have no guts—I’ll push his perishing face in. Preston, send: “Au revoir. Good luck.” … Number One, I feel like a murderer.’ He rubbed his hand across his forehead, nodded towards the shelter where Vallery lay stretched out, and strapped to his settee. ‘Month in, month out, he’s been taking these decisions. It’s no wonder …’ He broke off as the gate creaked open.

‘Is that you, Nicholls? There is work for you, my boy. Can’t have you medical types idling around uselessly all day long.’ He raised his hand. ‘All right, all right,’ he chuckled. ‘I know … How are things on the surgical front?’ he went on seriously.

‘We’ve done all we can, sir. There was very little left for us to do,’ Nicholls said quietly. His face was deeply lined, haggard to the point of emaciation. ‘But we’re in a bad way for supplies. Hardly a single dressing left. And no anæsthetics at all—except what’s left in the emergency kit. The Surgeon-Commander refused to touch those.’

‘Good, good,’ Turner murmured. ‘How do you feel, laddie?’

‘Awful.’

‘You look it,’ Turner said candidly. ‘Nicholls—I’m terribly sorry, boy—I want you to go over to the Sirrus.’

‘Yes, sir.’ There was no surprise in the voice: it hadn’t been difficult to guess why the Commander had sent for him. ‘Now?’

Turner nodded without speaking. His face, the lean strong features, the heavy brows and sunken eyes were quite visible now in the strengthening light of the plunging flare. A face to remember, Nicholls thought.

‘How much kit can I take with me, sir?’

‘Just your medical gear. No more. You’re not travelling by Pullman, laddie!’

‘Can I take my camera, my films?’

‘All right.’ Turner smiled briefly. ‘Looking forward keenly to photographing the last seconds of the Ulysses, I suppose … Don’t forget that the Sirrus is leaking like a sieve, Pilot—get through to the WT. Tell the Sirrus to come alongside, prepare to receive medical officer by breeches buoy.’

The gate creaked again. Turner looked at the bulky figure stumbling wearily on to the compass platform. Brooks, like every man in the crew was dead on his feet; but the blue eyes burned as brightly as ever.

‘My spies are everywhere,’ he announced. ‘What’s this about the Sirrus shanghaiing young Johnny here?’

‘Sorry, old man,’ Turner apologized. ‘It seems things are pretty bad on the Sirrus.’

‘I see.’ Brooks shivered. It might have been the thin threnody of the wind in the shattered rigging, or just the iceladen wind itself. He shivered again, looked upwards at the sinking flare. ‘Pretty, very pretty,’ he murmured. ‘What are the illuminations in aid of?’

‘We are expecting company,’ Turner smiled crookedly. ‘An old world custom, O Socrates—the light in the window and what have you.’ He stiffened abruptly, then relaxed, his face graven in granitic immobility. ‘My mistake,’ he murmured. ‘The company has already arrived.’

The last words were caught up and drowned in the rumbling of a heavy explosion. Turner had known it was coming—he’d seen the thin stiletto of flame stabbing skywards just for’ard of the Ohio Freighter’s bridge. The sound had taken five or six seconds to reach them—the Ohio was already over a mile distant on the starboard quarter, but clearly visible still under the luminance of the Northern Lights—the Northern Lights that had betrayed her, almost stopped in the water, to a wandering U-boat.

The Ohio Freighter did not remain visible for long. Except for the moment of impact, there was neither smoke, nor flame, nor sound. But her back must have been broken, her bottom torn out—and she was carrying a full cargo of nothing but tanks and ammunition. There was a curious dignity about her end—she sank quickly, quietly, without any fuss. She was gone in three minutes.

It was Turner who finally broke the heavy silence on the bridge. He turned away and in the light of the flare his face was not pleasant to see.

‘Au revoir,’ he muttered to no one in particular. ‘Au revoir. That’s what he said, the lying … ’ He shook his head angrily, touched the Kapok Kid on the arm. ‘Get through to WT,’ he said sharply. ‘Tell the Viking to sit over the top of that sub till we get clear.’

‘Where’s it all going to end?’ Brooks’s face was still and heavy in the twilight.

‘God knows! How I hate those murdering bastards!’ Turner ground out. ‘Oh, I know, I know, we do the same—but give me something I can see, something I can fight, something—’

‘You’ll be able to see the Tirpitz all right,’ Carrington interrupted dryly. ‘By all accounts, she’s big enough.’

Turner looked at him, suddenly smiled. He clapped his arm, then craned his head back, staring up at the shimmering loveliness of the sky. He wondered when the next flare would drop.

‘Have you a minute to spare, Johnny?’ The Kapok Kid’s voice was low. ‘I’d like to speak to you.’

‘Sure.’ Nicholls looked at him in surprise. ‘Sure, I’ve a minute, ten minutes—until the Sirrus comes up. What’s wrong, Andy?’

‘Just a second.’ The Kapok Kid crossed to the Commander. ‘Permission to go to the charthouse, sir?’

‘Sure you’ve got your matches?’ Turner smiled. ‘OK. Off you go.’

The Kapok Kid smiled faintly, said nothing. He took Nicholls by the arm, led him into the charthouse, flicked on the lights and produced his cigarettes. He looked steadily at Nicholls as he dipped his cigarette into the flickering pool of flame.

‘Know something, Johnny?’ he said abruptly. ‘I reckon I must have Scotch blood in me.’

‘Scots,’ Nicholls corrected. ‘And perish the very thought.’

‘I’m feeling—what’s the word?—fey, isn’t it? I’m feeling fey tonight, Johnny.’ The Kapok Kid hadn’t even heard the interruption. He shivered. ‘I don’t know why—I’ve never felt this way before.’

‘Ah, nonsense! Indigestion, my boy,’ Nicholls said briskly. But he felt strangely uncomfortable.

‘Won’t wash this time.’ Carpenter shook his head, half-smiling. ‘Besides, I haven’t eaten a thing for two days. I’m, on the level, Johnny.’ In spite of himself, Nicholls was impressed. Emotion, gravity, earnestness—these were utterly alien to the Kapok Kid.

‘I won’t be seeing you again,’ the Kapok Kid continued softly. ‘Will you do me a favour, Johnny?’

‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ Nicholls said angrily. ‘How the hell do you—?’

‘Take this with you.’ The Kapok Kid pulled out a slip of paper, thrust it into Nicholls’s hands. ‘Can you read it?’

‘I can read it.’ Nicholls had stilled his anger. ‘Yes, I can read it.’ There was a name and address on the sheet of paper, a girl’s name and a Surrey address. ‘So that’s her name,’ he said softly. ‘Juanita … Juanita.’ He pronounced it carefully, accurately, in the Spanish fashion. ‘My favourite song and my favourite name,’ he murmured.

‘Is it?’ the Kapok Kid asked eagerly. ‘Is it indeed? And mine, Johnny.’ He paused. ‘If, perhaps—well, if I don’t—well, you’ll go to see her, Johnny?’

‘What are you talking about, man?’ Nicholls felt embarrassed. Half-impatiently, half-playfully, he tapped him on the chest. ‘Why, with that suit on, you could swim from here to Murmansk. You’ve said so yourself, a hundred times.’

The Kapok Kid grinned up at him. The grin was a little crooked.

‘Sure, sure, I know, I know—will you go, Johnny?’

‘Dammit to hell, yes!’ Nicholls snapped. ‘I’ll go—and it’s high time I was going somewhere else. Come on!’ He snapped off the lights, pulled back the door, stopped with his foot halfway over the sill. Slowly, he stepped back inside the charthouse, closed the door and flicked on the light. The Kapok Kid hadn’t moved, was gazing quietly at him.

‘I’m sorry, Andy,’ Nicholls said sincerely. ‘I don’t know what made me—’

‘Bad temper,’ said the Kapok Kid cheerfully. ‘You always did hate to think that I was right and you were wrong!’

Nicholls caught his breath, closed his eyes for a second. Then he stretched out his hand.

‘All the best, Vasco.’ It was an effort to smile. ‘And don’t worry. I’ll see her if—well, I’ll see her, I promise you. Juanita … But if I find you there,’ he went on threateningly, ‘I’ll—’

‘Thanks, Johnny. Thanks a lot.’ The Kapok Kid was almost happy. ‘Good luck, boy … Vaya con Dios. That’s what she always said to me, what she said before I came away. “Vaya con Dios.”’

Thirty minutes later, Nicholls was operating aboard the Sirrus.

The time was 0445. It was bitterly cold, with a light wind blowing steadily from the north. The seas were heavier than ever, longer between the crests, deeper in their gloomy troughs, and the damaged Sirrus, labouring under a mountain of ice, was making heavy weather of it. The sky was still clear, a sky of breath-taking purity, and the stars were out again, for the Northern Lights were fading. The fifth successive flare was drifting steadily seawards.

It was at 0445 that they heard it—the distant rumble of gunfire far to the south—perhaps a minute after they had seen the incandescent brilliance of a burning flare on the rim of the far horizon. There could be no doubt as to what was happening. The Viking, still in contact with the U-boat, although powerless to do anything about it, was being heavily attacked. And the attack must have been short, sharp and deadly, for the firing ceased soon after it had begun. Ominously, nothing came through on the WT. No one ever knew what had happened to the Viking, for there were no survivors.

The last echo of the Viking’s guns had barely died away before they heard the roar of the engines of the Condor, at maximum throttle in a shallow dive. For five, perhaps ten seconds—it seemed longer than that, but not long enough for any gun in the convoy to begin tracking him accurately—the great Focke-Wulf actually flew beneath his own flare, and then was gone. Behind him, the sky opened up in a blinding coruscation of flame, more dazzling, more hurtful, than the light of the noonday sun. So intense, so extraordinary the power of those flares, so much did pupils contract and eyelids narrow in instinctive self-protection, that the enemy bombers were through the circle of light and upon them before anyone fully realized what was happening. The timing, the split-second co-operation between marker planes and bombers were magnificent.

There were twelve planes in the first wave. There was no concentration on one target, as before: not more than two attacked any ship. Turner, watching from the bridge, watching them swoop down steeply and level out before even the first gun in the Ulysses had opened up, caught his breath in sudden dismay. There was something terribly familiar about the speed, the approach, the silhouette of these planes. Suddenly he had it—Heinkels, by God! Heinkel 111s. And the Heinkel 111, Turner knew, carried that weapon he dreaded above all others—the glider bomb.

And then, as if he had touched a master switch, every gun on the Ulysses opened up. The air filled with smoke, the pungent smell of burning cordite: the din was indescribable. And all at once, Turner felt fiercely, strangely happy … To hell with them and their glider bombs, he thought. This was war as he liked to fight it: not the cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek frustration of trying to outguess the hidden wolf-packs, but war out in the open, where he could see the enemy and hate him and love him for fighting as honest men should and do his damnedest to destroy him. And, Turner knew, if they could at all, the crew of the Ulysses would destroy him. It needed no great sensitivity to direct the sea-change that had overtaken his men—yes, his men now: they no longer cared for themselves: they had crossed the frontier of fear and found that nothing lay beyond it and they would keep on feeding their guns and squeezing their triggers until the enemy overwhelmed them.

The leading Heinkel was blown out of the sky, and fitting enough it was ‘X’ turret that destroyed it—‘X’ turret, the turret of dead marines, the turret that had destroyed the Condor, and was now manned by a scratch marine crew. The Heinkel behind lifted sharply to avoid the hurtling fragments of fuselage and engines, dipped, flashed past the cruiser’s bows less than a boat-length away, banked steeply to port under maximum power, and swung back in on the Ulysses. Every gun on the ship was caught on the wrong foot, and seconds passed before the first one was brought to bear—time and to spare for the Heinkel to angle in at 60°, drop his bomb and slew frantically away as the concentrated fire of the Oerlikons and pom-poms closed in on him. Miraculously, he escaped.

The winged bomb was high, but not high enough. It wavered, steadied, dipped, then glided forwards and downwards through the drifting smoke of the guns to strike home with a tremendous, deafening explosion that shook the Ulysses to her keel and almost shattered the eardrums of those on deck.

To Turner, looking aft from the bridge, it seemed that the Ulysses could never survive this last assault. An ex-torpedo officer and explosives expert himself, he was skilled in assessing the disruptive power of high explosive: never before had he been so close to so powerful, so devastating an explosion. He had dreaded these glider bombs, but even so he had under-estimated their power: the concussion had been double, treble what he had been expecting.

What Turner did not know was that what he had heard had been not one explosion but two, but so nearly simultaneous as to be indistinguishable. The glider bomb, by a freakish chance, had crashed directly into the port torpedo tubes. There had been only one torpedo left there—the other two had sent the Vytura to the bottom— and normally Amatol, the warhead explosive, is extremely stable and inert, even when subjected to violent shock: but the bursting bomb had been too close, too powerful: sympathetic detonation had been inevitable.

Damage was extensive and spectacular: it was severe, but not fatal. The side of the Ulysses had been ripped open, as by a giant can-opener, almost to the water’s edge: the tubes had vanished: the decks were holed and splintered: the funnel casing was a shambles, the funnel itself tilting over to port almost to fifteen degrees; but the greatest energy of the explosion had been directed aft, most of the blast expending itself over the open sea, while the galley and canteen, severely damaged already, were no more than a devil’s scrapyard.

Almost before the dust and debris of the explosion had settled, the last of the Heinkels was disappearing, skimming the waves, weaving and twisting madly in evasive action, pursued and harried by a hundred glowing streams of tracer. Then, magically, they were gone, and there was only the sudden deafening silence and the flares, drooping slowly to extinction, lighting up the pall above the Ulysses, the dark clouds of smoke rolling up from the shattered Stirling and a tanker with its after superstructure almost gone. But not one of the ships in FR77 had faltered or stopped; and they had destroyed five Heinkels. A costly victory, Turner mused, if it could be called a victory; but he knew the Heinkels would be back. It was not difficult to imagine the fury, the hurt pride of the High Command in Norway: as far as Turner knew, no Russian Convoy had ever sailed so far south before.

Riley eased a cramped leg, stretched it gently so as to avoid the great spinning shaft. Carefully he poured some oil on to the bearing, carefully, so as not to disturb the Engineer Commander, propped in sleep between the tunnel wall and Riley’s shoulder. Even as Riley drew back, Dodson stirred, opened heavy, gummed lids.

‘Good God above!’ he said wearily. ‘You still here, Riley?’ It was the first time either of them had spoken for hours.

‘It’s a—good job I am here,’ Riley growled. He nodded towards the bearing. ‘Bloody difficult to get a firehose down to this place, I should think!’ That was unfair, Riley knew: he and Dodson had been taking it in half-hour turns to doze and feed the bearing. But he felt he had to say something: he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep on being truculent to the Engineer Commander.

Dodson grinned to himself, said nothing. Finally, he cleared his throat, murmured casually: The Tirpitz is taking its time about making its appearance, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Riley was uncomfortable. ‘Should ‘a’ been here long ago, damn her!’

‘Him,’ Dodson corrected absently. ‘Admiral von Tirpitz, you know … Why don’t you give up this foolishness, Riley?’

Riley grunted, said nothing. Dodson sighed, then brightened.

‘Go and get some more coffee, Riley. I’m parched!’

‘No.’ Riley was blunt. ‘You get it.’

‘As a favour, Riley.’ Dodson was very gentle. ‘I’m damed thirsty!’

‘Oh, all right.’ The big stoker swore, climbed painfully to his feet. ‘Where’ll I get it?’

‘Plenty in the engine-room. If it’s not iced water they’re swigging, it’s coffee. But no iced water for me.’ Dodson shivered.

Riley gathered up the Thermos, stumbled along the passage. He had only gone a few feet when they felt the Ulysses shudder under the recoil of the heavy armament. Although they did not know it, it was the beginning of the air attack.

Dodson braced himself against the wall, saw Riley do the same, pause a second then hurry away in an awkward, stumbling run. There was something grotesquely familiar in that awkward run, Dodson thought. The guns surged back again and the figure scuttled even faster, like a giant crab in a panic … Panic, Dodson thought: that’s it, panic-stricken. Don’t blame the poor bastard—I’m beginning to imagine things myself down here. Again the whole tunnel vibrated, more heavily this time—that must be ‘X’ turret, almost directly above. No, I don’t blame him. Thank God he’s gone. He smiled quietly to himself. I won’t be seeing friend Riley again—he isn’t all that of a reformed character. Tiredly, Dodson settled back against the wall. On my own at last, he murmured to himself, and waited for the feeling of relief. But it never came. Instead, there was only a vexation and loneliness, a sense of desertion and a strangely empty disappointment.

Riley was back inside a minute. He came back with that same awkward crab-like run, carrying a three-pint Thermos jug and two cups, cursing fluently and often as he slipped against the wall. Panting, wordlessly, he sat down beside Dodson, poured out a cup of steaming coffee.

Why the hell did you have to come back?’ Dodson demanded harshly. ‘I don’t want you and—’ ‘You wanted coffee,’ Riley interrupted rudely. ‘You’ve got the bloody stuff. Drink it.’

At that instant the explosion and the vibration from the explosion in the port tubes echoed weirdly down the dark tunnel, the shock flinging the two men heavily against each other. His whole cup of coffee splashed over Dodson’s leg: his mind was so tired, his reactions so slow, that his first realization was of how damnably cold he was, how chill that dripping tunnel. The scalding coffee had gone right through his clothes, but he could feel neither warmth nor wetness: his legs were numbed, dead below the knees. Then he shook his head, looked up at Riley.

‘What in God’s name was that? What’s happening? Did you—?’

‘Haven’t a clue. Didn’t stop to ask.’ Riley stretched himself luxuriously, blew on his steaming coffee. Then a happy thought struck him, and a broad cheerful grin came as near to transforming that face as would ever be possible.

‘It’s probably the Tirpitz,’ he said hopefully.

Three times more during that terrible night, the German squadrons took off from the airfield at Alta Fjord, throbbed their way nor’-nor’-west through the bitter Arctic night, over the heaving Arctic sea, in search of the shattered remnants of FR77. Not that the search was difficult—the Focke-Wulf Condor stayed with them all night, defied their best attempts to shake him off. He seemed to have an endless supply of these deadly flares, and might very well have been—in fact, almost certainly was—carrying nothing else. And the bombers had only to steer for the flares.

The first assault—about 0545—was an orthodox bombing attack, made from about 3,000 feet. The planes seemed to be Dorniers, but it was difficult to be sure, because they flew high above a trio of flares sinking close to the water level. As an attack, it was almost but not quite abortive, and was pressed home with no great enthusiasm. This was understandable: the barrage was intense. But there were two direct hits—one on a merchantman, blowing away most of the fo’c’sle, the other on the Ulysses. It sheered through the flag deck and the Admiral’s day cabin, and exploded in the heart of the Sick Bay. The Sick Bay was crowded with the sick and dying, and, for many, that bomb must have come as a God-sent release, for the Ulysses had long since run out of anaesthetics. There were no survivors. Among the dead was Marshall, the Torpedo Officer, Johnson, the Leading SBA, the Master-At-Arms who had been lightly wounded an hour before by a splinter from the torpedo tubes, Burgess, strapped helplessly in a strait-jacket—he had suffered concussion on the night of the great storm and gone insane. Brown, whose hip had been smashed by the hatch-cover of ‘Y’ magazine, and Brierley, who was dying anyway, his lungs saturated and rotted away with fuel oil. Brooks had not been there.

The same explosion had also shattered the telephone exchange: barring only the bridgegun phones, and the bridge-engine phones and speaking-tubes, all communication lines in the Ulysses were gone.

The second attack at 7 a.m., was made by only six bombers— Heinkels again, carrying glider-bombs. Obviously flying strictly under orders, they ignored the merchantmen and concentrated their attack solely on the cruisers. It was an expensive attack: the enemy lost all but two of their force in exchange for a single hit aft on the Stirling, a hit which, tragically, put both after guns out of action.

Turner, red-eyed and silent, bareheaded in that sub-zero wind, and pacing the shattered bridge of the Ulysses, marvelled that the Stirling still floated, still fought back with everything she had. And then he looked at his own ship, less a ship, he thought wearily, than a floating shambles of twisted steel still scything impossibly through those heavy seas, and marvelled all the more. Broken, burning cruisers, cruisers ravaged and devastated to the point of destruction, were nothing new for Turner: he had seen the Trinidad and the Edinburgh being literally battered to death on these same Russian convoys. But he had never seen any ship, at any time, take such inhuman murderous punishment as the Ulysses and the obsolete Stirling and still live. He would not have believed it possible.

The third attack came just before dawn. It came with the grey half-light, an attack carried out with great courage and the utmost determination by fifteen Heinkel 111 glider-bombers. Again the cruisers were the sole targets, the heavier attack by far being directed against the Ulysses. Far from shirking the challenge and bemoaning their illluck the crew of the Ulysses, that strange and selfless crew of walking zombies whom Nicholls had left behind, welcomed the enemy gladly, even joyfully, for how can one kill an enemy if he does not come to you? Fear, anxiety, the nearcertainty of death—these did not exist. Home and country, families, wives and sweethearts, were names, only names: they touched a man’s mind, these thoughts, touched it and lifted and were gone as if they had never been. ‘Tell them,’ Vallery had said, ‘tell them they are the best crew God ever gave a captin.’ Vallery. That was what mattered, that and what Vallery had stood for, that something that had been so inseparably a part of that good and kindly man that you never saw it because it was Vallery. And the crew hoisted the shells, slammed the breeches and squeezed their triggers, men uncaring, men oblivious of anything and everything, except the memory of the man who had died apologizing because he had let them down, except the sure knowledge that they could not let Vallery down. Zombies, but inspired zombies, men above themselves, as men commonly are when they know the next step, the inevitable step, has them clear to the top of the far side of the valley …

The first part of the attack was launched against the Stirling. Turner saw two Heinkels roaring in in a shallow dive, improbably surviving against heavy, concentrated fire at point-blank range. The bombs, delayed action and armour-piercing, struck the Stirling amidships, just below deck level, and exploded deep inside, in the boiler-room and engine-room. The next three bombers were met with only pom-pom and Lewis fire: the main armament for’ard had fallen silent. With sick apprehension, Turner realized what had happened: the explosion had cut the power to the turrets.[1] Ruthlessly, contemptuously almost, the bombers brushed aside the puny opposition: every bomb went home. The Stirling, Turner saw, was desperately wounded. She was on fire again, and listing heavily to starboard.

The suddenly lifting crescendo of aero engines spun Turner round to look to his own ship. There were five Heinkels in the first wave, at different heights and approach angles so as to break up the pattern of AA fire, but all converging on the after end of the Ulysses. There was so much smoke and noise that Turner could only gather confused, broken impressions. Suddenly, it seemed, the air was filled with glider-bombs and the tearing, staccato crash of the German cannon and guns. One bomb exploded in mid-air, just for’ard of the after funnel and feet away from it: a maiming, murderous storm of jagged steel scythed across the boat-deck, and all Oerlikons and the pom-poms fell immediately silent, their crews victim to shrapnel or concussion. Another plunged through the deck and Engineers’ Flat and turned the WT office into a charnel house. The remaining two that struck were higher, smashing squarely into ‘X’ gun-deck and ‘X’ turret. The turret was split open around the top and down both sides as by a giant cleaver, and blasted off its mounting, to lie grotesquely across the shattered poop.

Apart from the boat-deck and turret gunners, only one other man lost his life in that attack, but that man was virtually irreplaceable. Shrapnel from the first bomb had burst a compressed air cylinder in the torpedo workshop, and Hartley, the man who, above all, had become the backbone of the Ulysses had taken shelter there, only seconds before …

The Ulysses was running into dense black smoke, now—the Stirling was heavily on fire, her fuel tanks gone. What happened in the next ten minutes, no one ever knew. In the smoke and flame and agony, they were moments borrowed from hell and men could only endure. Suddenly, the Ulysses was out in the clear, and the Heinkels, all bombs gone, were harrying her, attacking her incessantly with cannon and machine-gun, ravening wolves with their victim on its knees, desperate to finish it off. But still, here and there, a gun fired on the Ulysses.

Just below the bridge, for instance—there was a gun firing there. Turner risked a quick glance over the side, saw the gunner pumping his tracers into the path of a swooping Heinkel. And then the Heinkel opened up, and Turner flung himself back, knocking the Kapok Kid to the deck. Then the bomber was gone and the guns were silent. Slowly, Turner hoisted himself to his feet, peered over the side: the gunner was dead, his harness cut to ribbons.

He heard a scuffle behind him, saw a slight figure fling off a restraining hand, and climb to the edge of the bridge. For an instant, Turner saw the pale, staring face of Chrysler, Chrysler who had neither smiled nor even spoken since they had opened up the Asdic cabinet; at the same time he saw three Heinkels forming up to starboard for a fresh attack.

‘Get down, you young fool!’ Turner shouted. ‘Do you want to commit suicide?’

Chrysler looked at him, eyes wide and devoid of recognition, looked away and dropped down to the sponson below. Turner lifted himself to the edge of the bridge and looked down.

Chrysler was struggling with all his slender strength, struggling in a strange and frightening silence, to drag the dead man from his Oerlikon cockpit. Somehow, with a series of convulsive, despairing jerks, he had him over the side, had laid him gently to the ground, and was climbing into the cockpit. His hand, Turner saw, was bare and bleeding, stripped to the raw flesh—then out of the corner of his eyes he saw the flame of the Heinkel’s guns and flung himself backward.

One second passed, two, three—three seconds during which cannon shells and bullets smashed against the reinforced armour of the bridge—then, as a man in a daze, he heard the twin Oerlikons opening up. The boy must have held his fire to the very last moment. Six shots the Oerlikon fired—only six, and a great, grey shape, stricken and smoking, hurtled over the bridge barely at head height, sheared off its port wing on the Director Tower and crashed into the sea on the other side.

Chrysler was still sitting in the cockpit. His right hand was clutching his left shoulder, a shoulder smashed and shattered by a cannon shell, trying hopelessly to stem the welling arterial blood. Even as the next bomber straightened out on its strafing run, even as he flung himself backwards, Turner saw the mangled, bloody hand reach out for the trigger grip again.

Flat on the duckboards beside Carrington and the Kapok Kid, Turner pounded his fist on the deck in terrible frustration of anger. He thought of Starr, the man who had brought all this upon them, and hated him as he would never have believed he could hate anybody. He could have killed him then. He thought of Chrysler, of the excruciating hell of that gun-rest pounding into that shattered shoulder, of brown eyes glazed and shocked with pain and grief. If he himself lived, Turner swore, he would recommend that boy for the Victoria Cross. Abruptly the firing ceased and a Heinkel swung off sharply to starboard, smoke pouring from both its engines.

Quickly, together with the Kapok Kid, Turner scrambled to his feet, hoisted himself over the side of the bridge. He did it without looking, and he almost died then. A burst of fire from the third and last Heinkel—the bridge was always the favourite target—whistled past his head and shoulders: he felt the wind from the convulsive back-thrust that had sent him there, he was stretched full length on the duckboards again. They were only inches from his eyes, these duckboards, but he could not see them. All he could see was the image of Chrysler, a gaping wound the size of a man’s hand in his back, slumped forward across the Oerlikons, the weight of his body tilting the barrels grotesquely skywards. Both barrels had still been firing, were still firing, would keep on firing until the drums were empty, for the dead boy’s hand was locked across the trigger.

Gradually, one by one, the guns of the convoy fell silent, the clamour of the aero engines began to fade in the distance. The attack was over.

Turner rose to his feet, slowly and heavily this time. He looked over the side of the bridge, stared down into the Oerlikon gunpit, then looked away, his face expressionless.

Behind him, he heard someone coughing. It was a strange, bubbling kind of cough. Turner whirled round, then stood stock-still, his hands clenched tightly at his sides.

The Kapok Kid, with Carrington kneeling helplessly at his side, was sitting quietly on the boards, his back propped against the legs of the Admiral’s chair. From left groin to right shoulder through the middle of the embroidered ‘J’ on the chest, stretched a neat, straight, evenly-spaced pattern of round holes, stitched in by the machine-gun of the Heinkel. The blast of the shells must have hurtled him right across the bridge.

Turner stood absolutely still. The Kid, he knew with sudden sick certainty, had only seconds to live: he felt that any sudden move on his part would snap the spun-silk thread that held him on to life.

Gradually, the Kapok Kid became aware of his presence, of his steady gaze, and looked up tiredly. The vivid blue of his eyes was dulled already, the face white and drained of blood. Idly, his hand strayed up and down the punctured kapok, fingering the gashes. Suddenly, he smiled, looked down at the quilted suit.

‘Ruined,’ he whispered. ‘Bloody well ruined!’ Then the wandering hand slipped down to his side, palm upward, and his head slumped forward on his chest. The flaxen hair stirred idly in the wind.

1. It is almost impossible for one single explosion, or even several in the same locality, to destroy or incapacitate all the dynamos in a large naval vessel, or to sever all the various sections of the Ring Main, which carries the power around the ship. When a dynamo or its appropriate section of the Ring Main suffered damage, the interlinking fuses automatically blew, isolating the damaged section. Theoretically, that is. In practice, it does not always happen that way— the fuses may not rupture and the entire system breaks down. Rumour—very strong rumour—had it that at least one of HM capital ships was lost simply because the Dynamo Fuse Release Switches—fuses of the order of 800 amps— failed to blow, leaving the capital ship powerless to defend itself.

SEVENTEEN

Sunday Morning

The Stirling died at dawn. She died while still under way, still plunging through the heavy seas, her mangled, twisted bridge and superstructure glowing red, glowing white-hot as the wind and sundered oil tanks lashed the flames into an incandescent holocaust. A strange and terrible sight, but not unique: thus the Bismarck had looked, whitely incandescent, just before the Shropshire’s torpedoes had sent her to the bottom.

The Stirling would have died anyway—but the Stukas made siccar. The Northern Lights had long since gone: now, too, the clear skies were going, and dark cloud was banking heavily to the north. Men hoped and prayed that the cloud would spread over FR77, and cover it with blanketing snow. But the Stukas got there first.

The Stukas—the dreaded gull-winged Junkers 87 dive-bombers—came from the south, flew high over the convoy, turned, flew south again. Level with, and due west of the Ulysses, rear ship in the convoy, they started to turn once more: then, abruptly, in the classic Stuka attack pattern, they peeled off in sequence, port wings dipping sharply as they half-rolled, turned and fell out of the sky, plummeting arrow-true for their targets. Any plane that hurtles down in undeviating dive on waiting gun emplacements has never a chance. Thus spoke the pundits, the instructors in the gunnery school of Whale Island, and proceeded to prove to their own satisfaction the evident truth of their statement, using AA guns and duplicating the situation which would arise insofar as it lay within their power. Unfortunately, they couldn’t duplicate the Stuka.

‘Unfortunately’, because in actual battle, the Stuka was the only factor in the situation that really mattered. One had only to crouch behind a gun, to listen to the ear-piercing, screaming whistle of the Stuka in its near-vertical dive, to flinch from its hail of bullets as it loomed larger and larger in the sights, to know that nothing could now arrest the flight of that underslung bomb, to appreciate the truth of that. Hundreds of men alive today—the lucky ones who endured and survived a Stuka attack—will readily confirm that the war produced nothing quite so nerve-rending, quite so demoralizing as the sight and sound of those Junkers with the strange dihedral of the wings in the last seconds before they pulled out of their dive.

But one time in a hundred, maybe one time in a thousand, when the human factor of the man

behind the gun ceased to operate, the pundits could be right. This was the thousandth time, for fear was a phantom that had vanished in the night: ranged against the dive-bombers were only one multiple pom-pom and half a dozen Oerlikons—the for’ard turrets could not be brought to bear—but these were enough, and more, in the hands of men inhumanly calm, ice-cool as the Polar wind itself, and filled with an almost dreadful singleness of purpose. Three Stukas in almost as many seconds were clawed out of the sky, two to crash harmlessly in the sea, a third to bury itself with tremendous impact in the already shattered day cabin of the Admiral.

The chances against the petrol tanks not erupting in searing flame or of the bomb not exploding were so remote as not to exist: but neither happened. It hardly seemed to call for comment—in extremity, courage becomes routine—when the bearded Doyle abandoned his pom-pom, scrambled up to the fo’c’sle deck, and flung himself on top of the armed bomb rolling heavily in scuppers awash with 100 per cent octane petrol. One tiny spark from Doyle’s boot or from the twisted, broken steel of the Stuka rubbing and grinding against the superstructure would have been trigger enough: the contact fuse in the bomb was still undamaged, and as it slipped and skidded over the ice-bound deck, with Doyle hanging desperately on, it seemed animistically determined to smash its delicate percussion nose against a bulkhead or stanchion.

If Doyle thought of these things, he did not care. Coolly, almost carelessly, he kicked off the only retaining clip left on a broken section of the guard-rail, slid the bomb, fins first, over the edge, tipped the nose sharply to clear the detonator. The bomb fell harmlessly into the sea.

It fell into the sea just as the first bomb sliced contemptuously through the useless one-inch deck armour of the Stirling and crashed into the engineroom. Three, four, five, six other bombs buried themselves in the dying heart of the cruiser, the lightened Stukas lifting away sharply to port and starboard. From the bridge of the Ulysses, there seemed to be a weird, unearthly absence of noise as the bombs went home. They just vanished into the smoke and flame, engulfed by the inferno.

No one blow finished the Stirling, but a mounting accumulation of blows. She had taken too much and she could take no more. She was like a reeling boxer, a boxer overmatched against an unskilled but murderous opponent, sinking under an avalanche of blows.

Stony-faced, bitter beyond words at his powerlessness, Turner watched her die. Funny, he thought tiredly, she’s like all the rest. Cruisers, he mused in a queerly detached abstraction, must be the toughest ships in the world. He’d seen many go, but none easily, cleanly, spectacularly. No sudden knock-out, no coup de grâce for them—always, always, they had to be battered to death … Like the Stirling. Turner’s grip on the shattered windscreen tightened till his forearms ached. To him, to all good sailors, a well-loved ship was a well-loved friend: for fifteen months, now, the old and valiant Stirling had been their faithful shadow, had shared the burden of the Ulysses in the worst convoys of the war: she was the last of the old guard, for only the Ulysses had been longer on the blackout run. It was not good to watch a friend die: Turner looked away, stared down at the ice-covered duckboards between his feet, his head sunk between hunched shoulders.

He could close his eyes, but he could not close his ears. He winced, hearing the monstrous, roaring hiss of boiling water and steam as the white-hot superstructure of the Stirling plunged deeply into the ice-chilled Arctic. For fiteen, twenty seconds that dreadful, agonized sibilation continued, then stopped in an instant, the sound sheared off as by a guillotine. When Turner looked up, slowly, there was only the rolling, empty sea ahead, the big oil-slicked bubbles rising to the top, bubbles rising only to be punctured as they broke the surface by the fine rain falling back into the sea from the great clouds of steam already condensing in that bitter cold.

The Stirling was gone, and the battered remnants of FR77 pitched and plunged steadily onwards to the north. There were seven ships left now—four merchantmen, including the Commodore’s ship, the tanker, the Sirrus and the Ulysses. None of them was whole: all were damaged, heavily damaged, but none so desperately hurt as the Ulysses. Seven ships, only seven: thirty-six had set out for Russia.

At 0800 Turner signalled the Sirrus: ‘WT gone. Signal C-in-C course, speed, position. Confirm 0930 as rendezvous. Code.’

The reply came exactly an hour later. ‘Delayed heavy seas. Rendezvous approx 1030. Impossible fly off air cover. Keep coming. C-in-C.

‘Keep coming!’ Turner repeated savagely. ‘Would you listen to him! “Keep coming,” he says! What the hell does he expect us to do—scuttle ourselves?’ He shook his head too in angry despair. ‘I hate to repeat myself,’ he said bitterly. ‘But I must. Too bloody late as usual!’[1] Dawn and daylight had long since come, but it was growing darker again. Heavy grey clouds, formless and menacing, blotted out the sky from horizon to horizon. They were snow clouds, and, please God, the snow would soon fall: that could save them now, that and that alone. But the snow did not come—not then. Once more, there came instead the Stukas, the roar of their engines rising and falling as they methodically quartered the empty sea in search of the convoy—Charlie had left at dawn. But it was only a matter of time before the dive-bomber squadron found the tiny convoy; ten minutes from the time of the first warning of their approach, the leading Junkers 87 tipped over its wing and dropped out of the sky.

Ten minutes—but time for a council and plan of desperation. When the Stukas came, they found the convoy stretched out in line abreast, the tanker Varella in the middle, two merchantmen in close line ahead on either side of it, the Sirrus and the Ulysses guarding the flanks. A suicidal formation in submarine waters—a torpedo from port or starboard could hardly miss them all. But weather conditions were heavily against submarines, and the formation offered at least a fighting chance against the Stukas. If they approached from astern—their favourite attack technique—they would run into the simultaneous massed fire of seven ships; if they approached from the sides, they must first attack the escorts, for no Stuka would present its unprotected underbelly to the guns of a warship … They elected attack from either side, five from the east, four from the west. This time, Turner noted, they were carrying long-range fuel tanks.

Turner had no time to see how the Sirrus was faring. Indeed, he could hardly see how his own ship was faring, for thick acrid smoke was blowing back across the bridge from the barrels of ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets. In the gaps of sound between the crash of the 5.25s, he could hear the quick-fire of Doyle’s midship pom-pom, the vicious thudding of the Oerlikons.

Suddenly, startling in its breath-taking unexpectedness, two great beams of dazzling white stabbed out through the mirk and gloom. Turner stared, then bared his teeth in fierce delight. The 44-inch searchlights! Of course! The great searchlights, still on the official secret list, capable of lighting up an enemy six miles away! What a fool he had been to forget them—Vallery had used them often, in daylight and in dark, against attacking aircraft. No man could look into those terrible eyes, those flaming arcs across the electrodes and not be blinded.

Blinking against the eye-watering smoke, Turner peered aft to see who was manning the control position. But he knew who it was before he saw him. It could only be Ralston—searchlight control, Turner remembered, was his day action station: besides, he could think of no one other than the big, blond torpedoman with the gumption, the quick intelligence to burn the lamps on his own initiative.

Jammed in the corner of the bridge by the gate, Turner watched him. He forgot his ship, forgot even the bombers—he personally could do nothing about them anyway—as he stared in fascination at the man behind the controls.

His eyes were glued to the sights, his face expressionless, absolutely; but for the gradual stiffening of back and neck as the sight dipped in docile response to the delicate caress of his fingers on the wheel, he might have been carved from marble: the immobility of the face, the utter concentration was almost frightening.

There was not a flicker of feeling or emotion: never a flicker as the first Stuka weaved and twisted in maddened torment, seeking to escape that eye-staring flame, not even a flicker as it swerved violently in its dive, pulled out too late and crashed into the sea a hundred yards short of the Ulysses.

What was the boy thinking of? Turner wondered. His mother, his sisters, entombed under the ruins of a Croydon bungalow: of his brother, innocent victim of that mutiny—how impossible that mutiny seemed now!—in Scapa Flow: of his father, dead by his son’s own hand? Turner did not know, could not even begin to guess: clairvoyantly, almost, he knew that it was too late, that no one would ever know now.

The face was inhumanly still. There wasn’t a shadow of feeling as the second Stuka overshot the Ulysses, dropped its bomb into the open sea: not a shadow as the third blew up in mid-air: not a trace of emotion when the guns of the next Stuka smashed one of the lights … not even when the cannon shells of the last smashed the searchlight control, tore half his chest away. He died instantaneously, stood there a moment as if unwilling to abandon his post, then slumped back quietly on to the deck. Turner bent over the dead boy, looked at the face, the eyes upturned to the first feathery flakes of falling snow. The eyes, the face, were still the same, mask-like, expressionless. Turner shivered and looked away.

One bomb, and one only, had struck the Ulysses. It had struck the fo’c’sle deck just for’ard of ‘A’ turret. There had been no casualties, but some freak of vibration and shock had fractured the turret’s hydraulic lines. Temporarily, at least, ‘B’ was the only effective remaining turret in the ship.

The Sirrus hadn’t been quite so lucky. She had destroyed one Stuka—the merchantmen had claimed another—and had been hit twice, both bombs exploding in the after mess-deck. The Sirrus, overloaded with survivors, was carrying double her normal complement of men, and usually that mess-deck would have been crowded: during action stations it was empty. Not a man had lost his life—not a man was to lose his life on the destroyer Sirrus: she was never damaged again on the Russian convoys.

Hope was rising, rising fast. Less than an hour to go, now, and the battle squadron would be there. It was dark, dark with the gloom of an Arctic storm, and heavy snow was falling, hissing gently into the dark and rolling sea. No plane could find them in this—and they were almost beyond the reach of shore-based aircraft, except, of course, for the Condors. And it was almost impossible weather for submarines.

‘It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,’ Carrington quoted softly.

‘What?’ Turner looked up, baffled. ‘What did you say, Number One?’

‘Tennyson.’ Carrington was apologetic. ‘The Captain was always quoting him … Maybe we’ll make it yet.’

‘Maybe, maybe.’ Turner was non-committal. ‘Preston!’

‘Yes, sir, I see it.’ Preston was staring to the north where the signal lamp of the Sirrus was flickering rapidly.

‘A ship, sir!’ he reported excitedly. ‘Sirrus says naval vessel approaching from the north!’

‘From the north! Thank God! Thank God!’ Turner shouted exultantly. ‘From the north! It must be them! They’re ahead of time … I take it all back. Can you see anything, Number One?’

‘Not a thing, sir. Too thick—but it’s clearing a bit, I think … There’s the Sirrus again.’

‘What does she say, Preston?’ Turner asked anxiously.

‘Contact. Sub contact. Gren 30. Closing.’

‘Contact! At this late hour!’ Turner groaned, then smashed his fist down on the binnacle. He swore fiercely.

‘By God, she’s not going to stop us now! Preston, signal the Sirrus to stay … ’

He broke off, looked incredulously to the north. Up there in the snow and gloom, stilettos of white flame had lanced out briefly, vanished again. Carrington by his side now, he stared unwinkingly north, saw shells splashing whitely in the water under the bows of the Commodore’s ship, the Cape Hatteras: then he saw the flashes again, stronger, brighter this time, flashes that lit up for a fleeting second the bows and superstructure of the ship that was firing.

He turned slowly, to find that Carrington, too, had turned, was gazing at him with set face and bitter eyes, Turner, grey and haggard with exhaustion and the sour foretaste of ultimate defeat, looked in turn at his First Lieutenant in a long moment of silence.

‘The answer to many questions,’ he said softly. ‘That’s why they’ve been softening up the Stirling and ourselves for the past couple of days. The fox is in among the chickens. It’s our old pal the Hipper cruiser come to pay us a social call.’

‘It is.’

‘So near and yet … ’ Turner shrugged. ‘We deserved better than this … ’ He grinned crookedly. ‘How would you like to die a hero’s death?’

‘The very idea appals me!’ boomed a voice behind him. Brooks had just arrived on the bridge.

‘Me, too,’ Turner admitted. He smiled: he was almost happy again. ‘Have we any option, gentlemen?’

‘Alas, no,’ Brooks said sadly.

‘Full ahead both!’ Carrington called down the speaking-tube: it was by way of his answer.

‘No, no,’ Turner chided gently: ‘Full power, Number One. Tell them we’re in a hurry: remind them of the boasts they used to make about the Abdiel and the Maxman … Preston! General emergency signal: “Scatter: proceed independently to Russian ports.”’

The upper deck was thick with freshly fallen snow, and the snow was still falling. The wind was rising again and, after the warmth of the canteen where he had been operating, it struck at Johnny Nicholls’s lungs with sudden, searing pain: the temperature, he guessed must be about zero. He buried his face in his duffel coat, climbed laboriously, haltingly up the ladders to the bridge. He was tired, deadly weary, and he winced in agony every time his foot touched the deck: his splinted left leg was shattered just above the ankle—shrapnel from the bomb in the after mess-deck.

Peter Orr, commander of the Sirrus, was waiting for him at the gate of the tiny bridge.

‘I thought you might like to see this, Doc.’ The voice was strangely high-pitched for so big a man. ‘Rather I thought you would want to see this,’ he corrected himself. ‘Look at her go!’ he breathed. ‘Just look at her go!’

Nicholls looked out over the port side. Half a mile away on the beam, the Cape Hatteras was blazing furiously, slowing to a stop. Some miles to the north, through the falling snow, he could barely distinguish the vague shape of the German cruiser, a shape pinpointed by the flaming guns still mercilessly pumping shells into the sinking ship. Every shot went home: the accuracy of their gunnery was fantastic.

Half a mile astern on the port quarter, the Ulysses was coming up. She was sheeted in foam and spray, the bows leaping almost clear of the water, then crashing down with a pistol-shot impact easily heard, even against the wind, on the bridge of the Sirrus, as the great engines thrust her through the water, faster, faster, with the passing of every second.

Nicholls gazed, fascinated. This was the first time he’d seen the Ulysses since he’d left her and he was appalled. The entire upper-works, fore and aft, were a twisted, unbelievable shambles of broken steel: both masts were gone, the smokestacks broken and bent, the Director Tower shattered and grotesquely askew: smoke was still pluming up from the great holes in fo’c’sle and poop, the after turrets, wrenched from their mountings, pitched crazily on the deck. The skeleton of the Condor still lay athwart ‘Y’ Turret. A Stuka was buried to the wings in the fo’c’sle deck, and she was, he knew, split right down to the water level abreast the torpedo tubes. The Ulysses was something out of a nightmare.

Steadying himself against the violent pitching of the destroyer, Nicholls stared and stared, numbed with horror and disbelief. Orr looked at him, looked away as a messenger came to the bridge.

‘Rendezvous 1015,’ he read. ‘1015! Good lord, 25 minutes’ time! Do you hear that, Doc? 25 minutes’ time!’

‘Yes, sir,’ Nicholls said absently: he hadn’t heard him.

Orr looked at him, touched his arm, pointed to the Ulysses.

‘Bloody well incredible, isn’t it?’ he murmured.

‘I wish to God I was aboard her,’ Nicholls muttered miserably. ‘Why did they send me—? Look! What’s that?’

A huge flag, a flag twenty feet in length, was streaming out below the yardarm of the Ulysses, stretched taut in the wind of its passing. Nicholls had never seen anything remotely like it: the flag was enormous, red and blue and whiter than the driving snow.

‘The battle ensign,’ Orr murmured. ‘Bill Turner’s broken out the battle ensign.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘To take time off to do that now—well, Doc, only Turner would do that. You know him well?’

Nicholls nodded silently.

‘Me, too,’ Orr said simply. ‘We are both lucky men.’

The Sirrus was still doing fifteen knots, still headed for the enemy, when the Ulysses passed them by a cable-length away as if they were stopped in the water.

Long afterwards, Nicholls could never describe it all accurately. He had a hazy memory of the Ulysses no longer plunging and lifting, but battering through waves and troughs on a steady even keel, the deck angling back sharply from a rearing forefoot to the counter buried deep in the water, fifteen feet below the great boiling tortured sea of white that arched up in seething magnificence above the shattered poop-deck. He could recall, too, that ‘B’ turret was firing continuously, shell after shell screaming away through the blinding snow, to burst in brilliant splendour over and on the German cruiser: for ‘B’ turret had only starshells left. He carried, too, a vague mental picture of Turner waving ironically from the bridge, of the great ensign streaming stiffly astern, already torn and tattered at the edges. But what he could never forget, what he would hear in his heart and mind as long as he lived, was the tremendous, frightening roar of the great boiler-room intake fans as they sucked in mighty draughts of air for the starving engines. For the Ulysses was driving through the heavy seas under maximum power, at a speed that should have broken her shuddering back, should have burnt out the great engines. There was no doubt as to Turner’s intentions: he was going to ram the enemy, to destroy him and take him with him, at a speed of just on or over forty incredible knots.

Nicholls gazed and gazed and did not know what to think: he felt sick at heart, for that ship was part of him now, his good friends, especially the Kapok Kid—for he did not know that the Kid was already dead—they, too, were part of him, and it is always terrible to see the end of a legend, to see it die, to see it going into the gulfs. But he felt, too, a strange exultation; she was dying but what a way to die! And if ships had hearts, had souls, as the old sailing men declared, surely the Ulysses would want it this way too.

She was still doing forty knots when, as if by magic, a great gaping hole appeared in her bows just above the waterline. Shell-fire; possibly, but unlikely at that angle. It must have been a torpedo from the U-boat, not yet located: a sudden dip of the bows could have coincided with the upthrust of a heavy sea forcing a torpedo to the surface. Such things had happened before: rarely, but they happened … The Ulysses brushed aside the torpedo, ignored the grievous wound, ignored the heavy shells crashing into her and kept on going.

She was still going forty knots, driving in under the guns of the enemy, guns at maximum depression, when ‘A’ magazine blew up, blasted off the entire bows in one shattering detonation. For a second, the lightened fo’c’sle reared high into the air: then it plunged down, deep down, into the shoulder of a rolling sea. She plunged down and kept on going down, driving down to the black floor of the Arctic, driven down by the madly spinning screws, the still thundering engines her own executioner.

1. It is regrettable but true—the Home Fleet squadron was almost always too late. The Admiralty could not be blamed—the capital ships were essential for the blockade of the Tirpitz; and they did not dare risk them close inshore against the land-based bombers. The long awaited trap did eventually snap shut; but it caught only the heavy cruiser Scharnhorst and not the Tirpitz. It never caught the great ship. She was destroyed at her anchorage in Alta Fjord by Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force.

EIGHTEEN

Epilogue

The air was warm and kind and still. The sky was blue, a deep and wonderful blue, with little puffs of cotton-wool cloud drifting lazily to the far horizon. The street-gardens, the hanging birdcage flower-baskets, spilled over with blue and yellow and red and gold, all the delicate pastel shades and tints he had almost forgotten had ever existed: every now and then an old man or a hurrying housewife or a young man with a laughing girl on his arm would stop to admire them, then walk on again, the better for having seen them.

The nesting birds were singing, clear and sweet above the distant roar of the traffic, and Big Ben was booming the hour as Johnny Nicholls climbed awkwardly out of the taxi, paid off the driver and hobbled slowly up the marble steps.

His face carefully expressionless, the sentry saluted, opened the heavy swing door. Nicholls passed inside, looked around the huge hall, saw that both sides were lined with heavy, imposing doors: at the far end, beneath the great curve of the stairs and overhanging the widely convex counter of the type usually found in banks, hung a sign: ‘Typist Pool: Inquiries.’

The tip-tap of the crutches sounded unnaturally loud on the marble floor as he limped over to the counter. Very touching and melodramatic, Nicholls, he thought dispassionately: trust the audience are having their money’s worth. Half a dozen typists had stopped work as if by command, were staring at him in open curiosity, hands resting limply on their machines. A trim young Wren, red-haired and shirt-sleeved, came to the counter.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ The quiet voice, the blue eyes were soft with concern. Nicholls, catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror behind her, a glimpse of a scuffed uniform jacket over a great fisherman’s jersey, of blurred, sunken eyes and gaunt, pale cheeks, admitted wryly to himself that he couldn’t blame her. He didn’t have to be a doctor to know that he was in pretty poor shape.

‘My name is Nicholls, Surgeon-Lieutenant Nicholls. I have an appointment—’

‘Lieutenant Nicholls … HMS Ulysses!’ The girl drew in her breath sharply. ‘Of course, sir. They’re expecting you.’ Nicholls looked at her, looked at the Wrens sitting motionless in their chairs, caught the intense, wondering expression in their eyes, the awed gaze with which one would regard beings from another planet. It made him feel vaguely uncomfortable.

‘Upstairs, I suppose?’ He hadn’t meant to sound so brusque.

‘No, sir.’ The Wren came quietly round the counter. ‘They—well, they heard you’d been wounded, sir,’ she murmured apologetically. ‘Just across the hall here, please.’ She smiled at him, slowed her step to match his halting walk.

She knocked, held open the door, announced him to someone he couldn’t see, and closed the door softly behind him when he had passed through.

There were three men in the room. The one man he recognized, Vice-Admiral Starr, came forward to meet him. He looked older, far older, far more tired than when Nicholls had last seen him—hardly a fortnight previously.

‘How are you, Nicholls?’ he asked. ‘Not walking so well, I see.’ Under the assurance, the thin joviality so flat and misplaced, the harsh edge of strain burred unmistakably. ‘Come and sit down.’

He led Nicholls across to the table, long, big and covered with leather. Behind the table, framed against huge wall-maps, sat two men. Starr introduced them. One, big, beefy, red of face, was in full uniform, the sleeves ablaze with the broad band and four stripes of an Admiral of the Fleet: the other was a civilian, a small, stocky man with iron-grey hair, eyes still and wise and old. Nicholls recognized him immediately, would have known anyway from the deference of both the Admirals. He reflected wryly that the Navy was indeed doing him proud: such receptions were not for all … But they seemed reluctant to begin the reception, Nicholls thought—he had forgotten the shock his appearance must give. Finally, the grey-haired man cleared his throat.

‘How’s the leg, boy?’ he asked. ‘Looks pretty bad to me.’ His voice was low, but alive with controlled authority.

‘Not too bad, thank you, sir,’ Nicholls answered. ‘Two, three weeks should see me back on the job.’

‘You’re taking two months, laddie,’ said the grey-haired man quietly. ‘More if you want it.’ He smiled faintly. ‘If anyone asks, just tell ’em I said so. Cigarette?’

He flicked the big table-lighter, sat back in his chair. Temporarily, he seemed at a loss as to what to say next. Then he looked up abruptly.

‘Had a good trip home?’

‘Very fair, sir. VIP treatment all the way. Moscow, Teheran, Cairo, Gib.’ Nicholls’s mouth twisted. ‘Much more comfortable than the trip out.’ He paused, inhaled deeply on his cigarette, looked levelly across the table. ‘I would have preferred to come home in the Sirrus.’

‘No doubt,’ Starr broke in acidly. ‘But we cannot afford to cater for the personal prejudices of all and sundry. We were anxious to have a first-hand account of FR77—and particularly the Ulysses—as soon as possible.’

Nicholls’s hands clenched on the edge of his chair. The anger had leapt in him like a flame, and he knew that the man opposite was watching closely. Slowly he relaxed, looked at the greyhaired man, interrogative eyebrows mutely asking confirmation.

The grey-haired man nodded.

‘Just tell us all you know,’ he said kindly. ‘Everything—about everything. Take your time.’

‘From the beginning?’ Nicholls asked in a low voice.

‘From the beginning.’

Nicholls told them. He would have liked to tell the story, right as it fell out, from the convoy before FR77 straight through to the end. He did his best, but it was a halting story, strangely lacking in conviction. The atmosphere, the surroundings were wrong—the contrast between the peaceful warmth of these rooms and the inhuman cold and cruelty of the Arctic was an immense gulf that could be bridged only by experience and understanding. Down here, in the heart of London, the wild, incredible tale he had to tell fell falsely, incredibly even on his own ears. Halfway through, he looked at his listeners, almost gave up. Incredulity? No, it wasn’t that—at least, not with the grey-haired man and the Admiral of the Fleet. Just a baffled incomprehension, an honest failure to understand.

It wasn’t so bad when he stuck to the ascertainable facts, the facts of carriers crippled by seas, of carriers mined, stranded and torpedoed: the facts of the great storm, of the desperate struggle to survive: the facts of the gradual attrition of the convoy, of the terrible dying of the two gasoline tankers, of the U-boats and bombers sent to the bottom, of the Ulysses, battering through the snowstorm at 40 knots, blown up by the German cruiser, of the arrival of the battle squadron, of the flight of the cruiser before it could inflict further damage, of the rounding-up of the scattered convoy, of the curtain of Russian fighters in the Barents Sea, of the ultimate arrival in the Kola Inlet of the battered remnants of FR77—five ships in all.

It was when he came to less readily ascertainable facts, to statements that could never be verified at all, that he sensed the doubt, the something more than wonder. He told the story as calmly, as unemotionally as he could: the story of Ralston, Ralston of the fighting lights and the searchlights, of his father and family: of Riley, the ringleader of the mutiny and his refusal to leave the shaft tunnel: of Petersen, who had killed a marine and gladly given his own life: of McQuater and Chrysler and Doyle and a dozen others.

For a second, his own voice broke uncertainly as he told the story of the half-dozen survivors from the Ulysses, picked up by the Sirrus soon afterwards. He told how Brooks had given his lifejacket to an ordinary seaman, who amazingly survived fifteen minutes in that water: how Turner, wounded in head and arm, had supported a dazed Spicer till the Sirrus came plunging alongside, had passed a bowline round him and was gone before anything could be done: how Carrington, that enduring man of iron, a baulk of splintered timber under his arms, had held two men above water till rescue came. Both men—Preston was one—had died later: Carrington had climbed the rope unaided, clambered over the guard-rails dangling a left-leg with the foot blown off above the ankle. Carrington would survive: Carrington was indestructible. Finally, Doyle, too, was gone: they had thrown him a rope, but he had not seen it, for he was blind.

But what the three men really wanted to know, Nicholls realized, was how the Ulysses had been, how a crew of mutineers had borne themselves. He had told them, he knew, things of wonder and of splendour, and they could not reconcile these with men who would take up arms against their own ship, in effect, against their own King.

So Nicholls tried to tell them, then knew, as he tried, that he could never tell them. For what was there to tell? That Vallery had spoken to the men over the broadcast system: how he had gone among them and made them almost as himself, on that grim, exhausting tour of inspection: how he had spoken of them as he died: and how, most of all, his death had made them men again? For that was all that there was to tell, and these things were just nothing at all. With sudden insight, Nicholls saw that the meaning of that strange transformation of the men of the Ulysses, a transformation of bitter, broken men to men above themselves, could neither be explained nor understood, for all the meaning was in Vallery, and Vallery was dead.

Nicholls felt tired, now, desperately so. He knew he was far from well. His mind was cloudy, hazy in retrospect, and he was mixing things up: his sense of chronological time was gone, he was full of hesitations and uncertainties. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by the futility of it all, and he broke off slowly, his voice trailing into silence.

Vaguely, he heard the grey-haired man ask something in a quiet voice, and he muttered aloud, unthinking.

‘What was that? What did you say?’ The greyhaired man was looking at him strangely. The face of the Admiral behind the table was impassive. Starr’s, he saw, was open in disbelief.

‘I only said, “They were the best crew God ever gave a Captain,”’ Nicholls murmured.

‘I see.’ The old, tired eyes looked at him steadily, but there was no other comment. Fingers drumming on the table, he looked slowly at the two Admirals, then back to Nicholls again.

‘Take things easy for a minute, boy … If you’ll just excuse us … ’

He rose to his feet, walked slowly over to the big, bay windows at the other end of the long room, the others following. Nicholls made no move, did not even look after them: he sat slumped in the chair, looking dejectedly, unseeingly, at the crutches on the floor between his feet.

From time to time, he could hear a murmur of voices. Starr’s high-pitched voice carried most clearly. ‘Mutiny ship, sir … never the same again … better this way.’ There was murmured reply, too low to catch, then he heard Starr saying, ‘ … finished as a fighting unit’. The grey-haired man said something rapidly, his tone sharp with disagreement, but the words were blurred. Then the deep, heavy voice of the Fleet Admiral said something about ‘expiation’, and the grey-haired man nodded slowly. Then Starr looked at him over his shoulder, and Nicholls knew they were talking about him. He thought he heard the words ‘not well’ and ‘frightful strain’, but perhaps he was imagining it.

Anyway, he no longer cared. He was anxious for one thing only, and that was to be gone. He felt an alien in an alien land, and whether they believed him or not no longer mattered. He did not belong here, where everything was so sane and commonplace and real—and withal a world of shadows.

He wondered what the Kapok Kid would have said had he been here, and smiled in fond reminiscence: the language would have been terrible, the comments rich and barbed and pungent. Then he wondered what Vallery would have said, and he smiled again at the simplicity of it all, for Vallery would have said: ‘Do not judge them, for they do not understand.’

Gradually, he became aware that the murmuring had ceased, that the three men were standing above him. His smile faded, and he looked up slowly to see them looking down strangely at him, their eyes full of concern.

‘I’m damnably sorry, boy,’ the grey-haired man said sincerely. ‘You’re a sick man and we’ve asked far too much of you. A drink, Nicholls? It was most remiss—’

‘No, thank you, sir.’ Nicholls straightened himself in his chair. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right.’ He hesitated. ‘Is—is there anything else?’

‘No, nothing at all.’ The smile was genuine, friendly. ‘You’ve been a great help to us, Lieutenant, a great help. And a fine report. Thank you very much indeed.’

A liar and a gentleman, Nicholls thought gratefully. He struggled to his feet, reached out for his crutches. He shook hands with Starr and the Admiral of the Fleet, and said goodbye. The greyhaired man accompanied him to the door, his hand beneath Nicholls’s arm.

At the door Nicholls paused.

‘Sorry to bother you but—when do I begin my leave, sir?’

‘As from now,’ the other said emphatically. ‘And have a good time. God knows you’ve earned it, my boy … Where are you going?’

‘Henley, sir.’

‘Henley! I could have sworn you were Scots.’

‘I am, sir—I have no family.’

‘Oh … A girl, Lieutenant?’

Nicholls nodded silently.

The grey-haired man clapped him on the shoulder, and smiled gently.

‘Pretty, I’ll be bound?’

Nicholls looked at him, looked away to where the sentry was already holding open the street doors, and gathered up his crutches.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t know at all, I’ve never seen her.’

He tip-tapped his way across the marble flags, passed through the heavy doors and limped out into the sunshine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge my debt to my elder brother, Ian L. MacLean, Master Mariner, for the considerable technical help and advice on matters maritime given me in the preparation of this book.

To avoid possible confusion it must be clearly stated that there is no connection whatsoever between the HMS Ulysses of this book and the Ulster-class destroyer—now fully converted to a frigate—of the same name which entered operational service in the early part of 1944, some 12 months after the events described in this book. Nor is there any connection between any ship herein mentioned as being in Scapa Flow or participating in the convoy and any naval ship of the same name that has served, or is serving, in the Royal Navy.

A.M.

MacLean Goes Everywhere You Do

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide best-sellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

South by

Java Head

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1958

© 1958 Devoran Trustees Ltd.

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9260-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4027-9261-8 (ebook)

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

To Ian

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

ONE

Choking, dense, impenetrable, the black smoke lay pall-like over the dying city. Every building, every office-block and house, the intact and the bomb-shattered alike, was invested by it, swathed in the dark anonymity of its gently swirling cocoon. Every street, every alley, every dock-side basin was full of it, drowned by it. It lay everywhere, sulphurous and evil, scarcely moving in the soft airs of the tropical night.

Earlier in the evening, when the smoke had come only from the burning buildings in the city, there had been wide, irregular gaps overhead and the stars had shone in the empty sky. But a slight change of wind had obliterated these gaps, had brought with it the rolling, blinding oil-smoke from ruptured fuel tanks outside the city. Where the smoke came from, no one knew. Perhaps from the Kallang airport, perhaps from the power station, perhaps clear across the island from the naval base in the north, perhaps from the oil islands, from Pulo Sambo and Pulo Sebarok, four or five miles away. No one knew. All one could know was what one saw, and the blackness of that midnight was almost complete. There was hardly any light now even from the burning buildings, for these were burnt out and utterly destroyed, the last embers, the last tiny flames flickering to extinction, like the life of Singapore itself.

A dying city, and already the silence of death seemed to have enveloped it. Every now and then a shell would whistle eerily overhead, to splash harmlessly into the water or to erupt in a brief roar of sound and flash of light as it smashed into a building. But the sound and the light, extinguished and smothered in an instant by the all-enveloping smoke, had a peculiarly evanescent quality, seemed a natural, an integral part of the strangeness and the remote unreality of the night and left the silence even deeper and more intense than it had been before. Now and again, out beyond Fort Canning and Pearls Hill, beyond the north-west limits of the city, came the irregular crackle of rifle and machine-gun fire, but that, too, was distant and unreal, a far-off echo in a dream. Everything that night had the same dreamlike quality, shadowy and unsubstantial: even those few who still moved slowly through the rubble-strewn and almost deserted streets of Singapore were like the aimless wanderers of a dream, hesitant, listless and unsure, stumbling blindly through the swirling banks of smoke, little figures lost and hopelessly groping through the fog of a nightmare.

Moving slowly, uncertainly through the darkened streets, the small group of soldiers, perhaps two dozen in all, made their way down towards the waterfront like very old, very tired men. They looked like old men, they walked with the faltering steps and the bowed head and shoulders of old men, but they weren’t old men, the eldest of them was not more than thirty: but they were tired, terribly tired, tired to that point of uncaring exhaustion when nothing matters any more and it is easier to keep stumbling along than it is to stop. Tired and sick, wounded and ravaged by disease, their every action was now unthinking, automatic, their conscious minds had all but ceased to function. But complete mental and physical exhaustion carries with it its own blessing, its own drug and anodyne, and the dull, lack-lustre eyes staring emptily down at the ground beneath their trudging feet showed this beyond all doubt: whatever sufferings of the body they still endured, they had at least stopped remembering.

For the moment, at least, they no longer remembered the waking nightmare of the past two months, the privations, the hunger, the thirst, the wounds, the sickness and the fear as the Japanese had driven them down the endless length of the Malayan peninsula, over the now destroyed Johore causeway into the illusory safety of the island of Singapore. They no longer remembered their vanished comrades, the screams as some unsuspecting sentry was butchered in the hostile dark of the jungle, the diabolical yells of the Japanese as they overran hastily prepared defensive positions in that black hour before dawn. They no longer remembered these desperate, suicidal counter-attacks that achieved nothing but a few square yards of land bitterly, uselessly re-won for only a moment of time, afforded them nothing but the sight of the horribly maimed and tortured bodies of their captured friends and the civilians who had been just that little bit too slow in co-operating with the enemy. They no longer remembered their anger and bewilderment and despair as the last of the Brewster fighters and, latterly, the Hurricanes, had been driven from the skies, leaving them completely at the mercy of the Japanese air force. Even their utter disbelief at the news, five days ago, of the landing of the Japanese troops on the island itself, their bitterness as the carefully nurtured legend, the myth of the impregnability of Singapore, collapsed before their eyes—these, too, had vanished from their memories. They no longer remembered. They were too dazed and sick and wounded and weak to remember. But one day, soon, if they lived, they would remember, and then none of them would ever be the same again. But meantime they just trudged wearily on, eyes down, heads down, not looking where they were going, not caring where they would arrive.

But one man looked and one man cared. He walked along slowly at the head of the double column of men, flicking a torch on and off as he picked a clear way through the debris that littered the street and checked their direction of progress from time to time. He was a small, slightly-built man, the only one in the company who wore a kilt, and a balmoral on his head. Where the kilt had come from only Corporal Fraser knew: he certainly hadn’t been wearing it during the retreat south through Malaya.

Corporal Fraser was as tired as any of the others. His eyes, too, were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and his face grey and wasted with what might have been malaria or dysentery or both. He walked with his left shoulder far higher than the other, hunched up near his ear, as if he suffered from some physical deformity, but it was no deformity, just a rough gauze pad and bandage that a medical orderly had hurriedly stuffed under his shirt earlier in the day in a token attempt to staunch the bleeding from an ugly shrapnel wound. In his right hand he carried a Bren gun, and its weight of twenty-three pounds was almost more than his weakened body could carry: it had the effect of pulling down his right arm and dragging his left shoulder upwards, even nearer his ear.

The one-sided hunch, the balmoral askew on his head, the kilt flapping loosely about his wasted legs, made the little man appear grotesque and ridiculous. But there was nothing grotesque and ridiculous about Corporal Fraser. A Cairngorms shepherd to whom privations and gruelling exertions were of the very stuff of existence, he had yet to tap the last reserves of his will-power and endurance. Corporal Fraser was still very much a going concern as a soldier—the very best type of soldier. Duty and responsibility weighed heavily with him, his own pain and weakness didn’t exist, his thoughts were only for the men who stumbled along behind, following him blindly. Two hours ago, the officer commanding their confused and disorganised company on the northern city limits had ordered Fraser to lead all the walking wounded, and those whom they could carry, out of the firing-line and back to some place of relative safety and quiet. Only a token gesture, the officer had known, and Fraser had known it also, for the last defences were caving in and Singapore was finished. Before the next day was through, every single man on Singapore island would be dead, wounded or prisoner. But orders were orders and Corporal Fraser trudged resolutely on, heading down for the Kallang creek.

Every now and then, when he came to a clear stretch of street, he stepped to one side and let his men file slowly past him. It was doubtful whether any of them as much as saw him, either the very ill men on the stretchers, or the less ill but still sick and wounded men who carried them. And every time Corporal Fraser would have to wait for the last of the party, a tall thin youngster whose head swayed loosely from side to side as he muttered to himself continuously in a rambling and incoherent voice. The young soldier suffered from neither malaria nor dysentery, nor had he been wounded in any way, but he was the sickest of them all. Every time Fraser would seize his arm and hustle him on to catch up with the main party, the boy quickened his pace without protesting, just looked at Corporal Fraser out of incurious eyes that were empty of all recognition: and every time Fraser would look at him hesitantly, shake his head then hurry forwards again until he reached the head of the column.

In a winding, smoke-filled alley, a little boy cried in the darkness. He was only a very little boy, perhaps two and a half years old. He had blue eyes, blond hair and a fair skin all streaked with dirt and tears. He was clad only in a thin shirt and khakicoloured haltered shorts: his feet were bare, and he was shivering all the time.

He cried and cried, a lost, anguished wailing in the night, but there was no one there to hear or heed. And no one could have heard him who was more than a few yards away, for he cried very softly, short muffled sobs punctuated by long, quivering indrawn breaths. From time to time he rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of small and grubby fists, as little children will when they are tired or weeping: and with the backs of his hands he tried to rub the pain away, from the black smoke constantly laced a smarting path across the tear filled eyes.

The little boy cried because he was very, very tired, and it was hours past his normal bedtime. He cried because he was hungry and thirsty and shaking with the cold—even a tropical night can be cold. He cried because he was confused and afraid, because he did not know where his home was or where his mother was—he had been with his old amah, his Malayan nurse, at a nearby bazaar a fortnight previously and had been too young and unknowing to appreciate the significance of the bombed and burnt-out rubble that awaited their return—and he and his mother had been due to sail out on the Wakefield, the last big ship from Singapore, on the same night of that 29th January … But he cried, most of all, because he was alone.

His old nurse, Anna, was half-sitting, half-lying on a pile of rubble beside him, like one lost in sleep. She had been wandering with him for hours through the darkened streets, carrying him in her arms for the last hour or two, when she had suddenly placed him on the ground, clasped both hands above her heart and sunk to the ground, saying that she must rest. For half an hour now she had been there, motionless, her head resting far over on one shoulder, her eyes wide and unblinking. Once or twice, earlier, the little boy had stooped to touch her, but only once or twice: now he kept away, afraid, afraid to look and afraid to touch, vaguely knowing, without knowing why, that the old nurse’s rest would be for a long, long time.

He was afraid to go and afraid to stay, and then he stole another glance, through latticed fingers, at the old woman and he was suddenly more afraid to stay than go. He moved off down the alley, not looking where he was going, stumbling and falling over loose bricks and stones, picking himself up and running on again, all the time sobbing and shivering in the cool night. Near the end of the alley a tall, emaciated figure wearing a tattered straw hat eased himself off the shafts of his rickshaw and reached out to stop the child. The man meant no harm. A sick man himself—most of the consumptionridden rickshaw coolies of Singapore usually died after five years—he could still feel pity for others, especially little children. But all the little boy saw was a tall menacing figure reaching down out of the gloom: his fear changed to terror, he eluded the outstretched hands and ran out through the mouth of the alley into the deserted street and the darkness beyond. The man made no further movement, just wrapped his night blanket more tightly around himself and leaned back again against the shafts of his rickshaw.

Like the little boy, two of the nurses were sobbing quietly as they stumbled along. They were passing by the only building still burning in the business quarter of the town, and they kept their heads averted from the flames, but even so it was possible to see the smooth broad-boned faces and upcurving eyes of their lowered faces. Both were Chinese, people who do not lightly give way to emotion: but both were very young, and both had been sitting very close to the explosion when the shell had blown their Red Cross truck into the ditch near the southern exit of the Bukit Timor road. They were badly shocked, and still very sick and dazed.

Two of the others were Malays. One was young, as young as the two Chinese nurses, and the other was well past middle age. The young one’s great, sooty eyes were wide with fear, and she kept glancing nervously over her shoulder as they hurried along. The face of the elderly one was a mask of almost complete indifference. From time to time she tried to protest at the speed with which they were being hurried along, but she was incapable of making herself understood: she, too, had been sitting very close to the blast of the explosion, and the shock had blocked her speech centres, probably only temporarily, although it was too soon to say yet. Once or twice she reached up a hand to try to stop the nurse in the lead, the one who was setting the pace, but the other just removed her hand, gently but firmly enough, and hurried on again.

The fifth nurse, the one in the lead, was tall, slender and in her middle twenties. She had lost her cap when the explosion had blown her over the tail-board of the truck, and the thick, blue-black hair kept falling down over her eyes. From time to time she swept it back with an impatient gesture, and it was then that one could see that she was neither Malayan nor Chinese—not with those startlingly blue eyes. Eurasian, perhaps, but still definitely not European. In the flickering yellow light it was impossible to see her complexion, the colour of her skin, which was streaked with mud and dust anyway. Even under the caked dust, it was possible to see some kind of long scratch on her left cheek.

She was the leader of the party and she was lost. She knew Singapore, and knew it well, but in the enveloping smoke and darkness she was a stranger lost in a strange city. Somewhere down there on the waterfront, she had been told, there was a party of soldiers, many of whom urgently required attention—and if they didn’t get it that night, they would most certainly never get it inside a Japanese prison camp. But with every minute that passed, it looked more and more as if the Japanese would get to them first. The more they twisted and turned through the deserted streets, the more hopelessly lost she became. Somewhere opposite Cape Ru on the Kallang creek she might expect to find them, she had been told: but, as it was, she couldn’t even find the waterfront, far less have any idea where Cape Ru lay in the darkness.

Half an hour passed, an hour, and even her own steps began to flag as despair touched her for the first time. They could never find the soldiers, never, not in this endless confusion and darkness. It was desperately unfair of their doctor, Major Blackley, to have expected it of them. And even with the thought the girl knew that it was not Blackley who was unfair but herself: when dawn came on the outskirts of Singapore, the life of neither man nor woman would be worth a moment’s purchase—it all depended on what kind of mood the Japanese had been in: she had met them before and had bitter cause to remember the meeting, and scars that would bear witness of that meeting, for the rest of her life. The further away from the Jap’s immediate blood-lust the better: besides, as the Major had pointed out, none of them was in a fit state to remain any longer where they were. Unknowingly, almost, the girl shook her head, quickened her pace again and turned off down another dark and empty street.

Fear and dismay, sickness and despair—such were the things that coloured and dominated the entire existences of the wandering band of soldiers, the little boy and the nurses, and tens of thousands of others on that midnight of 14th February, 1942, as the exultant, all-conquering Japanese crouched outside the last defences of the city, waiting for the dawn, waiting for the assault, the bloodbath and the victory that must inevitably come. But for one man at least fear and hurt and despair did not exist.

The tall, elderly man in the candle-lit waiting-room of the offices some way south of Fort Canning was conscious of none of these things. He was conscious only of the rapid passage of time, of the most overwhelming urgency he had ever known, of the almost inhuman burden of responsibility that lay in his hands alone. He was conscious of these things, consumed by them to the exclusion of all else, yet no trace of them showed in the expressionless calm of the lined, brick-red face beneath the shock of thick white hair. Perhaps the tip of the Burma cheroot that jutted up jauntily past the bristling white moustache and aquiline nose glowed just a little too brightly, perhaps he sat just that little too relaxed in his cane-bottomed armchair, but that was all. To all outward appearances Foster Farnholme, Brigadier-General (Ret.), was at peace with the world.

The door behind him opened and a young, tired-looking sergeant came into the room. Farnholme removed the cheroot from his mouth, turned his head slowly and raised one tufted eyebrow in mute interrogation.

“I’ve delivered your message, sir.” The sergeant sounded as tired as he looked. “Captain Bryceland says he’ll be along right away.”

“Bryceland?” The white eyebrows met in a bar-straight line across the deep-set eyes. “Who the devil’s Captain Bryceland? Look, sonny, I asked, specifically, to see your colonel, and I must see him, immediately. At once. You understand?”

“Perhaps I can be of some help.” Another man stood in the doorway now, behind the sergeant. Even in the flickering candle-light it was possible to see the badly bloodshot eyes, the fever-flush that stained the yellow cheeks, but his soft Welsh voice was civil enough.

“Bryceland?”

The young officer nodded, said nothing.

“You certainly can help,” Farnholme nodded. “Your colonel, please, and right away. I haven’t a moment to lose.”

“I can’t do it.” Bryceland shook his head. “He’s having his first sleep for three days and three nights—and God only knows we’re going to need him with us tomorrow morning.”

“I know. Nevertheless, I must see him.” Farnholme paused, waited until the frenetic hammering of a nearby heavy machine-gun had died away, then went on very quietly, very earnestly. “Captain Bryceland, you can’t even begin to guess how vitally important it is that I see your colonel. Singapore is nothing—not compared to my business.” He slid a hand beneath his shirt, brought out a black Colt automatic—the heavy .45. “If I have to find him myself, I’ll use this and I’ll find him, but I don’t think I’ll need it. Tell your colonel that Brigadier Farnholme is here. He’ll come.”

Bryceland looked at him for a long moment, hesitated, nodded, then turned away without a word. He was back inside three minutes and stood aside at the doorway to let the man following him precede him into the room.

The colonel, Farnholme guessed, must have been a man of about forty-five—fifty at the most. He looked about seventy, and walked with the swaying, half-inebriated gait of a man who has lived too long with exhaustion. He had difficulty in keeping his eyes open, but he managed to smile as he walked slowly across the room and extended a courteous hand.

“Good evening, sir. Where in the world have you come from?”

“Evening, Colonel.” On his feet now, Farnholme ignored the question. “You know of me, then?”

“I know of you. I heard about you for the first time, sir—just three nights ago.”

“Good, good.” Farnholme nodded in satisfaction. “That will save a lot of explaining—and I’ve no time for explanations. I’ll come to the point right away.” He half-turned as the explosion of a shell landing very close shook the room, the shock wave of displaced air almost blowing the candles out, then looked back at the colonel. “I want a ‘plane out of Singapore, Colonel. I don’t care what kind of ‘plane, I don’t care who you’ve got to shove off to get me on board, I don’t care where it’s going—Burma, India, Ceylon, Australia—it’s all the same to me. I want a ‘plane out of Singapore—immediately.”

“You want a ‘plane out of Singapore.” The colonel echoed the words tonelessly, his voice as wooden as the expression on his face, then he suddenly smiled, tiredly, as if the effort had cost him a great deal. “Don’t we all, Brigadier.”

“You don’t understand.” Slowly, with a gesture of infinitely controlled patience, Farnholme ground out his cheroot on an ashtray. “I know there are hundreds of wounded and sick, women and children—”

“The last ‘plane has already gone,” the colonel interrupted flatly. He rubbed a bare forearm across exhausted eyes. “A day, two days ago—I’m not sure.”

“11th February,” Bryceland supplied. “The Hurricanes, sir. They left for Palembang.”

“That’s right,” the colonel remembered. “The Hurricanes. They left in a great hurry.”

“The last plane.” Farnholme’s voice was empty of all emotion. “The last ‘plane. But—but there were others, I know. Brewster fighters, Wildebeestes—”

“All gone, all destroyed.” The colonel was watching Farnholme now with some vague curiosity in his eyes. “Even if they weren’t, it would make no difference. Seletar, Sembawang, Tengah—the Japs have all these aerodromes. I don’t know about Kallang airport—but I do know it’s useless.”

“I see. I see indeed.” Farnholme stared down at the gladstone bag beside his feet, then looked up again. “The flying-boats, Colonel? The Catalinas?”

The colonel shook his head in slow finality. Farnholme gazed at him for long seconds with unwinking eyes, nodded his head in understanding and acceptance, then glanced at his watch. “May I see you alone, Colonel?”

“Certainly.” The colonel didn’t even hesitate. He waited until the door had closed softly behind Bryceland and the sergeant, then smiled faintly at Farnholme. “I’m afraid the last ‘plane has still gone, sir.”

“I never doubted it.” Farnholme, busy unbuttoning his shirt, paused and glanced up. “You know who I am, Colonel—not just my name, I mean?”

“I’ve known for three days. Utmost secrecy, and all that—it was thought you might be in the area.” For the first time the colonel regarded his visitor with open curiosity. “Seventeen years counterespionage-chief in South-East Asia, speak more Asiatic languages than any other—”

“Spare my blushes.” His shirt unbuttoned, Farnholme was unfastening a wide, flat rubber-covered belt that encircled his waist. “I don’t suppose you speak any Eastern languages yourself, Colonel?”

“For my sins, yes. That’s why I’m here. Japanese.” The colonel grinned mirthlessly. “It’ll come in very handy in the concentration camps, I should think.”

“Japanese, eh? That’s a help.” Farnholme unzipped two pouches on the belt, placed their contents on the table before him. “See what you make of these, will you, Colonel?”

The colonel glanced sharply at him, glanced down at the photostats and rolls of film that lay on the table, nodded, went out of the room and returned with a pair of spectacles, a magnifying glass and a torch. For three minutes he sat at the table without looking up or speaking. From outside came the occasional crump of an exploding shell, the staccato chattering of a distant machine-gun and the evil whine of some misshapen ricochet whistling blindly through the smoke-filled night. But no noise whatsoever came from inside the room itself. The colonel sat at his table like a man carved from stone, only his eyes alive: Farnholme, a fresh cheroot in his mouth, was stretched out in his wicker chair, lost in a seeming vast indifference.

By and by the colonel stirred and looked across at Farnholme. When he spoke both his voice and the hands that held the photostats were unsteady.

“I don’t need Japanese to understand these. My God, sir, where did you get them?”

“Borneo. Two of our best men, and two Dutchmen, died to get these. But that’s not important now, and quite irrelevant.” Farnholme puffed at his cheroot. “All that matters is that I have them and the Japs don’t know it.”

The colonel didn’t seem to have heard him. He was staring down at the papers in his hands, shaking his head slowly from side to side. Finally he laid the papers down on the desk, folded his spectacles away into their case and lit a cigarette. His hands were still trembling.

“This is fantastic,” he muttered. “This is quite fantastic. There can only be a few of these in existence. All Northern Australia—blueprints for invasion!”

“Complete in every relevant detail,” Farnholme assented. “The invasion ports and airfields, the times to the last minute, the forces to be used down to the last battalion of infantry.”

“Yes.” The colonel stared down at the photostats, his brows wrinkling. “But there’s something that—”

“I know, I know,” Farnholme interrupted bitterly. “We haven’t got the key. It was inevitable. The dates and primary and secondary objectives are in code. They couldn’t take the risk of having these in plain language—and Japanese codes are unbreakable, all of them. All of them, that is, except to a little old man in London who looks as if he couldn’t write his own name.” He paused and puffed some more blue smoke into the air. “Still, It’s quite something, isn’t it, Colonel?”

“But—but how did you happen to get—”

“That’s quite irrelevant, I’ve told you.” The steel below was beginning to show through the camouflage of lazy indifference. He shook his head, then laughed softly. “Sorry, Colonel. Must be getting edgy. There was no ‘happen’ about it, I assure you. I’ve worked for five years on one thing and one thing only—to get these delivered to me at the right time and the right place: the Japanese are not incorruptible. I managed to get them at the right time: not at the right place. That’s why I’m here.”

The colonel hadn’t even been listening. He had been staring down at the papers, shaking his head slowly from side to side, but now he looked up again. All at once his face was haggard and defeated and very old.

“These papers—these papers are priceless, sir.” He lifted the photostats in his hand and stared unseeingly at Farnholme. “God above, all the fortunes that ever were are nothing compared to these. It’s all the difference between life and death, victory and defeat. It’s—it’s—great heavens, sir, think of Australia! Our people must have these—they must have them!”

“Exactly,” Farnholme agreed. “They must have them.”

The colonel stared at him in silence, the tired eyes slowly widening in shocked understanding, then slumped back into his chair, his head resting on his chest. The spiralling cigarette smoke laced painfully across his eyes, but he didn’t even seem to notice it.

“Exactly, once again,” Farnholme said dryly. He reached out for the films and photostats and began to replace them carefully in the waterproof pouches of his belt. “You begin to understand, perhaps, my earlier anxiety for—ah—aerial transport out of Singapore.” He zipped the pouches shut. “I’m still as anxious as ever, I assure you.”

The colonel nodded dully, but said nothing.

“No ‘plane at all?” Farnholme persisted. “Not even the most dilapidated, broken down—” He stopped abruptly at the sight of the expression on the colonel’s face, then tried again. “Submarine?”

“No.”

Farnholme’s mouth tightened. “Destroyer, frigate, any naval vessel at all?”

“No.” The colonel stirred. “And not even a merchant ship. The last of them—the Grasshopper, Tien Kwang, Katydid, Kuala, Dragonfly and a few other small coastal vessels like these—pulled out of Singapore last night. They won’t be back. They wouldn’t get a hundred miles, even, the Jap air force is everywhere round the archipelago. Wounded, women and children aboard all these vessels, Brigadier. Most of them will finish up at the bottom of the sea.”

“A kindly alternative to a Japanese prison camp. Believe me, Colonel, I know.” Farnholme was buckling on the heavy belt again. He sighed. “This is all very handy, Colonel. Where do we go from here?”

“Why in God’s name did you ever come here?” the colonel demanded bitterly. “Of all places, of all times, you had to come to Singapore now. And how in the world did you manage to get here anyway?”

“Boat from Banjermasin,” Farnholme replied briefly. “The Kerry Dancer—the most dilapidated floating death-trap that was ever refused a certificate of seaworthiness. Operated by a smooth, dangerous character by the name of Siran. Hard to say, but I’d almost swear he was a renegade Englishman of some kind, and on more than nodding terms with the Japs. He stated he was heading for Kota Bharu—lord knows why—but he changed his mind and came here.”

“He changed his mind?”

“I paid him well. Not my money, so I could afford it. I thought Singapore would be safe enough. I was in North Borneo when I heard on my own receiver that Hong Kong and Guam and Wake had fallen, but I had to move in a considerable hurry. A long time passed before I heard the next item of news, and that was on board the Kerry Dancer. We waited ten days in Banjermasin before Siran condescended to sail,” Farnholme went on bitterly. “The only respectable piece of equipment and the only respectable man on that ship were both to be found in the radio room—Siran must have considered them both necessary for his nefarious activities—and I was in the radio room with this lad Loon on our second day aboard the ship—29th January, it was, when we picked up this B.B.C. broadcast that Ipoh was being bombarded, so, naturally, I thought the Japs were advancing very slowly and that we’d plenty of time to go to Singapore and pick up a ‘plane.”

The colonel nodded in understanding. “I heard that communiqué, too. Heaven only knows who was responsible for that appalling claptrap. Ipoh had actually fallen to the Japs more than a month before that, sir. The Japs were only a few miles north of the causeway at the time. My God, what a damnable mess!” He shook his head slowly. “A damnable, damnable mess!”

“You put things very mildly,” Farnholme agreed. “How long have we got?”

“We’re surrendering tomorrow.” The colonel stared down at his hands.

“Tomorrow!”

“We’re all washed up, sir. Nothing more we can do. And we’ve no water left. When we blew up the causeway we blew up the only water-pipe from the mainland.”

“Very clever, far-seeing chaps who designed our defences here,” Farnholme muttered. “And thirty million quid spent on it. Impregnable fortress. Bigger and better than Gib. Blah, blah, blah. God, it all makes you sick!” He snorted in disgust, rose to his feet and sighed. “Ah, well, nothing else for it. Back to the dear old Kerry Dancer. God help Australia!”

“The Kerry Dancer!” The colonel was astonished. “She’ll be gone an hour after dawn, sir. I tell you, the Straits are swarming with Japanese ‘planes.”

“What alternative can you offer?” Farnholme asked wearily.

“I know, I know. But even if you are lucky, what guarantee have you that the captain will go where you want him to?”

“None,” Farnholme admitted. “But there’s a rather handy Dutchman aboard, by the name of Van Effen. Together we may be able to persuade our worthy captain where the path of duty lies.”

“Perhaps.” A sudden thought occurred to the colonel. “Besides, what guarantee have you that he’ll even be waiting when you get back down to the waterfront?”

“Here it is.” Farnholme prodded the shabby valise lying by his feet. “My guarantee and insurance policy—I hope. Siran thinks this thing’s stuffed full of diamonds—I used some of them to bribe him to come here—and he’s not so far out. Just so long as he thinks there’s a chance of separating me from these, he’ll hang on to me like a blood brother.”

“He—he doesn’t suspect—”

“Not a chance. He thinks I’m a drunken old reprobate on the run with ill-gotten gains. I have been at some pains to—ah—maintain the impersonation.”

“I see, sir.” The colonel came to a decision and reached out for a bell. When the sergeant appeared, he said, “Ask Captain Bryceland to come here.”

Farnholme lifted an eyebrow in silent interrogation.

“It’s the least I can do, sir,” the colonel explained, “I can’t provide a plane. I can’t guarantee you won’t all be sunk before noon tomorrow. But I can guarantee that the captain of the Kerry Dancer will follow your instructions implicitly. I’m going to detail a subaltern and a couple of dozen men from a Highland regiment to accompany you on the Kerry Dancer.” He smiled. “They’re a tough bunch at the best of times, but they’re in an especially savage mood just now. I don’t think Captain Siran will give you very much trouble.”

“I’m sure he won’t. Damned grateful to you. Colonel. It should help a lot.” He buttoned his shirt, picked up his gladstone and extended his hand. “Thanks for everything, Colonel. It sounds silly knowing a concentration camp is awaiting you—but, well, all the best.”

“Thank you, sir. And all the luck to you—God knows you’re going to need it.” He glanced down in the region of the concealed belt that held the photostats, then finished sombrely. “We’ve at least got a chance.”

The smoke was slowly clearing when Brigadier Farnholme went out again into the darkness of the night, but the air still held that curious, unpleasant amalgam of cordite and death and corruption that the old soldier knows so well. A subaltern and a company of men were lined up outside waiting for him.

Musketry and machine-gun fire had increased now, visibility was far better, but the shell-fire had ceased altogether—probably the Japanese saw no sense in inflicting too much damage on a city which would be theirs on the following day anyway. Farnholme and his escort moved quickly through the deserted streets through the now gently falling rain, the sound of gunfire in their ears all the time, and had reached the waterfront within a few minutes. Here the smoke, lifted by a gentle breeze from the east, was almost entirely gone.

The smoke was gone, and almost at once Farnholme realised something that made him clutch the handle of the gladstone until his knuckles shone white and his forearms ached with the strain. The small lifeboat from the Kerry Dancer, which he had left rubbing gently against the wharf, was gone also, and the sick apprehension that at once flooded through his mind made him lift his head swiftly and stare out into the roads but there was nothing there for him to see. The Kerry Dancer was gone as if she had never existed. There was only the falling rain, the gentle breeze in his face and, away to his left, the quiet, heartbroken sobs of a little boy crying alone in the darkness.

TWO

The subaltern in charge of the soldiers touched Farnholme on the arm and nodded out to sea. “The boat, sir—she’s gone!”

Farnholme restrained himself with an effort. His voice, when he spoke, was as calm and as matter-of-fact as ever.

“So it would appear, Lieutenant. In the words of the old song, they’ve left us standing on the shore. Deuced inconvenient, to say the least of it.”

“Yes, sir.” Farnholme’s reaction to the urgency of the situation, Lieutenant Parker felt, was hardly impressive. “What’s to be done now, sir?”

“You may well ask, my boy.” Farnholme stood still for several moments, a hand rubbing his chin, an abstracted expression on his face. “Do you hear a child crying there, along the waterfront?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Have one of your men bring him here. Preferably,” Farnholme added, “a kindly, fatherly type that won’t scare the living daylights out of him.”

“Bring him here, sir?” The subaltern was astonished. “But there are hundreds of these little street Arabs—” He broke off suddenly as Farnholme towered over him, his eyes cold and still beneath the jutting brows.

“I trust you are not deaf, Lieutenant Parker,” he inquired solicitously. The low-pitched voice was for the lieutenant’s ears alone, as it had been throughout.

“Yes, sir! I mean, no, sir!” Parker hastily revised his earlier impression of Farnholme. “I’ll send a man right away, sir.”

“Thank you. Then send a few men in either direction along the waterfront, maybe half a mile or so. Have them bring back here any person or persons they find—they may be able to throw some light on the missing boat. Let them use persuasion if necessary.”

“Persuasion, sir?”

“In any form. We’re not playing for pennies tonight, Lieutenant. And when you’ve given the necessary orders, I’d like a private little talk with you.”

Farnholme strolled off some yards into the gloom. Lieutenant Parker rejoined him within a minute. Farnholme lit a fresh cheroot and looked speculatively at the young officer before him.

“Do you know who I am, young man?” he asked abruptly.

“No, sir.”

“Brigadier Farnholme.” Farnholme grinned in the darkness as he saw the perceptible stiffening of the lieutenant’s shoulders. “Now that you’ve heard it, forget it. You’ve never heard of me. Understand?”

“No, sir,” Parker said politely. “But I understand the order well enough.”

“That’s all you need to understand. And cut out the ‘sirs’ from now on. Do you know my business?”

“No, sir, I—”

“No ‘sirs,’ I said,” Farnholme interrupted. “If you cut them out in private, there’s no chance of your using them in public.”

“I’m sorry. No, I don’t know your business. But the colonel impressed upon me that it was a matter of the utmost importance and gravity.”

“The colonel was in no way exaggerating,” Farnholme murmured feelingly. “It is better, much better, that you don’t know my business. If we ever reach safety I promise you I’ll tell you what it’s all about. Meantime, the less you and your men know the safer for all of us.” He paused, drew heavily on the cheroot and watched the tip glow redly in the night. “Do you know what a beachcomber is, Lieutenant?”

“A beachcomber?” The sudden switch caught Parker off balance, but he recovered quickly. “Naturally.”

“Good. That’s what I am from now on, and you will kindly treat me as such. An elderly, alcoholic and somewhat no-account beachcomber hell-bent on saving his own skin. Good-natured and tolerant contempt—that’s your line. Firm, even severe when you’ve got to be. You found me wandering about the streets, searching for some form of transport out of Singapore. You heard from me that I had arrived on a little inter-island steamer and decided that you would commandeer it for your own uses.”

“But the ship’s gone,” Parker objected.

“You have a point,” Farnholme admitted. “We may find it yet. There may be others, though I very much doubt it. The point is that you must have your story—and your attitude—ready, no matter what happens. Incidentally, our objective is Australia.”

“Australia!” Parker was startled into momentary forgetfulness. “Good lord, sir, that’s thousands of miles away!”

“It’s a fairish bit,” Farnholme conceded. “Our destination, nevertheless, even if we can’t lay hands on anything larger than a rowing boat.” He broke off and swung round. “One of your men returning, I think, Lieutenant.”

It was. A soldier emerged out of the darkness, the three white chevrons on his arms easy to see. A very big man, over six feet tall and broad in proportion, he made the childish figure in his arms tiny by comparison. The little boy, face buried in the soldier’s sunburned neck, was still sobbing, but quietly now.

“Here he is, sir.” The burly sergeant patted the child’s back. “The little duffer’s had a bad fright, I think, but he’ll get over it.”

“I’m sure he will, Sergeant.” Farnholme touched the child’s shoulder. “And what’s your name, my little man, eh?”

The little man took one quick look, flung his arms round the sergeant’s neck and burst into a fresh torrent of tears. Farnholme stepped back hastily.

“Ah, well.” He shook his head philosophically. “Never had much of a way with children, I’m afraid. Crusty old bachelors and what have you. His name can wait.”

“His name is Peter,” the sergeant said woodenly. “Peter Tallon. He’s two years and three months old, he lives in Mysore Road in north Singapore and he’s a member of the Church of England.”

“He told you all that?” Farnholme asked incredulously.

“He hasn’t spoken a word, sir. There’s an identity disc tied round his neck.”

“Quite,” Farnholme murmured. It seemed the only appropriate remark in the circumstances. He waited until the sergeant had rejoined his men, then looked speculatively at Parker.

“My apologies.” The lieutenant’s tone was sincere. “How the devil did you know?”

“Be damned funny if I didn’t know after twenty-three years in the East. Sure, you’ll find Malay and Chinese waifs, but waifs only of their own choice. You don’t find them crying. If they did, they wouldn’t be crying long. These people always look after their own—not just their own children, but their own kind.” He paused and looked quizzically at Parker. “Any guesses as to what brother Jap would have done to that kid, Lieutenant?”

“I can guess,” Parker said sombrely. “I’ve seen a little and I’ve heard a lot.”

“Believe it all, then double it. They’re an inhuman bunch of fiends.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Let’s rejoin your men. Berate me as we go. It’ll create no end of a good impression—from my point of view, that is.”

Five minutes passed, then ten. The men moved about restlessly, some smoked, some sat on their packs, but no one spoke. Even the little boy had stopped crying. The intermittent crackle of gunfire carried clearly from the north-west of the town, but mostly the night was very still. The wind had shifted, and the last of the smoke was clearing slowly away. The rain was still falling, more heavily than before, and the night was growing cold.

By and by, from the north-east, the direction of Kallang creek, came the sound of approaching footsteps, the measured paces of three soldiers marching in step and the quicker, more erratic click of feminine heels. Parker stared as they emerged out of the darkness, then turned to the soldier who had been leading the party.

“What’s all this? Who are these people?”

“Nurses, sir. We found them wandering a little way along the front.” The soldier sounded apologetic. “I think they were lost, sir.”

“Lost?” Parker peered at the tall girl nearest him. “What the dickens are you people doing wandering about the town in the middle of the night?”

“We’re looking for some wounded soldiers, sir.” The voice was soft and husky. “Wounded and sick. We—well, we don’t seem able to find them.”

“So I gather,” Parker agreed dryly. “You in charge of this party?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name, please?” The lieutenant’s tone was a shade less peremptory now; the girl had a pleasant voice, and he could see that she was very tired, and shivering in the cold rain.

“Drachmann, sir.”

“Well, Miss Drachmann, have you seen or heard anything of a small motorboat or a coastal steamer, anywhere offshore?”

“No, sir.” Her tone held tired surprise. “All the ships have left Singapore.”

“I hope to heaven you’re wrong,” Parker muttered. Aloud, he said, “Know anything about kids, Miss Drachmann?”

“What?” She sounded startled.

“The sergeant there has found a little boy.” Parker nodded to the child still in the sergeant’s arms, but wrapped now in a waterproof cape against the cold and rain. “He’s lost, tired, lonely and his name is Peter. Will you look after him for the present?”

“Why, of course I will.”

Even as she was stretching out her hands for the child, more footsteps were heard approaching from the left. Not the measured steps of soldiers, nor the crisp clickety-clack of women’s heels, but a shambling, shuffling sound such as very old men might make. Or very sick men. Gradually there emerged out of the rain and the darkness a long, uncertain line of men, weaving and stumbling, in token column of twos. They were led by a little man with a high, hunched left shoulder, with a Bren gun dangling heavily from his right hand. He wore a balmoral set jauntily on his head and a wet kilt that flapped about his bare, thin knees. Two yards away from Parker he stopped, shouted out a command to halt, turned round to supervise the lowering of the stretchers—it was then that Parker saw for the first time that three of his own men were helping to carry the stretchers—then ran backwards to intercept the straggler who brought up the end of the column and was now angling off aimlessly into the darkness. Farnholme stared after him, then at the sick, maimed and exhausted men who stood there in the rain, each man lost in his suffering and silent exhaustion.

“My God!” Farnholme shook his head in wonder. “The Pied Piper never had anything on this bunch!”

The little man in the kilt was back at the head of the column now. Awkwardly, painfully, he lowered his Bren to the wet ground, straightened and brought his hand up to his balmoral in a salute that would have done credit to a Guards’ parade ground. “Corporal Fraser reporting, sir.” His voice had the soft burr of the north-east Highlands.

“At ease, Corporal.” Parker stared at him. “Wouldn’t it—wouldn’t it have been easier if you’d just transferred that gun to your left hand?” A stupid question, he knew, but the sight of that long line of haggard, half-alive zombies materialising out of the darkness had had a curiously upsetting effect on him.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I think my left shoulder is kind of broken, sir.”

“Kind of broken,” Parker echoed. With a conscious effort of will he shook off the growing sense of unreality. “What regiment, Corporal?”

“Argyll and Sutherlands, sir.”

“Of course.” Parker nodded. “I thought I recognised you.”

“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Parker, isn’t it, sir.”

“That’s right.” Parker gestured at the line of men standing patiently in the rain. “You in charge, Corporal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“Why?” The corporal’s fever-wasted face creased in puzzlement. “Dunno, sir. Suppose it’s because I’m the only fit man here.”

“The only fit—” Parker broke off in mid-sentence, lost in incredulity. He took a deep breath. “That’s not what I meant, Corporal. What are you doing with these men? Where are you going with them?”

“I don’t rightly know, sir,” Fraser confessed. “I was told to lead them back out of the line to a place of safety, get them some medical attention if I could.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the intermittent firing. “Things are a little bit confused up there, sir,” he finished apologetically.

“They’re all of that,” Parker agreed. “But what are you doing down here at the waterfront?”

“Looking for a boat, a ship, anything.” The little corporal was still apologetic. “‘Place of safety’ was my orders, sir. I thought I’d have a real go at it.”

“A real go at it.” The feeling of unreality was back with Parker once again. “Aren’t you aware, Corporal, that by the time you get anywhere the nearest place of safety would be Australia—or India?”

“Yes, sir.” There was no change of expression on the little man’s face.

“Heaven give me strength.” It was Farnholme speaking for the first time, and he sounded slightly dazed. “You were going to set out for Australia in a rowing-boat with that—that—” He gestured at the line of patient, sick men, but words failed him.

“Certainly 1 was,” Fraser said doggedly. “I’ve got a job to do.”

“My God, you don’t give up easy, do you, Corporal?” Farnholme stared at him. “You’d have a hundred times more chance in a Jap prison camp. You can thank your lucky stars that there isn’t a boat left in Singapore.”

“Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t,” the corporal said calmly. “But there’s a ship lying out there in the roads.” He looked at Parker. “I was just planning how to get out to it when your men came along, sir.”

“What!” Farnholme stepped forward and gripped him by his good shoulder. “There’s a ship out there? Are you sure, man?”

“Sure I’m sure.” Fraser disengaged his shoulder with slow dignity. “I heard its anchor going down not ten minutes ago.”

“How do you know?” Farnholme demanded. “Perhaps the anchor was coming up and—”

“Look, pal,” Fraser interrupted. “I may look stupid, I may even be stupid, but I know the bloody difference between—”

“That’ll do, Corporal, that’ll do!” Parker cut him off hastily. “Where’s this ship lying?”

“Out behind the docks, sir. About a mile out, I should say. Bit difficult to be sure—still some smoke around out there.”

“The docks? In the Keppel Harbour?”

“No, sir. We haven’t been near there tonight. Only a mile or so away—just beyond Malay Point.”

Even in the darkness the journey didn’t take long—fifteen minutes at the most. Parker’s men had taken over the stretchers, and others of them helped the walking wounded along. And all of them, men and women, wounded and well, were now possessed of the same overwhelming sense of urgency. Normally, no one among them would have placed much hope on any evidence so tenuous as the rattle of what might, or might not have been an anchor going down: but, so much had their minds been affected by the continuous retreats and losses of the past weeks, so certain had they been of capture before that day was through, capture and God only knew how many years of oblivion, so complete was their sense of hopelessness that even this tiny ray of hope was a blazing beacon in the dark despair of their minds. Even so the spirit of the sick men far exceeded their strength, and most of them were spent and gasping and glad to cling to their comrades for support by the time Corporal Fraser came to a halt.

“Here, sir. It was just about here that I heard it.”

“What direction?” Farnholme demanded. He followed the line indicated by the barrel of the corporal’s Bren, but could see nothing: as Fraser had said, smoke still lay over the dark waters … He became aware that Parker was close behind him, his mouth almost touching his ear.

“Torch? Signal?” He could barely catch the lieutenant’s soft murmur. For a moment Farnholme hesitated, but only a moment: they had nothing to lose. Parker sensed rather than saw the nod, and turned to his sergeant.

“Use your torch, Sergeant. Out there. Keep flashing until you get an answer or until we can see or hear something approaching. Two or three of you have a look round the docks—maybe you might find some kind of boat.”

Five minutes passed, then ten. The sergeant’s torch clicked on and off, monotonously, but nothing moved out on the dark sea. Another five minutes, then the searchers had returned to report that they were unable to find anything. Another five minutes passed, five minutes during which the rain changed from a gentle shower to a torrential downpour that bounced high off the metalled roadway, then Corporal Fraser cleared his throat.

“I can hear something coming,” he said conversationally.

“What? Where?” Farnholme barked at him.

“A rowing-boat of some sorts. I can hear the rowlocks. Coming straight at us, I think.”

“Are you sure?” Farnholme tried to listen over the drumming of the rain on the road, the hissing it made as it churned the surface of the sea to a white foam. “Are you sure, man?” he repeated. “I can’t hear a damn thing.”

“Aye, I’m sure. Heard it plain as anything.”

“He’s right!” It was the big sergeant who spoke, his voice excited. “By God, he’s right, sir. I can hear it, too!”

Soon everybody could hear it, the slow grinding creak of rowlocks as men pulled heavily on their oars. The tense expectancy raised by Fraser’s first words collapsed and vanished in the almost palpable wave of indescribable relief that swept over them and left them all chattering together in low ecstatic voices. Lieutenant Parker took advantage of the noise to move closer to Farnholme.

“What about the others—the nurses and the wounded?”

“Let ’em come, Parker—if they want to. The odds are high against us. Make that plain—and make it plain that it must be their own choice. Then tell them to keep quiet, and move back out of sight. Whoever it is—and it must be the Kerry Dancer—we don’t want to scare ‘em away. As soon as you hear the boat rubbing alongside, move forward and take over.”

Parker nodded and turned away, his low urgent tones cutting through the babble of voices.

“Right. Take up these stretchers. Move back, all of you, to the other side of the road—and keep quiet. Keep very quiet, if you ever want to see home again. Corporal Fraser?”

“Sir?”

“You and your men—do you wish to come with us? If we go aboard that ship it’s highly probably that we’ll be sunk within twelve hours. I must make that clear.”

“I understand, sir.”

“And you’ll come, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you asked the others?”

“No, sir.” The corporal’s injured tone left no doubt about his contempt for such ridiculously democratic procedures in the modern army, and Farnholme grinned in the darkness. “They’ll come too, sir.”

“Very well. On your head be it. Miss Drachmann?”

“I’ll come, sir,” she said quietly. She lifted her left hand to her face in a strange gesture. “Of course I’ll come.”

“And the others?”

“We’ve discussed it.” She indicated the young Malayan girl by her side. “Lena here wants to go too. The other three don’t care much, sir, one way or another. Shock, sir—a shell hit our lorry tonight. Better if they come, I think.”

Parker made to answer, but Farnholme gestured him to silence, took the torch from the sergeant and advanced to the edge of the dock. The boat could be seen now, less than a hundred yards away, vaguely silhouetted by the distant beam of the torch. Even as Farnholme peered through the heavy rain, he could see the flurry of white foam as someone in the sternsheets gave an order and the oars dug into the sea, back-watering strongly until the boat came to a stop and lay silently, without moving, a half-seen blur in the darkness.

“Ahoy, there!” Farnholme called. “The Kerry Dancer?”

“Yes.” The deep voice carried clearly through the falling rain. “Who’s there?”

“Farnholme, of course.” He could hear the man in the sternsheets giving an order, could see the rowers starting to pull strongly again. “Van Effen?”

“Yes, Van Effen.”

“Good man!” There was no questioning the genuineness of the warmth in Farnholme’s voice. “Never been so glad to see anyone in all my life. What happened?” The boat was only twenty feet away now, and they could talk in normal tones.

“Not much.” The Dutchman spoke perfect, colloquial English, with a scarcely discoverable trace of accent. “Our worthy captain changed his mind about waiting for you, and had actually got under way before I persuaded him to change his mind.”

“But—but how do you know the Kerry Dancer won’t sail before you get back? Good God, Van Effen, you should have sent someone else. You can’t trust that devil an inch.”

“I know.” Hand steady on the tiller, Van Effen was edging in towards the stonework. “If she sails, she sails without her master. He’s sitting in the bottom of the boat here, hands tied and with my gun in his back. Captain Siran is not very happy, I think.”

Farnholme peered down along the beam of the torch. It was impossible to tell whether Captain Siran was happy or not, but it was undoubtedly Captain Siran. His smooth, brown face was as expressionless as ever.

“And just to make certain,” Van Effen continued, “I’ve got the two engineers tied in Miss Plenderleith’s room—tied hand and foot by myself, I may say. They won’t get away. The door’s locked, and Miss Plenderleith’s in there with them, with a gun in her hand. She’s never fired a gun in her life, but she’s perfectly willing to try, she says. She’s a wonderful old lady, Farnholme.”

“You think of everything,” Farnholme said admiringly. “If only—”

“All right, that’ll do! Stand aside, Farnholme.” Parker was by his side, a powerful torch shining down on to the upturned faces below. “Don’t be a bloody fool!” he said sharply, as Van Effen made to bring up his pistol. “Put that thing away—there’s a dozen machine-guns and rifles lined up on you.”

Slowly Van Effen lowered his gun and looked up bleakly at Farnholme.

“That was beautifully done, Farnholme,” he said slowly. “Captain Siran here would have been proud to claim such a masterpiece of treachery.”

“It wasn’t treachery,” Farnholme protested. “They’re British troops, our friends, but I’d no option. I can explain—”

“Shut up!” Parker cut in brusquely. “You can do all your explaining later.” He looked down at Van Effen. “We’re coming with you, whether you like it or not. That’s a motor lifeboat you have there. Why were you using your oars?”

“For silence. Obviously. Much good it did us,” Van Effen added bitterly.

“Start the motor,” Parker ordered.

“I’ll be damned if I will!”

“Perhaps. You’ll probably be dead if you don’t,” Parker said coldly. “You look an intelligent man, Van Effen. You’ve got eyes and ears and should realise we’re desperate men. What’s to be gained by childish obstinacy at this stage?”

Van Effen looked at him for a long moment in silence, nodded, jammed his gun hard into Siran’s ribs and gave an order. Within a minute the engine had come to life and was putt-putting evenly away as the first of the wounded soldiers was lowered on to the thwarts. Within half an hour the last of the men and women who had been standing on the dockside were safely aboard the Kerry Dancer. It had taken two trips, but short ones: Corporal Fraser had been about right in his estimate of distance, and the ship was anchored just outside the three-fathom shoal line of the Pagar Spit.

The Kerry Dancer got under way just before half-past two in the morning, the last ship out of the city of Singapore before she fell into the hands of the Japanese later on that same day of 15th February, 1942. The wind had dropped away now, the rain fined to a gentle drizzle and a brooding hush lay over the darkened city as it faded swiftly into the gloom of the night. There were no fires to be seen now, no lights at all, and even the crackle of desultory gunfire had died away completely. Everything was unnaturally, uncannily silent, silent as death itself, but the storm would break when the first light of day touched the rooftops of Singapore.

Farnholme was in the bleak, damp aftercastle of the Kerry Dancer, helping two of the nurses and Miss Plenderleith to attend to the bandaging and care of the wounded soldiers, when a knock came to the door—the only door, the one that led out into the deep after well. He switched out the light, stepped outside and closed the door carefully behind him. He turned to look at the shadowy figure standing in the gloom.

“Lieutenant Parker?”

“Yes.” Parker gestured in the darkness. “Perhaps we’d better go up on the poop-deck here—we can’t be overheard there.”

Together they climbed the iron ladder and walked right aft to the taffrail. The rain had quite stopped now, and the sea was very calm. Farnholme leaned over the rail, gazed down at the phosphorescence bubbling in the Kerry Dancer’s creaming wake and wished he could smoke. It was Parker who broke the silence.

“I’ve a rather curious item of news for you, sir—sorry, no ‘sir’. Did the corporal tell you?”

“He told me nothing. He only came into the aftercastle a couple of minutes ago. What is it?”

“It appears that this wasn’t the only ship in the Singapore roads tonight. While we were coming out to the Kerry Dancer with the first boatload, it seems that another motor-boat came in and tied up less than a quarter of a mile away. A British crew.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Farnholme whistled softly in the darkness. “Who were they? What the hell were they doing there anyway? And who saw them?”

“Corporal Fraser and one of my own men. They heard the engine of the motor-boat—we never heard it, obviously, because the sound of our own drowned it—and went across to investigate. Only two men in it, both armed with rifles The only man who spoke was a Highlander—chap from the Western Isles, Fraser says, and he’d know. Very uncommunicative indeed, Fraser says, although he asked plenty of questions himself. Then Fraser heard the Kerry Dancer’s boat coming back, and they had to go. He thinks one of the men followed him, but he can’t be sure.”

“‘Curious’ is hardly the word to describe it, Lieutenant.” Farnholme bit his lower lip thoughtfully and stared out to sea. “And Fraser has no idea where they came from, or what kind of ship they had or where they were going?”

“He knows nothing,” Parker said positively. “They might have come straight from the moon for all Fraser knows.”

They talked about it for a few minutes, then Farnholme dismissed the matter.

“No good talking about it, Parker, so let’s forget it. It’s over and done with and no harm to anyone—we got clear away, which is all that matters.” Deliberately he changed the subject. “Got everything organised?”

“Yes, more or less. Siran’s going to co-operate, no doubt about that—his own neck’s at stake just as much as ours and he’s fully aware of it. The bomb or torpedo that gets us isn’t very likely to miss him. I’ve a man watching him, one watching the quarter-master and one keeping an eye on the duty engineer. Most of the rest of my men are asleep in the fo’c’sle—and heaven knows they need all the sleep they can get. I’ve got four of them asleep in the midships cabin—very handy in emergency.”

“Good, good.” Farnholme nodded his head in approval. “And the two Chinese nurses and the elderly Malayan one?”

“Also in one of the midships cabins. They’re pretty sick and dazed, all three of them.”

“And Van Effen?”

“Asleep on deck, under a boat. Just outside the wheel-house, not ten feet from the captain.” Parker grinned. “He’s no longer mad at you, but his knife is still pretty deep in Siran. It seemed a good place to have Van Effen sleep. A reliable sort of chap.”

“He’s all of that. How about food?”

“Lousy, but plenty of it. Enough for a week or ten days.”

“I hope we get the chance to eat it all,” Farnholme said grimly. “One more thing. Have you impressed on everyone, especially Siran, that I’m now pretty small beer around these parts and that there’s only one man that matters—yourself?”

“I don’t think you’re as well thought of as you were previously,” Parker said modestly.

“Excellent.” Unconsciously, almost, Farnholme touched the belt under his shirt. “But don’t overdo it—just ignore me whenever possible. By the way, there’s something you can do for me on your way for’ard. You know the radio shack?”

“Behind the wheelhouse? Yes, I’ve seen it.”

“The operator, Willie Loon or something like that, sleeps in it. I think he’s a pretty decent sort of lad—God knows what he’s doing aboard this floating coffin—but I don’t want to approach him myself. Find out from him what his set’s transmitting radius is and let me know before dawn. I’ll probably have a call to make round about that time.”

“Yes, sir.” Parker hesitated, made to speak, then changed his mind about the question he had been going to ask. “No time like the present. I’ll go and find out now. Good night.”

“Good night, Lieutenant.” Farnholme remained leaning over the taffrail for a few more minutes, listening to the asthmatic clanking of the Kerry Dancer’s superannuated engine as she throbbed her way steadily east-south-east through the calm and oily sea. By and by he straightened up with a sigh, turned and went below. The whisky bottles were in one of his bags in the aftercastle and he had his reputation to sustain.

Most men would have objected strongly to being waked at halfpast three in the morning and asked a purely technical question about their work, but not Willie Loon. He merely sat up in his bunk, smiled at Lieutenant Parker, told him that the effective range of his transmitter was barely five hundred miles and smiled again. The smile on his round pleasant face was the essence of good will and cheerfulness, and Parker had no doubt but that Farnholme had been a hundred per cent correct in his assessment of Willie Loon’s character. He didn’t belong here.

Parker thanked him, and turned to go. On his way out he noticed on the transmitting table something he had never expected to see on a ship such as the Kerry Dancer—a round, iced cake, not too expertly made, it’s top liberally beskewered with tiny candles. Parker blinked, then looked at Willie Loon.

“What on earth is this for?”

“A birthday cake.” Willie Loon beamed proudly at him. “My wife—that’s her picture there—made it. Two months ago, now, to be sure I would have it. It is very pretty, is it not?”

“It’s beautiful,” Lieutenant Parker said carefully. He looked at the picture again. “Beautiful as the girl who made it. You must be a very lucky man.”

“I am.” Again he smiled, blissfully. “I am very lucky indeed, sir.”

“And when’s the birthday?”

“Today. That is why the cake is out. I am twenty-four years old today.”

“Today!” Parker shook his head. “You’ve certainly picked a wonderful day to have a birthday on, by all the signs. But it’s got to be some time, I suppose. Good luck, and many happy returns of the day.”

He turned, stepped over the storm combing, and closed the door softly behind him.

THREE

Willie Loon died when he was twenty-four years of age. He died on his twenty-fourth birthday, at the high noon of day, with the harsh glare of the equatorial sunlight striking savagely through the barred skylight above his head. A white light, a bright merciless light that mocked the smoking flame from the solitary candle still burning on the birthday cake, a yellow flame that bloomed and faded, bloomed and faded, regularly, monotonously, as the ship rolled and the black bar of shadow from the skylight passed and repassed across it—across the candle, across the cake and across the picture of Anna May, the shy-smiling Batavian girl who had baked it.

But Willie Loon could not see the candle or the cake or the picture of his young wife, for he was blind. He could not understand why this should be so, for the last of these hammer-blows of just ten seconds ago had struck the back of his head, not the front. He could not even see his radio transmitting key, but that did not matter, for Mr. Johnson of the Marconi school had always insisted that no one could be a real Marconi man until he was as good in pitch darkness as he was in the light of day. And Mr. Johnson had also said that the Marconi man should be the last to leave his post, that he should leave the ship together with his captain. And so Willie Loon’s hand moved up and down, up and down, in the staccato, off-beat rhythm of the trained operator, triggering off the key, sending the same call over and over again: S.O.S., enemy air attack, 0.45 N, 104.24 E, on fire: S.O.S., enemy air attack, 0.45 N, 104.24 E, on fire: S.O.S. …

His back hurt, hurt abominably. Machine-gun bullets, he did not know how many, but they hurt, badly. But better that, he thought tiredly, than the transmitter. If his back hadn’t been there the transmitter would have been smashed, there would have been no distress signal, no hope at all. A fine Marconi man he would have been with the most important message of his life to send and no way of sending it … But he was sending that message, the most important message of his life, although already his hand was becoming terribly heavy and the transmitting key was starting to jump around from side to side, eluding the fumbling, sightless fingers.

There was a strange, muted thunder in his ears. He wondered vaguely, if it was the sound of aero engines, or if the flames that enveloped the foredeck were bearing down on him, or if it was just the roaring of his own blood in his head. Most likely it was his own blood, for the bombers should have gone by now, their work done, and there was no wind to fan the flames. It didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered except that his hand should keep bearing down on that transmitting key, keep sending out the message. And the message went out, time and time again, but it was now only a jumbled, meaningless blur of dots and dashes.

Willie Loon did not know this. Nothing was very clear to him any longer. Everything was dark and confused and he seemed to be falling, but he could feel the edge of his chair catching him behind the knees and he knew he was still there, still sitting at his transmitter and he smiled at his own foolishness. He thought again of Mr. Johnson and he thought that perhaps Mr. Johnson would not be ashamed of him if he could see him then. He thought of his dark and gentle Anna May, and smiled again, without bitterness. And then there was the cake. Such a lovely cake, made as only she could make it, and he hadn’t even tasted it. He shook his head sadly, cried out once as the sharp scalpel of agony sliced through his shattered head and reached the unseeing eyes.

For a moment, just for a moment, consciousness returned. His right hand had slipped off the transmitting key. He knew it was desperately urgent that he should move his hand back, but all the power seemed to have gone from his right arm. He moved his left hand across, caught his right wrist and tried to lift it, but it was far too heavy, it might have been nailed to the table. He thought again, dimly, briefly, of Mr. Johnson, and he hoped he had done his best. Then silently, without even a sigh, he slid forward wearily on to the table, his head cradling on his crossed hands, his left elbow crushing down on the cake until the candle leaned over horizontally, the dripping wax pooling on the polished table, the smoke, thick now and very black, spiralling lazily upwards until it flattened against the deckhead, and spread across the tiny cabin. A dark, oily smoke, but it could do nothing to soften the cruel shafts of sunshine or hide the three little neat, red-ringed holes in the back of Willie Loon’s shirt as he lay sprawled tiredly across the table. By and by the candle flickered feebly, flared up once and died.

Captain Francis Findhorn, O.B.E., Commodore of the British-Arabian Tanker Company and master of the 12,000 ton motor-ship Viroma, gave the barometer a last two taps with his fingernail, looked at it without expression for a moment then walked back quietly to his seat in the port corner of the wheelhouse. Unthinkingly, he reached up to direct the overhead ventilation louver on to his face, winced as the blast of hot, humid air struck at him, then pushed it away again, quickly but without haste. Captain Findhorn never did anything with haste. Even the next simple gesture of taking off his gold-braided white cap and rubbing the dark, thinning hair with his handkerchief was made with an unhurried speed, with so complete a lack of unnecessary and wasted movement that one instinctively knew this calm deliberation, this unstudied economy of motion, to be an inseparable part of the man’s nature.

There was a soft padding behind him, footsteps crossing the ironhard teak deck. Captain Findhorn replaced his cap, slewed round in his chair and looked at his chief officer who was standing where he himself had been seconds before, gazing thoughtfully at the barometer. For a few moments Captain Findhorn studied him in silence, thought that his chief officer was a classic refutation of the widelyheld belief that light-haired, light-skinned people cannot sunburn well: between the white shirt and the fair flaxen hair, sun-bleached almost to a platinum blond, the back of the neck was a strip of old, dark oak. Then the chief officer had turned round and caught his eye, and Findhorn smiled, briefly.

“Well, Mr. Nicolson, what do you make of it?” The quartermaster was only feet away: with members of the crew within earshot, the captain was always punctiliousness itself towards his senior officers.

Nicolson shrugged his shoulders and walked across to the screen door. He had a peculiarly soft-footed, almost catlike gait, as if he were stepping on old, dry sticks and feared he might break them. He looked at the brassy oven of the sky, at the oily copper sheen of the water, at the far horizon to the east where the two met in a shimmer of metallic blue, and finally at the glassy swell that was building up to the northeast, pushing up on their port quarter. He shrugged again, turned and looked at the captain, and for the hundredth time Findhorn found himself marvelling at the clear, ice-blue of his officer’s eyes, doubly striking in the sunburnt darkness of the face. He had never seen eyes like them, remotely like them, anywhere. They always reminded Captain Findhorn of Alpine lakes, and this irritated the captain, for he had a precise, logical mind, and he had never been in the Alps in his life.

“Not much doubt about it, sir, is there?” The voice was soft, controlled, effortless—the perfect complement to the way he walked and carried himself: but it had a deep, resonant quality that enabled him to be heard through a roomful of talking people or in a high wind with an abnormal ease and clarity. He gestured through the open screen door. “All the signs. The glass is only 28.5, but it was .75 hardly an hour ago. It’s falling like a stone. The wrong time of the year, and I’ve never heard of a tropical storm in these latitudes, but we’re in for a bit of a blow, I’m afraid.”

“You have a genius for understatement, Mr. Nicolson,” Findhorn said dryly. “And don’t refer disrespectfully to a typhoon as ‘a bit of a blow’. It might hear you.” He paused a moment, smiled and went on softly. “I hope it does, Mr. Nicolson. It’s a Godsend.”

“It would be all of that,” Nicolson murmured. “And rain. There’ll be plenty of rain?”

“Buckets of it,” Captain Findhorn said with satisfaction. “Rain, high seas and a ten or eleven wind and there’s nary a son in the Nipponese army or navy will see us this night. What’s our course, Mr. Nicolson?”

“One-thirty, sir.”

“We’ll keep it there. The Carimata Straits for us by noon tomorrow, and then there’s always a chance. We’ll turn aside only for their Grand Fleet and we’ll turn back for nothing.” Captain Findhorn’s eyes were calm, untroubled. “Think there’ll be anyone out looking for us, Mr. Nicolson?”

“Apart from a couple of hundred aircraft pilots and every ship in the China Sea, no.” Nicolson smiled briefly, and the smile touched and whitened the wrinkles at his eyes and was gone. “I doubt if there’s any of our little yellow pals within 500 miles who doesn’t know that we broke out of Singapore last night. We must be the juiciest tit-bit since the Prince of Wales went down, and the size of the flap will be corresponding. They’ll have combed every exit—Macassar, Singapore, Durian and Rhio—and the High Command will be throwing blue fits and chucking themselves on to their swords by the dozen.”

“But they never thought to check the Tjombol Straits and Temiang?”

“I suppose they’re reasonably sane and do us the compliment of thinking we are also,” Nicolson said thoughtfully. “No sane man would take a big tanker through these waters at night, not with the draught we’ve got, and not a light in sight.”

Captain Findhorn inclined his head, half-nod, half-bow. “You have rather a pretty line in compliments yourself, Mr. Nicolson.”

Nicolson said nothing. He turned away and walked to the other side of the bridge, past the quartermaster and Vannier, the fourth officer. His feet on the deck made no more sound, almost, than the whisper of falling leaves. At the far end of the bridge he stopped, looked through the starboard wheel-house door at the haze-blurred silhouette of Linga Island melting softly into the purple distance, then turned back again. Vannier and the quartermaster watched him silently, tired speculation in tired eyes.

From above their heads came the occasional murmur of voices, or the shuffling of aimless, wandering feet. Up there were the gunners who manned the two wheelhouse top Hotchkisses, .5s well spaced on each side of the starboard compass platform teak screen. Old guns these, very old and feeble and inaccurate, good only for boosting the morale of those who had never had to use them against an enemy. The suicide seats, these two gun positions were called: the exposed wheel-house top, highest point of the bridge superstructure, always held priority for strafing attacks on tankers. The gunners knew this, and they were only human: they had been unhappy, increasingly restless, for days now.

But the fidgety unease of the gunners, the quartermaster’s hands moving gently on the spokes of the wheel—these were only small, insignificant sounds that punctuated the strange, hushed silence that lay over the Viroma, an enveloping, encompassing silence, thick, cocoon-like, almost tangible. And the little sounds came and went and left the silence deeper, more oppressive than before.

It was the silence that comes with great heat and the climbing humidity that spills out sweat over a man’s arms and body with every mouthful of liquid he drinks. It was the dead, flat silence that lies over the China Sea while the gathering storm bides its time beyond the horizon. It was the silence that comes upon men when they have not slept for a long, long time, and they are very tired. But, above all, it was the silence that comes with waiting. That kind of waiting where a man’s nerves are stretched out on a rack, and every hour more of waiting is another turn of the rack, and if the waiting doesn’t end soon the rack will turn too far and the nerves tear and sunder with the strain—but if the waiting does end then that will be even worse for it will be the end not only of the waiting, it will almost certainly be the end of everything.

The men of the Viroma had been waiting for a long time now, Or perhaps not such a long time—it was only a week since the Viroma, with a false funnel, dummy ventilators, the newly painted name of Resistencia and flying the flag of the Argentine republic, had rounded the Northern tip of Sumatra and steamed into the Malacca Straits in broad daylight. But a week has seven days, every day twenty-four hours and every hour sixty minutes. Even a minute can be a long time when you are waiting for something which must inevitably happen, when you know that the laws of chance are operating more and more inexorably against you, that the end cannot be much longer delayed. Even a minute can be a long, long time when the first bomb or the first torpedo may be only seconds away, and you have ten thousand, four hundred tons of fuel oil and high octane gasoline beneath your feet …

The telephone above the flag locker shrilled jarringly, insistently, cutting knife-like through the leaden silence on the bridge. Vannier, slight, brown-haired, an officer of only ten weeks standing, was nearest to it. He whirled round, startled, knocked over the binoculars on the locker-top behind him, and fumbled the receiver off its hook. Even through the tan the red flush could be seen creeping up through neck and face.

“Bridge here. What is it?” The voice was meant to be crisp, authoritative. It didn’t quite come off. He listened for a few moments, said thank you, hung up and turned round to find Nicolson standing beside him.

“Another distress signal,” he said quickly. Nicolson’s cold blue eyes always made him feel flustered. “Up north somewhere.”

“Up north somewhere.” Nicolson repeated the words, his tone almost conversational, but carrying an undertone that made Vannier squirm. “What position? What ship?” There was a sharp edge to Nicolson’s voice now.

“I—I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

Nicolson looked at him for a long second, turned away, reached down the phone and began to crank the generator handle. Captain Findhorn beckoned to Vannier and waited until the boy had walked hesitantly across to his corner of the bridge.

“You should have asked, you know,” the captain said pleasantly. “Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think it necessary, sir.” Vannier was uncomfortable, on the defensive. “It’s our fourth call today. You—you ignored the others, so I—”

“True enough,” Findhorn agreed. “It’s a question of priorities, boy. I’m not going to risk a valuable ship, a priceless cargo and the lives of fifty men on the off-chance of picking up a couple of survivors from an inter-island steamer. But this might have been a troopship, or a cruiser. I know it’s not, but it might have been. And it might have been in a position where we could have given some help without sticking our necks out too far. All improbable ‘ifs’ and ‘mights’, but we must know where she is and what she is before we make a decision.” Findhorn smiled and touched the gold-braided epaulettes on his shoulders. “You know what these are for?”

“You make the decisions,” Vannier said stiffly. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Forget it, boy. But one thing you might remember—to call Mr. Nicolson ‘sir’ once in a while. It’s—ah—expected.”

Vannier flushed and turned away. “Sorry again, sir. I don’t usually forget. I’m—well, I think I’m just a little bit tired and edgy, sir.”

“We all are,” Findhorn said quietly. “And not a little bit, either. But Mr. Nicolson isn’t—he never is.” He raised his voice. “Well, Mr. Nicolson?”

Nicolson hung up the receiver and turned round.

“Vessel bombed, burning, possibly sinking,” he said briefly. “0.45 N, 104.24 E. That makes it the Southern entrance to the Rhio channel. Name of the vessel uncertain. Walters says the message came through very fast, very clear at first, but quickly deteriorated into crazy nonsense. He thinks the operator was seriously injured and finally collapsed over his table and key, for he finished up with a continuous send—it’s still coming through. Name of the ship, as far as Walters could make out, was the Kenny Danke.

“Never heard of it. Strange he didn’t send his international callsign. Nothing big, anyway. Mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing, sir.” Nicolson shook his head, turned to Vannier. “Look it up in the Register anyway, please. Then look through the K’s. Obviously the wrong name.” He paused for a moment, the cold blue eyes remote, distant, then turned again to Vannier. “Look up the Kerry Dancer. I think it must be that.”

Vannier riffled through the pages. Findhorn looked at his chief officer, eyebrows raised a fraction.

Nicolson shrugged. “A fair chance, sir, and it makes sense. N and R are very close in Morse. So are C and K. A sick man could easily trade them—even a trained man. If he was sick enough.”

“You’re right, sir.” Vannier smoothed out a page of the directory. “The Kerry Dancer, 540 tons, is listed here. Clyde, 1922. Sulaimiya Trading Company—”

“I know them,” Findhorn interrupted. “An Arab company, Chinese backed, sailing out of Macassar. They’ve seven or eight of these small steamers. Twenty years ago they had only a couple of dhows—that was about the time they gave up legitimate trading as a bad business and went in for the fancy stuff—guns, opium, pearls, diamonds, and little of that legally come by. Plus a fair amount of piracy on the side.”

”No tears over the Kerry Dancer!”

“No tears over the Kerry Dancer, Mr. Nicolson. Course 130 and hold it there.” Captain Findhorn moved through the screen door on to the port wing of the door. The incident was closed.

“Captain!”

Findhorn halted, turned round unhurriedly and looked curiously at Evans. Evans was the duty quartermaster, dark, wiry, thinfaced and with tobacco stained teeth. His hands rested lightly on the wheel, and he was looking straight ahead.

“Something on your mind, Evans?”

“Yes, sir. The Kerry Dancer was lying in the roads last night.” Evans glanced at him for a moment then stared ahead again. “A Blue Ensign boat, sir.”

“What!” Findhorn was jerked out of his normal equanimity. “A Government ship? You saw her?”

“I didn’t see her, sir. The bo-sun did—I think. Anyway, I heard him talking about it last night—just after you’d come back from shore.”

“Are you quite certain, man? He said that?”

“No mistake, sir.” The high-pitched Welsh voice was very definite.

“Get the bo’sun up here at once!” Findhorn ordered. He went over to his chair, sat down, easy and relaxed, and thought back to the night just gone. He remembered his surprise—and relief—when he had gone over the side and found the bo’sun and carpenter manning the motor lifeboat that was to take him ashore, his surprise and relief when he had seen the butts of a couple of short Lee Enfields protruding beneath a piece of canvas thrown carelessly over them. He had said nothing about these. He remembered the distant sound of guns, the pall of smoke lying over Singapore from the last bombing raid—one could set a watch by the appearance of Japanese bombers over Singapore every morning—the weird, unnatural hush that had lain over city and roads. The roads themselves had been empty, deserted as he’d never known them, and he couldn’t remember seeing the Kerry Dancer or any other ship flying the Blue Ensign as they went in. It had been too dark and he had had too much on his mind. And he had had even more to worry about on the way out. He had learnt that the oil islands of Poko Bukum, Pulo Sambo and Pulo Sebarok had been fired, or were to be fired—he had been unable to find out or even see for himself, the pall of smoke obscured everything. The last of the naval units had pulled out and there was no one to take his fuel oil. Nor his aviation spirit—the Catalinas were gone, and the only Brewster Buffaloes and Wildebeeste torpedo bombers that remained were charred skeletons on the Selengar Airfield. 10,400 tons of explosive fuel, trapped in the harbour of Singapore and—

“McKinnon, sir. You sent for me.” Twenty years that hadn’t missed out a sea or port in the world worth looking at had turned McKinnon from a raw, shy, unknowing Lewis boy to a byword among the sixty odd ships of the British Arabian Company for toughness, shrewdness and unvarying competence—but they hadn’t altered a single inflexion in his slow, soft-spoken Highland voice, “About the Kerry Dancer?”

Findhorn nodded, said nothing, just continued looking at the dark, stocky figure before him. A commodore, he thought dryly, inconsequentially, has his privileges. The best first mate and the best bo’sun in the company …

“I saw her lifeboat yesterday evening, sir,” McKinnon said quietly. “She left before us—with a full complement of passengers.” He looked speculatively at the captain. “A hospital ship. Captain.”

Findhorn climbed down off his chair and stood in front of McKinnon, without moving, The two men were of a height, eye to eye. No one else moved. It was as if each one feared to break the sudden, utter stillness that had fallen on the bridge. The Viroma wandered one degree off course, then two, then three, and Evans made no move to correct it.

“A hospital ship,” Findhorn repeated tonelessly. “A hospital ship, Bo’sun? She’s only a little interisland tramp—500 tons or so.”

“That’s right. But she’s been commandeered, sir. I was talking to some of the wounded soldiers while Ferris and myself were at the jetty, waiting for you. Her captain’s been given the option of losing his ship or sailing her to Darwin. There’s a company of soldiers aboard to see that he does.”

“Go on.”

“That’s all there is, sir. They filled up the second boatload before you came back—most of the cases were walking wounded but there were a few on stretchers. I believe there are five or six nurses, none British, and a little boy.”

“Women, children and sick men and they stick them aboard one of the Sulaimiya Company’s floating death-traps—and the whole archipelago swarming with Jap aircraft.” Findhorn swore, quietly, savagely. “I wonder what mutton-headed genius in Singapore thought that one up.”

“I don’t know, sir,” McKinnon said woodenly.

Findhorn looked at him sharply, then looked away again. “The question was purely rhetorical, McKinnon,” he said coldly. His voice dropped almost an octave and he went on quietly, musingly, speaking to no one in particular, a man thinking aloud and not liking his thoughts at all.

“If we go north, the chances of our getting as far as Rhio and back again are less than remote: they do not exist. Let us not deceive ourselves about that. It may be a trap—it probably is: the Kerry Dancer left before us and she should have been through Rhio six hours ago. If it’s not a trap, the probability is that the Kerry Dancer is at this moment sinking, or has sunk. Even if she is still afloat, fire will have forced passengers and crew to abandon ship. If they’re just swimming around—most of them wounded men—there’ll be mighty few of them left in the six or seven hours it would take us to get there.”

Findhorn paused for some moments, lit a cigarette in defiance of the company’s and his own regulations, and went on in the same flat monotone.

“They may have taken to their boats, if they had any boats left after bombs, machine-guns and fire had all had a go at them. Within a few hours all the survivors can land on any one of a score of islands. What chance have we got of finding the right island in total darkness in the middle of a storm—assuming that we were crazy enough—suicidal enough—to move into the Rhio Straits and throw away all the sea-room we must have in the middle of a typhoon?” He grunted in irritation as spiralling smoke laced his tired eyes—Captain Findhorn hadn’t left the bridge all night—gazed down with mild surprise, as if seeing it for the first time, at the cigarette clipped between his fingers, dropped it and ground it out with the heel of his white canvas shoe. He stared down at the crushed stub for long seconds after it had gone out, then looked up, his gaze travelling slowly round the four men in the wheelhouse. The gaze meant nothing—Findhorn would never have included the quartermaster, bo’sun or the fourth officer in his counsels. “I can see no justification whatsoever for jeopardising the ship, the cargo and our lives on a wild goose chase.”

No one said anything, no one moved. The silence was back again, heavy, foreboding, impenetrable. The air was still, and very airless—the approaching storm, perhaps. Nicolson was leaning against the flag locker, hooded eyes looking down at his hands clasped before him: the others were looking at the captain, and not blinking: the Viroma had now slewed yet further off course, ten, perhaps twelve degrees, and still swinging steadily.

Captain Findhorn’s wandering gaze finally settled on Nicolson. The remoteness had gone from the captain’s eyes now, when he looked at his first mate.

“Well, Mr. Nicolson?” he asked.

“You’re perfectly right, sir, of course.” Nicolson looked up, gazed out the window at the foremast swaying slowly, gently, under the lift of the deepening swell. “A thousand to one that it’s a trap, or, if it isn’t, ship, crew and passengers will all be gone by now—one way or another.” He looked gravely at the quartermaster, at the compass, then back at Findhorn again. “But as I see we’re already ten degrees off course and still slewing to starboard, we might as well save trouble and just keep on going round to starboard. The course would be about 320, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nicolson.” Findhorn let his breath escape in a long, almost inaudible sigh. He crossed over towards Nicolson, his cigarette case open. “For this once only, to hell with the rules. Mr. Vannier, you have the Kerry Dancer’s position. A course for the quarter master, if you please.”

Slowly, steadily, the big tanker swung round, struck off to the north-west back in the direction of Singapore, into the heart of the gathering storm.

A thousand to one were the odds that Nicolson would have offered and the captain would have backed him in that and gone even further—and they would both have been wrong. There was no trap, the Kerry Dancer was still afloat and she hadn’t been abandoned—not entirely.

Still afloat, at 2 o’clock on that sultry, breathless mid-February afternoon in 1942, but not looking as if she would be afloat much longer. She was deep in the water, down by the head and listing over so heavily to starboard that the well-deck guardrail was dipping into the sea, now lost in it, now showing clear as the long, low swell surged up the sloping deck and receded, like waves breaking on a beach.

The forward mast was gone, broken off about six feet above the deck; a dark, gaping hole, still smouldering, showed where the funnel had been, and the bridge was unrecognisable, a scrapyard shambles of buckled steel plates and fractured angle-irons, outlined in crazy, surrealist silhouette against a brazen sky. The fo’c’sle—the crew’s quarters just for’ard of the well-deck—looked as if it had been opened up by a gigantic can-opener, the scuttles on the ship’s side had disappeared completely and there was no trace of anchors, wind lass or for’ard derrick winch; all this fo’c’sle damage the result, obviously, of a bomb that had penetrated the thin steel deck plating and failed to explode until it was deep inside the ship. No one there at the time could have known anything about it, for the lethal blast would have been far faster than realisation. Abaft the well-deck, the wood-lined accommodation quarters on the main and upper decks had been completely burnt out, gutted as far as the after well, sky and sea clearly visible through the gaunt and twisted framework.

It was impossible that human beings could have survived the bludgeoning, the consuming, metal-melting white heat that had reduced the Kerry Dancer to the charred, dead wreck drifting imperceptibly south-westwards towards the Abang Straits and faraway Sumatra. And, indeed, there was no life to be seen on what was left of the decks of the Kerry Dancer, no life to be seen anywhere, above or below. A deserted, silent skeleton, a dead hulk adrift on the China Sea. … But there were twenty-three people still alive in the after-castle of the Kerry Dancer.

Twenty-three people, but some of them had not much longer to live. These were the wounded soldiers, the stretcher cases that had been close enough to death already before the ship had pulled out from Singapore, and the conclusive impact of the bombs and the gasping heat of the fires that had stopped short at the break of the after well-deck had destroyed what feeble resources and hold of life were left to most of them, and tipped the scales against recovery. There might have been hope for them, some slender hope, had they been brought out of that panting suffocation while there was yet time and lowered to the rafts and boats. But there had been no time. Within seconds of the first bomb falling, someone outside had sledgehammered tight the eight clips that secured the only door—the water-tight door—that gave access to the upper deck.

Through this smoke-blackened door a man cried out from time to time, a cry not of pain but of anguished memory lacerating a darkening mind; there were whimpers, too, from other badly wounded men, again not moans of pain; the Eurasian nursing sister had with her all the drugs and sedatives she required, not pain but just the feeble, aimless murmur of dying men. Now and again a woman’s voice could be heard, soothing, consoling, the soft sound of it punctuated from time to time by the deep angry rumble of a man. But mostly it was just the husky undertones of sick men and, very occasionally, the quivering indrawn breaths, the lost and lonely wailing of a little child.

Twilight, the brief tropical twilight, and the sea was milky white from horizon to horizon. Not close at hand—there it was green and white, great steep-sided walls of green, broken-topped and parallelstreaked with the wind-blown spume, waves that collapsed in a boiling, seething cauldron of rushing phosphorescence and foamed whitely across the low, wide decks of the Viroma, burying hatchcovers, pipe-lines and valves, burying, at times, even the catwalks, the gangways that stretched fore-and-aft eight feet above the deck. But further away from the ship, as far as the eye could see in the darkening night, there was nothing but the eerie, glistening whiteness of wind-flattened wave-tops and driving spray.

The Viroma, her big single screw thrusting under maximum power, lurched and staggered northwards through the storm. Northwest should have been her course, but the fifty-knot wind that had hit her on the starboard beam, almost without warning and with the typical typhoon impact of a tidal wave moving at express speed, had pushed her far off course to the south and west close in to Sebanga. She was far round into the sea now, corkscrewing violently and pitching steeply, monotonously, as the big, quartering seas bore down on her starboard bow and passed over and below her. She shuddered every time her bows crashed into a trough, then quivered and strained throughout every inch of her 460 foot length when the bows lifted and fought their way clear of the press of cascading white water. The Viroma was taking punishment, severe punishment—but that was what she had been built for.

Up on the starboard wing of the bridge, muffled in oilskins, crouched down behind the negligible shelter of the canvas dodger, and with his eyes screwed almost shut against the lash of the driving rain, Captain Findhorn peered out into the gathering dusk. He didn’t look worried, his chubby face was as composed, as impassive as ever, but he was worried, badly, and not about the storm. The wild staggering of the Viroma, the explosive, shuddering impact of plummeting bows burying themselves to the hawse-pipes in a massive head sea, would have been a terrifying experience for any landsman: Captain Findhorn barely noticed it. A deep-laden tanker has a remarkably low centre of gravity with corresponding stability—which doesn’t make it roll any less but what matters is not the extent of the roll but whether or not a ship will recover from a roll, and a tanker always does: its system of water-tight cross bulkheads gives it enormous strength: and with the tiny access hatches securely battened down, the smooth, unbroken sweep of steel decks makes it the nearest thing afloat to a submarine. Where wind and weather are concerned, a tanker is virtually indestructible. Captain Findhorn knew that only too well, and he had sailed tankers through typhoons far worse than this, and not only across the rim, where he was now, but through the heart. Captain Findhorn was not worried about the Viroma.

Nor was he worried about himself. Captain Findhorn had nothing left to worry about—literally: he had a great deal to look back upon, but nothing to look forward to. The senior captain of the British-Arabian Tanker Company, neither the sea nor his employers had anything more to offer him than two more years of command, retirement, and a sufficient pension. He had nowhere to go when he retired: his home for the past eight years, a modest bungalow off the Bukit Timor road, just outside the town of Singapore, had been destroyed by bombs in mid-January. His twin sons, who had always maintained that anyone who went to sea for a livelihood wanted his head examined, had joined the R.A.F. at the outbreak of war, and died in their Hurricanes, one over Flanders, one over the English Channel. His wife, Ellen, had survived the second son for only a few weeks. Cardiac failure, the doctor had said, which was a neat enough medical equivalent for a broken heart. Captain Findhorn had nothing to worry about, just nothing in the world—as far as he himself was concerned.

But selfishness had no root, no hold in Captain Findhorn’s nature, and the emptiness of all that lay ahead had not robbed him of his concern for those for whom life still held much. He thought of the men under his command, men not like himself but men with parents and children, wives and sweethearts, and he wondered what moral justification, if any, he had had for risking the life of non-combatants in turning back towards the enemy. He wondered, too, about the oil beneath his feet again, about his justification, if any, for hazarding a priceless cargo so desperately needed by his country—the thought of the loss to his company he dismissed with the mental equivalent of an indifferent shrug. Lastly, and most deeply of all, he thought about his chief officer of the past three years, John Nicolson.

He did not know and he did not understand John Nicolson. Some woman might, some day, but he doubted whether any man ever would. Nicolson was a man with two personalities, neither of them in any way directly connected with his professional duties, or the manner of the performance of them, which was exceptional: next in line for command in the Anglo-Arabian fleet, Nicolson was regarded by Captain Findhorn as the finest officer he had had serve under him in his thirty-three years as master: unvaryingly competent when competence was called for, brilliant when competence was not enough, John Nicolson never made a mistake. His efficiency was almost inhuman. Inhuman, Findhorn thought, that was it, that was the other side of his character. Nicolson normally was courteous, considerate, even humorously affable: and then some strange sea-change would come over him and he became aloof, remote, cold—and above all ruthless.

There had to be a link, a meeting point between the two Nicolsons, something that triggered off the transition from one personality to another. What it was Captain Findhorn did not know. He did not even know the nature of the slender bond between Nicolson and himself, he was not close to Nicolson, but he believed he was closer than anyone he knew. It could have been the fact that they were both widowers, but it was not that. It should have been that, for the parallels were striking—both wives had lived in Singapore, Nicolson’s on her first and his on her second five-year tour of duty in the Far East: both had died within a week of each other, and within a hundred yards of each other. Mrs. Findhorn had died at home grieving: Caroline Nicolson had died in a high-speed car smash almost outside the white-painted gates of Captain Findhorn’s bungalow, victim of a drunken maniac who had escaped without as much as a single scratch.

Captain Findhorn straightened up, tightened the towel round his neck, wiped some salt from his eyes and lips and glanced at Nicolson, farther out on the wing of the bridge. He was quite upright, seeking no shelter behind the venturi dodger, hands resting lightly on the side of the bridge, the intense blue eyes slowly quartering the duskblurred horizon, his face impassive, indifferent. Wind and rain, the crippling heat of the Persian Gulf or the bitter sleet storms of the Scheldt in January were all the same to John Nicolson. He was immune to them, he remained always indifferent, impassive. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

The wind was backing now, slowly, very slowly, and as steadily increasing in strength, the brief tropical twilight was almost over, but the seas were as milky-white as ever, stretching away into the gloom. Findhorn could see their gleaming phosphorescence off to port and starboard, curving in a great heaving horseshoe round the stern, but he could see nothing forward. The Viroma was now thrusting north dead in the eye of the gale-force wind, and the heavy driving rain, strangely cold after the heat of the day, was sweeping almost horizontally fore and aft across the decks and the bridge, numbing his face with a thousand little lances, filling his eyes with pain and tears. Even with eyes screwed tight to the narrowest slits, the rain still stung and blinded: they were blind men groping in a blind world and the end of the world was where they stood.

Captain Findhorn shook his head impatiently, an impatience compounded equally of anxiety and exasperation, and called to Nicolson. There was no sign that he had been heard. Findhorn cupped his hands to his mouth and called again, realised that what little of his voice was not being swept away by the wind was being drowned by the crash of the plunging bows and the thin high whine in the halyards and rigging. He moved across to where Nicolson stood, tapped him on the shoulder, jerked his head towards the wheelhouse and made for there himself. Nicolson followed him. As soon as he was inside Findhorn waited for a convenient trough in the sea, eased forward the sliding door with the downward pitch of the ship, and secured it. The change from driving rain, wind and the roaring of the sea to dryness, warmth and an almost miraculous quiet was so abrupt, so complete, that it took mind and body seconds to accustom themselves to the change.

Findhorn towelled his head dry, moved across to the port for-ard window and peered through the Clear View Screen—a circular, inset plate or glass band-driven at high speed by an electric motor. Under normal conditions of wind and rain centrifugal force is enough to keep the screen clear and provide reasonable visibility. There was nothing normal about the conditions that night and the worn driving belt, for which they had no spare, was slipping badly. Findhorn grunted in disgust and turned away.

“Well, Mr. Nicolson, what do you make of it?”

“The same as you, sir.” He wore no hat and the blond hair was plastered over head and forehead. “Can’t see a thing ahead.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I know.” Nicolson smiled, braced himself against a sudden, vicious pitch, against the jarring shock that shook the windows of the wheelhouse. “This is the first time we’ve been safe in the past week.”

Findhorn nodded. “You’re probably right. Not even a maniac would come out looking for us on a night like this. Valuable hours of safety, Johnny,” he murmured quietly, “and we would be better employed putting even more valuable miles between ourselves and brother Jap.”

Nicolson looked at him, looked away again. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking, but Findhorn knew something at least of what he must be thinking, and swore quietly to himself. He was making it as easy as possible—Nicolson had only to agree with him.

“The chances of there being any survivors around are remote,” Findhorn went on. “Look at the night. Our chances of picking anybody up are even more remote. Again, look at the night—and as you say yourself we can’t see a damn’ thing ahead. And the chances of piling ourselves up on a reef—or even a fair-sized island—are pretty high.” He looked out a side window at the driving fury of the rain and the low, scudding cloud. “We haven’t a hope of a star-sight while this lot lasts.”

“Our chances are pretty thin,” Nicolson agreed. He lit a cigarette, automatically returned the spent match to its box, watched the blue smoke eddying lazily in the soft light of the binnacle, then looked up at Findhorn. “How much do you give for the chances of any survivors on the Kerry Dancer, sir?”

Findhorn looked into the ice-cold blue of the eyes, looked away again, said nothing.

“If they took to the boats before the weather broke down, they’ll be on an island now,” Nicolson went on quietly. “There are dozens of them around. If they took to the boats later, they’re gone long ago—a dozen of these coasters couldn’t muster one regulation lifeboat between them. If there are any survivors we can save, they’ll still be on the Kerry Dancer. A needle in a haystack, I know, but a bigger needle than a raft or a baulk of wood.”

Captain Findhorn cleared his throat. “I appreciate all this, Mr. Nicolson—”

“She’ll be drifting more or less due south,” Nicolson interrupted. He looked up from the chart on the table. “Two knots, maybe three. Heading for the Merodong Straits—bound to pile up later tonight. We could come round to port a bit, still give Mesana Island a good offing and have a quick looksee.”

“You’re assuming an awful lot,” Findhorn said slowly.

“I know. I’m assuming that she wasn’t sunk hours ago.” Nicolson smiled briefly, or maybe it was only a grimace, it was very dark in the wheelhouse now. “Perhaps I’m feeling fey tonight, sir. Perhaps it’s my Scandinavian ancestry coming out … An hour and a half should get us there. Even in this head sea, not more than two.”

“All right, damn you!” Findhorn said irritably. “Two hours, and then we turn back.” He glanced at the luminous figures on his wrist-watch. “Six twenty-five now. The deadline is eight-thirty.” He spoke briefly to the helmsman, turned and followed Nicolson, who was holding the screen door open for him against the wild lurching of the Viroma. Outside the howling wind was a rushing, irresistible wall that pinned them helplessly, for seconds on end, against the after end of the bridge, fighting for their breath: the rain was no longer rain but a deluge, driving horizontally, sleet-cold, razor edged, that seemed to lay exposed foreheads and cheeks open to the bone: the wind in the rigging was no longer a whine but an ululating scream, climbing off the register, hurtful to the ear. The Viroma was moving in on the heart of the typhoon.

FOUR

Two hours, Captain Findhorn had given them, two hours at the outside limit, but it might as well have been two minutes or two days, for all the hope that remained. Everyone knew that, knew that it was just a gesture, maybe to their own consciences, maybe to the memory of a few wounded soldiers, a handful of nurses and a radio operator who had leaned over his transmitting key and died. But still only a hopeless gesture …

They found the Kerry Dancer at twenty-seven minutes past eight, three minutes before the deadline. They found her, primarily, because Nicolson’s predictions had been uncannily correct, the Kerry Dancer was almost exactly where he had guessed they would find her and a long, jagged fork of lightning had, for a brief, dazzling moment, illumined the gaunt, burnt-out scarecrow as brightly as the noonday sun. Even then they would never have found her had not the hurricane force of the wind dropped away to the merest whisper, and the blinding rain vanished as suddenly as if someone had turned off a gigantic tap in the heavens.

That there was no miracle about the almost instantaneous transition from the clamour of the storm to this incredible quiet Captain Findhorn was grimly aware. Always, at the heart of a typhoon, lies this oasis of peace. This breathless, brooding hush was no stranger to him—but on the two or three previous occasions he had had plenty of sea room, could turn where he wished when the going became too bad. But not this time. To the north, to the west and to the southwest their escape route was blocked off by islands of the archipelago. They couldn’t have entered the heart of the typhoon at a worse time.

And they couldn’t have done it at a better time. If anyone lived on the Kerry Dancer conditions for rescue would never be more favourable than this. If anyone lived—and from what they could see of her in the light of their canal searchlights and the port signalling lamp as they bore slowly down on her, it seemed unlikely. More, it seemed impossible. In the harsh glare of the searchlights she seemed more forlorn, more abandoned than ever, so deep now by the head that the for’ard well deck had vanished, and the fo’c’sle, like some lonely rock, now awash, now buried deep as the big seas rolled it under—the wind had gone, the rain had gone, but the seas were almost as high as ever, and even more confused.

Captain Findhorn gazed out silently at the Kerry Dancer his eyes bleak. Caught in a cone of light, broached to and broadside on to the waves, she was rolling sluggishly in the troughs, her centre of gravity pulled right down by the weight of hundreds of tons of water. Dead, he thought to himself, dead if ever a ship was dead but she just won’t go. Dead, and that’s her ghost, he thought inconsequentially, and ghost-like she seemed, eerie and foreboding with the searchlights shining through the twisted rectangular gaps in her burnt-out upper-works. She reminded him vaguely, tantalisingly, of something, then all of a sudden he had it—the Death Ship of the Ancient Mariner, with the red, barred sun shining through the skeleton of her timbers. No deader than this one here, he thought grimly. Nothing could have been emptier of life than this .… He became aware that the chief officer was standing just behind his shoulder.

“Well, there she is, Johnny,” he murmured “Candidate-elect for the Sargasso Sea, or wherever dead ships go. It’s been a nice trip. Let’s be getting back.”

“Yes, sir.” Nicolson didn’t seem to have heard him. “Permission to take a boat across, sir.”

“No.” Findhorn’s refusal was flat, emphatic. “We’ve seen all we want to see.”

“We’ve come back a long way for this.” There was no particular inflection in Nicolson’s voice. “Vannier, the bo’sun, Ferris, myself and a couple of others. We could make it.”

“Maybe you could.” Bracing himself against the heavy rolling of the Viroma, Findhorn made his way to the outer edge of the port wing and stared down at the sea. Even in the lee of the ship, there were still ten or fifteen feet between troughs and wavecrests, the short, steep seas confused and treacherous. “And maybe you couldn’t. I don’t propose to risk anyone’s life just to find that out.”

Nicolson said nothing. Seconds passed, then Findhorn turned to him again, the faintest edge of irritation in his voice.

“Well, what’s the matter. Still feeling—what do you call it?—fey? Is that it?” He flung out an impatient arm in the direction of the Kerry Dancer. “Damn it all, man, she’s obviously abandoned. Burnt-out and hammered till she looks like a floating colander. Do you honestly think there would be any survivors after she had been through that little lot? And even if there were, they’re bound to see our lights. Why aren’t they all dancing about the upper deck—if there’s any deck left—waving their shirts above their heads? Can you tell me that?” Captain Findhorn was being heavily sarcastic.

“No idea, sir, though I should imagine a badly-wounded soldier—McKinnon said there were a few stretcher cases aboard—would find it difficult, far too difficult, even to get out of bed and take his shirt off, far less wave it all over the upper deck,” Nicolson said dryly. “A favour, sir. Switch our searchlights off and on, a few 12-pounder ack-ack shots, half-a-dozen rockets. If there’s anyone left alive, that’ll attract their attention.”

Findhorn considered for a moment, then nodded his head. “It’s the least I can do, and I don’t suppose there’s a Jap within fifty miles. Go ahead, Mr. Nicolson.”

But the flicking on and off of the searchlights, the flat, sharp crack of the 12-pounder echoing emptily over the sea had no effect, just no effect at all. The Kerry Dancer looked even more lifeless than before, a floating, burnt-out skeleton, deeper than ever in the water, the fo’c’sle only awash now in the deepest troughs. And then came the rockets, seven or eight of them, dazzling white in the pitchy darkness, curving away in shallow arcs to the west; one of them landed on the poop of the Kerry Dancer, lay there for long seconds bathing the heaving deck in a fierce white glare, then sputtering to extinction. And still nothing moved aboard the Kerry Dancer, no sign of life at all.

“Well, that’s it.” Captain Findhorn sounded a little weary: even with no hope in the first place he was still disappointed, more than he would have cared to admit. “Satisfied, Mr. Nicolson?”

“Captain, sir!” It was Vannier speaking before Nicolson could answer, his voice high-pitched, excited. “Over there, sir. Look!”

Findhorn had steadied himself on the handrail and had his night glasses to his eyes before Vannier had finished talking. For a few seconds he stood motionless, then he swore softly, lowered his glasses and turned to Nicolson. Nicolson forestalled him.

“I can see it, sir. Breakers. Less than a mile south, of the Kerry Dancer—she’ll pile up there in twenty minutes, half an hour. Metsana, it must be—it’s not just a reef.”

“Metsana it is,” Findhorn growled. “Good God, I never dreamed we were so close! That settles it. Cut the lights. Full ahead, hard a starboard and keep her 090—biggest possible offing in the shortest possible time. We’re about due to move out of the eye of the typhoon any minute now and heaven only knows how the wind is going to break—what the devil!”

Nicolson’s hand was on his upper arm, the lean fingers digging hard into his flesh. His left arm was stretched out, finger pointing towards the stern of the sinking ship.

“I saw a light just now—just after ours went out.” His voice was very quiet, almost hushed. “A very faint light—a candle, or maybe even a match. The porthole nearest the well-deck.”

Findhorn looked at him, stared out at the dark, tenebrous silhouette of the steamer, then shook his head.

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Nicolson. Some optical trick, nothing else. The retina can hold some queer after-images, or maybe it was just the scuttle reflecting the dying glow from one of our—”

“I don’t make mistakes of that kind,” Nicolson interrupted flatly.

A few seconds passed, seconds of complete silence, then Findhorn spoke again: “Anybody else see that light?” The voice was calm, impersonal enough, the faint edge of anger just showing through.

Again the silence, longer this time, then Findhorn turned abruptly on his heel. “Full ahead, quartermaster, and—Mr. Nicolson! What are you doing?”

Nicolson replaced the phone he had been using without any sign of haste. “Just asking for a little light on the subject,” he murmured laconically. He turned his back to the captain and gazed out over the sea.

Findhorn’s mouth tightened; he took a few quick steps forward but slowed up suddenly as the port light switched on, wavered uncertainly, then settled on the aftercastle of the Kerry Dancer. More slowly still the captain came alongside Nicolson, shoulder to shoulder, both hands reaching up for the dodger rail to steady himself: but seeking balance alone could not have accounted for the strength of his grip on the rail, a grip that tightened and tightened until the straining knuckles were burnished ivory in the washback of light from the beam pinned on the Kerry Dancer.

The Kerry Dancer was barely three hundred yards away now, and there could be no doubt about it, none at all. Everybody saw it, clearly—the narrow scuttle swinging in, then the long, bare arm stretching out and frantically waving a white towel or sheet, an arm that withdrew suddenly, thrust out a flaming bundle either of paper or rags, held on to it until the flames began to lick and twist around the wrist, then dropped it hissing and smoking, into the sea.

Captain Findhorn sighed, a long, heavy sigh, and unclamped his aching fingers from the dodger rail. His shoulders sagged, the tired, dispirited droop of a man no longer young, a man who has been carrying too heavy a burden for too long a time. Beneath the dark tan his face was almost drained of colour.

“I’m sorry, my boy.” It was only a whisper; he spoke without turning round, his head shaking slowly from side to side. “Thank God you saw it in time.”

No one heard him, for he was talking only to himself. Nicolson was already gone, sliding on his forearms down the teak ladder rails without his feet touching one step, before the captain had started speaking. And even before he was finished Nicolson had knocked off the gripes’ release links on the port lifeboat, and was already easing off the handbrake, shouting for the bo’sun to muster the emergency crew at the double.

Fireman’s axe in one hand, a heavy, rubber-sheathed torch in the other, Nicolson made his way quickly along the fore and aft passage through the Kerry Dancer’s gutted midships superstructure. The steel deck beneath his feet had been buckled and twisted into fantastic shapes by the intense heat, and pieces of charred wood were still smouldering in sheltered corners. Once or twice the heavy, jerky rolling of the ship threw him against the walls of the passage and the fierce heat struck at him even through the canvas gloves on his outflung hands: that the metal should still be so hot after hours of gale force winds and torrential rain gave him a very vivid idea of the tremendous heat that must have been generated by the fire. He wondered, vaguely, what sort of cargo she had been carrying: probably contraband of some sort.

Two-thirds of the way along the passage, on the right hand side, he noticed a door, still intact, still locked. He leaned back and smashed at the lock, straight-legged, with the sole of his shoe: the door gave half an inch, but held. He swung his axe viciously against the lock, kicked the door open with his foot, pressed the button of his torch and stepped over the coaming. Two charred, shapeless bundles lay on the floor at his feet. They might have been human beings once, they might not. The stench was evil, intolerable, striking at his wrinkling nostrils like a physical blow. Nicolson was back in the passage within three seconds, hooking the door shut with the blade of the axe. Vannier was standing there now, the big red fire extinguisher under his arm, and Nicolson knew that even in those brief moments Vannier had had time to look inside. His eyes were wide and sick, his face like paper.

Nicolson turned abruptly, continued down the passage, Vannier behind him, followed by the bo’sun with a sledge and Ferris with a crowbar. He kicked open two more doors, shone his torch inside. Empty. He came to the break of the after well-deck, and here he could see better, for all the lights of the Viroma were trained there. Quickly he looked round for a ladder or companionway, as quickly found it—a few charred sticks of wood lying on the steel deck eight feet below. A wooden companionway, completely destroyed by the fire. Nicolson turned swiftly to the carpenter.

“Ferris, get back to the boat and tell Ames and Docherty to work it aft as far as the well deck here. I don’t care how they do it, or how much damage is done to the boat—we can’t get sick and wounded men up here. Leave your crowbar.”

Nicolson had swung down on his hands and dropped lightly to the deck below before he had finished speaking. In ten paces he had crossed the deck, rung the haft of his axe hard against the steel door of the aftercastle.

“Anyone inside there?” he shouted.

For two or three seconds there was complete silence, then there came a confused, excited babble of voices, all calling to him at once. Nicolson turned quickly to McKinnon, saw his own smile reflected in the wide grin on the bo’sun’s face, stepped back a pace and played his torch over the steel door. One clip was hanging loose, swinging pendulum-like with the heavy, water-logged rolling of the Kerry Dancer, the other seven jammed hard in position.

The seven-pound sledgehammer was a toy in McKinnon’s hands. He struck seven times in all, once for each clip, the metallic clangs reverberating hollowly throughout the sinking ship. And then the door had swung open of its own accord and they were inside.

Nicolson flashed his torch over the back of the steel door and his mouth tightened: only one clip, the one that had been hanging loose, was continued through the door—the rest just ended in smooth rivet heads. And then he was facing aft again, the beam circling slowly round the aftercastle.

It was dark and cold, a dank, dripping dungeon of a place with no covering at all on the slippery steel deckplates, and barely enough headroom for a tall man to stand upright. Three-tiered metal bunks, innocent of either mattresses or blankets, were ranged round both sides, and about a foot or so above each bunk a heavy iron ring was welded to the bulkheads. A long, narrow table ran fore and aft the length of the compartment, with wooden stools on either side.

There were maybe twenty people in the room, Nicolson estimated; some sitting on the bottom bunks, one or two standing, hanging on to the uprights of the bunks to brace themselves, but most of them still lying down. Soldiers they were, those who were lying on the bunks, and some of them looked as if they would never get up again: Nicolson had seen too many dead men, the waxen cheek, the empty lustreless eye, the boneless relaxation that inhabits a shapeless bundle of clothes. There were also a few nurses in khaki skirts and belted tunics, and two or three civilians. Everyone, even the dusky skinned nurses, seemed white and strained and sick. The Kerry Dancer must have lain in the troughs since early afternoon, rolling wickedly, continuously, for endless hours.

“Who’s in charge here?” Nicolson’s voice beat back at him hollowly from the iron walls of the aftercastle.

“I think he is. Rather, I think he thinks he is.” Slim, short, very erect, with silver hair drawn back in a tight bun beneath a liberally be-skewered straw hat, the elderly lady by Nicolson’s side still had the fire of authority in the washed-out blue of her eyes. There was disgust in them now, too, as she pointed down at the man huddled over a half-empty whisky bottle on the table. “But he’s drunk, of course.”

“Drunk, madam? Did I hear you say I was drunk?” Here was one man who wasn’t pale and sick, Nicolson realised: face, neck, even the ears were burnt brick in colour, a dramatic background for the snow-white hair and bristling white eyebrows. “You have the effrontery to—to—” He rose spluttering to his feet, hands pulling down the jacket of his white linen suit. “By heaven, madam, if you were a man—”

“I know,” Nicolson interrupted. “You’d horsewhip her within an inch of her life. Shut up and sit down.” He turned to the woman again. “What is your name, please?”

“Miss Plenderleith. Constance Plenderleith.”

“The ship is sinking, Miss Plenderleith,” Nicolson said rapidly. “She’s lower by the head every minute. We’ll be on the rocks in about half an hour, and the typhoon is going to hit us again any moment.” Two or three torches were on now, and he looked round the silent half-circle of faces. “We must hurry. Most of you look like death, and I’m quite sure you feel that way, but we must hurry. We have a lifeboat waiting on the port side, not thirty feet away. Miss Plenderleith, how many can’t walk that far?”

“Ask Miss Drachmann. She’s the sister in charge.” Miss Plenderleith’s quite different tone left no doubt that she thoroughly approved of Miss Drachmann.

“Miss Drachmann?” Nicolson asked expectantly.

A girl in a faraway corner turned to look at him. Her face was in shadow. “Only two, I’m afraid, sir.” Beneath the overtones of strain, the voice was soft and low and musical.

“You’re afraid?”

“All the other stretcher cases died this evening,” she said quietly. “Five of them, sir. They were very sick—and the weather was very bad.” Her voice was not quite steady.

“Five of them,” Nicolson repeated. He shook his head slowly, wonderingly.

“Yes, sir.” Her arm tightened around the child standing on the seat beside her, while her free hand pulled a blanket more tightly round him. “And this little one is just very hungry and very tired.” Gently she tried to remove a grubby thumb from his mouth, but he resisted her efforts and continued to inspect Nicolson with a certain grave detachment.

“He’ll feed and sleep well tonight,” Nicolson promised. “Right, all those who can, walk into the boat. Fittest first—you can help steady the boat and guide the wounded into it. How many arm or leg wounds, apart from the stretcher cases, nurse?”

“Five, sir.”

“No need to call me ‘sir’. You five wait till there’s someone down there to help you.” He tapped the whisky-drinker on the shoulder. “You lead the way.”

“Me?” He was outraged. “I’m in charge here, sir—the captain, in effect, and a captain is always last to—”

“Lead the way,” Nicolson repeated patiently.

“Tell him who you are, Foster,” Miss Plenderleith suggested acidly.

“I certainly shall.” He was on his feet now, a black gladstone bag in one hand, the half-empty bottle in the other. “Farnholme is the name, sir. Brigadier Foster Farnholme.” He bowed ironically. “At your service, sir.”

“Delighted to hear it.” Nicolson smiled coldly. “On your way.” Behind him, Miss Plenderleith’s low chuckle of amusement came unnaturally loud in the sudden silence.

“By God, you shall pay for this, you insolent young—”

He broke off hurriedly and took a step backwards as Nicolson advanced on him. “Dammit all, sir,” he spluttered. “The traditions of the sea. Women and children first.”

“I know. Then we’ll all line up on the deck and die like little gentlemen while the band plays us under. I won’t tell you again, Farnholme.”

“Brigadier Farnholme to you—you—”

“You’ll get a seventeen gun salute as you go aboard,” Nicolson promised. His stiff-armed push sent Farnholme, still clutching his bag, reeling back into the arms of the expectant bo’sun. McKinnon had him outside in less than four seconds.

Nicolson’s torch probed round the aftercastle and came to rest on a cloaked figure sitting huddled on a bunk.

“How about you?” Nicolson asked. “You hurt?”

“Allah is good to those who love Allah.” The voice was deep, almost sepulchral, the dark eyes deepset above an eagle nose. He stood up, tall, dignified, pulling his black cap tightly over his head. “I am unhurt.”

“Good. You next, then.” Nicolson swivelled the torch round, picked out a corporal and two soldiers. “How do you boys feel?”

“Ach, we’re fine.” The thin, dark corporal withdrew his puzzled, suspicious stare from the doorway through which Farnholme had just vanished and grinned at Nicolson. It was a grin that belied the bloodshot eyes, the yellow, fever-ridden face. “Britain’s hardy sons. We’re just in splendid form.”

“You’re a liar,” Nicolson said pleasantly. “But thanks very much. Off you go. Mr. Vannier, will you see them into the boat, please? Have them jump every time the lifeboat rides up near the welldeck—it should come within a couple of feet. And a bowline round each person—just in case. The bo’sun will give you a hand.”

He waited until the broad, retreating back of the cloaked man had vanished through the door, then looked curiously at the little lady by his side. “Who’s the boy friend, Miss Plenderleith?”

“He’s a Muslim priest, from Borneo.” She pursed her lips in disapproval. “I spent four years in Borneo once. Every river bandit I ever heard of was a Muslim.”

“He should have a wealthy congregation,” Nicolson murmured. “Right, Miss Plenderleith, you next, then the nurses. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind staying a bit longer, Miss Drachmann? You can see to it that we don’t do too much damage to your stretcher cases when we start carrying them out.”

He turned without waiting for a reply and hurried through the door on the heels of the last of the nurses. On the well-deck he stood blinking for a few seconds, unaccustomed eyes adjusting themselves to the fierce glare of light from the Viroma that threw everything into harsh relief, a merciless whiteness broken by black, impenetrable blocks of shadow. The Viroma couldn’t be more than a hundred and fifty yards away: with seas like these, Captain Findhorn was gambling, and gambling high.

Less than ten minutes had elapsed since they had come on board, but the Kerry Dancer was already appreciably lower in the water; the seas were beginning to break over the starboard side of the after well-deck. The lifeboat was on the port side, one moment plunging a dozen feet down into the depths of a trough, the next riding up almost to the level of the well-deck rail, the men in the boat screwing shut their eyes and averting their heads as they were caught in the glare of the searchlights. Even as Nicolson watched, the corporal released his grip on the rail, stepped into the lifeboat, was grabbed by Docherty and Ames and dropped from sight like a stone. Already McKinnon had swung one of the nurses over the rail and was holding her in readiness for the next upward surge of the boat.

Nicolson stepped to the rail, switched on his torch and peered down over the side. The lifeboat was down in the trough, smashed jarringly into the side of the Kerry Dancer, despite all the crew could do to fend her off, as opposing seas flung the lifeboat and ship together: the two upper planks of the lifeboat were stove in and broken, but the gunwale of tough American elm still held. Fore and aft Farnholme and the Muslim priest clung desperately to the ropes that held them alongside, doing their best to keep the boat in position and to ease it against the shocks of the sea and the hull of the Kerry Dancer: as far as Nicolson could judge in the confusion and near darkness, their best was surprisingly good.

“Sir!” Vannier was by his side, his voice agitated, his arm pointing out into the darkness. “We’re almost on the rocks!”

Nicolson straightened up and stared along the line of the pointing arm. The sheet-lightning was still playing around the horizon, but even in the intervals of darkness there was no difficulty in seeing it—a long, irregular line of seething white, blooming and fading, creaming and dying as the heavy seas broke over the outlying rocks of the coastline. Two hundred yards away now, Nicolson estimated, two fifty at the most, the Kerry Dancer had been drifting south at almost twice the speed he’d estimated. For a moment he stood there immobile, racing mind calculating his chances, then he staggered and almost fell as the Kerry Dancer struck heavily, with a grinding, tearing screech of metal, on an underground reef, the decks canting far over on the port side. Nicolson caught a glimpse of McKinnon, feet wide braced on the deck, an arm crooked tightly round the nurse outside the rail, bared teeth white and deepset eyes screwed almost shut as he twisted round and stared into the searchlight, and he knew that McKinnon was thinking the same thing as himself.

“Vannier!” Nicolson’s voice was quick, urgent. “Get the Aldis out of the boat. Signal the captain to stand well off, tell him it’s shoal ground, with rocks, and we’re fast. Ferris—take the bo’sun’s place. Heave ‘em in any old how. We’re pinned for’ard and if she slews round head into the sea we’ll never get anybody off. Right, McKinnon, come with me.”

He was back inside the aftercastle in five seconds, McKinnon close behind him. He swept his torch once, quickly, round the metal bunks. Eight left in all—the five walking wounded, Miss Drachmann and the two seriously injured men lying stretched out at full length on the lowest bunks. One was breathing stertorously through his open mouth, moaning and twisting from side to side in deep-drugged sleep. The other lay very still, his breathing so shallow as to be almost imperceptible, his face a waxen ivory: only the slow, aimless wandering of pain-filled eyes showed that he was still alive.

“Right, you five.” Nicolson gestured at the soldiers. “Outside as fast as you can. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He reached out, tore a knapsack from the hands of a soldier who was struggling to slip his arms through the straps, flung it into a corner. “You’ll be lucky to get out of this with your life, far less your damn luggage. Hurry up and get outside.”

Four of the soldiers, urged on by McKinnon, stumbled quickly through the door. The fifth—a pale-faced boy of about twenty—had made no move to rise from his seat. His eyes were wide, his mouth working continuously and his hands were clasped tightly in front of him. Nicolson bent over him.

“Did you hear what I said?” he asked softly.

“He’s my pal.” He didn’t look at Nicolson, gestured to one of the bunks behind him. “He’s my best friend. I’m staying with him.”

“My God!” Nicolson murmured. “What a time for heroics.” He raised his voice, nodded to the door. “Get going.”

The boy swore at him, softly, continuously, but broke off as a dull booming sound echoed and vibrated throughout the ship, the noise accompanied by a sharp, sickening lurch even farther to port.

“Water-tight bulkhead abaft the engine-room gone, I’m thinking, sir.” McKinnon’s soft-spoken Highland voice was calm, almost conversational.

“And she’s filling up aft,” Nicolson nodded. He wasted no further time. He stooped over the soldier, twisted his left hand in his shirt, jerked him savagely to his feet, then stiffened in sudden surprise as the nurse threw herself forward and caught his free right arm in both her hands. She was tall, taller than he had thought, her hair brushed his eyes and he could smell the faint fragrance of sandalwood. What caught and held his almost shocked attention, however, was her eyes—or, rather, her eye, for the beam from McKinnon’s torch lit up only the right hand side of her face. It was an eye of a colour and an intensity that he had seen only once before—in his own mirror. A clear Arctic blue, it was very Arctic right then, and hostile.

“Wait! Don’t hit him—there are other ways, you know.”

The voice was still the same, soft, well-modulated, but the earlier respect had given way to something edged with near-contempt. “You do not understand. He is not well.” She turned away from Nicolson and touched the boy lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, Alex. You must go, you know. I’ll look after your friend—you know I will. Please, Alex.”

The boy stirred uncertainly and looked over his shoulder at the man lying in the bunk behind him. The girl caught his hand, smiled at him and urged him gently to his feet. He muttered something, hesitated, then stumbled past Nicolson out on to the well-deck.

“Congratulations.” Nicolson nodded towards the open door. “You next, Miss Drachmann.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You heard me promise him—and you asked me to stay behind a little time ago.”

“That was then, not now,” Nicolson said impatiently. “We’ve no time to fool around with stretchers now—not with a slippery deck canted over at twenty degrees. Surely you can see that.”

She stood irresolute a moment, then nodded without speaking and turned round to grope in the shadowed darkness of a bunk behind her.

Nicolson said roughly, “Hurry up. Never mind your precious belongings. You heard what I said to that soldier.”

“Not my belongings,” she said quietly. She turned round and pulled a wrap more tightly round the sleeping child in her arms. “But very precious to someone, I’m sure.”

Nicolson stared at the child for a moment, then shook his head slightly. “Call me what you like, Miss Drachmann. I just plain forgot. And you can call that what you like—‘criminal negligence’ will do for a start.”

“Our lives are all with you.” The tone was no longer hostile. “You cannot think of everything.” She walked past him along the sharply sloping deck, propping herself against the line of bunks with her free hand. Again the faint smell of the sandalwood drifted past him, a scent so faint that it was just a fleeting memory lost in the dank airlessness of the aftercastle. Near the door she slipped and almost fell, and McKinnon put out his hand to help her. She took it without any hesitation, and they went out on deck together.

Within a minute both the seriously injured men had been brought out on deck, Nicolson carrying the one and McKinnon the other. The Kerry Dancer, already settling deep by the stern, was still pinned fast for’ard, working jerkily round with every pounding wave that smashed along its starboard length, the bows coming slowly, inexorably, head on to the seas. A minute at the most, Nicolson estimated, and the lifeboat would have lost the last of its shelter and would be exposed, head on, to the heavy combers shorter and steeper than ever as they raced in over the shoaling seabed. Already the lifeboat, now plunging, now rolling in short, vicious arcs, was corkscrewing almost uncontrollably in the quartering seas, shipping gallons of water at a time over the port gunwale. Not even a minute left, Nicolson felt sure. He jumped over the rail, waited for the bo’sun to hand him the first of the two injured men. Seconds only, just seconds, and any more embarkation would be quite impossible—the lifeboat would have to cast off to save itself. Seconds, and the devil of it was that they had to work with sick men, maybe even dying men, in almost total darkness: the Kerry Dancer was so far round now that her superstructure completely blocked off the searchlights of the Viroma.

Nicolson, leaning inboard against the slope of the deck, took the first man from McKinnon, waited until the bo’sun had hooked his fingers in his belt, twisted round and leaned far out as the lifeboat came surging up out of the darkness into the thin beam of Vannier’s torch. Docherty and Ames, each securely anchored by a couple of soldiers sitting on the side benches, rode up almost level with Nicolson—with the stern of the Kerry Dancer settling in the water the lifeboat was now riding comparatively higher—caught the wounded man neatly at the first attempt, had him lowered to the thwarts just as the lifeboat dropped from sight and fell heavily into the next trough in a welter of spray and phosphorescent foam. Only six or seven seconds later the other wounded man had joined his companion in the bottom of the boat. Inevitably their handling had been hurried, rough, and must have been agonising, but neither man had uttered even a whimper.

Nicolson called to Miss Drachmann, but she pushed forward two of the walking wounded: they jumped together, landed safely in the boat. One more soldier to come: even with all speed it was going to be touch and go, Nicolson thought grimly—the Kerry Dancer was far round into the sea already. But the last soldier didn’t come. In the darkness Nicolson couldn’t see him. but he could hear his voice, high-pitched and fearful, at least fifteen feet away. He could hear the nurse talking too, urgency in the soft, persuasive voice, but her arguments didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere.

“What the hell’s the matter there?” Nicolson shouted savagely.

There was a confused murmur of voices, and then the girl called, “Just a minute, please.”

Nicolson twisted round, looked for’ard along the port side of the Kerry Dancer, then flung up a forearm in instinctive defence as the searchlights of the Viroma cleared the slowly swinging superstructure of the Kerry Dancer and struck at his dark-accustomed eyes. The Kerry Dancer was right round now, heading straight into the seas, and the lifeboat with all protection gone. He could see the first of the steep-walled, spume-veined waves racing smoothly, silently, down the listing side of the ship, the next not far behind. How big they were Nicolson couldn’t tell: the searchlights, paralleling the surface of the sea, high-lit the broken white of the wave-tops but left the troughs in impenetrable blackness. But they were big enough, too big and too steep: half-a-dozen of these and the lifeboat would fill right up and overturn. At the very least they would flood the engine air intake, and then the results would be just as disastrous.

Nicolson wheeled round, vaulted over the rail, shouted at Vannier and Ferris to get into the lifeboat, called to McKinnon to cast off aft, and half-ran, half-stumbled up the heeling, slippery deck to where the girl and the soldier stood half-way between the aftercastle screen door and the ladder leading to the poop-deck above.

He wasted no time on ceremony but caught the girl by the shoulders, twisted her round and propelled her none too gently towards the ship’s side, turned round again, grabbed the soldier and started to drag him across the deck. The boy resisted and, as Nicolson sought for a better grip, struck out viciously, catching Nicolson squarely between the eyes. Nicolson stumbled and half fell on the wet, sloping deck, got to his feet again like a cat and jumped towards the soldier, then swore, softly, bitterly, as his swinging arm was caught and held from behind. Before he could free it the soldier had turned and flung himself up the poop ladder, his studded soles scrabbling frantically on the metal steps.

“You fool!” Nicolson said quietly. “You crazy little fool!” Roughly he freed his arm, made to speak again, saw the bo’sun, in sharp silhouette against the glare of the searchlight, beckoning frantically from where he stood outside the well-deck rail. Nicolson waited no longer. He turned the nurse round, hustled her across the deck, swung her across the rail. McKinnon caught her arm, stared down at the lifeboat two-thirds lost in the shrouded gloom of a trough and waited for his chance to jump. Just for a moment he looked round and Nicolson could tell from the anger and exasperation on his face that he knew what had happened.

“Do you need me, sir?”

“No.” Nicolson shook his head decisively. “The lifeboat’s more important.” He stared down at the boat as she came surging up sluggishly into the light, water from a high, breaking wave-crest cascading into her bows.” My God, McKinnon, she’s filling right up already! Get her away from here as fast as you can! I’ll cast off for’ard.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Mckinnon nodded matter-of-fact acknowledgment, judged his time perfectly, stepped off the side on to the mast thwart, taking the girl with him: ready hands caught and steadied them as the boat dropped down again into the darkness of a trough. A second later the for’ard rope went snaking down into the lifeboat, Nicolson bending over the rail and staring down after it.

“Everything all right, bo’sun?” he called.

“Aye, no bother, sir. I’m going under the stern, in the lee.”

Nicolson turned away without waiting to see what happened. The chances of a water-logged lifeboat broaching to in the initial moments of getting under way in those heavy seas were no better than even, but if McKinnon said everything was under control then everything was: and if he said he would heave to under the stern, he would be waiting there. Nicolson shared Captain Findhorn’s implicit faith in McKinnon’s initiative, reliability and outstanding seamanship.

He reached the top of the poop-deck ladder and stood there with his hand on the rail, looking slowly round him. Ahead was the superstructure, and in the distance, beyond it and on either side of it, stretched the long, lean shadow of the tanker, a dark smudge on the water, half-seen, half-imagined behind the white brilliance of its searchlights. But the lights, Nicolson suddenly realised, weren’t nearly as brilliant or intense as they had been, even ten minutes earlier. For a fleeting moment he thought that the Viroma must be standing out to sea, working her way clear of the shoal water, then almost instantly realised, from the size and unaltered fore-and-aft position of the vague silhouette, that it hadn’t moved at all. The ship hadn’t changed, the searchlights hadn’t changed—but the beams from the searchlights were no longer the same, they seemed to have lost their power, to be swallowed up, dissipated in the blackness of the sea. And there was something else, too—the sea was black, a darkness unrelieved by the slightest patch of white, by even one breaking whitecap on a wave: and then all of a sudden Nicolson had it—oil.

There could be no doubt about it—the sea between the two ships was covered in a wide, thick film of oil. The Viroma must have been pumping it overboard for the past five minutes or so—hundreds of gallons of it, enough to draw the teeth of all but the wildest storm. Captain Findhorn must have seen the Kerry Dancer swinging head on to the sea and quickly realised the danger of the lifeboat being swamped by inboard breaking seas. Nicolson smiled to himself, an empty smile, and turned away. Admitted the oil all but guaranteed the safety of the lifeboat, he still didn’t relish the prospect of having his eyes burnt, ears, nostrils and mouth clogged, and being fouled from head to foot when he went overboard in just a few seconds—he and young Alex, the soldier.

Nicolson walked easily aft across the poop-deck towards the stern. The soldier was standing there, pressed against the taffrail in a stiff, unnatural fashion, his back to it and his hands grasping the stanchions on either side. Nicolson went close up to him, saw the wide, fixed eyes, the trembling of a body that has been tensed far too long; a leap into the water with young Alex, Nicolson thought dryly, was an invitation to suicide, either by drowning or strangulation—terror lent inhuman strength and a grip that eased only with death. Nicolson sighed, looked over the taffrail and switched on the torch in his hand. McKinnon was exactly where he had said he would be, hove to in the lee of the stern, and not fifteen feet away.

The torch snapped off and quietly, without haste, Nicolson turned away from the rail and stood in front of the young soldier. Alex hadn’t moved, his breath came in short, shallow gasps. Nicolson transferred the torch to his left hand, lined it up, snapped it on, caught a brief glimpse of a white, strained face, bloodless lips drawn back over bared teeth and staring eyes that screwed tight shut as the light struck at them, then hit him once, accurately and very hard, under the corner of the jawbone. He caught the boy before he had started falling, heaved him over the taffrail, slid across himself, stood there for a second, sharply limned in a cone of light from a torch new lit in the boat—McKinnon had prudently bided his time until he had heard the sharp thud of the blow—crooked an arm round the young soldier’s waist and jumped. They hit the water within five feet of the boat, vanished almost silently beneath the oil-bound sea, surfaced, were caught at once by waiting hands and dragged inside the lifeboat, Nicolson cursing and coughing, trying to clear gummed-up eyes, nose and ears, the young soldier lying motionless along the starboard side bench, Vannier and Miss Drachmann working over him with strips torn from Vannier’s shirt.

The passage back to the Viroma was not dangerous, just very brief and very rough indeed, with almost all the passengers so seasick and so weak that they had to be helped out of the boat when they finally came alongside the tanker. Within fifteen minutes of his jump into the water with the young soldier Nicolson had the lifeboat safely heaved home on her housing on the patent gravity davits, the last of the gripes in position and had turned for a final look at the Kerry Dancer. But there was no sign of her anywhere, she had vanished as if she had never been; she had filled up, slid off the reef and gone to the bottom. For a moment or two Nicolson stood staring out over the dark waters, then turned to the ladder at his side and climbed slowly up to the bridge.

FIVE

Half an hour later the Viroma was rolling steadily to the south-west under maximum power, the long, low blur of Metsana falling away off the starboard quarter and vanishing into the gloom. Strangely, the typhoon still held off, the hurricane winds had not returned. It could only be that they were moving with the track of the storm: but they had to move out, to break through it sometime.

Nicolson, showered, violently scrubbed and almost free from oil, was standing by the screen window on the bridge, talking quietly to the second mate when Captain Findhorn joined them. He tapped Nicolson lightly on the shoulder.

“A word with you in my cabin, if you please, Mr. Nicolson. You’ll be all right, Mr. Barrett?”

“Yes, sir, of course. I’ll call you if anything happens?” It was halfquestion, half-statement, and thoroughly typical of Barrett. A good many years older than Nicolson, stolid and unimaginative, Barrett was reliable enough but had no taste at all for responsibility, which was why he was still only a second officer.

“Do that.” Findhorn led the way through the chartroom to his day cabin—it was on the same deck as the bridge—closed the door, checked that the blackout scuttles were shut, switched on the light and waved Nicolson to a settee. He stooped to open a cupboard, and when he stood up he had a couple of glasses and an unopened bottle of Standfast in his hand. He broke the seal, poured three fingers into each glass, and pushed one across to Nicolson.

“Help yourself to water, Johnny. Lord only knows you’ve earned it—and a few hours’ sleep. Just as soon as you leave here.”

“Delighted,” Nicolson murmured. “Just as soon as you wake up, I’ll be off to my bunk. You didn’t leave the bridge all last night. Remember?”

“All right, all right.” Findhorn held up a hand in mock defence. “We’ll argue later.” He drank some whisky, then looked thoughtfully at Nicolson over the rim of his glass. “Well, Johnny, what did you make of her?”

“The Kerry Dancer?”

Findhorn nodded, waiting.

“A slaver,” Nicolson said quietly. “Remember that Arabian steamer the Navy stopped off Ras al Hadd last year?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Identical, as near as makes no difference. Steel doors all over the shop, main and upper decks. Most of them could only be opened from one side. Eight-inch scuttles—where there were scuttles. Ringbolts beside every bunk. Based on the islands, I suppose, and no lack of trade up round Amoy and Macao.”

“The twentieth century, eh?” Findhorn said softly. “Buying and selling in human lives.”

“Yes,” Nicolson said dryly. “But at least they keep ’em alive. Wait till they catch up with the civilised nations of the west and start on the wholesale stuff—poison gas, concentration camps, the bombing of open cities and what have you. Give ’em time. They’re only amateurs yet.”

“Cynicism, young man, cynicism.” Findhorn shook his head reprovingly. “Anyway, what you say about the Kerry Dancer bears out Brigadier Farnholme’s statements.”

“So you’ve been talking to his Lordship.” Nicolson grinned. “Court-martialling me at dawn tomorrow?”

“What’s that?”

“He didn’t approve of me,” Nicolson explained. “He wasn’t backward about saying so either.”

“Must have changed his mind.” Findhorn refilled their glasses.

“‘Able young man that, very able, but—ah—impetuous.’ Something like that. Very pukka, the Tuan Besar to the life.”

Nicolson nodded. “I can just see him stuffed to the ears, stewed to the gills and snoring his head off in an armchair in the Bengal Club. But he’s a curious bird. Did a good job with a rope in the lifeboat. How phoney do you reckon he is?”

“Not much.” Findhorn considered for a moment. “A little, but not much. A retired army officer for a certainty. Probably upped himself a little bit in rank after his retirement.”

“And what the hell’s a man like that doing aboard the Kerry Dancer?” Nicolson asked curiously.

“All sorts of people are finding themselves with all sorts of strange bed-fellows these days,” Findhorn replied. “And you’re wrong about the Bengal Club, Johnny. He didn’t come from Singapore. He’s some sort of businessman in Borneo—he was a bit vague about the business—and he joined the Kerry Dancer in Banjermasin, along with a few other Europeans who found the Japanese making things a little too hot for them. She was supposed to be sailing for Bali, and they hoped to find another ship there that would take them to Darwin. But apparently Siran—that’s the name of the captain, and a thoroughgoing bad lot according to old Farnholme—got radio orders from his bosses in Macassar to proceed to Kota Bharu. Farnholme bribed him to go to Singapore, and he agreed. Why, heaven only knows, with the Japs more or less knocking at the gates, but there’s always opportunity for sufficiently unscrupulous men to exploit a situation such as exists there just now. Or maybe they expected to make a quick fortune by charging the earth for passages out of Singapore. What they didn’t expect, obviously, was what happened—that the Army should commandeer the Kerry Dancer.”

“Yes, the army,” Nicolson murmured. “I wonder what happened to the soldiers—McKinnon says there were at least two dozen—who went aboard to see that the Kerry Dancer did go straight to Darwin, and no funny tricks?”

“I wonder.” Findhorn was tight-lipped. “Farnholme says they were quartered in the fo’c’sle.”

“With one of these clever little doors that you can only open from one side, maybe?”

“Maybe. Did you see it?”

Nicolson shook his head. “The whole fo’c’sle was practically under water by the time we went aboard. I shouldn’t be surprised. But it could have been jammed by bomb burst.” He swallowed some more of the whisky and grimaced in distaste, not at the drink but at his thoughts. “A pleasant little alternative, drowning or cremation. I should like to meet Captain Siran some day. I suspect a great number of other people would too … How are the rest of our passengers? They got anything to add?”

Findhorn shook his head. “Nothing. Too sick, too tired, too shocked or they just don’t know anything.”

“All sorted out, washed up and bedded down for the night, I suppose?”

“More or less. I’ve got them all over the ship. All the soldiers are together, aft—the two really sick boys in the hospital, the other eight in the smoke-room and the two spare engineers’ cabins on the port side. Farnholme and the priest are together in the engineers’ office.”

Nicolson grinned. “That should be worth seeing—the British Raj breathing the same air as the dusky heathen!”

“You’d be surprised,” Findhorn grunted. “They have a settee each there, a table between them and a bottle of whisky, almost full, on the table. They’re getting along very well indeed.”

“He had a half bottle when I saw him last,” Nicolson said thoughtfully. “I wonder—”

“Probably drank it without coming up for air once. He’s lugging around a great big gladstone bag and if you ask me it’s full of nothing but whisky bottles.”

“And the rest?”

“The what? Oh, yes. The little old lady’s in Walter’s room—he’s taken a mattress into his radio room. The senior nurse, the one that seems to be in charge—”

“Miss Drachmann?”

“That’s her. She and the child are in the apprentices’ cabin. And Vannier and the Fifth engineer have doubled up with Barrett and the fourth engineer—two nurses in Vannier’s cabin and the last of them in the Fifth’s.”

“All accounted for.” Nicolson sighed, lit a cigarette and watched the blue smoke drift lazily up to the ceiling. “I only hope they haven’t exchanged the frying pan for the fire. We having another go at the Carimata Straits, sir?”

“Why not? Where else can we—”

He broke off as Nicolson stretched out for the ringing telephone and put it to his ear.

“Yes, captain’s cabin … Oh, it’s you, Willy … Yes, he’s here. Hang on a minute.” Nicolson rose easily to his feet, vacating his seat for the captain. “The second engineer, sir.”

Findhorn talked for perhaps half a minute, mostly in monosyllabic grunts. Nicolson wondered idly what Willoughby had wanted. He had sounded almost bored but then nobody had ever seen Willoughby excited about anything. Ernest Willoughby never found anything in life worth getting excited about. A crazy, dreaming old coot—he was the oldest man in the ship—with a passion for literature matched only by his utter contempt for engines and the means whereby he earned his livelihood, he was the most honest man, and the most completely unselfish, that Nicolson had ever met. Willoughby himself took no pride in this, and was probably unaware of it: he was a man who had little, but wanted nothing at all. With him Nicolson had little in common, superficially at any rate: but, almost as if by the attraction of opposites, he had formed the greatest liking and admiration for the old engineer, and Willoughby, unmarried and with only a threadbare bed-sitting-room in the company club in Singapore, had spent a good few evenings in his home. Caroline, he remembered, had thought the world of old Willy and had usually made a point of seeing that the best meals and the longest, coolest drinks were always waiting for the old engineer. Nicolson stared down at his glass, and his mouth twisted in bitter memory … Suddenly he became aware that Captain Findhorn was on his feet, looking down at him with a peculiar expression on his face.

“What’s the matter, Johnny? You feel all right?”

“Just wandering, sir.” Nicolson smiled and waved a hand at the whisky bottle. “A great help, this, when you’re taking a walk around in your mind.”

“Help yourself: take another walk round.” Findhorn picked up his hat and turned for the door. “Wait here for me, will you? I have to go below.”

Two minutes after the captain had gone the phone rang again. It was Findhorn speaking, asking Nicolson to come below to the dining-saloon. He gave no reason. On his way below Nicolson met the fourth officer coming out of the wireless operator’s cabin. Vannier was looking neither happy nor pleased. Nicolson looked at him, an eyebrow raised in interrogation, and Vannier glanced back at the wireless operator’s door, his expression a nice mixture of indignation and apprehension.

“That old battleaxe in there is in full cry, sir.” He kept his voice low.

“The what?”

“Miss Plenderleith,” Vannier explained. “She’s in Walter’s cabin. I was just dropping off to sleep when she started hammering on the bulkhead between us, and when I ignored that she went out to the passage and started calling.” Vannier paused, then went on feelingly: “She has a very loud voice, sir.”

“What did she want?”

“The captain.” Vannier shook his head incredulously.

“‘Young man, I want to see the captain. At once. Tell him to come here.’ Then she pushed me out the door. What will I do, sir?”

“Exactly what she asks, of course.” Nicolson grinned. “I want to be there when you tell him. He’s below in the saloon.”

They dropped down one deck and went into the dining-saloon together. It was a big room, with two fore-and-aft tables with seating for twenty. But it was almost empty now: there were only three people there and they were all standing.

The captain and the second engineer stood side by side, facing aft, giving easily with the rolling of the ship. Findhorn, immaculately correct in uniform as always, was smiling. So was Willoughby, but there all resemblance between the two men ended. Tall, stooped, with a brown, wrinkled face and a thick, unkempt shock of grey hair, Willoughby was a tailor’s nightmare. He wore a white shirt—what had originally been a white shirt—unpressed, buttonless and frayed at the collar and half-sleeves, a pair of khaki duck trousers, wrinkled like an elephant’s legs and far too short for him, diamondpatterned plaid socks and unlaced canvas shoes. He hadn’t had a shave that day, he probably hadn’t had a shave that week.

Half-standing, half-leaning against the buffet table, the girl was facing them, hands gripping the edge of the table to steady herself. Nicolson and Vannier could see only her profile as they went in, but they could see that she, too, was smiling, the righthand corner of her mouth curving up and dimpling the olive-tinted peach of her cheek. She had a straight nose, very finely chiselled, a wide smooth forehead, and long, silky hair gathered in a deep roll round her neck, hair black with that intense blackness that reflects blue under the strong sun and gleams like a raven’s wing. With her hair, complexion and rather high cheekbones, she was a typical Eurasian beauty: but after a long, long look—and all men would always give Miss Drachmann a long, long look—she was neither typical nor Eurasian: the face was not broad enough, the features were too delicate and those incredible eyes spoke only of the far north of Europe. They were as Nicolson had first seen them in the harsh light of his torch aboard the Kerry Dancer—an intense, startling blue, very clear, very compelling, the most remarkable features in a remarkable face. And round and beneath these eyes, just then, were the faint, blue smudges of exhaustion.

She had got rid of her hat and belted bush-jacket, Nicolson saw. She wore only her stained khaki skirt and a clean white shirt, several sizes too large for her, with the sleeves rolled far up the slender arms. Vannier’s shirt, Nicolson felt sure. He had sat beside her all the way back in the lifeboat, talking in a low voice and most solicitous for her welfare. Nicolson smiled to himself, sought back in his memory for the days when he too had been an impressionable young Raleigh with a cloak always ready to hand, a knight-errant for any lady in distress. But he couldn’t remember the days: there probably hadn’t been any.

Nicolson ushered Vannier into the room ahead of him—Findhorn’s reactions to Miss Plenderleith’s request would be worth watching—closed the door softly behind him, turned round and checked himself just in time to stop from bumping into Vannier, who had halted suddenly and was standing motionless, rigid, not three feet from the door, his clenched fists by his side.

All three had fallen silent and turned to the door as Nicolson and Vannier had come in. Vannier had no eyes for Findhorn and Willoughby—he was staring at the nurse, his eyes widening, his lips parting in shock. Miss Drachmann had turned so that the lamplight fell full on the left hand side of her face, and that side of her face was not pretty. A great, long, jagged scar, still raw and livid and puckering up the cheek where it had been roughly, clumsily stitched, ran the whole length of her face from the hairline of the temple to the corner of the soft, round chin. Near the top, just above the cheekbone, it was half an inch wide. On anyone’s face it would have looked ghastly: on the smooth loveliness of hers it had the unreality of a caricature, the shocking impact of the most impious blasphemy.

She looked at Vannier in silence for a few seconds, then she smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was enough to dimple one cheek and to whiten the scar on the other, at the corner of the mouth and behind the eye. She reached up her left hand and touched her cheek lightly.

“I’m afraid it’s really not very nice, is it?” she asked. There was neither reproach nor condemnation in her voice: it was apologetic, rather, and touched with a queer kind of pity, but the pity was not for herself.

Vannier said nothing. His face had turned a shade paler, but when she spoke the colour returned and began to flood all over his neck and face. He looked away—one could almost see the sheer physical effort it cost him to pull his eyes off that hideous scar—and opened his mouth to speak. But he said nothing; perhaps there was nothing he could say.

Nicolson walked quickly past him, nodded to Willoughby and stopped in front of the girl. Captain Findhorn was watching him closely, but Nicolson was unaware of it.

“Good evening, Miss Drachmann.” His tone was cool but friendly. “All your patients nice and comfortable?” If you want banal remarks, he thought, Nicolson’s your man.

“Yes, thank you, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir’,” he said irritably. “I’ve told you that once already.” He lifted his hand and gently touched the scarred cheek. She didn’t flinch, there was no movement at all but for a momentary widening of the blue eyes in the expressionless face. “Our little yellow brothers, I take it?” His voice was as gentle as his hand.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I was caught near Kota Bharu.”

“A bayonet?”

“Yes.”

“One of these notched, ceremonial bayonets, wasn’t it?” He looked closely at the scar, saw the narrow deep incision on the chin and the rough tear beneath the temple. “And you were lying on the ground at the time?”

“You are very clever,” she said slowly.

“How did you get away?” Nicolson asked curiously.

“A big man came into the room—a bungalow we were using as a field hospital. A very big man with red hair—he said he was an Argyll, some word like that. He took the bayonet away from the man who had stabbed me. He asked me to look away, and when I turned back the Japanese soldier was lying on the floor, dead.”

“Hooray for the Argylls,” Nicolson murmured. “Who stitched it up for you?”

“The same man: he said he wasn’t very good.”

“There was room for improvement,” Nicolson admitted. “There still is.”

“It’s horrible!” Her voice rose sharply on the last word. “I know it’s horrible.” She looked down at the floor for some seconds, then looked up at Nicolson again and tried to smile. It wasn’t a very happy smile. “It’s hardly an improvement, is it?”

“It all depends.” Nicolson jerked a thumb at the second engineer. “On Willy here it would look good: he’s just an old sourpuss anyway. But you’re a woman.” He paused for a moment, looked at her consideringly and went on in a quiet voice: “You’re more than good-looking, I suppose—Miss Drachmann, you’re beautiful, and on you it looks bloody awful, if you’ll excuse my saying so. You’ll have to go to England,” he finished abruptly.

“England?” The high cheekbones were stained with colour. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes, England. I am pretty sure that there are no plastic surgeons in this part of the world who are skilled enough. But there are two or three men in England—I don’t think there are any more—who could repair that scar and leave you with a hairline so fine that even a dancing partner wouldn’t notice it.” Nicolson waved a deprecating hand. “A little bit of powder and the old war-paint, naturally.”

She looked at him in silence, her clear blue eyes empty of expression, then said in a quiet, flat voice: “You forget that I am a nurse myself. I am afraid I don’t believe you.”

“‘Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know’,” Willoughby intoned.

“What? What did you say?” The girl looked startled.

“Pay no attention to him, Miss Drachmann.” Captain Findhorn took a step towards her, smiling. “Mr. Willoughby would have us think that he is always ready with apt quotations, but Mr. Nicolson and I know better—he makes them up as he goes along.”

“‘Be thou chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny’.” Willoughby shook his head sadly.

“Thou shalt not,” Findhorn agreed. “But he’s right, Miss Drachmann, in that you shouldn’t be quite so ready with your disbelief. Mr. Nicolson knows what he’s talking about. Only three men in England, he said—and one of them is his uncle.” He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “But I didn’t bring you here to discuss surgery or to give me the pleasure of refereeing a slanging match. Mr. Nicolson, we appear to have run out of—”

He broke off abruptly, fists clenching tightly by his sides, as the klaxon above his head blared into sudden, urgent life, drowning his words as the raucous clangour, a harsh, discordant, shocking sound in a confined space, filled the dining-cabin. Two longs and a short, two longs and a short—the emergency action stations call. Nicolson was first out of the room, Findhorn only a pace behind him.

To the north and east thunder rumbled dully along the distant horizon, sheet-lightning flickered intermittently all round the Rhio straits, on the inner vortex of the typhoon, and, overhead, the half-seen clouds were beginning to pile up, rampart upon rampart, the first huge, tentative raindrops spattering on the wheelhouse top of the Viroma, so heavily, so slowly, that each single one could be heard and counted. But to the south and west there was no rain, no thunder, just an occasional flash of lightning over the islands, half-seen, half-imagined, far off and feeble flickers that left the darkness more impenetrable than before.

But not quite impenetrable. For the fifth time in two minutes the watchers on the bridge of the Viroma, elbows braced against the wind-dodger and night-glasses held hard and motionless against their straining eyes, caught the same signal winking out of the darkness to the south-west—a series of flashes, about a half-dozen in all, very weak and not lasting more than ten seconds altogether.

“Starboard 25 this time,” Nicolson murmured, “and opening. I would say it’s stationary in the water, sir.”

“As near as makes no difference.” Findhorn lowered his binoculars, rubbed aching eyes with the back of his hand, and raised the glasses again, waiting. “Let’s hear you thinking aloud, Mr. Nicolson.”

Nicolson grinned in the darkness. Findhorn might have been sitting in the front parlour of his bungalow at home instead of where he was, in the eye of a typhoon, not knowing which way it would break, with a million pounds and fifty lives in his hand and a new, unknown danger looming up in the darkness.

“Anything to oblige, sir.” He lowered his own binoculars and stared out thoughtfully into the darkness. “It might be a lighthouse, buoy or beacon, but it’s not: there are none hereabouts, and none I know of anywhere that have that sequence. It might be wreckers—the gentlemen of Romney, Rye and Penzance had nothing on the lads out here—but it’s not: the nearest island is at least six miles to the south-west and that light’s not more than two miles off.”

Findhorn walked to the wheelhouse door, called for half speed, then came back beside Nicolson. “Go on,” he said.

“It might be a Jap warship—destroyer, or something, but again it’s not: only suicide cases like ourselves sit out in the middle of a typhoon instead of running for shelter—and, besides, any sensible destroyer commander would sit quiet until he could give us the benefit of his searchlights at minimum range.”

Findhorn nodded. “My own way of thinking exactly. Anything you think it might be? Look, there he goes again!”

“Yes, and still nearer. He’s stationary, all right … Could be a sub, hears us as something big on his hydrophones, not sure of our course and speed and wants us to answer and give him a line of sight for his tin fish.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.”

“I’m not convinced one way or the other, sir. I’m just not worried. On a night like this any sub will be jumping so much that it couldn’t hit the Queen Mary at a hundred feet.”

“I agree. It’s probably what would be obvious to anyone without our suspicious minds. Someone’s adrift—open boat or raft—and needs help, badly. But no chances. Get on the intercom to all guns, tell them to line up on that light and keep their fingers on their triggers. And get Vannier to come up here. Ring down for dead slow.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Nicolson went inside the wheelhouse and Findhorn again raised his night glasses to his eyes, then grunted in irritation as someone jogged his elbow. He lowered his glasses, half-turned and knew who it was before the man spoke. Even in the open air the fumes of whisky were almost overpowering.

“What the devil’s happening, Captain?” Farnholme was irate, peevish. “What’s all the fuss about? That damn’ great klaxon of yours just about blasted my ears off.”

“I’m sorry about that, Brigadier.” Findhorn’s tone was even polite and disinterested. “Our emergency signal. We’ve sighted a suspicious light. It may be trouble.” His voice changed, subtly. “And I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. No one is allowed on the bridge without permission. I’m sorry.”

“What?” Farnholme’s tone was that of a man being asked to comprehend the incomprehensible. “Surely you can’t expect that to apply to me?”

“I do. I’m sorry.” The rain was beginning to fall now, faster and faster, the big fat drops drumming so heavily on his shoulders that he could feel the weight of them through his oilskins: yet another soaking was inevitable, and he didn’t relish the prospect. “You will have to go below, Brigadier.”

Farnholme, strangely, did not protest. He did not even speak, but turned abruptly on his heel and vanished into the darkness. Findhorn felt almost certain that he hadn’t gone below, but was standing in the darkness at the back of the wheelhouse. Not that it mattered: there was plenty of room on the bridge, it was just that Findhorn didn’t want anyone hanging over his shoulder when he had to move fast and make fast decisions.

Even as Findhorn lifted his glasses the light came on again, nearer, this time, much nearer, but fainter: the battery in that torch was dying, but it was more than strong enough to let them see the message being flashed: not the steady series of flashes of the last few times, but an unmistakable S.O.S., three shorts, three longs, three shorts, the universal distress signal at sea.

“You sent for me, sir?”

Findhorn lowered his glasses and looked round. “Ah, it’s you, Vannier. Sorry to drag you out into this damned deluge, but I want a fast hand on the signal lamp. See that signal just now?”

“Yes, sir. Someone in trouble, I take it?”

“I hope so,” Findhorn said grimly. “Get the Aldis out, ask him who he is.” He looked round as the screen door opened. “Mr. Nicolson?”

“Yes, sir. Ready as we can be, sir. Everybody lined up with their guns, and everybody so damned edgy after the last few days that I’m only afraid that someone may fire too soon. And I’ve got the bo’sun rigging up a couple of floodlamps, starboard side, number three tank, and a couple of A.B.s—all we can spare from the guns—getting a scrambling net out over the side.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nicolson. You think of everything. How about the weather?”

“Wet,” Nicolson said morosely. He pulled the towel more tightly round his neck, listened to the clack of the Aldis trigger and watched the beam lancing its way whitely through the sheeting rain. “Wet and stormy—going to be very soon. What’s happening and where it’s going to hit us I haven’t a clue. I think Buys Ballot’s law and the book on tropical storms are about as useful to us here as a match in hell.”

“You’re not the only one,” Findhorn confessed. “We’ve been an hour and fifteen minutes now in the centre of this storm. I was in one, about ten years ago, for twenty-five minutes, and I thought that was a record.” He shook his head slowly, scattering raindrops. “It’s crazy. We’re six months too early—or too late—for a real hurricane. Anyway, it’s not bad enough for that, not for a real force twelve job. But it’s far out of season and a complete freak in these waters at any season, and that must be throwing the book of rules out of kilter. I’m certain that we’re at the point of recurvature of the storm, and I’m almost certain that it will break north-east, but whether we’ll find ourselves in the dangerous quadrant or—” He broke off abruptly and stared at the tiny pinpoint of yellowing light winking mistily through the pouring rain. “Something about sinking. What else does he say, Walters?”

“‘Van Effen, sinking’. That’s all, sir—at least I think it was that. Bad morse. The Van Effen.”

“Oh, lord, my lucky night.” Again Findhorn shook his head. “Another Kerry Dancer. The Van Effen. Who ever heard of the Van Effen? You, Mr. Nicolson?”

“Never.” Nicolson turned and shouted through the screen door. “Are you there, Second?”

“Sir?” The voice came from the darkness, only feet away.

“The Register, quickly. The Van Effen. Two words, Dutch. Fast as you can.”

“Van Effen? Did I hear someone say ‘Van Effen’?” There was no mistaking the clipped Sandhurst drawl, this time with an overtone of excitement in it. Farnholme’s tall shadow detached itself from the gloom at the back of the wheelhouse.

“That’s right. Know any ship by that name?”

“It’s not a ship, man—it’s a friend of mine, Van Effen, a Dutchman. He was on the Kerry Dancer—joined her with me at Banjermasin. He must have got away on her boat after we’d been set on fire—there was only one boat, as far as I can remember.” Farnholme had pushed his way through the screen door now and was out on the wing of the bridge, peering excitedly over the canvas dodger, oblivious to the rain thumping down on his unprotected back. “Pick him up, man, pick him up!”

“How do we know it’s not a trap?” The captain’s relaxed, matter-of-fact voice came like a cold douche after Farnholme’s impatient vehemence. “Maybe it is this man, Van Effen, maybe it isn’t. Even if it is, how do we know that we can trust him?”

“How do you know?” Farnholme’s tone was that of a man with a tight hold, a very tight hold on himself. “Listen. I’ve just been talking to that young man in there, Vannier or whatever his name is—”

“Get to the point, please,” Findhorn interrupted coldly. “That boat—if it is a boat—is only a couple of hundred yards away now.”

“Will you listen?” Farnholme almost shouted the words, then went on more quietly. “Why do you think I’m standing here alive? Why do you think these nurses are alive, these wounded soldiers you took off the Kerry Dancer only an hour ago? Why do you think all of us you picked up, with the exception of Miss Plenderleith and the priest, are alive? For one reason only—when the captain of the Kerry Dancer was scuttling out of Singapore to save his own skin a man stuck a pistol in his back and forced him to return to Singapore. That man was Van Effen, and he’s out in that boat now: we all owe our lives to Van Effen, Captain Findhorn.”

“Thank you, Brigadier.” Findhorn was calm, unhurried as ever. “Mr. Nicolson, the searchlight. Have the bo’sun switch on the two floods when I give the word. Slow astern.”

The searchlight beam stabbed out through the darkness and lit up a heavy, rolling sea churned milky white by the torrential rain. For a moment or two the searchlight stayed stationary, the almost solid curtain of rain sheeting palely through its beam, then started to probe forward and almost immediately picked it up—a lifeboat very close to hand, riding on its sea-anchor and plunging violently up and down as it rode the short, steep seas that swept down upon it. But the waves in the heart of a tropical storm have little set pattern, and every so often a twisting cross sea would curve over and break in-board. There were seven or eight men in the boat, stooping and straightening, stooping and straightening as they baled for their lives—a losing struggle, for she was already deep in the water, settling by the minute. One man alone seemed indifferent: he was sitting in the sternsheets, facing the tanker, a forearm across his eyes to ward off the glare of the searchlight. Just above the forearm something white gleamed in the light, a cap, perhaps, but at that distance it was difficult to be sure.

Nicolson dropped down the bridge ladder, ran quickly past the lifeboat, down another ladder to the fore and aft gangway, along to a third ladder that led down to the top of number three tank, and picked his way surely round valves and over the maze of discharge lines, gas lines and steam smothering pipes until he came to the starboard side: Farnholme followed close behind all the way. Just as Nicolson put his hands on the guardrail and leaned out and over, the two floodlights switched on together.

Twelve thousand tons and only a single screw, but Findhorn was handling the big ship, even in those heavy seas, like a destroyer. The lifeboat was less than forty yards away now, already caught in the pool of light from the floods, and coming closer every moment, and the men in the boat, safely into the lee of the Viroma, had stopped baling and were twisted round in their seats, staring up at the men on deck, and making ready to jump for the scrambling net. Nicolson looked closely at the man in the sternsheets: he could see now that it was no cap that the man was wearing on his head but a rough bandage, stained and saturated with blood: and then he saw something else, too, the stiff and unnatural position of the right arm.

Nicolson turned to Farnholme and pointed to the man in the sternsheets. “That your friend sitting at the back there?”

“That’s Van Effen all right,” Farnholme said with satisfaction “What did I tell you?”

“You were right.” Nilcolson paused, then went on: “He seems to have a one-track mind in some things.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that he’s still got a gun in his hand. He’s got it lined up on his pals in front, and he hasn’t taken his eyes off them once while I’ve been watching.”

Farnholme stared, then whistled softly. “You’re dead right, he has.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I really can’t guess at all. But you can take it from me, Mr. Nicolson, that if my friend Van Effen thinks it necessary to have a gun on them, then he has an excellent reason for it.”

Van Effen had. Leaning against a bulkhead in the dining-saloon, a large whisky in his hand and the water pooling from his soaking clothes on to the corticene at his feet, he told it all quickly, concisely and convincingly. Their lifeboat had been fitted with an engine, had carried them quickly clear of the Kerry Dancer after she had gone on fire and they had managed to reach the shelter of a small island miles away to the south just as the storm broke. They had pulled the boat up on to the shingle on the lee side, huddling there for hours until the wind had suddenly dropped: it was shortly afterwards that they had seen the rockets going up to the northwest.

“Those were ours,” Findhorn nodded. “So you decided to make a break for us?”

“I did.” A wintry smile touched the Dutchman’s steady brown eyes as he gestured towards the group of men, dark-eyed and swarthy-skinned, standing huddled in one corner. “Siran and his little friends weren’t keen. They’re not exactly pro-Allied and they knew there weren’t any Jap ships in these waters. Besides, for all we knew these were distress rockets from a sinking ship.” Van Effen downed the rest of his whisky at a gulp and laid the glass carefully on the table beside him. “But I had the gun.”

“So I saw.” It was Nicolson speaking. “And then?”

“We took off, towards the north-west. We ran into a long stretch of confused water, not too rough, and made good time. Then heavy seas hit us and flooded the engine. We just had to sit there and I thought we were finished till I saw your phosphorescence—you can see it a long way off on a night as black as this. If the rain had come five minutes earlier we would never have seen you. But we did, and I had my torch.”

“And your gun,” Findhorn finished. He looked at Van Effen for a long time, his eyes speculative and cold. “It’s a great pity you didn’t use it earlier, Mr. Van Effen.”

The Dutchman smiled wryly. “It is not difficult to follow your meaning, Captain.” He reached up, grimaced, tore the blood-stained strip of linen from his head: a deep gash, purple-bruised round the edges, ran from the corner of his forehead to his ear. “How do you think I got this?”

“It’s not pretty,” Nicolson admitted. “Siran?”

“One of his men. The Kerry Dancer was on fire, the boat—it was the only boat—was out on the falls and Siran here and all that were left of his crew were ready to pile into it.”

“Just their sweet little selves,” Nicolson interrupted grimly.

“Just their sweet little selves,” Van Effen acknowledged. “I had Siran by the throat, bent back over the rail, going to force him to go through the ship. That was a mistake—I should have used my gun. I didn’t know then that all his men were—what is the phrase?—tarred with the same brush. It must have been a belaying pin. I woke up in the bottom of the boat.”

“You what?” Findhorn was incredulous.

“I know.” Van Effen smiled, a little tiredly. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense at all, does it? They should have left me to fry. But there I was—not only alive, but with my head all nicely tied up. Curious, is it not, Captain?”

“Curious is hardly the word.” Findhorn’s voice was flat, without inflection. “You are telling the truth, Mr. Van Effen? A silly question, I suppose—whether you are or not, you’d still say ‘yes’.”

“He is, Captain Findhorn.” Farnholme’s voice sounded oddly confident and, for that moment, not at all like the voice of Brigadier Farnholme. “I am perfectly certain of that.”

“You are?” Findhorn turned to look at him, as had everyone, caught by something peculiar in Farnholme’s tone. “What makes you so sure, Brigadier?”

Farnholme waved a deprecating hand, like a man who finds himself being taken more seriously than he intended. “After all, I know Van Effen better than anybody here. And his story has to be true: if it weren’t true, he wouldn’t be here now. Something of an Irishism, gentlemen, but perhaps you follow?”

Findhorn nodded thoughtfully but made no comment. There was silence for some time in the dining-saloon, a silence broken only by the distant crash of bows in a trough in the seas, the indefinable creaking noises a ship makes when it works with the waves in heavy weather, and the shuffling of the feet of the crew of the Kerry Dancer. Then Findhorn looked at his watch and turned to Nicolson.

“The bridge for us, Mr. Nicolson, I suggest: from the feel of things we’re running into the heavy stuff again. For Captain Siran and his crew, an armed guard for the remainder of the night, I think.” Findhorn’s eyes were as bleak and cold as his voice. “But there’s one little point I’d like to clear up first.”

He walked unhurriedly towards the crew of the Kerry Dancer, balancing himself easily against the heavy rolling of the ship, then halted as Van Effen stretched out his hand.

“I’d watch them if I were you,” the Dutchman said quietly. “Half of them carry more than one knife and they’re not slow with them.”

“You have a gun.” Findhorn put out his hand and took the automatic which Van Effen had stuck in his waistband. “May I?” He glanced down at the weapon, saw that the safety catch was still on. “A Colt .38.”

“You know guns, yes?”

“A little.” Soft-footed, Findhorn walked across to the nearest man in the group in the corner. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a brown, smooth, expressionless face: he looked as if he had got out of the habit of using expressions a long time ago. He wore a hairline moustache, black sideburns that reached three inches below his ears, and he had black, empty eyes. “You are Siran?” Findhorn asked, almost indifferently.

“Captain Siran. At your service.” The insolence lay in the faint emphasis on the ‘captain,’ the millimetric inclination of the head. The face remained quite expressionless.

“Formalities bore me.” Findhorn was looking at him with sudden interest. “You are English, aren’t you?”

“Perhaps.” This time the lips curled, less in a smile than in a token of lazy contempt, perfectly done. “Anglo-Saxon, shall we say?”

“It doesn’t matter. You are the captain—were the captain—of the Kerry Dancer. You abandoned your ship—and abandoned all the people that you left behind to die, locked behind steel doors. Maybe they drowned, maybe they were burnt to death: it doesn’t make any difference now. You left them to die.”

“Such melodramatics!” Siran lazily patted a yawn to extinction, a masterpiece of weary insolence. “You forget the traditions of the sea. We did all in our power for those unfortunates.”

Findhorn nodded slowly and turned away, looking over Siran’s six companions. None of them seemed at all happy, but one—a thin-faced man with a cast in one eye—was especially nervous and apprehensive. He shuffled his feet constantly and his hands and fingers seemed to have an independent life of their own. Findhorn walked across and stood in front of him.

“Do you speak English?”

There was no answer, just a furrowing of brows, the raising of shoulders and outspread palms in the universal gesture of incomprehension.

“You picked well, Captain Findhorn,” Van Effen drawled slowly. “He speaks English almost as well as you do.”

Findhorn brought the automatic up quickly, placed it against the man’s mouth and pushed, none too lightly. The man gave way and Findhorn followed. The second step backward brought the man against the bulkhead, palms of his outstretched hands pressing hard against the wall, his one good eye staring down in terror at the gun that touched his teeth.

“Who hammered shut all the clips on the poop-deck door?” Findhorn asked softly. “I’ll give you five seconds.” He pressed more heavily on the gun and the sudden click of the safety catch snicking off was unnaturally loud in the strained silence. “One, two—”

“I did, I did!” His mouth was working and he was almost gibbering with fear. “I closed the door.”

“On whose orders?”

“The captain. He said that—”

“Who shut the fo’c’sle door?”

“Yussif. But Yussif died—”

“On whose orders?” Findhorn asked relentlessly.

“Captain Siran’s orders.” The man was looking at Siran now, sick fear in his eye. “I’ll die for this.”

“Probably,” Findhorn said carelessly. He pushed the gun into his pocket and walked across to Siran. “Interesting little talk, wasn’t it, Captain Siran?”

“The man’s a fool,” Siran said contemptuously. “Any terrified man will say anything with a gun in his face.”

“There were British soldiers—probably your own countrymen—in the fo’c’sle. A score, maybe two dozen, I don’t know, but you couldn’t have them cluttering up your getaway in the only boat.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Siran’s brown face was still the same, still without expression. But his voice was wary now, the calculated insolence gone.

“And there were over twenty people in the aftercastle.”

Siran might not have spoken for all the attention Findhorn paid to him, “Wounded men, dying men, women—and one little child.”

This time Siran said nothing. The smooth face was impassive as ever, but his eyes had narrowed, just perceptibly. When he spoke, however, his voice still held its insolent indifference.

“And just what do you hope to achieve by all this stupid rigmarole, Captain Findhorn?”

“I hope for nothing.” Findhorn’s lined face was grim, the faded eyes bleak and relentless. “It’s not a question of hope, Siran, but of certainty—the certainty of your conviction for murder. In the morning we shall take independent statements from all the members of your own crew and have them signed in the presence of neutral witnesses from my crew. I shall make it my personal responsibility to see to it that you arrive in Australia safely and in good health.” Findhorn picked up his hat and prepared to leave. “You will have a fair trial, Captain Siran, but it shouldn’t last long, and the penalty for murder, of course, is known to us all.”

For the first time, Siran’s mask of impassivity cracked and the faintest shadow of fear touched the dark eyes, but Findhorn wasn’t there to see it. He was already gone, climbing up the companionway to the shrieking bridge of the Viroma.

SIX

Dawn, a cloudless, windless dawn with a lightening eastern sky mother-of-pearl in its opalescent beauty, found the Viroma far to the south-eastwards of the Rhio channel, twenty miles due north of the Rifleman Rock and almost half-way towards the Carimata Straits. The big tanker was travelling under full power, a wisp of hazed blue drifting aft from its funnel, the after-decks shaking in teeth-rattling vibration as Carradale, the chief engineer, pushed the big engine to its limit, and then a little beyond.

The typhoon of that long night was gone, the great winds had vanished as if they had never been. But for the salt-stained decks and upper-works and the long, heaving swell that would not die away for many hours yet, it might all have been a dream. But it had been no dream while it had lasted: a nightmare, perhaps, but no dream, not with Captain Findhorn driving the lurching, staggering tanker through the great quartering seas and cyclonic winds for hour upon endless hour, with no thought for the grievous punishment the Viroma was taking, with no thought for the comfort and welfare of passengers and crew, with no thought for anything but to put as many miles as possible between himself and Singapore before the day broke and the enemy could see them again.

The delicately-hued pastel shades to the east faded and whitened and vanished, all in a matter of minutes, and the big blurred silhouette of the sun climbed swiftly above the horizon, stretching out a broad, shimmering band of dazzling white across the sea, between itself and the Viroma. Not quite an unbroken band, however: something lay in the water, miles away, a big fishing-boat perhaps, or a small coaster, hull down, black as midnight against the rising sun and steaming steadily east, soon diminished to a little black speck in the distance and then nothing at all. Captain Findhorn, on the bridge with Barrett, watched and wondered until it was gone. Perhaps it had seen them, perhaps not. Perhaps it was Japanese, or pro-Japanese, perhaps not. Perhaps it carried a radio, perhaps it didn’t. There was nothing they could do about it anyway.

The sun, as it always does in the open sea, seemed to rise straight up into the sky. By half-past seven it was already hot, hot enough to dry out the rain and sea-soaked decks and upperworks of the Viroma, hot enough for Findhorn to hang up his oilskins and move far out on to the wing of the bridge to bask in its heat and draw in great lungfuls of the fresh morning air—it wouldn’t, he knew, be fresh much longer. Findhorn himself felt fresh enough, if a little tired in his bones: about half-way through the middle watch, when the teeth of the typhoon had lost their edge, Nicolson had persuaded him to go to his cabin and he had slept like a dead man for over three hours.

“Good morning, sir. Quite a change this, isn’t it?” Nicolson’s soft voice, directly behind him, jerked Findhorn out of his reverie. He turned round.

“Morning, Johnny. What are you doing up at this unearthly hour?” Nicolson, Findhorn knew, couldn’t have had much more than a couple of hours’ sleep, but he had the rested look of a man with at least eight solid hours behind him. Not for the first time Findhorn had to remind himself that, where durability and resilience were concerned, John Nicolson was a man apart.

“Unearthly hour?” Nicolson glanced at his watch. “It’s almost eight o’clock.” He grinned. “Conscience and the calls of duty, sir. I’ve just been making a quick round of our non-paying guests.”

“No complaints?” Findhorn asked humorously.

“I gather that most of them were a bit under the weather during the night, but otherwise no complaints.”

“And those who might have know a damn sight better than to make them,” Findhorn nodded. “How are the sick nurses?”

“The two Chinese girls and the elderly ones are much better. A couple of them were down in the hospital and smoke-room when I was there, changing bandages. All five of the soldiers there were in fine form and hungry as hunters.”

“An excellent sign,” Findhorn interrupted dryly. “How about the two boys in the hospital?”

“Holding their own, the nurses say. I think that they suffer a good deal of pain, which is more than our worthy Brigadier and his pal are doing. You can hear ’em snoring twenty feet away and the engineers’ office smells like a distillery.”

“And Miss Plenderleith?”

“Taking her constitutional, of course. From one end of the fore and aft gangway to the other. The English cherish the delusion that they are a nautical race: Miss Plenderleith is enjoying herself thoroughly. And then there are three soldiers in the dining-saloon—Corporal Fraser and his two men. They’ve got a chair apiece, and they’re all sitting very comfortably with their .3O3s and Brens cradled in their hands. I think they’re praying for Siran or one of his men to take an extra deep breath so that they can have a cast-iron excuse for shooting a lot of big holes through them. Siran and his pals know exactly how these boys are feeling about them; they’re only taking very small breaths indeed and blinking one eye at a time.”

“I tend to share your confidence in the guards.” Findhorn looked sideways at his chief officer, a quizzical expression on his face. “And how is our worthy Captain Siran looking this morning? A trifle worse of the wear, you would say?”

“Not he. Anyone can see that he’s slept the deep, untroubled sleep of a man with the conscience of a new-born child.” Nicolson stared out to sea for a few moments, then said quietly: “I’d appreciate the opportunity of giving the hangman any assistance he may require.”

“You’d probably be one of the last in a long queue,” Findhorn said grimly. “I don’t want to sound melodramatic, Johnny, but I think the man’s an inhuman fiend and should be shot down the same way as you’d destroy a mad dog.”

“It’ll probably come to that one of these days.” Nicolson shook his head. “Mad or not, he’s queer enough.”

“Meaning?”

“He’s English, or three parts English, I’ll bet my last penny. He’s come up through one of the big public schools, and it’s an odds-on guess that he’s had a damn sight more education than I ever had. What’s a man like that doing in charge of a miniature hell-ship like the Kerry Dancer?”

Findhorn shrugged. “Lord knows. I could give you a dozen explanations, all different and with only one thing in common—they’d all be wrong. You’ll find half the dead-beats and black sheep of the world within a couple of hundred miles of Singapore—but he wouldn’t come in either category, so that still doesn’t answer your question. Frankly, I’m at a loss.” Findhorn drummed his fingers on the dodger rail. “He baffles me, but, by Harry, he’s not the only one!”

“Van Effen? Our worthy Brigadier?”

“Among others.” Findhorn shook his head. “Our passengers are a strange bunch, but not half as strange as the way they act. Take the Brigadier and this Muslim priest. They’re thick as thieves. Unusual, you might say?”

“Incredible. The doors of the Bengal and Singapore Clubs would be for ever shut against him. Not done, in capital letters.” Nicolson grinned. “Think of the shock and the fearful mortality rate if it were known—in the upper military circles, I mean: all the best bars in the East littered with apoplectic cases, sundowners still clutched in their stiffening hands. Brigadier Farnholme is carrying a fearful responsibility.”

Findhorn smiled faintly. “And you still think he’s not a phoney?”

“No, sir—neither do you. Colonel Blimp, Grade A—then he does or says something offbeat, completely out of character. He just doesn’t classify easily. Inconsiderate of him, very.”

“Very,” Findhorn murmured dryly. “Then there’s his other pal, Van Effen. Why the devil should Siran show such tender concern for his health?”

“It’s difficult,” Nicolson admitted. “Especially when Van Effen didn’t show much concern for his, what with threatening to blow holes in his spine and trying to throttle him. But I’m inclined to believe Van Effen. I like him.”

“I believe him, too. But Farnholme just doesn’t believe him—he knows Van Effen is telling the truth—and when I ask him why he backwaters at high speed and advances piffling reasons that wouldn’t convince a five year old.” Findhorn sighed wearily. “Just about as puerile and unconvincing as the reasons Miss Plenderleith gave me for wanting to see me when I went to her cabin just after you and Siran had finished your—ah—discussion.”

“So you went after all?” Nicolson smiled. “I’m sorry I missed that.”

“You knew?”

“Vannier told me. I practically had to drag him to the saloon to get him to give you her message. What did she say?”

“First of all she denied having sent for me at all, then gave me some nonsense about when would we arrive in port and could she send a cable to her sister in England, just something fabricated on the spur of the moment, obviously. She’s worried about something and I think she was going to tell me what it was, then changed her mind.” Captain Findhorn shrugged his shoulders, dismissing the problem. “Did you know that Miss Plenderleith came from Borneo too? She’s been headmistress in a girls’ school there and hung on to the last minute.”

“I know. We had a long conversation on the catwalk this morning. Called me ‘young man’ all the time and made me wonder whether I had washed behind the ears.” Nicolson looked speculatively at the captain. “Just to add to your worries, I’ll tell you something else you don’t know. Miss Plenderleith had a visitor, a gentleman friend, in her cabin last night.”

“What! Did she tell you this?”

“Good lord, no. Walters told me. He was just stretching out on his settee after coming off watch last night when he heard a knock on Miss Plenderleith’s door—pretty soft, but he heard it: his settee in the wireless office is right up against the bulkhead of his cabin. Walters says he was curious enough to listen at the communicating door, but it was shut tight and he couldn’t hear much, it was all very whispery and conspiratorial. But one of the voices was very deep, a man’s murmur for certain. He was there almost ten minutes, then he left.”

“Midnight assignations in Miss Plenderleith’s cabin!” Findhorn still hadn’t recovered from his astonishment. “I would have thought she would have screamed her head off.”

“Not her!” Nicolson grinned and shook his head positively. “She’s a pillar of respectability, all right, but any midnight visitor would have been hauled in, lectured over the old girl’s wagging forefinger and sent on his way a chastened man, bent on leading a better life. But this was no lecture, I gather, but a very hush-hush discussion.”

“Walters any idea who it was?”

“None at all—just that it was a man’s voice and that he himself was too damn tired and sleepy to worry about it anyway.”

“Yes. Maybe he has the right idea at that.” Findhorn took off his cap and mopped his dark head with a handkerchief: only eight o’clock, but already the sun was beginning to burn. “We’ve more to do than worry about them anyway. I just can’t figure them out. They’re a strange bunch—each one I talk to seems queerer than the last.”

“Including Miss Drachmann?” Nicolson suggested.

“Good heavens, no! I’d trade the bunch of them for that girl.” Findhorn replaced his cap and shook his head slowly, his eyes distant. “A shocking case, Johnny—what a ghastly mess those diabolical little butchers made of her face.” His eyes came into focus again, and he looked sharply at Nicolson. “How much of what you told her last night was true?”

“About what the surgeons could do for her, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Not much. I don’t know a great deal, but that scar will have stretched and set long before anyone can do anything about it. They can still do something, of course—but they’re not miracle workers: none of them claims to be.”

“Then damn it all, mister, you’d no right to give her the impression they are.” Findhorn was as near anger as his phlegmatic nature would allow. “My God, think of the disillusionment!”

“Eat, drink and be merry,” Nicolson quoted softly. “Do you think you’ll ever see England again, sir?”

Findhorn looked at him for a long moment, craggy brows drawn deep over his eyes, then nodded in slow understanding and turned away. “Funny how we keep thinking in terms of peace and normality,” he murmured. “Sorry, boy, sorry. Yet I’ve been thinking about nothing else since the sun came up. Young Peter, the nurses, everyone—mostly the child and that girl, I don’t know why.” He was silent for a few moments, eyes quartering the cloudless horizon, then added with only apparent inconsequence: “It’s a lovely day, Johnny.”

“It’s a lovely day to die,” Nicolson said sombrely. Then he caught the captain’s eye and smiled, briefly. “It’s a long time waiting, but the Japanese are polite little gentlemen—ask Miss Drachmann: they always have been polite little gentlemen: I don’t think they’ll keep us waiting much longer.”

But the Japanese did keep them waiting. They kept them waiting a long, long time. Not long, perhaps, as the world reckons seconds and minutes and hours, but when men, despairing men too long on the rack of suspense, momentarily await and expect the inevitable, then the seconds and the minutes and the hours lose any significance as absolute units of time and, instead, become relative only to the razor-edged expectancy of the passing moment, to the ever-present anticipation of what must inexorably come. And so the seconds crawled by and became minutes, and the minutes stretched themselves out interminably and lengthened into an hour, and then another hour, and still the skies were empty and the line of the shimmering horizon remained smooth and still and unbroken. Why the enemy—and Findhorn knew hundreds of ships and planes must be scouring the seas for them—held off so long was quite beyond his understanding: he could only hazard the guess that they must have swept that area the previous afternoon after they had turned back to the aid of the Kerry Dancer and were now searching the seas farther to the south. Or perhaps they thought the Viroma had been lost in the typhoon—and even as that explanation crossed his mind Findhorn dismissed it as wishful thinking and knew that the Japanese would think nothing of the kind .… Whatever the reason, the Viroma was still alone, still rolling south-eastwards in a vast expanse of empty sea and sky. Another hour passed, and then another and it was high noon, a blazing, burning sun riding almost vertically overhead in the oven of the sky and for the first time Captain Findhorn was allowing himself the luxury of the first tentative stirrings of hope: the Carimata Straits and darkness and the Java Sea and they might dare begin to think of home again. The sun rolled over its zenith, noon passed, and the minutes crept on again, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, each minute dragging longer and longer as hope began to rise once more. And then, at twenty-four minutes past noon, hope had turned to dust and the long wait was over.

A gunner on the fo’c’sle saw it first—a tiny black speck far to the south-west, materialising out of the heat haze, high above the horizon. For a few seconds it seemed to remain there, stationary in the sky, a black, meaningless dot suspended in the air, and then, almost all at once, it was no longer tiny but visibly swelling in size with every breath the watchers took, and no longer meaningless, but taking shape, hardening in definition through the shimmering haze until the outline of fuselage and wings could be clearly seen, so clearly as to be unmistakable. A Japanese Zero fighter, probably fitted with long-range tanks, and even as the watchers on the Viroma recognised it the muted thunder of the aero engine came at them across the stillness of the sea.

The Zero droned in steadily, losing height by the second and heading straight for them. It seemed at first as if the pilot intended flying straight across the Viroma, but, less than a mile away, he banked sharply to starboard and started to circle the ship at a height of about five hundred feet. He made no move to attack, and not a gun fired aboard the Viroma. Captain Findhorn’s orders to his gunners had been explicit—no firing except in self-defence: their ammunition was limited and they had to conserve it for the inevitable bombers. Besides, there was always the chance that the pilot might be deceived by the newly-painted name of Siyushu Maru and the large flag of the Rising Sun which had taken the place of Resistencia and the flag of the Argentine Republic a couple of days previously—about one chance in ten thousand, Findhorn thought grimly. The brazen effrontery and the sheer unexpectedness that had carried the Viroma thus far had outlived their usefulness.

For almost ten minutes the Zero continued to circle the Viroma, never much more than half a mile away, banking steeply most of the time. Then two more ’planes—Zero fighters also—droned up from the south-west and joined the first. Twice all three of them circled the ship, then the first pilot broke formation and made two fore-and-aft runs, less than a hundred yards away, the canopy of his cockpit pushed right back so that the watchers on the bridge could see his face—or what little of it was visible behind helmet, goggles on forehead and transmitter mouthpiece—as the pilot took in every detail of the ship. Then he banked away sharply and rejoined the others: within seconds they were in line ahead formation, dipping their wings in mocking salute and heading north-west, climbing steadily all the time.

Nicolson let go his breath in a long, soundless sigh and turned to Findhorn. “That bloke will never know how lucky he is.” He jerked his thumb upwards towards the Hotchkiss emplacements. “Even our pop-gun merchants up top could have chewed him into little bits.”

“I know, I know.” His back against the dodger screen, Findhorn stared bleakly after the disappearing fighters. “And what good would it have done? Just wasted valuable ammunition, that’s all. He wasn’t doing us any harm—all the harm he could do he’d done long before he came anywhere near us. Our description, right down to the last rivet, our position, course and speed—his command H.Q. got that over the radio long before he came anywhere near us.” Findhorn lowered his glasses and turned round heavily. “We can’t do anything about our description and position, but we can about our course. 200, Mr. Nicolson, if you please. We’ll try for the Macclesfield Channel.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Nicolson hesitated. “Think it’ll make any difference, sir?”

“None whatsoever.” Findhorn’s voice was just a little weary. “Somewhere within two hundred and fifty miles from here laden bombers—altitude bombers, dive-bombers, torpedo bombers—are already taking off from Japanese airfields. Scores of them. Prestige is vital. If we escaped, Japan would be the laughing-stock of their precious Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and they can’t afford to lose anybody’s confidence.” Findhorn looked directly at Nicolson, his eyes quiet and sad and remote. “I’m sorry, Johnny, sorry for little Peter and the girl and all the rest of them. They’ll get us all right. They got the Prince of Wales and the Repulse: they’ll massacre us. They’ll be here in just over an hour.”

“So why alter course, sir?”

“So why do anything. Give us another ten minutes, perhaps, before they locate us. A gesture, my boy—empty, I know, but still a gesture. Even the lamb turns and runs before the wolf-pack tears him to pieces.” Findhorn paused a moment, then smiled. “And speaking of lambs, Johnny, you might go below and drive our little flock into the fold.”

Ten minutes later Nicolson was back on the bridge. Findhorn looked at him expectantly.

“All safely corralled, Mr. Nicolson?”

“Afraid not, sir.” Nicolson touched the three golden bars on his epaulets. “The soldiers of today are singularly unimpressed by authority. Hear anything, sir?”

Findhorn looked at him in puzzlement, listened, then nodded his head. “Footsteps. Sounds like a regiment up above.”

Nicolson nodded. “Corporal Fraser and his two merry men. When I told them to get into the pantry and stay there the corporal asked me to raffle myself. His feelings were hurt, I think. They can muster three rifles and a sub-machine-gun between them, and I suspect they’ll be ten times as effective as the two characters with the Hotchkisses up there.”

“And the rest?”

“Same story with the other soldiers—off with their guns right aft. No heroics anywhere—all four of them just kind of grim and thoughtful. Just kids. The sick men are still in the hospital—too sick to be moved. Safe there as anywhere, I suppose: there’s a couple of nurses with them.”

“Four of them?” Findhorn frowned. “But I thought—”

“There were five,” Nicolson acknowledged. “Fifth’s a shellshock case, I imagine. Alex something—don’t know his name. He’s useless—nerves shot to ribbons. I dragged him along to join the others in the pantry.

“All the others accounted for. Old Farnholme wasn’t too keen on leaving the engineers’ office but when I pointed out that the pantry was the only compartment in the superstructure that didn’t open to the outside, that it had steel instead of the usual wooden bulkheads, and that it had a couple of protective bulkheads fore and aft and three on either side he was over there like a shot.”

Findhorn’s mouth twisted. “Our gallant army. Colonel Blimp to the ramparts, but not when the guns start firing. A bad taste in the mouth, Johnny, and quite out of character. The saving grace of the Blimps of this world is that they don’t know what fear is.”

“Neither does Farnholme.” Nicolson was positive. “I’d take very long odds on that. But I think he’s worried about something, badly worried.” Nicolson shook his head. “He’s a queer old bird, sir, and he’s some very personal reason for taking shelter: but it’s got nothing to do with saving his own skin.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Findhorn shrugged. “I don’t see that it matters anyway, not now. Van Effen with him?”

“In the dining-saloon. He thought Siran and his pals might pick an awkward time to start trouble. He has his gun on them. They won’t start anything.” Nicolson smiled faintly.

“Van Effen strikes me as a very competent gentleman indeed.”

“You left Siran and his men in the saloon?” Findhorn pursed his lips. “Our suicide parlour. Wide open to fore-and-aft strafing attacks and a cannon shell wouldn’t even notice the shuttering on these windows.” It was more a question than statement, and Findhorn matched it with his look, half-quizzical, half-expectant, but Nicolson merely shrugged his shoulders and turned away, the cold blue eyes lost in indifference and quartering the sun-hazed horizon to the north.

The Japanese returned at twelve minutes past two o’clock in the afternoon, and they came in force. Three or four planes would have been enough: the Japanese sent fifty. There were no delays, no tentative skirmishing, no preliminary altitude bombing, just the long curving sweep to the south-west and then that single, shattering attack out of the sun, a calculated, precision-engineered attack of dovetailing torpedo-bombers, dive-bombers and Zeros, an attack the skill of whose execution was surpassed only by its singleminded savagery and ferocity. From the moment that the first Zero swept in at deck level, shells from its twin cannon smashing into the bridge, until the last torpedo-bomber lifted and banked away from the concussive blast of its own detonating torpedo, only three minutes passed. But they were three minutes that transformed the Viroma from the finest, most modern tanker of the Anglo-Arabian fleet, from twelve thousand tons of flawless steel with all the guns on deck chattering their puny defiance at the incoming enemy, to a battered, blazing, smoke-enshrouded shambles with all the guns fallen silent, the engines gone and nearly all the crew dying or already dead. Massacre, ruthless, inhuman massacre with but one saving grace—the merciless fury of the attack tempered only by its merciful speed.

Massacre, but massacre aimed not at the ship primarily, but at the men who manned the ship. The Japanese, obviously flying under strict orders, had executed these, and brilliantly. They had concentrated their attacks on the engine-room, bridge, fo’c’sle and gun positions, the first of these suffering grievously: two torpedoes and at least a dozen bombs had entered the machinery space and the decks above: half the stern was blown away and in the after part of the ship there were no survivors at all. Of all the gunners, only two survived—Jenkins, an able seaman who had manned a fo’c’sle gun, and Corporal Fraser. Perhaps Corporal Fraser would not be a survivor for long: half his already crippled left arm had been shot away and he was too weak, too shocked, to make more than a token attempt to stem the welling arterial blood.

On the bridge, crouched flat on the floor behind the armoured steel bulkheads of the wheelhouse, half-stunned with the blast and concussion of exploding cannon shells, both Findhorn and Nicolson dimly realised the significance of the plan of attack, the reason for the overwhelming weight of bombers used in the onslaught and the heavy escort of Zero fighters. They realised, too, why the bridge remained miraculously immune from bombs, why no torpedo had as yet smashed into any of the oil cargo tanks—a target impossible to miss—and torn the heart out of the Viroma. The Japanese weren’t trying to destroy the Viroma: they were trying to save the Viroma and to destroy the crew. What matter if they blew the stern off the ship—her nine great oil tanks, still intact, and the fo’c’sle had enough reserve buoyancy to keep the ship afloat: awash, perhaps, but still afloat. And if they could ensure that none of the Viroma’s crew lived to blow up or scuttle the shattered ship, ten thousand tons of oil would be theirs for the taking: millions of gallons of high grade fuel for their ships and tanks and planes.

And then, quite suddenly, the almost continuous roar and teethchattering vibration of bursting bombs and torpedoes were at an end, the off-beat drone of heavy bomber engines faded quickly in the distance and the abrupt, comparative silence was almost as hurting to the ear as the clamour that had just ended. Wearily Nicolson shook his head to clear it of the shock and sound and smoke and choking dust, levered himself groggily to his hands and knees, caught the handle of the screen door and pulled himself to his feet, then dropped to the deck like a stone as cannon shells whistled evilly through the smashed windows just above his head and exploded against the chartroom bulkhead, filling the wheelhouse with the shocking blast of sound and a lethal storm of splintered steel.

For a few seconds Nicolson remained prone on the deck, face down with his hands over his ears and his cradling forearms protecting his head, half-dazed and cursing himself silently for his precipitate, unthinking folly in rising so quickly to his feet. He should have known better than to imagine for a moment that the entire Japanese assault force would withdraw. It had been inevitable that they would leave some planes behind to take care of any survivor who might move out on deck and try to rob them of their prize—and these planes, Zero fighters, would remain to the limit of their long range tanks.

Slowly, this time, moving with infinite caution, Nicolson rose to his feet again and peered out over the jagged glass in the bottom of the shattered window frame. Puzzled for a moment, he tried to orientate himself and the ship, then realised from the black bar of shadow from the foremast what had happened. A torpedo must have blown off or jammed the rudder, for the Viroma, losing way rapidly in the water until she was now almost stopped, had swung right round through a hundred and eighty degrees and was facing in the direction she had come. And then, almost at the same time, Nicolson saw something else again, something that made the position of the Viroma of no importance at all, something that made a mockery of the vigil of the planes watching and waiting in the sky.

It hadn’t been miscalculation on the part of the bomber pilots, just ignorance. When they had attacked the fo’c’sle, destroying guns and gunners and using armour piercing cannon shells to penetrate the fo’c’sle deck and kill any of the crew members sheltering beneath, it must have been a reasonable supposition to them that that was all they were doing. But what they did not know, what they could have had no means of knowing, was that the storage space beneath the fo’c’sle deck, the ’tween-deck cargo hold beneath that and the even larger hold beneath that were not empty. They were full, completely, filled to capacity with hundreds of closely stacked barrels, with tens of thousands of gallons of high-octane aircraft fuel—petrol intended for the shattered, burnt-out wrecks that now littered the Selengar airfield.

The flames rose a hundred, two hundred feet into the still, breathless air, a great, solid column so white, so intensely hot and free from smoke that it was all but invisible in the bright glare of the afternoon sun, not flames really but a broad shimmering band of super-heated air that narrowed as it climbed and ended in a twisting, wavering point that reached far up beyond the tip of the foremast and died in a feathery wisp of pale blue smoke. Every now and then another barrel would explode deep in the hold and, just for a moment, a gout of thick smoke would lace the almost invisible flame and then, as quickly, it would be gone. And the fire, Nicolson knew, was only starting. When the flames really got hold, when the barrels started bursting by the dozen, the aviation spirit in the for’ard fuel tank, number nine, would go up like an exploding ammunition dump. The heat of the flames already fierce on his forehead, he stared at the fo’c’sle a few moments longer, trying to estimate how much time they had left. But it was impossible to know, impossible even to guess. Perhaps only two minutes, perhaps as long as twenty—after two years of war the toughness of tankers, their reluctance to die, had become almost legendary … But certainly not more than twenty minutes.

Nicolson’s attention was suddenly caught by something moving among the maze of pipes on the deck, just aft of the foremast. It was a man, dressed only in a pair of tattered blue denims, stumbling and falling as he made his way towards a ladder that led up to the catwalk. He seemed dazed and kept rubbing his forearm across his eyes, as if he couldn’t see too well, but he managed to reach the foot of the ladder, drag himself to the top and began, at a lurching run, to make his way along the catwalk to the bridge superstructure. Nicolson could see him clearly now—Able Seaman Jenkins, trainer of the fo’c’sle pompom. And someone else had seen him too and Nicolson had time only for a desperate shout of warning before he flung himself to the deck and listened, with clenched fists, to the hammerblows of exploding cannon shells as the Zero pulled out of its short, sudden dive and raked the foredeck from fo’c’sle to bridge. This time Nicolson didn’t get to his feet. Getting to his feet inside that wheelhouse, he realised, was a good way of committing suicide. There could be only one good reason for getting to his feet, and that was to see how Jenkins was. But he didn’t have to look to know how Jenkins was. Jenkins should have bided his time and chosen his chance for making his dash, but perhaps he had been too dazed: or perhaps the only alternative he’d had was between running and being killed, and staying and being incinerated.

Nicolson shook his head to clear away the fumes and smell of cordite, pushed himself to a sitting position and looked round the scarred and shattered wheelhouse. There were four people in it apart from himself—and there had only been three a moment ago. McKinnon, the bo’sun, had just arrived, just as the last shells had exploded inside the bridge. He was half-crouched, half-lying across the threshold of the chartroom door, propped on one elbow and looking cautiously around him. He was unhurt, but taking no chances before moving any further.

“Keep your head down!” Nicolson advised him urgently. “Don’t stand up or you’ll get it blown off.” Even to himself his voice sounded hoarse and whispery and unreal.

Evans, the duty quartermaster, was sitting on his duckboard grill, his back to the wheel and swearing softly, fluently, continuously in his high-pitched Welsh voice. Blood dripped from a long gash on his forehead on to his knees, but he ignored it and concentrated on wrapping a makeshift bandage round his left forearm. How badly the arm was gashed Nicolson couldn’t tell: but every fresh strip of ragged white linen torn from his shirt became bright red and saturated the moment it touched his arm.

Vannier was lying against the deck in the far corner. Nicolson crawled across the deck and lifted his head, gently. The fourth officer had a cut and bruised temple, but seemed otherwise unharmed: he was quite unconscious, but breathing quietly and evenly. Carefully, Nicolson lowered his head to the deck and turned to look at Findhorn. The captain was sitting watching him on the other side of the bridge, back against the bulkhead, palms and splayed fingers resting on the deck beside him. The old man looks a bit pale, Nicolson thought: he’s not a kid any longer, not fit for it, especially this kind of fun and games. He gestured at Vannier.

“Just knocked out, sir. He’s as lucky as the rest of us—all alive, if not exactly kicking.” Nicolson made his voice sound more cheerful than he felt. Even as he stopped speaking he saw Findhorn bending forward to get up, his fingernails whitening as he put pressure on his hands. “Easy does it, sir!” Nicolson called out sharply. “Stay where you are. There are some characters snooping around outside just begging for a sight of you.”

Findhorn nodded and relaxed, leaning back against the bulkhead. He said nothing. Nicholson looked at him sharply. “You all right, sir?”

Findhorn nodded again and made to speak. But no words came, only a strange gravelly cough and suddenly his lips were flecked with bright bubbles of blood, blood that trickled down his chin and dripped slowly on to the fresh, white crispness of his tunic shirt. Nicolson was on his feet in a moment, crossed the wheelhouse in a stumbling run and fell on his knees in front of the captain.

Findhorn smiled at him and tried to speak, but again there was only the bubbling cough and more blood at his mouth, bright arterial blood that contrasted pitifully with the whiteness of the lips. His eyes were sick and glazed.

Quickly, urgently, Nicolson searched body and head for evidence of a wound. At first he could see nothing, then all at once he had it—he’d mistaken it for one of the drops of blood soaking into Findhorn’s shirt. But this was no blood-drip, but a hole—a small, insignificant looking hole, quite circular and reddening at the edges. That was Nicolson’s first shocked reaction—how small a hole it was, and how harmless. Almost in the centre of the captain’s chest, but not quite. It was perhaps an inch or so to the left of the breastbone and two inches above the heart.

SEVEN

Gently, carefully, Nicolson caught the captain by the shoulders, eased his back off the bulkhead and turned to look for the bo’sun. But McKinnon was already kneeling by his side, and one glance at McKinnon’s studiously expressionless face told Nicolson that the stain on the captain’s shirt-front must be spreading. Quickly, without any word from Nicolson, McKinnon had his knife out and the back of the captain’s shirt slit open in one neat movement, then he closed the knife, caught the edges of the cut cloth in his hands and ripped the shirt apart. For a moment he scanned the captain’s back, then he closed the tear together, looked up at Nicolson and shook his head. As carefully as before Nicolson eased the captain back against the bulkhead.

“No success, gentlemen, eh?” Findhorn’s voice was only a husky, strained murmur, a fight against the blood welling up in his throat.

“It’s bad enough, not all that bad though.” Nicolson picked his words with care. “Does it hurt much, sir?”

“No.” Findhorn closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Please answer my question. Did it go right through?”

Nicolson’s voice was detached, almost clinical. “No, sir. Must have nicked the lung, I think, and lodged in the ribs at the back. We’ll have to dig for it, sir.”

“Thank you.” ‘Nicked’ was a flagrant meiosis and only a fully equipped hospital theatre could hope to cope with surgery within the chest wall, but if Findhorn appreciated these things he gave no sign by either tone or expression. He coughed painfully, then tried to smile. “The excavations will have to wait. How is the ship, Mr. Nicolson?”

“Going,” Nicolson said bluntly. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You can see the flames, sir. Fifteen minutes if we’re lucky. Permission to go below, sir?”

“Of course, of course! What am I thinking of?” Findhorn struggled to rise to his feet, but McKinnon held him down, talking to him in his soft Highland voice, looking at Nicolson for guidance. But the guidance came not from Nicolson but in the shape of a crescendoing roar of an aircraft engine, the triphammer thudding of aircraft cannon and a shell that screamed through the smashed window above their heads and blasted the top of the chartroom door off its hinges. Findhorn ceased to struggle and leaned back tiredly against the bulkhead, looking up at McKinnon and half smiling. Then he turned to speak to Nicolson, but Nicolson was already gone, the chartroom door half closing behind him, swinging crazily on its shattered hinges.

Nicolson dropped down the centre ladder, turned for’ard and went in the starboard door of the dining-saloon. Van Effen was sitting on the deck by the door as he went in, his gun in his hand, unhurt. He looked up as the door opened.

“A great deal of noise indeed, Mr. Nicolson. Finished?”

“More, or less. I’m afraid the ship is. Still two or three Zeros outside, looking for the last drop of blood. Any trouble?”

“With them?” Van Effen waved a contemptuous pistol barrel at the crew of the Kerry Dancer: five of them lay huddled fearfully on the deck at the foot of the for’ard settees, two more were prostrate under the tables. “Too worried about their own precious skins.”

“Anyone hurt?”

Van Effen shook his head regretfully. “The devil is good to his own kind, Mr. Nicolson.”

“Pity.” Nicolson was already on his way across to the port door of the dining-saloon. “The ship’s going. We haven’t long. Herd our little friends up to the deck above—keep ‘em in the passageway for the time being. Don’t open the screen doors—” Nicolson broke off suddenly, halted in mid-stride. The wooden serving hatch into the pantry was riddled and smashed in a dozen places. From the other side he could hear the thin, quavering sobbing of a little child.

Within three seconds Nicolson was out in the passage, wrestling with the handle of the pantry door. The handle turned, but the door refused to open—locked, perhaps, more probably jammed and buckled. A providential fire axe hung on the bulkhead outside the fifth engineer’s cabin and Nicolson swung it viciously against the lock of the pantry door. On the third blow the lock sprang open and the door crashed back on its hinges.

Nicolson’s first confused impressions were of smoke, burning, a sea of smashed crockery and an almost overpowering reek of whisky. Then the rush of fresh air quickly cleared the air and he could see the two nurses sitting on the deck, almost at his feet, Lena, the young Malayan girl, with her dark, sooty eyes wide and shadowed with terror, and Miss Drachmann beside her, her face pale and strained but calm. Nicolson dropped on his knees beside her.

“The little boy?” he asked harshly.

“Do not worry. Little Peter is safe.” She smiled at him gravely, eased back the heavy metal door of the hot press, already ajar. The child was inside, snugly wrapped in a heavy blanket, staring out at him with wide, fearful eyes. Nicolson reached in a hand, gently ruffled the blond hair, then rose abruptly to his feet and let his breath go in a long sigh.

“Thank God for that, anyway.” He smiled down at the girl. “And thank you, too, Miss Drachmann. Damned clever idea. Take him outside in the passage, will you? It’s stifling in here.” He swung round, then halted and stared down in disbelief at the tableau at his feet. The young soldier, Alex, and the priest were stretched out on the deck, side by side, both obviously unconscious—at least. Farnholme was just straightening up from examining the priest’s head. The smell of whisky from him was so powerful that his clothes might have been saturated in it.

“What the hell’s been going on here?” Nicolson demanded icily. “Can’t you keep off the bottle for even five minutes, Farnholme?”

“You’re a headstrong young man, young man.” The voice came from the far corner of the pantry. “You mustn’t jump to conclusions, especially wrong conclusions.”

Nicolson peered through the gloom. With the dynamos and lighting gone the windowless pantry was half-shrouded in darkness. He could barely distinguish the slight form of Miss Plenderleith sitting straight-backed against the ice-box. Her head was bent over her hands and the busy click-click, click-click of needles seemed unnaturally loud. Nicolson stared at her in utter disbelief.

“What are you doing, Miss Plenderleith?” Even to himself, Nicolson’s voice sounded strained, incredulous.

“Knitting, of course. Have you never seen anyone knitting before?”

“Knitting!” Nicolson murmured in awe. “Knitting, of course! Two lumps or three, vicar.” Nicolson shook his head in wonder. “If the Japs knew this they’d demand an armistice tomorrow.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Miss Plenderleith demanded crisply. “Don’t tell me that you’ve lost your senses, too.”

“Too?”

“This unfortunate young man here.” She pointed at the young soldier. “We jammed some trays against the serving hatch when we came in—it’s only wood, you know. The Brigadier thought it might give protection from bullets.” Miss Plenderleith was talking very rapidly, very concisely, her knitting now laid aside. “When the first bombs hit, this young man tried to get out. The Brigadier locked the door—and very quick he was about it, too. Then he started to pull the trays down—going to go out the hatch, I suppose. The—ah—priest here was trying to pull him back when the bullets came through the hatch.”

Nicolson turned away quickly, looked at Farnholme and then nodded down at the Muslim priest. “My apologies, Brigadier. Is he dead?”

“Thank God, no.” Farnholme straightened on his knees, his Sandhurst drawl temporarily in abeyance. “Creased, concussed, that’s all.” He looked down at the young soldier and shook his head in anger. “Bloody young fool.”

“And what’s the matter with him?”

“Laid him out with a whisky bottle,” Farnholme said succinctly. “Bottle broke. Must have been flawed. Shockin’ waste, shockin’.”

“Get him outside, will you? The rest of you outside, too.” Nicolson turned round as someone entered the door behind him. “Walters! I’d forgotten all about you. Are you all right?”

“All right, sir. Wireless room’s a bit of a shambles, I’m afraid.” Walters looked pale and sick, but purposeful as ever.

“Doesn’t matter now.” Nicolson was grateful for Walters’ presence, his solidity and competence. “Get these people up to the boatdeck—in the passage, better still in your office or cabin. Don’t let ‘em out on deck. If there’s anything they want to get from their cabins, give ‘em a couple of minutes.”

Walters smiled wryly. “We’re taking a little trip, sir?”

“Very shortly. Just to be on the safe side.” It would hardly benefit the morale of the passengers, Nicolson reflected, by adding what Walters himself must have been aware of—that the only alternatives were cremation or disintegration when the ship went up. He went out the door quickly, then staggered and almost fell as a tremendous detonation, right aft, seemed to lift the stern of the Viroma out of the water and sent a shuddering, convulsive shock through her every plate and rivet. Instinctively Nicolson reached out and caught the lintel of the door, caught and held Miss Drachmann and Peter as the nurse fell against him, steadied her and turned quickly to Walters.

“Belay that last order. No one to go to their cabins. Just get ‘em up there and see that they stay there.” In four strides he was at the after screen door, opening it cautiously. Seconds later he was outside on deck, standing at the top of the iron ladder that led down to the main deck, and staring aft.

The heat struck at him almost with the physical impact of a blow and brought tears of pain to his eyes. No complaints that he couldn’t see this fire, he thought grimly. Billowing, convoluted clouds of oily black smoke stretched up hundreds of feet into the sky, reaching higher and higher with the passing of every second, not tailing off to a peak but spreading out at the top in a great, black anvil-head, spreading over the ship like a pall: at the base, however, just at deck level, there was hardly any smoke at all, only a solid wall of flame perhaps sixty feet in diameter, a wall that rose forty feet, then broke into a dozen separate pillars of fire; fiery, twisting tongues of flame that reached hungrily upwards, their flickering points swallowed up in the rolling darkness of the smoke. In spite of the intense heat, Nicolson’s first reaction was to cover not his face but his ears: even at a hundred and fifty feet the roaring of the flames was all but intolerable.

Another miscalculation on the part of the Japs, he thought grimly. A bomb meant for the engine-room had exploded in the diesel oil bunkers, blowing aft through the engine-room bulkhead and for’ard clear through both walls of the cofferdam into number one cargo tank. And it was almost certainly number one tank that was on fire, its quarter of a million gallons of fuel oil ignited and fanned by the fierce down-draught of air through the wrecked cofferdam. Even if they had had firefighting apparatus left, and the men to man the apparatus, tackling that inferno, an inferno that would have engulfed and destroyed any man before he could have come within fifty feet of it, would only have been the suicidal gesture of an imbecile. And then, above the deep, steady roar of the flames, Nicolson heard another, more deadly sound, the high-pitched, snarling howl of an aero engine under maximum boost, caught a momentary glimpse of a Zero arrowing in off the starboard beam, at mast-top height, flung himself convulsively backward through the open door behind him as cannon-shells struck and exploded where he had been only two seconds before.

Cursing himself for his forgetfulness, Nicolson pushed himself to his feet, clipped the door shut and looked around him. Already both pantry and passage were quite empty—Walters was not a man to waste time. Quickly Nicolson made his way along the passage, through the dining-saloon to the foot of the companionway leading up to the boat deck. Farnholme was there, struggling to carry the young soldier up the stairs. Nicolson helped him in silence, and at the top Walters met him and relieved him of his share of the burden. Nicolson glanced along the passage towards the wireless office.

“All safely corralled, Sparks?”

“Yes, sir. The Arab Johnny’s just coming to and Miss Plenderleith’s packing her bag as if she were off to Bournemouth for a fortnight.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed. The worrying kind.” Nicolson looked along to the for’ard end of the passage. Siran and his men were huddled round the ladder that led up to the chartroom, fearful and unhappy. All, that is, except Siran himself. Despite its cuts and bruises, the brown face still held its expressionless calm. Nicolson looked sharply at Walters. “Where’s Van Effen?”

“No idea, sir. Haven’t seen him.”

Nicolson walked to face Siran. “Where’s Van Effen?”

Siran shrugged his shoulders, twisted his lips into a smile and said nothing.

Nicolson jammed a pistol into Siran’s solar plexus, and the smile faded from the brown face. “I’d just as soon you died,” Nicolson said pleasantly.

“He went above.” Siran nodded at the ladder. “A minute ago.”

Nicolson swung round. “Got a gun, Sparks?”

“In the office, sir.”

“Get it. Van Effen had no right to leave this lot.” He waited till Walters returned. “No reasons required for shooting this bunch. Any flimsy excuse will do.”

He went up the stairs three at a time, passed through the chartroom and into the wheelhouse. Vannier was conscious now, still shaking his head to free it from muzziness, but recovered enough to help Evans bind his arm. McKinnon and the captain were still together.

“Seen Van Effen, Bo’sun?”

“Here a minute ago, sir. He’s gone up top.”

“Up top? What in heaven’s name—” Nicolson checked himself. Time was too short as it was. “How do you feel, Evans?”

“Bloody well mad, sir,” Evans said, and looked it. “If I could get my hands on those murderin’—”

“All right, all right.” Nicolson smiled briefly. “I can see you’ll live. Stay here with the captain. How are you, Fourth?”

“O.K. now, sir.” Vannier was very pale. “Just a crack on the head.”

“Good. Take the bo’sun with you and check the boats. Just numbers one and two—three and four are finished.” He broke off and looked at the captain. “You said something, sir?”

“Yes.” Findhorn’s voice was still weak, but clearer than it had been. “Three and four gone?”

“Bombed to bits and then burnt to a cinder,” Nicolson said without bitterness. “A very thorough job. Number one tank’s on fire, sir.”

Findhorn shook his head. “What hope, boy?”

“None, just none at all.” Nicolson turned back to Vannier. “If they’re both serviceable we’ll take them both.” He glanced at Findhorn, raised eyebrows seeking confirmation. “We don’t want Siran and his cut-throat pals in the same open boat as us when night falls.”

Findhorn nodded silently, and Nicolson went on: “As many spare blankets, food, water, arms and ammunition as you can find. And first-aid kits. All these in the better boat—ours. That clear. Fourth?”

“All clear, sir.”

“One other thing. When you’re finished, a strap stretcher for the captain. Don’t get yourselves shot full of cannon holes—they nearly got me a couple of minutes ago. And for God’s sake hurry! Five minutes for the lot.”

Nicolson moved just outside the wheelhouse starboard door and stood there for two or three seconds, taking stock. The blast of fiery heat struck at him, fore and aft, like the scorching incalescence of an opened furnace door, but he ignored it. The heat wouldn’t kill him, not yet, but the Zeros would if they were given any chance at all: but the Zeros were half a mile away, line ahead and port wings dipped as they circled the Viroma, watching and waiting.

Five steps, running, took him to the foot of the wheel-house top ladder. He took the first three steps in a stride, then checked so abruptly that only a swiftly bent arm cushioned the shock as he fell forward against the rungs. Van Effen, face and shirt streaked with blood, was just beginning to descend, half supporting, half carrying Corporal Fraser. The soldier was in a very bad way, a man obviously willing himself to hang on to the last shreds of consciousness. Beneath the dark tan the pain-twisted face was drained of blood, and with his right arm he supported what was left of his left forearm, torn and shredded and horribly maimed—only an exploding cannon shell could have worked that savage injury. He seemed to be losing only a little blood: Van Effen had knotted a tourniquet just above the elbow.

Nicolson met them half-way up the ladder, caught the soldier and took some of the almost dead weight off Van Effen. And then, before he realised what was happening, he had all the weight and Van Effen was on his way back up to the wheelhouse top.

“Where are you going, man?” Nicolson had to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the flames. “Damn all anybody can do up there now. We’re abandoning ship. Come on!”

“Must see if there’s anyone else alive,” Van Effen yelled. He shouted something else and Nicolson thought he heard him mention guns, but couldn’t be sure. His voice didn’t carry too well above the roar of the two great fires and Nicolson’s attention was already elsewhere. The Zeros—there were only three of them—were no longer circling the ship but banking steeply, altering formation to line abreast and heading straight for the midships superstructure. It needed no imagination at all to realise what tempting and completely exposed targets they must be, perched high on top of the ship. Nicolson tightened his hold on Corporal Fraser and pointed urgently out to sea with his free hand.

“You haven’t a chance, you crazy fool!” he shouted. Van Effen was now at the top of the ladder. “Are you blind or mad?”

“Look to yourself, my friend,” Van Effen called, and was gone. Nicolson waited no longer, he would have to look to himself, and with a vengeance. Only a few steps, only a few seconds to the door of the wheelhouse, but Fraser was now only a limp, powerless weight in his arms, and it would take a Zero perhaps six seconds, no more, to cover the intervening distance. Already he could hear the thin, high snarl of the engines, muted but menacing over the steady roar of the flames, but he didn’t dare look, he knew where they were anyway, two hundred yards away and with the gunsights lined up on his unprotected back. The wheelhouse sliding door was jammed, he could get only a minimal purchase on it with his left hand, then it was suddenly jerked open, the bo’sun was dragging Corporal Fraser inside and Nicolson was catapulting himself forward on to the deck, wincing involuntarily as he waited for the numbing shock of cannon shells smashing into his back, And then he had rolled and twisted his way into shelter and safety, there was a brief, crescendoing thunder of sound and the planes had swept by only feet above the wheel-house. Not a gun had been fired.

Nicolson shook his head in dazed incredulity and rose slowly to his feet. Maybe the smoke and the flame had blinded the pilots, perhaps even they had exhausted their ammunition—the number of cannon shells a fighter could carry was limited. Not that it mattered anyway, not any more. Farnholme was on the bridge now, Nicolson saw, helping McKinnon to carry the soldier below. Vannier was gone, but Evans was still there with the captain. Then the chartroom door swung open on its shattered hinges, and once again Nicolson’s face tightened in disbelief.

The man who stood before him was almost naked, clad only in the charred tatters of what had been a pair of blue trousers: they were still smoking, smouldering at the edges. Eyebrows and hair were singed and frizzled and the chest and arms red and scorched: the chest rose and fell very quickly in small shallow breaths, like a man whose lungs have been so long starved of air that he cannot find time to breathe deeply. His face was very pale.

“Jenkins!” Nicolson had advanced, seized the man by the shoulders then dropped his hands quickly as the other winced with pain. “How on earth—I saw the ‘planes—”

“Somebody trapped, sir!” Jenkins interrupted. “For’ard pumproom.” He spoke hurriedly, urgently but jerkily, only a word or two for every breath. “Dived off the catwalk—landed on the hatch. Heard knocking, sir.”

“So you got the hell out of it? Is that it?” Nicolson asked softly.

“No, sir. Clips jammed,” Jenkins shook his head tiredly. “Couldn’t open them, sir.”

“There’s a pipe clipped to the hatch,” Nicolson said savagely. “You know that as well as I do.”

Jenkins said nothing, turned his palms up for inspection. Nicolson winced. There was no skin left, none at all, just red, raw flesh and the gleam of white bone.

“Good God!” Nicolson stared at the hands for a moment, then looked up at the pain-filled eyes. “My apologies, Jenkins. Go below. Wait outside the wireless office.” He turned round quickly as someone touched him on the shoulder. “Van Effen. I suppose you know that apart from being a bloody fool you’re the luckiest man alive?”

The tall Dutchman dropped two rifles, an automatic carbine and ammunition on the deck and straightened up. “You were right,” he said quietly. “I was wasting my time. All dead.” He nodded at Jenkins’ retreating back. “I heard him. That’s the small deckhouse just for’ard of the bridge, isn’t it? I’ll go.”

Nicolson looked at the calm grey eyes for a moment, then nodded. “Come with me if you like. Might need help to get him out, whoever he is.”

In the passage below they bumped into Vannier, staggering under the weight of an armful of blankets. “How are the boats, Fourth?” Nicolson asked quickly.

“Remarkable, sir. They’re hardly scratched. You’d think the Japs had left them alone on purpose.”

“Both of them?” Nicolson asked in astonishment.

“Yes, sir.”

“Gift horses,” Nicolson muttered. “Carry on, Fourth. Don’t forget the stretcher for the captain.”

Down on the main deck the heat was almost suffocating, and both men were gasping for oxygen before ten seconds had passed. The petrol fire in the cargo holds was twice, three times as fierce as it had been five minutes ago, and dimly, through the roar of the flames, they could hear an almost continuous rumble of explosions as the metal fuel barrels ruptured and burst in the intense heat. But Nicolson noticed these things with only a corner of his mind. He was standing by the water-tight steel door of the entrance house to the hatch, rapping on the surface with the end of the two-foot length of pipe that served as clip levers for these doors. As he waited for a reply, bent low over the hatch, he could see the sweat from his forehead dripping on to the hatch in an almost continuous trickle. The air was so dry and parched, the metal so hot—they could feel the heat of the deck even through the soles of their shoes—that the drips of perspiration evaporated and vanished almost as they touched the deck … And then, so suddenly that both men started in spite of their tense expectation, there came an answering rap from inside, very faint but quite unmistakable, and Nicolson waited no longer. The clips were very stiff indeed—some explosive shock must have warped or shifted the metal—and it took a dozen powerful strokes from the sledge he carried to free the two jammed clips: the last retaining clip sheered at the first blow.

A gust of hot, fetid air swept up from the gloomy depths of the pump-room, but Nicolson and Van Effen ignored it and peered into the darkness. Then Van Effen had switched on his torch and they could clearly see the oil-streaked grey hair of a man climbing up towards the top of the ladder. And then two long arms reached down and, a moment later, the man was standing on deck beside him, a forearm flung up in reflex instinct to shield himself from the heat of the flames. He was drenched in oil from head to foot, the whites of his eyes almost comically prominent in the black, smeared face.

Nicolson peered at him for a moment, and then said in astonishment: “Willy!”

“Even so,” Willoughby intoned. “None other. Good old Willy. Golden lads and lasses must, etc., but not superannuated second engineers. No ordinary mortals we.” He wiped some oil from his face. “Sing no sad songs for Willoughby.”

“But what the hell were you doing?—never mind. It can wait. Come on, Willy. No time to lose. We’re leaving.”

Willoughby panted for air as they climbed up to the bridge. “Dived in for shelter, my boy. Almost cut off in my prime. Where are we going?”

“As far away from this ship as possible,” Nicolson said grimly. “She’s due to go up any moment now.”

Willoughby turned round, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Only a petrol fire, Johnny. Always a chance that it’ll burn itself out.”

“Number one cargo tank’s gone up.”

“The boats, and with all speed,” Willoughby said hastily. “Old Willy would live and fight another day.”

Within five minutes both boats had been provisioned and lowered for embarkation. All the survivors, including the wounded, were gathered together, waiting. Nicolson looked at the captain.

“Ready when you give the word, sir.”

Findhorn smiled faintly: even that seemed an effort, for the smile ended in a grimace of pain. “A late hour for this modesty, Mr. Nicolson. You’re in charge, my boy.” He coughed, screwed shut his eyes, then looked up thoughtfully. “The ‘planes, Mr. Nicolson. They could cut us to ribbons when we’re lowering into the water.”

“Why should they bother when they can have a far better go at us once we’re in the water?” Nicolson shrugged his shoulders. “We’ve no option, sir.”

“Of course. Forgive a foolish objection.” Findhorn leaned back and closed his eyes.

“There will be no trouble from the ‘planes.” It was Van Effen speaking, and he seemed oddly sure of himself. He smiled at Nicolson. “You and I could have been dead twice over: they either cannot fire or do not wish to fire. There are other reasons, too, but time is short, Mr. Nicolson.”

“Time is short.” Nicolson nodded, then clenched his fists as a deep, rumbling roar reverberated throughout the ship. A heavy, prolonged shudder ran through the superstructure of the Viroma, a shudder that culminated in a sudden, sickening lurch as the deck dropped away under their feet, towards the stern. Nicolson smiled faintly at Van Effen. “Time is indeed short, Van Effen. Must you illustrate your points quite so thoroughly?” He raised his voice. “Right, everybody, into the boats.”

The need for speed had been urgent before: it was desperate now. The bulkheads of number two tank had ruptured, and one of the tanks, possibly both, were open to the sea: the Viroma was already settling by the stern. But speed was a double-edged weapon and Nicolson only too clearly realised that undue haste and pressure would only drive the untrained passengers into panic, or, at best—and equally delaying—confusion. McKinnon and Van Effen were invaluable, shepherding the passengers to their positions, carrying the wounded and laying them down between the thwarts, talking quietly, encouragingly all the time. Inside, that is—outside they had to shout to make themselves heard above the sound of the flames—a weird, terrifying noise compounded of a thin, highpitched hissing noise that set teeth and nerves on edge and a deep, continuous tearing sound like the ripping of calico, only magnified a thousand times.

The heat was no longer uncomfortable. It was intense, and the two great curtains of flame were beginning to sweep irresistibly together—the pale-blue transparent gauze, shimmering and unreal, of the petrol fire from the bows, and the blood-red, smoke-shot flames from the stern. Breathing became a rasping, throat-tearing agony, and Jenkins, especially, suffered terribly as the super-heated air laid agonising fingers on his scorched skin and raw, bleeding hands. Of them all, young Peter Tallon suffered the least discomfort: McKinnon had dipped a large, fleecy blanket in the pantry sink and wrapped it round the little boy, covering him from head to toe.

Within three minutes of giving the order both boats were in the water. The port lifeboat, manned only by Siran and his six men, was first away—with fewer men, and none of these injured, it had taken less time to embark them, but, from the glimpse Nicolson had of them before he ran back to the starboard lifeboat, it was going to take them a long time to get clear of the burning ship. They were having difficulty in clearing the falls, although Nicolson had given instructions about the patent release gear, two of them were swinging fear-maddened blows at one another and all of them gesticulating and shouting at the tops of their voices. Nicolson turned away, heedless, indifferent. Let them sort it out themselves and if they failed the world would be the better for their failure. He had given them what they had denied the little boy—a chance to live.

Less than a minute later Nicolson, the last man to leave, was sliding down the knotted lifeline into the waterborne number one lifeboat. He could see the lifeboat beneath him, jammed with passengers and equipment, and realised how difficult it would be to ship the oars and pull away, especially with only three or four people fit or able to use an oar, but even as his feet touched a thwart the engine coughed, sputtered, coughed again, caught and settled down to a gentle murmur he could barely hear above the flames.

Within a minute they were well away from the Viroma’s side, circling anti-clockwise round the bows. Abreast the fo’c’sle, with two hundred feet of intervening sea, the heat from the flames still stung their eyes and caught at their throats but Nicolson still held the lifeboat in, rounding the bows as closely as they dared. And then, all at once, the long length of the port side of the Viroma opened up and they could see number two lifeboat. Three minutes, at least, had passed since she had been launched: she was still less than twenty yards from the side of the ship. Siran had finally succeeded in restoring order with the lash of his tongue and the heavy and indiscriminate use of the boathook, but, with two men lying groaning on the bottom-boards and a third nursing a numbed and, for the moment, useless arm, Siran had only three men left to man the heavy sweeps. On board number one boat Nicolson compressed his lips and looked at Findhorn. The captain interpreted the look correctly and nodded heavily and reluctantly.

Half a minute later McKinnon sent a coil of rope snaking expertly over the water. Siran himself caught it and made it fast to the mast thwart, and almost at once the motorboat took up the slack and started towing Siran and his men clear of the ship’s side. This time Nicolson made no attempt to circle the ship but moved straight out to sea intent on putting the maximum possible distance between themselves and the Viroma in the least possible time.

Five minutes and five hundred yards passed and still nothing happened. The motorboat, with the other lifeboat in tow, was making a top speed of perhaps three and a half knots, but every foot covered was a foot nearer safety. The fighters still cruised overhead, but aimlessly: they had made no move to attack since the embarkation had begun and obviously had no intention of making any now.

Two more minutes passed, and the Viroma was burning more fiercely than ever. The flames from the fo’c’sle were now clearly visible, no longer swallowed up by the brilliance of the sunlight: the dense pall of smoke from the two after cargo tanks now spread over half a square mile of sea and not even the fierce tropical sun could penetrate its black intensity. Under this dark canopy the two great pillars of flame swept more and more closely together, remorseless, majestic in the splendour of their inexorable progress. The tips of the two great fires leaned in towards one another—some curious freak of the superheated atmosphere—and Findhorn, twisted round in his seat and watched his ship die, knew with sudden certainty that when these two flames touched the end would come. And so it was.

After the barbaric magnificence of the dying, the death was strangely subdued and unspectacular. A column of white flame streaked upwards just abaft the bridge, climbing two, three, four hundred feet, then vanishing as suddenly as it had come. Even as it vanished a low, deep, prolonged rumble came at them across the stillness of the sea; by and by the echoes vanished away in the empty distance and there was only then the silence. The end came quietly and without any fuss, even with a certain grace and dignity, the Viroma slipping gently under the surface of the sea on an even steady keel, a tired and dreadfully wounded ship that had taken all it could and was glad to go to rest. The watchers in the lifeboats could hear the gentle hissing, quickly extinguished, of water pouring into red-hot holds, could see the tips of the two slender masts sliding down vertically into the sea, then a few bubbles and then nothing at all, no floating wood or flotsam on the oily waters, just nothing at all. It was as if the Viroma had never been.

Captain Findhorn turned to Nicolson, his face like a stone, his eyes drained and empty of all expression. Almost everybody in the lifeboat was looking at him, openly or covertly, but he seemed completely unaware of it, a man sunk in a vast and heedless indifference.

“Unaltered course, Mr. Nicolson, if you please.” His voice was low and husky, but only from weakness and blood. “200, as I remember. Our objective remains. We should reach the Macclesfield Channel in twelve hours.”

EIGHT

Hours passed, interminable, breathless hours under a blue, windless sky and the fierce glare of the tropical sun and still number one lifeboat chugged steadily south, towing the other boat behind it. Normally a lifeboat carries a fuel supply good only for a hundred miles steaming at about four knots, and is used solely for emergencies, such as towing other boats clear of a sinking ship, cruising around for survivors, going for immediate help or keeping the boat itself hove to in heavy seas. But McKinnon had had the foresight to throw in extra cans of petrol and, even allowing for the possibility of bad weather, they had enough, and more than enough, to carry them to Lepar, an island about the size of the Isle of Sheppey on the starboard hand as they passed through the Macclesfield Channel. Captain Findhorn, with fifteen years in the Archipelago behind him, knew where he could find petrol on Lepar, and plenty of it. The only unknown quantity was the Japanese: they might have already taken over the island, but with their land forces already so widespread and thinly stretched it seemed unlikely that they could yet have had the time or sufficient reason to garrison so small a place. And with plenty of petrol and fresh water there was no saying how far they might go: the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and Java was not impossible, especially when the north-east trades started up again and helped them on their way.

But there were no trades just now, not even the lightest zephyr of a breeze; it was absolutely still and airless and suffocatingly hot and the tiny movement of air from their slow passage through the water was only a mockery of coolness and worse than nothing at all. The blazing sun was falling now, slipping far to the west, but still burning hot: Nicolson had both sails stretched as awnings, the jib for the fore end and the lug-sail, its yard lashed half-way up the mast, stretched aft as far as it would go, but even beneath the shelter, of these the heat was still oppressive, somewhere between eighty and ninety degrees with a relative humidity of over 85 per cent. It was seldom enough in the East Indies, at any time of the year, that the temperature dropped below eighty degrees. Nor was there any relief to be obtained, any chance of cooling off by plunging over the side into the water, the temperature of which lay somewhere between eighty degrees and eighty-five. All the passengers could do was to recline limply and listlessly in the shade of awnings, to sit and suffer and sweat and pray for the sun to go down.

The passengers. Nicolson, sitting in the stern-sheets with the tiller in his hand, looked slowly round the people in the boat, took in their condition and lifeless inertia and tightened his lips. If he had to be afloat in an open boat in the tropics, hundreds—thousands—of miles from help and surrounded by the enemy and enemy-held islands, he could hardly have picked a boatload of passengers less well equipped for handling a boat, with a poorer chance of survival. There were exceptions, of course, men like McKinnon and Van Effen would always be exceptions, but as for the remainder …

Excluding himself, there were seventeen people aboard. Of these, as far as sailing and fighting the boat were concerned, only two were definite assets: McKinnon, imperturbable, competent, infinitely resourceful, was worth any two men, and Van Effen, an otherwise unknown quantity, had already proved his courage and value in an emergency. About Vannier it was difficult to say: no more than a boy, he might possibly stand up to prolonged strain and hardship, but time alone would show. Walters, still looking sick and shaken, would be a useful man to have around when he had recovered. And that, on the credit side, was just about all.

Gordon, the second steward, a thin-faced, watery-eyed and incurably furtive individual, a known thief who had been conspicuously and mysteriously absent from his action stations that afternoon, was no seaman, no fighter and could be trusted to do nothing whatsoever that didn’t contribute to the immediate safety and benefit of himself. Neither the Muslim priest nor the baffling, enigmatic Famholme—they were seated together on the same thwart, conversing in low murmurs—had shown up too well that afternoon either. There was no more kindly nor better-meaning man than Willoughby, but, outside his engine room and deprived of his beloved books and for all his rather pathetic eagerness to be of assistance, there was no more ineffectual and helpless person alive than the gentle second engineer. The captain, Evans, the quartermaster, Fraser and Jenkins, the young able seaman, were too badly hurt to give any more than token assistance. Alex, the young soldier—Nicolson had discovered that his name was Sinclair—was as jittery and unstable as ever, his wide, staring eyes darting restlessly, ceaselessly, from one member of the boat’s company to the next, the palms of his hands rubbing constantly up and down the thighs of his trousers, as if desperately seeking to rub off some contamination. That left only the three women and young Peter—and if anyone wanted to stack the odds even higher, Nicolson thought bitterly, there was always Siran and his six cut-throat friends not twenty feet away. The prospects, overall, were not good.

The one happy, carefree person in the two boats was young Peter Tallon. Clad only in a haltered pair of white, very short shorts, he seemed entirely unaffected by the heat or anything else, bouncing incessantly up and down on the stern-sheets and having to be rescued from falling overboard a dozen times a minute. Familiarity breeding trust, he had quite lost his earlier fear of the other members of the crew but had not yet given him his unquestioning confidence: whenever Nicolson, whose seat by the tiller was nearest to the youngster, offered him a piece of ship’s biscuit or a mug with some watered down sweet condensed milk, he would smile at him shyly, lean forward, snatch the offering, retreat and eat or drink it, head bent and looking suspiciously at Nicolson under lowered eyelids. But if Nicolson reached out a hand to touch or catch him he would fling himself against Miss Drachmann, who sat on the starboard side of the sternsheets, entwine one chubby hand in the shining black hair, often with a force that brought a wince and an involuntary ‘ouch’ from the girl, twist his head round and regard him gravely through the spread fingers of his left hand. It was a favourite trick of his, this peeping from behind his fingers, one which he seemed to imagine made him invisible. For long moments at a time Nicolson forgot the war, the wounded men and their own near-hopeless situation, absorbed in the antics of the little boy but always he came back to the bitter present, to an even keener despair, to a redoubled fear of what would happen to the child when the Japanese finally caught up with them.

And they would catch up with them. Nicolson had known that, known it beyond any shadow of doubt, known that Captain Findhorn knew it also despite his encouraging talk of sailing for Lepar and the Sunda Straits. The Japanese had their position to within a few miles, could find them and pick them off whenever they wished. The only mystery was why they had not already done so. Nicolson wondered if the others knew that their hours of freedom and safety were limited, that the cat was playing with the mouse. If they did, it was impossible to tell by their behaviour and appearance. A helpless, useless bunch in many ways, a crushing liability to any man who hoped to sail his boat to freedom, but Nicolson had to concede them one saving grace: Gordon and the shocked Sinclair apart, their morale was magnificent.

They had worked hard and uncomplainingly to get all the blankets and provisions stowed away as neatly as possible, had cleared spaces at the expense of their own comfort for the wounded men—who themselves, in spite of obvious agony, had never complained once—and accepted all Nicolson’s orders and their own cramped positions cheerfully and willingly. The two nurses, surprisingly and skilfully assisted by Brigadier Farnholme, had worked for almost two hours over the wounded men and done a splendid job. Never had the Ministry of Transport’s insistence that all lifeboats carry a comprehensive first-aid kit been more fully justified, and seldom could it have been put to better use: collapse revivers, ‘Omnopon,’ sulphanilamide powder, codeine compounds, dressings, bandages, gauze, cotton wool and jelly for burns—they were all there and they were all used. Surgical kit Miss Drachmann carried herself: and with the lifeboat’s hatchet and his own knife McKinnon had perfectly adequate splints improvised from the bottom-boards for Corporal Fraser’s shattered arm within ten minutes of being asked for them.

And Miss Plenderleith was magnificent. There was no other word for it. She had a genius for reducing circumstances and situations to reassuring normality, and might well have spent her entire life in an open boat. She accepted things as they were, made the very best of them, and had more than sufficient authority to induce others to do the same. It was she who wrapped the wounded in blankets and pillowed their heads on lifebelts, scolding them like unruly and recalcitrant little children if they showed any signs of disobeying: Miss Plenderleith never had to scold anyone twice. It was she who had taken over the commissariat and watched over the wounded until they had eaten the last crumb and drunk the last drop of what she had offered them. It was she who had snatched Farnholme’s gladstone bag from him, stowed it beneath her side bench, picked up the hatchet McKinnon had laid down, and informed the seething Brigadier, with the light of battle in her eyes, that his drinking days were over and that the contents of the bag, which he had been on the point of broaching, would be in future reserved for medicinal use only—and thereafter, incredibly, had produced needles and wool from the depths of her own capacious bag and calmly carried on with her knitting. And it was she who was now sitting with a board across her knees, carefully slicing bully beef and bread, doling out biscuits, barley sugar and thinned down condensed milk and ordering around a grave and carefully unsmiling McKinnon, whom she had pressed into service as her waiter, as if he were one of her more reliable but none too bright school children. Magnificent, Nicolson thought, trying hard to match his bo’sun’s deadpan expression, just magnificent: there was no other word for her. Suddenly her voice sharpened, rose almost an octave.

“Mr. McKinnon! What on earth are you doing?” The bo’sun had dropped his latest cargo of bread and corned beef to the bottomboards and sunk down on his knees beside her, peering out below the awning, ignoring Miss Plenderleith as she repeated her question. She repeated it a third time, received no answer, tightened her lips and jabbed him ferociously in the ribs with the haft of her knife. This time she got a reaction.

“Will you look what you’ve done, you clumsy idiot?” She pointed her knife angrily at McKinnon’s knee: between it and the side bench half a pound of meat was squashed almost flat.

“Sorry, Miss Plenderleith, sorry.” The bo’sun stood up, absently rubbing shreds of beef off his trousers, and turned to Nicolson. “‘Plane approaching, sir. Green ninety, near enough.”

Nicolson glanced at him out of suddenly narrowed eyes, stopped and stared out to the west under the awning. He saw the plane almost at once, not more than two miles away, at about two thousand feet. Walters, the lookout in the bows, had missed it, but not surprisingly: it was coming at them straight out of the eye of the sun. McKinnon’s sensitive ears must have picked up the faraway drone of the engine. How he had managed to detect it above the constant flow of Miss Plenderleith’s talk and the steady putt-putt of their own engine Nicolson couldn’t imagine. Even now he himself could hear nothing.

Nicolson drew back, glanced over at the captain. Findhorn was lying on his side, either asleep or in a coma. There was no time to waste finding out which.

“Get the sail down, Bo’sun,” he said quickly. “Gordon, give him a hand. Quickly, now. Fourth?”

“Sir?” Vannier was pale, but looked eager and steady enough.

“The guns. One each for yourself, the brigadier, the bo’sun, Van Effen, Walters and myself.” He looked at Farnholme. “There’s some sort of automatic carbine there, sir. You know how to handle it?”

“I certainly do!” Pale blue eyes positively gleaming, Farnholme stretched out a hand for the carbine, cocked the bolt with one expert flick of his fingers and cradled the gun in his arms, glaring hopefully at the approaching plane: the old warhorse sniffing the scent of battle and loving it. Even in that moment of haste Nicolson found time to marvel at the complete transformation from the early afternoon: the man who had scuttled thankfully into the safe refuge of the pantry might never have existed. It was incredible, but there it was: far back in his mind Nicolson had a vague suspicion that the brigadier was just too consistent in his inconsistencies, that a purposeful but well-concealed pattern lay at the root of all his odd behaviour. But it was only a suspicion, he couldn’t make sense of it and maybe he was reading into Farnholme’s strange, see-saw conduct something that didn’t exist. Whatever the explanation, now was not the time to seek it.

“Get your gun down,” Nicolson said urgently. “All of you. Keep them hidden. The rest of you flat on the boards, as low down as you can get.” He heard the boy’s outraged wail of protest as he was pulled down beside the nurse and deliberately forced all thought of him out of his mind. The aircraft—a curious looking seaplane of a type he had never seen before—was still heading straight for them, perhaps half a mile distant now. Losing height all the time, it was coming in very slowly: that type of plane was not built for speed.

It was banking now, beginning to circle the lifeboats, and Nicolson watched it through his binoculars. On the fuselage the emblem of the rising sun glinted as the plane swung first to the south and then to the east. A lumbering, clumsy plane, Nicolson thought, good enough for low-speed reconnaissance, but that was about all. And then Nicolson remembered the three Zeros that had circled indifferently overhead as they had abandoned the burning Viroma and all at once he had a conviction that amounted to complete certainty.

“You can put your guns away,” he said quietly. “And you can all sit up. This character isn’t after our lives. The Japs have plenty of bombers and fighters to make a neat, quick job of us. If they wanted to finish us off, they wouldn’t have sent an old carthorse of a seaplane that has more than an even chance of being shot down itself. They’d have sent the fighters and bombers.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” Farnholme’s blood was roused, and he was reluctant to abandon the idea of lining the Japanese ‘plane up over the sights of his carbine. “I wouldn’t trust the beggars an inch!”

“Who would?” Nicolson agreed. “But I doubt whether this fellow has more than a machine-gun.” The seaplane was still circling, still at the same circumspect distance. “My guess is they want us, but they want us alive, lord only knows why. This bloke here, as the Americans would say, is just keeping us on ice.” Nicolson had spent too many years in the Far East not to have heard, in grisly detail, of Japanese atrocities and barbaric cruelties during the Chinese war and knew that, for an enemy civilian, death was a pleasant, a desirable end compared to being taken prisoner by them. “Why we should be all that important to them I can’t even begin to guess. Just let’s count our blessings and stay alive a little longer.”

“I agree with the chief officer.” Van Effen had already stowed away his gun. “This plane is just—how do you say—keeping tabs on us. He’ll leave us alone, Brigadier, don’t you worry about that.”

“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t.” Farnholme brought his carbine into plain view. “No reason then why I shouldn’t have a pot at him. Dammit all, he’s an enemy, isn’t he?” Farnholme was breathing hard. “A bullet in his engine—”

“You’ll do no such thing, Foster Farnholme.” Miss Plenderleith’s voice was cold, incisive and imperious. “You’re behaving like an idiot, an irresponsible child. Put that gun down at once.” Farnholme was already wilting under her glare and the lash of her tongue. “Why kick a wasp’s nest? You fire at him and the next thing you know he loses his temper and fires at us and half of us are dead. Unfortunately there’s no way of guaranteeing that you’ll be among that half.”

Nicolson struggled to keep his face straight. Where their journey would end he had no idea, but as long as it lasted the violent antipathy between Farnholme and Miss Plenderleith promised to provide plenty of light entertainment: no one had yet heard them speak a civil word to each other.

“Now, then, Constance.” The brigadier’s voice was half truculent, half placating. “You’ve no right—”

“Don’t you ‘Constance’ me,” she said icily. “Just put that gun away. None of us wishes to be sacrificed on the altar of your belated valour and misplaced martial ardour.” She gave him the benefit of a cold, level stare, then turned ostentatiously away. The subject was closed and Farnholme suitably crushed. “You and the brigadier—you’ve known each other for some time?” Nicolson ventured.

For a moment she transferred her glacial stare to Nicolson, and he thought he had gone too far. Then she pressed her lips together and nodded. “A long time. For me, far too long. He had his own regiment in Singapore, years before the war, but I doubt whether they ever saw him. He practically lived in the Bengal Club. Drunk, of course. All the time.”

“By heaven, madam!” Farnholme shouted. His bristly white eyebrows were twitching furiously. “If you were a man—”

“Oh, do be quiet,” she interrupted wearily. “When you repeat yourself so often, Foster, it becomes downright nauseating.”

Farnholme muttered angrily to himself, but everybody’s attention was suddenly transferred to the plane. The engine note had deepened, and for one brief moment Nicolson thought it was coming in to attack, but realised almost at once that its circle round the boats was widening, if anything. The seaplane had cut its engine booster, but only for extra power for climb. It was still circling, but rising steadily all the time, making a laborious job of it, but nonetheless climbing. At about five thousand feet it levelled off and began to cruise round in great circles four or five miles in diameter.

“Now what do you think he’s done that for?” It was Findhorn talking, his voice stronger and clearer than it had been at any time since he had been wounded. “Very curious, don’t you think, Mr. Nicolson?”

Nicolson smiled at him. “Thought you were still asleep, sir. How do you feel now?”

“Hungry and thirsty. Ah, thank you, Miss Plenderleith.” He stretched out his hand for a cup, winced at the sudden pain the movement caused him, then looked again at Nicolson. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“Sorry, sir. Difficult to say. I suspect he’s bringing some of his pals along to see us and he’s giving himself a spot of elevation, probably to act as a marker. Only a guess, of course.”

“Your guesses have an unfortunate habit of being too damned accurate for my liking.” Findhorn lapsed into silence and sank his teeth into a corned beef sandwich.

Half an hour passed, and still the scout seaplane stayed in the same relative position. It was all rather nerve-racking and necks began to ache from staring up so fixedly into the sky. But at least it was obvious now that the ‘plane had no directly hostile intentions towards them.

Another half-hour passed and the blood-red sun was slipping swiftly, vertically down towards the rim of the sea, a mirror-smooth sea that faded darkly towards the blurred horizon to the east, but a great motionless plain of vermilion to the west, stretching far away into the eye of the setting sun. Not quite mirror-smooth on this side—one or two tiny islets dimpled the red sheen of the water, standing out black against the level rays of the sun, and away to the left, just off the starboard bow and maybe four miles to the south-southwest a larger, low-lying island was beginning to climb imperceptibly above the tranquil surface of the sea.

It was soon after sighting this last island that they saw the seaplane begin to lose height and move off to the east in a long shallow dive. Vannier looked hopefully at Nicolson.

“Knocking-off time for the watch-dog, sir? Off home to bed, likely enough.”

“Afraid not, Fourth.” Nicolson nodded in the direction of the retreating plane. “Nothing but hundreds of miles of sea in that direction, and then Borneo—and that’s not where our friend’s home is. He’s spotted a pal, a hundred to one.” He looked at the captain. “What do you think, sir?”

“You’re probably right again, damn you.” Findhorn’s smile robbed the words of any offence, and then the smile slowly vanished and the eyes became bleak as the seaplane levelled off about a thousand feet and began to circle. “You are right, Mr. Nicolson,” he added softly. He twisted painfully in his seat and stared ahead. “How far off would you say that island there is?”

“Two and a half miles, sir. Maybe three.”

“Near enough three.” Findhorn turned to look at Willoughby, then nodded at the engine. “Can you get any more revs out of that sewing machine of yours, Second?”

“Another knot, sir, if I’m lucky.” Willoughby laid a hand on the tow-rope that stretched back to Siran’s boat. “Two, if I cut this.”

“Don’t tempt me, Second. Give her all you can, will you?”

He jerked his head at Nicolson, who handed over the tiller to Vannier and moved over beside the captain. “What’s your guess, Johnny?” Findhorn murmured.

“What do you mean, sir? Kind of ship it is, or what’s going to happen?”

“Both.”

“No idea about the first—destroyer, M.T.B., fishing boat, anything. As to the other—well, it’s clear now that they want us, and not our blood.” Nicolson grimaced. “The blood will come later. Meantime, they take us prisoner—then the old green bamboo torture, the toenails and teeth, the water treatment, the silos and all the usual refinements.” Nicolson’s mouth was only a white gash in his face and his eyes were gazing at the sternsheets where Peter and Miss Drachmann were playing together, laughing at each other, the girl as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Findhorn followed his gaze and nodded slowly.

“Yes, me too, Johnny. It hurts—just to look at them hurts. They go well together.” He rubbed his grey-grizzled chin thoughtfully. “‘Translucent amber’—that was the phrase some writing johnny used once about his heroine’s complexion. Blasted fool—or that was what I thought then. I’d like to apologise to him some day. Really incredible, isn’t it.” He grinned. “Imagine the traffic jam if you brought her back to Piccadilly.”

Nicolson smiled in turn. “It’s just the sunset, sir, and your bloodshot eyes.” He was grateful to the older man for deliberately diverting his train of thought and, remembering, he quickly became serious again. “That bloody awful gash. Our yellow brethren. I think there should be some payment on account.”

Findhorn nodded slowly. “We should—ah—postpone our capture, perhaps? Let the thumbscrews rust a while longer? The idea is not without its attractions, Johnny.” He paused, then went on quietly: “I think I can see something.”

Nicolson had his glasses to his eyes at once. He stared through them for a moment, caught a glimpse of a craft hull-down on the horizon with the golden gleams of the setting sun striking high- lights off its superstructure, lowered the glasses, rubbed his eyes and looked again. Seconds passed, then he lowered the binoculars, his face expressionless, and handed them in silence to the captain. Findhorn took them, held them steady to his eyes, then handed them back to Nicolson. “No signs of our luck turning, is there? Tell them, will you? Trying to raise my voice above that damned engine is like having a set of fish-hooks dragged up my throat.”

Nicolson nodded and turned round.

“Sorry, everybody, but—well, I’m afraid there’s some more trouble coming along. It’s a Jap submarine, and it’s overtaking us as if we were standing still. If he’d appeared fifteen minutes later we might have made that island there.” He nodded forward over the starboard bow. “As it is, he’ll be up on us before we’re much more than half-way there.”

“And what do you think will happen then, Mr. Nicolson?” Miss Plenderleith’s voice was composed almost to the level of indifference.

“Captain Findhorn thinks—and I agree with him—that they will probably try to take us prisoner.” Nicolson smiled wryly. “All I can say just now, Miss Plenderleith, is that we’ll try not to be taken prisoner. It will be difficult.”

“It will be impossible.” Van Effen spoke from his seat in the bows, and his voice was cold. “It’s a submarine, man. What can our little pop-guns do against a pressure hull. Our bullets will just bounce off.”

“You propose that we give ourselves up?” Nicolson could see the logic of Van Effen’s words and knew that the man was without fear: nevertheless he felt vaguely disappointed.

“Why commit outright suicide—which is what you suggest we do.” Van Effen was pounding the heel of his fist gently on the gunwale, emphasising his point. “We can always find a better chance to escape later.”

“You obviously don’t know the Japs,” Nicolson said wearily. “This is not only the best chance we’ll ever have—it’s also the last.”

“And I say you’re talking nonsense!” There was hostility now in every line in Van Effen’s face. “Let us put it to the vote, Mr. Nicolson.” He looked round the boat. “How many of you are in favour of—”

“Shut up and don’t talk like a fool!” Nicolson said roughly. “You’re not attending a political meeting, Van Effen. You’re aboard a vessel of the British Mercantile Marine, and such vessels are not run by committees but by the authority of one man only—the captain. Captain Findhorn says we offer resistance—and that’s that.”

“The captain is absolutely determined on that?”

“He is.”

“My apologies.” Van Effen bowed. “I bow to the authority of the captain.”

“Thank you.” Feeling vaguely uncomfortable, Nicolson transferred his gaze to the submarine. It was clearly visible now, in all its major details, less than a mile distant. The seaplane was still circling overhead. Nicolson looked at it and scowled.

“I wish that damn snoop would go on home,” he muttered.

“He does complicate things rather,” Findhorn agreed. “Time is running out, Johnny. He’ll be up with us in five minutes.”

Nicolson nodded absently. “We’ve seen that type of sub before, sir?”

“I rather think we have,” Findhorn said slowly.

“We have.” Nicolson was certain now. “Light A.A. gun aft, machine-gun on the bridge and a heavy gun for’ard—3.7 or 4-inch, something like that, I’m not sure. If they want to take us aboard we’ll have to go right alongside the hull—beneath the conningtower, probably. Neither of the two guns can depress that far.” He bit his lip and stared ahead. “It’ll be dark in twenty minutes—and that island won’t be much more than half a mile away by the time he stops us. It’s a chance, a damn poor chance at that, but still …” He raised the glasses again and stared at the submarine, then shook his head slowly. “Yes, I thought I remembered that. That 3.7 or whatever it is has a big armoured shield for its gun-crew. Some sort of hinged, collapsible thing, probably.” His voice trailed off and his fingers beat an urgent tattoo on the rim of the gunwale. He looked absently at the captain. “Complicates things rather, doesn’t it, sir?”

“I’m not with you, Johnny.” Findhorn was beginning to sound tired again. “Afraid my head’s not at its best for this sort of thing. If you’ve got any idea at all—”

“I have. Crazy, but it might work.” Nicolson explained rapidly, then beckoned to Vannier, who handed the tiller to the bo’sun and moved across. “Don’t smoke, do you, Fourth?”

“No, sir.” Vannier looked at Nicolson as if he had gone off his head.

“You’re starting tonight.” Nicolson dug into his pocket, fished out a flat tin of Benson and Hedges and a box of matches. He gave them to him, along with a few quick instructions. “Right up in the bows, past Van Effen. Don’t forget, everything depends on you. Brigadier? A moment, if you please.”

Farnholme looked up in surprise, lumbered over a couple of thwarts and sat down beside them. Nicolson looked at him for a second or two in silence and then said seriously: “You really know how to use that automatic carbine, Brigadier?”

“Good God, man, yes!” the Brigadier snorted. “I practically invented the bloody thing.”

“How accurate are you?” Nicolson persisted quietly.

“Bisley,” Farnholme answered briefly. “Champion. As good as that, Mr. Nicolson.”

“Bisley?” Nicolson’s eyebrows reflected his astonishment.

“King’s marksman.” Farnholme’s voice was completely out of character now, as quiet as Nicolson’s own. “Chuck a tin over the side, let it go a hundred feet and I’ll give you a demonstration. Riddle it with this carbine in two seconds.” The tone was matter-offact; more, it was convincing.

“No demonstration,” Nicolson said hastily. “That’s the last thing we want. As far as brother Jap is concerned, we haven’t even a firecracker between us. This is what I want you to do.” His instructions to Farnholme were rapid and concise, as were those given immediately afterwards to the rest of the boat’s company. There was no time to waste on lengthier explanations, to make sure he was fully understood: the enemy was almost on them.

The sky to the west was still alive and glowing, a kaleidoscopic radiance of red and orange and gold, the barred clouds on the horizon ablaze with fire, but the sun was gone, the east was grey and the sudden darkness of the tropical night was rushing across the sea. The submarine was angling in on their starboard quarter, grim and black and menacing in the gathering twilight, the glassy sea piling up in phosphorescent whiteness on either side of its bows, the diesels dying away to a muted murmur, the dark, evil mouth of the big for’ard gun dipping and moving slowly aft as it matched the relative movement of the little lifeboat, foot by remorseless foot. And then there had come some sharp, unintelligible command from the conning-tower of the submarine; McKinnon cut the engine at a gesture from Nicolson and the iron hull of the submarine scraped harshly along the rubbing piece of the lifeboat.

Nicolson craned his neck and looked swiftly along the deck and conning-tower of the submarine. The big gun for’ard was pointing in their direction, but over their heads, as he had guessed it would: it had already reached maximum depression. The light A.A. gun aft was also lined up at them—lined up into the heart of their boat: he had miscalculated about that one, but it was a chance they had to take. There were three men in the conning-tower, two of them armed—an officer with a pistol and a sailor with what looked like a submachine gun—and five or six sailors at the foot of the conningtower, only one of them armed. As a reception committee it was dismaying enough, but less than what he had expected. He had thought that the lifeboat’s abrupt, last-minute alteration off course to port—a movement calculated to bring them alongside the port side of the submarine, leaving them half-shadowed in the gloom to the east while the Japanese were silhouetted against the afterglow of sunset—might have aroused lively suspicion: but it must have been almost inevitably interpreted as a panic-stricken attempt to escape, an attempt no sooner made than its futility realised. A lifeboat offered no threat to anyone and the submarine commander must have thought that he had already taken far more than ample precautions against such puny resistance as they could possibly offer.

The three craft—the submarine and the two lifeboats—were still moving ahead at about two knots when a rope came spinning down from the deck of the submarine and fell across the bows of number one lifeboat. Automatically Vannier caught it and looked back at Nicolson.

“Might as well make fast, Fourth.” Nicolson’s tone was resigned, bitter. “What good’s fists and a couple of jack-knives against this lot?”

“Sensible, so sensible.” The officer leaned over the conning-tower, his arms folded, the barrel of the gun lying along his upper left arm: the English was good, the tone self-satisfied, and the teeth a white gleaming smirk in the dark smudge of the face. “Resistance would be so unpleasant for all of us, would it not?”

“Go to hell!” Nicolson muttered.

“Such incivility! Such lack of courtesy—the true Anglo-Saxon.” The officer shook his head sadly, vastly enjoying himself. Then he suddenly straightened, looked sharply at Nicolson over the barrel of his gun. “Be very careful!” His voice was like the crack of a whip.

Slowly, unhurriedly, Nicolson completed his movement of extracting a cigarette from the packet Willoughby had offered him, as slowly struck a match, lit his own and Willoughby’s cigarettes and sent the match spinning over the side.

“So! Of course!” The officer’s laugh was brief, contemptuous. “The phlegmatic Englishman! Even though his teeth chatter with fear, he must maintain his reputation—especially in front of his crew. And another of them!” Up in the bows of the lifeboat Vannier’s bent head, a cigarette clipped between his lips, was highlit by the flaring match in his hand. “By all the gods, it’s pathetic, really pathetic.” The tone of his voice changed abruptly. “But enough of this—this foolery. Aboard at once—all of you.” He jabbed his gun at Nicolson. “You first.”

Nicolson stood up, one arm propping himself against the hull of the submarine, the other pressed close by his side.

“What do you intend to do with us, damn you?” His voice was loud, almost a shout, with a nicely-induced tremor in it. “Kill us all? Torture us? Drag us to those damned prison camps in Japan?” He was shouting in earnest now, fear and anger in the voice: Vannier’s match hadn’t gone over the side, and the hissing from the bows was even louder than he had expected. “Why in the name of God don’t you shoot us all now instead of—”

With breath-taking suddenness there came a hissing roar from the bows of the lifeboat, twin streaks of sparks and smoke and flame lancing upwards into the darkening sky across the submarine’s deck and at an angle of about thirty degrees off the vertical and then two incandescent balls of flame burst into life hundreds of feet above the water as both the lifeboat’s rocket parachute flares ignited almost at the same instant. A man would have had to be far less than human to check the involuntary, quite irresistible, impulse to look at the two rockets exploding into flame far up in the skies, and the Japanese crew of the submarine were only human. To a man, like dolls in the hands of a puppet master, they twisted round to look, and to a man they died that way, their backs half-turned to the lifeboat and their necks craned back as they stared up into the sky.

The crash of automatic carbines, rifles and pistols died away, the echoes rolled off into distant silence across the glassy sea and Nicolson was shouting at everyone to lie flat in the boat. Even as he was shouting, two dead sailors rolled off the sloping deck of the submarine and crashed into the stern of the lifeboat, one of them almost pinning him against the gunwale. The other, lifeless arms and legs flailing, was heading straight for little Peter and the two nurses, but McKinnon got there first. The two heavy splashes sounded almost like one.

One second passed, two, then three. Nicolson was on his knees, staring upwards, fists clenched as he waited in tense expectation. At first he could hear the shuffle of feet and the fast, low-pitched murmur of voices behind the shield of the big gun. Another second passed, and then another. His eyes moved along the submarine deck, perhaps there was someone still alive, still seeking a glorious death for his Emperor—Nicolson had no illusions about the fanatical courage of the Japanese. But now everything was still, still as death. The officer hanging tiredly over the conning-tower, gun still locked in a dangling hand—Nicolson’s pistol had got him, and the other two had fallen inside. Four shapeless forms lay in a grotesque huddle about the foot of the conning-tower. Of the two men who had manned the light A.A. gun there was no sign: Farnholme’s automatic carbine had blasted them over the side.

The tension was becoming intolerable. The big gun, Nicolson knew, couldn’t depress far enough to reach the boat, but he had vague memories of stories told him by naval officers of the almost decapitating effects of a naval gun fired just above one’s head. Perhaps the blast of the concussion would be fatal to those directly beneath, there was no way of knowing. Suddenly, silently, he began to curse his own stupidity and turned quickly to Willoughby.

“Start the engine up, Bo’sun. Then reverse—fast as you can. The conning-tower can block off that gun if we—”

The words were lost, obliterated in the roar of the firing gun. It wasn’t a roar, really, but a flat, violent whip-lash crack that stabbed savagely at the eardrums and almost stunned in its intensity. A long red tongue of flame flickered evilly out of the mouth of the barrel, reaching down almost to the boat itself. The shell smashed into the sea, throwing up a fine curtain of spray and a spout of water that reached fifty feet up into the sky, and then the sound had died, the smoke had cleared, and Nicolson, desperately shaking a dazed head, knew that they were alive, that the Japanese were frantically trying to load again, knew that the time had come.

“Right, Brigadier.” He could see Farnholme heaving himself to his feet. “Wait till I give the word.” He looked up swiftly towards the bows as a rifle boomed.

“Missed him.” Van Effen was disgusted. “An officer looked over the edge of the conning-tower just now.”

“Keep your gun lined up,” Nicolson ordered. He could hear the boy wailing with fear and knew that the blast of the big gun must have terrified him: his face twisted savagely as he shouted to Vannier. “Fourth! The signal set. A couple of red hand flares and heave them into the conning-tower. That’ll keep ‘em busy.” He was listening all the time to the movements of the gun crew. “All of you—watch the tower and the fore and aft hatches.”

Perhaps another five seconds passed and then Nicolson heard the sound he had been waiting for—the scrape of a shell in the breech and the block swinging solidly home. “Now!” he called sharply.

Farnhome didn’t even bother to raise the gun to his shoulder but fired with the stock under his arm, seemingly without taking any aim whatsoever. He didn’t need to, he was even better than he had claimed to be. He ripped off perhaps five shots, no more, deflected them all down the barrel of the big gun then dropped to the bottom of the lifeboat like a stone as the last bullet found the percussion nose of the shell and triggered off the detonation. Severe enough in sound and shock at such close range, the explosion of the bursting shell inside the breech was curiously muffled, although the effects were spectacular enough. The whole big gun lifted off its mounting and flying pieces of the shattered metal clanged viciously against the conning-tower and went whistling over the sea, ringing the submarine in an erratic circle of splashes. The gun-crew must have died unknowing: enough T.N.T. to blow up a bridge had exploded within arm’s length of their faces.

“Thank you, Brigadier.” Nicolson was on his feet again, forcing his voice to steadiness. “My apologies for all I ever said about you. Full ahead, Bo’sun.” A couple of sputtering crimson hand flares went arching through the air and landed safely inside the conningtower, silhouetting the coaming against a fierce red glow. “Well done, Fourth. You’ve saved the day today.”

“Mr. Nicolson?”

“Sir?” Nicolson glanced down at the captain.

“Wouldn’t it be better, perhaps, if we stayed here a little longer? No one dare show his head through the hatches or over the tower. In ten or fifteen minutes it’ll be dark enough for us to reach that island there without the beggars taking potshots at us all the time.”

“Afraid that wouldn’t do, sir.” Nicolson was apologetic. “Right now the lads inside there are shocked and stunned, but pretty soon someone’s going to start thinking, and as soon as he does we can look for a shower of hand grenades. They can shuck them into the boat without having to show a finger—and even one would finish us.”

“Of course, of course.” Findhorn sank back wearily on his bench. “Carry on, Mr. Nicolson.”

Nicolson took the tiller, came hard round with both lifeboats through a hundred and eighty degrees, circled round the slender, fish-tail stern of the submarine while four men with guns in their hands watched the decks unblinkingly, and slowed down just abaft the submarine’s bridge to allow Farnholme to smash the A.A. gun’s delicate firing mechanism with a long, accurate burst from his automatic carbine. Captain Findhorn nodded in slow realisation.

“Exit their siege gun. You think of everything, Mr. Nicolson.”

“I hope so, sir.” Nicolson shook his head. “I hope to God I do.”

The island was perhaps half-a-mile distant from the submarine. A quarter of the way there Nicolson stooped, brought up one of the lifeboat’s two standard Wessex distress signal floats, ripped away the top disc seal, ignited it by tearing off the release fork and immediately threw it over the stern, just wide enough to clear Siran’s boat. As soon as it hit the water it began to give off a dense cloud of orange-coloured smoke, smoke that hung almost without moving in the windless twilight, an impenetrable screen against the enemy. A minute or two later bullets from the submarine began to cut through the orange smoke, whistling overhead or splashing into the water around them, but none came near enough to do any damage; the Japanese were firing at random and in blind anger. Four minutes after the first smoke float, now fizzling to extinction, had been thrown overboard the second one followed it, and long before it, too, had burnt out they had beached their boats and landed safely on the island.

NINE

It hardly deserved the name of island. An islet, perhaps, but no more. Oval in shape, lying almost due east and west, it was no more than three hundred yards long, and about a hundred and fifty from north to south. It wasn’t a perfect oval, however: about a hundred yards along from the apex the sea had cut deep notches on both sides, at points practically opposite one another, so that the islet was all but bisected. It was in the southerly bight—Nicolson had taken the precaution of rounding the island before landing—that they had beached their boats and moored them to a couple of heavy stones.

The narrow end of the island, east beyond the bights, was low and rocky and bare, but the west had some vegetation—scrub bushes and stunted lalang grass—and rose to a height of perhaps fifty feet in the middle. On the southern side of this hill there was a little hollow, hardly more than a shelf, about half-way up the slope, and it was towards this that Nicolson urged the passengers as soon as the boat had grounded. The Captain and Corporal Fraser had to be carried, but it was only a short trip and within ten minutes of the boats’ grounding the entire party had taken refuge in the hollow, surrounded by all the food, water supplies and portable equipment, even the oars and the crutches.

A light breeze had sprung up with the going down of the sun, and clouds were slowly filling up the sky from the north-east, blanketing the early evening stars, but it was still light enough for Nicolson to use his glasses. He stared through them for almost two minutes, then laid them down, rubbing his eyes. He was aware, without being able to see, that everybody in the hollow was watching him anxiously—all except the boy who was bundled up in a blanket and already drowsing off to sleep.

“Well?” Findhorn broke the silence.

“They’re moving round the western tip of the island, sir, Pretty close inshore, too.”

“I can’t hear them.”

“Must be using their batteries. Why, I don’t know. Just because they can’t see us it doesn’t mean that we can’t see them. It’s not all that dark.”

Van Effen cleared his throat. And what do you think the next move is going to be, Mr. Nicolson?”

“No idea. It’s up to them, I’m afraid. If they had either their big gun or A.A. gun left they could blast us out of here in two minutes.” Nicolson gestured at the low ridge that bounded the hollow to the south, barely visible in the gloom even six feet away. “But with a little luck I think that’ll stop rifle bullets.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Time enough to worry about that when it happens,” Nicolson answered shortly. “Maybe they’ll try to land men at various points and surround us. Maybe they’ll try a frontal attack.” He had the glasses to his eyes again. “Whatever happens they can’t just go home and say they left us here—they’d get their heads in their hands, perhaps literally. Either that or hara-kiri all over the shop.”

“They won’t go home.” Captain Findhorn’s voice was heavy with certainty. “Too many of their shipmates have died.”

For some time there had been a murmur of voices behind them, and now the murmur died away and Siran spoke.

“Mr. Nicolson?”

Nicolson lowered his binoculars and looked over his shoulder.

“What do you want?”

“My men and I have been having a discussion. We have a proposition to make to you.”

“Make it to the captain. He’s in charge.” Nicolson turned away abruptly and raised the binoculars again.

“Very well. It is this, Captain Findhorn. It is obvious—painfully obvious, if I may say so—that you do not trust us. You force us to occupy a separate lifeboat—and not, I think, because we don’t bathe twice a day. You feel—wrongly, I assure you—that you must watch us all the time. We are a heavy—ah—responsibility, a liability, I should say. We propose, with your permission, to relieve you of this liability.”

“For heaven’s sake get to the point,” Findhorn snapped irritably.

“Very well. I suggest you let us go, have no more worry about us. We prefer to be the prisoners of the Japanese.”

“What!” The angry interjection came from Van Effen. “God in heaven, sir, I’d shoot the lot of them first!”

“Please!” Findhorn waved a hand in the darkness, looking curiously at Siran, but it was too dark to see his expression.

“As a matter of interest, how would you propose to surrender yourselves. Just walk off down the hill towards the beach?”

“More or less.”

“And what guarantee would you have that they wouldn’t shoot you before you surrendered? Or, if you did succeed in surrendering, that they wouldn’t torture or kill you afterwards?”

“Don’t let them go, sir.” Van Effen’s voice was urgent.

“Do not distress yourself,” Findhorn said dryly. “I’ve no intention of complying with his ridiculous request. You stay, Siran, although heaven knows we don’t want you. Please don’t insult our intelligence.”

“Mr. Nicolson!” Siran appealed. “Surely you can—”

“Shut up!” Nicolson said curtly. “You heard what Captain Findhorn said. How naïve and dim-witted do you think we are? Not one of you would risk his precious neck if there was the slightest chance of being shot or ill-treated by the Japs. It’s a hundred to one—”

“I assure you—” Siran made to interrupt but Nicolson stopped him.

“Save your breath,” he said contemptuously. “Do you think anyone would believe you? You’re obviously in cahoots with the Japs, one way or another—and we have enough on our plates without making ourselves the present of another seven enemies.” There was a pause, then Nicolson went on thoughtfully, “A pity you promised this man to the gallows, Captain Findhorn. I think Van Effen went to the heart of the matter at once—it would simplify things all round if we shot the lot of them now. We’ll probably have to do it later on anyway.”

There was a long pause, then Findhorn said quietly: “You are very silent, Siran. You miscalculated, perhaps? Almost your last blunder? You can be very grateful, Captain Siran, for the fact that we are not callous murderers of your own stamp. But please bear in mind that it will require very little provocation indeed for us to carry out the suggestion just made.”

“And just move back a bit, will you?” Nicolson asked. “Right to the edge, there. And maybe a quick search of your pockets wouldn’t do any harm, either.”

“Already done, Mr. Nicolson,” the captain assured him. “We took a whole arsenal off them after you left the saloon last night … Still see that sub?”

“Almost due south of us now, sir. About two hundred yards offshore.”

He suddenly dropped the binoculars and pushed himself back down into the hollow. A searchlight had just been switched on in the conning-tower of the submarine, its dazzling white beam swinging rapidly along the rocky shore of the island. Almost at once it found the little notch in the shoreline where the lifeboats lay, steadied there for a couple of seconds, then started moving slowly up the hill, almost in a line with the hollow where they lay hidden.

“Brigadier!” Nicolson’s voice was sharp, urgent.

“It’ll be a pleasure,” Farnholme grunted. He slid the carbine forward along the ground, cradled it to his shoulder, sighted and fired, all in one swift movement. It was set for single shot firing, but the single shot was enough: through the fading echoes of the crash of the carbine they caught the distant tinkle of glass, and the white glare of the light faded quickly to a dull red glow, then died away altogether.

“Stay with us a few more days, will you, Brigadier?” Findhorn said dryly. “I can see that we’re going to need you around … Hardly a very bright move on their part, was it, Mr. Nicolson? I mean, they’ve already had a sample from the Brigadier here.”

“Bright enough,” Nicolson differed. “A calculated risk, and it paid off. They’ve found out where the boats are and they know now, from the flash of the brigadier’s rifle, where we are—two facts it might have cost a landing party a long time and a good few lives to find out. But it was really the boats they were worried about, not us. If they can stop us from leaving the island, they can get us at their leisure, preferably in daylight.”

“I’m afraid I agree with you,” Findhorn said slowly. “The boats come next. Sink them from the sub, you reckon? We can’t stop them if they do.”

“Not from the sub.” Nicolson shook his head. “They can’t see the boats and it would take them all night to sink them with random fire: a hundred lucky shots at least. A landing party to knock the bottom out of the boats and spike the air tanks is more likely—or tow them or row them out to sea.”

“But—but how do they get ashore?” Vannier asked.

“Swim if they have to, but they don’t have to. Most subs carry collapsible or inflatable dinghies of some kind. For a sub operating in close waters, almost certainly in contact with their own troops on a score of different islands, it would be essential.”

No one spoke for several minutes. The little boy was muttering to himself in his sleep, and Siran and his men were whispering in the far corner of the hollow, their words indistinguishable. Then Willoughby coughed to catch their attention.

“The flood of time is rolling on, etc., etc.,” he quoted. “I have an idea.”

Nicolson smiled in the darkness. “Careful, Willy.”

“Base envy hates that excellence it cannot reach,” Willoughby said loftily. “My plan has the simplicity of true genius. Let us sail away.”

“Brilliant.” Nicolson was heavily sarcastic. “Muffled oars in the moonlight. How far do you reckon we get?”

“Tush! You underrate me. Willoughby soaring in the realms of pure thought and our worthy chief officer still trudging in the mire. We use the engine, of course!”

“Oh, of course! And how do you propose to persuade our pals out there to wear ear-plugs?”

“I don’t. Give me an hour on that exhaust-pipe and baffle plates and I guarantee you won’t hear that engine a hundred yards away. Lose some speed of course, but not much. And even if they do hear it, you know yourself how difficult it is to get a bearing on a faint sound over the sea at night. Freedom beckons, gentlemen. Let us no longer delay.”

“Willy,” Nicolson said gently, “I have news for you. The human ear is not to be depended on for finding bearings at night, but then the Japs don’t have to depend on it. They use hydrophones, which are very accurate indeed—and which couldn’t care less whether you muffle the exhaust or not as the propeller thrash in the water will serve them excellently.”

“Damn them,” Willoughby said with feeling. He lapsed into silence, then spoke again. “Let no one despair. Willoughby shall think of something else.”

“I’ve no doubt you will,” Nicolson said kindly. “Don’t forget that the north-west monsoon only lasts for another couple of months or so and it would be handy if—down, everybody, down!”

The first bullets were thudding soggily into the earth around them, ricocheting with a vicious whine off the rocks and whistling evilly overhead as they heard the barrage opening up from the deck of the submarine. It had moved a good deal closer inshore and it sounded as if at least a dozen different guns, machine-guns, two at least, included, were all firing at once. And someone aboard the ship had been fast enough to take a bearing on the flash of Farnholme’s carbine: the fire was as accurate as it was heavy.

“Anybody hurt? Anybody hurt at all?” It was difficult to hear the captain’s low, hoarse voice above the crackle of gunfire.

There was no immediate reply, and Nicolson answered for the others. “I don’t think so, sir. I was the only one exposed at the time.”

“Good enough—and no retaliation just now,” Findhorn warned. “No reason for anybody to get his head blown off.” He lowered his voice with evident relief. “Mr. Nicolson, this baffles me completely. The Zeros didn’t touch us when we left the Viroma: the sub didn’t try to sink us: and the seaplane left us alone even after we’d thumped their pals. And now they’re trying their best to massacre us. It doesn’t make any kind of sense at all to me.”

“Still less to me,” Nicolson admitted. He winced involuntarily as a bullet thudded into the earth a couple of feet above his head. “And we can’t stay here and do an ostrich act, sir. This is a cover for an attack on the boats. Pointless otherwise.”

Findhorn nodded heavily in the darkness. “What do you want to do? I’m afraid I’m a dead loss, Johnny.”

“As long as you’re not just dead,” Nicolson said grimly. “Permission to take some men down to the shore, sir. We must stop them.”

“I know, I know … Good luck, boy.”

Seconds later, in a brief lull in the firing, Nicolson and six men slithered over the edge of the bank and started downhill. They hadn’t gone five paces when Nicolson whispered in Vannier’s ear, caught the Brigadier by the arm and retraced his steps with him to the eastern edge of the hollow. They lay down on the edge, peering into the darkness. Nicolson put his mouth to the Brigadier’s ear. “Remember, we play for keeps.”

He could just sense Farnholme nodding in the darkness.

They didn’t have to wait long. Within fifteen seconds they heard the first faint, cautious slither, followed at once by Findhorn’s voice, sharp and hoarse, jerking out a question. There was no reply, just another ominous movement, a swift rush of feet, the sudden click as Nicolson’s torch switched on, the brief glimpse of two running stooping figures with upraised arms, the stuttering crash of Farnholme’s automatic carbine, the heavy thud of falling bodies and then the silence and the darkness together.

“Bloody fool that I am! I’d forgotten all about these.” Nicolson was crawling about the hollow, torch hooded in his hand, tearing away weapons still clenched in dead hands. He let the light play on them for a moment. “The two hatchets from number two lifeboat, sir. They’d have made a pretty mess at close quarters.” He shone his torch at the other end of the hollow. Siran was still sitting there, his face smooth and expressionless. Nicolson knew that he was guilty, guilty as hell, that he had sent his three men to do the hatchet-work—literally—while he remained safely behind. He also knew that the bland, inscrutable face would remain that way as Siran denied all knowledge of the attack: dead men couldn’t talk, and the three men were quite dead. There was no time to waste.

“Come here, Siran.” Nicolson’s voice was as expressionless as Siran’s face. “The rest won’t give any trouble, sir.” Siran rose to his feet, walked the few paces forward and toppled to the ground like a falling tree trunk as Nicolson struck him viciously behind the ear with the butt of his Navy Colt. The blow had carried sufficient weight to crush the skull, and it had sounded like it, but Nicolson was on his way even before Siran had fallen, Farnholme at his heels. The whole episode hadn’t taken thirty seconds from start to finish.

They ran at full speed, uncaringly, down the slope, stumbling, slipping, recovering and racing on again. Thirty yards from the beach they heard a sudden flurry of shots, screams of pain, oaths, high-pitched voices shouting some insane gibberish, another volley of shots then the sounds of more blows, of struggling and violent splashing as men fought hand to hand in the water. Ten yards from the water’s edge, well ahead of Farnholme by this time, and still pounding along at the full stretch of his legs, Nicolson switched on his torch. He had a confused impression of men struggling furiously in the shallow water round the boats, caught a brief glimpse of an officer poised above a fallen McKinnon with a sword or bayonet swung back for a decapitation stroke and then leapt, one arm round the officer’s throat and the gun exploding in his back, before he landed cat-like on his feet. Again his torch swung up, steadied for a moment on Walters and a Japanese sailor thrashing and splashing as they rolled over and over in the mud-stained water: nothing to be done there—as easy to kill the one as the other. The beam lifted, and stopped again.

One of the lifeboats, well aground, was lying almost parallel to the shore. Two Japanese sailors, knee-deep in the water and sharply profiled in the harsh glare of the torch, were standing close by the stern, one of them stooping with bent head, the other upright, arm upraised, his right hand far behind his head. For a long second of time, all volition inhibited by the light that bunded their shrinking eyes, the two men held their respective positions, a frozen sequence from some nightmare ballet: and then, in perfect unison, petrified stillness yielded to convulsive action, the stooped man straightening with his right hand clutching something snatched from the net bag tied to his belt, the other dropping his left shoulder and lunging forward as his throwing arm came flashing over, and Nicolson, even as he brought his Colt up, his finger tightening on the trigger, knew that he was already too late.

Too late for Nicolson, too late for the Japanese sailors. For a second time they stiffened into immobility, brought up short by the savage jerk of some invisible hand, then they began to move again, slowly, this time, very slowly, pivoting forward with an almost ponderous deliberation on rooted, lifeless legs: Nicolson’s torch had switched off and the crash of Farnholme’s carbine was only an echoing memory as they fell on their faces, one full length into the water, the other jackknifing heavily over the gunwale of the lifeboat and crashing on to the sternsheets, the sound of his falling lost in a flat explosive crack and sheet of blinding white as the grenade exploded in his hand.

After the bright light of the bursting grenade the darkness was doubly dark. Darkness everywhere, on land, over the sea and in the sky, complete and, for the moment, impenetrable. Away to the southwest a last few stars winked faintly in an indigo sky, but they too were going, extinguished one by one as the unseen blanket of cloud closed with the horizon. Dark, and very silent; there was no sound, no movement at all.

Nicolson risked one quick sweep with his lighted torch, then clicked off the switch. His men were all there, all on their feet, and the enemy were the enemy no longer, just little dead men lying still in the shadows. They had had next to no chance at all: they had expected no attack, deeming the Viroma’s crew safely pinned in the hollow by the submarine’s covering fire: they had been silhouetted against the sea, always lighter by night than the land: and they had been caught at a crippling disadvantage in the moment of stepping from their rubber boats into the sea.

“Anybody hurt?” Nicolson kept his voice low.

“Walters is, sir.” Vannier matched his tone with Nicolson’s. “Pretty badly, I think.”

“Let me see.” Nicolson moved across to the source of the voice, hooded the torch with his fingers and clicked the switch. Vannier was cradling Walters’s left wrist in his hand: it was a gaping, gory wound just below the ball of the thumb, and half the wrist was severed. Vannier already had a handkerchief twisted as a tourniquet, and the bright red blood was pulsing only very slowly from the wound. Nicolson switched off the light.

“Knife?”

“Bayonet.” Walters’s voice was a good deal steadier than Vannier’s had been. He prodded something lying still and shapeless at his feet in the water. “I took it from him.”

“So I gathered,” Nicolson said dryly. “Your wrist’s a mess. Get Miss Drachmann to fix it for you. It’ll be some time before you can use that hand, I’m afraid.” Which was one way of saying ‘never,’ Nicolson thought bitterly to himself. The clenching tendons had been severed clean through, and it was a certainty that the radial nerve had gone also. Paralysis, in any event.

“Better than the heart,” Walters said cheerfully. “I really need that.”

“Get up there as fast as you can. The rest of you go with him—and don’t forget to announce yourselves. For all the captain knows we lost—and he’s got a gun lying handy. Bo’sun, you stay with me.” He broke off suddenly as he heard splashing in the vicinity of the nearest lifeboat. “Who’s there?”

“Me, Farnholme. Just investigatin’, old boy. Dozens of them, actually dozens of them.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Nicolson asked irritably.

“Grenades. Bags full of ‘em. Fellow here like a walkin’ arsenal.”

“Take them away, will you? We may need them. Get someone to help you.” Nicolson and McKinnon waited till the last of the men had gone, then waded out towards the nearest lifeboat. Just as they reached it, two machine-guns opened up from the darkness to the south, tracer bullets burning white then extinguishing in vicious plops and gouts of water. Now and then a freak ricocheted off the water and whined thinly into the darkness: more rarely still a bullet thudded solidly into one or other of the lifeboats.

Stretched full length behind a boat, only his head above water, McKinnon touched Nicolson on the arm. “What’s all this in aid of, sir?” The soft Highland voice was puzzled, but completely unworried. Nicolson grinned to himself in the darkness.

“Anybody’s guess, Bo’sun. Chances are that their landing party was supposed to signal—torch or something—if they landed safely. Alarums and excursions ashore and our pals on the sub climbing the walls with uncertainty. Finally, they open up—no signal.”

“And if that’s all they’re wanting, why shouldn’t we be sending them one?”

Nicolson stared at him for a moment in the darkness, then laughed softly. “Genius, McKinnon, pure genius. If they’re all confused, and if they imagine their pals ashore are as confused as they are themselves, any old signal has a chance of getting by.”

And so it proved. Nicolson raised his hand above the lifeboat gunwale, flashed the torch irregularly on and off, then hurriedly withdraw his arm. To any trigger-happy machine-gunner that pinpoint of light must have been the answer to a prayer, but no line of tracers came lancing at them out of the darkness. Instead, both machine-guns abruptly ceased fire and all at once the night was silent and still. Land and sea alike might have been deserted; empty of all life: even the blurred silhouette of the submarine lying quietly out to sea was only a shadow, insubstantial and quite unreal, more imagined than seen.

Furtive attempts at concealment seemed not only unnecessary but dangerous. Unhurriedly both men rose to their feet and inspected the lifeboats in the light of the torch. Number two, Siran’s boat, had been holed in several places, but all above the water-line, and she appeared to be making little or no water: several of her airtight tanks had been punctured, but sufficient were undamaged to provide a still reasonable margin of safety.

It was a different story altogether with number one, the motor lifeboat. If anything, even fewer random shots had pierced her hull, but she was already settled deeply, heavily in the shallow water, her floorboards covered. The water inside the boat was stained and streaked with red blood from the shockingly mutilated Japanese sailor who lay draped over the gunwale, and it was below this barely recognisable remains of a human being that Nicolson found the cause of the trouble. The same grenade that had blown off a hand and most of a face had also blown a hole clear through the bottom of the boat, shattering the garboard strake for eighteen inches of its length and the adjacent planks right up to the bilge stringer on the starboard side. Nicolson straightened slowly and looked at McKinnon in the backwash of reflected light.

“Holed,” he murmured briefly. “I could stick my head and shoulders through that gap in the bottom. Take us days to patch the damn thing.”

But McKinnon wasn’t listening. The beam of the torch had shifted and he was staring down into the boat. When he spoke, he sounded remote, indifferent.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, sir. The engine’s finished.” He paused, then went on quietly: “The magneto, sir: the grenade must have gone off just beneath it.”

“Oh, lord, no! The magneto? Perhaps the second engineer —”

“No one could repair it, sir,” McKinnon interrupted patiently. “There’s damn all left to repair.”

“I see.” Nicolson nodded heavily and gazed down at the shattered magneto, his mind dull and heavy with all the appalling implications that smashed magneto carried with it. “There isn’t very much left of it, is there?”

McKinnon shivered. “Somebody’s walking over my grave,” he complained. He shook his head slowly, stared down into the boat even after Nicolson had switched the light off, then touched Nicolson lightly on the arm. “You know something, sir? It’s a long, long row to Darwin.”

Gudrun was her name, she told him, Gudrun Jörgensen Drachmann, the Jörgensen being for her maternal grandfather. She was three parts Danish, twenty-three years old and had been born in Odense on Armistice Day, 1918. Apart from two short stays in Malaya, she had lived in Odense all her life until she had qualified as a nurse and come out to her father’s plantations near Penang. That had been in August, 1939.

Nicolson, lying on his back against the bank of the hollow, clasped hands beneath his head and staring up unseeingly at the dark canopy of clouds, waited for her to go on, waited till she would begin again and hoped she would begin again. What was that quotation that old Willoughby, a hopeless, inveterate bachelor if ever there had lived one, had thrown at him so often in the past? “Her voice was ever soft”—that was it. King Lear. “Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low.” Willoughby’s stock excuse for avoiding the accursed snares—his own words—of holy matrimony: a female—Willoughby could invest that word with a wealth of scorn—with a voice ever soft, gentle and low—he had never found one. But maybe if Willoughby had been sitting where he’d been in the twenty minutes that had elapsed since he’d reported back to Findhorn and then come to see how the young boy was, he might have changed his mind.

Two minutes passed, three and she had said no more. By and by Nicolson stirred and turned towards her.

“You’re a long way from home, Miss Drachmann. Denmark—you liked it?” It was just something to say, but the vehemence of her answer surprised him.

“I loved it.” There was finality in her voice, the tone of someone speaking of something lost beyond recall. Damn the Japanese, damn that waiting submarine, Nicolson thought viciously. He changed the subject abruptly.

“And Malaya? Hardly the same high regard for that, eh?”

“Malaya?” The tone changed, was the vocal accompaniment of an indifferent shrug. “Penang was all right, I suppose. But not Singapore. I—I hated Singapore.” She was suddenly vehement, all indifference gone, and had no sooner shown the depths of her feelings than she had realised what she had done, for voice and subject changed again. She reached out and touched him on the arm. “I would love a cigarette too. Or does Mr. Nicolson disapprove.”

“Mr. Nicolson is sadly lacking in old world courtesy, I’m afraid.” He passed over a packet of cigarettes, struck a match and as she bent to dip her cigarette in the pool of flame he could smell the elusive sandalwood again and the faint fragrance of her hair before she straightened and withdrew into the darkness. He ground out his match into the soil and asked her gently: “Why do you hate Singapore?”

Almost half a minute passed before she replied. “Don’t you think that that might be a very personal question?”

“Very possibly.” He paused a moment, then went on quietly, “What does it matter now?”

She took his meaning at once. “You’re right, of course. Even if it’s only idle curiosity on your part, what does it matter now? It’s funny, but I don’t mind telling you—probably because I can be sure that you wouldn’t waste false sympathy on anyone, and I couldn’t stand that.” She was silent for a few seconds, and the tip of her cigarette burnt brightly in the gloom. “It’s true what I say. I do hate Singapore. I hate it because I have pride, personal pride, because I have self-pity and because I hate not to belong. You wouldn’t know about any of these things, Mr. Nicolson.”

“You know an awful lot about me,” Nicolson murmured mildly. “Please go on.”

“I think you know what I mean,” she said slowly. “I am European, was born in Europe, brought up and educated in Europe, and thought of myself only as a Dane—as did all the Danish people. I was welcome in any house in Odense. I have never been asked to any European’s house in Singapore, Mr. Nicolson.” She tried to keep her voice light. “A drug on the social market, you might say. I wasn’t a nice person to be seen with. It’s not funny when you hear someone say, ’A touch of the tarbrush, old man.’” And say it without bothering to lower their voice, and then everybody looks at you and you never go back there again. I know my mother’s mother was Malay, but she is a wonderful, kind old lady and—”

“Easy, take it easy. I know it must have been rotten. And the British were the worst, weren’t they?”

“Yes, yes they were.” She was hesitant. “Why do you say that?”

“When it comes to empire-building and colonialism we are the world’s best—and the world’s worst. Singapore is the happy hunting ground of the worst, and our worst is something to wonder at. God’s chosen people and with a dual mission in life—to pickle their livers in an impossibly short time and to see to it that those who are not of the chosen remain continually aware of the fact—the sons of Ham to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the end of their days. Good Christians all, of course, and staunch pillars and attenders of the church—if they can sober up in time on the Sunday morning. They’re not all like that, not even in Singapore: but you just didn’t have the luck to run into any of the others.”

“I didn’t expect to hear you say that.” Her voice was slow, surprised.

“Why not? It’s true.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s just that I didn’t expect to hear you talking like—oh, well, never mind.” She laughed, self-consciously. “The colour of my skin is not all that important.”

“That’s right. Go on. Give the knife a good twist.” Nicolson ground out his cigarette beneath his heel. His voice was deliberately rough, almost brutal. “It’s damned important to you, but it shouldn’t be. Singapore’s not the world. We like you, and we don’t give two hoots if you’re heliotrope.”

“Your young officer—Mr. Vannier—he gives two hoots,” she murmured.

“Don’t be silly—and try to be fair. He saw that gash and he was shocked—and ever since he’s been ashamed of showing that shock. He’s just very young, that’s all. And the captain thinks you’re the cat’s pyjamas. ‘Translucent amber,’ that’s what he says your skin’s like.” Nicolson tuttutted softly. “Just an elderly Lothario.”

“He is not. He’s just very, very nice and I like him very much.” She added, inconsequentially: “You make him feel old.”

“Nuts!” Nicolson said rudely. “A bullet in the lungs would make anyone feel old.” He shook his head. “Oh, lord, there I go again. Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to snap at you. Daggers away, shall we, Miss Drachmann?”

“Gudrun.” The one word was both his answer and a request, and completely innocent of any hint of coquetry.

“Gudrun? I like it, and it suits you.”

“But you don’t—what is the word—reciprocate?” There was mischief now in the husky voice. “I have heard the captain call you ‘Johnny.’ Nice,” she said consideringly. “In Denmark it is the kind of name we would give to a very little boy. But I think I might manage to become used to it.”

“No doubt,” Nicolson said uncomfortably. “But you see—”

“Oh, but of course!” She was laughing at him, he knew, and he felt still more uncomfortable. “‘Johnny’ in front of the members of your crew—unthinkable! But then, of course, it would be Mr. Nicolson,” she added demurely. “Or perhaps you think ‘sir’ would be better?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Nicolson began, then stopped short and found himself echoing the girl’s barely audible laughter. “Call me anything you like. I’ll probably deserve it.”

He rose to his feet, crossed to the front of the hollow where the Muslim priest was keeping watch, spoke briefly to him then moved down the hill to where Van Effen was keeping watch over the one serviceable lifeboat. He sat there with him for a few minutes, wondering what point there was anyway in guarding the boat, then made his way back up to the hollow. Gudrun Drachmann was still awake, sitting close by the little boy. He sat down quietly beside her.

“There’s no point in sitting up all night,” he said gently. “Peter will be all right. Why don’t you go to sleep?”

“Tell me straight.” Her voice was very low. “How much chance have we got?”

“None.”

“Honest and blunt enough,” she acknowledged. “How long?”

“Noon tomorrow—and that’s a very late estimate. The submarine will almost certainly send a landing party ashore first—or try to. Then they’ll call up help—but probably the planes will be here at first light anyway.”

“Perhaps the men from the submarine will be enough. Perhaps they won’t require to call up help. How many—”

“We’ll cut them to ribbons,” Nicolson said matter-of-factly. “They’ll need help, all right. They’ll get it. Then they’ll get us. If they don’t kill us all by bombing or shelling, they may take you and Lena and Miss Plenderleith prisoner. I hope not.”

“I saw them at Kota Bharu.” She shivered at the memory. “I hope not too. And little Peter?”

“I know. Peter. Just another casualty,” Nicolson said bitterly. “Who cares about a two-year-old kid?” He did, he knew; he was becoming more attached to the youngster than he would ever have admitted to anybody, and one day, had Caroline lived—

“Is there nothing we can do?” The girl’s voice cut through his wandering thoughts.

“I’m afraid not. Just wait, that’s all.”

“But—but couldn’t you go out to the submarine and—and do something?”

“Yes, I know. Cutlasses in teeth, capture it and sail it home in triumph. You’ve been reading the wrong comic books, lady.” Before she could speak, he stretched out and caught her arm. “Cheap and nasty. I’m sorry. But they’ll be just begging for us to do something like that.”

“Couldn’t we sail the boat away without being heard or seen?”

“My dear girl, that was the first thing we thought of. Hopeless. We might get away, but not far. They or the planes would get us at dawn—and then those who weren’t killed would be drowned. Funny, Van Effen was very keen on the idea too. It’s a fast way of committing suicide,” he ended abruptly.

She thought for a few more moments. “But you think it’s possible to leave here without being heard?”

Nicolson smiled. “Persistent young so-and-so, aren’t you? Yes, it’s possible, especially if someone were creating some sort of diversion elsewhere on the island to distract their attention. Why?”

“The only way out is to make the submarine think we’re gone. Couldn’t two or three of you take the boat away—maybe to one of these little islands we saw yesterday—while the rest of us make some kind of diversion.” She was speaking quickly, eagerly now. “When the submarine saw you were gone, it would go away and—”

“And go straight to these little islands—the obvious place to go—see that there was only a few of us, kill us, sink the boat, come back here and finish the rest of you off.”

“Oh!” Her voice was subdued. “I never thought of that.”

“No, but brother Jap would. Look, Miss Drachmann—”

“Gudrun. We’ve stopped fighting, remember?”

“Sorry. Gudrun. Will you stop trying to beat your head against a brick wall? You’ll just give yourself a headache. We’ve thought of everything ourselves, and it’s no good. And if you don’t mind now I’ll try to get some sleep. I have to relieve Van Effen in a little while.”

He was just dropping off when her voice came again. “Johnny?”

“Oh lord,” Nicolson moaned. “Not another flash of inspiration.”

“Well, I’ve just been thinking again and—”

“You’re certainly a trier.” Nicolson heaved a sigh of resignation and sat up. “What is it?”

“It wouldn’t matter if we stayed here as long as the submarine went away, would it?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Answer me please, Johnny.”

“It wouldn’t matter, no. It would be a good thing—and if we could hole up here, unsuspected, for a day or so they’d probably call off the search. From this area, at least. How do you propose to make them sail away, thinking we’re gone? Going to go out there and hypnotise them?”

“That’s not even a little bit funny,” she said calmly. “If dawn came and they saw that our boat was gone—the good one, I mean—they’d think we were gone too, wouldn’t they.”

“Sure they would. Any normal person would.”

“No chance of them being suspicious and searching the island?”

“What the devil are you getting at?”

“Please, Johnny.”

“All right,” he growled. “Sorry again and again and again. No, I don’t think they’d bother to search. What are you after, Gudrun?”

“Make them think we’ve gone,” she said impatiently. “Hide the boat.”

“‘Hide the boat,’ she says! There’s not a place on the shores of this island where we could put it that the Japs wouldn’t find in half-anhour. And we can’t hide it on the island—it’s too heavy to drag up and we’d make such a racket trying that they’d shoot the lot of us, even in the darkness, before we’d moved ten feet. And even if we could, there isn’t a big enough clump of bushes on this blasted rock to hide a decent-sized dinghy, far less a twenty-four foot lifeboat. Sorry and all that, but it’s no go. There’s nowhere you could hide it, either on sea or land, that the Japs couldn’t find it with their eyes shut.”

“These were your suggestions, not mine,” she said tranquilly. “Impossible to hide it on or around the island, and I agree. My suggestion is that you should hide it under the water.”

“What!” Nicolson half sat up, stared at her in the darkness.

“Make some sort of diversion at one end of the island,” she said quickly. “Sail the boat round the other end to that little bay in the north, fill it with stones, pull out the plug or whatever you call it, sink it in pretty deep water and then after the Japs have gone—”

“Of course!” Nicolson’s voice was a slow, considering whisper. “Of course it would work! My God, Gudrun, you’ve got it, you’ve got it!” His voice almost a shout now, he sat up with a jerk, caught the protesting, laughing girl in a bear hug of sheer joy and splendidly renewed hope, scrambled to his feet and ran across to the other side of the hollow. “Captain! Fourth! Bo’sun! Wake up, wake up all of you!”

Luck was with them at last, and it went off without a hitch. There had been some argument about the nature of the diversion—some held that the captain of the submarine, or the man who had taken over since the captain’s death, would be suspicious of a straight forward diversion, but Nicolson insisted that any man stupid enough to send a landing party straight ashore to where the boats had been instead of making a flank attack, was unlikely to be acute enough not to fall for the deception, and his insistence carried the day. Moreover, the wind, which had backed to the north, lent strength to his arguments, and the events proved him right.

Vannier acted as decoy and carried out his part intelligently and with perfect timing. For about ten minutes he moved around the shore of the south-west tip of the island, flashing his hooded torch furtively and at infrequent intervals. He had Nicolson’s night glasses with him, and as soon as he saw the dark shadow of the submarine begin to creep silently forward on her batteries he laid aside the torch altogether and took shelter behind a boulder. Two minutes later, with the submarine directly abreast of him and not more than a hundred yards off-shore, he stood up, twisted off the release fork of one of number two lifeboat’s smoke floats and hurled it as far out to sea as he could: within thirty seconds the light northerly breeze had carried the dense orange smoke out to the submarine, smoke that swirled chokingly round the men in the conning-tower and made them blind.

Four to five minutes is the normal burning time for a smokefloat, but it was more than enough. Four men and muffled oars had number two lifeboat well round to the northern side of the island a full minute before the canister hissed softly to extinction. The submarine remained where it was, motionless. Nicolson eased the lifeboat quietly alongside a steep shelf in the deep bight to the north, and found Farnholme, Ahmed the priest, Willoughby and Gordon waiting for them, a huge pile of smooth round stones lying ready at their feet.

Willoughby had insisted on removing the aircases—the idea of driving holes into them had wounded his engineer’s soul. It would take time with the limited tools at their disposal, require light for working by, would inevitably cause too much noise—and the submarine commander might at any moment take it into his head to make a quick cruise round the island, lighting his way with flares. But the risk had to be taken.

Quickly the plugs were pulled out of the gar-board strake, the men working at breakneck speed, and in almost complete silence, loading the bottom-boards with the stones passed down from the shelf, carefully avoiding blocking the gushing plug holes. After two minutes Nicolson spoke softly to Farnholme, and the Brigadier went running off up the hill: only seconds later he was firing spaced shots in the direction of the submarine, the flat, explosive crack of the carbine roughly synchronising with and covering the metallic rings from the north side of the island as Nicolson and the others removed the shuttering of the buoyancy tanks and withdrew the yellow metal aircases, but leaving enough of the tanks in place to give the boat a strong positive buoyancy.

More stones into the boat, more water through the plug holes, and the level inside and out was just the same, lipping the lowest part of the gunwale, and then a few last stones and she was gone, slipping gently below the surface of the sea, steadied by fore and aft painters, settling in fifteen feet of water, on an even keel and a fine, shingly bottom. As they returned to the hollow on the hill, they saw a rocket parachute flare soaring up from the eastern tip of the island, curving away to the north-east. Vannier had timed it well, and if the submarine investigated there it would find it as quiet and empty of life as was now the other end. It would also have the effect of confusing them utterly, filling their minds with half a dozen conflicting suspicions, and, when morning came, would lend colour to the obvious conclusion that the survivors on the island had outwitted them and made off during the night.

And that was the conclusion to which they unmistakably came in the morning—a grey, overcast dawn with a strengthening wind and no sign of the sun. As soon as it was light, the carefully hidden watchers on the island, securely screened behind thick bushes, could see the figures manning the conning-tower raising binoculars to their eyes—the submarine had moved much farther out during the night—and gesticulating at each other. Shortly afterwards the sound of the diesel motors could be heard, and the submarine moved off, circling quickly round the island. Abreast the remaining lifeboat once more it came to a stop and the A.A. gun lined up on the boat and started firing—artificers must have repaired the damaged firing mechanism during the night. Only six shots in all were fired, but they were enough to reduce the boat to a holed and splintered wreck, and immediately after the last shell had exploded in the shallows the heavy diesels throbbed again and the submarine moved off due west, travelling at high speed, and investigated the two little islands there. Half an hour later it was lost to sight over the southern horizon.

TEN

The lifeboat lay motionless and dead on the motionless mirror of the sea. Nothing moved, nothing stirred, not the faintest ghost of a catspaw to ruffle the shining, steel-blue metal of the ocean that reflected every tiniest detail of the clincher sides with faithful and merciless accuracy. A dead boat on a dead sea, in a dead and empty world. An empty sea, a vast, shimmering plain of nothingness that stretched away endlessly on every side until it blurred in the far distance into the hazed rim of a vast and empty sky. No cloud in sight, and none for three days past. An empty and a terrible sky, majestic in its cruel indifference, and all the emptier for the blinding sun that beat down like an open furnace on the sweltering sea beneath.

A dead boat, too, it seemed, but not empty. It seemed full, rather, packed to capacity, but the impression was misleading. Under such pitiful shade as the remaining tatters of sail provided, men and women lay sprawled or stretched their full length on the benches, thwarts and bottom-boards, spent beyond words and prostrate with the heat, some in coma, some in nightmare sleep, others half-asleep, half-waking, making no movement at all, carefully hoarding what little spark of life was left them and the will to keep it burning. They were waiting for the sun to go down.

Of all that emaciated, sun-blackened shipload of survivors, only two could be seen to be alive. They were in as bad case as the others, gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyes, with cracked and purpled lips and ugly red suppurating blisters where their saltwater and heat-rotted clothes had laid open patches of untanned skin to the burning sun. Both men were right aft in the boat, and they could be seen to be alive only because they were sitting upright in the sternsheets. But for all the movement they made they too might have been dead, or carved from stone. One man sat with his arm leaning on the tiller, though there had been neither wind to fill the torn sails nor men with strength to man the oars for almost four days: the other had a gun in his hand, unwavering, rocklike, and only his eyes showed that he was alive.

There were twenty people in the boat. There had been twentytwo when they had set sail from that little island in the South China Sea six days ago, but only twenty now. Two had died. There never had been any hope for Corporal Fraser, he had already been weakened and ravaged with fever long before the cannon shell from the Zero had all but blown his left arm off as he had fought back at it with his puny rifle from the wheelhouse top of the Viroma. There had been no medical supplies, no anæsthetics at all left, but he had hung on for a lifetime of four days and had died only forty-eight hours ago, cheerfully and in great agony, his arm blackened right to the shoulder. Captain Findhorn had said as much of the burial service as he could remember, almost his last conscious act before he had fallen into the restless, muttering coma from which it seemed unlikely that he would ever emerge.

The other man, one of Siran’s three remaining crew members, had died the previous afternoon. He had died violently and because he had completely misinterpreted McKinnon’s slow smile and soft Highland voice. Shortly after Fraser’s death, McKinnon, whom Nicolson had made responsible for the water supplies, had discovered that one of the tanks had been damaged during the previous night, probably broached, but it was impossible to say: in any event it was empty, and they were left with less than three gallons in the remaining tank. Nicolson had at once suggested that each person in the boat should be limited to one and a half ounces of water twice a day, taken from the graduated drinking cup—part of every lifeboat’s standard equipment: all except the little boy—he was to have as much as he wanted. There had been only one or two murmurs of dissent, but Nicolson had ignored them completely. The following day when McKinnon had handed Miss Drachmann the child’s third drink of the afternoon, two of Siran’s men had made their way down the boat from their place, in the bows, armed with a heavy metal crutch apiece. McKinnon had glanced quickly at Nicolson, seen that he was asleep—he had kept guard almost all the previous night—and quietly asked them to get back, the revolver in his hand backing up his suggestion. One man had hesitated, but the other had flung himself forward, snarling like an animal, the crutch sweeping down in a vicious arc that would have crushed the bo’sun’s skull like a rotten melon if it had landed, but McKinnon had flung himself to one side even as his finger had squeezed down on the trigger and the man’s own impetus carried him headlong over the stern. He was dead before he hit the water. Then McKinnon had wordlessly lined up the Colt on the other man, but the gesture was unnecessary; the man was staring down at the thin blue smoke still wisping from the barrel of the gun, and his face was contorted with fear. He turned quickly and stumbled back to his seat in the bows. After that there had been no more trouble about the water.

At the beginning, six days ago, there had been no trouble at all. Morale had been high, hopes higher, and even Siran, still suffering from the after-effects of concussion, had been as co-operative as possible and seen to it that his men were the same: Siran was nobody’s fool and realised as clearly as any that their survival depended upon common and combined effort: an alliance of expediency, it would last just as long as it suited him.

They had left thirty-six hours after the submarine, twenty-four hours after the last reconnaissance ’plane had passed over the tiny island and failed to find any sign of life. They had sailed at sunset, in a light following swell and the monsoon blowing steadily from the north. All night long and nearly all of the following day they had run free before the wind, and all this time the skies had remained empty and the only boat they had seen had been a prahu, lying far to the east. In the evening, with the eastern tip of Banka Island just lifting over the red and gold horizon to the west, they had seen a submarine surface not two miles away, then move away steadily to the north. Perhaps it had seen them, perhaps not—the lifeboat might have been lost against the darkening sea and sky to the east and Nicolson had dropped the tell-tale orange sails—the lug stamped with the even more damning “VA”—as soon as the submarine had broken water: either way it showed no suspicion, and was lost to sight before the sun had gone down.

That night they had gone through the Macclesfield Channel. This, they had thought, would be the most dangerous and difficult part of all, and had the wind dropped or backed or veered a few points either way they would have been lost, and found in clear sight of land when morning came. But the trades had held steadily from the north, they had left Liat on the port hand shortly after midnight and cleared the island of Lepar long before sunrise. It was just on noon of that same day that their luck finally ran out.

The wind had dropped then, suddenly and completely, and all day long they lay becalmed, not more than twenty-five miles from Lepar Island. Late in the afternoon a slow, lumbering seaplane—it might have been the same one as they had seen previously—appeared out of the west, circled overhead for almost an hour, then moved off without making any attempt to molest them. The sun was just sinking and a faint breeze beginning to spring up, again from the north, when another aeroplane appeared, again out of the west, flying about three thousand feet and straight at them. No seaplane this, but a Zero, and in no mood for either preliminaries or timewasting. Less than a mile away it had dropped its nose and come screaming down out of the sky, twin cannon at its wing roots stabbing daggers of red in the gathering dusk, cannon-shells stitching parallel patterns of splashes and spouting spray across the placid surface of the sea right up to the centre of the helplessly waiting lifeboat, through it and away beyond. Or perhaps not so helpless—not while the Brigadier held the machine-carbine in his hands, for the Zero swung round in a tight turn and headed off back again towards the west in the direction of Sumatra, its sleek fuselage black-streaked with pouring engine oil: less than two miles away it met the seaplane returning, and the two planes disappeared together into the pale golden afterwash of sunset. The boat had been holed, severely, in two places but, remarkably, only one person hurt—Van Effen’s thigh had been badly gashed by a jagged splinter of shrapnel.

Not an hour afterwards the wind had started gusting up to force six or seven, and the sudden tropical storm was upon them almost before they had realised what was coming. It lasted for ten hours, ten interminable hours of wind and darkness and rain strangely cold, then interminable hours of yawing and pitching while the exhausted boat’s company baled for their lives all night long as pooping seas swept over the sternsheets and swirled over the sides and water gushed continuously through the jury patches in the bottom of the lifeboat—the supply of wooden plugs in the repair outfit hadn’t gone very far. Nicolson sailed south before the storm with the jib down and the lug sail reefed until he had steerage way and just no more. Every mile south was a mile nearer the Sunda Strait, but he could have done nothing else than let the storm drive him along even if he had wished to: holed by the stern and deep down by the stern, a sea anchor streamed aft would have pulled them under, and it was quite impossible to heave to with a bow anchor out: enough speed, enough steerage way to get them round would have meant enough sail to dismast the boat or capsize her on the turn, and without that steerage way the sluggish, waterlogged boat would have broached to and been driven under in the troughs. The long agony of the night had ended as abruptly as it had begun, and it was then that the real agony had started.

And now, leaning on the useless tiller, McKinnon sitting armed and still watchful by his side, Nicolson tried to thrust aside the nagging, dominating pains of thirst and swollen tongue and cracked lips and sunblistered back and to assess the damage caused, the complete change brought about by those terrible days that had elapsed since the storm had ended, endless, torturing hours under the pitiless lash of the sun, a sun at once dreadfully impersonal and malignant beyond belief, a sun that steadily grew more and more intolerable until it drove helpless, uncaring men over the edge of breakdown and collapse, physical, moral and mental.

The old spirit of comradeship had gone, vanished completely as if it had never been. Where earlier every man had sought only to help his neighbour, now most sought only to help themselves, and their indifference to their neighbour’s welfare was absolute. As each man received his pitiful portion of water or condensed milk or barley sugar—the biscuits had come to an end two days ago—a dozen greedy, hostile eyes followed every movement of thin clawed hands and thirst-cracked lips, intent on making sure that he received his exact ration and not a drop or nibble more. The greed, the starvation lust in bloodshot eyes, the ivory-knuckled clenching of sun-dark wasting hands, became especially terrible to see whenever young Peter was given an extra drink and some of the water dribbled down his chin and dripped on to the hot bench, evaporating almost as it touched. They were at the stage now when even death appeared an almost attractive alternative to the excruciating torture of their thirst. McKinnon had need of the gun in his hand.

The physical change for the worse was, if anything, even more serious than the moral collapse. Captain Findhorn was deep sunk in coma, but a restless pain-filled coma, and Nicolson had taken the precaution of tying him loosely to the gunwale and one of the thwarts. Jenkins, too, was tied down, although still conscious. Conscious, but in a private hell of indescribable agony: there were no bandages, no protection left for the terrible burns he had received just before they had abandoned the Viroma, and the blazing sun had lacerated every inch of exposed flesh until he had gone crazy with the pain. His finger-nails were blood-stained from his insane clawing of raw burning flesh. His wrists were now lashed together, the rope tied to a thwart, not to prevent further pain-maddened scratching but to prevent him from throwing himself overboard, as he had twice tried to do. For long minutes he would sit without moving, then he would fling all his strength against the rope that held his bleeding wrists, his breathing hoarse and quick with agony. Already Nicolson was wondering whether he should just cut him loose, wondering what moral justification he had for condemning the seaman to die a slow lingering death on the rack instead of letting him finish it all, finish it quickly and cleanly, in the waiting waters over the side. For he was going to die anyway: he had the look of death about him.

Evans’ gashed arm and Walters’ savagely mutilated wrist were becoming steadily worse. All medical supplies were gone, their recuperative powers were gone and salt-water drying in tattered bandages had inflamed the open wounds. Van Effen was in little better case, but his wound had been more recent and he had innate toughness and reserves of stamina far beyond the ordinary: he lay still for hours at a time, reclining on the bottomboards, shoulders braced against a thwart and staring for’ard. He seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep.

And the mental breakdown had gone furthest of all. Vannier and the old second engineer had not yet slid over the edge of sanity, but both showed the same symptoms of increasing lack of contact with reality, the same long periods of withdrawn melancholy silence, the same occasional aimless mutterings to themselves, the brief, apologetic half-smiles if they realised they were being overheard, then the relapse once more into melancholy and silence. Lena, the young Malayan nurse, showed only the melancholy, the utter disinterest, but never talked, to herself or anyone, at any time. The Muslim priest, on the contrary, showed no melancholy, no emotion whatsoever, but was silent all the time: but then he was always silent, so it was impossible to be sure of him one way or the other. It was impossible, too, to be sure about Gordon, one moment widely smiling with staring, unfocused eyes, the next head sunk in unmoving despair. Nicolson, who had the profoundest distrust for Gordon’s calculated cunning and who had tried more than once, without success, to persuade Findhorn to get rid of him, watched him with expressionless face: the symptoms might be real enough, but they might equally well be the symptoms of a man who had read some quasi-medical article on manic-depressives and hadn’t quite got the hang of it. But there was, tragically, no doubt about the young soldier, Sinclair: all contact with reality lost, he was quite insane and had all the classic symptoms of acute schizophrenia.

But the collapse, the physical and mental breakdown, was not complete. Not quite. Apart from Nicolson, there were two men who remained quite untouched by weakness and doubt and despair—the bo’sun and the brigadier. McKinnon was the McKinnon of old, unchangeable, apparently indestructible, still with the slow smile and the soft voice and the gun always in his hand. And the brigadier—Nicolson looked at him for the hundredth time and shook his head in unconscious wonder. Farnholme was magnificent. The more their circumstances deteriorated into hopelessness, the better the brigadier became. When there was pain to be eased, sick men to be made more comfortable or shielded from the sun, or water to be baled—it was seldom enough, now, that the floorboards weren’t covered, and a random bullet on the island had smashed the manual pump—the brigadier was there, helping, encouraging, smiling and working without complaint or hope of thanks or reward. For a man of his age—Farnholme would never see sixty again—it was a quite incredible performance. Nicolson watched him in a kind of bewildered fascination. The fiery and fatuous Colonel Blimp of the up-and-at-’em-sir school he had met aboard the sinking Kerry Dancer might never have existed. Strangely enough, too, the affected Sandhurst drawl had vanished so completely that Nicolson found himself wondering whether he had imagined it in the first place: but there was no questioning the fact that the military expressions and Victorian oaths that had so heavily larded his conversation only a week ago were now so rare as to occasion comment whenever he used them. Perhaps the most convincing proof of his conversion—if that was the word—was the fact that he had not only buried the hatchet with Miss Plenderleith but spent most of his time sitting beside her and talking softly in her ear. She was now very weak, though her tongue had lost none of its power for pungent and acid comment, and she graciously accepted the innumerable small services Farnholme performed for her. They were together now, and Nicolson looked at them, his face expressionless, but smiling to himself. Had they been thirty years younger, he’d have laid odds on the brigadier having designs on Miss Plenderleith. Honourable designs, of course.

Something stirred against his knee, and Nicolson glanced down. Gudrun Drachmann had been sitting there for almost three days now, on the lower cross seat, holding on to the little boy when he jumped about the thwart in front of her—thanks to the unstinted supplies of food and water he received from Miss Plenderleith and McKinnon, Peter Tallon was the only person on the boat with excess energy to dispose of—and cradling him in her arms for hours at a time as he slept. She must have suffered severely from cramp, but never complained. Her face was thinned down now, the cheekbones very prominent, and the great scar on her left cheek more livid and uglier every hour as her skin darkened under the burning sun. She was smiling at him now, a small painful smile through sun-cracked lips, then looked away and nodded at Peter. But it was McKinnon who caught the look, interpreted it correctly, smiled in return and lowered the dipper into the little warm, brackish water that was left in the tank. Almost as if by a pre-arranged signal, a dozen heads lifted and followed every movement of the dipper, McKinnon’s careful transfer of the water from the dipper to a cup, the eagerness with which the little boy clasped the cup in his pudgy hands and gulped the water down. Then they looked away from the child and the empty cup and looked at McKinnon instead, bloodshot eyes dulled with suffering and hate, but McKinnon just smiled his slow, patient smile and the gun in his hand never moved.

Night, when it came at last, brought relief, but relief only of a very limited nature. The burning heat of the sun was gone, but the air was still very hot and stifling and oppressive, and the pitiful ration of water each had received just as the sun had gone down had only whetted their appetite for more, made their raging thirsts all the more painful and intolerable. For two or three hours after sunset people shifted restlessly in their seats in the lifeboat, and some even tried to talk with others, but the talk didn’t last very long: their throats were too parched, their blistered mouths too sore, and always, at the back of everybody’s mind must have been the hopeless thought that, unless some miracle occurred, for some of them tonight’s would have been the last sunset they would ever see. But nature was merciful, their minds and bodies were exhausted by hunger and thirst and by the day-long energy-sapping power of the sun, and by and by nearly all of them dropped off into a restless muttering sleep.

Nicolson and McKinnon went to sleep too. They hadn’t intended to, it had been their purpose to share the night watches, but exhaustion had dug its fingers as deeply into them as any, and they dozed off from time to time, heads nodding on their chests, then waking with a start. Once, waking out of a short sleep, Nicolson thought he heard someone moving around the boat, and called out softly. There was no reply, and when he called out again and was again answered with silence, he reached under his seat and brought out his torch. The battery was almost gone now, but the feeble yellow beam was enough to show him that all was quiet, that nobody was out of his or her place, every black and shapeless shadow lying sprawled lifelessly across thwarts and bottomboards almost exactly where it had been when the sun had gone down. Not long afterwards, just as he was dozing off again, he could have sworn he heard a splash reaching down through his deep-drugged mists of sleep, and again he reached for his torch. But again there was no one there, no one moving around, no one even moving at all. He counted all the huddled shadows, and the number was right: nineteen, excluding himself.

He stayed awake for the remainder of the night, consciously fighting against an almost overpowering tiredness, against leaden eyelids and a woolly, fuzzy mind, ignoring the demands of a parched throat and dry, swollen tongue that seemed to fill all his mouth that he should let go, let his quivering eyelids fall and bring a few hours’ blessed oblivion. But something far back in his mind kept telling him that he mustn’t let go, that the lifeboat and the lives of twenty people were in his hands, and when these urgings were not enough he thought of the little boy asleep less than two feet away, and then he was wide awake again. And so a night that was the epitome of all the sleepless nights he had ever known dragged endlessly by, and after a long, long time the first faint streaks of grey began to lighten the eastern horizon.

Minutes passed, and he was beginning to see the mast clearly silhouetted against the greying sky, then the line of the gunwale of the boat, then the separate and distinct forms of the people lying about the boat. He looked first at the boy. He was still sleeping peacefully in the sternsheets beside him, wrapped in a blanket, his face only a white blur in the darkness, his head lying pillowed in the crook of Gudrun Drachmann’s arm. She herself was still sitting on the lower cross seat, twisted round at an uncomfortable angle, her head on the sternsheets. Bending down more closely, Nicolson could see that her head wasn’t resting squarely on the seat but against it, the edge of the wood cutting cruelly into her right cheek. Carefully he raised her head, eased a doubled corner of the blanket over the edge of the seat and then, moved by some strange impulse, gently moved back the wave of blue-black hair that had fallen forward over her face, concealing the long, ragged scar. For a moment he let his hand rest there, lightly, then he saw the sheen of her eyes in the gloom and knew that she had not been asleep. He felt no embarrassment, no guilt, just smiled down at her without speaking: she must have seen the gleam of his teeth against his darkly-tanned face, for she smiled in return, rubbed the scarred cheek softly, twice, against his hand then slowly straightened, careful not to disturb the sleeping boy.

The boat was settling deeper in the water, the level inside already two or three inches above the floorboards, and Nicolson knew it was time and past time to bale it out. But baling was a noisy business, and it seemed pointless to wake people from the forgetfulness of sleep to the iron realities of another day when the boat could go at least another hour without being emptied: true, many people were up to their ankles in water, and one of two actually sitting in it, but these were only tiny discomforts compared to what they would have to suffer before the sun went down again.

And then, suddenly, he saw something that drove away all thought of inaction, all thought of sleep. Quickly he shook McKinnon awake—he had to, for McKinnon had been leaning against him and would have fallen had Nicolson risen without warning—rose, stepped over the after thwart and dropped down on his knees on the next lower cross seat. Jenkins, the seaman who had been so dreadfully burnt, was lying in a most peculiar position, half-crouched, half-kneeling, his bloodied wrists still tied to the thwart, his head jammed against the tank leading. Nicolson stooped and shook him by the shoulder: the seaman fell further over on his side, but made no other movement. Again Nicolson shook him, more urgently this time, calling his name, but Jenkins would never be shaken awake nor hear his name again. By accident or design—probably by design, and in spite of the ropes that bound him—he had slipped off the thwart some time during the night and drowned in a few inches of bilge-water.

Nicolson straightened his back and looked at McKinnon, and the bo’sun nodded, understanding at once. It wouldn’t do the lifeboat’s morale any good at all if the survivors woke and found a dead man in their midst, and that they should slip him quietly over the side without even a shred of a burial service seemed a small price to pay for preserving the already fading reason of more than one who might lose it entirely if he opened his eyes only to find already in their midst what he knew must eventually come to all.

But Jenkins was heavier than he looked, and his body was awkwardly jammed between the thwarts. By the time McKinnon had cut free the securing ropes with his jack-knife and helped Nicolson drag him to a side bench, at least half the people in the lifeboat were awake, watching them struggle with the body, knowing that Jenkins was dead, yet looking on with eyes lack-lustre and strangely uncomprehending. But no one spoke; it seemed as if they might get Jenkins over the side without any hysterical outbursts or demonstrations, when a sudden high-pitched cry from for’ard, a cry that was almost a scream, made even the most tired and lethargic jerk their heads round and stare up towards the bows of the boat. Both Nicolson and McKinnon, startled, dropped the body and swung round: in the hushed stillness of the tropical dawn, the cry had seemed unnaturally loud.

The cry had come from the young soldier, Sinclair, but he wasn’t looking at Jenkins, or anywhere in that direction. He was on his knees on the floorboards, rocking gently to and fro, staring down at somebody lying stretched on his back. Even as Nicolson watched, he flung himself to one side and pillowed his head on his forearms and the gunwale, moaning softly to himself.

In three seconds Nicolson was by his side, gazing down at the man in the bottom of the boat. Not all of his body was lying on the boards—the backs of his knees were hooked over a thwart, the legs pointing incongruously skywards, as if he had fallen backwards from the seat on which he had been sitting: the back of his head rested in a couple of inches of water. It was Ahmed the priest, Farnholme’s strange and taciturn friend, and he was quite dead.

Nicolson stooped over the priest, quickly thrust his hand inside the man’s black robe to feel for the heart and as quickly withdrew. The flesh was cold and clammy: the man had been dead for hours.

Unconsciously, almost, Nicolson shook his head in bewilderment, glanced up at McKinnon and saw his own expression reflected there. He looked down again, bent over the body to lift up the head and the shoulders, and it was then that the shock came. He couldn’t shift the body more than a couple of inches. Again he tried and again he failed. At his signal, McKinnon lifted one side of the body while Nicolson knelt down till his face was almost in the water, and then he saw why he had failed. The jack-knife between the shoulder-blades was buried clear up to the hilt, and the handle was caught between the planks of the bottom-boards.

ELEVEN

Nicolson rose slowly to his feet and drew his forearm across his forehead. It was already hot for the time of the day, but not that hot. His right arm hung loosely by his side, the butt of the Colt gripped tightly in his hand. He had no recollection of pulling it out of his belt. He gestured at the fallen priest.

“This man is dead.” His quiet voice carried easily in the hushed silence. “He has a knife in his back. Someone in this boat murdered him.”

“Dead! You said he was dead? A knife in his back?” Farnholme’s face wasn’t pleasant as he pushed for’ard and knelt at the priest’s side. He was on his feet in a moment, his mouth a thin white line in the darkness of his face. “He’s dead all right. Give me that gun, Nicolson. I know who did it.”

“Leave that gun alone!” Nicolson held him off with a stiff arm, then went on: “Sorry, Brigadier. As long as the captain’s unwell I am in charge of this boat. I can’t let you take the law into your own hands. Who did it?”

“Siran, of course!” Farnholme was back on balance again, but there was no masking the cold rage in his eyes. “Look at the damn murdering hound, sitting there smirking.”

“‘The smiler with the knife beneath the cloak’.” It was Willoughby who spoke. His voice was weak and husky, but he was quiet and composed enough: the night’s sleep seemed to have done him some good.

“It’s not under anyone’s cloak,” Nicolson said matter-of-factly. “It’s sticking in Ahmed’s back—and it’s because of my damn criminal care- lessness that it is,” he added in the bitterness of sudden recollection and understanding. “I forgot that there was a boat jack-knife as well as two hatchets in number two lifeboat … Why Siran, Brigadier?”

“Good God, man, of course it’s Siran!” Farnholme pointed down at the priest.”We’re looking for a cold-blooded murderer, aren’t we? Who else, but Siran?”

Nicolson looked at him. “And what else, Brigadier?”

“What do you mean, ‘what else’?”

“You know very well. I wouldn’t shed any more tears than you if we had to shoot him, but let’s have some little shred of evidence first.”

“What more evidence do you want? Ahmed was facing aft, wasn’t he? And he was stabbed in the back. So somebody in the front of the boat did it—and there were only three people farther for’ard than Ahmed. Siran and his two killers.”

“Our friend is overwrought.” It was Siran who spoke, his voice as smooth and expressionless as his face. “Too many days in an open boat in tropical seas can do terrible things to a man.”

Farnholme clenched his fists and started for’ard, but Nicolson and McKinnon caught him by the arms.

“Don’t be a fool,” Nicolson said roughly. “Violence won’t help matters, and we can’t have fighting in a small boat like this.” He released his grip on Farnholme’s arm, and looked thoughtfully at the man in the bows. “You may be right, Brigadier. I did hear someone moving about the boat, up for’ard, last night, and I did hear something like a thud. Later on I heard a splash. But I checked where the priest had been sitting.”

“His bag is gone, Nicolson. I wonder if you can guess where?”

“I saw his bag,” Nicolson said quietly. “Canvas, and very light. It wouldn’t sink.”

“I’m afraid it would, sir.” McKinnon nodded towards the bows. “The grapnel’s gone.”

“Weighted to the bottom, eh, Bo’sun? That would sink it all right.”

“Well, there you are then,” Farnholme said impatiently. “They killed him, took his bag and flung it over the side. You looked both times you heard a noise and both times you saw Ahmed sitting up. Somebody must have been holding him up—probably by the handle of the knife stuck in his back. Whoever was holding him must have been sitting behind him—in the bows of the boat. And there were only these three damned murderers sitting there.” Farnholme was breathing heavily, his fists still white-knuckled, and his eyes not leaving Siran’s face.

“It sounds as if you were right,” Nicolson admitted. “How about the rest of it?”

“How about the rest of what?”

“You know quite well. They didn’t kill him just for the exercise. What was their reason?”

“How the devil should I know why they killed him?”

Nicolson sighed. “Look Brigadier, we’re not all morons. Of course you know. You suspected Siran immediately. You expected Ahmed’s bag to be missing. And Ahmed was your friend.”

Just for a moment something flickered far back in Farnholme’s eyes, a faint shadow of expression that seemed to be reflected in the sudden tense tightening of Siran’s mouth, almost as if the two men were exchanging a guarded look, maybe of understanding, maybe of anything. But the sun was not yet up, and Nicolson couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t imagining the exchange of glances, and, besides, any idea or suspicion of collusion between the two was preposterous. Give Farnholme a gun and Siran would be only a memory.

“I suppose you have a right to know.” Farnholme appeared to be holding himself tightly under control but his mind was racing furiously, fabricating a story that would bear examination. “It won’t do any harm, not now, not any more.” He looked away from Siran and stared down at the dead man at his feet, and his expression and tone softened. “Ahmed was my friend, you say. He was, but a very new friend, and only then because he desperately needed a friend. His name is Jan Bekker, a countryman of Van Effen’s here. Lived in Borneo—Dutch Borneo—near Samarinda, for many years. Representative of a big Amsterdam firm and supervisor of a whole string of river rubber plantations. And a lot more besides.”

He paused, and Nicolson prompted him: “Meaning?”

“I’m not quite certain. He was some kind of agent for the Dutch Government. All I know is that some weeks ago he broke up and exposed a well-organised Japanese Fifth Column in Eastern Borneo. Dozens of them arrested and shot out of hand—and he also managed to get hold of their complete list of every Japanese agent and fifth-columnist in India, Burma, Malaya and the East Indies.

“He carried it in his bag, and it would have been worth a fortune to the allies. The Japs knew he had it, and they’ve put a fantastic price on his head—dead or alive—and offered a similar reward for the return or destruction of the lists. He told me all this himself. Somehow or other Siran knew of all this, and that’s what he’s been after. He’s earned his money, but I swear before God he’ll never live to collect.”

“And that’s why Bekker or whatever his name is was disguised?”

“It was my idea,” Farnholme said heavily. “I thought I was being very, very clever. Muslim priests are as good as any other priests in the world: a renegade, whisky-drinking priest is an object of contempt and everybody shuns him. I tried as best I could to be the kind of dissolute drinking companion a man like that would have. We weren’t clever enough. I don’t think we could have been anyway. The alarm call was out for Bekker the length and breadth of the Indies.”

“He was a very lucky man to have got even this far,” Nicolson acknowledged. “That’s why the Japs have been at such pains to get us?”

“Heavens above, man, surely it’s all obvious enough now!” Farnholme shook his head impatiently, then looked again at Siran: there was no anger in his eyes now, only cold, implacable purpose. “I’d sooner have a king cobra loose in this boat than that murderous swine there. I don’t want you to have any blood on your hands, Nicolson. Give me your gun.”

“How very convenient,” Siran murmured. Whatever he lacked, Nicolson thought, it wasn’t courage. “Congratulations, Farnholme. I salute you.”

Nicolson looked at him curiously, then at Farnholme. “What’s he talking about?”

“How the devil should I know,” Farnholme answered impatiently. “We’re wasting time, Nicolson. Give me that gun!”

“No.”

“For God’s sake, why not? Don’t be a fool, man. There’s not one of our lives worth a snuff of a candle as long as this man’s at large in the boat.”

“Very likely,” Nicolson agreed. “But suspicion, no matter how strong, is not proof. Even Siran is entitled to a trial.”

“In the name of heaven!” Farnholme was completely exasperated. “Don’t you know that there’s a time and place for these quaint old Anglo-Saxon notions about fair play and justice. This is neither the time nor the place. This is a matter of survival.”

Nicolson nodded. “I know it is. Siran wouldn’t recognise a cricket bat if he saw one. Get back in your seat, Brigadier, please. I’m not completely indifferent to the safety of the others in the boat. Cut one of the heaving lines in three, bo’sun, and make a job on these characters. It doesn’t matter if the knots are a bit tight.”

“Indeed?” Siran raised his eyebrows. “And what if we refuse to subject ourselves to this treatment?”

“Suit yourselves,” Nicolson said indifferently. “The brigadier can have the gun.”

McKinnon made a very thorough job of immobilising Siran and his two men, and took a great deal of grim satisfaction in hauling the ropes tight. By the time he was finished the three men were trussed hand and foot and quite unable to move: as a further precaution he had secured the three rope ends to the ring-bolt in the for’ard apron. Farnholme had made no further protest. It was noticeable, however, that when he resumed his seat on the benches beside Miss Plenderleith, he changed his position so that he was between her and the stern, and from there he could watch both her and the bows of the boat at the same time: his carbine was lying on the seat beside him.

His work done, McKinnon came aft to the sternsheets and sat down beside Nicolson. He brought out dipper and graduated cup, ready to serve out the morning ration of water, then turned suddenly to Nicolson. Half-a-dozen people in the boat were talking— the babble wouldn’t last long after the sun cleared the horizon—and his low pitched words could not have been heard two feet away.

“It’s a desperate long way to Darwin, sir,” he said obliquely.

Nicolson lifted his shoulders in a half-shrug and smiled: but his face was dark with worry. “You, too, Bo’sun? Maybe my judgment was wrong. I’m sure that Siran will never stand trial. But I can’t kill him, not yet.”

“He’s just waiting his chance, sir.” McKinnon was as worried as Nicolson. “A killer. You heard the Brigadier’s story.”

“That’s the trouble. I did hear his story.” Nicolson nodded heavily, looked at Farnholme, glanced at McKinnon and then stared down at his hands. “I didn’t believe a damn single word he said. He was lying all the way.”

The sun wheeled like a great burning ball above the eastern horizon. Inside an hour nearly all talk was stopped and people were crawling back into their shells of remote indifference, each alone with his own private hell of thirst and pain. Hour succeeded interminable hour, the sun climbed higher and higher into the empty washedout blue of the windless sky, and the lifeboat remained as she had been for days on end now, motionless on the water. That they had moved many miles south in those days Nicolson was well aware, for the current set due south from Straat Banka to the Sunda Strait eleven months out of twelve: but there was no movement relative to the water surrounding them, nothing that the human eye could see.

Nobody moved aboard the boat any more than the boat moved on the surface of the sea. With the sun swinging high towards the zenith, the slightest effort brought exhaustion in its wake, a panting of breath that whistled shrilly through a bone-dry mouth and cracked and blistered lips. Now and again the little boy moved about and talked to himself in his own private language, but as the day lengthened and the hot and humid air became more and more oppressive and suffocating, his activities and his talk lessened and lessened until finally he was content to lie still on Gudrun’s lap, gazing up thoughtfully into the clear blue eyes: but by and by his eyelids grew heavy and dropped, and he fell asleep. Arms outstretched in dumb show Nicolson offered to take him and give her a rest, but she just smiled and shook her head. It suddenly came home to Nicolson, with a sense of something like wonder, that she nearly always smiled when she spoke: not always, but he’d yet to hear his first complaint from her or see the first expression of discontent. He saw the girl looking at him, strangely, and he forced a smile on his face, then looked away.

Now and again a murmur of voices came from the side benches on the starboard side. What the brigadier and Miss Plenderleith found to talk about Nicolson couldn’t even begin to guess, but find it they did, and plenty of it. In the gaps in their conversation they just sat and looked into one another’s eyes, and the brigadier held her thin wasted hand in his all the time. Two or three days ago it had struck Nicolson as mildly humorous, and he had had visions of the brigadier in a bygone and gentler age, immaculately dressed in white tie and tails and carnation in his buttonhole, hair and moustache as jet black as they were now snowy white, his hansom cab ready while he himself stood at the stage door entrance, waiting. But he couldn’t see anything funny in it, not any longer. It was all rather quiet and pathetic, a Darby and Joan waiting patiently for the end, but not at all afraid.

Slowly Nicolson’s gaze travelled round the boat. There wasn’t much change from yesterday that he could see, except that everybody seemed just that much weaker, that much more exhausted than they had been, with hardly the strength left to move into the few solitary scraps of shade that remained. They were very low. It didn’t need any expert medical eye to see that the distance from listlessness to lifelessness was only a very short step indeed. Some were now so far through that it was only by a conscious effort that they could rouse themselves to accept their midday ration of water, and even then one or two found the greatest difficulty in swallowing. Forty-eight hours and most of them would be dead. Nicolson knew where they were, near enough, since he still had his sextant with him: in the vicinity of the Noordwachter light, perhaps fifty miles due east of the coast of Sumatra. If neither wind nor rain came within the next twenty-four hours, then it wouldn’t matter after that whether it came or not.

On the credit side, the only cheering item was that of the captain’s health. He had come out of his coma just after dawn and now, sitting on a cross seat and wedged between a thwart and bench, he seemed determined not to lose consciousness again. He could speak normally now—as normally as any of them could speak with thirst choking in their throats—and he no longer coughed blood, not at any time. He had lost a great deal of weight in the past week, but in spite of that looked stronger than he had done for days. For a man with a bullet lodged either in his lung or the chest wall to survive the rigours of the previous week, and at the same time be denied all medical attention or medicines was something Nicolson would have refused to believe unless he had seen it. Even now, he found Findhorn’s recuperative powers—Findhorn was almost at his retiring age—difficult to credit. He knew, too, that Findhorn had really nothing to live for, no wife, no family, just nothing, which made his courage and recovery all the more astonishing. And all the more bitter for, with all the guts in the world, he was still a very sick man, and the end could not be very far away. Maybe it was just his sense of responsibility, but perhaps not. It was difficult to say, impossible to say. Nicolson realised that he himself was too tired, too uncaring to worry about it longer. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered. He closed his eyes to rest them from the harsh, shimmering glare of the sea, and quietly dropped off to sleep in the noonday sun.

He awoke to the sound of someone drinking water, not the sound of a person drinking the tiny little rations of hot, brackish liquid that McKinnon doled out three times a day, but great, gasping mouthfuls at a time, gurgling and splashing as if he had a bucket to his head. At first Nicolson thought that someone must have broached the remaining supplies, but he saw immediately that it wasn’t that. Sitting on a thwart up near the mast, Sinclair, the young soldier, had the baler to his head. It was an eight-inch baler, and it held a lot of water. His head was tilted right back, and he was just draining the last few drops from it.

Nicolson rose stiffly to his feet, carefully picked his way for’ard through the bodies sprawled over seats and benches and took the can from the boy’s unresisting hand. He lifted the baler and let a couple of drops trickle slowly into his mouth. He grimaced at the prickly saltiness of the taste. Seawater. Not that there had really been any doubt about it. The boy was staring up at him, his eyes wide and mad, pitiful defiance in his face. There were perhaps half a dozen men watching them, looking at them with a kind of listless indifference. They didn’t care. Some of them at least must have seen Sinclair dipping the baler in the sea and then drink from it, but they hadn’t bothered to stop him. They hadn’t even bothered to call out. Maybe they even thought it was a good idea. Nicolson shook his head and looked down at the soldier.

“That was sea-water, wasn’t it, Sinclair?”

The soldier said nothing. His mouth was twitching, as if he were forming words, but no sound came out. The insane eyes, wide and flat and empty, were fixed on Nicolson, and the lids didn’t blink, not once.

“Did you drink all of it?” Nicolson persisted, and this time the boy did answer, a long, monotonous string of oaths in a high, cracked voice. For a few seconds Nicolson stared down at him without speaking, then shrugged his shoulders tiredly and turned away. Sinclair half rose from his thwart, clawed fingers reaching for the baler, but Nicolson easily pushed him away, and he sank back heavily on his seat, bent forward, cradled his face in his hands and shook his head slowly from side to side. Nicolson hesitated for a moment, then made his way back to the sternsheets.

Midday came and went, the sun crossed over its zenith and the heat grew even more intense. The boat now was as soundless as it was lifeless and even Farnholme’s and Miss Plenderleith’s murmurings had ceased and they had dropped off into an uneasy sleep. And then, just after three o’clock in the afternoon, when even to the most resolute it must have seemed that they were lost in an endless purgatory, came the sudden change.

Little enough in itself, the change was as dramatic as it was abrupt, but a change so slight that at first it failed to register or have its significance encompassed by exhausted minds. It was McKinnon who noticed it first, noticed it and knew what it meant, and he sat bolt upright in the sternsheets, blinking at first in the sea-mirrored glare of the sun, then searching the horizon from north to east. Seconds later he dug his fingers into Nicolson’s arm and shook him awake.

“What is it, Bo’sun?” Nicolson asked quickly. “What’s happened?” But McKinnon said nothing, just sat there looking at him, cracked, painful lips drawn back in a grin of sheer happiness. For a moment Nicolson stared at him, blankly uncomprehending, thinking only that at last McKinnon, too, had gone over the edge, then all at once he had it.

“Wind!” His voice was only a faint, cracked whisper, but his face, a face that could feel the first tentative stirrings of a breeze degrees cooler than the suffocating heat of only minutes previously, showed how he felt. Almost at once, exactly as McKinnon had done, he too stared away to the north and east and then, for the first and only time in his life, he thumped the grinning bo’sun on the back. “Wind, McKinnon! And cloud! Can you see it?” His pointing arm stretched away to the north-east: away in the far distance a bluish purple bar of cloud was just beginning to lift over the horizon.

“I can see it, sir. No doubt about it at all. Coming our way, all right.”

“And that wind’s strengthening all the time. Feel it?” He shook the sleeping nurse by the shoulder. “Gudrun! Wake up! Wake up!”

She stirred, opened her eyes and looked up at him. “What is it, Johnny?”

“Mr. Nicolson to you.” He spoke with mock severity, but he was grinning with delight. “Want to see the most wonderful sight anyone ever saw?” He saw the shadow of distress cross the clear blue of her eyes, knew what she must be thinking, and smiled again. “A raincloud, you chump! A wonderful, wonderful rain-cloud. Give the captain a shake, will you?”

The effect on the entire boat’s company was astonishing, the transformation almost beyond belief. Within two minutes everybody was wide awake, twisted round and staring eagerly towards the north-east, chattering excitedly to one another. Or not quite everybody—Sinclair, the young soldier, paid no heed at all, just sat staring down at the bottom of the boat, lost in a vast indifference. But he was the solitary exception. For the rest, they might have been condemned men granted the right to live again, and that was almost literally true. Findhorn had ordered an extra ration of water all round. The long bar of clouds was perceptibly nearer. The wind was stronger and cool on their faces. Hope was with them again and life once more worth the living. Nicolson was dimly aware that this excitement, this physical activity, was purely nervous and psychological in origin, that, unknown to them, it must be draining their last reserves of strength, and that any disappointment, any reversal of this sudden fortune, would be the equivalent of a death penalty. But it didn’t seem likely.

“How long, do you think, my boy?” It was Farnholme talking.

“Hard to say.” Nicolson stared off to the northeast. “Hour and a half, perhaps, maybe less if the wind freshens.” He looked at the captain. “What do you think, sir?”

“Less,” Findhorn nodded. “Wind’s definitely strengthening, I think.”

“‘I bring fresh showers for thirsting flowers’,” the second engineer quoted solemnly. He rubbed his hands together. “For flowers substitute Willoughby. Rain, rain, glorious rain!”

“A bit early to start counting your chickens yet, Willy,” Nicolson said warningly.

“What do you mean?” It was Farnholme who replied, his voice sharp.

“Just that rain-clouds don’t necessarily mean rain, that’s all.” Nicolson spoke as soothingly as he could. “Not at first, that is.”

“Do you mean to tell me, young man, that we’ll be no better off than we were before?” There was only one person on the boat who addressed Nicolson as ‘young man.’

“Of course not, Miss Plenderleith. These clouds look thick and heavy, and it’ll mean shelter from the sun, for one thing. But what the captain and I are really interested in is the wind. If it picks up and holds we can reach the Sunda Straits sometime during the night.”

“Then why haven’t you the sails up?” Farnholme demanded.

“Because I think the chances are that we will have rain,” Nicolson said patiently. “We’ve got to have something to funnel the water into cups or baler or whatever we use. And there’s not enough wind yet to move us a couple of feet a minute.”

For the better part of an hour after that nobody spoke. With the realisation that salvation wasn’t as immediate as they had thought, some of the earlier listlessness had returned. But only some. The hope was there, and none of them had any intention of letting it go. No one closed his eyes or went to sleep again. The cloud was still there, off the starboard beam, getting bigger and darker all the time, and it had all their attention. Their gaze was on that and on nothing else and maybe that was why they didn’t see Sinclair until it was too late.

It was Gudrun Drachmann who saw him first, and what she saw made her rise as quickly as she could and stumble for’ard towards the boy. His eyes upturned in his head so that his pupils had vanished and only the whites were visible, he was jerking convulsively in his seat, his teeth chattering violently like a man in an ague and his face was the colour of stone. Even as the girl reached him, calling his name softly, beseechingly, he pushed himself to his feet, struck at her so that she stumbled and fell against the brigadier, and then, before anyone had time to recover and do anything, tore off his shirt, flung it at the advancing Nicolson and jumped overboard, landing flat-faced with a splash that sent water spattering all over the boat.

For a few seconds no one moved. It had been all so swift and unexpected that they could have imagined it. But there was no imagination about the empty thwart in the boat, the spreading ripples on the glassy surface of the sea. Nicolson stood motionless, arrested in mid-step, the ragged shirt caught in one hand. The girl was still leaning against Farnholme, saying ‘Alex’, ‘Alex’, over and over again, meaninglessly. And then there came another splash from right aft, not so loud this time. The bo’sun had gone after him.

The second splash brought Nicolson back to life and action with a perceptible jerk. Stooping quickly, he caught hold of the boathook and turned quickly to the side of the boat, kneeling on the bench. Almost without thinking he had dragged his pistol from his belt and was holding it in his free hand. The boat-hook was for McKinnon, the pistol for the young soldier. The panic-stricken grip of a drowning man was bad enough: God only knew what that of a drowning madman might be like.

Sinclair was thrashing about in the water about twenty feet from the boat and McKinnon, just surfaced, was splashing determinedly towards him—like nearly all Islanders, swimming was not one of his better accomplishments—when Nicolson caught sight of something that struck at him like an ice-cold chill. He swung the boathook in a wide curving arc that brought it crashing into the water only inches from McKinnon‘s shoulder. Instinctively the bo’sun caught hold of it and twisted round, his dark face a mass of startled incomprehension.

“Back, man, back!” Nicolson shouted. Even in that moment of near-panic he could hear that his voice was hoarse and cracked. “For God’s sake, hurry up!”

McKinnon started to move slowly towards the boat, but not of his own volition: he still held on to the boat-hook, and Nicolson was drawing it quickly inboard. McKinnon’s face still had its almost comical expression of bewilderment. He looked over his shoulder to where Sinclair was still splashing aimlessly around, more than thirty feet away now, looked back again towards the boat, opened his mouth to speak and then shouted aloud with pain. A split second passed, he shouted again, and then, mysteriously galvanised into furious activity, splashed his way madly towards the boat. Five frantic strokes and he was alongside, half-a-dozen hands dragging him headfirst into the boat. He landed face down on a cross-seat, and, just as his legs came inboard, a greyish, reptilian shape released its grip on his calf and slid back soundlessly into the water.

“What—what on earth was that?” Gudrun had caught a glimpse of the vicious teeth, the evil snake’s body. Her voice was shaking.

“Barracuda,” Nicolson said tonelessly. He carefully avoided looking at her face.

“Barracuda!” The shocked whisper left no doubt but that she had heard all about them, the most voracious killers in the sea. “But Alex! Alex! He’s out there! We must help him, quickly!”

“There’s nothing we can do.” He hadn’t meant to speak so harshly, but the knowledge of his utter powerlessness affected him more than he knew. “There’s nothing anyone can do for him now.”

Even as he was speaking, Sinclair’s agonised scream came at them across the water. It was a frightening sound, half-human, halfanimal, and it came again and again, strident with some nameless terror, as he flung himself convulsively about, at times rising halfclear of the sea and arching so far back that his hair almost touched the water, his hands churning foam as he beat insanely at some invisible enemies. The Colt in Nicolson’s hand crashed six times in rapid succession, kicking up gouts of flying water and spray around the soldier, quick, unsighted shots that could never have hoped to accomplish anything. Careless, almost, one might have called them, all except the first: there had been nothing careless about that shot, it had taken Sinclair cleanly through the head. Long before the smell of cordite and blue wisps of smoke had drifted away to the south, the water was calm again and Sinclair had vanished, lost to sight beneath the steel-blue mirror of the sea.

Twenty minutes later that sea was no longer blue but churned to a milky, frothing white as the sheets of driving torrential rain swept across it from horizon to horizon.

Close on three hours had passed, and it was about the time of sundown. It was impossible to see the sun, to know where it was, for the rain-squalls still marched successively south and in the failing light the sky was the same leaden grey at all points of the compass. The rain still fell, still swept across the unprotected boat, but nobody cared. Drenched to the skin, shivering often in the cold rain that moulded and plastered thin cottons to arms and bodies and legs, they were happy. In spite of the sudden, numbing shock the death of Sinclair had given them, in spite of the realisation of the tragic futility of his death with the life-giving rain so near at hand, in spite of these things they were happy. They were happy because the law of self-preservation still yielded place to none. They were happy because they had slaked their terrible thirsts and drunk their fill, and more than their fill, because the cold rain cooled down their burns and blistered skins, because they had managed to funnel over four gallons of fresh rainwater into one of the tanks. They were happy because the lifeboat, driven by the spanking breeze, had already covered many of the miles that stretched between where they had lain becalmed and the now steadily nearing coast of Western Java. And they were deliriously happy, happier than they had dreamed that they could ever be again, because salvation was at hand, because miracles still happened and their troubles were over at last.

It was, as ever, McKinnon that had seen it first, a long, low shape through a distant gap in the rain-squalls, just over two miles away. They had no reason to fear anything but the worst, the inevitable worst, and it had taken only seconds to lower the tattered lug and jib, knock the pin from the mast clamp, unship the mast itself and cower down in the bottom of the boat, so that it had become, even from a short distance, no more than an empty, drifting lifeboat, difficult to see in the mists of driving rain, possibly not worth investigating even if it had been seen. But they had been seen, the long grey shape had altered course to intercept their line of drift, and now they could only thank God that it had altered its course, bless the sharp-eyed lookouts who had impossibly picked out their little grey boat against its vast grey background.

It was Nicolson who had at first incredulously identified it, then Findhorn, McKinnon, Vannier, Evans and Walters had all recognised it too. This was not the first time they had seen one of them, and there could be no possible doubt about it. It was a U.S. Navy Torpedo Boat, and their torpedo boats couldn’t be confused with anything afloat. The long, sweeping flare of the bows, the seventyfoot plywood shell driven by its three high-speed marine motors, its quadruple torpedo tubes and .50 calibre machine-guns were quite unmistakable. It was flying no flag at all, but, almost as if to remove any last doubts they might have about its nationality, a seaman aboard the torpedo boat broke out a large flag that streamed out stiffly in the wind of its passing: it was approaching at a speed of something better than thirty knots—nowhere near its maximum—and the white water was piled high at its bows. Even in the gathering gloom there was no more mistaking the flag than there was the torpedo boat: the Stars and Stripes is probably the most easily identifiable flag of all.

They were all sitting up in the lifeboat now, and one or two were standing, waving at the M.T.B. A couple of men on the M.T.B. waved back, one from the wheelhouse, the other standing by one of the for’ard turrets. Aboard the lifeboat, people were gathering their few pitiful possessions together, preparatory to boarding the American vessel, and Miss Plenderleith was in the act of skewering her hat more firmly on to her head when the M.T.B. abruptly slowed down her big Packard motors, jammed them into reverse and came sliding smoothly alongside, only feet away, dwarfing the little lifeboat. Even before she stopped completely, a couple of heaving lines came sailing across the gap of water and smacked accurately fore and aft into the lifeboat. The coordinated precision, the handling of the boat clearly bespoke a highly-trained crew. And then both boats were rubbing alongside, Nicolson had his hand on the M.T.B.’s side, the other raised in greeting to the short, rather stocky figure that had just appeared from behind the wheelhouse.

“Hallo there!” Nicolson grinned widely, and stretched out a hand in greeting. “Brother, are we glad to see you!”

“Not half as glad as we are to see you.” There was a gleam of white teeth in a sunburnt face, an almost imperceptible movement of the left hand, and the three sailors on deck were no longer interested bystanders but very alert, very attentive guards, with suddenly produced sub-machineguns rock-steady in their hands. A pistol, too, had appeared in the speaker’s right hand. “I fear, however, that your rejoicing may prove to be rather shorter-lived than ours. Please to keep very still indeed.”

Nicolson felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. With a queer sort of detachment he saw that his hand was no longer resting loosely against the ship’s side but was bar-taut, each separate tendon standing out rigidly from the back of his hand. In spite of all the water he had drunk, his mouth felt suddenly as dry as a kiln. But he managed to keep his voice steady enough.

“What kind of bad joke is this?”

“I agree.” The other bowed slightly, and for the first time Nicolson could see the unmistakable slant, the tight-stretched skin at the corner of the eyes. “For you it is not funny at all. Look.” He gestured with his free hand, and Nicolson looked. The Stars and Stripes was already gone and, even as he watched, the Rising Sun of Japan fluttered up and took its place.

“A regrettable stratagem, is it not?” the man continued. He seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly. “As is also the boat and, alas, the passably Anglo-Saxon appearance of my men and myself. Though specially chosen on account of this last, I can assure you we are not especially proud of it. All that, however, is by the way.” His English was perfect, with a pronounced American accent, and he obviously took pleasure in airing it. “There has been much sunshine and storm in the past week. It is most considerate of you to have survived it all. We have been waiting a long time for you. You are very welcome.”

He stopped suddenly, teeth bared, and lined up his pistol on the brigadier, who had sprung to his feet with a speed astonishing in a man of his years, an empty whisky bottle swinging in his hands. The Japanese officer’s finger tightened involuntarily on the trigger, then slowly relaxed when he saw that the bottle had been intended not for him but for Van Effen, who had half-turned as he had sensed the approaching blow, but raised his arm too late. The heavy bottle caught him just above the ear and he collapsed over his thwart as if he had been shot. The Japanese officer stared at Farnholme.

“One more such move and you will die, old man. Are you mad?”

“No, but this man was, and we would all have died. He was reaching for a gun.” Farnholme stared down angrily at the fallen man. “I have come too far to die like this, with three machine-guns lined on me.”

“You are a wise old man,” the officer purred. “Indeed, there is nothing you can do.”

There was nothing they could do, Nicolson realised helplessly, nothing whatsoever. He was conscious of an overwhelming bitterness, a bitterness that he could taste in his mouth. That they should have come so far, that they should have overcome so much, overcome it impossibly and at the expense of five lives, and then that it should all come to this. He heard the murmur of Peter’s voice behind him and when he turned round the little boy was standing up in the sternsheets, looking at the Japanese officer through the lattice screen of his crossed fingers, not particularly afraid, just shy and wondering, and again Nicolson felt the bitterness and the angry despair flood over him almost like a physical tide. Defeat one could accept, but Peter’s presence made defeat intolerable.

The two nurses were sitting one on either side of him, Lena’s dark, sooty eyes wide with terror, Gudrun’s blue ones with a sadness and despair that all too accurately reflected his own feelings. He could see no fear in her face, but high on the temple, where the scar ran into the hairline, he could see a pulse beating very quickly. Slowly, involuntarily, Nicolson’s gaze travelled all round the boat, and everywhere the expressions were the same, the fear, the despair, the stunned and heart-sickening defeat. Not quite everywhere. Siran’s face was expressionless as ever. McKinnon’s eyes were flickering from side to side as he looked swiftly over the lifeboat, up at the M.T.B. and then down into the lifeboat again—gauging, Nicolson guessed, their suicidal chances of resistance. And the brigadier seemed almost unnaturally unconcerned: his arm round Miss Plenderleith’s thin shoulders, he was whispering something in her ear.

“A touching and pathetic scene, is it not?” The Japanese officer shook his head in mock sorrow. “Alas, gentlemen, alas for the frailty of human hopes. I look upon you and I am almost overcome myself. Almost, I said, but not quite. Further, it is about to rain, and rain heavily.” He looked at the heavy bank of cloud bearing down from the north-east, at the thick curtain of rain, now less than half a mile away, sweeping across the darkening sea. “I have a rooted objection to being soaked by rain, especially when it is quite unnecessary. I suggest, therefore—”

“Any more suggestions are superfluous. Do you expect me to remain in this damned boat all night?” Nicolson swung round as the deep, irate voice boomed out behind him. He swung round to see Farnholme standing upright, one hand grasping the handle of the heavy Gladstone bag.

“What—what are you doing?” Nicolson demanded.

Farnholme looked at him, but said nothing. Instead he smiled, the curve of the upper lip below the white moustache a masterpiece of slow contempt, looked up at the officer standing above them and jerked a thumb in Nicolson’s direction.

“If this fool attempts to do anything silly or restrain me in any way, shoot him down.”

Nicolson stared at him in sheer incredulity, then glanced up at the Japanese officer. No incredulity there, no surprise even, just a grin of satisfaction. He started to speak rapidly in some language quite unintelligible to Nicolson, and Farnholme answered him, readily and fluently, in the same tongue. And then, before Nicolson had quite realised what was happening, Farnholme had thrust a hand into his bag, brought out a gun and was making for the side of the boat, bag in one hand, gun in the other.

“This gentleman said we were welcome.” Farnholme smiled down at Nicolson. “I fear that he referred only to myself. A welcome and, as you can see, honoured guest.” He turned to the Japanese. “You have done splendidly. Your reward shall be great.” Then he broke once more into the foreign language—Japanese, it must be, Nicolson was sure—and the conversation lasted for almost two minutes. Once more he looked down at Nicolson. The first heavy drops of the next rainsquall were beginning to patter on the decks of the M.T.B.

“My friend here suggests that you come aboard as prisoners. However, I have convinced him that you are too dangerous and that you should be shot out of hand. We are going below to consider in comfort the exact methods of your disposal.” He turned to the Japanese. “Tie their boat aft. They are desperate men—it is most inadvisable to have them alongside. Come, my friend, let us go below. But one moment—I forget my manners. The departing guest must thank his hosts.” He bowed ironically. “Captain Findhorn, Mr. Nicolson, my compliments. Thank you for the lift. Thank you for your courtesy and skill in rendezvousing so accurately with my very good friends.”

“You damned traitor!” Nicolson spoke with slow savagery.

“There speaks the youthful voice of unthinking nationalism.” Farnholme shook his head sadly. “It’s a harsh and cruel world, my boy. One has to earn a living somehow.”’ He waved a negligent, mocking hand. “Au revoir. It’s been very pleasant.”

A moment later he was lost to sight and the rain swept down in blinding sheets.

TWELVE

For what seemed a long time no one in the lifeboat spoke or moved, except to ride with the slight rolling of the boat: oblivious of the cold driving rain they just stared blankly, stupidly, at the spot where Farnholme had been standing before he had disappeared.

It probably wasn’t a long time, it just seemed that way, it was probably only a matter of seconds before Nicolson heard Miss Plenderleith call him by name and say something. But in the swish of the heavy rain in the sea and frenetic drumming on the torpedo boat’s deck, her voice was only a meaningless murmur. He turned and stooped, the better to hear, and even in that moment of shock her appearance caught and held his attention. She was sitting on the port side bench, her back as straight as a wand, her hands clasped primly in her lap, her face quiet and composed. She might have been sitting in her drawing-room at home, but for one thing: her eyes were flooded with tears and, even as he watched, two large drops trickled slowly down the lined cheeks and fell on to her hands.

“What’s the matter, Miss Plenderleith?” Nicolson asked gently. “What is it?”

“Take the boat farther back,” she said. Her eyes stared sightlessly ahead, and she gave no signs of seeing him. “He told you. Farther back, at once.”

“I don’t understand.” Nicolson shook his head. “Why do you want us—”

He broke off abruptly as something hard and cold struck painfully at the back of his neck. He whirled round and stared up at the Japanese who had just prodded him with the barrel of his machinegun, at the smooth, yellow face shining in the rain.

“No speaking, Englishman.” His English was far poorer than his officer’s. He looked dangerous, the kind of man who might welcome the opportunity to use the gently waving gun in his hand. “No speaking, anyone. I do not trust you. I will kill.”

“You heard what I said.” Miss Plenderleith’s voice was firm and clear, without the vestige of a tremor. “Please.”

The sailor moved his gun till it was lined up on Miss Plenderleith’s head, and dozen pairs of eyes watched as the knuckles of his right index finger whitened under the pull. His lips were drawn back in an evil smile and Nicolson knew that the Japanese—many of them, at least—required far less provocation to kill. But Miss Plenderleith just stared up at him with an expressionless face—almost certainly she wasn’t seeing him anyway—and he suddenly lowered the gun with some angry exclamation and took a pace backwards. He jerked his head at the other armed sailor—the officer had taken the third with him when he had gone below—and gestured that the rope made fast to the lifeboat’s bow should be brought farther aft. Nicolson and McKinnon paid the lifeboat along the torpedo boat’s side, and very soon they were streaming off its stern at the end of a couple of fathoms of rope. The two sailors stood side by side on the poop of the torpedo boat, side by side, cocked carbines ready in their hands. Their eyes searched the lifeboat hungrily, searched for the slightest movement, for anything at all that would give them an excuse to use their guns.

The torpedo boat was moving again, engines throttled back to dead slow but still enough to send it cutting through the water at three or four knots. It headed north-east, into the sea and the heavy rain, rain so heavy that, from the lifeboat, the bows of the torpedo boat were almost lost in the murk and the gloom. The lifeboat itself was beginning to pitch at the end of the tautened rope, but not heavily.

Miss Plenderleith had her back to the rain and the guards. Perhaps there were still tears on her cheeks, it was difficult to say—the heavy rain was soaking through the straw brim of her hat, and all her face was wet. But her eyes were clearer now, and they were looking straight at Nicolson. He caught her glance, saw her drop it to the carbine lying by her side where Farnholme had left it, saw her raise her eyes to his again.

“Don’t look at me,” she murmured. “Pay no attention to me. Can they hear me?”

Nicolson stared ahead at the guards, his face bleak. The tiny shake of his head must have been imperceptible to them.

“Can you see the gun? Behind my bag?”

Nicolson looked idly at the bench where Miss Plenderleith was sitting and looked away again. Behind the canvas and leather bag where Miss Plenderleith kept her knitting and all her worldly possessions he could see the heel of the butt of the carbine. Farnholme’s gun, the carbine he had used so effectively against—Suddenly there flooded into Nicolson’s mind the recollection of all the times the brigadier had used that gun, of the damage he’d done with it, how he’d blown up the big gun on the submarine, how he’d beaten off the attack by the Zero that had attacked the lifeboat, how he’d saved his, Nicolson’s life on the beach of that little island, and all at once he knew that there was something fantastically wrong with this desertion and betrayal, that no man could so wholly alter—

“Can you see it?” Miss Plenderleith repeated urgently. Nicolson was startled, but didn’t show it. He nodded slowly, carefully. The butt of the carbine was less than a foot from his hand.

“It’s cocked,” Miss Plenderleith said quietly. “It’s ready to fire. Foster said it was ready to fire.”

This time Nicolson did look at her, slow astonishment and wonder in his face, his eyes blinking in the driving rain as he tried to read her expression. And then he had forgotten all about Miss Plenderleith, and he was half out of his seat, staring intently for’ard, his head automatically reaching for the carbine.

Even at that distance of forty or fifty feet the sound of the explosion was deafening and the sheer physical shock of the pressure wave like an invisible blow in their faces. Smoke and flames belched out through a great hole blown in the starboard side and almost at once the torpedo boat was heavily on fire amidships. The guards, their charge completely forgotten, had swung round to face for’ard, but one of them, caught off-balance by the force of the explosion, stumbled, flung away his machine-gun in a clawing, desperate attempt to regain balance and save himself, failed and fell backwards over the stern into the sea: the other had only taken a couple of running paces forward when the blast of the carbine in Nicolson’s hand pitched him forward on his face, dead. Even as he was falling, McKinnon was plunging towards the bows, an axe in his hand, and one vicious blow on the tow-rope taut-stretched across the gunwale severed it completely. Immediately, Nicolson pushed the tiller hard over to starboard, and the lifeboat slewed away heavily to the west. The torpedo boat still throbbed north-east on unaltered course, and within half a minute all signs of it, even the flames that twisted high above the bridge, were completely lost in the rain-squalls and the rapidly falling darkness.

Swiftly, and in a strange unanimity of silence, they stepped the mast, hoisted the lug and jib, and bore off into the rain and the gloom with as much speed as they could command from their tattered sails. With the port gunwale dipping perilously low, Nicolson steered a point north of west: when the torpedo boat recovered from the shock and the fire—and it was probably too large a craft to be permanently crippled by an explosion even of that magnitude—it would come looking for them, but it would almost certainly go looking towards the south-west, in the direction the wind was blowing, in the direction of the Sunda Strait and freedom.

Fifteen minutes passed slowly by, fifteen minutes in which there was only the swift slap of the waves against the hull, the flapping of shredded sails, the creaking of blocks and the tap-tapping of the yard against the mast. Now and again someone would be about to speak, to seek out the reason for the explosion aboard the torpedo boat, then he would catch sight of that stiff-backed little figure with the ridiculous straw hat skewered on the grey bun of hair, and change his mind. There was something about the atmosphere, there was something about that little figure, about the upright carriage, about the indifference to the cold and the rain, about its fierce pride and complete helplessness that precluded easy conversation, that precluded any conversation at all.

It was Gudrun Drachmann who had the courage to make the first move, the delicacy to make it without blundering. She rose carefully to her feet, the blanketed form of the little boy in her arm, and moved across the canted bottom-boards towards the empty seat beside Miss Plenderleith—the seat where the brigadier had been sitting. Nicolson watched her go, unconsciously holding his breath. Far better if she hadn’t gone. So easy to make a mistake, so almost impossible not to make a mistake. But Gudrun Drachmann made no mistake.

For a minute or two they sat together, the young and the old, sat without moving, sat without speaking. Then the little boy, halfasleep in his wet blanket, stretched out a chubby hand and touched Miss Plenderleith on her wet cheek. She started, half turned in her seat, then smiled at the boy and caught her hand in his, and then, almost without thinking, she had the little boy on her lap and was hugging him in her thin arms. She hugged him tightly, but it was as if the child knew that there was something far amiss, he just stirred sleepily and looked at her gravely under heavy eyelids. Then, just as gravely, he smiled at her, and the old lady hugged him again, even more tightly, and smiled back down at him, smiled as if her heart was breaking. But she smiled.

“Why did you come and sit here?” she asked the girl. You and the little one—why did you come?” Her voice was very low.

“I don’t know.” Gudrun shook her head, almost as if the thought were occurring to her for the first time. “I’m afraid I just don’t know.”

“It’s all right. I know.” Miss Plenderleith took her hand and smiled at her. “It’s very curious, it is really very curious. That you should come, I mean. He did it for you, he did it all for you—for you and the little one.”

“You mean—”

“Fearless Foster.” The words were ridiculous, but not the way Miss Plenderleith said them. She said them as if she were saying a prayer. “Fearless Foster Farnholme. That was what we used to call him, when we were in school. He was afraid of nothing that walked on earth.”

“You have known him so long, Miss Plenderleith?”

“He said you were the best of us all.” Miss Plenderleith hadn’t even heard the question. She shook her head musingly, her eyes soft with remembrance. “He teased me about you this afternoon. He said he didn’t know what the young men of the present generation were coming to and, by heaven, if he was thirty years younger, he’d have had you to the altar years ago.”

“He was very kind.” Gudrun smiled without any embarrassment. “I’m afraid he didn’t know me very well.”

“That’s what he said, that’s exactly what he said.” Miss Plenderleith gently removed the child’s thumb from his mouth: he was almost asleep. “Foster always said that education was very important, but that it didn’t really matter, because intelligence was more important than that, and that even intelligence didn’t count for so much, that wisdom was far more important still. He said he had no idea in the world whether you had education or intelligence or wisdom and that it couldn’t matter less, a blind man could see that you had a good heart, and the good heart was all that mattered in this world.” Miss Plenderleith smiled, her grief momentarily lost in nostalgic remembrance. “Foster used to complain that there were very few good-hearted people like himself left.”

“Brigadier Farnholme was very kind,” Gudrun murmured.

“Brigadier Farnholme was a very clever man,” Miss Plenderleith said in gentle reproof. “He was clever enough to—well, never mind. You and the little boy. He was very fond of the little boy.”

“Trailing clouds of glory do we come,” Willoughby murmured.

“What’s that?” Miss Plenderleith looked at him in surprise. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just a passing thought, Miss Plenderleith.”

Miss Plenderleith smiled at him, then sat gazing down at the little boy. Silence again, but a comfortable silence now. It was Captain Findhorn, speaking for the first time, who broke it, who asked the question they all wanted answered.

“If we come home again, we will owe it all to Brigadier Farnholme. I do not think any of us will ever forget that. You have told us why he did it. You seem to have known him far better than any of us, Miss Plenderleith. Can you tell me how he did it.”

Miss Plenderleith nodded. “I’ll tell you. It was very simple, because Foster was a very simple and direct man. You all noticed that big Gladstone bag he carried?”

“We did.” Findhorn smiled. “The one he carried his—ah—supplies in.”

“That’s right, whisky. Incidentally, he hated the stuff—used it only for local colour. Anyway, he left all the bottles and all the other contents of his bag behind on the island, in a hole in the rocks, I believe. Then he—”

“What? What did you say?” It was Van Effen speaking, still groggy from Farnholme’s blow on the head, leaning so far forward on his seat that he winced with the pain of his injured leg. “He—he left all his stuff behind?”

“That’s what I said. Why should you find that so surprising, Mr. Van Effen?”

“No reason at all, I suppose.” Van Effen leaned back and smiled at her. “Please continue.”

“That’s all, really. He’d found lots of Japanese grenades on the beach that night and he’d stuffed fourteen or fifteen into his Gladstone bag.”

“Into his bag?” Nicolson patted the seat beside him. “But they’re under here, Miss Plenderleith.”

“He found more than he told you.” Miss Plenderleith’s voice was very low. “He took them all aboard with him, he spoke Japanese fluently and he had no difficulty in persuading them that he was carrying Jan Bekker’s plans with him. When he got below he was going to show them the plans, put his hand inside the bag, press a grenade release catch and leave his hand there. He said it would only take four seconds.”

There was no moon that night, and no stars, only the dark scudding cloud-wrack overhead, and Nicolson drove the lifeboat on, for hour after hour, by guess and by God. The glass of the compass bowl had cracked, nearly all the spirit had escaped and the card was gyrating so uncontrollably that trying to read it in the feeble light of a failing torch was quite impossible. He steered instead by the wind, trying to keep it on the port quarter all the time, gambling that the trades would hold steady, and neither back nor veer to any appreciable degree. Even with the wind steady, handling the boat was difficult enough: more and more water was pouring in through the ruptured planks aft and she was sitting heavily by the stern, falling away to the south time after time.

As the night passed his anxiety and tension increased, a tension that communicated itself to most of the others in the boat, few of whom slept that night. Shortly after midnight, even with the roughest dead reckoning, Nicolson knew that he must be within ten or twelve miles of the Sunda Straits. Not more, probably even a good deal less, perhaps only five miles. And he had reason to be anxious. Their chart of the Eastern Archipelago was now salt-stained, rotted and useless, but he remembered all too clearly the rocks, the reefs and the shoals that lay off the south-east coast of Sumatra. But he couldn’t remember where they were, and he didn’t know where the lifeboat was, perhaps even his latitude reckonings were so far out that they would miss the Straits altogether. Their chances of tearing the bottom out on some off-shore reef seemed as good as their chances of missing it: and the passengers were so sick, so tired and so hurt that were they to pile up not more than half a mile from land not half of them had a hope of survival. And, even if they missed all the waiting perils, they would still have to beach the boat through heavy surf.

Shortly after two o’clock in the morning Nicolson sent the bo’sun and Vannier up to the bows to keep a lookout ahead. Half a dozen others volunteered to stand up and keep watch also, but Nicolson curtly ordered them to remain where they were, to lie as low as possible in the bottom of the boat and give maximum stability. He might have added, but he didn’t, that McKinnon’s eyes were probably better than all the others put together.

Half an hour more passed, and suddenly Nicolson became aware that some subtle change was taking place. The change itself wasn’t sudden, it was the realisation of the change that struck at him almost like a blow and made him peer desperately ahead into the darkness. The long, low swell from the north-west was changing, it was becoming shorter and steeper with every minute that passed, but he was so tired, so physically exhausted with steering blindly all night long that he’d almost missed the change. And the wind was still the same, no stronger, no weaker than it had been for hours past.

“McKinnon!” Nicolson’s hoarse shout had half a dozen dozing people struggling up to a sitting position. “We’re running into shallows!”

“Aye, I think you’re right, sir.” The bo’sun’s voice, not particularly perturbed, carried clearly against the wind. He was standing upright on the mast thwart, on the port side, one hand gripping the mast, the other shading his eyes as he stared ahead into the night.

“Can you see anything?”

“Damn the thing I see,” McKinnon called back. “It’s a bloody black night, sir.”

“Keep looking. Vannier?”

“Sir?” The voice was excited, but steady enough for all that. On the brink of breakdown less than twelve hours ago, Vannier had made a remarkable recovery and seemed to have regained more life and energy than any of them.

“Get the lug down! Fast as you can. Don’t furl it—no time. Van Effen, Gordon, give him a hand.” The lifeboat was beginning to pitch quite violently in the rapidly shortening seas. “See anything yet, Bo’sun?”

“Nothing at all, sir.”

“Cut Siran loose. And his two men. Send them back amidships.” He waited for half a minute until the three men came stumbling aft. “Siran, you and your men get a crutch apiece. Gordon, you get another. When I give the words you will ship oars and start pulling.”

“Not tonight, Mr. Nicolson.”

”You said?”

“You heard what I said. I said ‘not tonight’.” The tone was cool and insolent. “My hands are numb. And I’m afraid I don’t just feel like cooperating.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool, Siran. Lives depend on this.”

“Not mine.” Nicolson could see the white gleam of teeth in the darkness. “I am an excellent swimmer, Mr. Nicolson.”

“You left forty people to die, didn’t you, Siran?” Nicolson asked obliquely. The safety-catch of his Colt clicked, unnaturally loud in the sudden silence. A second passed, two, three, then Siran slammed a crutch home into its socket, reached for an oar and muttered orders to his two men.

“Thank you,” Nicolson murmured. He raised his voice. “Listen, all of you. I think we’re nearing shore. The chances are that there will be rocks or reefs off the beach, or a heavy surf running. The boat may founder or capsize—not likely, but it may.” It’ll be a ruddy miracle if it doesn’t, he thought bleakly. “If you find yourselves in the water, stick together. Hang on to the boat, the oars, lifebelts or anything that will float. And whatever happens, hang on to each other. Do you all understand?”

There was a low murmur of assent. Nicolson flashed his torch round the inside of the boat. From what he could see in the sickly yellow light everybody was awake. Even their sodden, shapeless clothes couldn’t disguise the peculiar tenseness of their attitudes. Quickly he switched off the light. Weak though the beam was, his pupils were narrowing enough to affect his night vision and he knew it.

“Still nothing, Bo’sun?” he called out.

“Nothing at all, sir. It’s as black as a—wait a minute!” He stood there immobile, one hand on the mast, head cocked sideways, saying nothing.

“What is it, man?” Nicolson shouted. “What can you see?”

“Breakers!” McKinnon called. “Breakers or surf. I can hear it.”

“Where? Where are they?”

“Ahead. Can’t see them yet.” A pause. “Starboard bow, I think.”

“Cut the jib!” Nicolson ordered. “Mast down, Vannier.” He leaned far over on the tiller, bringing the lifeboat round to face wind and sea. She answered the helm slowly, soggily; there were at least fifty gallons of sea-water swishing about the after end of the boat, but she came round eventually: even water-logged and in a running sea, she’d still carried enough way from the thrust of the jib.

“I can see it now.” It was McKinnon shouting from the bows. “Starboard quarter, sir.”

Nicolson twisted in his seat, looked quickly over his shoulder. For a moment or two he could see nothing, he couldn’t even hear anything, and then he could both hear and see it, a thin white line in the darkness, a long continuous line that vanished and appeared again, closer than it had been when it faded. Surf, it must be surf, no breakers ever looked like that in the darkness. Thank God for so much anyway. Nicolson faced for’ard again.

“Right, Bo’sun, let it go.”

McKinnon had been waiting the word, the iron-hooped mouth of the sea-anchor in his hands. Now he flung it as far for’ard into the sea as he could, paying out the warp as the sea-anchor filled and started dragging.

“Get those oars out!” Nicolson had already unshipped the rudder and drawn the shaft of the steering oar up through the grummet, sculling furiously to keep the lifeboat head on to sea until the seaanchor took hold: no easy work when he couldn’t make out the set of the waves in the darkness, when he’d nothing to guide him but the wind in his face and the water-logged movement of the boat. He could hear the scraping and muffled oaths as men tried to free trapped oars, then the metallic clunks as they dropped into the crutches. “Give way together,” he called. “Easy, now, easy!”

He had no hope that they would pull together in the darkness, and he didn’t expect it. Just so long as they pulled, he could correct any excesses with his steering oar. He glanced quickly over his shoulder. The line of surf was almost directly astern now, and its low sullen booming carried clearly to his ears, even against the wind. It could have been fifty yards away, it could have been two hundred and fifty yards away. It was impossible to tell in the darkness.

He faced round again, tried to peer for’ard, but the wind whipped the rain and the salt spray into his eyes, and he could see nothing. The wind appeared to be strengthening. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. “How’s it taking, McKinnon?”

“Och, it’s just fine, sir. Taking grand.” Several fathoms of the sea-anchor were already stretched out tautly over the bow, and the bo’sun had just finished stabbing the attached oil-bag with his gully knife. He’d made a thorough job of the stabbing, the oil wouldn’t have to last for long, and the more they had over the surface of the sea the easier would be their passage through the surf. He passed the oil-bag over the bows, let some more of the warp pass through his hands, then tied it securely to the mast thwart.

They hadn’t taken all the beaching precautions a moment too soon. The surf had been much nearer fifty than two hundred and fifty yards, and already they were almost on it. Carefully, expertly, making the fullest possible use of the oars, steering oar and sea anchor, Nicolson slowly backed the lifeboat on to the beginning of the smooth convexity of the swell of the surf. Almost immediately the boat picked up speed, rose and rode in swiftly with the giant wave as the oars came out of the water and McKinnon pulled the tripping line of the sea-anchor, sped along smoothly and soundlessly as the surf curved its way into seething white destruction, checked suddenly as oars dipped and the tripping line was released at Nicolson’s sharp command, then plunged over the breaking crest of the surf and raced in to the shelving beach in a phosphorescent smother of foam and spray—there had been no time for the sea to carry the oil so far ahead—with the bartaut anchor warp holding the stern pointing straight into the shore, and the white water passing them by, out-distancing them in the race for the shore. It was then and only then, when the worst was safely by, that Nicolson, peering intently astern, saw something that shouldn’t have been there. His hoarse shout of warning came almost on the instant of recognition, but it came too late.

The jagged rock—or maybe it was a knife-edge of coral—sliced the bottom out of the rushing boat, from the stern clear back to the bows. The jarring, braking shock jerked people free from their clutching handholds, flung them in headlong confusion, all arms and bodies and legs, towards the stern, and hurled two or three over the side into the water. A second later the wrecked boat slewed violently to the side and overturned, catapulting everyone into the seething afterwash of the surf.

Of the seconds that followed no one had afterwards any more than a confused, inchoate recollection, a recollection of being rolled over and over by the surging sea, of swallowing sea-water and scrambling to their feet on the shingly, shelving beach only to be knocked down and buffeted by the inverted lifeboat, scrambling to their feet again to have their legs sucked from under them by the retreating seas, struggling upright again and wading, staggering ashore to fling themselves down on the beach in gasping, heart-pounding exhaustion.

Nicolson made three trips to the beach altogether. That first was with Miss Plenderleith. The shock of the collision had flung her hard against him even as they went over the stern, and he had instinctively tightened his arm round her as they had gone to the bottom together. She had been almost twice the weight he had expected, she had both her forearms locked through the handles of her heavy canvas travelling bag, and resisted Nicolson’s efforts to tear it away with what he could only imagine to be a strength—an unreasoning suicidal strength—born of fear and panic. But he had got her ashore somehow, still grimly clutching her bag, waited his chance for the receding surf, then plunged back into the sea to help Vannier carry the captain ashore. Findhom hadn’t wanted assistance, he kept on repeating that he didn’t want assistance, but his legs and his strength had gone as a result of his wound and the suffering of the past week, and he would have drowned where he had lain, in a couple of feet of water. Slipping, stumbling, falling and getting up again, they had carried him ashore bodily and dumped him on the shingle beyond the reach of the waves.

By now there were almost a dozen of them clustered in a tight knot on the beach, some lying, some sitting, some standing, indistinct blurs in the darkness who gasped for breath or moaned or retched sea-water in convulsive agony. Chest heaving and gasping for breath himself, Nicolson started to take a quick roll-call of those present. But he didn’t even get beyond the first name.

“Gudrun. Miss Drachmann!” There was no reply, just the moaning and the painful retching. “Miss Drachmann! Has anyone seen Miss Drachmann? Has anyone got Peter?” There was only silence. “For God’s sake, somebody answer! Has anyone seen Peter? The little boy? Has anyone seen him?” But there was only the sullen boom of the surf, the rustling shirr of the retreating sea dragging the shingle down the beach.

Nicolson dropped to his knees, felt the forms and faces of those who were lying on the beach. No Peter there, no Gudrun Drachmann. He jumped to his feet, knocked staggering someone who was standing in his way and rushed madly down into the sea, plunged out into the water and was knocked off his feet by the surge of the incoming surf. He was on his feet again like a cat, all his exhaustion gone as if it had never existed. He was vaguely conscious of someone plunging into the sea behind him but paid no attention.

Six running, splashing steps at the full stretch of his legs and something struck him with cruel, numbing force against the kneecaps. The boat, drifting upside down. He somersaulted in mid-air, struck his shoulder against the keel, landed flat on his back on the water on the other side with an explosive smack that drove all the breath out of his body, then was on his way again, propelled by a fear and a nameless anger such as he had never known before. The pain in his chest and his legs was another turn of the rack for every step he took, but he drove himself on remorselessly as if the fire in his legs and his body’s gasping demands for air simply did not exist. Another two steps and he had crashed into something soft and yielding and knocked it backwards into the next incoming rush of water. He stooped, grabbed hold of a shirt and lifted, bracing the two of them against the surge of the sea.

“Gudrun?”

“Johnny! Oh, Johnny!” She clung to him and he could feel her trembling.

“Peter! Where’s Peter?” he demanded urgently.

“Oh, Johnny!” The habitual cool self-possession was gone, and her voice was almost a wail. “The boat struck and—and—”

“Where is Peter?” His fingers digging deeply into her shoulders, he was shaking her violently, his voice a savage shout.

“I don’t know, I don’t know! I—I can’t find him.” She broke away, dived sideways into the water that was boiling waist-high by them. He caught her, jerked her to her feet and whirled round. It was Vannier who had followed him into the surf, and he was right behind him. He thrust the girl at him.

“Take her ashore, Vannier.”

“I won’t go! I won’t!” She was struggling in Vannier’s arms, but she hadn’t the strength left to struggle very much. “I lost him! I lost him!”

“You heard me, Vannier?” Nicolson’s voice as he turned away was a cutting whip. Vannier mumbled “Yes, sir” to the retreating back and started to drag the half-hysterical girl through the surf.

Again and again Nicolson plunged into the white water, his hands scrabbling desperately along the shingled bed of the sea: again and again he came up empty-handed. Once he thought he had found him, but it was only an empty bag; he threw it away like a man demented and flung himself yet farther out into the surf, near the coral that had sunk them. He was up almost shoulder high in the water now, being swept off his feet with monotonous regularity, swallowing great mouthfuls of sea, shouting the name of the boy over and over again like some crazy litany, driving his exhausted body to incredible, inhuman efforts, driven by a horrifying fear, a dreadful anxiety that left him no longer sane, and anxiety such as he had not known could exist in the heart of any man. Two minutes, perhaps three, had elapsed since the boat had struck, and even in his madness he knew that the little boy could not have lived so long in these waters. What little reason he had left told him so, but he ignored it, dived once more through the creaming surf to the shingled floor of the sea. But again nothing, below the water or on the surface, only the wind, the rain, the darkness and the deep-throated booming of the surf. And then, high and clear above the wind and the sea, he heard it.

The child’s thin, terrified cry came from his right, along the beach, about thirty yards away. Nicolson whirled and plunged in that direction, cursing the deep waters that reduced his stumbling run to grotesque slow-motion. Again the child cried, not a dozen feet away this time. Nicolson shouted, heard a man’s answering call, and then all at once he was upon them, the looming bulk of a man as tall as himself, with the child high up in his arms.

“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Nicolson.” Van Effen’s voice was very faint and far away. “The little one is not harmed. Please to take him from me.” Nicolson had barely time to snatch him in his arm before the Dutchman swayed on his feet, just once, then toppled and fell his length, face down in the foaming water.

THIRTEEN

The jungle, dank, dripping and steaming hot, was all around them. High above, through tiny gaps in the interwoven branches of heavily lianad trees, they could catch glimpses of the grey sullen sky, the same sky that had completely obscured the sunrise, just over two hours previously. The light that filtered down from these tree-tops had a strangely unreal quality, sinister and foreboding, but a quality that accorded well with the claustrophobic green walls of the jungle and the scummed, miasmal swamps that bounded both sides of the jungle path.

Even as a jungle path it was almost a failure. As far as the jungle was concerned, it offered a fairly free passage, and axes or machetes had evidently been busy, fairly recently, on either side. But as a path it was treacherous to a degree, one moment hard-packed and worn smooth by constant use, the next vanishing abruptly and mysteriously as it rounded a giant tree-trunk and dipped into the waiting swamps ahead then reappearing a few yards ahead, smooth and firm again.

Nicolson and Vannier, already covered to the waists in the rotting, evil-smelling slime, were beginning to discover the techniques for dealing with these sudden breaches in the path. Invariably, they were beginning to find, there was an alternative route round these swamp patches and if they cast around long enough they usually found it. But it took too long to seek out these bypasses and, more than once, they had wandered so far from the track that they had regained it only by chance, so that now, unless the bypass was almost immediately obvious, they plunged through the swamps and regained firm land on the other side, pausing every time to wipe off as much of the slime as possible and the ugly grey leeches that fastened to their legs. Then they would hurry on again, following the tortuous path round the massive trees as best they could in the weird, dim half-light of the tropical forest, trying their best to ignore the strange stirrings and rustlings that paralleled their progress on either side.

Nicolson was a seaman, first, last and all the time. He was little at home on land, still less so in the jungle, and this was not a journey that he would ever have made, would ever have contemplated making, had there been any option. But there had been no option, none whatsoever, a fact that had become cruelly evident soon after the first grey stirrings of dawn had let him look around to assess their position and the condition of the boat’s company. Both had been very far from reassuring.

They had landed somewhere on the Java shore of the Sunda Straits, in a deep bay, two miles wide across the horns, with a narrow shingled beach and a jungle that crowded down almost to the water’s edge, a dense, impenetrable looking jungle that ran back into the high rain-forests that covered the slopes of the low hills to the south. The shores of the bay itself were completely empty of any life, animal or human, or any signs of life: there was only their own little company, huddled for what pitiful shelter they could under a cluster of palms, and, about a hundred yards along the beach, the upturned lifeboat.

The lifeboat was in bad shape. A great hole, almost fifteen feet in length, had been ripped out between the keel and the bilge grabrail, and the keel itself had been broken and wrenched away from its hog piece. The lifeboat was beyond repair, a total loss. There was only the jungle left for them, and they were in no condition to face that.

Captain Findhorn, for all his courage, was still a very sick man, unable to walk a dozen steps. Van Effen was weak too, and in considerable pain, violently sick at regular intervals: before Nicolson and McKinnon had succeeded in freeing his badly mangled leg from the clam that had seized it while he had been bringing the child ashore, he had almost drowned in the shallow water, and this, coupled with the shrapnel wound in the thigh received some days previously and the crack on the skull lately given him by Farnholme had dangerously lowered his resistance and powers of recuperation. Both Walters and Evans had swollen arms from infected wounds, and they, too, suffered constantly, while McKinnon, though in no great pain, limped on a badly stiffened leg. Willoughby was weak, Gordon shiftless and worse than useless and Siran and his men obviously intended to be of help to no one but themselves.

That left only Nicolson and the fourth officer, and Nicolson knew that there was nothing they could do for the others, not directly. To try to repair the lifeboat was out of the question, and to think of building any kind of boat or raft with the few tools they had left was just ridiculous. On land they were, and on land they would have to remain. But they couldn’t remain on that beach indefinitely. If they did, they would starve. Nicolson had no illusions about their ability to survive for any time at all on the food they could scrape from trees, bushes, on and under the ground. An experienced jungle man might get enough for survival, but the chances were that they would poison themselves in the very first meal they took. Even if they didn’t, bark and berries wouldn’t keep seriously ill men alive for long, and without medicines and fresh bandages for infected and suppurating wounds, the outlook was bleak indeed.

Food, shelter, bandages and medicine—these were the essentials and wouldn’t just come to them. They would have to go to look for them, to seek for help. How far distant help might be, and in what direction it would lie, was anybody’s guess. The north-west corner of Java, Nicolson knew, had a fair population, and there were, he remembered, one or two largish towns some way inland. Too far inland—their best chances lay with the coastal fishing villages. They might encounter hostility instead of help, they might possibly encounter Japanese—in a mountainous land of forest and jungle like Java, they would almost certainly confine their activities to the coastal areas. But these possibilities, Nicolson realised, weren’t even worth considering: they had to do this, and the incidental risks, no matter how severe, had to be ignored. Less than an hour after dawn he had taken a Colt .455—the only other salvaged weapon, the brigadier’s machine-carbine, he had left with McKinnon—and moved off into the jungle, Vannier close behind him.

Less than twenty yards inland, just before they had reached the belt of forest, they had struck a well-defined path, running northeast and south-west between the woods and the sea. Automatically, without even looking at one another, they had turned south-west: it wasn’t until they had gone some distance that Nicolson realised why they had done it: in the long run, the south represented ultimate escape and freedom. Less than half a mile from where they had left the others, the beach to their left curved away to the west and north-west, following the lower horn of the bay: but the path had carried straight on across the base of the promontory, leaving the scrub and bushes and penetrating deep into the rain-forest itself.

Ninety minutes and three miles after leaving the beach Nicolson called a halt. They had just struggled through a thirty-yard patch of watery swamp that had taken them almost up to the armpits, and both men were exhausted. The effort, the sheer labour involved in their grotesquely slow-motion wading through these swamps was energy-sapping enough for men who had had little to drink and almost nothing to eat for a week: but even worse was the steaming jungle, the oppressive heat, the enervating humidity that stung and blinded their eyes with sweat.

Safe on a patch of firm ground, Nicolson sat and leaned his back against a thick tree-trunk. He wiped some mud off his forehead with the back of his left hand—the right still clutched the gun—and looked at Vannier, who had slid down almost full length on the ground, a forearm across his eyes, his chest rising and falling, deeply, quickly.

“Enjoying yourself, Fourth? I bet you never thought your Second Mate’s ticket was a licence for traipsing through the Indonesian jungles?” Unconsciously, almost, he kept his voice down to a gentle murmur: the jungle, and everything about it, breathed hostility.

“Bloody awful, isn’t it, sir?” Vannier stirred, groaned softly as some aching muscle rebelled, then tried to smile. “These treeswinging Tarzans you see in films give you a quite erroneous idea of how progress is made through the jungle. Me, I think this damn path here just goes on for ever and ever. You don’t think we’re travelling in circles, do you, sir?”

“Possible enough,” Nicolson admitted. “Haven’t seen the sun all day, and it’s so blasted thick overhead that you can’t even see lightness in the sky. We could be going north, south, or west, but I don’t think so. I think this path will come out again to the sea.”

“I hope you’re right.” Vannier was gloomy, but not depressed. Looking at the thin, sun-darkened face, with the now too- prominent cheekbones and the blistered, resolute mouth, Nicolson thought that, in the past few days, the furnace of privation and experience had cast Vannier in a completely different mould, changing him from an irresolute, uncertain boy to a toughened, determined man, a man aware of newfound resources and unsuspected capacities, a man well worth having by his side.

A minute, perhaps two, passed in silence, a silence marred only by the diminishing sound of their breathing and the sodden dripping of water in the leaves of the trees. Then, abruptly, Nicolson stiffened, his left hand reaching out to touch Vannier warningly on the shoulder. But the warning was unheeded. Vannier, too, had heard it, was drawing his legs under him and rising steadily, noiselessly to his feet. Seconds later both men were standing behind the trunk of the tree, waiting.

The murmur of voices and the soft pad of footsteps on the matted jungle floor came steadily nearer, the owners of the voices still hidden by the curve in the trail, less than ten yards away. They would have to wait till the last moment before identifying the approaching men, but it couldn’t be helped. Nicolson looked swiftly round for a better place of hiding but there was none. The treetrunk would have to do, and behind the tree-trunk they would wait. The approaching men—it sounded as if there were only two of them—might be Japanese. Even muffled by his shirtfront, the click of the Colt’s safety-catch sliding off sounded unnaturally loud: a month ago he would have shrunk from the thought of shooting unsuspecting men from ambush; a month ago …

Suddenly the approaching men had rounded the bend in the trail and were in full view. Three men, not two, and certainly not Japanese, Nicolson realised with quick relief. Relief and a vague surprise: subconsciously he had expected, if not Japanese, Sumatran natives dressed in the scanty minimum the climate demanded and carrying spears or blow-pipes: two of the newcomers were dressed in denims and faded blue shirts. Even more upsetting to preconceived notions was the rifle the eldest of the three carried. But it didn’t upset the steadiness of the Colt in his hand. Nicolson waited until they were only ten feet away then stepped out into the middle of the path, the pistol barrel lined up motionless on the chest of the man with the rifle.

The man with the rifle was quick. A break in mid-stride, a flicker of the seamed brown eyes under the straw hat and the long snout of the rifle was swinging up as the left hand reached down for the barrel. But the young man by his side was even quicker. His sinewy hand darted out and clamped down on the barrel of the other’s rifle, checking its upward sweep, and he answered the surprise and anger in the other’s face with quick, sharp words. The elder man nodded heavily, looked away and let the gun droop till its muzzle almost touched the ground. Then he muttered something to the young man, who nodded and looked at Nicolson, eyes hostile in a calm, smooth face.

“Begrijp U Nederlands?”

“Dutch? Sorry, I don’t understand.” Nicholson lifted his shoulders in incomprehension, then looked briefly at Vannier. “Take his gun, Fourth. From the side.”

“English? You speak English?” The young man’s tongue was slow and halting. He was peering at Nicholson with eyes suspicious but no longer hostile, then his glance lifted an inch or two above Nicolson’s eyes and he suddenly smiled. He turned and spoke rapidly to the man by his side, then looked at Nicolson. “I tell my father you are English. I know your hat. Of course you are English.”

“This?” Nicolson touched the badge on his uniform cap.

“Yes. I live in Singapore “—he waved his hand vaguely towards the north—” for almost two years. Often I see English officers from ships. Why are you here?”

“We need help,” Nicolson said bluntly. His first instinct had been to temporise, make sure of his ground, but something about the quiet dark eyes of the young man changed his mind: not he realised wryly, that he was in any position to temporise anyway. “Our ship has been sunk. We have many sick, many hurt. We need shelter, food, medicines.”

“Give us back the gun,” the young man said abruptly.

Nicolson didn’t hesitate. “Give them back the gun, Fourth.”

“The gun?” Vannier was apprehensive, and looked it. “But how do you know—”

“I don’t. Give them the gun.” Nicolson thrust the Colt into his belt.

Reluctantly, Vannier handed the rifle back to the man in the straw hat. The man snatched it, folded his arms over his gun and stared off into the forest. The young man looked at him in exasperation, then smiled apologetically to Nicolson.

“You must excuse my father,” he said haltingly. “You have hurt his feelings. Men do not take guns from him.”

“Why?”

“Because Trikah is Trikah, and nobody dare.” The young man’s voice held a blend of affection and pride and amusement. “He is the headman of our village.”

“He is your chief?” Nicolson looked at Trikah with new interest. On this man, on his capacity to make decisions, to lend or refuse aid, all their lives might depend. Now that he looked closely, Nicolson could see in the lined brown face, grave and unsmiling, the authority, the repose one would associate with the ruler of a tribe or village. Trikah, in appearance, was very like his son and the boy who stood some distance behind them—a younger son, Nicolson guessed. All three shared the low, wide forehead, intelligent eyes, finely chiselled lips and thin, almost aquiline nose: they had no negroid characteristics whatsoever, were almost certainly of unmixed Arabian descent. A good man to help you, Nicolson thought—if he would help you.

“He is our chief,” the young man nodded. “I am Telak, his eldest son.”

“My name is Nicolson. Tell your father I have many sick English men and women on the beach, three miles to the north. We must have help. Ask him if he will help us.”

Telak turned to his father, spoke rapidly in a harsh staccato tongue for a minute, listened to his father, then spoke again. “How many are sick?”

“Five men—at least five men. There are also three women—I do not think they could walk far. How many miles is it to your village?” “Miles?” Telak smiled. “A man can walk there in ten minutes.” He spoke again to his father, who nodded several times as he listened, then turned and spoke briefly to the young boy by his side. The boy listened intently, appeared to repeat instructions, flashed his white teeth in a smile at Nicolson and Vannier, turned quickly and ran off in the direction he had come.

“We will help you,” Telak said. “My young brother has gone to the village—he will bring strong men and litters for the sick. Come, let us go to your friends.”

He turned, led the way into an apparently impenetrable patch of forest and undergrowth, skirted the swamp through which Nicolson and Vannier had so lately waded, and led them back on to the path again, all inside a minute. Vannier caught Nicolson’s eye and grinned.

“Makes you feel stupid, doesn’t it? Easy enough when you know how.”

“What does your friend say?” Telak asked.

“Just that he wishes we had had you with us earlier on,” Nicolson explained. “We spent most of our time wading up to the waists in swamps.”

Trikah grunted an inquiry, listened to Telak, then muttered to himself. Telak grinned.

“My father says only fools and very little children get their feet wet in the forest. He forgets that one must be used to it.” He grinned again. “He forgets the time—the only time—he was ever in a car. When it moved off he jumped over the side and hurt his leg badly.”

Telak talked freely as they walked along through the filtered green light of the jungle. He made it quite obvious that he and his father were in no way pro-British. Nor were they pro-Dutch nor pro-Japanese. They were just pro-Indonesian, he explained, and wanted their country for themselves. But, once the war was over, if they had to negotiate with anyone for the freedom of their country, they would rather do it with the British or the Dutch. The Japanese made great protestations of friendship, but once the Japanese moved in on a country, they never moved out again. They asked for what they called co-operation, Telak said, and already they were showing that if they didn’t get it one way, willingly, they would get it another—with the bayonet and the tommygun.

Nicolson looked at him in quick surprise and sudden dismay.

“There are Japanese near here? They have landed, then?”

“Already they are here,” Telak said gravely. He gestured to the east. “The British and Americans still fight, but they cannot last long. Already the Japanese have taken over a dozen towns and villages within a hundred miles of here. They have—what do you call it—a garrison, they have a garrison at Bantuk. A big garrison, with a colonel in charge. Colonel Kiseki.” Telak shook his head like a man shivering with cold. “Colonel Kiseki is not human. He is an animal, a jungle animal. But the jungle animals kill only when they have to. Kiseki would tear the arm off a man—or a little child—as a thoughtless child would pull the wings off a fly.”

“How far away from your village is this town?” Nicolson asked slowly.

“Bantuk?”

“Where the garrison is. Yes.”

“Four miles. No more.”

“Four miles! You would shelter us—you would shelter so many within four miles of the Japanese! But what will happen if—”

“I am afraid that you cannot stay long with us,” Telak interrupted gravely. “My father, Trikah, says it will not be safe. It will not be safe for you or for us. There are spies, there are those who carry information for reward, even among our own people. The Japanese would capture you and take my father, my mother, my brothers and myself to Bantuk.”

“As hostages?”

“That is what they would call it.” Telak smiled sadly. “The hostages of the Japanese never return to their villages. They are a cruel people. That is why we help you.”

“How long can we stay?”

Telak consulted briefly with his father, then turned to Nicolson. “As long as it is safe. We will feed you, give you a hut for sleeping and the old women of our village can heal any wounds. Perhaps you can stay three days, but no more.”

“And then?”

Telak shrugged his shoulders and led the way through the jungle in silence.

They were met by McKinnon less than a hundred yards from where the boat had beached the previous night. He was running, staggering from side to side, and not because of his stiffened leg: blood was trickling down into his eyes from a bruised cut in the middle of his forehead, and Nicolson knew without being told who must have been responsible.

Furious, mortified and blaming only himself, McKinnon was very bitter, but no fault could really be attached to him. The first he had known of the heavy hurtling stone that had knocked him unconscious was when he had recovered his senses and found it lying by his side, and no man can watch three others, indefinitely and simultaneously. The others had been powerless, for the concerted attack had been carefully planned and the only carbine in the company snatched by Siran from McKinnon even as he fell. Siran and his men, Findhorn said, had made off towards the north-east.

McKinnon was all for pursuing the men, and Nicolson, who knew that Siran, alive and free, was a potential danger no matter where he was, agreed. But Telak vetoed the idea. Impossible to find them in the jungle in the first place, he said: and searching for a man with a machine-gun who could pick his place of ambush and then lie still was a very quick way of committing suicide. Nicolson acknowledged the verdict of an expert and led them down to the beach.

Just over two hours later the last of the litter-bearers entered Trikah’s kampong—the village clearing in the jungle. Small thin men but amazingly tough and enduring, most of the bearers had made the journey without being relieved of their loads or once stopping.

Trikah, the chief was as good as his promise. Old women washed and cleaned suppurating wounds, covered them with cool, soothing pastes, covered these in turn with large leaves and bound the whole with strips of cotton. After that, all were fed, and fed magnificently. More correctly, they were given a splendid selection of food to eat—chicken, turtle eggs, warmed rice, durians, crushed prawns, yams, sweet boiled roots and dried fish: but hunger had long since died, they had lived too long with starvation to do anything but token justice to the spread before them. Besides, the paramount need was not for food, but for sleep, and sleep they soon had. No beds, no hammocks, no couch of twigs or grass: just cocoanut matting on the swept earthen floor of a hut, and that was enough, more than enough, it was paradise for those who had been without a night’s sleep for longer than their weary minds could remember. They slept like the dead, lost beyond call in the bottomless pit of exhaustion.

When Nicolson awoke, the sun had long gone and night had fallen over the jungle. A still, hushed night, and a still, hushed jungle. No chatter of monkeys, no cries of night birds, no sounds of any life at all. Just the hush and the stillness and the dark. Inside the hut it was hushed, too, and still, but not dark: two smoking oil lamps hung from poles near the entrance.

Nicolson had been deep sunk in drugged, uncaring sleep. He might have slept for hours longer, and would have, given the opportunity. But he did not awake naturally. He awoke because of a sharp stab of pain that reached down even through the mists of sleep, a strange unknown pain that pierced his skin, cold and sharp and heavy. He awoke with a Japanese bayonet at his throat.

The bayonet was long and sharp and ugly, its oiled surface gleaming evilly in the flickering light. Down its length ran the notched runnel for blood. At a distance of a few inches, it looked like a huge metallic ditch, and into Nicolson’s uncomprehending, halfwaking mind flickered evil visions of slaughter and mass burials. And then the film was away from his eyes, and his gaze travelled with sick fascination up the shining length of the bayonet, up to the barrel of the rifle and the bronzed brown hand that held it halfway down, beyond the bolt and magazine to the wooden stock and the other bronzed hand, beyond that again to the belted grey-green uniform and the face beneath the visored cap, a face with the lips drawn far back in a smile that was no smile at all, but an animal snarl of hate and expectancy, a sneering malignancy well matched by the blood lust in the porcine little eyes. Even as Nicolson watched, the lips drew still further back over the long, canine teeth, and the man leaned again on the stock of his rifle. The point of the bayonet went right through the skin at the base of the throat. Nicolson felt the waves of nausea flood over him, almost like the waves of the sea. The lights in the hut seemed to flicker and grow dim.

Seconds passed and his vision gradually returned. The man above him—an officer, Nicolson could see now, he had a sword by his side—had not moved, the bayonet still rested on his throat. Slowly, painfully, as best he could without moving head or neck even a millimetre, Nicolson let his eyes wander slowly round the hut, and the sickness came back to him again. Not from the bayonet, this time, but from the bitterness, the hopelessness that welled up in his throat in an almost physical tide of despair. His guard was not the only one in the hut. There must have been at least a dozen of them, all armed with rifles and bayonets, all with rifles and bayonets pointing down at the sleeping men and women. There was something weird and ominous about their silence and stealth and unmoving concentration. Nicolson wondered dimly whether they were all to be murdered in their sleep, and had no sooner done so when the man above him shattered the idea and the brooding silence.

“Is this the swine you spoke of?” He spoke in English, with the precise, grammatical fluency of an educated man who has not learned the language among the people who spoke it. “Is this their leader?”

“That is the man Nicolson.” It was Telak who spoke, shadowed just beyond the doorway. He sounded remote, indifferent. “He is in charge of the party.”

“Is that the case? Speak up, you English pig!” The officer emphasised his request with another jab at Nicolson’s throat. Nicolson could feel the blood trickling slowly, warmly, on to the collar of his shirt. For a moment he thought to deny it, to tell the man that Captain Findhorn was his commanding officer, but instinct immediately told him that things would go very hard with the man whom the Japanese recognised as the leader. Captain Findhorn was in no condition to take any further punishment. Even a blow, now, could easily be enough to kill him.

“Yes, I am in charge.” Even to himself, his voice sounded weak and husky. He looked at the bayonet, tried to gauge his chances of knocking it aside, recognised that it was hopeless. Even if he did, there were another dozen waiting men ready to shoot him down. “Take that damned thing away from my neck.”

“Ah, of course! How forgetful of me.” The officer removed his bayonet, stepped back a pace and then kicked Nicolson viciously in the side, just above the kidney. “Captain Yamata, at your service,” he murmured silkily. “An officer in His Imperial Majesty’s Nipponese Army. Be careful how you speak to a Japanese officer in future. On your feet, you swine.” He raised his voice to a shout. “All of you, on your feet!”

Slowly, shakily, grey-faced beneath his dark tan and almost retching with the agony in his side, Nicolson rose to his feet. All around the hut others, too, were shaking off the dark fog of sleep and pushing up dazedly off the floor, and those who were too slow, too sick or too badly hurt were jerked cruelly upright regardless of their moans and cries and hustled out towards the door. Gudrun Drachmann, Nicolson saw, was one of those who were roughly handled; she had bent over to roll a still sleeping Peter in a blanket and gather him in her arms, and the guard had jerked them both up with a violence that must nearly have dislocated the girl’s arm: the sharp cry of pain was hardly uttered before she had bitten it off in tightlipped silence. Even in his pain and despair Nicolson found himself looking at her, looking and wondering, wondering at her patience and courage and the selfless unceasing devotion with which she had looked after the child for so many long days and endless nights, and as he looked and wondered he was conscious of a sudden and almost overwhelming sense of pity, conscious that he would have done anything to save this girl from further harm and hurt degradation, a feeling, he had to confess to himself with slow surprise, that he could never remember having had for any other than Caroline. He had known this girl for only ten days, and he knew her better than he would have known most in a dozen lifetimes: the quality and the intensity of their experiences and suffering in the past ten days had had the peculiar power and effect of selecting, highlighting and magnifying with a brutal and revealing clarity faults and merits, vices and virtues that might otherwise have remained concealed or dormant for years. But adversity and privation had been a catalyst that had brought the best and the worst into unmistakable view and, like Lachie McKinnon, Gudrun Drachmann had emerged shining and untarnished out of the furnace of pain and suffering and the extremest hardships. For a moment and incredibly, Nicolson forgot where he was, forgot the bitter past and empty future and looked again at the girl and he knew for the first time that he was deceiving himself, and doing it deliberately. It wasn’t pity, it wasn’t just compassion he felt for this slow-smiling scarred girl with a skin like a rose at dusk and the blue eyes of northern seas: or if it had been, it would never be again. Never again. Nicolson shook his head slowly and smiled to himself, then grunted with pain as Yamata drove the heel of his rifle between his shoulder blades and sent him staggering towards the door.

It was almost pitch dark outside, but light enough for Nicolson to see where the soldiers were taking them—towards the brightlylit elders’ meeting-place, the big square council house where they had eaten earlier, on the other side of the kampong. It was also light enough for Nicolson to see something else—the faint outline of Telak, motionless in the gloom. Ignoring the officer behind him, ignoring the certainty of another teeth-rattling blow, Nicolson stopped, less than a foot away from him. Telak might have been a man carved from stone. He made no movement, no gesture at all, just stood still in the darkness, like a man far lost in thought.

“How much did they pay you, Telak?” Nicolson’s voice was hardly more than a whisper.

Seconds passed and Telak did not speak. Nicolson tensed himself for another blow on the back, but no blow came. Then Telak spoke, his words so faraway a murmur that Nicolson had to bend forward, involuntarily, to hear him.

“They paid me well, Mr. Nicolson.” He took a pace forward and half-turned, so that his side and profile were suddenly caught in the light streaming from the door of the hut. His left cheek, neck, arm and upper chest were a ghastly mass of sword or bayonet cuts, it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended; the blood seemed to mask the whole side of his body and, even as Nicolson watched, he could see it drip soundlessly on to the hard-beaten earth of the kampong. “They paid me well,” Telak repeated tonelessly. “My father is dead, Trikah is dead. Many of our men are dead. We were betrayed and they took us by surprise.”

Nicolson stared at him without speaking, all thought temporarily blocked by the sight of Telak—a Telak, he could see now, with another Japanese bayonet only inches from his back. Not one bayonet, but two: Telak would have fought well before they struck him down. And then thought did come, pity and shock that this should have happened, and so soon, to men who had so selflessly befriended them, then, swift on the heels of that thought, bitter regret for the words that he himself had just uttered, for the horribly unjust accusation that must have been the last few grains of salt in the wounds of Telak’s sorrow and suffering. Nicolson opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out, only a gasp of pain as a rifle butt again thudded into his back, a gasp synchronised with Yamata’s low, evil laugh in the darkness.

Rifle now reversed, the Japanese officer drove Nicolson across the kampong at the jabbing point of his bayonet. Ahead of him, Nicolson could see the others being herded through the sharply-limned rectangle of light that was the entrance to the council house. Some were already inside. Miss Plenderleith was just passing through, with Lena at her back, then Gudrun with Peter, followed closely by the bo’sun and Van Effen. Then Gudrun, approaching the door, stumbled over something on the ground, overbalanced with the weight of the little boy in her arms, and almost fell. Her guard caught her savagely by the shoulder and pushed. Perhaps he meant to push her through the door, but if he did his direction was bad, for girl and child together crashed heavily into the lintel of the doorway. Almost twenty feet away Nicolson could hear the thud of a head or heads against unyielding wood, the girl’s exclamation of pain and young Peter’s shrill, high-pitched cry of fear and hurt. McKinnon, only a few feet behind the girl shouted something unintelligible—his native Gaelic, Nicolson guessed—took two quick steps forward and leapt for the back of the guard who had pushed the girl: but the swinging rifle butt of the soldier behind was even faster and the bo’sun never saw it coming ….

The council house, brightly lit now with half a dozen oil-lamps, was a large, lofty room, twenty feet in width by thirty in length, with the entrance door in the middle of one of the longer sides. To the right hand side of the door, taking up nearly all the width of the room, was the elder’s platform, with another door behind it leading out to the kampong. All the rest of the big wooden house, facing the door and to the left of it, was completely bare, hard-packed earth and nothing else. On this bare earth the prisoners sat in a small, tight semicircle. All except McKinnon—Nicolson could just see him from where he sat, the shoulders, the lifeless, out-flung arms and the back of the dark, curly head cruelly illumined by the harsh bar of light streaming out from the doorway of the council house, the rest of his body shadowed in the darkness.

But Nicolson had only an occasional glance to spare for the bo’sun, none at all for the watchful guards who lounged behind them or with their backs to the doorway. He had eyes at the moment only for the platform, for the men on the platform, thoughts only for his own stupidity and folly and squeamishness, for the carelessness that had led them all, Gudrun and Peter and Findhorn and all the rest of them, to this dark end.

Captain Yamata was sitting on the platform, on a low bench, and next to him was Siran. A grinning, triumphant Siran who no longer bothered to conceal his emotions with an expressionless face, a Siran obviously on the best of terms with the broadly smiling Yamata, a Siran who from time to time removed a long black cheroot from his gleaming teeth and blew a contemptuous cloud of smoke in the direction of Nicolson. Nicolson stared back with bleak unwavering eyes, his face drained of all expression. There was murder in his heart.

It was all too painfully obvious what had happened. Siran had pretended to go north from the beach where they had land—a subterfuge, Nicolson thought savagely, that any child should have expected. He must have gone some little way to the north, hidden, waited until the litter-bearers had moved off, followed them, bypassed the village, moved on to Bantuk and warned the garrison there. It had all been so inevitable, so clearly what Siran had been almost bound to do that any fool should have foreseen it and taken precautions against it. The precautions consisting of killing Siran. But he, Nicolson, had criminally failed to take these precautions. He knew now that if he ever again had the chance he would shoot Siran with as little emotion as he would a snake or an old tin can. He knew also that he would never have the chance again.

Slowly, with as much difficulty as if he were fighting against the power of magnetism, Nicolson dragged his gaze away from Siran’s face and looked round the others sitting on the floor beside him. Gudrun, Peter, Miss Plenderleith, Findhorn, Willoughby, Vannier—they were all there, all tired and sick and suffering, nearly all quiet and resigned and unafraid. His bitterness was almost intolerable. They had all trusted him, trusted him completely, implicitly depended upon him to do all in his power to bring them all safely home again. They had trusted him, and now no one of them would ever see home again … He looked away towards the platform. Captain Yamata was on his feet, one hand hooked in his belt, the other resting on the hilt of his sword.

“I shall not delay you long.” His voice was calm and precise. “We leave for Bantuk in ten minutes. We leave to see my commanding officer, Colonel Kiseki, who is very anxious to see you all: Colonel Kiseki had a son who commanded the captured American torpedo boat sent to meet you.” He was aware of the sudden quick looks between the prisoners, the sharp indrawing of breath and he smiled faintly. “Denial will serve you nothing. Captain Siran here will make an excellent witness. Colonel Kiseki is mad with grief. It would have been better for you—for all of you, each last one of you—had you never been born.

“Ten minutes,” he went on smoothly. “Not more. There is something we must have first, it will not take long, and then we will go.” He smiled again, looked slowly round the prisoners squatting on the floor beneath him. “And while we wait, I am sure you would all care to meet someone whom you think you know but do not know at all. Someone who is a very good friend of our glorious Empire, someone who, I feel sure, our glorious Emperor will wish to thank in person. Concealment is no longer necessary, sir.”

There was a sudden movement among the prisoners, then one of them was on his feet, advancing towards the platform, speaking fluently in Japanese and shaking the bowing Captain Yamata by the hand. Nicolson struggled half-way to his feet, consternation and disbelief in every line of his face, then fell heavily to the ground as a rifle butt caught him across the shoulder. For a moment his neck and arm seemed as if they were on fire, but he barely noticed it.

“Van Effen! What the devil do you think—”

“Not Van Effen, my dear Mr. Nicolson,” Van Effen protested. “Not ‘Van’ but ‘von’. I’m sick and tired of masquerading as a damned Hollander.” He smiled faintly and bowed. “I am at your service, Mr. Nicolson. Lieutenant-Colonel Alexis von Effen, German counter-espionage.”

Nicolson stared at him, stared without speaking, nor was he alone in his shocked astonishment. Every eye in the council house was on Van Effen, eyes held there involuntarily while stunned minds fought to orientate themselves, to grasp the situation as it was, and memories and incidents of the past ten days slowly coalesced into comprehension and the tentative beginnings of understanding. The seconds dragged interminably by and formed themselves into a minute, and then almost another minute, and there were no more tentative wonderings and deepening suspicions. There was only certainty, stone cold certainty that Colonel Alexis von Effen was really who he claimed to be. There could be no doubt at all.

It was Van Effen who finally broke the silence. He turned his head slightly and looked out the door, then glanced again at his late comrades in distress. There was a smile on his face, but there was no triumph in it, no rejoicing, no signs of pleasure at all. If anything, the smile was sad.

“And here, gentlemen, comes the reason for all our trials and suffering of the past days, of why the Japanese—my people’s allies, I would remind you—have pursued and harried us without ceasing. Many of you wondered why we were so important to the Japanese, our tiny group of survivors. Now you will know.”

A Japanese soldier walked past the men and women on the floor and dumped a heavy bag between Van Effen and Yamata. They all stared at it, then stared at Miss Plenderleith. It was her bag, and her lips and knuckles were pale as ivory, her eyes half-shut as if in pain. But she made no move and said nothing at all.

At a sign from Van Effen the Japanese soldier took one handle of the bag, while Van Effen took the other. Between them they raised it to shoulder height, then inverted it. Nothing fell to the ground, but the heavily weighted lining dropped through the inverted mouth of the canvas and leather bag and hung down below it as if it were filled with lead. Van Effen looked at the Japanese officer. “Captain Yamata?”

“My pleasure, Colonel” Yamata stepped forward, the sword hissing from its sheath. It gleamed once in the bright yellow light from the oil-lamps, then its razored edge sliced cleanly through the tough canvas lining as if it had been so much paper. And then the gleam of the sword was lost, buried, extinguished in the dazzling, scintillating stream of fire that poured from the bag and pooled on the earth beneath in a deep, lambent cone of coruscating brilliance.

“Miss Plenderleith has quite a taste in gee-gaws and trinkets.” Van Effen smiled pleasantly and touched the sparkling radiance at his feet with a casual toe. “Diamonds, Mr. Nicolson. The largest collection, I believe, ever seen outside the Union of South Africa. These are valued at just under two million pounds.”

FOURTEEN

The soft murmur of Van Effen’s voice faded away and the silence in the council house was heavy and deep. For each man and woman there the others might not have existed. The great heap of diamonds at their feet, sparkling and flaming with a barbaric magnificence in the light of the flickering oil-lamps, had a weirdly hypnotic quality, held every eye in thrall. But by and by Nicolson stirred and looked up at Van Effen. Strangely enough, he could feel no bitterness, no hostility towards this man: they had come through too much together, and Van Effen had come through it better than most, unselfish, enduring and helpful all the way. The memory of that was much too recent to be washed away.

“Borneo stones, of course,” he murmured. “From Banjermasin by the Kerry Dancer—couldn’t have been any other way. Uncut, I suppose—and you say they’re worth two million?”

“Rough cut and uncut,” Van Effen nodded. “And their market value is at least that—a hundred fighter planes, a couple of destroyers, I don’t know. In wartime they’re worth infinitely more to any side that gets its hands on them.” He smiled faintly. “None of these stones will ever grace milady’s fingers. Industrial use only—diamond-tipped cutting tools. A great pity, is it not?”

No one spoke, no one as much as glanced at the speaker. They heard the words, but the words failed to register, for that moment they all lived in their eyes alone. And then Van Effen had stepped quickly forward, his foot swinging, and the great pile of diamonds were tumbling over the earthen floor in a glittering cascade.

“Trash! Baubles!” His voice was harsh, contemptuous. “What matter all the diamonds, all the precious stones that ever were when the great nations of the world are at each other’s throats and men are dying in their thousands and their hundreds of thousands? I wouldn’t sacrifice a life, not even the life of an enemy, for all the diamonds in the Indies. But I have sacrificed many lives, and put many more I’m afraid, in deadly danger to secure another treasure, an infinitely more valuable treasure than these few paltry stones at our feet. What do a few lives matter, if losing them enables a man to save a thousand times more?”

“We can all see how fine and noble you are,” Nicolson said bitterly. “Spare us the rest and get to the point.”

“I have already arrived,” Van Effen said equably. “That treasure is in this room, with us, now. I have no wish to prolong this unduly or seek after dramatic effect.” He stretched out his hand. “Miss Plenderleith, if you please.”

She stared at him, her eyes uncomprehending.

“Oh, now, come, come.” He snapped his fingers and smiled at her. “I admire your performance, but I really can’t wait all night.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said blankly.

“Perhaps it may help you if I tell you that I know everything.” There was neither gloating nor triumph in Van Effen’s voice, only certainty and a curious overtone of weariness. “Everything, Miss Plenderleith, even to that simple little ceremony in a Sussex village on 18th February, 1902.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Nicolson demanded.

“Miss Plenderleith knows, don’t you Miss Plenderleith?” There was almost compassion in Van Effen’s voice: for the first time the life had faded from her lined old face and her shoulders were sagging wearily.

“I know.” She nodded in defeat and looked at Nicolson. “He is referring to the date of my marriage—my marriage to Brigadier-General Farnholme. We celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary aboard the lifeboat” She tried to smile, but failed.

Nicolson stared at her, at the tired little face and empty eyes, and all at once he was convinced of the truth of it. Even as he looked at her, not really seeing her, memories came flooding in on him and many things that had baffled him gradually began to become clear … But Van Effen was speaking again.

“18th February, 1902. If I know that, Miss Plenderleith, I know everything.”

“Yes, you know everything.” Her voice was a distant murmur.

“Please.” His hand was still outstretched. “You would not care for Captain Yamata’s men to search you.”

“No.” She fumbled under her salt-stained, bleached jacket, undid a belt and handed it to Van Effen. “I think this is what you want.”

“Thank you.” For a man who had secured what he had spoken of as a priceless treasure, Van Effen’s face was strangely empty of all triumph and satisfaction. “This is indeed what I want.”

He undid the pouches of the belt, lifted out the photostats and films that had lain inside and held them up to the light of the flickering oil-lamps. Almost a minute passed while he examined them in complete silence, then he nodded his head in satisfaction and returned papers and films to the belt.

“All intact,” he murmured. “A long time and a long way—but all intact.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Nicolson demanded irritably. “What is that?”

“This?” Van Effen glanced down at the belt he was buckling round his waist. “This, Mr. Nicolson, is what makes everything worth while. This is the reason for all the action and suffering of the past days, the reason why the Kerry Dancer and the Viroma were sunk, why so many people have died, why my allies were prepared to go to any length to prevent your escape into the Timor Sea. This is why Captain Yamata is here now, although I doubt whether even he knows that—but his commanding officer will. This is—”

“Get to the point!” Nicolson snapped.

“Sorry.” Van Effen tapped the belt. “This contains the complete, fully detailed plans, in code, of Japan’s projected invasion of Northern Australia. Japanese codes are almost impossible to break, but our people know that there is one man in London who could do it. If anyone could have escaped with these and got them to London, it would have been worth a fortune to the allies.”

“My God!” Nicolson felt dazed. “Where—where did they come from?”

“I don’t know.” Van Effen shook his head. “If we had known that they would never have got into the wrong hands in the first place … The full-scale invasion plans, Mr. Nicolson—forces employed, times, dates, places—everything. In British or American hands, these would have meant three months’ setback to the Japanese, perhaps even six. At this early stage of the war, such a delay could have been fatal to the Japanese: you can understand their anxiety to recover these. What’s a fortune in diamonds compared to these, Mr. Nicolson?”

“What, indeed,” Nicolson muttered. He spoke automatically, a man with his mind far away.

“But now we have both—the plans and the diamonds.” There was still that strange, complete lack of any inflection of triumph in Van Effen’s voice. He reached out a toe and touched the pile of diamonds. “Perhaps I was over hasty in expressing my contempt of these. They have their own beauty.”

“Yes.” The bitterness of defeat was sharp in Nicolson’s mouth, but his face was impassive. “A fantastic sight, Van Effen.”

“Admire them while you may, Mr. Nicolson.” Captain Yamata’s voice, cold and harsh, cut through the spell, brought them all tumbling back to reality. He touched the tip of the cone of diamonds with his sword-point and the white fire glittered and blazed as the stones spilled over on to the ground. “They are beautiful, but man must have eyes to see.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nicolson demanded.

“Just that Colonel Kiseki has had orders only to recover the diamonds and deliver them intact to Japan. Nothing was said about prisoners. You killed his son. You will see what I mean.”

“I can guess.” Nicolson looked at him with contempt. “A shovel, a six by two hole and a shot in the back when I’ve finished digging. Oriental culture. We’ve heard all about it.”

Yamata smiled emptily. “Nothing so quick and clean and easy, I assure you. We have, as you say, culture. Such crudities are not for us.”

“Captain Yamata.” Van Efifen was looking at the Japanese officer, fractionally narrowed eyes the only sign of emotion in an expressionless face.

“Yes, Colonel?”

“You—you can’t do that. This man is not a spy, to be shot without trial. He’s not even a member of the armed forces, Technically, he’s a noncombatant.”

“Of course, of course.” Yamata was heavily ironic. “To date he has only been responsible for the deaths of fourteen of our sailors and an airman. I shudder to think of the carnage if he ever became a combatant. And he killed Kiseki’s son.”

“He didn’t. Siran will bear that out.”

“Let him explain that to the colonel,” Yamata said indifferently. He sheathed his sword. “We quibble, and uselessly. Come, let us go. Our truck should be here shortly.”

“Truck?” Van Eflfen queried.

“We left it almost a mile away.” Yamata grinned. “We did not wish to disturb your sleep. What’s the matter, Mr. Nicolson?” he finished sharply.

“Nothing,” Nicolson answered shortly. He had been staring out through the open doorway and in spite of himself a flicker of excitement had crossed his face, but he knew that his eyes had been safely away before Yamata had caught his expression. “The truck isn’t here yet. I would like to ask Van Effen one or two questions.” He hoped his voice sounded casual.

“We have a minute or two,” Yamata nodded. “It might amuse me. But be quick.”

“Thank you.” He looked at Van Effen. “As a matter of interest, who gave Miss Plenderleith the diamonds—and the plans?”

“What does it matter now?” Van Effen’s voice was heavy, remote. “It’s all past and done with now.”

“Please,” Nicolson persisted. It had suddenly become essential to stall for time. “I really would like to know.”

“Very well.” Van Effen looked at him curiously. “I’ll tell you. Farnholme had them both—and he had them nearly all the time. That should have been obvious to you from the fact that Miss Plenderleith had them. Where the plans came from I’ve told you I don’t know: the diamonds were given him by the Dutch authorities in Borneo.”

“They must have had a great deal of faith in him,” Nicolson said dryly.

“They had. They had every reason to. Farnholme was utterly reliable. He was an infinitely resourceful and clever man, and knew the East—especially the islands—as well as any man alive. We know for a fact that he spoke at least fourteen Asiatic languages.”

“You seem to have known a great deal about him.”

“We did. It was our business—and very much to our interest—to find out all we could. Farnholme was one of our arch-enemies. To the best of our knowledge he had been a member of your Secret Service for just over thirty years.”

There were one or two stifled gasps of surprise and the sudden low murmur of voices. Even Yamata had sat down again and was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, his keen dark face alight with interest.

“Secret Service!” Nicolson let his breath go in a long, soundless whistle of surprise, rubbed a hand across his forehead in a gesture of disbelief and wonderment. He had guessed as much five minutes ago. Under the protective cover of his hand his eyes flickered sideways for a split second, glanced through the open door of the council house, then looked at Van Effen. “But—but Miss Plenderleith said he commanded a regiment in Malaya, some years ago.”

“That’s right, he did.” Van Effen smiled. “At least, he appeared to.”

“Go on, go on.” It was Captain Findhorn who urged him.

“Not much to go on with. The Japanese and myself knew of the missing plans, within hours of their being stolen. I was after them with official Japanese backing. We hadn’t reckoned on Farnholme having made arrangements to take the diamonds with him also—a stroke of genius on Farnholme’s part. It served a double purpose. If anyone penetrated his disguise as an alcoholic beachcomber on the run, he could buy his way out of trouble. Or if anyone were still suspicious of him and discovered the diamonds they would be sure to think that that accounted for his disguise and odd behaviour and let it go at that. And, in the last resort, if the Japanese discovered on what ship he was, he hoped that cupidity or their natural desire to recover such a valuable wartime merchandise would make them think twice about sinking the ship, in the hope that they might get the plans and so recover the diamonds another way, killing two birds with one stone. I tell you, Farnholme was brilliant. He had the most diabolically ill luck.”

“It didn’t work out that way,” Findhorn objected. “Why did they sink the Kerry Dancer?”

“The Japanese didn’t know he was aboard at the time,” Van Effen explained. “But Siran did—he always did. He was after the diamonds, I suspect, because some renegade Dutch official doublecrossed his own people and gave Siran the information in return for a promised share of the profits when Siran laid hands on the stones. He would never have seen a single guilder or stone. Neither would the Japanese.”

“A clever attempt to discredit me.” It was Siran speaking for the first time, his voice smooth and controlled. “The stones would have gone to our good friends and allies, the Japanese. That was our intention. My two men here will bear me out.”

“It will be difficult to prove otherwise,” Van Effen said indifferently. “Your betrayal this night is worth something. No doubt your masters will throw the jackal a bone.” He paused, then went on: “Farnholme never suspected who I was—not, at least, until after we had been several days in the lifeboat. But I had known him all along, cultivated him, drunk with him. Siran here saw us together several times and must have thought that Farnholme and I were more than friends, a mistake anyone might make. That, I think, is why he rescued me—or rather didn’t chuck me overboard when the Kerry Dancer went down. He thought I either knew where the diamonds were or would find out from Farnholme.”

“Another mistake,” Siran admitted coldly. “I should have let you drown.”

“You should. Then you might have got the whole two million to yourself.” Van Effen paused for a moment’s recollection, then looked at the Japanese officer. “Tell me, Captain Yamata, has there been any unusual British naval activity in the neighbourhood recently?”

Captain Yamata looked at him in quick surprise. “How do you know?”

“Destroyers, possibly?” Van Effen had ignored the question. “Moving in close at night?”

“Exactly.” Yamata was astonished. “They come close in to Java Head each night, not eighty miles from here, then retire before dawn, before our planes can come near. But how—”

“It is easily explained. On the dawn of the day the Kerry Dancer was sunk, Farnholme spent over an hour in the radio room. Almost certainly he told them of his escape hopes—south from the Java Sea. No allied ship dare move north of Indonesia—it would be a quick form of suicide. So they’re patrolling the south, moving close in at nights. My guess is that they’ll have another vessel patrolling near Bali. You have made no effort to deal with this intruder, Captain Yamata?”

“Hardly.” Yamata’s tone was dry. “The only vessel we have here is our commander’s, Colonel Kiseki’s. It is fast enough, but too small—just a launch, really only a mobile radio station. Communications are very difficult in these parts.”

“I see.” Van Effen looked at Nicolson. “The rest is obvious. Farnholme came to the conclusion that it was no longer safe for him to carry the diamonds round with him any longer—nor the plans. The plans, I think, he gave to Miss Plenderleith aboard the Viroma, the diamonds on the island—he emptied his own bag and filled it with grenades … I have never known a braver man.”

Van Effen was silent for a few moments, then continued. “The poor renegade Muslim priest was just that and no more: Farnholme’s story, told on the spur of the moment, was completely untrue, but typical of the audacity of the man—to accuse someone else of what he was doing himself … And just one final thing—my apologies to Mr. Walters here.” Van Effen smiled faintly. “Farnholme wasn’t the only one who was wandering into strange cabins that night. I spent over an hour in Mr. Walters’ radio room. Mr. Walters slept well. I carry things with me that ensure that people will sleep well.”

Walters stared at him, then glanced at Nicolson, remembering how he had felt that next morning, and Nicolson remembered how the radio operator had looked, white, strained and sick. Van Effen caught Walters’ slow nod of understanding.

“I apologise, Mr. Walters. But I had to do it, I had to send out a message. I am a skilled operator, but it took me a long time. Each time I heard footsteps in the passage outside, I died a thousand deaths. But I got my message through.”

“Course, speed and position, eh?” Nicolson said grimly. “Plus a request not to bomb the oil cargo tanks. You just wanted the ship stopped, isn’t that it?”

“More or less,” Van Effen admitted. “I didn’t expect them to make quite so thorough a job of stopping the ship, though. On the other hand, don’t forget that if I hadn’t sent the message, telling them the diamonds were on board, they would probably have blown the ship sky-high.”

“So we all owe our lives to you,” Nicolson said bitterly. “Thank you very much.” He looked at him bleakly for a long, tense moment, then swung his gaze away, his eyes so obviously unseeing that no one thought to follow his gaze. But his eyes were very far indeed from unseeing, and there could be no doubt about it now. McKinnon had moved, and moved six inches, perhaps nearer nine, in the past few minutes, not in the uncontrolled, jerky twitchings of an unconscious man in deep-reaching pain, but in the stealthy, smoothly coordinated movements of a fully conscious person concentrating on inching silently across the ground, so silently, so soundlessly, with such imperceptible speed that only a man with his nerves strung up to a pitch of hyper-sensitivity could have seen it at all. But Nicolson saw it, knew there could be no mistake at all. Where originally there had been head, shoulders and arms lying in the bar of light that streamed out through the door, now there was only the back of the black head and one tanned forearm. Slowly, unconcernedly, his face an empty, expressionless mask, Nicolson let his gaze wander back to the company. Van Effen was speaking again, watching him with speculative curiosity.

“As you will have guessed by now, Mr. Nicolson, Farnholme remained safely in the pantry during the fight because he was sitting with two million pounds in his lap and wasn’t going to risk any of it for any old-fashioned virtue of courage and honour and decency. I remained in the dining-saloon because I wasn’t going to fire on my allies—and you will recall that the only time I did—at the sailor in the conning-tower of the submarine—I missed. A very convincing miss, I’ve always thought. After the initial attack no Japanese ‘plane attacked us on the Viroma, when we were clearing the boat—or afterwards: I had signalled with a torch from the top of the wheelhouse.

“Similarly the submarine did not sink us—the captain wouldn’t have been very popular had he returned to base and reported that he had sent two million pounds worth of diamonds to the bottom of the South China Sea.” He smiled, again without mirth. “You may remember that I wished to surrender to that submarine—you adopted a rather hostile view-point about that.”

“Then why did that ‘plane attack us?”

“Who knows?” Van Effen shrugged his shoulders. “Getting desperate, I suppose. And don’t forget that it had a seaplane in attendance—it could have picked up one or two selected survivors.”

“Such as yourself?”

“Such as myself,” Van Effen admitted. “Shortly after this Siran found out that I hadn’t the diamonds—he searched my bag during one of the nights we were becalmed: I saw him do it and I let him do it, and there was nothing in it anyway. And it always lessened my chances of being stabbed in the back—which happened to his next suspect, the unfortunate Ahmed. Again he chose wrongly.” He looked at Siran with unconcealed distaste. “I suppose Ahmed woke up while you were rifling his bag?”

“An unfortunate accident.” Siran waved an airy hand. “My knife slipped.”

“You have very little time to live, Siran.” There was something curiously prophetic about the tone of Van Effen’s voice, and the contemptuous smile drained slowly from Siran’s face. “You are too evil to live.”

“Superstitious nonsense!” The smile was back, the upper lip curled over the even white teeth.

“We shall see, we shall see.” Van Effen transferred his gaze to Nicolson. “That’s all, Mr. Nicolson. You’ll have guessed why Farnholme hit me over the head when the torpedo boat came alongside. He had to, if he was to save your lives. A very, very gallant man—and a fast thinker.” He turned and looked at Miss Plenderleith. “And you gave me quite a fright, too, when you said Farnholme had left all his stuff on the island. Then I realised right away that he couldn’t have done that, because he’d never have a chance of going back there again. So I knew you must have it.” He looked at her compassionately. “You are a very courageous lady, Miss Plenderleith. You deserved better than this.”

He finished speaking, and again the deep, heavy silence fell over the council house. Now and again the little boy whimpered in his uneasy sleep, a small frightened sound, but Gudrun rocked and soothed him in her arms and by and by he lay still. Yamata was staring down at the stones, the thin aquiline face dark and brooding, seemingly in no hurry to move off. The prisoners were almost all looking at Van Effen, their expressions ranging from astonishment to blank incredulity. Behind them stood the guards, ten or twelve in all, alert and watchful and their guns ready in their hands. Nicolson risked a last quick look out through the lighted doorway, felt the breath checking in his throat and the almost unconscious tightening of his fists. The doorway and the lighted oblong beyond it were completely empty. McKinnon had gone. Slowly, carelessly, easing out his pent-up breath in a long soundless sigh, Nicolson looked away—and found Van Effen’s speculative eyes full upon him. Speculative—and understanding. Even as Nicolson watched, Van Effen looked sideways through the door for a long, meaningful moment, looked back at Nicolson again. Nicolson felt the chill wave of defeat wash through his mind, wondered if he could get to Van Effen’s throat before he spoke. But that would do no good, it would only postpone the inevitable. Even if he killed him—but Nicolson knew he was fooling himself, he hadn’t a chance, and even if he had, even to save themselves, he could do Van Effen no harm. He owed Van Effen a life—Peter’s. Van Effen could have freed himself very easily that morning—the clam hadn’t been all that large. He could have let Peter go and released himself by the use of both his hands: but he had elected, instead, to stand there in agony with the child in his arms and have his leg badly mauled and cut … Van Effen was smiling at him, and Nicolson knew it was too late to stop him from speaking.

“Beautifully done, wasn’t it, Mr. Nicolson?”

Nicolson said nothing. Captain Yamata lifted his head and looked puzzled. “What was beautifully done, Colonel?”

“Oh, just the whole operation.” Van Effen waved his hand. “From beginning to end.” He smiled deprecatingly, and Nicolson could feel the blood pounding in his pulse.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yamata growled. He rose to his feet. “Time we were going. I can hear the truck coming.”

“Very well.” Van Effen flexed his wounded leg stiffly: with the clam bite and the shrapnel wound in his thigh it was almost useless to him. “To see your colonel? Tonight?”

“Inside the hour,” Yamata said briefly. “Tonight Colonel Kiseki entertains important headmen and chiefs in his villa. His son lies dead, but duty crushes grief. Crushes it, I say, not kills it. But the sight of all these prisoners will lighten his saddened heart.”

Nicolson shivered. Someone, he thought wryly, walking over his grave. Even without the almost sadistic anticipation in Yamata’s voice, he had no illusions as to what lay in store for himself. For a moment he thought of all the stories he had heard of Japanese atrocities in China, then resolutely pushed the thought away. An empty mind on a razor edge was his only hope, he knew, and that no hope at all. Not even with McKinnon out there, for what could McKinnon do except get himself killed. The thought that the bo’sun might try to make good his own escape never crossed Nicolson’s mind. McKinnon just wasn’t made that way … Van Effen was speaking again.

“And afterwards? When the colonel has seen the prisoners? You have quarters for them?”

“They won’t need quarters,” Yamata said brutally. “A burial party will be all that’s required.”

“I’m not joking, Captain Yamata,” Van Effen said stiffly.

“Neither am I, Colonel.” Yamata smiled, said no more. In the sudden silence they could hear the squeal of brakes and the blipping of an accelerator as the truck drew up in the middle of the kampong. Then Captain Findhorn cleared his throat.

“I am in charge of our party, Captain Yamata. Let me remind you of international wartime conventions.” His voice was low and husky, but steady for all that. “As a captain in the British Mercantile Marine, I demand—”

“Be quiet!” Yamata’s voice was almost a shout, and his face was twisted in ugliness. He lowered his voice until it was almost a whisper, a caressing murmur more terrifying by far than a roar of anger. “You demand nothing, Captain. You are in no position to demand anything. International conventions! Bah! I spit at international conventions. These are for the weak, for simpletons and for children. The strong have no need for them. Colonel Kiseki has never heard of them. All Colonel Kiseki knows is that you have killed his son.” Yamata shivered elaborately. “I fear no man on earth, but I fear Colonel Kiseki. Everyone fears Colonel Kiseki. At any time he is a terrible man. Ask your friend there. He has heard of him.” He pointed at Telak, standing in the background between two armed guards.

“He is not a man.” All Telak’s left side was ridged and lumped in long streaks of coagulated blood. “He is a fiend. God will punish Colonel Kiseki.”

“Ah, so?” Yamata said something quickly in Japanese, and Telak staggered back as a rifle butt jabbed cruelly into his face. “Our allies,” Yamata purred apologetically, “but they have to be educated. In particular, they must not speak ill of our senior army officers … At any time, I said, Colonel Kiseki is a terrible man. But now that his only son has been killed …” He allowed his voice to trail off into silence.

“What will Colonel Kiseki do?” There was no trace of emotion, of any feeling in Van Effen’s voice. “Surely the women and children—”

“They will be the first to go—and they will take a long time going.” Captain Yamata might have been discussing arrangements for a garden party. “Colonel Kiseki is a connoisseur, an artist in this sort of thing—it is an education for lesser men such as myself to watch him. He thinks mental suffering is no less important than physical pain.” Yamata was warming to his subject, and finding it more than pleasant. “For instance, his main attention will be directed towards Mr. Nicolson here.”

“Inevitably,” Van Effen murmured.

“Inevitably. So he will ignore Mr. Nicolson—at first, that is. He will concentrate instead on the child. But he may spare the boy, I don’t know, he has a strange weakness for very small children.” Yamata frowned, then his face cleared. “So he will pass on to the girl here—the one with the scarred face. Siran tells me she and Nicolson are very friendly, to say the least.” He looked at Gudrun for a long moment of time, and the expression on his face woke murder in Nicolson’s heart. “Colonel Kiseki has rather a special way with the ladies—especially the young one: a rather ingenious combination of the green bamboo bed and the water treatment. You have heard of them, perhaps, Colonel?”

“I have heard of them.” For the first time that evening Van Effen smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, and Nicolson felt fear for the first time, the overwhelming certainty of ultimate defeat. Van Effen was toying with him, the cat with the mouse, sadistically lending false encouragement while waiting for the moment to pounce. “Yes, indeed I have heard of them. It should be a most interesting performance. I presume I shall be permitted to watch the—ah—festivities?”

“You shall be our guest of honour, my dear Colonel,” Yamata purred.

“Excellent, excellent. As you say, it should be most educative.” Van Effen looked at him quizzically, waved a lackadaisical hand towards the prisoners. “You think it likely that Colonel Kiseki will—ah—interview them all? Even the wounded?”

“They murdered his son,” Yamata answered flatly.

“Quite so. They murdered his son.” Van Effen looked again at the prisoners, and his eyes were bleak and cold. “But one of them also tried to murder me. I don’t think Colonel Kiseki would miss just one of them, would he?”

Yamata raised his eyebrows. “I’m not quite certain that I—”

“One of them tried to kill me,” Van Effen said harshly. “I have a personal score to settle. I would take it as a great favour, Captain Yamata, to be able to settle that score now.”

Yamata looked away from the soldier who was pouring the diamonds back into the torn bag and stroked his chin. Nicolson could once more feel the blood pounding in his pulse, forced himself to breathe quietly, normally. He doubted if anyone else knew what was going on.

“I suppose it is the least you are entitled to—we owe you a very great deal. But the colonel—” Suddenly the doubt and uncertainty cleared from Yamata’s face, and he smiled. “But of course! You are a senior allied officer. An order from you—”

“Thank you, Captain Yamata,” Van Effen interrupted. “Consider it given.” He whirled round, limped quickly into the middle of the prisoners, bent down, twisted his hand in Gordon’s shirtfront and jerked him viciously to his feet. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this, you little rat. Get across there.” He ignored Gordon’s struggles, his fear-maddened face and incoherent protestations of innocence, marched him across to an empty space at the back of the council house, at a point directly opposite the door, and flung him into a huddled heap, sprawled almost his length against the back wall of the hut, one arm raised in pathetic defence, unreasoning panic limned in every line of his unlovely face.

Van Effen ignored the panic, the protestations and the man, turned quickly round and limped across towards the elders’ platform, towards the Japanese soldier who stood with his own rifle under one arm and Farnholme’s machine-carbine under the other. With the careless assurance of a man who expects neither question nor resistance, Van Effen firmly relieved the soldier of the machine- carbine, checked that it was fully loaded, slipped the catch to automatic and hobbled back again towards Gordon who still lay where he had left him, eyes unnaturally wide and staring, moaning softly, long, quivering indrawn breaths were the only sound in the room. Every eye in the room was on Van Effen and Gordon, eyes that reflected various states of pity or anger or anticipation or just blank incomprehension. Nicolson’s face was quite expressionless, Yamata’s almost so, but the tongue running slowly over his lips gave him away. But no one spoke, no one moved, no one thought to speak or move. A man was about to be killed, to be murdered, but some indefinable factor in that electric atmosphere prevented any protest, any interruption, from anyone inside that house. And when the interruption did come, a sudden, jarring shock that shattered the spell as a stone might shatter a delicate crystal, it came from the kampong outside.

The high-pitched yell in Japanese jerked every head towards the door. Immediately afterwards came the sound of a short, sharp scuffle, a cry, a revolting, hollow sound like a giant cleaver splitting a water-melon, a momentary, weirdly ominous silence, then a roar and a rush of smoke and flame and the doorway and most of the wall were engulfed, with incredible speed, in a leaping, crackling wall of flame.

Captain Yamata took two steps towards the doorway, opened his mouth to shout an order and died with his mouth still open, the slugs from Van Effen’s carbine tearing half his chest away. The staccato hammering of the machine-gun inside the room was almost deafening, completely blotting out the roar of the flames. The sergeant still on the platform died next, then a soldier beside him, then a great red flower spread outwards from the centre of Siran’s face, and still Van Effen crouched low over the slowly swinging barrel of his carbine, his hand locked on the trigger, his face that of a man carved from stone. He staggered when the first Japanese rifle bullet caught him high up on the shoulder, stumbled and fell to one knee as a second bullet smashed into his side with the force of a battering ram, but still no flicker of expression crossed his face and the ivoryknuckled trigger finger only tightened the more. That much and that only Nicolson saw before he catapulted himself backwards and crashed into the legs of a soldier lining his tommy-gun on the man by the far wall. They went down together in a writhing, twisting, furiously struggling heap, then Nicolson was smashing the butt of the tommy-gun again and again into the dark blur of the face before him and was on his feet once more, knocking aside a gleaming bayonet blade and kicking viciously for an unprotected groin.

Even as he closed with the man, hooked fingers locking round a scrawny throat, he was conscious that Walters and Evans and Willoughby were on their feet also, fighting like madmen in the weird half-light compounded of the red glare of the flames and the choking acrid smoke that filled the room. He was conscious, too, that Van Effen’s machine-carbine had fallen silent, that another machine-gun, with a different cyclic rate, was firing through the licking, resinous flames that all but curtained off the doorway. And then he had forgotten all about these things, another man had seized him from behind and locked an elbow round his throat, strangling him in a grim and savage silence. There was a red mist, a mist shot through with sparks and flame, swimming before his eyes, and he knew it was his own blood pounding in his head and not the furiously burning walls of the council house. His strength was going, he was just sliding away into the darkness, when he vaguely heard the man behind him cry out in agony, and then McKinnon had him by the arm, leading him at a stumbling run out through the blazing doorway. But they were too late—too late at least for Nicolson. The blazing overhead beam falling from the roof caught him only a glancing blow on head and shoulder, but it was enough, in his weakened state more than enough, and the darkness closed over him.

He came to almost a minute later, lying huddled against the wall of the nearest upwind hut from the council house. He was dimly aware of men standing and moving around him, of Miss Plenderleith wiping blood and soot from his face, of the great tongue of flame licking thirty or forty feet vertically upwards into a dark and starless sky as the council house, a wall and most of the roof already gone, burnt torch-like to destruction.

Consciousness returned. He staggered to his feet, pushing Miss Plenderleith ungently to one side. All firing had stopped now, he realised, and he could hear the distant sound of a truck engine revving and fading, revving and fading as it slammed through the gears—the Japanese, or what few of them were left, leaving in a panic-stricken hurry.

“McKinnon!” He had to raise his voice above the crackling roar of the flames. “McKinnon! Where are you?”

“He’s round the other side of that house, somewhere.” It was Willoughby speaking, and he was pointing to the burning council house. “He’s all right, Johnny.”

“Everybody out?” Nicolson demanded. “Anybody left inside that thing. For God’s sake tell me!”

“They’re all out, I think, sir.” Walters was at his side, his voice hesitant. “Nobody left where we were all sitting, I know that.”

“Thank God, thank God!” He stopped abruptly. “Is Van Effen out?”

No one said anything.

“You heard what I said,” Nicolson shouted. “Is Van Effen out?” He caught sight of Gordon, reached him in two steps and caught him by the shoulder. “Is Van Effen still in there? You were nearest him.”

Gordon stared at him blankly, his eyes still wide with fear. His mouth was working, the lips jerking and twisting in uncontrollable fashion, but no words came out. Nicolson released his grip on the shoulder, struck him twice, savagely, across the face, open-handed and back-handed, caught him again before he could fall.

“Answer me or I’ll kill you, Gordon. Did you leave Van Effen in there?”

Gordon nodded his head jerkily, his fear-whitened face wealing red from the imprint of Nicolson’s fingers.

“You left him in there?” Nicolson demanded incredulously. “You left him to die in that inferno?”

“He was going to murder me!” Gordon whined. “He was going to kill me.”

“You bloody fool! He saved your life. He saved all our lives.” He sent Gordon staggering with a savage shove, brushed off a couple of restraining hands and had covered the ten paces to the council house and leapt through the sheeted flame of the doorway before he had properly realised what he was doing.

The heat inside struck at him with the physical impact of a violent blow, he could feel it engulf him, wash over him in a great wave of burning pain. The superheated air, starved now of its life-giving oxygen, seared down into his lungs like fire itself. He could smell his hair singeing almost immediately, and the tears flooded into his eyes and threatened to blind him, and had it been any darker inside he would have been blinded: but in the savage red glare of the flames it was as bright, almost, as the noon-day sun.

There was no difficulty in seeing Van Effen. He was huddled against the still intact far wall, sitting on the ground, propped up on one arm. His khaki shirt and drill trousers were saturated with blood, and his face was ashen. Gasping, choking, his heaving lungs fighting for air and getting none, Nicolson stumbled as fast as he could across to the far wall of the council house. He had to hurry, he knew, he could last only moments in this atmosphere, half a minute at the most. His clothes were already smouldering, torn edges smoking and burning irregularly red, his tortured lungs couldn’t find the oxygen for his rapidly weakening body and the heat on his face and body was like a blast furnace.

Van Effen looked at him vaguely, without either expression or comment. Probably half dead already, Nicolson thought, God only knew how the man had survived even that long. He stooped, tried to pry Van Effen’s fingers free from the guard and trigger of the machinecarbine, but it was hopeless, the hand was locked across the metal like a band of iron. There was no time to lose, perhaps it was already too late. Gasping, struggling, the sweat running off his overheated body in streams, Nicolson put out the last of his fading strength in one despairing effort and raised the wounded man up in his arms.

He had covered half the return journey when a crackling, rending noise, loud even above the roar of the flames, made him break step and halt just in time as several blazing, smoking timbers from the roof crashed to the ground in a pyrotechnic eruption of flying sparks and red-hot embers not three feet from where he stood. The doorway was completely blocked off. Nicolson jerked back his head, stared upwards through smarting, sweat-filmed eyes, gathered a hasty blurred impression of a crumbling, caving roof already falling in upon him, and waited no longer. Four stumbling, plunging steps it took him to cross the blazing beams that lay between them and the doorway, and four steps were eternity. The now tindery dry khaki drills caught fire immediately and the writhing cocoons of flame ran up his legs so fast and so far that he could feel their hungry tips licking agonisingly at the bare forearms that supported the dead weight of Van Effen. Red-hot swords of fire pierced the soles of his feet in merciless excoriation and his nostrils were full of the sickening stench of scorching flesh. His mind was going, his strength was gone, and no sense of time or purpose or direction was left him when he felt urgent hands catching him by the arms and shoulders and pulling him out into the cool, sweet, life-giving air of the evening.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to hand Van Effen over to outstretched arms, to collapse himself on the ground and let the waiting wave of unconsciousness wash over him and carry him off to merciful oblivion, and the temptation to do both was almost irresistible. But he did neither, just stood instead with wide-planted feet, sucking giant draughts of air into a body that seemed able to accommodate only a fraction of what it needed. Seconds passed and his mind began to clear, the trembling in his legs eased, and he could see Walters and Evans and Willoughby crowding round him, but he ignored them, brushed through and carried Van Effen to the shelter of the nearest up-wind hut in the kampong.

Slowly, with an infinite gentleness, he lowered the wounded man to the ground, and started to unbutton the holed and bloodstained shirt. Van Effen caught his wrists with feeble hands.

“You are wasting your time, Mr. Nicolson.” His voice was only a feeble murmur with blood in it, barely audible above the crackling roar of the flames.

Nicolson ignored him, ripped the sides of the shirt apart and winced in shock at the sight that lay below. If Van Effen were to live, he would have to be strapped up, and at once. He tore off his own charred and shredded shirt, ripped it and padded the wounds as his eyes travelled up to the German’s white, pinched face. Van Effen’s lips twisted in some kind of a smile, it might have been a sardonic smile, but it was difficult to tell without reading the expression in his eyes, and it was no longer possible to read anything in Van Effen’s eyes for they were already misted over with the glaze of approaching unconsciousness.

“I told you—don’t waste time,” he murmured. “The launch—Kiseki’s launch. Get it. It has a radio, probably a big transmitter— you heard what Yamata said … Walters can send a message.” His voice was an urgent whisper. “At once, Mr. Nicolson, at once.” His hands dropped away from Nicolson’s wrists and fell limply by his side, palm upwards on the hard-packed earth of the kampong.

“Why did you do it, Van Effen?” Nicolson stared down at the sick man and shook his head, slowly, wonderingly, from side to side. “Why in the name of heaven did you do it?”

“God only knows. Or maybe I know also.” He was breathing very rapidly, very shallowly, now, with only a few gasping words to every breath. “Total war is total war, Mr. Nicolson, but this is work for barbarians.” He gestured weakly at the blazing hut. “If any one of my countrymen could have been with me tonight, he would have done what I have done. We’re people, Mr. Nicolson, we’re just people.” He reached up one flaccid hand, pulled the opened shirt to one side, and smiled. “If you cut us, do we not bleed?” He burst into a paroxysm of bubbling, whooping coughs that contracted torn stomach muscles and lifted head and shoulders clear of the ground, then sank back again, so quiet, so still, that Nicolson stooped quickly forward, in sudden surety that the man was gone. But Van Effen lifted his eyelids again, with the slowness and infinite effort of a man raising a massive weight and smiled at Nicolson through filmed and misted eyes.

“We Germans do not go easily. This is not the end of Van Effen.” He paused for a long moment, went on in a whisper: “Winning a war costs a great deal. It always costs a great deal. But sometimes the cost is too high, and it is not worth the price. Tonight the cost, the price asked, was far too high. I—I could not pay the price.” A great gout of flame shot up from the roof of the council house, bathing his face in its red and savage glare, then it died down again and his face was white and still and he was murmuring something about Kiseki.

“What is it?” Nicolson was so low over him now that their faces were almost touching. “What did you say?”

“Colonel Kiseki.” Van Effen’s voice was very far away. He tried to smile again, but it was only a pathetic twitch of his lower lip. “Perhaps we have something in common. I think—” Here his voice faded into nothingness, then came again, strongly. “I think we both have a weakness for very little children.”

Nicolson stared down at him, then twisted round as a loud, rending crash echoed across the kampong and a sheet of flame leapt up, a flame that illumined every remotest corner of the little village. The council house, its last supports burnt out, had collapsed in on itself and was burning more furiously than ever. But only for a moment. Even as Nicolson watched the licking tongues of flame shrank back down towards the earth and the dark gloomy shadows crept forward from every side. Nicolson looked away and bent down to talk again to Van Effen, but Van Effen was unconscious.

Slowly, wearily, Nicolson straightened himself, but remained sunk on his knees, staring down at the grievously wounded man. All at once the exhaustion, the despair and the sharp, fiery agony of his legs and feet and arms flooded in on him and the temptation to let himself go, to slip into the friendly, embracing darkness that hovered round the woolly, shadowed edges of his mind was almost overpowering. He was actually swaying backwards and forwards on his knees, eyes all but closed and his arms swinging limply from his shoulders, when he heard a voice shouting, the sound of feet thudding across the kampong at a dead run and felt the hard urgent fingers biting cruelly through the red charred skin of his upper arm.

“Come on, sir, come on! For God’s sake get to your feet!” There was a fierceness, a burning desperation in McKinnon’s voice that Nicolson had never heard before. “They’ve got them, sir. Those yellow devils have taken them away!”

“What? What?” Nicolson shook his aching fuzzy head from side to side. “They’ve taken what away? The plans, the diamonds? They’re welcome to all—”

“I hope the diamonds go to hell and roast there with every little yellow bastard in the East.” McKinnon was half-sobbing, half-shouting at the top of his voice in a voice Nicolson had never heard before, his eyes were flooded with tears, his great fists whiteknuckled by his side, and he was quite mad, insane with rage. “It’s not only the diamonds they’ve taken, sir, I wish to God it was. The inhuman devils have taken hostages with them, I saw them throw them into their truck. The captain, Miss Drachmann and that poor wee boy!”

FIFTEEN

Beyond anger lies fury, the heedless, ungovernable rage of the berserker, and beyond that again, a long, long step beyond the boundary of madness, lies the region of cold and utterly uncaring indifference. When a man enters that region, as few ever do, he is no longer himself, he is a man beside himself, a man without all his normal codes and standards of feeling and thought and emotions, a man for whom words like fear and danger and suffering and exhaustion are words that belong to another world and whose meaning he can no longer comprehend. It is a state characterised by an abnormally heightened clarity of mind, by a hyper-sensitive perception of where danger lies, by a total and unhuman disregard for that danger. It is, above all, a state characterised by an utter implacability. It was in such a state that Nicolson found himself at half-past eight on the evening of that day in late February, seconds only after McKinnon had told him that Gudrun and Peter were gone.

His mind was clear, unnaturally so, swiftly weighing up the situation as far as he knew it, balancing the possibilities and the probabilities, racing ahead and formulating the only plan that could offer any hope at all of success. His weariness, the sheer physical exhaustion, had dropped from him like a falling cloak: he knew the change was psychological, not physiological, that he would pay heavily for it later, but it didn’t matter, he was oddly certain that no matter what the source of his energy, it would carry him through. He was still aware, remotely, of the severe burns on his legs and arms, of the pain in his throat where the Japanese bayonet had bitten in so deeply, but his awareness was no more than an intellectual acknowledgment of these burns and wounds, they might well have belonged to another man.

His plan was simple, suicidally simple, and the chances of failure so high that they seemed inevitable, but the thought of failure never entered his mind. Half a dozen questions fired at Telak, the same at McKinnon and he knew what he must do, what everyone must do if there was to be any hope at all. It was McKinnon’s story that settled the problem for him.

The council house had blazed so fiercely, had gone up with such incredible speed, for one reason only—McKinnon had saturated the whole windward wall with the contents of a four-gallon can of petrol. He had stolen this from the Japanese truck within a couple of minutes of its arrival—the driver had kept careless watch and was now lying on the ground, less than ten feet away—and he had been just on the point of setting fire to it when a patrolling sentry had almost literally stumbled across him. But he had done more than steal the petrol, he had tried to immobilise the truck. He had searched for the distributor, failed to find it in the darkness, but had located the carburettor intake fuel line, and the soft copper had bent like putty in his hands. It seemed unlikely, impossible rather, that the truck could get much more than a mile on the cupful of fuel that remained—and it was four miles to the town of Bantuk.

Quickly, Nicolson asked Telak for co-operation, and got it at once. With his father and several of his tribesmen dead, neutrality no longer existed for Telak. He said little, but what little he did say was bitter and savage and concerned with nothing but vengeance. He nodded immediate compliance to Nicolson’s request that he provide a guide to lead the main party—only seven now, all told, under the leadership of Vannier—via the main road to Bantuk, where they were to seize and board the launch, if this could be done in absolute silence, and rapidly translated to one of his tribesmen, giving him the rendezvous. He then ordered half a dozen of his men to search the dead Japanese soldiers lying around the kampong and to bring all their weapons and ammunition to a central spot. A tommy-gun, two automatic rifles and a strange automatic pistol proved to be still serviceable. Telak himself disappeared into a nearby hut and emerged with two Sumatran parangs, honed to razor-sharp edges, and a couple of curious, elaborately-chased daggers, ten inches long and shaped like a flame, which he stuck in his own belt. Within five minutes of the destruction of the council house, Nicolson, McKinnon and Telak were on their way.

The road to Bantuk—no road, really, but a graded jungle path barely six feet wide—wound tortuously in and out among palm-oil plantations, tobacco plantations and evil-smelling swamps, waist deep and infinitely treacherous in the darkness. But the way Telak led them that night skirted the road only once, crossed it twice, penetrated straight through swamps and paddy fields and plantations, arrow-straight for the heart of Bantuk. All three men were hurt, and badly: all of them had lost blood, Telak most of all, and no competent doctor would have hesitated to immobilise any of the three in hospital: but they ran all the way to Bantuk, across impossible, energy-sapping, heart-breaking terrain, never once breaking down into a walk. They ran with their hearts pounding madly under the inhuman strain, leaden legs fiery with the pain of muscles taxed far beyond endurance, chests rising and falling, rising and falling as starving lungs gasped for more and still more air, the sweat running off their bodies in streams. They ran and they kept on running, Telak because this was his element and his father lay dead in the village with a Japanese bayonet through his chest, McKinnon because he was still mad with rage and his heart would keep him going until he dropped, Nicolson because he was a man beside himself and all the pain and labour and suffering was happening to someone else.

The second time they crossed the road they saw the Japanese truck, not five yards away in the darkness. They didn’t even break stride, there could be no doubt that it was abandoned, that the Japanese had taken their prisoners with them and hurried on foot towards the town. And the truck had managed to travel much farther than they had expected before it had broken down, at least half-way towards Bantuk, and they had no means of knowing how long ago the Japanese had left it. Nicolson was coldly aware that their chances now were all the poorer, very slender indeed. All of them knew it, but not one of them expressed the thought, suggested that they might ease their killing pace, even if only a fraction. If anything they lengthened their strides and pounded on even more desperately through the darkness.

More than once, after the sight of that truck, pictures flashed into Nicolson’s mind of how the Japanese soldiers must be treating their prisoners as they hurried them on fearfully along the jungle path. He had visions of rifle butts, maybe even bayonets, prodding viciously into the sick old captain, stumbling in sheer weakness and weariness, and into Gudrun as she, too, stumbled along in the darkness, cruelly handicapped by the crippling weight of the little boy in her arms—even after half a mile, a two-year old can become an intolerable weight. Or maybe she had dropped young Peter, maybe they had abandoned the little boy in their haste, left him by the side of the jungle, left him surely to die. But the mentor watching over Nicolson’s mind that night never let these thoughts stay with him long. They stayed long enough only to spur him on to even greater efforts, never long enough for obsession and ultimate weakness. Throughout all that interminable lurching, gasping run in the darkness, Nicolson’s mind remained strangely cold and remote.

It had turned cold, the stars had gone and it was beginning to rain when at last they reached the outskirts of Bantuk. Bantuk was a typical Javanese coastal town, not too big, not too little, a curious intermingling of the old and the new, a blend of Indonesia of a hundred years ago and of Holland ten thousand miles away. On the shore, following the curve of the bay, were the crazy, ramshackle huts erected on long bamboo poles below the highwater mark, with their suspended nets to trap the tidal catch of fish, and half-way along the beach a curved breakwater hooked far out into the bay, sheltering launches and fishing vessels, the tented prahus and the double outrigger canoes too large to be dragged up past the fishinghuts. Paralleling the beach, behind the huts, stretched two or three straggling, haphazard rows of straw-roofed wooden huts as found in the villages in the interior, and behind that again was the shopping and business centre of the community, which led in turn to the houses that stretched back into the gentle valley behind. A typical Dutch suburb, this last, not perhaps with the wide, lined boulevards of Batavia or Medan, but with trim little bungalows and the odd colonial mansion, every one of them with its beautifully kept garden.

It was towards this last section of the town that Telak now led his two companions. They raced through the darkened streets in the middle of the town, making no attempt at concealment, for the time for concealment was past. Few people saw them, for there were few abroad in the rain-washed streets. At first Nicolson thought that the Japanese must have declared a curfew, but soon saw that this was not the case, for a few coffee shops here and there were still open, their smocked Chinese proprietors standing under the awnings at the doorways, watching their passing in an impassive silence.

Half a mile inland from the bay, Telak slowed down to a walk and gestured Nicolson and McKinnon into the sheltered gloom of a high hedge. Ahead of them, not more than fifty yards away, the metalled road they were now standing on ended in a cul-de-sac. The bounding wall was high, arched in the middle, and the archway beneath was illuminated by a pair of electric lanterns. Below the archway itself two men were standing, talking and smoking, each leaning a shoulder against the curving walls. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the grey-green uniforms and hooked caps of the Japanese army, for the light was strong. Behind the archway they could see a drive-way stretching back up the hill, illuminated by lamps every few yards. And beyond that again was a high, whitewalled mansion. Little of it was visible through the archway, just a pillared stoop and a couple of big bay windows to one side, both of them brightly lit. Nicolson turned to the gasping man by his side.

“This is it, Telak?” They were the first words spoken since they had left the kampong.

“This is the house.” Telak’s words, like Nicolson’s, came in short, jerky gasps. “The biggest in Bantuk.”

“Naturally.” Nicolson paused to wipe the sweat off his face and chest and arms. Very particularly he dried the palms of his hands. “This is the way they would come?”

“No other way. They are sure to come up this road. Unless they have already come.”

“Unless they have already come,” Nicolson echoed. For the first time the fear and anxiety swept through his mind like a wave, a fear that would have panicked his mind and an anxiety that would have wrecked his plans but he thrust them ruthlessly aside. “If they’ve come, it’s already too late. If not, we still have time in hand. We may as well get our breath back for a minute or two—we can’t go into this more dead than alive. How do you feel, Bo’sun?”

“My hands are itching, sir,” McKinnon said softly. “Let’s go in now.”

“We won’t be long,” Nicolson promised. He turned to Telak. “Do I see spikes above the walls?”

“You do.” Telak’s voice was grim. “The spikes are nothing. But they’re electrified all the way.”

“So this is the only way in?” Nicolson asked softly.

“And the only way out.”

“I see. I see indeed.” No words were spoken for the next two minutes, there was only the sound of their breathing becoming shallower and more even, the intervals between breaths lengthening all the time. Nicolson waited with an almost inhuman patience, carefully gauging the moment when recovery would be at its maximum but the inevitable reaction not yet set in. Finally he stirred and straightened, rubbing his palms up and down the charred remnants of his khaki drills to remove the last drop of excess moisture, and turned again to Telak.

“We passed a high wall on this side about twenty paces back?”

“We did,” Telak nodded.

“With trees growing up behind it, close to the wall?”

“I noticed that also,” Telak nodded.

“Let’s get back there.” Nicolson turned and padded softly along in the shelter of the hedge.

It was all over inside two minutes, and no one more than thirty or forty yards away could have heard the slightest whisper of sound. Nicolson lay on the ground at the foot of the high wall and moaned softly, then more loudly, more pitifully still as his first groans had attracted no attention at all. Within seconds, however, one of the guards started, straightened up and peered anxiously down the road, and a moment later the second guard, his attention caught by an especially anguished moan, did the same. The two men looked at one another, held a hurried consultation, hesitated, then came running down the road, one of them switching on a torch as he came. Nicolson moaned even more loudly, twisted in apparent agony so that his back was to them and so that he could not be so quickly identified as a Westerner. He could see the flickering gleam of bayonets in the swinging light of the torch, and an edgy guard would be just that little bit liable to prefer investigating a corpse to a living enemy, no matter how seriously hurt he might appear to be.

Heavy boots clattering on the metalled road, the two men slithered to a stop, stooped low over the fallen man and died while they were still stooping, the one with a flame-shaped dagger buried to the hilt in his back as Telak dropped off the high wall above, the other as McKinnon’s sinewy hands found his neck a bare second after Nicolson had kicked the rifle out of his unsuspecting hand.

Nicolson twisted swiftly to his feet, stared down at the two dead men. Too small, he thought bitterly, far too damned small. He’d hoped for uniforms, for disguise, but neither of these two uniforms would have looked at any of the three of them. There was no time to waste. Telak and himself at wrists and ankles, one swing, two, a powerful boost from McKinnon in the middle and the first of the guards was over the high wall and safely out of sight, five seconds more and the other had joined him. Moments later all three men were inside the grounds of the mansion.

The well-lighted pathway was flanked on both sides by either high bushes or trimmed trees. On the right-hand side, behind the trees, was only the high wall with the electric fence on top: on the other side of the drive-way was a wide, sloping lawn, bare in patches but well-kept and smooth, dotted with small trees irregularly planted in circular plots of earth. Light reached the lawn from the drive-way and the front of the house, but not much. The three men flitted soundlessly across the grass, from the shadowed shelter of one tree to the next until they reached a clump of bushes that bordered the gravel in front of the portico of the house. Nicolson leaned forward and put his mouth to Telak’s ear.

“Ever been here before?”

“Never.” Telak’s murmur was as soft as his own.

“Don’t know about any other doors? Never heard if the windows are barred or live-wired or fitted with intruder alarms?”

Telak shook his head in the darkness.

“That settles it,” Nicolson whispered. “The front door. They won’t be expecting visitors, especially visitors like us, through the front door.” He groped at his belt, unhooked the parang Telak had given him and began to straighten up from his kneeling position. “No noise, no noise at all. Quick and clean and quiet. We mustn’t disturb our hosts.”

He took half a pace forward, choked a muffled exclamation and sank back to his knees again. He had little option. McKinnon, for all his medium height, weighed almost two hundred pounds and was phenomenally strong.

“What is it,” Nicolson whispered. He rubbed his burnt forearm in silent agony, certain that McKinnon’s digging forefingers had torn off some of the skin.

“Someone coming,” McKinnon breathed in his ear. “Must have guards outside.”

Nicolson listened a second, then shook his head in the gloom to show that he could hear nothing. For all that he believed the bo’sun—his hearing was on a par with his remarkable eyesight.

“On the verge, not the gravel,” McKinnon murmured. “Coming this way. I can take him.”

“Leave him alone.” Nicolson shook his head strongly. “Too much noise.”

“He’ll hear us crossing the gravel.” McKinnon’s voice sank even lower, and Nicolson could hear the man coming now, could hear the soft swish of feet in the wet grass. “There’ll be no noise. I promise it.”

This time Nicolson nodded and gripped his arm in token of consent. The man was almost opposite them now, and in spite of himself Nicolson shivered. To his certain knowledge this would be the soft-spoken Highland bo’sun’s fourth victim that night, and only one of them, so far, had managed to get even a breath of sound past his lips. How long one could live with a man—three years in his case—and not really get to know him …

The man was just a foot past them, head turned away as he looked towards the two lighted windows and the far-off murmur of voices from behind them, when McKinnon rose to his feet, noiseless as a wraith, hooked hands closing round the man’s neck like a steel trap. He was as good as his word. There was no noise at all, not even the faintest whisper of sound.

They left him behind the bushes and crossed the gravel at a steady, unhurried walk, in case there were still some guards in the grounds to hear them, mounted the steps, crossed the portico and walked unchallenged through the wide open double doors.

Beyond lay a wide hall, softly lit from a central chandelier, with a high, arching roof, walls panelled in what looked like oak, and a gleaming parquetry floor, finely tesselated in jarrah and kauri and some light-coloured tropical hardwoods. From either side of the hall, wide, sweeping staircases, a darker coloured wood than that of the walls, curved up to meet the broad, pillared balcony that ran the full length of both sides and the back. At the foot of either stairway was a set of double doors, closed, and between them, at the back, a third, single door. All the doors were painted white, lending an incongruous note to the dusky satin of the walls. The door at the back of the hall was open.

Nicolson gestured to McKinnon and Telak to take up position one on either side of the double doors to the right, then padded catfooted across the hall to the open door at the back. He could feel the cool, hard floor under the pads of his feet; that gruelling crosscountry run must have torn off most of what charred remains of canvas soles had been left him after he had carried Van Effen out of the burning council house. His mind registered it automatically, but disregarded it, just as it disregarded the pain of the raw, burnt flesh. There would come a time for suffering, but that time was not yet. That feeling of ice-cold indifference coupled with its razor-edged calculation was with him still, more strongly than ever.

He flattened himself against the far wall, cocked his head in listening, his eyes turned towards the open doorway. At first he could hear nothing, then faintly he caught the far-off murmur of voices and the occasional chink of crockery. The kitchens and the servants’ quarters, obviously—and if the men behind these double doors were eating, and they might well be, this being about the hour of the late evening meal, servants would be liable to be coming down that long passage and across the hall at any moment. Nicolson slid noiselessly forward and risked a quick glance round the edge of the door. The passage was dimly lit, about twenty feet in length, with two closed doors on either side and one at the far end, open, showing a white rectangle of light. There was no one to be seen. Nicolson stepped into the passage, felt behind the door, found a key, withdrew it, stepped back out into the entrance hall, pulled the door softly shut behind him and locked it.

He recrossed the hall as softly as he had come and rejoined the others at the white-painted double doors. Both men looked at him as he approached—McKinnon still grim and implacable, his surging anger well under control but ready to explode at any moment, Telak a ghastly, blood-smeared sight under the lights, dusky face drawn and grey with fatigue, but revenge would keep him going for a long time yet. Nicolson whispered a few instructions in Telak’s ear, made sure he understood and waited until he had slipped away and hidden himself behind the right-hand staircase.

There was a low murmur of voices from behind the double-doors, a murmur punctuated by an occasional guffaw of laughter. For a few moments Nicolson listened with his ear to the crack between the two doors, then tested each in turn with an infinitely gentle pressure of a probing forefinger. Each yielded an almost imperceptible fraction of an inch, and Nicolson straightened, satisfied. He nodded at McKinnon. The two men lined up the guns at their sides, muzzles just touching the white-painted woodwork in front of them, kicking the doors wide open and walked into the room together.

It was a long, low room, wood-panelled and parquet-floored like the hall, with wide bay windows, mosquito-curtained. The far wall of the room had another, smaller window, and the two doors in the left wall had a long, oaken side-board between them, this last the only wall furnishing. Most of the floor space was taken up by a U-shaped banqueting-table and the chairs of the fourteen men who sat around it. Some of the fourteen were still talking, laughing and drinking from the deep glasses in their hands, oblivious of the entrance of the two men, but, one by one, the sudden silence of the others caught the attention of those who still talked, and they too fell silent, staring towards the door and sitting very still indeed.

For a man allegedly mourning the death of his son, Colonel Kiseki was making a magnificent job of dissembling his sorrow. There was no doubt to his identity. He occupied the ornate, highbacked chair of honour at the top of the table, a short, massive man of tremendous girth, with his neck bulging out over his tight uniform collar, tiny, porcine eyes almost hidden in folds of flesh, and very short black hair, grey at the temples, sticking up from the top of his round head like the bristles of a wire brush. His face was flushed with alcohol, empty bottles littered the table in front of him and the white cloth was stained with spilt wine. He had had his head flung back and been roaring with laughter when Nicolson and McKinnon had entered, but now he was sitting hunched forward in his chair, tightly-gripping fists ivory-knuckled on the arms of his chair, the laughter in his puffy face slowly congealing into an expression of frozen incredulity.

No one spoke, no one moved. The silence in the room was intense. Slowly, watchfully, Nicolson and McKinnon advanced one on either side of the table, the soft padding of their feet only intensifying the uncanny silence, Nicolson to the left, McKinnon advancing up by the wide bay windows. And still the fourteen men sat motionless in their seats, only their eyes slowly swivelling as they followed the movements of the two men with the guns. Half-way up the lefthand side of the table Nicolson halted, checked that McKinnon had his eye on the whole table, turned and opened the first door on his left, let the door swing slowly open as soon as it had clicked, swung noiselessly round and took a silent step towards the table. As soon as the door had clicked an officer with his back to him, his hand hidden from McKinnon on the other side, had started to slide a revolver from a side holster and already had the muzzle clear when the butt of Nicolson’s automatic rifle caught him viciously just above the right ear. The revolver clattered harmlessly on to the parquet floor and the officer slumped forward heavily on to the table. His head knocked over an almost full bottle of wine and it gurgled away in the unnatural silence until it had almost emptied itself. A dozen pairs of eyes, as if mesmerised by the only moving thing in that room, watched the blood-red stain spread farther and farther across the snow-white cloth. And still no one had spoken.

Nicolson turned again to look through the now open door. A long passage, empty. He shut the door, locked it, turned his attention to the next. A cloak-room lay behind this, small, about six feet square and windowless. This door Nicolson left open.

He went back to the table, moved swiftly down one side of it, searching men for weapons while McKinnon kept his tommy-gun gently circling. As soon as he had finished searching he waited until McKinnon had done the same on his side. The total haul was surprisingly small, a few knives and three revolvers, all of the latter taken from army officers. With the one recovered from the floor that made four in all. Two of these Nicolson gave McKinnon, two he stuck in his own belt. For close, concentrated work the automatic rifle was a far deadlier weapon.

Nicolson walked to the head of the table and looked down at the grossly corpulent man sitting in the central chair.

“You are Colonel Kiseki?”

The officer nodded but said nothing. The astonishment had now vanished, and the watchful eyes were the only sign of expression in an otherwise impassive face. He was on balance again, completely under control. A dangerous man, Nicolson thought bleakly, a man whom it would be fatal to underestimate.

“Tell all these men to put their hands on the table, palm upwards, and to keep them there.”

“I refuse.” Kiseki folded his arms and leaned, back negligently in his chair. “Why should I—” He broke off with a gasp of pain as the muzzle of the automatic rifle gouged deeply into the thick folds of flesh round his neck.

“I’ll count three,” Nicolson said indifferently. He didn’t feel indifferent. Kiseki dead was no good to him. “One. Two—”

“Stop!” Kiseki sat forward in his chair, leaning away from the pressure of the rifle, and started to talk rapidly. Immediately hands came into view all round the table, palms upward as Nicolson had directed.

“You know who we are?” Nicolson went on.

“I know who you are.” Kiseki’s English was slow and laboured, but sufficient. “From the English tanker Viroma. Fools, crazy fools! What hope have you? You may as well surrender now. I promise you—”

“Shut up!” Nicolson nodded at the men sitting on either side of Kiseki, an army officer and a heavy-jowled, dark-faced Indonesian with immaculately waved black hair and a well-cut grey suit. “Who are these men?”

“My second in command and the Mayor of Bantuk.”

“The Mayor of Bantuk, eh?” Nicolson looked at the mayor with interest. “Collaborating well, I take it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kiseki looked up at Nicolson through narrowed slits of eyes. “The mayor is a founder, a member of our Greater East Asia co-prosperity—”

“For heaven’s sake, shut up!” Nicolson glanced round the others sitting at the table—two or three officers, half-a-dozen Chinese, an Arab and some Javanese—then looked back at Kiseki. “You, your second in command and the Mayor remain here. The rest into that cloakroom there.”

“Sir!” McKinnon was calling softly from his place by one of the bay windows. “They’re coming up the drive now!”

“Hurry up!” Again Nicolson jammed his rifle into Kiseki’s neck. “Tell them. Into that cloakroom. At once!”

“In that box? There is no air.” Kiseki pretended horror. “They will suffocate in there.”

“Or they can die out here. They can take their choice.”

Nicolson leaned yet more heavily on the rifle and his forefinger began to whiten on the trigger. “But not until you go first.”

Thirty seconds later the room was still and almost empty, three men only sitting at the head of the banqueting-table. Eleven men were jammed into the tiny cloakroom, and the door was locked against them. McKinnon was pressed fiat to the wall close by one of the open double doors, and Nicolson was in the open doorway that led into the side passage. He was placed so that he could see the entrance to the double doors through the crack between his own door and the jamb. He was also placed so that the rifle in his hand was lined up on the centre of Colonel Kiseki’s chest. And Colonel Kiseki had had his orders. He’d had his orders, and Colonel Kiseki had lived too long, had seen too many desperate and implacable men not to know that Nicolson would shoot him like a dog even on the suspicion, far less the certainty, that he was being doublecrossed. Colonel Kiseki’s reputation for cruelty was matched only by his courage, but he was no fool. He intended to carry out his orders implicitly.

Nicolson could hear young Peter crying, a tired, dispirited wail, as the soldiers crossed the gravel and mounted the steps to the portico, and his mouth tightened. Kiseki caught his look and his muscles tensed in expectancy, waiting for the numbing crash of the bullet, then saw Nicolson shake his head and visibly, consciously relax. And then the footsteps had crossed the hall, halted at the doorway, then advanced again as Kiseki shouted out an order. A moment later the Japanese escort—there were six of them altogether—were inside the room, pushing their prisoners in front of them.

Captain Findhorn was in the lead. A soldier held him by either arm, his legs were dragging and he was ashen-faced and drawn, breathing quickly, hoarsely and in great pain. As soon as the soldiers halted they released his arms. He swayed once backwards, once forwards, his bloodshot eyes turned up in his head and he crumpled and folded slowly to the floor, fading into the merciful oblivion of unconsciousness. Gudrun Drachmann was directly behind him, Peter still in her arms. Her dark hair was tangled and dishevelled, the once-white shirt ripped half-way down her back. From where he stood, Nicolson couldn’t see her back, but he knew the smooth skin would be pock-marked with blood, for the soldier behind had his bayonet pressed into her shoulders. The impulse to step out from behind the door and empty the automatic rifle’s magazine into the man with the bayonet was almost overwhelming, but he crushed it down, stood where he was, still and quiet, looking from Kiseki’s impassive face to the smudged, scarred face of the girl. She, too, Nicolson could see now, was swaying slightly, her legs trembling with weariness, but she still held her head proudly and high.

Suddenly Colonel Kiseki barked an order. His men stared at him, uncomprehending. He repeated it almost immediately, smashing the flat of his hand down on the table before him, and at once four of the six men dropped the arms they were carrying on to the parquet floor. A fifth frowned in a slow, stupid fashion, as if still unwilling to believe his ears, looked at his companions, saw their arms on the floor, opened his hand reluctantly and let his rifle crash down on the floor beside the weapons of his comrades. Only the sixth, the man with the bayonet in Gudrun’s back, realised that something was very far wrong. He dropped lower into a crouch, glanced wildly round then collapsed to the floor like a stricken tree as Telak came up feather-footed from the hall behind him and smashed his rifle down on the unprotected back of the soldier’s head.

And then Nicolson and McKinnon and Telak were all in the room, Telak herding the five Japanese soldiers into a corner, McKinnon kicking the double doors shut and keeping a wary eye on the three men at the table, Nicolson unashamedly hugging the girl and the young boy still in her arms, smiling his delight and immense relief and saying nothing, while Gudrun, stiff-backed and straight, stared at him, for a long, long moment in uncomprehending wonder and disbelief, then sagged heavily against him, her face buried in his shoulder, murmuring his name over and over again. McKinnon was looking at them from time to time, grinning hugely, all the savage anger gone from his face. But he didn’t look at them for more than a fraction of a second at a time, and the muzzle of his gun never wavered from the three men at the top of the table.

“Johnny, Johnny!” The girl lifted her head and looked at him, the intensely blue eyes now shining and misted, rolling tear-drops cutting through the dark smudges on her cheek. She was shivering now, shivering from reaction and from the cold of her wet rainsoaked clothes, but she was quite oblivious of all that. The happiness in her eyes was something that Nicolson had never seen before. “Oh, Johnny, I thought it was all finished. I thought that Peter and I—” She broke off and smiled at him again. “How in the world did you get here? I—I don’t understand. How did you?”

“Private aeroplane.” Nicolson waved an airy hand. “It was no trouble. But later, Gudrun. We must hurry. Bo’sun?”

“Sir?” McKinnon carefully removed the smile from his face.

“Tie up our three friends at the head of the table there. Their wrists only. Behind their backs.”

“Tie us up!” Kiseki leaned forward, his fists clenched on the table top. “I see no need—”

“Shoot ‘em if you have to,” Nicolson ordered. “They’re no use to us any more.” He thought it as well not to add that Kiseki’s usefulness was yet to come but feared that the knowledge of his intentions might provoke the man to an act of desperation.

“Consider it done, sir.” McKinnon advanced purposefully towards them, tearing down several mosquito curtains as he passed. Twisted, they would make excellent ropes. Nicolson turned away from Gudrun after seeing her and Peter into a chair, and stooped low over the captain. He shook him by the shoulder and Findhorn finally stirred and wearily opened his eyes. Aided by Nicolson he sat up, moving like a very old man and gazed slowly round the room, comprehension slowly dawning on his exhausted mind.

“I don’t know how on earth you did it, but well done, my boy.” He looked back at Nicolson, inspected him from head to toe, wincing as he saw the cuts and savage burns on his chief officer’s legs and forearms. “What a bloody mess! I hope to God you don’t feel half as bad as you look.”

“Top of the world, sir,” Nicolson grinned.

“You’re a fluent liar, Mr. Nicolson. You’re as much a hospital case as I am. Where do we go from here?”

“Away, and very shortly. A few minutes, sir. Some little things to attend to first.”

“Then go by yourselves.” Captain Findhorn was half-joking, wholly earnest. “I think I’d rather take my chance as a prisoner of war. Frankly, my boy, I’ve had it, and I know it. I couldn’t walk another step.”

“You won’t have to, sir. I guarantee it.” Nicolson poked an inquiring toe at the bag one of the soldiers had been carrying, stooped and had a look inside. “Even brought the plans and the diamonds right here. But then, where else would they bring them? I hope, Colonel Kiseki, that you hadn’t set your heart too much on these?”

Kiseki stared at him, his face expressionless. Gudrun Drachmann drew in a quick breath.

“So that’s Colonel Kiseki!” She looked at him for a long moment, then shivered. “I can see that Captain Yamata was right enough. Thank God you got here first, Johnny.”

“Captain Yamata!” Kiseki’s eyes small enough normally in the folds of fat, had almost vanished. “What happened to Captain Yamata?”

“Captain Yamata has joined his ancestors,” Nicolson said briefly. “Van Effen shot him almost in half.”

“You’re lying! Van Effen was our friend, our very good friend.”

“‘Was’ is right,” Nicolson agreed. “Ask your men here—later.” He nodded to the group still cowering under the menace of Telak’s rifle. “Meantime, send one of these men to collect a stretcher, blankets and torches. I needn’t warn you what will happen if you try any foolish tricks.”

Kiseki looked at him impassively for a moment, then spoke rapidly to one of his men. Nicolson waited until he had gone then turned again to Kiseki.

“You must have a radio in this house. Where is it?”

For the first time Kiseki smiled, displaying a magnificent collection of gold inlays on his front teeth.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr.—ah—”

“Nicolson. Never mind the formalities. The radio, Colonel Kiseki.”

“That is the only one we have.” Grinning more broadly still, Kiseki nodded towards the sideboard. He had to nod. McKinnon had already lashed his wrists behind his back.

Nicolson barely glanced at the small receiver.

“Your transmitter, Colonel Kiseki, if you don’t mind,” Nicolson said softly. “You don’t depend on carrier pigeons for communication, do you?”

“English humour. Ha-ha. Very funny indeed.” Kiseki was still smiling. “Of course we have a transmitter, Mr.—ah—Nicolson. At the barracks, our soldiers’ quarters.”

“Where?”

“The other end of the town.” Kiseki had the appearance of a man actually enjoying himself. “A mile from here. At least a mile.”

“I see.” Nicolson looked thoughtful. “Too far—and I very much doubt my ability to march you into your own barracks at the point of a gun, destroy a transmitter and get out again—not without getting myself killed in the process.”

“You show signs of wisdom, Mr. Nicolson,” Kiseki purred.

“I’m just not suicidally minded.” Nicolson rubbed his stubble of beard with a forefinger, then looked up at Kiseki again. “And that’s the only transmitter in town, eh?”

“It is. You’ll have to take my word for that.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Nicolson lost interest in the matter, watched McKinnon finish tying up the other officer with an enthusiastic heave that brought a sharp exclamation of pain, then turned as the soldier sent off by the colonel returned with stretcher, blankets and two torches. Then he looked back at the head of the table, first at Kiseki, then at the civilian by his side. The mayor was trying to look indignant and outraged, but only succeeded in looking scared. There was unmistakable fear in his dark eyes, and there was a violent tic at the corner of his mouth. He was sweating freely, and even the beautifully cut grey suit seemed to have become suddenly limp … Nicolson switched his glance back to Kiseki.

“The mayor is a good friend of yours, I take it, Colonel?” He could see the look in McKinnon’s eyes as he busied himself with the mayor’s wrists, the look of a man anxious to be gone and impatient of this talk, but he ignored it.

Kiseki cleared his throat pompously. “In our—what is the word?—capacities as commander of the garrison and the representative of the people we naturally—”

“Spare me the rest,” Nicolson interrupted. “I suppose his duties bring him here quite often.” He was looking at the mayor now, a deliberately contemptuous speculation in his eyes, and Kiseki fell for it.

“Comes here?” Kiseki laughed. “My dear Nicolson, this is the mayor’s house. I am only his guest.”

“Indeed?” Nicolson looked at the mayor. “You speak a few words of English perhaps, Mr. Mayor.”

“I speak it perfectly.” Pride momentarily overcame fear.

“Excellent,” Nicolson said dryly. “How about speaking some now?” His voice dropped an octave to a calculated theatrically low growl: the mayor didn’t look as if he would take much terrifying. “Where does Colonel Kiseki keep his transmitter in this house?”

Kiseki swung round on the mayor, his face suffused with anger at being tricked, started to shout something unintelligible at him, stopped short in mid-torrent as McKinnon cuffed him heavily over the ear.

“Don’t be a fool, Colonel,” Nicolson said wearily. “And don’t insist on treating me like a fool. Who ever heard of a military commander, especially in a red-hot, troubled area such as this is bound to be, having his communications centre a mile from where he is himself? Obviously the transmitter’s here, and just as obviously it would take all night to make you talk. I doubt if the mayor’s willing to make such sacrifices for your precious co-prosperity sphere.” He turned to the frightened looking civilian again. “I’m in a hurry. Where is it?”

“I will say nothing.” The mayor’s mouth worked and twisted even when he wasn’t speaking. “You can’t make me talk.”

“You’re not even kidding yourself.” Nicolson looked at McKinnon. “Just kind of twist his arm, will you, Bo’sun?”

McKinnon twisted. The mayor screamed, more in anticipatory fear than in any real pain. McKinnon slackened his grip.

“Well?”

“I don’t know what you were talking about.”

This time McKinnon didn’t have to be told. He jerked the mayor’s right arm high up until the back of his wrist was flat against the shoulder-blade. The mayor shrieked like a pig at the approach of the poleaxe.

“Upstairs.” The mayor was sobbing with pain and fear—chiefly fear. “On the roof. My arm—you’ve broken my arm!”

“You can finish tying him up now, Bo’sun.” Nicolson turned away in disgust. “Right, Colonel, you can lead the way.”

“My gallant friend here can finish the job.” Kiseki spat the words out. His teeth were tightly clenched and the expression on his face boded ill for the mayor should they meet again in different circumstances. “He can show you where it is.”

“No doubt. But I would prefer you to come. Some of your men might be wandering about with machine-guns and I’m quite sure they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the mayor and myself full of a lot of little holes. But you’re a foolproof life insurance.” Nicolson transferred his rifle to his left hand, pulled one of the revolvers from his belt and checked that the safety-catch was off. “I’m in a hurry, Colonel. Come on.”

They were back inside five minutes. The transmitter was now a havoc of twisted steel and shattered valves, and they had encountered no one, coming or going. The mayor’s screams appeared to have attracted no attention, possibly because of the closed doors, but more probably, Nicolson suspected, because the staff were well accustomed to such sounds emanating from Kiseki’s rooms.

McKinnon had not been idle in his absence. Captain Findhorn, covered with blankets and holding a rather fearful Peter Tallon in his arms, was lying comfortably on the stretcher on the floor. A Japanese soldier squatted at each of the four comers of the stretcher, and closer inspection showed that they hadn’t much option: the bo’sun had tied their wrists securely to the handles. The mayor and Kiseki’s second in command were tied together by a short length of rope linking their right and left elbows respectively. Telak’s victim still lay on the floor and Nicolson suspected that he would be there for a long time to come. There was no sign of the sixth man.

“Very nice indeed, Bo’sun.” Nicolson looked round approvingly. “Where’s our missing friend?”

“He’s not really missing, sir. He’s in the cloakroom there.” Ignoring Kiseki’s scowls and protests, McKinnon was busy securing him to the mayor’s left elbow. “It was a bit of a job getting the door shut, but I managed it.”

“Excellent.” Nicolson took a last look round the room. “No point in waiting any longer, then. Let’s be on our way.”

“Where are we going?” Kiseki had his feet planted wide, his huge head hunched far down into his shoulders. “Where are you taking us?”

“Telak tells me that your personal launch is the finest and fastest for a hundred miles up and down the coast. We’ll be through the Sunda Straits and into the Indian Ocean long before the dawn comes.”

“What!” Kiseki’s face was contorted in fury. “You’re taking my launch! You’ll never get away with it, Englishman, you’ll never get away with it.” He paused, another and even more shocking thought occurred to him and he lunged forward across the parquet floor, dragging the other two behind him and kicking out at Nicolson in berserk anger. “You’re taking me with you, damn you, you’re taking me with you!”

“Of course. What else did you think?” Nicolson said coldly. He stepped back a couple of paces to avoid the flailing feet and jabbed the muzzle of his rifle, none too gently into Kiseki’s midriff, just below the breast-bone. Kiseki doubled up in agony. “You’re our one guarantee of a safe-conduct. We’d be madmen to leave you behind.”

“I won’t go,” Kiseki gasped. “I won’t go. You can kill me first, but I won’t go. Concentration camps! Prisoner-of-war of the English! Never, never, never! You can kill me first!”

“It won’t be necessary to kill you.” Nicolson pointed out. “We can tie you, gag you, even take you on a stretcher if we have to.” He nodded at the cloakroom door. “Plenty of cheap labour in there. But it would only complicate matters. You can come on your feet or you can come on a stretcher with a couple of bullet holes in your legs to quieten you down.”

Kiseki looked at the pitiless face and made his choice. He came on his feet.

On their way down to the jetty they met no Japanese soldiers, no one at all. A windless night, but the rain was falling heavily, persistently, and the streets of Bantuk were deserted. At long, long last, luck was turning their way.

Vannier and the others were already aboard the launch. There had been only one man on guard, and Telak and his men had been as silent as the night. Van Effen was already asleep in a bunk below, and Walters was just about to begin transmission. Forty-four feet long and with a fourteen-foot beam, the launch gleamed and shone even in the rain and the darkness and was ready for instant departure.

Willoughby took over the engine-room and almost drooled with sheer joy at the sight of the big, immaculately kept twin diesels. Gordon and Evans loaded another half-dozen drums of fuel oil on to the deck aft. And McKinnon and Vannier were already making a round of the larger vessels behind the breakwater, checking for radio sets, smashing the magneto of the only other launch in the harbour.

They left at exactly ten o’clock at night, purring gently out into a sea as smooth as a mill-pond. Nicolson had begged Telak to accompany them, but he had refused, saying that his place was with his people. He had gone up the long jetty without as much as a backward glance, and Nicolson knew they would never see him again.

As they moved out into the darkness, the four Japanese soldiers, still lashed to the stretchers, ran pell-mell up the vanishing jetty, shouting at the tops of their high-pitched voices. But their cries were abruptly lost, drowned in a sudden clamour of sound as the launch rounded the point of the breakwater, the twin throttles jammed wide open, and headed south-west under maximum power towards Java Head and the Indian Ocean beyond.

They rendezvoused with H.M.A.S. Kenmore, a Q-class destroyer, at half-past two in the morning.

MacLean Goes Everywhere You Do

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (short stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Last Frontier

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins 1994 and by Fontana 1963

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1959

Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1959

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9354-7

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

To Gilleasburg

ONE

The wind blew steadily out of the north and the night air was bitterly chill. Nothing moved across the snow. Under the high cold stars the frozen plain empty, desolate, stretched endlessly away on every side until it vanished into the blurred distance of an empty horizon. Over everything lay the silence of death.

But the emptiness, Reynolds knew, was illusion. So was the desolation and the silence. Only the snow was real, the snow and that bone-deep, sub-zero cold that shrouded him from head to toe in a blanket of ice and continuously shook his entire body in violent, uncontrollable spasms of shivering, like a man suffering from ague. Perhaps that feeling of drowsiness that was beginning to creep over him was only an illusion also, but he was aware that it, too, was no illusion, it was real and he knew only too well the meaning it carried with it. Resolutely, desperately almost, he crushed down all thought of the cold, the snow and sleep, and concentrated on the problem of survival.

Slowly, painstakingly, careful to make not the slightest unnecessary sound or movement, he slid one frozen hand under the lapels of his trench-coat, fumbled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket, rolled it into a crushed ball and stuffed it into his mouth: betrayal of his position could come only by sight or sound, and the folds of the handkerchief would break up the heavy condensation of his breath in the frosty air and muffle the chattering of his teeth. Then he twisted round cautiously in the deep, snow-filled ditch by the roadside into which he had fallen, reached out an exploratory hand – now curiously mottled blue and white by the cold – for the trilby hat that had been knocked from his head when he had tumbled off the overhanging branch of the tree above him, found it and inched it slowly towards him. As thoroughly as his numbed, now almost useless fingers would permit, he covered crown and brim with a thick layer of snow, crammed the trilby deep over the giveaway black thatch of his head and lifted head and shoulders in almost grotesque slow motion until first the hat brim and then the eyes cleared the level of the ditch.

In spite of its violent shivering, his whole body was as taut as a bow-string as he waited, in tense, sickening expectation, for the shout that betokened discovery, or the shot or the numbing crash that carried oblivion with it as a bullet found the exposed target of his head. But there was no sound, no shot and his awareness only heightened with the passing of every moment. His first quick scanning of the circuit of the horizon was now complete, and there could be no doubt about it: there was no one there, at least close at hand, either to see or to be seen.

Moving just as carefully, just as slowly, but with a long drawn-out easing of his pent-up breath, Reynolds straightened until he was kneeling upright in the ditch. He was cold and shivering still, but was no longer aware of it, and the sleepiness had vanished as if it had been a dream. Once again his gaze travelled in a full circle around the horizon, but slowly, probingly, this time, the keen brown eyes missing nothing, and once more the answer was the same. There was nobody to be seen. There was nothing to be seen, nothing at all but the icy twinkle of the stars in the dark velvet of the sky, the level white plain, a few small isolated groves of trees and the curving ribbon of road beside him, its surface hard-packed by the snow-treads of heavy trucks.

Reynolds lowered himself back down into the deep trench which the impact of his falling body had carved out in the drifted snow in the ditch. He had to have time. He had to have time to recover his breath, to ease his still gasping lungs’ demands for air and more air: a scant ten minutes had passed since the truck in which he had stolen a lift had been stopped by the police block, and the brief, fierce scuffle, clubbed automatic in hand, with the two unsuspecting policemen who had investigated the rear of the truck, the sprint round the providential bend in the road and then the mile-long, grinding run till he had reached the grove of trees beside which he now lay had brought him to the point of exhausted collapse. He had to have time to figure out why the police had given up the pursuit so easily – they must have known that he would be bound to keep to the road: leaving the road for the deep, virgin snow on either side of it would not only have slowed him to a trudging walk but also, by virtue of the fresh tracks so easily visible on that starlit night, would have instantly given him away. And, above all, he had to have time to think, to plan out what he must do next.

It was typical of Michael Reynolds that he spent no time in self-recrimination or in wondering what might have happened had he chosen some other course of action. He had been trained in a hard and bitter school, where such idle luxuries as self-blame for what was irrevocably past and done with, useless post-mortems, crying over spilt milk and all negative speculations and emotions which might possibly contribute to a lessening of overall efficiency, were rigidly proscribed. He spent perhaps five seconds considering the past twelve hours, then dismissed the matter completely from his mind. He would have done the same thing over again. He had had every reason to believe his informant in Vienna that air travel to Budapest was temporarily out – airport security precautions during the fortnight of the forthcoming International Scientific Conference were reported to be the most stringent ever. The same applied to all the main railway stations, and all long-distance passenger trains were reported to be heavily patrolled by Security Police. That left only the road: first an illegal crossing of the frontier – no great feat if one had expert help and Reynolds had had the best there was – and then a stolen ride on some eastward bound truck. A road-block, the same Viennese informant had warned him, would almost certainly be in operation on the outskirts of Budapest, and Reynolds had been prepared for this: what he hadn’t been prepared for, and what none of his informants had known of, was the block east of Komarom, some forty miles outside the capital. Just one of those things – it could have happened to anyone and it just so chanced that it had happened to him. Reynolds gave the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug and the past ceased to exist for him.

It was equally typical of him – more precisely, perhaps, it was typical of the rigorous mental conditioning he had undergone in his long training – that his thoughts about the future were rigidly canalized, channelled along one all-exclusive, particular line of thought, towards the achievement of one specific objective. Again, the emotional colourings which would normally accompany the thought of the potentialities of a successful mission or the tragic consequences of failure had no part in his racing mind as he lay there in the freezing snow, thinking, calculating, planning, assessing chances with a cold and remote detachment. ‘The job, the job, always the job on hand,’ the colonel had repeated once, twice, a thousand times. ‘Success or failure in what you do may be desperately important to others, but it must never matter a damn to you. For you, Reynolds, consequences do not exist and must never be allowed to exist, and for two reasons: thinking about them upsets your balance and impairs your judgment – and every second you give up to thinking along these negative lines is always a second that should and must be used to working out how you’re going to achieve the job on hand.’

The job on hand. Always the job on hand. In spite of himself, Reynolds grimaced as he lay there waiting for his breathing to return to normal. There never had been more than one chance in a hundred, and now the odds had lengthened astronomically. But the job was still there, Jennings and all his priceless knowledge must be reached and brought out and that was all that mattered. But if he, Reynolds, failed in this, then he had failed and that was all there was to it. He might even fail to-night, on his first day of the assignment after eighteen months of the most rigorous and ruthless specialist training aimed at the accomplishment of this task alone, but that made no difference whatsoever.

Reynolds was superbly fit – he had to be, all the colonel’s specialist handful of men had to be – and his breathing was again as near normal as made no difference. As for the police mounting the road-block – there must be half a dozen of them, he had caught a glimpse of several others emerging from the hut just as he had rounded the bend – he would have to take a chance on them: there was nothing else he could do. Possibly they had only been stopping and searching eastbound trucks for contraband, and had no interest in panic-stricken passengers who fled away into the night – although it seemed likely enough that the two policemen he had left groaning in the snow might take a rather more personal interest in him. As for the immediate future he couldn’t lie there indefinitely to freeze in the snow or risk discovery by the sharp-eyed drivers of passing cars or trucks.

He would have to make for Budapest on foot – for the first part of the journey, at least. Three or four miles’ heavy trudging through the fields and then regain the road – that, at least, he would need to take him well clear of the road-block before he dared try a lift. The road to the east curved left before the block, and it would be easier for him to go to the left also, to short-circuit the bend of the road across the base of the triangle. But to the left, the north, that was, lay the Danube at no great distance, and he baulked from finding himself trapped in a narrow strip of land between river and road. There was nothing for it but to strike off to the south and round the apex of the triangle at a discreet distance – and on a clear night like that, a discreet distance meant a very considerable distance indeed. The detour would take hours to complete.

Teeth again chattering violently – he had removed the handkerchief to draw in the great, gasping breaths of air his lungs had demanded – chilled to the bone and with his hands and feet useless and empty of all feeling, Reynolds pushed himself shakily to his feet and began to brush the frozen snow off his clothes, glancing down the road in the direction of the police road-block. A second later he was once more flat on his face in the snow-filled ditch, his heart thumping heavily in his chest, his right hand struggling desperately to free his gun from the pocket in his coat where he had stuck it after his fight with the police.

He could understand now why the police had taken their time in looking for him – they could afford to. What he could not understand was his own folly in supposing that discovery could result only from some betraying movement or incautious sound made by himself. He had forgotten that there was such a thing as a sense of smell – he had forgotten all about the dogs. And there had been no mistaking the identity of the leading dog as it nosed eagerly along the road, not even in the semi-darkness: a bloodhound was unmistakable where there was any light at all.

With the sudden shout from one of the approaching men and the excited jabber of voices, he was on his feet again, reaching the grove of trees behind him in three short steps: it had been too much to hope that he hadn’t been spotted against that vast backcloth of white. He himself, in turn, had seen in that last quick glimpse that there were four men, each with a dog on leash: the other three dogs weren’t bloodhounds, he was sure of that.

He drew in behind the bole of the tree whose branches had lately given him such brief and treacherous refuge, freed the gun from his pocket and looked down at it. A specially made, beautifully machined version of a Belgian 6.35 automatic, it was a precise and deadly little gun and with it he could hit a target smaller than a man’s hand, at twenty paces, ten times out of ten. To-night, he knew, he would have difficulty even in hitting a man at half that distance, so unresponsive to the mind’s demands had his numbed and shaking hands become. Then some instinct made him lift the gun up before his eyes, and his mouth tightened: even in the faint starlight he could see that the barrel of the gun was blocked with frozen slush and snow.

He took off his hat, held it by the brim, and about shoulder height, jutting out from one side of the tree, waited a couple of seconds, then stooped as low as he could and risked a quick glance round the others. Fifty paces away now, if that, the four men were walking along in line abreast, the dogs still straining on their leashes. Reynolds straightened, dug out a Biro pen from his inside pocket and quickly, but without haste, began to free the barrel of the automatic of the frozen slush. But his numbed hands betrayed him, and when the Biro slipped from his fumbling fingers and disappeared point downwards in the deep snow, he knew it was useless to search for it, too late for anything more.

He could hear the brittle-soft crunch of steel-shod boots on the hard-packed snow of the road. Thirty paces, perhaps even less. He slid a white, pinched forefinger through the trigger guard, placed the inside of his wrist against the hard rough bark of the tree, ready to slide it round the trunk – he would have to press hard against the bole to keep his shaking hand even reasonably steady – and with his left hand fumbled at his belt to release the knife with its spring-loaded blade. The gun was for the men, the knife for the dogs, the chances about even, for the policemen were advancing towards him shoulder to shoulder across the width of the road, rifles dangling loose in the crooks of their arms, unskilled amateurs who knew what neither war nor death was. Or, rather, the chances would have been about even, but for the gun in his hand: the first shot might clear the blocked barrel, it might equally well blow his hand off. On balance, then, the chances were heavily against him, but then, on a mission such as this, the chances would always be against him: the job on hand was still on hand, and its accomplishment justified all risks short of the suicidal.

The knife spring clicked loudly and released the blade, a five-inch sliver of double-edged blued steel that gleamed evilly in the starlight as Reynolds edged round the bole of the tree and lined up his automatic on the nearest of the advancing policemen. His trigger finger tightened, held, slackened and a moment later he was back behind the tree trunk. Another and fresh tremor had seized his hand, and his mouth had gone suddenly dry: for the first time he had recognized the other three dogs for what they were.

Untrained country policemen, however armed, he could deal with: bloodhounds, too, he could handle, and with a fair chance of success: but only a madman would try conclusions with three trained Dobermann pinschers, the most vicious and terrible fighting dogs in the world. Fast as a wolf, powerful as an Alsatian and a ruthless killer utterly without fear, only death could stop a Dobermann. Reynolds didn’t even hesitate. The chance he had been about to take was no longer a chance but a certain way to suicide. The job on hand was still all that mattered. Alive, though a prisoner, there was always hope: with his throat torn out by a Dobermann pinscher, neither Jennings nor all the old man’s secrets would ever come home again.

Reynolds placed the point of his knife against a tree, pushed the spring-loaded blade home into its leather scabbard, placed it on the crown of his head and crammed his trilby on top of it. Then he tossed his automatic at the feet of the startled policemen and stepped out into the road and the starlight, both hands held high above his head.

Twenty minutes later they arrived at the police block hut. Both the arrest and the long cold walk back had been completely uneventful. Reynolds had expected, at the least, a rough handling, at the most a severe beating-up from rifle butts and steel-shod boots. But they had been perfunctory, almost polite in their behaviour, and had shown no ill-will or animosity of any kind, not even the man with his jaw blue and red and already badly swelling from the earlier impact of Reynold’s clubbed automatic. Beyond a token search of his clothing for further arms, they had molested him in no way at all, had neither asked any questions nor demanded to see and inspect his papers. The restraint, the punctiliousness, made Reynolds feel uneasy; this was not what one expected in a police state.

The truck in which he had stolen a lift was still there, its driver vehemently arguing and gesticulating with both hands as he sought to convince two policemen of his innocence – almost certainly, Reynolds guessed, he was suspected of having some knowledge of Reynolds’ presence in the back of the truck. Reynolds stopped, made to speak and if possible clear the driver, but had no chance: two of the policemen, all brisk officiousness now that they were once more in the presence of headquarters and immediate authority, caught his arms and hustled him in through the doors of the hut.

The hut was small, square and ill-made, the chinks in its walls closed up with wadded wet newspaper, and sparsely furnished: a portable wood stove with its chimney sticking through the roof, a telephone, two chairs and a battered little desk. Behind the desk sat the officer in charge, a small fat man, middle-aged, red-faced and insignificant. He would have liked his porcine little eyes to have had a cold, penetrating stare, but it didn’t quite come off: his air of spurious authority he wore like a threadbare cloak. A nonentity, Reynolds judged, possibly even, in given circumstances – such as the present – a dangerous little nonentity, but ready for all that to collapse like a pricked balloon at the first contact with real authority. A little bluster could do no harm.

Reynolds broke away from the hands of the men holding him, reached the desk in two paces and smashed down his fist so heavily that the telephone on the rickety little desk jumped and gave a tiny, chime-like ring.

‘Are you the officer in charge here?’ he demanded harshly.

The man behind the desk blinked in alarm, hurriedly sat back in his chair and had just begun to raise his hands in instinctive self-defence when he recovered himself and checked the movement. But he knew his men had seen it, and the red neck and cheeks turned an even darker hue.

‘Of course I’m in charge!’ His voice started off as a high squeak, dropped an octave as he came on balance again. ‘What do you think?’

‘Then what the devil do you mean by this outrage?’ Reynolds cut him short in mid-sentence, drew his pass and identification papers from his wallet and flung them on the table. ‘Go on, examine these! Check the photograph and thumb-print, and be quick about it. I’m late already, and I haven’t all night to argue with you. Go on! Hurry up!’

If he had failed to be impressed by the display of confidence and righteous indignation, the little man behind the desk would have been less than human – and he was very human indeed. Slowly, reluctantly, he drew the papers towards him and picked them up.

‘Johann Buhl,’ he read out. ‘Born Linz 1923, now resident Vienna, businessman, Import-Export dealer machine parts.’

‘And here by the express invitation of your Economic Ministry,’ Reynolds added softly. The letter he now threw on the table was written on the Ministry’s official notepaper, the envelope date-stamped Budapest four days previously. Negligently, Reynolds reached out a leg, hooked a chair towards him, sat and lit a cigarette – cigarette, case, lighter all made in Austria: the easy self-confidence could not be other than genuine. ‘I wonder what your superiors in Budapest will think of this night’s work?’ he murmured. ‘It will hardly increase your chances of promotion, I should think.’

‘Zeal, even misplaced zeal, is not a punishable offence in our country.’ The officer’s voice was controlled enough, but the pudgy white hands trembled slightly as he returned the letter to its envelope and pushed the papers back to Reynolds. He clasped his hands on the desk before him, stared at them, then looked up at Reynolds, his forehead creased. ‘Why did you run away?’

‘Oh, my God!’ Reynolds shook his head in despair: the obvious question had been a long time coming, and he’d had plenty of time to prepare. ‘What would you do if a couple of thugs, waving their guns around, set on you in the darkness? Lie down and let them butcher you?’

‘They were police officers. You could –’

‘Certainly they’re police officers,’ Reynolds interrupted acidly. ‘I can see that now – but it was as black as night inside the back of the truck.’ He was stretched out at his ease now, calm and relaxed, his mind racing. He had to end this interview quickly. The little man behind the desk was, after all, a lieutenant in the police or its equivalent. He couldn’t possibly be as stupid as he looked, he might stumble across an awkward question at any moment. Quickly Reynolds decided that his best hope lay in audacity: the hostility was gone from his manner, and his voice was friendly as he went on.

‘Look, let’s forget about this. I don’t think it’s your fault. You were just doing your duty – unfortunate though the consequences of your zeal might be for you. Let’s make a deal: you provide me with transport to Budapest, and I’ll forget it all. No reason why this should ever reach the ears of your superiors.’

‘Thank you. You are very kind.’ The police officer’s reception of the proposal was less enthusiastic than Reynolds had expected, one might even have imagined a hint of dryness in the tone. ‘Tell me, Buhl, why were you in that truck? Hardly a normal method of transport for businessmen as important as yourself. And you didn’t even let the driver know.’

‘He would probably have refused me – he had a notice forbidding unauthorized passengers.’ Far back in Reynolds’ mind a tiny little warning bell was ringing. ‘My appointment is urgent.’

‘But why –’

‘The truck?’ Reynolds smiled ruefully. ‘Your roads are treacherous. A skid on ice, a deep ditch and there you were – my Borgward with a broken front axle.’

‘You came by car? But for businessmen in a hurry –’

‘I know, I know!’ Reynolds let a little testiness, a little impatience, creep into his voice. ‘They come by plane. But I had 250 kilos of machine samples in the boot and back of my car: you can’t lug a damned great weight like that aboard a plane.’ Angrily, now, he stubbed out his cigarette. ‘This questioning is ridiculous. I’ve established my bona-fides and I’m in a great hurry. What about that transport?’

‘Two more little questions, and then you shall go,’ the officer promised. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair now, fingers steepled across his chest, and Reynolds felt his uneasiness deepen. ‘You came direct from Vienna? The main road?’

‘Of course! How else would I come?’

‘This morning?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Vienna was less than 120 miles from where they were. ‘This afternoon.’

‘Four o’clock? Five o’clock?’

‘Later. Ten past six exactly. I remember looking at my watch as I passed through your customs post.’

‘You could swear to that?’

‘If necessary, yes.’

The police officer’s nod, the quick shifting of his eyes, took Reynolds by surprise, and, before he could move, three pairs of hands had pinioned his from behind, dragged him to his feet, twisted his arms in front of him and snapped on a pair of shiny steel handcuffs.

‘What the devil does this mean?’ In spite of the shock, the cold fury in Reynolds’ tone could hardly have been bettered.

‘It just means that a successful liar can never afford to be unsure of his facts.’ The policeman tried to speak equably, but the triumph in his voice and eyes were unmistakable. ‘I have news for you, Buhl – if that is your name, which I don’t for a moment believe. The Austrian frontier has been closed to all traffic for twenty-four hours – a normal security check, I believe – as from three o’clock this afternoon. Ten past six by your watch indeed!’ Grinning openly, now, he stretched out a hand for the telephone. ‘You’ll get your transport to Budapest, all right, you insolent imposter – in the back of a guarded police car. We haven’t had a Western spy on our hands for a long time now: I’m sure they’ll be delighted to send transport for you, just especially for you, all the way from Budapest.’

He broke off suddenly, frowned, jiggled the receiver up and down, listened again, muttered something under his breath and replaced the receiver with an angry gesture.

‘Out of order again! That damned thing is always out of order.’ He was unable to conceal his disappointment, to have made the important announcement personally would have been one of the highlights of his life. He beckoned the nearest of the men.

‘Where is the nearest telephone?’

‘In the village. Three kilometres.’

‘Go there as fast as you can.’ He scribbled furiously on a sheet of paper. ‘Here is the number and the message. Don’t forget to say it comes from me. Hurry, now.’

The man folded the message, stuffed it into his pocket, buttoned his coat to the neck and left. Through the momentarily opened door, Reynolds could see that, even in the short time that had elapsed since his capture, clouds had moved across the stars and slow, heavy snowflakes were beginning to swirl across the silhouetted oblong of darkening sky. He shivered involuntarily, then looked back at the police officer.

‘I’m afraid that you’ll pay heavily for this,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re making a very grave mistake.’

‘Persistence is an admirable thing in itself, but the wise man knows when to stop trying.’ The little fat man was enjoying himself. ‘The only mistake I made was ever to believe a word you said.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘An hour and a half, perhaps two, on these snowy roads, before your – ah – transport arrives. We can fill in that time very profitably. Information, if you please. We’ll start off with your name – your real one this time, if you don’t mind.’

‘You’ve already had it. You’ve seen my papers.’ Unasked, Reynolds resumed his seat, unobtrusively testing his handcuffs: strong, close-fitting over the wrist and no hope there. Even so, even with bound hands, he could have disposed of the little man – the spring-knife was still under his trilby – but it was hopeless to think of it, not with three armed policemen behind him. ‘That information, those papers, are accurate and true. I can tell lies to oblige you.’

‘No one is asking you to tell lies, just to, shall we say, refresh your memory? Alas, it probably needs some jogging.’ He pushed back from the desk, levered himself heavily to his feet – he was even shorter and fatter standing upright than he had seemed sitting down – and walked round his desk. ‘Your name, if you please?’

‘I told you –’ Reynolds broke off with a grunt of pain as a heavily ringed hand caught him twice across the face, back-handed and forehanded. He shook his head to clear it, lifted his bound arms and wiped some blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His face was expressionless.

‘Second thoughts are always wiser thoughts,’ the little man beamed. ‘I think I detect the beginning of wisdom. Come now, let us have no more of this disagreeble foolishness.’

Reynolds called him an unprintable name. The heavily-jowled face darkened with blood almost as if at the touch of a switch, he stepped forward, ringed hand clubbing down viciously, then collapsed backwards across his desk, gasping and retching with agony, propelled by the scythe-like sweep of Reynolds’ upward swinging leg. For seconds the police officer remained where he had fallen, moaning and fighting for breath, half-lying, half-kneeling across his own desk, while his own men still stood motionless, the suddenness, the unbelievable shock of it holding them in thrall. It was just at this moment that the door crashed open and a gust of icy air swept into the hut.

Reynolds twisted round in his chair. The man who had flung open the door stood framed in the opening, his intensely cold blue eyes – a very pale blue indeed – taking in every detail of the scene. A lean, broad-shouldered man so tall that the uncovered thick brown hair almost touched the lintel of the doorway, he was dressed in a military, high-collared trench-coat, belted and epauleted, vaguely greenish under a dusting of snow, so long-skirted that it hid the top of his high, gleaming jackboots. The face matched the eyes: the bushy eyebrows, the flaring nostrils above the clipped moustache, the thin chiselled mouth all lent to the hard, handsome face that indefinable air of cold authority of one long accustomed to immediate and unquestioning obedience.

Two seconds were enough to complete his survey – two seconds would always be enough for this man, Reynolds guessed: no astonished looks, no ‘What’s going on here?’ or ‘What the devil does all this mean?’ He strode into the room, unhooked one of his thumbs from the leather belt that secured his revolver, butt forward, to his left waist, bent down and hauled the police officer to his feet, indifferent to his white face, his whooping gasps of pain as he fought for breath.

‘Idiot!’ The voice was in keeping with the appearance, cold, dispassionate, all but devoid of inflection. ‘Next time you – ah – interrogate a man, stand clear of his feet.’ He nodded curtly in Reynolds’ direction. ‘Who is this man, what were you asking him and why?’

The police officer glared malevolently at Reynolds, sucked some air down into his tortured lungs and whimpered huskily through a strangled throat.

‘His name is Johann Buhl, a Viennese businessman – but I don’t believe it. He’s a spy, a filthy Fascist spy,’ he spat out viciously. ‘A filthy Fascist spy!’

‘Naturally.’ The tall man smiled coldly. ‘All spies are filthy Fascists. But I don’t want your opinions, I want facts. First, how did you find out his name?’

‘He said so, and he had papers. Forgeries, of course.’

‘Give them to me.’

The police officer gestured towards the table. He could stand almost upright now. ‘There they are.’

‘Give them to me.’ The request, in tone, inflection, in every way, was a carbon copy of the first. The policeman reached out hastily, wincing with the pain of the sudden movement and handed him the paper.

‘Excellent. Yes, excellent.’ The newcomer rifled expertly through the pages. ‘Might even be genuine – but they’re not. He’s our man all right.’

Reynolds had to make a conscious effort to relax his clenching fists. This man was infinitely dangerous, more dangerous than a division of stupid bunglers like the little policeman. Even trying to fool this man would be a waste of time.

‘Your man? Your man?’ The policeman was groping, completely out of his depth. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I ask the questions, little man. You say he is a spy. Why?’

‘He says he crossed the frontier this evening.’ The little man was learning lessons in brevity. ‘The frontier was closed.’

‘It was indeed.’ The stranger leaned against the wall, selected a Russian cigarette from a thin gold case – no brass or chromium for the top boys, Reynolds thought bleakly – lit a cigarette and looked thoughtfully at Reynolds. It was the policeman who finally broke the silence. Twenty or thirty seconds had given him time to recover his thoughts and a shred of his courage.

‘Why should I take orders from you?’ he blustered. ‘I’ve never seen you in my life before. I am in charge here. Who the devil are you?’

Perhaps ten seconds, ten seconds spent minutely examining Reynolds’ clothes and face, elapsed before the newcomer turned lazily away and looked down at the little policeman. The eyes were glacial, dispassionate, but the expression on the face showed no change: the policeman seemed to shrink curiously inside his clothes and he pressed back hard against the edge of the desk.

‘I have my rare moments of generosity. We will forget, for the present, what you said and how you said it.’ He nodded towards Reynolds, and his tone hardened almost imperceptibly. ‘This man is bleeding from the mouth. He tried, perhaps, to resist arrest?’

‘He wouldn’t answer my questions and …’

‘Who gave you authority either to question or injure prisoners?’ The tone of the voice cut like a whip. ‘You stupid bungling idiot, you might have done irreparable harm! Overstep your authority once again and I personally will see to it that you have a rest from your exacting duties. The seaside, perhaps – Constanta, for a start?’

The policeman tried to lick his dry lips and his eyes were sick with fear. Constanta, the area of the Danube-Black Sea Canal slave labour camps, was notorious throughout Central Europe: many had gone there but no one ever returned.

‘I – I only thought –’

‘Leave thinking to those capable of such difficult feats.’ He jerked a thumb at Reynolds. ‘Have this man taken out to my car. He has been searched, of course?’

‘But of course!’ The policeman was almost trembling in his eagerness. ‘Thoroughly, I assure you.’

‘That statement coming from such as you makes a further search imperative,’ the tall man said dryly. He looked at Reynolds, one heavy eyebrow lifting slightly. ‘Must we be reduced to this mutual indignity – my having to search you personally, I mean.’

‘There’s a knife under my hat.’

‘Thank you.’ The tall man lifted the hat, removed the knife, courteously replaced the hat, pressed the release catch, thoughtfully inspected the blade, closed the knife, slid it into his coat pocket and looked at the white-faced policeman.

‘There is no conceivable reason why you should not rise to the topmost heights of your profession.’ He glanced at his watch – as unmistakably gold as the cigarette case. ‘Come, I must be on my way. I see you have the telephone here. Get me the Andrassy Ut, and be quick about it!’

The Andrassy Ut! Even though he had been becoming surer of the identity of the man with the passing of every moment, confirmation of his suspicions still came to Reynolds with a sense of shock and he could feel his face tightening in spite of himself under the speculative gaze of the tall stranger. Headquarters of the dreaded AVO, the Hungarian Secret Police currently reckoned the most ruthless and implacably efficient behind the iron curtain, the Andressy Ut was the one place on earth he wanted at all costs to avoid.

‘Ah! I see the name is not new to you.’ The stranger smiled. ‘That bodes no good for you, Mr Buhl, or for your bona-fides: the Andrassy Ut is hardly a name on every western businessman’s lips.’ He turned to the policeman. ‘Well, what are you stuttering about now?’

‘The – the telephone.’ The voice was high and squeaking again and faltering badly: he was afraid now to the point of terror. ‘It’s out of action.’

‘Inevitably. Matchless efficiency on every hand. May the gods help our unfortunate country.’ He produced a wallet from his pocket, opened it briefly for inspection. ‘Sufficiently good authority for the removal of your prisoner?’

‘Of course, Colonel, of course.’ The words tripped over one another. ‘Whatever you say, Colonel.’

‘Good.’ The wallet snapped shut, and the stranger turned to Reynolds and bowed with ironic courtesy.

‘Colonel Szendrô, Headquarters, Hungarian Political Police. I am at your service, Mr Buhl, and my car at your disposal. We leave for Budapest, immediately. My colleagues and I have been expecting you for some weeks now, and are most anxious to discuss certain matters with you.’

TWO

It was pitch dark outside now, but light streaming from the open door and uncovered window of the hut gave them enough visibility to see by. Colonel Szendrô’s car was parked on the other side of the road – a black, left-hand drive Mercedes saloon already covered with a deep layer of snow, all except the front part of the bonnet where the engine heat melted the snow as it fell. There was a minute’s delay while the colonel told them to release the truck driver and search the inside of the truck for any personal luggage Buhl might have been forced to abandon there – they found his overnight bag almost immediately and stuffed his gun into it – then Szendrô opened the front right-hand door of the car and gestured Reynolds to his seat.

Reynolds would have sworn that no one man driving a car could have held him captive for fifty miles, only to find out how wrong he was even before the car started. While a soldier with a rifle covered Reynolds from the left-hand side, Szendrô stooped inside the other door, opened the glove compartment in front of Reynolds, fetched out two lengths of thin chain and left the glove box open.

‘A somewhat unusual car, my dear Buhl,’ the colonel said apologetically. ‘But you understand. From time to time I feel that I must give certain of my passengers a feeling of – ah – security.’ Rapidly he unlocked one of the handcuffs, passed the end link of one of the chains through it, locked it, passed the chain through a ring or eye bolt in the back of the glove box and secured it to the other handcuff. Then he looped the second chain round Reynolds’ legs, just above the knees and, closing the door and leaning in through the opened window, secured it with a small padlock to the arm-rest. He stood back to survey his work.

‘Satisfactory, I think. You should be perfectly comfortable and have ample freedom of movement – but not enough, I assure you, to reach me. At the same time you will find it difficult to throw yourself out of the door, which you would find far from easy to push open anyway: you will observe that the pull-out handle is missing from your door.’ The tone was light, even bantering, but Reynolds knew better than to be deceived. ‘Also, kindly refrain from damaging yourself by surreptitiously testing the strength of the chains and their anchors: the chains have a breaking load of just over a ton, the arm-rest is specially reinforced and that ring in the glove box bolted through on to the chassis … Well, what on earth do you want now?’

‘I forgot to tell you, Colonel.’ The policeman’s voice was quick, nervous. ‘I sent a message to our Budapest Office asking to send a car for this man.’

‘You did?’ Szendrô’s voice was sharp. ‘When?’

‘Ten, perhaps fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Fool! You should have told me immediately. However, it’s too late now. No harm done, possibly some good. If they are as thick in the head as you are, a circumstance of which it is admittedly difficult to conceive, a long drive in the cold night air should clear their minds admirably.’

Colonel Szendrô banged the door shut, switched on the roof light above the windscreen so that he should have no difficulty in seeing his prisoner, and drove off for Budapest. The Mercedes was equipped with snow tyres on all four wheels, and, in spite of the hard-packed snow on the road, Szendrô made good time. He drove with the casual, easy precision of an expert, his cold blue eyes for ever shifting to his right, very frequently and at varying intervals.

Reynolds sat very still, staring right ahead. He had already, in spite of the colonel’s admonitions, tested the chains; the colonel hadn’t exaggerated. Now he was forcing his mind to think coldly, clearly and as constructively as possible. His position was almost hopeless – it would be completely so when they reached Budapest. Miracles happened, but only a certain kind of miracle: no one had ever escaped from the AVO Headquarters, from the torture chambers in Stalin Street. Once there he was lost: if he was ever to escape it would have to be from this car, inside the next hour.

There was no window winding handle on the door – the colonel had thoughtfully removed all such temptations: even if the window had been open he couldn’t have reached the handle on the outside. His hands couldn’t reach the wheel; he had already measured the arc of radius of the chain and his straining fingers would have been at least two inches away. He could move his legs to a certain extent, but couldn’t raise them high enough to kick in the windscreen, shatter the toughened glass throughout its length and perhaps cause a crash at fairly high speed. He could have placed his feet against the dashboard, and he knew of some cars where he could have heaved the front seat backwards off the rails. But everything in this car spelt solidity, and if he tried and failed, as he almost certainly would, all he’d probably get for his pains would be a tap on the head that would keep him quiet till they got to the Andrassy Ut. All the time he deliberately compelled himself to keep his mind off what was going to happen to him when he got there: that way lay only weakness and ultimate destruction.

His pockets – had he anything in his pockets he could use? Anything solid enough to throw at Szendrô’s head, shock him for a length of time necessary to lose control and crash the car: Reynolds was aware that he himself might be hurt as seriously as the colonel, even though he had the advantage of preparation: but a fifty-fifty chance was better than the one in a million he had without it. He knew exactly where Szendrô had put the key to the handcuffs.

But a rapid mental inventory dismissed that hope: he had nothing heavier in his pocket than a handful of forints. His shoes, then – could he remove a shoe and get Szendrô in the face with it before the colonel knew what he was doing? But that thought came only a second ahead of the realization of its futility; with his wrists handcuffed, the only way he could reach his shoes in any way unobtrusively was between his legs – and his knees were lashed tightly together … Another idea, desperate but with a chance of success, had just occurred to him when the colonel spoke for the first time in the fifteen minutes since they had left the police block.

‘You are a dangerous man, Mr Buhl,’ he remarked conversationally. ‘You think too much – Cassius – you know your Shakespeare, of course.’

Reynolds said nothing. Every word this man said was a potential trap.

‘The most dangerous man I’ve ever had in this car, I should say, and a few desperate characters have sat from time to time where you’re sitting now,’ Szendrô went on ruminatively. ‘You know where you’re going, and you don’t appear to care. But you must, of course.’

Again Reynolds kept silent. The plan might work – the chance of success was enough to justify the risk.

‘The silence is uncompanionable, to say the least,’ Colonel Szendrô observed. He lit a cigarette, sent the match spinning through the ventilation window. Reynolds stiffened slightly – the very opening he wanted. Szendrô went on: ‘You are quite comfortable, I trust?’

‘Quite.’ Reynolds’ conversational tone matched Szendrô’s own. ‘But I’d appreciate a cigarette too, if you don’t mind.’

‘By all means.’ Szendrô was hospitality itself. ‘One must cater for one’s guests – you’ll find half a dozen lying loose inside the glove compartment. A cheap and undistinguished brand, I fear, but I’ve always found that people in your – ah – position do not tend to be over-critical about these things. A cigarette – any cigarette – is a great help in times of stress.’

‘Thank you.’ Reynolds nodded at the projection on top of the dashboard at his own side. ‘Cigar lighter, is it not?’

‘It is. Use it by all means.’

Reynolds stretched forward with his handcuffed wrists, pressed it down for a few seconds then lifted it out, its spiral tip glowing red in the faint light from above. Then, just as it cleared the fascia, his hands fumbled and he dropped it on the floor. He reached down to get it, but the chain brought his hands up with a sharp jerk inches from the floor. He swore softly to himself.

Szendrô laughed, and Reynolds, straightening, looked at him. There was no malice in the colonel’s face, just a mixture of amusement and admiration, the admiration predominating.

‘Very, very clever, Mr Buhl. I said you were a dangerous man, and now I’m surer than ever.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘We are now presented with a choice of three possible lines of action, are we not? None of them, I may say, has any marked appeal for me.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Magnificent again!’ Szendrô was smiling broadly. ‘The puzzlement in your voice couldn’t be improved upon. Three courses are open, I say. First, I could courteously bend over and down to retrieve it, whereupon you would do your best to crush in the back of my head with your handcuffs. You would certainly knock me senseless – and you observed very keenly, without in any way appearing to do so, exactly where I put the key to these handcuffs.’ Reynolds looked at him uncomprehendingly, but already he could taste defeat in his mouth.

‘Secondly I could toss you a box of matches. You would strike one, ignite the heads of all the other matches in the box, throw it in my face, crash the car and who knows what might happen then? Or you could just hope that I’d give you a light, either from the lighter or cigarette; then the finger judo lock, a couple of broken fingers, a transfer to a wrist lock and then the key at your leisure. Mr Buhl, you will bear watching.’

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ Reynolds said roughly.

‘Perhaps, perhaps. I have a suspicious mind, but I survive.’ He tossed something on to the lap of Reynolds’ coat. ‘Herewith one single match. You can light it on the metal hinge of the glove box.’

Reynolds sat and smoked in silence. He couldn’t give up, he wouldn’t give up, although he knew in his heart that the man at the wheel knew all the answers – and the answers to many questions which he, Reynolds, probably didn’t know ever existed. Half a dozen separate plans occurred to him, each one more fantastic and with less chance of success than the previous one, and he was just coming to the end of his second cigarette – he had lit it off the butt end of the first – when the colonel changed down into third gear, peered at the near side of the road, braked suddenly and swung off into a small lane. Half a minute later, on a stretch of the lane parallel to and barely twenty yards from the highway, but almost entirely screened from it by thick, snow-covered bushes, Szendrô stopped the car and switched off the ignition. Then he turned off his head and side lights, wound his window right down in spite of the bitter cold and turned to face Reynolds. The roof light above the windscreen still burned in the darkness.

Here it comes, Reynolds thought bleakly. Thirty miles yet to Budapest, but Szendrô just can’t bear to wait any longer. Reynolds had no illusions, no hope. He had had access to secret files concerning the activities of the Hungarian Political Police in the year that had elapsed since the bloody October rising of 1956, and they had made ghastly reading: it was difficult to think of the AVO – the AVH, as they were more lately known – as people belonging to the human race. Wherever they went they carried with them terror and destruction, a living death and death itself, the slow death of the aged in deportee camps and the young in the slave labour camps, the quick death of the summary executions and the ghastly, insane screaming deaths of those who succumbed to the most abominable tortures ever conceived of the evil that lay buried deep in the hearts of the satanic perverts who find their way into the political police of dictatorships the world over. And no secret police in modern times excelled or even matched Hungary’s AVO in the nameless barbarities, the inhuman cruelties and all-pervading terror with which they held hopeless people in fear-ridden thrall: they had learnt much from Hitler’s Gestapo during the Second World War, and had that knowledge refined by their current nominal masters, the NKVD of Russia. But now the pupils had outdistanced their mentors, and they had developed flesh-crawling refinements and more terribly effective methods of terrorization such as the others had not dreamed of.

But Colonel Szendrô was still at the talking stage. He turned round in his seat, lifted Reynolds’ bag from the back, set it on his lap and tried to open it. It was locked.

‘The key,’ Szendrô said. ‘And don’t tell me there isn’t one, or that it’s lost. Both you and I, I suspect, Mr Buhl, are long past that kindergarten stage.’

They were indeed, Reynolds thought grimly. ‘Inside ticket pocket of my jacket.’

‘Get it. And your papers at the same time.’

‘I can’t get at these.’

‘Allow me.’ Reynolds winced as Szendrô’s pistol barrel pushed hard against lips and teeth, felt the colonel slip the papers from his breast pocket with a professional ease that would have done credit to a skilled pickpocket. And then Szendrô was back on his own side of the car, the bag open: almost, it seemed, without pausing to think, he had slit open the canvas lining and extracted a slim fold of papers, and was now comparing them with those he had taken from Reynolds’ pockets.

‘Well, well, well, Mr Buhl. Interesting, most interesting. Chameleon-like, you change your identity in a moment of time. Name, birthplace, occupation, even your nationality all altered in an instant. A remarkable transformation.’ He studied the two sets of documents, one in either hand. ‘Which, if any, are we to believe?’

‘The Austrian papers are fakes,’ Reynolds growled. For the first time he stopped speaking in German and switched to fluent idiomatic Hungarian. ‘I had word that my mother, who has lived in Vienna for many years, was dying. I had to have them.’

‘Ah, of course. And your mother?’

‘No more.’ Reynolds crossed himself. ‘You can find her obituary in Tuesday’s paper. Maria Rakosi.’

‘I’m at the stage now where I would be astonished if I didn’t.’ Szendrô spoke also in Hungarian, but his accent was not that of Budapest, Reynolds was sure of that – he had spent too many agonizing months learning every last Budapest inflection and idiom from an ex-Professor of Central European languages of Budapest University. Szendrô was speaking again. ‘A tragic interlude, I am sure. I bare my head in silent sympathy – metaphorically, you understand. So you claim your real name is Lajos Rakosi? A very well-known name indeed.’

‘And a common one. And genuine. You’ll find my name, date of birth, address, date of marriage all in the records. Also my –’

‘Spare me.’ Szendrô held up a protesting hand. ‘I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt you could show me the very school desk on which your initials are carved and produce the once-little girl whose books you once carried home from school. None of which would impress me in the slightest. What does impress me is the extraordinary thoroughness and care of not only yourself but the superiors who have so magnificently trained you for whatever purpose they have in mind. I do not think I have ever met anything quite like it.’

‘You talk in riddles, Colonel Szendrô. I’m just an ordinary Budapest citizen. I can prove it. All right, I did have fake Austrian papers. But my mother was dying, and I was prepared to risk indiscretion. But I’ve committed no crime against our country. Surely you can see that. If I wished, I could have gone over to the west. But I did not so wish. My country is my country, and Budapest is my home. So I came back.’

‘A slight correction,’ Szendrô murmured. ‘You’re not coming back to Budapest – you’re going, and probably for the first time in your life.’ He was looking Reynolds straight in the eyes when his expression changed. ‘Behind you!’

Reynolds twisted round, a split second before he realized Szendrô had shouted in English – and there had been nothing in Szendrô’s eyes or tone to betray his meaning. Reynold’s turned back slowly, an expression almost of boredom on his face.

‘A schoolboyish trick. I speak English’ – he was using English now– ‘why should I deny it? My dear Colonel, if you belonged to Budapest, which you don’t, you would know that there are at least fifty thousand of us who speak English. Why should so common an accomplishment be regarded with suspicion?’

‘By all the gods!’ Szendrô slapped his hand on his thigh. It’s magnificent, it’s really magnificent. My professional jealousy is aroused. To have a Britisher or an American – British, I think, the American intonation is almost impossible to conceal – talk Hungarian with a Budapest accent as perfectly as you do is no small feat. But to have an Englishman talk English with a Budapest accent – that is superb!’

‘For heaven’s sake, there’s nothing superb about it.’ Reynolds almost shouted in exasperation. ‘I am Hungarian.’

‘I fear not.’ Szendrô shook his head. ‘Your masters taught you, and taught you magnificently – you, Mr Buhl, are worth a fortune to any espionage system in the world. But one thing they didn’t teach you, one thing they couldn’t teach you – because they don’t know what it is – is the mentality of the people. I think we may speak openly, as two intelligent men, and dispense with the fancy patriotic phrases employed for the benefit of the – ah – proletariat. It is, in brief, the mentality of the vanquished, of the fear-ridden, the cowed shoulder that never knows when the long hand of death is going to reach out and touch it.’ Reynolds was looking at him in astonishment – this man must be tremendously sure of himself – but Szendrô ignored him. ‘I have seen too many of our countrymen, Mr Buhl, going as you are, to excruciating torture and death. Most of them are just paralysed: some of them are plainly terror-stricken and weeping; and a handful are consumed by fury. You could not possibly fit in any of these categories – you should, but, as I say, there are things your masters cannot know. You are cold and without emotion, planning, calculating all the time, supremely confident of your own ability to extract the maximum advantage from the slightest opportunity that arises, and never tired of watching for that opportunity to come. Had you been a lesser man, Mr Buhl, self-betrayal would not have come so easily …’

He broke off suddenly, reached and switched off the roof light, just as Reynolds’ ears caught the hum of an approaching car engine, wound up his window, deftly removed a cigarette from Reynolds’ hand and crushed it beneath his shoe. He said nothing and made no move until the approaching car, a barely perceptible blur behind the sweep of its blazing headlights, its tyres silent on the snow-packed road, had passed by and vanished to the west. As soon as it was lost to sight and sound Szendrô had reversed out on the highway again and was on his way, pushing the big car almost to the limit of safety along the treacherous road and through the gently falling snow.

Over an hour and a half elapsed before they reached Budapest – a long, slow journey that could normally have been done in half the time. But the snow, a curtain of great feathery flakes that swirled whitely, suddenly, into the flat-topped beams of the headlights, had become steadily heavier and slowed them up, at times almost to walking pace as the labouring wipers, pushing the clogging snow into corrugated ridges on the middle and at the sides of the windscreen, swept through narrower and narrower arcs until finally they had stopped altogether; a dozen times, at least, Szendrô had had to stop to clear the mass of snow off the screen.

And then, a few miles short of the city limits, Szendrô had left the highway again, and plunged into a mass of narrow, twisting roads: on many stretches where the snow lay smooth and deep and treacherously masking the border between road and ditch, theirs was obviously the first car that had passed since the snow had begun to fall, but despite the care and concentrated attention Szendrô gave the roads, his flickering eyes found Reynolds every few seconds; the man’s unflagging vigilance was almost inhuman.

Why the colonel had left the main road Reynolds couldn’t guess, any more than he could guess why he had stopped and drawn off the road earlier on. That he wanted, in the earlier instance, to avoid the big police car racing west to Komarom and now to bypass the police block on the city limits of which Reynolds had been warned at Vienna, was obvious enough: but the reason for these actions was a different thing altogether. Reynolds wasted no time on the problem: he had problems enough of his own. He had perhaps ten minutes left.

They were passing now through the winding, villa-lined streets and steeply-cobbled residential avenues of Buda, the western half of the city, and dropping down to the Danube. The snow was easing again, and, twisting round in his seat, Reynolds could just vaguely see the rock-bound promontory of the Gellert Hill, its grey, sharp granite jutting through the windblown snow, the vast bulk of the St Gellert Hotel and, as they approached the Ferenc Jozsef Bridge, the St Gellert Mount where some old-time bishop, who had incurred the wrath of his fellowman, had been shoved into a spiked barrel and heaved into the Danube. Bungling amateurs in those days, Reynolds thought grimly, the old bishop couldn’t have lasted a couple of minutes: down in the Andrassy Ut things would doubtless be much better arranged.

Already they were across the Danube and turning left into the Corso, the one-time fashionable embankment of open-air cafés on the Pest side of the river. But it was black and desolate now, as deserted as were nearly all the streets, and it seemed dated, anachronistic, a nostalgic and pathetic survival from an earlier and happier age. It was difficult, it was impossible to conjure up the ghosts of those who had promenaded there only two decades ago, carefree and gay and knowing that another tomorrow would never come, that all the other tomorrows could only be the same as today. It was impossible to visualize, however dimly, the Budapest of yesterday, the loveliest and happiest of cities, all that Vienna never was, the city to which so many westerners, of so many nations, came to visit briefly, for a day, for two days, and never went home again. But all that was gone, even the memory was almost gone.

Reynolds had never been in the city before, but he knew it as few of the citizens of Budapest would ever know it. Over beyond the west bank of the Danube, the Royal Palace, the Gothic-Moorish Fisher’s Bastion, and the Coronation Church were half-imagined blurs in the snow-filled darkness, but he knew where they were and what they were as if he had lived in the city all his life. And now, on their right, was the magnificent Parliament of the Magyars, the Parliament and its tragic, blood-stained square where a thousand Hungarians had been massacred in the October Rising, mown down by tanks and the murderous fire of the heavy AVO machine-guns mounted on the roof of the Parliament itself.

Everything was real, every building, every street was exactly where it should be, precisely where he had been told it would be, but Reynolds could not shake off the growing feeling of unreality, of illusion, as if he were spectator of a play and all this was happening to someone else. A normally unimaginative man, ruthlessly trained to be abnormally so, to subject all emotion and feeling to the demands of reason and the intellect, he was aware of the strangeness in his mind and at a loss to account for it. Perhaps it was the certain foreknowledge of defeat, the knowledge that old Jennings would never come home again. Or it could have been the cold or tiredness or hopelessness or the ghostly veil of drifting snow that hung over everything, but he knew it was none of these things, it was something else again.

And now they had left the Embankment and were turning into the long, broad, tree-lined Boulevard of the Andrassy Ut itself: the Andrassy Ut, that street of well-loved memories leading past the Royal Opera House to the Zoo, the Fun Fair and the City Park, had been an inseparable part of a thousand days and nights of pleasure and enjoyment, of freedom and escape, to tens of thousands of citizens in days gone by and no place on earth had lain nearer to the hearts of the Hungarians: and now all that was gone, it could never be the same again, no matter what befell, not even if peace and independence and freedom were to come again. For now the Andrassy Ut meant only repression and terror, the hammering on the door in the middle of the night and the brown lorries that came to take you away, the prison camps and deportation, the torture chambers and the benison of death: Andrassy Ut meant only the headquarters of the AVO.

And still the feeling of remoteness, of detached unreality remained with Michael Reynolds. He knew where he was, he knew his time had run out, he was beginning to know what Szendrô had meant by the mentality of a people who had lived too long with terror and the ever-present spectre of death, and he knew too that no one who ever made a journey such as he was making now could feel exactly the same again. Indifferently, almost, with a kind of detached academic interest, he wondered how long he would last in the torture chambers, what latest diabolical variations of destroying a man lay in wait for him.

And then the Mercedes was slowing down, its heavy tyres crunching through the frozen slush of the street, and Reynolds, in spite of himself, in spite of the unemotional stoicism of years and the shell of protective indifference in which he had armoured himself, felt fear touch him for the first time, a fear that touched his mouth and left it parched and dry, his heart and left it pounding heavily, painfully in his chest and his stomach as if something heavy and solid and sharp lay there, constricting it upon itself; but no trace of any of this touched the expression on his face. He knew Colonel Szendrô was watching him closely, he knew that if he were what he claimed to be, an innocent citizen of Budapest, he should be afraid and fear should show in his face, but he could not bring himself to it: not because he was unable to do so, but because he knew of the reciprocal relationship between facial expression and the mind: to show fear did not necessarily mean that one was afraid: but to show fear when one was afraid and fighting desperately not to be afraid, would be fatal … It was as if Colonel Szendrô had been reading his mind.

‘I have no suspicion left, Mr Buhl: only certainties. You know where you are, of course?’

‘Naturally.’ Reynolds’ voice was steady. ‘I’ve walked along here a thousand times.’

‘You’ve never walked here in your life, but I doubt whether even the City Surveyor could draw as accurate a map of Budapest as you could,’ Szendrô said equably. He stopped the car. ‘Recognize any place?’

‘Your H.Q.’ Reynolds nodded at a building fifty yards away on the other side of the street.

‘Exactly. Mr Buhl, this is where you should faint, go into hysterics or just sit there moaning with terror. All the others do. But you don’t. Perhaps you are completely devoid of fear – an enviable if not admirable characteristic, but one which, I assure you, no longer exists in this country: or perhaps – an enviable and admirable characteristic – you are afraid, but ruthless training has eliminated all its outward manifestations. In either case, my friend, you are condemned. You don’t belong. Perhaps not, as our police friend said, a filthy Fascist spy, but assuredly a spy.’ He glanced at his watch, then stared at Reynolds with a peculiar intentness. ‘Just after midnight – the time we operate best. And for you, the best treatment and the best quarters – a little soundproof room deep below the streets of Budapest; only three AVO officers in all Hungary know of its existence.’

He stared at Reynolds for several seconds longer, then started the car. Instead of stopping at the AVO building, he swung the car sharp left off the Andrassy Ut, drove a hundred yards down an unlighted street and stopped again long enough to tie a silk handkerchief securely over Reynolds’ eyes. Ten minutes later, after much turning and twisting which completely lost Reynolds, as he knew it was designed to do, all sense of place and direction, the car bumped heavily once or twice, dropped steeply down a long ramp and drew up inside an enclosed space – Reynolds could hear the deep exhaust note of the car beating back off the walls. And then, as the motor died, he heard heavy iron doors clanging shut behind them.

Seconds later the door on Reynolds’ side of the car opened and a pair of hands busied themselves with freeing him of the restraining chains and then re-securing the handcuffs. Then the same hands were urging him out of the car and removing the blindfold.

Reynolds screwed up his eyes and blinked. They were in a big, windowless garage with heavy doors already locked behind them, and the brightness of the overhead light reflecting off whitewashed walls and ceiling was momentarily dazzling after the darkness of the blindfold and the night. At the other end of the garage, close to him, was another door, half-open, leading into a brightly-lit whitewashed corridor: whitewash, he reflected grimly, appeared to be an inseparable concomitant of all modern torture chambers.

Between Reynolds and the door, still holding him by the arm, was the man who had removed the chains. Reynolds looked at him for a long moment. With this man available, the AVO had no need to rely on instruments of torture – those enormous hands could just tear prisoners apart, slowly, piece for piece. About Reynolds’ own height, the man looked squat, almost deformed in comparison, and the shoulders above that great barrel of chest were the widest Reynolds had ever seen: he must have weighed at least 250 lbs. The face was broken-nosed and ugly, but curiously innocent of any trace of depravity or bestiality, just pleasantly ugly. Reynolds wasn’t deceived. In his line of business, faces meant nothing: the most ruthless man he had ever known, a German espionage agent who had lost count of the number of men he had killed, had the face of a choirboy.

Colonel Szendrô slammed the car door and walked round to where Reynolds was standing. He looked at the other man and nodded at Reynolds.

‘A guest, Sandor. A little canary who is going to sing us a song before the night is through. Has the Chief gone to bed?’

‘He is waiting for you in the office.’ The man’s voice was what one would have expected, a low, deep rumble in the throat. ‘Excellent. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Watch our friend here, watch him closely. I suspect he’s very dangerous.’

‘I’ll watch him,’ Sandor promised comfortably. He waited till Szendrô, with Reynolds’ bag and papers in his hand, had gone, then propped himself lazily against a whitewashed wall, massive arms folded across his chest. Hardly had he done so when he had pushed himself off the wall and taken a step towards Reynolds. ‘You do not look well.’

‘I’m all right.’ Reynolds’ voice was husky, his breathing quick and shallow, and he was swaying slightly on his feet. He lifted his shackled hands over his right shoulder, and massaged the back of his neck, wincing. ‘It’s my head, the back of my head.’

Sandor took another step forward, then moved swiftly as he saw Reynolds’ eyes turning up till only the whites showed, beginning to topple forward, his body twisting slightly to the left as he fell. He could injure himself badly, even kill himself if his unprotected head struck the concrete floor, and Sandor had to reach forward quickly, arms outstretched to cushion the fall.

Reynolds hit Sandor harder than he had ever hit anyone in his life. Thrusting forward off the ball of his foot and pivoting his body with whiplash speed from left to right, he brought his manacled hands scything down in a violent, vicious, chopping blow that carried with it every last ounce of power of his sinewy arms and shoulders. The flat edges of his two hands, pressed hard together, caught Sandor across the exposed neck, just below the line of jawbone and ear. It was like striking the trunk of a tree, and Reynolds gasped with pain: it felt as if both his little fingers were broken.

It was a judo blow, a killing judo blow, and it would have killed many men: all others it would have paralysed, left unconscious for hours; all others, that is, that Reynolds had ever known: Sandor just grunted, momentarily shook his head to clear it, and kept on coming, turning sideways to neutralize any attempt Reynolds might make to use feet or knees, pressing him back remorselessly against the side of the Mercedes.

Reynolds was powerless. He couldn’t have resisted even had he been of a mind to, and his utter astonishment that any man could not only survive such a blow but virtually ignore it left no room for any thought of resistance. Sandor leaned against him with all his great weight, crushing him against the car, reached down with both hands, caught Reynolds by the forearms and squeezed. There was no animosity, no expression at all in the giant’s eyes as they stared unblinkingly into Reynolds’ from a distance of three or four inches. He just stood there and squeezed.

Reynolds clenched teeth and lips together till his jaws ached, forcing back the scream of agony. It seemed as if his forearms had been caught in two giant, inexorably tightening vices. He could feel the blood draining from his face, the cold sweat starting on his forehead, and the bones and sinews of his arms felt as if they were being mangled and crushed beyond recovery. The blood was pounding in his head, the garage walls were becoming dim and swimming before his eyes, when Sandor released his grip and stepped back, gently massaging the left-hand side of his neck.

‘Next time I squeeze it will be a little higher up,’ he said mildly. ‘Just where you hit me. Please stop this foolishness. Both of us have been hurt and for nothing.’

Five minutes passed, five minutes during which the sharp agony in Reynolds’ arms faded to a dull, pounding ache, five minutes in which Sandor’s unblinking eyes never strayed from him. Then the door opened wide, and a young man – he was hardly more than a boy – stood there, looking at Reynolds. He was thin and sallow, with an unruly mop of black hair and quick, nervous darting eyes, almost as dark as his hair. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

‘The Chief wants to see him, Sandor. Bring him along, will you?’

Sandor escorted Reynolds along the narrow corridor, down a shallow flight of stairs at the end into another corridor, then pushed him through the first of several doors that lined both sides of the second passageway. Reynolds stumbled, recovered, then looked around him.

It was a large room, wood panelled, the worn linoleum on the floor relieved only by a stretch of threadbare carpet in front of the desk at the far end of the room. The room was brightly lit, with a lamp of moderate power in the ceiling and a powerful wall-light on a flexible extension arm behind the desk: at the moment the latter was pointing downward on to the surface of the desk, harshly highlighting his gun, the jumble of clothes and the other articles that had recently been so neatly folded in Reynolds’ bag: beside the clothes were the torn remnants of the bag itself: the lining was in tatters, the zip had been torn off, the leather handle had been slit open and even the four studs of the base of the bag had been torn out by the pair of pliers lying beside them. Reynolds silently acknowledged the handiwork of an expert.

Colonel Szendrô was standing beside the table, leaning over towards the man seated behind it. The face of the latter was hidden in deep shadow, but both hands, holding some of Reynolds’ papers, were exposed to the pitiless glare of the lamp. They were terrible hands, Reynolds had never seen anything remotely like them, had never imagined that any human being’s hands could be so scarred, crushed and savagely mutilated and still serve as hands. Both thumbs were crushed and flattened and twisted, fingertips and nails were blurred into a shapeless mass, the little finger and half of the fourth finger of the left hand were missing, and the backs of both hands were covered with ugly scars surrounding bluish-purple weals in the middle, between the tendons of the middle and fourth fingers. Reynolds stared at these weals, fascinated, and shivered involuntarily, he had seen these marks once before, on a dead man: the marks of crucifixion. Had these been his hands, Reynolds thought in revulsion, he would have had them amputated. He wondered what manner of man could bear to live with these hands, not only live with them but have them uncovered. He was suddenly possessed of an almost obsessive desire to see the face of the man behind these hands, but Sandor had halted several paces from the desk and the blackness of the shadow by the lamp defeated him.

The hands moved, gesturing with Reynolds’ papers, and the man at the desk spoke. The voice was quiet, controlled, almost friendly. ‘These papers are interesting enough in their own way – masterpiece of the forger’s art. You will be good enough to tell us your real name.’ He broke off and looked at Sandor who was still tenderly massaging his neck. ‘What is wrong, Sandor?’

‘He hit me,’ Sandor explained apologetically. ‘He knows how to hit and where to hit – and he hits hard.’

‘A dangerous man,’ Szendrô said. ‘I warned you, you know.’

‘Yes, but he’s a cunning devil,’ Sandor complained. ‘He pretended to faint.’

‘A major achievement to hurt you, an act of desperation to hit you at all,’ the man behind the desk said dryly. ‘But you mustn’t complain, Sandor. He who expects that death comes with the next breath but one is not given to counting the cost … Well, Mr Buhl, your name, please.’

‘I’ve already told Colonel Szendrô,’ Reynolds replied. ‘Rakosi, Lajos Rakosi. I could invent a dozen names, all different, in the hope of saving myself unnecessary suffering, but I couldn’t prove my right to any of them. I can prove my right to my own name, Rakosi.’

‘You are a brave man, Mr Buhl.’ The seated man shook his head. ‘But in this house you will find courage a useless prop: lean on it and it will only crumble to dust under your weight. The truth alone will serve. Your name, please?’

Reynolds paused before replying. He was fascinated and puzzled and hardly afraid any more. The hands fascinated him, he could scarcely take his eyes off them, and he could see now some tattooing on the inside of the man’s wrist – at that distance it looked like a figure 2, but he couldn’t be certain. He was puzzled because there were too many off-beat angles to all that was happening to him, too much that didn’t fit in with his conception of the AVO and all that he had been told about them: there was a curious restraint, almost a cold courtesy in their attitude to him, but he was aware that the cat could just be playing with the mouse, perhaps they were just subtly sapping his determination to resist, conditioning him to be least prepared for the impact of the blow when it came. And why his fear was lessening he would have found it impossible to say, it must have arisen from some subtle promptings of his subconscious mind for he was at a conscious loss to account for it.

‘We are waiting, Mr Buhl.’ Reynolds couldn’t detect the slightest trace of an edge through the studied patience of the voice.

‘I can only tell you the truth. I’ve already done that.’

‘Very well. Take your clothes off – all of them.’

‘No!’ Reynolds glanced swiftly round, but Sandor stood between him and the door. He looked back, and Colonel Szendrô had his pistol out. ‘I’ll be damned if I do it!’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Szendrô’s voice was weary. ‘I have a gun in my hand and Sandor will do it by force, if necessary. Sandor has a spectacular if untidy method of undressing people – he rips coats and shirts in half down the back. You’ll find it far easier to do the job yourself.’

Reynolds did it himself. The handcuffs were unlocked and inside a minute all his clothes were crumpled heaps about his feet, and he was standing there shivering, his forearms angry masses of red and blue weals where Sandor’s vice-like fingers had dug into his flesh.

‘Bring the clothes over here, Sandor,’ the man at the desk ordered. He looked at Reynolds. ‘There’s a blanket on the bench behind you.’

Reynolds looked at him in sudden wonder. That it was his clothes they wanted – looking for giveaway tags, probably – instead of himself was surprising enough, that the courtesy – and on that cold night, the kindness – of a covering blanket should be offered was astonishing. And then he caught his breath and utterly forgot about both of those things, because the man behind the desk had risen and walked round with a peculiarly stiff-legged gait to examine the clothes.

Reynolds was a trained judge, very highly trained, of faces and expressions and character. He made mistakes and made them often, but he never made major mistakes and he knew that it was impossible that he was making a major one now. The face was fully in the light now, and it was a face that made these terrible hands a blasphemous contradiction, an act of impiety in themselves. A lined tired face, a middle-aged face that belied the thick, snow-white hair above, a face deeply, splendidly etched by experience, by a sorrowing and suffering such as Reynolds could not even begin to imagine, it held more goodness, more wisdom and tolerance and understanding than Reynolds had ever seen in the face of any man before. It was the face of a man who had seen everything, known everything and experienced everything and still had the heart of a child.

Reynolds sank slowly down on to the bench, mechanically wrapping the faded blanket around him. Desperately, almost, forcing himself to think with detachment and clarity, he tried to reduce to order the kaleidoscopic whirling of confused and contradictory thoughts that raced through his mind. But he had got no farther than the first insoluble problem, the presence of a man like that in a diabolical organization like the AVO, when he received his fourth and final shock and almost immediately afterwards, the answer to all his problems.

The door beside Reynolds swung open towards him, and a girl walked into the room. The AVO, Reynolds knew, not only had its complement of females but ranked among them skilled exponents of the most fiendish tortures imaginable: but not even by the wildest leap of the imagination could Reynolds include her in that category. A little below middle height, with one hand tightly clasping the wrap about her slender waist, her face was young and fresh and innocent, untouched by any depravity. The yellow hair the colour of ripening corn, was awry about her shoulders and with the knuckles of one hand she was still rubbing the sleep from eyes of a deep cornflower blue. When she spoke, her voice was still a little blurred from sleep, but soft and musical if perhaps touched with a little asperity.

‘Why are you still up and talking? It’s one o’clock in the morning – it’s after one, and I’d like to get some sleep.’ Suddenly her eyes caught sight of the pile of clothing on the table, and she swung round to catch sight of Reynolds, sitting on the bench and clad only in the old blanket. Her eyes widened, and she took an involuntary step backwards, clutching her wrap even more tightly around her. ‘Who – who on earth is this, Jansci?’

THREE

‘Jansci!’ Michael Reynolds was on his feet without any volition on his own part. For the first time since he had fallen into Hungarian hands the studied calmness, the mask of emotional indifference vanished and his eyes were alight with excitement and a hope that he had thought had vanished for ever. He took two quick steps towards the girl, grabbing at his blanket as it slipped and almost fell to the floor. ‘Did you say, “Jansci”?’ he demanded.

‘What’s wrong? What do you want?’ The girl had retreated as Reynolds had advanced, then stopped as she bumped into the reassuring bulk of Sandor and clutched his arm. The apprehension in her face faded, and she looked at Reynolds thoughtfully and nodded. ‘Yes, I said that. Jansci.’

‘Jansci.’ Reynolds repeated the word slowly, incredulously, like a man savouring each syllable to the full, wanting desperately to believe in the truth of something but unable to bring himself to that belief. He walked across the room, the hope and the conflicting doubt still mirrored in his eyes, and stopped before the man with the scarred hands.

‘Your name is Jansci?’ Reynolds spoke slowly, the unbelief, the inability to believe, still registering in his eyes.

‘I am called Jansci.’ The older man nodded, his eyes speculative and quiet.

‘One four one four one eight two.’ Reynolds looked unblinkingly at the other, searching for the faintest trace of response, of admission. ‘Is that it?’

‘Is that what, Mr Buhl?’

‘If you are Jansci, the number is one four one four one eight two,’ Reynolds repeated. Gently, meeting no resistance, he reached out for the scarred left hand, pushed the cuff back from the wrist and stared down at the violet tattoo. 1414182 – the number was as clear, as unblemished as if it had been made only that day.

Reynolds sat down on the edge of the desk, caught sight of a packet of cigarettes and shook one loose. Szendrô struck and held a match for him, and Reynolds nodded gratefully: he doubted whether he could have done it for himself, his hands were trembling uncontrollably. The fizzling of the igniting match seemed strangely loud in the sudden silence of the room. Jansci it was who finally broke the silence.

‘You seem to know something about me?’ he prompted gently.

‘I know a lot more.’ The tremor was dying out of Reynolds’ hands and he was coming back on balance again, outwardly, at least. He looked round the room, at Szendrô, Sandor, the girl and the youth with the quick nervous eyes, all with expressions of bewilderment or anticipation on their faces. ‘These are your friends? You can trust them absolutely – they all know who you are? Who you really are, I mean?’

‘They do. You may speak freely.’

‘Jansci is a pseudonym for Illyurin.’ Reynolds might have been repeating something by rote, something he knew off by heart, as indeed he did. ‘Major-General Alexis Illyurin. Born Kalinovka, Ukraine, October 18th, 1904. Married June 18th, 1931. Wife’s name Catherine, daughter’s name Julia’. Reynolds glanced at the girl. ‘This must be Julia, she seems about the right age. Colonel Mackintosh says he’d like to have his boots back: I don’t know what he means.’

‘Just an old joke.’ Jansci walked round the desk to his seat and leant back, smiling. ‘Well, well, my old friend Peter Mackintosh still lives. Indestructible, he always was indestructible. You must work for him, of course, Mr – ah –’

‘Reynolds. Michael Reynolds. I work for him.’

‘Describe him.’ The subtle change could hardly be called a hardening, but it was unmistakable. ‘Face, physique, clothes, history, family – everything.’

‘Reynolds did so. He talked for five minutes without stopping, them Jansci held up his hand.

‘Enough. You must know him, must work for him and be the person you claim to be. But he took a risk, a great risk. It is not like my old friend.’

‘I might be caught and made to talk, and you, too, would be lost?’

‘You are very quick, young man.’

‘Colonel Mackintosh took no chance,’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘Your name and number – that was all I knew. Where you lived, what you looked like – I had no idea. He didn’t even tell me about the scars on your hands, these would have given me instant identification.’

‘And how then did you hope to contact me?’

‘I had the address of a café.’ Reynolds named it. ‘The haunt, Colonel Mackintosh said, of disaffected elements. I was to be there every night, same seat, same table, till I was picked up.’

‘No identification?’ Szendrô’s query lay more in the lift of an eyebrow than the inflection of the voice.

‘Naturally. My tie.’

Colonel Szendrô looked at the vivid magenta of the tie lying on the table, winced, nodded and looked away without speaking. Reynolds felt the first faint stirrings of anger.

‘Why ask if you already know?’ The edged voice betrayed the irritation in his mind.

‘No offence.’ Jansci anwered for Szendrô. ‘Endless suspicion, Mr Reynolds, is our sole guarantee of survival. We suspect everyone. Everyone who lives, everyone who moves – we suspect them every minute of every hour. But, as you see, we survive. We had been asked to contact you in that café – Imre has practically lived there for the past three days – but the request had come from an anonymous source in Vienna. There was no mention of Colonel Mackintosh – he is an old fox, that one … And when you had been met in the café?’

‘I was told that I would be led to you – or to one of two others: Hridas and the White Mouse.’

‘This has been a happy short-cut,’ Jansci murmured. ‘But I am afraid you would have found neither Hridas nor the White Mouse.’

‘They are no longer in Budapest?’

‘The White Mouse is in Siberia. We shall never see him again. Hridas died three weeks ago, not two kilometres from here, in the torture chambers of the AVO. They were careless for a moment, and he snatched a gun. He put it in his mouth. He was glad to die.’

‘How – but how do you know these things?’

‘Colonel Szendrô – the man you know as Colonel Szendrô – was there. He saw him die. It was Szendrô’s gun he took.’

Reynolds carefully crushed his cigarette stub in an ashtray. He looked up at Jansci, across to Szendrô and back at Jansci again: his face was empty of all expression.

‘Szendrô has been a member of the AVO for eighteen months,’ Jansci said quietly. ‘One of their most efficient and respected officers, and when things mysteriously go wrong and wanted men escape at the last moment, there is no one more terrible in his anger than Szendrô, no one who drives his men so cruelly till they literally collapse with exhaustion. The speeches he makes to newly indoctrinated recruits and cadets to the AVO have already been compiled in book form. He is known as The Scourge. His chief, Furmint, is at a loss to understand Szendrô’s pathological hatred for his own countrymen, but declares he is the only indispensable member of the Political Police in Budapest … A hundred, two hundred Hungarians alive to-day, still here or in the west, owe their lives to Colonel Szendrô.’

Reynolds stared at Szendrô, examining every line of that face as if he were seeing it for the first time, wondering what manner of man might pass his life in such incredibly difficult and dangerous circumstances, never knowing whether he was being watched or suspected or betrayed, never knowing whether or not the next shoulder for the tap of the executioner might be his own, and all at once, without at all knowing why, Reynolds knew that this was indeed such a man as Jansci claimed. All other considerations apart, he had to be or he, Reynolds, might even then have been screaming on the torture racks, deep down below the basement of Stalin Street …

‘It must indeed be as you say, General Illyurin,’ Reynolds murmured. ‘He runs incredible risks.’

‘Jansci, if you please. Always Jansci. Major-General Illyurin is dead.’

‘I’m sorry … And to-night, how about tonight?’

‘Your – ah – arrest by our friend here?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is simple. He has access to all but a few secret master files. Also he is privy to all proposed plans and operations in Budapest and Western Hungary. He knew of the road-block, the closing of the frontier … And he knew you were on the way.’

‘But surely – surely they weren’t after me? How could –’

‘Don’t flatter yourself, my dear Reynolds.’ Szendrô carefully fitted another brown and black Russian cigarette into his holder – Reynolds was to discover that he chain-smoked a hundred of these every day – and struck a match. ‘The arm of coincidence is not all that long. They weren’t looking for you, they weren’t looking for anyone. They were stopping only trucks, searching for large quantities of ferro-wolfram that are being smuggled into the country.’

‘I should have thought they would have been damned glad to get all the ferro-wolfram they could lay their hands on,’ Reynolds murmured.

‘And so they are, my dear boy, and so they are. However, there are proper channels to be gone through, certain customs to be observed. Not to put too fine a point on it, several of our top party officials and highly-respected members of the government were being deprived of their usual cut. An intolerable state of affairs.’

‘Unthinkable,’ Reynolds agreed. ‘Action was imperative.’

‘Exactly!’ Szendrô grinned, the first time Reynolds had seen him smile, and the sudden flash of white, even teeth and the crinkling of the eyes quite transformed the cold aloofness of the man. ‘Unfortunately, on such occasions as these some fish other than the ones we are trawling for get caught in the net.’

‘Such as myself?’

‘Such as yourself. So I have made it my practice to be in the vicinity of certain police blocks at such times: a fruitless vigil, I fear, on all but very few occasions: you are only the fifth person I’ve taken away from the police inside a year. Unfortunately, you will also be the last. On the previous occasions I warned the country bumpkins who man these posts that they were to forget that I or the prisoner I had taken from them ever existed. To-night, as you know, their headquarters had been informed and the word will be out to all block posts to beware of a man posing as an AVO officer.’

Reynolds stared at him.

‘But good God, man, they saw you! Five of them, at least. Your description will be in Budapest before –’

‘Pah!’ Szendrô flicked off some ash with a careless forefinger. ‘Much good it will do the fools! Besides, I’m no imposter – I am an AVO officer. Did you doubt it?’

‘I did not,’ Reynolds said feelingly. Szendrô hitched an immaculately trousered leg and sat on the desk, smiling.

‘There you are, then. Incidentally, Mr Reynolds, my apologies for my rather intimidating conduct on the way here to-night. As far as Budapest, I was concerned only with finding out whether you really were a foreign agent and the man we were looking for or whether I should throw you out at a street corner and tell you to lose yourself. But by the time I had reached the middle of the town another and most disquieting possibility had struck me.’

‘When you stopped in the Andrassy Ut?’ Reynolds nodded. ‘You looked at me in a rather peculiar fashion, to say the least.’

‘I know. The thought had just occurred that you might have been an AVO member deliberately planted on me and therefore had no cause to fear a visit to the Andrassy Ut: I confess I should have thought of it earlier. However, when I said I was going to take you to a secret cellar, you would have known at once what I suspected, known I could not now afford to let you live and screamed your head off. But you said nothing, so I knew you were at least no plant … Jansci, could I be excused for a few minutes? You know why.’

‘Certainly, but be quick. Mr Reynolds hasn’t come all the way from England just to lean over the Margit Bridge and drop pebbles into the Danube. He has much to tell us.’

‘It is for your ear alone,’ Reynolds said. ‘Colonel Mackintosh said so.’

‘Colonel Szendrô is my right hand, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Very well. But only the two of you.’

Szendrô bowed and walked out of the room. Jansci turned to his daughter.

‘A bottle of wine, Julia. We have some Villányi Furmint left?’

‘I’ll go and see.’ She turned to leave, but Jansci called her. ‘One moment, my dear. Mr Reynolds, when did you eat last?’

‘Ten o’clock this morning.’

‘So. You must be starving. Julia?’

‘I’ll see what I can get, Jansci.’

‘Thank you – but first the wine. Imre’ – he addressed the youngster who was pacing restlessly up and down – ‘the roof. A walk around. See if everything is clear. Sandor, the car number plates. Burn them, and fix new ones.’

‘Burn them?’ Reynolds asked as the man left the room. ‘How is that possible?’

‘We have a large supply of number plates.’ Jansci smiled. ‘All of three-ply wood. They burn magnificently … Ah, you found some Villányi?’

‘The last bottle.’ Her hair was combed now, and she was smiling, appraisal and frank curiosity in her blue eyes as she looked at Reynolds. ‘You can wait twenty minutes, Mr Reynolds?’

‘If I have to.’ He smiled. ‘It will be difficult.’

‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she promised.

As the door closed behind her Jansci broke open the seal of the bottle and poured the cool white wine into a couple of glasses.

‘Your health, Mr Reynolds. And to success.’

‘Thank you.’ Reynolds drank slowly, deeply, gratefully of the wine – he could not recall when his throat and mouth had been so parched before – and nodded at the one ornament in that rather bleak and forbidding room, a silver-framed photograph on Jansci’s desk. ‘An extraordinarily fine likeness of your daughter. You have skilled photographers in Hungary.’

‘I took it myself,’ Jansci smiled. ‘It does her justice, you think? Come, your honest opinion: I am always interested in the extent and depth of a man’s percipience.’

Reynolds glanced at him in faint surprise then sipped his wine and studied the picture in silence, studied the fair, waving hair, the broad smooth brow above the long-lashed eyes, the rather high Slavonic cheekbones curving down to a wide, laughing mouth, the rounded chin above the slender column of the throat. A remarkable face, he thought, a face full of character, of eagerness and gaiety and a splendid zest for living. A face to remember …

‘Well, Mr Reynolds?’ Jansci prompted him gently.

‘It does her justice,’ Reynolds admitted. He hesitated, fearing presumption, looked at Jansci, knew instinctively how hopeless it would be to try to deceive the wisdom in these tired eyes, then went on: ‘You might almost say it does her more than justice.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, the bone structure, the shape of all the features, even the smile is exactly the same. But this picture has something more – something more of wisdom, of maturity. In two years perhaps, in three then it will be your daughter, really your daughter: here, somehow you have caught a foreshadowing of these things. I don’t know how it is done.’

‘It’s quite simple. That photograph is not of Julia but of my wife.’

‘Your wife! Good lord, what a quite extraordinary resemblance.’ Reynolds broke off, hurriedly searched his past sentences for any unfortunate gaffes, decided he had made none. ‘She is here just now?’

‘No, not here.’ Jansci put his glass down and turned it round and round between his fingers. ‘I’m afraid we do not know where she is.’

‘I’m sorry.’ It was all Reynolds could think of to say.

‘Do not misunderstand me,’ Jansci said gently. ‘We know what happened to her, I’m afraid. The brown lorries – you know what I mean?’

‘The Secret Police.’

‘Yes.’ Jansci nodded heavily. ‘The same lorries that took away a million in Poland, the same in Roumania and half a million in Bulgaria, all to slavery and death. The same lorries that wiped out the middle classes of the Baltic States, that have taken a hundred thousand Hungarians, they came also for Catherine. What is one person among so many million who have suffered and died?’

‘That was in the summer of ’51?’ It was all Reynolds could think to say: it was then, he knew, that the mass deportations from Budapest had taken place.

‘We were not living here then, it was just two and a half years ago, less than a month after we had come. Julia, thank God, was staying with friends in the country. I was away that night, I had left about midnight, and when she went to make herself coffee after I had gone, the gas had been turned off and she did not know what that meant. So they took her away.’

‘The gas? I’m afraid –’

‘You don’t understand? A chink in your armour the AVO would soon have prised open, Mr Reynolds. Everybody else in Budapest understands. It is the practice of the AVO to turn off the gas supply to a block of houses or flats before serving deportation notices there: a pillow on the bottom shelf of a gas oven is comfortable enough, and there is no pain. They stopped the sale of poisons in all chemists, they even tried to ban the sale of razor blades. They found it difficult, however, to prevent people from jumping from top storey flats …’

‘She had no warning?’

‘No warning. A blue slip of paper thrust in her hand, a small suitcase, the brown lorry and then the locked cattle trucks of the railway.’

‘But she may yet be alive. You have heard nothing?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all. We can only hope she lives. But so many died in these trucks, stifling or freezing to death, and the work in the fields, the factories or mines is brutal, killing, even for one fit and well: she had just been discharged from hospital after a serious operation. Chest-surgery – she had tuberculosis: her convalescence had not even begun.’

Reynolds swore softly. How often one read, one heard about this sort of thing, how easily, how casually, almost callously, one dismissed it – and how different when one was confronted with reality.

‘You have looked for her – for your wife?’ Reynolds asked harshly. He hadn’t meant to speak that way, it was just the way the words came out.

‘I have looked for her. I cannot find her.’

Reynolds felt the stirring of anger. Jansci seemed to take it all so easily, he was too calm, too unaffected.

‘The AVO must know where she is,’ Reynolds persisted. ‘They have lists, files. Colonel Szendrô –’

‘He has no access to top secret files,’ Jansci interrupted. He smiled. ‘And his rank is only equivalent to that of major. The promotion was self-awarded and for to-night only. So was the name … I think I heard him coming now.’

But it was the youngster with the dark hair who entered – or partially entered. He poked his head round the door, reported that everything was clear and vanished. But even in that brief moment Reynolds had had time to notice the pronounced nervous tic on the left cheek, just below the darting black eyes. Jansci must have seen the expression on Reynolds’ face, and when he spoke his voice was apologetic.

‘Poor Imre! He was not always like this, Mr Reynolds, not always so restless, so disturbed.’

‘Restless! I shouldn’t say it, but because my safety and plans are involved too, I must: he’s a neurotic of the first order.’ Reynolds looked hard at Jansci, but Jansci was his usual mild and gentle self. ‘A man like that in a set-up like this! To say he’s a potential danger is the understatement of the month.’

‘I know, don’t think I don’t know.’ Jansci sighed. ‘You should have seen him just over two years ago, Mr Reynolds, fighting the Russian tanks on Castle Hill, just north of Gellert. He hadn’t a nerve in his entire body. When it came to spreading liquid soap at the corners – and the steep, dangerous slopes of the Hill saw to the rest as far as the tanks were concerned – or prising up loose cobbles, filling the holes with petrol and touching it off as a tank passed across, Imre had no equal. But he became too rash, and one night one of the big T-54 tanks, slipping backwards down a hill with all the crew dead inside, pinned him, kneeling on all fours, against the wall of a house. He was there for thirty-six hours before anyone noticed him – and twice during that time the tank had been hit by high-explosive rockets from Russian fighter planes – they didn’t want their own tanks used against them.’

‘Thirty-six hours!’ Reynolds stared at Jansci. ‘And he lived?’

‘He hadn’t a mark on him, he still hasn’t. It was Sandor who got him out – that was how they met for the first time. He got a crowbar and broke down the wall of the house from the inside – I saw him do it, and he was flinging 200-pound blocks of masonry around as if they were pebbles. We took him into a nearby house, left him, and when we returned the house was a huge pile of rubble: some resistance fighters had taken up position there and a Mongolian tank commander had pulverized the bottom storey until the whole house fell down. But we got him out again, still without a scratch. He was very ill for a long time – for months – but he’s much better now.’

‘Sandor and yourself both fought in the rising?’

‘Sandor did. He was foreman electrician in the Dunapentele steel works, and he put his knowledge to good use. To see him handling high-tension wires with nothing but a couple of wooden battens held in his bare hands would make your blood freeze, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Against the tanks?’

‘Electrocution,’ Jansci nodded. ‘The crews of three tanks. And I’ve been told he destroyed even more down in Csepel. He killed an infantryman, stole his flame-thrower, sprayed through the driver’s visor then dropped a Molotov cocktail – just bottles of ordinary petrol with bits of burning cotton stuffed into the necks – through the hatch when they opened it to get some air. Then he would shut the hatch, and when Sandor shuts a hatch and sits on it, the hatch stays shut.’

‘I can imagine,’ Reynolds said dryly. Unconsciously, almost, he rubbed his still aching arms, then a sudden thought occurred to him. ‘Sandor took part, you said. And yourself?’

‘Nothing.’ Jansci spread his scarred, misshapen hands, palms upwards, and now Reynolds could see that the crucifixion marks indeed went right through. ‘I took no part in it. I tried all I could to stop it.’

Reynolds looked at him in silence, trying to read the expression of the faded grey eyes enmeshed in those spider webs of wrinkles. Finally he said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t believe you.’

‘I’m afraid you must.’

Silence fell on the room, a long, cold silence: Reynolds could hear the far-off tinkle of dishes in a distant kitchen as the girl prepared the meal. Finally, he looked directly at Jansci.

‘You let the others fight, fight for you?’ He made no attempt to conceal his disappointment, the near-hostility in his tone. ‘But why? Why did you not help, not do something?’

‘Why? I’ll tell you why.’ Jansci smiled faintly and reached up and touched his white hair. ‘I am not as old as the snow on my head would have you think, my boy, but I am still far too old for the suicidal, the futile act of the grand but empty gesture. I leave that for the children of this world, the reckless and the unthinking, the romanticists who do not stop to count the cost; I leave it to the righteous indignation that cannot see beyond the justice of its cause, to the splendid anger that is blinded by its own shining splendour. I leave it to the poets and the dreamers, to those who look back to the glorious gallantry, the imperishable chivalry of the bygone world, to those whose vision carries them forward to the golden age that lies beyond tomorrow. But I can only see to-day.’ He shrugged. ‘The charge of the Light Brigade – my father’s father fought in that – you remember the charge of the Light Brigade and the famous commentary on that charge? “It’s magnificent, but it’s not war.” So it was with our October Revolution.’

‘Fine words,’ Reynolds said coldly. ‘These are find words. I’m sure a Hungarian boy with a Russian bayonet in his stomach would have taken great comfort from them.’

‘I am also too old to take offence,’ Jansci said sadly. ‘I am also too old to believe in violence, except as a last resort, the final fling of desperation when every hope is gone, and even then it is only a resort to hopelessness: besides, Mr Reynolds, besides the uselessness of violence, of killing, what right have I to take the life of any man? We are all our Father’s children, and I cannot but think that fratricide must be repugnant to our God.’

‘You talk like a pacifist,’ Reynolds said roughly. ‘Like a pacifist before he lies down and lets the jackboot tramp him into the mud, him and his wife and his children.’

‘Not quite, Mr Reynolds, not quite,’ Jansci said softly. ‘I am not what I would like to be, not at all. The man who lays a finger on my Julia dies even as he does it.’

For a moment Reynolds caught a glimpse that might almost have been imagination, of the fire smouldering in the depths of those faded eyes, remembered all that Colonel Mackintosh had told of this fantastic man before him and felt more confused than ever.

‘But you said – you told me that –’

‘I was only telling you why I didn’t take part in the rising.’ Jansci was his gentle self again. ‘I don’t believe in violence if any other way will serve. Again, the time could not have been more badly chosen. And I do not hate the Russians, I even like them. Do not forget, Mr Reynolds, that I am a Russian myself. A Ukranian, but still a Russian, despite what many of my countrymen would say.’

‘You like the Russians. Even the Russian in your brother?’ Mask it as he tried with politeness, Reynolds could not quite conceal the incredulity in his question. ‘After what they have done to you and your family?’

‘A monster, and I stand condemned. Love for your enemies should be confined to where it belongs – between the covers of the Bible – and only the insane would have the courage, or the arrogance or the stupidity, to open the pages and turn the principles into practice. Madmen, only madmen would do it – but without these madmen our Armageddon will surely come.’ Jansci’s tone changed. ‘I like the Russian people, Mr Reynolds. They’re likeable, cheerful and gay when you get to know them, and there are no more friendly people on earth. But they are young, they are very young, like children. And like children they are full of whims, they’re arbitrary and primitive and a little cruel, as are all little children, forgetful and not greatly moved by suffering. But for all their youth, do not forget that they have a great love of poetry, of music and dancing, and singing and folk-tales, of ballet and the opera that would make the average westerner, in comparison, seem culturally dead.’

‘They’re also brutal and barbarous and human life doesn’t matter a damn to them,’ Reynolds interjected.

‘Who can deny it? But do not forget, so also was the western world when it was politically as young as the peoples of Russia are now. They’re backward, primitive and easily swayed. They hate and fear the west because they’re told to hate and fear the west. But your democracies, too, can act the same way.’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ Reynolds crushed out his cigarette in a gesture of irritation. ‘Are you trying to say –’

‘Don’t be so naïve, young man, and listen to me.’ Jansci’s smile robbed his words of any offence. ‘All I’m trying to say is that unreasoning, emotionally-conditioned attitudes are as possible in the west as in the east. Look, for instance, at your country’s attitude to Russia in the past twenty years. At the beginning of the last war Russia’s popularity ran high. Then came the Moscow-Berlin pact, and you were actually ready, remember, to send an army of 50,000 to fight the Russians in Finland. Then came Hitler’s assault in the east, your national press full of paeans of praise for “Good old Joe” and all the world loved a moujik. Now the wheel has come full circle again and the holocaust only awaits the one rash or panic-stricken move. Who knows, in five years’ time, all will be smiles again. You are weathercocks, just as the Russians are weathercocks, but I blame neither people; it is not the weathercock that turns, it is the wind that turns the weathercock.’

‘Our governments?’

‘Your governments,’ Jansci nodded. ‘And, of course, the national press that always conditions the thinking of a people. But primarily the governments.’

‘We in the west have bad governments, often very bad governments,’ Reynolds said slowly. ‘They stumble, they miscalculate, they make foolish decisions, they even have their quota of opportunists, careerists and plain downright power-seekers. But all these things are only because they are human. They mean well, they try hard for the good and not even a child fears them.’ He looked speculatively at the older man. ‘You yourself said recently that the Russian leaders have sent literally millions in the past few years to imprisonment and slavery and death. If, as you say, the peoples are the same, why are the governments so utterly different? Communism is the only answer.’

Jansci shook his head. ‘Communism is gone, and gone for ever. To-day it remains only as a myth, an empty lip-service catchword in the name of which the cynical, ruthless realists of the Kremlin find sufficient excuse and justification for whatever barbarities their policies demand. A few of the old guard still in power may cherish the dream of world communism, but just a few: only a global war could now achieve their aims, and these same hard-headed realists in the Kremlin can see no point or sense or future in pursuing a policy that carries with it the seed of their own destruction. They are essentially businessmen, Mr Reynolds, and letting off a time-bomb under your own factory is no way to run a business.’

‘Their barbarities, their enslavements and their massacres don’t stem from world conquest?’ The fractional lift of Reynolds’ eyebrows was its own sceptical comment. ‘You tell me that?’

‘I do.’

‘Then from what in the world –?’

‘From fear, Mr Reynolds,’ Jansci interrupted. ‘From an almost terror-stricken fear that has no parallel among governments of modern times.

‘They are afraid because the ground lost in leadership is almost irrecoverable: Malenkov’s concessions of 1953, Kruschev’s famous de-Stalinization speech of 1956 and his forced decentralization of all industry were contrary to all the cherished ideas of Communist infallibility and centralized control, but they had to be done, in the interest of efficiency and production – and the people have smelled Freedom. And they are afraid because their Secret Police has slipped and slipped badly: Beria is dead, the NKVD in Russia are not nearly so feared as the AVO in this country, so the belief in the power of authority, of the inevitability of punishment, has slipped also.

‘These fears are of their own people. But these fears are nothing compared to their fears of the outside world. Just before he died, Stalin said, “What will happen without me? You are blind, as young kittens are blind, and Russia will be destroyed because you do not know how to recognize her enemies”. Even Stalin couldn’t have known how true his words would prove to be. They cannot recognize enemies, and they can only be safe, only feel safe, if all the peoples of the outside world are regarded as enemies. Especially the west. They fear the west and, from their own point of view, they fear with every reason.

‘They are afraid of a western world that, they think, is unfriendly and hostile and just waiting its chance. How terrified would you be, Mr Reynolds if you were ringed, as Russia is ringed, with nuclear bomb bases in England and Europe and North Africa and the Middle East and Japan? How much more terrified would you be if, every time the world tensions increase, fleets of foreign bombers appear mysteriously on the far edge of your long-distance radar screens, if you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that whenever such tensions arise there are, at any given moment of the day or night anywhere between 500 and 1,000 bombers of the American Strategic Air Command each with its hydrogen bomb, cruising high in the stratosphere, just waiting the signal to converge on Russia and destroy it. You have to have an awful lot of missiles, Mr Reynolds, and an almost supernatural confidence in them to forget those thousand hydrogen bombers already airborne – and it only requires five per cent of them to get through, as they inevitably would. Or how would you, in Britain, feel if Russia were pouring arms into Southern Ireland, or the Americans if a Russian aircraft carrier fleet armed with hydrogen bombs cruised indefinitely in the Gulf of Mexico? Try to imagine all that, Mr Reynolds, and you can perhaps begin to imagine – only begin, for the imagination can be only a shadow of the reality – how the Russians feel.

‘Nor does their fear stop there. They are afraid of people who try to interpret everything in the limited light of their own particular culture, who believe that all people, the world over, are basically the same. A common assumption, and a stupid and dangerous one. The cleavage between western and Slavonic minds and ways of thinking, the differences between their culture patterns are immense, and alas, unrealized.

‘Finally, but perhaps above all, they are afraid of the penetration of western ideas into their own country. And that is why the satellite countries are so invaluable to them as a cordon sanitaire, an insulation against dangerous capitalist influences. And that’s why revolt in one of their satellites, as in this country two years last October, brings out all that is worst in the Russian leaders. They reacted with such incredible violence because they saw in this Budapest rising the culmination, the fulfilment at one and the same time of their three nightmare fears – that their entire satellite empire might go up in smoke and the cordon sanitaire vanish for ever, that even a degree of success could have touched off a similar revolt in Russia and, most terrible of all, that a large-scale conflagration from the Baltic to the Black Sea would have given the Americans all the excuse or reason they ever needed to give the green light to the Strategic Air Command and the carriers of the Sixth Fleet. I know, you know, that idea’s fantastic, but we are not dealing with facts, only with what the Russian leaders believe to be facts.’

Jansci drained his glass and looked quizzically at Reynolds. ‘You begin to see now, I hope, why I was neither advocate of nor participant in the October rising. You begin to see, perhaps, why the revolt just had to be crushed, and the bigger and more serious the revolt the more terrible would have to be the repression, to preserve the cordon, to discourage other satellites or any of their own people who might be having similar ideas. You begin to see the hopelessness – the fore-doomed hopelessness – of it, the disastrously ill-judged futility of it all. The only effect it had was to strengthen Russia’s position among the other satellites, kill and maim countless thousands of Hungarians, destroy and damage over 20,000 houses, bring inflation, a serious shortage of food and an almost mortal blow to the country’s economy. It should never have happened. Only, as I say, the anger of despair is always blind: noble anger can be a magnificent thing, but annihilation has its – ah – drawbacks.’

Reynolds said nothing: for the moment he could think of nothing to say. A long silence fell on the room, long but not cold any more: the only sound was the scuffling of Reynolds’ shoes as he tied his laces – he had been dressing as Jansci talked. Finally Jansci rose, switched out the light, drew back the curtain of the solitary window, peered out, then switched on the light again. It meant nothing, Reynolds could see, it was purely an automatic gesture, the routine precaution of a man who had lived as long as he had by never neglecting the slightest precaution. Reynolds replaced his papers in his wallet and the gun in its shoulder holster.

A tap came on the door, and Julia came in. Her face was flushed from the warmth of a stove, and she carried a tray holding a bowl of soup, a steaming plate of diced meat and diced vegetables and a bottle of wine. She laid this on the desk.

‘Here you are, Mr Reynolds. Two of our national dishes – Gulyás soup and tokány. I’m afraid there may be too much paprika in the soup and garlic in the tokány for your taste, but that’s how we like it.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘Left-overs – all I could produce in a hurry at this time of night.’

‘Smells wonderful,’ Reynolds assured her. ‘I’m only sorry to be such a bother to you in the middle of the night.’

‘I’m used to it,’ she said dryly. ‘Usually there’s half a dozen to be fed, generally about four o’clock in the morning. Father’s guests keep irregular hours.’

‘They do indeed,’ Jansci smiled. ‘Now off to bed with you, my dear: it’s very late.’

‘I’d like to stay a little, Jansci.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ Jansci’s faded grey eyes twinkled. ‘Compared to our average guest, Mr Reynolds is positively handsome. With a wash, brush-up and shave he might be almost presentable.’

‘You know that’s not fair, Father.’ She stood her ground well, Reynolds thought, but the colour had deepened in her cheeks. ‘You shouldn’t say that.’

‘It’s not fair, and I shouldn’t,’ Jansci said. He looked at Reynolds. ‘Julia’s dream world lies west of the Austrian frontier, and she’d listen for hours to anyone talking about it. But there are some things she must not know, things that it would be dangerous for her even to guess about. Off you go, my dear.’

‘Very well.’ She rose obediently, if reluctantly, kissed Jansci on the cheek, smiled at Reynolds and left. Reynolds looked over at Jansci as the older man reached for the second bottle of wine and broke open the seal.

‘Aren’t you worried to death about her all the time?’

‘God knows it,’ Jansci said simply. ‘This is no life for her, or for any girl, and if I get caught she goes too, almost for a certainty.’

‘Can’t you get her away?’

‘You want to try it! I could get her across the frontier tomorrow without the slightest difficulty or danger – you know that that is my speciality – but she won’t go. An obedient, respectful daughter as you have seen – but only up to a self-drawn line. After that, she is as stubborn as a mule. She knows the risks, but she stays. She says she’ll never leave till we find her mother and they go together. But even then –’

He broke off suddenly as the door opened and a stranger walked in. Reynolds, twisting round and out of his seat like a cat, had his automatic out and lined up on the man before he had taken a step into the room, the snick of the safety catch plain above the scraping of the chair legs on the linoleum. He stared at the man unwinkingly, taking in every detail of the face, the smooth, dark hair brushed straight back, the lean eagle face, with the thin pinched nostrils and high forehead of a type he knew well – the unmistakable Polish aristocrat. Then he started as Jansci reached out gently and pressed down the barrel of the automatic.

‘Szendrô was right about you,’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘Dangerous, very dangerous – you move like a snake when it strikes. But this man is a friend, a good friend. Mr Reynolds, meet the Count.’

Reynolds put the gun away, crossed the room and extended his hand. ‘Delighted,’ he murmured. ‘Count who?’

‘Just the Count,’ the newcomer said, and Reynolds stared at him again. The voice was unmistakable. ‘Colonel Szendrô!’

‘No other,’ the Count admitted, and with these words his voice had changed as subtly, but as completely, as his appearance. ‘I say modestly, but with truth, I have few equals in the matter of disguise and mimicry. What you now see before you, Mr Reynolds, is me – more or less. Then a scar here, a scar there, and that is how the AVO see me. You will understand, perhaps, why I was not unduly worried about being recognized to-night?’

Reynolds nodded slowly. ‘I do indeed. And – and you live here – with Jansci? Isn’t that rather dangerous?’

‘I live in the second best hotel in all Budapest,’ the Count assured him. ‘As befits a man of my rank, naturally. But as a bachelor, I must, of course, have my – ah – diversions, shall we say. My occasional absences call for no comment … Sorry to have been so long, Jansci.’

‘Not at all,’ Jansci, assured him. ‘Mr Reynolds and I have had the most interesting discussion.’

‘About the Russians, inevitably?’

‘Inevitably.’

‘And Mr Reynolds was all for conversion by annihilation?’

‘More or less.’ Jansci smiled. ‘It’s not so long since you felt the same way yourself.’

‘Age comes to us all.’ The Count crossed to a wall-cabinet, drew out a dark bottle, poured himself a half-tumblerful of liquid and looked at Reynolds. ‘Barack – apricot brandy, you would call it. Deadly. Avoid it like the plague. Home-made.’ As Reynolds watched in astonishment, he drank the contents without stopping, then refilled the glass. ‘You have not yet come to the business of the day?’

‘I’m coming to it now.’ Reynolds pushed back his plate, drank some more wine. ‘You gentlemen have heard, perhaps, of Dr Harold Jennings?’

Jansci’s eyes narrowed. ‘We have indeed. Who hasn’t?’

‘Exactly. Then you know what he’s like – an elderly dodderer well over seventy, short-sighted, amiable, a typically absent-minded professor in every respect but one. He has a brain like an electronic computer and is the world’s greatest expert and authority on the higher mathematics of ballistics and ballistic missiles.’

‘Which was why he was induced to defect to the Russians,’ the Count murmured.

‘He didn’t,’ Reynolds said flatly. ‘The world thinks he did, but the world is wrong.’

‘You are sure of this?’ Jansci was leaning far forward in his seat.

‘Certainly. Listen. At the time of the defection of other British scientists, old Jennings spoke out strongly, if unwisely, in their defence. He bitterly condemned what he called out-worn nationalism, and said that any man had the right to act according to the dictates of his mind, conscience and ideals. Almost immediately, as we expected, he was contacted by the Russians. He rebuffed them, told them to get the hell back to Moscow and said he fancied their brand of nationalism a damn’ sight less than his own: he had only been talking generally, he said.’

‘How can you be sure of this?’

‘We are sure – we had a tape recording of the entire conversation – we had the whole house wired. But we never made public the recording, and, after he had gone over to the Russians, it would have been too late – nobody would have believed us.’

‘Obviously,’ Jansci murmured. ‘And then, also obviously, you called off the watchdogs?’

‘We did,’ Reynolds admitted. ‘It would have made no difference anyway – we were watching the wrong party. Less than two months after the old boy’s interview with the Russian agents, Mrs Jennings and her sixteen-year-old schoolboy son, Brian – the professor married late in life – went to Switzerland for a holiday. Jennings was to have gone with them, but was held up by some important business at the last minute, so he let them go on alone, intending to rejoin them in two or three days in their Zurich hotel. He found his wife and son gone.’

‘Abducted, of course,’ Jansci said slowly. ‘And the Swiss-Austrian frontier is no barrier to determined men; but more likely, perhaps, by boat, at night.’

‘That’s what we thought,’ Reynolds nodded. ‘Lake Constance. Anyway, what’s certain is that Jennings was contacted within minutes of arriving at the hotel, told what had happened, and left in no doubt as to what lay in store for his wife and son if he didn’t immediately follow them behind the iron curtain. Jennings may be an old dodderer, but he’s not an old fool: he knew these people weren’t kidding, so he went at once.’

‘And now, of course, you want him back?’

‘We want him back. That’s why I’m here.’

Jansci smiled faintly. ‘It will be interesting to learn just how you propose to rescue him, Mr Reynolds, and, of course, his wife and son, for without them you achieve nothing. Three people, Mr Reynolds, an old man, a woman and a boy, a thousand miles to Moscow, and the snow lies deep upon the steppes.’

‘Not three people, Jansci: just one – the professor. And I don’t have to go to Moscow for him. He’s not two miles from where we’re sitting now, right here in Budapest.’

Jansci made no effort to conceal his astonishment. ‘Here? You’re sure of that, Mr Reynolds?’

‘Colonel Mackintosh was.’

‘Then Jennings must be here, he must be.’ Jansci twisted in his seat and looked at the Count. ‘Had you heard of this?’

‘Not a word. Nobody in our office knows of it, I’ll swear to that.’

‘All the world will know next week.’ Reynolds’ voice was quiet but positive. ‘When the International Scientific Conference opens here on Monday, the first paper will be read by Professor Jennings. He is being groomed to be the star of the show. It will be the Communists’ biggest propaganda triumph for years.’

‘I see, I see.’ Jansci drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the table, then looked up sharply. ‘Professor Jennings, you said you only wanted the professor?’

Reynolds nodded.

‘Only the professor!’ Jansci stared at him. ‘God above, man, aren’t you aware what will happen to his wife and son? I assure you, Mr Reynolds, if you expect our assistance –’

‘Mrs Jennings is already in London.’ Reynolds held up his hand to forestall the questions. ‘She fell seriously ill about ten weeks ago, and Jennings insisted that she go to the London Clinic for treatment, and he forced the Communists to accede to his demands – you can’t coerce, torture or brainwash a man of the professor’s calibre without destroying his capacity for work, and he flatly refused to carry on working till they had granted his demands.’

‘He must be quite a man.’ The Count shook his head in admiration.

‘He’s a holy terror when something gets his back up,’ Reynolds smiled. ‘But it wasn’t all that much of an achievement. The Russians had everything to gain – the continued services of the greatest ballistic expert alive to-day – and nothing to lose. They held the two trump cards – Jennings and his son – in Russia and knew that Mrs Jennings would return: and they insisted that everything be done in the utmost secrecy. Not half a dozen people in Britain know that Mrs Jennings is in Britain; not even the surgeon who carried out the two major operations on her.’

‘She recovered?’

‘It was touch and go, but she recovered and she’s recuperating very well.’

‘The old man will be pleased,’ Jansci murmured. ‘His wife returns to Russia soon?’

‘His wife will never return to Russia again,’ Reynolds said bluntly. ‘And Jennings has no reason to be pleased. He thinks his wife is critically ill, and that what little hope there is is going fast. He thinks that, because that is what we have told him.’

‘What! What’s that?’ Jansci was on his feet now, the faded grey eyes cold and hard as tone. ‘God in heaven, Reynolds, what kind of inhuman conduct is that? You actually told the old man his wife was dying?’

‘Our people at home need him, and need him desperately: our scientists have been held up, completely blocked, on their latest project for ten weeks now, and they’re convinced that Jennings is the only man that can give them the breakthrough they must have.’

‘So they would use this despicable trick –’

‘It’s life or death, Jansci,’ Reynolds interrupted flatly. ‘It may literally be life or death for millions. Jennings must be moved and we will use every lever we can to that end.’

‘You think this is ethical, Reynolds? You think anything can justify –’

‘Whether I think these things or not doesn’t matter a damn,’ Reynolds said indifferently. ‘The pros and cons are not for me to decide. The only things that concern me are that I’ve been given a job to do: if it is possible in any way at all, I’ll get that job done.’

‘A ruthless and dangerous man,’ the Count murmured. ‘I told you. A killer, but he happens to be on the side of the law.’

‘Yes.’ Reynolds was unmoved. ‘And there’s another point. Like many other brilliant men, Jennings is rather naïve and short-sighted when it comes to matters outside his own speciality. Mrs Jennings tells us that the Russians have assured her husband that the project he is working on will be used for exclusively peaceful purposes. Jennings believes this. He’s a pacifist at heart, and so –’

‘All the best scientists are pacifists at heart.’ Jansci was sitting down now, but his eyes were still hostile. ‘All the best men everywhere are pacifists at heart.’

‘I’m not arguing. All I’m saying is that Jennings is now at the stage where he would sooner work for the Russians, if he thinks he is working for peace, than for his own people, if he knows he is working for war. Which makes him all the more difficult to move – and which – in turn, makes necessary the use of every lever that comes to hand.’

‘The fate of his young son is, of course, a matter of indifference.’ The Count waved an airy hand. ‘Where such tremendous stakes are at issue –’

‘Brian, his son, was in Poznan all day yesterday,’ Reynolds interrupted. ‘Some exposition or other, mainly for youth organizations. Two men shadowed him from the moment he got up. By noon tomorrow – to-day, that is – he’ll be in Stettin. Twenty-four hours later he’ll be in Sweden.’

‘Ah, so. But you are too confident, Reynolds, you underestimate Russian vigilance.’ The Count was regarding him thoughtfully over the rim of his brandy glass. ‘Agents have been known to fail.’

‘These two agents have never failed. They are the best in Europe. Brian Jennings will be in Sweden tomorrow. The call-sign comes from London on a regular European transmission. Then, and not till then, we approach Jennings.’

‘So.’ The Count nodded. ‘Perhaps you have some humanity after all.’

‘Humanity!’ Jansci’s voice was cold still, almost contemptuous. ‘Just another lever to use against the poor old man – and Reynolds’ people know very well that if they left the boy to die in Russia Jennings would never work for them again.’

The Count lit another of his interminable chain of brown cigarettes.

‘Perhaps we are being too harsh. Perhaps, here, self-interest and humanity go hand in hand. “Perhaps,” I said … And what if Jennings still refuses to go?’

‘Then he’ll just have to go whether he wants to or not.’

‘Wonderful! Just wonderful!’ The Count smiled wryly. ‘What a picture for Pravda. Our friends here lugging Jennings by the heels across the border and the caption “British Secret Agent Liberates Western Scientist.” Can’t you just see it, Mr Reynolds?’

Reynolds shrugged and said nothing. He was only too keenly aware of the change of atmosphere in the past five minutes, the undercurrent of hostility that now ran strongly towards himself. But he had had to tell Jansci everything – Colonel Mackintosh had been insistent on that point, and it had been inevitable if they were to have Jansci’s help. The offer of help, if it were to be made at all, now hung in the balance – and without it, Reynolds knew, he might as well have saved himself the trouble of coming at all … Two minutes passed in silence, then Jansci and the Count looked at one another and exchanged an almost imperceptible nod. Jansci looked squarely at Reynolds.

‘If all your countrymen were like you, Mr Reynolds, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help you: cold-blooded, emotionless people to whom right and wrong, justice and injustice, and suffering are matters of academic disinterest are as guilty, by silence of consent, as the barbarous murderers of whom you so recently spoke: but I know they are not all like you: neither would I help if it were only to enable your scientists to make machines of war. But Colonel Mackintosh was – is – my friend and I think it inhuman, no matter what the cause, that an old man should die in a foreign land, among uncaring strangers, far from his family and those he loves. If it lies in our power, in any way at all, we will see to it, with God’s help, that the old man comes safely home again.’

FOUR

The inevitable cigarette holder clipped between his teeth, the inevitable Russian cigarette well alight, the Count leaned a heavy elbow on the buzzer and kept on leaning until a shirt-sleeved little man, unshaven and still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, came scurrying out from the little cubicle behind the hotel’s reception desk. The Count eyed him with disfavour.

‘Night-porters should sleep in the daytime,’ he said coldly. ‘The manager, little man, and at once.’

‘The manager? At this hour of the night?’ The night-porter stared with ill-concealed insolence at the clock above his head, transferred his stare to the Count, now innocuously dressed in a grey suit and grey raglan raincoat, and made no effort at all to conceal the truculence in his voice. ‘The manager is asleep. Come back in the morning.’

There came a sudden sound of ripping linen, a gasp of pain, and the Count, his right hand gripping the bunched folds of the porter’s shirt, had him halfway across the desk: the blood-shot, sleep-filmed eyes, widened first with surprise and then with fear, were only inches away from the wallet that had magically appeared in the Count’s free hand. A moment of stillness, a contemptuous shove and the porter was scrabbling frantically at the pigeon-holed mail racks behind him in an attempt to keep his balance.

‘I’m sorry, comrade, I’m terribly sorry!’ the porter licked his lips suddenly dry and stiff. ‘I – I didn’t know –’

‘Who else do you expect to come calling at this hour of night?’ the Count demanded softly.

‘No one, comrade, no one! No – no one at all. It’s just that – well, you were here only twenty minutes ago –’

‘I was here?’ It was the raised eyebrow as much as the inflection of the voice that cut short the frightened stammering.

‘No, no, of course not. Not you – your people, I mean. They came –’

‘I know little man. I sent them.’ The Count waved a weary hand in bored dismissal and the porter hurried off across the hall. Reynolds rose from the wall-bench where he had been sitting and crossed the room.

‘Quite a performance,’ he murmured. ‘You even had me scared.’

‘Just practice,’ the Count said modestly. ‘Sustains my reputation and doesn’t do them any permanent harm, distressing though it is to be addressed as “comrade” by such a moron … You heard what he said?’

‘Yes. They don’t waste much time, do they?’

‘Efficient enough in their own unimaginative way,’ the Count conceded. ‘They’ll have checked most of the hotels in town by morning. Only a slim chance, of course, but one that they can’t afford to neglect. Your position is now doubly safe, three times as safe as it was at Jansci’s house.’

Reynolds nodded and said nothing. Only half an hour had elapsed since Jansci had agreed to help him. Both Jansci and the Count had decided that he must leave there at once: it was too inconvenient, too dangerous. It was inconvenient not so much because of the cramped accommodation, but because it was in a lonely and out of the way place: movements of a stranger at any hour of the day or night, such as Reynolds might be compelled to make, would be sure to draw unfavourable attention: it was too remote from the centre of the town, from the big hotels of Pest, where Jennings might be expected to be staying: and, biggest drawback of all, it had no telephone for instant communications.

And it was dangerous because Jansci was becoming increasingly convinced that the house was being watched: in the past day or two both Sandor and Imre had seen two people, singly and on several different occasions, walking slowly by the house on the other side of the street. It was unlikely that they were innocent passers-by: like every city under a police state rule, Budapest had its hundreds of paid informers, and probably they were just confirming their suspicions and gathering their facts before going to the police and collecting their blood-money. Reynolds had been surprised by the casual, almost indifferent way Jansci had treated this danger, but the Count had explained as he had driven the Mercedes through the snow-filled street to this hotel on the banks of the Danube. The changing of their hideouts because of suspicious neighbours had become so frequent as to be almost routine, and Jansci had a sixth sense which, so far, had always led them to pull out in good time. Annoying, the Count said, but no serious inconvenience, they knew of half a dozen bolt-holes just as good, and their permanent headquarters, a place known to Jansci, Julia and himself, was in the country.

Reynolds’ thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the door across the hall opening. He looked up to see a man hurrying across the parquet floor, the tap-tap of his metalled heels urgent and almost comically hurried: he was shrugging a jacket over a crumpled shirt, and the thin, bespectacled face was alive with fear and anxiety.

‘A thousand apologies, comrade, a thousand apologies!’ he wrung white-knuckled hands in his distress, then glared at the porter following more slowly behind him. ‘This oaf here –’

‘You are the manager?’ the Count interrupted curtly.

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘Then dismiss the oaf. I wish to talk to you privately.’ He waited till the porter had gone, drew out his gold cigarette case, selected a cigarette with due care, examined it minutely, inserted it with much deliberation in his holder, took his time about finding his matchbox and removing a match, finally lit the cigarette. A beautiful performance, Reynolds thought dispassionately: the manager, already on the tenterhooks of fright, was now almost in hysterics.

‘What is it, comrade, what has gone wrong?’ In his attempt to keep his voice steady, it had been louder than intended, and it now dropped to almost a whisper. ‘If I can help the AVO in any way, I assure you –’

‘When you speak, you will do so only to answer my questions.’ The Count hadn’t even raised his voice, but the manager seemed to shrink visibly, and his mouth closed tightly in a white line of fear. ‘You spoke to my men some little time ago?’

‘Yes, yes, a short time ago. I wasn’t even asleep just now –’

‘Only to answer my questions,’ the Count repeated softly. ‘I trust I do not have to say that again … They asked if you had any new arrival staying here, any fresh bookings, checked the register and searched the rooms. They left, of course, a typed description of the man they were looking for?’

‘I have it here, comrade.’ The manager tapped his breast pocket.

‘And orders to phone immediately if anyone resembling that description appeared here?’

The manager nodded.

‘Forget all that,’ the Count ordered. ‘Things are moving quickly. We have every reason to believe that the man is either coming here or that his contact is already living here or will be coming here in the course of the next twenty-four hours.’ The Count exhaled a long, thin streamer of smoke and looked speculatively at the manager. ‘To our certain knowledge, this is the fourth time in three months that you have harboured enemies of the State in your hotel.’

‘Here? In this hotel?’ The manager had paled visibly. ‘I swear to God, comrade –’

‘God?’ The Count creased his forehead. ‘What God? Whose God?’

The manager’s face was no longer pale, it was ashen grey: good communists never made fatal blunders of this kind. Reynolds could almost feel sorry for him, but he knew what the Count was after: a state of terror, instant compliance, blind, unreasoning obedience. And already he had it.

‘A – a slip of the tongue, comrade.’ The manager was now stuttering in his panic, and his legs and hands were trembling. ‘I assure you, comrade –’

‘No. No, let me assure you, comrade.’ The Count’s voice was almost a purr. ‘One more slip-up and we must see to a little re-education, an elimination of these distressing bourgeois sentiments, of your readiness to give refuge to people who would stab our mother country in the back.’ The manager opened his mouth to protest, but his lips moved soundlessly, and the Count went on, his every word now a cold and deadly menace. ‘My instructions will be obeyed and obeyed implicitly, and you will be held directly responsible for any failure, however unavoidable that failure. That, my friend, or the Black Sea Canal.’

‘I’ll do anything, anything!’ The manager was begging now, in a state of piteous terror, and he had to clutch the desk to steady himself. ‘Anything, comrade. I swear it!’

‘You will have your last chance.’ The Count nodded towards Reynolds. ‘One of my men. Sufficiently like the spy we are after, in build and appearance, to pass muster, and we have disguised him a little. A shadowed corner of your lounge, say, an incautious approach, and the contact is ours. The contact will sing to us, as all men sing to the AVO, and then the spy himself will be ours also.’

Reynolds stared at the Count, only the years of professional training keeping his face expressionless, and wondered if there was any limit to this man’s effrontery. But in that same insolent audacity, Reynolds knew, the best hope of safety lay.

‘However, all that is no concern of yours,’ the Count continued. ‘These are your instructions. A room for my friend here – let us call him, for the sake of convenience, say, Mr Rakosi – the best you have, with a private bathroom, fire-escape, short-wave radio receiver, telephone, alarm clock, duplicates of all master-keys in the hotel and absolute privacy. No switchboard operator eavesdropping on Mr Rakosi’s room telephone – as you are probably aware, my dear manager, we have devices that tell us instantly when a line is being monitored. No chambermaid, no floor waiters, no electricians, plumbers or any other tradesmen to go near his room. All meals will be taken up by yourself. Unless Mr Rakosi chooses to show himself, he doesn’t exist. No one knows he exists, even you have never seen him, you haven’t even seen me. All that is clearly understood?’

‘Yes, of course, of course.’ The manager was grasping frantically at this straw of a last chance. ‘Everything will be exactly as you say, comrade, exactly. You have my word.’

‘You may yet live to mulct a few thousand more guests,’ the Count said contemptuously. ‘Warn that oaf of a porter not to talk, and show us this room immediately.’

Five minutes later they were alone. Reynolds’ room was not large, but comfortably furnished, complete with radio and telephone and a fire-escape conveniently placed outside the adjoining bathroom. The Count glanced round approvingly.

‘You’ll be comfortable here for a few days, two or three, anyway. Not more, it’s too dangerous. The manager won’t talk, but you’ll always find some frightened fool or mercenary informer who will.’

‘And then?’

‘You’ll have to become somebody else. A few hours’ sleep then I go to see a friend of mine who specializes in such things.’ The Count thoughtfully rubbed a blue and bristly chin. ‘A German, I think will be best for you, preferably from the Ruhr – Dortmund, Essen or thereabouts. Much more convincing than your Austrian, I assure you. East-west contraband trade is becoming so big that the deals are now being handled by the principals themselves, and the Swiss and Austrian middlemen who used to handle these transactions are having a thin time of it. Very rare birds now, and hence an object of suspicion. You can be a supplier of, let us say, aluminium and copper goods. I’ll get you a book on it.’

‘These, of course, are banned goods?’

‘Naturally, my dear fellow. There are hundreds of banned goods, absolutely proscribed by the governments of the west, but a Niagara of the stuff flows across the iron curtain every year – £100,000,000 worth, £200,000,000 – no one knows.’

‘Good lord!’ Reynolds was astonished, but recovered quickly. ‘And I’ll contribute my quota to the flow?’

‘Easiest thing imaginable, my boy. Your stuff is sent to Hamburg or some other free port under false stencils and manifest: these are changed inside the factory and the stuff embarked on a Russian ship. Or, easier still, just send them across the border to France, break up, repack and send to Czechoslovakia – by the 1921 ‘in transit’ agreement goods can be shipped from countries A to C clear across B without benefit of any customs examinations. Beautifully simple, is it not?’

‘It is,’ Reynolds admitted. ‘The governments concerned must be at their wits’ end.’

‘The governments!’ The Count laughed. ‘My dear Reynolds, when a nation’s economy booms, governments become afflicted with an irremediable myopia. Some time ago an outraged German citizen, a socialist leader by the name of, I think, Wehner – that’s it, Herbert Wehner – sent to the Bonn Government a list of six hundred firms – six hundred, my dear fellow! – actively engaged in contraband trade.’

‘And the result?’

‘Six hundred informants in six hundred factories sacked,’ the Count said succinctly. ‘Or so Wehner said, and no doubt he knew. Business is business, and profits are profits the world over. The Communists will welcome you with open arms, provided you have what they want. I’ll see to that. You will become a representative, a partner, of some big metal firm in the Ruhr.’

‘An existing firm?’

‘But of course. No chances and what that firm doesn’t know won’t hurt them.’ The Count pulled a stainless steel hip flask from his pocket. ‘You will join me?’

‘Thank you, no.’ To Reynolds’ certain knowledge, the Count had drunk three-quarters of a bottle of brandy that night already, but its effects, outwardly at least, were negligible: the man’s tolerance to alcohol was phenomenal. In fact, Reynolds reflected, a phenomenal character in many ways, an enigma if ever he had known one. Normally a coldly humorous man with a quick, sardonic wit, the Count’s face, in its rare moments of repose, held a withdrawn remoteness, almost a sadness that was in sharp, baffling contrast to his normal self. Or, maybe his remote self was his normal self …

‘Just as well.’ The Count fetched a glass from the bathroom, poured a drink and swallowed it in one gulp. ‘A purely medicinal precaution, you understand, and the less you have the more I have and thus the more adequately is my health safeguarded … As I say, first thing this morning I fix your identiy. Then I’ll go to the Andrassy Ut and find out where the Russian delegates to this conference are staying. The Three Crowns, probably – staffed by our people – but it may be elsewhere.’ He brought out paper and pencil and scribbled on it for a minute. ‘Here are the names and the addresses of seven or eight hotels – it’s bound to be one of these. Listed A-H, you observe. When I call you on the phone, I’ll first of all address you by the wrong name. The first letter of that name will correspond to the hotel. You understand?’

Reynolds nodded.

‘I’ll also try to get you Jennings’ room number. That will be more difficult. I’ll reverse it on the phone – in the form of some financial quotations in connection with your export business.’ The Count put away his brandy flask and stood up. ‘And that, I’m afraid, is about all I can do for you, Mr Reynolds. The rest is up to you. I can’t possibly go near any hotel where Jennings is staying, because our own men will be there watching them, and, besides, I expect to be on duty this coming afternoon and evening until ten o’clock at least. Even if I could approach him, it would be useless. Jennings would know me for a foreigner right away, and be instantly suspicious, and, apart from that, you are the only person who has seen his wife and can bring all the facts and necessary arguments to bear.’

‘You’ve already done more than enough,’ Reynolds assured him. ‘I’m alive, aren’t I? And I won’t leave this room till I hear from you?’

‘Not a step. Well, a little sleep, then on with the uniform and my daily stint of terrorizing all and sundry.’ The Count smiled wryly. ‘You cannot imagine, Mr Reynolds, what it feels like to be universally beloved. Au revoir.’

Reynolds wasted no time after the Count had gone. He felt desperately tired. He locked his room door, securing the key so that it could not be pushed clear from the outside, placed a chair-back under the handle as additional security, locked his room and bathroom windows, placed an assortment of glasses and other breakable articles on the window-sills – a most efficient burglar alarm, he had found from past experience – slipped his automatic under his pillow, undressed and climbed thankfully into bed.

For a minute or two only his thoughts wandered over the past few hours. He thought of the patient and gentle Jansci, a Jansci whose appearance and philosophies were at such wild variance with the almost incredible violence of his past, of the equally enigmatic Count, of Jansci’s daughter, so far only a pair of blue eyes and golden hair without any personality to go with them, of Sandor, as gentle in his own way as his master, and of Imre with the nervous shifting eyes.

He tried, too, to think of tomorrow – today, it was now – of his chances of meeting the old professor, of the best method of handling the interview, but he was far too tired really, his thoughts were no more than a kaleidoscope pattern without either form or coherence, and even that pattern blurred and faded swiftly into nothingness as he sank into the sleep of exhaustion.

The harsh jangling of the alarm clock roused him only four hours later. He woke with that dry, stale feeling of one who has only half-slept, but none the less he woke instantly, cutting off the alarm before it had rung for more than a couple of seconds. He rang down for coffee, put on his dressing-gown, lit a cigarette, collected the coffee pot at the door, locked it again and clamped the radio’s headphones to his ears.

The password announcing Brian’s safe arrival in Sweden was to consist of a planned mistake on the announcer’s part: it had been agreed that he would say, ‘… tonight – I beg your pardon, that should read “tomorrow” night.’ But the BBC’s short-wave European news transmission that morning was innocent of any such deliberate slip, and Reynolds took off the headphones without any feeling of disappointment. He hadn’t really expected it as early as this, but even so remote a chance was not to be neglected. He finished the rest of the coffee and was asleep again within minutes.

When he woke again he did so naturally, feeling completely rested and refreshed. It was just after one o’clock. He washed, shaved, rang down for lunch, dressed and then pulled apart his window curtains. It was so cold outside that his windows were still heavily frosted, and he had to open them to see what the weather was like. The wind was light, but it struck through his thin shirt like a knife, and it had all the makings, he thought grimly, of an ideal night for a secret agent at large – provided, that was, that the secret agent didn’t freeze to death. The snowflakes, big, lazy, feathery snowflakes, were swirling down gently out of a dark and leaden sky. Reynolds shivered and hastily closed the window, just as the knock came on the door.

He unlocked the door and the manager carried in a tray with Reynolds’ lunch under covers. If the manager resented what he must have regarded as menial work, he showed no signs of it: on the contrary, he was obsequiousness itself, and the presence on the tray of a bottle of Imperial Aszu, a mellow and golden Tokay with, Reynolds rightly judged, the scarcity value of gold itself, was proof enough of the manager’s almost fanatical desire to please the AVO in every conceivable way. Reynolds refrained from thanking him – the AVO, he fancied, were not given to such little courtesies – and waved a hand in dismissal. But the manager dug into his pocket and brought out an envelope, blank on both sides. ‘I was told to deliver this to you, Mr Rakosi.’

‘To me?’ Reynolds’ voice was sharp, but not with anxiety. Only the Count and his friends knew his new assumed name. ‘When did it arrive?’

‘Only five minutes ago.’

‘Five minutes ago!’ Reynolds stared coldly at the manager and his voice dropped a theatrical octave: melodramatic tones and gestures that would have led only to ridicule back home, were, he was beginning to discover, all too readily accepted as genuine in this terror-ridden country. ‘Then why wasn’t it brought to me five minutes ago?’

‘I’m sorry, comrade.’ The quaver was back in the voice once more. ‘Your – your lunch was almost ready, and I thought –’

‘You’re not required to think. Next time a message arrives for me deliver it immediately. Who brought this?’

‘A girl – a young woman.’

‘Describe her.’

‘It is difficult. I am not good at this.’ He hesitated. ‘You see she wore a belted raincoat, with a big hood attached. She wasn’t tall, short almost, but well built. Her boots –’

‘Her face, idiot! Her hair.’

‘The hood covered her hair. She had blue eyes, very blue eyes …’ The manager seized eagerly on this point, but then his voice trailed away. ‘I’m afraid, comrade –’ Reynolds cut him off and dismissed him. He had heard enough and the description tallied sufficiently well with Jansci’s daughter. His first reaction, surprising even to himself, was a faint stirring of anger that she could be risked in this fashion, but on the heels of the thought came the awareness of its injustice: it would have been highly dangerous for Jansci himself, with a face that must have been known to hundreds, to move abroad in the streets, and Sandor and Imre, conspicuous figures as they must have been in the October Rising, would be remembered by many: but a young girl would rouse neither suspicion nor comment, and even if inquiries were made later, the manager’s description would have fitted a thousand others.

He slit open the envelope. The message was brief, printed in block capitals: ‘Do not come to the house tonight. Meet me in the White Angel Café between eight and nine.’ It was signed ‘J.’ Julia of course, not Jansci – if Jansci wouldn’t take the chance of walking through the streets, he certainly wouldn’t go near a crowded café. The reason for the change in plan – he had been supposed to report to Jansci’s house after his meeting with Jennings – he couldn’t guess. Police or informer surveillance, probably, but there could be half a dozen other reasons. Typically, Reynolds wasted no time in worrying about it: guessing would get nowhere, and he would find out from the girl in due time. He burnt letter and envelope in the bathroom washbasin, flushed away the ashes and sat down to an excellent dinner.

The hours came and went. Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock and still no word from the Count. Either he was having difficulty in getting the information or, more likely, he could find no opportunity of passing it on. Reynolds, interrupting his pacing of the room only for an occasional glance through the window at the snow sifting down soundlessly, more heavily than ever, on the houses and streets of the darkening city, was beginning to grow anxious: if he was to find out where the professor was staying, interview him, persuade him to make the break for the Austrian frontier and himself be at the White Angel Café – he had found its address in the directory – by nine o’clock, time was growing very short indeed.

Five o’clock came and passed. Half-past. Then, at twenty minutes to six, the telephone bell jangled shrilly in the silence of the room. Reynolds reached the phone in two strides and picked up the receiver.

‘Mr Buhl? Mr Johann Buhl?’ The Count’s voice was low and hurried, but it was unmistakably the Count’s voice.

‘Buhl speaking.’

‘Good. Excellent news for you, Mr Buhl. I’ve been to the Ministry this afternoon, and they’re very interested in your firm’s offer, especially in the rolled aluminium. They’d like to discuss it with you right away – provided you’re willing to accept their top price – ninety-five.’

‘I think my firm would find that acceptable.’

‘Then they will do business. We can talk over dinner. Six-thirty too early for you?’

‘Not at all. I’ll be there. Third floor, isn’t it?’

‘Second. Until six-thirty, then. Good-bye.’ The receiver clicked, and Reynolds replaced his own phone. The Count had sounded pushed for time and in danger of being overheard, but he had got all the information through. B for Buhl – that was indeed the Three Crowns Hotel, the one exclusively staffed by the AVO and its creatures. A pity, it made everything trebly dangerous, but at least he would know where he stood there – every man’s hand would be against him. Room 59, second floor and the professor dined at six-thirty, when his room would be, presumably, empty. Reynolds looked at his watch and wasted no more time. He belted on his trench-coat, pulled his trilby well down, screwed the special silencer on to his Belgian automatic, and stuck the gun in his right-hand pocket, a rubberized torch in the other and two spare clips for the gun in an inside jacket pocket. Then he rang the switchboard, told the manager that he was on no account to be disturbed by visitors, telephone calls, messages or meals during the next four hours, secured the key in the lock, left the light burning to mislead any person inquisitive enough to peep through the keyhole, unlocked the bathroom window and left by the fire-escape.

The night was bitterly cold, the thick, soft snow more than ankle deep and before he had covered two hundred yards Reynolds’ coat and hat were as white, almost, as the ground beneath his feet. But he was grateful for both the cold and the snow: the cold would discourage even the most conscientious of the police and secret police from prowling the streets with their usual vigilance, and the snow, apart from shrouding him in the protective anonymity of its white cocoon, also muffled every noise, reducing even the sound of his footfalls to the merest whisper. A night for a hunter, Reynolds thought grimly.

He arrived at the Three Crowns in less than ten minutes – even in the snow-filled gloom he had found his way there as unerringly as if he had lived in Budapest all his days – and made his first circumspect inspection of the place, keeping to the far side of the street.

It was a big hotel, occupying a city block to itself. The entrance, the big double glass doors open to the night with a revolving door behind the vestibule, was bathed in a harsh fluorescent light. Two uniformed doormen, occasionally stamping their feet and beating their arms against the cold, guarded the entrance: both men, Reynolds could see, were armed with revolvers in buttoned-down holsters, and carried a baton or night-stick apiece. They were no more doormen than he was himself, Reynolds guessed, but almost certainly regular members of the AVO. One thing was certain: no matter how he was going to effect an entry, it wasn’t going to be through that front door. All this Reynolds saw out of the corner of his eyes as he hurried along the other side of the street, head bent against the snow, to all appearances a man homeward bound with all speed to the comforts of his own fireside. As soon as he was out of their sight, he doubled in his tracks and made a quick examination of the sides of the Three Crowns. There was no more hope here than there had been at the front: all the ground-floor windows were heavily barred and the windows of the storey above might as well have been on the moon as far as accessibility was concerned. That left only the back.

The trade and staff entrance to the hotel lay through a deep archway in the middle of the wall, wide enough and high enough to take a big delivery truck. Through the archway Reynolds caught a glimpse of the snow-covered courtyard beyond – the hotel was built in the form of a hollow square – an entrance door at the far side, opposite the main doors, and one or two parked cars. Above the entrance door to the main block, a hooded electric lantern burned brightly and light shone from several of the ground and first-floor windows. The total illumination was not much, but enough to let him see the angular shapes of three fire-escapes zig-zagging upwards before being lost in the snow and the darkness.

Reynolds walked to the corner, glanced quickly round him, crossed the street at a fast walk and made his way back towards the entrance, hugging the hotel wall as closely as he could. Approaching the opening of the archway, he slowed down, stopped, pulled the brim of his hat farther over his eyes, and peered cautiously round the corner.

For the first moment he could see nothing, for his eyes, so long accustomed and adjusted to the darkness, were momentarily dazzled, blinded by the beam from a powerful torch, and in that sickening instant he was certain he had been discovered. His hand was just coming out of his pocket, the butt of the automatic cradled in his hand, when the beam left him and went round the inside of the courtyard.

The pupils of his eyes slowly widening again, Reynolds could see now what had happened. A man, a soldier armed with a shoulder-slung carbine, was making his rounds of the perimeter of the courtyard, and the carelessly swinging torch light had illuminated Reynolds’ face for an instant, but the guard, his eyes obviously not following the beam, had missed it.

Reynolds turned into the archway, took three silent paces forward and stopped again. The guard was going away from him now, approaching the main block, and Reynolds could clearly see what he was doing. He was making a round of the fire-escapes shining his light on the bottom, snow-covered flight of steps of each. Reynolds wondered ironically whether he was guarding against the possibility of outsiders going in – or insiders going out. Probably the latter – from what the Count had told him, he knew that quite a few of the guests at this forthcoming conference would willingly have passed it up in exchange for an exit visa to the west. A rather stupid precaution, Reynolds thought, especially when it was made so obvious: any reasonably fit person, forewarned by the probing torch, could go up or down the first flight of a fire-escape without his feet making any telltale tracks on the steps.

Now, Reynolds decided, now’s my chance. The guard, passing under the electric storm lantern at the far entrance, was at his maximum distance, and there was no point in waiting until he had made another circuit. Soundlessly, a shadowy ghost in the white gloom of the night, Reynolds flitted across the cobblestones of the archway, barely checked an exclamation, halted abruptly in mid-step and shrank into the wall beside him, legs, body, arms and widespread, stiff-fingered hands pressing hard against the cold, clammy stone of the wall behind, the brim of his hat crushed flat between the side of his head and the archway. His heart was thumping slowly, painfully in his chest.

You fool, Reynolds, he told himself savagely, you bloody kindergarten idiot. You almost fell for it, but for the grace of God and the red arc of that carelessly flung cigarette now sizzling to extinction in the snow not two feet from where you stood, rock-still, not even daring to breathe, you would have fallen for it. He should have known, he should have done the intelligence of the AVO the elementary courtesy of guessing that they wouldn’t make things so childishly simple for anyone hoping to break in or out.

The sentry-box just inside the courtyard stood only a few inches back from the archway, and the sentry himself, half in, half out of the box, his shoulders leaning against the corners both of the box and the archway, was less than thirty inches from where Reynolds stood. Reynolds could hear him breathing, slowly, distinctly and the occasional shuffling of his feet on the wooden floor of the box was almost thunderous in his ears.

He had barely seconds left, Reynolds knew, half a dozen at the most. The sentry had only to stir, to turn his head a couple of lazy inches to the left and he was lost. Even if he didn’t so stir, his companion, now only yards away, would be bound to catch him in the sweep of his torch as he came by the entrance. Three courses, Reynolds’ racing mind calculated, three courses only lay open to him. He could turn and run, and stood a good chance of escape in the snow and the darkness, but the guard would be then so strengthened that his last chance of seeing old Jennings would have gone for ever. He could kill both men – he never questioned his own ability to do this, and would have destroyed them ruthlessly if the necessity were there – but the problem of the disposal of the bodies would be insuperable, and if the hue and cry over their discovery were raised while he was still inside the Three Crowns he knew he would never come out alive. There was only the third way that offered any chance of success, and there was time neither for further thought nor delay.

The automatic was out now, the butt firmly clasped in both hands, the back of his right wrist pressed hard against the archway wall for maximum steadiness. The bulk of the silencer made sighting difficult, the swirling snow made it doubly so, but the chance had to be taken. The soldier with the torch was perhaps ten feet away, the guard in the box clearing his throat to make some remark to his companion when Reynolds slowly squeezed the trigger.

The soft ‘plop’ of the silencer muffling the escaping gases was lost in the sudden crash as the storm lantern above the entrance door shattered into a hundred pieces, the broken fragments tinkling against the wall behind before falling into the cushioning silence of the snow. To the ears of the man at the sentry-box, the dull report of the silencer must have come a fraction of a second before the smashing of the glass, but the human ear is incapable of making such fine distinctions in time, and only the vastly louder sound could have registered. Already he was pounding across the courtyard toward the far entrance, the man with the torch close by his side.

Reynolds wasn’t far behind them. He passed the sentry-box, turned sharply right, ran lightly along the track the circling sentry had beaten in the virgin snow, passed the first fire-escape, turned, launched himself sideways and upwards and caught the stanchion supporting the hand-rail on the first platform at the full extent of his arms. For one bad moment he felt his fingers slipping on the cold, smooth steel, tightened his grip desperately, held, then overhanded himself upwards till he caught the rail. A moment later he was standing securely on the first platform, and neither the snow round the three outer edges of the platform nor that on any of the steps leading up to it showed any signs of having been disturbed.

Five seconds later, taking two steps at a time with his feet, each time, placed sideways in the middle of each step so as to leave no visible trace from below, he had reached the second platform, on a level now with the first floor. Here he crouched, kneeling so as to reduce his bulk to the smallest dimensions possible, for the two soldiers were returning to the archway, in no great hurry, talking to one another. They were convinced, Reynolds could hear, that the hot glass had shattered because of the extreme cold, and not disposed to worry unduly about it. Reynolds felt no surprise: the spent bullet deflected by these granite-hard walls would leave scarcely a mark, and it might lie undisturbed, undiscovered for days under the thick carpet of snow. In their position, he would probably have come to the same conclusion himself. For form’s sake, the two men walked round the parked cars and shone their torches over the lower flights of the fire-escapes, and by the time their cursory inspection was over, Reynolds was on the platform level with the second floor, standing outside a set of double glass doors.

He tried them, cautiously, firmly. They were locked. He had expected nothing else. Slowly, with the utmost care – for his hands were now almost numbed with the cold and the slightest fumble could be his undoing – he had brought out his knife, eased the blade open without a click, slid it into the crack between the doors and pressed upwards. Seconds later he was inside locking the glass doors behind him.

The room was pitch dark but his outstretched, inquiring hands soon told him where he was. The hard smoothness all around, the glazed feel of wall tiles, marble washbasins and chromed rails could belong only to a bathroom. He pulled the door curtains carelessly together – as far as the men below were concerned, there was no reason why a light should not appear in that room more than in any other room – fumbled his way across to the door and switched on the light.

It was a large room with an old-fashioned bath, three of the walls tiled and the other given up to a couple of big linen cupboards, but Reynolds wasted no time in examining it. He crossed to the washbasin, ran the water till the basin was almost full of hot water and plunged his hands in. A drastic method of restoring circulation to numbed and frozen hands, and an exquisitely painful one, but what it lacked in finesse it more than compensated for in speed, and Reynolds was interested in that alone. He dried his tingling fingers, took his automatic out, switched off the light, cautiously opened the door and eased an eye round the corner of the jamb.

He was standing, he found, at the end of a long corridor, luxuriously carpeted as he would have expected of any hotel run by the AVO. Both sides of the corridor were lined with doors, the one opposite him bearing the number 56 and the next but one 57: luck was beginning to break his way and chance had brought him directly into the wing where Jennings and, probably, a handful of other top scientists were quartered. But as his glance reached the end of the corridor, his mouth tightened and he drew back swiftly, noiselessly inside the door, shutting it softly behind him. Self-congratulations were a trifle premature, he thought grimly. There had been no mistaking the identity of that uniformed figure standing at the far end of the corridor, hands clasped behind his back and staring out through a frost-rimmed window: there was no mistaking an AVO guard anywhere.

Reynolds sat on the edge of the bath, lit a cigarette and tried to figure out his next move. The need for haste was urgent, but not desperate enough for rashness: at this stage, rashness could ruin everything.

The guard, obviously, was there to stay – he had that curiously settled look about him. Equally obviously, he, Reynolds, could not hope to break his way into No. 59 as long as the guard remained there. Problem, remove the guard. No good trying to rush him or even stalk him down the brightly lit length of the 120-foot corridor: there were other ways of committing suicide but few more foolish. The guard would have come to him, and he would have to come unsuspectingly. Suddenly Reynolds grinned, crushed out his cigarette and rose quickly to his feet. The Count, he thought, would have appreciated this.

He stripped off hat, jacket, tie and shirt, tossing them into the bath, ran hot water into the basin, took a bar of soap and lathered his face vigorously till it was covered in a deep white film up to his eyes: for all he knew his description had been issued to every policeman and AVO man in Budapest. Then he dried his hands thoroughly, took the gun in his left hand, draped a towel over it and opened the door. His voice, when he called, was low-pitched enough but it carried down the length of the corridor with remarkable clarity.

The guard whirled round at once, his hand automatically reaching down for his gun, but he checked the movement as he saw the harmless appearance of the singlet-clad, gesticulating figure at the other end of the corridor. He opened his mouth to speak, but Reynolds urgently gestured him to silence with the universal dumb-show of a forefinger raised to pursed lips. For a second the guard hesitated, saw Reynolds beckoning him frantically, then came running down the corridor, his rubber soles silent on the deep pile of the carpet. He had his gun in his hand as he drew up alongside Reynolds.

‘There’s a man on the fire-escape outside,’ Reynolds whispered. His nervous fumbling with the towel concealed the transfer of the gun, barrel foremost, to his right hand. ‘He’s trying to force the doors open.’

‘You are sure of this?’ The man’s voice was no more than a hoarse, guttural murmur. ‘You saw him?’

‘I saw him.’ Reynolds’ whisper was shaking with nervous excitement. ‘He can’t see in, though. The curtains are drawn.’

The guard’s eyes narrowed and the thick lips drew back in a smile of almost wolfish anticipation. Heaven only knew what wild dreams of glory and promotion were whirling through his mind. Whatever his thoughts, none was of suspicion or caution. Roughly he pushed Reynolds to one side and pushed open the bathroom door and Reynolds, his right hand coming clear of the towel, followed on his heels.

He caught the guard as he crumpled and lowered him gently to the floor. To open up the linen cupboard, rip up a couple of sheets, bind and gag the unconscious guard, lift him into the cupboard and lock the door on him took Reynolds’ trained hands only two minutes.

Two minutes later, hat in hand and overcoat over his arm, very much in the manner of an hotel guest returning to his room, Reynolds was outside the door of No. 59. He had half a dozen skeleton keys, together with four masters the manager of his own hotel had given him – and not one of them fitted.

Reynolds stood quite still. This was the last thing he had expected – he would have guaranteed the entry to any hotel door with these keys. And he couldn’t risk forcing the door – breaking it open was out of the question, and a lock tripped by force can’t be closed again. If a guard accompanied the professor back to his room, as might well happen, and found unlocked a door he had left locked, suspicion and immediate search would follow.

Reynolds moved on to the next door. On both sides of this corridor only every other door bore a number, and it was a safe assumption that the numberless doors were the corridor entrances to the private bathrooms adjoining each room – the Russians accorded to their top scientists facilities and accommodation commonly reserved in other and less realistic countries for film stars, aristocracy and the leading lights of society.

Inevitably, this door too was locked. So long a corridor in so busy a hotel couldn’t remain empty indefinitely and Reynolds was sliding the keys in and out of the lock with the speed and precision of a sleight-of-hand artist. Luck was against him again. He pulled out his torch, dropped to his knees and peered into the crack between the door and the jamb; this time luck was with him. Most continental doors fit over a jamb, leaving the lock bolt inaccessible, but this one fitted into the jamb. Reynolds quickly took from his wallet a three by two oblong of fairly stiff celluloid – in some countries the discovery of such an article on a known thief would be sufficient to bring him before a judge on a charge of being in possession of a burglarious implement – and slipped it between door and jamb. He caught the door handle, pulling towards himself and in the direction of the hinges, worked the celluloid in behind the bolt, eased the door and jerked it back again. The bolt slid back with a loud click, and a moment later Reynolds was inside.

The bathroom, for such it was, resembled in every detail the one he had just left, except for the position of the doors. The double cupboard was to his right as he entered between the two doors. He opened the cupboards, saw that one side was given over to shelves and the other, with a full-length mirror to its door, empty, then closed them again. A convenient bolt-hole, but one he hoped he would have no occasion to use.

He crossed to the bedroom connecting door and peered in through the keyhole. The room beyond was in darkness. The door yielded to his touch on the handle and he stepped inside, the pencil beam of his torch swiftly circling the room. Empty. He crossed to the window, saw that no chink of light could possibly escape through the shutters and heavy curtains, crossed over to the door, switched on the light and hung his hat over the handle to block off the keyhole.

Reynolds was a trained searcher. It took only a minute’s meticulous examination of walls, pictures and ceilings to convince him that there was no spy-hole into the room, and less than twenty seconds thereafter to find the inevitable microphone, concealed behind the ventilation grill above the window. He transferred his attention to this bathroom, and the examination there took only seconds. The bath was built in, so there could be nothing there. There was nothing behind the washbasin or the water closet, and behind the shower curtains were only the brass handgrip and the old-fashioned spray nozzle fixed to the ceiling.

He was just pulling back the curtains when he heard footsteps approaching in the corridor outside – only feet away, the deep carpet had muffled their approach. He ran through the connecting door into the bedroom, switched off the light – there were two people coming, he could hear them talking and could only hope that their voices drowned the click of the switch – picked up his hat, moved swiftly back into the bathroom, had the door three parts shut and was peering through the crack between jamb and door when the key turned in the lock and Professor Jennings walked into the room. And, hard on his heels, a tall, bulky man in a brown suit followed him through the doorway. Whether he was some AVO appointed guard or just a colleague of Jennings’, it was impossible to say. But one thing was clear enough: he carried with him a bottle and two glasses, and he intended to stay.

FIVE

Reynolds’ gun was in his hand, almost without his being aware of it. If Jennings’ companion chose to make an inspection of the bathroom, there was no time for him, Reynolds, to move into the shelter of the big cupboard. And if he was discovered, then Reynolds would be left without any option, and with the guard – and for safety’s sake he had to assume that it was a guard – unconscious or dead, his boats would have been burnt behind him. There would never then be another chance of contacting Jennings, the old professor would have to come with him that night whether he liked it or not, and Reynolds rated as almost non-existent his chances of escaping unobserved from the Three Crowns with an unwilling prisoner at the point of a gun and getting any distance at all through the hostile dark of Budapest.

But the man with Jennings made no move to enter the bathroom, and it soon became apparent that he was no guard. Jennings appeared to be on friendly enough terms with the man, called him Jozef, and discussed with him, in English, some highly technical subjects that Reynolds couldn’t even begin to understand. A scientific colleague, beyond doubt. For a moment, Reynolds was conscious of astonishment that the Russians should allow two scientists, one a foreigner, to discuss so freely; then he remembered the microphone, and he wasn’t astonished any more. It was the man in the brown suit who was doing most of the talking, and this was at first surprising, for Harold Jennings had the reputation of being talkative to the point of garrulousness, forthright to the point of indiscretion. But Reynolds, peering through the jamb of the door, could see that Jennings was a vastly changed Jennings from the person whose figure and face he had memorised from a hundred photographs. Two years in exile had added more than ten in age to his appearance. He seemed smaller, somehow, curiously shrunken, and in place of a once splendid mane of white hair were now only a few straggling locks across a balding head: his face was unhealthily pale, and only his eyes, dark, sunken pools in a deeply lined and etched face, had lost none of their fire and authority. Reynolds smiled to himself in the darkness. Whatever the Russians had done to the old man, they hadn’t broken his spirit: that would have been altogether too much to expect.

Reynolds glanced down at the face of his luminous watch, and his smile vanished. Time was running out. He must see Jennings, see him alone, and soon. Half a dozen different ideas occurred to him within the space of a minute, but he dismissed them all as unpractical or too dangerous. He must take no chances. For all the apparent friendliness of the man in the brown suit, he was a Russian and must be treated as an enemy.

Finally he came up with an idea that carried with it at least a fair chance. It was far from foolproof, it could fail as easily as it could succeed, but the chance had to be taken. He crossed the bathroom on noiseless feet, picked up a piece of soap, made his silent way back to the big cupboard, opened the door with the long mirror inside and started to write on the glass.

It was no good. The dry soap slid smoothly over the smooth surface and made scarcely a mark. Reynolds swore softly, as he softly recrossed to the washbasin, turned the tap with infinite care till a little trickle of water came out, then wet the soap thoroughly. This time the writing on the glass was all he could have wished for, and he wrote in clear, block letters:

‘I AM FROM ENGLAND – GET RID OF YOUR FRIEND AT ONCE.’

Then, gently, careful to guard against even the smallest metallic sound or creak of hinges, he eased open the bathroom corridor door and peered out. The corridor was deserted. Two long paces took him outside Jennings’ bedroom door, a very soft, quick tap-tap on the wood and he was back inside the bathroom as noiselessly as he had gone, picking his torch up from the floor.

The man in the brown suit was already on his feet, walking towards the door, when Reynolds stuck his head through the partly open bathroom door, one finger in urgent warning at his lips, another pressing down on the morse button of his torch, the beam striking Jennings’ eyes – a fraction of a second only, but long enough. Jennings glanced up, startled, saw the face at the door, and not even Reynolds’ warning forefinger could stifle the exclamation that leapt to his lips. The man in the brown suit, with the door open now and glancing uncomprehendingly along the length of the corridor, swung round.

‘Something is wrong, Professor?’

Jennings nodded. ‘This damned head of mine – you know how it troubles me … No one there?’

‘No one – no one at all. I could have sworn – you do not look well, Professor Jennings.’

‘No. Excuse me.’ Jennings smiled wanly and rose to his feet. ‘A little water, I think, and some of my migraine tablets.’

Reynolds was standing inside the big cupboard, the door just ajar. As soon as he saw Jennings come into the bathroom, he pushed the door wide open. Jennings couldn’t fail to see the mirror with its message: he nodded almost imperceptibly, glanced warningly at Reynolds, and continued towards the washbasin without breaking his stride. For an old man unaccustomed to this sort of thing, it was a remarkable performance.

Reynolds interpreted the warning glance correctly, and the cupboard door had hardly closed before the professor’s companion was in the room.

‘Perhaps I should get the hotel doctor,’ he said worriedly. ‘He would be only too willing.’

‘No, no.’ Jennings swallowed a tablet and washed it down with a gulp of water. ‘I know these damned migraines of mine better than any doctor. Three of these tablets, three hours lying down in absolute darkness. I’m really terribly sorry, Jozef, our discussion was just beginning to become really interesting, but if you would excuse me –’

‘But of course, of course.’ The other was cordiality and understanding itself. ‘Whatever else happens, we must have you fit and well for the opening speech on Monday.’ A few platitudes of sympathy, a word of farewell and the man in the brown suit was gone.

The bedroom door clicked shut and the soft sound of his footfalls faded in the distance. Jennings, his face a nice mixture of indignation, apprehension and expectation, made to speak but Reynolds held up his hand for silence, went to the bedroom door, locked it, withdrew the key, tried it in the bathroom corridor door, found to his relief that it fitted, locked it and closed the communicating door leading to the bedroom. He produced his cigarette case and offered it to the professor, only to have it waved aside.

‘Who are you? What are you doing in my room?’ The Professor’s voice was low, but the asperity in it, an asperity just touched with fear, was unmistakable.

‘My name is Michael Reynolds.’ Reynolds puffed a cigarette alight: he felt he needed it. ‘I left London only forty-eight hours ago, and I would like to talk to you, sir.’

‘Then, dammit, why can’t we talk in the comfort of my bedroom?’ Jennings swung round, then brought up abruptly as Reynolds caught him by the shoulder.

‘Not in the bedroom, sir.’ Reynolds shook his head gently. ‘There’s a concealed microphone in the ventilation grill above your window.’

‘There’s a what – How did you know, young man?’ The professor walked slowly back toward Reynolds.

‘I had a look around before you came,’ Reynolds said apologetically. ‘I arrived only a minute before you.’

‘And you found a microphone in that time?’ Jennings was incredulous and not even politely so.

‘I found it right away. It’s my job to know where to look for such things.’

‘Of course, of course! What else could you be? An espionage agent, counter-espionage – damned things mean the same to me. Anyway, the British Secret Service.’

‘A popular if erroneous –’

‘Bah! A rose by any other name.’ Whatever of fear there was in the little man, Reynolds thought dryly, it certainly wasn’t for himself: the fire of which he had heard so much burned as brightly as ever. ‘What do you want, sir? What do you want?’

‘You,’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘Rather, the British Government wants you. I am asked by the Government to extend to you a most cordial invitation –’

‘Uncommonly civil of the British Government, I must say. Ah, I expected this, I’ve been expecting it for a long time now.’ If Jennings had been a dragon, Reynolds mused, everything within ten feet of him would have been incinerated. ‘My compliments to the British Government, Mr Reynolds, and tell them from me to go to hell. Maybe when they get there, they’ll find someone who’ll help them build their infernal machines, but it isn’t going to be me.’

‘The country needs you, sir, and needs you desperately.’

‘The last appeal and the most pathetic of all.’ The old man was openly contemptuous now. ‘The shibboleths of outworn nationalism, the catchpenny phrase words of the empty-headed flag wavers of your bogus patriotism are only for the children of this world, Mr Reynolds, the morons, the self-seekers and those who live entirely for war. I care only to work for the peace of the world.’

‘Very good, sir.’ The people at home, Reynolds thought wryly, had badly underestimated either Jennings’ credulity or the subtlety of Russian indoctrination: even so, his words had seemed a far-off echo of something Jansci had said. He looked at Jennings. ‘The decision, of course, must rest entirely with you.’

‘What!’ Jennings was astonished, and could not conceal his astonishment. ‘You accept it? You accept it as easily as that – and you have come so far?’

Reynolds shrugged. ‘I am only a messenger, Dr Jennings.’

‘A messenger? And what if I had agreed to your ridiculous suggestion?’

‘Then, of course, I would have accompanied you back to Britain.’

‘You would have – Mr Reynolds, do you realise what you are saying? Do you realise what – you – you would have taken me out of Budapest, through Hungary and across the frontier …’ Jennings’ voice slowly trailed away into nothingness, and when he looked up at Reynolds again, the fear was back in his eyes.

‘You are no ordinary messenger, Mr Reynolds,’ he whispered. ‘People like you are never messengers.’ All of a sudden certainty struck home at the old man, and a thin white line touched the edges of his mouth. ‘You were never told to invite me back to Britain – you were told to bring me back. There were to be no ‘ifs’ or ‘maybes,’ were there, Mr Reynolds!’

‘Isn’t that rather silly, sir?’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘Even if I were in a position to use compulsion, and I’m not, I wouldn’t be such a fool as to use it. Supposing you were to be dragged back to Britain tied hand and foot, there’s still no way of keeping you there or making you work against your own will. Let’s not confuse flag wavers with the secret police of a satellite state.’

‘I don’t for a moment think you’d use direct force to get me home.’ The fear was still in the old man’s eyes, fear and sickness of heart. ‘Mr Reynolds, is – is my wife still alive?’

‘I saw her two hours before I left London Airport.’ There was a quiet sincerity in every word that Reynolds spoke, and he had never seen Mrs Jennings in his life. ‘She was holding her own, I think.’

‘Would you say – would you say she is still critically ill?’

Reynolds shrugged. ‘That is for the doctors to say.’

‘For God’s sake, man, don’t try to torture me! What do the doctors say?’

‘Suspended animation. Hardly a medical term, Dr Jennings, but that’s what Mr Bathurst – he was her surgeon – calls it. She’s conscious all the time, and in little pain, but very weak: to be brutally frank, she could go at any moment. Mr Bathurst says she’s just lost the will to live.’

‘My God, my god!’ Jennings turned away and stared unseeingly through the frosted window. After a moment he swung round, his face contorted, his dark eyes blurred with tears. ‘I can’t believe it, Mr Reynolds, I just can’t. It’s not possible. My Catherine was always a fighter. She was always –’

‘You don’t want to believe it,’ Reynolds interrupted. His voice was cold to the point of cruelty. ‘Doesn’t matter what the self-deception is, does it, as long as it satisfies your conscience, this precious conscience that would let you sell your own people down the river in exchange for all this claptrap about co-existence. You know damned well your wife has nothing to live for – not with her husband and son lost for ever to her beyond the iron curtain.’

‘How dare you talk –’

‘You make me sick!’ Reynolds felt a momentary flash of distaste for what he was doing to this defenceless old man; but crushed it down. ‘You stand there making noble speeches and standing upon all these wonderful principles of yours, and all the time your wife is in a London hospital, dying: she’s dying, Dr Jennings, and you are killing her as surely as if you were standing by her side and throttling –’

‘Stop! Stop! For God’s sake stop!’ Jennings had his hands to his ears and was shaking his head like a man in agony. He drew back his hands across his forehead. ‘You’re right, Reynolds, heaven only knows you’re right, I’d go to her tomorrow but there’s more to it than that.’ He shook his head in despair. ‘How can you ask any man to choose between the lives of his wife, who may be already beyond hope, and his only son. My situation is impossible! I have a son –’

‘We know all about your son, Dr Jennings. We are not inhuman altogether.’ Reynolds’ voice had dropped to a gentle, persuasive murmur. ‘Yesterday Brian was in Poznan. This afternoon he will be in Stettin and tomorrow morning he will be in Sweden. I have only to receive radio confirmation from London, and then we can be on our way. Certainly inside twenty-four hours.’

‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ Hope and disbelief struggled pitifully for supremacy in the old, lined face. ‘How can you say –’

‘I can’t prove a thing, I don’t have to prove a thing,’ Reynolds said wearily. ‘With all respect, sir, what the hell’s happened to this mighty intellect? Surely you know that all the government wants of you is that you should work for them again, and you also know they know what you’re like: they know damned well if you returned home and found your son still a prisoner in Russia that you’d never work for them as long as you lived. And that’s the last thing in the world they’d ever want.’

Conviction had come slowly to Jennings, but now that it had come it had come for keeps. Reynolds, seeing the new life come into the professor’s face, the determination gradually replacing the worry and the sorrow and the fear, could have laughed aloud from sheer relief: even on himself, the strain had been greater than he had realised. Another five minutes, a score of questions tumbling out one after the other, and the professor, afire now with the hope of seeing his wife and son in the course of the next few days, was all for leaving that very night, at that very instant, and had to be restrained. Plans had to be made, Reynolds explained gently, and much more important, they had first to get news of Brian’s escape and this had brought Jennings to earth immediately. He agreed to await further instructions, repeated aloud several times the address of Jansci’s house until he had completely memorized it, but agreed never to use it except in extreme emergency – the police might have already moved in as far as Reynolds knew – and promised, in the meantime, to carry on working and behaving exactly as he had been doing.

So completely had his attitude towards Reynolds changed that he tried to persuade him to share a drink, but Reynolds declined. It was only half past seven, he had plenty of time before his appointment in the White Angel, but he had already pushed his luck to the limit: at any moment now the imprisoned guard might recover consciousness and start to kick the door down, or a supervisor might make his rounds and find him missing. He left immediately, by way of the professor’s bedroom window and by means of a couple of sheets which let him climb down far enough to catch the barred grills of a window on the ground storey. Even before Jennings had had time to reel in the sheets and close his windows, Reynolds had dropped silently to the ground and vanished wraith-like into the darkness and the snow.

The White Angel Café lay just back from the east bank of the Danube on the Pest side, opposite St Margit Island, and Reynolds passed through its frosted swing doors just as a nearby church bell, muffled and faint through the curtaining snow, struck the hour of eight o’clock.

The contrast between the world outside these swing doors and the one inside was as abrupt as it was complete. One step across the threshold and the snow, the cold, the chill dark silent loneliness of the lifeless streets of Budapest were magically transformed into warmth and brightness and the gaiety of laughing, babbling voices as men and women found an outlet for their natural gregariousness in the cramped and smoky confines of the little café and sought to make their escape, however artificial and ephemeral such escape might be, from the iron realities of the world outside. Reynolds’ first and immediate reaction was that of surprise, shock, almost, to find such an oasis of colour and light in the grim, drab greyness of a police state, but that reaction was brief: it was inevitable that the Communists, no mean psychologists, should not only permit such places but positively encourage them. If people were to gather in the company of one another, as people would no matter what the prohibitions, how much better that they should do it in the open and drink their coffee and wine and porter under the watchfully benevolent eye of some trusted servants of the state, rather than gather in dark and huddled corners and plot against the régime. Excellent safety valves, Reynolds thought dryly.

He had broken step and paused just inside the door, then moved on again almost at once, but without haste. Two tables near the doors were crowded with Russian soldiers laughing, singing and banging their glasses on the table in high good humour. Harmless enough, Reynolds judged, and doubtless that was why the café had been chosen as a rendezvous: no one was going to look for a western spy in the drinking haunt of Russian soldiers. But these were Reynolds’ first Russians, and he preferred not to linger.

He moved in to the back of the café and saw her almost at once, sitting alone at a tiny table for two. She was dressed in the belted hooded coat the manager had described to Reynolds earlier in the day, but now the hood was down and the coat open at the throat. Her eyes caught his without a flicker of recognition and Reynolds took his cue at once. There were half a dozen tables nearby with one or two vacant places and he stood there hesitating over which seat to choose long enough for several people to notice his presence. Then he moved across to Julia’s table.

‘Do you mind if I share your table?’ he asked.

She stared at him, turned her head to look pointedly at a small empty table in the corner, glanced at him again, then pointedly shifted her body until her shoulder was turned to him. She said nothing, and Reynolds could hear the stifled sniggers behind him as he sat down. He edged his chair closer to hers, and his voice was only a murmur.

‘Trouble?’

‘I’m being followed.’ She had turned towards him again, her face hostile and aloof. She’s no fool, Reynolds thought, and by heavens she knew how to act.

‘He’s here?’

A millimetric nod, but nod nevertheless.

‘Where?’

‘Bench by the door. Near the soldiers.’

Reynolds made no move to turn his head.

‘Describe him.’

‘Medium height, brown raincoat, no hat, thin face and black moustache.’ The disdain still registering on her face was in almost comical contrast with the words.

‘We must get rid of him. Outside. You first, me last.’ He stretched out his hand, squeezed her forearm, bent forward and leered at her. ‘I’ve been trying to pick you up. In fact, I’ve just made a most improper suggestion. How do you react?’

‘Like this.’ She swung back her free hand and caught Reynolds across the face with a slap so loud that it momentarily stopped all hubbub and conversation and turned every eye in their direction. Then Julia was on her feet, gathering up her handbag and gloves and walking haughtily towards the door, looking neither to her left nor right. As if by a signal, the talk and the laughter broke out again – and most of the laughter, Reynolds knew, was directed against himself.

He lifted a hand and gingerly caressed a tingling cheek. The young lady, he thought ruefully, carried realism to quite unnecessary lengths. A scowl on his face, he swivelled in his seat in time to see the glass doors swinging to behind her and to see a man in a brown raincoat rise unobtrusively from his seat by the door, throw some money on his table and follow close behind her even before the door had stopped swinging.

Reynolds was on his feet, a man obviously bent on leaving the scene of his discomfiture and mortification with all possible speed. Everybody, he knew, was looking at him, and when he pulled his coat collar up and his hat brim down, a renewed chorus of sniggers broke out. Just as he approached the door, a burly Russian soldier, his face red with laughter and drink, heaved himself to his feet, said something to Reynolds, thumped him on the back hard enough to send him staggering against the counter, then doubled up, convulsed with laughter over his own wit. A stranger to Russians and Russian ways, Reynolds had no idea whether anger or fear would be the safer reaction in the circumstances: he contented himself with a grimace that was compounded of a sullen scowl and sheepish grin, sidestepped nimbly and was gone before the humorist could renew the assault.

The snow was very light now, and he had little difficulty in locating both the girl and the man. They were walking slowly up the street to the left, and he followed, keeping the man at the very limit of observation. Two hundred yards, four hundred, a couple of corners and Julia had halted in a tram shelter outside a row of shops. Her shadow slid silently into a doorway behind the shelter and Reynolds went past him, joining the girl in the glass-fronted shelter.

‘He’s behind us, in a doorway,’ Reynolds murmured. ‘Do you think you could put up a desperate fight for your honour?’

‘Could I –’ She broke off, and glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘We must be careful. He’s AVO, I’m certain, and all AVO men are dangerous.’

‘Dangerous fiddlesticks,’ Reynolds said roughly. ‘We haven’t all night.’ He looked at her speculatively, then lifted his hands and caught her by the coat lapels. ‘Strangulation, I think. Must account for the fact that you’re not screaming for help. We have enough company as it is!’

The shadow fell for it, he would have been less than human not to fall for it. He saw the man and woman come staggering out of the tram shelter, the woman fighting desperately to tear away the hands encircling her throat, and didn’t hesitate. His feet silent on the hard-packed snow he came running lightly across the pavement, the weapon raised high in his right hand ready to strike – then collapsed soundlessly as Reynolds, at a warning exclamation from the girl, swung round, elbowed him viciously in the solar plexus and chopped him with the edge of his open hand across the side of the neck. It took only seconds thereafter for Reynolds to stuff the man’s blackjack – a canvas tube filled with lead shot – in his pocket, bundle the man himself into the tram shelter, take the girl’s arm and hurry away along the street.

The girl shivered violently, and Reynolds peered at her in surprise in the almost total darkness of the watchman’s box. Confined as they were in a narrow space and shelterd from the snow and the bitter wind they were relatively comfortable, and even through his coat he could feel the warmth of the girl’s shoulder against his own. He reached for her hand – she had taken off her gloves to rub the circulation into life when they had arrived ten minutes previously – but she snatched it away as from the touch of flame.

‘What’s the matter?’ Reynolds’ voice was puzzled. ‘Still feeling frozen?’

‘I don’t know, I – yes, I do know. I’m not cold.’ She shivered again. ‘It’s – it’s you. You’re too inhuman. I’m afraid of people who are inhuman.’

‘Afraid of me?’ Reynolds sounded incredulous and felt that way. ‘My dear child, I wouldn’t harm a hair of your head.’

‘Don’t you “child” me!’ A sudden flash of spirit, then a quiet, small voice, ‘I know you wouldn’t.’

‘Then what the devil am I supposed to have done?’

‘Nothing. That’s the whole point. It’s not what you do, it’s what you don’t do, it’s what you don’t show. You show no feelings, no emotions, no interest or concern in anything. Oh, yes, you’re interested enough in the job to be done, but the method, the how of it is a matter of absolute indifference, just as long as the job is done.

‘The Count says you’re only a machine, a mechanism designed to carry out a certain piece of work, but without any life or existence as an individual. He says you’re about the only person he knows who cannot be afraid, and he is afraid of people who cannot be afraid. Imagine! The Count afraid!’

‘Imagine,’ Reynolds murmured politely.

‘Jansci says the same. He says you’re neither moral nor immoral, just amoral, with certain conditioned pro-British, anti-Communist reactions that are valueless in themselves. He says whether you kill or not is decided not on a basis of wrong or right but simply of expediency. He says that you are the same as hundreds of young men he has met in the NKVD, the Waffen SS and other such organizations, men who obey blindly and kill blindly without ever asking themselves whether it is right or wrong. The only difference, my father says, is that you would never kill wantonly. But that is the only difference.’

‘I make friends wherever I go,’ Reynolds murmured.

‘There! You see what I mean? One cannot touch you. And now tonight. You bundle a man into a hotel cupboard, bound and gagged, and let him suffocate – he probably did. You hit another and leave him to freeze to death in the snow – he won’t last twenty minutes in this. You –’

‘I could have shot the first man,’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘I have a silencer, you know. And do you think that lad with the blackjack wouldn’t have left me to freeze to death if he’d got in first?’

‘You’re just quibbling … And, worst of all, that poor old man. You don’t care what you do as long as he goes back to Britain, do you? He thinks his wife is dying, and yet you’d torture him till he must be almost insane with worry and grief. You encourage him to believe, you make him believe that if she goes he’ll be her murderer. Why, Mr Reynolds, why?’

‘You know why. Because I’m a nasty, amoral, emotionless machine of a Chicago gangster just doing what I’m told. You just said so, didn’t you?’

‘I’m just wasting my breath, am I not, Mr Reynolds?’ The tone was flat and dull.

‘By no means.’ Reynolds grinned in the darkness. ‘I could listen all night to your voice, and I’m sure you wouldn’t preach so earnestly unless you thought there was some hope of conversion.’

‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’

‘A nasty, superior sort of smirk,’ Reynolds admitted. Suddenly he caught her hand and lowered his voice. ‘Keep quiet – and keep still!’

‘What –’ Only the one word had escaped before Reynolds clamped a hand tightly over her mouth. She started to struggle, then relaxed almost immediately. She, too, had heard it – the crunch of footsteps in the snow. They sat without moving, hardly daring to breathe while three policemen walked slowly past them, past the abandoned café terraces farther on and disappeared along a winding path beneath the bare, snow-laden beeches, planes and oaks that lined the perimeter of a great lawn.

‘I thought you told me this part of Margit Island was always deserted?’ His voice was a savage whisper. ‘That no one ever came here in the winter?’

‘It always has been before,’ she murmured. ‘I knew the policemen made a round, but I didn’t know they came that way. But they won’t be back for another hour, I’m sure of that. The Margitsziget is big, and they will take time to go round.’

It had been Julia, teeth chattering with the cold and desperate for a place where they could talk in privacy – the White Angel had been the only café in the area which was open – who, after a fruitless search elsewhere, had suggested Margit Island. Parts of it, she had said, were banned and under curfew after a certain hour, but the curfew wasn’t treated too seriously. The patrolling guards were members of the ordinary police forces, not the secret police, and were as different from the AVO as chalk from cheese. Reynolds, himself almost as cold as the girl, had readily agreed and the watchman’s hut, surrounded by the granite setts, chips and tar barrels of road repairers who had vanished with the onset of the cold weather, had seemed an ideal place.

There Julia had told of the latest happenings at Jansci’s house. The two men who had been watching the house so assiduously had made an error – only one, admittedly, but their last. They had grown overconfident and had taken to walking past on the same side of the street as the garage instead of the opposite side, and, on one occasion, finding the garage door open had gone so far as to let their curiosity get the better of them and peer in, which was a mistake, as Sandor had been waiting for them. Whether they had been informers or AVO men was not known, as Sandor had cracked their heads together rather harder than was necessary. All that mattered was that they were under lock and key and that it would now be safe for Reynolds to visit the house to make final plans for the abduction of the professor. But not before midnight, Jansci had insisted on that.

Reynolds in his turn had told her of what had happened to him, and now, just after the departure of the three policemen, he looked at her in the gloom of the shelter. Her hand was still in his, she was quite unaware of it: and her hand was tense and rigid and unyielding.

‘You’re not really cut out for this sort of thing, Miss Illyurin,’ he said quietly. ‘Very few people are. You don’t stay here and lead this life because you like it?’

‘Like it! Dear God, how could anyone ever like this life? Nothing but fear and hunger and repression, and, for us, always moving from place to place, always looking over our shoulders to see if someone is there, afraid to look over our shoulder in case someone is there. To speak in the wrong place, to smile at the wrong time –’

‘You’d go over to the west tomorrow, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes. No, no, I can’t. I can’t. You see –’

‘Your mother, isn’t that it?’

‘My mother!’ He could feel her shift against him as she turned to stare in the darkness. ‘My mother is dead, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Dead?’ His voice inflected in surprise. ‘That’s not what your father says.’

‘I know it’s not.’ Her voice softened. ‘Poor, dear Jansci, he’ll never believe that Mother is dead. She was dying when they took her away, one lung was almost gone, she couldn’t have lived a couple of days. But Jansci will never believe it. He’ll stop hoping when he stops breathing.’

‘But you tell him you believe it too?’

‘Yes. I wait here because I am all Jansci has left in the world and cannot leave him. But if I told him that, he would have me across the Austrian frontier tomorrow – he would never have me risk my life for him. And so I tell him I wait for Mother.’

‘I see.’ Reynolds could think of nothing else to say, wondered if he himself could have done what this girl was doing if he felt as she did. He remembered something, his impression that Jansci had seemed indifferent to the fate of his wife. ‘Your father – he has looked for your mother, searched for her, I mean?’

‘You don’t think so, do you? He always gives that impression, I don’t know why.’ She paused for a moment, then went on, ‘You will not believe this, no one believes this, but it is true: there are nine concentration camps in Hungary, and, in the past eighteen months, Jansci has been inside five of them, just looking for Mother. Inside, and, as you see, out again. It’s just not possible, is it?’

‘It’s just not possible,’ Reynolds echoed slowly.

‘And he’s combed a thousand, over a thousand collective farms – or what used to be collective farms before the October Rising. He has not found her, he never will find her. But always he looks, always he will keep on looking and he will never find her.’

Something in her voice caught Reynolds’ attention. He reached up a gentle hand and touched her face: her cheeks were wet, but she did not turn away, she didn’t resent the touch.

‘I told you this wasn’t for you, Miss Illyurin.’

‘Julia, always Julia. You mustn’t say that name, you mustn’t even think that name … Why am I telling you all these things?’

‘Who knows? But tell me more – tell me about Jansci. I have heard a little, but only a little.’

‘What can I tell you? “A little,” you say, but that’s all I, too, know about my father. He will never talk about what is gone, he will not even say why he will not talk. I think it is because he lives now only for peace and the making of peace, to help all those who cannot help themselves. That is what I heard him say once. I think his memory tortures him. He has lost so much, and he has killed so many.’

Reynolds said nothing, and after a time the girl went on, ‘Jansci’s father was a Communist leader in the Ukraine. He was a good Communist and he was also a good man – you can be both at the same time, Mr Reynolds. In 1938 he – and practically every leading Communist in the Ukraine – died in the secret police torture cellars in Kiev. That was when it all started. Jansci executed the executioners, and some of the judges, but too many hands were against him. He was taken to Siberia and spent six months in an underground cell in the Vladivostock transit camp waiting for ice to melt and the steamer to come to take them away. He saw no daylight for six months, he didn’t see another human being for six months – his crusts and the slops that passed for food were lowered through a hatch. They all knew who he was and he was to take a long time dying. He had no blankets, no bed, and the temperature was far below zero. For the last month they stopped all supplies of water also, but Jansci survived by licking the hoar frost off the iron door of his cell. They were beginning to learn that Jansci was indestructible.’

‘Go on, go on.’ Reynolds still held the girl’s hand tightly in his own, but neither of them was aware if it. ‘And after that?’

‘After that the freighter came and took him away, to the Kolyma Mountains. No one ever comes back from the Kolyma Mountains – but Jansci came back.’ He could hear the awe in the girl’s voice even as she spoke, even as she repeated something she must have said or thought a thousand times. ‘These were the worst months of his life. I don’t know what happened in those days, I don’t think there is anyone still alive who knows what happened then. All I know is that he sometimes still wakes up from his sleep, his face grey, whispering, “Davai, davai!” – get going, get going! – and “Bystrey, bystrey” – faster, faster! It’s something to do with driving or pulling sledges, I don’t know what. I know too, that even to this day, he cannot bear to hear the sound of sleigh bells. You’ve seen the missing fingers on his hands – it was a favourite sport to drag prisoners along behind the NKVD’s – or OGPU’s, as it was then – propeller-driven sledges, and see how close they could be brought to the propeller … Sometimes they were jerked too close, and their faces …’ She was silent for a moment, then went on, her voice unsteady. ‘I suppose you could say Jansci was lucky. His fingers, only his fingers … and his hands, these scars on his hands. Do you know how he came by these, Mr Reynolds?’

He shook his head in the darkness, and she seemed to sense the movement.

‘Wolves, Mr Reynolds. Wolves mad with hunger. The guards trapped them, starved them and then flung a man and a wolf into the same pit. The man would have only his hands: Jansci had only his hands. His arms, his entire body is a mass of these scars.’

‘It’s not possible, all this is not possible.’ Reynolds’ low-pitched mutter was that of a man trying to convince himself of something which must be true.

‘In the Kolyma Mountains all things are possible. That wasn’t the worst, that was nothing. Other things happened to him there, degrading, horrible, bestial things, but he has never spoken of them to me.’

‘And the palms of his hands, the crucifixion marks on his hands?’

‘These aren’t crucifixion marks, all the Biblical pictures are wrong, you can’t crucify a man by the palms of his hands … Jansci had done something terrible, I don’t know what it was, so they took him out to the taiga, the deep forest, in the middle of winter, stripped him of all his clothes, nailed him to two trees that grew close together and left him. They knew it would be only a few minutes, the fearful cold or the wolves … He escaped, God knows how he escaped, Jansci doesn’t, but he escaped, found his clothes where they had thrown them away and left the Kolyma Mountains. That was when all his fingers, his fingertips and nails went, that’s when he lost all his toes … You have seen the way he walks?’

‘Yes.’ Reynolds remembered the strange, stiff-legged gait. He thought of Jansci’s face, its kindness and its infinite gentleness, and tried to see that face against the background of its history, but the gap was too great, his imagination baulked at the attempt. ‘I would not have believed this of any man, Julia. To survive so much … He must be indestructible.’

‘I think so too … It took him four months to arrive at the Trans-Siberian Railway where it crosses the Lena, and when he stopped a train he was quite insane. He was out of his mind for a long time, but he finally recovered and made his way back to the Ukraine.

‘That was in 1941. He joind the army, and became a major inside a year. Jansci joined for the reason that most Ukrainians joined – to wait his chance, as they are still waiting their chance, to turn their regiments against the Red Army. And the chance came soon, when Germany attacked.’

There was a long pause, then she went on quietly.

‘We know now, but we didn’t know then, what the Russians told the world. We know what they told of the long, bloody battle as we fell back on the Dnieper, the scorched earth, the desperate defence of Kiev. Lies, lies, all lies – and still most of the world doesn’t know it.’ He could hear her voice softening in memory. ‘We welcomed the Germans with open arms. We gave them the most wonderful welcome any army has ever had. We gave them food and wine, we decorated our streets, we garlanded the storm-troopers with flowers. Not one shot was fired in defence of Kiev. Ukrainian regiments, Ukrainian divisions deserted en masse to the Germans, Jansci said there’s never been anything like it in history, and soon the Germans had an army of a million Russians fighting for them, under the command of the Soviet General Andrei Vlassov. Jansci was with this army, he rose to be Major-General and one of Vlassov’s right-hand men, and fought with this army, until the Germans fell back on his home town of Vinnitsa in 1943.’ Her voice tailed away, came again after a long silence. ‘It was after Vinnitsa that Jansci changed. He swore he would never fight again, he swore he would never kill again. He has kept his promise.’

‘Vinnitsa?’ Reynolds’ curiosity was roused. ‘What happened at Vinnitsa?’

‘You – you’ve never heard of Vinnitsa?’

‘Never.’

‘Dear God,’ she whispered. ‘I thought the whole world had heard of Vinnitsa.’

‘Sorry, no. What happened there?’

‘Don’t ask me, don’t ask me!’ Reynolds heard the long, quivering sigh. ‘Someone else, but please don’t ask me.’

‘Okay, okay.’ Reynolds’ voice was quick, surprised. He could feel her whole body shaking with silent sobs, and he patted her shoulder awkwardly. ‘Skip it. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Thank you.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘That’s just about all, Mr Reynolds. Jansci went to visit his old home in Vinnitsa, and the Russians were waiting for him – they had been waiting a long time. He was put in command of a Ukrainian regiment – all deserters who had been recaptured – given obsolete weapons and no uniforms at all and forced into a suicide position against the Germans. That happened to tens of thousands of Ukrainians. He was captured by the Germans – he had thrown away his weapons and walked across to their lines, was recognised and spent the rest of the war with General Vlassov. After the war the Ukrainian Liberation Army broke up into sections – some of them, believe it or not, are still operating – and it was there that he met the Count. They have never parted since.’

‘He is a Pole, isn’t he – the Count, I mean?’

‘Yes, that’s where they met – in Poland.’

‘And who is he really? Do you know?’

He sensed rather than saw the shake of the head in the darkness.

‘Jansci knows, but only Jansci. I only know that next only to my father, he is the most wonderful person I have ever known. And there’s some strange bond between them. I think it’s because they both have so much blood on their hands, and because neither of them has killed for years. They are dedicated men, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Is he really a Count?’

‘He is indeed. So much I know. He owned huge estates, lakes and forests and great pastures at a place called Augustow, up near the borders of East Prussia and Lithuania – or what used to be the borders. He fought the Germans in 1939, then took to the underground. After a long time he was captured and the Germans thought that it would be very amusing to make a Polish aristocrat earn his living by forced labour. You know the kind of labour, Mr Reynolds – clearing the thousands of corpses out of the Warsaw ghetto after the Stukas and the tanks had finished with it. He and a band of others killed their gaolers and joined General Bor’s Polish Resistance Army. You will remember what happened – Marshal Rossokovsky halted his Russian armies outside Warsaw and let the Germans and the Polish resistance fight it out to the death in the sewers of Warsaw.’

‘I remember. People speak of it as the bitterest battle of the war. The Poles were massacred, of course.’

‘Nearly all. The remnants, the Count among them, were taken off to the Auschwitz gas chambers. The German guards let them nearly all go, no one yet knows why – but not before they branded them. The Count has his number inside his forearm, running from wrist to elbow, all scarred, raised lumps.’ She shivered. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘And then he met your father?’

‘Yes. They were both with Vlassov’s men, but they didn’t stay long. The endless, senseless killings sickened them both. These bands used to disguise themselves as Russians, stop and board the Polish trains, make the passengers get out and shoot all who held Communist Party cards – and many of the holders had no option but to have these cards, if they and their families were to survive: or they would move into towns, ferret out the Stakhanovites or would-be Stakhanovites and throw them among the ice blocks of the Vistula. So they left for Czechoslovakia and joined the Slovak partisans in the High Tatra.’

‘I’ve heard of them, even in England,’ Reynolds acknowledged. ‘The fiercest and most independent fighters in Central Europe.’

‘I think Jansci and the Count would agree,’ she said feelingly. ‘But they left very soon. The Slovaks weren’t really interested in fighting for something, they were just interested in fighting, and when things were dull they were just as happy to fight among themselves. So Jansci and the Count came to Hungary – they’ve been here over seven years now, most of the time outside Budapest.’

‘And how long have you been here?’

‘The same time. One of the first things Jansci and the Count did was to come to the Ukraine for us, and they took my mother and me here by way of the Carpathians and the High Tatra. I know what it must sound like, but it was a wonderful journey. It was high summer, the sun shone, they knew everybody, they had friends everywhere. I never saw my mother so happy.’

‘Yes.’ Reynolds steered her away from the topic. ‘The rest I know. The Count tips off who’s next for the axe and Jansci gets them out. I’ve talked to dozens in England alone who were taken out by Jansci. The strange thing is that none of them hated the Russians. They all want peace, Jansci has talked them all into preaching for peace. He even tried to talk to me!’

‘I told you,’ she said softly. ‘He’s a wonderful man.’ A minute passed in silence, two minutes, then she said suddenly, surprisingly: ‘You’re not married, are you, Mr Reynolds?’

‘What’s that again?’ Reynolds was startled at the sudden switch.

‘You haven’t a wife, have you, or a sweetheart or any girls at all? And please don’t say “No, and don’t bother applying for the vacancy,” for that would be harsh and cruel and just a little cheap, and I don’t really think you are any of these things.’

‘I never opened my mouth,’ Reynolds protested. ‘As to the question, you guessed the answer. Anybody could. Women and my kind of life are mutually exclusive. Surely you can see that.’

‘I know it,’ she murmured. ‘I also know that two or three times this evening you have turned me away from – from unpleasant subjects. Inhuman monsters just don’t bother about that kind of thing. I’m sorry I called you that, but I’m glad I did, for I found out I was wrong before Jansci and the Count did. You don’t know what it’s like for me – these two – they’re always right, and I’m always wrong. But this time I’m right before them.’

‘I’ve no doubt you know what you’re talking about …’ Reynolds began politely.

‘And can’t you just see their expressions when I tell them that I sat for ten minutes tonight with Mr Reynolds’ arm around me.’ The voice was demure, with bubbling undertones of laughter. ‘You put it round me when you thought I was crying – and so I was crying,’ she admitted. ‘Your wolf’s clothing is getting a little threadbare, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Good lord!’ Reynolds was genuinely astonished. For the first time he realised that his arm lay along her shouders, he could just feel the touch of her hair on the back of his almost numbed hand. He muttered some discomfited apology, and was just starting to lift his arm when he froze into perfect stillness. Then his arm fell back slowly and tightened round her shoulder as he put his lips to her ear.

‘We have company, Julia,’ he murmured.

He looked out of the corner of his eye, and this confirmed what his abnormally keen ear had already told him. The snow had stopped, and he could clearly see three people advancing softly towards them. He would have seen them a hundred feet away if his vigilance hadn’t slipped. For the second time that night Julia had been wrong about the policemen, and this time there was no escaping them. That soft-footed advance was a sure acknowledgement of the policemen’s awareness of their presence in the little hut.

Reynolds didn’t hesitate. He brought his right hand over, caught her by the waist, bent down and kissed her. At first, as if by reflex instinct, she tried to push him off, to turn her face away, her whole body stiff in his arms. Then all at once she relaxed, and Reynolds knew that she understood. She was her father’s daughter, and she caught on fast. Her arm came up around his neck.

Ten seconds passed, then as many again. The policemen, Reynolds thought – and it was becoming difficult to keep his thoughts on the policemen – were in no hurry to make their presence known, but it was no punishment, and he could have sworn that the pressure of her arm around his neck was beginning to tighten when a powerful flashlight clicked on and a deep, cheerful voice spoke.

‘By heaven, Stefan, I don’t care what people say, there’s nothing wrong with the young generation. Here they are, the thermometer twenty degrees below zero, and you’d think they were lying on the beaches of Balaton in a heatwave. Now, now, not so fast, young man.’ A large hand reached out of the darkness behind the torch beam and pushed Reynolds, who had been struggling to his feet, back down again. ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you know this place is forbidden at night?’

‘I know it is,’ Reynolds muttered. His face was a nice mixture of fear and embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry. We had nowhere else to go.’

‘Nonsense!’ the hearty voice boomed. ‘When I was your age, young man, there was nothing better in wintertime than the little curtained alcoves of the White Angel. Only a few hundred metres from here.’

Reynolds began to relax. There was little to fear from this man. ‘We were at the White Angel –’ ‘Show us your papers,’ another voice demanded, a cold, hard, mean little voice. ‘You have them?’

‘Of course I have them.’ The man behind that voice was a different proposition altogether. Reynolds reached inside his coat, his fingers folding over the butt of his automatic, when the first policeman spoke again.

‘Don’t be silly, Stefan. You really will have to be careful – all those terrible thrillers you read. Or maybe you think he’s a western spy sent to find out how much co-operation they can expect from the young ladies of Budapest when the next rising comes.’ He roared with laughter, bent over and slapped his thigh, all but overcome by his own wit, then slowly straightened. ‘Besides, he’s as Budapest born and bred as I am. The White Angel you said,’ his voice suddenly thoughtful. ‘Come out of there the two of you.’

They rose stiffly, and the torch shone so close to Reynolds’ face that he screwed his eyes shut.

‘This is him, all right,’ the policeman announced jovially. ‘This is the one we heard about. Look, you can still see the mark of every finger on his cheek. No wonder he wouldn’t go back. It’s a wonder his jaw wasn’t dislocated.’ He swung his torch on to a blinking Julia. ‘Looks as if she could do it too. Built like a boxer.’ He ignored the outraged gasp, turned to Reynolds, and waving a warning forefinger, his voice solemn with the solemnity of a comic vastly enjoying himself. ‘You want to be careful, young man. Beautiful, but – well, you can see for yourself. If she’s as plump as this in her twenties, what’s she going to be like in her forties? You should see my wife!’ His laugh boomed out again, and he waved a hand in dismissal. ‘Be off, my children. Next time it’s the dungeon for you.’

Five minutes later they parted on the shore side of the bridge, just as the snow began to fall again. Reynolds glanced at his luminous watch.

‘Just after nine o’clock. I’ll be there in three hours.’

‘We will be expecting you then. That should give me just about enough time to describe in detail how I almost dislocated your jaw, and how the ice-cold calculating machine had his arm round me and kissed me for a whole minute without coming up for air once!’

‘Thirty seconds,’ Reynolds protested.

‘A minute and a half at least. And I won’t tell them why. I can hardly wait to see their faces!’

‘I’m at your mercy,’ Reynolds grinned. ‘But don’t forget to tell them what you’re going to look like by the time you’re forty.’

‘I won’t,’ she promised. She was standing close to him now, and he could see the mischief in her eyes. ‘After what has passed between us,’ she went on solemnly, ‘this counts even less than a handshake.’ She reached up on tiptoe, brushed her lips lightly across his cheek and hurried away into the darkness. For a full minute Reynolds stood looking after her, long seconds after she had vanished, thoughtfully rubbing his cheek: then he swore softly to himself, and made off in the opposite direction, head bent forward and hat-brim pulled far down against the snow in his eyes.

When Reynolds reached his room in the hotel, unobserved and by way of the fire-escape, it was twenty minutes to ten and he was very cold and very hungry. He switched on the central heating, satisfied himself that no one had been in the room during his absence, then called the manager on the phone. There had been no message for him, no callers. Yes, he would be delighted to provide dinner even at this late hour: the chef was just going to bed, but would consider it an honour to show Mr Rakosi just what he could do in the way of an impromptu meal. Reynolds rather ungraciously said that speed was of the essence and that the culinary masterpieces could wait till another day.

He finished an excellent meal and the best part of a bottle of Soproni just after eleven o’clock and prepared to depart. Almost an hour, yet, to his appointment, but what had taken only six or seven minutes in the Count’s Mercedes would take far longer by foot, the more so as his route would be wandering and devious. He changed a damp shirt, tie and socks and folded them neatly away, for he did not then know that he was never to see either that room or its contents again, jammed the key in the door, dressed against the winter night and left once more by the fire-escape. As he reached the street, he could hear a telephone ringing faintly, insistently, but he ignored it, the sound could have come from a hundred rooms other than his own.

By the time he had arrived at the street of Jansci’s house it was a few minutes after twelve. Despite the brisk pace he had kept up throughout he was half-frozen, but satisfied enough for all that, he was certain that he had neither been followed nor observed since he had left the hotel. Now, if only the Count still had some of that barack left …

The street was deserted and the garage door, when he came to it was, as by arrangement, open. He turned into the darkness of its interior without breaking step, angled confidently across to the corridor door at the other end, and had taken perhaps four paces when the garage was flooded with light at the touch of a switch and the iron doors clanged shut behind him.

Reynolds stood perfectly still, keeping both hands well clear of his clothes, then looked slowly around him. In each corner of the garage, a submachine-gun cradled under his arm, stood a watchful, smiling AVO man, each in his high peaked cap and long, sweeping belted trench-coat. There was no mistaking these men, Reynolds thought dully, there was no mistaking the real thing when you saw it, the coarsened brutality, the leering, expectant sadism of the lowermost dregs of society which automatically find their ways into the Secret Police of Communist countries the world over.

But it was the fifth man, the little man by the corridor door with the dark, thin, intelligent Jew’s face that caught and held his attention. Even as Reynolds looked at him, he put away and buttoned up his pistol, took two steps forward, smiled and bowed ironically.

‘Captain Michael Reynolds of the British Secret Service, I believe. You are very punctual, and we sincerely appreciate it. We of the AVO do not like to be kept waiting.’

SIX

Without moving, without speaking, Reynolds stood in the middle of the floor. He stood there, it seemed to him, for an eternity of time, while his mind first of all asborbed the shock, then the bitter realisation, then hunted frantically for the reason for this, for the presence of the AVO and the absence of his friends. But it was no eternity, it was probably no more than fifteen seconds altogether, and even as the seconds passed Reynolds let his jaw fall lower and lower in shock while his eyes slowly widened in fear.

‘Reynolds,’ he whispered, the word coming awkwardly, with difficulty as they would to a Hungarian. ‘Michael Reynolds? I – I do not know what you mean, comrade. What – what is wrong? Why are these guns –? I swear I have done nothing, comrade, nothing! I swear it!’ His hands were clasped together now, wringing each other till the knuckles stood white, and the tremor in his voice was the quaver of fear.

The two guards that Reynolds could see wrinkled their heavy brows and stared at each other in slow, puzzled wonder, but not even a shadow of doubt touched the dark, amused eyes of the little Jew.

‘Amnesia,’ he said kindly. ‘The shock, my friend, that is why you forget your own name. A remarkable effort, none the less, and had I not known your identity beyond any doubt, I too – like my men here who do not yet know who you are – would have been more than halfway towards belief. The British Espionage Service do us a great compliment, they send us only their best. But, then, I would have expected nothing else but the best where the – ah – recovery, shall we say – of Professor Harold Jennings is concerned.’

Reynolds could feel the sickness deep down in his stomach, the bitter taste of despair in his mouth. God, this was even worse than he had feared, if they knew this, they knew everything, it was the end of everything. But the stupid, fearful expression remained on his face: it might have been pinned there. Then he shook himself, a person throwing off the dark terror of a nightmare, and looked wildly around him.

‘Let me go, let me go!’ His voice was high-pitched now, almost a scream. ‘I’ve done nothing, I tell you, nothing, nothing! I am a good Communist, I am a member of the party.’ His mouth was working uncontrollably in a strained face. ‘I am a citizen of Budapest, comrade, I have my papers, my membership cards! I will show you, I will show you!’ His hand was reaching up to go inside his coat, when he froze at a single word from the AVO officer, a soft-pitched word, but cold and dry and cutting like the lash of a whip.

‘Stop!’ Reynolds arrested his hand just at the lapels of his coat, then let it fall slowly to his side. The little Jew smiled.

‘A pity you will not live to retire from your country’s secret service, Captain Reynolds. A pity, indeed, that you ever joined it – I feel convinced that a notable Thespian has been thereby lost to the boards and the silver screen.’ He looked over Reynolds’ shoulder at a man standing by the garage door. ‘Coco, Captain Reynolds was about to produce a pistol or some such offensive weapon. Relieve him of the temptation.’

Reynolds heard the tread of heavy boots on the concrete floor behind him, then grunted in agony as a rifle butt smashed into the small of his back, just above the kidney. He swayed dizzily on his feet, and through the red haze of pain he could feel trained hands searching his clothes, could hear the little Jew’s apologetic murmur.

‘You must excuse Coco, Captain Reynolds. A singularly direct fellow in his approach to these matters, always the same. However, experience has taught him that a sample of what misbehaviour will inevitably bring, when he is searching a prisoner, is much more effective than even the direst threats.’ His voice changed subtly. ‘Ah, Exhibit A, and most interesting. A Belgian 6.35 automatic – and a silencer – neither of which is obtainable in this country. No doubt you found them lying in the streets … And does anyone recognize this?’

Reynolds focused his eyes with difficulty. The AVO officer was tossing in his hand the blackjack Reynolds had taken from his assailant earlier in the evening.

‘I think so, I think I do, Colonel Hidas.’ The AVO man whom his superior called Coco moved into Reynolds’ line of sight – a mountain of a man, Reynolds could now see, six foot four if an inch, and built accordingly, with a broken-nosed, seamed and brutalized face – and took the blackjack, almost engulfing it in his huge, black-haired paw. ‘This is Herped’s, Colonel. Without a doubt. See, it has his initials on the base. My friend Herped. Where did you get this?’ he snarled at Reynolds.

‘I found it along with the gun,’ Reynolds said sullenly. ‘In a parcel, at the corner of Brody Sador Street and –’

He saw the blackjack whipping across, but too late to duck. It smashed him back against the wall, and he slipped down to the floor and pushed himself groggily to his feet. In the silence he could hear the blood from his smashed lips dripping on the floor, could feel teeth loose in the front of his mouth.

‘Now, now, Coco.’ Hidas spoke soothingly, reprovingly. ‘Give that back to me, Coco. Thank you. Captain Reynolds, you have only yourself to blame – we do not know yet whether Herped is Coco’s friend or was Coco’s friend: he was at death’s door when he was found in that tram shelter where you left him.’ He reached up and patted the shoulder of the scowling giant by his side. ‘Do not misjudge our friend here, Mr Reynolds. He is not always thus, as you can judge from his name – not his own, but that of a famous clown and comic of whom you have doubtless heard. Coco can be most amusing, I assure you, and I have seen him convulsing his colleagues down in the Stalin Street cellars with the interesting variations in his – ah – techniques.’

Reynolds said nothing. The reference to the AVO torture-chambers, the free hand Colonel Hidas was allowing this sadistic brute were neither unconnected nor accidental. Hidas was feeling his way, shrewdly assessing Reynolds’ reaction and resistance to this line of approach. Hidas was interested only in certain results, to be achieved by the swiftest means, and if he became convinced that brutality and violence were a waste of time with a man like Reynolds, he would desist and seek out more subtle methods. Hidas looked a dangerous man, cunning and embittered, but there was no sadism that Reynolds could see in the dark, thin features. Hidas beckoned to one of his men.

‘Go to the bottom of the street – there’s a telephone there. Have a van come round here right away. They know where we are.’ He smiled at Reynolds. ‘We could not, unfortunately, park it outside the front door. Might have aroused your suspicions, eh, Captain Reynolds?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The van should be here in ten minutes, no more, but that ten minutes can be passed profitably. Captain Reynolds might be interested in writing – and signing – an account of his recent activities. Non-fiction, of course. Bring him inside.’

They brought him inside and stood him facing the desk while Hidas sat behind it and adjusted the lamp so that it shone strongly into Reynolds’ face from a distance of less than two feet.

‘We will sing, Captain Reynolds, then we will record the words of the song for a grateful posterity, or, at least, for the People’s Court. A fair trial awaits you. Equivocation, outright lies or even delay will serve you nothing. A speedy confirmation of what we already know may yet spare your life – we would prefer to dispense with what would inevitably become an international incident. And we know everything, Captain Reynolds, everything.’ He shook his head, a man remembering and wondering. ‘Who would have thought that your friend’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘I forget his name, the squat fellow with the shoulders like a barn door – would have had such a beautiful singing voice?’ He pulled a paper out from a drawer in front of him, and Reynolds could see that it was covered with writing. ‘A somewhat unsteady hand, understandable perhaps in the circumstances, but it will serve: I think the judge will have little difficulty in deciphering it.’

In spite of the deep-seated, tearing pain in his side and puffing agony of his smashed mouth, Reynolds felt a wave of elation wash over him and spat blood on the floor to conceal the expression on his face. He knew, now, that no one had talked, because the AVO had caught none of them. The nearest they had come to Jansci and his men, probably, was a glimpse some informer had had of Sandor working about the garage … There were far too many things wrong with what Hidas had said.

Sandor, Reynolds was sure, did not know enough to tell Hidas everything he wanted to know. They wouldn’t have started on Sandor anyway, not with the girl and Imre around. Nor was Hidas the man to forget the name of any person, especially a name that he had only that evening learned. Besides, the whole idea of Sandor talking under physical torture – there had been time for nothing else – was incomprehensible. Hidas, Reynolds reflected grimly, had never been crushed in Sandor’s grip and gazed into those gentle, implacable eyes from a range of six inches. Reynolds stared at the document on the table, then looked slowly around him. If they had tried to torture Sandor in that room, he doubted very much whether even the walls would be still standing.

‘Suppose you begin by telling us how you entered the country,’ Hidas suggested. ‘Were the canals frozen, Mr Reynolds?’

‘Entered the country? Canals?’ Reynolds’ voice came thick and blurred through his swollen lips, and he shook his head slowly. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know –’

He broke off, jumped sideways and twisted round in one convulsive movement, a movement that sliced fresh agony through his side and back: even in the relative gloom where Hidas was sitting, he had caught the sudden shift of eyes, the tiny nod to Coco, and it was not until afterwards that Reynolds realised that he had probably been meant to catch both. Coco’s downward clubbing fist missed him almost completely, the burred edge of a signet ring burning a thin line from temple to jaw, but Reynolds, with the giant guard completely off balance, made no mistake.

Hidas was on his feet now, his pistol showing. His eyes over the tableau: the other two guards moving in with carbines ready. Reynolds leaning heavily on one foot – the other felt as if it were broken – and Coco rolling about the floor, writhing in a silent agony; then he smiled, thinly.

‘You condemn yourself, Captain Reynolds. A harmless citizen of Budapest would have been where the unfortunate Coco now lies: the savate is not taught in the schools hereabouts.’ Reynolds realised, with a chill wonder, that Hidas had deliberately provoked the incident, indifferent to the consequences to his subordinate. ‘I know all I want – and I do you the compliment of realizing that breaking your bones is just a waste of time. Stalin Street for us, Captain Reynolds, and some gentler forms of persuasion.’

Three minutes later they were all inside the lorry that had just drawn up outside the garage. The giant Coco, grey-faced and still breathing stertorously, was stretched his length on one fore-and-aft bench seat, while Colonel Hidas and two of the guards sat on the opposite bench, with Reynolds sitting on the floor between with his back to the cab: the fourth AVO man was in the cab with the driver.

The smash, the grinding crash that flung all the men in the back of the lorry off their seats and catapulted one of the guards on top of Reynolds, came within twenty seconds of starting off, just as they were rounding the first corner. There was no warning, not even a split second in which to prepare themselves, just a squealing of brakes and tearing of metal as the truck’s tyres slithered across the hard-packed snow of the street and bumped softly into the opposite kerb.

They were still sprawled anyhow across the floor of the truck, still recovering their wits to make the first move, when the doors at the back of the truck were flung open, the light switched off and the suddenly darkened interior illuminated a moment afterwards by the white, blinding light from a pair of powerful torches. The long, slender snouts of two gun-barrels, gleaming evilly, slid forward into the narrow arcs of the torch beams, and a deep, hoarse-sounding voice ordered them to clasp their hands above their heads. Then, at some low murmur from the road outside, the two torches and guns moved farther apart and a man – Reynolds recognized him as the fourth AVO man – came stumbling into the pool of light, followed almost at once by an unconscious form that was bundled unceremoniously on the floor. Then the doors slammed shut, the truck engine revved furiously in reverse, there came a thin, screeching sound as if the truck were freeing itself from some metal obstruction and a moment later they were on their way again. The whole operation hadn’t taken twenty seconds from first to last, and Reynolds mentally saluted the high-speed, smoothly functioning efficiency of a group of experts.

The identity of the experts he did not for a moment doubt, but even so it was not until he had caught a momentary glimpse of the hand that held one of the guns – a gnarled, scarred hand with a curious bluish-purple mark in the middle, a hand that no sooner appeared than it was snatched back again – that the relief of certainty swept over him like a warm and releasing wave: only then, and not till then, could he appreciate how tense and how keyed-up he had been, how steeled his every nerve and thought against the nameless horrors that awaited all the luckless beings who were ever interrogated in the cellars of Stalin Street.

The agony of his side and mouth was back again, redoubled in its acuteness now that the dread of the future was removed and he could think again of the present. Waves of nausea swept over him, he could feel the blood pounding in his dizzily swimming head, and he knew that it required only the slightest deliberate relaxation of his will for the grateful oblivion of unconsciousness to sweep over him. But there would come a time for that, later.

Grey-faced with the pain, setting his teeth against the groan that came to his mouth, he pushed away the guard who was leaning against and on top of him, bent over and took his carbine away: this he placed on the bench by his left and sent sliding down to the rear where an unseen hand drew it into the darkness. Another two carbines went the same way, followed by Hidas’ pistol: his own gun Reynolds retrieved from Hidas’ tunic, thrust under his coat, and sat up on the bench opposite Coco.

After a few minutes they heard the truck engine changing down and felt the truck itself braking to a stop. The guns at the back of the truck poked forward a few suggestive inches, and a hoarse voice warned him to keep absolute silence. Reynolds took out his automatic, screwed on the silencer and pressed the barrel none too softly into the base of Hidas’ neck: the faint, appreciative murmur from the rear reached him just as the truck ground to a halt.

The halt was brief. A question from some unknown person, a quick, harsh authoritative reply – tones, only, could be distinguished inside the back of the lorry, the words were quite undistinguishable – an acknowledgment, the hiss of releasing air brakes, and they were on their way once more, Reynolds leaning back in his seat with a long, soundless sigh and pocketing his gun again. The mark gouged out on Hidas’ neck by his silencer was deep and red and angry: it had been a tense, nerve-racking moment.

Once again they came to a halt, and once again Reynolds’ automatic found the self-same spot in the AVO officer’s neck, but the halt was this time, if anything, even briefer. After that there were no more stops, and from the gently undulating and curving nature of the road together with the lack of exhaust echo beating back from encompassing walls and buildings, Reynolds realized that they were clear of Budapest’s suburbs and running into the country. He forced himself to stay awake, to cling grimly to the thread of consciousness, and he did so by constantly shifting his gaze round the interior of the truck. His eyes were now accustomed to the gloom in the rear and in the faint backwash of light he could just make out two figures, with hats pulled low over their eyes, sitting hunched and motionless over guns and torches that never wavered: there was something almost inhuman in the intensity of that vigilance, in its unflagging concentration, and Reynolds began to have his first inkling of how Jansci and his friends had come to survive so long. Now and again Reynolds’ eyes would come back to the men at his feet, and he could see the uncomprehending, fearful play of expression on their faces, the trembling of their arms as their shoulder muscles ached from the long strain of holding their arms clasped above their heads: only Hidas remained immobile throughout, his features composed and empty of all expression. For all the man’s coldblooded indifference to the suffering of others, Reynolds had to admit to himself that there was something admirable about him: with no hint of either fear or self-pity, he accepted defeat with the same detached remoteness that characterized him in the moment of victory.

One of the men at the back of the truck flashed a light at his wrist – a watch probably, though Reynolds couldn’t see it at that distance – then spoke. A deep gruff voice, muffled by the swathes of a handkerchief, it could have belonged to anyone.

‘Boots and shoes off, all of you, but one at a time. Place them on the right hand bench.’ For a moment it seemed that Colonel Hidas was going to refuse – and there was no doubt that the man had sufficient courage to do just that – but the urgent jab from Reynolds’ gun made all too apparent the uselessness of any resistance. Even Coco, now sufficiently recovered to lean on an elbow and help himself, had his boots off within thirty seconds.

‘Excellent,’ came the dry voice from the rear. ‘Now the overcoats, gentlemen, and that will be all.’ A pause. ‘Thank you. Now listen carefully. We are at present driving along a very quiet and deserted road and will stop soon at a tiny hut by the wayside. The nearest house in any direction – and I’m not telling you which direction – is over three miles away. If you try to find it tonight, in the darkness, in your stockinged feet, you will probably be frozen before you find it – and you will almost certainly have to have both feet amputated: that is not a melodramatic threat, but a warning. If you want to find out the hard way, do so by all means.

‘On the other hand,’ the voice went on, ‘the hut is dry, windproof and with a good stock of wood. You can keep warm and a passing farmer’s cart or truck will doubtless come your way in the morning.’

‘Why are you doing all this?’ Hidas’ voice was quiet, almost bored.

‘Leaving you in the middle of nowhere, you mean – or just sparing your worthless lives?’

‘Both.’

‘You should guess easily enough. No one knows we have an AVO truck, and provided you’re not let loose near a telephone box, no one will know until we reach the Austrian frontier – and this truck in itself should grant us a safe passport all the way. As to your lives, the question is natural enough from you: those who live by the sword must expect to die by it. But we are no murderers.’

Almost as the man behind the torch finished speaking the truck drew up. A few seconds passed in complete silence, then the crunch of feet in the snow was heard and the rear doors were flung wide. Reynolds caught a glimpse of two figures standing in the road, outlined against the snow-covered walls of a tiny hut just behind them, then, at a gruff order, Hidas and his men filed out, one of them helping a still-crippled Coco. Reynolds heard a faint click as the inspection hatch behind the driver’s cab was opened, but the face of the man peering through was only a grey blur in the gloom. He looked out again through the rear of the truck, saw the last of the AVO men being bundled into the hut and the door shut behind them, again heard a click, this time as the hatch was closed and, almost at once, three figures piled into the back of the truck, the doors slammed and the truck was under way again.

The light clicked on, fumbling hands were busily undoing handkerchiefs that concealed their faces, then Reynolds heard a girl’s gasp of horror – understandable enough, Reynolds thought wryly, if his face looked anything like it felt – but it was the Count who spoke first.

‘You would appear to have fallen under a bus, Mr Reynolds. Either that or spent an entertaining half-hour with our good friend Coco.’

‘You know him?’ Reynolds’ voice was hoarse and indistinct.

‘Everybody in the AVO knows him – and half of Budapest, to their cost. Makes friends wherever he goes. What happened to our vast friend, incidentally? He did not seem to be in his usual high spirits.’

‘I hit him.’

‘You hit him!’ The Count raised an eyebrow – a gesture equivalent to blank astonishment in any other man. ‘Even to lay a finger on Coco is itself a feat, but to render him hors de combat –’ ‘Oh, will you stop talking!’ Julia’s voice held a mixture of exasperation and distress. ‘Look at his face! We must do something.’

‘It isn’t pretty,’ the Count admitted. He reached for his hip flask. ‘The universal specific.’

‘Tell Imre to stop.’ It was Jansci speaking, his voice deep and low and authoritative. He looked closely at Reynolds, who was coughing and spluttering as the fiery liquid burnt his mouth and throat, and screwing tight his eyes with every cough. ‘You are badly hurt, Mr Reynolds. Where?’

Reynolds told him and the Count swore. ‘My apologies, my boy. I should have realised. That damned Coco … Come, some more barack. It hurts, but it helps.’

The truck stopped, Jansci jumped out and returned a minute later with one of the AVO’s overcoats packed with snow.

‘Woman’s work, my dear.’ He handed Julia the coat and a handkerchief. ‘See if you can’t make our friend look a bit more presentable.’

She took the handkerchief from Jansci and turned towards Reynolds. Her touch was as gentle as her face was concerned, but even so the freezing snow stung cruelly at the open cuts on cheek and lips as she washed the matted blood away and Reynolds winced in spite of himself. The Count cleared his throat.

‘Perhaps you should try the more direct method, Julia,’ he suggested. ‘Like when the policeman was watching you tonight in the Margitsziget. For almost three minutes, Mr Reynolds, she told us –’

‘A lying minx.’ Reynolds tried to smile, but it hurt too much. ‘Thirty seconds, and in self-defence only …’ He looked at Jansci. ‘What happened tonight? What went wrong?’

‘You may well ask,’ Jansci said quietly. ‘What went wrong? Everything, my boy, just everything. Blunders everywhere, by everyone – by you, by us, by the AVO. The first mistake was ours. You know that the house was being watched and that we had assumed that the watchers were just common informers. A bad mistake on my part – they were nothing of the sort. They were AVO, and the Count here recognized the two men Sandor had caught as soon as he came off duty tonight and came to the house. But by that time Julia had gone to meet you, we couldn’t get word to you by her, and later we decided not to bother anyway: the Count knows the ways of the AVO as well as any man, and was certain that if they were going to move in on us they wouldn’t do it until the early hours of the morning … That’s how they invariably work. We were going to leave in the middle of the night.’

‘So the man who had followed Julia to the White Angel had probably trailed her from the house?’

‘Yes. An efficient job of disposal on your part, by the way, but no more than I have come to expect … but the worst mistake of the night had come earlier, when you were talking to Dr Jennings.’

‘When I was – I don’t understand.’

‘It was as much my fault as his,’ the Count said heavily. ‘I knew – I should have warned him.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Reynolds demanded.

‘This.’ Jansci looked down on his hands, then raised his eyes slowly. ‘Did you look for microphones in his room?’

‘Yes, I did. It was behind the ventilation grille.’

‘And the bathroom?’

‘Nothing there.’

‘There was, I’m afraid. Built into the shower. The Count says there’s one in the shower in every bathroom in the Three Crowns. None of the showers work: you should have tried it.’

‘In the shower!’ Oblivious of the shooting pain in his back, Reynolds jerked upright, brushing the startled girl to one side. ‘A microphone! Oh, my God!’

‘Exactly,’ Jansci said heavily.

‘Then every word, everything I said to the professor –’ Reynolds broke off and leaned back against the side of the truck, overcome for the moment by the enormity of the implications, the surely fatal blunder he had made. No wonder Hidas had known who he was, and why he was there. Hidas knew everything now. As far as any hope that now remained of rescuing the professor was concerned, he might as well have remained in London. He had suspected as much, had almost known as much from what Hidas had said to him in Jansci’s garage, but the confirmation that Hidas knew, why he knew and how he came to have proof, seemed to set the final seal of inevitability and defeat on everything.

‘It is a bitter blow,’ Jansci said gently.

‘You did all you could,’ Julia murmured. She brought his head forward to be sponged again, and he made no resistance. ‘You are not to blame yourself.’

A minute passed in silence, while the truck bumped and bounced along the snow-rutted road. The pain in Reynolds’ side and head was lessening now, dulling down to a nagging, throbbing ache, and he was beginning to think clearly for the first time since Coco had hit him.

‘The security guard will have been clamped on Jennings – he may already be on his way back to Russia,’ he said to Jansci. ‘I spoke to Jennings of Brian, so the word will have already gone to Stettin to try to stop him. The game is lost.’ He stopped, probed two loose teeth in his lower jaw with an exploring tongue. ‘The game is lost, but otherwise I don’t think any great harm has been done. I didn’t mention the name – or the activities – of any person in your house, although I did give the professor the address. Not that that makes them any the wiser – they knew anyway. But so far as you people, personally, are concerned, the AVO don’t know you exist. A couple of points trouble me.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. First, why, if they were listening in the hotel, didn’t they nail me there and then.’

‘Simple. Almost every microphone in the place is wired to tape recorders.’ The Count grinned. ‘I’d have given a fortune to see their faces when they ran off that reel.’

‘Why didn’t you phone to stop me? You must have known from what Julia said that the AVO would come round to your place right away.’

‘They did – almost. We got out only ten minutes before them. And we did phone you – but there was no reply.’

‘I had left my room early.’ Reynolds remembered the ringing of the telephone bell as he had reached the bottom of the fire-escape. ‘You could still have stopped me on the street.’

‘We could.’ It was Jansci speaking. ‘You’d better tell him, Count.’

‘Very well.’ For a moment the Count looked almost uncomfortable – so unexpected an expression to find on his face that Reynolds for a moment doubted he had read it correctly. But he had.

‘You met my friend Colonel Hidas tonight,’ the Count began obliquely. ‘Second-in-command of the AVO, a dangerous and clever man – no more dangerous and clever man in all Budapest. A dedicated man, Mr Reynolds, who has achieved more – and more remarkable – success than any police officer in Hungary. I said he was clever – he’s more, he’s brilliant, an ingenious, resourceful man, entirely without emotion, who never gives up. A man, obviously, for whom I have the highest respect – you will observe that I was at considerable pains not to let him see me tonight, even although I was disguised. And that Jansci was at even more pains to direct his line of thinking towards the Austrian border, where, I assure you, we have no intention of going.’

‘Get to the point,’ Reynolds said impatiently.

‘I have arrived. For several years past our activities have been far the greatest thorn in his flesh, and lately, I have had just the tiniest suspicion that Hidas was taking just a little too much interest in me.’ He waved a deprecatory hand. ‘Of course, we officers at the AVO expect to be ourselves checked and shadowed from time to time, but perhaps I have become just a trifle hypersensitive about these things. I thought perhaps that my trips to police blocks had not been so unobserved as I would have wished, and that Hidas had deliberately planted you on me, to break us up.’ He smiled slightly, ignoring the astonishment on the faces of both Reynolds and Julia. ‘We survive by never taking a chance, Mr Reynolds – it was really too opportune, a western spy so ready to hand. We thought, as I say, you were a plant. The fact that you knew – or said Colonel Mackintosh knew – that Jennings was in Budapest while we didn’t was another point against you: all the questions you asked Julia tonight about us and our organization might have been friendly interest – but it might equally well have been from a more sinister reason and the policemen might have left you alone because they knew who you were, not because of your – ah – activities in the watchman’s box.’

‘You never told any of this to me!’ Julia’s face was flushed, the blue eyes cold and angry.

‘We seek,’ said the Count gallantly, ‘to shelter you from the harsher realities of this life … Then, Mr Reynolds, when there was no reply to our telephone call, we suspected you might be elsewhere – the Andrassy Ut, for example. We weren’t sure, not by a long way, but suspicious enough to take no chances. So we let you walk into the spider’s web – I regret to say that we actually saw you walking. We weren’t a hundred yards away, lying low in the car – not mine, I’m glad to say – which Imre later crashed into the truck.’ He looked regretfully at Reynolds’ face. ‘We did not expect you to get the full treatment right away.’

‘Just so long as you don’t expect me to go through it all again.’ Reynolds pulled at a loose tooth, winced as it came out and threw it on the floor. ‘I trust you’re satisfied now.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ Julia demanded. Her eyes, hostile as they looked both at the Count and Jansci, softened as she looked at the battered mouth. ‘After all that’s been done to you?’

‘What do you expect me to do?’ Reynolds asked mildly. ‘Try to knock out a few of the Count’s teeth? I’d have done the same in his position.’

‘Professional understanding, my dear,’ Jansci murmured. ‘Nevertheless, we are extremely sorry for what has happened. And the next move, Mr Reynolds – now that that tape recording will have started off the biggest man-hunt for months? The Austrian frontier, I take it, with all speed.’

‘The Austrian frontier, yes. With all speed – I don’t know.’ Reynolds looked at the two men sitting there, thought of their fantastic histories as Julia had recounted them and knew there was only one possible answer to Jansci’s question. He gave another tentative wrench, sighed with relief as a second tooth came clear and looked at Jansci. ‘It all depends how long I take to find Professor Jennings.’

Ten seconds, twenty, half a minute passed and the only sounds were the whirr of the snow tyres on the road, the low murmur from the cab of Sandor’s and Imre’s voices above the steady roar of the engine, then the girl reached out and turned Reynolds’ face towards her, her fingertips gentle against the cut and swollen face.

‘You’re mad.’ She stared at him, her eyes empty of belief. ‘You must be mad.’

‘Beyond all question.’ The Count unstopped his flask, gulped and replaced the stopper. ‘He has been through a great deal tonight.’

‘Insanity,’ Jansci agreed. He gazed down at his scarred hands, and his voice was very soft. ‘There is no disease half so contagious.’

‘And very sudden in its onset.’ The Count gazed down sadly at his hip flask. ‘The universal specific, but this time I left it too late.’

For a long moment the girl stared at the three men, her face a study of bewildered incomprehension, then understanding came and with it some certainty of foreknowledge, some evil vision that drained all the colour from her cheeks, darkened the cornflower blue of her eyes and left them filled with tears. She made no protest, no slightest gesture of dissent – it was as if the same foreknowledge had warned her of the uselessness of dissent – and, as the first tears brimmed over the edge of her eyes, turned away so that they could not see her face.

Reynolds reached out a hand to comfort her, hesitated, caught Jansci’s troubled eye and the slow shake of the white head, nodded and withdrew his hand.

He drew out a pack of cigarettes, placed one between his smashed lips and lit it. It tasted like burnt paper.

SEVEN

It was still dark when Reynolds awoke, but the first grey tinges of dawn were beginning to steal through the tiny window facing the east. Reynolds had known that the room had a window, but until then he hadn’t known where it was: when they had arrived in the abandoned farmhouse last night – or early that morning, it had been almost two o’clock – after a mile-long, freezing trudge in the snow, Jansci had forbidden lights in all rooms without shutters, and Reynolds’ had been one of these.

He could see the whole of the room from where he lay without even moving his head. It wasn’t difficult – the entire floor area was no more than twice that of the bed, and the bed only a narrow canvas cot. A chair, a washbasin and a mildewed mirror and the furnishings of the room were complete: there would have been no room for more.

The light was beginning to filter in more strongly now through the single pane of glass above the washbasin, and Reynolds could see in the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, the heavily snow-weighted branches of pine trees: the trees must have been well downhill, the feathery white tops appeared to be almost on level with his eyes. The air was so clear that he could make out every tiny detail of the branches. The greying sky was changing to a very pale blue hue, empty of all snow and clouds: the first cloudless sky, indeed the first patch of blue sky he had seen at all since he had come to Hungary: perhaps it was a good omen, he needed all the good omens he could get. The wind had dropped, not the slightest zephyr stirring across the great plains, and the silence everywhere was profound with that frozen stillness that comes only with a sub-zero dawn and the snow lying deeply across the land.

The silence was interrupted – one could not say ended, for afterwards it seemed even deeper than before – by a thin, whip-like crack, like a distant rifle shot, and now that Reyonlds searched back through his memory he knew that was what had wakened him in the first place. He waited, listening, then after a minute or so he heard it again, perhaps closer this time. After even a shorter interval, he heard it a third time and decided to investigate. He flung back the bedclothes and swung his legs out of bed.

Only seconds afterwards he decided not to investigate and that flinging his legs over the side of the cot without due forethought was not to be recommended: with the sudden movement his back felt as if somebody had stuck in a giant hook and pulled with vicious force. Gently, carefully, he pulled his legs back into the cot and lay down with a sigh: most of the trouble, he thought, came from the large area of stiffness that extended even up past his shoulder blades, but the sudden jerking of stiffened muscles could be as agonizing as any other pain. The noise outside could wait, no one else appeared unduly worried: and even his brief contact with the outer air – all he wore was a pair of borrowed pyjama trousers – had convinced him that a further acquaintance should be postponed as long as possible: there was no heating of any kind and the little room was bitterly cold.

He lay back, staring at the ceiling, and wondered if the Count and Imre had made it safely back to Budapest last night, after they had dropped the others. It had been essential that the truck be abandoned in the anonymity of the big city: just to park it in some empty lane near at hand would have invited disaster. As Jansci had said, the hunt would be up for that truck this morning over all Western Hungary, and no better place could be found for it than some deserted alley in a large town.

Further, it had been essential that the Count return also. The Count was now as near certain as he could be that no suspicion had fallen on him, and if they were ever to find out where Dr Jennings had been taken – it was unlikely that the Russians would risk keeping him in a hotel, no matter how heavy a guard they mounted – he would have to return to the AVO offices, where he was due on duty anyway after lunchtime. There was no other way they could find out. There was always an element of risk in his going there, but then there always had been.

Reynolds did not deceive himself. With the finest help in the world – and with Jansci and the Count he believed that he had just that – the chances of ultimate success were still pretty poor. Forewarned was forearmed, and the Communists – he thought of the tape recorder with a deep chagrin that would long remain with him – had been well and truly forewarned. They could block all the roads, they could stop all traffic in and out of Budapest. They could remove the professor to the security of the remote and impregnable fortified prison or concentration camp in the country, they might even ship him back to Russia. And, over and above all that, there was the keystone to the whole conjectural edifice, the overriding question of what had happened to young Brian Jennings in Stettin: the Baltic port, Reynolds was grimly aware, would be combed that day as it had seldom been combed before, and it required only one tiny miscalculation, the slightest relaxation of vigilance by the two agents responsible for the boy’s safety – and they had no means of knowing that the alarm-call was out, that hundreds of the Polish UB would be searching every hole and corner in the city – for everything to be lost. It was frustrating, maddening, to have to lie there, to wait helplessly while the net closed a thousand miles away.

The fire in his back gradually ceased, the sharp, stabbing pains finally stopping altogether. Not so, however, the whiplike cracks from just outside the window: they were becoming clearer and more frequent with the passing of every minute. Finally Reynolds could restrain his curiosity no longer, and, moreover, a wash was urgently needed – on arrival that night he had just tumbled, exhausted, into bed and been asleep in a moment. With infinite care he slowly levered his legs over the side of the bed, sat on its edge, pulled on the trousers of his grey suit – now considerably less immaculate than when he had left London three days previously – pushed himself gingerly to his feet and hobbled across to the tiny window above the washbasin.

An astonishing spectacle met his eyes – not so much the spectacle, perhaps, as its central figure. The man below his window, no more than a youngster really, looked as if he had stepped directly from the stage of some Ruritanian musical comedy: with his high-plumed velvet hat, long, flowing cloak of yellow blanket cloth and magnificently embroidered high boots fitted with gleaming silver spurs all so sharply limned against and emphasized by the dazzling white background of snow, he was a colourful figure indeed, in that drab, grey Communist country, colourful even to the point of the bizarre.

His pastime was no less singular than his appearance. In his gauntleted hand he held the grey-horned stock of a long, thin whip, and even as Reynolds watched he flicked his wrist with casual ease and a cork lying on the snow fifteen feet away jumped ten feet to one side. With the next flick it jumped back to exactly where it had lain before. A dozen times this was repeated, and not once did Reynolds see the whip touch the cork, or go anywhere near the cork, the lash was too fast for his eyes to follow. The youngster’s accuracy was fantastic, his concentration absolute.

Reynolds, too, became absorbed in the performance, so absorbed that he failed to hear the door behind him open softly. But he heard the startled ‘Oh!’ and swung round away from the window, the sudden jerk screwing up his face as the pain knifed sharply across his back.

‘I’m sorry.’ Julia was confused. ‘I didn’t know –’ Reynolds cut her off with a grin.

‘Come in. It’s all right – I’m quite respectable. Besides, you ought to know that we agents are accustomed to entertaining all sorts of feminine company in our bedrooms.’ He glanced at the tray she had laid on his bed. ‘Sustenance for the invalid? Very kind of you.’

‘More of an invalid than he’ll admit.’ She was dressed in a belted blue woollen dress, with white at the wrists and throat, her golden hair had been brushed till it gleamed and her face and eyes looked as if they had just been washed in the snow. Her fingertips, as they touched the tender swelling on his back, were as fresh and cool as her appearance. He heard the quick, indrawn breath.

‘We must get a doctor, Mr Reynolds. Red, blue, purple – every colour you could think of. You can’t leave this as it is – it looks terrible.’ She turned him round gently and looked up at his unshaven face. ‘You should go back to bed. It hurts badly, doesn’t it?’

‘Only when I laugh, as the bloke said with the harpoon through his middle.’ He moved back from the washbasin, and nodded through the window.

‘Who’s the circus artist?’

‘I don’t have to look,’ she laughed. ‘I can hear him. That’s the Cossack – one of my father’s men.’

‘The Cossack?’

‘That’s what he calls himself. His real name is Alexander Moritz – he thinks we don’t know that, but my father knows everything about him, the same way he knows everything about nearly everybody. He thinks Alexander is a sissy’s name, so he calls himself the Cossack. He’s only eighteen.’

‘What’s the comic opera get-up for?’

‘Insular ignorance,’ she reproved. ‘Nothing comic about it. Our Cossack is a genuine csikós – a cow-boy, you would say, from the puszta, the prairie land to the east, round Debrecen, and that’s exactly how they dress. Even to the whip. The Cossack represents another side to Jansci’s activities that you haven’t heard of yet – feeding starving people.’ Her voice was quiet now. ‘When winter comes, Mr Reynolds, many people of Hungary starve. The Government takes away far too much meat and potatoes from the farms – they have to meet terribly high surrender quotas – and it’s worst of all in the wheat areas, where the Government takes all. It was so bad at one time that the people of Budapest were actually sending bread to the country. And Jansci feeds these hungry people. He decides from which Government farm the cattle shall be taken, and where they’ll be taken: the Cossack takes them there. He was across the border only last night.’

‘Just as simple as that?’

‘It is for the Cossack: he has a strange gift for handling cattle. Most of them come from Czechoslovakia – the border is only twenty kilometres from here. The Cossack just chloroforms them or gives them a good drink of bran mash laced with cheap brandy. When he’s got them half-drunk or half-anaesthetised, he just walks across the border with them with as little trouble as you or I would cross a street.’

‘Pity you can’t handle humans the same way,’ Reynolds said dryly.

‘That’s what the Cossack wants – to help Jansci and the Count with people, I mean, not chloroform them. He will soon.’ She lost interest in the Cossack, gazed unseeingly out of the window for some moments, then looked up at Reynolds, the remarkable blue eyes grave and still. She said, tentatively, ‘Mr Reynolds, I –’

Reynolds knew what was coming and hastened to forestall her. It had needed no perspicuity last night to see that her acceptance of their decision not to give up the search for Jennings was a token one and only for the moment: he had been waiting for this, for the inevitable appeal, had known it was in her mind from the moment she had entered the room.

‘Try Michael,’ he suggested. ‘I find it difficult to be formal and stand on my dignity with my shirt off.’

‘Michael.’ She said the name slowly, pronouncing it ‘Meechail.’ ‘Mike?’

‘I’ll murder you,’ he threatened.

‘Very well. Michael.’

‘Meechail,’ he mimicked, and smiled down at her. ‘You were going to say something?’

For a moment the dark eyes and the blue ones met and held mute understanding. The girl knew the answer to her question without ever having to ask it, and the slender shoulders drooped fractionally in defeat as she turned away.

‘Nothing.’ The life had gone out of her voice. ‘I’ll see about a doctor. Jansci says to be down in twenty minutes.’

‘Good lord, yes!’ Reynolds exclaimed. ‘The broadcast. I’d forgotten all about it.’

‘That’s something anyway.’ She smiled faintly and closed the door behind her.

Jansci rose slowly to his feet, turned off the radio and looked down at Reynolds.

‘It is bad you think?’

‘It’s bad enough.’ Reynolds stirred in his chair to try to ease his aching back: even the effort of washing, dressing and coming downstairs had taken more out of him than he cared to admit, and the pain was constant now. ‘The call-out word was definitely promised for today.’

‘Perhaps they have arrived in Sweden and haven’t yet been able to get word through to your people?’ Jansci suggested.

‘I’m afraid not.’ Reynolds had banked heavily on the call-word coming through that morning, and the disappointment ran deep. ‘Everything was laid on for that: a contact from the consul’s office at Hälsingborg is waiting all the time.’

‘Ah, so … But if these agents are as good as you said they were, they may have become suspicious and are lying low in Stettin for a day or two. Till – how do you say – the heat is off.’

‘What else can we hope for? … My God, to think I should have fallen for that mike in the shower,’ he said bitterly. ‘What’s to be done now?’

‘Nothing, except possess our souls in patience,’ Jansci counselled. ‘Us, that is. For you, bed – and no arguments. I’ve seen too much sickness not to know a sick man when I see one. The doctor has been sent for. A friend of mine for years,’ he smiled, seeing the question in Reynold’s face. ‘We can trust him completely.’

The doctor came up to Reynolds’ room with Jansci twenty minutes later. A big, burly, red-faced man with a clipped moustache, he had the professionally cheerful voice that invariably made patients suspect the worst, and radiated a magnificent self-confidence – in fact, Reynolds thought dryly, he was very much like doctors the world over. Like many doctors also, he was a man of strong opinions and not unduly backward about expressing them: he roundly cursed those damned Communists half a dozen times within the first minute of entering the room.

‘How have you managed to survive so long?’ Reynolds smiled. ‘I mean, if you express your opinions –’

‘Tchah! Everybody knows what I think of these damned Communists. Daren’t touch us quacks, my boy. Indispensable. Especially the good ones.’ He clamped a stethoscope to his ears. ‘Not that I’m any damned good. The whole trick lies in making them think you are.’

The doctor did himself considerably less than justice. The examination was skilled, thorough and swift.

‘You’ll live,’ he announced. ‘Probably some internal haemorrhaging, but very slight. Considerable inflammation and really magnificent bruising. A pillow-case, Jansci, if you please. The effectiveness of this remedy,’ he continued, ‘is in direct proportion to the pain it inflicts. You’ll probably go through the roof, but you’ll be better tomorrow.’ He spooned a liberal amount of greyish paste on to the pillow-case and spread it evenly. ‘A form of horse liniment,’ he explained. ‘Centuries old recipe. Use it everywhere. Not only do patients have trust in the doctor that sticks to the good old-fashioned remedies, but it also enables me to dispense with the tedious and laborious necessity of keeping abreast of all the latest developments. Besides, it’s just about all these damned Communists have left us.’

Reynolds winced as the liniment burnt in through his skin, and he could feel the sweat coming to his brow. The doctor seemed pleased.

‘What did I tell you? Fit as a fiddle tomorrow! Just swallow a couple of these white tablets, my boy – they’ll ease the pain internally – and the blue one. Make you sleep – if you don’t, you’ll have that poultice off in ten minutes. Quick-acting, I assure you.’

They were indeed, and Reynolds’ last conscious recollection was of hearing the doctor loudly declaiming against those damned Communists as he went down the stairs. After that, he remembered nothing more for almost twelve hours.

When he awoke night had come again, but this time his window had been curtained and a small oil lamp was burning. He awoke quickly and completely, as he had long trained himself to do, without movement or change in his rate of breathing, and his eyes were on Julia’s face, a face with an expression he had not seen on it before, for a full second; she was aware he was awake and looking at her. He could see the dull colour touching throat and face as she slowly withdrew from his shoulder the hand that had been shaking him awake, but he twisted his wrist and glanced at his watch, a man who had observed nothing unusual.

‘Eight o’clock!’ He sat up abruptly in bed, and it was only after he had done so that he remembered the agony that had followed the last precipitate move he had made. The surprise on his face was obvious.

‘How does it feel?’ she smiled. ‘Better, isn’t it?’

‘Better? It’s miraculous!’ His back felt almost as if it were on fire, but the pain was quite gone. ‘Eight o’clock!’ he repeated incredulously. ‘I’ve been asleep for twelve hours?’

‘You have indeed. Even your face looks better.’ Her composure was back again. ‘The evening meal is ready. Shall I bring it up?’

‘I’ll be down in a couple of minutes,’ Reynolds promised.

He was as good as his word. A cheerful wood fire was burning in the small kitchen, and the table, set for five, was over against the fire. Sandor and Jansci greeted him, were pleased to hear of the progress made in his recovery, and introduced him to the Cossack. The Cossack shook hands briefly, nodded, scowled, sat down to his bread soup and said nothing, not a word throughout the course of the meal: he kept his head lowered all the time so that though Reynolds had an excellent view of his thick, black Magyar hair, brushed straight back from the forehead, it was not until the Cossack rose with his last mouthful and left, with a muttered word to Jansci, that Reynolds caught his first sight of the open, good-looking, boyish face, with its ill-concealed expression of truculence. That the expression was meant for him, Reynolds was left in no doubt. Seconds after the door was slammed, they heard the roar of what seemed to be a powerful motorcycle that swept past the house and faded swiftly away in the distance, soon to be lost in silence. Reynolds looked round the others at table.

‘Will somebody please tell me what I’m supposed to have done? Your young friend just tried to incinerate me by will power alone.’

He looked at Jansci, but Jansci was having trouble in getting his pipe to light. Sandor was staring into the fire, lost apparently in his own thoughts. When the explanation finally came, it came from Julia, her voice edged with an irritation and annoyance so foreign to her that Reynolds glanced at her in surprise.

‘Very well, if these two cowards won’t tell you, it seems I must. The only thing about you that annoys the Cossack is the fact that you’re here at all. You see, he – well, he fancies he’s in love with me – me, six years older than he is.’

‘What’s six years, after all,’ Reynolds began judicially. ‘If you –’ ‘Oh, do be quiet! Then one night he got hold of the remains of a bottle of szilvorium the Count had left lying around and he told me. I was surprised and confused, but he’s such a nice boy and I was wanting to be kind so like a fool I said something about waiting until he was grown up. He was furious …’

Reynolds wrinkled his brow. ‘What has all this –?’

‘Don’t be so dense! He thinks you are a – well, a rival for my affections!’

‘May the best man win,’ Reynolds said solemnly. Jansci choked on his pipe, Sandor covered his face with one massive hand, and the stony silence from the head of the table made Reynolds think that he himself had better look elsewhere. But the silence stretched out, he felt compelled to look eventually, and when he did so he found neither the anger nor the blushing confusion he had expected, but a composed Julia, chin on hand, regarding him with a thoughtfulness and just possibly the faintest trace of mockery that he found vaguely disquieting. Not for the first time, he had to remind himself that underestimating the daughter of such a man as Jansci might be foolish in the extreme.

Finally she rose to clear away the dishes and Reynolds turned to Jansci.

‘I take it that was the Cossack we heard departing. Where has he gone?’

‘Budapest. He has a rendezvous with the Count on the outskirts of the town.’

‘What! On a big powerful motor-bike you can hear miles away – and in those clothes that can be seen from about the same distance?’

‘A small motor-bike only – the Cossack removed the silencer some time ago because not enough people could hear him coming … He has the vanity of extreme youth. But the loudness of both machine and clothes is his surest safeguard. He is so conspicuous that no one would ever dream of suspecting him.’

‘How long?’

‘On good roads, he’d be there and back in just over half an hour – we’re only about 15 kilometres from the town. But tonight?’ Jansci thought. ‘Perhaps an hour and a half.’

It took in fact two hours – two of the most unforgettable hours Reynolds had ever spent. Jansci talked nearly all the time, and Reynolds listened with the intentness of a man aware that he was being accorded a rare privilege which might never come his way again. The mood of expansiveness, Reynolds divined, came seldom to this man, so much the most remarkable, the most extraordinary man Reynolds had ever met in a chequered and dangerous lifetime that all others, with the possible exception of Jansci’s alter ego, the Count, seemed to fade away into insignificance. And for two unbroken hours Julia sat on a cushion by his side: the mischief and laughter that were never long absent from her eyes were gone as if they had never been, and she was grave and unsmiling as Reynolds had imagined she could never be: during those hours her eyes left her father’s face hardly at all, and even then only to gaze at the scarred and shattered ruins that were Jansci’s hands before seeking his face again. It was as if she, too, shared Reynolds’ irrational presentiment that this privilege would never come her way again, as if she were seeking to memorize every detail of her father’s face and hands so that she would never forget them: and Reynolds, remembering the strange, fey look in her eyes in the truck the previous night, felt queerly unaccountably cold. It cost him almost physical effort to shake off this abnormal feeling, to dismiss from his mind what he knew could only be the first tentative stirrings of superstitious nonsense.

Jansci spoke of himself not at all, and of his organization and its method of operation only where necessary: the only concrete fact that Reynolds gathered in the course of the evening was that his H.Q. was not here but in a farmhouse that lay in the low hills between Szombathely and the Neusiedler See, not far from the Austrian frontier – the only frontier of any interest to the great majority of those escaping to the west. He talked instead of people, hundreds of people whom he and the Count and Sandor had helped to safety, of their hopes and fears and terrors of this world. He talked of peace, of his hope for the world, of his conviction that that peace would ultimately come for the world if only one good man in a thousand worked for it, of the folly of imagining that there was anything else in the world worth working for, not even the ultimate peace, for that could only come from this. He spoke of Communists and non-Communists, and of the distinctions between them that existed only in the tiny minds of men, of the intolerance and the infinite littleness of minds that knew beyond question that all men were inescapably different by virtue of their births and beliefs, their creeds and religions, and that the God who said that every man was the brother of the next man was really a pretty poor judge of these things. He spoke of the tragedies of the various creeds that knew beyond doubt that theirs was the only way that was the right way, of the religious sects that usurped the gates of heaven against all comers, of the tragedy of his own Russian people who were perfectly willing to let others do this, for there were no gates anyway.

Jansci was wandering, not arguing, and he drifted from his own people to his youth amongst them. The transition seemed pointless, inconsequential at first, but Jansci was not an aimless wanderer, almost everything he did or said or thought was concerned with reinforcing and consolidating, both in himself and all his listeners, his almost obsessive faith in the oneness of humanity. When he spoke of his boyhood and young manhood in his own country, it could have been any person, of any creed, remembering with a fond nostalgia the happiest hours of a happy land. The picture he painted of the Ukraine was one touched, perhaps, with the sentimentality felt for that which is irrecoverably lost, but none the less Reynolds felt it to be a true picture, for the sadly remembered gladness in those tired and gentle eyes could never have arisen from self-deception, however unaware. Jansci did not deny the hardships of the life, the long hours in the fields, the occasional famines, the burning heat of summer and the bitter cold when the Siberian wind blew across the steppes: but it was essentially a picture of a happy land, a golden land untouched by fear or repression, a picture of far horizons with the golden wheat waving into the blurred and purpling distance, a picture of laughter and singing and dancing, of jingling horse-drawn, fur-collared troika rides under the frozen stars, of a steamboat drifting gently down the Dnieper in the warmth of a summer’s night and the soft music dying away across the water. And it was then, when Jansci was talking wistfully of the night-time scents of honeysuckle and wheat, of jasmine and new-mown hay drifting across the river that Julia rose quickly to her feet, murmuring something about coffee and hurried from the room. Reynolds caught only a glimpse of her face as she went, but he saw her eyes were dimmed with tears.

The spell was broken, but somehow a trace of its magic lingered on. Reynolds was under no illusion. For all his apparently aimless generalizations, Jansci had been talking directly to him, trying to undermine beliefs and prejudices, trying to make him see the glaringly tragic contrasts between the happy people whose portrait he had just drawn and the sinister apostles of world revolution, making him question whether so complete reversal lay within the bounds of credulity or even possibility, and it had been no accident, Reynolds thought wryly, that the first part of Jansci’s rambling had been devoted to the intolerance and wilful blindness of humanity at large. Jansci had deliberately intended that Reynolds should see in himself a microcosm of that humanity, and Reynolds was uncomfortably aware that he had not entirely failed. He did not like the unsettling, questioning half-doubts that were beginning to trouble him, and pushed them deliberately aside. For all his old friendship with Jansci, Colonel Mackintosh, Reynolds thought grimly, would not have approved of tonight’s performance: Colonel Mackintosh did not like to have his agents unsettled, they were to keep their thoughts on the ultimate objective, the job on hand and only the job on hand, and not concern themselves with side issues. Side issues, Reynolds thought incredulously, then pushed the matter from his mind.

Jansci and Sandor were talking now, in low, friendly tones, and as he listened Reynolds realized that he had misjudged the relationship between these two men. There was nothing of the master and the man, the employer and the employed about it, the atmosphere was too easy, too informal for that, and Jansci listened as carefully and considerately to what Sandor had to say as Sandor did to him. There was a bond between them, Reynolds realized, unseen but no less powerful for that, the bond of a devotion to a common ideal, a devotion which, on Sandor’s side, made no distinction between the ideal and the man who was the inspiration of it: Jansci, Reynolds was slowly beginning to discover, had the unconscious gift of inspiring a loyalty which barely stopped this side of idolatry, and even Reynolds himself, uncompromising individualist that nature and training had inescapably made him, could feel that magnetism of its subtle pull.

It was exactly eleven o’clock when the door was flung open and the Cossack strode in, bringing with him a snow-laden flurry of freezing air, dropped a large paper parcel in one corner and clapped his gauntlets vigorously together. His face and hands were blue with cold, but he affected to be unaware of it, not even seeking the warmth of the fire. Instead, he sat at the table, lit a cigarette, rolled it into the corner of his mouth and let it stay there. Reynolds noted with amusement that though the smoke laced upward and brought tears to one eye, the Cossack made no attempt to remove it: there he had placed it and there it would stay.

His report was brief and to the point. He had met the Count as arranged. Jennings was no longer in his hotel, and already a precautionary rumour was circulating to the effect that he was unwell. The Count did not know where he was – he certainly had not been removed to the AVO H.Q. or any of their known centres in Budapest: he had either been taken directly back to Russia, the Count thought, or to some place of safety outside the city, he would try to find out where, but he had little hope. The Count, the Cossack said, was almost certain that they would not be taking him directly home: he was much too important a figure at the conference: they were probably hiding him in a place of absolute security until they heard from Stettin, and if Brian was still there the Russians would still let him participate in the conference – after letting him hear his son on the phone. But if Jennings’ son had escaped, then Jennings himself would almost certainly be immediately removed to Russia. Budapest was too near the frontier, and the Russians couldn’t afford the incalculable prestige loss of having him escape … And there was one other extremely disquieting bit of information. Imre had disappeared, and the Count could not find him anywhere.

The day that followed, an interminable, wonderful Sunday with an azure, cloudless, windless sky and a dazzling white sun turning the undulating plains and heavy-laden pines into an impossibly lovely Christmas card, was never afterwards clear in Reynolds’ mind. It was as if everything that day had been seen through a haze, or in a dimly remembered dream: it was almost as if it had been a day lived by someone else, so remote it was, so detached from all reality, whenever he later tried to recall it.

And it wasn’t because of his health, the injuries he had received, that all this was so: the doctor had claimed no more than the truth for the effectiveness of his liniment, and though Reynolds’ back was still stiff, the pain had gone: his mouth and jaw, too, were healing fast with only an occasional throb to remind him of where his teeth had been before he had run foul of the giant Coco. He knew himself, and admitted to himself, that it all stemmed from the tearing anxiety in his mind, a savage restlessness that would not let him be still a moment but led him to pacing through the house and over the hard frozen snow outside the house until even the phlegmatic Sandor begged him to take a rest.

Once again, that morning, they had listened to the BBC 7 o’clock broadcast, and once again the message had failed to come through. Brian Jennings had failed to arrive in Sweden, and Reynolds knew that there could be little hope left: but he had been on missions before that had ended in failure, and the failure had never troubled him. What troubled him was Jansci, for he knew that that gentle man, having given his promise to help, meant to carry it out at all costs, even although he must have known, more clearly even than Reynolds himself, just what the cost of trying to rescue the most heavily guarded man in Communist Hungary must almost inevitably be. And then, beyond that again, he knew that his worry wasn’t solely on Jansci’s behalf, deep as was his admiration and respect for the man, it wasn’t even mainly on his behalf: it was on account of his daughter, who worshipped her father and would be broken-hearted and inconsolable at the loss of the last member of her family left alive. And worst still, she would regard him as the sole instrument of her father’s death, the barrier between them would for ever remain, and Reynolds looking for the hundredth time at the smiling curve of the mouth and the grave, troubled eyes above that belied the smile, realized, with a slow wonder and a profound sense of shock, that was what he feared above all. They were together much of the day, and Reynolds came to love the slow smile and the outlandish way she pronounced his name, but once when she said ‘Meechail’ and smiled with her eyes as well as her lips, he had been brusque to her, even rude, and he had seen the uncomprehending hurt in her eyes as the smile faded and vanished and he himself had felt sick to his heart and more confused than he had been all day … Reynolds could only feel profoundly thankful that Colonel Mackintosh could not see just then the man whom he regarded as the person most likely to succeed himself some day: but the colonel probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

The interminable day wheeled slowly to its close, the sun setting over the distant hills to the west burnished the snowcapped pine tops with a brush of flame and gold, and darkness fell swiftly over the land as the stars stood white in the frozen sky. The evening meal came and went almost in complete silence, then Jansci and Reynolds tried on, and altered with Julia’s help, the contents of the parcel the Cossack had brought home the previous night – a couple of AVO uniforms. There had been no question of the Count’s gambling that these might prove useful when he had sent them, no matter where old Jennings was, they would be essential: they were the ‘Open Sesame’ to every door in Hungary. And they could only be for Jansci and Reynolds. No uniform Reynolds had ever seen could have stretched across Sandor’s shoulders.

The Cossack departed on his motor-bicycle shortly after nine o’clock. He departed dressed in his usual flamboyant clothes, a cigarette over each ear and another unlit in the corner of his mouth, and in high good humour: he could not have failed to observe the strain between Reynolds and Julia during the course of the evening, and had reason for his cheerful smile.

He should have been back by eleven o’clock, by midnight at the latest. Midnight came and went, but there was no sign of the Cossack. One o’clock struck, half past one, anxiety had changed to tension and almost despair, when he made his appearance a few moments before two o’clock. He arrived not on his motor-bike, but at the wheel of a big, grey Opel Kapitan, braked, stopped the engine and climbed out with the unconcerned indifference of one who was accustomed to this sort of thing to the point of boredom. It was not until later that they discovered that this was the first time in his life that the Cossack had ever driven a car, a fact which wholly accounted for his delay in arrival.

The Cossack brought with him good news, bad news, papers and instructions. The good news was that the Count had discovered Jennings’ whereabouts with almost ridiculous ease – Furmint, the Chief of the AVO had told him personally, in the course of conversation. The bad news was two-fold: the place where the professor had been taken was the notorious Szarháza prison about 100 kilometres south of Budapest, considered the most impregnable fortress in Hungary, and generally reserved for such enemies of the state as were destined never to be seen again; but the Count himself, unfortunately, could not help them: Colonel Hidas himself had personally put him in charge of a loyalty investigation in the town of Gödöllö where disaffected elements had been giving trouble for some time. Also on the debit account was the fact that Imre was still missing: the Count feared that his nerve had gone altogether and that he had run out on them.

The Count, the Cossack said, regretted that he could provide them with practically no detail at all of the Szarháza, as he himself had never been there, his sphere of operations being limited to Budapest and north-west Hungary. The internal geography and routine of the prison, the Count had added, were unimportant anyway: only complete and brazen bluff could hope to serve their purposes. Hence the papers. The papers were for Jansci and Reynolds, and masterpieces of their kind. Complete AVO identity cards for both, and a document, on the Allám Védelmi Hátoság’s own headed, unreproduceable notepaper, signed by Furmint and countersigned by a cabinet minister, with the appropriate and correct stamps for each office, authorizing the Commandant of the Szarháza prison to hand over Professor Harold Jennings to the bearers of the document.

It was the Count’s suggestion that, should the rescue of the professor still be on the cards, they stood a fair chance: no higher authority could be produced for the release of a prisoner than the document he had provided: and the idea of anyone willingly penetrating the walls of the dreaded Szarháza was so fantastic as to be beyond sane contemplation.

It was the Count’s further suggestion that the Cossack and Sandor should accompany them as far as the inn of Petoli, a small village about five miles north of the prison, and wait there by the telephone: that way all members of the organization could keep in touch with each other. And, to complete a magnificent day’s work, the Count had provided the essential transport. He had omitted to say where he had obtained it.

Reynolds shook his head in wonder.

‘The man’s a marvel! Heaven only knows how he managed to do all this in one day – you’d think they’d given him a holiday just to concentrate on our business.’ He gazed at Jansci, his face carefully empty of expression. ‘What do you think?’

‘We will go in,’ Jansci said quietly. He was looking at Reynolds, but Reynolds knew he was talking to Julia. ‘If there is any hope left of good news from Sweden, we will go in. He is an old man, and it’s inhuman that he should die so far from his wife and from his homeland. If we did not go in …’ He broke off and smiled. ‘You know what the good Lord – or maybe I would only get the length of St Peter – do you know what St Peter would say to me? He’d say, “Jansci, we have no place for you here. You cannot expect kindness and mercy from us – what kindness and mercy had you in your heart for Harold Jennings?”’

Reynolds looked at him, and thought of the man he had revealed himself to be last night, a man to whom compassion in and for his fellow man, and a belief in an all-embracing supernatural compassion, were the keystones of existence, and knew that he lied. He glanced at Julia, and saw the smile of understanding on her face, then he saw below the shadowing hand and knew that she, too, had not been deceived, for her eyes were dark and stricken and numb.

‘… the conference in Paris ends this evening, when an official statement will be issued. It is expected that the Foreign Minister will fly home tonight – I beg your pardon, that should read tomorrow night – and report to the Cabinet. It is not yet known …’

The announcer’s voice trailed away into silence, and died away altogether as the radio switch clicked off and for a long moment no one looked at each other. It was Julia who finally broke the silence, her voice unnaturally calm and matter-of-fact.

‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the password that’s been so long in coming. “Tonight – tomorrow night”. The boy is free, he’s safe in Sweden. You had better go at once.’

‘Yes.’ Reynolds rose to his feet. He felt none of the relief, none of the elation that he had expected now that the green light had been given them at last, just a numbness, such as he had seen in Julia’s eyes that night, and a strange heaviness of heart. ‘If we know, the Communists are bound to know by this time also; he may be leaving for Russia at any hour. We have no time to waste.’

‘Indeed we haven’t.’ Jansci pulled on his greatcoat – like Reynolds he was already dressed in his borrowed uniform – and pulled his military gauntlets on. ‘Please don’t worry about us, my dear. Just be at our H.Q. twenty-four hours from now – and don’t go through Budapest.’ He kissed her and went out into the dark, bitter morning. Reynolds hesitated, half-turned towards her, saw her avert her head and stare into the fire, and left without a word. As he climbed into the back seat of the Opel, he caught a glimpse of the Cossack’s face, following him into the car: he was beaming from ear to ear.

Three hours later, under a dark and lowering sky heavy with its burden of unshed snow, Sandor and the Cossack were dropped at the roadside, not far from the Poteli Inn. The journey had been completely uneventful, and although they had been prepared for roadblocks there had been none. The Communists were very sure of themselves, they had no reason to be anything else.

Ten minutes later, the great, grey forbidding mass of the Szarháza came into sight, an old, impregnably walled building surrounded now by three concentric rings of barbed wire with ploughed earth between, the wire no doubt electrified and the earth heavily sown with fragmentation mines. The inner and outer rings were dotted with manned machine-gun towers raised high on wooden stilts, and, gazing at it for the first time, Reynolds felt the first touch of fear, the realization of the madness of what they were doing.

Jansci might well have divined his feelings, for he made no comment, increased speed over the last halfmile and skidded to a stop outside the great arched gateway. One of the guards came rushing forward, gun in hand, demanding to know their identity and see their papers, but stepped back respectfully as Jansci emerged in his AVO uniform, froze him with a single contemptuous glance and demanded to see the commandant. It spoke well for the terror inspired by that uniform, even among those who had no reasonable cause to fear it, that Jansci and Reynolds were inside the commandant’s office in five minutes’ time. The commandant was the last kind of person Reynolds would have expected to see in that position. He was a tall, slightly stooped man in a well-cut dark suit, with a high-domed, thin, intellectual face. He wore a pince-nez, had lean capable hands and looked to Reynolds more like an outstanding surgeon or scientist. In point of fact he was both, and reckoned the greatest expert on psychological and physiological breakdown procedures outside the Soviet Union.

He had no suspicions as to their genuineness, Reynolds could see. He offered them a drink, smiled when they refused it, gestured them to a seat and took the release paper that Jansci handed him.

‘Hm! No doubt about the validity of this document, is there, gentlemen?’ ‘Gentlemen,’ Reynolds noted. A man had to be very sure of himself before he used that word in place of the ubiquitous ‘comrade.’ ‘I have been expecting this from my good friend Furmint. After all, the conference opens today, does it not? We cannot afford to have Professor Jennings absent. The brightest jewel in our crown, if one may use a somewhat – ah – outmoded expression. You have your own papers, gentlemen?’

‘Naturally.’ Jansci produced his, Reynolds did the same, and the commandant nodded, apparently satisfied. He looked at Jansci, then nodded at his phone.

‘You know, of course, that I have a direct line into the Andrassy Ut. I can take no chances with a prisoner of Jennings’ – ah – magnitude. You will not be offended if I phone for confirmation of this release – and of your identity papers?’

Reynolds felt his heart miss a beat, felt the skin on his face tighten till it seemed like waxed paper. God, how could they possibly have overlooked so obvious a precaution? Their pistols – there was only the one chance, their pistols, the commandant as hostage … His hand was actually beginning to move when Jansci spoke, his voice magnificent in its assured confidence, his face unclouded by the slightest trace of worry.

‘But of course, Commandant! A prisoner of Jennings’ importance? We should have expected nothing else.’

‘In that case there is no need.’ The commandant smiled, pushing the papers across the desk, and Reynolds could feel every stiffened muscle in his body relax as relief poured over him, flooded him like a great wave. He was beginning to realize, just vaguely realize, what manner of man Jansci really was: in comparison, he himself had not yet started to learn.

The commandant reached for a sheet of paper, scribbled on it and stamped it with an official seal. He rang a bell, handed it to a warder and dismissed the man with a wave of his hand.

‘Three minutes, gentlemen, no more. He is not far from here.’

But the commandant overestimated. It was not three minutes, it was less than thirty seconds before the door opened, and it opened to admit not Jennings but half a dozen armed swift-moving guards who had Jansci and Reynolds pinned helplessly to their seats before they had recovered from their state of lulled security and could properly begin to realize what was happening. The commandant shook his head and smiled sadly.

‘Forgive me, gentlemen. A subterfuge, I fear – unpleasant as are all subterfuges, but essential. That document I signed was not for the professor’s release but your arrest.’ He took off his pince-nez, polished them and sighed. ‘Captain Reynolds, you are an uncommonly persistent young man.’

EIGHT

Reynolds, in those first few minutes of shock, was conscious of nothing but the entire absence of all emotion, of all feeling, as if the touch of the metal fetters on his wrists and ankles had somehow deprived him of all capacity to react. But then came the first slow wave of numbed disbelief, then the shocked disbelief and chagrin that this should have happened to him again, then the bitter, intolerable realization that they had been effortlessly and absolutely trapped, that the commandant had been toying with them and had deceived them completely, that they were prisoners now within the dreaded Szarháza and that if they ever emerged they would do so only as unrecognizable zombies, as the broken, empty husks of the men they had once been.

He looked across at Jansci, to see how the older man was taking this crushing blow, the final defeat of all their plans, the virtual sentence of death on themselves, to see what his reaction was. As far as he could judge, Jansci wasn’t reacting at all. His face was quiet and he was looking at the commandant with a thoughful, measuring gaze – a gaze, Reynolds thought, curiously like the one with which the commandant was regarding Jansci.

As the last metal shackle clipped home around a chair leg, the leader of the guards looked questioningly at the commandant. The latter waved a hand in dismissal.

‘They are secure?’

‘Completely.’

‘Very well, then. You may go.’

The guard hesitated. ‘They are dangerous men –’

‘I am aware of that,’ the commandant said patiently. ‘Why else do you think I deemed it necessary to summon so many to secure them? But they are shackled to chairs that are bolted to the floor. It is unlikely that they will merely evaporate.’

He waited until the door had closed, steepled his thin fingers and went on in his quiet, precise voice.

‘This, gentlemen, is the moment, if ever there was a moment, for gloating: a self-confessed British spy – that recording, Mr Reynolds, will create an international sensation in the People’s Court – and the redoubtable leader of the best organized escape group and anti-Communist ring in Hungary both in one fell swoop. We shall, however, dispense with the gloating: it is useless and time-wasting, a fit pastime only for morons and imbeciles.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Speaking of such, it is, incidentally, a pleasure to deal with intelligent men, who accept the inevitable and who are sufficiently realistic to dispense with the customary breast-beating lamentations, denials and outraged expostulations of innocence.

‘Nor do theatricalism, prolonged climaxes, the creation of suspense or unnecessary secrecy interest me,’ he continued. ‘Time is the most valuable gift we have, and its waste an unforgiveable crime … Your first thoughts, naturally – Mr Reynolds, be so good as to follow your friend’s example and refrain from doing yourself an unnecessary injury in testing these shackles – your first thought, I say, is, how has it come about that you find yourself in this melancholy position. There is no reason why you should not know, and at once.’ He looked at Jansci. ‘I regret to inform you that your brilliantly gifted and quite incredibly courageous friend who has been masquerading so long, and with such fantastic success, as a Major in the Allám Védelmi Hátoság, has finally betrayed you.’

There was a long moment’s silence. Reynolds looked expressionlessly at the commandant, then at Jansci. Jansci’s face was quite composed.

‘That is always possible.’ He paused. ‘Inadvertently, of course. Completely so.’

‘It was,’ the commandant nodded. ‘Colonel Josef Hidas, whose acquaintance Captain Reynolds here has already made, has had a feeling – he could call it no more than that, it was not even a suspicion – about Major Howarth for some little time.’ It was the first time Reynolds heard the name by which the Count was known to the AVO. ‘Yesterday the feeling became suspicion and certainty, and he and my good friend Furmint prepared a trap baited with the name of this prison and convenient access to Furmint’s room for a length of time sufficient to secure certain documents and stamps – these now on the table before me. For all his undoubted genius, your friend walked into the trap. We are all human.’

‘He is dead?’

‘Alive, in the best of health and, as yet, in blissful ignorance of what is known. He was despatched on a wild goose chase to keep him out of the way during the course of today: I believe that Colonel Hidas wishes to make the arrest personally. I expect him here this morning – later in the day Howarth will be seized, given a midnight court-martial at the Andrassy Ut and executed – but not, I fear, summarily.’

‘Of course.’ Jansci nodded heavily. ‘With every AVO officer and man in the city present he will die only a little at a time, so that no one else will be tempted to emulate him. The fools, the blind, imbecilic fools! Do they not know that there can never be another?’

‘I’m afraid I agree with you. But it is no direct concern of mine. Your name, my friend?’

‘Jansci will serve.’

‘For the moment.’ He removed his pince-nez and tapped them thoughtfully on the table. ‘Tell me, Jansci, what do you know of us members of the Political Police – of our composition, I mean.’

‘You tell me. It is obvious that you wish to.’

‘Yes, I’ll tell you, though I think you must already know. Of our members, all but a negligible fraction are composed of power-seekers, morons who find our service intellectually undemanding, the inevitable sadists whose very nature bans them from all normal civilian employment, the long-time professionals – the very people who dragged screaming citizens from their beds in the service of the Gestapo are still doing precisely the same thing for us – and those with a corroding grievance against society: of the last category, Colonel Hidas, a Jew whose people have suffered in Central Europe agonies beyond all imagining is the prime example in the AVO today. There are also, of course, those who believe in Communism, a tiny minority only, but nevertheless certainly the most feared and dangerous of all inasmuch as they are automats pervaded by the whole idea of the state with their moral judgments either in a state of permanent suspension or completely atrophied. Furmint is one such. So, also, strangely enough, is Hidas.’

‘You must be terribly sure of yourself.’ Reynolds was speaking for the first time, slowly.

‘He is the commandant of the Szarháza prison.’ Jansci’s words were answer enough. ‘Why do you tell us this? Did you not say waste of time was abhorrent to you?’

‘It still is, I assure you. Let me continue. When it comes to the delicate question of gaining another’s confidence, all the various categories in the list I have given you have one thing in common. With the exception of Hidas, they are all victims of the idée fixe, of the hidebound conservatism – and somewhat biased dogmatism – of their unshakable convictions that the way to a man’s heart –’

‘Spare us the fancy phrases,’ Reynolds growled. ‘What you mean is, if they want the truth from a man they batter it out of him.’

‘Crude, but admirably brief,’ the commandant murmured. ‘A valuable lesson in time-saving. To continue in the same curt fashion, I have been entrusted with the task of gaining your confidence, gentlemen: to be precise, a confession from Captain Reynolds, and, from Jansci, his true name and the extent and modus operandi of his organization. You know yourselves the almost invariable methods as practised by the – ah – colleagues I have mentioned? The whitewashed walls, the brilliant lights, the endless, repetitive, trip-hammering questions, all judiciously interspersed with kidney-beatings, teeth and nail extractions, thumb-screws and all the other revolting appurtenances and techniques of the medieval torture chamber.’

‘Revolting?’ Jansci murmured.

‘To me, yes. As an ex-professor of nerve surgery in Budapest’s University and leading hospitals, the whole medieval conception of interrogation is intensely distasteful. To be honest, interrogation of any kind is distasteful, but I have found in this prison unsurpassed opportunities for observation of nervous disorders and for probing more deeply than ever before possible into the intensely complicated workings of the human nervous system. For the moment I may be reviled: future generations may differ in their appraisal … I am not the only medical man in charge of prisons or prison camps, I assure you. We are extremely useful to the authorities: they are no less so to us.’

He paused, then smiled, almost diffidently.

‘Forgive me, gentlemen. My enthusiasm for my work at times quite carries me away. To the point. You have information to give, and it will not be extracted by medieval methods. From Colonel Hidas I have already learnt that Captain Reynolds reacts violently to suffering, and is likely to prove difficult to a degree. As for you …’ He looked slowly at Jansci. ‘I do not think I have ever seen in any human face the shadows of so many sufferings: suffering for you can now itself be only a shadow. I have no wish to flatter when I say that I cannot conceive of a physical torture which could even begin to break you.’

He sat back, lit a long, thin cigarette and looked at them speculatively. After the lapse of over two minutes he leaned forward again.

‘Well, gentlemen, shall I call a stenographer?’

‘Whatever you wish,’ Jansci said courteously. ‘But it would grieve us to think of wasting any more of your time than we have already done.’

‘I expected no other answer.’ He pressed a switch, talked rapidly into a boxed microphone, then leant back. ‘You will, of course, have heard of Pavlov, the Russian medical psychologist?’

‘The patron saint of the AVO, I believe,’ Jansci murmured.

‘Alas, there are no saints in our Marxist philosophy – one to which, I regret to say, Pavlov did not subscribe. But you are right insofar as your meaning goes. A bungler, a crude pioneer in many ways, but nevertheless one to whom the more advanced of us – ah – interrogators owe a considerable debt and –’

‘We know all about Pavlov and his dogs and his conditioning and breakdown processes,’ Reynolds said roughly. ‘This is the Szarháza prison, not the University of Budapest. Spare us the lecture on the history of brainwashing.’

For the first time the commandant’s studied calm cracked, a flush touched the high cheekbones, but he was immediately under control again. ‘You are right, of course, Captain Reynolds. One requires a certain, shall we say, philosophical detachment to appreciate – but there I go again. I merely wished to say that the combination of the very advanced developments we have made of Pavlov’s physiological techniques and certain – ah – psychological processes that will become apparent to you in the course of time, we can achieve quite incredible results.’ There was something about the man’s detached enthusiasm that was chilling, frightening. ‘We can break any human being who ever lived – and break him so that never a scar shows. With the exception of the incurably insane, who are already broken, there are no exceptions. Your stiff-upper-lipped Englishman of fiction – and, for all I know, fact – will break eventually, like everyone else: the efforts of the Americans to train their Servicemen to resist what the western world so crudely calls brainwashing – let us call it rather a reintegration of personality – are as pathetic as they are hopeless. We broke Cardinal Mindszenty in eighty-four hours: we can break anyone.’

He stopped speaking as three men, white-coated and carrying a flask, cups and a small metal box, entered the room and waited until they had poured out two cups of what was indubitably coffee.

‘My assistants, gentlemen. Excuse the white coats – a crude psychological touch which we find effective with a large majority of our – ah – patients. Coffee, gentlemen. Drink it.’

‘I’ll be damned if I will,’ Reynolds said coldly.

‘You will have to undergo the indignity of nose-clips and a forcible tube feed if you don’t,’ the commandant said wearily. ‘Do not be childish.’

Reynolds drank and so did Jansci. It tasted like any other coffee, but perhaps stronger and more bitter.

‘Genuine coffee,’ the commandant smiled. ‘But it also contains a chemical commonly known as Actedron. Do not be deceived by its effects, gentlemen. For the first minutes you will feel yourself stimulated, more determined than ever to resist: but then will come somewhat severe headaches, dizziness, nausea, inability to relax and a state of some mental confusion – the dose, of course, will be repeated.’ He looked at an assistant with a syringe in his hands, gestured at it, and went on to explain. ‘Mescaline – produces a mental state very akin to schizophrenia, and is becoming increasingly popular, I believe, among writers and others artists of the western world: for their own sakes, I trust they do not take it with Actedron.’

Reynolds stared at him and had to force himself not to shiver. There was something evil, something abnormally wrong and inhuman about the quiet-talking commandant with the gently humorous professorial talk, all the more evil, all the more inhuman because it was deliberately neither, just the chillingly massive indifference of one whose utter and all-exclusive absorption in an insatiable desire for the furthering of his own particular life’s work left no possible room for any mere consideration of humanity … The commandant was speaking again.

‘Later, I shall inject a new substance, my own invention but so recently discovered that I have not yet named it: Szarházazine, perhaps, gentlemen – or would that be too whimsical? I can assure you that if we had had it some years ago the good Cardinal would not have lasted twenty-four hours, much less than eighty-four. The combined efforts of the three, after perhaps two doses of each, will be to reduce you to a state of absolute mental exhaustion and collapse. Then the truth will come inevitably, and we will add what we will to your minds, and that, for you, will be the truth.’

‘You tell us all this?’ Jansci said slowly.

‘Why not? Forewarned, in this case, is not forearmed: the process is irreversible.’ The quiet certainty in his voice left no room for any doubt. He waved away the white-coated attendants and pressed a button on his desk. ‘Come gentlemen, it is time that you were shown your quarters.’

Almost at once the guards were in the room again, releasing legs and arms one at a time from chair arms and legs, then reshackling wrists and ankles together, all with a swift and trained efficiency that precluded all idea of escape, much less escape itself. When Jansci and Reynolds were on their feet, the commandant led the way from the room: two guards walked on either side and a third, with a pistol ready, behind each of the two men. The precautions were absolute.

The commandant led the way across the hard-packed snow of the courtyard, through the guarded entrance to a massively-walled, window-barred block of buildings and along a narrow, dim-lit corridor. Half-way along, at the head of a flight of stone steps leading down in the gloom below, he paused at a door, gestured to one of the guards and turned to the two prisoners.

‘A last thought, gentlemen, a last sight to take with you down into the dungeons below, while you spend your last few hours on earth as the men you have always known yourselves to be.’ The key clicked in the lock, and the commandant pushed it open with his foot. ‘After you, gentlemen.’

Hobbled by the shackles, Reynolds and Jansci stumbled into the room, saving themselves from falling by catching at the foot-rail of an old-fashioned iron bedstead. A man was lying on the bed, dozing, and Reynolds saw, almost with no sensation of surprise – he had been expecting it from the moment the commandant had stopped outside the door – that it was Dr Jennings. Haggard and wasted and years older than when Reynolds had seen him three days previously, he had been dozing on a dirty straw mattress: but he was almost instantly awake, and Reynolds could not resist a slow stirring of satisfaction when he saw that, whatever else the old man had lost, it certainly wasn’t his intransigence: the fire was back in the faded eyes even as he struggled upright.

‘Well, what the devil does this latest intrusion mean?’ He spoke English, the only language he knew, but Reynolds could see that the commandant understood. ‘Haven’t you damned ruffians pushed me about enough for a weekend without …’ He broke off when he recognized Reynolds for the first time and stared at him. ‘So the fiends got you, too?’

‘Inevitably,’ the commandant said in precise English. He turned to Reynolds. ‘You came all the way from England to see the professor. You have seen him. Now you can say goodbye. He leaves this afternoon – in three hours’ time, to be precise, for Russia.’ He turned to Jennings. ‘Road conditions are extremely bad – we have arranged for a special coach to be attached to the Pécs train. You will find it comfortable enough.’

‘Pécs?’ Jennings glared at him. ‘Where the devil is Pécs?’

‘One hundred kilometres south of here, my dear Jennings. The Budapest airport is temporarily closed by snow and ice, but the latest word is that Pécs Airport is still open. A special plane for yourself and a – ah – a few other special cases is being diverted there.’

Jennings ignored him, turned and stared at Reynolds.

‘I understand that my son Brian has arrived in England?’ Reynolds nodded in silence.

‘And I’m still here, eh? You’ve done splendidly, young man, just splendidly. What the devil is going to happen now God only knows.’

‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, sir.’ Reynolds hesitated, then made up his mind. ‘There’s one thing you should know. I have no authority for telling you this, but for this once only to hell with authority. Your wife – your wife’s operation was one hundred per cent successful and her recovery is already almost complete.’

‘What! What’s that you’re saying?’ Jennings had Reynolds by the lapels, and though forty pounds lighter than the younger man was actually shaking him. ‘You’re lying, I know you’re lying! The surgeon said …’

‘The surgeon said what we told him to say,’ Reynolds interrupted flatly. ‘I know it was unforgivable, but it was essential to bring you home and every possible lever was to be brought to bear. But it doesn’t matter a damn any more, so you might as well know.’

‘My God, my God!’ The reaction Reynolds had expected, especially from a man of the professor’s reputation – that of an almost berserker anger over having been duped so long and so cruelly – completely failed to materialize. Instead, he collapsed on his bed as if the weight of his body had grown too much for his old legs to bear, and blinked happily through his tears. ‘This is wonderful, I can’t tell you how wonderful … And only a few hours ago, I knew I could never be happy again!’

‘Most interesting, all most interesting,’ the commandant murmured. ‘And to think that the west has the effrontery to accuse us of inhumanity.’

‘True, true,’ Jansci murmured. ‘But at least the west doesn’t pump its victims full of Actedron and Mescaline.’

‘What? What’s that?’ Jennings looked up. ‘Who’s been pumped full of –?’

‘We have,’ Jansci interrupted mildly. ‘We’re to be given a fair trial and then shot in the morning, but first comes the modern equivalent of being broken on the wheel.’

Jennings stared at Jansci and Reynolds, the incredulity on his face slowly changing to horror. He rose and looked at the commandant.

‘Is this true? What this man says, I mean?’

The commandant shrugged. ‘He exaggerates, of course, but –’

‘So it is true.’ Jennings’ voice was quiet. ‘Mr Reynolds, it is as well you told me of my wife: the use of that lever would now be quite superfluous. But it’s too late now, I can see that, just as I begin to see many other things – and begin to know the things I shall never see again.’

‘Your wife.’ Jansci’s words were statement, not question.

‘My wife,’ Jennings nodded. ‘And my boy.’

‘You shall see them again,’ Jansci said quietly. Such was the quiet certainty, the unshakable conviction in his tone, that the others stared at him, half-convinced that he had some knowledge that was denied them, half-convinced that he was mad. ‘I promise you, Dr Jennings.’

The old man stared at him, then the hope slowly faded from his eyes.

‘You are kind, my friend. Religious faith is the prop –’

‘In this world,’ Jansci interrupted. ‘And soon.’

‘Take him away,’ the commandant ordered curtly. ‘The man goes mad already.’

Michael Reynolds was going insane, slowly but inevitably insane, and the most terrible part of it was that he knew he was going insane. But since the last forced injection shortly after they had been strapped in their chairs in that underground cellar, there had been nothing he could do about the relentless onset of this madness, and the more he fought against it, the more resolutely he struggled to ignore the symptoms, the pains, the agonizing stresses that were being set up in mind and body, then the more acutely he became aware of the symptoms, the deeper into his mind dug these fiendish claws, chemical claws, claws that were tearing his mind apart.

He was secured to his high-backed chair hand and foot, by a thigh belt and by a waist-belt and he would have given all he ever had or would have for the blessed release of throwing off these bonds, of flinging himself to the floor, or against a wall, or of contorting, convulsing his body in every fashion conceivable, of flexing and stretching, flexing and stretching every muscle he had, anything in a desperate attempt to ease that intolerable itch and frightening tension set up by ten thousand jumping, jangling nerve-ends all over his body. It was the old Chinese torture of tickling the soles of the feet magnified a hundredfold, only here there were no feathers, only the countless insidious probing needles of Actedron jabbing every screaming nerve-end into a frantic frenzy, an undreamed-of pitch of phrenetic excitability.

Waves of nausea swept over him, his inside felt as if a wasp’s nest had been broken there and a thousand buzzing wings were beating against the walls of his stomach, he was having difficulty with his breathing and, more and more frequently now, his throat would constrict in a terrifying fashion, he could feel himself choke for want of air while waves of panic surged through him, then at the last instant release would come and the air surge gaspingly into his starving lungs. But his head, his mind – that was the worst of all. The inside of his head seemed dark and confused, the edges of his mind ragged and woolly and increasingly losing contact with reality, for all his conscious, desperate attempts to cling on to what shreds of reason the Actedron and Mescaline had left him. The back of his head felt as if it were being crushed between a vice, and his eyes ached abominably. He could hear voices now, voices calling from afar, and as the last vestiges of his reason slipped away from his powerless grasp and down into the darkness he knew, even as his power of knowing left him, that the dark shroud of madness had completely enveloped him in its thick and choking folds.

But still the voices came – even down in the black depths, still the voices came. Not voices, something seemed to tell him, not voices but just a voice, and it wasn’t speaking to him or whispering insanely in the dark corners of his mind as all the other voices had been, it was shouting at him, calling him with a strength that penetrated even through the folds of madness, with a desperate, compelling urgency that no man with life at all left in him could possibly ignore. Again and again it came, endlessly insistent, seeming to grow louder and louder with every moment that passed, until at last something reached deep down into Reynolds’ darkness, lifted a tiny corner of the shroud and let him recognize the voice for a passing moment of time. It was a voice he knew well, but a voice he had never heard like this before: it was, he just dimly managed to realize, Jansci’s voice, and Jansci was shouting at him, over and over again. ‘Keep your head up! For God’s sake, keep your head up! Keep it up, keep it up!’ over and over again like some insane litany.

Slowly, ponderously, inch by agonizing inch as if he were lifting some tremendous weight, Reynolds lifted his head off his chest, his eyes still clamped shut, until he felt the back of his head press against the high chairback. For a long moment he stayed in that position, fighting for breath like a long-distance runner at the end of a gruelling race, then his head started to droop again.

‘Keep it up! I told you to keep it up!’ Jansci’s voice was vibrant with command, and Reynolds was suddenly aware, clearly and unmistakably aware, that Jansci was projecting towards himself, making a part of himself, some of that fantastic will-power that had taken him from the Kolyma Mountains and brought him back alive across the uncharted, sub-zero wastes of the Siberian deserts. ‘Keep it up, I tell you! That’s better, that’s better! Now, your eyes – open your eyes and look at me!’

Reynolds opened his eyes and looked at him. It was as if someone had covered his eyes with thick sheaths of lead, the effort was so great, but open them he finally did and peered with unfocused gaze across the gloom of the cellar. At first he could see nothing, he thought his eyes were gone, there was only a misty vapour swimming across his eyes, and then suddenly he knew it was a misty vapour, and he remembered that the stone floor was covered in six inches of water and the entire cellar festooned with steam pipes: the steaming, humid heat, worse by far than any Turkish bath he had ever known, was part of the treatment.

And now he could see Jansci: he could see him as if he were seeing through a misted, frosted glass, but he could see him, perhaps eight feet away, in a chair the duplicate of his own. He could see the head continually shaking from side to side, the jaws working constantly, the hands at the end of the pinioned arms opening and closing convulsively as Jansci sought to release some of the accumulated tension, the exquisitely agonizing titillation of his over-stimulated nervous system.

‘Don’t let your head go again, Michael,’ he said urgently. Even in his distress, the use of his Christian name struck Reynolds, the first time Jansci had ever used it, pronouncing it exactly as his daughter had done. ‘And for heaven’s sake keep your eyes open. Don’t let yourself go, whatever you do, don’t let yourself go! There’s a peak, a crisis of some kind to the effects of these damned chemicals, and if you get over that – don’t let go!’ he shouted suddenly. Again Reynolds opened his eyes: this time the effort was fractionally less.

‘That’s it, that’s it!’ Jansci’s voice came more clearly now. ‘I felt just the same a moment ago, but if you let go, yield to the effects, there’s no recovery. Just hang on, boy, just hang on. I can feel it going already.’

And Reynolds, also, could feel the grip of the chemicals easing. He had still the same mad urge to tear loose, to convulse every muscle in his body, but his head was clearing, and the ache behind his eyes beginning to dwindle. Jansci was talking to him all the while, encouraging him, distracting him, and gradually all his limbs and body began to quieten, he grew cold even in the fierce tropical heat of the cellar and bouts of uncontrollable shivering shook him from head to foot. Then the shivering faded and died away, and he began to sweat and grow faint as the humidity and the heat pouring from the steam pipes increased with every moment that passed. He was again on the threshold of collapse – a clear-headed, sane collapse this time – when the door opened and gum-booted warders came splashing through the water. Within seconds the warders had them free and were urging them through the open door into the clear, icy air and Reynolds, for the first time in his life, knew exactly what the taste of water must seem like to a man who had been dying of thirst in the desert.

Ahead of him he could see Jansci shrugging off the supporting hands of the warders on either side of him, and Reynolds, though he felt like a man after a long and wasting bout of fever, did the same. He staggered, all but fell when the support of the arms was withdrawn, recovered and steeled himself to follow Jansci out into the snow and bitter cold of the courtyard with his body erect and his head held high.

The commandant was waiting for them, and his eyes narrowed in swift disbelief as he saw them come out. For a few moments he was at a loss, and the words so ready on his lips remained unsaid. But he recovered quickly, and the professorial mask slipped effortlessly into place.

‘Candidly, gentlemen, had one of my medical colleagues reported this to me, I should have called him a liar. I would not, I could not have believed it. As a matter of clinical interest, how do you feel?’

‘Cold. And my feet are freezing – maybe you hadn’t noticed it, but our feet are soaking wet – we’ve been sitting with them in water for the past two hours.’ Reynolds leaned negligently against a wall as he spoke, not because his attitude reflected his feelings, but because without the wall’s support he would have collapsed on to the snow. But not even the wall lent him the support and encouragement that the approving gleam in Jansci’s eye did.

‘All in good time. Periodic alternations of temperature is part of the – ah – treatment. I congratulate you, gentlemen. This promises to be a case of unusual interest.’ He turned to one of the guards. ‘A clock in their cellar, and where they can both see it. The next injection of Actedron will be – let me see, it’s now midday – will be at 2 p.m. precisely. We must not keep them in undue suspense.’

Ten minutes later, gasping in the sudden, stifling heat of the cellar after the zero cold of the yard outside, Reynolds looked at the ticking clock, then at Jansci.

‘He doesn’t miss out even the smallest refinement of torture, does he?’

‘He would be horrified, genuinely horrified, if he heard you mention the word “torture,”’ Jansci said thoughtfully. ‘To himself the commandant is just a scientist carrying out an experiment, and all he wants is to achieve the maximum efficiency from the point of view of results. He is, of course, quite mad, with the blind insanity of all zealots. He would be shocked to hear you say that, too.’

‘Mad?’ Reynolds swore. ‘He’s an inhuman fiend. Tell me, Jansci, is that the sort of man you call your brother? You still believe in the oneness of humanity?’

‘An inhuman fiend?’ Jansci murmured. ‘Very well, let us admit it. But at the same time let us not forget that inhumanity knows no frontiers, no frontiers in either time or space. It’s hardly the exclusive perquisite of the Russians, you know. God only knows how many thousands of Hungarians have been executed or tortured till death came as a welcome release – by their fellow Hungarians. The Czech SSB – their secret police – were on a par with the NKVD, and the Polish UB – composed almost entirely of Poles – were responsible for worse atrocities than the Russians had ever dreamed of.’

‘Worse even than Vinnitsa?’

Jansci looked at him in long, slow speculation, then raised the back of his hand to his forehead: he could have been wiping the sweat away.

‘Vinnitsa?’ He lowered his hand and stared sightlessly into the gloom of a far corner. ‘Why do you ask about Vinnitsa, my boy?’

‘I don’t know. Julia mentioned it – perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry, Jansci, forget it.’

‘No need to be sorry – I can never forget it.’ He broke off for a long moment, then went on slowly. ‘I can never forget it. I was with the Germans in 1943 when we dug up a high-fenced orchard near the NKVD headquarters. We found 10,000 dead in a mass grave in that orchard. We found my mother, my sister, my daughter – Julia’s elder sister – and my only son. My daughter and my son had been buried alive: it is not difficult to tell these things.’

In the minutes that followed, that dark, furnace-hot dungeon deep under the frozen earth of Szarháza did not exist for Reynolds. He forgot their ghastly predicament, he forgot the haunting thought of the international scandal his trial would bring about, he forgot the man who was bent on destroying them, he could not even hear the ticking of the clock. He could think only of the man who sat quietly opposite him, of the dreadfully stark simplicity of his story, of the shattering traumatic shock that must have followed his discovery, of the miracle that he should not only have kept his sanity but grown into the kind and wise and gentle man he was, with hatred in his heart towards none that lived. To have lost so many that he loved, to have lost the most of what he lived for, and then to call their murderers his brothers … Reynolds looked at him and knew that he did not even begin to know this man, and knew that he would never know him …

‘It is not difficult to read your thoughts,’ Jansci said gently. ‘I lost so many I loved and, for a time, almost my reason. The Count – I will tell you his story some day, has lost even more – I, at least have still Julia and, I believe in my heart, my wife also. He has lost everything in the world. But we both know this. We know that it was bloodshed and violence that took our loved ones away from us, but we also know that all the blood spilt between here and eternity will never bring them back again. Revenge is for the madmen of the world and for the creatures of the field. Revenge will never create a world in which bloodshed and violence can never take our loved ones away from us. There may be a better kind of world worth living for, worth striving for and devoting our lives to, but I am a simple man and I just cannot conceive of it.’ He paused, then smiled. ‘Well, we are talking of inhumanity in general. Let us not forget this specific instance.’

‘No, no!’ Reynolds shook his head violently. ‘Let us forget it, let’s forget all about it.’

‘And that is what the world says – let us forget. Let us not think of it – the contemplation is too awful to bear. Let us not burden our hearts and our minds and our consciences, for then the good that is in us, the good that is in every man, might drive us to do something about it. And we can’t do anything about it, the world will say, because we do not even know where to begin or how to begin – by not thinking that inhumanity is endemic to any particular part of this suffering world.

‘I have mentioned the Hungarians, the Poles and the Czechs. I might also mention Bulgaria and Roumania where nameless atrocities have taken place of which the world has never yet heard – and may never hear. I could mention the 7,000,000 homeless refugees in Korea. And to all of that you might say: It is all one, it is all communism. And you would be right, my boy.

‘But what would you say if I reminded you of the cruelties of Falangist Spain, of Buchenwald and Belsen, of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, of the Japanese prison camps, the death railways of not so long ago? Again you would have the ready answer. All these things flourish under a totalitarian régime. But I said also that inhumanity has no frontiers in time. Go back a century or two. Go back to the days when the two great upholders of democracy were not quite as mature as they are today. Go back to the days when the British were building up their Empire, to some of the most ruthless colonization the world has ever seen, go back to the days when they were shipping slaves, packed like sardines in a tin, across to America – and the Americans themselves were driving the Indian off the face of their continent. And what then, my boy?’

‘You gave the answer yourself: we were young then.’

‘And so are the Russians young today. But even today, even in this twentieth century, things happen which any respecting people in the world should be ashamed of. You remember Yalta, Michael, you remember the agreements between Stalin and Roosevelt, you remember the great repatriation of the people of the east who had fled to the west?’

‘I remember.’

‘You remember. But what you do not remember is what you have never seen, but what both the Count and I have seen and will never forget: thousands upon countless thousands of Russians and Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians being forcibly repatriated to their own homelands where they knew that one thing and one thing only awaited them – death. You have not seen as we have seen, thousands mad with fear, hanging themselves from every projection that offered, falling on their pocket knives, flinging themselves under the moving wheels of a railway wagon and cutting their throats with rusty razor blades, anything in the world, any form of painful, screaming, self-ending, rather than go back to the concentration camps and torture and death. But we have seen, and we have seen how the thousands unlucky enough not to commit suicide were embarked: they were driven aboard their transports and their cattle cars – they were driven like cattle themselves – and they were driven by British and American bayonets … Never forget that, Michael: by British and American bayonets … Let him who is without sin …’

Jansci shook his head to remove the beads of sweat which spilled out in the climbing humidity: both of them were beginning to gasp with the heat, to have to fight consciously for each breath they took, but Jansci was not yet finished.

‘I could go on indefinitely, my boy, about your own country and the country that now regards itself as the true custodian of democracy – America. If your people and the Americans are not the world’s greatest champions of democracy, you are certainly the loudest. I could speak of the intolerance and cruelties that accompany integration in America, of the springing up of Ku Klux Klan in England which once firmly, but erroneously, regarded itself as being vastly superior to America in the matters of racial tolerance. But it is pointless and your countries are big enough and secure enough to take care of their own intolerant minorities, and free enough to publicise them to the world. The point I make is simply that cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world. There are as many evil and wicked and sadistic men in London or New York as there are in Moscow, but the democracies of the west guard their liberties as an eagle does its young and the scum of society can never rise to the top; but here, with a political system that, in the last analysis, can exist only by repression, it is essential to have a police force absolute in its power, legally constituted but innately lawless, arbitrary and utterly despotic. Such a force is a lodestone for the dregs of our society, which first join it and then dominate it, and then dominate the country. The police force is not intended to be a monster, but inevitably, by virtue of the elements attached to it, it becomes a monster, and the Frankenstein that built it becomes its slave.’

‘One cannot destroy the monster?’

‘It is hydra-headed and self-propagating. One cannot destroy it. Nor can one destroy the Frankenstein that created it in the first place. It is the system, the creed by which the Frankenstein lives that we must destroy, and the surest way to its destruction is to remove the necessity for its existence. It cannot exist in a vacuum. And I have already told you why it exists.’ Jansci smiled ruefully. ‘Was it three nights or three years ago?’

‘I’m afraid my remembering and my thinking are not at their best at the present moment,’ Reynolds apologized. He stared at the sweat dripping continuously from his forehead and splashing into the water that covered the floor. ‘Do you think our friend intends to melt us?’

‘It would seem like it. As to what I was saying, I fear I talk too much and at the wrong time. You don’t feel even a little more kindly disposed towards our worthy commandant?’

‘No!’

‘Ah, well,’ Jansci sighed philosophically. ‘Understanding the reasons for an avalanche does not, I suppose, make one any the more grateful for being pinned beneath it.’ He broke off, and twisted to face the door. ‘I fear,’ he murmured, ‘that our privacy is about to be invaded yet again.’

The guards entered, released them, pulled them to their feet and hustled them out of the door, upstairs and across the yard in their usual efficient and uncommunicative fashion. The leader knocked on the commandant’s door, waited for the command, then pushed the door wide, pushing the two men in in front of him. The commandant had company and Reynolds recognized him at once – Colonel Joseph Hidas, the deputy chief of the AVO. Hidas rose to his feet as they entered and walked over to where Reynolds stood trying to stop his teeth chattering and his whole body from shaking: even without the drugs, the instantaneous one hundred degrees alternations in temperature were beginning to have a strangely weakening and debilitating effect. Hidas smiled at him.

‘Well, Captain Reynolds, so we meet again, to coin a phrase. The circumstances, I fear, are even more unfortunate this time than the last. Which reminds me: you will be pleased to hear that your friend Coco has recovered and returned to duty, although still limping somewhat badly.’

‘I’m distressed to hear it,’ Reynolds said briefly. ‘I didn’t hit him hard enough.’

Hidas raised an eyebrow and turned his head to have a look at the commandant. ‘They have had full treatment, this morning?’

‘They have, Colonel. A singularly high degree of resistance – but a clinical challenge after my own heart. They will talk before midnight.’

‘Quite. I’m sure they will.’ Hidas turned back to Reynolds. ‘Your trials will take place on Thursday, in the People’s Court. The announcement wil be made tomorrow, and we are offering immediate visas and superb hotel accommodation to every western journalist who cares to attend.’

‘There will be no room for anyone else,’ Reynolds murmured.

‘Which will suit us admirably … However, that is of little interest to me compared to another, and somewhat less public trial that will take place even earlier in the week.’ Hidas walked across the room and stood before Jansci. ‘At this moment I achieve what I must frankly admit has become the consuming desire, the over-riding ambition of my life – to meet, under the proper circumstances, the man who has caused me more trouble, more positive distress and more sleepless nights than the combined efforts of all other – ah – enemies of the state I have ever known. Yes, I admit it. For seven years now you have crossed my path almost continually, shielded and spirited away hundreds of traitors and foes of communism, and interfered with and broken the laws of justice. In the past eighteen months your activities, aided by those of the luckless but brilliant Major Howarth, have become quite intolerable. But the end of the road has come, as it must come for everyone. I can hardly wait to hear you talk … Your name, my friend?’

‘Jansci. That is the only name I have.’

‘Of course! I would have expected nothing –’ Hidas broke off in mid-sentence, his eyes widened and colour ebbed from his face. He took a step backwards, then another.

‘What did you say your name was?’ His voice, this time, was only a husky whisper. Reynolds looked at him in astonishment.

‘Jansci. Just Jansci.’

Perhaps ten seconds passed in utter silence while everyone stared at the AVO colonel. Then Hidas licked his lips and said hoarsely: ‘Turn round!’

Jansci turned and Hidas stared down at the manacled hands. They heard the quick indrawing of his breath, then Jansci turned round of his own accord.

‘You’re dead!’ Hidas’ voice was still the same hoarse whisper, his face lined with shock. ‘You died two years ago. When we took your wife away –’

‘I didn’t die, my dear Hidas,’ Jansci interrupted. ‘Another man did – there were scores of suicides when your brown lorries were so busy that week. We just took one the nearest to me in appearance and build. We took him to our flat, disguised him, and painted his hands well enough to pass any but medical examination. Major Howarth, as you are probably aware by this time, is a genius with disguise.’ Jansci shrugged. ‘It was an unpleasant thing to do, but the man was already dead. My wife was alive – and we thought she might remain alive if I were thought to be dead.’

‘I see, I see indeed.’ Colonel Hidas had had time to recover his balance, and he could not keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘No wonder you defied us for so long! No wonder we could never break your organization. Had I known, had I but known! I am privileged indeed to have had you for adversary.’

‘Colonel Hidas!’ The commandant’s voice was imploring. ‘Who is this man?’

‘A man who, alas, will never stand trial in Budapest. Kiev, possibly Moscow, but never Budapest. Commandant, let me introduce you. Major-General Alexis Illyurin, second only to General Vlassov in command of the Ukrainian National Army.’

‘Illyurin!’ The commandant stared. ‘Illyurin! Here, in my room? It is impossible!’

‘It is, I know it is, but there is only one man in the world with hands like that! He hasn’t talked yet? No? But he will, we must have a complete confession ready when he goes to Russia.’ Hidas glanced at his watch. ‘So much to do, my Commandant, so little time to do it in. My car, and at once. Guard my friend well against my return. I will be back in two hours, three at the most. Illyurin? By all the gods, Illyurin!’

Back once more in the stone-walled room, Jansci and Reynolds had little to say to one another. Even Jansci’s usual optimism seemed to have failed him, but his face was as untroubled as ever. But Reynolds knew that everything was over, for Jansci even more than himself, and that the last card had been played. There was, he thought, something tragic beyond words about the man sitting quietly opposite him, a giant toppling into the dust, but quiet and unafraid.

And looking at him Reynolds was almost glad that he himself would die also, and he could not but be conscious of the bitter irony of his courage as the thought sprang not from courage but from cowardice: with Jansci dead, and because of him, he could not have faced Jansci’s daughter again. Worse, even worse than that, was the thought of what must inevitably happen to her with the Count and Jansci and himself all gone, but the thought had no sooner come than he had thrust it violently, ruthlessly away from him: if ever there was a time that no weakness must touch his mind, that time was now, and dwelling on the laughter and the sadness of that mobile, delicate face that was all too easily evoked in his mind’s eye was the highroad to despair …

The steam hissed out of the pipes, the humidity spilled over the room, the temperature climbed steadily upwards: 120, 130, 140 and their bodies were drenched with sweat, their eyes blinded by it, and their breathing was the breathing of fire. Twice, three times, Reynolds lost consciousness, and would have fallen and drowned in a few inches of water but for the restraining body belt.

It was as he was emerging from the last of these periods of unconsciousness that he felt hands fumbling at his fastenings and before he properly realized what was happening the guards had himself and Jansci once more out of the cell and into the bitter air of the courtyard for the third time that morning. Reynolds’ mind was reeling as his body was reeling, and Jansci, too, he could see, was being half-carried across, but even through the fog in his mind Reynolds remembered something and looked at his watch. It was exactly two o’clock. He saw Jansci looking at him, saw the grim nod of acquiescence. Two o’clock, and the commandant would be waiting for them, he would be as punctual and precise about this as he was about everything else. Two o’clock and the commandant would be waiting for them: and so, too, would the syringes and the coffee, the Mescaline and the Actedron, waiting to drive them over the edge of madness.

The commandant was waiting for them, but he was not waiting alone. The first person Reynolds saw was an AVO guard, then two more, then the giant Coco leering at him with a wide, anticipatory grin on his seamed and brutalized face. Then, last of all, he saw the back of a man leaning negligently against the window-frame and smoking a black Russian cigarette in a tapered holder: and when the man turned round Reynolds saw that it was the Count.

NINE

Reynolds was certain that his eyes and his mind were deceiving him. He knew that the Count was safely out of the way and that his AVO superiors would not let him move an inch without guarding him like a hawk. He knew, too, that that last hour and a half in that steam oven of a dungeon had had an enormously debilitating effect and that his mind, dark and woolly and still confused, was playing curious tricks on him. Then the man at the window pushed himself leisurely off the wall and was sauntering easily across the room, cigarette holder in one hand, a pair of heavy leather gloves swinging in the other and suddenly, there could be doubt no more. It was the Count, alive, completely unharmed, the old mocking self that he had always been. Reynolds’ lips parted in the first conclusive moment of shock, his eyes widened, then the beginning of a smile began to limn its lines on his pale and haggard face.

‘Where on earth –’ he began, then staggered back against the wall behind him as the Count slashed him across the face and mouth with his heavy gauntlets. He could feel the blood springing from one of the recently healed cuts on his upper lip, and with all he had already suffered this latest pain and shock left him weak and dizzy, and he could see the Count only dimly, as through a haze.

‘Lesson number one, little man,’ the Count said casually. He eyed a tiny spot of blood on his glove with evident distaste. ‘In future you will speak only when you have been spoken to.’ The look of distaste transferred itself from his gloves to the two prisoners. ‘Have these men fallen into a river, Commmandant?’

‘Not at all, not at all.’ The commandant was looking very upset. ‘Just undergoing a course of treatment in one of our steam rooms … This is most unfortunate, Captain Zsolt, really most unfortunate. It has destroyed the entire sequence.’

‘I wouldn’t worry, Commandant,’ the Count said soothingly. ‘This is unofficial, and please don’t quote me, but I understand that they are being brought back here either late tonight or early in the morning. I believe Comrade Furmint has the greatest of faith in you as a – shall we say – psychologist.’

‘You’re sure of that, Captain?’ The commandant was anxious. ‘You’re quite sure?’

‘Certain.’ The Count glanced at his watch. ‘We must not delay, Commandant. You know how essential haste is. Besides,’ he smiled, ‘the sooner they’re away, the sooner they’re back again.’

‘Let me not delay you then.’ The commandant was now affability itself. ‘I am quite reconciled to their departure. I am looking forward to completing my experiment, especially on so illustrious a personage as Major-General Illyurin.’

‘It’s not a chance which will come your way again,’ the Count agreed. He turned to the four AVO men. ‘Right, out into the truck with them, at once … Coco, my infant, I fear you are losing your grip. They are made of glass, you think?’

Coco grinned and took his cue. His shove, massive palm flat-handed against Reynolds’ face, sent him staggering against the wall with wicked force, and two others grabbed Jansci and hustled him brutally out of the room. The commandant raised horrified hands.

‘Captain Zsolt. Is it necessary – I mean, I want them back in good condition, so that –’

‘Don’t be afraid, Commandant,’ the Count grinned. ‘We too, in our own crude way, are specialists. You will explain to Colonel Hidas when he returns, and ask him to phone the Chief? You will tell him, perhaps, how sorry I am to have missed him, but I cannot wait. Good. Thank you again, Commandant, and goodbye.’

Shivering violently in their sodden clothes, Jansci and Reynolds were hustled across the courtyard into the back of a waiting AVO lorry. A guard accompanied the driver into the cab, and the Count, Coco and another guard climbed into the back of the lorry, placed their guns on their knees and kept a watchful eye on the two prisoners. A moment later the engine turned over, the truck got under way, and within seconds had passed by the saluting sentry at the gate.

Almost at once the Count pulled a map from his pocket, consulted it briefly, then replaced it. Five minutes later he passed by Jansci and Reynolds, slid back the inspection hatch and spoke to the driver.

‘Half a kilometre from here a side road branches off to the left. Take it, and drive until I order you to stop.’

Within a minute the truck slowed, then turned off the road and went bouncing and jolting along a narrow rough track. So pot-holed was the road, so deep the frozen snow, that the truck constantly skidded from one side to the other, and the driver had the greatest difficulty in keeping it on the road at all, but the progress, if slow, was steady. After ten minutes the Count moved to the rear of the truck, stood up and leaned out the door as if looking for a familiar landmark, and after several minutes there he seemed to find it. He gave an order, the truck stopped, and he jumped out on to the snow, followed by Coco and the other guard. Obeying the implicit orders of the silently gesturing gun muzzles, Jansci and Reynolds jumped out after them.

The Count had stopped the truck in the middle of a thick wood, with a clearing to one side. He gave another order and the driver used the space provided by the clearing for reversing the truck. It skidded and slipped on the snow-slicked grass, but heaving shoulders and a few broken branches under the back wheels soon had it back on the road again, facing the direction it had come. The driver stopped the engine and climbed out, but the Count made him restart it and leave it idling: he wasn’t, he said, going to take the chance of the engine freezing up in that zero weather.

And it was indeed bitterly cold. Jansci and Reynolds, still in their same wet clothes, were shivering like men with the ague. The icy air turned chins and ears and nose-tips red and blue and white, and the condensation of breath was heavy and almost like smoke, evaporating slowly like smoke in the still, frozen air.

‘Speed everyone!’ the Count commanded. ‘You don’t all want to freeze to death here, do you? Coco, you will guard these men. I can trust you?’

‘To the death.’ Coco grinned evilly. ‘One slightest move, and I will kill.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ The Count looked at him thoughtfully. ‘How many men have you killed, Coco?’

‘I lost count many years ago, comrade,’ Coco said simply. Reynolds, looking at him, knew with certainty that he was speaking the truth.

‘Your reward will come one of these fine days,’ the Count said cryptically. ‘The rest of you – a shovel apiece. We have some work to do that will get your blood moving.’

One of the guards blinked stupidly at him.

‘Spades, comrade? For the prisoners?’

‘You thought, perhaps, I was planning a garden allotment?’ the Count asked coldly.

‘No, no. It was just that you said to the commandant – I mean, I thought we were going to Budapest …’ His voice trailed away into silence.

‘Exactly, comrade,’ the Count said dryly. ‘You have seen the error of your ways in time – in time and no more. Whatever else is required of you, comrade, heaven knows it is not thought. Come, or we all freeze. And do not be afraid. There will be no need to dig the ground, impossible anyway, it’s like iron. A little vale in the woods where the snow has drifted deep, a trench in the snow – and – well, at least Coco understands.’

‘I do indeed.’ The grinning Coco licked his lips. ‘Perhaps the comrade will permit me to –’

‘Put an end to their sufferings?’ the Count suggested. He shrugged indifferently. ‘You may as well. What’s only another two after you’ve lost count of all the ones that have gone before?’

He disappeared into the woods behind the clearing with the other three guards and, even in that crystal clear, sound carrying air, the men left behind could hear their voices growing fainter and fainter until they were only distant murmurs: the Count must have been leading them deep into the very heart of the wood. Coco, meanwhile, watched them with an unblinking, venomous little eyes, and Jansci and Reynolds were both all too clearly aware that he was awaiting only the slighest excuse to pull the trigger of the carbine that his great hands cradled as if it were a toy. But they gave him no such excuse: excepting only their uncontrollable shivering, they stood like statues.

Five minutes elapsed and the Count emerged from the woods, slapping a gauntlet against his polished high boots and the skirts of his long coat to free them of snow.

‘The work proceeds apace,’ he annunced. ‘Two more minutes and we will rejoin our comrades. They have behaved, Coco?’

‘They have behaved’ The disappointment in Coco’s voice was all too clear.

‘Never mind, comrade,’ the Count consoled him. He was marching up and down behind Coco, beating his arms to keep warm. ‘You haven’t much longer to wait. Don’t take your eyes off them for a moment … How is – how is the pain today?’ He inquired delicately.

‘It still hurts.’ Coco glared at Reynolds and swore. ‘I am black and blue all over!’

‘My poor Coco, you’ve having an uncommonly rough time of it these days,’ the Count said gently, and the sound of his viciously clubbing revolver was a pistol shot in the silence of the woods as the butt struck home accurately and with tremendous force just above Coco’s ear. The carbine dropped from Coco’s hands, he swayed, eyes turned up in his head, then crashed to the ground like a stricken tree as the Count stepped respectfully to one side to give a clear path to the giant’s fall. Twenty seconds later the truck was on its way and the clearing in the woods already lost to sight round a curve in the road.

For the first three or four minutes there was no sound, no word spoken in the cab of the truck, only the low, steady roar of the Diesel engine. A hundred questions, a hundred comments framed themselves on the lips of Jansci and Reynolds, but they didn’t know where to start, and the shadow of the nightmare from which they had just escaped was still too vivid in their minds. And then the Count was slowing down and stopping, one of his rare smiles illuminating his thin, aristocratic face as he dipped into his capacious hip pocket and drew out his metal flask.

‘Plum brandy, my friends.’ His voice wasn’t quite steady. ‘Plum brandy, and God only knows that no one needs it more than we three do today. Me, for I have died a thousand deaths today – especially when our friend here nearly ended everything when he first saw me in the commandant’s office – and you because you are soaking and freezing and prime candidates for pneumonia. And also, I suspect, because they did not treat you too well. I am right?’

‘Right.’ Jansci had to answer, for Reynolds was coughing and choking as the grateful, life-giving warmth of the strong spirit burnt its way down his throat. ‘The usual breakdown chemicals, plus a special one he’s just developed – and, as you know, the steam treatment.’

‘It was not difficult to guess,’ the Count nodded. ‘You did not look at all happy. In fact, you had no right to be on your feet at all, but doubtless you were sustained by the sure knowledge that it was only a matter of time before I appeared on the scene.’

‘Doubtless,’ Jansci said dryly. He drank deep of the brandy, his eyes flooded with tears, and he gasped for air. ‘Poison, sheer poison – but I have never tasted anything half as good!’

‘There are times when one’s critical judgments are better suspended,’ the Count admitted. He tilted the bottle to his mouth, swallowed as another man might swallow water, for all the apparent effect it had on him, and pushed the flask back in his pocket. ‘A most essential stop, but we must press on: time is not on our side.’

He engaged the clutch and the truck moved forward. Reynolds had to shout his protest over the high-pitched roar of its first gear.

‘But surely you are going to tell us –’

‘Try to stop me,’ the Count said. ‘But as we drive along, if you don’t mind. I will explain why later. However, to the happenings of to-day … First of all, I must tell you that I have resigned from the AVO. Reluctantly, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Jansci murmured. ‘Does anyone know yet?’

‘Furmint does, I should think.’ The Count’s eyes never left the road as he wrestled the skidding truck along between the narrow banks. ‘I didn’t actually give notice in writing, but as I left him gagged and bound hand and foot in his own office, I don’t think he could have been in much doubt about my intentions.’

Neither Reynolds nor Jansci said anything, there seemed no remark to meet the occasion, and as the silence stretched out they could see the grin spreading over the Count’s thin lips.

‘Furmint!’ It was Jansci who broke the silence, his voice sounding strained. ‘Furmint! You mean your chief –’

‘Ex-chief,’ the Count corrected. ‘None other. But let me begin from the morning. You will remember that I had sent a message out with the Cossack – incidentally, did he and his Opel arrive intact?’

‘Both of them.’

‘A miracle. You should have seen his take off. As I say, I told him that I was being sent out to Gödöllö – some security check-up, a big one. I should have expected Hidas to handle it himself, but he told me he had some important business elsewhere in Györ.

‘Well, we went to Gödöllö – eight men, myself and a Captain Kálmán Zsolt – an able man with a rubber truncheon, but singularly ungifted otherwise. And as we went I was worried – in a mirror I had caught the Chief giving me a very curious look indeed just before I left the Andrassy Ut. Not, mind you, that there is anything remarkable about the Chief giving anybody curious looks, he doesn’t even trust his own wife, but it was curious coming from the man who had only last week complimented me on being the ablest AVO officer in Budapest.’

‘You are irreplaceable,’ Jansci murmured.

‘Thank you … Then, just as we were arriving in Gödöllö, Zsolt dropped a bomb in my lap. He mentioned casually that he had been speaking to Hidas’ chauffeur that morning and that he understood that the colonel was going to the Szarháza prison and wondered what the devil the colonel was going to that hell-hole for. He kept on rambling about something or other, I don’t know what, which was just as well as I’m sure my face at that moment must have been a very interesting sight for anyone who cared to look at it.

‘Everything fell together in my mind with such loud clicks that it’s a wonder that Zsolt didn’t hear it. Shoving me out of the way to Gödöllö, the Chief’s strange look, the lie Hidas had told me, the ease with which I had found out that the professor was in Szarháza, the still greater ease with which I got the papers and stamps from Furmint’s office. My God, I could have kicked myself when I remembered that Furmint had actually gone out of his way, quite unnecessarily, to tell me that he was going to hold a meeting with some officers, thereby letting me know that his office would be empty for some time to come – it was during the dinner hour when there was no one in his outer office … How they got on to me, I will never know. I’ll swear that only forty-eight hours ago I was the most trusted officer in Budapest. However, that is by the way.

‘I had to act, I had to act once for all, and I knew that my bridges were already burnt and that I had nothing to lose. I had to act on the assumption that only Furmint and Hidas knew about me. Obviously Zsolt knew nothing, but I wasn’t banking on that, he’s too stupid to be entrusted with anything, it’s just that both Furmint and Hidas are naturally so distrustful that they wouldn’t risk telling anyone.’ The Count smiled broadly. ‘After all, if their best man had defected, how were they to know how far the rot had spread?’

‘How indeed,’ Jansci said.

‘Precisely. Immediately we arrived in Gödöllö we went to the mayor’s office – not our local branch there, they were being investigated among others – threw the mayor out and took over. I left Zsolt there, went downstairs, collected the men, told them that their duty until five o’clock this evening was to consist of going round cafés and bars, posing as disaffected AVO men, to see what they could turn up in the way of seditious talk. A job after their own hearts. I provided them with plenty of money for local colour: they’ll be drinking away steadily for hours yet.

‘Then I went dashing back to the mayor’s place in a state of great excitement, and told Zsolt that I had found something of utmost importance. He didn’t even stop to ask what it was. He came tearing out of the office with me, dreams of promotion shining in his eyes.’ The Count coughed. ‘We will miss out the unpleasant part of it. Suffice to say that he is now incarcerated in an abandoned cellar not fifty yards from the mayor’s office. Not bound or hurt in any way, but it will take an oxy-acetylene torch to free him.’

The Count stopped speaking, braked the truck and got out to clear his windscreen. It had been snowing quite heavily now for two or three minutes, but neither of the other two had noticed it.

‘I took my unfortunate colleague’s identity papers.’ The Count was on his way again both with truck and story. ‘Forty-five minutes later, stopping only en route to buy a clothes rope, I was at the door of our H.Q., and a minute later I was in Furmint’s office – the very fact that I got as far as that showed that Furmint and Hidas had indeed been as close-mouthed about my defection as I had suspected they might be.

‘The whole thing was ridiculously simple throughout. I had nothing to lose, I was still officially in the clear, and nothing succeeds like effrontery, especially on a massive scale, Furmint was so staggered to see me that I had the barrel of my pistol between his teeth before his jaw had time to close again: he is surrounded by fancy knobs and bell-pushes all designed to save his life in an emergency, but they were not, you understand, designed to protect him against such as myself.

‘I gagged him, then informed him to write a letter, in his own hand, to my dictation. Furmint is a brave man and he was most reluctant, but nothing overcomes high moral principles like the muzzle of a pistol grinding into your ear. The letter was to the commandant of the Szarháza prison, who knows Furmint’s writing as well as he knows his own, authorizing him to release you two to myself, one Captain Zsolt. Then he signed it, covered it with practically every stamp we could find in his office, put it in an envelope and sealed it with his own private seal, a seal not known to a score of people in all Hungary: I, fortunately, was one of them, although Furmint didn’t know it.

‘I had twenty metres of clothes rope, and when I was finished Furmint was trussed like a fowl. All he could move were his eyes and his eyebrows, and he used these to great effect when I picked up the direct phone to the Szarháza and spoke to the commandant in what I pride myself was a perfect imitation of Furmint’s voice. I think Furmint began to understand a great many things that had puzzled him over the last year or so. Anyway, I told the commandant that I was sending Captain Zsolt to pick up these prisoners, and that I was also sending a written authorization, in my own personal writing with my own personal seal, with him. There were to be no slip ups.’

‘What if Hidas had still been there?’ Reynolds asked curiously. ‘He must have left only very shortly before you phoned.’

‘Nothing could have been better and easier.’ The Count gestured with an airy hand, then grabbed the wheel quickly as the truck slewed towards a ditch. ‘I’d just have ordered Hidas to bring you back immediately, and waylaid him en route … When I was speaking to the commandant, I coughed and sneezed from time to time, and let my voice seem a little husky. I told the commandant I had a devil of a cold coming on. I had my reasons for that. Then I spoke on the table microphone to his outer office, and said that I wasn’t to be disturbed, on any account whatsoever, for the next three hours, not even if a minister wanted to speak to me. I left them in no doubt as to what would happen if my orders were disobeyed. I thought Furmint was going to have an apoplectic stroke. Then, still in Furmint’s voice, I rang up the transport pool, ordered a truck to be brought round for Major Howarth at once, and ordered four men to be standing by in readiness to accompany him – I didn’t want them, but I had to have them for local colour. Then I bundled Furmint into a cupboard, locked it, left his office, locked that too and took the key with me. Then we set off for Szarháza … I wonder what Furmint’s thoughts are at this very moment? Or Zsolt’s? Or if any of the AVO men I left in Gödöllö are still sober. And can’t you just see Hidas’ and the commandant’s face as the truth dawns on them?’ The Count smiled dreamily. ‘I could spend all day just thinking of these things.’

For the next few minutes they drove along in silence. The snow, although not yet blinding, was thickening steadily, and the Count had to give his exclusive attention to the road. Beside him Jansci and Reynolds, helped as much by the heat generated in the cab by the engine as by the second drink they had had from the Count’s bottle, could feel the warmth gradually returning to their frozen bodies as the continuous shivering eased and gradually stopped and a thousand pins and needles jabbed their numbed legs and arms in the exquisite agony of returning circulation. They had listened to the Count’s story in an almost complete silence, and still sat in silence: Reynolds could think of no suitable comment on either this fantastic man or his story, and to know how even to begin to thank him was quite beyond his imagination. Besides, he had more than a shrewd suspicion that thanks would receive very short shrift indeed.

‘Did either of you see the car Hidas arrived in?’ the Count asked suddenly.

‘I saw it,’ Reynolds answered. ‘A black Russian Zis – big as a house.’

‘I know it. Solid steel body and bullet-proof windows.’ The Count was slowing down now, edging their truck close in to the shelter of some trees that crowded down on the roadside. ‘I think it unlikely that Hidas would fail to recognize one of his own trucks and pass by without comment. Let us see how the land lies.’

He stopped, jumped out into the swirling snow and the others followed him. Fifty yards took them to the junction of the main road, smooth and unbroken now under its fresh covering of snow.

‘Obviously nothing’s passed by here since the snow started falling,’ Jansci observed.

‘Exactly,’ the Count agreed. He glanced at his watch. ‘Three hours almost to the minute since Hidas left Szarháza – and he said he would return within the three hours. He shouldn’t be long.’

‘Couldn’t we just run the truck across the road and stop him?’ Reynolds suggested. ‘That would delay the alarm another couple of hours.’

The Count shook his head regretfully. ‘Impossible. I’d thought of it, but it’s no good. In the first place, the men we left behind in the woods should make it back to Szarháza in an hour – an hour and a half at the most. Then you’d require a crowbar or a stick of dynamite to break into a car armoured like the Zis, but even that’s not the point: in this weather the driver almost certainly wouldn’t see the truck until it was too late – and that Zis weighs about three tons. It would wreck the truck – and if we are to survive at all, we want to keep that truck intact.’

‘He could have passed by in the first minutes after we left the road, before the snow started falling,’ Jansci put in.

‘It’s possible,’ the Count conceded. ‘But I think we should give him a few minutes –’ He broke off suddenly, listened, and Reynolds heard it at the same time – the subdued hum of a powerful motor, closing rapidly.

They were off the road and into the shelter of a few trees just in time. The approaching car, Hidas’ black Zis without a doubt, swept by in the swirling snow with a hissing crunch of wide snow tyres, and was lost to sight and sound almost immediately. Reynolds caught a glimpse of a chauffeur in the front, and of Hidas in the back with what looked like another small figure huddled beside him, but it was impossible to be sure. And then they were racing back to the truck and the Count was swinging it out on the main road: the hunt would be up in minutes now, and time was running out. The Count had barely changed up to top gear when he changed down again and brought the truck to a halt by the side of a small wood through which telephone poles and wires were strung to cut off the approaching corner. Almost at once two men, half-frozen with the bitter cold and their clothes so matted with snow that they looked more like a couple of walking snowmen than human beings, came stumbling out of the wood and running towards the truck, each carrying a box under his arm. As they saw, through the windscreen, Jansci and Reynolds sitting in the cab, they waved their arms in delight and grinned broadly, and there was no mistaking them now: Sandor and the Cossack, and their expressions were those of men welcoming friends back from the dead. They piled into the back of the truck with as much speed as their frozen limbs would allow, and the Count was on his way again within fifteen seconds of coming to rest.

The inspection door behind the cab pushed open and Sandor and the Cossack plied them with excited questions and congratulations. After a minute or two, the Count passed back his brandy flask and Jansci took advantage of the sudden lull in talk to ask a question.

‘What boxes were they carrying?’

‘The small one was a telephone linesman’s kit for tapping wires,’ the Count explained. ‘Every AVO truck carries one of these. On the way here I stopped at the inn in Petoli, gave it to Sandor and told him to follow us to near the Szarháza, climb a telephone pole and tap the private line from the prison to Budapest. If the commandant was still suspicious and wanted confirmation, Sandor would have answered: I told him to talk through a handkerchief, as if Furmint’s cold, which I had already let the commandant know was developing, had become much worse.’

‘Good lord!’ Reynolds found it impossible to hide his admiration. ‘Is there anything you did not think of?’

‘Very little,’ the Count admitted modestly. ‘Anyway, the precaution was not needed: the commandant, as you saw, had never a suspicion. The only thing I was really afraid of was that these dolts of AVO men I had with me might call me Major Howarth in front of the commandant, instead of Captain Zsolt as I had coached them to call me, for reasons, I said, which Furmint would personally explain to them if any of them blundered … The other box contains your ordinary clothes, which Sandor also brought on from Petoli in the Opel. I’ll stop in a moment and you can nip into the back and change out of these uniforms … Where did you leave the Opel, Sandor?’

‘Back there, deep in the wood. No one can see it.’

‘No loss.’ The Count dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand. ‘It wasn’t ours in the first place. Well, gentlemen, the hunt is up, or will be any moment now, and it will be up with a vengeance. Every escape route to the west, from trunk roads down to bicycle tracks, will be blocked as they have never been blocked before: with all due respects to yourself, Mr Reynolds, General Illyurin is the biggest fish that has ever threatened to escape their net. We will do very well indeed to escape with our lives: I do not rate our chances very highly. So what now, I wonder.’

No one had immediate suggestions to make. Jansci sat looking straight ahead, the lined face beneath the thick white hair calm and unworried, and Reynolds could almost have sworn that a slight smile was touching the corners of his mouth. He himself had never felt less like smiling and as the truck roared steadily on from the whitely opaque world of snow behind to the whitely opaque world of snow ahead, he made a mental catalogue of his own successes and failures since he had entered Hungary only four days previously. The catalogue was not one that he could contemplate with either pleasure or pride. On the credit side, there could only be reckoned the contacts he had made, with Jansci and his men in the first place, and then with the professor – and he could derive no real satisfaction from these, without the Count and Jansci even these would have been impossible. On the debit side – he winced as he realized the length of the list on the debit side: being captured immediately after arriving in the country, making the AVO a gratis presentation of a tape recording that had ruined everything, walking into Hidas’ trap and having to be rescued by Jansci and his men, having to be saved by Jansci from succumbing to the effects of the drug in the Szarháza, almost betraying his friends and himself when his astonishment had overcome him at the sight of the Count in the commandant’s room. He writhed in his seat as he thought of it. In short, he had lost the professor, split up the professor’s family beyond recovery, been responsible for the Count losing the position that alone enabled Jansci’s organization to work smoothly – and, as bitter as anything, he had lost any hope he might have had that Jansci’s daughter might look kindly on him again. It was the first time that Reynolds had admitted, even to himself, that he ever had any such hope, and he was lost for a long, long moment at the wonder of it. With physical effort, almost, he shook off all thought of it, and when he spoke he knew there was only one thing he could say.

‘There’s something I want to do, and I want to do it alone,’ he said slowly. ‘I want to find a train. I want to find the train that’s –’

‘Don’t we all!’ the Count shouted. He smashed a gloved hand down on the steering-wheel with a force that nearly broke it, and his thin face was alive with a grin of sheer delight. ‘Don’t we all, my boy! Look at Jansci there – he’s been thinking of nothing else for the past ten minutes.’

Reynolds looked sharply at the Count, then more slowly at Jansci. It had been the beginnings of a smile that he had seen on Jansci’s face, he realized now, and even as he watched the smile widened as Jansci turned towards him.

‘I know this country like the back of my hand.’ The tone was almost apologetic. ‘It was about five kilometres back that I noticed that the Count was headed due south. I do not imagine,’ Jansci added dryly, ‘that very much of a welcome awaits us across the border of Yugoslavia.’

‘It’s no good.’ Reynolds shook his head stubbornly. ‘Just me, only me. Everything I’ve touched yet has gone wrong, just one more step towards the concentration camps. Next time there’ll be no Count turning up with an AVO truck. What train is the professor on?’

‘You will do this alone?’ Jansci asked.

‘Yes. I must.’

‘The man’s mad,’ the Count announced.

‘I can’t.’ Jansci shook his white head. ‘I can’t let you do it. Put yourself in my position, and admit that you may be selfish. I have, unfortunately, a conscience to live with, and I would not care to face it every waking night for the rest of my life.’ He stared forward through the windscreen. ‘Even worse, I would not care to face my daughter for the rest of my life.’

‘I don’t understand –’

‘Of course you don’t.’ It was the Count interrupting, and he sounded almost jovial. ‘Your all-exclusive devotion to your job may be admirable – to be frank, I don’t think it is – but it also tends to blind you to things that are dazzlingly clear to your elders. However, we argue, and uselessly. Colonel Hidas is even now having a fit in our worthy commandant’s office. Jansci?’ He was asking for a decision, and Reynolds knew it.

‘You know all we need to know?’ Jansci asked the Count.

‘Naturally.’ The Count was hurt. ‘I had four minutes to wait while the – ah – prisoners were being produced. I did not waste those minutes.’

‘Very well, then. There it is, Meechail. The information in exchange for our help.’

‘I don’t appear to have much option,’ Reynolds said bitterly.

‘The sign of an intelligent man – he knows when he has lost an argument.’ The Count was almost purring. He jammed on the brakes, pulled a map from his pocket, made sure that Sandor and the Cossack could see it from the observation hatch behind and jabbed at it with his finger. ‘Here is Cece – this is where the professor is being put aboard the train to-day – or, rather, has already been put aboard the train. Special wagon tacked on to the end.’

‘The commandant mentioned something like that,’ Jansci said. ‘A number of high-ranking scientists –’

‘Pah! Scientists? High-ranking criminals bound for the Siberian taiga, and it’s where they deserve to go. Nor is Dr Jennings getting any special treatment – it’s a convict coach, pure and simple, a front-loading cattle truck: the commandant made no bones about it.’ His finger traced the railway line down to the point where it intersected with the main road due south from Budapest at the town of Szekszárd, sixty kilometres north of the Yugoslavian border. ‘The train will stop here. Then it follows the main road due south to Bataszek – it goes straight through there – then turns west for Pécs, leaving the main road completely. It will have to be somewhere between Szekszárd and Pécs, gentlemen, and it presents quite a problem. There are plenty of trains I would derail, but not one carrying hundreds of my adopted countrymen. This is just a regular service train.’

‘May I see that map, please?’ Reynolds asked. It was a very large scale map, a road map but also a physical map showing rivers and hills, and as he studied it his excitement mounted, and his mind went back fourteen years to the days when he had been the youngest subaltern in the S.O.E. It was a crazy idea now, but it had been a crazy idea then … He pointed to a spot on the map, not far north of Pécs, where the roads from Szekszárd, after cutting for almost forty kilometres across country, again paralleled the railway line, then looked across at the Count.

‘Can you get the truck there before the train arrives?’

‘With luck, with the roads not being blocked and, above all, with Sandor to lift me out of a ditch if I go into one – yes, I think I can.’

‘Very well. Here is what I propose.’ Quickly, succinctly, Reynolds outlined his plan and at the end of it he looked at the others. ‘Well?’

Jansci shook his head slowly, but it was the Count who spoke.

‘Impossible.’ He was very definite. ‘It cannot be done.’

‘It’s been done before. In the Vosges mountains, 1944. An ammunition dump went up as a result. I know, because I was there … What alternative do you propose?’

There was a short period of silence, then Reynolds spoke again.

‘Exactly. As the Count said, it is an intelligent man who knows when he has lost an argument. We’re wasting time.’

‘We are.’ Jansci had already made up his mind, and the Count nodded agreement. ‘We can but try.’

‘Into the back and change.’ The Count had made up his mind. ‘I’m on my way. The train is due in Szekszárd in twenty minutes. I’ll be there in fifteen.’

‘Just so long as the AVO aren’t there in ten,’ Reynolds said sombrely.

Involuntarily, almost, the Count glanced over his shoulder. ‘Impossible. No signs of Hidas yet.’

‘There are such things as telephones.’

‘There were.’ It was Sandor speaking for the first time for minutes, and he showed Reynolds the pair of pliers in his huge hand. ‘Six cables – six snips. The Szarháza is completely cut off from the outside world.’

‘I,’ said the Count modestly, ‘think of everything.’

TEN

The ancient train rocked and swayed alarmingly along the ill-maintained track, shuddering and straining whenever a snow-laden gust of wind from the south-east caught it broadside on along its entire length and threatened for a heart-stopping moment, that was only one of a never-ending series of such moments, to topple it off the track. The carriage wheels, transmitting a teeth-rattling vibration through a suspension that had long since given up an unequal battle with the years, screeched and grated in a shrilly metallic cacophony as they jarred and leapt across the uneven intersection of the rails. The wind and the snow whistled icily through a hundred cracks in ill-made doors and windows, the wooden coachwork and seats creaked and protested like a ship working in a heavy seaway, but the ancient train battered on steadily through the white blindness of that late afternoon in mid-winter, sometimes slowing down unexpectedly on a straight stretch of track, at other times increasing speed round seemingly dangerous curves: the driver, one hand almost constantly on the steam whistle that whispered and died to a muffled extinction only a hundred yards away in the driving snow, was a man, obviously, with complete confidence in himself, the capacities of his train and his knowledge of the track ahead.

Reynolds, lurching and staggering down the wildly swaying length of a coach corridor, shared none of the engine driver’s obvious confidence, not in the safety of the train, which was the least of Reynolds’ worries, but in his own capacity to carry out the task that lay ahead of him. When he had broached the plan first of all to the others, it had been with the memory in his mind of a soft starlit summer’s night and a train puffing gently along between the wooded hills of the Vosges: now, just ten minutes after he and Jansci had bought their tickets and boarded the train at Szekszárd without let or hindrance, what he had to do, what he must do, assumed the proportions of a nightmare impossibility.

What he had to do was simply enough stated. He had to free the professor, and to free the professor he had to separate the convict coach from the rest of the train, and this could only be done by stopping the train and easing the tension on the coupling securing the convict’s coach to the guard’s van. One way or another he had to reach the locomotive, which, at the moment, seemed impossibility enough, and then prevail upon the footplate crew to bring their engine to a halt when and where he told them. ‘Prevail’ was right, Reynolds thought grimly. Perhaps he could persuade them, if they were half-way friendly. Perhaps he could frighten them, but what was certain enough was that he couldn’t force them. All they would have to do was to refuse to obey, and he would have been helpless. The control cabin of a locomotive was a complete mystery to him, and not even for the professor could he shoot or knock out engineer and fireman and place hundreds of innocent passengers in danger of death or disfigurement. Even as he thought of these things, Reynolds could almost feel the physical sensation of cold, dull despair flooding into his mind, and he thrust these thoughts ruthlessly aside. One evil at a time. First of all, he had to get there.

He was rounding the corner of the coach, supported only by the one hand that clung to the window-bar – his other was deep in his coat pocket supporting the weight of, and concealing, the suspicious bulge by the heavy hammer and torch there – when he bumped into Jansci. The older man muttered an apology, glanced at him briefly and without recognition, stepped forward till he could see the entire length of the corridor from which Reynolds had just emerged, stepped back, opened the door of the adjacent toilet to check that it was empty, then spoke softly.

‘Well?’

‘Not so well. They’re on to me already.’

‘They?’

‘Two men. Civilian clothes, belted trench-coats, no hats. They followed me up front and back again. Discreetly. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed it.’

‘Stand out in the corridor. Let me know –’

‘They’re coming now,’ Reynolds murmured.

He glanced briefly at the two men lurching towards him as Jansci slid quietly inside the toilet pulling the door till only a tiny crack was left. The man in the lead, a tall man with a dead-white face and black eyes, looked at Reynolds incuriously as he passed, but the other ignored him completely.

‘They’re on to you, all right.’ Jansci had waited till they were out of sight. ‘Worse still, they know you’re on to them. We should have remembered that every train in and out of Budapest is being watched for the duration of this conference.’

‘Know them?’

‘I’m afraid so. That man with the pale face is AVO – one of Hidas’ hatchet-men. As dangerous as a snake. I don’t know the other.’

‘But it’s an obvious assumption that he’s AVO also. Surely the Szarháza –’

‘They don’t know about that yet. They can’t. But your description has been out for a couple of days to every AVO man in Hungary.’

‘That’s it.’ Reynolds nodded slowly. ‘Of course … How are things with you?’

‘Three soldiers in the guard’s van – there’ll be no one in the wagon behind – they never travel in the same wagons as the prisoners. They’re sitting with the guard round a red-hot wood stove, and there’s a wine bottle circulating.’

‘Will you manage?’

‘I think so. But how –’ ‘Get back!’ Reynolds hissed.

He was leaning against the window, both hands in his pockets, and gazing down at the ground when the same two men returned. He glanced up indifferently, raised an eyebrow fractionally as he saw who it was, glanced down again and then sideways as he watched them stagger up the length of the corridor and then out of sight.

‘Psychological warfare,’ Jansci murmured. ‘A problem.’

‘And not the only one. I can’t get into the first three coaches.’

Jansci glanced sharply at him, but said nothing.

‘The military,’ Reynolds explained. ‘The third carriage from the front is a mid-aisle coach, and full of troops. An officer turned me back. Anyway, it’s no good: I tried an outside door handle when I turned my back to him, and it was locked.’

‘From the outside,’ Jansci nodded. ‘Conscripts, and the army is trying to discourage a premature return to civilian life. Any hope at all, Meechail? Communication cords?’

‘Not one in the whole length of the train. I’ll manage – I’ve damn well got to. You have a seat?’

‘Second last carriage.’

‘I’ll give you the tip off ten minutes beforehand. I’d better go. They’ll be back any second.’

‘Right. Bataszek in five minutes. Remember, if the train stops there it means that Hidas has guessed and got through to them. Jump out of the blind side and run for it.’

‘They’re coming,’ Reynolds murmured. He levered himself off the window and walked forward, passing the two men. This time both men looked at him with expressionless eyes and Reynolds wondered how much more time they would allow to elapse before making their pounce. He lurched forward the length of another two coaches, went into the toilet at the end of the fourth coach, hid his hammer and torch in the tiny triangular cupboard that supported the cracked tin wash-basin, transferred his gun to his right pocket and closed his hand round it before moving out to the corridor. It wasn’t his own Belgian pistol, which had been taken from him, it was the Count’s, it had no silencer on it and it was the last thing he wanted to use. But, to live, he might be compelled to use it: it all depended on the two men who were shadowing his every movement.

They were running through the outskirts of Bataszek now and Reynolds realized, all at once, that their speed had slackened perceptibly, and even as the realization came he had to brace himself from sliding forwards as the air brakes came on. He could feel the curious tingling in the finger-tips of the hand that held the gun. He left the toilet, moved into the middle of the passage between the two opposite doors – he had no idea on which side the station platform was going to be – made sure that the safety-catch was off his gun, and waited tensely, his heart hammering heavily, slowly in his chest. They were still slowing down, he had to steady himself as the train battered violently across a set of points, then, so suddenly that the change of motion caught him off balance, the air brakes hissed off, the locomotive’s whistle shrilled once, briefly, as the train started to accelerate again, and Bataszek station was only a confused memory of a flickering row of palely-blurred lights lost in the moment of seeing in this greyish-white curtain of driving snow.

Reynolds’ grip on his gun eased. Despite the bitter cold of that coach corridor, he could feel the neck-band of his collar wet with sweat. So, too, he realized, was his gun-hand, and as he moved across to the left-hand door he withdrew it and wiped it up and down the outside of his coat.

He pulled the door window down a few inches, jammed it up a second later and stepped back, gasping, to clear his eyes of the whistling blizzard that had lashed whiplike across his forehead and blinded him just in an instant of time. He leant back against the wood behind him, lit a cigarette and his hands were unsteady.

It was hopeless, he told himself, worse than hopeless. With a steadily increasing wind gusting up to forty, perhaps even fifty miles per hour and the train doing the same speed diagonally into it, the combined total strength of that now howling wind outside was that of a whole gale, maybe a little more – and a whole gale that was no gale at all, just a screaming white wall of almost horizontally driving snow and ice. Even a split second of it on a tiny part of his body while standing in the relative warmth and security of the train had been too much. God only knew what it would be like outside for minutes on end, with his whole life depending just …

Relentlessly, he pushed the thought to one side. He moved swiftly through the concertina coupling leading to the next carriage and glanced quickly down the corridor. No sign yet of the two men returning. He went back to where he had been, across to the door on the leeward side, opened it cautiously so as not to be dragged out of the train by the vacuum suction on that side, gauged the size of the bolt-hole in the jamb that engaged the door catch, closed the door, checked that the window worked easily then returned to the toilet. Here he used his knife to cut a small piece of wood off the small door below the basin and in a couple of minutes he had it trimmed to a shape and size just a fraction larger than that of the bolt-hole. Then, as soon as he was finished, he moved out into the corridor again. It was essential that he be seen, and keep on being seen by his two shadows: if they missed him, the hunt would be up the length of the train – and there were a hundred maybe two hundred soldiers in the leading coaches that could be called upon to help them.

And this time he almost bumped into them as he closed the toilet door behind him. They had been hurrying, he could see, and the relief on the face of the shorter man showed clearly as he saw Reynolds emerging. The tall, pale man’s expressionless face did not change, but his reaction showed in so sudden a shortening of step that the other bumped into him. Both men slowed down, then stopped a couple of feet away from Reynolds. Reynolds himself made no move, he just leaned into a corner to brace his body against the violent shaking of the train and to leave both his hands free for use should the need arise. The pale man saw this and his dark, flat eyes narrowed fractionally before he brought a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and smiled with a smile that never got any farther than the corner of his lips.

‘Have you a match, comrade?’

‘Certainly. Help yourself.’ Reynolds fished out a box of matches with his left hand and held them out at arm’s length. At the same time his other hand moved slightly in his pocket, and the mouth of his gun sharply limned its circular outline through the thin gaberdine of his trench-coat. The pale man caught the slight movement and looked down, but Reynolds’ eyes never left his face. After a moment the pale man looked up, regarded Reynolds unwinkingly over the flame of the cigarette, slowly handed back the matches, nodded his thanks and continued on his way. Unfortunate, Reynolds thought, looking after them, but quite unavoidable; it had just been a silent challenge, a kite flown to see whether or not he had been armed: and if he hadn’t convinced them, Reynolds felt sure, they would have nailed him there and then.

He looked at his watch for the tenth time. Three minutes to go, four at the most: he could feel the train’s speed perceptibly easing as it started its gentle climb, and he could have sworn that he had just had his first glimpse of a road outside, almost paralleling the railway track. He wondered what the chances were of the Count and the others having made it there in time, he wondered what chances there were that they could make it at all. He could hear the wind now, clearly hear its high-pitched ululation above the rattle and the roar of the train, could see the almost solid wall of driving whiteness that limited visibility to only a few feet, and unconsciously shook his head. In this almost Arctic weather, a train on rails and a truck on tyres were two vastly different propositions altogether, and it was all too easy to visualize the strained face of the Count peering through the ever-narrowing arcs before him as the wipers struggled vainly to clear the snow battering against the windscreen.

But he had to depend on it, Reynolds knew that. He had to treat a remote possibility as a certainty. He took a last glance at his watch, let himself into the toilet once more, filled a big earthenware jug with water, put it in the cupboard, picked up the piece of shaped wood he had left there, took it outside, opened the leeward door again and jammed the wood into the bolt-hole, knocking it in firmly with the butt of his gun. He closed the door again, letting the latch gently into the wooden plug, and tested it carefully: the latch was clear of the bolt, but held firmly enough by the wood. Thirty pounds pressure, maybe forty, would be required to tear the wood away.

He walked towards the rear of the train, quickly and softly. One carriage away two men appeared from a dark corner and followed silently after him, but he ignored them. He knew they would try nothing while they were opposite the compartments with people in them, and when he came to the end of a coach Reynolds ran as quickly as possible through the concertina connection into the next. And then he was in the second last carriage, walking slowly, head straight on his shoulders so as to deceive the men behind, but his eyes to one side and searching the compartments.

Jansci was in the third compartment. Reynolds stopped abruptly, catching his shadows on the wrong foot, stood stiffly to one side to let them pass, waited till they were about ten feet away, nodded to Jansci then ran back the way he had come praying that he would not bump into anyone: a portly man blocking the corridors just then could have been the end of everything.

He could hear the footsteps pounding behind him, increased his speed and that was almost his undoing: he slipped on a wet corner, struck his head against a window bar, fell, but forced himself to his feet, ignoring the sharp, almost stunning pain and the bright lights that flashed in front of his eyes, and ran on again. Two carriages, three carriages, four and this was his: he rounded a corner sharply, dodged into the toilet, banged the door shut behind him as loudly as possible – he didn’t want his pursuers to be in a moment’s doubt as to where he had gone – and locked it.

Once inside he wasted no time. He picked up the big earthenware jar of water, stuffed a dirty towel into the top to retain as much of the water as possible, took a step backwards and flung the jar with all his strength through the window. The crash was all that he had hoped for and more, the noise almost deafening in that confined space, and the sound of the shattering glass was still in his ears when he took the gun from his pocket, caught it by the barrel, switched off the light, softly eased the lock and stepped into the corridor.

The shadows had the window down and were peering out, leaning as far as possible, crowding each other in their eagerness to see what had happened, where Reynolds had gone: they would have been less than human to have done anything else. Reynolds didn’t even break step as he came through the door: one long stride, a leap propelled by all the strength of his legs, his feet stiffly in front of him smashing into the back of the nearest man and the door burst open, one of the men catapulting out into the driving snow and the gloom before he had even time to cry out. The other, the pale-faced man, twisted impossibly in mid-air, caught the inside edge of the door with one hand, his face contorted with venom and fear as he fought like a wild-cat to pull himself inside. But the whole struggle lasted perhaps only two seconds, and Reynolds was merciless, his downward clubbing pistol, aimed at the snarling face, changing direction in the last moment as the man’s free hand came up in instinctive protection. The butt struck the fingers clinging to the doorway with a force that jarred Reynolds’ arm to the elbow, and then there was no man in the doorway, only the gathering darkness of the night and a thin, high scream lost in the thunder of the wheels and the high threnody of the wind.

It took Reynolds seconds only to work the already loosened piece of wood free of the bolt-hole and shut the door securely. Then he stuffed his gun into his pocket, retrieved the hammer and the torch from the toilet and moved across to the opposite door of the coach, on the windward side.

It was here that he had his first setback, and one that all but defeated him before he had even started. The train was now angling due south-west towards Pécs, the gale of wind and snow out of the south-east was blowing directly on the beam, and it seemed as if an even stronger man than himself were pushing against him on the other side. Twice, three times he heaved with all his strength, but the door gave no more than an inch.

Little enough time was left – seven minutes perhaps, eight at the most. He reached up, caught the metal grip at the top of the window, brought it right down in one convulsive jerk and had he not dropped to the floor, the blast of wind and snow that shrieked in through the open window would have blown him clear across to the other side of the coach. It was even worse than he had imagined it would be, he could understand now that the driver was slowing up not because of the incline but because he wanted to keep his train on the rails, and for one bad moment Reynolds was tempted to give up the whole suicidal project. Then he thought of the professor sitting alone in the last wagon among a pack of hardened criminals, of Jansci and all the others who were depending on him, of the girl who had turned her back on him when he had made to say good-bye, and the next moment he was on his feet, gasping as the bulleting snow lashed cruelly across his exposed face and sucked the breath from his lungs. He heaved with all his strength, once, twice, three times, unmindful of the fact that a sudden lull in the wind would have pitched him helplessly out into the snow, and on the fourth attempt managed to get the sole of his shoe stuck in the opening. He got his forearm into the crack, then his shoulder and finally half his body, pressed outwards with all the strength of his arms, reached down with a groping right foot until he found the snow-encrusted running-board, and brought his left foot into the gap of the door. It was then that the hammer and torch in his inside pocket caught on the inside jamb of the door and he stood there for almost a minute, a minute that seemed an eternity, jammed between door and side of the coach, struggling frantically to free himself, fearing that at any moment someone might come along the corridor to investigate the source of the snow-laden gale that was whistling the length of the carriage. And then, suddenly, with a ripping of buttons and tearing of cloth, he was free, freed with a jerk that caused his right foot to slip off the running-board, and he hung there for a moment supported only by his left hand and the left foot still jammed in the doorway. Then he hauled himself slowly, painfully upright – he could get no purchase anywhere for his right hand – regained his footing on the board, stood there for a moment until he had regained control of himself, got his left hand out, hooked it round the inside of the open window and jerked his left sole free. The door shut with a crash, and he was now completely outside, supported only by the already numbing fingers of his left hand and the pressure of the wind pinning him against the carriage side.

It was dusk now, but though there was still enough light to see by he could not see, for with the driving snow he was a blind man groping in a blind world. He was, he knew, at the very end of the coach, and the corner was only a foot from where he stood, but though he could reach his right arm almost two feet round the corner he could find not the smallest projection to give him purchase of any kind. At the fullest stretch of his left arm he tried with his right foot, and found the narrow lateral steel member that housed the bumpers, but it was at far too acute an angle to serve his purpose: he tried to find the bumper, but it eluded him.

His left forearm was beginning to ache with the strain of supporting his weight, and his fingers were now so numbed that he had no means of knowing whether they were slipping or not. He hauled himself upright outside the carriage door window again, changed arms, cursed himself for his stupidity as he suddenly thought of his torch, changed hands again and once more leaned back and as far round the corner as he could, this time with the beam of the powerful torch probing through the gloom and the snow. It took him only two seconds to see all he wanted to see and memorize the relative positions of the lateral steel member at the back of the coach, the concertina coupling and the steel bumper that seemed to leap uncontrollably from side to side as every jolting sway of the train caused a violent change in position relative to the opposing bumper on the next carriage. He pulled himself quickly upright, thrust the torch back in his pocket, and didn’t hesitate, because he was dimly aware, without admitting it to himself, that if he as much as paused to consider the near certainty of a miss, a slip and being crushed to instant death under the wheels, he could never have brought himself to do what he now did at once without any thought for the consequences. He moved both feet along till they were at the very edge of the running-board, released his grip with his left hand, stood there held against the outcurving side of the carriage by wind pressure alone, then lifted his right foot into blind space, his body curving far over to the left as he did so. For an instant of time he was poised there in mid-air, the toe of his left shoe the only contact he had left with the train, and then, in the very moment of that toe slipping off the frozen running-board the wind caught him and he flung himself forward into the darkness.

He landed with one knee on the lateral member, the shin of the other leg striking cruelly across the bumper even as his outstretched hands struck against the stiffly yielding side of the concertina coupling. Such was his momentum that his right leg slipped at once across the frozen metal of the bumper, but he tightened his leg muscles convulsively and hooked his instep round the narrowest part of the bumper as his knees pointed down to the track rushing by beneath. For a few seconds he hung there, supported only by the counteracting pressures of his arms and one shin, wondering vaguely whether his leg had been broken, then he felt his hands, for all the maximum pressure he was exerting against them, begin to slip helplessly down the smooth, snow-covered material of the coupling. Despairingly, he flung out his left hand, struck it painfully against the back of the carriage he had just left, pushed it forward and felt his stiffened, outstretched fingers slide in the narrow gap between the carriage and its coupling. He clutched the rough edge of the toughened, rubberized fabric as if he were seeking to drive his hooking fingers clear through it, and three seconds later he was standing upright on the lateral member, securely anchored by his left hand, and trembling uncontrollably from the reaction of his effort.

But the trembling was from the reaction only. Reynolds, afraid only moments ago as he had never been afraid before, had crossed that nebulous frontier between fear and that strange world of uncaring and selfless indifference that lies beyond. With his right hand he felt for his spring knife, clicked open the blade and thrust the dagger point into the material about waist-height: there could have been a dozen people streaming through the inside of the concertina coupling at that instant for all he cared. A few seconds’ vigorous sawing with the blade’s razor edges and he had a hole cut in the material, large enough to accommodate the toe of one foot, and at head-height he cut another for a hand-grip. Then he thrust his right toe into the first hole, his left hand into the second, pushed and heaved upwards and drove the blade into the hilt through the top of the coupling to give him a secure hand-hold. And then he was on top, clinging desperately to the handle of the knife as the full force of the wind caught him and sought to blow him over the other side of the wildly vibrating coupling.

The first carriage – the fourth from the front, that was – proved to be relatively easy. The narrow metal sheathing for the ventilation louvres ran the entire length of the carriage along the top, and it took him less than half a minute, lying on the leeward side of the roof with his face bowed against the knifing blizzard and overhanding himself along the sheathing, to reach the far end. All the way along his feet had hung out over the edge, but he could do nothing about this: he should have been able to get some purchase with his toes on the guttering, but it was blocked and smooth with frozen snow.

And now he was reaching out gingerly on top of the corrugations of the next carriage coupling, and had no sooner let go of the security of the ventilation sheathing that he realized the mistake he had made: he should have launched himself across in a dive for the other side, instead of exposing himself to that shrieking wind that was beginning to gust most dangerously now, one moment all but blowing him clear over the far side of the furiously vibrating coupling, the next easing so unexpectedly that he had to hang on grimly to prevent himself toppling off into the wind: but by flattening himself as low as possible and working his hand-grip from corrugation to corrugation he safely reached the end of the third carriage. It was again a relatively easy matter to traverse this, and when he reached the front he sat up, swung his legs over on to the next coupling, bent low and launched himself across the intervening space, barking one of his knees badly as it struck the sheeting on the second carriage, but getting a secure grip at the time. Seconds later only, it seemed, he was at the front end of the second carriage and it was then as he swung his legs out on to the coupling that he saw it: the wavering dipping beams of headlights, vanishing and reappearing through swirling flurries of snow, on a road that paralleled the railway track not twenty yards away. The elation that swept through Reynolds banished for the moment all thought of exhaustion and cold, and numbed senseless hands that could not serve him very much longer: it could have been anyone, of course, driving that vehicle out there in the blinding snow, but Reynolds was oddly certain it wasn’t. He stooped again, poised on his toes and launched himself across on to the roof of the first carriage: it wasn’t until he arrived there and was skidding along helplessly on his face that he realized that this carriage, unlike the others, had no ventilation sheathing running along the top.

For a moment panic returned again, and he scrabbled furiously on the ice-smooth, slippery surface of the roof seeking for a handhold – any handhold. Then he forced himself to be calm, for that frantic threshing of legs and arms was exactly what was required to destroy what little friction coefficient there was between himself and the train and send him sliding helplessly over the side to his death. There must, he told himself desperately, be ventilators of some kind or other, and suddenly he knew what they must be – those little top-hatted chimneys spaced three or four to a coach and it was just at that moment he realized something else: the train was curving round sharply into the wind and the centrifugal force was sending him sliding slowly, remorselessly, towards the edge.

He was sliding feet first, face down, and his toes beat a furious tattoo on the carriage roof as he sought to crack the frozen snow that filled up the guttering and gain at least a toehold. But the snow was frozen into ice, he smashed against it in vain, and the first he knew that he had failed was when his shins struck painfully against the edge of the carriage roof. And still the train kept curving round that interminable corner.

His knees now rested on the edge of the roof and his nails were breaking off as his fingers, hooked into rigid talons, furrowed through the smooth ice on the carriage top. He knew nothing could save him, and he could never afterwards explain what strange, subconscious instinct – for in that moment of approaching death his mind had ceased to work altogether – had caused him to jerk out his knife, press the release catch and bury the blade in the roof just before his hips reached the side and he had passed the point of no return.

How long he lay there at the full stretch of his knife he did not know. It could have been only seconds. Gradually he became aware that the track beneath him had straightened out again, that centrifugal force no longer had him in its murderous grip and that he was free to move once more, although with infinite caution. Inch by inch he slowly pulled his legs back on to the roof again, freed the knife, stabbed it in farther up and gradually hauled himself on to the top. A moment later, still using his knife as his sole support, he found the first circular ventilator and clutched it as if he would never let it go. But he had to let it go, there could only be two or three minutes left. He had to reach the next ventilator. He reached out in its direction, raised the knife and stabbed it down: but it struck some metal, probably a bolt head, with a jarring shock, and when he brought it up to his eyes he saw that the blade had been snapped off cleanly at the hilt. He flung the handle away, braced his feet against the ventilator and pushed off along the roof, colliding heavily with the next ventilator, perhaps only six feet away. Seconds later, again using his feet to propel him forward from one ventilator to the next, he had reached the third one, and then the fourth: and then he had realized he did not know how long the carriage was, whether there were any more ventilators, whether or not another push along the top of the carriage would send him skidding helplessly over the front of the carriage to fall to his death under the wheels of the train. He decided to risk it, placed his feet against the ventilator and was on the point of pushing off when the thought struck him that with any height at all he should be able to see from there into the cab of the locomotive and see limned against its brightness, perhaps, the edge of that coach, for the snow was beginning to ease at last.

He knelt upright, the ventilator clutched tightly between his thighs, and his heart turned slowly over as he saw the edge of the carriage, silhouetted clearly against the red glow from the locomotive’s open firebox, a bare four feet away. In the cab itself, through the flurries of snow, he caught a glimpse of the engineer, and of his fireman turning and stooping as he shovelled coal from the tender into the firebox. And he could see something that had no right to be there, but which he might have expected – a soldier armed with a carbine, crouched for protection from the cold close into the gaping red maw of the firebox.

Reynolds fumbled for his gun, but all the feeling had left his hands, he couldn’t even get his frozen forefinger through the trigger-guard. He thrust it back in his pocket and rose quickly to his feet, leaning far into the wind, the ventilator still locked between his legs. It was all or nothing now. He took one short step, the sole of his right shoe found the edge of the carriage with the second step, he was in mid-air, then he was sliding and slithering down the sloping, crumbling coal of the tender to land on his shoulder and side, temporarily winded, at the back of the footplate.

They turned to stare at him – all three, engineer, stoker and soldier turned to stare at him, their faces almost comical in bewilderment and disbelief. Perhaps five seconds elapsed, five precious seconds that enabled Reynolds partially to regain his breath, before the soldier abruptly recovered from his astonishment, unslung his rifle, swept the butt high in the air and leapt towards the prostrate Reynolds. Reynolds grasped a lump of coal, the first thing that came to hand, and flung it despairingly at the advancing man, but his fingers were too numb, and as the soldier ducked low the coal flew high over his head, missing him completely. But the fireman didn’t miss, and the soldier collapsed on to the footplate as the flat of the shovel caught him on the back of the head.

Reynolds scrambled to his feet. With the torn clothes and bleeding, frost-whitened hands and face streaked with coal dust, he was an incredible spectacle, but at that moment quite oblivious of the fact. He stared at the fireman, a big, curly-haired youngster with his shirt sleeves rolled far up in defiance of the bitter cold, then transferred his gaze to the soldier at his feet.

‘The heat.’ The youngster was grinning. ‘He was suddenly overcome.’

‘But why –’

‘Look, friend, I don’t know who you’re for, but I know who I’m against.’ He leaned on his shovel. ‘Can we help you?’

‘You certainly can!’ Reynolds rapidly explained, and the two men looked at each other. The older man, the driver, hesitated.

‘We have to think of ourselves –’

‘Look!’ Reynolds ripped his coat open. ‘A rope. Take it off, will you – my hands are about gone. You can tie each other’s wrists. That should –’

‘Of course!’ The younger man grinned even as the driver reached for the air-brake lever. ‘We were held up. Five or six men at least. Safe home, my friend.’

Reynolds hardly stopped to thank the men who helped him so casually, with so little thought for themselves. The train was slowing down quickly on that incline, and he had to get to the back wagon before it stopped altogether and the tightening of the coupling made it impossible to free it. He jumped out from the lowest cab step, tumbled head over heels, regained his feet and started running back. The train was almost stopped now as the guard’s van crawled past him, and he had a momentary, heart-warming glimpse of Jansci standing in the open door at the rear of the van, a gun rock-steady in his hand.

Then the buffers were banging and rattling together as the locomotive up front came to a halt, Reynolds had his torch switched on and was lifting the towing links clear and knocking off the air-brake flange coupling with his hammer. He looked briefly for a steam coupling, but there was none – convicts didn’t need heat – he had severed all connections between the last wagon and the train. All the carriages were now jolting backwards under the impetus of the releasing pressure of the compressed buffer springs, Jansci, a bunch of keys swinging in one hand and the levelled gun still in the other, was stepping across from the guard’s van to the cattle truck, and Reynolds himself was just grabbing hold of the handrail when the guard’s van bumped violently into the truck and gave it its initial impetus for the run down the long, gentle hill they had just climbed.

The big brake wheel was on the outside of the wagon and Reynolds was beginning to turn this, perhaps a mile after they had left the main train, when Jansci finally found the right key for the wagon, kicked the door open and flashed his torch inside. Half a mile farther on Reynolds was just giving the wheel its final lock and bringing the coach to a gentle standstill, watched by a smiling Jansci and a Dr Jennings who had been at first dazed then unbelieving but now as wildly excited as any schoolboy. And they had barely left the wagon and were striking out for the west where they knew the road lay when they heard a cry and saw a figure floundering towards them through the deep snow. It was the Count, all aristocratic reserve gone, yelling and shouting and waving his arms like a madman.

ELEVEN

They arrived at Jansci’s headquarters in the country, not ten miles from the Austrian frontier, at half past six in the following morning. They arrived after fourteen consecutive hours’ motoring over the frozen snow-bound roads of Hungary at an average speed of well under twenty miles an hour, after fourteen of the coldest, most uncomfortable, most exhausting hours’ travelling that Reynolds had ever done in his life. But they arrived, and for all their cold and hunger and weariness and sleeplessness, they arrived in tremendous spirits, their elation buoying them up above all their distress: all except the Count, who, after his first outburst of gladness at their safety and success, had relapsed, as the long hours of the night wheeled by, into his usual remote, detached mood of sombre cynicism.

They had covered exactly four hundred endless, gruelling kilometres in the course of that night, and the Count had driven every kilometre of the way, stopping twice only for petrol, rousing reluctant, sleeping pump attendants with the twin menaces of his voice and uniform. More than once, as the lines of strain had etched themselves more and more deeply into the Count’s lean face, Reynolds had been on the point of suggesting that he take over, but each time his common sense had come to the rescue and he had refrained: as he had observed on that first drive in the black Mercedes, the Count, as a driver, was in a world all of his own and, on these snow-bound treacherous roads, it was more important that they should arrive safely than that the Count’s exhaustion should be relieved. And so for most of the night Reynolds had sat and dozed and watched him, as did the Cossack by his side, both of them being in the relatively warm cab for the same reason – to thaw out. The Cossack had been in far worse case than even Reynolds, and understandably so: for the last half of the distance between Szekszárd and Pécs – almost twenty miles – he had been perched outside the truck, jammed between fender and bonnet, keeping the screen completely clear for the Count as he had driven through the blinding snow. And it had been on that fender that he had his grandstand view of Reynolds’ suicidal climb across the coach roofs, and there was no scowl now in his face as he looked at Reynolds, just a kind of awed wonder.

The direct route from Pécs to Jansci’s house in the country would have been just under half of the actual distance they had covered, but both Jansci and the Count had been convinced that taking that route could only have had one end – a concentration camp. The fifty-mile stretch of Lake Balaton blocked off most of the escape routes to the Austrian border in the west, and both men had been sure that between its southern tip and the Yugoslavian border not even the most insignificant road would be left unwatched. The other routes to the west, between, the northern tip of Balaton and Budapest might or might not have been watched, but they had taken no chances. They had gone 200 kilometres due north, circled round the northern outskirts of the capital itself, then taken the main highway to Austria, branching off to the southwest as they approached Györ.

And so it had taken them fourteen hours and 400 kilometres, and brought them to their destination cold and hungry and exhausted. But once inside the safety and shelter of the house, these things fell from them like a cloak, and when Jansci and the Cossack produced a roaring fire in the wood stove, Sandor a cooking pot and a magnificent smell of cooking and the Count a bottle of barack from a more than adequate stock he kept in the house, their relief at their safe arrival, their jubilation at having completely thwarted the AVO, expressed itself in talk and laughter and still more talk, and with warm food inside them and the Count’s barack bringing life back to frozen bodies and limbs, all thought of weariness and sleep was forgotten. There would be time enough for sleep, they had all day for sleep, for Jansci wasn’t going to make his attempt at the border till after midnight of that day.

Eight o’clock came, and with it the weather and news reports over the big, modern radio Jansci had recently installed in the house. Of their own activities and the rescue of the professor there was no mention, nor had they expected any: such a confession of failure was the last thing the Communists would make to their satellite subjects. The weather report, which predicted further heavy and continuous snowfalls over almost the entire country, contained an item of extreme interest: all south-west Hungary, in an area stretching east from Lake Balaton to Szeged on the Yugoslavian border, was completely immobilized by the severest snowstorm since the war, every road, railway line and airport being completely blocked. Jansci and the others listened in a silence more eloquent of their relief than any words could have been: had their attempt been made twelve hours later both rescue and escape would have been impossible.

Nine o’clock came and with it the first grey tinges of dawn through the again thickly falling snow, the second bottle of barack and the recounting of many stories. Jansci told of their sojourn in the Szarháza, the Count, already with half a bottle of brandy inside him, gave an ironic account of his interview with Furmint, and Reynolds himself had to tell, several times over, of his perilous journey across the top of the train. To all this, the most avid listener by far was the old professor, whose feeling towards his Russian hosts, as Jansci and Reynolds had observed when they had seen him in the Szarháza, had undergone a radical and violent change. The beginnings of the change and their change towards him had come, he said, when he had refused to speak at the conference until he knew what had happened to his son, and when he had heard that his son had escaped, he refused to speak anyway – the Russians’ last hold over him was gone. Being thrown into the Szarháza had made him more furious than ever, and the final indignity of being imprisoned in the same freezing cattle truck as a band of hardened criminals had completed his conversion in no uncertain fashion. And when he had heard of the tortures inflicted on Jansci and Reynolds his fury had known no bounds. He swore in a most uncharacteristic fashion.

‘Wait!’ he said. ‘By heavens, just wait till I get home! The British Government, their precious projects, their missiles – damn their projects and their missiles! I’ve got more important things to do first.’

‘Such as?’ Jansci asked mildly.

‘Communism!’ Jennings downed his glass of barack and his voice was almost a shout. ‘I’m not boasting, but I’ve got the ear of nearly all the big newspapers in the country. They’ll listen to me – especially when they remember the damned poppycock I used to talk before. I’ll expose the whole damned rotten system of communism, and by the time I’m finished –’

‘Too late.’ The interruption came from the Count, and the tone was ironic.

‘What do you mean “Too late”?’ Jennings demanded.

‘The Count just means that communism has already been pretty thoroughly exposed,’ Jansci said soothingly, ‘and, without offence, Dr Jennings, by people who have suffered for years under it, not just a weekend, as you have.’

‘You expect me to go back to London and sit on my hands –’ Jennings broke off, and when he spoke again his tone was calmer. ‘Damn it, man, it’s the duty of everyone – all right, all right, I’m late in seeing it, but I see it now – it’s the duty of everyone to do what he can to stop the spread of this damned creed –’

‘Too late.’ Again the dry interruption came from the Count.

‘He just means that communism, outside its homeland, is failing of its own accord,’ Jansci explained hastily. ‘You don’t need to stop it, Dr Jennings – it’s already stopped. Oh, it works here and there, but only to a limited extent, and then only among primitive peoples like the Mongols who fall for the fine phrases and the even finer promises, but not with us, not with the Hungarians, Czechs, Poles or others, not in any country where the people are more politically advanced than the Russians themselves. Take this country itself – who were the most heavily indoctrinated people?’

‘The youth, I should imagine.’ Jennings was holding his impatience in check only with difficulty. ‘They always are.’

‘The youth.’ Jansci nodded. ‘And the pampered darlings of communism – the writers, the intellectuals, the lionized workers of heavy industry. And who led the revolt here against the Russians? Exactly the same people – the young, the intellectuals and the workers. The fact that I think that the whole rising was futile, crazily ill-timed has nothing to do with it. The point is that communism failed most completely in those among whom it had the best chance of succeeding – if it were ever to succeed.’

‘And you should see the churches in my country,’ the Count murmured. ‘Crowded masses every Sunday – packed with kids. You wouldn’t worry about communism so much then, Professor. In fact,’ he added dryly, ‘the only thing to match the failure of communism in our countries is its remarkable success in countries like Italy and France who have never seen one of these in their lives.’ He gestured, with evident distaste, at the uniform he was wearing, and shook his head sadly. ‘Human nature is a wonderful thing.’

‘Then what the devil would you have me do?’ Jennings demanded. ‘Forget the whole damned thing?’

‘No.’ Jansci shook his head, with just a trace of weariness. ‘That’s the last thing I want you to do, that’s the last thing I want anyone to do – there may be a greater crime, a greater sin than indifference, but I don’t know of it. No, Dr Jennings, what I should like you to do is to go home and tell your people that we in Central Europe have only our one little life apiece to lead, and time is running out. Tell them that we would like to smell the sweet air of freedom, just once, before we go. Tell them that we have been waiting for seventeen long years now, and hope cannot last for ever. Tell them we don’t want our children, and our children’s children, to walk along the dark and endless road of slavery, and never see a light at the end. Tell them we don’t want much – we only want a little peace, green fields and church bells and carefree children playing in the sun, without fear, without want, without wondering what dark clouds tomorrow must surely bring.’

Jansci leant forward in his chair, his glass forgotten, the tired lined face beneath the thick white hair ruddy in the flickering flames of the fire, earnest and intense as Reynolds had never seen.

‘Tell them, tell your people at home, that our lives, and the lives of generations to come, lie in their hands. Tell them that there is only one thing that ultimately matters on this earth, and that is peace on this earth. And tell them that this is a very small earth, and growing smaller with every year that passes, but that we all have to live on it together, that we all must live on it together.’

‘Co-existence?’ Dr Jennings raised an eyebrow.

‘Co-existence. A terrible word, a big bogey-man word, but what else could any sane man ever offer in its place – all the nameless horrors of a thermo-nuclear war, the requiem for the lost hopes of mankind? No, co-existence must come, it must if mankind is to survive, but this world without spheres, the dream of that great American, Cordell Hull, will never come if you have impetuous fools, as you do have, Dr Jennings, shouting for big results now, here, to-day. It will never come so long as people in the west think in terms of parachute diplomacy, of helping us to help ourselves … My God! They’ve never seen even a single Mongol division in action or they wouldn’t talk such arrant nonsense – it will never come while people talk dangerous drivel about the Russian people being their secret allies, who say, ‘Get at the Russian people,’ or listen to the gratuitous advice of people who fled these unhappy countries of ours years ago and have lost all contact with what we are thinking and feeling to-day.

‘Most of all, it will never come so long as our leaders and governments, our newspapers and our propagandists teach us incessantly, insistently, that we must hate and fear and despise all the other peoples who share this same tiny world with us. The nationalism of those who cry, “We are the people,” the jingoistic brand of patriotism – these are the great evils of our world to-day, the barriers to peace that no man can overcome. What hope is there for the world as long as we cling to the outmoded forms of national allegiance? We owe allegiance to no one, Dr Jennings, at least not on this earth.’ Jansci smiled. ‘Christ came to save mankind, we are told – but maybe he has made a special exception in the case of the Russians.’

‘What Jansci is trying to tell you, Dr Jennings,’ the Count murmured, ‘is that all you’ve got to do is to convert the western world to Christianity and all will be well.’

‘Not quite.’ Jansci shook his head. ‘What I say applies to the Russians even more than the western world, but I think the first move must come from the western world – a maturer people, a more politically advanced people – and not nearly so afraid of the Russians as the Russians are of them.’

‘Talk.’ Jennings was no longer angry, not even ironic, just thoughtful. ‘Talk, talk, just talk. It’ll require a great deal more than that, my friend, to bring about the millennium. It needs action. First move, you said. What move?’

‘Heaven only knows.’ Jansci shook his head. ‘I don’t; if I did know, no name in all history would be so revered as that of Major-General Illyurin. No man can do more, no man dare do more than make suggestions.’

No one spoke, and after a time Jansci went on slowly.

‘It is essential, I think, to hammer home the idea of peace, the idea of disarmament, to convince the Russians, above all things, of our peaceful intentions. Peaceful intentions!’ Jansci laughed without mirth. ‘The British and the Americans filling the armouries of the nations of Western Europe with hydrogen bombs – what a way to demonstrate peaceful intentions, what a way rather to ensure that Russia will never relax its grip on the satellites it no longer wants, what a way to drive the men of the Kremlin, scared men, I tell you, inexorably nearer the last thing in the world they want to do – sending the first intercontinental missile on its way: the last thing they want to do, the last act of panic or desperation, because they know better than any that, though in their deep cellars in Moscow they may survive the retaliation that will surely come, they will never survive the vengeful fury of the crazed survivors of the holocaust that will just as surely engulf their own nation. To arm Europe is to provoke the Russians to the point of madness: whatever else we may not do, it is essential to avoid all provocation, to keep the door of negotiation and approach always open, no matter what the rebuffs may be.’

‘It is essential to watch ’em like hawks, I would say,’ Reynolds commented.

‘Alas, I thought we had made him see the light,’ the Count mourned. ‘Perhaps we never will.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Jansci agreed. ‘But he’s right, all the same. In the one hand the big gun, in the other the olive branch. But the safety-catch must always be on, and the hand of peace always a little in advance, and you must be endlessly patient – rashness, impatience could bring the world to catastrophe. Patience, endless patience. What matter a blow to your pride when the peace of the world is at stake?

‘You must try to meet them in as many fields as possible – culture, sport, literature, holidays, all those things are important enough – anything that brings people into contact with one another and lets them see the idiocies of Chauvinism is bound to be important – but the great opening lies in trade. Meet them in trade, and never care how many concessions you make – the losses would be negligible in exchange for the goodwill gained, the suspicions allayed. And get your churches to help, as they are helping now here and in Poland. Cardinal Wyszinski who walks hand-in-hand with Gomulka of Poland knows more about the way to achieve the peace of the world that must eventually come than I ever will. People all over Poland to-day walk in freedom, talk in freedom, worship in freedom, and who knows what another five years may bring – and all because men of vastly different creeds but of an equally great goodwill, determined that they were going to get on together, and get on well, no matter what sacrifices they had to make, no matter what blows to their pride they had received.

‘And that, I think is the real answer – not the proposing of courses of action, as Dr Jennings suggested, but in creating the climate of goodwill in which those actions can flower and bear fruit. Ask the rulers of the great nations who should be leading our sick world to a better tomorrow what their greatest need of to-day is, and they will tell you scientists and still more scientists – those luckless, brilliant creatures who have long since traded in their birthright of independence, buried their consciences, and sold out to the governments of the world – so that they can strive harder and still harder until they have in their hands the ultimate weapon of destruction.’

Jansci paused and wearily shook his head. ‘The governments of the world may not be mad, but they are blind and their blindness is but one step removed from insanity. The desperate, most urgent need this world knows or will ever know, is the need for an effort without parallel in history to get to know ourselves and the other people of the world even as well as we know ourselves, and then we will see that the other man is just as we are, that right and virtue and truth belong to him as much as to us. We must think of people not as a conglomerate mass, not conveniently, indiscriminately, as a faceless nation: we must always remember that a nation is made of millions of little human beings just like we are, and to talk about national sin and guilt and wickedness is to be wilfully blind, unjust and un-Christian; and while it is true that such a nation may go off the rails, it never goes off because it wants to, but because it couldn’t help it, because there was something in its past or in its environment that inescapably made it what it is to-day, just as some forgotten incidents, some influences that we can neither recall nor understand, has made each one of us what we are to-day.

‘And with that understanding and knowledge there will come compassion, and no power on earth can compete against compassion – the compassion that makes the Jewish Society issue worldwide appeals for money for their sworn but starving enemies, the Arab refugees, the compassion that made a Russian soldier thrust his gun into Sandor’s hands, the compassion – a compassion born of understanding – that made nearly all the Russians who were stationed in Budapest refuse to fight the Hungarians, whom they had come to know so well. And this compassion, this charity will come, it must come, but men the world over must want to make it come.

‘There is no certainty that it will come in our time. It’s a gamble, it must be a gamble, but better surely a gamble from hope, however tenuous that hope, than a gamble from despair and pressing the button that sends the first intercontinental missile on its way. But for the gamble to succeed, understanding comes first; mountains, rivers, seas are no longer the barriers that separate mankind, just the minds of mankind itself. The intolerance of ignorance, not wanting to know – that is the last real frontier left on earth.’

For a long time after Jansci had finished speaking only the crackling of pine logs in the fire and the gentle singing of a kettle broke the silence in the room. The fire seemed to fascinate, to hypnotize everyone sitting there, and they stared into it as if by staring long enough they could see the future of Jansci’s dream. But it wasn’t the fire that fascinated them, it had been the effect of Jansci’s quiet, insistent hypnotic voice, and what his voice had said and the memory lingered long. Even the professor had lost all his anger, and Reynolds reflected wryly that if Colonel Mackintosh could only know the thoughts that were running through his mind at that moment he would be unemployed as soon as he arrived back in England. After a time, the Count rose to his feet, walked round replenishing the empty glasses, then took his seat again, and all in silence. No one even looked at him as he was doing it, no one, it seemed, wanted to be the first to break the silence, or even wanted the silence to break. They were all deep sunk in their own private thoughts, Reynolds was thinking, almost inevitably, perhaps, of the long dead English poet who had said centuries ago almost exactly what Jansci had been saying then, when the interruption came, the harsh strident ringing of a telephone bell, and it came so pat with Reynolds’ thoughts, the bell tolled. The answer was not long to wait: it tolled for Jansci.

Jansci, startled out of a deep reverie, sat up, transferred his glass to his right hand and picked up the telephone with his other. As the phone was lifted off its receiver, the ringing stopped abruptly, and in its place, clearly audible to everyone in the room, came a high-pitched shriek, a long-drawn-out scream of agony which faded away into a thin, horrible whisper as Jansci pressed the phone to his ear. The whisper gave way to staccato words, then a lighter, higher, sobbing voice, but what the words were no one could distinguish, one ivory-knuckled hand was pressing the receiver so hard to Jansci’s ear that only vague incoherent sounds could escape. The others in the room could do no more than watch Jansci’s face, and as they watched, it hardened into a mask of stone and the ruddy colour drained slowly from his cheeks until they were as pale, almost, as the snow-white hair above. Twenty seconds, perhaps thirty, passed without Jansci speaking a word, then there came a sudden crack and a splintering of glass and the tumbler in Jansci’s hand crashed and broke and shivered into a hundred fragments as it fell on to the stone floor, and the blood from the scarred, misshapen hand began to well and flow and drip steadily down among the shattered pieces of glass. Jansci didn’t even know it had happened, his whole mind, his whole being was at that moment at the other end of that telephone wire. Then he said, suddenly, ‘I’ll call you back,’ listened for another few moments, whispered, ‘No, no,’ in a low strangled voice, and thrust the phone violently back on its rest, but not before the others had time to hear the same sound as they had heard when Jansci had picked up the phone, a hoarse scream of pain that ended as if sheared by a guillotine as the connection went.

‘That was a silly thing to do, wasn’t it?’ Jansci, staring down at his hand, was the first to speak, and his voice was quiet and empty of all life. He drew out a handkerchief and dabbed at the streaming blood. ‘And such a waste of all that good barack. My apologies, Vladimir.’ It was the first time that anyone had ever heard him call the Count by his true name. ‘What in the name of God was that?’ Old Jennings’ hands were shaking, so that the brandy spilled over the lip of his glass, and his voice was a trembling whisper.

‘That was the answer to many things.’ Jansci wrapped the handkerchief round his hand, clenched his fist to keep it in place, and stared into the dull-red heart of the fire. ‘We know now why Imre went missing, we know now why the Count was betrayed. They caught Imre, and they took him down to Stalin Street, and he talked to them, just before he died.’

‘Imre!’ the Count whispered. ‘Before he died. Heaven forgive me. I thought he had run out on us.’ He looked uncomprehendingly across at the telephone. ‘You mean that –’

‘Imre died yesterday,’ Jansci murmured. ‘Poor, lost, lonely Imre. That was Julia. Imre had told them where she was and they went out to the country and took her, just as she was leaving to come here. And then they made her tell where this place was.’

Reynolds’ chair crashed over backwards as he rose to his feet and his lower teeth were showing like a wolf’s.

‘That was Julia screaming.’ His voice was hoarse and unreal, totally unlike his normal voice. ‘They tortured her, they tortured her!’

‘That was Julia, Hidas wanted to show that he meant business.’ Jansci’s dull voice became muffled as he buried his face in his hands. ‘But they didn’t torture Julia, they tortured Catherine in front of Julia, and Julia had to tell.’

Reynolds stared at him uncomprehendingly, Jennings looked baffled and fearful, and the Count was swearing to himself, over and over, a meaningless, blasphemous litany of oaths, and Reynolds knew that the Count understood, and then Jansci was talking, mumbling to himself, and all of a sudden Reynolds understood also and he felt sick and fumbled his chair upright and sat down, his legs seemed to have become weak and nerveless.

‘I knew she hadn’t died,’ Jansci muttered. ‘I always knew she hadn’t died, I never gave up hoping, did I, Vladimir? I knew she hadn’t died … Oh, God, why didn’t you let her die, why didn’t you make her die?’

Jansci’s wife, Reynolds realized dully, his wife was still alive. Julia had said that she must have died, died within days of the AVO taking her away, but she hadn’t died, the same faith and hope that had kept Jansci searching the breadth of Hungary in the sure knowledge that she lived must also have kept the spark of life burning in Catherine, firm in the faith that one day Jansci would find her. But now they had her, Hidas had left the Szarháza because he had known where to find her, these devils of the AVO had her … and they had Julia, and that was a thousand times worse. Unbid, shadowy pictures of her crossed his mind, the mischievous way she had smiled at him when she had kissed him good-bye near Margit Island, the deep concern in her face when she had seen what Coco had done to him, how she had been looking at him when he wakened from sleep, the dead, dull look and the clouded eyes when foreknowledge of coming tragedy had touched her mind … Suddenly, without being aware that he had had any intention of doing so, Reynolds rose to his feet.

‘Where did the call come from, Jansci?’ His voice was back to normal again, no trace of the ice-cold rage showing through.

‘The Andrassy Ut. What does it matter, Meechail?’

‘We can get them back for you. We can go now and get them back. Just the Count and myself. We can do it.’

‘If any two men alive could do it, I can see these two before me now. But even you cannot do it.’ Jansci smiled, a slow, wan smile that hardly touched his lips, but none the less he smiled. ‘The job, only the job, nothing but your job. That is your creed, what you live by. Your job is done, what would Colonel Mackintosh think, Meechail?’

‘I don’t know, Jansci,’ Reynolds said slowly. ‘I don’t know, and God knows I don’t even care. I’m through, I’m finished. I’ve done my last job for Colonel Mackintosh, I’ve done my last job for our intelligence service, so with your permission, the Count and I –’

‘One moment.’ Jansci held up his hand. ‘There’s more to it than that, it’s even worse than you think … What did you say, Dr Jennings?’

‘Catherine,’ the old man murmured. ‘What a strange coincidence, my wife’s name is Catherine also.’

‘The coincidence is affecting us even deeper than that, I’m afraid, Professor.’ For a long time Jansci gazed sightlessly into the fire, then he stirred. ‘The British used your wife as a lever against you and now –’

‘Of course, of course,’ Jennings murmured. He was no longer trembling, but quiet and unafraid. ‘It is obvious, is it not, why else should they have rung up? I shall leave at once.’

‘Leave at once?’ Reynolds stared. ‘What does he mean?’

‘If you knew Hidas as well as I,’ the Count said, ‘you wouldn’t have to ask. A straight trade, is it not, Jansci? Catherine and Julia returned alive in exchange for the professor here.’

‘That’s what they say. They’ll give them back to me if I return the professor.’ Jansci shook his head, slowly, finally. ‘It cannot be, of course, it cannot be. I cannot give you up, I cannot give you back. God only knows what they might do to you if they had hands on you again.’

‘But you must, you must.’ Jennings was on his feet and was staring down at Jansci. ‘They will not harm me, I am too useful to them. Your wife, Jansci, your family – what is my freedom compared to their lives? You have no choice in the matter. I am going.’

‘You would give my family back to me – and you would never see your own again. Do you realize what you are saying, Dr Jennings?’

‘Yes.’ Jennings spoke quietly, doggedly. ‘I do know what I’m saying. It’s not the separation that’s so important, it’s just that if I go to them both our families will be alive – and who knows, freedom may come my way again. If I don’t your wife and daughter die. Surely you can see that?’

Jansci nodded, and Reynolds, even through his anxiety, through his almost overpowering anger, could still feel pity, could feel heart-sorry for any man presented with such a cruel, inhuman choice: and that the choice should be presented to a man like Jansci, a man who only moments ago had been preaching the creed of loving his enemies, of the need for understanding and helping and conciliating his Communist brother, made everything so bitterly intolerable. And then Jansci cleared his throat to speak, and Reynolds knew what he was going to say even before he said it.

‘I am more glad than ever, Dr Jennings, that I have helped in what little way I could, to save you. You are a brave man, and a good man, but you shall not die for me or mine. I will tell Colonel Hidas –’

‘No, I will tell Colonel Hidas,’ the Count interrupted. He crossed to the phone, cranked a handle and gave a number. ‘The Colonel is always so pleased to have reports from his junior officers … No, Jansci, leave this to me. You have never questioned my judgment before: I beg of you don’t start doing it now.’

He broke off, stiffened slightly, then relaxed and smiled.

‘Colonel Hidas? Ex-Major Howarth here … In excellent health, I’m glad to say … Yes, we have thought over your proposition, and have one to make in return. I know how grievously you must miss me – me, the most efficient officer in the AVO, a fact vouched for, you will remember, by no less a person than yourself – and propose to remedy this. If I can guarantee that Professor Jennings will not talk when he reaches the west, will you accept myself, a humble make-weight to be sure, in exchange for Major-General Illyurin’s wife and daughter … Yes, yes, certainly I’ll wait. But I haven’t all day.’

He cradled the phone in his hand, and turned to face both the professor and Jansci, holding out a hand to stop their protestations and the professor’s futile efforts to take the phone from him.

‘Rest easy, gentlemen, and reassure yourselves. Noble self-sacrifice has little appeal for me: in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, it has none at all … Ah, Colonel Hidas … Ah, so, I feared as much … A blow to my self-esteem, but then I am, I suppose, only a little fish … Then the professor it must be … Yes, he is more than willing … He will not go back to Budapest for the transfer, Colonel Hidas … Do you think we are mad? If we go there, then you have all three, so if you insist on Budapest then Dr Jennings crosses the border to-night, and nothing you or any man in Hungary can do can prevent that. You know that better than – aha, I thought you would see reason – you always were so reasonable a man, were you not? Then listen carefully.

‘About three kilometres north of this house – the General’s daughter will show you the way here if you cannot find it easily – a side road branches off to the left. Follow this road – it ends about eight kilometres farther on at a small ferry across a tributary of the Raab. Remain there. About three kilometres to the north there is a wooden bridge over the same stream. We are going to cross that, destroy it so that you will not be tempted to follow it, and make our way south to the ferryman’s house opposite which you will arrive. There is a small, rope-operated boat there which we will use to effect the transfer of prisoners. All this is clear to you?’

There was a long pause, the faintly metallic, indistinguishable murmur of Hidas’ voice was the only sound in the silence of the room, then the Count said, ‘Wait a moment,’ covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned to the others.

‘He says he must have an hour’s delay – they must have government permission. It’s quite likely. It’s also more than likely that, in normal circumstances, our dear friend would use that hour to call up the army to surround us or the air force to drop a few well-chosen bombs down the chimney.’

‘Impossible.’ Jansci shook his head. ‘The nearest army units are at Kaposvar, south of Balaton, and we know from the radio that they must be completely bogged down.’

‘And the nearest air force bases are up at the Czech border.’ The Count glanced through the window at the grey world of driving snow. ‘Even if they aren’t unserviceable or closed in, no aircraft could ever find us in this weather. We take a chance?’

‘We take a chance,’ Jansci echoed.

‘You have your hour, Colonel Hidas.’ The Count had removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘Call us a minute late, and you’ll find us gone. One other thing. You will come by way of the village of Vylok, and by no other way – we do not wish to have our escape route cut off, and you know the size of our organization –we will have every other road north of Szombathely covered, and if a car or truck as much as stirs along these roads, you will arrive here to find us gone. Until we meet then, my dear Colonel … In about three hours, you would say? Au revoir.’

He replaced the phone and turned to the others.

‘You see how it is, gentlemen – I get all the kudos and reputation for chivalry and self-sacrificing gallantry, without any of the distressing risks customarily associated with these things. Missiles mean more than revenge, and they want the professor. We have three hours.’

Three hours, and now one of them was almost gone. It was an hour that should have been spent in sleep, they were all exhausted and desperately in need of sleep, but the thought of sleep occurred to none. It could not occur to Jansci, dazed though he was with joy at the thought of seeing Catherine again, because he was at the same time unhappy, consumed with anxiety and remorse, and still in his heart blindly determined that the professor should not go: it could not occur to the professor, for he had no wish to spend his last few hours of freedom in sleep, and it did not occur to the Cossack, because he was again at his interminable practice with his whip, readying himself for glorious battle against the accursed AVO. Sandor never thought of it, he had just walked up and down in the bitter cold outside by Jansci’s shoulder, because he would not leave him at this hour. And the Count was drinking, heavily, steadily, as if he would never see a bottle of brandy again. Reynolds watched him in silent wonder as he opened a third bottle of brandy – and the Count had already consumed more than half of the others. He might have been drinking water, for all the apparent effects.

‘You think I drink too much, my friend?’ He smiled at Reynolds. ‘You do not conceal your thoughts.’

‘Wrong. Why shouldn’t you?’

‘Why not indeed? I like the stuff.’

‘But –’

‘But what, my friend?’

Reynolds shrugged. ‘That’s not why you drink.’

‘No?’ The Count raised an eyebrow. ‘To drown my many sorrows, perhaps?’

‘To drown Jansci’s sorrows, I think,’ Reynolds said slowly. Then he had a moment of acute, unusual perception. ‘No, I think I know. You know, how you can be sure I do not know, but you are sure that Jansci will see his Catherine and Julia again. His sorrow is gone, but yours remains, and yours was the same as his, but now you have to bear yours alone, so you feel it with redoubled effect.’

‘Jansci has been talking to you?’

‘He has said nothing to me.’

‘I believe you.’ The Count regarded him thoughtfully. ‘You know, you have aged ten years in a few days, my friend. You will never be the same again. You are, of course, leaving your intelligence service?’

‘This is my last mission. No more.’

‘And going to marry the fair Julia?’

‘Good God!’ Reynolds stared at him. ‘Is it – is it as obvious as that?’

‘You were the last to see it. It was obvious to everyone else.’

‘Well, then, yes. Of course.’ He frowned in surprise. ‘I haven’t asked her yet.’

‘No need. I know women.’ The Count waved a lackadaisical hand. ‘She probably has faint hopes of making something of you.’

‘I hope she has.’ Reynolds paused, hesitated, then looked directly at the Count. ‘You put me off beautifully, there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did. It was unfair – I was personal, and you had the grace not to rebuff me. Sometimes I think pride is a damnable thing.’ The Count poured a half-tumbler full of brandy, drank from it, chain-lit another Russian cigarette, then went on abruptly, ‘Jansci was looking for his wife, I for my little boy. Little boy! He would be twenty next month – maybe he is twenty. I don’t know, I don’t know. I hope he lived.’

‘He was not your only child?’

‘I had five children, and the children had a mother and grandfather and uncles, but I do not worry about them, they are all safe.’

Reynolds said nothing, there was no need to say anything. He knew from what Jansci had said that the Count had lost everything and everybody in the world – except his little boy.

‘They took me away when he was only three years old,’ the Count went on softly. ‘I can still see him standing there in the snow, wondering, not understanding. I have thought of him since, every night, every day of my life. Did he survive? Who looked after him? Had he clothes to keep the cold out, has he still clothes to keep the cold out? Does he get enough to eat, or is he thin and wasted? Perhaps no one wanted him, but surely to God – he was such a little boy, Mr Reynolds. I wonder what he looks like, I always wondered what he looked like. I wondered how he smiled and laughed and played and ran, I wanted all the time to be by his side, to see him every day of my life, to see all the wonderful things you see when your child is growing up, but I have missed it all, all the wonderful years are gone, and it is too late now. Yesterday, all our yesterdays, can never come again. He was all that I have lived for, but to every man there comes a moment of truth, and mine came this morning. I shall never see him again. May God look after my little boy.’

‘I’m sorry I asked,’ murmured Reynolds. I’m terribly sorry.’ He paused then he said: ‘That’s not true, I don’t know why I said that. I’m glad I asked.’

‘It’s strange, but I’m glad I told you.’ The Count drained his glass, refilled it, glanced at his watch and when he spoke again he was the old Count, his voice brisk and assertive and ironic. ‘Barack brings self-pity, but it also dispels it. Time we were moving, my friend. The hour is almost up. We cannot stay here – only a madman would trust Hidas.’

‘So Jennings must go?’

‘Jennings must go. If they don’t get him, then Catherine and Julia …’

‘Finish. Is that it?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Hidas must want him badly.’

‘He wants him desperately. The Communists are mortally afraid that if he escapes to the west and talks – and that would be a blow from which they would not recover for a long time – the damage would be irreparable. That is why I phoned and offered myself. I knew how badly they wanted me, I wanted to find out how badly they wanted Jennings. As I said, they want him desperately.’

‘Why?’ Reynolds’ voice was strained.

‘He will never work for them again,’ the Count answered obliquely. ‘They know that.’

‘What you mean is –’ ‘What I mean is that they only want his everlasting silence,’ the Count said harshly. ‘There is only one way you can ensure that.’

‘God above!’ Reynolds cried. ‘We can’t let him go, we can’t let him walk to his death and not do –’

‘You forget about Julia,’ the Count said softly.

Reynolds buried his face in his hands, too confused, too dazed to think any more. Half a minute passed, perhaps a minute, then he jerked upright as the harsh, strident ring of the telephone bell cut through the silence of the room. The Count had the receiver off its rest within two seconds.

‘Howarth here. Colonel Hidas?’

Again the listeners – Jansci and Sandor had just hurried in through the doorway, heads and shoulders matted with snow – could hear the metallic murmur of the voices in the earpiece, but were unable to distinguish anything. All they could do was watch the Count as he leaned negligently against the wall, his eyes moving idly, unseeingly around the room. Suddenly he straightened off the wall, the contracting muscles of his eyebrows etching a deep, vertical line on his forehead.

‘Impossible! I said an hour, Colonel Hidas. We cannot wait any longer. Do you think we are madmen to sit here till you can take us at your leisure?’

He paused as the voice at the other end interrupted him, listened for a few moments to the urgent, staccato chatter, stiffened as he heard the click of a receiver being replaced, looked for a moment at the lifeless phone, then slowly returned it to his hook. His right thumb, as he turned to face the others, was rubbing slowly, gratingly against the side of his forefinger and his lower lip was caught between his teeth.

‘Something’s wrong.’ The voice reflected the anxiety in his face. ‘Something’s very wrong. Hidas says the minister responsible is at his country retreat, the telephone lines are down, they’ve had to send a car to fetch him and it might be another half-hour, or possibly – you damned idiot!’

‘What do you mean?’ Jansci demanded. ‘Who –’

‘Me.’ The uncertainty had vanished from the Count’s face, and the low controlled voice was alive with a desperate urgency that Reynolds had never heard before. ‘Sandor, start the truck – now. Grenades, ammonium nitrate to take care of that little bridge at the foot of the road and the field telephone. Hurry, all of you. For God’s sake, hurry!’

No one stopped to question the Count. Ten seconds later they were all outside in the heavily falling snow, piling equipment into the truck, and within a minute the truck was jolting down the bumpy path towards the road. Jansci turned to the Count, one eyebrow raised in mute interrogation.

‘That last call came from a call-box,’ the Count said quietly. ‘Criminal negligence on my part not to catch on to it right away. Why is Colonel Hidas of the AVO telephoning from a call-box? Because he’s no longer in his Budapest office. It’s a hundred to one that the previous call wasn’t from Budapest either, but from our divisional H.Q. in Györ. Hidas has been on his way here all the time, desperately trying to delay us, to keep us here with these bogus phone calls. The minister, government permission, broken phone lines – lies, all lies. My God, to think that we fell for that sort of thing! Budapest – Hidas left Budapest hours ago! I’ll wager he’s no more than five miles from here at this very moment. Another fifteen minutes and he would have nailed us all, six good little flies waiting patiently in the spider’s parlour.’

TWELVE

They waited at the foot of the telephone pole by the side of the wood, peering through the momentarily thinning snow and shivering almost continuously. Too little sleep, too much exhaustion and the treacherous, quickly-evaporating warmth of the brandy were no fit preparation for even so brief a vigil in the bitter cold.

And it had been a brief vigil, so far. A scant fifteen minutes had elapsed since they had left the house, driven down the dirt-track across the little hump-backed bridge then turned west along the main road till they had come to this wood, perhaps two hundred yards from the turn-off, with its hiding-place for the truck. The Count and Sandor had been dropped at the bridge, to place the charges of ammonium nitrate, while Reynolds and the professor had run into the wood, improvised rough and ready switches from dead branches, hurried back to the bridge and helped the Count and Sandor to conceal their tyre tracks and the wiring which led from the nitrate to the wood where Sandor was now in hiding with the plunger in his hand. By the time the others had returned to the truck Jansci and the Cossack, the latter agile as a monkey on any pole or tree, had already connected up their field set to the overhead telephone wires leading to the house.

Another ten minutes passed, twenty, then half an hour, the snow still fell thinly, the cold reached deeper for the marrow of their bones, and both Jansci and the Count, with the AVO now long overdue, had become suspicious and anxious. It was not like the AVO to be late, especially when such a prize was at stake, it was most unlike Colonel Hidas, the Count declared, to be late at any time. Perhaps they were being held up by bad or impassable roads. Perhaps Hidas had disregarded instructions, perhaps his men were at that very moment sealing off every road to the frontier and encircling them from the rear, but the Count thought it highly unlikely: he knew that Hidas was under the impression that Jansci had a large and far-reaching organization, and that Jansci should neglect the obvious precaution of posting lookouts on the roads for miles around would probably never even cross his mind. But that Hidas had some stratagem in mind, the Count was now convinced: Hidas was a formidable adversary at any time, and the concentration camps held all too many people who had underrated the astuteness and persistence of that thin and embittered Jew. Hidas was up to something.

And, it became immediately plain when Hidas did finally turn up, he had indeed been up to something. He came from the east, and he came in a big, green, closed-in truck which, the Count said, was his mobile H.Q.-cum-caravan, accompanied by another, small brown truck, almost certainly with some of his AVO killers inside. So much Jansci and the Count had expected. But what they had not expected, and what amply accounted for the AVO’s delay in arriving, was the presence of the third vehicle in the convoy, a big, lumbering, heavily-armoured half-track, equipped with a vicious looking high-velocity anti-tank rifle, almost half the length of the vehicle itself. The watchers by the telephone pole at the woodside stared at each other in perplexity, at the loss to discover any possible reason for this display of armed might: they were not left to wonder long.

Hidas knew exactly what he was doing – he must have learned from Julia that Jansci’s house had two blind gable end walls – for he didn’t hesitate, not even for a moment; he had his men well briefed and trained, and the manoeuvre was executed with smooth and effortless efficiency. A few hundred yards distant from the track leading off the road to the house the two trucks accelerated, leaving the half-track behind, then changed down almost in perfect unison, braked, swerved off the road and across the little hump-backed bridge, raced up to the house and fanned out, one on either side of it, coming to rest opposite and several yards distant from either of the blind gable walls. Immediately the trucks had stopped, armed men leapt out and took up crouching positions behind the trucks and behind the little outbuildings and some of the trees that bordered the back of the house.

Even before the last man had taken up position, the big half-track had swung off the road, scraped between the low walls of the hump bridge with the snout of its long gun pointing grotesquely skywards, plunged down the other side and ground to a halt about fifty yards away from the front of the house. A second elapsed, then another, then there came a flat, whiplash crack as the big gun fired and a roar and erupton of smoke and flying débris as the shell exploded in the wall of the house, just below the ground-floor windows. A few more seconds passed, the dust from the first explosion hadn’t even had time to settle, when the next shell smashed into the house, perhaps a yard away from the first, then another and another and another, and already a hole almost ten feet in length had been torn in the masonry of the front wall.

‘The treacherous, murderous swine,’ the Count whispered. His face was quite expressionless. ‘I knew I couldn’t trust him, but I didn’t know till now just how much I couldn’t trust him.’ He broke off as the big gun fired again, and waited until the rolling echoes had died away. ‘I’ve seen this a hundred times – this is the technique that the Germans first perfected in Warsaw. If you want to bring a house down without blocking the streets, you just knock the bottom out and the house falls in upon itself. They also discovered, just by way of an extra dividend, that everyone hiding in such a house would be crushed to death at the same time.’

‘And that’s what they are trying – I mean, they think we’re in there?’ There was a tremor in Dr Jennings’ voice, and his horror showed in his pale face.

‘They’re not just amusing themselves by having target practice,’ the Count said roughly. ‘Of course they think we’re there. And Hidas has his terriers stationed all round the house, in case the rats should try to bolt from their hole.’

‘I see.’ Jennings’ voice was steadier now. ‘It would appear that I have overestimated the value of my services to the Russians.’

‘No,’ the Count lied. ‘No you haven’t. They want you all right – but I suspect they want Major-General Illyurin – and myself – even more. Jansci is Communist Hungary’s enemy No. 1, and they know this chance would never come their way again. They couldn’t pass it up – and they were prepared to sacrifice even you to make the most of this chance.’

Reynolds felt a slow stirring within him – a stirring of anger and admiration – anger for the way the Count was hiding the truth from Jennings, for letting him think that they could still trade him without any danger to himself, admiration for the ready skill with which he had invented so plausible an explanation.

‘They’re fiends – they’re inhuman fiends,’ Jennings was saying in wonder.

‘It is certainly difficult to think of them as anything else at times,’ Jansci said heavily. ‘Did – did anyone see them?’ There was no need to ask who he meant by ‘them,’ the mute head-shakings showed that all had understood. ‘No? Then perhaps we had better call our friend up there. The phone connection is under the gable. It shouldn’t have been damaged yet.’

And it hadn’t. There was a lull in the firing, and in the still, frosty air it was quite easy for them to hear the ringing of the bell inside the house as Jansci cranked the handle of the field telephone, easy, too, to hear a shouted order and see the man who ran round the corner of the house, waving a signal to the gunners in the half-track: almost at once the big rifle dipped to one side. Another order, and the crouching soldiers round the house broke quickly from their hiding-places, some running towards the front of the house, some towards the back. At the front, the watchers could see the AVO men stooping low along the gaping ruin that was all that remained of the wall, then jumping up and poking their carbines through the shattered windows, while a couple of men kicked the front door back off its broken hinges and passed inside. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the first of the two men who had gone inside, there was no mistaking the giant, gorilla-like figure of Coco anywhere.

‘You begin to understand, perhaps, why the worthy Colonel Hidas has survived so long?’ The Count murmured. ‘One could hardly accuse him of taking unnecessary chances.’

Coco and the other AVO men reappeared at the front door, and at a word from the giant the other men watching at the windows relaxed, while one of them disappeared round the corner of the house. He reappeared almost at once, followed by another who went straight inside the house, and that this other could only have been Colonel Hidas was obvious when they heard his voice coming tinnily through the field phone’s head set seconds later: Jansci had only one of the receivers to his ear and the voice came clearly enough through the second for all the others to hear.

‘Major-General Illyurin, I presume?’ Hidas’ voice was calm, composed, and only the Count knew it well enough to detect the faint edge of anger underneath.

‘Yes. Is this the way the gentlemen of the AVO keep their bargains, Colonel Hidas?’

‘There is no room for childish recrimination between the two of us,’ Hidas replied. ‘Where are you speaking from, may I inquire?’

‘That, too, is irrelevant. You have brought my wife and daughter?’

‘There was a long pause, while the receiver went dead, then Hidas’s voice came again. ‘Naturally. I said I would.’

‘May I see them, please?’

‘You do not trust me?’

‘A superfluous question, Colonel Hidas. Let me see them.’

‘I must think.’ Again the phone went dead, and the Count said urgently:

‘He’s not thinking, that fox never requires to think. He’s stalling for time. He knows we must be somewhere we can see him – so he knows he can see us. That was what his first pause was for – he was telling his men to –’

A shout from the house brought confirmation of the Count’s guess, even before he had made it in words, and a moment later a man came rushing out of the front door and ran down pell-mell towards the half-track.

‘He’s seen us,’ said the Count softly. ‘Us or the truck behind us. And now guess what?’

‘No need to guess.’ Jansci dropped the field set. ‘The half-track. Take cover! Will it blast us from there – or will it come to seek us out? That’s the only question.’

‘It’ll come for us,’ Reynolds was certain. ‘Shells are useless in a wood.’

He was right. Even as he was speaking, the big Diesel of the half-track had growled into life, and now it was lumbering up to the clear space in front of the house, stopping and going into reverse.

‘He’s coming all right,’ Jansci nodded. ‘They didn’t have to move to fire from there – that rifle turret can traverse through 360 degrees.’ He moved out from the cover of his tree, jumped over the snow-filled ditch on to the road and held both arms, just touching, high above his head – the agreed signal to the hidden, waiting Sandor that he was to press the plunger.

No one was prepared for what happened, not even the Count, who had underestimated how desperate Hidas had become. Faintly, through the field telephone lying on the ground, he heard Hidas shouting ‘Fire!’ and before the Count had time even to call out a warning, several automatic carbines had opened up from the house and they leapt back behind tree-trunks to escape the whistling hail of rifle fire that smashed into the wood around them, some shells striking into the boles with solid hammer blows, others ricocheting off and whining away evilly to bury their misshapen metal in tree-trunks still deeper in the wood, and yet others just breaking off branches and twigs to bring tiny flurries of frozen snow sifting down gently to the ground. But Jansci had had no time, no chance and no warning and he toppled and swayed and crashed heavily to the road as might one of the trees behind him when the feller’s axe had struck the last blow at its base. Reynolds straightened from his shelter and had just taken his first plunging step towards the road when he was grabbed from behind and hauled roughly behind the tree he had just left.

‘Do you want to get yourself killed, too?’ The Count’s voice was savage, but the savagery was not directed at Reynolds. ‘I don’t think he’s dead – you can see his foot moving.’

‘They’ll fire again,’ Reynolds protested. The crackling of the carbines had ended as abruptly as it had begun. ‘They can riddle him lying there.’

‘All the more reason why you shouldn’t commit suicide.’

‘But Sandor’s waiting! He hadn’t time to see the signal –’

‘Sandor’s nobody’s fool. He doesn’t require any signal.’ The Count edged an eye round a corner of his sheltering tree, saw the half-track rumbling down the dirt road towards the bridge. ‘If that bridge goes up now that damn tank can stop and pulverize us from where it stands: worse, it can reverse and cross the ditch, tracks first, on to the main road. Sandor knows it. Watch!’

Reynolds watched. The half-track was almost on the bridge now. Ten yards, five yards, it was climbing up the far hump of the bridge. Sandor had left it too late, Reynolds knew he had left it too late, then there came a sudden flash of light, a low dull roar nothing like so loud as Reynolds had expected, followed first by the rumbling of falling masonry then a grinding metallic screeching and a crash which shook the ground almost as much as the explosion had done as the half-track plunged nose first into the bed of the stream and the far abutment of the bridge, its long rifle smashing against what was left of the wall of the bridge, fracturing and bending sharply upwards at a crazy angle as if it had been made of cardboard.

‘Our friend has a superb sense of timing,’ the Count murmured. The dry, ironic tone accorded ill with the set, bitter mouth, the fury barely in check. He picked up the field phone, cranked the handle viciously and waited.

‘Hidas? … Howarth here.’ The Count bit each word out separately. ‘You mad, crazy fool! Do you know who you’ve shot?’

‘How should I know? Why should I care?’ The easy suavity had gone from Hidas’ voice, the loss of his half-track had shaken him badly.

‘I’ll tell you why you should care.’ The Count had his control back again, and his voice was silky with menace. ‘That was Jansci you shot, and if he’s dead you will be well advised to accompany us when we cross the border into Austria to-night.’

‘Fool! Have you taken leave of your senses?’

‘Listen, and judge who is sane. If Jansci is dead, we have no further interest in either his wife or daughter. You may do what you like with them. If he is dead, we will be across the border by midnight and within twenty-four hours Professor Jennings’ story will be splashed in banner headlines across the front page of every newspaper in Western Europe and America, every paper in the free world. The fury of your masters in Budapest and Moscow will know no bounds – and I shall take great care that every paper will publish a full account of our escape and the part you played in it, Colonel Hidas. For you, the Black Sea Canal if you’re lucky, perhaps Siberia, but almost certainly just a disappearance, shall we say. If Jansci dies, you die also – and no one knows it better than you do, Colonel Hidas.’

There was a long silence, and when Hidas finally spoke his voice was no more than a husky whisper.

‘Perhaps he is not dead, Major Howarth.’

‘You can but pray. We shall see – I’m going to see now. If you value your life, call off these murderous hounds of yours!’

‘I shall give the orders immediately.’

The Count replaced the phone, to find Reynolds staring at him.

‘Did you mean that? Would you have turned Julia and her mother over –?’

‘My God, what do you think I am? … Sorry, boy, didn’t mean to bite. I must have sounded convincing, eh? I’m bluffing, but Hidas doesn’t know I am, and even if he wasn’t more scared right now than he has ever been in his life before and realized that perhaps I was bluffing, he wouldn’t even dare to try to call the bluff. We have him by the hip. Come, he should have called his dogs off by this time.’

Together they ran out on the road and stooped to examine Jansci. He was lying on his back, his limbs outflung and relaxed, but he was breathing steadily and evenly. There was no need to search for the injury – the welling red blood from the long wound that stretched from the temple back past the ear was in shocking contrast to the snow-white hair. The Count stooped low, examined him briefly then straightened.

‘No one could expect Jansci to die as easily as that.’ The wide grin on the Count’s face was eloquent of his relief. ‘He’s been creased and concussed, but I don’t even think that the bone has been chipped. He’ll be all right, perhaps in a couple of hours. Come, give me a hand to lift him.’

‘I will take him.’ It was Sandor speaking, he had just emerged from the wood behind and he brushed them gently aside. He stooped, caught Jansci under the body and legs and lifted him with the ease one would have lifted a little child. ‘He is badly hurt?’

‘Thank you, Sandor. No, just a glancing blow … That was a splendid job down by the bridge. Take him into the back of the truck and make him comfortable, will you? Cossack, a pair of pliers, up that telephone pole and wait till I give you the word, Mr Reynolds, you might start the engine, if you please. She may be cold.’

The Count picked up the phone, and smiled thinly. He could hear the anxious breathing of Hidas at the other end.

‘Your time has not yet come, Colonel Hidas. Jansci is badly hurt, shot through the head, but he will live. Now listen carefully. It is painfully obvious that you are not to be trusted – although that, I may say, is no recent discovery on my part. We cannot and will not carry out the exchange here – there is no guarantee that you will keep your word, every possibility that you won’t. Drive along the field for about half a kilometre – it will be difficult in the snow, but you have the men and it will give us time to be on our way – and you will come to a plank bridge that will take you on to the road again. Then drive straight to the ferry. This is clear?’

‘It is clear.’ Some of the confidence was back in Hidas’ voice. ‘We will be there as soon as possible.’

‘You will be there an hour from now. No more. We do not wish to make you a present of the time to send for reinforcements and cut off escape routes to the west. Incidentally, do not waste precious time in attempting to summon help by this telephone. I am about to cut all the wires now, and shall cut them again about five kilometres north of here.’

‘But in an hour!’ Dismay was back in Hidas’ voice. ‘To clear these fields so deep in snow – and who knows what this side road to the river you speak of is like. If we are not there in an hour –’

‘Then you will find us gone.’ The Count hung up the receiver, gestured to the Cossack to cut the wires, looked into the back of the truck to see if Jansci was comfortable, then hurried round to the cab. Reynolds had the engine running, moved over to make room for the Count behind the wheel, and within seconds they were bumping out of the wood, on to the main road, and off into the north-east where the first dusky fingers of twilight were beginning to touch the snow-capped hills under a dark and leaden sky.

Darkness was almost upon them, and the snow was beginning to fall more heavily again, with the chill promise of still more to come, when the Count swung the truck off the river road, drove a couple of hundred jolting yards up a narrow dirt track and stopped at the bottom of a small, abandoned stone quarry. Reynolds started out of his deep reverie and looked at him in surprise.

‘The ferryman’s house – you’ve left the river?’

‘Yes. Just about another three hundred metres from here – the ferry, I mean. Leaving the truck in plain view of Hidas when he arrives on the other side would be too much of a temptation altogether.’

Reynolds nodded and said nothing – he had spoken barely a dozen words since they had left Jansci’s house, had sat in silence beside the Count all the way, had hardly exchanged a word with Sandor as he had helped him to destroy the bridge they had so lately crossed. His mind was confused, he was torn by conflicting emotions, consumed by a torturing anxiety that made all previous anxieties fade into insignificance. The most damnable part of it all was that old Jennings had now become talkative and positively cheerful as he had never been since Reynolds had first known him, and was trying all he could to raise the flagging spirits of the others – and Reynolds suspected, without in any way having reason for his suspicion, that the old professor knew, in spite of what the Count had said, that he was going to his death. It was intolerable, it was unthinkable, that such a gallant old man should be allowed to die like that. But if he didn’t, nothing was more certain than that Julia would die. Reynolds sat there in the gathering darkness, his fists clenched till his forearms ached, but far at the back of his mind he knew, without in any way consciously admitting his decision to himself, that there could be only one answer.

‘How is Jansci, Sandor?’ The Count had slid open the inspection hatch at the back of the cab.

‘He stirs.’ Sandor’s voice was deep and gentle. ‘And he is muttering to himself.’

‘Excellent. It takes more than a bullet in the head to account for Jansci.’ The Count paused a moment, then continued. ‘We cannot leave him here – it is altogether too cold, and I don’t want him to wake up not knowing where he is, not knowing where we are. I think –’

‘I will carry him to the house.’

Five minutes later they reached the ferryman’s house, a small white stone building between the road and the heavily shingled, sloping bank of the river. The river here was perhaps forty feet wide, and very sluggish, and even in the near darkness it looked as if it might be very deep at that particular spot. Leaving the others at the door of the ferryman’s house – the door faced on to the river – the Count and Reynolds jumped from the steep bank on to the shingle and went down to the water’s edge.

The boat was double-ended, perhaps twelve feet long, without either engine or oars, the sole means of propulsion being provided by a rope stretched tight between concrete embedded iron posts on either side of the river. This rope passed through screwed pulleys, one at either end of the boat and one on a raised amidships block, and passengers simply crossed from one bank to the other by overhanding themselves along the rope. It was a type of ferry Reynolds had never seen before, but he had to admit that, for a couple of women who probably knew nothing whatsoever about boats, it was a foolproof system. The Count echoed his thoughts.

‘Satisfactory, Mr Reynolds, very satisfactory. And so is the lay of the land on the other side of the river.’ He gestured at the far bank, at the curving half-moon of trees that swept back from either bank enclosing a smooth treeless expanse of snow unbroken but for the bisecting road that reached down to the water’s edge. ‘A terrain which might have been specifically designed to discourage our good friend Colonel Hidas, who is no doubt at this very moment entertaining pleasant visions of his men lurking at the water’s edge with their hands full of machine-guns. It would have been difficult – I say it with modesty – for anyone to have chosen a better spot for effecting the transfer … Come, let us call upon the ferryman, who is about to enjoy some unexpected and, no doubt, unwonted exercise.’

The ferryman was just opening the door as the Count raised his hand to knock. He stared first at the Count’s high-peaked hat, then at the wallet in the Count’s hand, then licked suddenly dry lips. In Hungary it was not necessary to have a bad conscience to tremble at the sight of the AVO.

‘You are alone in this house?’ the Count demanded.

‘Yes, yes, I am alone. What – what is it, comrade?’ He made an attempt to pull himself together. ‘I have done nothing, comrade, nothing!’

‘That’s what they all say,’ the Count said coldly. ‘Get your hat and coat and return immediately.’

The man was back in a matter of moments, pulling a fur cap on to his head. He made to speak, but the Count raised his hand.

‘We wish to use your house for a short time, for a purpose that is no concern of yours. We are not interested in you.’ The Count pointed to the road leading south. ‘A brisk walk comrade, and let an hour elapse before you return. You will find us gone.’

The man looked at him unbelievingly, looked wildly around to see what the trap was, saw none and scuttled round the corner of the house and up on to the road without a word. Within half a minute, his legs going like pistons, he was lost to sight round a corner of the road.

‘Putting the fear of death in one’s fellow-man becomes, as a pastime, increasingly distasteful with the passing of the days,’ the Count murmured. ‘I must put an end to it. Bring Jansci inside, will you, Sandor?’ The Count led the way through the little lobby and into the ferryman’s living-room, paused at the door, expelled his breath gustily and turned round.

‘On second thoughts, leave him in the lobby. It’s like a damn’ furnace in this room – It’ll only send him off again.’ He looked closely at Jansci as Sandor propped him in a corner with coats and some cushions taken from the living-room. ‘See, his eyes open already, but he is still dazed. Stay with him, Sandor, and let him come out of it by himself … Yes, my boy?’ He raised an eyebrow as the Cossack came rushing into the lobby. ‘You are perturbed about something?’

‘Colonel Hidas and his men,’ the Cossack gasped. ‘They have arrived. Their two trucks have just pulled up at the water’s edge.’

‘Even so.’ The Count screwed one of his Russian cigarettes into his holder, lit it and sent the match spinning out through the dark oblong of the open doorway. ‘They are punctual to a degree. Come, let us go and pass the time of day with them.’

THIRTEEN

The Count walked the length of the lobby, stopped abruptly, and barred the doorway with his arm.

‘Remain inside, Professor Jennings, if you please.’

‘I?’ Jennings looked at him in surprise. ‘Remain inside? My dear fellow, I’m the only person who is not remaining here.’

‘Quite. Nevertheless, remain here for the present. Sandor, see that he does.’ The Count wheeled and walked quickly away, without giving the professor opportunity for reply. Reynolds was at his heels, and his voice, when he spoke, was low and bitter.

‘What you mean is that it requires only one single, well-directed bullet into the professor’s heart and Colonel Hidas can retire, complete with prisoners, well satisfied with his night’s work.’

‘Something of the kind had occurred to me,’ the Count admitted. His feet ground on the shifting shingle, then he halted by the boat and looked about the dark, cold waters of the sluggish river. The truck and each individual figure, each man, were easily seen against the white background of snow, but it had already grown so dark that it was nearly impossible to distinguish features or uniforms, just black, empty silhouettes. Only Coco was recognizable, and that by virtue of his great height: but one man stood in advance of the others, his toes by the water’s edge, and it was to this man that the Count addressed himself.

‘Colonel Hidas?’

‘I am here, Major Howarth.’

‘Good, let us not waste time. I propose to effect this exchange as quickly as possible. Night, Colonel Hidas, is almost upon us, and while you’re treacherous enough in the daylight, God only knows what you’re like when darkness falls. I don’t propose to stay long enough to find out.’

‘I shall honour my promise.’

‘You shouldn’t use words you don’t understand … Tell your drivers to reverse till they come to the wood. You and your men are also to fall back as far as that. At that distance – two hundred metres – it should be quite impossible for you to distinguish any of us in any way. From time to time guns are accidentally discharged, but not to-night.’

‘It shall be exactly as you say.’ Hidas turned, gave some orders, waited till the two trucks and his men had started to move back from the river bank, then turned to face the Count. ‘And now what, Major Howarth?’

‘This. When I call you, you will release the general’s wife and daughter, and they will start walking towards the ferry. At the same moment, Dr Jennings will get into the boat here and cross over to the other side. Once there, he will climb up to the bank, wait there till the women are close, pass by them as they approach the river, then walk slowly towards you. By the time he’s there, the women should be safely across and it should be, by then, too dark for anyone, on either side, to achieve anything by indiscriminate shooting. The plan, I think, is foolproof.’

‘It shall be exactly as you say,’ Hidas repeated. He wheeled, scrambled up the shelving bank and started to walk back towards the dark line of trees in the distance, leaving the Count gazing after him and thoughtfully rubbing his chin.

‘Just that little bit too compliant, just that little bit too eager to please,’ he murmured. ‘Just a little … Tchah! My endlessly suspicious nature. What can he do? The time has come.’ He raised his voice. ‘Sandor! Cossack!’

He waited till the two men had come out from the cottage, then spoke to Sandor. ‘How is Jansci?’

‘Sitting up, still swaying a bit. His head hurts very badly.’

‘Inevitably.’ The Count turned to Reynolds. ‘I want to say a few words to Jennings, alone – Jansci and I. Perhaps you understand. I won’t keep him a minute, I promise you.’

‘Be as long as you like,’ Reynolds said dully. ‘There’s no hurry for me.’

‘I know, I know.’ The Count hesitated, made to say something, then changed his mind. ‘You might launch the boat, will you?’

Reynolds nodded, watched the Count disappear into the house, and turned to give the others a hand to pull the boat down the shingled beach into the water. The boat was heavier than it looked, they had to pull it gratingly across the pebbles, but with Sandor’s help it was in the water in a matter of a few seconds, tugging gently on its rope as the sluggish current caught it. Sandor and the Cossack walked back up to the top of the bank, but Reynolds remained at the water’s edge. He stood there for a few moments, pulled out his gun, checked that the safety-catch was on, and thrust it in his coat pocket, his hand still round it.

It seemed that only moments had elapsed, but already Dr Jennings was at the door. He said something that Reynolds couldn’t distinguish, then came Jansci’s deep voice, and then the Count’s.

‘You – you will forgive me if I remain here, Dr Jennings.’ The Count was hesitant and unsure for the first time that Reynolds had ever known. ‘It’s just – I would rather –’

‘I quite understand.’ Jennings’ voice was steady and composed. ‘Do not distress yourself, my friend – and thank you for all you have done for me.’

Jennings turned away abruptly, took Sandor’s arm to help him down from the high bank, then stumbled awkwardly down the shingle, a stooped figure – until this moment Reynolds had never quite realized how stooped the old man really was – with his collar turned high against the bitter chill of the evening and the skirts of his thin raglan coat flapping out pathetically about his legs. Reynolds felt his heart go out to the defenceless, gallant old man.

‘The end of the road, my boy.’ Jennings was still calm, but just a little husky. ‘I am sorry, I’m terribly sorry to have given you so much trouble, and all for nothing. You came a long way, a long way – and now this. This must be a bitter blow for you.’

Reynolds said nothing, he couldn’t trust himself to say anything: but the gun was coming clear of his pocket.

‘One thing I forgot to say to Jansci,’ Jennings murmured.

‘Dowidzenia tell him I said that. Just “dowidzenia!” He will understand.’

‘I don’t understand, and it doesn’t matter.’ Jennings moving towards the boat, gasped as he walked into the barrel of the gun held rigidly in Reynolds’ hand. ‘You’re not going anywhere, Professor Jennings. You can deliver your own messages.’

‘What do you mean, my boy? I don’t understand you.’

‘There’s nothing to understand. You’re just not going anywhere.’

‘But then – but then, Julia –’

‘I know.’

‘But – but the Count said you were going to marry her!’

Reynolds nodded silently in the darkness.

‘And you’re willing – I mean, you will give her up –’

‘There are some things even more important than that.’ Reynolds’ voice was so low that Jennings had to stoop forward to catch the words.

‘Your final word?’

‘My final word.’

‘I am well content,’ Jennings murmured. ‘I need now hear nothing more.’ He turned to retrace his steps up the shingle, and, as Reynolds made to thrust his gun back in his pocket, pushed him with all his strength. Reynolds lost his footing on the treacherous pebbles, fell heavily backwards and struck his head against a stone with force enough to leave him momentarily dazed. By the time he had shaken his head clear and risen dizzily to his feet, Jennings had shouted something at the top of his voice – it wasn’t until much later that Reynolds realized that it had been the signal for Hidas to send Julia and her mother on their way – scrambled into the boat and was already half-way across the river.

‘Come back, come back, you crazy fool!’ Reynolds’ voice was hoarse and savage, and, quite without realizing the futility of what he was doing, he was tugging frantically at the rope which stretched across the river, and then he dimly remembered that the rope was fixed and the boat completely independent of it. Jennings paid no attention to his call, did not even as much as look over his shoulder: the bow was grinding on the pebbles of the far side, when Reynolds heard Jansci calling him hoarsely from the door of the ferryman’s cottage.

‘What is it? What’s happening?’

‘Nothing,’ Reynolds said wearily. ‘Everything is going just according to plan.’ He climbed up the bank as if his legs were made of lead and looked at Jansci, looked at the white hair and face and the blood that caked one side from temple to chin. ‘You had better get cleaned up. Your wife and daughter will be here at any moment – I can see them crossing the field now.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Jansci pressed his hand to his head.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Reynolds fumbled a cigarette into his hand and lit it. ‘We’ve kept our side of the bargain, and Jennings is gone.’ He stared down at the cigarette glowing in his cupped palm, then looked up. ‘I forgot. He said I was to say “dowidzenia” to you.’

‘Dowidzenia?’ Jansci had taken his hand from his head and was staring in perplexity at the blood on his fingers, but now he looked strangely at Reynolds. ‘He said that?’

‘Yes. He said you’d understand. What does it mean?’

‘Farewell – the Polish “Auf Wiedersehen.” Till we meet again.’

‘Oh, my God, my God!’ Reynolds said softly. He spun his cigarette into the darkness, turned and walked quite slowly along the lobby into the living-room. The sofa was over in the far corner, by the fire, and the old Jennings, hatless, coatless, and shaking his head from side to side, was trying to prop himself into a sitting position. Reynolds crossed the room, with Jansci now just behind him, and steadied the old man with an arm round his shoulders.

‘What happened?’ Reynolds asked gently. ‘The Count?’

‘He was here.’ Jennings rubbed an obviously aching jaw. ‘He came in, and took two grenades out of a bag and put them on the table, and I asked him what they were for and he said, “If they’re going back to Budapest with these trucks, they’re going to have a damned long shove.” Then he came across and shook hands with me – and that’s all I remember.’

‘That’s all there is, Professor,’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘Wait here. We’ll be back soon – and you’ll be with your wife and son within forty-eight hours.’

Reynolds and Jansci went out into the lobby, and Jansci was speaking softly.

‘The Count.’ There was warmth in his voice, something that touched on reverence. ‘He dies as he has lived, thinking never of himself. The grenades end the last chance of our being cut off before the border.’

‘Grenades!’ A slow, dull anger was beginning to kindle deep down inside Reynolds, a strange anger he had never felt before. ‘You talk of grenades – at this hour! I thought he was your friend.’

‘You will never know a friend like him.’ Jansci was filled with a simple conviction. ‘He is the best friend that I or any man could ever have, and because he is that to me I would not stop him now if I could. The Count has wanted to die, he has wanted to die ever since I have known him, it was just a point of honour with him to postpone it as long as possible, to give as many suffering people what they wanted of life and freedom and happiness before he himself took what he wanted of death. That is why risks did not exist for the Count, he courted death every day of his life, but not openly, and I have always known that when the chance came to seize it with honour, he would grasp it with both hands.’ Jansci shook his blood-stained head, and Reynolds could see from the light streaming out of the living-room that the faded grey eyes were misted with tears. ‘You are young, Meechail, you cannot possibly conceive of the dreariness, the purposelessness, the dreadful emptiness of living day after interminable day when the wish to live has long since died in you. I am as selfish as any other man, but not so selfish as to buy my happiness at the expense of his. I loved the Count. May the snow lie softly on him tonight.’

‘I am sincerely sorry, Jansci.’ Reynolds spoke with genuine regret, and in his heart he knew he was deeply sorry, but for what or for whom he could not at that moment have said: all he clearly knew was that the fire of anger within him was slowly increasing, burning more brightly than ever. They were at the front door now, and he strained his eyes to pick out what he could on that white expanse of snow on the other side of the river. Julia and her mother he could clearly see, making their way slowly towards the river bank, but, at first, he could see no signs of the Count. But the pupils of his eyes were now widening steadily since he had left the brightness of the room behind him, and he finally picked out his moving figure, no more than a half-seen blur against the dark line of the trees beyond him – and, Reynolds suddenly realized, far too near the trees. Julia and her mother were as yet hardly more than half-way across the field.

‘Look!’ Reynolds grabbed the elder man’s arms. ‘The Count’s almost there – and Julia and your wife are hardly moving. In the name of heaven, what’s the matter with them? They’ll be caught, they’ll be shot – what the devil was that?’

A loud splash, a thunderclap of a splash in the silence of the night, had startled him with its unexpected suddenness. He ran to the bank and saw the cold dark waters of the river churning to a foam as unseen arms thrashed through them: Sandor had seen the danger even before he had, had flung off his overcoat and jacket and now his great arms and shoulders were carrying him across to the far bank like a torpedo.

‘They are in trouble, Meechail.’ Jansci too, was on the bank now, and his voice was tense with anxiety. ‘One of them, it must be Catherine, can hardly walk – you see how she drags her steps. It is too much for Julia …’

Sandor was at the other side now, out of the water, up the shingled shore and over the three-foot bank beyond as if it didn’t even exist. And then, just as he cleared the bank, they heard it – a sharp, flat explosion, the unmistakable crack of a grenade, from the woods beyond the field, then another even while the echoes of the first explosion were still rolling away, through the trees, and then, immediately afterwards, the harsh staccato rattle of an automatic carbine – and then silence.

Reynolds winced and looked at Jansci, but it was too dark to see the expression on his face, he could only hear him murmuring something over and over again to himself, but Reynolds could not distinguish the words, they must have been Ukranian. And there was not time to wonder, even at that very moment Colonel Hidas might be stooping over the man whom he had thought to be Professor Jennings …

Sandor had reached the two women now, had an arm around each of them, and was plunging back through the frozen-crusted snow towards the river bank as if he had been leading two fleet-footed runners by the hand instead of virtually carrying them, which he was. Reynolds wheeled round, to find the Cossack standing just behind him.

‘There’s going to be trouble,’ Reynolds said quickly. ‘Get up to the house, stick the submachine-gun through the window and when Sandor drops below the level of the river bank …’ But the Cossack was already on his way, his feet churning up the gravel as he raced for the house.

Reynolds turned round again, the fists by his side clenching and unclenching in his anxiety, his frustration at their helplessness. Thirty yards to go now, twenty-five, twenty, still a strange absence of all sound and activity from the woods in the background and Reynolds was just beginning to hope against hope when he heard the excited shouts from the trees, a barked command and at once an automatic carbine opened up with its harsh staccato cough, the very first shells whistling by only inches from Reynolds’ head: he dropped to the ground like a stone, dragging Jansci with him, and lay there with his open hand beating at the pebbles in his impotence while the bullets whined harmlessly overhead, but even at that moment he found time to wonder why only the one man was firing – one would have expected Hidas to bring his entire arsenal to bear.

Then, muffled though the sound was by the thick snow, there suddenly came to his ears the thud, thud of pounding feet and a moment later, in a waist-high flurry of flying snow, Sandor came over the top of the far bank like a charging bull, literally lifting Julia and her mother clear off their feet, and landed with a grating, sliding crunch on the pebbles at least ten feet beyond and below, and even while he was still stumbling, still recovering his balance on that treacherous footing, a machine-gun with a different cyclic rate had opened up – the Cossack had timed it without the loss of a second. It was doubtful whether he could see anybody against the dark background of trees, but the AVO machine-gun was pointing directly at him and must have betrayed its position, flash-cover or not, by the red fire streaking from the mouth of the barrel. In any event, the firing from the wood stopped almost immediately.

Sandor had reached the boat now, and was lifting somebody into it. A moment later he helped the second person inside, dragged the heavily-laden boat off the gravel with one mighty heave and was overarming himself so powerfully across the river that the gurgling water at the forefoot piled high into a bow-wave that gleamed whitely even in the darkness of the night.

Jansci and Reynolds, on their feet again, were at the water’s edge, waiting, hands reached out ready to grab the boat and drag it ashore, when all at once there came a hiss, a soft crack and a blinding white light burst into life not a hundred feet above their heads, and, almost on the instant, a machine-gun and several rifles opened up, again, still from the trees, but much farther to the south, where the wood curved in to meet the river.

‘Shoot the flare down!’ Reynolds shouted to the Cossack. ‘Never mind the AVO. Shoot that damned flare down!’ Blinded by the glare, he plunged into the river just as he heard Jansci doing the same thing, swore softly as the side of the boat struck painfully against the kneecap, grabbed the gunwale, jerked the boat up on the shelving pebbled beach, staggered as someone who had incautiously stood up in the boat pitched forward against him, recovered and caught her up in his arms just as the flare above the river died as suddenly as it had come to life. The Cossack was proving himself that night. But the guns from the wood across the river still coughed and chattered, the men behind them were firing from memory, and bullets were still whistling and ricocheting all around them.

There was no doubt who Reynolds had in his arms, it must have been Jansci’s wife, she was too frail, too light altogether for Julia. Guided now only by the slope of the pebbled shore – the darkness, after the blinding whiteness of the flare, was now quite impenetrable – Reynolds took a step forward and all but collapsed to the ground as the pain in his momentarily paralyzed knee struck at him. He freed one hand, grabbed at the tautened rope to steady himself, heard a thud as if someone had fallen heavily, felt someone else brush by him and heard steps running up towards the bank, clenched his teeth against the pain and limped up the shingles as quickly as he could. He felt a bullet pluck at the sleeve of his coat, the three-foot bank that he had to scale with his aching leg and the woman in his arms loomed as an unsurmountable obstacle in his mind, then a great pair of hands caught him from behind and he was standing on top of the bank, still clutching the woman before he had more than dimly realized what was happening.

The oblong of pale light that was the door of the ferryman’s cottage was before him now, not ten feet away, and, even as he saw it, even as he heard bullets smashing against the stonework of the cottage and whining away into the darkness, Jansci, who had been first to reach the house, reappeared in the doorway, suicidally silhouetted against the light behind him. Reynolds made to shout a warning, changed his mind – it was too late now if any marksman had drawn a bead, and it was only two seconds away – moved forwards, heard the woman in his arms say something, knew instinctively, without understanding the words, what she wanted and set her gently on her feet. She took two or three faltering steps forward then flung herself into the outstretched arms of the waiting man, murmuring, ‘Alex! Alex! Alex!’ then she seemed to shudder, leaned heavily against him as if she had been struck from behind, but that was all Reynolds saw: Sandor had bundled them all into the lobby and crashed the door shut behind him.

Julia was half-sitting, half-lying at the far end of the corridor, supported by an anxious-looking Dr Jennings. Reynolds reached her in two strides and fell on his knees beside her. Her eyes were shut, her face very pale, there was the beginning of a bruise high upon her forehead, but she was breathing, shallowly but evenly.

‘What’s happened to her?’ Reynolds asked huskily. ‘Has she been – has she been –’

‘She’ll be all right.’ Sandor’s voice behind him was deep and reassuring. He stooped and lifted her in his arms, and turned towards the living-room. ‘She fell getting out of the boat, and she must have struck her head on the stones. I’ll take her in to the couch here.’

Reynolds watched the giant, the water dripping steadily from his soaking clothes, carry her through the door as if she had been a child, rose slowly to his feet and almost bumped into the Cossack. The youngster’s face was alive with exultation.

‘You should be at your window,’ Reynolds said quietly.

‘No need.’ The Cossack’s grin stretched from ear to ear. ‘They’ve stopped firing and gone now back to the trucks – I can hear their voices in the woods. I got two of them, Mr Reynolds, two of them! I saw them fall in the light of the flare, just before you shouted at me to shoot the flare out.’

‘And you did that too,’ Reynolds acknowledged. That accounted, he realized, for the lack of any more of the pistol flares: a double-edged weapon, it had turned disastrously in Hidas’ hand. ‘You’ve saved us all tonight.’ He clapped the proud boy on his shoulder, turned to look at Jansci and then stood very still.

Jansci was kneeling on the rough wooden floor, and his wife was in his arms. Her back was to Reynolds, and the first thing he saw was the round, red-ringed hole in her coat, high up below her left shoulder. It was a very small hole, and only a little blood and the stain wasn’t spreading at all. Slowly, Reynolds walked the length of the corridor and sank on his knees beside Jansci. Jansci lifted his white, blood-stained head and looked at him with sightless eyes.

‘Dead?’ Reynolds whispered.

Jansci nodded without speaking.

‘My God!’ Reynolds’ shock showed in every line of his face. ‘Now, now – to die now!’

‘A merciful God, Meechail, and understanding far beyond my deserts. Only this morning, I asked Him why He hadn’t let Catherine die, why He hadn’t made her die … He has forgiven my presumption. He knew far better than I. Catherine was gone, Meechail, gone before the bullet ever touched her.’ Jansci shook his head, a man marvelling at the splendour of it all. ‘Could there be anything more wonderful, Meechail, than to pass from this earth, without pain, at the moment of your greatest happiness? Look! Look at her face – see how she smiles!’

Reynolds shook his head without speaking. There was nothing to say, he could think of nothing to say, his mind was numbed.

‘We are both blessed.’ Jansci was talking, almost rambling to himself, he eased his arms, so that he could look down on his wife’s face and his voice was soft with memory. ‘The years have been kind to her, Meechail, time loved her almost as much as I. Twenty years ago, five and twenty years ago, drifting down the Dnieper on a summer’s night – I see her now as I saw her then. She has not been touched.’ He said something in a tone so low that Reynolds couldn’t catch it, then his voice came more clearly again. ‘You remember her photograph, Meechail, the one you thought did Julia more than justice? Now you can see: it could never have been anyone else.’

‘It could never have been anyone else, Jansci,’ Reynolds echoed. He thought of the photograph of the beautiful, laughing girl and stared down at the dead face in Jansci’s arms, at the thin white hair, the grey face haggard and emaciated as he had never seen a face before, a pitifully wasted face sculpted and graven into the deep lines of premature old age by unimaginable privations and hardships and he felt his eyes go blind. ‘It could never have been anyone else,’ Reynolds repeated. ‘The portrait did her less than justice.’

‘That’s what I said to Catherine, that’s what I always said to her,’ Jansci murmured. He turned away and bent low and Reynolds knew that he wanted to be alone. Reynolds stumbled blindly to his feet, he had to feel for the wall to support and guide him, and walked slowly away, the numbness in his mind slowly giving way first of all to a confusing maelstrom of conflicting thoughts and emotions, then slowly clearing and settling till there was only one thought, one fixed immovable purpose left in his mind. The slow anger that had been smouldering within him all evening now burst into an intense white flame that consumed his mind, his every thought to the exclusion of all else, but there was no trace of this blazing fury within him when he spoke quietly to Sandor.

‘Could I ask you to bring the truck here, please?’

‘In a moment,’ Sandor promised. He gestured at the girl lying on the couch. ‘She is just coming to. We must hurry.’

‘Thank you. We will.’ Reynolds turned away and looked at the Cossack. ‘Keep a good watch, Cossack. I will not be long.’ He walked along the corridor, went past Jansci and Catherine without looking at either of them, picked up the automatic carbine that leaned against the wall and passed out through the door, closing it softly behind him.

FOURTEEN

The dark, sluggish waters were ice-cold as the tomb, but Reynolds didn’t even feel their freezing touch, and though his whole body shuddered involuntarily as he had slid silently into the river, his mind had not even registered the shock. There was no room in his mind for any physical sensation, for any emotion or thought of any kind, except for that one starkly simple, primeval desire, the desire that had sloughed off the tissue veneer of civilization as if it had never been – that of revenge. Revenge or murder – there was no distinction in Reynolds’ mind at that moment, the absolute fixity of his purpose permitted of none. That frightened boy in Budapest, Jansci’s wife, the incomparable Count – they were all dead. They were dead, primarily, because he, Reynolds, had set foot in Hungary, but he had not been their executioner: only the evil genius of Hidas could be held accountable for that. Hidas had lived too long.

Automatic carbine held high above his head, Reynolds breasted his way through the thin film of crackling ice that stretched out from the far bank, felt his feet touch bottom and scrambled ashore. Stooping, he filled a spread handkerchief with handfuls of tiny pebbles and sand, tied the corners and was on his way, without even pausing to wring or shake any of the icy water out of his clothes.

He had run two hundred yards down-river before making his crossing, and now he found himself in the perimeter of the wood that curved east and south to the bisecting road where the two trucks were parked. Here, in the shadow of the trees, he could not be seen and the frozen snow on the ground beneath their laden branches was so thin that his stealthy progress could have been heard barely ten feet away. He had slung his automatic carbine now, and the weighted handkerchief in his hand swung gently to and fro as he picked his wary way from tree to tree.

But for all his soft-footed caution, he had covered the ground swiftly, and was alongside the parked trucks within three minutes, peering out from the shelter of a tree. There was no sign of life from either truck, their rear doors were closed, there was no sign of life at all. Reynolds straightened, preparing to glide across the snow to Hidas’ truck, then froze into immobility, rigid against the bole of his tree. A man had moved out from behind the shelter of Hidas’ truck, and was coming directly towards him.

For a moment Reynolds was certain that the man had seen him, then almost at once relaxed. AVO soldiers didn’t go hunting for armed enemies in a dark wood with their gun carried under the crook of one arm and a lighted cigarette in the other hand. The sentry obviously had no suspicions, was just walking around to keep his blood moving in that bitter cold. He passed by within six feet of Reynolds and as he began to move away, Reynolds waited no longer. He took one long step out from the concealing shelter of the tree, his right arm swinging, and just as the man started to whirl round, his mouth open to cry out, the weighted cloth caught him with vicious force at the nape of the neck. Reynolds had time to spare and to catch both the man and his gun and lower them silently to the ground.

He had the carbine in his hand now, and half a dozen steps took him to the front of the brown truck – a truck, Reynolds could see, with its engine hood blown off and motor damaged by the explosion of the Count’s grenade – then he was moving silently across to Hidas’ caravan, his eyes so intently watching the back door that he all but tripped over the crumpled shape lying at his feet on the ground. Reynolds stooped low, and although he knew, even as he stooped, who it was that was lying there, nevertheless the shock of confirmation made him grasp the barrel of his carbine as if he would crush it in his bare hands.

The Count was lying face upwards in the snow, his AVO cap still framing the lean aristocratic face, the chiselled aquiline features even more aloof and remote in death than they had been in life. It was not hard to see how he had died – that burst of machine-gun fire must have torn half his chest away. Like a dog they had shot him down, like a dog they had left him lying there in the darkness of that bitter night, and the gently falling snow was beginning to lie on the cold, dead face. Moved by some strange impulse, Reynolds removed the hated AVO cap, sent it spinning away into the darkness, pulled a handkerchief – a handkerchief stained with the Count’s own blood – from the dead man’s breast pocket and spread it gently across his face. Then he rose and walked to the door of Hidas’ caravan.

Four wooden steps led to the door and Reynolds walked up these as softly as a cat, kneeling at the top to peer through the keyhole. In the space of a second he could see what he wanted to see – a chair on the left-hand side, a made-up bunk on the right hand and, at the far end, a table with what looked like a wireless transmitter bolted to the top of it. Hidas, back to the door, was just seating himself in front of the table, and as he cranked a handle with his right hand and picked up a telephone with his left, Reynolds realized that it was no transmitter but a radio telephone. They should have thought of it. Hidas was not a man to move about the country without means of instant communication available to him, and now, with the skies clearing, he would almost certainly be calling in the air force, in a last, desperate gamble to stop them, but it didn’t matter any more. It was too late, it made no difference now, none to those whom Hidas was pursuing, and certainly none to Hidas himself.

Reynolds’ groping hand found the knob and he passed through the well-oiled door like a shadow, not quite closing it behind him: Hidas, his ear filled with the sound of the ratchety whirl of the call-up handle, heard nothing. Reynolds took three steps forward, the barrel of his carbine gripped in both hands and the stock raised high above his shoulders, and, as Hidas began to speak, brought it swinging down over Hidas’ shoulder and smashed the delicate mechanism to pieces.

Hidas sat for a moment in petrified astonishment, then whirled round in his chair, but he had lost the only moment he would ever need, Reynolds was already two paces away, the carbine again reversed in his hands, the muzzle trained on Hidas’ heart. Hidas’ face was a stone mask carved in shock, only his lips moved but no sound came from them as Reynolds slowly retreated, picked up the key he had seen lying on the bunk, felt for the keyhole and locked the door, his eyes never once leaving Hidas’. Then he moved forward and halted, with the mouth of the carbine, rocklike in its steadiness, just thirty inches short of the man in the chair.

‘You look surprised to see me, Colonel Hidas,’ Reynolds murmured. ‘You should not be surprised, you of all men. Those who live by the sword, as you have lived by the sword, must know better than any man that this moment comes to all of us. It comes to you to-night.’

‘You have come to murder me.’ It was a statement and not a question. Hidas had looked on death too often from the sidelines not to recognize it when its face turned towards himself. The shock was slowly draining out of his face, but no fear had yet come to replace it.

‘Murder you? No. I have come to execute you. Murder is what you did to Major Howarth. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t shoot you down in cold blood as you shot him? He hadn’t even a gun on him.’

‘He was an enemy of the State, an enemy of the people.’

‘My God! You try to justify your actions?’

‘They need no justification, Captain Reynolds. Duty never does.’

Reynolds stared at him. ‘Are you trying to excuse yourself – or just begging for your life?’

‘I never beg.’ There was no pride, no arrogance in the Jew’s voice, just a simple dignity.

‘Imre – the boy in Budapest. He died – slowly.’

‘He withheld important information. It was essential that we got it quickly.’

‘Major-General Illyurin’s wife.’ Reynolds spoke quickly to fight off a growing feeling of unreality. ‘Why did you murder her?’

For the first time a flicker of emotion showed in the thin, intelligent face, then vanished as quickly as it had come.

‘I did not know that.’ He inclined his head. ‘It is no part of my duty to wage war on women. I genuinely regret her death – even though she was dying as it was.’

‘You are responsible for the actions of your AVO thugs?’

‘My men?’ He nodded. ‘They take their orders from me.’

‘They killed her – but you are responsible for their actions. Therefore you are responsible for her death.’

‘If you put it that way, I am.’

‘If it were not for you, these three people would be alive now.’

‘I cannot speak for the General’s wife. The other two – yes.’

‘Is there then – I ask you for the last time – any reason why I shouldn’t kill you – now?’

Colonel Hidas looked at him for a long moment, in silence, then he smiled faintly, and Reynolds could have sworn that the smile was tinged with sadness.

‘Numerous reasons, Captain Reynolds, but none that would convince an enemy agent from the west.’

It was the word ‘west’ that did it – but Reynolds was not to realize that until long afterwards. All he knew was that something had triggered open a flood gate, released a spate of pictures and memories in his mind, pictures of Jansci talking to him in his house in Budapest, in the dark agony of that torture cell in the Szarháza prison, with the firelight on his face in the cottage in the country, memories of what Jansci had said, what he had said over and over again with a repetitive persistence, with a passionate conviction that had hammered his ideas more deeply home into his mind than Reynolds had ever suspected. Everything he had said about – deliberately, desperately, Reynolds forced the thoughts and pictures from his mind. His carbine jabbed forward another six inches.

‘On your feet, Colonel Hidas.’

Hidas rose and stood facing him, his hands hanging by his sides, and stared down at the gun.

‘Clean and quick, Colonel Hidas, eh?’

‘As you wish.’ His eyes lifted from Reynolds’ whitening trigger finger and found his face. ‘I would not beg for myself what had been denied so many of my victims.’

For a fraction of a second longer Reynolds continued to increase the pressure on the trigger, then, almost as if something had snapped inside him, he relaxed and took one pace back. The white flame of anger still burnt within him, burnt as brightly as ever, but with these last words, the words of a man quite unafraid to die, he had felt the bitterness of defeat welling in him so powerfully that he could taste it in his mouth. When he spoke his voice was strained and hoarse, he scarcely recognized it as his own.

‘Turn round!’

‘Thank you, but no. I prefer to die this way.’

‘Turn round,’ Reynolds said savagely, ‘or I’ll smash both your kneecaps and turn you round myself.’

Hidas looked at his face, saw the implacability, shrugged to the inevitable, turned away and collapsed without a sound across his desk as the butt of the rifle caught him behind the ear. For a long moment Reynolds stared down at the fallen man, swore in a bitter fury that was directed not against the man at his feet but at himself, turned and left the caravan.

There was a feeling of emptiness, almost of despair, in Reynolds’ mind as he descended the steps. He was no longer particularly careful to conceal his presence, that fury within him had still not found its outlet, and though he would not have admitted it, even to himself, he would have welcomed the chance to turn his automatic carbine on the armed AVO men within that other truck, cut them down without compunction as they came pouring out the door silhouetted against the light behind, just as they had cut down Jansci’s wife silhouetted in the light of the door of the ferryman’s cottage. And then suddenly he broke step and stood still, stood very still indeed: he had just realized something that he should have realized minutes ago had he not been so bent on his reckoning with Colonel Hidas. The brown lorry was not only quiet: it was far too quiet to be true.

In three steps he had reached the side of the truck and pressed his ear against it. There was nothing to be heard, just nothing at all. He ran round to the back, flung open a door and peered inside. He could see nothing, it was pitch dark inside, but he did not need to see anything: the truck was empty, and no one moved or even breathed inside.

The truth struck with such suddenness, such savage force, that he was for the moment numbed, incapable of all action, capable of nothing but the realization of the enormity of his blunder, the thoroughness, the appalling ease with which he had been deceived. He might have known, he might have guessed – the Count had been suspicious of it even at the beginning – that Colonel Hidas would never have accepted defeat, never have given up, far less given up with such submissive ease. The Count would never have fallen for it, never. Hidas’ men must have been on their way to make the crossing of the river to the south even when the flare had been fired, and both he and the Cossack had blindly accepted as genuine the noisily faked withdrawal through the woods. They would be there by now, they were bound to be there by now, and he, Reynolds, was missing at the very moment his friends needed him as they had never done before – and, to crown the folly of his night’s work, he had sent Sandor, the one man who might have saved them, to collect the truck. Jansci had only the boy and the old man to help him – and Julia was there. When he thought of Julia, when he thought of her and the leering gargoyle face of the giant Coco, something snapped inside Reynolds’ mind and released him from his motionless thrall.

Two hundred metres lay between him and the bank of the river, two hundred metres covered in deep, frozen snow, he was exhausted from sleeplessness and privations and weighed down by heavy boots and saturated clothes, but he covered the distance in less time than he had ever done before. It was not anger now – although it was still there – that lent wings to his heels, and kicked the flying gouts of snow head-high as he pounded along, it was not anger, it was fear, fear such as he had never known before.

But it was not numbing, paralyzing fear, but a fear, instead, that seemed to sharpen all his senses and lend him an abnormal clarity of mind. He braked suddenly, arms windmilling violently, as he approached the bank of the river, slid noiselessly over the edge on to the shingle, cat-footed down to the water’s edge and pushed himself out into the icy current without even the tiniest splash. He was almost half-way across, swimming smoothly and powerfully, one arm holding the carbine far above his head, when he heard the first shot from the ferryman’s cottage, followed immediately afterwards by another and another.

The time for caution was gone – if ever there had been such a time. Churning the water madly, Reynolds reached the far side in a few seconds, touched bottom, scrambled up the far shore with his driving feet slipping desperately on the sliding shingle, swarmed over the bank, clicked over the carbine switch from automatic to single shot firing – a machine-gun was less than useless, it was positively dangerous, if friend and enemy were fighting in the same confined space – and ran, crouching, through the pale oblong of light that was the ferryman’s front door. Ten minutes, at the most, had elapsed since he had walked out through that door.

Jansci’s wife was no longer in the corridor, but the corridor was not empty. An AVO man, carbine in hand, had just come out of the living-room and was shutting the door behind him, and even at that moment Reynolds realized that that could mean only one thing – the fight inside, if there had been a fight and not just a massacre, was over. The AVO man saw him, tried to bring his gun up, realized he could not make it in time and the warning shout died in his throat as the stock of Reynolds’ carbine caught him terribly across the head and side of the face.

Carbine again reversed in his hands, Reynolds gently toed open the door. One swift, all-encompassing glance at the tableau before him and he knew that the fight was indeed over. Six AVO men Reynolds could see inside the room, four of them still alive: one lay almost at his feet in that strangely crumpled relaxation that only the dead can achieve, another by the wall on the right-hand side, not far from where Jennings was sitting with his head almost on his knees as he shook it slowly from side to side. In one far corner a man held a carbine on a bleeding Jansci while another bound his hands to the chair on which he was sitting, while in the other corner the Cossack, lying on his back, was struggling desperately with the man who, lying on top of him, was bludgeoning him with short arm blows to the head: but the Cossack fought on, and Reynolds could see how he was fighting: he was pulling with all his strength on the stock of his whip whose sixteen-foot length was wrapped round and round the throat of the man above, inexorably turning his face a strange bluish colour and slowly strangling him. Near the centre of the room stood the giant Coco, contemptuously ignoring the girl who struggled so futilely in the crook of one great arm, grinning with wolfish expectation as the AVO man fighting with the Cossack stopped belabouring him, reached back with his right hand, fumbled with his belt and came clear with a sheath knife.

Reynolds had been trained, and ruthlessly trained by wartime professionals who had survived similar situations a score of times, and survived by neither demanding surrender nor wasting the tiniest fraction of a second in unnecessary announcement of their presence. Those who kicked open a door and said, ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ never lived to talk about it. The door was still swinging gently on its hinges when he fired the first of three deliberate, spaced, carefully-aimed shots. The first pitched the Cossack’s assailant into the corner of the room, the knife falling from his upraised hand and clattering to the floor, the second took the man who held the gun on Jansci, the third the man who had been tying Jansci’s hands. Reynolds was just lining up for the fourth shot, sighting for Coco’s head with an almost inhuman lack of haste – the giant AVO had swung the girl round in front of his body for protection – when a rifle barrel smashed across his carbine and left forearm, sending his gun clattering heavily on the floor. Yet another AVO man had been behind the door as it had opened, and been completely hidden: he must have thought it had been the man who had just left returning, until Reynolds had fired his first shot.

‘Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot him!’ The quick hoarse order had come from Coco. With a careless shove he sent the girl across the room to land heavily on the couch, and stood there with his hands on his hips, while his fury at what had just happened and his elation at seeing Reynolds powerless before him fought for supremacy in the darkly evil face. The struggle didn’t last long, lives, even the lives of his comrades, mattered little to Coco, and a grin of unholy anticipation spread across the brutalized face.

‘See if our friend is armed,’ he commanded.

The other man searched Reynolds briefly, hands running up and down the outside of the clothes, then shook his head.

‘Excellent. Catch this.’ Coco threw his carbine across to the other, and drew his open palms slowly up and down across the front of his tunic. ‘I have an account to settle with you, Captain Reynolds. Or perhaps you have forgotten.’

Coco meant to kill him, Reynolds knew, meant to have the joy of killing him with his bare hands. His own left arm was useless, it felt as if it had been broken, and useless it would remain for some time to come. Deep inside him he knew that he had no chance in the world, that he couldn’t hold Coco off for more than a few seconds, but he told himself that if ever he was to have a chance it was now, before the fight had started, while the element of surprise still existed as a possibility, and even with the thought he was hurling himself across the room, his legs jack-knifing open as his feet reached for the giant’s chest. Coco was almost taken by surprise – almost, but not quite. He was moving away even as the feet struck him, making him grunt with the pain, and one of his flailing arms caught Reynolds behind the head so that he all but somersaulted, his back striking painfully against the wall by the couch with a force that drove all the breath from his body with an explosive gasp. For a moment he lay quite still, then, badly winded and aching though he was, he forced himself to struggle to his feet again – if Coco’s feet reached him while he was still on the floor, Reynolds knew that he would never rise again – moved to meet the advancing giant and struck out with all that remained of his strength at the sneering face before him, felt his fist strike home jarringly against solid bone and flesh, then coughed in agony as Coco contemptuously ignored the blow and struck him with tremendous force in the middle of the body.

Reynolds had never been hit so hard, he had never imagined any person could have been capable of hitting so hard. The man had the strength of an ox. In spite of the sea of pain below his chest, in spite of his rubbery legs and the wave of nausea that threatened to choke him, he was still on his feet, but only because his splayed hands were supporting him from the wall against which he had been hurled. He thought he could hear the girl calling his name, but he couldn’t be sure, he seemed to have become suddenly deaf. His vision, too, was blurred and dimmed, he could just vaguely distinguish Jansci struggling frantically with the ropes that secured him, when he saw Coco coming at him again. Hopelessly, despairingly, Reynolds flung himself forward in a last futile attempt to lash out at his tormentor, but Coco just sidestepped, laughed, placed the flat of his hand against Reynolds’ back and sent him reeling crazily across the room to crash into the jamb of the open door and slide slowly down to the floor.

For a few brief moments consciousness left him, then slowly returned, and he shook his head dazedly. Coco was still in the middle of the room, arms akimbo, triumph in every line of the seamed and evil face, the lips drawn back in wolfish anticipation of pleasure yet to come. Coco meant him to die, Reynolds realized dimly, but he meant him to die slowly. Well, at this rate, it would not be much longer. He had no strength left, he had to fight for every gasping breath he took and his legs were almost gone.

Weakly, dizzily, he pushed himself somehow to his feet and stood there swaying, conscious of nothing but the reeling room, the fire of his body, the salt taste of blood on his lips and his indestructible enemy standing there laughing in the middle of the floor. Once more, Reynolds told himself dully, once more, he can only kill me once, and he was reaching his hands behind to launch himself on his last tottering run when he saw the expression on Coco’s face change and an iron arm reached across his chest and pinned him to the corner as Sandor walked slowly into the room.

Reynolds would never afterwards forget how Sandor looked at that moment, like something that belonged not to this world but to the ice-halls of Scandinavian mythology. Fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty, had elapsed since Sandor had plunged into that freezing river, and most of the time since then he had spent out in the sub-zero cold. He was coated now with ice, coated almost from head to foot, and the falling snow had clung to him and turned to ice also: in the light from the ferryman’s oil lamp, he glistened and glittered in that rigid, crackling suit of ice like some eerie visitor from another and alien world.

The AVO man by the door stood open-mouthed in shock, recovered with a visible effort, dropped one of the two carbines – his own and Coco’s – that were encumbering him and tried to line the other up on Sandor, but he was too late. Sandor caught the rifle with one hand, tore it from the man’s grasp as one would take a stick from a little child and pushed the man back against the wall with his free hand. The man swore, took two running steps and leapt snarling at him, but Sandor just plucked him out of the air, whirled round in a complete circle, then flung him across the room with dreadful force to smash high up against a wall, where he hung grotesquely for a moment as if held there by invisible hands, then fell to the floor like a broken, crumpled doll.

Even as the AVO man had leapt at Sandor, Julia had slid off the couch and thrown herself at Coco’s back, flinging her arms round him, trying to delay him if only for a second. But her hands could not even meet round his chest, he had broken her grip as if it were cotton and pushed her to one side without as much as looking at her, and had already fallen upon an off-balance Sandor, bludgeoning him with great swinging sledge-hammer blows, so that Sandor fell heavily to the floor with Coco on top of him, his great hands already round Sandor’s throat. There was no grin on Coco’s face now, no gleam of anticipation in the small black eyes: he was fighting for his life, and he knew it.

For a moment Sandor lay motionless, while Coco’s iron fingers tightened inexorably round his throat, the massive shoulders hunching as he put all his great strength into the effort. Then Sandor stirred, reached up his hands and caught Coco round the wrists.

Reynolds, still weak and barely able to stand upright, Julia beside him now and clutching his arms, stared in fascination. Reynolds’ entire body seemed a sea of pain, but even through that pain he seemed to feel again something of the agony he had felt when Sandor had once caught him by the forearms and squeezed – and squeezed with the flat of his fingers and not as he was now doing, with his hooked fingertips digging deep into the tendons on the inside of Coco’s wrists.

Shock it was that showed first in Coco’s face, the shock of unbelief, then pain, then fear as his wrists were crushed in the vice of Sandor’s grip and his fingers round Sandor’s throat slowly forced to open. Still holding Coco’s wrists, Sandor pushed him to one side, rose to his feet, pulled Coco after him so that the AVO giant towered high above him, swiftly released the wrists and had his arms locked round Coco’s chest before Coco had had time to appreciate what was happening. Reynolds thought at first that Sandor meant to throw the other, and from the momentary relief on Coco’s face it seemed that he had thought so also, but if he had so thought the disillusionment and the pain and the fear came soon and all in an instant as Sandor buried his head deep into Coco’s chest, lifted his shoulders high and began to crush the giant in a murderous bear hug which Coco must have known in a sudden flash of certainty he would never live to feel relaxing, for the fear in his expression gave way to contorted terror as his face turned bluish-red from the lack of oxygen, as he moaned deep in his throat while his starving lungs fought for air and his fists hammered in frantic madness against Sandor’s back and shoulders with as much effect as if he were beating them against a rock of granite. But the memory of that moment that Reynolds took with him was not of Coco’s threshing panic and darkening, pain-contorted features, not even of Sandor’s expressionless face with the still gentle eyes, but of the steady crackling of ice as Sandor crushed ever more tightly, more remorselessly, and of the horror on Julia’s face as he caught her to him and tried to shut out from her ears as best he could the hoarse, horrible scream that filled the room then slowly faded and died.

FIFTEEN

It was just after four o’clock in the morning when Jansci halted them in the centre of a thick clump of head-high reeds, turned and waited until the others had caught up with him. They came in single file, Julia, Reynolds, the Cossack and Dr Jennings with Sandor beside him, half-helping, half-carrying him across the frozen marshes, all with their heads bent low, all except Sandor with the trudging, stumbling gait of those very close to exhaustion.

They had reason, and more than reason, for their exhaustion. Two hours and three miles lay between them and where they had left the truck, two hours of winding in and out between the frozen reeds that snapped and crackled at the lightest touch, two hours of interminable stumbling and crunching through the thin ice of freezing marshes, ice just not strong enough to bear their weight, but more than strong enough to impede their progress, compelling them to lift each foot high to clear it before moving on to the next step, where they would sink down again through ice and frozen mud, often beyond their knees. But that same ice was their salvation that night, the dogs of the border guards would have found the conditions hopeless for operation and could only have floundered along, helplessly out of their depth. Not that they had seen or heard either dogs or guards once in those three miles: on a night such as this even the fanatical guards of the AVO huddled high in their stilted border towers round the warmth of a stove, and let who would pass by.

It was a night such as the night on which Reynolds had crossed the border into Hungary, with the cold stars riding high in a cold and empty sky, and a wind sighing gently through the marshes, a bitter wind that touched their cheeks with icy talons and carried their frozen breath drifting away through the softly rustling reeds. For a moment Reynolds himself was lost in the memory of that first night, when he had lain in the snow, as cold, and even colder than he was now, and had felt the icy wind in his face and seen the stars high above, and then, with an almost physical effort, he wrenched his mind away from that night, for his thoughts had moved on to the police hut and the appearance of the Count and he felt sick to his heart when he remembered for the hundredth time that the Count would never come again.

‘No time for dreaming now, Meechail,’ Jansci said gently. He nodded with his roughly-bandaged head, leaned forward and parted high reeds for Reynolds to have a glimpse of what lay beyond – a sheet of ice, perhaps ten feet wide, that stretched in both directions as far as he could see. He straightened again and looked at Jansci.

‘A canal?’

‘A ditch, that’s all. Just a little drainage ditch, but the most important in all Europe. On the other side lies Austria.’ Jansci smiled. ‘Five metres from freedom, Meechail, freedom and the success of a mission. Nothing can stop you now.’

‘Nothing can stop me now,’ Reynolds echoed. His voice was flat, empty of all life. The longed-for freedom interested him hardly at all, the complete success of his mission even less: the success was ashes in his mouth, the cost had been too cruelly high. Worst of all perhaps, was what was to come, and he knew with a sombre certainty what that was. He shivered in the bitter cold. ‘It grows even colder, Jansci. The crossing is safe – no guards are near?’

‘The crossing is safe.’

‘Come then – let’s not wait any longer.’

‘Not me.’ Jansci shook his head. ‘Just you and the professor and Julia. I remain here.’

Reynolds nodded heavily and said nothing. He had known what Jansci was about to say, and knew with equal certainty that discussion was useless. He turned away, not knowing what to say, and even as he turned Julia broke loose from his arms and caught her father by the lapels of his coat.

‘What did you say, Jansci? What was that you said?’

‘Please, Julia. There is no other way, you know there is no other way. I have to stay.’

‘Oh, Jansci! Jansci!’ She was pulling at his lapels, shaking them in her anxiety. ‘You can’t stay, you mustn’t, not now, not after all that’s happened!’

‘More than ever after all that’s happened.’ He put his arms round her and pulled her close and said: ‘I have work to do, I have much work to do, and as yet I have hardly begun: if I stop now, the Count will never forgive me.’ He smoothed the blonde hair with his scarred and twisted hand. ‘Julia, Julia, how could I ever accept freedom for myself while I know there are hundreds of poor people who will never know freedom unless it comes through me – no one can help them as well as I, you know that. How can I buy for myself at the expense of others a happiness that would be no happiness at all? Can you expect me to sit at my ease somewhere in the west while the young men here are still being dragged off to the Black Sea Canal or dying old women being driven out to work in the beet fields, and the snow still on the ground? Do you indeed think so little of me, Julia?’

‘Jansci.’ Her face was buried in his coat, and her voice was muffled. ‘I can’t leave you, Jansci.’

‘You can and must. You were not known before, but you are known now and there is no place for you in Hungary. No harm will come to me, my dear – not while Sandor lives. And the Cossack, too, will look after me.’ In the starlit gloom the Cossack seemed to straighten and grow tall.

‘And you can leave me? You can let me go?’

‘You no longer need me, my child – you have stayed with me all these years because you thought I needed you – and now Meechail here will look after you. You know that.’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was more muffled than ever. ‘He is very kind.’

Jansci caught her by the shoulders, held her at arm’s length and looked at her.

‘For the daughter of Major-General Illyurin, you’re a very silly girl. Do you not know, my dear, that if it were not for you, Meechail would not be returning to the west?’

She turned and stared at Reynolds, and he could see that her eyes were shining in the starlight with unshed tears. ‘Is – is this true?’

‘It’s true.’ Reynolds smiled faintly. ‘A long argument, but I lost it. He won’t have me at any price.’

‘I’m sorry. I did not know.’ The life had gone out of her voice. ‘This is the end of it, then.’

‘No, my dear, only the beginning.’ Jansci caught her close and held her as her body shook with dry soundless sobs, looked over her shoulder and nodded at Reynolds and Sandor. Reynolds nodded in return, shook the scarred misshapen hand in silence, murmured his good-bye to the Cossack, parted the tall reeds and went down to the ditch, followed by Sandor, who held one end of the Cossack’s whip while Reynolds held the other and moved out gingerly on the ice. On the second step it broke under his weight and he was standing on the muddy bottom, covered to the thighs in the freezing water, but he ignored the numbing cold of it, broke the ice in front of him and pulled himself up on to the far bank. Austria, he said to himself, this is Austria, but the word meant nothing to him.

Something splashed into the water behind him and he turned to see Sandor forging his way through the water and broken ice, carrying Dr Jennings high in his arms, and as soon as Reynolds had him safely on top of the bank, Sandor waded back to the Hungarian side, gently took the girl away from Jansci and carried her in turn across the ditch. For a moment she clung to him almost desperately as if she were terrified of breaking the last contact with the life she was leaving behind her, then Reynolds stooped down and raised her on to the bank beside him.

‘Do not forget what I told you, Dr Jennings,’ Jansci called softly. He and the Cossack had come through the reeds and were standing on the far bank. ‘We are walking a long dark road, but we do not want to walk it for ever more.’

‘I will not forget.’ Jennings was shaking with cold. ‘I will never forget.’

‘It is good.’ Jansci bowed his white bandaged head in a barely perceptible token of farewell. ‘God be with you. Dowidzenia.’

‘Dowidzenia,’ Reynolds echoed. Dowidzenia – till we meet again. He turned, caught Julia and Dr Jennings by the arms and led them, the shivering old man and the silently crying girl, up the gentle slope to the field and the freedom that lay beyond. At the top he turned, just for a moment, and he could see the three men walking slowly away across the Hungarian marshes, never once looking back, and by and by they were lost to sight behind the tall reeds and he knew that he would never see them again.

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Night Without End

HARPER

To Bunty

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

ONE: Monday midnight

TWO: Monday 1 a.m.–2 a.m.

THREE: Monday 2 a.m.–3 a.m.

FOUR: Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m.

FIVE: Monday 6 p.m.–7 p.m.

SIX: Monday 7 p.m.–Tuesday 7 a.m.

SEVEN: Tuesday 7 a.m.–Tuesday midnight

EIGHT: Wednesday 4 a.m–8 p.m.

NINE: Wednesday 8 p.m.–Thursday 4 p.m.

TEN: Thursday 4 p.m.–Friday 6 p.m.

ELEVEN: Friday 6 p.m.–Saturday 12.15 p.m.

TWELVE: Saturday 12.15 p.m.–12.30 p.m.

HMS Ulysses: Alistair MacLean

Where Eagles Dare: Alistair MacLean

What’s next?

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Monday midnight

It was Jackstraw who heard it first – it was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stove – curio collectors paid fancy prices for what they imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusks – rose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough.

‘Aeroplane,’ he announced casually.

‘Aeroplane!’ I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. ‘Jackstraw, you’ve been hitting the methylated spirits again.’

‘Indeed, no, Dr Mason.’ The blue eyes, so incongruously at variance with the swarthy face and the broad Eskimo cheekbones, crinkled into a smile: coffee was Jackstraw’s strongest tipple and we both knew it. ‘I can hear it plainly now. You must come and listen.’

‘No, thanks.’ It had taken me fifteen minutes to thaw out the frozen condensation in my sleeping-bag, and I was just beginning to feel warm for the first time. Heaven only knew that the presence of a plane in the heart of that desolate ice plateau was singular enough – in the four months since our IGY station had been set up this was the first time we had had any contact, however indirectly, with the world and the civilisation that lay so unimaginably beyond our horizons – but it wasn’t going to help either the plane or myself if I got my feet frozen again. I lay back and stared up through our two plate glass skylights: but as always they were completely opaque, covered with a thick coating of rime and dusting of snow. I looked away from the skylights across to where Joss, our young Cockney radioman, was stirring uneasily in his sleep, then back to Jackstraw.

‘Still hear it?’

‘Getting louder all the time, Dr Mason. Louder and closer.’

I wondered vaguely – vaguely and a trifle irritably, for this was our world, a tightly-knit, compact little world, and visitors weren’t welcome – what plane it could be. A met. plane from Thüle, possibly. Possibly, but unlikely: Thule was all of six hundred miles away, and our own weather reports went there three times a day. Or perhaps a Strategic Air Command bomber testing out the DEW-line – the Americans’ distant early warning radar system – or even some civilian proving flight on a new trans-polar route. Or maybe some base plane from down by Godthaab—

‘Dr Mason!’ Jackstraw’s voice was quick, urgent. ‘It’s in trouble, I think. It’s circling us-lower and closer all the time. A big plane, I’m sure: many motors.’

‘Damn!’ I said feelingly. I reached out for the silk gloves that always hung at night above my head, pulled them on, unzipped my sleeping-bag, swore under my breath as the freezing air struck at my shivering skin, and grabbed for my clothes. Half an hour only since I had put them off, but already they were stiff, awkward to handle and abominably cold – it was a rare day indeed when the temperature inside the cabin rose above freezing point. But I had them on – long underwear, woollen shirt, breeches, silk-lined woollen parka, two pairs of socks and my felt cabin shoes – in thirty seconds flat. In latitude 72.40 north, 8000 feet up on the Greenland ice-cap, self-preservation makes for a remarkable turn of speed. I crossed the cabin to where no more than a nose showed through a tiny gap in a sleeping-bag.

‘Wake up, Joss.’ I shook him until he reached out a hand and pushed the hood off his dark tousled head. ‘Wake up, boy. It looks as if we might need you.’

‘What – what’s the trouble?’ He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared up at the chronometer above his head. ‘Midnight! I’ve been asleep only half an hour.’

‘I know. Sorry. But get a move on.’ I recrossed the cabin, passed by the big RCA transmitter and stove, and halted in front of the instrument table. The register showed the wind ENE, velocity 15 knots – near enough 17 miles per hour, on a night like this, with the ice-crystals and drift lifting off the ice-cap, clogging and slowing up the anemometer cups, the true speed was probably half as much again. And the pen of the alcohol thermograph was running evenly along the red circle of 40 degrees below zero – 72 degrees of frost. I thought of the evil combination of these two factors of wind and cold and felt my skin crawl.

Already Jackstraw was silently climbing into his furs. I did the same – caribou trousers and parka with reindeer fur trimmed hood, all beautifully tailored by Jackstraw’s wife – sealskin boots, woollen mittens and reindeer gloves. I could hear the plane quite clearly now, and so too, I could see, did Joss. The deep even throb of its motors was plain even above the frantic rattling of the anemometer cups.

‘It’s – it’s an aeroplane!’ You could see that he was still trying to convince himself.

‘What did you think it was – one of your precious London double-deckers?’ I slipped snow-mask and goggles round my neck and picked up a torch from the shelf beside the stove: it was kept there to keep the dry batteries from freezing. ‘Been circling for the past two or three minutes. Jackstraw thinks it’s in trouble, and I agree.’

Joss listened.

‘Engines sound OK to me.’

‘And to me. But engine failure is only one of a dozen possible reasons.’

‘But why circle here?’

‘How the devil should I know? Probably because he can see our lights – the only lights, at a guess, in 50,000 square miles. And if he has to put down, which God forbid, he stands his only chance of survival if he puts down near some human habitation.’

‘Heaven help them,’ Joss said soberly. He added something else, but I didn’t wait to hear. I wanted to get up top as quickly as possible.

To leave our cabin, we had to use a trap-door, not an ordinary door. Our cabin, a prefabricated, sectioned structure that had been hauled up from the coast on tractor sleds during the month of July was deep-sunk in a great oblong hole that had been gouged out from the surface of the icecap, so that only the top few inches of its flat roof projected above ground level. The trap-door, hinged at both ends so that it could open either upwards or downwards, was reached by a short steep flight of steps.

I climbed the first two of these, took down the wooden mallet that hung there permanently by the wall and pounded round the already bruised and splintered edges of the trap to loosen the ice that held it locked fast. This was an almost invariable routine: whenever the trap had previously been opened for any length of time at all, the layer of warm air that always lay under the roof seeped slowly out, melting the surrounding snow – which promptly turned to ice when the trap was closed again.

Tonight the ice cracked easily. I got my shoulder under the trap, levered upwards against the accumulated drift of snow above, and scrambled out.

I was prepared for what awaited me up top-the gasping, panic-stricken feeling of suffocation as the warm air was sucked from my lungs by that deadly, numbing cold – but even so I wasn’t sufficiently prepared. The wind speed was far higher than I had feared. Bent double and coughing violently, breathing shallowly to avoid frosting my lungs, I turned my back to the wind, breathed into my reindeer gloves, slipped on my snow-mask and goggles and straightened. Jackstraw was already standing by my side.

The wind on the ice-cap never howled or shrieked. It moaned, instead, a low-pitched, unutterably eerie ululation: a requiem for the damned, if ever there was one, the agony of some soul lost in torment. That same moan had driven men mad before now: less than two months previously I had had to send our tractor mechanic, a completely broken youngster who had lost all contact with the last shadow of reality, back to our Uplavnik base. The wind had done that to him.

Tonight its desolate threnody boomed and faded, boomed and faded in the lower registers of sound with an intensity which I had seldom heard, while its fingers plucked at the tightly strung guy ropes of the radio antenna and instrument shelters to provide its own whistling obbligato of unearthly music. But I was in no mood then to listen to its music, and, indeed, that sepulchral wailing was not the dominant sound on the ice-cap that night.

The throbbing roar of big aero engines, surging and receding, as the wind gusted and fell away, like surf on some distant shore, was very close now. The sound lay to windward of us at that moment, and we turned to face it, but we were blind. Although the sky was overcast, there was no snow that night – at any time, heavy snowfalls, strangely enough, are all but unknown on the Greenland ice-cap – but the air was full of millions of driving, needle-pointed ice spicules that swept towards us out of the impenetrable darkness to the east, clogging up our goggles in a matter of seconds and stinging the narrow exposed area of my face between mask and goggles like a thousand infuriated hornets. A sharp, exquisite pain, a pain that vanished almost in the moment of arrival as the countless sub-zero spicules dug deep with their anæsthetising needles and drove out all sensation from the skin. But I knew this ominous absence of feeling all too well. Once again I turned my back to the wind, kneaded the deadened flesh with mittened hands till the blood came throbbing back, then pulled my snow-mask higher still.

The plane was flying in an anti-clockwise direction, following, it seemed, the path of an irregular oval, for the sound of its motors faded slightly as it curved round to north and west. But within thirty seconds it was approaching again, in a swelling thunder of sound, to the south-west – to the leeward of us, that was – and I could tell from Jackstraw’s explosive ejaculation of sound, muffled behind his mask, that he had seen it at the same moment as myself.

It was less than half a mile distant, no more than five hundred feet above the ice-cap, and during the five seconds it remained inside my line of vision I felt my mouth go dry and my heart begin to thud heavily in my chest. No SAC bomber this, nor a Thule met. plane, both with crews highly trained in the grim craft of Arctic survival. That long row of brightly illuminated cabin windows could belong to only one thing – a trans-Atlantic or trans-polar airliner.

‘You saw it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw’s snow-mask was close to my ear.

‘I saw it.’ It was all I could think to say. But what I was seeing then was not the plane, now again vanished into the flying ice and drift, but the inside of the plane, with the passengers – God, how many passengers, fifty, seventy? – sitting in the cosy security of their pressurised cabin with an air-conditioned temperature of 70°F, then the crash, the tearing, jagged screeching that set the teeth on edge as the thin metal shell ripped along its length and the tidal wave of that dreadful cold, 110 degrees below cabin temperature, swept in and engulfed the survivors, the dazed, the injured, the unconscious and the dying as they sat or lay crumpled in the wreckage of the seats, clad only in thin suits and dresses …

The plane had completed a full circuit and was coming round again. If anything, it was even closer this time, at least a hundred feet lower, and it seemed to have lost some speed. It might have been doing 120, perhaps 130 miles an hour, I was no expert in these things, but for that size of plane, so close to the ground, it seemed a dangerously low speed. I wondered just how effective the pilot’s windscreen wipers would be against these flying ice spicules.

And then I forgot all about that, forgot all about everything except the desperate, urgent need for speed. Just before the plane had turned round to the east again and so out of the line of our blinded vision, it had seemed to dip and at the same instant two powerful lights stabbed out into the darkness, the one lancing straight ahead, a narrow powerful beam glittering and gleaming with millions of sparkling diamond points of flame as the ice-crystals in the air flashed across its path, the other, a broader fan of light, pointing downwards and only slightly ahead, its oval outline flitting across the frozen snow like some flickering will o’ the wisp. I grabbed Jackstraw’s arm and put my head close to his.

‘He’s going to land! He’s looking for a place to put down. Get the dogs, harness them up.’ We had a tractor, but heaven only knew how long it would have taken to start it on a night like this. ‘I’ll give you a hand as soon as I can.’

He nodded, turned and was lost to sight in a moment. I turned too, cursed as my face collided with the slatted sides of the instrument shelter, then jumped for the hatch, sliding down to the floor of the cabin on back and arms without bothering to use the steps. Joss, already completely clad in his furs but with the hood of his parka hanging over his shoulders, was just emerging from the food and fuel tunnel which led off from the other end of the cabin, his arms loaded with equipment.

‘Grab all the warm clothing you can find, Joss,’ I told him quickly. I was trying to think as quickly and coherently as I was talking, to figure out everything that we might require, but it wasn’t easy, that intense cold numbed the mind almost as much as it did the body. ‘Sleeping-bags, blankets, spare coats, shirts, it doesn’t matter whose they are. Shove them into a couple of gunny sacks.’

‘You think they’re going to land, sir?’ Curiosity, anticipation, horror – each struggled for supremacy in the thin, dark intelligent face. ‘You really think so?’

‘I think they’re going to try. What have you got there?’

‘Fire bombs, a couple of Pyrenes.’ He dumped them by the stove. ‘Hope they’re not solid.’

‘Good boy. And a couple of the tractor extinguishers – the Nu-Swifts, G-1000, I think.’ A great help these little things are going to be, I thought, if several thousand gallons of petrol decide to go up in flames. ‘Fire axes, crowbars, canes, the homing spool – for heaven’s sake don’t forget the homing spool – and the searchlight battery. Be sure and wrap that up well.’

‘Bandages?’

‘No need. Seventy degrees of frost will freeze blood and seal a wound quicker than any bandage. But bring the morphia kit. Any water in these two buckets?’

‘Full. But more ice than water.’

‘Put them on the stove – and don’t forget to turn out the stove and both the lights before you leave.’ Incongruously enough, we who could survive in the Arctic only by virtue of fire, feared it above all else. ‘Pile the rest of the stuff up by the instrument shelter.’

I found Jackstraw, working only by the feeble light of his torch, outside the lean-to drift-walled shelter that we had built for the dogs from empty packing cases and an old tractor tarpaulin. He appeared to be fighting a losing battle in the centre of a milling pack of snarling yelping dogs, but the appearance was illusion only: already he had four of the dogs off the tethering cable and the sledge tracelines snapped into their harness.

‘How’s it coming?’ I shouted.

‘Easy.’ I could almost see the crinkling grin behind the snow-mask. ‘I caught most of them asleep, and Balto is a great help – he’s in a very bad temper at being woken up.’

Balto was Jackstraw’s lead dog – a huge, 90-pound, half-wolf, half-Siberian, direct descendant of, and named for the famous dog that had trekked with Amundsen, and who later, in the terrible winter of ‘25, his sledge-driver blind behind him, had led his team through driving blizzards and far sub-zero cold to bring the life-giving anti-toxin into the diphtheria-stricken town of Nome, Alaska. Jackstraw’s Balto was another such: powerful, intelligent, fiercely loyal to his master – although not above baring his wolf’s fangs as he made a token pass at him from time to time-and, above all, like all good lead dogs, a ruthless disciplinarian with his team-mates. He was exercising that disciplinary authority now – snarling, pushing and none-too-gently nipping the recalcitrant and the slow-coaches, quelling insubordination in its earliest infancy.

‘I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll get the searchlight.’ I made off towards the mound of snow that loomed high to the westward of the cabin, broke step and listened. There was no sound to be heard, nothing but the low-pitched moan of the wind on the ice-cap, the eternal rattling of the anemometer cups. I turned back to Jackstraw, my face bent against the knifing wind.

‘The plane – have you heard the plane, Jackstraw? I can’t hear a thing.’

Jackstraw straightened, pulled off his parka hood and stood still, hands cupped to his ears. Then he shook his head briefly and replaced the hood.

‘My God!’ I looked at him. ‘Maybe they’ve crashed already’

Again the shake of the head.

‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘On a night like this you wouldn’t hear a thing if they crashed half a mile downwind.’

‘I’d have felt it, Dr Mason.’

I nodded slowly, said nothing. He was right, of course. The frozen surface of this frozen land transmitted vibration like a tuning-fork. Last July, seventy miles inland, we had distinctly felt the vibration of the ice-cap as an iceberg had broken off from a glacier in a hanging valley and toppled into the fjord below. Maybe the pilot had lost his bearings, maybe he was flying in ever-widening circles trying to pick up our lights again, but at least there was hope yet.

I hurried across to where the tractor, sheeted in tarpaulin, lay close in to the high snow wall that had been cut down the middle of the drift. It took me a couple of minutes to clear away the accumulated snow at one end and wriggle in under the tarpaulin. There was no question of trying to lift it – its impregnated oils had frozen solid and it would have cracked and torn under any pressure.

The searchlight, fixed to a couple of bolts on the tractor bonnet, was held down by two quick-release butterfly nuts. In these latitudes, quick-release was a misnomer: the nuts invariably froze after even the briefest exposure. The accepted practice was to remove one’s gloves and close mittened hands round the nuts until body heat warmed and expanded them enough to permit unscrewing. But there was no time for that tonight: I tapped the bolts with a spanner from the tool box and the steel pins, made brittle by the intense cold, sheared as if made from the cheapest cast iron.

I crawled out at the foot of the tarpaulin, searchlight clutched under one arm, and as soon as I straightened I heard it again – the roar of aero engines, closing rapidly. They sounded very near, very low, but I wasted no time trying to locate the plane. Head lowered against the wind and the needle-sharp lances of the flying ice, I felt rather than saw my way back to the cabin hatch and was brought up short by Jackstraw’s steadying hand. He and Joss were busy loading equipment aboard the sledge and lashing it down, and as I stooped to help them something above my head fizzled and spluttered into a blinding white glare that threw everything into a harsh black and white relief of frozen snow and impenetrable shadow. Joss, remembering what I had completely forgotten – that dousing our cabin lights would have robbed the pilot of his beacon – had ignited a magnesium flare in the slats of the instrument shelter.

We all turned as the plane came into our vision again, to the south, and it was at once apparent why we had lost all sight and sound of it. The pilot must have made a figure of eight turn out in the darkness, had reversed his approach circle, and was flying from east to west: less than two hundred feet up, undercarriage still retracted, it passed within a couple of hundred yards of us like some monstrous bird. Both headlights were now dipped, the twin beams a glitter of kaleidoscopic light in the ice-filled darkness of the sky, the twin oval pools of light interlocking now and very bright, racing neck and neck across the snow. And then these pools, increasing as rapidly in size as they diminished in strength, slipped away to the left as the plane banked sharply to the right and came curving round clockwise to the north. I knew now what the pilot was intending and my hands clenched helplessly inside mittens and gloves. But there was nothing I could do about this.

‘The antenna!’ I shouted. ‘Follow out the line of the antenna.’ I stooped and gave the sledge its initial shove as Jackstraw shouted at Balto. Joss was by my side, head close to mine.

‘What’s happening? Why are we—’

‘He’s coming down this time. I’m sure of it. To the north.’

‘The north?’ Not even the snow-mask could hide the horror in his voice. ‘He’ll kill himself. He’ll kill all of them. The hummocks—’

‘I know.’ The land to the north-east was broken and uneven, the ice raised up by some quirk of nature into a series of tiny hillocks, ten, twenty feet high, tiny but the only ones within a hundred miles. ‘But he’s going to do it, all the same. A belly landing with the wheels up. That’s why he reversed his circle. He wants to land upwind to give himself the minimum stalling ground speed.’

‘He could land to the south, into the wind.’ Joss sounded almost desperate. ‘It’s a billiard table there.’

‘He could, but he won’t.’ I had to shout the words to make myself heard above the wind. ‘He’s nobody’s fool. He knows if he lands to windward of us, even a hundred yards to windward, the chances of finding our lights, our cabin, in this weather just don’t exist. He’s got to land upwind. He’s just got to.’

There was a long silence as we staggered forward, head and shoulders bent almost to waist level against the wind and ice-filled drift, then Joss moved close again.

‘Maybe he’ll see the hummocks in time. Maybe he can—’

‘He’ll never see them,’ I said flatly. ‘Flying into this stuff he can’t possibly see a hundred yards in front of him.’

The radio antenna, rime-coated now to almost fifty times its normal size, sagging deeply and swaying pendulum-like in the wind between each pair of fourteen-foot poles that supported it, stretched away almost 250 feet to the north. We were following the line of this, groping our way blindly from pole to pole and almost at the end of the line, when the roar of the aircraft engines, for the last few seconds no more than a subdued murmur in the night as the wind carried the sound from us, suddenly swelled and increased to a deafening crescendo as I shouted a warning to the others and flung myself flat on the ground: the huge dark shape of the airliner swept directly over us even as I fell. I would have sworn, at the time, that I could have reached out and touched it with my hand, but it must have cleared us by at least ten feet – the antenna poles, we later discovered, were undamaged.

Like a fool, I immediately leapt to my feet to try to get a bearing on the vanishing plane and was literally blown head over heels by the tremendous slipstream from the four great propellers, slid helplessly across the frozen crust of the snow and fetched up on my back almost twenty feet from where I had been standing. Cursing, bruised and not a little dazed, I got to my feet again, started off in the direction where I could hear the dogs barking and howling in a paroxysm of fear and excitement, then stopped abruptly and stood quite still. The engines had died, all four of them had died in an instant, and that could mean only one thing: the airliner was about to touch down.

Even with the realisation a jarring vibration, of a power and intensity far beyond anything I had expected, reached my feet through the frozen crust of the ice-cap. No ordinary touchdown that, I knew, not even for a belly landing: the pilot must have overestimated his height and set his ship down with force enough to crumple the fuselage, to wreck the plane on the spot.

But he hadn’t. I was prone to the frozen snow again, ear pressed hard against it, and I could half hear, half feel, a kind of hissing tremor which could only have come from the fuselage, no doubt already splintered and ripped, sliding over the ice, gouging a furrowed path through it. How long this sound continued, I couldn’t be sure – six seconds, perhaps eight. And then, all at once, came another earth tremor, by far more severe than the first, and I heard clearly, even above the gale, the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of metal being twisted and tortured out of shape. And then, abruptly, silence – a silence deep and still and ominous, and the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all.

Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-mask-it must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parka – it was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enough – and probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn’t like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin.

Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them.

‘You all right, sir?’ Joss asked. He took a step closer. ‘Good lord, you’ve lost your mask!’

‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’ It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. ‘Did you get a bearing on that plane?’

‘Roughly. Due east, I should say.’

‘Jackstraw?’

‘A little north of east, I think.’ He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind.

‘We’ll go east.’ Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. ‘We’ll go east – Joss, how long is that spool?’

‘Four hundred yards. More or less.’

‘So. Four hundred yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we’ll cut across them. Let’s hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here.’

I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathers – weird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leeward – and made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fast – our lives depended on that line, and without it we could never find our way back to the antenna, and so eventually to the cabin, through the pitch-dark confusion of that gale-ridden arctic night. There was no possibility of retracing steps through the snow: in that intense cold, the rime-crusted snow was compacted into a frozen névé that was but one degree removed from ice, of an iron-hard consistency that would show nothing less than the crimp marks of a five-ton tractor.

We started off at once, with the wind almost in our faces, but slightly to the left. I was in the lead, Jackstraw came behind with the dogs and Joss brought up the rear, unreeling the line from the homing spool against the pressure of the return winding spring.

Without my mask, that blinding suffocating drift was a nightmare, a cruel refinement of contrasting torture where the burning in my throat contrasted with the pain of my freezing face for dominance in my mind. I was coughing constantly in the super-chilled air, no matter how I tried to cover mouth and nose with a gloved hand, no matter how shallowly I breathed to avoid frosting my lungs.

The devil of it was, shallow breathing was impossible. We were running now, running as fast as the ice-glazed slipperiness of the surface and our bulky furs would allow, for to unprotected people exposed to these temperatures, to that murderous drift-filled gale, life or death was simply a factor of speed, of the duration of exposure. Maybe the plane had ripped open or broken in half, catapulting the survivors out on to the ice-cap – if there were any survivors: for them, either immediate death as the heart failed in the near impossible task of adjusting the body to an instantaneous change of over 100°F, or death by exposure within five minutes. Or maybe they were all trapped inside slowly freezing. How to get at them? How to transport them all back to the cabin? But only the first few to be taken could have any hope. And even if we did get them all back, how to feed them – for our own supplies were already dangerously low? And where, in heaven’s name, were we going to put them all?

Jackstraw’s shout checked me so suddenly that I stumbled and all but fell. I turned back, and Joss came running up.

‘The end of the line?’ I asked.

He nodded, flashed a torch in my face. ‘Your nose and cheek – both gone. They look bad.’

Gloves off, I kneaded my face vigorously with my mittened hands until I felt the blood pounding painfully back, then took the old jersey which Jackstraw dug out from a gunny sack and wrapped it round my face. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

We struck off to the north, with the wind on our right cheeks – I had no option but to gamble on the hope that the wind had neither backed nor veered – our torches probing the ground in front of us, stopping every fifteen or twenty feet to drive a pointed bamboo marker into the frozen ground. We had covered fifty yards without sighting anything, and I was just beginning to become convinced that we must still be well to the west of the plane’s touchdown point and wondering what in the world we should do next when we almost literally stumbled into an eighteen inch deep, ten foot wide depression in the snow-crust of the ice-cap.

This was it, no question about that. By a one in a hundred chance we had hit on the very spot where the plane had touched down – or crashed down, if the size of the depression in that frozen snow were anything to go by. To the left, the west, the ground was virginal, unmarked – ten feet to that side and we should have missed it altogether. To the east, the deep depression shelved rapidly upwards, its smooth convexity now marred by two large gouge marks, one in the centre and one to the right of the track, as if a pair of gigantic ploughs had furrowed through the ground: part of the under fuselage must have been ripped open by the impact – it would have been a wonder had it not been. Some way farther to the east, and well to the right of the main track, two other grooves, parallel and of a shallow bowl shape, had been torn in the snow. The gouge marks, plainly, of the still-racing propellers: the plane must have tilted over on its right wing just after the moment of landing.

To see all this took no longer than to sweep a torch through a swift semi-circle. I shouted to Joss to take another bundle of canes and prop up the homing spool line that led back to the antenna-if this weren’t done it would drift over and be lost to sight in ten minutes – and then rejoin us: then I turned and ran after Jackstraw who had already urged his team forwards and eastwards along the track of the crashed plane.

The wind was worse than ever, the drift an almost solid wall that reduced our speed to a lurching stumble and forced us to lean far into it to maintain our balance. Two hundred yards, three hundred, and then, almost a quarter of a mile from where it had touched down we found the airliner simply by walking straight into it. It had slewed almost 90 degrees as it had come to a halt, and was lying square across its own path, still resting on even keel.

In the feeble light of my torch the airliner, even although its fuselage rested on the ground, seemed immensely high and to stretch away for a vast distance on either side, but for all its great size there was something peculiarly pathetic and forlorn about it. But this, of course, was purely subjective, the knowledge in my own mind that this crippled giant would never leave here again.

I could hear no movement, see no movement. High above my head a faint blue light seemed to glow behind some of the cabin windows but apart from that there was no sign of life at all.

TWO

Monday 1 a.m.–2 a.m.

My greatest fear had already proved groundless-there was no sign of fire anywhere, no flickering red to see, no hidden crackling to hear. It was still possible that some small tongue of flame was creeping along inside the fuselage or wings looking for the petrol or oil that would help it blaze into destructive life – and with that wind to fan the flames, destruction would have been complete – but it hardly seemed worth worrying about: and it was unlikely that any pilot cool-headed enough to turn off the ignition would have forgotten to shut down the petrol lines.

Already Jackstraw had plugged our searchlight into the dry battery and handed me the lamp. I pressed the switch, and it worked: a narrow but powerful beam good for six hundred yards in normal conditions. I swung the beam to my right, then brought it slowly forward.

Whatever colours the plane may have had originally, it was impossible to distinguish any of them now. The entire fuselage was already shrouded in a sheet of thin rimed ice, dazzling to the eye, reflecting the light with the intensity, almost, of a chromed mirror. The tail unit was intact. So, too, was the fuselage for half its length, then crumpled and torn underneath, directly opposite the spot where we stood. The left wing was tilted upwards at an angle of about five degrees above the normal – the plane wasn’t on such an even keel as I had first thought. From where I stood this wing blocked off my view of the front, but just above and beyond it I saw something that made me temporarily forget the urgency of my concern for those inside and stand there, stockstill, the beam trained unwaveringly on that spot.

Even under the coating of ice the big bold lettering ‘BOAC was clearly visible. BOAC! What on earth was a BOAC airliner doing in this part of the world? The SAS and KLM, I knew, operated trans-Arctic flights from Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Winnipeg, Los Angeles and Vancouver via Sondre Strömfjord, about an hour and a half’s flying time away to the south-west on the west coast of Greenland, just on the Arctic Circle, and I was pretty sure that Pan American and Trans World operated reciprocal services on the same route. It was just barely possible that freak weather conditions had forced one of these planes far enough off course to account for its presence here, but if I was right about the BOAC, it just wasn’t possible—

‘I’ve found the door, Dr Mason.’ Jackstraw had taken my arm, jerking me out of my reverie, and was pointing to a big oval door with its lowest point just at our eye-level. ‘We will try these, perhaps?’

I heard the metallic clang as he lifted a couple of crowbars off the sledge, and nodded. We could only try. I set the searchlight on the snow, adjusted it on its gimbals so as to illuminate the door, took one of the crowbars and thrust it beneath the foot of the oval, the flattened end sliding easily between door and fuselage. Jackstraw did the same. We heaved together, but nothing happened. Again we heaved, and again, our feet coming clear of the ground, but the door remained immovable. To localise pressure, we concentrated on one bar, and this time we felt something giving: but it was the lever, not the door. With a pistol-shot crack, the cold-weakened crowbar snapped six inches from the end and we both landed on our backs.

Even the urgency of the moment, my almost complete lack of knowledge about planes, was no excuse. I cursed my stupidity in wasting valuable time trying to force open a massive door locked on the inside by heavy clips designed to withstand an internal pressure of many thousands of pounds, grabbed searchlight and battery, ducked round under the towering tail assembly into the full force of the wind and flying drift and moved forward till I came to the right wing.

Its tip was buried deep under the frozen snow, the airscrew blades bent back at right angles to their normal line. I thought perhaps I might try to scramble up the wing towards the fuselage and smash in one of the cabin windows, but after a couple of seconds wild slithering on the ice-sheeted wing in that gusting gale wind I gave up the idea. To maintain a foothold was quite impossible: besides, it was doubtful whether I could have smashed in a window anyway. Like the door, the windows were designed to withstand great pressures.

Stumbling, slipping, we ran round the buried tip of the wing, and clear in sight now was the ice hummock that had brought the big airliner to its sudden halt. About fifteen feet high and twenty wide at the base, it lay in the right angle formed by the front of the fuselage and the leading edge of the wing. But it wasn’t the root of the wing that had absorbed the initial impact, a glance at the nose of the aircraft was enough to show that. The plane must have crashed into the ice-mound just to right of centre of the control cabin: the windscreens were smashed, the fuselage ripped open and crushed back for six or seven feet. What had happened to the pilot sitting on that side at the moment of the telescopic impact just didn’t bear thinking about: but at least we had found our way in.

I set the searchlight so that its beam illuminated the wrecked control cabin, gauged the distance to the lower sill of the windscreen – it must have been fully nine feet – and jumped. My gloved hands hooked on firmly but slipped almost at once on the ice-rimed surface. I grabbed for a purchase grip on one of the windscreen pillars, felt my fingers striking against solid glass on both sides -the windscreen hadn’t been as completely shattered as I had imagined – and was on the point of losing my hold altogether when Jackstraw moved forward swiftly and took my weight.

With my knees on his shoulders and a fire axe in my hand it took me no more than two minutes to smash away the glass that clung to the pillars and the upper and lower edges. I hadn’t realised that aircraft glass – toughened perspex – could be so tough, nor, when it came to clambering through into the control cabin in my bulky furs, that windscreens could be so narrow.

I landed on top of a dead man. Even in the darkness I knew he was dead. I fumbled under my parka, brought out the torch, switched it on for a couple of seconds, then put it out. It was the co-pilot, the man who had taken the full impact of the crash. He was pinned, crushed between his seat and the twisted, fractured wreckage of what had been control columns, levers and dashboard instruments: not since I had once been called out to the scene of a head-on collision between a racing motor-cyclist and a heavy truck had I seen such dreadful injuries on any man. Whatever any of the survivors, the shocked and injured survivors in the plane, must see, it mustn’t be this. It was ghastly beyond description.

I turned and leaned out the windscreen. Jackstraw was directly below, cupped gloved hands shielding his eyes against the flying ice spicules as he stared upwards.

‘Bring a blanket,’ I shouted. ‘Better, bring a full gunny sack. And the morphia kit. Then come up yourself.’

He was back in twenty seconds. I caught both sack and morphia box, placed them on the twisted cabin floor behind me, then reached out a hand to help Jackstraw, but it wasn’t necessary. Athleticism wasn’t the forte of the short and stocky Greenlanders, but Jackstraw was the fittest and most agile man I had ever met. He sprang, caught the lower sill of the left windscreen in his left hand, the central pillar in the other and swung legs and body through the centre screen as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.

I gave him my torch to hold, rummaged in the gunny sack and dragged out a blanket. I spread it over the dead co-pilot, tucking the corners down among twisted and broken ends of metal, so that it shouldn’t blow free in the icy wind that swirled and gusted through the wrecked control cabin.

‘Waste of a good blanket, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘But – well, it isn’t pretty’

‘It isn’t pretty’ Jackstraw agreed. His voice was quite steady, devoid of all inflection. ‘How about this one?’

I looked across at the left-hand side of the cabin. It was almost completely undamaged and the chief pilot, still strapped in his seat and slumped against his sidescreens, seemed quite unmarked. I stripped fur glove, mitten and silk glove off my right hand, reached out and touched the forehead. We had been out of doors now for over fifteen minutes in that ferocious cold, and I would have sworn that my hand was about as cold as the human flesh could get. But I was wrong. I pulled the gloves back on and turned away, without touching him further. I wasn’t carrying out any autopsies that night.

A few feet farther back we found the radio operator in his compartment. He was half-sitting, half-lying against the for’ard bulkhead of his shack where he must have been catapulted by the crash. His right hand was still clutched firmly round the handgrip of the front panel of his radio set – it must have been ripped clear off the transmitter, which didn’t look as if it would ever transmit anything again.

On the bulkhead, behind his head, blood gleamed dully in the torch-light. I bent over the unconscious man – I could see that he was still breathing – removed my gloves once more and gently slid my fingers behind his head. Just as gently I withdrew them. How the hell, I thought, part hopelessly, part savagely, am I to carry out a head operation on a person with a telescoped occiput: the state he was in, I wouldn’t have given a fig for his chance in the finest operating theatre in London. At the very least he would be blind for life, the sight centre must have been completely destroyed. I reached for his pulse: racing, faint, erratic to a degree. The thought came to me, a thought compounded as much of cowardice as of regret, that in all likelihood the possibility of my having to operate on him was remote, very remote. If he were to survive the inevitably rough handling that would be needed to get him out of that aircraft and then the journey back to the cabin through that ice-laden sub-zero gale, it would be a miracle indeed.

It seemed unlikely that he would ever wake again. But he might, he just conceivably might, so I broached the morphia kit. Then we eased his head and neck into a more comfortable position, covered him with a blanket and left him.

Immediately behind the radio compartment was a long narrow room which extended across two-thirds of the width of the plane. A quick glance at the two chairs and collapsible bunk was enough to show that this must be the crew’s rest room, and someone had been resting there at the moment of the crash. That crumpled shirt-sleeved figure on the floor must have been taken completely unawares, before he had the slightest knowledge of what was happening: and he would never know now.

We found the stewardess in the pantry, lying on her left side on the floor, the outspread black hair fallen forward over her face. She was moaning softly to herself, but it wasn’t the moan of one in pain. Her pulse was steady enough, but fast. Jackstraw stooped down beside me.

‘Shall we lift her, Dr Mason?’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘She’s coming to, I think, and she can tell us far quicker than we can find out whether there’s anything broken. Another blanket, and we’ll let her be. Almost certainly someone much more in need of our attention.’

The door leading into the main passenger compartment was locked. At least, it appeared to be, but I was pretty certain it would never be locked under normal circumstances. Perhaps it had been warped by the impact of landing. It was no time for half measures. Together, we took a step back, then flung all the weight of our shoulders against it. It gave suddenly, three or four inches, and at the same time we heard a sharp exclamation of pain from the other side.

‘Careful!’ I warned, but Jackstraw had already eased his weight. I raised my voice. ‘Get back from that door, will you? We want to come in.’

We heard a meaningless mutter from the other side, followed by a low groan and the slipping shuffle of someone trying to haul himself to his feet. Then the door opened and we passed quickly inside.

The blast of hot air struck me in the face like an almost physical blow. I gasped, fought off a passing moment of weakness when my legs threatened to give under me, then recovered sufficiently to bang the door shut behind me. With the motors dead and the arctic chill striking through the thin steel of the fuselage this warmth, no matter how efficient the cabin insulation, wouldn’t last long: but while it did, it might be the saving of all those who still lived. A thought struck me and, ignoring the man who stood swaying before me, one hand clutching a seat grip for support, the other rubbing at a blood-masked forehead, I turned to Jackstraw.

‘Carry the stewardess in here. We’ll take a chance – and it’s not all that much of a chance either. There’s a damned sight more hope for her in here with a broken leg than out there with only a bump on the head. Throw her blanket over the wireless operator – but whatever you do don’t touch him.’

Jackstraw nodded and went out, closing the door quickly behind him. I turned to the man who still stood shakily in the aisle, still dazedly rubbing his hand, a big brown square hand matted on the back with black hair, across a bleeding forehead. He looked at me for a moment, then stared down uncomprehendingly at the blood dripping on to the bright red tie and blue shirt that contrasted so oddly with the light grey gaberdine suit. He closed his eyes tightly, then shook his head to clear it.

‘Sorry to ask the inevitable question.’ The voice was quiet, deep, well under control. ‘But – what happened?’

‘You crashed,’ I said shortly. ‘What do you remember?’

‘Nothing. Well, that is, just a bump, then a loud screeching tearing noise—’

‘Then you hit the door.’ I gestured at the bloodstains behind me. ‘Sit down for a moment. You’ll be all right.’ I’d lost interest in him and was staring down the length of the cabin. I’d expected to see most of the seats wrenched off their bases, but instead they were all there exactly as they should have been, three wide to the left of me, two to the right, the seats in the front half facing aft, those to the rear facing forward. More than that, I had expected to see people, injured, broken and moaning people, flung all over the seats and aisles: but the big passenger compartment seemed almost empty, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

But it wasn’t empty, not quite. Apart from the man by my side there were, I found, nine others altogether. Two men lay in the front part of the aisle. One, a big broad-shouldered man with curly dark hair, was propped up on an elbow, staring around him with a puzzled frown on his face; near him, lying on his side, was a smaller, much older man, but all I could see of him were a few wisps of black hair plastered across a bald head, a Glenurquhart plaid jacket that seemed a couple of sizes too big for him and the loudest check tie it had ever been my misfortune to see. It seemed obvious that they had been sitting together in the left-hand seat adjacent to them and had been flung out when the plane crashed into the ice-mound and slewed violently to one side.

In the seat beyond that, also on the left, a man sat by himself. My first reaction was surprise that he, too, hadn’t been hurled into the aisle, but then I saw that he was awake and fully conscious. He was sitting rigidly in his seat, pressed in hard against the window, legs braced on the floor, holding on with both hands to the table fixed to the seat in front: tautened tendons ridged the backs of his thin white hands, and his knuckles gleamed in the torch-light. I lifted the beam higher, saw that he was wearing a close-fitting clerical collar.

‘Relax, Reverend,’ I said soothingly. ‘Terra firma once more, and this is as far as you are going.’ He said nothing, just stared at me through rimless glasses, so I left him. He seemed unhurt.

Four people sat in the right-hand side of the front part of the plane, each one in a window seat; two women, two men. One of the women was fairly elderly, but so heavily made-up and with her hair so expensively dyed and marcelled that I couldn’t have guessed her age within ten years: her face, somehow, seemed vaguely familiar. She was awake, and looking slowly about her, her eyes empty of understanding. So, too, was the woman in the next seat, an even more expensive-looking creature with a mink coat flung cape-wise over her shoulders to show a simple green jersey dress that I suspected cost a small fortune: she was about twenty-five, I guessed, and with her blonde hair, grey eyes and perfect features would have been one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, if it weren’t for the overfull and rather sulky mouth. Maybe, I thought uncharitably, she remembered to do something about that mouth when she was fully awake. But right then, she wasn’t fully awake: none of them was, they all behaved as if they were being dragged up from the depths of an exhausting sleep.

Still more asleep than awake were the other two men in the front, one a big, burly, high-coloured man of about fifty-five, with the gleaming thick white hair and moustache of the caricature of a Dixie colonel: the other was a thin elderly man, his face heavily lined, unmistakably Jewish.

Not bad going so far, I thought with relief. Eight people, and only one cut forehead among the lot of them – the perfect argument, if ever there was one, for having all seats in a plane face towards the rear. No question but that they all owed, if not their lives, at least their immunity to injury to the fact that their high-backed seats had almost completely cushioned and absorbed the shock of impact.

The two passengers in the rear end of the cabin were the perfect argument for not having the seat face forward. The first I came to – a brown-haired young girl of about eighteen or nineteen, wearing a belted raincoat – was lying on the floor between two seats. She was stirring, and as I put my hands under her arms to help her up, she screamed in sudden pain. I changed my grip and lifted her gently on to the seat.

‘My shoulder.’ Her voice was low and husky. ‘It is very sore.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ I’d eased back the blouse at the neck and closed it again. ‘Your clavicle – the collar-bone – is gone. Just sit there and hold your left arm in your right hand … yes, so. I’ll strap you up later. You won’t feel a thing, I promise you.’

She smiled at me, half-timidly, half-gratefully, and said nothing. I left her, went to the very rear seat in the plane, stooped to examine the man there then straightened in almost the same instant: the weirdly unnatural angle of the head on the shoulders made any examination superfluous.

I turned and walked forward, everybody was awake now, sitting upright or struggling dazedly to their feet, their half-formed questions as dazed as the expressions on their faces. I ignored them for a moment, looked questioningly at Jackstraw as he came through the forward door, closely followed by Joss.

‘She won’t come.’ Jackstraw jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’s awake, but she won’t leave the wireless operator.’

‘She’s all right?’

‘Her back hurts, I think. She wouldn’t say.’

I made no answer and moved across to the main door – the one we’d failed to open from the outside. I supposed it no business of mine if the stewardess chose to devote her attention to a member of the crew instead of to the passengers who were her charges. But it was damned queer all the same – almost as queer as the fact that though the inevitability of the crash must have been known for at least fifteen minutes before the actual event, not one of the ten passengers in the cabin had been wearing a seat-belt – and the stewardess, wireless operator and the crew member in the rest room appeared to have been caught completely unprepared.

The circular door handle refused to budge. I called Jackstraw, but even the extra weight made not the slightest impression on it. Obviously, it was immovably jammed – there must have been a slight telescoping effect along the entire length of the fuselage as the plane had crashed into the ice-mound. If the door I had noticed behind the control cabin was as badly warped as this one -and, being nearer the point of impact, it almost inevitably would be – then they’d all have to leave via the windscreens of the control cabin. I thought of the wireless operator with his dreadful head wound and wondered bleakly whether even trying to move him out could be more than a futile gesture, anyway.

A figure barred my way as I turned from the door. It was the white-haired, white-moustached Dixie colonel. His face was dark red, his eyes light blue, choleric and protuberant. It only required someone to get this man good and mad and he would be no more than a debit entry in the account book of some life assurance company. And he seemed good and mad now.

‘What’s happened? What in the devil is all this?’ He had a voice like a Dixie colonel too, the Mason-Dixon line lay far to the north of wherever he had been born. ‘We’ve landed. Why? What are we doing here? What’s the noise outside? And -and who in the name of heaven are you?’

A big business tycoon, I thought wryly, with money enough and power enough to indulge an obviously over-generous capacity for righteous indignation: if I was going to meet any trouble, it wasn’t hard to guess the direction it was going to come from. But, right then, there was some excuse for his attitude: I wondered how I would have felt if I had gone to sleep in a trans-Atlantic airliner and woken up to find myself landed in the freezing middle of nowhere with three fur-clad people, complete with snow-goggles and snow-masks, waddling about the aisle of the plane.

‘You’ve crash-landed,’ I said briefly. ‘I don’t know why – how the hell should I? The noise outside is an ice-blizzard rattling against the fuselage. As for us, we are scientists managing an International Geophysical Year station half a mile from here. We saw and heard you just before you crashed.’

I made to push past him, but he barred my way.

‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind.’ The voice was more authoritative than ever and there was a surprising amount of muscle in that arm across my chest. ‘I think we have a right to know—’

‘Later.’ I knocked his arm away and Jackstraw completed the job by pushing him down into his seat. ‘Don’t make a damned nuisance of yourself. There’s a critically injured man who has to have attention, and at once. We’ll take him to safety and then come back for you. Keep the door shut.’ I was addressing all of them now, but the white-haired man’s wrathful spluttering attracted my attention again. ‘And if you don’t shut up and cooperate, you can stay here. If it weren’t for us you’d be dead, stiff as a board, in a couple of hours. Maybe you will be yet.’

I moved up the aisle, followed by Jackstraw. The young man who had been lying on the floor pulled himself on to a seat, and he grinned at me as I passed.

‘How to win friends and influence people.’ He had a slow cultured drawl. ‘I fear you have offended our worthy friend.’

‘I fear I have.’ I smiled, passed by, then turned. These wide shoulders and large capable hands could be more than useful to us. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Recoverin’ rapidly.’

‘You are indeed. You didn’t look so good a minute ago.’

‘Just takin’ a long count,’ he said easily. ‘Can I help?’

‘That’s why I asked,’ I nodded.

‘Glad to oblige.’ He heaved himself to his feet, towering inches above me. The little man in the loud tie and the Glenurquhart jacket gave an anguished sound, like the yelp of an injured puppy.

‘Careful, Johnny, careful!’ The voice, the rich, nasal and rather grating twang, was pure Bowery. ‘We got our responsibilities, boy, big commitments. We might strain a ligament—’

‘Relax, Solly’ The big man patted him soothingly on his bald head. ‘Just takin’ a little walk to clear my head.’

‘Not till you put this parka and pants on first.’ I’d no time to bother about the eccentricities of little men in loud jackets and louder ties. ‘You’ll need them.’

‘Cold doesn’t bother me, friend.’

‘This cold will. Outside that door it’s 110 degrees below the temperature of this cabin.’

I heard a murmur of astonishment from some of the passengers, and the large young man, suddenly thoughtful, took the clothes from Jackstraw. I didn’t wait until he had put them on, but went out with Joss.

The stewardess was bent low over the injured wireless operator. I pulled her gently to her feet. She offered no resistance, just looked wordlessly at me, the deep brown eyes huge in a face dead-white and strained with shock. She was shivering violently. Her hands were like ice.

‘You want to die of cold, Miss?’ This was no time for soft and sympathetic words, and I knew these girls were trained how to behave in emergencies. ‘Haven’t you got a hat, coat, boots, anything like that?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was dull, almost devoid of life. She was standing alone by the door now, and I could hear the violent rat-a-tat of her elbow as it shook uncontrollably and knocked against the door. ‘I’ll go and get them.’

Joss scrambled out through the windscreen to get the collapsible stretcher. While we were waiting I went to the exit door behind the flight deck and tried to open it, swinging at it with the back of my fire axe. But it was locked solid.

We had the stretcher up and were lashing the wireless operator inside as carefully as we could in these cramped conditions, when the stewardess reappeared. She was wearing her uniform heavy coat now, and high boots. I tossed her a pair of caribou trousers.

‘Better, but not enough. Put these on.’ She hesitated, and I added roughly, ‘We won’t look.’

‘I – I must go and see the passengers.’

‘They’re all right. Bit late in thinking about it, aren’t you?’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t leave him.’ She looked down at the young man at her feet. ‘Do you – I mean—’ She broke off, then it came out with a rush. ‘Is he going to die?’

‘Probably,’ I said, and she flinched away as if I had struck her across the face. I hadn’t meant to be brutal, just clinical.

‘We’ll do what we can for him. It’s not much, I’m afraid.’

Finally we had him securely lashed to the stretcher, his head cushioned against the shock as best we could. When I got to my feet, the stewardess was just pulling her coat down over the caribou pants.

‘We’re taking him back to our cabin,’ I said. ‘We have a sledge below. There’s room for another. You could protect his head. Want to come?’

‘The passengers—’ she began uncertainly.

‘They’ll be all right.’

I went back inside the main cabin, closing the door behind me, and handed my torch to the man with the cut brow. The two feeble night or emergency lights that burned inside were poor enough for illumination, worse still for morale.

‘We’re taking the wireless operator and stewardess with us,’ I explained. ‘Back in twenty minutes. And if you want to live, just keep this door tight shut.’

‘What an extraordinarily brusque young man,’ the elderly lady murmured. Her voice was low-pitched, resonant, with an extraordinary carrying power.

Only from necessity, madam,’ I said dryly. ‘Would you really prefer long-winded and flowery speeches the while you were freezing to death?’

‘Well, do you know, I really don’t think I would,’ she answered mock-seriously, and I could hear her chuckling – there was no other word for it – as I closed the door behind me.

Working in the cramped confines of that wrecked control cabin, in almost pitch darkness and with that ice-laden bitter gale whistling through the shattered windscreens, we had the devil’s own time of it trying to get the injured wireless operator down to that waiting sledge below. Without the help of the big young stranger I don’t think we would ever have managed it, but manage it we eventually did: he and I lowered and slid the stretcher down to Jackstraw and Joss, who took and strapped it on the sledge. Then we eased the stewardess down: I thought I heard her cry out as she hung supported only by a hand round either wrist, and remembered that Jack-straw had said something about her back being injured. But there was no time for such things now.

I jumped down and a couple of seconds later the big young man joined me. I hadn’t intended that he should come, but there was no harm in it: he had to go sometime, and there was no question of his having to ride on the sledge.

The wind had eased a little, perhaps, but the cold was crueller than ever. Even the dogs cowered miserably in the lee of the plane: now and again one of them stretched out a neck in protest and gave its long, mournful wolf call, a sound eerie beyond description. But their misery was all to the good: as Jackstraw said, they were mad to run.

And, with the wind and ice-drift behind them, run they did. At first I led the way with the torch, but Balto, the big lead dog, brushed me aside and raced on into the darkness: I had sense enough to let him have his head. He followed the twisting route of the plane’s snow-furrow, the bamboos, homing spool and antenna line as swiftly and unerringly as if it had been broad daylight, and the polished steel runners of the sledge fairly hissed across the snow. The frozen ground was smooth and flat as river ice; no ambulance could have carried the wireless operator as comfortably as our sledge did that night.

It took us no more than five minutes to reach the cabin, and in three more minutes we were on our way again. They were a busy three minutes. Jackstraw lit the oil stove, oil lamp and Colman pressure lamp, while Joss and I put the injured man on a collapsible cot before the stove, worked him into my sleeping-bag, slid in half a dozen heat pads – waterproof pads containing a chemical which gave off heat when water was added -placed a rolled up blanket under his neck to keep the back of his head off the cot, and zipped the sleeping-bag shut. I had surgical instruments enough to do what had to be done, but it had to wait: not so much because we had others still to rescue, urgent enough though that was, but the man lying at our feet, so still, so ashen-faced, was suffering so severely from shock and exposure that to touch him would have been to kill him: I was astonished that he had managed to survive even this long.

I told the stewardess to make some coffee, gave her the necessary instructions, and then we left her and the big young man together: the girl heating a pan over a pile of meta tablets, the young man staring incredulously into a mirror as he kneaded a frost-bitten cheek and chin with one hand, and with another held a cold compress to a frozen ear. We took with us the warm clothes we had lent them, some rolls of bandages, and left.

Ten minutes later we were back inside the plane. Despite its insulation, the temperature inside the main cabin had already dropped at least thirty degrees and almost everyone was shivering with the cold, one or two beating their arms to keep themselves warm. Even the Dixie colonel was looking very subdued. The elderly lady, fur coat tightly wrapped around her, looked at her watch and smiled.

‘Twenty minutes, exactly. You are very prompt, young man.’

‘We try to be of service.’ I dumped the pile of clothes I was carrying on a seat, nodded at them and the contents of a gunny sack Joss and Jackstraw were emptying. ‘Share these out between you and be as quick as you can. I want you to get out at once – my two friends here will take you back. Perhaps one of you will be kind enough to remain behind.’ I looked to where the young girl still sat alone in her back seat, still holding her left forearm in her hand. ‘I’ll need some help to fix this young lady up.’

‘Fix her up?’ It was the expensive young woman in the expensive furs speaking for the first time. Her voice was expensive as the rest of her and made me want to reach for a hairbrush. ‘Why? What on earth is the matter with her?’

‘Her collar-bone is broken,’ I said shortly.

‘Collar-bone broken?’ The elderly lady was on her feet, her face a nice mixture of concern and indignation. ‘And she’s been sitting there alone all this time – why didn’t you tell us, you silly man?’

‘I forgot,’ I replied mildly. ‘Besides, what good would it have done?’ I looked down at the girl in the mink coat. Goodness only knew that I didn’t particularly want her, but the injured girl had struck me as being almost painfully shy, and I was sure she’d prefer to have one of her own sex around. ‘Would you like to give me a hand?’

She stared at me, a cold surprised stare that would have been normal enough had I made some outrageous or improper request, but before she could answer the elderly lady broke in again.

‘I’ll stay behind. I’d love to help.’

‘Well—’ I began doubtfully, but she interrupted immediately.

‘Well yourself. What’s the matter? Think I’m too old, hey?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ I protested.

‘A fluent liar, but a gallant one.’ She grinned. ‘Come on, we’re wasting this valuable time you’re always so concerned about.’

We brought the girl into the first of the rear seats, where there was plenty of space between that and the first of the rearward facing front seats, and had just worked her coat off when Joss called me.

‘We’re off now, sir. Back in twenty minutes.’

As the door closed behind the last of them and I broke open a roll of bandage, the old lady looked quizzically at me.

‘Know what you’re doing, young man?’

‘More or less. I’m a doctor.’

‘Doctor, hey?’ She looked at me with open suspicion, and what with my bulky, oil-streaked and smelly furs, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t shaved for three days, I suppose there was justification enough for it. ‘You sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ I said irritably. ‘What do you expect me to do – whip my medical degree out from under this parka or just wear round my neck a brass plate giving my consulting hours?’

‘We’ll get along, young man,’ she chuckled. She patted my arm, then turned to the young girl. ‘What’s your name, my dear?’

‘Helene.’ We could hardly catch it, the voice was so low: her embarrassment was positively painful.

‘Helene? A lovely name.’ And indeed, the way she said it made it sound so. ‘You’re not British, are you? Or American?’

‘I’m from Germany, madam.’

‘Don’t call me “madam”. You know, you speak English beautifully. Germany, hey? Bavaria, for a guess?’

‘Yes.’ The rather plain face was transfigured in a smile, and I mentally saluted the old lady for the ease with which she was distracting the young girl’s thoughts from the pain. ‘Munich. Perhaps you know it?’

‘Like the back of my hand,’ she said complacently. ‘And not just the Hofbrauhaus either. You’re still very young, aren’t you?’

‘I’m seventeen.’

‘Seventeen.’ A nostalgic sigh. ‘Ah, my dear, I remember when I was seventeen. A different world. There was no trans-Atlantic airliner in those days, I can tell you.’

‘In fact,’ I murmured, ‘the Wright brothers were hardly airborne.’ The face had been more than familiar to me, and I was annoyed that I should have taken so long in placing it: I suppose it was because her normal setting was so utterly different from this bleak and frozen world.

‘Being insulting, young man?’ she queried. But there was no offence in her face.

‘I can’t imagine anyone ever insulting you. The world was at your feet even in the Edwardian days, Miss LeGarde.’

‘You know me, then?’ She seemed genuinely pleased.

‘It would be difficult to find anyone who doesn’t know the name of Marie LeGarde.’ I nodded at the young girl. ‘See, Helene knows it too.’ And it was clear from the awe-struck expression on the young German girl’s face that the name meant as much to her as to me. Twenty years queen of the music-hall, thirty years queen of the musical comedy stage, beloved wherever she was known less for her genius than for the innate kindliness and goodness which she tried to conceal from the world with a waspish tongue, for the half-dozen orphanages she maintained in Britain and Europe, Marie LeGarde was one of the few truly international names in the world of entertainment.

‘Yes, yes, I see you know my name.’ Marie LeGarde smiled at me. ‘But how did you know me?’

‘From your photograph, naturally. I saw it in Life the other week, Miss LeGarde.’

‘“Marie”, to my friends.’

‘I don’t know you,’ I protested.

‘I paid a small fortune to have that photograph retouched and made briefly presentable,’ she answered obliquely. ‘It was a splendid photograph, inasmuch as it bore precious little resemblance to the face that I carry about with me. Anyone who recognises me from that is my friend for life. Besides,’ she smiled, ‘I bear nothing but the most amicable feelings towards people who save my life.’

I said nothing, just concentrated on finishing the job of strapping up Helene’s arm and shoulders as quickly as possible: she was blue with cold, and shivering uncontrollably. But she hadn’t uttered a murmur throughout, and smiled gratefully at me when I was finished. Marie LeGarde regarded my handiwork approvingly.

‘I really do believe you have picked up some smattering of your trade along the way, Doctor -ah—’

‘Mason. Peter Mason, Peter to my friends.’

‘“Peter” it shall be. Come on, Helene, into your clothes as fast as you like.’

Fifteen minutes later we were back in the cabin. Jackstraw went to unharness the dogs and secure them to the tethering cable, while Joss and I helped the two women down the ice-coated steps from the trap-door. But I had no sooner reached the foot of the steps than I had forgotten all about Marie LeGarde and Helene and was staring unbelievingly at the tableau before me. I was just vaguely aware of Joss by my shoulder, and anger and dismay on his face slowly giving way to a kind of reluctant horror. For what we saw, though it concerned us all, concerned him most of all.

The injured wireless operator still lay where we had left him. All the others were there too, grouped in a rough semi-circle round him and round a cleared space to the left of the stove. By their feet in the centre of this space, upside down and with one corner completely stove in on the wooden floor, lay the big metal RCA radio transmitter and receiver, our sole source of contact with, our only means of summoning help from the outer world. I knew next to nothing about radios, but it was chillingly obvious to me – as it was, I could see, to the semi-circle of fascinated onlookers – that the RCA was smashed beyond recovery.

THREE

Monday 2 a.m.–3 a.m.

Half a minute passed in complete silence, half a minute before I could trust myself to speak, even bring myself to speak. When at last I did, my voice was unnaturally low in the unnatural hush that was broken only by the interminable clacking of the anemometer cups above.

‘Splendid. Really splendid. The perfect end to the perfect day.’ I looked round them slowly, one by one, then gestured at the smashed transmitter. ‘What bloody idiot was responsible for this – this stroke of genius?’

‘How dare you, sir!’ The white-haired man whom I had mentally labelled as the Dixie colonel took a step forward, face flushed with anger. ‘Mind your tongue. We’re not children to be—’

‘Shut up!’ I said, quietly enough, but there must have been something in my voice rather less than reassuring, for he fell silent, though his fists still remained clenched. I looked at them all again. ‘Well?’

‘I’m afraid – I’m afraid I did it,’ the stewardess faltered. Her brown eyes were as unnaturally large, her face as white and strained as when I had first seen her. ‘It’s all my fault.’

‘You! The one person here who should know just how vital radio really is. I don’t believe it.’

‘You must, I’m afraid.’ The quiet controlled voice belonged to the man with the cut brow. ‘No one else was anywhere near it at the time.’

‘What happened to you?’ I could see he was nursing a bruised and bleeding hand.

‘I dived for it when I saw it toppling.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I should have saved myself the trouble. That damned thing’s heavy.’

‘It’s all that. Thanks for trying anyway. I’ll fix your hand up later.’ I turned to the stewardess again, and not even that pale and exhausted face, the contrition in the eyes, could quieten my anger – and, to be honest, my fear. ‘I suppose it just came to pieces in your hand?’

‘I’ve told you I’m sorry. I – I was just kneeling beside Jimmy here—’

‘Who?’

‘Jimmy Waterman – the Second Officer. I—’

‘Second Officer?’ I interrupted. ‘That’s the radio operator, I take it?’

‘No, Jimmy is a pilot. We’ve three pilots – we don’t carry a radio operator.’

‘You don’t—’ I broke off my surprised question, asked another instead. ‘Who’s the man in the crew rest room? Navigator?’

‘We don’t carry a navigator either. Harry Williamson is – was – the Flight Engineer.’

No wireless operator, no navigator. There had been changes indeed since I’d flown the Atlantic some years previously in a Stratocruiser. I gave it up, returned to my original question and nodded at the smashed RCA.

‘Well, how did it happen?’

‘I brushed the table as I rose and – well, it just fell.’ Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

‘It just fell,’ I echoed incredulously. ‘One hundred and fifty pounds of transmitter and you flicked it off the table just like that?’

‘I didn’t knock it off. The legs collapsed.’

‘It’s got no legs to collapse,’ I said shortly. ‘Hinges.’

‘Well, hinges, then.’

I looked at Joss, who had been responsible for the erection of the table as well as the radio. ‘Is it possible?’

‘No.’ His voice was flat, definite.

Again the silence in the cabin, the hush, the tension that grew from the merely uncomfortable to the all but unbearable. But I was beginning to see that there was nothing to be gained now by further questioning, much to be lost. The radio was wrecked. Finish.

I turned away without a word, hung up my caribou furs on nails on the walls, took off goggles and gloves and turned to the man with the cut brow.

‘Let’s have a look at your head and your hand – it’s a pretty nasty gash on your forehead. Forget the radio for the moment, Joss – let’s have coffee first, lots of it.’ I turned to Jackstraw, who had just come down the steps from the hatch and was staring at the smashed radio. ‘I know, Jackstraw, I know. I’ll explain later – not that I know anything about it. Bring some empty cases for seats out of the food tunnel, will you. And a bottle of brandy. We all need it.’

I’d just started to wash the cut forehead – a nasty gash, as I had said, but surprisingly little signs of bruising – when the big amiable young man who had helped us lower the second officer from the wrecked plane came to us. I looked across up at him, and saw that I could be wrong about the amiability: his face wasn’t exactly hostile, but his eyes had the cool measuring look of one who knew from experience that he could cope with most of the situations, pleasant and unpleasant, that he was ever likely to come up against.

‘Look,’ he began without preamble, ‘I don’t know who you are or what your name is, but I’m sure we are all most grateful to you for what you have done for us. It’s more than probable that we owe our lives to you. We acknowledge that. Also, we know you’re a field scientist, and we realise that your equipment is of paramount importance to you. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’ I dabbed iodine fairly liberally on the injured man’s head – he was tough, all right, he didn’t even wince – and looked at the speaker. Not at all a man to ignore, I thought. Behind the strong intelligent face lay a hardness, a tenacity of purpose that hadn’t been acquired along with the cultured relaxed voice at the Ivy League college I was pretty certain he had attended. ‘You’d something else to say?’

‘Yes. We think – correction, I think – that you were unnecessarily rough on our air hostess. You can see the state the poor kid’s in. OK, so your radio’s bust, so you’re hoppin’ mad about it – but there’s no need for all this song and dance.’ His voice was calm, conversational all the time. ‘Radios aren’t irreplaceable. This one will be replaced, I promise you. You’ll have a new one inside a week, ten days at the most.’

‘Kind,’ I said dryly. I finished tying the head bandage and straightened up. ‘The offer is appreciated, but there’s one thing you haven’t taken into account. You may be dead inside that ten days. You may all be dead in ten days.’

‘We may all—’ He broke off and stared at me, his expression perceptibly hardening. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘What I’m talking about is that without this radio you dismiss so lightly your chances – our chances – of survival aren’t all that good. In fact, they’re not good at all. I don’t give a tuppenny damn about the radio, as such.’ I eyed him curiously, and a preposterous thought struck me: at least, it was preposterous for all of a couple of

seconds, before the truth hit me. ‘Have you – have any of you any idea just where you are, right here, at the present moment?’

‘Sure we have.’ The young man lifted his shoulders fractionally. ‘Just can’t say how far to the nearest drugstore or pub—’

‘I told them,’ the stewardess interrupted. ‘They were asking me, just before you came in. I thought Captain Johnson had overshot the landing field at Reykjavik in a snowstorm. This is Langjökull, isn’t it?’ She saw the expression on my face and went on hastily. ‘Or Hofsjökull? I mean, we were flying more or less north-east from Gander, and these are the only two snow-fields or glaciers or whatever you call them in Iceland in that direction from—’

‘Iceland?’ I suppose there is a bit of the ham actor in all of us, and I really couldn’t pass it up. ‘Did you say Iceland?’

She nodded, dumbly. Everybody was looking at her, and when she didn’t answer they all transferred their gazes to me, as at the touch of a switch.

‘Iceland,’ I repeated. ‘My dear girl, at the present moment you’re at an altitude of 8500 feet, right slam bang in the middle of the Greenland ice-cap.’

The effect was all that anybody could ever have wished for. I doubt whether even Marie LeGarde had ever had a better reaction from an audience. ‘Stunned’ is an inadequate word to describe their mental state immediately after this announcement: paralysis was nearer it, especially where the power of speech was concerned. And when the power of thought and speech did return, it expressed itself, as I might have expected, in the most violent disbelief. Everybody seemed to start talking at once, but it was the stewardess who took my attention, by coming forward and catching me by the lapels. I noticed the glitter of a diamond ring on her hand, and remember having some vague idea that this was against airline regulations.

‘What kind of joke is this? It can’t be, it can’t be! Greenland – it just can’t be.’ She saw by the expression on my face that I wasn’t joking, and her grip tightened even more. I had just time to be conscious of two conflicting thoughts – that, wide with fear and dismay though they might be, she had the most extraordinarily beautiful brown eyes and, secondly, that the BOAC were slipping in their selection of stewardesses whose calmness in emergency was supposed to match the trim-ness of their appearance – then she rushed on wildly.

‘How – how can it be? We were on a Gander-Reykjavik flight. Greenland – we don’t go anywhere near it. And there’s the automatic pilot, and radio beams and – and radio base checks every half-hour. Oh, it’s impossible, it’s impossible! Why do you tell us this?’ She was shaking now, whether from nervous strain or cold I had no idea: the big young man with the Ivy League accent put an arm awkwardly round her shoulder, and I saw her wince. Something indeed seemed to be hurting her – but again it could wait.

‘Joss,’ I called. He looked up from the stove, where he was pouring coffee into mugs. ‘Tell our friends where we are.’

‘Latitude 72.40 north, longitude 40.10 east,’ Joss said unemotionally. His voice cut clearly through the hubbub of incredulous conversation. ‘Three hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Near enough 800 miles from Reykjavik, 1000 from Cape Farewell, the southernmost point of Greenland, and just a little further distant from the North Pole. And if anyone doesn’t believe us, sir, I suggest they just take a walk – in any direction – and they’ll find out who’s right.’

Joss’s calm, matter-of-fact statement was worth half an hour of argument and explanation. In a moment, conviction was complete – and there were more problems than ever to be answered. I held up my hand in mock protest and protection against the waves of questions that surged against me from every side.

‘All in good time, please – although I don’t really know anything more than yourselves – with the exception, perhaps, of one thing. But first, coffee and brandy all round.’

‘Brandy?’ The expensive young woman had been the first, I’d noticed, to appropriate one of the empty wooden cases that Jackstraw had brought in in lieu of seats, and now she looked up under the curve of exquisitely modelled eyebrows. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ The tone of her voice left little room for doubt as to her opinion.

‘Of course.’ I forced myself to be civil: bickering could reach intolerable proportions in a rigidly closed, mutually interdependent group such as we were likely to be for some time to come. ‘Why ever not?’

‘Opens the pores, dear man,’ she said sweetly. ‘I thought everyone knew that – how dangerous it is when you’re exposed to cold afterwards. Or had you forgotten? Our cases, our night things in the plane – somebody has to get these.’

‘Don’t talk such utter rubbish.’ My short-lived attempt at civility perished miserably. ‘Nobody’s leaving here tonight. You sleep in your clothes – this isn’t the Dorchester. If the blizzard dies down, we may try to get your things tomorrow morning.’

‘But—’

‘If you’re all that desperate, you’re welcome to get them yourself. Want to try?’ It was boorish of me, but that was the effect she had. I turned away to see the minister or priest hold up his hand against the offered brandy.

‘Go on, take it,’ I said impatiently.

‘I don’t really think I should.’ The voice was high-pitched, but the enunciation clear and precise, and I found it vaguely irritating that it should so perfectly match his appearance, be so exactly what I should have expected. He laughed, a nervous deprecating laugh. ‘My parishioners, you know …’

I was tired, worried and felt like telling him what he could do with his parishioners, but it wasn’t his fault.

‘There’s precedent in plenty in your Bible, Reverend. You know that better than I. It’ll do you good, really.’

‘Oh well, if you think so.’ He took the glass gingerly, as if Beelzebub himself were on the offering end, but I noticed that there was nothing so hesitant about his method and speed of disposal of the contents: his subsequent expression could properly be described as beatific. I caught Marie LeGarde’s eye, and smiled at the twinkle I caught there.

The reverend wasn’t the only one who found the coffee – and brandy – welcome. With the exception of the stewardess, who sipped at her drink in a distraught fashion, the others had also emptied their glasses, and I decided that the broaching of another Martell’s was justified. In the respite from the talk, I bent over the injured man on the floor. His pulse was slower, steadier and his breathing not quite so shallow: I slipped in a few more heat pads and zipped up the sleeping-bag.

‘Is he – is he any better, do you think?’ The stewardess was so close to me that I brushed against her as I straightened. ‘He – he seems a bit better, doesn’t he?’

‘He is a bit, I think. But nothing like over the shock from the wound and the exposure, though.’ I looked at her speculatively and suddenly felt almost sorry for her. Almost, but not quite: I didn’t at all like the direction my thoughts were leading me. ‘You’ve flown together quite a bit, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t offer anything more. ‘His head – do you think—’

‘Later. Let me have a quick look at that back of yours.’

‘Look at what?’

‘Your back,’ I said patiently. ‘Your shoulders. They seem to give you some pain. I’ll rig a screen.’

‘No, no, I’m all right.’ She moved away from me.

‘Don’t be silly, my dear.’ I wondered what trick of voice production made Marie LeGarde’s voice so clear and carrying. ‘He is a doctor, you know.’

‘No!’

I shrugged and reached for my brandy glass. Bearers of bad news were ever unpopular: I supposed her reaction was the modern equivalent of the classical despot’s unsheathing his dagger. Probably only bruises, anyhow, I told myself, and turned to look at the company.

An odd-looking bunch, to say the least, but then any group of people dressed in lounge suits and dresses, trilby hats and nylon stockings would have looked odd against the strange and uncompromising background of that cabin where every suggestion of anything that even remotely suggested gracious living had been crushed and ruthlessly made subservient to the all-exclusive purpose of survival.

Here there were no armchairs – no chairs, even – no carpets, wall-paper, book-shelves, beds, curtains – or even windows for the curtains. It was a bleak utilitarian box of a room, eighteen feet by fourteen. The floor was made of unvarnished yellow pine. The walls were made of spaced sheets of bonded ply, with kapok insulation between: the lower part of the walls was covered with green-painted asbestos, the upper part and entire roof sheeted with glittering aluminium to reflect the maximum possible heat and light. A thin, ever-present film of ice climbed at least halfway up all four walls, reaching almost to the ceiling in the four corners, the parts of the room most remote from the stove and therefore the coldest. On very cold nights, such as this, the ice reached the ceiling and started to creep across it to the layers of opaque ice that permanently framed the undersides of our rimed and opaque skylights.

The two exits from the cabin were let into the fourteen-foot sides: one led to the trap, the other to the snow and ice tunnel where we kept our food, petrol, oil, batteries, radio generators, explosives for seismological and glacial investigations and a hundred and one other items. Half-way along, a secondary tunnel led off at right angles - a tunnel which steadily increased in length as we cut out the blocks of snow which were melted to give us our water supply. At the far end of the main tunnel lay our primitive toilet system.

One eighteen-foot wall and half of the wall that gave access to the trap-door were lined with twin rows of bunks – eight in all. The other eighteen-foot wall was given over entirely to our stove, work-bench, radio table and housings for the meteorological instruments. The remaining wall by the tunnel was piled with tins and cases of food, now mostly empties, that had been brought in from the tunnel to begin the lengthy process of defrosting.

Slowly I surveyed all this, then as slowly surveyed the company. The incongruity of the contrast reached the point where one all but disbelieved the evidence of one’s own eyes. But they were there all right, and I was stuck with them. Everyone had stopped talking now and was looking at me, waiting for me to speak: sitting in a tight semi-circle round the stove, they were huddled together and shivering in the freezing cold. The only sounds in the room were the clacking of the anemometer cups, clearly audible down the ventilation pipe, the faint moaning of the wind on the ice-cap and the hissing of our pressure Colman lamp. I sighed to myself, and put down my empty glass.

‘Well, it looks as if you are going to be our guests for some little time, so we’d better introduce ourselves. Us first.’ I nodded to where Joss and Jackstraw were working on the shattered RCA, which they had lifted back on the table. ‘On the left, Joseph London, of the city of London, our radio operator.’

‘Unemployed,’ Joss muttered.

‘On the right, Nils Nielsen. Take a good look at him, ladies and gentlemen. At this very moment the guardian angels of your respective insurance companies are probably putting up a prayer for his continued well-being. If you all live to come home again, the chances are that you will owe it to him.’ I was to remember my own words later. ‘He probably knows more than any man living about survival on the Greenland ice-cap.’

‘I thought you called him “Jackstraw”,’ Marie LeGarde murmured.

‘My Eskimo name.’ Jackstraw had turned and smiled at her, his parka hood off for the first time; I could see her polite astonishment as she looked at the fair hair, the blue eyes, and it was as if Jackstraw read her thoughts. ‘Two of my grandparents were Danish – most of us Greenlanders have as much Danish blood as Eskimo in us nowadays.’ I was surprised to hear him talk like this, and it was a tribute to Marie LeGarde’s personality: his pride in his Eskimo background was equalled only by his touchiness on the subject.

‘Well, well, how interesting.’ The expensive young lady was sitting back on her box, hands clasped round an expensively-nyloned knee, her expression reflecting accurately the well-bred condescension of her tone. ‘My very first Eskimo.’

‘Don’t be afraid, lady.’ Jackstraw’s smile was wider than ever, and I felt more than vaguely uneasy; his almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness and good nature concealed an explosive temper which he’d probably inherited from some far distant Viking forebear. ‘It doesn’t rub off.’

The silence that followed could hardly be described as companionable, and I rushed in quickly.

‘My own name is Mason, Peter Mason, and I’m in charge of this IGY station. You all know roughly what we’re doing stuck out here on the plateau – meteorology, glaciology, the study of the earth’s magnetism, the borealis, airglow, ionosphere, cosmic rays, magnetic storms and a dozen other things which I suppose are equally uninteresting to you.’ I waved my arm. ‘We don’t, as you can see, normally live here alone. Five others are away to the north on a field expedition. They’re due back in about three weeks, after which we all pack up and abandon this place before the winter sets in and the ice-pack freezes on the coast.’

‘Before the winter sets in?’ The little man in the Glenurquhart jacket stared at me. ‘You mean to tell me it gets colder than this?’

‘It certainly does. An explorer called Alfred Wegener wintered not fifty miles from here in 1930–1, and the temperature dropped by 85 degrees below zero – 117 degrees of frost. And that may have been a warm winter, for all we know.’

I gave some time to allow this cheering item of information to sink in, then continued.

‘Well, that’s us. Miss LeGarde – Marie LeGarde – needs no introduction from anyone.’ A slight murmur of surprise and turning of heads showed that I wasn’t altogether right. ‘But that’s all I know, I’m afraid.’

‘Corazzini,’ the man with the cut brow offered. The white bandage, just staining with blood, was in striking contrast to the receding dark hair. ‘Nick Corazzini. Bound for Bonnie Scotland, as the travel posters put it.’

‘Holiday?’

‘No luck.’ He grinned. ‘Taking over the new Global Tractor Company outside Glasgow. Know it?’

‘I’ve heard of it. Tractors, eh? Mr Corazzini, you may be worth your weight in gold to us yet. We have a broken-down elderly tractor outside that can usually only be started by repeated oaths and assaults by a four-pound hammer.’

‘Well.’ He seemed taken aback. ‘Of course, I can try—’

I don’t suppose you’ve actually laid a finger on a tractor for many years,’ Marie LeGarde interrupted shrewdly. ‘Isn’t that it, Mr Corazzini?’

‘Afraid it is,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘But in a situation like this I’d gladly lay my hands on another one.’

‘You’ll have your chance,’ I promised him. I looked at the man beside him.

‘Smallwood,’ the minister announced. He rubbed his thin white hands constantly to drive the cold away. ‘The Reverend Joseph Smallwood. I’m the Vermont delegate to the international General Assembly of the Unitarian and Free United Churches in London. You may have heard of it – our biggest conference in many years?’

‘Sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘But don’t let that disturb you. Our paper boy misses out occasionally. And you, sir?’

‘Solly Levin. Of New York City,’ the little man in the check jacket added unnecessarily. He reached up and laid a proprietary arm along the broad shoulders of the young man beside him. ‘And this is my boy, Johnny.’

‘Your boy? Your son?’ I fancied I could see a slight resemblance.

‘Perish the thought,’ the young man drawled. ‘My name is Johnny Zagero. Solly is my manager. Sorry to introduce a discordant note into company such as this’ – his eyes swept over us, dwelt significantly longer on the expensive young lady by his side – ‘but I’m in the way of being a common or garden pugilist. That means “boxer”, Solly.’

‘Would you listen to him?’ Solly Levin implored. He stretched his clenched fists heavenwards. ‘Would you just listen to him? Apologisin’. Johnny Zagero, future heavyweight champion, apologisin’ for being a boxer. The white hope for the world, that’s all. Rated number three challenger to the champ. A household name in all—’

‘Ask Dr Mason if he’s ever heard of me,’ Zagero suggested.

‘That means nothing,’ I smiled. ‘You don’t look like a boxer to me, Mr Zagero. Or sound like one. I didn’t know it was included in the curriculum at Yale. Or was it Harvard?’

‘Princeton,’ he grinned. ‘And what’s so funny about that? Look at Tunney and his Shakespeare. Roland La Starza was a college boy when he fought for the world title. Why not me?’

‘Exactly’ Solly Levin tried to thunder the word, but he hadn’t the voice for it. ‘Why not? And when we’ve carved up this British champ of yours – a doddery old character rated number two challenger by one of the biggest injustices ever perpetrated in the long and glorious history of boxin’ – when we’ve massacred this ancient has-been, I say—’

‘All right, Solly,’ Zagero interrupted. ‘Desist. There’s not a press man within a thousand miles. Save the golden words for later.’

‘Just keepin’ in practice, boy. Words are ten a penny. I’ve got thousands to spare—’

‘T’ousands, Solly, t’ousands. You’re slippin’. Now shut up.’

Solly shut up, and I turned to the girl beside Zagero.

‘Well, miss?’

‘Mrs. Mrs Dansby-Gregg. You may have heard of me?’

‘No.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’ I’d heard of her all right, and I knew now that I’d seen her name and picture a score of times among those of other wealthy unemployed and unemployable built up by the tongue-in-the-cheek gossip columnists of the great national dailies into an ersatz London society whose frenetic, frequently moronic and utterly unimportant activities were a source of endless interest to millions. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I seemed to recall, had been particularly active in the field of charitable activities, although perhaps not so in the production of the balance sheets.

She smiled sweetly at me.

‘Well, perhaps it’s not so surprising after all. You are a bit distant from the centre of things, aren’t you?’ She looked across to where the youngster with the broken collar-bone was sitting. ‘And this is Fleming.’

‘Fleming?’ This time the wrinkling of my brow was genuine. ‘You mean Helene?’

‘Fleming. My personal maid.’

‘Your personal maid,’ I said slowly. I could feel the incredulous anger stirring inside me. ‘Your own maid? And you didn’t even bother to volunteer to stay while I fixed her shoulder up?’

‘Miss LeGarde did it first,’ she said coolly. ‘Why should I?’

‘Quite right, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, why should you?’ Johnny Zagero said approvingly. He looked at her long and consideringly. ‘You might have got your hands dirty.’

For the first time the carefully cultivated façade cracked, the smile stiffened mechanically, and her colour deepened. Mrs Dansby-Gregg made no reply, maybe she had none to make. People like Johnny Zagero never got close enough even to the fringes of her money-sheltered world for her to know how to deal with them.

‘Well, that leaves just the two of you,’ I said hastily. The large Dixie colonel with the florid face and white hair was sitting next to the thin wispy-haired little Jew. They made an incongruous pair.

‘Theodore Mahler,’ the little Jew said quietly. I waited, but he added nothing. A communicative character.

‘Brewster,’ the other announced. He made a significant pause. ‘Senator Hoffman Brewster. Glad to help in any way I can, Dr Mason.’

‘Thank you, Senator. At least I know who you are.’ Indeed, thanks to his magnificent flair for self-publicity, half the Western world knew who this outspoken, bitterly – but fairly – anti-communist, near isolationist senator from the south-west was. ‘On a European tour?’

‘You might say that.’ He had the politician’s gift for investing even the most insignificant words with a statesmanlike consideration. ‘As Chairman of one of our Appropriation committees, I – well, let’s call it a fact-finding tour.’

‘Wife and secretaries gone ahead by humble passenger steamer, I take it,’ Zagero said mildly. He shook his head. ‘That was a fearful stink your Congressional investigation boys raised recently about the expenses of US senators abroad.’

‘That was quite unnecessary, young man,’ Brewster said coldly. ‘And insulting.’

‘I believe it was,’ Zagero apologised. ‘Not really intended as such. Sorry, Senator.’ He meant it.

What a bunch, I thought despairingly, what a crowd to be stuck with in the middle of the Greenland ice-plateau. A business executive, a musical comedy star, a minister of religion, a boxer with an uninhibited if cultured tongue, his zany manager, a London society playgirl and her young German maid, a Senator, a taciturn Jew and a near-hysterical hostess – or one apparently so. And a gravely injured pilot who might live or die. But willy-nilly I was stuck with them, stuck with the responsibility of doing my damnedest to get these people to safety, and the prospect appalled me. How on earth was I even to start to go about it, go about it with people with no arctic clothing to ward off the razor-edged winds and inhuman cold, people lacking in all knowledge and experience of arctic travel, even lacking, with two or three exceptions, the endurance and sheer muscular strength to cope with the savagery of the Greenland icecap? I couldn’t even begin to guess.

But whatever else they were lacking in at that moment, it wasn’t volubility: the life-giving warmth of the brandy had had the unfortunate side effect of loosening their tongues. Unfortunate, that is, from my point of view: they had a hundred and one questions to ask, and they seemed to think that I should have the answer to all of them.

More accurately, they had only half a dozen questions to ask, with a hundred and one variations of these. How was it possible for a pilot to veer so many hundreds of miles off course? Could the compasses have gone wrong? Could the pilot have had a brain-storm? But then surely both co-pilot and second pilot would have known something was wrong? Could the radio have been damaged? It had been a bitterly cold afternoon even when they had left Gander, was it possible that some of the flaps and controls had iced up, forcing them off course? But if this were the case, why hadn’t someone come to warn them of the possibility of the crash?

I answered all of their questions as best I could but these answers were all to the same effect, that I didn’t really know anything more about it than they did.

‘But you said some time ago that you did, perhaps, know one thing more than we did.’ It was Corazzini who put the question, and he was looking at me shrewdly. ‘What was that, Dr Mason?’

‘What? Ah, yes, I remember now.’ I hadn’t forgotten, but the way things were shaping up in my mind I’d had second thoughts about mentioning it, and had time to think up a plausible alternative. ‘I need hardly tell you that it’s nothing that I actually know, Mr Corazzini – how could I, I wasn’t in the plane – just a reasonably informed guess in the absence of all other solutions. It’s based on the scientific observations made here and in other IGY stations in Greenland, some of them over the past eighteen months.

‘For over a year now, we have been experiencing a period of intense sun-spot activity – that’s one of the main interests of the IGY year – the most intense of this century. As you may know, sun-spots, or, rather, the emission of solar particles from these sun-spots, are directly responsible for the formation of the aurora borealis and magnetic storms, both of these being related to disturbances in the ionosphere. These disturbances can and, actually, almost invariably do interfere with radio transmission and reception, and when severe enough can completely disrupt all normal radio communications: and they can also produce temporary alterations of the earth’s magnetism which knock magnetic compasses completely out of kilter.’ All of which was true enough as far as it went. ‘It would, of course, require extreme conditions to produce these effects: but we have been experiencing these lately, and I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened with your plane. Where astral navigation – by the stars, that is – is impossible, as it was on a night like this, you are dependent on radio and compasses as your two main navigational aids: if these are knocked out, what have you left?’

A fresh hubbub of talk arose at this, and though it was quite obvious that most of them had only a vague idea what I was talking about, I could see that this idea was finding a fair degree of ready acceptance, satisfying them and fitting the facts as they knew them. I saw Joss gazing at me with an expressionless face, looked him in the eye for a couple of seconds, then turned away. As a radio operator, Joss knew even better than I that, though there was still some sun-spot activity, it had reached its maximum in the previous year: and as an ex-aircraft radio operator, he knew that airliners flew on gyrocompasses, which neither sun-spots nor magnetic storms could ever affect in the slightest.

‘We’ll have something to eat now.’ I cut through the buzz of conversation. ‘Any volunteers to give Jackstraw a hand?’

‘Certainly.’ Marie LeGarde, as I might have guessed, was first on her feet. ‘I’m by way of being what you might call a mean cook. Lead me to it, Mr Nielsen.’

‘Thanks, Joss, you might give me a hand to rig a screen.’ I nodded at the injured pilot. ‘We’ll see what we can do for this boy here.’ The stewardess, unbidden, moved forward to help me also. I was on the point of objecting - I knew that this wasn’t going to be nice – but I didn’t want trouble with her, not yet. I shrugged my shoulders and let her stay.

*

Half an hour later, I had done all I could. It indeed hadn’t been nice, but both the patient and the stewardess had stood it far better than I had expected. I was fixing and binding on a stiff leather helmet to protect the back of his head and Joss was strapping him down, inside the sleeping-bag, to the stretcher, so that he couldn’t toss around and hurt himself, when the stewardess touched my arm.

‘What – what do you think now, Dr Mason?’

‘It’s hard to be sure. I’m not a specialist in brain or head injuries, and even a specialist would hesitate to say. The damage may have penetrated deeper than we think. There may be haemor-rhaging – it’s often delayed in these cases.’

‘But if there’s no haemorrhaging?’ she persisted. ‘If the damage is no worse than what you think, what you see?’

‘Fifty-fifty. I wouldn’t have said so a couple of hours ago, but he seems to have quite astonishing powers of resistance and recuperation. Better than an even chance, I would say – if he had the warmth, the food, the skilled nursing he would have in a first class hospital. As it is – well, let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you.’

I looked at her, looked at the washed-out face, the faint blue circles forming under her eyes, and almost felt touched with pity. Almost. She was exhausted, and shivering with cold.

‘Bed,’ I said. ‘You’re dying for sleep and warmth, Miss – I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask your name.’

‘Ross. Margaret Ross.’

‘Scots?’

‘Irish. Southern Irish.’

‘I won’t hold it against you,’ I smiled. There was no answering smile from her. ‘Tell me, Miss Ross, why was the plane so empty?’

‘We had an “X” flight – an extra or duplicate charter for an overflow of passengers – out from London yesterday. Day before yesterday it is now, I suppose. We just stayed the night in Idlewild and had to return after we’d slept. The office phoned up people who had booked out on the evening plane, giving the chance of an earlier flight: ten of them accepted.’

‘I see. By the way, isn’t it a bit unusual to have only one stewardess aboard? On a trans-Atlantic flight, I mean?’

‘I know. There’s usually two or three – a steward and two stewardesses – or two stewards and a stewardess. But not for ten people.’

Of course. Hardly worth stewarding, you might say. Still,’ I went on smoothly, ‘it at least gives you time for the odd forty winks on these long night-flights.’

‘That wasn’t fair!’ I hadn’t been as clever as I thought, and her white cheeks were stained with red. ‘That’s never happened to me before. Never!’

‘Sorry, Miss Ross – it wasn’t really meant as a dig. It doesn’t matter anyhow.’

‘It does so matter!’ Her extraordinary brown eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘If I hadn’t been asleep I would have known what was going to happen. I could have warned the passengers. I could have moved Colonel Harrison to a front seat facing the rear—’

‘Colonel Harrison?’ I interrupted sharply.

‘Yes. The man in the back seat – the dead man.’

‘But he hadn’t a uniform on when—’

‘I don’t care. That was his name on the passenger list … If I’d known, he wouldn’t be dead now – and Miss Fleming wouldn’t have had her collar-bone broken.’

So that’s what has been worrying her, I thought. That accounts for her strange distraught behaviour. And then a moment later I realised that it didn’t account for it all – she had been behaving like that before ever she had known what had happened to any of the passengers. My slowly forming suspicions came back with renewed force: the lady would bear watching.

‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with, Miss Ross. The captain must have been flying blind in the storm – and we’re more than 8000 feet up here. Probably he’d no knowledge of what was going to happen until the actual moment of crashing.’ In my mind’s eye I saw again the doomed airliner, landing lights on, circling our cabin for at least ten minutes, but if Miss Ross had any such thing in her mind’s eye, it was impossible for me to detect it. She had no idea at all – or she was an extraordinarily good actress.

‘Probably,’ she murmured dully, ‘I don’t know.’

We had a hot and satisfying meal of soup, corned meat, potatoes and vegetables – everything out of cans, but passable enough for all that. It was the last satisfying meal that our guests – or ourselves, for that matter – were likely to have for some considerable time to come, but I felt the moment unpropitious for breaking that sort of news. Time enough for that tomorrow – or later in the day, rather, for it was now already after three o’clock in the morning.

I suggested that the four women sleep in the top bunks – not from any delicacy of sentiment but because it was at least twenty-five degrees warmer there than it was at ground level, and the proportional difference would increase as the night wore on after the stove had been put out. There were some half-hearted protests when they learnt that I intended to shut down the fire, but I didn’t even bother arguing with them. Like all people who have lived for any length of time in the Arctic, I had an almost pathological dread of fire.

Margaret Ross, the stewardess, refused the offer of a bunk, and said she would sleep by the injured pilot, lest he should wake and want anything during the night. I had intended doing that myself, but I saw her mind was set on it, and though I felt unaccountably uneasy about the idea, I raised no objection.

That left five empty bunks among six men -Jackstraw, Joss and I could sleep reasonably enough in our furs. Inevitably, there was some magnanimous argument over the allocation of these bunks, but Corazzini settled the argument by producing a coin and beginning to toss for it. He himself lost in the end, but accepted defeat and the prospect of a cold uncomfortable night on the floor with amiable grace.

When they were all settled down, I picked up a torch and our weather log book, glanced at Joss and made for the trap. Zagero turned in his bunk to look at me.

‘What gives, Dr Mason? Especially at this hour of night, what gives?’

‘Weather reports, Mr Zagero. That’s why we’re here, remember? And I’m already three hours late with these.’

‘Even tonight?’

‘Even tonight. Continuity is the most important thing in weather observation.’

‘Sooner you than me.’ He shivered. ‘If it’s only half as cold outside as it is in here.’

He turned his back, and Joss rose to his feet. He’d correctly interpreted my look, and I knew he was consumed with curiosity.

‘I’ll come with you, sir. Better have a last look at the dogs.’

We didn’t bother looking at either the dogs or the weather instruments. We went straight towards the tractor and huddled under the tarpaulin for what miserable shelter it could afford. True, the wind had eased, but it was colder than ever: the long winter night was beginning to close down on the ice-cap.

‘It stinks,’ Joss said flatly. ‘The whole set-up stinks.’

‘To high heaven,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s finding out where the smell comes from that the trouble lies.’

‘This fairy tale of yours about magnetic storms and compasses and radios,’ he went on. ‘What was the idea?’

‘I’d previously said I knew something they didn’t. I did. But when it came to the bit I knew I’d be better to keep it to myself. You know how this damnable cold slows up your mind – I should have realised it sooner.’

‘Realised what?’

‘That I should keep it to myself.’

‘Keep what, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Sorry, Joss. Not trying to build up suspense. The reason none of them knew anything about the crash until after it had happened is that they were all doped. As far as I could see, all of them, or nearly all, were under the influence of some sleeping drug or narcotic’

In the darkness I could almost feel him staring at me. After a long time he said softly, ‘You wouldn’t say this unless you were sure of it.’

‘I am sure of it. Their reactions, their dazed fumbling back to reality – and, above all, the pupils of their eyes. Unmistakable. Some kind of sleeping tablet mixtures, of the fast-acting kind. What is known to the trade, I believe, as Mickey Finns.’

‘But—’ Joss broke off. He was still trying to orientate his mind to this new line of thought. ‘But – they would be bound to know of it, to be aware that they had been doped, when they came to.’

‘In normal circumstances, yes. But they came to in what was, to say the least, most abnormal circumstances. I’m not saying that they didn’t experience any symptoms of weakness, dizziness and lassitude – they must have done – and what more natural than that they should ascribe any such unusual physical or mental symptoms to the effects of the crash. And what more natural, too, than that they should conceal these symptoms as best they could – and refrain from mentioning them? They would be ashamed to admit or discuss weaknesses – it’s a very human trait to show to your neighbours the very best face you can put on in times of emergency or danger.’

Joss didn’t reply at once. The implications of all this, as I’d found out for myself, took no little time for digestion, so I let him take his time and waited, listening to the lost and mournful wailing of the wind, the rustling hiss of millions of ice spicules scudding across the frozen snow of the ice-cap, and my own thoughts were in keeping with the bleak misery of the night.

‘It’s not possible,’ Joss muttered at length. I could hear his teeth chattering with the cold. ‘You can’t have some maniac rushing around an aircraft cabin with a hypo needle or dropping fizz-balls into their gin and tonics. You think they were all doped?’

‘Just about.’

‘But how could anyone—’

‘A moment, Joss,’ I interrupted. ‘What happened to the RCA?’

‘What?’ The sudden switch caught him momentarily off-balance. ‘What happened – you mean, how did it go for a burton? I’ve no idea at all, sir. All I know is that these hinges couldn’t have been knocked into the wall accidentally -not with radio and equipment weighing about 180 pounds sitting on top of them. Someone shoved them in. Deliberately.’

‘And the only person anywhere near it at the time was the stewardess, Margaret Ross. Everyone agreed on that.’

‘Yes, but why in the name of heaven should anyone want to do a crazy thing like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘There’s a hundred things I don’t know. But I do know she did it … And who’s in the best position to spike the drinks of aircraft passengers?’

‘Good God!’ I could hear the sharp hissing intake of breath. ‘Of course. Drinks – or maybe the sweets they hand out at take-off.’

‘No.’ I shook my head definitely in the darkness. ‘Barley sugar is too weak a covering-up agent to disguise the taste of a drug. Coffee, more likely’

‘It must have been her,’ Joss said slowly. ‘It must have been. But – but she acted as dazed and abnormal as any of the others. More so, if anything.’

‘Maybe she’d reason to,’ I said grimly. ‘Come on, let’s get back or we’ll freeze to death. Tell Jackstraw when you get him by himself.’

Inside the cabin, I propped the hatch open a couple of inches – with fourteen people inside, extra ventilation was essential. Then I glanced at the thermograph: it showed 48° below zero – eighty degrees of frost.

I lay down on the floor, pulled my parka hood tight to keep my ears from freezing, and was asleep in a minute.

FOUR

Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m.

For the first time in four months I had forgotten to set the alarm-clock before I went to sleep, and it was late when I awoke, cold and stiff and sore all over from the uneven hardness of the wooden floor. It was still dark as midnight – two or three weeks had passed since the rim of the sun had shown above the horizon for the last time that year, and all the light we had each day was two or three hours dim twilight round noon – but a glance at the luminous face of my watch showed me that it was nine-thirty.

I pulled the torch out from my parka, located the oil-lamp and lit it. The light was dim, scarcely reaching the far corners of the cabin, but sufficient to show the mummy-like figures lying huddled on the bunks and sprawled grotesquely across the floor, their frozen breath clouding before their faces and above their heads, then condensing on the cabin walls. The walls themselves were sheeted with ice which had extended far out across the roof, in places reaching the skylights, a condition largely brought about by the cold heavy air that had flooded down the opened hatchway during the night: the outside temperature registered on the drum at 54° below zero.

Not everyone was asleep: most of them, I suspected, had slept but little, the numbing cold had seen to that: but they were as warm in their bunks as they would be anywhere else and nobody showed any inclination to move. Things would be better when the cabin heated up a little.

I had trouble starting the stove – even though it was gravity fed from a tank above and to one side of it, the fuel oil had thickened up in the cold – but when it did catch it went with a roar. I turned both burners up to maximum, put on the water bucket that had lain on the floor all night and was now nearly a solid mass of ice, pulled on snow-mask and goggles and clambered up the hatchway to have a look at the weather.

The wind had died away almost completely -I’d known that from the slow and dispirited clacking of the anemometer cups – and the ice-drift, which at times could reach up several hundred feet into the sky, was no more than gentle puffs of dust stirring lazily and spectrally, through the feeble beam of my torch, across the glittering surface of the ice-cap. The wind, such as it was, still held out to the east. The cold, too, was still intense, but more bearable than it had been on the previous night. In terms of the effect of cold on human beings in the Arctic, absolute temperature is far from being the deciding factor: wind is just as important – every extra mile per hour is equivalent to a one degree drop in temperature -and humidity far more so. Where the relative humidity is high, even a few degrees below zero can become intolerable. But today the wind was light and the air dry. Perhaps it was a good omen … After that morning, I never believed in omens again.

When I got below, Jackstraw was on his feet, presiding over the coffee-pot. He smiled at me, and his face was as fresh and rested as if he’d had nine hours on a feather bed behind him. But then Jackstraw never showed fatigue or distress under any circumstances: his tolerance to sleeplessness and the most exhausting toil was phenomenal.

He was the only one on his feet, but far from the only one awake: of those in the bunks, only Senator Brewster was still asleep. The others were facing into the centre of the room, a few propped up on their elbows: all of them were shivering, and shivering violently, their faces blue and white and pinched with the cold. Some were looking at Jackstraw, wrinkling their noses in anticipation of the coffee, the pungent smell of which already filled the cabin; others were staring in fascination at the sight of the ice on the roof melting as the temperature rose, melting, dripping down to the floor in a dozen different places and there beginning to form tiny stalagmites of ice, building up perceptibly before their eyes: the temperature on the cabin floor must have been almost forty degrees lower than that at the roof.

‘Good morning, Dr Mason.’ Marie LeGarde tried to smile at me, but it was a pathetic effort, and she looked ten years older than she had on the previous night: she was one of the few with a sleeping-bag, but even so she must have passed a miserable six hours, and there is nothing so exhausting to the human body as uncontrollable night-long shivering, a vicious circle in which the more one shivers the more tired one becomes, and the more tired the less resistance to cold and hence the more shivering. For the first time, I knew that Marie LeGarde was an old woman.

‘Good morning,’ I smiled. ‘How did you enjoy your first night in your new home?’

‘First night!’ Even in the sleeping-bag her movements of clasping her arms together and huddling her head down between her shoulders were unmistakable. ‘I hope to heaven that it’s the last night. You run a very chilly establishment here, Dr Mason.’

‘I’m sorry. Next time we’ll keep watches and have the stove on all night.’ I pointed to the water splashing down to the floor. ‘The place is heating up already. You’ll feel better when you have some hot coffee inside you.’

‘I’ll never feel better again,’ she declared vigorously, but the twinkle was back in her eye. She turned to the young German girl in the next bunk. ‘And how do you feel this morning, my dear?’

‘Better, thank you, Miss LeGarde.’ She seemed absurdly grateful that anyone should even bother to ask. ‘I don’t feel a thing now.’

‘Means nothing,’ Miss LeGarde assured her cheerfully. ‘Neither do I. It’s just that we’re both frozen stiff … And how did you survive the night, Mrs Dansby-Gregg?’

‘As you say, I survived.’ Mrs Dansby-Gregg smiled thinly. ‘As Dr Mason observed last night, this is not the Ritz … That coffee smells delicious. Bring me a cup over, Fleming, will you?’

I picked up one of the cups Jackstraw had poured out and took it across to the young German girl who was struggling to unzip her sleeping-bag with her one good arm. Her embarrassment and discomfort were obvious, but I knew I’d no option, the time to stop this nonsense was before ever it had a chance to start.

‘You stay where you are, young lady, and drink this.’ She took the cup reluctantly, and I turned away. ‘You’ve surely forgotten, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, that Helene has a broken collar-bone?’

The expression on her face made it quite obvious that she hadn’t forgotten, but she was no fool. The gossip columnists would murder her for this, if they got hold of it. In her circle, an outward if meaningless conformity to the accepted mores and virtues of the day was a sine qua non: the knife between the ribs was permitted, but only to the accompaniment of the well-bred smile.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said sweetly. ‘I’d quite forgotten, of course.’ Her eyes were cold and hard, and I knew I had an enemy. That didn’t worry me, but I found the very triviality of the whole thing irritating beyond measure when there were so many other and vastly more important things to talk about. But less than thirty seconds later we had forgotten all about it, even, I am sure, Mrs Dansby-Gregg herself.

I was just handing Marie LeGarde a cup when someone screamed. It wasn’t really loud, I suppose, but in that confined space it had a peculiarly piercing and startling quality. Marie LeGarde’s arm jerked violently and the scalding contents of the coffee-cup were emptied over my bare hand.

I hardly noticed the pain. It was Margaret Ross, the young stewardess, who had screamed, and she was now kneeling, half in and half out of her sleeping-bag, one rigidly spread-fingered hand stretched out at arm’s length before her, the other clasped over her mouth as she stared down at the figure lying near her on the floor. I pushed her to one side and sank on to my own knees.

In that bitter cold it was impossible to be any way sure, but I felt reasonably certain that the young pilot had been dead for several hours. I knelt there for a long time, just looking down at him, and when I finally rose to my feet I did so like an old man, a defeated old man, and I felt as cold, almost, as the dead man lying there. Everyone was wide awake now, everyone staring at me, the eyes of nearly all of them reflecting the superstitious horror which the presence of sudden and unexpected death brings to those who are unaccustomed to it. It was Johnny Zagero who broke the silence.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he, Dr Mason?’ His low voice sounded a little husky. ‘That head injury—’ His voice trailed off.

‘Cerebral hæmorrhage,’ I said quietly, ‘as far as I can tell.’

I lied to him. There was no shadow of doubt in my mind as to the cause of death. Murder. The young boy had been ruthlessly, cold-bloodedly murdered: lying there unconscious, gravely injured and with his hands strapped helplessly to his sides, he had been smothered as easily, as surely, as one might smother a very little child.

We buried him out on the ice-cap, not fifty yards from the place where he had died. Bringing his stiffened body out of the hatch was a grisly job, but we managed it and laid him on the snow while we sawed out a shallow grave for him in the light of one of our torches. It was impossible to dig it out: that frozen ringing surface turned shovel blades as would a bar of iron: even at eighteen inches, the impacted névé of snow and ice defied the serrated spearpoints of our special snow saws. But it was deep enough and within a few hours the eternal ice-drift would have smoothed its blanket across the grave, and we would never be able to find it again. The Reverend Joseph Smallwood murmured some sort of burial service over the grave but his teeth chattered so violently in the cold and his voice was so low and indistinct and hurried that I could hardly catch a word of it. I thought wryly that heavenly forgiveness for this indecent haste was unlikely to be withheld: by all odds it must have been by far the coldest funeral service that Mr Smallwood had ever conducted.

Back in the cabin, breakfast was a sketchy and silent affair. Even in the steadily rising warmth, the melancholy gloom was an almost palpable blanket under the dripping ceiling. Hardly anybody said anything, hardly anybody ate anything. Margaret Ross ate nothing, and when she finally set down her coffee-cup, the contents had scarcely been touched.

You’re overdoing it, my dear, I thought viciously, you’re carrying the grief-stricken act just a little too far: a little longer, and even the others will start wondering – and they have no suspicions at all, you damned inhuman little murderess.

For I had no suspicions either – only certainty. There was no doubt in my mind at all but that she had smothered the young pilot. She was only slightly built – but then it would have required only slight strength. Lashed to the cot as he had been, he wouldn’t even have been able to drum his heels as he had died. I could feel my flesh crawl at the very thought.

She had killed him, just as she had broken the radio and doped the passengers. He had been killed, obviously, to keep him from talking – about what, I couldn’t even begin to guess, any more than I could guess the reason for the destruction of the radio, except that she clearly did not want the news of the crash broadcast to the outer world. But why in the world destroy the radio in the first place, surely she must have known how essential it was for survival? But then, after all, how was she even to have guessed that: she might well have thought that we had big fast tractors that could have whipped them down to the coast in a matter of a couple of days. For that matter, she might have thought she was a great deal nearer the coast than we really were – it was impossible, surely, that she had genuinely imagined that we were in Iceland. Or was it?

My thoughts were spinning now in an unbreakable circle. I knew I was getting nowhere, couldn’t possibly get anywhere without some fresh information. As it was, I was only confusing myself the more with the passing of every moment. I gave it up then, promising myself that from now on I would watch her every possible minute of the day. I looked at her again, covertly, and she was staring vacantly at one of the glowing embers of the stove. Planning her next move, no doubt, planning it as cleverly as the last: asking me last night about the pilot’s chances of survival, doubtless to decide whether he would have to be killed or could safely be left to die, had been clever enough, but insisting on sleeping next to the man she had meant to kill had been nothing short of brilliant. On that account alone no one would ever suspect her, even if the fact that it had been murder became known. And it wouldn’t: I intended keeping that to myself. Or did she suspect I suspected? Heaven only knew. All I knew was that she must be playing for tremendous stakes. Or that she was mad.

It was just after eleven o’clock. Joss and Jackstraw were in a corner by themselves, stripping down the smashed transmitter, while the rest were grouped in a large semi-circle round the stove. They looked wan and sickly and were sitting very still indeed. They looked unwell because the first greyness of the noon twilight was stealing through our rimed skylights and it did unflattering things to any complexion: and they sat so still because I had just explained to them in detail exactly what their situation was, and they didn’t like it one little bit. Neither did I.

‘Let’s get this quite straight, Dr Mason.’ Corazzini leant forward, his lean brown face intent and serious. He was worried all right, but he wasn’t scared. Corazzini didn’t look as if he would scare easily: I had the idea that he would be a pretty good man to have around. ‘The others left here three weeks ago in a big modern Sno-Cat, and aren’t expected back for another three weeks. You’ve overstayed your welcome on the ice-cap, you say, and things have been cut a trifle too fine – you had already started rationing yourselves to make your food spin out until they returned. With thirteen of us here we have food for less than five days. Therefore we may be a fortnight without food before they return.’ He smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘My arithmetic is correct, Dr Mason?’

‘It is, unfortunately.’

‘How long would the tractor you have take to get to the coast?’

‘There’s no guarantee that it ever would. I told you, it’s falling to pieces. I’ll show you later. Maybe a week – given the right conditions. Any bad weather would stop it in its tracks.’

‘You doctors are all the same,’ Zagero drawled. ‘Always spreadin’ sweet cheerfulness and light. Why don’t we wait for the other machine to get back?’

‘Indeed?’ Senator Brewster said heavily. ‘And how do you propose to live in the meanwhile, Mr Zagero?’

‘People can live for longer than fourteen days without food, Senator,’ Zagero said cheerfully. ‘Think what it would do for that figure of yours. Tush, Senator, you surprise me. Too gloomy by half.’

‘Not in this case,’ I said flatly. ‘The Senator is right. Sure you can live a long time without food in normal conditions. You might even do it here – if you had proper day clothes and night coverings. You haven’t – and how many of you have stopped shivering since you came here? Cold burns up your energy and depletes your reserves at a fantastic pace. Do you want me to list all the Arctic and Antarctic explorers – and Himalayan climbers – who have died within forty-eight hours of their food running out? And don’t kid yourselves about the life-giving warmth of this cabin. The floor temperature is about zero now – and that’s as hot as it’s likely to get.’

‘You said there was a radio on your old tractor,’ Corazzini said abruptly. ‘What range does it have? Couldn’t you possibly reach your friends – or your Uplavnik base – with that?’

I nodded in Joss’s direction. ‘There’s the man to ask.’

‘I heard,’ Joss said without enthusiasm. ‘Do you think I’d be trying to salvage this wreckage, Mr Corazzini, if there was any chance? It’s an eight-watt transmitter with hand-cranked generator and battery receiver, it came out of the ark and was never meant for anything more than walkie-talkie use.’

‘But what is its range?’ Corazzini persisted.

‘Impossible to say’ Joss shrugged. ‘You know how it is with transmission and reception. One day you can hardly pick up the BBC a hundred miles away, another you can pick up a taxi-cab at twice the distance, if you have the right receiver. All depends on conditions. This one? Hundred miles, maybe – hundred fifty in perfect conditions. In the present conditions, you’d be better with a megaphone. I’ll have a go with it this afternoon, perhaps. Might as well waste my time that way as any other.’ Joss turned away and it was obvious that, as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed.

‘Perhaps your friends will move within transmission range?’ Corazzini suggested. ‘After all, you said they’re not much more than a couple of hundred miles away.’

‘And I said they’ll be staying there. They’ve set up their equipment and instruments and they won’t move until they have to. They’re too short of petrol for that.’

‘They can refuel here, of course?’

‘That’s no worry.’ I jerked a thumb towards the tunnel. ‘There’s eight hundred gallons out there.’

‘I see.’ Corazzini looked thoughtful for a moment, then went on. ‘Please don’t think I’m being annoyingly persistent. I just want to eliminate possibilities. I believe you have – or have had – a radio schedule with your friends. Won’t they worry if they fail to hear from you?’

‘Hillcrest – that’s the scientist in charge – never worries about anything. And unfortunately, their own radio, a big long-range job, is giving trouble – they said a couple of days ago that the generator brushes were beginning to give out – and the nearest spares are here. If they can’t raise us, they’ll probably blame themselves. Anyway, they know we’re safe as houses here. Why on earth should they worry?’

‘So what do we do?’ Solly Levin asked querulously. ‘Starve to death or start hikin’?’

‘Succinctly and admirably put,’ Senator Brewster boomed. ‘In a nutshell, one might say. I propose we set up a small committee to investigate the possibilities—’

‘This isn’t Washington, Senator,’ I said mildly. ‘Besides, we already have a committee – Mr London, Mr Nielsen and myself.’

‘Indeed?’ It seemed to be the Senator’s favourite word, and long years of practice had matched it perfectly to the lift of his eyebrows. ‘You will remember, perhaps, that we have rather a personal stake in this also?’

‘I’m unlikely to forget it,’ I said dryly. ‘Look, Senator, if you were adrift in a hurricane and were picked up by a ship, would you presume to advise the captain and his officers of the course they should adopt to survive the hurricane?’

‘That’s not the point.’ Senator Brewster puffed out his cheeks. ‘This is not a ship—’

‘Shut up!’ It was Corazzini who spoke, his voice quiet and hard, and I could suddenly understand why he had reached the top in his own particularly tough and competitive business. ‘Dr Mason is absolutely right. This is their own backyard, and our lives should be left in the hands of experts. I take it you have already reached a decision, Dr Mason?’

‘I reached it last night. Joss – Mr London – stays here to contact the others when they return. He will be left enough food for three weeks. We take the remainder, and we leave tomorrow.’

‘Why not today?’

‘Because the tractor is at present unfit for winter travel, especially travel with ten passengers. It’s still got the canvas hood on it that it had when we hauled stuff up from the coast. We have the prefabricated wooden sides and top that we need to arcticise it, plus the bunks and portable stove, but it will take several hours.’

‘We start on that now?’

‘Soon. But first your luggage. We’ll go out to the plane now, and bring that back.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ Mrs Dansby-Gregg said stiffly. ‘I was beginning to think I’d never see my stuff again.’

‘Oh, you will,’ I said. ‘Briefly.’

‘Just what do you mean by that?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘I mean that you’ll all put on as many clothes as you’re able to stagger about in,’ I said. ‘Then you have a small attaché-case for your valuables, if you have any. The rest of the stuff we’ll have to abandon. This is no Cook’s tour. We’ll have no room on the tractor.’

‘But – but I have clothes worth hundreds of pounds,’ she protested angrily. ‘Hundreds? -Thousands would be nearer it. I have a Balenciaga alone that cost over five hundred pounds, not to mention—’

‘How much do you reckon your own life is worth?’ Zagero said shortly. He grinned. ‘Or maybe we should abandon you and save the Balenciaga. Better still, wear it on top of everything – you know, how the well-dressed woman leaves the ice-cap.’

‘Excruciatingly funny.’ She stared at him icily.

‘Frequently fracture myself,’ Zagero agreed. ‘Can I give you a hand with the stuff, Doc?’

‘You stay here, Johnny Zagero!’ Solly Levin jumped up in agitation. ‘One little slip on that ice—’

‘Calm yourself, calm yourself.’ Zagero patted his shoulder. ‘Merely goin’ in a supervisory capacity, Solly. How about it, Doc?’

‘Thanks. You want to come, Mr Corazzini?’ I could see he was already struggling into a parka.

‘I’d be glad to. Can’t sit here all day’

‘These cuts on your head and hands aren’t sealed yet. They’ll sting like the devil when you get out into this cold.’

‘Got to get used to it, haven’t I? Lead the way.’

The airliner, crouching in the snow like some great wounded bird, was faintly visible in the twilight now, seven or eight hundred yards away to the north-east, port wing-tip facing us, lying at exactly right angles to our line of sight. There was no saying how often we might have to go out there, the quasi daylight would be gone in another hour or so, and it seemed pointless to follow in darkness the zigzag route we had been compelled to make the previous night, so with help from Zagero and Corazzini I staked out a route, with bamboo markers about five yards apart, straight out to the plane. Some of the bamboos I fetched from the tunnel, but most of them were transplanted from the positions where they had been stuck the previous night.

Inside the plane itself it was as cold as the tomb and as dark as the tomb. One side of the plane was already thickly sheeted in drift ice, and all the windows were completely blanked off, made opaque, by rime frost. In the light of a couple of torches we ourselves moved around like spectres, our heads enveloped in the clouds of our frozen breath, clouds that remained hanging almost stationary above our heads. In the silence we could faintly hear the crackling of our breath in the super-chilled air, followed by the curious wheezing noise that men make in very low temperatures when they were trying not to breathe too deeply.

‘God, this is a ghastly place,’ Zagero said. He shivered, whether or not from cold it was impossible to say, and flashed his torch at the dead man sitting in the back seat. ‘Are we – are we going to leave them there, Doc?’

‘Leave them?’ I dumped a couple of attaché-cases on to the pile we were making in the front seat. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I don’t know, I thought – well, we buried the second officer this morning, and—’

‘Bury them? The ice-cap will bury them soon enough. In six months’ time this plane will have drifted over and be vanished for ever. But I agree – let’s get out of here. Give anyone the creeps.’

As I made my way to the front I saw Corazzini, a doleful look on his face, shaking an ebonite and metal portable radio and listening to the rattling that came from inside.

‘Another casualty?’ I inquired.

‘Afraid so.’ He twiddled some dials, without result. ‘Battery and mains model. A goner, Doc. Valves, I expect. Still, I’ll tote it along – cost me two hundred dollars two days ago.’

‘Two hundred?’ I whistled. ‘You should have bought two. Maybe Joss can give you some valves. He’s got dozens of spares.’

‘No good.’ Corazzini shook his head. ‘Latest transistor model – that’s why it was so damn’ expensive.’

‘Take it with you,’ I advised. ‘It’ll only cost you another two hundred to get it repaired in Glasgow. Listen, there’s Jackstraw now.’

We could hear the barking of dogs, and we lost no time in lowering the odds and ends down to Jackstraw who loaded them on the sledge. In the forward hold we found about twenty-five suitcases of various sizes. We had to make two trips to bring all the stuff back, and on the second trip the rising wind was in our faces, already lifting the drift off the ice-cap. The climate on the Greenland plateau is one of the most unstable in the world, and the wind, which had all but stopped for a few hours, had now veered suddenly to the south. I didn’t know what it presaged, but I suspected it wasn’t anything good.

We were all chilled to the bone by the time the luggage had been lowered down into the cabin, and Corazzini looked at me, his eyes sober and speculative. He was shaking with cold, and his nose and one of his cheeks were white with frostbite, and when he pulled off one of his gloves the hand, too, was limp and white and dead.

‘Is this what it’s like to be exposed to this stuff for half an hour, Dr Mason?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘And we’re to be out in this for maybe seven days and seven nights! Good God, man, we’ll never make it! And the women, old Miss LeGarde, and Brewster and Mahler, they’re no chickens either—’ He broke off, wincing – and I was beginning to suspect that it would take a great deal to make this man wince – as the circulation returned under the influence of vigorous rubbing. ‘It’s nothing short of suicide.’

‘It’s a gamble,’ I corrected. ‘Staying here and starving to death is suicide.’

‘You put the alternative so nicely.’ He smiled a smile that never touched the cold and determined eyes. ‘But I guess you’re right at that.’

Lunch that day was a bowl of soup and crackers, poor fare at any time, shockingly insufficient to stay and warm men who would have to work for the next few hours in these bitter sub-zero temperatures above. But there was no help for it: if it would take us a week to reach the coast, and in all optimism I couldn’t count on less, rationing would have to start now.

In a matter of a couple of hours the thermometer reading had risen with astonishing speed – these dramatic temperature variations were commonplace on the ice-cap – and it was beginning to snow when we emerged from the hatch and moved across to where the tractor lay. The rise in temperature flattered only to deceive: the south wind brought with it not only snow but a rapidly climbing humidity, and the air was almost unbearably chill.

We ripped off the covering tarpaulin – it cracked and tore but I was no longer concerned with preserving it – and our guests saw for the first time the vehicle upon which all their lives were to depend. Slowly I played my torch over it – the dark shroud of the arctic night had already fallen across the ice-cap – and I heard the quick indrawn hiss of breath beside me.

‘Drove it out when the museum attendant wasn’t looking, I suppose.’ Corazzini kept his voice carefully expressionless. ‘Or did you just find it here – left over from the last ice-age?’

‘It is a bit old,’ I admitted. ‘Pre-war. But all we can afford. The British Government isn’t quite so lavish with its IGY expenditure as the Russians and your people. Know it? It’s the prototype, the ancestor of the modern arctic tractor.’

‘Never seen it before. What is it?’

‘French. A 10–20 Citroen. Underpowered, narrow-tracked as you can see, and far too short for its weight. Lethal in crevasse country. Plods along fairly well on the frozen ice-cap, but you’d be better with a bicycle when there’s any depth at all of new-fallen snow. But it’s all we have.’

Corazzini said no more. As the managing director of a factory producing some of the finest tractors in the world, I suppose his heart was too full to say any more. But his disappointment made no difference to his drive, his sheer unflagging determination. For the next few hours he worked like a demon. So, too, did Zagero.

Less than five minutes after we had started work we had to stop again to rig up a canvas screen, lashed to aluminium poles brought up from the tunnel, round three sides of the tractor: work had been impossible in that snow and knifelike wind that lanced through even the bulkiest layers of clothing – and most of them were now wearing so many that they could move only with difficulty – as if they were tissue paper. Behind this screen we placed a portable oil stove – the very illusion of warmth was better than nothing – two storm lanterns and the blow-torches without which we could have made no progress at all. Even with this shelter, practically everyone had to go below from time to time to rub and pound life back into his freezing body: only Jackstraw and I, in our caribou furs, could stay up almost indefinitely. Joss was below all the afternoon: after spending a couple of hours trying to raise our field party on the tractor’s emergency radio he gave up and went doggedly back to work on the RCA.

Our first job, the removal of the hoped canvas hood, gave us some measure of the difficulty of the task that lay before us. The hood was secured by only seven bolts and nuts, but these had been in position for over four months now, were frozen solid and took over an hour to remove: each set had to be thawed out separately by blow-torch before the heavy wrenches could get the nuts to turn.

Then came the assembly of the wooden body. This was in fifteen prefabricated pieces, three each for the floor, sides, roof and front – the back was only a canvas screen. Each set of three pieces had to be brought out singly through the narrow hatchway before assembly, and it was the devil’s own job, in that numbing cold and flickering semi-darkness, to locate and line up the bolt-holes in the wood with the matching holes in the connecting iron cross-pieces. It took us well over an hour to assemble and fit the floor section alone, and it was beginning to look as if we would be here until midnight when Corazzini had the idea – and a brilliant one it seemed at the time – of assembling the various sections in the comparative warmth and brightness of the cabin, sliding the complicated piece out vertically into the food and fuel tunnel, sawing a long narrow slit through the snow roof, which was no more than a foot thick in the middle, and hauling the sections up from below.

After this we made rapid progress. By five o’clock the entire body shell was completed and with the end in sight less than a couple of hours away, everyone worked more furiously than ever. Most of them were unskilled, ham-handed and completely unused to any physical work at all, far less work of this cruel, exacting nature, but my opinion of them was rising all the time. Corazzini and Zagero especially, were tireless, and Theodore Mahler, the silent little Jew whose entire conversational range so far had been limited to ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’, was indefatigable, completely selfless and uncomplaining, driving his slight body to lengths of which I would never have believed it capable. Even the Senator, the Rev Smallwood and Solly Levin did what they could, as best they could, trying their best to hide their misery and their pain. By this time everyone, even Jackstraw and myself, was shaking almost uncontrollably with the cold so that our hands and elbows rat-tat-tatted like machine-guns against the wooden sides of the tractor: and our hands themselves, through constant contact with metal were in a shocking state, puffed and bleeding and blistered, the mittens continuously filled with lumps and slivers of ice that never melted.

We had just installed the four collapsible bunks and were fitting the stove-pipe through its circular hole in the roof when someone called me. I jumped down and all but knocked over Marie LeGarde.

‘You shouldn’t be out here,’ I scolded. ‘It’s far too cold for you, Miss LeGarde.’

‘Don’t be silly, Peter.’ I could never bring myself to call her ‘Marie’, though she had asked me to several times. ‘I have to get used to it, don’t I? Would you come below for a moment or two, please?’

‘Why? I’m busy’

‘But not indispensable,’ she retorted. ‘I want you to have a look at Margaret.’

‘Margaret – oh, the stewardess. What does she want?’

‘Nothing. It’s I who want it. Why are you so hostile towards her?’ she asked curiously. ‘It’s not like you – at least, I don’t think it is. She’s a fine girl.’

‘What does the fine girl want?’

‘What in the world’s got into you? Why – oh, forget it. I’m not going to fight with you. Her back hurts – she’s in considerable pain. Come and see it, please.’

‘I offered to see it last night. If she wants me now why doesn’t she come and ask me?’

‘Because she’s scared of you, that’s why,’ she said angrily. She stamped a foot in the frozen snow. ‘Will you go or not?’

I went. Below, I stripped off my gloves, emptied the ice out of them and washed my blistered, bleeding hands in disinfectant. I saw Marie LeGarde’s eyes widen at the sight of my hands, but she said nothing: maybe she knew I wasn’t in the mood for condolences.

I rigged up a screen in the corner of the room remote from the table where the women had been gathering and dividing out the remaining food supplies, and had a look at Margaret Ross’s back. It was a mess, all right, a great ugly blue and purpling bruise from the spine to the left shoulder: in the centre, just below the shoulder blade, was a deep jagged cut, which looked as if it had been caused by a heavy blow from some triangular piece of sharp metal. Whatever had caused it had passed clean through her tunic and blouse.

‘Why didn’t you show me this yesterday?’ I asked coldly.

‘I – I didn’t want to bother you,’ she faltered.

Didn’t want to bother me, I thought grimly. Didn’t want to give yourself away, you mean. In my mind’s eye I had a picture of the pantry where we had found her, and I was almost certain now that I could get the proof that I needed. Almost, but not quite. I’d have to go to check.

‘Is it very bad?’ She twisted round, and I could see there were tears in the brown eyes from the pain of the disinfectant I was rubbing on none too gently.

‘Bad enough,’ I said shortly. ‘How did you get this?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said helplessly. ‘I just don’t know, Dr Mason.’

‘Perhaps we can find out.’

‘Find out? Why? What does it matter?’ She shook her head wearily. ‘I don’t understand, I really don’t. What have I done, Dr Mason?’

It was magnificent, I had to admit. I could have hit her, but it was magnificent.

‘Nothing, Miss Ross. Just nothing at all.’ By the time I had pulled on my parka, gloves, goggles and mask she was fully dressed, staring at me as I climbed up the steps and out through the hatch.

The snow was falling quite heavily now, gusting in swirling ghostly flurries through the pale beam of my torch: it seemed to vanish as it hit the ground, freezing as it touched, or scudding smokelike over the frozen surface with a thin rustling sound. But the wind was at my back, the bamboo markers stretched out in a dead straight line ahead, never less than two of them in the beam of my torch, and I had reached the crashed plane in five or six minutes.

I jumped for the windscreen, hooked my fingers over the sill, hauled myself up with some difficulty and wriggled my way into the control cabin. A moment later I was in the stewardess’s pantry, flashing my torch around.

On the after bulkhead was a big refrigerator, with a small hinged table in front of it, and at the far end, under the window, a hinged box covered over what might have been a heating unit or sink or both. I didn’t bother investigating, I wasn’t interested. What I was interested in was the for’ard bulkhead, and I examined it carefully. It was given up entirely to the small closed doors of little metal lockers let in flush to the wall – food containers, probably – and there wasn’t a single metal projection in the entire wall, nothing that could possibly account for the wound in the stewardess’s back. And if she had been here at the moment of impact, that was the wall she must have been flung against. The inference was inescapable – she must have been elsewhere at the time of the crash. I remembered now, with chagrin, that I hadn’t even bothered to see whether or not she was conscious when we’d first found her lying on the floor.

Across the passage in the radio compartment I found what I was looking for almost immediately – I’d a pretty good idea where to look. The thin sheet metal at the top left-hand corner of the radio cabinet was bent almost half an inch out of true: and it didn’t require any microscope to locate or forensic expert to guess at the significance of the small dark stain and the fibres of navy blue cloth clinging to the corner of the smashed set. I looked inside the set itself, and now that I had time to spare it more than a fleeting glance it was abundantly clear to me that the wrenching away of the face-plate didn’t even begin to account for the damage that had been done to the set: it had been systematically and thoroughly wrecked.

If ever there was a time when my thoughts should have been racing it was then, but the plain truth is that they weren’t. It was abominably cold inside the chilled metal of that dead plane, and my mind was sluggish, but even so I knew that this time I couldn’t be wrong about what had happened. I could see now why the second officer had sent out no distress messages. I could see now why he had almost certainly been sending out his regular On route – on time’ checks to base. Poor devil, he hadn’t had much option – not with the stewardess sitting there with a gun on him. It must have been a gun. It was no consolation at all that the crash had caught her unprepared.

A gun! Gradually, ever so gradually, in infuriating slow-motion process, thoughts were beginning to click into place in my numbed mind. Whoever had landed that plane, landed it so skilfully into the blinding maelstrom of last night’s blizzard, it hadn’t been a dead man. I straightened, walked forward into the control cabin and shone my torch on the dead captain of the plane. As I’d noticed when I’d first seen him, he appeared to be completely unmarked, and I don’t know whether it was some unconscious process of logical reasoning or some strange instinct that made me right away lift up the crackling ice-stiffened tunic jacket enough to see the black powder-ringed bullet hole in the middle of the spine. I had been expecting it, I had been uncannily certain that I would find such a hole, and find it just there: but my mouth was suddenly dry, dry as if I had drunk nothing for days, and my heart was thudding heavily in my chest.

I lowered the jacket, pulled it down into position, turned away and walked slowly towards the rear of the plane. The man the stewardess had called Colonel Harrison was still sitting as I had left him, propped up stiffly in a corner, as stiffly as he would remain there for heaven only knew how many frozen centuries to come.

The jacket was fastened by a central button. I undid it, saw nothing except a curious thin leather strap running across the chest, undid a shirt button, another, and there it was, the same deadly little hole, the same powder-ringed evidence of point-blank firing staining the whiteness of the singlet. But in this case the powder marks were concentrated on the upper part of the ring, showing that the pistol had been directed in a slightly downward angle. On a hunch, but still like a man in a dream, I eased him forward, and there, less like a bullet hole in the jacket than an inconsequential rip one might easily overlook, was the point of exit, matched by an equally tiny tear in the padding of the upholstered seat behind. At the time, that carried no special significance for me. Heaven knows that I was in no mental frame of mind at the moment, anyway, to figure anything out. I was like an automaton, the movements of which were controlled by something outside me. I felt nothing at the time, not even horror at the hideous thought that the man’s neck might well have been cold-bloodedly broken after death to conceal its true cause.

The leather strap across the man’s chest led to a felt-covered holster under the arm. I took out the little dark snub-nosed automatic, pressed the release switch and shook the magazine out from the base of the grip. It was an eight shot clip, full. I replaced it and shoved the gun into the inside pocket of my parka.

There were two inside breast pockets in the jacket. The left-hand one held another clip of ammunition, in a thin leather case. This, too, I pocketed. The right-hand pocket held only passport and wallet. The picture on the passport matched the face, and it was made out in the name of Lieut-Colonel Robert Harrison. The wallet contained little of interest – a couple of letters with an Oxford postmark, obviously from his wife, British and American currency notes and a long cutting that had been torn from the top half of a page of the New York Herald Tribune, with a mid-September date-mark, just over two months previously.

For a brief moment I studied this in the light of my torch. There was a small, indistinct picture of a railway smash of some kind, showing carriages on a bridge that ended abruptly over a stretch of water, with boats beneath, and I realised that it was some kind of follow-up story on the shocking train disaster of about that time when a loaded commuters’ train at Elizabeth, New Jersey, had plunged out over an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay. I was in no mood for reading it then, but I had the obscure, unreasonable idea that it might be in some way important.

I folded it carefully, lifted up my parka and thrust the paper into my inside pocket, along with the gun and the spare ammo clip. It was just at that moment that I heard the sharp metallic sound coming from the front of the dark and deserted plane.

FIVE

Monday 6 p.m.–7 p.m.

For maybe five seconds, maybe ten, I sat there without moving, as rigid and motionless as the dead man by my side, bent right arm frozen in the act of folding the newspaper cutting into my parka pocket. Looking back on it, I can only think that my brain had been half numbed from too long exposure to the cold, that the shock of the discovery of the savagely murdered men had upset me more than I would admit even to myself, and that the morgue-like atmosphere of that chill metal tomb had affected my normally unimaginative mind to a degree quite unprecedented in my experience. Or maybe it was a combination of all three that triggered open the floodgates to the atavistic racial superstitions that lurk deep in the minds of all of us, the nameless dreads that can in a moment destroy the tissue veneer of our civilisation as if it had never been, and send the adrenalin pumping crazily into the bloodstream. However it was, I had only one thought in mind at that moment, no thought, rather, but an unreasoning blood-freezing certainty: that one of the dead pilots or the flight engineer had somehow risen from his seat and was walking back towards me. Even yet I can remember the frenzy of my wild, frantic hope that it wasn’t the co-pilot, the man who had been sitting in the right-hand pilot’s seat when the telescoping nose of the airliner had folded back on him, mangling him out of all human recognition.

Heaven only knows how long I might have sat there, petrified in this superstitious horror, had the sound from the control cabin not repeated itself. But again I heard it, the same metallic scraping sound as someone moved around in the darkness among the tangled wreckage of the flight deck, and as the touch of an electric switch can turn a room from pitch darkness to the brightness of daylight, so this second sound served to recall me, in an instant, from the thrall of superstition and panic to the world of reality and reason, and I dropped swiftly to my knees behind the high padded back of the seat in front of me, for what little shelter it offered. My heart was still pounding, the hairs still stiff on the back of my neck, but I was a going concern again, my mind beginning to race under the impetus invariably provided by the need for self-preservation.

And that self-preservation entered very acutely into it I did not for a moment doubt. A person who had killed three times to achieve her ends - I had no doubt at all as to the identity of the person in the control cabin, only the stewardess had seen me leave for the plane – and protect her secret wouldn’t hesitate to kill a fourth. And she knew her secret was no longer a secret, not while I lived, I had stupidly made my suspicions plain to her. And not only was she ready to kill, but she had the means to kill – of the fact that she carried a gun and was murderously ready to use it I’d had grisly evidence in the past few minutes. Nor need she hesitate to use it: apart from the fact that falling snow had a peculiarly blanketing effect on all sound, the south wind would carry the crack of a pistol-shot away from the cabin.

Then something snapped inside my mind and I was all of a sudden fighting mad. Perhaps it was the thought of the four dead men – five, including the co-pilot – perhaps it was the inevitable reaction from my panic-stricken fear of a moment ago, and perhaps, too, it had no little to do with the realisation that I, too, had a gun. I brought it out from my pocket, transferred the torch to my left hand, jumped up, pressed the torch button and started running down the aisle.

It was proof enough of my utter inexperience in this murderous game of hide-and-seek that it was not until I was almost at the door at the forward end of the cabin that I remembered how easy it would have been for anyone to crouch down behind the backs of one of the rearward facing front seats and shoot me at point-blank range as I passed. But there was no one there and as I plunged through the door I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark muffled figure, no more than a featureless silhouette in the none too powerful beam of my torch, wriggling out through the smashed windscreen of the control cabin.

I brought up my automatic – the thought that I could be indicted on a murder charge for killing a fleeing person, no matter how criminal a person, never entered my mind – and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I squeezed the trigger again, and before I remembered the existence of such a thing as a safety-catch the windscreen was no more than an empty frame for the thickening snow that swirled greyly in the darkness beyond, and I plainly heard the thud of feet hitting the ground.

Cursing my stupidity, and again oblivious of the perfect target I was presenting, I leaned far out of the window. Again I was lucky, again I had another brief sight of the figure, this time scurrying round the tip of the left wing before vanishing into the snow and the dark.

Three seconds later I was on the ground myself. I landed awkwardly but picked myself up at once and skirted round the wing, pounding after the fleeing figure with all the speed I could muster in the hampering bulkiness of my furs.

She was running straight back to the cabin, following the line of bamboo sticks, and I could both hear the thudding of feet in the frozen snow and see the wildly erratic swinging of a torch, the beam one moment pooling whitely on the ground beside the flying feet, the next reaching ahead to light up the bamboo line. She was moving swiftly, much more so than I would have thought her capable of doing, but nevertheless I was steadily overhauling her when suddenly the torch beam ahead curved away in a new direction, as the runner angled off into the darkness, about forty-five degrees to the left. I turned after her, still following both my sight of the torch and sound of the feet. Thirty yards, forty, fifty – then I stopped and stood very still indeed. The torch ahead had gone out and I could hear nothing at all.

For the second time that night I cursed my unthinking folly. What I should have done, of course, was to carry straight on back to the cabin and await the moment she turned up there, as she inevitably must: no person could hope to survive for any great length of time, without shelter of some kind, in the deadly cold of that arctic night.

But it wasn’t too late yet. The wind had been blowing almost directly in my face as I had been running: all I had to do was walk back, keeping it on my left cheek, and I would be bound to hit the line of bamboos at right angles, and the chances of my passing unwittingly between two of them, with the light of my torch to help me, did not exist. I turned, took one step, then two, then halted in my tracks.

Why had I been lured out here away from the bamboo line? Not so that she could thereby escape me – she couldn’t do it that way. As long as we both lived, we were both utterly dependent on the cabin and would have to meet there sooner or later.

As long as we both lived! God, what a fool I was, what a veriest amateur at this game. The only way she could escape me, really and permanently escape me, was if I no longer lived. I could be shot down here and no one would ever know. And as she had stopped running before I had and been first to switch out her torch, she must have a much better idea of my position than I of hers. And these two rash, incautious steps I had taken had given her a new and even more accurate bearing on my position. Perhaps she was only feet away now, lining her gun up for the kill.

I switched on my torch and whirled round in a complete circle. Nobody there, nothing to be seen at all. Only the frozen feathers of the snow brushing my cheeks in the blackness of the night, the low moaning lament of the soughing south wind and the faint rustle of ice spicules brushing their blind way across the iron-hard surface of the ice-cap.

Swiftly, softly, I moved half a dozen long steps to my left. My torch was out now, and I’d been crazy ever to switch it on in the first place. Nothing could have been better calculated to betray my position – the light of a torch, seen head on, can be seen at twenty times the farthest distance that its beam will reach. I prayed that a flurry of snow had hidden it.

Where would the attack come from – downwind, so that I could see nothing in that blinding snow, or upwind, so that I could hear nothing? Downwind, I decided – on the ice-cap one could move as silently as on a tar-macadam road. The better to hear, I pulled the parka hood off my head: the better to see, I slipped up my goggles and stared out unwinkingly under my visored hands.

Five minutes passed, and nothing happened -if, that is, the freezing of my ears and forehead could be called nothing. Still no sound, still no sight of anything: the strain, the nerve-racking expectancy could not be borne for much longer. Slowly, with infinite care, I moved off in a circle of about twenty yards diameter, but I saw nothing, heard nothing, and so well adjusted now were my eyes to the darkness, so well attuned my ears to the ice-cap’s mournful symphony of sound, that I would have sworn that had there been anyone there to be seen or heard, I would have seen or heard them. It was as if I were alone on the ice-cap.

And then the appalling truth struck me – I was alone. I was alone, I realised in a belated and chilling flash of understanding, because shooting me would have been a stupid way of disposing of both myself and my dangerous knowledge – the discovery of a bullet-riddled body on the ice-cap during the brief hours of daylight would have provoked a hundred questions and suspicions. Much more desirable, from the killer’s point of view, would be my dead body without a trace of violence. Even the most experienced man can get lost in a snow-storm on the ice-cap.

And I was lost. I knew I was lost, I was convinced of it even before I got the wind on my left and walked back to the line of bamboo poles. The bamboos were no longer there. I made a wide circle, but still found nothing. For at least twenty yards back in the direction of the plane, and probably all the way towards the cabin, the poles had been removed, that slender series of markers which alone meant all the difference between safety and being irrecoverably lost on the ice-cap, were no longer there. I was lost, really and truly lost.

For once, that night, I didn’t panic. It wasn’t just that I knew that panic would be the end of me. I was consumed by a cold fury that I should have been so ignominiously tricked, so callously left to die. But I wasn’t going to die. I couldn’t even begin to guess what the tremendously high stakes must be in the murderous game that this incredibly ruthless, wickedly-deceptive gentle-faced stewardess was playing; but I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to be one of the pawns that were going to be brushed off the table. I stood still, and took stock.

The snow was increasing now, thickening by the minute, building up into a blizzard with visibility cut down to a few feet: the yearly precipitation of the ice-cap was no more than seven or eight inches, and it was just my evil luck that it should fall so heavily that night. The wind was southerly, or had been, but in that fickle Greenland climate there was no knowing what minute it might back or veer. My torch was failing: continual use plus the cold had left it with a pale yellowish beam that reached not much more than a few yards: but that was the limit of visibility, anyway, even downwind. The plane, I calculated, was not much more than a hundred yards away, the cabin six hundred. My chances of stumbling upon the latter, flush as it almost was with the surface of the ice-cap, were no better than one in a hundred. But my chances of finding the plane, or what came to the same thing, the great quarter-mile trench that it had gouged out in the frozen snow when it had crash-landed, were far better than even: it was impossible that it could have already been filled in with drift. I turned until I had the wind over my left shoulder and started walking.

I reached the deep furrow in the snow inside a minute – I’d switched off my torch to conserve the battery but my stumble and heavy fall as I went over the edge was intimation enough -turned right and reached the plane in thirty seconds. I suppose I might possibly have lasted out the night inside the wrecked fuselage, but such was my singleness of purpose at the moment that the thought never occurred to me. I walked round the wing, picked up the first of the bamboos in the dim beam of my torch and started to follow them.

There were only five altogether. After that, nothing. Every one of the others had been removed. These five, I knew, pointed straight towards the cabin and all I had to do was to keep shifting the last of the five to the front, lining it up straight with the others in the light of my torch, and it would be bound to bring out to the cabin. Or so I thought, for perhaps ten seconds. But it was a task that really required two people to achieve anything like accuracy: what with that, the feebleness of my rapidly dying torch and the hopeless visibility, I couldn’t be accurate within two or three degrees at the least. That seemed a trifle, but when I stopped and worked it out I discovered that, over the distance, even one degree out would have put me almost forty feet off course. On a night like that, I could pass by the cabin ten feet away and never see it. There were less laborious means of committing suicide.

I picked up the five sticks, returned to the plane and walked along the furrowed trench till I came to the depression where the plane had touched down. The 250-foot line of the antenna, I knew, was roughly four hundred yards away, just a little bit south of west – slightly to my left, that was, as I stood with my back to the plane. I didn’t hesitate. I strode out into the darkness, counting my steps, concentrating on keeping the wind a little more than on my left cheek but not quite full face. After four hundred long paces I stopped and pulled out my torch.

It was quite dead – the dull red glow from the filament didn’t even register on my glove six inches away, and the darkness was as absolute as it would ever become on the ice-cap. I was a blind man moving in a blind world, and all I had left to me was the sense of touch. For the first time fear came to me, and I all but gave way to an almost overpowering instinct to run. But there was no place to run to.

I pulled the drawstring from my hood and with numbed and clumsy hands lashed together two of the bamboos to give me a stick seven feet in length. A third bamboo I thrust into the snow, then lay down flat, the sole of my boot touching it while I described a complete circle, flailing out with my long stick into the darkness. Nothing. At the full stretch of my body and the stick I stuck the last two bamboos into the snow, one upwind, the other downwind from the central bamboo, and described horizontal flailing circles round both of these. Again, nothing.

I gathered up the bamboos, walked ten paces more, and repeated the performance. I had the same luck again – and again and again. Five minutes and seventy paces after I had stopped for the first time I knew I had completely missed the antenna line and was utterly lost. The wind must have backed or veered, and I had wandered far off my course: and then came the chilling realisation that if that were so I had no idea now where the plane lay and could never regain it. Even had I known the direction where it lay, I doubted whether I could have made my way back anyway, not because I was tired but because my only means of gauging direction was the wind in my face, and my face was so completely numbed that I could no longer feel anything. I could hear the wind, but I couldn’t feel it.

Ten more paces, I told myself, ten more and then I must turn back. Turn back where, a mocking voice seemed to ask me, but I ignored it and stumbled on with leaden-footed steps, doggedly counting. And on the seventh step I walked straight into one of the big antenna poles, staggered with the shock, all but fell, recovered, grabbed the pole and hugged it as if I would never let go. I knew at that moment what it must be like to be condemned to death and then live again, it was the most wonderful feeling I had ever experienced. And then the relief and the exultation gradually faded and anger returned to take its place, a cold, vicious, all-consuming anger of which I would never have believed myself capable.

With my stick stretched up and running along the rimed antenna cable to guide me, I ran all the way back to the cabin. I was vaguely surprised to see shadows still moving in the lamp-lit screen that surrounded the tractor – it was almost impossible for me to realise that I had been gone no more than thirty minutes – but I passed by opened the hatch and dropped down into the cabin.

Joss was still in the far corner, working on the big radio, and the four women were huddled close round the stove. The stewardess, I noticed, wore a parka – one she had borrowed from Joss – and was rubbing her hands above the flame.

‘Cold, Miss Ross?’ I inquired solicitously. At least, I had meant it to sound that way, but even to myself my voice sounded hoarse and strained.

‘And why shouldn’t she be, Dr Mason?’ Marie LeGarde snapped. ‘Dr Mason’, I noted. ‘She’s just spent the last fifteen minutes or so with the men on the tractor.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I was giving them coffee.’ For the first time the stewardess showed some spirit. ‘What’s so wrong in that?’

‘Nothing,’ I said shortly. Takes you a damned long time to pour a cup of coffee, I thought savagely. ‘Most kind, I’m sure.’ Massaging my frozen face, I walked away into the food tunnel, nodding to Joss. He joined me immediately.

‘Somebody just tried to murder me out there,’ I said without preamble.

‘Murder you!’ Joss stared at me for a long moment, then his eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll believe anything in this lot.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I was looking for some of the radio spares a moment ago – a few of them seem to be missing, but that’s not the point. The spares, as you know, are next to the explosives. Someone’s been tampering with them.’

‘The explosives!’ I had a momentary vision of some maniac placing a stick of gelignite under the tractor. ‘What’s missing?’

‘Nothing, that’s what so damned funny. I checked, all the explosives are there. But they’re scattered everywhere, all mixed up with fuses and detonators.’

‘Who’s been in here this afternoon?’

He shrugged. ‘Who hasn’t?’

It was true enough. Everyone had been coming and going there all afternoon and evening, the men for a hundred and one pieces of equipment for the tractor body, the women for food and stores. And, of course, our primitive toilet lay at the farthest end of the tunnel.

‘What happened to you, sir?’ Joss asked quietly.

I told him, and watched his face tighten till the mouth was a thin white line in the dark face. Joss knew what it meant to be lost on the ice-cap.

‘The murderous, cold-blooded she-devil,’ he said softly. ‘We’ll have to nail her, sir, we’ll have to, or God only knows who’s next on her list. But – but won’t we have to have proof or confession or something? We can’t just—’

‘I’m going to get both,’ I said. The bitter anger still dominated my mind to the exclusion of all else. ‘Right now.’

I walked out of the tunnel and across the cabin to where the stewardess was sitting.

‘We’ve overlooked something, Miss Ross,’ I said abruptly. ‘The food in your galley on the plane. It might make all the difference between life and death. How much is there?’

‘In the galley? Not very much, I’m afraid. Only odds and ends for snacks, if anyone was hungry. It was a night flight, Dr Mason, and they had already had their evening meal.’

Followed by a very special brand of coffee, I thought grimly. ‘Doesn’t matter how little it is,’ I said. ‘It might be invaluable. I’d like you to come and show me where it is.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ The protest came from Marie LeGarde. ‘Can’t you see that the poor girl is chilled to death?’

‘Can’t you see that I am too?’ I snapped. It was a measure of the mood I was in when I could bring myself to speak like that to Marie LeGarde. ‘Coming, Miss Ross?’

She came. I was taking no chances this time, so I carried with me the big searchlight with its portable battery and another torch, and gave the stewardess an armful of bamboos. When we had reached the top of the hatchway steps she waited for me to lead the way, but I told her to walk in front. I wanted to watch her hands.

The snow was easing now, the wind dropping and visibility just a little improved. We walked the length of the antenna line, angled off a little way north of east, setting down an occasional bamboo, and were at the plane within ten minutes of leaving the cabin.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘You first, Miss Ross. Up you go.’

‘Up?’ She turned towards me, and though the big searchlight lying on the ground was no help in letting me see the expression of her face, the puzzled tone of her voice was exactly right. ‘How?’

‘Same way as you did before,’ I said harshly. My anger was almost out of control now, I couldn’t have restrained myself any longer. ‘Jump for it.’

‘The same way—’ She stopped in mid-sentence and stared at me. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was only a whisper.

‘Jump for it,’ I said implacably.

She turned away slowly and jumped. Her fingers didn’t come within six inches of the sill. She tried again, got no nearer, and on her third attempt I boosted her so that her hands hooked over the sill. She hung there for a moment, then pulled herself up a few inches, cried out and fell heavily to the ground. Slowly, dazedly she picked herself up and looked at me. A splendid performance.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said huskily. ‘You can see I can’t. What are you trying to do to me? What’s wrong?’ I didn’t answer, and she rushed on. ‘I -I’m not staying here. I’m going back to the cabin.’

‘Later.’ I caught her arm roughly as she made to move away. ‘Stand there where I can watch you.’ I jumped up, wriggled inside the control cabin, reached down and pulled her up after me, none too gently, and without a word I led her straight into the galley.

‘The Mickey Finn dispensary,’ I observed. ‘An ideal quiet spot it is, too.’ She had her mask off now, and I held up my hand to forestall her as she opened her mouth to speak. ‘Dope, Miss Ross. But of course you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about.’

She stared at me unblinkingly, made no answer.

‘You were sitting here when the plane crashed,’ I went on. ‘Possibly on this little stool here? Right?’

She nodded, again without speaking.

‘And, of course, were flung against this front bulkhead here. Tell me, Miss Ross, where’s the metal projection that tore this hole in your back?’

She stared at the lockers, then looked slowly back to me.

‘Is – is that why you’ve brought me here—’

‘Where is it?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head from side to side and took a backward step. ‘What does it matter? And – and dope – what is the matter? Please.’

I took her arm without a word and led her through to the radio cabin. I trained the torch beam on to the top of the radio cabinet.

‘Blood, Miss Ross. And some navy blue fibres. The blood from the cut on your back, the fibres from your tunic. Here’s where you were sitting -or standing – when the plane crashed. Pity it caught you off balance. But at least you managed to retain your hold on your gun.’ She was gazing at me now with sick eyes, and her face was a mask carved from white papiermâché. ‘Missed your cue, Miss Ross – your next line of dialogue was “What gun?”. I’ll tell you – the one you had lined up on the second officer. Pity you hadn’t killed him then, isn’t it? But you made a good job of it later. Smothering makes such a much less messy job, doesn’t it?’

‘Smothering?’ She had to try three times before she got the word out.

‘On cue, on time,’ I approved. ‘Smothering. When you murdered the second officer in the cabin last night.’

‘You’re mad,’ she whispered. Her lips, startlingly red against the ashen face, were parted and the brown eyes enormous with fear and sick despair. ‘You’re mad,’ she repeated unsteadily.

‘Crazy as a loon,’ I agreed. Again I caught her arm, pulled her out on to the flight deck and trained my flashlight on the captain’s back. ‘You wouldn’t, of course, know anything about this either.’ I leaned forward, jerked up the jacket to expose the bullet hole in the back, then stumbled and all but fell as she gave a long sigh and crumpled against me. Instinctively I caught her, lowered her to the floor, cursed myself for having fallen for the fainting routine even for a second, and ruthlessly stabbed a stiff couple of fingers into the solar plexus, just below the breastbone.

There was no reaction, just no reaction at all. The faint had been as genuine as ever a faint can be and she was completely unconscious.

The next few minutes, while I sat beside her on the front seat of the plane waiting for her to recover consciousness, were some of the worst I have ever gone through. Self-reproach is a hopeless word to describe the way I swore at myself for my folly, my utter stupidity and unforgivable blindness, above all for the brutality, the calculated cruelty with which I’d treated this poor, crumpled young girl by my side. Especially the cruelty in the past few minutes. Perhaps there had been excuse enough for my earlier suspicions, but there was none for my latest actions: if I hadn’t been so consumed by anger, so utterly sure of myself so that the possibility of doubt never had a chance to enter my mind, if my mind hadn’t been concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, on the exposure of her guilt, I should have known at least that it couldn’t have been she who had jumped down from the control cabin half an hour ago when I had rushed up the aisle, for the simple but sufficient reason that she had been incapable of getting up there in the first place. Quite apart from her injury, I should have been doctor enough to know that the arms and shoulders I had seen while attending to her back that evening weren’t built for the acrobatic performance necessary to swing oneself up and through the smashed windscreen. That had been no act she had put on when she had fallen back into the snow, I could see that clearly now; but I should have seen it then.

I still hadn’t got beyond the stage of calling myself by every name I could think of when she stirred, sighed and straightened in the crook of the arm with which I was supporting her. Her eyes opened slowly, focused themselves on me, and I could feel the pressure on my forearm as she shrank away.

‘It’s all right, Miss Ross,’ I urged her. ‘Please don’t be afraid. I’m not mad – really I’m not – just the biggest blundering half-witted idiot you’re ever likely to meet in all the rest of your days. I’m sorry, I’m most terribly sorry for all I’ve said, for all I’ve done. Do you think you can ever forgive me?’

I don’t think she heard a word I said. Maybe the tone of my voice gave her some reassurance, but it was impossible to tell. She shuddered, violently, and twisted her head to look in the direction of the flight deck.

‘Murder!’ The word was so low that I could hardly catch it. Suddenly her voice became high-pitched, unsteady. ‘He’s been murdered! Who -who killed him?’

‘Now take it easy, Miss Ross.’ My heavens, I thought, of all the fatuous advice. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that you had nothing to do with it.’

‘No.’ She shook her head tiredly. ‘I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Captain Johnson. Why should anyone – he hadn’t an enemy in the world, Dr Mason!’

‘Maybe Colonel Harrison hadn’t an enemy either.’ I nodded towards the rear of the plane. ‘But they got him too.’

She stared down the plane, her eyes wide with horror, her lips moving as if to speak, but no sound came.

‘They got him too,’ I repeated. ‘Just as they got the captain. Just as they got the second officer -and the flight engineer.’

‘They?’ she whispered. ‘They?’

‘Whoever it was. I only know it wasn’t you.’

‘No,’ she whispered. Again she shuddered, even more uncontrollably than before, and I tightened my arm round her. ‘I’m frightened, Dr Mason. I’m frightened.’

‘There’s nothing—’ I’d started off to say there was nothing to be frightened of, before I realised the idiocy of the words. With a ruthless and unknown murderer among us, there was everything in the world to be frightened of. I was scared myself: but admitting that to this youngster wasn’t likely to help her morale any. So I started talking, telling her of all the things we had found out, of the suspicions we had and of what had happened to me, and when I finished she looked at me and said: ‘But why was I taken into the wireless cabin? I must have been, mustn’t I?’

‘You must have been,’ I agreed. ‘Why? Probably so that someone could turn a gun on you and threaten to kill you if the second officer – Jimmy Waterman, you called him, wasn’t it – didn’t play ball. Why else?’

‘Why else?’ she echoed. She gazed at me, the wide brown eyes never leaving mine, and then I could see the slow fear touching them again and she whispered: ‘And who else?’

‘How do you mean “Who else”?’

‘Can’t you see? If someone had a gun on Jimmy Waterman, someone else must have had one on the pilots. You can see yourself that no one could cover both places at the same time. But Captain Johnson must have been doing exactly as he was told, just as Jimmy was.’

It was so glaringly obvious that a child could have seen it: it was so glaringly obvious that I’d missed it altogether. Of course there must have been two of them, how else would it have been possible to force the entire crew to do as they were ordered? Good heavens, this was twice as bad, ten times as bad as it had been previously. Nine men and women back there in the cabin, and two of them killers, ruthless merciless killers who would surely kill again, at the drop of a hat, as the needs of the moment demanded. And I couldn’t even begin to guess the identity of either of them …

‘You’re right, of course, Miss Ross,’ I forced myself to speak calmly, matter-of-factly. ‘It was blind of me, I should have known.’ I remembered how the bullet had passed clear through the man in the back seat. ‘I did know, but I couldn’t add one and one. Colonel Harrison and Captain Johnson were killed by different guns – the one by a heavy carrying weapon, like a Colt or a Luger, the other by a less powerful, a lighter weapon, like something a woman might have used.’

I broke off abruptly. A woman’s gun! Why not a woman using it? Why not even this girl by my side? It could have been her accomplice that had followed me out to the plane earlier in the evening, and it would fit in beautifully with the facts … No, it wouldn’t, faints couldn’t be faked. But perhaps—

‘A woman’s gun?’ I might have spoken my thoughts aloud, so perfectly had she understood. ‘Perhaps even me – or should I say perhaps still me?’ Her voice was unnaturally calm. ‘Goodness only knows I can’t blame you. If I were you, I’d suspect everyone too.’

She pulled the glove and mitten off her left hand, took the gleaming ring off her third finger and passed it across to me. I examined it blankly in the light of my torch, then bent forward as I caught sight of the tiny inscription on the inside of the gold band: ‘J. W.-M. R. Sept. 28, 1958’. I looked up at her and she nodded, her face numb and stricken.

‘Jimmy and I got engaged two months ago. This was my last flight as a stewardess – we were being married at Christmas.’ She snatched the ring from me, thrust it back on her finger with a shaking hand and when she turned to me again the tears were brimming over in her eyes. ‘Now do you trust me?’ she sobbed. ‘Now do you trust me?’

For the first time in almost twenty-four hours I acted sensibly – I closed my mouth tightly and kept it that way. I didn’t even bother reviewing her strange behaviour after the crash and in the cabin, I knew instinctively that this accounted for everything: I just sat there silently watching her staring straight ahead, her fists clenched and tears rolling down her cheeks, and when she suddenly crumpled and buried her face in her hands and I reached out and pulled her towards me she made no resistance, just turned, crushed her face into the caribou fur of my parka and cried as if her heart was breaking: and I suppose it was.

I suppose, too, that the moment when a man hears that a girl’s fiancé has died only that day is the last moment that that man should ever begin to fall in love with her, but I’m afraid that’s just how it was. The emotions are no respecters of the niceties, the proprieties and decencies of this life, and, just then, I was clearly aware that mine were stirred as they hadn’t been since that dreadful day, four years ago, when my wife, a bride of only three months, had been killed in a car smash and I had given up medicine, returned to my first great love, geology, completed the B.Sc. course that had been interrupted by the outbreak of World War Two and taken to wandering wherever work, new surroundings and an opportunity to forget the past had presented themselves. Why when I gazed down at that small dark head pressed so deeply into the fur of my coat, I should have felt my heart turn over I didn’t know. For all her wonderful brown eyes she had no pretensions to beauty and I knew nothing whatsoever about her. Perhaps it was just a natural reaction from my earlier antipathy: perhaps it was pity for her loss, for what I had so cruelly done to her, for having so exposed her to danger – whoever knew that I knew too much would soon know that she knew it also: or perhaps it was just because she was so defenceless and vulnerable, so ridiculously small and lost in Joss’s big parka. And then I caught myself trying to work out the reasons and I gave it up: I hadn’t been married long, but long enough to know that the heart has its own reasons which even the acutest mind couldn’t begin to suspect.

By and by the sobbing subsided and she straightened, hiding from me what must have been a very badly tear-stained face.

‘I’m sorry’ she murmured. ‘And thank you very much.’

‘My crying shoulder.’ I patted it with my right hand. ‘For my friends. The other one’s for my patients.’

‘For that, too, but I didn’t mean that. Just for not saying how sorry you were for me, or patting me or saying “Now, now” or anything like that. I – I couldn’t have stood it.’ She finished wiping her face with the palm of her mitten, looked up at me with brown eyes still swimming in tears and I felt my heart turn over again. ‘Where do we go from here, Dr Mason?’

‘Back to the cabin.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘I know. What am I to say? I’m completely at a loss. A hundred questions, and never an answer to one of them.’

‘And I don’t even know all the questions, yet,’ she murmured. ‘It’s only five minutes since I even knew that it wasn’t an accident.’ She shook her head incredulously. ‘Who ever heard of a civilian airliner being forced down at pistol point?’

‘I did. On the radio, just over a month ago. In Cuba – some of Fidel Castro’s rebels forced a Viscount to crash land. Only they picked an even worse spot than this -I think there were only one or two survivors. Maybe that’s where our friends back in the cabin got the idea from. I shouldn’t be surprised.’

She wasn’t even listening, her mind was already off on another track.

‘Why – why did they kill Colonel Harrison?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe he had a high resistance to Mickey Finns. Maybe he saw too much, or knew too much. Or both.’

‘But – but now they know you’ve seen too much and know too much.’ I wished she wouldn’t look at me when she was talking, these eyes would have made even the Rev Smallwood forget himself in the middle of his most thundering denunciations – not that I could imagine Mr Smallwood going in for thundering denunciations very much.

‘A disquieting thought,’ I admitted, ‘and one that has occurred to me several times during the past half-hour. About five hundred times, I would say’

Oh, stop it! You’re probably as scared as I am.’ She shivered. ‘Let’s get out of here, please. It’s -it’s ghastly, it’s horrible. What – what was that?’ Her voice finished on a sharp high note.

‘What was what?’ I tried to speak calmly, but that didn’t stop me from glancing around nervously. Maybe she was right, maybe I was as scared as she was.

‘A noise outside.’ Her voice was a whisper and her fingers were digging deep into the fur of my parka. ‘Like someone tapping the wing or the fuselage.’

‘Nonsense.’ My voice was rough, but I was on razor-edge. ‘You’re beginning to—’

I stopped in mid-sentence. This time I could have sworn I had heard something, and it was plain that Margaret Ross had too. She twisted her head over her shoulder, looking in the direction of the noise, then slowly turned back to me, her face tense, her eyes wide and staring.

I pushed her hands away, reached for gun and torch, jumped up and started running. In the control cabin I checked abruptly – God, what a fool I’d been to leave that searchlight burning and lined up on the windscreens, blinding me with its glare, making me a perfect target for anyone crouching outside with a gun in hand – but the hesitation was momentary only. It was then or never – I could be trapped in there all night, or until the searchlight battery died. I dived head first through the windscreen, caught a pillar at the very last moment and was lying flat on the ground below in less time than I would have believed possible.

I waited five seconds, just listening, but all I could hear was the moan of the wind, the hiss of the ice spicules rustling along over the frozen snow – I’d never before heard that hissing so plainly, but then I’d never before lain with my uncovered ear on the ice-cap itself – and the thudding of my heart. And then I was on my feet, the probing torch cutting a bright swathe in the darkness before me as I ran round the plane, slipping and stumbling in my haste. Twice I made the circuit, the second time in the opposite direction, but there was no one there at all.

I stopped before the control cabin and called softly to Margaret Ross. She appeared at the window, and I said: ‘It’s all right, there’s no one here. We’ve both been imagining things. Come on down.’ I reached up my hands, caught her and lowered her to the ground.

‘Why did you leave me up there, why did you leave me up there?’ The words came rushing out, tumbling frantically one over the other, the anger drowned in the terror. ‘It was – it was horrible! The dead man … Why did you leave me?’

‘I’m sorry’ There was a time and a place for comment on feminine injustice, unreasonableness and downright illogicality, but this wasn’t it. In the way of grief and heartbreak, shock and ill-treatment, she had already had far more than she could stand. ‘I’m sorry’ I repeated. ‘I shouldn’t have done it. I just didn’t stop to think.’

She was trembling violently, so I put my arms round her and held her tightly until she had calmed down, took the searchlight and battery in one hand and her hand in my other and we walked back to the cabin together.

SIX

Monday 7 p.m.–Tuesday 7 a.m.

Jackstraw and the others had just completed the assembly of the tractor body when we arrived back at the cabin, and some of the men were already going below. I didn’t bother to check the tractor: when Jackstraw made anything, he made a perfect job of it.

I knew he must have missed me in the past hour, but I knew, too, that he wasn’t the man to question me while the others were around. I waited till the last of these had gone below, then took him by the arm and walked out into the darkness, far enough to talk in complete privacy, but not so far as to lose sight of the yellow glow from our skylights – twice lost in the one night was twice too many.

He heard me out in silence, and at the end he said: ‘What are we going to do, Dr Mason?’

‘Depends. Spoken to Joss recently?’

‘Fifteen minutes ago. In the tunnel.’

‘How about the radio?’

‘I’m afraid not, Dr Mason. He’s missing some condensers and spare valves. He’s looked for them, everywhere – says they’ve been stolen.’

‘Maybe they’ll turn up?’ I didn’t believe it myself.

‘Two of the valves already have. Crushed little bits of glass lying in the bottom of the snow tunnel.’

‘Our little friends think of everything.’ I swore softly. ‘That settles it, Jackstraw. We can’t wait any longer, we’ll leave as soon as possible. But first a night’s sleep – that we must have.’

‘Uplavnik?’ That was our expedition base, near the mouth of the Strömsund glacier. ‘Do you think we will ever get there?’

He wasn’t thinking, just as I wasn’t, about the rigours and dangers of arctic winter travel, daunting enough though these were when they had to be faced with a superannuated tractor like the Citroën, but of the company we would be keeping en route. If any fact was ever so glaringly obvious that it didn’t need mention, it was that the killers, whoever they were, could only escape justice, or, at least, the mass arrest and interrogation of all the passengers, by ensuring that they were the only ones to emerge alive from the icecap.

‘I wouldn’t like to bet on it,’ I said dryly. ‘But I’d bet even less on our chances if we stay here. Death by starvation is kind of final.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ He paused for a moment, then switched to a fresh line of thought. ‘You say they tried to kill you tonight. Is that not surprising? I would have thought that you and I would have been very safe, for a few days at least.’

I knew what he meant. Apart from Jackstraw and myself, there probably wasn’t a handful of people in all Greenland who could start that damned Citroen, far less drive it, only Jackstraw could handle the dogs, and it was long odds indeed against any of the passengers knowing anything at all about astral or magnetic compass navigation – the latter very tricky indeed in these high latitudes. These special skills should have been guarantee enough of our immediate survival.

‘True enough,’ I agreed. ‘But I suspect they haven’t given any thought to these things simply because they haven’t realised the importance of them. We’ll make it our business to point out that importance very plainly. Then we’re both insured. Meantime, we’ll have one last effort to clear this business up before we get started. It’s not going to make us very popular, but we can’t help that.’ I explained what I had in mind, and he nodded thoughtful agreement.

After he had gone below, I waited a couple of minutes and then followed him. All nine of the passengers were sitting in the cabin now – eight, rather, watching Marie LeGarde presiding over a soup pan – and I took a long, long look at all of them. It was the first time I had ever examined a group of my fellow-men with the object of trying to decide which among them were murderers, and found it a strange and unsettling experience.

In the first place, every one of them looked to me like a potential or actual murderer – or murderess – but even with that thought came the realisation that this was purely because I associated murder with abnormality, and in these wildly unlikely surroundings, clad in the layered bulkiness of these wildly unlikely clothes, every one of them seemed far removed from normality. But on a second and closer look, when one ignored the irrelevancies of surroundings and clothes, there remained only a group of shivering, feet-stamping, miserable and very ordinary people indeed.

Or were they so ordinary? Zagero, for instance, was he ordinary? He had the build, the strength and, no doubt, also the speed and temperament for a top-ranking heavyweight, but he was the most unlikely looking boxer I had ever seen. It wasn’t just that he was obviously a well-educated and cultured man – there had been such boxers before: it was chiefly because his face was absolutely unmarked, without even that almost invariable thickening of skin above the eyes. Moreover, I had never heard of him, although that, admittedly, didn’t go for much: as a doctor, I took a poor view of homo sapiens wreaking gratuitous physical and mental injury on homo sapiens, and took little interest in the sport.

Or take his manager, Solly Levin, or, for that matter, the Rev Joseph Smallwood. Solly wasn’t a New York boxing manager, he was a caricature of all I had ever heard or read about these Runyonesque characters, and he was just too good to be true: so, also, was the Rev Smallwood, who was so exactly the meek, mild, slightly nervous, slightly anæmic man of God that preachers are so frequently represented to be – and almost invariably never are – that his movements, reactions, comments and opinions were predictable to the nth degree. But, against that, I had to set the fact that the killers were clever calculating men who would have carefully avoided assuming the guise of any character so patently cut from cardboard: on the other hand, they might have been astute enough to do just that.

There was a question mark, too, about Corazzini. America specialised in producing shrewd, intelligent, tough business leaders and executives, and Corazzini was undoubtedly one such. But the toughness of the average business man was purely mental: Corazzini had physical toughness as well, a ruthlessness I felt he wouldn’t hesitate to apply to matters lying far outside the immediate sphere of business. And then I realised, wryly, that I was prepared to suspect Corazzini for reasons diametrically opposed to those for which I was prepared to suspect Levin and the Rev Smallwood: Corazzini didn’t fit into any pattern, any prefabricated mental image of the American business man.

Of the two remaining men, Theodore Mahler, the little Jew, and Senator Brewster, I would have taken the former any time as the more likely suspect. But when I asked myself why, I could adduce no more damaging reasons than that he was thin, dark, rather embittered looking and had told us absolutely nothing about himself: and if that weren’t prejudice on my part, I couldn’t guess what was. As for Senator Brewster, he was surely above suspicion: and then the startling thought struck me that if one wished to be above suspicion surely there were no better means of achieving that than by assuming the identity of someone who was above suspicion. How did I know he was Senator Brewster? A couple of forged papers, a white moustache and white hair on top of a naturally florid complexion and anyone could have been Senator Brewster. True, it would be an impersonation impossible to sustain indefinitely: but the whole point was that any such impersonation didn’t have to be sustained indefinitely.

I was getting nowhere and I knew it: I was more confused, more uncertain, and infinitely more suspicious than ever. I was even suspicious of the women. The young German girl, Helene -Munich was her home town, near enough Central Europe and the skulduggery that went on in the neighbourhood of the iron curtain for anything to be possible: but on the other hand the idea of a seventeen-year-old master criminal – we certainly weren’t dealing with apprentices – was ridiculously far-fetched, and the fact that she had fractured her collar-bone, almost sure proof that the crash had been unexpected, was a strong point in her favour. Mrs Dansby-Gregg? She belonged to a world I knew little about, except for what slight information I had gleaned from my psychiatric brethren, who found rich fishing in the troubled waters of what passed for the younger London society: but instability and neuroses – not to mention the more than occasional financial embarrassment – were not criminal in themselves, and, in particular, that world lacked what people like Zagero and Corazzini had in full measure -the physical and mental toughness required for a job like this. But particularising from the general could be every bit as dangerous and misleading as generalising from the particular: of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, as a person, I knew nothing.

That left only Marie LeGarde. She was the touchstone, the one rock I could cling to in this sea of uncertainty, and if I were wrong about her so too had been a million others. There are some things that cannot be because they are unthinkable, and this was one of them. It was as simple as that. Marie LeGarde was above suspicion.

I became gradually aware of the muted clack of the anemometer cups turning sluggishly in the dying wind above and that the hiss of the Colman lamp had become abnormally loud: a total silence had fallen over the cabin and everyone was staring at me with mingled puzzlement and curiosity. So much for my impassive features, my casual negligent ease: so clearly had I betrayed the fact that something was far wrong that not one of the nine had missed it. But to be the centre of attraction at the moment suited me well enough: Jackstraw had just made his entry unobserved, a Winchester repeater cradled under his arm, his finger ready through the trigger guard.

‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘Rude to stare, I know. However, now it’s your turn.’ I nodded in Jackstraw’s direction. ‘Every expedition carries a gun or two – for coast use against prowling bears and wolves and to get seal meat for the dogs. I never thought that it would come in so handy right in the middle of the ice-cap – and against far more dangerous game than we ever find on the coast. Mr Nielsen is a remarkably accurate shot. Don’t try anything – just clasp your hands above your heads. All of you.’

As if controlled by a master switch, all the eyes had now swivelled back to me. I’d had time to spare to pull out the automatic – a 9 mm butt-loading Beretta – that I’d taken off Colonel Harrison: and this time I didn’t forget to slide off the safety-catch. The click was abnormally loud in the frozen silence of the room. But the silence didn’t last long.

‘What damnable outrage is this?’ Senator Brewster shouted out the words, his face purpling in rage. He leapt to his feet, started to move forwards towards me then stopped as if he had run into a brick wall. The crash of Jackstraw’s Winchester was a deafening, eardrum shattering thunderclap of sound in that confined space: and when the last reverberations of the rifle-shot had faded and the smoke cleared away, Senator Brewster was staring down whitely at the splintered hole in the floor boards, almost literally beneath his feet: Jackstraw must have miscalculated the Senator’s rate of movement, for the bullet had sliced through the edge of the sole of Brewster’s boot. However it was, the effect couldn’t have been bettered: the Senator reached back blindly for the support of the bunk behind him and lowered himself shakily to his seat, so terrified that he even forgot to clasp his hands above his head. But I didn’t care about that: there would be no more trouble from the Senator.

ok, so you mean business. Now we’re convinced.’ It was Zagero who drawled out the words, but his hands were tightly enough clasped above his head. ‘We know you wouldn’t do this for nothin’, Doc. What gives?’

‘This gives,’ I said tightly. ‘Two of you people are murderers – or a murderer and murderess. Both have guns. I want those guns.’

‘Succinctly put, dear boy’ Marie LeGarde said slowly. ‘Very concise. Have you gone crazy?’

‘Unclasp your hands, Miss LeGarde, you’re not included in this little lot. No, I’m not crazy. I’m as sane as you are, and if you want evidence of my sanity you’ll find it out on the plane there -or buried out on the ice-cap: the captain of the plane with a bullet through his spine, the passenger in the rear with a bullet through his heart and the second officer smothered to death. Yes, smothered. Not cerebral hæmorrhage, as I said: he was murdered in his sleep. Believe me, Miss LeGarde? Or would it take a personal tour of the plane to convince you?’

She didn’t speak at once. Nobody spoke. Everyone was too stunned, too busy fighting incredulity and trying to assimilate the meaning of the shocking news I’d given them – everyone, that is, except two. But though I scanned eight faces with an intensity with which I had never before examined people I saw nothing – not the slightest off-beat gesture, the tiniest guilty reaction. As for what I’d secretly hoped for – a guilty interchange of glances – well, the idea now seemed hopelessly, laughably improbable. Whoever the killers were, they were in perfect control of themselves. I felt despair touch me, a sure knowledge of defeat.

‘I must believe you.’ Marie LeGarde spoke as slowly as before, but her voice was unsteady and her face drained of colour. She looked at Margaret Ross. ‘You knew of this, my dear?’

‘Half an hour ago, Miss LeGarde. Dr Mason thought I had done it.’

‘Good God! How – how utterly ghastly! How horrible! Two of us murderers.’ From her position by the stove, Marie LeGarde glanced round the eight seated people, then looked quickly away. ‘Suppose – suppose you tell us everything, Dr Mason.’

I told them everything. On the way back from the plane with Miss Ross I had debated this with myself – the question of secrecy or not. The no secrecy decision had won hands down: keeping quiet wouldn’t fool the killers – they knew I knew: no secrecy would mean each and every one of the passengers watching the others like hawks, making my task of constant vigilance all that much easier, the killers’ chance of making mischief all that more difficult.

‘You will stand up one at a time,’ I said when I’d finished. ‘Mr London will search you for your guns. And please don’t forget – I know I’m dealing with desperate men. I’m prepared to act accordingly. When your turn comes stand very still indeed and make no suspicious move, not the slightest. I’m not very good with a pistol, and I shall have to aim at the middle of your bodies to make certain.’

‘I believe you would at that,’ Corazzini said thoughtfully.

‘It doesn’t matter what you believe,’ I said coldly. ‘Just don’t be the one to find out.’

Joss started on Zagero. He searched him thoroughly – I could see the anger on Zagero’s face, but his eyes didn’t leave my gun – and found nothing. He moved on to Solly Levin.

‘Might I ask why I’m being excused?’ Marie LeGarde asked suddenly.

‘You?’ I said shortly. My eyes didn’t move from Solly. ‘Marie LeGarde? Don’t be so damned silly!’

‘The choice of words and tone of voice leave a lot to be desired.’ Her voice was soft and warm, though still shaky. ‘But I’ve never had a greater compliment. All the same, I insist on being searched: I don’t want to be the one under a cloud if the guns don’t turn up.’

And the guns didn’t turn up. Joss finished searching the men, Margaret Ross the women -Mrs Dansby-Gregg under icy protest – and neither found anything. Joss looked at me, his face empty of all expression.

‘Get their luggage,’ I said harshly. ‘The small cases they’re taking with them. We’ll try these.’

‘You’re wasting your time, Dr Mason,’ Nick Corazzini said quietly. ‘To any characters smart enough to guess that you were going to frisk them, the next move would stick out a mile. A child could guess it. You might find those guns you talk about hidden on the tractor or the sledges or buried under a couple of inches of snow, ready to be picked up whenever required, but you won’t find them in our grips. A thousand to one, in dollars, that you don’t.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said slowly. ‘On the other hand, if I were one of the killers and did have a gun in my case – well, that’s exactly the way I’d talk too.’

‘As you said to Miss LeGarde just now, don’t be so damned silly!’ He jumped to his feet, walked over to a corner of the cabin under the watchful eyes of Jackstraw and myself, picked up a handful of small cases and dumped them on the floor before me, his own nearest me. ‘Where are you going to start? There’s mine, that’s the Reverend’s robe case, this’ – he picked it up and looked at the initials – ‘this is the Senator’s brief-case. I don’t know whose the last is.’

‘Mine,’ Mrs Dansby-Gregg said coldly.

Corazzini grinned. ‘Ah, the Balenciaga. Well, Doc, who—’ He broke off, straightened slowly, and gazed up through the skylight. ‘What – what the devil is happening up there?’

‘Don’t try to pull any fast stuff, Corazzini,’ I said quickly. ‘Jackstraw’s gun—’

‘The hell with Jackstraw’s gun!’ he snapped impatiently. ‘Have a look for yourself.’

I motioned him out of the way and had a look. Two seconds later I had thrust my automatic into Joss’s hand and was on my way up top.

The airliner was a blazing torch in the darkness of the night. Even at that distance of half a mile and against the light wind, I could clearly hear the fierce roaring and crackling of the flames -not flames, rather, but one great solid column of fire that seemed to spring from the wings and centre of the fuselage and reach up clear and smokeless and sparkless two hundred feet into the night sky, brushing its blood-red stain across the snow for hundreds of yards around, transforming the rest of the still ice-sheathed fuselage into a vast effulgent diamond, a million constantly shifting points of refracted white and red and blue and green that glittered and gleamed with an eye-dazzling scintillating brilliance that no jewels on earth could have matched. It was a fantastically beautiful spectacle, but I’d had time to watch it for barely ten seconds when the dazzling coloured irradiation turned into a blaze of white, the central flame leapt up to twice, almost three times its original height and, two or three seconds later, the roar of the exploding petrol tanks came at me across the frozen stillness of the ice-cap.

Almost at once the flames seemed to collapse in upon themselves and the perimeter of the blood-red circle of snow shrank almost to vanishing point, but I waited to see no more. I dropped down into the cabin, pulling the hatch shut behind me, and looked at Jackstraw.

‘Any chance at all of accounting for the presence of our various friends here during the past half-hour?’

‘I’m afraid not, Dr Mason. Everyone was on the move all the time, finishing off the tractor body or bringing up the stores and petrol drums and lashing them on the sledge.’ He glanced up through the skylight. ‘The plane, wasn’t it?’

‘“Was” is right.’ I glanced at the stewardess. ‘My apologies, Miss Ross. You did hear somebody out there.’

‘You mean – you mean it wasn’t an accident?’ Zagero asked.

There’s a fair chance that you know damned well that it wasn’t, I thought. Aloud, I said: ‘It was no accident.’

‘So there goes your evidence, eh?’ Corazzini asked. ‘The pilot and Colonel Harrison, I mean.’

‘No. The nose and tail of the plane are still intact. I don’t know what the reason could be -but I’m sure there’s a damned good one. And you can put these bags away, Mr Corazzini. We’re not, as you say, playing with children or amateurs.’

There was silence while Corazzini returned the bags, then Joss looked at me quizzically.

‘Well, that explains one thing at least.’

‘The messed-up explosives?’ I remembered with chagrin how I had listened to the abnormally loud hissing out by the plane, but had ignored it. Someone who had known very clearly what he was doing had led a fuse into petrol lines or tanks or carburettors. ‘It certainly does.’

‘What’s all this about explosives and fuses?’ Senator Brewster demanded. It was the first word he had spoken since Jackstraw had scared the wits out of him, and even yet the colour wasn’t all back in his face.

‘Somebody stole the fuses to set fire to the plane. For all I know it may have been you.’ I held up my hand to still his outraged spluttering and went on wearily: ‘It may equally well have been one of the other seven of you. I don’t know. All I know is that the person or persons responsible for the murders were responsible for the theft of the fuses. And for the smashing of the radio valves. And for the theft of the condensers.’

‘And for the theft of the sugar,’ Joss put in. ‘Though heaven only knows why they should want to steal that.’

‘Sugar!’ I exclaimed, and then the question died in my throat. I happened to be looking straight at the little Jew, Theodore Mahler, and the nervous start he gave, the quick flicker of his eyes in Joss’s direction, was unmistakable. I knew I couldn’t have imagined it. But I looked away quickly, before he could see my face.

‘Our last bag,’ Joss explained. ‘Maybe thirty pounds. It’s gone. I found what little was left of it – just a handful lying on the floor of the tunnel – mixed up with the smashed valves.’

I shook my head and said nothing. The reason for this last theft I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Supper that night was a sketchy affair – soup, coffee and a couple of biscuits each as the only solids. The soup was thin, the biscuits no more than a bite and the coffee, for me at any rate, all but undrinkable without sugar.

And the meal was as silent as it was miserable, conversation being limited to what was absolutely necessary. Time and again I would see someone turn to his neighbour and make to say something, then his lips would clamp tightly shut, the expression drain out of his face as he turned away without a word: with almost everyone thinking that his or her neighbour might be a murderer, or, what was almost as bad, that his or her neighbour might be thinking that he was a murderer, the meal was by all odds the most awkward and uncomfortable that I’d ever had. Or, that is, the first part of it was: but by and by I came to the conclusion that I’d a great deal more to worry about than the niceties of social intercourse.

After the meal I rose, pulled on parka and gloves, picked up the searchlight; told Jackstraw and Joss to come with me and headed for the trap-door. Zagero’s voice stopped me.

‘Where you goin’, Doc?’

‘That’s no concern of yours. Well, Mrs Dansby-Gregg?’

‘Shouldn’t you – shouldn’t you take the rifle with you?’

‘Don’t worry’ I smiled thinly. ‘With everyone watching everyone else like hawks, that rifle’s as safe as houses.’

‘But – but someone could jump for it,’ she said nervously. ‘They could get you when you’re coming down the hatch—’

‘Mr Nielsen and I are the last two persons they’d ever shoot. Without us, they couldn’t get a mile from here. The most likely candidates for the next bullet are some of yourselves. You’re absolutely inessential and, as far as the killers are concerned, represent nothing more than a waste of priceless rations.’ With this comforting thought I left them, each person trying to watch all the others at one and the same time, while doing his level best to give the appearance of watching no one.

The wind was so slight now that the anemometer cups had stopped turning. The dying embers of the burnt-out plane were a dull smouldering glow to the north-east. The snow had gone completely and the first faint stars were beginning to show through the thinning cloud above. It was typically Greenland, this swift change in the weather, and so, too, was the temperature inversion that would surely follow in the morning, or before morning. Twelve hours from now it was going to be very cold indeed.

With searchlight and torches we examined every inch of the tractor and sledges, above and below, and if there had been a pin there I would have sworn that we couldn’t have missed it, far less anything so large as a couple of guns. We found nothing.

I straightened, and turned to look at the glow that was lightening the sky to the east, and even as I stood there with Joss and Jackstraw by my side the moon, preternaturally large and rather more than half full, heaved itself above the distant horizon and flooded the ice-cap with its pale and ghostly light, laying down between itself and our feet a bar-straight path of glittering silver grey. We watched in silence for a full minute, then Jackstraw stirred. Even before he spoke, I knew what was in his mind.

‘Uplavnik,’ he murmured. ‘Tomorrow, we set off for Uplavnik. But first, you said, a good night’s sleep.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘A traveller’s moon.’

‘A traveller’s moon,’ he echoed.

He was right, of course. Travel in the Arctic, in winter, was regulated not by daylight but my moonlight. And tonight we had that moon – and we had a clear sky, a dying wind and no snow at all. I turned to Joss.

‘You’ll be all right alone?’

‘I have no worries,’ he said soberly. ‘Look, sir, can’t I come too?’

‘Stay here and stay healthy,’ I advised. ‘Thanks, Joss, but you know someone must remain behind. I’ll call you up on the usual schedules. You might get a kick out of the RCA yet. Miracles still happen.’

‘Not this time, they won’t.’ He turned away abruptly and went below. Jackstraw moved across to the tractor – we didn’t say another word to each other, we didn’t have to – and I followed Joss down to the cabin. No one had moved an inch, as far as I could see, but they all looked up as I came in.

‘All right,’ I said abruptly. ‘Get your stuff together and pile on every last stitch of clothes you can. We’re leaving now.’

We left, in fact, just over an hour later. The Citroën had been lying unused for the better part of a fortnight, and we had the devil’s own job getting it to start. But start it eventually did, with a roar and a thunderous clatter that had everybody jumping in startlement then looking at it in dismay. I knew the thoughts in their minds, that they’d have to live with this cacophony, this bedlam of sound assaulting their shrinking eardrums for no one knew how many days to come, but I wasted little sympathy on them: at least they would have the protection of the wooden body while I would be sitting practically on top of the engine.

We said our goodbyes to Joss. He shook hands with Jackstraw and myself, with Margaret Ross and Marie LeGarde, and, pointedly, with no one else. We left him standing there by the hatchway, a lonely figure outlined against the pale light of the steadily climbing moon, and headed west by south for Uplavnik, three hundred long and frozen miles away. I wondered, as I knew Joss was wondering, whether we would ever see each other again.

I wondered, too, what right I had in exposing Jackstraw to the dangers which must lie ahead. He was sitting beside me as I drove, but as I looked at him covertly in the moonlight, at that strong lean face that, but for the rather broad cheekbones, might have been that of any Scandinavian sea-rover, I knew I was wasting my time wondering. Although nominally under my command, he had only been lent me, as other Greenlanders had been lent as an act of courtesy by the Danish Government to several IGY stations, as a scientific officer – he had a geology degree from the University of Copenhagen and had forgotten more about the ice-cap than I would ever know – and in times of emergency, especially where his own pride, and he had plenty of that, was concerned would be extremely liable to do what he thought best, regardless of what I thought or said. I knew he wouldn’t have remained behind even if I had ordered him to – and, if I were honest with myself, I was only too damned glad to have him along, as a friend, as an ally, and as insurance policy against the disaster that can so easily overtake the careless or the inexperienced on the ice-cap. But even so, even though I quieted my conscience as best I could, it was difficult to push from my mind the picture of his dark vivacious young schoolteacher wife and little daughter, the red and white brick house in which I’d lived for two weeks as a guest in the summer. What Jackstraw thought was impossible to say. He sat immobile as if carved from stone, only his eyes alive, constantly moving, constantly shifting, as he probed for sudden dips in the ice-cap, for differences in the structure of the snow, for anything that might spell trouble. It was purely automatic, purely instinctive: the crevasse country lay, as yet, two hundred and fifty miles away, where the ice-cap started to slope sharply to the sea, and Jackstraw himself maintained that Balto, his big lead dog, had a surer instinct for crevasses than any human alive.

The temperature was dropping down into the minus thirties, but it was a perfect night for arctic travel – a moonlit, windless night under a still and starry sky. Visibility was phenomenal, the ice-cap was smooth and flat, the engine ran sweetly with never a falter: had it not been for the cold, the incessant roar and body-numbing vibration of the big engine, I think I would almost have enjoyed it.

With the wide tractor body blocking off the view behind, it was impossible for me to see what was happening there: but every ten minutes or so Jackstraw would jump off and stand by the side of the trail. Behind the tractor body and its shivering occupants – because of the tractor fuel tank beneath and the spare fuel drums astern the stove was never lit while we were in motion -came the sledge with all our stores: 120 gallons of fuel, provisions, bedding and sleeping-bags, tents, ropes, axes, shovels, trail flags, cooking utensils, seal meat for the dogs, four wooden bridging battens, canvas sheets, blow-lamps, lantern, medical equipment, radio-sonde balloons, magnesium flares and a score of minor items. I had hesitated over including the radio sondes, especially the relatively heavy hydrogen cylinders for these: but they were ready crated with tents, ropes, axes and shovels and – this was the deciding factor – had saved lives on at least one occasion when a trail party, lost on the plateau with defective compasses, had saved themselves by releasing several balloons in the brief daylight hours thereby enabling base to see them and send accurate radio bearings.

Behind the heavy transport sled was towed the empty dog-sled, with the dogs on loose traces running astern of it, all except Balto who always ran free, coursing tirelessly backwards and forwards all night long, one moment far ahead of us, the next ranging out to one side, the next dropping astern, like some destroyer circling a straggling convoy by night. When the last of the dogs had passed by him, Jackstraw would run forward to overtake the tractor and jump in alongside me once more. He was as tireless, as immune to fatigue, as Balto himself.

The first twenty miles were easy. On the way up from the coast, over four months previously we had planted big marker flags at intervals of half a mile. On a night such as this, with the moonlight flooding the ice-cap, these trail flags, a bright luminous orange in colour and mounted on aluminium poles stuck in snow beacons, were visible at a great distance, with never less than two and sometimes three in sight at the same time, the long glistening frost feathers stretching out from the poles sometimes twice the length of the flags themselves. We counted twenty-eight of these flags altogether – about a dozen were missing – then, after a sudden dip in the land, completely lost them: whether they had blown away or just drifted under it was impossible to say.

‘Well, there it is, Jackstraw,’ I said resignedly. ‘This is where one of us starts getting cold. Really cold.’

‘We’ve been cold before, Dr Mason. Me first.’ He slid the magnetic compass off its brackets, started to unreel a cable from a spool under the dashboard, then jumped out, still unwinding the cable, while I followed to help. Despite the fact that the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the north pole – at that time it was almost a thousand miles south of it and lay more to the west than north of us – a magnetic compass, when proper variation allowances are made, is still useful in high latitudes: but because of the counter-acting magnetic effects of a large mass of metal, it was quite useless when mounted on the tractor itself. Our plan, therefore, was that someone should lie with the compass on the dog-sled, fifty feet behind the tractor, and, by means of a switch which operated red and green lights in the tractor dashboard, guide the driver to left or right. It wasn’t our original idea, it wasn’t even a recent idea: it had been used in the Antarctic a quarter century previously but, as far as I knew, had not been improved upon yet.

With Jackstraw established on the sledge, I walked back to the tractor and pushed aside the canvas screen at the back of the wooden body. What with the faces of the passengers, drawn and pinched and weirdly pale in the light of the tiny overhead bulb, the constant shivering, the chattering of teeth and the frozen breath drifting upwards to condense and freeze on the wooden roof, it was a picture of utter and abject misery: but I was in no mood to be moved at that moment.

‘Sorry for the delay’ I said. ‘Just off again now. But I want one of you for a lookout.’

Both Zagero and Corazzini volunteered almost in the same breath, but I shook my head.

‘You two get what sleep or rest you can – I’m liable to need you very much later on. Perhaps you, Mr Mahler?’

He looked pale and ill, but he nodded silently, and Zagero said in a quiet voice: ‘Corazzini and myself too high up on the list of suspects, huh?’

‘I wouldn’t put either of you at the very foot,’ I said shortly. I waited till Mahler had climbed down then dropped the canvas and walked round to the driver’s seat.

Theodore Mahler, strangely enough, proved only too anxious to talk – and keep on talking. It was so completely out of keeping with the idea I had formed of his character that I was more than surprised. Loneliness, perhaps, I thought, or trying to forget the situation, or trying to divert my thoughts and suspicions: how wrong I was on all three counts I wasn’t to find out until later.

‘Well, Mr Mahler, it looks as if the itinerary of your European trip is going to be upset a bit.’ I had almost to shout to make my words heard above the roar of the tractor.

‘Not Europe, Dr Mason.’ I could hear the machine-gun-like chatter of his teeth. ‘Israel.’

‘You live there?’

‘Never been there in my life.’ There was a pause, and when his voice came again it was all but drowned in the sound of the engine. I thought I caught the words ‘My home’.

‘You – you’re going to start a new life there, Mr Mahler?’

‘I’m sixty-nine – tomorrow,’ he answered obliquely. ‘A new life? Let’s say, rather, that I’m going to end an old one.’

‘And you’re going to live there, make your home there – after sixty-nine years in another country?’

‘Millions of us Jews have done just that, in the past ten years. Not that I’ve lived in America all my life …’

And then he told me his story – a story of refugee oppression that I’d heard a hundred times, with a hundred variations. He was a Russian Jew, he said, one of the millions of the largest Jewry in the world that had been ‘frozen’ for over a century in the notorious Pale of Settlement, and in 1905 had been forced to flee with his father -leaving mother and two brothers behind – to escape the ruthless massacres carried out by the ‘Black Hundreds’ at the behest of the last of the Romanoff Tzars who was seeking scapegoats for his crushing defeat by the Japanese. His mother, he learned later, had just disappeared, while his two brothers had survived only to die in agony long years afterwards, one in the rising in the Bialystok ghetto, the other in the Treblinka gas chambers. He himself had found work in the clothing industry in New York, studied in night school, worked for an oil company, married and with the death of his wife that spring had set about fulfilling the agelong ambition of his race, the return to their holy land.

It was a touching story, pathetic and deeply moving, and I didn’t believe a word of it.

Every twenty minutes I changed position with Jackstraw and so the long hours of the night dragged by as the cold deepened and the stars and the moon wheeled across the black vault of the sky. And then came moonset, the blackness of the arctic night rushed across the ice-cap, I slowed the Citroën gratefully to a stop and the silence, breathless and hushed and infinitely sweet, came flooding in to take the place of the nightlong clamour of the deafening roar of the big engine, the metallic clanking of the treads.

Over our black sugarless coffee and biscuits I told our passengers that this would be only a brief three-hour halt, that they should try to get what sleep they could: most of them, myself included, were already red-eyed and drooping from exhaustion. Three hours, no more: not often did Greenland offer travel weather like this, and the chance was not to be missed.

Beside me, as I drank my coffee, was Theodore Mahler. He was for some reason restless, ill at ease, jerky and nervous, and his eyes and attention both wandered so much that it was easy enough for me to find out what I wanted.

When my cup was empty, I whispered in Mahler’s ear that there was a little matter that I wished to discuss privately with him. He looked at me in surprise, hesitated, then nodded in agreement, rising to follow me as I moved out into the darkness.

A hundred yards away I stopped, switched on my torch so that he blinked in its beam, and slid my Beretta forward until its barrel was clearly visible, sharply outlined in the harsh white glare. I heard the catch of the breath, saw the eyes widening in fear and horror.

‘Save the act for the judge, Mahler,’ I said bleakly. ‘I’m not interested in it. AU I want is your gun.’

SEVEN

Tuesday 7 a.m.–Tuesday midnight

‘My gun?’ Mahler had slowly lifted his arms until his hands were at shoulder level, and his voice wasn’t quite steady. ‘I – I don’t understand, Dr Mason. I have no gun.’

‘Naturally.’ I jerked the barrel of the Beretta to lend emphasis to my words. “Turn round.’

‘What are you going to do? You’re making a—’

‘Turn round!’

He turned. I took a couple of steps forward, ground the muzzle of the automatic none too gently into the small of his back, and started to search him with my free hand.

He was wearing two overcoats, a jacket, several sweaters and scarves, two pairs of trousers and layer upon layer of underclothes: searching him was easier said than done. It took me a full minute to convince myself that he wasn’t carrying a weapon of any kind. I stepped back, and he came slowly round to face me.

‘I hope you’re quite satisfied now, Dr Mason?’

‘We’ll see what we find in your case. As for the rest, I’m satisfied enough. I have all the proof I want.’ I dipped the torch beam to illuminate the handful of sugar I’d taken from the pocket of his inner overcoat – there had been well over a pound in either pocket. ‘You might care to explain where you got this from, Mr Mahler?’

‘I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’ His voice was very low. ‘I stole it, Dr Mason.’

‘You did indeed. A remarkably small-time activity for a person who operates on the scale you do. It was just your bad luck, Mahler, that I happened to be looking directly at you when the theft of the sugar was mentioned back in the cabin. It was just your bad luck that when we had our coffee just now it was dark enough for me to have a swig from your cup without your knowledge: it was so stiff with sugar that I couldn’t even drink the damn’ stuff. Curious, isn’t it, Mahler, that such a tiny thing as giving way to a momentary impulse of greed should ruin everything? But I believe it’s always the way: the big slip-up never brings the big criminal to book, because he never makes any. If you’d left that sugar alone when you were smashing up the valves, I’d never have known. Incidentally, what did you do with the rest of the sugar? In your grip? Or just thrown away?’

‘You’re making a very grave mistake, Dr Mason.’ Mahler’s voice was steady now, and if it held any trace of worry or guilt I couldn’t detect it. But I was now far beyond the naïve stage of expecting to detect anything of the sort. ‘I didn’t touch those valves. And, apart from the few handfuls I took, the sugar bag was quite intact when I left it.’

‘Of course, of course.’ I waved the Beretta. ‘Back to the tractor, my friend, and let’s have a look at this case of yours.’

‘No!’

‘Don’t be crazy,’ I snapped. ‘I have a gun, Mahler. Believe me, I won’t hesitate to use it.’

‘I believe you. I think you would be quite ruthless if the need arose. Oh, I don’t doubt you’re tough, Doctor, as well as being headstrong, impulsive and not very subtle, but because I rather respect your efficient and selfless handling of an awkward and ugly situation for which you were in no way responsible, I don’t want to see you make a complete fool of yourself in public’ He lifted his right hand towards the lapel of his coat. ‘Let me show you something.’

I jerked the Beretta forward, but the gesture was quite needless. As he pushed his hand under his topcoats, Mahler’s gestures were smooth and unhurried, just as smooth and unhurried when he brought his hand out again and passed over to me a leather-covered card. I stepped back a few feet, flipped open the card and glanced down at it.

That one glance was enough – or should have been enough. I’d seen these cards scores of times before, but I stared down at this one as if I’d never seen one in my life. This was a completely new factor, it knocked all my preconceived notions on the head, and I needed time, time for reorientation, for understanding, for quelling the professional fear that came hard on the heels of that understanding. Then, slowly, I folded the card, pulled down my snow-mask, stepped close to Mahler and pulled his down also. In the harsh glare of the torch, his face was blue and white with the cold, and I could see the jutting of the jaw muscles as he clamped his teeth together to keep them from chattering uncontrollably.

‘Breathe out,’ I said.

He did as I asked, and there was no mistaking it, none at all: the sweet acetone breath of the advanced and untreated diabetic can’t possibly be confused with anything else. Wordlessly, I handed him back the card and thrust the automatic into my parka pocket.

At last I said quietly: ‘How long have you had this, Mr Mahler?’

‘Thirty years.’

‘A pretty advanced condition?’ When it came to discussing a man’s illness with him, I had little time for the professional reticence of many of my colleagues: besides, the average elderly diabetic had survived to that age simply because he was intelligent about the dietary and medical treatment of his trouble, and usually knew all about it.

‘My doctor would agree with you.’ I caught the smile on his face as he pushed his mask up, and there wasn’t much humour in it. ‘So would I.’

‘Twice daily injections?’

‘Twice,’ he nodded. ‘Before breakfast and in the evening.’

‘But don’t you carry a hypo and—’

‘Normally’ he interrupted. ‘But not this time. The Gander doctor gave me a jab and as I can usually carry on a few hours overdue without ill effects I thought I’d wait until we got to London.’ He tapped his breast pocket. ‘This card’s good anywhere.’

‘Except on the Greenland ice-cap,’ I said bitterly. ‘But then I don’t suppose you anticipated a stop-over here. What diet were you on?’

‘High protein, high starch.’

‘Hence the sugar?’ I looked down at the white crystals still clenched in my left mitten.

‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘But I know sugar used to be used for the treatment of coma. I thought maybe if I stuffed enough into myself … Well, anyway, you know now why I turned criminal.’

‘Yes, I know now. My apologies for the gun-waving act, Mr Mahler, but you must admit I had every justification. Why in the hell didn’t you tell me before now? I am supposed to be a doctor, you know.’

‘I would have had to tell you sooner or later, I suppose. But right now you’d plenty of troubles of your own without worrying about mine also. And I didn’t think there would be much chance of your carrying insulin among your medical stores.’

‘We don’t – we don’t have to. Everybody gets a thorough medical before going on an IGY station, and diabetes hardly develops overnight … You take it all very calmly, I must say, Mr Mahler. Come on, let’s get back to the tractor.’

We reached there inside a minute. I pulled back the canvas screen, and a thick white opaque cloud formed almost immediately as the relatively warm air inside met the far sub-zero arctic air outside. I waved my hand to dispel it, and peered inside. They were all still drinking coffee – it was the one thing we had in plenty. It seemed difficult to realise that we’d been gone only a few minutes.

‘Hurry up and finish off,’ I said abruptly. ‘We’re on our way within five minutes. Jackstraw, would you start the engine, please, before she chills right down?’

On our way!’ The protest, almost inevitably, came from Mrs Dansby-Gregg. ‘My dear man, we’ve hardly stopped. And you promised us three hours’ sleep only a few minutes ago.’

‘That was a few minutes ago. That was before I found out about Mr Mahler here.’ Quickly I told them all I thought they needed to know. ‘It sounds brutal to say it in Mr Mahler’s presence,’ I went on, ‘but the facts themselves are brutal. Whoever crashed that plane – and, to a lesser extent, stole the sugar – put Mr Mahler’s life in the greatest danger. Only two things, normally, could save Mr Mahler – a properly balanced high-calorie diet as a short term measure, insulin as a long term one. We have neither. All we can give Mr Mahler is the chance to get one or other of these things with all speed humanly possible. Between now and the coast that tractor engine is going to stop only if it packs in completely, if we run into an impassable blizzard – or if the last of the drivers collapses over the wheel. Are there any objections?’

It was a stupid, unnecessary, gratuitously truculent question to ask, but that’s just the way I felt at that moment. I suppose, really, that I was inviting protest so that I could have some victim for working off the accumulated rage inside me, the anger that could find its proper outlet only against those responsible for this fresh infliction of suffering, the anger at the near certainty that no matter what effort we made to save Mahler it would be completely nullified when the time came, as it inevitably must come, that the killers showed their hand. For one wild moment I considered the idea of tying them all up, lashing them inside the tractor body so that they couldn’t move, and had the conditions been right I believe I would have done just that. But the conditions couldn’t have been more hopeless: a bound person wouldn’t have lasted a couple of hours in that bitter cold.

There were no objections. For the most part, I suppose, they were too cold, too tired, too hungry and too thirsty – for with the rapid evaporation of moisture from the warm, relatively humid body thirst was always a problem in dry, intensely cold air – to raise any objections. To people unaccustomed to the Arctic, it must have seemed that they had reached the nadir of their sufferings, that things could get no worse than they were: I hoped as much time as possible would elapse before they found out how wrong they were.

There were no objections, but there were two suggestions. Both came from Nick Corazzini.

‘Look, Doc, about this diet Mr Mahler must have. Maybe we can’t balance it, but we can at least make sure that he gets a fair number of calories – not that I know how you count the damn’ things. Why don’t we double his rations -no, even that wouldn’t keep a decent sparrow alive. What say each of the rest of us docks a quarter of his rations and hands them over? That way Mr Mahler would have about four times his normal—’

‘No, no!’ Mahler protested. ‘Thank you, Mr Corazzini, but I cannot permit—’

‘An excellent idea,’ I interrupted. ‘I was thinking along the same lines myself.’

‘Good,’ Corazzini grinned. ‘Carried unanimously. I also suggest we’d get along farther and faster if, say, Mr Zagero and I were to spell you two on the tractor.’ He held up a hand as if to forestall protest. ‘Either of us may be the man you want, in fact, we might be the two men you want – if it is two men. But if I’m one of the killers, and I know nothing about the Arctic, navigation, the maintenance of this damned Citroën and wouldn’t as much as recognise a crevasse if I fell down one, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that I’m not going to make a break for it until I’m within shouting distance of the coast. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ I said. Even as I spoke, there came a coughing clattering roar as Jackstraw coaxed the still-warm Citroën back into life, and I looked up at Corazzini. ‘All right,’ I went on. ‘Come on down. You can have your first driving lesson now.’

We left at half-past seven that morning, in driving conditions that were just about perfect. Not the slightest breath of air stirred across the icecap and the deep blue-black vault of the sky was unmarred by even the tiniest wisp of cloud. The stars were strangely remote, pale and shimmering and unreal through the gossamer gauze of the glittering ice needles that filled the sky and sifted soundlessly down on the frozen snow, but even so visibility was all that could have been desired: the powerful headlights of the Citroën, striking a million sparkling diamond points of light off the ice spicules, reached a clear three hundred yards ahead into the darkness, leaving the ground to either side of the twin interlocking beams shrouded in impenetrable darkness. The cold was intense, and deepening by the hour: but the Citroën seemed to thrive on it that morning.

Luck was with us almost right away. Within fifteen minutes of starting off, Balto, ranging free as always, appeared out of the darkness to the south-west and ran alongside the dog-sledge, barking to attract Jackstraw’s attention. Jackstraw gave us the signal to stop – a rapid flickering of the red and green lights on the tractor dashboard – and in two or three minutes appeared out of the darkness, grinning, to tell us that Balto had picked up a standing trail flag. That was good news in itself, in that it meant that our navigation the previous night had been all that could have been wished for and that we were almost exactly on course: even more important, however, was the fact that if this flag was the first of a series we could dispense with the navigator on the dog-sledge and that Jackstraw and I could have some sleep – if sleep were possible in that miserably cold and lurching tractor body. And, indeed, that flag proved to be the first of an almost unbroken series that was to guide us all the length of that interminable day, so that from eight o’clock onwards Jackstraw, Zagero, Corazzini and I took it in turns to drive, with the Senator, the Reverend Smallwood or Solly Levin up front as lookout. Theirs was probably the coldest, certainly the most unwelcome job of all: but all three bore up uncomplainingly, even to the extent of thawing out in silent agony at the end of their hour on duty.

Shortly after eight o’clock I left an obviously competent Corazzini to his own devices, dropped back to the shelter of the tractor body and asked the Senator to go up front. I then set about breaking the strictest rule of all, where these old tractors were concerned – that no fire should ever be lit inside when they were in motion. But even the most stringent rules are to be observed only until such time as the need for breaking them is paramount: and now both the need and the time were here. My concern was not for the warmth and comfort of the passengers, or even for the cooking of the food – we had little enough of that, heaven knew, though a constant supply of warm water would come in useful for dealing with the inevitable cases of frostbite – but purely and simply for the life of Theodore Mahler.

Even following Corazzini’s suggestion we couldn’t give him enough food, and what we could didn’t, and wouldn’t, even begin to resemble a balanced diet. His best chance of survival, and that was slender enough, lay in conserving his body reserves and his energy as far as lay within our power. To achieve that, work, or exercise of even the lightest kind, was out: he had to remain as immobile as possible, which was why I had him climb into a sleeping-bag and lie down on one of the bunks, wrapped in a pair of heavy blankets, as soon as I entered. But without work or exercise he would have no means to combat that numbing cold except by a constant shivering which would deplete his reserves just as quickly as the most violent exercise would. So he had to have heat: heat from the stove, heat from the warm fluids which I told Margaret Ross that he was to have at least every two hours. Mahler protested strongly against all these arrangements being made on his behalf, but at the same time he was sensible enough to realise that his only chance of survival depended on doing what I said: but I believe that the main factor which finally made him yield was not so much my medical explanations as the pressure of public opinion.

That all the passengers should suddenly, and so vehemently, be concerned with Theodore Mahler’s welfare seemed, on the face of it, inexplicable. But only on the face of it. It did not require a great deal of thought or probing beneath the surface to discover that the true motivating factor was not selflessness – though there may have been some of that, too – but selfishness. Mahler represented not so much a sufferer as a most welcome diversion from their own thoughts and suspicions, from the tension, from the never-ending constraint that had laid its chilling hand over the entire company for the past twelve hours.

This constraint, apart from its awkwardness and sheer unpleasantness, had the further effect of splitting up the passengers into tiny groups. Communal speech had ceased entirely, except where necessity and the barest demands of common politeness made it inevitable.

Marie LeGarde and Margaret Ross, each of whom knew that the other was not under suspicion, kept very much to themselves and talked only between themselves. So, too, did Zagero and Solly Levin, and also – though this would have seemed ridiculously improbable only twenty-four hours ago – Mrs Dansby-Gregg and her maid, Helene. Improbable then, but inevitable now: whether guilty or not, both knew exactly where the other stood, and, of all the passengers, each could only fully trust the other. They could, of course, as could all the others, trust Marie LeGarde and Margaret Ross: but the fact that they knew that Marie LeGarde and Margaret Ross couldn’t trust them was enough to prohibit any attempts to establish an easier relationship. As for Corazzini, the Rev. Smallwood, the Senator and Mahler, they kept very much to themselves.

In the circumstances, then, it was inevitable that they should welcome the introduction of an absolutely innocuous subject of interest and conversation, something that would ease, however slightly, the coldness and discomfort of the social atmosphere, something that would divert their unwelcome and suspicious thoughts into some more tolerable channel. Theodore Mahler promised to be the best looked after patient I had ever had.

I had just got the oil stove going to my satisfaction when Zagero called to me from his seat by the rear canvas screen.

‘There’s somethin’ funny goin’ on outside, Doc. Come and have a look.’

I had a look. Far off to the right – the northwest, that was – and high above the horizon a great diffuse formless volume of luminosity, spreading over almost a quarter of the dark dome of the sky, was beginning to pulse and fade, pulse and fade, strengthening, deepening, climbing with the passing of every moment. At first it was no more than a lightening in the sky, but already it was beginning to take form, and faint colours beginning to establish themselves in definite patterns.

‘The Aurora, Mr Zagero,’ I said. ‘The Northern Lights. First time you’ve seen it?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. Amazin’ spectacle, ain’t it?’

‘This? This is nothing. It’s just starting up. It’s going to be a curtain – you get all sorts, rays, bands, coronas, arcs and what have you, but this is a curtain. Best of the lot.’

‘Get this sort of thing often. Doc?’

‘Every day, for days on end, when the weather is like this – you know, cold and clear and still. Believe it or not, you can even get so used to it that you won’t bother looking.’

‘I don’t believe it. It’s amazin’,’ he repeated, ‘just amazin’. Tired of it, you say – I hope we see it every day.’ He grinned. ‘You don’t have to look, Doc’

‘For your own sake you’d better hope for something else,’ I said grimly.

‘Meanin’?’

‘Meaning that radio reception is hopeless when the aurora is on.’

‘Radio reception?’ He crinkled his brows. ‘What we gotta lose, with the radio set in the cabin smashed and your friends in the trail party gettin’ further away every minute? You couldn’t raise either of them anyway’

‘No, but we can raise our Uplavnik base when we get a bit nearer the coast,’ I said, and the next moment I could have bitten my tongue off. I had never even thought of the matter until then, but as soon as the words were out I realised that I should have kept this piece of knowledge to myself. The chances of Uplavnik listening in at the right time and on the right frequency were remote enough, but it was always a chance: we could have sent out a warning, summoned help long before the killers would have thought of making a break for it. But, now, if Zagero were one of the killers, he would make good and certain that the set would be smashed long before we got within radio range of the Uplavnik base.

I cursed myself for a blundering idiot, and stole a quick glance at Zagero. In the light streaming out from the gap in the curtain and in the fainter light of the aurora, his every feature was plain, but I could tell nothing from his expression. He was playing it casual, all right, but not too stupidly casual. The slow nod, the pursing of the lips, the thoughtful lifting of the eyebrows could not have been improved upon. Not even the best professional actor could have improved on it, and hard on the heels of that came the second thought that there were a couple of extraordinarily fine actors among us. But, then, if he hadn’t reacted at all, or had reacted too violently, I would have been doubly suspicious. Or would I? If Zagero were one of the guilty men, wouldn’t he have known that too much or too little reaction would have been the very thing to excite suspicion, and taken due precaution against registering either? I gave it up and turned away. But in my mind there was growing a vague but steadily strengthening suspicion against Johnny Zagero: and on the basis of the success and validity of my previous suspicions, I thought bitterly, that just about guaranteed Zagero’s innocence.

I turned and touched Margaret Ross on the shoulder.

‘I’d like to have a few words with you, Miss Ross, if you don’t mind the cold outside.’

She looked at me in surprise, hesitated for a moment, then nodded. I jumped down, reached up a hand to steady her, then helped her aboard the big sled as it passed by a few seconds later. For a short time we just sat there, side by side on a petrol drum, watching the aurora while I wondered how to begin. I stared almost unseeingly at the tremendous sweep of the developing aurora, the great folded, fluted curtain of yellow-green with red-tipped feet that seemed almost to brush the surface of the ice-cap, a translucent transparent drapery – for even at its brightest the stars still shone faintly through – that waved and shimmered and pulsed and glowed, a pastel poem in insubstantiality, like the ethereal backdrop to some unimaginably beautiful fairyland. Margaret Ross sat there gazing at it like one lost in a trance. But she might have been looking at it with the same uncaring eyes as myself, lost not in wonder but in the memory of the man we had left behind in the ice-cap. And when she turned at the sound of my voice, and I saw the glow of the aurora reflected in the sad depths of the wide brown eyes, I knew I was right.

‘Well, Miss Ross, what do you think of the latest development?’

‘Mr Mahler?’ She’d slipped up her snow-mask – in her case just a gauze and cotton-wool pad with a central breathing aperture – and I had to lean forward to catch her soft voice. ‘What can one say about anything so – so dreadful. What chance does the poor man have, Dr Mason?’

‘I’ve honestly no idea. There are far too many unpredictable factors involved … Did you know that after I’d crossed you off I’d lined him up as number one on my list of suspects?’

‘No!’

‘But yes, I’m afraid. I fear I’m no sleuth, Miss Ross. I may be long on the empirical, trial and error method – and it at least has had the negative advantage of reducing the number of suspects by two – but I’m pretty short on the deductive.’ I told her what had happened between Mahler and myself during the brief stop we had made.

‘And now you’re as badly off as ever,’ she said, when I had finished. ‘I suppose all we can do now is to sit and wait to see what happens?’

‘Wait for the axe to fall, you mean?’ I said grimly. ‘Not quite. I haven’t much hope from it, but I thought I might try the deductive reasoning act for a change. But before we can deduce, we have to have some facts we can deduce from. And we’re very short on facts. That’s why I asked you out here – to see if you could help me.’

‘I’ll do anything I can, you know that.’ She lifted her head as the aurora swelled and flamed to the incandescent climax of its performance, and shivered violently as its unearthly beautiful colourings struck a million sparks of coloured light, red and green and yellow and gold, off the ice spicules in the sky. ‘I don’t know why, that makes me feel colder than ever … But I think I’ve already told you everything I know, everything I can remember, Dr Mason.’

‘I’m sure you have. But you may have missed some things just because you couldn’t see they mattered anyway. Now, as I see it, we have three big questions looking for an answer. How come the crash in the first place? How was the coffee spiked? How was the radio broken? If we can turn up anything that can throw a light on even one of these, we may be a long way towards finding out what we want to know.’

Ten freezing minutes later we were still a long way from finding out anything. I’d taken Margaret Ross step by step from the Customs Hall, where she’d met her passengers, to the plane where she had settled them down, flown with them to Gander, watched them go through the same process again, flown them out of Gander, watched her as she’d served their evening meal, and still I’d learnt nothing, turned up nothing suspicious, off-beat or abnormal that could even begin to account for the crash. Then, slowly, just as she was describing the serving of the meal, her voice trailed away into silence, and she turned and stared at me.

‘What’s the matter, Miss Ross?’

‘Of course,’ she said softly. ‘Of course! What a fool I am! Now I see …’

‘What do you see?’ I demanded.

‘The coffee. How it was tampered with. I’d just served Colonel Harrison – he was in the rear seat, so he was the last to be served – when he wrinkled his nose and asked if I could smell something burning. I couldn’t, but I made some sort of joke about something burning on the galley hotplate and I’d just got back there when I heard the Colonel calling, and when I looked round he had the door of the starboard washroom open and smoke was coming out. Not much, just a little. I called the captain, and he hurried aft to see what it was, but it was nothing serious, just a few papers burning – somebody had been careless with a cigarette, I suppose.’

‘And everybody rose out of their seats and crowded to have a look?’ I asked grimly.

‘Yes. Captain. Johnson ordered them all back to their seats – they were upsetting the trim of the plane.’

‘And you didn’t think this worth mentioning to me,’ I said heavily. ‘No importance at all?’

‘I’m sorry. It – it did seem unimportant, unrelated to anything. That was hours before the crash, so—’

‘It doesn’t matter. Who could have gone into the galley then – anybody in the front seats, I suppose?’

‘Yes. They all seemed to crowd down past the middle—’

‘They? Who were “They”?’

‘I don’t know. What – why do you ask?’

‘Because by knowing who was there, we might find out who wasn’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated helplessly. ‘I was a little upset for a moment, then Captain Johnson was in front of me shooing everybody back to their seats and I couldn’t see.’

‘All right.’ I changed my approach. ‘This was the men’s washroom, I take it?’

‘Yes. The powder room is on the port side.’

‘Can you remember who went in there, say, any time up to an hour beforehand?’

‘An hour? But the cigarette end—’

‘Do you believe now that the fire was caused deliberately?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’ She stared at me, wide-eyed.

‘Right. And we’re dealing, obviously, with hardened professional criminals. The whole success of their plan depended on causing this excitement. Do you for a moment believe that they were going to let the whole thing hinge on the mere off-chance of a smouldering butt-end setting some papers alight – especially setting them alight at the correct moment?’

‘But how—’

‘Easy. You can get a little plastic tube with a central composition shield dividing it into two compartments. In one compartment you have a free acid, in the other a different acid enclosed in a glass tube. All you have to do is to crush the tube, break the glass, drop the tube in your chosen spot, walk away and after a predetermined time the acid that was in the glass eats through the shield, meets the other acid and starts a fire. It’s been used hundreds of times, especially in wartime sabotage. If you’re an arsonist looking for a cast-iron alibi and want to be five miles away when the fire starts, it’s the perfect answer.’

‘There was a funny smell—’ she began slowly.

‘You bet there was. Can you remember who went there?’

‘It’s no good.’ She shook her head. ‘I was in the galley most of the time, getting the meal ready’

‘Who were in the front two seats – those nearest the galley?’

‘Miss LeGarde and Mr Corazzini. And I’m afraid that’s not much help. We know Marie LeGarde can’t have had anything to do with it. And Mr Corazzini is the one person I’m sure didn’t leave his seat before dinner. He had a gin soon after take-off, then switched off his reading light, draped a newspaper over his head and went to sleep.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure. I always peek through the cabin door from time to time, and he was always there.’

‘That seems to cut him out,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘And reduce the number of suspects – though, I suppose, he could still have got an accomplice to plant the acid tube.’ Then, suddenly, I had what was, for me, an inspiration. ‘Tell me, Miss Ross, did anyone ask you earlier in the evening when dinner would be?’

She looked at me for a long moment before answering, and even in the fading light of the aurora I could see the understanding coming into her eyes.

‘Mrs Dansby-Gregg did, I’m sure.’

‘She would. Anyone else.’

‘Yes. I remember now.’ Her voice was suddenly very quiet. ‘Colonel Harrison – but he doesn’t count any more – and Mr Zagero.’

‘Zagero?’ In my excitement I bent forward until my face was almost touching hers. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. I remember when he asked me, I said, “Are you feeling peckish, sir?” and he grinned and said, “My dear air hostess, I always feel peckish.’”

‘Well, well. This is most interesting.’

‘Do you think Mr Zagero—’

‘I’m at the stage where I’m afraid to think anything. I’ve been wrong too often. But it’s a straw in the wind all right – a straw about the size of a haystack … Was he anywhere near you when the radio fell? Behind you, for instance, when you rose and brushed against the radio table?’

‘No, he was by the hatch, I’m sure of that. Could he—’

‘He couldn’t. Joss and I worked it out. Somebody had pushed one of the table hinges right home and the other until it was at the critical point of balance. Then as you stood up he pushed the other in. From a distance. There was a long-handled brush lying there – but it had no significance for us at the time … When you heard the crash you whirled round, didn’t you?’ She nodded without speaking.

‘And what did you see?’

‘Mr Corazzini—’

‘We know he dived for it,’ I said impatiently. ‘But in the background, against the wall?’

‘There was someone.’ Her voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘But no – no, it couldn’t have been. He’d been sitting dozing on the floor, and he got the fright of his life when—’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ I cut in harshly. ‘Who was it?’

‘Solly Levin.’

The brief twilight of noon came and went, the cold steadily deepened and by late in the evening it seemed that we had been on board that lurching, roaring tractor all our lives.

Twice only we stopped in the course of that interminable day, for refuelling at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. I chose these times because I had arranged with Joss that I would try to contact him every fourth hour. But though we set up the apparatus outside while Jackstraw was refuelling and Corazzini sat astride the bicycle seat and cranked the generator handle while I tapped out our call sign for almost ten unbroken minutes, no shadow of an answer came through. I had expected none. Even if by some miracle Joss had managed to fix the set, the ionosphere turbulence that had caused the aurora would have almost certainly killed any chance of making contact. But I’d promised Joss, and I had to keep faith.

By the time I made the second try, everyone, even Jackstraw and myself, was shaking and shivering in the bitter cold. Normally, we wouldn’t have felt it much – in very cold weather we wore two complete sets of furs, the inner one with the fur inside, the outer with the fur outside. But we’d given our extra pairs away to Corazzini and Zagero – furs were essential in that ice-box of a tractor cabin – and suffered just as much as the others.

Occasionally, someone would jump down from the tractor and run alongside to try to get warm, but so exhausted were most from sleeplessness, hunger, cold and eternally bracing themselves against the lurching of the tractor, that they were staggering from exhaustion within minutes and had to come aboard again. And when they did come aboard, the sweat from their exertions in such heavy clothes turned ice-cold on their bodies, putting them in worse case than ever, until finally I had to stop it.

It grieved me to do what had to be done, what I saw must be done, but there was no help for it. The weariness, the cold and the sleeplessness could be borne no longer. When I finally gave the order to stop it was ten minutes after midnight, and we had been driving continuously, except for brief fuel and radio halts, for twenty-seven hours.

EIGHT

Wednesday 4 a.m–8 p.m.

Despite our exhaustion, despite our almost overwhelming need for sleep, I don’t think anyone slept that night, even for a moment, for to have slept would have been to freeze to death.

I had never known such cold. Even with twelve of us jam-packed inside a tiny wooden box built to hold five sleeping people at the most, even with the oil fire roaring up the chimney all night long and warmed by a couple of cups of piping hot coffee apiece, we all of us suffered agonies during these dark hours. The chattering of teeth, the St Vitus’ dance of tremor-ridden limbs knocking against the thin uninsulated wooden walls, the constant rubbing as someone sought to restore life to a frozen face or arm or foot. These were the sounds that never ceased. How the elderly Marie LeGarde or the sick Mahler survived that night was indeed a matter for wonder.

But survive they did, for when I looked at my luminous watch, saw that it was almost four o’clock and decided that enough was enough, both of them were wide awake when I switched on the little overhead light. Weak enough normally, that light was now no more than a feeble yellow glow – an ominous sign, it meant that even the tractor batteries were beginning to freeze up – but enough to see the crowded circle of faces, white and blue and yellowing with frostbite, the smoke-like exhalations that clouded in the air before them with every breath they took, the film of slick ice that already covered the walls and all of the roof except for a few inches round the stove pipe exit. As a spectacle of suffering, of sheer unrelieved misery, I don’t think I have ever seen its equal.

‘Insomnia, eh, Doc?’ It was Corazzini speaking, his teeth chattering between the words. ‘Or just forgotten to plug in your electric blanket?’

‘Just an early riser, Mr Corazzini.’ I glanced round the haggard and pain-filled faces. ‘Anybody here slept at all?’

I was answered by mute headshakes from everybody.

‘Anybody likely to sleep?’

Again the headshakes.

‘That settles it.’ I struggled to my feet. ‘It’s only 4 a.m., but if we’re going to freeze to death we might as well freeze on the move. Not only that, but another few hours in this temperature, and that tractor engine will never start again. What do you think, Jackstraw?’

‘I’ll get the blow-torches,’ he said by way of answer, and pushed his way out through the canvas screen. Almost at once I heard him begin to cough violently in the deadly cold of the air outside, and, in the intervals between the coughing, we could clearly hear the dry rustling crackling of his breath as the moisture condensed, froze and drifted away in the all but imperceptible breeze.

Corazzini and I followed, choking and gasping in turn as that glacial cold seared through throat and lungs, adjusting masks and goggles until not a millimetre of flesh was left exposed. Abreast the driving cabin I drew out my torch and glanced at the alcohol thermometer – ordinary mercury froze solid at −38° – then looked again in disbelief. The red spirit inside the glass had sunk down to within an inch of the bulb and stood on the line of −68° – exactly one hundred degrees of frost. Still well below Wegener’s −85°, further short still of the incredible −125° that the Russians had recorded at the Vostok in Antarctica, but nevertheless the lowest, by almost fifteen degrees, that I had ever experienced. And that it should happen now -now, two hundred miles from the nearest human habitation, with Jackstraw and myself stuck with two murderers, a possibly dying man, seven other passengers rapidly weakening from exposure, exhaustion and lack of food, and a superannuated tractor that was due to pack up at any moment at all.

Over an hour later I had cause to revise the last part of that estimate – it seemed that the tractor had already packed up. I had had my first intimation of trouble to come when I had switched on the ignition and pressed the horn – the faint mournful beep could hardly have been heard twenty yards away. The batteries were so gummed up by the cold that they couldn’t even have turned over a hot engine, far less one in which the crankcase, transmission and differential were all but locked solid in lubricating oil that had lost all power to lubricate anything and had been turned into a super viscous liquid with the consistency and intractability of some heavy animal glue. Even with two of us bringing all our weight to bear on the starting handle it was impossible to turn even one cylinder over the top.

We made to light the paraffin blow-torches but they, too, were frozen solid: paraffin freezes at just over −50°, and even at −40° it still flows like heavy gear-case oil. We had to thaw them out with a petrol blow-torch, then place all five of them on wooden boxes and behind canvas aprons to retain the heat, two to thaw out the crankcase, two for the gear-box and transmission and the last for the differential. After an hour or so, when the engine had begun to turn fairly easily and we had brought out the heavy battery which had been thawing out by the stove, we tried again. But it gave no sign of life at all.

None of us, not even Corazzini whose Global tractors were all diesel-powered, was an expert in engine maintenance, and this was when we came very close to despair. But despair was the one emotion we couldn’t afford, and we knew it. We kept the blow-torches burning, returned the battery to the stove, removed and cleaned the plugs, eased the frozen brushes in the generator, stripped and removed the petrol lines, thawed them and sucked out the frozen condensation by mouth, scraped away the ice from the carburettor intake and returned everything in place. We had to remove our gloves for most of this delicate work, the flesh stuck to metal and pulled off like the skin of an orange when we removed our hands, even the backs of our fingers became burnt and blistered from casual knocks on metal, blood oozed out from under our fingernails only to coagulate in the freezing air, and our lips, where they had touched the copper petrol feeds, were swollen and puffed and blistered. It was brutal, killing work, and in addition to the work our arms and legs and faces were almost constantly frozen, despite frequent visits to the stove to thaw ourselves out. It was murderous – but it was worth it. At six-fifteen, two and a quarter hours after we had begun, the big engine coughed and spluttered into life, missed, coughed again, caught and settled down into a steady even roar. I felt my split lips cracking into a painful grin under my mask, thumped Jackstraw and Corazzini for the moment quite forgetting that the latter might be one of the killers – on the back, turned and went in for breakfast.

Or what passed for breakfast. It was little enough, heaven knew – coffee, crackers and the contents of a couple of corned beef tins shared among the twelve of us, the lion’s share going to Theodore Mahler. That left us with only four more tins of beef, four cans of vegetables, about ten pounds of dried fruit, a little frozen fish, a small tin of biscuits, three packets of cereal and – it was the only thing apart from coffee of which we had an adequate supply – over twenty tins of Nestlé’s unsweetened milk. We had, of course, seal meat for the dogs – Jackstraw thawed some out for them over the stove while we had breakfast – and the fried meat of young seal is palatable to a degree. But the dogs had first claim on that. It was more important to preserve their strength than our own: should the engine of the Citroën break down completely, our last hope lay with the dogs.

Breakfast over and the dogs fed, we started off just before moonset, Corazzini driving, with the long trailing plume of our exhaust vapour, milk-white but thick as smoke in that bitter air, stretching out far behind us, bar-straight, almost as far as the eye could see in the waning light of the moon. I had arranged that the drivers should change over every fifteen minutes – as long a period as any person could stand in that unheated and largely unprotected cabin. I had heard of a case in the Antarctic where a driver had sat so long in an exposed tractor that his numbed and frozen fingers had locked so immovably that the steering-wheel had had to be unbolted and brought inside still clutched in the driver’s grasp before the hands could be thawed sufficiently to release the wheel: I didn’t want anything of that kind happening to us.

As soon as we were under way I had a look at Mahler, and his appearance certainly did nothing to inspire any great confidence in his chances. Even although he was fully dressed, lying in an eiderdown sleeping-bag that was zipped all the way to his chin, and covered in blankets, his pinched face was a mottled blue-white and he was shaking continuously with the cold, a handkerchief between his teeth to prevent their chattering. I reached for his wrist. The pulse was very fast, though it seemed strong enough: but I couldn’t be sure, so much skin had been sloughed or burnt off in the past two or three hours that I’d lost all sensitivity in my fingertips. I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

‘Well, how do you feel, Mr Mahler?’

‘No worse than anyone else, I’m sure, Dr Mason.’

‘That could still be bad enough. Hungry?’

‘Hungry!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thanks to the generosity of these good people here, I couldn’t eat another crumb.’

It was typical of what I had come to expect of this gentle Jew in the past few hours. Despite the relatively generous amount of food he’d had for his breakfast, he’d wolfed it all down like a famished man. He was hungry, all right: his body, lacking the insulin to break down the mounting sugar in his blood, was crying out for nourishment yet unable to find it no matter what his food intake was.

‘Thirsty?’

He nodded. Perhaps he thought he was on safe ground there, but it was another and invariable symptom of the developing acuteness of his trouble. I was pretty certain, too, that he had already begun to weaken, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he began to lose weight rapidly. Indeed, he already looked thinner, the cheekbones were more prominent, than even thirty-six hours ago. But then that was true of all the others also, especially Marie LeGarde: for all her uncomplaining courage, her determined cheerfulness, she now looked more than old: she looked sick, and very tired. But there was nothing I could do for her.

‘Your feet?’ I asked Mahler. ‘How are they?’

‘I don’t think they’re there any longer,’ he smiled.

‘Let me see them,’ I asked sharply. He protested, but I overruled him. One look at that dead-white ice-cold flesh was enough.

‘Miss Ross,’ I said. ‘From now on you are Mr Mahler’s personal Gunga Din. We have a couple of rubber bags in the sled. I want you to keep these alternately filled just as soon as you can get water heated – unfortunately, it takes a long time to melt that damned snow. They’re for Mr Mahler’s feet.’ Again Mahler protested, objecting to what he called ‘This babying’, but I ignored him. I didn’t want to tell him, not yet, that frostbite in the feet of an untreated diabetic could mean only one thing: gangrene and amputation, at the least. Slowly I looked round the occupants of the tractor cabin and I think that had I known for certain who the person responsible for all this was, I would have killed him without compunction.

Just then Corazzini came in. After only fifteen minutes at the wheel of the tractor he had just yielded to Jackstraw he was in a pretty bad way. The bluish-white bloodless face was mottled with yellow frostbite blisters, his lips were cracked, the fingernails were beginning to discolour and his hands were in a shocking mess. True, Jackstraw, Zagero and I were little better, but Corazzini was the only one who had driven in that intense cold: he was shaking like a man with malarial fever, and from the way he stumbled up the steps I could see that his legs were gone. I helped him to a vacant seat by the stove.

‘Feel anything below the knees?’ I asked quickly.

‘Not a damned thing.’ He tried to smile, but the effort was too painful, the blood started to well again from the open cuts on his lips. ‘It’s pretty vicious out there, Doc. Better rub the old feet with some snow, huh?’ He stooped and fumbled uselessly at laces with his numbed and bleeding fingers, but before he could move Margaret Ross was on her knees, easing off his boots with gentle fingers. Looking down at that slight figure lost beneath the bulky layers of clothing, I wondered for the hundredth time how I could ever have been crazy enough to believe about her all the things I had done.

‘In your own idiom, Mr Corazzini,’ I said, ‘snow is strictly for the birds. Just an old wives’ tale as far as these temperatures are concerned. You’d be better rubbing your skin off with emery-paper.’ At 70° below, snow had the hard crystalline structure of sandstone, and, when rubbed, granulated into a gritty white powdery sand. I nodded to one of the snow-buckets on the stove. ‘When the temperature there reaches 85°, stick your feet in it. Wait till the skin turns red. It won’t be pleasant, but it’ll work. If there are any blisters I’ll puncture and sterilise them tomorrow.’

He stared at me. ‘Is that sort of thing going to go on all the time, Doc?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

And it did go on for all the time – or for the next ten hours, at least, during which time the temperature dropped down to the low seventies, halted and began its slow, ever so slow, upward swing again. Ten hours while the snow-buckets were never off the stove, ten hours while Mrs Dansby-Gregg, her maid, Helene and, later on, Solly Levin held blow-torches against the sides of the buckets to hurry up the melting and heating process, ten hours while we drivers suffered the regularly recurring pounding agony of circulation returning to our frozen limbs, ten hours during which we began to build up an almost pathological dread of the moment when we must again plunge our feet into hot water, ten hours during which Mahler grew steadily weaker and Marie LeGarde, falling silent for the first time, slipped down and lay huddled in a corner, eyelids closed, like one already dead. Ten hours. Ten interminable indescribable hours of suffering borrowed from purgatory. But long before these ten hours were up something happened to change the picture completely.

At noon we halted the tractor. While the women were heating up soup and using a blowtorch to thaw out two cans of fruit, Jackstraw and I rigged up the radio transmitter, strung out an antenna and started triggering out our GFK call-sign. Normally, on these hand-cranked eight-watt jobs, a morse key was used for transmission while reception was by a pair of earphones, but thanks to a skilful improvisation by Joss who knew how hopelessly awkward morse was for everyone in the party except himself, the set had been rigged so that the key was used only for the call-up sign. After the link was made, a hand microphone could be used for transmission: and simply by throwing the receiving switch into the antenna lead, the microphone was transformed into a small but sufficiently effective loudspeaker.

Calling up Joss was only a gesture. I’d made a promise and was keeping it, that was all. But by this time, I estimated, we were 120 miles distant from him, near enough the limit of our small set: I didn’t know what effect the intense cold would have on radio transmission, but I suspected it wouldn’t be anything good: there had been no aurora that morning, but the ionosphere disturbance might still be lingering on: and, of course, Joss himself had declared that his RCA was entirely beyond repair.

Ten minutes passed, ten minutes during which Jackstraw industriously cranked the handle and I sent out the call-sign, GFK three times repeated, a flick of the receiver switch, ten seconds listening, then the switch pulled back and the call-sign made again. At the end of the ten minutes I sent out the last call, pushed over the receiving switch, listened briefly then stood up, resignedly gesturing to Jackstraw to stop cranking. It was then, almost in the very last instant, that the mike in my hand crackled into life.

‘GFX calling GFK. GFX calling GFK. We are receiving you faint but clear. Repeat, we are receiving you. Over.’

I fumbled and nearly dropped the mike in my excitement.

‘GFK calling GFX, GFK calling GFX.’ I almost shouted the words, saw Jackstraw pointing to the switch which was still in the receiving position, cursed my stupidity, threw it over, called out the signs again and then, quite forgetting the procedure and etiquette of radio communication, rushed on, the words tumbling over one another: ‘Dr Mason here. Dr Mason here. Receiving you loud and clear. Is that you, Joss?’ I threw the switch.

‘Yes, sir. Glad to hear from you.’ Static lent a flat impersonality to the crackling words, robbed them of meaning. ‘How are you? What weather, how far out?’

‘Going strong,’ I replied. ‘Cold intense – minus 70°. Approximately 120 miles out. Joss, this is a miracle! How on earth did you fix it?’

‘I didn’t,’ he said unemotionally. There was a pause and then his voice came again. ‘Captain Hillcrest is waiting to speak to you, sir.’

‘Captain Hillcrest! What on earth is Captain Hillcrest—’ I broke off abruptly, not through astonishment, great though that was, that Hillcrest, whom I had believed to be almost 250 miles to the north of our IGY cabin should have suddenly turned up there, but because the warning glance from Jackstraw had found an echoing answer in the back of my own mind. ‘Hold on,’ I said quickly. ‘Will call you back in two or three minutes.’

We had set up the transmitter just to the rear of the tractor cabin, and I knew that every word said on both sides could be heard by those inside. It was just then that the curtains parted and Corazzini and Zagero peered out, but I ignored them. I never cared less about the hurt I was offering to anybody’s feelings, just picked up the radio and generator while Jackstraw unstrung the antenna, and walked away from the tractor. Two hundred yards away I stopped. Those in the tractor could still see us – the brief light of noonday was flooding over the ice-cap – but they could no longer hear us.

We rigged the radio again, and I tried to tap out the call-sign but it was hopeless, we’d been out too long in that dreadful cold and my hand was beating an uncontrollable tattoo on the key. Fortunately, they knew or guessed at the other end what was happening, for Hillcrest’s voice, calm, confident, infinitely reassuring, came through as soon as I pressed the receiving switch.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ the mike crackled mechanically. ok, Dr Mason, from what Joss has said -and the recent delay – I guess you’re a good way from the tractor. At seventy below you won’t want to stay there too long. Suggest I do all the talking. I’ll keep it brief. Receiving me?’

‘Loud and clear. What on earth are you – sorry, carry on.’

‘Thanks. We heard Monday afternoon, on both British and American broadcasts, of the overdue airliner. Tuesday morning – yesterday, that is – we heard from the Uplavnik base. They say this hasn’t been announced officially, but the US and British governments are convinced that the plane has not been lost at sea, but that it has landed somewhere in Greenland or Baffin Island. Don’t ask me why they’re convinced – I’ve no idea. Anyway they’ve mounted the biggest air-sea rescue search since the war. Merchant vessels of several nationalities have been diverted. American, British, French and Canadian fishing trawlers are moving in to the Greenland coast – the west coast mainly. The east’s already blocked with ice. A dozen US air force search bombers are already operating from Thüle and Sondre Strömfjord. US coastguard cutters are on the job, a flotilla of Canadian destroyers have been rerouted from mid-Atlantic and are steaming at full speed for the southern entrance of the Davis Strait – although it will take them at least thirty-six more hours to get there – and a British aircraft-carrier, accompanied by a couple of destroyers, has already rounded Cape Farewell: we don’t know yet how far north she can get, the ice is solid on the Baffin side, but it’s open at least to Disko on the Greenland coast, maybe as far as Svartenhuk. All IGY stations in Greenland have been ordered to join in the search. That’s why we came back non-stop to the cabin – to pick up more petrol.’

I could contain myself no longer, threw over the receiving switch.

‘What on earth’s all the mad flap about? You’d think the President of the United States and half the Royal Family were aboard that plane. Why no more information from Uplavnik?’

I waited, and then Hillcrest’s voice crackled again.

‘Radio transmission impossible during preceding twenty-four hours. Will raise them now, tell them we’ve found the missing plane and that you’re on your way to the coast. Any fresh developments with you?’

‘None. Correction. One of the passengers -Mahler – turns out to be an advanced diabetic. He’s in a bad way. Radio Uplavnik to get insulin. Godthaab will have it.’

‘Wilco,’ the microphone crackled back. A long pause, during which I could faintly hear the murmur of conversation, then Hillcrest came on again. ‘Suggest you return to meet us. We have plenty of petrol, plenty of food. With eight of us on guard instead of two, nothing could happen. We’re already forty miles out’ – I glanced at Jackstraw, caught the sudden wrinkling of the eyes which I knew to be the tell-tale sign of a quick grin of astonished delight which so accurately reflected my own feelings – ‘so not more than eighty miles behind you. We could meet up in five or six hours.’

I felt elation wash through me like a releasing wave. This was wonderful, this was more than anything I had ever dared hope for. All our troubles were at an end … And then the momentary emotion of relief and triumph ebbed, the cold dismaying processes of reason moved in inexorably to take their place, and it didn’t require the slow, definite shake of Jackstraw’s head to tell me that the end of our troubles was as far away as ever.

‘No go,’ I radioed back. ‘Quite fatal. The minute we turned back the killers would be bound to show their hand. And even if we don’t turn they know now that we’ve been in contact with you and will be more desperate than ever. We must go on. Please follow at your best speed.’ I paused for a moment, then continued. ‘Emphasise to Uplavnik essential for our lives to know why crashed plane so important. Tell them to find out the passenger list, how genuine it is. This is absolutely imperative, Captain Hillcrest. Refuse to accept “No” for an answer. We must know.’

We talked for another minute, but we’d really said all there was to be said. Besides, even during the brief periods that I’d pushed down my snow-mask to speak the cold had struck so cruelly at my cut and bleeding lips that I could now raise scarcely more than a mumble, so after arranging an 8 p.m. rendezvous and making a time-check I signed off.

Back in the tractor cabin curiosity had reached fever pitch, but at least three minutes elapsed -three excruciatingly uncomfortable minutes while Jackstraw and I waited for the blood to come surging back through our frozen veins – before anyone ventured to speak. The inevitable question came from the Senator – a now very much chastened Senator who had lost much of his choler and all of his colour, with the heavy jowls, hanging more loosely than ever, showing unhealthily pale through the grey grizzle of beard. The very fact that he spoke showed, I suppose, that he didn’t regard himself as being heavily under suspicion. He was right enough in that.

‘Made contact with your friends, Dr Mason, eh? The field party, I mean.’ His voice was hesitant, unsure.

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Joss – Mr London – got the set working after almost thirty hours’ non-stop work. He raised Captain Hillcrest – he’s in charge of the field party – and managed to establish a relay contact between us.’ I’d never heard of the phrase ‘relay contact’ in my life, but it sounded scientific enough. ‘He’s packing up immediately, and coming after us.’

‘Is that good?’ the Senator asked hopefully. ‘I mean, how long—?’

‘Only a gesture, I’m afraid,’ I interrupted. ‘He’s at least 258 miles away. His tractor’s not a great deal faster than ours.’ It was, in fact, almost three times as fast. ‘Five or six days, at the least.’

Brewster nodded heavily and said no more. He looked disappointed, but he looked as if he believed me. I wondered which of them didn’t believe me, which of them knew I was lying because they knew that they had so thoroughly destroyed all the spare condensers and valves that it would have been quite impossible for Joss to repair the RCA.

The long bitter day, a day filled by nothing except that dreadful cold, an endless suffering and the nerve-destroying thunderous roar and vibration of that big engine, crawled by like a dying man. About two-thirty in the afternoon, as the last glow of the noon-light faded and the stars began to stand clear in the cold and brittle sky, the temperature reached its nadir – a frightening 73 degrees below zero. Then it was, that strange things happened: flashlights brought from under a parka died out inside a minute: rubber became hard as wood and cracked and fractured like wood: breath was an opaque white cloud that shrouded the heads of every person who ventured outside the tractor body: the ice-cap froze to such an unprecedented degree of hardness that the tractor treads spun and slipped on flat surfaces, the crimp marks no more than half-seen hairlines on the ground: the dogs, who could with impunity stand up to howling blizzards that would kill any man, whined and wailed in their utter misery in that appalling cold: and, now and again, like some far-off intimation of doom and the end of the world, a dull rumbling sound would come echoing across the ice-cap and the ground shake beneath the treads of the tractor as some great areas of snow and ice contracted still farther under the iron hand of that glacial cold.

It was then, inevitably, that the tractor started to give trouble: it was only a matter for wonder that it hadn’t broken down long before that. What I feared above all was the shearing of some moving metal part, made brittle by that intense cold, that would have been the end of us: a valve-stem, a cam-rod, any one part of the delicate timing mechanism, even so small a thing as a crankshaft pin: it needed just one of these to go, and we would be gone also.

We were spared these lethal mishaps, but what we had was almost as bad. Carburettor ice was a constant problem. The steering box froze up and had to be thawed out by blow-torches. Generator brushes stuck and broke, but fortunately we carried spares enough of these. But the biggest trouble was the radiator. Despite the fact that we had it heavily lagged, the cold penetrated the lagging as if it were tissue paper and the subsequent metal contraction produced distortion. Soon it began to leak, and by three o’clock in the afternoon we were losing water at dismaying speed. I doled out some of our precious reserves of heat pads for Mahler’s feet, with the instructions that the water from the snow-buckets on the stove was to be kept solely for the radiator. But even with blow-torches assisting the heat of a stove, the melting of super-chilled snow is a discouragingly slow process: soon we were reduced to pouring half-melted slush down the radiator cap, and finally to cramming snow itself down in order to keep going at all. All this was bad enough: but the frightening thing was that for every pint of radiator liquid lost and every pint of snow-water used to replace it, the anti-freeze became that much more diluted, and though we carried a small reserve drum of ethylene glycol its weight diminished perceptibly with every halt we made.

We had, hours before that, dispensed with a lookout, and the burden of all this work fell on Jackstraw, Zagero, Corazzini and myself. Of the four of us, Jackstraw was the only one who escaped what I knew would be permanent injury or disfigurement in the shape of scars and destroyed tissue. Zagero might never before have borne any of the scars of his trade, but he was going to have what looked peculiarly like one now: we had been too late in getting a cold-water compress to his right ear, and these destroyed tissues would need plastic surgery: two of Corazzini’s toes had also been left too long without treatment, and I knew that he, too, would finish up in a surgical ward: and, because I was the one most in contact with the engine, my fingertips were a painful bleeding mess, the nails already blackening and beginning to rot away.

Nor were things a great deal better with those inside the tractor cabin. The first physiological effects of the cold were beginning to assert themselves, and assert themselves strongly – the almost overpowering desire for sleep, the uncaring indifference to all that went on around them. Later would come the sleeplessness, the anæmia, the digestive troubles, the nervousness that could lead to insanity – if the cold continued long enough these conditions would inevitably succeed the picture of huddled, lifeless misery that presented itself to me whenever I sought the shelter of the cabin and the agony of returning circulation after my spell at the wheel. Many times I saw the picture that afternoon, and always the picture was the same.

The Senator sat slumped in a corner, a dead man but for the fits of violent shuddering that overtook him at regularly recurring intervals. Mahler appeared to sleep. Mrs Dansby-Gregg and Helene lay huddled in one another’s arms – an incredible sight, I thought, but then, next only to death itself, the Arctic was the great leveller, an unparalleled agent in stripping away the pretensions and shoddy veneers of everyday living. I was no great believer in the sudden conversions of human nature, and was pretty certain that, with Mrs Dansby-Gregg, the return to civilisation would coincide with the return to her normal self, and that this moment of common humanity shared by herself and her maid would be no more than a fading and unwelcome memory: but for all my dislike of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I was beginning to develop more than a sneaking admiration for her. The carefully cherished snobbery, the maddeningly easy and condescending assumption of an inevitable social superiority were irritating enough, heaven knew, but behind that unlovable façade seemed to lie a deep-buried streak of that selflessness which is the hallmark of the genuine aristocrat: although she complained constantly about the tiny irritations, she was silent on matters that caused her genuine suffering: she was developing a certain brusque helpfulness, as if she was half-ashamed of it, and showed a care for her maid which, though probably no more than that feudal kindness that reaches its best in adversity, nevertheless verged almost on tenderness: and I had seen her take a mirror from her handbag, inspect the ravages frostbite had wreaked on her lovely face, then return the mirror to her bag with a gesture of indifference. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, in short, was becoming for me an object lesson against the dangers of an over-ready classification of people into types.

Marie LeGarde, the lovable, indomitable Marie LeGarde, was a sick old woman, weakening by the hour. Her attempts at cheerfulness in her fully wakeful moments – she was asleep most of the time – were strained and almost desperate. The effort was too much. There was nothing I could do for her. Like an old watch, her time was running out, the mainspring of her life running down. A day or two of this would surely kill her.

Solly Levin had taken over the blow-torches which played constantly against the sides of the snow-buckets. Wrapped and huddled in clothes until only one eye was visible, he nevertheless achieved the near impossible of looking a picture of abject misery: but the way my thoughts had been running all day, I had no sympathy to waste on Mr Levin. Margaret Ross dozed by the side of the stove but I turned my eyes away quickly, even to look at that thin white face was a physical hurt.

The marvel of them all was Mr Smallwood, yet another instance, I thought wryly, of how wrong I could get. Instead of being one of the first to go under, he showed every sign of being the last. Three hours ago, when I had been in the cabin, he had brought up his bag from the tractor sled, and as he’d opened it I’d caught a glimpse of a black gown and the red and purple divinity hood. He’d brought out a Bible, donned a pair of rimless steel spectacles and, for several hours now, had been reading as best he could in the dim overhead light. He seemed composed, relaxed yet alert, fit to carry on for a long time to come. As doctor and scientist I didn’t go in much for theological speculation, but I could only suppose that Mr Smallwood was in some way sustained by something that was denied the rest of us. I could only envy him.

During the course of the evening two blows fell. The first of these was not in any way figurative. I still have the scar on my forehead to prove it.

We stopped just before eight o’clock that evening, partly in order to keep our radio schedule with Hillcrest, partly – because I wanted to make a long halt, to give Hillcrest all the more opportunity to overtake us – on the pretext that the Citroën’s engine was overheating badly in the temperature that had been rising steadily since the early afternoon. But despite the fact that it was now almost twenty-five degrees warmer than in mid-afternoon, it was still bitterly cold – our hunger and physical exhaustion saw to it that we still suffered almost as much as ever – dark and very still. Far away to the south-west we could see the jagged saw-tooth line of the Vindeby Nunataks – that hundred-mile long ridge of hills that we would have to cross the next day – the forbidding peaks a gleaming crystalline white in the light of the moon that had not yet topped our eastern horizon.

I was driving when we stopped. I switched off the motor, walked round to the back of the tractor and told those inside that we were making a halt. I asked Margaret Ross to heat some food on the stove – soup, dried fruit, one of our four remaining tins of corned beef – asked Jackstraw to rig up the antenna for the radio, then went back to the tractor, stooped and turned the radiator drainage cap, catching the liquid in a can. The anti-freeze in the water had been thinned down so much in the course of the day that I was pretty certain that, in those temperatures, it wouldn’t take half an hour for the radiator water to freeze up and split open the cylinder jacket.

I suppose it was because of the gurgling of the water into the can that I didn’t hear the sound behind me until the last moment, and even so I had no particular reason just then to be suspicious of anything. I half-straightened and turned round to see who was there, but I was too late. The consciousness of a vague blur in the darkness and the blinding white flash of light and pain as something solid smashed into my forehead, just above the goggles on my right eye, came in one and the same instant. I was out, completely unconscious, long before I crumpled down on to the frozen surface of the ice-cap.

Death could easily have supervened then. It would have been easy, ever so easy, for me to drift from unconsciousness into that numbed sleep from which, almost eighty degrees of frost in the ground, I would never have awakened. But awake I did, slowly, painfully, reluctantly, at the insistence of urgently shaking hands.

‘Dr Mason! Dr Mason!’ Dimly I realised that it was Jackstraw speaking, that he had my head and shoulders supported in the crook of his arm. His voice was low, but with a peculiarly carrying quality. ‘Wake up, Dr Mason. Ah, good, good. Easy does it now, Dr Mason.’

Groggily, Jackstraw’s strong arm helping, I levered myself up into an upright sitting position. A brilliant flame of pain lanced like a scalpel through my head, I felt everything blurring once more, consciously, almost violently, shook off the shadows that were creeping in on me again, then looked dazedly up at Jackstraw. I couldn’t see very well, I thought for one frightening moment that the vision centre had been damaged when the back of my head had struck against the iron-hard ice-cap – the ache there was almost as severe as the one in my forehead – but I soon discovered that it was only the blood seeping from the cut on my forehead that had frozen and gummed together the lids of my right eye.

‘No idea who did it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw wasn’t the man to ask stupid questions like ‘What happened?’

‘No idea at all.’ I struggled to my feet. ‘Have you?’

‘Hopeless.’ I could sense rather than see the shrug in the darkness. ‘As soon as you stopped, three or four of them came out. I don’t know where they went – I was out to the south rigging up the antenna.’

‘The radio, Jackstraw!’ I was beginning to think again. ‘Where’s the radio?’

‘No worry, Dr Mason, I have it with me,’ Jackstraw said grimly. ‘It’s here … Any idea why?’

‘None … Yes, I have.’ I thrust my hand into the inside pocket of my parka, then looked at Jackstraw in disbelief. ‘My gun – it’s still there!’

‘Nothing else missing?’

‘No. Spare ammo clip there – wait a moment,’ I said slowly. I hunted around in my parka pocket, but with no success. ‘A paper -I took a newspaper cutting from Colonel Harrison’s pocket – it’s gone.’

‘A cutting? What was in it, Dr Mason?’

‘You’re talking to one of the world’s prize idiots, Jackstraw.’ I shook my head in self-reproach, winced as the pain struck again. ‘I’ve never even read the damn’ thing.’

‘If you had,’ Jackstraw murmured philosophically, ‘you’d probably know why it was taken from you.’

‘But – but what was the point in it?’ I asked blankly. ‘For all they know I might have read it a dozen times.’

‘I think they know you haven’t even read it once,’ Jackstraw said slowly. ‘If you had, they’d have known it by the fact that you would have said or done something they would have expected you to say or do. But because you haven’t – well, they know they’re still safe. They must have been desperate to take a chance like this. It is a great pity. I do not think, Dr Mason, that you will ever see that paper again.’

Five minutes later I had washed and bandaged the cut on my forehead – I’d savagely told an inquiring Zagero that I’d walked into a lamp-post and refused to answer all other questions – and set off with Jackstraw in the strengthening light of the newly-risen moon. We were late for our rendezvous, but when I switched the receiver into the antenna I heard Joss’s call-up sign come through straightaway.

I acknowledged, then asked without preamble: ‘What news from Uplavnik?’

‘Two things, Dr Mason.’ Hillcrest had taken the microphone over from Joss, and, even through the distortion of the speaker, his voice sounded strange, with the flat controlled unemotionalism of one speaking through a suppressed anger. ‘Uplavnik has been in touch with HMS Triton -the carrier coming up the Davis Strait. Triton is in constant communication with the British Admiralty and the Government. Or so I gather.

‘The answers to your questions are these. Firstly the passenger list from A O AC in America is not yet through, but it is known from newspaper reports that the following three people were aboard: Marie LeGarde, the musical comedy star, Senator Hoffman Brewster of the United States and a Mrs Phyllis Dansby-Gregg, who appears to be a very prominent London socialite.’

I wasn’t greatly excited over this item of news. Marie LeGarde had never been a suspect. Mrs Dansby-Gregg – and, by implication, Helene Fleming – had never had more than a faint question mark against their names, and I had already come to the conclusion that it was long odds against the man who was, or purported to be, Senator Brewster being one of the killers.

‘The second thing is this. The Admiralty cannot or will not say why the plane has been forced down, but I gather there must have been a most vital reason. Uplavnik suggests, on what basis I cannot say, perhaps it is officially inspired, that some person aboard the plane must have been in possession of something of the utmost importance, so important that complete secrecy was vital. Don’t ask me what it was. A microfilm, a formula, something, perhaps, only committed to memory – it sounds fanciful, but that’s all we can guess at. It does seem likely that Colonel Harrison was in possession of it.’

I looked at Jackstraw, and he at me. The man who had so recently knocked me out had been desperate all right. I knew then what I had subconsciously known all along, that I was dealing blindfolded against a man – or men – far cleverer than myself. They knew that Joss couldn’t possibly have hoped to repair the RCA. They knew, therefore, that I must have been talking direct to Hillcrest. They knew, because I had told them, that the eight-watt radio we had with us had a range of not more than 150 miles under normal conditions, so that the chances were high that Hillcrest was actually speaking from the IGY cabin – or a point even nearer. I had also told them that Hillcrest and his four companions wouldn’t be returning from their field trip for another two or three weeks, so that this premature return could only be accounted for by some unforeseen and extraordinary event. It wasn’t hard to guess what that event must have been. That I should ask Hillcrest to find out the reason for the crash followed inevitably, but what was not inevitable, what pointed most clearly of all to the shrewdness of the killers, was their guess that whoever knew the reason for the crash would be most reluctant to go into specific detail: and they had robbed me of the only clue that might have helped me discover what that detail was and so also, I felt sure, the identity of the killers. But the time was far past now for crying over spilt milk.

I pressed the switch to ‘Transmit’.

‘Thank you. But please radio Uplavnik again, emphasise desperate urgency of finding out crash reasons … How far behind do you estimate you are now? We have made only twenty miles since noon. Cold extreme, bad radiator trouble. Over.’

‘We have made only eight miles since noon. It seems—’

I threw the switch over.

‘Eight miles?’ I demanded harshly. ‘Did I hear you say eight miles?’

‘You heard.’ Hillcrest’s voice was savage. ‘Remember the missing sugar? Well, it’s turned up. Your fine friends dumped the whole bloody lot into the petrol. We’re completely immobilised.’

NINE

Wednesday 8 p.m.–Thursday 4 p.m.

We were on our way again just after nine o’clock that night. It had been my original intention, by dreaming up a variety of excuses and even, if necessary, by sabotaging the engine, to stay there for several hours or at least what I reckoned to be the longest possible time before the killers became restive, suspected that I was deliberately stalling, and took over. Or tried to take over. For it had been my further intention that, after an hour or two, Jackstraw should produce his rifle -it was strapped to his shoulders night and day -and I my automatic, and hold them all at the point of the gun until Hillcrest came up. If all had gone well, he should have been with us by midnight. Our troubles would have been over.

But it had not gone well, our troubles were as bad as ever, the Sno-Cat was bogged down and with Mahler now seriously ill and Marie LeGarde frighteningly weak and exhausted, I couldn’t remain any longer. Had I been made of tougher stuff, or even had I not been a doctor, I might have brought myself to recognise that both Marie LeGarde and Theodore Mahler were expendable pawns in a game where the stakes, I was now certain, were far greater than just the lives of one or two people. I might have held everybody – or the major suspects, at least – at gunpoint until such time, twenty-four hours if need be, as Hillcrest did come up. But I could not bring myself to regard our sick passengers as expendable pawns. A weakness, no doubt, but one that I was almost proud to share with Jackstraw, who felt exactly as I did.

That Hillcrest would come up eventually I felt pretty sure. The dumping of the sugar in the petrol – I bit my lips in chagrin whenever I remembered that it had been I who had told them all that Hillcrest was running short of fuel – had been a brilliant move, but nothing more, now, than I had come to expect of men who thought of everything, made every possible provision against future eventualities. Still, even though furiously angry at the delay, Hillcrest had thought he could cope with the situation. The big cabin of the Sno-Cat was equipped with a regular workshop with tools fit to deal with just about every mechanical breakdown, and already his driver-mechanic – I didn’t envy him his murderous task even though he was reportedly working behind heated canvas aprons – had stripped down the engine and was cleaning pistons, cylinder walls and valves of the unburnt carbon deposits that had finally ground the big tractor to a halt. A couple of others had rigged up a makeshift distillation unit – a petrol drum, almost full, with a thin metal tube packed in ice leading from its top to an empty drum. Petrol, Hillcrest had explained, had a lower boiling point than sugar, and when the drum was heated the evaporating gas, which would cool in the ice-packed tube, should emerge as pure petrol.

Such, at least, was the theory, although Hillcrest didn’t seem absolutely sure of himself. He had asked if we had any suggestion, whether we could help him in any way at all, but I had said we couldn’t. I was tragically, unforgivably wrong. I could have helped, for I knew something that no one else did, but, at the moment, I completely forgot it. And because I forgot, nothing could now avert the tragedy that was to come, or save the lives of those who were about to die.

My thoughts were black and bitter as the tractor roared and lurched and clattered its way southwest by west under the deepening darkness of a sky that was slowly beginning to fill with cloud. A dark depression filled me, and a cold rage, and there was room in my mind for both. I had a strange fey sense of impending disaster, and though I was doctor enough to know that it was almost certainly a psychologically induced reaction to the cold, exhaustion, sleeplessness and hunger – and a physical reaction to the blow on the head – nevertheless I could not shake it off: and I was angry because I was helpless.

I was helpless to do anything to protect any of the innocent people with me, the people who had entrusted themselves to my care, the sick Mahler and Marie LeGarde, the quiet young German girl, the grave-faced Margaret Ross – above all, I had to admit to myself, Margaret Ross: I was helpless because I knew the murderers might strike at any time, for all I knew they might believe that Hillcrest had already told me all I needed to know and that I was just waiting my chance to catch them completely off guard; on the other hand they, too, were almost certainly just biding their time, not knowing how much I knew, but just taking a calculated gamble, letting things ride as long as the tractor kept moving, kept heading in the right direction, but prepared to strike once and for all when the time came: and, above all, I was helpless because I still had no definite idea as to who the killers were.

For the hundredth time I went over everything I could remember, everything that had happened, everything that had been said, trying to dredge up from the depths of memory one single fact, one isolated word that would point the finger in one unmistakable direction. But I found nothing.

Of the ten passengers Jackstraw and I had with us, six of them, I felt certain, were almost beyond suspicion. Margaret Ross and Marie LeGarde were completely beyond it. The only things that could be said against Mrs Dansby-Gregg and Helene was that I hadn’t absolute proof of their innocence, but I was certain that such proof was quite unnecessary. United States senators, as recent bribery and corruption cases had lamentably shown, had as many human failings – especially cupidity – as the next man: but, even so, the idea of a senator getting mixed up with murder and criminal activities on this massive scale was too preposterous to bear further examination. As for Mahler, I was quite aware that being a diabetic didn’t bar a man from criminal pursuits, and he could have been one of the guilty men – just possibly, he had thought they would force-land near some easily available insulin supplies. But that was just a little too far-fetched, and even if it weren’t, I wasn’t seriously interested in Mahler. I was concerned with killers who might kill again at any moment, and he most certainly wasn’t included in that category: Mahler was a dying man.

That left only Zagero, Solly Levin, Corazzini and the Rev Smallwood, and the Rev Smallwood was too good not to be true. The Bible was hardly ever out of his hands these days: there were certain lengths to which any impostor might reasonably be expected to go to convince us of his identity, but lengths such as these passed the bounds of the superfluous into the realms of the ridiculous.

I had reason to suspect Corazzini. As a tractor specialist, he knew precious little about tractors -although I had to be fair and admit that Citroën and Global tractors were a quarter of a century different in time and a world different in design. But he had been the only person I had found on his feet when I had opened the door of the passenger cabin in the plane. It was he who, back in the IGY cabin, had questioned me so closely about Hillcrest’s movements. It was he, I had learnt, who had helped Jackstraw and Zagero bring up the petrol from the tunnel and so had the opportunity to spike the stuff left behind. Finally, I believed he could be utterly ruthless. But there was one great point in his favour: that still-bandaged hand, token of his desperate attempt to save the falling radio.

I had far greater reason to suspect Zagero, and, by implication of friendship, Solly Levin. Zagero had inquired of Margaret Ross when dinner was: a damning point. Solly Levin had been nearest the radio, and in the right position for doing the damage when it had been destroyed: another damning point. Zagero had been one of those working with the petrol. And, most damning of all, Zagero bore no more resemblance to a boxer than Levin did to any boxing manager who had ever lived outside the pages of Damon Runyon. And, as a further negative mark against Zagero, I had Margaret Ross’s word that Corazzini had never left his seat in the plane. That didn’t, of course, necessarily exclude Corazzini, he could well have had an accomplice. But who could that accomplice be?

It was not until then that the chilling, frightening thought struck me that, because two guns had been used in the plane, I had assumed all along that there were only two criminals. There wasn’t a shadow of evidence to suggest why there should not be more than two: why not three? Why not Corazzini, Zagero and Levin all in the conspiracy together? I thought over the implications of this for some minutes, and at the end I felt more helpless than ever, more weirdly certain of ultimate tragedy to come. Forcibly, almost, I had to remind myself that all three were not necessarily working together; but it was a possibility that had to be faced.

About three o’clock in the morning, still following the flag trail that stretched out interminably before us in the long rake of the headlights, we felt the tractor slow down and Jackstraw, who was driving at the time, change gear as we entered on the first gentle slope of the long foothills that led to the winding pass that cut the Vindeby Nunataks almost exactly in half. We could have gone round the Nunataks, but that would have wasted an entire day, perhaps two, and with the ten-mile route through the hills clearly marked, it was pointless to make a detour.

Two hours later, as the incline perceptibly steepened, the tractor treads began to slip and spin on the frozen snow, but by off-loading almost all the petrol and gear we carried on the tractor sled and stowing it inside the tractor cabin, we managed to build up enough weight to gain a purchase on the surface. Even so, progress was slow and difficult. We could only make ground by following a zigzag pattern, and it took us well over an hour to cover the last mile before the entrance to the pass. Here we halted, soon after seven o’clock in the morning. The pass was lined on one side by a deep crevasse in the ice that ran its entire length, and although not particularly treacherous the trail was difficult and dangerous enough to make me determined to wait for the two or three brief hours’ light at the middle of the day.

While breakfast was being prepared, I looked at Mahler and Marie LeGarde. The steady rise in temperature – it was now less than −30°F – had done nothing to help either of them. Marie LeGarde looked as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks, her face, pock-marked with sores and frostbite blisters, was appallingly thin and wasted, and the once sparkling eyes lack-lustre, pouched and filled and rimmed with blood. She hadn’t spoken a word in ten hours, just sat there, in her increasingly rare moments of waking, shivering and staring ahead with sightless eyes. Theodore Mahler looked in better case than she, but I knew when his defences went down they would do so in a matter of hours. Despite all that we – or, rather, Margaret Ross – had done for him, the insidious talons of frostbite had already sunk deep into his feet, he had developed a very heavy cold – rare indeed in the Arctic, the seeds of it must have been sown before he had left New York – and he had neither the energy nor reserves to fight either that or the boils that were beginning to plague him. His breathing was difficult, the sweet ethereal odour of acetone very strong. He seemed wide awake and rational enough, superficially a much better going concern than Marie LeGarde, but I knew that the collapse, the preliminary to the true diabetic coma, might come at any time.

At eight o’clock Jackstraw and I moved out on to the hillside, and again made contact with Hillcrest. My heart sank when I heard the grim news that they’d hardly progressed a couple of miles in the previous twelve hours. In that bitter cold, it seemed – and where they were temperatures were all of thirty degrees lower than they were with us – heating up an eight gallon drum of petrol, even using stoves, blow-lamps and every means at their disposal, to the point of boiling was a heartbreakingly slow job, and the Sno-Cat gobbled up in a minute all the pure fuel they could distil in thirty times that. Beyond that, there was no news: Uplavnik, which they had contacted less than an hour previously, had still nothing fresh to report. Without a word, Jackstraw and I packed up the equipment and made our way back to the cabin of the tractor. Jackstraw’s almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness was at the lowest ebb I had ever seen, he seldom spoke now and even more rarely smiled. As for me, I felt our last hope was gone.

*

We started up the tractor again at eleven o’clock and headed straight into the pass, myself at the wheel. I was the only person left in either the driving compartment or the cabin behind: Mahler and Marie LeGarde, vanished under a great mound of clothing, rode on the dog-sled while the others walked. The tractor was wide, the trail narrow and sometimes sloping outwards and downwards, and with a sideslip into the gaping crevasse that bordered our path nobody inside the cabin would have had any chance of escape.

The first part was easy. The trail, sometimes not more than eight or nine feet broad, more often than not opened out into a shelf wide enough, almost, to be called the flat floor of a valley, and we made rapid progress. At noon – I’d warned Hillcrest that we would be traversing the Vindeby Nunataks then and would have to miss our regular radio schedule – we were more than half-way through and had just entered the narrowest and most forbidding defile in the entire crossing when Corazzini came running up alongside the tractor and waved me down to a stop. I suppose he must have been shouting but I’d heard nothing above the steady roar of the engine: and, of course, I’d seen nothing, because they had all been behind me and the width of the tractor cabin made my driving mirror useless.

‘Trouble, Doc,’ he said swiftly, just as the engine died. ‘Someone’s gone over the edge. Come on. Quick!’

‘Who?’ I jumped out of the seat, forgetting all about the gun I habitually carried in the door compartment as an insurance against surprise attack when I was driving. ‘How did it happen?’

‘The German girl.’ We were running side by side round a corner in the track towards the little knot of people forty yards back, clustering round a spot on the edge of the crevasse. ‘Slipped, fell, I dunno. Your friend’s gone over after her.’

‘Gone after her!’ I knew that crevasse was virtually bottomless. ‘Good God!’

I pushed Brewster and Levin to one side, peered gingerly over the edge into the blue-green depths below, then drew in my breath sharply. To the right, as I looked, the gleaming walls of the crevasse, their top ten feet glittering with a beaded crystalline substance like icing sugar, and here not more than seven or eight feet apart, stretched down into the illimitable darkness, curving away from one another to form an immense cavern the size of which I couldn’t even begin to guess at. To the left, more directly below, at a depth of perhaps twenty feet, the two walls were joined by a snow and ice bridge, maybe fifteen feet long, one of the many that dotted the crevasse through its entire length. Jackstraw was standing on this pressed closely into one edge, holding an obviously dazed Helene in the crook of his right arm.

It wasn’t hard to work out Jackstraw’s presence there. Normally, he was far too careful a man to venture near a crevasse without a rope, and certainly far too experienced to trust himself to the treachery of a snow-bridge. But, when Helene had stumbled over the edge, she must have fallen heavily – almost certainly in an effort to protect her broken collar-bone – and when she had risen to her feet had been so dazed that Jackstraw, to prevent her staggering over the edge of the snow-bridge to her death, had taken the near-suicidal gamble of jumping after her to stop her. Even in that moment I wondered if I would have had the courage to do the same myself. I didn’t think so.

‘Are you all right?’ I shouted.

‘I think my left arm is broken,’ Jackstraw said conversationally. ‘Would you please hurry, Dr Mason? This bridge is rotten, and I can feel it going.’

His arm broken and the bridge going – and, indeed, I could see chunks of ice and snow falling off from the underside of the arch on which he was standing! The matter-of-fact lack of emotion of his voice was more compelling than the most urgent cry could possibly have been. But for the moment I was in the grip of a blind panic that inhibited all feeling, all thought except the purely destructive. Ropes – but Jackstraw couldn’t tie a rope round himself, not with an arm gone, the girl couldn’t help herself either, both of them were helpless, somebody would have to go down to them, and go at once. Even as I stared into the crevasse, held in this strange motionless thrall, a large chunk of névé broke off from the side of the bridge and plummeted slowly down into the depths, to vanish from sight, perhaps two hundred feet below, long before we heard it strike the floor of the crevasse.

I jumped up and raced towards the tractor sled. How to belay the man who was lowered? With only eight or nine feet between the edge of the crevasse and the cliff behind, not more than three men could get behind a rope, and, with perhaps two men dangling at the end of it what possible purchase could those three find on that ice-hard snow to support them, far less pull them up? They would be pulled over the edge themselves. Spikes – drive a spike into the ground and anchor a rope to that. But heaven only knew how long it would take to drive a spike into the icy surface with no guarantee at the end that the ice wouldn’t crack and refuse to hold, and all the time that snow-bridge crumbling under the feet of the two people who were depending on me to save their lives. The tractor, I thought desperately – perhaps the tractor. That would take any weight: but by the time we’d disconnected the tractor sled, pushed it over the edge and slowly backed the tractor along that narrow and treacherous path, it would have been far too late.

I literally stumbled upon the answer – the four big wooden bridging battens sticking out from the end of the tractor sled. God, I must have been crazy not to think of them straightaway. I grabbed a coil of nylon rope, hauled out one of the battens Zagero was already beside me pulling at another – and ran back to the spot as fast as I could. That three-inch thick, eleven-foot long batten must have weighed over a hundred pounds, but such is the supernormal strength given us in moments of desperate need that I brought it sweeping over and had it in position astride the crevasse, directly above Jackstraw and Helene, as quickly and surely as if I had been handling a half-inch plank. Seconds later Zagero had laid the second batten alongside mine. I stripped off fur gloves and mittens, tied a double bowline in the end of the nylon rope, slipped my legs through the two loops, made a quick half-hitch round my waist, shouted for another rope to be brought, moved out and tied my own rope to the middle of the planks, allowing for about twenty feet of slack, and lowered myself down hand over hand until I was standing beside Jackstraw and Helene.

I could feel the snow-bridge shake under my feet even as I touched it, but I’d no time to think about that, it would have been fatal if I had even begun to think about it. Another rope came snaking down over the edge and in seconds I had it tied round Helene’s waist so tightly that I could hear her gasp with the pain of it: but this was no time for taking chances. And whoever held the other end of the rope up above was moving even as quickly as I was, for the rope tightened just as I finished tying the knot.

I learned later that Helene owed her life to Mahler’s quick thinking. The dog-sledge carrying Marie LeGarde and himself had stopped directly opposite the spot where Helene had gone over, and he had shouted to Brewster and Margaret Ross to sit on it and thread the rope through the slats on the sledge top. It had been a chance, but one that came off: even on that slippery surface their combined weights were more than enough to hold the slightly built Helene.

It was then that I made my mistake – my second mistake of that afternoon, though I did not realise that at the time. To help those above I stooped to boost her up, and as I straightened abruptly the suddenly increased pressure proved too much for the already crumbling bridge. I heard the ominous rumble, felt the snow begin to give under my feet, released my hold on Helene – she was already well clear anyway – grabbed Jackstraw by the arm and jumped for the other side of the bridge a second before the spot where we had been standing vanished with a whroom and went cascading down into the gloomy depths of the crevasse. At the full extent of my rope I hit the ice on the far side of the crevasse, wrapped both arms tightly round Jackstraw – I heard his muffled expression of pain and remembered his injury for the first time – and wondered how long I could hold him when that side of the bridge went too, as go it must, its support on the far side no longer existing. But, miraculously, for the moment it held.

Both of us were pressed hard in against the ice, motionless, hardly daring to breathe, when I heard a sudden cry of pain from above. It came from Helene – she must have caught her injured shoulder as she was being pulled over the edge of the crevasse. But what caught my eye was not Helene, but Corazzini. He was standing very close to the edge, and he had my gun in his hand.

I have never known such chagrin, such profound despair, such bitterness of spirit – or, to be utterly frank, such depths of fear. The one thing I had guarded against all the time, the one thing I had dreaded above all other things, that Jackstraw and I should ever find ourselves, at the same time, completely at the mercy of the killers, had come to pass. But even in my fear there was savagery – savagery towards the man who had engineered this so beautifully, savagery towards myself for having been so easily and utterly fooled.

Even a child could see how it had been done. The series of snow-bridges had given Corazzini the idea. A little nudge to Helene Fleming at the right place – it was as plain as a pikestaff that it had been no accident – and it was a foregone conclusion that either Jackstraw or myself would have to go down to fix a rope round the youngster who, with her broken collar-bone, would be unable to do it herself: I suppose the possibility that she might have crashed straight through the snow-bridge must have occurred to Corazzini, but a man with a record of killings like he had wouldn’t be worried unduly on that score – annoyance at the failure of his plan would probably have been his only reaction. And when one of us had gone down and the other was supervising the rescue from above – well, another little nudge would have solved all Corazzini’s problems. As it was, I had played into his hands more completely than he could ever have hoped.

Mouth dry, sweat breaking out in the palms of my clenched fists and my heart going like a trip-hammer in my chest, I was wondering desperately how he was going to administer the coup de grâce when I saw the Rev Smallwood approaching him arms outstretched and saying something I couldn’t catch. It was a brave gesture of the little minister’s, but a forlorn and hopeless one: I could see Corazzini change his gun to his left hand, strike Mr Smallwood a heavy backhanded blow across the face and the sound of a body falling on the ice above was unmistakable. And then Corazzini was waving the others back at the point of the gun and was advancing towards the wooden battens that straddled the crevasse, and I knew with a dull certainty how he intended to dispose of us. Why waste two bullets when all he had to do was to kick the edges of these battens over the side? Whether these battens, weighing two hundred pounds between them, struck us or smashed away the last remaining buttress of the snow-bridge was quite immaterial: the point was that I was inescapably attached to them by the nylon rope round my waist, and when they plummeted down I would go with them, tearing away the bridge and carrying Jackstraw with me to our deaths in the unthinkable depths below.

Despairingly, I considered the idea of snatching at the rifle still strapped to Jackstraw’s back, but dismissed it even with the thought. It would take me seconds to get it off. There was only one thing for it, and it wasn’t going to do me any good at all. With a jump I could be half-way up the rope in a second, the increased weight would make the battens difficult to kick over, and while Corazzini was either pushing these or pumping bullets into me as I swarmed up the rope, somebody – Zagero, say, could get him from the rear. That way there might, at least, be a faint chance for Jackstraw. I swung my arms behind me, bent my knees then remained frozen in that ridiculous position as a rope came uncoiling down from above and struck me across the shoulder. I glanced up and saw Corazzini smiling down at me.

‘You two characters fixin’ on stayin’ down there all day? Come on up.’

It would be useless to try to describe the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions that whirled through my mind in the ninety seconds that elapsed before Jackstraw and I stood once more in incredulous safety on the trail above. They ranged from hope to bafflement to wild relief to the conviction that Corazzini was playing a cat-and-mouse game with us, and no one thought was in my mind for more than seconds at a time. Even when I was safe, I still didn’t know what to think, the overwhelming relief and gladness and reaction blotted out everything. I was trembling violently, and although Corazzini must have noticed it he affected not to. He stepped forward and handed me the Beretta, butt first.

‘You’re a mite careless about where you stow your armoury, Doc. I’ve known for a long time where you kept this. But I guess it may have been fairly useful these last few minutes.’

‘But – but why—?’

‘Because I’ve got a damned good job and a chair behind a vice-president’s desk waiting for me in Glasgow,’ he snapped. ‘I’d appreciate the chance to sit in that chair some day’ Without another word, he turned away.

I knew what he meant, all right. I knew we owed him our lives. Corazzini was as convinced as I that someone had engineered the whole thing. It didn’t require any thought at all to guess who that someone was.

My first thought was for Jackstraw. Jackstraw with a broken arm was going to make things very difficult for me: it might well make things quite impossible. But when I’d worked his parka off it required only one glance at the unnatural twist of the left arm to see that though Jackstraw had had every excuse for thinking his arm gone, it was, in fact, an elbow dislocation. He made no murmur and his face remained quite expressionless as I manipulated the bone back into the socket, but the wide white grin that cracked his face immediately afterwards was proof enough of his feelings.

I walked over to where Helene Fleming sat on the sledge, still shaking from the shock, Mrs Dansby-Gregg and Margaret Ross doing their best to soothe her. The uncharitable thought struck me that it was probably the first time that Mrs Dansby-Gregg had ever tried to soothe anyone, but I was almost ashamed of the thought as soon as it had occurred to me.

‘That was a close call, young lady,’ I said to Helene. ‘But all’s well … Any more bones broken, eh?’ I tried to speak jocularly, but it didn’t sound very convincing.

‘No, Dr Mason.’ She gave a long shuddering sigh. ‘I don’t know how to thank you and Mr Nielsen—’

‘Don’t try,’ I advised. ‘Who pushed you?’

‘What?’ She stared at me.

‘You heard, Helene. Who did it?’

‘Yes, I – I was pushed,’ she murmured reluctantly. ‘But it was an accident, I know it was.’

‘Who?’ I persisted.

‘It was me,’ Solly Levin put in. He was twisting his hands nervously. ‘Like the lady said, Doc, it was an accident. I guess I kinda stumbled. Someone tapped my heels and—’

‘Who tapped your heels?’

‘For cryin’ out loud!’ I’d made no attempt to hide the cold disbelief in my voice. ‘What would I want to do a thing like that for?’

‘Suppose you tell me,’ I said, and turned away, leaving him to stare after me. Zagero stepped in my way, but I brushed roughly past him and went up towards the tractor. On the sled behind I saw the Rev Smallwood sitting nursing a bleeding mouth. Corazzini was apologising to him.

‘I’m sorry, Reverend, I’m really and truly sorry. I didn’t for a moment think you were one of them, but I couldn’t afford to take any chances back there. I hope you understand, Mr Smallwood.’

Mr Smallwood did, and was suitably Christian and forgiving. But I didn’t wait to hear the end of it. I wanted to get through the Vindeby Nunataks, and get through with as little loss of time as possible, preferably before it became dark. There was something that I knew now that I had to do, and as soon as possible: but I didn’t want to do it while we were all teetering on the edge of that damned crevasse.

We were through without further incident and at the head of that long almost imperceptible slope that fell away for thousands of feet towards the ice-bare rocks of the Greenland coast, before the last of the noon twilight had faded from the sky. I halted the tractor, spoke briefly to Jackstraw, told Margaret Ross to start thawing out some corned beef for our belated mid-day meal, and had just seen Mahler, now semi-conscious, and Marie LeGarde once again safely ensconced in the tractor cabin when Margaret Ross came up to me, her brown eyes troubled.

‘The tins, Dr Mason – the corned beef. I can’t find them.’

‘What’s that? The bully? They can’t be far away, Margaret.’ It was the first time I’d called her that, but my thoughts had been fixed exclusively on something else, and it wasn’t until I saw the slight smile touching her lips – if she was displeased she was hiding it quite well – that I realised what I had said. I didn’t care, it was worth it, it was the first time I had ever seen her smile, and it transformed her rather plain face – but I told my heart that there was a time and a place for somersaults, and this wasn’t it. ‘Come on, let’s have a look.’

We looked, and we found nothing. The tins were gone all right. This was the excuse, the opportunity I had been waiting for. Jackstraw was by my side, looking at me quizzically as we bent over the sled, and I nodded. ‘Behind him,’ I murmured.

I moved back to where the others were grouped round the rear of the tractor cabin and took up a position where I could watch them all – but especially Zagero and Levin.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you heard. Our last tins of beef have gone. They didn’t just vanish. Somebody stole them. That somebody had better tell me, for I’m going to find out anyway.’

There was an utter silence that was broken only occasionally by the stirring of the dogs on the tethering cable. No one said anything, no one as much as looked at his neighbour. The silence stretched on and on, then, as one man, they all swung round startled at the heavy metallic click from behind them. Jackstraw had just cocked the bolt of his rifle, and I could see the slow stiffening of Zagero’s back and arms as he realised that the barrel was lined up on his own head.

‘It’s no coincidence, Zagero,’ I said grimly. I had my own automatic in my hand by the time he turned round. ‘That rifle’s pointed just where it’s meant to. Bring your bag here.’

He stared at me, then called me an unprintable name.

‘Bring it here,’ I repeated. I pointed the Beretta at his head. ‘Believe me, Zagero, I’d as soon kill you as let you live.’

He believed me. He brought the bag, flung it at my feet.

‘Open it,’ I said curtly.

‘It’s locked.’

‘Unlock it.’

He looked at me without expression, then searched through his pockets. At last he stopped and said, ‘I can’t find the keys.’

‘I’d expected nothing else. Jackstraw—’ I changed my mind, one gun was not enough to cover a killer like Zagero. I glanced round the company, made my choice. ‘Mr Smallwood, perhaps you—’

‘No, thank you,’ Mr Smallwood said hastily. He was still holding a handkerchief to his puffed mouth. He smiled wryly. ‘I’ve never realised so clearly before now how essentially a man of peace I am, Dr Mason. Perhaps Mr Corazzini—’

I glanced at Corazzini, and he shrugged indifferently. I understood his lack of eagerness. He must have known that I’d had him high up among my list of suspects until very recently indeed and a certain delicacy of sentiment might well prevent him from being too forthcoming too soon. But this was no time for delicacy. I nodded, and he made for Zagero.

He missed nothing, but he found nothing. After two minutes he stepped back, looked at me and then, thoughtfully, at Solly Levin. Again I nodded, and again he began to search. In ten seconds he brought out a bunch of keys, and held them up.

‘It’s a frame-up,’ Levin yelped. ‘It’s a plant! Corazzini musta palmed ‘em and put ‘em there. I never had no keys—’

‘Shut up!’ I ordered contemptuously. ‘Yours, Zagero?’

He nodded tightly, said nothing.

Ok, Corazzini,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what we can find.’

The second key opened the soft leather case. Corazzini dug under the clothes on top and brought out the three corned beef tins.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Our friend’s iron rations for his take-off. Miss Ross, our lunch … Tell me, Zagero, can you think of any reason why I shouldn’t kill you now?’

‘You’ve made nothin’ but mistakes ever since I met you,’ Zagero said slowly ‘but, brother, this is the biggest you ever made. Do you think I would be such a damn’ fool as to incriminate myself that way? Do you think I would be so everlastingly obvious—’

‘I think that’s exactly the way you expected me to think,’ I said wearily. ‘But I’m learning, I’m learning. One more job, Corazzini, if you would. Tie their feet.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Zagero asked tightly.

‘Don’t worry. The executioner will collect his fee. From now on you and Levin ride, with your feet tied, in the front of the tractor sled – and with a gun on you all the time … What is it, Miss LeGarde?’

‘Are you sure, Peter?’ It was the first time she had spoken for hours, and I could see that even that tiny effort tired her. ‘He doesn’t look like a murderer.’ The tone of her voice accurately reflected the expressions of consternation and shocked disbelief on half a dozen faces: Zagero had spared no effort to make himself popular with everyone.

‘Does anybody here?’ I demanded. ‘The best murderers never do.’ I then explained to her -and the others – all I knew and had suspected about everything. It shook them, especially the facts of the spiking of the petrol and of Hillcrest having been, at one time, only a few hours behind us: and by the time I was finished I could see that there was as little doubt in their minds about Zagero’s guilt as there was in mine.

Two hours later, well down the slope from the Vindeby Nunataks, I stopped and set up the radio gear. I reckoned that we were now less than a hundred miles from the coast, and for half an hour tried to raise our base at Uplavnik. We had no success, but I had hardly expected any: the radio shack at the base was manned only by one operator, he couldn’t be expected to be on watch all the time, and obviously his call-up bell wasn’t set for the frequency I was using.

At four o’clock exactly I got through to Hillcrest. This time I hadn’t bothered to move the radio out of hearing range – I was actually leaning against the tractor cabin as I spoke – and every word said, both by Hillcrest and myself, could be clearly heard. But it didn’t matter any more.

The first thing I did, of course, was to tell him that we had got our men. Even as I spoke, my own voice sounded curiously flat and lifeless. I should, I suppose, have been exultant and happy, but the truth was that I had suffered too much, both physically and psychologically, in the past few days, exhaustion lay over me like a smothering blanket, the reaction from the strain of those days was beginning to set in, the awareness was clearly with me that we weren’t out of the wood by a long way yet, the lives of Marie LeGarde and Mahler were now the uppermost thoughts in my mind, and, to be perfectly honest, I also felt curiously deflated because I had developed a considerable liking for Zagero and the revelation of his true character had been more of a shock to me than I would have been prepared to admit to anyone.

Hillcrest’s reactions, I must admit, were all that could have been wished for, but when I asked him about his progress the enthusiasm vanished from his voice. They were still bogged down, it seemed, and progress had been negligible. There was no word yet of passenger lists or of what the plane had carried that had been so important. The Triton, the aircraft-carrier, had insulin aboard and would fly it up to Uplavnik. A landing barge was moving into Uplavnik through an ice lead and was expected to arrive tomorrow and unload the tractor it was carrying, which would move straight out to meet us. Two ski-planes and two search bombers had been looking for us, but failed to locate us – we’d probably been traversing the Vindeby Nunataks at the time … His voice went on and on, but I hadn’t heard anything he’d said in the past minute or so. I had just remembered something I should have remembered a long time ago.

‘Wait a minute,’ I called. ‘I’ve just thought of something.’

I climbed inside the tractor cabin and shook Mahler. Fortunately, he was only asleep – from the look of him an hour or two ago I’d have said the collapse was due any minute.

‘Mr Mahler,’ I said quickly. ‘You said you worked for an oil company?’

‘That’s right.’ He looked at me in surprise. ‘Socony Mobil Oil Co., in New Jersey.’

‘As what?’ There were a hundred things he could have been that were of no use to me.

‘Research chemist. Why?’

I sighed in relief, and explained. When I’d finished telling him of Hillcrest’s solution to his troubles – distilling the petrol – I asked him what he thought of it.

‘It’s as good a way as any of committing suicide,’ he said grimly. ‘What does he want to do – send himself into orbit? It only requires one weak spot in the can he’s trying to heat … Besides, the evaporation range of petrol is so wide – anything from 30 degrees centigrade to twice the temperature of boiling water – that it may take him all day to get enough to fill a cigarette lighter.’

‘That seems to be more or less the trouble,’ I agreed. ‘Is there nothing he can do?’

‘Only one thing he can do – wash it. What size drums does your petrol come in?’

‘Ten gallon.’

‘Tell him to pour out a couple of gallons and replace with water. Stir well. Let it stand for ten minutes and then syphon off the top seven gallons. It’ll be as near pure petrol as makes no difference.’

‘As easy as that!’ I said incredulously. I thought of Hillcrest’s taking half an hour to distil a cupful. ‘Are you sure, Mr Mahler?’

‘It should work,’ he assured me. Even the strain of a minute’s speaking had been too much for him, his voice was already no more than a husky whisper. ‘Sugar is insoluble in petrol – it just dissolves in the small amounts of water present in petrol, small enough to be held in suspension. But if you’ve plenty of water it’ll sink to the bottom, carrying the sugar with it.’

‘If I’d the Nobel Science Prize, I’d give it to you right now, Mr Mahler.’ I rose to my feet. ‘If you’ve any more suggestions to make, for heaven’s sake let me know.’

‘I’ve one to make now,’ he smiled, but he was almost gasping for breath. ‘It’s going to take your friend a pretty long time to melt the snow to get all the water he needs to wash the petrol.’ He nodded towards the tractor sled, visible through the gap in the canvas screen. ‘We’re obviously carrying far too much fuel. Why don’t you drop some off for Captain Hillcrest – why, in fact, didn’t you drop some off last night, when you first heard of this?’

I stared at him for a long long moment, then turned heavily for the door.

‘I’ll tell you why, Mr Mahler,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s because I’m the biggest damned prize idiot in this world, that’s why’

And I went out to tell Hillcrest just how idiotic I was.

TEN

Thursday 4 p.m.–Friday 6 p.m.

Jackstraw, Corazzini and I took turns at driving the Citroën all through that evening and the following night. The engine was beginning to run rough, the exhaust was developing a peculiar note and it was becoming increasingly difficult to engage second gear. But I couldn’t stop, I daren’t stop. Speed was life now.

Mahler had gone into collapse shortly after nine o’clock that evening, and from the collapse had gradually moved into the true diabetic coma. I had done all I could, all anyone could, but heaven only knew it was little enough. He needed bed, heat, fluids, stimulants, sugar by mouth or injection. Both suitable stimulants and the heat were completely lacking, the lurching, narrow, hard wooden bunk was poor substitute for any bed, despite his great thirst he had found it increasingly difficult to keep down the melted snow water, and I had no means of giving an intravenous injection. For the others in the cabin it was distressing to watch him, distressing to listen to the dyspnoea – the harsh laboured breathing of coma. Unless we could get the insulin in time, I knew no power on earth could prevent death from supervening in from one to three days – in these unfavourable conditions, a day would be much more likely.

Marie LeGarde, too, was weakening with dangerous speed. It was with increasing difficulty that she could force down even the smallest mouthfuls of food, and spent most of her time in restless troubled sleep. Having seen her on the stage and marvelled at her magnificent vitality, it now seemed strange to me that she should go under so easily. But her vitality had really been a manifestation of a nervous energy: she had little of the physical resources necessary to cope with a situation like this, and I had frequently to remind myself that she was an elderly woman. Not that any such reminder was needed when one saw her face: it was haggard and lined and old.

But worried though I was about my patients, Jackstraw was even more deeply concerned with the weather. The temperature had been steadily rising for many hours now, the moaning ululation of the ice-cap wind, which had been absent for over two days, was increasing in intensity with every hour that passed, and the skies above were dark and heavy with black drifting clouds of snow. And when, just after midnight, the wind-speed passed fifteen miles an hour, the wind began to pick up the drift off the ice-cap.

I knew what Jackstraw was afraid of, though I myself had never experienced it. I had heard of the katabatic winds of Greenland, the equivalent of the feared Alaskan williwaws. When great masses of air in the heart of the plateau were cooled, as they had been in the past forty-eight hours, by extremely low temperatures, they were set in motion by a gradient wind and cascaded -there was no other word for it – downwards from the edge of the plateau through suitable drainage channels. Set in motion through their own sheer weight of cold air, these gravity or drainage winds, slowly warmed by the friction and compression of their descent, could reach a hurricane force of destructive violence in which nothing could live.

And all the signs, all the conditions for a gravity storm were there. The recent extreme cold, the rising wind, the rising temperature, the outward flowing direction of the wind, the dark star-obscuring clouds scudding by overhead – there could be no mistaking it, Jackstraw declared. I had never known him to be wrong about Greenland weather, I didn’t believe him to be wrong now, and when Jackstraw became nervous it was time for even the most optimistic to start worrying. And I was worried all right.

We drove the tractor to its limit, and on the slight downward slope – we had changed direction by this time and were heading due south-west for Uplavnik – we were making very good time indeed. But by four o’clock in the morning, when we were, I reckoned, not more than sixty miles from Uplavnik, we ran into the sastrugi and were forced to slow down.

The sastrugi, regular undulations in the frozen snow, were the devil on tractors, especially elderly machines like the Citroën. Caused by raking winds, symmetrical as the waves in an eighteenth-century sailing print, hard on the crest and soft in the trough, they made progress possible only by slowing down to a disheartening crawl. Even so the Citroën and the sledges behind rolled and pitched like ships in a heavy seaway, the headlights one moment reaching up into the lowering darkness of the sky, the next dipping to illuminate the barred white and shadowed black of the sastrugi immediately ahead. Sometimes it gave way to deceptively clear patches – deceptively, for snow had obviously fallen here recently or been carried down from the plateau, and we were reduced to low gear to make any headway at all on it.

Shortly before eight o’clock in the morning Jackstraw brought the Citroën to a halt, and as the roar of the big engine died the deep moaning of the wind, a wind carrying with it a rising wall of ice and snow, swept in to take its place. Jackstraw had drawn up broadside on to the wind and the slope of the hill and I jumped down to rig up a canvas shelter extending out from the cabin: it was nothing elaborate, just a triangular sheet of proofed canvas attached to the top of the cabin and the cleat of a caterpillar track on its vertical side, with its apex stretched out to a spike hammered into the surface of the ice-cap: there was no room for us all within the cabin at mealtimes, I wanted some protection when we kept our 8 a.m. radio schedule with Hillcrest, and, in particular, it was time that Zagero and Levin had some relief from their sufferings. They had ridden all night on the tractor sled, under the guard of either Jackstraw or myself, and though the temperature was now only a few degrees below zero and though they were sheltering under a mound of clothing, nevertheless they must have spent a miserable night.

Breakfast, such as it was, was waiting and ready to be eaten as soon as the tractor had stopped, but I had little appetite for it: it seemed to me I had forgotten what sleep was like, I had had none for almost three days, I was living now in a permanent state of physical and mental exhaustion and it was becoming almost impossible to concentrate, to think of the hundred and one things that had to be thought of all the time. More than once I caught myself nodding and dozing off over my cup of coffee, and it was only with a conscious effort of will that I forced myself to my feet to keep the radio schedule. I was going to call both Hillcrest and our base – Hillcrest had given me the frequency the previous evening. I decided to call Hillcrest first.

We got through without any difficulty, although Hillcrest said they could hear me only very faintly. I suspected some fault on the generator side, for our receiver was powered by a hundred-hour battery and we could hear Hillcrest’s voice clearly.

All the men except Mahler were gathered round me during the transmission – they seemed to find a peculiar reassurance in another voice -however distant and disembodied that voice – and even Zagero and Levin were only seven or eight feet away, sitting in front of the tractor sled with their feet still bound. I was on a canvas chair, with my back to the canvas screen, and Corazzini and Brewster were sitting on the tailboard, the canvas curtains drawn behind them to keep the heat in the cabin. The Rev Smallwood was behind me, turning the generator handle, and Jackstraw a few feet away, watchful as ever, the cocked rifle ready in his hand.

‘Receiving you loud and clear,’ I said to Hillcrest. My hands were cupped round the microphone and I was holding it close to my mouth to cut out as much as possible of the background noise of the wind. ‘What progress?’ I threw the receiver switch into the antenna, and Hillcrest’s voice came again.

‘Great!’ He sounded enthusiastic, excited. ‘My congratulations to your learned friend. Works like a charm and we’re going like a bomb. We are approaching the Vindeby Nunataks and expect to be through by this afternoon.’

This was wonderful news. With any luck he would be up with us late in the evening of that day, and we would have the moral support of his company and the even more important technical resources of everything his big modern Sno-Cat could offer. And Jackstraw and I could get some desperately needed sleep … I became aware that Hillcrest was continuing, his voice still charged with the same suppressed excitement.

The Admiralty or the Government or whoever it is have loosened up at last! Brother, you’re sitting on dynamite and you don’t know it. You’ve got it right there with you and you could exchange it tomorrow for a million pounds in the right place. No wonder the Government were so cagey, no wonder they knew something fishy was going on and mounted the biggest search ever. The carrier Triton’s going to collect it personally—’

I threw the receiving switch.

‘For heaven’s sake!’ I shouted in exasperation – an exasperation, I was dimly aware, shared by all the others who were leaning forward to hear Hillcrest’s voice. ‘What are you talking about? What was the plane carrying? Over.’

‘Sorry. It’s a guided-missile mechanism of such advanced design and so top-secret that its details, I gather, are known only to a handful of scientists in all the United States. It’s the only one of its kind, and was being sent to Britain for study under the recent agreement to share knowledge on atomic weapons and guided missiles.’ Hillcrest’s voice was calm now, measured and sober. There was a pause, then he went on, slowly, impressively. ‘I understand the governments concerned are prepared to go to any lengths – any lengths -to secure the recovery of this mechanism and prevent its falling into wrong hands.’

There was another, longer pause: Hillcrest, clearly, was giving me an opportunity to say something, but I just didn’t know what to say. The magnitude of the entire thing took my breath away, temporarily inhibited all thought and speech … Hillcrest’s voice was coming through again:

‘To help you identify this mechanism, Dr Mason. It’s camouflaged, made up to look like an ebonite and metal portable radio of fairly large size, with a braided leather carrying strap. Find that portable, Dr Mason, and you’ll—’

I never heard the end of that sentence. I was still sitting there, dazedly wondering why the words ‘portable radio’ should have triggered off such a clangorous bell in my mind – I can only plead my extreme physical and mental exhaustion – when Zagero catapulted himself off his seat on the sled, knocking Jackstraw staggering, took one tremendous hop with his bound feet just opposite where I was sitting and hurled himself bodily towards Corazzini who, his face twisted in a vicious and unrecognisable mask, had pushed himself off the tractor tailboard with one hand and with the other was fumbling desperately to bring something out from under his coat. He saw he couldn’t make it in time, threw himself to one side, but Zagero, bound though he was, was like a cat on his feet and I knew that instant, that instant that was too late, that Zagero was indeed the world-class boxer that he claimed to be. If the astonishing speed of his reflexes were not proof enough, that blurring right arm of his carried with it lethal conviction. Corazzini was a very big man, six feet two and at least two hundred pounds and he was swathed in many layers of heavy clothing, but when that fist caught him with such frightening power just under the heart he staggered back against the tailboard and slid slowly to the ground, unseeing eyes turned up to the first driving flakes of the newly fallen snow. I had never seen a blow delivered with such power: nor do I ever want to see it again.

For perhaps five seconds no one moved, no one spoke, men were held in thrall. The soughing, wailing moan of the wind on the ice-cap sounded weirdly, unnaturally loud. I was the first to break the silence. I was still sitting on my canvas stool.

‘Corazzini!’ I said. ‘Corazzini!’ My voice was barely more than a whisper, but Zagero heard me.

‘Sure it’s Corazzini,’ he said levelly. ‘It always was.’ He stooped, thrust his hand under the unconscious man’s coat and brought out his gun. ‘You’d better keep this, Doc. Not only do I not trust our little playmate here with toys like these, but the state prosecutor or district attorney or whatever you call the guy in England will find that the riflin’ on this barrel matches the riflin’ marks on some very interestin’ bullets.’

He tossed the gun across, and automatically I caught it. It was a pistol, not an automatic, and it had a strange-looking cylinder screwed on to the front of the barrel. A silencer, I supposed; I had never seen one before. Nor had I ever seen that type of gun before. I didn’t like the look of it at all, and I guessed it might be wise to have a gun in my hand when Corazzini came round. Jackstraw, I could see, already had his rifle lined up on the unconscious man. I placed the pistol on the ground beside me and pulled out the Beretta.

‘You were ready for him.’ I was still trying to put things in order in my own mind. ‘You were waiting for the break. How—’

‘Do I have to draw a diagram, Doc?’ There was no insolence in his voice, only weariness. ‘I knew it wasn’t me. I knew it wasn’t Solly. So it had to be Corazzini.’

‘Yes, I see. It had to be Corazzini.’ The words were automatic, meaningless. My thoughts were in a state of utter confusion, as confused, no doubt, as those of Corazzini who was now pushing himself groggily into a sitting position, but for the past fifteen seconds another bell had been ringing far back in my mind, not so loud as the first but even more desperately insistent, and all at once I had it and began to rise to my feet. ‘But there were two of them, two of them! Corazzini had an accomplice—’ That was as far as I got when some metal object smashed across my wrist with brutal force, sending my Beretta flying, and something small and hard ground viciously into the back of my neck.

‘Don’t move, Dr Mason.’ The voice, flat, controlled but alive with a vibrant power that I had never heard before, was almost unrecognisable as the Rev Joseph Smallwood’s. ‘Nobody is to move. Nielsen, drop that rifle – now! Just one suspicious move and Dr Mason gets his head blown off.’

I stood stock-still. The man behind that voice meant every word he said. I didn’t need any convincing of that. The cold certainty in his voice only reinforced the knowledge I already had that the sanctity of human life was a factor which could never enter into this man’s considerations.

‘All right, Corazzini?’ Smallwood was speaking again, his voice empty of all concern for and interest in his accomplice: his only anxiety, if one could by any stretch of imagination call it that, lay in his desire for Corazzini’s effectively continued co-operation.

‘All right,’ Corazzini said softly. He was standing now and that both mind and reactions were back to normal was evident from the dexterity with which he caught the gun Smallwood threw back to him. ‘Never thought any man could move so fast with his feet tied. But he won’t catch me again. Everybody out, eh?’

‘Everybody out,’ Smallwood nodded. No question, he was the leader of the two, ridiculously improbable though that would have seemed only two minutes ago: but it didn’t seem improbable any longer, it seemed inevitable.

‘Jump down! All of you,’ Corazzini ordered. Gun in one hand, he held back a flap of canvas screen with the other. ‘Hurry it up.’

‘Mahler can’t jump down,’ I protested. ‘He can’t move – he’s in coma. He—’

‘Shut up!’ Corazzini interrupted. ‘All right, Zagero, inside and get him out.’

‘You can’t move him!’ I shouted furiously. ‘You’ll kill him if—’ My last word was choked off in a grunt of pain as Smallwood’s gun barrel caught me viciously across the side of the head. I fell to my hands and knees in the snow and remained there for several seconds, head down and shaking it from side to side as I tried to overcome the dizziness and the pain.

‘Corazzini said “shut up”. You must learn to listen.’ Smallwood’s voice was chillingly devoid of all emphasis and inflection. He stood waiting quietly until the last of the passengers had descended or been carried from the tractor cabin, then waved us all into a straight line facing towards Corazzini and himself. Both of them had their backs to the canvas screen, while we were placed just far enough clear of the shelter to be blinded by the increasingly heavy snowfall that swirled down into our eyes, but not so far off as not to be clearly seen by them. Whatever these two did, I was beginning to discover, betrayed that economy of movement and unquestioning sure-ness of the complete professionals who had long ago worked out the answers to and counters against any of a vast range and permutation of situations they were ever likely to encounter.

Smallwood beckoned me.

‘You haven’t finished your radio call, Dr Mason. Finish it. Your friend Hillcrest must be wondering at the delay.’ The gun in his hand came forward a fraction of an inch, just enough for the movement to be perceptible. ‘For your own sake, do nothing to arouse his suspicions. Don’t be clever. Keep it brief.’

I kept it brief. I excused the interruption of transmission on the grounds that Mahler had taken a sudden turn for the worse – as indeed, I thought bitterly, he had – said that I’d guard the missile mechanism with my life and apologised for cutting the call short, but said it was essential to get Mahler to Uplavnik with all speed.

‘Finish it off,’ Smallwood said softly in my ear. I nodded.

‘That’s the lot then, Captain Hillcrest. Will make the noon schedule. This is Mayday signing off. Mayday, Mayday’

I switched off, and turned indifferently away. I had taken only one step when Smallwood caught my shoulder and whirled me round. For such an apparently slight man, he was phenomenally strong. I gasped as his pistol barrel dug into my stomach.

‘“Mayday”, Dr Mason?’ he asked silkily. ‘What is “Mayday”?’

‘Our call-sign, of course,’ I said irritably.

‘Your call-sign is GFK.’

Our call-up is GFK. Our signing-off is “Mayday”.’

‘You’re lying.’ I wondered how I could ever have thought this face meek and nervous and colourless. The mouth was a thin hard line, the upper eyelids bar-straight and hooded above the unwinking eyes. Flat marbled eyes of a faded light-blue. A killer’s eyes. ‘You’re lying,’ he repeated.

‘I’m not lying,’ I said angrily.

‘Count five and die.’ His eyes never left mine, the pressure of the gun increased. ‘One … two … three—’

‘I’ll tell you what it is!’ The cry came from Margaret Ross. ‘“Mayday” is the international air distress signal, the SOS … I had to tell him, Dr Mason, I had to!’ Her voice was a shaking sob. ‘He was going to kill you.’

‘I was indeed,’ Smallwood agreed. If he felt either anger or apprehension, no trace of either appeared in the calm conversational voice. ‘I should do it now – you’ve lost us four hours’ head start. But courage happens to be one of the few virtues I admire … You are an extremely brave man, Dr Mason. Your courage is a fair match for your – ah – lack of perspicacity, shall we say’

‘You’ll never get off the ice-cap, Smallwood,’ I said steadily. ‘Scores of ships and planes are searching for you, thousands of men. They’ll get you and they’ll hang you for these five dead men.’

‘We shall see.’ He gave a wintry smile, and now that he had removed his rimless glasses I could see that the man’s smile left his eyes untouched, left them flat and empty and lifeless, like the stained glass in a church and no sun behind it. ‘All right, Corazzini, the box. Dr Mason, bring one of the maps from the driver’s seat.’

‘In a moment. Perhaps you would care to explain—’

‘Explanations are for children.’ The voice was level, curt, devoid of all inflection. ‘I’m in a hurry, Dr Mason. Bring the map.’

I brought it and when I returned Corazzini was sitting on the front of the tractor sled with a case before him. But it wasn’t the leather-covered portable radio: it was Smallwood’s robe case.

Corazzini snapped open the catches, pulled out Bible, robes and divinity hood, tossed them to one side then carefully brought out a metal box which looked exactly like a tape-recorder: indeed, when he shone his torch on it I could clearly see the word ‘Grundig’. But it soon became apparent that it was like no tape-recorder that I had ever seen.

The twin spools he ripped off the top of the machine and sent spinning away into the darkness and the snow, the tape unwinding in a long convoluted streamer. By this time I would have taken long odds that anyone suspicious enough to investigate would have found that tape perfectly genuine: probably, I thought bitterly, Bach’s organ music, in keeping with Smallwood’s late ecclesiastical nature.

Still in silence, we watched Corazzini undo and fling away the false top of the recorder, but not before I had time to notice the padded spring clips on its underside – the perfect hiding place for a couple of automatics: revealed now were controls and calibrated dials that bore no resemblance to those of a tape-recorder. Corazzini straightened and erected a hinged telescopic aerial, clamped a set of headphones to his ears, made two switches and started to turn a dial, at the same time watching a green magic eye similar to those found in tape-recorders and many modern radios. Faintly, but unmistakably, I could hear a steady whine coming from the earphones, a whine which altered in pitch and intensity as Corazzini turned the dial. When it reached its maximum strength, he turned his attention to a built-in alcohol compass about three inches in diameter. A few moments later he doffed the earphones and turned round, apparently satisfied.

‘Very strong, very clear,’ he announced to Smallwood. ‘But there’s too heavy a deviation factor from all the metal in the tractor and sledge. Back in two minutes. Your torch, Dr Mason.’

He walked away for about fifty yards, taking the machine with him: it was with intense chagrin that I realised that it was perfectly in keeping with all that had gone before that Corazzini had probably forgotten more about navigation than I was ever likely to know. He returned soon, consulted a small chart – correcting for variation, no doubt – then grinned at Smallwood.

‘It’s them, all right. Perfect signal. Bearing 268.’

‘Good.’ If Smallwood felt relieved or gratified at the news, no shadow of his feeling touched the thin immobile face. Their quiet certainty, their forethought, their foolproof organisation was dismaying, frightening. Now that I could see what manner of men they were it was unthinkable that they should have set themselves down in a vast featureless country such as this without some means of orientating themselves: what we had just seen in operation could only be a battery operated radio direction finder, and even to me, inexperienced though I was in such matters, it was obvious that Corazzini must have been taking a bearing on some continuous directional line-up signals transmitted by a vessel, or vessels, off-shore: trawlers, probably, or some other inconspicuous type of fishing vessel … I would have been less than human had I not wanted to shake this absolute confidence.

‘You’ve miscalculated the hornet’s nest you’ve stirred up. The Davis Strait, the coast of Greenland is alive with ships and planes. The scout planes of the carrier Triton will pick up every boat that’s larger than a skiff. The trawlers will never get away with it: they won’t get five miles.’

‘They don’t have to.’ Implicit in Corazzini’s words was confirmation of the accuracy of my guess about trawlers. ‘There are such things as submarines. In fact there is one, not far from here.’

‘You still won’t—’

‘Be quiet,’ Smallwood said coldly. He turned to Corazzini. ‘Two hundred and sixty-eight, eh – due west more or less. Distance?’

Corazzini shrugged, said nothing: Smallwood beckoned to me.

‘We’ll soon find it. That map, Dr Mason – indicate our position, accurately.’

‘You can go to hell,’ I said briefly.

‘I expected nothing else. However, I’m not blind and your clumsy attempts at concealment have done little to hide the growing attachment between yourself and the young lady here.’ I glanced quickly at Margaret, saw the faint colour beginning to stain the pale cheek and looked as quickly away. ‘I am prepared to shoot Miss Ross.’

I never doubted him. I knew he’d do it in an instant. I gave him our position, he asked for another map, asked Jackstraw to mark our position on the second, and compared the two.

‘They coincide,’ he nodded. ‘Fortunately for you.’ He studied the map briefly, then looked at Corazzini. ‘The Kangalak fjord, undoubtedly, at the foot of the Kangalak glacier. Approximately—’

‘The Kangalak fjord,’ I interrupted. My voice was bitter. ‘Why the hell didn’t you land there in the first place and save us all this?’

The plane captain deserved to die,’ Smallwood said obliquely. His smile was wintry. ‘I had instructed him to put down on the coast just north of the fjord where our – ah – friends had reconnoitred a section of the ice-cap, three miles long and absolutely flat, that is the equal of the finest runway in Europe or America, and it wasn’t until I saw the altimeter reading just before the crash that I realised he had deceived me.’ He made an impatient gesture and turned to Corazzini. ‘We waste time. Approximately sixty miles, you would say?’

Corazzini examined the map. ‘Yes, about that.’

‘So, come then, on our way.’

‘Leaving us here to starve and die of cold, I suppose?’ I said bitterly.

‘What becomes of you no longer concerns me,’ Smallwood said indifferently. Already, in a matter of minutes, it had become almost impossible to think of him, to remember him as the meek retiring minister we had known. ‘It is possible, however, that you might be foolish enough to take advantage of the cover of snow and darkness to run after us, waylay and try to overcome us. You might even succeed, even though unarmed. We must immobilise you, temporarily’

‘Or permanently,’ Zagero said softly.

‘Only fools kill wantonly and unnecessarily. Fortunately – for you – it is not necessary for my plans that you die. Corazzini, bring some rope from the sled. There’s plenty of cord there. Tie their feet only. With their numbed hands it will take them an hour to undo their bonds: we will be well on our way by then.’ He moved his gun gently from side to side. ‘Sit in the snow. All of you.’

There was nothing for it but to do as we were told. We sat down and watched Corazzini bring a hank of cord from the sled. He looked at Smallwood, and Smallwood nodded at me.

‘Dr Mason first.’

Corazzini gave his gun to Smallwood – they missed nothing, that pair, not even the remote possibility that one of us might try to snatch Corazzini’s gun – and advanced on me. He knelt and had taken a couple of turns round my ankles when the truth struck me with the suddenness, the shocking impact of a physical blow. I sent Corazzini staggering with a violent shove and leapt to my feet.

‘No!’ My voice was hoarse, savage. ‘By God, you’re not going to tie me up, Smallwood!’

‘Sit down, Mason!’ His voice was hard, whip-like, and the light from the tractor cabin was enough for me to see the rock-like pistol barrel centred between my eyes. I ignored it completely.

‘Jackstraw!’ I shouted. ‘Zagero, Levin, Brewster! On your feet if you want to live. He’s only got one gun. If he starts firing at any of us, the rest go for him and get him – he can’t possibly get us all. Margaret, Helene, Mrs Dansby-Gregg – first shot that’s fired, run off into the darkness – and stay there!’

‘Have you gone crackers, Doc?’ The words came from an astonished Zagero, but for all that something namelessly urgent and compelling in my voice had got him to his feet, and he was bent forward, crouched like a great cat, ready to launch himself at Smallwood. ‘Want to get us all killed?’

‘That’s just what I don’t want.’ I could feel my spine, the back of my neck cold with a cold that was not of the Arctic, and my legs were trembling. ‘Going to tie us up and leave us here? Is he hell! Why do you think he told us of the trawler, its position, the submarine and all the rest of it? I’ll tell you why – because he knew it was safe, because he’d made up his mind that none of us would ever live to tell of these things.’ I was rattling the words out with machine-gun rapidity, desperate with the need to convince the others of what I was saying before it was too late: and my eyes never left the gun in Smallwood’s hand.

‘But—’

‘No “buts”,’ I interrupted harshly. ‘Smallwood knows that Hillcrest will be coming through here this afternoon. If we’re still here – and alive – first thing we’d tell him would be Smallwood’s course, speed, approximate position and destination. Within an hour the Kangalak glacier would be sealed, within an hour bombers from the Triton would have blasted him off the face of the glacier. Tie us up? Sure – and then he and Corazzini would shoot us at their leisure while we flopped around like birds with broken wings.’

Conviction was immediate and complete. I couldn’t see the faces of the others, but the fractional lowering of Smallwood’s gun was enough to tell me.

‘I underestimated you, Dr Mason,’ he admitted softly. His voice was devoid of all trace of anger. ‘But you almost died there.’

‘What’s five minutes more or less?’ I asked, and Smallwood nodded absently. He was already working out an alternative solution.

‘You – you inhuman monster!’ Senator Brewster’s voice was shaking with fear or anger or both. ‘You were going to tie us up and butcher us like – like—’ Words failed him for a moment, then he whispered: ‘You must be mad, Smallwood, stark raving mad.’

‘He’s not in the slightest,’ Zagero said quietly. ‘Not mad. Just bad. But it’s kind of hard to tell the difference at times. Figured out our next jolly little scheme, Smallwood?’

‘Yes. As Dr Mason says, we can’t possibly dispose of all of you inside a couple of seconds, which is all the time it would take for one – probably more – of you to reach the cover of the snow and darkness.’ He nodded towards the tractor sled, lifted his high collar against the snow and biting wind. ‘I think you had better ride a little way with us.’

And ride with them we did for the thirty longest miles I have ever driven, for nine hours that had no end. A relatively short distance, but this eternity of time to cover it: partly because of the sastrugi, partly because of the increasingly long stretches of soft snow, but mainly because of the weather, which was deteriorating rapidly. The wind had now risen to something better than thirty miles an hour, it carried with it a blinding wall of flying ice-filled drift, and, even though it was directly behind us, it made things troublesome for the driver. For all the others except Smallwood it made the conditions intolerable: had the temperature been what it was only twenty-four hours previously, none of us, I am sure, would have survived that trip.

I would have thought that with either Smallwood or Corazzini driving and the other navigating from the dog-sled we would have had a chance, slender though it might be, to overpower them or at least make good our escape. But Smallwood never offered even a shadow of a chance of either. Corazzini drove all the time, with the radio direction finder headphones clamped to his ears, so that compass navigation became an inaccurate superfluity. Smallwood sat alone in the back of the tractor cabin, his gun unwaveringly trained on the rest of us who were crammed aboard the big tractor sled, ten feet to the rear of him: when the snow eventually became too heavy he stopped the tractor, detached the portable searchlight and mounted it, facing aft, in the rear of the tractor cabin; this had the double advantage of illuminating us so that he could clearly see us even through the drift and making certain that none of us tried to drop off the sled, and of blinding us so that we were quite unable to see what he was doing, even to see whether he was watching us at all. It was frustrating, maddening. And, for good measure and to prevent any desperate attempt at escape in the occasionally blinding flurries of snow, he brought Margaret and Helene up into the cabin and bound their hands: they were the surety for our good conduct.

That left eight of us on the tractor sled, Theodore Mahler and Marie LeGarde stretched out in the middle, three of us sitting on each side. Almost immediately after we had moved off and pulled a pair of tarpaulins over ourselves for what meagre shelter they could afford, Jackstraw leaned across and tapped me on the shoulder with something held in his hand. I reached up and took it from him.

‘Corazzini’s wallet,’ he said softly. For all the chance of his being overheard by either Smallwood or Corazzini above the roar of the engine and the voice of the gale, he could have shouted out the words. ‘Fell from his pocket when Zagero knocked him down. He didn’t see it go, but I did – sat on top of it while Smallwood told us to squat in the snow.’

I stripped off my gloves, opened the wallet and examined its contents in the light of the torch Jackstraw had also passed across – a torch with the beam carefully hooded and screened to prevent the slightest chink of light escaping from under the tarpaulin: at this time, Smallwood had not yet switched on the searchlight.

The wallet provided us with that last proof of the thoroughness, the meticulous care with which these two men had provided themselves with false but utterly convincing identities: I knew that whatever Corazzini’s name was it wasn’t the one he had given himself, but, had I not known, the ‘N.C.’ stamped on the hand-tooled morocco, the visiting cards with the inscribed ‘Nicholas Corazzini’ above the name and address of the Indiana head office of the Global Tractor Company, and the leather-backed fold of American Express cheques, each one already signed ‘N. R. Corazzini’ in its top left-hand corner, would have carried complete conviction.

And, too late, the wallet also presented us, obliquely but beyond all doubt, with the reason for many things, ranging from the purpose of the crash-landing of the plane to the explanation of why I had been knocked on the head the night before last: inside the bill-fold compartment was the newspaper cutting which I had first found on the dead body of Colonel Harrison. I read it aloud, slowly, with infinite chagrin.

The account was brief. That it concerned that dreadful disaster in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where a commuters’ train had plunged through an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay, drowning dozens of the passengers aboard, I already knew from the quick glance I had had at the cutting in the plane. But, as I had also gathered in the plane, this was a follow-up story and the reporter wasted little time on the appalling details: his interest lay in another direction entirely. It was ‘reliably reported’, he said, that the train had been carrying an army courier: that he was one of the forty who had died: and that he had been carrying a ‘super-secret guided missile mechanism’.

That was all the cutting said, but it was enough, and more than enough. It didn’t say whether the mechanism had been lost or not, it most certainly never even suggested that there was any connection between the presence of the mechanism aboard the train and the reasons for the crash. It didn’t have to, the cheek-by-jowl contiguity of the two items made the reader’s own horrifying conclusions inevitable. From the silence that stretched out after I had read out the last words, I knew that the others were lost in the same staggering speculations as myself. It was Jackstraw who finally broke this silence, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact.

‘Well, we know now why you were knocked on the head.’

‘Knocked on the head?’ Zagero took him up. ‘What do you—’

‘Night before last,’ I interrupted. ‘When I told you I’d walked into a lamp-post.’ I told them all about the finding of the cutting and its subsequent loss.

‘Would it have made all that difference even if you had read it?’ Zagero asked. ‘I mean—’

‘Of course it would!’ My voice was harsh, savage almost, but the savagery was directed against myself, my own stupidity. ‘The fact of finding a cutting about a fatal crash which occurred in strange unexplained circumstances on the person of a man who had just died in a fatal crash in equally strange and unexplained circumstances would have made even me suspicious. When I heard from Hillcrest that something highly secret was being carried aboard the plane, the parallel would have been even more glaringly obvious, especially as the cutting was found on the man -an army officer – who was almost certainly the courier, the carrier of this secret. Anything larger than a match-box in the luggage the passengers were carrying I’d have ripped open and examined, radio and tape-recorder included. Small-wood knew it. He didn’t know what was in the cutting, but he – or Corazzini – knew it was a cutting and they were taking no chances at all.’

‘You weren’t to know this,’ Levin said soothingly. ‘It’s not your fault—’

‘Of course it’s my fault,’ I said wearily. ‘All my fault. I don’t even know how to start apologising. You first, Zagero, I suppose, you and Solly Levin, for tying you—’

‘Forget it.’ Zagero was curt but friendly. ‘We’re just as bad – all of us. All the facts that mattered were as available to us as they were to you – and we made no better use of them: less, if anything.’ In the tiny glow from the torch I could see him shaking his head. ‘Lordy, lordy, but ain’t it easy to understand everything when it’s too late. Easy enough to understand now why we crashed in the middle of nowhere – the plane captain must have been in on it, he must have known that the mechanism was aboard and thought it important enough to put the passengers’ lives second and crash-land in the middle of the ice-plateau, where Smallwood could never reach the coast.’

‘Not knowing that I was there waiting to oblige Smallwood,’ I said bitterly. I shook my head in turn. ‘It’s obvious now, all too obvious. How Corazzini damaged his hand in the shack – not by saving or trying to save the radio but by accelerating its fall after he’d pushed the hinges in. How and why he lost the toss and had to sleep on the floor – to give him a chance to smother the second officer.’

‘What you might call a good loser,’ Zagero said grimly. Then he gave a short laugh. ‘Remember when we buried the second officer? I wonder what Smallwood’s burial service would have sounded like if we’d really been close enough to hear?’

‘I missed that,’ I nodded. ‘I missed the suggestion you made inside the plane that we should bury the murdered men – if you had been guilty you’d never have dared make that suggestion for then the way these men died would almost certainly have been discovered.’

‘You missed it,’ Zagero said feelingly. ‘How about me – I said it, and I never even thought of it till now.’ He snorted. ‘Boy, am I disgusted with myself. As far as I can see the only thing I knew that you didn’t was that Corazzini clouted our friend Smallwood back in the pass there simply in order to throw suspicion on me: but, then, I knew that even trying to tell you that would have been crazy’

There was a long moment’s silence, while we listened to the rise and fall of the Citroën’s exhaust note in the gusting, strengthening wind, then Solly Levin spoke.

‘The plane,’ he said. ‘The fire – how come?’

‘There was enough high-octane fuel in its tanks to take Hillcrest’s Sno-Cat a couple of thousand miles,’ I explained. ‘If Hillcrest’s tanks had been empty when he arrived back at base and if he’d found out right away that the spare fuel in the tunnel had been doctored – well, it wouldn’t have taken him long to siphon out the stuff in the plane. So, no plane.’

The silence this time was even longer, then Zagero cleared his throat, as if uncertain how to begin.

‘Seeing explanations are in the air – well, I guess it’s time we made one too.’ Zagero, to my astonishment, sounded almost embarrassed. ‘It’s about the phony conduct of that phony character to your left, Doc, one Solly Levin. We’d plenty of time to talk about it when we were lashed to this damned sledge all of last night and—’

‘Come to the point,’ I interrupted impatiently.

‘Sorry’ He leaned across to Solly Levin. ‘Want I should make a formal introduction, Pop?’

I stared at him in the darkness.

‘Did I hear—’

‘Sure you did, Doc’ He laughed softly. ‘Pop. The old man. The paternal parent. Says so on my birth certificate and everything.’ He was enjoying himself vastly. ‘Confirmation on the right here.’

‘It’s perfectly true, Dr Mason,’ Solly Levin smiled. The dreadful Bowery accent was quite gone, yielding place to a crisper, more decisive version of Zagero’s cultured drawl. ‘I’ll put it briefly. I’m the owner and managing director – or was till I retired a year ago – of a plastics factory in Trenton, New Jersey, near Princeton, where Johnny managed to acquire a splendid accent and very little else. It was not, I might add, Princeton’s fault; Johnny spent most of his time in the gymnasium, nursing his – ah – pugilistic ambitions, much to my annoyance as I wanted him to take over from me.’

‘Alas,’ Zagero put in, ‘I was almost as stubborn as he is himself.’

‘A great deal more so,’ his father said. ‘So I made him a proposition. I’d give him two years -it seemed enough, he was already amateur heavyweight champion – to prove himself, and at the end of that time if he hadn’t made it he was to take his place in the factory. His first manager was as corrupt as they come and Johnny literally kicked him out at the end of a year. So I took over. I’d newly retired, I’d time on my hands, I’d a very strong vested interest in his well-being apart from the fact that he was my son – and, quite frankly, I’d begun to see that he really was going to get to the very top.’ He broke off there – so I took the opportunity to interrupt.

‘Zagero or Levin. Which is it?’

‘Zagero,’ the elder man answered.

‘Why the Levin?’

‘Some state and national boxing commissions refuse to permit a close relative to be either manager or second. Especially second. So I used an alias. A practice by no means uncommon, and officially winked at. A harmless deception.’

‘Not so harmless,’ I said grimly. ‘It was one of the worst acting performances I’ve ever seen, and that was one of the primary reasons for my suspecting your son and, in turn, for Corazzini and Smallwood getting away with what they did. Had you come clean earlier on, I would have known that they were bound, even in the absence of all possible evidence, to be the guilty men. But with Solly Levin – I’ll find it very difficult to think of you as Mr Zagero, I’m afraid – with Solly Levin sticking out like a sore thumb as an obvious phony – well, I just couldn’t leave you two out of the list of suspects.’

‘I obviously modelled myself on the wrong person – or type of person,’ Levin said wryly. ‘Johnny ribbed me about it all the time. I’m deeply sorry for any trouble we may have caused, Dr Mason. I honestly never looked at it from your point of view, never realised the dangers involved in maintaining the impersonation – if you could call it that. Please forgive me.’

‘Nothing to forgive,’ I said bitterly. ‘A hundred to one I’d have found some other way of messing things up.’

Shortly after five o’clock in the evening Corazzini stopped the tractor – but he didn’t stop the engine. He came down from the driver’s seat and walked round to the cabin, pushing the searchlight slightly to one side. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar of the tractor and the high ululating whine of the still-strengthening blizzard.

‘Half-way, boss. Thirty-two miles on the clock.’

‘Thank you.’ We couldn’t see Smallwood, but we could see the tip of his gun barrel protruding menacingly into the searchlight’s beam. ‘The end of the line, Dr Mason. You and your friends will please get down.’

There was nothing else for it. Stiffly, numbly, I climbed down, took a couple of steps towards Smallwood, stopped as the pistol steadied unwaveringly on my chest.

‘You’ll be with your friends in a few hours,’ I told Smallwood. ‘You could leave us a little food, a portable stove and tent. Is that too much to ask?’

‘It is.’

‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’

‘You’re wasting your time, Dr Mason. And it grieves me to see you reduced to begging.’

‘The dog sledge, then. We don’t even want the dogs. But neither Mahler nor Miss LeGarde can walk.’

‘You’re wasting your time.’ He turned his attention to the sledge. ‘Everybody off, I said. Did you hear me, Levin? Get down!’

‘It’s my legs.’ In the harsh glare of the searchlight we could see the lines of pain deep-etched round Levin’s eyes and mouth, and I wondered how long he had been sitting there suffering, saying nothing. ‘I think they’re frozen or sleeping or something.’

‘Get down!’ Smallwood repeated sharply.

‘In a moment.’ Levin swung one of his legs over the edge of the sledge, his teeth bared with the effort. ‘I don’t seem to be able—’

‘Maybe a bullet in one of your legs will help,’ Smallwood said unemotionally. ‘To get the feeling back.’

I didn’t know whether he meant it or not. I didn’t think so – gratuitous violence wasn’t in character for this man, I couldn’t see him killing or wounding without sound reason. But Zagero thought differently. He advanced within six feet of Smallwood.

‘Don’t touch him, Smallwood,’ he said warningly.

‘No?’ The rising inflection was a challenge accepted, and Smallwood went on flatly: ‘I’d snuff you and him like a candle.’

‘No!’ Zagero said, softly and savagely, the words carrying clearly in a sudden lull in the wind. ‘Lay a finger on my old man, Smallwood, and I’ll get you and break your neck like a rotten carrot if you empty the entire magazine into me.’ I looked at him as he crouched there like a great cat, toes digging into the frozen snow, fists clenched and slightly in advance of him, ready for the explosive leap that would take him across that tiny space in a split second of time and I believed he could do exactly what he said. So, too, I suspected, did Smallwood.

‘Your old man?’ he inquired. ‘Your father?’

Zagero nodded.

‘Good.’ Smallwood showed no surprise. ‘Into the tractor cabin with him, Zagero. We’ll exchange him for the German girl. Nobody cares about her.’

His point was clear. I couldn’t see how we could offer any danger to Smallwood and Corazzini now, but Smallwood was a man who guarded even against impossibilities: Levin would be a far better surety for Zagero’s conduct than Helene.

Levin half-walked, was half-carried into the tractor cabin. With Corazzini and Smallwood both armed, resistance was hopeless: Smallwood had us summed up to a nicety. He knew we were desperate men, that we would fling ourselves on him and his gun in a moment of desperate emergency: but he also knew that we weren’t so desperate as to commit suicide when no lives were in immediate danger.

When Levin was inside, Smallwood turned to the young German girl seated opposite him in the cabin. ‘Out!’

It was then that it happened, with the stunning speed and inevitability that violent tragedy, viewed in retrospect, always seems to possess. I thought perhaps that it was some calculated plan, a last-minute desperate effort to save us that made Helene Fleming act as she did, but I found out later that she had merely been driven and goaded into a pain-filled unreasoning anger and resentment and despair by the agony she had suffered in her shoulder from having had her arms bound for so many long hours in the cruel jolting discomfort of the tractor cabin.

As she passed by Smallwood she stumbled, he put up an arm either to help her or ward her off, and before he had realised what was happening – it must have been the last quarter from which he expected any show of violence or resistance -she kicked out blindly and knocked the gun spinning out of his hand to land in the snow beneath. Smallwood sprang after it like a cat – the speed was unnecessary, the low growl of warning from an armed Corazzini put paid to any ideas we might have had of taking advantage of the situation -picked up the gun and whirled round, the gun lining up on Helene, his eyes narrowed to slits against the beam of the searchlight, his face twisted into an unrecognisable snarl, the lips drawn far back over the teeth. I’d been wrong once more about Smallwood – he could kill without reason.

‘Helene!’ Mrs Dansby-Gregg was the nearest to her, and her voice was high-pitched, almost a scream. ‘Look out, Helene!’ She plunged forward to push her maid to one side, but I don’t think Smallwood even saw her: he was mad with fury, I knew he was, and nothing on earth was going to stop him from pressing that trigger. The bullet caught Mrs Dansby-Gregg squarely in the back and pitched her headlong to fall face down in the frozen snow.

Already Smallwood’s moment of uncontrollable rage was spent as if it had never been. He said not another word, just nodded to Corazzini and jumped up on to the tail of the tractor cabin to keep us covered with searchlight and gun as Corazzini gunned the motor, engaged gear and lumbered off into the darkness to the west. We stood in a forlorn huddled little group and watched the train pass us by, the tractor, the tractor sled, the dog sledge and finally the huskies themselves, running on the loose traces astern.

I heard Helene murmur something to herself, and when I bent to listen she was saying in a strange, wondering voice: ‘Helene. She called me “Helene”.’ I stared at her as if she were mad, glanced down at the dead woman at my feet then gazed unseeingly after the receding lights of the Citroën until both the lights and the sound had faded and vanished into the snow-filled darkness of the night.

ELEVEN

Friday 6 p.m.–Saturday 12.15 p.m.

The white hell of that night, the agony of the bitter dreadful hours that followed – and God only knows how many hours these were – is a memory that will never die.

How many hours did we stagger and lurch after that tractor like drunk or dying men – six hours, eight, ten? We didn’t know, we shall never know. Time as an independent system of measurement ceased to exist: each second was an interminable unit of suffering, of freezing, of exhausted marching, each minute an æon where the fire in our aching leg muscles fought with the ice-cold misery of hands and feet and faces for domination in our minds, each hour an eternity which we knew could never end. Not one of us, I am sure, expected to live through that night.

The thoughts, the emotions of these hours I could never afterwards recall. Chagrin there was, the most bitter I have ever known, an overwhelming mortification and self-condemnation that I had all along been deceived with such childish ease, that I had been powerless to offer any hindrance or resistance to the endless resourcefulness of that brilliant little man. And then I would think of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, and of Margaret bound and hostage and afraid and looking at Smallwood in the dim light of that lurching tractor cabin, looking at Smallwood and the gun in Smallwood’s hand, and with that thought anger would flood in to supplant the chagrin, a consuming hatred and a fury that flamed throughout my entire being, but even that anger wasn’t all exclusive: it couldn’t be, not so long as fear, a fear such as I had never before known, was the dominating factor in my mind. And it was.

It was, too, I should think, in Zagero’s mind. He hadn’t spoken a word since Mrs Dansby-Gregg had died, had just flung himself uncaringly, ruthlessly, into what had to be done. Head bowed, he plodded on like an automaton. I wondered how many times he must have regretted that impetuous slip of the tongue when he had betrayed to Smallwood the fact that Solly Levin was his father.

And Jackstraw was as silent as we were, noncommittal, speaking only when he had to, keeping his thoughts strictly to himself. I wondered if he was blaming me for what had happened but I didn’t think so, Jackstraw’s mind just didn’t work that way. I could guess what he was thinking, I knew the explosive temper that slumbered under that placid exterior. Had we met an unarmed Smallwood and Corazzini then, I do not think we would have stopped short of killing him with our hands.

I suppose, too, that we were all three of us exhausted as we had never been before, frostbitten, bleeding, thirsty and steadily weakening from lack of food. I say ‘suppose’, because logic and reason tell me that these things must have been so. But if they were I do not think they touched the minds of any of us that night. We were no longer ourselves, we were outside ourselves. Our bodies were but machines to serve the demands of our minds, and our minds so consumed with anxiety and anger that there was no place left for any further thought.

We were following the tractor. We could, I suppose, have turned back in the hope of stumbling across Hillcrest and his men. I knew Hillcrest well enough to know that he would know that those who had taken over our tractor – he had no means of knowing who they were, for all he knew Zagero might have suddenly overpowered us – would never dare make for Uplavnik but would almost certainly head for the coast. The likelihood was that Hillcrest, too, would head for the Kangalak fjord – together with a small bay beside it, the Kangalak fjord was the only break, the only likely rendezvous in a hundred miles of cliff-bound coast – and he could go there arrow-straight: on board his Sno-Cat he had a test prototype of a new, compact and as yet unmarketed Arma gyroscope specially designed for land use which had proved to have such astonishing accuracy that navigation on the ice-cap, as a problem, had ceased to exist for him.

But, even should he be heading towards the coast, our chances of meeting him in that blizzard did not exist, and if we once passed them by we would have been lost for ever. Better by far to head for the coast, where some patrolling ship or plane might just possibly pick us up – if we ever got there. Besides, I knew that both Jackstraw and Zagero felt exactly as I did – under a pointless but overpowering compulsion to follow Smallwood and Corazzini until we dropped in our tracks.

And the truth was that we couldn’t have gone any other way even had we wished to. When Smallwood had dropped us off we had been fairly into the steadily deepening depression in the icecap that wound down to the Kangalak glacier and it was a perfect drainage channel for the katabatic wind that was pouring down off the plateau. Although powerful enough already when we had been abandoned, that wind was now blowing with the force of a full gale, and for the first time on the Greenland ice-plateau – although we were now, admittedly, down to a level of 1500 feet – I heard a wind where the deep ululating moaning was completely absent. It howled, instead, howled and shrieked like a hurricane in the upper works and rigging of a ship, and it carried with it a numbing bruising flying wall of snow and ice against which progress would have been utterly impossible. So we went the only way we could, with the lash of the storm ever on our bent and aching backs.

And ache our backs did. Only three people -Zagero, Jackstraw and myself – were able to carry anything more than their own weight: and we had among us three people completely unable to walk. Mahler was still unconscious, still in coma, but I didn’t think we would have him with us very much longer: Zagero carried him for hour after endless hour through that white nightmare and for his self-sacrifice he paid the cruellest price of all for when, some hours later, I examined the frozen, useless appendages that had once been his hands, I knew that Johnny Zagero would never step into a boxing ring again. Marie LeGarde had lost consciousness too, and as I staggered along with her in my arms I felt it to be no more than a wasted token gesture: without shelter, and shelter soon, she would never see this night out. Helene, too, had collapsed within an hour of the tractor’s disappearance, her slender strength had just given out, and Jackstraw had her over his shoulder. How all three of us, exhausted, starved, numbed almost to death as we were, managed to carry them for so long, even though with so many halts, is beyond my understanding: but Zagero had his strength, Jackstraw his superb fitness and I still the sense of responsibility that carried me on long hours after my legs and arms had given out.

Behind us Senator Brewster blundered along in a blind world all of his own, stumbling often, falling occasionally but always pushing himself up and staggering gamely on. And in those few hours Hoffman Brewster, for me, ceased to be a senator and became again my earliest conception of the old Dixie Colonel, not the proud, rather overbearing aristocrat but the embodiment of a bygone southern chivalry, when courtesy and a splendid gallantry in the greatest perils and hardships were so routine as to excite no comment. Time and time again during that bitter night he insisted, forcibly insisted, on relieving one of the three of us of our burdens and would stagger along under the load until he reached the point of collapse. Despite his age, he was a powerful man: but he had no longer the heart and the lungs and the circulation to match his muscles, and his distress, as the night wore on, became pitiful to see. The bloodshot eyes were almost closed in exhaustion, his face deep-etched in grey suffering and his breath coming in painful whooping gasps that reached me clearly even above the thin high shriek of the wind.

No doubt but that Smallwood and Corazzini had left us to die, but they had made one mistake: they had forgotten Balto. Balto, as always, had been running loose when they had left us, and they had either failed to see him or forgotten all about him. But Balto hadn’t forgotten us, he must have known something was far wrong, for all the hours we had been prisoners on the tractor sled he had never come within a quarter-mile of us. But as soon as the tractor had dumped and left us, he had come loping in out of the driving snow and settled to the task of leading us down towards the glacier. At least, we hoped he was doing that. Jackstraw declared that he was following the crimp marks of the Citroën’s caterpillars, now deep buried under the flying drift and new-fallen snow. Zagero wasn’t so sure. Once, twice, a dozen times that night, I heard him muttering the same words: ‘I hope to hell that hound knows where it’s goin’.’

But Balto knew where he was going. Sometime during the night – it might have been any time between midnight and three o’clock in the morning – he stopped suddenly, stretched out his neck and gave his long eerie wolf call. He seemed to listen for an answer, and if he heard anything it was beyond our range: but he seemed satisfied, for he suddenly changed direction and angled off to the left into the blizzard. At Jackstraw’s nod, we followed.

Three minutes later we came upon the dog-sledge, with two of the dogs curled up beside it, their backs to the wind, their muzzles to their bellies and long brushes of tails over their faces, the drift wailing high around them. They were comfortable enough – so splendid an insulation does a husky’s thick coat provide that snow at forty degrees below zero will lie on its back indefinitely without being melted by body heat but they preferred freedom to comfort, for they were on their feet and vanished into the swirling whiteness beyond before we could lay hands on them. That left only the sledge.

I suppose that after Smallwood had gone far enough to consider that we would never be able to reach that point, he had cut loose dogs and dog-sledge as a needless encumbrance – but not before he had severed all the traces attaching the dogs to the sledge and, I noticed grimly, removed all the wraps and the magnetic compass that had been there. He thought of everything. For a moment, admiration for the man’s undoubtedly remarkable qualities came in to supplant what had become the motivating reason for my existence, a reason that, as the hours crawled by, were crowding out even the feelings I had for Margaret Ross: my hatred for Smallwood burned like a cold steady flame, an obsession with the idea of sinking my fingers into that scrawny throat and never letting go.

Within three minutes of finding the sledge we had tied together the severed remnants of the traces, changed them to the front and were on our way again, Marie LeGarde, Mahler and Helene propped up on the thin wooden slats. We had, of course, to pull the sledge ourselves, but that was nothing: for Jackstraw, Zagero and myself, the relief was beyond measure. But it was only momentary.

We were running on to the smooth, slick ice of the Kangalak glacier, but our progress was no faster than it had been before we found the sledge. The wind was climbing up to its maximum now, the blizzard shrieking along horizontally to the ground and coming in great smoking flurries that cut visibility to zero and made us stop and grab one another lest one of us be knocked flying and for ever lost to sight: several times Theodore Mahler, restless in unconsciousness, rolled off the sledge until I at last made Brewster sit at the back and watch. He protested violently, but he was glad to do as I said.

I don’t remember much after that, I think I must have been unconscious, eyes shut, but still plodding along in my sleep on leaden, frozen feet. My first conscious memory after installing Brewster on the back of the sledge was of someone shaking me urgently by the shoulder. It was Jackstraw.

‘No more!’ he shouted in my ear. ‘We must stop, Dr Mason, wait till it’s blown itself out. We can’t live through this.’

I said something that was unintelligible even to myself, but Jackstraw took it for agreement and began pulling the sledge into the sloping side of the glacier valley and to the leeward side of one of the snowdrifts piled up against some of the ridges on the side of the valley. It wasn’t all that much of an improvement, but the wind and the effect of the blizzard were perceptibly less. We unloaded the three sick people on the sledge into what pitiful shelter the ridge offered: I was just about to let my knees buckle and collapse beside them when I realised that someone was missing: it was a fair indication of the toll taken by wind and cold and exhaustion that almost twenty seconds passed before I realised it was Brewster.

‘Good God!’ I cried in Jackstraw’s ear. ‘The Senator – we’ve lost him! I’ll go back and look. I won’t be a minute.’

‘Stay here.’ The grip on my arm was promise enough that Jackstraw meant to detain me by force, if necessary. ‘You’d never come back. Balto! Balto!’ He shouted a few Eskimo words which meant nothing to me, but the big Siberian seemed to understand, for he was gone in a moment, following the direction of Jackstraw’s pointing hand. He was back again inside two minutes.

‘He’s found him?’ I asked Jackstraw.

Jackstraw nodded silently.

‘Let’s bring him in.’

Balto led us there, but we didn’t bring him in. Instead we left him lying where we found him, face down in the snow, dead. The blizzard was already drawing its concealing shroud over him, in an hour he would be no more than a featureless white mound in a featureless white valley. My hands were too numb to examine him, but I wouldn’t have bothered anyway: the half-century of self-indulgence in food and drink and temper, all of which had been so clearly reflected in the heavy florid face when first I’d seen him, had had their inevitable way. The heart, cerebral thrombosis, it didn’t matter now. But he had been a man.

How long we lay there, the six of us and Balto huddled close together for warmth, unconscious or dozing while that hurricane of a blizzard reached then passed its howling crescendo, I never knew. Probably only half an hour, perhaps not even that. When I awoke, stiff and numbed, I reached for Jackstraw’s torch. It was exactly four o’clock in the morning.

I looked at the others. Jackstraw was wide awake – I was pretty sure he’d never shut an eye lest one of us slip away from sleep into that easy frozen sleep from which there would have been no wakening – and Zagero was stirring. That they – and I – would survive, I didn’t doubt. Helene was a question mark. A seventeen-year-old, though short on endurance, was usually high on resilience and recuperative powers, but Helene’s seemed to have deserted her. After the death of her mistress and up to the time she had collapsed she had become strangely withdrawn and unresponsive, and I guessed that the death of Mrs Dansby-Gregg had hit her far more than any of us would have guessed. The previous forty-eight hours apart, it seemed to me that she had had little enough to thank Mrs Dansby-Gregg for in the way of affection and warmth: but, then, she was young, Mrs Dansby-Gregg had been the person she had known best and, as a foreigner, she must have regarded Mrs Dansby-Gregg as her sole anchor in an alien sea … I asked Jackstraw if he would massage her hands, then turned to have a look at Mahler and Marie LeGarde.

‘They don’t look so hot to me.’ Zagero, too, was studying them. ‘What’s their chances, Doc?’

‘I just don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘I don’t know at all.’

‘Don’t take it to heart, Doc. It’s no fault of yours.’ Zagero waved a hand towards the snow-filled emptiness and desolation of the glacier. ‘Your dispensary ain’t all that well stocked.’

‘No.’ I smiled faintly, then nodded at Mahler. ‘Bend down and listen to his breathing. The end’s coming pretty close. Ordinarily I’d say a couple of hours. With Mahler I don’t know – he’s got the will to live, sheer guts, his beliefs – the lot … But in twelve hours he’ll be dead.’

‘And how long do you give me, Dr Mason?’

I twisted round and gazed down at Marie LeGarde. Her voice was no more than a weak, husky whisper: she was trying to smile, but the smile was a pitiful grimace and there was no humour in either the eyes or the voice.

‘Good lord, you’ve come to!’ I reached out, pulled off her gloves and started to massage the frozen wasted hands. ‘This is wonderful. How do you feel, Miss LeGarde?’

‘How do you think I feel?’ she said with a flash of her old spirit. ‘Don’t try to put me off, Peter. How long?’

‘About another thousand curtain calls at the old Adelphi.’ The light came from the torch that had been thrust, butt down, into the snow, and I bent forward so that my face was shadowed, my expression unreadable. ‘Seriously, the fact that you’ve recovered consciousness is a good sign.’

‘I once played a queen who recovered consciousness only to speak a few dramatic words before she died. Only, I can’t think of any dramatic words.’ I had to strain to catch the feeble whispered words. ‘You’re a shocking liar, Peter. Is there any hope for us at all?’

‘Certainly,’ I lied. Anything to get away from that topic. ‘We’ll be on the coast, with a good chance of being picked up by ship or plane, tomorrow afternoon – this afternoon, rather. It can’t be more than twenty miles from here.’

‘Twenty miles!’ Zagero interjected. ‘In this little lot?’

He raised a cupped hand significantly to his ear, a gesture superbly superfluous in the ululating shriek of the blizzard.

‘It won’t last, Mr Zagero,’ Jackstraw put in. ‘These williwaws always blow themselves out in a short time. This already has gone on longer than most and it’s easing a lot. Tomorrow will be clear and calm and cold.’

‘The cold will be a change,’ Zagero said feelingly. He looked past me. ‘The old lady’s off again, Doc’

‘Yes.’ I stopped massaging her hands and slid the gloves on. ‘Let’s have a look at these paws of yours, Mr Zagero, will you?’

‘“Johnny” to you, Doc. I’ve been dismissed without a stain on my character, remember?’ He thrust his big hands out for inspection. ‘Pretty, aren’t they?’

They weren’t pretty, they were the worst case of frostbite I had ever seen, and I had seen all too many, in Korea and later. They were white and yellow and dead. The original skin had vanished under a mass of blisters, and from the few warm spots I could detect on either hand I knew that much of the tissue had been permanently destroyed.

“Fraid I was a mite careless with my gloves,’ Zagero said apologetically. ‘In fact, I lost the damn’ things about five miles back. Didn’t notice it at the time – hands were too cold, I reckon.’

‘Feel anything in them now?’

‘Here and there.’ He nodded as I touched some spots where the blood still flowed, and went on conversationally: ‘Am I goin’ to lose my hands, Doc? Amputation, I mean?’

‘No.’ I shook my head definitely. I saw no point in mentioning that some of his fingers were beyond hope.

‘Will I ever fight again?’ Still the same casual, careless tone.

‘It’s difficult to say. You never know—’

‘Will I ever fight again?’

‘You’ll never fight again.’

There was a long pause, then he said quietly: ‘You’re sure, Doc? You’re absolutely sure?’

‘I’m absolutely sure, Johnny. No boxing commission doctor in the world would ever let you climb into a ring. It would cost him his listing in the Medical Register.’

‘Okay, so that’s how it is. Consolidated Plastics of Trenton, New Jersey, have just got themselves a new factory hand: this boxin’ racket was too damn’ strenuous anyway.’ There was no regret in his voice, no resignation even, but that meant nothing: like me, he had more important things to worry about. He looked away into the darkness, then twisted round: ‘What’s the matter with that hound of yours, Jackstraw?’

‘I don’t know. I think I’d better find out.’ Twice while we had been talking Balto had left us, vanished into the snow, and returned after a few minutes: he seemed restless, uneasy. ‘I won’t be long.’

He rose, followed Balto into the darkness, returned in a short time: ‘Come and see this, Dr Mason.’

‘This’ was a spot less than a hundred yards away, close into the side of the glacier valley. Jackstraw flashed his torch on to the snow-dusted ice. I stooped, made out a black circular patch on the ground and, a few feet away, a smaller discoloured area where the surface snow had frozen solid.

‘Oil from the gearcase or sump, water from the radiator,’ Jackstraw said briefly. He altered the torch-beam. ‘And you can still see the crimp marks of the caterpillars.’

‘And very recent?’ I suggested. The drifting snow, the scouring effect of the flying ice-particles had scarcely begun to obliterate the traces left by the treads.

‘I think so. And they were stopped here a long time, Dr Mason – look at the size of that oil patch.’

‘Mechanical trouble?’ I hazarded. I didn’t really believe it myself.

‘Riding out the storm – Corazzini must have been blind,’ Jackstraw said definitely. ‘If the engine had stopped on that pair, they’d never have got it started again.’

I knew he was right. Neither Smallwood nor Corazzini had shown any mechanical ability at all, and I was convinced that it had been no act.

‘Perhaps they were still here when we arrived back there? My God, if we’d only carried on another hundred yards!’

‘Spilt milk, as you say, Dr Mason. Yes, I’m sure they were here then.’

‘We wouldn’t have heard their engine?’

‘Not in this wind.’

‘Jackstraw!’ A sudden thought, a flash of hope. ‘Jackstraw, did you sleep back there?’

‘No.’

‘How long were we stopped?’

‘Half an hour, maybe less.’

‘And you think they were still here – Good God, man, they can’t be more than a mile away. The wind’s dropping right away, it’s getting colder and we’ll only freeze to death if we stay here, maybe there’ll be crevasses on the glacier to hold them up—’

I was already on my way, running, slipping, stumbling, Jackstraw by my side, Balto leading the way. Zagero was standing up, waiting – and the young German girl by his side.

‘Helene!’ I caught her hands. ‘You all right? How are you feeling?’

‘Better, much better.’ She didn’t sound all that much better. ‘I’m sorry I was so silly, Dr Mason. I don’t know—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I cut in, rather brusquely. ‘You can walk? Fine, fine.’ I could feel new hope surging through me as I rapped out a brief explanation to Zagero, within a minute we had Mahler and Marie LeGarde bundled aboard the sledge and were on our way.

But the hope was short-lived. We made the best speed we could, at times breaking into a kind of staggering run, but the sledge slowed us up terribly on that uneven surface of the glacier. Once it overturned, throwing both Mahler and Marie LeGarde heavily on to the snow, and after that we were forced to slow down. Another such violent capsizing, or even too severe a jolting, and that sledge would become a bier. From time to time Jackstraw flashed his failing torch on the crimp marks we were following, and even to my inexperienced eye it was obvious that the tracks in the snow were becoming progressively fainter every time we looked at them until the time came at last when I knew we must call a halt to this pursuit, admit defeat: we had fallen so far behind now, three or four miles I was certain, that the hope and chance of overtaking them no longer existed: we were only chasing a hopeless dream, and killing ourselves doing it.

Jackstraw and Zagero agreed. We put Helene aboard the sledge to steady the two sick people, took a trace apiece over our shoulders and plodded on slowly down the glacier, backs bent, heads bowed, each one of us lost in his own hopeless thoughts.

As Jackstraw had prophesied, the storm had blown itself out. Completely. The wind had gone so that not a breath stirred across the glacier. The snow had vanished, with the dark and heavy clouds that had carried it: the white stars stood high in a dark and frozen sky. It was cold, with a temperature well below zero, but cold was an old friend now. By eight o’clock that morning, some three hours and six miles after we had left our resting place, the conditions for travel were perfect.

The weather conditions, that was – underfoot, they varied from the indifferent to the abominable. We were now fairly into the Kangalak glacier and the going was often difficult indeed. A glacier is seldom a smooth river of ice that flows evenly down-hill, but much more frequently an irregularly surfaced fissured and crevassed mass descending as often as not in a series of rounded steps and ledges like a sea of petrified lava. The Kangalak was no exception. Here and there we found some straight stretches, but, for the most part, progress was possible only at the sides where the rate of flow was less and the ice smoother. It was the left-hand side that we were following, but even so it was heavy work, for our path was frequently blocked by the debris of ground moraines that had been forced out on the sides, and when these were absent we were as often as not floundering through the thick drifts that the great wind of the night just gone had piled up high against the sides. The one consolation I found was that if it were difficult for us, it was proving doubly so for the tractor whose irregularly weaving twisting crimp marks we were so doggedly following.

I wondered how far away Hillcrest and the Sno-Cat were. I was as certain as I could be of anything that he would have headed due west as soon as he would have emerged from the Vindeby Nunataks, and he’d had time and to spare to make the coast by this time – not even the blizzard of last night could have stopped the Sno-Cat, the engine was a completely enclosed unit, its great caterpillars would take it over the loosest, the most newly fallen snow. But even had he backed his hunches and headed for the coast, as I hoped, he might still be anything up to twenty miles to the north or south of us, or he might be not only north or south but fifteen miles ahead of us – we had no maps left but I was fairly certain we were about that distance from the coast. Or was it possible that Hillcrest, a shrewd and thoughtful man, might have thought the gambit of a break for the coast too obvious a move? Could it not be that he might have indeed pressed on for Uplavnik, or even turned due north after he had come through the hills? Or, if he were coming west, would he not perhaps be driving in a search pattern, quartering the ground between the Vindeby Nunataks and the coast in a series of wide advancing zigzags? If that were so, he might still be anything up to thirty miles behind. It was infuriating beyond measure to know that he was almost certainly within two or three hours’ driving time from where we were, but without a wireless or any other means of contacting him he might as well have been a thousand miles away for any hope there was of two tiny moving objects encountering each other by chance in that vast and featureless land.

Soon after eight o’clock in the morning I stopped to have a look at the two sick people on the sledge, professional instinct, I suppose, but an empty token gesture: there was nothing we could do for them, except give massage at frequent intervals. The sound of Mahler’s dyspnoea, his whooping gasping breathing, was the tolling of a death-bell to our ears, and this effort to breathe was extinguishing the last embers of life in his emaciated and frozen body. In three hours’ time, by noon at the latest, Mahler would be dead. Nothing could ever save him now, it was madness, an utterly wasted effort to continue to drag him along on a sledge: he was past caring or knowing or feeling now, he could die just as peacefully if we left him lying on the glacier. Or so I have thought since then. But Mahler was more than a man to us that day, he was a symbol: we would leave Mahler when he had drawn his last gasping breath, but never before.

Marie LeGarde was dying too, but quietly, softly, peacefully, like a little candle flame flickering to extinction. Maybe she would go first, maybe Mahler. But both of them would die this day.

The going was becoming increasingly difficult now, not so much because of the gradually steepening slope of the glacier which made the sledge overrun us more and more frequently, but because of the fact that Jackstraw’s torch had all but completely given out, and the fissures and crevasses that, earlier, had merely been nuisances to be negotiated, now became menaces to be avoided at the cost of our lives. It was now that Balto proved of his greatest value yet: as Jackstraw had said on our first day out from the IGY cabin, the big Siberian had an uncanny nose for crevasses, both open and hidden, in daytime or dark, and he made never a mistake that morning, constantly running ahead and then back towards us to guide us in the safest direction. Even so, progress was heartbreakingly slow.

Shortly after half-past eight in the morning we came across the tractor sled lying at an angle against a moraine. Even in the near darkness it was plain to see what had happened. The steepness of the glacier, not to mention sudden unaccountable dips to left and right across its width, must have made the heavy sled a dangerous liability, for, from its tracks, we had several times seen where it had slewed wildly at an angle, pivoting round on its iron tow-bar as, brakeless, it had sought to overrun the tractor. Obviously, Smallwood and Corazzini must have feared – and with reason -that on one of these occasions it would pull round the tail of the tractor after it and topple the tractor on its side, or, worse, drag it into a crevasse: so they had unhooked the tow-bar and left the sled.

It was surprising that they hadn’t done this earlier: apart from carrying their fuel and food, which reserves could easily have gone into the tractor cabin itself, it had been a useless encumbrance to them. As far as I could judge they had abandoned it with all its contents – apart, of course, from the portable radio – including the wraps we had given Zagero and Levin when they had ridden on it at the point of a gun. We took these, tucked them round Mahler and Marie LeGarde and passed on.

Three hundred yards later I stopped so abruptly that the sledge, bumping into me, made me lose my footing on the slippery ice. I stood up, laughing softly, laughing for the first time for days, and Zagero came up close and peered into my face.

‘What gives, Doc?’

I laughed again and was just on the point of speaking when his hand struck me sharply across the face.

‘Cut it out, Doc’ His voice was harsh. ‘That ain’t goin’ to help us any’

‘On the contrary, it’s going to help us a very great deal.’ I rubbed a hand across my cheek, I couldn’t blame him for what he had done. ‘My God, and I almost missed it!’

‘Missed what?’ He still wasn’t sure that I wasn’t hysterical.

‘Come on back to the tractor sled and see. Smallwood claims he thinks of everything, but he’s missed out at last. He’s made his first big mistake, but oh, brother, what a mistake! And the weather’s just perfect for it!’ I turned on my heel and actually ran up the glacier towards the sled.

Many items were carried as standard equipment in IGY parties, both in the field and at base camps, and none more standard than the magnesium flares which first came into common use in the Antarctic over a quarter of a century ago – they are indispensable as location beacons in the long polar nights – and radio-sondes. We carried more radio-sondes than any other item of equipment, for our primary purpose on the ice-cap – the garnering of information about density pressure, temperature, humidity and wind direction of the upper atmosphere – was impossible without them. These sondes, still crated with the tents, ropes, axes and shovels which we had found no occasion to use on this trip, were radio-carrying balloons which wirelessed back information from heights of between 100,000 and 150,000 feet. We also carried rockoons, radio rockets fired from balloons which took them clear of the denser parts of the atmosphere before releasing them. But right then rockoons were useless to me. So, too, were balloons at their normal operating height: 5000 feet should serve our purpose admirably.

The dim glow from the torch was more than sufficient, Jackstraw and I had worked with these things a hundred times. To couple the balloon to the hydrogen cylinder, disconnect the radio and substitute a group of three magnesium flares fused with RDX took only minutes. We lit the fuse, cut the holding cord and had a second balloon coupled on to the cylinder before the first was 500 feet up. Then, just as we had the third on the cylinder and were disconnecting its radio, the first flare, now at about a height of 4000 feet, burst into scintillating brilliant life.

It was all I could have wished for, indeed it was more than I’d ever hoped for, and Zagero’s heavy thump on my back showed how joyfully he shared my feelings.

‘Dr Mason,’ he said solemnly, ‘I take it all back, all I ever said about you. This, Dr Mason, is genius.’

‘It’s not bad,’ I admitted, and indeed if anyone, in those perfect conditions of visibility, couldn’t see the coruscating dazzlement of those flares at any distance up to thirty miles, he would have to be blind. If they were looking in the right direction, that was, but I was sure that with Hillcrest carrying five men and everybody almost certainly on the lookout for us, the chances of missing it were remote.

The second flare, considerably higher, burst into life just as the first went sputtering into extinction and the further thought struck me that if there were any ships patrolling out in the sea beyond, it would give them a bearing the significance of which none of them could surely overlook. And then I saw Jackstraw and Zagero looking at me and though I couldn’t read their expressions in the darkness I knew from their stillness what they were both thinking and suddenly I didn’t feel so happy any more. The odds were high that Corazzini and Smallwood – they could be no more than a few miles distant – had seen the flares also. They would know what it signified, they would know it was the first tug on the drawstring of the net that might even then be starting to close round them. In addition to being dangerous, ruthless killers, they would become frightened killers; and they had Margaret and Johnny Zagero’s father with them. But I knew I’d had no option, tried to thrust all thought of the hostages from my mind, turned to look at the third balloon that we had just released, then winced and closed my eyes involuntarily as the third flare, through some flaw or misjudgment in the length of the fuse, ignited not more than five hundred feet above us, the blue-white intensity mingling almost immediately with a bright orange flame as the balloon also caught fire and both started drifting slowly earthwards.

And so intently was I watching this through narrowed eyes that I all but missed something vastly more important, but Jackstraw didn’t. He never missed anything. I felt his hand on my arm, turned to see the strong white teeth gleaming in the widest grin I had seen for weeks, then half-turned again to follow the direction of his pointing arm just in time to see low on the horizon in the south-east and not more than five miles away the earthward curving red and white flare of a signal rocket.

Our feelings were impossible to describe – I know, at least, that mine were. I had never seen anything half so wonderful in all my life, not even the sight, twenty minutes later, of the powerful wavering headlight beams of the Sno-Cat as it appeared over a rise in the plateau and headed towards the spot – we had scrambled up from the glacier to the flat land above – where we had just ignited the last of our flares and were waving it round and round our heads on the end of a long metal pole, like men demented. It seemed an age, although I don’t suppose it was much more than ten minutes, before the great red and yellow Sno-Cat ground to a halt beside us and willing arms reached down to help us into the incredible warmth and comfort of that superbly equipped and insulated cabin.

Hillcrest was a great bull of a man, red-faced, black-bearded, jovial, confident, with a tremendous zest for living, a deceptive external appearance that concealed a first-class brain and a competence of a very high order indeed. It did me good just to sit there, glass of brandy in hand, relaxed – if only for a moment – for the first time in five days and just to look at him. I could tell that it hadn’t done him the same good to look at us – in the bright overhead light I could clearly see our yellowed, blistered, emaciated faces, the bleeding, black-nailed, suppurating all but useless hands, and I was shocked myself – but he concealed it well, and busied himself with handing out restoratives, tucking away Mahler and Marie LeGarde in two deep, heat-pad-filled bunks, and supervising the efforts of the cook who had a steaming hot meal ready prepared. All this he had done before he had as much as asked us a question.

‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘First things first. Where’s the Citroen? I presume the missile mechanism is still aboard it. Brother, you just don’t begin to have any idea how many heart attacks this thing is causing.’

‘That’s not the first thing,’ I said quietly. I nodded to Theodore Mahler, whose hoarse gasping breath filled the room. ‘This man is dying.’

‘All under control,’ he boomed. He jerked a thumb at Joss who, after the first delighted greeting, had returned to his radio set in the corner. ‘The boy here hasn’t left his set for over twenty-four hours – ever since we got your “Mayday” call.’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘You took a chance there. I wonder you didn’t stop a bullet for your pains.’

‘I just about did … We were talking about Mahler.’

‘Yes. We’ve been in constant contact, same wave-length, with two ships in that time – the destroyer Wykenham and the carrier Triton. I had a fair idea your friends must be heading in this direction, so the Wykenham has been moving up overnight and is lying off the coast. But the leads and patches in the ice aren’t big enough for the Triton to manoeuvre to fly off planes. She’s about eighty miles south, in clear water.’

‘Eighty miles!’ I didn’t bother to conceal my shock and my disappointment, I’d begun to have a faint irrational hope that we might yet save the dying man. ‘Eighty miles!’

‘I have news for you, Doctor,’ Hillcrest announced jovially. ‘We have moved into the air age.’ He turned towards Joss and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

‘A Scimitar jet fighter is just taking off.’ Joss tried to speak unemotionally, but failed. ‘It’s airborne – now. Time-check 0933. We’re to fire our first rocket at 0946 – thirteen minutes from now. Then two more at intervals of thirty seconds. At 0948 we’re to set off a slow-burning magnesium flare where we want the stuff dropped, at least two hundred yards from the tractor.’ Joss listened for another few moments and grinned. ‘He says we’re to get the hell out of it after we’ve lit the flare or we’re liable to collect a headache or worse.’

I didn’t know what to say, where to look, moments like this came all too seldom. Not until that moment did I realise how much of a symbol Theodore Mahler had become, how much his survival had meant for me. Hillcrest must have had some intuitive understanding of how I felt, for he spoke at once, his voice normal, matter of fact.

‘Service, old boy. Sorry we couldn’t have laid it on earlier, but the Triton refused to risk an expensive plane and an even more expensive pilot flying low over virtually uncharted territory unless they definitely knew that Mahler was alive.’

‘They’ve done all anyone could ask.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘These planes don’t usually carry ammunition in peace-time, do they?’

‘Don’t worry’ Hillcrest said grimly. He ladled some steaming stew on to our plates. ‘Nobody’s playing any more. There’s been a flight of Scimitars standing by since midnight, and every cannon’s loaded … Right, Doctor. Give with the story.’

I gave, as briefly and concisely as possible. At the end, he clapped his hands together.

‘Maybe five miles ahead, eh? Then it’s tallyho down the old glacier and after ‘em.’ He rubbed his hands in anticipation. ‘We’re three times as fast and we’ve three times as many rifles. This is the way any decent IGY expedition should be run!’

I smiled faintly, a token response to his bubbling enthusiasm. I never felt less like smiling: now that the worry of Mahler – and in that warmth and with hot food, almost certainly also the worry of Marie LeGarde – was off my hands, my anxiety about Margaret had returned with redoubled force.

‘We’re not tallyho-ing down any old glacier, Captain Hillcrest. Apart from the fact that it’s a rotten surface, which would bring your speed down to about the same as the Citroën’s, open pursuit is a pretty sure way of guaranteeing that Margaret Ross and Mr Levin get a bullet through their heads. Incidentally, Mr Levin is the father of Mr Zagero.’

‘What?’ Both Hillcrest and Joss had spoken at the same time.

‘Yes. But later. Have you a map of the area?’

‘Sure.’ Hillcrest handed it over. Like most Greenland maps it showed topographical detail for no more than the first twenty miles inland, but it was sufficient for my purpose. It showed the twisting Kangalak glacier debouching into the Kangalak Fjord, the wide deep bay beyond the southern headland of the fjord, the northern headland continuing in a wide shallow smooth curve for many miles to the north.

“Where did you say the destroyer was?’ I asked.

‘The Wykenham? I’m not sure.’

‘Blocking the Kangalak Fjord here, perhaps?’ I indicated the spot on the map.

‘No, that I’m certain of.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘Captain said the pack-ice was too heavy, he couldn’t risk his destroyer in any of the leads in case they closed.’ Hillcrest snorted in disgust. ‘I gather its hull is made of paper.’

‘It’s not much thicker – I’ve served in destroyers. I don’t blame him. But I’ll bet his trawler, probably a specially strengthened job, is well inside the fjord – and a submarine no great distance away. Look, this is all we can do.’ I traced my finger on the map. ‘We must parallel the glacier, maybe a mile away. With the slope of the valley sides Smallwood won’t see us, and with his own engine running he can’t hear us. Down here—’

‘What’s to stop him from cutting his engine now and again to listen?’ Hillcrest demanded.

‘Because what Smallwood and Corazzini don’t know about engines would fill an encyclopedia. They’d be dead scared to stop it in case they couldn’t start it again … Down here, at the base of the headland separating the fjord from the bay to the south – about a mile from the end of the glacier, I would say – the sides of the glacier valley fall away and level off into the plateau on either side. But there’s bound to be some kind of moraine or shelter there. That’s where we’ll ambush them.’

‘Ambush?’ He frowned at me. ‘What’s the difference between that and pursuing them? It’ll still come to a fight – and they can still hold pistols to the heads of Levin and the stewardess, and bargain from there.’

‘There’ll be no fight,’ I said quietly. ‘They’ve been following the left-hand side of the glacier all the way down, I see no reason why they should change. They should come into sight maybe fifty yards from where we’re hiding -farther out on the glacier the going is impossible for tractors.’ I nodded at the telescopic sighted .303 in the corner. ‘With that Jackstraw can hit a three-inch target at a hundred yards. A man’s head at fifty yards is six times that size. First he gets Corazzini, who’s probably driving, and when Smallwood sticks his head out the back as he certainly will – well that’s it.’

‘But, good God, man, you can’t do that!’ Hillcrest was horrified. ‘Without a chance, without warning? It’s murder, simple murder!’

‘Want me to go over the number of people they’ve murdered?’ I shook my head. ‘You just don’t begin to know those two, Hillcrest.’

‘But—’ He broke off, turned to Jackstraw. ‘It’s you he’s asking to do it. What do you say?’

‘It will be a pleasure,’ Jackstraw said very softly.

Hillcrest stared at us both, baffled incomprehension in his eyes. I suppose he thought he knew both of us well. And he did. But he didn’t know what we had been through, words couldn’t even begin to make him understand. The atmosphere was uncomfortable, tense even, and I was grateful for Joss’s sudden calm words.

‘0943, Captain Hillcrest. Three minutes to go.’

‘Good.’ He was, I could see, as glad of the interruption as I was. ‘Barclay’ – this to the cook, the only other of Hillcrest’s men there, the other three were in the big driving cabin to make room for us – ‘three Wessex rockets. Line them up on the stand and wait for the word. I’ll go myself with the flare, two for safety. Give a beep on the horn, Joss, when it’s time to set ‘em off.’

I went with him to watch and the whole thing went off without a hitch. Dead on time, just seconds after the third rocket had been fired to curve upwards and explode into incandescent light in the star-dusted darkness above, we heard the high-pitched whine approaching out of the south-west, and in an incredibly short space of time a vague dark blur, carrying no navigation lights, screamed by five hundred feet overhead, banked in the distance, came at us again at much reduced speed, banked a second time and then, with a crescendoing banshee shriek of the jet engine, had vanished again into the vaguely lightening darkness to the south-east before we had realised that the pilot had made his drop. It was a measure of his complete self-confidence that he didn’t even trouble to check the accuracy of his drop: but for a man skilled in landing on the handkerchief-sized flight deck of a carrier in the middle of the night this must have been a childishly simple exercise.

There were two packages, not one, attached not to parachutes but to insignificant little drogues that seemed to let them fall much too fast for safety: they landed almost together not forty yards from the magnesium flares and with such force that I was sure that their contents must be smashed. But I had underestimated the Fleet Air Arm’s skill and experience in these matters, the contents were so beautifully packed and cushioned that everything was completely intact. The packages were duplicated: two ampoules of insulin and three hypodermic syringes in each package: whoever had packed these had been taking no chances. But gratitude was the last thought in my mind at that moment: I just tucked the boxes under my arm and made for the tractor at a dead run.

For close on two hours Hillcrest’s driver pushed the big Sno-Cat along at its maximum speed, and despite the inherent stability afforded by its four wide caterpillars, the tractor swayed and lurched in terrifying fashion. This was bad country, this was crevasse country, and we had been forced to make a wide detour that had carried us more than three miles away from the Kangalak glacier. And once again Jackstraw’s big Siberian wolf proved how invaluable he was: running tirelessly ahead, he repeatedly guided the Sno-Cat away from dangerous territory, but even so our route was a necessarily devious and twisted one, though the picking out of a path became considerably easier after the pale grey light of the arctic noon spread across the ice-cap.

For all of us it was a time of tension, of an ever-mounting anxiety that reached intolerable proportions. For the first half-hour or so I was busy enough in broaching the tractor’s first-aid kit and doing what doctoring I could to Mahler – a Mahler whose dyspnoea was already dramatically easing – Marie LeGarde, Helene, Jackstraw and, above all, to Zagero’s shattered hands. Then I myself submitted to Hillcrest’s rough and ready ministrations, but after that there was nothing for me to do, nothing for any of us to do except try to avoid the bitterness of thinking what must happen if the Citroen reached the tongue of the glacier before us.

Suddenly, exactly on noon, the tractor stopped abruptly. We jumped out to see what the matter was, and it became apparent soon enough the driver was awaiting instructions. We had abruptly rounded the humpback of the last ice ridge that had lain between us and the glacier itself.

Even in the half-light of the arctic day the panorama suddenly unfolded before us was a breathtaking one. To the north, the ice-sheet extended all the way down to the coast, forming vertical and in some places overhanging cliffs, the well-known phenomenon of the Chinese Wall fronts: nobody, nothing, could hope to land there.

To the south and separated from the fjord by the mile-long ridgeback of the seaward-projecting southern wall of the fjord, was a wide bay, fringed by a low, ice-bare rocky coast, quilted here and there with drifts of snow blown off the ice-cap. There, if anywhere, was where we would have to leave.

In the centre, between the low walls of the fjord, the Kangalak glacier itself, here, at its tongue, about 300 yards wide, ran down to the waters of the fjord in a great dog-leg curving sharply thirty degrees right about half-way down its length, ending abruptly with its upper surface a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the pack-ice-strewn water beneath. For the first half of its length the tongue of the glacier sloped fairly sharply from right to left down to the nunataks, crescent-fringed by the debris of moraines, that thrust up through the ice at the far corner of the dog-leg: the surface of the glacier was a nightmare of transverse and longitudinal fissures, some of them anything up to two hundred feet deep, great gaping chasms fanged with seracs – the irregular, often needle-pointed ice pinnacles that reached up between the walls of the larger crevasses. Surely Smallwood could never be so desperate, so insane as to drive the Citroen out on that: apart from the fissures, the very steepness of the slope downwards and to the left would be enough to send him into an uncontrollable slide.

And beyond everything lay the sea, the island-studded, ice-filled waters of Baffin Bay. Off-shore there was a mile-wide belt of loose pressure ice -the season was not yet far enough advanced for the fantastic shapes it would assume in the early spring – streaked with open, ever-changing leads and dotted at rare intervals with small icebergs -probably ones that had broken off from the east coast, drifted south round Cape Farewell and then moved north again, the whole half-lost, unearthly, and impossibly, weirdly, continuously altered in configuration by the white drifting fog that hung miasma-like over the sea.

But two things there were that were not lost: two ships. The one to the south-west, wraith-like and blurred though its lines were through the swirling mist, was quite unmistakable, that raked and slender silhouette would have been unmistakable anywhere: it was a destroyer, it could only be the Wykenham, moving slowly, cautiously shorewards through the ice-filled waters of the bay to our left. A heart-warming, immensely reassuring spectacle – or it should have been: but after the first cursory identifying glance I lost interest, my attention was taken and completely held by the second ship.

I couldn’t see all of it, most of its hull was hidden by the precipitous end of the glacier, but its small squat bridge, two masts and broad, bluff seaward-pointing bows were clearly etched against the mirror-calm waters of the head of the fjord and the sloping ice-bare rock that brushed its portside fenders. I could see no flag. It was a trawler, unmistakably so, and I thought grimly that it must have been a very special trawler indeed to have battered that still-visible path through the ice-choked mouth of the fjord.

My gaze moved back to the trawler again and a second later I was grabbing Hillcrest’s binoculars without so much as by your leave. One glance was enough, even in that shadowed gloom of the depth of the fjord I could see all I wanted to see by the grey noon-light. I could see a great deal more than I wanted to. For a few seconds I stood stock-still listening desperately for the sound of the Citroën’s engines: moments later I was in the tractor cabin, by the radio table.

‘Still in contact with the Triton, Joss?’ He nodded, and I rushed on: ‘Tell them there’s a group of men coming ashore from a trawler in the Kangalak Fjord. Ten, twelve, I’m not sure. And I’m not sure whether they’re armed. I’ll be damned surprised if they aren’t. Tell them I’m certain they’re going to move up on the glacier.’

‘Now?’

‘Of course!’ I snapped. ‘Send a message immediately. And—’

‘No. I meant are they moving up the glacier now?’

‘Take them ten, fifteen minutes – the fjord walls are pretty steep and it’s tricky to climb … After that ask the Wykenham if they will send a landing party ashore. An armed party. And for God’s sake tell them it’s urgent.’

‘Will they get here in time, Doc?’ Zagero was behind me. ‘By the time they lower a boat, row ashore, cross this headland – it’s half a mile if it’s an inch – it’ll take them fifteen minutes, maybe more.’

‘I know,’ I said irritably – irritably, but softly, for Joss was already talking into the table microphone, in the swift, staccato yet strangely unhurried voice of the trained radioman. ‘If you have any better suggestions—’

‘It’s coming!’ Hillcrest’s excited face had just appeared at the door of the cabin. ‘Come on! We can hear it coming down the glacier.’

And indeed they could. The deep throaty roar of that heavy engine was recognisable anywhere. Hurriedly we moved about a hundred yards away from the moraine-ringed depression where we had parked the tractor, Jackstraw, Hillcrest and I each with a rifle in our hands, and crouched down behind the concealing protection of some ice-covered debris at the edge of the glacier. From where we lay we could command a view of the glacier across its entire width and up to a point several hundred yards away, where it curved sharply out of sight.

We needn’t have hurried. The Citroen was still some good way off, the sound of its engine being funnelled down through the glacier valley well ahead of it, and I had time to look around me. What I saw seemed good. I was banking everything on the hope that the Citroën would still be on the same side of the glacier as when we had last seen it, and, from what I could see, the chances were high that it still would be. The entire centre of the glacier was a devil’s playground of crevasses ranging from hairlines to chasms twenty and more feet in width, transverse, longitudinal and diagonal, and as far as I could see they extended clear to the other wall. But here, on the left side, close in to the lining wall of moraine, was a relatively clear path, fissured only at long intervals, and not more than thirty yards broad. Thirty yards! Jackstraw could never miss at this point-blank range, even with a moving target.

I stole a glance at him, but his face might have been carved from the glacier itself, it was immobile and utterly devoid of expression. Hillcrest, on the other hand, was restless, forever shifting his cramped position: he was unhappy, I knew; he didn’t like this one little bit. He didn’t like murder. Neither did I. But this wasn’t murder, it was a long overdue execution: it wasn’t life-taking, it was life-saving, the lives of Margaret and Solly Levin …

There came the sudden click, abnormally loud even above the closing roar of the tractor, and Jackstraw, stretched his length on the snow, had the rifle raised to his shoulder. And then, suddenly, the Citroen had come clearly into sight and Jackstraw was gently lowering his rifle to the ground. I had gambled, and I had lost. The tractor was on the far side of the glacier, hugging the right bank as closely as possible: even at its nearest point of approach it would still be three hundred yards away.

TWELVE

Saturday 12.15 p.m.–12.30 p.m.

The Citroen was travelling in a most erratic fashion – one moment slowing down almost to a stop, the next jerking forward and covering perhaps twenty to thirty yards at a rush. Although we couldn’t see the glacier surface at that distance, it was obvious that the driver was picking his way round ice-mounds and threading along between fissures at the best speed he could manage. But his average speed was very low: it would probably take him almost five minutes to reach that point opposite us where the glacier fell away sharply to the left towards the outer angle of the dog-leg half-way down towards the fjord.

All these things I noted mechanically, without in any way consciously thinking of them. All I could think of was that Smallwood and Corazzini had outwitted us right up to the last – almost certainly, I could understand now, they had seen and been warned by the rockets Hillcrest had fired to give the Scimitar our position, and decided to give that side of the glacier the widest possible berth.

But the reasons no longer mattered a damn. All that mattered was the accomplished fact, and the fact was that Corazzini and Smallwood could no longer be stopped, not in the way we had intended. Even yet, of course, they could be stopped – but I had no illusions but that that would be at the cost of the lives of the two hostages in the tractor.

Frantically I tried to work out what to do for the best. There was no chance in the world that we might approach them openly over the glacier – we would be spotted before we had covered ten yards, and a pistol at the heads of Margaret and Levin would halt us before we got half-way. If we did nothing, let them get away, I knew the hostages’ chances of survival were still pretty slim – that trawler would almost certainly have a name or number or both and I couldn’t see Smallwood letting them make an identification of the trawler and then come back to report to us – and to all the waiting ships and planes in the Davis Strait -Baffin Sea area. Why should he take the slightest risk when it would be so easy to shoot them, so much easier still to throw them down a crevasse or shove them over the edge of the glacier into the freezing waters of the fjord a hundred and fifty feet below … Already the Citroën was no more than three minutes away from the nearest point of approach they would make to us.

‘Looks like they’re going to get away with it,’ Hillcrest whispered. It seemed as if he feared he might be overheard, though Smallwood and Corazzini couldn’t have heard him had he shouted at the top of his voice.

‘Well, that was what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ I asked bitterly.

‘What I wanted! My God, man, that missile mechanism—’

‘I don’t give a single solitary damn about the missile mechanism.’ I ground the words out between clenched teeth. ‘Six months from now other scientists will have invented something twice as good and ten times as secret. They’re welcome to it, and with pleasure.’

Hillcrest was shocked, but said nothing. But someone was in agreement with me.

‘Hear, hear!’ Zagero had just come up, his hands swathed to the size of boxing gloves in white bandages. The words were light enough, but his face was grim and his eyes bleak as he stared out across the glacier. ‘My sentiments exactly, Doc. To hell with their murderous little toys. My old man’s in that buggy out there. And your girl.’

‘His girl?’ Hillcrest turned, looked sharply at me under creased brows for a long moment, then murmured: ‘Sorry, boy, I didn’t understand.’

I made no response, but twisted my head as I heard footsteps behind me. It was Joss, hatless and gloveless in his excitement.

‘Wykenham’s anchored, sir,’ he panted out. ‘Her—’

‘Get down, man! They’ll see you.’

‘Sorry.’ He dropped to his hands and knees. ‘Her powerboat’s already moving inshore. And there was a flight of four Scimitars already airborne: they should be half-way here already. In two minutes’ time four or five bombers are taking off, with HE and incendiaries. They’re slower, but—’

‘Bombers?’ I snapped irritably. ‘Bombers? What do they think this is – the Second Front?’

‘No sir. They’re going to clobber the trawler if Smallwood gets away with that missile mechanism. They won’t get a hundred yards.’

‘The hell with their missile mechanism. Do human lives mean nothing to them? What is it, Jackstraw?’

‘Lights, Dr Mason.’ He pointed to the spot on the fjord wall where the men from the trawler had already covered two-thirds of the horizontal and vertical distance to the end of the glacier. ‘Signalling, I think.’

I saw it right away, a small light, but powerful, winking irregularly. I watched it for a few moments then heard Joss’s voice.

‘It’s morse, but it’s not our morse, sir.’

‘They’re hardly likely to signal in English just for our benefit,’ I said dryly. I tried to speak calmly, to hide the fear, the near despair in my mind, and when I spoke again my voice, I knew, was abnormally matter-of-fact. ‘It’s the tip-off to our friends Smallwood and Corazzini. If we can see the men from the trawler, it’s a cinch the men from the trawler can see us. The point is, do Smallwood and Corazzini understand them?’

Five seconds later I had my answer in the form of a suddenly deepening roar coming to us across the glacier from the engine of the Citroën. Corazzini – Hillcrest’s binoculars had shown him to be the driver – had understood the danger all right, he was casting caution to the winds and gunning the engine to its maximum. He must have been desperate, desperate to the point of madness, for no sane man would have taken the fearful risks of driving that tractor through sloping crevasse ice with the friction coefficient between treads and surface reduced almost to zero. Or could it be that he just didn’t know the suicidal dangers involved?

After a few seconds I was convinced he didn’t. In the first place, I couldn’t see either Corazzini or Smallwood as men who would panic under pressure, no matter how severe that pressure, and in the second place suicidal risks weren’t absolutely necessary, they would have stood a more than even chance of getting away with their lives and the missile mechanism if they had stopped the tractor, got out and picked their cautious way down the glacier on foot, with their pistol barrels stuck in the backs of their hostages. Or would they – rather, did they think they would?

I tried fleetingly, frantically, to get inside their cold and criminal minds, to try to understand their conception of us. Did they think that we thought, like them, that the mechanism was all important, that human lives were cheap and readily expendable? If they did, and guessing the quality of Jackstraw’s marksmanship with a rifle, would they not be convinced that they would be shot down as soon as they had stepped out on to the ice, regardless of the fate of their hostages? Or did they have a better understanding than that of minds more normal than their own?

Even as these thoughts flashed through my mind I knew I must act now. The time for thought, had there ever been such a time, was past. If they were left to continue in the tractor, they would either kill themselves on the glacier or if, by a miracle, they reached the bottom safely, they would then kill their hostages. If they were stopped now, there was a faint chance that Margaret and Levin might survive, at least for the moment: they were Smallwood’s and Corazzini’s only two trump cards, and would be kept intact as long as lay within their power, for they were their only guarantee of escape. I just had to gamble on the hope that they would be desperately reluctant to kill them where they were now, still a mile from the end of the glacier. And the last time I had gambled I had lost.

‘Can you stop the tractor?’ I asked Jackstraw, my voice a flat lifeless monotone in my own ear.

He nodded, his eyes on me: I nodded silently in return.

‘You can’t do that!’ Zagero shouted in urgent protest. The drawl had gone for the first time ever. ‘They’ll kill them, they’ll kill them! My God, Mason, if you’re really stuck on that kid you’d never—’

‘Shut up!’ I said savagely. I grabbed a coil of rope, picked up my rifle and went on brutally: ‘If you think they’d ever let your father come out of this alive you must be crazy.’

A second later I was on my way, plunging out into the open across the narrow thirty-yard stretch of ice that led into the first of the fissures, wincing and ducking involuntarily as the first .303 shell from Jackstraw’s rifle screamed past me, only feet to my right, and smashed through the hood of the Citroen and into the engine with all the metallic clamour, the vicious power of a sledge-hammer wielded by some giant hand. But still the Citroen came on.

I leapt across a narrow crevasse, steadied myself, glanced back for a moment, saw that Hillcrest, Joss, Zagero and a couple of Hillcrest’s men were following, then rushed on again, weaving and twisting my way through the cracks and mounds in the ice. What was Zagero doing there, I asked myself angrily? Unarmed, with two useless hands that could hold no firearm, he was nothing but a liability, what could any man do with ruined hands like those? I was to find out just what a man with ruined hands could do …

We were running straight across the narrowest neck of the glacier making straight for the spot where the tractor would arrive if it survived Jackstraw’s attempts to halt it: Jackstraw was firing in a line well above us now, but we could still hear the thin high whine of every bullet, the metallic crash as it struck the Citroën. Every bullet went home. But that engine was incredibly tough.

We were about half-way across when we heard the engine change gear, the high unmistakable whine of the tractor beginning to overrun its engine. Corazzini -I could clearly see him now, even without the aid of binoculars – must have found himself losing control on the steepening slope and was using the engine to brake the Citroën. And then, when we were less than a hundred yards away and after a longer than usual lull in the firing – Jackstraw must have stopped to change magazines – the sixth shell smashed through the riddled hood and the engine stopped as abruptly as if the ignition had been switched off.

The tractor stopped too. On that steep slope this was surprising, the last thing I would have expected, but there was no doubt that not only had it stopped but that it had been stopped deliberately: there was no mistaking the high-pitched screech of those worn brakes.

And then I could see the reason why. There was some violent activity taking place in the driving cabin of the tractor, and as we neared – a maddeningly slow process, there were dozens of crevasses to be jumped, as many more to be skirted – we could see what it was. Corazzini and Solly Levin were struggling furiously, and, from thirty or forty yards, it seemed, incredibly enough, that Solly Levin was getting the better of it. He had flung himself completely on top of Corazzini where the latter sat behind the wheel, and was butting him savagely in the face with the top of his bald head, and Corazzini, trapped in the narrow space, could find no room to make use of his much greater strength.

Then, abruptly, the door on the driver’s side burst open – we could see it clearly, having been lower down than the tractor when it had stopped we were approaching it now almost head on -and the two men fell out fighting and struggling furiously. We could see now why Levin had been using his head – both hands were bound behind his back. It had been an act of desperate courage to attack Corazzini in the first place, but the old man wasn’t to get the reward he deserved for his selflessness: even as we came up to them Corazzini got his automatic clear and fired down point-blank at Solly Levin who was lying helplessly on his back but still gamely trying to get a leg lock on the bigger man. I was a split second too late in getting there, even as I crashed into Corazzini and sent his automatic flying away to slide down the glacier, I knew I was too late, Solly Levin was a crumpled little blood-stained figure lying on the ice even before Corazzini’s gun went slithering over the edge of a crevasse. And then I felt myself being pushed to one side, and Johnny Zagero was staring down at the outspread stillness of the man huddled at his feet. For what seemed an eternity, but was probably no more than three seconds, he stood there without moving, then when he turned to Corazzini his face was empty of all expression.

It might have been a flash of fear, of realisation that he had come to the end of his road that I saw in Corazzini’s eyes, but I could never swear to it, the turn of his head, the sudden headlong dash for the shelter of the ice-covered moraine rocks by the side of the glacier, ten yards away, were so swift that I could be certain of nothing. But swift as he was, Zagero was even swifter: he caught Corazzini before he had covered four yards and they crashed to the glacier together, clawing, punching and kicking in the grim desperate silence of men who know that the winner’s prize is his life.

‘Drop that gun!’ I whirled round at the sound of the voice behind me, but all I could see at first was the white strained face of Margaret Ross, the brown eyes dulled with sickness and fear. Involuntarily I brought up the rifle in my hands.

‘Drop it!’ Smallwood’s voice was curt, deadly, his face barely visible behind Margaret’s shoulder as he peered out through the canvas screen at the rear of the tractor cabin. He was completely shielded by her body – it was typical of the man’s cunning, his ice-cold calculation that he should have waited until our attention was completely distracted before making his move. ‘And your friend. Quickly now!’

I hesitated, glanced at Hillcrest – the only other man with a weapon – to see how he was placed, then jerked my head back again as there came a sudden plop from the silenced automatic and a sharp cry of pain from Margaret. She was clutching her left arm just below the elbow.

‘Quickly, I said! The next one goes through her shoulder.’ His voice was soft with menace, his face implacable. Not for a moment did I doubt that he would do exactly as he said: the clatter of Hillcrest’s rifle and mine falling on the ice came in the same instant.

‘Now kick them over the edge of that crevasse.’

We did as he said and stood there powerless to do anything except watch the savage, mauling fight on the glacier. Neither man had regained his feet since the struggle had begun, the ice was too slippery for that, and still they rolled over and over first one on top, now the other. Both were powerful men, but Zagero was severely handicapped by the exhaustion of the terrible night’s march that lay behind him, by his crippled useless hands, by thickly-swathed bandages over his hands that not only prevented him from catching or holding Corazzini but softened the impact of every blow he struck. For all that, there was no question how the battle was going: those broken hands I’d said would never fight again were clubbing and hammering the life out of Corazzini. I thought of the tremendous force with which I’d seen Zagero strike a blow only the previous morning and felt a momentary flash of pity for Corazzini: then I remembered he was just as Smallwood was, that Smallwood was prepared to kill Margaret with as little compunction as he would snuff out the life of a fly, I looked at the crumpled figure at my feet and every shadow of pity vanished as if it had never been.

Smallwood, his eyes unblinking, his face expressionless as ever, had his gun on them all the time, waiting for that second when the two men would break far enough apart to give him a clear sight of Zagero. But, now, Zagero was underneath nearly all the time, one arm crooked round Corazzini’s neck while the other delivered a murderous series of short-arm jabs, each one drawing a grunting gasp of agony from a white-faced Corazzini: finally, goaded into supreme effort by panic and fear, Corazzini managed to break loose and hurled himself not towards Smallwood, where safety lay, but for the shelter of the moraine rocks, where he would never know safety again. Zagero, cat-like as ever, was only feet behind him, moving so fast, so unexpectedly that Smallwood’s swift snapshot missed him altogether.

‘Call your friend Nielsen.’ Smallwood must have realised how things were going behind the concealing shelter of the rocks for his voice was suddenly savage, urgent. He spared a swift glance in Jackstraw’s direction – Jackstraw, followed at some distance by two more of Hillcrest’s crew, was crossing the glacier at a dead run and now less than fifty yards away. ‘His rifle. In a crevasse. Quickly!’

‘Jackstraw!’ My voice was hoarse, cracked. ‘Throw your rifle away! He’s got a gun on Miss Ross, and he’s going to kill her.’ Jackstraw braked, slipped on the ice, halted and stood there for a moment irresolute, and then at my repeated desperate cry carefully, deliberately dropped his rifle into a nearby fissure and came slowly on to join us. It was at that moment that Hillcrest grabbed me by the arm.

‘He’s moving, Mason! He’s alive!’ He was pointing down to Levin, who was indeed stirring slightly. I had never thought to examine Levin, it had seemed a ludicrous idea that a professional like Corazzini could have missed at such point-blank range, but now, regardless of Smallwood’s reaction, I dropped to my knees on the glacier and put my face close to Levin’s. Hillcrest was right. The breathing was shallow, but breathing there undoubtedly was, and now I could see the thin red line that extended from the temple almost to the back of the head. I rose to my feet.

‘Creased, concussed probably, that’s all.’ Involuntarily I glanced over my shoulder towards the rocks. ‘But too late now for Corazzini.’

And I needed no eyes to know that this was so. The unseen battle behind the rocks had been fought out with a dumb feral ferocity, with a silent savagery that had been far more frightening than all the most maddened oaths and shouting could ever have been, but even now, as Smallwood jumped down from the tailboard of the tractor cabin, Margaret Ross still held in front of him, and started hustling her towards the rocks, a hoarse high-pitched scream that raised the hackles on the back of my neck froze us all, even Smallwood, to immobility: and then came a long quavering moan of agony, cut off as abruptly as it had begun. And now there was no more screaming or moaning, no more slipping of feet on ice, no more gasping or frenzied flurries bespeaking the interchange of desperate blows: there was only silence, a silence chillingly broken by regular rhythmic pounding blows like the stamping feet of a pile-driver.

Smallwood had recovered, had just reached the rocks when Zagero came out to meet him face to face. Smallwood moved to one side, his gun covering him, as Zagero came slowly towards us, his face cut and bruised, his blood-saturated bandaged hands hanging by his sides, with two long ribbons of red-stained bandage trailing on the ice behind him.

‘Finished?’ I asked.

‘Finished.’

‘Good,’ I said, and meant it. ‘Your father’s still alive, Johnny. Scalp wound, that’s all.’

His battered face transformed, first by disbelief then by sheer joy, Zagero dropped on his knees beside Solly Levin. I saw Smallwood line his pistol on Zagero’s back.

‘Don’t do it, Smallwood!’ I shouted. ‘You’ll only have four shells left.’

His eyes swivelled to my face, the cold flat eyes of a killer, then the meaning of my words struck home, his expression subtly altered and he nodded as if I had made some reasonable suggestion. He turned to Jackstraw, the nearest man to him, and said, ‘Bring out my radio.’

Jackstraw moved to obey, and while he was inside the cabin Zagero rose slowly to his feet.

‘Does look like I was a mite premature,’ he murmured. He glanced towards the rocks, and there was no regret in his face, only indifference. ‘Half a dozen witnesses, and you all saw him beatin’ himself to death … You’re next, Smallwood.’

‘Corazzini was a fool,’ Smallwood said contemptuously. The man’s cold-blooded callousness was staggering. ‘I can easily replace him. Just leave that radio here, Nielsen, and join your friends – while I join mine.’ He nodded down the glacier. Or perhaps you hadn’t noticed?’

And we hadn’t. But we noticed it now all right, the first of the party from the trawler climbing on to the ice at the precipitous tip of the glacier. Within seconds half a dozen of them were on the ice, running, stumbling, falling, picking themselves up again as they clawed their way up the slippery ice with all the speed they could muster.

‘My – ah – reception committee.’ Smallwood permitted himself the shadow of a smile. ‘You will remain here while Miss Ross and I make our way down to meet them. You will not move. I have the girl.’ Victory complete and absolute victory was in his grasp, but his voice, his face were again devoid as ever of all shadow of expression or feeling. He stooped to pick up the portable radio, then swung round and stared up into the sky.

I had heard it too, and I knew what it was before Smallwood did because it was a factor that had never entered into his calculations. But there was no need for me to explain, within seconds of hearing the first high screaming whine from the south a flight of four lean sleek deadly Scimitar jet fighters whistled by less than four hundred feet overhead, banked almost immediately, broke formation and came back again, speed reduced, flying a tight circle over the tongue of the fjord. I don’t like planes, and I hate the sound of jets: but I had never seen so welcome a sight, heard so wonderful a sound in all my life.

‘Jet fighters, Smallwood,’ I cried exultantly. ‘Jet fighters from a naval carrier. We called them up by radio.’ He was staring at the circling planes with his thin lips drawn back wolfishly over his teeth, and I went on more softly: ‘They’ve had orders to shoot and destroy any person seen going down that glacier – any person, especially, with a case or radio in his hand.’ It was a lie, but Smallwood wasn’t to know that, the very presence of the jets above must have seemed confirmation of the truth of my words.

‘They wouldn’t dare,’ he said slowly. ‘They’d kill the girl too.’

‘You fool!’ I said contemptuously. ‘Not only doesn’t human life matter a damn to either side compared to the recovery of the mechanism – you should know that better than anyone, Smallwood – but these planes have been told to watch out for and kill two people going down the glacier. Wrapped in these clothes, Miss Ross is indistinguishable from a man – especially from the air. They’ll think it’s you and Corazzini and they’ll blast you both off the face of the glacier.’

I knew Smallwood believed me, believed me absolutely, this was so exactly the way his own killer’s mind would have worked in its utterly callous indifference to human life that conviction could not be stayed. But he had courage, I’ll grant him that, and that first-class brain of his never stopped working.

‘There’s no hurry,’ he said comfortably. He was back on balance again. ‘They can circle there as long as they like, they can send out relief planes to take over, it doesn’t matter. As long as I’m with you here, they won’t touch me. And in just over an hour or so it will be dark again, after which I can leave. Meantime, stay close to me, gentlemen: I don’t think you would so willingly sacrifice Miss Ross’s life.’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Margaret said desperately. Her voice was almost a sob, her face twisted in pain. ‘Go away, please, all of you, go away. I know he’s going to kill me in the end anyway. It may as well be now.’ She buried her face in her hands. ‘I don’t care any more, I don’t, I don’t!’

‘But I care,’ I said angrily. Soft words, sympathetic words were useless here. ‘We all care. Don’t be such a little fool. Everything will be all right, you’ll see.’

‘Spoken like a man,’ said Smallwood approvingly. ‘Only, my dear, I wouldn’t pay much attention to the last part of his speech.’

‘Why don’t you give up, Smallwood?’ I asked him quietly. I had neither hope nor intention of persuading this fanatic, I was only talking for time, for I had seen something that had made my heart leap: moving quietly out over the right-hand side of the glacier, from the self-same spot where we had lain in ambush, was a file of about a dozen men. ‘Bombers have already taken off from the carrier, and, believe me, they’re carrying bombs. Bombs and incendiaries. And do you know why, Smallwood?’

They were dressed in khaki, this landing party from the Wykenham, not navy blue. Marines, almost certainly, unless they had been carrying soldiers on some combined manœuvres. They were heavily armed, and had that indefinable but unmistakable look of men who knew exactly what they were about. Their leader, I noticed, wasn’t fooling around with the usual pistol a naval officer in charge of a landing party traditionally carried: he had a sub-machine-gun under his arm, the barrel gripped in his left hand. Three others had similar weapons, the rest rifles.

‘Because they’re going to make good and sure you’re never going to get off this glacier alive, Smallwood,’ I went on. ‘At least, not out of the fjord alive. Neither you nor any of your friends coming to meet you – nor any of the men waiting aboard that trawler down there.’

God, how slowly they were coming! Why didn’t one of their marksmen with a rifle shoot Smallwood there and then – at that moment, the thought that a rifle bullet would have gone clear though Smallwood and killed the girl held so tightly in front of him never occurred to me. But if I could hold his attention another thirty seconds, if none of the others standing by my side betrayed by the slightest flicker of expression—

‘They’re going to destroy that trawler, Small-wood,’ I rushed on quickly. The men advancing up from the foot of the glacier were waving their arms furiously now, shouting wildly in warning, and even at over three-quarters of a mile their voices were carrying clearly. I had to try to drown their voices, to make sure that Smallwood kept his eyes fixed only on me. ‘They’re going to blow it out of the water, it and you and that damned missile mechanism. What’s the use of—’

But it was too late. Smallwood had heard the shouts even as I had begun to speak, twisted his head to look down the valley, saw the direction of the pointing arms, glanced briefly over his shoulder, then turned to face me again, his face twisted in a bestial snarl, that monolithic calm shattered at last:

‘Who are they?’ he demanded viciously. ‘What are they doing? Quick – or the girl gets it!’

‘It’s a landing party from the destroyer in the next bay,’ I said steadily. ‘This is the end, Smallwood. Maybe you’ll stand trial yet.’

‘I’ll kill the girl!’ he whispered savagely.

‘They’ll kill you. They’ve been ordered to recover that mechanism at all costs. Nobody’s playing any more, Smallwood. Give up your gun.’

He swore, vilely, blasphemously, the first time I had ever heard such words from him, and leapt for the driving cabin of the tractor, pushing the girl in front of him while his pistol swung in a wide arc covering all of us. I understood what he was going to do, what this last desperate suicidal gamble was going to be, and hurled myself at the door of the driving cabin.

‘You madman!’ My voice was a scream. ‘You’ll kill yourself, you’ll kill the girl—’

The gun coughed softly, I felt the white-hot burning pain in my upper arm and crashed backward on to the ice just as Smallwood released the brakes of the Citroën. At once the big tractor started to move, those murderous treads passing inches from me as Jackstraw leapt forward and dragged me to safety a second before they would have run over my face. The next moment I was on my feet, running after the tractor, Jackstraw at my heels: I suppose that wound just below my shoulder must have been hurting like hell, but the truth is that I felt nothing at all.

The tractor, with next to no adhesion left on the steepening slope of ice, accelerated with dismaying speed, soon outdistancing us. At first it seemed as if Smallwood was making some attempt to steer it, but it was obvious almost immediately that any such attempts were utterly useless: five tons of steel ran amok, it was completely out of control, skidding violently first to one side then the other, finally making a complete half-circle and sliding backward down the glacier at terrifying speed, following the slope of the ice which led from the right-hand side where we had been standing to the big nunataks thrusting up through the ice on the far left-hand corner of the dog-leg half-way down.

How it missed all the crevasses – it went straight across some narrow ones, thanks to its treads -and all the ice-mounds on the way down and across the glacier I shall never know, but miss them it did, increasing speed with every second that passed, its treads screeching out a shrilly metallic cacophony of sound as they scored their serrated way across and through the uneven ice of the glacier. But then, I shall never know either how Jackstraw and I survived all the crazy chances we took on our mad headlong run down that glacier, unable to stop, leaping across crevasses we would never have dared attempt in our normal minds, pounding our sliding way alongside others where the slip of either foot would have been our death.

We were still two hundred yards behind the tractor when, less than fifty yards from the corner, it struck an ice-mound, spun round crazily several times and then smashed, tail first, with horrifying force into the biggest of the nunataks – a fifty-foot pinnacle of rock at the very corner. We were still over a hundred yards away when we saw Smallwood, obviously dazed, half-fall out of the still upright driving cabin, hat-box in hand, followed by the girl. Whether she flung herself at him or just stumbled against him it was impossible to say, but both of them slipped and fell together and next moment had disappeared from sight against the face of the nunatak.

Still fifty yards away, already trying all we could to brake ourselves, we heard the staccato roar of cannon shells seemingly directly above us and as I flung myself flat on the ice, not to avoid the fire but to stop myself before I, too, plunged into the crevasse by the nunatak where I knew Margaret and Smallwood must have disappeared, I caught a glimpse of two Scimitars hurtling low across the glacier, red fire streaking from their guns. For a moment, rolling over and over, I saw no more, then I had another glimpse of the lower part of the glacier, of exploding cannon shells raking a lethal barrier of fragmenting steel across the glacier’s entire width, and, about sixty or seventy yards lower down, the men from the trawler lying flat on their faces to escape the whistling flying shrapnel. Even in that brief moment I had time to see a third Scimitar screaming down out of the north, exactly following the path of the other two. They were making no attempt to kill the trawler men, obviously they were under the strictest instructions to avoid any but the most necessary bloodshed. And it wasn’t necessary, if ever anything was crystal clear it was the fact that we weren’t going to have any trouble at all from those trawler men. Both men and trawler could depart now, unmolested: with the missile mechanism beyond their reach, they no longer mattered.

Ten yards ahead of Jackstraw, sick to the heart and almost mad with fear, I reached the crevasse by the nunatak – no more than a three-foot wide gap between ice and rock – peered down over the side, and as I peered I felt faint from the wave of relief that swept over me: the crevasse, narrowing as it went down to not much more than two feet, ended about fifteen feet down in a solid shelf of rock, a ledge sculpted by thousands of years of moving, grinding ice.

Margaret and Smallwood were still on their feet, shaky, I could see, but seemingly unharmed – it had been a short drop and they could have slowed their descent by pressing against both sides of the crevasse as they fell. Smallwood, flattened lips drawn back over his teeth, was staring up at me, his pistol barrel pressed savagely against Margaret’s temple.

‘A rope, Mason!’ he said softly. ‘Get me a rope. This crevasse is closing – the ice is moving!’

And it was, I knew it was. All glaciers moved, some of them, on this West Greenland coast, with astonishing speed – the great Upernivik glacier, farther north, covered over four feet every hour. As if in confirmation of his words, the ice beneath my feet groaned and shuddered and slid forward a couple of inches.

‘Hurry up!’ Smallwood’s incomparable nerve held to the last, his voice was urgent but completely under control, his face tight-lipped but calm. ‘Hurry up or I’ll kill her!’

I knew he meant it absolutely.

‘Very well,’ I said calmly. My mind felt preternaturally clear, I knew Margaret’s life hung on a fraying thread but I had never felt so cool, so self-possessed in my life. I unwound the rope round my shoulders. ‘Here it comes.’

He reached up both hands to catch the falling rope, I took a short step forward and then, stiff-legged and with my hands pressed close to my sides, fell on top of him like a plummeting stone. He saw me coming, but with the tangle of the rope and the narrowness of the crevasse he had no chance to get clear. My feet caught him on the shoulder and outstretched arm, and we crashed on to the ledge together.

He was, as I have said, phenomenally strong for his size, but he had no chance then. True, he was partially numbed by the shock of my fall, but that was more than cancelled out by my weakness, by the loss of blood from my wounded shoulder. But he still had no chance, I locked my hands round that scrawny throat, ignored his kickings, his eye-gougings, the fusillade of blows rained on my unprotected head, and squeezed and knocked his head against the blue-banded striations of the side of the crevasse until I felt him go limp in my hands. And then it was time to go, the ice-wall was now no more than eighteen inches distant from the polished rock of the nunatak.

Smallwood apart, I found myself alone on that narrowing ledge. Jackstraw had already been lowered by Hillcrest and his men, fastened a rope round Margaret and been pulled up himself after her: I could have sworn that I had fought with Smallwood for no more than ten seconds, but was told later that we had struggled like madmen for three or four minutes. It may well have been so, I have no memory of that time, my coolness, my detachment was something altogether outside me.

My first clear recollection was hearing Jack-straw’s voice, quick and urgent, as a rope snaked down over my shoulders.

‘Quickly, Dr Mason! It’ll close any second now.’

‘I’m coming. But another rope first, please.’ I pointed to the radio lying at my feet. ‘We’ve come too long a way with this, we’ve suffered too much for this to leave it now.’

Twenty seconds later, just as I scrambled over the edge of the crevasse, the grinding ice-wall lurched another inch or two towards the rock of the nunatak, and, at the same moment, Smallwood’s voice came to us again. He had propped himself up on his hands and knees and was staring up numbly, almost disbelievingly, at the narrowing walls above him.

‘Throw me a rope.’ He could see death’s hand reaching out to touch him, but the urgency in his voice was still under that iron control, his face an expressionless mask. ‘For God’s sake, throw me a rope.’

I thought of the trail of death Smallwood had left behind him, of the plane’s dead captain, the three dead crew members, Colonel Harrison, Brewster and Mrs Dansby-Gregg, of how close to the brink of death he had brought Marie LeGarde and Mahler, of how often he had threatened death to the girl now trembling violently in the crook of my arm. I thought of these things, then I looked at Jackstraw, who carried a rope over his arm, and I saw reflected in his face the same implacability, the same bleak mercilessness that informed my own mind. And then Jackstraw moved towards the brink of the crevasse, lifted the tightly coiled rope high above his head, hurled it down on top of the man below and stepped back without a word.

We turned, Jackstraw and I, with Margaret Ross supported between us, and walked slowly up the glacier to meet the officer in charge of the landing party, and as we walked we could feel the glacier shiver beneath our feet as a million tons of ice lurched down towards the head of the Kangalak Fjord.

HMS Ulysses

Alistair MacLean

‘A brilliant, overwhelming piece of descriptive writing’

Observer

This is one of the great war novels of our century and one of the finest achievements of Alistair MacLean’s bestselling career. It is the story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk – a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance, crippled by enemy atack and the bitter cold of the Arctic.

‘A story of exceptional courage which grips the imagination’

Daily Telegraph

‘It deserves an honourable place among twentieth-century war books’

Daily Mail

‘HMS Ulysses is in the same class as The Cruel Sea’

Evening Standard

ISBN 0 00 613512 9

Where Eagles Dare

Alistair MacLean

‘A real humdinger. The best MacLean yet.’ Daily Mirror

‘There is a splendid audacity about Where Eagles Dare in which a handful of British agents invade an “impenetrable” Gestapo command post … MacLean offers a real dazzler of a thriller, with vivid action, fine set pieces of suspense, and a virtuoso display of startling plot twists.’

New York Times

‘Alistair MacLean has done it again: produced another king-sized thriller of tremendous pace and excitement. The tension is almost unbearable at times, but you can’t stop turning the pages in a feverish desire to know what happens next.’

Liverpool Echo

ISBN 0 00 615804 8

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About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognised as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

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By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

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This paperback edition 2005

2

Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1962

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1959

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1959

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

ISBN 978-0-00-616122-6

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear Is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D. Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear Is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Ice Station

Zebra

An Imprint of Sterling Publishing

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New York, NY 10016

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1963

© 1963 by HarperCollinsPublishers

The author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work.

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ISBN 978-1-4027-9033-1 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4027-9037-9 (ebook)

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To Lachlan, Michael and Alistair

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Ice Station Zebra

U.S.S. Dolphin

1. Rudder

2. Stern Room

3. Nucleonics Room

4. Manoeuvring Room

5. Engine Room

6. Machinery space

7. Passage over reactor

8. Reactor Room

9. Sail

10. Bridge

11. Radio Room (port)

12. Control Room

13. Captain’s Cabin (port; Sickbay (starboard)

14. Wardroom

15. Inertial Navigation Room

16. Electronics Room

17. Crew’s Quarters

18. Galley

19. Medical Store

20. Disposal Chute

21. Periscope (retracted)

22. Torpedo Storage Room

23. Collision Space

24. Torpedo Room

25. Torpedo Tubes

26. Bow caps

ICE STATION ZEBRA

ONE

Commander James D. Swanson of the United States Navy was short, plump and crowding forty. He had jet black hair topping a pink cherubic face, and with the deep permanent creases of laughter lines radiating from his eyes and curving round his mouth he was a dead ringer for the cheerful, happy-go-lucky extrovert who is the life and soul of the party where the guests park their brains along with their hats and coats. That, anyway, was how he struck me at first glance but on the reasonable assumption that I might very likely find some other qualities in the man picked to command the latest and most powerful nuclear submarine afloat I took a second and closer look at him and this time I saw what I should have seen the first time if the dank grey fog and winter dusk settling down over the Firth of Clyde hadn’t made seeing so difficult. His eyes. Whatever his eyes were they weren’t those of the gladhanding, wisecracking bon vivant. They were the coolest, clearest grey eyes I’d ever seen, eyes that he used as a dentist might his probe, a surgeon his lancet or a scientist his electronic microscope. Measuring eyes. They measured first me and then the paper he held in his hand but gave no clue at all as to the conclusions arrived at on the basis of measurements made.

‘I’m sorry, Dr Carpenter.’ The south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line voice was quiet and courteous, but without any genuine regret that I could detect, as he folded the telegram back into its envelope and handed it to me. ‘I can accept neither this telegram as sufficient authorisation nor yourself as a passenger. Nothing personal, you know that; but I have my orders.’

‘Not sufficient authorisation?’ I pulled the telegram from its cover and pointed to the signature. ‘Who do you think this is — the resident window-cleaner at the Admiralty?’

It wasn’t funny, and as I looked at him in the failing light I thought maybe I’d overestimated the depth of the laughter lines in the face. He said precisely: ‘Admiral Hewson is commander of the Nato Eastern Division. On Nato exercises I come under his command. At all other times I am responsible only to Washington. This is one of those other times. I’m sorry. And I must point out, Dr Carpenter, that you could have arranged for anyone in London to send this telegram. It’s not even on a naval message form.’

He didn’t miss much, that was a fact, but he was being suspicious about nothing. I said: ‘You could call him up by radio-telephone, Commander.’

‘So I could,’ he agreed. ‘And it would make no difference. Only accredited American nationals are allowed aboard this vessel — and the authority must come from Washington.’

‘From the Director of Underseas Warfare or Commander Atlantic submarines?’ He nodded, slowly, speculatively, and I went on: ‘Please radio them and ask them to contact Admiral Hewson. Time is very short, Commander.’ I might have added that it was beginning to snow and that I was getting colder by the minute, but I refrained.

He thought for a moment, nodded, turned and walked a few feet to a portable dockside telephone that was connected by a looping wire to the long dark shape lying at our feet. He spoke briefly, keeping his voice low, and hung up. He barely had time to rejoin me when three duffel-coated figures came hurrying up an adjacent gangway, turned in our direction and stopped when they reached us. The tallest of the three tall men, a lean rangy character with wheat-coloured hair and the definite look of a man who ought to have had a horse between his legs, stood slightly in advance of the other two. Commander Swanson gestured towards him.

‘Lieutenant Hansen, my executive officer. He’ll look after you till I get back.’ The commander certainly knew how to choose his words.

‘I don’t need looking after,’ I said mildly. ‘I’m all grown up now and I hardly ever feel lonely.’

‘I shall be as quick as I can, Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson said. He hurried off down the gangway and I gazed thoughtfully after him. I put out of my mind any idea I might have had about the Commander U.S. Atlantic Submarines picking his captains from the benches in Central Park. I had tried to effect an entrance aboard Swanson’s ship and if such an entrance was unauthorised he didn’t want me taking off till he’d found out why. Hansen and his two men, I guessed, would be the three biggest sailors on the ship.

The ship. I stared down at the great black shape lying almost at my feet. This was my first sight of a nuclear-engined submarine, and the Dolphin was like no submarine that I had ever seen. She was about the same length as a World War II long-range ocean-going submarine but there all resemblance ceased. Her diameter was at least twice that of any conventional submarine. Instead of having the vaguely boat-shaped lines of her predecessors, the Dolphin was almost perfectly cylindrical in design: instead of the usual V-shaped bows, her fore end was completely hemi-spherical. There was no deck, as such: the rounded sheer of sides and bows rose smoothly to the top of the hull then fell as smoothly away again, leaving only a very narrow fore-and-aft working space so dangerously treacherous in its slippery convexity that it was permanently railed off in harbour. About a hundred feet back from the bows the slender yet massive conning-tower reared over twenty feet above the deck, for all the world like the great dorsal fin of some monstrous shark: half-way up the sides of the conning-tower and thrust out stubbily at right angles were the swept-back auxiliary diving planes of the submarine. I tried to see what lay farther aft but the fog and the thickening snow swirling down from the north of Loch Long defeated me. Anyway, I was losing interest. I’d only a thin raincoat over my clothes and I could feel my skin start to gooseflesh under the chill fingers of that winter wind.

‘Nobody said anything about us having to freeze to death,’ I said to Hansen. ‘That naval canteen there. Would your principles prevent you from accepting a cup of coffee from Dr Carpenter, that well-known espionage agent?’

He grinned and said: ‘In the matter of coffee, friend, I have no principles. Especially tonight. Someone should have warned us about these Scottish winters.’ He not only looked like a cowboy, he talked like one: I was an expert on cowboys as I was sometimes too tired to rise to switch off the TV set. ‘Rawlings, go tell the captain that we are sheltering from the elements.’

While Rawlings went to the dockside phone Hansen led the way to the nearby neon-lit canteen. He let me precede him through the door then made for the counter while the other sailor, a red-complexioned character about the size and shape of a polar bear, nudged me gently into an angled bench seat in one corner of the room. They weren’t taking too many chances with me. Hansen came and sat on the other side of me, and when Rawlings returned he sat squarely in front of me across the table.

‘As neat a job of corralling as I’ve seen for a long time,’ I said approvingly. ‘You’ve got nasty suspicious minds, haven’t you?’

‘You wrong us,’ Hansen said sadly. ‘We’re just three friendly sociable guys carrying out our orders. It’s Commander Swanson who has the nasty suspicious mind, isn’t that so, Rawlings?’

‘Yes, indeed, Lieutenant,’ Rawlings said gravely. ‘Very security-minded, the captain is.’

I tried again. ‘Isn’t this very inconvenient for you?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I should have thought that every man would have been urgently required aboard if you’re due to sail in less than two hours’ time.’

‘You just keep on talking, Doc,’ Hansen said encouragingly. There was nothing encouraging about his cold blue Arctic eyes, ‘I’m a right good listener.’

‘Looking forward to your trip up to the icepack?’ I inquired pleasantly.

They operated on the same wavelength, all right. They didn’t even look at one another. In perfect unison they all hitched themselves a couple of inches closer to me, and there was nothing imperceptible about the way they did it either. Hansen waited, smiling in a pleasantly relaxed fashion until the waitress had deposited four steaming mugs of coffee on the table, then said in the same encouraging tone: ‘Come again, friend. Nothing we like to hear better than top classified information being bandied about in canteens. How the hell do you know where we’re going?’

I reached up my hand beneath my coat lapel and it stayed there, my right wrist locked in Hansen’s right hand.

‘We’re not suspicious or anything,’ he said apologetically. ‘It’s just that we submariners are very nervous on account of the dangerous life we lead. Also, we’ve a very fine library of films aboard the Dolphin and every time a character in one of those films reaches up under his coat it’s always for the same reason and that’s not just because he’s checking to see if his wallet’s still there.’

I took his wrist with my free hand, pulled his arm away and pushed it down on the table. I’m not saying it was easy, the U.S. Navy clearly fed its submariners on a high protein diet, but I managed it without bursting a blood-vessel. I pulled a folded newspaper out from under my coat and laid it down. ‘You wanted to know how the hell I knew where you were going,’ I said. ‘I can read, that’s why. That’s a Glasgow evening paper I picked up in Renfrew Airport half an hour ago.’

Hansen rubbed his wrist thoughtfully, then grinned. ‘What did you get your doctorate in, Doc? Weight-lifting? About that paper — how could you have got it in Renfrew half an hour ago?’

‘I flew down here. Helicopter.’

‘A whirlybird, eh? I heard one arriving a few minutes ago. But that was one of ours.’

‘It had U.S. Navy written all over it in four-foot letters,’ I conceded, ‘and the pilot spent all his time chewing gum and praying out loud for a quick return to California.’

‘Did you tell the skipper this?’ Hansen demanded.

‘He didn’t give me the chance to tell him anything.’

‘He’s got a lot on his mind and far too much to see to,’ Hansen said. He unfolded the paper and looked at the front page. He didn’t have far to look to find what he wanted: the two-inch banner headlines were spread over seven columns.

‘Well, would you look at this.’ Lieutenant Hansen made no attempt to conceal his irritation and chagrin. ‘Here we are, pussyfooting around in this God-forsaken dump, sticking-plaster all over our mouths, sworn to eternal secrecy about mission and destination and then what? I pick up this blasted Limey newspaper and here are all the top-secret details plastered right across the front page.’

‘You are kidding, Lieutenant,’ said the man with the red face and the general aspect of a polar bear. His voice seemed to come from his boots.

‘I am not kidding, Zabrinski,’ Hansen said coldly, ‘as you would appreciate if you had ever learned to read. “Nuclear submarine to the rescue,” it says. “Dramatic dash to the North Pole.” God help us, the North Pole. And a picture of the Dolphin. And of the skipper. Good lord, there’s even a picture of me.’

Rawlings reached out a hairy paw and twisted the paper to have a better look at the blurred and smudged representation of the man before him. ‘So there is. Not very flattering, is it, Lieutenant? But a speaking likeness, mind you, a speaking likeness. The photographer has caught the essentials perfectly.’

‘You are utterly ignorant of the first principles of photography,’ Hansen said witheringly. ‘Listen to this lot. “The following joint statement was issued simultaneously a few minutes before noon (G.M.T.) today in both London and Washington: ‘In view of the critical condition of the survivors of Drift Ice Station Zebra and the failure either to rescue or contact them by conventional means, the United States Navy has willingly agreed that the United States nuclear submarine Dolphin be dispatched with all speed to try to effect contact with the survivors.

“‘The Dolphin returned to its base in the Holy Loch, Scotland, at dawn this morning after carrying out extensive exercises with the Nato naval forces in the Eastern Atlantic. It is hoped that the Dolphin (Commander James D. Swanson, U.S.N., commanding) will sail at approximately 7 p.m. (G.M.T.) this evening.

‘“The laconic understatement of this communique heralds the beginning of a desperate and dangerous rescue attempt which must be without parallel in the history of the sea or the Arctic. It is now sixty hours —”’

‘“Desperate,” you said, Lieutenant?’ Rawlings frowned heavily. ‘“Dangerous,” you said? The captain will be asking for volunteers?’

‘No need. I told the captain that I’d already checked with all eighty-eight enlisted men and that they’d volunteered to a man.’

‘You never checked with me.’

‘I must have missed you out. Now kindly clam up, your executive officer is talking. “It is now sixty hours since the world was electrified to learn of the disaster which had struck Drift Ice Station Zebra, the only British meteorological station in the Arctic, when an English-speaking ham radio operator in Bodo, Norway picked up the faint SOS from the top of the world.

‘“A further message, picked up less than twenty-four hours ago by the British trawler Morning Star in the Barents Sea makes it clear that the position of the survivors of the fuel oil fire that destroyed most of Drift Ice Station Zebra in the early hours of Tuesday morning is desperate in the extreme. With their fuel oil reserves completely destroyed and their food stores all but wiped out, it is feared that those still living cannot long be expected to survive in the twenty-below temperatures — fifty degrees of frost — at present being experienced in that area.

‘“It is not known whether all the prefabricated huts, in which the expedition members lived, have been destroyed.

‘“Drift Ice Station Zebra, which was established only in the late summer of this year, is at present in an estimated position of 85° 40’ N. 21° 30’ E., which is only about three hundred miles from the North Pole. Its position cannot be known with certainty because of the clockwise drift of the polar ice-pack.

‘“For the past thirty hours long-range supersonic bombers of the American, British and Russian air forces have been scouring the polar ice-pack searching for Station Zebra. Because of the uncertainty about the Drift Station’s actual position, the complete absence of daylight in the Arctic at this time of year and the extremely bad weather conditions they were unable to locate the station and forced to return.”’

‘They didn’t have to locate it,’ Rawlings objected. ‘Not visually. With the instruments those bombers have nowadays they could home in on a humming-bird a hundred miles away. The radio operator at the Drift Station had only to keep on sending and they could have used that as a beacon.’

‘Maybe the radio operator is dead,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘Maybe his radio has packed up on him. Maybe the fuel that was destroyed was essential for running the radio. All depends what source of power he used.’

‘Diesel-electric generator,’ I said. ‘He had a standby battery of Nife cells. Maybe he’s conserving the batteries using them only for emergencies. There’s also a hand-cranked generator, but its range is pretty limited.’

‘How do you know that?’ Hansen asked quietly. ‘About the type of power used?’

‘I must have read it somewhere.’

‘You must have read it somewhere.’ He looked at me without expression, then turned back to his paper. “‘A report from Moscow,”’ he read on, ‘“states that the atomic-engined Dvina, the world’s most powerful ice-breaker, sailed from Murmansk some twenty hours ago and is proceeding at high speed towards the Arctic pack. Experts are not hopeful about the outcome for at this late period of the year the ice-pack has already thickened and compacted into a solid mass which will almost certainly defy the efforts of any vessel, even those of the Dvina, to smash its way through.

“The use of the submarine Dolphin appears to offer the only slender hope of life for the apparently doomed survivors of Station Zebra. The odds against success must be regarded as heavy in the extreme. Not only will the Dolphin have to travel several hundred miles continuously submerged under the polar ice-cap, but the possibilities of its being able to break through the ice-cap at any given place or to locate the survivors are very remote. But undoubtedly if any ship in the world can do it it is the Dolphin, the pride of the United States Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet.”’

Hansen broke off and read on silently for a minute. Then he said: ‘That’s about all. A story giving all the known details of the Dolphin. That, and a lot of ridiculous rubbish about the enlisted men in the Dolphin’s crew being the élite of the cream of the U.S. Navy.’

Rawlings looked wounded. Zabrinski, the polar bear with the red face, grinned, fished out a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Then he became serious again and said: ‘What are those crazy guys doing up there at the top of the world anyway?’

‘Meteorological, lunkhead,’ Rawlings informed him. ‘Didn’t you hear the lieutenant say so? A big word, mind you,’ he conceded generously, ‘but he made a pretty fair stab at it. Weather station to you, Zabrinski.’

‘I still say they’re crazy guys,’ Zabrinski rumbled. ‘Why do they do it, Lieutenant?’

‘I suggest you ask Dr Carpenter about it,’ Hansen said dryly. He stared through the plate-glass windows at the snow whirling greyly through the gathering darkness, his eyes bleak and remote, as if he were already visualising the doomed men drifting to their death in the frozen immensity of the polar ice-cap. ‘I think he knows a great deal more about it than I do.’

‘I know a little,’ I admitted. ‘There’s nothing mysterious or sinister about what I know. Meteorologists now regard the Arctic and the Antarctic as the two great weather factories of the world, the areas primarily responsible for the weather that affects the rest of the hemisphere. We already know a fair amount about Antarctic conditions, but practically nothing about the Arctic. So we pick a suitable ice-floe, fill it with huts crammed with technicians and all sorts of instruments and let them drift around the top of the world for six months or so. Your own people have already set up two or three of those stations. The Russians have set up at least ten, to the best of my knowledge, most of them in the East Siberian Sea.’

‘How do they establish those camps, Doc?’ Rawlings asked.

‘Different ways. Your people prefer to establish them in wintertime, when the pack freezes up enough for plane landings to be made. Someone flies out from, usually, Point Barrow in Alaska and searches around the polar pack till they find a suitable ice-floe — even when the ice is compacted and frozen together into one solid mass an expert can tell which pieces are going to remain as good-sized floes when the thaw comes and the break-in begins. Then they fly out all huts, equipment, stores and men by ski-plane and gradually build the place up.

‘The Russians prefer to use a ship in summertime. They generally use the Lenin, a nuclear-engined ice-breaker. It just batters its way into the summer pack, dumps everything and everybody on the ice and takes off before the big freeze-up starts. We used the same technique for Drift Ice Station Zebra — our one and only ice station. The Russians lent us the Lenin — all countries are only too willing to cooperate on meteorological research as everyone benefits by it — and took us pretty deep into the ice-pack north of Franz Josef Land. Zebra has already moved a good bit from its original position — the polar ice-cap, just sitting on top of the Arctic Ocean, can’t quite manage to keep up with the west-east spin of the earth so that it has a slow westward movement in relation to the earth’s crust. At the present moment it’s about four hundred miles due north of Spitzbergen.’

‘They’re still crazy,’ Zabrinski said. He was silent for a moment then looked speculatively at me. ‘You in the Limey navy, Doc?’

‘You must forgive Zabrinski’s manners, Dr Carpenter,’ Rawlings said coldly. ‘But he’s denied the advantages that the rest of us take for granted. I understand he was born in the Bronx.’

‘No offence,’ Zabrinski said equably. ‘Royal Navy, I meant. Are you, Doc?’

‘Attached to it, you might say.’

‘Loosely, no doubt,’ Rawlings nodded. ‘Why so keen on an Arctic holiday, Doc? Mighty cool up there, I can tell you.’

‘Because the men on Drift Station Zebra are going to be badly in need of medical aid. If there are any survivors, that is.’

‘We got our own medico on board and he’s no slouch with a stethoscope, or so I’ve heard from several who have survived his treatment. A well-spoken-of quack.’

‘Doctor, you ill-mannered lout,’ Zabrinski said severely.

‘That’s what I meant,’ Rawlings apologised. ‘It’s not often that I get the chance to talk to an educated man like myself, and it just kinda slipped out. The point is, the Dolphin’s already all buttoned up on the medical side.’

‘I’m sure it is.’ I smiled. ‘But any survivors we might find are going to be suffering from advanced exposure, frostbite and probably gangrene. The treatment of those is rather a speciality of mine.’

‘Is it now?’ Rawlings surveyed the depths of his coffee cup. ‘I wonder how a man gets to be a specialist in those things?’

Hansen stirred and withdrew his gaze from the darkly-white world beyond the canteen windows.

‘Dr Carpenter is not on trial for his life,’ he said mildly. ‘The counsel for the prosecution will kindly pack it in.’

They packed it in. This air of easy familiarity between officer and men, the easy camaraderie, the mutually tolerant disparagement with the deceptively misleading overtones of knock-about comedy, was something very rare in my experience but not unique. I’d seen it before, in first-line R.A.F. bomber crews, a relationship found only among a close-knit, close-living group of superbly trained experts each of whom is keenly aware of their complete interdependence. The casually informal and familiar attitude was a token not of the lack of discipline but of the complete reverse: it was the token of a very high degree of self-discipline, of the regard one man held for another not only as a highly-skilled technician in his own field but also as a human being. It was clear, too, that a list of unwritten rules governed their conduct. Offhand and frequently completely lacking in outward respect though Rawlings and Zabrinski were in their attitude towards Lieutenant Hansen, there was an invisible line of propriety over which it was inconceivable that they would ever step: for Hansen’s part, he scrupulously avoided any use of his authority when making disparaging remarks at the expense of the two enlisted men. It was also clear, as now, who was boss.

Rawlings and Zabrinski stopped questioning me and had just embarked upon an enthusiastic discussion of the demerits of the Holy Loch in particular and Scotland in general as a submarine base when a jeep swept past the canteen windows, the snow whirling whitely, thickly, through the swathe of the headlights. Rawlings jumped to his feet in mid-sentence, then subsided slowly and thoughtfully into his chair.

‘The plot,’ he announced, ‘thickens.’

‘You saw who it was?’ Hansen asked.

‘I did indeed. Andy Bandy, no less.’

‘I didn’t hear that, Rawlings,’ Hansen said coldly.

‘Vice-Admiral John Garvie, United States Navy, sir.’

‘Andy Bandy, eh?’ Hansen said pensively. He grinned at me. ‘Admiral Garvie, Officer Commanding U.S. Naval Forces in Nato. Now this is very interesting, I submit. I wonder what he’s doing here.’

‘World War III has just broken out,’ Rawlings announced. ‘It’s just about time for the Admiral’s first martini of the day and no lesser crisis -’

‘He didn’t by any chance fly down with you in that chopper from Renfrew this afternoon?’ Hansen interrupted shrewdly.

‘No.’

‘Know him, by any chance?’

‘Never even heard of him until now.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Hansen murmured.

A few minutes passed in desultory talk — the minds of Hansen and his two men were obviously very much on the reason for the arrival of Admiral Garvie — and then a snow-filled gust of chilled air swept into the canteen as the door opened and a blue-coated sailor came in and crossed to our table.

‘The captain’s compliments, Lieutenant. Would you bring Dr Carpenter to his cabin, please?’

Hansen nodded, rose to his feet and led the way outside. The snow was beginning to lie now, the darkness was coming down fast and the wind from the north was bitingly chill. Hansen made for the nearest gangway, halted at its head as he saw seamen and dockyard workers, insubstantial and spectral figures in the swirling flood-lit snow, carefully easing a slung torpedo down the for’ard hatch, turned and headed towards the after gangway. We clambered down and at the foot Hansen said: ‘Watch your step, Doc. It’s a mite slippery hereabouts.’

It was all that, but with the thought of the ice-cold waters of the Holy Loch waiting for me if I put a foot wrong I made no mistake. We passed through the hooped canvas shelter covering the after hatch and dropped down a steep metal ladder into a warm, scrupulously clean and gleaming engine-room packed with a baffling complexity of grey-painted machinery and instrument panels, its every corner brightly illuminated with shadowless fluorescent lighting.

‘Not going to blindfold me, Lieutenant?’ I asked.

‘No need.’ He grinned. ‘If you’re on the up and up, it’s not necessary. If you’re not on the up and up it’s still not necessary, for you can’t talk about what you’ve seen — not to anyone that matters — if you’re going to spend the next few years staring out from behind a set of prison bars.’

I saw his point. I followed him for’ard, our feet soundless on the black rubber decking past the tops of a couple of huge machines readily identifiable as turbo-generator sets for producing electricity. More heavy banks of instruments, a door, then a thirty-foot-long very narrow passageway. As we passed along its length I was conscious of a heavy vibrating hum from beneath my feet. The Dolphin’s nuclear reactor had to be somewhere. This would be it, here. Directly beneath us. There were circular hatches on the passageway deck and those could only be covers for the heavily-leaded glass windows, inspection ports which would provide the nearest and only approach to the nuclear furnace far below.

The end of the passage, another heavily-clipped door, and then we were into what was obviously the control centre of the Dolphin. To the left was a partitioned-off radio room, to the right a battery of machines and dialled panels of incomprehensible purpose, straight ahead a big chart table. Beyond that again, in the centre were massive mast housings and, still farther on, the periscope stand with its twin periscopes. The whole control room was twice the size of any I’d ever seen in a conventional submarine but, even so, every square inch of bulkhead space seemed to be taken up by one type or another of highly-complicated looking machines or instrument banks: even the deckhead was almost invisible, lost to sight above thickly twisted festoons of wires, cables and pipes of a score of different kinds.

The for’ard port side of the control room was for all the world like a replica of the flight-deck of a modern multi-engined jet airliner. There were two separate yoke aircraft-type control columns, facing on to banks of hooded calibrated dials. Behind the yokes were two padded leather chairs, each chair, I could see, fitted with safety-belts to hold the helmsman in place. I wondered vaguely what type of violent manoeuvres the Dolphin might be capable of when such safety-belts were obviously considered essential to strap the helmsman down.

Opposite the control platform, on the other side of the passageway leading forward from the control room, was a second partitioned-off room. There was no indication what this might be and I wasn’t given time to wonder. Hansen hurried down the passage, stopped at the first door on his left, and knocked. The door opened and Commander Swanson appeared.

‘Ah, there you are. Sorry you’ve been kept waiting, Dr Carpenter. We’re sailing at six-thirty, John’ — this to Hansen. ‘You can have everything buttoned up by then?’

‘Depends how quickly the loading of the torpedoes goes, Captain.’

‘We’re taking only six aboard.’

Hansen lifted an eyebrow, made no comment. He said: ‘Loading them into the tubes?’

‘In the racks. They have to be worked on.’

‘No spares?’

‘No spares.’

Hansen nodded and left. Swanson led me into his cabin and closed the door behind him.

Commander Swanson’s cabin was bigger than a telephone booth, I’ll say that for it, but not all that much bigger to shout about. A built-in bunk, a folding washbasin, a small writing-bureau and chair, a folding camp-stool, a locker, some calibrated repeater instrument dials above the bunk and that was it. If you’d tried to perform the twist in there you’d have fractured yourself in a dozen places without ever moving your feet from the centre of the floor.

‘Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson said, ‘I’d like you to meet Admiral Garvie, Commander U.S. Nato Naval Forces.’

Admiral Garvie put down the glass he was holding in his hand, rose from the only chair and stretched out his hand. As he stood with his feet together, the far from negligible clearance between his knees made it easy to understand the latter part of his ‘Andy Bandy’ nickname: like Hansen, he’d have been at home on the range. He was a tall florid-faced man with white hair, white eyebrows and a twinkle in the blue eyes below: he had that certain indefinable something about him common to all senior naval officers the world over, irrespective of race or nationality.

‘Glad to meet you, Dr Carpenter. Sorry for the — um — lukewarm reception you received, but Commander Swanson was perfectly within his rights in acting as he did. His men have looked after you?’

‘They permitted me to buy them a cup of coffee in the canteen.’

He smiled. ‘Opportunists all, those nuclear men. I feel that the good name of American hospitality is in danger. Whisky, Dr Carpenter?’

‘I thought American naval ships were dry, sir.’

‘So they are, my boy, so they are. Except for a little medicinal alcohol, of course. My personal supply.’ He produced a hip-flask about the size of a canteen, reached for a convenient tooth-glass. ‘Before venturing into the remoter fastnesses of the Highlands of Scotland the prudent man takes the necessary precautions. I have to make an apology to you, Dr Carpenter. I saw your Admiral Hewson in London last night and had intended to be here this morning to persuade Commander Swanson here to take you aboard. But I was delayed.’

‘Persuade, sir?’

‘Persuade.’ He sighed. ‘Our nuclear submarine captains, Dr Carpenter, are a touchy and difficult bunch. From the proprietary attitude they adopt towards their submarines you’d think that each one of them was a majority shareholder in the Electric Boat Company of Groton, where most of those boats are built.’ He raised his glass. ‘Success to the commander and yourself. I hope you manage to find those poor devils. But I don’t give you one chance in a thousand.’

‘I think we’ll find them, sir. Or Commander Swanson will.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ He added slowly, ‘Hunch?’

‘You could call it that.’

He laid down his glass and his eyes were no longer twinkling. ‘Admiral Hewson was most evasive about you, I must say. Who are you. Carpenter? What are you?’

‘Surely he told you, Admiral? Just a doctor attached to the navy to carry out —’

‘A naval doctor?’

‘Well, not exactly. I —’

‘A civilian, is it?’

I nodded, and the admiral and Swanson exchanged looks which they were at no pains at all to conceal from me. If they were happy at the prospect of having aboard America’s latest and most secret submarine a man who was not only a foreigner but a civilian to boot, they were hiding it well. Admiral Garvie said: ‘Well, go on.’

‘That’s all. I carry out environmental health studies for the services. How men react to extremes of environmental conditions, such as in the Arctic or the tropics, how they react to conditions of weightlessness in simulated space flights or to extremes of pressure when having to escape from submarines. Mainly -’

‘Submarines.’ Admiral Garvie pounced on the word. ‘You have been to sea in submarines, Dr Carpenter. Really sailed in them, I mean?’

‘I had to. We found that simulated tank escapes were no substitute for the real thing.’

The admiral and Swanson looked unhappier than ever. A foreigner — bad. A foreign civilian -worse. But a foreign civilian with at least a working knowledge of submarines — terrible. I didn’t have to be beaten over the head to see their point of view. I would have felt just as unhappy in their shoes.

‘What’s your interest in Drift Ice Station Zebra, Dr Carpenter?’ Admiral Garvie asked bluntly.

‘The Admiralty asked me to go there, sir.’

‘So I gather, so I gather,’ Garvie said wearily. ‘Admiral Hewson made that quite plain to me already. Why you, Carpenter?’

‘I have some knowledge of the Arctic, sir. I’m supposed to be an expert on the medical treatment of men subjected to prolonged exposure, frostbite and gangrene. I might be able to save lives or limbs that your own doctor aboard might not.’

‘I could have half a dozen such experts here in a few hours,’ Garvie said evenly. ‘Regular serving officers of the United States Navy, at that. That’s not enough, Carpenter.’

This was becoming difficult. I tried again. I said: ‘I know Drift Station Zebra. I helped select the site. I helped establish the camp. The commandant, a Major Halliwell, has been my closest friend for many years.’ The last was only half the truth but I felt that this was neither the time nor the place for over-elaboration.

‘Well, well,’ Garvie said thoughtfully. ‘And you still claim you’re just an ordinary doctor?’

‘My duties are flexible, sir.’

‘I’ll say they are. Well, then. Carpenter, if you’re just a common-or-garden sawbones, how do you explain this?’ He picked a signal form from the table and handed it to me. ‘This has just arrived in reply to Commander Swanson’s radioed query to Washington about you.’

I looked at the signal. It read: ‘Dr Neil Carpenter’s bonafides beyond question. He may be taken into your fullest, repeat fullest confidence. He is to be extended every facility and all aid short of actually endangering the safety of your submarine and the lives of your crew.’ It was signed by the Director of Naval Operations.

‘Very civil of the Director of Naval Operations, I must say.’ I handed back the signal. ‘With a character reference like this, what are you worrying about? That ought to satisfy anyone.’

‘It doesn’t satisfy me,’ Garvie said heavily. ‘The ultimate responsibility for the safety of the Dolphin is mine. This signal more or less gives you carte blanche to behave as you like, to ask Commander Swanson to act in ways that might be contrary to his better judgment. I can’t have that.’

‘Does it matter what you can or can’t have? You have your orders. Why don’t you obey them?’

He didn’t hit me. He didn’t even bat an eyelid. He wasn’t activated by pique about the fact that he wasn’t privy to the reason for the seeming mystery of my presence there, he was genuinely concerned about the safety of the submarine. He said: ‘If I think it more important that the Dolphin should remain on an active war footing rather than to go haring off on a wild-goose chase to the Arctic, or if I think you constitute a danger to the submarine, I can countermand the D.N.O.’s orders. I’m the C.-in-C. on the spot. And I’m not satisfied.’

This was damnably awkward. He meant every word he said and he didn’t look the type who would give a hoot for the consequences if he believed himself to be in the right. I looked at both men, looked at them slowly and speculatively, the unmistakable gaze, I hoped, of a man who was weighing others in the balance: what I was really doing was thinking up a suitable story that would satisfy both. After I had given enough time to my weighing-up — and my thinking — I dropped my voice a few decibels and said: ‘Is that door soundproof?’

‘More or less,’ Swanson said. He’d lowered his own voice to match mine.

‘I won’t insult either of you by swearing you to secrecy or any such rubbish,’ I said quietly. ‘I want to put on record the fact that what I am about to tell you I am telling you under duress, under Admiral Garvie’s threat to refuse me transport if I don’t comply with his wishes.’

‘There will be no repercussions,’ Garvie said.

‘How do you know? Not that it matters now. Well, gentlemen, the facts are these. Drift Ice Station Zebra is officially classed as an Air Ministry meteorological station. Well, it belongs to the Air Ministry all right, but there’s not more than a couple of qualified meteorologists among its entire personnel.’

Admiral Garvie refilled the tooth-glass and passed it to me without a word, without a flicker of change in his expression. The old boy certainly knew how to play it cool.

‘What you will find there,’ I went on, ‘are some of the most highly skilled men in the world in the fields of radar, radio, infra-red and electronic computers, operating the most advanced instruments ever used in those fields. We know now, never mind how, the countdown succession of signals the Russians use in the last minute before launching a missile. There’s a huge dish aerial in Zebra that can pick up and amplify any such signals within seconds of it beginning. Then long-range radar and infra-red home in on that bearing and within three minutes of the rocket’s lift-off they have its height, speed and course pin-pointed to an infinitesimal degree of error. The computers do this, of course. One minute later the information is in the hands of all the anti-missile stations between Alaska and Greenland. One minute more and solid fuel infra-red homing anti-missile rockets are on their way; then the enemy missiles will be intercepted and harmlessly destroyed while still high over the Arctic regions. If you look at a map you will see that in its present position Drift Ice Station Zebra is sitting practically on Russia’s missile doorstep. It’s hundreds of miles in advance of the present DEW line — the distant early warning system. Anyway, it renders the DEW line obsolete.’

‘I’m only the office boy around those parts,’ Garvie said quietly. ‘I’ve never heard of any of this before.’

I wasn’t surprised. I’d never heard any of it myself either, not until I’d just thought it up a moment ago. Commander Swanson’s reactions, if and when we ever got to Drift Station Zebra, were going to be very interesting. But I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. At present, my only concern was to get there.

‘Outside the Drift Station itself,’ I said, ‘I doubt if a dozen people in the world know what goes on there. But now you know. And you can appreciate how vitally important it is to the free world that this base be maintained in being. If anything has happened to it we want to find out just as quick as possible what has happened so that we can get it operating again.’

‘I still maintain that you’re not an ordinary doctor,’ Garvie smiled. ‘Commander Swanson, how soon can you get under way?’

‘Finish loading the torpedoes, move alongside the Hunley, load some final food stores, pick up extra Arctic clothing and that’s it, sir.’

‘Just like that? You said you wanted to make a slow-time dive out in the loch to check the planes and adjust the underwater trim — those missing torpedoes up front are going to make a difference you know.’

‘That’s before I heard Dr Carpenter. Now I want to get up there just as fast as he does, sir. I’ll see if immediate trim checks are necessary: if not, we can carry them out at sea.’

‘It’s your boat,’ Garvie acknowledged. ‘Where are you going to accommodate Dr Carpenter, by the way?’

‘There’s space for a cot in the Exec’s and Engineer’s cabin.’ He smiled at me. ‘I’ve already had your suitcase put in there.’

‘Did you have much trouble with the lock?’ I inquired.

He had the grace to colour slightly. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a combination lock on a suitcase,’ he admitted. ‘It was that, more than anything else — and the fact that we couldn’t open it — that made the admiral and myself so suspicious. I’ve still one or two things to discuss with the admiral, so I’ll take you to your quarters now. Dinner will be at eight to-night.’

‘I’d rather skip dinner, thanks.’

‘No one ever gets seasick on the Dolphin, I can assure you,’ Swanson smiled.

‘I’d appreciate the chance to sleep instead. I’ve had no sleep for almost three days and I’ve been travelling non-stop for the past fifty hours. I’m just tired, that’s all.’

‘That’s a fair amount of travelling.’ Swanson smiled. He seemed almost always to be smiling, and I supposed vaguely that there would be some people foolish enough to take that smile always at its face value. ‘Where were you fifty hours ago, Doctor?’

‘In the Antarctic’

Admiral Garvie gave me a very old-fashioned look indeed, but he let it go at that.

TWO

When I awoke I was still heavy with sleep, the heaviness of a man who has slept for a long time. My watch said nine-thirty, and I knew it must be the next morning, not the same evening: I had been asleep for fifteen hours.

The cabin was quite dark. I rose, fumbled for the light switch, found it and looked around. Neither Hansen nor the engineer officer was there: they must have come in after I had gone to sleep and left before I woke. I looked around some more, and then I listened. I was suddenly conscious of the almost complete quiet, the stillness, the entire lack of any perceptible motion. I might have been in the bedroom of my own house. What had gone wrong? What hold-up had occurred? Why in God’s name weren’t we under way? I’d have sworn the previous night that Commander Swanson had been just as conscious of the urgency as I had been.

I had a quick wash in the folding Pullman-type basin, passed up the need for a shave, pulled on shirt, trousers and shoes and went outside. A few feet away a door opened to starboard off the passage. I went along and walked in. The officers’ wardroom, without a doubt, with one of them still at breakfast, slowly munching his way through a huge plateful of steak, eggs and French fries, glancing at a magazine in a leisurely fashion and giving every impression of a man enjoying life to the luxurious full. He was about my own age, big, inclined to fat — a common condition, I was to find, among the entire crew who ate so well and exercised so little — with close-cropped black hair already greying at the temples and a cheerful intelligent face. He caught sight of me, rose and stretched out a hand.

‘Dr Carpenter, it must be. Welcome to the wardroom. I’m Benson. Take a seat, take a seat.’

I said something, appropriate but quick, then asked: ‘What’s wrong? What’s been the hold-up? Why aren’t we under way?’

‘That’s the trouble with the world to-day,’ Benson said mournfully. ‘Rush, rush, rush. And where does all the hurry get them? I’ll tell you —’

‘Excuse me. I must see the captain.’ I turned to leave but he laid a hand on my arm.

‘Relax, Dr Carpenter. We are at sea. Take a seat.’

‘At sea? On the level? I don’t feel a thing.’

‘You never do when you’re three hundred feet down. Maybe four hundred. I don’t,’ he said expansively, ‘concern myself with those trifles. I leave them to the mechanics.’

‘Mechanics?’

‘The captain, engineer officer, people like those.’ He waved a hand in a generously vague gesture to indicate the largeness of the concept he understood by the term ‘mechanics’. ‘Hungry?’

‘We’ve cleared the Clyde?’

‘Unless the Clyde extends to well beyond the north of Scotland, the answer to that is, yes, we have.’

‘Come again?’

He grinned. ‘At the last check we were well into the Norwegian Sea, about the latitude of Bergen.’

‘This is still only Tuesday morning?’ I don’t know if I looked stupid: I certainly felt it.

‘It’s still only Tuesday morning.’ He laughed. ‘And if you can work out from that what kind of speed we have been making in the last fifteen hours we’d all be obliged if you’d keep it to yourself.’ He leaned back in his seat and lifted his voice. ‘Henry!’

A steward, white-jacketed, appeared from what I took to be the pantry. He was a tall thin character with a dark complexion and the long lugubrious face of a dyspeptic spaniel. He looked at Benson and said in a meaningful voice: ‘Another plate of French fries, Doc?’

‘You know very well that I never have more than one helping of that carbohydrated rubbish,’ Benson said with dignity. ‘Not, at least, for breakfast. Henry, this is Dr Carpenter.’

‘Howdy,’ Henry said agreeably.

‘Breakfast, Henry,’ Benson said. ‘And, remember, Dr Carpenter is a Britisher. We don’t want him leaving with a low opinion of the chow served up in the United States Navy.’

‘If anyone aboard this ship has a low opinion of the food,’ Henry said darkly, ‘they hide it pretty well. Breakfast. The works. Right away.’

‘Not the works, for heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘There are some things we decadent Britishers can’t face up to first thing in the morning. One of them is French fries.’

He nodded approvingly and left. I said: ‘Dr Benson, I gather.’

‘Resident medical officer aboard the Dolphin, no less,’ he admitted. ‘The one who’s had his professional competence called into question by having a competing practitioner called in.’

‘I’m along for the ride. I assure you I’m not competing with anyone.’

‘I know you’re not,’ he said quickly. Too quickly. Quickly enough so that I could see Swanson’s hand in this, could see him telling his officers to lay off quizzing Carpenter too much. I wondered again what Swanson was going to say when and if we ever arrived at the Drift Station and he found out just how fluent a liar I was. Benson went on, smiling: ‘There’s no call for even one medico aboard this boat, far less two.’

‘You’re not overworked?’ From the leisurely way he was going about his breakfast it seemed unlikely.

‘Overworked! I’ve sick-bay call once a day and no one ever turns up — except the morning after we arrive in port with a long cruise behind us and then there are liable to be a few sore heads around. My main job, and what is supposed to be my speciality, is checking on radiation and atmosphere pollution of one kind or another — in the olden submarine days the atmosphere used to get pretty foul after only a few hours submerged but we have to stay down for months, if necessary.’ He grinned. ‘Neither job is very exacting. We issue each member of the crew with a dosimeter and periodically check a film badge for radiation dosage — which is invariably less than you’d get sitting on the beach on a moderately warm day.

‘The atmospheric problem is even easier. Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are the only things we have to worry about. We have a scrubbing machine that absorbs the breathed-out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumps it out into the sea. Carbon monoxide — which we could more or less eliminate if we forbade cigarette smoking, only we don’t want a mutiny on our hands when we’re three hundred feet down — is burned to dioxide by a special heater and then scrubbed as usual. And even that hardly worries me, I’ve a very competent engineman who keeps those machines in tip-top condition.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve a surgery here that will delight your heart, Dr Carpenter. Operating table, dentist’s chair, the lot, and the biggest crisis I’ve had yet is a cigarette burn between the fingers sustained by a cook who fell asleep during one of the lectures.’

‘Lectures?’

‘I’ve got to do something if I’m not to go round the bend. I spend a couple of hours a day keeping up with all the latest medical literature but what good is that if you don’t get a chance to practise it? So I lecture. I read up about places we’re going to visit and everyone listens to those talks. I give lectures on general health and hygiene and some of them listen to those. I give lectures on the perils of overeating and under-exercise and no one listens to those. I don’t listen to them myself. It was during one of those that the cook got burned. That’s why our friend Henry, the steward, adopts his superior and critical attitude towards the eating habits of those who should obviously be watching their habits. He eats as much as any two men aboard but owing to some metabolic defect he remains as thin as a rake. Claims it’s all due to dieting.’

‘It all sounds a bit less rigorous than the life of the average G.P.’

‘It is, it is.’ He brightened. ‘But I’ve got one job — a hobby to me — that the average G.P. can’t have. The ice-machine. I’ve made myself an expert on that.’

‘What does Henry think about it?’

‘What? Henry?’ He laughed. ‘Not that kind of ice-machine. I’ll show you later.’

Henry brought food and I’d have liked the maîtres d’hôtel of some allegedly five-star hotels in London to be there to see what a breakfast should be like. When I’d finished and told Benson that I didn’t see that his lectures on the dangers of overweight were going to get him very far, he said: ‘Commander Swanson said you might like to see over the ship. I’m at your complete disposal.’

‘Very kind of you both. But first I’d like to shave, dress and have a word with the captain.’

‘Shave if you like. No one insists on it. As for dress, shirt and pants are the rig of the day here. And the captain told me to tell you that he’d let you know immediately anything came through that could possibly be of any interest to you.’

So I shaved and then had Benson take me on a conducted tour of this city under the sea: the Dolphin, I had to admit, made any British submarine I’d ever seen look like a relic from the Ice Age.

To begin with, the sheer size of the vessel was staggering. So big had the hull to be to accommodate the huge nuclear reactor that it had internal accommodation equivalent to that of a 3,000-ton surface ship, with three decks instead of the usual one and lower hold found in the conventional submarine. The size, combined with the clever use of pastel paints for all accommodation spaces, working spaces and passageways, gave an overwhelming impression of lightness, airiness and above all, spaciousness.

He took me first, inevitably, to his sick-bay. It was at once the smallest and most comprehensively equipped surgery I’d ever seen, whether a man wanted a major operation or just a tooth filled, he could have himself accommodated there. Neither clinical nor utilitarian, however, was the motif Benson had adopted for the decoration of the one bulkhead in his surgery completely free from surgical or medical equipment of any kind — a series of film stills in colour featuring every cartoon character I’d ever seen, from Popeye to Pinocchio, with, as a two-foot square centrepiece, an immaculately cravatted Yogi Bear industriously sawing off from the top of a wooden signpost the first word of a legend which read ‘Don’t feed the bears.’ From deck to deckhead, the bulkhead was covered with them.

‘Makes a change from the usual pin-ups,’ I observed.

‘I get inundated with those, too,’ Benson said regretfully. ‘Film librarian, you know. Can’t use them, supposed to be bad for discipline. However. Lightens the morgue-like atmosphere, what? Cheers up the sick and suffering, I like to think -and distracts their attention while I turn up page 217 in the old textbook to find out what’s the matter with them.’

From the surgery we passed through the wardroom and officers’ quarters and dropped down a deck to the crew’s living quarters. Benson took me through the gleaming tiled washrooms, the immaculate bunk-room, then into the crew’s mess hall.

‘The heart of the ship,’ he announced. ‘Not the nuclear reactor, as the uninformed maintain, but here. Just look at it. Hifi, jukebox, record player, coffee machine, ice-cream machine, movie theatre, library and the home of all the card-sharps on the ship. What chance has a nuclear reactor against this lot? The old-time submariners would turn in their graves if they could see this: compared to the prehistoric conditions they lived in we must seem completely spoiled and ruined. Maybe we are, then again maybe we’re not: the old boys never had to stay submerged for months at a time. This is also where I send them to sleep with my lectures on the evils of overeating.’ He raised his voice for the benefit of seven or eight men who were sitting about the tables, drinking coffee, smoking and reading. ‘You can observe for yourself, Dr Carpenter, the effects of my lectures in dieting and keeping fit. Did you ever see a bunch of more out-of-condition fat-bellied slobs in your life?’

The men grinned cheerfully. They were obviously well used to this sort of thing: Benson was exaggerating and they knew it. Each of them looked as if he knew what to do with a knife and fork when he got them in his hands, but that was about as far as it went. All had a curious similarity, big men and small men, the same characteristic as I’d seen in Zabrinski and Rawlings — an air of calmly relaxed competence, a cheerful imperturbability, that marked them out as being the men apart that they undoubtedly were.

Benson conscientiously introduced me to everyone, telling me exactly what their function aboard ship was and in turn informing them that I was a Royal Navy doctor along for an acclimatisation trip. Swanson would have told him to say this, it was near enough the truth and would stop speculation on the reason for my presence there.

Benson turned into a small compartment leading off the mess hall. ‘The air purification room. This is Engineman Harrison. How’s our box of tricks, Harrison?’

‘Just fine, Doc, just fine. CO reading steady on thirty parts a million.’ He entered some figures up in a log book, Benson signed it with a flourish, exchanged a few more remarks and left.

‘Half my day’s toil done with one stroke of the pen,’ he observed. ‘I take it you’re not interested in inspecting sacks of wheat, sides of beef, bags of potatoes and about a hundred different varieties of canned goods.’

‘Not particularly. Why?’

‘The entire for’ard half of the deck beneath our feet — a storage hold, really — is given up mainly to that. Seems an awful lot, I know, but then a hundred men can get through an awful lot of food in three months, which is the minimum time we must be prepared to stay at sea if the need arises. We’ll pass up the inspection of the stores, the sight of all that food just makes me feel I’m fighting a losing battle all the time, and have a look where the food’s cooked.’

He led the way for’ard into the galley, a small square room all tiles and glittering stainless steel. A tall, burly, white-coated cook turned at our entrance and grinned at Benson. ‘Come to sample to-day’s lunch, Doc?’

‘I have not,’ Benson said coldly. ‘Dr Carpenter, the chief cook and my arch-enemy, Sam MacGuire. What form does the excess of calories take that you are proposing to thrust down the throats of the crew to-day?’

‘No thrusting required,’ said MacGuire happily. ‘Cream soup, sirloin of beef, no less, roast potatoes and as much apple pie as a man can cope with. All good nourishing food.’

Benson shuddered. He made to leave the galley, stopped and pointed at a heavy bronze ten-inch tube that stood about four feet above the deck of the galley. It had a heavy hinged lid and screwed clamps to keep the lid in position. ‘This might interest you, Dr Carpenter. Guess what?’

‘A pressure cooker?’

‘Looks like it, doesn’t it? This is our garbage disposal unit. In the old days when a submarine had to surface every few hours garbage disposal was no problem, you just tipped the stuff over the side. But when you spend weeks on end cruising at three hundred feet you can’t just walk up to the upper deck and tip the waste over the side: garbage disposal becomes quite a problem. This tube goes right down to the bottom of the Dolphin. There’s a heavy watertight door at the lower end corresponding to this one, with interlocking controls which make it impossible for both doors to be open at the same time — it would be curtains for the Dolphin if they were. Sam here, or one of his henchmen, sticks the garbage into nylon mesh or polythene bags, weighs them with bricks —’

‘Bricks, you said?’

‘Bricks. Sam, how many bricks aboard this ship?’

‘Just over a thousand at the latest count, Doc.’

‘Regular builder’s yard, aren’t we?’ Benson grinned. ‘Those bricks are to ensure that the garbage bags sink to the bottom of the sea and not float to the surface — even in peacetime we don’t want to give our position away to anyone. In go three or four bags, the top door is clamped shut and the bags pumped out under pressure. Then the outer door is closed again. Simple.’

‘Yes.’ For some reason or other this odd contraption had a curious fascination for me. Days later I was to remember my inexplicable interest in it and wonder whether, after all, I wasn’t becoming psychic with advancing years.

‘It’s not worth all that attention,’ Benson said good-humouredly. ‘Just an up-to-date version of the old rubbish chute. Come on, a long way to go yet.’

He led the way from the galley to a heavy steel door set in a transverse bulkhead. Eight massive clips to release, then replace after we had passed through the doorway.

‘The for’ard torpedo storage room.’ Benson’s voice was lowered, for at least half of the sixteen or so bunks that lined the bulkheads or were jammed up close to the torpedoes and racks were occupied and every man occupying them was sound asleep. ‘Only six torpedoes as you can see. Normally there’s stowage for twelve plus another six constantly kept loaded in the torpedo tubes. But those six are all we have just now. We had a malfunction in two of our torpedoes of the newest and more or less untested radio-controlled type — during the Nato exercises just ended — and Admiral Garvie ordered the lot removed for inspection when we got back to the Holy Loch. The Hunley, that’s our depot ship, carries experts for working on those things. However, they were no sooner taken off yesterday morning than this Drift Station operation came our way and Commander Swanson insisted on having at least six of them put back on straight away.’ Benson grinned. ‘If there’s one thing a submarine skipper hates it’s putting to sea without his torpedoes. He feels he might just as well stay at home.’

‘Those torpedoes are still not operational?’

‘I don’t know whether they are or not. Our sleeping warriors here will do their best to find out when they come to.’

‘Why aren’t they working on them now?’

‘Because before our return to the Clyde they were working on them for nearly sixty hours nonstop trying to find out the cause of the malfunction — and if it existed in the other torpedoes. I told the skipper that if he wanted to blow up the Dolphin as good a way as any was to let those torpedomen keep on working — they were starting to stagger around like zombies and a zombie is the last person you want to have working on the highly-complicated innards of a torpedo. So he pulled them off.’

He walked the length of the gleaming torpedoes and halted before another steel door in a cross bulkhead. He opened this, and beyond, four feet away, was another such heavy door set in another such bulkhead. The sills were about eighteen inches above deck level.

‘You don’t take many chances in building these boats, do you?’ I asked. ‘It’s like breaking into the Bank of England.’

‘Being a nuclear sub doesn’t mean that we’re not as vulnerable to underwater hazards as the older ships,’ Benson said. ‘We are. Ships have been lost before because the collision bulkhead gave way. The hull of the Dolphin can withstand terrific pressures, but a relatively minor tap from a sharp-edged object can rip us wide like an electric can-opener. The biggest danger is surface collision which nearly always happens at the bows. So, to make doubly sure in the event of a bows collision, we have those double collision bulkheads — the first submarine ever to have them. Makes fore and aft movement here a bit difficult but you’ve no idea how much more soundly we all sleep at night.’

He closed the after door behind him and opened the for’ard one: we found ourselves in the for’ard torpedo room, a narrow cramped compartment barely long enough to permit torpedoes to be loaded or withdrawn from their tubes. Those tubes, with their heavy-hinged rear doors, were arranged close together in two vertical banks of three. Overhead were the loading rails with heavy chain tackles attached. And that was all. No bunks in here and I didn’t wonder: I wouldn’t have liked to be the one to sleep for’ard of those collision bulkheads.

We began to work our way aft and had reached the mess hall when a sailor came up and said that the captain wanted to see me. I followed him up the wide central stairway into the control room, Dr Benson a few paces behind to show that he wasn’t being too inquisitive. Commander Swanson was waiting for me by the door of the radio room.

‘Morning, Doctor. Slept well?’

‘Fifteen hours. What do you think? And breakfasted even better. What’s up, Commander?’ Something was up, that was for sure: for once, Commander Swanson wasn’t smiling.

‘Message coming through about Drift Station Zebra. Has to be decoded first but that should take minutes only.’ Decoding or not, it seemed to me that Swanson already had a fair idea of the content of that message.

‘When did we surface?’ I asked. A submarine loses radio contact as soon as it submerges.

‘Not since we left the Clyde. We are close on three hundred feet down right now.’

‘This is a radio message that’s coming through?’

‘What else? Times have changed. We still have to surface to transmit but we can receive down to our maximum depth. Somewhere in Connecticut is the world’s largest radio transmitter using an extremely low frequency which can contact us at this depth far more easily than any other radio station can contact a surface ship. While we’re waiting, come and meet the drivers.’

He introduced me to some of his control centre crew — as with Benson it seemed to be a matter of complete indifference to him whether it was officer or enlisted man — finally stopped by an officer sitting just aft of the periscope stand, a youngster who looked as if he should still be in high school. ‘Will Raeburn,’ Swanson said. ‘Normally we pay no attention to him but after we move under the ice he becomes the most important man on the ship. Our navigation officer. Are we lost, Will?’

‘We’re just there, Captain.’ He pointed to a tiny pinpoint of light on the Norwegian Sea chart spread out below the glass on the plotting-table. ‘Gyro and sins are checking to a hair.’

‘Sins?’ I said.

‘You may well look surprised, Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson said.

‘Lieutenant Raeburn here is far too young to have any sins. He is referring to S.I.N.S. — Ship’s Inertial Navigational System — a device once used for guiding intercontinental missiles and now adapted for submarine use, specifically nuclear submarines. No point in my elaborating, Will’s ready to talk your head off about it if he manages to corner you.’ He glanced at the chart position. ‘Are we getting along quickly enough to suit you, Doctor?’

‘I still don’t believe it,’ I said.

‘We cleared the Holy Loch a bit earlier than I expected, before seven,’ Swanson admitted. ‘I had intended to carry out some slow-time dives to adjust trim — but it wasn’t necessary. Even the lack of twelve torpedoes up in the nose didn’t make her as stern-heavy as I’d expected. She’s so damned big that a few tons more or less here or there doesn’t seem to make any difference to her. So we just came haring on up —’

He broke off to accept a signal sheet from a sailor, and read through it slowly, taking his time about it. Then he jerked his head, walked to a quiet corner of the control centre and faced me as I came up to him. He still wasn’t smiling.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Major Halliwell, the commandant of the Drift Station — you said last night he was a very close friend of yours?’

I felt my mouth begin to go dry. I nodded, took the message from him. It read: ‘A further radio message, very broken and difficult to decipher, was received 0945 Greenwich Mean Time from Drift Ice Station Zebra by the British trawler Morning Star, the vessel that picked up the previous broadcast. Message stated that Major Halliwell, Officer Commanding, and three others unnamed critically injured or dead, no indication who or how many of the four are dead. Others, number again unknown, suffering severely from burns and exposure. Some message about food and fuel, atmospheric conditions and weakness in transmission made it quite indecipherable. Understood from very garbled signal that survivors in one hut, unable to move because of weather. Word ‘ice-storm’ clearly picked up. Apparently details of wind speed and temperature but unable to make out.

‘Morning Star several times attempted contact Drift Station Zebra immediately afterwards. No acknowledgment.

‘Morning Star, at request of British Admiralty, has abandoned fishing grounds and is moving closer in to Barrier to act as listening post. Message ends.’

I folded the paper and handed it back to Swanson. He said again: ‘Sorry about this. Carpenter.’

‘Critically injured or dead,’ I said. ‘In a burnt-out station on the ice-cap in winter, what’s the difference?’ My voice fell upon my ears as the voice of another man, a voice flat and lifeless, a voice empty of all emotion. ‘Johnny Halliwell and three of his men. Johnny Halliwell. Not the kind of man you would meet often. Commander. A remarkable man. Left school at fifteen when his parents died to devote himself to the support of a brother eight years younger than himself. He slaved, he scraped, he sacrificed, he devoted many of the best years of his life to doing everything for his young brother, including putting him through a six-year University course. Not till then did he think of himself, not till then did he get married. He leaves a lovely wife and three marvellous kids. Two nieces and a nephew not yet six months old.’

‘Two nieces —’ He broke off and stared at me. ‘Good God, your brother? Your brother?’ He didn’t, for the moment, seem to find anything peculiar in the difference of surname.

I nodded silently. Young Lieutenant Raeburn approached us, an odd expression of anxiety on his face, but Swanson abruptly waved him away without seeming even to glance in his direction. He shook his head slowly and was still shaking it when I said abruptly: ‘He’s tough. He may be one of the survivors. He may live. We must get Drift Station Zebra’s position. We must get it.’

‘Maybe they haven’t got it themselves,’ Swanson said. You could see he was grateful for something to talk about. ‘It is a drifting station, remember. The weather being what it is, it may have been days since they got their last fixes -and for all we know their sextants, chronometers and radio direction finders have been lost in the fire.’

‘They must know what their latest fix was, even although it was a week ago. They must have a fairly accurate idea of the speed and direction of their drift. They’ll be able to provide approximate data. The Morning Star must be told to keep transmitting non-stop with a continuous request for their position. If you surface now, can you contact the Morning Star?’

‘I doubt it. The trawler must be the best part of a thousand miles north of us. His receiver wouldn’t be big enough to pull us in — which is another way of saying that our transmitter is too small.’

‘The B.B.C. have plenty of transmitters that are big enough. So have the Admiralty. Please ask one or other to contact the Morning Star and ask it to make a continuous send for Zebra’s position.’

‘They could do that themselves direct.’

‘Sure they could. But they couldn’t hear the reply. The Morning Star can — if there’s any reply. And she’s getting closer to them all the time.’

‘We’ll surface now,’ Swanson nodded. He turned away from the chart table we’d been standing beside and headed for the diving stand. As he passed the plotting table he said to the navigator: ‘What was it you wanted, Will?’

Lieutenant Raeburn turned his back on me and lowered his voice, but my hearing has always been a little abnormal. He whispered: ‘Did you see his face, Captain? I thought he was going to haul off and clobber you one.’

‘I thought the same thing myself,’ Swanson murmured. ‘For a moment. But I think I just happened to be in his line of vision, that’s all.’

I went forward to my cabin and lay down in the cot.

THREE

‘There it is, then,’ said Swanson. ‘That’s the Barrier.’

The Dolphin, heading due north, her great cylindrical bulk at one moment completely submerged, the next showing clear as she rolled heavily through the steep quartering seas, was making less than three knots through the water, the great nuclear-powered engines providing just enough thrust to the big twin eight-foot propellers to provide steerage way and no more: thirty feet below where we stood on the bridge the finest sonar equipment in the world was ceaselessly probing the waters all around us but even so Swanson was taking no chances on the effects of collision with a drifting ice-block. The noonday Arctic sky was so overcast that the light was no better than that of late dusk. The bridge thermometer showed the sea temperature as 28° R, the air temperature as -16° F. The gale-force wind from the north-east was snatching the tops off the rolling steel-grey waves and subjecting the steep-walled sides of the great conning-tower — sail, the crew called it — to the ceaseless battering of a bullet-driven spray that turned to solid ice even as it struck. The cold was intense.

Shivering uncontrollably, wrapped in heavy duffel-coat and oilskins and huddled against the illusory shelter of the canvas wind-dodger, I followed the line of Swanson’s pointing arm: even above the high thin shrill whine of the wind and the drum-fire of the flying spray against the sail, I could hear the violent chattering of his teeth. Less than two miles away a long, thin, greyish-white line, at that distance apparently smooth and regular, seemed to stretch the entire width of the northern horizon. I’d seen it before and it wasn’t much to look at but it was a sight a man never got used to, not because of itself but because of what it represented, the beginning of the polar ice-cap that covered the top of the world, at this time of year a solid compacted mass of ice that stretched clear from where we lay right across to Alaska on the other side of the world. And we had to go under that mass. We had to go under it to find men hundreds of miles away, men who might be already dying, men who might be already dead. Who probably were dead. Men, dying or dead, whom we had to seek out by guess and by God in that great wasteland of ice stretching out endlessly before us, for we did not know where they were.

The relayed radio message we had received just forty-nine hours previously had been the last. Since then, there had been only silence. The trawler Morning Star had been sending almost continuously in the intervening two days, trying to raise Drift Station Zebra, but out of that bleak desert of ice to the north had come nothing but silence. No word, no signal, no faintest whisper of sound had come out of that desolation.

Eighteen hours previously the Russian atomic-engined Dvina had reached the Barrier and had started on an all-out and desperate attempt to smash its way into the heart of the ice-cap. In this early stage of winter the ice was neither so thick nor so compacted as it would be at the time of its maximum density, in March, and the very heavily armoured and powerfully engined Dvina was reputed to be able to break through ice up to a thickness of eighteen feet: given fair conditions, the Dvina was widely believed to be capable of battering its way to the North Pole. But the conditions of the rafted ice had proved abnormal to a degree and the attempt a hopeless one. The Dvina had managed to crash its way over forty miles into the ice-cap before being permanently stopped by a thick wall of rafted ice over twenty feet in height and probably more than a hundred deep. The Dvina, according to reports, had sustained heavy damage to its bows and was still in the process of extricating itself, with the greatest difficulty, from the pack. A very gallant effort that had achieved nothing except an improvement in East-West relations to an extent undreamed of for many years.

Nor had the Russian efforts stopped there. Both they and the Americans had made several flights over the area with front-line long-range bombers. Through the deep overcast and driving ice-and snow-filled winds those planes had criss-crossed the suspected area a hundred times, searching with their fantastically accurate radar. But not one single radar sighting had been reported. Various reasons had been put forward to explain the failure, especially the failure of the Strategic Air Command’s B52 bomber whose radar was known to be easily capable of picking out a hut against contrasting background from ten thousand feet and in pitch darkness. It had been suggested that the huts were no longer there: that the radar’s eye was unable to distinguish between an ice-sheathed hut and the thousands of ice-hummocks which dot the polar cap in winter; and that they had been searching in the wrong area in the first place. The most probable explanation was that the radar waves had been blurred and deflated by the dense clouds of ice-spicules blowing over the area. Whatever the reason, Drift Ice Station Zebra remained as silent as if no life had ever been there, as lost as if it had never existed.

‘There’s no percentage in staying up here and getting frozen to death.’ Commander Swanson’s voice was a half-shout, it had to be to make him heard. ‘If we’re going under that ice, we might as well go now.’ He turned his back to the wind and stared out to the west where a big broad-beamed trawler was rolling heavily and sluggishly in the seas less than a quarter of a mile away. The Morning Star, which had closed right up to the edge of the ice-pack over the last two days, listening, waiting, and all in vain, was about to return to Hull: her fuel reserves were running low.

‘Make a signal,’ Swanson said to the seaman by his side. ‘“We are about to dive and proceed under the ice. We do not expect to emerge for minimum four days, are prepared to remain maximum fourteen.”’ He turned to me and said: ‘If we can’t find them in that time …’ and left the sentence unfinished.

I nodded, and he went on: ‘“Many thanks for your splendid cooperation. Good luck and a safe trip home.”’ As the signalman’s lamp started chattering out its message, he said wonderingly: ‘Do those fishermen trawl up in the Arctic the entire winter?’

‘They do.’

‘The whole winter. Fifteen minutes and I’m about dead. Just a bunch of decadent Limeys, that’s what they are.’ A lamp aboard the Morning Star flickered for some seconds and Swanson said: ‘What reply?’

‘“Mind your heads under that ice. Good luck and goodbye.”’

‘Everybody below,’ Swanson said. As the signalman began to strip the canvas dodger I dropped down a ladder into a small compartment beneath, wriggled through a hatch and down a second ladder to the pressure hull of the submarine, another hatch, a third ladder and then I was on the control deck of the Dolphin. Swanson and the signalman followed, then last of all Hansen, who had to close the two heavy watertight doors above.

Commander Swanson’s diving technique would have proved a vast disappointment to those brought up on a diet of movie submarines. No frenzied activity, no tense steely-eyed men hovering over controls, no Tannoy calls of ‘Dive, dive, dive,’ no blaring of klaxons. Swanson reached down a steel-spring microphone, said quietly: ‘This is the captain. We are about to move under the ice. Diving now,’ hung up and said: ‘Three hundred feet.’

The chief electronics technician leisurely checked the rows of lights indicating all hatches, surface openings and valves closed to the sea. The disc lights were out: the slot lights burned brightly. Just as leisurely he re-checked them, glanced at Swanson and said: ‘Straight line shut, sir.’ Swanson nodded. Air hissed loudly out of the ballast tanks, and that was it. We were on our way. It was about as wildly exciting as watching a man push a wheelbarrow. And there was something oddly reassuring about it all.

Ten minutes later Swanson came up to me. In the past two days I’d come to know Commander Swanson fairly well, like him a lot and respect him tremendously. The crew had complete and implicit faith in him. I was beginning to have the same thing. He was a kindly genial man with a vast knowledge of every aspect of submarining, a remarkable eye for detail, an even more remarkably acute mind and an imperturbability that remained absolute under all conditions. Hansen, his executive officer and clearly no respecter of persons, had said flatly that Swanson was the best submarine officer in the Navy. I hoped he was right, that was the kind of man I wanted around in conditions like those.

‘We’re about to move under the ice now, Dr Carpenter,’ he said. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘I’d feel better if I could see where we were going.’

‘We can see,’ he said. ‘We’ve the best eyes in the world aboard the Dolphin. We’ve got eyes that look down, around, ahead and straight up. Our downward eye is the fathometer or echo-sounder that tells us just how deep the water below our keel is — and as we have about five thousand feet of water below our keel at this particular spot we’re hardly likely to bump into underwater projections and its use right now is purely a formality. But no responsible navigation officer would ever think of switching it off. We have two sonar eyes for looking around and ahead, one sweeping the ship, another searching out a fifteen-degree path on either side of the bow. Sees everything, hears everything. You drop a spanner on a warship twenty miles away and we know all about it. Fact. Again it seems purely a formality. The sonar is searching for underwater ice stalactites forced down by the pressure of rafted ice above, but in five trips under the ice and two to the Pole I’ve never seen underwater stalactites or ridges deeper than 200 feet, and we’re at 300 feet now. But we still keep them on.’

‘You might bump into a whale?’ I suggested.

‘We might bump into another submarine.’ He wasn’t smiling. ‘And that would be the end of both of us. What with the Russian and our own nuclear submarines busy criss-crossing to and fro across the top of the world the underside of the polar ice-cap is getting more like Times Square every day.’

‘But surely the chances -’

‘What are the chances of mid-air collision to the only two aircraft occupying ten thousand square miles of sky? On paper, they don’t exist. There have been three such collisions this year already. So we keep the sonar pinging. But the really important eye, when you’re under the ice, is the one that looks up. Come and have a squint at it.’

He led the way to the after starboard end of the control room where Dr Benson and another man were busy studying a glassed-in eye-level machine which outwardly consisted of a seven-inch-wide moving ribbon of paper and an inked stylus that was tracing a narrow straight black line along it. Benson was engrossed in adjusting some of the calibrated controls.

‘The surface fathometer,’ Swanson said. ‘Better known as the ice-machine. It’s not really Dr Benson’s machine at all, we have two trained operators aboard, but as we see no way of separating him from it without actually court-martialling him, we take the easy way out and let him be.’ Benson grinned, but his eye didn’t leave the line traced by the stylus. ‘Same principle as the echo-sounding machine, it just bounces an echo back from the ice — when there is any. That thin black line you see means open water above. When we move under the ice the stylus has an added vertical motion which not only indicates the presence of ice but also gives us its thickness.’

‘Ingenious,’ I said.

‘It’s more than that. Under the ice it can be life or death for the Dolphin. It certainly means life or death for Drift Station Zebra. If we ever get its position we can’t get at it until we break through the ice and this is the only machine that can tell us where the ice is thinnest.’

‘No open water at this time of year? No leads?’

‘Polynyas, we call them. None. Mind you, the ice-pack is never static, not even in winter, and surface pressure changes can very occasionally tear the ice apart and expose open water. With air temperatures such as you get in winter you can guess how long the open water stays in a liquid condition. There’s a skin of ice on it in five minutes, an inch in an hour and a foot inside two days. If we get to one of those frozen over polynyas inside, say, three days, we’ve a fair chance of breaking through.’

‘With the conning-tower?’

‘That’s it. The sail. All new nuclear subs have specially strengthened sails designed for one purpose only — breaking through Arctic ice. Even so we have to go pretty gently as the shock, of course, is transmitted to the pressure hull.’

I thought about this a bit then said: ‘What happens to the pressure hull if you come up too fast — as I understand may happen with a sudden change in salinity and sea temperature — and you find out at the last minute that you’ve drifted away from the indicated area of thin ice and have ten solid feet of the stuff above you?’

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Like you say, it’s the last minute. Don’t even think about such things, far less talk about them: I can’t afford to have nightmares on this job.’ I looked at him closely, but he wasn’t smiling any more. He lowered his voice. ‘I don’t honestly think that there is one member of the crew of the Dolphin who doesn’t get a little bit scared when we move in under the ice. I know I do. I think this is the finest ship in the world, Dr Carpenter, but there are still a hundred things that can go wrong with it and if anything happens to the reactor or the steam turbines or the electrical generators — then we’re already in our coffin and the lid screwed down. The ice-pack above is the coffin lid. In the open sea most of those things don’t matter a damn — we just surface or go to snorkel depth and proceed on our diesels. But for diesels you need air — and there’s no air under the ice-pack. So if anything happens we either find a polynya to surface in, one chance in ten thousand at this time of year, before our standby battery packs up or — well, that’s it.’

‘This is all very encouraging,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it?’ He smiled, none too soon for me. ‘It’ll never happen. What’s the worthy Benson making all the racket about?’

‘Here it is,’ Benson called. ‘The first drift-block. And another. And another! Come and have a look, Doctor.’

I had a look. The stylus, making a faint soft hissing sound, was no longer tracing out a continuously horizontal line but was moving rapidly up and down across the paper, tracing out the outline of the block of ice passing astern above us. Another thin straight line, more agitated vertical movements of the stylus, and again another block of ice had gone. Even as I watched the number of thin horizontal lines became fewer and fewer and shorter and shorter until eventually they disappeared altogether.

‘That’s it, then,’ Swanson nodded. ‘We’ll take her deep now, real deep, and open up all the stops.’

When Commander Swanson had said he was going to hurry, he’d meant every word of it. In the early hours of the following morning I was awakened from a deep sleep by a heavy hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes, blinked against the glare of the overhead light then saw Lieutenant Hansen.

‘Sorry about the beauty sleep, Doc,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But this is it.’

‘This is what?’ I said irritably.

‘85° 35’ north, 21° 20’ east — the last estimated position of Drift Station Zebra. At least, the last estimated position with estimated correction for polar drift.’

‘Already?’ I glanced at my watch, not believing it. ‘We’re there already?’

‘We have not,’ Hansen said modestly, ‘been idling. The skipper suggests you come along and watch us at work.’

‘I’ll be right with you.’ When and if the Dolphin managed to break through the ice and began to try her one in a million chance of contacting Drift Station Zebra, I wanted to be there.

We left Hansen’s cabin and had almost reached the control room when I lurched, staggered and would have fallen but for a quick grab at a handrail that ran along one side of the passageway. I hung on grimly as the Dolphin banked violently sideways and round like a fighter plane in a tight turn. No submarine in my experience had ever been able to begin to behave even remotely in that fashion. I understood now the reasons for the safety belts on the diving control seats.

‘What the hell’s up?’ I said to Hansen. ‘Avoiding some underwater obstruction ahead?’

‘Must be a possible polynya. Some place where the ice is thin, anyway. As soon as we spot a possible like that we come around like a chicken chasing its own tail just so we don’t miss it. It makes us very popular with the crew, especially when they’re drinking coffee or soup.’

We passed into the control room. Commander Swanson, flanked by the navigator and another man, was bent over the plotting table, examining something intently. Farther aft a man at the surface fathometer was reading out ice thickness figures in a quiet unemotional voice. Commander Swanson looked up from the chart.

‘Morning, Doctor. John, I think we may have something here.’

Hansen crossed to the plot and peered at it. There didn’t seem to be much to peer at — a tiny pin-point of light shining through the glass top of the plot and a squared sheet of chart paper marked by a most unseamanlike series of wavering black lines traced out by a man with a pencil following the track of the tiny moving light. There were three red crosses superimposed on the paper, two very close together, and just as Hansen was examining the paper the crewman manning the ice-machine — Dr Benson’s enthusiasm for his toy did not, it appeared, extend to the middle of the night — called out ‘Mark!’ Immediately the black pencil was exchanged for a red and a fourth cross made.

‘“Think” and “may” are just about right, Captain,’ Hansen said. ‘It looks awfully narrow to me.’

‘It looks the same way to me, too,’ Swanson admitted. ‘But it’s the first break in the heavy ice that we’ve had in an hour, almost. And the farther north we go, the poorer our chances. Let’s give it a go. Speed?’

‘One knot,’ Raeburn said.

‘All back one-third,’ Swanson said. No sharp imperatives, not ever, in the way Swanson gave his orders, more a quiet and conversational suggestion, but there was no mistaking the speed with which one of the crewmen strapped into the diving-stand bucket seat leaned forward to telegraph the order to the engine-room. ‘Left full rudder.’

Swanson bent over to check the plot, closely watching the tiny pin-point of light and tracing pencil move back towards the approximate centre of the elongated quadrangle formed by the four red crosses. ‘All stop,’ he went on. ‘Rudder amidships.’ A pause then: ‘All ahead one-third. So. All stop.’

‘Speed zero,’ Raeburn said.

‘120 feet,’ Swanson said to the diving officer. ‘But gently, gently.’

A strong steady hum echoed in the control centre. I asked Hansen: ‘Blowing ballast?’

He shook his head. ‘Just pumping the stuff out. Gives a far more precise control of rising speed and makes it easier to keep the sub on an even keel. Bringing a stopped sub up on a dead even keel is no trick for beginners. Conventional subs never try this sort of thing.’

The pumps stopped. There came the sound of water flooding back into the tanks as the diving officer slowed up the rate of ascent. The sound faded.

‘Secure flooding,’ the diving officer said. ‘Steady on 120 feet.’

‘Up periscope,’ Swanson said to the crewman by his side. An overhead lever was engaged and we could hear the hiss of high-pressure oil as the hydraulic piston began to lift the starboard periscope off its seating. The gleaming cylinder rose slowly against the pressure of the water outside until finally the foot of the periscope cleared its well. Swanson opened the hinged handgrips and peered through the eyepiece.

‘What does he expect to see in the middle of the night at this depth?’ I asked Hansen.

‘Never can tell. It’s rarely completely dark, as you know. Maybe a moon, maybe only stars — but even starlight will show as a faint glow through the ice — if the ice is thin enough.’

‘What’s the thickness of the ice above, in this rectangle?’

‘The sixty-four thousand dollar question,’ Hansen admitted, ‘and the answer is that we don’t know. To keep that ice-machine to a reasonable size the graph scale has to be very small. Anything between four and forty inches. Four inches we go through like the icing on a wedding cake: forty inches and we get a very sore head indeed.’ He nodded across to Swanson. ‘Doesn’t look so good. That grip he’s twisting is to tilt the periscope lens upwards and that button is for focusing. Means he’s having trouble in finding anything.’

Swanson straightened. ‘Black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat,’ he said conversationally. ‘Switch on hull and sail floodlights.’

He stooped and looked again. For a few seconds only. ‘Pea-soup. Thick and yellow and strong. Can’t see a thing. Let’s have the camera, shall we?’

I looked at Hansen, who nodded to a white screen that had just been unshuttered on the opposite bulkhead. ‘All mod cons, Doc. Closed circuit TV. Camera is deck mounted under toughened glass and can be remotely controlled to look up or round.’

‘You could do with a new camera, couldn’t you?’ The TV screen was grey, fuzzy, featureless.

‘Best that money can buy,’ Hansen said. ‘It’s the water. Under certain conditions of temperature and salinity it becomes almost completely opaque when floodlit. Like driving into a heavy fog with your headlights full on.’

‘Floodlights off,’ Swanson said. The screen became quite blank. ‘Floodlights on.’ The same drifting misty grey as before. Swanson sighed and turned to Hansen. ‘Well, John?’

‘If I were paid for imagining things,’ Hansen said carefully, ‘I could imagine I see the top of the sail in that left corner. Pretty murky out there, Captain. Heigh-ho for the old blind man’s buff, is that it?’

‘Russian roulette, I prefer to call it.’ Swanson had the clear unworried face of a man contemplating a Sunday afternoon in a deck-chair. ‘Are we holding position?’

‘I don’t know.’ Raeburn looked up from the plot. ‘It’s difficult to be sure.’

‘Sanders?’ This to the man at the ice-machine.

‘Thin ice, sir. Still thin ice.’

‘Keep calling. Down periscope.’ He folded the handles up and turned to the diving officer. ‘Take her up like we were carrying a crate of eggs atop the sail and didn’t want to crack even one of them.’

The pumps started again. I looked around the control room. Swanson excepted, everyone was quiet and still and keyed-up. Raeburn’s face was beaded with sweat and Sanders’s voice was too calm and impersonal by half as he kept repeating: ‘Thin ice, thin ice,’ in a low monotone. You could reach out and touch the tension in the air. I said quietly to Hansen:

‘Nobody seems very happy. There’s still a hundred feet to go.’

‘There’s forty feet,’ Hansen said shortly. ‘Readings are taken from keel level and there’s sixty feet between the keel and the top of the sail. Forty feet minus the thickness of the ice — and maybe a razor-sharp or needle-pointed stalactite sticking down ready to skewer the Dolphin through the middle. You know what that means?’

‘That it’s time I started getting worried too?’

Hansen smiled, but he wasn’t feeling like smiling. Neither was I, not any more.

‘Ninety feet,’ the diving officer said.

‘Thin ice, thin ice,’ Sanders intoned.

‘Switch off the deck flood, leave the sail flood on,’ Swanson said. ‘And keep that camera moving. Sonar?’

‘All clear,’ the sonar operator reported. ‘All clear all round.’ A pause, then: ‘No, hold it, hold it! Contact dead astern!’

‘How close?’ Swanson asked quickly.

‘Too close to say. Very close.’

‘She’s jumping!’ the diving officer called out sharply. ‘80, 75.’ The Dolphin had hit a layer of colder water or extra salinity.

‘Heavy ice, heavy ice!’ Sanders called out urgently.

‘Flood emergency!’ Swanson ordered — and this time it was an order.

I felt the sudden build-up of air pressure as the diving officer vented the negative tank and tons of sea-water poured into the emergency diving tank, but it was too late. With a shuddering jarring smash that sent us staggering the Dolphin crashed violently into the ice above, glass tinkled, lights went out and the submarine started falling like a stone.

‘Blow negative to the mark!’ the diving officer called. High pressure air came boiling into the negative tank — at our rate of falling we would have been flattened by the sea-pressure before the pumps could even have begun to cope with the huge extra ballast load we had taken aboard in seconds. Two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty and we were still falling. Nobody spoke, everybody just stood or sat in a frozen position staring at the diving stand. It required no gift for telepathy to know the thought in every mind. It was obvious that the Dolphin had been struck aft by some underwater pressure ridge at the same instant as the sail had hit the heavy ice above: if the Dolphin had been holed aft this descent wasn’t going to stop until the pressure of a million tons of water had crushed and flattened the hull and in a flicker of time snuffed out the life of every man inside it.

‘Three hundred feet,’ the diving officer called out. ‘Three fifty — and she’s slowing! She’s slowing.’

The Dolphin was still falling, sluggishly passing the four-hundred-foot mark, when Rawlings appeared in the control room, tool-kit in one hand, a crate of assorted lamps in the other.

‘It’s unnatural,’ he said. He appeared to be addressing the shattered lamp above the plot which he had immediately begun to repair. ‘Contrary to the laws of nature, I’ve always maintained. Mankind was never meant to probe beneath the depths of the ocean. Mark my words, those new-fangled inventions will come to a bad end.’

‘So will you, if you don’t keep quiet,’ Commander Swanson said acidly. But there was no reprimand in his face, he appreciated as well as any of us the therapeutic breath of fresh air that Rawlings had brought into that tension-laden atmosphere. ‘Holding?’ he went on to the diving officer.

The diving officer raised a finger and grinned. Swanson nodded, swung the coiled-spring microphone in front of him. ‘Captain here,’ he said calmly. ‘Sorry about that bump. Report damage at once.’

A green light flashed in the panel of a box beside him. Swanson touched a switch and a loudspeaker in the deck-head crackled.

‘Manoeuvring room here.’ The manoeuvring room was in the after end of the upper level engine-room, towards the stern. ‘Hit was directly above us here. We could do with a box of candles and some of the dials and gauges are out of kilter. But we still got a roof over our heads.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant. You can cope?’

‘Sure we can.’

Swanson pressed another switch. ‘Stern room?’

‘We still attached to the ship?’ a cautious voice inquired.

‘You’re still attached to the ship,’ Swanson assured him. ‘Anything to report?’

‘Only that there’s going to be an awful lot of dirty laundry by the time we get back to Scotland. The washing-machine’s had a kind of fit.’

Swanson smiled and switched off. His face was untroubled, he must have had a special sweat-absorbing mechanism on his face, I felt I could have done with a bath towel. He said to Hansen: ‘That was bad luck. A combination of a current where a current had no right to be, a temperature inversion where a temperature inversion had no right to be, and a pressure ridge where we least expected it. Not to mention the damned opacity of the water. What’s required is a few circuits until we know this polynya like the backs of our hands, a small offset to allow for drift and a little precautionary flooding as we approach the ninety-foot mark.’

‘Yes, sir. That’s what’s required. Point is, what are we going to do?’

‘Just that. Take her up and try again.’

I had my pride so I refrained from mopping my brow. They took her up and tried again. At 200 feet and for fifteen minutes Swanson juggled propellers and rudder till he had the outline of the frozen polynya above as accurately limned on the plot as he could ever expect to have it. Then he positioned the Dolphin just outside one of the boundary lines and gave an order for a slow ascent.

‘One twenty feet,’ the diving officer said. ‘One hundred ten.’

‘Heavy ice,’ Sanders intoned. ‘Still heavy ice.’

Sluggishly the Dolphin continued to rise. Next time in the control room, I promised myself, I wouldn’t forget that bath towel. Swanson said: ‘If we’ve overestimated the speed of the drift, there’s going to be another bump I’m afraid.’ He turned to Rawlings who was still busily repairing lights. ‘If I were you, I’d suspend operations for the present. You may have to start all over again in a moment and we don’t carry all that number of spares aboard.’

‘One hundred feet,’ the diving officer said. He didn’t sound as unhappy as his face looked.

‘The water’s clearing,’ Hansen said suddenly. ‘Look.’

The water had cleared, not dramatically so, but enough. We could see the top corner of the sail clearly outlined on the TV screen. And then, suddenly, we could see something else again, heavy ugly ridged ice not a dozen feet above the sail.

Water flooding into the tanks. The diving officer didn’t have to be told what to do, we’d gone up like an express lift the first time we’d hit a different water layer and once like that was enough in the life of any submarine.

‘Ninety feet,’ he reported. ‘Still rising.’ More water flooded in, then the sound died away. ‘She’s holding. Just under ninety feet.’

‘Keep her there.’ Swanson stared at the TV screen. ‘We’re drifting clear and into the polynya — I hope.’

‘Me too,’ Hansen said. ‘There can’t be more than a couple of feet between the top of the sail and that damned ugly stuff.’

‘There isn’t much room,’ Swanson acknowledged. ‘Sanders?’

‘Just a moment, sir. The graph looks kinda funny — no, we’re clear.’ He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘Thin ice!’

I looked at the screen. He was right. I could see the vertical edge of a wall of ice move slowly across the screen, exposing clear water above.

‘Gently, now, gently,’ Swanson said. ‘And keep the camera on the ice wall at the side, then straight up, turn about.’

The pumps began to throb again. The ice wall, less than ten yards away, began to drift slowly down past us.

‘Eighty-five feet,’ the diving officer reported. ‘Eighty.’

‘No hurry,’ Swanson said. ‘We’re sheltered from that drift by now.’

‘Seventy-five feet.’ The pumps stopped, and water began to flood into the tanks. ‘Seventy.’ The Dolphin was almost stopped now, drifting upwards as gently as thistledown. The camera switched upwards, and we could see the top corner of the sail clearly outlined with a smooth ceiling of ice floating down to meet it. More water gurgled into the tanks, the top of the sail met the ice with a barely perceptible bump and the Dolphin came to rest.

‘Beautifully done,’ Swanson said warmly to the diving officer. ‘Let’s try to give that ice a nudge. Are we slewing?’

‘Bearing constant.’

Swanson nodded. The pumps hummed, pouring out water, lightening ship, steadily increasing positive buoyancy. The ice stayed where it was. More time passed, more water pumped out, and still nothing happened. I said softly to Hansen: ‘Why doesn’t he blow the main ballast? You’d get a few hundred tons of positive buoyancy in next to no time and even if that ice is forty inches thick it couldn’t survive all that pressure at a concentrated point.’

‘Neither could the Dolphin,’ Hansen said grimly. ‘With a suddenly induced big positive buoyancy like that, once she broke through she’d go up like a cork from a champagne bottle. The pressure hull might take it, I don’t know, but sure as little apples the rudder would be squashed flat as a piece of tin. Do you want to spend what little’s left of your life travelling in steadily decreasing circles under the polar ice-cap?’

I didn’t want to spend what little was left of my life travelling in steadily decreasing circles under the ice-cap so I kept quiet. I watched Swanson as he walked across to the diving stand and studied the banked dials in silence for some seconds. I was beginning to become a little apprehensive about what Swanson would do next: I was beginning to realise, and not slowly either, that he was a lad who didn’t give up very easily.

‘That’s enough of that lot,’ he said to the diving officer. ‘If we go through now with all this pressure behind us we’ll be airborne. This ice is even thicker than we thought. We’ve tried the long steady shove and it hasn’t worked. A sharp tap is obviously what is needed. Flood her down, but gently, to eighty feet or so, a good sharp whiff of air into the ballast tanks and we’ll give our well-known imitation of a bull at a gate.’

Whoever had installed the 240-ton air-conditioning unit in the Dolphin should have been prosecuted, it just wasn’t working any more. The air was very hot and stuffy — what little there was of it, that was. I looked around cautiously and saw that everyone else appeared to be suffering from this same shortage of air, all except Swanson, who seemed to carry his own built-in oxygen cylinder around with him. I hoped Swanson was keeping in mind the fact that the Dolphin had cost 120 million dollars to build. Hansen’s narrowed eyes held a definite core of worry and even the usually imperturbable Rawlings was rubbing a bristly blue chin with a hand the size and shape of a shovel. In the deep silence after Swanson had finished speaking the scraping noise sounded unusually loud, then was lost in the noise of water flooding into the tanks.

We stared at the screen. Water continued to pour into the tanks until we could see a gap appear between the top of the sail and the ice. The pumps started up, slowly, to control the speed of descent. On the screen, the cone of light thrown on to the underside of the ice by the flood-lamp grew fainter and larger as we dropped, then remained stationary, neither moving nor growing in size. We had stopped.

‘Now,’ said Swanson. ‘Before that current gets us again.’

There came the hissing roar of compressed air under high pressure entering the ballast tanks. The Dolphin started to move sluggishly upwards while we watched the cone of light on the ice slowly narrow and brighten.

‘More air,’ Swanson said.

We were rising faster now, closing the gap to the ice all too quickly for my liking. Fifteen feet, twelve feet, ten feet.

‘More air,’ Swanson said.

I braced myself, one hand on the plot, the other on an overhead grab bar. On the screen, the ice was rushing down to meet us. Suddenly the picture quivered and danced, the Dolphin shuddered, jarred and echoed hollowly along its length, more lights went out, the picture came back on the screen, the sail was still lodged below the ice, then the Dolphin trembled and lurched and the deck pressed against our feet like an ascending elevator. The sail on the TV vanished, nothing but opaque white taking its place. The diving officer, his voice high with strain that had not yet found relief, called out. ‘Forty feet, forty feet.’ We had broken through.

‘There you are now,’ Swanson said mildly. ‘All it needed was a little perseverance.’ I looked at the short plump figure, the round good-humoured face, and wondered for the hundredth time why the nerveless iron men of this world so very seldom look the part.

I let my pride have a holiday. I took my handkerchief from my pocket, wiped my face and said to Swanson: ‘Does this sort of thing go on all the time?’

‘Fortunately, perhaps, no.’ He smiled. He turned to the diving officer. ‘We’ve got our foothold on this rock. Let’s make sure we have a good belay.’

For a few seconds more compressed air was bled into the tanks, then the diving officer said: ‘No chance of her dropping down now, Captain.’

‘Up periscope.’

Again the long gleaming silver tube hissed up from its well. Swanson didn’t even bother folding down the hinged handles. He peered briefly into the eyepiece, then straightened.

‘Down periscope.’

‘Pretty cold up top?’ Hansen asked.

Swanson nodded. ‘Water on the lens must have frozen solid as soon as it hit that air. Can’t see a thing.’ He turned to the diving officer. ‘Steady at forty?’

‘Guaranteed. And all the buoyancy we’ll ever want.’

‘Fair enough.’ Swanson looked at the quartermaster who was shrugging his way into a heavy sheepskin coat. ‘A little fresh air, Ellis, don’t you think?’

‘Right away, sir.’ Ellis buttoned his coat and added: ‘Might take some time.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Swanson said. ‘You may find the bridge and hatchways jammed with broken ice but I doubt it. My guess is that that ice is so thick that it will have fractured into very large sections and fallen outside clear of the bridge.’

I felt my ears pop with the sudden pressure change as the hatch swung up and open and snapped back against its standing latch. Another more distant sound as the second hatch-cover locked open and then we heard Ellis on the voice-tube.

‘All clear up top.’

‘Raise the antennae,’ Swanson said. ‘John, have them start transmitting and keep transmitting until their fingers fall off. Here we are and here we stay — until we raise Drift Ice Station Zebra.’

‘If there’s anyone left alive there,’ I said.

‘There’s that, of course,’ Swanson said. He couldn’t look at me. ‘There’s always that.’

FOUR

This, I thought, death’s dreadful conception of a dreadful world, must have been what had chilled the hearts and souls of our far-off Nordic ancestors when life’s last tide slowly ebbed and they had tortured their failing minds with fearful imaginings of a bleak and bitter hell of eternal cold. But it had been all right for the old boys, all they had to do was to imagine it, we had to experience the reality of it and I had no doubt at all in my mind as to which was the easier. The latter-day Eastern conception of hell was more comfortable altogether, at least a man could keep reasonably warm there.

One thing sure, nobody could keep reasonably warm where Rawlings and I were, standing a half-hour watch on the bridge of the Dolphin and slowly freezing solid. It had been my own fault entirely that our teeth were chattering like frenzied castanets. Half an hour after the radio room had started transmitting on Drift Ice Station Zebra’s wavelength and all without the slightest whisper by way of reply or acknowledgment, I had suggested to Commander Swanson that Zebra might possibly be able to hear us without having sufficient power to send a reply but that they might just conceivably let us have an acknowledgment some other way. I’d pointed out that Drift Stations habitually carried rockets — the only way to guide home any lost members of the party if radio communication broke down — and radio-sondes and rockoons. The sondes were radio-carrying balloons which could rise to a height of twenty miles to gather weather information: the rockoons, radio rockets fired from balloons, could rise even higher. On a moonlit night such as this, those balloons, if released, would be visible at least twenty miles away: if flares were attached to them, at twice that distance. Swanson had seen my point, called for volunteers for the first watch and in the circumstances I hadn’t had much option. Rawlings had offered to accompany me.

It was a landscape — if such a bleak, barren and featureless desolation could be called a landscape — from another and ancient world, weird and strange and oddly frightening. There were no clouds in the sky, but there were no stars either: this I could not understand. Low on the southern horizon a milky misty moon shed its mysterious light over the dark lifelessness of the polar icecap. Dark, not white. One would have expected moonlit ice to shine and sparkle and glitter with the light of a million crystal chandeliers — but it was dark. The moon was so low in the sky that the dominating colour on the ice-cap came from the blackness of the long shadows cast by the fantastically ridged and hummocked ice: and where the moon did strike directly the ice had been so scoured and abraded by the assaults of a thousand ice-storms that it had lost almost all its ability to reflect light of any kind.

This ridged and hummocked ice-cap had a strange quality of elusiveness, of impermanence, of evanescence: one moment there, definitively hard and harsh and repellent in its coldly contrasting blacks and whites, the next, ghost-like, blurring, coalescing and finally vanishing like a shimmering mirage fading and dying in some icebound desert. But this was no trick of the eye or imagination, it was the result of a ground-level ice-storm that rose and swirled and subsided at the dictates of an icy wind that was never less than strong and sometimes gusted up to gale force, a wind that drove before it a swirling rushing fog of billions of needle-pointed ice-spicules. For the most part, standing as we were on the bridge twenty feet above the level of the ice — the rest of the Dolphin might never have existed as far as the eye could tell — we were above this billowing ground-swell of ice particles; but occasionally the wind gusted strongly, the spicules lifted, drummed demoniacally against the already ice-sheathed starboard side of the sail, drove against the few exposed inches of our skin with all the painfully stinging impact of a sand-blaster held at arm’s length: but unlike a sand-blaster, the pain-filled shock of those spear-tipped spicules was only momentary, each wasp-like sting carried with it its own ice-cold anaesthetic and all surface sensation was quickly lost. Then the wind would drop, the furious rattling on the sail would fade and in the momentary contrast of near-silence we could hear the stealthy rustling as of a million rats advancing as the ice-spicules brushed their blind way across the iron-hard surface of the polar cap. The bridge thermometer stood at -21° F. — 53° of frost. If I were a promoter interested in developing a summer holiday resort, I thought, I wouldn’t pay very much attention to this place.

Rawlings and I stamped our feet, flailed our arms across our chests, shivered non-stop, took what little shelter we could from the canvas windbreak, rubbed our goggles constantly to keep them clear, and never once, except when the ice-spicules drove into our faces, stopped examining every quarter of the horizon. Somewhere out there on those frozen wastes was a lost and dying group of men whose lives might depend upon so little a thing as the momentary misting up of one of our goggles. We stared out over those shifting ice-sands until our eyes ached. But that was all we had for it, just aching eyes. We saw nothing, nothing at all. The ice-cap remained empty of all signs of life. Dead.

When our relief came Rawlings and I got below with all the speed our frozen and stiffened limbs would allow. I found Commander Swanson sitting on a canvas stool outside the radio room. I stripped off outer clothes, face coverings and goggles, took a steaming mug of coffee that had appeared from nowhere and tried not to hop around too much as the blood came pounding back into arms and legs.

‘How did you cut yourself like that?’ Swanson asked, concern in his voice. ‘You’ve a half-inch streak of blood right across your forehead.’

‘Flying ice, it just looks bad.’ I felt tired and pretty low. ‘We’re wasting our time transmitting. If the men on Drift Station Zebra were without any shelter it’s no wonder all signals ceased long ago. Without food and shelter no one could last more than a few hours in that lot. Neither Rawlings nor I is a wilting hothouse flower but after half an hour up there we’ve both just about had it.’

‘I don’t know,’ Swanson said thoughtfully. ‘Look at Amundsen. Look at Scott, at Peary. They walked all the way to the Poles.’

‘A different breed of men, Captain. Either that or the sun shone for them. All I know is that half an hour is too long to be up there. Fifteen minutes is enough for anyone.’

‘Fifteen minutes it shall be.’ He looked at me, face carefully empty of all expression. ‘You haven’t much hope?’

‘If they’re without shelter, I’ve none.’

‘You told me they had an emergency power pack of Nife cells for powering their transmitter,’ he murmured. ‘You also said those batteries will retain their charge indefinitely, years if necessary, irrespective of the weather conditions under which they are stored. They must have been using that battery a few days ago when they sent out their first S O S. It wouldn’t be finished already.’

His point was so obvious that I didn’t answer. The battery wasn’t finished: the men were.

‘I agree with you,’ he went on quietly. ‘We’re wasting our time. Maybe we should just pack up and go home. If we can’t raise them, we’ll never find them.’

‘Maybe not. But you’re forgetting your directive from Washington, Commander.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Remember? I’m to be extended every facility and all aid short of actually endangering the safety of the submarine and the lives of the crew. At the present moment we’re doing neither. If we fail to raise them I’m prepared for a twenty-mile sweep on foot round this spot in the hope of locating them. If that fails we could move to another polynya and repeat the search. The search area isn’t all that big, there’s a fair chance, but a chance, that we might locate the station eventually. I’m prepared to stay up here all winter till we do find them.’

‘You don’t call that endangering the lives of my men? Making extended searches of the ice-cap, on foot, in midwinter?’

‘Nobody said anything about endangering the lives of your men.’

‘You mean — you mean you’d go it alone.’ Swanson stared down at the deck and shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to think. I don’t know whether to say you’re crazy or whether to say I’m beginning to understand why they — whoever “they” may be — picked you for the job, Dr Carpenter.’ He sighed, then regarded me thoughtfully. ‘One moment you say there’s no hope, the next that you’re prepared to spend the winter here, searching. If you don’t mind my saying so, Doctor, it just doesn’t make sense.’

‘Stiff-necked pride,’ I said. ‘I don’t like throwing my hand in on a job before I’ve even started it. I don’t know what the attitude of the United States Navy is on that sort of thing.’

He gave me another speculative glance, I could see he believed me the way a fly believes the spider on the web who has just offered him safe accommodation for the night. He smiled. He said: ‘The United States Navy doesn’t take offence all that easily, Dr Carpenter. I suggest you catch a couple of hours’ sleep while you can. You’ll need it all if you’re going to start walking towards the North Pole.’

‘How about yourself? You haven’t been to bed at all to-night.’

‘I think I’ll wait a bit.’ He nodded towards the door of the radio room. ‘Just in case anything comes through.’

‘What are they sending? Just the call sign?’

‘Plus request for position and a rocket, if they have either. I’ll let you know immediately anything comes through. Good night, Dr Carpenter. Or rather, good morning.’

I rose heavily and made my way to Hansen’s cabin.

The atmosphere round the 8 a.m. breakfast table in the wardroom was less than festive. Apart from the officer on deck and the engineer lieutenant on watch, all the Dolphin’s officers were there, some just risen from their bunks, some just heading for them, none of them talking in anything more than monosyllables. Even the ebullient Dr Benson was remote and withdrawn. It seemed pointless to ask whether any contact had been established with Drift Station Zebra, it was painfully obvious that it hadn’t. And that after almost five hours’ continuous sending. The sense of despondency and defeat, the unspoken knowledge that time had run out for the survivors of Drift Station Zebra hung heavy over the wardroom.

No one hurried over his meal — there was nothing to hurry for — but by and by they rose one by one and drifted off, Dr Benson to his sickbay call, the young torpedo officer, Lieutenant Mills, to supervise the efforts of his men who had been working twelve hours a day for the past two days to iron out the faults in the suspect torpedoes, a third to relieve Hansen, who had the watch, and three others to their bunks. That left only Swanson, Raeburn and myself. Swanson, I knew, hadn’t been to bed at all the previous night, but for all that he had the rested clear-eyed look of a man with eight solid hours behind him.

The steward, Henry, had just brought in a fresh pot of coffee when we heard the sound of running footsteps in the passageway outside and the quartermaster burst into the wardroom. He didn’t quite manage to take the door off its hinges, but that was only because the Electric Boat Company put good solid hinges on the doors of their submarines.

‘We got it made!’ he shouted, and then perhaps recollecting that enlisted men were expected to conduct themselves with rather more decorum in the wardroom, went on: ‘We’ve raised them, Captain, we’ve raised them!’

‘What!’ Swanson could move twice as fast as his comfortable figure suggested and he was already half-out of his chair.

‘We are in radio contact with Drift Ice Station Zebra, sir,’ Ellis said formally.

Commander Swanson got to the radio room first, but only because he had a head start on Raeburn and myself. Two operators were on watch, both leaning forward towards their transmitters, one with his head bent low, the other with his cocked to one side, as if those attitudes of concentrated listening helped them to isolate and amplify the slightest sounds coming through the earphones clamped to their heads. One of them was scribbling away mechanically on a signal pad. DSY, he was writing down, DSY repeated over and over again, DSY. The answering call-sign of Drift Station Zebra. He stopped writing as he caught sight of Swanson out of the corner of one eye.

‘We’ve got ‘em, Captain, no question. Signal very weak and intermittent but —’

‘Never mind the signal!’ It was Raeburn who made this interruption without any by-your-leave from Swanson. He tried, and failed, to keep the rising note of excitement out of his voice and he looked more than ever like a youngster playing hookey from high school. ‘The bearing? Have you got their bearing? That’s all that matters.’

The other operator swivelled in his seat and I recognised my erstwhile guard, Zabrinski. He fixed Raeburn with a sad and reproachful eye.

‘Course we got their bearing, Lieutenant. First thing we did. O-forty-five, give or take a whisker. North-east, that is.’

‘Thank you, Zabrinski,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘O-forty-five is north-east. The navigating officer and I wouldn’t have known. Position?’

Zabrinski shrugged and turned to his watch-mate, a man with a red face, leather neck and a shining polished dome where his hair ought to have been. ‘What’s the word, Curly?’

‘Nothing. Just nothing.’ Curly looked at Swanson. ‘Twenty times I’ve asked for his position. No good. All he does is send out his call-sign. I don’t think he’s hearing us at all, he doesn’t even know we’re listening, he just keeps sending his call-sign over and over again. Maybe he hasn’t switched his aerial in to “receive”.’

‘It isn’t possible,’ Swanson said.

‘It is with this guy,’ Zabrinski said. ‘At first Curly and I thought that it was the signal that was weak, then we thought it was the operator who was weak or sick, but we were wrong, he’s just a ham-handed amateur.’

‘You can tell?’ Swanson asked.

‘You can always tell. You can —’ He broke off, stiffened and touched his watchmate’s arm.

Curly nodded. ‘I got it,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Position unknown, the man says.’

Nobody said anything, not just then. It didn’t seem important that he couldn’t give us his position, all that mattered was that we were in direct contact. Raeburn turned and ran forward across the control room. I could hear him speak rapidly on the bridge telephone. Swanson turned to me.

‘Those balloons you spoke of earlier. The ones on Zebra. Are they free or captive?’

‘Both.’

‘How do the captive ones work?’

‘A free-running winch, nylon cord marked off in hundreds and thousands of feet.’

‘We’ll ask them to send a captive balloon up to 5,000 feet,’ Swanson decided. ‘With flares. If they’re within thirty or forty miles we ought to see it, and if we get its elevation and make an allowance for the effect of wind on it, we should get a fair estimate of distance … What is it, Brown?’ This to the man Zabrinski called ‘Curly’.

‘They’re sending again,’ Curly said. ‘Very broken, fades a lot. “God’s sake, hurry.” Just like that, twice over. “God’s sake hurry.”’

‘Send this,’ Swanson said. He dictated a brief message about the balloons. ‘And send it real slow.’

Curly nodded and began to transmit. Raeburn came running back into the radio room.

‘The moon’s not down yet,’ he said quickly to Swanson. ‘Still a degree or two above the horizon. I’m taking a sextant up top and taking a moon-sight. Ask them to do the same. That’ll give us the latitude difference and if we know they’re o-forty-five of us we can pin them down to a mile.’

‘It’s worth trying,’ Swanson said. He dictated another message to Brown. Brown transmitted the second message immediately after the first. We waited for the answer. For all of ten minutes we waited. I looked at the men in the radio room, they all had the same remote withdrawn look of men who are there only physically, men whose minds are many miles away. They were all at the same place and I was too, wherever Drift Ice Station Zebra was.

Brown started writing again, not for long. His voice this time was still matter-of-fact, but with overtones of emptiness. He said: ‘“All balloons burnt. No moon.”’

‘No moon.’ Raeburn couldn’t hide the bitterness, the sharpness of his disappointment. ‘Damn! Must be pretty heavy overcast up there. Or a bad storm.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t get local weather variations like that on the ice-cap. The conditions will be the same over 50,000 square miles. The moon is down. For them, the moon is down. Their latest estimated position must have been pure guesswork, and bad guesswork at that. They must be at least a hundred miles farther north and east than we had thought.’

‘Ask them if they have any rockets,’ Swanson said to Brown.

‘You can try,’ I said. ‘It’ll be a waste of time. If they are as far off as I think, their rockets would never get above our horizon. Even if they did, we wouldn’t see them.’

‘It’s always a chance, isn’t it?’ Swanson asked.

‘Beginning to lose contact, sir,’ Brown reported. ‘Something there about food but it faded right out.’

‘Tell them if they have any rockets to fire them at once,’ Swanson said. ‘Quickly, now, before you lose contact.’

Four times in all Brown sent the message before he managed to pick up a reply. Then he said: ‘Message reads: “Two minutes.” Either this guy is pretty far through or his transmitter batteries are. That’s all. “Two minutes,” he said.’

Swanson nodded wordlessly and left the room. I followed. We picked up coats and binoculars and clambered up to the bridge. After the warmth and comfort of the control room, the cold seemed glacial, the flying ice-spicules more lancet-like than ever. Swanson uncapped the gyro-repeater compass, gave us the line of o-forty-five, told the two men who had been keeping watch what to look for and where.

A minute passed, two minutes, five. My eyes began to ache from staring into the ice-filled dark, the exposed part of my face had gone completely numb and I knew that when I removed those binoculars I was going to take a fair bit of skin with them.

A phone bell rang. Swanson lowered his glasses, leaving two peeled and bloody rings round his eyes — he seemed unaware of it, the pain wouldn’t come until later — and picked up the receiver. He listened briefly, hung up.

‘Radio room,’ he said. ‘Let’s get below. All of us. The rockets were fired three minutes ago.’

We went below. Swanson caught sight of his face reflected in a glass gauge and shook his head. ‘They must have shelter,’ he said quietly. ‘They must. Some hut left. Or they would have been gone long ago.’ He went into the radio room. ‘Still in contact?’

‘Yeah.’ Zabrinski spoke. ‘Off and on. It’s a funny thing. When a dicey contact like this starts to fade it usually gets lost and stays lost. But this guy keeps coming back. Funny.’

‘Maybe he hasn’t even got batteries left,’ I said. ‘Maybe all they have is a hand-cranked generator. Maybe there’s no one left with the strength to crank it for more than a few moments at a time.’

‘Maybe,’ Zabrinski agreed. ‘Tell the captain that last message, Curly.’

‘“Can’t late many tours,”’ Brown said. ‘That’s how the message came through. “Can’t late many tours.” I think it should have read “Can’t last many hours.” Don’t see what else it can have been.’

Swanson looked at me briefly, glanced away again. I hadn’t told anyone else that the commandant of the base was my brother and I knew he hadn’t told anyone either. He said to Brown: ‘Give them a time-check. Ask them to send their call-signs five minutes every hour on the hour. Tell them we’ll contact them again within six hours at most, maybe only four. Zabrinski, how accurate was that bearing?’

‘Dead accurate, Captain. I’ve had plenty of re-checks. O-forty-five exactly.’

Swanson moved out into the control centre. ‘Drift Station Zebra can’t see the moon. If we take Dr Carpenter’s word for it that weather conditions are pretty much the same all over, that’s because the moon is below their horizon. With the elevation we have of the moon, and knowing their bearing, what’s Zebra’s minimum distance from us?’

‘A hundred miles, as Dr Carpenter said,’ Raeburn confirmed after a short calculation. ‘At least that.’

‘So. We leave here and take a course o-forty. Not enough to take us very far from their general direction but it will give us enough offset to take a good cross-bearing eventually. We will go exactly a hundred miles and try for another polynya. Call the executive officer, secure for diving.’ He smiled at me. ‘With two cross-bearings and an accurately measured base-line, we can pin them down to a hundred yards.’

‘How do you intend to measure a hundred miles under the ice? Accurately, I mean?’

‘Our inertial navigation computer does it for me. It’s very accurate, you wouldn’t believe just how accurate. I can dive the Dolphin off the eastern coast of the United States and surface again in the Eastern Mediterranean within five hundred yards of where I expect to be. Over a hundred miles I don’t expect to be twenty yards out.’

Radio aerials were lowered, hatches screwed down and within five minutes the Dolphin had dropped down from her hole in the ice and was on her way. The two helmsmen at the diving stand sat idly smoking, doing nothing: the steering controls were in automatic interlock with the inertial navigation system which steered the ship with a degree of accuracy and sensitivity impossible to human hands. For the first time I could feel a heavy jarring vibration rumbling throughout the length of the ship: ‘Can’t last many hours’ the message had said: the Dolphin was under full power.

I didn’t leave the control room that morning. I spent most of the time peering over the shoulder of Dr Benson who had passed his usual five minutes in the sick-bay waiting for the patients who never turned up and then had hurried to his seat by the ice-machine. The readings on that machine meant living or dying to the Zebra survivors. We had to find another polynya to surface in to get a cross-bearing: no cross-bearing, no hope. I wondered for the hundredth time how many of the survivors of the fire were still alive. From the quiet desperation of the few garbled messages that Brown and Zabrinski had managed to pick up I couldn’t see that there would be many.

The pattern traced out by the hissing stylus on the chart was hardly an encouraging sight. Most of the time it showed the ice overhead to be of a thickness of ten feet or more. Several times the stylus dipped to show thicknesses of thirty to forty feet, and once it dipped down almost clear of the paper, showing a tremendous inverted ridge of at least 150 feet in depth. I tried to imagine what kind of fantastic pressures created by piled-up logjams of rafted ice on the surface must have been necessary to force ice down to such a depth: but I just didn’t have the imagination to cope with that sort of thing.

Only twice in the first eighty miles did the stylus trace out the thin black line that meant thin ice overhead. The first of those polynyas might have accommodated a small rowing boat, but it would certainly never have looked at the Dolphin: the other had hardly been any bigger.

Shortly before noon the hull vibration died away as Swanson gave the order for a cutback to a slow cruising speed. He said to Benson: ‘How does it look?’

‘Terrible. Heavy ice all the way.’

‘Well, we can’t expect a polynya to fall into our laps straight away,’ Swanson said reasonably, ‘We’re almost there. We’ll make a grid search. Five miles east, five miles west, a quarter-mile farther to the north each time.’

The search began. An hour passed, two, then three. Raeburn and his assistant hardly ever raised their heads from the plotting table where they were meticulously tracing every movement the Dolphin was making in its criss-cross search under the sea. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The normal background buzz of conversation, the occasional small talk from various groups in the control centre, died away completely. Benson’s occasional ‘Heavy ice, still heavy ice,’ growing steadily quieter and more dispirited, served only to emphasise and deepen the heavy brooding silence that had fallen. Only a case-hardened undertaker could have felt perfectly at home in that atmosphere. At the moment, undertakers were the last people I wanted to think about.

Five o’clock in the afternoon. People weren’t looking at each other any more, far less talking. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Defeat, despair, hung heavy in the air. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Even Swanson had stopped smiling, I wondered if he had in his mind’s eye what I now constantly had in mine, the picture of a haggard, emaciated, bearded man with his face all but destroyed with frostbite, a frozen, starving, dying man draining away the last few ounces of his exhausted strength as he cranked the handle of his generator and tapped out his call-sign with lifeless fingers, his head bowed as he strained to listen above the howl of the ice-storm for the promise of aid that never came. Or maybe there was no one tapping out a call-sign any more. They were no ordinary men who had been sent to man Drift Ice Station Zebra but there comes a time when even the toughest, the bravest, the most enduring will abandon all hope and lie down to die. Perhaps he had already lain down to die. Heavy ice, still heavy ice.

At half past five Commander Swanson walked across to the ice-machine and peered over Benson’s shoulder. He said: ‘What’s the average thickness of that stuff above?’

‘Twelve to fifteen feet,’ Benson said. His voice was low and tired. ‘Nearer fifteen, I would say.’

Swanson picked up a phone. ‘Lieutenant Mills? Captain here. What is the state of readiness of those torpedoes you’re working on? … Four? … Ready to go? … Good. Stand by to load. I’m giving this search another thirty minutes, then it’s up to you. Yes, that is correct. We shall attempt to blow a hole through the ice.’ He replaced the phone.

Hansen said thoughtfully: ‘Fifteen feet of ice is a helluva lot of ice. And that ice will have a tamping effect and will direct 90 per cent of the explosive force down the way. You think we can blow a hole through fifteen feet of ice, Captain?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Swanson admitted. ‘How can anyone know until we try it?’

‘Nobody ever tried to do this before?’ I asked.

‘No. Not in the U.S. Navy, anyway. The Russians may have tried it, I wouldn’t know. They don’t,’ he added dryly, ‘keep us very well informed on those matters.’

‘Aren’t the underwater shock waves liable to damage the Dolphin?’ I asked. I didn’t care for the idea at all, and that was a fact.

‘If they do, the Electric Boat Company can expect a pretty strong letter of complaint. We shall explode the warhead electronically about 1,000 yards after it leaves the ship — it has to travel eight hundred yards anyway before a safety device unlocks and permits the warhead to be armed. We shall be bows-on to the detonation and with a hull designed to withstand the pressures this one is, the shock effects should be negligible.’

‘Very heavy ice,’ Benson intoned. ‘Thirty feet, forty feet, fifty feet. Very, very heavy ice.’

‘Just too bad if your torpedo ended up under a pile like the stuff above us just now,’ I said. ‘I doubt if it would even chip off the bottom layer.’

‘We’ll take care that doesn’t happen. We’ll just find a suitably large layer of ice of normal thickness, kind of back off a thousand yards and then let go.’

‘Thin ice!’ Benson’s voice wasn’t a shout, it was a bellow. ‘Thin ice. No, by God, clear water! Clear water! Lovely clear, clear water!’

My immediate reaction was that either the ice-machine or Benson’s brain had blown a fuse. But the officer at the diving panel had no such doubts for I had to grab and hang on hard as the Dolphin heeled over violently to port and came curving round, engines slowing, in a tight circle to bring her back to the spot where Benson had called out. Swanson watched the plot, spoke quietly and the big bronze propellers reversed and bit into the water to bring the Dolphin to a stop.

‘How’s it looking now, Doc?’ Swanson called out.

‘Clear, clear water,’ Benson said reverently. ‘I got a good picture of it. It’s pretty narrow, but wide enough to hold us. It’s long, with a sharp left-hand dog-leg, for it followed us round through the first forty-five degrees of our curve.’

‘One fifty feet,’ Swanson said.

The pumps hummed. The Dolphin drifted gently upwards like an airship rising from the ground. Briefly, water flooded back into the tanks. The Dolphin hung motionless.

‘Up periscope,’ Swanson said.

The periscope hissed up slowly into the raised position. Swanson glanced briefly through the eyepiece, then beckoned me. ‘Take a look,’ he beamed. ‘As lovely a sight as you’ll ever see.’

I took a look. If you’d made a picture of what could be seen above and framed it you couldn’t have sold the result even if you added Picasso’s name to it: but I could see what he meant. Solid black masses on either side with a scarcely lighter strip of dark jungle green running between them on a line with the fore-and-aft direction of the ship. An open lead in the polar pack.

Three minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under two hundred and fifty miles from the Pole.

The rafted, twisted ice-pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked icehills we could see stretching off to the west and then the light of the floodlamp failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.

To the east we could see nothing at all. To have stared out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the Dolphin’s side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over: but it was more imagined than seen.

The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over 60 m.p.h. on the bridge anemometer. The ice-storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, high speed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant grinding, crashing and deep-throated booming as millions of tons of racked and tortured ice, under the influence of the gale and some mighty pressure centre, heaven knew how many hundreds of miles away, reared and twisted and tore and cracked, one moment forming another rafted ridge as a layer of ice, perhaps ten feet thick, screeched and roared and clambered on to the shoulders of another and then another, the next rending apart in indescribably violent cacophony to open up a new lead, black wind-torn water that started to skim over with ice almost as soon as it was formed.

‘Are we both mad? Let’s get below.’ Swanson cupped his hands to my ear and had to shout, but even so I could hardly hear him above that hellish bedlam of sound.

We clambered down into the comparatively sudden stillness of the control room. Swanson untied his parka hood and pulled off scarf and goggles that had completely masked his face. He looked at me and shook his head wonderingly.

‘And some people talk about the white silence of the Arctic. My God, a boilermaker’s shop is like a library reading-room compared to that lot.’ He shook his head again. ‘We stuck our noses out a few times above the ice-pack last year, but we never saw anything like this. Or heard it. Wintertime, too. Cold, sure, damned cold, and windy, but never so bad that we couldn’t take a brief stroll on the ice, and I used to wonder about those stories of explorers being stuck in their tents for days on end, unable to move. But I know now why Captain Scott died.’

‘It is pretty nasty,’ I admitted. ‘How safe are we here, Commander?’

‘That’s anybody’s guess,’ Swanson shrugged. ‘The wind’s got us jammed hard against the west wall of this polynya and there’s maybe fifty yards of open water to starboard. For the moment we’re safe. But you can hear and see that pack is on the move, and not slowly either. The lead we’re in was torn open less than an hour ago. How long? Depends on the configuration of the ice, but those polynyas can close up damned quickly at times, and while the hull of the Dolphin can take a fair old pressure, it can’t take a million tons of ice leaning against it. Maybe we can stay here for hours, maybe only for minutes. Whichever it is, as soon as that east wall comes within ten feet of the starboard side we’re dropping down out of it. You know what happens when a ship gets caught in the ice.’

‘I know. They get squeezed flat, are carried round the top of the world for a few years then one day are released and drop to the bottom, two miles straight down. The United States Government wouldn’t like it, Commander.’

‘The prospects of further promotion for Commander Swanson would be poor,’ Swanson admitted. ‘I think —’

‘Hey!’ The shout came from the radio room. ‘Hey, c’m here.’

‘I rather think Zabrinski must be wanting me,’ Swanson murmured. He moved off with his usual deceptive speed and I followed him into the radio room. Zabrinski was sitting half-turned in his chair, an ear-to-ear beam on his face, the earphones extended in his left hand. Swanson took them, listened briefly, then nodded.

‘DSY,’ he said softly, ‘DSY, Dr Carpenter. We have them. Got the bearing? Good.’ He turned to the doorway, saw the quartermaster. ‘Ellis, ask the navigating officer to come along as soon as possible.’

‘We’ll pick ‘em all up yet, Captain,’ Zabrinski said jovially. The smile on the big man’s face, I could see now, didn’t extend as far as his eyes. ‘They must be a pretty tough bunch of boys out there.’

‘Very tough, Zabrinski,’ Swanson said absently. His eyes were remote and I knew he was listening to the metallic cannonading of the ice-spicules, a billion tiny pneumatic chisels drumming away continuously against the outer hull of the submarine, a sound loud enough to make low speech impossible. ‘Very tough. Are you in two-way contact?’

Zabrinski shook his head and turned away. He’d stopped smiling. Raeburn came in, was handed a sheet of paper and left for his plotting table. We went with him. After a minute or two he looked up, and said: ‘If anyone fancies a Sunday afternoon’s walk, this is it.’

‘So close?’ Swanson asked.

‘So very close. Five miles due east, give or take half a mile. Pretty fair old bloodhounds, aren’t we?’

‘We’re just lucky,’ Swanson said shortly. He walked back to the radio room. ‘Talking to them yet?’

‘We’ve lost them altogether.’

‘Completely?’

‘We only had ‘em a minute, Captain. Just that. Then they faded. Got weaker and weaker. I think Doc Carpenter here is right, they’re using a hand-cranked generator.’ He paused, then said idly: ‘I’ve a six-year-old daughter who could crank one of those machines for five minutes without turning a hair.’

Swanson looked at me, then turned away without a word. I followed him to the unoccupied diving stand. From the bridge access hatch we could hear the howl of the storm, the grinding ice with its boom and scream that spanned the entire register of hearing. Swanson said: ‘Zabrinski put it very well … I wonder how long this damnable storm is going to last?’

‘Too long. I have a medical kit in my cabin, a fifty-ounce flask of medicinal alcohol and cold-weather clothes. Could you supply me with a thirty-pound pack of emergency rations, high protein high-calorie concentrates, Benson will know what I mean.’

‘Do you mean what I think you mean?’ Swanson said slowly. ‘Or am I just going round the bend?’

‘What’s this about going round the bend?’ Hansen had just come through the doorway leading to the for’ard passageway, and the grin on his face was clear enough indication that though he’d caught Swanson’s last words he’d caught neither the intonation nor the expression on Swanson’s face. ‘Very serious state of affairs, going round the bend. I’ll have to assume command and put you in irons, Captain. Something about it in regulations, I dare say.’

‘Dr Carpenter is proposing to sling a bag of provisions on his back and proceed to Drift Station Zebra on foot.’

‘You’ve picked them up again?’ Just for the moment Hansen had forgotten me. ‘You really got them? And a cross-bearing?’

‘Just this minute. We’ve hit it almost on the nose. Five miles, young Raeburn says.’

‘My God! Five miles. Only five miles!’ Then the elation vanished from voice and face as if an internal switch had been touched. ‘In weather like this it might as well be five hundred. Even old Amundsen couldn’t have moved ten yards through this stuff.’

‘Dr Carpenter evidently thinks he can improve on Amundsen’s standards,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘He’s talking about walking there.’

Hansen looked at me for a long and considering moment, then turned back to Swanson. ‘I think maybe it’s Doc Carpenter we should be clapping in the old irons.’

‘I think maybe it is,’ Swanson said.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘There are men out there on Drift Station Zebra. Maybe not many, not now, but there are some. One, anyway. Men a long way past being sick. Dying men. To a dying man it takes only the very smallest thing to spell out the difference between life and death. I’m a doctor, I know. The smallest thing. An ounce of alcohol, a few ounces of food, a hot drink, some medicine. Then they’ll live. Without those little things they will surely die. They’re entitled to what smallest aid they can get, and I’m entitled to take whatever risks I care to see they get it. I’m not asking anyone else to go, all I’m asking is that you implement the terms of your orders from Washington to give me all possible assistance without endangering the Dolphin or its crew. Threatening to stop me is not my idea of giving assistance. And I’m not asking you to endanger your submarine or the lives of your men.’

Swanson gazed at the floor. I wondered what he was thinking of: the best way to stop me, his orders from Washington, or the fact that he was the only man who knew that the commandant on Zebra was my brother. He said nothing.

‘You must stop him, Captain,’ Hansen said urgently. ‘Any other man you saw putting a pistol to his head or a razor to his throat, you’d stop that man. This is the same. He’s out of his mind, he’s wanting to commit suicide.’ He tapped the bulkhead beside him. ‘Good God, Doc, why do you think we have the sonar operators in here on duty even when we’re stopped? So that they can tell us when the ice wall on the far side of the polynya starts to close in on us, that’s why. And that’s because it’s impossible for any man to last thirty seconds on the bridge or see an inch against the ice-storm up there. Just take a quick twenty-second trip up there, up on the bridge, and you’ll change your mind fast enough, I guarantee.’

‘We’ve just come down from the bridge,’ Swanson said matter-of-factly.

‘And he still wants to go? It’s like I say, he’s crazy.’

‘We could drop down now,’ Swanson said. ‘We have the position. Perhaps we can find a polynya within a mile, half a mile of Zebra. That would be a different proposition altogether.’

‘Perhaps you could find a needle in a haystack,’ I said. ‘It took you six hours to find this one, and even at that we were lucky. And don’t talk about torpedoes, the ice in this area is rafted anything up to a hundred feet in depth. Pretty much all over. You’d be as well trying to blast your way through with a .22. Might be twelve hours, might be days before we could break through again. I can get there in two-three hours.’

‘If you don’t freeze to death in the first hundred yards,’ Hansen said. ‘If you don’t fall down a ridge and break your leg. If you don’t get blinded in a few minutes. If you don’t fall into a newly-opened polynya that you can’t see, where you’ll either drown or, if you manage to get out, freeze solid in thirty seconds. And even if you do survive all those things, I’d be grateful if you’d explain to me exactly how you propose to find your way blind to a place five miles away. You can’t carry a damn’ great gyro weighing about half a ton on your back, and a magnetic compass is useless in those latitudes. The magnetic north pole is a good bit south of where we are now and a long way to the west. Even if you did get some sort of bearing from it, in the darkness and the ice-storm you could still miss the camp — or what’s left of it — by only a hundred yards and never know it. And even if by one chance in a million you do manage to find your way there, how on earth do you ever expect to find your way back again? Leave a paper-trail? A five-mile ball of twine? Crazy is hardly the word for it.’

‘I may break a leg, drown or freeze,’ I conceded. ‘I’ll take my chance on that. Finding my way there and back is no great trick. You have a radio bearing on Zebra and know exactly where it lies. You can take a radio bearing on any transmitter. All I have to do is to tote a receiver-transmitter radio along with me, keep in touch with you and you can keep me on the same bearing as Zebra. It’s easy.’

‘It would be,’ Hansen said, ‘except for one little thing. We don’t have any such radio.’

‘I have a twenty-mile walkie-talkie in my case,’ I said.

‘Coincidence, coincidence,’ Hansen murmured. ‘Just happened to bring it along, no doubt. I’ll bet you have all sorts of funny things in that case of yours, haven’t you, Doc?’

‘What Dr Carpenter has in his case is really no business of ours,’ Swanson said in mild reproof. He hadn’t thought so earlier. ‘What does concern us is his intention to do away with himself. You really can’t expect us to consent to this ridiculous proposal, Dr Carpenter.’

‘No one’s asking you to consent to anything,’ I said. ‘Your consent is not required. All I’m asking you to do is to stand to one side. And to arrange for that food provision pack for me. If you won’t, I’ll have to manage without.’

I left and went to my cabin. Hansen’s cabin, rather. But even although it wasn’t my cabin that didn’t stop me from turning the key in the lock as soon as I had passed through the door.

Working on the likely supposition that if Hansen did come along soon he wasn’t going to be very pleased to find the door of his own cabin locked against him, I wasted no time. I spun the combination lock on the case and opened the lid. At least three-quarters of the available space was taken up by Arctic survival clothing, the very best that money could buy. It hadn’t been my money that had bought it.

I stripped off the outer clothes I was wearing, pulled on long open-mesh underwear, woollen shirt and cord breeches, then a triple-knit wool parka lined with pure silk. The parka wasn’t quite standard, it had a curiously shaped suède-lined pocket below and slightly to the front of the left armpit, and a differently shaped suède-lined pocket on the right-hand side. I dug swiftly to the bottom of my case and brought up three separate items. The first of these, a nine-millimetre Mannlicher-Schoenauer automatic, fitted into the left-hand pocket as securely and snugly as if the pocket had been specially designed for it, which indeed it had: the other items, spare magazine clips, fitted as neatly into the right-hand pocket.

The rest of the dressing didn’t take long. Two pairs of heavy-knit woollen socks, felt undershoes and then the furs — caribou for the outer parka and trousers, wolverine for the hood, sealskin for the boots and reindeer for the gloves, which were pulled on over other layers of silk gloves and woollen mittens. Maybe a polar bear would have had a slight edge over me when it came to being equipped to survive an Arctic blizzard, but there wouldn’t have been much in it.

I hung snow-mask and goggles round my neck, stuck a rubberised waterproofed torch into the inside pocket of the fur parka, unearthed my walkie-talkie and closed the case. I set the combination again. There was no need to set the combination any more, not now that I had the Mannlicher-Schoenauer under my arm, but it would give Swanson something to do while I was away. I shoved my medicine case and a steel flask of alcohol in a rucksack and unlocked the door.

Swanson was exactly where I’d left him in the control room. So was Hansen. So were two others who had not been there when I had left, Rawlings and Zabrinski. Hansen, Rawlings, and Zabrinski, the three biggest men in the ship. The last time I’d seen them together was when Swanson had whistled them up from the Dolphin in the Holy Loch to see to it that I didn’t do anything he didn’t want me to do. Maybe Commander Swanson had a one-track mind. Hansen, Rawlings, and Zabrinski. They looked bigger than ever.

I said to Swanson: ‘Do I get those iron rations or not?’

‘One last formal statement,’ Swanson said. His first thoughts, as I came waddling into the control centre, must have been that a grizzly bear was loose inside his submarine, but he hadn’t batted an eyelid. ‘For the record. Your intentions are suicidal, your chances are non-existent. I cannot give my consent.’

‘All right, your statement is on record, witnesses and all. The iron rations.’

‘I cannot give my consent because of a fresh and dangerous development. One of our electronic technicians was carrying out a routine calibration test on the ice-machine just now and an overload coil didn’t function. Electric motor burnt out. No spares, it will have to be rewired. You realise what that means. If we’re forced to drop down I can’t find my way to the top again. Then it’s curtains for everybody — everybody left above the ice, that is.’

I didn’t blame him for trying, but I was vaguely disappointed in him: he’d had time to think up a better one than that. I said: ‘The iron rations, Commander. Do I get them?’

‘You mean to go through with this? After what I’ve said?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. I’ll do without the food.’

‘My executive officer, Torpedoman Rawlings and Radioman Zabrinski,’ Swanson said formally, ‘don’t like this.’

‘I can’t help what they like or don’t like.’

‘They feel they can’t let you go through with it,’ he persisted.

They were more than big. They were huge. I could get past them the way a lamb gets past a starving lion. I had a gun all right but with that one-piece parka I was wearing I’d practically have to undress myself to get at it and Hansen, in that Holy Loch canteen, had shown just how quickly he could react when he saw anyone making a suspicious move. And even if I did get my gun out, what then? Men like Hansen, like Rawlings and Zabrinski, didn’t scare. I couldn’t bluff them with a gun. And I couldn’t use the gun. Not against men who were just doing their duty.

‘They won’t let you go through with it,’ Swanson went on, ‘unless, that is, you will permit them to accompany you, which they have volunteered to do.’

‘Volunteered,’ Rawlings sniffed. ‘You, you, and you.’

‘I don’t want them,’ I said.

‘Gracious, ain’t he?’ Rawlings asked of no one in particular. ‘You might at least have said thanks, Doc.’

‘You are putting the lives of your men in danger, Commander Swanson. You know what your orders said.’

‘Yes. I also know that in Arctic travels, as in mountaineering and exploring, a party has always double the chances of the individual. I also know that if it became known that we had permitted a civilian doctor to set off on his own for Drift Station Zebra while we were all too scared to stir from our nice warm sub, the name of the United States Navy would become pretty muddy’

‘What do your men think of your making them risk their lives to save the good name of the submarine service?’

‘You heard the captain,’ Rawlings said. ‘We’re volunteers. Look at Zabrinski there, anyone can see that he is a man cast in a heroic mould.’

‘Have you thought of what happens,’ I said, ‘if the ice closes in when we’re away and the captain has to take the ship down?’

‘Don’t even talk of it,’ Zabrinski urged. ‘I’m not all that heroic.’

I gave up. I’d no option but to give up. Besides, like Zabrinski, I wasn’t all that heroic and I suddenly realised that I would be very glad indeed to have those three men along with me.

FIVE

Lieutenant Hansen was the first man to give up. Or perhaps ‘give up’ is wrong, the meaning of the words was quite unknown and the thought totally alien to Hansen, it would be more accurate to say that he was the first of us to show any glimmerings of common sense. He caught my arm, brought his head close to mine, pulled down his snow mask and shouted: ‘No farther, Doc. We must stop.’

‘The next ridge,’ I yelled back. I didn’t know whether he’d heard me or not, as soon as he’d spoken he’d pulled his mask back up into position again to protect the momentarily exposed skin against the horizontally driving ice-storm, but he seemed to understand for he eased his grip on the rope round my waist and let me move ahead again. For the past two and a half hours Hansen, Rawlings and I had each taken his turn at being the lead man on the end of the rope, while the other three held on to it some ten yards behind, the idea being not that the lead man should guide the others but that the others should save the life of the lead man, should the need arise. And the need already had arisen, just once. Hansen, slipping and scrambling on all-fours across a fractured and upward sloping raft of ice, had reached gropingly forward with his arms into the blindness of the night and the storm and found nothing there. He had fallen eight vertical feet before the rope had brought him up with a vicious jerk that had been almost as painful for Rawlings and myself, who had taken the brunt of the shock, as it had been for Hansen. For nearly two minutes he’d dangled above the wind-torn black water of a freshly opened lead before we’d managed to drag him back to safety. It had been a close thing, far too close a thing, for in far sub-zero temperatures with a gale-force wind blowing, even a few seconds’ submersion in water makes the certainty of death absolute, the process of dissolution as swift as it is irreversible. In those conditions the clothes of a man pulled from the water become a frozen and impenetrable suit of armour inside seconds, an armour that can neither be removed nor chipped away. Petrified inside this ice-shroud, a man just simply and quickly freezes to death — in the unlikely event, that is, of his heart having withstood the thermal shock of the body surface being exposed to an almost instantaneous hundred degree drop in temperature.

So now I stepped forward very cautiously, very warily indeed, feeling the ice ahead of me with a probe we’d devised after Hansen’s near accident — a chopped-off five foot length of rope which we’d dipped into the water of the lead then exposed to the air until it had become as rigid as a bar of steel. At times I walked, at times I stumbled, at times, when a brief lull in the gale-force wind, as sudden as it was unexpected, would catch me off balance I’d just fall forward and continue on hands and knees, for it was quite as easy that way. It was during one of those periods when I was shuffling blindly forward on all-fours that I realised that the wind had, for the time being, lost nearly all of its violence and that I was no longer being bombarded by that horizontally driving hail of flying ice-spicules. Moments later my probe made contact with some solid obstacle in my path: the vertical wall of a rafted ice ridge. I crawled thankfully into its shelter, raised my goggles and pulled out and switched on my torch as the others came blindly up to where I lay.

Blindly. With arms outstretched they pawed at the air before them like sightless men, which for the past two and a half hours was exactly what they had been. For all the service our goggles had given us we might as well have stuck our heads in gunny sacks before leaving the Dolphin. I looked at Hansen, the first of the three to come up. Goggles, snow-mask, hood, clothing — the entire front part of his body from top to toe was deeply and solidly encrusted in a thick and glittering layer of compacted ice, except for some narrow cracks caused by joint movements of legs and arms. As he drew close to me I could hear him splintering and crackling a good five feet away. Long ice-feathers streamed back from his head, shoulders and elbows; as an extra-terrestrial monster from one of the chillier planets, such as Pluto, he’d have been a sensation in any horror movie. I suppose I looked much the same.

We huddled close together in the shelter of the wall. Only four feet above our heads the ice-storm swept by in a glittering grey-white river. Rawlings, sitting on my left, pushed up his goggles, looked down at his ice-sheathed furs and started to beat himself with his fist across the chest to break up the covering. I reached out a hand and caught his arm.

‘Leave it alone,’ I said.

‘Leave it alone?’ Rawlings’s voice was muffled by his snow-mask, but not so muffled that I couldn’t hear the chattering of his teeth. ‘This damn’ suit of armour weighs a ton. I’m out of training for this kind of weight-lifting, Doc.’

‘Leave it alone. If it weren’t for that ice, you’d have frozen to death by this time: it’s insulating you from that wind and the ice-storm. Let’s see the rest of your face. And your hands.’

I checked him and the two others for frostbite, while Hansen checked me. We were still lucky. Blue and mottled and shaking with the cold, but no frostbite. The furs of the other three might not have been quite as fancy as mine, but they were very adequate indeed. Nuclear subs always got the best of everything, and Arctic clothing was no exception. But although they weren’t freezing to death I could see from their faces and hear from their breathing that they were pretty far gone in exhaustion. Thrusting into the power of that ice-storm was like wading upstream against the current of a river of molasses: that was energy-sapping enough, but the fact that we had to spend most of our time clambering over, slipping on, sliding and falling across fractured ice or making detours round impassable ridges while being weighed down with forty pound packs on our back and heaven only knew how many additional pounds of ice coating our furs in front had turned our trudge across that contorted treacherous ice into a dark and frozen nightmare.

‘The point of no return, I think,’ Hansen said. His breathing, like Rawlings’s, was very quick, very shallow, almost gasping. ‘We can’t take much more of this, Doc.’

‘You ought to listen to Dr Benson’s lectures a bit more,’ I said reprovingly. ‘All this ice-cream and apple pie and lolling around in your bunks is no training for this sort of thing.’

‘Yeah?’ He peered at me. ‘How do you feel?’

‘A mite tired,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing much to speak of.’ Nothing much to speak of, my legs felt as if they were falling off, that was all, but the goad of pride was always a useful one to have to hand. I slipped off my rucksack and brought out the medicinal alcohol. ‘I suggest fifteen minutes’ break. Any more and we’ll just start stiffening up completely. Meantime, a little drop of what we fancy will help keep the old blood corpuscles trudging around.’

‘I thought medical opinion was against alcohol in low temperatures,’ Hansen said doubtfully. ‘Something about opening the pores.’

‘Name me any form of human activity,’ I said, ‘and I’ll find you a group of doctors against it. Spoilsports. Besides, this isn’t alcohol, it’s very fine Scotch whisky.’

‘You should have said so in the first place. Pass it over. Not too much for Rawlings and Zabrinski, they’re not used to the stuff. Any word, Zabrinski?’

Zabrinski, with the walkie-talkie’s aerial up and one earphone tucked in below the hood of his parka, was talking into the microphone through cupped hands. As the radio expert, Zabrinski had been the obvious man to handle the walkie-talkie and I’d given it to him before leaving the submarine. This was also the reason why Zabrinski wasn’t at any time given the position of lead man in our trudge across the pack ice. A heavy fall or immersion in water would have finished the radio he was carrying slung on his back: and if the radio were finished then so would we be, for without the radio not only had we no hope of finding Drift Station Zebra, we wouldn’t have a chance in a thousand of ever finding our way back to the Dolphin again. Zabrinski was built on the size and scale of a medium-sized gorilla and was about as durable; but we couldn’t have treated him more tenderly had he been made of Dresden china.

‘It’s difficult,’ Zabrinski said. ‘Radio’s O.K., but this ice-storm causes such damn’ distortion and squeaking — no, wait a minute, though, wait a minute.’

He bent his head over the microphone, shielding it from the sound of the storm, and spoke again through cupped hands. ‘Zabrinski here … Zabrinski. Yeah, we’re all kinda tuckered out, but Doc here seems to think we’ll make it … Hang on, I’ll ask him.’

He turned to me. ‘How far do you reckon we’ve come, they want to know.’

‘Four miles.’ I shrugged. ‘Three and a half, four and a half. You guess it.’

Zabrinski spoke again, looked interrogatively at Hansen and myself, saw our headshakes and signed off. He said: ‘Navigating officer says we’re four-five degrees north of where we should be and that we’ll have to cut south if we don’t want to miss Zebra by a few hundred yards.’

It could have been worse. Over an hour had passed since we’d received the last bearing position from the Dolphin and, between radio calls, our only means of navigating had been by judging the strength and direction of the wind in our faces. When a man’s face is completely covered and largely numb it’s not a very sensitive instrument for gauging wind direction — and for all we knew the wind might be either backing or veering. It could have been a lot worse and I said so to Hansen.

‘It could be worse,’ he agreed heavily. ‘We could be travelling in circles or we could be dead. Barring that, I don’t see how it could be worse.’ He gulped down the whisky, coughed, handed the flask top back to me. ‘Things look brighter now. You honestly think we can make it?’

‘A little luck, that’s all. You think maybe our packs are too heavy? That we should abandon some of it here?’ The last thing I wanted to do was to abandon any of the supplies we had along with us: eighty pounds of food, a stove, thirty pounds of compressed fuel tablets, 100 ounces of alcohol, a tent, and a very comprehensive medical kit; but if it was to be abandoned I wanted the suggestion to be left to them, and I was sure they wouldn’t make it.

‘We’re abandoning nothing,’ Hansen said. Either the rest or the whisky had done him good, his voice was stronger, his teeth hardly chattering at all.

‘Let the thought die stillborn,’ Zabrinski said. When first I’d seen him in Scotland he had reminded me of a polar bear and now out here on the ice-cap, huge and crouched in his ice-whitened furs, the resemblance was redoubled. He had the physique of a bear, too, and seemed completely tireless; he was in far better shape than any of us. ‘This weight on my bowed shoulders is like a bad leg: an old friend that gives me pain, but I wouldn’t be without it.’

‘You?’ I asked Rawlings.

‘I am conserving my energy,’ Rawlings announced. ‘I expect to have to carry Zabrinski later on.’

We pulled the starred, abraded and now thoroughly useless snow-goggles over our eyes again, hoisted ourselves stiffly to our feet and moved off to the south to find the end of and round the high ridge that here blocked our path. It was by far the longest and most continuous ridge we’d encountered yet, but we didn’t mind, we required to make a good offing to get us back on course and not only were we doing just that but we were doing it in comparative shelter and saving our strength by so doing. After perhaps four hundred yards the ice wall ended so abruptly, leading to so sudden and unexpected an exposure to the whistling fury of the ice-storm that I was bowled completely off my feet. An express train couldn’t have done it any better. I hung on to the rope with one hand, clawed and scrambled my way back on to my feet with the help of the other, shouted a warning to the others, and then we were fairly into the wind again, holding it directly in our faces and leaning far forward to keep our balance.

We covered the next mile in less than half an hour. The going was easier now, much easier than it had been, although we still had to make small detours round rafted, compacted and broken ice: on the debit side, we were all of us, Zabrinski excepted, pretty far gone in exhaustion, stumbling and falling far more often than was warranted by the terrain and the strength of the ice-gale: for myself, my leaden dragging legs felt as if they were on fire, each step now sent a shooting pain stabbing from ankle clear to the top of the thigh. For all that, I think I could have kept going longer than any of them, even Zabrinski, for I had the motivation, the driving force that would have kept me going hours after my legs would have told me that it was impossible to carry on a step farther. Major John Halliwell. My elder, my only brother. Alive or dead. Was he alive or was he dead, this one man in the world to whom I owed everything I had or had become? Was he dying, at that very moment when I was thinking of him, was he dying? His wife, Mary, and his three children who spoilt and ruined their bachelor uncle as I spoilt and ruined them: whatever way it lay they would have to know and only I could tell them. Alive or dead? My legs weren’t mine, the stabbing fire that tortured them belonged to some other man, not to me. I had to know, I had to know, and if I had to find out by covering whatever miles lay between me and Drift Ice Station Zebra on my hands and knees, then I would do just that. I would find out. And over and above the tearing anxiety as to what had happened to my brother there was yet another powerful motivation, a motivation that the world would regard as of infinitely more importance than the life or death of the commandant of the station. As infinitely more important than the living or dying of the score of men who manned that desolate polar outpost. Or so the world would say.

The demented drumming of the spicules on my mask and ice-sheathed furs suddenly eased, the gale wind fell away and I found myself standing in the grateful shelter of an ice-ridge even higher than the last one we’d used for shelter. I waited for the others to come up, asked Zabrinski to make a position check with the Dolphin and doled out some more of the medicinal alcohol. More of it than on the last occasion. We were in more need of it. Both Hansen and Rawlings were in a very distressed condition, their breath whistling in and out of their lungs in the rapid, rasping, shallow panting of a long-distance runner in the last tortured moments of his final exhaustion. I became gradually aware that the speed of my own breathing matched theirs almost exactly, it required a concentrated effort of will-power to hold my breath even for the few seconds necessary to gulp down my drink. I wondered vaguely if perhaps Hansen hadn’t had the right of it, maybe the alcohol wasn’t good for us. But it certainly tasted as if it were.

Zabrinski was already talking through cupped hands into the microphone. After a minute or so he pulled the earphones out from under his parka and buttoned up the walkie-talkie set. He said: ‘We’re either good or lucky or both. The Dolphin says we’re exactly on the course we ought to be on.’ He drained the glass I handed him and sighed in satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s the good part of the news. Here comes the bad part. The sides of the polynya the Dolphin is lying in are beginning to close together. They’re closing pretty fast. The captain estimates he’ll have to get out of it in two hours. Two at the most.’ He paused, then finished slowly: ‘And the ice-machine is still on the blink.’

‘The ice-machine,’ I said stupidly. Well, anyway, I felt stupid, I don’t know how I sounded. ‘Is the ice —?’

‘It sure is, brother,’ Zabrinski said. He sounded tired. ‘But you didn’t believe the skipper, did you, Dr Carpenter? You were too clever for that.’

‘Well, that’s a help,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘That makes everything just perfectly splendid. The Dolphin drops down, the ice closes up, and there we are, the Dolphin below, us on top and the whole of the polar ice-cap between us. They’ll almost certainly never manage to find us again, even if they do fix the ice-machine. Shall we just lie down and die now or shall we first stagger around in circles for a couple of hours and then lie down and die?’

‘It’s tragic,’ Rawlings said gloomily. ‘Not the personal aspect of it, I mean the loss to the United States Navy. I think I may fairly say, Lieutenant, that we are — or were — three promising young men. Well, you and me, anyway. I think Zabrinski there had reached the limit of his potentialities. He reached them a long time ago.’

Rawlings got all this out between chattering teeth and still painful gasps of air. Rawlings, I reflected, was very much the sort of person I would like to have by my side when things began to get awkward, and it looked as if things were going to become very awkward indeed. He and Zabrinski had, as I’d found out, established themselves as the homespun if slightly heavy-handed humorists on the Dolphin; for reasons known only to themselves both men habitually concealed intelligence of a high order and advanced education under a cloak of genial buffoonery.

‘Two hours yet,’ I said. ‘With this wind at our back we can be back in the sub in well under an hour. We’d be practically blown back there.’

‘And the men on Drift Station Zebra?’ Zabrinski asked.

‘We’d have done our best. Just one of those things.’

‘We are profoundly shocked, Dr Carpenter,’ Rawlings said. The tone of genial buffoonery was less noticeable than usual.

‘Deeply dismayed,’ Zabrinski added, ‘by the very idea.’ The words were light, but the lack of warmth in the voice had nothing to do with the bitter wind.

‘The only dismaying thing around here is the level of intelligence of certain simple-minded sailors,’ Hansen said with some asperity. He went on, and I wondered at the conviction in his voice: ‘Sure, Dr Carpenter thinks we should go back. That doesn’t include him. Dr Carpenter wouldn’t turn back now for all the gold in Fort Knox.’ He pushed himself wearily to his feet. ‘Can’t be much more than half a mile to go now. Let’s get it over with.’

In the backwash of light from my torch I saw Rawlings and Zabrinski glance at each other, saw them shrug their shoulders at the same moment. Then they, too, were on their feet and we were on our way again.

Three minutes later Zabrinski broke his ankle.

It happened in an absurdly simple fashion, but for all its simplicity it was a wonder that nothing of the same sort had happened to any of us in the previous three hours. After starting off again, instead of losing our bearing by working to the south and north until we had rounded the end of the ice ridge blocking our path, we elected to go over it. The ridge was all of ten feet high but by boosting and pulling each other we reached the top without much difficulty. I felt my way forward cautiously, using the ice-probe — the torch was useless in that ice-storm and my goggles completely opaque. After twenty feet crawling across the gently downward sloping surface I reached the far side of the ridge and stretched down with the probe.

‘Five feet,’ I called to the others as they came up. ‘It’s only five feet.’ I swung over the edge, dropped down and waited for the others to follow. Hansen came first, then Rawlings, both sliding down easily beside me. What happened to Zabrinski was impossible to see, he either misjudged his distance from the edge or a sudden easing of the wind made him lose his footing. Whatever the cause, I heard him call out, the words whipped away and lost by the wind, as he jumped down beside us. He seemed to land squarely and lightly enough on his feet, then cried out sharply and fell heavily to the ground.

I turned my back to the ice-storm, raised the useless snow-goggles and pulled out my torch. Zabrinski was half-sitting, half-lying on the ice, propped up on his right elbow and cursing steadily and fluently and, as far as I could tell because of the muffling effect of his snow-mask, without once repeating himself. His right heel was jammed in a four-inch crack in the ice, one of the thousands of such fractures and fissures that crisscrossed the pressure areas of the pack: his right leg was bent over at an angle to the outside, an angle normally impossible for any leg to assume. I didn’t need to have a medical diploma hung around my neck to tell that the ankle was gone: either that or the lowermost part of the tibia, for the ankle was so heavily encased in a stout boot with lace binding that most of the strain must have fallen on the shin bone. I hoped it wasn’t a compound fracture, but it was an unreasonable hope: at that acute angle the snapped bone could hardly have failed to pierce the skin. Compound or not, it made no immediate difference, I’d no intention of examining it: a few minutes’ exposure of the lower part of his leg in those temperatures was as good a way as any of ensuring that Zabrinski went through the rest of his life with one foot missing.

We lifted his massive bulk, eased the useless foot out of the crack in the ice and lowered him gently to a sitting position. I unslung the medical kit from my back, knelt beside him and asked: ‘Does it hurt badly?’

‘No, it’s numb, I hardly feel a thing.’ He swore disgustedly. ‘What a crazy thing to do. A little crack like that. How stupid can a man get?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ Rawlings said acidly. He shook his head. ‘I prophesied this, I prophesied this. I said it would end up with me carrying this gorilla here.’

I laid splints to the injured leg and taped them as tightly as possible over the boot and the furs, trying not to think of the depth of trouble we were in now. Two major blows in one. Not only had we lost the indispensable services of the strongest man in our party, we now had an extra 220 lbs. — at least — of weight, of dead-weight, to carry along with us. Not to mention his 40-lb. pack. Zabrinski might almost have read my thoughts.

‘You’ll have to leave me here, Lieutenant,’ he said to Hansen. His teeth were rattling, with shock and cold. ‘We must be almost there now. You can pick me up on the way back.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Hansen said shortly. ‘You know damn’ well we’d never find you again.’

‘Exactly,’ Rawlings said. His teeth were like Zabrinski’s, stuttering away irregularly like an asthmatic machine-gun. He knelt on the ice to support the injured man’s bulk. ‘No medals for morons. It says so in the ship’s articles.’

‘But you’ll never get to Zebra,’ Zabrinski protested. ‘If you have to carry me —’

‘You heard what I said,’ Hansen interrupted. ‘We’re not leaving you.’

‘The lieutenant is perfectly correct,’ Rawlings agreed. ‘You aren’t the hero type, Zabrinski. You haven’t the face for it, for one thing. Now clam up while I get some of this gear off your back.’

I finished tightening the splints and pulled mittens and fur gloves back on my silk-clad but already frozen hands. We shared out Zabrinski’s load among the three of us, pulled goggles and snow-masks back into position, hoisted Zabrinski to his one sound leg, turned into the wind and went on our way again. It would be truer to say that we staggered on our way again.

But now, at last and when we most needed it, luck was with us. The ice-cap stretched away beneath our feet level and smooth as the surface of a frozen river. No ridges, no hummocks, no crevasses, not even the tiny cracks one of which had crippled Zabrinski. Just billiard-flat unbroken ice and not even slippery, for its surface had been scoured and abraded by the flying ice-storm.

Each of us took turns at being lead man, the other two supporting a Zabrinski who hopped along in uncomplaining silence on one foot. After maybe three hundred yards of this smooth ice, Hansen, who was in the lead at the moment, stopped so suddenly and unexpectedly that we bumped into him.

‘We’re there!’ he yelled above the wind. ‘We’ve made it. We’re there! Can’t you smell it?’

‘Smell what?’

‘Burnt fuel oil. Burnt rubber. Don’t you get it?’

I pulled down my snow-mask, cupped my hands to my face and sniffed cautiously. One sniff was enough. I hitched up my mask again, pulled Zabrinski’s arm more tightly across my shoulder and followed on after Hansen.

The smooth ice ended in another few feet. The ice sloped up sharply to a level plateau and it took the three of us all of what pitifully little strength remained to drag Zabrinski up after us. The acrid smell of burning seemed to grow more powerful with every step we took. I moved forward, away from the others, my back to the storm, goggles down and sweeping the ice with semicircular movements of my torch. The smell was strong enough now to make my nostrils wrinkle under the mask. It seemed to be coming from directly ahead. I turned round into the wind, protectively cupped hand over my eyes, and as I did my torch struck something hard and solid and metallic. I lifted my torch and vaguely through the driving ice I could just make out the ghostly hooped steel skeleton, ice-coated on the windward side, fire-charred on the leeward side, of what had once been a Nissen-shaped hut.

We had found Drift Ice Station Zebra.

I waited for the others to come up, guided them past the gaunt and burnt-out structure, then told them to turn backs to wind and lift their goggles. For maybe ten seconds we surveyed the ruin in the light of my torch. No one said anything. Then we turned round into the wind again.

Drift Station Zebra had consisted of eight separate huts, four in each of two parallel rows, thirty feet between the two rows, twenty feet between each two huts in the rows — this to minimise the hazard of fire spreading from hut to hut. But the hazard hadn’t been minimised enough. No one could be blamed for that. No one, except in the wildest flights of nightmarish imagination, could have envisaged what must indeed have happened — exploding tanks and thousands of gallons of blazing oil being driven through the night by a gale-force wind. And, by a doubley inescapable irony, fire, without which human life on the polar ice-cap cannot survive, is there the most dreaded enemy of all: for although the entire ice-cap consists of water, frozen water, there is nothing that can melt that water and so put out the fire. Except fire itself. I wondered vaguely what had happened to the giant chemical fire-extinguishers housed in every hut.

Eight huts, four in each row. The first two on either side were completely gutted. No trace remained of the walls, which had been of two layers of weather-proofed bonded ply that had enclosed the insulation of shredded glass-fibre and kapok: on all of them even the aluminium-sheeted roofs had disappeared. In one of the huts we could see charred and blackened generator machinery, ice-coated on the windward side, bent and twisted and melted almost out of recognition: one could only wonder at the furnace ferocity of the heat responsible.

The fifth hut — the third on the right-hand side — was a gutted replica of the other four, the framing even more savagely twisted by the heat. We were just turning away from this, supporting Zabrinski and too sick at heart even to speak to each other, when Rawlings called out something unintelligible. I leaned closer to him and pulled back my parka hood.

‘A light!’ he shouted. ‘A light. Look, Doc — across there!’

And a light there was, a long narrow strangely white vertical strip of light from the hut opposite the charred wreck by which we stood. Leaning sideways into the storm we dragged Zabrinski across the intervening gap. For the first time my torch showed something that was more than a bare framework of steel. This was a hut. A blackened, scorched and twisted hut with a roughly nailed-on sheet of plywood where its solitary window had been, but nevertheless a hut. The light was coming from a door standing just ajar at the sheltered end. I laid my hand on the door, the one unscorched thing I’d seen so far in Drift Station Zebra. The hinges creaked like a rusty gate in a cemetery at midnight and the door gave beneath my hand. We passed inside.

Suspended from a hook in the centre of the ceiling a hissing Coleman lamp threw its garish light, amplified by the glittering aluminium ceiling, over every corner and detail of that eighteen by ten hut. A thick but transparent layer of ice sheathed the aluminium roof except for a three-foot circle directly above the lamp, and the ice spread from the ceiling down the plywood walls all the way to the door. The wooden floor, too, was covered with ice, except where the bodies of the men lay. There may have been ice under them as well. I couldn’t tell.

My first thought, conviction rather, and one that struck at me with a heart-sapping sense of defeat, with a chill that even the polar storm outside had been unable to achieve, was that we had arrived too late. I had seen many dead men in my life, I knew what dead men looked like, and now I was looking at just that many more. Shapeless, huddled, lifeless forms lying under a shapeless mass of blankets, mackinaws, duffels and furs, I wouldn’t have bet a cent on my chances of finding one heart-beat among the lot of them. Lying packed closely together in a rough semicircle at the end of the room remote from the door, they were utterly still, as unmoving as men would be if they had been lying that way for a frozen eternity. Apart from the hissing of the pressure-lamp there was no sound inside the hut other than the metallic drumfire of the ice-spicules against the ice-sheathed eastern wall of the hut.

Zabrinski was eased down into a sitting position against a wall. Rawlings unslung the heavy load he was carrying on his back, unwrapped the stove, pulled off his mittens and started fumbling around for the fuel tablets. Hansen pulled the door to behind him, slipped the buckles of his rucksack and wearily let his load of tinned food drop to the floor of the shack.

For some reason, the voice of the storm outside and the hissing of the Coleman inside served only to heighten the deathly stillness in the hut, and the unexpected metallic clatter of the falling cans made me jump. It made one of the dead men jump, too. The man nearest to me by the left-hand wall suddenly moved, rolled over and sat up, bloodshot faded eyes staring out unbelievingly from a frostbitten, haggard and cruelly burnt face, the burns patchily covered by a long dark stubble of beard. For long seconds he looked at us unblinkingly, then, some obscure feeling of pride making him ignore the offer of my outstretched arm, he pushed himself shakily and with obvious pain to his feet. Then the cracked and peeling lips broke into a grin.

‘You’ve been a bleedin’ long time getting here.’ The voice was hoarse and weak and cockney as the Bow Bells themselves. ‘My name’s Kinnaird. Radio operator.’

‘Whisky?’ I asked.

He grinned again, tried to lick his cracked lips, and nodded. The stiff tot of whisky went down his throat like a man in a barrel going over the Niagara Falls, one moment there, the next gone for ever. He bent over, coughing harshly until the tears came to his eyes, but when he straightened life was coming back into those same lacklustre eyes and colour touching the pale emaciated cheeks.

‘If you go through life saying “Hallo” in this fashion, mate,’ he observed, ‘then you’ll never lack for friends.’ He bent and shook the shoulder of the man beside whom he had been lying. ‘C’mon, Jolly, old boy, where’s your bleedin’ manners? We got company.’

It took quite a few shakes to get Jolly, old boy, awake, but when he did come to he was completely conscious and on his feet with remarkable speed in the one case and with remarkable nimbleness in the other. He was a short, chubby character with china-blue eyes, and although he was as much in need of a shave as Kinnaird, there was still colour in his face and the round good-humoured face was far from emaciated: but frostbite had made a bad mess of both mouth and nose. The china-blue eyes, flecked with red and momentarily wide in surprise, crinkled into a grin of welcome. Jolly, old boy, I guess, would always adjust fast to circumstances.

‘Visitors, eh?’ His deep voice held a rich Irish brogue. ‘And damned glad we are to see you, too. Do the honours, Jeff.’

‘We haven’t introduced ourselves,’ I said. I’m Dr Carpenter and this —’

‘Regular meeting of the B.M.A., old boy,’ Jolly said. I was to find out later that he used the phrase ‘old boy’ in every second or third sentence, a mannerism which went strangely with his Irish accent.

‘Dr Jolly?’

‘The same. Resident medical officer, old boy.’

‘I see. This is Lieutenant Hansen of the United States Navy submarine Dolphin —’

‘Submarine?’ Jolly and Kinnard stared at each other, then at us. ‘You said “submarine,” old top?’

‘Explanations can wait. Torpedoman Rawlings. Radioman Zabrinski.’ I glanced down at the huddled men on the floor, some of them already stirring at the sound of voices, one or two propping themselves up on their elbows. ‘How are they?’

‘Two or three pretty bad burn cases,’ Jolly said. ‘Two or three far gone with cold and exhaustion, but not so far gone that food and warmth wouldn’t have them right as rain in a few days. I made them all huddle together like this for mutual warmth.’

I counted them. Including Jolly and Kinnaird, there were twelve all told. I said: ‘Where are the others?’

‘The others?’ Kinnaird looked at me in momentary surprise, then his face went bleak and cold. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘In the next hut, mate.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ He rubbed a weary forearm across bloodshot eyes. ‘Because we don’t fancy sleeping with a roomful of corpses, that’s why.’

‘Because you don’t —’ I broke off and stared down at the men at my feet. Seven of them were awake now, three of them propped on elbows, four still lying down, all seven registering various degrees of dazed bewilderment: the three who were still asleep — or unconscious — had their faces covered by blankets. I said slowly. ‘There were nineteen of you.’

‘Nineteen of us,’ Kinnaird echoed emptily. ‘The others — well, they never had a chance.’

I said nothing. I looked carefully at the faces of the conscious men, hoping to find among them the one face I wanted to see, hoping perhaps that I had not immediately recognised it because frostbite or hunger or burns had made it temporarily unrecognisable. I looked very carefully indeed and I knew that I had never seen any of those faces before.

I moved over to the first of the three still sleeping figures and lifted the blanket covering the face. The face of a stranger. I let the blanket drop. Jolly said in puzzlement: ‘What’s wrong? What do you want?’

I didn’t answer him. I picked my way round recumbent men, all staring uncomprehendingly at me, and lifted the blanket from the face of the second sleeping man. Again I let the blanket drop and I could feel my mouth go dry, the slow heavy pounding of my heart. I crossed to the third man, then stood there hesitating, knowing I must find out, dreading what I must find. Then I stooped quickly and lifted the blanket. A man with a heavily bandaged face. A man with a broken nose and a thick blond beard. A man I had never seen in my life before. Gently I spread the blanket back over his face and straightened up. Rawlings, I saw, already had the solid-fuel stove going.

‘That should bring the temperature up to close to freezing,’ I said to Dr Jolly. ‘We’ve plenty of fuel. We’ve also brought food, alcohol, a complete medical kit. If you and Kinnaird want to start in on those things now I’ll give you a hand in a minute. Lieutenant, that was a polynya, that smooth stretch we crossed just before we got here? A frozen lead?’

‘Couldn’t be anything else.’ Hansen was looking at me peculiarly, a wondering expression on his face. ‘These people are obviously in no fit state to travel a couple of hundred yards, far less four or five miles. Besides, the skipper said he was going to be squeezed down pretty soon. So we whistle up the Dolphin and have them surface at the back door?’

‘Can he find that polynya — without the ice-machine, I mean?’

‘Nothing simpler. I’ll take Zabrinski’s radio, move a measured two hundred yards to the north, send a bearing signal, move two hundred yards to the south and do the same. They’ll have our range to a yard. Take a couple of hundred yards off that and the Dolphin will find itself smack in the middle of the polynya.’

‘But still under it. I wonder how thick that ice is. You had an open lead to the west of the camp some time ago, Dr Jolly. How long ago?’

‘A month. Maybe five weeks. I can’t be sure.’

‘How thick?’ I asked Hansen.

‘Five feet, maybe six. Couldn’t possibly break through it. But the captain’s always had a hankering to have a go with his torpedoes.’ He turned to Zabrinski. ‘Still fit to operate that radio of yours?’

I left them to it. I’d hardly been aware of what I’d been saying, anyway. I felt sick and old and empty and sad, and deathly tired. I had my answer now. I’d come 12,000 miles to find it, I’d have gone a million to avoid it. But the inescapable fact was there and now nothing could ever change it. Mary, my sister-in-law and her three wonderful children — she would never see her husband again, they would never see their father again. My brother was dead and no one was ever going to see him again. Except me. I was going to see him now.

I went out, closing the door behind me, moved round the corner of the hut and lowered my head against the storm. Ten seconds later I reached the door of the last hut in the line. I used the torch to locate the handle, twisted it, pushed and passed inside.

Once it had been a laboratory: now it was a charnel house, a house of the dead. The laboratory equipment had all been pushed roughly to one side and the cleared floor space covered with the bodies of dead men. I knew they were dead men, but only because Kinnaird had told me so: hideously charred and blackened and grotesquely misshapen as they were, those carbonised and contorted lumps of matter could have been any form of life or indeed no form of life at all. The stench of incinerated flesh and burnt diesel fuel was dreadful. I wondered which of the men in the other hut had had the courage, the iron resolution, to bring those grisly burdens, the shockingly disfigured remains of their former comrades into this hut. They must have had strong stomachs.

Death must have been swift, swift for all of them. Theirs had not been the death of men trapped by fire, it had been the death of men who had themselves been on fire. Caught, drenched, saturated by a gale-borne sea of burning oil, they must have spent the last few seconds of life as incandescently blazing human torches before dying in insane screaming agony. They must have died as terribly as men can ever die.

Something about one of the bodies close to me caught my attention. I stooped and focused the torch beam on what had once been a right hand, now no more than a blackened claw with the bone showing through. So powerful had been that heat that it had warped, but not melted, the curiously shaped gold ring on the third finger. I recognised that ring, I had been with my sister-in-law when she had bought it.

I was conscious of no grief, no pain, no revulsion. Perhaps, I thought dully, those would come later when the initial shock had worn off. But I didn’t think so. This wasn’t the man I remembered so well, the brother to whom I owed everything, a debt that could never now be repaid. This charred mass of matter before me was a stranger, so utterly different from the man who lived on in my memory, so changed beyond all possibility of recognition that my numbed mind in my exhausted body just could not begin to bridge the gap.

As I stood there, staring down, something ever so slightly offbeat about the way the body lay caught my professional attention. I stooped low, very low, and remained bent over for what seemed a long time. I straightened, slowly, and as I did I heard the door behind me open. I whirled round and saw that it was Lieutenant Hansen. He pulled down his snow-mask, lifted up his goggles, looked at me and then at the man at my feet. I could see shock draining expression and colour from his face. Then he looked up at me.

‘So you lost out, Doc?’ I could hardly hear the husky whisper above the voice of the storm. ‘God, I’m sorry.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your brother?’ He nodded at the man at my feet.

‘Commander Swanson told you?’

‘Yeah. Just before we left. That’s why we came.’ His gaze moved in horrified fascination over the floor of the hut, and his face was grey, like old parchment. ‘A minute, Doc, just a minute.’ He turned and hurried through the doorway.

When he came back he looked better, but not much. He said: ‘Commander Swanson said that that was why he had to let you go.’

‘Who else knows?’

‘Skipper and myself. No one else.’

‘Keep it that way, will you? As a favour to me.’

‘If you say so, Doc.’ There was curiosity in his face now, and puzzlement, but horror was still the dominant expression. ‘My God, have you ever seen anything like it?’

‘Let’s get back to the others,’ I said. ‘We’re doing nobody any good by staying here.’

He nodded without speaking. Together we made our way back to the other hut. Apart from Dr Jolly and Kinnaird, three other men were on their feet now, Captain Folsom, an extraordinarily tall thin man with savagely burnt face and hands who was second in command of the base, Hewson, a dark-eyed taciturn character, a tractor driver and engineer who had been responsible for the diesel generators, and a cheerful Yorkshireman, Naseby, the camp cook. Jolly, who had opened my medical kit and was applying fresh bandages to the arms of the men still lying down, introduced them, then turned back to his job. He didn’t seem to need my help, not for the moment, anyway. I heard Hansen say to Zabrinski: ‘In contact with the Dolphin!’

‘Well, no.’ Zabrinski stopped sending his call-sign and shifted slightly to ease his broken ankle. ‘I don’t quite know how to put this, Lieutenant, but the fact is that this little ol’ set here seems to have blown a fuse.’

‘Well, now,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘That is clever of you, Zabrinski. You mean you can’t raise them?’

‘I can hear them, they can’t hear me.’ He shrugged, apologetically. ‘Me and my clumsy feet, I guess. It wasn’t just only my ankle that went when I took that tumble out there.’

‘Well, can’t you repair the damn’ thing?’

‘I don’t think so, Lieutenant.’

‘Damn it, you’re supposed to be a radioman.’

‘That’s so,’ Zabrinski acknowledged reasonably. ‘But I’m not a magician. And with a couple of numbed and frozen hands, no tools, an old-type set without a printed circuit and the code signs in Japanese — well, even Marconi would have called it a day.’

‘Can it be repaired?’ Hansen insisted.

‘It’s a transistor set. No valves to smash. I expect it could be repaired. But it might take hours, Lieutenant — I’d even have to fake up a set of tools first.’

‘Well, fake them. Anything you like. Only get that thing working.’

Zabrinski said nothing. He held out the headphones to Hansen. Hansen looked at Zabrinski, then at the phones, took them without a word and listened briefly. Then he shrugged, handed back the phones and said: ‘Well, I guess there is no hurry to repair that radio.’

‘Yeah,’ Zabrinski said. ‘Awkward, you might say, Lieutenant.’

‘What’s awkward?’ I asked.

‘Looks as if we’re going to be next on the list for a rescue party,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘They’re sending a more or less continuous signal: “Ice closing rapidly, return at once.”’

‘I was against this madness from the very beginning,’ Rawlings intoned from the floor. He stared down at the already melting lumps of frozen tinned soup and stirred it moodily with a fork. ‘A gallant attempt, men, but foredoomed to failure.’

‘Keep your filthy fingers out of that soup and kindly clam up,’ Hansen said coldly. He turned suddenly to Kinnaird. ‘How about your radio set? Of course, that’s it. We have fit men here to crank your generator and -’

‘I’m sorry.’ Kinnaird smiled the way a ghost might smile. ‘It’s not a hand-powered generator, that was destroyed, it’s a battery set. The batteries are finished. Completely finished.’

‘A battery set, you said?’ Zabrinski looked at him in mild surprise. ‘Then what caused all the power fluctuations when you were transmitting?’

‘We kept changing over the nickel cadmium cells to try to make the most of what little power was left in them: we’d only fifteen left altogether, most of them were lost in the fire. That caused the power fluctuations. But even Nife cells don’t last for ever. They’re finished, mate. The combined power left in those cells wouldn’t light a pencil torch.’

Zabrinski didn’t say anything. No one said anything. The ice-spicules drummed incessantly against the east wall, the Coleman hissed, the solid-fuel stove purred softly: but the sole effect of those three sounds was to make the silence inside seem that little bit more absolute. No one looked at his neighbours, everyone stared down at the floor with the fixed and steadfast gaze of an entomologist hunting for traces of woodworm. Any newspaper printing a picture taken at that instant wouldn’t have found it any too easy to convince its readers that the men on Drift Ice Station Zebra had been rescued just ten minutes previously, and rescued from certain death at that. The readers would have pointed out that one might have expected a little more jubilation in the atmosphere, a touch, perhaps, of lighthearted relief, and they wouldn’t have been far wrong at that, there wasn’t very much gaiety around.

After the silence had gone on just that little too long I said to Hansen: ‘Well, that’s it, then. We don’t have to hire any electronic computer to work this one out. Someone’s got to get back to the Dolphin and get back there now. I’m nominating myself.’

‘No!’ Hansen said violently, then more quietly: ‘Sorry, friend, but the skipper’s orders didn’t include giving permission to anyone to commit suicide. You’re staying here.’

‘So I stay here,’ I nodded. This wasn’t the time to tell him I didn’t need his permission for anything, far less was it the time to start flourishing the Mannlicher-Schoenauer. ‘So we all stay here. And then we all die here. Quietly, without any fighting, without any fuss, we just lie down and die here. I suppose you reckon that comes under the heading of inspiring leadership. Amundsen would have loved that.’ It wasn’t fair, but then I wasn’t feeling fair-minded at the moment.

‘Nobody’s going any place,’ Hansen said. ‘I’m not my brother’s keeper, Doc, but for all that I’ll be damned if I let you kill yourself. You’re not fit, none of us is fit to make the return trip to the Dolphin — not after what we’ve just been through. That’s one thing. The next thing is that without a transmitter from which the Dolphin can pick up our directional bearings, we could never hope to find the Dolphin again. The third thing is that the closing ice will probably have forced the Dolphin to drop down before anyone could get halfway there. And the last thing is that if we failed to find the Dolphin either because we missed her or because she was gone, we could never make our way back to Zebra again: we wouldn’t have the strength and we would have nothing to guide us back anyway.’

‘The odds offered aren’t all that attractive,’ I admitted. ‘What odds are you offering on the ice-machine being repaired?’

Hansen shook his head, said nothing. Rawlings started stirring his soup again, carefully not looking up, he didn’t want to meet the anxious eyes, the desperate eyes, in that circle of haggard and frost-bitten faces any more than I did. But he looked up as Captain Folsom pushed himself away from the support of a wall and took a couple of unsteady steps towards us. It didn’t require any stethoscope to see that Folsom was in a pretty bad way.

‘I am afraid that we don’t understand,’ he said. His voice was slurred and indistinct, the puffed and twisted lips had been immobilised by the savage charring of his face: I wondered bleakly how many months of pain would elapse, how many visits to the surgeon’s table, before Folsom could show that face to the world again. In the very remote event, that was, of our ever getting him to hospital. ‘Would you please explain? What is the difficulty?’

‘Simply this,’ I said. ‘The Dolphin has an ice fathometer, a device for measuring the thickness of the overhead ice. Normally, even if Commander Swanson — the captain of the Dolphin — didn’t hear from us, we could expect him on our doorstep in a matter of hours. He has the position of this Drift Station pinned down pretty closely. All he would have to do is to drop down, come under us here, start a grid search with his ice fathometer and it would be only minutes before he would locate the relatively thin ice out in that lead there. But things aren’t normal. The ice-machine has broken down and if it stays that way he’ll never find that lead. That’s why I want to go back there. Now. Before Swanson’s forced to dive by the closing ice.’

‘Don’t see it, old boy,’ Jolly said. ‘How’s that going to help? Can you fix this ice what-you-may-call-it?’

‘I don’t have to. Commander Swanson knows his distance from this camp give or take a hundred yards. All I have to do is to tell him to cover the distance less quarter of a mile and loose off a torpedo. That ought -’

‘Torpedo?’ Jolly asked. ‘Torpedo? To break through the ice from beneath?’

‘That’s it. It’s never been tried before. I suppose there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work if the ice is thin enough and it won’t be all that thick in the lead out there. I don’t really know.’

‘They’ll be sending planes, you know, Doc,’ Zabrinski said quietly. ‘We started transmitting the news as soon as we broke through and everybody will know by now that Zebra has been found — at least, they’ll know exactly where it is. They’ll have the big bombers up here in a few hours.’

‘Doing what?’ I asked. ‘Sculling around uselessly in the darkness up above? Even if they do have the exact position, they still won’t be able to see what’s left of this station because of the darkness and the ice-storm. Perhaps they can with radar, it’s unlikely, but even if they do, what then? Drop supplies? Maybe. But they won’t dare drop supplies directly on us for fear of killing us. They’d have to drop them some distance off — and even a quarter-mile would be too far away for any chance we’d ever have of finding stuff in those conditions. As for landing — even if weather conditions were perfect, no plane big enough to have the range to fly here could ever hope to land on the ice-cap. You know that.’

‘What’s your middle name, Doc?’ Rawlings asked dolefully. ‘Jeremiah?’

‘The greatest good of the greatest number,’ I said. ‘The old yardstick, but there’s never been a better one. If we just hole up here without making any attempt to help ourselves and the ice-machine remains useless, then we’re all dead. All sixteen of us. If I make it there safely, then we’re all alive. Even if I don’t, the ice-machine may be fixed and there would only be one lost then.’ I started pulling on my mittens. ‘One is less than sixteen.’

‘We might as well make it two,’ Hansen sighed and began to pull on his own gloves. I was hardly surprised, when he’d last spoken he’d talked at first of ‘you’ having no chance and finished by saying that ‘we’ had none and it hadn’t required any psychiatrist to follow his quick shift in mental orientation: whatever men like Hansen were hand-picked for, it wasn’t for any predilection for shifting the load to others’ shoulders when the going became sticky.

I didn’t waste time arguing with him.

Rawlings got to his feet.

‘One skilled volunteer for the soup-stirring,’ he requested. ‘Those two wouldn’t get as far as the door there without my holding their hands. I shall probably get a medal for this. What’s the highest decoration awarded in peace-time, Lieutenant?’

‘There are no medals given for soup-stirring, Rawlings,’ Hansen said, ‘which is what you are going to keep on doing. You’re staying right here.’

‘Uh-uh.’ Rawlings shook his head. ‘Prepare yourself to deal with your first mutiny, Lieutenant. I’m coming with you. I can’t lose. If we get to the Dolphin you’ll be too damned glad and happy to have made it to dream of reporting me, apart from being a fair-minded man who will have to admit that our safe arrival back at the ship will be entirely due to Torpedoman Rawlings.’ He grinned. ‘And if we don’t make it — well, you can’t very well report it, can you, Lieutenant?’

Hansen walked across to him. He said quietly: ‘You know that there’s more than an even chance that we won’t reach the Dolphin. That would leave twelve pretty sick men here, not to mention Zabrinski with a broken ankle, and with no one to look after them. They must have one fit man to look after them. You couldn’t be that selfish, now, could you, Rawlings? Look after them, will you? As a favour to me?’

Rawlings looked at him for long seconds, then squatted down and started stirring the soup again.

‘As a favour to me, you mean,’ he said bitterly. ‘O.K., I’ll stay. As a favour to me. Also to prevent Zabrinski tripping over his legs again and breaking another ankle.’ He stirred the soup viciously. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? The skipper may be making up his mind to dive any minute.’

He had a point. We brushed off protests and attempts to stop us made by Captain Folsom and Dr Jolly and were ready to leave in thirty seconds. Hansen was through the door first. I turned and looked at the sick and emaciated and injured survivors of Drift Station Zebra. Folsom, Jolly, Kinnaird, Hewson, Naseby and seven others. Twelve men altogether. They couldn’t all be in cahoots together, so it had to be a single man, maybe two, acting in concert. I wondered who those men might be, those men I would have to kill, that person or persons who had murdered my brother and six other men on Drift Ice Station Zebra.

I pulled the door to behind me and followed Hansen out into the dreadful night.

SIX

We had been tired, more than tired, even before we had set out. We had been leaden-legged, bone-weary, no more than a short hand-span from total exhaustion. But for all that we flitted through the howling darkness of that night like two great white ghosts across the dimly seen whiteness of a nightmare lunar landscape. We were no longer bowed under the weight of heavy packs. Our backs were to that gale-force wind so that for every laborious plodding step we had made on our way to Zebra, we now covered five, with so little a fraction of our earlier toil that at first it seemed all but effortless. We had no trouble in seeing where we were going, no fear of falling into an open lead or of crippling ourselves against some unexpected obstacle, for with our useless goggles removed and powerful torch beams dancing erratically ahead of us as we jog-trotted along, visibility was seldom less than five yards, more often near to ten. Those were the physical aids that helped us on our way but even more sharply powerful as a spur to our aching legs was that keen and ever-growing fear that dominated our minds to the exclusion of all else, the fear that Commander Swanson had already been compelled to drop down and that we would be left to die in that shrieking wasteland: with our lacking both shelter and food, the old man with the scythe would not be keeping us waiting too long.

We ran, but we did not run too fast, for to have done that would have been to have the old man tapping us on the shoulder in very short order indeed. In far sub-zero temperatures, there is one thing that the Eskimo avoids as he would the plague — over-exertion, in those latitudes more deadly, even, than the plague itself. Too much physical effort while wearing heavy furs inevitably results in sweat, and when the effort ceases, as eventually cease it must, the sweat freezes on the skin: the only way to destroy that film of ice is by further exertion, producing even more sweat, the beginnings of a vicious and steadily narrowing circle that can have only one end. So though we ran it was only at a gentle jog-trot, hardly more than a fast walk: we took every possible precaution against overheating.

After half an hour, perhaps a little more, I called for a brief halt in the shelter of a steep ice-wall. Twice in the past two minutes Hansen had stumbled and fallen where there hadn’t appeared to be any reason to stumble and fall: and I had noticed that my own legs were more unsteady than the terrain warranted.

‘How are you making out?’ I asked.

‘Pretty bushed, Doc.’ He sounded it, too, his breathing quick and rasping and shallow. ‘But don’t write me off yet. How far do you reckon we’ve come?’

‘Three miles, near enough.’ I patted the ice-wall behind us. ‘When we’ve had a couple of minutes I think we should try climbing this. Looks like a pretty tallish hummock to me.’

‘To try to get into the clear above the ice-storm?’ I nodded my head and he shook his. ‘Won’t do you any good, Doc. This ice-storm must be at least twenty feet thick, and even if you do get above it the Dolphin will still be below it. She’s only got the top of her sail clear above the ice.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘We’ve been so lost in our own woes and sorrows that we have forgotten about Commander Swanson. I think we have been guilty of underestimating him pretty badly.’

‘It’s likely enough. Right now I’m having a full-time job worrying about Lieutenant Hansen. What’s on your mind?’

‘Just this. The chances are better than fifty-fifty that Swanson believes we are on the way back to the Dolphin. After all, he’s been ordering us to return for quite some time; and if he thinks we didn’t get the order because something has happened to us or to the radio, he’ll still figure that we will be returning.’

‘Not necessarily. Radio or not, we might still be pushing on for Drift Station Zebra.’

‘No. Definitely not. He’ll be expecting us to be smart enough to figure it the way he would; and smart enough to see that that is the way he would figure it. He would know that if our radio broke down before we got to Zebra that it would be suicidal for us to try to find it without radio bearing — but that it wouldn’t be suicidal for us to try to make it back to the Dolphin, for he would be hoping that we would have sufficient savvy to guess that he would put a lamp in the window to guide the lost sheep home.’

‘My God, Doc, I believe you’ve got it! Of course he would, of course he would. Lordy, lordy, what am I using for brains?’ He straightened and turned to face the ice-wall.

Pushing and pulling, we made it together to the top. The summit of the rafted ice hummock was less than twenty feet above the level of the icepack and not quite high enough. We were still below the surface of that gale-driven river of ice-spicules. Occasionally, for a brief moment of time, the wind force would ease fractionally and let us have a brief glimpse of the clear sky above but only occasionally and for a fraction of a second. And if there was anything to be seen in that time, we couldn’t see it.

‘There’ll be other hummocks,’ I shouted in Hansen’s ear. ‘Higher hummocks.’ He nodded without answering. I couldn’t see the expression on his face but I didn’t have to see it. The same thought was in both our minds: we could see nothing because there was nothing to see. Commander Swanson hadn’t put a lamp in the window, for the window was gone, the Dolphin forced to dive to avoid being crushed by the ice.

Five times in the next twenty minutes we climbed hummocks, and five times we climbed down, each time more dejected, more defeated. By now I was pretty far gone, moving in a pain-filled nightmare: Hansen was in even worse case, lurching and staggering around like a drunken man. As a doctor, I knew well of the hidden and unsuspected resources that an exhausted man can call on in times of desperate emergency; but I knew, too, that those resources are not limitless and that we were pretty close to the end. And when that end came we would just lie down in the lee of an ice-wall and wait for the old man to come along: he wouldn’t keep us waiting long.

Our sixth hummock all but defeated us. It wasn’t that it was hard to climb, it was well ridged with foot-and handholds in plenty, but the sheer physical effort of climbing came very close to defeating us. And then I dimly began to realise that part of the effort was due to the fact that this was by far the highest hummock we had found yet. Some colossal pressures had concentrated on this one spot, rafting and log-jamming the ice-pack until it had risen a clear thirty feet above the general level: the giant underwater ridge beneath must have stretched down close on two hundred feet towards the black floor of the Arctic.

Eight feet below the summit our heads were in the clear: on the summit itself, holding on to each other for mutual support against the gale, we could look down on the ice-storm whirling by just beneath our feet: a fantastic sight, a great grey-white sea of undulating turbulence, a giant rushing river that stretched from horizon to horizon. Like so much else in the high Arctic the scene had an eerie and terrifying strangeness about it, a mindless desolation that belonged not to earth but to some alien and long-dead planet.

We scanned the horizon to the west until our eyes ached. Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that endless desolation. From due north to due south, through 180°, we searched the surface of that great river; and still we saw nothing. Three minutes passed. Still nothing. I began to feel the ice running in my blood.

On the remote off-chance that we might already have bypassed the Dolphin to the north or south, I turned and peered towards the east. It wasn’t easy, for that far subzero gale of wind brought tears to the eyes in an instant of time; but at least it wasn’t impossible, we no longer had to contend with the needle-pointed lances of the ice-spicules. I made another slow 180° sweep of the eastern horizon, and again, and again. Then I caught Hansen’s arm.

‘Look there,’ I said. ‘To the north-east. Maybe quarter of a mile away, maybe half a mile. Can you see anything?’

For several seconds Hansen squinted along the direction of my outstretched hand, then shook his head. ‘I see nothing. What do you think you see?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. I can imagine I see a very faint touch of luminescence on the surface of the ice-storm there, maybe just a fraction of a shade whiter than the rest.’

For a full half-minute Hansen stared out through cupped hands. Finally he said: ‘It’s no good. I don’t see it. But then my eyes have been acting up on me for the past half-hour. But I can’t even imagine I see anything.’

I turned away to give my streaming eyes a rest from that icy wind and then looked again. ‘Damn it,’ I said, ‘I can’t be sure that there is anything there; but I can’t be sure that there isn’t, either.’

‘What do you fancy it would be?’ Hansen’s voice was dispirited, with overtones of hopelessness. ‘A light?’

‘A searchlight shining vertically upwards. A searchlight that’s not able to penetrate that ice-storm.’

‘You’re kidding yourself, Doc,’ Hansen said wearily. ‘The wish father to the thought. Besides, that would mean that we had already passed the Dolphin. It’s not possible.’

‘It’s not impossible. Ever since we started climbing those damned ice-hummocks I’ve lost track of time and space. It could be.’

‘Do you still see it?’ The voice was empty, uninterested, he didn’t believe me and he was just making words.

‘Maybe my eyes are acting up, too,’ I admitted. ‘But, damn it, I’m still not sure that I’m not right.’

‘Come on, Doc, let’s go.’

‘Go where?’

‘I don’t know.’ His teeth chattered so uncontrollably in that intense cold that I could scarcely follow his words. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter very much where —’

With breath-taking abruptness, almost in the centre of my imagined patch of luminescence and not more than four hundred yards away, a swiftly climbing rocket burst through the rushing river of ice-spicules and climbed high into the clear sky trailing behind it a fiery tail of glowing red sparks. Five hundred feet it climbed, perhaps six hundred, then burst into a brilliantly incandescent shower of crimson stars, stars that fell lazily back to earth again, streaming away to the west on the wings of the gale and dying as they went, till the sky was colder and emptier than ever before.

‘You still say it doesn’t matter very much where we go?’ I asked Hansen. ‘Or maybe you didn’t see that little lot?’

‘What I just saw,’ he said reverently, ‘was the prettiest ol’ sight that Ma Hansen’s little boy ever did see — or ever will see.’ He thumped me on the back, so hard that I had to grab him to keep my balance. ‘We got it made, Doc!’ he shouted. ‘We got it made. Suddenly I have the strength of ten. Home sweet home, here we come.’

Ten minutes later we were home.

‘God this is wonderful,’ Hansen sighed. He stared in happy bemusement from the captain to me to the glass in his hand to the water dripping from the melting ice on his furs on to the corticene decking of the captain’s tiny cabin. ‘The warmth, the light, the comfort and home sweet home. I never thought I’d see any of it again. When that rocket went up, Skipper, I was just looking around to pick a place to lay me down and die. And don’t think I’m joking, for I’m not.’

‘And Dr Carpenter?’ Swanson smiled.

‘Defective mental equipment somewhere,’ Hansen said. ‘He doesn’t seem to know how to set about giving up. I think he’s just mule-headed. You get them like that.’

Hansen’s slightly off-beat, slightly irrational talk had nothing to do with the overwhelming relief and relaxation that comes after moments of great stress and tension. Hansen was too tough for that. I knew that and I knew that Swanson knew it also. We’d been back for almost twenty minutes now, we’d told our story, the pressure was off, a happy ending for all seemed in sight and normalcy was again almost the order of the day. But when the strain is off and conditions are back to normal a man has time to start thinking about things again. I knew only too well what was in Hansen’s mind’s eye, that charred and huddled shapelessness that had once been my brother. He didn’t want me to talk about him, and for that I didn’t blame him; he didn’t want me even to think about him, although he must have known that that was impossible. The kindest men nearly always are like that, hard and tough and cynical on the outside, men who have been too kind and showed it.

‘However it was,’ Swanson smiled, ‘you can consider yourselves two of the luckiest men alive. That rocket you saw was the third last we had, it’s been a regular fourth of July for the past hour or so. And you reckon Rawlings, Zabrinski and the survivors on Zebra are safe for the present?’

‘Nothing to worry about for the next couple of days,’ Hansen nodded. ‘They’ll be O.K. Cold, mind you, and a good half of them desperately in need of hospital treatment, but they’ll survive.’

‘Fine. Well, this is how it is. This lead here stopped closing in about half an hour ago, but it doesn’t matter now, we can drop down any time and still hold our position. What does matter is that we have located the fault in the ice-machine. It’s a damnably tricky and complicated job and I expect it will take several hours yet to fix. But I think we’ll wait until it is fixed before we try anything. I’m not too keen on this idea of making a dead reckoning approach to this lead near Zebra then loosing off a shot in the dark. Since there’s no desperate hurry, I’d rather wait till we got the ice fathometer operating again, make an accurate survey of this lead then fire a torpedo up through the middle. If the ice is only four or five feet thick there, we shouldn’t have much trouble blowing a hole through.’

‘That would be best,’ Hansen agreed. He finished off his medicinal alcohol — an excellent bourbon — rose stiffly to his feet and stretched. ‘Well, back to the old treadmill again. How many torpedoes in working order?’

‘Four, at the last count.’

‘I may as well go help young Mills load them up now. If that’s O.K. by you, Skipper.’

‘It is not O.K. by me,’ Swanson said mildly, ‘and if you’ll take a quick gander at that mirror there you’ll understand why. You’re not fit to load a slug into an airgun far less a torpedo into its tube. You haven’t just been on a Sunday afternoon stroll, you know. A few hours’ sleep, John, then we’ll see.’

Hansen didn’t argue. I couldn’t imagine anyone arguing with Commander Swanson. He made for the door. ‘Coming, Doc?’

‘In a moment. Sleep well.’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’ He touched me lightly on the shoulder and smiled through bloodshot and exhausted eyes. ‘Thanks for everything. Goodnight, all.’

When he was gone Swanson said: ‘It was pretty wicked out there to-night?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it for an old ladies’ home Sunday afternoon outing.’

‘Lieutenant Hansen seems to imagine he’s under some kind of debt to you,’ he went on inconsequentially.

‘Imagination, as you say. They don’t come any better than Hansen. You’re damned lucky to have him as an exec.’

‘I know that.’ He hesitated, then said quietly: ‘I promise you, I won’t mention this again — but, well, I’m most damnably sorry, Doctor.’

I looked at him and nodded slowly. I knew he meant it, I knew he had to say it, but there’s not much you can say in turn to anything like that. I said: ‘Six others died with him, Commander.’

He hesitated again. ‘Do we — do we take the dead back to Britain with us?’

‘Could I have another drop of that excellent bourbon, Commander? Been a very heavy run on your medicinal alcohol in the past few hours, I’m afraid.’ I waited till he had filled my glass then went on: ‘We don’t take them back with us. They’re not dead men, they’re just unrecognisable and unidentifiable lumps of charred matter. Let them stay here.’

His relief was unmistakable and he was aware of it for he went on hurriedly, for something to say: ‘All this equipment for locating and tracking the Russian missiles. Destroyed?’

‘I didn’t check.’ He’d find out for himself soon enough that there had been no such equipment. How he’d react to that discovery in light of the cock-and-bull story I’d spun to himself and Admiral Garvie in the Holy Loch I couldn’t even begin to guess. At the moment I didn’t even care. It didn’t seem important, nothing seemed important, not any more. All at once I felt tired, not sleepy, just deathly tired, so I pushed myself stiffly to my feet, said good-night and left.

Hansen was in his bunk when I got back to his cabin, his furs lying where he had dropped them. I checked that he was no longer awake, slipped off my own furs, hung them up and replaced the Mannlicher-Schoenauer in my case. I lay down in my cot to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Exhausted though I was, I had never felt less like sleep in my life.

I was too restless and unsettled for sleep, too many problems coming all at once were causing a first-class log-jam in my mind. I got up, pulled on shirt and denim pants, and made my way to the control room. I spent the better part of what remained of the night there, pacing up and down, watching two technicians repairing the vastly complicated innards of the ice-machine, reading the messages of congratulation which were still coming in, talking desultorily to the officer on deck and drinking endless cups of coffee. It passed the night for me and although I hadn’t closed an eye I felt fresh and almost relaxed by the time morning came.

At the wardroom breakfast table that morning everyone seemed quietly cheerful. They knew they had done a good job, the whole world was telling them they had done a magnificent job, and you could see that they all regarded that job as being as good as over. No one appeared to doubt Swanson’s ability to blow a hole through the ice. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the ghost at the feast, myself, they would have been positively jovial.

‘We’ll pass up the extra cups of coffee this morning, gentlemen,’ Swanson said. ‘Drift Station Zebra is still waiting for us and even although I’m assured everyone there will survive, they must be feeling damned cold and miserable for all that. The ice-machine has been in operation for almost an hour now, at least we hope it has. We’ll drop down right away and test it and after we’ve loaded the torpedoes — two should do it, I fancy — we’ll blow our way up into this lead at Zebra.’

Twenty minutes later the Dolphin was back where she belonged, 150 feet below the surface of the sea — or the ice-cap. After ten minutes’ manoeuvring, with a close check being kept on the plotting table to maintain our position relative to Drift Station Zebra, it was clear that the ice-machine was behaving perfectly normally again, tracing out the inverted ridges and valleys in the ice with its usual magical accuracy. Commander Swanson nodded his satisfaction.

‘That’s it, then.’ He nodded to Hansen and Mills, the torpedo officer. ‘You can go ahead now. Maybe you’d like to accompany them, Dr Carpenter. Or is loading torpedoes old hat to you?’

‘Never seen it,’ I said truthfully. ‘Thanks, I’d like to go along.’ Swanson was as considerate towards men as he was towards his beloved Dolphin which was why every man in the ship swore by him. He knew, or suspected that, apart from the shock I felt at my brother’s death, I was worried stiff about other things: he would have heard, although he hadn’t mentioned it to me and hadn’t even asked me how I had slept, that I’d spent the night prowling aimlessly and restlessly about the control room: he knew I would be grateful for any distraction, for anything that would relieve my mind, however temporarily, of whatever it was that was troubling it. I wondered just how much that extraordinarily keen brain knew or guessed. But that was an unprofitable line of thought so I put it out of my mind and went along with Hansen and Mills. Mills was another like Raeburn, the navigation officer, he looked to me more like a college undergraduate than the highly competent officer he was, but I supposed it was just another sign that I was growing old.

Hansen crossed to a panel by the diving console and studied a group of lights. The night’s sleep had done Hansen a great deal of good and, apart from the abraded skin on his forehead and round the cheekbones where the ice-spicules of last night had done their work, he was again his normal cheerfully-cynical relaxed self, fresh and rested and fit. He waved his hand at the panel.

‘The torpedo safety light, Dr Carpenter. Each green light represents a closed torpedo tube door. Six doors that open to the sea — bow caps, we call them — six rear doors for loading the torpedoes. Only twelve lights but we study them very, very carefully — just to make sure that all the lights are green. For if any of them were red — any of the top six, that is, which represent the sea doors — well, that wouldn’t be so good, would it?’ He looked at Mills. ‘All green?’

‘All green,’ Mills echoed.

We moved for’ard along the wardroom passage, and dropped down the wide companionway into the crew’s mess. From there we moved into the for’ard torpedo storage room. Last time I’d been there, on the morning after our departure from the Clyde, nine or ten men had been sleeping in their bunks; now all the bunks were empty. Five men were waiting for us: four ratings and a Petty Officer Bowen whom Hansen, no stickler for protocol, addressed as Charlie.

‘You will see now,’ Hansen observed to me, ‘why officers are more highly paid than enlisted men, and deservedly so. While Charlie and his gallant men skulk here behind two sets of collision bulkheads, we must go and test the safety of the tubes. Regulations. Still, a cool head, and an iron nerve: we do it gladly for our men.’

Bowen grinned and unclipped the first collision bulkhead door. We stepped over the eighteen-inch sill, leaving the five men behind, and waited until the door had been clipped up again before opening the for’ard collision bulkhead door and stepping over the second sill into the cramped torpedo room. This time the door was swung wide open and hooked back on a heavy standing catch.

‘All laid down in the book of rules,’ Hansen said. ‘The only time the two doors can be opened at the same time is when we’re actually loading the torpedoes.’ He checked the position of metal handles at the rear of the tubes, reached up, swung down a steel-spring microphone and flicked a switch. ‘Ready to test tubes. All manual levers shut. All lights showing green?’

‘All lights still green.’ The answering voice from the overhead squawk box was hollow, metallic, queerly impersonal.

‘You already checked,’ I said mildly.

‘So we check again. Same old book of rules.’ He grinned. ‘Besides, my grandpa died at ninety-seven and I aim to beat his record. Take no chances and you run no risk. What are they to be, George?’

‘Three and four.’ I could see the brass plaques on the circular rear doors of the tubes, 2, 4 and 6 on the port side, 1, 3 and 5 on the starboard. Lieutenant Mills was proposing to use the central tubes on each side.

Mills unhooked a rubber torch from the bulkhead and approached number 3 first. Hansen said: ‘Still no chances. First of all George opens the test cock in the rear door which will show if there is any water at all in the tubes. Shouldn’t be, but sometimes a little gets past the bow caps. If the test cock shows nothing, then he opens the door and shines his torch up to examine the bow cap and see that there is no obstruction in the tube. How’s it, George?’

‘O.K., number three.’ Three times Mills lifted the test cock handle and no trace of water appeared. ‘Opening the door now.’

He hauled on the big lever at the rear, pulled it clear and swung back the heavy circular door. He shone his torch up the gleaming inside length of the tube, then straightened. ‘Clean as a whistle and dry as a bone.’

‘That’s not the way he was taught to report it,’ Hansen said sorrowfully. ‘I don’t know what the young officers are coming to these days. Right, George, number four.’

Mills grinned, secured the rear door on number 3 and crossed to number 4. He lifted the test cock handle and said: ‘Oh-oh.’

‘What is it?’ Hansen asked.

‘Water,’ Mills said tersely.

‘Is there much? Let’s see?’

‘Just a trickle.’

‘Is that bad?’ I asked.

‘It happens,’ Hansen said briefly. He joggled the handle up and down and another spoonful of water appeared. ‘You can get a slightly imperfect bow-cap and if you go deep enough to build up sufficient outside pressure you can get a trickle of water coming in. Probably what has happened in this case. If the bow-cap was open, friend, at this depth the water would come out of that spout like a bullet. But no chances, no chances.’ He reached for the microphone again. ‘Number four bow-cap still green? We have a little water here.’

‘Still green.’

Hansen looked down at Mills. ‘How’s it coming?’

‘Not so much now.’

‘Control centre,’ Hansen said into the microphone. ‘Check the trim chit, just to make sure.’

There was a pause, then the box crackled again.

‘Captain here. All tubes showing “Empty”. Signed by Lieutenant Hansen and the foreman engineer.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Hansen switched off and grinned. ‘Lieutenant Hansen’s word is good enough for me any day. How’s it now?’

‘Stopped.’

‘Open her up.’

Mills tugged the heavy lever. It moved an inch or two, then stuck. ‘Uncommon stiff,’ he commented.

‘You torpedomen never heard of anything called lubricating oil?’ Hansen demanded. ‘Weight, George, weight.’

Mills applied more weight. The lever moved another couple of inches. Mills scowled, shifted his feet to get maximum purchase and heaved just as Hansen shouted: ‘No! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!’

He was too late. He was a lifetime too late. The lever snapped clear, the heavy circular rear door smashed open as violently as if it had been struck by some gigantic battering ram and a roaring torrent of water burst into the for’ard torpedo room. The sheer size, the enormous column of water was staggering. It was like a giant hosepipe, like one of the outlet pipes of the Boulder Dam. It caught up Lieutenant Mills, already badly injured by the flailing sweep of that heavy door and swept him back across the torpedo room to smash heavily against the after bulkhead; for a moment he half-stood there, pinned by the power of that huge jet, then slid down limply to the deck.

‘Blow all main ballast!’ Hansen shouted into the microphone. He was hanging on to a rear torpedo door to keep from being carried away and even above the thunderous roar of the waters his voice carried clearly. ‘Emergency. Blow all main ballast. Number four tube open to the sea. Blow all main ballast!’ He released his grip, staggered across the deck trying to keep his balance in the madly swirling already foot-deep waters. ‘Get out of here, for God’s sake.’

He should have saved his energy and breath. I was already on my way out of there. I had Mills under the arms and was trying to drag him over the high sill of the for’ard collision bulkhead and I was making just no headway at all. The proper trim of a submarine is a delicate thing at the best of times and even after these few seconds the nose of the Dolphin, heavy with the tons of water that had already poured in, was beginning to cant sharply downwards: trying to drag Mills and at the same time keep my balance on that sloping deck with knee-high water boiling around me was more than I could do; but suddenly Hansen had Mills by the feet and I stumbled off-balance, tripped over the high sill and fell backwards into the confined space between the two collision bulkheads, dragging Mills after me.

Hansen was still on the other side of the bulkhead. I could hear him cursing steadily, monotonously and as if he meant it as he struggled to unhook the heavy door from its standing catch. Because of the steep downward pitch of the Dolphin’s deck he had to lean all his weight against the massive steel door to free the catch, and with his insecure footing among the swirling waters on that sloping slippery deck he was obviously having the devil’s own time trying to release it. I let Mills lie, jumped over the sill, flung my shoulder against the door and with the suddenly added pressure the latch clicked free. The heavy door at once swung half-shut, carrying us along with it and knocking us both off our feet into the battering-ram path of that torrent still gushing from number 4 tube. Coughing and spluttering we scrambled upright again, crossed the sill and, hanging on to a clip handle apiece, tried to drag the door shut.

Twice we tried and twice we failed. The water boiled in through the tube and its level was now almost lipping the top of the sill. With every second that passed the downward angle of the Dolphin increased and with every extra degree of steepness the task of pulling that door uphill against the steadily increasing gravity became more and more difficult.

The water began to spill over the sill on to our feet.

Hansen grinned at me. At least, I thought for a moment he was grinning, but the white teeth were clamped tightly together and there was no amusement at all in his eyes. He shouted above the roar of the water: ‘It’s now or never.’

A well-taken point. It was indeed now or never. At a signal from Hansen we flung our combined weights on to those clip-handles each with one hand to a clip while the other braced against the bulkhead to give maximum purchase. We got the door to within four inches. It swung open. We tried again. Still four inches and I knew that all our strength had gone into that one.

‘Can you hold it for a moment?’ I shouted.

He nodded. I shifted both hands to the lower corner clip, dropped to the deck, braced my feet against the sill and straightened both legs in one convulsive jerk. The door crashed shut, Hansen jammed his clip home, I did the same with mine and we were safe. For the moment we were safe.

I left Hansen to secure the remaining clips and started knocking the clips off the after collision bulkhead door. I’d only got as far as the first one when the others started falling off by themselves. Petty Officer Bowen and his men, on the other side of that door, needed no telling that we wanted out of there just as fast as possible. The door was pulled open and my eardrums popped with the abrupt fall in air pressure. I could hear the steady echoing roar of air blasting into the ballast tanks under high pressure. I hoisted Mills by the shoulders, strong competent hands lifted him out and over the sill and a couple of seconds later Hansen and I were beside him.

‘In God’s name!’ Petty Officer Bowen said to Hansen. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘Number four tube open to the sea.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Clip up that door,’ Hansen ordered. ‘But good.’ He left at a dead run, clawing his way up the sharply sloping deck of the torpedo storage room. I took a look at Lieutenant Mills — one short look was all I needed — and followed after Hansen. Only I didn’t run. Running wasn’t going to help anybody now.

The roar of compressed air filled the ship, the ballast tanks were rapidly emptying, but still the Dolphin continued on its deadly dive, arrowing down for the dark depths of the Arctic: not even the massive compressed-air tanks of the submarine could hope to cope so soon with the effects of the scores of tons of sea-water that had already flooded into the for’ard torpedo room: I wondered bleakly if they would ever be able to cope at all. As I walked along the wardroom passage, using the hand-rail to haul myself up that crazily canted deck, I could feel the entire submarine shudder beneath my feet. No doubt about what that was, Swanson had the great turbines turning over at maximum revolutions, the big bronze propellers threshing madly in reverse, trying to bite deep into the water to slow up the diving submarine.

You can smell fear. You can smell it and you can see it and I could do both as I hauled my way into the control centre of the Dolphin that morning. Not one man as much as flickered an eye in my direction as I passed by the sonar room. They had no eyes for me. They had no eyes for anybody: tense, strained, immobile, with hunted faces, they had eyes for one thing only — the plummetting needle on the depth gauge.

The needle was passing the six-hundred-feet mark. Six hundred feet. No conventional submarine I’d ever been on could have operated at this depth. Could have survived at this depth. Six hundred and fifty. I thought of the fantastic outside pressure that represented and I felt far from happy. Someone else was feeling far from happy also, the young seaman manning the inboard diving seat. His fists were clenched till the knuckles showed white, a muscle was jumping in his cheek, a nerve twitching in his neck and he had the look on his face of a man who sees the bony finger of death beckoning.

Seven hundred feet. Seven hundred and fifty. Eight hundred. I’d never heard of a submarine that had reached that depth and lived. Neither, apparently, had Commander Swanson.

‘We have just set up a new mark, men,’ he said. His voice was calm and relaxed and although he was far too intelligent a man not to be afraid, no trace of it showed in tone or manner. ‘Lowest recorded dive ever, as far as I am aware. Speed of descent?’

‘No change.’

‘It will change soon. The torpedo room must be about full now — apart from the pocket of air compressed under high pressure.’ He gazed at the dial and tapped his teeth thoughtfully with a thumb-nail — this, for Swanson, was probably the equivalent of going into hysterics. ‘Blow the diesel tanks: blow the fresh-water tanks.’ Imperturbable though he sounded, Swanson was close to desperation for this was the counsel of despair: thousands of miles from home and supplies, yet jettisoning all the diesel and drinking water, the lack of either of which could make all the difference between life and death. But, at that moment, it didn’t matter: all that mattered was lightening ship.

‘Main ballast tanks empty’ the diving officer reported. His voice was hoarse and strained.

Swanson nodded, said nothing. The volume of the sound of the compressed air had dropped at least seventy-five per cent and the suddenly comparative silence was sinister, terrifying, as if it meant that the Dolphin was giving up the fight. Now we had only the slender reserves of the fresh water and diesel to save us: at the rate at which the Dolphin was still diving I didn’t see how it could.

Hansen was standing beside me. I noticed blood dripping from his left hand to the deck and when I looked more closely I could see that two of his fingers were broken. It must have happened in the torpedo room. At the moment, it didn’t seem important. It certainly didn’t seem important to Hansen. He was entirely oblivious of it.

The pressure gauge fell farther and still farther. I knew now that nothing could save the Dolphin. A bell rang. Swanson swung down a microphone and pressed a button.

‘Engine-room here,’ a metallic voice came through. ‘We must slow down. Main bearings beginning to smoke, she’ll seize up any moment.’

‘Maintain revolutions.’ Swanson swung back the microphone. The youngster at the diving console, the one with the jumping cheek muscles and the nervous twitch, started to mumble, ‘Oh, dear God, oh, dear God,’ over and over again, softly at first, then the voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. Swanson moved two paces, touched him on the shoulder. ‘Do you mind, laddie? I can hardly hear myself think.’ The mumblings stopped and the boy sat quite still, his face carved from grey granite, the nerve in his neck going like a trip-hammer.

‘How much more of this will she take?’ I asked casually. At least, I meant it to sound casual but it came out like the croak of an asthmatic bullfrog.

‘I’m afraid we’re moving into the realms of the unknown,’ Swanson admitted calmly. ‘One thousand feet plus. If that dial is right, we passed the theoretical implosion point — where the hull should have collapsed — fifty feet ago. At the present moment she’s being subjected to well over a million tons of pressure.’ Swanson’s repose, his glacial calm, was staggering, they must have scoured the whole of America to find a man like that. If ever there was the right man in the right place at the right time it was Commander Swanson in the control room of a runaway submarine diving to depths hundreds of feet below what any submarine had ever experienced before.

‘She’s slowing,’ Hansen whispered.

‘She’s slowing,’ Swanson nodded.

She wasn’t slowing half fast enough for me. It was impossible that the pressure hull could hold out any longer. I wondered vaguely what the end would be like, then put the thought from my mind, I would never know anything about it, anyway. At that depth the pressure must have been about twenty tons to the square foot, we’d be squashed as flat as flounders before our senses could even begin to record what was happening to us.

The engine-room call-up bell rang again. The voice this time was imploring, desperate. We must ease up, Captain. Switch gear is turning red hot. We can see it glowing.’

‘Wait till it’s white hot, then you can complain about it,’ Swanson said curtly. If the engines were going to break down they were going to break down; but until they did he’d tear the life out of them in an attempt to save the Dolphin. Another bell rang.

‘Control room?’ The voice was harsh, high-pitched. ‘Crew’s mess deck here. Water is beginning to come in.’ For the first time, every eye in the control room turned away from the depth gauge and fixed itself on that loudspeaker. The hull was giving at last under the fantastic pressure, the crushing weight. One little hole, one tiny threadlike crack as a starting point and the pressure hull would rip and tear and flatten like a toy under a steamhammer. A quick glance at the strained, shocked faces showed this same thought in every mind.

‘Where?’ Swanson demanded.

‘Starboard bulkhead.’

‘How much?’

‘A pint or two, just trickling down the bulkhead. And it’s getting worse. It’s getting worse all the time. For God’s sake, Captain, what are we going to do?’

‘What are you going to do?’ Swanson echoed. ‘Mop the damn’ stuff up, of course. You don’t want to live in a dirty ship, do you?’ He hung up.

‘She’s stopped. She’s stopped.’ Four words and a prayer. I’d been wrong about every eye being on the loudspeaker, one pair of eyes had never left the depth gauge, the pair belonging to the youngster at the console.

‘She’s stopped,’ the diving officer confirmed. His voice had a shake in it.

No one spoke. The blood continued to drip unheeded from Hansen’s crushed fingers. I thought that I detected, for the first time, a faint sheen of sweat on Swanson’s brow, but I couldn’t be sure. The deck still shuddered beneath our feet as the giant engines strove to lift the Dolphin out of those deadly depths, the compressed air still hissed into the diesel and fresh-water tanks. I could no longer see the depth gauge, the diving officer had drawn himself up so close to it that he obscured most of it from me.

Ninety seconds passed, ninety seconds that didn’t seem any longer than a leap year, ninety interminable seconds while we waited for the sea to burst into our hull and take us for its own, then the diving officer said: ‘Ten feet. Up.’

‘Are you sure?’ Swanson asked.

‘A year’s pay.’

‘We’re not out of the wood yet,’ Swanson said mildly. ‘The hull can still go — it should have gone a damn’ long time ago. Another hundred feet — that means a couple of tons less pressure to the square foot — and I think we’ll have a chance. At least a fifty-fifty chance. And after that the chances will improve with every foot we ascend; and as we ascend the highly compressed air in the torpedo room will expand, driving out water and so lightening ship.’

‘Still rising,’ the diving officer said. ‘Still rising. Speed of ascent changed.’

Swanson walked across to the diving stand and studied the slow movement of the depth gauge dial. ‘How much fresh water left?’

‘Thirty per cent.’

‘Secure blowing fresh-water ballast. Engines all back two-thirds.’

The roar of compressed air fell away and the deck vibration eased almost to nothing as the engine revolutions fell from emergency power to two-thirds full speed.

‘Speed of ascent unchanged,’ the diving officer reported. ‘One hundred feet up.’

‘Secure blowing diesel.’ The roar of compressed air stopped completely. ‘All back one-third.’

‘Still rising. Still rising.’

Swanson took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck. ‘I was a little worried there,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘and I don’t much care who knows it.’ He reached for a microphone and I could hear his voice booming faintly throughout the ship.

‘Captain here. All right, you can all start breathing again. Everything is under control, we’re on our way up. As a point of interest we’re still over three hundred feet deeper than the lowest previous submarine dive ever recorded.’

I felt as if I had just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. We all looked as if we’d just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. A voice said: ‘I’ve never smoked in my life, but I’m starting now. Someone give me a cigarette.’ Hansen said: ‘When we get back to the States do you know what I’m going to do?’

‘Yes,’ Swanson said. ‘You’re going to scrape together your last cent, go up to Groton and throw the biggest, the most expensive party ever for the men who built this boat. You’re too late, Lieutenant, I thought of it first.’ He checked abruptly and said sharply: ‘What’s happened to your hand?’

Hansen lifted his left hand and stared at it in surprise. ‘I never even knew I’d been scratched. Must have happened with that damn’ door in the torpedo room. There’s a medical supply box there, Doc. Would you fix this?’

‘You did a damn’ fine job there, John,’ Swanson said warmly. ‘Getting that door closed, I mean. Couldn’t have been easy.’

‘It wasn’t. All pats on the back to our friend here,’ Hansen said. ‘He got it closed, not me. And if we hadn’t got it closed —’

‘Or if I’d let you load the torpedoes when you came back last night,’ Swanson said grimly. ‘When we were sitting on the surface and the hatches wide open. We’d have been eight thousand feet down now and very, very dead.’

Hansen suddenly snatched his hand away. ‘My God!’ he said remorsefully. ‘I’d forgotten. Never mind this damned hand of mine. George Mills, the torpedo officer. He caught a pretty bad smack. You’d better see him first. Or Doc Benson.’

I took his hand back. ‘No hurry for either of us. Your fingers first. Mills isn’t feeling a thing.’

‘Good lord!’ Astonishment showed in Hansen’s face, maybe shock at my callousness. ‘When he recovers consciousness —’

‘He’ll never recover consciousness again,’ I said. ‘Lieutenant Mills is dead.’

‘What!’ Swanson’s fingers bit deeply, painfully into my arm. ‘“Dead,” did you say?’

‘That column of water from number four tube came in like an express train,’ I said tiredly. ‘Flung him right back against the after bulkhead and smashed in the occiput — the back of his head — like an eggshell. Death must have been instantaneous.’

‘Young George Mills,’ Swanson whispered. His face had gone very pale. ‘Poor young beggar. His first trip on the Dolphin. And now -just like that. Killed.’

‘Murdered,’ I said.

‘What!’ If Commander Swanson didn’t watch out with his fingers he’d have my upper arm all black and blue. ‘What was that you said?’

‘“Murdered,” I said. “Murdered,” I meant.’

Swanson stared at me for a long moment, his face empty of expression, but the eyes strained and tired and suddenly somehow old. He wheeled, walked across to the diving officer, spoke a few words to him and returned. ‘Come on,’ he said abruptly. ‘You can fix up the lieutenant’s hand in my cabin.’

SEVEN

‘You realise the seriousness of what you are saying?’ Swanson asked. ‘You are making a grave accusation —’

‘Come off it,’ I said rudely. ‘This is not a court of law and I’m not accusing anyone. All I say is that murder has been done. Whoever left that bow-cap door open is directly responsible for the death of Lieutenant Mills.’

‘What do you mean “left the door open”? Who says anyone left the door open? It could have been due to natural causes. And even if — I can’t see it — that door had been left open, you can’t accuse a man of murder because of carelessness or forgetfulness or because —’

‘Commander Swanson,’ I said. ‘I’ll go on record as saying that you are probably the best naval officer I have ever met. But being best at that doesn’t mean that you’re best at everything. There are noticeable gaps in your education, Commander, especially in the appreciation of the finer points of skulduggery. You require an especially low and devious type of mind for that and I’m afraid that you just haven’t got it. Doors left open by natural causes, you say. What natural causes?’

‘We’ve hit the ice a few hefty smacks,’ Swanson said slowly. ‘That could have jarred it open. Or when we poked through the ice last night a piece of ice, a stalactite, say, could have —’

‘Your tubes are recessed, aren’t they. Mighty oddly-shaped stalactite that would go down then bend in at a right angle to reach the door — and even then it would only shut it more tightly.’

‘The doors are tested every time we’re in harbour,’ Commander Swanson persisted quietly. ‘They’re also opened when we open tubes to carry out surface trimming tests in dock. Any dockyard has pieces of waste, rope and other rubbish floating around that could easily have jammed a door open.’

‘The safety lights showed the doors shut.’

‘They could have been opened just a crack, not enough to disengage the safety contact.’

‘Open a crack! Why do you think Mills is dead? If you’ve ever seen the jet of water that hits the turbine blades in a hydro-electric plant, then you’ll know how that water came in. A crack? My God! How are those doors operated?’

‘Two ways. Remote control, hydraulic, just press a button: then there are manually-operated levers in the torpedo room itself.’

I turned to Hansen. He was sitting on the bunk beside me, his face pale as I splinted his broken fingers. I said: Those hand-operated levers. Were they in the shut position?’

‘You heard me say so in there. Of course they were. First thing we always check.’

‘Somebody doesn’t like you,’ I said to Swanson. ‘Or somebody doesn’t like the Dolphin. Or somebody knew that the Dolphin was going searching for the Zebra survivors and they didn’t like that either. So they sabotaged the ship. You will remember you were rather surprised you didn’t have to correct the Dolphin’s trim? It had been your intention to carry out a slow-time dive to check the underwater trim because you thought that would have been affected by the fact that you had no torpedoes in the for’ard tubes. But surprise, surprise. She didn’t need any correction.’

‘I’m listening,’ Swanson said quietly. He was with me now. He was with me all the way. He cocked an eyebrow as we heard water flooding back into the tanks. The repeater gauge showed 200 feet, Swanson must have ordered his diving officer to level off at that depth. The Dolphin was still canted nose downwards at an angle of about 25°.

‘She didn’t need any correcting because some of her tubes were already full of water. For all I know maybe number three tube, the one we tested and found O.K. is the only one that is not full of water. Our clever little pal left the doors open, disconnected the hand-operated levers so that they appeared to be in the shut position when they were actually open and crossed over a few wires in a junction box so that the open position showed green while the closed showed red. A man who knew what he was about could have done it in a few minutes. Two men who knew what they were about could have done it in no time at all. I’ll lay anything you like that when you’re eventually in a position to check you’ll find the levers disconnected, the wires crossed and the inlets of the test-cocks blocked with sealing-wax, quick-drying paint or even chewinggum so that when the test-cocks were opened nothing would show and you would assume the tubes to be empty.’

‘There was a trickle from the test-cock in number four tube,’ Hansen objected.

‘Low-grade chewing-gum.’

‘The murderous swine,’ Swanson said calmly. His restraint was far more effective than the most thunderous denunciations could ever have been. ‘He could have murdered us all. But for the grace of God and the Groton boatyard shipwrights he would have murdered us all.’

‘He didn’t mean to,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mean to kill anyone. You had intended to carry out a slow-time dive to check trim in the Holy Loch before you left that evening. You told me so yourself. Did you announce it to the crew, post it up in daily orders or something like that?’

‘Both.’

‘So. Our pal knew. He also knew that you carried out those checks when the boat is still awash or just under the surface. When you checked the tubes to see if they were O.K., water would come in, too much water to permit the rear doors to be shut again, but not under such high pressure that you wouldn’t have time and to spare to close the for’ard collision bulkhead door and make a leisurely retreat in good order. What would have happened? Not much. At the worst you would have settled down slowly to the bottom and stayed there. Not deep enough to worry the Dolphin. In a submarine of even ten years ago it might have been fatal for all, because of the limited air supply. Not to-day when your air purifying machines can let you stay down for months at a time. You just float up your emergency indicator buoy and telephone, tell your story, sit around and drink coffee till a naval diver comes down and replaces the bow cap, pump out the torpedo room and surface again. Our unknown pal — or pals — didn’t mean to kill anyone. But they did mean to delay you. And they would have delayed you. We know now that you could have got to the surface under your own steam, but even so your top brass would have insisted that you go into dock for a day or two to check that everything was O.K.’

‘Why should anyone want to delay us?’ Swanson asked. I thought he had an unnecessarily speculative look in his eyes, but it was hard to be sure, Commander Swanson’s face showed exactly what Commander Swanson wanted it to show and no more.

‘My God, do you think I know the answer to that one?’ I said irritably.

‘No. No, I don’t think so.’ He could have been more emphatic about it. ‘Tell me, Dr Carpenter, do you suspect some member of the Dolphin’s crew to be responsible?’

‘Do you really need an answer to that one?’

‘I suppose not,’ he sighed. ‘Going to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is not a very attractive way of committing suicide, and if any member of the crew had jinxed things he’d damn’ soon have unjinxed them as soon as he realised that we weren’t going to carry out trim checks in shallow water. Which leaves only the civilian dockyard workers in Scotland — and every one of them has been checked and rechecked and given a top-grade security clearance.’

‘Which means nothing. There are plushy Moscow hotels and British and American prisons full of people who had top-grade security clearances … What are you going to do now, Commander. About the Dolphin, I mean?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it. In the normal course of events the thing to do would be to close the bow-cap of number four and pump out the torpedo room, then go in and close the rear door of number four. But the bow-cap door won’t close. Within a second of John’s telling us that number four was open to the sea the diving officer hit the hydraulic button — the one that closes it by remote control. You saw for yourself that nothing happened. It must be jammed.’

‘You bet your life it’s jammed,’ I said grimly. ‘A sledge-hammer might do some good but pressing buttons won’t.’

‘I could go back to that lead we’ve just left, surface again and send a diver under the ice to investigate and see what he can do, but I’m not going to ask any man to risk his life doing that. I could retreat to the open sea, surface and fix it there, but not only would it be a damned slow and uncomfortable trip with the Dolphin canted at this angle, it might take us days before we got back here again. And some of the Drift Station Zebra men are pretty far through. It might be too late.’

‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘You have the man to hand, Commander. I told you when I first met you that environmental health studies were my speciality, especially in the field of pressure extremes when escaping from submarines. I’ve done an awful lot of simulated sub escapes, Commander. I do know a fair amount about pressures, how to cope with them and how I react to them myself.’

‘How do you react to them, Dr Carpenter?’

‘A high tolerance. They don’t worry me much.’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘You know damn’ well what I have in mind,’ I said impatiently. ‘Drill a hole in the door of the after collision bulkhead, screw in a high-pressure hose, open the door, shove someone in the narrow space between the two collision bulkheads and turn up the hose until the pressure between the collision bulkheads equals that in the torpedo room. You have the clips eased off the for’ard collision door. When the pressures are equalised it opens at a touch, you walk inside, close number four rear door and walk away again. That’s what you had in mind wasn’t it?’

‘More or less,’ he admitted. ‘Except that you are no part of it. Every man on this ship has made simulated escapes. They all know the effects of pressure. And most of them are a great deal younger than you.’

‘Suit yourself,’ I said. ‘But age has little to do with the ability to stand stresses. You didn’t pick a teen-ager as the first American to orbit the earth, did you? As for simulated escapes, making a free ascent up a hundred-foot tank is a different matter altogether from going inside an iron box, waiting for the slow build-up of pressure, working under that pressure, then waiting for the slow process of decompression. I’ve seen young men, big, tough, very, very fit young men break up completely under those circumstances and almost go crazy trying to get out. The combination of physiological and psychological factors involved is pretty fierce.’

‘I think,’ Swanson said slowly, ‘that I’d sooner have you — what do the English say, batting on a sticky wicket — than almost any man I know. But there’s a point you’ve overlooked. What would the Admiral Commanding Atlantic Submarines say to me if he knew I’d let a civilian go instead of one of my own men?’

‘If you don’t let me go, I know what he’ll say. He’ll say: “We must reduce Commander Swanson to lieutenant, j-g., because he had on board the Dolphin an acknowledged expert in this speciality and refused, out of stiff-necked pride, to use him, thereby endangering the lives of his crew and the safety of his ship.”’

Swanson smiled a pretty bleak smile, but with the desperately narrow escape we had just had, the predicament we were still in and the fact that his torpedo officer was lying dead not so many feet away, I hardly expected him to break into gales of laughter. He looked at Hansen: ‘What do you say, John?’

‘I’ve seen more incompetent characters than Dr Carpenter,’ Hansen said. ‘Also, he gets about as nervous and panic-stricken as a bag of Portland cement.’

‘He has qualifications you do not look to find in the average medical man,’ Swanson agreed. ‘I shall be glad to accept your offer. One of my men will go with you. That way the dictates of common sense and honour are both satisfied.’

It wasn’t all that pleasant, not by quite a way, but it wasn’t all that terribly bad either. It went off exactly as it could have been predicted it would go off. Swanson cautiously eased the Dolphin up until her stern was just a few feet beneath the ice: this reduced the pressure in the torpedo room to a minimum, but even at that the bows were still about a hundred feet down.

A hole was drilled in the after collision bulkhead door and an armoured high-pressure hose screwed into position. Dressed in porous rubber suits and equipped with an aqualung apiece, a young torpedoman by the name of Murphy and I went inside and stood in the gap between the two collision bulkheads. High-powered air hissed into the confined space. Slowly the pressure rose: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds to the square inch. I could feel the pressure on lungs and ears, the pain behind the eyes, the slight wooziness that comes from the poisonous effect of breathing pure oxygen under such pressure. But I was used to it, I knew it wasn’t going to kill me: I wondered if young Murphy knew that. This was the stage where the combined physical and mental effects became too much for most people, but if Murphy was scared or panicky or suffering from bodily distress he hid it well. Swanson would have picked his best man and to be the best man in a company like that Murphy had to be something very special.

We eased off the clips on the for’ard bulkhead door, knocked them off cautiously as the pressures equalised. The water in the torpedo room was about two feet above the level of the sill and as the door came ajar the water boiled whitely through into the collision space while compressed air hissed out from behind us to equalise the lowering pressure of the air in the torpedo room. For about ten seconds we had to hang on grimly to hold the door and maintain our balance while water and air fought and jostled in a seething maelstrom to find their own natural levels. The door opened wide. The water level now extended from about thirty inches up on the collision bulkhead to the for’ard deckhead of the torpedo room. We crossed the sill, switched on our waterproof torches and ducked under.

The temperature of that water was about 28° F. — four below freezing. Those porous rubber suits were specially designed to cope with icy waters but even so I gasped with the shock of it — as well as one can gasp when breathing pure oxygen under heavy pressure. But we didn’t linger, for the longer we remained there the longer we would have to spend decompressing afterwards. We half-walked, half-swam towards the fore end of the compartment, located the rear door on number 4 tube and closed it, but not before I had a quick look at the inside of the pressure cock. The door itself seemed undamaged: the body of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mills had absorbed its swinging impact and prevented it from being wrenched off its hinges. It didn’t seem distorted in any way, and fitted snugly into place. We forced its retaining lever back into place and left.

Back in the collision compartment we gave the prearranged taps on the door. Almost at once we heard the subdued hum of a motor as the high-speed extraction pumps in the torpedo room got to work, forcing the water out through the hull. Slowly the water level dropped and as it dropped the air pressure as slowly decreased. Degree by degree the Dolphin began to come back on even keel. When the water was finally below the level of the for’ard sill we gave another signal and the remaining over-pressure air was slowly bled out through the hose.

A few minutes later, as I was stripping off the rubber suit, Swanson asked: ‘Any trouble?’

‘None. You picked a good man in Murphy.’

‘The best. Many thanks, Doctor.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance —’

‘You know damned well I would,’ I said. ‘I did. Not sealing-wax, not chewing-gum, not paint. Glue, Commander Swanson. That’s how they blocked the test-cock inlet. The old-fashioned animal hide stuff that comes out of a tube. Ideal for the job.’

‘I see,’ he said, and walked away.

The Dolphin shuddered along its entire length as the torpedo hissed out of its tube — number 3 tube, the only one in the submarine Swanson could safely rely upon.

‘Count it down,’ Swanson said to Hansen. ‘Tell me when we should hit, tell me when we should hear it hit.’

Hansen looked at the stop-watch in his bandaged hand and nodded. The seconds passed slowly. I could see Hansen’s lips move silently. Then he said: ‘We should be hitting — now,’ and two or three seconds later: ‘We should be hearing — now.’

Whoever had been responsible for the settings and time calculations on that torpedo had known what he was about. Just on Hansen’s second ‘now’ we felt as much as heard the clanging vibration along the Dolphin’s hull as the shock-waves from the exploding war-head reached us. The deck shook briefly beneath our feet but the impact was nowhere nearly as powerful as I had expected. I was relieved. I didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to know that everyone was relieved. No submarine had ever before been in the vicinity of a torpedo detonating under the ice-pack: no one had known to what extent the tamping effect of overhead ice might have increased the pressure and destructive effect of the lateral shock-waves.

‘Nicely,’ Swanson murmured. ‘Very nicely done indeed. Both ahead one-third. I hope that bang had considerably more effect on the ice than it had on our ship.’ He said to Benson at the ice-machine: ‘Let us know as soon as we reach the lead, will you?’

He moved to the plotting table. Raeburn looked up and said: ‘Five hundred yards gone, five hundred to go.’

‘All stop,’ Swanson said. The slight vibration of the engine died away. ‘We’ll just mosey along very carefully indeed. That explosion may have sent blocks of ice weighing a few tons apiece pretty far down into the sea. I don’t want to be doing any speed at all if we meet any of them on the way up.’

‘Three hundred yards to go,’ Raeburn said.

‘All clear. All clear all round,’ the sonar room reported.

‘Still thick ice,’ Benson intoned. ‘Ah! That’s it. We’re under the lead. Thin ice. Well, five or six feet.’

‘Two hundred yards,’ Raeburn said. ‘It checks.’

We drifted slowly onwards. At Swanson’s orders the propellers kicked over once or twice then stopped again.

‘Fifty yards,’ Raeburn said. ‘Near enough.’

‘Ice reading?’

‘No change. Five feet, about.’

‘Speed?’

‘One knot.’

‘Position?’

‘One thousand yards exactly. Passing directly under target area.’

‘And nothing on the ice-machine. Nothing at all?’

‘Not a thing.’ Benson shrugged and looked at Swanson. The captain walked across and watched the inked stylus draw its swiftly etched vertical lines on the paper.

‘Peculiar, to say the least of it,’ Swanson murmured. ‘Seven hundred pounds of very high-grade amatol in that lot. Must be uncommonly tough ice in those parts. Again to say the least of it. We’ll go up to ninety feet and make a few passes under the area. Floodlights on, TV on.’

So we went up to ninety feet and made a few passes and nothing came of it. The water was completely opaque, the floods and camera useless. The ice-machine stubbornly registered four to six feet — it was impossible to be more accurate — all the time.

‘Well, that seems to be it,’ Hansen said. ‘We back off and have another go?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Swanson said pensively. ‘What say we just try to shoulder our way up?’

‘Shoulder our way up?’ Hansen wasn’t with him: neither was I. ‘What kind of shoulder is going to heave five feet of ice to one side?’

‘I’m not sure. The thing is, we’ve been working from unproved assumptions and that’s always a dangerous basis. We’ve been assuming that if the torpedo didn’t blow the ice to smithereens it would at least blow a hole in it. Maybe it doesn’t happen that way at all. Maybe there’s just a big upward pressure of water distributed over a fair area that heaves the ice up and breaks it into pretty big chunks that just settle back into the water again in their original position in the pattern of a dried-up mud hole with tiny cracks all round the isolated sections. But with cracks all round. Narrow cracks, but there. Cracks so narrow that the ice-machine couldn’t begin to register them even at the slow speed we were doing.’ He turned to Raeburn. ‘What’s our position?’

‘Still in the centre of the target area, sir.’

‘Take her up till we touch the ice,’ Swanson said.

He didn’t have to add any cautions about gentleness. The diving officer took her up like floating thistledown until we felt a gentle bump.

‘Hold her there,’ Swanson said. He peered at the TV screen but the water was so opaque that all definition vanished half-way up the sail. He nodded to the diving officer. ‘Kick her up — hard.’

Compressed air roared into the ballast tanks. Seconds passed without anything happening then all at once the Dolphin shuddered as something very heavy and very solid seemed to strike the hull. A moment’s pause, another solid shock then we could see the edge of a giant segment of ice sliding down the face of the TV screen.

‘Well, now, I believe I might have had a point there,’ Swanson remarked. ‘We seem to have hit a crack between two chunks of ice almost exactly in the middle. Depth?’

‘Forty-five.’

‘Fifteen feet showing. And I don’t think we can expect to lift the hundreds of tons of ice lying over the rest of the hull. Plenty of positive buoyancy?’

‘All we’ll ever want.’

‘Then we’ll call it a day at that. Right, Quartermaster, away you go up top and tell us what the weather is like.’

I didn’t wait to hear what the weather was like. I was interested enough in it, but I was even more interested in ensuring that Hansen didn’t come along to his cabin in time to find me putting on the Mannlicher-Schoenauer along with my furs. But this time I stuck it not in its special holster but in the outside pocket of my caribou trousers. I thought it might come in handier there.

It was exactly noon when I clambered over the edge of the bridge and used a dangling rope to slide down a great rafted chunk of ice that slanted up almost to the top of the sail. The sky had about as much light in it as a late twilight in winter when the sky is heavy with grey cloud. The air was as bitter as ever, but the weather had improved for all that. The wind was down now, backed round to the north-east, seldom gusting at more than twenty m.p.h., the ice-spicules rising no more than two or three feet above the ice-cap. Nothing to tear your eyes out. To be able to see where you were going on that damned ice-cap made a very pleasant change.

There were eleven of us altogether — Commander Swanson himself, Dr Benson, eight enlisted men and myself. Four of the men were carrying stretchers with them.

Even seven hundred pounds of the highest grade conventional explosive on the market hadn’t managed to do very much damage to the ice in that lead. Over an area of seventy yards square or thereabouts the ice had fractured into large fragments curiously uniform in size and roughly hexagonal in shape but fallen back so neatly into position that you couldn’t have put a hand down most of the cracks between the adjacent fragments of ice: many of the cracks, indeed, were already beginning to bind together. A poor enough performance for a torpedo war-head — until you remembered that though most of its disruptive power must have been directed downwards it had still managed to lift and fracture a chunk of ice-cap weighing maybe 5,000 tons. Looked at in that way, it didn’t seem such a puny effort after all. Maybe we’d been pretty lucky to achieve what we had.

We walked across to the eastern edge of the lead, scrambled up on to the ice-pack proper and turned round to get our bearings, to line up on the unwavering white finger of the searchlight that reached straight up into the gloom of the sky. No chance of getting lost this time. While the wind stayed quiet and the spicules stayed down you could see that lamp in the window ten miles away.

We didn’t even need to take any bearings. A few steps away and up from the edge of the lead and we could see it at once. Drift Station Zebra. Three huts, one of them badly charred, five blackened skeletons of what had once been huts. Desolation.

‘So that’s it,’ Swanson said in my ear. ‘Or what’s left of it. ‘I’ve come a long way to see this.’

‘You nearly went a damned sight longer and never saw it,’ I said. ‘To the floor of the Arctic, I mean. Pretty, isn’t it?’

Swanson shook his head slowly, moved on. There were only a hundred yards to go. I led the way to the nearest intact hut, opened the door and passed inside.

The hut was about thirty degrees warmer than the last time I had been there, but still bitterly cold. Only Zabrinski and Rawlings were awake. The hut smelt of burnt fuel, disinfectant, iodine, morphine and a peculiar aroma arising from a particularly repulsive looking hash that Rawlings was industriously churning around in a dixie over the low stove.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Rawlings said conversationally. He might have been hailing a neighbour who’d phoned a minute previously to see if he could come across to borrow the lawnmower rather than greeting men he’d been fairly certain he’d never see again. ‘The time is perfect — just about to ring the dinner bell, Captain. Care for some Maryland chicken — I think.’

‘Not just at the moment, thank you,’ Swanson said politely. ‘Sorry about the ankle, Zabrinski. How is it?’

‘Just fine, Captain, just fine. In a plaster cast.’ He thrust out a foot, stiffly. ‘The Doc here — Dr Jolly — fixed me up real nice. Had much trouble last night?’ This was for me.

‘Dr Carpenter had a great deal of trouble last night,’ Swanson said. ‘And we’ve had a considerable amount since. But later. Bring that stretcher in here. You first, Zabrinski. As for you, Rawlings, you can stop making like Escoffier. The Dolphin’s less than a couple of hundred yards from here. We’ll have you all aboard in half an hour.’

I heard a shuffling noise behind me. Dr Jolly was on his feet, helping Captain Folsom to his. Folsom looked even weaker than he had done yesterday: his face, bandaged though it was, certainly looked worse.

‘Captain Folsom,’ I introduced him. ‘Dr Jolly. This is Commander Swanson, captain of the Dolphin. Dr Benson.’

‘Doctor Benson, you said, old boy?’ Jolly lifted an eyebrow. ‘My word, the pill-rolling competition’s getting a little fierce in these parts. And Commander. By jove, but we’re glad to see you fellows.’ The combination of the rich Irish brogue and the English slang of the twenties fell more oddly than ever on my ear, he reminded me of educated Singhalese I’d met with their precise, lilting, standard southern English interlarded with the catch-phrases of forty years ago. Topping, old bean, simply too ripping for words.

‘I can understand that,’ Swanson smiled. He looked around the huddled unmoving men on the floor, men who might have been living or dead but for the immediate and smoky condensation from their shallow breathing, and his smile faded. He said to Captain Folsom: ‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am. This has been a dreadful thing.’

Folsom stirred and said something but we couldn’t make out what it was. Although his shockingly burnt face had been bandaged since I’d seen him last it didn’t seem to have done him any good: he was talking inside his mouth all right but the ravaged cheek and mouth had become so paralysed that his speech didn’t emerge as any recognisable language. The good side of his face, the left, was twisted and furrowed and the eye above almost completely shut. This had nothing to do with any sympathetic neuromuscular reaction caused by the wickedly charred right cheek. The man was in agony. I said to Jolly: ‘No morphine left?’ I’d left him, I’d thought, with more than enough of it.

‘Nothing left,’ he said tiredly. ‘I used the lot. The lot.’

‘Dr Jolly worked all through the night,’ Zabrinski said quietly. ‘Eight hours. Rawlings and himself and Kinnaird. They never stopped once.’

Benson had his medical kit open. Jolly saw it and smiled, a smile of relief, a smile of exhaustion. He was in far worse case than he’d been the previous evening. He hadn’t had all that much in him when he’d started. But he’d worked. He’d worked a solid eight hours. He’d even fixed up Zabrinski’s ankle. A good doctor. Conscientious, Hippocratic, anyway. He was entitled to relax. Now that there were other doctors here, he’d relax. But not before.

He began to ease Folsom into a sitting position and I helped him. He slid down himself, his back to the wall. ‘Sorry, and all that, you know,’ he said. His bearded frostbitten face twisted into the semblance of a grin. ‘A poor host.’

‘You can leave everything to us now, Dr Jolly,’ Swanson said quietly. ‘You’ve got all the help that’s going. One thing. All those men fit to be moved?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jolly rubbed an arm across bloodshot, smudged eyes. ‘I don’t know. One or two of them slipped pretty far back last night. It’s the cold. Those two. Pneumonia, I think. Something an injured man could fight off in a few days back home can be fatal here. It’s the cold,’ he repeated. ‘Uses up ninety per cent of his energy not in fighting illness and infection but just generating enough heat to stay alive.’

‘Take it easy,’ Swanson said. ‘Maybe we’d better change our minds about that half-hour to get you all aboard. Who’s first for the ambulance, Dr Benson?’ Not Dr Carpenter. Dr Benson. Well, Benson was his own ship’s doctor. But pointed, all the same. A regrettable coolness, as sudden in its onset as it was marked in degree, had appeared in his attitude towards me, and I didn’t have to be beaten over the head with a heavy club to guess at the reason for the abrupt change.

‘Zabrinski, Dr Jolly, Captain Folsom and this man here,’ Benson said promptly.

‘Kinnaird, radio operator,’ Kinnaird identified himself. ‘We never thought you’d make it, mate.’ This to me. He dragged himself somehow to his feet and stood there swaying. ‘I can walk.’

‘Don’t argue,’ Swanson said curtly. ‘Rawlings, stop stirring that filthy mush and get to your feet. Go with them. How long would it take you to run a cable from the boat, fix up a couple of big electric heaters in here, some lights?’

‘Alone?’

‘All the help you want, man.’

‘Fifteen minutes. I could rig a phone, sir.’

‘That would be useful. When the stretcher bearers come back bring blankets, sheets, hot water. Wrap the water containers in the blankets. Anything else, Dr Benson?’

‘Not now, sir.’

‘That’s it then. Away you go.’

Rawlings lifted the spoon from the pot, tasted it, smacked his lips in appreciation and shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a crying shame,’ he said mournfully. ‘It really is.’ He went out in the wake of the stretcher bearers.

Of the eight men left lying on the floor, four were conscious. Hewson the tractor-driver, Naseby the cook, and two others who introduced themselves as Harrington. Twins. They’d even been burnt and frostbitten in the same places. The other four were either sleeping or in coma. Benson and I started looking them over, Benson much more carefully than myself, very busy with thermometer and stethoscope. Looking for signs of pneumonia. I didn’t think he’d have to look very far. Commander Swanson looked speculatively around the cabin, occasionally throwing a very odd look in my direction, occasionally flailing his arms across his chest to keep the circulation going. He had to. He didn’t have the fancy furs I had and in spite of the solid-fuel stove the place was like an ice-box.

The first man I looked at was lying on his side in the far right-hand corner of the room. He had half-open eyes, just showing the lower arcs of his pupils, sunken temples, marble-white forehead and the only part of his face that wasn’t bandaged was as cold as the marble in a winter graveyard. I said: ‘Who is this?’

‘Grant. John Grant.’ Hewson, the dark quiet tractor-driver answered me. ‘Radio operator. Kinnaird’s side-kick. How’s it with him?’

‘He’s dead. He’s been dead quite some time.’

‘Dead?’ Swanson said sharply. ‘You sure?’ I gave him my aloof professional look and said nothing. He went on to Benson: ‘Anybody too ill to be moved?’

‘Those two here, I think,’ Benson said. He wasn’t noticing the series of peculiar looks Swanson was letting me have, so he handed me his stethoscope. After a minute I straightened and nodded.

‘Third-degree burns,’ Benson said to Swanson. ‘What we can see of them, that is. Both high temperatures, both very fast, very weak and erratic pulses, both with lung fluids.’

‘They’d have a better chance inside the Dolphin,’ Swanson said.

‘You’ll kill them getting there,’ I said. ‘Even if you could wrap them up warmly enough to take them back to the ship, hauling them up to the top of the sail and then lowering them vertically through those hatchways would finish them off.’

‘We can’t stay out in that lead indefinitely,’ Swanson said. ‘I’ll take the responsibility for moving them.’

‘Sorry, Captain.’ Benson shook his head gravely. ‘I agree with Dr Carpenter.’

Swanson shrugged and said nothing. Moments later the stretcher bearers were back, followed soon after by Rawlings and three other enlisted men carrying cables, heaters, lamps and a telephone. It took only a few minutes to button the heaters and lamps on to the cable. Rawlings cranked the call-up generator of his field-phone and spoke briefly into the mouthpiece. Bright lights came on and the heaters started to crackle and after a few seconds glow.

Hewson, Naseby and the Harrington twins left by stretcher. When they’d gone I unhooked the Coleman lamp. ‘You won’t be needing this now,’ I said. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘Where are you going?’ Swanson’s voice was quiet.

‘I won’t be long,’ I repeated. ‘Just looking around.’

He hesitated, then stood to one side. I went out, moved round a corner of the hut and stopped. I heard the whirr of the call-up bell, a voice on the telephone. It was only a murmur to me, I couldn’t make out what was being said. But I’d expected this.

The Coleman storm lantern flickered and faded in the wind, but didn’t go out. Stray ice-spicules struck against the glass, but it didn’t crack or break, it must have been one of those specially toughened glasses immune to a couple of hundred degrees’ temperature range between the inside and the outside.

I made my way diagonally across to the only hut left on the south side. No trace of burning, charring or even smoke-blackening on the outside walls. The fuel store must have been the one next to it, on the same side and to the west, straight downwind: that almost certainly must have been its position to account for the destruction of all the other huts, and the grotesquely buckled shape of its remaining girders made this strong probability a certainty. Here had been the heart of the fire.

Hard against the side of the undamaged hut was a lean-to shed, solidly built. Six feet high, six wide, eight long. The door opened easily. Wooden floor, gleaming aluminium for the sides and ceiling, big black heaters bolted to the inside and outside walls. Wires led from those and it was no job for an Einstein to guess that they led — or had led — to the now destroyed generator house. This lean-to shed would have been warm night and day. The squat low-slung tractor that took up nearly all the floor space inside would have started any time at the touch of a switch. It wouldn’t start at the turn of a switch now, it would take three or four blowtorches and the same number of strong men even to turn the engine over once. I closed the door and went into the main hut.

It was packed with metal tables, benches, machinery and every modern device for the automatic recording and interpretation of every conceivable observed detail of the Arctic weather. I didn’t know what the functions of most of the instruments were and I didn’t care. This was the meteorological office and that was enough for me. I examined the hut carefully but quickly and there didn’t seem to be anything odd or out of place that I could see. In one corner, perched on an empty wooden packing-case, was a portable radio transmitter with listening phones — transceivers, they called them nowadays. Near it, in a box of heavy oiled wood, were fifteen Nife cells connected up in series. Hanging from a hook on the wall was a two-volt test lamp. I touched its bare leads to the outside terminals of the battery formed by the cells. Had those cells left in them even a fraction of their original power that test lamp should have burnt out in a white flash. It didn’t even begin to glow. I tore a piece of flex from a nearby lamp and touched its ends to the terminals. Not even the minutest spark. Kinnaird hadn’t been lying when he had said that his battery had been completely dead. But, then, I hadn’t for a moment thought he’d been lying.

I made my way to the last hut — the hut that held the charred remnants of the seven men who had died in the fire. The stench of charred flesh and burnt diesel seemed stronger, more nauseating than ever. I stood in the doorway and the last thing I wanted to do was to approach even an inch closer. I peeled off fur and woollen mittens, set the lamp on a table, pulled out my torch and knelt by the first dead man.

Ten minutes passed and all I wanted was out of there. There are some things that doctors, even hardened pathologists, will go a long way to avoid. Bodies that have been too long in the sea is one: bodies that have been in the immediate vicinity of underwater explosion is another; and men who have literally been burned alive is another. I was beginning to feel more than slightly sick; but I wasn’t going to leave there until I was finished.

The door creaked open. I turned and watched Commander Swanson come in. He’d been a long time, I’d expected him before then. Lieutenant Hansen, his damaged left hand wrapped in some thick woollen material, came in after him. That was what the phone call had been about, the Commander calling up reinforcements. Swanson switched off his torch, pushed up his snow-goggles and pulled down his mask. His eyes narrowed at the scene before him, his nostrils wrinkled in involuntary disgust, and the colour drained swiftly from his ruddy cheeks. Both Hansen and I had told him what to expect, but he hadn’t been prepared for this: not often can the imagination encompass the reality. For a moment I thought he was going to be sick, but then I saw a slight tinge of colour touch the cheekbones and I knew he wasn’t.

‘Dr Carpenter,’ he said in a voice in which the unsteady huskiness seemed only to emphasise the stilted formality, ‘I wish you to return at once to the ship where you will remain confined to your quarters. I would prefer you went voluntarily, accompanied by Lieutenant Hansen here. I wish no trouble. I trust you don’t either. If you do, we can accommodate you. Rawlings and Murphy are waiting outside that door.’

‘Those are fighting words, Commander,’ I said, ‘and very unfriendly. Rawlings and Murphy are going to get uncommon cold out there.’ I put my right hand in my caribou pants pocket — the one with the gun in it — and surveyed him unhurriedly. ‘Have you had a brainstorm?’

Swanson looked at Hansen and nodded in the direction of the door. Hansen half-turned, then stopped as I said: ‘Very highhanded, aren’t we? I’m not worth an explanation, is that it?’

Hansen looked uncomfortable. He didn’t like any part of this. I suspected Swanson didn’t either, but he was going to do what he had to do and let his feelings look elsewhere.

‘Unless you’re a great deal less intelligent than I believe — and I credit you with a high intelligence — you know exactly what the explanation is. When you came aboard the Dolphin in the Holy Loch both Admiral Garvie and myself were highly suspicious of you. You spun us a story about being an expert in Arctic conditions and of having helped set up this station here. When we wouldn’t accept that as sufficient authority or reason to take you along with us you told a highly convincing tale about this being an advanced missile-warning outpost and even although it was peculiar that Admiral Garvie had never heard of it, we accepted it. The huge dish aerial you spoke of, the radar masts, the electronic computers — what’s happened to them, Dr Carpenter? A bit insubstantial, weren’t they? Like all figments of the imagination.’

I looked at him, considering, and let him go on.

‘There never were any of those things, were there? You’re up to the neck in something very murky indeed, my friend. What it is I don’t know nor, for the moment, do I care. All I care for is the safety of the ship, the welfare of the crew and bringing the Zebra survivors safely back home and I’m taking no chances at all.’

‘The wishes of the British Admiralty, the orders from your own Director of Underseas Warfare -those mean nothing to you?’

I’m beginning to have very strong reservations about the way those orders were obtained,’ Swanson said grimly. ‘You’re altogether too mysterious for my liking, Dr Carpenter — as well as being a fluent liar.’

‘Those are harsh, harsh words, Commander.’

‘The truth not infrequently sounds that way. Will you please come?’

‘Sorry. I’m not through here yet.’

‘I see. John, will you -’

‘I can give you an explanation. I see I have to. Won’t you listen?’

‘A third fairy-story?’ A headshake. ‘No.’

‘And I’m not ready to leave. Impasse.’

Swanson looked at Hansen, who turned to go. I said: ‘Well, if you’re too stiff-necked to listen to me, call up the bloodhounds. Isn’t it just luck, now, that we have three fully-qualified doctors here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean this.’ Guns have different characteristics in appearance. Some look relatively harmless, some ugly, some business-like, some wicked-looking. The Mannlicher-Schoenauer in my hand just looked plain downright wicked. Very wicked indeed. The white light from the Coleman glittered off the blued metal, menacing and sinister. It was a great gun to terrify people with.

‘You wouldn’t use it,’ Swanson said flatly.

‘I’m through talking. I’m through asking for a hearing. Bring on the bailiffs, friend.’

‘You’re bluffing, mister,’ Hansen said savagely. ‘You don’t dare.’

‘There’s too much at stake for me not to dare. Find out now. Don’t be a coward. Don’t hide behind your enlisted men’s backs. Don’t order them to get themselves shot.’ I snapped off the safety-catch. ‘Come and take it from me yourself.’

‘Stay right where you are, John,’ Swanson said sharply. ‘He means it. I suppose you have a whole armoury in that combination-lock suitcase of yours,’ he said bitterly.

‘That’s it. Automatic carbines, six-inch naval guns, the lot. But for a small-size situation a small-size gun. Do I get my hearing?’

‘You get your hearing.’

‘Send Rawlings and Murphy away. I don’t want anyone else to know anything about this. Anyway, they’re probably freezing to death.’

Swanson nodded. Hansen went to the door, opened it, spoke briefly and returned. I laid the gun on the table, picked up my torch and moved some paces away. I said: ‘Come and have a look at this.’

They came. Both of them passed by the table with the gun lying there and didn’t even look at it. I stopped before one of the grotesquely misshapen charred lumps lying on the floor. Swanson came close and stared down. His face had lost whatever little colour it had regained. He made a queer noise in his throat.

‘That ring, that gold ring —’ he began, then stopped short.

‘I wasn’t lying about that.’

‘No. No you weren’t. II don’t know what to say. I’m most damnably —’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said roughly. ‘Look here. At the back. I’m afraid I had to remove some of the carbon.’

‘The neck,’ Swanson whispered. ‘It’s broken.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Something heavy, I don’t know, a beam from one of the huts, must have fallen —’

‘You’ve just seen one of those huts. They have no beams. There’s an inch and a half of the vertebrae missing. If anything sufficiently heavy to smash off an inch and a half of the backbone had struck him, the broken piece would be imbedded in his neck. It’s not. It was blown out. He was shot from the front, through the base of the throat. The bullet went out the back of the neck. A soft-nosed bullet — you can tell by the size of the exit hole — from a powerful gun, something like a .38 Colt or Luger or Mauser.’

‘Good God above!’ For the first time, Swanson was badly shaken. He stared at the thing on the floor, then at me. ‘Murdered. You mean he was murdered.’

‘Who would have done this?’ Hansen said hoarsely. ‘Who, man, who? And in God’s name, why?’

‘I don’t know who did it.’

Swanson looked at me, his eyes strange. ‘You just found this out?’

‘I found out last night.’

‘You found out last night.’ The words were slow, far-spaced, a distinct hiatus between each two. ‘And all the time since, aboard the ship, you never said — you never showed — my God, Carpenter, you’re inhuman.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘See that gun there. It makes a loud bang and when I use it to kill the man who did this I won’t even blink. I’m inhuman, all right.’

‘I was speaking out of turn. Sorry.’ Swanson was making a visible effort to bring himself under normal control. He looked at the Mannlicher-Schoenauer, then at me, then back at the gun. ‘Private revenge is out, Carpenter. No one is going to take the law into his own hands.’

‘Don’t make me laugh out loud. A morgue isn’t a fit place for it. Besides, I’m not through showing you things yet. There’s more. Something that I’ve just found out now. Not last night.’ I pointed to another huddled black shape on the ground. ‘Care to have a look at this man here?’

‘I’d rather not,’ Swanson said steadily. ‘Suppose you tell us?’

‘You can see from where you are. The head. I’ve cleaned it up. Small hole in the front, in the middle of the face and slightly to the right: larger exit hole at the back of the top of the head. Same gun. Same man behind the gun.’

Neither man said anything. They were too sick, too shocked to say anything.

‘Queer path the bullet took,’ I went on. ‘Ranged sharply upwards. As if the man who fired the shot had been lying or sitting down while his victim stood above him.’

‘Yes.’ Swanson didn’t seem to have heard me. ‘Murder. Two murders. This is a job for the authorities, for the police.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘For the police. Let’s just ring the sergeant at the local station and ask him if he would mind stepping this way for a few minutes.’

‘It’s not a job for us,’ Swanson persisted. ‘As captain of an American naval vessel with a duty to discharge I am primarily interested in bringing my ship and the Zebra survivors back to Scotland again.’

‘Without endangering the ship?’ I asked. ‘With a murderer aboard the possibility of endangering the ship does not arise?’

‘We don’t know he is — or will be — aboard.’

‘You don’t even begin to believe that yourself. You know he will be. You know as well as I do why this fire broke out and you know damn’ well that it was no accident. If there was any accidental element about it it was just the size and extent of the fire. The killer may have miscalculated that. But both time and weather conditions were against him: I don’t think he had very much option. The only possible way in which he could obliterate all traces of his crime was to have a fire of sufficient proportions to obliterate those traces. He would have got off with it too, if I hadn’t been here, if I hadn’t been convinced before we left port that something was very far wrong indeed. But he would take very good care that he wouldn’t obliterate himself in the process. Like it or not, Commander, you’re going to have a killer aboard your ship.’

‘But all of those men have been burned, some very severely —’

‘What the hell did you expect? That the unknown X would go about without a mark on him, without as much as a cigarette burn, proclaiming to the world that he had been the one who had been throwing matches about and had then thoughtfully stood to one side? Local colour. He had to get himself burnt.’

‘It doesn’t follow,’ Hansen said. ‘He wasn’t to know that anyone was going to get suspicious and start investigating.’

‘You’ll be well advised to join your captain in keeping out of the detecting racket,’ I said shortly. ‘The men behind this are top-flight experts with far-reaching contacts — part of a criminal octopus with tentacles so long that it can even reach out and sabotage your ship in the Holy Loch. Why they did that, I don’t know. What matters is that top-flight operators like those never take chances. They always operate on the assumption that they may be found out. They take every possible precaution against every possible eventuality. Besides, when the fire was at its height — we don’t know the story of that, yet — the killer would have had to pitch in and rescue those trapped. It would have seemed damned odd if he hadn’t. And so he got burnt.’

‘My God.’ Swanson’s teeth were beginning to chatter with the cold but he didn’t seem to notice it. ‘What a hellish set-up.’

‘Isn’t it? I dare say there’s nothing in your navy regulations to cover this lot.’

‘But what — what are we going to do?’

‘We call the cops. That’s me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say. I have more authority, more official backing, more scope, more power and more freedom of action than any cop you ever saw. You must believe me. What I say is true.’

‘I’m beginning to believe it is true,’ Swanson said in slow thoughtfulness. ‘I’ve been wondering more and more about you in the past twenty-four hours. I’ve kept telling myself I was wrong, even ten minutes before I kept telling myself. You’re a policeman? Or detective?’

‘Naval officer. Intelligence. I have credentials in my suitcase which I am empowered to show in an emergency.’ It didn’t seem the time to tell him just how wide a selection of credentials I did have. ‘This is the emergency.’

‘But — but you are a doctor.’

‘Sure I am. A navy doctor — on the side. My speciality is investigating sabotage in the U.K. armed forces. The cover-up of research doctor is the ideal one. My duties are deliberately vague and I have the power to poke and pry into all sorts of corners and situations and talk to all sorts of people on the grounds of being an investigating psychologist that would be impossible for the average serving officer.’

There was a long silence, then Swanson said bitterly: ‘You might have told us before this.’

‘I might have broadcast it all over your Tannoy system. Why the hell should I? I don’t want to trip over blundering amateurs every step I take. Ask any cop. The biggest menace of his life is the self-appointed Sherlock. Besides, I couldn’t trust you, and before you start getting all hot and bothered about that I might add that I don’t mean you’d deliberately give me away or anything like that but that you might inadvertently give me away. Now I’ve no option but to tell you what I can and chance the consequences. Why couldn’t you just have accepted that directive from your Director of Naval Operations and acted accordingly?’

‘Directive?’ Hansen looked at Swanson. ‘What directive?’

‘Orders from Washington to give Dr Carpenter here carte blanche for practically everything. Be reasonable, Carpenter. I don’t like operating in the dark and I’m naturally suspicious. You came aboard in highly questionable circumstances. You knew too damn’ much about submarines. You were as evasive as hell. You had this sabotage theory all cut and dried. Damn it, man, of course I had reservations. Wouldn’t you have had, in my place?’

‘I suppose so. I don’t know. Me, I obey orders.’

‘Uh-huh. And your orders in this case?’

‘Meaning what exactly is all this about,’ I sighed. ‘It would have to come to this. You must be told now — and you’ll understand why your Director of Naval Operations was so anxious that you give me every help possible.’

‘We can believe this one?’ Swanson asked.

‘You can believe this one. The story I spun back in the Holy Loch wasn’t all malarkey — I just dressed it up a bit to make sure you’d take me along. They did indeed have a very special item of equipment here — an electronic marvel that was used for monitoring the count-down of Soviet missiles and pin-pointing their locations. This machine was kept in one of the huts now destroyed — the second from the west in the south now. Night and day a giant captive radio-sonde balloon reached thirty thousand feet up into the sky — but it had no radio attached. It was just a huge aerial. Incidentally, I should think that is the reason why the fuel oil appears to have been flung over so large an area — an explosion caused by the bursting of the hydrogen cylinders used to inflate the balloons. They were stored in the fuel hut.’

‘Did everybody in Zebra know about this monitoring machine?’

‘No. Most of them thought it a device for investigating cosmic rays. Only four people knew what it really was — my brother and the three others who all slept in the hut that housed this machine. Now the hut is destroyed. The free world’s most advanced listening-post. You wonder why your D.N.O. was so anxious?’

‘Four men?’ Swanson looked at me, a faint speculation still in his eye. ‘Which four men, Dr Carpenter?’

‘Do you have to ask? Four of the seven men you see lying here, Commander.’

He stared down at the floor then looked quickly away. He said: ‘You mentioned that you were convinced even before we left port that something was far wrong. Why?’

‘My brother had a top-secret code. We had messages sent by himself — he was an expert radio operator. One said that there had been two separate attempts to wreck the monitor. He didn’t go into details. Another said that he had been attacked and left unconscious when making a midnight check and found someone bleeding off the gas from the hydrogen cylinders — without the radio-sonde aerial the monitor would have been useless. He was lucky, he was out only for a few minutes, as long again and he would have frozen to death. In the circumstances did you expect me to believe that the fire was unconnected with the attempts to sabotage the monitor?’

‘But how would anyone know what it was?’ Hansen objected. ‘Apart from your brother and the other three men, that is?’ Like Swanson, he glanced at the floor and, like Swanson, looked as hurriedly away. ‘For my money this is the work of a psycho. A madman. A coldly calculating criminal would — well, he wouldn’t go in for wholesale murder like this. But a psycho would.’

‘Three hours ago,’ I said, ‘before you loaded the torpedo into number three tube you checked the manually controlled levers and the warning lights for the tube bow-caps. In the one case you found that the levers had been disconnected in the open position: in the other you found that the wires had been crossed in a junction-box. Do you think that was the work of a psycho? Another psycho?’

He said nothing. Swanson said: ‘What can I do to help, Dr Carpenter?’

‘What are you willing to do, Commander?’

‘I will not hand over command of the Dolphin.’ He smiled, but he wasn’t feeling like smiling. ‘Short of that, I — and the crew of the Dolphin — are at your complete disposal. You name it, Doctor, that’s all.’

‘This time you believe my story?’

‘This time I believe your story.’

I was pleased about that, I almost believed it myself.

EIGHT

The hut where we’d found all the Zebra survivors huddled together was almost deserted when we got back to it — only Dr Benson and the two very sick men remained. The hut seemed bigger now, somehow, bigger and colder, and very shabby and untidy like the remnants of a church rummage sale where the housewives have trained for a couple of months before moving up to battle stations. Pieces of clothing, bedding, frayed and shredded blankets, gloves, plates, cutlery and dozens of odds and ends of personal possessions lay scattered all over the floor. The sick men had been too sick — and too glad to be on their way — to worry overmuch about taking too many of their various knick-knacks out of there. All they had wanted out of there was themselves. I didn’t blame them.

The two unconscious men had their scarred and frostbitten faces towards us. They were either sleeping or in a coma. But I took no chances. I beckoned Benson and he came and stood with us in the shelter of the west wall.

I told Benson what I’d told the commander and Hansen. He had to know. As the man who would be in the most constant and closest contact with the sick men, he had to know. I suppose he must have been pretty astonished and shaken, but he didn’t show it. Doctors’ faces behave as doctors tell them to, when they come across a patient in a pretty critical state of health they don’t beat their breasts and break into loud lamentations, as this tends to discourage the patient. This now made three men from the Dolphin’s crew who knew what the score was — well, half the score, anyway. Three was enough. I only hoped it wasn’t too much.

Thereafter Swanson did the talking: Benson would take it better from him than he would from me. Swanson said: ‘Where were you thinking of putting the sick men we’ve sent back aboard?’

In the most comfortable places I can find. Officers’ quarters, crew’s quarters, scattered all over so that no one is upset too much. Spread the load, so to speak.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t know of the latest — um — development at the time. Things are rather different now.’

‘They are. Half of them in the wardroom, the other half in the crew’s mess — no, the crew’s quarters. No reason why they shouldn’t be fixed up comfortably. If they wonder at this, you can say it’s for ease of medical treatment and that they can all be under constant medical watch, like heart patients in a ward. Get Dr Jolly behind you in this, he seems a co-operative type. And I’ve no doubt he’ll support you in your next move — that all patients are to be stripped, bathed and provided with clean pyjamas. If they’re too ill to move, bed-bath. Dr Carpenter here tells me that prevention of infection is of paramount importance in cases of severe burn injuries.’

‘And their clothes?’

‘You catch on more quickly than I did,’ Swanson grunted. ‘All their clothes to be taken away and labelled. All contents to be removed and labelled. The clothes, for anyone’s information, are to be disinfected and laundered.’

‘It might help if I am permitted to know just what we are looking for,’ Benson suggested.

Swanson looked at me.

‘God knows,’ I said. ‘Anything and everything. One thing certain — you won’t find a gun. Be especially careful in labelling gloves — when we get back to Britain we’ll have the experts test them for nitrates from the gun used.’

‘If anyone has brought aboard anything bigger than a postage stamp I’ll find it,’ Benson promised.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Even if you brought it aboard yourself?’

‘Eh? Me? What the devil are you suggesting?’

‘I’m suggesting that something may have been shoved inside your medical kit, even your pockets, when you weren’t looking.’

‘Good lord.’ He dug feverishly into his pockets. ‘The idea never occurred to me.’

‘You haven’t the right type of nasty suspicious mind,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘Off you go. You too, John.’

They left, and Swanson and I went inside. Once I’d checked that the two men really were unconscious, we went to work. It must have been many years since Swanson had policed a deck or parade-ground, far less doubled as scavenger, but he took to it in the manner born. He was assiduous, painstaking, and missed nothing. Neither did I. We cleared a corner of the hut and brought across there every single article that was either lying on the floor or attached to the still ice-covered walls. Nothing was missed. It was either shaken, turned over, opened or emptied according to what it was. Fifteen minutes and we were all through. If there was anything bigger than a matchstick to be found in that room then we would have found it. But we found nothing. Then we scattered everything back over the floor again until the hut looked more or less as it had been before our search. If either of the two unconscious men came to I didn’t want him knowing that we had been looking for anything.

‘We’re no great shakes in the detecting business,’ Swanson said. He looked slightly discouraged.

‘We can’t find what isn’t there to be found. And it doesn’t help that we don’t know what we’re looking for. Let’s try for the gun now. May be anywhere, he may even have thrown it away on the ice-cap, though I think that unlikely. A killer never likes to lose his means of killing — and he couldn’t have been sure that he wouldn’t require it again. There aren’t so very many places to search. He wouldn’t have left it here, for this is the main bunkhouse and in constant use. That leaves only the met. office and the lab. where the dead are lying.’

‘He could have hidden it among the ruins of one of the burnt-out huts,’ Swanson objected.

‘Not a chance. Our friend has been here for some months now, and he must know exactly the effect those ice-storms have. The spicules silt up against any object that lies in their path. The metal frameworks at the bases of the destroyed buildings are still in position, and the floors of the huts — or where the wooden floors used to be — are covered with solid ice to a depth of from four to six inches. He would have been as well to bury his gun in quick-setting concrete.’

We started on the meteorological hut. We looked in every shelf, every box, every cupboard and had just started ripping the backs off the metal cabinets that housed the meteorological equipment when Swanson said abruptly: ‘I have an idea. Back in a couple of minutes.’

He was better than his word. He was back in a minute flat, carrying in his hands four objects that glittered wetly in the lamplight and smelled strongly of petrol. A gun — a Luger automatic — the haft and broken-off blade of a knife and two rubber-wrapped packages which turned out to be spare magazines for the Luger. He said: ‘I guess this was what you were looking for.’

‘Where did you find them?’

‘The tractor. In the petrol tank.’

‘What made you think of looking there?’

‘Just luck. I got to thinking about your remark that the guy who had used this gun might want to use it again. But if he was to hide it anywhere where it was exposed to the weather it might have become jammed up with ice. Even if it didn’t, he might have figured that the metal would contract so that the shells wouldn’t fit or that the firing mechanism and lubricating oil would freeze solid. Only two things don’t freeze solid in these subzero temperatures — alcohol and petrol. You can’t hide a gun in a bottle of gin.’

‘It wouldn’t have worked,’ I said. ‘Metal would still contract — the petrol is as cold as the surrounding air.’

‘Maybe he didn’t know that. Or if he did, maybe he just thought it was a good place to hide it, quick and handy.’ He looked consideringly at me as I broke the butt and looked at the empty magazine, then said sharply: ‘You’re smearing that gun a little, aren’t you?’

‘Fingerprints? Not after being in petrol. He was probably wearing gloves anyway.’

‘So why did you want it?’

‘Serial number. May be able to trace it. It’s even possible that the killer had a police permit for it. It’s happened before, believe it or not. And you must remember that the killer believed there would be no suspicion of foul play, far less that a search would be carried out for the gun.

‘Anyway, this knife explains the gun. Firing guns is a noisy business and I’m surprised — I was surprised — that the killer risked it. He might have wakened the whole camp. But he had to take the risk because he’d gone and snapped off the business end of this little sticker here. This is a very slender blade, the kind of blade it’s very easy to snap unless you know exactly what you’re doing, especially when extreme cold makes the metal brittle. He probably struck a rib or broke the blade trying to haul it out — a knife slides in easily enough but it can jam against cartilage or bone when you try to remove it.’

‘You mean — you mean the killer murdered a third man?’ Swanson asked carefully. ‘With this knife?’

‘The third man but the first victim,’ I nodded. ‘The missing half of the blade will be stuck inside someone’s chest. But I’m not going to look for it — it would be pointless and take far too long.’

‘I’m not sure that I don’t agree with Hansen,’ Swanson said slowly. ‘I know it’s impossible to explain away the sabotage on the boat — but, my God, this looks like the work of a maniac. All this — all this senseless killing.’

‘All this killing,’ I agreed. ‘But not senseless — not from the point of view of the killer. No, don’t ask me, I don’t know what his point of view was — or is. I know — you know — why he started the fire: what we don’t know is why he killed those men in the first place.’

Swanson shook his head, then said: ‘Let’s get back to the other hut. I’ll phone for someone to keep a watch over those sick men. I don’t know about you, but I’m frozen stiff. And you had no sleep last night.’

‘I’ll watch them meantime,’ I said. ‘For an hour or so. And I’ve some thinking to do, some very hard thinking.’

‘You haven’t much to go on, have you?’

‘That’s what makes it so hard.’

I’d said to Swanson that I didn’t have much to go on, a less than accurate statement, for I didn’t have anything to go on at all. So I didn’t waste any time thinking. Instead I took a lantern and went once again to the lab. where the dead men lay. I was cold and tired and alone, and the darkness was falling and I didn’t very much fancy going there. Nobody would have fancied going there, a place of dreadful death which any sane person would have avoided like the plague. And that was why I was going there, not because I wasn’t sane, but because it was a place that no man would ever voluntarily visit — unless he had an extremely powerful motivation, such as the intention of picking up some essential thing he had hidden there in the near certainty that no one else would ever go near the place. It sounded complicated, even to me. I was very tired. I made a fuzzy mental note to ask around, when I got back to the Dolphin, to find out who had suggested shifting the dead men in there.

The walls of the lab. were lined with shelves and cupboards containing jars and bottles and retorts and test-tubes and such-like chemical junk, but I didn’t give them more than a glance. I went to the corner of the hut where the dead men lay most closely together, shone my torch along the side of the room and found what I was looking for in a matter of seconds — a floorboard standing slightly proud of its neighbours. Two of the blackened contorted lumps that had once been men lay across that board. I moved them just far enough, not liking the job at all, then lifted one end of the loose floorboard.

It looked as if someone had had it in mind to start up a supermarket. In the six-inch space between the floor and the base of the hut were stacked dozens of neatly arranged cans — soup, beef, fruit, vegetables, a fine varied diet with all the proteins and vitamins a man could want. Someone had had no intention of going hungry. There was even a small pressure-stove and a couple of gallons of kerosene to thaw out the cans. And to one side, lying flat, two rows of gleaming Nife cells — there must have been about forty in all.

I replaced the board, left the lab. and went across to the meteorological hut again. I spent over an hour there, unbuttoning the backs of metal cabinets and peering into their innards, but I found nothing. Not what I had hoped to find, that was. But I did come across one very peculiar item, a small green metal box six inches by four by two, with a circular control that was both switch and tuner, and two glassed-in dials with neither figures nor marking on them. At the side of the box was a brass-rimmed hole.

I turned the switch and one of the dials glowed green, a magic-eye tuning device with the fans spread well apart. The other dial stayed dead. I twiddled the tuner control but nothing happened. Both the magic eye and the second dial required something to activate them — something like a preset radio signal. The hole in the side would accommodate the plug of any standard telephone receiver. Not many people would have known what this was, but I’d seen one before — a transistorised homing device for locating the direction of a radio signal, such as emitted by the ‘Sarah’ device on American space capsules which enables searchers to locate it once it has landed in the sea.

What legitimate purpose could be served by such a device in Drift Ice Station Zebra? When I’d told Swanson and Hansen of the existence of a console for monitoring rocket-firing signals from Siberia, that much of my story, anyway, had been true. But that had called for a giant aerial stretching far up into the sky: this comparative toy couldn’t have ranged a twentieth of the distance to Siberia.

I had another look at the portable radio transmitter and the now exhausted Nife batteries that served them. The dialling counter was still tuned into the waveband in which the Dolphin had picked up the distress signals. There was nothing for me there. I looked more closely at the nickel-cadmium cells and saw that they were joined to one another and to the radio set by wire-cored rubber leads with very powerfully spring-loaded saw-tooth clips on the terminals; those last ensured perfect electrical contact as well as being very convenient to use. I undid two of the clips, brought a torch-beam to bear and peered closely at the terminals. The indentations made by the sharpened steel saw-teeth were faint but unmistakable.

I made my way back to the laboratory hut, lifted the loose floorboard again and shone the torch on the Nife cells lying there. At least half of the cells had the same characteristic markings. Cells that looked fresh and unused, yet they had those same markings and if anything was certain it was that those cells had been brand-new and unmarked when Drift Ice Station Zebra had been first set up. A few of the cells were tucked so far away under adjacent floorboards that I had to stretch my hand far in to reach them. I pulled out two and in the space behind I seemed to see something dark and dull and metallic.

It was too dark to distinguish clearly what the object was but after I’d levered up another two floorboards I could see without any trouble at all. It was a cylinder about thirty inches long and six in diameter with brass stopcock and mounted pressure gauge registering ‘full’: close beside it was a package about eighteen inches square and four thick, stencilled with the words ‘RADIO-SONDE BALLOONS’. Hydrogen, batteries, balloons, corned beef and mulligatawny soup. A catholic enough assortment of stores by any standards; but there wouldn’t have been anything haphazard about the choice of that assortment.

When I made it back to the bunkhouse, the two patients were still breathing. That was about all I could say for myself, too, I was shaking with the cold and even clamping my teeth together couldn’t keep them from chattering. I thawed out under the big electric heaters until I was only half-frozen, picked up my torch and moved out again into the wind and the cold and the dark. I was a sucker for punishment, that was for sure.

In the next twenty minutes I made a dozen complete circuits of the camp, moving a few yards farther out with each circuit. I must have walked over a mile altogether and that was all I had for it, just the walk and a slight touch of frostbite high up on the cheekbones, the only part of my face, other than the eyes, exposed to that bitter cold. I knew I had frostbite for the skin had suddenly ceased to feel cold any more and was quite dead to the touch. Enough was enough and I had a hunch that I was wasting my time anyway. I headed back to the camp.

I passed between the meteorological hut and the lab. and was just level with the eastern end of the bunkhouse when I sensed as much as saw something odd out of the corner of my eye. I steadied the torch-beam on the east wall and peered closely at the sheath of ice that had been deposited there over the days by the ice-storm. Most of the encrustation was of a homogeneous greyish-white, very smooth and polished, but it wasn’t all grey-white: it was speckled here and there with dozens of black flecks of odd shapes and sizes, none of them more than an inch square. I tried to touch them but they were deeply imbedded in and showing through the gleaming ice. I went to examine the east wall of the meteorological hut, but it was quite innocent of any such black flecking. So was the east wall of the lab.

A short search inside the meteorological hut turned up a hammer and screwdriver. I chipped away a section of the black-flecked ice, brought it into the bunkhouse and laid it on the floor in front of one of the big electrical heaters. Ten minutes later I had a small pool of water and, lying in it, the sodden remains of what had once been fragments of burnt paper. This was very curious indeed. It meant that there were scores of pieces of burnt paper imbedded in the east wall of the bunkhouse. Just there: nowhere else. The explanation, of course, could be completely innocuous: or not, as the case might be.

I had another look at the two unconscious men. They were warm enough and comfortable enough but that was about all you could say for them. I couldn’t see them as fit enough to be moved inside the next twenty-four hours. I lifted the phone and asked for someone to relieve me and when two seamen arrived, I made my way back to the Dolphin.

There was an unusual atmosphere aboard ship that afternoon, quiet and dull and almost funereal. It was hardly to be wondered at. As far as the crew of the Dolphin had been concerned, the men manning Drift Ice Station Zebra had been just so many ciphers, not even names, just unknowns. But now the burnt, frostbitten, emaciated survivors had come aboard ship, sick and suffering men each with a life and individuality of his own, and the sight of those wasted men still mourning the deaths of their eight comrades had suddenly brought home to every man on the submarine the full horror of what had happened on Zebra. And, of course less than seven hours had elapsed since their own torpedo officer, Lieutenant Mills, had been killed. Now, even although the mission had been successful, there seemed little enough reason for celebration. Down in the crew’s mess the hi-fi and the juke-box were stilled. The ship was like a tomb.

I found Hansen in his cabin. He was sitting on the edge of his Pullman bunk, still wearing his fur trousers, his face bleak and hard and cold. He watched me in silence as I stripped off my parka, undid the empty holster tied round my chest, hung it up and stuck inside it the automatic I’d pulled from my caribou pants. Then he said suddenly: ‘I wouldn’t take them off, Doc. Not if you want to come with us, that is.’ He looked at his own furs and his mouth was bitter. ‘Hardly the rig of the day for a funeral, is it?’

‘You mean —’

‘Skipper’s in his cabin. Boning up on the burial service. George Mills and that assistant radio operator — Grant, wasn’t it — who died out there today. A double funeral. Out on the ice. There’s some men there already, chipping a place with crowbars and sledges at the base of a hummock.’

‘I saw no one.’

‘Port side. To the west.’

‘I thought Swanson would have taken young Hills back to the States. Or Scotland.’

‘Too far. And there’s the psychological angle. You could hardly dent the morale of this bunch we have aboard here far less shoot it to pieces, but carrying a dead man as a shipmate is an unhappy thing. He’s had permission from Washington … ’ He broke off uncertainly, looked quietly up at me and then away again. I didn’t have any need of telepathy to know what was in his mind.

‘The seven men on Zebra?’ I shook my head. ‘No, no funeral service for them. How could you? I’ll pay my respects some other way.’

His eyes flickered up at the Mannlicher-Schoenauer hanging in its holster, then away again. He said in a quiet savage voice: ‘Goddam his black murderous soul. That devil’s aboard here, Carpenter. Here. On our ship.’ He smacked a bunched fist hard against the palm of his other hand. ‘Have you no idea what’s behind this, Doc? No idea who’s responsible?’

‘If I had, I wouldn’t be standing here. Any idea how Benson is getting along with the sick and injured?’

‘He’s all through. I’ve just left him.’

I nodded, reached up for the automatic and stuck it in the pocket of my caribou pants. Hansen said quietly: ‘Even aboard here?’

‘Especially aboard here.’ I left him and went along to the surgery. Benson was sitting at his table, his back to his art gallery of Technicolor cartoons, making entries in a book. He looked up as I closed the door behind me.

‘Find anything?’ I asked.

‘Nothing that I would regard as interesting. Hansen did most of the sorting. You may find something.’ He pointed to neatly folded piles of clothing on the deck, several small attache-cases and a few polythene bags, each labelled. ‘Look for yourself. How about the two men left out on Zebra?’

‘Holding their own. I think they’ll be O.K., but it’s too early to say yet.’ I squatted on the floor, went carefully through all the pockets in the clothes and found, as I had expected, nothing. Hansen wasn’t the man to miss anything. I felt every square inch of the lining areas and came up with the same results. I went through the small cases and the polythene bags, small items of clothing and personal gear, shaving kits, letters, photographs, two or three cameras. I broke open the cameras and they were all empty. I said to Benson: ‘Dr Jolly brought his medical case aboard with him?’

‘Wouldn’t even trust one of your own colleagues, would you?’

‘No.’

‘Neither would I.’ He smiled with his mouth only. ‘You’re an evil influence. I went through every item in it. Not a thing. I even measured the thickness of the bottom of the case. Nothing there.’

‘Good enough for me. How are the patients?’

‘Nine of them,’ Benson said. ‘The psychological effect of knowing that they’re safe has done them more good than any medication ever could.’ He consulted cards on his desk. ‘Captain Folsom is the worst. No danger, of course, but his facial burns are pretty savage. We’ve arranged to have a plastic surgeon standing by in Glasgow when we return. The Harrington twins, both met. officers, are rather less badly burnt, but very weak, from both cold and hunger. Food, warmth and rest will have them on their feet in a couple of days again. Hassard, another met officer, and Jeremy, a lab. technician, moderate burns, moderate frostbite, fittest of the lot otherwise — it’s queer how different people react so differently to hunger and cold. The other four — Kinnaird, the senior radio operator, Dr Jolly, Naseby, the cook, and Hewson, the tractor-driver and man who was in charge of the generator — are much of a muchness: they’re suffering most severely of all from frostbite, especially Kinnaird, all with moderate burns, weak, of course, but recovering fast. Only Folsom and the Harrington twins have consented to become bed-patients. The rest we’ve provided with rigouts of one sort or another. They’re all lying down, of course, but they won’t be lying down long. All of them are young, tough, and basically very fit — they don’t pick children or old men to man places like Drift Station Zebra.’

A knock came to the door and Swanson’s head appeared. He said, ‘Hallo, back again,’ to me then turned to Benson. ‘A small problem of medical discipline here, Doctor.’ He stood aside to let us see Naseby, the Zebra cook, standing close behind him, dressed in a U.S. Navy petty officer’s uniform. ‘It seems that your patients have heard about the funeral service. They want to go along — those who are able, that is — to pay their last respects to their colleagues. I understand and sympathise, of course, but their state of health —’

‘I would advise against it, sir,’ Benson said. ‘Strongly.’

‘You can advise what you like, mate,’ a voice came from behind Naseby. It was Kinnaird, the cockney radio operator, also clad in blue. ‘No offence. Don’t want to be rude or ungrateful. But I’m going. Jimmy Grant was my mate.’

‘I know how you feel,’ Benson said. ‘I also know how I feel about it — your condition, I mean. You’re in no fit state to do anything except lie down. You’re making things very difficult for me.’

‘I’m the captain of this ship,’ Swanson put in mildly. ‘I can forbid it, you know. I can say “No,” and make it stick.’

‘And you are making things difficult for us, sir,’ Kinnaird said. ‘I don’t reckon it would advance the cause of Anglo-American unity very much if we started hauling off at our rescuers an hour or two after they’d saved us from certain death.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Besides, look at what it might do to our wounds and burns.’

Swanson cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘Well, they’re your countrymen.’

‘Dr Benson is perfectly correct,’ I said. ‘But it’s not worth a civil war. If they could survive five or six days on that damned ice-cap, I don’t suppose a few minutes more is going to finish them off.’

‘Well, if it does,’ Swanson said heavily, ‘we’ll blame you.’

If I ever had any doubt about it I didn’t have then, not after ten minutes out in the open. The Arctic ice-cap was no place for a funeral; but I couldn’t have imagined a more promising set-up for a funeral director who wanted to drum up some trade. After the warmth of the Dolphin the cold seemed intense and within five minutes we were all shivering violently. The darkness was as nearly absolute as it ever becomes on the ice-cap, the wind was lifting again and thin flurries of snow came gusting through the night. The solitary floodlamp served only to emphasise the ghostly unreality of it all, the huddled circle of mourners with bent heads, the two shapeless canvas-wrapped forms lying huddled at the base of an ice-hummock, Commander Swanson bent over his book, the wind and the snow snatching the half-heard mumble from his lips as he hurried through the burial service. I caught barely one word in ten of the committal and then it was all over, no meaningless rifle salutes, no empty blowing of bugles, just the service and the silence and the dark shapes of stumbling men hurriedly placing fragments of broken ice over the canvas-sheeted forms. And within twenty-four hours the eternally drifting spicules and blowing snow would have sealed them for ever in their icy tomb, and there they might remain for ever, drifting in endless circles about the North Pole; or some day, perhaps a thousand years from then, an ice-lead might open up and drop them down to the uncaring floor of the Arctic, their bodies as perfectly preserved as if they had died only that day. It was a macabre thought.

Heads bent against the snow and ice, we hurried back to the shelter of the Dolphin. From the icecap to the top of the sail it was a climb of over twenty feet up the almost vertically inclined huge slabs of ice that the submarine had pushed upwards and sideways as she had forced her way through. Hand-lines had been rigged from the top of the sail but even then it was a fairly tricky climb. It was a set-up where with the icy slope, the frozen slippery ropes, the darkness and the blinding effect of the snow and ice, an accident could all too easily happen. And happen it did.

I was about six feet up, giving a hand to Jeremy, the lab. technician from Zebra whose burnt hands made it almost impossible for him to climb alone, when I heard a muffled cry above me. I glanced up and had a darkly-blurred impression of someone teetering on top of the sail, fighting for his balance, then jerked Jeremy violently towards me to save him from being swept away as that same someone lost his footing, toppled over backwards and hurtled down past us on to the ice below. I winced at the sound of the impact, two sounds, rather, a heavy muffled thud followed immediately by a sharper, crisper crack. First the body, then the head. I half imagined that I heard another sound afterwards, but couldn’t be sure. I handed Jeremy over to the care of someone else and slithered down an ice-coated rope, not looking forward very much to what I must see. The fall had been the equivalent of a twenty-foot drop on to a concrete floor.

Hansen had got there before me and was shining his torch down not on to one prostrate figure as I had expected, but two. Benson and Jolly, both of them out cold.

I said to Hansen: ‘Did you see what happened?’

‘No. Happened too quickly. All I know is that it was Benson that did the falling and Jolly that did the cushioning. Jolly was beside me only a few seconds before the fall.’

‘If that’s the case then Jolly probably saved your doctor’s life. We’ll need to strap them in stretchers and haul them up and inside. We can’t leave them out here.’

‘Stretchers? Well, yes, if you say so. But they might come round any minute.’

‘One of them might. But one of them is not going to come round for a long time. You heard that crack when a head hit the ice, it was like someone being clouted over the head with a fence-post. And I don’t know which it is yet.’

Hansen left. I stooped over Benson and eased back the hood of the duffel-coat he was wearing. A fence-post was just about right. The side of his head, an inch above the right ear, was a blood-smeared mess, a three-inch long gash in the purpling flesh with the blood already coagulating in the bitter cold. Two inches farther forward and he’d have been a dead man, the thin bone behind the temple would have shattered under such an impact. For Benson’s sake, I hoped the rest of his skull was pretty thick. No question but that this had been the sharp crack I’d heard.

Benson’s breathing was very shallow, the movement of his chest barely discernible. Jolly’s, on the other hand, was fairly deep and regular. I pulled back his anorak hood, probed carefully over his head and encountered a slight puffiness far back, near the top on the left-hand side. The inference seemed obvious. I hadn’t been imagining things when I thought I had heard a second sound after the sharp crack caused by Benson’s head striking against the ice. Jolly must have been in the way of the falling Benson, not directly enough beneath him to break his fall in any way but directly enough to be knocked backwards on to the ice and clout the back of his head as he fell.

It took ten minutes to have them strapped in stretchers, taken inside and placed in a couple of temporary cots in the sick-bay. With Swanson waiting anxiously I attended to Benson first, though there was little enough I could do, and had just started on Jolly when his eyes flickered and he slowly came back to consciousness, groaning a bit and trying to hold the back of his head. He made to sit up in his cot but I restrained him.

‘Oh, lord, my head.’ Several times he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, opened them wide, focused with difficulty on the bulkhead riotous with the colour of Benson’s cartoon characters, then looked away as if he didn’t believe it. ‘Oh, my word, that must have been a dilly. Who did it, old boy?’

‘Did what?’ Swanson asked.

‘Walloped me on the old bean. Who? Eh?’

‘You mean to say you don’t remember?’

‘Remember?’ Jolly said irritably. ‘How the devil should I …’ He broke off as his eye caught sight of Benson in the adjacent cot, a huddled figure under the blankets with only the back of his head and a big gauze pack covering his wound showing. ‘Of course, of course. Yes, that’s it. He fell on top of me, didn’t he?’

‘He certainly did,’ I said. ‘Did you try to catch him?’

‘Catch him? No, I didn’t try to catch him. I didn’t try to get out of the way either. It was all over in half a second. I just don’t remember a thing about it.’ He groaned a bit more then looked across at Benson. ‘Came a pretty nasty cropper, eh? Must have done.’

‘Looks like it. He’s very severely concussed. There’s X-ray equipment here and I’ll have a look at his head shortly. Damned hard luck on you too, Jolly.’

‘I’ll get over it,’ he grunted. He pushed off my hand and sat up. ‘Can I help you?’

‘You may not,’ Swanson said quietly. ‘Early supper then twelve hours solid for you and the eight others, Doctor, and those are my doctor’s orders. You’ll find supper waiting in the wardroom now.’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Jolly gave a ghost of a smile and pushed himself groggily to his feet. ‘That bit about the twelve hours sounds good to me.’

After a minute or two, when he was steady enough on his feet, he left. Swanson said: ‘What now?’

‘You might inquire around to see who was nearest or near to Benson when he slipped climbing over the edge of the bridge. But discreetly. It might do no harm if at the same time you hinted around that maybe Benson had just taken a turn.’

‘What are you hinting at?’ Swanson asked slowly.

‘Did he fall or was he pushed? That’s what I’m hinting at.’

‘Did he fall or … ’ He broke off then went on warily: ‘Why should anyone want to push Dr Benson?’

‘Why should anyone want to kill seven — eight, now — men in Drift Ice Station Zebra?’

‘You have a point,’ Swanson acknowledged quietly. He left.

Making X-ray pictures wasn’t very much in my line but apparently it hadn’t been very much in Dr Benson’s line either for he’d written down, for his own benefit and guidance, a detailed list of instructions for the taking and development of X-ray pictures. I wondered how he would have felt if he had known that the first beneficiary of his meticulous thoroughness was to be himself. The two finished negatives I came up with wouldn’t have caused any furore in the Royal Photographic Society, but they were enough for my wants.

By and by Commander Swanson returned, closing the door behind him. I said: ‘Ten gets one that you got nothing.’

‘You won’t die a poor man,’ he nodded. ‘Nothing is what it is. So Chief Torpedoman Patterson tells me, and you know what he’s like.’

I knew what he was like. Patterson was the man responsible for all discipline and organisation among the enlisted men and Swanson had said to me that he regarded Patterson, and not himself, as the most indispensable man on the ship.

‘Patterson was the man who reached the bridge immediately before Benson,’ Swanson said. ‘He said he heard Benson cry out, swung round and saw him already beginning to topple backwards. He didn’t recognise who it was at the time, it was too dark and snowy for that. He said he had the impression that Benson had already had one hand and one knee on the bridge coaming when he fell backwards.’

‘A funny position in which to start falling backwards,’ I said. ‘Most of his body weight must already have been inboard. And even if he did topple outwards he would surely still have had plenty of time to grab the coaming with both hands.’

‘Maybe he did take a turn,’ Swanson suggested. ‘And don’t forget that the coaming is glass-slippery with its smooth coating of ice.’

‘As soon as Benson disappeared Patterson ran to the side to see what had happened to him?’

‘He did,’ Swanson said wearily. ‘And he said there wasn’t a person within ten feet of the top of the bridge when Benson fell.’

‘And who was ten feet below?’

‘He couldn’t tell. Don’t forget how black it was out there on the ice-cap and that the moment Patterson had dropped into the brightly lit bridge he’d lost whatever night-sight he’d built up. Besides, he didn’t wait for more than a glance. He was off for a stretcher even before you or Hansen got to Benson. Patterson is not the sort of man who has to be told what to do.’

‘So it’s a dead end there?’

‘A dead end.’

I nodded, crossed to a cupboard and brought back the two X-rays, still wet, held in their metal clips. I held them up to the light for Swanson’s inspection.

‘Benson?’ he asked, and when I nodded peered at them more closely and finally said: ‘That line there — a fracture?’

‘A fracture. And not a hair-line one either, as you can see. He really caught a wallop.’

‘How bad is it? How long before he comes out of this coma — he is in a coma?’

‘He’s all that. How long? If I were a lad fresh out of medical school I’d let you have a pretty confident estimate. If I were a top-flight brain surgeon I’d say anything from half an hour to a year or two, because people who really know what they are talking about are only too aware that we know next to nothing about the brain. Being neither, I’d guess at two or three days — and my guess could be hopelessly wrong. There may be cerebral bleeding. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Blood-pressure, respiration and temperature show no evidence of organic damage. And now you know as much about it as I do.’

‘Your colleagues wouldn’t like that.’ Swanson smiled faintly. ‘This cheerful confession of ignorance does nothing to enhance the mystique of your profession. How about your other patients — the two men still out in Zebra?’

‘I’ll see them after supper. Maybe they’ll be fit enough to be brought here to-morrow. Meanwhile, I’d like to ask a favour of you. Could you lend me the services of your Torpedoman Rawlings? And would you have any objections to his being taken into our confidence?’

‘Rawlings? I don’t know why you want him, but why Rawlings? The officers and petty officers aboard this ship are the pick of the United States Navy. Why not one of them? Besides, I’m not sure that I like the idea of passing on to an enlisted man secrets denied to my officers.’

‘They’re strictly non-naval secrets. The question of hierarchy doesn’t enter into it. Rawlings is the man I want. He’s got a quick mind, quick reflexes, and a dead-pan give-away-nothing expression that is invaluable in a game like this. Besides, in the event — the unlikely event, I hope — of the killer suspecting that we’re on to him, he wouldn’t look for any danger from one of your enlisted men because he’d be certain that we wouldn’t let them in on it.’

‘What do you want him for?’

‘To keep a night guard on Benson here.’

‘On Benson?’ A fractional narrowing of the eyes, that could have been as imagined as real, was the only change in Swanson’s impassive face. ‘So you don’t think it was an accident, do you?’ ‘I don’t honestly know. But I’m like yourself when you carry out a hundred and one different checks, most of which you know to be unnecessary, before you take your ship to sea — I’m taking no chances. If it wasn’t an accident — then someone might have an interest in doing a really permanent job next time.’

‘But how can Benson represent a danger to anyone?’ Swanson argued. ‘I’ll wager anything you like, Carpenter, that Benson doesn’t — or didn’t — know a thing about them that could point a finger at anyone. If he did, he’d have told me straight away. He was like that.’

‘Maybe he saw or heard something the significance of which he didn’t then realise. Maybe the killer is frightened that if Benson has time enough to think about it the significance will dawn on him. Or maybe it’s all a figment of my overheated imagination: maybe he just fell. But I’d still like to have Rawlings.’

‘You shall have him.’ Swanson rose to his feet and smiled. ‘I don’t want you quoting that Washington directive at me again.’

Two minutes later Rawlings arrived. He was dressed in a light brown shirt and overall pants, obviously his own conception of what constituted the well-dressed submariner’s uniform, and for the first time in our acquaintance he didn’t smile a greeting. He didn’t even glance at Benson on his cot. His face was still and composed, without any expression.

‘You sent for me, sir?’ ‘Sir,’ not ‘Doc’

‘Take a seat, Rawlings.’ He sat, and as he did I noticed the heavy bulge in the twelve-inch thigh pocket on the side of his overall pants. I nodded and said: ‘What have you got there? Doesn’t do much for the cut of your natty suiting, does it?’

He didn’t smile. He said, ‘I always carry one or two tools around with me. That’s what the pocket is for.’

‘Let’s see this particular tool,’ I said.

He hesitated briefly, shrugged and, not without some difficulty, pulled a heavy gleaming drop-forged steel pipe-wrench from the pocket. I hefted it in my hand.

‘I’m surprised at you, Rawlings,’ I said. ‘What do you think the average human skull is made of — concrete? One little tap with this thing and you’re up on a murder or manslaughter charge.’ I picked up a roll of bandage. Ten yards of this wrapped round the business end will automatically reduce the charge to one of assault and battery.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said mechanically.

‘I’m talking about the fact that when Commander Swanson, Lieutenant Hansen and I were inside the laboratory this afternoon and you and Murphy were outside, you must have kind of leaned your ear against the door and heard more than was good for you. You know there’s something far wrong and though you don’t know what, your motto is “be prepared”. Hence the cosh. Correct?’

‘Correct.’

‘Does Murphy know?’

‘No.’

‘I’m a naval intelligence officer. Washington know all about me. Want the captain to vouch for me?’

‘Well, no.’ The first faint signs of a grin. ‘I heard you pull a gun on the skipper, but you’re still walking about loose. You must be in the clear.’

‘You heard me threaten the captain and Lieutenant Hansen with a gun. But then you were sent away. You heard nothing after that?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Three men have been murdered on Zebra. Two shot, one knifed. Their bodies were burned to conceal traces of the crime. Four others died in the fire. The killer is aboard this ship.’

Rawlings said nothing. His eyes were wide, his face pale and shocked. I told him everything I’d told Swanson and Hansen and emphasised that he was to keep it all to himself. Then I finished: ‘Dr Benson here has been seriously hurt. A deliberate attempt for God knows what reason, may have been made on his life. We don’t know. But if it was a deliberate attempt, then it’s failed — so far.’

Rawlings had brought himself under control. He said, his voice as empty of expression as his face: ‘Our little pal might come calling again?’

‘He may. No member of the crew except the captain, the executive officer or I will come here. Anyone else — well, you can start asking him questions when he recovers consciousness.’

‘You recommended ten yards of this bandage, Doc?’

‘It should be enough. And only a gentle tap, for God’s sake. Above and behind the ear. You might sit behind that curtain there where no one can see you.’

‘I’m feeling lonesome to-night,’ Rawlings murmured. He broke open the bandage, started winding it around the head of the wrench and glanced at the cartoon-decorated bulkhead beside him. ‘Even old Yogi Bear ain’t no fit companion for me to-night. I hope I have some other company calling.’

I left him there. I felt vaguely sorry for anyone who should come calling, killer or not. I felt, too, that I had taken every possible precaution. But when I left Rawlings there guarding Benson I did make one little mistake. Just one. I left him guarding the wrong man.

The second accident of the day happened so quickly, so easily, so inevitably that it might almost have been just that — an accident.

At supper that evening I suggested that, with Commander Swanson’s permission, I’d have a surgery at nine next morning; because of enforced neglect most of the burn wounds were suppurating fairly badly, requiring constant cleaning and changing of coverings: I also thought it about time that an X-ray inspection be made of Zabrinski’s broken ankle. Medical supplies in the sick-bay were running short. Where did Benson keep his main supplies? Swanson told me and detailed Henry, the steward, to show me where it was.

About ten that night, after I’d returned from seeing the two men out on Zebra, Henry led me through the now deserted control room and down the ladder which led to the inertial navigation room and the electronics space, which abutted on it. He undid the strong-back clamp on the square heavy steel hatch in a corner of the electronics room and with an assist from me — the hatch must have weighed about 150 pounds — swung it up and back until the hatch clicked home on its standing latch.

Three rungs on the inside of the hatch-cover led on to the vertical steel ladder that reached down to the deck below. Henry went down first, snapping on the light as he went, and I followed.

The medical storage room, though tiny, was equipped on the same superbly lavish scale as was everything else on the Dolphin. Benson, as thoroughly meticulous in this as he had been in his outlining of X-ray procedure, had everything neatly and logically labelled so that it took me less than three minutes to find everything I wanted. I went up the ladder first, stopped near the top, stretched down and took the bag of supplies from Henry, swung it up on the deck above, then reached up quickly with my free hand to grab the middle of the three rungs welded on the lower side of the hatch cover to haul myself up on to the deck of the electronics space. But I didn’t haul myself up. What happened was that I hauled the hatch cover down. The retaining latch had become disengaged, and the 150-pound dead weight of that massive cover was swinging down on top of me before I could even begin to realise what was happening.

I fell half-sideways, half-backwards, pulling the hatch cover with me. My head struck against the hatch coaming. Desperately I ducked my head forward — if it had been crushed between the coaming and the falling cover the two sides of my skull would just about have met in the middle -and tried to snatch my left arm back inside. I was more or less successful with my head — I had it clear of the coaming and was ducking so quickly that the impact of the cover was no more than enough to give me a slight headache afterwards; but my left arm was a different matter altogether. I almost got it clear — but only almost. If my left hand and wrist had been strapped to a steel block and a gorilla had had a go at it with a sledgehammer, the effect couldn’t have been more agonising. For a moment or two I hung there, trapped, dangling by my left wrist, then the weight of my body tore the mangled wrist and hand through the gap and I crashed down to the deck beneath. Then the gorilla seemed to have another go with the sledge-hammer and consciousness went.

‘I won’t beat about the bush, old lad,’ Jolly said. ‘No point in it with a fellow pill-roller. Your wrist is a mess — I had to dig half your watch out of it. The middle and little fingers are broken, the middle in two places. But the permanent damage, I’m afraid, is to the back of your hand — the little and ring finger tendons have been sliced.’

‘What does that mean?’ Swanson asked.

‘It means that in his left hand he’ll have to get by with two fingers and a thumb for the rest of his life,’ Jolly said bluntly.

Swanson swore softly and turned to Henry. ‘How in God’s name could you have been so damnably careless? An experienced submariner like you? You know perfectly well that you are required to make a visual check every time a hatch cover engages in a standing latch. Why didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t need to, sir.’ Henry was looking more dyspeptic and forlorn than ever. ‘I heard it click and I gave a tug. It was fixed, all right. I can swear to it, sir.’

‘How could it have been fixed? Look at Dr Carpenter’s hand. Just a hair-line engagement and the slightest extra pressure — my God, why can’t you people obey regulations?’

Henry stared at the deck in silence. Jolly, who was understandably looking about as washed-out as I felt, packed away the tools of his trade, advised me to take a couple of days off, gave me a handful of pills to take, said a weary good-night and climbed up the ladder leading from the electronics space, where he had been fixing my hand. Swanson said to Henry: ‘You can go now, Baker.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone address Henry by his surname, a sufficient enough token of what Swanson regarded as the enormity of his crime. ‘I’ll decide what to do about this in the morning.’

‘I don’t know about the morning,’ I said after Henry was gone. ‘Maybe the next morning. Or the one after that. Then you can apologise to him. You and me both. That cover was locked on its standing latch. I checked it visually, Commander Swanson.’

Swanson gave me his cool impassive look. After a moment he said quietly: ‘Are you suggesting what I think you are suggesting?’

‘Someone took a risk,’ I said. ‘Not all that much of a risk, though — most people are asleep now and the control room was deserted at the moment that mattered. Some one in the wardroom tonight heard me ask your permission to go down to the medical store and heard you giving your okay. Shortly after that nearly everyone turned in. One man didn’t-he kept awake and hung around patiently until I came back from the Drift Station. He followed us down below — he was lucky, Lieutenant Sims, your officer on deck, was taking star-sights up on the bridge and the control room was empty — and he unhooked the latch but left the hatch cover in a standing position. There was a slight element of gambling as to whether I would come up first, but not all that much, it would have been a matter of elementary courtesy, he would have thought, for Henry to see me up first. Anyway, he won his gamble, slight though it was. After that our unknown friend wasn’t quite so lucky — I think he expected the damage to be a bit more permanent.’

‘I’ll get inquiries under way immediately,’ Swanson said. ‘Whoever was responsible, someone must have seen him. Someone must have heard him leaving his cot —’

‘Don’t waste your time, Commander. We’re up against a highly intelligent character who doesn’t overlook the obvious. Not only that but word of your inquiries is bound to get around and you’d scare him under cover where I’d never get at him.’

‘Then I’ll just keep the whole damned lot under lock and key until we get back to Scotland,’ Swanson said grimly. ‘That way there’ll be no more trouble.’

‘That way we’ll never find out who the murderer of my brother and the six — seven now — others are. Whoever it is has to be given sufficient rope to trip himself up.’

‘Good lord, man, we can’t just sit back and let things be done to us.’ A hint of testiness in the commander’s voice and I couldn’t blame him. ‘What do we — what do you propose to do now?’

‘Start at the beginning. To-morrow morning we’ll hold a court of inquiry among the survivors. Let’s find out all we can about that fire. Just an innocent above-board fact-finding inquiry — for the Ministry of Supply, let us say. I’ve an idea we might turn up something very interesting indeed.’

‘You think so?’ Swanson shook his head. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it for a moment. Look what’s happened to you. It’s obvious, man, that someone knows or suspects that you’re on to them. They’ll take damned good care to give nothing away.’

‘You think that’s why I was clouted to-night?’

‘What other reason could there be?’

‘Was that why Benson was hurt?’

‘We don’t know that he was. Deliberately, I mean. May have been pure coincidence.’

‘Maybe it was,’ I agreed. ‘And again maybe it wasn’t. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that the accident or accidents have nothing at all to do with any suspicions the killer may have that we’re on to him. Anyway, let’s see what to-morrow brings.’

It was midnight when I got back to my cabin. The engineer officer was on watch and Hansen was asleep so I didn’t put on any light lest I disturb him. I didn’t undress, just removed my shoes, lay down on the cot and pulled a cover over me.

I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. My left arm from the elbow downwards still felt as if it were caught in a bear-trap. Twice I pulled from my pocket the pain-killers and sleeping-tablets that Jolly had given me and twice I put them away.

Instead I just lay there and thought and the first and most obvious conclusion I came up with was that there was someone aboard the Dolphin who didn’t care any too much for the members of the medical profession. Then I got to wondering why the profession was so unpopular and after half an hour of beating my weary brain-cells around I got silently to my feet and made my way on stockinged soles to the sick-bay.

I passed inside and closed the door softly behind me. A red nightlight burnt dully in one corner of the bay, just enough to let me see the huddled form of Benson lying on a cot. I switched on the overhead light, blinked in the sudden fierce wash of light and looked at the curtain at the other end of the bay. Nothing stirred behind it. I said: ‘Just kind of take your itching fingers away from that pipe-wrench, Rawlings. It’s me, Carpenter.’

The curtain was pulled to one side and Rawlings appeared, the pipe-wrench, with its bandage-wrapped head, dangling from one hand. He had a disappointed look on his face.

‘I was expecting someone else,’ he said reproachfully. ‘I was kinda hoping — my God, Doc, what’s happened to your arm?’

‘Well may you ask, Rawlings. Our little pal had a go at me tonight. I think he wanted me out of the way. Whether he wanted me out of the way permanently or not I don’t know, but he near as a toucher succeeded.’ I told him what had happened, then asked him: ‘Is there any man aboard you can trust absolutely?’ I knew the answer before I had asked the question.

‘Zabrinski,’ he said unhesitatingly.

‘Do you think you could pussy-foot along to wherever it is that he’s sleeping and bring him here without waking up anyone?’

He didn’t answer my questions. He said: ‘He can’t walk, Doc, you know that.’

‘Carry him. You’re big enough.’

He grinned and left. He was back with Zabrinski inside three minutes. Three-quarters of an hour later, after telling Rawlings he could call off his watch, I was back in my cabin.

Hansen was still asleep. He didn’t wake even when I switched on a side light. Slowly, clumsily, painfully, I dressed myself in my furs, unlocked my case and drew out the Luger, the two rubber-covered magazines and the broken knife which Commander Swanson had found in the tractor’s petrol tank. I put those in my pocket and left. As I passed through the control room I told the officer on deck that I was going out to check on the two patients still left out in the camp. As I had pulled a fur mitten over my injured hand he didn’t raise any eyebrows, doctors were a law to themselves and I was just the good healer en route to give aid and comfort to the sick.

I did have a good look at the two sick men, both of whom seemed to me to be picking up steadily, then said good night to the two Dolphin crewmen who were watching over them. But I didn’t go straight back to the ship. First I went to the tractor shed and replaced the gun, magazines and broken knife in the tractor tank. Then I went back to the ship.

NINE

‘I’m sorry to have to bother you with all these questions,’ I said pleasantly. ‘But that’s the way it is with all government departments. A thousand questions in quadruplicate and each of them more pointlessly irritating than the rest. But I have this job to do and the report to be radioed off as soon as possible and I would appreciate all the information and co-operation you can give me. First off, has anyone any idea at all how this damnable fire started?’

I hoped I sounded like a Ministry of Supply official which was what I’d told them I was -making a Ministry of Supply report. I’d further told them, just to nip any eyebrow-raising in the bud, that it was the Ministry of Supply’s policy to send a doctor to report on any accident where loss of life was involved. Maybe this was the case. I didn’t know and I didn’t care.

‘Well, I was the first to discover the fire, I think,’ Naseby, the Zebra cook, said hesitantly. His Yorkshire accent was very pronounced. He was still no picture of health and strength but for all that he was a hundred per cent improved on the man I had seen yesterday. Like the other eight survivors of Drift Ice Station Zebra who were present in the wardroom that morning, a long night’s warm sleep and good food had brought about a remarkable change for the better. More accurately, like seven others. Captain Folsom’s face had been so hideously burnt that it was difficult to say what progress he was making although he had certainly had a good enough breakfast, almost entirely liquid, less than half an hour previously.

‘It must have been about two o’clock in the morning,’ Naseby went on. ‘Well, near enough two. The place was already on fire. Burning like a torch, it was. I -’

‘What place?’ I interrupted. ‘Where were you sleeping?’

‘In the cookhouse. That was also our dining-hall. Farthest west hut in the north row.’

‘You slept there alone?’

‘No. Hewson, here, and Flanders and Bryce slept there also. Flanders and Bryce, they’re — they were — lab. technicians. Hewson and I slept at the very back of the hut, then there were two big cupboards, one each side, that held all our food stores, then Flanders and Bryce slept in the dining-hall itself, by a corner of the galley.’

‘They were nearest the door?’

‘That’s right. I got up, coughing and choking with smoke, very groggy, and I could see flames already starting to eat through the east wall of the hut. I shook Hewson then ran for the fire extinguisher — it was kept by the door. It wouldn’t work. Jammed solid with the cold, I suppose. I don’t know. I ran back in again. I was blind by this time, you never saw smoke like it in your life. I shook Flanders and Bryce and shouted at them to get out then I bumped into Hewson and told him to run and wake Captain Folsom here.’

I looked at Hewson. ‘You woke Captain Folsom?’

‘I went to wake him. But not straight away. The whole camp was blazing like the biggest Fifth of November bonfire you ever saw and flames twenty feet high were sweeping down the lane between the two rows of huts. The air was full of flying oil, a lot of it burning. I had to make a long swing to the north to get clear of the oil and the flames.’

‘The wind was from the east?’

‘Not quite. Not that night. South-east, I would say. East-south-east would be more like it, rather. Anyway, I gave a very wide berth to the generator house — that was the one next the dining-hall in the north row — and reached the main bunkhouse. That was the one you found us in.’

‘Then you woke Captain Folsom?’

‘He was already gone. Shortly after I’d left the dining-hall the fuel drums in the fuel storage hut — that was the one directly south of the main bunkhouse — started exploding. Like bloody great bombs going off they were, the noise they made. They would have wakened the dead. Anyway, they woke Captain Folsom. He and Jeremy here’ — he nodded at a man sitting across the table from him — ‘had taken the fire extinguisher from the bunkhouse and tried to get close to Major Halliwell’s hut.’

‘That was the one directly west of the fuel store?’

‘That’s right. It was an inferno. Captain Folsom’s extinguisher worked well enough but he couldn’t get close enough to do any good. There was so much flying oil in the air that even the extinguisher foam seemed to burn.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘To get back to my original question. How did the fire start?’

‘We’ve discussed that a hundred times among ourselves,’ Dr Jolly said wearily. ‘The truth is, old boy, we haven’t a clue. We know where it started all right: match the huts destroyed against the wind direction that night and it could only have been in the fuel store. But how? It’s anybody’s guess. I don’t see that it matters a great deal now.’

‘I disagree. It matters very much. If we could find out how it started we might prevent another such tragedy later on. That’s why I’m here. Hewson, you were in charge of the fuel store and generator hut. Have you no opinion on this?’

‘None. It must have been electrical, but how I can’t guess. It’s possible that there was a leakage from one of the fuel drums and that oil vapour was present in the air. There were two black heaters in the fuel store, designed to keep the temperature up to zero Fahrenheit, so that the oil would always flow freely. Arcing across the make and break of the thermostats might have ignited the gas. But it’s only a wild guess, of course.’

‘No possibility of any smouldering rags or cigarette ends being the cause?’

Hewson’s face turned a dusky red.

‘Look, mister, I know my job. Burning rags, cigarette ends — I know how to keep a bloody fuel store -’

‘Keep your shirt on,’ I interrupted. ‘No offence. I’m only doing my job.’ I turned back to Naseby. ‘After you’d sent Hewson here to rouse up Captain Folsom, what then?’

‘I ran across to the radio room — that’s the hut due south of the cookhouse and west of Major Halliwell’s —’

‘But those two lab technicians — Flanders and Bryce, wasn’t it — surely you checked they were awake and out of it before you left the dining-hall?’

‘God help me, I didn’t.’ Naseby stared down at the deck, his shoulders hunched, his face bleak. ‘They’re dead. It’s my fault they’re dead. But you don’t know what it was like inside that dining-hall. Flames were breaking through the east wall, the place was full of choking smoke and oil, I couldn’t see, I could hardly breathe. I shook them both and shouted at them to get out. I shook them hard and I certainly shouted loud enough.’

‘I can bear him out on that,’ Hewson said quietly. ‘I was right beside him at the time.’

‘I didn’t wait,’ Naseby went on. ‘I wasn’t thinking of saving my own skin. I thought Flanders and Bryce were all right and that they would be out the door on my heels. I wanted to warn the others. It wasn’t — it wasn’t until minutes later that I realised that there was no sign of them. And then — well, then it was too late.’

‘You ran across to the radio room. That’s where you slept, Kinnaird, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s where I slept, yes.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Me and my mate Grant, the boy that died yesterday. And Dr Jolly slept in the partitioned-off east end of the hut. That’s where he had his surgery and the little cubby-hole where he carried out his tests on ice samples.’

‘So your end would have started to go on fire first?’ I said to Jolly.

‘Must have done,’ he agreed. ‘Quite frankly, old chap, my recollection of the whole thing is just like a dream — a nightmare, rather. I was almost asphyxiated in my sleep, I think. First thing I remember was young Grant bending over me, shaking me and shouting. Can’t recall what he was shouting but it must have been that the hut was on fire. I don’t know what I said or did, probably nothing, for the next thing I clearly remember was being hit on both sides of the face, and not too gently either. But, by jove, it worked! I got to my feet and he dragged me out of my office into the radio room. I owe my life to young Grant. I’d just enough sense left to grab the emergency medical kit that I always kept packed.’

‘What woke Grant?’

‘Naseby, here, woke him,’ Kinnaird said. ‘He woke us both, shouting and hammering on the door. If it hadn’t been for him Dr Jolly and I would both have been goners, the air inside that place was like poison gas and I’m sure if Naseby hadn’t shouted on us we would never have woken up. I told Grant to waken the doctor while I tried to get the outside door open.’

‘It was locked?’

‘The damned thing was jammed. That was nothing unusual at night. During the day when the heaters were going full blast to keep the huts at a decent working temperature the ice around the doors tended to melt: at night, when we got into our sleeping-bags, we turned our heaters down and the melted ice froze hard round the door openings, sealing it solid. That happened most nights in most of the huts — usually had to break our way out in the morning. But I can tell you that I didn’t take too long to burst it open that night.’

‘And then?’

‘I ran out,’ Kinnaird said. ‘I couldn’t see a thing for black smoke and flying oil. I ran maybe twenty yards to the south to get some idea of what was happening. The whole camp seemed to be on fire. When you’re woken up like that at two in the morning, half-blinded, half-asleep and groggy with fumes your mind isn’t at its best, but thank God I’d enough left of my mind to realise that an SOS radio message was the one thing that was going to save our lives. So I went back inside the radio hut.’

‘We all owe our lives to Kinnaird.’ Speaking for the first time was Jeremy, a burly red-haired Canadian who had been chief technician on the base. ‘And if I’d been a bit quicker with my hands we’d have all been dead.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, mate, shut up,’ Kinnaird growled.

‘I won’t shut up,’ Jeremy said soberly. ‘Besides, Dr Carpenter wants a full report. I was first out of the main bunkhouse after Captain Folsom here. As Hewson said, we tried the extinguisher on Major Halliwell’s hut. It was hopeless from the beginning but we had to do it — after all, we knew there were four men trapped in there. But, like I say, it was a waste of time. Captain Folsom shouted that he was going to get another extinguisher and told me to see how things were in the radio room.

‘The place was ablaze from end to end. As I came round as close as I could to the door at the west end I saw Naseby here bending over Dr Jolly, who’d keeled over as soon as he had come out into the fresh air. He shouted to me to give him a hand to drag Dr Jolly clear and I was just about to when Kinnaird, here, came running up. I saw he was heading straight for the door of the radio room.’ He smiled without humour. ‘I thought he had gone off his rocker. I jumped in front of him, to stop him. He shouted at me to get out of the way. I told him not to be crazy and he yelled at me — you had to yell to make yourself heard above the roar of the flames — that he had to get the portable radio out, that all the oil was gone and the generator and the cookhouse with all the food were burning up. He knocked me down and the next I saw was him disappearing through that door. Smoke and flames were pouring through the doorway. I don’t know how he ever got out alive.’

‘Was that how you got your face and hands so badly burnt?’ Commander Swanson asked quietly. He was standing in a far corner of the wardroom, having taken no part in the discussion up till now, but missing nothing all the same. That was why I had asked him to be present: just because he was a man who missed nothing.

‘I reckon so, sir.’

‘I fancy that should earn a trip to Buckingham Palace,’ Swanson murmured.

‘The hell with Buckingham Palace,’ Kinnaird said violently. ‘How about my mate, eh? How about young Jimmy Grant? Can he make the trip to Buckingham Palace? Not now he can’t, the poor bastard. Do you know what he was doing? He was still inside the radio room when I went back in, sitting at the main transmitter, sending out an S O S on our regular frequency. His clothes were on fire. I dragged him off his seat and shouted to him to grab some Nife cells and get out. I caught up the portable transmitter and a nearby box of Nife cells and ran through the door. I thought Grant was on my heels but I couldn’t hear anything, what with the roar of flames and the bursting of fuel drums the racket was deafening. Unless you’d been there you just can’t begin to imagine what it was like. I ran far enough clear to put the radio and cells in a safe place. Then I went back. I asked Naseby, who was still trying to bring Dr Jolly round, if Jimmy Grant had come out. He said he hadn’t. I started to run for the door again — and, well, that’s all I remember.’

‘I clobbered him,’ Jeremy said with gloomy satisfaction. ‘From behind. I had to.’

‘I could have killed you when I came round,’ Kinnaird said morosely. ‘But I guess you saved my life at that.’

‘I certainly did, brother.’ Jeremy grimaced. That was my big contribution that night. Hitting people. After Nasebv, here, had brought Dr Jolly round he suddenly started shouting: ‘Where’s Flanders and Bryce, where’s Flanders and Bryce?’ Those were the two who had been sleeping with Hewson and himself in the cookhouse. A few others had come down from the main bunkhouse by that time and the best part of a minute had elapsed before we realised that Flanders and Bryce weren’t among them. Naseby, here, started back for the cookhouse at a dead run. He was making for the doorway, only there was no doorway left, just a solid curtain of fire where the doorway used to be. I swung at him as he passed and he fell and hit his head on the ice.’ He looked at Naseby. ‘Sorry again, Johnny, but you were quite crazy at the moment.’

Naseby rubbed his jaw and grinned wearily. ‘I can still feel it. And God knows you were right.’

‘Then Captain Folsom arrived, along with Dick Foster, who also slept in the main bunkhouse,’ Jeremy went on. ‘Captain Folsom said he’d tried every other extinguisher on the base and that all of them were frozen solid. He’d heard about Grant being trapped inside the radio room and he and Foster were carrying a blanket apiece, soaked with water. I tried to stop them but Captain Folsom ordered me to stand aside.’ Jeremy smiled faintly. ‘When Captain Folsom orders people to stand aside — well, they do just that.

‘He and Foster threw the wet blankets over their heads and ran inside. Captain Folsom was out in a few seconds, carrying Grant. I’ve never seen anything like it, they were burning like human torches. I don’t know what happened to Foster, but he never came out. By that time the roofs of both Major Halliwell’s hut and the cookhouse had fallen in. Nobody could get anywhere near either of those buildings. Besides, it was far too late by then, Major Halliwell and the three others inside the major’s hut and Flanders and Bryce inside the cookhouse must already have been dead. Dr Jolly, here, doesn’t think they would have suffered very much — asphyxiation would have got them, like enough, before the flames did.’

‘Well,’ I said slowly, ‘that’s as clear a picture of what must have been a very confusing and terrifying experience as we’re ever likely to get. It wasn’t possible to get anywhere near Major Halliwell’s hut?’

‘You couldn’t have gone within fifteen feet of it and hoped to live,’ Naseby said simply.

‘And what happened afterwards?’

‘I took charge, old boy,’ Jolly said. ‘Wasn’t much to take charge of, though, and what little there was to be done could be done only by myself -fixing up the injured, I mean. I made ‘em all wait out there on the ice-cap until the flames had died down a bit and there didn’t seem to be any more likelihood of further fuel drums bursting then we all made our way to the bunkhouse where I did the best I could for the injured men. Kinnaird here, despite pretty bad burns, proved himself a first-class assistant doctor. We bedded down the worst of them. Young Grant was in a shocking condition — ‘fraid there never really was very much hope for him. And — well, that was about all there was to it.’

‘You had no food for the next few days and nights?’

‘Nothing at all, old boy. No heat either, except for the standby Coleman lamps that were in the three remaining huts. We managed to melt a little water from the ice, that was all. By my orders everyone remained lying down and wrapped up in what was available in order to conserve energy and warmth.’

‘Bit rough on you,’ I said to Kinnaird. ‘Having to lose any hard-earned warmth you had every couple of hours in order to make those SOS broadcasts.’

‘Not only me,’ Kinnaird said. ‘I’m no keener on frostbite than anyone else. Dr Jolly insisted that everyone who could should take turn about at sending out the S O S’s. Wasn’t hard. There was a pre-set mechanical call-up and all anyone had to do was to send this and listen in on the earphones. If any message came through I was across to the met. office in a flash. It was actually Hewson, here, who contacted the ham operator in Bodo and Jeremy who got through to that trawler in the Barents Sea. I carried on from there, of course. Apart from them there were Dr Jolly and Naseby, here, to give a hand, so it wasn’t so bad. Hassard, too, took a turn after the first day — he’d been more or less blinded on the night of the fire.’

‘You remained in charge throughout, Dr Jolly?’ I asked.

‘Bless my soul, no. Captain Folsom, here, was in a pretty shocked condition for the first twenty-four hours, but when he’d recovered from that he took over. I’m only a pill-roller, old boy. As a leader of men and a dashing man of action — well, no, quite frankly, old top, I don’t see myself in that light at all.’

‘You did damned well, all the same.’ I looked round the company. ‘That most of you won’t be scarred for life is due entirely to the quick and highly-efficient treatment Dr Jolly gave you under almost impossible circumstances. Well, that’s all. Must be a pretty painful experience for all of you, having to relive that night again. I can’t see that we can ever hope to find out how the fire started, just one of those chance in a million accidents, what the insurance companies call an act of God. I’m certain, Hewson, that no shadow of negligence attaches to you and that your theory on the outbreak of fire is probably correct. Anyway, although we’ve paid a hellishly high cost, we’ve learnt a lesson — never again to site a main fuel store within a hundred yards of the camp.’

The meeting broke up. Jolly bustled off to the sick-bay, not quite managing to conceal his relish at being the only medical officer aboard who wasn’t hors de combat. He had a busy couple of hours ahead of him — changing bandages on burns, checking Benson, X-raying Zabrinski’s broken ankle and resetting the plaster.

I went to my cabin, unlocked my case, took out a small wallet, relocked my case and went to Swanson’s cabin. I noticed that he wasn’t smiling quite so often now as when I’d first met him in Scotland. He looked up as I came in in answer to his call and said without preamble: ‘If those two men still out in the camp are in any way fit to be moved I want them both aboard at once. The sooner we’re back in Scotland and have some law in on this the happier I’ll be. I warned you that this investigation of yours would turn up nothing. Lord knows how short a time it will be before someone else gets clobbered. God’s sake, Carpenter, we have a murderer running loose.’

‘Three things,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s going to get clobbered any more, that’s almost for certain. Secondly, the law, as you call it, wouldn’t be allowed to touch it. And in the third place, the meeting this morning was of some use. It eliminated three potential suspects.’

‘I must have missed something that you didn’t.’

‘Not that. I knew something that you didn’t. I knew that under the floor of the laboratory were about forty Nife cells in excellent condition — but cells that had been used.’

‘The hell you did,’ he said softly. ‘Sort of forgot to tell me, didn’t you?’

‘In this line of business I never tell anyone anything unless I think he can help me by having that knowledge.’

‘You must win an awful lot of friends and influence an awful lot of people,’ Swanson said dryly.

‘It gets embarrassing. Now, who could have used cells? Only those who left the bunkhouse from time to time to send out the S O S’s. That cuts out Captain Folsom and the Harrington twins — there’s no question of any of the three of them having left the bunkhouse at any time. They weren’t fit to. So that leaves Hewson, Naseby, Dr Jolly, Jeremy, Hassard and Kinnaird. Take your choice. One of them is a murderer.’

‘Why did they want those extra cells?’ Swanson asked. ‘And if they had those extra cells why did they risk their lives by relying on those dying cells that they did use? Does it make sense to you?’

‘There’s sense in everything,’ I said. If you want evasion, Carpenter has it. I brought out my wallet, spread cards before him. He picked them up, studied them and returned them to my wallet.

‘So now we have it,’ he said calmly. ‘Took quite a while to get round to it, didn’t you? The truth, I mean. Officer of M.I.6. Counterespionage. Government agent, eh? Well, I won’t make any song and dance about it, Carpenter, I’ve known since yesterday what you must be: you couldn’t be anything else.’ He looked at me in calm speculation. ‘You fellows never disclose your identity unless you have to.’ He left the logical question unspoken.

‘Three reasons why I’m telling you. You’re entitled to some measure of my confidence. I want you on my side. And because of what I’m about to tell you, you’d have known anyway. Have you ever heard of the Perkin-Elmer Roti satellite missile tracker camera?’

‘Quite a mouthful,’ he murmured. ‘No.’

‘Heard of Samos? Samos III?’

‘Satellite and Missile Observation System?’ He nodded. ‘I have. And what conceivable connection could that have with a ruthless killer running amok on Drift Station Zebra?’

So I told him what connection it could have. A connection that was not only conceivable, not only possible, not only probable, but absolutely certain. Swanson listened very carefully, very attentively, not interrupting even once and at the end of it he leaned back in his chair and nodded. ‘You have the right of it, no doubt about that. The question is, who? I just can’t wait to see this fiend under close arrest and armed guard.’

‘You’d clap him in irons straight away?’

‘Good God!’ He stared at me. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, I do. I’d leave him be. I think our friend is just a link in a very long chain and if we give him enough rope he’ll not only hang himself, he’ll lead us to the other members of the chain. Besides, I’m not all that sure that there is only one murderer: killers have been known to have accomplices before now, Commander.’

‘Two of them? You think there may be two killers aboard my ship?’ He pursed his lips and squeezed his chin with a thoughtful hand, Swanson’s nearest permissible approach to a state of violent agitation. Then he shook his head definitely. ‘There may only be one. If that is so, and I knew who he was, I’d arrest him at once. Don’t forget, Carpenter, we’ve hundreds of miles to go under the ice before we’re out into the open sea. We can’t watch all six of them all the time and there are a hundred and one things that a man with even only a little knowledge of submarines could do that would put us all in mortal danger. Things that wouldn’t matter were we clear of the ice, things that would be fatal under it.’

‘Aren’t you rather overlooking the fact that if the killer did us in he’d also be doing himself in?’

‘I don’t necessarily share your belief in his sanity. All killers are a little crazy. No matter how excellent their reasons for killing, the very fact that they do kill makes them a rogue human being, an abnormal. You can’t judge them by normal standards.’

He was only half-right, but unfortunately that half might apply in this case. Most murderers kill in a state of extreme emotional once-in-a-lifetime stress and never kill again. But our friend in this case had every appearance of being a stranger to emotional stress of any kind — and, besides, he’d killed a great deal more than once.

‘Well,’ I said doubtfully. ‘Perhaps. Yes, I think I do agree with you.’ I refrained from specifying our common ground for agreement. ‘Who’s your candidate for the high jump, Commander?’

‘I’m damned if I know. I listened to every word that was said this morning. I watched the face of each man who spoke — and the faces of the ones who weren’t speaking. I’ve been thinking nonstop about it since and I’m still damned if I have a clue. How about Kinnaird?’

‘He’s the obvious suspect, isn’t he? But only because he’s a skilled radio operator. I could train a man in a couple of days to send and receive in morse. Slow, clumsy, he wouldn’t know a thing about the instrument he was using, but he could still do it. Any of them may easily have been competent enough to operate a radio. The fact that Kinnaird is a skilled operator may even be a point in his favour.’

‘Nife cells were removed from the radio cabin and taken to the laboratory,’ Swanson pointed out. ‘Kinnaird had the easiest access to them. Apart from Dr Jolly who had his office and sleeping quarters in the same hut.’

‘So that would point a finger at Kinnaird or Jolly?’

‘Well, wouldn’t it?’

‘Certainly. Especially if you will agree that the presence of those tinned foods under the lab. floor also points a finger at Hewson and Naseby, both of whom slept in the cookhouse where the food was stored, and that the presence of the radiosonde balloon and the hydrogen in the lab. also points a finger at Jeremy and Hassard, one a met. officer and the other a technician who would have had the easiest access to those items.’

‘That’s right, confuse things,’ Swanson said irritably. ‘As if they weren’t confused enough already.’

‘I’m not confusing things. All I’m saying is that if you admit a certain possibility for a certain reason then you must admit similar possibilities for similar reasons. Besides, there are points in Kinnaird’s favour. He risked his life to go back into the radio room to bring out the portable transmitter. He risked almost certain suicide when he tried to go in the second time to bring out his assistant, Grant, and probably would have died if Jeremy hadn’t clobbered him. Look what happened to that man Foster who went in there immediately afterwards with a wet blanket over his head — he never came out.

‘Again, would Kinnaird have mentioned the Nife cells if he had any guilt complex about them? But he did. That, incidentally, might have been why Grant, the assistant radio operator, collapsed in there and later died — Kinnaird had told him to bring out the other Nife cells and he was overcome because he stayed there too long looking for things that had already been removed from the hut. And there’s one final point: we have Naseby’s word for it that the door of the radio room was jammed, presumably by ice. Had Kinnaird been playing with matches a few moments previously, that door wouldn’t have had time to freeze up.’

‘If you let Kinnaird out,’ Swanson said slowly, ‘you more or less have to let Dr Jolly out too.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t see a member of your profession running round filling people full of holes, Dr Carpenter. Repairing holes is their line of business, not making them. Hippocrates wouldn’t have liked it.’

‘I’m not letting Kinnaird out,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going off halfcocked and pinning a murder rap on him either. As for the ethics of my profession — would you like a list of the good healers who have decorated the dock in the Old Bailey? True, we have nothing on Jolly. His part in the proceedings that night seems to have consisted in staggering out from the radio room, falling flat on his face and staying there till pretty near the end of the fire. That, of course, has no bearing upon whatever part he might have taken in the proceedings prior to the fire. Though against that possibility there’s the fact of the jammed door, the fact that Kinnaird or Grant would have been almost bound to notice if he had been up to something — Jolly’s bunk was at the back of the radio room and he would have had to pass Kinnaird and Grant to get out, not forgetting that he would also have to stop to pick up the Nife cells. And there is one more point in his favour — an apparent point, that is. I still don’t think that Benson’s fall was an accident and if it was no accident it is difficult to see how Jolly could have arranged it while he was at the foot of the sail and Benson at the top and it’s even more difficult to see why he should have stood at the foot of the sail and let Benson fall on top of him.’

‘You’re putting up a very good defence case for both Jolly and Kinnaird,’ Swanson murmured.

‘No. I’m only saying what a defence lawyer would say.’

‘Hewson,’ Swanson said slowly. ‘Or Naseby, the cook. Or Hewson and Naseby. Don’t you think it damned funny that those two, who were sleeping at the back or east side of the cookhouse, which was the first part of the hut to catch fire, should have managed to escape while the other two — Flanders and Bryce, wasn’t it — who slept in the middle should have suffocated in there? Naseby said he shouted at them and shook them violently. Maybe he could have shouted and shaken all night without result. Maybe they were already unconscious — or dead. Maybe they had seen Naseby or Hewson or both removing food supplies and had been silenced. Or maybe they had been silenced before anything had been removed. And don’t forget the gun. It was hidden in the petrol tank of the tractor, a pretty damn’ funny place for a man to hide anything. But nothing funny about the idea occurring to Hewson, was there? He was the tractor-driver. And he seems to have taken his time about getting around to warn Captain Folsom. He said he had to make a wide circuit to avoid the flames but apparently Naseby didn’t find it so bad when he went to the radio room. Another thing, a pretty telling point, I think, he said that when he was on the way to the bunkhouse the oil drums in the fuel store started exploding. If they only started exploding then how come all the huts -the five that were eventually destroyed, that is — were already uncontrollably on fire. They were uncontrollably on fire because they were saturated by flying oil so the first explosions must have come a long time before then. And, apart from warning Folsom — who had already been warned — Hewson doesn’t seem to have done very much after the fire started.’

‘You’d make a pretty good prosecuting counsel yourself, Commander. But wouldn’t you think there is just too much superficially against Hewson? That a clever man wouldn’t have allowed so much superficial evidence to accumulate against him? You would have thought that, at least, he would have indulged in a little firefighting heroics to call attention to himself?’

‘No. You’re overlooking the fact that he would never have had reason to expect that there would be any investigation into the causes of the fire? That the situation would never arise where he — or anyone else, for that matter — would have to justify their actions and behaviour if accusations were to be levelled against them?’

‘I’ve said it before and I say it again. People like that never take a chance. They always act on the assumption that they may be found out.’

‘How could they be found out?’ Swanson protested. ‘How could they possibly expect to have suspicion aroused?’

‘You don’t think it possible that they suspect that we are on to them?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘That wasn’t what you were saying last night after that hatch fell on me,’ I pointed out. ‘You said it was obvious that someone was on to me.’

‘Thank the Lord that all I have to do is the nice uncomplicated job of running a nuclear submarine,’ Swanson said heavily. ‘The truth is, I don’t know what to think any more. How about this cook fellow — Naseby?’

‘You think he was in cahoots with Hewson?’

‘If we accept the premise that the men in the cookhouse who were not in on this business had to be silenced, and Naseby wasn’t, then he must have been, mustn’t he? But, dammit, how then about his attempt to rescue Flanders and Bryce?’

‘May just have been a calculated risk. He saw how Jeremy flattened Kinnaird when he tried to go back into the radio-room a second time and perhaps calculated that Jeremy would oblige again if he tried a similar but fake rescue act.’

‘Maybe Kinnaird’s second attempt was also fake,’ Swanson said. ‘After all, Jeremy had already tried to stop him once.’

‘Maybe it was,’ I agreed. ‘But Naseby. If he’s your man, why should he have said that the radio room door was jammed with ice, and that he had to burst it open. That gives Kinnaird and Jolly an out — and a murderer wouldn’t do anything to put any other potential suspect in the clear.’

‘It’s hopeless,’ Swanson said calmly. ‘I say let’s put the whole damn’ crowd of them under lock and key.’

‘That would be clever,’ I said. ‘Yes, let’s do just that. That way we’ll never find out who the murderer is. Anyway, before you start giving up, remember it’s even more complicated than that. Remember you’re passing up the two most obvious suspects of all — Jeremy and Hassard, two tough, intelligent birds who, if they were the killers, were clever enough to see that nothing pointed the finger against them. Unless, of course, there might have been something about Flanders and Bryce that Jeremy didn’t want anyone to see, so he stopped Naseby from going back into the cookhouse. Or not.’

Swanson almost glared at me. Watching his submarine plum-metting out of control beyond the 1000-feet mark was something that rated maybe the lift of an eyebrow; but this was something else again. He said: ‘Very well, then, we’ll let the killer run loose and wreck the Dolphin at his leisure. I must have very considerable confidence in you, Dr Carpenter. I feel sure my confidence will not be misplaced. Tell me one last thing. I assume you are a highly skilled investigator. But I was puzzled by one omission in your questioning. A vital question, I should have thought.’

‘Who suggested moving the corpses into the lab knowing that by doing so he would be making his hiding-place for the cached material a hundred per cent foolproof?’

‘I apologise.’ He smiled faintly. ‘You had your reasons, of course.’

‘Of course. You’re not sure whether or not the killer is on to the fact that we are on to him. I’m sure. I know he’s not. But had I asked that question, he’d have known immediately that there could be only one reason for my asking it. Then he would have known I was on to him. Anyway, it’s my guess that Captain Folsom gave the order, but the original suggestion, carefully camouflaged so that Folsom may no longer be able to pin it down, would have come from another quarter.’

Had it been a few months earlier with the summer Arctic sun riding in the sky, it would have been a brilliant day. As it was, there was no sun, not in that latitude and so late in the year, but for all that the weather was about as perfect as it was possible for it to be. Thirty-six hours — the time that had elapsed since Hansen and I had made that savage trip back to the Dolphin — had brought about a change that seemed pretty close to miraculous. The knifing east wind had died, completely. That flying sea of ice-spicules was no more. The temperature had risen at least twenty degrees and the visibility was as perfect as visibility on the winter ice-pack ever is.

Swanson, sharing Benson’s viewpoint on the crew’s over-sedentary mode of existence and taking advantage of the fine weather, had advised everyone not engaged in actual watch-keeping to take advantage of the opportunity offered to stretch their legs in the fresh air. It said much for Swanson’s powers of persuasion that by eleven that morning the Dolphin was practically deserted; and of course the crew, to whom Drift Ice Station Zebra was only so many words, were understandably curious to see the place, even the shell of the place, that had brought them to the top of the world.

I took my place at the end of the small queue being treated by Dr Jolly. It was close on noon before he got round to me. He was making light of his own burns and frostbite and was in tremendous form, bustling happily about the sick-bay as if it had been his own private domain for years.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the pill-rolling competition wasn’t so fierce after all, was it? I’m damned glad there was a third doctor around. How are things on the medical front?’

‘Coming along not too badly, old boy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Benson’s picking up very nicely, pulse, respiration, blood-pressure close to normal, level of unconsciousness very slight now, I should say. Captain Folsom’s still in considerable pain, but no actual danger, of course. The rest have improved a hundred per cent, little thanks to the medical fraternity: excellent food, warm beds and the knowledge that they’re safe have done them more good than anything we could ever do. Anyway, it’s done me a lot of good, by jove!’

‘And then some,’ I agreed. ‘All your friends except Folsom and the Harrington twins have followed most of the crew on to the ice and I’ll wager that if you had suggested to them forty-eight hours ago that they’d willingly go out there again in so short a time, they’d have called for a strait-jacket.’

‘The physical and mental recuperative power of homo sapiens,’ Jolly said jovially. ‘Beyond belief at times, old lad, beyond belief. Now, let’s have a look at that broken wing of yours.’

So he had a look, and because I was a colleague and therefore inured to human suffering he didn’t spend any too much time in molly-coddling me, but by hanging on to the arm of my chair and the shreds of my professional pride I kept the roof from falling in on me. When he was finished he said: ‘Well, that’s the lot, except for Brownell and Bolton, the two lads out on the ice.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘Commander Swanson is waiting pretty anxiously to hear what we have to say. He wants to get away from here as soon as possible.’

‘Me, too,’ Jolly said fervently. ‘But what’s the commander so anxious about?’

‘Ice. You never know the hour or minute it starts to close in. Want to spend the next year or two up here?’

Jolly grinned, thought over it for a bit, then stopped grinning. He said apprehensively: ‘How long are we going to be under this damned ice? Before we reach the open sea, I mean?’

‘Twenty-four hours, Swanson says. Don’t look so worried, Jolly. Believe me, it’s far safer under this stuff than among it.’

With a very unconvinced look on his face Jolly picked up his medical kit and led the way from the sick-bay. Swanson was waiting for us in the control room. We climbed up the hatches, dropped down over the side and walked over to the Drift Station.

Most of the crew had already made their way out there. We passed numbers of them on the way back and most of them looked grim or sick or both and didn’t even glance up as we passed. I didn’t have to guess why they looked as they did, they’d been opening doors that they should have left closed.

With the sharp rise in outside temperature and the effect of the big electric heaters having been burning there for twenty-four hours the bunkhouse hut was now, if anything, overheated, with the last traces of ice long vanished from walls and ceiling. One of the men, Brownell, had recovered consciousness and was sitting up, supported, and drinking soup provided by one of the two men who had been keeping watch over him.

‘Well,’ I said to Swanson, ‘here’s one ready to go —’

‘No doubt about that,’ Jolly said briskly. He bent over the other, Bolton, for some seconds, then straightened and shook his head. ‘A very sick man, Commander, very sick. I wouldn’t care to take the responsibility of moving him.

‘I might be forced to take the responsibility myself,’ Swanson said bluntly. ‘Let’s have another opinion on this.’ His tone and words, I thought, could have been more diplomatic and conciliatory; but if there were a couple of murderers aboard the Dolphin there was a thirty-three and a third per cent chance that Jolly was one of them and Swanson wasn’t forgetting it for a moment.

I gave Jolly an apologetic half-shrug, bent over Bolton and examined him as best I could with only one hand available for the task. I straightened and said: ‘Jolly’s right. He is pretty sick. But I think he might just stand the transfer to the ship.’

‘“Might just” is not quite the normally accepted basis for deciding the treatment of a patient,’ Jolly objected.

‘I know it’s not. But the circumstances are hardly normal either.’

‘I’ll take the responsibility,’ Swanson said. ‘Dr Jolly, I’d be most grateful if you would supervise the transport of those two men back to the ship. I’ll let you have as many men as you want straight away.’

Jolly protested some more, then gave in with good grace. He supervised the transfer, and very competent he was about it too. I remained out there a little longer, watching Rawlings and some others dismantling heaters and lights and rolling up cables and, after the last of them was gone and I was alone, I made my way round to the tractor shed.

The broken haft of the knife was still in the tank of the tractor. But not the gun and not the two magazines. Those were gone. And whoever had taken them it hadn’t been Dr Jolly, he hadn’t been out of my sight for two consecutive seconds between the time he’d left the Dolphin and the time of his return to it.

At three o’clock that afternoon we dropped down below the ice and headed south for the open sea.

TEN

The afternoon and evening passed quickly and pleasantly enough. Closing our hatches and dropping down from our hardly won foothold in that lead had had a symbolic significance at least as important as the actual fact of leaving itself. The thick ceiling of ice closing over the hull of the Dolphin was a curtain being drawn across the eye of the mind. We had severed all physical connection with Drift Ice Station Zebra, a home of the dead that might continue to circle slowly about the Pole for mindless centuries to come; and with the severance had come an abrupt diminution of the horror and the shock which had hung palllike over the ship and its crew for the past twenty-four hours. A dark door had swung to behind us and we had turned our backs on it. Mission accomplished, duty done, we were heading for home again and the sudden upsurge of relief and happiness among the crew to be on their way again, their high anticipation of port and leave, was an almost tangible thing. The mood of the ship was close to that of lighthearted gaiety. But there was no gaiety in my mind, and no peace: I was leaving too much behind. Nor could there be any peace in the minds of Swanson and Hansen, of Rawlings and Zabrinski: they knew we were carrying a killer aboard, a killer who had killed many times. Dr Benson knew also, but for the moment Dr Benson did not count: he still had not regained consciousness and I held the very unprofessional hope that he wouldn’t for some time to come. In the twilight world of emergence from coma a man can start babbling and say all too much.

Some of the Zebra survivors had asked if they could see around the ship and Swanson agreed. In light of what I had told him in his cabin that morning, he must have agreed very reluctantly indeed, but no trace of this reluctance showed in his calmly smiling face. To have refused their request would have been rather a churlish gesture, for all the secrets of the Dolphin were completely hidden from the eye of the layman. But it wasn’t good manners that made Swanson give his consent: refusing a reasonable request could have been responsible for making someone very suspicious indeed.

Hansen took them around the ship and I accompanied them, less for the exercise or interest involved than for the opportunity it gave me to keep a very close eye indeed on their reactions to their tour. We made a complete circuit of the ship, missing out only the reactor room, which no one could visit, anyway, and the inertial navigation room which had been barred to me also. As we moved around I watched them all, and especially two of them, as closely as it is possible to watch anyone without making him aware of your observation, and I learned precisely what I had expected to learn — nothing. I’d been crazy even to hope I’d learn anything, our pal with the gun was wearing a mask that had been forged into shape and riveted into position. But I’d had to do it, anyway: playing in this senior league I couldn’t pass up the one chance in a million.

Supper over, I helped Jolly as best I could with his evening surgery. Whatever else Jolly was, he was a damn’ good doctor. Quickly and efficiently he checked and where necessary rebandaged the walking cases, examined and treated Benson and Folsom then asked me to come right aft with him to the nucleonics laboratory in the stern room which had been cleared of deck gear to accommodate the four other bed patients, the Harrington twins, Brownell and Bolton. The sick-bay itself had only two cots for invalids and Benson and Folsom had those.

Bolton, despite Jolly’s dire predictions, hadn’t suffered a relapse because of his transfer from the hut to the ship - which had been due largely to Jolly’s extremely skilful and careful handling of the patient and the stretcher into which he had been lashed. Bolton, in fact, was conscious now and complaining of severe pain in his badly burned right forearm. Jolly removed the burn covering and Bolton’s arm was a mess all right, no skin left worth speaking of, showing an angry violent red between areas of suppuration. Different doctors have different ideas as to the treatment of burns: Jolly favoured a salve-coated aluminium foil which he smoothed across the entire burn area then lightly bandaged in place. He then gave him a painkilling injection and some sleeping tablets, and briskly informed the enlisted man who was keeping watch that he was to be informed immediately of any change or deterioration in Bolton’s condition. A brief inspection of the three others, a changed bandage here and there and he was through for the night.

So was I. For two nights now I had had practically no sleep - what little had been left for me the previous night had been ruined by the pain in my left hand. I was exhausted. When I got to my cabin, Hansen was already asleep and the engineer officer gone.

I didn’t need any of Jolly’s sleeping pills that night.

I awoke at two o’clock. I was sleep-drugged, still exhausted and felt as if I had been in bed about five minutes. But I awoke in an instant and in that instant I was fully awake.

Only a dead man wouldn’t have stirred. The racket issuing from the squawk box just above Hansen’s bunk was appalling: a high-pitched, shrieking, atonic whistle, two-toned and altering pitch every half-second, it drilled stiletto-like against my cringing eardrums. A banshee in its death agonies could never have hoped to compete with that lot.

Hansen already had his feet on the deck and was pulling on clothes and shoes in desperate haste. I had never thought to see that slow-speaking laconic Texan in such a tearing hurry, but I was seeing it now.

‘What in hell’s name is the matter?’ I demanded. I had to shout to make myself heard above, the shrieking of the alarm whistle.

‘Fire!’ His face was shocked and grim. ‘The ship’s on fire. And under this goddamned ice!’

Still buttoning his shirt, he hurdled my cot, crashed the door back on its hinges and was gone.

The atonic screeching of the whistle stopped abruptly and the silence fell like a blow. Then I was conscious of something more than silence — I was conscious of a complete lack of vibration throughout the ship. The great engines had stopped. And then I was conscious of something else again: feathery fingers of ice brushing up and down my spine. Why had the engines stopped? What could make a nuclear engine stop so quickly and what happened once it did? My God, I thought, maybe the fire is coming from the reactor room itself. I’d looked into the heart of the uranium atomic pile through a heavily leaded glass inspection port and seen the indescribable unearthly radiance of it, a nightmarish coalescence of green and violet and blue, the new ‘dreadful light’ of mankind. What happened when this dreadful light ran amok? I didn’t know, but I suspected I didn’t want to be around when it happened.

I dressed slowly, not hurrying. My damaged hand didn’t help me much but that wasn’t why I took my time. Maybe the ship was on fire, maybe the nuclear power plant had gone out of kilter. But if Swanson’s superbly trained crew couldn’t cope with every emergency that could conceivably arise then matters weren’t going to be improved any by Carpenter running around in circles shouting: ‘Where’s the fire?’

Three minutes after Hansen had gone I walked along to the control room and peered in: if I was going to be in the way then this was as far as I was going to go. Dark acrid smoke billowed past me and a voice — Swanson’s — said sharply: ‘Inside and close that door.’

I pulled the door to and looked around the control room. At least, I tried to. It wasn’t easy. My eyes were already streaming as if someone had thrown a bag of pepper into them and what little sight was left them didn’t help me much. The room was filled with black evil-smelling smoke, denser by far and more throat-catching than the worst London fog. Visibility was no more than a few feet, but what little I could see showed me men still at their stations. Some were gasping, some were half-choking, some were cursing softly, all had badly watering eyes, but there was no trace of panic.

‘You’d have been better on the other side of that door,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘Sorry to have barked at you, Doctor, but we want to limit the spread of the smoke as much as possible.’

‘Where’s the fire?’

‘In the engine-room.’ Swanson could have been sitting on his front porch at home discussing the weather. ‘Where in the engine-room we don’t know. It’s pretty bad. At least, the smoke is. The extent of the fire we don’t know, because we can’t locate it. Engineer officer says it’s impossible to see your hand in front of your face.’

‘The engines,’ I said. ‘They’ve stopped. Has anything gone wrong?’

He rubbed his eyes with a handkerchief, spoke to a man who was pulling on a heavy rubber suit and a smoke-mask, then turned back to me.

‘We’re not going to be vaporised, if that’s what you mean.’ I could have sworn he was smiling. ‘The atomic pile can only fail safe no matter what happens. If anything goes wrong the uranium rods slam down in very quick time indeed — a fraction under a one-thousandth of a second — stopping the whole reaction. In this case, though, we shut it off ourselves. The men in the manoeuvring-room could no longer see either the reactor dials or the governor for the control rods. No option but to shut it down. The engine-room crew have been forced to abandon the engine and manoeuvring-rooms and take shelter in the stern room.’

Well, that was something at least. We weren’t going to be blown to pieces, ignobly vaporised on the altar of nuclear advancement: good old-fashioned suffocation, that was to be our lot. ‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

‘What we should do is surface immediately. With fourteen feet of ice overhead that’s not easy. Excuse me, will you?’

He spoke to the now completely masked and suited man who was carrying a small dialled box in his hands. They walked together past the navigator’s chart desk and ice-machine to the heavy door opening on the passage that led to the engine-room over the top of the reactor compartment. They unclipped the door, pushed it open. A dense blinding cloud of dark smoke rolled into the room as the masked man stepped quickly into the passageway and swung the door to behind him. Swanson clamped the door shut, walked, temporarily blinded, back to the control position and fumbled down a roof microphone.

‘Captain speaking.’ His voice echoed emptily through the control centre. ‘The fire is located in the engine-room. We do not know yet whether it is electrical, chemical or fuel oil: the source of the fire has not been pin-pointed. Acting on the principle of being prepared for the worst, we are now testing for a radiation leak.’ So that was what the masked man had been carrying, a Geiger counter. ‘If that proves negative, we shall try for a steam leak; and if that is negative we shall carry out an intensive search to locate the fire. It will not be easy as I’m told visibility is almost zero. We have already shut down all electrical circuits in the engine-room, lighting included, to prevent an explosion in the event of atomised fuel being present in the atmosphere. We have closed the oxygen intake valves and isolated the engine-room from the air-cleaning system in the hope that the fire will consume all available oxygen and burn itself out.

‘All smoking is prohibited until further notice. Heaters, fans, and all electrical circuits other than communication lines to be switched off — and that includes the juke-box and the ice-cream machine. All lamps to be switched off except those absolutely essential. All movement is to be restricted to a minimum. I shall keep you informed of any progress we may make.’

I became aware of someone standing by my side. It was Dr Jolly, his normally jovial face puckered and woebegone, the tears flowing down his face. Plaintively he said to me: ‘This is a bit thick, old boy, what? I’m not sure that I’m so happy now about being rescued. And all those prohibitions — no smoking, no power to be used, no moving around — do those mean what I take them to mean?’

‘I’m afraid they do indeed.’ It was Swanson who answered Jolly’s question for him. ‘This, I’m afraid, is every nuclear submarine captain’s nightmare come true — fire under the ice. At one stroke we’re not only reduced to the level of a conventional submarine — we’re two stages worse. In the first place, a conventional submarine wouldn’t be under the ice, anyway. In the second place, it has huge banks of storage batteries, and even if it were beneath the ice it would have sufficient reserve power to steam far enough south to get clear of the ice. Our reserve battery is so small that it wouldn’t take us a fraction of the way.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Jolly nodded. ‘But this no smoking, no moving —’

‘That same very small battery, I’m afraid, is the only source left to us for power for the air-purifying machines, for lighting, ventilation, heating — I’m afraid the Dolphin is going to get very cold in a short time — so we have to curtail its expenditure of energy on those things. So no smoking, minimum movement — the less carbon dioxide breathed into the atmosphere the better. But the real reason for conserving electric energy is that we need it to power the heaters, pumps and motors that have to be used to start up the reactor again. If that battery exhausts itself before we get the reactor going — well, I don’t have to draw a diagram.’

‘You’re not very encouraging, are you, Commander?’ Jolly complained.

‘No, not very. I don’t see any reason to be,’ Swanson said dryly.

‘I’ll bet you’d trade in your pension for a nice open lead above us just now,’ I said.

‘I’d trade in the pension of every flag officer in the United States Navy,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘If we could find a polynya I’d surface, open the engine-room hatch to let most of the contaminated air escape, start up our diesel — it takes its air direct from the engine-room — and have the rest of the smoke sucked out in nothing flat. As it is, that diesel is about as much use to me as a grand piano.’

‘And the compasses?’ I asked.

‘That’s another interesting thought,’ Swanson agreed. ‘If the power output from our reserve battery falls below a certain level, our three Sperry gyro-compass systems and the N6A— that’s the inertial guidance machine — just pack up. After that we’re lost, completely. Our magnetic compass is quite useless in these latitudes — it just walks in circles.’

‘So we would go around and around in circles, too,’ Jolly said thoughtfully. ‘For ever and ever under the jolly old ice-cap, what? By jove. Commander, I’m really beginning to wish we’d stayed up at Zebra.’

‘We’re not dead yet, Doctor … Yes, John?’ This to Hansen, who had just come up.

‘Sanders, sir. On the ice-machine. Can he have a smoke mask? His eyes are watering pretty badly.’

‘Give him anything you like in the ship,’ Swanson said, ‘just so long as he can keep his eyes clear to read that graph. And double the watch on the ice-machine. If there’s a lead up there only the size of a hair, I’m going for it. Immediate report if the ice thickness falls below, say, eight or nine feet.’

‘Torpedoes?’ Hansen asked. ‘There hasn’t been ice thin enough for that in three hours. And at the speed we’re drifting there won’t be for three months. I’ll go keep the watch myself. I’m not much good for anything else, this hand of mine being the way it is.’

‘Thank you. First you might tell Engineman Harrison to turn off the CO_2 scrubber and monoxide burners. Must save every amp of power we have. Besides, it will do this pampered bunch of ours the world of good to sample a little of what the old-time submariners had to experience when they were forced to stay below maybe twenty hours at a time.’

That’s going to be pretty rough on our really sick men,’ I said. ‘Benson and Folsom in the sickbay, the Harrington twins, Brownell and Bolton in the nucleonics lab., right aft. They’ve got enough to contend with without foul air as well.’

‘I know,’ Swanson admitted. I’m damnably sorry about it. Later on, when — and if — the air gets really bad, we’ll start up the air-purifying systems again but blank off every place except the lab. and sick-bay.’ He broke off and turned round as a fresh wave of dark smoke rolled in from the suddenly opened after door. The man with the smoke mask was back from the engine-room and even with my eyes streaming in that smoke-filled acrid atmosphere I could see he was in a pretty bad way. Swanson and two others rushed to meet him, two of them catching him as he staggered into the control room, the third quickly swinging the heavy door shut against the darkly-evil clouds of smoke.

Swanson pulled off the man’s smoke mask. It was Murphy, the man who had accompanied me when we’d closed the torpedo tube door. People like Murphy and Rawlings, I thought, always got picked for jobs like this.

His face was white and he was gasping for air, his eyes upturned in his head. He was hardly more than half-conscious, but even that foul atmosphere in the control centre must have seemed to him like the purest mountain air compared to what he had just been breathing for within thirty seconds his head had begun to clear and he was able to grin up painfully from where he’d been lowered into a chair.

‘Sorry, Captain,’ he gasped. ‘This smoke mask was never meant to cope with the stuff that’s in the engine-room. Pretty hellish in there, I tell you.’ He grinned again. ‘Good news, Captain. No radiation leak.’

‘Where’s the Geiger counter?’ Swanson asked quietly.

It’s had it, I’m afraid, sir. I couldn’t see where I was going in there, honest, sir, you can’t see three inches in front of your face. I tripped and damn’ near fell down into the machinery space. The counter did fall down. But I’d a clear check before then. Nothing at all.’ He reached up to his shoulder and unclipped his film badge. This’ll show, sir.’

‘Have that developed immediately. That was very well done, Murphy,’ he said warmly. ‘Now nip for’ard to the mess room. You’ll find some really clear air there.’

The film badge was developed and brought back in minutes. Swanson took it, glanced at it briefly, smiled and let out his breath in a long slow whistle of relief. ‘Murphy was right. No radiation leak. Thank God for that, anyway. If there had been — well, that was that, I’m afraid.’

‘The for’ard door of the control room opened, a man passed through, and the door was as quickly closed. I guessed who it was before I could see him properly.

‘Permission from Chief Torpedoman Patterson to approach you, sir,’ Rawlings said with brisk formality. ‘We’ve just seen Murphy, pretty groggy he is, and both the Chief and I think that youngsters like that shouldn’t be —’

‘Am I to understand that you are volunteering to go next, Rawlings?’ Swanson asked. The screws of responsibility and tension were turned hard down on him, but I could see that it cost him some effort to keep his face straight.

Well, not exactly volunteering, sir. But — well, who else is there?’

‘The torpedo department aboard this ship,’ Swanson observed acidly, ‘always did have a phenomenally high opinion of itself.’

‘Let him try an underwater oxygen set,’ I said. ‘Those smoke masks seem to have their limitations.’

‘A steam leak, Captain?’ Rawlings asked. ‘That what you want me to check on?’

‘Well, you seemed to have been nominated, voted for and elected by yourself,’ Swanson said. ‘Yes, a steam leak.’

‘That the suit Murphy was wearing?’ Rawlings pointed to the clothes on the desk.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘You’d have thought there would be some signs of moisture or condensation if there had been a steam leak, sir.’

‘Maybe. Maybe soot and smoke particles are holding the condensing steam in suspension. Maybe it was hot enough in there to dry off any moisture that did reach his suit. Maybe a lot of things. Don’t stay too long in there.’

‘Just as long as it takes me to get things fixed up,’ Rawlings said confidently. He turned to Hansen and grinned. ‘You baulked me once back out there on the ice-cap, Lieutenant, but sure as little apples I’m going to get that little old medal this time. Bring undying credit on the whole ship, I will.’

‘If Torpedoman Rawlings will ease up with his ravings for a moment,’ Hansen said, ‘I have a suggestion to make, Captain. I know he won’t be able to take off his mask inside there but if he would give a call-up signal on the engine telephone or ring through on the engine answering telegraph every four or five minutes we’d know he was O.K. If he doesn’t, someone can go in after him.’

Swanson nodded. Rawlings pulled on suit and oxygen apparatus and left. That made it the third time the door leading to the engine compartment had been opened in a few minutes and each time fresh clouds of that black and biting smoke had come rolling in. Conditions were now very bad inside the control room, but someone had issued a supply of goggles all round and a few were wearing smoke masks.

A phone rang. Hansen answered, spoke briefly and hung up.

‘That was Jack Cartwright, Skipper.’ Lieutenant Cartwright was the main propulsion officer, who’d been on watch in the manoeuvring-room and had been forced to retreat to the stern room. ‘Seems he was overcome by the fumes and was carried back into the stern room. Says he’s O.K. now and could we send smoke masks or breathing apparatus for himself and one of his men — they can’t get at the ones in the engine-room. I told him yes.’

‘I’d certainly feel a lot happier if Jack Cartwright was in there investigating in person,’ Swanson admitted. ‘Send a man, will you?’

‘I thought I’d take them myself. Someone else can double on the ice-machine.’

Swanson glanced at Hansen’s injured hand, hesitated then nodded. ‘Right. But straight through the engine-room and straight back.’

Hansen was on his way inside a minute. Five minutes later he was back again. He stripped off his breathing equipment. His face was pale and covered in sweat.

‘There’s fire in the engine-room, all right,’ he said grimly. ‘Hotter than the hinges of hell. No trace of sparks or flames but that doesn’t mean a thing, the smoke in there is so thick that you couldn’t see a blast furnace a couple of feet away.’

‘See Rawlings?’ Swanson asked.

‘No. Has he not rung through?’

‘Twice, but —’ He broke off as the engine-room telegraph rang. ‘So. He’s still O.K. How about the stern room, John?’

‘Damn’ sight worse than it is here. The sick men aft there are in a pretty bad way, especially Bolton. Seems the smoke got in before they could get the door shut.’

‘Tell Harrison to start up his air scrubbers. But for the lab. only. Blank off the rest of the ship.’

Fifteen minutes passed, fifteen minutes during which the engine-room telegraph rang three times, fifteen minutes during which the air became thicker and fouler and steadily less breathable, fifteen minutes during which a completely equipped fire-fighting team was assembled in the control centre, then another billowing cloud of black smoke announced the opening of the after door.

It was Rawlings. He was very weak and had to be helped out of his breathing equipment and his suit. His face was white and streaming sweat, his hair and clothes so saturated with sweat that he might easily have come straight from an immersion in the sea. But he was grinning triumphantly.

‘No steam leak, Captain, that’s for certain.’ It took him three breaths to get that out. ‘But fire down below in the machinery space. Sparks flying all over the shop. Some flame, not much. I located it, sir. Starboard high-pressure turbine. The lagging’s on fire.’

‘You’ll get that medal, Rawlings,’ Swanson said, ‘even if I have to make the damn’ thing myself.’ He turned to the waiting firemen. ‘You heard. Starboard turbine. Four at a time, fifteen minutes maximum. Lieutenant Raeburn, the first party. Knives, claw-hammers, pliers, crow-bars, CO_12. Saturate the lagging first then rip it off. Watch out for flash flames when you’re pulling it off. I don’t have to warn you about the steam pipes. Now on your way’

They left. I said to Swanson: ‘Doesn’t sound so much. How long will it take? Ten minutes, quarter of an hour?’

He looked at me sombrely. ‘A minimum of three or four hours — if we’re lucky. It’s hell’s own maze down in the machinery space there. Valves, tubes, condensers and miles of that damned steam piping that would burn your hands off if you touched it. Working conditions even normally are so cramped as to be almost impossible. Then there’s that huge turbine housing with this thick insulation lagging wrapped all round it — and the engineers who fitted it meant it to stay there for keeps. Before they start they have to douse the fire with the CO_2 extinguishers and even that won’t help much. Every time they rip off a piece of charred insulation the oil-soaked stuff below will burst into flames again as soon as it comes into contact with the oxygen in the atmosphere.’

‘Oil-soaked?’

‘That’s where the whole trouble must lie,’ Swanson exclaimed. ‘Wherever you have moving machinery you must have oil for lubrication. There’s no shortage of machinery down in the machine space — and no shortage of oil either. And just as certain materials are strongly hygroscopic so that damned insulation has a remarkable affinity for oil. Where there’s any around, whether in its normal fluid condition or in fine suspension in the atmosphere that lagging attracts it as a magnet does iron filings. And it’s as absorbent as blotting-paper.’

‘But what could have caused the fire?’

‘Spontaneous combustion. There have been cases before. We’ve run over 50,000 miles in this ship now and in that time I suppose the lagging has become thoroughly saturated. We’ve been going at top speed ever since we left Zebra and the excess heat generated has set the damn thing off … John, no word from Cartwright yet?’

‘Nothing.’

‘He must have been in there for the best part of twenty minutes now.’

‘Maybe. But he was just beginning to put his suit on — himself and Ringman — when I left. That’s not to say they went into the engine-room straight away. I’ll call the stern room.’ He did, spoke then hung up, his face grave. ‘Stern room says that they have been gone twenty-five minutes. Shall I investigate, sir?’

‘You stay right here. I’m not —’

He broke off as the after door opened with a crash and two men came staggering out — rather, one staggering, the other supporting him. The door was heaved shut and the men’s masks removed. One man I recognised as an enlisted man who had accompanied Raeburn: the other was Cartwright, the main propulsion officer.

‘Lieutenant Raeburn sent me out with the lieutenant here,’ the enlisted man said. ‘He’s not so good, I think, Captain.’

It was a pretty fair diagnosis. He wasn’t so good and that was a fact. He was barely conscious but none the less fighting grimly to hang on to what few shreds of consciousness were left him.

‘Ringman,’ he jerked out. ‘Five minutes — five minutes ago. We were going back —’

‘Ringman,’ Swanson prompted with a gentle insistence. ‘What about Ringman?’

‘He fell. Down into the machinery space. I — I went after him, tried to lift him up the ladder. He screamed. God, he screamed. I — he —’

He slumped in his chair, was caught before he fell to the floor. I said: ‘Ringman. Either a major fracture or internal injuries.’

‘Damn!’ Swanson swore softly. ‘Damn and blast it all. A fracture. Down there. John, have Cartwright carried through to the crew’s mess. A fracture!’

‘Please have a mask and suit ready for me,’ Jolly said briskly. ‘I’ll fetch Dr Benson’s emergency kit from the sick-bay.’

‘You?’ Swanson shook his head. ‘Damned decent, Jolly. I appreciate it but I can’t let you —’

‘Just for once, old boy, the hell with your navy regulations,’ Jolly said politely. ‘The main thing to remember, Commander, is that I’m aboard this ship too. Let us remember that we all — um — sink or swim together. No joke intended.’

‘But you don’t know how to operate those sets —’

‘I can learn, can’t I?’ Jolly said with some asperity. He turned and left.

Swanson looked at me. He was wearing goggles, but they couldn’t hide the concern in his face. He said, curiously hesitant: ‘Do you think —’

‘Of course Jolly’s right. You’ve no option. If Benson were fit you know very well you’d have him down there in jig-time. Besides, Jolly is a damned fine doctor.’

‘You haven’t been down there, Carpenter. It’s a metal jungle. There isn’t room to splint a broken finger far less —’

‘I don’t think Dr Jolly will try to fix or splint anything. He’ll just give Ringman a jab that will lay him out so that he can be brought up here without screaming in agony all the way.’

Swanson nodded, pursed his lips and walked away to examine the ice fathometer. I said to Hansen: ‘It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?’

‘You can say that again, friend. It’s worse than bad. Normally, there should be enough air in the submarine to last us maybe sixteen hours. But well over half the air in the ship, from here right aft, is already practically unbreathable. What we have left can’t possibly last us more than a few hours. Skipper’s boxed in on three sides. If he doesn’t start the air purifiers up the men working down in the machinery space are going to have the devil of a job doing anything. Working in near-zero visibility with breathing apparatus on you’re practically as good as blind — the floods will make hardly any difference. If he does start up the purifiers in the engine-room, the fresh oxygen will cause the fire to spread. And, when he starts them up, of course, that means less and less power to get the reactor working again.’

‘That’s very comforting,’ I said. ‘How long will it take you to restart the reactor?’

‘At least an hour. That’s after the fire has been put out and everything checked for safety. At least an hour.’

‘And Swanson reckoned three or four hours to put the fire out. Say five, all told. It’s a long time. Why doesn’t he use some of his reserve power cruising around to find a lead?’

‘An even bigger gamble than staying put and trying to put out the fire. I’m with the skipper. Let’s fight the devil we know rather than dice with the one we don’t.’

Medical case in hand, Jolly came coughing and spluttering his way back into the control centre and started pulling on suit and breathing apparatus. Hansen gave him instructions on how to operate it and Jolly seemed to get the idea pretty quickly. Brown, the enlisted man who’d helped Cartwright into the control centre, was detailed to accompany him. Jolly had no idea of the location of the ladder leading down from the upper engine-room to the machinery space.

‘Be as quick as you can,’ Swanson said. ‘Remember, Jolly, you’re not trained for this sort of thing. I’ll expect you back inside ten minutes.’

They were back in exactly four minutes. They didn’t have an unconscious Ringman with them either. The only unconscious figure was that of Dr Jolly, whom Brown half-carried, half-dragged over the sill into the control room.

‘Can’t say for sure what happened,’ Brown gasped. He was trembling from the effort he had just made, Jolly must have out-weighed him by at least thirty pounds. ‘We’d just got into the engine-room and shut the door. I was leading and suddenly Dr Jolly fell against me — I reckon he must have tripped over something. He knocked me down. When I got to my feet he was lying there behind me. I put the torch on him. Out cold, he was. His mask had been torn loose. I put it on as best I could and pulled him out.’

‘My word,’ Hansen said reflectively. ‘The medical profession on the Dolphin is having a rough time.’ He gloomily surveyed the prone figure of Dr Jolly as it was carried away towards the after door and relatively fresh air. ‘All three sawbones out of commission now. That’s very handy, isn’t it, Skipper?’

Swanson didn’t answer. I said to him: ‘The injection for Ringman. Would you know what to give, how to give it and where?’

‘No.’

‘Would any of your crew?’

‘I’m in no position to argue, Dr Carpenter.’

I opened Jolly’s medical kit, hunted among the bottles on the lid rack until I found what I wanted, dipped a hypodermic and injected it in my left forearm, just where the bandage ended. ‘Painkiller,’ I said. ‘I’m just a softy. But I want to be able to use the forefinger and thumb of that hand.’ I glanced across at Rawlings, as recovered as anyone could get in that foul atmosphere, and said: ‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Just resting lightly.’ He rose from his chair and picked up his breathing equipment. ‘Have no fears, Doc. With Torpedoman First-class Rawlings by your side -’

‘We have plenty of fresh men still available aft, Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson said.

‘No. Rawlings. It’s for his own sake. Maybe he’ll get two medals now for this night’s work.’

Rawlings grinned and pulled the mask over his head. Two minutes later we were inside the engine-room.

It was stiflingly hot in there, and visibility, even with powerful torches shining, didn’t exceed eighteen inches, but for the rest it wasn’t too bad. The breathing apparatus functioned well enough and I was conscious of no discomfort. At first, that was.

Rawlings took my arm and guided me to the head of a ladder that reached down to the deck of the machinery space. I heard the penetrating hiss of a fire-extinguisher and peered around to locate its source.

A pity they had no submarines in the Middle Ages, I thought, the sight of that little lot down there would have given Dante an extra fillip when he’d started in on his Inferno. Over on the starboard side two very powerful floodlamps had been slung above the huge turbine: the visibility they gave varied from three to six feet, according to the changing amount of smoke given off by the charred and smouldering insulation. At the moment, one patch of the insulation was deeply covered in a layer of white foam — carbon dioxide released under pressure immediately freezes anything with which it comes in contact. As the man with the extinguisher stepped back, three others moved forward in the swirling gloom and started hacking and tearing away at the insulation. As soon as a sizeable strip was dragged loose the exposed lagging below immediately burst into flames reaching the height of a man’s head, throwing into sharp relief weird masked figures leaping backwards to avoid being scorched by the flames. And then the man with the CO_2 would approach again, press his trigger, the blaze would shrink down, flicker and die, and a coat of creamy-white foam would bloom where the fire had been. Then the entire process would be repeated all over again. The whole scene with the repetitively stylised movements of the participants highlit against a smoky oil-veined background of flickering crimson was somehow weirdly suggestive of the priests of a long-dead and alien culture offering up some burnt sacrifice on their bloodstained pagan altar.

It also made me see Swanson’s point: at the painfully but necessarily slow rate at which those men were making progress, four hours would be excellent par for the course. I tried not to think what the air inside the Dolphin would be like in four hours’ time.

The man with the extinguisher — it was Raeburn — caught sight of us, came across and led me through a tangled maze of steam pipes and condensers to where Ringman was lying. He was on his back, very still, but conscious: I could see the movement of the whites of his eyes behind his goggles. I bent down till my mask was touching his.

‘Your leg?’ I shouted.

He nodded.

‘Left?’

He nodded again, reached out gingerly and touched a spot halfway down the shin-bone. I opened the medical case, pulled out scissors, pinched the clothes on his upper arm between finger and thumb and cut a piece of the material away. The hypodermic came next and within two minutes he was asleep. With Rawlings’s help I laid splints against his leg and bandaged them roughly in place. Two of the fire-fighters stopped work long enough to help us drag him up the ladder and then Rawlings and I took him through the passage above the reactor room. I became aware that my breathing was now distressed, my legs shaking and my whole body bathed in sweat.

Once in the control centre I took off my mask and immediately began to cough and sneeze uncontrollably, tears streaming down my cheeks. Even in the few minutes we had been gone the air in the control room had deteriorated to a frightening extent.

Swanson said: ‘Thank you, Doctor. What’s it like in there?’

‘Quite bad. Not intolerable, but not nice. Ten minutes is long enough for your fire-fighters at one time.’

‘Fire-fighters I have in plenty. Ten minutes it shall be.’

A couple of burly enlisted men carried Ringman through to the sick-bay. Rawlings had been ordered for’ard for rest and recuperation in the comparatively fresh air of the messroom, but elected to stop off at the sick-bay with me. He’d glanced at my bandaged left hand and said: ‘Three hands are better than one, even although two of them do happen to belong to Rawlings.’

Benson was restless and occasionally murmuring, but still below the level of consciousness. Captain Folsom was asleep, deeply so, which I found surprising until Rawlings told me that there were no alarm boxes in the sick-bay and that the door was completely soundproofed.

We laid Ringman down on the examination table and Rawlings slit up his left trouser leg with a pair of heavy surgical scissors. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared it would be, a clean fracture of the tibia, not compound: with Rawlings doing most of the work we soon had his leg fixed up. I didn’t try to put his leg in traction, when Jolly, with his two good hands, had completely recovered he’d be able to make a better job of it than I could.

We’d just finished when a telephone rang. Rawlings lifted it quickly before Folsom could wake, spoke briefly and hung up.

‘Control room,’ he said. I knew from the wooden expression on his face that whatever news he had for me, it wasn’t good. ‘It was for you. Bolton, the sick man in the nucleonics lab., the one you brought back from Zebra yesterday afternoon. He’s gone. About two minutes ago.’ He shook his head despairingly. ‘My God, another death.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Another murder.’

ELEVEN

The Dolphin was an ice-cold tomb. At half past six that morning, four and a half hours after the outbreak of the fire, there was still only one dead man inside the ship, Bolton. But as I looked with bloodshot and inflamed eyes at the men sitting or lying about the control room — no one was standing any more — I knew that within an hour, two at the most, Bolton would be having company. By ten o’clock, at the latest, under those conditions, the Dolphin would be no more than a steel coffin with no life left inside her.

As a ship, the Dolphin was already dead. All the sounds we associated with a living vessel, the murmurous pulsation of great engines, the high-pitched whine of generators, the deep hum of the air-conditioning unit, the unmistakable transmission from the sonar, the clickety-clack from the radio room, the soft hiss of air, the brassy jingle from the juke-box, the whirring fans, the rattle of pots from the galley, the movement of men, the talking of men — all those were gone. All those vital sounds, the heart-beats of a living vessel, were gone; but in their place was not silence but something worse than silence, something that bespoke not living but dying, the frighteningly rapid, hoarse, gasping breathing of lung-tortured men fighting for air and for life.

Fighting for air. That was the irony of it. Fighting for air while there were still many days’ supply of oxygen in the giant tanks. There were some breathing sets aboard, similar to the British Built-in Breathing System which takes a direct oxy-nitrogen mixture from tanks, but only a few, and all members of the crew had had a turn at those, but only for two minutes at a time. For the rest, for the more than ninety per cent without those systems, there was only the panting straining agony that leads eventually to death. Some portable closed-circuit sets were still left, but those were reserved exclusively for the firefighters.

Oxygen was occasionally bled from the tanks directly into the living spaces and it just didn’t do any good at all; the only effect it seemed to have was to make breathing even more cruelly difficult by heightening the atmospheric pressure. All the oxygen in the world was going to be of little avail as long as the level of carbon dioxide given off by our anguished breathing mounted steadily with the passing of each minute. Normally, the air in the Dolphin was cleaned and circulated throughout the ship every two minutes, but the giant 200-ton air-conditioner responsible for this was a glutton for the electric power that drove it; and the electricians’ estimate was that the reserve of power in the stand-by battery, which alone could reactivate the nuclear power-plant, was already dangerously low. So the concentration of carbon dioxide increased steadily towards lethal levels and there was nothing we could do about it.

Increasing, too, in what passed now for air, were the Freon fumes from the refrigerating machinery and the hydrogen fumes from the batteries. Worse still, the smoke was now so thick that visibility, even in the for’ard parts of the ship, was down to a few feet, but that smoke had to remain also, there was no power to operate the electrostatic precipitators and even when those had been briefly tried they had proved totally inadequate to cope with the concentration of billions of carbon particles held in suspension in the air. Each time the door to the engine-room was opened — and that was progressively oftener as the strength of the fire-fighters ebbed — fresh clouds of that evil acrid smoke rolled through the submarine. The fire in the engine-room had stopped burning over two hours previously; but now what remained of the redly-smouldering insulation round the starboard high-pressure turbine gave off far more smoke and fumes than flames could ever have done.

But the greatest enemy of all lay in the mounting count of carbon monoxide, that deadly, insidious, colourless, tasteless, odourless gas with its murderous affinity for the red blood cells — five hundred times that of oxygen. On board the Dolphin the normal permissible tolerance of carbon monoxide in the air was thirty parts in a million. Now the reading was somewhere between four and five hundred parts in a million. When it reached a thousand parts, none of us would have more than minutes to live.

And then there was the cold. As Commander Swanson had grimly prophesied, the Dolphin, with the steam pipes cooled down and all heaters switched off, had chilled down to the sub-freezing temperature of the sea outside, and was ice-cold. In terms of absolute cold, it was nothing — a mere two degrees below zero on the centigrade scale. But in terms of cold as it reacted on the human body it was very cold indeed. Most of the crew were without warm clothing of any kind — in normal operating conditions the temperature inside the Dolphin was maintained at a steady 22° C. regardless of the temperature outside — they were both forbidden to move around and lacked the energy to move around to counteract the effects of the cold, and what little energy was left in their rapidly weakening bodies was so wholly occupied in forcing their labouring chest muscles to gulp in more and ever more of that foul and steadily worsening air that they had none at all left to generate sufficient animal heat to ward off that dank and bitter cold. You could actually hear men shivering, could listen to their violently shaking limbs knocking and rat-tat-tatting helplessly against bulkheads and deck, could hear the chattering of their teeth, the sound of some of them, far gone in weakness, whimpering softly with the cold: but always the dominant sound was that harsh strangled moaning, a rasping and frightening sound, as men sought to suck air down into starving lungs.

With the exception of Hansen and myself — both of whom were virtually one-handed — and the sick patients, every man in the Dolphin had taken his turn that night in descending into the machinery space and fighting that red demon that threatened to slap us all. The number in each fire-fighting group had been increased from four to eight and the time spent down there shortened to three or four minutes, so that efforts could be concentrated and more energy expended in a given length of time; but because of the increasingly Stygian darkness in the machinery space, the ever-thickening coils of oily black smoke, and the wickedly cramped and confined space in which the men had to work, progress had been frustratingly, maddeningly slow; and entered into it now, of course, was the factor of that dreadful weakness that now assailed us all, so that men with the strength only of little children were tugging and tearing at the smouldering insulation in desperate near-futility and seemingly making no progress at all.

I’d been down again in the machinery space, just once, at 5.30 a.m. to attend to Jolly who had himself slipped, fallen and laid himself out while helping an injured crewman up the ladder, and I knew I would never forget what I had seen there, dark and spectral figures in a dark and spectral and swirling world, lurching and staggering around like zombies in some half-forgotten nightmare, swaying and stumbling and falling to the deck or down into the bilges now deep-covered in great snowdrifts of carbon dioxide foam and huge smoking blackened chunks of torn-off lagging. Men on the rack, men in the last stages of exhaustion. One little spark of fire, one little spark of an element as old as time itself and all the brilliant technological progress of the twentieth century was set at nothing, the frontiers of man’s striving translated in a moment from the nuclear age to the dark unknown of prehistory.

Every dark hour brings forth its man and there was no doubt in the minds of the crew of the Dolphin that that dark night had produced its own here. Dr Jolly. He had made a swift recovery from the effects of his first disastrous entry into the engine-room that night, appearing back in the control centre only seconds after I had finished setting Ringman’s broken leg. He had taken the news of Bolton’s death pretty badly, but never either by word or direct look did he indicate to either Swanson or myself that the fault lay with us for insisting against his better judgment on bringing on board the ship a man whose life had been hanging in the balance even under the best of conditions. I think Swanson was pretty grateful for that and might even have got around to apologising to Jolly had not a fire-fighter come through from the engine-room and told us that one of his team had slipped and either twisted or broken an ankle — the second of many minor accidents and injuries that were to happen down in the machinery space that night. Jolly had reached for the nearest closed-circuit breathing apparatus before we could try to stop him and was gone in a minute.

We eventually lost count of the number of trips he made down there that night. Fifteen at least, perhaps many more, by the time six o’clock had come my mind was beginning to get pretty fuzzy round the edges. He’d certainly no lack of customers for his medical skill. Paradoxically enough, the two main types of injury that night were diametrically opposite in nature: burning and freezing, burning from the red-hot lagging — and, earlier, the steam pipes — and freezing from a carelessly directed jet of carbon dioxide against exposed areas of face or hands. Jolly never failed to answer a call, not even after the time he’d given his own head a pretty nasty crack. He would complain bitterly to the captain, old boy, for rescuing him from the relative safety and comfort of Drift Ice Station Zebra, crack some dry joke, pull on his mask and leave. A dozen speeches to Congress or Parliament couldn’t have done what Jolly did that night in cementing Anglo-American friendship.

About 6.45 a.m. Chief Torpedoman Patterson came into the control centre. I suppose he walked through the doorway, but that was only assumption, from where I sat on the deck between Swanson and Hansen you couldn’t see half-way to the door; but when he came up to Swanson he was crawling on his hands and knees, head swaying from side to side, whooping painfully, his respiration rate at least fifty to the minute. He was wearing no mask of any kind and was shivering constantly.

‘We must do something, Captain,’ he said hoarsely. He spoke as much when inhaling as when exhaling, when your breathing is sufficiently distressed one is as easy as the other. ‘We’ve got seven men passed out now between the for’ard torpedo room and the crew’s mess. They’re pretty sick men, Captain.’

‘Thank you, Chief.’ Swanson, also without a mask, was in as bad a way as Patterson, his chest heaving, his breath hoarsely rasping, tears and sweat rolling down the greyness of his face. ‘We will be as quick as possible.’

‘More oxygen,’ I said. ‘Bleed more oxygen into the ship.’

‘Oxygen? More oxygen?’ He shook his head. ‘The pressure is too high as it is.’

‘Pressure won’t kill them.’ I was dimly aware through my cold and misery and burning chest and eyes that my voice sounded just as strange as did those of Swanson and Patterson. ‘Carbon monoxide will kill them. Carbon monoxide is what is killing them now. It’s the relative proportion of CO_2 to oxygen that matters. It’s too high, it’s far too high. That’s what’s going to finish us all off.’

‘More oxygen,’ Swanson ordered. Even the unnecessary acknowledgment of my words would have cost too much. ‘More oxygen.’

Valves were turned and oxygen hissed into the control room and, I know, into the crew spaces. I could feel my ears pop as the pressure swiftly built up, but that was all I could feel. I certainly couldn’t feel any improvement in my breathing, a feeling that was borne out when Patterson, noticeably weaker this time, crawled back and croaked out the bad news that he now had a dozen unconscious men on his hands.

I went for’ard with Patterson and a closed-circuit oxygen apparatus — one of the few unexhausted sets left — and clamped it for a minute or so on to the face of each unconscious man in turn, but I knew it was but a temporary palliative, the oxygen revived them but within a few minutes of the mask being removed most of them slipped back into unconsciousness again. I made my way back to the control room, a dark dungeon of huddled men nearly all lying down, most of them barely conscious. I was barely conscious myself. I wondered vaguely if they felt as I did, if the fire from the lungs had now spread to the remainder of the body, if they could see the first slight changes in colour in their hands and faces, the deadly blush of purple, the first unmistakable signs of a man beginning to die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Jolly, I noticed, still hadn’t returned from the engine-room: he was keeping himself permanently on hand, it seemed, to help those men who were in ever increasingly greater danger of hurting themselves and their comrades, as their weakness increased, as their level of care and attention and concentration slid down towards zero.

Swanson was where I’d left him, propped on the deck against the plotting table. He smiled faintly as I sank down beside himself and Hansen.

‘How are they, Doctor?’ he whispered. A whisper, but a rock-steady whisper. The man’s monolithic calm had never cracked and I realised dimly that here was a man who could never crack; you do find people like that, once in a million or once in a lifetime. Swanson was such a man.

‘Far gone,’ I said. As a medical report it maybe lacked a thought in detail but it contained the gist of what I wanted to say and it saved me energy. ‘You will have your first deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning within the hour.’

‘So soon?’ The surprise was in his red, swollen streaming eyes as well as in his voice. ‘Not so soon, Doctor. It’s hardly — well, it’s hardly started to take effect.’

‘So soon,’ I said. ‘Carbon monoxide poisoning is very rapidly progressive. Five dead within the hour. Within two hours fifty. At least fifty.’

‘You take the choice out of my hands,’ he murmured. ‘For which I am grateful. John, where is our main propulsion officer? His hour has come.’

‘I’ll get him.’ Hansen hauled himself wearily to his feet, an old man making his last struggle to rise from his deathbed, and at that moment the engine-room door opened and blackened exhausted men staggered into the control room. Waiting men filed out to take their place. Swanson said to one of the men who had just entered: ‘Is that you, Will?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Lieutenant Raeburn, the navigating officer, pulled off his mask and began to cough, rackingly, painfully. Swanson waited until he had quieted a little.

‘How are things down there, Will?’

‘We’ve stopped making smoke, Skipper.’ Raeburn wiped his streaming face, swayed dizzily and lowered himself groggily to the floor. ‘I think we’ve drowned out the lagging completely.’

‘How long to get the rest of it off?’

‘God knows. Normally, ten minutes. The way we are — an hour. Maybe longer.’

‘Thank you. Ah!’ He smiled faintly as Hansen and Cartwright appeared out of the smoke-filled gloom. ‘Our main propulsion officer. Mr Cartwright, I would be glad if you would put the kettle on to boil. What’s the record for activating the plant, getting steam up and spinning the turbo-generators?’

‘I couldn’t say, Skipper.’ Red-eyed, coughing, smoke-blackened and obviously in considerable pain, Cartwright nevertheless straightened his shoulders and smiled slowly. ‘But you may consider it broken.’

He left. Swanson heaved himself to his feet with obvious weakness — except for two brief inspection trips to the engine-room he had not once worn any breathing apparatus during those interminable and pain-filled hours. He called for power on the broadcast circuit, unhooked a microphone and spoke in a calm clear strong voice: it was an amazing exhibition in self-control, the triumph of a mind over agonised lungs still starving for air.

‘This is your captain speaking,’ he said. ‘The fire in the engine-room is out. We are already reactivating our power plant. Open all watertight doors throughout the ship. They are to remain open until further orders. You may regard the worst of our troubles as lying behind us. Thank you for all you have done.’ He hooked up the microphone, and turned to Hansen. ‘The worst is behind, John — if we have enough power left to reactivate the plant.’

‘Surely the worst is still to come,’ I said. ‘It’ll take you how long, three-quarters of an hour, maybe an hour to get your turbine generators going and your air-purifying equipment working again. How long do you think it will take your air cleaners to make any noticeable effect on this poisonous air?’

‘Half an hour. At least that. Perhaps more.’

There you are, then.’ My mind was so woolly and doped now that I had difficulty in finding words to frame my thoughts, and I wasn’t even sure that my thoughts were worth thinking. ‘An hour and a half at least — and you said the worst was over. The worst hasn’t even begun.’ I shook my head, trying to remember what it was that I had been been going to say next, then remembered. ‘In an hour and a half one out of every four of your men will be gone.’

Swanson smiled. He actually, incredibly, smiled. He said: ‘As Sherlock used to say to Moriarty, I think not, Doctor. Nobody’s going to die of monoxide poisoning. In fifteen minutes’ time we’ll have fresh breathable air throughout the ship.’

Hansen glanced at me just as I glanced at him. The strain had been too much, the old man had gone off his rocker. Swanson caught our interchange of looks and laughed, the laugh changing abruptly to a bout of convulsive coughing as he inhaled too much of that poisoned smoke-laden atmosphere. He coughed for a long time then gradually quietened down.

‘Serves me right,’ he gasped. ‘Your faces … Why do you think I ordered the watertight doors opened, Doctor?’

‘No idea.’

‘John?’

Hansen shook his head. Swanson looked at him quizzically and said: ‘Speak to the engine-room. Tell them to light up the diesel.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Hansen said woodenly. He made no move.

‘Lieutenant Hansen is wondering whether he should fetch a strait-jacket,’ Swanson said. ‘Lieutenant Hansen knows that a diesel engine is never never lit up when a submarine is submerged — unless with a snorkel which is useless under ice — for a diesel not only uses air straight from the engine-room atmosphere, it gulps it down in great draughts and would soon clear away all the air in the ship. Which is what I want. We bleed compressed air under fairly high pressure into the forepart of the ship. Nice clean fresh air. We light up the diesel in the after part — it will run rough at first because of the low concentration of oxygen in this poisonous muck — but it will run. It will suck up much of this filthy air, exhausting its gases over the side, and as it does it will lower the atmospheric pressure aft and the fresh air will make its way through from for’ard. To have done this before now would have been suicidal, the fresh air would only have fed the flames until the fire was out of control. But we can do it now. We can run it for a few minutes only, of course, but a few minutes will be ample. You are with me, Lieutenant Hansen?’

Hansen was with him all right, but he didn’t answer. He had already left.

Three minutes passed, then we heard, through the now open passageway above the reactor room, the erratic sound of a diesel starting, fading, coughing, then catching again — we learned later that the engineers had had to bleed off several ether bottles in the vicinity of the air intake to get the engine to catch. For a minute or two it ran roughly and erratically and seemed to be making no impression at all on that poisonous air: then, imperceptibly, almost, at first, then with an increasing degree of definition, we could see the smoke in the control room, illuminated by the single lamp still left burning there, begin to drift and eddy towards the reactor passage. Smoke began to stir and eddy in the corners of the control room as the diesel sucked the fumes aft, and more smoke-laden air, a shade lighter in colour, began to move in from the wardroom passageway, pulled in by the decreasing pressure in the control room, pushed in by the gradual build-up of fresh air in the forepart of the submarine as compressed air was bled into the living spaces.

A few more minutes made the miracle. The diesel thudded away in the engine-room, running more sweetly and strongly as air with a higher concentration of oxygen reached its intake, and the smoke in the control room drained steadily away to be replaced by a thin greyish mist from the forepart of the ship that was hardly deserving of the name of smoke at all. And that mist carried with it air, an air with fresh life-giving oxygen, an air with a proportion of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that was now almost negligible. Or so it seemed to us.

The effect upon the crew was just within the limits of credibility. It was as if a wizard had passed through the length of the ship and touched them with the wand of life. Unconscious men, men for whom death had been less than half an hour away, began to stir, some to open their eyes: sick, exhausted, nauseated and pain-racked men who had been lying or sitting on the decks in attitudes of huddled despair sat up straight or stood, their faces breaking into expressions of almost comical wonderment and disbelief as they drew great draughts down into their aching lungs and found that it was not poisonous gases they were inhaling but fresh breathable air: men who had made up their minds for death began to wonder how they could ever have thought that way. As air went, I suppose, it was pretty sub-standard stuff and the Factory Acts would have had something to say about it; but, for us, no pine-clad mountain air ever tasted half so sweet.

Swanson kept a careful eye on the gauges recording the air pressure in the submarine. Gradually it sunk down to the fifteen pounds at which the atmosphere was normally kept, then below it; he ordered the compressed air to be released under higher pressure and then when the atmospheric pressure was back to normal ordered the diesel stopped and the compressed air shut off.

‘Commander Swanson,’ I said. ‘If you ever want to make admiral you can apply to me for a reference any time.’

‘Thank you.’ He smiled. ‘We have been very lucky.’ Sure we had been lucky, the way men who sailed with Swanson would always be lucky.

We could hear now the sounds of pumps and motors as Cartwright started in on the slow process of bringing the nuclear power plant to life again. Everyone knew that it was touch and go whether there would be enough life left in the batteries for that, but, curiously, no one seemed to doubt that Cartwright would succeed; we had been through too much to entertain even the thought of failure now.

Nor did we fail. At exactly eight o’clock that morning Cartwright phoned to say that he had steam on the turbine blades and that the Dolphin was a going proposition again. I was glad to hear it.

For three hours we cruised along at slow speed while the air-conditioning plant worked under maximum pressure to bring the air inside the Dolphin back to normal. After that Swanson slowly stepped up our speed until we had reached about fifty per cent of normal cruising speed, which was as fast as the propulsion officer deemed it safe to go. For a variety of technical reasons it was impractical for the Dolphin to operate without all turbines in commission, so we were reduced to the speed of the slowest and, without lagging on it, Cartwright didn’t want to push the starboard high-pressure turbine above a fraction of its power. This way, it would take us much longer to clear the ice-pack and reach the open sea but the captain, in a broadcast, said that if the limit of the ice-pack was where it had been when we’d first moved under it — and there was no reason to think it should have shifted more than a few miles — we should be moving out into the open sea about four o’clock the following morning.

By four o’clock of that afternoon, members of the crew, working in relays, had managed to clear away from the machinery space all the debris and foam that had accumulated during the long night. After that, Swanson reduced all watches to the barest skeletons required to run the ship so that as many men as possible might sleep as long as possible. Now that the exultation of victory was over, now that the almost intolerable relief of knowing that they were not after all to find their gasping end in a cold iron tomb under the ice-cap had begun to fade, the inevitable reaction, when it did come, was correspondingly severe. A long and sleepless night behind them; hours of cruelly back-breaking toil in the metal jungle of the machinery space; that lifetime of tearing tension when they had not known whether they were going to live or die but had believed they were going to die: the poisonous fumes that had laid them all on the rack: all of those combined had taken cruel toll of their reserves of physical and mental energy and the crew of the Dolphin were now sleep-ridden and exhausted as they had never been. When they lay down to sleep they slept at once, like dead men.

I didn’t sleep. Not then, not at four o’clock. I couldn’t sleep. I had to much to think about, like how it had been primarily my fault, through mistake, miscalculation or sheer pig-headedness, that the Dolphin and her crew had been brought to such desperate straits: like what Commander Swanson was going to say when he found out how much I’d kept from him, how little I’d told him. Still, if I had kept him in the dark so long, I couldn’t see that there would be much harm in it if I kept him in the dark just that little time longer. It would be time enough in the morning to tell him all I knew. His reactions would be interesting, to say the least. He might be striking some medals for Rawlings, but I had the feeling that he wouldn’t be striking any for me. Not after I’d told him what I’d have to.

Rawlings. That was the man I wanted now. I went to see him, told him what I had in mind and asked him if he would mind sacrificing a few hours’ sleep during the night. As always, Rawlings was co-operation itself.

Later that evening I had a look at one or two of the patients. Jolly, exhausted by his Herculean efforts of the previous night, was fathoms deep in slumber, so Swanson had asked if I would deputise for him. So I did, but I didn’t try very hard. With only one exception they were sound asleep and none of them was in so urgent need of medical attention that there would have been any justification for waking him up. The sole exception was Dr Benson, who had recovered consciousness late that afternoon. He was obviously on the mend but complained that his head felt like a pumpkin with someone at work on it with a riveting gun so I fed him some pills and that was the extent of the treatment. I asked him if he had any idea as to what had been the cause of his fall from the top of the sail, but he was either too woozy to remember or just didn’t know. Not that it mattered now. I already knew the answer.

I slept for nine hours after that, which was pretty selfish of me considering that I had asked Rawlings to keep awake half the night; but then I hadn’t had much option about that, for Rawlings was in the position to perform for me an essential task that I couldn’t perform for myself.

Some time during the night we passed out from under the icecap into the open Arctic Ocean again.

I awoke shortly after seven, washed, shaved and dressed as carefully as I could with one hand out of commission, for I believe a judge owes it to his public to be decently turned out when he goes to conduct a trial, then breakfasted well in the wardroom. Shortly before nine o’clock I walked into the control room. Hansen had the watch. I went up to him and said quietly; so that I couldn’t be overheard: ‘Where is Commander Swanson?’

‘In his cabin.’

‘I’d like to speak to him and yourself. Privately.’

Hansen looked at me speculatively, nodded, handed over the watch to the navigator and led the way to Swanson’s cabin. We knocked, went in and closed the door behind us. I didn’t waste any time in preamble.

‘I know who the killer is,’ I said. ‘I’ve no proof but I’m going to get it now. I would like you to be on hand. If you can spare the time.’

They’d used up all their emotional responses and reactions during the previous thirty hours so they didn’t throw up their hands or do startled double-takes or make any of the other standard signs of incredulousness. Instead Swanson just looked thoughtfully at Hansen, rose from his table, folded the chart he’d been studying and said dryly: ‘I think we might spare the time, Dr Carpenter. I have never met a murderer.’ His tone was impersonal, even light, but the clear grey eyes had gone very cold indeed. ‘It will be quite an experience to meet a man with eight deaths on his conscience.’

‘You can count yourself lucky that it is only eight,’ I said. ‘He almost brought it up to the hundred mark yesterday morning.’

This time I did get them. Swanson stared at me, then said softly: ‘What do you mean?’

‘Our pal with the gun also carries a box of matches around with him,’ I said. ‘He was busy with them in the engine-room in the early hours of yesterday morning.’

‘Somebody deliberately tried to set the ship on fire?’ Hansen looked at me in open disbelief. ‘I don’t buy that, Doc’

‘I buy it,’ Swanson said. ‘I buy anything Dr Carpenter says. We’re dealing with a madman, Doctor. Only a madman would risk losing his life along with the lives of a hundred others.’

‘He miscalculated,’ I said mildly. ‘Come along.’

They were waiting for us in the wardroom as I’d arranged, eleven of them in all — Rawlings, Zabrinski, Captain Folsom, Dr Jolly, the two Harrington twins, who were now just barely well enough to be out of bed, Naseby, Hewson, Hassard, Kinnaird and Jeremy. Most of them were seated round the wardroom table except for Rawlings, who opened the door for us, and Zabrinski, his foot still in the cast, who was sitting in a chair in one corner of the room, studying an issue of the Dolphin Daze, the submarine’s own mimeographed newspaper. Some of them made to get to their feet as we came in but Swanson waved them down. They sat, silently, all except Dr Jolly who boomed out a cheerful: ‘Good morning, Captain. Well, well, this is an intriguing summons. Most intriguing. What is it you want to see us about, Captain?’

I cleared my throat. ‘You must forgive a small deception. It is I who wants to see you, not the captain.’

‘You?’ Jolly pursed his lips and looked at me speculatively. ‘I don’t get it, old boy. Why you?’

‘I have been guilty of another small deception. I am not, as I gave you to understand, attached to the Ministry of Supply. I am an agent of the British Government. An officer of M.I.6, counterespionage.’

Well, I got my reaction, all right. They just sat there, mouths wide open like newly-landed fish, staring at me. It was Jolly, always a fast adjuster, who recovered first.

‘Counter-espionage, by jove! Counter-espionage! Spies and cloaks and daggers and beautiful blondes tucked away in the wardrobes — or wardroom, should I say. But why — but why are you here? What do you — well, what can you want to see us about, Dr Carpenter?’

‘A small matter of murder,’ I said.

‘Murder!’ Captain Folsom spoke for the first time since coming aboard ship, the voice issuing from that savagely burnt face no more than a strangled croak. ‘Murder?’

‘Two of the men lying up there now in the Drift Station lab. were dead before the fire. They had been shot through the head. A third had been knifed. I would call that murder, wouldn’t you?’

Jolly groped for the table and lowered himself shakily into his seat. The rest of them looked as if they were very glad that they were already sitting down.

‘It seems so superfluous to add,’ I said, adding it all the same, ‘that the murderer is in this room now.’

You wouldn’t have thought it, not to look at them. You could see at a glance that none of those high-minded citizens could possibly be a killer. They were as innocent as life’s young morning, the whole lot of them, pure and white as the driven snow.

TWELVE

It would be an understatement to say that I had the attention of the company. Maybe had I been a two-headed visitor from outer space, or had been about to announce the result of a multi-million pound sweepstake in which they held the only tickets, or was holding straws for them to pick to decide who should go before the firing squad — maybe then they might have given me an even more exclusive degree of concentration. But I doubt it. It wouldn’t have been possible.

‘If you’ll bear with me,’ I began, ‘first of all I’d like to give you a little lecture in camera optics — and don’t ask me what the hell that has to do with murder, it’s got everything to do with it, as you’ll find out soon enough.

‘Film emulsion and lens quality being equal, the clarity of detail in any photograph depends upon the focal length of the lens — that is, the distance between the lens and the film. As recently as fifteen years ago the maximum focal length of any camera outside an observatory was about fifty inches. Those were used in reconnaissance planes in the later stages of the Second World War. A small suitcase lying on the ground would show up on a photograph taken from a height of ten miles, which was pretty good for those days.

‘But the American Army and Air Force wanted bigger and better aerial cameras, and the only way this could be done was by increasing the focal length of the lens. There was obviously a superficial limit to this length because the Americans wanted this camera to fit into a plane — or an orbiting satellite — and if you wanted a camera with a focal length of, say, 250 inches, it was obviously going to be quite impossible to install a twenty-foot camera pointing vertically downwards in a plane or small statellite. But scientists came up with a new type of camera using the folded lens principle, where the light, instead of coming down a long straight barrel, is bounced round a series of angled mirrored corners, which permits the focal length to be increased greatly without having to enlarge the camera itself. By 1950 they’d developed a hundred-inch focal length lens. It was quite an improvement on the World War II cameras which could barely pick up a suitcase at ten miles — this one could pick up a cigarette packet at ten miles. Then, ten years later, came what they called the Perkin-Elmer Roti satellite missile tracker, with a focal length of five hundred inches — equivalent to a barrel type camera forty feet long: this one could pick up a cube of sugar at ten miles.’

I looked inquiringly around the audience for signs of inattention. There were no signs of inattention. No lecturer ever had a keener audience than I had there.

‘Three years later,’ I went on, ‘another American firm had developed this missile tracker into a fantastic camera that could be mounted in even a small-size satellite. Three years’ non-stop work to create this camera — but they reckoned it worth it. We don’t know the focal length, it’s never been revealed: we do know that, given the right atmospheric conditions, a white saucer on a dark surface will show up clearly from 300 miles up in space. This on a relatively tiny negative capable of almost infinite enlargement — for the scientists have also come up with a completely new film emulsion, still super-secret and a hundred times as sensitive as the finest films available on the commercial market today.

‘This was to be fitted to the two-ton satellite the Americans called Samos III — Samos for Satellite and Missile Observation System. It never was. This, the only camera of its kind in the world, vanished, hi-jacked in broad daylight and, as we later learned, dismantled, flown from New York to Havana by a Polish jet-liner which had cleared for Miami and so avoided customs inspection.

‘Four months ago this camera was launched in a Soviet satellite on a polar orbit, crossing the American Middle West seven times a day. Those satellites can stay up indefinitely, but in just three days, with perfect weather conditions, the Soviets had all the pictures they ever wanted — pictures of every American missile launching base west of the Mississippi. Every time this camera took a picture of a small section of the United States another smaller camera in the satellite, pointing vertically upwards, took a fix on the stars. Then it was only a matter of checking map co-ordinates and they could have a Soviet inter-continental ballistic missile ranged in on every launching-pad in America. But first they had to have the pictures. ‘Radio transmission is no good, there’s far too much quality and detail lost in the process — and you must remember this was a relatively tiny negative in the first place. So they had to have the actual films. There are two ways of doing this — bring the satellite back to earth or have it eject a capsule with the films. The Americans, with their Discoverer tests, have perfected the art of using planes to snatch falling capsules from the sky. The Russians haven’t, although we do know they have a technique for ejecting capsules should a satellite run amok. So they had to bring the satellite down. They planned to bring it down some two hundred miles east of the Caspian. But something went wrong. Precisely what we don’t know, but our experts say that it could only have been due to the fact that the retro-rockets on one side of the capsule failed to fire when given the radio signal to do so. You are beginning to understand, gentlemen?’

‘We are beginning to understand indeed.’ It was Jeremy who spoke, his voice very soft. ‘The satellite took up a different orbit.’

‘That’s what happened. The rockets firing on one side didn’t slow her up any that mattered, they just knocked her far off course. A new and wobbly orbit that passed through Alaska, south over the Pacific, across Grahamland in Antarctica and directly south of South America, up over Africa and Western Europe, then round the North Pole in a shallow curve, maybe two hundred miles distant from it at the nearest point.

‘Now, the only way the Russians could get the films was by ejecting the capsule, for with retro-rockets firing on one side only they knew that even if they did manage to slow up the satellite sufficiently for it to leave orbit, they had no idea where it would go. But the damnably awkward part of it from the Russians’ viewpoint was that nowhere in its orbit of the earth did the satellite pass over the Soviet Union or any sphere of Communist influence whatsoever. Worse, ninety per cent of its travel was over open sea and if they brought it down there they would never see their films again as the capsule is so heavily coated with aluminium and Pyroceram to withstand the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere that it was much heavier than water. And as I said, they had never developed the American know-how of snatching falling capsules out of the air — and you will appreciate that they couldn’t very well ask the Americans to do the job for them.

‘So they decided to bring it down in the only safe place open to them — either the polar ice-cap in the north or the Antarctic in the south. You will remember, Captain, that I told you that I had just returned from the Antarctic. The Russians have a couple of geophysical stations there and, up until a few days ago, we thought that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the capsule might be brought down there. But we were wrong. Their nearest station in the Antarctic was 300 miles from the path of orbit — and no field parties were stirring from home.’

‘So they decided to bring it down in the vicinity of Drift Ice Station Zebra?’ Jolly asked quietly. It was a sign of his perturbation that he didn’t even call me ‘old boy‘.

‘Drift Ice Station Zebra wasn’t even in existence at the time the satellite went haywire, although all preparations were complete. We had arranged for Canada to lend us a St Lawrence ice-breaker to set up the station but the Russians in a burst of friendly goodwill and international co-operation offered us the atomic-powered Lenin, the finest ice-breaker in the world. They wanted to make good and sure that Zebra was set up and set up in good time. It was. The east-west drift of the ice-cap was unusually slow this year and almost eight weeks elapsed after the setting up of the station until it was directly beneath the flight trajectory of the satellite.

‘You knew what the Russians had in mind?’ Hansen asked.

‘We knew. But the Russians had no idea whatsoever that we were on to them. They had no idea that one of the pieces of equipment which was landed at Zebra was a satellite monitor which would tell Major Halliwell when the satellite received the radio signal to eject the capsule.’ I looked slowly round the Zebra survivors. ‘I’ll wager none of you knew that. But Major Halliwell did — and the three other men who slept in his hut where this machine was located.

‘What we did not know was the identity of the member of Zebra’s company that had been suborned by the Russians. We were certain someone must have been but had no idea who it was. Every one of you had first-class security clearances. But someone was suborned — and that someone, when he arrived back in Britain, would have been a wealthy man for the rest of his days. In addition to leaving what was in effect an enemy agent planted in Zebra, the Soviets also left a portable monitor — an electronic device for tuning in on a particular radio signal which would be activated inside the capsule at the moment of its ejection from the satellite. A capsule can be so accurately ejected 300 miles up that it will land within a mile of its target, but the ice-cap is pretty rough territory and dark most of the time, so this monitor would enable our friend to locate the capsule which would keep on emitting its signal for at least, I suppose, twenty-four hours after landing. Our friend took the monitor and went out looking for the capsule. He found it, released it from its drogue and brought it back to the station. You are still with me, gentlemen? Especially one particular gentleman?’

‘I think we are all with you, Dr Carpenter,’ Commander Swanson said softly. ‘Every last one of us.’

‘Fine. Well, unfortunately, Major Halliwell and his three companions also knew that the satellite had ejected its capsule — don’t forget that they were monitoring this satellite twenty-four hours a day. They knew that someone was going to go looking for it pretty soon, but who that someone would be they had no idea. Anyway, Major Halliwell posted one of his men to keep watch. It was a wild night, bitterly cold, with a gale blowing an ice-storm before it, but he kept a pretty good watch all the same. He either bumped into our friend returning with the capsule or, more probably, saw a light in a cabin, investigated, found our friend stripping the film from the capsule and, instead of going quietly away and reporting to Major Halliwell, he went in and challenged this man. If that was the way of it, it was a bad mistake, the last he ever made. He got a knife between the ribs.’ I gazed at all the Zebra survivors in turn. ‘I wonder which one of you did it? Whoever it was, he wasn’t very expert. He broke off the blade inside the chest. I found it there.’ I was looking at Swanson and he didn’t bat an eyelid. He knew I hadn’t found the blade there: he had found the haft in the petrol tank. But there was time enough to tell them that.

‘When the man he had posted didn’t turn up, Major Halliwell got worried. It must have been something like that. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Our friend with the broken knife was on the alert now, he knew someone was on to him — it must have come as a pretty severe shock, he’d thought himself completely unsuspected — and when the second man the Major sent turned up he was ready for him. He had to kill him — for the first man was lying dead in his cabin. Apart from his broken knife he’d also a gun. He used it.

‘Both those men had come from Halliwell’s cabin, the killer knew that Halliwell must have sent them and that he and the other man still in the major’s cabin would be around in double quick time if the second watcher didn’t report back immediately. He decided not to wait for thathe’d burnt his boats anyway. He took his gun, went into Major Halliwell’s cabin and shot him and the other man as they lay on their beds. I know that because the bullets in their heads entered low from the front and emerged high at the back — the angle the bullets would naturally take if the killer was standing at the foot of their beds and fired at them as they were lying down. I suppose this is as good a time as any to say that my name is not really Carpenter. It’s Halliwell. Major Halliwell was my elder brother.’

‘Good God!’ Dr Jolly whispered. ‘Good God above!’

‘One thing the killer knew it was essential to do right away — to conceal the traces of his crime. There was only one way — burn the bodies out of all recognition. So he dragged a couple of drums of oil out of the fuel store, poured them against the walls of Major Halliwell’s huthe’d already pulled in there the first two men he’d killed — and set fire to it. For good measure he also set fire to the fuel store. A thorough type, my friends, a man who never did anything by halves.’

The men seated around the wardroom table were dazed and shocked, uncomprehending and incredulous. But they were only incredulous because the enormity of the whole thing was beyond them. But not beyond them all.

‘I’m a man with a curious turn of mind,’ I went on. ‘I wondered why sick, burnt, exhausted men had wasted their time and their little strength in shifting the dead men into the lab. Because someone had suggested that it might be a good thing to do, the decent thing to do. The real reason, of course, was to discourage anyone from going there. I looked under the floorboards and what did I find? Forty Nife cells in first-class condition, stores of food, a radio-sonde balloon and a hydrogen cylinder for inflating the balloon. I had expected to find the Nife cells — Kinnaird, here, has told us that there were a good many reserves, but Nife cells won’t be destroyed in a fire. Buckled and bent a bit, but not destroyed. I hadn’t expected to find the other items of equipment, but they made everything clear.

‘The killer had had bad luck on two counts -being found out and with the weather. The weather really put the crimp on all his plans. The idea was that when conditions were favourable he’d send the films up into the sky attached to a radio-sonde balloon which could be swept up by a Russian plane: snatching a falling capsule out of the sky it very tricky indeed; snaring a stationary balloon is dead easy. The relatively unused Nife cells our friend used for keeping in radio touch with his pals to let them know when the weather had cleared and when he was going to send the balloon up. There is no privacy on the air-waves, so he used a special code; when he no longer had any need for it he destroyed the code by the only safe method of destruction in the Arctic — fire. I found scores of pieces of charred paper embedded in the walls of one of the huts where the wind had carried them from the met. office after our friend had thrown the ashes away.

‘The killer also made sure that only those few worn-out Nife cells were used to send the S O S’s and to contact the Dolphin. By losing contact with us so frequently, and by sending such a blurred transmission, he tried to delay our arrival here so as to give the weather a chance to clear up and let him fly off his balloon. Incidentally you may have heard radio reports — it was in all the British newspapers — that Russian as well as American and British planes scoured this area immediately after the fire. The British and Americans were looking for Zebra: the Russians were looking for a radio-sonde balloon. So was the ice-breaker Dvina when it tried to smash its way through here a few days ago. But there have been no more Russian planes: our friend radioed his friends to say that there was no hope of the weather clearing, that the Dolphin had arrived and that they would have to take the films back with them on the submarine.’

‘One moment, Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson interrupted in a careful sort of voice. ‘Are you saying that those films are aboard this ship now?’

‘I’ll be very much surprised if they aren’t, Commander. The other attempt to delay us, of course, was by making a direct attack on the Dolphin itself. When it became known that the Dolphin was to make an attempt to reach Zebra, orders went through to Scotland to cripple the ship. Red Clydeside is no more red than any other maritime centre in Britain, but you’ll find Communists in practically every shipyard in the country — and, more often than not, their mates don’t know who they are. There was no intention, of course, of causing any fatal accident — and, as far as whoever was responsible for leaving the tube doors open was concerned, there was no reason why there should be. International espionage in peacetime shuns violence — which is why our friend here is going to be very unpopular with his masters. Like Britain or America, they’ll adopt any legitimate or illegitimate tactic to gain their espionage end — but they stop short of murder, just as we do. Murder was no part of the Soviet plan.’

‘Who is it, Dr Carpenter?’ Jeremy said very quietly. ‘For God’s sake, who is it? There’s nine of us here and — do you know who it is?’

‘I know. And only six, not nine, can be under suspicion. The ones who kept radio watches after the disaster. Captain Folsom and the two Harringtons here were completely immobilised. We have the word of all of you for that. So that, Jeremy, just leaves yourself, Kinnaird, Dr Jolly, Hassard, Naseby and Hewson. Murder for gain, and high treason. There’s only one answer for that. The trial will be over the day it begins: three weeks later it will all be over. You’re a very clever man, my friend. You’re more than that, you’re brilliant. But I’m afraid it’s the end of the road for you, Dr Jolly.’

They didn’t get it. For long seconds they didn’t get it. They were too shocked, too stunned. They’d heard my words all right, but the meaning hadn’t registered immediately. But it was beginning to register now for like marionettes under the guidance of a master puppeteer they all slowly turned their heads and stared at Jolly. Jolly himself rose slowly to his feet and took two paces towards me, his eyes wide, his face shocked, his mouth working.

‘Me?’ His voice was low and hoarse and unbelieving. ’Me? Are you — are you mad, Dr Carpenter? In the name of God, man —’

I hit him. I don’t know why I hit him, a crimson haze seemed to blur my vision, and Jolly was staggering back to crash on the deck, holding both hands to smashed lips and nose, before I could realise what I had done. I think if I had had a knife or a gun in my hand then, I would have killed him. I would have killed him the way I would have killed a fer-de-lance, a black widow spider or any other such dark and evil and deadly thing, without thought or compunction or mercy. Gradually the haze cleared from my eyes. No one had stirred. No one had stirred an inch. Jolly pushed himself painfully to his knees and then his feet and collapsed heavily in his seat by the table. He was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to his face. There was utter silence in the room.

‘My brother, Jolly,’ I said. ‘My brother and all the dead men on Zebra. Do you know what I hope?’ I said. I hope that something goes wrong with the hangman’s rope and that you take a long, long time to die.’

He took the handkerchief from his mouth.

‘You’re crazy, man,’ he whispered between smashed and already puffing lips. ‘You don’t know what you are saying.’

‘The jury at the Old Bailey will be the best judge of that. I’ve been on to you now, Jolly, for almost exactly sixty hours.’

‘What did you say?’ Swanson demanded. ‘You’ve known for sixty hours!’

‘I knew I’d have to face your wrath some time or other, Commander,’ I said. Unaccountably, I was beginning to feel very tired, weary and heartsick of the whole business. ‘But if you had known who he was you’d have locked him up straightaway. You said so in so many words. I wanted to see where the trail led to in Britain, who his associates and contacts would be. I had splendid visions of smashing a whole spy ring. But I’m afraid the trail is cold. It ends right here. Please hear me out.

‘Tell me, did no one think it strange that when Jolly came staggering out of his hut when it caught fire that he should have collapsed and remained that way? Jolly claimed that he had been asphyxiated. Well, he wasn’t asphyxiated inside the hut because he managed to come out under his own steam. Then he collapsed. Curious. Fresh air invariably revives people. But not Jolly. He’s a special breed. He wanted to make it clear to everyone that he had nothing to do with the fire. Just to drive home the point, he has repeatedly emphasised that he is not a man of action. If he isn’t, then I’ve never met one.’

‘You can hardly call that proof of guilt,’ Swanson interrupted.

‘I’m not adducing evidence,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m merely introducing pointers. Pointer number two. You, Naseby, felt pretty bad about your failure to wake up your two friends, Flanders and Bryce. You could have shaken them for an hour and not woken them up. Jolly, here, used either ether or chloroform to lay them out. This was after he had killed Major Halliwell and the three others; but before he started getting busy with matches. He realised that if he burnt the place down there might be a long, long wait before rescue came and he was going to make damned certain that he wasn’t going to go hungry. If the rest of you had died from starvation — well, that was just your bad luck. But Flanders and Bryce lay between him and the food. Didn’t it strike you as very strange, Naseby, that your shouting and shaking had no effect? The only reason could be that they had been drugged — and only one man had access to drugs. Also, you said that both Hewson and yourself felt pretty groggy. No wonder. It was a pretty small hut and the chloroform or ether fumes had reached and affected Hewson and yourself — normally you’d have smelt it on waking up, but the stink of burning diesel obliterates every other smell. Again, I know this is not proof of any kind.

‘Third pointer. I asked Captain Folsom this morning who had given the orders for the dead men to be put in the lab. He said he had. But, he remembered, it was Jolly’s suggestion to him. Something learnedly medical about helping the morale of the survivors by putting the charred corpses out of sight.

‘Fourth pointer. Jolly said that how the fire started was unimportant. A crude attempt to sidetrack me. Jolly knew as well as I did that it was all-important. I suppose, by the way. Jolly, that you deliberately jammed all the fire-extinguishers you could before you started the fire. About that fire, Commander. Remember you were a bit suspicious of Hewson, here, because he said the fuel drums hadn’t started exploding until he was on his way to the main bunkhouse. He was telling the truth. There were no fewer than four drums in the fuel stores that didn’t explode — the ones Jolly, here, used to pour against the huts to start the fire. How am I doing, Dr Jolly?’

‘It’s all a nightmare,’ he said very quietly. ‘It’s a nightmare. Before God, I know nothing of any of this.’

‘Pointer number five. For some reason that is unclear to me Jolly wanted to delay the Dolphin on its return trip. He could best do this, he reckoned, if Bolton and Brownell, the two very sick men still left out on the station, could be judged to be too sick to be transferred to the Dolphin. The snag was, there were two other doctors around who might say that they were fit to be transferred. So he tried, with a fair measure of success, to eliminate us.

‘First Benson. Didn’t it strike you as strange, Commander, that the request for the survivors to be allowed to attend the funeral of Grant and Lieutenant Mills should have come from Naseby in the first place, then Kinnaird? Jolly, as the senior man of the party with Captain Folsom, here, temporarily unfit, was the obvious man to make the approach — but he didn’t want to go calling too much attention to himself. Doubtless by dropping hints, he engineered it so that someone else should do it for him. Now Jolly had noticed how glass-smooth and slippery the ice-banked sides of the sail were and he made a point of seeing that Benson went up the rope immediately ahead of him. You must remember it was almost pitch dark — just light enough for Jolly to make out the vague outline of Benson’s head from the wash of light from the bridge as it cleared the top of the rail. A swift outward tug on the rope and Benson overbalanced. It seemed that he had fallen on top of Jolly. But only seemed. The loud sharp crack I heard a fraction of a second after Benson’s body struck was not caused by his head hitting the ice — it was caused by Jolly, here, trying to kick his head off. Did you hurt your toes much, Jolly?’

‘You’re mad,’ he said mechanically. ‘This is utter nonsense. Even if it wasn’t nonsense, you couldn’t prove a word of it.’

‘We’ll see. Jolly claimed that Benson fell on top of him. He even flung himself on the ice and cracked his head to give some verisimilitude to his story — our pal never misses any of the angles. I felt the slight bump on his head. But he wasn’t laid out. He was faking. He recovered just that little bit too quickly and easily when he got back to the sick-bay. And it was then that he made his first mistake, the mistake that put me on to him — and should have put me on guard for an attack against myself. You were there, Commander.’

‘I’ve missed everything else,’ Swanson said bitterly. ‘Do you want me to spoil a hundred per cent record?’

‘When Jolly came to he saw Benson lying there. All he could see of him was a blanket and a big gauze pack covering the back of his head. As far as Jolly was concerned, it could have been anybody — it had been pitch dark when the accident occurred. But what did he say? I remember his exact words. He said: ‘Of course, of course. Yes, that’s it. He fell on top of me, didn’t he?’ He never thought to ask who it was — the natural, the inevitable question in the circumstances. But Jolly didn’t have to ask. He knew.’

‘He knew.’ Swanson stared at Jolly with cold bleak eyes and there was no doubt in his mind now about Jolly. ‘You have it to rights, Dr Carpenter. He knew.’

‘And then he had a go at me. Can’t prove a thing, of course. But he was there when I asked you where the medical store was, and he no doubt nipped down smartly behind Henry and myself and loosened the latch on the hatch-cover. But he didn’t achieve quite the same high degree of success this time. Even so, when we went out to the station next morning he still tried to stop Brownell and Bolton from being transferred back to the ship by saying Bolton was too ill. But you overruled him.’

‘I was right about Bolton,’ Jolly said. He seemed strangely quiet now. ‘Bolton died.’

‘He died,’ I agreed. ‘He died because you murdered him and for Bolton alone I can make certain you hang. For a reason I still don’t know. Jolly was still determined to stop this ship. Delay it, anyway. I think he wanted only an hour or two’s delay. So he proposed to start a small fire, nothing much, just enough to cause a small scare and have the reactor shut down temporarily. As the site of his fire he chose the machinery space — the one place in the ship where he could casually let something drop and where it would lie hidden, for hours if need be, among the maze of pipes down there. In the sick-bay he concocted some type of delayed action chemical fuse which would give off plenty of smoke but very little flame — there are a dozen combinations of acids and chemicals that can bring this about and our friend will be a highly-trained expert well versed in all of them. Now all Jolly wanted was an excuse to pass through the engine-room when it would be nice and quiet and virtually deserted. In the middle of the night. He fixed this too. He can fix anything. He is a very, very clever man indeed is our pal here; he’s also an utterly ruthless fiend.

‘Late on the evening of the night before the fire the good healer here made a round of his patients. I went with him. One of the men he treated was Bolton in the nucleonics lab. — and, of course, to get to the nucleonics lab. you have to pass through the engine-room. There was an enlisted man watching over the patients and Jolly left special word that he was to be called at any hour if Bolton became any worse. He was called. I checked with the engine-room staff after the fire. The engineer officer was on watch and two others were in the manoeuvring-room but an engine-man carrying out a routine lubrication job saw him passing through the engine-room about 1.30 a.m. in answer to a call from the man watching over the patients. He took the opportunity to drop his little chemical fuse as he was passing by the machinery space. What he didn’t know was that his little toy lodged on or near the oil-saturated lagging on the housing of the starboard turbo-generator and that when it went off it would generate sufficient heat to set the lagging on fire.’

Swanson looked at Jolly, bleakly and for a long time, then turned to me and shook his head. ‘I can’t wear that, Dr Carpenter. This phone call because a patient just happens to turn sick. Jolly is not the man to leave anything to chance.’

‘He isn’t,’ I agreed. ‘He didn’t. Up in the refrigerator in the sickbay I have an exhibit for the Old Bailey. A sheet of aluminium foil liberally covered with Jolly’s fingerprints. Smeared on this foil is the remains of a salve. That foil was what Jolly had bandaged on to Bolton’s burnt forearm that night, just after he had given him painkilling shots — Bolton was suffering very badly. But before Jolly put the salve on the foil he spread on something else first — a layer of sodium chloride -common or garden household salt. Jolly knew that the drugs he had given Bolton would keep him under for three or four hours; he also knew that by the time Bolton had regained consciousness body heat would have thinned the salve and brought the salt into contact with the raw flesh on the forearm. Bolton, he knew, when he came out from the effects of the drugs, would come out screaming in agony. Can you imagine what it must have been like: the whole forearm a mass of raw flesh — and covered with salt? When he died soon after, he died from shock. Our good healer here — a lovable little lad, isn’t he?

‘Well, that’s Jolly. Incidentally, you can discount most of the gallant doctor’s heroism during the fire — although he was understandably as anxious as any of us that we survive. The first time he went into the engine-room it was too damned hot and uncomfortable for his liking so he just lay down on the floor and let someone carry him for’ard to where the fresh air was. Later —’

‘He’d his mask off,’ Hansen objected.

‘He took it off. You can hold your breath for ten or fifteen seconds — don’t you think Jolly can too? Later on, when he was performing his heroics in the engine-room it was because conditions there were better, conditions outside were worse — and because by going into the engine-room he was entitled to a closed-circuit breathing set. Jolly got more clean air last night than any of us. He doesn’t mind if he causes someone to die screaming his head off in agony — but he himself isn’t going to suffer the slightest degree of hardship. Not if he can help it. Isn’t that so, Jolly?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Where are the films, Jolly?’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ he said in a quiet toneless voice. ‘Before God, my hands are clean.’

‘How about your fingerprints on that foil with the salt on it?’

‘Any doctor can make a mistake.’

‘My God! Mistake! Where are they, Jolly — the films?’

‘For God’s sake leave me alone,’ he said tiredly.

‘Have it your own way.’ I looked at Swanson. ‘Got some nice secure place where you can lock this character up?’

‘I certainly have,’ Swanson said grimly. ‘I’ll conduct him there in person.’

‘No one’s conducting anyone anywhere,’ Kinnaird said. He was looking at me and I didn’t care very much for the way he was looking at me. I didn’t care very much either for what he held in his hand, a very nasty-looking Luger. It was cradled in his fist as if it had grown there and it was pointing straight between my eyes.

THIRTEEN

‘Clever, clever counter-espionage, Carpenter,’ Dr Jolly murmured. ‘How swiftly the fortunes of war change, old boy. But you shouldn’t be surprised really. You haven’t found out anything that actually matters, but surely you should have found out enough to realise that you are operating out of your class. Please don’t try anything foolish. Kinnaird is one of the finest pistol shots I have ever known — and you will observe how strategically he’s placed so that everyone in the room is covered.’

He delicately patted his still-bleeding mouth with a handkerchief, rose, went behind me and ran his hands quickly down my clothes.

‘My word,’ he said. ‘Not even carrying a gun. You really are unprepared, Carpenter. Turn round, will you, so that your back is to Kinnaird’s gun?’

I turned round. He smiled pleasantly then hit me twice across the face with all his strength, first with the back of his right hand and then with the back of the left. I staggered, but didn’t fall down. I could taste the salt of blood.

‘Can’t even call it regrettable loss of temper,’ Jolly said with satisfaction. ‘Did it deliberately and with malice aforethought. Enjoyed it, too.’

‘So Kinnaird was the killer,’ I said slowly, thickly. ‘He was the man with the gun?’

‘Wouldn’t want to take all the credit, mate,’ Kinnaird said modestly. ‘Let’s say we sorted them out fifty-fifty.’

‘You were the one who went out with the monitor to find the capsule,’ I nodded. ‘That’s why you got your face so badly frostbitten.’

‘Got lost,’ Kinnaird admitted. ‘Thought I’d never find the damned station again.’

‘Jolly and Kinnaird,’ Jeremy said wonderingly. ‘Jolly and Kinnaird. Your own mates. You two filthy murderous —’

‘Be quiet,’ Jolly ordered. ‘Kinnaird, don’t bother answering questions. Unlike Carpenter here, I take no pleasure in outlining my modus operandi and explaining at length how clever I’ve been. As you observed, Carpenter, I’m a man of action. Commander Swanson, get on that phone there, call up your control room, order your ship to surface and steam north.’

‘You’re becoming too ambitious, Jolly,’ Swanson said calmly. ‘You can’t hi-jack a submarine.’

‘Kinnaird,’ Jolly said. ‘Point your gun at Hansen’s stomach. When I reach the count of five, pull the trigger. One, two, three —’

Swanson half-raised a hand in acknowledgment of defeat, crossed to the wall-phone, gave the necessary orders, hung up and came back to stand beside me. He looked at me without either respect or admiration. I looked round all the other people in the room. Jolly, Hansen and Rawlings standing, Zabrinski sitting on a chair by himself with the now disregarded copy of the Dolphin Daze on his knees, all the others sitting round the table, Kinnaird well clear of them, the gun very steady in his hand. So very steady. No one seemed to be contemplating any heroics. For the most part everyone was too shocked, too dazed, to think of anything.

‘Hi-jacking a nuclear submarine is an intriguing prospect — and no doubt would be a highly profitable one, Commander Swanson,’ Jolly said. ‘But I know my limitations. No, old top, we shall simply be leaving you. Not very many miles from here is a naval vessel with a helicopter on its after deck. In a little while, Commander, you will send a wireless message on a certain frequency giving our position: the helicopter will pick us up. And even if your crippled engine would stand the strain I wouldn’t advise you to come chasing after that ship with ideas about torpedoing it or anything of that dramatic ilk. Apart from the fact that you wouldn’t like to be responsible for triggering off a nuclear war, you couldn’t catch it, anyway. You won’t even be able to see the ship, Commander — and if you did it wouldn’t matter, anyway. It has no nationality markings.’

‘Where are the films?’ I asked.

‘They’re already aboard that naval vessel.’

‘They’re what?’ Swanson demanded. ‘How in hell’s name can they be?’

‘Sorry and all that, old boy. I repeat that unlike Carpenter, here, I don’t go around shooting off my mouth. A professional, my dear captain, never gives information about his methods.’

‘So you get off with it,’ I said bitterly. My mouth felt thick and swollen.

‘Don’t see what’s to stop us. Crimes don’t always come home to roost, you know.’

‘Eight men murdered,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Eight men. You can stand there and cheerfully admit that you are responsible for the deaths of eight men.’

‘Cheerfully?’ he said consideringly. ‘No, not cheerfully. I’m a professional, and a professional never kills unnecessarily. But this time it was necessary. That’s all.’

‘That’s the second time you’ve used the word “professional”,’ I said slowly. I was wrong on one theory. You weren’t just suborned after the Zebra team had been picked. You’ve been at this game a long time — you’re too good not to have been.’

‘Fifteen years, old lad,’ Jolly said calmly. ‘Kinnaird and I — we were the best team in Britain. Our usefulness in that country, unfortunately, is over. I should imagine that our — um — exceptional talents can be employed elsewhere.’

‘You admit to all those murders?’ I asked.

He looked at me in sudden cold speculation. ‘A damned funny question, Carpenter. Of course. I’ve told you. Why?’

‘And do you, Kinnaird?’

He looked at me in bleak suspicion. ‘Why ask?’

‘You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.’ At the corner of my range of vision I could see Jolly looking at me with narrowed eyes. He was very sensitive to atmosphere, he knew there was something off-key.

‘You know damn’ well what I did, mate,’ Kinnaird said coldly.

‘So there we have it. In the presence of no less than twelve witnesses, you both confess to murder. You shouldn’t have done that, you know. I’ll answer your question, Kinnaird. I wanted to have an oral confession from you because, apart from the sheet of aluminium foil and something I’ll mention in a minute, we have no actual proof at all against either of you. But now we have your confessions. Your great talents are not going to be used in any other sphere, I’m afraid. You’ll never see that helicopter or that naval vessel. You’ll both die jerking on the end of a rope.’

‘What rubbish is this?’ Jolly asked contemptuously. But there was worry under the contempt. ‘What last-minute despairing bluff are you trying to pull, Carpenter?’

I ignored his question. I said: ‘I’ve been on to Kinnaird, here, for some sixty hours also, Jolly. But I had to play it this way. Without letting you gain what appeared to be the upper hand you would never have admitted to the crimes. But now you have.’

‘Don’t fall for it, old boy,’ Jolly said to Kinnaird. ‘It’s just some desperate bluff. He never had any idea that you were in on this.’

‘When I knew you were one of the killers,’ I said to Jolly, ‘I was almost certain Kinnaird had to be another. You shared the same cabin and unless Kinnaird had been sapped or drugged he had to be in on it. He was neither. He was in on it. That door wasn’t jammed when Naseby ran round to the radio room to warn you — the two of you were leaning all your weight against it to give the impression that it had been closed for hours and that ice had formed.

‘By the same token, young Grant, the assistant radio operator, was in cahoots with you — or he wasn’t. If he wasn’t, he would have to be silenced. He wasn’t. So you silenced him. After I’d caught on to the two of you I had a good look at Grant. I went out and dug him up from where we’d buried him. Rawlings and I. I found a great big bruise at the base of his neck. He surprised you in something, or he woke when you knifed or shot one of Major Halliwell’s men, and you laid him out. You didn’t bother killing him, you were about to set the hut on fire and incinerate him, so killing would have been pointless. But you didn’t reckon on Captain Folsom, here, going in and bringing him out — alive.

‘That was most damnably awkward for you, wasn’t it, Jolly? He was unconscious but when and if he recovered consciousness he could blow the whole works on you. But you couldn’t get at him to finish him off, could you? The bunkhouse was full of people, most of them suffering so severely that sleep was impossible for them. When we arrived on the scene you got desperate. Grant was showing signs of regaining consciousness. You took a chance, but not all that much of a chance. Remember how surprised I was to find that you had used up all my morphine? Well, I was surprised then. But not now. I know now where it went. You gave him an injection of morphine — and you made damn’ sure the hypodermic had a lethal dose. Am I correct?’

‘You’re cleverer than I thought you were,’ he said calmly. ‘Maybe I have misjudged you a little. But it still makes no difference, old boy.’

‘I wonder. If I’d known about Kinnaird so long why do you think I allowed a situation to develop where you could apparently turn the tables?’

‘Apparently is not the word you want. And the answer to your question is easy. You didn’t know Kinnaird had a gun.’

‘No?’ I looked at Kinnaird. ‘Are you sure that thing works?’

‘Don’t come that old stuff with me, mate,’ Kinnaird said in contempt.

‘I just wondered,’ I said mildly. ‘I thought perhaps the petrol in the tractor’s tank might have removed all the lubricating oil.’

Jolly came close to me, his face tight and cold. ‘You knew about this? What goes on, Carpenter?’

‘It was actually Commander Swanson, here, who found the gun in the tank,’ I said. ‘You had to leave it there because you knew you’d all be getting a good clean-up and medical examination when we got you on board and it would have been bound to be discovered. But a murderer — a professional, Jolly — will never part with his gun unless he is compelled to. I knew if you got the slightest chance you would go back for it. So I put it back in the tank.’

‘The hell you did!’ Swanson was as nearly angry as I’d ever seen him. ‘Forget to tell me, didn’t you?’

‘I must have done. That was after I’d cottoned on to you, Jolly. I wasn’t absolutely sure you had a partner, but I knew if you had it must be Kinnaird. So I put the gun back there in the middle of the night and I made good and certain that you, Jolly, didn’t get the chance to go anywhere near the tractor shed at any time. But the gun vanished that following morning when everyone was out sampling the fresh air. So then I knew you had an accomplice. But the real reason for planting that gun, of course, is that without it you’d never have talked. But now you have talked and it’s all finished. Put up that gun, Kinnaird.’

‘I’m afraid your bluff’s run out, mate.’ The gun was pointing directly at my face.

‘Your last chance, Kinnaird. Please pay attention to what I am saying. Put up that gun or you will be requiring the services of a doctor within twenty seconds.’

He said something, short and unprintable. I said: ‘It’s on your own head. Rawlings, you know what to do.’

Every head turned towards Rawlings who was standing leaning negligently against a bulkhead, his hands crossed lightly in front of him. Kinnaird looked too, the Luger following the direction of his eyes. A gun barked, the sharp flat crack of a Mannlicher-Schoenauer, Kinnaird screamed and his gun spun from his smashed hand. Zabrinski, holding my automatic in one hand and his copy of the Dolphin Daze — now with a neat charred hole through the middle — in the other, regarded his handiwork admiringly then turned to me. ‘Was that how you wanted it done, Doc?’

‘That was exactly how I wanted it done, Zabrinski. Thank you very much. A first-class job.’

‘A first-class job,’ Rawlings sniffed. He retrieved the fallen Luger and pointed it in Jolly’s general direction. ‘At four feet even Zabrinski couldn’t miss.’ He dug into a pocket, pulled out a roll of bandage and tossed it to Jolly. ‘We kinda thought we might be having to use this so we came prepared. Dr Carpenter said your pal here would be requiring the services of a doctor. He is. You’re a doctor. Get busy.’

‘Do it yourself,’ Jolly snarled. No ‘old boy,’ no ‘old top’. The bonhomie was gone and gone for ever.

Rawlings looked at Swanson and said woodenly: ‘Permission to hit Dr Jolly over the head with this little old gun, sir?’

‘Permission granted,’ Swanson said grimly. But no further persuasion was necessary. Jolly cursed and started ripping the cover off the bandage.

For almost a minute there was silence in the room while we watched Jolly carry out a rough, ready and far from gentle repair job on Kinnaird’s hand. Then Swanson said slowly: ‘I still don’t understand how in the devil Jolly got rid of the film.’

‘It was easy. Ten minutes thinking and you’d get it. They waited until we had cleared the icecap then they took the films, shoved them in a waterproof bag, attached a yellow dye marker to the bag then pumped it out through the garbage disposal unit in the galley. Remember, they’d been on a tour of the ship and seen it — although the suggestion was probably radioed them by a naval expert. I had Rawlings posted on watch in the early hours of this morning and he saw Kinnaird go into the galley about half past four. Maybe he just wanted a ham sandwich, I don’t know. But Rawlings says he had the bag and marker with him when he sneaked in and empty hands when he came out. The bag would float to the surface and the marker stain thousands of square yards of water. The naval ship up top would have worked out our shortest route from Zebra to Scotland and would be within a few miles of our point of exit from the ice-pack. It could probably have located it without the helicopter: but the chopper made it dead certain.

‘Incidentally, I was being rather less than accurate when I said I didn’t know the reason for Jolly’s attempts to delay us. I knew all along. He’d been told that the ship couldn’t reach our exit point until such and such a time and that it was vital to delay us until then. Jolly, here, even had the effrontery to check with me what time we would be emerging from the ice-pack.’

Jolly looked up from Kinnaird’s hand and his face was twisted in a mask of malevolence.

‘You win, Carpenter. So you win. All along the line. But you lost out in the only thing that really mattered. They got the films — the films showing the location, as you said, of nearly every missile base in America. And that was all that mattered. Ten million pounds couldn’t buy that information. But we got it.’ He bared his teeth in a savage smile. ‘We may have lost out, Carpenter, but we’re professionals. We did our job.’

‘They got the films, all right,’ I acknowledged. ‘And I’d give a year’s salary to see the faces of the men who develop them. Listen carefully, Jolly. Your main reason in trying to cripple Benson and myself was not so much that you could have the say-so on Bolton’s health and so delay us: your main reason, your over-riding reason, was that you wanted to be the only doctor on the ship so that it could only be you who would carry out the X-ray on Zabrinski’s ankle here and remove the plaster cast. Literally everything hinged on that: basically, nothing else mattered. That was why you took such a desperate chance in crippling me when you heard me say I intended to X-ray Zabrinski’s ankle the following morning. That was the one move you made that lacked the hallmark of class — of a professional — but then I think you were close to panic. You were lucky.

‘Anyway, you removed the plaster cast two mornings ago and also the films which you had hidden there in oilskin paper when you’d fixed the plaster on to Zabrinski’s leg the first night we arrived in Zebra. A perfect hiding-place. You could always, of course, have wrapped them in bandages covering survivors’ burns, but that would be too dicey. The cast was brilliant.

‘Unfortunately for you and your friends I had removed the original plaster during the previous night, extracted the films from the oiled paper and replaced them with others. That, incidentally, is the second piece of evidence I have on you. There are two perfect sets of prints on the leaders of the satellite films — yours and Kinnaird’s. Along with the salt-covered aluminium foil and the confession freely made in front of witnesses that guarantees you both the eight o’clock walk to the gallows. The gallows and failure, Jolly. You weren’t even a professional. Your friends will never see those films.’

Mouthing soundless words through smashed lips, his face masked in madness and completely oblivious to the two guns, Jolly flung himself at me. He had taken two steps and two only when Rawlings’s gun caught him, not lightly, on the side of the head. He crashed to the floor as if the Brooklyn bridge had fallen in on top of him. Rawlings surveyed him dispassionately.

‘Never did a day’s work that gave me profounder satisfaction,’ he said conversationally. ‘Except, perhaps, those pictures I took with Dr Benson’s camera to give Dr Carpenter, here, some negatives to shove inside that oiled paper.’

‘Pictures of what?’ Swanson asked curiously.

Rawlings grinned happily. ‘All those pin-ups in Doc Benson’s sick-bay. Yogi Bear, Donald Duck, Pluto, Popeye, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — you name it, I got it. The lot. Each a guaranteed work of art — and in glorious Technicolor.’ He smiled a beatific smile. ‘Like Doc Carpenter, here, I’d give a year’s pay to see their faces when they get around to developing those negatives.’

MacLean Goes Everywhere You Do

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Fear is the Key

To W.A. Murray

PROLOGUE

May 3rd, 1958.

If you could call a ten by six wooden box mounted on a four-wheel trailer an office, then I was sitting in my office. I’d been sitting there for four hours, the earphones were beginning to hurt and the darkness was coming in from the swamps and the sea. But if I had to sit there all night, then I was going to do just that: those earphones were the most important thing in the world. They were the only remaining contact between me and all the world held for me.

Peter should have been within radio range three hours ago. It was a long haul north from Barranquilla, but we’d made that haul a score of times before. Our three DCs were old but as mechanically perfect as unceasing care and meticulous attention could make them. Pete was a fine pilot, Barry a crack navigator, the West Caribbean forecast had been good and it was far too early in the season for hurricanes.

There was no conceivable reason why they shouldn’t have been on the air hours ago. As it was, they must have already passed the point of nearest approach and be drawing away to the north, towards Tampa, their destination. Could they have disobeyed my instructions to make the long dog-leg by the Yucatan Strait and flown the direct route over Cuba instead? All sorts of unpleasant things could happen to planes flying over war-torn Cuba those days. It seemed unlikely, and when I thought of the cargo they were carrying it seemed impossible. Where any element of risk was concerned, Pete was even more cautious and far-seeing than myself.

Over in the corner of my office on wheels a radio was playing softly. It was tuned in to some English-speaking station and for the second time that evening some hill-billy guitar-player was singing softly of the death of mother or wife or sweetheart, I wasn’t sure which. ‘My Red Rose Has Turned to White’ it was called. Red for life and white for death. Red and white – the colours of the three planes of our Trans-Carib Air Charter service. I was glad when the song stopped.

There was nothing much else in the office. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet and the big RCA receiver-transmitter powered by a heavy TRS cable that ran through the hole in the door and snaked across the grass and mud and one corner of the tarmac to the main terminal buildings. And there was a mirror. Elizabeth had put that up the only time she’d ever been here and I’d never got around to taking it down.

I looked in the mirror and that was a mistake. Black hair, black brows, dark blue eyes and a white strained haggard face to remind me how desperately worried I was. As if I needed reminding. I looked away and stared out of the window.

That was hardly any better. The only advantage was that I could no longer see myself. I certainly couldn’t see anything else. Even at the best of times there was little enough to see through that window, just the ten empty desolate miles of flat swampland stretching from the Stanley Field airport to Belize, but now that the Honduras rainy season had begun, only that morning, the tiny tidal waves of water rolling endlessly down the single sheet of glass and the torn and lowering and ragged hurrying clouds driving their slanting rain into the parched and steaming earth turned the world beyond the window into a grey and misty nothingness.

I tapped out our call sign. The same result as the last five hundred times I’d tapped it. Silence. I altered the waveband to check that reception was still OK, heard a swift succession of voices, static, singing, music, and homed back on our own frequency again.

The most important flight the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co. had ever made and I had to be stuck here in our tiny sub-office waiting endlessly for the spare carburettor that never came. And until I got it that red and white DC parked not fifty yards away on the apron was about as useful to me right then as a pair of sun-glasses.

They’d have got off from Barranquilla, I was certain of that. I’d had the first news three days ago, the day I’d arrived here, and the coded cable had made no mention of any possible trouble. Everything highly secret, only three permanent civil servants knew anything about it, Lloyd’s willing to carry the risk even although at one of the biggest premiums ever. Even the news, received in a radio report, of an attempted coup d’état yesterday by pro-dictatorship elements to try to prevent the election of the Liberal Lleras hadn’t concerned me too much, for although all military planes and internal services had been grounded, foreign airlines had been excluded: with the state of Colombia’s economy they couldn’t afford to offend even the poorest foreigners, and we just about qualified for that title.

But I’d taken no chances. I’d cabled Pete to take Elizabeth and John with him. If the wrong elements did get in on May 4th – that was tomorrow – and found out what we’d done, the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co. would be for the high jump. But fast. Besides, on the fabulous fee that was being offered for this one freight haul to Tampa …

The phones crackled in my ears. Static, weak, but bang on frequency. As if someone was trying to tune in. I fumbled for the volume switch, turned it to maximum, adjusted the band-switch a hair-line on either side and listened as I’d never listened before. But nothing. No voices, no morse call sign, just nothing. I eased off one of the earphones and reached for a packet of cigarettes.

The radio was still on. For the third time that evening and less than fifteen minutes since I’d heard it last, someone was again singing ‘My Red Rose Has Turned to White.’

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I tore off the phones, crossed to the radio, switched it off with a jerk that almost broke the knob and reached for the bottle under my desk. I poured myself a stiff one, then replaced the headphones.

‘CQR calling CQS. CQR calling CQS. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Over.’

The whisky splashed across the desk, the glass fell and broke with a tinkering crash on the wooden floor as I grabbed for the transmitter switch and mouthpiece.

‘CQS here, CQS here!’ I shouted. ‘Pete, is that you, Pete? Over.’

‘Me. On course, on time. Sorry for the delay.’ The voice was faint and faraway, but even the flat metallic tone of the speaker couldn’t rob it of its tightness, its anger.

‘I’ve been sitting here for hours.’ My own anger sounded through my relief, and I was no sooner conscious of it than ashamed of it. ‘What’s gone wrong, Pete?’

‘This has gone wrong. Some joker knew what we had aboard. Or maybe he just didn’t like us. He put a squib behind the radio. The detonator went off, the primer went off, but the charge – gelignite or TNT or whatever – failed to explode. Almost wrecked the radio – luckily Barry was carrying a full box of spares. He’s only just managed to fix it.’

My face was wet and my hands were shaking. So, when I spoke again, was my voice.

‘You mean someone planted a bomb? Someone tried to blow the crate apart?’

‘Just that.’

‘Anyone – anyone hurt?’ I dreaded the answer.

‘Relax, brother. Only the radio.’

‘Thank God for that. Let’s hope that’s the end of it.’

‘Not to worry. Besides, we have a watchdog now. A US Army Air Force plane has been with us for the past thirty minutes. Barranquilla must have radioed for an escort to see us in.’ Peter laughed dryly. ‘After all, the Americans have a fair interest in this cargo we have aboard.’

‘What kind of plane?’ I was puzzled, it took a pretty good flier to move two or three hundred miles out into the Gulf of Mexico and pick up an incoming plane without any radio directional bearing. ‘Were you warned of this?’

‘No. But not to worry – he’s genuine, all right. We’ve just been talking to him. Knows all about us and our cargo. It’s an old Mustang, fitted with long-range tanks – a jet fighter couldn’t stay up all this time.’ ‘I see.’ That was me, worrying about nothing, as usual. ‘What’s your course?’

‘040 dead.’

‘Position?’

He said something which I couldn’t catch. Reception was deteriorating, static increasing.’

‘Repeat, please?’

‘Barry’s just working it out. He’s been too busy repairing the radio to navigate.’ A pause. ‘He says two minutes.’

‘Let me talk to Elizabeth.’

‘Wilco.’

Another pause, then the voice that was more to me than all the world. ‘Hallo, darling. Sorry we’ve given you such a fright.’ That was Elizabeth. Sorry she’d given me a fright: never a word of herself.

‘Are you all right? I mean, are you sure you’re –’

‘Of course.’ Her voice, too, was faint and faraway, but the gaiety and the courage and the laughter would have come through to me had she been ten thousand miles away. ‘And we’re almost there. I can see the light of land ahead.’ A moment’s silence, then very softly, the faintest whisper of sound. ‘I love you, darling.’

‘Truly?’

‘Always, always, always.’

I leaned back happily in my chair, relaxed and at ease at last, then jerked forwards, on my feet, half-crouched over the transmitter as there came a sudden exclamation from Elizabeth and then the harsh, urgent shout from Pete.

‘He’s diving on us! The bastard’s diving on us and he’s opened fire. All his guns! He’s coming straight –’

The voice choked off in a bubbling, choking moan, a moan pierced and shattered by a high-pitched feminine cry of agony and in the same instant of time there came to me the staccato thunderous crash of exploding cannon-shells that jarred the earphones on my head. Two seconds it lasted, if that. Then there was no more sound of gunfire, no more moaning, no more crying. Nothing.

Two seconds. Only two seconds. Two seconds to take from me all this life held dear for me, two seconds to leave me alone in an empty and desolate and meaningless world.

My red rose had turned to white.

May 3rd, 1958.

ONE

I don’t quite know what I had expected the man behind the raised polished mahogany desk to look like. Subconsciously, I suppose, I’d looked for him to match up with those misconceptions formed by reading and film-going – in the far-off days when I had had time for such things – that had been as extensive as they had been hopelessly unselective. The only permissible variation in the appearances of the county court judges in the southeastern United States, I had come to believe, was in weight – some were dried-up, lean and stringy, others triple-jowled and built to match – but beyond that any departure from the norm was unthinkable. The judge was invariably an elderly man: his uniform was a crumpled white suit, off-white shirt, bootlace necktie and, on the back of his head, a panama with coloured band: the face was usually red, the nose purplish, the drooping tips of the silver-white Mark Twain moustache stained with bourbon or mint-juleps or whatever it was they drank in those parts; the expression was usually aloof, the bearing aristocratic, the moral principles high and the intelligence only moderate.

Judge Mollison was a big disappointment. He didn’t match up with any of the specifications except perhaps the moral principles, and those weren’t visible. He was young, clean-shaven, impeccably dressed in a well-cut light grey tropical worsted suit and ultra-conservative tie and, as for the mint-juleps, I doubt if he’d ever as much as looked at a bar except to wonder how he might close it. He looked benign, and wasn’t: he looked intelligent, and was. He was highly intelligent, and sharp as a needle. And he’d pinned me now with this sharp needle of his intelligence and was watching me wriggle with a disinterested expression that I didn’t much care for.

‘Come, come,’ he murmured gently. ‘We are waiting for an answer, Mr – ah – Chrysler.’ He didn’t actually say that he didn’t believe that my name was Chrysler, but if any of the spectators on the benches missed his meaning they should have stayed at home. Certainly the bunch of round-eyed schoolgirls, courageously collecting credit marks for their civics course by venturing into this atmosphere of sin and vice and iniquity, didn’t miss it: neither did the sad-eyed dark-blonde girl sitting quietly on the front bench and even the big black ape-like character sitting three benches behind her seemed to get it. At least the broken nose beneath the negligible clearance between eyebrows and hairline seemed to twitch. Maybe it was just the flies. The court-room was full of them. I thought sourly that if appearances were in any way a reflection of character he ought to be in the box while I was below watching him. I turned back to the judge.

‘That’s the third time you’ve had trouble in remembering my name, Judge.’ I said reproachfully. ‘By and by some of the more intelligent citizens listening here are going to catch on. You want to be more careful, my friend.’

‘I am not your friend.’ Judge Mollison’s voice was precise and legal and he sounded as if he meant it. ‘And this is not a trial. There are no jurors to influence. This is only a hearing, Mr – ah – Chrysler.’

‘Chrysler. Not ah-Chrysler. But you’re going to make damned certain that there will be a trial, won’t you, Judge?’

‘You would be advised to mind both your language and your manners,’ the judge said sharply. ‘Don’t forget I have the power to remand you in gaol – indefinitely. Once again, your passport. Where is it?’

‘I don’t know. Lost, I suppose.’

‘Where?’

‘If I knew that it wouldn’t be lost.’

‘We are aware of that,’ the judge said dryly. ‘But if we could localize the area we could notify the appropriate police stations where it might have been handed in. When did you first notice you no longer had your passport and where were you at the time?’

‘Three days ago – and you know as well as I do where I was at the time. Sitting in the dining-room of the La Contessa Motel, eating my dinner and minding my own business when Wild Bill Hickock here and his posse jumped me.’ I gestured at the diminutive alpaca-coated sheriff sitting in a cane-bottomed chair in front of the judge’s bench and thought that there could be no height barriers for the law enforcement officers of Marble Springs: the sheriff and his elevator shoes together couldn’t have topped five feet four. Like the judge, the sheriff was a big disappointment to me. While I had hardly expected a Wild West lawman complete with Frontier Colt I had looked for something like either badge or gun. But no badge, no gun. None that I could see. The only gun in sight in the court-house was a short-barrelled Colt revolver stuck in the holster of the police officer who stood behind and a couple of feet to the right of me.

‘They didn’t jump you,’ Judge Mollison was saying patiently. ‘They were looking for a prisoner who had escaped from the nearby camp of one of our state convict road forces. Marble Springs is a small town and strangers easily identifiable. You are a stranger. It was natural –’

‘Natural!’ I interrupted. ‘Look, Judge, I’ve been talking to the gaoler. He says the convict escaped at six o’clock in the afternoon. The Lone Ranger here picks me up at eight. Was I supposed to have escaped, sawed off my irons, had a bath, shampoo, manicure and shave, had a tailor measure and fit a suit for me, bought underclothes, shirt and shoes –’

‘Such things have happened before,’ the judge interrupted. ‘A desperate man, with a gun or club –’

‘––and grown my hair three inches longer all in the space of two hours?’ I finished.

‘It was dark in there, Judge––’ the sheriff began, but Mollison waved him to silence.

‘You objected to being questioned and searched. Why?’

‘As I said I was minding my own business. I was in a respectable restaurant, giving offence to no one. And where I come from a man doesn’t require a state permit to enable him to breathe and walk around.’

‘He doesn’t here either,’ the judge said patiently. ‘All they wanted was a driver’s licence, insurance card, social security card, old letters, any means of identification. You could have complied with their request.’

‘I was willing to.’

‘Then why this?’ The judge nodded down at the sheriff. I followed his glance. Even when I’d first seen him in the La Contessa the sheriff had struck me as being something less than good-looking and I had to admit that the large plasters on his forehead and across the chin and the corner of the mouth did nothing to improve him.

‘What else do you expect?’ I shrugged. ‘When big boys start playing games little boys should stay home with Mother.’ The sheriff was halfway out of his seat, eyes narrowed and ivory-knuckled fists gripping the cane arms of his chair, but the judge waved him back impatiently. ‘The two gorillas he had with him started roughing me up. It was self-defence.’

‘If they assaulted you,’ the judge asked acidly, ‘how do you account for the fact that one of the officers is still in hospital with damaged knee ligaments and the other has a fractured cheekbone, while you are still unmarked?’

‘Out of training, Judge. The state of Florida should spend more money on teaching its law officers to look after themselves. Maybe if they ate fewer hamburgers and drank less beer –’

‘Be silent!’ There was a brief interval while the judge seemed to be regaining control of himself, and I looked round the court again. The schoolgirls were still goggle-eyed, this beat anything they’d ever had in their civics classes before: the dark-blonde in the front seat was looking at me with a curious half-puzzled expression on her face, as if she were trying to work out something: behind her, his gaze lost in infinity, the man with the broken nose chewed on the stump of a dead cigar with machine-like regularity: the court reporter seemed asleep: the attendant at the door surveyed the scene with an Olympian detachment: beyond him, through the open door, I could see the harsh glare of the late afternoon sun on the dusty white street and beyond that again, glimpsed through a straggling grove of palmettos, the twinkling ripple of sunlight reflecting off the green water of the Gulf of Mexico … The judge seemed to have recovered his composure.

‘We have established,’ he said heavily, ‘that you are truculent, intransigent, insolent and a man of violence. You also carry a gun – a small-bore Lilliput, I believe it is called. I could already commit you for contempt of court, for assaulting and obstructing constables of the law in the course of the performance of their duties and for being in illegal possession of a lethal weapon. But I won’t.’ He paused for a moment, then went on: ‘We will have much more serious charges to prefer against you.’

The court reporter opened one eye for a moment, thought better of it and appeared to go to sleep again. The man with the broken nose removed his cigar, examined it, replaced it and resumed his methodical champing. I said nothing.

‘Where were you before you came here?’ the judge asked abruptly.

‘St Catherine.’

‘I didn’t mean that, but – well, how did you arrive here from St Catherine?’

‘By car.’

‘Describe it – and the driver.’

‘Green saloon – sedan, you’d call it. Middle-aged businessman and his wife. He was grey, she was blonde.’

‘That’s all you can remember?’ Mollison asked politely.

‘That’s all.’

‘I suppose you realize that description would fit a million couples and their cars?’

‘You know how it is,’ I shrugged. ‘When you’re not expecting to be questioned on what you’ve seen you don’t bother –’

‘Quite, quite.’ He could be very acid, this judge. ‘Out of state car, of course?’

‘Yes. But not of course.’

‘Newly arrived in our country and already you know how to identify licence plates of –’

‘He said he came from Philadelphia. I believe that’s out of state.’

The court reporter cleared his throat. The judge quelled him with a cold stare, then turned back to me.

‘And you came to St Catherine from –’

‘Miami.’

‘Same car, of course?’

‘No. Bus.’

The judge looked at the clerk of the court, who shook his head slightly, then turned back to me. His expression was less than friendly.

‘You’re not only a fluent and barefaced liar, Chrysler’ – he’d dropped the ‘Mister’ so I assumed the time for courtesies was past – ‘but a careless one. There’s no bus service from Miami to St Catherine. You stayed the previous night in Miami?’

I nodded.

‘In a hotel,’ he went on. ‘But, of course, you will have forgotten the name of that hotel?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact –’

‘Spare us.’ The judge held up his hand. ‘Your effrontery passes all limits and this court will no longer be trifled with. We have heard enough. Cars, buses, St Catherine, hotels, Miami – lies, all lies. You’ve never been in Miami in your life. Why do you think we kept you on remand for three days?’

‘You tell me,’ I encouraged him.

‘I shall. To make extensive inquiries. We’ve checked with the immigration authorities and every airline flying into Miami. Your name wasn’t on any passenger or aliens list, and no one answering to your description was seen that day. You would not be easily overlooked.’

I knew what he meant, all right. I had the reddest hair and the blackest eyebrows I’d ever seen on anyone and the combination was rather startling. I’d got used to it myself, but I had to admit it took a bit of getting used to. And when you added to that a permanent limp and a scar that ran from the corner of my right brow to the lobe of my right ear – well, when it came to identification, I was the answer to the policeman’s prayer.

‘As far as we can discover,’ the judge went on coldly, ‘you’ve spoken the truth once. Only once.’ He broke off to look at the youth who had just opened the door leading to some chambers in the rear, and lifted his eyebrows in fractional interrogation. No impatience: no irritation: all very calm: Judge Mollison was no pushover.

‘This just came for you, sir,’ the boy said nervously. He showed an envelope. ‘Radio message. I thought –’

‘Bring it here.’ The judge glanced at the envelope, nodded at no one in particular, then turned back to me.

‘As I say, you told the truth just once. You said you had come here from Havana. You did indeed. You left this behind you there, In the police station where you were being held for interrogation and trial.’ He reached into a drawer and held up a small book, blue and gold and white. ‘Recognize it?’

‘A British passport,’ I said calmly. ‘I haven’t got telescopic eyes but I assume that it must be mine otherwise you wouldn’t be making such a song and dance about it. If you had it all the time, then why –?’

‘We were merely trying to discover the degree of your mendacity, which is pretty well complete, and your trustworthiness, which does not appear to exist.’ He looked at me curiously. ‘Surely you must know what this means: if we have the passport, we have much else besides. You appear unmoved. You’re a very cool customer, Chrysler, or very dangerous: or can it be that you are just very stupid?’

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘Faint?’

‘Our police and immigration authorities happen, for the moment at least, to be on very good terms with their Cuban colleagues.’ He might never have heard my interjection. ‘Our cables to Havana have produced much more than this passport: they have produced much interesting information.’

‘Your name is not Chrysler, it’s Ford. You have spent two and a half years in the West Indies, and are well known to the authorities in all of the principal islands.’

‘Fame, Judge. When you’ve as many friends –’

‘Notoriety. Served three minor prison sentences in two years.’ Judge Mollison was skimming through a paper he had in his hand. ‘No known means of support except three months working as consultant to a Havana salvage and diving firm.’ He looked up at me. ‘And in what – ah – capacity did you serve this firm?’

‘I told ’em how deep the water was.’

He regarded me thoughtfully then returned to his paper.

‘Associate of criminals and smugglers,’ he went on. ‘Chiefly of criminals known to be engaged in the stealing and smuggling of precious stones and metal. Known to have fomented, or attempted to foment, labour troubles in Nassau and Manzanillo, for ends suspected to be other than political. Deported from San Juan, Haiti and Venezuela. Declared persona non grata in Jamaica and refused landing permit in Nassau, Bahamas.’ He broke off and looked at me. ‘A British subject – and not even welcome in British territories.’

‘Sheer prejudice, Judge.’

‘You have, of course, made an illegal entry into the United States.’ Judge Mollison was a difficult man to knock off his stride. ‘How, I don’t pretend to know – it happens constantly in those parts. Probably by Key West and a landing at night somewhere between Port Charlotte and here. It doesn’t matter. And so now, in addition to assaulting officers of the law and carrying a gun without declaring it or possessing a licence for it, you can be charged with illegal entry. A man with your record could collect a stiff sentence for those, Ford.’

‘However, you won’t. Not here, at least. I have consulted with the state immigration authorities and they agree with me that what best meets the case is deportation: we wish no part of any person like you. We understand from the Cuban authorities that you broke custody while being held on a charge of inciting violence among dockworkers and on a further alleged charge of attempted shooting of the policeman who arrested you. Such offences carry heavy penalties in Cuba. The first charge is not an extraditable offence and on the second we have had no demand from the competent authorities. However, as I say, we intend to work not under extradition laws but deportation laws – and we’re deporting you to Havana. The proper authorities will be there to meet your plane when it lands tomorrow morning.’

I stood still and said nothing. The court-room was very quiet. Presently I cleared my throat and said, ‘Judge, I think that’s downright unkind of you.’

‘It depends on the point of view,’ he said indifferently. He rose to go, caught sight of the envelope the youth had brought in and said: ‘No, wait a moment,’ and sat down again, slitting open the envelope. He smiled bleakly at me as he extracted the flimsy sheets of paper.

‘We thought we would ask Interpol to find out what was known about you in your own country, although I hardly think now there will be any further useful information. We have all we want … No, no, I thought not, nothing fresh here, not known … no longer listed. Wait a minute though!’ The calm leisured voice rose to a sudden shout that brought the somnolent reporter jack-in-the-box bolt upright and sent him scurrying after note-book and pen that had spilled over the floor. ‘Wait a minute!’

He turned back to the first page of the cable.

‘37b Rue Paul-Valéry, Paris,’ he read rapidly. ‘Your request received, etc. etc. Regret inform you no criminal listed in rotary card index under name of John Chrysler. Could be any of four others under alias, but unlikely: identification impossible without cephalic index and fingerprints.

‘Remarkable resemblance from your description to the late John Montague Talbot. Reasons for your request and demand for urgency unknown but enclosed please find summarized copy of salient features of Talbot’s life. Regret unable to help you further, etc.

‘John Montague Talbot. Height 5 feet 11 inches, weight 185 lb, deep red hair parted far over on left side, deep blue eyes, heavy black brows, knife scar above right eye, aquiline nose, exceptionally even teeth. Carries left shoulder perceptibly higher than right owing to fairly severe limp.’

The judge looked at me and I looked out the door: I had to admit the description was not at all bad.

‘Date of birth unknown, probably early 1920s. Place of birth unknown. No record of war career. Graduated Manchester University 1948 with B.Sc. in engineering. Employed for three years by Siebe, Gorman & Co.’ He broke off, looked sharply at me. ‘Who are Siebe, Gorman & Co?’

‘Never heard of them.’

‘Of course not. But I have. Very well-known European engineering firm specializing, among other things, in all types of diving equipment. Ties in rather neatly with your employment with a salvage and diving firm in Havana, doesn’t it?’ He obviously didn’t expect an answer, for he carried on reading at once.

‘Specialized in salvage and deep-water recovery. Left Siebe Gorman, joined Dutch salvage firm from which dismissed after eighteen months following inquiries into whereabouts of two missing 28-lb ingots worth 60,000 dollars salvaged by firm in Bombay Harbour from the wreck of the ammunition and treasure ship Fort Strikene which blew up there 14th April, 1944. Returned England, joined Portsmouth salvage and diving firm, associated with “Corners” Moran, notorious jewellery thief, during salvage work on the Nantucket Light which sank off the Lizard, June 1955, carrying valuable cargo diamonds from Amsterdam to New York. Salvaged jewels to the value of 80,000 dollars were found to be missing. Talbot and Moran traced to London, arrested, escaped from police wagon when Talbot shot police officer with small concealed automatic. Police officer subsequently died.’

I was leaning far forward now, my hands gripped tightly on the edge of the box. Every eye was on me but I had eyes only for the judge. There wasn’t a sound to be heard in that stuffy courtroom except the drowsy murmur of flies high up near the ceiling and the soft sighing of a big overhead fan.

‘Talbot and Moran finally traced to riverside rubber warehouse.’ Judge Mollison was reading slowly now, almost haltingly, as if he had to take time to appreciate the significance of what he was saying. ‘Surrounded, ignored order to surrender. For two hours resisted all attempts by police armed with guns and tear-gas bombs to overcome them. Following explosion, entire warehouse swept by uncontrollable fire of great intensity. All exits guarded but no attempt at escape. Both men perished in fire. Twenty-four hours later firemen found no trace of Moran – believed to have been almost completely incinerated. Talbot’s charred remains positively identified by ruby ring worn on left hand, brass buckles of shoes and German 4.25 automatic which he was known to carry habitually …’

The judge’s voice trailed off and he sat in silence several moments. He looked at me, wonderingly, as if unable to credit what he saw, blinked, then slowly swivelled his gaze until he was looking at the little man in the cane chair.

‘A 4.25 mm gun, Sheriff? Have you any idea –?’

‘I do.’ The sheriff’s face was cold and mean and hard and his voice exactly matched his expression. ‘What we call a .21 automatic, and as far as I know there’s only one of that kind made – a German “Lilliput.”’

‘Which was what the prisoner was carrying when you arrested him.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘And he’s wearing a ruby ring on his left hand.’ The judge shook his head again, then looked at me for a long, long moment: you could see the disbelief was slowly giving way to inescapable conviction. ‘The leopard – the criminal leopard – never changes his spots. Wanted for murder – perhaps two murders: who knows what you did to your accomplice in that warehouse? It was his body they found, not yours?’

The court was hushed and shocked and still: a falling pin would have had the lot airborne.

‘A cop-killer.’ The sheriff licked his lips, looked up at Mollison and repeated the words in a whisper. ‘A cop-killer. He’ll swing for that in England, won’t he, Judge?’

The judge was on balance again.

‘It’s not within the jurisdiction of this court to –’

‘Water!’ The voice was mine, and even to my own ears it sounded no more than a croak. I was bent over the side of the box, swaying slightly, propped up by one hand while I mopped my face with a handkerchief held in the other. I’d had plenty of time to figure it out and I think I looked the way I think I ought to have looked. At least, I hoped I did. ‘I – I think I’m going to pass out. Is there – is there no water?’

‘Water?’ The judge sounded half-impatient, half-sympathetic. ‘I’m afraid there’s no –’

‘Over there,’ I gasped. I waved weakly to a spot on the other side of the officer who was guarding me. ‘Please!’

The policeman turned away – I’d have been astonished if he hadn’t – and as he turned I pivoted on both toes and brought my left arm whipping across just below waist level – three inches higher and that studded and heavily brass-buckled belt he wore around his middle would have left me needing a new pair of knuckles. His explosive grunt of agony was still echoing through the shocked stillness of the court-room when I spun him round as he started to fall, snatched the heavy Colt from his holster and was waving it gently around the room even before the policeman had struck the side of the box and slid, coughing and gasping painfully for air, to the wooden floor.

I took in the whole scene with one swift sweeping glance. The man with the nose was staring at me with an expression as near amazement as his primitive features could register, his mouth fallen open, the mangled stub of his cigar clinging impossibly to the corner of his lower lip. The girl with the dark-blonde hair was bent forward, wide-eyed, her hand to her face, her thumb under her chin and her fore-finger crooked across her mouth. The judge was no longer a judge, he was a waxen effigy of himself, as motionless in his chair as if he had just come from the sculptor’s hands. The clerk, the reporter, the door attendant were as rigid as the judge, while the group of school-girls and the elderly spinster in charge were as goggle-eyed as ever, but the curiosity had gone from their faces and fear stepped in to take its place: the teenager nearest to me had her eyebrows arched high up into her forehead and her lips were trembling, she looked as if she were going to start weeping or screaming any moment. I hoped, vaguely, that it wasn’t going to be screaming, then an instant later I realized that it didn’t matter for there was likely going to be a great deal of noise in the very near future indeed. The sheriff hadn’t been so unarmed as I had supposed: he was reaching for his gun.

His draw was not quite the clean swift blurring action to which the cinema of my youth had accustomed me. The long flapping tails of his alpaca coat impeded his hand and he was further hindered by the arm of his cane chair. Fully four seconds elapsed before he reached the butt of his gun.

‘Don’t do it, Sheriff!’ I said quickly. ‘This cannon in my hand is pointing right at you.’

But the little man’s courage, or foolhardiness, seemed to be in inverse proportion to his size. You could tell by his eyes, by the lips ever so slightly drawn back over the tightly clamped tobacco-stained teeth, that there was going to be no stopping him. Except in the only possible way. At the full stretch of my arm I raised the revolver until the barrel was level with my eyes – this business of dead-eye Dan snap-shooting from the hip is strictly for the birds – and as the sheriff’s hand came clear of the folds of his jacket I squeezed the trigger. The reverberating boom of that heavy Colt, magnified many times by the confining walls of that small court-house, quite obliterated any other sound. Whether the sheriff cried out or the bullet struck his hand or the gun in his hand no one could say: all we could be sure of was what we saw, and that was the sheriff’s right arm and whole right side jerking convulsively and the gun spinning backwards to land on a table inches from the note-book of the startled reporter.

Already my Colt was lined up on the man at the door.

‘Come and join us, friend,’ I invited. ‘You look as if you might be having ideas about fetching help.’ I waited till he was halfway down the aisle then whirled round quickly as I heard a scuffling noise behind me.

There had been no need for haste. The policeman was on his feet, but that was all that could be said for him. He was bent almost double, one hand clutching his midriff, the knuckles of the other all but brushing the floor: he was whooping violently, gasping for the breath to ease the pain in his body. Then he slowly straightened to a crouched stooping position, and there was no fear in his face, only hurt and anger and shame and a do-or-die determination.

‘Call off your watchdog, Sheriff,’ I said curtly. ‘He’s liable to get hurt real bad next time.’

The sheriff glared at me venomously and spat out one single unprintable word. He was hunched in his chair, left hand tightly gripping his right wrist: he gave every impression of a man too preoccupied with his own hurt to worry about any damage to others.

‘Give me that gun!’ the policeman demanded hoarsely. His throat seemed to be constricted, he had difficulty in forcing out even those few words. He had taken one lurching step forward and was no more than six feet away. He was only a kid, hardly a day over twenty-one.

‘Judge!’ I said urgently.

‘Don’t do it, Donnelly!’ Judge Mollison had shaken off the first numbing shock. ‘Don’t do it! That man’s a killer. He’s got nothing to lose by killing again. Stay where you are.’

‘Give me that gun.’ Judge Mollison might have been talking to himself for all the effect his words had had. Donnelly’s voice was wooden, unemotional, the voice of a man whose decision lies so far behind that it is no longer a decision but the sole obsessive reason for his existence.

‘Stay where you are, sonny,’ I said quietly. ‘Like the judge said, I have nothing to lose. Take another step forward and I’m going to shoot you in the thigh. Have you any idea what a soft-nosed low-velocity lead bullet does, Donnelly? If it gets your thigh-bone it’ll smash it so badly that you’ll be like me and walk with a limp for the rest of your life: if it gets the femoral artery you’ll like as not bleed to death before – you fool!’

For the second time the court-room shook to the sharp crack and the hollow reverberations of the Colt. Donnelly was on the floor, both hands gripped round his lower thigh, staring up at me with an expression compounded of incomprehension and dazed disbelief.

‘We’ve all got to learn some time,’ I said flatly. I glanced at the doorway, the shots were bound to have attracted attention, but there was no one there. Not that I was anxious on this point: apart from the two constables – both of them temporarily unfit for duty – who had jumped me at the La Contessa, the sheriff and Donnelly constituted the entire police force of Marble Springs. But even so, delay was as foolish as it was dangerous.

‘You won’t get far, Talbot!’ The sheriff’s thin-lipped mouth twisted itself into exaggerated movements as he spoke through tightly clenched teeth. ‘Within five minutes of you leaving, every law officer in the county will be looking for you: within fifteen minutes the call will be state-wide.’ He broke off, wincing, as a spasm of pain twisted his face, and when he looked at me again his expression wasn’t pretty. ‘The call’s going out for a murderer, Talbot, an armed murderer: they’ll have orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.’

‘Look, now, Sheriff––’ the judge began, but got no further.

‘Sorry, Judge. He’s mine.’ The sheriff looked down at the policeman lying groaning on the floor. ‘The moment he took that gun he stopped being your business … You better get going, Talbot: you won’t have far to run.’

‘Shoot to kill, eh?’ I said thoughtfully. I looked round the court. ‘No, no, not the gentlemen – they might start getting death or glory ideas about having medals pinned on them …’

‘What the hell you talking about?’ the sheriff demanded.

‘Nor the young ladies of the high school. Hysteria …’ I murmured. I shook my head then looked at the girl with the dark-blonde hair. ‘Sorry, miss, it’ll have to be you.’

‘What – what do you mean?’ Maybe she was scared, maybe she was just acting scared. ‘What do you want?’

‘You. You heard what the Lone Ranger said – as soon as the cops see me they’re going to start shooting at everything in sight. But they wouldn’t shoot at a girl, especially not at one as good looking as you. I’m in a jam, miss, and I need an insurance policy. You’re it. Come on.’

‘Damn it, Talbot, you can’t do that!’ Judge Mollison sounded hoarse, frightened. ‘An innocent girl. You’d put her life in danger –’

‘Not me,’ I pointed out. ‘If anybody’s going to put her life in danger it’ll be the friends of the sheriff here.’

‘But – but Miss Ruthven is my guest. I – I invited her here this afternoon to –’

‘Contravention of the rules of the old southern hospitality. I know. Emily Post would have something to say about this.’ I caught her by the arm, pulled her none too gently to her feet and outside into the aisle. ‘Hurry up, miss, we haven’t –’

I dropped her arm and took one long step up the aisle, clubbed pistol already reversed and swinging. For some time now I’d had my eye on the broken-nosed character three seats behind the girl and the play and shift of expression across the broken landscape of his Neanderthalic features as he struggled to arrive at and finally make a decision couldn’t have been more clearly indicated by ringing bells and coloured lights.

He was almost vertical and halfway out into the aisle, with his right hand reaching deep under the lapel of his coat when the butt end of my Colt caught his right elbow. The impact jarred even my arm so I could only guess what it did to his: quite a lot, if his anguished howl and sudden collapse back into the bench were any criterion. Maybe I’d misjudged the man, maybe he’d only been reaching for another cigar; that would teach him not to carry a cigar-case under his left armpit.

He was still making a great deal of noise when I hobbled my way swiftly up the aisle, pulled the girl out into the porch, slammed the door and locked it. That would only give me ten seconds, fifteen at the most, but it was all I needed. I grabbed the girl’s hand and ran down the path to the street.

There were two cars parked by the kerb. One, an open Chevrolet without any official markings, was the police car in which the sheriff, Donnelly and I had arrived at the court, the other, presumably Judge Mollison’s, a low-built Studebaker Hawk. The judge’s looked to be the faster car of the two, but most of these American cars had automatic drive controls with which I was quite unfamiliar: I didn’t know how to drive a Studebaker and the time it would take me to find out could be fatal. On the other hand, I did know how to operate the automatic drive on a Chevrolet. On the way up to the court-house I’d sat up front beside the sheriff, who drove, and I hadn’t missed a move he made.

‘Get in!’ I nodded my head in the direction of the police car. ‘Fast!’

I saw her open the door out of a corner of an eye while I spared a few moments for the Studebaker. The quickest and most effective way of immobilizing any car is by smashing its distributor. I spent three or four seconds hunting for the bonnet catch before I gave it up and turned my attention to the front tyre nearest me. Had it been a tubeless tyre and had I been carrying my usual automatic, the small calibre steel-jacketed bullet might have failed to make more than a tiny hole, no sooner made than sealed: as it was, the mushrooming Colt bullet split the sidewall wide open and the Studebaker settled with a heavy bump.

The girl was already seated in the Chevrolet. Without bothering to open the door I vaulted over the side into the driving-seat, took one swift glance at the dashboard, grabbed the white plastic handbag the girl held in her lap, broke the catch and ripped the material in my hurry to open it, and emptied the contents on the seat beside me. The car keys were on the top of the pile, which meant she’d shoved them right to the bottom of her bag. I’d have taken long odds that she was good and scared, but longer odds still that she wasn’t terrified.

‘I suppose you thought that was clever?’ I switched on the motor, pressed the automatic drive button, released the handbrake and gunned the motor so savagely that the rear tyres spun and whined furiously on the loose gravel before getting traction. ‘Try anything like that again and you’ll be sorry. Regard that as a promise.’

I am a fairly experienced driver and where road-holding and handling are concerned I am no admirer of American cars: but when it came to straightforward acceleration those big V-8 engines could make the average British and European sports models look silly. The Chevrolet leapt forward as if it had been fitted with a rocket-assisted take-off – I suspected that being a police car it might have had a hotted-up engine – and when I’d straightened it up and had time for a fast look in the mirror we were a hundred yards away from the court-house: I had time only for a glimpse of the judge and the sheriff running out on to the road, staring after the Chevrolet, before a sharp right-angle bend came sweeping towards us: a quick twist of the wheel to the right, a four-wheel drift, the back end breaking away, another twist of the wheel to the left and then, still accelerating, we were clear of the town limits and heading into the open country.

TWO

We were heading almost due north along the highway, a white and dusty ribbon of road built up several feet above the level of the surrounding land. Away to our left the Gulf of Mexico glittered and twinkled like an opalescent emerald under the broiling sun. Between the road and the sea was a flat uninteresting belt of low mangrove coast, to our right swampy forests not of palms or palmettos as I would have expected to find in those parts but pine, and disheartened-looking scrub pine at that.

I wasn’t enjoying the ride. I was pushing the Chev along as fast as I dared, and the soft swinging suspension gave me no feeling of security at all. I had no sun-glasses, and even though the sun was not directly in my face the savage glare of sub-tropical light off that road was harsh and hurtful to the eyes. It was an open car, but the windscreen was so big and deeply curved that we got almost no cooling benefit at all from the wind whistling by our ears at over eighty miles an hour. Back in the court-room, the shade temperature had been close on a hundred: what it was out here in the open I couldn’t even begin to guess. But it was hot, furnace hot: I wasn’t enjoying the ride.

Neither was the girl beside me. She hadn’t even bothered to replace the stuff I’d emptied out of her bag, just sat there with her hands clasped tightly together. Now and again, as we took a fast corner, she reached out to grab the upper edge of the door but otherwise she’d made no movement since we’d left Marble Springs except to tie a white bandanna over her fair hair. She didn’t once look at me, I didn’t even know what colour her eyes were. And she certainly didn’t once speak to me. Once or twice I glanced at her and each time she was staring straight ahead, lips compressed, face pale, a faint red patch burning high up in her left cheek. She was still scared, maybe more scared than ever. Maybe she was wondering what was going to happen to her. I was wondering about that myself.

Eight miles and eight minutes out of Marble Springs the expected happened. Somebody certainly seemed to have thought and moved even faster.

The expected was a road-block. It came at a point where some enterprising firm had built up the land to the right of the road with crushed stones and coral, asphalted it and built a filling station and drivers’ pull-up. Right across the road a car had been drawn up, a big black police car – if the two pivoting searchlights and the big red ‘STOP’ light were not enough, the eight-inch white-lettered ‘POLICE’ sign would have removed all doubt. To the left, just beyond the nose of the police car, the land dropped sharply four or five feet into a ditch that lifted only slowly to the mangrove coast beyond: there was no escape that way. To the right, where the road widened and angled into the courtyard of the filling station, a vertically upright line of black corrugated fifty-gallon oil drums completely blocked the space between the police car and the first of the line of petrol pumps that paralleled the road.

All this I saw in the four or five seconds it took me to bring the shuddering skidding Chevrolet down from 70 to 30 mph, the high-pitched scream in our ears token of the black smoke trail of melted rubber that we were leaving on the white road behind us. I saw, too, the policemen, one crouched behind the bonnet of the police car, a second with his head and right arm just visible above the boot: both of them carried revolvers. A third policeman was standing upright and almost completely hidden behind the nearest petrol pump, but there was nothing hidden about his gun, that most lethal of all close-quarters weapons, a whipper, a sawn-off shotgun firing 20-gauge medium-lead shot.

I was down to 20 mph now, not more than forty yards distant from the block. The policemen, guns levelled on my head, were rising up and moving out into the open when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the girl reaching for the handle of the door and half-turning away from me as she gathered herself for the leap out of the car. I said nothing, just leaned across, grabbed her arm, jerked her towards me with a savage force that made her gasp with pain and, in the same instant that I transferred my grip to her shoulders and held her half against half in front of me so that the police dared not shoot, jammed my foot flat down on the accelerator.

‘You madman! You’ll kill us!’ For a split second of time she stared at the row of fifty-gallon drums rushing up to meet us, the terror in her face accurately reflecting the terror in her voice, then turned away with a cry and buried her face in my coat, the nails of her hands digging into my upper arms.

We hit the second drum from the left fair and square with the centre of our fender. Subconsciously, I tightened my grip on the girl and the steering wheel and braced myself for the numbing shattering shock, the stunning impact that would crush me against the steering-wheel or pitch me through the windscreen as the 500-lb dead weight of that drum sheared the chassis retaining bolts and smashed the engine back into the driving compartment. But there was no such convulsive shock, just a screeching of metal and a great hollow reverberating clang as the fender lifted the drum clear off the road, a moment of shock when I thought the drum would be carried over the bonnet of the car to smash the windscreen and pin us to the seat. With my free hand I jerked the wheel violently to the left and the cartwheeling drum bounced across the nearside wing and vanished from sight as I regained the road, jerked the wheel in the opposite direction and straightened out. The oil drum had been empty. And not a shot had been fired.

Slowly the girl lifted her head, stared over my shoulder at the road-block dwindling in the distance, than stared at me. Her hands were still gripping both my shoulders, but she was completely unaware of it.

‘You’re mad.’ I could hardly catch the husky whisper through the crescendo roar of the engine. ‘You’re mad, you must be. Crazy mad.’ Maybe she hadn’t been terrified earlier on, but she was now.

‘Move over, lady,’ I requested. ‘You’re blocking my view.’

She moved, perhaps six inches, but her eyes, sick with fear, were still on me. She was trembling violently.

‘You’re mad,’ she repeated. ‘Please, please let me out.’

‘I’m not mad.’ I was paying as much attention to my rear mirror as to the road ahead. ‘I think a little, Miss Ruthven, and I’m observant. They couldn’t have had more than a couple of minutes to prepare that road-block – and it takes more than a couple of minutes to bring six full drums out of store and manhandle them into position. The drum I hit had its filling hole turned towards me – and there was no bung. It had to be empty. And as for letting you out – well, I’m afraid I can’t spare the time. Take a look behind you.’

She looked.

‘They’re – they’re coming after us!’

‘What did you expect them to do – go into the restaurant and have a cup of coffee?’

The road was closer to the sea, now, and winding to follow the indentations of the coast. Traffic was fairly light, but enough to hold me back from overtaking on some blind corners, and the police car behind was steadily gaining on me: the driver knew his car better than I did mine, and the road he obviously knew like the back of his hand. Ten minutes from the road-block he had crept up to within a hundred and fifty yards of us.

The girl had been watching the pursuing car for the past few minutes. Now she turned and stared at me. She made an effort to keep her voice steady, and almost succeeded.

‘What’s – what’s going to happen now?’

‘Anything,’ I said briefly. ‘They’ll likely play rough. I don’t think they can be any too pleased with what happened back there.’ Even as I finished speaking there came, in quick succession, two or three whip-like cracks clearly audible above the whine of the tyres and the roar of the engine. A glance at the girl’s face told me I didn’t need to spell out what was happening. She knew all right.

‘Get down,’ I ordered. ‘That’s it, right down on the floor. Your head, too. Whether it’s bullets or a crash, your best chance is down there.’

When she was crouched so low that all I could see was her shoulders and the back of her blonde head I eased the revolver out of my pocket, abruptly removed my foot from the accelerator, grabbed for the handbrake and hauled hard.

With no tell-tale warning from the foot-operated braking lights, the slowing down of the Chevrolet was as unexpected as it was abrupt, and the screech of tyres and violent slewing of the pursuing police car showed that the driver had been caught completely off balance. I loosed off one quick shot and as I did the windscreen in front of me shattered and starred as a bullet went clear through the centre of it: I fired a second time, and the police car skidded wildly and finished up almost broadside across the road, the nearside front wheel into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road. It was the sort of uncontrollable skid that might have come from a front tyre blowout.

Certainly no harm had come to the policemen inside, within a couple of seconds of hitting the ditch all three were out on the road, squeezing off shots after us as fast as they could pull the triggers: but we were already a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards away and for all the value of revolvers and riot guns in distance work of this kind they might as well have been throwing stones at us. In a few seconds we rounded a curve and they were lost to sight.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘The war’s over. You can get up, Miss Ruthven.’

She straightened and pushed herself back on the seat. Some dark-blonde hair had fallen forward over her face, so she took off her bandanna, fixed her hair and pulled the bandanna on again. Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they’d comb their hair on the way down.

When she’d finished tying the knot under her chin she said in a subdued voice, without looking at me: ‘Thank you for making me get down. I – I might have been killed there.’

‘You might,’ I agreed indifferently. ‘But I was thinking about myself, lady, not you. Your continued good health is very closely bound up with mine. Without a real live insurance policy beside me they’d use anything from a hand grenade to a 14-inch naval gun to stop me.’

‘They were trying to hit us then, they were trying to kill us.’ The tremor was back in her voice again as she nodded at the bullet hole in the screen. ‘I was sitting in line with that.’

‘So you were. Chance in a thousand. They must have had orders not to fire indiscriminately, but maybe they were so mad at what happened back at the road-block that they forgot their orders. Likely that they were after one of our rear tyres. Hard to shoot well from a fast-moving car. Or maybe they just can’t shoot well anyway.’

Approaching traffic was still light, maybe two or three cars to the mile, but even that was too much for my peace of mind. Most of the cars were filled with family groups, out-of-state vacationers, and like all vacationers they were not only curious about everything they saw but obviously had the time and the inclination to indulge their curiosity. Every other car slowed down as it approached us and in my rear-view mirror I saw the stop lights of three or four of them come on as the driver tramped on the brakes and the occupants twisted round in their seats. Hollywood and a thousand TV films had made a bullet-scarred windscreen an object readily identifiable by millions.

This was disturbing enough. Worse still was the near certainty that any minute now every local radio station within a hundred miles would be broadcasting the news of what had happened back at the Marble Springs court-house, together with a complete description of the Chevrolet, myself and the blonde girl beside me. The chances were that at least half of those cars approaching me had their radios tuned in to one of those local stations with their interminable record programmes MC’d by disc jockeys with fixations about guitar and hill-billy country music. The inevitable news flash, then all it needed was for one of those cars to be driven by a halfwit out to show his wife and children what a hero he really was all the time although they had never suspected it.

I picked up the girl’s still-empty handbag, stuck my right hand inside it, made a fist and smashed away the centre of the laminated safety plate glass. The hole was now a hundred times bigger than before, but not nearly so conspicuous: in those days of stressed and curved glass, mysteriously shattered windscreens were not so unknown as to give rise to much comment: a flying pebble, a sudden change of temperature, even a loud enough sound at a critical frequency – any of those could blow out a screen.

But it wasn’t enough. I knew it wasn’t enough, and when an excited fast-talking voice broke into the soap opera on the Chev’s radio and gave a concise if highly-coloured account of my escape, warning all highway users to look out for and report the Chev, I knew that I would have to abandon the car, and at once. It was too hot, and on this, the only main north-south route, the chances of escaping detection just didn’t exist. I had to have a new car, and had to have it fast.

I got one almost at once. We had been passing through one of those new towns which mushroom by the score along the seaboards of Florida when I heard the flash, and less than two hundred yards beyond the limits we came to a lay-by on the shore side of the road. There were three cars there, and obviously they had been travelling in company for through a gap in the trees and low scrub that curved round the lay-by I could see a group of seven or eight people picking their way down to the shore, about three hundred yards away: they were carrying with them a barbecue grill, a cooking stove and luncheon baskets: they looked as if they intended making a stay.

I jumped out of the Chev, taking the girl with me, and quickly checked all three cars. Two were convertibles, a third a sports car and all were open. There were no ignition keys in any of the locks, but the sports car owner, as many do, had a spare set in a cubby-hole by the steering column, hidden only by a folded chamois cloth.

I could have just driven off leaving the police car there, but that would have been stupid. As long as the Chev’s whereabouts remained unknown, the search would be concentrated exclusively on it and little attention would be paid to the common car thief who had taken the other: but if the Chev were found in the lay-by then the state-wide search would immediately be switched to the sports car.

Thirty seconds later I had the Chev back at the limits of the new town, slowing down as I came to the first of the all-but-completed split-levels on the shore side of the road. There was no one around, and I didn’t hesitate: I turned in on the concrete drive of the first house, drove straight in under the open tip-up door of the garage, shut off the engine and quickly closed the garage door.

When we emerged from the garage two or three minutes later anyone looking for us would have looked a second or third time before getting suspicious. By coincidence, the girl had been wearing a short-sleeved green blouse of exactly the same shade of colour as my suit, a fact that had been repeated twice over the radio. A fast check point and a dead giveaway. But now the blouse had gone and the white sun-top she’d on beneath it was worn by so many girls that blazing summer afternoon that she’d subtly merged her identity with those of a thousand other women: her blouse was tucked inside my coat, my coat was inside out over my arm with only the grey lining showing and my necktie was in my pocket. I’d taken the bandanna from her, wrapped it kerchief-wise over my head, the loose ends of the knot hanging down the right-hand side, in front, all but obscuring my scar. The red hair showing at the temples was still a giveaway and while, by the time I had finished smearing it with her moistened mascara pencil, it didn’t look like any hair I had ever seen, at least it didn’t look red.

Under the blouse and coat I carried the gun.

Walking slowly so as to minimize my limp, we reached the sports car in three minutes. This, too, like the one we’d just tucked away in the garage, was a Chevrolet, with the same engine as the other, but there the resemblance ended. It was a plastic-bodied two-seater, I’d driven one in Europe, and I knew that the claims for 120 mph were founded on fact.

I waited till a heavy gravel truck came grinding past from the north, started the Corvette’s engine under the sound of its passing – the group of people I’d seen earlier were on the shoreline now but they might just have heard the distinctive note of this car’s engine and might just have been suspicious – made a fast U-turn and took off after the truck. I noticed the startled expression on the girl’s face as we drove off in the direction from which we’d just come.

‘I know. Go on, say it, I’m crazy. Only I’m not crazy. The next road-block won’t be so very far to the north now, and it’ll be no hurried makeshift affair like the last time, it’ll stop a fifty-ton tank. Maybe they’ll guess that I’ll guess that, maybe they’ll conclude that I’ll leave this road and make for the side-roads and dirt-tracks in the swamplands to the east there. Anyway, that’s what I’d figure in their place. Good country for going to ground. So we’ll just go south. They won’t figure on that. And then we’ll hide up for a few hours.’

‘Hide up? Where? Where can you hide up?’ I didn’t answer her question and she went on: ‘Let me go, please! You – you’re quite safe now. You must be. You must be sure of yourself or you wouldn’t be heading this way. Please!’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said wearily. ‘Let you go – and within ten minutes every cop in the state will know what kind of car I’m driving and where I’m heading! You must think I’m crazy.’

‘But you can’t trust me,’ she persisted. I hadn’t shot anybody in twenty minutes, she wasn’t scared any longer, at least not too scared to work things out. ‘How do you know I won’t make signs at people, or shout out when you do nothing about it, like at traffic lights, or – or hit you when you’re not looking? How do you know –?’

‘That cop, Donnelly,’ I said apropos of nothing. ‘I wonder if the doctors got to him in time.’

She got the point. The colour that had come back to her face drained out of it again. But she had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.

‘My father is a sick man, Mr Talbot.’ It was the first time she’d used my name, and I appreciated the ‘Mister’. ‘I’m terribly afraid of what will happen to him when he hears this. He – well, he has a very bad heart and –’

‘And I have a wife and four starving kiddies,’ I interrupted. ‘We can wipe each other’s tears away. Be quiet.’

She said nothing, not even when I pulled up at a drugstore a few moments later, went inside and made a short phone call. She was with me, far enough away not to hear what I was saying but near enough to see the shape of the gun under my folded coat. On the way out I bought cigarettes. The clerk looked at me, then at the Corvette roadster parked outside.

‘Hot day for driving, mister. Come far?’

‘Only from Chilicoote Lake.’ I’d seen the turnoff sign three or four miles to the north. My efforts at an American accent made me wince. ‘Fishing.’

‘Fishing, eh?’ The tone was neutral enough, which was more than could be said for the half-leer in his eyes as he looked over the girl by my side, but my Sir Galahad instincts were in abeyance that afternoon so I let it pass. ‘Catch anything?’

‘Some.’ I had no idea what fish if any were in the local lakes and, when I came to think of it, it seemed unlikely that anyone should take off for those shallow swampy lakes when the whole of the Gulf of Mexico lay at his front door. ‘Lost ’em, though.’ My voice sharpened in remembered anger. ‘Just put the basket down on the road for a moment when some crazy idiot comes past doing eighty. Knocked basket and fish to hell and breakfast. And so much dust on those side roads I couldn’t even catch his number.’

‘You get ’em everywhere.’ His eyes suddenly focused on a point a hundred miles away, then he said quickly: ‘What kind of car, mister?’

‘Blue Chev. Broken windscreen. Why, what’s the matter?’

‘“What’s the matter?” he asks. Do you mean to tell me you haven’t – Did you see the guy drivin’ it?’

‘No. Too fast. Just that he had a lot of red hair, but –’

‘Red hair. Chilicoote Lake. Brother!’ He turned and ran for the phone.

We went out into the sunshine. The girl said: ‘You don’t miss much, do you? How – how can you be so cool? He might have recognized –’

‘Get into the car. Recognized me? He was too busy looking at you. When they made that sun-top I guess they ran out of material but just decided to go ahead and finish it off anyway.’

We got in and drove off. Four miles farther on we came to the place I had noticed on the way up. It was a palm-shaded parking-lot between the road and the shore, and a big sign hung under a temporary wooden archway. ‘Codell Construction Company’ it read, then, underneath, in bigger lettering, ‘Sidewalk Superintendents: Drive Right In.’

I drove right in. There were fifteen, maybe twenty cars already parked inside, some people sitting on the benches provided, but most of them still in the seats of their cars. They were all watching the construction of foundations designed to take a seaward extension of a new town. Four big draglines, caterpillar-mounted power shovels, were crawling slowly, ponderously around, tearing up underwater coral rock from the bay bottom, building up a solid wide foundation, then crawling out on the pier just constructed and tearing up more coral rock. One was building a wide strip straight out to sea: this would be the new street of the community. Two others were making small piers at right angles to the main one – those would be for house lots, each house with its own private landing-stage. A fourth was making a big loop to the north, curving back into land again. A yacht harbour, probably. It was a fascinating process to watch, this making of a town out of the bottom of the sea, only I was in no mood to be fascinated.

I parked the car between a couple of empty convertibles, opened the pack of cigarettes I’d just bought and lit one. The girl half-turned in her seat and was staring at me incredulously.

‘Is this the place you meant when you said we’d go somewhere to hide up?’

‘This is it,’ I assured her.

‘You’re going to stay here?’

‘What’s it look like to you?’

‘With all those people around? Where everyone can see you? Twenty yards off the road where every passing police patrol –’

‘See what I mean? Everyone would think the same as you. This is the last place any hunted man in his senses would think of coming. So it’s the ideal place. So here we stay.’

‘You can’t stay here for ever,’ she said steadily.

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Just till it gets dark. Move closer, Miss Ruthven, real close. A man fleeing for his life, Miss Ruthven. What picture does that conjure up? An exhausted wild-eyed individual crashing through the high timber or plunging up to his armpits through some of the choicer Florida swamps. Certainly not sitting in the sunshine getting all close and confidential with a pretty girl. Nothing in the world less calculated to arouse suspicion, is there? Move over, lady.’

‘I wish I had a gun in my hand,’ she said quietly.

‘I don’t doubt it. Move over.’

She moved. I felt the uncontrollable shudder of revulsion as her bare shoulder touched mine. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I were a pretty young girl in the company of a murderer, but it was too difficult, I wasn’t a girl, I wasn’t even particularly young or good-looking, so I gave it up, showed her the gun under the coat lying over my knees, and sat back to enjoy the light on-shore breeze that tempered the sunlight filtering through the fronds of the rustling palm trees. But it didn’t look as if the sunlight would be with us too long, that sea breeze being pulled in by the sun-scorched land was laden with moisture and already the tiny white scraps of cloud that had been drifting across the sky were building and thickening up into grey cumulus. I didn’t like that much. I wanted to have the excuse to keep wearing the bandanna on my head.

Maybe ten minutes after we arrived a black police car came along the highway, from the south. I watched in the rear-view mirror as it slowed down and two policemen put their heads out to give the parking-lot a quick once-over. But their scrutiny was as cursory as it was swift, you could see they didn’t really expect to see anything interesting, and the car pulled away before its speed had dropped to walking pace.

The hope in the girl’s eyes – they were grey and cool and clear, I could see now – died out like a snuffed candleflame, the rounding and drooping of her sunburned shoulders unmistakable.

Half an hour later the hope was back. Two motor-cycle cops, helmeted, gauntleted, very tough and very competent, swept in under the archway in perfect unison, stopped in perfect unison and killed their motors on the same instant. For a few seconds they sat there, high gleaming boots astride on the ground, then they dismounted, kicked down the rests and started moving round the cars. One of them had his revolver in his hand.

They started at the car nearest the entrance, with only a quick glance for the car itself but a long penetrating wordless stare for the occupants. They weren’t doing any explaining and they weren’t doing any apologizing: they looked like cops might look if they had heard that another cop had been shot. And was dying. Or dead.

Suddenly they skipped two or three cars and came straight at us. At least, that seemed to be their intention, but they skirted us and headed for a Ford to the left and ahead of us. As they passed by, I felt the girl stiffening, saw her taking a quick deep breath.

‘Don’t do it!’ I flung an arm around her and grabbed her tight. The breath she’d meant for the warning shout was expelled in a gasp of pain. The policeman nearest turned round and saw the girl’s face buried between my shoulder and neck and looked away again. Having seen what he thought he’d seen he made a remark to his companion that wasn’t as sotto voce as it might have been and might have called for action in normal circumstances. But the circumstances weren’t normal. I let it go.

When I released the girl her face was red practically all the way down to the sun-top. Pressed in against my neck she hadn’t been getting much air but I think it was the policeman’s remark that was responsible for most of the colour. Her eyes were wild. For the first time she’d stopped being scared and was fighting mad.

‘I’m going to turn you in.’ Her voice was soft, implacable. ‘Give yourself up.’

The policeman had checked the Ford. The driver had been dressed in a green jacket the same colour as mine, with a panama hat jammed far down on his head: I’d seen him as he’d driven in, his hair was black and his tanned face moustached and chubby. But the police hadn’t moved on. They were no more than five yards away, but the tearing and growling of the big draglines covered our soft voices.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said quietly. ‘I have a gun.’

‘And there’s only one bullet in it.’

She was right. Two slugs gone in the courthouse, one blowing out the tyre in the judge’s Studebaker, and two when the police car was chasing us.

‘Quite the little counter, aren’t we?’ I murmured. ‘You’ll have plenty of time to practise counting in hospital after the surgeons have fixed you up. If they can fix you up.’

She looked at me, her lips parted, and said nothing.

‘One little slug, but what an awful mess it can make.’ I brought the gun forward under the coat, pressed it against her. ‘You heard me telling that fool Donnelly what a soft lead slug can do. This barrel is against your hipbone. Do you realize what that means?’ My voice was very low now, very menacing. ‘It’ll shatter that bone beyond repair. It means you’ll never walk again, Miss Ruthven. You’ll never run or dance or swim or sit a horse again. All the rest of your life you’ll have to drag that beautiful body of yours about on a pair of crutches. Or in a bath chair. And in pain all the time. All the days of your life … Still going to shout to the cops?’

She said nothing at first, her face was empty of colour, even her lips were pale.

‘Do you believe me?’ I asked softly.

‘I believe you.’

‘So?’

‘So I’m going to call them,’ she said simply. ‘Maybe you’ll cripple me – but they’ll surely get you. And then you can never kill again. I have to do it.’

‘Your noble sentiments do you credit, Miss Ruthven.’ The jeer in my voice was no reflection of the thoughts in my mind. She was going to do what I wouldn’t have done.

‘Go and call them. Watch them die.’

She stared at me. ‘What – what do you mean? You’ve only one bullet –’

‘And it’s no longer for you. First squawk out of you, lady, and that cop with the gun in his hand gets it. He gets it right through the middle of the chest. I’m pretty good with one of these Colts – you saw how I shot the gun out of the sheriff’s hands. But I’m taking no chances. Through the chest. Then I hold up the other cop – there’ll be no trouble about that, his own gun is still buttoned down, he knows I’m a killer and he doesn’t know my gun will be empty – take his gun, wing him with it and go off.’ I smiled. ‘I don’t think anyone will try to stop me.’

‘But – but I’ll tell him your gun’s empty. I’ll tell –’

‘You come first, lady. An elbow in the solar plexus and you won’t be able to tell anybody anything for the next five minutes.’

There was a long silence, the cops were still there, then she said in a small voice: ‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’

‘There’s only one way to find out the answer to that one.’

‘I hate you.’ There was no expression in her voice, the clear grey eyes were dark with despair and defeat. ‘I never thought I could hate anyone so much. It – it scares me.’

‘Stay scared and stay alive.’ I watched the policemen finish their tour of the parking-lot, walk slowly back to their motor bikes and ride away.

The late afternoon wore slowly on. The dragliners growled and crunched and crawled their implacable way out towards the sea. The sidewalk superintendents came and went, but mostly went and soon there were only a couple of cars left in the parking-lot, ours and the Ford belonging to the man in the green coat. And then the steadily darkening cumulus sky reached its final ominous indigo colour and the rain came.

It came with the violence of all sub-tropical storms, and before I could get the unaccustomed hood up my thin cotton shirt was wet as if I had been in the sea. When I’d wound up the side-screens and looked in the mirror, I saw that my face was streaked with black lines from temple to chin – the mascara on my hair had almost washed out. I scrubbed as clean as I could with my handkerchief, then looked at my watch. With the dark cloud obscuring the sky from horizon to horizon, evening had come before its time. Already the cars swishing by on the highway had their sidelights on, although it was still more day than night. I started the engine.

‘You were going to wait until it was dark.’ The girl sounded startled. Maybe she’d been expecting more cops, smarter cops to come along.

‘I was,’ I admitted. ‘But by this time Mr Chas Brooks is going to be doing a song and dance act a few miles back on the highway. His language will be colourful.’

‘Mr Chas Brooks?’ From her tone, I wondered if she really thought I was crazy.

‘Of Pittsburg, California.’ I tapped the licence tag on the steering column. ‘A long way to come to have your car hijacked.’ I lifted my eyes to the machine-gun symphony of the heavy rain drumming on the canvas roof. ‘You don’t think he’ll still be grilling and barbecuing down on the beach in this little lot, do you?’

I pulled out through the makeshift archway and turned right on the highway. When she spoke this time I knew she really did think I was crazy.

‘Marble Springs.’ A pause, then: ‘You’re going back there?’ It was a question and statement both.

‘Right. To the motel – La Contessa. Where the cops picked me up. I left some stuff there and I want to collect it.’

This time she said nothing. Maybe she thought ‘crazy’ a completely inadequate word.

I pulled off the bandanna – in the deepening dusk that white gleam on my head was more conspicuous than my red hair – and went on: ‘Last place they’ll ever think to find me. I’m going to spend the night there, maybe several nights until I find me a boat out. So are you.’ I ignored the involuntary exclamation. ‘That’s the phone call I made back at the drug store. I asked if Room 14 was vacant, they said yes, so I said I’d take it, friends who’d passed through had recommended it as having the nicest view in the motel. In point of fact it has the nicest view. It’s also the most private room, at the seaward end of a long block, it’s right beside the closet where they put my case away when the cops pinched me and it has a nice private little garage where I can stow this machine away and no one will ever ask a question.’

A mile passed, two miles, three and she said nothing. She’d put her green blouse back on, but it was a lacy scrap of nothing, she’d got just as wet as I had when I was trying to fix the roof, and she was having repeated bouts of shivering. The rain had made the air cool. We were approaching the outskirts of Marble Springs when she spoke.

‘You can’t do it. How can you? You’ve got to check in or sign a book or pick up keys or have to go to the restaurant. You can’t just –’

‘Yes, I can. I asked them to have the place opened up ready for us, keys in the garage and room doors, and that we’d check in later: I said we’d come a long way since dawn, that we were bushed and that we’d appreciate room service for meals and a little privacy.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I told the receptionist we were a honeymoon couple. She seemed to understand our request for privacy.’

We were there before she could find an answer. I turned in through an ornate lilac-painted gateway and drew up near the reception hallway in the central block, parking the car directly under a powerful floodlamp which threw such black shadows that my red hair would be all but invisible under the car roof. Over by the entrance stood a negro dressed in a lilac, blue and gold-buttoned uniform that had been designed by a colour-blind man wearing smoked glasses. I called him across.

‘Room 14?’ I asked. ‘Which way, please?’

‘Mr Brooks?’ I nodded, and he went on: ‘I’ve left all the keys ready. Down this way.’

‘Thank you.’ I looked at him. Grey and bent and thin and the faded old eyes the clouded mirrors of a thousand sorrows and defeats. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Charles, sir.’

‘I want some whisky, Charles.’ I passed money across. ‘Scotch not bourbon. And some brandy. Can you?’

‘Right away, sir.’

‘Thanks.’ I let in the gear, drove down the block to No. 14. It was at the end of a narrow peninsula between the gulf to the left and a kidney-shaped swimming pool to the right. The garage door was open and I drove straight in, switched off the car lights, closed the sliding door in the near-darkness, then switched on the overhead light.

At the inner end of the left-hand wall a single door led off the garage. We went through this, into a kitchenette, neat, hygienic and superbly equipped if all you wanted was a cup of coffee and had all night to make it. A door led off this into the bed-sitting-room. Lilac carpet, lilac drapes, lilac bedspread, lilac lamp-shades, lilac seatcovers, the same excruciating motif wherever you looked. Somebody had liked lilac. Two doors off this room: to the left, let into the same wall as the kitchen door, the door to the bathroom: at the far end, the door leading into the corridor.

I was in the corridor within ten seconds of arriving in the room, dragging the girl after me. The closet was no more than six feet away, unlocked, and my bag still where it had been left. I carried it back to the room, unlocked it and was about to start throwing stuff on the bed when a knock came to the door.

‘That will be Charles,’ I murmured. ‘Open the door, stand well back, take the bottles, tell him to keep the change. Don’t try to whisper, make signs or any clever little jumps out into the middle of the corridor. I’ll be watching you from the crack of the bathroom door and my gun will be lined up on your back.’

She didn’t try any of those things. I think she was too cold, miserable and exhausted by the accumulated tension of the day to try anything. The old man handed over the bottles, took the change with a surprised murmur of thanks and closed the door softly behind him.

‘You’re frozen and shivering,’ I said abruptly. ‘I don’t want my insurance policy to go catching pneumonia.’ I fetched a couple of glasses. ‘Some brandy, Miss Ruthven, then a hot bath. Maybe you’ll find something dry in my case.’

‘You’re very kind,’ she said bitterly. ‘But I’ll take the brandy.’

‘No bath, huh?’

‘No.’ A hesitant pause, a glint in her eyes more imagined than seen, and I knew I’d been mistaken in imagining her to be too worn out to try anything. ‘Yes, that too.’

‘Right.’ I waited till she’d finished her glass, dumped my case on the bathroom floor and stood to let her pass. ‘Don’t be all night. I’m hungry.’

The door closed and the key clicked in the lock. There came the sound of water running into the bath, then all the unmistakable soaping and splashing sounds of someone having a bath. All meant to lull any suspicions. Then came the sound of someone towelling themselves, and when, a minute or two later, there came the furious gurgling of water running out of the waste pipe, I eased myself off the door, passed through the two kitchen doors and outside garage door just in time to see the bathroom window open and a little cloud of steam come rushing out. I caught her arm as she lowered herself to the ground, stifled the frightened gasp with my free hand, and led her back inside.

I closed the kitchen door and looked at her. She looked fresh and scrubbed and clean and had one of my white shirts tucked into the waistband of her dirndl. She had tears of mortification in her eyes and defeat in her face, but for all that it was a face worth looking at. Despite our long hours in the car together it was the first time I had really looked at it.

She had wonderful hair, thick and gleaming and parted in the middle and of the same wheat colour and worn in the same braids as that often seen in girls from the East Baltic states or what used to be the Baltic states. But she would never win a Miss America contest, she had too much character in her face for that, she wouldn’t even have been in the running for Miss Marble Springs. The face was slightly Slavonic, the cheekbones too high and wide, the mouth too full, the still grey eyes set too far apart and the nose definitely retroussé. A mobile and intelligent face, a face, I guessed, that could move easily into sympathy and kindness and humour and laughter, when the weariness was gone and the fear taken away. In the days before I had given up the dream of my own slippers and my own fireside, this was the face that would have fitted the dream. She was the sort of person who would wear well, the sort of person who would still be part of you long after the synthetic chromium polished blondes from the production lines of the glamour factory had you climbing up the walls.

I was just standing there, feeling a little sorry for her and feeling a little sorry for myself, when I felt a cold draught on the back of my neck. It came from the direction of the bathroom door and ten seconds ago that bathroom door had been closed and locked. But it wasn’t now.

THREE

It didn’t require the sudden widening of the girl’s eyes to tell me that I wasn’t imagining that cold draught on the back of my neck. A cloud of steam from the overheated bathroom drifted past my right ear, a little bit too much to have escaped through the keyhole of a locked door. About a thousand times too much. I turned slowly, keeping my hands well away from my sides. Maybe I would try something clever later. But not now.

The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn’t the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.

The second thing I noticed was that the bathroom doorway seemed to have shrunk since I’d seen it last. His shoulders didn’t quite touch both sides of the doorway, but that was only because it was a wide doorway. His hat certainly touched the lintel.

The third thing I noticed was the kind of hat he wore and the colour of the jacket. A panama hat, a green jacket. It was our friend and neighbour from the Ford that had been parked beside us earlier that afternoon.

He reached behind him with his left hand and softly closed the bathroom door.

‘You shouldn’t leave windows open. Let me have your gun.’ His voice was quiet and deep, but there was nothing stagy or menacing about it, you could see it was the way he normally spoke.

‘Gun?’ I tried to look baffled.

‘Look, Talbot,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I suspect we’re both what you might call professionals. I suggest we cut the unnecessary dialogue. Gun. The thing you’re carrying in your right coat pocket there. With the finger and thumb of the left hand. So. Now drop it on the carpet. Thank you.’

I kicked the gun across to him without being told. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t a professional too.

‘Now sit down,’ he said. He smiled at me, and I could see now that his face wasn’t chubby, unless you could call a lump of rock chubby. It was just broad and looked as if you could bounce a two by four off it without achieving very much. The narrow black moustache and the thin, almost Grecian nose looked out of place, as incongruous, almost, as the laughter lines round the eyes and on either side of the mouth. I didn’t place much store on the laughter lines, maybe he only practised smiling when he was beating someone over the head with a gun.

‘You recognized me in the parking-lot?’ I asked.

‘No.’ He broke open the Colt with his left hand,

ejected the remaining shell, closed the gun and with a careless flick of his wrist sent it spinning ten feet to land smack in the waste-paper basket. He looked as if he could do this sort of thing ten times out of ten, everything this man tried would always come off: if he was as good as this with his left hand, what could he do with his right? ‘I’d never seen you before this afternoon, I’d never even heard of you when first I saw you in the lot,’ he continued. ‘But I’d seen and heard of this young lady here a hundred times. You’re a Limey, or you’d have heard of her too. Maybe you have, but don’t know who you got there, you wouldn’t be the first person to be fooled by her. No make-up, no accent, hair in kid’s plaits. And you only look and behave like that either if you’ve given up competing – or there’s no one left to compete against.’ He looked at the girl and smiled again. ‘For Mary Blair Ruthven there’s no competition left. When you’re as socially acceptable as she is, and your old man is who he is, then you can dispense with your Bryn Mawr accent and the Antonio hairdo. That’s for those who need them.’

‘And her old man?’

‘Such ignorance. Blair Ruthven. General Blair Ruthven. You’ve heard of the Four Hundred – well, he’s the guy that keeps the register. You’ve heard of the Mayflower – it was old Ruthven’s ancestors who gave the Pilgrims permission to land. And, excepting maybe Paul Getty, he’s the richest oil man in the United States.’

I made no comment, there didn’t seem to be any that would meet the case. I wondered what he’d say if I told him of my pipe-dream of slippers, a fire and a multimillion heiress. Instead I said: ‘And you had your radio switched on in the parking-lot. I hear it. And then a news flash.’

‘That’s it,’ he agreed cheerfully.

‘Who are you?’ It was Mary Blair speaking for the first time since he’d entered and that was what being in the top 1 per cent of the Four Hundred did for you. You didn’t swoon, you didn’t murmur ‘Thank God’ in a broken voice, you didn’t burst into tears and fling your arms round your rescuer’s neck, you just gave him a nice friendly smile which showed he was your equal even if you know quite well he wasn’t and said: ‘Who are you?’

‘Jablonsky, miss. Herman Jablonsky.’

‘I suppose you came over in the Mayflower too,’ I said sourly. I looked consideringly at the girl. ‘Millions and millions of dollars, eh? That’s a lot of money to be walking around. Anyway, that explains away Valentino.’

‘Valentino?’ You could see she still thought I was crazy.

‘The broken-faced gorilla behind you in the court-room. If your old man shows as much judgement in picking oil wells as he does in picking bodyguards, you’re going to be on relief pretty soon.’

‘He’s not my usual––’ She bit her lip, and something like a shadow of pain touched those clear grey eyes. ‘Mr Jablonsky, I owe you a great deal.’

Jablonsky smiled again and said nothing. He fished out a pack of cigarettes, tapped the bottom, extracted one with his teeth, bent back a cardboard match in a paper folder, then threw cigarettes and matches across to me. That’s how the high-class boys operated today. Civilized, courteous, observing all the little niceties, they’d have made the hoodlums of the thirties feel slightly ill. Which made a man like Jablonsky all the more dangerous: like an iceberg, seven-eighths of his lethal menace was out of sight. The old-time hoodlums couldn’t even have begun to cope with him.

‘I take it you are prepared to use that gun,’ Mary Blair went on. She wasn’t as cool and composed as she appeared and sounded; I could see a pulse beating in her neck and it was going like a racing car. ‘I mean, this man can’t do anything to me now?’

‘Nary a thing,’ Jablonsky assured her.

‘Thank you.’ A little sigh escaped her, as if it wasn’t until that moment that she really believed her terror was over, that there was nothing more to fear. She moved across the room. ‘I’ll phone the police.’

‘No,’ Jablonsky said quietly.

She broke step. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said “No”,’ Jablonsky murmured. ‘No phone, no police, I think we’ll leave the law out of it.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ Again I could see a couple of red spots burning high up in her cheeks. The last time I’d seen those it had been fear that had put them there, this time it looked like the first stirrings of anger. When your old man had lost count of the number of oil wells he owned, people didn’t cross your path very often. ‘We must have the police,’ she went on, speaking slowly and patiently like someone explaining something to a child. This man is a criminal. A wanted criminal. And a murderer. He killed a man in London.’

‘And in Marble Springs,’ Jablonsky said quietly. ‘Patrolman Donnelly died at five-forty this afternoon.’

‘Donnelly – died?’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Six o’clock news-cast. Got it just before I tailed you out of the parking-lot. Surgeons, transfusion, the lot. He died.’

‘How horrible!’ She looked at me, but it was no more than a flickering glance, she couldn’t bear the sight of me. ‘And – and you say, “Don’t bring the police.” What do you mean?’

‘What I say,’ the big man said equably. ‘No law.’

‘Mr Jablonsky has ideas of his own, Miss Ruthven,’ I said dryly.

‘The result of your trial is a foregone conclusion,’ Jablonsky said to me tonelessly. ‘For a man with three weeks to live, you take things pretty coolly. Don’t touch that phone, miss!’

‘You wouldn’t shoot me.’ She was already across the room. ‘You’re no murderer.’

‘I wouldn’t shoot you,’ he agreed. ‘I don’t have to.’ He reached her in three long strides – he could move as quickly and softly as a cat – took the phone from her, caught her arm and led her back to the chair beside me. She tried to struggle free but Jablonsky didn’t even notice it.

‘You don’t want law, eh?’ I asked thoughtfully. ‘Kind of cramps your style a little bit, friend.’

‘Meaning I don’t want company?’ he murmured. ‘Meaning maybe I would be awful reluctant to fire this gun?’

‘Meaning just that.’

‘I wouldn’t gamble on it,’ he smiled.

I gambled on it. I had my feet gathered under me and my hands on the arms of the chair. The back of my chair was solidly against the wall and I took off in a dive that was almost parallel to the floor, arrowing on for a spot about six inches below his breastbone.

I never got there. I’d wondered what he could do with his right hand and now I found out. With his right hand he could change his gun over to his left, whip a sap from his coat pocket and hit a diving man over the head faster than anyone I’d ever known. He’d been expecting something like that from me, sure: but it was still quite a performance.

By and by someone threw cold water over me and I sat up with a groan and tried to clutch the top of my head. With both hands tied behind your back it’s impossible to clutch the top of your head. So I let my head look after itself, climbed shakily to my feet by pressing my bound hands against the wall at my back and staggered over to the nearest chair. I looked at Jablonsky, and he was busy screwing a perforated black metal cylinder on to the barrel of the Mauser. He looked at me and smiled. He was always smiling.

‘I might not be so lucky a second time,’ he said diffidently.

I scowled.

‘Miss Ruthven,’ he went on. ‘I’m going to use the phone.’

‘Why tell me?’ She was picking up my manners and they didn’t suit her at all.

‘Because I’m going to phone your father. I want you to tell me his number. It won’t be listed.’

‘Why should you phone him?’

‘There’s a reward out for our friend here,’ Jablonsky replied obliquely. ‘It was announced right after the news-cast of Donnelly’s death. The state will pay five thousand dollars for any information leading to the arrest of John Montague Talbot.’ He smiled at me. ‘Montague, eh? Well, I believe I prefer it to Cecil.’

‘Get on with it,’ I said coldly.

‘They must have declared open season on Mr Talbot,’ Jablonsky said. ‘They want him dead or alive and don’t much care which … And General Ruthven has offered to double that reward.’

‘Ten thousand dollars?’ I asked.

‘Ten thousand.’

‘Piker,’ I growled.

‘At the last count old man Ruthven was worth 285 million dollars. He might,’ Jablonsky agreed judiciously, ‘have offered more. A total of fifteen thousand. What’s fifteen thousand?’

‘Go on,’ said the girl. There was a glint in those grey eyes now.

‘He can have his daughter back for fifty thousand bucks,’ Jablonsky said coolly.

‘Fifty thousand!’ Her voice was almost a gasp. If she’d been as poor as me she would have gasped.

Jablonsky nodded. ‘Plus, of course, the fifteen thousand I’ll collect for turning Talbot in as any good citizen should.’

‘Who are you?’ the girl demanded shakily. She didn’t look as if she could take much more of this. ‘What are you?’

‘I’m a guy that wants, let me see – yes, sixty-five thousand bucks.’

‘But this is blackmail!’

‘Blackmail?’ Jablonsky lifted an eyebrow. ‘You want to read up on some law, girlie. In its strict legal sense, blackmail is hush-money – a tribute paid to buy immunity, money extorted by the threat of telling everyone what a heel the blackmailee is. Had General Ruthven anything to hide? I doubt it. Or you might just say that blackmail is demanding money with menaces. Where’s the menace? I’m not menacing you. If your old man doesn’t pay up I’ll just walk away and leave you to Talbot here. Who can blame me? I’m scared of Talbot. He’s a dangerous man. He’s a killer.’

‘But – but then you would get nothing.’

‘I’d get it,’ Jablonsky said comfortably. I tried to imagine this character flustered or unsure of himself: it was impossible. ‘Only a threat. Your old man wouldn’t dare gamble I wouldn’t do it. He’ll pay, all right.’

‘Kidnapping is a federal offence––’ the girl began slowly.

‘So it is,’ Jablonsky agreed cheerfully. ‘The hot chair or the gas chamber. That’s for Talbot. He kidnapped you. All I’m doing is talking about leaving you. No kidnapping there.’ His voice hardened. ‘What hotel is your father staying at?’

‘He’snot at any hotel.’ Her voice was flat and toneless and she’d given up. ‘He’s out on the X 13.’

‘Talk sense,’ Jablonsky said curtly.

‘X 13 is one of his oil rigs. It’s out in the gulf, twelve, maybe fifteen miles from here. I don’t know.’

‘Out in the gulf. You mean one of those floating platforms for drilling for oil? I thought they were all up off the bayou country off Louisiana.’

‘They’re all round now – off Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Dad’s got one right down near Key West. And they don’t float, they – oh, what does it matter? He’s on X 13.’

‘No phone, huh?’

‘Yes. A submarine cable. And a radio from the shore office.’

‘No radio. Too public. The phone – just ask the operator for the X 13, huh?’

She nodded without speaking, and Jablonsky crossed to the phone, asked the motel switchboard girl for the exchange, asked for the X 13 and stood there waiting, whistling in a peculiarly tuneless fashion until a sudden thought occurred to him.

‘How does your father commute between the rig and shore?’

‘Boat or helicopter. Usually helicopter.’

‘What hotel does he stay at when he’s ashore?’

‘Not a hotel. Just an ordinary family house. He’s got a permanent lease on a place about two miles south of Marble Springs.’

Jablonsky nodded and resumed his whistling. His eyes appeared to be gazing at a remote point in the ceiling, but when I moved a foot a couple of experimental inches those eyes were on me instantly. Mary Ruthven had seen both the movement of my foot and the immediate switch of Jablonsky’s glance, and for a fleeting moment her eyes caught mine. There was no sympathy in it, but I stretched my imagination a little and thought I detected a flicker of fellow-feeling. We were in the same boat and it was sinking fast.

The whistling had stopped. I could hear an indistinguishable crackle of sound then Jablonsky said: ‘I want to speak to General Ruthven. Urgently. It’s about – say that again? I see. I see.’

He depressed the receiver and looked at Mary Ruthven.

‘Your father left the X 13 at 4 p.m., and hasn’t returned. They say he won’t be back until they’ve found you. Blood, it would appear, is thicker than oil. Makes things all the easier for me.’ He got through to the new number he’d been given from the oil rig and asked for the general again. He got him almost at once and didn’t waste a word.

‘General Blair Ruthven … I’ve got news for you, General. Good news and bad. I’ve got your daughter here. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’ll cost you fifty thousand bucks to get her back.’ Jablonsky broke off and listened, spinning the Mauser gently round his forefinger, smiling as always. ‘No, General, I am not John Talbot. But Talbot’s with me right now. I’ve persuaded him that keeping father and daughter apart any longer is downright inhuman. You know Talbot, General, or you know of him. It took a lot of persuading. Fifty thousand bucks’ worth of persuading.’

The smile suddenly vanished from Jablonsky’s face leaving it bleak and cold and hard. The real Jablonsky. His voice, when he spoke, was softer and deeper than ever and gently reproving as to an erring child.

‘General, do you know what? I just heard a funny little click. The sort of funny little click you hear on a line when some smart-alec nosey picks up an extension and starts flapping his ears or when somebody cuts in a tape recorder. I don’t want any eavesdroppers. No records of private conversations. Neither do you. Not if you ever want to see your daughter again … ah, that’s better. And General, don’t get any funny ideas about telling someone to get through to the cops on another line to ask them to trace this call. We’ll be gone from wherever we are in exactly two minutes from now. What’s your answer? Make it quickly, now.’

Another brief pause, then Jablonsky laughed pleasantly.

‘Threatening you, General? Blackmail, General? Kidnapping, General? Don’t be so silly, General. There’s no law that says that a man can’t run away from a vicious killer, is there? Even if that vicious killer happens to have a kidnappee with him. I’ll just walk out and leave them together. Tell me, are you bargaining for your daughter’s life, General? Is she worth no more to you than less than one-fiftieth of one per cent of all you own? Is that all her value to a doting father? She’s listening in to all this, General. I wonder what she might think of you, eh? Willing to sacrifice her life for an old shoe-button – for that’s all fifty thousand bucks is to you … Sure, sure you can speak to her.’ He beckoned to the girl, who ran across the room and snatched the phone from his hand.

‘Daddy? Daddy! … Yes, yes, it’s me, of course it’s me. Oh, Daddy, I never thought –’

‘Right, that’ll do.’ Jablonsky laid his big square brown hand across the mouthpiece and took the phone from her. ‘Satisfied, General Blair? The genuine article, huh?’ There was a short silence, then Jablonsky smiled broadly. ‘Thank you, General Blair. I’m not worrying about any guarantee. The word of General Ruthven has always been guarantee enough.’ He listened a moment, and when he spoke again the sardonic glint in his eyes as he looked at Mary Ruthven gave the lie to the sincerity in his voice. ‘Besides, you know quite well that if you welshed on that money and had a house full of cops, your daughter would never speak to you again … No need to worry about my not coming. There’s every reason why I should. Fifty thousand, to be exact.’

He hung up. ‘On your feet, Talbot. We have an appointment with high society.’

‘Yes.’ I sat where I was. ‘And then you turn me over to the law and collect your fifteen thousand?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

‘I could give you twenty thousand reasons.’

‘Yeah?’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘Got ’em on you?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Give me a week, or perhaps –’

‘Bird-in-the-hand Jablonsky, pal, that’s me. Get going. Looks like being a nice night’s work.’

He cut my bonds and we went out through the garage. Jablonsky had a hand on the girl’s wrist and a gun about thirty inches from my back. I couldn’t see it, but I didn’t have to. I knew it was there.

Night had come. The wind was rising, from the north-west, and it carried with it the wild harsh smell of the sea and a cold slanting rain that splattered loudly against the rustling dripping fronds of the palms and bounced at an angle off the asphalt pavement at our feet. It was less than a hundred yards to where Jablonsky had left his Ford outside the central block of the motel, but that hundred yards made us good and wet. The parking-lot, in that rain, was deserted, but even Jablonsky had backed his car into the darkest corner. He would. He opened both offside doors of the Ford, then went and stood by the rear door.

‘You first, lady. Other side. You’re driving, Talbot.’ He banged my door shut as I got in behind the wheel, slid into the back seat and closed his own door. He let me feel the Mauser, hard, against the back of my neck in case my memory was failing me.

‘Turn south on the highway.’

I managed to press the proper buttons, eased through the deserted motel courtyard and turned right. Jablonsky said to the girl: ‘Your old man’s place is just off the main highway? Right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any other way of getting there? Back streets? Side roads?’

‘Yes, you can go round the town and –’

‘So. We’ll go straight through. I’m figuring the same way as Talbot figured when he came to the La Contessa – no one will be looking for him within fifty miles of Marble Springs.’

We drove through the town in silence. The roads were almost deserted and there weren’t half a dozen pedestrians to be seen. I caught the red both times at the only two sets of traffic lights in Marble Springs, and both times the Mauser came to rest on the back of my head. By and by we were clear of the town and the rain sheeting down in a torrential cascade that drummed thunderously on the roof and hood of the car. It was like driving under a waterfall and the windscreen-wipers weren’t built for driving under waterfalls. I had to slow down to twenty and even so I was all but blind whenever the headlights of an approaching car spread their whitely-diffused glare over the streaming glass of the windscreen, a blindness which became complete with the spraying wall of water that thudded solidly against screen and offside of the body as the approaching cars swept by with the sibilant whisper of wet rubber on wet roads and a bow-wave that a destroyer captain would have been proud to own.

Mary Ruthven peered into the alternating glare and gloom with her forehead pressed against the windscreen. She probably knew the road well, but she didn’t know it tonight. A north-bound truck growled by at the wrong moment and she almost missed the turn-off.

‘There it is!’ She grabbed my forearm so hard that the Ford skidded for a moment on to the shoulder of the road before I could bring it under control. I caught a glimpse through the rain of a dimly phosphorescent glow on the left and was fifty yards beyond before I stopped. The road was too narrow for a U-turn so I backed and filled until we were heading the other way, crawled up to the illuminated opening in first and turned in slowly. I should have hated to turn in there quickly. As it was, I managed to pull up a few feet short of a six-barred white-painted metal gate that would have stopped a bulldozer.

The gate appeared to be at the end of an almost flat-roofed tunnel. On the left was a seven-foot high white limestone wall, maybe twenty feet long. On the right was a white lodge with an oak door and chintz-covered windows looking out on to the tunnel. Lodge and wall were joined by a shallowly curved roof. I couldn’t see what the roof was made of. I wasn’t interested in it anyway: I was too busy looking at the man who had come through the lodge door even before I had braked to a stop.

He was the dowager’s dream of a chauffeur. He was perfect. He was immaculate. He was a poem in maroon. Even his gleaming riding boots looked maroon. The flaring Bedford cord breeches, the high-buttoned tunic, the gloves perfectly folded under one epaulette, even the peak of the cap were all of the same perfect shade. He took his cap off. His hair wasn’t maroon. It was thick and black and gleaming and parted on the right. He had a smooth brown face and dark eyes set well apart, just like his shoulders. A poem, but no pansy. He was as big as I was, and a whole lot better looking.

Mary Ruthven had the window wound down, and the chauffeur bent to look at her, one sinewy brown hand resting on the edge of the door. When he saw who it was the brown face broke into a wide smile and if the relief and gladness in his eyes weren’t genuine he was the best actor-chauffeur I’d ever known.

‘It is you, Miss Mary.’ The voice was deep, educated and unmistakably English: when you’d two hundred and eighty-five million bucks it didn’t cost but pennies extra to hire a home-grown shepherd to look after your flock of imported Rolls-Royces. English chauffeurs were class. ‘I’m delighted to see you back, ma’am. Are you all right?’

‘I’m delighted to be back, Simon.’ For a brief moment her hand lay over his and squeezed it. She let her breath go in what was half-sigh, half-shudder, and added: ‘I’m all right. How is Daddy?’

‘The general has been worried stiff, Miss Mary. But he’ll be all right now. They told me to expect you. I’ll let them know right away.’ He half-turned, wheeled, craned forward and peered into the back of the car. His body perceptibly stiffened.

‘Yeah, it’s a gun,’ Jablonsky said comfortably from the rear seat. ‘Just holding it, sonny – gets kinda uncomfortable sitting down with a gun in your hip pocket. Haven’t you found that yourself?’ I looked and, sure enough, I could see the slight bulge on the chauffeur’s right hip. ‘Spoils the cut of the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, don’t it, though?’ Jablonsky went on. ‘And don’t get any funny ideas about using yours. The time for that’s past. Besides, you might hit Talbot. That’s him behind the wheel. Fifteen thousand dollars on the hoof and I want to deliver him in prime condition.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’ The chauffeur’s face had darkened, his voice was barely civil. ‘I’ll ring the house.’ He turned away, went into the small lobby behind the door, lifted the phone and pressed a button, and as he did so the heavy gate swung open silently, smoothly, of its own accord.

‘All we need now is a moat and a portcullis,’ Jablonsky murmured as we began to move forward. ‘Looks after his 285 million, does the old general. Electrified fences, patrols, dogs, the lot, eh, lady?’

She didn’t answer. We were moving past a big four-car garage attached to the lodge. It was a carport-type garage without doors and I could see I had been right about the Rolls-Royces. There were two of them, one sand-brown and beige, the other gun-metal blue. There was also a Cadillac. That would be for the groceries. Jablonsky was speaking again.

‘Old Fancy-pants back there. The Limey. Where’d you pick that sissy up?’

‘I’d like to see you say that to him without that gun in your hand,’ the girl said quietly. ‘He’s been with us for three years now. Nine months ago three masked men crashed our car with only Kennedy and myself in it. They all carried guns. One’s dead, the other two are still in prison.’

‘A lucky sissy,’ Jablonsky grunted and relapsed into silence.

The asphalt drive-way up to the house was narrow, long, winding and thickly wooded on both sides. The small evergreen leaves of live oak and long dripping grey festoons of Spanish moss reached out and brushed the roof and sidescreens of the car. Suddenly the trees receded on both sides from the beams of the headlamps, giving way to strategically placed clumps of palms and palmettos, and there, behind a stepped granite balustrade wall and a gravel terrace, lay the general’s house.

Built as an ordinary family house, the girl had said. Built for a family of about fifty. It was enormous. It was an old white ante-bellum-type house, so Colonial that it creaked, with a huge pillared two-storey porch, a curiously double-angled roof of a type I’d never seen before and enough glass to keep an active window-cleaner in year-round employment. Over the entrance of the lower porch were two more lights, big old-fashioned coach lamps each with a powerful electric bulb inside. Below the lamps stood the reception committee.

I hadn’t expected the reception committee. Subconsciously, I suppose, I had expected the old high-class routine of being welcomed by the butler and deferentially and ceremoniously conducted to the library where the general would be sipping his Scotch before a crackling pine fire. Which was pretty silly, when you come to think of it. When you’re expecting a daughter back from the dead and the door-bell rings, you don’t just keep on sipping whisky. Not if you’re halfway human. The chauffeur had warned them: hence the committee.

The butler was there too. He came down the steps of the porch carrying a huge golf umbrella out into the heavy rain. He didn’t look like any butler I’d ever seen. His coat was far too tight round his upper arms, shoulders and chest in a fashion that used to be popular among prohibition gangsters and his face did nothing to dispel the impression. He looked first cousin to Valentino, the bodyguard back in the court-room. Or maybe even more closely related. He even had the same broken nose. The general had a weird taste in butlers, especially when you considered his choice of chauffeur.

But the butler seemed courteous enough. At least I thought he was until he saw who it was behind the driving-wheel and then he made a smart about turn, went round the front of the car and escorted Mary Ruthven to the shelter of the porch where she ran forward and threw her arms round her father’s neck. Jablonsky and I had to make it alone. We got wet, but no one seemed worried.

By this time the girl had become disentangled from her father. I had a good look at him. He was an immensely tall old coot, thin but not too thin, in a silver-white linen suit. The colour of the suit was a perfect match for the hair. He had a long lean craggy Lincolnesque face, but just how craggy it was impossible to say for almost half of it was hidden behind a luxuriant white moustache and beard. He didn’t look like any big business magnate I’d ever come across, but with 285 million dollars he didn’t have to. He looked like the way I’d expected a southern judge to look and didn’t.

‘Come in, gentlemen,’ he said courteously. I wondered if he included me among the three other men standing in the shadows in the porch. It seemed unlikely, but I went in all the same. I hadn’t much option. Not only was Jablonsky’s Mauser jammed into the small of my back but another man who’d just stepped out of the shadow also carried a gun. We trooped across a huge, wide, chandelier-lit, tessellated-tile floored hall, down a broad passage and into a large room. I’d been right about the room anyway. It was a library, it did have a blazing pine fire and the slightly oily smell of fine leather-bound books mingled very pleasantly with the aroma of expensive Coronas and a high-class Scotch. I noticed there was nobody there smoking cigars. The walls that weren’t covered with bookshelves were panelled in polished elm. Chairs and settees were in dark gold leather and moquette, and the curtains of shot gold. A bronze-coloured carpet flowed over the floor from wall to wall and with a strong enough draught the nap on it would have waved and undulated like a wind-rippled field of summer corn. As it was, the chair castors were so deeply sunk in it as to be almost invisible.

‘Scotch, Mr – ah –?’ the general asked Jablonsky.

‘Jablonsky. I don’t mind, General. While I’m standing. And while I’m waiting.’

‘Waiting for what, Mr Jablonsky?’ General Ruthven had a quiet pleasant voice with very little inflection in it. With 285 million bucks you don’t have to shout to make yourself heard.

‘Ain’t you the little kidder, now?’ Jablonsky was as quiet, as unruffled as the general. ‘For the little paper, General, with your name signed at the bottom. For the fifty thousand iron men.’

‘Of course.’ The general seemed faintly surprised that Jablonsky should think it necessary to remind him of the agreement. He crossed to the dressed-stone mantelpiece, pulled a yellow bank slip from under a paper-weight. ‘I have it here, just the payee’s name to be filled in.’ I thought a slight smile touched his mouth but under all that foliage it was difficult to be sure. ‘And you needn’t worry about my phoning the bank with instructions not to honour this cheque. Such is not my way of doing business.’

‘I know it’s not, General.’

‘And my daughter is worth infinitely more to me than this. I must thank you, sir, for bringing her back.’

‘Yeah.’ Jablonsky took the cheque, glanced casually at it, then looked at the general, a speculative glint in his eyes.

‘Your pen slipped, General,’ he drawled. ‘I asked for fifty thousand. You got seventy thousand here.’

‘Correct.’ Ruthven inclined his head and glanced at me. ‘I had offered ten thousand dollars for information about this man here. I also feel that I’m morally bound to make good the five thousand offered by the authorities. It’s so much easier to make out one lump-sum cheque to one person, don’t you agree?’

‘And the extra five thousand?’

‘For your trouble and the pleasure it will give me to hand this man over to the authorities personally.’ Again I couldn’t be sure whether or not he smiled. ‘I can afford to indulge those whims, you know.’

‘Your pleasure is my pleasure, General. I’ll be on my way, then. Sure you can handle this fellow? He’s tough, fast, tricky as they come.’

‘I have people who can handle him.’ It was plain that the general wasn’t referring to the butler and another uniformed servant hovering in the background. He pressed a bell, and when some sort of footman came to the door, said: ‘Ask Mr Vyland and Mr Royale to come in, will you, Fletcher?’

‘Why don’t you ask them yourself, General?’ To my way of thinking I was the central figure in that little group, but they hadn’t even asked me to speak, so I thought it was time to say something. I bent down to the bowl of artificial flowers on the table by the fire, and pulled up a fine-meshed microphone. ‘This room’s bugged. A hundred gets one your friends have heard every word that’s been said. For a millionaire and high society flier, Ruthven, you have some strange habits.’ I broke off and looked at the trio who had just come through the doorway. ‘And even stranger friends.’

Which wasn’t quite an accurate statement. The first man in looked perfectly at home in that luxurious setting. He was of medium height, medium build, dressed in a perfectly cut dinner suit and smoking a cigar as long as your arm. That was the expensive smell I’d picked up as soon as I had come into the library. He was in his early fifties, with black hair touched by grey at the temples: his neat clipped moustache was jet black. His face was smooth and unlined and deeply sunburnt. He was Hollywood’s ideal of a man to play the part of a top executive, smooth, urbane and competent to a degree. It was only when he came closer and you saw his eyes and the set of the planes of his face that you realized that here was a toughness, both physical and mental, and a hardness that you would never see around a movie set. A man to watch.

The second man was more off-beat. It was hard to put a finger on the quality that made him so. He was dressed in a soft grey flannel suit, white shirt, and grey tie of the same shade as the suit. He was slightly below medium height, broadly built, with a pale face and smooth slicked hair almost the same colour as Mary Ruthven’s. It wasn’t until you looked again and again that you saw what made him off-beat, it wasn’t anything he had, it was something he didn’t have. He had the most expressionless face, the emptiest eyes I had even seen in any man.

Off-beat was no description for the man who brought up the rear. He belonged in that library the way Mozart would have belonged in a rock and roll club. He was only twenty-one or -two, tall, skinny, with a dead-white face and coal-black eyes. The eyes were never still, they moved restlessly from side to side as if it hurt them to be still, flickering from one face to another like a will-o’-the-wisp on an autumn evening. I didn’t notice what he wore, all I saw was his face. The face of a hophead, a junky, an advanced dope addict. Take away his white powder for even twenty-four hours and he’d be screaming his head off as all the devils in hell closed in on him.

‘Come in, Mr Vyland.’ The general was speaking to the man with the cigar and I wished for the tenth time that old Ruthven’s expression wasn’t so hard to read. He nodded in my direction. ‘This is Talbot, the wanted man. And this is Mr Jablonsky, the man who brought him back.’

‘Glad to meet you, Mr Jablonsky.’ Vyland smiled in a friendly fashion and put his hand out. ‘I’m the general’s chief production engineer.’ Sure, he was the general’s chief production engineer, that made me President of the United States. Vyland nodded at the man in the grey suit. ‘This is Mr Royale, Mr Jablonsky.’

‘Mr Jablonsky! Mr Jablonsky!’ The words weren’t spoken, they were hissed by the tall thin boy with the staring eyes. His hand dived under the lapel of his jacket and I had to admit he was fast. The gun trembled in his hand. He swore, three unprintable words in succession, and the eyes were glazed and mad. ‘I’ve waited two long years for this, you – Damn you, Royale! Why did –?’

‘There’s a young lady here, Larry.’ I could have sworn that Royale’s hand hadn’t reached under his coat, or for his hip pocket, but there had been no mistaking the flash of dulled metal in his hand, the sharp crack of the barrel on Larry’s wrist and the clatter of the boy’s gun bouncing off a brass-topped table. As an example of sleight-of-hand conjuring, I’d never seen anything to beat it.

‘We know Mr Jablonsky,’ Royale was continuing. His voice was curiously musical and soothing and soft. ‘At least, Larry and I know. Don’t we, Larry? Larry did six months once on a narcotics charge. It was Jablonsky that sent him up.’

‘Jablonsky sent––’ the general began.

‘Jablonsky.’ Royale smiled and nodded at the big man. ‘Detective-Lieutenant Herman Jablonsky, of New York Homicide.’

FOUR

It was one of those silences. It went on and on and on. Pregnant, they call it. It didn’t worry me much, I was for the high jump anyway. It was the general who spoke first and his voice and face were stiff and cold as he looked at the man in the dinner suit.

‘What is the explanation of this outrageous conduct, Vyland?’ he demanded. ‘You bring into this house a man who is apparently not only a narcotics addict and carries a gun, but who also served a prison sentence. As for the presence of a police officer, someone might care to inform me –’

‘Relax, General. You can drop the front.’ It was Royale who spoke, his voice quiet and soothing as before and curiously devoid of any trace of insolence. ‘I wasn’t quite accurate. Ex-Detective-Lieutenant, I should have said. Brightest boy in the bureau in his day, first narcotics, then homicide, more arrests and more convictions for arrests than any other police officer in the eastern states. But your foot slipped, didn’t it, Jablonsky?’

Jablonsky said nothing and his face showed nothing, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking plenty. My face showed nothing, but I was thinking plenty. I was thinking how I could try to get away. The servants had vanished at a wave of the hand from the general and, for the moment, everyone seemed to have lost interest in me. I turned my head casually. I was wrong, there was someone who hadn’t lost interest in me. Valentino, my court-room acquaintance, was standing in the passageway just outside the open door, and the interest he was taking in me more than made up for the lack of interest in the library. I was pleased to see that he was carrying his right arm in a sling. His left thumb was hooked in the side pocket of his coat, and although he might have had a big thumb it wasn’t big enough to make all that bulge in his pocket. He would just love to see me trying to get away.

‘Jablonsky here was the central figure in the biggest police scandal to hit New York since the war,’ Royale was saying. ‘All of a sudden there were a lot of murders – important murders – in his parish, and Jablonsky boobed on the lot. Everyone knew a protection gang was behind the killings. Everybody except Jablonsky. All Jablonsky knew was that he was getting ten grand a stiff to look in every direction but the right one. But he had even more enemies inside the force than outside, and they nailed him. Eighteen months ago it was, and he had the headlines to himself for an entire week. Don’t you remember, Mr Vyland?’

‘Now I do,’ Vyland nodded. ‘Sixty thousand tucked away and they never laid a finger on a cent. Three years he got, wasn’t it?’

‘And out in eighteen months,’ Royale finished. ‘Jumped the wall; Jablonsky?’

‘Good conduct remission,’ Jablonsky said calmly. ‘A respectable citizen again. Which is more than could be said for you, Royale. You employing this man, General?’

‘I fail to see –’

‘Because if you are, it’ll cost you a hundred bucks more than you think. A hundred bucks is the price Royale usually charges his employers for a wreath for his victims. A very fancy wreath. Or has the price gone up, Royale? And who are you putting the finger on this time?’

Nobody said anything. Jablonsky had the floor.

‘Royale here is listed in the police files of half the states in the Union, General. Nobody’s ever pinned anything on him yet, but they know all about him. No.1 remover in the United States, not furniture but people. He charges high, but he’s good and there’s never any comeback. A freelance, and his services are in terrific demand by all sorts of people you’d never dream of, not only because he never fails to give satisfaction but also because of the fact that it’s a point of Royale’s code that he’ll never touch a man who has employed him. An awful lot of people sleep an awful lot easier, General, just because they know they’re on Royale’s list of untouchables.’ Jablonsky rubbed a bristly chin with a hand the size of a shovel. ‘I wonder who he could be after this time, General? Could it even be yourself, do you think?’

For the first time the general registered emotion. Not even the beard and moustache could hide a narrowing of the eyes, a tightening of the lips and a slight but perceptible draining of colour from the cheeks. He wet his lips, slowly, and looked at Vyland.

‘Did you know anything of this? What truth is there –?’

‘Jablonsky’s just shooting off the top of his mouth,’ Vyland interjected smoothly. ‘Let’s get them into another room, General. We must talk.’

Ruthven nodded, his face still pale, and Vyland glanced at Royale. Royale smiled and said without inflection: ‘All right, you two, out. Leave that gun there, Jablonsky.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘You haven’t cashed that cheque yet,’ Royale said obliquely. They’d been listening, all right.

Jablonsky put his gun on the table. Royale himself didn’t have a gun in his hand. With the speed he could move at it would have been quite superfluous anyway. The hophead, Larry, came up behind me and dug his pistol barrel in my kidney with a force that made me grunt in pain. Nobody said anything, so I said: ‘Do that again, hophead, and it’ll take a dentist a whole day to repair your face.’ So he did it again, twice as painfully as before, and when I swung round he was too quick for me and caught me with the barrel of his gun high up on the face and raked the sight down my cheek. Then he stood off, four feet away, gun pointed at my lower stomach and those crazy eyes jumping all over the place, a wicked smile on his face inviting me to jump him. I mopped some of the blood off my face and turned and went out the door.

Valentino was waiting for me, gun in hand and heavy boots on his feet, and by the time Royale came leisurely out of the library, closed the door behind him and stopped Valentino with a single word, I couldn’t walk. There’s nothing wrong with my thigh, it’s carried me around for years, but it’s not made of oak and Valentino wore toe-plates on his boots. It just wasn’t my lucky night. Jablonsky helped me off the floor into an adjacent room. I stopped at the doorway, looked back at the grinning Valentino and then at Larry, and I wrote them both down in my little black book.

We spent perhaps ten minutes in that room, Jablonsky and I sitting, the hophead pacing up and down with the gun in his hand and hoping I would twitch an eyebrow, Royale leaning negligently against a table, nobody saying anything, until by and by the butler came in and said the general wanted to see us. We all trooped out again. Valentino was still there, but I made it safely to the library. Maybe he’d hurt his toe, but I knew it wasn’t that: Royale had told him once to lay off, and just once would be all that Royale would have to tell anybody anything.

A far from subtle change had taken place in the atmosphere since we’d left. The girl was sitting on a stool by the fire, head bent and the flickering light gleaming off her wheat-coloured braids, but Vyland and the general seemed easy and relaxed and confident and the latter was even smiling. A couple of newspapers were lying on the library table and I wondered sourly if those, with their big black banner headlines ‘Wanted Killer Slays Constable, Wounds Sheriff’ and the far from flattering pictures of myself had anything to do with their confidence. To emphasize the change in atmosphere, a footman came in with a tray of glasses, decanter and soda siphon. He was a young man, but moved with a peculiarly stiff leaden-footed gait and he laid the tray down on the table with so laborious a difficulty that you could almost hear his joints creak. His colour didn’t look too good either. I looked away, glanced at him again and then indifferently away once more, hoping that the knowledge of what I suddenly knew didn’t show in my face.

They’d read all the right books on etiquette, the footman and the butler knew exactly what to do. The footman brought in the drinks, the butler carried them around. He gave a sherry to the girl, whisky to each of the four men – Hophead was pointedly bypassed – and planted himself in front of me. My gaze travelled from his hairy wrists to his broken nose to the general in the background. The general nodded, so I looked back at the silver tray again. Pride said no, the magnificent aroma of the amber liquid that had been poured from the triangular dimpled bottle said yes, but pride carried the heavy handicap of my hunger, soaked clothes and the beating I’d just had and the aroma won looking round. I took the glass and eyed the general over the rim. ‘A last drink for the condemned man, eh, General?’

‘Not condemned yet.’ He lifted his glass. ‘Your health, Talbot.’

‘Very witty,’ I sneered. ‘What do they do in the state of Florida, General? Strap you over a cyanide bucket or just fry you in the hot seat?’

‘Your health,’ he repeated. ‘You’re not condemned, maybe you’ll never be condemned. I have a proposition to put before you, Talbot.’

I lowered myself carefully into a chair. Valentino’s boot must have mangled up one of the nerves in my leg, a thigh muscle was jumping uncontrollably. I waved at the papers lying on the library table.

‘I take it you’ve read those, General. I take it you know all about what happened today, all about my record. What kind of proposition can a man like you possibly have to put to a man like me?’

‘A very attractive one.’ I imagined I saw a touch of red touch the high cheekbones but he spoke steadily enough. ‘In exchange for a little service I wish you to perform for me I offer you your life.’

‘A fair offer. And the nature of this little service, General?’

‘I am not at liberty to tell you at present. In about, perhaps – thirty-six hours, would you say, Vyland?’

‘We should hear by then,’ Vyland agreed. He was less and less like an engineer every time I looked at him. He took a puff at his Corona and looked at me. ‘You agree to the general’s proposition, then?’

‘Don’t be silly. What else can I do? And after the job, whatever it is?’

‘You will be provided with papers and passport and sent to a certain South American country where you will have nothing to fear,’ the general answered. ‘I have the connections.’ Like hell I would be given papers and a trip to South America: I would be given a pair of concrete socks and a vertical trip to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

‘And if I don’t agree, then of course –’

‘If you don’t agree then they will all be overcome by a high sense of civic responsibility and turn you over to the cops,’ Jablonsky interrupted sardonically. ‘The whole set-up stinks to high heaven. Why should the general want you? – he can hire practically any man in the nation. Why, especially, should he hire a killer on the lam? What earthly use can you be to him? Why should he help a wanted murderer to evade justice?’ He sipped his drink thoughtfully. ‘General Blair Ruthven, the moral pillar of New England society, best-known and highest-minded do-gooder after the Rockefellers. It stinks. You’re paddling in some dark and dirty water, General. Very dark, very dirty. And paddling right up to your neck. Lord knows what stakes you must be playing for. They must be fantastic.’ He shook his head. ‘This I would never have believed.’

‘I have never willingly or knowingly done a dishonest thing in my life,’ the general said steadily.

‘Jeez!’ Jablonsky ejaculated. For a few seconds he was silent, then said suddenly: ‘Well, thanks for the drink, General. Don’t forget to sup with a long spoon. I’ll take my hat and my cheque and be on my way. The Jablonsky retirement fund is in your debt.’

I didn’t see who made the signal. Probably it came from Vyland. Again I didn’t see how the gun got into Royale’s hand. But I saw it there. So did Jablonsky. It was a tiny gun, a very flat automatic with a snub barrel, even smaller than the Lilliput the sheriff had taken from me. But Royale probably had the eye and the aim of a squirrel-hunter, and it was all he needed: a great big hole in the heart from a heavy Colt makes you no deader than a tiny little hole from a .22.

Jablonsky looked thoughtfully at the gun. ‘You would rather I stayed, General?’

‘Put that damn gun away,’ the general snapped. ‘Jablonsky’s on our side. At least, I hope he’s going to be. Yes, I’d rather you stayed. But no one’s going to make you if you don’t want to.’

‘And what’s going to make me want to?’ Jablonsky inquired of the company at large. ‘Could it be that the general, who has never willingly done a dishonest thing in his life, is planning to hold up payment on that cheque? Or maybe just planning to tear it up altogether?’

It didn’t need the general’s suddenly averted eyes to confirm Jablonsky’s guess. Vyland cut in smoothly: ‘It’ll only be for two days, Jablonsky, three at the most. After all, you are getting a great deal of money for very little. All we’re asking you to do is to ride herd on Talbot here until he’s done what we want him to do.’

Jablonsky nodded slowly. ‘I see. Royale here wouldn’t stoop to bodyguarding – he takes care of people in a rather more permanent way. The thug out in the passage there, the butler, our little friend Larry here – Talbot could eat ’em all before breakfast. You must need Talbot pretty badly, eh?’

‘We require him,’ Vyland said smoothly. ‘And from what we’ve learnt from Miss Ruthven – and from what Royale knows of you – you can hold him. And your money’s safe.’

‘Uh-huh. And tell me, am I a prisoner looking after a prisoner, or am I free to come and go?’

‘You heard what the general said,’ Vyland answered. ‘You’re a free agent. But if you do go out make sure he’s locked up or tied so that he can’t break for it.’

‘Seventy thousand bucks’ worth of guarding, eh?’ Jablonsky said grimly. ‘He’s safe as the gold in Fort Knox.’ I caught Royale and Vyland exchanging a brief flicker of a glance as Jablonsky went on: ‘But I’m kind of worried about that seventy thousand. I mean, if someone finds out Talbot is here, I won’t get the seventy thousand. All I’ll get, with my record, is ten years for obstructing the course of justice and giving aid and comfort to a wanted murderer.’ He looked speculatively at Vyland and the general and went on softly: ‘What guarantee have I that no one in this house will talk?’

‘No one will talk,’ Vyland said flatly.

‘The chauffeur lives in the lodge, doesn’t he?’ Jablonsky said obliquely.

‘Yes, he does.’ Vyland spoke softly, thoughtfully. ‘It might be a good idea to get rid of –’

‘No!’ the girl interrupted violently. She’d jumped to her feet, fists clenched by her sides.

‘Under no circumstances,’ General Ruthven said quietly. ‘Kennedy remains. We are too much in his debt.’

Vyland’s dark eyes narrowed for a moment and he looked at the general. But it was the girl who answered the unspoken query.

‘Simon won’t talk,’ she said tonelessly. She moved towards the door: ‘I’ll go to see him.’

‘Simon, eh?’ Vyland scraped a thumb-nail against the corner of his moustache, and looked at her appraisingly. ‘Simon Kennedy, chauffeur and general handyman.’

She retraced a few steps, stopped in front of Vyland and looked at him steadily, tiredly. You could just see the fifteen generations stretching back to the Mayflower and every one of the 285 million bucks was showing. She said distinctly: ‘I think you are the most utterly hateful man I have ever known,’ and walked out, closing the door behind her.

‘My daughter is overwrought,’ the general said hastily. ‘She –’

‘Forget it, General.’ Vyland’s voice was as urbane as ever, but he looked a bit overwrought himself. ‘Royale, you might show Jablonsky and Talbot their quarters for tonight. East end of the new wing – the rooms are being fixed now.’

Royale nodded, but Jablonsky held up his hand. ‘This job Talbot is going to do for you – is it in this house?’

General Ruthven glanced at Vyland, then shook his head.

‘Then where?’ Jablonsky demanded. ‘If this guy is taken out of here and anybody within a hundred miles spots him, we’ve had it. Particularly, it would be goodbye to my money. I think I’m entitled to a little reassurance on this point, General.’

Again the swift interchange of looks between the general and Vyland, again the latter’s all but imperceptible nod.

‘I think we can tell you that,’ the general said.

‘The job’s on the X 13, my oil rig out in the gulf.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Fifteen miles from here and well out in the gulf. No passers-by to see him there, Mr Jablonsky.’

Jablonsky nodded, as though for the moment satisfied, and said no more. I stared at the ground. I didn’t dare to look up. Royale said softly: ‘Let’s be on our way.’

I finished my drink and got up. The heavy library door opened outwards into the passage and Royale, gun in hand, stood to one side to let me pass through first. He should have known better. Or maybe my limp deceived him. People thought my limp slowed me up, but people were wrong.

Valentino had disappeared. I went through the doorway, slowed up and moved to one side round the edge of the door as if I were waiting for Royale to catch up and show me where to go, then whirled round and smashed the sole of my right foot against the door with all the speed and power I could muster.

Royale got nailed neatly between door and jamb. Had it been his head that was caught it would have been curtains. As it was, it caught his shoulders but even so it was enough to make him grunt in agony and send the gun spinning out of his hand to fall a couple of yards down the passage. I dived for it, I scooped it up by the barrel, swung round, still crouched, as I heard the quick step behind me. The butt of the automatic caught the diving Royale somewhere on the face, I couldn’t be sure where, but it sounded like a four-pound axe sinking into the bole of a pine. He was unconscious before he hit me – but he did hit me. An axe won’t stop a falling pine. It took only a couple of seconds to push him off and change my grip to the butt of the pistol, but two seconds would always be enough and more than enough for a man like Jablonsky.

His foot caught my gun-hand and the gun landed twenty feet away. I launched myself for his legs but he moved to one side with the speed of a fly-weight, lifted his knee and sent me crashing against the open door. And then it was too late, for he had the Mauser in his hand and it was pointing between my eyes.

I climbed slowly to my feet, not trying anything. The general and Vyland, the latter with a gun in his hand, came crowding through the open door, then relaxed when they saw Jablonsky with the gun on me. Vyland bent down and helped a now-moaning Royale to a sitting position. Royale had a long, heavily bleeding cut above his left eye and and tomorrow he’d have a duck’s egg bruise there. After maybe half a minute he shook his head to clear it, wiped blood away with the back of his hand and looked slowly round till his eyes found mine. I’d been mistaken. I’d thought his the emptiest, the most expressionless eyes I’d ever seen, but I’d been mistaken. I looked in them and I could almost smell the moist freshly-turned earth of an open grave.

‘I can see that you gents really do need me around,’ Jablonsky said jovially. ‘I never thought anyone would try that stuff with Royale and live to talk about it. But we learn.’ He dug into a side pocket and brought out a set of very slender blued-steel cuffs and slipped them expertly on my wrists. ‘A souvenir of the bad old days,’ he explained apologetically. ‘Would there happen to be another pair and some wire or chain round the house?’

‘It might be arranged,’ Vyland said almost mechanically. He still couldn’t credit what had happened to his infallible hatchet-man.

‘Fine.’ Jablonsky grinned down at Royale. ‘You don’t need to lock your door tonight. I’ll keep Talbot out of your hair.’ Royale transferred his sombre, evil stare from my face to Jablonsky’s and his expression didn’t alter any that I could see. I fancied perhaps Royale was beginning to have ideas about a double grave.

The butler took us upstairs and along a narrow passage to the back of the big house, took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door and ushered us in. It was just another bedroom, sparsely but expensively furnished, with a wash-basin in one corner and a modern mahogany bed in the middle of the right wall. To the left was a communicating door to another bedroom. The butler took a second key from his pocket and unlocked this door also. It gave on to another room, the mirror image of the first, except for the bed, which was an old-fashioned iron-railed effort. It looked as if it had been made with girders left over from the Key West bridge. It looked solid. It looked as if it were going to be my bed.

We went back into the other room. Jablonsky stretched out his hand. ‘The keys, please.’

The butler hesitated, peered uncertainly at him, then shrugged, handed over the keys and turned to leave. Jablonsky said pleasantly: ‘This Mauser I’m holding here, friend – want that I should bounce it off your head two three times?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.’

‘“Sir”, hey? That’s good. I wouldn’t have expected them to have books on buttling in Alcatraz. The other key, my friend. The one leading to the passage from Talbot’s room.’

The butler scowled, handed over a third key, and left. Whatever buttling book he’d read he’d skipped the section on closing doors, but it was a stout door and it stood up to it. Jablonsky grinned, locked the door with an ostentatious click, pulled the curtains, checked rapidly that there were no peep-holes in the walls and crossed back to where I stood. Five or six times he smacked a massive fist into a massive palm, kicked the wall and knocked over an armchair with a thud that shook the room. Then he said, not too softly, not too loudly: ‘Get up when you’re ready, friend. That’s just a little warning, shall we say, not to try any further tricks like you tried on Royale. Just move one finger and you’ll think the Chrysler building fell on top of you.’

I didn’t move a finger. Neither did Jablonsky. There was a complete silence inside the room. We listened hard. The silence in the passageway outside was not complete. With his flat feet and adenoidal, broken-nosed breathing, the butler was completely miscast as the Last of the Mohicans and he was a good twenty feet away by the time the thick carpet absorbed the last of his creaking footfalls.

Jablonsky took out a key, softly opened the handcuffs, pocketed them and shook my hand as if he meant to break every finger I had. I felt like it, too, but for all that my grin was as big, as delighted as his own. We lit cigarettes and started on the two rooms with toothpicks, looking for bugs and listening devices.

The place was loaded with them.

Exactly twenty-four hours later I climbed into the sports car that had been left empty, but with the ignition key in the lock, four hundred yards away from the entrance lodge to the general’s house. It was a Chevrolet Corvette – the same car that I’d stolen the previous afternoon when I’d been holding Mary Ruthven hostage.

The rain yesterday had vanished, completely. The sky had been blue and cloudless all day long – and for me it had been a very long day indeed. Lying fully dressed and handcuffed to the rails of an iron bed for twelve hours while the temperature in a closed-window south-facing room rises to a hundred in the shade – well, the heat and the somnolent inactivity would have been just right for a Galapagos tortoise. It left me as limp as a shot rabbit. They’d kept me there all day, Jablonsky bringing me food and parading me shortly after dinner before the general, Vyland and Royale to let them see how good a watch-dog he was and that I was still relatively intact. Relatively was the word: to increase the effect I’d redoubled my limp and had sticking plaster crossed over cheek and chin.

Royale needed no such adventitious aids to advertise the fact that he had been in the wars. I doubt if they made sticking plaster wide enough to cover the enormous bruise he had on his forehead. His right eye was the same bluish-purple as the bruise, and completely shut. I’d done a good job on Royale: and I knew, for all the empty remote expression that was back in his face and one good eye, that he’d never rest until he’d done a better job on me. A permanent job.

The night air was cool and sweet and full of the smell of the salt air. I had the hood down and as I travelled south I leaned far back and to one side to let the freshness drive away the last of the cobwebs from my dopy mind. It wasn’t just the heat that had made my mind sluggish, I had slept so long during that sticky afternoon that I was overslept and paying for it: but then, I wasn’t going to get much sleep that coming night. Once or twice I thought of Jablonsky, that big black smiling man with the engaging grin, sitting back in his upstairs room diligently and solemnly guarding my empty bedroom with all three keys in his pocket. I felt in my own pocket and they were still there, the duplicates that Jablonsky had had cut that morning when he had taken the air in the direction of Marble Springs. Jablonsky had been busy that morning.

I forgot about Jablonsky. He could take better care of himself than any man I’d ever known. I had enough troubles of my own coming up that night.

The last traces of the brilliant red sunset had just vanished over the wine-dark gulf to the west and the stars were standing clear in the high and windless sky when I saw a green-shaded lantern on the right of the road. I passed it, then a second, then at the third I turned sharp right and ran the Corvette down on to a little stone jetty, switching off my headlights even before I coasted to a standstill beside a tall, bulky man with a tiny pencil flash in his hand.

He took my arm – he had to, I was blind from staring into the glaring white pool of light cast by the Corvette’s headlamps – and led me wordlessly down a flight of wooden steps to a floating landing jetty and across this to a long dark shape that lay rocking gently by the side of the jetty. I was seeing better already, and I managed to grab a stay and jump down into the boat without a helping hand. A squat, short man rose to greet me.

‘Mr Talbot?’

‘Yes. Captain Zaimis, isn’t it?’

‘John.’ The little man chuckled and explained in his lilting accent: ‘My boys would laugh at me. “Captain Zaimis”, they would say. “And how is the Queen Mary or the United States today?” they would say. And so on. The children of today.’ The little man sighed in mock sorrow. ‘Ah, well, I suppose “John” is good enough for the captain of the little Matapan.’

I glanced over his shoulder and had a look at the children. They were, as yet, no more than dark blurs against a slightly less dark skyline, but there was little enough to let me see that they averaged about six feet and were built in proportion. Nor was the Matapan so little: she was at least forty feet long, twin-masted, with curious athwartships and fore-and-aft rails just above the height of a tall man’s head. Both men and vessel were Greek: the crew were Greeks to a man and if the Matapan wasn’t entirely Grecian, she had at least been built by Greek shipwrights who had come to and settled down in Florida just for the express purpose of building those sponge ships. With its slender graceful curves and upswept bows Homer would have had no trouble in identifying it as a direct lineal descendant of the galleys that had roamed the sunlit Aegean and the Levant countless centuries ago. I felt a sudden sense of gratitude and security that I was aboard such a vessel, accompanied by such men.

‘A fine night for the job in hand,’ I said.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’ The humour had left his voice. ‘I don’t think so. It is not the night that John Zaimis would have chosen.’

I didn’t point out that choice didn’t enter into the matter. I said: ‘Too clear, is that it?’

‘Not that.’ He turned away for a moment, gave some orders in what could only have been Greek, and men started moving about the deck, unhitching ropes from the bollards on the landing stage. He turned back to me. ‘Excuse me if I speak to them in our old tongue. Those three boys are not yet six months in this country. My own boys, they will not dive. A hard life, they say, too hard a life. So we have to bring the young men from Greece … I don’t like the weather, Mr Talbot. It is too fine a night.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Too fine. The air is too still, and the little breeze it comes from the north-west? That is bad. Tonight the sun was a flame in the sky. That is bad. You feel the little waves that are rocking the Matapan? When the weather is good the little waves they slap against the hull every three seconds, maybe four. Tonight?’ He shrugged. ‘Twelve seconds, maybe every fifteen. For forty years I have sailed out of Tarpon Springs. I know the waters here, Mr Talbot, I would be lying if I say any man knows them better. A big storm comes.’

‘A big storm, eh?’ When it came to big storms I didn’t fancy myself very much. ‘Hurricane war ning out?’

‘No.’

‘Do you always get those signs before a hurricane?’ Captain Zaimis wasn’t going to cheer me up, somebody had to try.

‘Not always, Mr Talbot. Once, maybe fifteen years ago, there was a storm warning but none of the signs. Not one. The fishermen from the South Caicos went out. Fifty drowned. But when it is September and the signs are there, then the big storm comes. Every time it comes.’

Nobody was going to cheer me up tonight. ‘When will it come?’ I asked.

‘Eight hours, forty-eight hours, I do not know.’ He pointed due west, the source of the long slow oily swell. ‘But it comes from there … You will find your rubber suit below, Mr Talbot.’

Two hours and thirteen miles later we were uncomfortably nearer that still-distant storm. We had travelled at full speed, but full speed on the Matapan was nothing to write home about. Almost a month ago two civilian engineers, sworn to secrecy, had bypassed the exhaust of the Matapan’s engine to an underwater cylinder with a curiously arranged system of baffle plates. They’d done a fine job, the exhaust level of the Matapan was no more than a throaty whisper, but back pressure had cut the thrust output in half. But it was fast enough. It got there. It got there too fast for me, and the farther out we went into the starlit gulf the longer and deeper became the troughs between the swells, the more convinced I was of the hopelessness of what I had set out to do. But someone had to do it and I was the man who had picked the joker.

There was no moon that night. By and by, even the stars began to go out. Cirrus clouds in long grey sheets began to fill the sky. Then the rain came, not heavy, but cold and penetrating, and John Zaimis gave me a tarpaulin for shelter – there was a cabin on the Matapan, but I had no wish to go below.

I must have dozed off, lulled by the motion of the boat, for the next I knew the rain had stopped spattering on the tarpaulin and someone was shaking my shoulder. It was the skipper, and he was saying softly: ‘There she is, Mr Talbot. The X 13.’

I stood up, using a mast to support myself – the swell was becoming really unpleasant now – and followed the direction of his pointing hand. Not that he needed to point, even at the distance of a mile the X 13 seemed to fill the entire sky.

I looked at it, looked away, then looked back again. It was still there. I’d lost more than most, I didn’t have a great deal to live for, but I did have a little, so I stood there and wished myself ten thousand miles away.

I was scared. If this was the end of the road, I wished to God I’d never set foot on it.

FIVE

I’d heard of those off-shore rigs before. I’d even had one of them described to me by a man who designed them, but I’d never seen one before and now that I did I realized that the description I’d had had been on the same level as my imaginative capacity to clothe with flesh the bare bones of facts and statistics.

I looked at the X 13 and I just didn’t believe it.

It was enormous. It was angular and ungainly as was no other structure I’d ever seen before. And, above all, it was unreal, a weird combination of Jules Verne and some of the fancier flights of space fiction.

At first glance, in the fleeting patches of dim starlight, it looked like a forest of huge factory chimneys sticking up out of the sea. Halfway up their height those chimneys were all joined by a deep and massive platform through the sides of which those chimneys penetrated. And, at the very right hand side, built on the platform itself and reaching up into the sky, mysterious and fragile in the spiderlike tracery of its slenderly interwoven girders, twice the height of the chimneys and outlined against the night sky in its fairy-like festoon of white and coloured operating and aircraft warning lights, was the oil-drilling derrick itself.

I’m not one of those characters who go about pinching themselves to convince themselves that things are real, but if I were I would never have had a better opportunity or reason to pinch than right then. To see that weird Martian structure suddenly thrusting itself up out of the sea would have had the most hardened topers in the country screaming to climb aboard the water wagon.

The chimneys, I knew, were massive tubular metal legs of almost unbelievable strength, each one capable of supporting a weight of several hundred tons, and on this rig I could count no less than fourteen of those legs, seven on each side, and there must have been a stretch of four hundred feet between the outer ones at the ends. And the astonishing thing was that this huge platform was mobile: it had been towed there with the platform deep-sunk in the sea and the legs thrusting high up almost to the level of the top of the derrick: arrived at the right spot, those legs had dropped right down to the floor of the sea – and then the whole huge platform and derrick, maybe four or five thousand tons in all and powered by huge engines, had risen dripping from the sea till it was safe beyond the reach of even the highest of the hurricane-lashed waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

All this I had known; but knowing and seeing weren’t the same things at all.

A hand touched my arm and I jumped. I had quite forgotten where I was.

‘What do you think of him, Mr Talbot?’ It was the skipper. ‘You like, eh?’

‘Yes. It’s nice. How much did this little toy cost? Any idea?’

‘Four million dollars.’ Zaimis shrugged. ‘Maybe four and a half.’

‘A fair investment,’ I conceded. ‘Four million dollars.’

‘Eight,’ Zaimis corrected. ‘A man cannot just come and start drilling, Mr Talbot. First he buy the land under the sea, five thousand acres, three million dollars. Then to drill a well – just one well, maybe two miles deep – it cost perhaps three-quarters of a million. If he’s lucky.’

Eight million dollars. And not an investment either. A gamble. Geologists could be wrong, they were more often wrong than right. General Blair Ruthven, a man with eight million dollars to throw away: what colossal prize could a man like that, with a reputation like his, be working for if he was prepared, as he so obviously was prepared, to step outside the law? There was only one way of finding out. I shivered and turned to Zaimis.

‘You can get in close? Real close, I mean?’

‘All the way.’ He pointed to the near side of the vast structure. ‘You have seen the ship tied up alongside?’

I hadn’t but I could see her now, a lean dark shape maybe two hundred and fifty feet long, completely dwarfed by the massive rig, the tips of her masts reaching no more than halfway up to the platform deck of the oil rig. I looked back at Zaimis.

‘Is that going to queer our pitch, John?’

‘Get in our way, you mean? No. We make a wide curve and approach from the south.’

He touched the rudder and the Matapan swung away to port, heading to bypass the X 13 to the south: to have gone to the north, the right, would have brought the Matapan under the glare of the arc and floodlights that illuminated the big working platform round the derrick. Even at a mile we could clearly see men moving around the derrick and the subdued hum of powerful machinery, like that of diesel compressors, came at us clearly over the darkened waters. So much, at least, was in our favour; it had not occurred to me that work on those mobile rigs would go on twenty-four hours a day but at least the clamour of their operations would drown out the throaty whisper of the Matapan’s engines.

The boat had begun to corkscrew violently. We were quartering to the south-west, taking that long, deepening swell on our starboard bow and water was beginning to break over the sides of the boat. And I was getting wet. I crouched under a tarpaulin near the rudder, lit a last cigarette under cover and looked at the skipper.

‘That ship out there, John. What chances of it moving away?’

‘I don’t know. Not much, I think. It is a supply and power ship. It brings out food and drink and mud for the drills and thousands of gallons of oil. Look closely, Mr Talbot. It is a kind of small tanker. Now it brings oil for the big machines, and perhaps electricity from its dynamos. Later, when the strike comes, it takes oil away.’

I peered out under a corner of the tarpaulin. It did look, as John said, a kind of small tanker. I had seen the same type of ship years ago in the war; the high, raised, bare centre-deck and after accommodation and engine-room of the inshore fleet oiler. But what interested me more right then was John’s statement that it was there most of the time.

‘I want to go aboard that ship, John. Can do?’ I didn’t want to go aboard, but I knew I had to. The idea of a vessel more or less permanently moored there had never occurred to me: now that I knew it to be a fact it was suddenly the most important factor in my considerations.

‘But – but I was told you wanted to go aboard the rig itself, Mr Talbot.’

‘Yes. Perhaps. But later. Can you manage the ship?’

‘I can try.’ Captain Zaimis sounded grim. ‘It is a bad night, Mr Talbot.’

He was telling me. I thought it was a terrible night. But I said nothing. Still angling south-west, we were passing directly opposite the middle of one of the long sides of the rig and I could see that the massive steel columns supporting the derrick platform were not so symmetrically arranged as I had imagined. Between the fourth and fifth of the huge legs, on either side, was a gap of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet and here the platform was scooped out to a much lower level than the main deck. On this lower level the thin spindly cigar-shaped outline of a crane reached up as high as the topmost level of the columns: the ship was moored directly below this cut-out well-deck, spanning the gap and a couple of steel pillars on either side of the gap.

Five minutes later the skipper changed course until we were heading due west again, in a direction that would have taken us clear to the south of the rig, but we had hardly time to get accustomed to the comparative comfort of heading straight into the swell when he put the helm over again, and headed north-west. We steered straight in, as it seemed, for the most southerly leg on the landward side of the rig, passing within forty feet of the bow of the ship moored alongside, scraped by the leg with only feet to spare and so found ourselves directly under the massive platform of the oil rig.

One of the young Greeks, a black-haired bronzed boy by the name of Andrew, was busy in the bows, and as we passed right under the platform and came abreast of the second pillar from the south on the seaward side he called softly to John and at the same time threw a lifebelt, attached to a coil of light rope, as far as he could to one side. As he did so John cut the engine to the merest whisper, and the Matapan, urged by the swell, drifted slowly back past one side of the pillar while the lifebelt came back on the other, so passing the light line completely round the pillar. Andrew picked up the lifebelt with a boat-hook and started pulling in the grass line which had been bent on to a heavier manila: within a minute the Matapan was securely moored to the pillar, with the engine just ticking over sufficiently to give her enough way to take the strain of the rope so that she wouldn’t snag too heavily in the steadily deepening swell. Nobody had heard us, nobody had seen us: not, at least, as far as we could tell.

‘You will be very quick,’ John said softly, anxiously. ‘I do not know how long we shall be able to wait. I smell the storm.’

He was anxious. I was anxious. We were all anxious. But all he had to do was to sit in that boat. Nobody was going to beat his head in or tie rocks to him and throw him into the Gulf of Mexico.

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ I said reassuringly. Nor had he, compared to me. ‘Half an hour.’ I stripped off my overcoat, snapped the vulcanized neck and wrist cuffs of the tanned twill and rubber suit I was wearing beneath it, slipped an oxygen apparatus over my shoulders, tightened the straps, took the nose and eye piece in one hand and coat, pants and hat under the other arm and stepped gingerly over the side into the rubber raft the crew had already slipped over the side.

Andrew sat at the after end of this flimsy contraption, holding a line in his hand, and, as soon as I’d settled, let go his grip on the gunwale of the Matapan. The drift of the swell carried us quickly under the gloomy mass of the platform, Andrew paying out the line as we went. Paddling a rubber dinghy in a swell is difficult enough, paddling it in a specific direction against such a swell all but impossible: it would be a hundred times easier to regain the Matapan by hauling ourselves back hand over hand.

At a whispered word from me Andrew checked the rope and took a turn. We were now close up to the side of the ship, but still in deep shadow: the ship lay close in to the massive legs, but the platform overhung those legs, and so ourselves, by a good dozen feet, so that the angled light from the floodlights by the crane on the well-deck above barely succeeded in touching the faraway side – the port side – of the upper deck of the ship. All the rest of the vessel lay shrouded in deep darkness except for a patch of light that fell on the fo’c’sle from a rectangular gap high up in the overhang of the platform. Through this hole was suspended the vertical gangway, a zig-zag set of caged-in metal steps like a fire-escape, which, I supposed, could be raised or lowered, with the ebb and flow of the tide.

The conditions might have been made for me.

The ship was low in the water, the ribbed oil tanks standing high but the gunwale only at waist level. I took a pencil light from my coat and went aboard.

I moved right for’ard in the darkness. Apart from a glimmer from the accommodation aft there was no light at all on board, not even navigation or riding lights: the Christmas tree illuminations of the oil derrick made those superfluous.

There were deep sliding vertical doors giving to the raised fo’c’sle. I pulled the head and foot bolts on one of these, waited for a slight roll of the ship to help and eased the door back a crack, enough for my head, arm and light. Barrels, paint drums, ropes, wood, heavy chains – it was some sort of bosun’s store. There was nothing there for me. I eased the door back, slid in the bolts and left.

I made my way aft over the tanks. There were raised trapdoors with large clips which stuck out at all angles, there were fore-and-aft and athwart-ships pipes of every conceivable size and at every conceivable height, there were valves, big wheels for turning those valves and nasty knobbly ventilators, and I don’t think I missed one of all of those, with my head, kneecaps or shins, on the way aft. It was like hacking your way through a virgin jungle. A metal virgin jungle. But I made it, and I made it with the sure knowledge that there wasn’t a trap or hatch on that deck able to take anything larger than a human being.

There was nothing for me in the stern either. Most of the deck space and superstructure there was given over to cabins: the one big coach-type hatch was glassed in and had a couple of skylights open. I used the flash. Engines. That ruled that hatch out. And the whole of the upper deck.

Andrew was waiting patiently in the dinghy. I felt, rather than saw, his inquiring look and shook my head. Not that I had to shake my head. When he saw me clamping on my rubber skull-cap and oxygen mask that was all the answer he needed. He helped me make fast a life-line round the waist, and it took the two of us a whole minute: the rubber raft was pitching and bouncing about so much that we had one hand for ourselves and only one for the job.

With the closed oxygen circuit the safe maximum depth I could get was about twenty-five feet. The oiler drew perhaps fifteen, so I had plenty in hand. The underwater search for a wire, or for something suspended from a wire, proved far easier than I had anticipated, for even at fifteen feet the effect of the surface swell motion was almost negligible. Andrew paid out, slackened and tightened the life-line to adjust to my every underwater movement as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his working life, which indeed he had. I covered the entire submerged length of the oiler twice, keeping close to the bilge keels on either side, examining every foot of the way with a powerful underwater flash. Halfway along the second sweep I saw a huge moray eel, which writhed out of the darkness beyond the beam of the torch and thrust its head with its evil unwinking eyes and vicious poisonous teeth right up against the glass of the flashlight: I clicked the beam on and off a couple of times and he was gone. But that was all I saw.

I felt tired when I got back to the rubber dinghy and hauled myself aboard. I felt tired because fifteen minutes’ hard swimming in an oxygen outfit would make anybody tired: but I knew too well if I’d found what I’d been looking for tiredness would never have touched me. I’d banked heavily on finding what I’d been looking for in on or under that ship. I felt let down.

I felt tired and low and dispirited and cold. I wished I could smoke. I thought of a crackling wood fire, of steaming coffee and a long long nightcap. I thought of Herman Jablonsky sleeping peacefully in his big mahogany bed back in the general’s house. I stripped off mask and cylinder, kicked the flippers off my feet, pulled on a pair of shoes with numbed and fumbling fingers, flung my pants, coat and hat up on the deck of the oiler and dragged myself up after them. Three minutes later, dressed in my outer clothes and dripping like a blanket that’s just been hauled from a wash-boiler, I was on my way up the enclosed gangway to the well-deck of the oil rig a hundred feet above my head.

Drifting grey cloud had washed the last of the starlight out of the sky, but that didn’t help me any. I’d thought the overhead lamp illuminating the gangway had been weak, but it hadn’t, it had only been distant. By the time I was ten feet from the underside of the platform it was a searchlight. And if they kept a gangway watch? Did I tell them I was the Second Engineer from the oiler and was suffering from insomnia? Did I stand there and spin a plausible story while the moisture dripping down under my pants from the diving-suit formed a pool of water under my feet and my vis-à-vis examined with interest the ruched high-necked glistening rubber where my collar and tie ought to have been? I had no gun, and I was prepared to believe that anyone in any way associated with General Ruthven and Vyland pulled on his shoulder holster before his socks when he got up in the morning: certainly everyone I’d met so far had been a walking armoury. And if a gun were pulled on me? Did I start running down a hundred and thirty steps while someone picked me off at their leisure? Of course I didn’t have to run, the fire-escape gangway was only enclosed on three sides, but the fourth opened seawards and I wouldn’t bounce far off that maze of valves and pipes on the oiler below. I concluded that any halfway intelligent man would have gone straight back down.

I went right on up.

There was no one there. The gangway emerged in an alcove closed off on three sides – by the railed platform edge on one side, by high steel walls on the other two. The fourth side gave directly on to the well-deck where the crane was. What little I could see of this well was brightly illuminated and I could hear the clank of machinery and the voices of men not thirty feet away. It didn’t seem like a good idea to wander straight out into their midst so I looked for another way out. I found it at once, a set of steel rungs built into one of the twelve-foot high steel bulkheads by my side.

I went up those, flattening myself out as I went over the top, crawled a few yards then stood up behind the shelter of one of the huge pillars. I could see the whole panorama of the oil rig now.

A hundred yards away, on the larger raised platform, to the north, was the derrick itself, looking more massive than ever, with control cabins at its base and men moving around: under the surface of that platform, I supposed, would be the power-generating machinery, the living accommodation. The smaller platform to the south, the one on which I stood, was almost completely bare with a semi-circular extension reaching out over the sea to the south. The purpose of this large cleared space baffled me for a moment and then something clicked in my memory: Mary Ruthven had said that the general normally commuted between oil-rig and shore in his helicopter. The helicopter would need a landing-ground. This was it.

On the well-deck between the two platforms, almost at my feet, men were moving large barrels with the aid of a tracked crane, trundling them into a brightly-lit opening half-way along the high bulkhead on the northern platform. Oil would be piped aboard, so those barrels could only be ‘Mud’, a chemical mixture of barites used for forcing down under pressure the cement that formed the outer casing of the drill hole. There was a whole series of those big storage sheds, most of them open, extending right across the width of the rig. There, if anywhere, would be what I was looking for.

I crossed to the far side of the south platform, found another set of rungs and dropped down to the well-deck. There was nothing to be gained by caution or stealth now; apart from the fact that they would only excite suspicion, the time factor was becoming all-important: with the weather steadily worsening – the wind now seemed twice as strong as it had been half an hour previously and it wasn’t just a factor of the height – Captain Zaimis would be climbing up the mast. Perhaps he might even be forced to take off without me. But there was no future in that thought and certainly none for me. I put it out of my mind and crossed to the first of the storage bays.

The door was held on a heavy steel latch, unlocked. I opened the latch, pushed back the door and passed inside. It was pitch dark, but my torch found the light switch right away. I pressed it and looked around.

The bay was perhaps a hundred feet long. Stacked in nearly empty racks on both sides were three or four dozen screwed pipes almost as long as the bay itself. Round each pipe, near the end, were deep gouge marks as if some heavy metal claws had bitten into it. Sections of the drill pipe. And nothing else. I switched off the light, went out, pulled shut the door and felt a heavy hand on my shoulder.

‘Would you be looking for something, my friend?’ It was a deep rough no-nonsense voice, as Irish as a sprig of shamrock.

I turned slowly, but not too slowly, pulling the lapels of my coat together with both hands as if to ward off the wind and the thin cold rain that was beginning to sift across the deck, glittering palely through the beams of the arc-lamps then vanishing into the darkness again. He was a short stocky man, middle-aged, with a battered face that could be kindly or truculent as the needs of the moment demanded. At that moment, the balance of expression was tipped on the side of truculence. But not much. I decided to risk it.

‘As a matter of fact, I am.’ Far from trying to conceal my British accent, I exaggerated it. A marked high-class English accent in the States excites no suspicion other than the charitable one that you may be slightly wrong in the head. ‘The field foreman told me to inquire for the – ah – roustabout foreman. Are you he?’

‘Golly!’ he said. I felt that it should have been ‘begorrah’ but the grammatical masterpiece had floored him. You could see his mind clambering on to its feet again. ‘Mr Jerrold sent you to look for me, he?’

‘Yes, indeed. Miserable night, isn’t it?’ I pulled my hat-brim lower. ‘I certainly don’t envy you fellows –’

‘If you was looking for me,’ he interrupted, ‘why were you poking about in there?’

‘Ah, yes. Well, I could see you were busy and as he thought he had lost it in there, I thought perhaps I –’

‘Who had lost what where?’ He breathed deeply, patience on a monument.

‘The general. General Ruthven. His brief-case, with very important private papers – and very urgent. He’d been making a tour of inspection yesterday – let me see, now, it would have been early afternoon – when he received the dastardly news –’

‘He what?’

‘When he heard his daughter had been kidnapped. He went straight for his helicopter, forgetting all about the brief-case and –’

‘I get you. Important, huh?’

‘Very. General Ruthven says he’d put it down just inside some doorway. It’s big, morocco, marked

C. C. F. in gold letters.’ ‘C.C.F.? I thought you said it was the general’s?’ ‘The general’s papers. He’d borrowed my case. I’m Farnborough, his private confidential secretary.’ It was very long odds indeed against one of the scores of roustabouts foremen employed by the general knowing the real name of his secretary, C. C. Farnborough.

‘C.C., eh?’ All suspicions and truculence now vanished. He grinned hugely. ‘Not Claude Cecil by any chance?’

‘One of my names does happen to be Claude,’ I said quietly. ‘I don’t think it’s funny.’

I had read the Irishman rightly. He was instantly contrite.

‘Sorry, Mr Farnborough. Talkin’ outa turn. No offence. Want that me and my boys help you look?’

‘I’d be awfully obliged.’

‘If it’s there we’ll have it in five minutes.’

He walked away, issued orders to his gang of

men. But I had no interest in the result of the search, my sole remaining interest lay in getting off that platform with all speed. There would be no brief-case there and there would be nothing else there. The foreman’s gang were sliding doors open with the abandon of men who have nothing to conceal. I didn’t even bother glancing inside any of the bays, the fact that doors could be opened without unlocking and were being opened indiscriminately in the presence of a total stranger was proof for me that there was nothing to be concealed. And apart from the fact that there were far too many men there to swear to secrecy, it stood out a mile that that genial Irishman was not the type to get mixed up in any criminal activities. Some people are like that, you know it the moment you see and speak to them. The roustabout foreman was one of those.

I could have slipped away and down the gangway while the search was still going on but that would have been stupid. The search for the missing brief-case would be nothing compared to the all-out search that would then start for C. C. Farnborough. They might assume I had fallen over the side. Powerful searchlights could pick up the Matapan in a matter of minutes. And even were I aboard the Matapan I didn’t want to leave the vicinity of the rig. Not yet. And above all I didn’t want the news to get back ashore that an intruder disguised as, or at least claiming to be, the general’s secretary had been prowling around the X 13.

What to do when the search was over? The foreman would expect me to go back to the derrick side, where the accommodation and offices were, presumably to report failure of a mission to Mr Jerrold. Once I left for there my retreat to the gangway would be cut off. And so far it hadn’t occurred to the foreman to ask how I had arrived aboard the rig. He was bound to know that there had been no helicopter or boat out to the rig in hours. Which argued the fact that I must have been aboard for hours. And if I had been aboard for hours why had I delayed so long in starting this so very urgent search for the missing brief-case?

The search, as far as I could see, was over. Doors were being banged shut and the foreman was starting back towards me when a bulkhead phone rang. He moved towards it. I moved into the darkest patch of shadow I could see and buttoned my coat right up to the neck. That, at least, wouldn’t excite suspicion: the wind was strong now, the cold rain driving across the well-deck at an angle of almost forty-five degrees.

The foreman hung up and crossed over to where I was standing. ‘Sorry, Mr Farnborough, no luck. You sure he left it here?’

‘Certain, Mr – ah –’

‘Curran. Joe Curran. Well, it’s not here now. And we can’t look any more.’ He hunched deeper into his black glistening oilskin. ‘Gotta go and start yo-yo-ing that damn pipe.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said politely.

He grinned and explained: ‘The drill. Gotta haul it up and change it.’

‘On a night like this and in a wind like this? And it must take some time.’

‘It takes some time. Six hours if we’re lucky. That damned drill’s two and half miles straight down, Mr Farnborough.’

I made the proper noises of astonishment instead of the noises of relief I felt like making. Mr Curran working on the derrick for the next six hours in this weather would have more to worry about than stray secretaries.

He made to go. Already his men had filed past and climbed up a companionway to the north platform. ‘Coming, Mr Farnborough?’

‘Not yet.’ I smiled wanly. ‘I think I’ll go and sit in the shelter of the gangway for a few minutes and work out what I’m going to tell the general.’ I had an inspiration. ‘You see, he only phoned up about five minutes ago. You know what he’s like. Lord knows what I’m going to tell him.’

‘Yeah. It’s tough.’ The words meant nothing, already his mind was on the recovery of the drill. ‘Be seein’ you.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’ I watched him out of sight and two minutes later I was back aboard the rubber dinghy: another two minutes and we had been hauled back to the Matapan.

‘You have been far too long, Mr Talbot,’ Captain Zaimis scolded. His small agitated figure gave the impression of hopping around in the darkness although it would have taken a monkey to hop around that pitching heaving sponge-boat without falling overboard with the first hop. The engine note was much louder now: not only had the skipper been forced to increase engine revolutions to keep a certain amount of slack on the rope tying the Matapan to the pillar, but the vessel was now pitching so wildly that almost every time the bows plunged deep into the sea the underwater exhaust beneath the stern came clear in a brief but carrying crackle of sound.

‘You have been successful, no?’ Captain Zaimis called in my ear.

‘No.’

‘So. It is sad. But no matter. We must leave at once.’

‘Ten minutes, John. Just another ten minutes. It’s terribly important.’

‘No. We must leave at once.’ He started to call the order to cast off to the young Greek sitting in the bows when I caught his arm.

‘Are you afraid, Captain Zaimis?’ Despicable, but I was desperate.

‘I am beginning to be afraid,’ he said with dignity. ‘All wise men know when it is time to be afraid and I hope I am not a fool, Mr Talbot. There are times when a man is selfish if he is not afraid. I have six children, Mr Talbot.’

‘And I have three.’ I hadn’t even one, not any more. I wasn’t even married, not any more. For a long moment we stood there, clinging on to the mast while the Matapan pitched and corkscrewed wickedly in that almost impenetrable darkness under the cavernous shadow of the oil rig, but apart from the thin whistling of the rain-laden wind in the rigging, it was a long silent moment. I changed my tactics. ‘The lives of men depend upon this, Captain Zaimis. Do not ask me how I know but I know. Would you have it said that men died because Captain Zaimis would not wait ten minutes?’

There was a long pause, the rain hissed whitely into the heaving blackness of the sea beneath us, then he said: ‘Ten minutes. No more.’

I slipped off shoes and outer clothing, made sure the life-line was securely tied to my waist just above the weights, slipped on the oxygen mask and stumbled forward to the bows, again thinking, for no reason at all, of big Herman Jablonsky sleeping the sleep of the just in his mahogany bed. I watched until a particularly big swell came along, waited until it had passed under and the bows were deep in the water, stepped off into the sea and grabbed for the rope that moored the Matapan to the pillar.

I went out towards the pillar hand over hand

– it couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away – but even with the rope to help me I got a pretty severe hammering and without the oxygen mask I don’t know how much water I would have swallowed. I collided with the pillar before I realized I was near it, let go the rope and tried to grab the pillar. Why, I don’t know. I might as well have tried to put my arms round a railway petrol tanker for the diameter was about the same. I grabbed the rope again before I was swept away and worked my way round to the left towards the seaward side of the massive steel leg. It wasn’t easy. Every time the Matapan’s bows rose with the swell the rope tightened and jammed my clutching hand immovably against the metal, but just so long as I didn’t lose any fingers I was beyond caring.

When my back was squarely to the swell I released the rope, spread out my arms and legs, thrust myself below water and started to descend that pillar something in the fashion of a Sinhalese boy descending an enormous palm tree, Andrew paying out the line as skilfully as before. Ten feet, twenty, nothing: thirty, nothing: thirty-five, nothing. My heart was starting to pound irregularly and my head beginning to swim; I was well below the safe operating limit of that closed oxygen mask. Quickly I half-swam, half-clawed my way up and came to rest about fifteen feet below the surface clinging to that enormous pillar like a cat halfway up a tree and unable to get down.

Five of Captain Zaimis’s ten minutes were gone. My time was almost run out. And yet it had to be that oil rig, it simply had to be. The general himself had said so, and there had been no need to tell anything but the truth to a man with no chance of escape: and if that weren’t enough, the memory of that stiff, creaking, leaden-footed man who’d brought the tray of drinks into the general’s room carried with it complete conviction.

But there was nothing on the ship alongside, nor was there anything under it. I would have sworn to that. There was nothing on the oil rig itself: I would have sworn to that too. And if it wasn’t on the platform, then it was under the platform, and if it was under the platform it was attached to a wire or chain. And that wire or chain must be attached, underwater, to one of those supporting legs.

I tried to think as quickly and clearly as I could. Which of those fourteen legs would they use? Almost certainly I could eliminate right away the eight legs that supported the derrick platform. Too much activity there, too many lights, too many eyes, too many dangling lines to catch the hundreds of fish attracted by the powerful overhead lights, too much danger altogether. So it had to be the helicopter platform under which the Matapan was rolling and plunging at the end of her mooring rope. To narrow it still farther – I had to narrow it, to localize the search by gambling on the probable and ignoring the possible and almost equally probable, there were only minutes left – it was more likely that what I sought was on the seaward side, where I was now, than on the landward side where there was always danger from ships mooring there.

The middle pillar of the seaward three, the one to which the Matapan was moored, I had already investigated. Which of the remaining two to try was settled at once by the fact that my life-line was passed round the left-hand side of the pillar. To have worked my way round three-quarters of the circumference would have taken too long. I rose to the surface, gave two tugs to indicate that I would want more slack, placed both feet against the metal, pushed off hard and struck out for the corner pillar.

I almost didn’t make it. I saw now why Captain Zaimis was so worried – and he’d a forty-foot boat and forty horse-power to cope with the power of the wind and the sea and that steadily growing, deepening swell that was already breaking white on the tops. All I had was myself and I could have done with more. The heavy weights round my waist didn’t help me any, it took me a hundred yards of frantic thrashing and gasping to cover the fifteen yards that lay between the two pillars, and closed oxygen sets aren’t designed for the kind of gasping I was doing. But I made it. Just.

Once more on the seaward side and pinned against the pillar by the pressure of the swell I started crabbing my way down below the surface. This time it was easy, for right away, by chance, my hand found a broad, deeply-and sharply-cut series of slightly curved grooves in the metal extending vertically downwards. I am no engineer, but I knew this must be the worm that engaged against the big motor-driven pinion which would be required to raise and lower those pillars. There must have been one on the last pillar also, but I’d missed it.

It was like going down a cliff with a series of rungs cut in the rock-face. I paused every other foot or so, reaching out on both sides, but there was nothing, no projection, no wire, just the smooth rather slimy surface. Steadily, painstakingly, I forced myself downwards, increasingly more conscious of the gripping pressure of the water, the difficulty of breathing. Somewhere close on forty feet I called it a day. Damaging my ear-drums or lungs or getting nitrogen into the bloodstream wasn’t going to help anyone. I gave up. I went up.

Just below the surface I stopped to have a rest and clear my head. I felt bitterly disappointed, I had banked more heavily than I knew on this last chance. Wearily, I laid my head against the pillar and thought with a bleak hopelessness that I would have to start all over again. And I had no idea in the world where to start. I felt tired, dead tired. And then, in a moment, the tiredness left me as if it had never been.

That great steel pillar was alive with sound. There could be no doubt about it, instead of being silent and dead and full of water, it was alive with sound.

I ripped off my rubber helmet, coughed and gagged and spluttered as some water found its way in under the oxygen mask, then pressed my ear hard against the cold steel.

The pillar reverberated with a deep resonant vibration that jarred the side of my head. Water-filled pillars don’t reverberate with sound, not with sound of any kind. But this one did, beyond all question. It wasn’t water that was in that pillar, it was air. Air! All at once I identified that peculiar sound I was hearing; I should have identified it immediately. That rhythmical rising and falling of sound as a motor accelerated and slowed, accelerated and slowed, was a sound that had for many years been part and parcel of my professional life. It was an air compressor, and a big one at that, hard at work inside the pillar. An air compressor deep down below water level inside one of the support legs of a mobile rig standing far out in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t make any kind of sense at all. I leant my forehead against the metal, and it seemed as if the shuddering, jarring vibration was an insistent clamorous voice trying to tell me something, something of urgency and vital importance, if only I could listen. I listened. For half a minute, perhaps a minute, I listened, and all of a sudden it made the very best kind of sense there was. It was the answer I would never have dreamed of, it was the answer to many things. It took me time to guess this might be the answer, it took me time to realize this must be the answer, but when I did realize it I was left with no doubts in the world.

I gave three sharp tugs on the rope and within a minute was back aboard the Matapan. I was hauled aboard as quickly and with as little ceremony as if I had been a sack of coals and I was still stripping off oxygen cylinder and mask when Captain Zaimis barked for the mooring rope to be slipped, gunned the engine, scraped by the mooring pillar and put the rudder hard over. The Matapan yawed and rolled wickedly as she came broadside on to the troughs, shipping solid seas and flying clouds of spray over the starboard side, and then, stern to the wind and steady on course, headed for shore.

Ten minutes later, when I’d peeled off the diving-suit, dried off, dressed in shore clothes and was just finishing my second glass of brandy, Captain Zaimis came down to the cabin. He was smiling, whether with satisfaction or relief I couldn’t guess, and seemed to regard all danger as being past: and true enough, riding before the sea, the Matapan was now almost rock-steady. He poured himself a thimble of brandy and spoke for the first time since I’d been dragged aboard.

‘You were successful, no?’

‘Yes.’ I thought the curt affirmative a bit ungracious. ‘Thanks to you, Captain Zaimis.’

He beamed. ‘You are kind, Mr Talbot, and I am delighted. But not thanks to me but to our good friend here who watches over us, over all those who gather sponges, over all who go to sea.’ He struck a match and put a light to a wick in an oil-filled boat-shaped pottery dish which stood in front of a glassed-in portrait of St Nicholas.

I looked sourly at him. I respected his piety and appreciated his sentiments but I thought he was a bit late in striking the matches.

SIX

It was exactly two o’clock in the morning when Captain Zaimis skilfully eased the Matapan alongside the wooden jetty from which we had left. The sky was black now, the night so dark that it was scarcely possible to distinguish land from sea and the rain was a drumfire of sound on the roof of the cabin. But I had to go and go at once. I had to get back inside the house without being observed, I had to have a long conference with Jablonsky, and I had to get my clothes dry: my luggage was still in La Contessa, I’d only the one suit, and I had to have it dry before morning. I couldn’t bank on not seeing anyone until evening, as I’d done the previous day. The general had said that he’d let me know what job it was he had in mind inside thirty-six hours: the thirty-six hours would be up at eight o’clock this morning. I borrowed a long oilskin to keep off the worst of the rain, put it on over my own raincoat – the oilskin was a couple of sizes too small, it felt as if I were wearing a strait-jacket – shook hands all round, thanked them for what they had done for me and left.

At a quarter past two, after making a brief stop at a call-box, I parked the Corvette in the side turning where I’d found it and squelched along the road in the direction of the drive leading up to the general’s house. There were no sidewalks on the road, the kind of people who lived on this exclusive stretch of sea frontage didn’t have any need of sidewalks, and the gutters were swollen little rivers with the muddy water spilling over the uppers of my shoes. I wondered how I was going to get my shoes dry in time for the morning.

I passed the lodge where the chauffeur lived – or where I presumed he lived – and passed by the driveway also. The enclosed tunnel was brightly lit and clambering over the top of that six-barred gate in that blaze of light wouldn’t have been a very clever thing to do. And for all I knew the top bar might be set to work some electrically operated warning bell if sufficient weight were brought to bear. I wouldn’t have put anything beyond the lot who lived in that house.

Thirty yards beyond the drive I squeezed through an all but imperceptible gap in the magnificent eight-foot hedge that fronted the general’s estate. Less than two yards behind the edge was an equally magnificent eight-foot wall, hospitably topped with huge chunks of broken glass set in cement. Neither the hedge concealing the wall, nor the wall designed to discourage those too shy to enter by the main driveway was, I had learnt from Jablonsky, peculiar to the general’s estate. All the neighbours had money enough and importance enough to make the protection of their privacy a matter of considerable consequence, and this set-up was common to most of them. The rope dangling from the gnarled branch of the big live oak on the other side of the wall was where I had left it. Badly hampered by the binding constriction of the oilskin I waddled rather than walked up that wall, swung to earth on the other side, clambered up the oak, unfastened the rope and thrust it under an exposed root. I didn’t expect to have to use that rope again, but one never knew: what I did know was that I didn’t want any of Vyland’s playmates finding it.

What was peculiar to the general’s estate was the fence about twenty feet beyond the wall. It was a five-stranded affair, and the top three were barbed. The sensible person, obviously, pushed up the second lowest plain wire, pushed down the bottom one, stooped and passed through. But what I knew, thanks to Jablonsky, and what the sensible person didn’t, was that pressure on either of the two lower wires operated a warning bell, so I climbed laboriously over the top three wires, to the sound of much ripping and tearing, and lowered myself down on the other side. Andrew wasn’t going to have much farther use for his oilskin by the time he got it back. If he ever got it back.

Under the closely packed trees the darkness was almost absolute. I had a pencil flash but I didn’t dare use it, I had to trust to luck and instinct to circle the big kitchen garden that lay to the left of the house and so reach the fire-escape at the back. I had about two hundred yards to go and I didn’t expect to make it in under a quarter of an hour.

I walked as old Broken-nose, the butler, had fancied he walked when he crept away from our bedroom door after leaving Jablonsky and myself there. I had the advantages of normal arches to my feet and no adenoids worth talking about. I walked with both arms outstretched before me, and it wasn’t until my face collided with a tree trunk that I learned not to walk with my arms outspread as well as outstretched. I couldn’t do anything about the dripping clammy Spanish moss that kept wrapping itself about my face but I could do something about the hundreds of twigs and broken branches that littered the ground. I didn’t walk, I shuffled. I didn’t lift my feet, I slid each one forward slowly and carefully, brushing aside whatever lay in my path, and not allowing any weight to come on the leading foot until I had made good and certain that there was nothing under that foot that would snap or creak when my weight was transferred to it. Although I do say it, I was pretty silent.

It was as well that I was. Ten minutes after leaving the fence, when I was seriously beginning to wonder whether I had angled off in the wrong direction, suddenly, through the trees and the curtain of rain dripping steadily from the oaks, I thought I saw a tiny glimmer of light. A flicker, then gone. I might have imagined it, but I don’t have that kind of imagination. I knew I didn’t, so I slowed down still more, pulling my hat-brim down and coat collar up so that no faintest sheen of paleness might betray my face. You couldn’t have heard the rustle of my heavy oilskin three feet away.

I cursed the Spanish moss. It wrapped its long clammy tendrils round my face, it made me blink and shut my eyes at the very moments when shutting my eyes might have been the last thing I ever did, and it obscured my vision to a degree where I felt like dropping to my hands and knees and crawling forward on all fours. I might even have done that, but I knew the crackling of the oilskin would give me away.

Then I saw the glimmer of light again. It was thirty feet away, no more, and it wasn’t pointing in my direction, it was illuminating something on the ground. I took a couple of quick smooth steps forward, wanting to pinpoint the light source, and see the reason for its use, and then I discovered that my navigational sense in the darkness had been completely accurate. The kitchen garden was surrounded by a wire-netted wooden fence and halfway through my second step I walked right into it. The top rail cracked like the door to an abandoned dungeon.

There came a sudden exclamation, the dousing of the light, a brief silence and then the torch flicked on again, the beam no longer pointing at the ground but reaching out for and searching the perimeter of the kitchen garden. Whoever held the torch was as nervous as a kitten, because whoever held the torch had more than a vague idea where the sound had come from and a steady careful sweep would have picked me up in three seconds. As it was the search consisted of a series of jittery probings and jerkings of the beam and I’d time to take a long smooth step backwards. Just one: there was no time for more. As far as it is possible to melt into a neighbouring oak tree, I melted into a neighbouring oak tree, I pressed against it as if I were trying to push it over and wished as I had never wished before: I wished I had a gun.

‘Give me that flash.’ The cold quiet voice was unmistakably Royale’s. The torch beam wavered, steadied, then shone down on the ground again. ‘Get on with it. Now!’

‘But I heard something, Mr Royale!’ It was Larry, his voice a high-pitched jittery whisper. ‘Over there! I know I did.’

‘Yeah, me too. It’s all right.’ With a voice like Royale’s, with a voice with as much warmth in it as a champagne bucket, it was difficult to sound soothing, but he was doing his best. ‘Woods are full of those noises in the dark. Hot day, cold rain at night, contraction, then all sorts of noises. Now hurry it up. Want to stay out in this damned rain all night?’

‘Look, Mr Royale.’ The whisper was more than earnest now, it was desperate. ‘I didn’t make a mistake, honest, I didn’t! I heard –’

‘Missed out on your shot of the white stuff, tonight?’ Royale interrupted cruelly. The strain of even a moment’s kindness had been too much for him. ‘God, why did I have to be saddled with a junky like you. Shut up and work.’

Larry shut up. I wondered about what Royale had said, because I’d been wondering about it ever since I saw Larry. His behaviour, the fact that he was allowed to associate with Vyland and the general, the liberties he was permitted, above all his very presence there. Big criminal organizations working for big stakes – and if this bunch weren’t working for big stakes I couldn’t imagine who were – usually picked the members of their organization with as much care and forethought as a big corporation picks its top executives. More. A careless slip-up, a moment’s indiscretion on the part of an executive won’t ruin a big corporation but it can destroy a criminal set-up. Big crime is big business, and big criminals are big businessmen, running their illegal activities with all the meticulous care and administrative precision of their more law-abiding colleagues. If, most reluctantly, it was found necessary to remove rivals or such as offered menace to their security, the removal was entrusted to quiet polite people like Royale. But Larry was about as much use to them as a match in a powder magazine.

There were three of them in that corner of the kitchen garden, Royale, Larry and the butler, whose range of duties appeared to be wider than that normally expected of his profession in the better class English country houses. Larry and the butler were busy with spades. Digging, I thought at first, because Royale had the light hooded and even at ten yards in that rain it was difficult to see anything, but by and by, judging more by ear than by eye, I knew that they were filling in a hole in the ground. I grinned to myself in the darkness. I would have taken long odds that they were burying something very valuable indeed, something that would not be remaining there very long. A kitchen garden was hardly the ideal permanent hiding place for treasure trove.

Three minutes later they were finished. Someone drew a rake to and fro across the filled-in hole – I assumed that they must have been digging in a freshly turned vegetable patch and wanted to conceal the signs of their work – and then they all went off together to the gardening shed a few yards away and left their spades and rake there.

They came out again, talking softly, Royale in the lead with the torch in his hand. They passed through a wicker gate not fifteen feet from me, but by this time I’d withdrawn some yards into the wood and had the thick bole of an oak for cover. They went off together up the path that led to the front of the house and by and by the low murmur of voices faded and vanished. A bar of light fell across the porch as the front door opened, then there came the solid click of a heavy door closing on its latch. Then silence.

I didn’t move. I stayed exactly where I was, breathing lightly and shallowly, not stirring an inch. The rain redoubled in violence, the thick foliage of the oak might have been a wisp of gauze for all the protection it afforded, but I didn’t move. The rain trickled down inside oilskin and overcoat and ran down my back and legs. But I didn’t move. It trickled down my front and into my shoes, but I didn’t move. I could feel the tide rising up to my ankles, but I didn’t move. I just stayed where I was, a human figure carved from ice, but colder. My hands were numb, my feet frozen and uncontrollable shivers shook my entire body every few seconds. I would have given the earth to move. But I didn’t. Only my eyes moved.

Hearing was of little value to me now. With the high moan of the steadily increasing wind through the topmost swaying branches of the trees and the loud frenetic rustling of the rain driving through the leaves, you couldn’t have heard a careless footfall ten feet away. But after three-quarters of an hour standing there motionless, eyes became perfectly accustomed to the dark and you could have spotted a careless movement ten yards away. And I spotted it.

A movement, that is, but not careless. Deliberate. I think it must have been a sudden furious flurry of wind and rain that finally broke the patience of the shadow that now detached itself from the shelter of a nearby tree and moved away silently up towards the house. If I hadn’t been watching, staring into the darkness with eyes sore and strained from staring, I would have missed it, for I certainly would have heard nothing. But I didn’t miss it. A shadow moving with the soundlessness of a shadow. A quiet deadly man. Royale. His words to Larry had been so much bluff for the benefit of any listener. Royale had heard a noise, all right, and the noise must have been just sufficiently off-beat to make him wonder if someone were there. Only enough to make him wonder. If Royale had been certain he’d have remained there all night waiting to strike. The strike of a fer-de-lance. I thought of myself going into that kitchen garden immediately after the three had left, getting a spade and starting to investigate, and I felt colder than ever. I could see myself bending over the hole, the unseen, unheard approach of Royale, and then the bullet, just one, a cupro-nickel jacketed .22 at the base of the skull.

But I had to go and get a spade and start investigating some time, and no better time than now. The rain was torrential, the night as dark as the tomb. In those conditions it was unlikely that Royale would return though I would have put nothing past that cunning and devious mind, but even if he did he would have been exposed to the bright lights inside and it would take him ten minutes, at least, to re-adapt his eyes to that almost total darkness before he would dare move around again. That he wouldn’t move around with a torch was certain: if he thought there was still an intruder in the grounds, then he thought that intruder had seen the digging operations but had still made no move: and if he thought there was such a man, then he would assume him to be a careful and dangerous man to move in search of whom with a lighted torch in hand would be to ask for a bullet in the back. For Royale was not to know that the intruder had no gun.

I thought ten minutes would be enough to find out what I wanted, both because any burial of anything in a garden was bound to be temporary and because neither Larry nor the butler had struck me as people who would derive any pleasure from using a spade or who would dig an inch deeper than was absolutely necessary. I was right. I found a spade in the tool shed, located the freshly-raked earth with a pin-point of light from my pencil flash, and from the time I had passed through the wicker gate till I had cleared off the two or three inches of earth that covered some kind of white pine packing case, no more than five minutes had elapsed.

The packing case was lying at a slight angle in the ground and so heavy was the rain drumming down on my bent back and on top of the case that within a minute the lid of the case had been washed white and clean and free from the last stain of earth, the muddy water draining off to one side. I flashed the torch cautiously: no name, no marks, nothing to give any indication of the contents.

The case had a wood and rope handle at each end. I grabbed one of those, got both hands round it and heaved, but the case was over five feet long and seemed to be filled with bricks: even so I might have managed to move it, but the earth around the hole was so waterlogged and soft that my heels just gouged through it and into the hole itself.

I took my torch again, hooded it till the light it cast was smaller than a penny, and started quartering the surface of the packing case. No metal clasps. No heavy screws. As far as I could see, the only fastenings holding down the lid were a couple of nails at either end. I lifted the spade, dug a corner under one end of the lid. The nails creaked and squealed in protest as I forced them out of the wood, but I went on anyway and sprung the end of the lid clear. I lifted it a couple of feet and shone my flash inside.

Even in death Jablonsky was still smiling. The grin was lopsided and crooked, the way they had had to make Jablonsky himself lopsided and crooked in order to force him inside the narrow confines of that case, but it was still a smile. His face was calm and peaceful, and with the end of a pencil you could have covered that tiny hole between his eyes. It was the kind of hole that would have been made by the cupro-nickel jacketed bullet from a .22 automatic. Twice that night, out on the gulf, I had thought of Jablonsky sleeping peacefully. He’d been asleep all right. He’d been asleep for hours, his skin was cold as marble.

I didn’t bother going through the pockets of the dead man, Royale and Vyland would have done that already. Besides, I knew that Jablonsky had carried nothing incriminating on his person, nothing that could have pointed to the true reason for his presence there, nothing that could have put the finger on me.

I wiped the rain off the dead face, lowered the lid and hammered the nails softly home with the handle of the spade. I’d opened a hole in the ground and now I closed a grave. It was well for Royale that I did not meet him then.

I returned spade and rake to the tool shed and left the kitchen garden.

There were no lights at the back of the entrance lodge. I found one door and two ground-level windows – it was a single-storey building – and they were all locked. They would be. In that place everything would be locked, always.

But the garage wasn’t. Nobody was going to be so crazy as to make off with a couple of Rolls-Royces, even if they could have got past the electrically operated gate, which they couldn’t. The garage was fit match for the cars: the tool bench and equipment were the do-it-yourself devotee’s dream.

I ruined a couple of perfectly good wood chisels, but I had the catch slipped on one of the windows in a minute flat. It didn’t seem likely that they had burglar alarms fitted to a lodge, especially as there hadn’t even been an attempt made to fit half-circle thief-proof sash latches. But I took no chances, pulled the top window down and climbed in over it. When wiring a window the usual idea is to assume that the sneak-thief who breaks and enters is a slave to habit who pushes up the lower sash and crawls in under, apart from which the average electrician finds it much kinder on the shoulder muscles to wire at waist level instead of above the head. And in this case, I found, an average electrician had indeed been at work. The lodge was wired.

I didn’t drop down on top of any startled sleeper in a bedroom or knock over a row of pots and pans in the kitchen for the sufficient reason that I’d picked a room with frosted windows and it seemed a fair bet that that might be the bathroom. And so it was.

Out in the passageway I flicked my pencil light up and down. The lodge had been designed – if that was the word – with simplicity. The passage directly joined the back and front doors. Two small rooms opened off either side of the passage: that was all.

The room at the back opposite the bathroom proved to be the kitchen. Nothing there. I moved up the small passageway as softly as the squelching of my shoes would permit, picked the door on the left, turned the handle with millimetric caution and moved soundlessly inside.

This was it. I closed the door behind me and moved softly in the direction of the deep regular breathing by the left hand wall. When I was about four feet away I switched on my pencil flash and shone it straight on the sleeper’s closed eyes.

He didn’t remain sleeping long, not with that concentrated beam on him. He woke as at the touch of a switch and half sat up in bed, propped on an elbow while a free hand tried to shade his dazzled eyes. I noticed that even when woken in the middle of the night he looked as if he’d just brushed that gleaming black hair ten seconds previously: I always woke up with mine looking like a half-dried mop, a replica of the current feminine urchin cut, the one achieved by a short-sighted lunatic armed with garden shears.

He didn’t try anything. He looked a tough, capable, sensible fellow who knew when and when not to try anything, and he knew that now was not the time. Not when he was almost blind.

‘There’s a .32 behind this flash, Kennedy,’ I said. ‘Where’s your gun?’

‘What gun?’ He didn’t sound scared because he wasn’t.

‘Get up,’ I ordered. The pyjamas, I was glad to see, weren’t maroon. I might have picked them myself. ‘Move over to the door.’

He moved. I reached under his pillow.

‘This gun,’ I said. A small grey automatic. I didn’t know the make. ‘Back to your bed and sit on it.’

Torch transferred to my left hand and the gun in the right, I made a quick sweep of the room. Only one window, with deep velvet wine curtains closed right across. I went to the door, switched on the overhead light, glanced down at the gun and slipped off the safety catch. The click was loud, precise and sounded as if it meant business. Kennedy said: ‘So you hadn’t a gun.’

‘I’ve got one now.’

‘It’s not loaded, friend.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said wearily. ‘You keep it under your pillow just so you can get oil stains all over the sheets? If this gun was empty you’d be at me like the Chatanooga Express. Whatever that is.’

I looked over the room. A friendly, masculine place, bare but comfortable, with a good carpet, not in the corn-belt class of the one in the general’s library, a couple of armchairs, a damask-covered table, small settee and glassed-in wall cupboard. I crossed over to the cupboard, opened it and took out a bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses. I looked at Kennedy. ‘With your permission, of course.’

‘Funny man,’ he said coldly.

I went ahead and poured myself a drink anyway. A big one. I needed it. It tasted just the way it ought to taste and all too seldom does. I watched Kennedy and he watched me.

‘Who are you, friend?’ he asked.

I’d forgotten that only about two inches of my face was visible. I turned down the collar of my oilskin and overcoat and took off my hat. My hat had become no better than a sponge, my hair was wet and plastered all over my head but for all that I don’t suppose it was any less red than normal. The tightening of Kennedy’s mouth, the suddenly still expressionless eyes told their own story.

‘Talbot,’ he said slowly. ‘John Talbot. The killer.’

‘That’s me,’ I agreed. ‘The killer.’

He sat very still, watching me. I suppose a dozen different thoughts must have been running through his mind, but none of them showed, he had as much expression in his face as a wooden Indian. But the brown intelligent eyes gave him away: he could not quite mask the hostility, the cold anger that showed in their depths.

‘What do you want, Talbot? What are you doing here?’

‘You mean, why am I not high-tailing it for the tall timber?’

‘Why have you come back? They’ve had you locked up in the house, God knows why, since Tuesday evening. You’ve escaped, but you didn’t have to mow anyone down to escape or I would have heard of it. They probably don’t even know you’ve been away or I’d have heard of that too. But you’ve been away. You’ve been out in a boat, I can smell the sea off you and that’s a seaman’s oilskin you’ve got on. You’ve been out for a long time, you couldn’t be any wetter if you’d stood under a waterfall for half an hour. And then you came back. A killer, a wanted man. The whole set-up is screwy as hell.’

‘Screwy as hell,’ I agreed. The whisky was good, I was beginning to feel half-human for the first time in hours. A smart boy, this chauffeur, a boy who thought on his feet and thought fast. I went on: ‘Almost as screwy a set-up as this weird bunch you’re working for in this place.’

He said nothing, and I didn’t see why he should. In his place I don’t think I would have passed the time of day by discussing my employers with a passing murderer. I tried again.

‘The general’s daughter,’ Miss Mary. She’s pretty much of a tramp, isn’t she?’

That got him. He was off the bed, eyes mad, fists balled into hard knots and was halfway towards me before he remembered the gun pointing straight at his chest. He said softly: ‘I’d love you to say that again, Talbot – without that gun in your hand.’

‘That’s better,’ I said approvingly. ‘Signs of life at last. Committing yourself to a definite opinion, you know the old saw about actions speaking louder than words. If I’d just asked you what Mary Ruthven was like you’d just have clammed up or told me go jump in the lake. I don’t think she’s a tramp either. I know she’s not. I think she’s a nice kid, a very fine girl indeed.’

‘Sure you do.’ His voice was bitter, but I could see the first shadows of puzzlement touching his eyes. ‘That’s why you scared the life out of her that afternoon.’

‘I’m sorry about that, sincerely sorry. But I had to do it, Kennedy, although not for the reasons that you or any of that murderous bunch up at the big house think.’ I downed what was left of my whisky, looked at him for a long speculative moment, then tossed the gun across to him. ‘Suppose we talk?’

It took him by surprise but he was quick, very quick. He fielded the gun neatly, looked at it, looked at me, hesitated, shrugged then smiled faintly. ‘I don’t suppose another couple of oil stains will do those sheets any harm.’ He thrust the gun under the pillow, crossed to the table, poured himself a drink, filled up my glass and stood there waiting.

‘I’m not taking the chance you might think I am,’ I began. ‘I heard Vyland trying to persuade the general and Mary to get rid of you. I gathered you were a potential danger to Vyland and the general and others I may not know of. From that I gathered you’re not on the inside of what’s going on. And you’re bound to know there’s something very strange indeed going on.’

He nodded. ‘I’m only the chauffeur. And what did they say to Vyland?’ From the way he spoke the name I gathered he regarded Vyland with something less than affection.

‘They stuck in their heels and refused point-blank.’

He was pleased at that. He tried not to show it, but he was.

‘It seems you did the Ruthven family a great service not so long ago,’ I went on. ‘Shot up a couple of thugs who tried to kidnap Mary.’

‘I was lucky.’ Where speed and violence were concerned, I guess, he’d always be lucky. ‘I’m primarily a bodyguard, not a chauffeur. Miss Mary’s a tempting bait for every hoodlum in the country who fancies a quick million. But I’m not the bodyguard any longer,’ he ended abruptly.

‘I’ve met your successor,’ I nodded. ‘Valentino. He couldn’t guard an empty nursery.’

‘Valentino?’ He grinned. ‘Al Grunther. But Valentino suits him better. You damaged his arm, so I heard.’

‘He damaged my leg. It’s black and blue and purple all over.’ I eyed him speculatively. ‘Forgotten that you’re talking to a murderer, Kennedy?’

‘You’re no murderer,’ he said flatly. There was a long pause, then he broke his gaze from me and stared down at the floor.

‘Patrolman Donnelly, eh?’ I asked.

He nodded without speaking.

‘Donnelly is as fit as you are,’ I said. ‘Might take him some little time to wash the powder-stains out of his pants, but that’s all the damage he suffered.’

‘Rigged, eh?’ he asked softly.

‘You’ve read about me in the papers.’ I waved a hand at the magazine stand in the corner. I was still front page news and the photograph was even worse than the previous one. ‘The rest you’ll have heard from Mary. Some of what you’ve heard and read is true, some of it just couldn’t be less true.

‘My name is John Talbot and I am, as they said in court, a salvage expert. I have been in all the places they mention, except Bombay, and for approximately the periods they mention. But I have never been engaged in any criminal activities of any kind. However, either Vyland or the general or both are very cagey birds indeed. They’ve sent cables to contacts in Holland, England and Venezuela – the general, of course, has oil interests in all three places – to check on my bonafides. They’ll be satisfied. We’ve spent a long time preparing the groundwork for this.’

‘How do you know they sent those cables?’

‘Every overseas cable out of Marble Springs in the past two months has been vetted. The general – all cables are in his name – uses code, of course. Perfectly legal to do so. There’s a little old man from Washington living a block away from the post office. He’s a genius with codes: he says the general’s is childish. From his point of view.’

I got up and started to walk around. The effects of the whisky were vanishing. I felt like a cold wet flounder.

‘I had to get in on the inside. Up till now we’ve been working very much in the dark, but for reasons which would take too long to explain at present we knew that the general would jump at the chance of getting hold of a salvage expert. He did.’

‘We?’ Kennedy still had his reservations about me.

‘Friends of mine. Don’t worry, Kennedy, I’ve got all the law in the world behind me. I’m not in this for myself. To make the general take the bait we had to use the general’s daughter. She knows nothing of what actually went on. Judge Mollison’s pretty friendly with the family, so I got him to invite Mary along for a meal, suggesting that she drop in at the court-house first while she was waiting for him to clear up the last cases.’

‘Judge Mollison’s in on this?’

‘He is. You’ve a phone there, and a phone book. Want to ring him?’

He shook his head.

‘Mollison knows,’ I continued, ‘and about a dozen cops. All sworn to secrecy and they know that a word the wrong way and they’re looking for a job. The only person outside the law who knows anything about it is the surgeon who is supposed to have operated on Donnelly and then signed his death certificate. He’d a kind of troublesome conscience, but I finally talked him into it.’

‘All a phoney,’ he murmured. ‘Here’s one that fell for it.’

‘Everybody did. They were meant to. Phoney reports from Interpol and Cuba – with the full backing of the police concerned – blank rounds in the first two chambers of Donnelly’s Colt, phoney road blocks, phoney chases by the cops, phoney –’

‘But – but the bullet in the windscreen?’

‘I told her to duck. I put it there myself. Car and empty garage all laid on, and Jablonsky laid on too.’

‘Mary was telling me about Jablonsky,’ he said slowly. ‘Mary’, I noticed, not. ‘Miss Mary’. Maybe it meant nothing, maybe it showed the way he habitually thought of her. ‘“A crooked cop”, she said. Just another plant?’

‘Just another plant. We’ve been working on this for over two years. Earlier on we wanted a man who knew the Caribbean backwards. Jablonsky was the man. Born and brought up in Cuba. Two years ago he was a cop, in New York homicide. It was Jablonsky who thought up the idea of rigging false charges against himself. It was smart: it not only accounted for the sudden disappearance of one of the best cops in the country, but it gave him the entrée into the wrong kind of society when the need arose. He’d been working with me in the Caribbean for the past eighteen months.’

‘Taking a chance, wasn’t he? I mean, Cuba is home from home for half the crooks in the States, and the chances –’

‘He was disguised,’ I said patiently. ‘Beard, moustache, both home-grown, all his hair dyed, glasses, even his own mother wouldn’t have known him.’

There was a long silence, then Kennedy put down his glass and looked steadily at me. ‘What goes on, Talbot?’

‘Sorry. You’ll have to trust me. The less anyone knows the better. Mollison doesn’t know, none of the lawmen know. They’ve had their orders.’

‘It’s that big?’ he asked slowly.

‘Big enough. Look, Kennedy, no questions. I’m asking you to help me. If you’re not frightened for Mary’s health, it’s time you started to be. I don’t think she knows a thing more about what goes on between Vyland and the general than you do, but I’m convinced she’s in danger. Great danger. Of her life. I’m up against big boys playing for big stakes. To win those stakes they’ve already killed eight times. Eight times to my certain knowledge. If you get mixed up in this business I’d say the chances are more than even that you’ll end up with a bullet in your back. And I’m asking you to get mixed up in it. I’ve no right to, but I’m doing it. What’s it to be?’

Some of the colour had gone out of his brown face, but not much. He didn’t like what I’d just said, but if his hands were trembling I couldn’t notice.

‘You’re a clever man, Talbot,’ he said slowly. ‘Maybe too clever, I don’t know. But you’re clever enough not to have told me all this unless you were pretty certain I’d do it. Playing for big stakes, you said: I think I’d like to sit in.’

I didn’t waste any time in thanking him or congratulating him. Sticking your neck in a running noose isn’t a matter for congratulation. Instead I said: ‘I want you to go with Mary. No matter where she goes I want you to go also. I’m almost certain that tomorrow morning – this coming morning, that is – we’ll all be going out to the oil rig. Mary will almost certainly go along too. She’ll have no option. You will go with her.’

He made to interrupt, but I held up my hand.

‘I know, you’ve been taken off the job. Make some excuse to go up to the house tomorrow morning, early. See Mary. Tell her that Valentino is going to have a slight accident in the course of the morning and she –’

‘What do you mean, he’ll have an accident?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said grimly. ‘He’ll have his accident all right. He won’t be able to look after himself, far less anybody else, for some time to come. Tell her that she is to insist on having you back. If she sticks out her neck and makes an issue of it she’ll win. The general won’t object, and I’m pretty sure Vyland won’t either: it’s only for a day, and after tomorrow the question of who looks after her won’t worry him very much. Don’t ask me how I know, because I don’t. But I’m banking on it.’ I paused. ‘Anyway, Vyland will just think she’s insisting on having you because he thinks she has, shall we say, a soft spot for you.’ He kept his wooden Indian expression in place, so I went on: ‘I don’t know whether it’s so and I don’t care. I’m just telling you what I think Vyland thinks and why that should make him accept her suggestion – that, and the fact that he doesn’t trust you and would rather have you out on the rig and under his eye anyway.’

‘Very well.’ I might have been suggesting that he come for a stroll. He was a cool customer, all right. ‘I’ll tell her and I’ll play it the way you want.’ He thought for a moment, then continued: ‘You tell me I’m sticking my neck out. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m doing it of my own free will. At the same time, I think that the fact that I’m doing it at all entitles me to a little more honesty on your part.’

‘Have I been dishonest?’ I wasn’t annoyed, I was just beginning to feel very tired indeed.

‘Only in what you don’t say. You tell me you want me so that I’ll look after the general’s daughter. Compared to what you’re after, Talbot, Mary’s safety doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn to you. If it did you could have hidden her away when you had her the day before yesterday. But you didn’t. You brought her back. You say she’s in great danger. It was you, Talbot, who brought her back to this danger. OK, so you want me to keep an eye on her. But you want me for something else, too.’

I nodded. ‘I do. I’m going into this with my hands tied. Literally. I’m going into this as a prisoner. I must have someone I can trust. I’m trusting you.’

‘You can trust Jablonsky,’ he said quietly.

‘Jablonsky’s dead.’

He stared at me without speaking. After a few moments hereached out for the bottle and splashed whisky into both our glasses. His mouth was a thin white line in the brown face.

‘See that?’ I pointed to my sodden shoes. ‘That’s the earth from Jablonsky’s grave. I filled it in just before I came here, not fifteen minutes ago. They got him through the head with a small-bore automatic. They got him between the eyes. He was smiling, Kennedy. You don’t smile when you see death coming to you. Jablonsky never saw it coming. He was murdered in his sleep.’

I gave him a brief account of what had happened since I’d left the house, including the trip in the Tarpon Springs sponge boat out to the X 13, up to the moment I had come here. When I was finished he said: ‘Royale?’

‘Royale.’

‘You’ll never be able to prove it.’

‘I won’t have to.’ I said it almost without realizing what I was saying. ‘Royale may never stand trial. Jablonsky was my best friend.’

He knew what I was saying, all right. He said softly: ‘I’d just as soon you never came after me, Talbot.’

I drained my whisky. It was having no effect now. I felt old and tired and empty and dead. Then Kennedy spoke again.

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘Do? I’m going to borrow some dry shoes and socks and underwear from you. Then I’m going to go back up to the house, go to my room, dry my clothes off, handcuff myself to the bed and throw the keys away. They’ll come for me in the morning.’

‘You’re crazy,’ he whispered. ‘Why do you think they killed Jablonsky?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said wearily.

‘You must know,’ he said urgently. ‘Why else should they kill him if they hadn’t found out who he really was, what he was really doing? They killed him because they found out the double-cross. And if they found that out about him, they must have found it out about you. They’ll be waiting for you up there in your room, Talbot. They’ll know you’ll be coming back, for they won’t know you found Jablonsky. You’ll get it through the head as you step over the threshold. Can’t you see that, Talbot? For God’s sake, man, can’t you see it?’

‘I saw it a long time ago. Maybe they know all about me. Maybe they don’t. There’s so much I don’t know, Kennedy. But maybe they won’t kill me. Maybe not yet.’ I got to my feet. ‘I’m going back on up.’

For a moment I thought he was going to use physical force to try to stop me but there must have been something in my face that made him change his mind. He put his hand on my arm.

‘How much are they paying you for this, Talbot?’

‘Pennies.’

‘Reward?’

‘None.’

‘Then what in the name of God is the compulsion that will drive a man like you to crazy lengths like those?’ His good-looking brown face was twisted in anxiety and perplexity, he couldn’t understand me.

I couldn’t understand myself either. I said: ‘I don’t know … Yes, I do. I’ll tell you someday.’

‘You’ll never live to tell anybody anything,’ he said sombrely.

I picked up dry shoes and clothes, told him good night and left.

SEVEN

There was nobody waiting for me in my room up in the general’s house. I unlocked the corridor door with the duplicate key Jablonsky had given me, eased it open with only a whisper of sound and passed inside. Nobody blasted my head off. The room was empty.

The heavy curtains were still drawn shut as I had left them, but I let the light switch be. There was a chance that they didn’t know that I’d left the room that night but if anyone saw a light come on in the room of a man handcuffed to his bed they’d be up to investigate in nothing flat. Only Jablonsky could have switched it on and Jablonsky was dead.

I went over every square foot of floor and walls with my pencil flash. Nothing missing, nothing changed. If anyone had been here he’d left no trace of his visit. But then if anyone had been here I would have expected him to leave no trace.

There was a big wall heater near the communicating door to Jablonsky’s room. I switched this on to full, undressed by its ruddy glow, towelled myself dry and hung trousers and coat over the back of a chair to dry off. I pulled on the underwear and socks I’d borrowed from Kennedy, stuffed my own rain-soaked underwear and socks into my sodden shoes, opened the curtains and windows and hurled them as far as I could into the dense undergrowth behind the house, where I’d already concealed oilskin and overcoat before climbing the fire-escape. I strained my ears but I couldn’t even hear the sound the shoes made on landing. I felt pretty sure no one else could have heard anything either. The high moan of the wind, the drumming of that torrential rain smothered all sound at its source.

I took keys from the pocket of my already steaming jacket and crossed to the communicating door to Jablonsky’s room. Maybe the reception committee was waiting there. I didn’t much care.

There was no committee. The room was as empty as my own. I crossed to the corridor door and tried the handle. The door was locked.

The bed, as I expected, had been slept in. Sheets and blankets had been pulled back so far that most of them were on the floor. There were no signs of a struggle. There were no signs, even, of violence: not until I turned the pillow upside down.

The pillow was a mess, but nothing to what it would have been if death hadn’t been instantaneous. The bullet must have passed clean through the skull, not what you would have expected from a .22 but then Mr Royale used very fancy ammunition. I found the shell in the down of the pillow. Cupro-nickel. It wasn’t like Royale to be so careless. I was going to look after that little piece of metal. I was going to treasure it like the Cullinan diamond. I found some adhesive in a drawer, pulled off a sock, taped the spent bullet under the second and third toes where there would be no direct pressure on it and where it wouldn’t interfere with my walking. It would be safe there. The most thorough and conscientious search – should there be one – would miss it. Houdini went around for years with tiny steel instruments taped to the soles of his feet and no one ever thought to look.

Down on my hands and knees I levelled the torch along the nap of the carpet and squinted down the beam. It wasn’t much of a carpet but it was enough, the two parallel indentations where Jablonsky’s heels had dragged across it were unmistakable. I rose to my feet, examined the bed again, picked up a cushion that lay on the armchair and examined that. I couldn’t see anything, but when I bent my head and sniffed there could be no doubt about it: the acrid odour of burnt powder clings to fabrics for days.

I crossed to the small table in the corner, poured three fingers of whisky into a glass and sat down to try to figure it all out.

The set-up just didn’t begin to make any sense at all. Nothing jibed, nothing fitted. How had Royale and whoever had been with him – for no one man could have carried Jablonsky out of that room by himself – managed to get in in the first place? Jablonsky had felt as secure in that house as a stray lamb in a starving wolf pack and I knew he would have locked the door. Somebody else could have had a key, of course, but the point was that Jablonsky invariably left his key in the lock and jammed it so that it couldn’t be pushed out or turned from the other side – not unless enough force were used and noise made to wake him up a dozen times over.

Jablonsky had been shot when sleeping in bed. Jablonsky, I knew, had pyjamas and used them – but when I found him in the kitchen garden he’d been completely clothed. Why dress him? It didn’t make sense, especially trying to dress a dead man weighing 240 lb didn’t make sense. And why had there been no silencer fitted to the gun? I knew there hadn’t been; with the pressure absorption of a silencer not even those special bullets would travel through a skull-bone twice, and, besides, he’d used a cushion to muffle the shot. Understandable enough, in a way: those rooms were in a remote wing of the house and with the help of a cushion and the background noise of the growing storm the chances were that the shot would not be heard in the other parts of the house. But the point was that I had been right next door and was bound to have heard it, unless I were deaf or dead, and as far as Royale had known – or as far as I thought he had known – I had been asleep in the next room. Or had Royale known I was not in that room? Had he come to make a quick check, found I was gone, knew that it must have been Jablonsky that had let me go and killed Jablonsky there and then? It fitted with the facts: but it didn’t fit with the smile on the dead man’s face.

I went back into my own room, rearranged my steaming clothes on the back of the chair before the electric fire, then returned to Jablonsky’s room. I took up my glass again and glanced at the whisky bottle. It was a five-gill flask, still three parts full. That was no help, what was missing wouldn’t even have begun to affect Jablonsky’s razor-edge vigilance. I’d seen Jablonsky dispose of an entire bottle of rum – he wasn’t a whisky man – in an evening and the only apparent effect it had had on him was that he smiled even more than usual.

But Jablonsky would never smile again.

Sitting there alone in the near darkness, the only illumination the glow from the electric fire in the next room, I lifted my glass. A toast, a farewell, I don’t know what you’d call it. It was for Jablonsky. I sipped it slowly, rolling the whisky over my tongue to savour to the full the rich bouquet and taste of a fine old Scotch; for the space of two or three seconds I sat very still indeed, then I put the glass down, rose, crossed quickly to the corner of the room, spat the Scotch into the wash-basin and rinsed my mouth out very carefully indeed.

It was Vyland who had provided the whisky. After Jablonsky had paraded me downstairs last night, Vyland had given him a sealed whisky bottle and glasses to take back to his room. Jablonsky had poured out a couple of drinks soon after we had gone upstairs and I’d actually had my glass in my hand when I remembered that drinking alcohol before breathing oxygen on a deep dive wasn’t a very clever thing to do. Jablonsky had drained them both, then had maybe a couple more after I had left.

Royale and his friends didn’t have to batter Jablonsky’s door in with foreaxes, they had a key for the job, but even if they had used axes Jablonsky would never have heard them. There had been enough knockout drops in that bottle of whisky to put an elephant out for the count. He must have been just able to stagger as far as his bed before collapsing. I knew it was stupid, but I stood there in the silent dark reproaching myself bitterly for not having accepted that drink; it was a fairly subtle blending of a Mickey Finn and Scotch, but I think I would have got on to it straight away. But Jablonsky wasn’t a whisky man, maybe he thought that was the way Scotch ought to taste.

And Royale, of course, had found two glasses with whisky dregs in them. That made me as unconscious as Jablonsky. But it hadn’t been any part of their plan to kill me too.

I understood it all now, everything except the answer to the one question that really mattered: why had they killed Jablonsky? I couldn’t even begin to guess. And had they bothered looking in to check on me? I didn’t think so. But I wouldn’t have bet a pair of old bootlaces on it.

There was nothing to be gained by sitting and thinking about it, so I sat and thought about it for a couple of hours. By that time my clothes were dry, or as near dry as made no difference. The trousers, especially, were lined and wrinkled like a pair of elephant’s legs, but then you couldn’t expect an immaculate crease in the clothes of a man who is compelled to sleep in them. I dressed, all except for coat and tie, opened the window and was just on the point of throwing out the three duplicate keys for the room doors and the handcuff key to join the other stuff in the shrubbery below when I heard a soft tapping on the door of Jablonsky’s room.

I only jumped about a foot, then I froze. I suppose I should have stood there with my mind racing but the truth was that with what I had been through that night and with all the inconclusive and futile thinking I’d been doing in the past two hours, my mind was in no condition to walk, far less race. I just stood there. Lot’s wife had nothing on me. For a lifetime of ten seconds not a single intelligent thought came, just an impulse, one single overpowering impulse. To run. But I had no place to run to.

It was Royale, that quiet cold deadly man with the little gun. It was Royale, he was waiting outside that door and the little gun would be in his hand. He knew I was out, all right. He’d checked. He knew I’d be back, because he knew that Jablonsky and I were in cahoots and that I hadn’t gone to such extreme lengths to get myself into that household just to light out at the first opportunity that offered, and he’d guessed that I should have been back by this time. Maybe he’d even seen me coming back. Then why had he waited so long?

I could guess the answer to that one too. He knew I would have been expecting Jablonsky to be there when I returned. He would think that I would have figured that Jablonsky must have gone off on some private expedition of his own and that as I’d locked the door when I came back and left the key there Jablonsky wouldn’t be able to use his own to get in. So he would knock. Softly. And after having waited two hours for my partner’s return I would be so worried stiff by his continuing absence that I would rush to the door when the knock came. And then Royale would let me have one of those cupro-nickel bullets between the eyes. Because if they knew beyond doubt that Jablonsky and I were working together they would also know that I would never do for them what they wanted me to do and so I would be of no further use to them. So, a bullet between the eyes. Just the same way Jablonsky had got his.

And then I thought of Jablonsky, I thought of him lying out there jammed up in that cheap packing case, and I wasn’t afraid any more. I didn’t see that I’d much chance, but I wasn’t afraid. I cat-footed through to Jablonsky’s room, closed my hand round the neck of the whisky bottle, went as silently back into my own room and slid a key into the lock of the door opening on to the passage outside. The bolt slid back without even the whisper of a click and just at that moment the knocking came again, slightly louder this time and more sustained. Under cover of the sound I slid the door open a crack, raised the bottle over my head ready for throwing and stuck my head round the corner of the door.

The passage was only dimly lit by a single weak night-light at the other end of a long corridor, but it was enough. Enough to let me see that the figure in the passage had no gun in its hand. Enough to let me see that it wasn’t Royale. It was Mary Ruthven. I lowered the whisky bottle and stepped back softly into my room.

Five seconds later I was at the door of Jablonsky’s room. I said in my best imitation of Jablonsky’s deep husky voice: ‘Who’s there?’

‘Mary Ruthven. Let me in. Quickly. Please!’

I let her in. Quickly. I had no more desire than she had that she could be seen out in that passage. I kept behind the door as she came through, then closed it swiftly before the pale glimmer of light from outside gave her time to identify me.

‘Mr Jablonsky.’ Her voice was a quick, urgent, breathless, frightened whisper. ‘I had to come to see you, I simply had. I thought I could never get away but Gunther dropped off to sleep and he may wake up at any moment and find that I’m –’

‘Easy, easy,’ I said. I’d lowered my voice to a whisper, it was easier to imitate Jablonsky that way, but even so it was one of the worst imitations I had ever heard. ‘Why come to see me?’

‘Because there was no one else I could turn to. You’re not a killer, you’re not even a crook, I don’t care what they say you’ve done, you’re not bad.’ She was a sharp one, all right, her woman’s insight or intuition or whatever had taken her far beyond what either Vyland or the general could see. ‘You must help me – us – you simply must. We – we are in great trouble.’

‘We?’

‘Daddy and I.’ A pause. ‘I honestly don’t know about my father, I honestly don’t. Perhaps he’s not in trouble. Maybe he’s working with those – those evil men because he wants to. He comes and goes as he pleases. But – but it’s so unlike him. Maybe he has to work with them. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. Perhaps they have power over him, some terrible hold, perhaps––’ I caught the glint of fair hair as she shook her head. ‘He – well, he was always so good and honourable and straight and – and everything, but now –’

‘Easy.’ I interrupted again. I couldn’t keep this deception up much longer, if she hadn’t been so scared, so worried, she’d have caught on right away. ‘Facts, miss, if you please.’

I’d left the electric fire burning in my room, the communicating door was open and I was pretty sure it was only a matter of time till she could see enough of my features to see that I wasn’t Jablonsky – and that red thatch of mine was a dead giveaway. I turned my back to the glow of the fire.

‘How can I begin?’ she said. ‘We seem to have lost all our freedom, or daddy has. Not in moving around, he’s not a prisoner, but we never make decisions for ourselves, or, rather, Daddy makes mine for me and I think he has his made for him too. We’re never allowed to be apart for any time. Daddy says I’m to write no letters unless he sees them, make no phone calls, never go anywhere except when that horrible man Gunther is with me. Even when I go to a friend’s house, like Judge Mollison’s, that creature is there all the time. Daddy says he’s had kidnap threats about me recently. I don’t believe it and if it were true Simon Kennedy – the chauffeur – is far better than Gunther. I never have a private moment to myself. When I’m out on the rig – the X 13 – I’m no prisoner, I just can’t get off, but here my room windows are screwed into the wall and Gunther spends the night in the ante-room watching to see –’

The last three words took a long, long time to come out and trailed off into a shocked silence. In her excitement, her eagerness to unburden herself of all those things that had been worrying her for weeks, she had come close to me. And now her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. She started to shake. Her right hand began to move up slowly towards her mouth, the arm trembling all the time and jerking like the arm of a marionette, her mouth opened and her eyes widened and kept on widening until I could see white all the way round the pupils. And then she drew a long quavering breath. Prelude to a scream.

But the prelude was all that there was to it. In my business, you don’t telegraph your signals. I’d one hand over her mouth and an arm round her before she’d even made up her mind what key to sing in. For several seconds, with surprising strength – or in the circumstances perhaps not so surprising – she struggled furiously, then sagged against me, limp as a shot rabbit. It took me by surprise, I’d thought the day when young ladies had passed out in moments of stress had vanished with the Edwardians. But perhaps I was underestimating the fearsome reputation I appeared to have built up for myself, perhaps I was underestimating the cumulative effect of the shock after a long night of nerving herself to take this last desperate chance, after weeks of endless strain. Whatever the reasons, she wasn’t faking, she was out cold. I lifted her across to the bed, then for some obscure reason I had a revulsion of feeling, I couldn’t bear to have her lie on that bed where Jablonsky had so recently been murdered, so I carried her through to the bed in my own room.

I’ve had a fairly extensive practical first-aid education, but I didn’t know the first thing about bringing young ladies out of swoons. I had a vague feeling that to do anything might be dangerous, a feeling that accorded well enough with my ignorance of what to do, so I came to the conclusion that not only the best thing but the only thing to do was to let her come out of it by herself. But I didn’t want her to come out of it unknown to me and start bringing the house down so I sat on the edge of the bed and kept the flash on her face, the beam just below the eyes so as not to dazzle her.

She wore a blue quilted silk dressing-gown over blue silk pyjamas. Her high-heeled slippers were blue, even the night-ribbon for holding those thick shining braids in place was of exactly the same colour. Her face, just then, was as pale as old ivory. Nothing would ever make it a beautiful face, but then I suppose that if it had been beautiful my heart wouldn’t have chosen that moment to start doing handsprings, the first time it had shown any life at all, far less such extravagant activity, in three long and empty years. Her face seemed to fade and again I could see the fire and the slippers that I’d seen two nights ago and all that stood between us was 285 million dollars and the fact that I was the only man in the world the very sight of whom could make her collapse in terror. I put my dreams away.

She stirred and opened her eyes. I felt that the technique I’d used with Kennedy – telling him that there was a gun behind my torch – might have unfortunate results in this case. So I caught one of the hands that were lying limply on the coverlet, bent forward and said softly, reprovingly: ‘You silly young muggins, why did you go and do a daft thing like that?’

Luck or instinct or both had put me on the right track. Her eyes were wide, but not staring wide, and the fear that still showed there was touched with puzzlement. Murderers of a certain category don’t hold your hand and speak reassuringly. Poisoners, yes: knife-plungers in the back, possibly: but not murderers with my reputation for pure violence.

‘You’re not going to try to scream again, are you?’ I asked.

‘No.’ Her voice was husky. ‘I – I’m sorry I was so stupid –’

‘Right,’ I said briskly. ‘If you’re feeling fit for it, we’ll talk. We have to, and there’s little time.’

‘Can’t you put the light on?’ she begged.

‘No light. Shines through curtains. We don’t want any callers at this time –’

‘There are shutters,’ she interrupted. ‘Wooden shutters. On every window in the house.’

Hawk-eye Talbot, that was me. I’d spent a whole day doing nothing but staring out the window and I’d never even seen them. I rose, closed and fastened the shutters, closed the communicating door to Jablonsky’s room and switched on the light. She was sitting on the side of the bed now, hugging her arms as if she were cold.

‘I’m hurt,’ I announced. ‘You can take one look at Jablonsky and tell right away, or so you think, that he’s not a crook. But the longer you look at me the more convinced you are that I’m a murderer.’ I held up a hand as she was about to speak. ‘Sure, you got reasons. Excellent reasons. But they’re wrong.’ I hitched up a trouser leg and offered for her inspection a foot elegantly covered in a maroon sock and completely plain black shoe. ‘Ever seen those before?’

She looked at them, just for a second, then switched her gaze to my face. ‘Simon’s,’ she whispered. ‘Those are Simon’s.’

‘Your chauffeur.’ I didn’t care much for this Simon business. ‘He gave them to me a couple of hours ago. Of his own free will. It took me five minutes flat to convince him that I am not a murderer and far from what I appear to be. Are you willing to give me the same time?’

She nodded slowly without speaking.

It didn’t even take three minutes. The fact that Kennedy had given me the OK was the battle more than half won as far as she was concerned. But I skipped the bit about finding Jablonsky. She wasn’t ready for any shocks of that nature, not yet.

When I was finished she said, almost unbelievingly: ‘So you knew about us all the time? About Daddy and me and our troubles and –’

‘We’ve known about you for several months. Not specifically about your trouble, though, nor you father’s whatever that may be: all we knew was that General Blair Ruthven was mixed up in something that General Blair Ruthven had no right to be mixed up in. And don’t ask me who “we” are or who I am, because I don’t like refusing to answer questions and it’s for your own sake anyway. What’s your father scared of, Mary?’

‘I – I don’t know. I know he’s frightened of Royale, but –’

‘He’s frightened of Royale. I’m frightened of Royale. We’re all frightened of Royale. I’ll take long odds that Vyland feeds him plenty of stories about Royale to keep him good and scared. But it’s not that. Not primarily. He’s frightened for your sake, too, but my guess is that those fears have only grown since he found out the kind of company he’s keeping. What they’re really like, I mean. I think he went into this with his eyes open and for his own ends, even if he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. Just how long have Vyland and you father been, shall we way, business associates?’

She thought a bit and she said: ‘I can tell you that exactly. It started when we were on holiday with our yacht, the Temptress, in the West Indies late last April. We’d been in Kingston, Jamaica, when Daddy got word from Mummy’s lawyers that she wanted a legal separation. You may have heard about it,’ she went on miserably. ‘I don’t think there was a paper in North America that missed out on the story and some of them were pretty vicious about it.’

‘You mean the general had been so long held up as the model citizen of the country and their marriage as the ideal family marriage?’

‘Yes, something like that. They made a lovely target for all the yellow Press,’ she said bitterly. ‘I don’t know what came over Mummy, we had all always got on so well together, but it just shows that children never know exactly how things were or are between their parents.’

‘Children?’

‘I was just speaking generally.’ She sounded tired and dispirited and beaten, and she looked that way. And she was, or she would never have talked to a stranger of such things. ‘As it happens, there’s another girl. Jean, my young sister – she’s ten years younger than I am. Daddy married late in life. Jean’s with my mother. It looks as if she’s going to stay with my mother, too. The lawyers are still working things out. There’ll be no divorce, of course.’ She smiled emptily. ‘You don’t know the New England Ruthvens, Mr Talbot, but if you did you’d know that there are certain words missing from their vocabulary. “Divorce” is one of them.’

‘And your father has never made any attempts at reconciliation?’

‘He went up to see her twice. It was no good. She doesn’t – she doesn’t even want to see me. She’s gone away somewhere and apart from Daddy nobody quite knows where. When you have money those things aren’t too difficult to arrange.’ It must have been the mention of the money that sent her thoughts off on a new tack for when she spoke again I could hear those 285 million dollars back in her voice and see the Mayflower in her face. ‘I don’t quite see how all our private family business concerns you, Mr Talbot.’

‘Neither do I,’ I agreed. It was as near as I came to an apology. ‘Maybe I read the yellow Press, too. I’m only interested in it as far as the Vyland tie-up is concerned. It was at this moment that he stepped in?’

‘About then. A week or two later. Daddy was pretty low, I suppose he was willing to listen to any proposal that would take his mind off his troubles, and – and –’

‘And, of course, his business judgement was below par. Although it wouldn’t have to be more than a fraction below to allow friend Vyland to get his foot stuck in the front door. From the cut of his moustache to the way he arranges his display handkerchief Vyland is everything a top-flight industrialist ought to be. He’s read all the books about Wall Street, he hasn’t missed his Saturday night at the cinema for years, he’s got every last littlest trick off to perfection. I don’t suppose Royale appeared on the scene until later?’

She nodded dumbly. She looked to me to be pretty close to tears. Tears can touch me, but not when I’m pushed for time. And I was desperately short of time now. I switched off the light, went to the window, pulled back one of the shutters and stared out. The wind was stronger than ever, the rain lashed against the glass and sent the water streaming down the pane in little hurrying rivers. But, more important still, the darkness in the east was lightening into grey, the dawn was in the sky. I turned away, closed the shutter, switched on the light and looked down at the weary girl.

‘Think they’ll be able to fly the helicopter out to the X 13 today?’ I asked.

‘Choppers can fly in practically any weather.’ She stirred. ‘Who says anybody’s flying out there today?’

‘I do,’ I didn’t elaborate. ‘Now, perhaps, you’ll tell me the truth of why you came here to see Jablonsky?’

‘Tell you the truth –’

‘You said he had a kind face. Maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t, but as a reason it’s rubbish.’

‘I see. I’m not holding anything back, honestly I’m not. It’s just that I’m so – so worried. I overheard something about him that made me think –’

‘Get to the point,’ I said roughly.

‘You know the library’s wired, I mean they’ve got listening devices plugged in –’

‘I’ve heard of them,’ I said patiently. ‘I don’t need a diagram.’

Colour touched the pale cheeks. ‘I’m sorry. Well, I was next door in the office where the earphones are and I don’t know why I just put them on.’ I grinned: the idea of the biter bit appealed. ‘Vyland and Royale were in the library. They were talking about Jablonsky.’

I wasn’t grinning any more.

‘They had him tailed this morning when he went into Marble Springs. It seems he went into a hardware store, why, they don’t know.’ I could have filled that part in: he’d gone to buy a rope, have duplicate keys cut and do quite a bit of telephoning. ‘It seems he was there half an hour without coming out, then the tail went in after him. Jablonsky came out, but his shadower didn’t. He’d disappeared.’ She smiled faintly. ‘It seems that Jablonsky must have attended to him.’

I didn’t smile. I said quietly: ‘How do they know this? The tail hasn’t turned up, has he?’

‘They had three tails on Jablonsky. He didn’t catch on to the other two.’

I nodded wearily. ‘And then?’

‘Jablonsky went to the post office. I saw him going in myself when we – Daddy and I – were on our way to tell the police the story Daddy insisted I tell, about how you’d dumped me and I’d thumbed a lift home. Well, it seems Jablonsky picked up a pad of telegraph forms, went into the booth, wrote out and sent off a message. One of Vyland’s men waited till he’d left then got the pad and took off the top message sheet – the one under the sheet Jablonsky had written on – and brought it back here. From what I could hear Vyland seemed to be working on this with some powder and lamps.’

So even Jablonsky could slip up. But in his place I would have done the same. Exactly the same. I would have assumed that if I’d disposed of a shadower that would be the lot. Vyland was clever, maybe he was going to be too clever for me. I said to the girl: ‘Hear anything more?’

‘A little, not much. I gather they made out most of what was written on the form, but they couldn’t understand it, I think it must have been in code.’ She broke off, wet her lips then went on gravely: ‘But the address was in plain language, of course.’

‘Of course.’ I crossed the room and stared down at her. I knew the answer to my next question, but I had to ask her. ‘And the address?’

‘A Mr J. C. Curtin, Federal Bureau of Investigation. That – that was really why I came. I knew I had to warn Mr Jablonsky. I didn’t hear any more, somebody came along the passage and I slipped out a side door, but I think he’s in danger. I think he’s in great danger, Mr Talbot.’

For the past fifteen minutes I’d been looking for a way to break the news to her, but now I gave up.

‘You’re too late.’ I hadn’t meant my voice to sound harsh and cold but that’s the way it sounded. ‘Jablonsky’s dead. Murdered.’

They came for me at eight o’clock next morning, Royale and Valentino.

I was fully dressed except for my coat and I was fastened to the bed-head by a single set of handcuffs – I’d thrown the key away together with Jablonsky’s three duplicate keys after I’d locked all the doors.

There was no reason why they should search me and I hoped as I never hoped before that they wouldn’t. After Mary had left, tear-stained, forlorn and having unwillingly promised me that no word of what had passed should be repeated to anyone, not even her father, I’d sat down and thought. All my thinking so far had been in a never-ending circle and I’d got so deep in the rut that I could hardly see daylight any more and just when my mental processes had been about to vanish completely into the darkness I’d had the first illuminating flash, in the dark gloom of my thinking a blindingly bright flash of intuition or common sense, that I’d had since I’d come to that house. I’d thought about it for another half-hour, then I’d got a sheet of thin paper and written a long message on one side, folded it twice until it was only a couple of inches wide, sealed it with tape and addressed it to Judge Mollison at his home address. Then I’d folded it in half lengthwise, slid it over the neck-band of my tie and turned my collar down over it until it was completely hidden. When they came for me I’d had less than an hour in bed and I hadn’t slept at all.

But I pretended to be sound asleep when they came in. Somebody shook me roughly by the shoulder. I ignored it. He shook me again. I stirred. He gave up the shaking as unprofitable and used the back of his hand across my face, not lightly. Enough was enough. I groaned, blinked my eyes painfully and propped myself up in bed, rubbing my forehead with my free hand.

‘On your feet, Talbot.’ Apart from the upper left-hand side of his face, a miniature sunset viewed through an indigo haze, Royale looked calm and smooth as ever, and fully rested: another dead man on his conscience wasn’t going to rob him of much sleep. Valentino’s arm, I was glad to see, was still in a sling: that was going to make my task of turning him into an ex-bodyguard all the easier.

‘On your feet,’ Royale repeated. ‘How come only one handcuff?’

‘Eh?’ I shook my head from side to side and made a great play of being dazed and half-doped. ‘What in hell’s name did I have for dinner last night?’

‘Dinner?’ Royale smiled his pale quiet smile. ‘You and your gaoler emptied that bottle between you. That’s what you had for dinner.’

I nodded slowly. He was on safe ground as far as he knew his ground; if I’d been doped I’d have only the haziest recollection of what had happened immediately before I’d passed out. I scowled at him and nodded at the handcuffs: ‘Unlock this damn thing, will you?’

‘Why only one cuff?’ Royale repeated gently.

‘What does it matter if it’s one cuff or twenty,’ I said irritably. ‘I can’t remember. I seem to think Jablonsky shoved me in here in a great hurry and could only find one. I think perhaps he didn’t feel too good either.’ I buried my face in my hands and drew them down hard as if to clear my head and eyes. Between my fingers I glimpsed Royale’s slow nod of understanding and I knew I had it made: it was exactly what Jablonsky would have done; he’d have felt something coming over him and rushed in to secure me before he collapsed.

The cuff was unlocked and on the way through Jablonsky’s room I glanced casually at the table. The whisky bottle was still there. Empty. Royale – or Vyland – didn’t miss much.

We went out into the passage with Royale leading and Valentino bringing up the rear. I shortened my step abruptly and Valentino dug his gun into the small of my back. Nothing Valentino would do would ever be gently, but, for him, it was a comparatively gentle prod and my sharp exclamation of pain might have been justified if it had been about ten times as hard. I stopped in my tracks, Valentino bumped into me and Royale swung round. He’d done his conjuring act again and his deadly little toy gun was sitting snugly in the palm of his hand.

‘What gives?’ he asked coldly. No inflection, not the slightest raising of the pitch of voice. I hoped I lived to see the day when Royale was good and worried.

‘This gives,’ I said tightly. ‘Keep your trained ape out of my hair, Royale, or I’ll take him apart. Gun or no guns.’

‘Lay off him, Gunther,’ Royale said quietly.

‘Jeez, boss, I didn’t hardly touch him.’ Discounting the anthropoid brow, broken nose, pock-marks and scars, there wasn’t much room left on Valentino’s face for the shift and play of expression, but what little area remained appeared to indicate astonishment and a sharp sense of injustice. ‘I just gave him a little tap –’

‘Sure, I know.’ Royale had already turned and was on his way. ‘Just lay off him.’

Royale reached the head of the stairs first and was half a dozen steps down by the time I got there. Again I slowed abruptly, again Valentino bumped into me. I swung round, chopped the side of my hand against his gun-wrist and knocked the automatic to the ground. Valentino dived to pick it up with his left hand then roared in anguish as the heel of my right shoe stamped down and crushed his fingers between leather and metal. I didn’t hear any bones break, but nothing so drastic was necessary – with both his hands out of commission Mary Ruthven was going to need a new bodyguard.

I made no attempt to stoop and pick up the gun. I made no attempt to move. I could hear Royale coming slowly up the stairs.

‘Move well back from that gun,’ he ordered. ‘Both of you.’

We moved. Royale picked up the gun, stood to one side and waved me down the stairs in front of him. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking; for all the expression on his face he might just as well have been watching a leaf falling. He said nothing more, he didn’t even bother to glance at Valentino’s hand.

They were waiting for us in the library, the general, Vyland and Larry the junky. The general’s expression, as usual, was hidden behind moustache and beard but there was a tinge of blood to his eyes and he seemed greyer than thirty-six hours ago: maybe it was just my imagination, everything looked bad to me that morning. Vyland was urbane and polished and smiling and tough as ever, freshly shaven, eyes clear, dressed in a beautifully cut charcoal-grey suit, white soft shirt and red tie. He was a dream. Larry was just Larry, white-faced, with the junky’s staring eyes, pacing up and down behind the desk. But he didn’t look quite so jerky as usual; he too, was smiling, so I concluded that he’d had a good breakfast, chiefly of heroin.

‘Morning, Talbot.’ It was Vyland speaking; the big-time crooks today find it just as easy to be civil to you as to snarl and beat you over the head and it pays off better. ‘What was the noise, Royale?’

‘Gunther.’ Royale nodded indifferently at Valentino, who had just come in, left hand tucked tightly under his disabled right arm and moaning in pain. ‘He rode Talbot too hard and Talbot didn’t like it.’

‘Go off and make a noise somewhere else,’ Vyland said coldly. The Good Samaritan touch. ‘Feeling tough and tetchy this morning, hey, Talbot?’ There was no longer even an attempt at keeping up the pretence that the general was the boss, or even had an equal say in what went on in his own house: he just stood quietly in the background, remote and dignified and in some way tragic. But maybe the tragedy was only in my own mind; I could be guessing wrongly about the general. I could be terribly wrong about him. Fatally wrong.

‘Where’s Jablonsky?’ I demanded.

‘Jablonsky?’ Vyland raised a lazy eyebrow: George Raft couldn’t have done it any better. ‘What’s Jablonsky to you, Talbot?’

‘My gaoler,’ I said briefly. ‘Where is he?’

‘You appear very anxious to know, Talbot?’ He looked at me long and consideringly and I didn’t like it at all. ‘I’ve seen you before, Talbot. So has the general. I wish I could remember who it is you remind me of.’

‘Donald Duck.’ This was perilous ground indeed. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s left. Lammed out. With his seventy thousand bucks.’

‘Lammed out’ was a slip, but I let it pass. ‘Where is he?’

‘You are becoming boringly repetitious, my friend.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Larry, the cables.’

Larry picked up some papers from the desk, handed them to Vyland, grinned at me wolfishly and resumed his pacing.

‘The general and I are very careful people, Talbot,’ Vyland went on. ‘Some people might say highly suspicious. Same thing. We checked up on you. We checked in England, Holland and Venezuela.’ He waved the papers. ‘These came in this morning. They say you’re all you claim to be, one of Europe’s top salvage experts. So now we can go ahead and use you. So now we don’t need Jablonsky any more. So we let him go this morning. With his cheque. He said he fancied a trip to Europe.’

Vyland was quiet, convincing, utterly sincere and could have talked his way past St Peter. I looked as I thought St Peter might have looked as he was in the process of being convinced, then I said a lot of things St Peter would never have said and finished up by snarling: ‘The dirty lying double-crosser!’

‘Jablonsky?’ Again the George Raft touch with the eyebrows.

‘Yes, Jablonsky. To think that I listened to that lying two-timer. To think I even spent five seconds listening to him. He promised me –’

‘Well, what did he promise you?’ Vyland asked softly.

‘No harm now,’ I scowled. ‘He reckoned I was for the high jump here – and he reckoned that the charges that had had him dismissed from the New York police had been rigged. He thinks – or said he thought – he could prove it, if he was given the chance to investigate certain policemen and certain police files.’ I swore again. ‘And to think that I believed –’

‘You’re wandering, Talbot,’ Vyland interrupted sharply. He was watching me very closely indeed. ‘Get on.’

‘He thought he could buy this chance – and at the same time have me help him while he helped me. He spent a couple of hours in our room trying to remember an old federal code and then he wrote a telegram to some agency offering to supply some very interesting information about General Ruthven in exchange for a chance to examine certain files. And I was mug enough to think he meant it!’

‘You don’t by any chance happen to remember the name of the man to whom this telegram was addressed?’

‘No. I forget.’

‘You better remember, Talbot. You may be buying yourself something very important to you – your life.’

I looked at him without expression, then stared at the floor. Finally I said without looking up: ‘Catin, Cartin, Curtin – yes, that was it. Curtin. J. C. Curtin.’

‘And all he offered was to give information if his own conditions were met. Is that it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Talbot, you’ve just bought yourself your life.’

Sure, I’d bought myself my life. I noticed Vyland didn’t specify how long I would be allowed to hang on to my purchase. Twenty-four hours, if that. It all depended how the job went. But I didn’t care. The satisfaction it had given me to stamp on Valentino’s hand upstairs was nothing compared to the glow I felt now. They’d fallen for my story, they’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker. In the circumstances, with the cards dealt the right way, it had been inevitable that they should. And I’d dealt my cards just right. Judged from the standpoint of their limited awareness of the extent of my knowledge, it would have been impossible for me to have concocted such a story. They didn’t and couldn’t know that I knew Jablonsky to be dead, that they had him tailed yesterday and deciphered the telegram’s address: for they didn’t know that I had been in the kitchen garden during the previous night, that Mary had overheard their conversation in the library and that she had been to see me. Had they thought I had been an accomplice of Jablonsky’s throughout, they’d have shot me out of hand. As it was, they wouldn’t shoot me for some time yet. Not a long time. But perhaps long enough.

I saw Vyland and Royale exchange glances, a mere flicker, and the faint shrug of Vyland’s shoulders. They were tough all right, those two, tough and cool and ruthless and calculating and dangerous. For the past twelve hours they must have lived with the knowledge or the possibility that Federal agents would be around their necks any moment but they had shown no awareness of pressure, no signs of strain. I wondered what they would have thought, how they would have reacted, had they known that Federal agents could have been on to them all of three months ago. But the time had not then been ripe. Nor was it yet.

‘Well, gentlemen, is there any need for further delay?’ It was the first time the general had spoken, and for all his calmness there was a harsh burred edge of strain beneath. ‘Let’s get it over with. The weather is deteriorating rapidly and there’s a hurricane warning out. We should leave as soon as possible.’

He was right about the weather, except in the tense he used. It had deteriorated. Period. The wind was no longer a moan, it was a high sustained keening howl through the swaying oaks, accompanied by intermittent squally showers of brief duration but extraordinary intensity. There was much low cloud in the sky, steadily thickening. I’d glanced at the barometer in the hall, and it was creeping down towards 27, which promised something very unpleasant indeed. Whether the centre of the storm was going to hit or pass by us I didn’t know: but if we stood in its path we’d have it in less than twelve hours. Probably much less.

‘We’re just leaving, General. Everything’s set. Petersen is waiting for us down in the bay.’ Petersen, I guessed, would be the helicopter pilot. ‘A couple of fast trips and we should all be out there in an hour or so. Then Talbot here can get to work.’

‘All?’ asked the general. ‘Who?’

‘Yourself, myself, Royale, Talbot, Larry and, of course, your daughter.’

‘Mary. Is it necessary?’

Vyland said nothing, he didn’t even use the eyebrow routine again, he just looked steadily at the general. Five seconds, perhaps more, then the general’s hands unclenched and his shoulders drooped a fraction of an inch. Picture without words.

There came the quick light tap of feminine footsteps from the passage inside and Mary Ruthven walked in through the open door. She was dressed in a lime-coloured two-piece costume with an open-necked green blouse beneath. She had shadows under her eyes, she looked pale and tired and I thought she was wonderful. Kennedy was behind her, but he remained respectfully in the passage, hat in hand, a rhapsody of maroon and shining high leather boots, his face set in the remote unseeing, unhearing expression of the perfectly trained family chauffeur. I started to move aimlessly towards the door, waiting for Mary to do what I’d told her less than two hours previously, just before she’d gone back to her own room.

‘I’m going in to Marble Springs with Kennedy, Father,’ Mary began without preamble. It was phrased as a statement of fact, but was in effect a request for permission.

‘But – well, we’re going to the rig, my dear,’ her father said unhappily. ‘You said last night –’

‘I’m coming,’ she said with a touch of impatience. ‘But we can’t all go to once. I’ll come on the second trip. We won’t be more than twenty minutes. Do you mind, Mr Vyland?’ she asked sweetly.

‘I’m afraid it’s rather difficult, Miss Ruthven,’ Vyland said urbanely. ‘You see, Gunther has hurt himself –’

‘Good!’

He worked his eyebrow again. ‘Not so good for you, Miss Ruthven. You know how your father likes you to have protection when –’

‘Kennedy used to be all the protection I ever needed,’ she said coldly. ‘He still is. What is more, I’m not going out to the rig with you and Royale and that – that creature there’ – she left no doubt but that she meant Larry – ‘unless Kennedy comes with me. And that’s final. And I must go into Marble Springs. Now.’

I wondered when anyone had last talked to Vyland like that. But the veneer never even cracked.

‘Why must you, Miss Ruthven?’

‘There are some questions a gentleman never asks,’ she said icily.

That floored him. He didn’t know what she meant, the same as I wouldn’t have known what she meant, and the net result was to leave him stranded. Every eye in the room was on the two of them, except mine: mine were on Kennedy’s and his were on mine. I was near the door now, with my back turned to the company. It had been easy to slip out the piece of paper from under my collar and now I held it against my chest so that he could see Judge Mollison’s name on it. His expression didn’t alter and it would have taken a micrometer to measure his nod. But he was with me. Everything was fine – but for the chance that Royale might get me with a snapshot before I cleared the doorway.

And it was Royale who broke the tension in the room, giving Vyland an easy out. ‘I’d like some fresh air, Mr Vyland. I could go along with them for the ride.’

I went out through that doorway the way a torpedo leaves its tube. Kennedy had his arm outstretched and I caught it: we crashed heavily to the floor and went rolling along the passageway together. Inside the first two seconds I had the letter stuck deep inside his tunic and we were still threshing about and belabouring each other on the shoulders and back and everywhere it didn’t hurt very much when we heard the unmistakable flat click of a safety catch.

‘Break it up, you two.’

We broke it up and I got to my feet under the steady menace of Royale’s gun. Larry, too, was hopping around in the background, waving a revolver in his hand: had I been Vyland I wouldn’t even have let him have a catapult in his hand.

‘That was a good job of work, Kennedy,’ Vyland was saying warmly. ‘I won’t forget it.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Kennedy said woodenly. ‘I don’t like killers.’

‘Neither do I, my boy, neither do I,’ Vyland said approvingly. He only employed them himself because he wanted to rehabilitate them. ‘Very well, Miss Ruthven. Mr Royale will go along. But be as quick as you can.’

She swept by without a word to him or a glance at me. Her head was high. I still thought she was wonderful.

EIGHT

I hadn’t enjoyed the helicopter trip out to the oil rig.

Planes I’m used to, I’ve flown my own, I once even owned a piece in a small charter airline, but helicopters are not for me. Not even in fine weather, and the weather that morning was indescribable. We swayed and rocked and plummeted and soared up again as if some drunk had us on the end of a giant yo-yo, and nine-tenths of the time we couldn’t see where we were going because the wipers couldn’t cope with the deluge of water that lashed against the windscreen: but Petersen was a fine pilot and we made it. We touched down on the landing-deck of the X 13 shortly after ten o’clock in the morning.

It took six men to hold the machine even reasonably steady while the general, Vyland, Larry and I shinned down the extension ladder. Petersen gunned his motor and took off just as the last of us reached the deck, and was lost in a blinding flurry of rain inside ten seconds. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

Out there on the exposed deck the wind was far stronger and much gustier than it had been on land and it was all that we could do to keep our balance on the slippery metal underfoot. Not that there was much chance of me falling, at least not backwards, not with Larry’s cannon jabbing into the small of my back all the time. He was wearing the big-collared, big-lapelled, belted, epauletted and leather-buttoned coat that Hollywood had taught him was the correct rig of the day for this kind of weather, and he had the gun inside one of the deep pockets. I felt nervous. Larry didn’t like me and would have counted a hole in his fine coat as a small price to pay for the privilege of pulling that trigger. I’d got right under Larry’s skin like a burr under a saddle, and I meant to stay there. I rarely spoke to him, but when I did I never failed to refer to him as ‘hophead’ or ‘junky’ and to hope that his supplies of snow were coming along all right. On the way down to the helicopter that morning I’d inquired solicitously whether or not he’d remembered to pack his grip, and when he’d asked suspiciously what the unprintable I meant by that I explained that I was concerned that he might have forgotten to pack his syringe. It took Vyland and the general all the strength of their combined efforts to pull him off me. There is nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than a drug addict, just as there is nothing more pitiable: but there was no pity in my heart then, Larry was the weakest link in the chain and I meant to keep sawing away at him until something snapped.

We staggered along against the wind till we came to a raised hatch-cover entrance which gave to a wide companionway leading to the deck below. A group of men awaited us here, and I had my collar turned up, hat-brim turned down and a handkerchief in my hand busy wiping the rain off my face, but I needn’t have bothered: Joe Curran, the roustabout foreman I’d talked to ten hours previously, was not there. I tried to imagine what would have happened had he been there, or had he asked the general whether C. C. Farnborough, his private confidential secretary, had found the missing brief-case; but I gave it up, the strain on the imagination was too great. I’d probably just have borrowed Larry’s gun and shot myself.

Two men came forward to meet us. General Ruthven did the honours: ‘Martin Jerrold, our field foreman, Tom Harrison, our petroleum engineer. Gentlemen, this is John Smith, a specialist engineer flown out from England to help Mr Vyland in his research.’ John Smith, I gathered, was the inspired choice of name for myself.

Both men made perfunctory noises of greeting. Larry prodded me in the back so I said I was delighted too, but they obviously had no interest at all in me. Both men looked worried and uneasy, and both men were doing their best to conceal the fact. But the general didn’t miss it.

‘Something bothering you, Harrison?’ Out here on the rig it was obviously the policy for Vyland to keep very much in the background.

‘Very much so, sir.’ Harrison, a crew-cut youngster with heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, looked to me as if he should still be in college, but he must have been good to hold down the responsible job he did. He produced a small chart, spread it out and pointed with a carpenter’s pencil. ‘This chart’s good, General Ruthven. It couldn’t be better, and Pride and Honeywell are the best geological team in the business. But we’re already twelve hundred feet overdue. We should have hit oil at least five hundred feet back. But there’s not even a smell of gas yet. I can’t even begin to explain it, sir.’

I could have explained it, but it was hardly the time.

‘Those things happen, my boy,’ the general said easily. I had to admire the old coot; I was beginning to have more than a fair idea of the almost inhuman strain he was labouring under, but the control, the self-possession were admirable. ‘We’re lucky if we make it two out of five. And no geologist would claim to be 100 per cent accurate, or even within shouting distance of it. Give it another thousand. The responsibility’s mine.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Harrison looked relieved, but there was still a certain uneasiness about him and the general was quick to get on to it.

‘Still something worrying you, Harrison?’

‘No, sir, of course not.’ He was too quick, too emphatic, he wasn’t half the actor the old boy was. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Hmm.’ The general considered him thoughtfully, then looked at Jerrold. ‘Something on your mind, too?’

‘The weather, sir.’

‘Of course.’ The general nodded understandingly. ‘Latest reports are that Hurricane Diane is going to hit Marble Springs fair and square. And that means the X 13. You don’t have to ask me, Jerrold. You know that. You’re the captain of this ship, I’m only a passenger. I don’t like losing ten thousand dollars a day, but you must suspend drilling the moment you think it’s right to.’

‘It’s not that, sir,’ Jerrold said unhappily. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘That experimental leg you’re working on, sir – shouldn’t it be lowered to give maximum stability?’

So the drilling crew did know there was something going on in that pillar I’d investigated the previous night. When I came to think of it, although it wasn’t inevitable that they should know, it was advisable. So much easier to give the crew a specious explanation for the activities taking place there than to cordon off a section and raise suspicion and unwanted and possibly dangerous speculation. I wondered what sort of yarn had been spun to them. I was to find that out right away.

‘Vyland?’ The general had turned to the man by his side and raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘I’ll accept full responsibility, General Ruthven.’ He spoke in the quiet, precise, confident tones that a top-flight engineer might have employed, although it would have surprised me if he knew a nut from a bolt. But he could use reason, too, for he added: ‘This storm is going to hit from the west and the maximum strain is going to be on the other, the landward, side. The effect on this side will merely be to lift it.’ He made a deprecating gesture. ‘It does seem rather pointless, doesn’t it, to lower an additional leg just when the other legs on that same side will have far less strain than normal to carry? Besides, General, we are now so near the perfection of this technique which is going to revolutionize underwater drilling that it would be a crime to set it back, maybe several months, by lowering the leg and perhaps destroying all our delicate equipment.’

So that was the line. It was well done, I had to admit: the dedicated enthusiasm in his voice was so exactly right, without being in any way overdone.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ Jerrold said. He turned back to the general. ‘Coming across to your quarters, sir?’

‘Later. To eat, but don’t wait lunch for us. Order it for my stateroom, will you? Mr Smith here is keen to get to work right away.’ Like hell I was.

We left them and made our way down a broad passage. Deep inside the platform here the sound of the wind and the rising waves crashing and breaking against the pillars was completely inaudible. Perhaps some faint murmur of sound might have been heard if the air in that brightly-lit steel passage hadn’t been filled with the hum of powerful generators: we appeared to be passing by some diesel engine room.

At the far end of the passage we turned left and walked almost to its far cul-de-sac limits before stopping outside a door on the right-hand side. On this door, printed in large white letters, was the legend: ‘Drilling Research Project’ followed, in letters scarcely less large, by the words: ‘Private. Most Secret. Positively No Admittance’.

Vyland rapped on the door in a long code knock – I made a mental note of it: four shorts, two long, four shorts – waited till there came three long knocks from the inside, then knocked again, four times in rapid succession. Ten seconds later we had all passed through the door and it was double locked and bolted behind us. It made all the signs about ‘Private’ and ‘No Admittance’ seem rather superfluous.

Steel floor, steel bulkheads, steel ceiling, it was a black cheerless box of a room. At least, three sides of it formed a box – the bulkhead we’d just passed through, the blank bulkhead on the left and the one to the right, with a high grilled door in its centre. The fourth side was convex, bulging out into the room in an almost perfect semicircle, with a butterfly-clamped hatchway in its middle: the trunking, I felt certain, of the big steel pillar reaching down to the floor of the sea. On either side of the hatchway hung large drums with neatly coiled rubber tubes armoured in flexible steel. Below each drum, and bolted to the floor, was a large motor: the one on the right was, I knew, an air compressor – that’s what I’d heard when I’d been out there during the night – and the one on the left probably a forced-suction water pump. As for the furnishings of the room, even the Spartans would have found it rugged: a deal table, two benches and a metal wall-rack.

There were two men in the room – the one who had opened the door and another sitting at the table, dead cigar in his mouth and a pack of greasy cards spread out on the table in front of him – and both cast in the same mould. It wasn’t the fact that they were both shirt-sleeved and had leather holsters strapped across their chests and high up on their left sides that gave them close similarity, not even their evenly-matched height and weight and broad bulky shoulders. The sameness lay in their faces, hard expressionless faces with cold, still, watchful eyes. I’d seen men out of the same mould before, the top-notch professionals of the strong-arm underworld, all that Larry would have given his life to be and could never hope to be. They were so exactly the type of men I would have expected Vyland to employ that the presence of Larry was all the more mysterious indeed.

Vyland grunted a greeting and that was all the time he wasted in the next ten minutes. He walked across to the wall-rack, reached down a long roll of canvas-backed paper that was wrapped round a wooden stick, unrolled it flat on the table and weighted the ends to keep them from curling up again. It was a large and highly complicated diagram, sixty inches long by about thirty in depth. He stood back and looked at me.

‘Ever seen that before, Talbot?’

I bent over the table. The diagram represented a peculiar object shaped halfway between a cylinder and a cigar, about four times as long as its average width. It was flat on top, flat along the middle third of the bottom, then tapering slightly upwards towards either end. At least eighty per cent of it appeared to be given up to some kind of storage tanks – I could see the fuel lines leading to the tanks from a raised bridge-like structure superimposed on the top side. This same bridge housed the beginnings of a vertical cylindrical chamber which ran clear through the body of the machine, passed out through the bottom, angled sharply left and entered an oval-shaped chamber suspended beneath the body of the cigar. On either side of this oval chamber and attached to the underside of the cigar were large rectangular containers. To the left, towards the narrower and more tapering end, were what appeared to be searchlights and long slender remote-control grabs housed in spring clips along the side.

I took a good long look at all of this, then straightened. ‘Sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘Never seen it in my life.’

I needn’t have bothered straightening for next moment I was lying on the deck: maybe five seconds later I had pushed myself to my knees and was shaking my head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. I looked up, groaned with the pain just behind my ear, and tried to focus my eyes. I focused one of them, at any rate, for I made out Vyland standing above me, his pistol held by the barrel.

‘I kind of thought you might say that, Talbot.’ A nice quiet controlled voice, we were sitting at the vicar’s afternoon tea-table and he was asking me to pass along the muffins. ‘Your memory, Talbot. Perhaps you would like to jog it again a little, eh?’

‘Is all this really necessary?’ General Ruthven sounded distressed. He looked distressed. ‘Surely, Vyland, we –’

‘Shut up!’ Vyland snapped. We were no longer calling on the vicar. He turned to me as I climbed to my feet. ‘Well?’

‘What’s the good of beating me over the head?’ I said savagely. ‘How will that make me remember something I never –?’

This time I saw it coming, got the palm of my hand up to the side of my head and was riding the blow, going fast away from it, when it connected. I staggered and hit the bulkhead. It was nearly all show and to complete the effect I slid down to the deck. Nobody said anything. Vyland and his two hoodlums were looking at me with a detached interest, the general was white and he had his lower lip caught in his teeth; Larry’s face was a mask of unholy glee.

‘Remember anything now?’

I called him an unprintable name and rose shakily to my feet.

‘Very well.’ Vyland shrugged. ‘I think Larry here would like to persuade you.’

‘Can I? Can I really?’ The eagerness on Larry’s face was revolting, frightening. ‘Want that I make him talk?’

Vyland smiled and nodded. ‘Remember he’s got to work for us when you’re finished.’

‘I’ll remember.’ This was Larry’s big moment. To be in the centre of the stage, to get his own back for my sneers and gibes, above all to indulge a sadistic streak wide as a barn door – this was going to be one of the high spots of his existence. He advanced towards me, big gun wavering slightly, wetting his lips continuously and giggling in a high and horrible falsetto. ‘The inside of the right thigh, high up. He’ll scream like – like a pig going under the knife. Then the left. And he’ll still be able to work.’ The eyes were wide and staring and mad, and for the first time in my life I was confronted by a human being drooling at the mouth.

Vyland was a good psychologist; he knew I would be ten times more scared of Larry’s viciousness, his neurotic instability, than of any coldly calculated brutality he or his two thugs would have brought to bear. I was scared all right. Besides, I’d put up a good enough front, it would have been expected of me, but there was no point in overdoing it.

‘It’s a development of the early French bathyscaphes,’ I said rapidly. ‘This model is a combined British and French naval project, designed to reach only about twenty per cent of the depths of its predecessors – it’s good for about 2,500 feet – but it’s faster, more manoeuvrable and it’s equipped for actual underwater salvage which its predecessors weren’t.’

Nobody ever hated anyone more than Larry hated me at that moment. He was a little boy, I was a promised toy, the most wonderful he had ever seen, and he was being robbed of it just as it came within his grasp. He could have wept with rage and frustration and the sheer bitterness of his disappointment. He was still prancing in front of me and waving the gun around.

‘He’s lying!’ His voice was shrill, almost a scream. ‘He’s just trying –’

‘He’s not lying,’ Vyland interrupted coldly. No triumph, no satisfaction in his voice, the end had been achieved and the past was done with. ‘Put that gun away.’

‘But I tell you––’ Larry broke off in an exclamation of pain as one of the two big silent men caught his wrist and forced the gun down till it was pointing at the floor.

‘Put that heater away, punk,’ the man growled, ‘or I’ll take it off you.’

Vyland glanced at them, then ignored the byplay. ‘And you not only know what this is, Talbot, but you’ve actually worked on it. The general has impeccable sources in Europe and we got the word this morning.’ He bent forward and went on softly: ‘And you also worked on it later on. Recently. Our sources in Cuba are even better than those in Europe.’

‘I didn’t work on it recently.’ I held up my hand as Vyland tightened his mouth. ‘When this bathyscaphe was brought out in a freighter to do its preliminary unmanned dives in the sheltered waters off Nassau, the British and French thought it would be cheaper and more sensible to hire a local vessel suitable for the job instead of bringing one out from Europe. I was working with a salvage firm in Havana at the time and they had a ship with a heavy crane and boom right aft. It was ideal for the job. I was aboard it, but I didn’t work on the bathyscaphe itself. What would be the point in denying it if it wasn’t so?’ I smiled faintly. ‘Besides, I was only aboard the salvage ship for a week or so. They got wind that I was there, I knew they were after me and I had to leave in a hurry.’

‘They?’ Vyland’s eyebrow was still working as smoothly as ever.

‘What does it matter now?’ Even to myself I sounded tired, defeated.

‘True, true,’ Vyland smiled. ‘From what we know of your record it might have been any one of the police forces of half a dozen countries. Anyway, General, it explains one thing that has been worrying us – where we saw Talbot’s face before.’

General Ruthven said nothing. If ever I’d needed conviction that he was a tool, a pawn of Vyland’s I needed it no longer. He was miserable, unhappy and clearly wished to have no part whatever in what was going on.

I said, as if a great light had suddenly dawned upon me: ‘Have you – were you the people responsible for the loss of this bathyscaphe? My God, it was you! How in the –’

‘You didn’t think we brought you here just to discuss the diagrammatic layout of this vessel?’ Vyland permitted himself a small pleased smile. ‘Of course it was us. It was easy. The fools moored it on a wire hawser in ten fathoms of water. We unhitched it, substituted a frayed hawser so that they would think that it had broken its moorings and that the tide had carried it out to deep water, then we towed it away. We made most of the trip in darkness, and the few ships we saw we just slowed down, pulled the bathyscaphe up on the side remote from the approaching vessel and towed it like that.’ He smiled again – he was spoiling himself this morning. ‘It wasn’t difficult. People do not expect to see a bathyscaphe being towed by a private yacht.’

‘A private yacht. You mean the –?’ I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling, I’d almost made the blunder that would have finished everything. It had been on the tip of my tongue to say the Temptress – but no one knew I’d ever heard that name, except Mary Ruthven, who’d told me. ‘You mean the general’s private yacht? He has one?’

‘Larry and I certainly haven’t one,’ he grinned. ‘Larry and I’ – an off-beat phrase, but there was nothing in it for me, so I let it pass. ‘Of course it’s the general’s yacht.’

I nodded. ‘And equally of course you have the bathyscaphe somewhere near here. Would you mind telling me what in the world you want a bathyscaphe for?’

‘Certainly not. You’ll have to know anyhow. We are – ah – treasure-hunting, Talbot.’

‘Don’t tell me you believe this Captain Kidd and Blackbeard nonsense,’ I sneered.

‘Recovering your courage, eh, Talbot? No, it’s rather more recent than that and very close to here.’

‘How did you find it?’

‘How did we find it?’ Vyland seemed to have forgotten his urgency; like every criminal who ever lived he had a streak of the ham in him and wouldn’t pass up the chance of basking in the glow of his own glory. ‘We had a vague idea where it was. We tried trawling for it – in the days before I met the general, that was – but had no success. Then we met the general. As you may not know, the general provides his yacht for his geologists when they plod around setting off their little bombs on the bottom of the ocean tuning in with their seismographic instruments to find out where the oil strata are. And while they were doing this we were plotting the ocean bed with an extremely sensitive depth recorder. We found it all right.’

‘Near here?’

‘Very near.’

‘Then why haven’t you recovered it?’ Talbot giving his impression of a salvage specialist so engrossed in a problem that he has forgotten his own circumstances.

‘How would you recover it, Talbot?’

‘Diving for it, of course. Should be easy in those waters. After all, there’s a huge continental shelf here, you have to go a hundred miles out from any point off the west coast of Florida before you even reach five hundred feet. We’re close inshore here. Hundred feet, hundred fifty?’

‘The X 13 is standing in how much, General?’

‘One-thirty feet low tide,’ Ruthven said mechanically.

I shrugged. ‘There you are then.’

‘There we are not.’ Vyland shook his head. ‘What’s the greatest depth at which you can expect divers to perform really useful work, Talbot?’

‘Perhaps three hundred feet.’ I thought a moment. ‘The deepest I know was by US divers off Honolulu. Two hundred and seventy-five feet. US Submarine F4.’

‘You really are a specialist, aren’t you, Talbot?’

‘Every diver and salvage man worth his salt knows that.’

‘Two hundred and seventy-five feet, eh? Unfortunately, what we’re after is in the bottom of a big hole, a deep chasm in the sea bed. The general’s geologists were very interested indeed when we located this hole. Said it was just like – what was it, General?’

‘The Hurd Deep.’

‘That’s it. The Hurd Deep. In the English Channel. Deep valley in the sea-bed where the Limeys dump all their old explosives. This one here is four hundred and eighty feet in depth.’

‘That makes a difference,’ I said slowly.

‘Doesn’t it now? And how would you get at that?’

‘All depends how difficult it is to reach. The newest Neufeldt-Kuhnke rigid diving-suit, armour-plated in cast steel, could just about make it. I doubt if any diver could accomplish anything at that depth. He’d be under a pressure of two hundred pounds to the square inch and any movement would be like a barrel of heavy tar. Anything except the simplest manoeuvre would be beyond him. The way to do it would be with observation turrets – Galeazzi and my old firm, Siebe-Gorman, produce the best – and use those. They can go down about one thousand five hundred feet. You get inside one of these and use a phone to guide laying of explosives or dredgers or grapnels or power grabs. That’s the way they took over ten million dollars’ worth of gold from the Niagara, from about the same depth, off New Zealand, and about four million dollars’ worth of gold from the Egypt, lying four hundred feet off Ushant. Those are the two classic cases of modern times and that’s how I would do it.’

‘And of course that would require at least a couple of surface vessels and much specialized equipment,’ Vyland said softly. ‘Do you think we can go around buying up observation turrets – if there are any available in this country – and dredgers and then sit anchored in the same spot for weeks without exciting suspicion?’

‘You have a point,’ I admitted.

‘So the bathyscaphe,’ Vyland smiled. ‘The valley in the sea floor is less than six hundred yards from here. We take with us grabs and hooks attached to wires on drums fastened to the outside of the scaphe, fix them on – you can do some very fancy work with those extension arms and graphs fitted in front – then come back here, unreeling the wire as we go. Then we haul the wire in from the X 13.’

‘As easy as that, eh?’

‘Just as easy as that, Talbot. Clever, you would say?’

‘Very.’ I didn’t think it clever at all, I didn’t think Vyland had even begun to appreciate the difficulties involved, the endless slow-motion try, try, try again frustration of underwater salvage, the scope of the initial preparation, the skill and experience of years required. I tried to remember how long it had taken to salvage two and a half million dollars’ worth of gold and silver from the Laurentic, sunk in only just over a hundred feet of water – something like six years if I remembered rightly. And Vyland spoke as if he was going to do it in an afternoon. ‘And where exactly is the scaphe?’ I asked.

Vyland pointed at the semi-circular trunking. ‘That’s one of the support legs of this rig – but it happens to be raised twenty feet above the sea bed. The bathyscaphe is moored below that.’

‘Moored below it?’ I stared at him. ‘What do you mean? It’s beneath the bottom of that leg? How did you get it there? How do you get into it? How in the world –?’

‘Simple,’ he interrupted. ‘I am not, as you may have gathered, much of an engineer but I do have an – ah – professional friend who is. He devised the simple expedient of fitting a reinforced and completely waterproof steel floor of great strength across the bottom of this leg – about six feet from the bottom, actually – and letting into this a tapering steel cylinder about six feet long and not quite three feet in diameter, projecting downwards, open top and bottom, but the top capable of being sealed off flush with the waterproof floor by a screwed hatch. In a recession about two feet from the top of this cylinder is a reinforced rubber tube … You begin to see daylight, I think, Talbot?’

‘I see daylight.’ They were an ingenious bunch, if nothing else. ‘Somehow – almost certainly at night – you got the rig’s engineer’s to co-operate with you in the lowering of this leg – I suppose you told them the yarn about top secret research, so secret that no one was allowed to see what was going on. You had the bathyscaphe on the surface, unbolted its bridge cover, lowered the leg slowly until this cylinder fitted over the bathyscaphe’s entrance hatch, pumped this rubber ring full of compressed air to make a perfect seal, then lowered the leg into the water, pushing the bathyscaphe down before it while someone inside the bathyscaphe, probably your engineering friend, adjusted the hydrostatic valve for one of the adjacent flooding chambers enough to let it sink easily but not so much as to rob it of its slight positive buoyancy necessary to keep the top of the entrance chamber jammed into the cylinder at the foot of the leg. And when you want to take off you just climb into the bathyscaphe, seal both the cylinder and the bathyscaphe hatches, have someone on the rig blow the air from the rubber seal gripping the entrance chamber of the bathyscaphe, flood your tanks to get enough negative buoyancy to drop clear of the leg and there you are. Reverse process when you come back except that you’ll need a suction pump to clear the water that’s accumulated in the cylinder. Right?’

‘In every detail.’ Vyland permitted himself one of his rare smiles. ‘Brilliant, you might call it?’

‘No. The only brilliant thing was stealing the bathyscaphe. The rest is within the scope of any moderately competent underwater operator. Just an application of the double-chambered submarine rescue diving bell which can fit in much the same way over the escape hatch of practically any submarine. And a fairly similar principle has been used for caisson work – sinking underwater piers for bridges and the like. But smart enough for all that. Your engineer friend was no fool. A pity about him, wasn’t it?’

‘A pity?’ Vyland was no longer smiling.

‘Yes. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

The room became very still. After perhaps ten seconds Vyland said very quietly: ‘What did you say?’

‘I said he was dead. When anyone in your employ dies suddenly, Vyland, I would say it was because he had outlived his usefulness. But with your treasure unrecovered, he obviously hadn’t. There was an accident.’

Another long pause. ‘What makes you think there was an accident?’

‘And he was an elderly man, wasn’t he, Vyland?’

‘What makes you think there was an accident?’ A soft menace in every word. Larry was licking his lips again.

‘The waterproof floor you had put in in the bottom of the pillar was not quite as waterproof as you had thought. It leaked, didn’t it, Vyland? Only a very small hole, possibly, and in the perimeter of the floor where it joined the side of the leg. Bad welding. But you were lucky. Somewhere above where we’re standing there must be another transverse seal in the leg – to give structural strength, no doubt. So you used this machine here’ – I pointed to one of the generators bolted to the deck – ‘to drive in compressed air after you’d sent someone inside the leg and sealed this door off. When you’d driven in enough compressed air the accumulated water was driven out the bottom and then the man – or men – inside were able to repair the hole. Right, Vyland?’

‘Right,’ He was on balance again, and there was no harm in admitting something to a person who would never live to repeat it to anyone. ‘How do you know all this, Talbot?’

‘That footman up in the general’s house. I’ve seen many cases. He’s suffering from what used to be called caisson disease – and he’ll never recover from it. The diver’s bends, Vyland. When people are working under a high air or sea pressure and that pressure is released too quickly they get nitrogen bubbles in the blood. Those men in the leg were working in about four atmospheres, about sixty pounds to the square inch. If they’d been down there more than half an hour they should have spent at least half an hour decompressing, but as it was some criminal idiot released the built-up pressure far too fast – as fast as it could escape, probably. At the best of times caisson work, or its equivalent, is only for fit young men. Your engineer friend was no longer a fit young man. And you had, of course, no decompressor. So he died. The footman may live long enough but he’ll never again know what a pain-free existence is. But I don’t suppose that troubles you, does it, Vyland?’

‘We’re wasting time.’ I could see the relief on Vyland’s face, for a moment there he’d suspected that I – and possibly others as well – knew too much about the happenings on the X 13. But he was satisfied now – and very relieved. But I wasn’t interested in his expression, only in the general’s.

General Ruthven was regarding me in a very peculiar fashion indeed: there was puzzlement in his face, some thought that was troubling him, but worse than that there were the beginnings of the first faint incredulous stirrings of understanding.

I didn’t like that, I didn’t like that at all. Swiftly I reviewed everything I’d said, everything I’d implied, and in those matters I have an almost total recall, but I couldn’t think of a single word that might have been responsible for that expression on his face. And if he’d noticed something, then perhaps Vyland had also. But Vyland’s face showed no sign of any knowledge or suspicion of anything untoward and it didn’t necessarily follow that any off-beat word or circumstance noted by the general would also be noted by Vyland. The general was a very clever man indeed: fools don’t start from scratch and accumulate close on 300 million dollars in a single lifetime.

But I wasn’t going to give Vyland time to look at and read the expression on the general’s face – he might be smart enough for that. I said: ‘So your engineer is dead and now you need a driver, shall we say, for your bathyscaphe?’

‘Wrong. We know how to operate it ourselves: You don’t think we’d be so everlastingly stupid as to steal a scaphe without at the same time knowing what to do with it. From an office in Nassau we had obtained a complete set of maintenance and operation instructions in both French and English. Don’t worry, we know how to operate it.’

‘Indeed? This is most interesting.’ I sat down on a bench without as much as a by-your-leave and lit a cigarette. Some such gesture would be expected from me. ‘Then what precisely do you want with me?’

For the first time in our brief acquaintance Vyland looked embarrassed. After a few seconds he scowled and said harshly: ‘We can’t get the damned engines to start.’

I took a deep draw on my cigarette and tried to blow a smoke-ring. It didn’t come off – with me it never came off.

‘Well, well, well,’ I murmured. ‘How most inconvenient. For you, that is. For me, it couldn’t be more convenient. All you’ve got to do is to start those two little engines and hey presto! you pick up a fortune for the asking. I assume that you aren’t playing for peanuts – not operating on this scale. And you can’t start them up without me. As I said, how convenient – for me.’

‘You know how to make that machine run?’ he asked coldly.

‘I might. Should be simple enough – they’re just battery-powered electric motors.’ I smiled. ‘But the electric circuits and switches and fuse boxes are pretty complicated. Surely they’re listed in the maintenance instructions?’

‘They are.’ The smooth polished veneer was showing a distinct crack and his voice was almost a snarl. ‘They’re coded for a key. We haven’t got a key.’

‘Wonderful, just wonderful.’ I rose leisurely to my feet and stood in front of Vyland. ‘Without me you’re lost, is that it?’

He made no answer.

‘Then I have my price, Vyland. A guarantee of my life.’ This angle didn’t worry me at all but I knew I had to make the play or he’d have been as suspicious as hell. ‘What guarantee do you offer, Vyland?’

‘Good God, man, you don’t need any guarantee.’ The general was indignant, astonished. ‘Why would anyone want to kill you?’

‘Look, General,’ I said patiently. ‘You may be a big, big tiger when you’re prowling along the jungles of Wall Street, but as far as the other side of the legal divide is concerned you’re not even in the kitten class. Anyone not in your friend Vyland’s employ who knows too much will always come to the same sticky end – when he can no longer be of any use to him, of course. Vyland likes his money’s worth, even when it costs him nothing.’

‘You’re suggesting, by inference, that I might also come to the same end?’ Ruthven inquired.

‘Not you, General. You’re safe. I don’t know what the stinking tie-up between you and Vyland is and I don’t care. He may have a hold on you and you may be up to the ears in cahoots with him but either way it makes no difference. You’re safe. The disappearance of the richest man in the country would touch off the biggest man-hunt of the decade. Sorry to appear cynical, General, but there it is. An awful lot of money buys an awful lot of police activity. There would be an awful lot of pressure, General, and snowbirds like our hopped-up young friend here’ – I jerked a finger over my shoulder in the general direction of Larry – ‘are very apt indeed to talk under pressure. Vyland knows it. You’re safe, and when it’s all over, if you’re not really Vyland’s ever-loving partner, he’ll find ways to ensure your silence. There would be nothing you could prove against him, it would only be your word against his and many others and I don’t suppose even your own daughter knows what’s going on. And then, of course, there’s Royale – the knowledge that Royale is prowling around on the loose waiting for a man to make just one slip is enough to guarantee that man putting on an act that would make a clam seem positively garrulous.’ I turned from him and smiled at Vyland. ‘But I’m expandable, am I not?’ I snapped my fingers. ‘The guarantee, Vyland, the guarantee.’

‘I’ll guarantee it, Talbot,’ General Ruthven said quietly. ‘I know who you are. I know you’re a killer. But I won’t have even a killer murdered out of hand. If anything happens to you I’ll talk, regardless of the consequences. Vyland is first and foremost a business man. Killing you wouldn’t even begin to be compensation for the millions he’d lose. You need have no fear.’

Millions. It was the first time there had been any mention of the amounts involved. Millions. And I was to get it for them.

‘Thanks, General, that puts you on the side of the angels,’ I murmured. I stubbed out my cigarette, turned and smiled at Vyland. ‘Bring along the bag of tools, friend, and we’ll go and have a look at your new toy.’

NINE

It isn’t the fashion to design tombs in the form of two-hundred-foot-high metal cylinders, but if it were that pillar on the X 13 would have been a sensation. As a tomb, I mean. It had everything. It was cold and dank and dark, the gloom not so much relieved as accentuated by three tiny glow-worms of light at top, middle and bottom: it was eerie and sinister and terrifying and the hollow, reverberating echoing boom of a voice in those black and cavernous confines held all the dark resonance, the doom-filled apocalyptic finality of the dark angel calling your name on the day of judgement. It should have been, I thought bleakly, a place you went through after you died, not just before you died. Not that the question of precedence mattered at the end of the day.

As a tomb, fine: as a means of getting anywhere, terrible. The only connection between top and bottom lay in a succession of iron ladders welded on to the riveted sides of the pillar. There were twelve of those ladders, each with fifteen rungs, not one break or resting place between top and bottom. What with the weight of a heavy circuit-testing bridge Megger hanging down my back and the fact that the rungs were so wet and slippery that I had to grip them with considerable force to keep myself from falling off the ladder, the strain on forearm and shoulder muscles was severe; twice that distance and I wouldn’t have made it.

It is customary for the host to lead the way in strange surroundings but Vyland passed up his privilege. Maybe he was frightened that if he preceded me down the ladder I’d take the opportunity of kicking his head off and sending him a hundred and more feet to his death on the iron platform below. However it was, I went first, with Vyland and the two cold-eyed men we’d found waiting in the little steel room following close behind. That left Larry and the general up above, and no one was under the impression that Larry was fit to guard anyone. The general was free to move around as he wished, yet Vyland appeared to have no fears that the general might use his freedom to queer his pitch. This I had found inexplicable: but I knew the answer to it now. Or I thought I knew: if I were wrong, innocent people would surely die. I put the thought out of my mind.

‘Right, open it up, Cibatti,’ Vyland ordered.

The larger of the two men bent down and unscrewed the hatch, swinging it up and back on its hinges to lock into a standing catch. I peered down the narrow steel cylinder that led to the steel cabin beneath the bathyscaphe and said to Vyland: ‘I suppose you know you’ll have to flood this entrance chamber when you go looking for your Blackbeard’s treasure?’

‘What’s that?’ He looked at me narrowly, suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘Were you thinking of leaving it unflooded?’ I asked incredulously. ‘This entrance chamber is usually flooded the minute you start descending – and that’s normally surface level, not a hundred and thirty feet down as you are here. Sure, sure, I know it looks solid, it might even hold at double this depth, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is completely surrounded by your gasoline buoyancy tanks, about eight thousand gallons of it, and those are open to the sea at the bottom. The pressure inside those tanks corresponds exactly to the sea pressure outside – which is why only the thinnest sheet metal is required to hold the gasoline. But with only air inside your entrance chamber you’re going to have at least two hundred pounds to the square inch pressing on the outside of this entrance chamber. And it won’t stand that. It’ll burst inwards, your gasoline will escape, your positive buoyancy will be gone for ever and there you are, four hundred and eighty feet below the surface of the sea. And there you would remain until the end of time.’ It was hard to be positive in that thinly-lit gloom, but I could have sworn that the colour had drained from Vyland’s face.

‘Bryson never told me this.’ Vyland’s voice was a vicious whisper and there was a shake in it.

‘Bryson? Your engineering friend?’ There was no answer, so I went on: ‘No, I don’t suppose he would. He was no friend, was he, Vyland: he had a gun in his back, didn’t he, and he knew that when his usefulness was over someone was going to pull the trigger of that gun? Why the hell should he tell you?’ I looked away from him and shouldered the bridge Megger again. ‘No need for anyone to come down with me – it’ll only make me nervous.’

‘Think I’m going to let you go down there on your own?’ he asked coldly. ‘To get up to your tricks?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said wearily. ‘I could stand there in front of an electrical switchboard or fuse-box and sabotage the bathyscaphe so that it would never move again, and neither you nor your friends would ever know anything about it. It’s in my own interests to get this machine going and have the whole thing over as soon as possible. The quicker the better for me.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Twenty to eleven. It’ll take me three hours to find out what’s wrong. At least. I’ll have a break at two. I’ll knock on the hatch so that you can let me out.’

‘No need.’ Vyland wasn’t happy, but as long as he couldn’t put his finger on any possibility of treachery he wasn’t going to deny me – he wasn’t in any position to. ‘There’s a microphone in the cabin, with its extension cable wound round a drum on the outside and a lead through a gland in the side of the leg that’s carried up to that room where we were. There’s a button call-up. Let us know when you’re ready.’

I nodded and started down the rungs welded into the side of the cylinder, unscrewed the upper hatch of the bathyscaphe’s flooding and entrance chamber, managed to wriggle down past it – the downward projecting cylinder which encompassed the top of the entrance chamber was only a few inches wider and didn’t give enough room to open the hatch fully – felt for the rungs below, pulled down the hatch, clamped it shut and then worked my way down the constricting narrowness of that chamber to the cabin below. The last few feet involved an almost right-angle bend, but I managed to ease myself and the Megger round it. I opened the heavy steel door to the cabin, wriggled through the tiny entrance, then closed and locked the door behind me.

Nothing had changed, it was as I had remembered it. The cabin was considerably bigger than that of the earlier FRNS from which it had been developed, and slightly oval in shape instead of round: but what was lost in structural power was more than compensated for in the scope and ease of movement inside, and as it was only intended for salvage operations up to about 2,500 feet, the relative loss in strength was unimportant. There were three windows, one set in the floor, cone-shaped inwards as was the entrance door, so that sea pressure only tightened them in their seats: they looked fragile, those windows, but I knew that the specially constructed Plexiglas in the largest of them – and that was no more than a foot in its external diameter – could take a pressure of 250 tons without fracturing, many times the strain it would ever be required to withstand in the depths in which that bathyscaphe would operate.

The cabin itself was a masterpiece of design. One wall – if approximately one-sixth on the surface area of the inside of a sphere could be called a wall – was covered with instruments, dial, fuse-boxes, switchboards and a variety of scientific equipment which we would not be called upon to use: set to one side were the controls for engine starting, engine speed, advance and reverse, for the searchlights, remote-controlled grabs, the dangling guiderope which could hold the bathyscaphe stable near the bottom by resting part of its length on the sea-bed and so relieving the scaphe of that tiny percentage of weight which was sufficient to hold it in perfect equilibrium; and, finally, there were the fine adjustments for the device for absorbing exhaled carbon dioxide and regenerating oxygen.

One control there was that I hadn’t seen before, and it puzzled me for some time. It was a rheostat with advance and retard positions graded on either side of the central knob and below this was the brass legend ‘Tow-rope control’. I had no idea what this could be for, but after a couple of minutes I could make a pretty sure guess. Vyland – or rather, Bryson on Vyland’s orders – must have fitted a power-operated drum to the top, and almost certainly the rear, of the bathyscaphe, the wire of which would have been attached, before the leg had been lowered into the water, to some heavy bolt or ring secured near the base of the leg. The idea, I now saw, was not that they could thereby haul the bathyscaphe back to the rig if anything went wrong – it would have required many more times the power that was available in the bathyscaphe’s engines to haul that big machine along the ocean bed – but purely to overcome the very tricky navigational problem of finding their way back to the leg. I switched on a searchlight, adjusted the beam and stared down through the window at my feet. The deep circular ring in the ocean floor where the leg had originally been bedded was still there, a trench over a foot in depth: with that to guide, re-engaging the top of the entrance chamber in the cylinder inside leg shouldn’t be too difficult.

At least I understood now why Vyland hadn’t objected too strongly to my being left by myself inside the scaphe: by flooding the entrance chamber and rocking the scaphe to and fro if and when Igot the engines started, I might easily have managed to tear clear of the rubber seal and sail the bathyscaphe away to freedom and safety: but I wouldn’t get very far with a heavy cable attaching me to the leg of the X 13. Vyland might be a phoney in the ways of dress, mannerisms and speech, but that didn’t alter the fact that he was a very smart boy indeed.

Apart from the instruments on that one wall, the rest of the cabin was practically bare except for three small canvas seats that hinged on the outer wall and a rack where there was stored a variety of cameras and photo-flood equipment.

My initial comprehensive look round the interior didn’t take long. The first thing that called for attention was the control box of the hand microphone by one of the canvas seats. Vyland was just the sort of person who would want to check whether I really was working, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to change over wires in the control box so that when the switch was in the off position the microphone would be continuously live and so let him know that I was at least working, even if he didn’t know what kind of work it was. But I’d misjudged or over-rated him, the wiring was as it should have been.

In the next five minutes or so I tested every item of equipment inside that cabin except the engine controls – should I have been able to start them anyone still waiting on the bottom floor of that leg would have been sure to feel the vibration.

After that I unscrewed the cover of the largest of the circuit boxes, removed almost twenty coloured wires from their sockets and let them hang down in the wildest confusion and disorder. I attached a lead from the Megger to one of those wires, opened the covers of another two circuits and fuse-boxes and emptied most of my tools on to the small work-bench beneath. The impression of honest toil was highly convincing.

So small was the floor area of that steel cabin that there was no room for me to stretch out my length on the narrow mesh duckboard but I didn’t care. I hadn’t slept at all the previous night, I’d been through a great deal in the past twelve hours and I felt very tired indeed. I’d sleep all right.

I slept. My last impression before drifting off was that the wind and the seas must be really acting up. At depths of a hundred feet or over, wave-motion is rarely or never felt: but the rocking of that bathyscaphe was unmistakable, though very gentle indeed. It rocked me to sleep.

My watch said half-past two when I awoke. For me, this was most unusual: I’d normally the ability to set a mental alarm-clock and wake up almost to the pre-selected moment. This time I’d slipped, but I was hardly surprised. My head ached fiercely, the air in that tiny cabin was foul. It was my own fault, I’d been careless. I reached for the switch controlling carbon dioxide absorption and turned it up to maximum. After five minutes, when my head began to clear, I switched on the microphone and asked for someone to loosen the hatch-cover set into the floor of the leg. The man they called Cibatti came down and let me out and three minutes later I was up again in that little steel room.

‘Late, aren’t you?’ Vyland snapped. He and Royale – the helicopter must have made the double trip safely – were the only people there, apart from Cibatti who had just closed the trunking door behind me.

‘You want the damn thing to go sometime, don’t you?’ I said irritably. ‘I’m not in this for the fun of the thing, Vyland.’

‘That’s so.’ The top executive criminal, he wasn’t going to antagonize anyone unnecessarily. He peered closely at me. ‘Anything the matter with you?’

‘Working for hours on end in a cramped coffin is the matter with me,’ I said sourly. ‘That and the fact that the air purifier was maladjusted. But it’s OK now.’

‘Progress?’

‘Damn little.’ I lifted my hand as the eyebrow went up and the face began to darken in a scowl. ‘It’s not for want of trying. I’ve tested every single contact and circuit in the scaphe and it’s only in the past twenty minutes that I began to find out what’s the matter with it.’

‘Well, what was the matter with it?’

‘Your late engineer friend Bryson was the matter with it, that’s what.’ I looked at him speculatively. ‘Had you intended taking Bryson with you when you were going to recover this stuff? Or were you going to go it alone?’

‘Just Royale and myself. We thought –’

‘Yes, I know. Not much point in taking him along with you. A dead man can’t accomplish much. Either you dropped a hint that he wouldn’t be coming along and he knew why he wouldn’t be coming along so he’d fixed it so that he’d get a nice little posthumous revenge, or he hated you so much that if he had to go along he was determined that he was going to take you with him. Out of this world, I mean. Your friend had made a very clever little fix indeed, only he hadn’t quite time to finish it before the bends knocked him off – which is why the engines are still out of commission. He’d fixed it so that the bathyscaphe would have operated perfectly; would have gone backwards and forwards, up and down, anything you liked – until you had taken it down to a depth of just over three hundred feet. Then he had fixed that certain hydro-static cut-outs would come into operation. A beautiful job.’ I wasn’t gambling much, I knew their ignorance of those matters was profound.

‘And then what?’ Vyland asked tightly.

‘Then nothing. The bathyscaphe would never have been able to get above three hundred feet again. When either the batteries had been exhausted or the oxygen regenerating unit had failed, as it would have to in a few hours – well, you’d have died of suffocation.’ I looked at him consideringly. ‘After, that is, you had screamed your way into madness.’

On a previous occasion I had thought I had seen Vyland losing some colour from his rather ruddy cheeks, but on this occasion there was no doubt: he turned white and to conceal his agitation fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit a cigarette with hands whose tremor he could not conceal. Royale, sitting on the table, just smiled his little secret smile and went on unconcernedly swinging his foot. That didn’t make Royale any braver than Vyland, maybe it only meant he was less imaginative. The last thing a professional killer could ever afford was imagination; he had to live with himself and the ghosts of all his victims. I looked at Royale again. I swore to myself that one day I would see that face the mask and mirror of fear, as Royale himself had seen so many other faces the masks and mirrors of fear in that last second of awareness and knowingness before he pulled the trigger of his deadly little gun.

‘Neat, eh?’ Vyland said harshly. He had regained a measure of composure.

‘It wasn’t bad,’ I admitted. ‘At least I sympathize with his outlook, the object he had in mind.’

‘Funny. Very funny indeed.’ There were times when Vyland forgot that the well-bred business tycoon never snarls. He looked at me with sudden speculation in his eyes. ‘You wouldn’t be thinking along the same lines yourself, Talbot? Of pulling a fast one like Bryson tried to pull?’

‘It’s an attractive idea,’ I grinned at him, ‘but you insult my intelligence. In the first place, had I had any ideas along those lines do you think I would have given you any hint of them? Besides, I intend to go along with you on this little trip. At least, hope to.’

‘You do, eh?’ Vyland was back on balance, his shrewd quick self again. ‘Getting suspiciously cooperative all of a sudden, aren’t you, Talbot?’

‘You can’t win,’ I sighed. ‘If I said I didn’t want to go, you’d think that a damn sight more suspicious. Be your age, Vyland. Things aren’t as they were a few hours ago. Remember the general’s speech about ensuring my continued well-being? He meant it all right, he meant every word of it. Try seeing me off and he’ll see you off. And you’re too much of a business man to make a bad deal like that. Royale here is going to be deprived of the pleasure of killing me.’

‘Killing gives me no pleasure,’ Royale put in softly. It was a simple statement of fact and I stared at him, temporarily off-balance by the preposterousness of it.

‘Did I hear what I thought I heard?’ I asked slowly.

‘Ever hear of a ditch-digger digging ditches for pleasure, Talbot?’

‘I think I see your point.’ I stared at him for a long moment, he was even more inhuman than I had ever imagined. ‘Anyway, Vyland, now that I’m going to live I have a different outlook on things. The sooner this business is over, the sooner I’ll be away from you and your cosy little pals. And then, I think, I could put the touch on the general for a few thousand. I hardly think he would like it known that he had been aiding and abetting criminal activities on a grand scale.’

‘You mean – you mean, you’d put the black on the man who saved your life?’ Apparently some things were still capable of astonishing Vyland. ‘God, you’re as bad as any of us. Worse.’

‘I never said I wasn’t,’ I said indifferently. ‘These are hard times, Vyland. A man must live. And I’m in a hurry. That’s why I suggest I come along. Oh, I admit a child could steer and lower and raise the bathyscaphe once he’d read the instructions, but salvage is no job for amateurs. Believe me, Vyland, I know, and it’s not. You’re amateurs. I’m an expert. It’s the one thing I’m really good at. So I come, eh?’

Vyland looked at me long and consideringly, then he said softly: ‘I just wouldn’t dream of going along without you, Talbot.’

He turned, opened the door and gestured to me to precede him. He and Royale came out behind me and as we walked along the passage we could hear Cibatti slamming home a heavy bolt and turning a key in the lock. Which made it as safe as the Bank of England, except for one thing: in the Bank of England a code knock does not automatically open the door to the vaults. But it opened doors here, and I had remembered it: and even had I forgotten it, it would have come back there and then for Vyland was using it again on a door about fifteen yards along the passage.

The door was opened by Cibatti’s opposite number. The compartment beyond wasn’t as bleakly furnished as the one we had just left, but it was a near thing. It had no wall coverings, no floor coverings, it didn’t even have a table: but it did have a padded bench along one wall, and on this the general and Mary were sitting. Kennedy was sitting very straight on a wooden chair in a corner and Larry, his big pistol out, his eyes twitching away feverishly as ever, was pacing up and down, doing his big watch-dog act. I scowled at them all impartially.

The general was his usual erect, impassive self, all his thoughts and emotions under the usual impeccable control; but there were dark half-moons under his eyes that hadn’t been there a couple of days ago. His daughter’s eyes, too, were smudged with blue, her face was pale and though it was composed enough she didn’t have the iron in her that her father had: the droop of the slender shoulders, slight though it was, was there for all to see. Myself, I didn’t go much for iron women at any time; there was nothing I would have liked better than to put an arm round those self-same shoulders, but the time and the place were wrong, the reactions anyway unpredictable. Kennedy was just Kennedy, his good-looking hard face a smooth brown mask, and he wasn’t worried about anything: I noticed that his maroon uniform fitted him better than ever; it wasn’t that he had been to see his tailor, someone had taken his gun from him and now there wasn’t even the suspicion of a bulge to mar the smooth perfection of the uniform.

As the door closed behind us, Mary Ruthven rose to her feet. There was an angry glint in her eye, maybe there was more iron to her than I had supposed. She gestured towards Larry without looking at him.

‘Is all this really necessary, Mr Vyland?’ she asked coldly. ‘Am I to assume that we have now arrived at the stage of being treated like criminals – like criminals under an armed guard?’

‘You don’t want to pay any attention to our little pal here,’ I put in soothingly. ‘The heater in his hand doesn’t mean a thing. He’s just whistling in the dark. All those snow-birds are as jittery and nervous as this, just looking at the gun gives him confidence: his next shot’s overdue, but when he gets it he’ll be ten feet tall.’

Larry took a couple of quick steps forward and jammed the gun into my stomach. He wasn’t any too gentle about it. His eyes were glazed, there were a couple of burning spots high up in the dead-white cheeks and his breath was a harsh and hissing half-whistle through bared and clenched teeth.

‘I told you, Talbot,’ he whispered. ‘I told you not to ride me any more. That’s the last time –’

I glanced over his shoulder then smiled at him.

‘Look behind you, sucker,’ I said softly. As I spoke I again shifted my gaze over his shoulder and nodded slightly.

He was too hopped up and unbalanced not to fall for it. So sure was I that he would fall for it that my right hand was reaching for his gun as he started to turn and by the time his head was twisted all the way round I had my hand locked over his and the gun pointing sideways and downwards where it would do no harm to anybody if it went off. No direct harm, that was: I couldn’t speak for the power and direction of the ricochet off steel decks and bulkheads.

Larry swung round, his face an ugly and contorted mask of fury and hate, swearing softly, vilely, continuously. He reached down with his free hand to try to wrench the pistol clear, but the hardest work Larry had ever done was pushing down the plunger of a hypodermic syringe and he was just wasting his time. I wrenched the gun away, stepped back, stiff-armed him joltingly with the heel of my palm as he tried to come after me, broke open the automatic, ejected the magazine and sent it clattering into one corner while the gun went into another. Larry half-stood, half-crouched against the far wall where my push had sent him, blood trickling from his nose and tears of rage and frustration and pain running down both cheeks. Just to look at him made me sick and cold.

‘All right, Royale,’ I said without turning my head. ‘You can put your gun away. The show’s over.’

But the show wasn’t over. A hard voice said: ‘Go pick up that gun, Talbot. And the clip. Put the clip in the gun and give it back to Larry.’

I turned round slowly. Vyland had a gun in his hand and I didn’t care very much for the whiteness of the knuckle of the trigger finger. He looked his usual polished urbane self, but the rigidity of his gun hand and the ever so slightly too fast rate of breathing gave him away. It didn’t make sense. Men like Vyland never allowed themselves to become emotionally involved, far less so concerned over what happened to a punk like Larry.

‘How would you like to go up top and take a walk over the side?’ I asked.

‘I’ll give you till I count five.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then I’ll shoot.’

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ I said contemptuously. ‘You’re not the type to pull triggers, Vyland. That’s why you employ this big bad hatchetman here. Besides, who would fix up the bathyscaphe then?’

‘I’m counting, Talbot.’ As far as I was concerned he’d gone nuts. ‘One … two –’

‘OK, OK,’ I interrupted, ‘so you can count. You’re a swell counter. I bet you can count up to ten. But I bet you can’t count up to all those millions you’re going to lose just because I don’t feel like picking up a gun.’

‘I can get other people to fix up that bathyscaphe.’

‘Not this side of the Atlantic, you won’t. And you haven’t got all that much time to play around with, have you, Vyland? What’s the betting a planeload of the FBI aren’t already on the way to Marble Springs to investigate that curious telegram Jablonsky sent? What’s the betting they aren’t already there? What’s the betting they aren’t knocking on the door of the general’s villa right now, saying, “Where’s the general?” and the butler saying, “Why the general’s just gone out to the rig gentlemen,” and then the FBI saying, “We must call upon the general immediately. We have important things to discuss with him.” And they will call, Vyland, just as soon as this storm blows over.’

‘I’m afraid he’s right, Mr Vyland.’ The unexpected help came from Royale. ‘We haven’t all that much time.’

For a long moment Vyland said nothing. Then he lowered his gun, turned and walked out of the room.

Royale, as always, showed no sign of strain or emotion whatever. He smiled and said: ‘Mr Vyland has gone to eat over on the other side. Lunch is ready for all of us,’ and stood to one side to let us out through the door.

It had been a strange off-beat episode. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t even begin to make any kind of sense at all. I pondered it, I tried to find a shadow of an explanation while Larry collected his gun and ammunition clip, but it was no good, I couldn’t find an explanation to fit the facts. Besides, I’d suddenly realized that I was very hungry indeed. I stood to one side to let all the others except Royale precede me, not so much out of courtesy as to ensure that Larry didn’t shoot me in the back, then hurried, without seeming to, to catch up on Mary and Kennedy.

To get to the other side of the rig we had to cross the hundred-foot width of the well-deck where I’d talked to Joe Curran, the roustabout foreman, in the early hours of that morning. It was by all odds the longest, wettest and windiest hundred feet that I’d ever walked.

They’d rigged up a couple of wire life-lines clear across to the other side. We could have done with a couple of dozen. The power of that wind was fantastic, it seemed to have redoubled in strength since we had arrived on the rig four hours previously and I knew now that we could expect no boat or helicopter to approach the rig until the storm had passed. We were completely cut off from the outer world.

At half-past two in the afternoon it was dark as twilight and out of the great black wall of cumulo-nimbus that all but surrounded us the wind flung itself upon the X 13, as if it were going to uproot it from its thirteen-leg foundation, topple it and drown it in the depths of the sea. It roared and howled across the deck of the oil rig in a maniacal fury of sound, and even at the distance of a couple of hundred feet we could plainly hear above the deep thunder of the storm the cacophonous obbligato, the screaming satanic music as the great wind whistled and shrieked its falsetto way through the hundreds of steel girders that went to make up the towering structure of the drilling derrick. We had to lean at an angle of almost forty-five degrees against the wind to keep our balance and at the same time hang on grimly to one of the life-lines. If you fell and started rolling along that deck you wouldn’t stop until the wind had pushed you clear over the side: it was as strong as that. It sucked the breath from your lungs and under its knife-edged hurricane lash the rain flailed and stung the exposed skin like an endless storm of tiny lead shot.

Mary led the way across this exposed storm-filled working platform, and right behind her came Kennedy, one hand sliding along the wire, his free arm tightly round the girl in front. At another time I might have been disposed to dwell on the subject of luck and how some people seemed to have all of it, but I had other much more urgent things on my mind. I came close up to him, actually treading on his heels, put my head close to his and shouted above the storm: ‘Any word come through yet?’

He was smart, all right, this chauffeur. He neither broke step nor turned round, but merely shook his head slightly.

‘Damn!’ I said, and meant it. This was awkward. ‘Have you phoned?’

Again the shake of the head. An impatient shake, this time, it looked like, and when I thought about it I couldn’t blame him. Much chance he’d had of either hearing or finding out anything with Larry dancing around flourishing his pistol, probably ever since he had come out to the rig.

‘I’ve got to talk to you, Kennedy.’ I shouted.

He heard me this time too; the nod was almost imperceptible but I caught it.

We reached the other side, passed through a heavy clipped door and at once found ourselves in another world. It wasn’t the sudden quiet, the warmth, the absence of wind and rain that caused the transformation, though those helped: compared to the other side of the rig from which we had just come, this side resembled a sumptuous hotel.

Instead of bleak steel bulkheads there was some form of polythene or Formica panelling painted in pleasing pastel shades. The floor was sheathed in deep sound-absorbing rubber and a strip of carpeting covered the length of the passageway stretching in front of us. Instead of harsh unshaded lighting falling from occasional overhead lamps, there was a warm diffused glow from concealed strip lighting. Doors lined the passage and the one or two that were open looked into rooms as finely furnished as the cabins you might find in the senior officer’s quarters aboard a battleship. Oil drilling might be a tough life, but the drillers obviously believed in doing themselves well in their off-duty hours. To find this comfort, luxury almost, in the Martian metal structure standing miles out to sea was somehow weird and altogether incongruous.

But what pleased me more than all those evidences of comfort was the fact that there were concealed loudspeakers at intervals along the passage. Those were playing music, soft music, but perhaps loud enough for my purpose. When the last of us had passed through the doorway, Kennedy turned and looked at Royale.

‘Where are we going, sir?’ The perfect chauffeur to the end, anyone who called Royale ‘sir’ deserved a medal.

‘The general’s stateroom. Lead the way.’

‘I usually eat in the drillers’ mess, sir,’ Kennedy said stiffly.

‘Not today. Hurry up, now.’

Kennedy took him at his word. Soon he had left most of them ten feet behind – all except me. And I knew I had very little time. I kept my voice low, head bent and talked without looking at him.

‘Can we put a phone call through to land?’

‘No. Not without clearance. One of Vyland’s men is with the switchboard operator. Checks everything, in and out.’

‘See the sheriff?’

‘A deputy. He got the message.’

‘How are they going to let us know if they had any success?’

‘A message. To the general. Saying that you – or a man like you – had been arrested at Jacksonville, travelling north.’

I should have loved to curse out loud but I contented myself with cursing inwardly. Maybe it had been the best they could think up at short notice, but it was weak, with a big chance of failure. The regular switchboard operator might indeed have passed the message on to the general and there would be no chance that I might be in the vicinity at the time: but Vyland’s creature supervising the operator would know the message to be false and wouldn’t bother passing it on, except perhaps hours later, by way of a joke: nor was there any certainty that even then the news would reach my ears. Everything, just everything could fail and men might die because I couldn’t get the news I wanted. It was galling. The frustration I felt, and the chagrin, were as deep as the urgency was desperate.

The music suddenly stopped, but we were rounding a corner which cuts off momentarily from the others, and I took a long chance.

‘The short-wave radio operator. Is he on constant duty?’

Kennedy hesitated. ‘Don’t know. Call-up bell, I think.’

I knew what he meant. Where, for various reasons, a radio post can’t be continuously manned, there is a device that triggers a distant alarm bell when a call comes through on the post’s listening frequency.

‘Can you operate a short-wave transmitter?’ I murmured.

He shook his head.

‘You’ve got to help me. It’s essential that –’

‘Talbot!’

It was Royale’s voice. He’d heard me, I was sure he’d heard me, and this was it, if he’d the slightest suspicion, then I knew Kennedy and I had exchanged our last words and that I was through. But I passed up the guilty starts and breaking of steps in mid-stride, instead I slowed down gradually, looked round mildly and inquiringly. Royale was about eight feet behind and there were no signs of suspicion or hostility in his face. But then there never were. Royale had given up using expressions years ago.

‘Wait here,’ he said curtly. He moved ahead of us, opened a door, peered in, had a good look round, then beckoned. ‘All right. In.’

We went in. The room was big, over twenty feet long, and luxuriously furnished. Red carpet from wall to wall, red drapes framing square rain-blurred windows, green and red chintz-covered armchairs, a cocktail bar lined with red leather-covered stools in one corner, a Formica-topped table to seat eight near the door: in the corner opposite the bar, a curtained-off alcove. The dining-room of the suite – internal doors opened off right-and left-hand walls – where the general roughed it when he came out to the oil rig.

Vyland was there, waiting for us. He seemed to have recovered his equanimity, and I had to admit that that smooth urbane face with its neatly trimmed moustache and distinguished sprinkling of iron-grey at the temples belonged right there in that room.

‘Close the door,’ he said to Larry, then turned to me and nodded towards the curtained alcove. ‘You eat there, Talbot.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘The hired help. I eat in the kitchen.’

‘You eat there for the same reason that you saw no one on your way through the corridors coming here. Think we want the drilling-rig crew running around shouting that they’ve just seen Talbot, the wanted murderer? Don’t forget they have radios here and the chopper delivers papers every day … I think we might have the steward in now, General, don’t you?’

I went quickly to my seat at the tiny table behind the curtain and sat down. I felt shaken. I should have felt relieved to know that Royale had not been suspicious, that he’d merely been checking to see that the coast was clear before we went into the general’s room, but I was more concerned about my own slip-up. My attention was so taken up with immediate problems that I had forgotten that I was playing the part of a murderer. Had I been a genuine and wanted killer, I’d have kept my face hidden, walked in the middle of the group and peered fearfully round every corner we’d come to. I had done none of those things. How long would it be before it occurred to Royale to wonder why I had done none of those things?

The outside door opened and someone, a steward, I assumed, entered. Once again it was the general who was the host, the man in charge, with Vyland his employee and guest: the general’s ability to switch roles, his unfailing command of himself in all circumstances, impressed me more every time I noticed it. I was beginning to hope that perhaps it might be a good thing to let the general in on something of what was happening, to seek his help in a certain matter, I was certain now he could carry off any deception, any duplicity where the situation demanded it. But he might as well have been a thousand miles away for any hope I had of contacting him.

The general finished giving his orders for lunch, the door closed behind the departing steward and for perhaps a minute there was complete silence. Then someone rose to his feet and crossed the room and the next I heard was the sound of bottles and glasses clinking. Trifles like murder and forcible coercion and underwater recovery of millions weren’t going to get in the way of the observance of the customs of the old Southern hospitality. I would have taken long odds that it was the general himself who was acting as barman, and I was right: I would have taken even longer odds that he would pass up Talbot the murderer, and I was wrong. The alcove curtain was pushed back and the general himself set down a glass before me: he remained bent over my tiny table for a couple of seconds, and the look he gave me wasn’t the look you give a known murderer who has at one time kidnapped your daughter and threatened her with death. It was a long, slow, considering, speculative look: and then incredibly, but unmistakably, the corner of his mouth twitched in a smile and his eye closed in a wink. Next moment he was gone, the curtain falling into place and shutting me off from the company.

I hadn’t imagined it, I knew I hadn’t imagined it. The general was on to me. How much he was on to me I couldn’t guess, any more than I could guess at the reasons that had led to the discovery of what he knew or suspected. One thing I was sure of, he hadn’t learned from his daughter, I’d impressed her enough with the necessity for complete secrecy.

There was a rumble of conversation in the room and I became aware that it was General Ruthven himself who held the floor.

‘It’s damnably insulting and utterly ridiculous,’ he was saying in a voice that I’d never heard before. A dry, icy voice that I could just see being brought to bear for maximum effect in quelling an unruly board of directors. ‘I don’t blame Talbot, murderer though he is. This gun-waving, this guarding has got to stop. I insist on it, Vyland. Good God, man, it’s so utterly unnecessary and I don’t think a man like you would go in for cheaply melodramatic stuff like this.’ The general was warming to his theme of making a stand against being shepherded around at pistol point, or at least against constant surveillance. ‘Look at the weather, man – no one can move from here in the next twelve hours at least. We’re not in the position to make any trouble – and you know I’m the last man in the world to want to. I can vouch personally for my daughter and Kennedy.’

The general was sharp, sharp as a needle, sharper than either Vyland or Royale. He was a bit late in the day in making his stand against surveillance, I guessed what he was really after was the power of freedom of movement – possibly for himself, even more possibly for his chauffeur. And, what was more, he was getting it. Vyland was agreeing, with the reservation that when he and Royale went in the bathyscaphe the general, his chauffeur and Mary should remain in the room above the pillar along with the rest of Vyland’s men. I still had no idea how many men Vyland actually had aboard the rig, but it seemed likely that apart from Larry, Cibatti and his friend there were at least three others. And they would be men in the mould of Cibatti.

Conversation broke off short as a knock came again to the door. A steward – or stewards – set down covers, made to serve but were told by the general to go. As the door closed he said: ‘Mary, I wonder if you would take something to Talbot?’

There came the soft sound of the rubbing of chair legs on the carpet, then Kennedy’s voice, saying: ‘If I might be permitted, sir?’

‘Thank you, Kennedy. Just a minute while my daughter serves it out.’ By and by the curtain was pushed to one side and Kennedy carefully laid a plate in front of me. Beside the plate he laid a small blue leather-covered book, straightened, looked at me expressionlessly and left.

He was gone before I had realized the significance of what he had done. He knew very well that whatever concessions in freedom of movement the general had gained did not apply to me, I was going to be under eye and gun for sixty seconds every minute, sixty minutes every hour and that our last chance for talking was gone. But not our last chance for communication, not with that little book lying around.

It wasn’t strictly a book, it was that cross between a diary and an account book, with a tiny pencil stuck in the loop of leather, which garages and car-dealers dole out in hundreds of thousands, usually at Christmas time, to the more solvent of their customers. Nearly all chauffeurs carried one for entering up in the appropriate spaces the cost of petrol, oil, services, repairs, mileage and fuel consumption. None of those things interested me: all that interested me was the empty spaces in the diary pages and the little blue pencil.

With one eye on the book and one on the curtain and both ears attuned to the voices and sounds beyond that curtain I wrote steadily for the better part of five minutes, feeding myself blindly with fork in the left hand while with my right I tried to set down in the briefest time and the shortest compass everything I wanted to tell Kennedy. When I was finished I felt reasonably satisfied: there was still a great deal left to chance but it was the best I could do. Accepting of chances was the essence of this game.

Perhaps ten minutes after I had finished writing Kennedy brought me in a cup of coffee. The book was nowhere to be seen, but he didn’t hesitate, his hand went straight under the crumpled napkin in front of me, closed over the little book and slid it smoothly inside his tunic. I was beginning to have a great deal of confidence indeed in Simon Kennedy.

Five minutes later Vyland and Royale marched me back to the other side of the rig. Negotiating the hurricane blast that swept across the open well-deck was no easier this time than it had been the last, and in the intervening half-hour the darkness had deepened until it was almost as black as night.

At twenty past three I dropped once more down into the bathyscaphe and pulled the hatch cover tight behind me.

TEN

At half-past six I left the bathyscaphe. I was glad to leave. If you have no work to occupy you – and apart from a task lasting exactly one minute I hadn’t done a stroke that afternoon – the interior of a bathyscaphe has singularly little to offer in the way of entertainment and relaxation. I left Cibatti to screw down the hatch in the floor of the pillar and climbed alone up the hundred and eighty iron rungs to the compartment at the top. Royale was there, alone.

‘Finished, Talbot?’ he asked.

‘All I can do down there. I need paper, pencil, the book of instructions and if I’m right – and I think I am – I can have those engines going within five minutes of getting down there again. Where’s Vyland?’

‘The general called for him five minutes ago.’ Good old general, dead on the dot. ‘They’ve gone off somewhere – I don’t know where.’

It doesn’t matter. This’ll only take me half an hour at the most. You can tell him we’ll be ready to go shortly after seven. Now I want some paper and peace and quiet for my calculations. Where’s the nearest place?’

‘Won’t this do?’ Royale asked mildly. ‘I’ll get Cibatti to fetch some paper.’

‘If you imagine I’m going to work with Cibatti giving me the cold cod eye all the time you’re mistaken.’ I thought a moment. ‘We passed a regular office a few yards along the passage on the way back here. It was open. Proper desk and everything, all the paper and rules I need.’

‘What’s the harm?’ Royale shrugged and stood aside to let me pass. As I went out Cibatti emerged through the trunking from the pillar and before we’d gone ten feet along the passage I heard the solid thudding home of a bolt, the turning of a key in the lock behind us. Cibatti took his keeper of the castle duties very seriously indeed.

Halfway along the passage an opened door led into a small, fairly comfortable room. I looked over my shoulder at Royale, saw his nod and went in. The room looked as if it had been used as an architect’s office, for there were a couple of large drawing boards on easels topped by strip lighting. I passed those up in favour of a big leather-covered desk with a comfortable armchair behind it.

Royale looked round the room the way Royale would always look round a room. It was impossible to imagine Royale sitting down anywhere with his back to a door, overlooked by a window or with light in his eyes. He would have behaved the same in a children’s nursery. In this case, however, he seemed to be examining the room more with an eye to its qualification as a prison, and what he saw must have satisfied him: apart from the doorway through which he had just entered, the only other point of egress from the room was through the plate-glass window that overlooked the sea. He picked a chair directly under the central overhead light, lit a cigarette and sat there quietly, the lamplight gleaming off his dark blond slick hair, his expressionless face in shadow. He was no more than six feet from me and he had nothing in his hands and could have had that little black gun out and two little holes drilled through me before I covered half the distance towards his chair. Besides, violence wasn’t on the cards just then: not, at least, for me.

I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule, consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere at all. I didn’t conceal the fact that I was getting nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience, scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed my lips and looked with mounting irritation at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it – he would have been hard pressed not to get it.

‘My presence here bothering you, Talbot?’

‘What? Well no, not exactly – I just don’t seem to be getting –’

‘Not working out as easily as you thought it would, eh?’

I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn’t going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved me the trouble.

‘Maybe I’m just as anxious as you to get this thing over. I guess you’re one of those characters who don’t like distraction. And I seem to be distracting you.’ He rose easily to his feet, glanced at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair with one hand and made for the door. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

I said nothing, just nodded briefly. He took the key from the inside of the door, went out into the passage, shut the door and locked it. I got up, crossed to the door on cat feet and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute I heard the sound of feet walking briskly along the passage outside, the sound of somebody saying, ‘Sorry, Mac’ in a pronounced and unmistakably American accent and then, almost in the same instant, the solid, faintly hollow sounding impact of a heavy blow that had me wincing in vicarious suffering. A moment later the key turned in the lock, the door opened and I helped drag a heavy load into the room.

The load was Royale and he was out, cold as a flounder. I hauled him inside while the oilskinned figure who’d lifted him through the door reversed the key and turned it in the lock. At once he started throwing off sou’wester, coat and leggings, and beneath everything his maroon uniform was as immaculate as ever.

‘Not at all bad,’ I murmured. ‘Both the sap and the American accent. You’d have fooled me.’

‘It fooled Royale.’ Kennedy bent and looked at the already purpling bruise above Royale’s temple. ‘Maybe I hit him too hard.’ He was as deeply concerned as I would have been had I accidentally trodden on a passing tarantula. ‘He’ll live.’

‘He’ll live. It must have been a long deferred pleasure for you.’ I had shed my own coat and was struggling into the oilskin rig-out as fast as I could. ‘Everything fixed? Get the stuff in the workshop?’

‘Look, Mr Talbot,’ he said reproachfully, ‘I had three whole hours.’

‘Fair enough. And if our friend here shows any sign of coming to?’

‘I’ll just kind of lean on him again,’ Kennedy said dreamily.

I grinned and left. I’d no idea how long the general could detain Vyland on whatever spurious errand he’d called him away, but I suspected it wouldn’t be very long; Vyland was beginning to become just that little bit anxious about the time factor. Maybe I hadn’t done myself any good by pointing out that the government agents might only be waiting for the weather to moderate before coming out to question the general, but with Vyland pointing his gun at me and threatening to kill me I had to reach out and grasp the biggest straw I could find.

The wind on the open well-deck shrieked and gusted as powerfully as ever, but its direction had changed and I had to fight my way almost directly against it. It came from the north now and I knew then that the centre of the hurricane must have passed somewhere also to the north of us, curving in on Tampa. It looked as if the wind and the seas might begin to moderate within a few hours. But, right then, the wind was as strong as it had ever been and on my way across I had my head and shoulders so far hunched into the wind that I was looking back the way I came. I fancied, in the near darkness, that I saw a figure clawing its way along the life-line behind me, but I paid no attention. People were probably using that line all day long.

The time for circumspection, for the careful reconnoitring of every potential danger in my path, was past. It was all or nothing now. Arrived at the other side I strode down the long corridor where I had whispered to Kennedy earlier in the afternoon, turned right at its end instead of left as we had done before, stopped to orientate myself and headed in the direction of the broad companionway which, Mary had said, led up to the actual drilling deck itself. There were several people wandering around, one of the open doors I passed gave on to a recreation room full of blue smoke and crowded with men: obviously all work on drilling and the upper deck was completely stopped. It didn’t worry the drillers, their ten-day tour of duty was paid from the time they left shore till they set foot on it again, and it didn’t worry me for it was to the working deck I was going and the absence of all traffic that I’d find up there would make my task all the easier.

Rounding another corner I all but cannoned into a couple of people who seemed to be arguing rather vehemently about something or other: Vyland and the general. Vyland was the man who was doing the talking but he broke off to give me a glare as I apologized for bumping him and continued down the passage. I was certain he could not have recognized me, my sou’wester had been pulled right down to my eyes, the high flyaway collar of my oilskin was up to my nose and, best disguise of all, I had dispensed with my limp, but for all that I had the most uncomfortable sensation between the shoulder blades until I had rounded another corner and was lost to their sight. I wasn’t sure whether this obvious argument between the general and Vyland was a good thing or not. If the general had managed to get him deeply interested in some controversial subject of immediate and personal importance to them both, then well and good; but if Vyland had been expostulating over what he regarded as some unnecessary delay, things might get very rough indeed. If he got back to the other side of the rig before I did, I didn’t like to think what the consequences would be. So I didn’t think about them. Instead, I broke into a run, regardless of the astonished looks from passers-by at a complete loss to understand the reason for this violent activity on what was in effect a well-paid holiday; reached the companion way and went up two steps at a time.

Mary, tightly wrapped in a hooded plastic raincoat, was waiting behind the closed doors at the top of the steps. She shrank back and gave a little gasp as I stopped abruptly in front of her and pulled down the collar of my oilskin for a moment to identify myself.

‘You!’ She stared at me. ‘You – your bad leg – what’s happened to your limp?’

‘Never had one. Local colour. Guaranteed to fool the most suspicious. Kennedy told you what I wanted you for?’

‘A – a watchdog. To keep guard.’

‘That’s it. I don’t want a bullet or a knife in my back in that radio shack. Sorry it had to be you, but there was no one else. Where’s the shack?’

‘Through the door.’ She pointed. ‘About fifty feet that way.’

‘Come on.’ I grabbed the door handle, incautiously twisted it open, and if I hadn’t had a strong grip on it I’d have been catapulted head over heels to the foot of the stairs. As it was, the hammerblow blast of that shrieking wind smashed both door and myself back against the bulkhead with a force that drove all the breath out of my lungs in an explosive gasp and would possibly have stunned me if the sou’wester hadn’t cushioned the impact as the back of my head struck painfully against the steel. For a moment I hung there, my head a kaleidoscopic whirl of shooting colour, bent double against the hurricane force of the wind, whooping painfully as I fought to overcome the shock of the blow and the sucking effect of the wind and to draw some breath into my aching lungs: then I straightened up and lurched out through the door, pulling Mary behind me. Twice I tried to heave the door close, but against the sustained pressure of that wind I couldn’t even pull it halfway to. I gave it up. They could, and no doubt very shortly would, send up a platoon from below and heave it shut: I had more urgent things to attend to.

It was a nightmare of a night. A dark howling nightmare. I screwed my eye almost shut against the hurricane-driven knife-lash of the rain and stared up into the black sky. Two hundred feet above my head I could just distinguish the intermittent flicker of the derrick-top aircraft warning lights, utterly unnecessary on a night such as this unless there were some lunatic pilots around, and quite useless as far as giving any illumination at deck-level was concerned. The absence of light was a mixed blessing but on the whole, I felt, favourable: I might run into dangerous, even crippling obstacles because I couldn’t see where I was going but on the other hand no one else could see where I was going either.

Arm in arm we lurched and staggered across the deck like a couple of drunks, heading for a square patch of light shining on the deck from a concealed window. We reached a door on the south side, on the near corner and sheltered from the wind, and I was on the point of bending down and having a squint through the keyhole when Mary caught the handle, pushed the door and walked into a small unlit corridor. Feeling rather foolish, I straightened and followed. She pulled the door softly to.

‘The entrance door is on the far end on the right,’ she whispered. She’d reached both arms up round my neck to murmur in my ear, her voice couldn’t have been heard a foot away. ‘I think there’s someone inside.’

I stood stock still and listened, with her arms still round my neck. Given a more favourable time I could have stayed there all night, but the time wasn’t favourable. I said: ‘Couldn’t it be that they just leave that light on to guide the operator to the shack when his call-up bell rings?’

‘I thought I heard a movement,’ she whispered.

‘No time to play it safe. Stay out in the passage,’ I murmured. ‘It’ll be all right.’ I gave her hands a reassuring squeeze as I disengaged them from my neck, reflecting bitterly that Talbot luck was running typically true to form, padded up the passage, opened the door and walked into the radio room.

For a moment I stood there blinking in the brightness of the light, but not blinking so fast that I couldn’t see a big burly character sitting at the radio table whirling round in his seat as the door opened. And even if I couldn’t have seen him I’d still have heard him a split second later as he sent his seat toppling backward with a crash and leapt to his feet, spinning so as to face me, with a speed so remarkable in so big a man. In so very big a man. He was taller than I was, a good bit wider, heavier and younger: he had that blue-jowled, black-eyed, black-haired very tough face that you occasionally see in first or second generation Italian-Americans and if he was a genuine radio-man I was the Queen of Sheba.

‘What’s all the panic about?’ I demanded shortly. It was my best American accent and it was terrible. ‘The boss has a message for you.’

‘What boss?’ he asked softly. A build like a heavy-weight champion and a face to match doesn’t necessarily mean a mind like a moron and this boy was no moron.

‘Let’s have a look at your face, Mac.’

‘What the hell’s bitin’ you?’ I demanded. I turned down the collar of my coat. ‘Is that what you want?’

‘Now the hat,’ he said quietly.

I took off the hat and flung it in his face just as I heard him spit out the solitary word ‘Talbot!’ I was into a dive even as I threw the hat and I hit him fair and square in the middle with the point of my left shoulder. It was like hitting the trunk of a tree, but he wasn’t as well anchored as a tree and he went over.

His head and shoulders crashed against the far wall with a crash that shook the radio shack to its metal foundations. That should have been that, but it wasn’t, I would have sworn that boy didn’t even blink. He brought up one knee in a vicious jab that would have been a sad farewell for me had it landed where it had been intended to land. It didn’t, it caught me on the chest and upper arm, but even so it had sufficient power behind it to knock me over on one side and the next moment we were rolling across the floor together, punching, kicking, clawing, and gouging. The Marquess of Queensberry wouldn’t have liked it at all.

I was under two big disadvantages. The heavy oilskins hampered my movements, and although they helped absorb some of the impact of his jolting short-arm jabs they also, because of their constricting effect, robbed my own blows of much of their power, and while he was obviously more than willing to turn the entire radio shack into a shambles of broken furniture and fittings, that was the last thing I wanted: everything, literally everything, depended on my keeping that radio intact. And we both rolled against the radio table now, myself underneath, where I could have a good view of one of the legs splintering and caving in under the combined weight of our bodies against it.

I wasn’t feeling any too good by this time. I had just the evidence of my own eyes to show me that this lad was only equipped with arms and fists just like anyone else and not a couple of flexible sledge-hammers which was what it felt like, but the sight of that tottering radio table made me desperate. A particularly vicious clubbing blow to the lower ribs didn’t make it at all hard for me to gasp out in pain and fall back limply on the floor, and while he was taking advantage of my co-operation and time off to wind up his right sledge-hammer to drive me through the floor I brought up my knee and simultaneously chopped him across the exposed neck with the edge of my right hand and all the power those hampering oilskins would permit.

By all the rules he should have gone out like a light, only he had never read any of the rules. But I had hurt him, though: the grunt of agony was as genuine as mine had been faked, and he was momentarily dazed – just long enough to let me squirm out from under and roll over and over until I brought up against the half-open doorway through which I had entered. I might have nailed him then, back where we had been, but I wasn’t going to take even the chance of touching the few splintered pieces of table leg which were all that kept the transmitter from crashing on to the steel deck.

He was tough, all right. By the time I was on my feet he was on his, shaken, but still on his feet. For a moment I thought he had lost all taste for the hand to hand stuff, the heavy wooden chair he had picked up and was bringing whistling over his shoulder certainly made it seem so, but when I ducked and heard the chair smash to pieces on the door jamb behind, it turned out that this was only his long-range artillery bombardment and that the assault troops were moving in later. Later, in this case, was almost right away, but I managed to avoid his wild flailing bull-rush and whirled round to meet his next charge.

It never came. He was crouching there, facing me, teeth showing and his eyes a couple of wicked slits in his dark Latin face, hands pressed against the wall behind him ready to help him in his take-off, when I saw a slender wrist appearing in the doorway behind him, high up. At the end of the wrist was a white-gloved hand and gripped in the hand was a broken chair-leg.

Mary Ruthven hit him as I would have taken long odds that she would hit him – a hesitant experimental tap on the head that wouldn’t have dazed a cockroach – but for all that it had the galvanic effect of an electric shock. He whipped his head round to locate the source of this fresh threat and as he did I moved in with two long steps and hit him with everything I had on the neck, just below the ear, my knuckles socketing solidly into the hollow behind the back of his left jawbone.

One of the most deadly blows in boxing, it could easily have dislocated his jaw or broken his neck, and with any normal man might well have done just that. But he was phenomenally tough. He crashed back against the steel bulkhead and started to slide down towards the floor, eyes unfocused in his head, but even as he slid he made a last despairing effort to fling himself at me and wrap his arms around my legs to bring me down. But his co-ordination, his timing were gone. I had time to step back as his face came down near my right foot. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t bring the two into contact and every reason why I should, so I did.

He lay spread-eagled face downwards on the floor, silent and still. I was far from silent myself, my breath was coming in great heaving gasps as if I had just run a mile, and I hadn’t even run a hundred yards in years. My arms, my hands, my face were wet with sweat, and it was this that made me think to get out a handkerchief and rub it all over my face. But there was no blood there, and I couldn’t feel any bruise. It would have been very difficult indeed to explain away a black eye or a bleeding nose to Vyland when I met him later. I tucked the handkerchief away and looked at the girl in the doorway. The hand that still held the chair-leg was trembling slightly, her eyes wide, her lips pale and what little expression there was on her face couldn’t easily have been misconstrued as the beginnings of a worshipping admiration.

‘Did you – did you have to use your boot?’ she asked shakily.

‘What did you expect me to use?’ I asked savagely. ‘The palm of my hand to smooth his fevered brow? Be your age, lady. That guy never heard of little Lord Fauntleroy, he’d have chopped me into bits and fed me to the barracuda if he’d had half the chance. Now, just you stand by with your shillelagh there and clout him if he bats an eyelid –but hard, this time. Not,’ I added hastily, lest she suspect me of being thought ungracious, ‘that I’m not grateful for what you’ve already done.’

I turned round, already a precious minute had been lost since I had come into the shack, and found what I was looking for right away. Several pegs on the walls were festooned with tightly-rolled coils of wire and flex, material for antenna leads and radio repairs. I picked a nice flexible roll of flex and within one minute I had the radio operator trussed like a chicken ready for the broiler, passed a slip knot round his neck and tied the end of it to a cupboard handle. There could only be some bells or pushes or phones he might try to reach but he’d soon give up when he found that all he was doing was strangling himself. I gave the matter of a gag only a passing thought: there may be those who know how to draw a happy median line between suffocating a man and making a gag loose enough to permit breathing without at the same time letting the victim be heard a hundred miles away, but I’m not one of them. Besides, with that great hurricane howling outside he could holler away till he got laryngitis and nobody below deck would ever hear him.

I reached for the only other chair in the shack and sat down before the radio. It was a standard aircraft-type transmitter, I knew it well and I knew how to operate it. I switched on, tuned it on the wavelength the sheriff had given me through Kennedy and clamped on a pair of headphones. I wouldn’t have long to wait, I knew that: the police were keeping a twenty-four hour watch on their short-wave receivers. Within three seconds of the end of my call-up sign the headphones crackled in my ears.

‘Police headquarters. Sheriff Prendergast here. Please go ahead.’

I threw the transmitter switch from manual to microphone.

‘Car Nineteen reporting.’ The agreed subterfuge wasn’t necessary for identification, every police car in the county had been warned to stay off the air and the sheriff knew it could only be me: but in these days of enthusiastic radio hams airwave eavesdroppers abound and I wouldn’t have put it past Vyland’s organization to maintain a permanent listening watch on the police wavelengths. I continued: ‘Suspect answering to description detained near Ventura crossroads. Shall we bring him in?’

‘Negative,’ the voice crackled. A pause. ‘We’ve found our man. Please release suspect.’

I felt as if someone had given me a million dollars. Almost without realizing it I relaxed heavily against the back-rest of the chair, the strain of the keyed-up tension of the past forty-eight hours had been far greater than I had realized. The sheer mental relief, the depth of satisfaction I experienced then surpassed anything I had ever known.

‘Car Nineteen,’ I said again. Even to myself my voice didn’t sound quite steady. ‘Would you repeat that, please?’

‘Release your suspect,’ Prendergast said slowly and distinctly. ‘We have found our man. Repeat, we have found –’

The transmitter leapt backwards about two inches, a great jagged hole appeared in the centre of the tuning band and the radio shack seemed to explode about my ears so deafening, so shattering was the effect of a heavy gun being fired in that confined space.

I didn’t jump more than a couple of feet and after I came down I got to my feet the normal way, but slowly, carefully. I didn’t want anyone getting too nervous, and whoever had pulled that stupid trick, unnecessarily smashing the set and tipping off the cops that something had gone wrong, was very nervous indeed. Almost as nervous as I felt as I turned slowly round and saw who my guest was.

It was Larry and the smoking Colt in his hand was lined up, as nearly as his shaking hand would permit, on a spot somewhere between my eyes. It looked as large as a howitzer. His lank black hair was plastered wetly over his forehead, and the coal-black eye behind that wavering barrel was jerking and burning and crazy as a loon’s. One eye. I couldn’t see the other, I couldn’t see any part of him except half his face, his gun-hand and a left forearm crooked round Mary Ruthven’s neck. The rest of him was completely hidden behind the girl. I looked at her reproachfully.

‘Fine watchdog you are,’ I said mildly.

‘Shut up!’ Larry snarled. ‘A cop, eh? A john. A dirty crawling double-crossing screw!’ He called me several names, all unprintable, his voice a venomous hiss of hate.

‘There’s a young lady here, friend,’ I murmured.

‘Lady? A – tramp.’ He tightened his grip around her neck as if it gave him pleasure and I guessed he had at some time mistakenly tried to make time with her and the roof had fallen in on him. ‘Thought you were clever, Talbot didn’t you? You thought you knew all the answers, you thought you had us all fooled, didn’t you, cop? But you didn’t have me fooled, Talbot. I’ve been watching you, I’ve been following you every second since we came out to the rig.’ He was jazzed up to the eyebrows, shaking and jumping as if he had the St Vitus’s Dance, and his voice held all the venomous and vindictive triumph of the consistently ignored and derided nonentity who has been proved right in the end while all those who despise him have been proved wrong. It was Larry’s night to sing, and he wasn’t going to miss out on a single note. But I had listened to pleasanter voices.

‘Didn’t know that I knew that you were in cahoots with Kennedy, did you, cop?’ he went ranting on. ‘And with this tramp. I was watching you when you came up from the bathyscaphe ten minutes ago, I saw that smooth-talking chauffeur give it to Royale on the head and –’

‘How did you know it was Kennedy?’ I interrupted. ‘He was dressed up –’

‘I listened outside the door, mug! I could have finished you off there and then, but I wanted to see what you were up to. Think I care if Royale gets sapped down?’ He broke off suddenly and swore as the girl went limp on him. He tried to hold her up but heroin is no substitute for protein when it comes to building muscle and even her slight weight was too much for him. He could have lowered her gently, but he didn’t: he stood back abruptly and let her collapse heavily on the floor.

I took half a step forward, fists clenched till they hurt, murder in my heart. Larry bared his teeth and grinned at me like a wolf.

‘Come and get it, copper. Come and get it,’ he whispered. I looked from him to the floor and back again and my hands slowly unclenched. ‘Scared, aren’t you, copper? Yellow, aren’t you, copper? Sweet on her, aren’t you, copper? Just like that pansy Kennedy is sweet on her.’ He laughed, a high falsetto giggle carrying the overtones of madness. ‘I’m afraid a little accident is going to happen to Kennedy when I get back over to the other side. Who’s going to blame me for gunning him down when I see him sapping Royale?’

‘All right,’ I said wearily. ‘You’re a hero and a great detective. Let’s go see Vyland and get it over with.’

‘We’re going to get it over with,’ he nodded. His voice was suddenly very quiet and I think I liked it even less that way. ‘But you’re not going to see Vyland, copper, you’re never going to see anyone again. I’m going to kill you, Talbot. I’m letting you have it now.’

My mouth felt as if someone had gone over it with a roll of high-absorbency blotting-paper. I could feel the slow heavy beat of my heart and the sweat coming on the palms of my hands. He meant every word he said. He was going to squeeze the trigger of that heavy Colt and if he lived to be a hundred nothing would ever give him half so much pleasure again. Finish. But I managed to keep my voice steady.

‘So you’re going to kill me,’ I said slowly. ‘Why?’

‘Because I hate your lousy rotten stinking guts, Talbot, that’s why,’ he whispered, a whisper with a shake in it, a horrible sound. ‘Because you’ve ridden me and laughed at me from the moment we met, hophead this, junky that, always asking about my syringe. Because you’re sweet on this dame here and if I can’t get her no one will. And because I hate cops.’

He didn’t like me, I could see that. Even when he wasn’t talking his mouth was working and twitching like an epileptic’s. He just told me things that I knew he’d never tell another, and I knew why. Dead men tell no tales. And that’s what I’d be any second now. Dead. Dead as Herman Jablonsky. Jablonsky in two feet of earth, Talbot in 130 feet of water, not that it made any difference where you slept when it was all over. And it made things no better to reflect that the end was going to come at the hands of a quivering mass of doped-up neuroses disguised as a human being.

‘You’re going to let me have it now?’ My eye never lifted off that jumping trigger finger.

‘That’s it.’ He giggled. ‘In the guts, low down, so I can watch you flop around for a while. You’ll scream and you’ll scream and you’ll scream and no one will ever hear it. How do you like it, copper?’

‘Hophead,’ I said softly. I’d nothing to lose.

‘What?’ His face was a mask of disbelief. He went into a crouch over his gun that would have been laughable in different circumstances. It wasn’t any strain at all not to laugh. ‘What did you say, copper?’

‘Junky,’ I said distinctly. ‘You’re all doped up so that you don’t know what you’re doing. What are you going to do with the body?’ It was the first time I’d ever thought of myself as a corpse and I didn’t care for the feeling very much. ‘Two of you couldn’t lift me out of here and if they find me shot in this cabin they’ll know it was you who did it and than you’ll be in for the high jump, because they still need my services very badly, more than ever. You won’t be popular, Larry boy.’

He nodded cunningly as if he had just thought up all this himself.

‘That’s right, copper,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t shoot you in here, can I? We’ll have to go outside, won’t we, copper? Near the edge, where I can shoot you and shove you into the sea.’

‘That’s it,’ I agreed. This was macabre, this arrangement for my own tidy disposal, but I wasn’t going as crazy as Larry, I was gambling on my last hope. But the gamble was crazy enough.

‘And then they’ll be running around and looking for you,’ Larry said dreamily. ‘And I’ll be running around and looking for you too and all the time I’ll be laughing to myself and thinking about you and the barracuda down among the seaweed there and knowing that I’m smarter than any one of them.’

‘You have a charming mind,’ I said.

‘Haven’t I now?’ Again that high falsetto giggle and I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck. He poked at Mary with his foot, but she didn’t stir. ‘The dame will keep till I come back. I won’t be long, will I, copper? Come on. You first. And don’t forget I have a torch and a gun.’

‘I’m not likely to forget.’

Neither Mary nor the radio operator had stirred. I was pretty sure that the operator wouldn’t stir for a long time, I could still feel the ache in my fist and foot. But I wasn’t at all sure about Mary, I wasn’t even sure that she wasn’t faking, her breathing seemed much too quick and irregular for an unconscious person.

‘Come on, now,’ Larry said impatiently. He thrust the gun painfully into the small of my back. ‘Out.’

I went out, through the door, along the passage and through the outer door on to the wind- and rain-swept deck beyond. The outer door had opened on the sheltered side of the radio shack but in a moment we would be exposed to the pile-driving blast of that wind and I knew that when that moment came it would be then or never.

It was then. Urged on by the revolver in my back I moved round the corner of the shack, crouched low and barrelling forward into that great wind as soon as it struck me. Larry wasn’t so prepared, not only was he slightly built but he was standing upright, and the sudden wavering and jerking of the torch beam on the deck by my feet was intimation enough to me that the wind had caught him off-balance, perhaps sent him staggering several feet backward. I lowered my head still farther until I was in the position of a hundred yards sprinter in the first two steps of the race and lurched forward into the wind.

Almost at once I realized that I had miscalculated. I had miscalculated the strength of the wind, running into that hurricane was like running through a barrel of molasses. And I had also forgotten that while a seventy-mile-an-hour wind offers an almost insuperable resistance to a human being it offers relatively none to a heavy slug from a Colt with a muzzle velocity of 600 mph.

I’d got maybe eight yards when the frantically searching torch beam picked me up and steadied on me, and managed to cover perhaps another two before Larry fired.

Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the world’s worst marksmen, their usual method being to come within a couple of yards before firing or spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of bullets to make the law of averages work for them and I had heard a hundred times that those boys couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule applied only to barn doors.

A mule-kick is nothing compared to the slamming stopping power of a forty-five. It caught me high up on the left shoulder and spun me round in a complete circle before dropping me in my tracks. But it was this that saved my life, even as I fell I felt the sharp tug on my oilskin collar as another slug passed through it. Those weren’t warning shots that Larry was firing: he was out to kill.

And kill he would if I had remained another couple of seconds on that deck. Again I heard the muffled boom of the Colt – even at ten yards I could hardly hear it over the howling power of that wind – and saw sparks strike off the deck inches from my face and heard the screaming whirr of the spent bullets ricocheting off into the darkness of the night. But the sparks gave me hope, it meant that Larry was using full metal-jacketed slugs, the kind cops use for firing through car bodies and locked doors, and that made an awful sight cleaner wound than a mushrooming soft-nose. Maybe it had passed clear through the shoulder.

I was on my feet and running again. I couldn’t see where I was running to and I didn’t care, all that mattered was running from. A blinding, bulleting gust of rain whistled across the deck and made me shut both eyes tight and I loved it. If I had my eyes shut so had Larry.

Still with my eyes shut I bumped into a metal ladder. I grabbed it to steady myself and before I properly realized what I was doing I was ten feet off the ground and climbing steadily. Maybe it was just man’s age-old instinct to climb high to get out of danger that started me off but it was the realization that this ladder must lead to some sort of platform where I might fend off Larry that kept me going.

It was a wicked, exhausting climb. Normally, even in that giant wind, it wouldn’t have given me so much trouble, but, as it was, I was climbing completely one-handed. My left shoulder didn’t hurt much, it was still too numb for that, the real pain would come later, but for the moment the entire arm seemed paralysed, and every time I released a rung with my right hand and grabbed for the one above, the wind pushed me out from the ladder so that my fingers hooked round the next rung usually at the full extent of my arm. Then I had to pull myself close with my one good arm and start the process all over again. After I’d climbed about forty rungs my right arm and shoulder were beginning to feel as if they were on fire.

I took a breather, hooked my forearm over a rung and looked down. One look was enough. I forgot about the pain and weariness and started climbing faster than ever, hunching my way upwards like a giant koala bear. Larry was down there at the foot of the ladder, flickering his torch in all directions and even with that bird-brain of his it was only going to be a matter of time until it occurred to him to shine that torch upwards.

It was the longest ladder I had ever climbed. It seemed endless, and I knew now that it must be some part of the drilling derrick, the ladder, I was now almost sure, that led up to the ‘monkey board,’ that narrow shelf where a man guided the half-ton sections of the drill pipe, as it came from the ground, into the storage-racks behind. The only thing I could remember about the monkey was the cheerless fact that it was devoid of handrails – those would only get in the way of the man guiding the heavy drill sections into place.

A jarring vibrating clang as if the iron ladder had been struck by a sledge-hammer was Larry’s way of announcing that he had caught sight of me. The bullet had struck the rung on which my foot rested and for one bad moment I thought it had gone through my foot. When I realized it hadn’t I took another quick look down.

Larry was coming up after me. I couldn’t see him, but I could see the torch clutched in one hand making regularly erratic movements as he swarmed his way up the ladder making about three times the speed I was. It wasn’t in character this, Larry could never have been accused of having an excess of courage: either he was loaded to the eyes or he was driven by fear – fear that I should escape and Vyland find out that he had been trying to murder me. And there was the further possibility, and a very strong one, that Larry had only one or two shells left in his gun: he couldn’t afford not to make those count.

I became gradually aware of lightness above and around me. I thought at first that this must be a glow cast from the aircraft warning lights in the top of the derrick, but in the same instant as the thought occurred I knew it to be wrong: the top of the derrick was still over a hundred feet above where I was. I took another breather, screwed my eyes almost shut against the stinging lash of the rain and peered upwards into the murky gloom.

There was a platform not ten feet above my head, with a light shining off feebly to the right. It wasn’t much of a light, but enough to let me see something of the dark maze of girders that was the derrick, enough to let me see a dark shadow above and also to the right which looked like some tiny cabin. And then Larry’s torch steadied and shone vertically upwards and I saw something that made me feel slightly sick: the platform above was not solid sheet-metal but open grille-work through which a person’s every move could be seen: gone were my hopes of waiting till Larry’s head appeared above the level of the platform and then kicking it off his shoulders.

I glanced downwards. Larry was no more than ten feet below, and both his gun and torch were levelled on me, I could see the dull glint of light in the barrel and the dark hole in the middle where death hid. One little pull on the trigger finger and that dark hole would be a streaking tongue of fire in the darkness of the night. Curtains for Talbot. I wondered vaguely, stupidly, if my eyes would have time to register the bright flame before the bullet and the oblivion it carried with it closed my eyes for ever … And then, slowly, I realized that Larry wasn’t going to fire, not even Larry was crazy enough to fire, not then. The 185-pound deadweight of my falling body would have brushed him off that ladder like a fly and from that ten-storey height neither of us would have bounced off that steel deck enough so that anyone would notice.

I kept on climbing and reached the top. Had it been a solid platform there and I don’t think I would have managed to pull myself on to it against that wind, my one good hand would just have scrabbled about on the smooth metal surface until exhaustion took me and I fell back off the ladder: but as it was I managed to hook my fingers in the openwork steel grille and drag myself on to the platform.

Larry was close behind. He gestured with his torch and I got his meaning. I moved to one side, past the little cabin at the corner where a lamp on a recessed shelf threw a faint light that was cut off abruptly at waist level, and waited.

Slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving my face, Larry came over the top and straightened to his feet. I moved farther along the monkey-board, slowly, backwards, with my face to Larry. On my right I could dimly make out the big pipe storage racks, on my left the edge of the monkey board, no handrail, just a sheer drop of a hundred feet. Then I stopped. The gallery of the monkey-board seemed to run all the way round the outside of the derrick and it would have suited Larry just fine to have me out on the northern edge where, wind or no wind, a good shove – or a .45 slug – might have sent me tumbling direct into the sea a hundred and fifty feet below.

Larry came close to me. He’d switched off his torch now. The fixed light on the cabin side might leave the lowermost three feet in darkness, but it was enough for him and he wouldn’t want to take even the remote chance of anyone spotting a flickering torchlight and wondering what any crazy person should be doing up on the monkey-board in that hurricane wind and with all the work stopped.

He halted three feet away. He was panting heavily and he had his wolf grin on again.

‘Keep going, Talbot,’ he shouted.

I shook my head. ‘This is as far as I’m going.’ I hadn’t really heard him, the response was purely automatic, I had just seen something that made me feel ice-cold, colder by far than the biting lash of that rain. I had thought, down in the radio shack, that Mary Ruthven had been playing possum, and now I knew I had been right. She had been conscious, she must have taken off after us immediately we had left. There was no mistaking at all that gleaming dark-blonde head, those heavily plaited braids that appeared over the top of the ladder and moved into the night.

You fool, I thought savagely, you crazy, crazy little fool. I had no thought for the courage it must have taken to make that climb, for the exhausting nightmare it must have been, even for the hope it held out for myself. I could feel nothing but bitterness and resentment and despair and behind all of those the dim and steadily growing conviction that I’d count the world well lost for Mary Ruthven.

‘Get going,’ Larry shouted again.

‘So you can shove me into the sea? No.’

‘Turn round.’

‘So you can sap me with that gun and they find me lying on the deck beneath, no suspicion of foul play.’ She was only two yards away now. ‘Won’t do, Larry boy. Shine your torch on my shoulder. My left shoulder.’

The flash clicked on and I heard again that maniac giggle.

‘So I did get you, hey, Talbot?’

‘You got me.’ She was right behind him now, that great wind had swept away any incautious sound she might have made. I had been watching her out of the corner of my eye, but now I suddenly looked straight at her over Larry’s shoulder, my eyes widening in hope.

‘Try again, copper,’ Larry giggled. ‘Can’t catch me twice that way.’

Throw your arms round his neck or his legs, I prayed. Or throw your coat over his head. But don’t, don’t, don’t go for his gun-hand.

She went for his gun-hand. She reached round his right side and I plainly heard the smack as her right hand closed over his right wrist.

For a moment Larry stood stock-still. Had he jumped or twisted or moved, I would have been on to him like an express train, but he didn’t, the very unexpectedness of the shock temporarily petrified his gun hand too – it was still pointing straight at me.

And it was still levelled at my heart when he made a violent grab for Mary’s right wrist with his left hand. A jerk up with his left hand, a jerk down with his right and his gun-hand was free. Then he moved a little to his left, jerked her forward a foot, pinned her against the storage racks to the right and started to twist her wrist away from him. He knew who he had now and the wolf grin was back on his face and those coal-black eyes and the gun were levelled on me all the time.

For five, maybe ten seconds, they stood there straining. Fear and desperation gave the girl strength she would never normally have had, but Larry too was desperate and he could bring far more leverage to bear. There was a half-stifled sob of pain and despair and she was on her knees before him, then on her side, Larry still holding her wrist. I couldn’t see her now, only the faint sheen of her hair, she was below the level of the faint light cast by the lamp. All I could see was the madness in the face of the man opposite me, and the light shining from the shelf of the little cabin a few feet behind him. I lifted the heel of my right shoe off the ground and started to work my foot out of it with the help of my left foot. It wasn’t even a chance.

‘Come here, cop,’ Larry said stonily. ‘Come here or I’ll give the girl friend’s wrist just another little turn and then you can wave her goodbye.’ He meant it, it would make no difference now, he knew he would have to kill her anyway. She knew too much. I moved two steps closer. My heel was out of the right shoe. He thrust the barrel of the Colt hard against my mouth, I felt a tooth break and the salt taste of blood from a gashed upper lip, on the inside. I twisted my face away, spat blood and he thrust the revolver deep into my throat.

‘Scared, cop?’ he said softly. His voice was no more than a whisper, but I heard it above the voice of that great wind, maybe it was true enough, this business of the abnormally heightened sensitivity of those about to die. And I was about to die. I was scared all right, I was scared right to the depths as I had never been scared before. My shoulder was beginning to hurt, and hurt badly, and I wanted to be sick, that damned revolver grinding into my throat was sending waves of nausea flooding through me. I drew my right foot back as far as I could without upsetting my balance. My right toe was hooked over the tongue of the shoe.

‘You can’t do it, Larry,’ I croaked. The pressure on my larynx was agonizing, the gun-sight jabbing cruelly into the underside of my chin. ‘Kill me and they’ll never get the treasure.’

‘I’m laughing.’ He was, too, a horrible maniacal cackle. ‘See me, cop, I’m laughing. I’d never see any of it anyway. Larry the junky never does. The white stuff, that’s all my old man ever gives his ever-loving son.’

‘Vyland?’ I’d known for hours.

‘My father. God damn his soul.’ The gun shifted, pointed at my lower stomach. ‘So long, cop.’

My right foot was already swinging forward, smoothly, accelerating, but unseen to Larry in the darkness.

‘I’ll tell him goodbye from you,’ I said. The shoe clattered against the corrugated iron of the little hut even as I spoke.

Larry jerked his head to look over his right shoulder to locate the source of this fresh menace. For a split second of time, before he started to swing round again, the back of his left jawbone was exposed to me just as that of the radio operator had been only a few minutes before.

I hit him. I hit him as if he were a satellite and I was going to send him into orbit round the moon. I hit him as if the lives of every last man, woman and child in the world depended on it. I hit him as I had never hit anyone in my life before, as I knew even as I did it that I could never hit anyone again.

There came a dull muffled snapping noise and the Colt fell from his hands and struck the grille at my feet. For two or three seconds Larry seemed to stand there poised, then, with the unbelievably slow, irrevocable finality of a toppling factory chimney, he fell out into space.

There was no terror-stricken screaming, no wild flailing of arms and legs as he fell to the steel deck a hundred feet below: Larry had been dead, his neck broken, even before he had started to fall.

ELEVEN

Eight minutes after Larry had died and exactly twenty minutes after I had left Kennedy and Royale in the cabin I was back there, giving the hurriedly prearranged knock. The door was unlocked, and I passed quickly inside. Kennedy immediately turned the key again while I looked down at Royale, spread-eagled and unconscious on the deck.

‘How’s the patient been?’ I inquired. My breath was coming in heaving gasps, the exertions of the past twenty minutes and the fact that I’d run all the way back there hadn’t helped my respiration any.

‘Restive.’ Kennedy grinned. ‘I had to give him another sedative.’ Then his eyes took me in and the smile slowly faded as he looked first at the blood trickling from my mouth then at the hole in the shoulder of the oilskin.

‘You look bad. You’re hurt. Trouble?’

I nodded. ‘But it’s all over now, all taken care of.’ I was wriggling out of my oilskins as fast as I could and I wasn’t liking it at all. ‘I got through on the radio. Everything is going fine. So far, that is.’

‘Fine, that’s wonderful.’ The words were automatic, Kennedy was pleased enough to hear my news but he was far from pleased with the looks of me. Carefully, gently, he was helping me out of the oilskins and I heard the quick indrawing of breath as he saw where I’d torn my shirt-sleeve off at the shoulder, the red-stained wads of gauze with which Mary had plugged both sides of the wound – the bullet had passed straight through, missing the bone but tearing half the deltoid muscle away – in the brief minute we’d stopped in the radio shack after we’d come down that ladder again. ‘My God, that must hurt.’

‘Not much.’ Not much it didn’t there were a couple of little men, working on piece-time rates, perched on either side of my shoulder and sawing away with a crosscut as if their lives depended on it, and my mouth didn’t feel very much better: the broken tooth had left an exposed nerve that sent violent jolts of pain stabbing up through my face and head every other second. Normally the combination would have had me climbing the walls: but today wasn’t a normal day.

‘You can’t carry on like this,’ Kennedy persisted. ‘You’re losing blood and –’

‘Can anyone see that I’ve been hit in the teeth?’ I asked abruptly.

He crossed to a wash-basin, wet a handkerchief and wiped my face clear of blood.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said consideringly. ‘Tomorrow your upper lip will be double size but it hasn’t started coming up yet.’ He smiled with humour. ‘And as long as the wound in your shoulder doesn’t make you laugh out loud no one can see that one of your teeth is broken.’

‘Fine. That’s all I need. You know I’ve got to do this.’ I was slipping off the oilskin leggings and had to reposition the gun in my waistband. Kennedy, beginning to dress up in the oilskins himself, saw it.

‘Larry’s?’

I nodded.

‘He did the damage?’

Another nod.

‘And Larry?’

‘He won’t need any more heroin where he’s gone.’ I struggled painfully into my coat, more than ever grateful that I’d left it off before going. ‘I broke his neck.’

Kennedy regarded me long and thoughtfully. ‘You play kind of rough, don’t you, Talbot?’

‘Not half as rough as you’d have been,’ I said grimly. ‘He’d Mary on her hands and knees on the monkey-board of the derrick, a hundred feet above the deck, and he was proposing that she go down again without benefit of the ladder.’

He stopped in the middle of tying the last button on his oilskin, crossed in two quick strides, grabbed me by the shoulders then released them again at my quick exclamation of pain.

‘Sorry, Talbot. Damn foolish of me.’ His face wasn’t as brown as usual, eyes and mouth were creased with worry. ‘How – is she all right?’

‘She’s all right,’ I said wearily. ‘She’ll be across here in ten minutes’ time and you’ll see for yourself. You’d better get going, Kennedy. They’ll be back any minute.’

‘That’s right,’ he murmured. ‘Half an hour, the general said – it’s nearly up. You – you’re sure she’s all right?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ I said irritably, then at once regretted the irritation. This man I could get to like very much. I grinned at him. ‘Never yet saw a chauffeur so worried about his employer.’

‘I’m off,’ he said. He didn’t feel like smiling. He reached for a leather note-case lying beside my papers on the desk and thrust it into an inside pocket. ‘Mustn’t forget this. Unlock the door, will you, and see if the coast is clear?’

I opened the door, saw that it was clear and gave him the nod. He got his hands under Royale’s armpits, dragged him through the doorway and dumped him unceremoniously in the passageway outside, beside the overturned chair. Royale was stirring and moaning: he would be coming to any moment now. Kennedy looked at me for a few moments, as if searching for something to say, then he reached out and tapped me lightly on the shoulder.

‘Good luck, Talbot,’ he murmured. ‘I wish to God I was coming with you.’

‘I wish you were,’ I said feelingly. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just about over now.’ I wasn’t even kidding myself, and Kennedy knew it. I nodded to him, went inside and closed the door. I heard Kennedy turn the key in the lock and leave it there. I listened, but I didn’t even hear his footsteps as he left: for so big a man he was as silent as he was fast.

Now that I was alone, with nothing to do, the pain struck with redoubled force. The pain and the nausea came at me in alternate waves, I could feel the shore of consciousness advancing and receding, it would have been so easy just to let go. But I couldn’t let go, not now. It was too late now. I would have given anything for some injection to kill the pain, something to see me through the next hour or so. I was almost glad when, less than two minutes after Kennedy had left, I heard the sound of approaching footsteps. We had cut things pretty fine. I heard an exclamation, the footsteps broke into a run and I went and sat behind my desk and picked up a pencil. The overhead light I had switched off and now I adjusted the angle extension lamp on the wall so that it shone directly overhead, throwing my face in deep shadow. Maybe, as Kennedy had said, my mouth didn’t show that it had been hit but it certainly felt as if it showed and I didn’t want to take any chances.

The key scraped harshly in the lock, the door crashed open and bounced off the bulkhead and a thug I’d never seen before, built along the same lines as Cibatti, jumped into the room. Hollywood had taught him all about opening doors in situations like this. If you damaged the panels or hinges or plaster on the wall it didn’t matter, it was the unfortunate proprietor who had to pay up. In this case, as the door was made of steel, all he had damaged was his toe and it didn’t require a very close student of human nature to see that there was nothing he would have liked better than to fire off that automatic he was waving in his hand. But all he saw was me, with a pencil in my hand and a mildly inquiring expression on my face. He scowled at me anyway, then turned and nodded to someone in the passageway.

Vyland and the general came in half-carrying a now conscious Royale. It did my heart good just to look at him as he sat heavily in a chair. Between myself a couple of nights ago and Kennedy tonight we had done a splendid job on him; it promised to be the biggest facial bruise I had ever seen. Already it was certainly the most colourful. I sat there and wondered with a kind of detached interest – for I could no longer afford to think of Royale with anything except detachment – whether the bruise would still be there when he went to the electric chair. I rather thought it would.

‘You been out of this room this evening, Talbot?’ Vyland was rattled and edgy and he was giving his urban top executive’s voice a rest.

‘Sure I dematerialized myself and oozed out through the keyhole.’ I gazed at Royale with interest. ‘What’s happened to the boyfriend? Derrick fall on him?’

‘It wasn’t Talbot.’ Royale pushed away Vyland’s supporting hand, fumbling under his coat and brought out his gun. His tiny deadly little gun, that would always be the first thought in Royale’s mind. He was about to shove it back when a thought occurred to him and he broke open the magazine. Intact, all the deadly little cupro-nickel shells there. He replaced the magazine in the automatic and the gun in his holster and then, almost as an afterthought, felt in his inside breast pocket. There was a couple of flickers of his one good eye that a highly imaginative character might have interpreted as emotions of dismay, then relief, as he said to Vyland: ‘My wallet. It’s gone.’

‘Your wallet?’ There was no mistaking Vyland’s feeling, it was one of pure relief. ‘A hit-and-run thief!’

‘Your wallet! On my rig? An outrage, a damnable outrage!’ The old boy’s moustache was waffling to and fro, he had the Method school whacked any day. ‘God knows I hold no brief for you, Royale, but on my rig! I’ll have a search instituted right away and the culprit –’

‘You can save yourself the trouble, General,’ I interrupted dryly. ‘The culprit’s got the money safely in his pants pocket and the wallet’s at the bottom of the sea. Besides, anyone who takes money away from Royale deserves a medal.’

‘You talk too much, friend,’ Vyland said coldly. He looked at me in a thoughtful way I didn’t like at all and went on softly: ‘It could have been a cover-up, a red herring, maybe Royale was knocked out for some other reason altogether. A reason you might know something about, Talbot.’

I felt cold. Vyland was nobody’s fool and I hadn’t looked for this. If they got suspicious and started searching me and found either Larry’s gun or the wound – and they would be bound to find both – then this was definitely Talbot’s farewell appearance. Next moment I felt colder still. Royale said: ‘Maybe it was a plant,’ rose groggily to his feet, crossed over to my desk and stared down at the papers in front of me.

This was it. I remembered now the far too carefully casual glance Royale had given the papers as he had left the room. I’d covered maybe half a sheet with letters and figures before he had gone and hadn’t added a single letter or figure since. It would be all the proof that Royale would ever want. I kept looking at his face, not daring to glance down at the papers, wondering how many bullets Royale could pump into me before I could even start dragging Larry’s cannon from my waistband. And then, incredulously, I heard Royale speak.

‘We’re barking up the wrong tree. Talbot’s in the clear, he’s been working, Mr Vyland. Pretty well nonstop, I should say.’

I glanced at the papers in front of me. Where I’d left half a page of scribbled figures and letters there were now two and a half pages. They had been written with the same pen and it would have taken a pretty close look to see that they hadn’t been written by the same hand – and it was upside down to Royale. The scribbled nonsense was as meaningless as my own had been, but it was enough, it was more than enough, it was my passport to life, given me by Kennedy, whose acute foresight in this case had far outstripped my own. I wished I had met Kennedy months ago.

‘OK. So it’s somebody short of cash.’ Vyland was satisfied, the matter dismissed from his mind. ‘How did you make out, Talbot? We’re getting pushed for time.’

‘No worry,’ I assured him. ‘All worked out. Guaranteed. Five minutes buttoning-up down in the scaphe and we’re set to go.’

‘Excellent.’ Vyland looked pleased but that was only because he didn’t know what I knew. He turned to the thug who had kicked the door open. ‘The general’s daughter and his chauffeur – you’ll find them in the general’s stateroom. They’re to come here at once. Ready, Talbot?’

‘Ready.’ I got to my feet, a bit shakily, but compared to Royale I looked positively healthy and nobody noticed. ‘I’ve had a long hard day, Vyland. I could do with something to fortify me before we go below.’

‘I’ll be surprised if Cibatti and his friends haven’t enough supplies to stock a bar.’ Vyland was seeing the end of the road, he was all good humour now. ‘Come along.’

We trooped out into the corridor and along to the door of the room that gave access to the caisson. Vyland gave his secret knock – I was glad to note that it was still the same – and we went inside.

Vyland had been right, Cibatti and his friend did indeed do themselves well in the liquor line and by the time I had three stiff fingers of Scotch inside me the two little men sawing with the crosscut on my shoulder had given up the piece-work and were back on time rates and I no longer felt like banging my head against the wall. It seemed logical to expect that the improvement might be maintained if I poured myself another shot of anaesthetic and I’d just done this when the door opened and the thug Vyland had sent to the other side of the rig appeared, ushering in Mary and Kennedy. My heart had been through a lot that night, heavy overtime stuff to which it wasn’t accustomed, but it only required one look at Mary and it started doing its handsprings again. My mind wasn’t doing handsprings, though, I looked at her face and my mind was filled with all sorts of pleasant thoughts about what I’d like to do to Vyland and Royale. There were big bluish-dark patches under her eyes, and she looked white and strained and more than a little sick. I’d have taken any odds that that last half-hour with me had scared and shaken her as she’d never been scared and shaken before. It had certainly scared and shaken me enough. But neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to notice anything amiss, people forced to associate with them and not scared and shaken would be the exception rather than the rule.

Kennedy didn’t look scared and shaken, he didn’t look anything at all except the perfect chauffeur. But Royale wasn’t any more fooled than I was. He turned to Cibatti and his side-kick and said: ‘Just go over this bird here, will you, and see that he’s not wearing anything that he shouldn’t be wearing.’

Vyland gave him a questioning look.

‘He may be as harmless as he looks – but I doubt it,’ Royale explained. ‘He’s had the run of the rig this afternoon. He might just possibly have picked up a gun and if he has he might just possibly get the drop on Cibatti and the others when they weren’t looking.’ Royale nodded to the door in the convex wall. ‘I just wouldn’t fancy climbing a hundred feet up an iron ladder with Kennedy pointing a gun down the way all the time.’

They searched Kennedy and found nothing. Royale was smart all right, you could have put in your eye all the bits he missed. But he just wasn’t smart enough. He should have searched me.

‘We don’t want to hurry you, Talbot,’ Vyland said with elaborate sarcasm.

‘Right away,’ I said. I sent down the last of the anaesthetic, frowned owlishly at the notes in my hand, folded them away in a pocket and turned towards the entrance door to the pillar. I carefully avoided looking at Mary, the general or Kennedy.

Vyland touched me on my bad shoulder and if it hadn’t been for the anaesthetic I’d have gone through the deckhead. As it was I jumped a couple of inches and the two lumberjacks on my shoulder started up again, sawing away more industriously than ever.

‘Getting nervous, aren’t we?’ Vyland sneered. He nodded at a mechanism on the table, a simple solenoid switch that I’d brought up from the scaphe. ‘Forgotten something, haven’t you?’

‘No. We won’t be needing that any more.’

‘Right, on your way. You first … Watch them real close, Cibatti, won’t you?’

‘I’ll watch them, boss,’ Cibatti assured him. He would, too, he’d bend his gun over the head of the first person to breathe too deeply. The general and Kennedy weren’t going to pull any fast ones when Vyland and Royale were down there with me in the bathyscaphe, they’d stay there under gun-point until we returned. I was sure that Vyland would even have preferred to have the general with us in the bathyscaphe as extra security, but apart from the fact that the scaphe held only three in comfort and Vyland would never move into the least danger without his hatchetman by his side, that 180-rung descent was far too much for the old general to look at.

It almost proved too much for me, too. Before I was halfway down, my shoulder, arm and neck felt as if they were bathed in a mould of molten lead, and the waves of fiery pain were shooting up into my head and there the fire turned to darkness, and down into my chest and stomach and there they turned to nausea. Several times the pain and the darkness and the nausea all but engulfed me. I had to cling on desperately with my good hand until the waves subsided and full consciousness returned. With every rung descended the periods of darkness grew longer and awareness shorter, and I must have descended the last thirty or forty rungs like an automaton, from instinct and memory and some strange sort of subconscious willpower. The only point in my favour was that, courteous as ever, they had sent me down first so that I wouldn’t have to fight the temptation of dropping something heavy on their heads, and so they weren’t able to see how I was suffering. By the time I had reached the platform at the bottom and the last of them – Cibatti’s friend, who was to close the platform hatch – had arrived, I was at least able to stand up without swaying. My face, I think, must have been the colour of paper and it was bathed in sweat, but the illumination from the tiny lamp at the foot of the cylindrical tomb was so faint, that there was little danger of Vyland or Royale detecting anything unusual. I suspected that Royale wouldn’t be feeling so good after the trip either, any man who has sustained a blow or blows sufficient to put him away for half an hour isn’t going to be feeling on top of his form a mere fifteen minutes after he recovers. As for Vyland, I had a faint suspicion that he was more than a little scared and that his primary concern, at the moment, would be himself and the journey that lay ahead of us.

The platform hatch was opened and we clambered down through the entrance flooding chamber of the bathyscaphe into the steel ball below. I took the greatest care to favour my bad shoulder when I was negotiating the sharp, almost right-angle bend into the observation chamber and the journey wasn’t any more than agonizing. I switched on the overhead light and made for the circuit boxes leaving Vyland to secure the flooding-chamber hatch. Half a minute later he wriggled into the observation chamber and shut the heavy wedge-shaped circular door behind him.

They were both suitably impressed by the profusion and confusion of the wires dangling from the circuit boxes and if they weren’t equally impressed by the speed and efficiency with which, barely consulting my notes, I buttoned them all back in place again, they ought to have been. Fortunately, the circuit boxes were no higher than waist level, my left arm was now so far gone that I could use it only from the elbow downwards.

I screwed home the last lead, shut the box covers and started to test all the circuits. Vyland watched me impatiently; Royale was watching me with a face, which, in its expressionlessness and battered appearance, was a fair match for the great Sphinx of Giza; but I remained unmoved by Vyland’s anxiety for haste – I was in this bathyscaphe too and I was in no mind to take chances. Then I turned on the control rheostats for the two battery-powered engines, turned to Vyland and pointed at a pair of flickering dials.

‘The engines. You can hardly hear them in here but they’re running just as they should. Ready to go?’

‘Yes.’ He licked his lips. ‘Ready when you are.’

I nodded, turned the valve control to flood the entrance chamber, pointed to the microphone which rested on a bracket at the head-height between Royale and myself and turned the wall-switch to the ‘on’ position. ‘Maybe you’d like to give the word to blow the air from the retaining rubber ring?’

He nodded, gave the necessary order and replaced the microphone. I switched it off and waited.

The bathyscaphe had been rocking gently, through maybe a three-or four-degree arc in a fore-and-aft line when suddenly the movement ceased altogether. I glanced at the depth gauge. It had been registering erratically, we were close enough to the surface for it to be affected by the great deep-troughed waves rolling by overhead, but even so there could be no doubt that the average depths of the readings had perceptibly increased.

‘We’ve dropped clear of the leg,’ I told Vyland. I switched on the vertical searchlight and pointed through the Plexiglas window at our feet. The sandy bottom was now only a fathom away. ‘What direction, quick – I don’t want to settle in that.’

‘Straight ahead, just how you’re pointing.’

I made the interlock switch for the two engines, advanced to half-speed and adjusted the planes to give us the maximum forward lift. It was little enough, not more than two degrees: unlike the lateral rudder the depth planes on the bathyscaphe gave the bare minimum of control, being quite secondary for the purpose of surfacing and diving. I slowly advanced the engines to maximum.

‘Almost due south-west.’ Vyland was consulting a slip of paper he had brought from his pocket. ‘Course 222°.’

‘True?’

‘What do you mean “true”, he snapped angrily. Now that he had his wishes answered and the bathyscaphe a going concern Vyland didn’t like it at all. Claustrophobic, at a guess.

‘Is that the true direction or is it for this compass?’ I asked patiently.

‘For this compass.’

‘Has it been corrected for deviation?’

He consulted his slip of paper again. ‘Yes. And Bryson said that as long as we took off straight in this direction the metal in the rig’s legs wouldn’t affect us.’

I said nothing. Bryson, the engineer who had died from the bends, where was he now? Not a couple of hundred feet away, I felt pretty certain. To drill an oil well maybe two and a half miles deep they’d have needed at least six thousand bags of cement and the two bucketsful of that needed to ensure that Bryson would remain at the bottom of the ocean until long after he was an unidentifiable skeleton wouldn’t even have been missed.

‘Five hundred and twenty metres,’ Vyland was saying. ‘From the leg we’ve left to the plane.’ The first mention ever of a plane. ‘Horizontal distance, that is. Allowing for the drop to the bottom of the deep, about six hundred and twenty metres. Or so Bryson said.’

‘Where does this deep begin?’

‘About two-thirds of the distance from here. At a hundred and forty feet – almost the same depth as the rig is standing in. Then it goes down about thirty degrees to four hundred and eighty feet.’

I nodded, but said nothing. I had always heard that you couldn’t feel two major sources of pain at the same time but people were wrong. You could. My arm, shoulder and back were a wide sea of pain, a pain punctuated by jolting stabbing spear-points of agony from my upper jaw. I didn’t feel like conversation, I didn’t feel like anything at all. I tried to forget the pain by concentrating on the job on hand.

The tow-rope attaching us to the pillar was, I had discovered, wound round an electrically driven power drum. But the power was unidirectional only, for reeling in the wire on the return journey. As we were moving just then it was being paid out against a weak spring carrying with it the insulated phone cable which ran through the centre of the wire, and the number of revolutions made by the drum showed on a counter inside the observation chamber, giving us a fairly accurate idea of the distance covered. It also gave us an idea of our speed. The maximum the bathyscaphe could do was two knots, but even the slight drag offered by the tow-cable paying out behind reduced this to one knot. But it was fast enough. We hadn’t far to go.

Vyland seemed more than content to leave the running of the bathyscaphe to me. He spent most of his time peering rather apprehensively out of a side window. Royale’s one good cold unwinking eye never left me; he watched every separate tiny movement and adjustment I made but it was only pure habit; I think his ignorance of the principles and controls of the bathyscaphe were pretty well complete. They must have been: even when I turned the intake control of the carbon dioxide absorption apparatus right down to its minimum operating figure it meant nothing to him.

We were drifting slowly along about ten feet above the floor of the sea, nose tilted slightly upwards by the drag of the wire, our guide-rope dangling down below the observation chamber and just brushing the rock and the coral formations or dragging over a sponge-bar. The darkness of the water was absolute, but our two searchlights and the light streaming out through the Plexiglas windows gave us light enough to see by. One or two groupers loafed lazily by the windows, absentmindedly intent on their own business; a snake-bodied barracuda writhed its lean grey body towards us, thrust its evil head against a side window and stared in unblinkingly for almost a minute; a school of what looked like Spanish mackerel kept us company for some time, then abruptly vanished in an exploding flurry of motion as a bottle-nosed shark cruised majestically into view, propelling itself along with a barely perceptible motion of its long powerful tail. But, for the most part, the sea floor seemed deserted; perhaps the storm raging above had sent most fish off to seek deeper waters.

Exactly ten minutes after we had left, the sea-floor abruptly dropped away beneath us in what seemed, in the sudden yawning darkness that our searchlight could not penetrate, an almost vertical cliff-face. I knew this to be only illusion; Vyland would have surveyed the ocean bed a dozen times and if he said the angle was only 30° it was almost certainly so, but nevertheless the impression of a sudden bottomless chasm was overwhelming.

‘This is it,’ Vyland said in a low voice. On his smooth polished face I could make out the faint sheen of sweat. ‘Take her down, Talbot.’

‘Later.’ I shook my head. ‘If we start descending now that tow-rope we’re trailing is going to pull our tail right up. Our searchlights can’t shine ahead, only vertically downwards. Want that we should crash our nose into some outcrop of rock that we can’t see? Want to rupture the for’ard gasoline tank? – don’t forget the shell of those tanks is only thin sheet metal. It only needs one split tank and we’ll have so much negative buoyancy that we can never rise again. You appreciate that, don’t you, Vyland?’

His face gleamed with sweat. He wet his lips again and said: ‘Do it your way, Talbot.’

I did it my way. I kept on course 222° until the tow-wire recorder showed 600 metres, stopped the engine and let our slight preponderance of negative buoyancy, which our forward movement and angled planes had so far overcome, take over. We settled gradually, in a maddeningly deliberate slow motion, the fathometer needle hardly appearing to move. The hanging weight of the tow-wire aft tended to pull us astern, and at every ten fathoms, between thirty and seventy, I had to ease ahead on the motors and pay out a little more wire.

At exactly seventy-six fathoms our searchlights picked up the bed of the sea. No rock or coral or sponge bars here, just little patches of greyish sand and long black stretches of mud. I started the two motors again, advanced them almost to half speed, trimmed the planes and began to creep forward very slowly indeed. We had to move only five yards. Bryson’s estimate had been almost exactly right; with 625 metres showing on the tow-wire indicator I caught a glimpse of something thrusting up from the bed of the sea, almost out of our line of vision to the left. It was the tailplane of an aircraft, we had overshot our target to the right, the nose of the plane was pointing back in the direction from which we had come … I put the motors in reverse, started up the tow-wire drum, backed about twenty yards then came forward again, angling to the left. Arrived at what I judged to be the right spot, I put the motors momentarily into reverse, then cut them out altogether. Slowly, surely, the bathyscaphe began to sink: the dangling guide rope touched bottom, but this lessening of weight failed to overcome the slight degree of negative buoyancy as it should have done, and the base of the observation chamber sank heavily into the black mud of the ocean floor.

Only fifteen minutes had elapsed since I’d turned down the intake control of the carbon monoxide absorption unit but already the air in the cabin was growing foul. Neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to be affected; maybe they thought that that was the normal atmospheric condition, but they probably didn’t even notice it. Both of them were completely absorbed in what could be seen, brightly illuminated by the for’ard searchlight, through our for’ard observation window.

I was absorbed in it myself, God only knew. A hundred times I had wondered how I’d feel, how I’d react when I finally saw, if ever I saw, what was lying half-buried in the mud outside. Anger I had expected, anger and fury and horror and heartbreak and maybe more than a little of fear. But there was none of those things in me, not any more, I was aware only of pity and sadness, of the most abysmal melancholy I had ever known. Maybe my reactions were not what I had expected because my mind was befogged by the swirling mists of pain, but I knew it wasn’t that: and it made things no better to know that the pity and the melancholy were no longer for others but for myself, melancholy for the memories that were all I would ever have, the pity a self-pity of a man irretrievably lost in his loneliness.

The plane had sunk about four feet into the mud. The right wing had vanished – it must have broken off on impact with the water. The left wing-tip was gone, but the tail unit and fuselage were still completely intact except for the riddled nose, the starred and broken glass that showed how the DC had died. We were close up to the fuselage, the bow of the bathyscaphe was overhanging the sunken cabin of the plane and the observation chamber no more than six feet distant from those shattered windows and almost on the same level. Behind the smashed windscreens I could see two skeletons: the one in the captain’s seat was still upright, leaning against the broken side window and held in position by the seat belt, the one in the co-pilot’s seat was bent far over forward and almost out of sight.

‘Wonderful, eh, Talbot? Isn’t that just something?’ Vyland, his claustrophobic fear in momentary abeyance, was actually rubbing his hands together. ‘After all this time – but it’s been worth it, it’s been worth it! And intact, too! I was scared it might have been scattered all over the floor of the sea. Should be no bother for an experienced salvage man like yourself, eh, Talbot?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but turned away immediately to stare out of the window and gloat. ‘Wonderful,’ he repeated again. ‘Just wonderful.’

‘It’s wonderful,’ I agreed. I was surprised at the steadiness, the indifference in my own voice. ‘With the exception of the British frigate De Braak, sunk in a storm off the Delaware coast in 1798, it’s probably the biggest underwater treasure in the western hemisphere. Ten million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold specie, emeralds and uncut diamonds.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Vyland had forgotten he was an urbane top executive and he was back at the hand-washing again. ‘Ten million, two hundred and––’ His voice trailed off slowly, faltered to a stop. ‘How – how did you know that, Talbot?’ he whispered.

‘I knew it before you ever heard of it, Vyland,’ I said quietly. Both of them had turned away from the window and were staring at me, Vyland with a mixture of puzzlement, suspicion and the beginnings of fear, Royale with his one good, cold, flat, marbled eye wider than I had ever seen it. ‘You’re not quite so smart as the general, I’m afraid, Vyland. Neither am I for that matter. He caught on to me this morning, Vyland. I’ve worked out why. Do you know why, Vyland? Do you want to know why?’

‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded hoarsely.

‘He’s smart, is the general.’ I went on as if I hadn’t heard the interruption. ‘He saw when we landed on the rig this morning that I only hid my face until I was certain that a certain person wasn’t among the reception committee and that then I didn’t bother any longer. Careless of me, I admit. But that tipped him off to the fact that I wasn’t a murderer – if I were I’d have hidden my face from everybody – and it also tipped him off to the fact that I had been out on the rig before and was frightened someone there would recognize me. He was right on both counts – I wasn’t a murderer, and I had been out on the rig before. In the early hours of this morning.’

Vyland had nothing to say, the shattering effect of my words, the limitless avenues of dark possibilities they were opening up had him completely off balance, too confused even to begin to put his conflicting thoughts into words.

‘And the general noticed something else,’ I went on. ‘He noticed that when you were telling me about this salvage job that I never once asked the first, the most obvious question in the world – what was the treasure to be salvaged, what kind of vessel or aircraft the treasure was in, if any. I never once asked one of those questions, did I, Vyland? Again careless of me, wasn’t it, Vyland? But you never noticed. But General Ruthven noticed, and he knew there could only be one answer – I already knew.’

There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds, then Vyland whispered: ‘Who are you, Talbot?’

‘No friend of yours, Vyland.’ I smiled at him, as near as my aching upper jaw would allow. ‘You’re going to die, Vyland, you’re going to die in agony and you’re going to use your last breath on earth cursing my name and the day you ever met me.’

Another silence, deeper even than the one that had gone before. I wished I could smoke, but it was impossible inside that cabin, and heaven only knew the air there was foul enough already, our breathing was already unnaturally quickened, and sweat was beginning to trickle down our faces.

‘Let me tell you a little story,’ I went on. ‘It’s not a fairy story but we’ll start it with “Once upon a time” for all that.

‘Once upon a time there was a certain country with a very small navy – a couple of destroyers, a frigate, a gunboat. Not much of a navy, is it, Vyland? So the rulers decided to double it. They were doing pretty well in the petroleum and coffee export markets, and they thought they could afford it. Mind you, they could have spent the money in a hundred more profitable ways but this was a country much given to revolution and the strength of any current government largely depended on the strength of the armed forces under their control. Let’s double our navy, they said. Who said, Vyland?’

He tried to speak, but only a croak came out. He wet his lips and said: ‘Colombia.’

‘However did you know, I wonder? That’s it, Colombia. They arranged to get a couple of secondhand destroyers from Britain, some frigates, mine sweepers and gunboats from the United States. Considering that those second-hand ships were almost brand new, they got them dead cheap: 10,250,000 dollars. But then the snag: Colombia was in a state of threatened revolution, civil war and anarchy, the value of the peso was tumbling abroad and Britain and the United States, to whom a combined payment was to be made, refused to deliver against the peso. No international bank would look at Colombia. So it was agreed that the payment be made in kind. Some previous government had imported, for industrial purposes, two million dollars’ worth of uncut Brazilian diamonds which had never been used. To that was added about two and a half million dollars’ worth of Colombian gold, near enough two tons in 28-lb ingots: the bulk of the payment, however, was in cut emeralds – I need hardly remind you, Vyland, that the Muzo mines in the Eastern Andes are the most famous and important source of emeralds in the world. Or perhaps you know?’

Vyland said nothing. He pulled out his display handkerchief and mopped his face. He looked sick.

‘No matter. And then came the question of transport. It was supposed to have been flown out to Tampa on its first leg, by an Avianca or Lansa freighter but all the domestic national airlines were temporarily grounded at the beginning of May, 1958, when the new elections were coming up. Some members of the permanent civil service were desperately anxious to get rid of this money in case it fell into the wrong hands, so they looked around for a foreign-owned freight airline operating only external flights. They picked on the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co. Lloyd’s agreed to transfer the insurance. The Trans-Carib freighter filed a false flight plan and took off from Barranquilla, heading for Tampa via the Yucatan Strait.

‘There were only four people in that plane, Vyland. There was the pilot, a twin brother of the owner of the Trans-Carib Line. There was the co-pilot, who also doubled as navigator, and a woman and a small child whom it was thought wiser not to leave behind in case things went wrong at the elections and it was found out the part played by the Trans-Carib in getting the money out of the country.

‘They filed a false flight plan, Vyland, but that didn’t do them any good at all for one of those noble and high-minded civil servants who had been so anxious to pay the debt to Britain and America was as crooked as they come and a creature of yours, Vyland. He knew of the true flight plan, and radioed you. You were in Havana, and you’d everything laid on, hadn’t you, Vyland?’

‘How do you know all this?’ Vyland croaked.

‘Because I am – I was – the owner of the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co.’ I felt unutterably tired, I don’t know whether it was because of the pain or the foul air or just because of the overwhelming sense of the emptiness of living. ‘I was grounded at Belize, in British Honduras, at the time, but I managed to pick them up on the radio – after they had repaired it. They told me then that someone had tried to blow up the plane, but I know now that wasn’t quite true, all they had tried to do was to wreck the radio, to cut the DC off from the outer world. They almost succeeded – but not quite. You never knew, did you, Vyland, that someone was in radio contact with that plane just before it was shot out of the sky. But I was. Just for two minutes, Vyland.’ I looked at him slowly, consideringly, emptily. ‘Two little minutes that mean you die tonight.’

Vyland stared at me with sick terror in his eyes. He knew what was coming all right, or thought he knew: he knew now who I was, he knew now what it was to meet a man who had lost everything, a man to whom pity and compassion were no longer even words. Slowly, as if at the expense of great effort and pain, he twisted his head to look at Royale, but, for the first time ever, there was no comfort, no security, no knowledge of safety to be found there, for the incredible was happening at last: Royale was afraid.

I half-turned and pointed at the shattered cabin of the DC.

‘Take a good look, Vyland,’ I said quietly. ‘Take a good look at what you’ve done and feel proud of yourself. In the captain’s seat – that skeleton was once Peter Talbot, my twin brother. The other is Elizabeth Talbot – she was my wife, Vyland. In the back of the plane will be all that’s left of a very little boy. John Talbot, my son. He was three and a half years old. I’ve thought a thousand times about how my little boy died, Vyland. The bullets that killed my wife and brother wouldn’t have got him, he’d have been alive till the plane hit the water. Maybe two or three minutes, the plane tumbling and falling through the sky, Vyland, and the little boy sobbing and screaming and terrified out of his mind, and his mother not coming when he called her name. When he called her name over and over again. But she couldn’t come, could she, Vyland? She was sitting in her seat, dead. And then the plane hit the water and even then, perhaps, Johny was still alive. Maybe the fuselage took time to sink – it happens that way often, you know, Vyland – or had it air trapped inside it when it sank. I wonder how long it was before the waters closed over him. Can’t you see it, Vyland, three years old, screaming and struggling and dying and no one near him? And then the screaming and struggling stopped and my little boy was drowned.’

I looked out at the smashed plane cabin for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, and when I turned away Vyland caught my right arm. I pushed him off and he fell on the duckboard floor, staring up at me with wide, panic-stricken eyes. His mouth was open, his breathing coming in quick, harsh gasps, and his entire body was trembling. Royale was still in control of himself, but only just: ivory knuckled hands rested on his knees and his eyes were moving constantly about the observation chamber, a hunted animal seeking a way to escape.

‘I’ve waited a long time for this, Vyland,’ I went on. ‘I’ve waited two years and four months and I don’t believe I’ve ever thought for five minutes about anything else in all that time.

‘I’ve nothing left to live for, Vyland, you can understand that. I’ve had enough. I suppose it’s macabre, but I’d kind of like to stay here beside them. I’ve stopped kidding myself about the point in carrying on living. There’s none, not any more, so I might as well stay here. There’s no point now, because all that’s kept me going was the promise I made myself on the third of May, 1958, that I’d never rest again till I’d sought out and destroyed the man who had destroyed life for me. That I’ve done, and there’s no more now. It should spoil it for me, I suppose, the thought that you’ll be here also, but on the other hand I suppose it’s kind of fitting. The killers and their victims, all together in the end.’

‘You’re mad,’ Vyland whispered. ‘You’re mad. What are you saying?’

‘Only this. Remember that electrical switch that was left on the table? The one you asked about and I said “We won’t be needing that any more”? Well we won’t. Not any more. That was the master control for the ballast release switches and without it the ballast release is completely jinxed. And without releasing ballast we can never rise again. Here we are, Vyland, and here we stay. For ever.’

TWELVE

The sweat poured down our faces in rivulets. The temperature had risen to almost 120° Fahrenheit, the air was humid and now almost indescribably foul. Our hoarse rasping gasps as we fought for oxygen was the only sound in that tiny steel ball resting on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, 480 feet below the level of the sea.

‘You jinxed it?’ Vyland’s voice was a weak incredulous whisper, his eyes near-crazed with fear. ‘We’re – we’re stuck here? Here, in this––’ His voice faded away as he turned his head and started looking around with all the terror-stricken desperation of a cornered rat about to die. Which was all he was.

‘There’s no way out, Vyland,’ I assured him grimly. ‘Only through that entrance hatch. Maybe you want to try opening it? – at this depth there can only be a pressure of fifty tons or so on the outside of it. And if you could open it – well, you’d be flattened half an inch thick against the opposite bulkhead. Don’t take it too badly, Vyland – the last few minutes will be agony such as you’ve never believed man could know, you’ll be able to see your hands and your face turning blue and purple in the last few seconds before all the major blood vessels in your lungs start to rupture, but soon after that you’ll –’

‘Stop it, stop it!’ Vyland screamed. ‘For God’s sake stop it! Get us out of here, Talbot, get us out of here! I’ll give you anything you like, one million, two millions, five millions. You can have it all, Talbot, you can have it all!’ His mouth and face worked like a maniac’s, his eyes were staring out of his head.

‘You make me sick,’ I said dispassionately. ‘I wouldn’t get you out if I could, Vyland. And it was just in case that I might be tempted that I left the control switch up in the rig. We’ve got fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to live, if you can call the screaming agony we’ll know living. Or, rather, the agony you’ll know.’ I put my hand to my coat, ripped off the central button and thrust it into my mouth. ‘I won’t know a thing, I’ve been prepared for this for months. That’s no button, Vyland, it’s a concentrated cyanide capsule. One bite on that and I’ll be dead before I know I’m dying.’

That got him. Dribbling from a corner of his mouth and babbling incoherently, he flung himself on me, with what purpose in mind I don’t know. He was too crazed to know. He was too crazed to know himself. But I had been expecting it, a heavy spanner lay to hand and he’d picked it up and swung it before he even touched me. It wasn’t much of a blow, but it was enough: he reeled backwards, struck his head against the casing and collapsed heavily on the floor.

That left Royale. He was half-sitting, half-crouched on his little canvas stool, his sphinx-like control had completely snapped, he knew he had only minutes to live and his face was working overtime making up for all those expressions it hadn’t used in those many years. He saw closing in on himself what he had meted out to so many victims over so long a time and the talons of fear were squeezing deep, reaching for the innermost corners of his mind. He wasn’t panic-stricken yet, not completely out of control as Vyland had gone, but his capacity for reason, for thought, was gone. All he could think to do was what he always thought to do in an emergency and that was of using his deadly little black gun. He had it out now and it was pointing at me, but I knew it meant nothing, it was purely a reflex action and he had no intention of using it. For the first time Royale had met a problem that couldn’t be solved by a squeeze of the trigger finger.

‘You’re scared, Royale, aren’t you?’ I said softly. It was an effort now even to speak, my normal breathing rate of about sixteen was now up to fifty, and it was difficult to get the time to force out a word.

He said nothing, just looked at me, and all the devils in hell were in the depth of those black eyes. For a second time in forty-eight hours, and this time in spite of the humidity, the foul and evil-smelling air in that cabin, I could have sworn I caught the smell of new-turned, moist, fresh earth. The smell you get from an open grave.

‘The big bad hatchet-man,’ I whispered huskily. ‘Royale. Royale the killer. Think of all the people who used to tremble, who still do tremble, whenever they hear the breath of your name? Don’t you wish they could see you now? Don’t you, Royale? Don’t you wish they could see you trembling? You are trembling, Royale, aren’t you? You’re terrified as you’ve never been terrified in your life. Aren’t you, Royale?’

Again he said nothing. The devils were still in his eyes, but they weren’t watching me any more, they were riding hard on Royale, they were digging deep into the dark recesses of that dark mind, the shift and play of expression on his contorted face was evidence enough that they were pulling him every which way but the overall pull was towards the dark precipice of complete breakdown, of that overmastering fear that wears the cloak of insanity.

‘Like it, Royale?’ I said hoarsely. ‘Can’t you feel your throat, your lungs starting to hurt? I can feel mine – and I can see your face starting to turn blue. Not much, yet, just starting under the eyes. The eyes and the nose, they always show up first.’ I thrust my hand into my display pocket, brought out a little rectangle of polished chrome. ‘A mirror, Royale. Don’t you want to look in it? Don’t you want to look in it? Don’t you want to see –?’

‘Damn you to hell, Talbot!’ He knocked the mirror flying out of my hand, his voice was halfway between a sob and a scream. ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’

‘But your victims did, didn’t they, Royale?’ I could no longer speak intelligibly, it took me four or five breaths to pant out that one sentence. ‘They all had their minds bent on suicide and you just helped them out of the depths of the kindness of your heart. Isn’t that it, Royale?’

‘You’re going to die, Talbot.’ His voice was a frenzied croak, the shaking gun was lined up on my heart. ‘It’s coming to you now.’

‘I’m laughing. I’m laughing out loud. I’ve got a Cyanide tablet between my teeth.’ My chest was hurting, the inside of the observation chamber was beginning to swim before my eyes. I knew I couldn’t last out much longer. ‘Go ahead,’ I gasped. ‘Go ahead and pull the trigger.’

He looked at me with crazy unfocused eyes that had hardly any contact left with reality and fumbled the little black gun into its holster. The beating he’d taken over his head was now beginning to take its toll, he was in an even worse state than I was. He began to sway in his seat, and suddenly fell forward on to his hands and knees, shaking his head from side to side as if to clear away a fog. I leaned across him, barely conscious myself, closed my fingers over the control knob of the carbon dioxide absorption unit and turned it from minimum all the way up to maximum. It would take two minutes, perhaps three, before there would be any noticeable improvement, maybe the best part of ten minutes before the atmosphere inside that chamber was anything like back to normal. Right then, it made no difference at all. I bent over Royale.

‘You’re dying, Royale,’ I gasped out. ‘How does it feel to die, Royale? Tell me, please, how does it feel? How does it feel to be buried in a tomb five hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea? How does it feel to know that you’ll never breathe that wonderful, clean, fresh air of the world above again? How does it feel to know that you’ll never see the sun again? How does it feel to die? Tell me, Royale, how does it feel?’ I bent still closer to him. ‘Tell me, Royale, how would you like to live?’

He didn’t get it, he was that far gone.

‘How would you like to live, Royale?’ I almost had to shout the words.

‘I want to live.’ His voice was a harsh moan of pain, his clenched right fist was beating weakly on the deck of the chamber. ‘Oh, God, I want to live.’

‘Maybe I can give you life yet. Maybe. You’re down on your hands and knees, aren’t you, Royale? You’re begging for your life, aren’t you, Royale? I’ve sworn I’d see the day when you were on your hands and knees begging for your life and now you’re doing just that, aren’t you, Royale?’

‘Damn you, Talbot!’ His voice was a hoarse, despairing, agonized shout, he was swaying on his hands and knees now, his head turning from side to side, his eyes screwed shut. Down there on the floor the air must have been foul and contaminated to a degree, almost completely without oxygen, and his face was really beginning to show the first tinges of blue. He was breathing with the rapidity of a panting dog, each brief indrawn breath a whoop of agony. ‘Get me out of here! For God’s sake get me out of here.’

‘You’re not dead yet, Royale,’ I said in his ear. ‘Maybe you will see the sun again. But maybe you won’t. I lied to Vyland, Royale. The master switch for the ballast release is still in position – I just altered a couple of wires, that’s all. It would take you hours to find out which two. I could fix it in thirty seconds.’

He stopped swaying his head, looked up at me with a blue-tinged sweat-sheened face, with bloodshot fear-darkened eyes that carried far back in them the faintest flicker of hope. ‘Get me out of here, Talbot,’ he whispered. He didn’t know whether there was any hope or whether this was just a further refinement of torture.

‘I could do it, Royale, couldn’t I? See, I’ve got the screwdriver right here.’ I showed it to him, smiled down without any compassion. ‘But I’ve still got this cyanide tablet in my mouth, Royale.’ I showed him the button, gripped between my teeth.

‘Don’t!’ A hoarse cry. ‘Don’t bite on that! You’re mad, Talbot, mad. God, you’re not human.’ Coming from Royale that was good.

‘Who killed Jablonsky?’ I asked quietly. It was becoming easier to breathe now, but not down where Royale was.

‘I did. I killed him,’ Royale moaned.

‘How?’

‘I shot him. Through the head. He was asleep.’

‘And then?’

‘We buried him in the kitchen garden.’ Royale was still moaning and swaying, but he was putting everything he could muster into his reeling thoughts to try to express them coherently: his nerve, for the moment, was gone beyond recall, he was talking for his life and he knew it.

‘Who’s behind Vyland?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Who’s behind Vyland?’ I repeated implacably.

‘Nobody.’ His voice was almost a scream he was so desperate to convince me. ‘There were two men, a Cuban minister in the government, and Houras, a permanent civil servant in Colombia. But not now.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘They were – they were eliminated,’ Royale said wearily. ‘I did it.’

‘Who else did you eliminate since you’ve been working for Vyland?’

‘Nobody.’

I showed him the button between my teeth and he shuddered.

‘The pilot. The pilot flying the fighter that shot down this plane. He – he knew too much.’

‘That’s why we could never find that pilot,’ I nodded. ‘My God, you’re a sweet bunch. But you made a mistake Royale, didn’t you? You shot him too soon. Before he’d told you exactly where the DC had crashed … Vyland give you orders for all this?’

He nodded.

‘Did you hear my question?’ I demanded.

‘Vyland gave me orders for all of that.’

There was a brief silence. I stared out of the window, saw some strange shark-like creature swim into sight, stare incuriously at both bathyscaphe and plane, then vanish into the stygian blackness beyond with a lazy flick of its tail. I turned and tapped Royale on the shoulder.

‘Vyland,’ I said. ‘Try to bring him round.’

While Royale stooped over his employer I reached above him for the oxygen regenerating switch. I didn’t want the air getting too fresh too soon.

After maybe a minute or so Royale managed to bring Vyland to. Vyland’s breathing was very distressed, he was pretty far gone in the first stages of anoxia, but for all that he still had some breath left, for when he opened his eyes, stared wildly around and saw me with the button still between my teeth he started screaming, time and again, a horrible nerve-drilling sound in that tiny confined metal space. I reached forward to smack his face to jolt him out of his panic-stricken hysteria, but Royale got there first. Royale had had his tiny fleeting glimpse of hope and he meant to play that hope to the end of the way. He lifted his hand and he wasn’t any too gentle with Vyland.

‘Stop it!’ Royale shook him violently. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it! Talbot says he can fix this machine. Do you hear me? Talbot says he can fix it!’

Slowly the screaming died away and Vyland stared at Royale with eyes where the first faint flicker of comprehension was beginning to edge in on the fear and the madness.

‘What did you say?’ he whimpered hoarsely. ‘What was that, Royale?’

‘Talbot says he can fix this machine,’ Royale repeated urgently. ‘He says he lied to us, he says that the switch he left up top wasn’t important. He can fix it!’

‘You – you can fix it, Talbot?’ Vyland’s eyes widened until I could see a ring of white all round the irises, his shaking voice was a prayer, the whole curve of his body a gesture of supplication. He wasn’t even daring to hope yet, his mind had gone too deeply into the shadow of the valley of death to glimpse the light above: or rather he didn’t dare to look, in case there was no light there. ‘You can get us out of this? Now – even now you –’

‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.’ My voice, for all its rasping hoarseness, had just the right shade of indifference. ‘I’ve said I’d rather stay down here, I mean I’d rather stay down here. It all depends. Come here, Vyland.’

He rose trembling to his feet and crossed to where I was standing. His legs, his whole body were shaking so violently that he could barely support himself. I caught him by the lapels with my good hand and pulled him close.

‘There’s maybe five minutes’ air left; Vyland. Perhaps less. Just tell me, and tell me quickly, the part you played in this business up until the time you met the general. Hurry it up!’

‘Get us out of here,’ he moaned. ‘There’s no air, no air! My lungs are going, I can’t – I can’t breathe.’ He was hardly exaggerating at that, the foul air was rasping in and out his throat with the frequency of a normal heartbeat. ‘I can’t talk. ‘I can’t!’

‘Talk, damn you, talk!’ Royale had him round the throat from behind, was shaking him to and fro till Vyland’s head bounced backwards and forwards like that of a broken doll. ‘Talk! Do you want to die, Vyland? Do you think I want to die because of you? Talk!’

Vyland talked. In less than three gasping, coughing, choking minutes he’d told me all I ever wanted to know – how he had struck a deal with a Cuban service minister and had a plane standing by for weeks, how he had suborned the officer in charge of a radar tracking station in Western Cuba, how he suborned a very senior civil servant in Colombia, how the plane had been tracked, intercepted and shot down and how he had had Royale dispose of those who had served his purposes. He started to talk of the general, but I held up my hand.

‘OK, that’ll do, Vyland. Get back to your seat.’ I reached for the carbon dioxide switch and turned it up to maximum.

‘What’s that you’re doing?’ Vyland whispered.

‘Bringing a little fresh air into the place. Getting rather stuffy down here, don’t you think?’

They stared at each other, then at me, but remained silent. Fury I would have expected, chagrin and violence, but there was nothing of any of those. Fear was still the single predominating emotion in their minds: and they knew that they were still completely at my mercy.

‘Who – who are you, Talbot?’ Vyland croaked.

‘I suppose you might call me a cop.’ I sat down on a canvas chair, I didn’t want to start the delicate job of taking the bathyscaphe up till the air – and my mind – was completely clear. ‘I used to be a bona fide salvage man, working with my brother. The man – or what’s left of the man – out there in the captain’s seat, Vyland. We were a good team, we struck gold off the Tunisian coast and used the capital to start our own airline – we were both wartime bomber pilots, we both had civilian licences. We were doing very well, Vyland – until we met you.

‘After you’d done this’ – I jerked a thumb in the direction of the broken, weed-and barnacle-encrusted plane – ‘I went back to London. I was arrested, they thought I’d something to do with this. It didn’t take long to clear that up and have Lloyd’s of London – who’d lost the whole insurance packet – take me over as a special investigator. They were willing to spend an unlimited sum to get even a percentage of their money back. And because state money was involved both the British and American governments were behind me. Solidly behind me. Nobody ever had a better backing, the Americans even went to the length of assigning a top-flight cop whole-time to the job. The cop was Jablonsky,’

That jolted them, badly. They had lost sufficient of their immediate terror of death, they had come far enough back into the world of reality to appreciate what I was saying, and what that meant. They stared at each other, then at me; I couldn’t have asked for a more attentive audience.

‘That was a mistake, wasn’t it, gentlemen?’ I went on. ‘Shooting Jablonsky. That’s enough to send you both to the chair; judges don’t like people who murder cops. It may not be complete justice, but it’s true. Murder an ordinary citizen and you may get off with it: murder a cop, and you never do. Not that that matters. We know enough to send you to the chair six times over.’

I told them how Jablonsky and I had spent well over a year, mostly in Cuba, looking for traces of the bullion, how we had come to the conclusion that it still hadn’t been recovered – not one of the cut emeralds had appeared anywhere in the world’s markets. Interpol would have known in days.

‘And we were pretty certain,’ I continued, ‘why the money hadn’t been recovered. Why? Only one reason – it had been lost in the sea and someone had been a mite hasty in killing off the only person who knew exactly where it was – the pilot of the fighter plane.

‘Our inquiries had narrowed down to the west coast of Florida. Somebody was looking for money sunk in the water. For that they needed a ship. The general’s Temptress did just fine. But for that you also needed an extremely sensitive depth recorder, and there is where you made your one and fatal mistake, Vyland. We had requested every major marine equipment supplier in Europe and North America to notify us immediately they sold any special depth-finding equipment to any vessels other than naval, mercantile or fishing. You are following me, I trust?’

They were following me all right. They were three parts back to normal now and there was murder in their eyes.

‘In the four-month period concerned no fewer than six of those ultra-sensitive recorders had been sold privately. All to owners of very large yachts. Two of those yachts were on a round-the-world cruise. One was in Rio, one was in Long Island Sound, one on the Pacific coast – and the sixth was plodding up and down the west of Florida. General Blair Ruthven’s Temptress.

‘It was brilliant. I admit it. What better cover could you ever have had for quartering every square yard of sea off the Florida Coast without arousing suspicion? While the general’s geologists were busy setting off their little bombs and making seismological maps of the under-sea rock strata, you were busy mapping every tiniest contour of the ocean floor with the depth recorder. It took you almost six weeks, because you started operating too far to the north – we were watching your every move even then and had fitted out a special boat for night prowling – that was the boat I came out on early this morning. Well, you found the plane. You even spent three nights dragging for it with grapples but all you could drag up was a small section of the left wing-tip.’ I gestured through the window. ‘You can see how comparatively recent that break is.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Vyland whispered.

‘Because I had secured a job as a replacement engineer aboard the Temptress.’ I ignored the startled oath, the involuntary clenching of Vyland’s hands. ‘You and the general thought you had seen me aboard that Havana salvage vessel, but you hadn’t, though I had been with the firm. I was five weeks on the Temptress and it wasn’t till I left that I dyed my hair this hellish colour, had a plastic surgeon fix up this scar and affected a limp. Even so, you weren’t very observant, were you, Vyland? You should have cottoned on.

‘So there you were. You knew where the treasure was, but you couldn’t get your hands on it – anyone who started using diving bells and all the complicated recovery gear necessary for a job like this would have been putting a noose round his own neck. But then someone had another brilliant idea – this one, I’d wager anything, came from the mind of our deceased engineer friend, Bryson. He’d read all about those bathyscaphe trials that were being carried out in the West Indies and came up with the idea of using it in conjunction with this rig.’

The air was almost back to normal inside the observation chamber and though the atmosphere was still stuffy and far too warm for comfort there was plenty of oxygen in the air and breathing was no longer any problem. Royale and Vyland were getting their meanness and courage back with the passing of every moment.

‘So, you see, everyone was having brilliant ideas,’ I continued. ‘But the real beauty, the one that’s brought you two to the end of the road, was Jablonsky’s. It was Jablonsky who thought that it would be real kind and helpful of us if we could provide a bathyscaphe for you to do the job.’

Vyland swore, softly and vilely, looked slowly at Royale then back to me. ‘You mean –?’ he began.

‘It was all laid on,’ I said tiredly. I was taking no pleasure in any of this. ‘The French and British Navies were carrying out tests with it in the Gulf of Lions, but they readily agreed to continue those tests out here. We made sure that it got terrific publicity, we made sure that its advantages were pointed out time and time again, that not even the biggest moron could fail to understand how good it was for stealthy underwater salvage and recovery of buried treasure. We knew it would be a matter of time before the Temptress turned up, and she did. So we left it in a nice lonely place. But before we left it I jinxed it so thoroughly that no one apart from the electrician who’d wired it in the first place and myself could ever have got it going again. You had to have someone to unjinx it, didn’t you, Vyland? Wasn’t it a fortunate coincidence that I happened to turn up at the right time? Incidentally, I wonder what our friends the field foreman and petroleum engineer are going to say when they find that they’ve spent the better part of three months drilling a couple of miles away from where the geologists told them to: I suppose it was you and Bryson who altered the reference navigation marks on the charts to bring you within shouting distance of the treasure and miles away from where the oil strata lie. At the present rate they’ll end up with the pipe in the Indian Ocean and still no oil.’

‘You’re not going to get off with this,’ Vyland said savagely. ‘By God, you’re not –’

‘Shut up!’ I interrupted contemptuously. ‘Shut up or I’ll turn a knob here, pull a switch there and have the two of you grovelling on your hands and knees and begging for your lives as you were doing not five minutes ago.’

They could have killed me there and then, they could have watched me die in screaming agony and the tears of joy would have rolled down their cheeks. Nobody had ever talked like this to them before, and they had just no idea what to say, what to do about it: for their lives were still in my hands. Then, after a long moment, Vyland leaned back in his stool and smiled. His mind was working again.

‘I suppose, Talbot, that you were entertaining some idea of turning us over to the authorities. Is that it?’ He waited for a reply, but when none came he went on: ‘If you were, I’d change my mind about it. For such a clever cop, Talbot, you’ve been very blind in one spot. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be responsible for the deaths of two innocent people, would you now, Talbot?’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked slowly.

‘I’m talking about the general.’ Vyland flicked a glance at Royale, a glance for the first time empty of fear, a look of triumph. ‘General Blair Ruthven. The general, his wife, and his younger daughter. Do you know what I’m talking about, Talbot?’

‘What’s the general’s wife got to do –?’

‘My God! And for a moment I thought you had us!’ The relief in Vyland’s face was almost tangible quality. ‘You fool, Talbot. You blind fool! The general – did it never occur to you to think how we got him to come in with us? Did it never occur to you to wonder why a man like that would let us use his yacht, his rig and anything else we wanted to? Didn’t it, Talbot? Didn’t it?’

‘Well, I thought –’

‘You thought!’ he sneered. ‘You poor fool, old Ruthven had to help us whether he wanted to or not. He helped us because he knew the lives of his wife and young daughter depended on us.’

‘His wife and young daughter? But – but they’ve had a legal separation, haven’t they – the general and his wife, I mean. I read all about it –’

‘Sure. Sure you read all about it.’ Vyland, his terror forgotten, was almost jovial now. ‘So did a hundred million others. The general made good and sure that the story got around. It would have been just too bad if the story hadn’t got around. They’re hostages, Talbot. We’ve got them in a place of safety where they’ll stay till we’re finished here. Or else.’

‘You – you kidnapped them?’

‘At last the penny drops,’ Vyland sneered. ‘Sure we kidnapped them.’

‘You and Royale?’

‘Me and Royale.’

‘You admit it? A federal and capital offence – kidnapping – you freely and openly admit it. Is that it?’

‘That’s it. Why shouldn’t we admit it?’ Vyland blustered. But he had become suddenly uneasy. ‘So you’d better forget about the cops and any ideas you have about delivering us to them. Besides, how do you think you’re going to get us up the caisson and off the rig without being chopped into little pieces? I reckon you’re mad, Talbot.’

‘The general’s wife and daughter,’ I mused, as if I hadn’t heard him. ‘It wasn’t a bad idea. You’d have let them go in the end, you couldn’t afford not to, it would have been the Lindbergh case ten times over had you tried anything. On the other hand you knew the general wouldn’t start anything afterwards: it would only be his word against yours, and up your sleeve you always carried the trump card – Royale. As long as Royale walked the face of America the general would never speak. This whole operation probably cost him a cool million – for the general a bagatelle compared to the value of wife and children. A sweet set-up.’

‘Correct. I hold the trumps, Talbot.’

‘Yes,’ I said absently. ‘And every day, just on noon, you sent a coded telegram – in the general’s company code – to your watchdogs who kept an eye on Mrs Ruthven and Jean. You see, Vyland, I even know the daughter’s name. And if the coded telegram didn’t arrive in twenty-four hours they had instructions to shift them to another place, a safer hide-out. Atlanta wasn’t too safe, I’m afraid.’

‘Vyland’s face was grey, his hands beginning to shake again. His voice came as a strained whisper. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I only caught on twenty-four hours ago.’ I replied. ‘We’d been blind – we’d been checking every outgoing cable from Marble Springs for weeks, but forgot all about the inland telegrams. When I did catch on, a message to Judge Mollison from me – through Kennedy, remember that fight we had, I slipped it to him then – started off what must have been the most concentrated and ruthless man hunt for years. The FBI would stop at nothing, not since Jablonsky got his, and obviously they stopped at nothing. Mrs Ruthven and Jean are safe and well – your friends, Vyland, are under lock and key and talking their heads off to beat the rap.’ This last bit was guesswork, but I thought my guess wouldn’t be so far out.

‘You’re making this up,’ Vyland said huskily. Fear was back in his face and he was clutching at straws. ‘You’ve been under guard all day and –’

‘If you were up in the radio shack and could see the state of that creature of yours who tried to stop me from putting through a radio call to the sheriff, you wouldn’t say that. It was Kennedy who gave Royale here his sore head. It was Kennedy who dragged him inside the room and kept on making those calculations on the papers on my desk while I went up to attend to things. You see, I didn’t dare move till they were free. But they are free.’

I looked at the grey and stricken and hunted face and looked away again. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The time had come to get back, I had found out all I wanted to know, got all the evidence I would ever want. I opened up a circuit box, unbuttoned and repositioned four wires, closed the box again and pulled the first of the four electro-magnetic releases for the lead shot ballast.

It worked. Two clouds of grey pellets showered mistily by the side observation windows and disappeared into the black mud on the seabed. It worked, but the lightening of the weight made no difference, the bathyscaphe didn’t budge.

I pulled the second switch, emptied the second pair of containers: still we remained immovable. We were sunk pretty deep into that mud, how deep I didn’t know, but this had never happened before on tests. I sat down to work out if there was any factor I had forgotten, and now that the strain was over the pain was back in my shoulder and mouth and I wasn’t thinking so well any more. I removed the button from between my teeth and absent-mindedly placed it in a pocket.

‘Was – was that cyanide?’ Vyland’s face was still grey.

‘Don’t be silly. Antler-horn, best quality.’ I rose, pulled the other two switches simultaneously. They worked – but again nothing happened. I looked at Vyland and Royale, and saw reflected in their faces the fear that was beginning to touch in my own mind. God, I thought, how ironic it would be if, after all I had said and done, we were to die down here. There was no point in putting off the moment of decision. I started up both motors, inclined the planes to the maximum upwards elevation, started up the tow-rope motor and at the same moment pressed the switch that jettisoned the two big electric batteries mounted on the outside of the scaphe. They fell simultaneously with a thud that jarred the bathyscaphe, sending up a dark spreading cloud of black viscous-looking mud: for two moments of eternity nothing happened, the bolt was shot, the last hope was gone, when, all in a second, the scaphe trembled, broke suction aft and started to rise. I heard Vyland sobbing with relief and terror.

I switched off the engines and we rose steadily, smoothly, on an even keel, now and again starting the tow-rope motor to take in some slack. We were about a hundred feet up when Royale spoke.

‘So it was all a plant, Talbot. You never had any intention of keeping us down there.’ His voice was an evil whisper, the one good side of his face back to its expressionless normal again.

‘That’s it,’ I agreed.

‘Why, Talbot?’

‘To find out exactly where the treasure was. But that was really secondary, I knew it wasn’t far away, a government survey ship could have found it in a day.’

‘Why, Talbot?’ he repeated in the same monotone.

‘Because I had to have evidence. I had to have evidence to send you both to the chair. Up till now we had no evidence whatsoever, all along the way your back trail was divided into a series of water-tight compartments with locked doors. Royale locked the doors by killing everybody and anybody who might talk. Incredibly, there wasn’t a single solitary thing we could pin on you, there wasn’t a person who could split on you for the sufficient reason that all those who could were dead. The locked doors. But you opened them all today. Fear was the key to all the doors.’

‘You’ve got no evidence, Talbot,’ Royale said. ‘It’s only your word against ours – and you won’t live to give your word.’

‘I expected something like that,’ I nodded. We were at a depth of about 250 feet now. ‘Getting your courage back, Royale, aren’t you? But you don’t dare do anything. You can’t get this scaphe back to the rig without me, and you know it. Besides, I have some concrete evidence. Taped under my toes is the bullet that killed Jablonsky.’ They exchanged quick startled looks. ‘Shakes you, doesn’t it? I know it all, I even dug Jablonsky’s body up in the kitchen garden. That bullet will match up with your automatic, Royale. That alone would send you to the chair.’

‘Give it to me, Talbot. Give it to me now.’ The flat marbled eyes were glistening, his hand sliding for his gun.

‘Don’t be stupid. What are you going to do with it – throw it out the window? You can’t get rid of it, you know it. And even if you could, there’s something else that you can never get rid of. The real reason for our trip today, the reason that means you both die.’

There was something in my tone that got them. Royale was very still, Vyland still grey, still shaking. They knew, without knowing why, that the end had come.

‘The tow-rope,’ I said. ‘The wire with the microphone cable leading back to the speaker in the rig. You see the microphone switch here, you see it’s at “Off”? I jinxed it, I fixed it this afternoon so that the microphone was always live. That’s why I made you speak up, made you repeat most things, that’s why I dragged you, Vyland, close up to me so that you were right against the mike when you were making your confession. Every word that’s been spoken down here today, every word we’re speaking now is going through live to that speaker. And every word is being taken down three times: by tape-recorder, by a civil stenographer and by a police stenographer from Miami. I phoned the police on the way back from the rig this morning, they were aboard the rig before daylight – which probably accounts for the field foreman and the petroleum engineer looking so nervous when we came aboard today. They’ve been hidden for twelve hours – but Kennedy knew where they were. And at lunchtime, Vyland, I gave Kennedy your secret knock. Cibatti and his men would have fallen for it, they were bound to. And it’s all over now.’

They said nothing. There was nothing they could say, at least not yet, not until the full significance of what I had said had become irrevocably clear to them.

‘And don’t worry about the tape recording,’ I went on. ‘They’re not normally acceptable as court evidence but those will be. Every statement you made was volunteered by yourselves – think back and you’ll see that: and there’ll be at least ten witnesses inside the caisson who can swear to the genuineness of the recordings, who will swear that they could not have come from any source other than the bathyscaphe. Any prosecutor in the Union will call for and get a verdict of guilty without the jury leaving the box. You know what that means.’

‘So.’ Royale had his gun out, he must have had some crazy notion of trying to snap the tow-rope and sailing the scaphe off to safety. ‘So we were all wrong about you, Talbot, so you were smarter than we were. All right, I admit it. You have what it takes – but you’ll never live to hear the jury give their verdict. As well hung for a sheep as a lamb.’ His trigger finger began to tighten. ‘So long, Talbot.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Not if I were you. Wouldn’t you like to be able to grip the arm-rests of the electric chair with both hands when the time comes?’

‘It’s no good talking, Talbot, I said –’

‘Look down the barrel,’ I advised him. ‘If you want to blow your hand off, you know what to do. When you were unconscious this evening Kennedy used a hammer and punch to jam a lead cylinder right down the barrel. Do you think I’d be so crazy as to come down here and you with a loaded gun in your hand? Don’t take my word for it, Royale – just pull the trigger.’

He squinted down the barrel and his face twisted into a malevolent mask of hate. He was using up ten years’ quota of expressions in one day – and he was telegraphing his signals. I knew that gun was coming before he did. I managed to dodge, the gun struck the Plexiglas behind me and fell harmlessly to the floor at my feet.

‘No one tampered with my gun,’ Vyland said hoarsely. He was almost unrecognizable as the smooth urbane slightly florid top executive he’d been, his face was haggard now, curiously aged and covered in a greyish sheen of sweat. ‘Made a mistake at last, haven’t you, Talbot?’ His breath was coming in brief shallow gasps. ‘You’re not going –’

He broke off, hand halfway inside his coat, and stared down into the muzzle of the heavy Colt pointing in between his eyes.

‘Where – where did you get that? It – it’s Larry’s gun?’

‘Was. You should have searched me, shouldn’t you – not Kennedy? Fools. Sure it’s Larry’s gun – that dope-headed junky who claimed he was your son.’ I looked steadily at him, I didn’t want any gunfire 150 feet below sea level. I didn’t know what might happen. ‘I took it off him this evening, Vyland, just about an hour ago. Just before I killed him.’

‘Just – just before –?’

‘Just before I killed him. I broke his neck.’

With something between a sob and a moan Vyland flung himself at me across the width of the chamber. But his reactions were slow, his movements even slower and he collapsed soundlessly to the floor as the barrel of Larry’s Colt caught him across the temple.

‘Tie him up,’ I said to Royale. There was plenty of spare flex lying around and Royale wasn’t fool enough to get tough about it. He tied him up, while I was blowing gasoline through a valve and slowing our ascent about 120 feet, and just as he finished and before he could straighten I let him have it behind the ear with the butt of Larry’s Colt. If ever there had been a time for playing it like a gentleman, that time was long gone, I was now so weak, so lost in that flooding sea of pain, that I knew it would be impossible for me to bring that scaphe back to the rig and watch Royale at the same time. I doubted whether I could even make it at all.

I made it, but only just. I remember easing the hatch of the bathyscaphe up inside the caisson, asking through the mike, in a slurred stumbling voice that wasn’t mine, for the annular rubber ring to be inflated and then lurching across to twist open the handle of the entrance door. I don’t remember any more. I am told they found the three of us lying unconscious on the floor of the bathyscaphe.

EPILOGUE

I walked down the court-house steps out into the still, warm October sunshine. They’d just sentenced Royale to death and everybody knew there would be no appeal, no reversal of the decision. The jury, as I had prophesied, had convicted without leaving the box. The trial had lasted only one day and during the entire day Royale had sat as though carved from stone, his eyes fixed on the same spot for hour after interminable hour. That spot had been me. Those blank, flat, marbled eyes had been as expressionless as ever, they hadn’t even altered a fraction when the prosecution had played the recording of Royale begging for his life on his hands and knees in the scaphe at the bottom of the sea, they hadn’t altered when the death sentence had come but for all the lack of expression a blind man could have read his message. ‘Eternity’s a long time, Talbot,’ his eyes had said. ‘Eternity is forever. But I’ll be waiting.’

Let him wait: eternity was too long for me to worry about.

They hadn’t sentenced Vyland, for they never even had the chance to try him. On the way up the caisson from the bathyscaphe, 170 steps from the bottom, Vyland had simply let go his grip on the ladder and leaned back into space: he hadn’t even screamed on the long way down.

I passed the general and his wife on the steps. I had met Mrs Ruthven for the first time on my first day out of hospital, which had been yesterday. She had been very charming and gracious and endlessly grateful. They had offered me everything, from a job at the top of the tree in Ruthven’s oil companies to enough money to last any man half a dozen lifetimes, but I just smiled and thanked them and turned them all down. There was nothing in them for me, all the fancy directorships and money in the world couldn’t buy me back the days that were gone. And money couldn’t buy the only thing I wanted out of the world today.

Mary Ruthven was standing on the sidewalk beside her father’s sand and beige Rolls-Royce. She was dressed in a plain white, simple one-piece dress that couldn’t have cost more than a thousand bucks, her braided wheat-coloured hair was piled high on her head and I had never seen her looking so lovely. Behind her was Kennedy. For the first time I saw him dressed in a lounge suit, dark blue and immaculately cut, and when you saw him like that it was impossible to imagine him any other way. His chauffeuring days were over: the general knew how much the Ruthven family owed him and you couldn’t pay a debt like that with chauffeur’s wages. I wished him all the luck in the world: he was a nice guy.

I halted at the foot of the steps. A little wind was blowing in from the blue sparkling shimmer that was the Gulf of Mexico, sending tiny little dust devils and small pieces of paper dancing across the street.

Mary saw me, hesitated a moment, then came across the sidewalk to where I was standing. Her eyes seemed dark and curiously blurred but maybe I was imagining it. She murmured something, I couldn’t make out what it was, then suddenly, careful not to hurt my left arm still in its sling, she put her two arms round my neck, pulled down my head and kissed me. Next moment she was gone, making her way back to the Rolls like a person who couldn’t see too well. Kennedy looked at her coming towards him, then lifted his eyes to mine, his face still and empty of all expression. I smiled at him and he smiled back. A nice guy.

I walked down the street, along towards the shore, and turned into a bar. I hadn’t intended to, I didn’t really need a drink, but the bar was there so I went in anyway. I had a couple of drinks, double Scotches, but it was just a waste of good liquor; I left and made my way down to a bench by the shore.

An hour, two hours, I don’t know how long I sat there. The sun sank down close to the rim of the ocean, the sea and the sky turned to orange and gold, and I could see, faintly on the horizon and weirdly silhouetted against this flaming backdrop, the massively grotesque angularity of the oil rig X 13.

X 13. I suppose that would always be a part of me now, that and the broken-winged DC that lay 580 yards to its south-west, buried under 480 feet of water. For better or for worse, it would always be part of me. For worse, I thought, for worse. It was all over and done with and empty now and it meant nothing, for that was all that was left.

The sun was on the rim of the sea now and the western world a great red flame, a flame that would soon be extinguished and vanish as if it had never been. And so it had been with my red rose, before it had turned to white.

The sun was gone and the night rushed across the sea. With the dark came the cold so I rose stiffly to my feet and walked back to the hotel.

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2004

Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1963

First published in Great Britain by

Collins 1961

Copyright. © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1961

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.

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About the Publisher

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Golden Rendezvous

To A. A. Lamont

Contents

I Tuesday Noon—5 p.m.

II Tuesday 8 p.m.—9.30 p.m.

III Tuesday 9.30 p.m.—10.15 p.m.

IV Tuesday 10.15 p.m.—Wednesday 8.45 a.m.

V Wednesday 8.45 a.m.—3.30 p.m.

VI Wednesday 7.45 p.m.—8.15 p.m.

VII Wednesday 8.30 p.m.—Thursday 10.30 a.m.

VIII Thursday 4.p.m.—10 p.m.

IX Thursday 10 p.m.—Midnight

X Friday 9 a.m.—Saturday 1 a.m.

XI Saturday 1 a.m.—2.15 a.m.

XII Saturday 6 a.m.—7 a.m.

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

I.

Tuesday Noon—5 p.m.

My shirt was no longer a shirt but just a limp and sticky rag soaked with sweat. My feet ached from the fierce heat of the steel deck plates. My forehead, under the peaked white cap, ached from the ever-increasing constriction of the leather band that made scalping only a matter of time. My eyes ached from the steely glitter of reflected sunlight from metal, water and white-washed harbour buildings. And my throat ached, from pure thirst. I was acutely unhappy.

I was unhappy. The crew were unhappy. The passengers were unhappy. Captain Bullen was unhappy and this last made me doubly unhappy because when things went wrong with Captain Bullen he invariably took it out on his chief officer. I was his chief officer.

I was bending over the rail, listening to the creak of wire and wood and watching our after jumbo derrick take the strain as it lifted a particularly large crate from the quayside, when a hand touched my arm. Captain Bullen again, I thought drearily, and then I realised that whatever the captain’s caprices wearing Chanel No. 5 wasn’t one of them. This would be Miss Beresford.

And it was. In addition to the Chanel she was wearing a white silk dress and that quizzical half-amused smile that made most of the other officers turn mental cartwheels and handsprings but served only to irritate me. I have my weaknesses, but tall, cool, sophisticated and worldly young women with a slightly malicious sense of humour is not one of them.

“Good afternoon, Mr. First Officer,” she said sweetly. She had a soft musical voice with hardly a hint of superiority or condescension when talking to the lower orders like myself, “We’ve been wondering where you were. You are not usually an absentee at apéritif time.”

“I know, Miss Beresford. I’m sorry.” What she said was true enough: what she didn’t know was that I turned up for apéritifs with the passengers more or less at the point of a gun. Standing company orders stated that it was as much a part of the ship’s officers’ duties to entertain the passengers as to sail the ship, and as Captain Bullen loathed all passengers with a fierce and total loathing, he saw to it that most of the entertaining fell to me. I nodded at the big crate now hovering over the hatchway of number five hold, then at the piled-up crates on the quayside. “I’m afraid I have work to do. Four or five hours at least. Can’t even manage lunch today, far less an apéritif.”

“Not Miss Beresford. Susan.” It was as if she had heard only my first few words. “How often do I have to ask you?”

Until we reach New York, I said to myself, and even then it will be no use. Aloud I said, smiling: “You mustn’t make things difficult for me. Regulations require that we treat all passengers with courtesy, consideration and respect.”

“You’re hopeless,” she laughed. I was too tiny a pebble to cause even a ripple in her smiling pool of self-complacency. “And no lunch, you poor man. I thought you were looking pretty glum as I came along.” She glanced at the winch-driver then at the seamen manhandling the suspended crate into position on the floor of the hold. “Your men don’t seem too pleased at the prospect either. They are a morose-looking lot.”

I eyed them briefly. They were a morose-looking lot.

“Oh, they’ll be spelled for food all right. It’s just that they have their own private worries. It must be about a hundred and ten down in that hold there, and it’s an almost unwritten law that white crews should not work in the afternoons in the tropics. Besides, they’re all still brooding darkly over the losses they’ve suffered. Don’t forget that it’s less than seventy-two hours since they had that brush with the Customs down in Jamaica.”

“Brush,” I thought was good: in what might very accurately be described as one fell swoop the Customs had confiscated from about forty crew members no fewer than 25,000 cigarettes and over two hundred bottles of hard liquor that should have been placed on the ship’s bond before arrival in Jamaican waters. That the liquor had not been placed in bond was understandable enough as the crew were expressly forbidden to have any in their quarters in the first place: that not even the cigarettes had been placed in bond had been due to the crew’s intention of following their customary practice of smuggling both liquor and tobacco ashore and disposing of them at a handsome profit to Jamaicans more than willing to pay a high price for the luxury of duty-free Kentucky bourbon and American cigarettes. But then, the crew had not been told that, for the first time in its five years’ service on the West Indian run, the s.s. Campari was to be searched from stem to stern with a thorough ruthlessness that spared nothing that came in its path, a high and searching wind that swept the ship clean as a whistle. It had been a black day.

And so was this. Even as Miss Beresford was patting me consolingly on the arm and murmuring a few farewell words of sympathy which didn’t go any too well with the twinkle in her eyes, I caught sight of Captain Bullen perched on top of the companionway leading down from the main deck. “Glowering” would probably be the most apt term to describe the expression on his face. As he came down the companionway and passed Miss Beresford he made a heroic effort to twist his features into the semblance of a smile and managed to hold it for all of two seconds until he had passed her by, then got back to his glowering again. For a man who is dressed in gleaming whites from top to toe to give the impression of a black approaching thundercloud is no small feat, but Captain Bullen managed it without any trouble. He was a big man, six feet two and very heavily built, with sandy hair and eyebrows, a smooth red face that no amount of sun could ever tan and a clear blue eye that no amount of whisky could ever dim. He looked at the quayside, the hold and then at me, all with the same impartial disfavour.

“Well, Mister,” he said heavily. “How’s it going? Miss Beresford giving you a hand, eh?” When he was in a bad mood, it was invariably “Mister”: in a neutral mood, it was “First”: and when in a good temper—which, to be fair, was most of the time—it was always “Johnny-me-boy.” But today it was “Mister.” I took my guard accordingly and ignored the implied reproof of time-wasting. He would be gruffly apologetic the next day. He always was.

“Not too bad, sir. Bit slow on the dock-side.” I nodded to where a group of men were struggling to attach chain slings to a crate that must have been at least eighteen feet in length by six square. “I don’t think the Carracio stevedores are accustomed to handling such heavy lifts.”

He took a good look.

“They couldn’t handle a damned wheel-barrow,” he snapped eventually. “Can you manage it by six, Mister?” Six o’clock was an hour past the top of the tide and we had to clear the harbour entrance sandbar by then or wait another ten hours.

“I think so, sir,” and then, to take his mind off his troubles and also because I was curious, asked: “What are in those crates? Motor-cars?”

“Motor-cars? Are you mad?” His cold blue eyes swept over the white-washed jumble of the little town and the dark green of the steeply-rising forested hills behind. “This lot couldn’t build a rabbit-hutch for export, far less a motorcar. Machinery. So the Bills of Lading say. Dynamos, generators, refrigerating, air-conditioning and refining machinery. For New York.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said carefully, “that the generalissimo, having successfully completed the confiscation of all the American sugar-refining mills, is now dismantling them and selling the machinery back to the Americans? Bare-faced theft like that?”

“Petty larceny on the part of the individual is theft,” Captain Bullen said morosely. “When governments engage in grand larceny, it’s economics.”

“The generalissimo and his government must be pretty desperate for money?”

“What do you think?” Bullen growled. “No one knows how many were killed in the capital and a dozen other towns in Tuesday’s hunger riots. Jamaican authorities reckon the number in hundreds. Since they turfed out most foreigners and closed down or confiscated nearly all foreign businesses they haven’t been able to earn a penny abroad. The coffers of the revolution are as empty as a drum. Man’s completely desperate for money.”

He turned away and stood staring out over the harbour, big hands wide-spaced on the guard-rail, his back ramrod-stiff. I recognised the sign, after three years of sailing with him it would have been impossible not to. There was something he wanted to say, there was some steam he wanted to blow off and no better outlet than that tried and trusty relief valve, Chief Officer Carter. Only whenever he wished to blow off steam it was a matter of personal pride with him never to bring the matter up himself. It was no great trick to guess what was troubling him, so I obliged.

I said, conversationally: “The cables we sent to London, sir. Any reply to them yet?”

“Just ten minutes ago.” He turned round casually as if the matter had already slipped his memory, but the slight purpling tinge in the red face betrayed him, and there was nothing casual about his voice when he went on: “Slapped me down, Mister, that’s what they did. Slapped me down. My own company. And the Ministry of Transport. Both of them. Told me to forget about it, said my protests were completely out of order, warned me of the consequences of future lack of co-operation with the appropriate authorities, whatever the hell appropriate authorities might be. Me! My own company! Thirty-five years I’ve sailed with the Blue Mail Line and now—and now … ” His fists clenched and his voice choked into fuming silence.

“So there was someone bringing very heavy pressure to bear after all,” I murmured.

“There was, Mister, there was.” The cold blue eyes were very cold indeed and the big hands opened wide then closed, tight, till the ivory showed. Bullen was a captain, but he was more than that: he was the commodore of the Blue Mail fleet and even the board of directors walk softly when the fleet commodore is around: at least, they don’t treat him like an office boy. He went on softly: “If ever I get my hands on Dr. Slingsby Caroline I’ll break his bloody neck.”

Captain Bullen would have loved to get his hands on the oddly named Dr. Slingsby Caroline. Tens of thousands of police, government agents and American servicemen engaged in the hunt for him would also have loved to get their hands on him. So would millions of ordinary citizens if for no other reason than the excellent one that there was a reward of 50,000 dollars for information leading to his capture. But the interest of Captain Bullen and the crew of the Campari was even more personal: the missing man was very much the root of all our troubles.

Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished, appropriately enough, in South Carolina. He had worked at a U.S. Government’s very hush-hush Weapons Research Establishment south of the town of Columbia, an establishment concerned with the evolving, as had only become known in the past week or so, of some sort of small fission weapon for use by either fighter-planes or mobile rocket-launchers in local tactical nuclear wars. As nuclear weapons went, it was the veriest bagatelle compared to the five megaton monsters already developed by both the United States and Russia, developing barely one-thousandth of the explosive power of those and hardly capable of devastating more than a square mile of territory. Still, with the explosive potential of 5,000 tons of T.N.T., it was no toy.

Then one day—night to be precise—Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished. As he was the director of the Research Establishment, this was serious enough, but what was even more dismaying was that he had taken the working prototype of the weapon with him. He had apparently been surprised by two of the night guards at the plant and had killed them both, presumably with a silenced weapon, since no one heard or suspected anything amiss. He had driven through the plant gates about ten o’clock at night at the wheel of his own blue Chevrolet station wagon: the guards at the gate recognising both the car and their own chief and knowing that he habitually worked until a late hour, had waved him on without a second glance. And that was the last anyone had ever seen of Dr. Caroline or the Twister, as the weapon, for some obscure reason, had been named. But it wasn’t the last that was seen of the blue Chevrolet. That had been discovered abandoned outside the port of Savannah, some nine hours after the crime had been committed but less than an hour after it had been discovered, which showed pretty smart police work on someone’s part.

And it had just been our evil luck that the s.s. Campari had called in at Savannah on the afternoon of the day the crime had been committed.

Within an hour of the discovery of the two dead guards in the research establishment an all inter-state and foreign air and sea traffic in the South-Eastern United States had been halted. As from seven o’clock in the morning, all planes were grounded until they had been rigorously searched: as from seven o’clock police stopped and examined every truck crossing a state border: and, of course, everything larger than a rowing-boat was forbidden to put out to sea. Unfortunately for the authorities in general and us in particular, the s.s. Campari had sailed from Savannah at six o’clock that morning. Automatically, the Campari became very, very “hot,” the number one suspect for the gateway.

The first radio call came through at 8.30 a.m. Would Captain Bullen return immediately to Savannah? The captain, no beater about the bush, asked why the hell he should. He was told that it was desperately urgent that he return at once. Not, replied the captain, unless they gave him a very compelling reason indeed. They refused to give him a reason and Captain Bullen refused to return. Deadlock. Then, because they hadn’t much option, the Federal Authorities, who had already taken over from the state, gave him the facts.

Captain Bullen asked for more facts. He asked for a description of the missing scientist and weapon, and he’d soon find out for himself whether or not they were on board. Followed a fifteen-minute delay, no doubt necessary to secure the release of top classified information, then the descriptions were reluctantly given.

There was a curious similarity between the two descriptions. Both the Twister and Dr. Caroline were exactly 75 inches in length. Both were very thin, the weapon being only eleven inches in diameter. The doctor weighed 180 pounds, the Twister 275. The Twister was covered in a one-piece sheath of polished anodised aluminium, the doctor in a two-piece grey gabardine. The Twister’s head was covered by a grey Pyroceram nose-cap, the doctor’s by black hair with a tell-tale lock of grey in the centre.

The orders for the doctor were to identify and apprehend: for the Twister to identify but do not repeat do not touch. The weapon should be completely stable and safe and normally it would take one of the only two experts who were as yet sufficiently acquainted with it at least ten minutes to arm it; but no one could guess what effect might have been had upon the Twister’s delicate mechanism by the jolting it might have suffered in transit.

Three hours later Captain Bullen was able to report with complete certainty that neither the missing scientist nor weapon was aboard. Intensive would be a poor word to describe that search, every square foot between the chain locker and steering compartment was searched and searched again. Captain Bullen had radioed the Federal Authorities and then forgotten about it.

And in Kingston the blow had fallen. We had no sooner arrived than the harbour authorities had come on board requesting that a search party from the American destroyer lying almost alongside be allowed to examine the Campari. The search party, about forty of them, were already lined up on the deck of the destroyer.

They were still there four hours later. Captain Bullen, in a few simple well-chosen words that had carried far and clear over the sunlit waters of Kingston harbour, had told the authorities that if the United States Navy proposed, in broad daylight, to board a British Mercantile Marine vessel in a British harbour, then they were welcome to try. They were also welcome, he had added, to suffer, apart from the injuries and the loss of blood they would incur in the process, the very heavy penalties which would be imposed by an international court of maritime law arising from charges ranging from assault, through piracy to an act of war: which maritime court, Captain Bullen had added pointedly, had its seat not in Washington, D.C., but in The Hague, Holland.

This stopped them cold. The authorities withdrew to consult with the Americans. Coded cables, as we learnt later, were exchanged with Washington and London. Captain Bullen remained adamant. Our passengers, 90 per cent. of them Americans, gave him their enthusiastic support. Messages were received from both the company head office and the Ministry of Transport requiring Captain Bullen to co-operate with the United States Navy. Pressure was being brought to bear. Bullen tore the messages up, seized the offer of the local Marconi agent to give the radio equipment an overdue check-up as a heaven-sent excuse to take the wireless officers off watch and told the quartermaster at the gangway to accept no more messages.

And so it had continued for all of thirty hours. And, because troubles never come singly, it was on the morning following our arrival that the Harrisons and Curtises, related families who occupied the for’ard two suites on “A” Deck, received cables with the shocking news that members of both families had been fatally involved in a car crash and left that afternoon. Black gloom hung heavy over the Campari.

Towards evening, the deadlock was broken by the skipper of the American destroyer, a diplomatic, courteous and thoroughly embarrassed commander by the name of Varsi. He had been allowed aboard the Campari, been gruffly asked into Bullen’s day-cabin, accepted a drink, been very apologetic and respectful and suggested a way out of the dilemma.

How would it be if the search were carried out not by his own men but by British Customs officials in the regular course of their duty, with his men present solely in the capacity of observers. Captain Bullen, after much outraged humming and hawing, had finally agreed. Not only did this suggestion save face and salvage honour to a certain degree, but he was in an impossible situation anyway, and he knew it. Until the search was completed, the Kingston authorities refused medical clearance, and until he had this clearance it would be impossible to unload the six hundred tons of food and machinery he had for delivery there. And the port officials could also make things very difficult indeed by refusing clearance papers to sail.

And so what seemed like every Customs official in Jamaica was routed out and the search began at 9 p.m. It lasted until 2 a.m. the following morning. Captain Bullen fumed as steadily and sulphurously as a volcano about to erupt. The passengers fumed, partly because of having to suffer the indignity of having their cabins so meticulously searched, partly because of their being kept out of their beds until the early hours of the morning. And, above all, the crew fumed because, on this occasion, even the normally tolerant Customs were forced to take note of the hundreds of bottles of liquor and thousands of cigarettes uncovered by their search.

Nothing else, of course, was found. Apologies were offered and ignored. Medical clearance was given and unloading began: we left Kingston late that night. For all of the following twenty-four hours Captain Bullen brooded over the recent happenings, then had sent off a couple of cablegrams, one to the head office in London, the other to the Ministry of Transport, telling them what he, Captain Bullen thought of them. And now, it seemed, they in turn had told Captain Bullen what they thought of him. I could understand his feelings about Dr. Slingsby Caroline, who was probably in China by this time.

A high-pitched shout of warning brought us both sharply back to the present and what was going on around us. One of the two chain slings round the big crate now poised exactly over the hatchway to number four hold had suddenly come adrift, one end of the crate dropping down through an angle of 60 degrees and bringing up with a jerking jolt that made even the big jumbo derrick shake and quiver with the strain. The chances were good that the crate would now slip through the remaining sling and crash down on to the floor of the hold far below, which is probably what would have happened if two of the crew holding on to a corner guiding rope hadn’t been quick-witted enough to throw all their weight on to it and so prevent the crate from tilting over at too steep an angle and sliding free. But even as it was it was still touch and go.

The crate swung back towards the side of the ship, the two men on the guide-rope still hanging on desperately. I caught a glimpse of the stevedores on the quayside below, their faces twisted into expressions of frozen panic: in the new people’s democracy where all men were free and equal, the penalty for this sort of carelessness was probably the firing squad: nothing else could have accounted for their otherwise inexplicably genuine terror. The crate began to swing back over the hold. I yelled to the men beneath to run clear and simultaneously gave the signal for emergency lowering. The winchman, fortunately, was as quick-witted as he was experienced, and as the wildly careering crate swung jerkily back to dead centre he lowered away at two or three times the normal speed, braking just seconds before the lowermost corner of the crate crunched and splintered against the floor of the hold. Moments later the entire length of the crate was resting on the bottom.

Captain Bullen fished a handkerchief from his drills, removed his gold-braided cap and slowly mopped his sandy hair and sweating brow. He appeared to be communing with himself.

“This,” he said finally, “is the bloody end. Captain Bullen in the dog-house. The crew sore as hell. The passengers hopping mad. Two days behind schedule. Searched by the Americans from truck to keelson like a contraband-runner. Now probably carrying contraband. No sign of our latest bunch of passengers. Got to clear the harbour bar by six. And now this band of madmen trying to send us to the bottom. A man can stand so much, First, just so much.” He replaced his cap. “Shakespeare had something to say about this, First.”

“A sea of troubles, sir?”

“No, something else. But apt enough.” He sighed. “Get the second officer to relieve you. Third’s checking stores. Get the fourth —no, not that blithering nincompoop—get the bo’sun, he talks Spanish like a native anyway, to take over on the shore side. Any objections and that’s the last piece of cargo we load. Then you and I are having lunch, First.”

“I told Miss Beresford that I wouldn’t——”

“If you think,” Captain Bullen interrupted heavily, “that I’m going to listen to that bunch jangling their money-bags and bemoaning their hard lot from hors d’œuvre right through to coffee, you must be out of your mind. We’ll have it in my cabin.”

And so we had it in his cabin. It was the usual Campari meal, something for even the most blasé epicure to dream about, and Captain Bullen, for once and understandably, made an exception to his rule that neither he nor his officers should drink with lunch. By the time the meal was over he was feeling almost human again and once went so far as to call me “Johhny-me-boy.” It wouldn’t last. But it was all pleasant enough, and it was with reluctance that I finally quit the air-conditioned coolness of the captain’s day-cabin for the blazing sunshine outside to relieve the second officer.

He smiled widely as I approached number four hold. Tommy Wilson was always smiling. He was a dark, wiry Welshman of middle height, with an infectious grin and an immense zest for life, no matter what came his way.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“You can see for yourself.” He waved a complacent hand towards the pile of stacked crates on the quayside, now diminished by a good third since I had seen it last. “Speed allied with efficiency. When Wilson is on the job let no man ever——”

“The bo’sun’s name is MacDonald, not Wilson,” I said.

“So it is.” He laughed, glanced down to where the bo’sun, a big, tough, infinitely competent Hebridean islander was haranguing the bearded stevedores, and shook his head admiringly. “I wish I could understand what he’s saying.”

“Translation would be superfluous,” I said dryly. “I’ll take over. Old man wants you to go ashore.”

“Ashore?” His face lit up, in two short years the second’s shoregoing exploits had already passed into the realms of legend. “Let no man ever say that Wilson ignored duty’s call. Twenty minutes for a shower, shave and shake out the number ones——”

“The agent’s offices are just beyond the dock gates,” I interrupted. “You can go as you are. Find out what’s happened to our latest passengers. Captain’s beginning to worry about them, if they’re not here by five o’clock he’s sailing without them.”

Wilson left. The sun started westering, but the heat stayed as it was. Thanks to MacDonald’s competence and uninhibited command of the Spanish language, the cargo on the quayside steadily and rapidly diminished. Wilson returned to report no sign of our passengers. The agent had been very nervous indeed. They were very important people, Señor, very, very important. One of them was the most important man in the whole province of Camafuegos. A jeep had already been dispatched westwards along the coast road to look for them. It sometimes happened, the señor understood, that a car spring would go or a shock absorber snap. When Wilson had innocently inquired if this was because the revolutionary government had no money left to pay for the filling in of the enormous potholes in the roads, the agent had become even more nervous and said indignantly that it was entirely the fault of the inferior metal those perfidious Americanos used in the construction of their vehicles. Wilson said he had left with the impression that Detroit had a special assembly line exclusively devoted to turning out deliberately inferior cars destined solely for this particular corner of the Caribbean.

Wilson went away. The cargo continued to move steadily into number four hold. About four o’clock in the afternoon I heard the sound of the clashing of gears and the asthmatic wheezing of what sounded like a very elderly engine indeed. This, I thought, would be the passengers at last, but no: what clanked into view round the corner of the dock gate was a dilapidated truck with hardly a shred of paint left on the bodywork, white canvas showing on the tyres and the engine hood removed to reveal what looked, from my elevation, like a solid block of rust. One of the special Detroit jobs, probably. On its cracked and splintered platform it carried three medium-sized crates, freshly boxed and metal-banded.

Wrapped in a blue haze from the staccato back-firing of its exhaust, vibrating like a broken tuning fork and rattling in every bolt in its superannuated chassis, the truck trundled heavily across the cobbles and pulled up not five paces from where MacDonald was standing. A little man in white ducks and peaked cap jumped out through the space where the door ought to have been, stood still for a couple of seconds until he got the hang of terra firma again and then scuttled off in the direction of our gangway. I recognised him as our Carracio agent, the one with the low opinion of Detroit, and wondered what fresh trouble he was bringing with him.

I found out in three minutes flat when Captain Bullen appeared on deck, an anxious-looking agent scurrying along behind him. The captain’s blue eyes were snapping, the red complexion was overlaid with puce, but he had the safety valve screwed right down.

“Coffins, Mister,” he said tightly. “Coffins, no less.”

I suppose there is a quick and clever answer to a conversational gambit like that but I couldn’t find it so I said politely: “Coffins, sir?”

“Coffins, Mister. Not empty, either. For shipment to New York.” He flourished some papers. “Authorisations, shipping notes, everything in order. Including a sealed request signed by no less than the ambassador. Three of them. Two British, one American subjects. Killed in the hunger riots.”

“The crew won’t like it, sir,” I said. “Especially the Gôanese stewards. You know their superstitions and how——”

“It will be all right, Señor,” the little man in white broke in hurriedly. Wilson had been right about the nervousness, but there was more to it than that, there was a strange over lay of anxiety that came close to despair. “We have arranged——”

“Shut up!” Captain Bullen said shortly. “No need for the crew to know, Mister. Or the passengers.” You could see they were just a careless after-thought. “Coffins are boxed —that’s them on the truck there.”

“Yes, sir. Killed in the riots. Last week.” I paused and went on delicately: “In this heat——”

“Lead-lined, he says. So they can go in the hold. Some separate corner, Mister. One of the—um—deceased is a relative of one of the passengers boarding here. Wouldn’t do to stack the coffins among the dynamos, I suppose.” He sighed heavily. “On top of everything else, we’re now in the funeral undertaking business. Life, First, can hold no more.”

“You are accepting this—ah—cargo, sir?”

“But of course, but of course,” the little man interrupted again. “One of them is a cousin of Señor Carreras, who sails with you. Señor Miguel Carreras. Señor Carreras, he is what you say heartbroken. Señor Carreras is the most important man——”

“Be quiet,” Captain Bullen said wearily. He made a gesture with the papers. “Yes, I’m accepting. Note from the Ambassador. More pressure. I’ve had enough of cables flying across the Atlantic. Too much grief. Just an old beaten man, First, just an old beaten man.” He stood there for a moment, hands outspread on the guard-rail, doing his best to look like an old beaten man and making a singularly unsuccessful job of it, then straightened abruptly as a procession of vehicles turned in through the dock gates and made for the Campari.

“A pound to a penny, Mister, here comes still more grief.”

“Praise be to God,” the little agent murmured. The tone, no less than the words, was a prayer of thanksgiving. “Señor Carreras himself! Your passengers, at last, Captain.”

“That’s what I said,” Bullen growled. “More grief.”

The procession, two big chauffeur-driven prewar Packards, one towed by a jeep, had just pulled up by the gangway and the passengers were climbing out. Those who could, that was—for very obviously there was one who could not. One of the chauffeurs, dressed in green tropical drills and a bush hat, had opened the boot of his car, pulled out a collapsible hand-propelled wheelchair and, with the smooth efficiency of experience, had it assembled in ten seconds flat while the other chauffeur, with the aid of a tall thin nurse clad in overall white from her smart, starched cap to the skirt that reached down to her ankles, tenderly lifted a bent old man from the back seat of the second Packard and set him gently in the wheel-chair. The old boy —even at that distance I could see the face creased and stretched with the lines of age, the snowy whiteness of the still plentiful hair—did his best to help them, but his best wasn’t very much.

Captain Bullen looked at me. I looked at Captain Bullen. There didn’t seem to be any reason to say anything. Nobody in a crew likes having permanent invalids aboard ship: they cause trouble to the ship’s doctor, who has to look after their health, to the cabin stewards who have to clean their quarters, to the dining-room stewards who have to feed them, and to those members of the deck crew detailed for the duty of moving them around. And when the invalids are elderly, and often infirm—and if this one wasn’t, I sadly missed my guess—there was always the chance of a death at sea, the one thing sailors hate above all else. It was also very bad for the passenger trade.

“Well,” Captain Bullen said heavily, “I suppose I’d better go and welcome our latest guests aboard. Finish it off as quickly as possible, Mister.”

“I’ll do that, sir.”

Bullen nodded and left. I watched the two chauffeurs slide a couple of long poles under the seat of the invalid chair, straighten and carry the chair easily up the sparred foot-planks of the gangway.

They were followed by the tall angular nurse and she in turn by another nurse, dressed exactly like the first but shorter and stockier. The old boy was bringing his own medical corps along with him, which meant that he had more money than was good for him or was a hypochondriac or very far through indeed or a combination of any or all of those.

But I was more interested in the last two people to climb out of the Packards.

The first was a man of about my own age and size, but the resemblance stopped short there. He looked like a cross between Ramon Novarro and Rudolph Valentino, only handsomer. Tall, broad-shouldered, with deeply-tanned, perfectly-sculpted Latin features, he had the classical long thin moustache, strong even teeth with that in-built neon phosphorescence that seems to shine in any light from high noon till dark, and a darkly gleaming froth of tight black curls on his head: he would have been a lost man if you’d let him loose on the campus of any girls’ university. For all that, he looked as far from being a sissy as any man I’d ever met: He had a strong chin, the balanced carriage, the light springy boxer’s step of a man well aware that he can get through this world without any help from a nursemaid. If nothing else, I thought sourly, he would at least take Miss Beresford out of my hair.

The other man was a slightly smaller edition of the first, same features, same teeth, same moustache and hair, only those were greying. He would be about fifty-five. He had about him that indefinable look of authority and assurance which can come from power, money or a carefully cultivated phoneyness. This, I guessed would be the Señor Miguel Carreras who inspired such fear in our local Carracio agent. I wondered why.

Ten minutes later the last of our cargo was aboard and all that remained were the three boxed coffins on the back of the old truck. I watched the bo’sun readying a sling round the first of those when a well-detested voice said behind me:

“This is Mr. Carreras, sir. Captain Bullen sent me.”

I turned round and gave Fourth Officer Dexter the look I specially reserved for Fourth Officer Dexter. Dexter was the exception to the rule that the fleet commodore always got the best available in the company as far as officers and men were concerned, but that was hardly the old man’s fault: there are some men that even a fleet commodore has to except and Dexter was one of them. A personable enough youngster of twenty-one, with fair hair, slightly prominent blue eyes, an excruciatingly genuine public school accent and limited intelligence, Dexter was the son—and, unfortunately, heir—of Lord Dexter, Chairman and Managing Director of the Blue Mail. Lord Dexter, who had inherited about ten millions at the age of fifteen and, understandably enough, had never looked back, had the quaint idea that his own son should start from the bottom up and had sent him to sea as a cadet some five years previously. Dexter took a poor view of this arrangement: every man in the ship, from Bullen downwards, took a poor view of the arrangement and Dexter: but there was nothing we could do about it.

“How do you do, sir?” I accepted Carreras’s outstretched hand and took a good look at him. The steady dark eyes, the courteous smile couldn’t obscure the fact that there were many more lines about his eyes and mouth at two feet than at fifty: but it also couldn’t obscure the compensatory fact that the air of authority and command was now redoubled in force, and I put out of my mind any idea that this air originated in phoneyness: it was the genuine article and that was that.

“Mr. Carter? My pleasure.” The hand was firm, the bow more than a perfunctory nod, the cultured English the product of some Stateside Ivy League college. “I have some interest in the cargo being loaded and if you would permit——”

“But certainly, Señor Carreras.” Carter, that rough-hewn Anglo-Saxon diamond, not to be outdone in Latin courtesy. I waved towards the hatch. “If you would be so kind as to keep to the starboard—the right hand—of the hatch——”

“‘Starboard’ will do, Mr. Carter,” he smiled. “I have commanded vessels of my own. It was not a life that ever appealed to me.” He stood there for a moment, watching MacDonald tightening the sling, while I turned to Dexter, who had made no move to go. Dexter was seldom in a hurry to do anything: he had a remarkably thick skin.

“What are you on now, Fourth?” I inquired.

“Assisting Mr. Cummings.”

That meant he was unemployed. Cummings, the purser, was an extraordinarily competent officer who never required help. He had only one fault, brought on by years of dealing with passengers—he was far too polite. Especially to Dexter. I said: “Those charts we picked up in Kingston. You might get on with the corrections, will you?” Which meant that he would probably land us on a reef off the Great Bahamas in a couple of days’ time.

“But Mr. Cummings is expecting——”

“The charts, Dexter.”

He looked at me for a long moment, his face slowly darkening, then spun on his heel and left. I let him go three paces then said, not loudly: “Dexter.”

He stopped, then turned, slowly.

“The charts, Dexter,” I repeated. He stood there for maybe five seconds, eyes locked on mine, then broke his gaze.

“Aye, aye, sir.” The accent on the “sir” was faint but unmistakable. He turned again and walked away and now the flush was round the back of his neck, his back ramrod stiff. Little I cared, by the time he sat in the chairman’s seat I’d have long since quit. I watched him go, then turned to see Carreras looking at me with a slow, still speculation in the steady eyes. He was putting Chief Officer Carter in the balance and weighing him, but whatever figures he came up with he kept to himself, for he turned away without any haste and made his way across to the starboard side of number four hold. As I turned, I noticed for the first time the very thin ribbon of black silk stitched across the left lapel of his grey tropical suit. It didn’t seem to go any too well with the white rose he wore in his button-hole, but maybe the two of them together were recognised as a sign of mourning in those parts.

And it seemed very likely, for he stood there perfectly straight, almost at attention, his hands loosely by his sides as the three crated coffins were hoisted inboard. When the third crate came swinging in over the rail he removed his hat casually, as if to get the benefit of the light breeze that had just sprung up from the north, the direction of the open sea: and then, looking around him almost furtively, lifted his right hand under the cover of the hat held in his left and made a quick abbreviated sign of the cross. Even in that heat I could feel the cold cat’s paw of a shiver brush lightly across my shoulders, I don’t know why, not even by the furthest stretch of imagination could I visualise that prosaic hatchway giving on number four hold as an open grave. One of my grandmothers was Scots, maybe I was psychic or had the second sight or whatever it was they called it up in the Highlands: or maybe I had just lunched too well.

Whatever might have upset me, it didn’t seem to have upset Señor Carreras. He replaced his hat as the last of the crates touched lightly on the floor of the hold, stared down at it for a few seconds, then turned and made his way for’ard, lifting his hat again and giving me a clear untroubled smile as he came by. For want of anything better to do, I smiled back at him.

Five minutes later, the ancient truck, the two Packards, the jeep and the last of the stevedores were gone, and MacDonald was busy supervising the placing of the battens on number four hold. By five o’clock, a whole hour before deadline and exactly on the top of the tide, the s.s. Campari was steaming slowly over the bar to the north of the harbour, then west-north-west into the setting sun, carrying with it its cargo of crates and machinery and dead men, its fuming captain, disgruntled crew and thoroughly outraged passengers. At five o’clock on that brilliant June evening it was not what one might have called a happy ship.

II.

Tuesday 8 p.m.—9.30 p.m.

By eight o’clock that night cargo, crates and coffins were, presumably, just as they had been at five o’clock: but among the living cargo, the change for the better, from deep discontent to something closely approaching light-hearted satisfaction, was marked and profound.

There were reasons for this, of course. In Captain Bullen’s case—he twice called me “Johnny-me-boy” as he sent me down for dinner—it was because he was clear of what he was pleased to regard as the pestiferous port of Carracio, because he was at sea again, because he was on his bridge again and because he had thought up an excellent reason for sending me below while he remained on the bridge, thus avoiding the social torture of having to dine with the passengers. In the crew’s case, it was because the captain had seen fit, partly out of a sense of justice and partly to repay the head office for the indignities they had heaped on him, to award them all many more hours’ overtime pay than they were actually entitled to for their off-duty labours in the past three days. And in the case of the officers and passengers it was simply because there are certain well-defined fundamental laws of human nature and one of them was that it was impossible to be miserable for long aboard the s.s. Campari.

As a vessel with no regular ports of call, with only very limited passenger accommodation and capacious cargo holds that were seldom far from full, the s.s. Campari could properly be classed as a tramp ship and indeed was so classed in the Blue Mail’s travel brochure’s. But —as the brochures pointed out with a properly delicate restraint in keeping with the presumably refined sensibilities of the extraordinarily well-heeled clientele it was addressing—the s.s. Campari was no ordinary tramp ship. Indeed, it was no ordinary ship in any sense at all. It was, as the brochure said simply, quietly, without any pretentiousness and in exactly those words, “a medium-sized cargo vessel offering the most luxurious accommodation and finest cuisine of any ship in the world today.”

The only thing that prevented all the great passenger shipping companies from the Cunard White Star downwards from suing the Blue Mail for this preposterous statement was the fact that it was perfectly true.

It was the chairman of the Blue Mail, Lord Dexter, who had obviously kept all his brains to himself and refrained from passing any on to his son, our current fourth officer, who had thought it up. It was, as all his competitors who were now exerting themselves strenuously to get into the act admitted, a stroke of pure genius. Lord Dexter concurred.

It had started off simply enough in the early fifties with an earlier Blue Mail vessel, the s.s. Brandywine. (For some strange whimsy, explicable only on a psycho-analysts’ couch, Lord Dexter himself a rabid teetotaller, had elected to name his various ships after divers wines and other spirituous liquors.) The Brandywine had been one of the two Blue Mail vessels engaged on a regular run between New York and various British possessions in the West Indies, and Lord Dexter, eyeing the luxury cruise liners which plied regularly between New York and the Caribbean and seeing no good reason why he shouldn’t elbow his way into this lucrative dollar-earning market, had some extra cabins fitted on the Brandywine and advertised them in a few very select American newspapers and magazines, making it quite plain that he was interested only in Top People. Among the attractions offered had been a complete absence of bands, dances, concerts, fancy-dress balls, swimming pools, tombola, deck games, sight-seeing and parties—only a genius could have made such desirable and splendidly resounding virtues out of things he didn’t have anyway. All he offered on the positive side was the mystery and romance of a tramp ship which sailed to unknown destinations —this didn’t make any alterations to regular schedules, all it meant was that the captain kept the names of the various ports of call to himself until shortly before he arrived there—and the resources and comfort of a telegraph lounge which remained in continuous touch with the New York, London and Paris stock exchanges.

The initial success of the scheme was fantastic. In stock exchange parlance, the issue was oversubscribed a hundred times. This was intolerable to Lord Dexter; he was obviously attracting far too many of the not quite Top People, aspiring wouldbe’s on the lower-middle rungs of the ladder who had not yet got past their first few million, people with whom Top People would not care to associate. He doubled his prices. It made no difference. He trebled them and in the process made the gratifying discovery that there were many people in the world who would pay literally almost anything not only to be different and exclusive but to be known to be different and exclusive. Lord Dexter held up the building of his latest ship, the Campari, had designed and built into her a dozen of the most luxurious cabin suites ever seen and sent her to New York, confident that she would soon recoup the outlay of a quarter of a million pounds extra cost incurred through the building of those cabins. As usual, his confidence was not misplaced.

There were imitators, of course, but one might as well have tried to immitate Buckingham Palace, the Grand Canyon or the Cullinan diamond. Lord Dexter left them all at the starting gate. He had found his formula and he stuck to it unswervingly: comfort, convenience, quiet, good food and good company. Where comfort was concerned, the fabulous luxury of the state-rooms had to be seen to be believed: convenience, as far as the vast majority of the male passengers was concerned, found its ultimate in the juxtaposition, in the Campari’s unique telegraph lounge, of the stock exchange tickers and one of the most superbly stocked bars in the world: quiet was achieved by an advanced degree of insulation both in cabin suites and engine-room, by imitating the royal yacht Britannia inasmuch as that no orders were ever shouted and the deck crew and stewards invariably wore rubber-soled sandals, and by eliminating all the bands, parties, games and dances which lesser cruise passengers believed essential for the enjoyment of ship-board life: the magnificent cuisine had been achieved by luring away, at vast cost and the expense of even more bad feeling, the chefs from one of the biggest embassies in London and one of the finest hotels in Paris: those masters of the culinary world operated on alternate days and the paradisical results of their efforts to outdo one another was the envious talk of the Western Ocean.

Other shipowners might, perhaps, have suceeded in imitating some or all of those features, although most certainly to a lesser degree. But Lord Dexter was no ordinary shipowner. He was, as said, a genius and he showed it in his insistence, above all, on having the right people aboard.

Never a single trip passed but the Campari had a Personage on its passenger list, a Personage varying from Notable to World-famous. A special suite was reserved for Personages. Well-known politicians, cabinet ministers, top stars of the stage and screen, the odd famous writer or artist—if he was clean enough and used a razor—and the lower echelons of the English nobility—travelled in this suite at vastly reduced prices: royalty, ex-presidents, ex-premiers, ranking dukes and above travelled free. It was said that if all the British peerage on the Campari’s waiting list could be accommodated simultaneously, the House of Lords could close its doors. It need hardly be added that there was nothing philanthropic in Lord Dexter’s offer of free hospitality: he merely jacked up his prices to the wealthy occupants of the other eleven suites, who would have paid the earth anyway for the privilege of voyaging in such close contact with such exalted company.

After several years on this run, our passengers consisted almost entirely of repeaters. Many came as often as three times a year, fair enough indication of the size of their bankroll. By now, the passenger list on the Campari had become the most exclusive club in the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, Lord Dexter had distilled the aggregate elements of social and financial snobbery and found in its purest quintessence an inexhaustible supply of gold.

I adjusted my napkin and looked over the current gold mine. Five hundred million dollars on the hoof—or on the dove-grey velvet of the armchair seats in that opulent and air-conditioned dining-room: perhaps nearer 1,000 million dollars, and old man Beresford himself would account for a good third of it.

Julius Beresford, president and chief stockholder of the Hart-McCormick Mining Federation, sat where he nearly always sat, not only now but on half a dozen previous cruises, at the top right-hand side of the captain’s table, next Captain Bullen himself: he sat there in the most coveted position in the ship, not because he insisted on it through sheer weight of weal, but because Captain Bullen himself insisted on it. There are exceptions to every rule, and Julius Beresford was the exception to Bullen’s rule that he couldn’t abide any passenger, period. Beresford, a tall, thin, relaxed man with tufted black eyebrows, a horse-shoe ring of greying hair fringed the sunburnt baldness of his head and lively hazel eyes twinkling in the lined brown leather of his face, came along only for the peace, comfort and food: the company of the great left him cold, a fact vastly appreciated by Captain Bullen, who shared his sentiments exactly. Beresford, sitting diagonally across from my table, caught my eye.

“Evening, Mr. Carter.” Unlike his daughter, he didn’t make me feel that he was conferring an earldom upon me every time he spoke to me. “Splendid to be at sea again, isn’t it? And where’s our captain tonight?”

“Working, I’m afraid, Mr. Beresford. I have to present his apologies to his table. He couldn’t leave the bridge.”

“On the bridge?” Mrs. Beresford, seated opposite her husband, twisted round to look at me. “I thought you were usually on watch at this hour, Mr. Carter?”

“I am.” I smiled at her. Plump, bejewelled, over-dressed, with dyed blonde hair but still beautiful at fifty, Mrs. Beresford bubbled over with good humour and laughter and kindness: this was only her first trip but Mrs. Beresford was already my favourite passenger. I went on: “But there are so many chains of islets, reefs and coral keys hereabouts that Captain Bullen prefers to see to the navigation himself.” I didn’t add, as I might have done, that had it been in the middle of the night and all the passengers safely in their beds, Captain Bullen would have been in his also, untroubled by any thoughts about his chief officer’s competence.

“But I thought a chief officer was fully qualified to run a ship?” Miss Beresford, needling me again, sweet-smiling, the momentarily innocent clear green eyes almost too big for the delicately-tanned face. “In case anything went wrong with the captain, I mean. You must hold a master’s certificate, mustn’t you?”

“I do. I also hold a driver’s licence, but you wouldn’t catch me driving a bus in the rush hour in downtown Manhattan.”

Old man Beresford grinned. His wife smiled. Miss Beresford regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, then bent to examine her hors d’œuvre, showing the gleaming auburn hair cut in a bouffant style that looked as if it had been achieved with a garden rake and a pair of secateurs, but had probably cost a fortune. The man by her side wasn’t going to let it go so easily, though. He laid down his fork, raised his thin dark head until he had me more or less sighted along his aquiline nose and said in his clear high drawling voice: “Oh, come now, Chief Officer. I don’t think the comparison is very apt at all.”

The “Chief Officer “was to put me in my place. The Duke of Hartwell spent a great deal of his time aboard the Campari in putting people in their places, which was pretty ungrateful of him considering that he was getting it all for free. He had nothing against me personally, it was just that he was publicly lending Miss Beresford his support: even the very considerable sums of money earned by inveigling the properly respectful lower classes into viewing his stately home at two and six a time were making only a slight dent on the crushing burden of death duties, whereas an alliance with Miss Beresford would solve his difficulties for ever and ever. Things were being complicated for the unfortunate duke by the fact that though his intellect was bent on Miss Beresford, his attentions and eyes were for the most part on the extravagantly opulent charms—and undeniable beauty—of the platinum blonde and oft-divorced cinema actress who flanked him on the other side.

“I don’t suppose it is, sir,” I acknowledged. Captain Bullen refused to address him as “Your Grace “and I’d be damned if I’d do it either. “But the best I could think up on the spur of the moment.”

He nodded as though satisfied and returned to attack his hors d’œuvre. Old Beresford eyed him speculatively, Mrs. Beresford half-smilingly, Miss Harcourt—the cinema acress—admiringly, while Miss Beresford herself just kept on treating us to an uninterrupted view of the auburn bouffant.

The courses came and went. Antoine was on duty in the kitchen that night and you could almost reach out and feel the blissful hush that descended on the company. Velvet-footed Gôanese waiters moved soundlessly on the dark grey pile of the Persian carpet, food appeared and vanished as if in a dream, an arm always appeared at the precisely correct moment with the precisely correct wine. But never for me. I drank soda water. It was in my contract.

The coffee appeared. This was the moment when I had to earn my money. When Antoine was on duty and on top of his form, conversation was a desecration and a hallowed hush of appreciation, an almost cathedral ecstasy, was the correct form. But about forty minutes of this rapturous silence was about par for the course. It couldn’t and never did go on. I never yet met a rich man —or woman, for that matter—who didn’t list talking, chiefly and preferably about themselves, as among their favourite occupations. And the prime target for their observations was invariably the officer who sat at the head of the table.

I looked round ours and wondered who would start the ball rolling. Miss Harrbride—her original central European name was unpronounceable—thin, scrawny, sixtyish and tough as whalebone, who had made a fortune out of highly-expensive and utterly worthless cosmetic preparations which she wisely refrained from using on herself? Mr. Greenstreet, her husband, a grey anonymity of a man with a grey sunken face, who had married her for heaven only knew what reason for he was a very wealthy man in his own fight? Tony Carreras? His father, Miguel Carreras? There should have been a sixth at my table, to replace the Curtis family of three who, along with the Harrisons, had been so hurriedly called home from Kingston, but the old man who had come aboard in his bath-chair was apparently to have his meals served in his cabin during the voyage, with his nurses, in attendance. Four men and one woman: it made an ill-balanced table.

Señor Miguel Carreras spoke first.

“The Campari’s prices, Mr. Carter, are quite atrocious,” he said calmly. He puffed appreciatively at his cigar. “Robbery on the high seas would be a very fitting description. On the other hand, the cuisine is as claimed. You have a chef of divine gifts.”

“From all accounts, sir, ‘divine’ is just about right. Experienced travellers who have stayed in the best hotels on both sides of the Atlantic maintain that Antoine has no equal in either Europe or America. Except, perhaps, Henriques.”

“Henriques?”

“Our alternate chef. He’s on tomorrow.”

“Do I detect a certain immodesty, Mr. Carter, in advancing the claims of the Campari?” There was no offence meant, not with that smile.

“I don’t think so, sir. But the next twenty-four hours will speak for themselves—and Henriques—better than I can.”

“Touché!” He smiled again and reached for the bottle of Remy Martin—the waiters vanished at coffee-time. “And the prices?”

“They’re terrible,” I agreed. I told that to all the passengers and it seemed to please them. “We offer what no other ship in the world offers, but the prices are still scandalous. At least a dozen people in this room at this very moment have told me that—and most of them are here for at least their third trip.”

“You make your point, Mr. Carter.” It was Tony Carreras speaking and his voice was as one might have expected—slow, controlled, with a deep resonant timbre. He looked at his father. “Remember the waiting list at the Blue Mail’s offices?”

“Indeed. We were pretty far down the list—and what a list. Half the millionaires in Central and South America. I suppose we may consider ourselves fortunate, Mr. Carter, in that we were the only ones able to accept at such short notice after the sudden departure of our predecessors in Jamaica. Can you give us any idea of our itinerary?”

“That’s supposed to be one of the attractions, sir. No set itinerary. Our schedule largely depends on the availability and destination of cargoes. One thing certain, we’re going to New York. Most of our passengers boarded there and passengers like to be returned to where they came from.” He knew this anyway, knew that we had coffins consigned to New York. “We may stop off at Nassau. Depends how the captain feels—the company gives him a lot of leeway in adjusting local schedules to suit the best needs of the passengers—and the weather reports. This is the hurricane season, Mr. Carreras, or pretty close to it: if the reports are bad Captain Bullen will want all the sea room he can and give Nassau a bye.” I smiled. “Among the other attractions of the s.s. Campari is that we do not make our passengers seasick unless it is absolutely essential.”

“Considerate, very considerate,” Carreras murmured. He looked at me speculatively. “But we’ll be making one or two calls on the east coast, I take it?”

“No idea, sir. Normally, yes. Again it’s up to the captain, and how the captain behaves depends on a Dr. Slingsby Caroline.”

“They haven’t caught him yet,” Miss Harrbride declared in her rough gravelly voice. She scowled with all the fierce patriotism of a first-generation American, looked round the table and gave us all the impartial benefit of her scowl.

“It’s incredible, frankly incredible. I still don’t believe it. A thirteenth-generation American!”

“We heard about this character.” Tony Cerreras, like his father, had had his education in some Ivy League college: he was rather less formal in his attitude towards the English language. “Slingsby Caroline, I mean. But what’s this guy got to do with us, Mr. Carter?”

“As long as he is at large every cargo vessel leaving the eastern seaboard gets a pretty thorough going over to make sure that neither he nor the Twister is aboard. Slows up the turn-round of cargo and passenger ships by 100 per cent., which means that the longshoremen are losing stevedoring money pretty fast. They’ve gone on strike—and the chances are, so many unpleasant words have been said on both sides, that they’ll stay on strike when they do nab Dr. Caroline. If.”

“Traitor,” said Miss Harrbride. “Thirteen generations!”

“So we stay away from the east coast, eh?” Carreras senior asked. “Meantime, anyway?”

“As long as possible, sir. But New York is a must. When, I don’t know. But if it’s still strike-bound, we might go up the St. Lawrence first. Depends.”

“Romance, mystery and adventure,” Carreras smiled. “Just like your brochure said.” He glanced over my shoulder. “Looks like a visitor for you, Mr. Carter.”

I twisted in my seat. It was a visitor for me. Rusty Williams—Rusty from his shock of flaming hair —was advancing towards me, whites immaculately pressed, uniform cap clasped stiffly under his left arm. Rusty was sixteen, our youngest cadet, desperately shy and very impressionable.

“What is it, Rusty?” Age-old convention said that cadets should always be addressed by their surnames, but everyone called Rusty just that. It seemed impossible not to.

“The captain’s compliments, sir. Could he see you on the bridge, please, Mr. Carter?”

“I’ll be right up.” Rusty turned to leave and I caught the gleam in Susan Beresford’s eye, a gleam that generally heralded some crack at my expense. This one, predictably, would be about my indispensability, about the distraught captain sending for his trusty servant when all was lost, and although I didn’t think she was the sort of a girl to say it in front of a cadet I wouldn’t have wagered pennies on it so I rose hastily to my feet, said “Excuse me, Miss Harrbride, excuse me, gentlemen,” and followed Rusty quickly out of the door into the starboard alleyway. He was waiting for me.

“The captain is in his cabin, sir. He’d like to see you there.”

“What? You told me ——”

“I know, sir. He told me to say that. Mr. Jamieson is on the bridge”—George Jamieson was our third officer—“and Captain Bullen is in his cabin. With Mr. Cummings.”

I nodded and left. I remembered now that Cummings hadn’t been at his accustomed table as I’d come out although he’d certainly been there at the beginning of dinner. The captain’s quarters were immediately below the bridge and I was there in ten seconds. I knocked on the polished teak door, heard a gruff voice and went in.

The Blue Mail certainly did its commodore well. Even Captain Bullen, no admirer of the sybaritic life, had never been heard to complain of being pampered. He had a three-room and bathroom suite, done in the best millionaire’s taste, and his day-cabin, in which I now was, was a pretty fair guide to the rest—wine-red carpet that sunk beneath your feet, darkly-crimson drapes, gleaming sycamore panelling, narrow oak beams overhead, oak and green leather for the chairs and settee. Captain Bullen looked up at me as I came in: He didn’t have any of the signs of a man enjoying the comforts of home.

“Something wrong, sir?” I asked.

“Sit down.” He waved to a chair and sighed. “There’s something wrong all right. Banana-legs Benson is missing. White reported it ten minutes ago.”

Banana-legs Benson sounded like the name of a domesticated anthropoid or, at best, like a professional wrestler on the small town circuits, but in fact, it belonged to our very suave, polished and highly-accomplished head steward, Frederick Benson: Benson had the well-deserved reputation of being a very firm disciplinarian, and it was one of his disgruntled subordinates who, in the process of receiving a severe and merited dressing-down had noticed the negligible clearance between Benson’s knees and rechristened him as soon as his back was turned. The name had stuck, chiefly because of its incongruity and utter unsuitability. White was the assistant chief steward.

I said nothing. Bullen didn’t appreciate anyone, especially his officers, indulging in double-takes, exclamations or fatuous repetition. Instead I looked at the man seated across the table from the captain. Howard Cummings.

Cummings, the purser, a small plump amiable and infinitely shrewd Irishman, was next to Bullen, the most important man on the ship. No one questioned that, though Cummings himself gave no sign that this was so. On a passenger ship a good purser is worth his weight in gold, and Cummings was a pearl beyond any price. In his three years on the Campari friction and trouble among—and complaints from—the passengers had been almost completely unknown. Howard Cummings was a genius in mediation, compromise, the soothing of ruffled feelings and the handling of people in general. Captain Bullen would as soon have thought of cutting off his right hand as of trying to send Cummings off the ship.

I looked at Cummings for three reasons. He knew everything that went on on the Campari, from the secret take-over bids being planned in the telegraph lounge to the heart troubles of the youngest stoker in the boiler-room. He was the man ultimately responsible for all the stewards aboard the ship. And, finally, he was a close personal friend of Banana-legs.

Cummings caught my look and shook his dark head.

“Sorry, Johnny,” I’m as much in the dark as you. I saw him shortly before dinner, about ten to eight it would have been, when I was having a noggin with the paying guests.” Cummings’s noggin came from a special whisky bottle filled only with ginger ale. “We’d White up here just now. He says he saw Benson in cabin suite 6, fixing it for the night, about 8.20—half an hour ago, no, nearer forty minutes now. He expected to see him shortly afterwards because for every night for the past couple of years, whenever the weather was good, Benson and White have had a cigarette together on deck when the passengers were at dinner.”

“Regular time?” I interrupted.

“Very. Eight-thirty, near enough, never later than 8.35. But not tonight. At 8.40 White went to look for him in his cabin. No sign of him there. Organised half a dozen stewards for a search and still nothing doing. He sent for me and I came to the captain.”

And the captain sent for me, I thought. Send for old trusty Carter when there’s dirty work on hand. I looked at Bullen.

“A search, sir?”

“That’s it, Mister. Damned nuisance, just one damned thing after another. Quietly, if you can.”

“Of course, sir. Can I have Wilson, the bo’sun, some stewards and A.B.s?”

“You can have Lord Dexter and his board of directors just so long as you find Benson,” Bullen grunted.

“Yes, sir,” I turned to Cummings. “Didn’t suffer from any ill-health, did he? Liable to dizziness, faintness, heart attacks, that sort of thing?”

“Flat feet, was all,” Cummings smiled. He wasn’t feeling like smiling. “Had his annual medical check-up last month from Doc Marston. One hundred per cent. The flat feet are an occupational disease.”

I turned back to Captain Bullen.

“Could I have twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour, for a quiet look around, sir, first? With Mr. Cummings. Your authority to look anywhere, sir?”

“Within reason, of course.”

“Everywhere?” I insisted. “Or I’m wasting my time. You know that, sir.”

“My God! And it’s only a couple of days since that Jamaican lot. Remember how our passengers reacted to the Customs and American Navy going through their cabins? The board of directors are going to love this.” He looked up wearily. “I suppose you are referring to the passengers’ quarters?”

“We’ll do it quietly, sir.”

“Twenty minutes, then. You’ll find me on the bridge. Don’t tramp on any toes if you can help it.”

We left, dropped down to “A” deck and made a right-left turn into the hundred-foot central passageway between the cabin suites on “A” deck: there were only six of those suites, three on each side. White was about half-way down the passageway, nervously pacing up and down. I beckoned to him and he came walking quickly towards us, a thin, balding character with a permanently pained expression who suffered from the twin disabilities of chronic dyspepsia and over-conscientiousness.

“Got all the pass-keys, White?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine.” I nodded to the first main door on my right, number one suite on the port side. “Open it, will you?”

He opened up. I brushed past him, followed by the purser. There was no need to switch on the lights, they were already on; asking the Campari’s passengers, at the prices they were paying, to remember to turn off the lights would have been a waste of breath and an insult.

There were no bunks in the Campari’s cabin suites. Four-posters and massive four-posters at that, with concealed and mechanically operated side-boards which could be quickly raised in bad weather; such was the standard of modern weather reporting, the latitude allowed Captain Bullen in avoiding bad weather and the efficiency of our Denny-Brown stabilisers that I don’t think those side-boards had ever been used. Seasickness was not allowed aboard the Campari.

The suite was composed of a sleeping cabin, an adjacent lounge and bathroom, and beyond the lounge another cabin. All the plate-glass windows faced out over the port aide. We went through the cabins in a minute, looking beneath beds, examining cupboards, wardrobes, behind drapes, everywhere. Nothing. We left.

Out in the passageway again I nodded at the suite opposite. Number two.

“This one now,” I said to White.

“Sorry, sir. Can’t do it. It’s the old man and his nurses, sir. They had three special trays sent up to them when now, let me see, yes, sir, about 6.15 tonight, and Mr. Carreras, the gentleman who came aboard today, he gave instructions that they were not to be disturbed till morning.” White was enjoying this. “Very strict instructions, sir.”

“Carreras?” I looked at the purser. “What’s he got to do with this, Mr. Cummings?”

“You haven’t heard? No, I don’t suppose so. Seems like Mr. Carreras—the father—is the senior partner in one of the biggest law firms in the country, Cerdan & Carreras. Mr. Cerdan, founder of the firm, is the old gentleman in the cabin here. Seems he’s been a semi-paralysed cripple—but a pretty tough old cripple—for the past eight years. His son and wife—Cerdan Junior being the next senior partner to Carreras—have had him on their hands all that time, and I believe the old boy has been a handful and a half. I understood Carreras offered to take him along primarily to give Cerdan Junior and his wife a break. Carreras, naturally, feels responsible for him so I suppose that’s why he left his orders with Benson.”

“Doesn’t sound like a man at death’s door to me,” I said. “Nobody’s wanting to kill him off, just to ask him a few questions. Or the nurses.” White opened his mouth to protest again, but I pushed roughly past him and knocked on the door.

No answer. I waited all of thirty seconds, then knocked again, loudly. White, beside me, was stiff with outrage and disapproval. I ignored him and was lifting my hand to put some real weight on the wood when I heard a movement and suddenly the door opened inwards.

It was the shorter of the two nurses, the plump one, who had answered the door. She had an old-fashioned pull-string linen cap over her head and was clutching with one hand a light woollen wrap that left only the toes of her mules showing. The cabin behind her was only dimly lit, but I could see it held a couple of beds, one of which was rumpled. The free hand with which she rubbed her eyes told the rest of the story.

“My sincere apologies, miss,” I said. “I had no idea you were in bed. I’m the chief officer of this ship and this is Mr. Cummings, the purser. Our chief steward is missing and we were wondering if you may have seen or heard anything that might help us.”

“Missing?” She clutched the wrap more tightly. “You mean—you mean he’s just disappeared?”

“Let’s say we can’t find him. Can you help us at all?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been asleep. You see,” she explained, “we take it in three-hour turns to be by old Mr. Cerdan’s bed. It is essential that he is watched all the time. I was trying to get in some little sleep before my turn came to relieve Miss Werner.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “You can’t tell us anything, then?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Perhaps your friend Miss Werner can?”

“Miss Werner?” She blinked at me. “But Mr. Cerdan is not to be——”

“Please. This might be very serious.”

“Very well.” Like all competent nurses she knew how far she could go and when to make up her mind. “But I must ask you to be very quiet and not to disturb Mr. Cerdan in any way at all.”

She didn’t say anything about the possibility of Mr. Cerdan disturbing us, but she might have warned us. As we passed through the open door of his cabin he was sitting up in bed, a book on the blankets before him, with a bright overhead bead-light illuminating a crimson tasselled night-cap and throwing his face into deep shadow, but a shadow not quite deep enough to hide the hostile gleam under bar-straight tufted eyebrows. The hostile gleam, it seemed to me, was as much a permanent feature of his face as the large beak of a nose that jutted out over a straggling white moustache. The nurse who led the way made to introduce us, but Cerdan waved her to silence with a peremptory hand. Imperious, I thought, was the word for the old boy, not to mention bad-tempered and downright ill-mannered.

“I hope you can explain this damnable outrage, sir.” His voice was glacial enough to make a polar bear shiver. “Bursting into my private stateroom without so much as by your leave.” He switched his gimlet eyes to Cummings. “You You there. You had your orders, damn it. Strictest privacy, absolutely. Explain yourself, sir.”

“I cannot tell you how sorry I am, Mr. Cerdan,” Cummings said smoothly. “Only the most unusual circumstances——”

“Rubbish!” Whatever this old coot was living for it couldn’t have been with the object of outliving his friends; he’d lost his last friend before he’d left the nursery. “Amanda! Get the captain on the phone. At once!”

The tall thin nurse sitting on the high-backed chair by the bedside made to gather up her knitting—an all but finished pale blue cardigan—lying on her knees, but I gestured to her to remain where she was.

“No need to tell the captain, Miss Werner. He knows all about it—he sent us here. We have only one very small request to make of you and Mr. Cerdan——”

“And I have only one very small request to make of you, sir.” His voice cracked into a falsetto, excitement or anger or age or all three of them. “Get the hell out of here!”

I thought about taking a deep breath to calm myself but even that two or three seconds’ delay would only have precipitated another explosion, so I said at once: “Very good, sir. But first I would like to know if either yourself or Miss Werner here heard any strange or unusual sounds inside the past hour or saw anything that struck you as unusual: Our chief steward is missing. So far we have found nothing to explain his disappearance.”

“Missing, hah?” Cerdan snorted. “Probably drunk or asleep.” Then, as an afterthought: “Or both.”

“He is not that sort of man,” Cummings said quietly. “Can you help us?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Miss Werner, the nurse, had a low husky voice. “We heard and saw nothing. Nothing at all that might be of any help. But if there’s anything we can do——”

“There’s nothing for you to do,” Cerdan interrupted harshly, “except your job. We can’t help you, gentlemen. Good evening.”

Once more outside in the passageway I let go a long deep breath that I seemed to have been holding for the past two minutes and turned to Cummings.

“I don’t care how much that old battle-axe is paying for his stateroom,” I said bitterly. “He’s still being undercharged.”

“I can see why Mr. and Mrs. Cerdan, Junior, were glad to have him off their hands for a bit,” Cummings conceded. Coming from the normally imperturbable and diplomatic purser, this was the uttermost limit in outright condemnation. He glanced at his watch. “Not getting anywhere, are we? And in another fifteen, twenty minutes the passengers will start drifting back to their cabins. How about if you finish off here while I go below with White?”

“Right. Ten minutes.” I took the keys from White and started on the remaining four suites of cabins while Cummings left for the six on the deck below.

Ten minutes later, having drawn a complete blank in three of the four remaining suites, I found myself in the last of them, the big one on the port side, aft, belonging to Julius Beresford and his family. I searched the cabin belonging to Beresford and his wife—and by this time I was really searching, not just only for Benson, but for any signs that he might have been there—but again a blank. The same in the lounge and bathroom. I moved into a second and smaller cabin—the one belonging to Beresford’s daughter. Nothing behind the furniture, nothing behind the drapes, nothing under the four-poster. I moved to the aft bulkhead and slid back the roll doors that turned that entire side of the cabin into one huge wardrobe.

Miss Susan Beresford, I reflected, certainly did herself well in the way of clothes. There must have been about sixty or seventy hangers in that wall cupboard, and if any one hanger was draped with anything less than two or three hundred dollars I sadly missed my guess. I ploughed my way through the Balenciagas, Diors and Givenchys, looking behind and beneath. But nothing there.

I closed the roll doors and moved across to a small wardrobe in a corner. It was full of furs, coats, capes, stoles; why anyone should haul that stuff along on a cruise to the Caribbean was completely beyond me. I laid my hand on a particularly fine full-length specimen and was moving it to one side to peer into the darkness behind when I heard a faint click, as of a handle being released, and a voice said:

“It is rather a nice mink, isn’t it, Mr. Carter? That should be worth two years’ salary to you any day.”

III.

Tuesday 9.30 p.m.—10.15 p.m.

Susan Beresford was a beauty, all right. A perfectly oval-shaped face, high cheek-bones, shining auburn hair, eyebrows two shades darker and eyes the greenest green you ever saw, she had all the officers on the ship climbing the walls, even the ones she tormented the life out of. All except Carter, that was. A permanent expression of cool amusement does nothing to endear the wearer to me.

Not, just then, that I had any complaint on that ground. She was neither cool nor amused and that was a fact. Two dull red spots of anger—and was there perhaps a tinge of fear?—touched the tanned cheeks and if the expression on her face didn’t yet indicate the reaction of someone who has just come across a particularly repulsive beetle under a flat stone you could see that it was going to turn into something like that pretty soon, it didn’t require any micrometer to measure the curl at the corner of her mouth. I let the mink drop into place and pulled the wardrobe door to.

“You shouldn’t startle people like that,” I said reproachfully. “You should have knocked.”

“I should have——” Her mouth tightened, she still wasn’t amused. “What were you going to do with that coat?”

“Nothing. I never wear mink, Miss Beresford. It doesn’t suit me.” I smiled, but she didn’t. “I can explain.”

“I’m sure you can.” She was half-way round the edge of the door now, on her way out. “But I think I would rather you made the explanation to my father.”

“Suit yourself,” I said easily. “But please hurry. What I’m doing is urgent. Use the phone there. Or shall I do it?”

“Leave that phone alone,” she said irritably. She sighed, closed the door and leaned against it, and I had to admit that any door, even the expensively-panelled ones on the Campari, looked twice the door with Susan Beresford draped against it. She shook her head, then gave me an up from under look with those startling green eyes. “I can picture many things, Mr. Carter, but one thing I can’t visualise is our worthy chief officer taking off for some deserted island in a ship’s lifeboat with my mink in the sternsheets.” Getting back to normal, I noted with regret. “Besides, why should you? There must be over fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery lying loose in that drawer there.”

“I missed that,” I admitted. “I wasn’t looking in drawers. I am looking for a man who is sick or unconscious or worse and Benson wouldn’t fit into any drawer I’ve ever seen.”

“Benson? Our head steward? That nice man?” She came a couple of steps towards me and I was obscurely pleased to see the quick concern in her eyes. “He’s missing?”

I told her all I knew myself. That didn’t take long. When I was finished, she said: “Well, upon my word! What a to-do about nothing. He could have gone for a stroll around the decks, or a sit-down, or a smoke, yet the first thing you do is to start searching cabins——”

“You don’t know Benson, Miss Beresford. He has never in his life left the passenger accommodation before 11 p.m. We couldn’t be more concerned if we’d found that the officer of the watch had disappeared from the bridge or the quartermaster left the wheel. Excuse me a moment.” I opened the cabin door to locate the source of voices outside, and saw White and another steward some way down the passage. White’s eyes lit up as he caught sight of me, then clouded in disapproval when he saw Susan Beresford emerging through the doorway behind me. White’s sense of propriety was having a roller-coaster ride that night.

“I was wondering where you were, sir,” he said reprovingly. “Mr. Cummings sent me up. No luck down below, I’m afraid, sir. Mr. Cummings is going through our quarters now.” He stood still for a moment, then the anxiety came to the foreground and erased the disapproval from his face. “What shall I do now, sir?”

“Nothing. Not personally. You’re in charge till we find the chief steward, and the passengers come first, you know that. Detail the stewards to be at the for’ard entrance to the ‘A’ accommodation in ten minutes’ time. One to search the officers’ quarters for’ard, another for the officers’ quarters aft, the third for the galleys, pantries, store-rooms. But wait till I give the word. Miss Beresford, I’d like to use your phone, please.”

I didn’t wait for permission. I lifted the phone, got the exchange, and had them put me through to the bo’sun’s cabin and found I was lucky. He was at home.

“MacDonald? First mate here. Sorry to call you out, Archie, but there’s trouble. Benson’s missing.”

“The chief steward, sir?” There was something infinitely reassuring about that deep slow voice that had never lost a fraction of its lilting West Highland intonation in twenty years at sea, in the complete lack of surprise or excitement in the tone. MacDonald was never surprised or excited about anything. He was more than my strong right arm, he was deck-side the most important person on the ship. And the most indispensable. “You’ll have searched the passengers’ and the stewards’ quarters, then?”

“Yes. Nothing doing. Take some men, on or off watch, doesn’t matter, move along the main decks. Lots of the crew usually up there at this time of night. See if any of them saw Benson, or saw or heard anything unusual. Maybe he’s sick, maybe he fell and hurt himself, for all I know he’s overboard.”

“And if we have no luck? Another bloody search, sir, I suppose?”

“I’m afraid so. Can you be finished and up here in ten minutes?”

“That will be no trouble, sir.”

I hung up, got through to the duty engineer officer, asked him to detail some men to come to the passenger accommodation, made another call to Tommy Wilson, the second officer, then asked to be put through to the captain. While I was waiting, Miss Beresford gave me her smile again, the sweet one with too much malice in it for my liking.

“My, my,” she said admiringly. “Aren’t we efficient? Phoning here, phoning there, crisp and commanding, General Carter planning his campaign. This is a new chief officer to me.”

“A lot of unnecessary fuss,” I said apologetically. “Especially for a steward. But he’s got a wife and three daughters who think the sun rises and sets on him.”

She coloured right up to the roots of her auburn hair and for a moment I thought she was going to haul off and hit me. Then she spun on her heel, walked across the deep-piled carpet and stood staring out through a window to the darkness beyond. I’d never realised before that a back could be so expressive of emotion.

Then Captain Bullen was on the phone. His voice was as gruff and brusque as usual, but even the metallic impersonality of the phone couldn’t hide the worry.

“Any luck yet, Mister?”

“None at all, sir. I’ve a search party lined up. Could I start in five minutes?”

There was a pause, then he said: “It has to come to that, I suppose. How long will it take you?”

“Twenty minutes, half an hour.”

“You’re going to be very quick about it, aren’t you?”

“I don’t expect him to be hiding from us, sir. Whether he’s sick or hurt himself, or had some urgent reason for leaving the passengers’ quarters, I expect to find him in some place pretty obvious.”

He grunted and said: “Nothing I can do to help?” Half-question, half-statement.

“No, sir.” The sight of the captain searching about the upper deck or peering under lifeboat covers would do nothing to increase the passengers’ confidence in the Campari.

“Right then, Mister. If you want me, I’ll be in the telegraph lounge. I’ll try to keep the passengers out of your hair while you’re getting on with it.” That showed he was worried all right, and badly worried; he’d just as soon have gone into a cageful of Bengal tigers as mingle socially with the passengers.

“Very good, sir.” I hung up. Susan Beresford had re-crossed the cabin and was standing near, screwing a cigarette into a jade holder about a foot in length. I found the holder vaguely irritating as I found everything about Miss Beresford irritating, not least the way she stood there confidently awaiting a light. I wondered when Miss Beresford had last been reduced to lighting her own cigarettes. Not in years, I supposed, not so long as there was a man within a hundred yards. She got her light, puffed out a lazy cloud of smoke and said: “A search party, is it? Should be interesting. You can count on me.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Beresford.” I must say I didn’t sound sorry. “Ship’s company business. The captain wouldn’t like it.”

“Nor his first officer, is that it? Don’t bother to answer that one.” She looked at me consideringly. “But I could be unco-operative, too. What would you say if I picked up this phone and told my parents I’d just caught you going through our personal belongings?”

“I should like that, lady. I know your parents. I should like to see you being spanked for behaving like a spoilt child when a man’s life may be in danger.”

The colour in the high cheek-bones was going on and off like a neon light that evening. Now it was on again; she wasn’t by a long way as composed and detached as she’d like the world to think. She stubbed out the newly-lit cigarette and said quietly: “How would it be if I reported you for insolence?”

“Don’t just stand there talking about it. The phone’s by your side.” When she made no move towards it I went on: “Quite frankly, lady, you and your kind make me sick. You use your father’s great wealth and your privileged position as a passenger on the Campari to poke fun, more often than not malicious fun, at members of the crew who are unable to retaliate. They’ve just got to sit and take it, because they’re not like you. They have no money in the bank at all, most of them, but they have families to feed, mothers to support, so they know they have to keep smiling at Miss Beresford when she cracks jokes at their expense or embarrasses or angers them, because if they don’t, Miss Beresford and her kind will see to it that they’re out of a job.”

“Please go on,” she said. She had suddenly become very still.

“That’s all of it. Misuse of power, even in so small a thing, is contemptible. And then, when anyone dares retaliate, as I do, you threaten them with dismissal, which is what your threat amounts to. And that’s worse than contemptible, it’s cowardly.”

I turned and made for the door. First I’d look for Benson, then I’d tell Bullen I was quitting. I was getting tired of the Campari anyway.

“Mr. Carter.”

“Yes?” I turned, but kept my hand on the door-knob. The colour mechanism in her cheeks was certainly working overtime, this time she’d gone pale under the tan. She took a couple of steps towards me and put her hand on my arm. Her hand wasn’t any too steady.

“I am very, very sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I had no idea. Amusement I like, but not malicious amusement. I thought—well, I thought it was harmless, and no one minded. And I would never never dream of putting anyone’s job in danger.”

“Ha!” I said.

“You don’t believe me.” Still the same small voice, still the hand on my arm.

“Of course I believe you,” I said unconvincingly. And then I looked into her eyes, which was a big mistake and a very dangerous thing to do for those big green eyes, I noticed for the first time, had a curious trick of melting and dissolving that could interfere very seriously with a man’s breathing. It was certainly interfering with my breathing. “Of course I believe you,” I repeated and this time the ring of conviction staggered even myself. “You will please forgive my rudeness. But I must hurry, Miss Beresford.”

“Can I come with you, please?”

“Oh, damn it all, yes,” I said irritably. I’d managed to look away from her eyes and start breathing again. “Come if you want.”

At the for’ard end of the passageway, just beyond the entrance to Cerdan’s suite, I ran into Carreras Senior. He was smoking a cigar and had that look of contentment and satisfaction that passengers invariably had when Antoine was finished with them.

“Ah, there you are, Mr. Carter,” he said. “Wondered why you hadn’t returned to our table. What is wrong, if I may ask? There must be at least a dozen of the crew gathered outside the accommodation entrance. I thought regulations forbade——”

“They’re waiting for me, sir. Benson—you probably haven’t had the chance to meet him since you came aboard, he’s our chief steward—is missing. That’s a search-party outside.”

“Missing?” The grey eyebrows went up. “What on earth—well, of course you haven’t any idea what has happened to him or you wouldn’t be organising this search. Can I help?”

I hesitated, thought of Miss Beresford, who had already elbowed her way in, realised I’d now no way of stopping any or all of the passengers from getting into the act if they wanted to and said: “Thank you, Mr. Carreras. You don’t look like a man who would miss very much.”

“We come from the same mould, Mr. Carter.”

I let his cryptic remark go and hurried outside. A cloudless night, with the sky crowded with the usual impossible number of stars, a soft warm wind blowing out of the south, a moderate cross-swell running, but no match for our Denny-Brown stabilisers that could knock 25 degrees off a 30-degree roll without half trying. A black shape detached itself from a nearby shadowed bulkhead, and Archie MacDonald, the bo’sun, came towards me. For all his solid fifteen stone bulk he was as light on his feet as a dancer.

“Any luck, Bo’sun?” I asked.

“No one saw anything: no one heard anything. And there were at least a dozen folk on deck tonight, between eight and nine.”

“Mr. Wilson there? Ah, there. Mr. Wilson, take the engine-room staff and three A.B.s Main deck and below. You should know where to look by this time,” I added bitterly. “MacDonald, you and I will do the upper decks. Port side you, starboard side me. Two seamen and a cadet. Half an hour. Then back here.”

I sent one man to examine the boat positions—why Benson should have wished to get into a boat I couldn’t even imagine except that lifeboats have always a queer attraction for those who wished to hide, although why he should wish to hide I couldn’t guess either—and another to scour the top superstructure abaft the bridge. I started going through the various cabins on the boat-deck, chart-house, flag and radar cabins, and had Mr. Carreras to help me. Rusty, our youngest apprentice, went aft to work his way for’ard, accompanied by Miss Beresford, who had probably guessed, and rightly, that I was in no mood for her company. But Rusty was. He always was. Nothing that Susan Beresford said to or about him made the slightest difference to him. He was her slave and didn’t care who knew it. If she’d asked him to jump down the funnel, just for her sake, he’d have considered it an honour: I could just imagine him searching about the upper decks with Susan Beresford by his side, his face the same colour as his flaming shock of hair.

As I stepped out of the radar office I literally bumped into him. He was panting, as if he’d run a long way, and I could see I had been wrong about the colour of his face: in the half-light on the deck it looked grey, like old newspaper.

“Radio office, sir.” He gasped out the words, and caught my arm, a thing he would never normally have dreamed of doing. “Come quickly, sir. Please.”

I was already running. “You found him?”

“No, sir. It’s Mr. Brownell.” Brownell was our chief wireless operator. “Something seems to have happened to him.”

I reached the office in ten seconds, brushed past the pale blur of Susan Beresford standing just outside the door, crossed over the storm-sill and stopped.

Brownell had the overhead rheostat turned down until the room was less than half-lit, a fairly common practice among radio operators on duty night watches. He was leaning forward over his table, his head pillowed on his right forearm, so that all I could see was his shoulders, dark hair and a bald spot that had been the bane of his life. His left hand was outflung, his fingers just brushing the bridge telephone. The transmitting key was sending continuously. I eased the right forearm forward a couple of inches. The transmitting stopped.

I felt for the pulse in the outstretched left wrist. I felt for the pulse in the side of the neck. I turned to Susan Beresford, still standing in the doorway, and said: “Do you have a mirror.” She nodded wordlessly, fumbled in her bag and handed over a compact, opened, the mirror showing. I turned up the rheostat till the radio cabin was harsh with light, moved Brownell’s head slightly, held the mirror near mouth and nostrils for maybe ten seconds, took it away, glanced at it and then handed it back.

“Something’s happened to him all right,” I said. My voice was steady, unnaturally so. “He’s dead. Or I think he’s dead. Rusty, get Dr. Marston right away, he’s usually in the telegraph lounge this time of night. Tell the captain, if he’s there. Not a word to anyone else about this.”

Rusty disappeared, and another figure appeared to take his place beside Susan Beresford in the doorway. Carreras. He stopped, one foot over the storm-sill, and said: “My God! Benson.”

“No, Brownell. Wireless officer. I think he’s dead.” On the off-chance that Bullen hadn’t yet gone down to the lounge I reached for the bulkhead phone labelled “Captain’s Cabin” and waited for an answer, staring down at the dead man sprawled across the table. Middle-aged, cheerful, his only harmless idiosyncrasy being an unusual vanity about his personal appearance that had once even driven him to the length of buying a toupee for his bald spot—public shipboard opinion had forced him to discard it—Brownell was one of the most popular and genuinely liked officers on the ship. Was? Had been. I heard the click of a lifted receiver.

“Captain? Carter here. Could you come down to the wireless office? At once, please.”

“Benson?”

“Brownell. Dead, sir, I think.”

There was a pause, a click. I hung up, reached for another phone that connected directly to the radio officers’ cabins. We had three radio officers and the one with the middle watch, from midnight to 4 a.m., usually skipped dinner in the dining-room and made for his bunk instead. A voice answered: “Peters here.”

“First mate. Sorry to disturb you, but come up to the radio room right away.”

“What’s up?”

“You’ll find out when you get here.”

The overhead light seemed far too bright for a room with a dead man in it. I turned down the rheostat and the white glare was replaced by a deep yellow glow. Rusty’s face appeared in the doorway. He didn’t seem so pale any more but maybe the subdued light was just being kind to him.

“Surgeon’s coming, sir.” His breathing was quicker than ever. “Just picking up his bag in the dispensary.”

“Thanks. Go and fetch the bo’sun, will you. And no need to kill yourself running, Rusty. There’s no great hurry now.”

He left, and Susan Beresford said in a low voice: “What’s wrong? What —what happened to him?”

“You shouldn’t be here, Miss Beresford.”

“What happened to him?” she repeated.

“That’s for the ship’s surgeon to say. Looks to me as if he just died where he sat. Heart attack, coronary thrombosis, something like that.”

She shivered, made no reply. Dead men were no new thing to me but the faint icy prickling on the back of my neck and spine made me feel like shivering myself. The warm trade wind seemed cooler, much cooler, than it had a few minutes ago.

Doctor Marston appeared. No running, no haste even, with Dr. Marston: a slow measured man with a slow measured stride. A magnificent mane of white hair, clipped white moustache, a singularly smooth and unlined complexion for a man getting so far on in years, steady clear keen blue eyes with a peculiarly penetrating property, here, you knew instinctively, was a doctor who you could trust implicitly, which only went to show that your instinct should be taken away from you and locked up in some safe place where it couldn’t do you any harm. Admittedly, even to look at him made you feel better, and that was all right as far as it went: but to go further, to put your life into his hands, say, was a very different and dicey proposition altogether for there was an even chance that you wouldn’t get it back again. Those piercing eyes had not lighted on the Lancet or made any attempt to follow the latest medical developments since quite a few years prior to the Second World War. But they didn’t have to: he and Lord Dexter had gone through prep school, public school and university together and his job was secure as long as he could lift a stethoscope. And, to be fair to him, when it came to treating wealthy and hypochondriacal old ladies he had no equal on the seven seas.

“Well, John,” he boomed. With the exception of Captain Bullen, he addressed every officer on the ship by his first name exactly as a public school headmaster would have addressed one of his more promising pupils, but a pupil that needed watching all the same. “What’s the trouble? Beau Brownell taken a turn?”

“Worse than that, I’m afraid, Doctor. Dead.”

“Good lord! Brownell? Dead? Let me see, let me see. A little more light if you please, John.” He dumped his bag on the table, fished out his stethoscope, sounded Brownell here and there, took his pulse and then straightened with a sigh. “In the midst of life, John … and not recently, either. Temperature’s high in here but I should say he’s been gone well over an hour.”

I could see the dark bulk of Captain Bullen in the doorway now, waiting, listening, saying nothing.

“Heart attack, Doctor?” I ventured. After all he wasn’t all that incompetent, just a quarter century out of date.

“Let me see, let me see,” he repeated. He turned Brownell’s head and looked closely at it. He had to look closely. He was unaware that everyone in the ship knew that, piercing blue eyes or not, he was as short-sighted as a dodo, and refused to wear glasses. “Ah, look at this. The tongue, the lips, the eyes, above all the complexion. No doubt about it, no doubt about it at all. Cerebral hæmorrhage. Massive. And at his age. How old, John?”

“Forty-seven, eight. Thereabouts.”

“Forty-seven. Just forty-seven.” He shook his head. “Gets them younger every day. The stress of modern living.”

“And that outstretched hand, Doctor?” I asked. “Reaching for the phone. You think——”

“Just confirms my diagnosis, alas. Felt it coming on, tried to call for help, but it was too sudden, too massive. Poor old Beau Brownell.” He turned, caught sight of Bullen looming in the doorway. “Ah, there you are, Captain. A bad business, a bad business.”

“A bad business,” Bullen agreed heavily. “Miss Beresford, you have no right to be here. You’re cold and shivering. Go to your cabin at once.” When Captain Bullen spoke in that tone, the Beresford millions didn’t seem to matter any more. “Doctor Marston will bring you a sedative later.”

“And perhaps Mr. Carreras will be so kind!——” I began.

“Certainly,” Carreras agreed at once. “I will be honoured to see the young lady to her cabin.” He bowed slightly, offered her his arm. She seemed more than glad to take it and they disappeared.

Five minutes later all was back to normal in the radio cabin. Peters had taken the dead man’s place, Dr. Marston had returned to his favourite occupation of mingling socially and drinking steadily with our millionaires, the captain had given me his instructions, I’d passed them on to the bo’sun and Brownell, canvas-wrapped, had been taken for’ard to the carpenter’s store.

I stayed in the wireless office for a few minutes, talking to a very shaken Peters, and looked casually at the latest radio message that had come through. All radio messages were written down in duplicate as received, the original for the bridge and the carbon for the daily spiked file.

I lifted the topmost message from the file, but it was nothing very important, just a warning of deteriorating weather far to the south-east of Cuba which might or might not build up into a hurricane. Routine and too far away to bother us. I lifted the blank message pad that lay by Peters’s elbow.

“May I have this?”

“Help yourself.” He was still too upset even to be curious as to why I wanted it. “Plenty more where that came from.”

I left him, walked up and down the deck outside for some time, then made my way to the captain’s cabin where I’d been told to report when I was through. He was in his usual seat by the desk with Cummings and the chief engineer sitting on the settee. The presence of McIlroy, a short, stout Tynesider with the facial expression and hair style of Friar Tuck, meant a very worried Captain and a council of war. McIlroy’s brilliance wasn’t confined to reciprocating engines, that plump laughter-creased face concealed a brain that was probably the shrewdest on the Campari, and that included Mr. Julius Beresford, who must have been very shrewd indeed to make his three hundred million dollars or whatever it was.

“Sit down, Mister, sit down,” Bullen growled. The “Mister “didn’t mean I was in his black books, just another sign that he was worried. “No signs of Benson yet?”

“No sign at all.”

“What a bloody trip!” Bullen pushed across a tray with whisky and glasses on it, unaccustomedly open-handed liberality that was just another sign of his worry. “Help yourself, Mister.”

“Thank you sir.” I helped myself lavishly, the chance didn’t come often, and went on: “What are we going to do about Brownell?”

“What the devil do you mean ‘What are we going to do about Brownell’? He’s got no folks to notify, no consent to get about anything. Head office has been informed. Burial at sea at dawn, before our passengers are up and about. Mustn’t spoil their blasted trip, I suppose.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to take him to Nassau, sir?”

“Nassau?” He stared at me over the rim of his glass, then lowered it carefully to the table. “Just because a man has died you don’t have to go off your blasted rocker, do you?”

“Nassau or some other British territory. Or Miami. Some place where we can get competent authorities, police authorities, to investigate things.”

“What things, Johnny?” McIlroy asked. He had his head cocked to one side like a fat and well-stuffed owl.

“Yes, what things?” Bullen’s tone was quite different from McIlroy’s. “Just because the search party hasn’t turned up Benson yet, you——”

“I’ve called off the search-party, sir.”

Bullen pushed back his chair till his hands rested on the table at the full stretch of his arms.

“You’ve called off the search party,” he said softly. “Who the hell gave you authority to do anything of the kind.”

“No one, sir. But I——”

“Why did you do it, Johnny?” McIlroy again, very quietly.

“Because we’ll never see Benson again. Not alive, that is, Benson’s dead. Benson’s been killed.”

No one said anything, not for all of ten seconds. The sound of the cool air rushing through the louvres in the overhead trunking seemed abnormally loud. The captain said harshly: “Killed? Benson killed? Are you all right, Mister? What do you mean, killed?”

“Murdered is what I mean.”

“Murdered? Murdered?” McIlroy shifted uneasily in his chair. “Have you seen him? Have you any proof? How can you say he was murdered?”

“I haven’t seen him. And I haven’t any proof. Not a scrap of evidence.” I caught a glimpse of the purser sitting there, his hands twisting together and his eyes staring at me, and I remembered that Benson had been his best friend for close on twenty years. “But I have proof that Brownell was murdered tonight. And I can tie the two together.”

There was an even longer silence.

“You’re mad,” Bullen said at length with harsh conviction. “So now Brownell’s been murdered too. You’re mad, Mister, off your bloody trolley. You heard what Dr. Marston said? Massive cerebral hæmorrhage. But of course he’s only a doctor of forty years’ standing. He wouldn’t know——”

“How about giving me a chance, sir,” I interrupted. My voice sounded as harsh as his own. “I know he’s a doctor. I also know he hasn’t very good eyes. But I have. I saw what he missed. I saw a dark smudge on the back of Brownell’s uniform collar—and when has anybody on this ship ever seen a mark on any shirt that Brownell ever wore? They didn’t call him Beau Brownell for nothing. Somebody had hit him, with something heavy and with tremendous force, on the back of the neck. There was also a faint discoloration under the left ear—I could see it as he lay there. When the bo’sun and I got him down to the carpenter’s store we examined him together. There was a corresponding slight bruise under his right ear—and traces of sand under his collar. Someone sandbagged him and then, when he was unconscious, compressed the carotid arteries until he died. Go and see for yourselves.”

“Not me,” McIlroy murmured. You could see that even his normally monolithic composure had been shaken. “Not me. I believe it—absolutely. It would be too easy to disprove it. I believe it all right—but I still can’t accept it.”

“But damn it all, Chief!” Bullen’s fists were clenched.

“The doctor said that——”

“I’m no medical man,” McIlroy interrupted. “But I should imagine the symptoms are pretty much the same in both cases. Can hardly blame old Marston.”

Bullen ignored him, gave me the full benefit of his commodore’s stare.

“Look, Mister,” he said slowly. “You’ve changed your tune, haven’t you? When I was there, you agreed with Dr. Marston. You even put forward the heart failure idea. You showed no signs ——”

“Miss Beresford and Mr. Carreras were there,” I interrupted. “I didn’t want them to start getting wrong ideas. If word got around the ship—and it would have been bound to—that we suspected murder, then whoever was responsible might have felt themselves forced to act again, and act quickly, to forestall any action we might take. I don’t know what they might do, but on the form to date it would have been something damned unpleasant.”

“Miss Beresford? Mr. Carreras?” Bullen had stopped clenching his hands but you could see that it wouldn’t take much to make him start up again. “Miss Beresford is above suspicion. But Carreras? And his son? Just aboard today—and in most unusual circumstances. It just might tie up.”

“It doesn’t. I checked. Carreras Senior and Junior had both been in either the telegraph lounge or the dining-room for almost two hours before we found Brownell. They’re completely in the clear.”

“Besides being too obvious,” McIlroy agreed. “I think, Captain, it’s time we took our hats of to Mr. Carter here: he’s been getting around and using his head while all we have been doing is twiddling our thumbs.”

“Benson,” Captain Bullen said. He didn’t show any signs of taking off his hat. “How about Benson? How does he tie up?”

“This way.” I slid the empty telegraph book across the table. “I checked the last message that was received and went to the bridge. Routine weather report. Time, 2007. But later there was another message written on this pad: original, carbon, duplicate. The message is indecipherable—but to people with modern police equipment it would be child’s play to find out what was written there. What is decipherable is the impression of the last two time figures. Look for yourself. It’s quite clear. 33. That means 2033. A message came through at that moment, a message so urgent in nature that, instead of waiting for the routine bridge messenger collection, Brownell made to phone it through at once. That was why his hand was reaching for the phone when we found him, not because he was feeling ill all of a sudden. And then he was killed. Whoever killed him had to kill. Knocking Brownell out and stealing the message would have accomplished nothing for as soon as he would have come to he would have remembered the contents of the message and immediately sent it to the bridge. It must,” I added thoughtfully, “have been a damned important message.”

“Benson,” Bullen repeated impatiently. “How about Benson?”

“Benson was the victim of a lifetime of habit. Howie here tells us how Benson invariably went out on deck between half past eight and twenty-five to nine for a smoke, while the passengers were at dinner. The radio room is immediately above where he would have been taking his promenade—and the message came through, and Brownell was killed, inside those five minutes. Benson must have seen or heard something unusual and gone to investigate. He might even have caught the murderer in the act. And so Benson had to die too.”

“But why?” Captain Bullen demanded. He still couldn’t believe it all. “Why, why, why? Why was he killed? Why was that message so desperately important? The whole damned thing’s crazy. And what in God’s name was in that message anyway?”

“That’s why we’ve got to go to Nassau to find out, sir.”

Bullen looked at me without expression, looked at his drink, evidently decided that he preferred his drink to me—or the ill news I brought with me—and knocked back the contents in a couple of gulps.

McIlroy didn’t touch his. He sat there for a whole minute looking at it consideringly, then he said: “You haven’t missed much, Johnny. But you’ve missed one thing. The wireless officer on watch—Peters, isn’t it? How do you know the same message won’t come through again? Maybe it was a message requiring acknowledgment? If it was, and it’s not acknowledged, it’s pretty certain to come through again. Then what’s the guarantee that Peters won’t get the same treatment?”

“The bo’sun’s the guarantee, Chief. He’s sitting in black shadow not ten yards from the wireless office with a marlin-spike in his hand and Highland murder in his heart. You know MacDonald. Heaven help anyone who goes within a Sunday walk of the wireless office.”

Bullen poured himself another small whisky, smiled tiredly and glanced at his single broad commodore’s stripe.

“Mr. Carter, I think you and I should change jackets.” It was as far in apology as he could ever go and about twelve hours ahead of par. “Think you’d like this side of my desk?”

“Suit me fine, sir,” I agreed. “Especially if you took over entertaining the passengers.”

“In that case we’ll stay as we are.” Another brief smile, no sooner there than vanished. “Who’s on the bridge? Jamieson, isn’t it? Better take over, First.”

“Later, sir, with your permission. There’s still the most important thing of all to investigate. But I don’t even know how to start.”

“Don’t tell me there’s something else,” Bullen said heavily.

“I’ve had some time to think about this, that’s all,” I said. “A message came through to our wireless office, a message so important that it had to be intercepted at all costs. But how could anybody possibly know that message was coming through? The only way that message could have come into the Campari was through a pair of earphones clamped to Brownell’s head, yet someone else was taking down that message at the same instant as Brownell was. Must have been. Brownell had no sooner finished transcribing that message on to his pad than he reached for the phone to get the bridge, and he no sooner reached for the phone than he died. There’s some other radio receiver aboard the Campari tuned into the same wave-length and wherever it is it’s not a hop, skip and jump from the wireless office, for wherever the eavesdropper was he got from there to the wireless office in seconds. Problem, find the receiver.”

Bullen looked at me. McIlroy looked at me. They both looked at each other. Then McIlroy objected: “But the wireless officer keeps shifting wave-lengths. How could anybody know what particular wave-length he was on at any one moment?”

“How can anyone know anything?” I asked. I nodded at the message pad on the table. “Until we get that deciphered.”

“The message.” Bullen gazed at the pad, abruptly made up his mind. “Nassau it is. Maximum speed, Chief, but slowly, over half an hour, so that no one will notice the step up in revs. First, the bridge. Get our position.” He fetched chart, rules, dividers while I was getting the figures, nodded at me as I hung up. “Lay off the shortest possible course.”

It didn’t take long. “047 from here to here, sir, approximately 220 miles, then 350.”

“Arrival?”

“Maximum speed?”

“Of course.”

“Just before midnight tomorrow night.”

He reached for a pad, scribbled for a minute, then read out: “‘Port authorities, Nassau, s.s. Campari, position such-and-such, arriving 2330 tomorrow Wednesday. Request police alongside immediate investigation one murdered man, one missing man. Urgent. Bullen, Master.’ That should do.” He reached for the phone. I touched his arm.

“Whoever has this receiver can monitor outgoing calls just as easily as incoming ones. Then they’ll know we’re on to them. God only knows what might happen then.”

Bullen looked slowly first at me, then at McIlroy, then at the purser, who hadn’t spoken a word since I’d arrived in the cabin, then back at me again. Then he tore the message into tiny shreds and dropped it into his waste-paper basket.

IV.

Tuesday 10.15 p.m—Wednesday 8.45 a.m.

I didn’t get a great deal of investigating done that night. I’d figured out how to start, all right, but the devil of it was I couldn’t start till the passengers were up and about in the morning. Nobody likes being turfed out of his bed in the middle of the night, a millionaire least of all.

After having cautiously identified myself to the bo’sun to ensure that I didn’t get the back of my head stove in with a marline-spike, I spent a good fifteen minutes in the vicinity of the wireless office relating its position to other offices and nearby accommodation. The wireless office was on the starboard side, for’ard, immediately above the passengers’ “A” deck accommodation—old man Cerdan’s suite was directly below—and on the basis of my assumption that the murderer, even if he didn’t wait for the last few words of the message to come through, could have had no more time than ten seconds to get from wherever the hidden receiver was to the wireless office, then any place within ten seconds’ reach of the wireless office automatically came under suspicion.

There were quite a few places within the suspected limits. There was the bridge, flag office, radar office, chart-room and all the deck officers’ and cadets’ accommodation. Those could be ruled out at once. There was the dining-room, galleys, pantries, officers’ lounge, telegraph lounge, and, immediately adjacent to the telegraph lounge, another lounge which rejoiced in the name of the drawing-room—it having been found necessary to provide an alternative lounge for our millionaire’s wives and daughters who weren’t all so keen on the alcoholic and ticker-tape attractions of the telegraph lounge as their husbands and fathers were. I spent forty minutes going through those—they were all deserted at that time of night—and if anyone had yet invented a transistor receiver smaller than a matchbox, then I might have missed it: but anything larger, I’d have found it for sure.

That left only the passengers’ accommodation, with the cabins on “A” deck, immediately below the wireless office, as the prime suspects. The “B” deck suites, on the next deck below, were not out-with the bounds of possibility: but when I ran a mental eye over the stiff-legged bunch of elderly crocks on “B” deck, I couldn’t think of a man among them who could have made it to the wireless office in under ten seconds. And it certainly hadn’t been a woman: Because whoever had killed Brownell had not only also laid out Benson but removed him from sight, and Benson weighed a hundred and eighty pounds if he weighed an ounce.

So, “A” or “B” decks. Both of them would have to go through the sieve tomorrow. I prayed for good weather to tempt our passengers out on to the sun-decks to give the stewards, in the course of making up beds and cleaning out the cabins, the chance to carry out a thorough search. The Customs in Jamaica, of course, had already done this; but they had been looking for a mechanism over six feet in length, not a radio which, in those days of miniaturisation, could easily have been hidden in, say, one of those hefty jewel-boxes which were the run of the mill among our millionaires’ wives.

We were running almost due north-east now, under the same indigo sky ablaze with stars, the Campari rolling gently as it sliced along the line of the long slow swell. We’d taken almost half an hour to make an eighty degree change of course so that no night-owl passenger abroad on deck could see the changing direction of our wake: not that those precautions were going to be of any use if any of our passengers had the faintest idea of stellar navigation or, come to that, the very elementary ability to locate the Pole Star.

I was walking slowly up the boat-deck, port side, when I saw Captain Bullen approaching. He lifted his arm, motioned me into the deep shadow cast by one of the ship’s lifeboats.

“Thought I would find you here or hereabouts,” he said softly. He reached under his jacket and pressed something cold and hard into my hand. “I believe you know how to use one of those.”

Starlight glinted dully off the blued metal in my hand. A Colt automatic, one of the three kept on a locked chain in a glass cabinet in the captain’s sleeping cabin. Captain Bullen was certainly taking things seriously at last.

“I can use it, sir.”

“Right. Stick it in your belt or wherever you stick those damned things. Never realised they were so blasted awkward to conceal about your person. And here’s a spare magazine. Hope to God we don’t have to use them.” Which meant the captain had one also.

“The third gun, sir?”

“I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Wilson, I thought.”

“He’s a good man. But give it to the bo’sun.”

“The bo’sun?” Bullen’s voice sharpened, then he remembered the need for secrecy and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial growl. “You know the regulations, Mister. Those guns to be used only in times of war, piracy or mutiny—and never to be issued to anyone other than an officer.”

“The regulations don’t concern me half as much as my own neck does, sir. You know MacDonald’s record—youngest-ever sergeant-major in the Commandos, a list of decorations as long as your arm. Give it to MacDonald, sir.”

“We’ll see,” he grunted, “we’ll see. I’ve just been to the carpenter’s store. With Doc Marston. First time I’ve ever seen that old phoney shaken to the core. He agrees with you, says there’s no doubt Brownell was murdered. You’d think he was up in the dock of the Old Bailey with the alibis he’s giving himself. But I think McIlroy was right when he said the symptoms were about the same.”

“Well,” I said doubtfully. “I hope nothing comes of it, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know old Doc Marston as well as I do, sir. The two great loves of his life are Jamaica rum and the desire to give the impression that he’s on the inside of everything that goes on. A dangerous combination. Apart from McIlroy, the purser, yourself and myself the only person who knows that Brownell didn’t die a natural death is the bo’sun, and he’d never talk. Doc Marston is a different proposition altogether.”

“Not to worry, my boy,” Bullen said with something like relish in his voice. “I told our worthy surgeon that, Lord Dexter’s pal or not, if he as much as lifted a glass of rum before we arrived in Nassau, I’d have him on the beach, for good, within the week.”

I tried to imagine anyone telling the venerable and aristocratic doctor anything of the sort: my mind boggled at the very thought. But they hadn’t made old Bullen company commodore for nothing. I knew he’d done exactly as stated.

“He didn’t take off any of Brownell’s clothes?” I asked. “His shirt, for instance?”

“No. What does it matter?”

“It’s just that it’s probable that whoever strangled Brownell had his fingers locked round the back of the neck to give him leverage, and I believe that police today can pick up fingerprints from practically any substance, including certain types of clothes. They shouldn’t have much trouble picking up prints from those nice shiny starched collars Brownell wore.”

“You don’t miss much,” Bullen said thoughfully. “Except that maybe you’ve missed your profession. Anything else?”

“Yes. About this burial at sea tomorrow at dawn.”

There was a long pause, then he said with the blasphemously weary restraint of a long-suffering man who has already held himself in check far too long: “What bloody burial at dawn? Brownell is our only exhibition for the Nassau police.”

“Burial, sir,” I repeated. “But not at dawn. About, say, eight o’clock, when a fair number of our passengers will be up and about, having their morning constitutional. This is what I mean, sir.”

I told him what I meant and he listened patiently enough, considering. When I was finished he nodded slowly, two or three times in succession, turned and left me without a word.

I moved out into a lane of light between two lifeboats, and glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes past eleven. I’d told MacDonald I’d relieve him at midnight. I walked across to the rail and stood there by a life-jacket locker, staring out over the slow shimmering swell of the sea, hands at arms’ length on the rail, vainly trying to figure out what could possibly lie behind all that had happened that evening.

When I awoke, it was twenty minutes to one. Not that I was immediately aware of the time when I awoke: I wasn’t immediately and clearly aware of anything. It’s difficult to be aware of anything when your head is being squeezed between the jaws of a giant vice and your eyes have gone blind, to be aware of anything, that is, except the vice and the blindness. Blindness. My eyes. I was worried about my eyes. I raised a hand and fumbled around for a while and then I found them. They were filled with something hard and encrusted and when I rubbed the crust came away and there was stickiness beneath. Blood. There was blood in my eyes, blood that was gumming the lids together and making me blind. At least, I hoped vaguely it was blood that was making me blind.

I rubbed some more blood away with the heel of my hand, and then I could see. Not too well, not the way I was used to seeing, the stars in the sky were not the bright pin-points of light to which I was accustomed, but just a pale fuzzy haze seen through a frosted glass window. I reached out a trembling hand and tried to touch this frosted glass but it vanished and dissolved as I reached out, and what my hand touched was cool and metallic. I strained my eyes wide open and saw that there was indeed no glass there, what I was touching was the lowermost bar of the ship’s rail.

I could see better now, at least better than a blind man could. My head was lying in the scuppers, inches away from one of the lifeboat davits. What in God’s name was I doing there with my head in the scuppers, inches away from the davits? I managed to get both hands under me and, with a sudden drunken lurch, heaved myself into a semi-sitting position with one elbow still on the deck. A great mistake, a very great mistake, for at once a blinding agonising pain, that never-recorded pain that must be experienced in the final shattering milli-second of awareness as a plunging guillotine slices through bone, flesh and muscle before crashing into the block beneath, slashed its paralysing way across head, neck and shoulders and toppled me back to the deck again. My head must have struck heavily against the iron of the scuppers, but I don’t think I even moaned.

Slowly, infinitely slowly, consciousness came back to me. Consciousness of a kind. Where clarity and awareness and speed of recovery were concerned I was a man chained hand and foot, surfacing from the bottom of a sea of molasses. Something, I dimly realised, was touching my face, my eyes, my mouth: something cold and moist and sweet. Water. Someone was sponging my face with water, gently trying to mop the blood from my eyes. I made to turn my head to see who it was and then I vaguely remembered what had happened last time I moved my head. I raised my right hand instead and touched someone’s wrist.

“Take it easy, sir. You just take it easy.” The man with the sponge must have had a long arm, he was at least two miles away, but I recognised the voice for all that. Archie MacDonald. “Don’t you try moving now. Just you wait a bit. You’ll be all right, sir.”

“Archie?” We were a real disembodied pair, I thought fuzzily. I was at least a couple of miles away, too. I only hoped we were a couple of miles away in the same direction. “Is that you, Archie?” God knows I didn’t doubt it, I just wanted the reassurance of hearing him say so.

“It’s myself, sir. Just you leave everything to me.” It was the bo’sun all right, he couldn’t have used that sentence more than five thousand times in the years I’d known him. “Just you lie still.”

I’d no intention of doing anything else. I’d be far gone in years before I’d ever forget the last time I moved, if I lived that long, which didn’t seem a bit likely at the moment.

“My neck, Archie.” My voice sounded a few hundred yards closer. “I think it’s broken.”

“Aye, I’m sure it feels that way, sir, but I’m thinking myself maybe it’s not as bad as all that. We’ll see.”

I don’t know how long I lay there, maybe two or three minutes, while the bo’sun swabbed the blood away until eventually the stars began to swim into some sort of focus again. Then he slid one arm under my shoulders and under my head and began to lift me, inch by inch, into a sitting position.

I waited for the guillotine to fall again, but it didn’t. This time it was more like a butcher’s meat-chopper, but a pretty blunt chopper: several times in a few seconds the Campari spun round 360 degrees on its keel, then settled down on course again. 047, I seemed to recall. And this time I didn’t lose consciousness.

“What time is it, Archie?” A stupid question to ask, but I wasn’t at my very best. And my voice, I was glad to hear, was at last practically next door to me.

He turned my left wrist.

“Twelve forty-five, your watch says, sir. I think you must have been lying there a good hour. You were in the shadow of the boat and no one would have seen you if they had passed by this way.”

I moved my head an experimental inch and winced at the pain of it. Two inches and it would fall off.

“What the hell happened to me, Archie? Some kind of turn or other? I don’t remember——”

“Some kind of turn!” His voice was soft and cold. I felt his fingers touch the back of my neck. “Our friend with the sandbag has been taking a walk again, sir. One of those days,” he added thoughtfully, “I’m going to catch him at it.”

“Sandbag!” I struggled to my feet, but I’d never have made it without the bo’sun. “The wireless office! Peters!”

“It’s young Mr. Jenkins that’s on now, sir. He’s all right. You said you’d relieve me for the middle watch, and when twenty past twelve came I knew something was wrong. So I just went straight into the wireless office and phoned Captain Bullen.”

“The captain?”

“Who else could I phone, sir?” Who else, indeed. Apart from myself the captain was the only deck officer who really knew what had happened, who knew where the bo’sun was concealed and why, MacDonald had his arm around me now, still half supporting me, leading me for’ard to the cross-passage that led to the wireless office. “He came at once. He’s there now, talking to Mr. Jenkins. Worried stiff—thinks the same thing might have happened to you as to Benson. He gave me a present before I came looking for you.” He made a movement and I could see the barrel of a pistol that was all but engulfed in his huge hand. “I am hoping that I get a chance to use this, Mr. Carter, and not the butt end, either. I suppose you realise that if you had toppled forward instead of sideways, you’d most likely have fallen over the rail into the sea.”

I wondered grimly why they—or he—hadn’t, in fact, shoved me over the side, but said nothing, just concentrated on reaching the wireless office.

Captain Bullen was waiting there, just outside the door, and the bulge in the pocket of his uniform jacket wasn’t caused only by his hand. He came quickly to meet us, probably to get out of earshot of the wireless officer, and his reaction to my condition and story of what had happened were all that anyone could reasonably have wished for. He was just mad clear through; I’d never seen him in such a mood of tightly-controlled anger since I’d first met him three years ago. When he’d calmed down a bit, he said: “But why the devil didn’t they just go the whole hog and throw you overboard while they were at it?”

“They didn’t have to, sir,” I said wearily. “They didn’t want to kill me. Just to get me out of the road.”

He peered closely at me, the cold eyes speculative.

“You talk as if you knew why they coshed you.”

“I do. Or I think I do.” I rubbed the back of my neck with a gentle hand. I was pretty sure now there weren’t any vertebrae broken, it just felt that way. “My own fault. I overlooked the obvious. Come to that, we all overlooked the obvious. Once they’d killed Brownell and we’d deduced, by association, that they’d also killed Benson, I lost all interest in Benson. I just assumed that they’d got rid of him. All I was concerned with, all any of us was concerned with, was to see that there was no further attack made on the wireless officer, to try to find out where the receiver was and to figure out what lay behind it all. Benson, we were sure, was dead and a dead Benson could no longer be of any use to us. So we forgot Benson. Benson belonged to the past.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Benson was—or is—still alive?”

“He was dead all right.” I felt about ninety, a badly crippled ninety, and the vice round my head wasn’t easing off any I could notice. “He was dead, but they hadn’t got rid of him. Maybe they hadn’t had a chance to get rid of him. Maybe they had to wait till it was real good and dark to get rid of him. But they had to get rid of him—if we’d found him, we’d have known there was a murderer on board. They probably had him stashed away in some place where we wouldn’t have thought of looking for him anyway, lying on top of one of the offices, stuck in a ventilator, behind one of the sun-deck benches, it could have been anywhere. And I was either too near where they’d stashed him, so that they couldn’t get at him, or they couldn’t chuck him overboard as long as I was standing by the rail there. Barring myself, they knew they were safe enough. Going at maximum speed, with a bow-wave like we’re throwing up right now, no one would have heard anything if they had dropped him into the sea: and on a dark moonless night like this, no one would have seen anything either. So they’d only me to deal with—and they didn’t find that any trouble at all,” I finished bitterly.

Bullen shook his head. “You never heard a thing? Not the faintest fall of a footstep, not even the swish of a cosh coming through the air.”

“Old flannel-feet must be a pretty dangerous character, sir,” I said reflectively. “He didn’t make the slightest whisper of sound. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. For all I know, I might have taken a fainting turn and struck my head on the davit as I fell. That’s what I thought myself—I even suggested it to the bo’sun here. And that’s what I’m going to tell anyone who wants to know tomorrow.” I grinned and winked at MacDonald, and even the wink hurt. “I’ll tell them you’ve been overworking me, sir, and I collapsed from exhaustion.”

“Why tell anyone?” Bullen wasn’t amused. “It doesn’t show where you have been coshed, that wound is just above the temple and inside the hairline, and could be pretty well camouflaged. Agreed?”

“No, sir. Someone knows I had an accident—the character responsible for it, and he’s going to regard is as damned queer if I make no reference to it at all: but if I do mention it and pass it off as a lady-like swoon, there’s an even chance he may accept it, and if he does we’re still going to have the advantage of being in the position of knowing that there’s murder and mayhem abroad, while they will have no suspicion we know anything of the kind.”

“Your mind,” said Captain Bullen unsympathetically, “is beginning to clear at last.”

When I awoke in the morning the already hot sun was streaming in through my uncurtained window. My cabin, immediately abaft the captain’s was on the starboard side, and the sun was coming from for’ard, which meant that we were still steaming north-east. I raised myself on my elbow to have a look at the sea conditions, for the Campari had developed a definite if gentle pitching movement, and it was then that I discovered that my neck was rigidly bound in a plaster cast. At least, it felt exactly like it. I could move it about an inch to either side and then a pair of clamps took hold. A dull steady ache, but no pain worth mentioning. I tried to force my head beyond the limits of the clamps, but I only tried once. I waited till the cabin stopped swaying around and the red-hot wires in my neck had cooled off to a tolerable temperature, then climbed stiffly out of my bunk. Let them call me stiff-neck Carter if they wanted. That was enough of that lot.

I crossed to the window. Still a cloudless sky with the sun, white, glaring, already high above the horizon, striking a glittering blinding path across the blueness of the sea. The swell was deeper, longer, heavier than I had expected, and coming up from the starboard quarter. I wound down the window and there was no wind I could notice, which meant that there was a fair breeze pushing up from astern, but not enough to whiten the smoothly roiled surface of the sea.

I showered, shaved,—I’d never before appreciated how difficult it was to shave when the turning motion of your head is limited to an arc of two inches—then examined the wound. Seen in daylight it looked bad, much worse than it had in the night: above and behind the left temple, it was a two-inch gash, wide and very deep. And it throbbed heavily in a way I didn’t much care for. I picked up the phone and asked for Doc Marston. He was still in bed but, yes, he would see me right away, an early-bird Hippocratic willingness that was very much out of character, but maybe his conscience was bothering him about his wrong diagnosis of the previous night. I dressed, put on my hat, adjusted it to a suitably rakish angle till the band just missed the wound and went down to see him.

Dr. Marston, fresh, rested, and unusually clear of eye—no doubt due to Bullen’s warning to lay off the rum—didn’t look like a conscience-stricken man who’d tossed and turned the sleepless night long. He didn’t even seem unduly worried about the fact that we carried aboard a passenger who, if he’d truthfully listed his occupation, would have put down the word “murderer.” All he seemed concerned about was the entry in last night’s log, and when I told him no entry about Brownell had been made nor would be made until we arrived in Nassau and that when it was no mention of my name would appear in connection with the diagnosis of Brownell’s death, he became positively jovial. He shaved off a few square inches of hair, jabbed in a local anæsthetic, cleaned and sutured the wound, covered it with a sticking-plaster pad and wished me good morning. He was through for the day.

It was quarter to eight. I dropped down the series of accommodation ladders that led to the fo’c’sle and made my way for’ard to the carpenter’s store. The fo’c’sle was unusually crowded for that time of the morning. There must have been close on forty members of the ship’s company gathered there, deck staff, engine-room staff, cooks and stewards, all waiting to pay their last respects to Brownell. Nor were these all the spectators. I looked up and saw that the promenade deck, which curved right round the for’ard superstructure of the Campari, was dotted with passengers, eleven or twelve in all: not many, but they represented close on the total male passenger compliment aboard—I could see no women there—with the exception of old Cerdan and possibly one or two others. Bad news travelled fast and even for millionaires the chance of seeing a burial at sea didn’t come along too often. Right in the middle of them was the Duke of Hartwell, looking nautical as anything in his carefully-adjusted Royal Yachting Club cap, silk scarf and brass-buttoned navy doeskin jacket.

I skirted number one hold and thought grimly that there might indeed be something in the old superstitions: the dead cried out for company, the old salts said, and the dead men loaded only yesterday afternoon and now lying in the bottom of number four hold hadn’t been slow to get their company. Two others gone in the space of a few hours, near as a toucher three: only, I’d fallen sideways instead of toppling over the rail. I felt those ice-cold fingers on the back of my neck again, and shivered: then passed into the comparative gloom of the carpenter’s store, right up in the forepeak.

Everything was ready. The bier—a hastily nailed together platform of boards, seven feet by two—lay on the deck: and the Red Ensign, tied to two corners of the handles at the top of the bier but free at the other end, covered the canvas-swathed mound beneath. Only the bo’sun and carpenter were there. To look at MacDonald you would never have guessed that he hadn’t slept the previous night. He had volunteered to remain on guard outside the wireless office until dawn: it had also been his idea that, though the chances of any trouble in daylight were remote, two men should be detailed for holystoning the deck outside the wireless office after breakfast, for the entire day if necessary. Meantime, the radio office was closed—and heavily padlocked—to allow Peters and Jenkins to attend the funeral of their colleague. There was no difficulty about this: as was common, there was a standard arrangement whereby a bell rang either on the bridge or in the chief wireless operator’s cabin whenever a call came through on the distress frequency or on the Campari’s call-sign.

The slight vibration of the Campari’s engines died away as the engines slowed and the revs dropped until we had just enough speed to give us steerage-way in that heavy swell. The captain came down the companionway, carrying a heavy brass-bound bible under his arm. The heavy steel door in the port hand fo’c’sle side was swung open and back till it secured with a clang in its retaining latch. A long wooden box was slid into position, one end level with the opening in the side of the ship. Then MacDonald and the carpenter, bareheaded, appeared, carrying bier and burden and laid them on the box.

The service was very brief, very simple. Captain Bullen said a few words about Brownell, about as true as words usually are in those circumstances, led the tattered singing of “Abide With Me,” read the burial service and nodded to the bo’sun. The Royal Navy did this sort of thing better, but we didn’t carry any bugles aboard the Campari. MacDonald lifted the inboard end of the bier, the canvas swathed mound slid out slowly from beneath the Red Ensign and was gone with only the faintest of splashings to mark its departure. I glanced up at the promenade deck and saw the Duke of Hartwell there standing stiffly at attention, right arm bent up to his peaked cap in rigid salute. Even allowing for the natural disadvantages lent him by his face, I had seldom seen a more ludicrous sight. No doubt to the unbiased observer he was putting up a more fitting show than myself but I find it hard to be at my reverent best when I know that all I’m committing to the deep is a length of canvas, large quantities of engine-room waste and a hundred and fifty pounds of rusty chain to give the necessary negative buoyancy.

The door in the ship’s side clanged shut, Captain Bullen handed over the Bible to a cadet, the engine revs mounted and the Campari was back in business again. And the first item on the agenda was breakfast.

In my three years aboard the Campari I had rarely seen more than half a dozen passengers in the dining-saloon for breakfast. Most of them preferred to have it served in their suites or on the private verandas outside their suites. Barring a few apéritifs, followed by Antoine’s or Henriques’s superb cooking, there was nothing to beat a good funeral to bring out the sociable best in our passengers. There could only have been seven or eight missing altogether.

I had a full complement at my table except, of course, for the invalid, Mr. Cerdan. I should have been on watch but the captain had decided that, as there was a very able quartermaster on the wheel and no land within seventy miles, young Dexter, who usually stood the watch with me, could stand it alone for the length of breakfast.

No sooner had I pulled in my chair than Miss Harrbride fixed her beady eyes on me.

“What on earth’s happened to you, young man?” she demanded.

“To tell you the truth, Miss Harrbride, I don’t really know myself.”

“You what?”

“It’s true.” I put on my best shamed-face. “I was standing up on the boat-deck last night and the next thing I knew I was lying in the scuppers with my head cut—I must have struck it against the davit when I fell.” I had my story all prepared. “Dr. Marston thinks it was a combination of sunstroke—I was loading cargo most of the day yesterday and I can assure you that the sun was very hot—and the fact that owing to our troubles in Kingston and the delay caused by it, I haven’t had very much sleep in the past three days.”

“I must say things do keep happening aboard the Campari,” Miguel Carreras said. His face was grave. “One man dead from a heart attack or whatever it was, another missing—they haven’t found our chief steward yet, have they?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“And now you get yourself banged up. Let’s sincerely hope that’s the end of it.”

“Troubles always happen in threes, sir. I’m sure this is the end of it. We’ve never before——”

“Young man, let me have a look at you,” a peremptory voice demanded from the captain’s table. Mrs. Beresford, my favourite passenger. I twisted round in my seat to find that Mrs. Beresford, who normally sat with her back to me, had herself completely turned round in hers. Beyond her, the Duke of Hartwell, unlike the previous night, was having no trouble at all in devoting his entire attention to Susan Beresford: the usual counter-attraction on his right, in the best traditions of the theatrical world, rarely rose before noon. Mrs. Beresford studied me in silence for the best part of ten seconds.

“You don’t look well at all, Mr. Carter,” she pronounced finally. “Twisted your neck, too, didn’t you? You didn’t have to turn around in your chair to talk to me.”

“A little,” I admitted. “It’s a bit stiff.”

“And hurt your back into the bargain,” she added triumphantly. “I can tell from the peculiar way you sit.”

“It hardly hurts at all,” I said bravely. It didn’t, in fact, hurt me in the slightest, but I hadn’t yet got the hang of carrying a gun in my waistband and the butt kept sticking painfully into my lower ribs.

“Sun-stroke, eh?” Her face held genuine concern. “And lack of sleep. You should be in bed. Captain Bullen, I’m afraid you’re overworking this young man.”

“That’s what I keep telling the captain, ma’am,” I said, “but he doesn’t pay any attention to me.”

Captain Bullen smiled briefly and rose to his feet. His eyes, as they roved slowly over the room, held the expression of one who wanted both attention and quiet: such was the personality of the man that he got it in three seconds flat.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. The Duke of Hartwell regarded the tablecloth with that smell-of-bad-fish expression he reserved for tenants wanting a cut in rent and merchant navy captains who forgot to preface public addresses with the words “Your Grace.”

“I am most distressed,” the captain went on, “as I am sure you are all distressed by the events of the past twelve hours. That we should lose our chief wireless officer through death by natural causes is, God knows, bad enough: but that our chief steward should vanish the same evening—well, in thirty-six years at sea I have never known anything like it.

“What happened to Chief Steward Benson we cannot say with any certainty: but I hazard a guess and at the same time issue a warning. There are literally hundreds of recorded cases of men vanishing overboard during the night and I have little doubt but that Benson’s death is due to the same reason which probably accounts for 99 per cent, of all the other cases. Even on the most experienced sailors the effect of leaning over the rail at night and watching the black water passing below has a weirdly hypnotic effect. I think it’s something akin to the vertigo that affects a great number of people, people who are convinced that if they go near, say, the parapet of a high building, some strange force will make them topple over, no matter what their conscious minds may say. Only, with leaning over the rails of a ship, there is no fear. Just a gradual mesmerism. A man just leans farther and farther over until his centre of gravity is suddenly displaced. And then he is gone.”

As an alibi or explanation for Benson’s disappearance it was as good as any: as a general statement it was also, unfortunately true.

“And so, ladies and gentlemen, I would counsel you all, most strongly, never to approach the ship’s rail at night unless you are accompanied by someone else. I would be most grateful if you would all bear that strongly in mind.”

I looked round the passengers as far as my stiff neck would allow. They would bear it in mind, all right. From now on, wild horses wouldn’t drag them near the Campari’s rails at night.

“But,” Bullen went on emphatically, “it will help neither of those unfortunate men and only do ourselves a great disservice if we allow ourselves to brood over those things. I cannot ask you to dismiss those deaths from your minds at once, but I can ask you not to dwell on them. On a ship, as elsewhere, life must go on—especially, I might say, on a ship. You are aboard the Campari to enjoy the cruise: we are aboard to help you enjoy it. I would be most grateful if you would give us your every assistance to get shipboard life back to normal as soon as absolutely possible.”

There was a subdued murmur of agreement, then Julius Beresford, rising from his seat beside the captain, was on his feet.

“Do you mind if I say a few words, sir?” He could have bought the Blue Mail Line without even denting his bank balance, but still he asked permission to speak and called old Bullen “sir.”

“Certainly, Mr. Beresford.”

“It’s just this.” Julius Beresford had addressed too many board meetings to be anything other than completely at ease when speaking to people, no matter how many million dollars they represented. “I agree, and agree completely with everything our captain has said. Captain Bullen has said that he and his crew have a job to do and that that job is to look after the every comfort and convenience of his passengers: under the rather sad circumstances in which we have to meet this morning, I think that we, the passengers, have also a job to do—to make things as easy as possible for the captain, officers and crew and help them bring things back to normal as soon as possible.

“I’d like to start the ball rolling by asking you all to be my guests for a brief period this evening. Today, ladies and gentlemen, my wife celebrates her birthday.” He smiled down at Mrs. Beresford. “She forgets exactly which one. I cannot invite you to a birthday dinner, for what could I offer you as a special meal that Antoine and Henriques do not give us every night of the week? But Mrs. Beresford and I should be grateful if you would be our guests at a cocktail party this evening. Seven forty-five. In the drawing-room. Thank you.”

I looked round the table. Miguel Carreras was nodding slightly, as if in grave acceptance and appreciation of Beresford’s underlying motives. Miss Harrbride was beaming with pleasure: she doted on the Beresfords, not for their money but for the fact that they were one of the very oldest American families, with goodness only knew how many generations behind them. Mr. Greenstreet, her husband, studied the tablecloth in his usual intent fashion. And Tony Carreras, more impossibly handsome than ever, leaned back in his chair and regarded Julius Beresford with a slightly amused, speculative interest. Or maybe it was Susan Beresford he was looking at; I was more certain than ever that there was something wrong with Tony Carreras’s eyes; it was almost impossible to tell in what direction they were looking. He caught my glance and smiled.

“You’ll be there, Mr. Carter?” He had that relaxed easygoing manner that comes from having a bank account bursting at the seams, but none of the usual hint of condescension: Tony Carreras I could get to like.

“Briefly, only, I’m afraid. I have to go on watch at eight o’clock this evening.” I smiled. “If you’re still at it at midnight, I’ll join you.” Like hell I’d join them: at midnight I’d be showing the Nassau police over the ship. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now: I have to relieve the officer of the watch.”

I made my excuses and left. On the deck I almost bumped into a sandy-haired young seaman, Whitehead, who usually shared my watches on the bridge in his capacity as engine-room telegraphist, lookout, bridge messenger and coffee-maker.

“What are you doing here?” I asked sharply. With young Dexter on watch I wanted as many sharp eyes and quick minds as possible around him: Whitehead had both. “You know you’re not to leave the bridge in my absence.”

“Sorry, sir. But Ferguson sent me.” Ferguson was the quarter-master on the forenoon watch. “We’ve missed the last two course alterations and he’s getting pretty worried about it.” We were bringing round three degrees to the north every fifteen minutes to get on a north by west course, but slowly, so as not to excite anyone.

“Why come and bother me about it?” I said irritably. “Fourth Officer Dexter is perfectly capable of handling these matters.” He wasn’t, but one of the drawbacks of being a fellow-officer of Dexter was that you were forced to lie like fury to maintain an outward appearance of solidarity.

“Yes, sir. But he’s not there, Mr. Carter. He left the bridge about twenty minutes ago and he hasn’t come back yet.”

I pushed violently past Whitehead, knocking him to one side, and made for the bridge at a dead run, three steps at a time up the companionways. Rounding one corner I caught a glimpse of Whitehead staring up after me with a most peculiar expression on his face. He probably thought I had gone mad.

V.

Wednesday 8.45 a.m.—3.30 p.m.

Ferguson, a tall swarthy saturnine Cockney with no hair left to speak of, glanced round as I burst through the doorway from the starboard wing of the bridge into the wheelhouse. His face showed his relief.

“Strewth, am I glad to see——”

“Where’s the fourth mate?” I demanded.

“Search me, sir. Them course alterations——”

“To hell with the course alterations! Where did he go?”

Ferguson blinked in surprise. He had the same look on his face as Whitehead had had a few seconds ago, the wary bafflement of a man who sees another going off his rocker.

“I don’t know, sir. He didn’t say.”

I reached for the nearest phone, got through to the dining-room, asked for Bullen. He came on and I said: “Carter here, sir. Could you come up to the bridge straightaway?”

There was a brief pause, then: “Why?”

“Dexter’s missing, sir. He had the watch but he left the bridge twenty minutes ago.”

“Left the bridge.” Bullen’s voice held no inflexion, but only because he made it that way. Lord Dexter’s son or not, young Dexter was finished on the Campari unless he could explain this one away. “Looked for him yet? He could be anywhere.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of, sir.”

The phone clicked and I hung up. Young Whitehead, still looking apprehensive, had just arrived in the cabin. I said: “You’ll find the third mate in his cabin. My compliments to him, ask him if he’ll take over the bridge for a few minutes. Ferguson?”

“Sir?” The voice was still wary.

“Mr. Dexter said nothing at all when he left?”

“Yes, sir. I heard him say something like ‘Wait a minute, what the hell’s going on here?’ Or something like that, I can’t be sure. Then he said: ‘Keep her as she is. Back in a jiffy,’ and then he was off.”

“That was all?”

“That was all, sir.”

“Where was he standing at the time?”

“On the starboard wing, sir. Just outside the door.”

“And he went down that side?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where was Whitehead at the time?”

“Out on the port wing, sir.” Ferguson’s expression and tone showed beyond all doubt that he was vis-à-vis with a loony, but he was playing it cool all the same.

“Didn’t cross to see where Mr. Dexter had gone?”

“No, sir.” He hesitated. “Well, not right away. But I thought it a bit funny so I asked him to have a look. He couldn’t see anything.”

“Damn! How long after Mr. Dexter left before he took this look?”

“A minute. Maybe closer on two. Couldn’t be sure, sir.”

“But whatever Mr. Dexter saw, it was aft?”

“Yes, sir.”

I moved out on to the wing bridge and looked aft. There was no one to be seen on any of the two decks below. The crew had long finished washing down decks and the passengers were still at breakfast. Nobody there. Nothing of any interest at all to be seen. Even the wireless office was deserted, its door closed and locked. I could see the brass padlock clearly, gleaming and glittering in the morning sun as the Campari pitched slowly, gently, through the ever-lengthening swell.

The wireless office! I stood there perfectly rigid for all of three seconds, a candidate, in Ferguson’s eyes, for a strait-jacket if ever there had been one, then took off down the companionway the same way as I had come up, three steps at a time. Only a smart piece of braking on my part and a surprisingly nimble bit of dodging on the captain’s prevented a head-on collision at the foot of the companionway. Bullen put into words the thought that was obviously gaining currency around the bridge.

“Have you gone off your bloody rocker, Mister?”

“The wireless office, sir,” I said quickly. “Come on.”

I was there in a few seconds, Bullen close behind. I tried the padlock, a heavy-duty double-action Yale, but it was securely locked.

It was then I noticed a key sticking out from the bottom of the padlock. I twisted it, first one way, then the other, but it was jammed fast. I tried to pull it out and had the same lack of success. I became aware that Bullen was breathing heavily over my shoulder.

“What the devil’s the matter, Mister? What’s got into you all of a sudden?”

“One moment, sir.” I’d caught sight of Whitehead making his way up to the bridge and beckoned him across. “Get the bo’sun, tell him to bring a pair of pliers.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll get the pliers——”

“I said ‘Tell the bo’sun to bring them,’” I said savagely. “Then ask Mr. Peters for the key to this door. Hurry!”

He hurried. You could see he was glad to escape. Bullen said: “Look here, Mister——”

“Dexter left the bridge because he saw something funny going on. So Ferguson said. Where else but here, sir?”

“Why here? Why not——”

“Look at that.” I took the padlock in my hand. “That bent key. And everything that’s happened has happened because of here.”

“The window?”

“No good. I’ve looked.” I led him round the corner to the single square of plate glass. “Night curtains are still drawn.”

“Couldn’t we smash the damn’ thing in?”

“What’s the point? It’s too late now.”

Bullen looked at me queerly, but said nothing. Half a minute passed in silence. Bullen was getting more worried every second. I wasn’t —I was as worried as could be already. Jamieson appeared, on his way to the bridge, caught sight of us, made to come towards us, then carried on as Bullen waved him away. And then the bo’sun was there, carrying a pair of heavy insulated pliers in his hand.

“Open this damned door,” Bullen said curtly.

MacDonald tried to remove the key with his fingers, failed and brought the pliers into use. With the first tug of the pliers the key in the lock snapped cleanly in half.

“Well,” Bullen said heavily. “That helps.”

MacDonald looked at him, at me, then back at the broken key still held in the jaws of the pliers.

“I didn’t even twist it, sir,” he said quietly. “And if that’s a Yale key,” he added with an air of faint distaste, “then I’m an Englishman.” He handed the key over for inspection. The break showed the grey, rough, porous composition of some base metal. “Home-made, and not very well made at that, either.”

Bullen pocketed the broken key.

“Can you get the other bit out?”

“No, sir. Completely jammed.” He fished in his overalls, produced a hacksaw. “Maybe this, sir?”

“Good man.”

It took MacDonald three minutes’ hard work—the hasp, unlike the padlock, was made of tempered steel—and then the hacksaw was through. He slid out the padlock, then glanced inquiringly at the captain.

“Come in with us,” Bullen said. There was sweat on his brow. “See that nobody comes near.” He pushed open the door and passed inside: I was on his heels.

We’d found Dexter all right, and we’d found him too late. He had that bundle of old clothes look, that completely relaxed huddled shapelessness that only the dead can achieve: face-down, out-flung on the Corticene flooring, he hardly left standing room for Bullen and myself.

“Shall I get the doctor, sir?” It was MacDonald speaking: he was standing astride the storm-sill and the knuckles of the hand holding the door shone bonily through the tautened skin.

“It’s too late for a doctor now, Bo’sun,” Bullen said stonily. Then his composure broke and he burst out violently: “My God, Mister, where’s it all going to end? He’s dead, you can see he’s dead. What’s behind—what murderous fiend—why did they kill him, Mister? Why did they have to kill him? Damn it to hell, why did the fiends have to kill him? He was only a kid, what real harm did young Dexter ever do anybody?” It said much for Bullen at the moment that the thought never even occurred to him that the dead man was the son of the chairman and managing director of the Blue Mail Line. That thought would come later.

“He died for the same reason that Benson died,” I said. “He saw too much.” I kneeled beside him, examined the back and sides of his neck. No marks there at all. I looked up and said: “Can I turn him over, sir?”

“It can’t do any harm now.” Bullen’s normally ruddy face had lost some colour and the lips were clamped in a thin hard line.

I heaved and pulled for a few seconds and managed to get Dexter more or less turned over, half on his shoulders and half on his back. I didn’t waste any time checking his breathing or his pulse; when you’ve been shot three times through the middle of the body the breathing and the pulse are things of the past. And Dexter’s white uniform shirt, with the three small powder-blackened blood-tinged holes just beneath the breastbone, showed indeed that he had been shot three times: the area covering those holes could have been blotted out by a playing card. Somebody had made very sure indeed. I rose to my feet, looked from the captain to the bo’sun, then said to Bullen: “We can’t pass this off as a heart attack, sir.”

“They shot him three times,” Bullen said matter-of-factly.

“We’re up against someone in the maniac class, sir.” I stared down at Dexter, unable to look away from the face racked and twisted by his last conscious moment of life, that fleeting moment of tearing agony that had opened the door to death. “Any one of those bullets would have killed him. But whoever killed him killed him three times, someone who likes pressing a trigger, someone who likes seeing bullets thud into a human being, even although that human being is dead already.”

“You seem very cool about this, Mister.” Bullen was looking at me with a strange look in his eyes.

“Sure I’m cool.” I showed Bullen my gun. “Show me the man who did this and I’ll give him what he gave Dexter. Exactly the same and to hell with Captain Bullen and the laws of the land. That’s how cool I am.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny.” Then his voice hardened again. “Nobody heard anything. How did nobody hear anything?”

“He had his gun close up to Dexter, maybe jammed right against him. You can see the marks of burnt powder. That would help to deaden the sound. Besides, everything points to this person—or those persons—as being professionals. They would have silencers on their guns.”

“I see.” Bullen turned to MacDonald. “Could you get Peters here, Bo’sun. At once.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” MacDonald turned to leave, and I said quickly: “Sir, a word before MacDonald goes.”

“What is it?” His voice was hard, impatient.

“You’re going to send a message?”

“Too right I’m going to send a message. I’m going to ask for a couple of fast patrol boats to be sent out to meet us. At the speed those gas turbine jobs can go they’ll be alongside before noon. And when I tell them I’ve had three men murdered in twelve hours, they’ll come running. I’ve had enough of playing it smart, First. This fake burial to lull their suspicions this morning, to make them think we’d got rid of the only evidence of murder against them. See where it’s got us? Another murdered man.”

“It’s no use, sir. It’s too late now.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t even bother to replace the lid after he left, sir.” I nodded towards the big transmitter-receiver, with its metal lid slightly askew, the securing screws loose. “Maybe he was in a hurry to get away, maybe he just knew there was no point in securing it anyway, we were bound to find it out sooner or later—and sooner rather than later.” I lifted the lid and stood to one side to let Bullen look also.

Nothing was ever surer than that no one would ever use that transmitter again. It was littered inside with torn wire, bent metal, smashed condensers and valves. Someone had used a hammer. There was no guesswork about that: the hammer was still lying among the tangled splintered wreckage that was all that was left of the once complicated innards of the transmitter. I replaced the lid.

“There’s an emergency set,” Bullen said hoarsely. “In the cupboard under the table there. The one with the petrol generator. He’ll have missed that.”

But the murderer hadn’t missed it, he wasn’t the type to miss anything. And he certainly hadn’t missed with that hammer. If anything, he’d done an even more thorough job on the emergency set than on the main set: and, just for good measure, he’d smashed up the armature of the patrol generator.

“Our friend must have been listening in on his receiver again,” MacDonald put in quietly. “So he came out either to stop the message or smash up the sets, so that no more messages could go through. He was lucky, had he been a bit later and the radio officer back on watch my men would have been holystoning the decks outside and there would have been nothing he would be able to do.”

“I don’t associate luck with this killer in any way,” I said. “He’s too damned efficient for that. I don’t think any more messages which might have worried him had come through, but he was afraid they might. He knew both Peters and Jennings were off watch at the burial, and he probably checked that the wireless office was locked. So he waited till the coast was clear, came out on deck, unlocked the office and went inside. And Dexter, unfortunately for himself, saw him going in.”

“The key, Mister,” Bullen said harshly. “The key. How come?”

“The Marconi-man in Kingston who checked the sets, sir. Remember?” He remembered all right: the Marconi-man had telephoned the ship asking if servicing facilities were required and Bullen had seized on it as a heaven-sent opportunity to close down the radio office and refuse to accept any more embarrassing and infuriating messages from London and New York. “He spent about four hours here. Time to do anything. If he was a Marconiman, I’m the Queen of the May. He had a nice big impressive tool-kit with him, but the only tool he used, if he could call it that, was a stick of wax, heated to the right temperature, to take an impression of the Yale —even if he had managed to pinch the Yale and return it unseen it would have been impossible for him to cut a new one, those special Yales are far too complicated. And my guess is that that was all he did while he was there.”

And my guess was completely wrong. But the thought that this fake Marconi-man might have employed himself in another way during his stay in the wireless office did not occur to me until many hours later: it was so blindingly obvious that I missed it altogether, although two minutes’ constructive thought would have been bound to put me on to it. But those hours were to elapse before I got around to the constructive thought: and by that time it was too late. Too late for the Campari, too late for its passengers, and far far too late for all too many of the crew.

We left young Dexter lying in the wireless office and secured the door with a new padlock. We’d talked for almost five minutes about the problem of where to put him before the simple solution occurred to us: leave him where he was. Nobody was going to use that wireless office any more that day: he was as well there as anywhere till the Nassau police came aboard.

From the wireless office we’d gone straight to the telegraph lounge. The teleprinters in there were coupled to receiver-transmitters on fixed wavelengths to London, Paris and New York, but could be adapted by men who knew what they were doing, such as Peters and Jenkins, to receive and transmit on practically any wavelength. But not even Peters and Jenkins could do anything about the situation we found: there were two big transmitters in the telegraph lounge, cleverly designed to look like cocktail cabinets, and both had received the same treatment as the sets in the wireless office: the exteriors intact, the interiors smashed beyond repair. Somebody had been very busy during the night: the wireless office must have been the last item on the list.

I looked at Bullen.

“With your permission, sir, MacDonald and I will go and have a look at the lifeboats. We might as well waste our time that way as in any other.”

He knew what I meant all right, and nodded. Captain Bullen was beginning to look slightly hunted. He was the ablest, the most competent master in the Blue Mail: but nothing in his long training and experience had ever been designed to cope with a situation like this.

And so MacDonald and I duly wasted our time. There were three lifeboats equipped with hand-cranked transmitters for emergency use if the Campari sank or had otherwise to be abandoned. Or they had been equipped with them. But not any more. The transmitters were gone. No need to waste time or make a racket smashing up sets when all you have to do is to drop them over the side. Our murderous friend hadn’t missed a single trick.

When we got back to the captain’s cabin, where we had been told to report, there was something in the atmosphere that I didn’t like at all. They say you can smell fear: I don’t know about that but you can sense it and you could certainly sense it in that cabin at nine o’clock that morning. The fear, the atmosphere of trapped helplessness, the sense of being completely at the mercy of unknown and infinitely powerful and ruthless forces made for an atmosphere of nervously brittle tension that I could almost reach out and touch.

McIlroy and Cummings were there with the captain and so, too, was our second mate, Tommy Wilson. He had had to be told, the stage had been reached now where every officer would have to be told, so Bullen said, in the interests of their own safety and self-defence: I wasn’t so sure. Bullen looked up as we came through the door: his face was grim and still, a thinly opaque mask for the consuming worry that lay beneath.

“Well?”

I shook my head, took a seat. MacDonald remained standing but Bullen gestured him irritably to a chair. He said, to no one in particular: “I suppose that accounts for all the transmitters on the ship?”

“As far as we know, yes.” I went on: “Don’t you think we should have White up here, sir?”

“I was about to do that.” He reached for the phone, spoke for a moment, hung up then said roughly: “Well, Mister, you were the man with the bright ideas last night. Got any this morning?” Just to repeat the words makes them sound harsh and unpleasant: but they were curiously empty of any offence, Bullen didn’t know which way to turn and he was grasping at straws.

“None. All we know is that Dexter was killed at eight twenty-six this morning, give or take a minute. No question about that. And that at that moment most of our passengers were at breakfast: no question about that either. The only passengers not at breakfast were Miss Harcourt, Mr. Cerdan and his two nurses, Mr. and Mrs. Piper from Miami and that couple from Venezuela—old Hournos and his wife, and their daughter. Our only suspects, and none of them makes any sense.”

“And all of those were at dinner last night when Brownell and Benson were killed,” McIlroy said thoughtfully, “except the old man and his nurses. Which leaves them as the only suspects, which is not only ridiculous but far too obvious: I think we’ve already had plenty of proof that whatever the people behind all this are guilty of, being obvious is not one of them. Unless, of course,” he added slowly, “some of the passengers are working in collusion with each other.”

“Or with the crew,” Tommy Wilson murmured.

“What?” Old Bullen gave him the full benefit of his commodore’s stare. “What did you say?”

“I said the crew,” Wilson repeated clearly. If old Bullen was trying to frighten Tommy Wilson he was wasting his time. “And by the crew I also include the officers. I agree, sir, that I heard—or knew—of those murders for the first time only a few minutes ago, and I admit I haven’t had time to sort out my thoughts. On the other hand, I haven’t had a chance to become so involved as all the rest of you are. With all respects, I’m not so deeply lost in the wood that I can’t see the trees. You all seem to be convinced that it must be one or more of the passengers responsible—our chief officer here seems to have set this bee firmly in all your bonnets—but if a passenger were in cahoots with one of the crew then it’s quite possible that that member of the crew was detailed to hang around in the vicinity of the wireless office and start laying about him when necessary.”

“You said the chief officer was responsible for planting this idea in our minds,” Bullen said slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

“No more than I said, sir. I only——” Then the implications of the captain’s question struck him. “Good God, sir! Mr. Carter? Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No one think’s you’re crazy,” McIlroy put in soothingly. Our chief engineer had always regarded Wilson as a bit of a mental bantam-weight, but you could see him slowly revising his opinion. “The crew, Tommy. What makes you suspect the crew?”

“Elimination, motive and opportunity,” Wilson said promptly. “We seem to have more or less eliminated the passengers. All with alibis. And the motive. What are the usual motives?” he asked of no one in particular.

“Revenge, jealousy, gain,” said McIlroy. “Those three.”

“There you are, then. Take revenge and jealousy. It is conceivable that any of our passengers should have their knives so deeply in Brownell, Benson and Dexter as to want to kill them all? Ridiculous. Gain? What could that bunch of bloated plutocrats want with any more lucre.” He looked round slowly. “And what officer or man aboard the Campari couldn’t do with a little more lucre. I could, for one.”

“Opportunity, Tommy,” McIlroy prompted him gently. “Opportunity, you said.”

“I don’t have to go into that,” Wilson said. “Engineer and deck crews could be eliminated at once. The engineering side, except for officers at mealtimes, never go anywhere near the passenger and boat-decks. The bo’sun’s men here are only allowed there in the morning watch, for washing down decks. But“—he looked around him again, even more slowly—”every deck officer, radio officer, radar operator, cook, galley slave and steward aboard the Campari has a perfect right to be within a few yards of the wireless office at any time: no one could question his presence there. Not only that——”

A knock came at the door and Assistant Chief Steward White came in, hat in hand. He was looking acutely unhappy and looked even more so when he saw the extent and composition of the welcoming committee.

“Come in and sit down,” Bullen said. He waited till White had done this, then went on: “Where were you between eight and half past eight this morning, White?”

“This morning. Eight and half past.” White was immediately all stiff outrage. “I was on duty, sir, of course. I——”

“Relax,” Bullen said wearily. “No one is accusing you of anything.” Then he said more kindly: “We’ve all had some very bad news, White. Nothing that concerns you directly, so don’t get too apprehensive. You’d better hear it.”

Bullen told him, without any trimmings, of the three murders and the one immediate result was that everyone present could immediately remove White from the list of suspects. He might have been a good actor, but not even an Irving could have turned his colour from a healthy red to a greyish pallor at the touch of a switch, which was what White did. He looked so bad, his breathing got so quick and shallow that I rose hastily and fetched him a glass of water. He swallowed it in a couple of gulps.

“Sorry to upset you, White,” Bullen went on. “But you had to know. Now then, between eight and eight-thirty: how many of our passengers had breakfast in their rooms?”

“I don’t know, sir, I’m not sure.” He shook his head, then went on slowly. “Sorry, sir, I do remember. Mr. Cerdan and his nurses, of course. The Hournos family. Miss Harcourt. Mr. and Mrs. Piper.”

“As Mr. Carter said,” McIlroy murmured.

“Yes,” Bullen nodded. “Now, White, be very careful. Did any of those passengers at any time leave their rooms during this period? At any time? Even for a moment?”

“No, sir. Quite definitely not. Not on my deck, anyway. The Hournos are on ‘B’ deck. But none of the others went in or out of any of the suites: only stewards with trays. I can swear to that, sir. From my cubicle—Mr. Benson’s, that is—I can see every door in the passageway.”

“That’s so,” Bullen agreed. He asked for the name of the senior steward on “B” deck, spoke briefly on the phone, then hung up. “All right, White, you can go. But keep your eyes—and ears—open and report to me immediately you come across anything that strikes you as unusual. And don’t talk about this to anyone.” White rose quickly, and left. He seemed glad to go.

“There it is, then,” Bullen said heavily. “Everyone—every one of the passengers, that is—in the clear. I’m beginning to think you may have the right of it after all, Mr. Wilson.” He looked speculatively at me. “How about it now, Mr. Carter?”

I looked at him, then at Wilson, and said: “Mr. Wilson seems to be the only one of us that makes any sense. What he says is logical, completely plausible and fits the facts. It’s too logical, too plausible. I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?” Bullen demanded. “Because you can’t believe that any crew member of the Campari could be bought? Or because it knocks your own pet theories on the head?”

“I can’t give you any why’s or why not’s, sir. It’s just a hunch, the way I feel.”

Captain Bullen grunted, not a very kindly grunt either, but unexpected support came from the chief engineer.

“I agree with Mr. Carter. We’re up against very very clever people—if it is people.” He paused, then said suddenly: “Is the passage money for the Carreras family, father and son, paid in yet?”

“What the devil has that got to do with anything?” Bullen demanded.

“Has it been paid?” McIlroy repeated. He was looking at the purser.

“It’s been paid,” Cummings said quietly. He was still a long way from getting over the shock caused by the murder of his friend Benson.

“In what currency?”

“Travellers’ cheques. Drawn on a New York bank.”

“Dollars, eh? Now, Captain Bullen, I submit that’s very interesting indeed. Paid in dollars. Yet in May of last year the generalissimo made it a penal offence to be in possession of any foreign currency whatsoever. I wonder where our friends got the money from. And why are they permitted to be in possession of it? Instead of lingering in some jungle jail?”

“What are you suggesting, Chief?”

“Nothing,” McIlroy confessed. “That’s the devil of it. I just don’t see how it can tie up with anything. I just submit that it is very curious indeed and that anything curious, in the present circumstances, is worth investigating.” He sat silently for a moment, then said idly: “I suppose you know that our generalissimo friend recently received a gift from the other side of the Iron Curtain? A destroyer and a couple of frigates? Trebled his naval strength in one fell sweep. I suppose you know the generalissimo is desperate for money—his régime is coming apart at the seams for lack of it and that’s what lay behind last week’s bloody riots. You know that we have a dozen people aboard who would be worth God knows how many millions in ransom money? And that if a frigate suddenly did heave over the horizon and order us to stop—well, how could we send out an SOS with all our transmitters smashed.”

“I have never heard such a ridiculous suggestion in my life,” Bullen said heavily. But ridiculous or not you’re thinking about it, Captain Bullen, I said to myself, by heaven you’re thinking about it. “To knock your suggestion on the head straightaway. How could any vessel ever find us? Where to look for us? We changed course last night, we’re over a hundred miles away from where they might expect us to be—even if they had any idea where we were going in the first place?”

“I could support the chief’s arguments in that, sir,” I put in. There seemed no point in mentioning that I thought McIlroy’s idea as far-fetched as did the captain. “Any person with a radio receiver might equally have a transmitter—and Miguel Carreras himself mentioned to me that he used to command his own ships. Navigation, by sun or stars would be easy for him. He probably knows our position to within ten miles.”

“And those messages that came through on the radio,” McIlroy went on. “Message or messages. A message so damned important that two men died: and the possibility that another such message might come through caused a third man to die. What message, Captain, what so tremendously important message? Warnings: from where, from whom, I don’t know. Warnings, Captain Bullen. Knowledge which in our hands would have destroyed some carefully laid plans: and the scope of those plans you can judge from the fact that three men died so that that message should not come through.”

Old Bullen was shaken. He tried not to show it but, he was shaken. Badly. And I knew it next moment when he turned to Tommy Wilson.

“On the bridge, Mr. Wilson. Double lookouts: stay doubled till we get to Nassau.” He looked at McIlroy. “If we get to Nassau. Signaller to stand by the Aldis all day. ‘I want assistance’ flags ready for the yardarm. Radar office: if they take their eyes off the screen for a second I’ll have ’em on the beach. No matter how small a blip they see, no matter what distance, report immediately to the bridge.”

“We turn towards them for assistance, sir?”

“You blithering idiot,” Bullen snarled. “We run for our lives in the opposite direction. Do you want to steam into the waiting guns of a destroyer?” No question but that Bullen was far off balance: the self-contradictory element in his instructions escaped him completely.

“You believe the chief, then, sir?” I asked.

“I don’t know what to believe,” Bullen growled. “I’m just taking no chances.”

When Wilson left I said: “Maybe the chief is right. Maybe Wilson is right, too. Both could go together—an armed attack on the Campari with certain suborned members of the crew backing up the attackers.”

“But you still don’t believe it,” McIlroy said, quietly.

“I’m like the captain. I don’t know what to believe. But one thing I do know for certain. The radio receiver that intercepted the message we never got—that’s the key to it all.”

“And that’s the key we’re going to find.” Bullen heaved himself to his feet. “Chief, I’d be glad if you came with me. We’re going to search for this radio, personally. First we start in my quarters, then in yours, then we go through the quarters of every member of the crew of the Campari. Then we start looking anywhere where it might be cached outside their quarters. You come with us, MacDonald.”

The old man was in earnest all right. If that radio was in the crew’s quarters, he’d find it. The fact that he’d offered to start the search in his own suite was warranty enough for that.

He went on: “Mr. Carter, I believe it’s your watch.”

“Yes, sir. But Jamieson could look out for me for an hour. Permission to search the passengers’ quarters?”

“Wilson was right about that bee in the bonnet, Mister.” Which only went to show how upset Bullen was: normally, where circumstances demanded, he was the most punctilious of men and, in the presence of the bo’sun, would never have spoken as he had done to Wilson and myself. He glowered at me and walked out.

He hadn’t given me permission, but he hadn’t refused it either. I glanced at Cummings: he nodded, and rose to his feet.

We had luck in the conditions of our search, the purser and I, in that we didn’t have to turf anyone out of their cabins: they were completely deserted. Radio reports in the morning watch had spoken of weather conditions deteriorating sharply to the south-east and bulletins had been posted warning of approaching bad weather: the sun-decks were crowded with passengers determined to make the most of the blue skies before the weather broke. Even old Cerdan was on deck, flanked by his two watchful nurses, the tall one with a big mesh-string knitting bag and clicking away busily with her needles, the other with a pile of magazines, reading. You had the impression with them, as with all good nurses, that less than half their minds were on what they were doing: without stirring from their chairs they seemed to hover over old Cerdan like a couple of broody hens. I had the feeling that when Cerdan paid nurses to hover, he would expect his money’s worth. He was in his bath-chair, with a richly-embroidered rug over his bony knees. I took a good long look at that rug as I passed by, but I was only wasting my time: so tightly was that rug wrapped round his skinny shanks that he couldn’t have concealed a matchbox under it, far less a radio.

With a couple of stewards keeping watch we went through the suites on “A” and “B” decks with meticulous care. I had a bridge megger with me, which was to lend cover to our cover story, if we had to use one, that we were trying to trace an insulation break in a power cable: but no passenger with a guilty mind was going to fall for that for a moment if he found us in his cabin, so we thought the stewards a good idea.

There should have been no need for any passenger aboard the Campari to have a radio. Every passenger’s cabin on the ship, with the Campari’s usual extravagance, was fitted out with not one but two bulkhead relay receivers, fed from a battery of radios in the telegraph lounge: Eight different stations could be brought into circuit simply by pressing the eight pre-selector buttons. This was all explained in the brochure so nobody thought of bringing radios along.

Cummings and I missed nothing. We examined every cupboard, wardrobe, bed, drawer, even my ladies’ jewel-boxes. Nothing. Nothing anywhere, except in one place: Miss Harcourt’s cabin. There was a portable there, but, then, I had known that there had been one: every night when the weather was fine Miss Harcourt would wander out on deck clad in one of her many evening gowns, find a chair and twiddle around the tuning knob till she found some suitable soft music. Maybe she thought it lent something to the air of enchantment and mystery that should surround a movie queen: maybe she thought it romantic: it could have been, of course, that she just liked soft music. However it was, one thing was certain, Miss Harcourt was not our suspect: not to put too fine a point on it, she just didn’t have the intelligence. And, in fairness, despite her pretensions, she was too nice.

I retired defeated to the bridge and took over from Jamieson. Almost an hour elapsed before another defeated man came to the bridge: Captain Bullen. He didn’t have to tell me he was defeated: it was written on him, in the still, troubled face, the slight sag of the broad shoulders. And a mute headshake from me told him all he needed to know. I made a mental note, in the not unlikely event of Lord Dexter turfing us both out of the Blue Mail, to turn down any suggestions by Captain Bullen that we should go into a detective agency together: there might be faster ways of starving, perhaps, but none more completely certain.

We were on the second leg of our course now, 10 degrees west of north, heading straight for Nassau. Twelve hours and we would be there. My eyes ached from scanning the horizons and skies, even although I knew there were at least ten others doing the same thing, still my eyes ached. Whether I believed McIlroy’s suggestion or not, I certainly behaved as if I did. But the horizon remained clear, completely, miraculously clear, for this was normally a fairly heavily travelled steamer lane. And the loudspeaker from the radar room remained obstinately silent. We had a radar screen on the bridge, but rarely troubled to consult it: Walters, the operator on watch, could isolate and identify a blip on the screen before most of us could even see it.

After maybe half an hour’s restless pacing about the bridge, Bullen turned to go. Just at the head of the companionway he hesitated, turned, beckoned me and walked out to the end of the starboard wing. I followed.

“I’ve been thinking about Dexter,” he said quietly. “What would be the effect—I’m past caring about the passengers now, I’m only worried about the lives of every man and woman aboard—if I announced that Dexter had been murdered?”

“Nothing,” I said. “If you can call mass hysteria nothing.”

“You don’t think the fiends responsible for all this might call it off? Whatever ‘it’ is?”

“I’m dead certain they wouldn’t. As no mention has been made of Dexter yet, no attempt to explain away his absence, they must know we know he’s dead. They’ll know damn’ well that the officer of the watch can’t disappear from the bridge without a hue and cry going up. We’d just be telling them out loud what they already know without being told. You won’t scare this bunch off. People don’t play as rough as they do unless there’s something tremendous at stake.”

“That’s what I thought myself, Johnny,” he said heavily. “That’s just what I thought myself.” He turned and went below, and I had a sudden foreknowledge of how Bullen would look when he was an old man.

I stayed on the bridge until two o’clock, long past my usual time for relief, but then I’d deprived Jamieson, who had the afternoon watch, of much free time that morning. A tray came up to me from the galley, and for the first time ever I sent an offering by Henriques back untouched. When Jamieson took over the bridge he didn’t exchange a word with me except routine remarks about course and speed. From the strained, set expression on his face you would have thought he was carrying the mainmast of the Campari over his shoulder. Bullen had been talking to him, he’d probably been talking to all the officers. That would get them all as worried as hell and jittery as a couple of old spinsters lost in the Casbah: I didn’t see that it would achieve anything else.

I went to my cabin, closed the door, pulled off shoes and shirt and lay on my bunk—no four-posters for the crew of the Campari—after adjusting the louvre in the overhead cold-air trunking until the draught was directed on my chest and face. The back of my head ached, and ached badly. I adjusted a pillow under it and tried to ease the pain. It still ached, so I let it go and tried to think. Somebody had to think and I didn’t see that old Bullen was in any state for it. Neither was I, but I thought all the same. I would have bet my last cent that the enemy—I couldn’t think of them as anything else by this time—knew our course, destination and time of arrival almost as well as we did ourselves. And I knew they couldn’t afford to let us arrive in Nassau that night, not, at least, until they had accomplished what they had set out to accomplish, whatever that might be. Somebody had to think. Time was terribly short.

By three o’clock I’d got nowhere. I’d worried all round the problem as a terrier worries an old slipper, I’d examined it from every angle, I’d put forward a dozen different solutions, all equally improbable, and turned up a round dozen suspects, all equally impossible. My thinking was getting me nowhere. I sat up, careful of my stiff neck, fished a bottle of whisky from a cupboard, poured a drink, watered it, knocked it back and then, because it was illegal, helped myself to another. I placed this second on the table by my bunk, and lay down again.

The whisky did it, I’ll always swear the whisky did it, as a mental lubricant for rusted-up brains it has no parallel. After five more minutes of lying on my back, staring sightlessly up at the cold-air trunking above my head, I suddenly had it. I had it suddenly, completely and all in a moment, and I knew beyond doubt that I had it right. The radio! The receiver on which the message to the wireless office had been intercepted! There had been no radio, God, only a blind man like myself could have missed it, of course there had been no radio. But there had been something else again. I sat bolt upright with a jerk, Archimedes coming out of his bath, and yelped with pain as a hot blade skewered through the back of my neck.

“Are you subject to those attacks often or do you always carry on like this when you are alone?” a solicitous voice inquired from the doorway. Susan Beresford, dressed in a square-necked white silk dress, was standing in the entrance, her expression half-amused, half-apprehensive. So complete had been my concentration that I’d never even heard the door open.

“Miss Beresford.” I rubbed my aching neck with my right hand. “What are you doing here? You know passengers are not allowed in the officers’ quarters.”

“No? I understand my father has been up here several times in the past few trips talking to you.”

“Your father is not young, female and unmarried.”

“Phui!” She stepped into the cabin and closed the door behind her. All at once the smile was no longer on her face. “Will you talk to me, Mr. Carter?”

“Any time,” I said courteously. “But not here …” My voice trailed away, I was changing my mind even as I spoke.

“You see, you’re the only person I can talk to,” she said.

“Yes.” A beautiful girl alone in my cabin and plainly anxious to speak to me and I wasn’t even listening to her. I was figuring out something: it did involve Susan Beresford, but only incidentally.

“Oh, do pay attention,” she said angrily.

“All right,” I said resignedly. “I’m paying.”

“You’re paying what?” she demanded.

“Attention.” I reached for my whisky glass. “Cheers!”

“I thought you were forbidden alcohol on duty?”

“I am. What do you want?”

“I want to know why no one will talk to me.” She lifted a hand as I made to speak. “Please don’t be facetious. I’m worried. Something’s terribly wrong, isn’t it? You know I always talk more to the officers than any of the other passengers”—I passed up the pleasure of loosing off a couple of telling shafts—“and now nobody will talk to me. Daddy says I’m imagining it. I’m not, I know I’m not. They won’t talk. And not because of me. I know. They’re all dead scared about something, going about with tight faces and not looking at anyone but looking at them all the time. Something is wrong, isn’t it? Terribly, terribly wrong. And Fourth Officer Dexter—he’s missing, isn’t he?”

“What would be wrong, Miss Beresford?”

“Please.” This was something for the books. Susan Beresford pleading with me. She walked across the cabin—with the size of the accommodation old Dexter saw fit to provide for his chief officers that didn’t require any more than a couple of steps—and stood in front of me. “Tell me the truth. Three men are missing in twenty-four hours—don’t tell me that’s coincidence. And all the officers looking as if they’re going to be shot at dawn.”

“Don’t you think it strange you’re the only person who seems to have noticed anything unusual? How about all the other passengers?”

“The other passengers!” The tone of her voice didn’t say a great deal for the other passengers. “How can they notice anything with all the women either in bed for their afternoon sleep or at the hairdresser’s or in the massage room and all the men sitting around in the telegraph lounge like mourners at a funeral just because the stock exchange machines have broken down? And that’s another thing. Why have those machines broken down? And why is the radio office closed? And why is the Campari going so fast? I went right aft just now to listen to the engines and I know we’ve never gone so fast before.”

She didn’t miss much, and that was a fact. I said. “Why come to me?”

“Daddy suggested it.” She hesitated, then half smiled. “He said I was imagining things and that for a person suffering from delusions and a hyperactive imagination he could recommend nothing better than a visit to Chief Officer Carter, who doesn’t know the meaning of either.”

“Your father is wrong.”

“Wrong? You do—ah—suffer from delusions?”

“About you’re imagining things. You aren’t.” I finished my whisky and got to my feet. “Something is wrong, far wrong, Miss Beresford.”

She looked at me steadily in the eyes, then said quietly: “Will you tell me what it is? Please!” The cool amusement was now completely absent from both face and voice: a completely different Susan Beresford from the one I’d known, and one I liked very much better than the old one. For the first time, and very late in the day, the thought occurred to me that this might be the real Susan Beresford: when you wear a price ticket marked umpteen million dollars and are travelling through a forest alive with wolves looking for gold and a free meal ticket for life, some sort of shield, some kind of protective device against the wolves is liable to be very handy indeed and I had to admit that the air of half-mocking amusement which seldom left her was a most effective deterrent.

“Will you tell me, please?” she repeated. She’d come close to me now, the green eyes had started to melt in that weird way they had and my breathing was getting all mixed up again. “I think you could trust me, Mr. Carter.”

“Yes.” I looked away—it took the last of my will-power, but I looked away—and managed to get my breathing working again, in-out, in-out, it wasn’t too difficult when you got the hang of it. “I think I could trust you, Miss Beresford. I will tell you. But not right away. If you knew why I say that you wouldn’t press me to tell you. Any of the passengers out taking the air or sun-bathing?”

“What?” The sudden switch made her blink, but she recovered quickly and gestured to the window. “In this?”

I saw what she meant. The sun had gone, completely, and heavy dark cumulus cloud coming up from the south-east had all but obscured the sky. The sea looked no rougher than it had been, but I had the feeling that the temperature would have fallen away. I didn’t like the look of the weather. And I could quite understand why none of the passengers would be on deck. That made things awkward. But there was another way.

“I see what you mean. I promise you I’ll tell you all you want to know this evening”—that was a pretty elastic time-limit—“if you in turn promise you won’t tell anyone I’ve admitted anything is wrong—and if you will do something for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“This. You know your father is holding some sort of cocktail party for your mother in the drawing-room tonight. It’s timed for seven forty-five. Get him to advance it to seven-thirty. I want more time before dinner—never mind why now. Use any reason you like but don’t bring me into it. And ask your father to invite old Mr. Cerdan to the party also. Doesn’t matter if he has to take his wheel-chair and two nurses along with him. Get him to the party. Your father’s a man of very considerable powers of persuasion—and I imagine you could persuade your father to do anything: Tell him you feel sorry for the old man, always being left out of things. Tell him anything: only get old man Cerdan to the cocktail party. I can’t tell you how vital that is.”

She looked at me in slow speculation. She really had the most extraordinary eyes, three weeks she’s been with us and I’d never really noticed them before, eyes of that deep yet translucent green of sea-water over sand in the Windward Isles, eyes that melted and shimmered in the same way as when a cat’s-paw of wind ruffled the surface of the water, eyes that—I dragged my own eyes away. See Carter, old Beresford had said. There’s the man for you. No imaginative fancies about him. That’s what he thought. I became aware that she was saying, quietly: “I’ll do it. I promise. I don’t know what track you’re on, but I know it’s the right track.”

“What do you mean?” I said slowly.

“That nurse of Mr. Cerdan’s. The tall one with the knitting. She can no more knit than fly over the moon. She just sits there, clicking needles, botching every other stitch and getting practically nowhere. I know. Being a millionaire’s daughter doesn’t mean that you can’t be as slick with a pair of knitting needles as the next girl.”

“What!” I caught her by the shoulders and stared down at her. “You saw this? You’re sure of it?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Well, now.” I was still looking at her but this time I wasn’t seeing the eyes, I was seeing a great number of other things and I didn’t like any of them. I said: “This is very very interesting. I’ll see you later. Be a good girl and get that fixed up with your father, will you?” I gave her shoulder an absent-minded pat, turned away and stared out of the window.

After a few seconds I became aware that she hadn’t yet gone. She’d the door opened, one hand on the handle, and was looking at me with a peculiar expression on her face.

“You wouldn’t like to give me a toffee-apple to suck?” If you can imagine a voice both sweet and bitter at the same moment, then that is how hers was. “Or a ribbon for my pigtails?” With that she banged the door and was gone. The door didn’t splinter in any way but that was only because it was made of steel.

I gazed at the closed door for a moment, then gave up. Any other time I might have devoted some minutes to figuring out the weird and wonderful workings of the female brain. But this wasn’t just any other time. Whatever it was, this just wasn’t any other time. I pulled on shoes, shirt and jacket, pulled out the Colt from under the mattress, stuck it in my waist-belt and went off in search of the captain.

VI.

Wednesday 7.45 pm.—8.15 p.m.

As far as attendance went, Mr. Julius Beresford had no grounds for complaint that night: every single passenger on the ship had turned up for his wife’s cocktail party and, as far as I could see, every off-duty officer on the Campari was there as well. And the party was certainly going splendidly: already, at seven forty-five, practically everyone was already on his or her second drink, and the drinks served up in the drawing-room of the Campari were never small ones.

Beresford and his wife had been moving around speaking to each of the guests in rotation and now it was my turn. I saw them approaching, raised my glass and said: “Many happy returns, Mrs. Beresford.”

“Thank you, young man. Enjoying yourself?”

“Of course. So is everybody. And you should be, most of all.”

“Yes.” She sounded just the slightest bit doubtful. “I don’t know if Julius was right—I mean, it’s less than twenty-four hours——”

“If you’re thinking about Benson and Brownell, ma’am, you’re worrying unnecessarily. You couldn’t have done a better thing than arrange this. I’m sure every passenger on the ship is grateful to you for helping to get things back to normal so quickly. I know all the officers are, anyway.”

“Just as I told you, my dear.” Beresford patted his wife’s hand then looked at me, amusement touching the corners of his eyes. “My wife, like my daughter, seems to have the greatest faith in your judgment, Mr. Carter.”

“Yes sir. I wonder if you could persuade your daughter not to go visiting in the officers’ quarters?”

“No,” Beresford said regretfully. “It’s impossible. Self-willed young lady.” He grinned. “I’ll bet she didn’t even knock.”

“She didn’t.” I looked across the room to where Miss Beresford was giving Tony Carreras the full benefit of her eyes over the rim of a Martini glass. They certainly made a striking couple. “She had, with respect, some bee in her bonnet about something being wrong aboard the Campari. I think the unfortunate happenings last night must have upset her.”

“Naturally. And you managed to remove this—um—bee?”

“I think so, sir.”

There was a slight pause, then Mrs. Beresford said impatiently: “Julius, we’re just beating about the bush.”

“Oh, now, Mary, I don’t think——”

“Rubbish,” she said briskly. “Young man, do you know one of the principal reasons I came along on this trip. Apart,” she smiled, “from the food? Because my husband asked me to, because he wanted a second opinion—on you. Julius, as you know, has made several trips on your ship. He has, as the saying goes, had an eye on you for a job in his organisation. My husband, I may say, has made his fortune not so much by working himself as by picking the right men to work for him. He’s never made a mistake yet. I don’t think he’s making a mistake now. And you have another very special recommendation.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said politely.

“You’re the only young man of our acquaintance who doesn’t turn himself into a carpet to be trampled upon as soon as our daughter appears in sight. A very important qualification, believe me.”

“Would you like to work for me, Mr. Carter?” Beresford asked bluntly.

“I think I would, sir.”

“Well!” Mrs. Beresford looked at her husband. “That’s settled——”

“Will you,” Julius Beresford interrupted.

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because your interests are in steel and oil. I know only the sea and ships. They don’t mix. I have no qualifications to work for you and at my present age I’d be too long in acquiring them. And I couldn’t accept a job for which I’d no qualifications.”

“Even at double the money? Or three times?”

“I’m grateful for the offer, sir, believe me. I do appreciate it. But there’s more to it than money.”

“Ah, well.” The Beresfords looked at each other. They didn’t seem too disturbed over my refusal: there was no reason why they should. “We asked a question, we got an answer. Fair enough.” He changed the subject. “What do you think of my feat in getting the old man here tonight?”

“I think it was very thoughtful of you.” I glanced across the room to the spot near the door where old Cerdan, sherry glass in hand, was sitting in his wheel-chair, with his nurses on a settee by his side. They too had sherry glasses. The old boy seemed to be talking animatedly to the captain. “He must lead a very shut-in life. Much difficulty in persuading him?”

“None at all. He was delighted to come.” I filed away this piece of information: my one encounter with Cerdan had left me with the impression that the only thing that would delight him about such an invitation would be the opportunity to give a surly refusal. “If you’ll excuse us, Mr. Carter. Hosts’ duties to their guests, you know.”

“Certainly, sir.” I stood to one side, but Mrs. Beresford planted herself in front of me and smiled quizzically.

“Mr. Carter,” she said firmly, “you’re a very stiff-necked young man. And please don’t for a moment imagine that I’m referring to your accident of last night.”

They moved off. I watched them go, thinking all sorts of thoughts, then crossed to the hinged flap that led to the rear of the bar. Whenever I approached that flap I felt it was not a glass I should have in my hand but a machete to help me hack my way through the jungle of flowers, potted shrubs, cacti, and festoons of creepers and hanging plants that transformed the place into the most unlikely-looking bar you’d ever seen. The interior designer responsible had gone into rhapsodies over it, but it was all right for him, he didn’t have to live with it, all he had to do was to retire nightly to his semi-detached in South London where his wife would have had him out the door if he’d tried on any such nonsense at home. But the passengers seemed to like it.

I made it to the back of the bar without getting scratched too much and said to the barman: “How’s it going, Louis?”

“Very well, sir,” Louis said stiffly. His bald pate was gleaming with sweat and his hair-line moustache twitching nervously. There were irregularities going on and Louis didn’t like irregularities. Then he thawed a bit and said: “They seem to be drinking a fair bit more than usual tonight, sir.”

“Not half as much as they will be later on.” I moved to the crystal-laden shelves from where I could see under the back of the bar, and said: “You don’t look very comfortable to me.”

“By God, and I’m not!” And indeed there wasn’t much room for the bo’sun to wedge his bulk between the raised deck and the under-side of the bar: his knees were up to his chin, but at least he was completely invisible to anyone on the other side of the counter. “Stiff as hell, sir. Never be able to move when the time comes.”

“And the smell of all that liquor driving you round the bend,” I said sympathetically. I wasn’t as cool as I sounded; I had to keep wiping the palms of my hands on the sides of my jacket, but try as I would I couldn’t seem to get them properly dry. I moved over to the counter again. “A double whisky, Louis. A large double whisky.”

Louis poured the drink and handed it across without a word. I raised it to my lips, lowered it below counter level and a large hand closed gratefully around it. I said quietly, as if speaking to Louis: “If the captain notices the smell afterwards you can claim it was that careless devil Louis that spilt it over you. I’m taking a walk now, Archie. If everything’s O.K., I’ll be back in five minutes.”

“And if not? If you’re wrong?”

“Heaven help me. The old man will feed me to the sharks.”

I made my way out from behind the bar and sauntered slowly towards the door. I saw Bullen trying to catch my eye but I ignored him; he was the world’s worst actor. I smiled at Susan Beresford and Tony Carerras, nodded civilly enough to old Cerdan, bowed slightly to the two nurses—the thin one, I noticed, had returned to her knitting and she seemed to me to be doing all right—and reached the doorway.

Once outside, I dropped all pretence of sauntering. I reached the entrance to the passengers’ accommodation on “A” deck in ten seconds. Halfway down the long central passageway White was sitting in his cubicle. I walked quickly down there, lifted the lid of his desk and took out the four items lying inside: Colt revolver, torch, screwdriver and master-key. I stuffed the Colt into my belt, the torch in one pocket, the screwdriver in the other. I looked at White, but he didn’t look at me. He was staring down into one corner of his cubicle as if I didn’t exist. He had his hands clasped tightly together, like one in prayer. I hoped he was praying for me. Even with his hands locked he couldn’t stop them from shaking uncontrollably. I left him without a word and ten seconds later was inside Cerdan’s and the nurses’ suite with the door locked behind me. On a sudden instinct I switched on my torch and played the beam round the edges of the door. The door was pale blue against a pale blue bulkhead. Hanging from the top of the bulkhead, dangling down for a couple of inches over the top of the door, was a pale blue thread. A broken pale blue thread: to the people who had put it there, an unmistakable calling card that visitors had been. I wasn’t worried about that but I was worried by the fact that it showed that someone was suspicious, very very suspicious. This might make things very awkward indeed. Maybe we should have announced Dexter’s death.

I passed straight through the nurses’ cabin and the lounge into Cerdan’s cabin. The curtains were drawn, but I left the lights off: light could show through the curtains and if they were suspicious as I thought someone might have wondered why I had left so suddenly and taken a walk outside. I hooded the torch to a small pencil beam and played it over the deckhead. The cold air trunking ran fore and aft and the first louvre was directly over Cerdan’s bed. I didn’t even need the screwdriver. I shone the torch through the louvre opening and saw, inside the trunking, something gleaming metallically in the bright spot of light. I reached up two fingers and slowly worked that something metallic down through the louvre. A pair of earphones. I peered into the louvre again. The earphones lead had a plug on the end of it and the plug was fitted into a socket that had been screwed on to the upper wall of the trunking. And the radio office was directly above. I pulled out the plug, rolled the lead round the headphones and switched off my torch.

White was exactly as I had left him, still vibrating away like a tuning fork. I opened his desk, returned the key, screwdriver and torch. The earphones I kept. And the gun.

They were into their third cocktails by the time I returned to the drawing-room. I didn’t need to count empty bottles to guess that, the laughter, the animated conversation, the increase in the decibel ratio was proof enough. Captain Bullen was still chatting away to Cerdan. The tall nurse was still knitting, the short one holding a newly-filled glass. Tommy Wilson was over by the bar. I rubbed my cheek and he crushed out the cigarette he was holding. I saw him say something to Miguel and Tony Carreras —at twenty feet, in that racket, it was impossible to hear a word he said—saw Tony Carreras lift a half-amused, half-questioning eyebrow, then all three of them moved over towards the bar.

I joined Captain Bullen and Cerdan. Long speeches weren’t going to help me here and only a fool would throw away his life by tipping off people like those.

“Good evening, Mr. Cerdan,” I said. I pulled my left hand out from under my jacket and tossed the earphones on to his rug-covered lap. “Recognise them?”

Cerdan’s eyes stared wide, then he flung himself forwards and sideways as if to clear his encumbering deck-chair, but old Bullen had been waiting for it and was too quick for him. He hit Cerdan with all the pent-up worry and fury of the past twenty-four hours behind the blow, and Cerdan toppled over the side of his chair and crashed heavily on the carpet.

I didn’t see him fall, I only heard the sound of it. I was too busy looking out for myself. The nurse with the sherry glass in her hand, quick as a cat, flung the contents in my face at the same instant that Bullen hit Cerdan. I flung myself sideways to avoid being blinded, and as I fell I saw the tall thin nurse flinging her knitting to one side and thrusting her right hand deep into the string knitting bag.

With my right hand I managed to tug the Colt clear of my belt before I hit the ground and squeezed the trigger, twice: it was my right shoulder that hit the carpet first, just as I fired, and I didn’t really know where the bullets went nor, for that one nearly blinding instant of agony as the shock of falling was transmitted to my injured neck, did I care: then my head cleared and I saw that the tall nurse was on her feet. Not only on her feet but raised high on her toes, head and shoulders arched sharply forwards, ivory knuckled hands pressed deep into her midriff: then she swayed forward, in macabre slow-motion action, and crumpled over the fallen Cerdan. The other nurse hadn’t moved from her seat: with Captain Bullen’s Colt only six inches from her face, and his finger pretty white in the trigger, she wasn’t likely to, either.

The reverberations of my heavy Colt, painful and deafening in their intensity in that confined metal-walled space, faded away into a silence that was deathly in more ways than one, and through the silence came a soft Highland voice saying gently: “If either of you move I will kill you.”

Carreras Senior and Junior, who must have had their backs to the bar, were now turned round half-way towards it, staring at the gun in MacDonald’s hand. Miguel Carreras’s face was unrecognisable, his expression changed from that of a smooth, urbane and highly prosperous businessman into something very ugly indeed. His right hand, as he had whirled round, had come to rest on the bar near a cut-glass decanter. Archie MacDonald wasn’t wearing any of his medals that night, and Carreras had no means of knowing the long and blood-stained record the bo’sun had behind him, or he would never have tried to hurl that decanter at MacDonald’s head. Carreras’s reactions were so fast, the movement so unexpected, that against another man he might have made it: against MacDonald he didn’t even manage to get the decanter off the counter, and a split-second later was staring down at the shattered bloody mass that had been his hand.

For the second time in a few seconds the crashing roar of a heavy gun, this time intermingled with the tinkle of smashed and flying glass, died away and again MacDonald’s voice came, almost regretfully: “I should have killed you, but I like reading about those murder trials. We’re saving you for the hangman, Mr. Carreras.”

I was climbing back to my feet when someone screamed, a harsh ugly sound that drilled through the room. Another woman took it up, a sustained shriek like an express, whistle wide open, heading for a level-crossing, and the stage seemed all set for mass hysteria.

“Stop that damned screaming!” I snarled. “Do you hear? Stop it at once. It’s all over now.”

The screaming stopped. Silence again, a weird unnatural silence that was almost as bad as the racket that had gone before. And then Beresford was coming towards me, a bit unsteadily, his lips forming words that didn’t come, his face white. I couldn’t blame him, in his well-ordered and wealth-cushioned world the entertainments offered his guests couldn’t often have ended up with bodies strewn all over the floor.

“You’ve killed her, Carter,” he said at length. His voice was harsh and strained. “You’ve killed her. I saw it, we all saw it. A—a defenceless woman.” He stared at me, and if he had any thought of offering me a job again I couldn’t see it in his face. “You murdered her!”

“Woman my foot!” I said savagely. I bent down, yanked off the nurse’s hat, then ruthlessly ripped away a glued wig to show a black close-cropped crew-cut. “Attractive, isn’t it? The very latest from Paris. And defenceless!” I grabbed her bag, turned it upside down, emptied the contents on the carpet, stooped and came up with what had originally been a full-length double-barrelled shotgun: the barrels had been sawn off until there was no more than six inches of them left, the wooden stock removed and a roughly-made pistol type grip fitted in its place. “Ever seen one of those before, Mr. Beresford? Native product of your own country, I believe. A whippet or some such name. Fires lead shot and from the range our nurse friend here intended to use it it would have blown a hole clear through my middle. Defenceless!” I turned to where Bullen was standing, his gun still trained on the other nurse. “Is that character armed, sir?”

“We’ll soon find out,” Bullen said grimly. “You carrying a gun, my friend?”

The “nurse” swore at him, two words in basic Anglo-Saxon, in a low, snarling voice. Bullen gave him no warning, he swept up the Colt and struck the barrel heavily across the man’s face and temple. He staggered and swayed, out on his feet. I caught him, held him with one hand while with the other I ripped the dress down the front, pulled out a snub-nosed automatic from a felt holster under the left arm, then let him go. He swayed some more, collapsed on the settee, then rolled to the floor.

“Is—is all this necessary?” Beresford’s voice was still hoarse and strained.

“Stand back everyone,” Bullen said authoritatively. “Keep well over to the windows and clear of those two men, our two Carreras’s friends. They are highly dangerous and might try to jump in among you for cover. MacDonald, that was splendidly done. But next time shoot to kill. That’s an order. I accept full responsibility. Dr. Marston, bring the necessary equipment, please, and attend to Carreras’s hand.” He waited till Marston had left, then turned to Beresford with a wry smile. “Sorry to ruin your party, Mr. Beresford. And all this, I assure you, is highly necessary.”

“But—but the violence, the—the killing——”

“They murdered three of my men in the past twenty-four hours.”

“They what?”

“Benson, Brownell and Fourth Officer Dexter. Murdered them. Brownell was strangled. Benson was strangled or shot, Dexter’s lying dead in the wireless office with three bullets in his stomach, and God knows how many more men would have died if Chief Officer Carter here hadn’t got on to them.”

I looked around the white, strained, still unbelieving faces, there was no real understanding there yet of what the captain was saying, the shock, the fear, the near-hysteria left no room for thought in their minds: of them all, I had to admit that old Beresford had taken it best, to adjust himself to what must have been the incredible spectacle of seeing fellow-passengers suddenly gunned down by officers of the Campari, to fight his way out of this fog of crazy bewilderment.

“But—I mean, Captain, what part can an old cripple like Mr. Cerdan have in all this?”

“According to Mr. Carter, Cerdan isn’t old at all—he’s just made up to look old. And also according to Mr. Carter, if Cerdan is a cripple, paralysed from the waist down as he is supposed to be, then you’re going to witness a modern miracle of healing just as soon as he recovers consciousness. For all we know, Cerdan is very probably the leader of this bunch of murderers. We don’t know.”

“But what in God’s name is behind it all?” Beresford demanded.

“That’s just what we are about to find out,” Bullen said tightly. He glanced at Carreras, father and son. “Come here, you two.”

They came, MacDonald and Tommy Wilson following: Carreras Senior had a handkerchief wrapped round his shattered hand trying, not very successfully, to stem the flow of blood, and the eyes that caught mine were wicked with hate: Tony Carreras on the other hand, seemed calmly unconcerned, even slightly amused. I made a mental note to keep a very close eye indeed on Tony Carreras. He was calm and relaxed by half.

They halted a few feet away. Bullen said: “Mr. Wilson.”

“Sir?”

“That sawn-off shotgun belonging to our late friend here. Pick it up.”

Wilson picked it up.

“Do you think you could use it? And don’t point the damned thing at me,” he added hastily.

“I think so, sir.”

“Cerdan and that so-called nurse. A sharp eye on them. If they come to try anything——” Bullen left the sentence unfinished. “Mr. Carter, Carreras and his son may be armed.”

“Yes, sir.” I moved round behind Tony Carreras. careful to keep out of the line of fire of both Bullen and MacDonald, caught his jacket by the collar and jerked it savagely down over shoulders and arms till it reached the level of his elbows.

“You seem to have done this sort of thing before, Mr. Carter,” Tony Carreras said easily. He was a cool customer all right, too damned cool for my liking.

“Television,” I explained. He was carrying a gun, under the left shoulder. He was wearing a specially made shirt with a couple of hemmed slips front and back on the left-hand side so that the chest strap for the holster was concealed under the shirt. Tony Carreras was very thorough in his preparations.

I went over his clothes, but he’d only the one gun. I went through the same routine with Miguel Carreras, he wasn’t anywhere near as affable as his son, but maybe his hand was hurting him. He wasn’t carrying any gun. And maybe that made Miguel Carreras the boss: maybe he didn’t have to carry any gun, maybe he was in a position to order other people to do his killing for him.

“Thank you,” Captain Bullen said. “Mr. Carreras, we will be in Nassau in a few hours’ time. The police will be aboard by midnight. Do you wish to make a statement now or would you rather make it to the police?”

“My hand is broken.” Miguel Carreras’s voice was a harsh whisper. “The forefinger is smashed, it will have to be amputated. Someone is going to pay for this.”

“I take it that is your answer,” Bullen said calmly. “Very well. Bo’sun, four heaving lines, if you please. I want those men trussed like turkeys.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” The bo’sun took one step forward, then stood stockstill. Through the open doorway had come a flat staccato burst of sound—the unmistakable chattering of a machine-gun. It seemed to come from almost directly above, from the bridge. And then all the lights went out.

I think I was the first person to move. I think I was the only person to move. I took a long step forward, hooked my left arm round Tony Carreras’s neck, rammed the Colt into the small of his back and said softly: “Don’t even think of trying anything, Carreras.”

And then there was silence again. It seemed to go on and on and on, but it probably didn’t last more than a few seconds altogether. A woman screamed, a brief choking sound that died away into a moan, and then there was silence once more, a silence that ended abruptly with a violent crashing, splintering and tinkling as heavy solid metallic objects, operating in almost perfect unison, smashed in the plate-glass windows that gave to the deck outside: at the same instant there came a sharp echoing crash of metal against metal as the door was kicked wide open to smash back against the bulkhead.

“Drop your guns, all of you,” Miguel Carreras called in a high, clear voice. “Drop them—now! Unless you want a massacre.”

The lights came on.

Vaguely outlined against the four smashed windows of the drawing-room I could see the blurs of four indistinct heads and shoulders and arms. The blurs I didn’t care about, it was what they held in their arms that worried me—the wicked-looking snouts and cylindrical magazines of four sub-machine-guns. A fifth man, dressed in jungle green and wearing a green beret on his head, stood in the doorway, a similar automatic carbine cradled in his hands.

I could see what Carreras meant by dropping our guns. It seemed an excellent idea to me, we had about as much chance as the last ice-cream at a children’s party. I was already starting to loosen my grip on the gun when, incredulously, I saw Captain Bullen jerk up his Colt on the armed man in the doorway. It was criminal, suicidal folly, either he was acting completely instinctively, without any thought at all, or the bitter chargin, the killing disappointment after having thought that he had held all the cards in his hands, had been too much for him. I might have known, I thought briefly and wildly, he’d been far too calm and self-controlled, the safety valve screwed down on the bursting boiler.

I tried to shout out a warning, but it was too late, it was far too late. I shoved Tony Carreras violently aside and tried to reach Bullen, to strike down his gun-hand, but I was still far too late, a lifetime too late. The heavy Colt was roaring and bucking in Bullen’s hand, and the man in the doorway, to whom the ridiculous idea of resistance must have been the very last thought in his head, let the machine-gun slide slowly out of his lifeless hands and toppled backwards out of sight.

The man outside the window nearest the door had his machine-gun lined up on the captain. Bullen, in that second, was the biggest fool in the world, a crazy suicidal maniac, but even so I couldn’t let him be gunned down where he stood. I don’t know where my first bullet went but the second must have struck the machine-gun, I saw it jerk violently as if struck by a giant hand, and then came a continuous cacophonous drumfire of deafening sound as a third man squeezed the trigger of his machine-gun and kept on squeezing it. Something with the power and weight of a plunging pile-driver smashed into my left thigh, hurling me back against the bar. My head struck the heavy brass rail at the foot of the counter and the sound of the drumfire died away.

The stink of drifting cordite and the silence of the grave. Even before consciousness came fully back to me, even before I opened my eyes, I was aware of those, of the cordite and the unearthly stillness. I opened my eyes slowly, pushed myself shakily up till I was sitting with my back more or less straight against the bar, and shook my head to try to clear it. I had, understandably enough, forgotten about my stiff neck: the sharp stab of pain did more to clear my head than anything else could have done.

The first thing I was aware of was the passengers. They were all stretched out on the carpet, lying very still. For one heart-stopping moment I thought they were all dead or dying, mown down in swathes by that stuttering machine-gun, then I saw Mr. Greenstreet, Miss Harrbride’s husband, move his head slightly and look around the drawing-room with a cautious and terrified eye. One eye was all I could see. At any other time it would have been very, very funny: but I never felt less like laughing. The passengers, perhaps through wisdom but more probably through the reflex reaction of instinctive self-preservation, must have flung themselves to the deck the moment the machine-gun had opened up and were only now daring to lift their heads. I concluded that I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds.

I moved my eyes to the right. Carreras and son were standing just where they had been and Tony Carreras had a gun in his hand now. My gun. Beyond them, a huddled group lay sprawling or sitting on the floor: Cerdan, the “nurse” I’d shot and three others.

Tommy Wilson, the laughing, lovable happy-go-lucky Tommy Wilson, was dead. He wouldn’t have to worry about his mathematics any more.

It didn’t need old Doc Marston and his shortsighted peering to tell me that Wilson was dead. He was lying on his back and it looked to me as if half his chest had been shot away, he must have taken the main brunt of that concentrated burst of machine-gun fire. And Tommy hadn’t even lifted his gun.

Archie MacDonald was stretched out on his side, close to Wilson. He seemed to me to be very still, far, far too still. I couldn’t see the front of his body for he was turned away from me, for all I knew machine-gun slugs had torn the life out of him as they had out of Tommy Wilson. But I could see blood all over his face and neck, slowly soaking into the carpet.

Captain Bullen was the one who was sitting. He wasn’t dead anyway, but I wouldn’t have bet a brass farthing on his chances of staying alive. He was fully conscious, his mouth warped and dragged into an unnatural smile, his face white and twisted with pain. From shoulder almost to the waist his right side was soaked in blood, so soaked that I couldn’t see where the bullets had gone home: but I could see bright red bubbles flecking the twisted lips, which meant that he had been shot through the lung.

I looked at the three of them again. Bullen, MacDonald, Wilson. Three better men it would have been hard to find, three better shipmates impossible to find. They had wanted none of this, none of this blood and agony and death, all they had wanted was the chance to do their jobs in peace and quiet as best they could. Hard-working, companionable and infinitely decent men, they had sought no violence, thought no violence, so now they lay there dead and dying. MacDonald and Bullen with their wives and families, Tommy Wilson with his fiancée in England and a girl in every port in America and the Caribbean. I looked at them and I felt no sadness or sorrow or anger or shock, I just felt cold and detached and strangely uninvolved in it all. I looked from them to the Carreras family and Cerdan and I made myself a promise, and it was well for me that neither Carreras heard my promise or knew of its irrevocable finality for they were clever, calculating men and they would have shot me dead as I lay there.

I wasn’t feeling any pain at all but I remembered about the pile-driver that had hurled me back against the bar. I looked down at my leg, and from mid-thigh to well below the knee the trousers were so saturated with blood that there was no trace of white left. The carpet all around my leg was soaked in it. That carpet I remembered vaguely, had cost over £10,000, and it was certainly taking a terrific beating that night. Lord Dexter would have been furious. I looked at my leg again and fingered the soggy material. Three distinct tears, which meant I had been shot three times. I supposed the pain would come later. A great deal of blood, far too much blood: I wondered if an artery had been torn.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” It was Carreras speaking, and although his hand had been giving him hell there was no sign of it in his face. The fury, the malevolence I had so recently seen, was only a memory: he was back on balance again, urbane, commanding, in complete control of the situation.”

“I regret all this, regret it extremely.” He waved his left hand in the direction of Bullen and Wilson, MacDonald and myself. “All so unnecessary, so terribly unnecessary, brought upon Captain Bullen and his men by Captain Bullen’s reckless folly.” Most of the passengers were on their feet now, and I could see Susan Beresford standing beside her father, staring down at me as if she weren’t seeing too well, eyes abnormally large in the pale face. “I regret, too, the distress you have been caused, and to you, Mr. and Mrs. Beresford, I tender my apologies for the ruin of your night’s entertainment. Your kindness has been ill-rewarded.”

“For God’s sake cut out the fancy speeches,” I interrupted. My voice didn’t sound like mine at all, a harsh, strained croak, a bull-frog with laryngitis. “Get the doctor for Captain Bullen. He’s been shot through the lung.”

He looked at me speculatively, then at Bullen, then back at me.

“A certain indestructible quality about you, Mr. Carter,” he said thoughtfully. He bent over and peered at my bloodstained leg. “Shot three times, your leg must be pretty badly smashed, yet you can observe so tiny a detail as a fleck of blood on Captain Bullen’s mouth. You are incapacitated, and I am glad: had your captain, officers and crew composed exclusively of men like yourself I would never have come within a thousand miles of the Campari. As for the doctor, he will be here soon. He is tending a man on the bridge.”

“Jamieson? Our third officer?”

“Mr. Jamieson is beyond all help,” he said curtly. “Like Captain Bullen, he fancied himself as a man in a heroic mould: like Captain Bullen he has paid the price for his stupidity. The man at the wheel was struck in the arm by a stray bullet.” He turned to face the passengers. “You need have no further worry about your personal safety. The Campari is now completely in my hands and will remain so: however, you form no part of my plans and will be transferred in two or three days to another vessel. Meanwhile you will all eat, live and sleep in this room: I cannot spare individual guards for each stateroom. Mattresses and blankets will be brought to you. If you co-operate, you can exist in reasonable comfort: you certainly have no more to fear.”

“What is the meaning of this damnable outrage, Carreras?” There was a shake in Beresford’s voice. “Those desperadoes, those killers. What of them? Who are they? Where in the name of God did they come from? What do you intend to do? You’re mad, man, completely mad. Surely you know that you can’t expect to get off with this?”

“You may use that thought for consolation. Ah, Doctor, there you are.” He held out his right hand, swathed in its bloodstained handkerchief. “Have a look at this, will you?”

“Damn you and your hand,” Dr. Marston said bitterly. The old boy was trembling, the sight of the dead and dying must have hit him hard, but he was hopping mad for all that. “There are other more seriously injured men here, I must——”

“You may as well realise that I, and I alone, give the orders from now on,” Carreras interrupted. “My hand. At once. Ah, Juan.” This to a tall thin swarthy man who had just entered, a rolled-up chart under his arm. “Give that to Mr. Carter here. That’s him, yes. Mr. Carter, Captain Bullen said —and I have been aware of it for many hours—that we are heading for Nassau and are due there in less than four hours. Lay off a course to take us well clear of Nassau, to the east, then out midway between the Great Abaco and Eleuthera islands and so approximately north-north-west into the North Atlantic. My own navigation has become rather rusty, I fear. Mark in the approximate times for course changes.”

I took the chart, pencil, parallel rulers and dividers and laid the chart on my knee. Carreras said consideringly: “What, no ‘Do your own damned navigation’ or words to that effect?”

“What’s the point?” I said wearily. “You wouldn’t hesitate to line up all the passengers and shoot them one by one if I didn’t co-operate.”

“It’s a pleasure to deal with a man who sees and accepts the inevitable,” Carreras smiled. “But you greatly overestimate my ruthlessness. Later, Mr. Carter, when we have you fixed up you shall become a permanent installation on the bridge. It is unfortunate, but I suppose you realise that you are the only deck officer left to us?”

“You’ll have to get some other installation on the bridge,” I said bitterly. “My thigh-bone is smashed “

“What?” He looked at me narrowly.

“I can feel it grating.” I twisted my face up to let him see how I could feel it grating. “Dr. Marston will soon confirm it.”

“We can arrive at some other arrangement,” Carreras said equably. He winced as Dr. Marston probed at his hand. “The forefinger: it will have to come off?”

“I don’t think so. A local anæsthetic, a small operation and I believe I can save it.” Carreras didn’t know the danger he was in, if he let old Marston get to work on him he’d probably end up by losing his whole arm. “But it shall have to be done in my surgery.”

“It’s probably time we all went to the surgery. Tony, check engine-room, radar-room, all men off duty: see that they are all safely under guard. Then take that chart to the bridge and see that the helmsman makes the proper course alterations at the proper time. See that the radar operator is kept under constant supervision and reports the slightest object on his screen: Mr. Carter here is quite capable of laying off a course which would take us smack into the middle of Eleuthera Island. Two men to take Mr. Cerdan to his cabin. Dr. Marston, is it possible to take those men down to your surgery without endangering their lives?”

“I don’t know.” Marston finished his temporary bandaging of Carreras’s hand and crossed to Bullen. “How do you feel, Captain?”

Bullen looked at him with lack-lustre eyes. He tried to smile but it was no more than an agonised grimace. He tried to speak but no words came, just fresh bubbles of blood at his lips. Marston produced scissors, cut the captain’s shirt open, examined him briefly and said. “We may as well risk it. Two of your men, Mr. Carreras, two strong men. See that his chest is not compressed.”

He left Bullen, bent over MacDonald and straightened almost immediately. “This man can be moved with safety.”

“MacDonald!” I said. “The bo’sun. He—he’s not dead?”

“He’s been hit on the head. Creased, probably concussed, perhaps even the skull fractured: but he’ll survive. He seems to have been hit on the knee, too: nothing serious.”

I felt as if someone had lifted the Sydney Bridge off my back. The bo’sun had been my friend, my good friend, for too many years now: and, besides, with Archie MacDonald by me all things were possible.

“And Mr. Carter?” Carreras queried.

“Don’t touch my leg,” I yelled. “Not until I get an anæsthetic.”

“He’s probably right,” Marston murmured. He peered closely. “Not much blood now, you’ve been lucky, John: if the main artery had been severed—well, you’d have been gone.” He looked at Carreras, his face doubtful. “He could be moved. I think, but with a fractured thigh-bone the pain will be excruciating.”

“Mr. Carter is very tough,” Carreras said unsympathetically. It wasn’t his thigh-bone, he’d been a Good Samaritan for a whole minute now and the strain had proved too much for him. “Mr. Carter will survive.”

VII.

Wednesday 8.30 p.m.—Thursday 10.30 a.m

I survived all right but no credit for that was due to the handling I received on the way down to the sick-bay. The sick-bay was on the port side, two decks below the drawing-room: on the second companionway one of the men who were carrying me slipped and fell and I was aware of nothing more until I woke up in bed.

Like every other compartment on the Campari, the sickbay was fitted out regardless of cost. A large room, twenty feet by sixteen, it had the usual wall-to-wall Persian carpeting and pastel walls decorated with murals depicting water-skiing, skin-diving, swimming and other such sporting activities symbolic of fitness and good health craftily designed to encourage to get on their feet and out of there with all possible speed any patient unfortunate enough to be confined to any of the three beds. The beds themselves, with their heads close up to the windows in the ship’s side, struck a jarring note: they were just plain standard iron hospital beds, the only concession to taste being that they were painted in the same pastel tints as the bulkheads. In the far corner of the room remote from the door was old Marston’s consulting desk, with a couple of chairs: farther along the inner bulkhead, nearer the door, was a flat-topped couch that could be raised for examinations, or, if need be, the carrying out of minor operations. Between couch and desk, a door led to two smaller compartments, a dispensary and a dentist’s surgery. I knew that because I had recently spent three-quarters of an hour in that dentist’s chair, with Marston attending to a broken tooth: the memory of the experience would stay with me the rest of my days.

The three beds were occupied. Captain Bullen was in the one nearest the door, the bo’sun next to him and myself in the corner, opposite Marston’s desk, all of us lying on rubber sheets placed over the beds. Marston was bent over the middle bed, examining the bo’sun’s knee: beside him, holding a metal tray with bowls, sponges, instruments and bottles containing some unidentifiable liquids, was Susan Beresford. She looked very pale. I wondered vaguely what she was doing here. Seated on the couch was a young man, badly in need of a shave: he was wearing green trousers, a green sweat-stained epauletted shirt and green beret. He had his eyes half closed against the smoke spiralling up from the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth and carried an automatic carbine in his hand. I wondered how many men with how many automatic carbines were posted all over the Campari. Detailing a man to guard three broken-down crocks like MacDonald, Bullen and myself showed that Carreras had plenty of men to spare or was excessively cautious. Or maybe both.

“What are you doing here, Miss Beresford?” I asked.

She looked up, startled, and the instruments rattled metallically on the tray in her hands.

“Oh, I am glad,” she said. She sounded almost as if she meant it. “I thought, I—how do you feel?”

“The way I look. Why are you here?”

“Because I needed her.” Doc Marston straightened slowly and rubbed his back. “Dealing with wounds like these—well, I must have a helper. Nurses, John, are usually young and female and there are only two on the Campari in that category. Miss Beresford and Miss Harcourt.”

“I don’t see any signs of Miss Harcourt.” I tried to visualise the glamorous young actress in the real-life role of Florence Nightingale, but my imagination was in no shape to cope with absurdities like that. I couldn’t even see her playing it on the screen.

“She was here,” he said curtly. “She fainted.”

“That helps. How’s the bo’sun?”

“I must ask you not to talk, John,” he said severely, “You’ve lost a great deal of blood and you’re very weak. Please conserve your strength.”

“How’s the bosun?” I repeated.

Dr. Marston sighed.

“He’ll be all right. That is, he’s in no danger. Abnormally thick skull, I should say: that saved him. Concussion, yes but not fractured. I think. Hard to say without an X-ray. Respiration, pulse, temperature, blood pressure—none of them shows any signs pointing to extensive brain injury. It’s his leg I’m worried about.”

“His leg?”

“Patella. Knee-cap to you. Completely shattered, beyond repair. Tendons sliced, tibia fractured. Leg sawn in half. Must have been hit several times. The damned murderers!”

“Amputation? You don’t think——”

“No amputation.” He shook his head irritably. “I’ve removed all the broken pieces I can find. Bones will either have to be fused, so shortening the leg, or a metal plate. Too soon to say. But this I can say: he’ll never bend that knee again.”

“You’re telling me he’s crippled? For life?”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re very friendly.”

“So he’s finished with the sea?”

“I’m sorry,” Marston repeated. Medical incompetence apart, he was really a pretty decent old duffer. “Your turn now, John.”

“Yes,” I wasn’t looking forward to my turn. I looked at the guard. “Hey, you! Yes, you. Where’s Carreras?”

“Señor Carreras.” The young man dropped his cigarette on the Persian carpet and ground it out with his heel. Lord Dexter would have gone off his rocker. “It is not my business to know where Señor Carreras is.”

That settled that. He spoke English. I couldn’t have cared less at that moment where Carreras was. Marston had his big scissors out, and was preparing to slit up my trouser leg.

“Captain Bullen?” I asked. “What chance?”

“I don’t know. He’s unconscious now.” He hesitated. “He was wounded twice. One bullet passed clean through below the shoulder, tearing the pectoral muscle. The other entered the right chest a little lower, breaking a rib, then must have gone through the lung near the apex. The bullet is still lodged inside the body, almost certainly in the vicinity of the shoulder-blade. I may decide to operate later to remove it.”

“Operate.” The thought of old Marston hacking around inside an unconscious Bullen made me feel even paler than I looked. I choked down the next few words I thought of and said: “Operate? You would take the grave chance, you would be willing to risk your lifetime’s professional reputation——”

“A man’s life is at stake, John,” he said solemnly.

“But you might have to penetrate the chest wall. A major operation, Dr. Marston. Without assistant surgeons, without skilled nurses, without a competent anæsthetist, no X-rays, and you might be removing a bullet that’s plugging a vital gap in the lung or pleura or whatever you call it. Besides, the bullet might have been deflected anywhere.” I took a deep breath. “Dr. Marston, I cannot say how much I respect and admire you for even thinking of operating in such impossible conditions. But you will not run the risk. Doctor, as long as the captain is incapacitated I am in command of the Campari—in nominal command, anyway,” I added bitterly. “I absolutely forbid you to incur the very heavy responsibility of operating in such adverse conditions. Miss Beresford, you are a witness to that.”

“Well, John, you may be right,” old Marston said weightily. He was suddenly looking five years younger. “You may indeed be right. But my sense of duty——”

“It does you great credit, Doctor. But think of all those people who have been carrying a bullet about inside their chests since the First World War and still going strong.”

“There’s that, of course, there’s that.” I had rarely seen a man looking so relieved. “We’ll give nature a chance, hey?”

“Captain Bullen’s as strong as a horse.” The old man had at least a fighting chance now. I felt as if I’d just saved a life. I said weakly: “You were right, Doctor. I’m afraid I have been talking too much. Could I have some water, please?”

“Of course, my boy, of course.” He brought some, watched me drink it and said: “That feel better?”

“Thank you.” My voice was very faint. I moved my lips several times, as if speaking, but no words came. Marston, alarmed, put his ear close to my mouth to make out what I was trying to say, and I murmured, slowly and distinctly: “My thighbone is not broken: but pretend it is.”

He stared, eyes reflecting astonishment, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He wasn’t all that slow, the old boy. He nodded slightly and said: “Ready for me to begin?”

He began. Susan Beresford helped him. My leg was a gory sight but looked worse than it was. One bullet had passed directly through the leg, but the other two had just torn ragged superficial gashes on the inside, and it was from those that most of the blood had come. All the while he was working, Dr. Marston kept up, for the sake of the guard, a running commentary on the extent and severity of my wounds, and if I hadn’t known he was lying fluently he would have made me feel very ill indeed. He certainly must have convinced the guard. When he’d cleaned and bound the wounds, a process I bore with stoic fortitude only because I didn’t want to start yelling in front of Susan Beresford, he fixed some splints to my leg and bound those on also. This done, he propped up my leg on a pile of pillows, went into the dispensary and reappeared with a couple of screwed pulleys, a length of wire with a heavy weight attached to the end and a leather strap. The strap he fitted to my left ankle.

“What’s this in aid of?” I demanded.

“I’m the medical officer, please remember,” he said curtly. His left eyelid dropped in a slow wink. “Traction, Mr. Carter. You don’t want your leg to be permanently shortened for life?”

“Sorry,” I muttered. Maybe I had been misjudging old Marston just a little. Nothing would ever make me reconsider my opinion of him as a doctor, but he was shrewd enough in other things: the first thing a man like Carreras would have asked was why a man with a broken bone in his leg was not in traction. Marston screwed the two hooks into holes in the deckhead, passed the wire through, attached the weight to one end and the strap to the other. It didn’t feel too uncomfortable. He then picked up the length of trouser leg that had been cut off, checked quickly to see if the guard was watching, splashed some water on it and then wrung it out on top of my bandages. Even to myself I had to admit that I’d seldom seen a more convincing sight, a patient more completely and thoroughly immobilised.

He finished just in time. He and Susan Beresford were just clearing away when the door opened and Tony Carreras came in. He looked at Bullen, MacDonald and myself, slowly, consideringly—he wasn’t a man who would miss very much—then came to my bedside.

“Good evening, Carter,” he said pleasantly. “How are you feeling?”

“Where’s that murderous parent of yours?” I asked.

“Murderous parent? You do my father an injustice. Asleep, at the moment, as it happens: his hand was giving him great pain after Marston had finished with it”—I wasn’t surprised at that—“so he was given a sleeping draught. The good ship Campari is all buttoned up for the night and Captain Tony Carreras in charge. You may all sleep easy. You’ll be interested to hear that we’ve just picked up Nassau on the radar-scope—port 40, or some such nautical term—so you weren’t playing any funny tricks with that course after all.”

I grunted and turned my head away. Carreras walked across to Marston. “How are they, Doctor?”

“How do you expect them to be after your thugs have riddled them with bullets?” Marston demanded bitterly. “Captain Bullen may live or die, I don’t know. MacDonald, the bo’sun, will live, but he’ll be a stiff-legged cripple for life. The chief officer has a compound fracture of the femur—the thigh-bone. Completely shattered. If we don’t get him to hospital in a couple of days, he also will be crippled for life: as it is, he’ll never be able to walk properly again.”

“I am genuinely sorry,” Tony Carreras said. He actually sounded as if he meant it. “Killing and crippling good men is an unforgivable waste. Well, almost unforgivable. Some things justify it.”

“Your humanity does you credit,” I sneered from my pillow.

“We are humane men,” he said.

“You’ve proved that all right.” I twisted to look at him. “But you could still show a little consideration for a very sick man.”

“Indeed?” He was very good at lifting eyebrows.

“Indeed. Dan’l Boone, here.” I nodded towards the sentry with the gun. “You permit your men to smoke on duty?”

“José?” He smiled. “José is an inveterate chain-smoker. Take his cigarettes away and he’d probably go on strike. This isn’t the Grenadier Guards, you know, Carter. Why the sudden concern?”

“You heard what Dr. Marston said. Captain Bullen. He’s in a critical condition with a hole through his lung.”

“Ah, I think I understand. You agree, Doctor?”

I held my breath. The chances were that the old boy haden’t even the faintest idea what we were talking about. But again I’d underrated his astuteness.

“For a man with a ruptured lung,” he said gravely, “there can be nothing worse than a smoke-laden atmosphere.”

“I see. José!” Carreras spoke rapidly in Spanish to the guard, who grinned amiably, got to his feet and made for the door, picking up a chair en route. The door swung to behind him.

“No discipline,” Tony Carreras sighed. “None of the brisk sentry-go marching and counter-marching like Buckingham Palace, Mr. Carter. A chair tilted against a wall. Our Latin blood, I fear. But I warn you, none the less effective a guard for all that. I see no harm in his keeping a watch outside, apart from jumping through one of the windows into the sea below—not that you are in any condition to do that anyway—I can’t see what mischief you can get up to.” He paused, looked at me consideringly. “You are singularly incurious, Mr. Carter? Far from being in character. Makes one suspicious, you know.”

“Curious about what?” I growled. “Nothing to be curious about. How many of those armed thugs do you have aboard the Campari?”

“Forty. Not bad, eh? Well, thirty-eight effectives. Captain Bullen killed one and you seriously damaged the hand of another. Where did you learn to shoot like that, Carter?”

“Luck. Cerdan recovered yet?”

“Yes,” he said briefly. He didn’t seem to want to talk about Cerdan.

“He killed Dexter?” I persisted.

“No. Werner, the nurse—the one you killed tonight.” For a professed humanitarian, the death of one of his colleagues in crime left him strangely unmoved. “A steward’s uniform and a tray of food at face level. Your head steward—White—saw him twice and never suspected: not that he went within thirty feet of White. And it was just Dexter’s bad luck that he saw this steward unlocking the radio room.”

“I suppose the same murderous devil got Brownell?”

“And Benson. Benson caught him coming out of the radio room after disposing of Brownell, and was shot. Werner was going to dump him straight over the side, but there were people—crew—directly beneath. He dragged him across to the port side. Again crew beneath. So he emptied a life-jacket locker and put Benson inside.” Carreras grinned. “And just your bad luck that you happened to be standing right beside that locker when we sent Werner up to dispose of the body, just before midnight last night.”

“Who dreamed up this scheme of having the fake Marconi-man in Kingston drill through from the wireless office to the cold air trunking in Cerdan’s room below and buttoning the earphones permanently into the wireless officer’s receiving circuit? Cerdan, your old man or you?”

“My father.”

“And the Trojan horse idea. Your father also?”

“He is a brilliant man. Now I know why you were not curious. You knew.”

“It wasn’t hard to guess,” I said wearily. “Not, that is, when it was too late. All our troubles really started in Carracio. And we loaded those huge crates in Carracio. Now I know why the stevedores were so terrified when one of the crates almost slipped from its slings. Now I know why your old man was so damned anxious to inspect the hold—not to pay his respects to the dead men in their coffins but to see how his men were placed for smashing their way out of the crates. And then they broke out last night and forced the battens of the hatch. How many men in a crate, Carreras?”

“Twenty. Rather uncomfortably jammed, poor fellows. I think they had a rough twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty. Two crates. We loaded four of those. What’s in the other crates?”

“Machinery, Mr. Carter, just machinery.”

“One thing I am really curious about.”

“Yes?”

“What’s behind all this murderous business? Kidnap? Ransom?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss those things with you.” He grinned. “At least, not yet. You remaining here, Miss Beresford, or do you wish me to—ah—escort you up to your parents in the drawing-room?”

“Please leave the young lady,” Marston said. “I want her to help me keep a twenty-four hour watch on Captain Bullen. He might have a relapse at any moment.”

“As you wish.” He bowed to Susan Beresford. “Good night all.”

The door closed. Susan Beresford said: “So that’s how they came aboard. How in the world did you know?”

“How in the world did I know! You didn’t think they had forty men hidden up inside the funnel, did you?” Once we knew it was Carreras and Cerdan, it was obvious. They came aboard at Carracio. So did those huge crates. Two and two, Miss Beresford’ have never failed to add up to four.” She flushed and gave me a very old-fashioned look, but I ignored it and went on: “You both see what this means, don’t you?”

“Let him tell us, Doctor,” Miss Beresford said acidly. “He’s just dying to tell us.”

“It means that there’s something very very big behind it all,” I said slowly. “All cargoes, except those in free ports and under certain transshipment conditions, which don’t apply here, have to be inspected by Customs. Those crates passed the Carracio Customs—which means that the Customs know what’s inside. Probably explains, too, why our Carracio agent was so nervous. But the Customs let it pass. Why? Because they had orders to let those crates pass. And who gave them the orders? Their government. Who gave the government its orders? Who but the generalissimo—after all, he is the government. The generalissimo,” I went on thoughtfully, “is directly behind all this. And we all know he’s desperate for money. I wonder, I wonder?”

“You wonder what?” Marston asked.

“I don’t really know. Tell me, Doctor, have you the facilities for making tea or coffee here?”

“Never yet seen a dispensary that hadn’t my boy.”

“What an excellent idea!” Susan Beresford jumped to her feet. “I’d love a cup of tea.”

“Coffee.”

“Tea.”

“Coffee. Humour a sick man. This should be quite an experience for Miss Beresford. Making her own coffee, I mean. You fill the percolator with water——”

“Please stop there.” She crossed over to my bedside and looked down at me, her face without expression, her eyes very steady. “You have a short memory, Mr. Carter. I told you night before last that I was sorry, very sorry. Remember?”

“I remember,” I acknowledged. “Sorry, Miss Beresford.”

“Susan.” She smiled. “If you want your coffee, that is.”

“Blackmail.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake call her ‘Susan’ if she wants,” Dr. Marston interrupted irritably. “What’s the harm?”

“Doctor’s orders,” I said resignedly. “O.K., Susan, bring the patient his coffee.” The circumstances were hardly normal: I could get back to calling her Miss Beresford later on.

Five minutes passed, then she brought the coffee. I looked at the tray and said: “What? Only three cups? There should be four.”

“Four?”

“Four. Three for us and one for our friend outside.”

“Our friend—you mean the guard?”

“Who else?”

“Have you gone mad, Mr. Carter?”

“Fair’s fair,” Marston murmured. “‘John’ to you.”

She looked coldly at him, glared at me and said icily: “Have you gone mad? Why should I bring that thug coffee? I’ll do nothing——”

“Our chief officer always has a reason for his actions,” Marston said in sharp and surprising support. “Please do as he asks.”

She poured a cup of coffee, took it through the outside door and was back in a few seconds.

“He took it?” I asked.

“Didn’t he just. Seems he’s had nothing except a little water to drink in the past day or so.”

“I can believe it. I should imagine that they weren’t too well equipped in the catering line in those crates.” I took the cup of coffee she offered me, drained it and set it down. It tasted just the way coffee ought to taste.

“How was it?” Susan asked.

“Perfect. Any suggestion I made that you didn’t even know how to boil water I withdraw unreservedly.”

She and Marston looked at each other and then Marston said: “No more thinking or worrying to do tonight, John?”

“Nary a bit. All I want is a good night’s sleep.”

“And that’s why I put a pretty powerful sedative in your coffee.” He looked at me consideringly. “Coffee has a remarkable quality of disguising other flavours, hasn’t it?”

I knew what he meant and he knew I knew what he meant. I said: “Dr. Marston, I do believe I have been guilty of underestimating you very considerably.”

“I believe you have, John,” he said jovially. “I believe you have indeed.”

I became drowsily aware that my left leg was hurting, not badly but badly enough to wake me up. Someone was pulling it, giving it a strong steady tug every few seconds, letting go, then tugging it again. And he kept on talking all the time he was doing it. I wished that that someone, whoever he was, would give it up. The tugging and the talking. Didn’t he know I was a sick man?

I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was the clock on the opposite bulkhead. Ten o’clock. Ten o’clock in the morning, for broad daylight was coming in through uncurtained windows. Dr. Marston had been right about the sedative: “powerful” was hardly the word for it.

Someone was talking, sure enough, old Bullen babbling away incoherently in a drugged and troubled sleep, but there was no one tugging at my leg. It was the traction weight suspended from the ceiling that was doing the tugging. The Campari, in spite of her stabilisers, was rolling through a ten-to-fifteen degree arc, which meant that there must be a pretty heavy and steep beam sea or swell running. Whenever the ship came to the end of a roll, the suspended pulley, reaching the limit of its pendulum swing, would give a pronounced jerk: a few seconds later another jerk. Now that I was fully awake, it was more painful than I had at first thought. Even if I had had a genuinely fractured femur that sort of thing wouldn’t be doing me any good at all. I looked around to see Dr. Marston and to ask him to remove it.

But the first person who caught my eye was not Dr. Marston but Miguel Carreras. He was standing near the top of my bed, maybe he had been shaking me awake. He was newly shaven, looked fresh and rested, had his neatly bandaged right hand in a sling and carried some charts under his arm. He gave me a slight smile.

“Good morning, Mr. Carter. How do you feel now?”

I ignored him. Susan Beresford was sitting at the doctor’s desk. She looked pretty tired to me and there were dark smudges under her green eyes. I said: “Susan, where’s doctor Marston?”

“Susan?” Carreras murmured. “How swiftly contiguity breeds familiarity.”

I ignored him again. Susan said: “In the dispensary, asleep. He’s been up most of the night.”

“Wake him, will you? Tell him I want this damned weight off. It’s tearing my leg in two.”

She went into the dispensary and Carreras said: “Your attention, Mr. Carter, if you please.”

“When I get that weight off,” I said surlily. “Not before.”

Dr. Marston appeared, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and started to remove the weight without a word.

“Captain Bullen and the bo’sun?” I asked. “How are they?”

“The captain’s holding his own—just.” The old boy looked tired and sounded tired. “The bo’sun’s recovering fast. Both of them came too early this morning: I gave them sedatives. The longer they sleep, the better.”

I nodded, waited till he had lifted me to a sitting position and adjusted my leg, then said curtly: “What do you want, Carreras?”

He unrolled a chart and spread it over my knees. “A little navigational assistance—cross-checking, shall we call it? You will co-operate?”

“I’ll co-operate.”

“What?” Susan Beresford crossed from the desk and stared down at me. “You—you’re going to help this man?”

“You heard me, didn’t you? What do you want me to be—a hero?” I nodded at my leg. “Look where being heroic’s got me.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it!” Patches of colour flared in the pale cheeks. “You. Going to help this—this monster, this murderer.”

“If I don’t,” I said wearily, “he’ll like as not start on you. Maybe break a finger at a time or yank out a tooth at a time with Dr. Marston’s forceps —and without anæsthetic. I’m not saying he’d like doing it: but he’d do it.”

“I’m not afraid of Mr. Carreras,” she said defiantly. But she was paler than ever.

“Then it’s time you were,” I said curtly. “Well, Carreras?”

“You have sailed the North Atlantic, Mr. Carter? Between Europe and America, I mean?”

“Many times.”

“Good.” He jabbed the chart. “A vessel leaving the Clyde and sailing for Norfolk, Virginia. I wish you to sketch the course it would take. Any reference books you wish I can have fetched.”

“I don’t require any.” I took his pencil. “North about round Ireland, so, a slightly flattened great circle route along the west-bound summer lane, so, to this point well southeast of Newfoundland. The northward curve looks strange, but that’s only because of the projection of the chart: it is the shortest route.”

“I believe you. And then?”

“Shortly after that the course diverges from the main west-bound New York lane, approximately here, and comes into Norfolk more or less from the east-north-east.” I twisted my head around to try to see out the surgery door “What’s all that racket? Where’s it coming from? Sounds like riveting guns or pneumatic chisels to me.”

“Later, later,” he said irritably. He unrolled another chart and the irritation vanished from his face. “Splendid, Carter, splendid. Your track coincides almost exactly with the information I have here.”

“Why the hell did you ask me——”

“I double-check everything, Mr. Carter. This vessel, now, is due to arrive at Norfolk at exactly ten o’clock at night, on Saturday, in two days’ time. Not earlier, not later: exactly ten o’clock. If I wish to meet that vessel at dawn that day, where would the interception point be?”

I kept my questions to myself. “Dawn, in that latitude, at this time, is five o’clock. Give or take a few minutes. What speed does this vessel do?”

“Of course. Foolish of me. Ten knots.”

“Ten knots. Seventeen hours. One hundred and seventy nautical miles. The interception point would be here.”

“Exactly.” He’d consulted his own chart again. “Exactly. Most gratifying.” He looked at a slip of paper in his hand. “Our present position is 26.52 north, 76.33 west, near enough, anyway. How long would it take us to get to this interception spot?”

“What is that hammering outside?” I demanded. “What devilry are you up to now, Carreras?”

“Answer my question!” he said sharply.

He held all the cards. I said: “What’s our speed just now?”

“Fourteen knots.”

“Forty three hours,” I said after a minute. “Just under.”

“Forty-three hours,” he said slowly. “It’s now 10 a.m. Thursday and I have to rendezvous at 5 a.m. on Saturday. My God, that is only forty-three hours.” The first shadow of worry crossed his face. “What is the maximum speed of the Campari?”

“Eighteen knots.” I caught a glimpse of Susan’s face. She was fast losing all her illusions about Chief Officer Carter.

“Ah! Eighteen?” His face cleared. “And at eighteen knots?”

“At eighteen knots you’ll probably tear the stabilisers off and break up the Campari,” I told him.

He didn’t like that. He said: “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve got trouble coming. Carreras. Big trouble.” I looked at the window. “I can’t see that sea, but I can feel it. An abnormally long deep swell. Ask any fisherman in the Bahamas what that means at this time of the year and he’ll tell you. It can mean only one thing, Carreras—tropical storm, pretty certainly a hurricane. The swell is coming from the east and that’s where the heart of the storm lies. Maybe a couple of hundred miles away yet, but it’s there. And the swell’s getting worse. Have you noticed? It’s getting worse because the classic path of a hurricane in those parts is west-north-west, at a speed of ten to fifteen miles an hour. And we’re heading north by east. In other words the hurricane and the Campari are on a collision course. Time you started listening to some weather reports, Carreras.”

“How long would it take at eighteen knots?”

“Thirty-three hours. About. In good weather.”

“And the course?”

I laid it off and looked at him. “The same as you have on that chart, undoubtedly.”

“It is. What wave-length for weather reports?”

“No wave-length,” I said dryly. “If there’s a hurricane moving in westwards from the Atlantic every commercial station on the eastern seaboard will be broadcasting practically nothing else.”

He moved across to Marston’s phone, spoke to the bridge, gave instructions for maximum speed and for listening-in to weather reports. When he’d finished, I said: “Eighteen knots? Well, I warned you.”

“I must have as much time as possible in hand.” He looked down at Bullen, who was still rambling on incoherently in his sleep. “What would your captain do in those circumstances?”

“Turn and run in any direction except north. We have our passengers to think of. They don’t like getting sea-sick.”

“They’re going to be very very sea-sick, I’m afraid. But all in a good cause.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. I knew now the source of the hammering on the deck. “A good cause. For a patriot such as yourself, Carreras, what better cause could there be? The generalissimo’s coffers are empty. Not a sou in sight—and his régime is tottering. Only one thing can save the sick man of the caribbean—a transfusion. A transfusion of gold. This ship that we’re going to intercept, Carreras—how many millions in gold bullion is she carrying?”

Marston was back in the surgery now and he and Susan looked at me, then at each other, and you could see their mutual diagnosis: delayed shock had made me light-headed. Carreras, I could see, wasn’t thinking anything of the kind: his face, like his body, had gone very still.

“You have access to sources of information of which I am completely unaware.” His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “What sources, Carter? Quickly?”

“There are no sources, Carreras.” I grinned at him. “Should there be?”

“No one plays cat and mouse with me.” He was still very quiet. “The sources, Carter?”

“Here.” I tapped my head. “Only here. This source.”

He regarded me for some seconds in cold silence, then nodded fractionally. “I knew it the first time I saw you. There is a—a quality about you. A champion boxer looks a champion boxer even in repose. A dangerous man cannot look anything else but dangerous, even in the most domestic situations, the most harmless surroundings. You have that quality. I have trained myself to recognise such things.”

“Hear that?” I said to Susan. “You never even suspected it, hey? Thought I was just like everybody else, didn’t you?”

“You are even more astute than I thought, Mr. Carter,” Carreras murmured.

“If adding two and two to make an obvious four is what you call being astute, then, sure, I’m astute. My God, if I were astute, I wouldn’t be lying here now with a shattered leg.” An occasional reminder of my helplessness would do no harm. “The generalissimo needing cash—I should have worked it out long ago.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Shall I tell you why Brownell, our radio officer, was killed?”

“I should be interested.”

“Because you had intercepted a message from the Harrisons and Curtises, the two families recalled by cable from Kingston: this message said that the cables had been a hoax, and if we knew it had been a hoax we would have started looking very closely at Messrs. Carreras and Cerdan, the people who had taken their places. The point is that the cables they had received came through your capital city, Carreras, which argues Post Office connivance and, by inference, government knowledge. The government owns the Post Office.

“Secondly, there is a long waiting list in your country for berths on the Campari: you were near the bottom but were mysteriously jumped to the top. You said you were the only people who could take immediate advantage of the availability of the two suddenly vacant suites. Poppycock. Somebody in authority—in great authority—said ‘Carreras and Cerdan go to the top.’ And no one squawked. I wonder why?

“Thirdly, although there is a waiting list, none of the people on it are your nationals, Carreras. They are not permitted to travel on foreign-going vessels—and, in addition, find themselves immediately in prison if caught in possession of foreign currency. But you were permitted to travel—and you paid in U.S. dollars. You’re still with me?”

He nodded. “We had to take the chance of paying in dollars.”

“Fourthly, the Customs closed their eyes to those crates with your men aboard—and those crates with the cannons. That shows——”

“Cannons?” Marston interrupted. He was looking almost completely dazed. “Cannons?”

“The noise you can hear outside,” Carreras said equably. “Mr Carter will explain by and by. I wish,” he went on almost with regret, “that we were on the same side of the fence. You would have made an incomparable lieutenant, Mr. Carter. You could have named your own price.”

“That’s just about what Mr. Beresford said to me yesterday,” I agreed. “Everybody’s offering me jobs these days. The timing of the offers could have been improved.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Susan said, “that Daddy offered——”

“Don’t panic,” I said. “He changed his mind. So, Carreras, there we have it. Government connivance on all sides. And what do the government want? Money. Completely desperate. Paid 350 million dollars to Iron Curtain countries in the past year or two, for arms. Trouble was, the generalissimo never had 350 million dollars in the first place. Now nobody will buy his sugar, trade’s practically non-existent, so how does an honest man raise money? Easy. He steals it.”

“Insulting personal remarks we can dispense with.”

“Suit yourself. Maybe armed robbery and piracy on the high seas sounds more moral than stealing. I wouldn’t know. Anyway, what does he steal? Bonds, stocks, shares, convertible drafts, currency? Not on your life. He only wants something that can never be traced back to him—and the only stuff he can get in sufficient quantity is gold. Your leader, Mr. Carreras,” I finished thoughtfully, “must have a very extensive spy network both in Britain and America.”

“If one is prepared to lay out sufficient capital on an affair such as this,” he said indifferently, “a large spy system is unnecessary. I even have the complete loading plans of the bullion vessel in my cabin. Most men have their price, Mr. Carter.”

“I wish someone would try me some day,” I said. “Well, there you are. The American Government has made no secret recently of its great success in recovering a large proportion of its gold reserves which went to Europe in the past few years. That bullion has to be transported—and part of it, I’ll bet my boots is in this ship we’re intercepting. The fact that it is not due to arrive in Norfolk until after dark is interesting enough in itself: what is even more interesting is that Norfolk, in this case, almost certainly means the Hampton Roads Naval Operating Base where the ship can be unloaded with the maximum security. And Norfolk, I would say, is the point that offers the shortest overland route to Fort Knox, where the gold will eventually be stored. How much gold, Carreras?”

“One hundred and fifty million dollars,” he said calmly. “You have missed very little. And nothing of importance.”

One hundred and fifty million dollars. I mentally examined this sum from several different angles but there didn’t seem to be any comment to meet the case, so I asked: “Why did you pick on the Campari?”

“I thought you would have guessed that, too. In point of fact we had three other ships under active consideration as well, all ships on the New York-Caribbean run. We have been studying the movements of all four ships for some time. Yours suited best.”

“You cut things pretty fine, didn’t you? If we had been a couple of days later in arriving at Carracio——”

“There has been a naval vessel, a frigate, standing by and ready to intercept you on a peaceful pretext ever since you left Savannah. I was aboard. But it wasn’t necessary.” So that explained the vessel we had seen on our radar screens at night after leaving Savannah: not an American warship, as we had thought, but the generalissimo’s. “This way was much easier, much more satisfactory.”

“And, of course,” I said, “you couldn’t have used the frigate for this job. Hasn’t the cruising range. Hopeless in bad weather. No derricks for heavy trans-shipment lifts. And conspicuous, far too conspicuous. But the Campari. Who’s going to miss the Campari if she’s only a few days late in arriving at her destination. Only the head office and——”

“The head office is being taken care of,” Carreras said. “You don’t think we overlooked the obvious, do you? Our own transmitter was brought aboard and is already in circuit. A stream of perfectly satisfactory messages are going out, I can assure you.”

“So you fixed that. And the Campari has the speed to overtake most cargo ships, it’s a good large seaboat for practically any weather, has first-class radar for picking up other vessels and jumbo derricks for heavy lifts.” I paused and looked at him. “We even have reinforced decks for gun-platforms both for’ard and on the poop. Most British vessels since the war have had those installed as a matter of course when building. But I warn you that they have to be strengthened from below with angle-irons, a couple of days’ job in itself. Without them, anything more than a three-inch will buckle and twist the plates beyond repair after even only a couple of shots.”

“A couple of shots will be all that we require.”

I thought about this last remark. A couple of shots. It didn’t make any kind of sense at all. What was Carreras up to?

“What on earth are you both talking about?” Susan asked wearily. “Reinforced steel decks, angle-irons—what is it all about?”

“Come with me, Miss Beresford, and I shall take pleasure in showing you personally what I mean.” Carreras smiled. “Besides I’m sure your good parents are becoming very anxious about you. I shall see you later, Mr. Carter. Come, Miss Beresford.”

She looked at him in doubtful hesitation. I said: “You might as well go, Susan. You never know what luck you’ll have. One good shove when he’s near the rail and off-balance. Just pick your time.”

“Your Anglo-Saxon sense of humour becomes rather wearisome,” Carreras said thinly. “One hopes that you will be able to preserve it intact in the days to come.”

He left on this suitably sinister note, and Marston looked at me, speculation taking the place of puzzlement in his eyes. “Did Carreras mean what I thought he meant?”

“He did. That’s the hammering you’ve been hearing, the pneumatic drills. There are prepared bolt-holes in the reinforced sections on the poop and fore-deck to accept the base-plates of several sizes of British guns. Carreras’s guns probably come from the other side of the Iron Curtain and he has to drill new holes.”

“He—he’s actually going to fit naval guns.”

“He had them in a couple of these crates. Almost certainly stripped down into sections, ready for quick assembly. Don’t have to be anything very big—can’t be, it’s a dockyard job to fit anything of any size. But it will be big enough to stop this ship.”

“I don’t believe it!” Marston protested. “Holdup on the high seas? Piracy in this day and age? It’s ridiculous! It’s impossible!”

“You tell that to Carreras. He hasn’t a moment’s doubt but that it’s very very possible. Neither have I. Can you tell me what’s going to stop him?”

“But we’ve got to stop him, John. We must stop him!”

“Why?”

“Good God! Why? Let a man like that get away with heaven only knows how many million pounds——”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“Of course,” Marston snapped. “So would anyone be.”

“You’re right, of course, Doctor,” I agreed. “I’m not at my best today.” What I could have said was that if he thought about it a bit more, he would become ten times as worried as he was, and not about the money. About half as worried as I was. And I was worried to death and frightened, badly frightened. Carreras was clever, all right, but perhaps a shade less so than he imagined. He made the mistake of letting himself get too involved in conversation: and when a man gets too involved and has anything to hide he makes the further mistake of either talking too much or not talking enough. Carreras had made the mistake on both counts. But why should he worry about whether he talked too much or not? He couldn’t lose. Not now.

Breakfast came. I didn’t feel much like eating, but I ate all the same. I had lost far too much blood and whatever little strength I could recover I was going to need that night. I felt even less like sleep, but for all that I asked Marston for a sedative and he gave it to me. I was going to need all the sleep I could get, too. I wouldn’t get much that coming night.

The last sensation I recalled as I dozed off was in my mouth, a queer unnatural dryness, the kind of dryness that usually comes with overmastering fear. But it wasn’t fear, I told myself, it wasn’t really fear. Just the effect of the sleeping draught. That’s what I told myself.

VIII.

Thursday 4 p.m.—10 p.m.

It was late afternoon when I awoke, around four o’clock: still a good four hours short of sunset, but already the surgery lights were on and the sky outside dark, almost, as night. Driving slanting rain was sheeting down torrentially from the black louring clouds and even through closed doors and windows I could hear the high thin sound, part whine, part whistle, of a gale-force wind howling through the struts and standing rigging.

The Campari was taking a hammering. She was still going fast, far, far too fast for the weather conditions, and was smashing her way through heavy rolling seas bearing down on her starboard bow. That they weren’t mountainous waves, or waves of even an unusual size for a tropical storm, I was quite sure: it was the fact that the Campari was battering her way at high speed through quartering seas that seemed to be almost tearing her apart. She was cork-screwing viciously, a movement that applies the maximum possible strain on a ship’s hull. With metronomic regularity the Campari was crashing, starboard bow first, into a rising sea, lifting bows and rolling over to port as she climbed up the wave, hesitating, then pitching violently for’ard and rolling over to starboard as she slid down the far shoulder of the vanishing wave to thud with a teeth-rattling, jolting violence into the shoulder of the next sea, a shaking, shuddering collision that made the Campari vibrate for seconds on end in every plate and rivet throughout her entire length. No doubt but that the Clyde yard that had built her had built her well: but they wouldn’t have constructed her on the assumption that she was going to fall into the hands of maniacs. Even steel can come apart.

“Dr. Marston,” I said. “Try to get Carreras on that phone.”

“Hallo, awake?” He shook his head. “I’ve been on to him myself, an hour ago. He’s on the bridge and he say’s he’s going to stay there all night if need be. And he won’t reduce speed any further: he’s taken her down to fifteen knots already, he says.”

“The man’s mad. Thank God for the stabilisers. If it weren’t for them, we’d be turning somersaults.”

“Can they stand up to this sort of thing indefinitely?”

“I should think it highly unlikely. The captain and bo’sun—how are they?”

“The captain’s still asleep, still delirious, but breathing easier. Our friend Mr. MacDonald you can ask for yourself.”

I twisted in my bed. The bo’sun was indeed awake, grinning at me. Marston said; “Seeing you’re both awake, do you mind if I have a kip down in the dispensary for an hour? I could do with it.”

He looked as if he could, too, pale and exhausted.

“We’ll call you if anything goes wrong.” I watched him go, then said to MacDonald: “You like your sleep, don’t you?”

“Just naturally idle, Mr. Carter.” He smiled. “I was wanting to get up, but the doctor wasn’t keen.”

“Surprised? You know your knee-cap is smashed and it’ll be weeks before you can walk properly again.” He’d never walk properly again.

“Aye, it’s inconvenient. Dr. Marston has been talking to me about this fellow Carreras and his plans. The man’s daft.”

“He’s all that. But daft or not, what’s to stop him?”

“The weather, perhaps. It’s pretty nasty outside.”

“The weather won’t stop him. He’s got one of those fantastic one-track minds. But I might have a small try at it myself.”

“You?” MacDonald had raised his voice, now lowered it to a murmur. “You! With a smashed thigh-bone. How in the——”

“It’s not broken.” I told him of the deception. “I think I can get around on it if I don’t have too much climbing to do.”

“I see. And the plan, sir?”

I told him. He thought me as daft as Carreras. He did his best to dissuade me, finally accepted the inevitable and had his own suggestions to make. We were still discussing it in low voices when the sick-bay door opened and a guard showed Susan Beresford in, closed the door and left.

“Where have you been all day?” I said accusingly.

“I saw the guns.” She was pale and tired and seemed to have forgotten that she had been angry with me for co-operating with Carreras. “He’s got a big one mounted on the poop and a smaller one on the fo’c’sle. Covered with tarpaulins now. The rest of the day I spent with Mummy and Daddy and the others.”

“And how are our passengers?” I inquired. “Hopping mad at being shanghaied or do they regard it as yet another of the attractions of the Campari—a splendid adventure thrown in at no extra charge that they can talk about to the end of their days. I’m sure most of them must be pretty relieved that Carreras is not holding them all to ransom.”

“Most of them are not caring one way or another,” she said. “They’re so sea-sick they couldn’t care if they lived or died. I feel a bit the same way myself, I can tell you.”

“You’ll get used to it,” I said callously. “You’ll all get used to it. I want you to do something for me.”

“Yes, John?” The dutiful murmur in the voice which was really tiredness, the use of the first name, had me glancing sharply across at the bo’sun, but he was busy examining a part of the deckhead that was completely devoid of anything to examine.

“Get permission to go to your cabin. Say you’re going for blankets, that you felt too cold here last night. Your father’s dinner suit—slip it between the blankets. Not the tropical one, the dark one. For heaven’s sake see you’re not observed. Have you any dark-coloured dresses?”

“Dark-coloured dresses?” She frowned. “Why——”

“For Pete’s sake!” I said in low-voiced exasperation. I could hear the murmur of voices outside. “Answer me!”

“A black cocktail dress——”

“Bring it also.”

She looked at me steadily. “Would you mind telling me——”

The door opened and Tony Carreras came in, balancing easily on the swaying, dipping deck. He carried a rain-spattered chart under his arm.

“Evening, all.” He spoke cheerfully enough, but for all that he looked rather pale. “Carter, a small job from my father. Course positions of the Fort Ticonderoga at 8 a.m., noon and 4 p.m. today. Plot them and see if the Ticonderoga is still on its predicted course.”

“Fort Ticonderoga being the name of the ship we have to intercept?”

“What else?”

“But—but the positions,” I said stupidly. “The course positions of—how the devil do you know? Don’t tell me the Ticonderoga is actually sending you her positions? Are the—are the radio operators on that ship——”

“My father thinks of everything,” Tony Carreras said calmly. “Literally everything. I told you he was a brilliant man. You know we’re going to ask the Ticonderoga to stand and deliver. Do you think we want it sending out S.O.S’s when we fire a warning shot across its bows? The Ticonderoga’s own radio officers had a slight accident before the ship left England and had to be replaced by—ah—more suitable men.”

“A slight accident?” Susan said slowly. What with seasickness and emotion her face was the colour of paper, but she wasn’t scared of Carreras any that I could see. “What kind of accident?”

“A kind that can so easily happen to any of us, Miss Beresford.” Tony Carreras was still smiling, but somehow he no longer looked charming and boyish: I couldn’t really see any expression on the face at all, all I could see were the curiously flattened eyes. More than ever I was sure that there was something wrong with young Carreras’s eyes: and more than ever I was sure that the wrongness lay not in the eyes alone but was symptomatic and indicative of a wrongness that lay much deeper than the eyes. “Nothing serious, I assure you.” Meaning that they hadn’t been killed more than once. “One of the replacements is not only a radio man but an expert navigator. We saw no reason why we should not take advantage of this fact to keep us informed as to the exact position of the Ticonderoga. Every hour on the hour.”

“Your father leaves nothing to chance,” I admitted. “Except that he seems to be depending on me as the expert navigator on this ship.”

“He didn’t know—we weren’t to know—that all the other deck officers on the Campari were going to be—ah—so foolish. We—both my father and I—dislike killing of any kind.” Again the unmistakable ring of sincerity, but I was beginning to wonder if the bell hadn’t a crack in it. “My father is also a competent navigator, but, unfortunately, he has his hands very full at the moment. He happens to be the only professional seaman we have.”

“Your other men aren’t?”

“Alas, no. But they are perfectly adequate to the task of seeing that professional seamen—your men—do their duties as they should.”

This was cheering news. If Carreras persisted in pushing the Campari through the storm at this rate, practically everyone who wasn’t a professional seaman was going to be feeling very ill indeed. That might help to ease my night’s labours.

I said: “What’s going to happen to us after you’ve hijacked this damn’ bullion?”

“Dump you all on the Ticonderoga,” he said lazily. “What else?”

“Yes?” I sneered. “So that we can straightaway notify every ship that the Campari had——”

“Notify whoever you like,” he said placidly. “Think we’re crazy? We’re abandoning the Campari the same morning: another vessel is already standing by. Miguel Carreras does think of everything.”

I said nothing and turned my attention to the charts while Susan made her request to be allowed to bring blankets. He smilingly said he would accompany her and they left together. When they returned in five minutes’ time I had entered in the course positions on the chart and found that the Fort Ticonderoga was really on course. I handed the chart to Carreras with that information: he thanked me and left.

Dinner came at eight o’clock. It wasn’t much of a meal as Campari dinners went, Antoine was never at his best when the elements were against him, but it was fair enough for all that. Susan ate nothing; I suspected she had been sick more than once, but had made no mention of it: millionaire’s daughter or not, she was no cry-baby and had no self-pity, which was only what I would have expected from the daughter of the Beresfords. I wasn’t hungry myself, there was a knot in my stomach that had nothing to do with the motion of the Campari, but again on the principle that I was going to need all the strength I could find, I made a good meal. MacDonald ate as if he hadn’t seen food for a week. Bullen still slept under sedation, restless against the securing straps that held him to his bed, breathing still distressed, mumbling away continually to himself.

At nine o’clock Marston said: “Time now for coffee, John?”

“Time for coffee,” I agreed. Marston’s hands, I noticed, weren’t quite steady. After too many years of consuming the better part of a bottle of rum every night, his nerves weren’t in any too fit a condition for this sort of thing.

Susan brought in five cups of coffee, one at a time—the wild pitching of the Campari, the jarring, jolting shocks as we crashed down into the troughs, made the carrying of more than one at a time impossible. One for herself, one for MacDonald, one for Marston, one for me—and one for the sentry, the same youngster as had been on guard the previous night. For the four of us, sugar: for the sentry, a spoonful of white powder from Marston’s dispensary. Susan took his cup outside.

“How’s our friend?” I asked when she returned.

“Almost as green as I am.” She tried to smile but it didn’t come off. “Seemed glad to get it.”

“Where is he?”

“In the passage. Sitting on the floor, jammed in a corner, gun across his knees.”

“How long before that stuff acts, Doctor?”

“If he drinks it straightaway, maybe twenty minutes. And don’t ask me how long the effects will last. People vary so much that I’ve no idea. Maybe half an hour, maybe three hours. You can never be certain with those things.”

“You’ve done all you can. Except the last thing. Take off those outside bandages and those damned splints, will you?”

He looked nervously at the door. “If someone comes——”

“We’ve been all through that,” I said impatiently. “Even by taking a chance and losing, we’ll be no worse off than we were before. Take them off.”

Marston fetched a chair to give himself steadier support, sat down, eased the point of his scissors under the bandages holding the splints in place and sliced through them with half a dozen swift clean cuts. The bandages fell away, the splints came loose and the door opened. Half a dozen long strides and Tony Carreras was by my bedside, staring down thoughtfully. He looked even paler than the last time I’d seen him.

“The good healer on the night shift, eh? Having a little patient trouble, Doctor?”

“Trouble?” I said hoarsely. I’d my eyes screwed half shut, lips compressed, fists lying on the coverlet tightly clenched. Carter in agony. I hoped wasn’t overdoing it. “Is your father mad, Carreras?” I closed my eyes completely and stifled—nearly—a moan as the Campari lurched forward and down into an abnormally deep trough with a shuddering, jarring impact that all but threw Carreras off his feet. Even through closed doors, even above the eldritch howl of the wind and the lash of the gale-driven rain, the sound of the impact was like gunfire, and not distant gunfire at that. “Does he want to kill us all? Why in God’s name can’t he slow down?”

“Mr. Carter is in very great pain,” Doc Marston said quietly. Whatever his faults as a doctor, he was fast at catching on, and when you looked into those steady wise blue eyes beneath the magnificent mane of white hair, it was impossible not to believe him. “Agony would be a better word. He has, as you know, a compound fracture of the femur.” With delicate fingers he touched the bloodstained bandages that had been concealed by the splints so that Carreras could see just how compound it was. “Every time the ship moves violently, the broken ends of the bone grind together. You can imagine what it’s like—no, I doubt if you can. I am trying to rearrange and tighten the splints so as to immobilise the leg completely. Difficult job for one man in those conditions. Care to give me a hand?”

In one second flat I revised my estimate of Marston’s shrewdness. No doubt he’d just been trying to allay any suspicions that Carreras might have had but he couldn’t have thought up a worse way. Not, that is, if Carreras offered his help, for the chances were that if he did delay to help he’d find the sentry snoring in the passageway outside when he left.

“Sorry.” Beethoven never sounded half as sweet as the music of that single word from Carreras. “Can’t wait. Captain Carreras making his rounds and all that. That’s what Miss Beresford is here for anyway. Failing all else, just shoot him full of morphia.” Five seconds later he was gone.

Marston raised an eyebrow.

“Less affable than of yore, John, you would say. A shade lacking in sympathy he so often professes?”

“He’s worried,” I said. “He’s also a little frightened and perhaps, heaven be praised, even more than a little sea-sick. But still very tough for all that. Susan, go collect the sentry’s cup and see if friend Carreras has really gone.”

She was back in fifteen seconds.

“He’s gone. The coast is clear.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. A moment later I had fallen heavily to the floor, my head just missing the iron foot of MacDonald’s bed. Four things were responsible for this: the sudden lurch of the deck as the Campari had fallen into a trough, the stiffness of both legs, the seeming paralysis of my left leg and the pain that had gone through my thigh like a flame as soon as my foot had touched the deck.

Hands gripping the bo’sun’s bed, I dragged myself to my feet and tried again. Marston had me by the right arm and I needed all the support I could get. I made it to my own bed and sat down heavily. MacDonald’s face was expressionless. Susan looked as if she were about to cry. For some obscure reason that made me feel better. I lurched to my feet like an opening jack-knife, caught hold of the foot of my own bed and had another go.

It was no good. I wasn’t made of iron. The lurching of the Campari I could cope with and the first stiffness was slowly beginning to disappear. Even that frightening weakness in my left leg I could in some measure ignore. I could always hop along. But that pain I couldn’t ignore. I wasn’t made of iron, I have a nervous system for transmitting pain just like anyone else’s and mine was operating in top gear at the moment. Even the pain I believe I could have coped with: but every time I set my left foot on the deck the shooting agony in my left thigh left me dizzy and light-headed, barely conscious. A few steps on that leg and I just wouldn’t be conscious at all. I supposed vaguely it must have had something to do with all the blood I had lost. I sat down again.

“Get back into bed,” Marston ordered. “This is madness. You’re going to have to lie on your back for at least the next week.”

“Good old Tony Carreras,” I said. I was feeling a bit lightheaded, and that’s a fact. “Clever lad, Tony. He’d the right idea. Your hypodermic, Doctor. Pain-killer for the thigh. Shoot me full of it. You know, the way a football player with a gammy leg gets an injection before a game.”

“No football player ever went out on a field with three bullet holes through his leg,” Marston said grimly.

“Don’t do it, Dr. Marston,” Susan said urgently. “Please don’t do it. He’ll surely kill himself.”

“Bo’sun?” Marston queried.

“Give it to him, sir,” the bo’sun said quietly. “Mr. Carter knows best.”

“Mr. Carter knows best,” Susan mimicked furiously. She crossed to the bo’sun and stared down at him. “It’s easy for you to lie there and say he knows best. You don’t have to go out there and get killed, to be shot down or die from the loss of blood.”

“Not me, miss.” The bo’sun smiled up at her. “You won’t catch me taking risks like that.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. MacDonald.” She sat down wearily on his bedside. “I’m so ashamed. I know that if your leg wasn’t smashed up—but look at him! He can’t even stand, far less walk. He’ll kill himself, I tell you, kill himself!”

“Perhaps he will. But then he will only be anticipating by about two days, Miss Beresford,” MacDonald said quietly. “I know. Mr. Carter knows. We both know that no one on the Campari has very long to live—not unless someone can do something. You don’t think, Miss Beresford,” he went on heavily, “that Mr. Carter is doing this just for the exercise?”

Marston looked at me, face slowly tightening. “You and the bosun have been talking? Talking about something I know nothing about?”

“I’ll tell you when I come back.”

“If you come back.” He went to his dispensary, came back with a hypodermic and injected some pale fluid. “Against all my instincts, this. It’ll ease the pain, no doubt about that, but it will also permit you to overstrain your leg and cause permanent damage.”

“Not half as permanent as being dead.” I hopped across into the dispensary, pulled old man Beresford’s suit out from the pile of folded blankets Susan had fetched and dressed as quickly as my bad leg and the pitching of the Campari would allow. I was just turning up the collar and tying the lapels together with a safety pin when Susan came in. She said, abnormally calm: “It suits you very well. Jacket’s a bit tight, though.”

“It’s a damn’ sight better than parading about the upper deck in the middle of the night wearing a white uniform. Where’s this black dress you spoke of?”

“Here.” She pulled it out from the bottom blanket.

“Thanks.” I looked at the label. Balenciaga. Should make a fair enough mask. I caught the hem of the dress between my hands, glanced at her, saw the nod and ripped, a dollar a stitch. I tore out a rough square, folded it in a triangle and tied it round my face, just below the level of my eyes. Another few rips, another square and I had a knotted cloth covering head and forehead until only my eyes showed. The pale glimmer of my hands I could always conceal.

“Nothing is going to stop you, then?” she said steadily.

“I wouldn’t say that.” I eased a little weight on to my left leg, used my imagination and told myself that it was going numb already. “Lots of things can stop me. Any one of forty-two men, all armed with guns and sub-machine-guns, can stop me. If they see me.”

She looked at the ruins of the Balenciaga. “Tear off a piece for me while you’re at it.”

“For you?” I looked at her. She was as pale as I felt. “What for?”

“I’m coming with you.” She gestured at her clothes, the navy-blue sweater and slacks. “It wasn’t hard to guess what you wanted Daddy’s suit for. You don’t think I changed into those for nothing?”

“I don’t suppose so.” I tore off another piece of cloth. “Here you are.”

“Well.” She stood there with the cloth in her hand. “Well. Just like that, eh?”

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

She gave me a slow, old-fashioned, up-from-under, shook her head and tied on the cloth. I hobbled to the sick-bay, Susan following.

“Where’s Miss Beresford going?” Marston demanded sharply. “Why is she wearing that hood?”

“She’s coming with me,” I said. “So she says.”

“Going with you? And you’d let her?” He was horrified. “She’ll get herself killed.”

“It’s likely enough,” I agreed. Something, probably the anæsthetic, was having a strange effect on my head: I felt enormously detached and very calm. “But, as the bo’sun says, what’s a couple of days early? I need another pair of eyes, somebody who can move quickly and lightly to reconnoitre, above all a lookout. Let’s have one of your torches, Doctor.”

“I object. I strongly protest against——”

“Get him the torch,” Susan interrupted.

He stared at her, hesitated, sighed and turned away. MacDonald beckoned me.

“Sorry I can’t be with you, sir, but this is the next best thing.” He pressed a seaman’s knife into my hand, wide-hinged blade on one side, shackle-locking marline-spike on the other: the marline came to a needle point. “If you have to use it hit upwards with the spike, the blade under in your hand.”

“Take your word for it any time.” I hefted the knife, saw Susan staring at it, her green eyes wide.

“You—you would use that thing?”

“Stay behind if you like. The torch, Dr. Marston.”

I pocketed the flash, kept the knife in my hand and passed through the surgery door. I didn’t let it swing behind me, I knew Susan would be there.

The sentry, sitting wedged into a corner of the passage, was asleep. His automatic carbine was across his knees. It was an awful temptation, but I let it go. A sleeping sentry would call for a few curses and kicks: but a sleeping sentry without his gun would start an all-out search of the ship.

It took me two minutes to climb up two companionways to the level of “A” deck. Nice wide flat companionways, but it took me two minutes. My left leg was very stiff, very weak and didn’t respond at all to auto-suggestion when I kept telling myself it was getting less painful by the minute: besides, the Campari was pitching so violently now that it would have been a full-time job for a fit person to climb upwards without being flung off.

Pitching. The Campari was pitching, but with a now even more exaggerated cork-screw motion, great sheets of flying water breaking over the bows and being hurled back against the superstructure. At some hundreds of miles from the centre of a hurricane—and I didn’t need any barometers or weather forecasts to tell me what was in the offing—it is the outspreading swell that indicates the direction of the centre: but closer in, and we were getting far too close for comfort, it is the wind direction that locates the centre. We were heading roughly 20 degrees east of north, and the wind blowing from dead ahead. That meant the hurricane was roughly to the east of us, with a little southing, still keeping pace with us, travelling roughly north-west, a more northerly course than was usual: and the Campari and the hurricane were on more of a collision course than ever. The strength of the wind I estimated at force eight or nine on the old Beaufort scale: that made the centre of the storm less than a hundred miles away. If Carreras kept on his present course at his present speed, everybody’s troubles, his as well as ours, would soon be over.

At the top of the second companion way I stood still for a few moments to steady myself, took Susan’s arm for support, then lurched aft in the direction of the drawing-room, twenty feet away. I’d hardly starting lurching when I stopped. Something was wrong.

Even in my fuzzy state it didn’t take long to find out what was wrong. On a normal night at sea, the Campari was like an illuminating Christmas tree: tonight, every deck light was off. Another example of Carreras taking no chances, although this was an unnecessary and exaggerated example. Sure he didn’t want anyone to see him, but in a black gale like this no one would have seen him anyway, even had any vessel been heading on the same course, which was hardly possible unless its master had taken leave of his senses. But it suited me well enough. We staggered on, making no attempt to be silent. With the shriek of the wind, the thunderous drumming of the torrential rain and the repeated pistol-shot explosions as the rearing Campari’s bows kept smashing into the heavy rolling combers ahead no-one could have heard us a couple of feet away.

The smashed windows of the drawing-room had been roughly boarded up. Careful not to cut a jugular or put an eye out on one of the jagged splinters of glass, I pressed my face close to the boards and peered through one of the cracks.

The curtains were drawn inside, but with the gale whistling through the gaps between the boards they were blowing and flapping wildly almost all the time. One minute there and I’d seen all I wanted to see and it didn’t help me at all. The passengers were all hearded together at one end of the room, most of them huddled down on close-packed mattresses, a few sitting with their backs to the bulkhead. A more miserably sea-sick collection of millionaires I had never seen in my life: their complexions ranged from a faintly greenish shade to a dead white pallor. They were suffering all right. In the corner I saw some stewards, cooks and engineer officers, including McIlroy, with Cummings beside him: seaman’s branch apart, it looked as if every off-duty man was imprisoned there with the passengers. Carreras was economising on his guards: I could see only two of them, hard-faced, unshaven characters with a tommy-gun apiece. For a moment I had the idea of bursting in the door and rushing them: but only for a moment. Armed with only a clasp-knife and with a top speed of about that of a fairly active tortoise, I wouldn’t have got a yard.

Two minutes later we were outside the wireless office. No one had challenged us, no one had seen us, the decks were entirely deserted. It was a night for deserted decks.

The wireless office was in darkness. I pressed one ear to the metal of the door, closed a hand over the other ear to shut out the clamour of the storm and listened as hard as I could. Nothing. I placed a gentle hand on the knob, turned and pushed. The door didn’t budge a fraction of an inch. I eased my hand off that door-knob with all the wary caution and thistledown delicacy of a man withdrawing the Koh-i-noor from a basket of sleeping cobras.

“What’s the matter?” Susan asked. “Is——”

That was as far as she got before my hand closed over her mouth, not gently. We were fifteen feet away from that door before I took my hand away.

“What is it? What is it?” Her low whisper had a shake in it, she didn’t know whether to be scared or angry or both.

“The door was locked.”

“Why shouldn’t it be? Why should they keep watch——”

“That door is locked by a padlock. From the outside. We put a new one on there yesterday morning. It’s no longer there. Somebody has shut the catch on the inside.” I didn’t know how much of this she was getting: the roar of the sea, the drumfire of the rain, the wind rushing in from the darkness of the north and playing its high-pitched threnody in the rigging seemed to drown out and snatch away the words even as I spoke them. I pulled her into what pitiful shelter was offered by a ventilator and her next words showed that she had indeed heard and understood most of what I had said.

“They have left a sentry? Just in case anyone tried to break in? How could anyone break in? We’re all under guard and lock and key.”

“It’s as Carreras Junior says—his old man never takes a chance.” I hesitated, then, because I didn’t know what else to say. I went on: “I’ve no right to do this. But I must. I’m desperate. I want you to be a stalking horse—help get that character out of there.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Good girl.” I squeezed her arm. “Knock at the door. Pull that hood off and show yourself at the window. He’ll almost certainly switch on a light or flash a torch, and when he sees it’s a girl—well, he’ll be astonished, but not scared. He’ll want to investigate.”

“And then you—you——”

“That’s it.”

“With only a clasp-knife.” The tremor in the voice was unmistakable. “You’re very sure of yourself.”

“I’m not sure at all. But if we don’t make a move until we’re certain of success we might as well jump over the side now. Ready?”

“What are you going to do? Once you get inside?” She was scared, and stalling. Not that I was happy myself.

“Send an SOS on the distress frequency. Warn every vessel within listening range that the Campari has been seized by force and is intending to intercept a bullion-carrying vessel at such and such a spot. Within a few hours everyone in North America will know the situation. That’ll get action all right.”

“Yes.” A long pause. “That’ll get action. The first action it will get is that Carreras will discover that his guard is missing—and where had you thought of hiding him?”

“In the Atlantic.”

She shivered briefly, then said obliquely: “I think perhaps Carreras knows you better than I do … The guard’s missing. They’ll know it must be one of the crew responsible. They’ll soon find out that the only guard keeping an eye on the crew who wasn’t awake all the time is the boy outside the sick-bay.” She was silent for a moment, then went on so softly that I could hardly hear her above the storm: “I can just see Carreras ripping those bandages off your leg and finding out that your thigh is not broken. You know what will happen then?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.” She said the words calmly, matter-of-factly, as if they were of no particular significance. “Another thing. You said everybody would know the set-up within a few hours. The two radio operators Carreras has planted on the Ticonderoga will know immediately. They will immediately radio the news back to the Campari, to Carreras.”

“After I’m finished in the wireless office no one will ever be able to send or receive on that set again.”

“All right. So you’ll smash it up. That itself would be enough to let Carreras know what you’ve done. And you can’t smash up every radio receiver on the Campari. You can’t for instance, get near the ones in the drawing-room. Everybody will know, you say. That means that the generalissimo and his government will know also: and then all the stations on the island will do nothing but keep up a non-stop broadcast of news. Carreras is bound to hear it.”

I said nothing. I thought vaguely that I must have lost a great deal of blood. Her mind was working about ten times as quickly and clearly as mine. Not that that made her very smart.

She went on: “You and the bo’sun seem very sure that Carreras won’t let us—the passengers and crew—live. Perhaps you think it’s because he can’t have any witnesses, that whatever advantage the generalissimo gained from getting this money would be offset over and over again by the world wide reaction against him if the world knew what he had done. Perhaps——”

“Reaction!” I said. “Reaction! He’d find the American and British navies and air forces on his doorstep the following morning and that would be the end of the generalissimo. Not even Russia would raise a hand to help him, they wouldn’t as much as rattle a rocket. Of course he can’t afford to let anyone know. He’d be finished.”

“In fact, he couldn’t even afford to let anyone know he’d made the attempt? So, as soon as Carreras picks up the news of your SOS, he gets rid of all the witnesses—permanently—sheers off, trans-ships to this other vessel that’s waiting and that’s that.”

I stood there saying nothing. My mind felt dull and heavy and tired, my body even more so. I tried to tell myself it was just the drug Marston had pumped into me, but it wasn’t that, I knew it wasn’t that, the sense of defeat is the most powerful opiate of all. I said, hardly knowing what I was saying: “Well, at least we would have saved the gold.”

“The gold!” You had to be a multi-millionaire’s daughter before you could put all that scorn into your voice when you mentioned the word “gold.” “Who cares a fig for all the gold in the world? What’s gold compared to your life and my life, my mother’s and father’s and the lives of everyone on the Campari? How much money did Carreras say the Fort Ticonderoga was carrying?”

“You heard him. A hundred and fifty million dollars.”

“A hundred and fifty million! Daddy could raise that in a week and still have as much again left.”

“Lucky Daddy,” I muttered. Light-headed, that’s what I was getting.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Nothing. It all seemed such a good idea when MacDonald and I worked it out, Susan.”

“I’m sorry.” She caught my right hand in both of hers and held it tight. “I’m truly sorry, Johnny.”

“Where did you get this ‘Johnny’ business from?” I mumbled.

“I like it. What’s good enough for Captain Bullen—your hands are like ice;” she exclaimed softly. “And you’re shivering.” Gentle fingers pushed up under my hood. “And your forehead is burning. Running a temperature and fever. You’re not well, oh, you’re not well. Come on back down to the sick-bay, Johnny. Please.”

“No.”

“Please!”

“Don’t nag at me, woman.” I pushed myself wearily off the ventilator. “Come on.”

“Where are you going?” She was quickly beside me, her arm in mine, and I was glad to hang on.

“Cerdan. Our mysterious friend Mr. Cerdan. Do you realise that we know practically nothing about Mr. Cerdan—except that he seems to be the one who lies back and lets the others do all the work? Carreras and Cerdan—they seem to be the king-pins and maybe Carreras isn’t the boss after all. But I do know this: if I could get a knife sticking into the throat or a gun jabbing into the back of either of those men I would have a big card to play in this game.”

“Come on, Johnny,” she pleaded. “Come on down below.”

“All right, so I’m loopy. But it’s still true. If I could shove either of those men into the drawing-room ahead of me and threaten the two guards with his death if they don’t drop their guns, I rather think they would. With two machine-guns and all the men in there to help I could do a lot on a night like this. I’m not crazy, Susan, just desperate, like I said.”

“You can hardly stand.” There was a note of desperation in her voice now.

“That’s why you’re here. To hold me up. Carreras is out of the question. He’ll be on the bridge and that’ll be the most heavily-guarded place on the ship, because it’s the most important place.” I winced and shrank back into a corner as a great blue-white jagged streak of forked lightning, almost directly overhead, flickered and stabbed through the black wall of cumulonimbus clouds and the driving rain, momentarily illuminating every detail of the Campari’s decks in its blinding glare. The curiously flat explosive clap of thunder was muffled, lost in the teeth of the gale.

“That helps,” I muttered. “Thunder, lightning, a tropical rainstorm and moving into the heart of a hurricane. King Lear should have seen this little lot. He’d never have complained of his blasted heath again.”

“Macbeth,” she said. “That was Macbeth.”

“Oh, hell,” I said. She was getting as nutty as I was. I took her arm or she took mine, I forget which. “Come on. We’re too exposed here.”

A minute later we were down on “A” deck, crouched against a bulkhead. I said: “Finesse will get us nowhere. I’m going into the central passageway, straight into Cerdan’s cabin. I’ll stick my hand in my pocket, pretend I have a gun. Stay at the entrance to the passageway, warn me if anyone comes.”

“He’s not in,” she said. We were standing at the starboard for’ard end of the accommodation, just outside Cerdan’s sleeping cabin. “He’s not at home. There’s no light on.”

“The curtains will be drawn,” I said impatiently. “The ship’s fully darkened. I’ll bet Carreras hasn’t even got the navigation lights on.” We shrank against the bulkhead as another lightning flash reached down from the darkened clouds, seemed almost to dance on the tip of the Campari’s mast. “I won’t be long.”

“Wait!” She held me with both hands. “The curtain’s aren’t drawn. That flash—I could see everything inside the cabin.”

“You could see——” for some reason I’d lowered my voice almost to a whisper. “Anyone inside?”

“I couldn’t see all the inside. It was just for a second.”

I straightened, pressed my face hard against the window, and stared inside. The darkness in the cabin was absolute—absolute, that is, until another forked finger of lightning lit up the entire upperworks of the Campari once more. Momentarily, I saw my own hooded face and staring eyes reflected back at me in the glass, then exclaimed involuntarily for I had seen something else again.

“What is it?” Susan demanded huskily. “What’s wrong?”

“This is wrong.” I fished out Marston’s torch, hooded it with my hand and shone it downwards through the glass.

The bed was up against the bulkhead, almost exactly beneath the window. Cerdan was lying on the bed, clothed and awake, his eyes staring up as if hypnotised by the beam of the torch. Wide eyes, staring eyes. His white hair was not just where his white hair had been, it had slipped back, revealing his own hair beneath. Black hair, jet black hair, with a startling streak of iron-grey almost exactly in the middle. Black hair with an iron-grey streak? Where had I seen somebody with hair like that? When had I ever heard of somebody with hair like that? All of a sudden, I knew it was “when” not “where”: I knew the answer. I switched off the light.

“Cerdan!” There was shock and disbelief and utter lack of comprehension in Susan’s voice. “Cerdan! Bound hand and foot and tied to his bed so that he can’t move an inch. Cerdan! But—no, no!” She was ready to give up. “Oh, Johnny, what does it all mean?”

“I know what it all means.” No question now but that I knew what it all meant, and I wished to heaven I didn’t. I’d only thought I’d been afraid before, the time I had only been guessing. But the time for guessing was past, oh, my God, it was past. I knew the truth now and the truth was worse than I had ever dreamed. I fought down the rising panic and said steadily through dry lips: “Have you ever robbed a grave, Susan?”

“Have I ever——” She broke off and when her voice came again there were tears in it. “We’re both worn out, Johnny. Let’s get down below. I want to go back to the sick-bay.”

“I have news for you, Susan. I’m not mad. But I’m not joking. And I hope to God that grave’s not empty.” I caught her arm to lead her away, and as I did the lightning flashed again and her eyes were wild and full of fear. I wondered what mine looked like to her.

IX.

Thursday 10 p.m.—Midnight

What with the darkness, my bad leg, the intermittent lightning, the wild rearing, wave-top staggering and plunging of the Campari and the need to use the greatest caution all the way, it took us a good fifteen minutes to reach number four hold, far back on the after-deck. And when we got there, pulled back the tarpaulin, loosened a couple of battens and peered down into the near Stygian depths of the hold, I wasn’t at all sure that I was glad we had come.

Along with several tools, I’d filched an electric lantern from the bo’sun’s store on the way there, and though it didn’t give off much of a light it gave off enough to let me see that the floor of the hold was a shambles. I’d secured for sea after leaving Carracio, but I hadn’t secured for a near-hurricane, for the excellent reason that whenever the weather was bad the Campari had invariably run in the other direction.

But now Carreras had taken us in the wrong direction and he either hadn’t bothered or forgotten to secure for the worsening weather conditions. Forgotten, almost certainly: for number four hold presented a threat, to say the least, to the lives of everybody aboard, Carreras and his men included. At least a dozen heavy crates, the weight of one or two of which could be measured in tons, had broken loose and were sliding and lurching across the floor of the hold with every cork-screwing pitch of the Campari, alternatively crashing into the secured cargo aft or the bulkhead for’ard. My guess was that this wasn’t doing the for’ard bulkhead any good: and just let the motion of the Campari change from pitching to rolling, especially as we neared the centre of the hurricane, and the massive deadweights of those sliding crates would begin to assault the sides of the ship. Buckled plates, torn rivets and a leak that couldn’t be repaired would only be a matter of time.

To make matters worse, Carreras’s men hadn’t bothered to remove the broken splintered sides of the wooden crates in which they and the guns had been slung aboard: they, too, were sliding about the floor with every movement of the ship, being continually smashed and becoming progressively smaller in size as they were crushed between the sliding crates and bulkheads, pillars and fixed cargo. Not the least frightening part of it was the din, the almost continuous goose-pimpling metallic screech as iron-banded cases slid over steel decks, a high-pitched grating scream that set your teeth on edge, a scream that invariably ended, predictably yet always unexpectedly, in a jarring crash that shook the entire hold as the crates brought up against something solid. And every sound in that echoing, reverberating, emptily cavernous hold was magnified ten times. All in all, the floor of that hold wasn’t the place I would have chosen for an afternoon nap.

I gave the electric lantern to Susan, after shining it on a vertical steel ladder tapering down into the depths of the hold.

“Down you go,” I said. “For heaven’s sake, hang on to that ladder. There’s a baffle about three feet high at the bottom of it. Get behind it. You should be safe there.”

I watched her climb slowly down, manoeuvred two of the battens back into place over my head—no easy job with one hand—and left them like that. Maybe they would be jarred loose, they might even fall down into the hold. It was a chance I had to take, they could only be secured from above, and the covering tarpaulin could also only be secured from above. There was nothing I could do about that either. If anyone was crazy enough to be out on deck that night—especially as Carreras had no lifelines rigged—the chances were in that blinding storm that they wouldn’t even notice the flapping corner of the tarpaulin or, if they did, they would only either pass it by or at the most secure it. If someone was curious enough to go to the length of pushing back a batten—well, there was no point in worrying about that.

I went down the hatch slowly, awkwardly, painfully—Marston had a higher opinion of his anæsthetics than I had—and joined Susan on the floor behind the baffle. At this level the noise was redoubled, the sight of those head-high behemoths of crates charging across the hold more terrifying than ever. Susan said: “The coffins. Where are they?” All I had told her was that I wanted to examine some coffins: I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what we might find in them.

“They’re boxed. In wooden crates. On the other side of the hold.”

“The other side!” She twisted her head, lined up the lantern and looked at the sliding wreckage and crates screeching and tearing their way across the floor. “The other side! We would —we would be killed before we got halfway there.”

“Like enough, but I can’t see anything else for it. Hold on a minute, will you?”

“You! With your leg! You can’t even hobble. Oh, no!” Before I could stop her she was over the baffle and half running, half staggering across the hold, tripping and stumbling as the ship lurched and her feet caught on broken planks of wood, but always managing to regain balance, to stop suddenly or dodge nimbly as a crate slid her away. She was agile, I had to admit, and quick on her feet: but she was exhausted with sea-sickness, with bracing herself for the past hours against the constant violent lurching of the Campari: she’d never make it.

But make it she did, and I could see her on the other side flashing her torch around. My admiration for her spirit was equalled only by my exasperation at her actions. What was she going to do with those boxed coffins when she found them: carry them back across the floor, one under each arm.

But they weren’t there, for after she had looked everywhere she shook her head. And then she was coming back and I was shouting out a warning, but the warning stuck in my throat and was only a whisper and she wouldn’t have heard it anyway. A plunging, careening crate, propelled by a sudden viscious lurch as the Campari plunged headlong into an exceptional trough, caught her back and shoulder and pitched her to the floor, pushing her along before its massive weight as if it were imbued with an almost human—or inhuman—quality of evil and malignance and determined to crush the life out of her against the for’ard bulkhead. And then, in the last second before she would have died, the Campari straightened, the crate screeched to a halt less than a yard from the bulkhead and Susan was lying there between crate and bulkhead, very still. I must have been at least fifteen feet away from her but I have no recollection of covering the distance from the baffle to where she lay and then back again, but I must have done for suddenly we were there in the place of safety and she was clinging to me as if I were the last hope left in the world.

“Susan!” My voice was hoarse, a voice belonging to someone else altogether. “Susan, are you hurt?”

She clung even closer. By some miracle she still held the lantern clutched in her right hand. It was round the back of my neck somewhere but the reflected beam from the ship’s side gave enough light to see by. … Her mask had been torn off, her face was scratched and bleeding, her hair a bedraggled mess, her clothes soaked and her heart going like a captive bird’s. For an incongruous moment an unbidden recollection touched my mind, a recollection of a very cool, very poised, sweetly-malicious, pseudo-solicitous young lady asking me about cocktails only two days ago in Carracio, but the vision faded as soon as it had come, the incongruity was too much.

“Susan!” I said urgently. “Are you——”

“I’m not hurt.” She gave a long tremendous sigh that was more shudder than sigh. “I was just too scared to move.” She eased her grip a trifle, looked at me with green eyes enormous in the pallor of her face, then buried her face in my shoulder. I thought she was going to choke me.

It didn’t last long, fortunately. I felt the grip slowly easing, saw the beam of the lantern shifting, and she was saying in an abnormally matter-of-fact voice: “There they are.”

I turned round and there, not ten feet away, they were indeed. Three coffins—Carreras had already removed the cases—and securely stowed between baffle and bulkhead and padded with tarpaulins, so that they could come to no harm. As Tony Carreras kept on repeating, his old man didn’t miss much. Dark shiny coffins with black-braided ropes and brass handles: one of them had an inlet plaque on the lid, copper or brass, I couldn’t be sure.

“That saves me some trouble.” My voice was almost back to normal. I took the hammer and chisel I’d borrowed from the bosun’s store and let them drop. “This screwdriver will be all I need. We’ll find two of those with what’s normally inside them. Give me the lantern and stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“You’ll be quicker if I hold the lantern,” Her voice matched my own in steadiness but the pulse in her throat was going like a trip-hammer. “Hurry, please.”

I was in no way to argue. I caught the foot of the nearest coffin and pulled it towards me so that I could have room to work. It was jammed. I slid my hand under the end to lift it and suddenly my finger found a hole in the bottom of the coffin. And then another. And a third. A lead-lined coffin with holes bored in the bottom of it. That was curious, to say the least.

When I’d moved it far enough out, I started on the screws. They were brass and very heavy, but so was the screwdriver I’d taken from MacDonald’s store. And at the back of my mind was the thought that if the knock-out drops Dr Marston had provided for the sentry were in any way ineffective as the anæsthetic he had given me, then the sentry would be waking up any minute now. If he hadn’t already come to. I had that coffin lid off in no time at all.

Beneath the lid was not the satin shroud or silks I would have expected, but a filthy old blanket. In the generalissimo’s country, perhaps, their customs with coffins were different from ours. I pulled of the blanket and found I was right. Their customs were on occasion, different. The corpse, in this case consisted of blocks of amatol—each block was clearly marked with the word, so there was no mistake about it—a primer, a small case of detonators and a compact square box with wires leading from it, a timing device probably.

Susan was peering over my shoulder. “What’s amatol?”

“High explosive. Enough here to blow the Campari apart.”

She asked nothing else. I replaced the blanket, screwed on the lid and started on the next coffin. This too, had holes in the under side, probably to prevent the explosive sweating. I removed the lid, looked at the contents and replaced the lid. Number two was a duplicate of number one. And then I started on the third one. The one with the plaque. This would be the one. The plaque was heart-shaped and read with impressive simplicity: “Richard Hoskins. Senator.” Just that. Senator of what I didn’t know. But impressive. Impressive enough to ensure its reverent transportation to the United States. I removed the lid with care, gentleness and as much respectful reverence as if Richard Hoskins actually were inside, which I knew he wasn’t.

Whatever lay inside was covered with a rug. I lifted the rug gingerly, Susan brought the lantern nearer, and there it lay, cushioned in blankets and cotton wool. A polished aluminium cylinder, 75 inches in length, 11 inches in diameter, with a whitish pyroceram nose-cap. Just lying there, there was something frightening about it, something unutterably evil: but perhaps that was just because of what was in my own mind.

“What is it?” Susan’s voice was so low that she had to come closer to repeat the words. “Oh, Johnny, what in the world is it?”

“The Twister.”

“The—the what?”

“The Twister.”

“Oh, dear God!” She had it now. “This—this atomic device that was stolen in South Carolina. The Twister.” She rose unsteadily to her feet and backed away. “The Twister!”

“It won’t bite you,” I said. I didn’t feel too sure about that either. “The equivalent of five thousand tons of TNT. Guaranteed to blast any ship on earth into smithereens, if not actually vapories. And that’s just what Carreras intends to do.”

“I—I don’t understand.” Maybe she was referring to the actual hearing of the words—our talk was continually being punctuated by the screeching of metal and the sounds of wood being crushed and snapped—or to the meaning of what I was saying. “You—when he gets the gold from the Ticonderoga and trans-ships it to this vessel he has standing by, he’s going to blow up the Campari—with this?”

“There is no ship standing by. There never was. When he’s loaded the gold aboard, the kindhearted Miguel Carreras is going to free all the passengers and crew of the Campari and let them sail off in the Fort Ticonderoga. As a further mark of his sentimentality and kindness he’s going to ask Senator Hoskins here and his two presumably illustrious companions to be taken back for burial in their native land. The captain of the Ticonderoga would never dream of refusing—and, if it came to the bit, Carreras would make certain that he damn’ well didn’t refuse. See that?” I pointed to a panel near the tail of the Twister.

“Don’t touch it!” If you can imagine anyone screaming in a whisper, then that’s what she did.

“I wouldn’t touch it for all the money in the Ticonderoga,” I assured her fervently. “I’m even scared to look at the damn’ thing. Anyway, that panel is almost certainly a timing device which will be pre-set before the coffin is trans-shipped. We sail merrily on our way, hell-bent for Norfolk, the Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI and what have you—for Carreras’s radio stooges aboard the Ticonderoga will make good and certain that the radios will be smashed and we’ll have no means of sending a message. Half an hour, an hour after leaving the Campari—an hour, at least, I should think, even Carreras wouldn’t want to be within miles of an atomic device going up—well, it would be quite a bang.”

“He’ll never do it—never.” The emphatic voice didn’t carry the slightest shred of conviction. “The man must be a fiend.”

“Grade one,” I agreed. “And don’t talk rubbish about his not doing it. Why do you think they stole the Twister and made it appear as if Dr. Slingsby Caroline had lit out with it?

“From the very beginning it was with the one and only purpose of blowing the Fort Ticonderoga to kingdom come. So that there would be no possibility of any come-back, everything hinged on the total destruction of the Ticonderoga and everyone aboard it, including passengers and crew of the Campari. Maybe Carreras’s two fake radio men could have smuggled some explosives aboard—but it would be quite impossible to smuggle enough to ensure complete destruction. Hundreds of tons of high explosives in the magazines of a British battle-cruiser blew up in the last war—but still there were survivors. He couldn’t sink it by gunfire—a couple of shots from a moderately heavy gun and the Campari’s decks would be so buckled that the guns would be useless—and even then there would be bound to be survivors. But with the Twister there will be no chances of survival. None in the world.”

“Carreras’s men,” she said slowly. “They killed the guards in the atomic research establishment.”

“What else? And then forced Dr. Caroline to drive out through the gates with themselves and the Twister in the back. The Twister was probably en route to their island, by air, inside the hour, but someone drove the brake wagon down to Savannah before abandoning it. No doubt to throw suspicion on the Campari, which they knew was leaving Savannah that morning. I’m not sure why, but I would take long odds it was because Carreras, knowing the Campari was bound for the Caribbean, was reasonably sure that she would be searched at her first port of call, giving him his opportunity to introduce his bogus Marconi-man aboard.”

While I had been talking I’d been studying two circular dials inset in the panel on the Twister. Now I spread the rug back in position with all the loving care of a father smoothing out the bedcover over his youngest son and started to screw the coffin lid back in position. For a time Susan watched me in silence, then said wonderingly: “Mr. Cerdan. Dr. Caroline. The same person. It has to be the same person. I remember now. At the time of the disappearance of the Twister it was mentioned that only one or two people so far know how to arm the Twister.”

“He was just as important to their plans as the Twister. Without him, it was useless. Poor old Doc Caroline has had a rough passage, I’m afraid. Not only kidnapped and forced to do as ordered, but knocked about by us also, the only people who could have saved him. Under constant guard by those two thugs disguised as nurses. He bawled me out of his cabin first time I saw him, but only because he knew that his devoted nurse, sitting beside him with her dear little knitting bag on her lap, had a sub-machine-gun inside it.”

“But—but why the wheel-chair? Was it necessary to take such elaborate——”

“Of course it was. They couldn’t have him mingling with the passengers, communicating with them. It helped conceal his unusual height. And it also gave them a perfect reason to keep a non-stop radio watch on incoming messages. He came to your father’s cocktail party because he was told to—the coup was planned for that evening and it suited Carreras to have his two armed nurses there to help in the take-over. Poor old Caroline. That dive he tried to make from his wheel-chair when I showed him the earphones wasn’t made with the intention of getting at me at all: He was trying to get at the nurse with the sub-machine-gun, but Captain Bullen didn’t know that, so he laid him out.” I tightened the last of the screws and said: “Don’t breathe a word of this back in the sick-bay—the old man talks non-stop in his sleep—or anywhere else. Not even to your parents. Come on. That sentry may come to any minute.”

“You—you’re going to leave that thing here?” She stared at me in disbelief. “You must get rid of it—you must!”

“How? Carry it up a vertical ladder over my shoulder. That thing weighs about 350 lb. altogether, including the coffin. And what happens if I do get rid of it? Carreras finds out within hours. Whether or not he finds out or guesses who took it doesn’t matter: what does matter is that he’ll know he can no longer depend on the Twister to get rid of all the inconvenient witnesses on the Campari. What then? My guess is that not one member of the crew or passengers will have more than a few hours to live. He would have to kill us then—no question of trans-shipping us to the Ticonderoga. As for the Ticonderoga, he would have to board it, kill all the crew and open the seacocks. That might take hours and would inconvenience him dangerously, might wreck all his plans. But he would have to do it. The point is that getting rid of the Twister is not going to save any lives at all, all it would accomplish is the certain death of all of us.”

“What are we going to do?” Her voice was strained and shaky, her face a pale blur in the reflected light. “Oh, Johnny, what are we going to do?”

“I’m going back to bed.” Heaven only knew I felt like it. “Then I’ll waste my time trying to figure out how to save Dr. Caroline.”

“Dr. Caroline? I don’t see—why Dr. Caroline?”

“Because he’s number one for the high-jump, as things stand. Long before the rest of us. Because he’s the man who’s going to arm the Twister,” I said patiently. “Do you think they’ll transfer him to the Ticonderoga and let him acquaint the captain with the fact that the coffin he’s taking back to the states contains not Senator Hoskins but an armed and ticking atom bomb?”

“Where’s it all going to end?” There was panic, open panic in her voice now, a near hysteria. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. It’s like some dark nightmare.” She had her hands twisted in my lapels, her face buried in my jacket—well, anyway, her old man’s jacket—and her voice was muffled. “Oh, Johnny, where’s it all going to end?”

“A touching scene, a most touching scene,” a mocking voice said from close behind me. “It all ends here and now. This moment.”

I whirled round, or at least I tried to whirl round, but I couldn’t even do that properly. What with disengaging Susan’s grip, the weakness of my leg, and the lurching of the ship, the sudden turn threw me completely off balance and I stumbled and fell against the ship’s side. A powerful light switched on, blinding me, and in black silhouette against the light I could see the snub barrel of an automatic.

“On your feet, Carter.” There was no mistaking the voice. Tony Carreras’s, no longer pleasant and affable, but cold, hard, vicious, the real Tony Carreras at last. “I want to see you fall when this slug hits you. Clever-clever Carter. Or so you thought. On your feet, I said! Or you’d rather take it lying there? Suit yourself.”

The gun lifted a trifle. The direct no-nonsense type, he didn’t believe in fancy farewell speeches. Shoot them and be done with it. I could believe now that he was his father’s son. My bad leg was under me and I couldn’t get up. I stared into the beam of light, into the black muzzle of the gun. I stopped breathing and tensed myself. Tensing yourself against a .38 fired from a distance of five feet is a great help but I wasn’t feeling very logical at the moment.

“Don’t shoot!” Susan screamed. “Don’t kill him or we’ll all die.”

The torch beam wavered, then steadied again. It steadied on me. And the gun hadn’t shifted any that I could see.

Susan took a couple of steps towards him, but he fended her off, stiff-armed.

“Out of my way, lady.” I’d never in my life heard such concentrated venom and malignance. I’d misjudged young Carreras all right. And her words hadn’t even begun to register on him, so implacable was his intention. I still wasn’t breathing and my mouth was dry as a kiln.

“The Twister!” Her voice was urgent, compelling, desperate. “He armed the Twister!”

“What! What are you saying?” This time she had got through. “The Twister? Armed?” The voice malignant as ever, but I thought I detected overtones of fear.

“Yes, Carreras, armed!” I’d never known before how important lubrication of the throat and mouth was to the human voice, a buzzard with tonsilitis had nothing on my croak. “Armed, Carreras, armed!” The repetition was not for emphasis. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, how to carry this off, how to exploit the few seconds’ grace Susan had brought from me. I shifted the hand that was propping me up, the one in the black shadow behind me, as if to brace myself against the pitching of the Campari. My fingers closed over the handle of the hammer I’d dropped. I wondered bleakly what I was going to do with it. The torch and gun were steady as ever.

“You’re lying, Carter.” The confidence was back in his voice. “God knows how you found out about it, but you’re lying: you don’t know how to arm it.”

That was it: keep him talking, just keep him talking.

“I don’t. But Dr. Slingsby Caroline does.”

That shook him, literally. The torch wavered. But it didn’t waver enough.

“How do you know about Dr. Caroline?” he demanded hoarsely. His voice was almost a shout. “How do you——”

“I was speaking to him tonight,” I said calmly.

“Speaking with him! But—there’s a key to arm this. The only key to arm it. And my father has it.”

“Dr. Caroline has a spare. In his tobacco pouch. You never thought to look, did you, Carreras?” I sneered.

“You’re lying,” he repeated mechanically. Then, more strongly: “Lying, I say, Carter! I saw you tonight. I saw you leave the sick bay—my God, do you think I was so stupid as not to get suspicious when I saw the sentry drinking coffee given him by kind-hearted Carter—locked it up, followed you to the radio office and then down to Caroline’s cabin. But you never went inside, Carter. I lost you then for a few minutes, I admit. But you never went inside.”

“Why didn’t you stop us earlier?”

“Because I wanted to find out what you were up to. I found it.”

“So he’s the person we thought we saw!” I said to Susan. The conviction in my voice astonished even myself. “You poor fool, we noticed something in the shadows and left in a hurry. But we went back, Carreras, oh, yes, we went back. To Dr. Caroline. And we didn’t waste any time talking to him, either. We had a far smarter idea than that. Miss Beresford wasn’t quite accurate. I didn’t arm the Twister. Dr. Caroline himself did that.” I smiled and shifted my eyes from the beam of the torch to a spot behind and to the right of Carreras. “Tell him Doctor.”

Carreras half turned, cursed viciously, swung back. His mind was fast, his reactions faster, he’d hardly even begun to fall for the old gag. All he allowed us was a second of time and in that brief moment I hadn’t even got past tightening my grip on the hammer. And now he was going to kill me.

But he couldn’t get his gun lined up. Susan had been waiting for the chance, she sensed I’d been building up towards the chance, she dropped her lantern and flung herself forward even as Carreras started to turn and she had only about three feet to go. Now she was clinging desperately to his gun arm, all her weight on it, forcing it down towards the floor. I twisted myself convulsively forward and that two-pound hammer came arching over my shoulder and flew straight for Carreras’s face with all the power, all the hatred and viciousness that was in me.

He saw it coming. His left hand, still gripping the torch, was raised high to smash down on the unprotected nape of Susan’s neck. He jerked his head sideways, flung out his left arm in instinctive reaction: the hammer caught him just below the left elbow with tremendous force, his torch went flying through the air and the hold was plunged into absolute darkness. Where the hammer went I don’t know: a heavy crate screeched and rumbled across the floor just at that moment and I never heard it land.

The crate ground to a standstill. In the sudden momentary silence I could hear the sound of struggling, of heavy breathing. I was slow in getting to my feet, my left leg was practically useless, but maybe it only seemed slow to me. Fear, when it is strong enough, has the curious effect of slowing up time. And I was afraid. I was afraid for Susan. Carreras, except as the source of menace to her, didn’t exist for me at that moment. Only Susan: he was a big man, a powerful man, he could break her neck with a single wrench, kill her with a single blow.

I heard her cry out, a cry of shock or fear. A moment’s silence, a heavy soft thump as of falling bodies, a scream of agony from Susan, and then that silence again.

They weren’t there. When I reached the spot where they had been struggling, they weren’t there. For a second I stood still in that impenetrable darkness, bewildered, then my hand touched the top of the three-foot baffle and I had it: In their wrestling on that crazily careening deck they’d staggered against the baffle and toppled over on to the floor of the hold. I was over that baffle before I had time to think, before I knew what I was doing: the bo’sun’s knife was in my hand, the needle-pointed marlinespike open, the locking shackle closed.

I stumbled as the weight came on my left leg, fell to my knees, touched someone’s head and hair. Long hair. Susan. I moved away, and had just reached my feet again when he came at me. He came at me. He didn’t back away, try to keep out of my reach in that darkness. He came at me. That meant he’d lost his gun.

We fell to the floor together, clawing, clubbing, kicking. Once, twice, half a dozen times he caught me on the chest, the side of the body, with sledgehammer short-arm jabs that threatened to break my ribs. But I didn’t really feel them. He was a strong man, tremendously strong, but even with all his great strength, even had his left arm not been paralysed and useless, he would have found no escape that night.

I grunted with the numbing shock of it and Carreras shrieked out in agony as the hilt of MacDonald’s knife jarred solidly home against his breast-bone. I wrenched the knife free and struck again. And again. And again. After the fourth blow he didn’t cry out any more.

Carreras died hard. He’d stopped hitting me now, his right arm was locked round my neck, and with every blow I struck the throttling pressure of his arm increased. All the convulsive strength of a man dying in agony was being brought to bear on exactly that spot where I had been so heavily sandbagged. Pain, crippling pain, red-hot barbed lances of fire shot through my back and head, I thought my neck was going to break. I struck again. And then the knife fell from my hand.

When I came to, the blood was pounding dizzily in my ears, my head felt as if it were going to burst, my lungs were heaving and gasping for air that wouldn’t come. I felt as if I were choking, being slowly and surely suffocated.

And then I dimly realised the truth. I was being suffocated, the arm of the dead man, by some freak of muscular contraction, was still locked around my neck. I couldn’t have been out for long, not for more than a minute. With both hands I grasped his arm by the wrist and managed to tear it free from my neck. For thirty seconds, perhaps longer, I lay there stretched out on the floor of the hold, my heart pounding, gasping for breath as waves of weakness and dizziness washed over me, while some faraway insistent voice, as desperately urgent as it was distant, kept saying in this remote corner of my mind, you must get up, you must get up.

And then I had it. I was lying on the floor of the hold and those huge crates were still sliding and crashing around with every heave and stagger of the Campari. And Susan. She was lying there too.

I pushed myself to my knees, fumbled around in my pocket till I found Marston’s pencil flash and switched it on. It still worked. The beam fell on Carreras and I’d time only to notice that the whole shirt-front was soaked with blood before I involuntary turned the torch away, sick and nauseated.

Susan was lying close in to the baffle, half on her side, half on her back. Her eyes were open, dull and glazed with shock and pain, but they were open.

“It’s finished.” I could scarcely recognise the voice as mine. “It’s all over now.” She nodded, and tried to smile.

“You can’t stay here,” I went on. “The other side of the baffle—quick.”

I rose to my feet, caught her under the arms and lifted her. She came easily, lightly, then cried out in agony and went limp on me. But I had her before she could fall, braced myself against the ladder, lifted her over the baffle and laid her down gently on the other side.

In the beam of my torch she lay there on her side, her arms outflung. The left arm, between wrist and elbow, was twisted at an impossible angle. Broken, no doubt of it. Broken. When she and Carreras had toppled over the baffle she must have been underneath: her left arm had taken the combined strain of their falling bodies and the strain had been too much. But there was nothing I could do about it. Not now. I turned my attention to Tony Carreras.

I couldn’t leave him there, I knew I couldn’t leave him there. When Miguel Carreras found out that his son was missing he’d have the Campari searched from end to end I had to get rid of him, but I couldn’t get rid of him in that hold. There was only one place where I could finally, completely and without any fear of re-discovery put the body of Tony Carreras. In the sea.

Tony Carreras must have weighed at least two hundred pounds, that narrow vertical steel ladder was at least thirty feet high, I was weak from loss of blood and sheer physical exhaustion and I’d only one sound leg, so I never even stopped to think about it. If I had, the impossibility of what I had to do would have defeated me even before I had begun.

I hauled him to the ladder, dragged him up to a sitting position against it, hooked my hands under his shoulders and jerked up his dead-weight, inch by inch, until his shoulders and hanging head were on a level with my own, stooped quickly, caught him in a fireman’s lift and started climbing.

For the first time that night, the pitching, corkscrewing Campari was my friend. When the ship plunged into a trough, rolling to starboard at the same time, the ladder would incline away from me as much as fifteen degrees and I’d take a couple of quick steps, hang on grimly as the Campari rolled back and the ladder swung out above me, wait for the return roll and repeat the process. Twice Carreras all but slipped from my shoulder, twice I had to take a quick step down to renew my purchase. I hardly used my left leg at all, my right leg and both arms took all the strain. Above all, my shoulders took the strain, I felt at times as if the muscles would tear, but it wasn’t any worse than the pain in my leg, so I kept on going. I kept on till I reached the top. Another half-dozen rungs and I would have had to let him drop for I don’t think I could ever have made it.

I heaved him over the hatch-coaming, followed, sank down on deck and waited till my pulse rate dropped down to the low hundreds. After the stench of oil and the close stuffiness of that hold, the driving gale-born rain felt and tasted wonderful I cupped the torch in my hand—not that there was more than a very remote chance of anyone being around at that hour, in that weather—and went through his pockets till I found a key tagged “Sick Bay.” Then I caught him by the collar and started for the side of the ship.

A minute later I was down in the bottom of the hold again. I found Tony Carreras’s gun, stuck it in my pocket and looked at Susan. She was still unconscious, which was the best way to be if I had to carry her up that ladder, and I had. With a broken arm she couldn’t have made it alone, and if I waited till she regained consciousness she would be in agony all the way. And she wouldn’t have remained conscious long.

After coping with Carreras’s dead weight, the task of getting Susan Beresford up on deck seemed almost easy. I laid her carefully on the rain-washed decks, replaced the battens and tied the tarpaulin back in place. I was just finishing when I sensed rather than heard her stir.

“Don’t move,” I said quickly. On the upper deck again I had to raise my voice to a shout to make myself heard against the bedlam of the storm. “Your forearm’s broken.”

“Yes.” Matter-of-fact, far too matter-of-fact. “Tony Carreras? Did you leave——”

“That’s all over. I told you that was all over.”

“Where is he?”

“Overboard.”

“Overboard?” The tremor was back in her voice now and I liked it much better than the abnormal calmness. “How did he——”

“I stabbed him God knows how many times,” I said wearily. “Do you think he got up all by himself, climbed the ladder and jumped——Sorry, Susan. I shouldn’t—well, I’m not quite my normal, I guess. Come on. Time old Doc Marston saw that arm.”

I made her cradle the broken forearm in her right hand, helped her to her feet and caught her by her good arm to help steady her on that heaving deck. The blind leading the blind.

When we reached the for’ard break of the well-deck I made her sit in the comparative shelter there while I went into the bo’sun’s store. It took me only a few seconds to find out what I wanted: two coils of nylon rope which I stuck into a canvas bag, and a short length of thicker manilla. I closed the door, left the bag beside Susan, and staggered across the sliding, treacherous decks to the port side and tied the manilla to one of the guard-rail stanchions. I considered knotting the rope, then decided against it. MacDonald, whose idea this was, had been confident that no one, in this wild weather, would notice so small a thing as a knot round the base of a stanchion, and even if it were noticed Carreras’s men would not be seamen enough to investigate and pull it in: but anyone peering over the side and seeing the knots might have become very curious indeed. I made the knot round that stanchion very secure indeed for there was going to depend on it the life of someone who mattered very much to me—myself.

Ten minutes later we were back outside the sick-bay. I need not have worried about the sentry. Head bent low over his chest, he was still far away in another world and showed no signs of leaving it. I wondered how he would feel when he came to. Would he suspect he had been drugged—or would he put any unusual symptoms down to a combination of exhaustion and sea-sickness? I decided I was worrying about nothing, one sure guess I could make and that was that when the sentry awoke he would tell no one about his sleep. Miguel Carreras struck me as the kind of man who might have a very short way indeed with sentries who slept on duty.

I took out the key I’d found on Tony Carreras and unlocked the door. Marston was at his desk, the bo’sun and Bullen were both sitting up in bed. This was the first time I’d seen Bullen conscious since he’d been shot. He was pale and haggard and obviously in considerable pain, but he didn’t look as if he were on his last legs. It took a lot to kill off a man like Bullen.

He gave me a long look that was pretty close to a glare.

“Well, Mister. Where the hell have you been?” Normally, with those words, it would have come out like a rasp, but his lung wound had softened his rasp to a hoarse whisper. If I’d had the strength to grin, I’d have done just that, but I didn’t have the strength: there was hope for the old man yet.

“A minute, sir. Dr. Marston, Miss Beresford has——”

“I can see, I can see. How in the world did you manage” Close to us now, he broke off and peered at me with his short-sighted eyes. “I would say, John, that you’re in the more immediate need of attention.”

“Me? I’m all right.”

“Oh, you are, are you?” He took Susan by her good arm and led her into the dispensary. He said, over his shoulder: “Seen yourself in a mirror recently?”

I looked in a mirror. I could see his point. Balenciagas weren’t blood-proof. The whole of the left side of my head, face and neck was covered in blood that had soaked through hood and mask, matted in thick dark blood and even the rain hadn’t been able to remove: the rain, if anything, had made it look worse than it really was. It must all have come from Tony Carreras’s bloodstained shirt when I’d carried him up the ladder of number four hold.

“It’ll wash off,” I said to Bullen and the bo’sun. “It’s not mine. That’s from Tony Carreras.”

“Carreras?” Bullen stared at me, then looked at MacDonald. In spite of the evidence in front of his eyes, you could see that he thought I’d gone off my rocker. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what I say. Tony Carreras.” I sat heavily on a, chair and gazed down vacantly at my soaking clothes. Maybe Captain Bullen wasn’t so far wrong: I felt an insane desire to laugh. I knew it was a climbing hysteria that came from weakness, from over-exhaustion, from mounting fever, from expending too much emotion in too short a time, and I had to make a physical effort to fight it down. “I killed him tonight down in number four hold.”

“You’re mad,” Bullen said flatly. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Don’t I?” I looked at him, then away again. “Ask Susan Beresford.”

“Mr. Carter’s telling the truth, sir,” MacDonald said quietly. “My knife, sir? Did you bring it back?”

I nodded, rose wearily, hobbled across to MacDonald’s bed and handed him the knife. I’d had no chance to clean it. The bo’sun said nothing, just handed it to Bullen, who stared down at it for long unspeaking moments.

“I’m sorry, my boy,” he said at length. His voice was husky; “Damnably sorry: But we’ve been worried to death.”

I grinned faintly. It was an effort even to do that. “So was I, sir, so was I.”

“All in your own good time,” Bullen said encouragingly.

“I think Mr. Carter should tell us later, sir,” MacDonald suggested. “He’s got to clean himself up, get those wet clothes off and into bed. If anyone comes——”

“Right, Bo’sun, right.” You could see that even so little talk was exhausting him. “Better hurry, my boy.”

“Yes.” I looked vaguely at the bag I’d brought with me. “I’ve got the ropes, Archie.”

“Let me have them, sir.” He took the bag, pulled out the two coils of rope, pulled the pillow from his lower pillowcase, stuffed the ropes inside and placed them under his top pillow. “Good a place as any, sir. If they really start searching, they’re bound to find it anyway. Now if you’d just be dropping this pillow and bag out the window. …”

I did that, stripped, washed, dried myself as best I could and climbed into bed, just as Marston came into the bay.

“She’s all right, John. Simple fracture. All wrapped up and in her blankets and she’ll be asleep in a minute. Sedatives, you know.”

I nodded. “You did a good job tonight, Doctor. Boy outside is still asleep and I hardly felt a thing in my leg.” It was only half a lie and there was no point in hurting his feelings unnecessarily. I glanced down at my leg. “The splints——”

“I’ll fix them right away.”

He fixed them, not more than half killing me in the process, and while he was doing so I told them what had happened. Or part of what happened. I told them the encounter with Tony Carreras was a result of an attempt to spike the gun on the afterdeck: with old Bullen talking away non-stop in his sleep, any mention of the Twister would not have been clever at all.

At the end of it all, after a heavy silence, Bullen said hopelessly: “It’s finished. It’s all finished. All that work and suffering for nothing. All for nothing.”

It wasn’t finished, it wasn’t going to be finished ever. Not till either Miguel Carreras or myself was finished. If I were a betting man I’d have staked the last cent of my fortune on Carreras.

I didn’t say that to them. I told them instead of the simple plan I had in mind, an unlikely plan concerned with taking over the bridge at gunpoint. But it wasn’t half as hopeless and desperate as the plan I really had in mind. The one I’d tell Archie MacDonald about later. Again I couldn’t tell the old man, for again the chances were heavy that he would have betrayed it in his half delirious muttering under sedation. I hadn’t even liked to mention Tony Carreras: but the blood had had to be explained away.

When I finished, Bullen said in a hoarse whisper: “I’m still the captain of this ship. I will not permit it. Good God, Mister, look at the weather, look at your condition. I will not allow you to throw your life away. I cannot permit it.”

“Thank you, sir. I know what you mean. But you have to permit it. You must. Because if you don’t …”

“What if someone comes into the sick-bay when you’re not here?” he asked helplessly. He’d accepted the inevitable.

“This.” I produced a gun and tossed it to the bo’sun. “This was Tony Carreras’s. There are still seven shots in the magazine.”

“Thank you, sir,” MacDonald said quietly. “I’ll be very careful with those shots.”

“But yourself, man?” Bullen demanded huskily. “How about yourself?”

“Give me back that knife, Archie,” I said.

X.

Friday 9 a.m.—Saturday 1 a.m.

I slept that night and slept deeply, as deeply, almost, as Tony Carreras: I had neither sedatives nor sleeping pills, exhaustion was the only drug I needed.

Coming awake next morning was a long slow climb from the depths of a bottomless pit. I was climbing in the dark but in the strange way of dreams I wasn’t climbing and it wasn’t dark, some great beast had me in his jaws and was trying to shake the life out of me. A tiger, but no ordinary tiger. A sabre-toothed tiger, the kind that had passed from the surface of the earth a million years ago. So I kept on climbing in the dark and the sabre-toothed tiger kept on shaking me like a terrier shaking a rat and I knew that my only hope was to reach the light above, but I couldn’t see any light. Then, all of a sudden, the light was there, my eyes were open and Miguel Carreras was bending over me and shaking my shoulder with no gentle hand. I would have preferred the sabre-toothed tiger any day.

Marston stood at the other side of the bed, and when he saw I was awake he caught me under the arms and lifted me gently to a sitting position. I did my best to help him but I wasn’t concentrating on it, I was concentrating on the lip-biting and eye-closing so that Carreras couldn’t miss how far through I was. Marston was protesting.

“He shouldn’t be moved, Mr. Carreras, he really shouldn’t be moved. He’s in constant great pain and I repeat that major surgery is essential at the earliest possible moment.” It was about forty years too late now, I supposed, for anyone to point out to Marston that he was a born actor. No question in my mind now but that that was what he should have been: the gain to both the thespian and medical worlds would have been incalculable.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and smiled wanly. “Why don’t you say it outright, Doctor? Amputation is what you mean.”

He looked at me gravely then went away without saying anything. I looked across at Bullen and MacDonald. Both of them were awake, both of them carefully not looking in my direction. And then I looked at Carreras.

At first glance he looked exactly the same as he had a couple of days ago. At first glance, that was. A second and closer inspection showed the difference: a slight pallor under the tan, a reddening of the eyes, a tightening of the face that had not been there before. He had a chart under his left arm, a slip of paper in his left hand.

“Well,” I sneered. “How’s the big bold pirate captain this morning?”

“My son is dead,” he said dully.

I hadn’t expected it to come like this, or so soon, but the very unexpectedness of it helped me to the right reaction, the reaction he would probably expect from me anyway. I stared at him through slightly narrowed eyes and said: “He’s what?”

“Dead.” Miguel Carreras, whatever else he lacked, unquestionably had all the normal instincts of a parent, a father. The very intensity of his restraint showed how badly he had been hit. For a moment I felt genuinely sorry for him. For a very short moment. Then I saw the faces of Wilson and Jamieson and Benson and Brownell and Dexter, the faces of all those dead men, and I wasn’t sorry any more.

“Dead?” I repeated. Stocked puzzlement, but not too much shock, it wouldn’t be expected of me. “Your son? Dead? How can he be dead? What did he die of?” Almost of its own volition, before I suddenly checked the movement, my hand started reaching for the clasp-knife under the pillow. Not that it would have made much difference even if he had seen it—five minutes in the dispensary steriliser had removed the last traces of blood.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head and I felt like cheering; there were no traces of suspicion in his face. “I don’t know.”

“Dr. Marston,” I said. “Surely you——”

“We haven’t been able to find him. He has disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” It was Captain Bullen making his contribution and his voice sounded a shade stronger, a little less husky, than it had the previous night. “Vanished? A man just can’t vanish aboard a ship like that, Mr. Carreras.”

“We spent over two hours searching the ship. My son is not aboard the Campari. When did you last see him Mr. Carter?”

I didn’t indulge in guilty starts, sharp upward glances or anything daft like that. I wondered what his reactions would have been if I’d said: “When I heaved him over the side of the Campari last night.” Instead, I pursed my lips and said: “After dinner last night when he came here. He didn’t linger. Said something like ‘Captain Carreras making his rounds,’ and left.”

“That is correct. I’d sent him to make a tour of inspection. How did he look?”

“Not his usual self. Green. Sea-sick.”

“My son was a poor sailor,” Carreras acknowledged. “It is possible——”

“You said he was making rounds,” I interrupted. “Of the whole ship? Decks and everything?”

“That is so.”

“Did you have life-lines rigged on the fore- and after-decks?”

“No. I had not thought it necessary.”

“Well,” I said grimly, “there’s your possible answer. Your probable answer. No lifelines, nothing to hang on to. Felt ill, ran for the side, a sudden lurch——” I left the sentence hanging.

“It is possible, but not in character. He had an exceptional sense of balance.”

“Balance doesn’t help much if you slip on a wet deck.”

“Quite. I also haven’t ruled out the possibility of foul play.”

“Foul play?” I stared at him, duly grateful that the gift of telepathy is so very limited. “With all the crew and passengers under guard, lock and key, how is foul play possible? Unless,” I added thoughtfully, “there’s a nigger in your own woodpile.”

“I have not yet completed my investigations.” The voice was cold, the subject was closed and Miguel Carreras was back in business again. Bereavement wouldn’t crush this man. However much he might inwardly mourn his son, it wouldn’t in the slightest detract from his efficiency or his ruthless determination to carry out exactly the plans he had made. It wasn’t, for instance, going to make the slightest difference in his plans to send us all into orbit the following day. Signs of humanity there might be but the abiding fundamental in Carreras’s character was an utter and all-excluding fanaticism that was all the more dangerous in that it lay so deeply hidden beneath the smooth urbanity of the surface.

“The chart, Carter.” He handed it across to me along with a paper giving a list of fixes. “Let me know if the Fort Ticonderoga is on course. And if she is running on time. We can later calculate our time of interception if and when I get a fix this morning.”

“You’ll get a fix,” Bullen assured him huskily. “They say the devil is good to his own, Carreras, and he’s been good to you. You’re running out of the hurricane and you’ll have clear patches of sky by noon. Rain later in the evening, but first clearing.”

“You are sure, Captain Bullen? You are sure we are running out of the hurricane?”

“I’m sure. Or, rather, the hurricane is running away from us.” Old Bullen was an authority on hurricanes and would lecture on his pet subject at the drop of a hat, even to Carreras, even when a hoarse whisper was all the voice he could summon. “Neither wind nor sea have moderated very much—they certainly hadn’t—but what matters is the direction of the wind. It’s from the northwest now, which means that the hurricane lies to the north-east of us. It passed us by to the east, on our starboard hand, some time during the night, moving northwards, then suddenly swung northeast. Quite often when a hurricane reaches the northern limits of its latitude and then is caught up by the westerlies it can remain stationary at its point of recurvature for twelve or twenty-four hours—which would have meant that you would have had to sail through it. But you had the luck: it recurved and moved to the east almost without a break.” Bullen lay back, close to exhaustion. Even so little had been too much for him.

“You can tell all this just lying in your bed there?” Carreras demanded.

Bullen gave him the commodore’s look he would have given any cadet who dared question his knowledge, and ignored him.

“The weather is going to moderate?” Carreras persisted.

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Carreras nodded slowly. Making his rendezvous in time and being able to trans-ship the gold had been his two great worries: and now both of those were gone. He turned abruptly, walked out of the sick-bay.

Bullen cleared his throat and said formally, in his strained whisper: “Congratulations, Mr. Carter. You are the most fluent liar I’ve ever known.”

MacDonald just grinned.

The forenoon, the afternoon came and went. The sun duly appeared, as Bullen had prophesied, and later disappeared, also as he had prophesied. The sea moderated, although not much, not enough, I guessed, to alleviate the sufferings of our passengers, and the wind stayed where it was, out of the north-west. Bullen, under sedation, slept nearly all day, once again relapsing into his incoherent mumblings—none of them, I was relieved to note, were about Tony Carreras—while MacDonald and I talked or slept. But we didn’t sleep before I told him what I hoped to do that night when—and if—I managed to get loose on the upper deck.

Susan I hardly saw that day. She made her appearance after breakfast with her arm in plaster and in a sling. There was no danger of this arousing any suspicion, even in a mind like Carreras’s: the story was to be that she had gone to sleep in a chair, been flung out of it during the storm and sprained her wrist. Such accidents were so commonplace in heavy weather that no one would think to raise an eyebrow. About ten o’clock in the morning she asked to be allowed to join her parents in the drawing-room, and stayed there all day.

Fifteen minutes after noon Carreras appeared again. If his investigations into possible foul play connected with his son’s death had made any progress, he made no mention of it: he did not even refer to the disappearance again. He had the inevitable chart—two of them this time—with him and the noon position of the Campari. Seemingly he’d managed to take a good fix from the sun.

“Our position, our speed, their position, their speed and our respective course. Do we intercept at the point marked ‘X’?”

“I suppose you’ve already worked it out for yourself?”

“I have.”

“We don’t intercept,” I said after a few minutes.

“At our present speed we should arrive at your rendezvous in between eleven and eleven and a half hours. Say midnight. Five hours ahead of schedule.”

“Thank you, Mr. Carter. My own conclusion exactly. The five-hour wait for the Ticonderoga won’t take long in passing.”

I felt a queer sensation in my middle, the phrase about a person’s heart sinking may not be physiologically accurate but it described the feeling perfectly. This would ruin everything, completely destroy what little chance my plan ever had of succeeding. But I knew the consternation did not show in my face.

“Planning on arriving there at midnight and hanging around till the fly walks into your parlour?” I shrugged. “Well, you’re the man who’s making the decisions.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked sharply.

“Nothing much,” I said indifferently. “It’s just that I would have thought that you would want your crew at the maximum stage of efficiency for trans-shipping the gold when we meet the Fort Ticonderoga.”

“So?”

“So there’s still going to be a heavy sea running in twelve hours’ time. When we stop at the rendezvous, the Campari is going to lie in the trough of the seas and, in the elegant phrase of our times, roll her guts out. I don’t know how many of that crowd of landlubbers you have along with you were sea-sick last night, but I’ll bet there will be twice as many tonight. And don’t think our stabilisers are going to save you—they depend upon the factor of the ship’s speed for their effect.”

“A well-taken point,” he agreed calmly. “I shall reduce speed, aim at being there about 4 a.m.” He looked at me with sudden speculation. “Remarkably co-operative, full of helpful suggestions. Curiously out of the estimate I had formed of your character.”

“Which only goes to show how wrong your estimate is, my friend. Common sense and self-interest explain it. I want to get into a proper hospital as soon as possible—the prospect of going through life with one leg doesn’t appeal. The sooner I see passengers, crew and myself transferred aboard the Ticonderoga the happier I’ll be. Only a fool kicks against the pricks: I know a fait accompli when I see one. You are going to transfer us all aboard the Ticonderoga, aren’t you, Carreras?”

“I shall have no further use for any member of the Campari’s crew, far less for the passengers.” He smiled thinly. “Captain Teach and Blackbeard are not my ideals, Mr. Carter. I should like to be remembered as a humane pirate. You have my word that all of you will be transferred in safety and unharmed.” The last sentence had the ring of truth and sincerity, because it was true and sincere. It was the truth, but it wasn’t of course, the whole truth: he’d left out the bit about our being blown out of existence half an hour later.

About seven o’clock in the evening Susan Beresford returned and Marston left, under guard, to dispense pills and soothing words to the passengers in the drawing-room, many of whom were, after twenty-four hours of continuously heavy weather, understandably not feeling at their best.

Susan looked tired and pale, no doubt the emotional and physical suffering of the previous night together with the pain from her broken arm accounted for that, but I had to admit for the first time, in an unbiased fashion, that she also looked very lovely: I’d never before realised that auburn hair and green eyes were a combination that couldn’t be matched, but possibly that was because I’d never before seen an auburn-haired girl with green eyes.

She was also tense, nervous and jumpy as a cat. Unlike old Doc Marston and myself, she’d never have made it in the Method school.

She came softly to my bedside—Bullen was still under sedation and MacDonald either asleep or dozing—and sat down on a chair. After I’d asked her how she was and how the passengers were, and she’d asked me how I was and I’d told her and she hadn’t believed me, she said suddenly: “Johnny, if everything goes all right, will you get another ship?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well,” she said impatiently, “if the Campari’s blown up and we get away or if we’re saved some other way, will you——”

“I see. I suppose I would. Blue Mail has plenty of ships and I’m supposed to be the senior chief officer.”

“You’ll like that? Getting back to sea again?” This was a crazy conversation, but she was only whistling in the dark. I said: “I don’t think I’ll be back to sea again, somehow.”

“Giving in?”

“Giving up. A different thing altogether. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life catering to the whims of wealthy passengers. I don’t include the Beresford family, father, mother—or daughter.”

She smiled at this, going into this weird routine of melting the green in her eyes, the kind of smile that could have a very serious effect on the constitution of a sick man like myself, so I looked away and went on: “I’m a pretty fair mechanic and I’ve a bit of cash put away. There’s a very nice flourishing little garage down in Kent that I can take over any time I want. And Archie MacDonald there is an outstanding mechanic. We’d make a pretty fair team, I think?”

“Have you asked him yet?”

“What chance have I had?” I said irritably. “I’ve only just thought about it.”

“You’re pretty good friends, aren’t you?”

“Good enough? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Nothing, just nothing. Funny, that’s all. There’s the bo’sun, he’ll never walk properly again, nobody will want him at sea any more, he’s probably got no qualifications for any decent job on land—especially with that leg—and all of a sudden Chief Officer Carter gets tired of the sea and decides——”

“It’s not that way at all,” I interrupted.

“I’m not very clever. But you don’t have to worry about him, anyway. Daddy told me this afternoon that he’s got a good job for him.”

“Oh?” I took a chance and looked at her eyes again. “What kind of job?”

“A storeman.”

“A storeman.” I know I sounded disappointed, but I’d have sounded ten times as disappointed if I had been able to take all this seriously, if I’d been able to share her belief that there was a future. “Well, it’s kind of him. Nothing wrong with a storeman, but I just don’t see Archie MacDonald as one, that’s all. Especially not in America.”

“Will you listen?” she asked sweetly. A touch of the Miss Beresford that was.

“I’m listening.”

“You’ve heard that Daddy’s building a big refinery in the West of Scotland? Storage tanks, own port to take goodness knows how many tankers?”

“I’ve heard.”

“Well, that’s the place. Stores for the oil-port and the refinery—millions and millions of dollars of stores, Daddy says, with goodness knows how many men to look after them. And your friend in charge—and with a dream house attached.”

“That is a different proposition altogether. I think it sounds wonderful, Susan, just wonderful. It’s terribly kind of you.”

“Not me!” she protested. “Daddy.”

“Look at me. Say that without blushing.”

She looked at me. She blushed. With those green eyes the effect was devastating. I thought about my constitution again and looked away, and then I heard her saying: “Daddy wants you to be the manager of the new oil-port. So then you and the bo’sun would be in business together after all. Wouldn’t you?”

I turned slowly and stared at her. I said slowly: “Was that the job he meant when he asked me if I’d like to work for him?”

“Of course. And you didn’t even give him a chance to tell you. Do you think he’d given up—he hadn’t really started. You don’t know my father. And you can’t claim I’d anything to do with it either.”

I didn’t believe her. I said: “I can’t tell you how—well, how grateful I am. It’s a terrific chance, I know and admit. If you see your father again this evening thank him very much indeed from me.”

Her eyes were shining. I’d never seen a girl’s eyes shining for me before. Not in this way.

“Then you’ll—then you’ll——”

“And tell him no.”

“And tell him——”

“It’s a foolish thing to have pride, perhaps, but I’ve still got a little left.” I hadn’t meant my voice to sound so harsh, it just came out that way. “Whatever job I’ll get, I’ll get one I found for myself, not one bought for me by a girl.” As a thumbs-down on a genuine offer, I reflected bitterly, the refusal could have been more graciously phrased.

She looked at me, her face suddenly very still, said, “Oh, Johnny” in a curiously muffled voice, turned and buried her face half on the pillow, half on the sheets, her shoulders heaving, sobbing as if her heart would break.

I didn’t feel good at all. I could have walked under a five-barred gate without opening it. I reached out and touched her head awkwardly and said: “I’m terribly sorry, Susan. But just because I turn down——”

“It’s not that, it’s not that.” She shook her head in the pillow, voice more muffled than ever. “It was all make-believe. No, not that, everything I said was true, but just for a few moments we—well, we weren’t here. We—were away from the Campari, it was something that had nothing to do with the Campari. You—you understand.”

I stroked her hair. “Yes, Susan, I understand.” I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“It was like a dream.” I didn’t see where she came into the dream. “In the future. Away—away from this dreadful ship. And then you burst the dream and we’re back on the Campari. And no one knows what the end’s to be, except us—Mummy, Daddy, all of them, Carreras has them believing their lives will be spared.” She sobbed again, then said, between sobs: “Oh, my dear. We’re just kidding ourselves. It’s all over. Everything’s over. Forty armed men and they’re prowling all over the ship. I saw them. Double guards everywhere—there are two outside this door. And every door locked. There’s no hope, there’s no hope. Mummy, Daddy, you, me, all of us—this time tomrorrow it will all be over. Miracles don’t happen any more.”

“It’s not all over, Susan.” I’d never make a salesman, I thought drearily, if I met a man dying of thirst in the Sahara I couldn’t have convinced him that water was good for him. “It’s never all over.” But that didn’t sound any better than my first attempt.

I heard the creak of springs and saw MacDonald propped up on one elbow, thick black eyebrows raised in puzzlement and concern. The sound of her crying must have awakened him.

“It’s all right, Archie,” I said. “Just a bit upset, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry.” She straightened herself and turned her tear-stained face in the bo’sun’s direction. Her breath was coming in the quick, short, indrawn gasps that are the aftermath of crying. “I’m terribly sorry. I woke you up. But there is no hope, is there, Mr. MacDonald?”

“‘Archie’ will do for me,” the bo’sun said gravely.

“Well, Archie.” She tried to smile at him through her tears. “I’m just a terrible coward.”

“And you spending all day with your parents and never once being able to tell them what you knew? What kind of cowardice do you call that, miss?” MacDonald said reproachfully.

“You’re not answering me,” she said in tearful accusation.

“I am a West Highlander, Miss Beresford,” MacDonald said slowly. “I have the gift of my ancestors, a black gift at times that I’d rather be without, but I have it. I can see what comes tom morrow or the day after tommorrow: not often, but at times I can. You cannot will the second sight to come, but come it does. I have seen what is to come many times in the past few years, and Mr. Carter there will tell you that I have never once been wrong.” This was the first I had ever heard of it, he was as fluent a liar as myself. “Everything is going to turn out well.”

“Do you think so, do you really think so?” There was hope in her voice now, hope in her eyes, that slow, measured speech of MacDonald’s, the rock-like steadiness of the dark eyes in that sun-weathered face, bespoke a confidence, a certainty, an unshakable belief that was most impressive. There, now, I thought, was a man who would have made a great salesman.

“I don’t think, Miss Beresford.” Again the grave smile. “I know. Our troubles are almost at their end. Do what I do—put your last cent on Mr. Carter here.”

He even had me convinced. I, too, knew that everything was going to turn out just fine, until I remembered who he was depending on. Me. I gave Susan a handkerchief and said: “Go and tell Archie about that job.”

“You’re not going to trust your life to that thing?” There was horror in Susan’s face, panic in her voice as she watched me tie a bowline round my waist. “Why, it’s no thicker than my little finger.” I could hardly blame her: the thin three-stranded rope, no bigger than an ordinary clothes line, was hardly calculated to inspire confidence in anyone. It didn’t inspire much in me, even although I did know its properties.

“It’s nylon, miss,” MacDonald explained soothingly. “The very rope mountaineers use in the Himalayas—and you don’t think they’d trust their lives to anything they weren’t dead sure of? You could hang a big motor-car on the end of this and it still wouldn’t break.” Susan gave him her it’s-all-right-for-you-to-talk-it’s-not-your-life-that’s-depending-on-it look, bit her lip and said nothing.

The time was exactly midnight. If I’d read the clock dial settings on the Twister properly, six hours was the maximum delayed action that could be obtained. Assuming Carreras rendezvoused exactly on time at 5 a.m., it would be at least another hour before he could get clear: so, the Twister wouldn’t be armed until after midnight.

Everything was ready. The sick-bay door had been cautiously locked on the inside with the key I’d taken from Tony Carreras so that neither of the two guards could burst in unexpectedly in the middle of things. And even if they did get suspicious and force an entrance, MacDonald had a gun.

MacDonald himself was now sitting at the top of my bed, beside the window. Marston and I had half-carried him there from his own bed. His left leg was quite useless—like myself, he’d been given an injection by Doc Marston to deaden the pain, mine being twice as powerful as the previous night’s dose—but then MacDonald was not going to be called upon to use his leg that night, only his arms and shoulders, and there was nothing wrong with MacDonald’s arms and shoulders. They were the strongest on the Campari. I had the feeling I was going to need all their strength that night. Only MacDonald knew the purpose I had in mind that night. Only MacDonald knew that I intended returning the way I went. The others believed in my suicidal plan for an attack on the bridge, believed if I were successful I would be returning via the sick-bay door. But they didn’t believe I would return at all. The atmosphere was less than festive.

Bullen was awake now, lying flat on his back, his face silent and grim.

I was dressed in the same dinner suit as I’d worn the previous night. It was still damp, still crusted with blood. I’d no shoes on. The clasp-knife was in one pocket, oilskin-wrapped torch in the other, the mask round my face, hood over my head. My leg ached, I felt as a man feels after a long bout of ’ flu and the fever still burned in my blood: but I was as ready as I ever was going to be.

“Lights,” I said to Marston.

A switch clicked and the sick-bay was dark as the tomb. I drew back the curtains, pulled open the window and secured it on the latch. I stuck my head outside.

It was raining steadily, heavily, a cold driving rain out of the north-west, slanting straight in through the window on to the bed. The sky was black with no star above. The Campari still pitched a little, rolled a little, but it was nothing as compared with the previous night. She was doing about twelve knots. I twisted my neck and peered upwards. No one there. I leaned out as far as possible and looked fore and aft. If there was a light showing on the Campari that night I couldn’t see it.

I came inside, stooped, picked up a coil of nylon rope, checked that it was the one secured to the top of the iron bedstead and flung it out into the rain and the darkness. I made a last check of the rope knotted round my waist—this was the one the bo’sun held in his hands—and said: “I’m off.” As a farewell speech it could perhaps have been improved upon, but it was all I could think of at the time.

Captain Bullen said: “Good luck, my boy.” He’d have said an awful lot more if he knew what I really had in mind. Marston said something I couldn’t catch. Susan said nothing at all. I wriggled my way through the window, favouring my wounded leg, and then was fully outside, suspended from the sill by my elbows. I could sense rather than see the bo’sun by the window, ready to pay out the rope round my waist.

“Archie,” I said softly. “Give me that spiel again. The one about how everything is going to turn out all right.”

“You’ll be here again before we know you’re gone,” he said cheerfully. “See and bring my knife back.”

I felt for the rope attached to the bed, got it in both hands, eased my elbows off the sill and dropped quickly, hand over hand, as MacDonald paid out my lifeline. Five seconds later I was in the water.

The water was dark and cold and it took my breath away. After the warmth of the sick-bay the shock of the almost immediate transition, the abrupt drop in temperature, was literally paralysing. Momentarily, involuntarily, I lost my grip on the rope, panicked when I realised what had happened, floundered about desperately and caught it again. The bo’sun was doing a good job above: the sudden increase in weight as I’d lost my lifeline must have had him half-way out of the window.

But the cold wasn’t the worst. If you can survive the initial shock you can tolerate the cold to a limited degree, accustomed but not reconciled: what you can’t tolerate, what you can’t become accustomed to is the involuntary swallowing of large mouthfuls of salt water every few seconds. And that was what was happening to me.

I had known that being towed alongside a ship doing twelve knots wasn’t going to be any too pleasant, but I had never thought it was going to be as bad as this. The factor I hadn’t taken into the reckoning was the waves. One moment I was being towed, face down and planing, up the side of a wave: the next, as the waves swept by under me, I was almost completely out of the water, then falling forwards and downwards to smash into the rising shoulder of the next wave with a jarring violence that knocked all the breath from my body. And when all the breath has been driven from you the body’s demands that you immediately gulp in air are insistent, imperative and not to be denied. But with my face buried in the sea I wasn’t gulping in air, I was gulping down large quantities of salt water. It was like having water under high pressure forced down my throat by a hose. I was floundering, porpoising, twisting and spinning exactly like a hooked fish being pulled in on the surface through the wake of a fast-trolling motorboat. Slowly, but very surely, I was drowning.

I was beaten before I started. I knew I had to get back, and at once, I was gasping and choking on sea-water, my nostrils were on fire with it, my mouth was full of it, my stomach was full of it, my throat burned with it and I knew that at least some of it had already reached my lungs.

A system of signals had been arranged, and now I began to tug frantically on the rope round my waist, hanging on to the other rope with my left hand. I tugged half a dozen times, slowly, in some sort of order at first, then, as no response came, frantically, despairingly. Nothing happened. I was porpoising up and down so violently that all MacDonald could be feeling anyway was a constant and irregular series of alternate tightenings and slackenings of the line: he had no means of distinguishing between one type of tug and another.

I tried to pull myself back on my own line, but against the onrushing pressure of the water as the Campari ploughed through that stormy sea, it was quite impossible. When the tension came off the line round my waist, it needed all the strength of both my hands just to hang on to the lifeline without being swept away. With all the strength and desperation that was in me I tried to edge forward an inch. But I couldn’t even make that inch. And I knew I couldn’t hang on much longer.

Salvation came by sheer chance: no credit to me. One particularly heavy wave had twisted me round till I was on my back, and in this position I fell into the next trough and hit the following wave with back and shoulders. Followed the inevitable explosive release of air from my lungs, the just as inevitable sucking in of fresh air—and this time I found I could breathe! Air rushed into my lungs, not water: I could breathe! Lying on my back like this, half lifted out of the water by my grip on the lifeline and with my head bent forward almost to my chest between my overhead arms, my face remained clear of the water and I could breathe.

I wasted no time but went hand over hand down the lifeline as fast as MacDonald paid out the rope about my waist. I was still swallowing some water, but not enough to matter.

After about fifteen seconds I took my left hand off the lifeline and started scraping it along the side of the ship, feeling for the rope I’d left dangling over the side of the after-deck last night. The lifeline was now sliding through my right hand and, wet though it was, it was burning the skin off my palm. But I hardly noticed it. I had to find that manilla I’d left tied to the guard-rail stanchion: if I didn’t, then it was curtains. Not only would the hopes of my carrying out my plan be at an end, it would be the end of me also. MacDonald and I had had to act on the assumption that the rope would be there and no attempt would be made to pull me back until he got the clear pre-arranged-signal that it was time to begin just that. And to make any such clear signal while in the water, I had discovered, was impossible. If the manilla wasn’t there I’d just be towed along at the end of that nylon rope until I drowned. Nor would that take long. The salt water I’d swallowed, the violent buffeting of the waves, the blows I’d suffered from being flung a score of times against the iron walls of the Campari, the loss of blood and my injured leg—all those had taken their frightening toll and I was dangerously weak. It would not be long.

My left hand brushed against the manilla: I grabbed it, a drowning man seizing the last straw in the whole endless expanse of the ocean.

Tucking the lifeline through the rope round my waist, I over-armed myself up the manilla till I was all but clear of the water, wrapped my one good leg round the rope and hung there, gasping like an exhausted dog, shivering and then being violently sick as I brought up all the sea-water that had collected in my stomach. After that I felt better, but weaker than ever. I started to climb.

I hadn’t far to go, twenty feet and I’d be there, but I hadn’t gone two feet before I was bitterly regretting the fact that I hadn’t followed my impulse of the previous night and knotted the manilla. The manilla was soaking wet and slippery and I had to clamp tight with all the strength of my hands to get any purchase at all. And there was little enough strength left in my hands, my aching forearm muscles were exhausted from clinging so long and so desperately to the lifeline: my shoulders were just as far gone, even when I could get a good purchase, even when my weakening hands didn’t slide down the rope when I put all my weight on them, I could still pull myself up only two or three inches at a time. Three inches, no more: that was all I could manage at one time.

I couldn’t make it, reason, instinct, logic, common sense all told me that I couldn’t make it: but I made it. The last few feet of the climb was something out of a dark nightmare, hauling myself up two inches, slipping back an inch, hauling myself up again and always creeping nearer the top. Three feet away from the top I stopped: I knew I was only that distance away from safety, but to climb another inch on that rope was something I knew I could never do. Arms shaking ague-like from the strain, shoulders on fire with agony, I hauled my body up until my eyes were level with knotted hands: even in that almost pitchy darkness I could see the faint white blur of my gleaming knuckles. For a second I hung there, then flung my right hand desperately upwards. If I missed the coaming of the scuppers … but I couldn’t miss it. I had no more strength in me, I could never make such an effort again.

I didn’t miss it. The top joint of my middle finger hooked over the coaming and locked there, then my other hand was beside it, I was scrabbling desperately for the lowermost bar in the guardrails, I had to get it over and over at once or I’d fall back into the sea. I found the bar, had both hands on it, swung my body convulsively to the right till my sound foot caught the coaming, reached up to the next bar, reached the teak rail, half dragged, half slid my body over the top and fell heavily on the deck on the other side.

How long I lay there, trembling violently in every weary muscle in my body, whooping hoarsely for the breath my tortured lungs were craving, gritting my teeth against the fire in my shoulders and arms, and trying not to let the red mist before my eyes envelop me completely, I do not know. It may have been two minutes, it may have been ten. Somewhere during that time I was violently ill again. And then slowly, ever so slowly, the pain eased a little, my breathing slowed and the mists before my eyes cleared away: but I still couldn’t stop trembling. It was well for me that no five-year-old happened along the deck that night: he could have had me over the side without taking his hands out of his pockets.

I untied the ropes from my waist with numbed and fumbling and all but useless hands, tied them both to the stanchion just above the manilla, pushed the lifeline till it was almost taut, then gave three sharp deliberate tugs. A couple of seconds passed, then came three clearly defined answering tugs. They knew now I had made it. I hoped they felt better about it than I did. Not that that would be hard.

I sat there for at least another five minutes till some measure of strength came back to me, rose shakily to my feet and padded across the deck to number four hold. The tarpaulin on the starboard forward corner was still secured. That meant there was no one down below. But I really hadn’t expected them to be there yet.

I straightened, looked all around me, then stood very still, the driving rain streaming down my sodden mask and soaking clothes. Not fifteen yards away from me, right aft, I had seen a red glow come and vanish in the darkness. Ten seconds passed, then the glow again. I’d heard of waterproof cigarettes, but not all that waterproof. But someone was smoking a cigarette, no question about that.

Like falling thistledown, only quieter, I drifted down in the direction of the glow. I was still trembling, but you can’t hear trembling. Twice I stopped to line up direction and distance by that glowing cigarette and finally stopped less than ten feet away from it. My mind was hardly working at all or I’d never have dared to do it: a careless flick of a torch beam, say, and it would have been all over. But no one flicked a torch.

The red glow came again, and I could now just make out that the smoker wasn’t standing in the rain. He was in the V-shaped entrance of a tarpaulin, a big tarpaulin draped over some big object. The gun, of course, the gun that Carreras had mounted on the after-deck, with the tarpaulin serving the dual purpose of protecting the mechanism from the rain and concealing it from any other vessel they might have passed during the day.

I heard the murmur of voices. Not the smoker, but another two crouched somewhere inside the shelter of the tarpaulin. That meant three people there. Three people guarding the gun. Carreras was certainly taking no chances with that gun. But why so many as three, he didn’t need three? Then I had it. Carreras hadn’t just been talking idly when he’d spoken of the possibility of foul play in connection with the death of his son. He did suspect it, but his cold logical mind had told him that neither crew nor passengers of the Campari could have been responsible. If his son had met death by violence, then death could only have come from one of his own men. The renegade who had killed his son might strike again, might attempt to ruin his plans. And so, three men on guard together. They could watch each other.

I left, skirted the hatch and made my way to the bo’sun’s store. I fumbled around in the darkness, found what I wanted, a heavy marline-spike, and then was on my way, marline-spike in one hand, MacDonald’s knife in the other.

Dr. Caroline’s cabin was in darkness. I was pretty sure that the windows were uncurtained, but I left my torch where it was. Susan had said that Carreras’s men were prowling around the decks that night: the chance wasn’t worth it. And if Dr. Caroline wasn’t already in number four hold, then the chances were high indeed that he would only be in one other place—in his bed, and bound to it hand and foot.

I climbed up to the next deck and padded along to the wireless office. My breathing and pulse were almost back to normal now, the shaking had eased and I could feel the strength slowly flooding back into my arms and shoulders. Apart from the constant dull ache in my neck where the sandbag merchant and Tony Carreras had been at work, the only pain I felt was a sharp burning in my left thigh where the salt water had got into the open wounds. Without the anæsthetic, I’d have been doing a war dance. On one leg, of course.

The wireless office was in darkness. I leaned my ear against the door, straining to hear the slightest sound from inside, and was just reaching out a delicate hand for the door-knob when I just about had a heart-attack. A telephone bell had gone off with a shattering metallic loudness not six inches from the ear I’d so hard pressed against the door. It jarred me rigid, for all of five seconds Lot’s wife couldn’t even have hoped to compete with me, then I pussy-footed silently across the deck into the shelter of one of the lifeboats.

I heard the vague murmur of someone talking on the telephone, saw the light come on in the wireless office, the door open and a man came out. Before he switched off the light I saw two things: I saw him bring a key from his right-hand trousers’ pocket, and I saw who it was, the artist with the machine-gun who had killed Tommy Wilson and cut down all the rest of us. If I had to settle any more accounts that night, I hoped bleakly it would be with this man.

He closed the door, locked it and went down the ladder to “A” deck below. I followed him to the top of the ladder and stayed there. There was another man at the foot of the ladder, lit torch in hand, just outside Dr. Caroline’s cabin, and in the backwash of light from the cabin bulkhead I could see who it was. Carreras himself. There were two other men close by, and I could distinguish neither of them, but I was certain that one of them would be Dr. Caroline. They were joined by the radio operator and the four men moved off aft. I never even thought of going after them. I knew where they were going.

Ten minutes. That was the detail the news broadcast about the disappearance of the Twister had mentioned. There were only one or two men who could arm the Twister, and it couldn’t be done in less than ten minutes. I wondered vaguely if Caroline knew he had only ten minutes to live. And that was all the time I had to do what I had to do. It wasn’t long.

I was coming down the ladder while Carreras’s swinging torch was still in sight. Three-quarters of the way down, three steps from the bottom, I froze into immobility. Two men—in that driving rain their black blurred shapes were barely distinguishable but I knew it was two men because of the low murmur of voices—were approaching the foot of the ladder. Armed men, they were bound to be armed, almost certainly with the ubiquitous tommy-gun which seemed the standard weapon among the generalissimo’s henchmen.

They were at the foot of the ladder now, I could feel the ache in my hands from the tension of my grip round marline-spike and opened clasp-knife, then suddenly they went veering off to the right, round the side of the ladder. I could have reached out and touched them both, I could see them almost clearly now, clearly enough to see that both had beards, and had I not been wearing the black hood and mask they would have been bound to see the white glimmer of my face. How they didn’t even see my shape standing there on the third bottom step was beyond me: The only reason I could think of was that they both had their heads lowered against the driving rain.

Seconds later I was inside the central passageway of “A” accommodation. I hadn’t poked my head round the outside passage door to see if the land was clear, after that escape I’d felt that nothing mattered, I’d just walked straight inside. The passageway was empty.

The first door on the right, the one opposite Caroline’s, was the entrance to Carreras’s suite. I tried the door. Locked. I walked down the passage to where Benson, the dead chief steward, had had his cubicle, hoping that the luxurious carpet underfoot was absorbent enough to soak up the water that was almost cascading off me. White, Benson’s successor, would have had a blue fit if he could have seen the damage I was doing.

The master-key to the passengers’ suites was in its secret little cubby-hole. I removed it, went back to Carreras’s cabin, unlocked the door and went inside, locking it behind me.

The lights were on throughout the suite. Carreras probably hadn’t bothered to switch them off when he’d left, he wasn’t paying for the electricity. I went through the cabins, sending each door in turn flying open with the sole of my stockinged foot. Nothing? No one. I had one bad moment when I entered Carreras’s own sleeping cabin and saw this desperate hooded, crouched figure, dripping water, hands clenched round weapons, with wide staring eyes and blood dripping down beside the left eye. Myself in a looking-glass. I had seen prettier sights. I hadn’t been aware that I had been cut, I supposed it must have been the result of one of the many knocks I’d had had against the side of the Campari, opening up the wound in my head.

Carreras had boasted that he had a complete loading plan of the Fort Ticonderoga in his cabin. Nine minutes now, maybe even less. Where in the name of God would he keep the plan? I went through the dressing-tables, wardrobes, lockers, cupboards, bedside tables. Nothing. Nothing. Seven minutes.

Where, where would he keep it? Think, Carter, for heaven’s sake think. Maybe Caroline was getting on with the arming of the Twister faster than anyone had thought possible. How did anyone know, as the broadcast had said, that it took all of ten minutes to arm it? If the Twister was such a secret—and until it had been stolen it had been such a top priority hush-hush secret that no member of the public had known of its existence—how did anyone know it took ten minutes to arm it? How could anyone know? Maybe all it required was a twist here, a turn there. Maybe—maybe he was finished already. Maybe——

I put those thoughts to one side, drove them out of my mind, crushed them ruthlessly. That way lay panic and defeat. I stood stock-still and forced myself to think, calmly, dispassionately. I had been looking in all the obvious places. But should I have been looking in the obvious places? After all I’d gone through this cabin once before, looking for a radio, I’d gone through it pretty thoroughly, and I hadn’t seen any signs. He would have it hidden, of course he would have it hidden. He wouldn’t have taken a chance on anyone finding it, such as the steward whose daily duty it was to clean out his cabin, before his men had taken over the ship. No stewards on duty now, of course, but then he probably hadn’t bothered to shift it since the take-over. Where would he have hidden it where a steward wouldn’t stumble across it?

That ruled out all the furniture fittings, all the places I’d wasted time in searching. It also ruled out bed, blankets, mattresses—but not the carpet! The ideal hiding-place for a sheet of paper.

I almost threw myself at the carpet in his sleeping cabin. The carpets in the Campari’s accommodation were secured by press-button studs for ease of quick removal. I caught the corner of the carpet by the door, ripped free a dozen studs, and there it was right away, six inches from the edge. A large sheet of canvas paper, folded in four, with “T.E.S. Fort Ticonderoga. Most Secret” printed in one corner. Five minutes to go.

I stared at the paper until I had memorised its exact position relative to the carpet, picked it up and smoothed it out. Diagrams of the Ticonderoga with complete stowage plans of the cargo. But all I was interested in was the deck cargo. The plan showed crates stacked on both fore- and aft-decks, and twenty of those on the foredeck were marked with a heavy red cross. Red for gold.

In a small careful hand Carreras had written on the side: “All deck cargo crates identical in size. Gold in waterproof, kapok-filled welded steel boxes to float free in event of damage or sinking. Each crate equipped with yellow water-stain.” I supposed this was some chemical which, when it came into contact with salt water, would stain the sea for a wide area around. I read on: “Gold crates indistinguishable from general cargo. All crates stamped ‘Harmsworth & Holden Electrical Engineering Company.’ Stated contents generators and turbines. For’ard deck cargo consigned to Nashville Tennessee, exclusively turbines: afterdeck cargo consigned to Oak Ridge Tennessee, exclusively generators. So marked. For’ard twenty crates on for’ard deck gold.”

I didn’t hurry. Time was desperately short, but I didn’t hurry. I studied the plan, which corresponded exactly to Carreras’s observations, and I studied the observations themselves until I knew I would never forget a word of them. I folded and replaced the plan exactly as I had found it, pressed the carpet snap-studs back into place, went swiftly through the cabins on a last check to ensure that I had left no trace on my passing: there were none that I could see. I locked the door and left.

The cold driving rain was falling even more heavily than ever now, slanting in across the port side, drumming metallically against the accommodation bulkheads, rebounding ankle-high off the polished wooden decks. On the likely enough theory that Carreras’s patrolling men would keep to the sheltered starboard side of the accommodation, I kept to the opposite side as I hurried aft: in my stocking soles and wearing that black suit and mask, no one could have heard or seen me at a distance of more than a few feet. No one heard or saw me, I heard or saw no one. I made no attempt to look, listen or exercise any caution at all. I reached number four hold within two minutes of leaving Carreras’s cabin.

I needn’t have hurried. Carreras had made no attempt to replace the tarpaulin he’d had to pull back in order to remove the battens, and I could see straight down into the bottom of the hold. Four men down there, two holding powerful electric lanterns, Carreras with a gun in the hand hanging by his side, the lanky, stooped form of Dr. Slingsby Caroline, still wearing that ridiculous white wig askew on his head, bent over the Twister. I couldn’t see what he was doing.

It was like a nineteenth-century print of grave-robbers at work? The tomb-like depths of the hold, the coffins, the lanterns, the feeling of apprehension and hurry and absorbed concentration that lent an evilly conspiratorial air to the scene—all the elements were there. And especially the element of tension, an electric tension that you could almost feel pulsating through the darkness of the night. But a tension that came not from the fear of discovery but from the possibility that at any second something might go finally and cataclysmically wrong. If it took ten minutes to arm the Twister, and obviously it took even longer than that, then it must be a very tricky and complicated procedure altogether. Dr. Caroline’s mind, it was a fair guess, would be in no fit state to cope with tricky and complicated procedures: he’d be nervous, probably badly scared, his hands would be unsteady, he was working, probably with inadequate tools, on an unstable platform by the light of unsteady torches and even though he might not be desperate enough or fool enough to jinx it deliberately there seemed to me, as there obviously seemed to the men down in the hold, that there was an excellent chance that his hand would slip. Instinctively, I moved back a couple of feet until the coaming of the hatch came between me and the scene below. I couldn’t see the Twister any more so that made me quite safe if it blew up.

I rose to my feet and made a couple of cautious circuits of the hatch, the first close in, the second farther out. But Carreras had no prowlers there: apart from the guards on the gun, the after-deck appeared to be completely deserted. I returned to the port for’ard corner of the hatch and settled down to wait.

I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait too long. The sea-water had been cold, that heavy rain was cold, the wind was cold, I was soaked to the skin and was recurringly and increasingly subject to violent bouts of shivering, shivering I could do nothing to control. The fever ran fiercely in my blood. Maybe the thought of Dr. Caroline’s hand slipping had something to do with the shivering: whatever the reason, I’d be lucky to get off with no more than pneumonia.

Another five minutes, and I took a second cautious peek down into the hold. Still at it. I rose, stretched and began to pace softly up and down to ward off the stiffness and cramp that was settling down on my body, especially on the legs. If things went the way I hoped I couldn’t afford to have stiffness anywhere.

If things went the way I hoped. I peered down a third time into the hold and this time stayed in that stooped position, unmoving. Dr. Caroline had finished. Under the watchful eye and gun of the radio operator, he was screwing the brass-topped lid back on to the coffin while Carreras and the other man had the lid already off the next coffin and were bent over it. Presumably fusing the conventional explosive inside: probably it was intended as a stand-by in case of the malfunction of the Twister, or even more probably, in the event of the failure of the Twister’s timing mechanism, it was designed to set it off by sympathetic detonation. I didn’t know, I couldn’t guess. And, for the moment, I was not in the slightest worried. The crucial moment had come.

The crucial moment for Dr. Caroline. I knew—as he was bound to know—that they couldn’t afford to let him live. He’d done all they required of him. He was of no further use to them. He could die any moment now. If they chose to put a gun to his head and murder him where he stood, there was nothing in the world I could do about it, nothing I would even try to do about it. I would just have to stand there silently, without movement or protest, and watch him die. For if I let Dr. Caroline die without making any move to save him, then only he would die: but if I tried to save him and failed—and with only a knife and marline-spike against two sub-machine-guns and pistols the chances of failure were a hundred per cent—then not only Caroline but every member of the passengers and crew of the Campari would die also. The greatest good of the greatest number … Would they shoot him where he stood or would they do it on the upper deck?

Logic said they would do it on the upper deck. Carreras would be using the Campari for a few days yet, he wouldn’t be wanting a dead man lying in the hold and there would be no point in shooting him down there and then carrying him up above when he could make the climb under his own steam and be disposed of on the upper deck. If I were Carreras, that is what I would have figured.

And that was how he did figure. Caroline tightened the last screw, laid down the screwdriver and straightened. I caught a glimpse of his face, white, strained, one eye twitching uncontrollably. The radio operator said: “Señor Carreras?”

Carreras straightened, turned, looked at him, then at Caroline and nodded.

“Take him to his cabin, Carlos. Report here afterwards.”

I moved back swiftly as a torch shone vertically upwards from the hold. Carlos was already climbing the ladder. “Report here afterwards.” God, I’d never thought of so obvious a possibility! For a moment I panicked, hands clenched on my pitiful weapons, irresolute, paralysed in thought and action. Without any justification whatsoever I’d had the picture firmly in my mind of being able to dispose of Caroline’s appointed executioner without arousing suspicion. Had Carlos, the radio operator, been under instructions to knock off the unsuspecting Caroline on the way for’ard then carry on himself to his wireless office, then I might have disposed of him and hours might have passed before Carreras got suspicious. But now what he was, in effect, saying was: “Take him up top, shove him over the side and come back and tell me as soon as you have done so.”

I could see the heavy rain slanting whitely through the wavering torch beam as Carlos climbed swiftly up the ladder. By the time he reached the top I was round the other side of the hatch coaming, lying flat on the deck.

Cautiously, I hitched an eye over the top of the coaming. Carlos was standing upright on the deck now, his torch shining downwards into the hold. I saw Dr. Caroline’s white head appear, saw Carlos move back a couple of steps and then Caroline, too, was over the top, a tall hunched figure pulling high his collar against the cold lash of the rain. I heard, but failed to understand, a quick sharp command and then they were moving off diagonally, Caroline leading, Carlos with his torch on him from behind, in the direction of the companion-way leading up to “B” deck.

I rose to my feet, remained immobile. Was Carlos taking him back to his cabin after all? Had I been mistaken? Could it be——

I never finished the thought, I was running after them as quickly, as lightly, as silently as the stiffness in my left leg would permit. Of course Carlos was taking him in the direction of the companionway, had he marched him straight towards the rail Caroline would have known at once what awaited him, would have turned and hurled himself against Carlos with all the frantic savagery of a man who knows he is about to die.

Five seconds, only five seconds elapsed from the time I started running until I caught up with them. Five seconds, far too short a time to think of the suicidal dangers involved, far too short to think what would happen if Carlos should swing his torch round, if any of the three guards at the gun should happen to be watching this little procession, if either Carreras or his assistant in the hold should choose to look over the coaming to see how the problem of disposal was being attended to, far too little time to figure out what I was going to do when I caught up with Carlos.

And I was given no time to figure. I was only three or four feet away when, in the backwash of light from the torch, I saw Carlos reverse his grip on his tommy-gun, catch it by the barrel, swing it up high over his head. It had reached its highest point and was just started on the down-swing when the base of the heavy marline-spike caught him on the back of the neck with all my weight and fury behind it. I heard something crack, caught the tommy-gun out of his suddenly nerveless hand before it could crash to the deck and made a grab for the torch. I missed. The torch struck the deck with a muffled thud, it must have been a ship’s rubber composition issue, rolled over a couple of times and came to rest, its beam shining straight out over the edge of the ship. Carlos himself pitched heavily forward, struck Dr. Caroline, and the two of them fell against the lower steps of the companionway.

“Keep quiet!” I whispered urgently. “Keep quiet if you want to live!” I dived for the torch, fumbled desperately for the switch, couldn’t find it, stuck the glass face against my jacket to kill the beam, finally located the switch and turned it off.

“What in heaven’s name——”

“Keep quiet!” I found the trigger on the automatic pistol and stood there stock-still, staring aft into the darkness, in the direction of both the hold and the gun, striving to pierce the darkness, listening as if my life depended upon it. Which it did. Ten seconds I waited. Nothing. I had to move, I couldn’t afford to wait another ten seconds. Thirty seconds would have been enough and more than enough for Carlos to dispose of Dr. Caroline: a few seconds after that and Carreras would start wondering what had happened to his trusty henchman.

I thrust gun and torch towards Caroline, found his hands in the darkness “Hold these,” I said softly.

“What—what is this?” An agonised whisper in the dark.

“He was going to smash your head in. Now shut up. You can still die. I’m Carter, the chief officer.” I’d pulled Carlos clear of the companionway where he’d held Caroline pinned by the legs and was going through his pockets as quickly as I could in the darkness. The key. The key of the wireless office. I’d seen him take it from his right-hand trousers’ pocket but it wasn’t there any more. The left-hand one. Not there either. The seconds were rushing by. Desperately I tore at the patch-pockets of his army type blouse, and I found it in the second pocket. But I’d lost at least twenty seconds.

“Is—is he dead?” Caroline whispered.

“Are you worried? Stay here.” I shoved the key into a safe inner pocket, caught the guard by his collar and started to drag him across the wet deck. It was less than ten feet to the ship’s rail. I dropped him, located the hinged section of the teak rail, fumbled for the catch, released it, swung the rail through 180 degrees and snapped it back in its open position. I caught the guard by his shoulders, eased the upper part of his body over the second rail, then tipped the legs high. The splash he made couldn’t have been heard thirty feet away. Certainly no one in number four hold or under the gun tarpaulin could possibly have heard anything.

I ran back to where Dr. Caroline was still sitting on the lower steps of the companionway. Maybe he was just obeying the order I’d given him, but probably he was just too dazed to move anyway. I said: “Quick, give me your wig.”

“What? What?” My second guess had been right. He was dazed.

“Your wig!” It’s no easy feat to shout in a whisper, but I almost made it.

“My wig? But—but it’s glued on.”

I leaned forward, twisted my fingers in the temporary thatch and tugged. It was glued on, all right. The gasp of pain and resistance offered to my hand showed he hadn’t been kidding: that wig felt as if it was riveted to his skull. It was no night for half measures. I clamped my left hand over his mouth and pulled savagely with my right. A limpet the size of a soup plate couldn’t have offered more resistance, but it did come off. I don’t know how much pain there was in it for him but it certainly cost me plenty: his teeth almost met through the heel of my palm.

The machine-gun was still in his hand. I snatched it away, whirled, and stopped motionless. For the second time in a minute I could see rain slanting whitely through the vertical beam of a torch. That meant only one thing: someone was climbing up the ladder from the bottom of the hold.

I reached the ship’s side in three long steps, placed the wig in the scuppers, laid the gun on top of it, raced back to the companionway, jerked Dr. Caroline to his feet and dragged him towards the bo’sun’s store, less than ten feet inboard from the companionway. The door was still less than halfway shut when Carreras appeared over the coaming, but his torch wasn’t pointing in our direction. I closed the door silently until only a crack remained.

Carreras was closely followed by another man, also with a torch. Both of them headed straight for the ship’s side. I saw the beam of Carreras’s torch suddenly steady on the opened rail, then heard the sharp exclamation as he bent forward and peered in the scuppers. A moment later he was erect again, examining the gun and the wig he held in his hand. I heard him say something short and staccato, repeated several times. Then he started talking rapidly to his companion, but it was in Spanish and I couldn’t get it. He then examined the inside of the wig, indicated something with the torch beam, shook his head in what might have been sorrow but was more probably exasperated anger, flung the wig over the side and returned to the hold, taking the tommy-gun with him. His companion followed.

“Our friend didn’t seem so happy,” I murmured.

“He’s a devil, a devil!” Dr. Caroline’s voice was shaking, only now was he beginning to realise the narrowness of his escape, how closely death had brushed him by. “You heard him. One of his own men dead and all he could call him was a crazy fool, and he just laughed when the other man suggested they turn the ship to look for him.”

“You understand Spanish?”

“Pretty well. He said something like: ‘Just like that sadistic so-and-so to force Caroline to open the rail so that he could see what was coming to him.’ He thinks I turned on the guard, grabbed his gun and that in the fight, before we both went overboard, my wig was torn off. There was a handful of my hair sticking to the underside of the wig, he says.”

“Sorry about that, Dr. Caroline.”

“Good God, Sorry! You saved both our lives. Mine anyway. Sorry!” Dr. Caroline, I thought, was a pretty strong-nerved person, he was recovering fast from the shock. I hoped his nerves were very strong indeed, he was going to need them all to survive the ordeal of the next few hours. “It was that handful of hair that really convinced him.”

I said nothing, and he went on: “Please tell me exactly what is going on?”

For the next five minutes, while I kept watch through that crack in the doorway, Dr. Caroline plied me with questions and I answered them as quickly and briefly as I could. He had a highly intelligent, incisive mind, which I found vaguely surprising which in turn was a stupid reaction on my part: you don’t pick a dim-wit as the chief of development for a new atomic weapon. I supposed his rather comical-sounding name and the brief glimpse I’d had of him the previous night—a man bound hand and foot to a four-poster and looking into a torch beam with wide and staring eyes looks something less than his best—had unconsciously given me the wrong impression entirely. At the end of the five minutes he knew as much about the past developments as I did myself: what he didn’t know was what was to come, for I hadn’t the heart to tell him. He was giving me some details of the kidnap when Carreras and his companion appeared.

They replaced battens, tied the tarpaulins and went for’ard without any delay. That meant, I supposed, that the fusing of the auxiliary time-bombs in the other two coffins were complete. I unwrapped the torch from its oilskin covering, looked around the store, picked up a few tools and switched off the light.

“Right,” I said to Caroline. “Come on.”

“Where?” He wasn’t keen to go anywhere, and after what he’d been through I didn’t blame him.

“Back down that hold. Hurry. We may have little enough time.”

Two minutes later, with the battens and tarpaulins as well pulled back into place as possible above us, we were on the floor of the hold. I needn’t  have bothered bringing any tools, Carreras had left his behind him, scattered carelessly around. Understandably he hadn’t bothered to remove them: he would never be using these tools again.

I gave Caroline the torch to hold, selected a screwdriver and started on the lid of the brass-plaqued coffin.

“What are you going to do?” Caroline asked nervously.

“You can see what I’m doing.”

“For pity’s sake be careful! That weapon is armed!”

“So it’s armed. It’s not due to go off until when?”

“Seven o’clock. But it’s highly unsafe, highly unsafe. It’s as unstable as hell. Good God, Carter, I know. I know!” His unsteady hand went on my arm, his face contorted with anxiety. “The development of this missile wasn’t fully completed when it was stolen. The fuse mechanism was only in an untried experimental state, and tests showed that the retaining spring on the trembler switch is far too weak. The Twister is dead safe normally, but this trembler switch is brought into circuit as soon as it is armed.”

“And?”

“A jar, a knock, the slightest fall—anything could overcome the tension of the spring and short-circuit the firing mechanism. Fifteen seconds later the bomb goes up.”

I hadn’t noticed until then, but it was much warmer down in that hold than it had been on deck. I raised a soaking sleeve in a half-witted attempt to wipe some sweat off my forehead.

“Have you told Carreras this?” The warmth was also affecting my voice, bringing it out as a harsh strained croak.

“I told him. He won’t listen. I think—I think Carreras is a little mad. More than a little. He seems perfectly prepared to take a chance. And he has the Twister tightly packed in cotton wool and blankets to eliminate the possibility of a jar.”

I gazed at him for a long moment without really seeing him, then got on with the next screw. It seemed much stiffer than the last one but it was just possible that I wasn’t applying so much pressure as I had been before. For all that, I had all the screws undone inside three minutes. Gently I slid off the lid, placed it to one side, slowly peeled back a couple of blankets and there lay the Twister. It looked more evil than ever.

“Of course.”

“There are your tools. Disarm the bloody thing.”

He stared at me, his face suddenly empty of expression. “That’s why we’re here?”

“Why else? Surely it was obvious? Get on with it.”

“It can’t be done.”

“It can’t be done?” I caught him by the arm, not gently. “Look friend, you armed the damn’ thing. Just reverse the process, that’s all.”

“Impossible.” Finality in the voice. “When it’s armed, the mechanism is locked in position. With a key. The key is in Carreras’s pocket.”

XI.

Saturday 1 a.m.—2.15 a.m.

The weakness in my left leg, a near paralysing weakness, hit me all of a sudden and I had to sit down on the baffle and hang on to the ladder for support. I gazed at the Twister. For a long time I gazed down at it, with bitter eyes: then I stirred and looked at Dr. Caroline.

“Would you mind repeating that?”

He repeated it. “I’m terribly sorry, Carter, but there you have it. The Twister can’t be rendered safe without the key. And Carreras has the key.”

I thought of all the impossible solutions to this one and recognised them at once for what they were—impossible. I knew what had to be done now, the only thing that could be done. I said tiredly: “Do you know, Dr. Caroline, that you’ve just condemned forty people to certain death?”

“I have done that?”

“Well, Carreras. When he put that key in his pocket he was condemning himself and all his men to death just as surely as the man who pulls the switch for the electric chair. And what am I worrying about, anyway? Death’s the only certain and permanent cure for scourges like Carreras and the people who associate with him. As for Lord Dexter, he’s rolling in the stuff. He can always build another Campari.”

“What are you talking about, Mr. Carter?” There was apprehension in his face as he looked at me, more than apprehension, fear. “Are you feeling all right, Carter?”

“Of course I’m all right,” I said irritably. “Everybody’s always asking the same stupid questions.” I stooped, picked up the rope grommet and Haltrac Midget Hoist I’d taken from the bo’sun’s store, then rose wearily to my feet. “Come on, Doctor, give me a hand with this.”

“Give you a hand with what?” He knew damn’ well what I meant but the fear in his mind would-n’t let him believe it.

“The Twister, of course,” I said impatiently. “I want to get it over to the port side, hidden in the tarpaulins behind the baffle.”

“Are you crazy?” he whispered. “Are you quite crazy? Did you hear what I said? You’re going to lift it out of its coffin with—with that? One little slip, the tiniest jar——”

“Are you going to help me?”

He shook his head, shuddered and turned away. I hooked the hoist on to a head-high rung of the ladder, pulled the lower block until it hung just above the Twister, picked up the grommet and moved around to the tail of the weapon. I was stooping low over it when I heard a quick footstep behind me and a pair of arms locked themselves around my body, arms informed with all the strength of fear and desperation. I struggled briefly to free myself but I might as well have tried to shrug off the tentacles of a squid. I tried to stamp on his instep but all I did was hurt my heel: I’d forgotten that I wasn’t wearing shoes.

“Let go!” I said savagely. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m not going to let you do it! I’m not going to let you do it!” He was panting, his voice low and hoarse and desperate. “I’m not going to let you kill us all!”

There are certain people in certain situations with whom there is no arguing. This was such a situation and Caroline such a person. I half turned, thrust backwards with all the power of my good leg and heard him gasp as his back struck heavily against the ship’s side. A momentary loosening of his grip, a wrench and I was free. I picked up the big marline-spike and showed it to him in the light of the torch.

“I don’t want to use this,” I said quietly. “Next time I will. My promise. Can’t you stop shaking long enough to realise that I’m trying to save all our lives, not throw them away. Don’t you realise that anyone might pass by up top any moment, see the loose tarpaulin and investigate?”

He stood there, hunched against the metal, staring down at the floor. He said nothing. I turned, took the torch in my teeth, placed the grommet on the edge of the coffin and bent down to lift the tail of the Twister. Or to try to lift it. It weighed a ton. To me it did, anyway, what with one thing and another I wasn’t as fit as I had been. I’d managed to lift it perhaps three inches and didn’t see how I was going to hold it there for even a couple of seconds when I heard a footstep and a kind of moan behind me. I tensed, braced myself for the next assault, then relaxed slowly as Dr. Caroline stepped past me, bent down and slid the grommet round the tail of the Twister. Together we managed to move the grommet up to approximately the mid-point of the missile. Neither of us said anything.

I hauled on the Haltrac pulley until it became taut. Dr. Caroline said hoarsely: “It’ll never take it. That thin cord——”

“It’s tested to a thousand pounds.” I hauled some more and the tail began to lift. The grommet wasn’t central. I lowered it again, the grommet was adjusted, and next time I hauled the Twister came clear along its entire length. When it was about three inches above its cotton wool and blanket bed, I set the automatic lock. I mopped my forehad again. It was warmer than ever down in that hold.

“How are we going to get it across to the other side?” Caroline’s voice had lost its shake now, it was flat and without inflection, the voice of a man resigned to the dark inevitability of a nightmare.

“We’ll carry it across. Between us we should manage it.”

“Carry it across?” he said dully. “It weighs 275 lb.”

“I know what it weighs,” I said irritably.

“You have a bad leg.” He hadn’t heard me. “My heart’s not good. The ship’s rolling, you can see that that polished aluminium is as slippery as glass. One of us would stumble, lose his grip. Maybe both of us. It would be bound to fall.”

“Wait here,” I said. I took the torch, crossed to the port side, picked up a couple of tarpaulins from behind the baffle and dragged them across the floor. “We’ll place it on these and pull it across.”

“Pull it across the floor? Bump it across the floor?” He wasn’t as resigned to the nightmare as I had thought. He looked at me, then at the Twister, then at me again and said with unshakable conviction: ‘’You’re mad.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you think of something else to say?” I grabbed the pulley again, released the lock, hauled and kept on hauling. Caroline wrapped both arms round the Twister as it came clear of the coffin, struggling to make sure that the nose of the missile didn’t collide with the baffle.

“Step over the baffle and take it with you,” I said. “Keep your back to the ladder as you turn.”

He nodded silently, his face strained and set in the pale beam of the torch. He put his back to the ladder, tightened his grip on the Twister, an arm on each side of the grommet, lifted his leg to clear the baffle, then staggered as a sudden roll of the ship threw the weight of the missile against him. His foot caught the top of the baffle, the combined forces of the Twister and the ship’s roll carried him beyond his centre of gravity, he cried out and overbalanced heavily across the baffle to the floor of the hold.

I’d seen it coining—or, rather, I’d seen the last second of it happening. I swept my hand up blindly, hit the auto-lock and jumped for the swinging missile, throwing myself between it and the ladder, dropping my torch as I reached out with both hands to prevent the nose from crashing into the ladder. In the sudden impenetrable darkness I missed the Twister—but it didn’t miss me. It struck me just below the breast-bone with a force that brought an agonised gasp from me, then I’d both arms wrapped round that polished aluminium shell as if I were going to crush it in half.

“The torch,” I yelled. Somehow, in that moment, it didn’t seem in any way important that I should keep down my voice. “Get the torch!”

“My ankle——”

“The hell with your ankle! Get the torch!”

I heard him give a half-suppressed moan, then sensed that he was clambering over the baffle. I heard him again, his hands scuffing over the steel floor. Then silence.

“Have you found it?” The Campari had started on its return roll and I was fighting to keep my balance.

“I’ve found it.”

“Then switch it on, you fool!”

“I can’t.” A pause. “It’s broken.”

That helped a lot. I said quickly: “Catch hold of the end of this damn’ thing. I’m slipping.”

He did, and the strain eased. He said: “Have you any matches?”

“Matches!” Carter showing inhuman restraint, if it hadn’t been for the Twister it would have been funny. “Matches! After being towed through the water for five minutes alongside the Campari?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said gravely, A few moments’ silence, then he offered: “I have a lighter.”

“God help America,” I said fervently. “If all her scientists—light it, man, light it!”

A wheel scraped on flint and a flickering pool of pale yellow light did its pitiful best to illuminate that one tiny corner of the dark hold.

“The block and tackle. Quickly.” I waited until he had reached it. “Take the strain on the free end, knock off the lock and lower gently. I’ll guide it on to the tarpaulins.”

I moved out half a step from the baffle, taking much of the weight of the missile with me. I was barely a couple of feet away from the tarpaulins when I heard the click of the auto-lock coming off and suddenly my back was breaking. The pulley had gone completely slack, the entire 275 lb. of the Twister was in my arms, the Campari was rolling away from me, I couldn’t hold it, I knew I couldn’t hold it, my back was breaking. I staggered and lurched forward, and the Twister, with myself above and still clinging desperately to it, crashed heavily on to the tarpaulins with a shock that seemed to shake the entire floor of the hold.

I freed my arms and climbed shakily to my feet. Dr. Caroline, the flickering flame held just at the level of his eyes, was staring down at the gleaming missile like a man held in thrall, his face a frozen mask of all the terrible emotions ever known. Then the spell broke.

“Fifteen seconds!” he shouted hoarsely. “Fifteen seconds to go!” He flung himself at the ladder, but got no further than the second step when I locked arms round both himself and the ladder. He struggled violently, frantically, briefly, then relaxed.

“How far do you think you’re going to get in fifteen seconds?” I said. I don’t know why I said it, I was barely aware that I had said it, I had eyes and mind only for the missile lying there, my face probably showed all the emotions that Dr. Caroline’s had been registering. And he was staring too. It was a senseless thing to do but for the moment we were both senseless men. Staring at the Twister to see what was going to happen, as if we would ever see anything, neither eyes nor ears nor mind would have the slightest chance in the world of registering anything before that blinding nuclear flash annihilated us, vaporised us, blew the Campari out of existence.

Ten seconds passed. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty. Half a minute. I eased my aching lungs—I hadn’t drawn a breath in all that time—and my grip round Caroline and the ladder. “Well,” I said, “how far would you have got?”

Dr. Caroline climbed slowly down the two steps to the floor of the hold, dragged his gaze away from the missile, looked at me for a long moment with uncomprehending eyes, then smiled. “Do you know, Mr. Carter, the thought never even occurred to me.” His voice was quite steady and his smile wasn’t the smile of a crazy man. Dr. Caroline had known that he was going to die and then he hadn’t died, and nothing would ever be quite so bad again. He had found that the valley of fear does not keep on going down for ever: somewhere there is a bottom, then a man starts climbing again.

“You grab the trailing rope first and then release the auto-lock,” I said reproachfully. If I was light-headed, who was to blame me? “Not the other way around. You might remember the next time.”

There are some things for which to make an apology is impossible, so he didn’t even try. He said regretfully: “I’m afraid I’ll never make a sailorman. But at least we know now that the retaining spring on the trembler switch is not as weak as we had feared.” He smiled wanly. “Mr. Carter, I think I’ll have a cigarette.”

“I think I’ll join you,” I said.

After that it was easy—well, relatively easy. We still treated the Twister with the greatest respect—had it struck at some other angle it might indeed have detonated—but not with respect exaggerated to the extent of tiptoeing terror. We dragged it on its tarpaulins across to the other side of the hold, transferred the Haltrac hoist to the corresponding ladder on the port side, arranged a couple of spare tarpaulins and blankets from the coffin to make a cushioned bed for the Twister between baffle and the ship’s side, hoisted the missile across the baffle without any of the acrobatics that had accompanied the last transfer, lowered it into position, pulled over the blankets and covered it completely with the tarpaulins on which we had dragged it across the floor.

“It’ll be safe here?” Dr. Caroline inquired. He seemed almost back to what I should have imagined his normal self to be, except for the hurried breathing, the cold sweat on his brow and face.

“They’ll never see it. They’ll never even think to look here. Why should they?”

“What do you propose to do now?”

“Leave with all possible speed. I’ve played my luck far enough. But first the coffin—must weight it to compensate for the absence of the Twister, then batten down the lid again.”

“And then where do we go?”

“You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here.” I explained to him just why he had to stay there, and he didn’t like it one little bit. I explained to him some more, pointed out carefully, so that he couldn’t fail to understand, that his only chance of life depended on his staying there and he still didn’t like it any more. But he saw that it had to be done, and the fear of certain death eventually outweighed the very understandable and almost hysterical panic my suggestion had caused him. And after that fifteen second lifetime when we had waited for the Twister to detonate, nothing could ever seem so terrifying again.

Five minutes later I battened down the coffin lid for the last time, thrust the screwdriver into my pocket and left the hold.

The wind, I thought, had eased a little: the rain, beyond question, was heavier by far, even in the pitchy darkness of that night I could see the blur of whiteness round my stockinged feet as the heavy wind-driven drops spattered on the iron decks and rebounded ankle-high.

I took my time making my way forward. There was no hurry any more, and now that the worst was behind I had no mind to destroy us all by undue haste. I was a black shadow, at one with the blackness of the night, and no ghost was ever half so quiet. Once two patrolling guards passed me by, going aft, once I passed a couple huddled miserably in the lee of “A” accommodation deck, seeking what little shelter they could from the cold rain. Neither pair saw me, neither even suspected my presence, which was just as it should have been. The dog never catches the hare, for lunch is less important than life.

I had no means of telling the time, but at least twenty minutes must have passed before I once more found myself outside the wireless office. Every major event in the past three days, right from the very first, had in some way or other stemmed from that wireless office: it seemed only fitting that it should also be the scene of the playing of the last card left in my hand.

The padlock was through the hasp and it was locked. That meant there was no one inside. I retreated to the shelter of the nearest boat and settled down to wait. The fact that there was no one in there didn’t mean that there wasn’t going to be someone there very soon. Tony Carreras had mentioned that their stooges on the Ticonderoga reported course and position every hour. Carlos, the man I’d killed, must have been waiting for just such a message, and if there was another report due through, then it was a certainty that Carreras would have his other operator up to intercept it. At this penultimate state of the game, he would be leaving nothing at all to chance. And, in the same state of the game, neither was I: the radio operator bursting in and finding me sitting in front of his transmitter was the last thing I could have afford happen.

The rain drummed pitilessly on my beat back. I couldn’t get any wetter than I was, but I could get colder. I got colder, very cold indeed, and within fifteen minutes I was shivering constantly. Twice guards padded softly by—Carreras was certainly taking no chances that night—and twice I was sure they must find me, so violent was my shivering that I had to clamp my sleeve between my teeth to prevent the chattering from betraying me. But on both occasions the guards passed by oblivious. The shivering became even worse. Would that damned radio operator never come? Or had I outsmarted myself, had I double-guessed and double-guessed wrongly? Perhaps the radio operator wasn’t going to come at all?

I had been sitting on a coiled lifeboat fall and now I rose to my feet, irresolute. How long would I have to wait there before I would be convinced that he wasn’t going to come? or maybe he wasn’t due for another hour yet, or more? Wherein lay the greater danger—risking going into the wireless office now with the ever-present possibility of being discovered and trapped in there, or waiting an hour, maybe two hours, before making my move, by which time it would almost certainly be too late anyway? Better a chance of failure, I thought, than the near certainty of it, and now that I’d left number four hold the only life which would be lost through my mistakes would be my own. Now, I thought, I’ll do it now. I took three silent steps, then no more. The radio operator had arrived. I took three silent steps back.

The click of a key turning in the padlock, the faint creak of the door, the metallic sound of it shutting, a faint gleam of light behind the curtained window. Our friend preparing to receive, I thought. He wouldn’t stay long, that was a safe enough guess, just long enough to take down the latest details of course and speed of the Ticonderoga—unless the weather was radically different to the north-east it was most unlikely that the Ticonderoga could have fixed its position that night—and take it up to Carreras on the bridge. I presumed that Carreras would still be there, it would be entirely out of keeping with the man if, in those last few crucial hours, he didn’t remain on the bridge and take personal charge of the entire operation as he had done throughout. I could just see him accepting the sheet of figures with the latest details of the Ticonderoga’s progress, smiling his smile of cold satisfaction, making his calculations on the chart.

My thoughts stopped dead right there. I felt as if someone had turned a master switch inside me and everything had seized up, heart, breathing, mind and every organ of sensation I felt as I had felt during those dreadful fifteen seconds while Dr. Caroline and I had waited for the Twister to blow up. I felt that way because there had abruptly, paralysingly flashed on me the realisation that would have come to me half an hour ago if I hadn’t been so busy commiserating with myself on the misery I was suffering. Whatever else Carreras had not established himself as—and there were many things—he had established himself as a consistent prudent and methodical man: and he’d never yet worked out any chart problems on figures supplied him without coming to have a check made by his trusty navigator, Chief Officer John Carter.

My mind churned into low gear again, but it didn’t make any difference. True, he’d sometimes waited some hours before having his check made, but he wouldn’t be waiting some hours tonight because by then it would be far too late. We couldn’t be more than three hours now from our rendezvous with the Ticonderoga, and he’d want a check made immediately. Waking up a sick man in the middle of the night would hardly be a consideration to worry Carreras. Nothing was surer than that within ten or fifteen minutes of that message coming through he’d be calling at the sick-bay. To find his navigator gone. To find the door locked from the inside. To find MacDonald waiting with a gun in his hand. MacDonald had only one automatic, Carreras could call on forty men with sub-machine-guns. There could only be one ending to any battle in the sick-bay and the end would be swift and certain and final. In my mind’s eye I could just see stammering machine-guns spraying the sick-bay, could see MacDonald and Susan, Bullen and Marston—I crushed down the thought, forced it from my mind. That way lay defeat.

When the radio operator left the office, if I got inside unseen, if I was left undisturbed to send off the message, how long would that leave me to get back to the sick-bay? Ten minutes, not any more than ten minutes, say seven or eight minutes to make my way undetected right aft to the port side to where I had left the three ropes tied to the guard-rail stanchion, secure one to myself, grab the lifeline, give the signal to the bo’sun, lower myself into the water and then make the long half-drowning trip back to the sick-bay. Ten minutes? Eight? I knew I could never do it in double that time, if my trip from the sick-bay to the after-deck through that water had been any criterion, the trip back, against instead of with the current, would be at least twice as bad: and the first trip had been near enough the end of me. Eight minutes? The chances were high I’d never get back there at all.

Or the radio operator? I could kill the radio operator as he left the office. I was desperate enough to try anything and frantic enough to have a fair chance of success. Even with the patrolling guards around. That way Carreras would never get the message. But he would be waiting for it, oh, yes, he would be waiting for it. He would be very anxious indeed to have the last check, and if it didn’t come within minutes he was going to send someone to investigate and when that someone found the operator was dead or missing the balloon would be up with a vengeance. Guards running here, guards running there, lights on all over the ship, every possible source of trouble investigated—and that still included the sick-bay. And MacDonald would still be there. With his gun.

There was a way. It was a way that gave little enough hope of success, with the added drawback that I would be forced to leave those three incriminating ropes attached to the guardrail aft: but at least it didn’t carry with it an outright guarantee of failure.

I stooped, felt for the coiled fall rope, cut it with my clasp-knife. One end of the rope I secured to my waist with a bowline: the rest of it, about sixty feet, I wrapped round my waist, tucking the end in. I fumbled for and found the radio office key that I’d taken off the dead Carlos. I stood in the rain and the darkness and waited.

A minute elapsed, no more, then the radio operator appeared, locked the door behind him and made for the companionway leading up to the bridge. Thirty seconds later I was sitting in the seat he’d just vacated, looking up the call-sign of the Fort Ticonderoga.

I made no attempt to hide my presence there by leaving the light off. That would only have aroused the suspicions, and quickly, too, of any passing guards hearing the stutter of transmitted Morse coming from a darkened wireless office.

Twice I tapped out the call sign of the Ticonderoga, and on the second occasion I got an acknowledgment. One of Carreras’s radio operator stooges aboard the Ticonderoga was certainly keeping a pretty sharp watch. I should have expected nothing else.

It was a brief message, speeded on its way by the introductory words “HIGHEST PRIORITY URGENT IMMEDIATE REPEAT IMMEDIATE ATTENTION MASTER FORT TICONDEROGA.” I sent the message and took the liberty of signing it “FROM THE OFFICE OF THE MINISTER OF TRANSPORT BY THE HAND OF VICE-ADMIRAL RICHARD HODSON DIRECTOR NAVAL OPERATIONS.” I switched off the light, opened the door and peered out cautiously. No curious listeners, no one at all in sight. I came all the way out, locked the padlock and threw the key over the side.

Thirty seconds later I was on the port side of the boat-deck carefully gauging, as best I could in that darkness and driving rain, the distance from where I stood to the break in the fo’c’sle. About thirty feet, I finally estimated, and the distance from the fo’c’sle break aft to the window above my bed was, I guessed, about the same. If I was right, I should be almost directly above that window now: the sick-bay was three decks below. If I wasn’t right—well, I’d better be right.

I checked the knot round my waist, passed the other end of the rope round a convenient arm of a davit and let it hang down loosely over the side. I was just about to start lowering myself when the rope below me smacked wetly against the ship’s side and went taut. Someone had caught that rope and hauled it tight.

Panic touched me but the instinct for self-preservation still operated independently of my mind. I flung an arm round the davit and locked on to the wrist of the other hand. Anyone wanting to pull me over the side would have to pull that davit and lifeboat along with me. But as long as that pressure remained on the rope I couldn’t escape, couldn’t free a hand to untie the bowline or get at my clasp-knife.

The pressure eased. I fumbled for the knot, then stopped as the pressure came on again. But the pressure was only momentary, no pull but a tug. Four tugs, in rapid succession. If I wasn’t feeling weak enough already, I’d have felt that way with relief. Four tugs. The pre-arranged signal with MacDonald to show I was on my way back: I might known Archie MacDonald would have been keeping watch every second of the time I was away. He must have seen or heard or even felt the rope snaking down past the window and guessed that it could only be myself. I went down that rope like a man reborn, checked suddenly as a strong hand caught me by the ankle and five seconds later was on terra firma inside the sickbay.

“The ropes!” I said to MacDonald. I was already untying the one around my own waist. “The two ropes on the bedstead. Off with them. Throw them out the window.” Moments later the last of the three ropes had vanished, I was closing the window, pulling the curtains and calling softly for lights.

The lights came on. MacDonald and Bullen were as I had left them, both eyeing me with expressionless faces: MacDonald, because he knew my safe return meant at least possible success and did not want to betray his knowledge: Bullen, because I had told him that I intended to take over the bridge by force, and he was convinced that my method of return meant failure and didn’t want to embarrass me. Susan and Marston were by the dispensary door, both fully dressed, neither making any attempt to conceal disappointment. No time for greetings.

“Susan, on with the heaters! Full on. This place feels like a frig after this window being open so long. Carreras will be here any minute and it’s the first thing he’ll notice. After that, towels for me. Doc, a hand to get MacDonald back to his own bed. Move, man, move! And why aren’t you and Susan dressed for bed? If Carreras sees you——”

“We were expecting the gentleman to come calling with a gun,” MacDonald reminded me. “You’re frozen stiff, Mr. Carter, blue with cold. And shivering like you were in an icebox.”

“I feel like it.” We dumped MacDonald, none too gently, on his bed, pulled up sheets and blankets, then I tore off my clothes and started to towel myself dry. No matter how I towelled, I couldn’t stop the shivering.

“The key,” MacDonald said sharply. “The key in the sick-bay door.”

“God, yes!” I’d forgotten all about it. “Susan, will you? Unlock it. And then to bed. Quickly! And you, Doctor.” I took the key from her, opened the window behind the curtain and flung the key out: the suit I had been wearing, the socks, the wet towels following in short order, but not before I had remembered to remove the screwdriver and MacDonald’s clasp-knife from the jacket. I dried and combed my hair into some sort of order—as orderly as anyone could expect it to be after a few hours sleeping in bed—and helped Doc Marston as he swiftly changed the plaster on my head and wrapped splints and fresh bandages round the still soaking ones covering the wounds in my leg. Then the lights clicked off and the sick-bay was once more in darkness.

“Have I forgotten anything, anybody?” I asked. “Anything that might show I’ve been out of here?”

“Nothing, I don’t think there’s anything.” The bo’sun speaking. “I’m sure.”

“The heaters?” I asked. “Are they on? It’s freezing in here.”

“It’s not that cold, my boy,” Bullen said in his husky whisper “You’re freezing, that’s what. Marston, haven’t you—?”

“Hot-water bags,” Marston said briskly. “Two of them Here they are.” He thrust them into my hands in the dark.

“Had them all prepared for you, we suspected all that sea water and rain wouldn’t do that fever of yours any good. And here’s a glass to show your friend Carreras a few drops of brandy in the bottom to convince him how far through you are.”

“You might have filled it,” I complained.

“I did.”

I emptied it. No question but that that neat brandy had a heating effect, it seemed to burn a hole through me all the way down to my stomach: but the only overall effect it had was to make the rest of me seem colder than ever.

Then MacDonald’s voice, quick and quiet: “Someone coming.”

I’d time to fumble the empty glass on to the bedside table, but time for nothing more, not even time to slide down to a lying position under the blankets. The door opened, the overhead lights clicked on and Carreras, the inevitable chart under his arm, advanced across the sick-bay towards my bed. As usual, he had his expressions and emotions under complete control: anxiety, tension, anticipation, all those must have been in his mind, and behind everything the memory of his lost son: but no trace showed.

He stopped a yard away and stared down at me, eyes speculative and narrowed and cold.

“Not asleep, Carter, eh?” he said slowly. “Not even lying down.” He picked up the glass from the bedside table, sniffed it and set it down again. “Brandy. And you’re shivering, Carter. Shivering all the time. Why? Answer me!”

“I’m frightened,” I said sourly. “Every time I see you I get terrified.”

“Mr. Carreras!” Doc Marston had just appeared through the dispensary doorway, a blanket wrapped round him, his magnificent mane of white hair tousled in splendid disorder, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “This is outrageous, completely outrageous. Disturbing this very sick boy—and at this hour. I must ask you to leave, sir. And at once!”

Carreras looked him over from head to toe and back again, then said quietly and coldly: “Be quiet.”

“I will not be quiet!” Doc Marston shouted. M.G.M. would have given him a life-contract any day. “I’m a doctor, I’ve my duty as a doctor and, by God, I’m going to have my say as a doctor!” There was unfortunately no table at hand otherwise he would have crashed down his fist on it, but even without the table-banging it was a pretty impressive performance and Carreras was obviously taken aback by Marston’s professional ire and outrage.

“Chief Officer Carter is a very sick man,” Marston thundered on. “I haven’t the facilities here to treat a compound fracture of the femur and the result was inevitable. Pneumonia, sir, pneumonia! In both lungs, so much fluid gathered already that he can’t lie down, he can hardly breathe. Temperature 104, pulse 130, high fever, constant shivering. I’ve packed him with hot-water bottles, fed him drugs, aspirin, brandy, all to no effect. Fever just won’t go down: one moment burning hot, the next soaking wet.” He was right about the soaking wet bit, anyway, I could feel the sea-water from the sodden bandages seeping through to the mattress below. “For God’s sake, Carreras, can’t you see he’s a sick man? Leave him be.”

“I’ll only keep him a moment, Doctor,” Carreras said soothingly. Whatever faint stirrings of suspicion he might have had had been completely laid to rest by Marston’s Oscar-winning performance. “I can see that Mr. Carter is unwell. But this will give him no trouble at all.”

I was reaching for the chart and pencil even before he handed it to me. What with the constant shivering and the numbness that seemed to be spreading from my injured leg over my entire body, the calculations took me longer than usual, but they weren’t difficult. I looked at the sick-bay clock and said: “You should be in position shortly before 4 a.m.”

“We can’t miss him, you would say, Mr. Carter?” He wasn’t as confident and unworried as he looked. “Even in the dark?”

“With the radar going I don’t see how you can.” I wheezed some more so that he wouldn’t forget to remember how sick I was, and went on: “How do you propose to make the Ticonderoga stop?” I was as anxious as he was that contact should be established and transfers accomplished as quickly and smoothly as possible. The Twister in the hold was due to blow up at 7 a.m.: I’d just as soon be a long distance away by that time.

“A shell across the bows and a signal to stop. If that doesn’t work,” he added reflectively, “a shell through the fo’c’sle.”

“You really do surprise me, Carreras,” I said slowly.

“Surprise you?” A barely perceptible lift of the left eyebrow, for Carreras a perfect riot of expression. “How so?”

“A man who has taken such infinite pains and, I must admit, shown such superb planning throughout—to throw it all away by such careless haphazard action at the end.” He made to speak, but I held up my hand and carried on: “I’m just as interested as you are in seeing that the Fort Ticonderoga is stopped. I don’t give a tuppenny damn about the gold. I do know it’s essential that Captain Bullen, the bo’sun and I get to a first-class hospital immediately. I do want to see all the passengers and crew transferred to safety. I don’t want to see any members of the Ticonderoga’s crew killed by gunfire. And finally——”

“Get on with it,” he interrupted coldly.

“Right. You intercept at five. In the present weather conditions it’ll be half light then—light enough to let the master of the Fort Ticonderoga see you approaching. When he sees another vessel closing in on him—with the whole width of the Atlantic to use to pass him by—he’ll become immediately suspicious. After all, he knows he’s carrying a fortune in gold. He’ll turn and run for it. In the half light, with poor visibility, falling rain, pitching decks and a gun-crew almost certainly untrained in naval gunnery, your chances of registering a hit on the small target presented by a target running away from you are pretty small. Not that that pop-gun I’m told you’ve mounted on the fo’c’sle will achieve very much anyway.”

“No one could call the gun I have mounted on the after-deck a pop-gun, Mr. Carter.” But for all the untroubled smoothness of the face, he was thinking plenty. “It’s almost the equivalent of a 3.7.”

“So what? You’ll have to turn broadside on to bring that one to bear, and while you’re turning the Ticonderoga will be getting even farther away from you. For the reasons already given, you’ll almost certainly miss anyway. After the second shot, those deck-plates will probably be buckled to hell and gone. Then how do you propose to stop him? You can’t make a 14,000-ton cargo ship stop just by waving a few tommy-guns at it.”

“It will not come to that. There is an element of uncertainty in everything. But we shall not fail.”

“There’s no need for any element of uncertainty, Carreras.”

“Indeed? How do you propose it should be done?”

“I think that’s enough!” It was Captain Bullen who broke in, his husky voice heavy with all the weight and authority of the commodore of the Blue Mail. “Doing chart-work under pressure is one thing: voluntarily scheming to further this criminal’s plans is another. I have listened to all of this. Haven’t you gone far enough, Mister?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I won’t have gone far enough till all of us have gone all the way to the Navy Hospital in Hampton Roads. The thing’s dead simple, Carreras. When he comes within a few miles on the radar scope, start firing off distress signals. At the same time—you’d better arrange this now—have your stooges on the Ticonderoga take a message to the master saying they’ve just picked up SOS signals from the Campari. When he comes nearer, send an Aldis message that you sprung engine-room plates coming through the hurricane, which he’s bound to have heard of.” I smiled my wan smile. “The last part is true anyway. When he’s stopped alongside and you whip the tarpaulins off your guns—well, you have him. He can’t and won’t dare to try to get away.”

He stared at me without seeing me, then gave a small nod.

“I suppose it’s out of the question to persuade you to become my—all—lieutenant, Carter?”

“Just see me safe aboard the Ticonderoga, Carreras. That’s all the thanks I want.”

“That shall be done.” He glanced at his watch. “In under three hours six of your crew will be here with stretchers to transfer Captain Bullen, the bo’sun and yourself to the Ticonderoga.”

He left. I looked round the sick-bay, they were all there, Bullen and MacDonald in their beds, Susan and Marston by the dispensary door, both shawled in blankets. They were all looking at me and the expressions on their faces were very peculiar indeed, to say the least of it.

The silence went on and on for what seemed like a quite unnecessarily long time, then Bullen spoke, his voice slow and hard.

“Carreras has committed one act of piracy: he is about to commit another. By doing so he declares himself an enemy of Queen and country. You will be charged with giving aid and comfort to the enemy, with being directly responsible for the loss of 150 million dollars in gold bullion. I shall take statements from witnesses present as soon as we get aboard the Ticonderoga.” I couldn’t blame the old man, he still believed in Carreras’s promise as to our future safety. In his eyes, I was just making things too damned easy for Carreras. But now wasn’t the time to enlighten him.

“Oh, here,” I said, “that’s a bit hard, isn’t it? Aiding, abetting, accessorying, if you like, but all this treason stuff——”

“Why did you do it?” Susan Beresford shook her head wonderingly. “Oh, why did you do it? Helping him like that just to save your own neck.” And now wasn’t the time to enlighten her either: neither she nor Bullen were actor enough to carry off their parts in the morning if they knew the whole truth.

“That’s a bit hard, too,” I protested. “Only a few hours ago there was no one keener than yourself to get away from the Campari. And now that——”

“I didn’t want it done this way! I didn’t know until now that there was a good chance that the Ticonderoga could escape.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it, John,” Dr. Marston said heavily. “I just wouldn’t have believed it.”

“It’s all right for all of you to talk,” I said. “You’ve all got families. I’ve only got myself. Can you blame me for wanting to took after all I have?”

No one took me up on this masterpiece of logical reasoning. I looked round them one by one and they turned away one by one, Susan, Marston and Bullen, not bothering to hide their expressions. And then MacDonald, too, turned away, but not before his left eyelid had dropped in a long slow wink.

I eased myself down in bed and made up my mind for sleep. No one asked me how I had got on that night.

XII.

Saturday 6 a.m.—7 a.m.

When I awoke I was stiff and sore and still shivering. But it wasn’t the pain or the cold or the fever that had brought me up from the murky depths of that troubled sleep. It was noise, a series of grinding, creaking metallic crashes that echoed and shuddered throughout the entire length of the Campari as if she were smashing into an iceberg with every roll she took. I could tell from the slow, sluggish, lifeless roll that the stabilisers weren’t working: the Campari was stopped dead in the water.

“Well, Mister.” Bullen’s voice was a harsh grate. “Your plan worked, damn you. Congratulations. The Ticonderoga’s alongside.”

“Right alongside,” MacDonald confirmed. “Lashed alongside.”

“In this weather?” I winced as the two ships rolled heavily together in the trough of a deep swell, and I heard the harsh tearing scream of sound as topsides metal buckled and rended under the staggering weight of the impact. “It’ll ruin the paintwork. The man’s mad.”

“He’s in a hurry,” MacDonald said. “I can hear the jumbo winch aft. He’s started trans-shipping cargo already.”

“Aft?” I couldn’t keep the note of excitement out of my voice, and everybody suddenly looked at me, curiosity in their eyes. “Aft? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, sir.”

“Are we tied bow to bow and stern to stern or are we facing in opposite directions?”

“No idea.” Both he and Bullen were giving me very close looks, but there was a difference in the quality of the closeness. “Does it matter, Mr. Carter?” He knew damned well it did.

“It didn’t matter,” I said indifferently. Not much it didn’t matter: only 150 million dollars, that was all it mattered.

“Where’s Miss Beresford?” I asked Marston.

“With her folks,” he said shortly. “Packing clothes. Your kind friend Carreras is allowing the passengers to take one suitcase apiece with them. He says they’ll get the rest of their stuff back in due course—if anyone manages to pick up the Campari after he has abandoned it, that is.”

It was typical, I thought, of the man’s extraordinary thoroughness in all he did: by letting them pack some clothes and promising the eventual safe return of the remainder, he would eliminate from even the most suspicious mind the unworthy thought that perhaps his intentions towards the crew and passengers weren’t of the highest and noblest.

The phone rang. Marston picked it up, listened briefly, then hung up.

“Stretcher party in five minutes,” he announced.

“Help me dress, please,” I said. “My white uniform shorts and white shirt.”

“You—you’re not getting up?” Marston was aghast.

“What if——”

“I’m getting up, dressing and getting back to bed again,” I said shortly. “Do you think I’m daft? What’s Carreras going to think if he sees a man with a compound fracture of the thigh hopping briskly over the rail on to the Ticonderoga”

I dressed, stuck the screwdriver under the splints on my left leg and got back to bed again. I was no sooner there than the stretcher party appeared and all three of us, still blanket-wrapped were lowered gently on to the stretchers. The six bearers stooped, caught the handles and we were on our way.

We were carried straight aft along the main deck passage to the after-deck. I saw the end of the passage approaching, the grey cold dawn light replacing the warm electric glow of the passageway, and I could feel my muscles tense involuntarily. The Ticonderoga would be in sight in a few seconds along our starboard side and I wondered if I would dare to look. Would we be tied bow to bow or bow to stern? Would I have won or lost? We came out on the after-deck. I forced myself to look.

I’d won. Bow to bow and stern to stern. From my low elevation on the stretcher I couldn’t see much, but that I could see—bow to bow, stern to stern. That meant that the Campari’s after jumbo was unloading from the Ticonderoga’s after-deck. I looked again and checked again and there was no mistake. Bow to bow, stern to stern. I felt like a million dollars, A hundred million dollars.

The Ticonderoga, a big cargo vessel, dark blue with a red funnel, was almost the same size as the Campari. More important, their after-decks were almost the same height above the water, which made for ease of transfer of both cargo and human beings. I could count eight crates already aboard the after-deck of the Campari: a dozen still to come.

The transfer of human livestock had gone even further: all of the passengers, as far as I could judge, and at least half of the Campari’s crew were already standing on the after-deck of the Ticonderoga, making no move except to brace themselves against the rolling of the ship: their stillness was encouraged by a couple of hard-faced characters in green jungle uniform, each with a machine-pistol cocked. A third gunman covered two Ticonderoga seamen who were stationed at lowered guard-rails to catch and steady men as they stepped or jumped from the after-deck of the Campari to that of the Ticonderoga, as the two ships rolled together. Two more supervised Ticonderoga crew members fitting slings to the crates still to be transferred. From where I lay I could see four other armed men—there were probably many more—patrolling the decks of the Ticonderoga and four others on the after-deck of the Campari. Despite the fact that most of them were dressed in a quasi-uniform of jungle-green, they didn’t look like soldiers to me: they just looked like what they were, hardened criminals with guns in their hands, cold-eyed men with their history written in their faces by the lines of brutality and depravity. Although he was maybe a bit short on the side of æsthetic appreciation, there was no doubt but that Carreras picked his killers well.

The sky was low with grey tattered cloud stretching away to the grey indistinctness of a tumbled horizon, the wind, westerly now, was still strong, but the rain had almost stopped, no more than a thin cold smirr of a drizzle, felt rather than seen. Visibility was poor, but it would be good enough to let Carreras see that there were no other ships in the vicinity: and the radar-scope, of course, would be working all the time. But apparently the visibility hadn’t been good enough to let Carreras see the three ropes still attached to the base of the guard-rail stanchion on the port side. From where I lay I could see them clearly. To me they looked about the size of the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge. I hastily averted my eyes.

But Carreras, I could now see, had no time to look around him anyway. He himself had taken personal charge of the trans-shipment of crates, hurrying on both his own men and the crew of the Ticonderoga, shouting at them, encouraging them, driving them on with an unflagging unrelenting energy and urgency which seemed strangely at variance with his normally calm, dispassionate bearing. He would, of course, be understandably anxious to have the transfer completed before any curious third ship might heave in sight over the horizon, but even so … And then I knew what accounted for all the nearly desperate haste: I looked at my watch.

It was already ten minutes past six. Ten past six! From what I’d gathered of Carreras’s proposed schedule for the transfer and from the lack of light in the sky I’d have put the time at no more than half past five. I checked again, but no mistake. Six-ten. Carreras would want to be over the horizon when the Twister went up—he would be safe enough from blast and radio-active fall-out but heaven alone knew what kind of tidal wave would be pushed up by the explosion of such an underwater nuclear device—and the Twister was due to go up in fifty minutes. His haste was understandable. I wondered what had held him up. Perhaps the late arrival of the Ticonderoga or the lapse of a longer period of time than he had expected in luring it alongside. Not that it mattered now.

A signal from Carreras and it was time for the stretcher cases to be transferred. I was the first to go. I didn’t much fancy the prospect of the brief trip, I’d just be a reddish stain spread over a couple of hundred square feet of metal if one of the bearers slipped as the two big ships rolled together, but the nimble-footed seamen probably had the same thought in mind for themselves, for they made no mistake. A minute later and both other stretchers had been brought across.

We were set down near the for’ard break of the after-deck, beside our passengers and crew. In a group slightly to one side, with a guard all to themselves, stood a few officers and maybe a dozen men of the Ticonderoga’s crew. One of them, a tall lean angry-eyed man in his early fifties with the four gold rings of a captain on his sleeves and carrying a telegraph form in his hand was talking to McIlroy, our chief engineer, and Cummings. McIlroy, ignoring the sudden lift of the guard’s gun, brought him across to where we’d been set down.

“Thank God you all survived,” McIlroy said quietly. “Last time I saw you three, I wouldn’t have given a bent penny for any of your chances. This is Captain Brace of the Ticonderoga. Captain Brace, Captain Bullen, Chief Officer Carter.”

“Glad to make your acquaintance, sir,” Bullen whispered huskily. “But not in those damnable circumstances.” No question about it, the old man was on the way to recovery. “We’ll leave Mr. Carter out of it, Mr. McIlroy. I intend to prefer charges against him for giving undue and unwarranted aid to that damned monster Carreras.” Considering I’d saved his life by refusing to let Doc Marston operate on him, I did think he might have shown a little more gratitude.

“Johnny Carter?” McIlroy looked his open disbelief. “It’s impossible!”

“You’ll have your proof,” Bullen said grimly. He looked up at Captain Brace. “Knowing that you knew what cargo you were carrying, I should have expected you to make a run for it when intercepted, naval guns or no naval guns. But you didn’t, did you? You answered an SOS, isn’t that it? Distress rockets, claims that plates had been sprung in the hurricane, sinking, come and take us off? Right, Captain?”

“I could have outrun or out-manoeuvred him,” Brace said tightly. Then, in sudden curiosity: “How did you know that?”

“Because I heard our first mate here advising him that that was the best way to do it. Part of your answer already, eh, McIlroy.” He looked at me without admiration, then back at McIlroy. “Have a couple of men move me nearer that bulkhead. I don’t feel too comfortable here.”

I gave him an injured glance but it bounced right off him. His stretcher was shifted and I was left more or less alone in front of the group. I lay there for about three minutes watching the cargo transfer. A crate a minute, and this despite the fact that the manilla holding the after-ends of the two vessels together snapped and had to be replaced. Ten minutes at the most and he should be all through.

A hand touched my shoulder and I looked round. Julius Beresford was squatting by my side.

“Never thought I’d see you again, Mr. Carter,” he said candidly. “How do you feel?”

“Better than I look,” I said untruthfully.

“And why left alone here?” he asked curiously.

“This,” I explained, “is what is known as being sent to Coventry. Captain Bullen is convinced that I gave unwarranted help or aid or some such legal phrase, to Carreras. He’s not pleased with me.”

“Rubbish!” he snorted.

“He heard me doing it.”

“Don’t care what he heard,” Beresford said flatly. “Whatever he heard he didn’t hear what he thought he did. I make as many mistakes as the next man, maybe more than most, but I never make a mistake about men. … Which reminds me, my boy, which reminds me, I can’t tell you how pleased I am—and how delighted. Hardly the time and place for it, but nevertheless my very heartiest congratulations. My wife feels exactly the same way about it, I can assure you.”

It was taking me all my time to pay attention to him. One of those crates was swinging dangerously in its slings, and if one of those crates dropped, fell on the deck and burst open to reveal its contents I didn’t see that there was going to be much future for any of us. It wasn’t a thought I liked to dwell on, It would be better to turn my mind to something else, like concentrating on what Julius Beresford was saying.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“The job at my Scottish oil-port.” He was half impatient, half smiling. “You know. Delighted that you are going to accept. But not half as delighted as we are about you and Susan. All her life she’s been pursued, as you can guess, by hordes of gold-digging dead-beats, but I always told her that when the day came that she met a man who didn’t give a damn for her money, even though he was a hobo, I wouldn’t stand in her way. Well, she’s found him. And you’re no hobo.”

“The oil-port? Susan—and me?” I blinked at him. “Look, sir——”

“I might have known it, I might have known it!” The laugh was pretty close to a guffaw. “That’s my daughter. Never even got around to telling you yet. Wait till my wife hears this!”

“When did she tell you?” I asked politely. When I’d last seen her about two-fifteen that morning I would have thought it the last thing in her mind.

“Yesterday afternoon.” That was even before she had made the job proposal to me. “But she’ll get around to it, my boy, she’ll get around to it.”

“I won’t get around to it!” I didn’t know how long she had been standing there, but she was there now, a stormy voice to match stormy eyes. “I’ll never get around to it. I must have been mad, I’m ashamed of myself for even thinking of it, I heard him, Daddy. I was there last night with the others in the sick-bay when he was telling Carreras that the best way of stopping the Ticonderoga was——”

A long piercing blast on a whistle brought the tale of Carter’s cowardice to a merciful end. Immediately green-shirted armed men began to appear from other parts of the Ticonderoga, from the bridge and engine-room where they had been on guard during the trans-shipment, which was now finished except for one last crate. Two of the men with guns, I noticed, were dressed in blue Merchant Navy uniforms: those would be the radio officers Carreras had introduced aboard the Ticonderoga. I looked at my watch. Six twenty-five. Carreras was cutting it fine enough.

And now Carreras himself had jumped across to the after-deck of the Ticonderoga. He said something to Captain Brace, I couldn’t hear what it was, but I could see Brace, his face hard and grim, nodding reluctantly. Carreras arranging for the transfer of the coffins. On his way back to the rail he stopped beside me.

“You see that Miguel Carreras keeps his word. Everybody safely transferred.” He glanced at his watch. “I still need a lieutenant.”

“Goodbye, Carreras.”

He nodded, turned on his heel and left as his men brought the coffins on to the after-deck of the Ticonderoga. They handled them very reverently indeed, with a tender delicacy that showed they were only too aware of the contents. The coffins were not immediately recognisable as such: in the final gesture of the consummate actor paying the minutest attention to the last detail in his role, he had draped them with three Stars and Stripes. Knowing Carreras, I was pretty sure he’d brought them all the way from the Caribbean.

Captain Brace stooped, lifted a corner of the flag on the coffin nearest him and looked down at the brass plaque with the name of Senator Hoskins on it. I heard a quick in-drawing of breath, saw that Susan Beresford, hand to her parted lips, was staring down wide-eyed at it too, remembered that she must still be under the impression that the Twister was inside, reached out and grabbed her ankle. I grabbed it hard.

“Be quiet!” I muttered fiercely. “For heaven’s sake shut up!”

She heard me. She kept quiet. Her old man heard me, but he kept quiet also, which must have taken quite a bit of doing on his part when he saw me with my hand round his daughter’s ankle. But the ability to keep expressions and emotions buttoned up must be among the most elementary training for an aspiring multimillionaire.

The last of Carreras’s men was gone. Carreras with them. He didn’t waste any time wishing us “Bon voyage” or anything of the kind, he just ordered ropes cast off and disappeared at speed for the bridge. A minute later the Campari was under way and her after-deck haphazardly packed with crates, was slewing round and heading away towards the east.

“Well,” Bullen said into the heavy silence. “There he goes, the murderer. With my ship, damn his soul!”

“He won’t have it for long,” I said. “Not even for half an hour. Captain Brace, I advise you——”

“We’ll dispense with your advice, Mister.” Captain Bullen’s voice was a series of rat-traps snapping shut, the blue eyes very frosty indeed.

“This is urgent, sir. It’s imperative that Captain Brace——”

“I gave you a direct order, Mr. Carter. You will obey——”

“Will you please be quiet, Captain Bullen?” Respectful exasperation, but more exasperation than respect.

“I think you’d better be listening to him, sir,” the bo’sun put in, gravely unhappy. “Mr. Carter was not idle last night, unless I’m much mistaken.”

“Thanks, Bo’sun.” I turned to Captain Brace again. “Phone the officer of the watch. Due west 180 degrees from the Campari and full speed. No, emergency power. Now, Captain Brace.”

The urgency in my voice got through. For a person who had just lost 150 million dollars in gold Brace reacted surprisingly quickly and well to the man who had caused him to lose it. He gave a few quick words of instruction to a junior officer, then turned a coldly speculative gaze on me.

“Your reasons, sir?”

“In number four hold of the Campari Carreras is carrying an armed atomic bomb with the time fuse running out. The Twister, the new missile stolen from the Americans a week or so ago.” A glance round the strained incredulous faces of the listeners showed that they knew what I was talking about all right; it showed equally clearly that they couldn’t believe it. “The Twister——”

“Atomic bomb?” Brace’s voice was harsh and too loud. “What damned rubbish——”

“Will you listen? Miss Beresford, am I telling the truth?”

“You’re telling the truth.” Her voice was unsteady, her green eyes jumpy and still on that coffin. “I saw it, Captain. But——”

“So,” I said. “The bomb. Armed. Due to go off in”—I glanced at my watch—“less than twenty-five minutes. Carreras knows it’s due to go off then. That’s why he’s in such a tearing hurry to get away: he imagines the Twister is aboard here. And that’s why I’m in such a tearing great hurry to go in the opposite direction: I know it’s not.”

“But it is here,” Susan said violently. “It is, you know it is! That coffin! There!”

“You’re wrong, Miss Beresford.” The Ticonderoga was picking up speed now, the rumbling thrust of her propeller shaft vibrating through the deck-plates. I wouldn’t have put it past Carreras to have had his glasses trained on our after-deck as long as he possibly could, so I lay quietly there where I was for the next ten or fifteen seconds while about forty pairs of frankly terrified eyes stared at the flag-shrouded coffins. Then the poop of the Ticonderoga had swung round to the east, the Campari was blocked from sight and I was out of my blankets, ripping off the outside bandages and splints and fishing for the concealed screwdriver before getting stiffly to my feet. The effect upon the passengers and crew, who had believed implicitly that Chief Officer Carter had a compound fracture of the thigh, was startling, to say the least. But I had no time to consider effects. I hobbled to the nearest coffin and pulled the flag clear.

“Mr. Carter.” Captain Brace was by my side. “What on earth are you doing? Criminal though Carreras may be, he told me Senator Hoskins——”

“Ha!” I said. With the handle of the screwdriver I rapped out three sharp double-knocks on the lid of the coffin: three knocks came in reply. I glanced round the ever-closing ring of watchers: a cameraman should have been there, recording those expressions for posterity.

“Remarkable recuperative powers, those American senators,” I said to Captain Brace. “You just can’t keep them down. You’ll see.”

I had the lid off that coffin in two minutes flat: in coffin-lid removing, as in everything else, practice makes perfect.

Dr. Slingsby Caroline was as pale as any corpse I’d ever seen. He looked as if he had been frightened to death. I didn’t blame him: there must be lots of harrowing experiences calculated to drive a man around the bend, but I think being screwed down in a coffin for about five hours must beat the lot. Dr. Caroline wasn’t yet round the bend, but he’d been approaching it pretty fast, with the throttle wide open, by the time I got to him. He was shaking like a broken bed-spring, his eyes were wide with fear and he could hardly speak: that knock of mine must have been the sweetest music he’d ever heard.

I left the ministrations to other hands and headed for the next coffin. The lid on this one was either pretty stiff or I was pretty weak, and I wasn’t making much progress when a burly seaman from the Ticonderoga’s crew took the driver from my hand. I wasn’t sorry to let it go. I looked at my watch. Seventeen minutes to seven.

“And this time, Mr. Carter?” It was Captain Brace once more at my elbow, a man whose expression clearly showed that his mind had given up trying to cope. It was understandable enough.

“Conventional explosive with a time-setting. I think it’s meant to blow up the Twister in sympathetic detonation if the Twister’s own time mechanism doesn’t work. Frankly, I don’t know. The thing is that even this could sink the Ticonderoga.”

“Couldn’t we—Couldn’t we just heave it over the side?” he asked nervously.

“Not safe, sir. About due to go off and the jar of its hitting the water might be enough to trigger off the clock. It would blow a hole the size of a barn through the side of your ship. … You might get someone to unscrew the third lid, too.”

I looked at my watch again. Fifteen minutes to seven. The Campari was already hardly more than a dark smudge far down on the lightening horizon to the east, six, perhaps seven miles away. A fair distance off: but not far enough.

The lid was clear of the second coffin. I pulled back the covering blankets, located the primer and the two slender leads of the inset detonator, and gingerly sliced through these, one at a time, with a knife. Just to be on the safe side I threw detonator and primer over the side. Two minutes later I’d rendered the time-bomb in the third coffin equally harmless. I looked round the after-deck, if those people had any sense, the place should have been deserted by now. No one seemed to have stirred an inch.

“Mr. Carter,” Bullen said slowly. He’d stopped glaring at me. “I think perhaps you owe us a little explanation. This business of Dr. Caroline, the coffins, the—the substitutions——”

So I gave it to him, highly condensed, while everybody crowded round, and at the end he said: “And I think maybe I might owe you a small apology.” Contrite, but not going overboard about it. “But I can’t get the thought of the Twister out of my head—the Twister and the Campari. She was a good ship, Mister. Damn it, I know Carreras is a villain, a monster, a man surrounded by cutthroats. But did you have to do it this way? To condemn them all to death? Forty lives on your hands?”

“Better than a hundred and fifty lives on Carreras’s hands,” Julius Beresford said sombrely. “Which is what it would have been but for our friend here.”

“Couldn’t be done, sir,” I said to Bullen. “The Twister was armed and locked in position. Carreras has the key. The only way to render the bomb safe would be to tell Carreras and let him unlock it. If we’d told him before he’d left here, sure, he’d have disarmed it: then he would have killed every man and woman on the Ticonderoga. You can bet what you like that the generalissimo’s last instruction was: ‘no one must live to talk about this.’”

“It’s still not too late,” Bullen said insistently. He wasn’t giving a damn about Carreras, but he loved the Campari. “Once we’re under way there’s no chance of his being able to board us again and kill us, even assuming he comes after us. We can dodge whatever shells——”

“One moment, sir,” I interrupted. “How do we warn him?”

“By radio, man, by radio! There’s still six minutes. Get a message——”

“The Ticonderoga’s transmitters are useless,” I said wearily. “They’re smashed beyond repair.”

“What!” Brace caught my arm. “What? Smashed? How do you know?”

“Use your head,” I said irritably. “Those two bogus wireless operators were under orders to wreck the transmitters before they left. Do you think Carreras wanted you sending out SOSs all over the Atlantic the moment he took off?”

“The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.” Brace shook his head and spoke to a young officer. “On the phone. You heard. Check.”

He checked, and was back in thirty seconds, his face grave. “He’s right, sir. Completely smashed.”

“Our friend Carreras,” I murmured. “His own executioner.”

Two seconds later and five minutes ahead of schedule, the Campari blew itself out of existence. She must have been at least thirteen miles away, she was well hull-down over the horizon and the high square bulk of the Ticonderoga’s raised poop lay in our direct line of sight, but, for all that, the searing blue-white glare that was the heart of the exploding bomb struck our cringing wounded eyes with all the strength of a dozen noon-day suns while it momentarily high-lit the Ticonderoga in blinding white and shadows blacker than night as if some giant searchlight had been switched on only yards away. The intense whiteness, the murderous dazzlement, lasted no more than a fraction of a second—although its imprint on the eye’s retina lasted many times longer—and was replaced by a single bar-straight column of glowing red fire that streaked up into the dawn until it pierced the cloud above: and, following that, a great column of boiling seething-white water surged up slowly from the surface of the sea, incredibly slowly, seemed to reach half-way up to the clouds, then as slowly began to fall again. What little was left of the shattered and vaporised Campari would have been in that gigantic waterspout. The Campari and Carreras.

From birth to death that waterspout must have taken a full minute and it was only seconds after it had vanished and the eastern horizon became clear again that the single flat thunderclap of sound followed by the deep menacing rumble of the after-explosion and accompanying shock-waves came to us over the surface of the sea. Then again all was silence, profound and deathly.

“Well, Dr. Caroline,” I said conversationally, “at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that the damn’ thing works.”

He didn’t take me up on my conversational gambit. No one took me up on it. They were all waiting for the tidal wave, but no tidal wave came. After a minute or two a long low, very fast-moving swell bore down on us from the east, passed under the Ticonderoga, made her pitch heavily perhaps half a dozen times and then was gone. It was Captain Brace who was the first of them all to find his voice.

“That’s it, then Captain Bullen. All gone up in smoke. Your ship and my 150 million dollars in gold.”

“Just the ship, Captain Brace,” I said. “Just the ship. As for the twenty vaporised generators. I’m sure the United States Government will gladly recompense the Harmsworth and Holden Electrical Engineering Company.”

He smiled faintly, heaven knows he couldn’t have felt like smiling.

“There were no generators in those crates, Mr. Carter. Gold bullion for Fort Knox. How that devil Carreras——”

“You knew there was gold in those crates?” I asked.

“Of course I did. Rather I knew we had it on board. But there had been a mistake in marking the crates. So much damned secrecy, I suppose, that one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. According to my manifest, the crates of gold were the for’ard twenty on the upper deck, but an Admiralty message last night informed me of the mistake that had been made. Rather, it informed those damned renegades of radio operators. Never showed it to me, of course. They must have radioed the news to Carreras and the first thing they did when he tied up alongside was to give him the written message itself as confirmation. He gave it to me as a souvenir,” he added bitterly. He held out his hand with the form in it. “Want to see it?”

“No need.” I shook my head. “I can tell you word for word what’s in that cable, ‘HIGHEST PRIORITY URGENT IMMEDIATE REPEAT IMMEDIATE ATTENTION MASTER FORT TICONDEROGA: GRAVE ERROR IN LOADING MANIFEST: SPECIAL CARGO NOT REPEAT NOT IN FOR’ARD TWENTY CRATES FOR’ARD DECK MARKED TURBINES NASHVILLE TENNESSEE BUT REPEAT BUT IN FOR’ARD TWENTY CRATES AFTER DECK MARKED GENERATORS OAK RIDGE TENNESSEE: INDICATIONS YOU MAY BE RUNNING INTO HURRICANE ESSENTIAL SECURE AFTER DECK CARGO EARLIEST: FROM THE OFFICE OF THE MINISTER OF TRANSPORT BY THE HAND OF VICE-ADMIRAL RICHARD HODSON DIRECTOR NAVAL OPERATIONS.’”

Captain Brace stared at me.

“How in the name of——”

“Miguel Carreras also had a manifest in his cabin,” I said. “Marked—and correctly—exactly the same as yours. I saw it. That radio message never came from London. It came from me. I sent it from the wireless office of the Campari at two o’clock this morning.”

It was a long long silence indeed that followed: predictably enough, it was Susan Beresford who finally broke it. She moved across to Bullen’s stretcher, looked down at him and said: “Captain Bullen, I think you and I both owe Mr. Carter a very great apology.”

“I think we do, Miss Beresford, I think we do indeed.” He tried to scowl, but it didn’t quite come off. “But he told me to shut up, mind you. Me. His captain. You heard him?”

“That’s nothing,” she said in dismissal. “You’re only his captain. He told me to shut up, too, and I’m his fiancée. We’re getting married next month.”

“His fiancée? Getting—getting married next month?” In spite of the pain Captain Bullen propped himself up on one elbow, stared uncomprehendingly at each of us in turn, then lay back heavily on his stretcher. “Well, I’ll be damned! This is the first I’ve heard of this.”

“It’s the first Mr. Carter has heard of it too,” she admitted. “But he’s hearing it now.”

THE END

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D. Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide best- sellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the

author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living  or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

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First published in Great Britain by

William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1962  then in paperback by Fontana 1964

Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1962

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Dark Crusader

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1961 then in paperback by Fontana 1963

Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1961

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9346-2

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact

Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

2  4  6  8  10  9  7  5  3  1

www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

To Douglas and Violet

Contents

Prologue

I

Tuesday 3 a.m.–5.30 a.m.

II

Tuesday 8.30 a.m.–7 p.m.

III

Tuesday 7 p.m.–Wednesday 9 a.m.

IV

Wednesday 3 p.m.–10 p.m.

V

Wednesday 10 p.m.–Thursday 5 a.m.

VI

Thursday noon–Friday 1.30 a.m.

VII

Friday 1.30 a.m.–3.30 a.m.

VIII

Friday 3.30 a.m.–6 a.m.

IX

Friday 6 a.m.–8 a.m.

X

Friday 10 a.m.–1p.m.

XI

Friday 1 p.m.–6 p.m.

XII

Saturday 3 a.m.–8 a.m.

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That’s how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

No cleaning woman was ever allowed to enter that office with its soot-stained heavily curtained windows overlooking Birdcage Walk: and no person, cleaner or not, was ever allowed inside unless Colonel Raine himself were there.

And no one could ever have accused the colonel of being allergic to dust.

It lay everywhere. It lay on the oak-stained polished floor surrounds that flanked the threadbare carpet. It filmed the tops of bookcases, filing cabinets, radiators, chair-arms and telephones: it lay smeared streakily across the top of the scuffed knee-hole desk, the dust-free patches marking where the papers or books had recently been pushed to one side: motes danced busily in a sunbeam that slanted through an uncurtained crack in the middle of a window: and, trick of the light or not, it needed no imagination at all to see a patina of dust on the thin brushed-back grey hair of the man behind the desk, to see it embedded in deeply trenched lines on the grey sunken cheeks, the high receding forehead.

And then you saw the eyes below the heavy wrinkled lids and you forgot all about the dust: eyes with the hard jewelled glitter of a peridot stone, eyes of the clear washed-out aquamarine of a Greenland glacier, but not so warm.

He rose to greet me as I crossed the room, offered me a cold hard bony hand like a gardening tool, waved me to a chair directly opposite the light-coloured veneered panel so incongruously let into the front of his mahogany desk, and seated himself, sitting very straight, hands clasped lightly on the dusty desk before him.

‘Welcome home, Bentall.’ The voice matched the eyes, you could almost hear the far-off crackling of dried ice. ‘You made fast time. Pleasant trip?’

‘No, sir. Some Midlands textile tycoon put off the plane to make room for me at Ankara wasn’t happy. I’m to hear from his lawyers and as a sideline he’s going to drive the B.E.A. off the European airways. Other passengers sent me to Coventry, the stewardesses ignored me completely and it was as bumpy as hell. Apart from that, it was a fine trip.’

‘Such things happen,’ he said precisely. An almost imperceptible tic at the left-hand corner of the thin mouth might have been interpreted as a smile, all you needed was a strong imagination, but it was hard to say, twenty-five years of minding other people’s business in the Far East seemed to have atrophied the colonel’s cheek muscles. ‘Sleep?’

I shook my head. ‘Not a wink.’

‘Pity.’ He hid his distress well and cleared his throat delicately. ‘Well, I’m afraid you’re off on your travels again, Bentall. Tonight. Eleven p.m., London Airport.’

I let a few seconds pass to let him know I wasn’t saying all the things I felt like saying, then shrugged in resignation. ‘Back to Iran?’

‘If I were transferring you from Turkey to Iran I wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the Midlands textile industry by summoning you all the way back to London to tell you so.’ Again the faint suggestion of a tic at the corner of the mouth. ‘Considerably farther away, Bentall. Sydney, Australia. Fresh territory for you, I believe?’

‘Australia?’ I was on my feet without realizing I had risen. ‘Australia! Look, sir, didn’t you get my cable last week? Eight months’ work, everything tied up except the last button, all I needed was another week, two at the most –’

‘Sit down!’ A tone of voice to match the eyes, it was like having a bucket of iced water poured over me. He looked at me consideringly and his voice warmed up a little to just under freezing point. ‘Your concern is appreciated, but needless. Let us hope for your own sake that you do not underestimate our – ah – antagonists as much as you appear to underestimate those who employ you. You have done an excellent job, Bentall, I am quite certain that in any other government department less forthcoming than ours you would have been in line for at least an O.B.E., or some such trinket, but your part in the job is over. I do not choose that my personal investigators shall also double in the role of executioners.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said lamely. ‘I don’t have the overall –’

‘To continue in your own metaphor, the last button is about to be tied.’ It was exactly as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘This leak – this near disastrous leak, I should say – from our Hepworth Ordinance and Fuel Research Establishment is about to be sealed. Completely and permanently sealed.’ He glanced at the electric clock on the wall. ‘In about four hours’ time, I should say. We may consider it as being in the past. There are those in the cabinet who will sleep well tonight.’

He paused, unclasped his hands, leaned his elbows on the desk and looked at me over steepled fingers.

‘That is to say, they should have been sleeping well tonight.’ He sighed, a faint dry sound. ‘But in these security-ridden days the sources of ministerial insomnia are almost infinite. Hence your recall. Other men, I admit, were available: but, apart from the fact that there is no one else with your precise and, in this case, very necessary qualifications, I have a faint – a very faint – and uneasy feeling that this may not be entirely unconnected with your last assignment.’ He unsteepled his fingers, reached for a pink polythene folder and slid it across the desk to me. ‘Take a look at these, will you?’

I quelled the impulse to wave away the approaching tidal wave of dust, picked up the folder and took out the half-dozen stapled slips of paper inside.

They were cuttings from the overseas vacancy columns of the Daily Telegraph. Each column had the date heavily pencilled in red at the top, the earliest not more than eight months ago: and each of the columns had an advertisement ringed in the same heavy red except for the first column which had three advertisements so marked.

The advertisers were all technical, engineering, chemical or research firms in Australia and New Zealand. The types of people for whom they were advertising were, as would have been expected, specialists in the more advanced fields of modern technology. I had seen such adverts before, from countries all over the world. Experts in aerodynamics, micro-miniaturization, hypersonics, electronics, physics, radar and advanced fuel technologies were at a premium these days. But what made those advertisements different, apart from their common source, was the fact that all those jobs were being offered in a top administrative and directorial capacity, carrying with them what I could only regard as astronomical salaries. I whistled softly and glanced at Colonel Raine, but those ice-green eyes were contemplating some spot in the ceiling about a thousand miles away, so I looked through the columns again, put them back in the folder and slid them across the desk. Compared to the colonel I made a noticeable ripple across the dustpond of the table-top.

‘Eight advertisements,’ the colonel said in his dry quiet voice. ‘Each over a hundred words in length, but you could reproduce them all word for word, if need be. Right, Bentall?’

‘I think I might, sir.’

‘An extraordinary gift,’ he murmured. ‘I envy you. Your comments, Bentall?’

‘That rather delicately worded advertisement for a thrust and propellant specialist to work on aero engines designed for speeds in excess of Mach 10. Properly speaking, there are no such aero engines. Only rocket engines, on which the metallurgical problems have already been solved. They’re after a top-flight fuel boffin, and apart from a handful at some of the major aircraft firms and at a couple of universities every worthwhile fuel specialist in the country works at the Hepworth Research Establishment.’

‘And there may lie the tie-in with your last job.’

He nodded. ‘Just a guess and it could far more easily be wrong than right. Probably a straw from another haystack altogether.’ He doodled in the dust with the tip of his forefinger. ‘What else?’

‘All advertisements from a more or less common source.’ I went on. ‘New Zealand or the Eastern Australian seaboard. All jobs to be filled in a hurry. All offering free and furnished accommodation, house to become the property of the successful applicant, together with salaries at least three times higher than the best of them could expect in this country. They’re obviously after the best brains we have. All specify that the applicants be married but say they’re unable to accommodate children.’

‘Doesn’t that strike you as a trifle unusual?’ Colonel Raine asked idly.

‘No, sir. Quite common for foreign firms to prefer married men. People are often unsettled at first in strange countries and there’s less chance of their packing up and taking the next boat home if they have their families to consider. Those advertisers are paying single fare only. With the money a man could save in the first weeks or months it would be quite impossible to transport his family home.’

‘But there are no families, ’ the colonel persisted. ‘Only wives.’

‘Perhaps they’re afraid the patter of tiny feet may distract the highly-paid minds.’ I shrugged. ’Or limited accommodation. Or the kids to follow later. All it says is “No accommodation for children.”

‘Nothing in all of this strikes you as being in any way sinister?’

‘Superficially, no. With all respect, I question whether it would strike you either, sir. Scores of our best men have been lured overseas in the past years. But if you were to provide me with the information you’re obviously withholding, I might very well begin to see it your way.’

Another momentary tic at the left-hand corner of the mouth, he was really letting himself go today, then he fished out a small dark pipe and started scraping the bowl with a penknife. Without looking up he said: ‘There was a further coincidence that I should have mentioned. All the scientists who accepted those jobs – and their wives – have disappeared. Completely.’

With the last word he gave me a quick up-from-under glance with those arctic eyes, to see how I was taking it. I don’t much like being played cat-and-mouse with, so I gave him back his wooden Indian stare and asked: ‘In this country, en route, or after arrival?’

‘I think maybe you are the right man for the job, Bentall,’ he said inconsequently. ‘All of them left this country. Four seem to have disappeared en route to Australia. From the immigration authorities in New Zealand and Australia we have learned that one landed in Wellington and three others in Sydney. And that’s all they know about them. That’s all any of the authorities in those countries know. They arrived. They vanished. Finished.’

‘Any idea why?’

‘None. Could be several alternatives. I never waste my time guessing, Bentall. All we know – hence, of course, the very great official anxiety – is that though all the men concerned were engaged in industrial research, their unique knowledge could all too easily be put to military uses.’

‘How thorough a search has been made for them, sir?’

‘You can imagine. And I’m led to believe that the police forces in the – ah – antipodes are as efficient as any in the world. But it’s hardly a job for a policeman, eh?’

He leaned back in his chair, puffing dark clouds of foul-smelling smoke into the already overweighted air and looked at me expectantly. I felt tired, irritable and I didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. He was waiting for me to be a bright boy. I supposed I’d better oblige.

‘What am I going out as? A nuclear physicist?’

He patted the arm of his chair. ‘I’ll keep this seat warm for you, my boy. It may be yours some day.’ It’s not easy for an iceberg to sound jovial, but he almost made it. ‘No false colours for you, Bentall. You’re going out as precisely what you were in the days you worked at Hepworth and we discovered your unique gifts in another and slightly less academic field. You’re going out as a specialist in fuel research.’ He extracted a slip of paper from another folder and tossed it across to me. ‘Read all about it. The ninth advertisement. Appeared in the Telegraph a fortnight ago.’

I let the paper lie where it had fallen. I didn’t even look at it.

‘The second application for a fuel specialist,’ I said. ’Who answered the first? I should know him.’

‘Does that matter, Bentall?’ His voice had dropped a few degrees.

‘Certainly it matters.’ My tone matched his. ‘Perhaps they – whoever “they” may be – picked on a dud. Perhaps he didn’t know enough. But if it was one of the top boys – well, sir, the implication is pretty clear. Something’s happened to make them need a replacement.’

‘It was Dr Charles Fairfield.’

‘Fairfield? My old chief? The second-in-command at Hepworth?’

‘Who else?’

I didn’t answer immediately. I knew Fairfield well, a brilliant scientist and a highly gifted amateur archaeologist. I liked this less and less and my expression should have told Colonel Raine so. But he was examining the ceiling with the minute scrutiny of a man who expected to see it all fall down any second.

‘And you’re asking me to –’ I began.

‘That’s all I’m doing,’ he interrupted. He sounded suddenly tired. It was impossible not to feel a quick sympathy for the man, for the heavy burden he had to carry. ‘I’m not ordering, my boy. I’m only asking.’ His eyes were still on the ceiling.

I pulled the paper towards me and looked at the red-ringed advertisement. It was almost but not quite the duplicate of one I’d read a few minutes earlier.

‘Our friends required an immediate cable answer,’ I said slowly. ‘I suppose they must be getting pushed for time. You answered by cable?’

‘In your name and from your home address. I trust you will pardon the liberty,’ he murmured dryly.

‘The Allison and Holden Engineering Company, Sydney,’ I went on. ‘A genuine and respected firm, of course?’

‘Of course. We checked. And the name is that of their personnel manager and an airmail letter that arrived four days ago confirming the appointment was on the genuine letterhead of the firm. Signed in the name of the personnel manager. Only, it wasn’t his signature.’

‘What else do you know, sir?’

‘Nothing. I’m sorry. Absolutely nothing. I wish to God I could help more.’

There was a brief silence. Then I pushed the paper back to him and said: ‘Haven’t you rather overlooked the fact that this advert is like the rest – it calls for a married man?’

‘I never overlook the obvious,’ he said flatly.

I stared at him. ‘You never –’ I broke off, then continued: ‘I suppose you’ve got the banns already called and the bride waiting in the church.’

I’ve done better than that.’ Again the faint tic in the cheek. He reached into a drawer, pulled out a nine by four buff envelope and tossed it across to me. ‘Take care of that, Bentall. Your marriage certificate. Caxton Hall, ten weeks ago. You may examine it if you wish but I think you’ll find everything perfectly in order.’

‘I’m sure I will,’ I muttered mechanically. ‘I should hate to be a party to anything illegal.’

‘And now,’ he said briskly, ‘you would, of course, like to meet your wife.’ He lifted the phone and said: ‘Ask Mrs Bentall to come here, please.’

His pipe had gone out and he’d resumed the excavations with the pen-knife, examining the bowl with great care. There was nothing for me to examine so I let my eye wander until I saw again the light-coloured panel in the wood facing me. I knew the story behind that. Less than nine months ago, shortly after Colonel Raine’s predecessor had been killed in an air crash, another man had sat in the chair I was sitting in now. It had been one of Raine’s own men, but what Raine had not known was that that man had been subverted in Central Europe and persuaded to act as double agent. His first task – which would also probably have been his last – was simple and staggering in its audacity: nothing less than the murder of Raine himself. Had it been successful, the removal of Colonel Raine – I never knew his real name – chief of security and the receptacle of a thousand secrets would have been an irreparable loss. The colonel had suspected nothing of this until the agent had pulled out his gun. But what the agent did not know – what nobody had known before then – was that Colonel Raine kept a silenced Luger with the safety catch permanently off, fastened to the underside of his chair by a spring clip. I did think he might have had a better job made of repairing that splintered panel in the front of his desk.

Colonel Raine had had no option, of course. But even had he had the chance of disarming or just wounding the man, he would probably still have killed him. He was, without exception, the most utterly ruthless man I had ever met. Not cruel, just ruthless. The end justified the means and if the end were important enough there were no sacrifices he would not make to achieve it. That was why he was sitting in that chair. But when ruthlessness became inhumanity, I felt it time to protest.

I said: ‘Are you seriously considering sending this woman out with me, sir?’

‘I’m not considering it.’ He peered into the bowl of his pipe with all the absorbed concentration of a geologist scanning the depths of an extinct volcano. ‘The decision is made.’

My blood pressure went up a couple of points.

‘Even though you must know that whatever happened to Dr Fairfield probably happened to his wife, too?’

He laid pipe and knife on the desk and gave me what he probably imagined was a quizzical look: with those eyes of his it felt more as if a couple of stilettos were coming my way.

‘You question the wisdom of my decisions, Bentall?’

‘I question the justification for sending a woman on a job where the odds-on chances are that she’ll get herself killed.’ There was anger in my voice now and I wasn’t bothering very much about concealing it. ‘And I do question the wisdom of sending her with me. You know I’m a loner, Colonel Raine. I could go by myself, explain that my wife had taken ill. I don’t want any female hanging round my neck, sir.’

‘With this particular female’ Raine said dryly, ‘most men would consider that a privilege. I advise you to forget your concern. I consider it essential that she go. This young lady has volunteered for this assignment. She’s shrewd, very, very able and most experienced in this business – much more so than you are, Bentall. It may not be a case of you looking after her, but vice versa. She can take care of herself admirably. She has a gun and never moves without it. I think you’ll find –’

He broke off as a side door opened and a girl walked into the room. I say ‘walked’ because it is the usual word to describe human locomotion, but this girl didn’t locomote, she seemed to glide with all the grace and more than the suggestion of something else of a Balinese dancing girl. She wore a light grey ribbed wool dress that clung to every inch of her hour-and-a-half-glass figure as if it fully appreciated its privilege, and round her waist she wore a narrow belt of darker grey to match her court shoes and lizard handbag. That would be where the gun was, in the bag, she couldn’t have concealed a pea-shooter under that dress. She had smooth fair gleaming hair parted far over on the left and brushed almost straight back, dark eyebrows and lashes, clear hazel eyes and a delicately tanned fair skin.

I knew where the tan came from, I knew who she was. She’d worked on the same assignment as I had for the past six months but had been in Greece all the time and I’d only seen her twice, in Athens: in all, this was only the fourth time I’d ever met her. I knew her, but knew nothing of her, except for the fact that her name was Marie Hopeman, that she had been born in Belgium but hadn’t lived there since her father, a technician in the Fairey Aviation factory in that country, had brought herself and her Belgian mother out of the continent at the time of the fall of France. Both her parents had been lost in the Lancastria. An orphan child brought up in what was to her a foreign country, she must have learned fast how to look after herself. Or so I supposed.

I pushed back my chair and rose. Colonel Raine waved a vaguely introductory hand and said: ‘Mr and – ah – Mrs Bentall. You have met before, have you not?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He knew damn’ well we’d met before. Marie Hopeman gave me a cool firm hand and a cool level look, maybe this chance to work so closely with me was the realization of a life’s ambition for her, but she was holding her enthusiasm pretty well in check. I’d noticed this in Athens, this remote and rather aloof self-sufficiency which I found vaguely irritating, but that wasn’t going to stop me from saying what I was going to say.

‘Nice to see you again, Miss Hopeman. Or it should be. But not here and not now. Don’t you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’

She looked at me with big hazel eyes wide open under her raised dark brows, then the mouth curved slowly into an amused smile as she turned away.

‘Has Mr Bentall been coming all over chivalrous and noble on my account, Colonel Raine?’ she asked sweetly.

‘Well, yes, I’m afraid he has, rather,’ the colonel admitted. ‘And please, we must have none of this Mr Bentall – Miss Hopeman talk. Among young married couples, I mean.’ He poked a pipe-cleaner through the stem of his pipe, nodded in satisfaction as it emerged from the bowl black as a chimney sweep’s brush and went on almost dreamily. ‘John and Marie Bentall. I think the names go rather well together.’

‘Do you feel that, too?’ the girl said with interest. She turned to me again and smiled brightly. ’I do so appreciate your concern. It’s really most kind of you.’ A pause, then she added: ‘John.’

I didn’t hit her because I hold the view that that sort of thing went out with the cavemen, but I could appreciate how the old boys felt. I gave her what I hoped was a cool and enigmatic smile and turned away.

‘Clothes, sir,’ I said to Raine. ‘I’ll need to buy some. It’s high summer out there now.’

‘You’ll find two new suitcases in your flat, Bentall, packed with everything you need.’

‘Tickets?’

‘Here.’ He slid a packet across. ‘They were mailed to you four days ago by Wagons/Lits Cook. Paid by cheque. Man called Tobias Smith. No one has ever heard of him, but his bank account is healthy enough. You don’t fly east, as you might expect, but west, via New York, San Francisco, Hawaii and Fiji. I suppose the man who pays the piper calls the tune.’

‘Passports?’

‘Both in your cases in your flat.’ The little tic touched the side of his face. ‘Yours, for a change, is in your own name. Had to be. They’d check on you, university, subsequent career and so forth. We fixed it so that no inquirer would know you left Hepworth a year ago. Also in your case you’ll find a thousand dollars in American Express cheques.’

‘I hope I live to spend it,’ I said. ‘Who’s travelling with us, sir?’

There was a small silence, a brittle silence, and two pairs of eyes were on me, the narrow cold ice-green ones and the large warm hazel eyes. Marie Hopeman spoke first.

‘Perhaps you would explain –’

‘Hah!’ I interrupted. ‘Perhaps I would explain. And you’re the person – well, never mind. Sixteen people leave from here for Australia or New Zealand. Eight never arrive. Fifty per cent. Which means that there’s a fifty per cent chance that we don’t arrive. So there will be an observer in the plane so that Colonel Raine can erect a tombstone over the spot where we’re buried. Or more likely just a wreath flung in the Pacific.’

‘The possibility of a little trouble en route had occurred to me,’ the colonel said carefully. ‘There will be an observer with you – not the same one all the way, naturally. It is better that you do not know who those observers are.’ He rose to his feet and walked round the table. The briefing was over.

‘I am sincerely sorry,’ he finished. ‘I do not like any of this, but I am a blind man in a dark room and there is no other course open to me. I hope things go well.’ He offered his hand briefly to both of us, shook his head, murmured: ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye,’ and walked back to his desk.

I opened the door for Marie Hopeman and glanced back over my shoulder to see how sorry he was. But he wasn’t looking sorry, he was just looking earnestly into the bowl of his pipe so I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him sitting there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

CHAPTER 1

Tuesday 3 a.m.–5.30 a.m.

Fellow-passengers on the plane, the old hands on the America-Australia run, had spoken of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Viti Levu as the finest in the Western Pacific, and a very brief acquaintance with it had persuaded me that they were probably right. Old-fashioned but magnificent and shining like a newly-minted silver coin, it was run with a quiet and courteous efficiency that would have horrified the average English hotelier. The bedrooms were luxurious, the food superb – the memory of the seven-course dinner we’d had that night would linger for years – and the view from the veranda of the haze-softened mountains across the moonlit bay belonged to another world.

But there’s no perfection in a very imperfect world: the locks on the bedroom doors of the Grand Pacific Hotel were just no good at all.

My first intimation of this came when I woke up in the middle of the night in response to someone prodding my shoulder. But my first thought was not of the door-locks but of the finger prodding me. It was the hardest finger I’ve ever felt. It felt like a piece of steel. I struggled to open my eyes against weariness and the glare of the overhead light and finally managed to focus them on my left shoulder. It was a piece of steel. It was a dully-gleaming .38 Colt automatic and just in case I should have made any mistake in identification whoever was holding it shifted the gun as soon as he saw me stir so that my right eye could stare down the centre of the barrel. It was a gun all right. My gaze travelled up past the gun, the hairy brown wrist, the white-coated arm to the brown cold still face with battered yachting cap above, then back to the automatic again.

‘O.K., friend.’ I said. I meant it to sound cool and casual but it came out more like the raven – the hoarse one – croaking on the battlements of Macbeth’s castle. ‘I can see it’s a gun. Cleaned and oiled and everything. But take it away, please. Guns are dangerous things.’

‘A wise guy, eh?’ he said coldly. ‘Showing the little wife what a hero he is. But you wouldn’t really like to be a hero, would you, Bentall? You wouldn’t really like to start something?’

I would have loved to start something. I would have loved to take his gun away and beat him over the head with it. Having guns pointed at my eye gives me a nasty dry mouth, makes my heart work overtime and uses up a great deal of adrenalin. I was just starting out to think what else I would like to do to him when he nodded across the bed.

‘Because if you are, you might have a look there first.’

I turned slowly, so as not to excite anyone. Except only for the yellow of his eyes, the man on the other side of the bed was a symphony in black. Black suit, black sailor’s jersey under it, black hat and one of the blackest faces I had ever seen: a thin, taut, pinch-nosed face, the face of a pure Indian. He was very narrow and very short but he didn’t have to be big on account of what he held in his hands, a twelve-bore shotgun which had had almost two-thirds of its original length sawn off at stock and barrels. It was like looking down a couple of unlit railway tunnels. I turned away slowly and looked at the white man.

‘I see what you mean. Can I sit up?’

He nodded and stepped back a couple of feet. I swung my legs over the bed and looked across to the other side of the room where Marie Hopeman, a third man, also black, standing beside her, was sitting in a rattan chair by her bed. She was dressed in a blue and white sleeveless silk dress and because it was sleeveless I could see the four bright marks on the upper arm where someone had grabbed her, not too gently.

I was more or less dressed myself, all except coat and tie, although we had arrived there seven earlier after a long and bumpy road trip forced on lack of accommodation at the airfield at the other end of the island.

With the unexpected influx of stranded aircraft passengers into the Grand Pacific Hotel the question of separate rooms for Mr and Mrs John Bentall had not ever arisen, but the fact that they were almost completely dressed had nothing to do with modesty, false or otherwise: it had to do with survival. The unexpected influx was due to an unscheduled stopover at the airfield: and what the unscheduled stopover was due to was something that exercised my mind very much indeed. Primarily, it was due to a medium-scale electrical fire that had broken out in our DC7 immediately after the fuelling hoses had been disconnected and although it had been extinguished inside a minute the plane captain had quite properly refused to continue until airline technicians had flown down from Hawaii to assess the extent of the damage: but what I would have dearly loved to know was what had caused the fire.

I am a great believer in coincidences, but belief stops short just this side of idiocy. Four scientists and their wives had already disappeared en route to Australia: the chances were even that the fifth couple, ourselves, would do likewise, and the fuelling halt at the Suva airfield in Fiji was the last chance to make us vanish. So we’d left our clothes on, locked the doors and taken watches: I’d taken the first, sitting quietly in the darkness until three o’clock in the morning, when I’d given Marie Hopeman a shake and lain down on my own bed. I’d gone to sleep almost immediately and she must have done exactly the same for when I now glanced surreptitiously at my watch I saw it was only twenty minutes past three. Either I hadn’t shaken her hard enough or she still hadn’t recovered from the effects of the previous sleepless night, a San Francisco–Hawaii hop so violent that even the stewards had been sick. Not that the reasons mattered now.

I pulled on my shoes and looked across at her. For the moment she no longer looked serene and remote and aloof, she just looked tired and pale and there were faint blue shadows under her eyes: she was a poor traveller and had suffered badly the previous night. She saw me looking at her and began to speak.

‘I – I’m afraid I –’

‘Be quiet!’ I said savagely.

She blinked as if she had been struck across the face, then tightened her lips and stared down at her stockinged feet. The man with the yachting cap laughed with the musical sound of water escaping down a waste-pipe.

‘Pay no attention, Mrs Bentall. He doesn’t mean a thing. The world’s full of Bentalls, tough crusts and jelly inside, and when they’re nervous and scared they’ve just got to lash out at someone. Makes them feel better. But, of course, they only lash out in a safe direction.’ He looked at me consideringly and without much admiration. ’Isn’t that so, Bentall?’

‘What do you want?’ I asked stiffly. ‘What is the meaning of this – of this intrusion? You’re wasting your time. I have only a few dollars in currency, about forty. There are traveller’s cheques. Those are no good to you. My wife’s jewellery –’

‘Why are you both dressed?’ he interrupted suddenly.

I frowned and stared at him. ‘I fail to see –’ Something pressed hard and cold and rough against the back of my neck; whoever had hacksawed off the barrels of that twelve-bore hadn’t been too particular about filing down the outside edges.

‘My wife and I are priority passengers,’ I said quickly. It is difficult to sound pompous and scared at the same time. ‘My business is of the greatest urgency. I – I have impressed that on the airport authorities. I understand that planes make occasional overnight refuelling stops in Suva and have asked that I should be notified immediately of any vacancies on a west-bound plane. The hotel staff have also been told, and we’re on a minute’s notice.’ It wasn’t true, but the hotel day staff were off duty and there would be no quick way of checking. But I could see he believed me.

‘That’s very interesting,’ he murmured. ‘And very convenient. Mrs Bentall, you can come and sit by your husband here and hold his hand – it doesn’t look too steady to me.’ He waited till she had crossed the room and sat down on the bed, a good two feet from me and staring straight ahead, then said: ‘Krishna?’

‘Yes, Captain?’ This from the Indian who had been watching Marie.

‘Go outside. Put a call through to the desk. Say you’re speaking from the airport and that there’s an urgent call for Mr and Mrs Bentall, that there’s a K.L.M. plane with two vacant seats due in for refuelling in two or three hours. They’ve to go at once. Got it?’

‘Yes, Captain.’ A gleam of white teeth and he started for the door.

‘Not that way, fool!‘ The white man nodded to the french doors leading to the outside veranda. ‘Want everyone to see you? When you’ve put the call through pick up your friend’s taxi, come to the main door, say you’ve been phoned for by the airport and come upstairs to help carry the bags down.’

The Indian nodded, unlocked the french doors and disappeared. The man with the yachting cap dragged out a cheroot, puffed black smoke into the air and grinned at us. ‘Neat, eh?’

‘Just what is it you intend to do with us?’ I asked tightly.

‘Taking you for a little trip.’ He grinned, showing irregular and tobacco-stained teeth. ‘And there’ll be no questions – everyone will think you have gone on to Sydney by plane. Ain’t it sad? Now stand up, clasp your hands behind your head and turn round.’

With three gun barrels pointing at me and the farthest not more than eighteen inches away it seemed a good idea to do what he said. He waited till I had a bird’s eye view of the two unlit railway tunnels, jabbed his gun into my back and went over me with an experienced hand that wouldn’t have missed even a book of matches. Finally, the pressure of the gun in my spine eased and I heard him taking a step back.

‘O.K., Bentall, sit. Bit surprising, maybe – tough-talking pansies like you often fancy themselves enough to pack a gun. Maybe it’s in your grips. We’ll check later.’ He transferred a speculative glance to Marie Hopeman. ‘How about you, lady?’

‘Don’t you dare touch me, you – you horrible man!’ She’d jumped to her feet and was standing there erect as a guardsman, arms stretched stiffly at her sides, fists clenched, breathing quickly and deeply. She couldn’t have been more than five feet four in her stockinged soles but outraged indignation made her seem inches taller. It was quite a performance. ‘What do you think I am? Of course I’m not carrying a gun on me.’

Slowly, thoughtfully, but not insolently, his eyes followed every curve of the more than adequately filled sheath dress. Then he sighed.

‘It would be a miracle if you were,’ he admitted regretfully. ‘Maybe in your grip. But later – neither of you will be opening those bags till we get where we’re going.’ He paused for a thoughtful moment. ‘But you do carry a handbag, don’t you, lady?’

‘Don’t you touch my handbag with your dirty hands!’ she said stormily.

‘They’re not dirty,’ he said mildly. He held one up for his own inspection. ‘At least, not really. The bag, Mrs Bentall.’

‘In the bedside cabinet,’ she said contemptuously.

He moved to the other side of the room, never quite taking his eye off us. I had an idea that he didn’t have too much faith in the lad with the blunderbuss. He took the grey lizard handbag from the cabinet, slipped the catch and held the bag upside down over the bed. A shower of stuff fell out, money, comb, handkerchief, vanity case and all the usual camouflage kit and warpaint. But no gun, quite definitely no gun.

‘You don’t really look the type,’ he said apologetically. ‘But that’s how you live to be fifty, lady, by not even trusting your own mother and –’ He broke off and hefted the empty bag in his hand. ‘Does seem a mite heavy, though, don’t it?’

He peered inside, fumbled around with his hand, withdrew it and felt the outside of the bag, low down. There was a barely perceptible click and the false bottom fell open, swinging on its hinges. Something fell on the carpet with a thud. He bent and picked up a small flat snub-nosed automatic.

‘One of those trick cigarette lighters,’ he said easily. ‘Or it might be for perfume or sand-blasting on the old face powder. Whatever will they think of next?’

‘My husband is a scientist and a very important person in his own line,’ Marie Hopeman said stonily. ‘He has had two threats on his life. I – I have a police permit for that gun.’

‘And I’ll give you a receipt for it so everything will be nice and legal,’ he said comfortably. The speculative eyes belied the tone. ‘All right, get ready to go out. Rabat’ – this to the man with the sawn-off gun –’ over the veranda and see that no one tries anything stupid between the main door and the taxi.’

He’d everything smoothly organised. I couldn’t have tried anything even if I’d wanted to and I didn’t, not now: obviously he’d no intention of disposing of us on the spot and I wasn’t going to find any answers by just running away.

When the knock came to the door he vanished behind the curtains covering the open french windows. The bell-boy came in and picked up three bags: he was followed by Krishna, who had in the meantime acquired a peaked cap: Krishna had a raincoat over his arm — he had every excuse, it was raining heavily outside – and I could guess he had more than his hand under it. He waited courteously until we had preceded him through the door, picked up the fourth bag and followed: at the end of the long corridor I saw the man in the yachting cap come out from our room and stroll along after us, far enough away so as not to seem one of the party but near enough to move in quick if I got any funny ideas. I couldn’t help thinking that he’d done this sort of thing before.

The night-clerk, a thin dark man with the world-weary expression of night-clerks the world over, had our bill ready. As I was paying, the man with the yachting cap, cheroot sticking up at a jaunty angle, sauntered up to the desk and nodded affably to the clerk.

‘Good morning, Captain Fleck,’ the clerk said respectfully. ‘You found your friend?’

‘I did indeed.’ The cold hard expression had gone from Captain Fleck’s face to be replaced with one that was positively jovial. ‘And he tells me the man I really want to see is out at the airport. Damn nuisance having to go all the way out there at this time of night. But I must. Get me a car, will you?‘

‘Certainly, sir.’ Fleck appeared to be a man of some consequence in these parts. He hesitated. ’Is it urgent, Captain Fleck?’

‘All my business is urgent.’ Fleck boomed.

‘Of course, of course.’ The clerk seemed nervous, anxious to ingratiate himself with Fleck. ‘It just so happens that Mr and Mrs Bentall here are going out there, too, and they have a taxi –’

‘Delighted to meet you, Mr. – ah – Bentall,’ Fleck said heartily. With his right hand he crushed mine in a bluff honest sailorman’s grip while with his left he brought the complete ruin of the shapeless jacket he was wearing mother long stage nearer by thrusting his concealed gun so far forward against the off-white material that I thought he was going to sunder the pocket from its moorings. ‘Fleck’s my name. I must get out to the airport at once and if you would be so kind – share the costs of course – I’d be more than grateful …’

No doubt about it, he was the complete professional, we were wafted out of that hotel and into the waiting taxi with all the smooth and suave dexterity of a head-waiter ushering you to the worst table in an overcrowded restaurant: and had I had any doubts left about Fleck’s experienced competence they would have been removed the moment I sat down in the back seat between himself and Rabat and felt something like a giant and none too gentle pincer closing round my waist. To my left, Rabat’s twelve-bore: to my right, Fleck’s automatic, both digging in just above the hipbones, the one position where it was impossible to knock them aside. I sat still and quiet and hoped that the combination of ancient taxi springs and bumpy road didn’t jerk either of the forefingers curved round those triggers.

Marie Hopeman sat in front, beside Krishna, very erect, very still, very aloof. I wondered if there was anything left of the careless amusement, the quiet self-confidence she had shown in Colonel Raine’s office two days ago. It was impossible to say. We’d flown together, side by side, for 10,000 miles and I still didn’t even begin to know her. She had seen to that.

I knew nothing at all about the town of Suva, but even if I had I doubt whether I would have known where we were being taken. With two people sitting in front of me, one on either side and what little I could see of the side-screens blurred and obscured by heavy rain, the chances of seeing anything were remote. I caught a glimpse of a dark silent cinema, a bank, a canal with scattered faint lights reflecting from its opaque surface and, after turning down some narrow unlighted streets and bumping over railway tracks, a long row of small railway wagons with C.S.R. stamped on their sides. All of these, especially the freight train, clashed with my preconceptions of what a South Pacific island should look like, but I had no time to wonder about it. The taxi pulled up with a sudden jerk that seemed to drive the twelve-bore about halfway through me, and Captain Fleck jumped out, ordering me to follow.

I climbed down and stood there rubbing my aching sides while I looked around me. It was as dark as the tomb, the rain was still sluicing down and at first I could see nothing except the vague suggestion of one or two angular structures that looked like gantry cranes. But I didn’t need my eyes to tell me where I was, my nose was all that was required. I could smell smoke and diesel and rust, the tang of tar and hempen ropes and wet cordage, and pervading everything the harsh flat smell of the sea.

What with the lack of sleep and the bewildering turn of events my mind wasn’t working any too well that night, but it did seem pretty obvious that Captain Fleck hadn’t brought us down to the Suva docks to set us aboard a K.L.M. plane for Australia. I made to speak, but he cut me off at once, flicked a pencil torch at two cases that Krishna had carefully placed in a deep puddle of dirty and oily water, picked up the other two cases himself and told me softly to do the same and follow him. There was nothing soft about the confirmatory jab in the ribs from Rabat’s twelve-bore. I was getting tired of Rabat and his ideas as to what constituted gentle prods. Fleck probably fed him on a straight diet of American gangster magazines.

Fleck had either better night eyes than I had or he had a complete mental picture of the whereabouts of every rope, hawser, bollard and loose cobble on that dockside, but we didn’t have far to go and I hadn’t tripped and fallen more than four or five times when he slowed down, turned to his right and began to descend a flight of stone stairs. He took his time about it and risked using his flash and I didn’t blame him: the steps were green-scummed and greasy and there was no hand-rail at all on the seaward side. The temptation to drop one of my cases on top of him and then watch gravity taking charge was strong but only momentarily: not only were there still two guns at my back but my eyes were now just sufficiently accustomed to the dark to let me make out the vague shape of some vessel lying alongside the low stone jetty at the foot of the steps. If he fell now, all Fleck would suffer would be considerable bruising and even greater damage to his pride which might well make him pass up his desire for silence and secrecy in favour of immediate revenge. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would miss so I tightened my grip on the cases and went down those steps with all the care and delicate precision of Daniel picking his way through a den of sleeping lions. And there wasn’t all that difference here, just that the lions were wide awake. A few seconds later Marie Hopeman and the two Indians were on the jetty behind me.

We were now only about eight feet above water level and I peered at the vessel to try to get a better idea of her shape and size, but the backdrop of that rain-filled sky was scarcely less dark than that of the land and sea. Broad-beamed, maybe seventy feet long – although I could have been twenty feet out either way – a fairly bulky midships superstructure and masts, whether two or three I couldn’t be sure. That was all I had time to see when a door in the superstructure opened and a sudden flood of white light completely destroyed what little night sight I’d been able to acquire. Someone, tall and lean, I thought, passed quickly through the bright rectangle of light and closed the door quickly behind him.

‘Everything O.K., boss?’ I’d never been to Australia but I’d met plenty of Australians: this one’s accent was unmistakable.

‘O.K. Got ’em. And watch that damned light. We’re coming aboard.’

Boarding the ship was no trick at all. The top of the gunwale, amidships where we were, was riding just level with the jetty and all we had to do was jump down the thirty inches to the deck below. A wooden deck, I noticed, not steel. When we were all safely down Captain Fleck said: ‘We are ready to receive guests, Henry?’ He sounded relaxed now, relieved to be back where he was.

‘Stateroom’s all ready, boss,’ Henry announced. His voice was a hoarse and lugubrious drawl. ‘Shall I show them to their quarters?’

‘Do that. I’ll be in my cabin. All right, Bentall, leave your grips here. I’ll see you later.’

Henry led the way aft along the deck, with the two Indians close behind. Once clear of the superstructure, he turned right, flicked on a torch and stopped before a small square raised hatch. He bent down, slipped a bolt, heaved the hatch-cover up and back and pointed down with his torch.

‘Get down there, the two of you.’

I went first, ten rungs on a wet, clammy and vertical steel ladder, Marie Hopeman close behind. Her head had hardly cleared the level of the hatch when the cover slammed down and we heard the scraping thud of a bolt sliding home. She climbed down the last two or three steps and we stood and looked round our stateroom.

It was a dark and noisome dungeon. Well, not quite dark, there was a dim yellow glow-worm of a lamp behind a steel-meshed glass on the deckhead, enough so that you didn’t have to paw your way around, but it was certainly noisome enough. It smelled like the aftermath of the bubonic plague, stinking to high heaven of some disgusting odour that I couldn’t identify. And it was all that could have been asked for in the way of a dungeon. The only way out was the way we had come in. Aft, there was a wooden bulkhead clear across the width of the vessel. I located a crack between two planks and though I couldn’t see anything I could sniff diesel oil: the engine-room, without doubt. In the for’ard bulkhead was a door unlocked; leading to a primitive toilet and a rust – stained washbasin supplied by a tap that gave a good flow of brown and brackish water, not sea-water. Near the two for’ard corners of the hold were six-inch-diameter holes in the deckhead: I peered up those, but could see nothing. Ventilators; probably, and they could hardly have been called a superfluous installation: but on that windless night and with the ship not under way they were quite useless.

Heavy spaced wooden battens, held in place by wooden slots in the deck and deckhead, ran the whole for-and-aft length of the hold. There were four rows of these battens, and behind the two rows nearest the port and starboard sides wooden boxes and open-sided crates were piled on the very top, except where a space had been left free for the air from the ventilators to find its way in. Between the outer and inner rows of battens other boxes and sacks were piled half the height of the hold: between the two inner rows, extending from the engine-room bulkhead to the two small doors in the for’ard bulkhead was a passage perhaps four feet wide. The wooden floor of this alleyway looked as if it had been scrubbed about the time of the coronation.

I was still looking slowly around, feeling my heart making for my boots and hoping that it was not too dark for Marie Hopeman to see my carefully balanced expression of insouciance and intrepidity, when the overhead light dimmed to a dull red glow and a high-pitched whine came from aft: a second later an unmistakable diesel engine came to life, the vessel began to vibrate as it revved up, then as it slowed again I could just hear the patter of sandalled feet on the deck above – casting off, no doubt – just before the engine note deepened as gear was engaged. It didn’t require the slight list to starboard as the vessel sheered off from the jetty wall to tell us that we were under way.

I turned away from the after bulkhead, bumped into Marie Hopeman in the near darkness and caught her arm to steady her. The arm was goose-fleshed, wet and far too cold. I fumbled a match from a box, scratched it alight and peered at her as she screwed her eyes almost shut against the sudden flare. Her fair bedraggled hair was plastered over her forehead and one cheek, the saturated thin silk of her dress was a clammy cocoon that clung to every inch and she was shivering constantly. Not until then did realize just how cold and dank it was in that airless hole, I waved the match to extinction, removed a shoe, started hammering the after bulkhead and when that had no effect, climbed a few steps up the ladder and started beating the hatch.

‘What on earth do you imagine you’re doing?’ Marie Hopeman asked.

‘Room service. If we don’t get our clothes soon I’m going to have a pneumonia case on my hands.’

‘Wouldn’t it suit you better to look round for some kind of weapon?’ she said quietly. ‘Has it never occurred to you to ask why they’ve brought us out here?’

‘To do us in? Nonsense.’ I tried out my carefree laugh to see how it went, but it didn’t, it sounded so hollow and unconvincing that it lowered even my morale. ‘Of course they’re not going to knock us off, not yet at least. They didn’t bring me all the way out here to do that – it could have as easily been done in England. Nor was it necessary to bring you that I should be knocked off. Thirdly, they didn’t have to bring us out on this boat to do it – for instance that dirty canal we passed and a couple of heavy stones would have been all that was needed. And fourthly, Captain Fleck strikes me as a ruffian and a rogue, but no killer.’ This was a better line altogether. If I repeated it about a hundred times I might even start believing it myself. Marie Hopeman remained silent, so maybe she was thinking about it, maybe there was something in it after all.

After a couple of minutes I gave the hatch up as a bad job, went for’ard and hammered against the bulkhead there. Crew quarters must have been on the other side for I got reaction within half a minute. Someone heaved open the hatch-cover and a powerful torch shone down into the hold.

‘Will you kindly quit that flamin’ row?’ Henry didn’t sound too pleased. ‘Can’t you sleep, or somethin’?’

‘Where are our cases?’ I demanded. ‘We must have dry clothes. My wife is soaked to the skin.’

‘Comin’, comin’,’ he grumbled. ‘Move right for’ard, both of you.’

We moved, he dropped down into the hole, took four cases from someone invisible to us then stepped aside to make room for another man to come down the ladder. It was Captain Fleck, equipped with torch and gun, and enveloped in an aroma of whisky. It made a pleasant change from the fearful stink in that hold.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he boomed cheerfully. ‘Locks on those cases were a mite tricky. So you weren’t carrying a gun after all, eh, Bentall?’

‘Of course not,’ I said stiffly. I had been, but it was still under the mattress of my bed in the Grand Pacific Hotel. ‘What’s the damnable smell down here?’

‘Damnable? Damnable?’ Fleck sniffed the foul atmosphere with the keen appreciation of a connoisseur bent over a brandy glass of Napoleon. ‘Copra and sharks’ fins. Mainly copra. Very healthgiving, they say.’

‘I dare say,’ I said bitterly. ‘How long are we to stay in this hell-hole?’

‘There’s not a finer schooner –’ Fleck began irritably, then broke off. ‘We’ll see. Few more hours, I don’t know. You’ll get breakfast at eight.’ He shone his torch around the hold and went on apologetically: ‘We don’t often have ladies aboard, ma’am especially not ones like you. We might have cleaned it up more. Don’t either of you sleep with your shoes off.’

‘Why?’ I demanded.

‘Cockroaches,’ he explained briefly. ‘Very partial to the soles of the feet,’ He flicked his torch beam suddenly to one side and momentarily picked up a couple of brown monstrous beetlelike insects at least a couple of inches in length that scuttled out of sight almost immediately.

‘As – as big as that?’ Marie Hopeman whispered.

‘It’s the copra and diesel oil,’ Henry explained lugubriously. ‘Their favourite food, except for D.D.T. We give them gallons of that. And them are only the small ones, their parents know better than to come out when there are people around.’

‘That’s enough,’ Fleck said abruptly. He thrust the torch into my hand. ‘Take this. You’ll need it. See you in the morning.’

Henry waited till Fleck’s head was clear of the hatch, then pushed back some of the sliding battens that bordered the central aisle. He nodded at the four-foot-high platform of cases exposed by this.

‘Sleep here,’ he said shortly. ‘There ain’t no other place. See you in the morning.’ With that he was gone and moments later the hatch shut to behind him.

And so, because there was no other place, we slept there, perched shoulder to shoulder on the high platform. At least, Marie did. I had other things to think about.

CHAPTER 2

Tuesday 8.30 a.m.–7 p.m.

She slept serenely, like one dead, for over three hours, her breathing so quiet that I could hardly hear it. As the time slipped by, the rolling of the schooner became increasingly more pronounced until after one particular violent lurch she woke up with a start and stared at me, her eyes reflecting confusion and perhaps a touch of fear. Then understanding came back and she sat up.

‘Hallo,’ she said.

‘Morning. Feel better?’

‘Mmm.’ She grabbed a batten as another violent lurch sent some loose boxes banging about in the hold. ‘But I won’t be for long, not if this sort of thing keeps up. Nuisance, I know, but I can’t help it. What’s the time? Half past eight, your watch says. Must be broad daylight. I wonder where we’re heading?’

‘North or south. We’re neither quartering nor corkscrewing, which means that we have this swell right on the beam. I don’t remember much of my geography but enough to be pretty sure that at this time of the year the steady easterly trades push up an east – west swell. So, north or south.’ I lowered myself stiffly to my feet, walked for’ard along the central aisle to where the two narrow spaces, one on each side, had been left clear of cargo to give access to the ventilator intakes. I moved into those in turn and touched both the port and starboard sides of the schooner, high up. The port side was definitely warmer than the starboard. That meant we were moving more or less due south. The nearest land in that direction was New Zealand, about a thousand miles away. I filed away this piece of helpful information and was about to move when I heard voices from above, faint but unmistakable. I pulled a box down from behind its retaining batten and stood on it, the side of my face against the foot of the ventilator.

The ventilator must have been just outside the radio office and its trumpet-shaped opening made a perfect earphone for collecting and amplifying soundwaves. I could hear the steady chatter of morse and, over and above that, the sound of two men talking as clearly as if they had been no more than three feet away from me. What they were speaking about I’d no idea, it was in a language I’d never heard before: after a couple of minutes I jumped down, replaced the box and went back to Marie.

‘What took you so long?’ she asked accusingly. She wasn’t very happy down in that black and evil-smelling hold. Neither was I.

‘Sorry. But you may be grateful yet for the delay. I’ve found out that we’re travelling south, but much more important, I’ve found out that we can hear what the people on the upper deck are talking about.’ I told her how I’d discovered this, and she nodded.

‘It could be very useful.’

‘It could be more than useful,’ I said. ‘Hungry?’

‘Well.’ She made a face and rubbed a hand across her stomach. ‘It’s not just that I’m a bad sailor, it’s the fearful smell down here.’

‘Those ventilators appear to be no damned help in the world,’ I agreed. ’But perhaps some tea might be.’ I went for’ard and called for attention as I’d done a few hours earlier by hammering on the bulkhead. I moved aft and within a minute the hatch was opened.

I blinked in the blinding glare of light that flooded down into the hold, then moved back as someone came down the ladder. A man with a lantern-jawed face, lean and lined and mournful.

‘What’s all the racket about?’ Henry demanded wearily.

‘You promised us some breakfast,’ I reminded him.

‘So we did. Breakfast in ten minutes.’ With that he was gone, shutting the hatch behind him.

Less than the promised time later the hatch opened again and a stocky brown-haired youngster with dark frizzy golliwog hair came nimbly down the ladder carrying a battered wooden tray in one hand. He grinned at me cheerfully, moved up the aisle and set the tray down on the boxes beside Marie, whipping a dented tin cover off a dish with the air of Escoffier unveiling his latest creation. I looked at the brown sticky mass. I thought I could see rice and shredded coconut.

‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Last week’s garbage?’

‘Dalo pudding. Very good, sir.’ He pointed to a chipped enamel pot. ‘Here is coffee. Also very good.’ He ducked his head at Marie and left as nimbly as he had come. It went without saying that he had shut the hatch behind him.

The pudding was an indigestible and gelatinous mess that tasted and felt like cooked cowhide glue. It was quite inedible but no match for the fearful coffee, lukewarm bilge-water strained through old cement sacks.

‘Do you think they’re trying to poison us?’ Marie asked.

‘Impossible. No one could ever eat this stuff in the first place. At least, no European could. By Polynesian standards it probably ranks with caviare. Well, there goes breakfast.’ I broke off and looked closely at the crate behind the tray. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. Don’t miss much, do I? I’ve only been sitting with my back against it for about four hours.’

‘Well. You haven’t eyes in the back of your head,’ she said reasonably. I didn’t reply, I’d already unhitched the torch and was peering through the inch cracks between the spars of the crate. ‘Looks like lemonade bottles or some such to me.’

‘And to me. Are you developing scruples about damaging Captain Fleck’s property?’ she asked delicately.

I grinned, latched on to my anti-rat club, pried off the top spar, pulled out a bottle and handed it to Marie. ‘Watch it. Probably neat bootleg gin for sale to the natives.’

But it wasn’t, it was lemon juice, and excellent stuff at that. Excellent for thirst, but hardly a substitute for breakfast: I took off my jacket and began to investigate the contents of the schooner’s hold.

Captain Fleck appeared to be engaged in the perfectly innocuous business of provision carrier. The half-filled spaces between the two sets of battens on either side were taken up by crates of food and drink: meat, fruit and soft drinks. Probably stuff he loaded up on one of the larger islands before setting off to pick up copra. It seemed a reasonable guess. But, then, Fleck didn’t seem like an innocuous man.

I finished off a breakfast of corned beef and pears – Marie passed it up with a shudder – then began to investigate the contents of the boxes and crates packed ceiling high between the two outer rows of battens and the sides of the schooner. But I didn’t get very far. The battens in those rows weren’t of the free-sliding type in the inboard rows but were hinged at the top and were designed to lift upwards and inwards: with their lower halfs jammed by the boxes in the inner rows, this was quite impossible. But two of the battens, the two directly behind the lemonade crate, were loose: I examined their tops with the torch and could see that there were no hinges attaching them to the deckhead: from the freshness of the wood where the screws had been, the hinges appeared to have been recently removed. I pushed the battens as far apart as possible, wrestled the top box out of position without breaking my neck – not so easy as it sounds for the boxes were heavy and the rolling of the schooner pretty violent by this time – and placed it on the platform where we’d spent the night.

The box was about two feet long, by eighteen inches wide and a foot deep, made of oiled yellow pine. On each of the four corners of the lid was the broad arrow property mark of the Royal Navy. At the top a stencil, which was semi-obliterated by a thick black line, said ‘Fleet Air Arm’. Below that were the words ‘Alcohol Compasses’ and beneath that again ‘Redundant. Authorized for disposal’, followed by a stencilled crown, very official looking. I pried the top off with some difficulty and the stencils didn’t lie: six unmarked alcohol compasses, packed in straw and white paper.

‘Looks O.K. to me,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen those stencils before. “Redundant” is a nice naval term for “Obsolete”. Gets a better price from civilian buyers. Maybe Captain Fleck is in the legitimate ex-Government surplus stock disposal trade.’

‘Maybe Captain Fleck had his own private stock of stencils,’ Marie said sceptically. ‘How about the next one?’

I got the next one down. This was stencilled ‘Binoculars’ and binoculars it contained. The third box had again the Fleet Air Arm marking, semi-obliterated, and the stencil ‘Inflatable Lifebelts (Aircraft)’, and again the stencil didn’t lie: bright red lifebelts with CO_2charges and yellow cylinders marked ‘Shark repellant’.

‘We’re wasting our time,’ I said. Having to brace oneself against the heavy rolling of the schooner made the lifting and prying open of the boxes heavy work, the heat of the hold was building up as the sun climbed in the sky and the sweat was pouring down my face and back. ‘Just a common-or-garden second-hand dealer.’

‘Second-hand dealers don’t kidnap people,’ she said tartly. ‘Just one more, please. I have a feeling.’

I checked the impulse to say that it was easy enough to have a feeling when you didn’t have to do the sweating, lugged a fourth and very heavy box off the steadily diminishing pile and lowered it beside the others. The same disposal stencils as before, contents marked ‘Champion Spark Plugs. 2 gross’.

It took me five minutes and a two-inch strip of skin from the back of my right hand to get the lid off. Marie carefully avoided looking at me, maybe she was a mind-reader, maybe she was just getting good and seasick. But she turned as the lid came clear, peered inside then glanced up at me.

‘Maybe Captain Fleck does have his own stencils,’ she murmured.

‘Maybe he does at that,’ I acknowledged. The case was full of drums, but the drums weren’t full of spark plugs: there was enough machine-gun belt ammunition inside the case to start off a fair-sized revolution. ‘This interests me strangely.’

‘Is – is it safe? If Captain Fleck –’

‘What’s Captain Fleck ever done for me? Let him come if he wants to.’ I lugged out a fifth case, sneered at the ‘Spark plug’ stencil, wrenched off the lid with a combination of leverage and a few well-chosen kicks, stared down at the writing on the heavy blue paper wrapped round the contents, then replaced the lid with all the gentle tenderness and reverent care of a Chicago gangster placing a wreath on the grave of his latest victim.

‘Ammonal, 25 per cent aluminium powder!’ Marie, too, had glimpsed the writing. ‘What on earth is that?’

‘A very powerful blasting explosive, just about enough to send the schooner and everybody aboard it into orbit.’ I lifted it gingerly back into position and fresh sweat came to my face when I thought of the élan with which I had hammered it open. ‘Damn tricky stuff, too. Wrong temperature, wrong handling, excessive humidity – well, it makes quite a bang. I don’t like this hold so much any more.’ I caught up the ammunition crate and returned that also: thistledown never felt so light as that box did on top of the ammonal.

‘Are you putting them all back?’ There was a tiny frown between her eyes.

‘What does it look like to you?’

‘Scared?’

‘No. Terrified. The next box might have had nitroglycerine or some such. That really would be something.’ I replaced all the boxes and battens, took the torch and went aft to see what else there was. But there wasn’t much. On the port side, six diesel oil drums, all full, kerosene, D.D.T. and some five-gallon water drums shaped and strapped for carrying over the shoulders – Fleck, I supposed, would need these when he topped up water supplies in the more remote islands where there were no other loading facilities. On the starboard side there were a couple of square metal boxes half-full of assorted and rusted ship’s ironmongery – nuts, bolts, eyebolts, blocks, tackles, bottle screws, even a couple of marline-spikes. I eyed the spikes longingly but left them where they were: it didn’t seem likely that Captain Fleck would have overlooked the possibility, but, even if he had, a marline-spike was a good deal slower than a bullet. And very difficult to conceal.

I walked back to Marie Hopeman. She was very pale.

‘Nothing there at all. Any ideas about what to do now?’

‘You can do what you like.’ she said calmly.

‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Oh, Lord.’ I ran for the cabin, hammered on the bulkhead and was standing below the hatch when it opened. It was Captain Fleck himself, clear-eyed, rested, freshly-shaved and clad in white ducks. He courteously removed his cheroot before speaking.

‘A splendid morning, Bentall. I trust you –’

‘My wife’s sick,’ I interrupted. ‘She needs fresh air. Can she come up on deck?’

‘Sick?’ His tone changed. ‘Fever?’

‘Seasick.’ I yelled at him.

‘On a day like this?’ Fleck half-straightened and looked around what he probably regarded as an expanse of flat calm. ‘One minute.’

He snapped his fingers, said something I couldn’t catch and waited till the boy who’d brought us breakfast came running up with a pair of binoculars. Fleck made a slow careful 360° sweep of the horizon, then lowered the glasses. ‘She can come up. You, too, if you like.’

I called Marie and let her precede me up the ladder. Fleck gave her a helping hand over the edge of the hatch and said solicitously: I’m sorry to hear that you are not too well, Mrs Bentall. You don’t look too good, and that’s a fact.’

‘You are most kind, Captain Fleck.’ Her tone and look would have shrivelled me, but it bounced right off Fleck. He snapped his fingers again and the boy appeared with a couple of sunshaded deck-chairs. ‘You are welcome to remain as long as you wish, both of you. If you are told to go below you must do so immediately. That is understood?’

I nodded silently.

‘Good. You will not, of course, be so foolish as to try anything foolish. Our friend Rabat is no Annie Oakley, but he could hardly miss at this range.’ I turned my head and saw the little Indian, still in black but without his jacket now, sitting on the other side of the hatch with his sawn-off shotgun across his knees. It was pointed straight at my head and he was looking at me in a longing fashion I didn’t care for. ‘I must leave you now,’ Fleck went on. He smiled, showing his brown crooked teeth. ‘We shipmasters have our business to attend to. I will see you later.’

He left us to fix up the deck-chairs and went for’ard into the wheelhouse beyond the wireless cabin. Marie stretched herself out with a sigh, closed her eyes and in five minutes had the colour back in her cheeks. In ten minutes she had fallen asleep. I should have liked to do the same myself, but Colonel Raine wouldn’t have liked it. ‘External vigilance, my boy’ was his repeated watchword, so I looked round me as vigilantly as I could. But there was nothing much to be vigilant about.

Above, a white-hot sun in a washed-out blue-white sky. To the west, a green-blue sea, to the east, the sunward side, deep green sparkling waters pushed into a long low swell by the warm twenty-knot trade wind. Off to the south-east, some vague and purplish blurs on the horizon I that might have been islands or might equally well have been my imagination. And in the whole expanse of sea not a ship or boat in sight. Not even a flying fish. I transferred my vigilance to the schooner.

Perhaps it wasn’t the filthiest vessel in all the seven seas, I’d never seen them all, but it would have taken a good ship to beat it. It was bigger, much bigger, than I had thought, close on a hundred feet in length, and everyone of them greasy, cluttered with refuse, unwashed and unpainted. Or there had been paint, but most of it had sun-blistered off. Two masts, sparred and rigged to carry sails, but no sails in sight, and between the mastheads a wireless aerial that trailed down to the radio cabin, about twenty feet for’ard from where I sat. I could see the rusted ventilator beyond its open door and beyond that a place that might have been Fleck’s charthouse or cabin or both and still further for’ard, but on a higher elevation, the closed-in bridge. Beyond that again, I supposed, below deck level, would be the crew quarters. I spent almost five minutes gazing thoughtfully at the superstructure and fore part of the ship with the odd vague feeling that there was something wrong, that there was something as it shouldn’t have been. Maybe Colonel Raine would have got it, but I couldn’t. I felt I had done my duty by the colonel, and keeping my eyes open any longer wouldn’t help anyone, asleep or awake they could toss us over the side whenever they wished. I’d had three hours’ sleep in the past forty-eight. I closed my eyes. I went to sleep.

When I awoke it was just on noon. The sun was almost directly overhead, but the chair shades were wide and the trade winds cool. Captain Fleck had just seated himself on the side of the hatchway. Apparently whatever business he had to attend to was over, and guessing the nature of that business was no trick at all, he’d just finished a long and difficult interview with a bottle of whisky. His eyes were slightly glazed and even at three feet to windward I’d no difficulty at all in smelling the Scotch. But conscience or maybe something else had got into him for he was carrying a tray with glasses, a bottle of sherry and a small stone jar.

‘We’ll send you a bite of food by-and-by.’ He sounded almost apologetic. ‘Thought you might like a snifter, first?’

‘Uh-huh.’ I looked at the stone jar. ‘What’s in it? Cyanide?’

‘Scotch,’ he said shortly. He poured out two drinks, drained his own at a gulp and nodded at Marie who was lying facing us, her face almost completely hidden under her windblown hair. ‘How about Mrs Bentall?’

‘Let her sleep. She needs it. Who’s giving you the orders for all of this, Fleck?’

‘Eh?’ He was off-balance, but only for a second, his tolerance to alcohol seemed pretty high. ‘Orders? What orders? Whose orders?’

‘What are you going to do with us?’

‘Impatient to find out, aren’t you, Bentall?’

‘I just love it here. Not very communicative, are you?’

‘Have another drink.’

‘I haven’t even started this one. How much longer do you intend keeping us here?’

He thought it over for a bit, then said slowly: ‘I don’t know. Your guess isn’t so far out, I’m not the principal in this. There was somebody very anxious indeed to see you.’ He gulped down some more whisky. ‘But he isn’t so sure now.’

‘He might have told you that before you took us from the hotel.’

‘He didn’t know then. Radio, not five minutes ago. He’s coming through again at 1900 hours – seven o’clock sharp. You’ll have your answer then. I hope you like it.’ There was something sombre in his voice that I didn’t find very encouraging. He switched his glance to Marie, looked at her for a long time in silence, then stirred. ‘Kind of a nice girl you got there, Bentall.’

‘Sure. That’s my wife, Fleck. Look the other way.’

He turned slowly and looked at me, his face hard and cold. But there was something else in it too, I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

‘If I were ten years younger or maybe even half a bottle of whisky soberer,’ he said without animosity, ‘I’d have your front teeth for that, Bentall.’ He looked away across the green dazzle of the ocean, the glass of whisky forgotten in his hand. ‘I got a daughter just a year or two younger than her. Right now she’s in the University of California. Liberal Arts. Thinks her old man’s a captain in the Australian Navy.’ He swirled the drink around in his glass. ‘Maybe it’s better she keeps on thinking just that, maybe it’s better that she never sees me again. But if I knew I would never see her again …’

I got it. I’m no Einstein but I don’t have to be beaten over the head more than a few times to make me see the obvious. The sun was hotter than ever, but I didn’t feel warm any more. I didn’t want him to realize that he had been talking to me, too, not just to himself, so I said: ‘You’re no Australian, are you, Fleck?’

‘No?’

‘No. You talk like one, but it’s an overlaid accent.’

‘I’m as English as you are,’ he growled. ’But my home’s in Australia.’

‘Who’s paying for all this, Fleck?’

He rose abruptly to his feet, gathered up the empty glasses and bottles and went away without another word.

It wasn’t until about half past five in the evening that Fleck came to tell us to get below. Maybe he’d spotted a vessel on the horizon and didn’t want to take the chance of anyone seeing us if they approached too closely, maybe he just thought we’d been on deck long enough. The prospect of returning to that stinking hole was no pleasure, but apart from the fact that both of us had slept nearly all day and felt rested again, we weren’t too reluctant to go: black cumulus thunderheads had swept up out of the east in the late afternoon, an obscured sun had turned the air cool and the rain wasn’t far away. It looked as if it were going to be a black and dirty night. The sort of night that would suit Captain Fleck very well indeed: the sort of night, I hoped, that would suit us even better.

The hatch-cover dropped in place behind us and the bolt slid home. Marie gave a little shiver and hugged herself tightly.

‘Well, another night in the Ritz coming up. You should have asked for fresh batteries – that torch isn’t going to last us all night.’

‘It won’t have to. One way or another we’ve spent our last night on this floating garbage can. We’re leaving this evening, just as soon as it’s good and dark. If Fleck has his way we’ll be leaving with a couple of iron bars tied to our feet: if I have mine, we’ll leave without them. If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Fleck.’

‘What do you mean?’ she whispered. ‘You – you were sure that nothing was going to happen to us. Remember all the reasons you gave me when we arrived on board last night. You said Fleck was no killer.’

‘I still don’t think he is. Not by nature, anyway. He’s been drinking all day, trying to drown his conscience. But there are many things that can make a man do what he doesn’t want to do, even kill: threats, blackmail, a desperate need for money. I was speaking to him while you slept. It seems that whoever wanted me out here no longer needs me. What it was for I don’t know, but whatever it was the end appears to have been achieved without me.’

‘He told you that we – that we –’

‘He told me nothing, directly. He merely said that the person who had arranged the kidnap thought that he no longer wanted me – or us. The definite word is to come through at seven but from the way Fleck spoke there wasn’t much doubt about what the word is going to be. I think old Fleck’s got a soft spot for you and he spoke of you, by inference, as if you already belonged in the past. Very touching, very wistful.’

She touched my arm, looked up at me with a strange expression I’d never seen before and said simply: ‘I’m scared. It’s funny, all of a sudden I look into the future and I don’t see it and I’m scared. Are you?’

‘Of course I’m scared,’ I said irritably. ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think you are, it’s just something to say. I know you’re not afraid – not of death, anyway. It’s not that you’re any braver than the rest of us, it’s just that if death came your way you’d be so busy figuring, planning, calculating, scheming, working out a way to beat it that you’d never even see it coming except in an academic sort of way. You’re working out a way to beat it now, you’re sure you will beat it: death for you, death that even one chance in a million might avoid, would be the supreme insult.’ She smiled at me, rather self-consciously, then went on:

‘Colonel Raine told me a good deal about you. He said that when things are completely desperate and there’s no hope left, it’s in the nature of man to accept the inevitable, but he said you wouldn’t, not because it was any positive thing, but just because you wouldn’t even know how to set about giving up. He said he thought you were the one man he could ever be afraid of, for if you were strapped to an electric chair and the executioner was pulling the switch, you’d still be figuring a way to beat it.’ She’d been abstractly twisting one of my shirt buttons until it was just about off, but I said nothing, one shirt button more or less wasn’t going to matter very much that night, and now she looked up and smiled again to rob her next words of offence. ‘I think you’re a very arrogant man. I think you’re a man with a complete belief in himself. But one of these days you’re going to meet up with a situation where your self-belief is going to be of just no help at all. ’

‘Mark my words,’ I said nastily. ‘You forgot to say, “Mark my words.”’

The smile faded and she turned away as the hatch opened. It was the brown-skinned Fijian boy, with soup, some sort of stew and coffee. He came and left without a word.

I looked at Marie. ‘Ominous, eh?’

‘What do you mean?’ she said coldly.

‘Our Fijian friend. This morning a grin from ear to ear: tonight the look of a surgeon who’s just come out to tell you that his scalpel slipped.’

‘So?’

‘It’s not the custom,’ I said patiently, ‘to crack gags and do a song-and-dance act when you’re bringing the last meal to the condemned man. The better penitentiaries frown on it.’

‘Oh,’ she said flatly. ‘I see.’

‘Do you want to sample this stuff?’ I went on. ‘Or will I just throw it away?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I’ll try.’

It was worth the try. The soup was good, the stew better, the coffee excellent. The cook had made a miraculous recovery from the depths he’d plumbed that morning: or maybe they’d shot the old one. I’d more to think of. I drained my coffee and looked at Marie.

‘You can swim, I take it?’

‘Not very well,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I can float.’

‘Provided there are no iron bars tied to your feet.’ I nodded. ‘That’ll be enough. Would you like to do a little listening while I do a little work?’

‘Of course.’ She was getting round to forgiving me. We went for’ard and I pulled down a couple of boxes for her to stand on, just below the opening of the port ventilator.

‘You won’t miss much of what they say up top,’ I said. ‘Especially, you’ll hear everything that’s said in or by the radio room. Probably nothing much before seven, but you never know. I’m afraid you’re going to get a bit of a crick in the neck but I’ll relieve you as soon as I’m through.’

I left her there, went back to the after end of the hold, climbed three steps up the iron ladder and made a rough estimate of the distance between the top rung and the bottom of the hatch-cover above. Then I came down and started rummaging around in the metal boxes in the starboard corner until I found a bottle-screw that suited me, picked up a couple of hardboard battens and stowed them away, together with the bottle-screw, behind some boxes.

Back at the platform of wooden boxes where we’d spent the night I pushed aside the two loose battens in the outboard row, cautiously lifted down the boxes with the compasses and binoculars, shoved them to one side, took down the box with the aircraft-type lifebelts and emptied out the contents.

There were twelve of the belts altogether, rubber and reinforced canvas covers with leather harness instead of the more usual tapes. In addition to the CO_2 bottle and shark-repellant cylinder, each belt had another waterproof cylinder with a wire leading up to a small red lamp fixed on the left shoulder strap. There would be a battery inside that cylinder. I pressed the little switch on one of them and the lamp at once glowed a deep bright red, indication that the equipment, though obsolete, was not old and good augury for the operating efficiency of the gas and water-tightness of the inflated belts. But it wasn’t a thing to be left to chance: I picked out four belts at random and struck the release knob on the first of them.

The immediate hiss of compressed gas wasn’t so terribly loud, I supposed, but inside that confined space it seemed as if everybody aboard the schooner must hear it. Certainly Marie heard it, for she jumped off her box and came quickly back into the pool of light cast by the suspended torch.

‘What’s that?’ she asked quickly. ‘What made the noise?’

‘No rats, no snakes, no fresh enemies,’ I assured her. The hissing had now stopped and I held up a round, stiff, fully inflated lifebelt for her inspection. ‘Just testing. Seems O.K. I’ll test one or two more, but I’ll try to keep it quiet. Heard anything yet?’

‘Nothing. Plenty of talk, that is, Fleck and that Australian man. But it’s mostly about charts, courses, islands, cargoes, things like that. And their girl friends in Suva.’

‘That must be interesting.’

‘Not the way they tell it,’ she snapped.

‘Dreadful,’ I agreed. ‘Just what you were saying last night. Men are all the same. Better get back before you miss anything.’

She gave me a long considering look but I was busy testing the other lifebelts, muffling the noise under the two blankets and the pillows. All four worked perfectly and when, after ten minutes, none showed any sign of deflation the chances seemed high that all the others were at least as good. I picked out another four, hid them behind some boxes, deflated the four I’d tested and replaced them in the box with the others. A minute later I’d all the battens and boxes back in place.

I looked at my watch. It lacked fifteen minutes to seven. There was little enough time left. I went aft again, inspected the water drums with my torch: heavy canvas carrying straps, the shell concave to fit the back, five-inch-diameter spring-loaded lid on top, a spigot with tap at the bottom. They looked sound enough. I dragged two of them out of the corner, snapped open the lids and saw that they were nearly full. I closed the lids again and shook the drums as vigorously as possible. No water escaped, they were completely tight. I turned both the taps on full, let the water come gushing out on the deck – it wasn’t my schooner – then, when they were as empty as I could get them, mopped their interiors dry with a shirt from my case and made my way for’ard to Marie.

‘Anything yet?’ I whispered.

‘Nothing.’

‘I’ll take over for a bit. Here’s the torch. I don’t know what things there are that go bump in the night in the Pacific Ocean, but it is possible that those lifebelts may get torn or just turn out to be perished through age. So I think we’ll take along a couple of empty water drums. They have a very high degree of buoyancy, far more than we require, so I thought we might as well use them to take along some clothes inside, whatever you think you’ll need. Don’t spend all night deciding what to take. Incidentally, I believe many women carry polythene bags in their cases for wrapping up this and that. Got any?’

‘One or two.’

‘Leave one out, please.’

‘Right.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t know much about boats but I think this one has changed once or twice in the past hour.’

‘How do you figure that out?’ Old sea-dog Bentall, very tolerant to the landlubbers.

‘We’re not rolling any more, are we? The waves are passing us from the stern. And it’s the second or third change I’ve noticed.’

She was right, the swell had died down considerably but what little was left was from aft. But I paid small attention to this, I knew the trades died away at night and local currents could set up all kinds of cross-motions in the water. It didn’t seem worth worrying about. She went away and I pressed close to the deckhead.

All I could hear at first was a violently loud tinny rattling against the radiator, a rattling that grew more violent and persistent with every second that passed. Rain, and very heavy rain at that: it sounded like rain that meant to keep going on for a long time. Both Fleck and I would be happy about that.

And then I heard Fleck’s voice. First the patter of hurrying footsteps, then his voice. I guessed that he was standing just inside the doorway of the wireless cabin.

‘Time you got your earphones on, Henry.’ The voice had a reverberating and queerly metallic timbre from its passage down the funnel-shaped ventilator, but was perfectly plain. ‘Just on schedule.’

‘Six minutes yet, boss.’ Henry, seated at the radio table, must have been five feet away from Fleck, yet his voice was hardly less distinct: the ventilator’s amplifying effects were as good as that.

‘Doesn’t matter. Tune in.’

I strained my ear against that ventilator until it seemed to me that I was about halfway up it, but I heard nothing further. After a couple of minutes I felt a tug at my sleeve.

‘All done,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Here’s the torch.’

‘Right.’ I jumped down, helped her up and murmured: ‘For heaven’s sake don’t move from there. Our friend Henry’s listening in for the final word right now.’

I had little enough left to do and three or four minutes saw me all through. I stuffed a blanket inside the polythene bag and tied the neck securely: that made me the complete optimist. There was an awful lot of ‘ifs’ attached to that blanket. If we managed to break open the hatch, if we managed to get off the schooner without too many bullet holes in us, if we didn’t subsequently drown, if we weren’t eaten alive by sharks or barracuda or whatever else took a fancy to us during the hours of darkness, then it seemed like a good idea to have a water-soaked blanket to ward off sunstroke the following day. But I didn’t want to have to cope with its water-logged deadweight during the night: hence the polythene bag. I tied the bag on to one of the drums and had just finished stowing some clothes and cigarettes inside the same drum when Marie came aft and stood beside me.

She said without preamble and in a quiet still voice, not scared: ‘They don’t need us any more.’

‘Well, at least my preparations haven’t been wasted. They discussed it?’

‘Yes. They might have been discussing the weather. I think you’re wrong about Fleck, he’s not worried about doing away with anyone. From the way he talked it was just an interesting problem. Henry asked him how they were going to get rid of us and Fleck said: “Let’s do it nice and quiet and civilized. We’ll tell them that the boss has changed his mind. We’ll tell them they’re to be delivered to him as soon as possible. We’ll forget and forgive, we’ll take them up to the cabin for a drink, slip them the knock-out drops then ease them soft and gently over the side.”’

‘A charming fellow. We drown peacefully and even if we do wash up somewhere there’ll be no bullet holes to start people asking questions.’

‘But a post-mortem can always show the presence of poison or narcotics –’

‘Any post-mortem carried out on us,’ I interrupted heavily, ‘could be made without the doctor taking his hands from his pockets. If there are no broken bones you can’t determine anything about the cause of death from a couple of nice clean shiny skeletons which would be all that was left after the denizens of the deep had finished with us. Or maybe the sharks eat bones, too: I wouldn’t know.’

‘Do you have to talk like that?’ she asked coldly.

‘I’m only trying to cheer myself up.’ I handed her a couple of lifebelts. ‘Adjust the shoulder straps so that you can wear them both round your waist, one above the other. Be careful that you don’t strike the CO_2 release accidentally. Wait till you are in the water before you inflate.’ I was already shrugging into my own harness. She appeared to be taking her time about adjusting the straps so I said: ‘Please hurry.’

‘There is no hurry,’she said.‘Henry said, “I suppose we’ll have to wait a couple of hours before we do anything,’ and Fleck said, “Yes, that at least.”May be they’re going to wait until it gets really dark.’

‘Or maybe they don’t want the crew to see anything. The reasons don’t matter. What does matter is that the two-hour delay refers to the time when they intend ditching us. They could come for us any time. And you’re overlooking the fact that when they do discover we’re missing the first thing they’ll do is back-track and search. I don’t much fancy being run down by a schooner or chopped to pieces by a propeller blade or just used for a little target practice. The sooner we’re gone the less chance we have of being picked up when they do discover we’re missing.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she admitted.

It’s like the colonel told you.’ I said. ‘Bentall thinks of everything.’

She didn’t think that worth any comment so we finished fixing the lifebelts in silence. I gave her the torch and asked her to hold it in position while I climbed up the ladder with the bottle-screw and two hardwood battens and set about opening the hatch. I placed one of the hardwood battens on the top rung, set one end of the bottle-screw on the wood directly above the rung and unscrewed the upper eyebolt until it was firmly against the other batten which I’d placed under the hatch, to spread the load. I could hear the rain drumming furiously on the hatch and shivered involuntarily at the prospect of the imminent soaking, which was pretty silly when I came to consider just how much wetter I would be a few seconds later.

Forcing the hatch-cover was easy. Either the wood of the cover was old and dry or the screws holding the bolt in position were rusted for I’d only given the central shank of the bottle-screw half a dozen turns, the counter-threaded eye-bolts steadily forcing themselves farther apart, when I heard the first creak of the wood beginning to give way and splinter. Another half-dozen turns and suddenly all resistance to my turning hand ceased. The bolt had come clear of its moorings and the way out was clear – if, that was to say, Fleck and his friends weren’t standing there patiently waiting to blow my head off as soon as it appeared above the level of the hatch. There was only one way to find out, it didn’t appeal much but at least it was logical. I would stick my head out and see what happened to it.

I handed down the battens and the bottle-screw, checked that the two water drums were conveniently to hand, softly told Marie to switch off the torch, eased the hatch-cover open a few inches and cautiously felt for the bolt. It was just where it ought to have been, lying loose on top of the hatch-cover. I lowered it gently to the deck, bent my back as I took another two steps up the ladder, hooked my fingers over the edge of the hatch-cover and straightened both back and arm in one movement so that the hinged cover swung vertically open and my head was suddenly two feet above deck level. A jack-in-the-box couldn’t have done any better. Nobody shot me.

Nobody shot me because there was nobody there to shoot me, and there was nobody there to shoot me because no one but a very special type of moron would have ventured out on that deck without an absolutely compelling reason. Even then he would have required a suit of armour. If you were willing to stand at the bottom of Niagara Falls and to say to yourself that it was only raining, then you could have said it was raining that night. If anyone ever gets around to inventing a machinegun that fires water instead of bullets I’ll know exactly what it will be like at the receiving end. Enormous cold drops of water, so close together as to be almost a solid wall, lashed the schooner with a ferocity and intensity I would not have believed possible. The decks were a welter of white seething foam as those cannonball giant drops disintegrated on impact and rebounded high into the air, while the sheer physical weight, the pitiless savagery of that torrential rain drumming on your bent back was nothing short of terrifying. Within five seconds I was literally soaked to the skin. I had to fight the almost overwhelming impulse to pull that cover over my head and retreat to the haven of that suddenly warm and dry and infinitely desirable hold. But then I thought of Fleck and his knock-out drops and of a couple of nice new shiny skeletons on the floor of the sea, and I had the hatch-cover fully back and was on deck, calling softly for the water-drums, before I was properly aware of what I was doing.

Fifteen seconds later Marie and the two drums were on deck and I was lowering the hatch-cover back into position and placing the bolt in approximately the original position in case someone did venture out later on a tour of inspection.

With the darkness and the blinding rain visibility didn’t exceed a few feet and we felt rather than saw our way to the stern of the schooner. I leaned far over the rail on the port counter to try to establish the position of the screw, for although the schooner was making hardly any more than three knots now – I supposed the lack of visibility must have forced Fleck to reduce speed – even so that screw could still chop us up pretty badly. At least that.

At first I could see nothing, just a sea surface that was no longer that but a churned and hissing expanse of milky white froth, but my eyes were gradually becoming more adjusted to the darkness and after a minute or so I could clearly make out the smooth black water in the rain-free shelter under the long overhang of the schooner’s stern. Not quite black – it was black flecked with the sparkling iridescence of phosphorus, and it wasn’t long before I traced the area of maximum turbulence that gave rise to the phosphorescence. That was where the screw was – and it was far enough forward to let us drop off over the sternpost without any fear of being sucked into the vortex of the screw.

Marie went first. She held a water drum in one hand while I lowered her by the other until she was half-submerged in the water. Then I let go. Five seconds later I was in the water myself.

No one heard us go, no one saw us go. And we didn’t see Fleck and his schooner go. He wasn’t using his steaming lights that night. With the line of business he was in, he’d probably forgotten where the switch was.

CHAPTER 3

Tuesday 7 p.m.–Wednesday 9 a.m.

After the numbing stinging cold of that torrential rain the water in the sea was almost blissfully warm. There were no waves, any that dared show its head was beaten flat by that deluge, and what little swell there was was long enough to be no more than a gentle undulation on the surface of the sea. The wind still seemed to be from the east: that was if my assumption that the schooner had still been travelling south had been correct.

For the first thirty seconds or so I couldn’t see Marie. I knew she could be only yards away but the rain bouncing off the water raised so dense and impenetrable a curtain that nothing at sea level could be seen through its milky opacity. I shouted, twice, but there was no reply. I took half a dozen strokes, towing the can behind me, and literally bumped into her. She was coughing and spluttering as if she had swallowed some water, but she still retained hold of her water drum and seemed otherwise unharmed. She was high in the water so she must have remembered to operate the CO_2 release switch on her lifebelt.

I put my head close to hers and said: ‘All right?’

‘Yes.’ She coughed some more and said: ‘My face and neck. That rain – they feel cut.’

It was too dark to see whether her face was, in fact, cut. But I could believe it, my own face felt as if it had blundered into a wasps’ nest. Black mark for Bentall. The first and most obvious thing that I should have done after opening that hatch and feeling the lash of that cannonading rain should have been to dig some of the left-over clothes out of our suitcases and wrap them round our heads, bandanna-fashion. But too late for tears now. I reached for the plastic bag attached to my drum, ripped it open and spread the blanket over our heads. We could still feel the impact of that rain like a shower of huge hailstones but at least our skins were no longer exposed. It was better than nothing.

When I’d finished arranging it Marie said: ‘What do we do now? Stay here in our tent or start swimming?’

I passed up all the obvious remarks about wondering whether we should swim for Australia or South America, they didn’t even begin to seem funny in the circumstances, and said: ‘I think we should try to move away from here. If this rain keeps up Fleck will never find us. But there’s no guarantee that it will last. We might as well swim west, that’s the way the wind and the swell are running, and it’s easiest for us.’

‘Isn’t that the way Fleck would think and move to the west looking for us?’

‘If he thinks we’re only half as twisted as he is himself, he’ll probably figure we’ve gone in the other direction. Heads you win, tails you lose. Come on.’

We made poor speed. As she’d said, she was no shakes as a swimmer, and those two drums and the soggy heavy blanket didn’t help us much, but we did cover a fair bit of ground in the first hour, swimming for ten minutes, resting for five. If it hadn’t been for the thought that we could do this sort of thing for the next month and still not arrive anywhere, it would have been quite pleasant: the sea was still warm, the rain was beginning to ease and the sharks stayed at home.

After an hour and a half or what I guessed to be approximately that, during which Marie became very quiet, rarely speaking, not even answering when I spoke to her, I said: ‘Enough. This’ll do us. Any energy we have left we’ll use for survival. If Fleck swings this far off course it’s just bad luck and not much that we can do about it.’

I let my legs sink down into the sea, then let out an involuntary exclamation as if I had been bitten or stung. Something large or solid had brushed my leg, and although there are a lot of large and solid things in the sea all I could think of was of something about fifteen feet long with a triangular fin and a mouth like an unsprung bear-trap. And then it came to me that I’d felt no swirl or disturbance in the water and I cautiously lowered my legs again just as Marie said: ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘I wish old Fleck would bring his schooner by here,’ I said yearningly. ‘That would be the end of both of them.

It wasn’t that something large and solid had brushed by my leg, it had been my leg brushing by something large and solid, which was a different thing altogether. ‘I’m standing in about four feet of water.’

There was a momentary pause, then she said: ‘Me, too.’ It was the slow dazed answer of one who cannot believe something: more accurately, of one who can’t understand something, and I found it vaguely puzzling. ‘What do you think –?’

‘Land, dear girl,’ I said expansively. I felt a bit light-headed with relief, I hadn’t given tuppence for our chances of survival. ‘The way the sea-bed is sloping up it can be nothing else. Now’s our chance to see those dazzling sands and waving palms and the brown-skinned beauties we’ve heard so much about. Give me your hand.’

There was no answering levity or even gladness from her, she just took my hand in silence as I transferred the blanket to my other hand and started feeling my cautious way up the rapidly shelving sea-floor. In less than a minute we were standing on rock, and on any other night we would have been high and dry. In that rain, we were high and wet. But we were high. Nothing else mattered.

We lifted both water drums on to the shore and I draped the blanket over Marie’s head: the rain had slackened, but slackening on that night was a comparative thing only, it was still fierce enough to be hurtful. I said: ‘I’m just going to take a brief look round. Back in five minutes.’

‘All right,’ she said dully. It didn’t seem to matter whether I came or went.

I was back in two minutes, not five. I’d taken eight steps and fallen into the sea on the other side and it didn’t take me long to discover that our tiny island was only four times as long as it was broad and consisted of nothing but rock. I would have liked to see Robinson Crusoe making out on that little lot. Marie hadn’t moved from where I had left her.

It’s just a little rock in the middle of the sea,’ I reported. ‘But at least we’re safe. For the present, anyway.’

‘Yes.’ She rubbed the rock with the toe of her sandal. It’s coral, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’ As with many others, the sun-drenched coral islands of the Pacific had formed a staple part of my earlier reading diet but when I incautiously sat down to take the weight off my feet and stock of the situation my youthful enthusiasms vanished pretty rapidly. If this was coral it felt like the sort of thing an Indian Fakir might graduate to after he’d mastered the easier stuff, like sleeping on a bed of red-hot nails. The rock was hard, broken, jagged and with frequent spiny razor-sharp edges. I pushed myself quickly to my feet, careful not to cut my hands on the coral, picked up the two drums and set them down on the highest part of the reef. I went back for Marie, took her arm and we sat down side by side on the drums with our backs to the wind and the rain. She offered me part of the blanket as protection, and I wasn’t too proud to take it. It at least gave me the illusion of shelter.

I talked to her for some time, but she only had monosyllables to offer in return. Then I dug a couple of cigarettes out from the packet I’d stowed in my water drum and offered her one, which she took, but that wasn’t very successful either for the blanket leaked like a sieve and inside a minute both cigarettes were completely sodden. After ten minutes or so I said: ‘What’s the matter, Marie? I agree that this is not the Grand Pacific Hotel, but at least we’re alive.’

‘Yes.’ A pause, then matter-of-factly: ‘I thought I was going to die out there tonight. I expected to die. I was so sure I would that this – well, it’s a sort of anticlimax. It’s not real. Not yet. You understand?’

‘No. What made you sure you were going to – ?’ I broke off for a moment. ‘Don’t tell me that you’re still thinking along the same daft lines as you were last night?’

She nodded in the darkness. I felt the movement of the blanket rather than saw that of her head.

‘I’m sorry, I really am. I can’t help it. Maybe I’m not well, it’s never been like this before,’ she said helplessly. ‘You look into the future but almost all the time there isn’t any but if you do catch glimpses of it you’re not there yourself. It’s a kind of curtain drawn between you and tomorrow, and because you can’t see past it you feel that there is none. No tomorrow, I mean.’

‘Superstitious rubbish,’ I said shortly. ‘Just because you’re tired and out of sorts and soaked and shivering, you start having recourse to those morbid fancies. You’re no help to me, just no help at all. Half the time I think Colonel Raine was right and that you would make a first-class partner in this god-forsaken racket of ours: and half the time I’m convinced that you’re going to be a dead-weight round my neck and drag me under.’ It was cruel, but I meant to be kind. ‘God knows how you managed to survive this business until now.’

‘I told you it’s new, something completely new for me. It is superstitious nonsense and I’ll not mention it again.’ She reached out and touched my hand. ‘It’s so terribly unfair to you. I’m sorry.’

I didn’t feel proud of myself at all. I let the subject go and returned to the consideration of the South Pacific. I was coming to the conclusion that I didn’t much care for the South Pacific. The rain was the worst I’d ever known: coral was nasty sharp dangerous stuff: it was inhabited by a bunch of homicidally-minded characters: and, another shattered illusion, the nights could be very cold indeed. I felt clammy and chilled under the clinging wetness of that blanket and both of us were shaken by uncontrollable bouts of shivering which grew more frequent as the night wore on. At one stage it seemed to me that the sensible and logical thing for us to do would be to lie down in the very much warmer sea water and spend the night like that but when I went, briefly, to test this theory, I changed my mind. The water was warm enough, what changed my mind was a tentacle that appeared from a cleft in the coral and wrapped itself round my left ankle: the octopus to which it belonged couldn’t have weighed more than a few pounds but it still took most of my sock with it as I wrenched my leg away, which gave me some idea of what to expect if its big brother happened by.

It was the longest, the most miserable night I have ever known. It must have been about midnight when the rain eased off but it continued in a steady drizzle until shortly before dawn. Sometimes I dozed off, sometimes Marie did, but when she did it was a restless troubled sleep, her breathing too shallow and quick, her hands too cold, her forehead too warm. Sometimes we both arose and stumbled precariously on the rough slippery rock to get our circulation moving again, but mostly we sat in silence.

I stared out into the rain and the darkness and I thought of just three things during the interminable hours of that night: the island we were on, Captain Fleck and Marie Hopeman.

I knew little enough about Polynesian islands, but I did recall that those coral islets were of two types: atolls, and barrier reefs for larger islands. If we were on the former, a broken, circular and probably uninhabited ring of coral islets, the future looked bleak indeed: but if it were part of a reef enclosing the lagoon round a large and possibly inhabited island, then we might still be lucky.

I thought of Captain Fleck. I thought of how much I would give for the chance of meeting him again, and what would happen then, and I wondered why he had done what he had done and who was the man behind the kidnap and attempted murder. One thing seemed certain and that was that the missing scientists and their wives were going to stay missing: I had been classified as redundant and would never now find out where they were or what had happened to them. Right then I wasn’t so worried about them, the longing to meet up with Fleck was the predominant emotion in my mind. A strange man. A hard callous ruthless man but a man I would have sworn was not all bad. But I knew nothing of him. All I did know now with certainty was his reason for deciding to wait till nine o’clock before getting rid of us: he must have known that the schooner had been passing a coral reef and if they’d thrown us overboard at seven o’clock we might well have been washed up before morning. If we had been found, identified and traced back to the Grand Pacific Hotel, Fleck would have had a great deal of explaining to do.

And I thought of Marie Hopeman, not as a person but as a problem. Whatever dark forebodings had possessed her had had no validity in themselves, they were just symptomatic of something else, and I no longer had any doubts about what that something else was. She was sick, not mentally but physically: the succession of bad flights from England to Suva and then the night on the boat and now all this all added up to far too little sleep and too little food, and the lack of those coupled with physical exhaustion had lowered her resistance till she was pretty open to anything that came along: and what was coming along was fever or chill or just plain old-fashioned ‘flu: there had certainly been plenty of that around when we had left London. I didn’t like to think what the outcome was going to be if she had to spend another twenty-four hours in sea-soaked clothes on this bare and exposed islet. Or even twelve.

Sometimes during the night my eyes became so tired from staring into the rain and the darkness that I began to have some mild forms of hallucination. I thought I could see lights moving in the rain-blurred distance, and that was bad enough: but when I began to imagine I could hear voices, I resolutely shut my eyes and tried to force myself into sleep. Sitting hunched forward on a water-can with only a soaking blanket for cover, falling off to sleep is quite a feat. But I finally made it, about an hour before the dawn.

I awoke with the sun hot on my back. I woke to the sound of voices, real voices, this time. I awoke to the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

I flung back the overhanging blanket as Marie stirred and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was a gleaming glorious dazzling world, a peaceful sun-warmed panorama of beauty that made the long night just gone a dark nightmare that could never have been.

A string of coral isles and reefs, reefs painted in the most impossible greens and yellows and violets and browns and whites, stretched away on both sides from us in two huge curving horns that all but encircled and enclosed a huge lagoon of burnished aquamarine, and, beyond the lagoon, the most remarkably-shaped island I’d ever laid eyes on. It was as if some giant hand had cut a giant stetson down the middle, and thrown one half away. The island reached its highest point in the extreme north, where it plunged vertically down into the sea: from this peak, it sloped down steeply to the east and south – I could only guess that it would be the same on the west – and where the wide brim of the stetson would have been was a flat plain running down to beaches of dazzling white sand which, even at that hour of the morning and at a distance of three miles, was positively hurtful to the eyes. The mountain itself, a rich bluish-purple in that early sunlight, was bald and bare of any vegetation: the plain below was bare, too, only scrub bushes and grass, with scattered palm down near the water’s edge.

But I didn’t spend much time on the scenery, I’d like to think I’d be right in there with the next man when it came to appreciating the beauties of nature, but not after a rain-soaked and chilly night on an exposed reef: I was far more interested in the outrigger canoe that was coming arrowing in towards us through the mirror-calm waters of that green lagoon.

There were two men in it, big sturdy brown-skinned men with huge mops of crinkly black hair and their paddles were driving in perfect unison into and through the gleaming glass of those waters faster than I would have believed possible, moving so quickly that the flying spray from the paddles was a continuously iridescent rainbow glitter in the rays of the rising sun. Less than twenty yards away from the reef they dug their paddles deep, slowed down their outrigger canoe and brought it slewing round to a standstill less than ten feet away. One of the men jumped out into the thigh-deep water, waded towards us then climbed nimbly up the coral. His feet were bare but the sharp rock didn’t worry him any that I could see. His face was a comical mixture of astonishment and good humour, astonishment at finding two white people on a reef at that hour of the morning, good humour because the world was a wonderful place and always would be. You don’t see that kind of face often, but when you do you can never mistake it. Good humour won. He gave us a huge white grin and said something that meant nothing at all to me.

He could see that it meant nothing at all and he wasn’t the kind of man to waste time. He looked at Marie, shook his head and clucked his tongue as his eyes took in the pale face, the two unnaturally red patches on her cheeks and the purplish shadows under her eyes, then grinned again, ducked his head as in greeting, picked her up and waded out to the canoe. I made it under my own steam, lugging the two water drums along.

The canoe was fitted with a mast, but there was no wind yet, so we had to paddle across the lagoon to the island. At least the two brown men did and I was glad to leave it to them. What they did with that canoe would have had me gasping and wheezing in five minutes and in a hospital bed in ten. They’d have been a sensation at Henley. They kept it up non-stop for the twenty minutes it took us to cross the lagoon, churning up the water as if the Loch Ness monster was after them, but still finding time and energy to chatter and laugh with each other all the way. If they were representative of the rest of the island’s population, we had fallen into good hands.

And that there were others on the island was obvious. As we came close to the shore, I could count at least half a dozen houses, stilted affairs with the floor about three feet off the ground and enormously deep-eaved thatched roofs that swept down steeply from high ridge-poles to within four or five feet of the ground. The houses had neither doors nor windows, understandably enough, for they had no walls either, except for one, the largest, in a clearing near the shore, close in to a stand of coconut palms: the other houses were set farther back and to the south. Still farther south was a metal and corrugated iron eyesore, grey in colour, like an old-fashioned crushing plant and hopper in a quarry. Beyond this again was a long low shed, with a slightly sloping corrugated iron roof: it must have been a real pleasure to work under that when the sun was high in the sky.

We were heading in just to the right of a small pier – not a real landing-stage with anchored piles but a thirty-foot-long floating platform of bound logs, secured on the shore end by ropes tied round a couple of tree stumps – when I saw a man lying on the shore. A white man, sunbathing. He was a lean wiry old bird with a lot of white hair all over his face, dark spectacles on his eyes and a grubby towel strategically placed across his midriff. He appeared to be asleep, but he wasn’t, for when the bow of the canoe crunched into the sand he sat up with a jerk, whipped off this dark glasses, peered myopically in our direction, pawed around the sand till he located a pair of slightly-tinted spectacles, stuck them across the bridge of his nose, said, ‘God bless my soul!’ in an agitated voice jumped to his feet with remarkable speed for such an old duffer and hurried into a nearby palm-thatched hut clutching his towel round him.

‘Quite a tribute to you, my dear,’ I murmured.

‘You looking like something the tide washed up and the old boy about ninety-nine, but you can still knock him for six.’

‘He didn’t seem any too pleased to see us, I thought,’ she said doubtfully. She smiled at the big man who’d just lifted her from the canoe and set her on her feet on the sand and went on: ‘Maybe he’s a recluse. Maybe he’s one of those remittanceman beachcombers and other white people are the last he wants to see.’

‘He’s just gone for his best bib and tucker,’ I said confidently. ‘He’ll be back in a minute to give us the big hand.’

And he was. We’d hardly reached the top of the beach when he reappeared from the hut, dressed in a white shirt and white ducks, with a panama on his head. He’d a white beard, flowing white moustache and plentiful thick white hair. If Buffalo Bill had ever worn tropical whites and a straw hat, he’d have been a dead ringer for Buffalo Bill.

He came puffing down to meet us, his hand outstretched in greeting. I’d made no mistake about the warmth of welcome, but I had about the age: he wasn’t a day over sixty, perhaps only five-five, and a pretty fit fifty-five at that.

‘God bless my soul, God bless my soul!’ He wrung our hands as if we’d brought him the first prize in the Irish Sweepstake. ‘What a surprise! Morning dip, you know – just drying off – couldn’t believe my eyes – where in all the world have you two come from? No, no, don’t answer now. Straight up to my house. Delightful surprise, delightful.’ He scurried off in front of us, God blessing himself with every other step. Marie smiled at me and we walked after him.

He led us along a short path, across a white-shingled front, up a wide flight of six wooden steps into his house: like the others, the floor was well clear of the ground. But once inside I could see why, unlike the other houses, it had walls: it had to have, to support the large bookcases and glass-covered showcases that lined three-quarters of the wall area of the room. The rest of the walls were given over to doors and window spaces, no glass in the windows, just screens of plaited leaves that could be raised or lowered as wished. There was a peculiar smell that I couldn’t place at first. The floor seemed to be made of the mid-ribs of some type of leaf, coconut palm, probably, laid across close-set joists, and there was no ceiling as such, just steep-angled rafters with thatch above. I looked at this thatch for a long and very interested moment. There was a big old-fashioned roll-top desk in one corner and a large safe against the inside wall. There were some brightly coloured straw mats on the floor, most of which was given over to low-slung comfortable looking rattan chairs and settees, each with a low table beside it. A man could be comfortable in that room – especially with a drink in his hand.

The old boy – with that beard and moustache I couldn’t think of him as anything else – was a mind-reader.

‘Sit down, sit down. Make yourselves comfortable. A drink? Yes, yes, of course, first of all a drink. You need it, you need it.’ He picked up a little bell, rang it furiously as if he were trying to see how much punishment it could stand before it came apart in his hands, replaced it and looked at me. ‘Too early in the morning for whisky, eh?’

‘Not this morning.’

‘And you, young lady. Some brandy, perhaps? Eh? Brandy?’

‘Thank you.’ She let him have the smile she never bothered letting me have and I could just about see the old boy’s toes curling. ‘You are very kind.’

I was just coming to the resigned conclusion that his staccato and repetitive talking was habitual and was going to be a thought wearing if we had to stay with him for any length of time – and I had the thought, even then, that the voice was vaguely familiar to me – when a rear door opened and a Chinese youth came in. He was very short, very thin, dressed in khaki drill and the only use he had for his facial muscles was to keep his expression buttoned up for he didn’t even bat an eyelid when he saw us.

‘Ah, Tommy, there you are. We have guests, Tommy. Drinks. Brandy for the lady, a large whisky for the gentleman and – let me see now, yes, yes, perhaps I rather think I will – a small whisky for me. Then run a bath. For the lady.’ I could get by with a shave. ‘Then breakfast. You haven’t had breakfast yet?’

I assured him we hadn’t.

‘Excellent! Excellent!’ He caught sight of the two men who had rescued us standing outside on the white shingles with the water drums, raised a bushy white eyebrow in my direction and said: ‘What’s in those?’

‘Our clothes.’

‘Indeed? Yes, yes, I see. Clothes.’ Any opinion he held as to our eccentricities in the choice of suitcases he kept to himself. He went to the doorway. ‘Just leave them there, James. You’ve done a splendid job, both of you. Splendid. I’ll speak to you later.’

I watched the two men smile broadly, then turn away. I said: ‘They speak English?’

‘Certainly. Of course they do.’

‘They didn’t speak any to us.’

‘Um. They didn’t, eh?’ He tugged his beard, Buffalo Bill to the life. ‘You speak any to them?’

I thought, then grinned: ‘No.’

‘There you are then. You might have been any of a score of nationalities.’ He turned as the Chinese boy came in, took the drinks from the tray and handed them to us. ‘Your excellent health.’

I grunted something appropriate and as short as it could decently be and went for that drink like a thirst-stricken camel for the nearest oasis. I insulted a perfectly good Scotch by swallowing half of it at one gulp, but even so it tasted wonderful and I was about to start on the remainder when the old boy said: ‘Well, preliminaries over, decencies observed. Your story, sir. Let’s have it.’

It brought me up short and I looked at him cautiously. I could be wrong about him being a happy old fusspot. I was wrong. The bright blue eyes were shrewd, and what little of his face was available for expression seemed to indicate a certain carefulness, if not actual wariness. Being a little odd in your behaviour doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a little odd in the head.

I gave it to him, short and straight. I said: ‘My wife and I were en route to Australia, by plane. During an overnight stop at Suva we were taken from our hotel at three in the morning by a Captain Fleck and two Indians, forced to board his schooner and locked up. Last night we heard them planning to murder us, so we broke out from the hold where they’d put us – it was a bad night and they didn’t see us go – jumped over the side and after some time washed up on a coral reef. Your men found us there this morning.’

‘God bless my soul! What an extraordinary tale. Extraordinary!’ He kept on blessing himself and shaking his head for a bit, then looked up at me from under bushy white eyebrows. ‘If we could have it with a little more detail, perhaps?’

So I gave it to him again, telling him everything that had happened since we had arrived in Suva. He peered at me through those tinted glasses all the time I was speaking and when I finished he sighed, did some more head shaking and said: ‘Incredible. The whole thing’s quite incredible!’

‘Do you mean that literally?’

‘What? What? That I don’t believe you? But I do believe it, young man! It’s just that everything is so bizarre, so – so fantastic. Of course it’s true, how else would you be here? But – but why should this villainous fellow, this Captain Fleck kidnap you and talk of killing you? It all seems so purposeless, so mad.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘The only thing I can think of – and even that is ridiculous – is that I’m a scientist, a specialist in fuel technology and maybe someone wanted to extract some information from me. Why on earth they should want to do that I just can’t imagine. And how the skipper of an obscure schooner knew that we should be flying out to Australia via Fiji – well, it doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.’

‘As you say, it makes no sense at all. Mr – ah – bless my soul, you must forgive me! I haven’t even asked your names yet!’

‘Bentall. John Bentall. And this is my wife, Marie.’ I smiled at him. ‘And you don’t need to tell me who you are. It’s just come back to me. Dr Harold Witherspoon – Professor Witherspoon, I should say. The doyen of British archaeologists.’

‘You know me then? You recognized me?’ The old boy seemed bucked about it.

‘Well, you do get a good deal of newspaper space,’ I said tactfully. Professor Witherspoon’s love for the public limelight was a byword. ‘And I saw your series of lectures on television, about a year ago.’

He didn’t look so pleased any longer. He suddenly looked downright suspicious, and his eyes narrowed as he said: ‘You interested in archaeology, Mr Bentall? Know anything about it, I mean?’

‘I’m like a million others, Professor. I know about this Egyptian tomb and this lad Tutankhamen who was in it. But I couldn’t begin to spell his name, I doubt if I’m even pronouncing it properly.’

‘So. Good. Forgive my asking, I’ll explain later. I am being most remiss, most remiss. This young lady here is far from well. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a doctor. Have to be, you know. Living your life at the back of beyond.’ He hustled out of the room, returned with a medical case, took out a thermometer and asked Marie to put it in her mouth while he took her wrist.

I said: ‘I don’t want to appear ungrateful or unappreciative of your hospitality, Professor, but my business is rather urgent. How soon will we be able to leave here and get back to Suva?’

‘Not long.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s a ketch from Kandavu – that’s about a hundred miles or so north of here – calls in about every six weeks. It was last here, let me see – yes, about three weeks ago. So, another three weeks.’

That was handy. Three weeks. Not long, he said, but they probably had a different time scale on those islands and looking over that shimmering lagoon with coral reefs beyond I found it easy to understand why. But I didn’t think Colonel Raine would be so happy if I just sat back and admired the lagoon for three weeks so I said: ‘Any planes ever pass this way?’

‘No ships, no planes, nothing.’ He shook his head and kept on shaking it as he examined the thermometer. ‘Bless my soul. A hundred and three and a pulse of a hundred and twenty. Dear, dear! You’re a sick young lady, Mrs Bentall, probably taken it from London with you, Bath, bed and breakfast in that order!’ he held up his hand as Marie murmured a token protest. ‘I insist. I insist. You can have Carstairs’ room. Red Carstairs, my assistant,’ he explained. ‘In Suva at present, recuperating from malaria. Rife in those parts. Expect him back on the next ship. And you, Mr Bentall – 1 expect you’d like a sleep, too?’ He gave a deprecating little laugh. ‘I dare say you didn’t sleep too soundly out on that reef last night.’

‘A clean-up, shave and a couple of hours on one of those very inviting chairs on your veranda will do me,’ I said. ‘No planes either, eh? Any boats on the island I could hire?’

‘The only boat on the island is the one belonging to James and John. Not their right names, those natives from Kandavu have unpronounceable names. They’re here on contract to supply fresh fish and whatever food and fruit they can gather. They wouldn’t take you anyway – even if they would, I’d absolutely forbid it. Absolutely’

‘Too dangerous?’ If it was I was right with him. ‘Of course. And illegal. The Fijian Government forbids inter-island proa travel in the cyclone season. Heavy penalties. Very heavy penalties. For breaking the law.’

‘No radio we could use to send a message?’

‘No radio. Not even a radio receiver.’ The professor smiled. ‘When I’m investigating something that happened many thousands of years ago I find contact with the outside world disturbing in the extreme. All I have is an old-fashioned hand-wound gramophone.’

He seemed a harmless old duffer, so I didn’t tell him what he could do with his gramophone. Instead, while Marie bathed, I had another drink then, after a shave, change and first-class breakfast, stretched out on a low rattan armchair in the shade of the veranda.

I meant to do some heavy thinking for it seemed to me that the situation was such that it was long past time that I showed some rudimentary signs of intelligence but I’d reckoned without my weariness, the warmth of the sun, the effects of a couple of double Scotches on an empty stomach and the soporific sound of the trade-wind whispering its sibilant clicking way through the nodding palms. I thought of the island and how anxious I’d been to leave it and what Professor Witherspoon would say if he knew that the only way to get me off now would be by sheer force. I thought of Captain Fleck and I thought of the professor, and I thought of them both with admiration, Fleck for the fact that he was twice as smart as I’d thought – which made him at least twice as smart as me – and the professor for the fact that he was as polished and accomplished a liar as I’d ever met. And then I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 4

Wednesday 3 p.m.–10 p.m.

There was a war on and I was right in the middle of it. I couldn’t see who or what was to the right or the left of me and I wasn’t even sure whether it was day or night. But there was a war on, I was sure of that. Heavy artillery, laying down a barrage before an attack. I was no hero. Let me get out of the way. I wasn’t going to be cannon-fodder for anyone. I moved, seemed to stumble and felt the sharp pain in my right arm. Shrapnel, perhaps, or a bullet. Maybe they’d invalid me out, it would be a change from the front line. Then I opened my eyes and found that I wasn’t in the front line: I’d achieved the near impossible feat of falling out of an armchair and landing on the wooden floor of Professor Witherspoon’s veranda. I seemed to have made a neat one point landing. On my right elbow. My elbow hurt.

I’d been dreaming, but I hadn’t been dreaming about the rumble of the explosions and the earthshaking. As I got to my feet, clutching my arm and trying not to hop around too much. I heard another couple of distant muffled thuds and the floor of the veranda shook both times, quite violently. I hadn’t even had time to try to guess at the source of those disturbances when I caught sight of Professor Witherspoon standing in the doorway leading in off the veranda, his face filled with concern. At least, his voice was, so I assumed that what lay behind the foliage would reflect his voice.

‘My dear fellow, my dear fellow!’ He came hurrying forward, hands outstretched as if he thought I was going to collapse at any moment. ‘I heard the sound of the fall. By jove, it was loud! You must have hurt yourself. What happened?’

‘I fell out of my chair,’ I said patiently. ‘I thought it was the Second Front. It’s my nerves.’

‘Dear me, dear me, dear me!’ He fussed and fluttered around without achieving anything. ‘Have you – have you damaged anything?’

‘Only my pride.’ I felt my elbow with cautious fingers. ‘Nothing broken. Just numbed. What’s making all that damned racket?’

‘Ha!’ He smiled, relieved. ‘I thought you’d want to know that. I’m just about to show you – thought you’d like to have a look over the place anyway.’ He regarded me with quizzical eyes. ‘Enjoy your two-hour snooze?’

‘Except for the waking-up bit, yes.

‘You’ve been asleep for six hours, Mr Bentall.’

I looked at my watch and looked at the sun, already far past the meridian, and realized that he was right, but it didn’t seem worth making a fuss over so I merely said politely: ‘I hope that didn’t cause you any trouble? Having to stay behind and look after me when you may have wished to be working.’

‘Not at all, not at all. No time clock here, young man. I work when I want to. Hungry?’

‘Thank you, no.’

‘Thirsty? Some Hong Kong beer before we go. Excellent stuff. Chilled. Eh?’

‘Sounds fine, Professor.’

So we went and drank his beer and it was as good as he had promised. We had it in the living-room where he’d first taken us and I looked at the various exhibits in the glass-fronted cases. To me they were only a mouldy collection of bones and fossils and shells, of stone pestles and mortars, of charred timber and clay utensils and curiously shaped stones. It was no difficulty at all not to show any interest and I didn’t show any interest because the professor had shown signs of being wary of any person interested in archaeology. But it seemed he’d given up being wary for when he caught my roving eye he said enthusiastically: ‘Magnificent collection of specimens, eh? Magnificent!’

‘I’m afraid it’s hardly in my line,’ I began apologetically. I don’t know –’

‘Of course not, of course not! Wouldn’t expect you to.’ He went across went across to his roll-top desk, pulled out a handful of papers and magazines from the central drawer and gave them to me. ‘Those may help you understand better.’

I leafed quickly through the magazines and papers. Nearly all of them were dated six months previously and of eight papers, five London national dailies and three major U.S. papers, no less than seven had given the professor page one headlines. It must have been a field day for the old boy. Most of the headlines were of the ‘Archaeological Discovery of the Century’ variety, far outranking in importance Tutankhamen, Troy or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every latest archaeological discovery, of course, was usually acclaimed in the same way, but there did appear to be some basis for this latest claim: Oceania, it seemed, had long been the dark continent of archaeological research, but now Professor Witherspoon claimed to have discovered on the island of Vardu, south of the Fijis, complete proof of the migration of the Polynesians from the south-east of Asia and of there being some form of primitive civilization on those islands as far back as 5,000 B.C., some 5,000 years before the previous earliest estimate. Three magazines carried spreads of the story, and one had a very fine picture of the professor and Dr ‘Red’ Carstairs standing on what looked to me like a cracked paving stone but which the caption said was part of a stepped tomb. Dr Carstairs was a remarkable-looking character, six and a half feet tall if he was an inch, with a flaming red handlebar moustache of heroic proportions.

‘I missed it all, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘I was in the Middle East at the time and pretty cut off from everything. This must have caused a terrific stir.’

‘It was the crowning moment of my life,’ he said simply.

‘It must have been. Why haven’t I read anything about this recently?’

‘There’s been nothing about it in the papers since and there won’t be till I’m through here,’ he said darkly. ‘I foolishly granted news agencies, papers and magazines facilities to come here after my first announcement had caused some stir. They hired a special ship from Suva. Descended on me like locusts – like locusts I tell you sir. All over the shop, interfering, poking, ruining weeks of intensive work. Helpless. I was completely helpless.’ The anger deepened. ‘And there were spies among them.’

‘Spies? You must forgive me –’

‘Rival archaeologists. Trying to steal my thunder.’ That would be just about the ultimate crime as far as the old boy was concerned. ‘Trying to steal other things, too, some of the most valuable finds ever made in the Pacific. Never trust a fellow archaeologist, my boy,’ he said bitterly. ‘Never trust ’em.’

I said I wouldn’t and he went on: ’One of them actually had the effrontery to arrive here in a yacht a couple of months ago. American millionaire who does archaeology as a hobby. Just wanted the credit. Damned impertinence to say he’d lost his way. Never trust an archaeologist. Threw him off. That’s why I was suspicious of you. How was I to know you weren’t a reporter, eh? At first, that is?’

‘I quite understand, Professor,’ I said soothingly.

‘Got the government behind me now, though,’ he went on triumphantly. ‘British territory this, of course. All access to the island forbidden till I’m through.’ He drained his glass. ‘Well, well, shouldn’t be bothering you with my troubles. Shall we go for this look round?’

‘Pleasure. Mind if I see my wife first?’

‘Certainly, certainly. You know the way.’

Marie Hopeman stirred, turned and looked up at me sleepily as I opened the creaking door. The bed was a pretty primitive affair, a wooden frame with criss-cross stringing but she seemed comfortable enough. I said: ‘Sorry if I wakened you. How’s it going?’

‘You didn’t waken me. Ten times better now.’ She looked it, blueness had gone from beneath her eyes and the harsh red spots from her cheeks. She stretched luxuriously. ‘I don’t intend moving for hours and hours. He’s very kind, isn’t he?’

‘Couldn’t have fallen into better hands,’ I agreed. I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. ‘Best thing would be for you to go to sleep again, my dear.’

She blinked a bit at the ‘my dear’, but let it go.

‘It won’t be too difficult. And you?’

‘Professor Witherspoon is going to show me around. Apparently he’s made some very important archaeological discoveries here. Should be very interesting.’ I added a few more banalities, bade her what I hoped old Witherspoon would consider a suitably tender farewell and left.

He was waiting for me on the veranda, pith helmet on head, malacca cane in hand. The British archaeologist abroad. He was perfect.

‘This is where Hewell lives.’ He waved his stick in the direction of the thatched house nearest his own. ‘My overseers. American. Rough diamond, of course’ – the tone of his voice lumped 180,000,000 citizens of the United States into the same category –’ but able. Yes indeed. Very able. This next house is my guest house. Unused, but having it done up. Looks a bit airy, I admit’ – he wasn’t exaggerating, all it consisted of was a roof, floor and four supporting corner-posts – ’ but very comfortable. Adapted for the climate. Reed curtain divides it in half and all the walls – screens of plaited coconut leaves – can be lowered to the floor. Kitchen and bathroom behind – can’t have them inside a house of this type. And that next long house belongs to the workers – the diggers.’

‘And this eyesore?’ I nodded at the corrugated iron building. ‘Quarry hopper or crusher?’

‘Not a bad guess at all, my boy. It is ghastly, isn’t it? Property – or ex-property – of the British Phosphate Commissioners. You can see the name on the side if you look closely. Their crushing mill. That flat-topped shed behind was the drying plant.’ He waved his malacca around in a sweeping half circle. ‘Almost a year since they left, but still the place is covered in this damnable grey dust. Killed off most of the vegetation on this side of the island. Damnable!’

‘It’s not very nice,’ I agreed. ‘What’s a British firm doing out in this forsaken part of the world?’

‘Not purely British. International, but run mostly by New Zealand. Digging out the rock, of course. Phosphate of lime. They were taking out a thousand tons a day a year ago. Valuable stuff.’ He peered at me shrewdly. ‘Know anything of geology, hey?’

The professor seemed suspicious of anyone who knew anything about anything, so I said I didn’t.

‘Ah well, who does, these days?’ he said cryptically. ‘But to put you in the picture, my boy. You must understand that this island once probably lay on the bottom of the sea – and as the bottom of the sea is about three miles down here, that was a fair depth. Then one day – geologically speaking you understand, it probably took a million years – the bottom came up to near the top. Upthrust or volcanic activity associated with the continuous outpouring of lava. Who knows?’ He coughed deprecatingly. ‘When one knows a little of those things’ – from the tone of his voice I gathered that if he knew only a little, anybody who claimed to know a lot was a liar – ‘one is unwilling to be dogmatic about it. Anyway, the net result was that after a few aeons you had this massive underwater mountain with the peak not yet above water but less than 120 feet from the surface.’

He peered at me, waiting for the obvious remark, so I obliged.

‘How can you be so certain about something that happened millions of years ago?’

‘Because this is a coral island,’ he said triumphantly, ‘and the polyps that build coral reefs must live in water but die below 120 feet. Well, some time later –’

‘Another million years?’

‘Give or take a million. This must have been a big low-lying coral reef when it was upthrust from below. This upthrust probably coincided with the beginning of the age of birds. This became a sanctuary for untold numbers of birds – there are many such in the Pacific – who stayed here for countless years. Eventually you had a layer of guano, up to perhaps fifty feet thick. Millions of tons of it, millions of tons – and then island, coral and guano subsided and sunk to the floor of the sea.’

It seemed to me that this island had had a pretty chequered history.

‘Some time later,’ he went on, ‘up it comes again. By this time the actions of sea deposits and salt water had changed the guano into a very rich phosphate of lime. Then came the slow laborious process of soil forming, of growing grass, shrubs, trees, a veritable tropical paradise. Then, probably in the last ice age, along came the wandering sea-rovers from south-east Asia and settled in this idyllic spot.’

‘If it was all that idyllic, why did they leave it?’

‘But they never left it! They never left it for the same reason that those fabulous deposits of lime phosphate weren’t discovered until recently, though most other deposits in the Pacific had been worked out by the end of the last century. This, Mr Bentall, is a highly volcanic region – there are still active volcanoes on the neighbouring Tonga Islands, you know. In the space of a few hours a gigantic volcano erupted out of the sea, drowning half of this coral island and covering the other half – coral, phosphate, vegetation and the unfortunate people who lived here in a tremendous layer of basaltic lava. The 79 A.D. eruption that destroyed Pompeii,’ Professor Witherspoon finished disparagingly, ‘was a bagatelle compared to this.’

I nodded at the mountain sloping up sharply behind us. ‘That’s the volcano that was formed?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘What happened to the other half of it?’

‘Must have been some ground fault formed at the same time as the volcano. One night it just broke in half and vanished into the sea. It took the seabed with it and the coral reefs built out to the north: you can see that the lagoon is open there.’

He marched on at a brisk pace apparently undisturbed by the thoughts that he lived in a very dicey spot where cataclysmic upheavals of a very final nature were the order of the day. He was angling his way slightly uphill and less than three hundred yards from the crushing mill we came to a sudden cleft in the side of the mountain. It was about seventy feet high and thirty wide, vertical at the side and back and with a flat floor leading to a circular hole in the mountainside. There were railway tracks of very narrow gauge coming out from the hole, running along the horizontal floor of the fissure then turning to the south where they dipped from view. There were two or three small sheds just outside the entrance, and from one of these came the humming sound I’d been hearing more and more clearly on the way up. Petrol-driven generators. It had never occurred to me until then but of course if the professor and his assistants were prospecting about inside the mountain they would have to have electric power for light and probably also for ventilation.

‘Well, here we are,’ the professor announced. ‘This is the spot where some curious and intelligent prospector for the phosphate company noticed this peculiar fault in the mountainside, started digging through the top-soil and struck phosphate before he’d got three feet. Heaven knows how many million tons of rock they took out – the mountain is a perfect honeycomb. Just as they were finishing up here somebody found a few pieces of pottery and curiously-shaped stones. An archaeologist in Wellington was shown them and immediately sent them to me.’ The professor coughed modestly. ‘The rest, of course, is history.’

I followed the history-maker through the entrance and along the winding horizontal passageway until we came to a huge circular excavation in the rock. It was a gigantic cavern, forty feet high, twenty by the encircling walls, supported by concrete columns and about two hundred feet in diameter. Half a dozen tiny electric lights, suspended from some of the pillars at about a height of ten feet, gave the dingy grey rock an eerie and forbidding appearance and were but token illumination at best. Spaced evenly round the perimeter of this cavern were five more tunnels, each with its own railway track.

‘Well, what do you think of this, Mr Bentall?’

‘It looks like the catacombs in Rome,’ I said. ‘But not so cheery.’

‘It’s a remarkable mining feat,’ the professor said severely. He didn’t care for any flippancy about his nearest and dearest, and his nearest and dearest would always be those dank and gloomy holes in the ground. ‘Very difficult stuff to work with, this limestone, and when you have to support a thick layer of basaltic lava and half the weight of a volcano above it it becomes very tricky indeed. This mountainside is honeycombed with similar caverns, all joined by tunnels. Hexagonal system. Those domed roofs give the greatest structural strength, but there’s a limit to their size. The mining company only managed to get about a third of the available limestone before the cost of supporting pillars to hold the roof in place became prohibitive.’

‘Doesn’t that make the blasting rather dangerous, then?’ I thought an interested question might put me back in his good books.

‘Well, yes, it is, rather,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Chance we have to take. Chance we must take. Interests of science. Come and see where our first discoveries were made.’

He led the way straight across the cavern to the tunnel opposite to the one by which we’d entered and went down this, hopping briskly along the sleepers of the railway tracks. After about twenty yards we entered another cavern, in height, width and number of exit tunnels the duplicate of the one we had just left. There was no illumination here other than one single lamp suspended from the electric light cable that traversed the width of the cavern and vanished down the faraway tunnel, but it was enough to let me see that the two tunnels to the left had been blocked off by heavy vertical baulks of timber.

‘What happened there, Professor? Cave in?’

‘Afraid so.’ He shook his head. ‘Two tunnels and parts of the caverns to which they led collapsed at the same time. Had to shore up the tunnel entrances in case the collapse spread to this chamber. Before my time, of course. I believe three men perished in the right-hand cavern in there – they’d just started to excavate it. A bad business, a bad business.’ He paused for a few moments to let me see how bad he thought it had been then said brightly: ‘Well, this is the historic spot.’

It was a five-foot niche in the wall just to the right of the tunnel by which we’d entered the cavern. To me it was just a five-foot niche. But to Witherspoon it was a temple and he himself the officiating priest.

‘This,’ he said reverently, ‘is where the mystery of Polynesia and the Polynesians was solved. It was here that were found the first adze-heads, stone mortars and pestles. It was this that triggered off the biggest archaeological discovery of our generation. Doesn’t it make you think, Mr Bentall?’

‘It certainly does.’ I refrained from specifying the nature of my thoughts. Instead I reached out for a spur of rock, damp and slimy to the touch, and pulled it off with little effort. I said in surprise: ‘Pretty soft stuff, this. You’d think picks or pneumatic drills would be almost as effective as blasting for removing this stuff.’

‘And so they are, my boy, and so they are. But how would you like to tackle basalt with a pick and shovel?’ he asked jovially. ‘A different proposition altogether.’

‘I’d forgotten about that,’ I confessed. ‘Of course, when the lava poured down it covered everything. What kind of stuff do you find in the basalt – pottery, stone utensils, axe handles, things like that?’

‘To name only a very few,’ he nodded. He hesitated, then said: ‘To speak frankly, unlike the average merchant, I put only my worst goods in the shop window. The things you saw in my room I regard only as trinkets, as the merest trifles. I have one or two hidden caches in here – I wouldn’t dream of even hinting to you where they are – that contain a fantastic collection of neolithic Polynesian relics that will astound the scientific world. Astound them.’

He moved off again, but instead of crossing the chamber and following the electric cable and farspaced lights down the opposite tunnel, he switched on a torch and turned into the first tunnel on his right, pointing out the various places from which these Polynesian relics had been recovered. He stopped in front of a particularly large excavation in the limestone and said: ‘And here we excavated the joists and timbers of what must be the oldest wooden house in the world. In an almost perfect state of preservation.’

‘And how old was that?’

‘Seven thousand years, near enough,’ he said promptly. ‘Van Duprez, of Amsterdam, who was out here with all the newspaper people, says it’s only four thousand. But the man’s a fool, of course.’

‘What basis do you use for assessing the age of those things?’ I asked curiously.

‘Experience and knowledge,’ he said flatly. ‘Van Duprez, despite his inflated reputation, hasn’t got a great deal of either. Man’s a fool.’

‘Um,’ I said non-committally. I looked apprehensively at the third chamber now opening out before us. ‘How deep are we here?’

‘About a hundred feet, I should say. Perhaps a hundred and twenty. Moving into the side of the mountain, you know. Nervous, Mr Bentall?’

‘Sure I’m nervous. I never realized you archaeologists went so deep or that you could find any trace of early life so deep. This must be about a record, eh?’

‘Close to it, close to it,’ he said complacently. Though they went pretty deep in the Nile Valley and Troy, you know.’ He led the way across the third chamber into a tunnel sparsely illuminated with battery lamps. ‘We should find Hewell and his crew down here.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘They must be due to pack up shortly. Been at it here all day.’

They were still working when we arrived at the spot where the tunnel began to open out into a rudimentary fourth chamber. There were nine men there altogether, some prising out lumps of limestone with pick-axes and crowbars to add to the heap of rubble at their feet, others loading the rubble on to rubber-tyred wheelbarrows while a gigantic man clad only in denim trousers and singlet closely examined each lump with a powerful torch.

Both the workers and the man with the torch were worth looking at. The workers were all Chinese, unusually tall and heavily-built for members of their race, and looked about the toughest and hardest-bitten characters I’d ever seen. But it could have been pure illusion, that feeble light shining on sweating and dust-coated faces would have made anyone seem unnatural.

But there was no illusion about the foreman who straightened from his examination of the rock and came to meet us. He was the toughest and hardest-bitten character I’d ever seen. He was about six feet three inches tall, but stunted for his breadth, with a couple of massive arms ending in five-fingered shovels that almost brushed his knees. His face looked as if it had been carved from solid rock by a sculptor whose only ambition was to get the job done in a hurry: there wasn’t a curve worth calling a curve in his entire face, just a granitic mass of crudely interesting planes that would have had the old cubist boys jumping for joy. He had a chin like a power-shovel, a gash for a mouth, a huge beak of a nose and black cold eyes set so far back under the beetling overhang of tufted brows that you had the illusion of some wild animal peering out from the dark depths of a cave. The sides of his face – you couldn’t have called them cheeks – and forehead were deeply trenched by a criss-cross of sun-weathered lines, like some ancient parchment. He could have had a terrible time making the romantic lead in a musical comedy.

Professor Witherspoon introduced us and Hewell stretched out his hand and said: ‘Glad to meet you, Bentall.’ His voice, deep and cavernous, matched both his vast frame and his occupation, and he was glad to see me with the same sort of gladness that you would have found in those same islands a hundred years previously when the cannibal chief hailed the arrival of the latest of a long line of toothsome missionaries. I braced myself as the giant hand closed over mine, but he was surprisingly gentle; it felt as if I was being pulled through a power wringer but when he gave me back my hand all the fingers were still there, bent and mangled a bit, but still there.

‘Heard about you this morning,’ he boomed. Canada or the American north-west, I couldn’t be sure. ‘Heard your wife wasn’t so well, neither. The islands: anything can happen in the islands. Must have had a terrible time.’

We talked a bit about the terrible time I’d had, then I said curiously: ‘You’ve had to go a fair way to recruit labour for this job?’

‘Had to, my boy, had to.’ It was Witherspoon who answered. ‘Indians no damn good – sullen, uncooperative, suspicious, haven’t the physique. Fijians have, but they’d have a heart attack if you suggested they do any work. Same with any white man you could pick up – loafers and wasters to a man. But the Chinese are different.’

‘Best workers I’ve ever had,’ Hewell confirmed. He had a curious trick of speaking without appearing to move his mouth. ‘When it comes to building railroads and driving tunnels you can’t beat ’em. Never have built the western railroads of America without them.’

I made some suitable remark and peered around me. Witherspoon said sharply: ‘What are you looking for, Bentall?’

‘Relics, of course.’ The right note of surprise. ‘Be interesting to see one being excavated from the rock.’

‘Won’t see none today, I’m afraid,’ Hewell boomed. ‘Lucky to find anything once a week. Ain’t that so, Professor?’

‘If we’re very lucky.’ Witherspoon agreed. ‘Well, well, mustn’t hold you back, Hewell, mustn’t hold you back. Just brought Bentall along to show him what all the bangs were about. We’ll see you at supper time.’

Witherspoon led the way back through the mine, out into the brilliant sunshine and down to his house, chattering away all the time, but I wasn’t listening any more, I’d heard and seen all I wanted to hear and see. When we got back he excused himself on the ground that he had some work to catch up on and I went to see Marie. She was sitting up in bed with a book in her hands and there wasn’t anything much the matter with her that I could see. I said: ‘I thought you said you were going to sleep?’

‘I said I wasn’t going to move. Different thing altogether.’ She lay back luxuriously on her pillow. ‘Warm day, cool breeze, sound of the wind in the palms, the sea on the surf and all the blue waters of the lagoon and white sand out there. Wonderful, isn’t it?’

‘Sure. What’s that you’re reading there?’

‘Book on Fiji. Very interesting.’ She gestured at the books piled on the table beside her. ‘Some more on Fiji, some on archaeology. Tommy – the Chinese boy – brought them to me. You should read them.’

‘Later. How are you feeling?’

‘Took your time in getting round to ask me, didn’t you?’

I frowned at her, at the same time jerking my head backwards. She caught on fast.

‘I’m sorry, dear.’ The impulsive cry, very well done. ‘Shouldn’t have said that. Much better, I’m feeling much better. Right as rain tomorrow. Had a nice walk round?’ The banal touch, like the cry, perfectly done.

I was in the middle of telling her about the nice walk I’d had when there came a diffident tap on the door, a clearing of the throat, and Witherspoon came in. By my reckoning he’d been outside the door for about three minutes. Behind him I could see the brown-skinned forms of John and James, the two Fijian boys.

‘Good evening, Mrs Bentall, good evening. How are you? Better, yes, better? You certainly look better.’ His eyes fell on the books by the bedside and he checked and frowned. ‘Where did these come from, Mrs Bentall?’

‘I hope that I haven’t done anything wrong, Professor Witherspoon,’ she said anxiously. ‘I asked Tommy for something to read and he brought me these. I’d just started the first one and –’

‘Those are rare and valuable editions,’ he said testily. ‘Very rare, very rare. Personal library and all that, we archaeologists never lend them out. Tommy had no right – well, never mind. I have an excellent selection of novels, detective fiction, you can have what you like.’ He smiled, the incident magnanimously forgotten. ‘I’ve come to bring you some good news. You and your husband are to have the guest house for yourselves during the remainder of your stay here. I’ve had John and James here at work most of the day clearing it up.’

‘Why, Professor!’ Marie stretched out her hand and took his. ‘How very, very nice. It’s so kind of you – it’s really far too kind of you.’

‘Nothing at all, my dear, nothing at all!’ He patted her hand and held on to it longer than was necessary, about ten times longer than was necessary. ‘I just thought you might appreciate the privacy. I dare say’ – this with a crinkling of half-closed eyes which I took to be a dyspeptic twinge, but it wasn’t dyspepsia, it was meant as a roguish twinkle –’ that you haven’t been married very long. Now, tell me, Mrs Bentall, will you be fit enough to join us for supper tonight?’

She could be as quick as a cat. She caught the all but imperceptible shake of my head and she wasn’t even looking in my direction.

‘I’m so sorry, Professor Witherspoon.’ It takes some doing to combine a dazzling smile with a tone of deep regret but she managed to do it. There’s nothing I’d like better, but I really do feel so weak still. If I could be excused until the morning, I –’

‘Of course. But of course. Mustn’t overdo the convalescence, must we?’ He seemed to be on the point of grabbing her hand again, but thought better of it. ‘We’ll send a tray along. And we’ll also send you along. No need to stir.’

At a signal from him the two Fijians caught an end of the bed apiece and lifted, not such a feat, as the bed itself probably didn’t weigh even thirty pounds. The Chinese boy came in to carry all the clothes we had, the professor led the way and there was nothing for me to do but to take her hand as we walked between the two houses, bend over her solicitously and murmur: ‘Ask him for a torch.’

I didn’t suggest a reason why she should ask for one, for the excellent reason that none occurred to me, but she handled it beautifully. When the professor had dismissed the bearers and was expatiating at length on how the guest house was built entirely from the products of two trees, the pandanus and coconut palm, she interrupted diffidently to ask: ‘Is there – is there a bathroom here, Professor Witherspoon?’

‘But of course, my dear. How remiss of me. Down the steps, to the left and it’s the first small hut you come to. The next to the kitchen. For obvious reasons you can’t have fire and water in houses like these.’

‘Of course not. But – but doesn’t it get rather dark at night here? I mean –’

‘God bless my soul! What must you think of me? A torch – of course you shall have a torch. You shall have it after our evening meal.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Expect you in about half an hour, Bentall?’ A few more platitudes, a smirk at Marie and he bustled briskly away.

The westering sun had already dipped behind the shoulder of the mountain but the heat of the day still lingered in the air. For all that Marie shivered and pulled the coverlet high about her shoulders. She said: ‘Would you care to let the side-screens down? Those trade winds aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Not when the darkness comes.’

‘Let the screen down? And have a dozen listening ears pressed against them in a couple of minutes?’

‘You – you think so?’ she said slowly. ‘You feel there’s something wrong here? With Professor Witherspoon?’

‘I’ve long passed the feeling stage. I know damn well there’s something wrong. I’ve known it ever since we arrived here.’ I pulled a chair up to her bed and took her hand: a hundred to one that we had a keen and interested audience and I didn’t want to disappoint them. ‘What are you going on? Feeling fey again or womanly intuition or hard facts?’

‘Don’t be unpleasant,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve already apologized for my foolish behaviour – just the fever, as you said. This is intuition, or a hunch – quite different. This ideal spot, those smiling Fijian boys, the marvellous Chinese servant, that Hollywood dream of what an English archaeologist should look like and behave – it’s all too idyllic, too perfect. You get the impression of – of a carefully maintained façade. It’s too dream-like, if you know what I mean.’

‘You mean you’d feel better if you saw the professor roaring and cursing round the place or saw someone lying under a stoep and drinking from the neck of a whisky bottle ?’

‘Well, something like that.’

‘I’ve heard that the South Pacific often affects people like that at first. The sense of unreality, I mean. Don’t forget I’ve seen the professor several times on the screen. He’s just as large as life. And if you want perfection marred, just wait until the boyfriend, Hewell, happens by.’

Why, what’s he like?’

‘Couldn’t describe him. You’re too young to have seen the King Kong films. You won’t mistake him, though. And while you’re watching out for him I want you to check the number of people who come and go into the workers’ hut. That’s why I didn’t want you to come across for supper.’

That shouldn’t be hard.’

‘Nor so easy. They’re all Chinese – the ones I’ve seen so far anyway – and they’ll all probably look alike to you. Check what they’re doing, how many stay in, whether the ones that come out are carrying anything or not. Don’t let anyone guess you’re checking. Let down the screens when it’s dark enough and if there are no window cut-outs you can peek through –’

‘Why don’t you write it all down for me?’ she said sweetly.

‘O.K., so you’ve been at this longer than I have. Just a cowardly concern for my own neck. I’m going to take a walk around during the middle of the night and I’d like to know what the score is.’

She didn’t put her hand to her mouth or gasp or try to dissuade me. I couldn’t even have sworn to it that the pressure of her hand had increased. She said, matter-of-factly: ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘No. I just want to look around that there’s nothing wrong with my own eyes. And while I don’t expect trouble I can’t see you’d be much help if any did come along. No offence, of course.’

‘Well,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Fleck’s got my gun, there wouldn’t be much point in calling the cops and I don’t suppose I could do very much if someone jumped me. But if someone jumped you, then I –’

‘You have the wrong idea entirely,’ I said patiently. ‘you’re not built for speed. I am. You never saw anyone who could run away from a fight as fast as Bentall.’ I crossed the coconut floor and pulled over a made-up string bed, placing it close up to hers. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said agreeably. She looked at me lazily under half-closed eyelids and an amused smile curved across her mouth but it wasn’t at all the same amused smile as she’d given me in Colonel Raine’s office in London. ‘I’ll hold your hand. I think you’re just a sheep in wolf’s clothing.’

‘Wait till I get off duty,’ I threatened. ‘You and me and the lights of London. You’ll see.’

She looked at me for a long moment then turned to gaze out over the darkening lagoon. She said: ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Ah, well. Wrong type. Lucky I’m not the sensitive kind. About this bed: I know this is going to be a big disappointment to you, but it occurred to me that when I take a walk tonight it might be a good thing to shove some sort of dummy in here and it’s not likely they’ll investigate its genuineness when the bed is so near yours.’ I heard the sound of voices, looked up and saw Hewell and his Chinese come into sight round a corner of the crushing mill: Hewell was a walking mountain, there was something almost frighteningly simian about the bowed form, the perceptibly rolling gait, the slow swing of the hands that all but brushed his knees as he walked. I said to Marie: ‘If you want to have the screaming heebie-jeebies during the night, turn round and have an eyeful. The boyfriend’s here.’

If it hadn’t been for the boyfriend’s face, the professor’s incessant chatter and the bottle of wine he’d produced to mark, he said, the occasion, it would have been quite a pleasant meal: the Chinese boy certainly knew how to cook and there was none of this nonsense of birds’ nests and sharks’ fins, either. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off that gaunt and ravaged face opposite me, the immaculate white drills into which he’d changed only emphasized the Neanderthalic hideousness of it: I couldn’t shut my ears to Witherspoon’s banalities: the wine, a ‘Burgundy’, was quite excellent if your tastes ran to sweetened vinegar but I was thirsty and managed to force some down.

But it was Hewell, curiously enough, who made the meal tolerable. Behind that primitive broken face lay a keen mind – at least he was smart enough to stay away from the Burgundy and drink Hong Kong beer by the quart – and his stories of life as a hard-rock mining engineer in what seemed to have been half the countries in the world made good listening. Or they would have made good listening if he hadn’t stared unwinkingly at me all the time he was speaking, the black eyes so far back in their sockets that the illusion of a bear peering out from his cave was stronger than ever. He had the Ancient Mariner whacked to the wide. I might have been sitting there transfixed all night if Witherspoon hadn’t finally pushed back his chair, rubbed his hands together in satisfaction and asked me how I’d enjoyed the meal.

‘It was excellent,’ I told him. ‘Don’t let that cook go. Very many thanks indeed. And now, if you will, I think I’ll be getting back to my wife.’

‘Nonsense, nonsense!’ The affronted host to the life. ‘Coffee and brandy to come yet, my boy. When ever do we archaeologists get an opportunity to celebrate? We’re delighted to see a strange face here, aren’t we, Hewell?’

Hewell didn’t contradict him, but he didn’t agree with him either. It didn’t matter to Witherspoon. He brought forward a rattan armchair, set it in position for me and fussed around like an old hen until he was certain I was comfortably seated. Then Tommy brought in the coffee and the brandy.

From that moment on, the evening went well. After the Chinese boy had brought in drinks for the second time the Professor told him to bring the bottle and leave it there. The level in the bottle sank as if there was a hole in the bottom of it. The professor was in tremendous form. The level sank some more. Hewell smiled twice. It was a great night. The calf was being fatted for the kill. They weren’t wasting all that excellent brandy for nothing. The bottle was emptied and another brought in. The professor told some mildly risqué jokes and convulsed himself with laughter. Hewell smiled again. I wiped away some tears of mirth and caught the quick flicker of interchanged glances. The axe was starting on its back swing. I congratulated the professor on his wit in a slurred and stumbling voice. I never felt more sober in my life.

They’d obviously rehearsed the whole thing meticlously. Witherspoon, the dedicated scientist to the life, started to bring me some of the exhibits from the showcases lining the walls, but after a few minutes he said: ‘Come, Hewell, we are insulting our friend here. Let us show him our real treasures.’

Hewell hesitated doubtfully and Witherspoon actually stamped his foot on the floor. ‘I insist. Damn it, man, what harm in it?’

‘Very well.’ Hewell crossed to the big safe by my left-hand side and after a minute’s fruitless twiddling of the knob said: ‘Combination’s stuck again, Professor.’

‘Well, open it from the back combination.’ Witherspoon said testily. He was standing to my right, a piece of broken pottery in his hand. ‘Now look at this, Mr Bentall. I want you to pay particular attention to …’ But I wasn’t paying any attention, particular or otherwise, to what he was saying. I wasn’t even looking at the pottery. I was looking at the window behind him, a window which the kerosene lamp inside and the darkness outside transformed into an almost perfect picture. I was looking at Hewell and the safe that he was tilting away from the wall. That safe weighed three hundredweights if it weighed an ounce. And the way I was sitting, leaning to the right in the armchair and left leg crossed over the right, my right foot was sticking out directly in its path, if it toppled. And it was going to topple. The safe was now a good foot away from the wall at the top and I could see Hewell actually sighting along its side to see if my foot was in the line of fall. And then he gave it a push.

‘My God!’ Professor Witherspoon shouted. ‘Look out!’

The cry of horror was as perfectly done as it was calculatedly late, but he needn’t have bothered himself, I was already looking out for myself. I was already starting to fall out of my chair as the safe fell on my leg, twisting my foot so that the side lay flush along the floor, the sole at right angles to the toppling safe. It was a heavy sole, more than half an inch of solid leather, but even so it was a chance. A long chance, but I had to take it.

There was nothing faked about my shout of pain. That stout leather sole felt as if it was being bent in half and so did my foot: but the safe didn’t touch any other part of my foot or leg.

I lay there, gasping, trapped by the weight of the safe, until Hewell rushed round to the front to heave it up while Witherspoon dragged me clear. I struggled painfully to my feet, shook off the professor’s arm, took one step on my injured foot and collapsed heavily to the floor. What with the safe and myself, the floor was certainly taking a beating that night.

‘Are you – are you badly hurt?’ The professor was aghast with anxiety.

‘Hurt? No, I’m not hurt. I just felt tired and lay down for a rest.’ I glared up at him savagely, both hands cradling my right foot. ‘How far do you think you could walk with a broken ankle?’

CHAPTER 5

Wednesday 10 p.m.–Thursday 5 a.m.

Abject apologies, restoring the patient with what few drops of brandy still remained, splinting and taping my ankle in a surgical dressing took about ten minutes. After that they half-helped, half-carried me back to the guest hut. The sidescreens were down but I could see the chinks of light through them. The professor rapped on the door and waited. The door opened.

‘Who – who is there?’ Marie had thrown some kind of wrap over her shoulders and the light of the kerosene lamp behind her made a shining halo round the soft fair hair.

‘Nothing to worry about, Mrs Bentall,’ Witherspoon said soothingly. ‘Your husband’s just had a slight accident. Hurt his foot rather, I’m afraid.’

‘Slight accident!’ I yelped. ‘Hurt his foot. I’ve broken my bloody ankle.’ I pushed off the restraining hands, tried to lurch through the door, stumbled, cried out and measured my length on the floor of the guest house. I was getting good at measuring my length on floors, it was far quicker than using a tape. Marie, her voice high-pitched in anxiety, said something I couldn’t catch above my own moans and dropped on her knees beside me but the professor lifted her gently to her feet while Hewell picked me up and placed me on my bed. I weigh close on two hundred, but he lifted and set me down with as little effort as a girl her doll, except perhaps not quite so gently. But those string beds were stronger than they looked and I didn’t go through to the floor. I moaned some more and then propped myself up on one elbow, letting them see how a stiff-lipped Englishman suffers in silent agony, wincing and screwing my eyes shut from time to time just in case they didn’t get it.

Professor Witherspoon explained, rather haltingly what had happened – at least, his version of what had happened, a convincing amalgam of jammed combinations, top-heavy safes and sagging floors which made safes unstable – and Marie listened to him in stormy silence. If she was acting, she’d missed out on her profession: the quick breathing, the compressed lips, the slightly flared nostrils, the tightly clenched fists, those I could understand: but to get your face as pale as she did hers you really have to put your heart into it. When he’d finished I really thought she was going to start in on him, she didn’t seem the slightest scared or awed by Hewell’s towering bulk, but she seemed to control herself and said in an icy voice: ‘Thank you both very much for bringing my husband home. It was most kind of you. I’m sure it was all an accident. Good night.’

That hardly left the door open for any further conversational gambits and they took themselves off hoping aloud that I would be better the next day. What they were really hoping they kept to themselves and they forgot to say how they expected a broken bone to set overnight. For about ten seconds more Marie stood staring through the door by which they’d left, then she whispered: ‘He’s – he’s terrifying, isn’t he? He’s like something left over from the dark ages.’

‘He’s no beauty. Scared?’

‘Of course I am.’ She stood still for some seconds longer, sighed, turned round and came and sat on the edge of my bed. For a long moment she looked down at me, like a person hesitating or making up her mind, then she touched me lightly on the forehead with both cool hands, smoothed her fingertips past my hair and looked down at me, propped up by a hand on either side of my head. She was smiling but there was no amusement in the smile and her hazel eyes were dark with worry.

‘I’m so sorry for this,’ she murmured. ‘It – It’s pretty bad, isn’t it, Johnny?’ She’d never called me that before.

Terrible.’ I reached my hands up, put them round her neck and pulled her down till her face was buried in the pillow. She didn’t resist any, recovering from the shock of a first-time close-up of Hewell would always take time or maybe she was just humouring a sick man. She had a cheek like a flower petal and she smelled of the sun and the sea. I put my lips close to her ear and whispered: ‘Go and check if they’ve really gone.’

She stiffened as if she’d touched a live-wire, then pushed herself upright and rose. She went to the door, peered through some interstices in the side-screens then said in a quiet voice: They’re both back in the professor’s living room. I can see them lifting the safe into position.’

‘Put the lights out.’

She crossed to the table, turned down the wick, cupped her hand over the top of the glass funnel and blew. The room was plunged into darkness. I swung off the bed, unwound the couple of yards of medical plaster they’d wrapped round the splints and ankle, cursing softly as it stuck to the flesh, put the splints to one side, stood up and gave two or three experimental hops on my right foot. I was hopping almost as good as ever, the only pain was on the outside of my big toe which had taken the brunt of the weight of the safe when the sole had bent. I tried it again and it was still O.K. I sat down and began to pull on sock and shoe.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ Marie asked. The soft concern, I noticed with regret, had gone from her voice.

‘Just testing.’ I said softly. ‘I think the old foot will carry me around a bit yet.’

‘But the bone – I thought the bone was broken.’

‘Just a natural fast healer.’ I tried the foot inside the shoe and hardly felt a thing. Then I told her what had happened. At the end she said: ‘I suppose you thought it was clever to fool me?’

I’d become used to a lot of the feminine injustice in my life so I let it pass. She was too smart not to see how unfair she was, not, at least, when she’d cooled down. Why she had to cool down I didn’t know, but when her temperature dropped she would realize the immense advantage I’d gained by having created the impression that I was completely incapacitated. I heard her moving across the room back to the bed and as she passed me she said quietly: ‘You told me to count the Chinese going in and out of the long hut ‘Well?’

‘There were eighteen.’

‘Eighteen!’ All I counted in the mine was eight.

‘Eighteen.’

‘Notice what any of them was carrying when he came out?’

‘I didn’t see any come out. Not before it was dark.’

‘Uh-huh. Where’s the torch?’

‘Under my pillow. Here.’

She turned in and shortly I could hear her slow even breathing but I knew she wasn’t asleep. I tore strips of the plaster and stretched them across the face of the torch until there was only a quarter inch diameter hole left in the middle. Then I took up position by a crack in the side-screens where I could watch the professor’s house. Hewell left shortly after eleven o’clock, went to his own house. I saw a light come on then go out after about ten minutes.

I crossed to the cupboard where the Chinese boy had put our clothes, hunted around with the tiny spotlight of light until I’d found a pair of dark grey flannels and a blue shirt and quickly changed in the darkness. Taking a midnight walk in white shirt and white ducks was something Colonel Raine wouldn’t have approved of at all. Then I went back to Marie’s bed and said softly: ‘You’re not sleeping, are you?’

‘What do you want?’ No warmth in the voice, just none at all.

‘Look, Marie, don’t be silly. To fool them I had to fool you too when they were there. Don’t you see the advantage of being mobile when they think I’m completely immobilized. What did you expect me to do? Stand there at the door supported by Hewell and the prof and sing out cheerily: “Don’t worry about this, dear. I’m only kidding.”

‘I suppose not,’ she said after a minute. ‘What did you want? Just to tell me that?’

‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t that, it was your eyebrows.’

‘My what?’

‘Eyebrows. Your hair so blonde, the eyebrows so black. Are they real? The colour, I mean?’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I want to blacken my face. Mascara. I thought you might have –’

‘Why didn’t you say that in the first place instead of trying to be clever?’ Whatever her intelligence said about ‘forgive’ some other part of her mind was against it. ‘No mascara. All I have is black shoe polish. Top drawer, right side.’

I shuddered at the thought but said thanks and left her. An hour later I left her altogether. I’d made up a rough dummy in my bed, checked every side of the house for interested spectators and left by the back, lifting a corner of the sidescreens just sufficiently to squirm under. There were no cries or shouts or shots, Bentall abroad unobserved and mighty glad of it. Against a dark background you couldn’t have seen me from five yards although you could have smelled me at ten times the distance down wind. Certain makes of boot polish are like that.

On the first part of my trip, between our house and the professor’s it wouldn’t really have mattered whether my foot had been in commission or not. To anyone looking out from Hewell’s house or the workers’ hut, I would have been silhouetted against the lightness of the sea and the white glimmer of the sands so I made it on my hands, elbows and knees, heading for the rear of the house, out of sight of all the others.

I passed the corner of the house and rose slowly and soundlessly to my feet, pressing close in against the wall. Three long quiet steps and I was at the back door.

Defeat had come almost before I’d started. Because there had been a hinged wooden door at front I had assumed that there would be the same at the rear: but it was a plaited bamboo screen and as soon as I’d touched it it rustled and clicked with the sound of a hundred distant castanets. I flattened myself against the door, hand clenched round the base of my torch. Five minutes passed, nothing happened, nobody came, and when finally a passing catspaw of wind brushed my face the reeds rustled again, just as they had done before. It took me two minutes to gather up twenty reeds in one hand without making too much racket about it, two seconds to pass through into the house and another two minutes to let those reeds fall one by one into place. The night wasn’t all that warm, but I could feel the sweat dripping down my forehead and into my eyes. I wiped it away, hooded my hand over the tiny hole in the centre of the torch face, slid on the switch with a cautious thumb and started going over the kitchen.

I didn’t expect to find anything there that I wouldn’t have found in any other kitchen, and I didn’t. But I found what I was after, the cutlery drawer. Tommy had a fine selection of carving knives, all of them honed to a razor’s edge. I picked a beauty, a ten-inch triangular job, serrated on one side and straight on the other that tapered from two inches below the hilt to just nothing at all. It had the point of a surgeon’s lancet. It was better than nothing, it was a lot better than nothing, if I could find the gap between the ribs not even Hewell would think I was tickling him. I wrapped it carefully in a kitchen cloth and stuck it under my belt.

The inside kitchen door, the one giving on the central passage, was made of wood, to keep the cooking smells from percolating throughout the house, I supposed. It opened inwards on oiled leather hinges. I eased myself through into the passage and stood there listening. I didn’t have to listen very hard. The professor was something less than a silent sleeper and the source of the snoring, a room with an opened door about ten feet up the passage on the right, was easy to locate. I had no idea where the Chinese boy slept, I hadn’t seen him leaving the house so I assumed that he must be in one of the other rooms and I didn’t intend to find out which. He seemed to me like a boy who would sleep very lightly indeed. I hoped the professor’s adenoidal orchestration would blanket any noise I might make but for all that I went up the passage towards the living-room door with all the rush and clatter of a cat stalking a bird across a sunlit lawn.

I made it in safety and closed the door behind me without even a whisper of sound. I didn’t waste any time looking around the room, I knew where to look and went straight for the big knee-hole desk. If the direction of the burnished copper wire, not quite buried in the thatch, that had caught my eye when first I’d sat in the rattan chair that morning hadn’t been guide enough, my nose would have led me straight there: the pungent smell, however faint, of sulphuric acid is unmistakable.

Most kneehole desks are lined on either side with a row of drawers, but Professor Witherspoon’s was an exception. There was a cupboard on either side and neither of them was locked. There was no reason why they should have been. I opened the left-hand door first and shone the pencil beam of light inside.

The compartment was big, thirty inches high by eighteen wide and perhaps two feet in depth. It was packed with lead acid accumulators and dry batteries. There were ten of the accumulators on an upper shelf, big glass-sided 2.5-volt cells, wired together in series: below were eight Exide 120-volt dry-cell batteries, wired up in parallel. Enough power there to send a signal to the moon, if a man had a radio transmitter. And the man had a radio transmitter. It was in the locker on the other side. It took up the entire space of the locker. I know a little of transmitter-receivers but this metallic grey mass with its score or more of calibrated dials, wave-bands and tuning knobs was quite unknown to me. I peered closely at the maker’s name and it read: ‘Kuruby-Sankowa Radio Corporation, Osaka and Shanghai.’ It didn’t mean a thing to me, any more than the jumble of Chinese characters engraved beneath it. The wave-lengths and receiving stations on the transmitting wave-band were marked in both Chinese and English and the needle was locked on Foochow. Perhaps Professor Witherspoon was the kind-hearted sort of employer who allowed his homesick workers to speak to their relatives in China. But perhaps he wasn’t.

I closed the door softly and turned my attention to the upper part of the desk. The professor might have known I was coming, he hadn’t even bothered to pull down the roll-top. After five minutes’ methodical search I was beginning to understand why he hadn’t bothered, there was nothing in the desk-top drawers and pigeonholes worth concealing. I was about to give up and fold my tent when I looked again at the most obvious thing on that desk – the blotting pad with its four-cornered leather holder. I took the blotters out of the holder and looked down at the piece of thin parchment paper that had been concealed between the lowest blotter and the pad.

It was a typewritten list of six lines, each line consisting of a double-barrelled name followed by figures, eight figures every time. The first line read: ‘Pelican-Takishamaru 20007815,’ the second: ‘Linkiang-Hawetta 10346925’ and so on with the other four lines containing equally meaningless names and combinations of figures.

Then there was a space of an inch then another line which read: ‘Every hour 46 Tombola.’

I could make nothing of it. It seemed to be about the most useless information – if that’s what it was – that anyone could ever want. Or I could be looking at the most important code I’d ever seen. Either way, it didn’t seem much help to me, but it might help later. Colonel Raine reckoned I’d a photographic memory, but not for this kind of junk. I took pencil and paper from the professor’s desk, copied the writing, put the parchment back where I’d found it, took off my shoe, folded the paper and placed it, wrapped in some waterproof polythene, between the sole of my foot and my sock. I didn’t fancy making that traverse through the passage to the kitchen again, so I left through a window remote from Hewell’s and the workers’ houses.

Twenty minutes later I was well clear of all the houses and rose painfully to my feet. I hadn’t travelled so far on my hands, elbows and knees since my nursery days and I’d lost the hang of the thing: moreover, years of not moving around on them had made mine quite unsuitable for this kind of locomotion and they ached fiercely: but they weren’t in any worse condition than the clothes that covered them.

The sky was almost completely overcast, but not quite, and every now and then a sudden unveiling of the almost full moon made me drop quickly into the shelter of some scrub or bush and wait until the sky darkened over again. I was following the line of the railway tracks which led from the crushing mills and drying shed round to the south and then, presumably, west of the island. I was very interested in this line and its destination. Professor Witherspoon had carefully refrained from making any mention of what lay on the other side of the island, but for all his care Professor Witherspoon talked too much. He’d told me that the phosphate company used to take 1,000 tons a day out of the hillside, and as it wasn’t there any more they must have taken it away. That meant a ship, a big ship, and no big ship would ever have used that tiny floating pier of logs below the professor’s house, even if it could have approached it closely enough in the shallow lagoon water, which it couldn’t. Something bigger was needed, something much bigger: a stone or concrete pier, maybe one made from coral blocks, and either a crane or a raised hopper with a canted loading chute. Maybe Professor Witherspoon hadn’t wished me to walk in this direction.

A few seconds later I was wishing the same thing myself. I’d just passed over a tiny culvert where a small stream, almost covered in with bushes and thickets, ran down from the mountain to the sea, and had taken no more than ten paces beyond when there came the quick stealthy rush of padding feet behind me, something heavy crashed into my back and shoulder and then, before I’d time to start reacting, something else closed over my upper left arm, just above the elbow, with all the power and brutal savagery of a sprung bear-trap. The immediate pain was agonizing.

Hewell. That was my first and instinctive reaction as I staggered and lurched and all but fell. Hewell, it must be Hewell, no one else I’d ever known could have a grip like that, it felt as if my arm was being crushed in half. I swung round in a vicious half-circle hooking with all the strength of my right arm for where his stomach ought to have been and all I did was to make a hole in the night. I almost dislocated my right shoulder but I’d more to think about than that as I lurched sideways again, fighting for my balance. Fighting for my balance and fighting for my life. It wasn’t Hewell who had me, but a dog about the size and power of a wolf.

I tried to tear him off with my right hand but all it did was to sink those huge teeth still deeper into my arm. I tried crashing my right fist again and again against that powerful body but he was so far to my left and back that I could barely reach him. I tried kicking, but I couldn’t get anywhere near him. I couldn’t get at him, I couldn’t shake him off, there was no solid object I could crush him against and I knew that if I tried falling on top of him he’d have loosened his grip and had my throat before I knew what he was about.

He must have weighed between eighty and ninety pounds. He had fangs like steel hooks and when you have steel hooks embedded in your arm and a weight of ninety pounds suspended from them only one thing can happen – the skin and flesh start to tear, and I haven’t any different skin or flesh from anyone else. I could feel myself getting weak, I could feel the waves of pain and nausea washing over me when, in a moment of clarity, my mind or what passes for it started working again. I’d no trouble in getting the knife clear of my belt, but it took almost ten interminable and pain-filled seconds before I could free it one-handed from its cloth wrapping. After that it was easy, the stiletto point entered just below the breastbone and angled inwards and upwards for the heart, meeting almost no resistance. The bear-trap grip on my arm loosened in a fraction of a second and the dog was dead before it reached the ground.

I didn’t know what kind of dog it was and I didn’t care. I hauled him by his heavy-studded collar till I came to the culvert I’d so recently crossed, dragged him down the short bank to the stream and pulled him into the water where the bushes were thickest. I thought he would be pretty well screened from sight above but I didn’t dare use my torch to see. I jammed him in place with some heavy stones so that no freshet after heavy rain could wash him into view, then lay face down by the stream for almost five minutes till the sharpest of the pain, the shock and nausea had worn off and my racing pulse and pounding heart returned to something like normal. It had been a bad couple of minutes.

Getting my shirt and singlet off was no pleasure at all, the arm was already stiffening up, but I managed it and washed my arm thoroughly in the running water. I was glad it was fresh water and not salt. Washing my arm, I thought, was going to do me a great deal of good if that dog had been suffering from hydrophobia, about the same effect as if I washed my arm after a king cobra had struck. But there didn’t seem to be much point in worrying about it, so I bandaged up my arm as well as I could with strips torn from my singlet, pulled on my shirt, climbed out of the culvert and continued on my way, still following the metal tracks. I carried the knife in my right hand now and I hadn’t any cloth wrapped round it either. I felt chilled, cold with the ice-cold of a vicious anger. I wasn’t kindly disposed towards anyone.

I was almost round to the south of the island now. There were no trees, just bushes and scattered low scrub that was no good for concealment at all unless you lay prone on the ground, and I wasn’t in the mood for lying prone on the ground. But I hadn’t altogether taken leave of my senses and when the moon suddenly broke through into a large patch quite free from cloud I dropped flat and peered out from the shelter of some bushes that wouldn’t have given decent cover to a rabbit.

In the brilliant wash of the moonlight I could see now that my first impression of the island from the reef that morning hadn’t been entirely accurate, the early morning mists had obscured the true features to the south of the island. True, the narrow plain at the foot of the mountain did, from where it lay, seem to go all the way round the island, but it was much narrower here than in the east. Moreover, it didn’t slope steadily towards the sea but seemed even to slope from the sea to the base of the mountain: which meant only one thing, that the island to the south must end in a very steep drop to the lagoon, perhaps even a sheer cliff-face. And I hadn’t been right about the mountain either, although this new feature I couldn’t have seen from the reef: instead of having the continuously smooth steeply-sloping surface of a cone, the mountain seemed to be almost completely bisected down its southerly face by a gigantic cleft or ravine, no doubt a relic of that catastrophic day when the northern half of the mountain had vanished into the sea. What this entire physical configuration amounted to was that the only way from east to west on this island appeared to lie across the narrow connecting belt of plain to the south: it couldn’t have been more than a hundred and twenty yards wide.

Fifteen minutes later that patch in the clouds was twice as large and the moon still in the middle of it, so I decided to move. In that bright moonlight a move backwards would have been just as conspicuous as a move forwards, so I decided I might as well keep going on. I cursed that moon pretty steadily. I said things about that moon that the poets and the Tin Pan Alley merchants wouldn’t have approved of at all. But they would have approved of the unreserved apology I made to the moon only a couple of minutes later.

I had been inching forward on what was left of my elbows and knees, with my head about nine inches above the ground, when suddenly I saw something else about nine inches above the ground and less than a couple of feet from my eyes. It was a wire, strung above the ground on little steel pins with looped heads, and I hadn’t seen it farther away because it was painted black. The paint, its low height above the ground, the presence of a dog wandering around and the fact that the wire wasn’t strung on insulators made it pretty clear that it wasn’t an electric circuit carrying some kind of lethal current. It was an old-fashioned trip-wire. It would be connected up with some kind of mechanical warning device.

I waited twenty minutes without moving until the moon had again gone behind the clouds, rose stiffly to my feet, crossed the wire and got down again. The land had now quite a definite dip to my right, towards the base of the mountain, and the railway track had been raised and banked on one side to meet the angle of the ground. It seemed like a good idea to crawl along beneath the raised edge of the embankment: I would be in shadow if the moon broke through again. Or I hoped I would be.

I was. After almost half an hour more of this elbow and knees caper during which I saw nothing and heard nothing and thought with increasing sympathetic admiration of the lower members of the animal kingdom who were doomed to spend their lives getting around in this fashion, the moon broke through again. And this time I really saw something.

Less than thirty yards ahead of me I saw a fence. I had seen such fences and they weren’t the kind that surround an English meadow. Where I’d seen them before had been in Korea, round prisoner-of-war cages. This one was a nine-stranded barbed-wire affair, over six feet high and curving outwards at the top: it emerged from the impenetrable darkness of the vertically-walled cleft in the mountain to my right and ran due south across the plain.

Perhaps ten yards beyond that there was another fence, a duplicate of the first, but what occupied my attention was not either of the fences but a group of three men I could see beyond the second fence. They were standing together, talking, I presumed, but so softly that I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and one of them had just lit a cigarette. They were dressed in white ducks, round caps, gaiters and cartridge belts, and carried rifles slung over their shoulders. They were, without any doubt at all, seamen of the Royal Navy.

By this time my mind had given up. I was tired. I was exhausted. I couldn’t think any more. Given time, I could maybe have thought of a couple of good reasons why I should suddenly on this remote Fijian island stumble across three seamen of the Royal Navy, but that seemed a daft sort of thing to do when all I had to do was to stand up and ask them. I transferred the weight from my elbows to the palms of my hands and started to get to my feet.

Three yards ahead of me a bush moved. Shock froze me into involuntary and life-saving immobility, no relic dug out by the professor was ever half so petrified as I was at that moment. The bush leaned over gently towards another bush and murmured something in so low a voice that I couldn’t have heard it another five feet away. But surely they must be hearing me. My heart was reverberating in my ears like a riveter’s hammer. It was going about the same speed, too. And even if they couldn’t hear me they must surely have felt the vibrations being transmitted through my body and the ground, I was as near to them as that, a seismograph could have picked me up in Suva. But they heard nothing, they felt nothing. I lowered myself back to the ground like a gambler laying down the last card that is going to lose him his fortune. I made a mental note that all this stuff about oxygen being necessary for life was a tale invented by the doctors. I had completely stopped breathing. My right hand ached, in the moonlight I could see the knuckles of the fist clenched round the hilt of the knife gleaming like burnished ivory. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the grip even slightly, but even so I still clung on to the handle of that knife harder than I’d ever clung on to anything before.

Seven or eight aeons passed. By and by the three naval guards, who had that liberal interpretation of their duties possessed by naval guards the world over, disappeared. At least they seemed to disappear, until I realized that what I had taken for a dark patch in the ground behind them was really a hut. A minute passed, then I heard the metallic clacking and hissing of a primus stove being pumped into life. The bush in front of me moved again. I twisted the knife in my hand until the blade was pointing up, not down, but he didn’t come my way. He crawled off silently, parallel to the wire, heading for another bush about thirty yards away, and I could see that other bush stir as he approached. The place was full of moving bushes that night. I changed my mind about asking the guards what they were doing there. Another night, perhaps. Tonight, the wise man went to bed and thought about things. If I could get to my bed without being chewed to pieces by dogs or knifed by one of Hewel’s Chinese, I would think about things.

I made it back to the house in one piece. It took me ninety minutes altogether, half of it to cover the first fifty yards, but I made it.

It was coming on for five in the morning when I raised the corner of the seaward screen and slipped into the house. Marie was asleep, and there seemed to be no point in wakening her; bad news could wait. I washed off the bootblack in a basin in the corner of the room, but I was too tired to do anything about re-bandaging my arm. I was too tired even to think about things. I climbed into bed and had only the faintest recollection of my head touching the pillow. Even if I had had a dozen arms and each one throbbing with pain as was my left, I don’t think they would have kept me awake that night.

CHAPTER 6

Thursday noon–Friday 1.30 a.m.

It was after noon when I awoke. Only one wall screen had been pulled up, the one that gave on the lagoon. I could see the green shimmer of water, the white glare of sand, the washed-out pastels of the coral and, beyond the lagoon, the darker line of the sea with a cloudless sky above. With three side-screens down there was no through draught and it was stiflingly hot under that thatched roof. But at least it made for privacy. My left arm throbbed savagely. But I was still alive. No hydrophobia.

Marie Hopeman was sitting on a chair by my bed. She was dressed in white shorts and blouse, her eyes were clear and rested, she had colour in her cheeks and altogether just looking at her made me feel terrible. She was smiling down at me and I could see that she had made up her mind not to be sore at me any more. She had a nice face, far nicer than the one she had worn in London. I said: ‘You look fine. How do you feel?’ Original, that was me.

‘Right as rain. Fever all gone. Sorry to wake you up like this, but there’ll be lunch going in half an hour. The professor had one of his boys make those so that you could get over there.’ She pointed to where a pair of remarkably well-made crutches lay against a chair. ‘Or you can have it here. You must be hungry, but I didn’t want to wake you up for breakfast.’

‘I didn’t turn in till about six o’clock.’

‘That explains it.’ I took my hat off to her patience, to her ability to suppress her curiosity. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I feel awful.’

‘You look it,’ she said candidly. ‘Just not tough at all.’

‘I’m falling to pieces. What have you been doing all morning?’

‘Been squired around by the professor. I went swimming with him this morning – I think the professor likes going swimming with me – then after we’d had breakfast he took me round a bit and into the mine.’ She shivered, mock earnest. ‘I don’t care for the mine very much.’

‘Where’s your boyfriend now?’

‘Away looking for a dog. They can’t find it anywhere. The professor’s very upset. It seems that this was a particular pet and he was very attached to it.’

‘Ha! A pet? I’ve met the pet and he was very attached to me. The clinging type.’ I freed my left arm from the blanket and unwrapped the blood-stained strips of cloth. ‘You can see where he was clinging.’

‘My God!’ Her eyes widened and the warm colour ebbed from her cheeks. ‘That – that looks ghastly.’

I examined my arm with a kind of doleful pride and had to admit that she wasn’t exaggerating any. From shoulder to elbow most of the arm was blue, purple and black and swollen as much as fifty per cent above normal. There were four or five deep triangular tears in the flesh and blood was still oozing slowly from three of them. The parts of my arm that didn’t seem discoloured were probably just as bad as the rest, only they were hidden under a thick crust of dark dried-up blood. I had seen pleasanter sights.

‘What happened to the dog?’ she whispered.

‘I killed him.’ I reached under the pillow and drew out the blood-stained knife. ‘With this.’

‘Where on earth did you get that? Where – I think you’d better tell me everything from the beginning.’

So I told her, quickly and softly, while she cleaned up my arm and bandaged it again. She didn’t like the job, but she did it well. When I’d finished speaking she said: ‘What lies on the other side of the island?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘But I’m beginning to make all sorts of guesses and I don’t like any of them.’

She said nothing to this, just finished tying up my arm and helping me into a long-sleeved shirt. After that she fixed up the splints and plaster again on my right ankle, went to the cupboard and brought back her handbag. I said sourly: ‘Going to powder your nose for the boyfriend?’

‘I’m going to powder yours,’ she said. Before I was properly aware of what she was doing she had some kind of cream on my face, had rubbed it in and was dusting powder over it. After a bit she leaned back and surveyed her handiwork. ‘You look simply sweet’ she murmured and handed me her pocket mirror.

I looked awful. One horrified glance at me would have had any life assurance salesman in the land jumping on his fountain pen with both feet. The drawn features, the bloodshot eyes with the blue under them were my own contributions: but the ghastly and highly convincing pallor of the rest of my face was entirely due to Marie.

‘Wonderful,’ I agreed. ‘And what’s going to happen when the professor gets a good whiff of this face-powder?’

She drew a miniature scent-spray from her bag. ‘After I’ve sprayed a couple of ounces of “Night of Mystery” on myself he won’t be able to smell anything else within twenty yards.’

I wrinkled my nose and said: ‘I see your point.’ ‘Night of Mystery’ was pretty powerful stuff, at least in the quantities she was using. ‘What happens if I start sweating? Won’t all this cream and powder stuff start to streak?’

‘It’s guaranteed not to.’ She smiled. ‘If it does, we’ll sue the makers.’

‘Sure,’ I said heavily. ‘That should be interesting. You know. The shades of the late J. Bentall and M. Hopeman herewith propose to raise an action –’

‘Stop it!’ she said sharply. ‘Stop it, will you?’

I stopped it. She was a very touchy girl on some subjects. Or maybe I was just clumsy and careless. I said: ‘Don’t you think the half-hour is just about up?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. We’d better go.’

It took me until I had got down the steps and moved six paces into the sunshine to realize that Marie’s careful preparation with the cream and powder was probably just so much wasted effort. The way I felt, nothing could have made me look worse. With only one foot in commission and the other shoeless foot swinging clear of the ground I was forced to throw much of my weight on the crutches and with every thud of the left-hand crutch on the hard-baked earth a violent jolt of pain stabbed clear through my arm, from the finger-tips all the way to the shoulder, then across my back to the very top of my head. I didn’t see why an arm injury should give me a violent headache, but it did. This was something else to take up with the medical profession.

Old Witherspoon had either been watching or had heard the thud of my crutches for he opened the door and came hopping briskly down the steps to greet us. The broad beam of welcome changed to a look of distress as he caught sight of my face.

‘God bless my soul! Bless my soul!’ He came hurrying anxiously forward and took my arm. ‘You look – I mean, this has given you a terrible shake. Good God, my boy, the sweat’s pouring down your face.’

He wasn’t exaggerating. It was pouring down my face. It had started pouring at the precise instant that he had gripped me by the arm, the left arm, just above the elbow. He was screwing my arm off at the shoulder socket. He thought he was helping me.

I’ll be all right.’ I gave him my wan smile. ‘Just jarred my foot coming down our steps. Otherwise I hardly feel a thing.’

‘You shouldn’t have come out,’ he scolded. ‘Foolish, terribly foolish. We would have sent lunch across. However, now that you’re here … Dear me, dear me, I feel so guilty about all this.’

It’s not your fault,’ I reassured him. He’d shifted his grip higher to assist me up the steps and I noted with faint surprise that his house was swaying from side to side. ‘You weren’t to know that the floor was unsafe.’

‘But I did, I did. That’s what vexes me so much. Unforgivable, unforgivable.’ He ushered me into a chair in his living-room, fussing and clucking around like an old hen. ‘By jove, you do look ill. Brandy, eh, brandy?’

‘Nothing I’d like better,’ I said honestly.

He did his usual testing to destruction act with the handbell, brandy was brought and the patient revived. He waited till I downed half my drink, then said: ‘Don’t you think I should have another look at that ankle?’

‘Thank you, but fortunately no need,’ I said easily. ‘Marie fixed it this morning. I had the good sense to marry a fully qualified nurse. I hear you’ve had a little trouble yourself. Did you find your dog?’

‘No trace of him anywhere. Most vexing, most disturbing. A Dobermann, you know – very devoted to him. Yes, very devoted. I can’t think what has happened.’ He shook his head worriedly, poured some sherry for himself and Marie and sat beside her on the rattan couch. ‘I fear some misfortune has overtaken him.’

‘Misfortune?’ Marie gazed at him, wide-eyed. ‘On this peaceful little island?’

‘Snakes, I’m afraid. Highly poisonous vipers. They infest the southern part of the island and live in the rocks at the foot of the mountain. Carl – my dog – may have been bitten by one of those. Incidentally, I meant to warn you – on no account go near that part of the island. Extremely dangerous, extremely.’

‘Vipers!’ Marie shuddered. ‘Do they – do they come near the houses here?’

‘Oh, dear me, no.’ The professor patted her hand in absent-minded affection. ‘No need to worry, my dear. They hate this phosphate dust. Just remind yourself to confine your walks to this part of the island.’

‘I certainly shall,’ Marie agreed. ‘But tell me, Professor, if the vipers had got him wouldn’t you – or someone – have found his body?’

‘Not if he were in among the rocks at the foot of the mountain. Fearful jumble there. Of course, he may come back yet?,

‘Or he may have taken a swim.’ I suggested.

‘A swim?’ The professor frowned. ‘I don’t follow you, my boy.’

‘Was he fond of water?’

‘As a matter of fact, he was. By jove, I believe you’ve hit on it. Lagoon’s full of tiger sharks. Monsters, some of them, up to eighteen feet – and I do know they move close in at night. That must have been it, that must have been it. Poor Carl! One of those monsters could have bitten him clear in two. What an end for a dog, what an end.’ Witherspoon shook his head mournfully and cleared his throat. ‘Dear me, I shall miss him. He was more than a dog, he was a friend. A faithful and a gentle friend.’

We all sat around for a couple of minutes in silent sorrow, paying our last respects to this departed pillar of canine benevolence, and then we got on with the lunch.

It was still daylight, but the sun had sunk beyond the shoulder of the mountain when I woke up. I felt fresh and rested, and while my arm was still stiff and sore, the throbbing pain of the morning had gone – as long as I didn’t have to move around, the discomfort was hardly worth mentioning.

Marie had not yet returned. She and the professor had gone out trolling for trevally – whatever trevally might be – with the two Fijian boys after lunch while I had returned to bed. The professor had invited me also, but it had obviously been only as a gesture of politeness, I hadn’t the strength to pull in a sardine that afternoon. So they’d gone without me. Professor Witherspoon had expressed regrets and apologies and hoped I didn’t mind his taking my wife with him. I’d told him not at all and hoped that they would enjoy themselves and he’d given me a funny look that I couldn’t quite figure out, and I’d had the obscure uneasy feeling of having put a foot wrong somewhere. But whatever it was he hadn’t let it puzzle him long. He was too interested in his trevally. Not to mention Marie.

I’d washed and shaved and managed to make myself look more or less respectable by the time they returned. It appeared that the trevally hadn’t been biting that day. Neither of them seemed very upset about it. The professor was in tremendous form at the table that evening, a genial thoughtful host with a fund of good stories. He really went out of his way to entertain us and it didn’t require any great deductive powers to guess that the effort wasn’t being made on my behalf or on the behalf of Hewell, who say at the opposite end of the table from me, brooding and silent and remote. Marie laughed and smiled and talked almost as much as the professor. She seemed to find his charm and good humour infectious, but it didn’t infect me any, I’d done a good solid hour of constructive thinking before I’d gone to sleep that afternoon and the thinking had led me to inevitable conclusions that I found very frightening indeed. I don’t scare easy but I know when to be scared: and never a better time in my opinion than when you’ve made the discovery that you’re under sentence of death. And I was under sentence of death. I had no doubt at all left in my mind about that.

Dinner over, I pulled myself to my feet, reached for the crutches, thanked the professor for the meal and said that we couldn’t possibly trespass on his kindness and hospitality any more that night. We knew, I said, that he was a busy man. He protested, but not too violently, and asked if there were any books he could send across to our house. I said we would be pleased, but that I’d like to take a few steps down to the beach first and he clucked his tongue and wondered whether it would not be too much for me, but when I said that he had only to look out of the window and see for himself how little I was exerting myself he supposed doubtfully it would be all right. We said good night and left them.

I’d some difficulty in negotiating the steep bank overhanging the top of the beach, but after that it was easy. The sand was dry and hard-packed and the crutches scarcely sank in at all. We went about a couple of hundred yards down and along the beach, always keeping in line of sight of the professor’s windows, till we came to the edge of the lagoon. There we sat down. The moon was as it had been the previous night, one moment there, the next vanished behind the drifting cloud. I could hear the distant murmur of the surf breaking on the reef of the lagoon and the faint rustling whisper of the night wind in the nodding palms. There were no exotic tropical scents, I suppose that suffocating grey phosphate dust had crushed the life out of all but the trees and the tougher plants, all I could smell was the sea.

Marie touched my arm with gentle fingers. ‘How does it feel?’

‘Improving. Enjoy your afternoon out?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so. You were too happy by half. Learn anything that might be useful?’

‘How could I?’ she asked disgustedly. ‘He did nothing but babble and talk nonsense all afternoon.’

‘It’s the “Night of Mystery” and those clothes you wear,’ I pointed out kindly. ‘You’re driving the man out of his mind.’

‘I don’t seem to be driving you out of your mind,’ she said tartly.

‘No,’ I agreed, then, after a few seconds, added bitterly: ‘You can’t drive me out of what I haven’t got.’

‘What strange modesty is this?’

‘Look at this beach,’ I said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that four or five days ago in London, before we even took off, someone knew that we would be sitting here tonight? My God, if ever I get out of this I’m going to devote the rest of my life to tiddlywinks. I’m out of my depth in this line. I knew I was right about Fleck, I knew I was. He was no killer.’

‘You’re hopping about too much,’ Marie protested. ‘Sure, he wasn’t going to kill us. Not nice Captain Fleck. He was just going to tap us on the head and push us over the side. The sharks would have done the dirty work for him.’

‘Remember when we were sitting on that upper deck? Remember I told you that I felt there was something wrong but that I couldn’t put my finger on it? Remember?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Good old Bentall,’ I said savagely. ‘Never misses a thing. The ventilator – the ventilator we used as a hearing aid, the one facing the radio room. It shouldn’t have been facing the radio shack, it should have been facing forward. Remember we got no air down there. No bloody wonder.’

‘There’s no need to –’

‘Sorry. But you see it all now, don’t you? He knew that even a fool like me would discover that voices from the radio room could be heard down that pipe. Ten to one he had a concealed mike down in that hold which let him know whenever Bentall, the Einstein of espionage, made such shattering discoveries. He knew there were cockroaches there, and he knew that they would discourage us from sleeping on a low bunk, so Henry pushes back some battens which coincidentally happen to be at the very spot where we can start searching for tinned food and drink after we’d passed up that deliberately awful breakfast they gave us. More coincidences: behind the tinned food are battens with loose screws and behind them are lifebelts. Fleck didn’t exactly hang up a sign saying “Lifebelts in this box” – but he came pretty close to it. Then Fleck puts the wind up me good and proper, without in any way appearing to do so, and more or less lets us know that the decision to execute or not will be coming through at seven. So we latch ourselves on to that ventilator and when the word comes through we leave, complete with lifebelts. What do you bet that Fleck had even loosened the screws on the hatch to make things easy – I could probably have forced it with my little finger.’

‘But – but we could still have drowned.’ Marie said slowly. ‘We might have missed the reef or lagoon.’

‘What – miss a six-mile wide target? You said old Fleck seemed to be changing course pretty often and you were right. He wanted to make good and sure that when we jumped we did so opposite the middle of the reef where we couldn’t miss. He even slowed right down so that we wouldn’t hurt ourselves when we jumped overboard. Probably standing there killing himself laughing when Bentall and Hopeman, two stooges in search of a comedian, pussy-footed it down to the stern. And those voices I heard on the reef that night? John and James out in their canoe, seeing that we didn’t even put a foot wrong and sprain an ankle. God, how much of a sucker can you be?’

There was a long silence. I lit a couple of cigarettes and gave her one. The moon had gone behind a cloud and her face was only a pale blur in the darkness. Then she said: ‘Fleck and the professor – they must be working hand in hand.’

‘Can you see any other possibility?’

‘What do they want with us?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’ I was sure, but this was one thing I couldn’t tell her.

‘But – but why all the fake build-up? Why couldn’t Fleck have sailed right in and handed us over to the professor?’

‘There’s an answer to that, too. Whoever is behind this is a very smart boy indeed. There’s a reason for everything he does.’

‘You – do you think the professor – is he the man behind? –’

‘I don’t know what he is. Don’t forget the barbed wire. The Navy is there. They may have come to play skittles, but I don’t think so. There’s something big, very big, and something very secret going on on the other side of the island. Whoever is in charge there will be taking no chances. They know Witherspoon is there, and that fence doesn’t mean a thing, that’s just to discourage wandering employees, they’ll have investigated him down to the last nail in his shoes. The Services have some very clever investigators indeed and if they’re content to have him there that means he’s got a clean bill of health. And he knows the Navy is there. Fleck and the professor in cahoots. The professor and the Navy in cahoots. What kind of sense do you make of it?’

‘You trust the professor, then? You’re saying, in effect, that he is on the level?’

I’m not saying anything. I’m just thinking out loud.’

‘No, you’re not,’ she insisted. ‘If he’s accepted by the Navy, he must be on the level. That’s what you say. If he is, then why the Chinese crouching in the darkness down by the fence, why the man-killing dog, why the trip-wire?’

‘I’m just guessing. He may have warned his employees to keep clear of that place and they know of the dog and the wire. I’m not saying those were his Chinese employees I saw, I only assumed it. If there’s something big and secret happening on the other side of the island, don’t forget that secrets can be lost by people breaking out as well as by people breaking in. The Navy may well have some top men on this side, to see that no one breaks out. Maybe the professor knows all about it – I think he does. We’ve lost too many secrets to the communist world during the past decade through sheer bad security. The Government may have learned its lesson.’

‘But where do we come in?’ she said helplessly. It’s so – so terribly complicated. And how can you explain away the attempt to cripple you?’

‘I can’t. But the more I think of it the more convinced I am that I’m only a tiny pawn in this and that nearly always tiny pawns have to be sacrificed to win the chess game.’

‘But why?’ she insisted. ‘Why? And what reason can a harmless old duffer like Professor Witherspoon have for – ?’

‘If that harmless old duffer is Professor Witherspoon,’ I interrupted heavily, ‘then I’m the Queen of the May.’

For almost a minute there was only the far-off murmur of the surf, the whisper of the night wind in the trees.

‘I can’t stand much more of this’ she said at last, wearily. ‘You said yourself you’ve seen him on television and –’

‘And very reasonable facsimile he is, too,’ I agreed. ‘His name may even be Witherspoon but he’s certainly no professor of archaeology. He’s the only person I ever met who knows less about archaeology than I do. Believe me, that’s a feat.’

‘But he knows so much about it –’

‘He knows nothing about it. He’s boned up on a couple of books on archaeology and Polynesia and never got quarter of the way through either. He didn’t get far enough to find out that there are neither vipers nor malaria in these parts, both of which he claims to exist. That’s why he objected to your having his books. You might find out more than he does. It wouldn’t take long. He talks about recovering pottery and wooden implements from basalt – the lava would have crushed the one and incinerated the other. He talks about dating wooden relics by experience and knowledge and any schoolboy in physics will tell you that it can be done with a high degree of accuracy by measuring the extent of decay of radio-active carbon in those relics. He gave me to understand that those relics were the deepest ever found, at a hundred and twenty feet, and I don’t suppose there are more than ten million people who know that a ten-million-year-old skeleton was dug out from the Tuscany hills about three years ago at a depth of 600 feet – in a coal mine. As for the idea of using high explosive in archaeology instead of prying away gently with pick and shovel – well, don’t mention it around the British Museum. You’ll have the old boys keeling over like ninepins.’

‘But – but all those relics and curios they have around –’

‘They may be genuine. Professor Witherspoon may have made a genuine strike, then the idea occurred to the Navy that here would be the perfect set-up for secrecy. They could have all access to the island forbidden for perfectly legitimate reasons and that would give them the ideal cover-up, nothing to excite the suspicions of the countries who would be very excited indeed if they knew what the Navy was doing. Whatever that is. The strike may be finished long ago and Witherspoon kept under wraps with someone very like him to put up a front for accidental visitors. Or those relics may be fakes. Maybe there never was an archaeological find here. Maybe it’s a brilliant idea dreamed up by the Navy. Again they would require Witherspoon’s co-operation, but not necessarily himself, which accounts for the bogus prof. Maybe the story was fed to the newspapers and magazines. Maybe some newspaper and magazine proprietors were approached by the Government and persuaded to help out in the fraud. It’s been done before.’

‘But there were also American papers, American magazines.’

‘Maybe it’s an Anglo-American project.’

‘I still don’t understand why they should try to cripple you,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But maybe one or either of your suggestions goes some way towards an answer.’

‘Maybe. I really don’t know. But I’ll have the answer tonight. I’ll find it inside that mine.’

‘Are you – are you really crazy?’ she said quietly. ‘You’re not fit to go anywhere.’

‘It’s only a short walk. I’ll manage. There’s nothing wrong with my legs.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the kind.’

‘Please, Johnny.’

‘No.’

She spread out her wings. ‘I’m no use to you at all?’

‘Don’t be silly. We’ve got to have someone to hold the fort, to see that no one comes snooping into our house to find two dummies. So long as they can hear even one person breathing and see another form beside him they’ll be happy. I’m going back for a couple of hours’ sleep. Why don’t you go and whoop it up with the old professor? He can’t keep his eyes off you and you may find out a great deal more in that way than I will in mine.’

‘I’m not quite sure that I understand what you mean.’

The old Mata-Hari act,’ I said impatiently. ‘Whisper sweet nothings in his silver beard. You’ll have him ga-ga in no time. Who knows what tender secrets he might not whisper in return?’

‘You think so?’

‘Sure, why not? He’s at the dangerous stage as far as women are concerned. Somewhere between eighteen and eighty.’

‘He might start getting ideas.’

‘Well, let him. What does it matter? Just so long as you get some information out of him. Duty before pleasure, you know.’

‘I see,’ she said softly. She rose to her feet and stretched out her hand. ‘Come on. Up.’

I got to my feet. A couple of seconds later I was sitting on the sand again. It hadn’t been so much the unexpectedness of the open-handed blow across the face as the sheer weight of it. I was still sitting there, feeling for the dislocation and marvelling at the weird antics of the female members of the race, when she scrambled over the high bank at the top of the beach and disappeared.

My jaw seemed all right. It hurt, but it was still a jaw. I got to my feet, swung the crutches under my arms and started for the head of the beach. It was pretty dark now and I could have made it three times as fast without the crutches but I wouldn’t have put it past the old boy to have night-glasses on me.

The bank at the top was only three feet high, but it was still too high for me. I finally solved it by sitting on the edge and pushing myself up with my crutches, but when I got to my feet, swung round and made to take off, the crutches broke through the soft soil and I fell backwards over on to the sand.

It knocked the breath out of me but it wasn’t much of a fall as falls go, not enough to make me swear out loud, just enough to make me swear softly. I was trying to get enough breath back to swear some more when I heard the quick light sound of approaching feet and someone slid over the edge of the bank. A glimpse of white, a whiff of ‘Night of Mystery’, she’d come back to finish me off. I braced my jaw again, then unbraced it. She was bent low down, peering at me, in no position at all to haul off at me again.

‘I – I saw you fall.’ Her voice was husky. ‘Are you badly hurt?’

I’m in agony. Hey, careful of my sore arm.’

But she wasn’t being careful. She was kissing me. She gave her kisses like she gave her slaps, without any holding back that I could notice. She wasn’t crying, but her cheek was wet with tears. After a minute, maybe two, she murmured: ‘I’m so ashamed. I’m so sorry.’

‘So am I,’ I said. I’m sorry, too.’ I’d no idea what either of us was talking about, but it didn’t seem to matter very much at the moment. By and by she rose and helped me over the edge of the bank and I tip-tapped my way back to the house, her arm in mine. We passed by the professor’s bungalow on the way, but I didn’t make any further suggestions about her going in to see him.

It was just after ten o’clock when I slid out under a raised corner of the seaward-facing side-screen. I could still feel her kisses, but I could also still feel my sore jaw, so I left in a pretty neutral frame of mind. As far as she was concerned, that is. As far as the others were concerned – the others being the professor and his men, I wasn’t feeling neutral at all. I carried the torch in one hand and the knife in the other, and this time I didn’t have any cloth wrapped round the knife. If there weren’t more lethal things than dogs on the island of Vardu, I sadly missed my bet.

The moon was lost behind heavy cloud, but I took no chances. It was almost a quarter of a mile to where the mine shaft was sunk into the side of the mountain but I covered nearly all of it on hands and knees and it didn’t do my sore arm any great deal of good. On the other hand, I got there safely.

I didn’t know if the professor would have any good reason to have a guard at the entrance to the mine or not. Again it seemed like a good idea to err on the side of caution, so when I stood up slowly and stiffly in the black shadow of a rock where the moon wouldn’t get me when and if it broke through, I just stayed there. I stood there for fifteen minutes and all I could hear was the far-off murmur of the Pacific on the distant reef and the slow thudding of my own heart. Any unsuspecting guard who could keep as still as that for fifteen minutes was asleep. I wasn’t scared of men who were asleep. I went into the mine.

My rubber-soled sandals heel-and-toed it along the limestone rock without the slightest whisper of sound. No one could have heard me coming and, after I was clear of the faint luminescence of the cave-mouth, no one could have seen me coming. My torch was off. If there was anyone inside that mine I’d meet them soon enough without letting them know I was on the way. In the dark all men are equal. With that knife in my hand, I was slightly more than equal.

There was plenty of room between the wall and the railway track in the middle to make it unnecessary for me to walk on the sleepers. I couldn’t risk a sudden variation of length between a couple of ties. It was simple enough to guide myself by brushing the back of the fingers of my right hand against the tunnel wall from time to time. I took care that the shaft of the knife did not strike solid rock.

Inside a minute, the tunnel wall fell away sharply to the right. I had reached the first hollowed-out cavern. I went straight across it to the tunnel opening directly opposite, guiding myself by touching the side of my left foot against the sleepers. It took me five minutes to cross the seventy-yard width of that cave. Nobody called out, nobody switched on a light, nobody jumped me. I was all alone. Or I was being left alone, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

Thirty seconds after leaving the first cavern I’d reached the next one. This was the one where the professor had said the first archaeological discoveries had been made, the cavern with the two shored-up entrances to the left, the railway going straight ahead and, to the right, the tunnel where we’d found Hewell and his crew working. I’d no interest in the tunnel where we’d found Hewell working. The professor had given me to understand that that was the source of the explosions that had wakened me the previous afternoon, but all the amount of loose rock I’d seen lying there could have been brought down by a couple of good-sized firecrackers. I followed the railway across the chamber straight into the opposite tunnel.

This led to a third chamber, and then a fourth. Neither of those had any exits to the north, into the side of the mountains, as I found by walking round a complete semicircle to my right before regaining the railway track again: I completed the circle in both chambers and found two openings to the south in each. But I went straight on. After that there were no more caverns, just the tunnel that went on and on.

And on. I thought I would never come to the end of it. There had been no archaeological excavations made here, it was just a plain and straightforward tunnel quite unconcerned with what lay on either side of it. It was a tunnel that was going someplace. I was having to walk on the ties now, the diameter had narrowed to half of what it had been at first, and I noticed that the gradient was slightly upward all the time. I noticed, too, that the air in the tunnel, and this at least a mile and a half after I’d left the mine entrance was still fresh, and I guessed that that explained the upward slant of the tunnel – it was being kept deliberately near the rising slope of the mountainside to facilitate the driving of vertical ventilation shafts. I must have been at least halfway across to the western side of the island by then and it wasn’t very hard to guess that it wouldn’t be long before the tunnel floor levelled out and started to descend.

It wasn’t. The stretch of level floor, when I came to it, didn’t extend more than a hundred yards, and then it began to dip. Just as the descent began my right hand failed to find the tunnel wall. I risked a quick snap of the torch and saw a thirty-foot deep cavern to my right, half full of rock and debris. For one moment I thought this must be the scene of yesterday’s blasting, but a second look put that thought out of my mind. There were a couple of hundred tons of loose rock lying there, far too much for one day’s work, and, besides, there was no advantage in driving suddenly north, into the heart of the mountain. This was just a storage dump, one probably excavated some time ago to provide a convenient deposit for the rock blasted from the tunnel proper, when the need arose to do that quickly.

Less than three hundred yards farther on I found the end of the tunnel. I rubbed my forehead, which had been the part of me that had done the finding, then switched on the tiny pencil-beam of light. There were two small boxes lying on the floor, both nearly empty, but still holding a few charges of blasting powders, detonators and fuses: this, beyond doubt, was the scene of yesterday’s blasting. I played the torch beam over the end of the tunnel and that was all it was, just the end of a tunnel, a seven foot high by four foot wide solid face of rock. And then I saw that it wasn’t all solid, not quite. Just below eye-level a roughly circular rock about a foot in diameter appeared to have been jammed into a hole in the wall. I eased out this lump of limestone and peered into the hole behind. It was maybe four feet long, tapering inwards to perhaps two inches and at the far end I could see something faintly twinkling, red and green and white. A star. I put the rock back in position and left.

It took me half an hour to get back to the first of the four caverns. I investigated the two openings leading off to the south, but they led only to two further caverns, neither of them with exits. I headed back along the railway till I came to the third of the caverns from the entrance, examined the two openings in this one and achieved nothing apart from getting myself lost in a maze for almost half an hour. And then I came to the second cavern.

Of the two tunnels leading off to the north, I passed up the one where Hewell had been working. I’d find nothing there. I found nothing in the neighbouring one either. And, of course, there would be nothing behind the timber baulks holding up the entrances to the two collapsed tunnels to the south. I made for the exit leading to the outer cavern when the thought occurred to me that the only reason I had for believing that those baulks of timber supported the entrances to a couple of caved-in tunnels was that Professor Witherspoon himself had told me they did and, apart from the fact that he knew nothing about archaeology, the only certain fact that I had so far established about the professor was that he was a fluent liar.

But he hadn’t been lying about the first of these two tunnels. The heavy vertical three by six timbers that blocked the entrance were jammed immovably in place and when I pressed my torch against a half-inch gap between two of the timbers and switched it on I could clearly see the solid mass of stone and rubble that completely blocked the passage behind, all the way from the floor to the collapsed roof. Maybe I’d been doing the professor an injustice.

And then again maybe I hadn’t. Two of the timber baulks guarding the entrance to the second barricade tunnel were loose.

No pickpocket ever lifted a wallet with half the delicate care and soundless stealth that I used to lift one of these baulks out of position and lean it against its neighbour. A brief pressure on the torch button showed no signs of a roof collapse anywhere, just a dingy grey smooth-floored tunnel stretching and dwindling away into the darkness. I lifted a second batten out of place and squeezed through the gap into the tunnel beyond.

It was then that I discovered that I couldn’t replace the battens from the inside. One, yes, but even then only roughly in place, but it was impossible to manoeuvre the other through the six-inch gap that was left. There was nothing I could do about it. I left it as it was and went down the tunnel.

Thirty yards and the tunnel turned abruptly to the left. I was still guiding myself as I had done earlier on, by brushing the back of my right hand against the wall, and suddenly the wall fell away to the right. I reached in cautiously and touched something cold and metallic. A key, hanging on a hook. I reached beyond it and traced out the outlines of a low narrow wooden door hinged on a heavy vertical post of timber. I took down the key, located the keyhole, softly turned the lock and opened the door a fraction of an inch at a time. My nostrils twitched to the pungent combined smells of oil and sulphuric acid. I eased the door another two inches. The hinges creaked in sepulchral protest, I had the sudden vision of a gibbet and a swaying corpse turning in the night wind and the corpse was myself, then I snapped abruptly to my senses, realized that the time for pussy-footing was over, passed quickly round the door and closed it behind me as I switched on the torch.

There was no one there. One quick traverse of the torch beam round a cave no more than twenty feet in diameter was enough to show me that someone had been there, and very recently.

I moved forward, stubbed my toe heavily against something solid, looked down and saw a large lead-acid accummulator. Wires from this led to a switch on the wall. I pressed the switch and the cave was flooded with light.

Perhaps ‘flooded’ is the wrong word, it was just by comparison with the weak beam from my torch. A naked lamp, forty watts or thereabouts, suspended from the middle of the roof: but it gave all the illumination I wanted.

Stacked in the middle of the chamber were two piles of oiled yellow boxes, I was almost certain what they were before I crossed to examine them, and as soon as I saw the stencils on top I was certain. The last time I had seen those boxes with the legend ‘Champion Spark Plugs’ stencilled on them was in the hold of Fleck’s schooner. Machine-gun ammunition and ammonal explosive. So perhaps I hadn’t been imagining things after all when I thought I had seen lights that night we’d been marooned on the reef. I had seen lights. Captain Fleck unloading cargo.

By the right-hand wall were two wooden racks, holding twenty machine-pistols and automatic carbines of a type I had never seen before: they were heavily coated with grease against the drippingly damp atmosphere of the cave. Stacked beside the racks were three squarish metal boxes, for a certainty ammunition for the guns. I looked at the racked guns and the boxes and for the first time in my life I could understand how a gourmet felt when he sat down to an eight-course dinner prepared by a cordon-bleu chef. And then I opened the first box, the second and the third, and I knew exactly how the same gourmet would have felt if, while adjusting his napkin, the maître d’hôtel had come along and told him that the shop was shut for the night.

The boxes contained not a single round of carbine or machine-pistol ammunition. One box contained black blasting powder, another beehive blocks of amatol explosive and a drum of .44 shotgun ammunition, the third primers, fulminate of mercury detonators, about a hundred yards of R.D.X. fuses and a flat tin case of chemical igniters, most of it stuff, presumably, that Hewell used in his blasting operations. And that was all. My pipe dreams about a loaded machine-pistol and the radical difference it would make to the balance of power on the island were just that, pipe dreams and no more. Ammunition without guns to fire them, guns without ammunition to let them. Useless, all useless.

I switched out the light and left. It would have taken me only five minutes to wreck the firing mechanisms on every carbine and machine-pistol there. I was going to spend the rest of my days bitterly regretting the fact that the thought had never even occurred to me.

Twenty yards farther on I came to a similar door on the right of the tunnel wall. No key to this one, it didn’t need it for the door wasn’t locked. I laid a gentle hand on the knob, turned it and eased the door open a couple of inches. The stench of fetid air that issued through the narrow crack was an almost physical blow to my face, a putrescent mephitis that wrinkled my nostrils in nauseated repugnance and lifted all the hairs on the back of my head. I felt suddenly very cold.

I opened the door farther, passed inside and shut it behind me. The switch was in the same place as it had been in the previous cavern. I pressed it and looked round the cave. But this was no cave. This was a tomb.

CHAPTER 7

Friday 1.30 a.m.–3.30 a.m.

Some freak in the atmosphere of the cave, possibly a combination of the moisture and the phosphate of lime, had maintained the bodies in a state of almost perfect preservation. Decomposition had set in, but to a negligible extent only, certainly not enough to mar any of the essential features of the nine corpses lying where they had been flung in a rough row at the far end of the cave. The dark stains on white and khaki shirt-fronts made it easy to see how they had died.

With my hand on my nose and breathing through my mouth only, I switched on my torch to give extra illumination and scanned the dead faces.

Six of the dead men were complete strangers to me, labourers by the looks of their clothes and hands, and I knew I had never seen them before. But the seventh I recognized immediately. White hair, white moustache, white beard, here was the real Professor Witherspoon, even in death his resemblance to the impostor who had taken his place was startling in its closeness. Beside him lay a giant of a man, a man with red hair and a great red handlebar moustache: this beyond any doubt, would be the Dr ‘Red’ Carstairs whose portrait I had been shown in a magazine. The ninth man, in a much better state of preservation than the others, I identified without a second glance: his presence there confirmed that the men who had advertised for a second fuel research specialist had indeed been in need of one: it was Dr Charles Fairfield, my old chief in the Hepworth Ordinance and Fuel Research, one of the eight scientists who had been lured out to Australia.

Sweat was pouring down my face but I was shivering with cold. What was Dr Fairfield doing here? Why had he been killed? Old Fairfield was the last man to stumble upon anything. A brilliant man in his own field, he was as short-sighted as a dodo and had a monumental incuriosity about everything and anything except his own work and his consuming private passion for archaeology. And the archaeological tie-up between Fairfield and Witherspoon was so blindingly obvious that it just didn’t make any sense at all. Whatever reason lay behind Dr Fairfield’s sudden disappearance from England nothing was more certain than that it was entirely unconnected with whatever pick and shovel expertise he might show in abandoned mine-workings. But then what in the name of God was he doing here?

I felt as if I were in an ice-box but the sweat was trickling more heavily than ever down the back of my neck. Still holding the torch in my right hand – the knife was in my left – I worked a handkerchief out of my right trouser pocket and mopped the back of my neck. To the left and front of me I caught a momentary flash of something glittering on the wall of the cave, something metallic, obviously, reflecting on the beam of the still burning torch. But what? What metallic object was there? Apart from the dead men the only other objects in that cave were the light fitting and the light switch, and both were made of Bakelite. I held the torch and handkerchief, both still over my shoulder, perfectly steady. The glimmer of light on the cave wall was still there. I stood like a statue, my eyes never leaving that gleam on the wall. The light moved.

My heart stopped. The medical profession can say what it likes, but my heart stopped. Then slowly, carefully, I brought down both torch and handkerchief, transferred the torch to my left hand as if to enable me to shove my handkerchief away with my right, then dropped the handkerchief, clutched the hilt of the knife in my right hand and whirled round all in one half second of time.

There were two of them, no more than four feet inside the cave, still fifteen feet distant from me. Two Chinese, already moving wide apart to encircle me, one in dungaree trousers and cotton shirt, the other in a pair of cotton shorts, both big muscular men, both in their bare feet. Their unwinking eyes, the oriental immobility of the yellow faces served only to emphasize, not mask, the cold implacability of the expressions. You didn’t have to know your Emily Post to realize that they just weren’t paying a social call. Nor would Emily have given them any medals for their calling cards, two of the most lethal-looking double-edged throwing knives I’d ever seen: the books on etiquette covered practically every possible situation in which strangers first made the other’s aquaintance, but they’d missed out on this one.

It would be ridiculous to deny that I was frightened, so I won’t. I was scared, and badly scared. Two fit men against one semi-invalid, four good arms against one, two undoubtedly skilled and cunning knife-fighters against a man who’d never even carved up a lump of cooked dead meat far less a live human being. And this wasn’t the time to learn. But it was the time to do something, and do it very quickly indeed before one or other of them caught on to the idea that at five yards I was a target that could hardly be missed and changed over from a stabbing to a throwing grip on his knife.

I rushed at them, right hand and knife over my shoulder as if I were wielding a club, and both of them fell back an involuntary couple of paces, maybe because of the foolhardy recklessness of it, more likely because of the respectful fear which Orientals habitually show in the presence of madness. I brought the knife whistling forward over my shoulder and with the tinkling of glass from the smashed overhead light and the flick of my left thumb on the torch switch the cave became as pitch-black as the tomb it really was.

It was essential to move, and move as fast as possible before they realized that I had the double advantage of having a torch and being in the position to lash out indiscriminately with my knife in a hundred per cent certainty that I would be stabbing an enemy, whereas they had a fifty per cent chance of a friend. Reckless of the noise I made in that utterly silent chamber, I pulled away the plaster from the face of the torch, slipped off my sandals, ran three heavy steps in the direction of the entrance, stopped abruptly and sent both sandals sliding along the ground to thud softly against the wooden door.

Had they been given another ten seconds to take stock of their position, to work out the possibilities, probably the last thing they would have done would have been to rush headlong to the source of the sudden noise. As it was, they had been given barely five seconds altogether in which to think, and the immediate and inevitable reaction must have been that I was trying to escape. I heard the quick patter of bare feet, the sound of a brief scuffle, a soft thud and an explosive gasp of agony that was lost in the clatter of something metallic falling to the floor.

Four swift soundless steps on my stockinged feet, a flick of the left thumb and they were pinned in the white glare of the torch, a tableau vivant but for their unnaturally petrified rigidity which gave them for all the world the appearance of a group sculpted from marble. They stood face to face, their chests almost but not quite touching. The man on my right had his left hand twisted in his companion’s shirt front, while his right hand was pressed against the other’s body, just below waist level: the man on the left, his face averted from me, was arched over backwards like an overstrung bow, both hands locked over the right hand of his companion: the ridged and straining tendons turned the hands into waxen claws, the knuckles gleamed white like polished bone. I could see the blood-stained point of a knife sticking out two inches from the small of his back.

For two seconds, perhaps three – it seemed far longer than that – the man on the right stared unbelievingly into the face of the dying man, then the realization of his lethal blunder and the awareness that death stood now at his own elbow broke the horror-numbed spell that had held him in thrall. He struggled frantically to withdraw his knife but the last agonies of his friend had locked right hand and knife fast in an iron-bound grip. He swung round desperately on me, his left arm flying upwards and outwards in a gesture that was half-blow, half an attempt to shield himself from the beam I’d now directed into his shrinking eyes, and for a moment he had no guard left. The moment was enough and to spare. The blade of my knife was twelve inches long but for all that I jarred both wrist and knife as the hilt struck home against the breast-bone. He coughed once, a brief convulsive choked sound and drew his thin lips far back from the fast-clenched teeth into a hideous and blood-flecked grin: then the blade of my knife snapped and I was left with only the hilt and an inch of steel in my hand as the two men, still locked together, swayed over to my right and crashed heavily on to the limestone of the cave.

I shone the torch beam down on the faces at my feet, but it was a superfluous precaution, they would never trouble me again. I recovered my sandals, picked up the fallen knife and left, closing the door behind me. Once outside I leaned my weight against the tunnel wall, hands hanging by my side, and drew in great deep lungfuls of the pure fresh air. I felt weak, but put it down to my damaged arm and the foul air inside that tomb, the brief and violent episode on the other side of that door had left me curiously unaffected, or so I thought until I felt the pain in my cheek muscles and jaw and realized that my lips were strained back in involuntary imitation of the death’s-head grin of the man I had just killed. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the overstrained muscles of my face.

It was then that I heard the singing. This was it, Bentall’s tottering reason had gone at last, the shock of what I’d just seen and done had overstrained more than the facial muscles. Bentall unhinged, Bentall round the bend, Bentall hearing noises in his head. What would Colonel Raine have said if he knew his trusty servant had gone off his trolley? He would probably have smiled his invisible little smile and said in his dry dusty voice that to hear singing in an abandoned mine-working, even a mine under the control of murderous impostors and patrolled by equally murderous Chinese, was not necessarily evidence of insanity. To which his trusty servant would have replied, no, it wasn’t, but to hear a choir of Englishwomen singing ‘Greensleeves’ most certainly was.

For that was what I was hearing. Women’s voices and singing ‘Greensleeves’. Not a recording, for one of the voices was slightly off-key and another trying to harmonize with what I could only regard as a very limited degree of success. Englishwomen, singing ‘Greensleeves’. I shook my head violently but they still kept at it. I clasped my hands over my ears and the singing stopped. I took them away and the singing started again. Noises in the head don’t stop when you put your hands over your ears. Maybe the fact that there were Englishwomen down in that mine was crazy, but at least I wasn’t. Still like a man in a trance, but careful, for all that, to make not the slightest whisper of sound, I pushed myself off the door and went padding down the tunnel to investigate.

The sound of the singing swelled abruptly as I followed a ninety degree turning to the left. Twenty yards away I could see a faint backwash of light against the left side of the tunnel where it seemed to make another abrupt turning, this time to the right. I drifted up to this corner like a falling snowflake and poked my head around with all the dead slow caution of the old hedgehog taking his first wary squint at the world after a winter’s hibernation.

Twenty feet away the full width of the tunnel was blocked by vertical iron bars, spaced about six inches apart, with an inset grille door. Ten feet beyond that was a similar set of bars, with a similar door. Halfway between the two doors, suspended close to the roof, a naked bulb threw a harsh light over the small table directly beneath it and the two overalled men who sat one on either side of the table. Between them were a pile of curiously shaped wooden blocks and I assumed they were playing a game, but it wasn’t any game I’d ever seen. But whatever it was, it was obviously a game that called for concentration to judge by the irritated looks both men gave in the direction of the darkened space that lay behind the second set of bars. The singing showed no sign of stopping. Why people should be singing after midnight struck me as inexplicable until I remembered that to people imprisoned in a darkened cave day and night must have no meaning. Why they should be singing at all I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

After maybe twenty seconds more of this, one of the men thumped his fist on the table, jumped to his feet, picked up one of two carbines that I could now see had been propped against a chair, crossed to the faraway set of bars and rattled the butt of the gun against the metal, at the same time shouting out something in an angry voice. I didn’t understand the words but it didn’t need a linguist to understand the meaning. He was asking for silence. He didn’t get it. After a pause lasting maybe three seconds the singing came again, louder and more off-key than ever. Give them time and they’d start in on ‘There’ll always be an England’. The man with the carbine shook his head in disgust and disbelief and came wearily back to the table. The situation was beyond him.

It was beyond me too. Maybe if I hadn’t been so tired, or maybe if I’d been someone else altogether, someone, say, about twice as smart as I was, I might have thought of a way to get past or even overpower the guards. But right then all I could think of was that I had one little knife and they had two big guns and that anyway I’d used up all my luck for that night.

I left.

Marie was sleeping peacefully when I finally got back to our hut and I didn’t wake her at once. Let her sleep as long as she could, she wouldn’t get any more sleep this night, maybe her dark fears of the future were justified after all, maybe she wasn’t going to have any more sleep, ever.

Mentally, physically, emotionally, I was exhausted. Completely exhausted, let down as I’d never been before. On the way out from the mine I’d come to the conclusion that there was one thing and one thing to do, I’d screwed what little was left of my nerve up to the sticking point to do it and when the doing had proved impossible the reaction had been correspondingly great. What I had planned to do had been to kill both Witherspoon – I still thought of him as that – and Hewell. Not kill them, murder them, murder them as they lay in their beds. Or maybe it was better to execute them. Obviously, from the tunnel that went clear through to the other side of the island and the armoury in the mine, a full-scale attack was about to be launched on the naval establishment on the other side of the island. With Witherspoon and Hewell dead, it seemed unlikely that the leaderless Chinese would go through with it, and to me, at that moment, the prevention of the attack was the only thing that mattered. It mattered even more than the welfare of the girl asleep beside me, and I could no longer kid myself that my feelings towards her were the same as they’d been three short days ago: but she still came second.

But I hadn’t killed them in their beds for the sufficient reason that neither of them had been in their beds: they’d both been across at the professor’s house, drinking the chilled canned beer that the Chinese boy brought in from time to time, talking in soft voices as they pored over charts. The general and his A.D.C. preparing for D-Day. And D-Day was at hand.

The disappointment, the bitterness of what had seemed the ultimate defeat, had taken the last of the heart from me. I’d withdrawn from the window of the profesor’s house and just stood there dully, unthinkingly, careless of the risk of discovery, until after maybe five minutes a few of my brain cells started trudging around again. Then I’d walked heavily back up to the mine. It says much for my state of mind that the thought of repeating my earlier hands and knees crawl up there never entered my head – picked up some R.D.X. fuses and chemical igniters in the armoury, came out again, rummaged around the generating plant until I found a can of petrol and then returned.

Now I got pencil and paper, hooded the torch light and started writing a message in block capitals. It took me only three minutes and when I was finished I was far from satisfied with it, but it would have to do. I crossed the room and shook Marie by the shoulder.

She woke slowly, reluctantly, murmuring something in a drowsy voice, then sat up abruptly in bed. I could see the pale gleam of her shoulders in the dark, the movement as a hand came to brush tousled hair away from her eyes.

‘Johnny?’ she whispered. ‘What is it? What – what did you find?’

‘Too damn much. Just let me talk. We have very little time left. Know anything about radio?’

‘Radio?’ A brief pause. ‘I did the usual course. I can send morse, not fast, but –’

‘Morse I can manage myself. Do you know what frequency ships’ radio operators use for sending distress messages?’

‘SOS’s you mean? I’m not sure. Low frequency, isn’t it? Or long wave?’

‘Same thing. You can’t remember the waveband?’

She thought for a few moments and I sensed rather than saw the shake of the head in the darkness. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny.’

It doesn’t matter.’ It did matter, it mattered a very great deal, but I’d been crazy to even hope.

‘But you’ll know old Raine’s private code, though?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, code this message, will you?’ I thrust the paper, pencil and torch into her hands. ‘As quickly as you can.’

She didn’t ask me the purpose of what must have struck her as an idiotic request: she just hooded the torch under the blanket and read the message in a low voice.

RIDEX COMBON LONDON STOP IMPRISONED VARDU ISLAND APPROX 150 MILES SOUTH VITI LEVU STOP DISCOVERED MURDERED BODIES DR CHARLES FAIRFIELD ARCHAEOLOGISTS PROFESSOR WITHERSPOON DR CARSTAIRS SIX OTHERS STOP BILEX WIVES MISSING SCIENTISTS HELD PRISONER HERE STOP MEN RESPONSIBLE PLANNING ALL-OUT ASSAULT DAWN NAVAL INSTALLATION WEST SIDE VARDU STOP SITUATION GRAVE STOP IMPERATIVE AIRBORNE ASSISTANCE IMMEDIATELY BENTALL

The faint glow of light died as the torch was switched off. For almost twenty seconds there was nothing to be heard but the far-off murmur of the surf on the reef, and when she finally spoke her voice was unsteady.

‘You found all this out tonight, Johnny?’

‘Yes. They’ve driven a tunnel clear through to the other side of the island. They’ve a wellstocked armoury hidden away in one of the caves, where they keep their blasting explosive. And I heard women’s voices. Singing.’

‘Singing!’

‘I know it sounds crazy. It must be the scientists’ wives, who else could it be? Get busy on that code. I have to go out again.’

‘The code – how are you going to send this message?’ she asked helplessly.

‘Professor’s radio.’

‘The professor’s – but you’re bound to wake him up.’

‘He isn’t asleep. He and Hewell are still talking. I’ll have to draw them off. I’d thought first of going up to the north for half a mile or so and setting some delayed action amatol blocks, but that wouldn’t work. So I’m going to set the workers’ hut on fire. I’ve got the petrol and fuses here.’

‘You’re crazy.’ Her voice was still unsteady, but maybe she had something there. ‘The workers’ hut is only a hundred yards from the professor’s house. You could let off those amatol blocks a mile away, give yourself plenty of time and –’ She broke off and then went on abruptly: ‘What’s all the desperate hurry, anyway? What makes you so certain that they’re going to attack at dawn?’

‘It’s the same answer to everything.’ I said wearily. ‘Letting off a few bombs to the north might draw them off all right, but as soon as they came back they’d start wondering where all the fireworks came from. It wouldn’t take them any time at all to realize that they must have come from the armoury. The first thing they’ll find up there is that a couple of their Chinese guards are missing. It won’t take them long to find out where they are. Even if I don’t set off bombs their absence is bound to be noticed by dawn at the latest, I imagine. Probably long before that. But we won’t be here. If we are, they’ll kill us. Me, at any rate.’

‘You said two guards were missing?’ she said carefully.

‘Dead.’

‘You killed them?’ she whispered.

‘More or less.’

‘Oh, God, must you try to be facetious?’

‘I wasn’t trying to be.’ I picked up the petrol can, fuse and igniters. ‘Please code that as quickly as possible.’

‘You’re a strange person,’ she murmured. ‘I think you frighten me at times.’

‘I know.’ I said. ‘I should have stood there turning both cheeks at once and let our yellow friends carve me into little ribbons. I just haven’t got it in me to be a Christian, that’s all.’

I dropped down under the back screen, lugging the can with me. Lights still burned in the professor’s house. I skirted Hewell’s hut, and brought up at the back of the long house at the point where the steep-pitched thatch of the roof swept down to within four feet of the ground. I had little hopes of and no interest in burning the house down completely, the huge salt-water butts which stood to the rear of every house precluded any chance of that, but the thatch should make a tidy enough blaze for all that. Slowly, painstakingly, careful to avoid even the faintest glug-glug from the neck of the can, I poured the petrol on a two-foot wide strip of thatch over almost half the length of the roof, stretched out a length of R.D.X. fuse above this, one end going into the saturated thatch, the other into a chemical igniter. I placed the igniter on a small stone held in my hand, tapped it with the base of the knife, held the fuse long enough to feel through its braided cover the sudden warmth of the ignited powder train then left at once. The empty petrol can I left under the floor of Hewell’s house.

Marie was sitting at a table when I got back, a blanket draped over her and the table. From beneath the blanket came a dim yellow glow and even as I carefully lowered the side-screen facing the sea, the lamp went out. She emerged from the blanket and said softly: ‘Johnny?’

‘Me. Finished?’

‘Here it is.’ She handed me a slip of paper.

‘Thanks.’ I folded it away in a breast pocket and went on: ‘The entertainment starts in about four minutes. When Hewell and Witherspoon come ankling by be at the doorway, wide-eyed, clutching your negligee or whatever and asking the usual daft questions appropriate to such occasions. Then you’ll turn round and speak into the darkness, telling me to stay where I am, that I’m not fit to go anywhere. After that get dressed quickly. Slacks, socks, shirt or cardigan, everything as dark as you can, cover up as much as you can, hardly the ideal bathing suit but in night waters you’ll look a less appetizing snack to the inshore tiger sharks the professor told us about than if you were wearing a bikini. Then take the shark-repellant canisters off the two spare lifebelts and fit them –’

‘Swimming?’ she interrupted. ‘We’re going swimming? Why?’

‘For our lives. Two canisters and one lifebelt apiece, we’ll make better time that way.’

‘But – but your arm, Johnny? And the sharks?’

‘My arm won’t be much good to me if I’m dead.’ I said heavily, ‘and I’ll take the sharks before Hewell any day. Two minutes. I must go.’

‘Johnny.’

‘What is it?’ I said impatiently.

‘Be careful, Johnny.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I touched her cheek in the darkness. ‘I’m pretty clumsy, aren’t I?’

‘Clumsy is no word for it.’ She reached up and pressed my hand against her cheek. ‘Just come back, that’s all.’

When I got round to the back window of the professor’s house, he and Hewell were still pressing on with arrangements for the second front. The conference seemed to be going well. The professor was talking in a low emphatic voice, pointing towards a chart which seemed to be some section of the Pacific, while Hewell’s granitic features cracked into a cold little half-smile from time to time. They were busy, but not too busy to drink their beer. It didn’t seem to have any effect on them but it did on me, it suddenly made me realize how dry and parched my throat was. I just stood there, waiting and wishing for two things, a beer and a gun, a beer to do away with my thirst and a gun to do away with Hewell and Witherspoon Good old Bentall, I thought bitterly, nothing of the common touch about him, whenever he wishes for something it has to be really unattainable. Which once more just showed how wrong I could be, within thirty seconds one of those wishes was mine.

The Chinese boy had just entered the room with fresh supplies for the strategists when the black oblong of window behind Hewell’s head became no longer black. A vivid yellow flash suddenly lit the darkness behind the hut of the Chinese – from the professor’s house the rear of the hut was invisible – and within five seconds the yellow had given way to a bright orangy red as the flames leaped up fifteen, even twenty feet, overtopping the high-ridge pole of the hut. Petrol and thatch make a combustible combination of some note.

The Chinese boy and the professor saw it in the same instant. For a man who had consumed the amount of beer he seemed to have done I must say the professor didn’t spend much time on doubletakes, he passed some comment which bore no resemblance to his usual ‘Dear me’s’ and ‘God bless my soul’s’, kicked over his chair and took off like a rocket. The Chinese boy had been even faster, but it had cost him a second to lay his tray down on the nearest flat surface, which happened to be the blotter on the open roll-top desk, he arrived at the door at the same instant as Witherspoon. For a moment they jammed in the doorway, the professor made some other comment, not very learned in its nature, and then they were off, Hewell pounding along on their heels.

Five seconds later I was seated at the roll-top desk. I tore open the right-hand door, unhooked from its inside the ear-pieces and the Bakelite-bonded transmitting key, leads from both of which led to the back of the set, clapped the earphones to my head and set the key on the table. There were a knob and a switch placed close together on the set, it seemed logical to suppose that they might be the on-off power switch and the transmitting switch, I turned the one and pressed the other and I was right. At least I’d guessed right for the power switch, the earphones filled at once with a loud insistent crackling so obviously it drew the receiving antenna into circuit.

Low frequency Marie had said, she’d thought distress signals went out on low frequency. I stared at the five semi-circular calibrated tuning dials, the middle one of which was already illuminated, gazed at the names of East Asiatic towns marked in English and Chinese and wondered how the hell a man could find out which was long wave and which was short.

Whether I could also hear my own transmissions on the earphones I didn’t know. I tapped out a few experimental SOS’s but heard nothing. I shifted the switch on the set back to the position I’d found it, tapped the transmitter again, but still nothing. It was then that I caught sight of the small push-pull switch just beyond the key on the Bakelite transmitter. I pulled it towards me, made the signal again and this time I heard it come clearly through on the phone. Obviously I could either transmit and receive at the same time or transmit without receiving if I felt so like it.

The tuning dials were calibrated in thin black lines to show wave-bands but there were no figures to indicate which bands they were. That would have made no difference to an expert operator but it made a crippling difference to me. I peered even more closely, saw that the top two bands were marked KHz at their outer ends, the lower three MHz. For several seconds I failed to see their significance, my head was tired now and aching almost as much as my arm, and then, miraculously, I got it. K for kilocycles, M for megacycles. The topmost of the five bands would be the longest wave-length, lowest-frequency of the lot. That’s where I wanted to be, or at least I hoped it was where I wanted to be. I pushed the left, hand knob of a group of what looked to be wave-band selector buttons and the top dial came to life as the light behind the centre dial died away.

I turned the station selector dial knob as far left as it would go and started transmitting. I would send out a group of three SOS’s, wait a second, repeat, listen for three or four seconds, move a fraction up the dial and start transmitting again. It was dull work but the beer helped me along.

Ten minutes passed, during which time I must have transmitted on at least thirty different frequencies. Nothing, no acknowledgement at all. Nothing. I glanced at the clock on the wall. One minute to three. I sent out another SOS call. The same as all the others.

I was jumping by this time. I could still see the red glare of the fire reflected on the inside walls, but there was no guarantee that Hewell and the professor were going to stay there till the last dying ember turned to charcoal. They might be back any second, or anyone happening by either of the two windows or the open door would be bound to see me, but I didn’t see that it mattered very much now, if I couldn’t get through on this radio I was finished anyway. What really worried me was whether anyone had yet discovered the two dead men in the mine: that way I would be finished too, only an awful lot quicker. Was somebody already conducting a search because the guards had failed to report. Was the professor checking up to see if I really was in bed? Had anyone found the petrol can under Hewell’s house…? The questions were endless and the answers to all of them held so high a degree of possibility of so high a degree of unpleasantness that I put all out of my mind. I drank some more beer and got on with the transmitting.

The phones crackled in my ears. I bent right forward, as if that would help to bring me into closer contact with the distant sender and sent out the distress signal again. Once more the morse started buzzing in my ears, I could make out the individual letters but not the words they spelled out. Akita Maru, Akita Maru, four times repeated. A Japanese ship. A Japanese radio operator. The Bentall luck running true to form. I moved farther across the wave-band.

I wondered how Marie was getting on. She would be set to go by now and trying to figure out what an earth had happened to me, she would be looking at the time and knowing that the dawn was only three hours to go, that those three hours might be all the time we had left: unless the dead men were discovered, in which case the time would be less. Maybe a great deal less. I kept on sending and composed a little speech I was going to make to Colonel Raine. When I got back. If I got back.

Fast fluent morse started stuttering through the earphones. First the acknowledgement signal followed by: The U.S. Frigate Novair County: position: name?’

A U.S. frigate! Maybe only a hundred miles away. God, it would be the answer to everything! A frigate. Guns, machine-guns, armed men, everything. Then my elation ebbed a trifle. Position? Name? Of course, in a genuine SOS, position came first, always.

‘One hundred and fifty miles south of Fiji,’ I tapped. ‘Vardu –’

‘Lat. and long.?’ the operator cut in. He was sending so fast that I could hardly pick it up.

‘Uncertain.’

‘What ship?’

‘No ship. Island of Vardu –’

Again he overrode my transmission.

‘Island?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get off the air, you damn fool, and stay off it. This is a distress frequency.’ With that the transmission ended abruptly.

I could have kicked that damned transmitter all the way into the lagoon. I could have done the same with the duty operator on the Novair County. I could have wept with frustration, but it was far too late for tears. Besides, I could hardly blame him. I sent again on the same frequency, but the operator on the Novair County – it must have been him – just leaned on his transmitting button and kept on leaning till I gave up. I twisted the selector dial again, but only a fraction. I’d learnt one invaluable thing: I was on the distress frequency. Keep burning, hut, I beseeched it silently, keep burning. For old Bentall’s sake, please don’t go out. Which was quite a lot to ask considering what I’d done to the hut.

It kept burning and I kept transmitting. Within twenty seconds I got another reply, the acknowledgement, then: ‘S.S. Annandale. Position?’

‘Australian registry?’ I sent.

‘Yes. Position, repeat position.’ Getting testy and understandably so: when a man’s shouting for help he shouldn’t first of all inquire into the pedigree of his rescuer. I hesitated for a second before sending, I had to make an immediate impact on the operator or I’d likely get as short shrift as I’d had from the U.S. Navy. The distress frequency is sacrosanct to all nations.

‘Special British Government investigator John Bentall requesting immediate relay coded message via Portishead radio to Admiralty Whitehall London. Desperately urgent.’

‘Are you sinking?’

I waited for a few assorted blood vessels to burst but when none did I sent: ‘Yes.’ In the circumstances it seemed that it might save a great deal of misunderstanding. ‘Please prepare receive message.’ I was almost certain that the glare outside was beginning to die down: there wouldn’t be much of the hut left by this time.

There was a long pause. Someone was taking time to make up his mind. Then the single word ‘Priority’. It was a question.

‘Telegraphic address carries over-riding priority all signals to London.’

That got him.

‘Proceed with message.’

I proceeded, forcing myself to tap it out slowly and accurately. The red glow was fading on the inside of the walls of the room. The fierce roar of flames had died away to a lazy crackling and I thought I could hear voices. My neck was stiff from glancing back over my shoulder through the window nearest the fire, but I didn’t need my eyes to transmit with and I got the message through. I finished: ‘Please dispatch immediately.’

There was a pause of maybe thirty seconds then he came through again. ‘Master authorises immediate transmission. Are you in danger?’

‘Vessel approaching.’ I sent. That would keep them quiet. ‘O.K.’ A sudden thought occurred to me. ‘What is your position?’

‘Two hundred miles due east Newcastle.’

For all the help that was they might as well have been orbiting the earth in a satellite, so I sent: ‘Thank you very much’ and signed off.

I replaced the transmitting key and headphones, closed up the doors and went to the window, poking a curious head round the corner. I’d been wrong about the value of those big salt-water butts; where the workers’ hut had been there remained now only a five-foot-high pile of glowing red embers and ashes. I’d get no Oscars for counter-espionage but as an arsonist I was neck and neck with the best. At least I wasn’t a complete failure. Hewell and the professor were standing together, presumably talking, as the Chinese dumped buckets of water on the smouldering remains and as it didn’t seem that there was much that they would be able to do at this late stage they’d likely be along any minute. Time to be gone. I went along the centre passage, turned right to pass through the still lit kitchen and then halted in a way that would have made an observer think that I had run into an invisible brick wall.

What had brought me up so short was the sight of a pile of canned beer empties lying in a wicker basket. My God, the beer! Good old Bentall, never missed a thing, not if you held it six inches from his nose and beat him over the head with a club to attract his attention. I’d drained two full beer glasses back in the living-room there, and just left the empties standing: even with all the excitement neither the professor nor Hewell struck me as a man who would be liable to forget that he had left a full glass behind him – certainly the Chinese house-boy wouldn’t – and they wouldn’t put it down to evaporation from the heat of the fire either. I picked up another couple of cans from the crate on the floor, opened them in four seconds flat with the steel opener lying on the sink unit, ran back to the desk in the living-room and filled up the two glasses again, holding them at a shallow angle so that too suspiciously high a head wouldn’t be formed on the beer. Back in the kitchen again I dropped the cans among the other empties – in the pile that had been consumed that night another two were liable to go unnoticed – and then left the house. I wasn’t any too soon, for I could see the houseboy making for the front door, but I got back to our house unobserved.

I entered under the seaweed screen and saw the outline of Marie against the front doorway where she was still watching what was left of the fire. I whispered her name and she came to me.

‘Johnny!’ She seemed glad to see me in a way that no one I could ever remember had been glad to see me before. ‘I’ve died about a hundred times since you left here.’

Is that all?’ I put my good arm around her and squeezed and said: ‘ I got the message through, Marie.’

‘The message?’ I was pretty well worn out that night, mentally as well as physically, but even so it took a pretty slow type to miss the fact that he’d just been paid the biggest compliment of his life. But I missed it. ‘You – you got it through? How wonderful, Johnny!’

‘Luck. A sensible sparks on an Aussie ship. Halfway to London by this time. And then things will happen. What, I don’t know. If there are any British, American or French naval craft near, they’ll be nearer still in a few hours. Or detachments of soldiers by flying boat, maybe from Sydney. I don’t know. But what I do know is that they won’t be here in time –’

‘Sshh.’ She touched my lips with her finger. ‘Someone coming.’

I heard the two voices, one quick and sharp, the other like a cement truck grinding up a grade in low gear. Witherspoon and Hewell. Maybe ten yards away, maybe not even that: through the interstices in the screen wall I could see the swinging of the lantern that one or other of them was carrying. I leapt for the bed fumbled desperately for a pyjama jacket, found one, shrugged into it and buttoned it up to the neck and dived under a blanket. I landed on the elbow of my injured arm and when I propped myself up on the other as a knock came and the two men entered without benefit of invitation, it was no difficulty at all to look sick and pale. Heaven knows I felt it.

‘You must excuse us, Mrs Bentall,’ the professor said with that nice mixture of smoothness, concern and undiluted unctuousness that would have made me sick if I hadn’t been that way already. But I had to admire his terrific powers of dissimulation under any and all circumstances: in the light of what I had seen, heard and done it was difficult to remember that we were still playing games of make-believe. ‘We were naturally anxious to see if you were all right. Most distressing this, really most distressing.’ He patted Marie’s shoulder in a paternal fashion that I would have ignored a couple of days ago, and brought his lantern closer to have a good look at me ‘Merciful heavens, my boy, you don’t look well at all! How do you feel?’

‘It’s only during the night that it gives me a little trouble,’ I said bravely. I had my head half-turned away ostensibly because the bright beam from the lantern was hurting my half-closed eyes but actually because, in the circumstances, it seemed hardly advisable to waft too many beer fumes in his direction. ‘I’ll be fine tomorrow.

‘That was a terrible fire, Professor. I wish I’d been fit to give you a hand. How on earth could it have started?’

‘Those damned Chinks’ Hewell growled. He was looming massively just outside the direct radiance of the light and the deep-sunk eyes were quite lost under the craggy overhang of his great tufted brows. ‘Pipe-smokers and always making tea on little spirit stoves. I’ve warned them often enough.’

‘And against all regulations,’ the professor put in testily. ‘They know it very well. Still, we won’t be here so much longer and they can sleep in the drying shed until then. Hope you haven’t been too upset about this. We’ll leave you now. Nothing we can do for you, my dear?’

I didn’t think he was talking to me so I lowered myself down to the pillow with a stifled moan. Marie thanked him and said no.

‘Good night, then. Incidentally, come across for breakfast when it suits you in the morning and my boy will be there to serve you. Hewell and I will be up betimes tomorrow.’ He chuckled ruefully. ‘This archaeology is like a mild poison in the blood – once it gets there it never lets you go.’

He patted Marie’s shoulder a bit more and took off. I waited till Marie reported that they’d reached the professor’s house, then said: ‘As I was saying before the interruption, help will come but not in time to save our bacon. Not if we stay here. Got the lifebelts and the shark-repellant ready?’

‘They’re a horrible pair, aren’t they?’ she murmured. ‘I wish that murderous old goat would keep his hands to himself. Yes, they’re ready. Must we, Johnny?’

‘Damn it all, can’t you see that we must leave?’

‘Yes, but –’

‘We can’t go by land. Sheer mountain on one side, a cliff on the other and a couple of barbed-wire fences and assorted Chinese in between make that impossible. We could go through the tunnel, but though three or four fit men might pickaxe their way through the last few feet in an hour, I couldn’t do it in a week the way I’m feeling.’

‘You could blast it down. You know where the supplies –’

‘Heaven help us both,’ I said. ‘You’re just as ignorant as I am. Tunnelling is a skilled occupation. If we didn’t bring the roof down on top of us we’d certainly seal off the end of the tunnel and then our pals would come along and nab us at their leisure. And we can’t go by boat, for the simple reason that both boatmen sleep in the boathouse and anyway it would be no good, if that simple method of approach was open to Witherspoon and Hewell and the doughty Captain Fleck available to them they wouldn’t tunnel all that way through rock. If the Navy takes such precautions with fences and guards against imagined friends, what are they going to take against the sea where anybody may turn up? You can bet your life that they have two or three small interlocking radar positions capable of picking up a seagull swimming ashore, with a few quick-firing guns to back them up.

‘The only thing I’m against is leaving the scientists and their wives here. But I don’t see –’ ‘You never mentioned that the scientists were there,’ she said in quick surprise.

‘No? Maybe I thought it was obvious. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m wrong. But why else in the name of heaven should the wives be there? The Navy is working on some project of clearly considerable importance and this damned murdering white-haired monster is just biding his time to pinch it. From his last remark, lying in his teeth to the end, I gather he’s biding no more. He’s going to get this thing, whatever it is, and use the wives as levers to make the back-room boys work on it and develop it further, for what purposes I can’t even guess except that they’re bound to be nefarious.’ I climbed stiffly out of the bed and pulled off the pyjama jacket. ‘What other alternative occurs to you? Eight missing wives, ditto scientists. Witherspoon’s bound to be using those wives as a lever, if they were no use to him in that capacity he wouldn’t even bother to feed them, he wouldn’t waste anything on them except for a few ounces of lead, as he did for the genuine Witherspoon and others. The man is devoid of feeling to the point of insanity. Where the wives are, there the husbands are. You don’t think Colonel Raine sent us out to the Fijis just to do the hula-hula dance, do you?’

‘That’s Hawaii,’ she murmured. ‘Not Fiji.’

‘My God!’ I said. ‘Women!’

‘I’m only teasing, you clown.’ She put her arms round my neck and came closer to me: her hands were abnormally cold and she was trembling. ‘Don’t you see I have to? I just can’t go on talking about it. I thought I was quite good – in this business – and so did Colonel Raine, but I don’t think so any longer. There’s too much – there’s too much calculated inhumanity, such an absolute indifference to good or evil or morality, just what’s expedient, there’s all those men murdered for no reason, there’s us, and I think you’re crazy to hope for us, there’s all those poor women, especially those poor women…’ She broke off, gave a long quivering sigh and whispered: ‘Tell me again about you and me and the lights of London.’

So I told her, told her so that I half believed it myself, and I thought she did too, for by and by she grew still, but when I kissed her, her lips were like ice and she turned away and buried her face in my neck. I held her so for all of a minute then, on mutual impulse at the same moment, we parted and started to fasten on the lifebelts.

The remains of the workers’ hut were now no more than an acrid-smelling dark red glow under the blackness of an overcast sky. The lights still burned in the professor’s window, I would have taken odds that he had no intention of going to sleep that night, I was beginning to know enough of his nature to suspect that the exhaustion of a sleepless night would be a small price to pay for the endless delights of savouring to the full the delightful anticipations of the pleasures of the day that was to come.

It started to rain as we left, the heavy drops spluttering to sibilant extinction in the dying fire. It couldn’t have been better for us. Nobody saw us go, for nobody could have seen us unless they had been within ten feet. We walked almost a mile and a half to the south along the sea-shore and then, as we approached the area where Hewell’s Chinese might be loitering as they’d been the night before, we took to the sea. We went out about twenty-five yards, to waist level, half-walking, half-swimming along: but when we came to the spot where I could just barely discern through the rain the dark overhang of the cliff that marked the beginning of the barbed wire, we made for the deeper water until we were over two hundred yards out. It didn’t seem likely, but the moon might just conceivably break through.

We inflated our lifebelts, very slowly, although I hardly thought the sound would carry to shore. The water was cool, but not cold. I swam in the lead and as I did I turned the operating screw of the shark-repellant canister and a darkish evilsmelling liquid – it would probably have been yellow in daylight – with extraordinary dissolving and spreading qualities spread over the surface of the sea. I don’t know what the shark-repellant did to the sharks, but it certainly repelled me.

CHAPTER 8

Friday 3.30 a.m.–6 a.m.

The rain eased and finally stopped altogether, but the night stayed dark. And the sharks stayed away. We made slow time, because I couldn’t use my left arm to help me along, but we made time and after almost an hour, when I calculated that we must be at least half a mile beyond the barbed-wire fences, we started angling in slowly for shore.

Less than two hundred yards from land I discovered that our change in direction was premature, the high wall of cliff extended farther round the south of the island than I had imagined it would. There was nothing for it but to trudge slowly on – by this time ‘swimming’ would have been a complete and flattering misnomer for our laboured and clumsy movements through the water – and hope that we wouldn’t lose our sense of direction in the slight obscuring drizzle that had again begun to fall.

Luck stayed with us and so did our sense of direction, for when the drizzle finally lifted I could see that we were no more than a hundred and fifty yards from a thin ribbon of sand that marked the shore-line. It felt more like a hundred and fifty miles, at least to me it did. I had the vague impression that an undertow was pulling us out into the lagoon all the time, but I knew this couldn’t be so, otherwise we would have been swept far out long ago. It was just sheer weakness. But my awareness was not of effort or exhaustion but almost wholly of frustration: the urgency so desperate, the progress so infuriatingly slow.

My feet touched bottom and I staggered upright in less than three feet of water: I swayed and would have fallen had not Marie caught my arm, she was in far better shape than I was. Side by side we waded slowly ashore and the way I felt no one ever looked less like Venus emerging from the deeps than I did right then. Together we stumbled on to the shore, then, two minds with but one thought, we sat down heavily on the damp sand.

‘God, at last!’ I gasped. The breath was wheezing in and out of my lungs like air through the sides of a moth-eaten bellows. ‘I thought we’d never make it.’

‘Neither did we,’ a drawling voice agreed. We swung round only to be blinded by the bright white glare from a pair of torches. ‘You certainly took your time. Please don’t try – Good Lord! A female!’

Although biologically accurate enough it struck me as a singularly inept term to describe Marie Hopeman, but I let it pass. Instead I scrambled painfully to my feet and said: ‘You saw us coming?’

‘For the past twenty minutes,’ he drawled. ‘We have radar and infra-red that would pick up the head of a shrimp if it stuck itself above water. My word, a woman! What’s your name? Are you armed?’ The grasshopper mind, a clear-cut case for Pelmanism.

‘I have a knife,’ I said tiredly. ‘Right now I couldn’t cut asparagus with it. You can have it if you want.’ The light was no longer directly in our eyes and I could make out the shape of three figures clad in white, two of them with the vague blurs of guns cradled in their arms. ‘My name is Bentall. You are a naval officer?’

‘Anderson. Sub-Lieutenant Anderson. Where in all the world have you two come from? What is your reason – ?’

‘Look,’ I interrupted. ‘Those things can wait. Please take me to your commanding officer, now. It’s very important. At once.’

‘Now, just a minute, my friend.’ The drawl was more pronounced than ever. ‘You don’t seem to realize –’

‘At once, I said. Look, Anderson, you sound like a naval officer who might have a very promising career in front of him but I can promise you that career stops to-day, violently, if you don’t co-operate fast. Don’t be a fool, man. Do you think I’d turn up like this unless there was something most desperately wrong? I’m a British Intelligence agent and so is Miss Hopeman here. How far is your C.O.’s place?’

Maybe he was no fool, or maybe it was the urgency in my voice because, after a moment’s hesitation, he said: ‘The better part of a couple of miles. But there’s a telephone at a radar post quarter of a mile along the way.’ He pointed in the direction of the twin barbed-wire fences. ‘If it’s really urgent –’

‘Send one of your men there, please. Tell your C.O. – what’s his name, by the way?’

‘Captain Griffiths.’

‘Tell Captain Griffiths than an attempt will almost certainly be made to overpower you and seize your installation very shortly, perhaps in only an hour or two,’ I said quickly. ‘Professor Witherspoon and his assistants who worked on the archaeological excavations on the other side of the island have been murdered by criminals who have driven –’

‘Murdered!’ He came close to me. ‘Did you say murdered?’

‘Let me finish. They’ve driven this tunnel clear through the island and need breach only a few more feet of limestone to emerge on this side of the island. Where, I don’t know, probably about a hundred feet above sea-level. You’ll need patrols, patrols to listen for their picks and shovels. They’re unlikely to blast their way out.’

‘Good God!’

‘I know. How many men have you here?’

‘Eighteen civilian, the rest Navy. About fifty all told.’

‘Armed?’

‘Rifles, tommy-guns, about a dozen altogether. Look here, Mr – ah – Bentall, are you absolutely certain about – I mean, how am I to know – ?’

‘I’m sure. For heaven’s sake, man, hurry!’

Another momentary hesitation, then he turned to one of the half-seen men by his side. ‘Did you get that, Johnston?’

‘Yes, sir. Witherspoon and others dead. Attack expected through tunnel, very soon. Patrols, listening. Yes, sir.’

‘Right. Off you go.’ Johnston disappeared at a dead run, and Anderson turned to me. ‘I suggest we go straight to the captain. You will forgive me if Leading Seaman Allison walks behind us. You have made an illegal entry into an officially protected area and I can’t take chances. Not till I have clear proof of your bona fides. ’

‘Just so long as he keeps his safety catch on I don’t care what he does,’ I said wearily. ‘I haven’t come all this length just to be shot in the back if your man trips over his own ankles.’

We went off in single file, not talking, Anderson with a torch leading the way and Allison with another bringing up the rear. I was feeling dizzy and unwell. The first greyish streaks of dawn were beginning to finger their way upwards from the eastern horizon. After we had gone perhaps three hundred yards, following an ill-defined track that ran first through a scrubby belt of palms and then low bush, I heard an exclamation from the sailor behind me.

He came up close to my back, then called out: ‘Sir!’

Anderson stopped, turned. ‘What is it, Allison?’

‘This man’s hurt, sir. Badly hurt, I should say. Look at his left arm.’

We all looked at my left arm, no one with more interest than myself. Despite my attempts to favour it as we had been swimming, the exertion seemed to have opened up the major wounds again and my left hand was completely covered with blood that had dripped down my arm. The spreading effect of the intermingled salt water made it seem worse than it actually was, but even so it was more than enough to account for the way I felt.

Sub-Lieutenant Anderson went far up in my estimation. He spent no time on exclamations or sympathies, but said: ‘Mind if I rip this sleeve off?;

‘Go ahead.’ I said. ‘But mind you don’t rip off the arm at the same time. I don’t think there’s a great deal holding it in place.’

They cut off the sleeve with the aid of Allison’s knife and I could see the tightening of Anderson’s thin brown intelligent face as he studied the wounds.

‘Your friends at the phosphate camp?’

‘That’s it. They had a dog.’

‘This is either infected or gangrenous or both. Either way it’s pretty nasty. Lucky for you we have a naval surgeon here. Hold this, miss, will you?’ He handed his torch to Marie, pulled off his shirt and tore it into several wide strips, using them to bandage my arm tightly. ‘Won’t do the infection any good, but it should cut down the bleeding. The civilian Quonset huts aren’t any more than half a mile from here. Think you can make it?’ The reserved tone in the voice had vanished: the sight of that left arm had been as good as a character reference from the First Sea Lord.

‘I can make it. It’s not all that bad.’

Ten minutes later a long low building with a Nissen type roof loomed up out of the greying dark. Anderson knocked at a door, walked in and touched a switch that lit up a couple of overhead lights.

It was a long bare barn-like structure of a place, with the first third of it given over to a kind of communal living-centre while beyond that a narrow central passage bisected two rows of eight by eight cubicles, each with its own door, all of them open to the main roof. In the foreground, brown Corticene on the floor, a couple of small tables with writing materials, seven or eight rattan and canvas chairs and that was it. No home from home, but good enough for something that would only be left there to rust and flake away when the Navy was finished with it.

Anderson nodded to a chair and I didn’t need any second invitation. He crossed to a small alcove, picked up a phone I hadn’t noticed and cranked a naval-type generator. He listened for a few minutes, then hung it back on its rest.

‘Damn thing’s gone dead,’ he said irritably. ‘Always when you need it most. Sorry, Allison, more walking for you. My apologies to Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman. Ask him to bring his kit. Tell him why. And tell the captain we’ll be over as soon as possible.’

Allison left. I looked at Marie, seated across the table from me, and I smiled back. The first impression of Anderson had been a wrong one, if only they were all as efficient as he was. The temptation to relax, to let go and close the eyes, was temptation indeed: but I’d only to think of those still prisoners in the hands of Witherspoon and Hewell and I didn’t feel sleepy any more.

The door of the nearest cubicle on the left opened and a tall skinny youngish man, with prematurely grey hair and a pair of horn-rimmed pebble glasses, clad only in a pair of undershorts, came out into the passage, glasses raised halfway up his forehead as he rubbed the sleep out of myopic eyes. He caught sight of Anderson, opened his mouth to speak, caught sight of Marie, dropped his jaw in astonishment, gave a peculiar kind of yelp and hurriedly retreated.

He wasn’t the only one who was astonished; compared to my own reactions he was a selling-plater in the jaw-dropping field. I rose slowly to my feet, propping myself up on the table, Bentall giving his incomparable impression of a man who has seen a ghost. I was still giving the impression when the man appeared a few seconds later, dressing-gown flapping about his lanky ankles, and this time the first person he saw was me. He stopped short, peered at me with his head out-thrust at the end of a long thin neck, then walked slowly to where I was standing.

‘John Bentall?’ He reached out to touch my right shoulder, maybe to make sure I was real. ‘Johnny Bentall!’

I’d got my jaw closed far enough to speak.

‘No other. Bentall it is. I didn’t exactly look to find you here, Dr Hargreaves.’ The last time I’d seen him had been over a year previously, when he’d been the chief of hypersonics in the Hepworth Ordinance establishment.

‘And the young lady?’ Even in moments of stress Hargreaves had always been the most punctilious of men. ‘Your wife, Bentall?’

‘Off and on.’ I said. ‘Marie Hopeman, ex-Mrs Bentall. I’ll explain later. What are you – ?’

‘Your shoulder!’ he said sharply. ‘Your arm. You’ve hurt it.’

I refrained from telling him that I knew all about my arm.

‘A dog bit me,’ I said patiently. It didn’t sound right, somehow. ‘I’ll tell you all you want, but, first, one or two things. Quickly, please. It’s important. Are you working here, Dr Hargreaves?’

‘Of course I am.’ He answered the question as if he considered it mildly half-witted and from his point of view I suppose it was. He would be unlikely to be taking a holiday in a naval camp in the South Pacific.

‘Doing what?’

‘Doing what?’ He paused and peered at me through his pebbles. ‘I’m not sure whether I –’

‘Mr Bentall says he is a Government Intelligence officer,’ Anderson put in quietly. ‘I believe him.’

‘Government? Intelligence?’ Dr Hargreaves was in a repetitive mood to-night. He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You must forgive me if I’m a bit confused, Bentall. What happened to that machine import-export business you inherited from your uncle a year or so ago?’

‘Nothing. It never existed. There had to be some cover-up story to account for my departure. I’m betraying official secrets but not really doing any harm in telling you that I was seconded to a government agency to investigate the leakage of information about the new solid fuels we were working on at the time.’

‘Um.’ He thought a bit, then made up his mind. ‘Solid fuel, eh? That’s why we’re out here. Testing the stuff. Very secret and all that, you know.’

‘A new type rocket?’

‘Precisely.’

‘It had to be that. You don’t have to take off to the middle of nowhere to carry out experiments on new stuff unless it’s either explosives or rockets. And heavens knows we’ve reached the limit in explosives without blowing ourselves into space.’

By this time other cubicle doors had opened and a variety of sleepy men, in a variety of clothes and underclothes, were peering out to see what the matter was. Anderson went and spoke softly to them, knocked on a couple of other doors, then came back and smiled apologetically.

‘Might as well have them all here, Mr Bentall. If your facts are right it’s time they were up and away: and it’ll save you having to tell the same story over again.’

‘Thanks, Lieutenant.’ I sat down again and closed grateful fingers over a large glass of whisky that had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Two or three tentative sips and the room seemed to be floating around me, neither my thoughts nor my eyes were any too keen to be focused on anything, but after another few sips my vision seemed to clear again and the pain in my arm began to recede. I supposed I was getting light-headed.

‘Well, come on, Bentall,’ Hargreaves said impatiently. ‘We’re waiting.’

I looked up. They were waiting. Seven of them altogether, not counting Anderson – and the late Dr Fairfield was the missing eighth.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep it short. But, first, I wonder if any of you gentlemen have any spare clothes. Miss Hopeman here has just recovered from a rather bad chill and fever and I’m afraid –’

This gave me another minute’s grace and time for the glass to be emptied and refilled by Anderson. The competition to supply Marie with clothes was brisk. When she’d given me a grateful and rather tired smile and disappeared into one of the cubicles, I told them the story in two minutes, quickly, concisely, missing out nothing but the fact that I’d heard women singing in the abandoned mine. When I’d finished, one of the scientists, a tall florid-faced old bird who looked like an elderly retired butcher and was, in fact, as I later discovered, the country’s leading expert in inertial and infra-red guidance systems, looked at me coldly and snapped: ‘Fantastic, absolutely fantastic. Imminent danger of attack. Bah! I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘What’s your theory of what happened to Dr Fairfield?’ I asked.

‘My theory?’ the retired butcher snapped. ‘No theory. We heard from Witherspoon – Fairfield used to visit him regularly, they were great friends – that they’d been out trolling for trevally –’

‘And he’d fallen overboard and the sharks got him, I suppose? The more intelligent the mind the more easily it falls for any old rubbish. I’d sooner rely on the babes in the wood than a scientist outside the four walls of his lab.’ Dale Carnegie wouldn’t have approved of any part of this. ‘I can prove it, gentlemen, but only by giving you bad news. Your wives are being held prisoner in the mine on the other side of the island.’

They looked at me, then at each other, then back at me again.

‘Have you gone mad, Bentall?’ Hargreaves was staring at me through his pebble glasses, his mouth tight.

‘It would be better for you if I had. No doubt you gentlemen imagine your wives are still in Sydney or Melbourne or wherever. No doubt you write to them regularly. No doubt you hear from them regularly. No doubt you will keep their letters, or some of them. Or am I wrong, gentlemen?’

No one said I was wrong.

‘So, if your wives are all writing from different homes, you would expect, by the law of averages, that most of them would use different paper, different pens, different inks and that the different postmarks on the envelopes would not all be printed in the same colours. As scientists, you will all have respect for the law of averages. I suggest we compare your letters and envelopes. No one wants to read any private correspondence, just to make a superficial comparison of likenesses and differences. Would you like to co-operate? Or’ – I glanced at the red-faced man –’ are you scared to learn the truth?’

Five minutes later the red-faced man was no longer red-faced, and he had learned the truth. Of the seven envelopes produced, three had been of one brand, two of another and two of a third – enough not to make incoming mail look suspiciously alike. The postmarks on the envelopes, so beautifully clear-cut as to suggest they had been stolen, not manufactured by unauthorized persons, were all in the same colour. Only two pens, a fountain and a ballpoint, had been used for the seven letters and the last point was the final clincher – every letter but one had been written on exactly the same notepaper. They must have thought themselves safe enough there, middle-aged and elderly scientists don’t usually show their letters around.

After I’d finished and given the letters back to their owners, they exchanged glances, dazed glances where the lack of understanding was matched only by the increasing fear. They believed me all right now.

‘I thought my wife’s tone was rather strange in recent letters,’ Hargreaves said slowly. ‘She’s always been so full of humour and poking fun at scientists and now – ’

I’ve noticed the same,’ someone else murmured. ‘But I put it down to –’

‘You can put it down to coercion.’ I said brutally. ‘It’s not easy to be witty when a gun is pointing at your head. I don’t pretend to know how the letters were introduced into your incoming mail but it would be a simple matter to a mind as brilliant as that of the man who killed Witherspoon. For he is brilliant. Anyway, you can introduce mail into mailbags for a hundred years and no one will ever notice, it’s only when you start taking it out that eyebrows begin to lift.’

‘But – but what does it all mean?’ Hargreaves’ voice had a shake in it and his hands were clenching and unclenching in involuntary nervousness. ‘What will they – what are they going to do with our wives?’

‘You must give me a minute,’ I said tiredly. ‘It’s as big a shock for me to find you here as it is for you to find out where your wives are. I think you’re safe enough now, and the rocket installation, but I believe your wives to be in deadly danger. There’s no good blinking facts, expediency is all that matters to the men we’re against and humanity not at all. If you move wrongly, you may never see them again. Let me think, please.’

They wandered off reluctantly to complete dressing, I thought, but the first part of my thinking was far from constructive. I thought of that old fox Colonel Raine, and I thought of him with something less than affection. I supposed that after twenty-five years in the business it was impossible for him to let his right hand know what his left was doing. But, more than that, he had made an extraordinarily accurate assessment of the Bentall character. What there was of it.

I hadn’t even bothered to ask the scientists whether they had been a party to the advertisements in the Telegraph. Obviously, they must have been. On a project involving the need for absolute secrecy and security, the last thing the government could have afforded was the sudden, simultaneous and unexplained vanishing of eight of Britain’s top scientists. The men for this job had been picked long before the advertisements appeared and the adverts had merely been a device to have them removed from the country without raising any questions or eyebrows: and as those scientists had been ostensibly leaving Britain for keeps, it had been essential that their wives accompany them. Rough on the wives, perhaps, but it had to be. No wives, no deception: when he is going to live permanently abroad not even the most absent-minded scientist forgets to bring his wife along.

Obviously, too, as it had been a government project, Raine had known all about it, in fact he was probably the man who had made all the necessary undercover arrangements. I thought of how I had completely swallowed the old colonel’s story and I cursed him for his devious and twisted mind.

But, for Raine, it had been necessary, because, somehow or other – his contacts, his sources of information were legion – he had discovered or strongly suspected that the wives of the men who had gone to Vardu Island were no longer in their Australian homes. He would have come to the conclusion that they were being held captive or hostage. He would have worked out why and come to the same conclusion as I recently had.

But he would never have guessed that they were on Vardu, for it was almost certainly Colonel Raine himself who had worked out with the now murdered Witherspoon the scheme to have Vardu used as a protected area based on archaeological discovery: whether discoveries were genuine or not was a matter of complete unimportance: old Witherspoon and his associates would have been screened with a tooth-comb and the idea of associating any skulduggery with that part of the island would have been fantastic. Vardu would have been the last place Raine would have thought of to look for them: he had just no idea at all where they were.

So he had fed me this yarn about sending me out to find the missing scientists but what he had actually intended was that Marie should find the missing scientists’ wives. She would find them, he reasoned, by being seized as they had been and for the same reasons, and all he could hope for was that she or I or both could do something about it: but if he had let me think for a moment that that was what he had in mind he knew I would never have gone along with it. He knew what I thought about throwing women to the wolves. Instead of Marie coming along as local colour for me, I was going as local colour, little better than a stooge for her. I remembered now what he had said about her being much more experienced than I was, that it might end up with her looking after me, not vice versa, and I felt about six inches tall. I wondered how much of all this, if any, was known to Marie herself.

At this moment Marie made her appearance. She had dried and combed her hair and changed into slacks and T-shirt that fitted only where they touched, but they touched in enough places to show that it wasn’t the original owner who was inside them. She smiled at me and I smiled back but it was a pretty mechanical sort of effort on my part, the more I thought of it the more I suspected she must have known just how the land lay with Colonel Raine. Maybe neither she nor Raine regarded me as anything other than a lucky amateur, and in this business amateurs weren’t trusted. Not even lucky ones. But what hurt was not the lack of trust but the fact that if I were right then she’d fooled me throughout. And if she could fool me about that, then she could fool me about many other things, too. I was tired and weak and the thought was acid in my mind. She was looking at me with the kind of expression on her face with which I’d always dreamed that someone just like Marie would look at me, and I knew it was impossible that I was being fooled. I knew it for all of two seconds, which was all the time it took me to remember that she had survived five years in one of the most hazardous professions in the world simply through an extremely highly developed gift of fooling everyone all the time.

I was about to ask her some cunning leading questions when Dr Hargreaves came up to me. The others trailed behind him. They were now all dressed in their day clothes. They were worried stiff, all of them, and they looked it.

‘We’ve been talking, and we’ve no doubt left in our minds that our wives are captive and in great danger,’ Hargreaves began without preamble. ‘Our – our wives are our sole concern at this moment. What do you suggest we do?’ He was holding himself well in check, but the tight mouth, the straining tendons of his clasped hands gave him away.

‘Damn it all, man!’ The elderly butcher had the choler back in his face again. ‘We rescue them, that’s what we do.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘We rescue them. How?’

‘Well –’

‘Look, friend, you don’t begin to know the score. Let me explain. There are three things we can do. We can let the Chinese break through the tunnel into the open, then a few of us nip smartly in there, go through to the other end, release your wives and then what? Hewell’s killers would be loose among the sailors here, and with all due respect to the Navy it would be wolves among chickens. And after they’d gobbled up the chickens they’d find we were missing and come back to finish us off – and your wives as well: and they might take some time finishing off your wives. Or we can blockade the tunnel exit and prevent them from coming out. We can prevent them for about an hour which is all the time it will take for them to go back and collect your wives and by either using them as shields or putting a gun to their heads force us to lay down our arms.’

I paused for a moment to let this sink in, but one glance round the tense still faces let me see that it had already sunk. They were looking at me as if they didn’t like me very much, but I suppose that it was what I was saying that they really didn’t like.

‘You said there was a third alternative.’ Hargreaves pressed me.

‘Yes.’ I rose stiffly to my feet, glanced at Anderson. ‘Sorry, Lieutenant, can’t wait any longer for your M.O. Time enough wasted. There is a third alternative, gentlemen. The only practicable one. As soon as they break through the mountainside – or as soon as we hear them trying to break through – a party of us, three or four, with sledges and crowbars to force locks and armed in case guards have been left behind to look after your wives, will go round the south of the island by boat, land and hope to get your wives clear before Witherspoon and Hewell get the idea of sending back for your wives to use as hostages. In this day and age I assume the navy no longer depends on oars and sails. A fast power boat should get us there in fifteen minutes.’

‘I’ve no doubt it would,’ Anderson said unhappily. There was an embarrassed silence then he went on reluctantly: ‘The fact is, Mr Bentall, we haven’t got any boats.’

‘Say that again?’

‘No boat. Not even a rowing boat. I’m sorry.’

‘Look.’ I said heavily. ‘I know there have been some pretty drastic cut-backs in naval estimates, but if you’ll tell me how a navy can function without –’

‘We did have boats,’ Anderson interrupted. ‘Four of them, attached to the light cruiser, Neckar, which has been anchored in the lagoon off and on for the past three months. The Neckar left two days ago with Rear-Admiral Harrison, who is in overall charge, and Dr Davies, who had been in charge of the development of the Dark Crusader throughout. The work on it –’

‘The Dark Crusader?’

‘The name of the rocket. Not quite in firing readiness yet, but we had an urgent cable from London forty-eight hours ago saying it was essential to complete the work immediately and ordering the Neckar to the firing range immediately – about 1,000 miles south-west of here. That’s why this particular island was chosen – all open water to the south-east if anything goes wrong with the rocket.’

‘Well, well.’ I said heavily. ‘What a lovely coincidence. A cable all the way from London. All the correct codes, hidden identification figures and telegraphic addresses, I’ll bet. It wasn’t the fault of your communication and coding boys that they fell for it.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand –’

‘And why should the Neckar leave if the rocket wasn’t in complete readiness.’ I interrupted.

‘It wasn’t much.’ Hargreaves put in. ‘Dr Fairfield had all his part of the job finished long before he – ah – disappeared, all that was required was that someone with a knowledge of solid fuels – I admit there aren’t many – should complete the wiring up and fusing of the firing circuitry. The cable giving the sailing orders said that a solid fuel expert would arrive on the island today.’

I refrained from introducing myself. The cable must have been sent off within hours of Witherspoon’s being told that Bentall was spending a wet and uncomfortable night on a reef out in the lagoon. There was no question but that the man was a criminal: but there was equally no question that he was a criminal genius. I was no criminal, but I was no genius either. We belonged in different leagues – the top and the bottom. I felt the way David would have felt if he had happened across Goliath and discovered that he had left his sling at home. I became vaguely aware that Anderson and the red-faced man, whom he addressed as Farley, were talking together and then the vagueness vanished. I heard a couple of words that caught and transfixed my attention the way a tarantula in my soup would have done.

‘Did I hear someone mention “Captain Fleck”?’ I asked carefully.

‘Yes.’ Anderson nodded. ‘Fleck. Chap who runs a schooner and transfers all our stores and mail from Kandavu to here. But he’s not due again until this afternoon.’

It was as well that I had risen to my feet, had I still been sitting in my chair I would probably have fallen out of it. I said stupidly: ‘Transfers your stores and mail, eh?’

‘That’s right, It was Farley speaking, his voice impatient. ‘Australian. Trader, mainly in Government surplus, but he’s also on charter to us. Rigorously investigated, security clearance, of course.’

‘Of course, of course.’ My mind was occupied with visions of Fleck busily transferring mail from one end of the island to the other and then back again. ‘Does he know what’s going on here?’

‘Of course not,’ Anderson said. ‘All the work on the rockets – there are two of them – is carried on under cover. Anyway, does it matter, Mr Bentall?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Not any more, it didn’t. ‘I think, Anderson, that we’d better go and consult with your Captain Griffiths. We have little time left. I’m afraid we may have no time left.’

I turned to the door and halted as knuckles rapped on the outside of it. Anderson said, ‘Come in,’ and the door opened. Leading Seaman Allison stood there, blinking in the sudden glare of light.

The Surgeon-Lieutenant is here, sir.’

‘Ah, good, good! Come in, Brookman, we –’ He broke off and said sharply: ‘Where’s your gun, Allison?’

Allison grunted in agony as something struck him from behind with tremendous force and sent him staggering into the room to crash heavily into Farley. Both men were still reeling, falling together against one of the cubicle walls, when the massive form of Hewell appeared in the doorway. He loomed tall as Everest, the gaunt granitic face empty of all life, the black eyes far back and hidden under the tufted brows – he must have forced Allison to go first to give his own eyes time to become accustomed to the light – and in his huge fist was a gun, a gun fitted with a black cylindrical object screwed on the barrel. A silencer.

Sub-Lieutenant Anderson made the last mistake of his life. He had a Navy Colt strapped to his waist and the mistake he made was trying to reach for it. I shouted out a warning, tried to reach him to knock his arm down, but he was on my left side and my crippled arm was far too slow.

I had a momentary glimpse of Hewell’s face and I knew it was too late. His face was as still and as motionless and as empty of life as ever as he squeezed the trigger. A soft muffled thud, a look of faint surprise in Anderson’s eyes as he put both hands on his chest and started toppling slowly backwards. I tried to catch him and break his fall, which was a foolish thing to do, it didn’t help either of us, all it did was to wrench my left shoulder violently and there’s not much point in hurting yourself trying to cushion the fall of a man who will never feel anything again.

CHAPTER 9

Friday 6 a.m.–8 a.m.

Hewell advanced into the room. He didn’t even look at the dead man on the floor. He made a gesture with his left hand and two soft-footed Chinese, each with a machine-pistol in his hand, came in through the doorway behind him: they carried their guns as if they knew how to use them.

‘Anybody here armed?’ Hewell asked in his deep gravelly voice. ‘Anybody here with arms in this room? If so, tell me now. If I find arms on any man or in any man’s room and he hasn’t told me, I’ll kill him. Any arms here?’

There were no arms there. If any of them had had toothpicks and thought Hewell might have considered those as arms, they’d have rushed to get them. Hewell had that effect on people. Also, there was no doubt but that he meant what he said.

‘Good.’ He advanced another step and looked down at me. ‘You fooled us, Bentall, didn’t you? That makes you very clever. Nothing wrong with your foot, was there, Bentall? But your arm isn’t so good, is it – I suppose the Dobermann did that to you before you killed it? And you killed two of my best men, didn’t you, Bentall? I’m afraid you will have to pay for that.’

There was nothing sinister or menacing about the slow sepulchral voice, but then it didn’t have to be, the man’s looming presence, the craggy ruin of a face made any further menace completely superfluous. I didn’t doubt that I would pay.

‘But it will have to wait. Just a little. We can’t have you dying on us yet, can we, Bentall?’ He spoke a few quick words in a foreign language to the Chinese on his right, a tall sinewy intelligentlooking man with a face as still as Hewell’s own, then turned back to me. ‘I have to leave you for a moment – we have the guards by the boundary fence to attend to. The main compound and garrison are already in our hands and all telephone lines to the guardposts cut. I am leaving Hang, here, to look after you. Don’t any of you try anything clever with Hang. You might think one man, even with a Tommy-gun, can’t hold nine men in a small room and if any of you think that and try to act on it that’s as good a way as any to find out why Hang was the sergeant-major of a machine-gun battalion in Korea.’ Hewell’s lips cracked in a humourless smile. ‘No prizes for guessing which side he was on.’

Seconds later he and the other Chinese were gone. I looked at Marie and she at me: her face was tired and somehow sad and the small smile she gave me hadn’t much behind it. Everybody else was looking at the Chinese guard. He didn’t appear to be looking at anybody.

Farley cleared his throat and said conversationally: ‘I think we could rush him, Bentall. One from each side.’

‘You rush him,’ I said. ‘I’m staying where I am.’

‘Damn it all, man.’ His voice was low and desperate. ‘It may be our last chance.’

‘We’ve had our last chance. Your courage is admirable, Farley, which is more than can be said for your intelligence. Don’t be a damned idiot.’

‘But – ’

‘You heard what Bentall said?’ The guard spoke faultless English, with a heavy American accent. ‘Don’t be a damned idiot.’

Farley subsided in a moment, you could see the swift collapse of the stiffened sinews of his resolution, the draining of the insular arrogance which had led to the bland assumption that the guard could speak no language other than his own.

‘You will all sit and cross your legs,’ the guard went on. ‘That will be safer – for yourselves. I don’t want to kill anyone.’ He paused, then added as an afterthought: ‘Except Bentall. You killed two members of my tong, tonight, Bentall.’

There didn’t seem to be any suitable comment on that one, so I let it pass.

‘You may smoke if you wish,’ he continued. ‘You may talk, but do not talk in whispers.’

There was no hurry to take him up on his second offer. There are some situations which make it difficult to choose an agreeable topic of conversation and this seemed to be one of them. Besides, I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to think, if I could do it without damaging myself. I tried to figure out how Hewell and company had got through so soon. It had been more or less a certainty, I’d known, that they were going to break through that morning, but it had come hours before I had expected it. Had they made a spot check to see if we were still in bed? Possible, but unlikely: they’d showed no signs of suspicion when we’d seen them after the fire. Or had they found the dead Chinese in the tomb. That was more likely, but even if true it was still damnably hard luck.

I suppose I ought to have been bent double under the weight of bitterness and chagrin but strangely enough it hardly crossed my mind. The game was lost and that was all there was to it: or the game up till now was lost, which seemed to be about the same thing. Or maybe it wasn’t. It was as if Marie had read my mind.

‘You’re still figuring, aren’t you, Johnny?’ She gave me that smile again, the smile that I’d never seen her give anyone, not even Witherspoon, and my heart started capering around like a court jester in the Middle Ages until I reminded it that this was a girl who could fool anyone. ‘It’s like the colonel said. Sitting in the electric chair, the man’s hand on the switch and you’re still figuring.’

‘Sure, I’m figuring,’ I said sourly. ‘I’m figuring how long I’ve got to live.’

I saw the quick hurt in her eyes and turned away. Hargreaves was regarding me thoughtfully. He was still scared, but he could still think. And Hargreaves had a good mind.

‘You’re hardly a goner yet, are you?’ he asked. ‘From what I gather neither your friend Hewell nor this man here would hesitate to kill you. But they don’t. Hewell said, “We can’t have you dying on us yet.” And you used to work in the same department as Dr Fairfield. Could you be the fuel expert that we’ve been expecting?’

‘I suppose I am.’ There was no point in saying anything else, I hadn’t known the bogus Witherspoon half an hour altogether before I’d told him that. I wondered if, anywhere along the line, there was a mistake I could have made and hadn’t. Looking back, it seemed unlikely. ‘It’s a long story. Some other time.’

‘Could you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Fuse up the rocket?’

‘I wouldn’t even know how to go about it,’ I said untruthfully.

‘But you worked with Fairfield,’ Hargreaves persisted.

‘Not on solid fuel.’

‘But – ’

‘I don’t know a single thing about his latest solid fuel development,’ I said harshly. And to think I’d thought he had a good mind. Would the damned fool never shut up? Didn’t he know the guard was listening? What did he want to do – put a rope round my neck? I could see Marie staring at him, her lips compressed, her hazel eyes very far from friendly. ‘They’ve been too damned secret about all this,’ I finished. ‘They’ve sent out the wrong expert.’

‘Well, that’s useful,’ Hargreaves muttered.

‘Isn’t it? I never even knew of the existence of this Dark Crusader of yours. How about putting me in the picture about it? I’m one of those characters who believe a man should go on learning till the day he dies: this looks like the last chance to collect some fresh information.’

He hesitated, then said slowly: ‘I’m afraid – ’

‘You’re afraid it’s all very top secret.’ I said impatiently. ‘Sure it’s very secret – but not to anyone on this island. Not any longer.’

‘I suppose not.’ Hargreaves said doubtfully. He thought for a moment and then smiled. ‘You will remember the late and bitterly lamented Blue Streak rocket?’

‘Our one and only entrant in the inter-continental ballistic missile stakes?’ I nodded. ‘Sure I remember it. It could do everything a missile should do, except fly. Everyone felt this was very awkward. Considerable heart-burning when the Government dropped it. Much talk about selling out to the Americans, being absolutely dependent for nuclear defence on the Americans, Britain now a very second-rate power, if you would call her a power at all. I remember. The Government was vastly unpopular.’

‘Yes. And they didn’t deserve any of it. They dropped the entire project because one or two of the better military and scientific minds in Britain – we have one or two – kindly pointed out to them that the Blue Streak was a hundred per cent unsuitable for its purpose anyway. It was based on American-type models, such as the Atlas ICBM, which takes twenty minutes to count down and get under way from the moment of the first alarm, which is all very well for the Americans: with their new DEW-lines and advanced radar stations, their infra-red detectors and spies-in-the-skies to detect exhaust trails of launched ICBMs, they’re counting on getting half an hour when some maniac presses the wrong button. All the warning we can expect is four minutes.’ Hargreaves took off his spectacles, polished them carefully and blinked myopically. ‘Which means that if the Blue Streak had worked, and if the count-down had started the moment the warning had come through it would still have been wiped out of existence by a five megaton Russian ICBM sixteen minutes before it was due to take off.’

‘I can count,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to spell it out for me.’

‘We had to spell it out for the Ministry of Defence.’ Hargreaves replied. ‘Took them three or four years to catch on, which is about par for the military mind. Look at the admirals and their battleships. The other great drawback of the Blue Streak, of course, is that it would have required a huge launching installation, all the ramps, gantries and blockhouses, the enormous trailers of helium and liquid nitrogen to pump in the kerosene and liquid oxygen under pressure, and, finally the vast size of the rocket itself. This meant a permanent and fixed installation, and with all those hordes of British and American planes flying over Russian territories, Russian planes flying over American and British territories and – for all I know, British and American flying over one another’s territories – those locations have become so well known that practically every launching base in the U.S. and Russia had a corresponding ICBM from the other country zeroed in on it.

‘What was wanted, then, was a rocket that could be fired instantaneously – and a rocket that was completely mobile, completely portable. This was impossible without any known missile fuel. Certainly not with the kerosene – kerosene, in this day and age! – which along with liquid oxygen still powers most of the American rockets. Certainly, either, not with the liquid hydrogen engines the Americans are working on today, the boiling point of 423°F makes them ten times as tricky to handle as anything yet known. And they’re far too big.’

‘They were working on caesium and ion fuels.’ I said.

‘They’ll be working on them for a long time to come. They’ve got a dozen separate firms working on those and you know the old saw about too many cooks. And so the mobile rocket ready for instant firing was impossible with any known propellant – until Fairfield came up with a brilliantly simple idea for solid fuel, twenty times as powerful as used in the American Minuteman. It’s so brilliantly simple.’ Hargreaves admitted, ‘that I don’t know how it works.’

Neither did I. But I’d learnt enough from Fairfield to learn how to make it work. But here and now I never would.

‘You’re sure it really does work?’ I asked.

‘We’re sure, all right. On a small scale, that is. Dr Fairfield fitted a twenty-eight-pound charge to a specially constructed miniature rocket and fired it from an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. It took off exactly as Fairfield had predicted, very slowly at first, far more slowly than conventional missiles.’ Hargreaves smiled reminiscently. ‘And then it started accelerating. We – the radar scanners – lost it about 60,000 feet. It was still accelerating and doing close on 16,000 miles an hour. Then more experiments, scaled down charges, till he got what he wanted. Then we multiplied the weight of the rocket, fuel, simulated warhead and brain by 400. And that’s the Dark Crusader.’

‘Maybe multiplying by 400 brings in some fresh factors.’

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. That’s why we’re here.’

‘The Americans know about this?’

‘No.’ Hargreaves smiled dreamily. ‘But we hope they will some day. We hope to supply them with it in a year or two, that’s why it’s been designed far in excess of our own requirements, designed to carry a two-ton hydrogen bomb six thousand miles in fifteen minutes, reaching a maximum speed of 20,000 miles per hour. Sixteen tons compared to the 200 tons of their own ICBMs. Eighteen feet high compared to a hundred. Can be carried and fired from any merchant ship, coaster, submarine, train or heavy truck. All that and instant firing.’ He smiled again, and this time the dreaminess was suffused with a certain complacency. ‘The Yanks are just going to love the Dark Crusader.’

I looked at him.

‘You’re not seriously suggesting that Witherspoon and Hewell are working for the Americans, are you?’

‘Working for the – ’ He pulled the spectacles down his nose and peered at me over the thick horn-rims, eyes wide in myopic astonishment. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I just mean that if they aren’t I don’t see how the Americans are going to have a chance to look at the Crusader, far less love it.’

He looked at me, nodded, looked away and said nothing. It seemed a shame to destroy his scientific enthusiasm.

The dawn was in the sky now, even with the lamps still burning inside the Quonset we could see the lightening grey patches where the windows lay. My arm felt as if the Dobermann were still clinging to it. I remembered the half-finished glass of whisky on the table, reached up for it and said ‘Cheers.’ No one said cheers back to me, but I disregarded their unmannerly attitude and downed it all the same. It didn’t do me any good that I could feel. Farley, the infra-red guidance expert, gradually recovered his colour, courage and indignation and carried on a long and bitter monologue, in which the two words ‘damnable’ and ‘outrage’ were the recurring theme. He didn’t say anything about writing to his M.P. Nobody else said anything at all. Nobody looked at the dead man on the floor. I wished that someone would give me some more whisky, or even that I knew where Anderson had found the bottle. It seemed all wrong that I should be thinking more about the bottle than the dead man who’d given me my first drink from it. But then everything was wrong that morning, and besides, the past was past, the future – what remained of it – was to come and while the whisky might help nothing was surer than that Anderson would never help anyone again.

Hewell returned at the dawn.

He returned at the dawn and he returned alone, and it didn’t need the sight of his bloodstained left forearm to tell me why he had returned alone. The three guards by the wire must have been more watchful and more capable than he had imagined, but they hadn’t been capable enough. If Hewell was worried by his wound, the death of yet another of his men or the murder of three seamen, he hid his worry well. I looked round the faces of the men in the Quonset, faces grey and strained and afraid, and I knew I didn’t need to spell out for them what had happened. In different circumstances – in very different circumstances – it would have been funny to watch the play of expression on their faces, the utter disbelief that this could be happening to them struggling with the frightening knowledge that it was indeed happening to them. But right there and then it wasn’t any strain at all not to laugh.

Hewell wasn’t in a word-wasting mood. He pulled out his gun, gestured to Hang to leave the hut, looked us over without expression and said the single word: ‘Out.’

We went out. Apart from a sprinkling of palms down by the water’s edge there weren’t any more trees or vegetation on this side of the island than there had been on the other. The central mountain was much steeper on this side, and the great gash that bisected its southward side was well in sight, with one of the spurs running down from the northeast obscuring our view to the west and north.

Hewell didn’t give us any time to admire the view. He formed us into a rough column of two, ordered us to clasp our hands above our heads – I paid no attention, I doubt whether I could have done it anyway and he didn’t press the matter – and marched us off to the north-west over the low spur of rock.

Three hundred yards on, just over the first spur – another still lay ahead of us – I noticed about fifty yards away on my right a pile of broken rock, of very recent origin. From my lower elevation I couldn’t see what was behind that pile but I didn’t have to see to know: it was the exit of the tunnel where Witherspoon and Hewell had broken through in the early hours of the morning. I looked carefully all around me, plotting and remembering its position against every topographical feature I could see until I felt fairly certain that I could find it without trouble even on the darkest night. I marvelled at my incurable penchant for assimilating and storing away information of the most useless character.

Five minutes later we were over the low crest of the second spur and could see the whole of the plain on the west side of the island stretched out in front of us. It was still in the shadow of the mountain, but it was full daylight now and easy to make out every feature.

The plain was bigger than the one to the east, but not much, maybe a mile long from north to south and four hundred yards wide between the sea and the first slopes of the mountain. There wasn’t a single tree to be seen. In the south-west corner of the plain a long wide pier stretched far out into the glittering lagoon, at our distance of four or five hundred yards this jetty seemed to be made of concrete but was more likely of coral blocks. At the far end of the pier, mounted on rails, with its supporting legs set very far apart, was a heavy crane of the type I’d seen in graving yards for ship repair work: the entire superstructure and jib – there was no counter-balance – were mounted on a ring of live rollers. This was the crane the phosphate company would have used to load its ships – and it was also the crane that must have formed one of the deciding factors in the Navy’s decision to set up its rocket installation on the island. It wasn’t often, I thought, that you would find ready-made unloading facilities with a pier and crane that looked as if it might be good for thirty tons on a deserted island in the South Pacific.

Two other much narrower sets of rails ran up the pier. A few years ago, I supposed, one of those would have brought loaded phosphate wagons down to the pierhead while the other took the empty ones away. Today, one could still see one of the original sets of lines as it left the pier curving away to the south, rusted and overgrown, towards the phosphate mine: but the other set had been removed and replaced by new lengths of fresh shining rail that led straight inland for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards. Halfway along its length it passed over a curious circular pad of concrete about twenty-five yards in diameter, and finally ended in front of a hangar-shaped building, about thirty feet high, forty wide and a hundred in length. From where we stood almost directly behind the hangar it was impossible to see either its doors or where the rails ended, but it was a safe guess that the latter went all the way inside. The hangar itself was dazzling, it appeared to have been painted in pure white; but it was covered not in paint but in a painted white canvas, a measure, I supposed, designed to reflect the sun’s rays and make work possible inside a building made of corrugated iron.

Some little distance north of this stood what were clearly the living-quarters, a group of haphazardly placed buildings, squat, ugly and obviously prefabricated. Farther to the north again, at a distance of almost three-quarters of a mile from the hangar, was what seemed to be a solid square of concrete set into the ground. At that distance it was hard to tell, but it didn’t look to be any more than two or three feet high. At least half a dozen tall steel poles rose from this concrete, each pole topped with a meshed scanner or radio antenna, all different in design.

Hang led us straight to the nearest and largest of the prefabricated huts. There were two men outside, Chinese, both with automatic carbines. One of them nodded, and Hang stood aside to let us pass through the open door.

The room beyond was obviously the ratings’ mess. Fifteen feet wide by forty long, it had threetiered bunks arranged the full length of both walls, with walls and bunks liberally decorated with pin-ups in every shape and form. Between each pair of vertical trios of bunks was a threepart locker: more art. Four mess tables, joined end to end to make one table and scrubbed as snowy white as the floor they stood on, ran the full length of the room. Set in the far wall of the room was a door. The sign above it read: ‘P.O.’s mess.’

On the benches round the two most distant tables sat about twenty men, petty officers and ratings. Some were fully dressed, others hardly dressed at all. One was slumped across the table, like a man asleep, his head pillowed on his bare forearms and his forearms and the table below covered with clotted blood. None of the men looked shocked or scared or worried, they just sat there with tight and angry faces. They didn’t look the type to scare easily, there were no kids among them, the Navy would have picked its best, its most experienced men for this operation, which probably explained why Hewell and his men, even with the elements of surprise and ambush on their side, had run into trouble.

Four men sat side by side on a bench by the top table. Like the men at the lower tables they had their hands clasped in front of them, resting on the wood. Each man had his epaulettes of rank on his shoulders. The big grey-haired man on the left with the puffed and bleeding mouth, the grey watchful eyes and the four gold bars would be Captain Griffiths. Beside him a thin balding hook-nosed man with three bars spaced by purple, an engineer commander. Next to him a blond young man with red between his two gold bars, that would be Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman; and finally another lieutenant, a red-haired youngster with bitter eyes and a white compressed line where his mouth should have been.

Five Chinese guards were spaced round the walls of the room. Each carried an automatic carbine. By the head of the first table, smoking a cheroot, with a malacca cane – no gun – in his hand and looking more benign and scholastic than ever, was the man I had known as Professor Witherspoon. Or so I thought until he turned and looked directly at me and then I saw, even although there was no particular expression on his face, that I could be wrong about the benign part of it. For the first time ever I saw him without the tinted glasses, and I didn’t like what I saw: eyes with the lightest pupils I have ever seen, but misted, eyes with the flat dull look of inferior coloured marbles. They were the eyes you sometimes see on men who are completely blind.

He glanced at Hewell and said: ‘Well?’

‘Well,’ Hewell said. Every man in the room, except the red-haired lieutenant, was staring at him, I’d forgotten the impact that the first sight of this moving Neanderthalic mountain could make. ‘We got them. They were suspicious and waiting, but we got them. I lost one man.’

‘So.’ Witherspoon turned to the captain. ‘That accounts for everyone?’

‘You murdering fiends, ‘the grey-haired man whispered. ‘You fiends! Ten of my men killed.’

Witherspoon gave a slight signal with his cane and one of his guards stepped forward and placed his carbine barrel against the back of the neck of the rating next to the one who lay with his head pillowed on his arms.

‘That’s all,’ Captain Griffiths said quickly. ’I swear that is all.’

Witherspoon gave another signal and the man stepped back. I could see the white mark where the gun had been pressing in the man’s neck, the slow droop of the shoulders as he exhaled in a long soundless breath. Hewell nodded at the dead man beside him.

‘What happened?’

‘I asked this young fool here’ – Witherspoon pointed at the red-haired lieutenant – ‘where all the guns and ammunition were stored. The young fool wouldn’t tell me. I had that man there shot. Next time I asked he told me.’

Hewell nodded absently as if it was the most right and natural thing in the world to shoot a man if another withheld information, but I wasn’t interested in Hewell, I was interested in Witherspoon. The absence of spectacles apart, he hadn’t changed externally at all: but for all that the change was complete. The quick bird-like movements, the falsetto affected voice, the repetitive habit of speech had vanished: here now was a calm, assured, ruthless man, absolute master of himself and all around him, a man who never wasted an action or a word.

‘Those the scientists?’ Witherspoon went on.

Hewell nodded and Witherspoon waved his cane towards the far end of the room.

‘They’re in there.’

Hewell and a guard started to shepherd the seven men towards the P.O.s’ mess. As they passed by Witherspoon, Farley stopped and stood before him with clenched hands.

‘You monster,’ he said thickly. ‘You damned – ’

Witherspoon didn’t seem even to look at him. His malacca cane whistled through the air and Farley screamed in agony and staggered back against the bunks, clutching his face with both hands. Hewell caught him by the collar and sent him staggering and stumbling the length of the room. Witherspoon never even looked at him. I had the vague idea that Witherspoon and I weren’t going to get along very well in the near future.

The door at the far end opened, the men were bundled inside and then the door was closed again, but not before we all heard the high-pitched excited disbelieving voices of women.

‘So you kept them under wraps while the Navy was doing your work for you.’ I said slowly to Witherspoon. ‘Now that you no longer need the Navy but do need the scientists – no doubt to supervise and develop the building of fresh rockets wherever you’re going – well, you need the wives, too. How else could you make their husbands work for you?’

He turned to face me, the long, thin, whippy cane swinging gently in his hand. ‘Who asked you to speak?’

‘You hit me with that cane,’ I said, ‘and I’ll choke out your life with it.’

Everthing was suddenly peculiarly still. Hewell, on his way back, halted in mid-stride. Everybody, for some reason best known to himself, had stopped breathing. The thunder of a feather falling on the floor would have had them all airborne. Ten seconds, each second about five minutes long, passed. Everyone was still holding his breath. Then Witherspoon laughed softly and turned to Captain Griffiths.

‘I’m afraid Bentall here is of a rather different calibre from your men and our scientists,’ he said, as if in explanation. ‘Bentall is, for instance, an excellent actor: no other man has ever fooled me so long or so successfully. Bentall allows himself to be savaged by wild dogs and never shows a sign. Bentall, with one arm out of commission, meets up with two experienced knife-fighters in a darkened cave and kills them both. He is also, for good measure, highly skilled in burning down houses.’ He shrugged, almost apologetically. ‘But, then, of course, it requires a very special man to become a member of Britain’s Secret Service.’

Another peculiar silence, even more peculiar than the one that had gone before. Everybody was looking at their first Secret Service man, and they couldn’t have been unduly impressed. With a drawn haggard face like that of a cadaver and a body that looked even more so, I wouldn’t have done at all as a subject for a poster to attract fresh recruits to the service. Not, of course, that they used posters. I wondered how on earth Witherspoon had known. The Chinese guard, Hang, had heard us, of course: but he hadn’t spoken yet to Witherspoon.

‘You are a government agent, Bentall, aren’t you?’ Witherspoon asked softly.

‘I’m a scientist,’ I said, just to see how it would go. ‘A fuel research technician. Liquid fuel,’ I added pointedly.

A sign that I didn’t see and a guard advanced and pressed his gun-barrel against Captain Griffiths’ neck.

‘Counter-espionage,’ I said.

‘Thank you.’ The guard fell back. ‘Honest-to-goodness plain scientists aren’t expert in codes, wireless telegraphy and Morse. You appear to be well versed in all of them, don’t you, Bentall?’

I looked at Lieutenant Brookman. ‘I wonder if you would be kind enough to fix up this arm of mine?’

Witherspoon took a long step towards me. His mouth was as white as the knuckles of the hand that held the malacca cane, but his voice was as unperturbed as ever.

‘When I’m finished. It may interest you to know that within two minutes of my returning home tonight after the fire a message started coming through on our radio transmitter from a vessel by the name of the Pelican, in which I have a considerable interest.’

If it wasn’t for the fact that my nervous system seemed to have completely stopped working, I’d probably have jumped a foot. If I’d the strength for any gymnastics like that, which I hadn’t. As it was, I didn’t move a muscle on my face. The Pelican! That had been the first name I’d seen on that list under the blotter, the copied list that now lay between my sock and the sole of my right foot.

‘The Pelican was listening in on a certain frequency,’ he continued. ‘It had instructions to do so. You may imagine the radio operator’s astonishment when an SOS started coming through on that frequency, a frequency far removed from the distress channels.’

I still didn’t move any facial muscles, but it called for no will-power this time, the shock of realization was enough, the shock of appreciating the enormity of my blunder. But it wasn’t really my fault. I had no means of knowing that the forty-six in the list I had picked up meant that the Pelican and the other ships – probably all the other names were ships’ names, too – were to begin listening in, to keep a radio watch at forty-six minutes past every hour. And, as nearly as I could remember, I had begun to transmit my first experimental SOS, when I was trying to line up the receiver and transmitter, at almost exactly that time and on the pre-set wave-length of Foochow, which just happened to be the transmitting wavelength they were using.

‘He was a clever man, this operator,’ Witherspoon continued. ‘He lost you, and guessed it was because you had dropped down to the distress frequencies. He found you there and followed you. He heard the name Vardu mentioned twice, and knew something was far wrong. He copied down letter for letter your signal to the Annandale. And then he waited ten minutes and called back.’

I was still giving my impression of one of the statues on Easter Island, carved from stone and badly battered. This wasn’t the end, this wasn’t necessarily the end. But it was the end, I knew it was.

‘“COMBO RIDEX LONDON” – the telegraphic address of the chief of your service, wasn’t it, Bentall?’ he asked. It seemed unlikely that I could convince him that all I had been doing was sending a birthday message to my Aunt Myrtle in Putney, so I nodded. ‘I guessed so. And I thought it might be rather useful if I sent a message myself. While Hewell – who had now discovered you were missing – and his men were already pickaxing away what was left of the tunnel, I composed a second message. I had no idea, of course, what your coded message had been, but the one I sent to “COMBO RIDEX LONDON” should meet the case. I sent: “PLEASE DISREGARD PREVIOUS MESSAGE EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL ESSENTIAL YOU DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONTACT ME FORTY-EIGHT HOURS NO TIME CODE,” and took the liberty of adding your name. Do you think that will meet the case, Bentall?’

I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. I looked round the faces at the table, but no one was looking at me any more, they were almost all staring down at their hands. I glanced in Marie’s direction, but even she wasn’t looking at me. I’d been born in the wrong time and place, I should have been in Rome two thousand years ago and toppling slowly forward on to my sword. I thought of the nasty big hole a sword would make and then, by association of ideas, of the nasty big holes in my upper left arm, so I said to Witherspoon: ‘Would you permit Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman to fix up my arm now?’

He looked at me long and consideringly, then said quietly: ‘I could almost regret that life has placed us on opposite sides of the fence. I can well understand why your chief sent you on this mission: you are a highly dangerous man.’

‘I’m better than that,’ I said. ‘I’m a lucky man. I’ll carry your coffin yet.’

He looked at me for a brief moment, then turned to Brookman. ‘Fix this man’s arm.’

‘Thank you, Professor Witherspoon,’ I said politely.

‘LeClerc,’ he said indifferently. ‘Not Witherspoon. That babbling old idiot has served his purpose.’

Brookman made a good job. He opened and cleaned the wounds with something that felt like a wire brush, stitched them up neatly, covered them all with aluminium foil and bandage, fed me a variety of pills, then, for good measure, jabbed me a couple of times with a hypodermic syringe. Had I been alone I’d have put any dancing dervish to shame, but I felt I’d done enough damage to future Secret Service recruitment so I kept reasonably still. By the time he was finished the room itself was beginning to go into a dancing dervish routine, so I thanked Brookman and without a by-your-leave made shakily for the table and sat down heavily opposite Captain Griffiths. Witherspoon – or LeClerc, as I had to think of him now – sat beside me.

‘You feel better, Bentall?’

‘I couldn’t feel worse. If there’s a hell for dogs and I hope that damned hound of yours is roasting.’

‘Quite. Who is the senior scientist among those present, Captain Griffiths?’

‘What damnable evil are you up to now?’ the grey-haired man demanded.

I won’t repeat the question, Captain Griffith,’ LeClerc said mildly. His misted white eyes flickered for a moment in the direction of the dead man collapsed on the table.

‘Hargreaves,’ Griffiths said wearily. He glanced in the direction of the sound of the voices behind the closed doors of the P.O.s’ mess. ‘Must you, LeClerc? He’s only just met his wife for the first time in many months. He won’t be fit to answer anything. There’s not much going on that I don’t know. I’m the man in overall charge, you understand, not Hargreaves.’

LeClerc considered, then said: ‘Very well. In what state of readiness is the Dark Crusader?’

Is that all you want to know?’

‘That’s all.’

‘The Dark Crusader is completely ready in every respect except for the wiring up and fusing of the firing circuitry.’

‘Why wasn’t this done?’

‘Because of the disappearance of Dr Fairfield…’ I tried to focus on Captain Griffiths’ face among the kaleidoscopic whirl of people and furniture and dimly realized that it was only now that Griffiths was beginning to understand why Fairfield had disappeared. He stared at LeClerc for long moments, then whispered huskily: ‘My God! Of course, of course.’

‘Yes, of course,’ LeClerc snapped. ‘But I didn’t mean that. Why was the circuitry and fusing not finished earlier? I understand that the loading of the propellant charge was completed over a month ago.’

‘How–how in heaven’s name do you know that?’

‘Answer my question.’

‘Fairfield feared that the propellant mixture might show inherent instability in very hot weather and regarded that as sufficient risk in itself without the additional risk of fusing it.’ Griffiths rubbed a sun-tanned hand across his damp and bleeding face. ‘You should know that no projectile or missile, from a two-pounder to a hydrogen bomb, is ever fused until the last possible moment.’

‘How long did Fairfield say the fusing would take?’

‘I once heard him mention a period of forty minutes.’

LeClerc said softly: ‘You’re lying, Captain. I know the great virtue of the Crusader is that it can be fired instantaneously.’

‘That is so. In time of war or tension it would be permanently fused, but we are as yet not quite certain as to the inherent stability of the propellant.’

‘Forty minutes?’

‘Forty minutes.’

LeClerc turned to me. ‘You heard? Forty minutes.’ ‘I heard bits of it.’ I mumbled. ‘I’m not hearing very well.’

‘You are feeling sick?’

‘Sick?’ I tried to stare at him in vast surprise, but I couldn’t find his face anywhere. ‘Why should I be feeling sick?’

‘You could fuse this, Bentall?’

‘I’m a specialist in liquid fuel.’ I said with difficulty.

‘I know differently.’ I could see his face now, because he’d stuck it within three inches of mine. ‘You were Fairfield’s assistant at the Hepworth Ordinance Branch. You worked on solid fuel, I know.’

‘You know an awful lot.’

‘Can you fuse this?’ he persisted quietly.

‘Whisky,’ I said. ‘I need a drink of whisky.’

‘Oh, my God!’ He followed this up with some more language, most of which I fortunately couldn’t catch, then called on one of his men. I suppose the Chinese must have gone to the officers’ mess, for a few moments later someone was putting a glass in my hand. I gazed blearily at it, a hefty three fingers in a tumbler, and put it all away in a couple of gulps. When I’d stopped coughing and wiped the tears away from my eyes, I found I could see almost as well as ever.

LeClerc touched my arm.

‘Well, what’s the answer? Can you fuse up the Crusader?’

‘I wouldn’t even know how to start.’

‘You’re ill.’ LeClerc said kindly. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. What you need is some sleep.’

CHAPTER 10

Friday 10 a.m.–1 p.m.

I slept for two hours. When I awoke the sun was high in the sky and Dr Hargreaves, the hypersonics specialist, was shaking me gently by the shoulder. At least he thought he was shaking me gently, it was probably the fact that I had a blanket drawn over me that caused him to forget that he shouldn’t have been shaking me by the left shoulder. I told him to be more careful, he looked hurt, maybe it was the way I said it, and then I pushed back the blanket and sat up. I felt stiff and sore practically everywhere, my shoulder and arm throbbed savagely, but much of the tiredness was gone and my head was clear again. Which, of course, was what LeClerc had wanted: you can’t have a man fusing and wiring up the complicated circuitry on a propellant with the disruptive potential of a hundred tons of high explosive if he’s peering, fumbling and staggering around with exhaustion like a drunken man. From time to time I have cherished my share of illusions but one which I didn’t cherish was that LeClerc had finished with me.

Hargreaves looked pale and distressed and unhappy. I didn’t wonder. His reunion with his wife couldn’t have been a very happy one, the circumstances hadn’t been very favourable and the immediate prospects even less so. I wondered what they had done with Marie, whether they had put her in with the other women and when I asked him he said they had.

I looked around the little hut. It was no more than eight by eight, with racks along the walls and a tiny steel-meshed window above my head. I seemed to remember vaguely that someone had mentioned that it used to be the small arms and ammunition storage shed, but I couldn’t be sure, I’d just dropped on to the canvas cot they’d brought in and gone to sleep instantly. I looked at Hargreaves again.

‘What’s been going on? Since this morning, I mean?’

‘Questions,’ he said tiredly. ‘Questions all the time. They interviewed my colleagues, myself and the naval officers separately, then they split us up and separated us from our wives. We’re all over the place now, two or three to the hut.’

LeClerc’s psychology was easy to understand. With the scientists and naval officers broken into tiny groups, agreement on a concerted plan of resistance or revolt would be impossible: and with the scientists separated from their wives and in a consequent and continuous state of fear and anxiety over their welfare, their co-operation with LeClerc would be absolute.

‘What did he want to see you about?’ I asked.

‘Lots of things.’ He hesitated and looked away. ‘Mainly about the rocket, how much did any of us know about the fusing. At least that’s what he asked me. I can’t speak for the others.’

‘Do you – do any of them know anything about it?’

‘Only the general principles. Each one of us knows the general principles of the various components. We have to. But that doesn’t even begin to be enough when it comes to the complex particulars.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Any of us could probably blow the whole thing to kingdom come.’

‘There’s a chance of that?’

‘No one has ever given a guarantee on an experimental rocket.’

‘Hence the blockhouse – that sunken concrete shelter to the north?’

‘The test firing was to have been carried out from there. Just a first-time precaution. It’s also why they placed the scientists’ Quonset so far away from the hangar.’

‘The sailors are expendable, but not the scientists? Is that it?’ He didn’t answer, so I went on: ‘Have you any idea where they’re intending to take this rocket, the scientists and their wives? The naval officers and ratings, of course, won’t be taken anywhere.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know damn well what I mean. They’re of no further use to LeClerc and will be eliminated.’ He shook his head in what was more an involuntary shudder than a shake and buried his face in his hands. ‘Did LeClerc make no mention of his ultimate destination?’

He shook his head again and turned away. He seemed badly upset about something, unwilling to meet my eye, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him.

‘Russia, perhaps?’

‘Not Russia.’ He stared at the floor. ‘Whatever it is, it’s not Russia. They wouldn’t look at this old steam-engine affair.’

‘They wouldn’t – ’ It was my turn to stare. ‘I thought this was the most advanced – ’

‘In the western world, yes. But in the last few months it’s been an open secret among our scientists, but one they’re all frightened to talk about, that Russia has developed – or is developing – the ultimate rocket. The proton rocket. Hints dropped by Professor Stanyukovich, the leading Soviet expert on the dynamics of gases, don’t leave much room for doubt, I’m afraid. Somehow or other they’ve discovered the secret of harnessing and storing anti-protons. We know about this anti-matter but have no conception of how to store it. But the Russians have. A couple of ounces of it would take the Dark Crusader to the moon.’

The implications of this were beyond me: but I agreed that it was unlikely that the Soviets would want the rocket. Red China, Japan? The presence of Chinese workers and LeClerc’s Sino-Japanese transmitting set seemed to point that way, but the possibility was that those pointers were far too obvious, there were other countries in Asia – and outside Asia – who would dearly love to lay hands on the Dark Crusader. But even more important than the question of what nation could or would want such a rocket was the answer to the question how any nation in the world had known that we were building such a rocket. Far back in my mind the first beginnings of an answer were beginning to shape themselves towards an impossible solution… I became gradually aware that Hargreaves was speaking again.

‘I want to apologize for my stupidity this morning,’ he was saying hesitantly. ‘Damn silly of me to persist in saying you were a solid fuel expert. I might have been putting a rope round your neck. I’m afraid I was too upset to think at all, far less think clearly. But I don’t think the guard noticed.’

It’s all right. I don’t think either that the guard noticed.’

‘You’re not going to co-operate with LeClerc?’ Hargreaves asked. His hands were clasping and unclasping all the time, his nerves were no match for his brains. ‘I know you could do it if you wanted.’

‘Sure I could. A couple of hours with Fairfield’s notes, diagrams, coding symbols and examining the actual layout, and I think I could. But time is on our side, Hargreaves – God knows it’s the only thing on our side. As far as LeClerc is concerned, the fusing is the key. He won’t leave till he gets the key. London knows I’m here, the Neckar may get suspicious over the delay, anything can happen, and anything that can happen can only be to our advantage.’ I tried to think of anything that could be to our advantage, but failed. ‘So I sit tight. LeClerc suspects I’m an expert on solid fuels: he cannot possibly know.’

‘Of course,’ Hargreaves muttered. ‘Of course. Time is on our side.’

He sat down on an empty ammunition box and stared down silently at the floor. He seemed to have lost all inclination to talk. I didn’t feel much like talking myself.

A key turned in the door and LeClerc and Hewell came in. LeClerc said: ‘Feeling better?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Just wondering whether you might have changed your mind about your alleged ignorance on the subject of solid fuel.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Of course not. Hewell?’ The giant came forward and laid a squat leather-covered box on the floor – a tape recorder.

‘Perhaps you would care to hear the playback of a recent recording we made?’

I rose slowly to my feet and stared down at Hargreaves. His gaze was still fixed on the floor.

‘Thank you, Hargreaves,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’

‘I had to do it,’ he said dully. ‘LeClerc said he would shoot my wife through the back of the head.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I touched him on the shoulder. ‘It wasn’t your fault. What now, LeClerc?’

‘It’s time you saw the Dark Crusaders.’ He stood to one side to let me pass.

The doors of the hangar were wide open, the lights burning high up near the roof. The rails ran all the way to the back of the hangar.

They were there, all right, the Dark Crusaders, stubby pencil-shaped cylinders with highly polished steel sides and water-cooled porcelain noses above great scalloped air-scoops, the height of a two-storey house and perhaps four feet in diameter. They rested on flat eight-wheeled steel bogies, and on either side of each rocket was a gantry crane, almost as high as the rocket itself, each crane mounted on a four-wheeled bogie: from the top and bottom of the gantries protruding clamps reached out to hold the rockets firmly in position. Both rockets and all four gantries were resting on the same set of rails.

LeClerc wasted no time, no words. He led me straight to the nearest rocket and mounted an open-sided lift fitted to the inner side of the nearest gantry. Hewell jabbed me painfully in the spine with his gun: I got the idea and climbed up beside LeClerc. Hewell stayed where he was. LeClerc pressed a button, an electric motor whined and the lift slid easily upwards for about five feet. LeClerc took a key from his pocket, slid it into a tiny hole in the side of the rocket, pulled out a flush-fitting handle and swung out a seven-foot-high door in the casing of the Dark Crusader: the door had been so meticulously machined, so beautifully fitted, that I hadn’t even noticed its existence.

‘Take a good look,’ LeClerc said. ‘That’s all you’re here for – to take a good look.’

I took a good look. The outer hardened steel casing of the rocket was just that and no more – an outer case. Inside was another casing and the gap between the two was at least five inches.

Directly opposite me, welded on to the inner casing, were two flat steel boxes, about six inches apart and each six inches square. The one to the left, green-painted, bore the legend ‘Propellant’ and below that the words ‘On-Off’: the one to the right was a bright pillar-box red in colour, with the words ‘Safe’ and ‘Armed’ stencilled in white on the left and right side of the box respectively. On both boxes, just below the top, was a knob-handled switch.

From the foot of both boxes issued flexible armoured cables, with plastic sheathing below the armour – a measure almost certainly designed to protect the underlying electric cables from the tremendous heat which would be generated in flight. The cable to the left, coming from the box marked ‘Propellant’ was almost an inch and a half in diameter,’ the other was half an inch in diameter. The former ran down the inner casing and, about three feet away from the box, split into seven separate cables, each one covered in the same plastic and armour; the latter crossed the gap to the outer casing and disappeared upwards out of sight.

There were two other cables. One, a small half-inch cable, joined the two boxes: the second, two inches in diameter, bridged the gap between the ‘Propellant’ box and a third box, larger than either of the two, which was fitted to the inside of the outer wall. This third box had a hinged door facing me, secured by a couple of butterfly nuts: no other electric cables led either to or from it.

And that was all there was to be seen. I saw it all in ten seconds. LeClerc looked at me and said: ‘Got it?’

I nodded and said nothing.

‘The photographic memory,’ he murmured cryptically. He closed the door, locked it, pressed the lift button and we hummed upwards again for about six feet. Once more the routine with the key, the opening of a door – much smaller this time, barely two feet in height, the invitation to inspect.

This time there was even less to see. A circular gap in the inner casing, a view beyond the gap of what appeared to be fifteen or twenty round pipes narrowing towards their tips and, in the centre of those pipes, the top of some cylindrical object, about six inches in diameter, which vanished down among the tubes. In the centre of the top of this cylinder was a small hole, less than half an inch across. Attached to the outer casing was an armoured cable of the same dimensions as the one which had issued from the box marked ‘Safe’ and ‘Armed’, and it seemed a pretty fair guess that it was the same cable. The end of this cable, which was tipped with a solid copper plug, bent right over and hung slackly downwards in the gap between the outer and inner casings. It seemed logical to suppose that this copper plug was intended to fit into the hole in the central cylinder but here, it would seem, logic would have been in error: the hole in the cylinder was at least four times the size of the narrow copper plug.

LeClerc closed the door, pressed the button, and the lift dropped down to the foot of the gantry. Another door, another key and this time a view of the very base of the rocket, a foot below where the last of the pipes in the inner casing ended. There was no impression of a confusion of pipes here as there had been at the top: everything was mathematically neat and completely symmetrical, nineteen cylinders all of which seemed to be sealed with a heavy plastic compound, each cylinder about seven inches in diameter, eighteen of them arranged in two concentric circles about an inner core. The cylinders, which completely filled the inner casing, were not entirely smooth-sided: at various distances above their lower ends they were smoothly indented in their sides, and those indentations, it was no trick at all to guess, were for the purpose of introducing the leads which hung in an untidy bunch between the two casings. I counted the leads, nineteen in all, breaking out from the seven armoured cables leading from the ‘Propellant’ box above: a pair of leads from each of three cables, three leads from each of other three cables and four leads from the remaining cable.

‘You have it all, Bentall?’ LeClerc asked.

‘I have it all.’ I nodded. It seemed simple enough.

‘Good.’ He closed the door, led the way towards the hangar entrance. ‘Now to have a look at Fairfield’s notebooks, codes and references. At least we were able to save those.’

I raised an eyebrow – it was one of the few muscular exercises I could perform without causing myself pain.

‘There are some things you couldn’t save?’

‘The complete set of blue-prints for the rocket. I must confess we did not think that the British would have had the intelligence to take such precautions. They were in the lower half of a sealed metal box – a standard war-time device, much faster and more foolproof than burning – the top half of which was a glass tank of concentrated hydrochloric with a metal plunger. The plunger was depressed, the glass broken and the acid released before we realized what was happening.’

I remembered the captain’s bleeding and battered face.

‘Good old Captain Griffiths. So now you’re completely dependent on having a working model of the rocket, eh?’

‘That’s so.’ If LeClerc was worried, he didn’t show it. ‘Don’t forget we still have the scientists.’

He led me to a hut beyond the armoury, a hut rather primitively fitted out as an office, with filing cabinets, a typewriter and a plain wooden desk. LeClerc opened the cabinet, pulled out the top drawer and dumped a pile of papers on the table.

‘I understand that those are Fairfield’s papers, all of them. I’ll come back in an hour.’

‘Two hours at least: probably more.’

‘I said an hour.’

‘All right.’ I rose from the chair where I’d just seated myself and pushed the papers to one side. ‘Get someone else to work the damn thing out.’

He looked at me for a long moment, the slaty milky eyes without expression, then he said evenly: ‘You take very many chances, Bentall.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’ If I couldn’t do anything else I could at least sneer at him. ‘When a man takes chances he can either win or lose. I can’t possibly win anything now, and God knows I’ve nothing to lose.’

‘You’re wrong, you know,’ he said pleasantly. ‘There is something you can lose. I can take your life away from you.’

‘Have it and welcome.’ I tried to ease the burning pain in my shoulder and arm. ‘The way I feel right now I’m just about finished with it anyway.’

‘You have a remarkable sense of humour,’ he said acidly. Then he was gone, banging the door shut behind him. He didn’t forget to turn the key in the lock.

Half an hour passed before I even bothered looking at Fairfield’s papers, I’d more important things to think about than those. It was not the most pleasant half-hour of my life. The evidence was all before me now, Bentall with the blinkers off – at last – and I knew the truth, also at last. Counter-espionage, I thought bitterly, they should never have let me out of the kindergarten, the wicked world and its wicked ways were far too much for Bentall, if he could put one foot in front of the other without breaking an ankle in the process that was all you could reasonably expect of him. On flat ground, of course. By the time I’d finished thinking my morale and self-respect had shrunk so much you’d have required an electronic microscope to find them, so I reviewed all that had happened in the hope of discovering one instance where I had been right, but no, I had a perfect and completely unmarred record, one hundred per cent wrong all along the line. It was a feat that not many people could have matched.

The one redeeming feature about being utterly wrong, of course, was that I’d also been wrong about Marie Hopeman. She had had no special instructions from Colonel Raine, she had never fooled me once. This was no mere hunch or opinion, it was a provable certainty. It was, I knew, rather late in the day to arrive at this knowledge, I couldn’t see that it was going to alter anything now, but in different circumstances… I gave myself up to the very pleasant contemplation of what things might have been like in different circumstances and was just finishing off the towers and battlements of a particularly enchanting dream castle in the air when a key turned in the lock. I’d barely time to open the folder and scatter a few papers around before LeClerc and a Chinese guard came in. He glanced down at the table, malacca cane swinging idly in his hand.

‘How is it coming, Bentall?’

‘Very difficult and very complicated and continual interruptions by you don’t help me any.’

‘Don’t make it too difficult, Bentall. I want this test rocket wired and fused and ready to take off in two and a half hours.’

‘Your wants are a matter of complete indifference to me.’ I said nastily. ‘What’s the hurry, anyway?’

‘The Navy is waiting, Bentall. We mustn’t keep the Navy waiting, must we?’

I thought this one over then said: ‘Do you mean to tell me that you have the colossal effrontery to keep in radio touch with the Neckar?’

‘Don’t be so naïve. Of course we’re in touch. There’s no one more interested than myself to have the Dark Crusader land on time, on target. Apart from which, the one sure way to rouse their suspicions and send them steaming back at high speed to Vardu is not to keep in touch with them. So hurry it up.’

‘I’m doing my best,’ I said coldly.

When he left, I got down to working out the firing circuits. Apart from the fact that they were coded, the instructions for the wiring were such as could have been carried out by any reasonably competent electrician. What could not have been done by the electrician was the calculation of the settings on the time clock – part of the mechanism in the box attached to the inside of the outer casing – which regulated the ignition of the nineteen propellant cylinders in their proper sequence.

From his notes it appeared that even Fairfield himself had been doubtful about the accuracy of his own recommendations as to firing sequences and times: they had been worked out on a purely theoretical basis, but theory and practice weren’t the same things at all. The trouble lay in the nature of the solid fuel propellant itself. A completely stable mixture in limited quantities and at normal temperatures, it became highly unstable under extremes of heat and pressure and beyond a certain unknown critical mass: the trouble was that no-one knew the precise limits of any of those factors, nor, even more worrying, did they know how they reacted upon one another. What was known as the highly lethal results of instability: when the safety limit was passed, the fuel changed from a relatively slow burning propellant to an instantaneously explosive disruptive estimated, weight for weight, at five times the power of T.N.T.

It was to reduce the danger of mass that the propellant had been fitted in nineteen separate charges and it was to reduce the danger of too suddenly applied pressure that the charges had been arranged to ignite in seven consecutive stages: but, unfortunately, no one could do anything about the danger of heat. The propellant had its own in-built oxidizing agent, but not nearly enough to ensure complete combustion: two high-speed turbine fans which started up two seconds before the ignition of the first four cylinders supplied air in quantity and under high pressure for the first fifteen seconds until the missile reached a high enough speed to supply itself with sufficient air through its giant air-scoops. But as the Dark Crusader was absolutely dependent on its air supply, it meant that it had to leave the earth on a very flat trajectory indeed in order not to run out of atmosphere before the propellant burnt out: it was not until all the fuel was consumed that the missile’s automatic brain lifted it sharply out of the atmosphere. But the need for even half a minute’s supply of air meant a tremendous air resistance generating extremely high temperatures and while it was hoped that the water-cooled porcelain nose would cope with part of the heat, no one knew what temperature would be generated in the heart of the rocket. All in all, I thought, it looked like a very dicey deal indeed.

The two switch-boxes I’d seen attached to the inner casing had both to be set before firing – the ‘On’ switch closed the firing circuits, the ‘Armed’ switch closed the circuit for the suicide box: if anything went wrong with the rocket in flight, such as a deviation to land or shipping lanes, it could be electronically instructed to commit suicide. In normal missiles fuelled by lox and kerosene, the flight could be stopped simply by sending out a radio message that automatically cut off the fuel supply: but there was no way of shutting off a solid fuel already in combustion. The cylinder I had seen in the middle of the propellant at the top of the rocket had been a sixty-pound charge of T.N.T., fitted with a primer, and the hole I had seen in the centre of the primer was to accommodate a seventyseven grain electrically fired fulminate of mercury detonator, which was connected to the cable I’d seen dangling in the vicinity. The circuit for this was triggered, as were all controls in the rocket, by radio, a certain signal on a certain wave-length activating an electrical circuit in the same box as the one that contained the timing mechanism for the firing circuits: this current passed through a coil which in turn activated a solenoid switch – a soft iron core in the centre of the coil – and this completed the circuit which fired the detonator in the T.N.T. charge. Again Fairfield had been very doubtful of the outcome: what was intended was that the explosion of the T.N.T. should disintegrate the rocket: but it was just as likely, he had thought, that the instantaneous change in heat and pressure would cause the whole rocket to blow up in sympathetic detonation.

If I was picked as the first man to go to the moon, I thought, I’d just as soon not travel on the Dark Crusader. Let someone else go first while Bentall remained earthbound and watched for the explosion.

I reached for the typewriter, made a list of which coloured and numbered firing cables marked which fuel cylinders, worked out an average of Fairfield’s suggested figures for the timing sequences and stuck the paper in my pocket. I’d just done this when Hewell appeared.

‘No, I’m damned well not finished,’ I said before he could open his mouth. ‘Why don’t you leave me alone to get on with it?’

‘How much longer?’ he asked in his rumbling gravelly voice. ’We’re getting impatient, Bentall.’

‘I’m worried stiff. Maybe fifteen minutes. Leave one of your men outside and I’ll knock when I’m finished.’

He nodded and left. I got to thinking some more, mainly about myself and my life expectancy and then I started thinking of the psychologists who speak of the tremendous power of the human mind, the power of positive thinking, and if you say to yourself a thousand times a day to be cheerful and optimistic and healthy, then you will end up that way and I tried it with a slight variation, I tried to see Bentall as a bent old man with silver hair but somehow the positive thinking didn’t seem to work in my case, I couldn’t see anything of the kind, all I could see was Bentall with a hole in the back of his head. Tonight, it would probably come tonight, but the one certain thing I knew was that it would come. The other scientists could live, but not me: I had to die, and I knew why. I got up and tore the cord from the window blind, but not with the idea of hanging myself before LeClerc and Hewell got round to torturing me to death or shooting me. I rolled the cord into a coil, stuck it in my hip pocket and knocked on the door. I heard the footsteps of the guard walking away.

A few minutes later the door opened again, this time both LeClerc and Hewell were there, accompanied by a couple of Chinese.

‘Finished?’ LeClerc asked abruptly.

‘Finished.’

‘Right. Start wiring up right away.’ No thank yous, no congratulations for Bental’s keen-witted intelligence in solving an abstruse problem. Just get started right away.

I shook my head.

‘Not that easy, LeClerc. I must go to the blockhouse first.’

‘The blockhouse?’ The blind-seeming eyes looked at me for a long moment. ‘Why?’

‘You have the launch console there, that’s why.’

‘The launch console?’

‘The little box with all the knobs and buttons for remote radio control of the various circuits in the rocket,’ I explained patiently.

‘I know it,’ he said coldly. ‘You don’t have to examine that before fusing up the rocket.’

‘You’re not the best judge of that,’ I said loftily.

He had no option but to give in, which he might have done with better grace. He sent a guard to the captain’s office for the keys while we walked in silence across the intervening half mile, and not a very companionable silence either, but it didn’t worry me. I didn’t feel like talking, I felt like looking, looking at the white glitter of the sands, the shimmering green-blue of the lagoon, the cloudless blue of the sky above. I took a long, long look at all of them, the look of a man who suspects that that look is going to have to last him a long, long time.

The blockhouse had all the strength and solidity of a medieval fortress with the notable difference that it was so deeply sunk in the ground that only the top two feet were visible. There were three radar scanners mounted on the top and three radio aerials and, what I hadn’t seen before, the tops of four periscopes which could be tilted on a vertical axis and swung on a horizontal axis.

The entrance was at the back at the foot of a short flight of steps. The door was a massive steel affair mounted on equally massive hinges that must have weighed close on half a ton. It was designed to keep more than the flies out, the possibility of the sock of the equivalent of a hundred tons of high explosive detonating just over a thousand yards away was something that made such a door very essential indeed, even although it was at the back.

The Chinese arrived with two keys, heavy chromed flat-sided jobs like enormous Yale keys. He inserted one, turned it twice and shoved the door slowly open on smooth oiled hinges. We passed inside.

‘My God!’ I muttered. ‘What a dungeon.’

It looked exactly like that. A ten by twenty room, concrete floor, concrete walls, concrete roof, the heavy door through which we’d just come and another only just less heavy door in the opposite wall. And that was all, except for wooden benches round the wall and the tiny glow-worm of a lamp near the ceiling.

Nobody took me up on my conversational gambit. The Chinese crossed the dungeon and opened the other door with the second key.

This part of the blockhouse was about the same size as the other, but brilliantly lit. One corner of the room, about five by five, was partitioned off with plywood, and it was an easy guess that the idea was to screen radar scopes from the bright light outside. In the other corner was a softly-humming petrol-powered generator with its exhaust pipe disappearing upwards through the roof. There were two tiny ventilators, one high up on either side. And in the middle, between the radar cabin and the generator, was the launch console. I crossed and looked down at it.

It wasn’t much, just a sloping metallic box backed by a radio transmitter, with a number of labelled buttons set in a straight line, each button with a telltale lamp above it. The first button bore the legend ‘Hydraulics’ and the second ‘Auxiliary’ – those would be for the last-minute testing of the oil and electricity circuits: the third said ‘Power-Disconnect’, that would be for cutting off the battery-feeding external electricity sources: the fourth read ‘Flight-control’, a radio signal to alert the guiding mechanism in the Crusader’s electronic ‘brain’. The fifth, with the legend ‘Clamps’, would, when pressed, show by lighting up the tell-tale that the gantry clamps supporting the missile were ready for instantaneous withdrawal when the missile took off. The sixth, ‘Gantry-Ex’, would move back the gantries leaving only the extension arms of the clamps in place; the seventh, the ‘Commit’ button, started up the power intake fans. Two seconds after that, I knew, the revolving clock drum would trigger off the first four of the nineteen cylinders; ten seconds after that, another circuit would close and the suicide circuit would be ready and waiting, waiting only for the moment when something went wrong and the launch console operator pushed the eighth and last button.

The last button. It was set well away from the other seven. There was no possibility of mistaking it, for it was a square white push set in the middle of a six-inch-square patch of red, and labelled EGADS in steel letters – Electronic Ground Automatic Destruct System: and there was no possibility of triggering it by mistake for it was covered by a heavy wire mesh that had to be unclipped at two sides, and even then the button had to be turned 180° on its axis before it could be depressed.

I gazed at this for some time, fiddled about with the radio behind, took out my notes and consulted them. Hewell loomed over me, which would have made it very difficult for me to concentrate if I had had to, which fortunately I hadn’t. LeClerc just stood there looking at me with those blind white eyes of his, until one of the guards murmured something to him and pointed in the direction of the back door.

LeClerc left and was back in thirty seconds.

‘All right, Bentall,’ he said curtly. ‘Hurry it up, will you? The Neckar has just reported that she is running into gale conditions which will make observations of the test impossible when and if the weather deteriorates any further. Seen all you want to?’

‘I’ve seen all I want to.’

‘You can do it?’

‘Sure I can do it.’

‘How long?’

‘Fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most.’

‘Fifteen?’ He paused. ‘Dr Fairfield said it would take forty minutes.’

‘I don’t care what Dr Fairfield said.’

‘Right. You can start now.’

‘Start what now?’

‘Wiring up the firing circuits, you fool.’

‘There must be some mistake somewhere,’ I said. ‘I never said anything about wiring up those circuits. Can you recall my saying I would. I’ve no intention of touching the damned circuits.’

The gentle swinging of the malacca cane stopped. LeClerc took a step nearer me.

‘You won’t do it?’ His voice was harsh, blurred with anger. ‘Then what the devil was the idea of wasting the past two and a half hours pretending you were figuring out how to do it?’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘That’s the whole point of it. Wasting time. You heard what I said to Hargreaves. Time is on our side. You made a recording of it.’

I knew it was coming and I saw it coming, but I felt about ninety that day and my reactions were correspondingly slow and the vicious lash of that cane with all LeClerc’s fury and weight behind it across my left cheek and eye was a razor-edged sword splitting my face in half. I choked in agony, staggered back a couple of paces, then flung myself at the blurred figure before me. I hadn’t covered a foot when Hewell’s two great hands closed over my bad arm and tore it off at the shoulder – later inspection showed it was still there, he must have stuck it back on again – and I swung round lashing out with all the power of my good right arm, but I was blind with agony and missed him completely. Before I could regain my balance one of the guards had me by the right arm and the cane was whistling towards me again. I somehow sensed it was coming, ducked and took the full weight of the blow on the top of my head. The cane swung back for a third blow, but this time it didn’t reach me: Hewell released my left arm, jumped forward and caught LeClerc’s wrist as it started on its downward swing. LeClerc’s arm stopped short as abruptly as if it had come to the limit of a chain attached to the roof. He struggled to free himself, throwing the whole weight of his body on Hewell’s hand: neither Hewell nor his hand moved an inch.

‘Damn you, Hewell, let me go!’ LeClerc’s voice was hardly more than a whisper, the trembling whisper of anger out of control. ‘Take your hand away, I tell you!’

‘Stop it, boss.’ The deep authoritative boom brought normalcy, everyday sanity, back into the blockhouse. ‘Can’t you see the guy’s half-dead already. Do you want to kill him? Who’s going to fuse up the rocket then?’

There was a few seconds’ silence, then LeClerc, in a completely changed tone, said: ‘Thank you, Hewell. You’re quite right, of course. But I had provocation.’

’Yeah,’ Hewell said in his gravelly voice. ‘You had at that. A clever-clever Alec. I’d like to break his goddamned neck, myself.’

I wasn’t among friends, that was clear enough. But I wasn’t worrying about them at that moment, I wasn’t even thinking about them, I was too busy worrying and thinking about myself. My left arm and the left side of my face were engaged in a competition to see which could make me jump most and the competition was fierce, but after a while they gave it up and joined forces and the whole left side of my body seemed to merge into one vast and agonizing pain. I was staring down at the launch console and the various buttons were swimming into focus and out again, one moment gone, the next hopping around like a trayful of jumping beans. Hewell hadn’t exaggerated any, if there was one thing that was certain it was that I couldn’t take much more of this. I was slowly coming to pieces. Or perhaps not so slowly.

I heard voices, but whether the voices were directed at me or not I didn’t know. I stumbled against a stool and sat down heavily, clinging to the launch console to keep myself from falling.

The voices came again, and this time I could distinguish LeClerc’s. He had advanced to within a couple of feet of me, the cane held in both hands, the backs of his thumbs gleaming white as if he were trying to snap the cane in half.

‘Do you hear me, Bentall?’ he said in a low cold voice that I liked even less than his hysterical outburst of a moment ago. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’

I stared down at the blood dripping to the concrete floor.

‘I want the doctor,’ I mumbled. My jaws, my mouth were swelling, stiffened up already and I found speech difficult. ‘My wounds have opened up again.’

‘The hell with your wounds,’ the Good Samaritan to the life. ‘You’re going to start on that rocket and you’re going to start on it now.’

‘Ah!’ I said. I forced myself to sit straight, and half-shut my eyes until I had him more or less in focus, like an image and six ghosts on a badly-adjusted TV screen. ‘How are you going to make me? Because you’ll have to make me, you know. How? Torture? Bring out the old thumb-screws and see if Bentall cares.’ I was half out of my mind with pain, I didn’t know what I was saying. ‘One turn of the rack and Bentall is in a better world. Besides, I wouldn’t feel it anyway. And a hand like mine, trembling like a leaf!’ I held it up to let him see it trembling like a leaf. ‘How do you expect me to fuse a tricky – ’

He gave me the back of his hand across my mouth, not lightly.

‘Shut up,’ he said coldly. Florence Nightingale would have loved him, he had exactly the right touch with sick men. ‘There are other ways. Remember when I asked that stupid young lieutenant a question and he refused to answer? Remember?’

‘Yes.’ It seemed about a month ago but it had been only a few hours. ‘I remember. You shot a man through the back of the head. The next time the lieutenant did what you wanted.’

‘Just like you’re going to. I’m having a sailor brought here and I’m going to ask you to fuse that rocket. If you won’t, I’ll have him shot.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Like that!’

‘You will, eh?’

He didn’t answer, just summoned and spoke to one of the men. The Chinese nodded, turned away and hadn’t gone five steps when I said to LeClerc: ‘Call him back.’

‘That’s better,’ LeClerc nodded. ‘You’re going to co-operate?’

Tell him to bring all the other ratings with him. And all the officers. You can shoot the lot of them through the head. See if I care.’

LeClerc stared at me.

‘Are you quite mad, Bentall?’ he demanded at last. ‘Don’t you realize that I mean what I say?’

‘And I mean what I say,’ I answered tiredly. ‘You forget what I am, LeClerc. I’m a counterespionage agent and humanitarian principles don’t matter a damn to me. You should know that better than anyone. Besides, I know damn well that you’re going to murder them all before you leave here. If they shuffle off twenty-four hours ahead of schedule, then what the hell? Go ahead and waste your ammunition.’

He looked at me in silence while the seconds passed, while my heart thudded heavily, painfully in my chest, while the palms of my hands grew moist, then turned away. He believed me all right, it was so exactly the way his own ruthless criminal mind would work. He spoke quietly to Hewell, who left with a guard, then turned back to me.

‘Everyone has their Achilles’ heel, Bentall,’ he said conversationally. ‘I believe you love your wife.’

The heat inside that reinforced concrete blockhouse was sweltering, oven-hot, but I felt myself turn as cold as if I had just stepped into an icebox. For a moment all the fierceness of the pain left me and all I could feel were goose-pimples running down my arms and back. My mouth was suddenly dry and I could feel deep in my stomach that hellish incapacitating nausea that can spring only from fear. And I was afraid, afraid with a fear I had not before known: I could feel this fear, I could feel it in my hands, I could taste it in my mouth and the taste was the taste of all the unpleasant things I had ever tasted: I could smell it in the air and the smell was an amalgam of all the evil odours I had ever known. God, I should have known this was coming, I thought of her face twisted in pain, the hazel eyes dark in agony, it was the most obvious thing in the world. Only Bentall could have missed it.

‘You poor fool,’ I said contemptuously. It was hard to get the words past my dry mouth and swollen lips, far less inform them with the appropriately scornful tones, but I managed it. ‘She’s not my wife. Her name is Marie Hopeman and I met her for the first time exactly six days ago.’

‘Not your wife, eh?’ He didn’t seem vastly surprised. ‘A fellow-employee of yours, one assumes?’

‘One assumes correctly. Miss Hopeman is fully aware of the risks involved. She has been a professional government agent for many years. Don’t threaten me with Miss Hopeman or she’ll laugh in your face.’

‘Quite so, quite so. An agent, you say. The British Government is to be congratulated, the level of pulchritude among female agents is apt to be dismally low and Miss Hopeman does much to correct the balance. An astonishingly lovely young lady and one whom I, personally, find quite charming.’ He paused fractionally. ‘Since she is not your wife you will not mind so much if she accompanies the other ladies towards our destination?’

He was watching me closely to get my reaction, he didn’t have to spell it out for me, but he didn’t get the reaction. He had a pistol in his right hand now and what with that and the guard’s automatic carbine pointing at my middle, there was nothing to be gained by reacting in the only way I felt like, so I said instead: ‘Destination? What destination would that be, LeClerc? Asia?’

‘That should be obvious, I thought.’

‘And the rocket? Prototype for a few hundreds more?’

‘Exactly.’ He seemed ready to talk, as all men are ready to talk about their obsessions. ‘Like many Asiatic nations my adopted country has a genius more, shall we say, for refined imitation than original invention. In six months we shall be turning them out in quantity. Rockets, Bentall, are today’s bargaining counters on the table of world politics. We need Lebensraum for what the papers of the world are pleased to call our teeming millions. The desert of Australia could be made to blossom like a rose. We should like to move in there peacefully, if possible.’

I stared at him. He’d gone off his rocker.

‘Lebensraum? Australia? My God, you’re mad. Australia! You couldn’t catch up with the military potential of Russia or America in a lifetime.’

‘By which you mean?’

‘Do you think either of those countries would stand by and let you run wild in the Pacific? You are mad.’

‘They wouldn’t,’ LeClerc said calmly. ‘I quite agree. But we can deal with Russia and America. The Dark Crusader will do it for us. Its great virtues, as you are well aware, are its complete mobility and the fact that it requires no special launching site. We fit out a dozen vessels – not our own, oh dear me no, but flags of convenience ships from Panama or Liberia or Honduras – with two or three rockets apiece. Three dozen missiles will be enough, more than enough. We dispatch those vessels to the Baltic and the Kamchatka Peninsula, off the Russian coast, and off Alaska and the Eastern seaboard of the United States: those off the Russian coasts will have their rockets zeroed in on ICBM launching sites in America, those off the American coasts zeroed in on the corresponding sites in the U.S.S.R. Then they fire, more or less simultaneously. Hydrogen bombs rain down on America and Russia. The advanced radar stations, their long-range infra-red scanners, their electronically relayed satellite photographs of inter-continental missile exhaust trails will show beyond dispute that those rocket-borne hydrogen bombs come from Russia and America. Any doubts left in their minds will be resolved by Moscow and Washington receiving radio messages apparently from each other, each calling upon the other to surrender. The two great world powers then proceed to devastate each other. Twenty-four hours later there will be nothing to prevent us from doing exactly as we wish in the world. Or do you see a serious flaw in my reasoning?’

‘You’re insane.’ My voice was strained and hoarse even in my own ears. ‘You’re completely insane.’

‘If we were to do exactly as I have outlined, I would tend to agree with you, although it may come in the last resort. But it would be most foolish, most ill-advised. Apart from the cloud of radioactive dust that would make the northern hemisphere rather unpleasant for some time, we wish to trade with those two rich and powerful nations. No, no, Bentall, the mere threat, the very possibility will be more than enough.

‘Both American and Russian observers will be asked to attend highly convincing tests of the Crusader’s – we shall probably rename it – power, load-carrying ability, accuracy and range. Then we shall leak the information that those dozen vessels are strategically placed and also leak our intention of triggering off a war in which the two nations will devastate each other. Then we move on Australia.

‘Note, then, the extremely interesting and delicate situation that will develop. One or other of the two great powers may move against us. Immediately it does, hydrogen bombs will fall on that country’s territory. Say it was America that moved against us. Bombs devastate their ICBM launching sites, their Strategic Air Command airfields. But where do those bombs come from? Do they come from us, because America has moved against us? Or do they come from Russia, who see in this the heaven-sent moment to destroy the United States without the possibility of immediate retaliation against them, knowing that the Americans have no proof that the hydrogen bombs came from Russia and assuming that the Americans will think that the bombs really did come from those strategically placed vessels of ours of which they have heard? But note this further: whether America really believed the hydrogen bombs come from us or not they will be forced to launch an all-out assault against the Soviet Union, for the bombs might just as possibly be coming from there and if they are and the Americans wait too long before launching their counter nuclear assault, the United States will be wiped out of existence. The same would happen, even more certainly, if we launched the missiles against Russia. What it comes to in effect, Bentall, is that both the great countries will know that if either of them moves against us, they will be forced to engage in a nuclear holocaust that may destroy them both. Neither of them will move an inch against us: instead they will combine to use their power to stop other countries like Britain or France moving against us. Or, once again, do you see a serious flaw in my reasoning?’

‘You’re insane,’ I repeated. ‘Completely, hopelessly insane.’ But they were only words, all conviction had left my voice. He didn’t look like a man who was insane. He didn’t talk like a man who was insane. It was only what he said that sounded insane, but it only sounded insane because it was so preposterous, and it was only preposterous because of the gigantic, the unprecedented scale of the blackmail and bluff involved, of the unparalleled deadliness of the threat that backed up the blackmail. But there was nothing insane about blackmail and bluffs and threats, and if a thing is not insane on a normal scale there is no necessary element of insanity introduced when the normal is multiplied to unimaginable proportions. Maybe he wasn’t insane after all.

‘We shall see, Bentall, we shall see.’ He turned as the outer door of the blockhouse opened and quickly switched off all the lights except a small bulb burning above the console.

Marie, with Hewell by her side, came into the semi-darkness. She caught sight of me standing there with my back to the light, smiled, took a step towards me then stopped abruptly as LeClerc lifted his cane to bar her passage.

‘Sorry to bring you across, Mrs Bentall,’ he said. ‘Or should it be Miss Hopeman? I understand you are not married.’

Marie gave him the sort of look I hoped I’d never see coming my way and said nothing.

‘Shy?’ LeClerc asked. ‘Or just uncooperative? Like Bentall here. He’s refusing to co-operate. He won’t agree to fuse the Dark Crusader.’

‘Good for him,’ Marie said.

‘I wonder. He may be sorry. Would you like to persuade him, Miss Hopeman?’

‘No.’

‘No? But we might persuade him through you, if not by you.’

‘You’re wasting your time,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I’m afraid you don’t know either of us. And we hardly know each other. I’m nothing to him nor is he anything to me.’

‘I see.’ He turned to me. ‘The stiff upper lip, the best traditions of the Secret Service. What do you say, Bentall?’

‘The same as Miss Hopeman. You’re wasting your time.’

‘Very well.’ He shrugged, turned to Hewell. ‘Take her away.’

Marie gave me another smile, clear enough proof that she couldn’t see my battered face in the shadow, and left.

Her head was high. LeClerc paced up and down, head bent like a man lost in thought, and after a time he gave some order to the guard and left.

Two minutes later the door opened and I saw Marie, with Hewell and LeClerc on either side of her. She had to have them there because she couldn’t walk. Her feet trailed on the floor, her head lay far across her left shoulder, and she was moaning softly, her eyes shut. The frightening thing was that she bore no mark of violence, not a hair of her head was out of place.

I tried to get to LeClerc, there were two carbines and Hewell’s pistol on me, I never even knew they were there, I tried to get to LeClerc to smash his face in, to lash out, to maim, to kill, to destroy, but I couldn’t even do that right. On my second step one of the guards tripped me with his carbine and I crashed heavily and full-length on the stone floor. I lay there for some time, dazed.

The guards hauled me to my feet, waiting one on either side of me. Hewell and LeClerc stood as they had done. Marie’s head had now fallen forward, so far forward that I could see where the fair hair parted on the nape of the neck. She was no longer moaning.

‘Do you fuse the Crusader?’ LeClerc asked softly.

‘Someday I’ll kill you, LeClerc,’ I said.

‘Do you fuse the Crusader?’

‘I fuse the Crusader,’ I nodded. ‘Then someday I’ll kill you.’

If I could carry out even half my promise, I thought bitterly, it would be a change for me.

CHAPTER 11

Friday 1 p.m.–6 p.m.

I’d said to LeClerc that I could close up the wiring circuitry and fuse the Dark Crusader in fifteen minutes. In point of fact it took me exactly an hour. Bentall wrong as usual, but this time it wasn’t Bentall’s fault.

It wasn’t my fault because my arm and face hurt so violently that it was impossible to concentrate on the job. It wasn’t my fault that I was mad with anger, that my vision was so blurred and indistinct that I could scarcely decipher my own notes, that my right hand – I did practically everything with my right hand – was shaking so badly that I had great difficulty in adjusting the time clock, in feeding cables through their allotted grooves, in fitting the fuses into place in the bases of the solid fuel cylinders. It wasn’t my fault that, when arming the sixty-pound disruptive charge, my sweating hand dropped a fulminate-of-mercury detonator that went up with so white a flash and so loud an explosion that it was touch or go whether Hewell, who was supervising the operation, pressed the trigger of the pistol he had lined up on me.

And it wasn’t my fault that LeClerc had insisted that I work on both rockets at once, or that I was hindered by the fact that he had appointed Hargreaves and another scientist by the name of Williams to check on every move and write it down in their notebooks. One on either side of me on the narrow gantry platforms, they got in my way with nearly every move I made.

I could see the logic of LeClerc’s insistence on the simultaneous wiring. He’d certainly warned Hargreaves and Williams that if they as much as spoke to each other they would be shot and probably warned that the same thing would happen to their wives if their notes did not compare exactly at the end of the day. Thus, if the first firing of the Crusader was a success and the compared notes for the wiring up of both rockets were absolutely the same, then he would have a guarantee that the second rocket would also be perfectly wired.

The simultaneous wiring, of course, also served notice of sentence of death on me. Had he been intending to take me with him along with the others, he would hardly have had me wire up both rockets at once, especially in view of the urgency: the most recent message from the Neckar spoke of seas so high that there was a possibility of having to abandon the test. Not that I needed any notice of this sentence. I wondered when I was slated to die. Immediately after I had finished the wiring or later, along with Captain Griffiths and his men, after the scientists and their wives had been embarked. Later, I thought. Even LeClerc wasn’t likely to embark on a blood bath with so many witnesses watching. But I wouldn’t have spent a penny to gamble on it.

A few minutes before two o’clock I said to Hewell: ‘Where are the keys for the destruct box?’

‘Are you all ready to go?’ he asked. The last move before the rockets were in final firing order was to make the switches in both the propellant and destruction systems, but the switch for the latter that completed the circuit to the sixty-pound T.N.T. charge couldn’t be made without a key which operated a safety lock on the back of the switch.

‘Not quite. The switch in the suicide box is sticking. I want to have a look at it.’

‘Wait. I’ll get LeClerc.’He left, leaving a watchful Chinese in charge, and was back with LeClerc inside a minute.

‘What’s the hold-up now?’ LeClerc demanded impatiently.

‘Two minutes. Have you got the key?’

He signalled for the lift to be lowered, told the two scientists with their notebooks to get off, then climbed up beside me. When we regained working height he said suspiciously: ‘What’s the trouble? Thinking of pulling the last-minute fast one of a desperate man?’

‘Try the switch yourself,’ I snapped. ‘It won’t move across.’

‘It’s not supposed to move more than halfway before the key is turned,’ he said angrily.

‘It won’t even move at all. Try it for yourself and see.’

He tried it, moved it less than a quarter-inch, nodded and handed me the key. I unlocked the switch, undid the four butterfly nuts that held the switch cover in position and as I eased the switch-cover off over the switch I managed to dislodge with the tip of my screwdriver the copper core of a piece of flex which I’d forced in between switch and cover to make the former stick. The switch itself was of the common type with the springloaded rocker arm where, when the switch handle was pushed over to the right the two copper lugs jumped over from the two dead terminals on the right to the live terminals on the left. As quickly as my blurred vision and shaky right hand would permit I unscrewed the central rocker arm, lifted out the switch, pretended to straighten out the copper lugs and then screwed the switch back in place.

‘Fault in design,’ I said briefly. ‘Probably the same in the other.’ LeClerc nodded, said nothing, just watched carefully as I replaced the cover and flicked the switch from side to side several times to demonstrate how easily it worked.

‘All finished?’ LeClerc asked.

‘Not yet. I’ve got to set the timing clock on the other one.’

‘That can wait. I want this one on its way – now.’ He looked up to where Farley and an assistant were fussing around with the automatic guidance and target location systems. ‘What the hell’s keeping him?’

‘Nothing’s keeping him,’ I said. Farley and I made a pair, both of us with great red and purple weals down the left-hand sides of our faces, his was even more angry-looking and rainbow hued than mine, but that was only because it had had more time to develop, give me twenty-four hours and nobody would even notice his. Twenty-four hours. I wondered who would give me twenty-four hours. ‘He finished days ago.’ I went on. ‘He’s just a last-minute fusser, wondering if he turned all the taps off before he left home.’ If I pushed LeClerc hard enough, I mused, he might break his neck on the concrete floor ten feet beneath: on the other hand he might not, and then I wouldn’t have twenty-four seconds left me, far less twenty-four hours. Besides, Hewell had his cannon pointing at me.

‘Good. Then we are ready to go.’ LeClerc turned the key in the switch cover, pushed the switch to the ‘Armed’ position, withdrew the key and closed and locked the door of the rocket. The lift sank down to the ground and LeClerc beckoned to one of the guards. ‘Go tell the wireless operator to send a message. Firing in twenty minutes.’

‘So where now, LeClerc?’ I asked. ‘The blockhouse?’

He looked at me coldly.

‘So that you can hide there in safety while the rocket blows itself up because of some fix you made on it?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about you, Bentall. I have no illusions. You are a highly dangerous man.’ Sure I was dangerous, but only to my friends and myself. ‘You have the ability to jinx the firing mechanism so that only you would know. Surely you were not so naïve as to imagine that I would overlook the possibility? You, the scientists and naval men will remain out here in the open while the rocket is being fired. They are already assembled. We shall go to the blockhouse.’

I swore at him, violently and viciously. He smiled.

‘So you had overlooked the possibility that I would take precautions?’

‘Leave men out in the open, you damned murderer. You can’t do that, LeClerc!’

‘Can’t I now?’ The slaty milky eyes stared into mine, as he went off softly: ‘Perhaps you have jinxed it, Bentall?’

‘I’ve done damn all of the kind,’ I shouted. ‘It’s just that this solid fuel is inherently unstable. Read Dr Fairfield’s notes and you’ll see that. No one really knows what’s going to happen. The fuel has never been tried before on this scale. Damn you to hell, LeClerc, if that thing goes up not a single man within half a mile has the ghost of a chance of survival.’

‘Exactly,’ he smiled. He smiled, but I became gradually aware that he wasn’t feeling like smiling. His hands were out of sight in his pockets, but I could see they were knotted into fists: he had a nervous tic at the corner of his mouth and he was sweating more than the heat of the sun justified. This, for LeClerc, was the most crucial moment of all, the moment when all could be won or all could be lost. He didn’t know just how ruthless I could be, he suspected I’d go to the limit and stick at nothing, that I’d even sacrifice innocent lives to stop him, after all I’d already told him that he could shoot every officer and seaman on the base as far as I was concerned. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t be so willing to sacrifice my own life, but he wouldn’t lay too much stress on that, he knew that I knew that I was going to die anyway. All his staggering plans, his hopes and his fears depended on the next few moments: would the Dark Crusader take off or blow itself to bits and all his schemes and dreams along with it? He had no means of knowing. He had to gamble, he just had to gamble: but if he gambled and was wrong at least he wasn’t going to let me know the satisfaction of winning.

We walked round the corner of the hangar. A hundred yards away, sitting in two ragged rows on the ground, were the naval and scientific personnel of the base. But no women, I couldn’t see any women. Two Chinese were standing guard with automatic carbines at the ready.

I said: ‘How do the guards feel about having to stay there when the rocket is fired?’

‘They don’t: they come to the blockhouse.’

‘And do you seriously imagine we’re just going to keep on sitting there like good little boys once the guards are gone?’

‘You’ll sit there,’ he said indifferently. ‘I have seven women in the blockhouse. If one of you stirs, they get it. I mean it.’

The last three words were completely superfluous. He meant it all right. I said: ‘Seven women? Where is Miss Hopeman?’

‘In the armoury.’

I didn’t ask why he hadn’t shifted her also – I knew the bitter answer to that, she was probably either still unconscious or too unwell to be moved – and I didn’t ask that she should be moved. If the Dark Crusader exploded she would have no more chance than we had, the armoury was less than a hundred yards from the hangar, but better that way than to survive in the blockhouse.

I sat down at the end of one of the rows of men, Farley beside me. Nobody looked at me, everyone was staring fixedly at the doors of the hangar waiting for the Dark Crusader to emerge.

They hadn’t long to wait. Thirty seconds after LeClerc and Hewell had left us the two big gantry cranes with the Dark Crusader between them rumbled slowly into view. Two of the technicians were at the controls of the gantries. The bogies of the gantries were spanned by two connecting bars that spanned the rocket bogie, so ensuring that the gantry clamps holding the Dark Crusader remained in exactly the same relative positions. After about thirty seconds the bogies stopped, leaving the Dark Crusader planted exactly in the centre of the concrete launching pad. The two technicians jumped down, removed the connecting bars and, at a gesture from one of the Chinese, came and sat beside us. Everything was now radio-controlled. The guards themselves left for the blockhouse at a dead run.

‘Well.’ Farley said heavily. ‘A grandstand seat. The murderous devil.’

‘Where’s your scientific spirit?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you want to see if the damn thing works?’

He glared at me and turned away. After a moment he said significantly: ‘My part of it will work, anyway. It’s not that I’m worried about.’

‘Don’t blame me if it blows up.’ I said. ‘I’m only the electrician around here.’

‘We can discuss it later on a higher plane,’ he said with heavy humour. ‘What are the chances, you think?’

‘Dr Fairfield thought it would work. That’s good enough for me. I just hope that you haven’t crossed any wires and that it doesn’t come down straight on top of us.’

‘It won’t.’ He seemed glad to talk as everybody around seemed glad to talk, the strain of just sitting and waiting in silence was too much. ‘Worked before, often. Never a failure. Our latest infra-red guidance system is foolproof. Locks on a star and stays there.’

‘I can’t see any stars. It’s broad daylight.’

‘No,’ Farley said patiently. ‘But the infra-red cell can. Heat detection. Wait and see, Bentall. One thousand miles and it will be bang on target to a yard. To a yard, I tell you.’

‘Yes? How’s anybody going to pinpoint a yard in the South Pacific?’

‘Well, eight foot by six,’ he conceded magnanimously. ‘A magnesium raft. When the rocket reenters the atmosphere the stellar navigation unit is switched off and an infra-red homer in the nose takes over. The rocket is designed to home in on a heat source. A ship, of course, especially a ship’s funnel, is also a heat source, so a magnesium raft, a source of tremendous heat, will be ignited by the Neckar’s radio ninety seconds before the missile arrives. The rocket will make for the greater source of heat.’

‘I hope so for the Neckar’s sake. Just too bad if they’re ninety seconds late in igniting the raft.’

‘They won’t be. A radio signal is sent from here when the rocket leaves.’ He paused. ‘Well, if it leaves. The Crusader will take exactly three and a half minutes for the flight, so they ignite two minutes after receiving the signal.’

But I wasn’t listening to him anymore. LeClerc, Hewell and the last of the guards had disappeared behind the blockhouse. I looked away, over the shining sands and the green gleam of the glass-smooth lagoon and stiffened abruptly as I saw a vessel about four miles out heading for a break in the reef. I didn’t stay stiff long, this wasn’t any knight-errant naval vessel coming to the rescue, it was the intrepid navigator, Captain Fleck, coming to collect his wages. Hargreaves had mentioned that he was expected that afternoon. I thought about Captain Fleck, and I thought that if I were in his shoes I’d be steering my schooner in the diametrically opposite direction and putting as many sea-miles as possible between myself and LeClerc. But then Captain Fleck didn’t know what I knew, or I was reasonably certain he didn’t. Captain Fleck, I thought, a shock awaits you.

I twisted round as the rumble of bogie wheels came to my ears. The two gantry cranes, weirdly unmanned and controlled by radio, were moving slowly away in opposite directions, withdrawing their top clamps and leaving the Crusader supported only by the extensible clamps still gripping its base. Ten seconds to go, perhaps less. No one was talking anymore, finding a suitable conversational topic when you’ve perhaps only eight seconds left to live isn’t a thing that many people have had practice in.

The big high-speed turbine induction fans near the nose of the Crusader whined abruptly into life, two seconds to go, one, everybody rigid as stone and with eyes half-closed against the shattering shock they would never feel, the base clamps leapt apart, a single thunderclap of sound and a great seething ball of orange flame appeared at the foot of the Crusader, completely enveloping the bogie. Slowly, incredibly slowly, the Crusader lifted off the ground, the ball of orange flame riding up with it, and now the echoes of the thunderclap were replaced by a steady continuous shrieking roar, terrifying in its intensity, battering at our shrinking eardrums like the close-up thunder of giant jet engines, as a fifty-foot long brilliant red tongue of flame pierced the flaming sphere at the base of the rocket and lifted the Dark Crusader on its way. Still it climbed slowly, unbelievably slowly, it seemed that it must topple over at any moment, then at a hundred and fifty feet another violent explosion as the second set of fuel cylinders ignited, the Crusader doubled its rate of climb, a third explosion about six hundred feet and then it began to accelerate at fantastic speed. At about five or six thousand feet it turned over abruptly and headed south-east on a trajectory that seemed almost to parallel the surface of the sea, and within eight seconds was completely lost to sight with nothing to show that it had ever been except the acrid stink of the burnt fuel, the flame-blackened bogie and the thick white trail of exhaust which stretched bar-straight across the hot blue sky.

By this time my chest was hurting me, so I started breathing again.

‘Well, it works!’ Farley smacked a fist into a palm in grinning exultation. He gave a long tremendous sigh of satisfaction, he’d been without oxygen even longer than I had. ‘It works, Bentall, it works!’

‘Of course it works. I never expected anything else.’ I rose stiffly to my feet, rubbing the wet palms of my hands against my drills, and crossed over to where Captain Griffiths sat with his officers. ‘Enjoy the show, Captain?’

He studied me coldly, not bothering to hide the dislike, the contempt in his eyes, and glanced at the left side of my face.

‘LeClerc seems to like using his cane, doesn’t he?’ he asked.

‘It’s just an addiction he’s got.’

‘And so you collaborated with him.’ He looked me up and down with all the enthusiasm of an art collector who’s been promised a Cézanne and finds a comic coloured postcard in front of him. ‘I didn’t think you would, Bentall.’

‘Sure, I collaborated with them,’ I agreed. ‘No moral fibre at all. But the court-martial can wait, Captain Griffiths.’ I sat down, pulled off shoe and sock, removed a paper from its plastic cover, smoothed out the creases and handed it to him. ‘What do you make of this? Quickly, please. I found it in LeClerc’s office and I’m certain it’s in some way connected with his plans for shipping the second Crusader to its destination. Nautical stuff isn’t my line.’

He took the paper reluctantly as I said: ‘The Pelican’s a ship, we know that, because LeClerc himself told us. I suspect the others are, too.’

‘Pelican-Takishamaru 20007815,’ Captain Griffiths read. ‘Takishamaru is a Japanese ship name, no doubt about that. Linkiang Hawetta 10346925. Probably all ships’ names. All paired. Now, what would that be for? The numbers, always eight numbers.’ He was getting interested. ‘Times, could they be times? 2000 could be eight p.m., none of the first four numbers go higher than twentyfour. But the second four do. References of some kind. Ships, eh? Now what kind of references – ’ His voice trailed off, I could see his lips moving, then he said slowly: ‘I think I have it. No, I know I have it.’

‘2000 is twenty point oh-oh. Latitude twenty degrees south. 7815 stands for 78.15 degrees east. Together they give a position less than fifty miles west of here.’ He studied the paper in silence for almost a minute while I looked over my shoulder to see if there was any sign of LeClerc approaching: there was none, he would be waiting to hear from the Neckar about the success of the firing.

‘They’re all lat., and long. positions.’ Griffiths said finally. ‘It’s difficult to be sure without a chart but I could be fairly certain that if those positions were plotted they would represent a north-east curve from here to some position off the Chinese or Formosan coasts. I should imagine those ships – pairs of ships, rather – will be located on those positions. I should also imagine they would have the duty of escorting the vessel carrying the rocket, or keeping a lookout or seeing that the road is clear. LeClerc would have taken precautions, I imagine, against premature discovery of the fact that the rocket had been stolen.’

‘They would be armed, those ships, you think?’ I said slowly.

‘Highly unlikely.’ He was an intelligent incisive old bird with a mind that matched his sharp speech. It would have to be concealed arms, and no amount of concealed arms would be a match for any searching warship which would be the only thing they would have to fear.’

‘They might be radar-equipped vessels, searching the sea and air for fifty, a hundred miles round?’

‘They might. They probably would be.’

‘But wouldn’t this ship carrying the rocket be equipped with its own radar?’

Captain Griffiths handed me back the paper.

‘It won’t be,’ he said positively. ‘LeClerc is the kind of man who will always succeed because he takes precautions elaborate to the point almost of the ridiculous. Almost, I say. This paper is of no use to you, even if you could act on the information enclosed. Those vessels are almost certainly screen vessels which will travel some miles in advance and in the rear of the vessel carrying the rocket. At various points they will turn this vessel over to another pair, if air searchers saw the same two ships going in the same direction the same distance apart for days on end they’d start getting suspicious.’

‘But – wait a moment, Captain, my mind – it’s just about stopped.’ I wasn’t joking at that, the heat of the sun and the fact that my wounds hadn’t been treated since I’d been knocked about in the blockhouse made my head reel dizzily. ‘Yes. But what happens if some warship or aircraft does come on the scene. You can detect them with radar but you can’t shoot them down with radar. What does the vessel with the Dark Crusader do then?’

‘It submerges.’ Griffiths said simply. ‘It will be a submarine, it’s bound to be a submarine. Enlarge the loading hatch and practically any submarine in service could carry the Crusader in its for’ard torpedo room. The screen vessels will enable it to travel on the surface at top speed. If anything happens it just submerges and proceeds at much lower speeds. But it’ll get there. A hundred naval ships equipped with Asdic could search for a year and never locate just one solitary sub loose in the Pacific. I think you can take it for granted, Bentall, that if that rocket leaves the island we will never see it again.’

‘Thank you very much, Captain Griffiths.’ No question, he had the final truth of it. I pushed myself wearily to my feet, like an old, old man making his final attempt to leave his death-bed, tore the paper into pieces and let them fall on the thin sun-brown grass. I looked in the direction of the blockhouse and could see several figures just appearing from the back. Out at sea Fleck was coming in through the gap in the reef.

‘One more request, Captain Griffiths. When LeClerc returns ask him if you and your men can remain out in the open for the remainder of the day, in the fresh air instead of baking in those corrugated iron huts. It’s likely they’ll soon start encasing the other rocket’ – I pointed to the two twenty-foot steel boxes with the built-in cradles in the hangar – ’ ready for shipment, and point out the fact that it would then need only one guard to look after you instead of the four or five required to watch the doors and windows if you’re locked up in the huts, so releasing more of his men for the work. Give him your word there will be no trouble. If the test went well, he’ll be in a good mood and likely to grant your request.’

‘Why do you want this, Bentall?’ The dislike was back in his voice.

‘I don’t want LeClerc to see me talking to you. If you want to live, do as I say.’ I wandered aimlessly off to inspect the extent of the damage caused by the rocket leaving the launching pad. Two minutes later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw LeClerc and Griffiths speaking to one another, and then LeClerc and Hewell came towards me. LeClerc was looking almost jovial, the way a man is apt to look when he sees his greatest dream coming true.

‘So you didn’t jinx it after all, did you, Bentall?’ He obviously didn’t want to embarrass me by showing too much gratitude for the job I’d done.

‘No, I didn’t jinx it.’ But I’ll jinx the other one, Mr LeClerc, oh, brother how I’ll jinx the other one. ‘Successful?’

‘Completely. Absolutely on target – after a thousand miles. Right, Bentall, finish off the other one.’

‘I want to see Miss Hopeman first.’

He stopped being jovial.

‘I said finish it off. I mean finish it off.’

‘I want to see Miss Hopeman first. Five minutes. No more, I promise you. Either that or wire up your own damn rocket. See how long it takes you.’

‘Why do you want to see her?’

‘Mind your own damned business.’

He looked at Hewell, who gave an all but imperceptible nod.

‘Very well. But five minutes. Five minutes only. You understand?’ He handed a guard the key and gestured us on our way.

The guard unlocked the door of the armoury and let me in. I closed the door behind me, not worrying whether I was hurting his feelings.

The room was in near darkness, with its shutters drawn. Marie was lying in a cot in the corner, the same cot as I had slept in that morning. I crossed over and sank on my knees by the side of the cot.

‘Marie.’ I said softly. I shook her shoulder with a gentle hand. ‘Marie. It’s me. Johnny.’

She must have been in a deep sleep and she took some time to come out of it. Finally she stirred and twisted round under the blanket. All I could see was the pale blur of the face, the sheen of the eyes.

‘Who – who is it?’

‘It’s me, Marie – it’s Johnny.’

She didn’t answer so I repeated my words, my face and mouth and jaws were so stiff and sore that perhaps she couldn’t catch my thick mumble.

‘I’m tired,’ she murmured. ‘I’m so very tired. Please leave me.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, Marie. Honest to God, I could shoot myself. I thought they were bluffing.’ Again no answer, so I went on: ‘What did they do to you, Marie? For God’s sake tell me what they did to you!’

She murmured something, I couldn’t catch it, then said in a low voice: ‘I’m all right. Please go away.’

‘Marie! Look at me!’

She gave no sign that she had heard.

‘Marie! Look at me. Johnny Bentall on his knees.’ I tried to laugh, but it was only a froglike croak, a frog with bronchitis at that. ‘I love you, Marie. That’s why I fused up their damned rocket, that’s why I’d fuse up a hundred rockets, that’s why I’d do anything in the world, anything that’s right, anything that’s wrong, just so no harm would ever come to you again. I love you, Marie. I’ve been so long in seeing it but you should know by now what to expect from a fool like me. I love you and if we ever come home again I want to marry you. Would you marry me, Marie? When we get home?’

There was a long silence, then she said softly: ‘Marry you? After you let them – please leave me, Johnny. Please leave me now. I’ll marry someone who loves me, not someone – ‘She broke off and then finished huskily ‘please. Now.’

I rose heavily to my feet and went to the door. I opened it and let the light flood into the room. A shaft of light from the westering sun illuminated the bed, the fair shining hair spread on the rolledup coat that served as a pillow, the great hazel eyes in the pale and exhausted face. I looked at her for a long, long moment, until I couldn’t bear to look any longer, I’d never shed more tears for the martyrs who went to the stake, it was all too easy. I looked at the only person I’d ever loved and as I turned away, Bentall the tough guy to the end, not wanting even his Marie to see the tears in his eyes, I heard her shocked whisper: ‘Dear God, oh, dear God! Your face!’

‘It’ll do.’ I said. ‘It won’t have to last me a great deal longer. I’m sorry, Marie. I’m sorry.’

I closed the door behind me. The guard took me straight to the hangar and luck was with me and LeClerc, for I did not meet him on the way. Hewell was waiting for me, with Hargreaves and Williams, both with their notebooks at the ready. I got on to the lift without being told, the other two followed and we started work.

First I opened the junction box on the inside of the outer casing and adjusted the timing devices on the rotary clock, then, checking that the hand-operated switch on the destruct box was locked at ‘Safe’, I took a quick look at the second break in the suicide circuit, the solenoid switch directly above the timing device. The solenoid, normally activated when its enveloping coil was energized, was held back by a fairly stout spring which required, as a quick tug informed me, about a pound and a half of pressure to close. I left the box open, the lid hanging downwards and secured by a couple of butterfly nuts, then again turned my attention to the destruct box: when pretending to check the action of the switch I did the same as I had done on the first Crusader, forced a small piece of wire between switch and cover. Then I called down to Hewell.

‘Have you the key for the destruct box? Switch stuck.’

I needn’t have bothered with the wire. He said: ‘Yeah, I have it. Boss said we might expect trouble with this one, too. Here, catch.’

I opened the cover, unscrewed the switch, pretended to adjust it, replaced it and screwed home the rocker arm. But before I replaced it I’d turned it through 180°, so that the brass lugs were in a reversed position. The switch was so small, my hands so completely covered it, that neither Hargreaves nor Williams saw what I was doing,’ nor had they any reason to expect anything amiss, this was exactly, they thought, the same as they had seen me doing in the destruct box in the other rocket. I replaced the cover, shoved the lever to the safe position: and now the destruct box was armed and it only awaited the closing of the solenoid switch to complete the suicide circuit. Normally, the switch would be closed by radio signal, by pressing the EGADS button in the launch console. But it could also be done by hand…

I said to Hewell: ‘Right, here’s the key.’

‘Not quite so fast,’ he growled. He signalled for the lift to be brought down for him, rode up to the open door and took the key from me. Then he tried the destruct box switch, checked that it was impossible to move it more than halfway towards ‘Armed’, let it spring back to the ‘Safe’ position, nodded, pocketed the key and said: ‘How much longer?’

‘Couple of minutes. Final clock settings and buttoning up.’

The lift whined downwards again, Hewell stepped off, and on the way up I murmured to Hargreaves and Williams: ‘Stop writing, both of you.’ The hum of the electric motor covered my words and it wasn’t any trick to speak without moving my lips, the left-hand side of my mouth was now so puffed and swollen that movement was almost impossible anyway.

I leaned inside the door, the cord I’d torn from the blind concealed in my hand. To fasten one end of the cord to the solenoid should have taken maybe ten seconds but my hand was shaking so badly, my vision and co-ordination so poor that it took me almost two minutes. Then I straightened and started to close the door with my left hand while the cord ran out through the fingers of my right. When only a four-inch crack remained between the door and the outer casing of the rocket, I peered inside and the watching Hewell must have had the impression that I had one hand on either side of the door handle, trying to ease its stiffness. It took only three seconds for my right hand to drop a round turn and two half hitches round the inner handle, then the door was shut, the key turned and the job finished.

The first man to open that door more than four inches, with a pressure of more than a pound and a half, would trigger off the suicide charge and blow the rocket to pieces. If the solid fuel went up in sympathetic detonation, as Dr Fairfield had suspected it would, he would also blow himself to pieces and everything within half a mile. In either case I hoped the man who would open it would be LeClerc himself.

The lift sank down and I climbed wearily to the ground. Through the open doors of the hangar I could see the scientists and some of the sailors sitting and lying about the shore, an armed guard walking up and down about fifty yards from them.

‘Giving the condemned boys their last few hours of sunshine, eh?’ I asked Hewell.

‘Yeah. Everything buttoned up?’

‘All fixed.’ I nodded towards the group. ‘Mind if I join them? I could do with some fresh air and sunshine myself.’

‘You wouldn’t be thinking of starting something?’

‘What the hell could I start?’ I demanded wearily. ‘Do I look fit to start anything?’

‘It’s God’s truth you don’t,’ he admitted. ‘You can go. You two’ – this to Hargreaves and Williams – ‘the boss wants to compare your notes.’

I made my own way down to the shore. Some of the Chinese were manhandling the metal casing for the rocket on to a couple of bogies, with about a dozen sailors helping them under gunpoint. Fleck was just tying up at the end of the pier, his schooner looked even more filthy than I had remembered it. On the sands, Captain Griffiths was sitting some little way apart from the others. I lay on the sand not six feet away from him, face down in the sand, my head pillowed on my right forearm. I felt awful.

Griffiths was the first to speak.

‘Well, Bentall, I suppose you’ve just wired up the other rocket for them?’ He wouldn’t win many friends talking to people in that tone of voice.

‘Yes, Captain Griffiths. I’ve wired it up. I’ve booby-trapped it so that the first man to open the door of the Dark Crusader will blow the rocket out of existence. That’s why I did so good a job on the other rocket, this is now the only one left. They were also going to shoot you and every other sailor on the base through the back of the head and torture Miss Hopeman. I was too late to stop them from getting at Miss Hopeman.’

There was a long pause. I wondered if he had managed to understand my slurred speech, then he said quietly: ‘I’m so damnably sorry, my boy. I’ll never forgive myself.’

‘Put a couple of your own men on watch.’ I said. ‘Tell them to warn us if LeClerc or Hewell or any of the guards approach. Then you just sit there, staring out at sea. Speak to me as little as possible. No one will see me speaking in this position.’

Five minutes later I’d finished telling Griffiths exactly what LeClerc had told me he planned to do after they had the Dark Crusader in production. When I was finished he was quiet for almost a minute.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘Fantastic,’ he murmured. ‘It’s utterly unbelievable!’

Isn’t it? It’s fantastic. But is it feasible, Captain Griffiths?’

‘It’s feasible,’ he said heavily. ‘Dear God, it’s feasible.’

‘That’s what I thought. So you think booby-trapping this rocket – well, it’s justifiable, you think?’

‘How do you mean, Bentall?’

‘When they get the Dark Crusader to wherever it’s going.’ I said, still talking to the sand, ‘they’re not going to take it out to any remote launching field. They’re going to take it to some factory, almost certainly in some heavily populated industrial area, to strip it down for examination. If this solid fuel goes up with the T.N.T. I don’t like to think how many hundreds of people, mainly innocent people, will get killed.’

‘I don’t like to think how many millions would be killed in a nuclear war.’ Griffiths said quietly. ‘The question of justification doesn’t enter into it. The only question is – will the batteries powering the suicide circuit last?’

‘Nickel cadmium nife cells. They’re good for six months, maybe even a year. Look, Captain Griffiths, I’m not telling you all this just to put you in the picture or to hear myself talking. It hurts me even to open my mouth. I’m telling you because I want you to tell it all to Captain Fleck. He should be coming ashore any minute now.’

‘Captain Fleck! That damned renegade?’

‘Keep your voice down, for heaven’s sake. Tell me, Captain, do you know what’s going to happen to you and me and all your men when our friend LeClerc departs?’

‘I don’t have to tell you.’

‘Fleck’s our only hope.’

‘You’re out of your mind, man!’

‘Listen carefully, Captain. Fleck’s a crook, a scoundrel and an accomplished rogue, but he’s no megalomaniac monster. Fleck would do anything for money – except one thing. He wouldn’t kill. He’s not the type, he’s told me so and I believe him. Fleck’s our only hope.’

I waited for comment, but there was none, so I went on: ‘He’ll be coming ashore any moment now. Speak to him. Shout and wave your arms and curse him for the damned renegade you say he is, the way you would be expected to do, nobody will pay any attention except LeClerc and Hewell and all they’ll do is laugh, they’ll think it highly amusing. Tell him what I’ve told you. Tell him he hasn’t long to live, that LeClerc will leave no one behind to talk. You’ll find that LeClerc has spun him some cock-and-bull yarn about what he intended to do here. One thing you can be certain of is LeClerc never told him of the rocket or what he intended to do with the rocket, he would never have dared with Fleck and his crew calling so often at Suva and other Fijian harbours where one careless word in a bar would have ruined everything. Do you think LeClerc would have told him the truth, Captain?’

‘He wouldn’t. You’re right, he couldn’t have afforded to.’

‘Has Fleck seen the rockets before?’

‘Of course not. Hangar doors were always closed when he called and he was allowed to speak only to the officers and the petty officers who supervised the unloading of the boat. He knew, of course, that it was something big, the Neckar was often anchored in the lagoon here.’

‘So. But he’ll see the Dark Crusader now, he can’t help seeing it from where he’s berthed at the end of the pier. He’ll have every justification for asking LeClerc questions about it and I’m much mistaken if LeClerc will be reluctant to talk about it. It’s the dream of his life and he knows that Fleck won’t live to talk about it. Fleck might even then still have some doubts left as to what’s in store for him, so just that he can understand exactly what kind of man he’s dealing with, tell him to go – no, better tell him to send Henry, his mate, he himself better not be seen to be missing to see what LeClerc really is capable of.’ I told Griffiths exactly how to find the spot where Hewell and his men had broken through the hillside, told him where to find the cave with all the dead men. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there are two more dead men there now, Fijian boys. And ask him to find out if the radio in LeClerc’s cabin is still there. After Henry comes back Fleck will have no more doubts.’

Griffiths said nothing. I only hoped I’d convinced him, if I had I couldn’t leave it in better hands, he was a wily old bird and sharp as they came. By and by I heard a movement as he got to his feet. I peered out of the corner of one eye and saw him walking slowly away. I twisted round till I saw the pier. Fleck and Henry, dressed in their best off-whites, were just leaving the schooner. I closed my eyes. Incredibly, I went to sleep. Or perhaps not so incredibly, I was exhausted beyond belief, the aches in my head and face and shoulder and body merging into one vast gulf of pain. I slept.

When I woke up I’d yet another ache to add to my list. Someone was kicking me in the lower ribs and he wasn’t trying to tickle me either. I twisted my head. LeClerc. Too late in the day for LeClerc to learn the more rudimentary rules of courtesy. Blinking against the sun, I turned round till I was propped up on my good elbow, then blinked again as something soft struck me in the face and fell on my chest. I looked down. A hank of cord – window cord – neatly rolled up and tied.

‘We thought you might like to have it back, Bentall. We’ve no further use for it.’ No fury in that face, not the vindictive anger I would have expected, but something approaching satisfaction. He looked at me consideringly. ‘Tell me, Bentall, did you really think that I’d overlook so obvious a possibility, the possibility – to me the certainty, rather – that you wouldn’t hesitate to jinx the second Crusader when you knew there would be no further danger to yourself? You sadly underrate me, which is why you find yourself where you are now.’

‘You weren’t as smart as all that.’ I said slowly. I felt sick. ‘I don’t think you did suspect. What I did overlook was the certainty that you would take Hargreaves and Williams apart and threaten to kill their wives if they didn’t tell you everything that happened. Separate huts and the usual menaces if their stories didn’t tally exactly. Maybe I do underestimate you. So now you take me away somewhere quietly and shoot me. I don’t really think I’ll mind.’

‘Nobody’s going to shoot you, Bentall. Nobody’s going to shoot anybody. We’re leaving tomorrow and I can promise that when we do we will leave you all alive.’

‘Of course,’ I sneered. ‘How many years’ practice does it take, LeClerc, to get that ring of conviction into your voice when you tell your damned lies?’

‘You’ll see tomorrow.’

‘Always tomorrow. And how do you propose to keep forty of us under control until then?’ I hoped his mind worked as mine did, or I’d probably wasted my time in sending Griffiths to Fleck.

‘You gave us the idea yourself, Bentall. The blockhouse. You said it would make a fine dungeon. Escape proof. Besides, I want all my men for the job of crating the Crusader tonight and I don’t need guards for anyone inside the blockhouse.’ He looked at Hewell and smiled. ‘Incidentally, Bentall, I believe there is no love lost between yourself and Captain Griffiths. He was saying some pretty hard things about you for fusing up that first rocket.’

I said nothing. I waited for it.

‘You’ll be pleased to hear he’s met with a little trouble. Nothing serious. I gather he took it into his head to berate Captain Fleck – as one Englishman to another – for his treasonable activities. Fleck, one gathers, took exception to Griffiths taking exception. In age, height and weight the two master mariners were pretty evenly matched and if Captain Griffiths was a bit fitter Fleck knew more dirty tricks. It was a fight to see. Had to stop it eventually. Distracting my men.’

‘I hope they beat each other to death.’ I growled. LeClerc smiled, and walked away with Hewell. The world was going well for them.

It wasn’t for me. The booby-trap sprung, Griffiths and Fleck at blows, the last hope gone, Marie finished with me, LeClerc winning all along the line and a bullet in the head for Bentall any hour now. I felt sick and weak and exhausted and beaten. Maybe it was time to give up. I rolled over on my face again, saw Griffiths approaching. He sat where he had been sitting before. His shirt was dirty and torn, his forehead grazed and a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth.

‘Congratulations.’ I said bitterly.

They are in order,’ he said calmly. ‘Fleck believes me. It wasn’t difficult to convince him. He was on the other side of the island this morning and found a dead man – or what was left of him – a Fijian, I think, floating out near the reef. He thought it was sharks. He doesn’t now. His mate has gone to investigate.’

‘But – but the fight?’

‘LeClerc came out of the hangar. He was watching us closely, much too closely. It was the only way to kill suspicion.’ I looked up and he was smiling. ‘We managed to exchange quite a bit of information as we were rolling around.’

‘Captain Griffiths.’ I said, ‘you deserve a battleship for this.’

The sun sank down towards the sea. Two Chinese brought us some food, mostly tinned, and beer. I saw another couple take some across to the blockhouse where the seven women were still held, probably as additional security against our making trouble. Lieutenant Brookman fixed my arm again and he didn’t seem too happy with its condition. All afternoon the Chinese and about half the sailors, closely supervised by Hewell, were dismantling two gantries and setting them up on either side of the railway track in preparation for lifting the Crusader into its metal crate, which was already in position on a pair of bogies. And all the time I wondered about Marie in her loneliness, whether she was asleep or awake, how she felt, whether she thought about me, whether her despair was half as deep as mine.

Shortly before sunset Fleck and Henry came strolling along the sands from the other side of the pier. They stopped directly opposite me, Fleck with his legs spread and arms akimbo. Griffiths shook his fist at him, there would be no doubt in any watcher’s mind that another violent argument, verbal or otherwise, was about to begin. I rolled over on my right elbow, the most natural thing in the world if one heard two people arguing over one’s head. Fleck’s brown hard face was set and grim.

‘Henry found them all right.’ His voice was husky with anger. ‘Eleven. Dead. The rotten lying murderous devil.’ He swore bitterly and went on: ‘God knows I play rough, but not that rough. He told me they were prisoners, that I was to find them by accident tomorrow and take them back to Fiji.’

I said: ‘Do you think there’s going to be any tomorrow for you, Fleck? Don’t you see the armed sentry on the pier waiting to see you don’t make a break for it with your ship? Don’t you see you’ll have to go the same way as the rest. He can’t leave anyone behind who’ll talk.’

‘I know. But I’m all right, tonight anyway, I can sleep on my schooner tonight, a coaster from Fiji by the name of Grasshopper, and manned by the most murderous crew of Asiatics in the Pacific is coming here at dawn. I’ve got to pilot them through the reefs.’ For all his anger, Fleck was playing his part well, gesticulating violently with every second word.

‘What’s the coaster for?’ I asked.

‘Surely it’s obvious?’ It was Griffiths who replied. ‘A big vessel couldn’t approach the pier, there’s only ten feet or so of water, and though they could load the rocket on to Fleck’s after deck he hasn’t anything in the crane line big enough to trans-ship it to a submarine. I’ll bet this coaster has a jumbo derrick, eh, Fleck?’

‘Yes, it has. Submarine? What – ?’

‘It can wait.’ I interrupted. ‘Did Henry find the radio?’

‘No.’ Henry himself replied, lugubrious as ever. ‘They’ve blasted down the roof at the other end of the tunnel and sealed it off.’

And tomorrow, I thought, they’ll shove us all inside this end of the tunnel and seal that off. Maybe LeClerc hadn’t been lying when he said he wouldn’t shoot us, starvation wasn’t as quick as shooting but it was just as effective.

‘Well, Fleck.’ I said, ‘how do you like it? You’ve got a daughter in the University of California in Santa Barbara, right next to one of the biggest inter-continental ballistic missile bases in the world, the Vanderberry Air Force Base, a number one target for a hydrogen bomb. The Asiatics sweeping down on your adopted country of Australia. All those dead men – ’

‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ he snarled. His fists were tightly clenched and fear and desperation and anger fought in his face. ‘What do you want me to do?’

I told him what I wanted him to do.

The sun touched the rim of the sea, the guards came for us and we were marched away to the blockhouse. As we went in I looked back and saw the floodlight going up outside the hangar. LeClerc and his men would be working all through the night. Let them work. If Fleck came through, there was an even chance the Dark Crusader would never reach its destination.

If Fleck came through.

CHAPTER 12

Saturday 3 a.m.–8 a.m.

I awoke in the darkness of the night. I’d been asleep four hours, maybe six, I didn’t know, all I knew was that I didn’t feel any better for it: the heat in that sealed ante-chamber of the blockhouse was oppressive, the air was stuffy and foul and the mattress-making companies had little to fear from the manufacturers of concrete.

I sat up stiffly and because the only thing I had left me were my few remaining shreds of pride I didn’t shout out at the top of my voice when I inadvertently put some weight on my left hand. It was near as a toucher, though. I leaned my good shoulder against the wall and someone stirred beside me.

‘You awake, Bentall?’ It was Captain Griffiths.

‘Uh-huh. What’s the time?’

‘Just after three o’clock in the morning.’

‘Three o’clock!’ Captain Fleck had promised to make it by midnight at the latest. ‘Three o’clock. Why didn’t you wake me, Captain?’

‘Why?’

Why, indeed. Just so that I could go round the bend with worry, that was why. If there was one thing certain it was that there was nothing I or anyone else could do about getting out of that place. For thirty minutes after we’d been locked in Griffiths, Brookman and myself had searched with matches for one weak spot in either the walls or the door of that ante-chamber, a hopelessly optimistic undertaking when you considered that those walls had been built of reinforced concrete, designed to withstand the sudden and violent impact of many tons of air pressure. But we had had to do it. We had found what we expected, nothing.

‘No sound, no movement outside?’ I asked.

‘Nothing, just nothing at all.’

‘Well,’ I said bitterly, ‘it would have been a pity to spoil the fine record I’ve set up.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that every damned thing I’ve touched on this damned job has gone completely wrong. When it comes to sheer consistency, Bentall’s your man. Too much to hope for a change at this late hour.’ I shook my head in the dark. ‘Three hours overdue. At least three hours. He’s either tried and been caught or they’ve locked him up as a precaution. Not that it matters now.’

‘I think there’s still a chance,’ Griffiths said. ‘Every fifteen minutes or so one of my men has stood on another’s shoulders and looked through the ventilation grille. Can’t see anything of interest, of course, just the hill on one side and the sea on the other. The point is that there has been brilliant moonlight nearly all night. Make it impossible for Fleck to get away unobserved from his ship. He might get the chance yet.’

‘Nearly all night, you said. Nearly?’

‘Well, there was a dark patch, lasting maybe half an hour, round about one o’clock,’ he admitted reluctantly.

‘He wouldn’t want half an hour, fifteen minutes would be all he needed,’ I said heavily.

‘There’s no future in kidding ourselves.’

There was no future anyway. I’d expected far too much. To expect him to slip away unobserved from his ship, in clear moonlight, with a guard on the pier and a working party with brilliant floodlamps not a hundred yards away, was to expect just a little bit too much: and to expect him afterwards to reach unseen the captain’s hut where the keyboard was, not fifty yards from the hangar, steal the keys, free Marie from the armoury and then free us – well, it had been expecting far too much altogether. But it had been the only shadow of hope that we had had and the clutch of a drowning man is pretty fierce.

The time dragged on, a night that could never end but, for all that, a night that would end all too soon. I don’t think anyone slept, there would be time and to spare for rest later on. The scientists and their wives murmured away softly most of the time, it occurred to me with a sense almost of shock that I wouldn’t have been able to identify any of those women had I met them again, I had never seen one in daylight. The air became more and more vitiated, breathing in that foul used-up atmosphere was becoming painful, the heat became steadily worse and sweat dripped from my face, ran down my arms and back. Every now and then a seaman would be hoisted up to look through the grille, and every time he had the same to report: bright moonlight.

Every time, that was, until four o’clock. The seaman had no sooner reached eye-level to the grille than he called out: ‘The moon’s gone. It’s pitch dark outside. I can’t see – ’

But I never did hear what he couldn’t see. There came from outside in swift succession the sounds of a quick rush of feet, a scuffle, a heavy blow then a metallic scratching as someone fumbled for the keyhole. Then a solid click, the door swung open and the cool sweet night air flooded into the room.

‘Fleck?’ Griffiths said softly.

‘Fleck it is. Sorry to be late but – ’

‘Miss Hopeman,’ I interrupted. ‘She there?’

‘Afraid not. Armoury key wasn’t on the board. I spoke to her through the window bars, she told me to give you this.’ He thrust a paper into my hand.

‘Anyone with a match?’ I asked. ‘I want – ’

‘It’s not urgent,’ Fleck said. ‘She wrote it this afternoon, been waiting for a chance to – ’ He broke off. ‘Come on. No time to waste. That damn moon isn’t going to stay behind a cloud all night.’

‘He’s right, you know,’ Griffiths said. He called softly: ‘Outside, all of you. No talking. Straight up the face of the hill and then cut across. That’s best, eh, Bentall?’

That’s best.’ I stuck the note into my shirt pocket, stood to one side to let the others file quietly out. I peered at Fleck. ‘What you got there?’

‘A rifle.’ He turned and spoke softly, and two men came round the corner of the blockhouse, dragging a third. ‘LeClerc had a man on guard. Gun belongs to him. Everybody out? All right, Krishna, inside with him.’

‘Dead?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Fleck didn’t sound worried one way or another. There came the sound of something heavy being dumped unceremoniously on the concrete floor inside and the two Indians came out. Fleck pulled the door quietly to and locked it.

‘Come on, come on.’ Griffiths whispered impatiently. ‘Time we were off.’

‘You go off,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get Miss Hopeman out of the armoury.’

He was already ten feet away, but he stopped, turned and came back to me.

‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘Fleck said there’s no key. That moon comes out any minute now. You’ll be bound to be seen. You won’t have a chance. Come on and don’t be so damn stupid.’

‘I’ll take the chance. Leave me.’

‘You know you’re almost certain to be seen,’ Giffiths said softly. ‘If you’re out, they’ll know we’re all out. They will know that there’s only one place we could go. We have women with us, it’s a mile and a half to that cave entrance, we would be bound to be intercepted and cut off. What it amounts to, Bentall, is that you are prepared to risk almost certain loss of all our lives on the selfish one in a thousand chance of doing something for Miss Hopeman. Is that it, Bentall? Is that how selfish you are?’

‘I’m selfish all right,’ I said at last. ‘But I’m not all that bad, I just hadn’t thought of it. I’ll come with you to the point where there is no further possibility of interception. Then I’ll turn back. Don’t make the mistake of trying to stop me.’

‘You’re quite crazy, Bentall.’ There was anger and worry both in Griffiths’ voice. ‘All you’ll do is lose your life, and lose it to no purpose.’

‘It’s my life.’

We moved straight towards the face of the hill, all in a closely bunched group. No one talked, not even in whispers, though LeClerc and his men were then well over half a mile away. After we’d gone about three hundred yards the hill started to rise steeply. We’d made as much offing as we could so now we turned south and began to skirt the base of the mountain. This was where things began to become dangerous, we had to pass by the hangar and buildings to get to the cave entrance, and just behind the hangar a sharp spur of the mountain rose above the surrounding level and would force us to come within two hundred yards of where LeClerc and his men were working.

Things went well in the first ten minutes, the moon stayed behind the cloud longer than we had any right to hope, but it wasn’t going to stay there all night, eighty per cent of the sky was quite free from cloud and in those latitudes even the starlight was a factor to be reckoned with. I touched Griffiths on the arm.

‘Moon’s coming out any second now. There’s a slight fold in the mountain about a hundred yards farther on. If we hurry, we might make it.’

We made it, just as the moon broke through, bathing the mountain and the plain below in a harsh white glare. But we were safe, for the moment at least, the ridge that blocked us off from the view of the hangar was only three feet high, but it was enough.

Fleck and his two Indians, I could see now, were dressed in clothes that were completely sodden. I looked at him and said: ‘Did you have to take a bath before you came?’

‘Damn guard sat on the pier all night with a rifle in his hands,’ Fleck growled. ‘Checking us, checking to see we didn’t go near the radio. We had to slip over the far side, about one o’clock when the moon went in, and swim for it, maybe a quarter-mile along the beach. Henry and the boy, of course, went the other way.’ I had asked that Henry make straight for the cave, hurry through the chamber that had served as an armoury and bring back amatol blocks, primers, R.D.X., chemical fuses, anything he could find. If they were still there, that was: there would certainly be neither arms nor ammunition left now, and though the explosive would be a poor substitute for arms at least they would be better than nothing.

‘Getting the keys was dicey.’ Fleck went on, ‘and there were only two – the inner and outer blockhouse doors. Then we tried to force the door and window on the armoury to get Miss Hopeman out. It was hopeless.’ He paused. ‘I don’t feel so good about that, Bentall. But we tried, honest to God we tried. But we couldn’t make a noise, you understand that.’

‘It’s not your fault, Fleck. I know you tried.’

‘Well, anyway, we came to the blockhouse just as the moon came out. Lucky for us it did. LeClerc had left a guard. We had to hide there two solid hours waiting till it got dark so we could rush him. I’ve got a pistol, so has Krishna here, but the water got through the wrappings. Couldn’t have used them anyway.’

‘You did damn well, Captain Fleck. And we have a gun. Any good with it?’

‘Haven’t the eyes for it. Want it?’

‘Hell, no. I couldn’t fire a pop-gun tonight.’ I turned and located Griffiths. ‘Any good shots among your men, Captain?’

‘As it happens, I have. Chalmers here’ – he gestured towards the red-haired lieutenant over whose refusal to answer a question a seaman had been shot –’ is one of the best shots in the Royal Navy. Would you care to have a go at them, Chalmers, if the need arises?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Chalmers said softly. ‘I would like that.’

A cloud was approaching the moon. It wasn’t much of a cloud as clouds go, it wasn’t half as big as I would have liked it to be, but it was going to have to do, there wasn’t another anywhere near the moon.

‘Half a minute, Captain Griffiths.’ I said. ‘Then we’re off.’

‘We’ll have to hurry,’ he said worriedly. ‘Single file is best, I think. Fleck to lead the way, then the women and the scientists, so that they can make a break for the cave if anything happens. My men and I will bring up the rear.’

‘Chalmers and I will do that.’

‘So that you fade away and go down to the armoury when the moment comes, is that it, Bentall?’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s time to go.’

We almost made it, but Bentall was around and nothing ever went right with Bentall around. We had safely passed the hangar where the two gantry cranes were slowly lowering the Dark Crusader into its cradle, and were a good two hundred yards clear when one of the women gave a high-pitched cry of pain. We found later that she’d slipped and sprained a wrist. I glanced back, saw every man in the brilliantly illuminated space before the hangar stop what they had been doing and whirl round. Within three seconds as many men started running in our direction while others raced for their parked guns.

‘Run for it,’ Griffiths shouted. ‘Go like hell.’

‘Not you, Chalmers.’ I said.

‘Not me,’ he said softly. ‘No, not me.’ He sank down on one knee, lifted, cocked and fired the rifle all in one smooth motion. I saw a puff of white jump up from the concrete two yards ahead of the nearest Chinese. Chalmers adjusted the sights with one quick turn.

‘Shooting low,’ he said unhurriedly. ‘It won’t be low the next time.’

It wasn’t. With his second shot the leading guard flung his rifle into the air, then pitched forward on his face. A second died, a third rolled over and over like a man in agony, and then suddenly all the lights in front of the hangar went out. Someone had just got on to the fact that they made a perfect target silhouetted against the floodlit concrete.

‘That’s enough.’ Griffiths shouted. ‘Get back. They’ll be fanning out, coming towards us. Get back!’

It was time to get back, nothing surer. A dozen guns, some of them automatic carbines, had opened up on us now. They couldn’t see us, it was too dark for that, but they had us roughly located from Chalmers’ gun-flashes and bullets were beginning to smash into the solid rock all around us, half of them lifting in screaming ricochet. Griffiths and Chalmers turned and ran, and so did I, but in the opposite direction, back the way we’d come. I didn’t see I’d any chance of getting back to the armoury, the moonlight was beginning to filter through the ragged edges of the cloud, but if I did get back the diversion made a perfect cover-up for smashing my way into the armoury. I took four steps, then pitched my length on the rock as something smashed into my knee with tremendous force. Dazed, I pushed myself shakily to my feet, took one step and fell heavily again. I wasn’t conscious of any great pain, it was just that my leg refused to support me.

‘You bloody fool! Oh, you bloody fool!’ Griffiths was by my side, Chalmers close behind him. ‘What’s happened?’

‘My leg. They got my leg.’ I wasn’t thinking about my leg, I wasn’t caring about my leg, all I was caring about was that my last chance to get to the armoury was gone. Marie was there, alone. She was in the armoury, waiting for me. Marie would know I would come for her. She knew Johnny Bentall was every kind of fool there was, but she knew I wouldn’t leave her to LeClerc. I was on my feet again, Griffiths supporting me, but it was no good, the leg was paralysed, completely without power.

‘Are you deaf?’ Griffiths shouted. ‘I’m asking you if you can walk.’

‘No. I’m all right, leave me. I’m going down to the armoury.’ I didn’t know what I was saying, I was too dazed to express the difference between a wish and an intention. ‘I’m really all right. You must hurry.’

‘Oh, God!’ Griffiths took me by one arm, Chalmers by the other and they half-hustled, half-dragged me along the flank of the mountain. The others were already out of sight, but after a minute Brookman and a seaman came hurrying back to see what had happened, and lent a hand with the job of dragging me along. I was a great help to everyone. Jonah Bentall. Come with me and you come a cropper. I wondered vaguely what I’d ever done to deserve luck like this.

We arrived at the cave almost three minutes after the last of the others were safely inside. I was told this, but I don’t remember it, I don’t remember anything about the last half-mile. I was told later that we wouldn’t have made it had the moon not broken through and Chalmers held up the Chinese by picking off two of them as they came over the last ridge. I was told, too, that I talked to myself all the way, and when they begged me to be quiet in case the pursuers caught us I kept on saying: ‘Who? Me? But I wasn’t talking,’ very hurt and indignant. Or so they told me. I don’t remember anything.

What I do remember was coming to inside the cave, very close to the entrance. I was lying against the wall, and the first thing I saw was another man lying beside me, face down. One of the Chinese. He was dead. I lifted my eyes and saw Griffiths, Brookman, Fleck, Henry and some petty officer I didn’t know, on the other side, pressed close against the wall. At least I thought it was them, it was still dark inside the tunnel. There was room enough for them to shelter. Although the tunnel had been four feet wide and seven high all the way to the end when I’d followed it, the last few feet where Hewell and his men had broken through was no more than three feet high and barely eighteen inches in width. I looked around to see where the others were, but I could see nothing. They would be a hundred yards back in the cavern Hewell had excavated for the temporary storage of the tunnelled out limestone. I looked out again through the tiny opening of the tunnel. The dawn was in the sky.

‘How long have I been lying here?’ I asked suddenly. My voice sounded in my ears like the husky quavering of an old, old man, but maybe it was just the echo inside the cave.

‘About an hour.’ Funny, Griffiths’ voice didn’t sound a bit like an old man’s. ‘Brookman says you’ll be all right. Chipped knee-cap, that’s all. You’ll be walking again in a week.’

‘Did we – did we all get here all right?’

‘Everyone made it.’ Sure, everyone made it. Marie Hopeman didn’t make it. Why should they care? What was all the world to me was only a name to them. Marie Hopeman was down there alone in the armoury and I would never see her again but she was only a name. It didn’t really matter if you were only a name. And I would never see her again, never. Never was a long time. Even in this last thing, this most important thing I’d ever known, I’d failed. I’d failed Marie. And now it was never. Never was going to be always.

‘Bentall!’ Griffiths’ voice was sharp. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You’re talking to yourself again.’

‘Am I?’ I reached out and touched the dead man. ‘What happened?’

‘LeClerc sent him in. I don’t know whether he thought we’d retreated to the other end of the cave or whether it was a kind of suicide mission. Chalmers waited till he was all the way in. And then we had two guns.’

‘And what else? An hour is a long time.’

‘They tried firing into the cave after that. But they had to stand in front if they weren’t going to do it blindly. They soon gave it up. Then they tried to blow up the entrance, to seal it off.’

‘They would try that,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t have made much difference, we could have got out. What they meant to do, if things had gone their way, would have been to blow in the tunnel roof for a hundred yards or so. That would really have finished us.’ I wondered vaguely why I was saying this, none of it mattered any more.

‘They set off one charge, above the entrance,’ Griffiths was continuing. ‘Nothing much happened. Then we heard them working just outside, using picks to make holes for more charges. We flung out a couple of fused amatol blocks. I think they lost some men. They didn’t try anything like that again.’

‘The note.’ I said. ‘Didn’t you tell them about the note?’

‘Of course.’ Griffiths said impatiently. I had told Fleck to leave a copy of a faked radio message on the wireless table, saying: ‘Message acknowledged: H.M.S. Kandahar proceeding high speed Suva-Vardu. Expect arrive 8.30 a.m.’ The inference would be that Fleck had sent an SOS by radio. ‘We told LeClerc a naval vessel was coming. He wouldn’t believe us, saying it was impossible, the sentry had been there to prevent messages from being sent, but Fleck said he’d been asleep. Maybe the sentry was one of those killed, I don’t know. We told him he’d find the message on the schooner. He sent someone to fetch it. LeClerc couldn’t afford to ignore it, it might mean he had only three hours left. Less, for Fleck says the captain of the Grasshopper, without him to pilot it in, wouldn’t attempt the gap in the reef before daybreak.’

‘LeClerc would be pleased.’

‘He was mad. He was out there talking to us and we could hear his voice shaking with fury. He kept asking for you but we told him you were unconscious. He said he would shoot Miss Hopeman if you didn’t come out, so I told him you were dying.’

‘That would cheer him up,’ I said drearily.

‘It seemed to,’ Griffiths admitted. ‘Then he went away. Perhaps he took his men with him. We don’t know.’

‘Yes,’ Fleck said heavily. ‘And the first man to stick his head out the entrance gets it blown off.’

Time passed. The light at the mouth of the tunnel steadily brightened through all the stages of dawn, until finally we could see a washed out patch of blue. The sun was up.

‘Griffiths!’ It was LeClerc’s voice from outside and it had us all jumping. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘I hear you.’

‘Is Bentall there?’

Griffiths waved a cautionary hand to silence me, but I ignored it.

‘I’m here. Come in and take me out.’

‘I thought you were dying, Bentall?’ His voice held a vicious overtone, the first time I’d heard anything of the kind from him.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you, Bentall.’

‘I’m here. Come in and take me out.’

‘Listen, Bentall. Don’t you want to save Miss Hopeman’s life?’

This was it. I should have expected this last desperate move to force my hand. LeClerc wanted me badly, he wanted me very badly indeed.

‘And then you’ve got us both, is that it, LeClerc?’ I’d no doubt that was it.

‘I give you my word. I’ll send her in.’

‘Don’t listen.’ Captain Griffiths warned me in an urgent whisper. ‘Once he’s got you, he’ll use you as bait to get someone like me out, and so on. Or he’ll just kill you both.’

I knew which it would be. He’d just kill us both. He wasn’t interested in the others, but he had to kill us both. Me, at any rate. But it was a chance I had to take. Maybe he wouldn’t dispose of us straight away, he might take us aboard the ship with him. It was one last chance – it wasn’t a chance in a million, but it was a chance. That was all I asked. A chance. I might yet save us both, and as the thought came I knew I never could. It wasn’t even that million to one chance, but it was like what Marie had said, sitting in the electric chair and the man pulling the switch and still hoping. I said: ‘All right, LeClerc, I’m coming out.’

I hadn’t seen the signal. Fleck, Henry and Griffiths reached me in the same instant, pinning me to the ground. For a few seconds I struggled like a madman, but I hadn’t the strength left to struggle any longer.

‘Let me go.’ I whispered. ‘For God’s sake, let me go.’

‘We’re not letting you go.’ Griffiths said. He raised his voice. ‘All right, LeClerc, you can leave. We’ve got Bentall and we’re keeping him. You know why.’

‘Then I shall have to kill Miss Hopeman,‘ LeClerc said savagely. ‘I’m going to kill her, do you hear, Bentall? I’m going to kill her. But not today, not for some time yet. Or perhaps she’ll kill herself first. Goodbye, Bentall. Thank you for the Dark Crusader.’

We heard the sound of departing footsteps and then there was only the silence… The three men took their hands away and Fleck said: ‘I’m sorry, boy, I’m more sorry than I can say.’

I didn’t answer. I just sat there, wondering why the world didn’t come to an end. By and by I heaved myself painfully on to my hands and one knee and said: ‘I’m going out.’

‘Don’t be so damn stupid.’ I could see by the expression on Griffiths’ face that he was regaining his first impression of me, one that had been far from favourable. ‘They’ll be waiting.’

‘He can’t afford to wait any longer. It’s what time now?’

‘Almost seven.’

‘He’ll be on his way. He wouldn’t risk the Dark Crusader for a chance at my life. Don’t try to stop me, please. I’ve something to do.’

I crawled out through the narrow mouth of the tunnel and looked around. For a few seconds I couldn’t see anything, the shooting stabs from my knee-cap blurred my eyes and put everything out of focus. Then the focus came back. There was no one there. No living person, that was.

There were three dead men lying outside the entrance. Two Chinese and Hewell, of course it would have been Hewell who would have been supervising the placing of the charges to blow in the mouth of the tunnel, and the exploding blocks of amatol had torn half the giant’s chest away, anything less than that would never have taken his life. I saw the metallic snout of a gun-barrel sticking out from under his body. I bent and pulled it clear with difficulty. It was fully loaded.

‘It’s all right.’ I said. ‘They’ve gone.’

Ten minutes later we were making our way slowly down to the hangar. Brookman was right, I thought dully, it would be a week or more before I could walk properly again, but the Navy boys took turns at helping me along, taking almost half my weight.

We came over the last ridge that separated us from the plain. The area around the hangar seemed deserted. A small coasting vessel was just clearing the reef. I heard Fleck curse bitterly, and then saw why: fifty yards out from the pier all you could see of his schooner was her masts and the top of her superstructure. LeClerc thought of everything.

Everyone was talking, talking and trying to joke and laughing, a nervous hysterical kind of laughter, but laughter all the same, you couldn’t blame them, when you’ve been under the shadow of certain death and it suddenly lifts, it has that effect on nearly everybody. The strain of the long night, for the women the long weeks were over, the fear and the horror and the suspense lay behind, the world they’d thought was ended was just beginning again. I looked at the seven scientists and their wives, seeing the wives for the first time ever, and they were smiling and gazing into each other’s eyes, each pair linked arm in arm. I couldn’t look at them, I had to look away. No more gazing for me into Marie’s eyes. But I’d walked arm in arm with her, though, once. Once, for about two minutes. It hadn’t been much. We might have been given more.

Only Fleck seemed depressed and heavy, only Fleck out of all of them. And I didn’t think it was because of what had happened to his schooner, not primarily, anyway. He had been the only one of them who had ever known Marie, and when he’d called her a nice girl I’d gratuitously insulted him. And he had a daughter of about the same age. Fleck was sad, he was sad for Marie. Fleck was all right, he’d pay no price for his earlier activities, he’d cleared the slate over and over again.

We came to the hangar. I cocked the gun in my hands and prayed that LeClerc had left an ambush party – or himself – behind to get us when the disappearing vessel had tricked us into thinking they were all gone. But there was no one there. Nor was there in any of the other huts, nothing but every radio set and transmitter smashed beyond repair. We came to the armoury, and I walked in through the open door and looked at the empty cot. I felt the crumpled coat that had served as a pillow and it was still warm. Some instinct made me lift it and under there was a ring. A plain golden ring she’d worn on the fourth finger of her left hand. The wedding ring. I slipped it over my little finger and left.

Griffiths gave instructions for the burial of the dead and then he and Fleck and I made our way slowly to the blockhouse, Fleck half-carrying me. Two armed sailors followed us.

The coaster was beyond the reef now, steering due west. The Dark Crusader and Marie. The Dark Crusader, carrying with it the threat of millions of ruined lives, of scores of great cities lying in the dust, of more carnage and sorrow and heartbreak than the world had known since time began. The Dark Crusader. And Marie. The Marie who had looked into the future and found nothing there. The Marie who had said that one day I would meet up with a situation where my self-belief would be no help to me at all. And the day had come.

Fleck turned the key in the blockhouse door, pushed the Chinese back at the point of his gun, then turned him over to the sailors. We passed inside the second door and switched on the lights. LeClerc had smashed every other transmitting mechanism on the base, but he hadn’t smashed the launch console, because he hadn’t been able to get at it. He wouldn’t have wanted to smash it anyway: for LeClerc did not know that the suicide circuit in the Dark Crusader was armed.

We crossed the room, I bent down to switch on the generator and as I did my shirt pocket fell open and I saw for the first time, and remembered for the first time, the little note Fleck had given me. I picked it up and smoothed the creases.

There were only a few words altogether. It said: ‘Please forgive me, Johnny. I’ve changed my mind about not marrying you – someone has to or you’ll be in trouble all your life. P.S. Maybe I love you a little, too.’ Then, at the foot: ‘PPS. You and me and the lights of London.’

I folded the note and put it away. I adjusted the periscope above my head and I could clearly see the Grasshopper, low down on the horizon, a plume of dark smoke trailing behind her, steaming steadily west. I moved the mesh cover over the EGADS destruct button, turned the white square knob 180° then reached over and pushed the ‘Commit’ button. The light glowed green. The safety clock in the Dark Crusader was running out.

Twelve seconds. Twelve seconds it took from the moment of pressing the button until the suicide circuit was fully armed. Twelve seconds. I stared down at my wrist-watch, seeing the sweep second hand jerking steadily forward, wondering vaguely whether the charge would merely blow the Crusader apart or whether, as Fairfield had suspected, there would be a sympathetic detonation of the solid fuel and the Dark Crusader would blow itself out of existence. Not that it mattered now. Two seconds. I stared blindly into the eyepiece of the periscope, all I could see was a misted blur, then leaned on the Destruct button with all the weight of my arm.

The Dark Crusader blew itself out of existence. Even at that distance the violence of the explosion was terrifying, a huge spouting volcano of seething boiling white water that drowned the shattered vessel in a moment of time, then a great fiery column of smoke-tipped flame that reached up a thousand feet into the blue of the morning, and vanished with the moment of seeing. The end of the Dark Crusader. The end of everything.

I turned away, Fleck’s arm round me, and stumbled out into the sparkling brightness of a new day and as I did I heard the heavy rumble of the explosion rolling in from the sea and echoing back from the silent hill beyond.

EPILOGUE

A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That’s how I always thought of him. Just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

He’d jumped to his feet when I’d entered, and now he was hurrying round the desk, coming towards me, taking me by my good arm and helping me towards the chair in front of his desk. The royal treatment for the returned hero, I’d have taken long odds that he’d never done anything like this before, he hadn’t even bothered to rise from his chair the first time I’d seen Marie Hopeman walk into that room.

‘Sit down, sit down, my boy.’ The grey, lined face was alive with concern, the steady watchful green eyes mirrored the worry that this man almost never showed. ‘My God, Bentall, you look awful.’

There was a mirror behind his desk, small, flyblown and covered with dust like everything else in that room, and he wasn’t exaggerating any that I could see. Left arm in a black linen sling, right hand holding the heavy stick that helped me along, bloodshot eyes and pale sunken cheeks with the great livid weal that ran from temple to chin, if I could get into the market quick I could make a fortune hiring myself out to haunt houses.

‘I look worse than I really am, sir. I’m just tired, that’s all.’ God only knew how tired I was, I hadn’t slept a couple of hours in the two days it had taken me to fly home from Suva.

‘Have you had anything to eat, Bentall?’ I wondered dryly when this room had last seen such a display of solicitude, not since old Raine had taken over the chair behind that desk, I’d bet.

‘No, sir. I came straight here after I’d phoned from the airport. I’m not hungry.’

‘I see.’ He crossed over to the window and stood there for a few moments, shoulders bent, thin fingers laced behind his back, gazing down at the blurred reflection of the lights on the wet glistening street below. Then he sighed, drew the curtains across the stained and dusty windows, went and sat down, hands lightly clasped on the desk before him. He said, without any preamble: ‘So Marie Hopeman is dead.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s dead.’

‘It’s always the best who go,’ he murmured. ‘Always the best. Why couldn’t an old useless man like myself have gone instead? But it’s never that way, is it? If it had been my own daughter I couldn’t – ’ He broke off and stared down at his hands. ‘We’ll never see a Marie Hopeman again.’

‘No, sir. We won’t see a Marie Hopeman again.’

‘How did she die, Bentall?’

‘I killed her, sir. I had to.’

‘You killed her.’ He said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘I had your cable from the Neckar, I’ve had a rough outline from the Admiralty about what happened on Vardu Island. I know you have done a magnificent job, but I know nothing. Please tell me everything that happened.’

I told him everything that had happened. It was a long story, but he heard me out without question or interruption. When I was finished he screwed the heels of his palms into his eyes, then pushed both hands slowly up and back across the high lined forehead, the sparse grey hair.

‘Fantastic,’ he murmured. ‘I have heard some strange tales in this office, but – ’ He broke off, reached for his pipe and penknife and started his excavations again. ‘A great job, a great job – but what a price. All the speeches, all the thanks in the world can never repay you for what you’ve done, my boy. And no medals in a job like ours, though I have already arranged that you shall have a very special – um – reward for what you have done, and have it very soon.’ A little tic at the corner of his mouth, I was supposed to guess from that that he was smiling. ‘You will, I think, find it positively – ah – staggering.’

I said nothing, and he continued: ‘I have, of course, a hundred and one questions to ask you and you no doubt one or two pointed questions for a small deception I was forced to practise. But this can all wait for the morning.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Good heavens, it’s half past ten. I’ve kept you too long, far too long, you look almost dead.’

‘It’s all right.’ I said.

‘It’s not all right.’ He laid down pipe and knife and gave me the up and under look with those iceberg eyes of his. ‘I have more than a vague idea of what you have suffered, not only physically, what you’ve been through. After all this, Bentall – do you still wish to continue in the service?’

‘More than ever, sir.’ I tried to smile, but it wasn’t worth the pain it cost, so I gave it up. ‘Remember what you said about that chair of yours before I left – I’d still like to sit in it some day.’

‘And I’m determined you shall,’ he said quietly.

‘So am I, sir.’ I put my right hand into the sling to ease my arm. ‘But that’s not the only determination we share.’

‘No?’ A millimetric lift of the grey eyebrows.

‘No. We’re both of us determined on something else. We’re both of us determined that the other will never leave this room alive.’ I took my hand from the sling and showed him my gun. ‘That Luger under your seat. Leave it where it is.’

He stared at me, his mouth slowly tightening.

‘Have you taken leave of your senses, Bentall?’

‘No, I just found them again, four days ago.’ I rose awkwardly to my feet and hobbled round to his side of the desk. My eye and my gun never left him. ‘Get out of that chair.’

‘You’re overstrained,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve been through too much – ’ I struck him across the face with the barrel of my gun.

‘Get out of that chair.’

He wiped some blood from his cheek and rose slowly to his feet.

‘Lay the chair on its side.’ He did as he was told. The Luger was there all right, held by a spring clip. ‘Lift it out with the forefinger and thumb of the left hand. By the point of the barrel. And lay it on the desk.’

Once more he did as he was directed.

‘Get back to the window and turn round.’

‘What in the name of God is –?’

I took a step towards him, gun swinging. He moved quickly backwards, four steps till he felt the curtains behind him, and turned round. I glanced down at the Luger. Heavy silencer, safety catch off, loading indicator registering full. I pocketed my own gun, picked up the Luger and told him to turn round. I hefted the Luger in my hand.

‘The staggering reward I was to get very soon, eh?’ I asked. ‘A slug in the middle of the guts from a 7.65 Luger would make anyone stagger. Only I wasn’t quite as unsuspecting as the last poor devil you murdered when he was sitting in that chair, was I?’

He exhaled his breath in a long silent sigh, and shook his head, very slowly. ‘I suppose you know what you’re talking about, Bentall?’

‘Unfortunately for you, I do. Sit down.’ I waited till he had straightened the chair and seated himself, then leaned against a corner of the desk. ‘How long have you been playing this double game, Raine?’

‘Whatever on earth are you talking about?’ he demanded wearily.

‘I suppose you know I’m going to kill you,’ I said. ‘With this nice silenced Luger. Nobody will hear a thing. The building is deserted. No one saw me come in: and no one will see me go out. They’ll find you in the morning, Raine. Dead. Suicide, they’ll say. Your responsibilities were too heavy.’

Raine licked his lips. He wasn’t saying I was mad any more.

‘I suppose you’ve been engaged in treason all your life, Raine. God knows how you got off with it for so long, I suppose you must be brilliant or they’d have caught on to you years ago. Do you want to tell me about it, Raine?’

The green eyes blazed into mine. I had never before seen such concentrated malignity in a human face. He said nothing.

‘Very well.’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell it as a little short story, a bed-time story before you go to sleep. Listen well, Raine, for it’s the last story you’ll ever hear before the last sleep you’ll ever have.

Twenty-five years you spent in the Far East, Raine, the last ten as chief of counter-espionage. Running with the hare and chasing with the hounds all the time, I suppose. God alone knows how much tragedy and suffering you caused out there, how many people died because of you. Then two years ago you came home.

‘But before you came you were approached by one of the powers for whom you were working while you were supposed to be our counterespionage chief. They told you they had heard rumours that English scientists were making preliminary investigations into solid fuel as a power source for missiles and rockets. They asked you to find out what you could. You agreed. I don’t pretend to know what they promised you, power, money, heaven only knows.

‘Nor do I pretend to know how exactly you set up your spying organization. Contacts across Europe were easy for you to arrange, and the actual clearing-house was Istanbul, where my investigations finally took me. I suspect that the way you acquired your information was by introducing into the Hepworth Ordinance and Research Establishment, the place with the highest security rating in Britain, men whom you yourself, in your official capacity, had thoroughly “screened”.

‘The months passed and information was gradually acquired, sent to Istanbul and re-transmitted to the Far East. But your predecessor got wind of what was happening, suspected a security leak and told the government: they instructed him, I imagine, that the business of investigating this leakage was to be given the highest priority. He started getting too close to the truth and his plane crashed into the Irish Sea and was never traced. He was seen off on that flight, at London Airport. He was seen off by you. Some time-bomb in his luggage, I suspect – our luggage is immune from Customs examination. It was a pity that there were thirty others in that plane, but that wasn’t really important, was it Raine?

‘You were then promoted. The obvious choice, a brilliant and devoted man who had given a lifetime to serving his country. You then found yourself in the fantastic position of having to send out agents to track down yourself. And, of course, you had to. One man you sent found out too much. He came back here and into this room with a gun in his hand to confront you with this evidence. He didn’t know about the hidden Luger, did he, Raine? And then you spread this story about how he’d been subverted and ordered to kill you. How am I doing, Colonel Raine.’

He had no comment to make on how I was doing.

‘Now the Government was getting really anxious. You persuaded them that the difficulty lay in the complex nature of the technical information that was being passed, that only a scientist could really understand it. Your own agents, the honest ones, were all right in their own way, but there was one great objection to them – they were too damn good at finding things out. So, having kidded the Government, you shopped around until you found the most stupid scientist you could. The one least likely to succeed. You picked me. I can understand your reasons.

‘And you picked Marie Hopeman. You tried to convince me that she was a first-class agent, tough, capable and highly-experienced. She was nothing of the sort. She was just a nice girl, with a beautiful face and figure, and a considerable capacity for acting which made her ideal for the passive and undemanding position of receiving and passing on information without arousing suspicions. But that was all she had. No great intelligence, no marked degree of inventiveness, certainly not the mental ruthlessness and physical toughness essential for success in this job.

‘So you sent the two of us to Europe to find out what we could about this fuel leak. You must have been convinced that if there was any pair in the world who could never find anything it was Marie Hopeman and I.

‘But you made one mistake, Colonel Raine. You checked up on my intelligence and inventiveness, and thought you’d nothing to fear on that score. But you forgot to check on other things. Toughness and ruthlessness. I am tough and I can be completely ruthless. You’ll see that when I pull this trigger. I’ll stop at nothing to finish something I’ve started. I began finding out things, far too many things. You panicked and called us back to London.’

Colonel Raine showed no reaction to any of this. His green unblinking eyes never left my face. He was waiting, waiting for a chance. He knew I was a sick man, and very tired. One false move, one slow reaction and he’d be on to me like an express train, and the way I felt that night I couldn’t have fought off a teddy bear.

‘Because of my activities,’ I went on, ‘the fuel leak had practically stopped. Your eastern friends were getting worried. But you had another string to your bow, hadn’t you, Colonel Raine? Some months before that the Government had set up a testing station for the Dark Crusader on Vardu. Security was essential and you, of course, were the man responsible for all the security arrangements. You arranged the set-up with Professor Witherspoon to have the island barred to visitors for a perfectly good and innocuous reason: you arranged for the scientists and their wives to go to Australia without arousing suspicion: you arranged for a security clearance for Captain Fleck – my God, who else but you could ever have given that rogue a clearance? – and then you told your eastern friends, under the leadership of LeClerc, to move in, eliminate and replace Witherspoon. Finally, probably by telling them that they were going to see their husbands and emphasizing to all of them the need for complete secrecy, you arranged for the transport of the scientists’ wives to Vardu. But they were landed on the wrong side of the island, weren’t they, Raine?

‘So now you had the two strings to your bow. If you couldn’t give your friends every detail of the new fuel, you could give them the fuel itself. Only there was one snag. Dr Fairfield got himself killed, and you had to have someone to arm the rocket.

‘It was brilliant, I admit it. Two birds with one stone. I had already found out too much in Europe and you knew now I was the type who wouldn’t stop till the answer was there. You told Marie Hopeman that I was the one man you could be afraid of and maybe for once you weren’t lying. I knew too much and I had to be eliminated. So did Marie Hopeman. But before my elimination, a duty you’d arranged that your friend LeClerc would carry out, I had a job to do. I was to arm the Crusader.

‘You could have sent me direct to the rocket installation, in a perfectly straightforward fashion, while the Navy was still there. But you knew I’d be as suspicious as hell if I was pulled off a security job and put on a civilian job. I’d be doubly suspicious because there are more qualified men in the country than I am. And of course, there would then be no reason for Marie Hopeman to accompany me. And you wanted her killed too. So you inserted this final and phoney advert in the Telegraph, showed it to me, spun us this cock-andbull story and sent us off to the Pacific.

‘There was only one potential snag, the vital matter on which everything else depended, and your psychological handling of this was perfect. The snag – and if you couldn’t find an answer to it everything would have been lost – was how to get me to wire up the firing circuitry and fuses of the Dark Crusader. The lamb you’d thought you’d caught had turned out to be a tiger. You knew by that time how stubborn and ruthless I could be. You guessed that threats of torture or torture itself wouldn’t make me do it. You knew, if I thought it important enough, that I could stand by and watch others being tortured or threatened with death, as Captain Griffiths and his men were, and still not do it. But you knew a man in love will do anything to protect the one he loves. And so you arranged that I fall in love with Marie Hopeman. You reckoned that no one could sit side by side in planes with Marie Hopeman for two days, spend a night in the same room, spend a night and a day in the hold of a ship, a night huddled together on a reef and two more days side by side in the same hut without falling in love with her. My God, even going to the length of having the bogus Witherspoon trying to make me jealous. Damn your black heart, Raine, you gave us the time, the situation and every opportunity to fall in love. And so we did. They tortured her, and let me see her. They threatened to do it again. And so, God help me, I armed the Dark Crusader. And God help you too, Colonel Raine, for it’s because of Marie that you’re going to die. Not because of all the deaths you’ve caused, the misery, the heartbreak, the suffering. But for Marie.’

I pushed myself painfully off the table and limped round till I was within three feet of him.

‘You can’t prove any of this.’ Raine said hoarsely.

‘That’s why I have to kill you here,’ I agreed indifferently. ‘No court in the country would look at my case. No proof, but there were many things that pointed to your guilt, Raine, things that I didn’t see till it was too late. How did Fleck know Marie had a gun in the false bottom of her bag? – scientists’ wives don’t usually carry guns. Why did LeClerc – Witherspoon, as I knew him – say we weren’t long married – we didn’t behave that way. Later, why did he show no surprise when I told him we weren’t married? He said I’d a photographic memory – how the hell did he know that unless you told him? Why did LeClerc and Hewell try to cripple me with a heavy safe? – they knew I was an intelligence agent, you told them and they didn’t want me snooping around. Who gave Fleck security clearance from London? How did they know the Crusader was about to be tested, if the word hadn’t been relayed from London? Why was no attention paid to the SOS cable I sent to London, no action taken? LeClerc spun a yarn about sending a second message cancelling the first, but you know every message to this office, coded or plain, must have my identification word “Bilex” in the middle. Why were no inquiries made at the Grand Pacific Hotel after our disappearance? I checked on my way home and neither the government house nor police had been asked to investigate. The observer who was supposed to accompany us on the plane never reported our disappearance – for there was no observer, was there, Colonel Raine? Pointers, only, not proof: you’re right, I couldn’t prove a thing.’

Raine smiled: the man seemed to have no nerves at all.

‘How would you feel, Bentall, if you killed me and found out you were completely wrong?’ He leaned forward and said softly: ‘How would you feel if I gave you absolute proof, here and now, that you’re completely, terribly wrong?’

‘You’re wasting your time, Colonel Raine. Here it comes.’

‘But damn it, man, I’ve got the proof!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got it right here. My wallet – ’

He lifted his left lapel with his left hand, reached for the inside pocket with his right, the small black automatic was clear of his coat and the finger tightening on the trigger when I shot him through the head at point-blank range. The automatic spun from his hand, he jerked back violently in his seat, then fell forward, head and shoulders striking heavily on the dusty desk.

I took out my handkerchief, pulling with it a piece of paper that fluttered to the floor. I let it lie. Handkerchief in hand I picked up the fallen gun, replaced it in his inside pocket, wiped the Luger, pushed it into the dead man’s hand, pressed his thumb and fingers against the butt and trigger, then let gun and hand fall loosely to the table. I then smeared the door-knobs, armrests, wherever I had touched, and picked up the fallen paper.

It was the note from Marie. I opened it, held it by a corner above Raine’s ashtray, struck a match and watched it slowly burn away, the tiny flame creeping inexorably down the paper until it reached the words at the foot, ‘You and me and the lights of London,’ until those, too, one by one, were burnt and blackened and gone. I crushed the ash in the tray and went.

I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him lying there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 best-selling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Satan Bug

An Imprint of Sterling Publishing

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STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1962

© 1962 by Devoran Trustees Ltd

The author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

To Bill Campbell

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

There was no mail for me that morning, but that was no surprise. There had been no mail for me in the three weeks I’d been renting that tiny second-floor suite of offices near Oxford Street. I closed the door of the outer eight by ten office, skirted the table and chair that might one day house a receptionist if the time ever came that Cavell Investigations could run to such glamorous extras, and pushed open the door marked “Private.”

Behind that door lay the office of the head of Cavell Investigations, Pierre Cavell. Me. And not only the head but the entire staff. It was a bigger room than the reception office, I knew that because I’d measured it, but only a trained surveyor could have told it with the naked eye.

I’m no sybarite, but I had to admit that it was a pretty bleak sort of place. The distempered walls were of that delicate tint of off-grey pastel shading from off-white at floor level to off-black just below the ceiling that only London fog and the neglect of years can achieve. In one wall, overlooking a narrow grimy courtyard, was a tall narrow window, washed on the inside, with a monthly calendar close by. On the linoleum-covered floor a square desk, not new, a swivel chair for me, a padded leather armchair for the client, a strip of threadbare carpet to keep the client’s feet from getting cold, a hatrack and a couple of green metal filing cabinets, both empty. Nothing more. There was no room for anything more.

I was just lowering myself into the swivel chair when I heard the deep double chime of the bell in the reception-room and the sound of hinges creaking. “Ring and enter” the legend on the corridor door read and someone was doing just that. Ringing and entering. I opened the top left-hand drawer of my desk, pulled out some papers and envelopes, scattered them before me, pulled a switch by my knee and had just risen to my feet when the knock came at my inner door.

The man who entered was tall, thin and a close student of the Tailor and Cutter. A narrow-lapelled coat hung over an immaculately cut charcoal suit in the latest Italian line, and in his suéde-gloved left hand he carried his other glove, black bowler, briefcase and, a few inches up his wrist, a tightly-rolled, horn-handled black umbrella. He had a long pale narrow face, thin black hair parted in the middle and brushed almost straight back, rimless glasses, an aquiline nose and on the upper lip a thin black line that, on closer inspection, still looked like a thin black line, miniaturisation of the moustache brought to an almost impossible state of perfection. He must have carried a micrometer about with him. He looked for all the world like a top-flight City accountant: I couldn’t see him as anything else.

“Excuse my walking straight in like this.” He smiled briefly, three gold caps in the upper teeth, and half-glanced over his shoulder. “But it seems your secretary——”

“That’s all right. Please come in.” He even talked like an accountant, controlled, positive, slightly over-precise in the articulation. He offered me his hand, and the hand-shake, too, was in character, quick, neat, giving nothing away.

“Martin,” he introduced himself. “Henry Martin. Mr. Pierre Cavell?”

“Yes. Won’t you sit down, Mr. Martin?”

“Thank you.” He sat down gingerly, very straight, feet together, brief-case balanced with scrupulous care across his touching knees and looked around him slowly, missing nothing, a faint smile not showing his teeth. “Business not— ah—so very brisk these days, Mr. Cavell?”

Maybe he wasn’t an accountant after all. Accountants, as a rule, are polite, well-mannered and slow to give unnecessary offence. But then maybe he wasn’t feeling quite himself. People who came to see private detectives were seldom in a normal frame of mind.

“I keep it this way to fool the Inspector of Taxes,” I explained. “How can I help you, Mr. Martin?”

“By giving me some information about yourself.” He was no longer smiling and his eyes were no longer wandering.

“About myself?” My voice was sharp, not razor-edged, just the voice of a man who hasn’t had a client in all the three weeks he’s been in business. “Please come to the point, Mr. Martin. I have things to do.” So I had. Lighting my pipe, reading the morning paper, things like that.

“I’m sorry. But about yourself. I have you in mind for a very delicate and difficult mission. I must be sure you are the man I want. That is reasonable, I think?”

“Mission?” I looked speculatively at Henry Martin and thought I could get to disliking him without too much trouble. “I don’t carry out missions, Mr. Martin. I carry out investigations.”

“Of course. When there are investigations to carry out.” The tone was too neutral to take specific offence. “Perhaps I should supply the information. Please bear with my unusual method of approach for a few minutes, Mr. Cavell. I think I can promise that you will not be sorry.” He opened his brief-case, brought out a buff folder, abstracted a stiff sheet of paper and began to read, paraphrasing as he went along.

“Pierre Cavell. Born Lisieux, Calvados, of Anglo-French parents. Father civil engineer, John Cavell of Kingsclere, Hampshire, mother Anne-Marie Lechamps of Lisieux. Mother of Franco-Belgian descent. One sister, Liselle. Both parents and sister killed in air attack on Rouen. Escaped fishing-boat Deauville-Newhaven. While still in late teens parachuted six times into Northern France, each time brought back information of great value. Parachuted into Normandy D-Day minus two. At end war recommended for no fewer than six decorations— three British, two French and one Belgian.”

Henry Martin looked up and smiled thinly.

“The first discordant note. Decorations refused. Some quotation to the effect that the war had aged you fast and that you were too old to play with toys. Joined regular British Army. Rose to Major in Intelligence Corps, understood to have co-operated closely with M.I.6—counter-espionage, I believe. Then joined police. Why did you leave the Army, Mr. Cavell?”

I’d throw him out later. Right now I was too intrigued. How much more did he know—and how? I said, “Poor prospects.”

“You were cashiered.” Again the brief smile. “When a junior officer elects to strike a senior officer, policy dictates that he should choose a man below field rank. You had the poor judgment to select a major-general.” He glanced at the paper again. “Joined Metropolitan Police. Rapid rise through the ranks—one must admit that you do appear to be rather gifted in your own line—to position of Inspector. In last two years seconded for special duties, nature unspecified. But we can guess. And then you resigned. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“On a record card, ‘Resigned’ looks much better than ‘Dismissed.’ Which is what you would have been had you remained another twenty-four hours. You do appear to have what amounts to a genius for insubordination. Something to do with an Assistant Commissioner, I understand. But you still had friends, quite powerful friends. Within a week of your resignation you had been appointed as head of security in Mordon.”

I stopped what I was doing, which was squaring off the papers on my desk, and said quietly, “Details of my record are readily available, if you know where to look. But you have no right to possess that last item of information.” The Mordon Microbiological Research Establishment in Wiltshire had a security rating that would have made access to the Kremlin seem simple.

“I am perfectly aware of that, Mr. Cavell. I possess a great number of items of information that I shouldn’t. Like the additional item that I know that, in keeping with your record, you were also dismissed from this post. Like yet another item— the real reason why I am here today: I know why you were dismissed.”

The accuracy of my first deduction in the detecting business, that my client was an accountant, spoke ill for my prospects: Henry Martin wouldn’t have recognised a balance sheet if it had been handed to him on a silver salver. I wondered what his line of business might really be: but I couldn’t even begin to guess.

“You were dismissed from Mordon,” Martin went on precisely, “primarily because you couldn’t keep a still tongue in your head. Oh, nothing to do with security, we know that.” He removed his rimless glasses and polished them thoughtfully. “After fifteen years in your line you probably don’t even tell yourself half of what you know. But you talked to top scientists, directors, in Mordon, and you made no secret of your opinion of the nature of the work in which they were engaged. You are not the first person to comment bitterly on the fact that this establishment, referred to in Parliamentary estimates as the Mordon Health Centre, is controlled exclusively by the War Office. You knew, of course, that Mordon is concerned mainly with the invention and production of microbiological organisms for use in war—but you are one of the few who know just how ghastly and terrifying are the weapons that have been perfected there, that armed with those weapons a few planes could utterly destroy all life in any country in the space of a few hours. You had very strong opinions about the indiscriminate use of such a weapon against an unsuspecting and innocent civilian population. And you made your opinion known in many places and to many people inside Mordon. Too many places, too many people. So today you are a private detective.”

“Life’s unjust,” I agreed. I rose to my feet, crossed to the door, turned the key in the lock and pocketed it. “You must realise, Mr. Martin, that you have already said too much. The sources of your information about my activities at Mordon. You’re not leaving here till you tell me.”

Martin sighed and replaced his spectacles.

“Melodramatic, understanding but totally unnecessary. Do you take me for a fool, Cavell? Do I look a fool? What I told you I had to tell you to gain your co-operation. I will put my cards on the table. Quite literally.” He drew out a wallet, found a rectangle of ivory cardboard and placed it on the table. “Mean anything to you?”

It meant a great deal. Across the middle of the card ran the legend. “Council for World Peace.” At the bottom right-hand corner: “Henry Martin, London Secretary.”

Martin pulled his chair close and leaned forward, his forearms on my desk. His face was intent, serious.

“Of course you know about it, Mr. Cavell. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that it is by far the greatest force for good in the world today. Our council cuts across race, religion and politics. You will have heard that our Prime Minister and most members of the cabinet belong. I do not wish to comment on that. But I can state that most of the church dignitaries in Britain, whether Protestant, Catholic or Jewish, are members. Our list of titled members reads like Debrett’s, of other distinguished members like Who’s Who. The Foreign Office, who really know what’s going on and are more afraid than any, are solidly on our side. We have the support of all the best, the wisest, the most far-seeing men in the country today. I have very powerful men behind me, Mr. Cavell. He smiled faintly. “We even have influential members in Mordon.”

All he said I knew to be true—except that bit about Mordon, and maybe that had to be true, to account for his knowledge. I wasn’t a member of the council myself, not being the right type for inclusion either in Debrett’s or Who’s Who, but I knew that the Council for World Peace, a society semi-secret in its nature inasmuch as it recognised that diplomatic negotiations were best not conducted through newspaper headlines, was of only the most recent origin but already regarded through the western world as the last best hope for mankind.

Martin took the card from me and slipped it back in his wallet. “All I am trying to say is that I am a respectable man working for a pre-eminently respectable body.”

“I believe that,” I said.

“Thank you.” He dipped into his brief-case again and brought out a steel container about the size and shape of a hip-flask. “There is, Mr. Cavell, a militarist clique in this country of whom we are frankly terrified, who promise to wreck all our dreams and hopes. Madmen, who are talking, every day more loudly, of waging a preventive war against the Soviet Union. Germ warfare. It is highly unlikely that they will win their way. But it is against the most unlikely contingencies that we have to be most warily on our guard.” He spoke like a man who had rehearsed his speech a hundred times.

“Against this bacteriological assault there could and would be no defence. A vaccine against this virus has been developed, after two years of the most intensive research, but the only supplies in the world are in Mordon.” He paused, hesitated, then pushed the flask across the table to me. “A statement that is no longer quite accurate. This flask was removed from Mordon three days ago. The contents can be cultured to produce sufficient vaccine to immunise any nation on earth. We are our brothers’ keepers, Mr. Cavell.”

I stared at him. I said nothing.

“Please take this at once, to this address in Warsaw.” He pushed a slip of paper across the table. “You will be paid a hundred pounds now, all expenses, and a hundred pounds on your return. A delicate mission, I realise, perhaps even a dangerous one, although in your case I should not think so. We have investigated you very carefully, Mr. Cavell. You are reputed to know the byways of Europe as a taxi-driver knows the streets of London: I do not foresee that frontiers will present you with much difficulty.”

“And my anti-war sympathies,” I murmured.

“Of course, of course.” The first trace of impatience. “We had to check most carefully, you realise that. You had the best all-over qualifications. You were the only choice.”

“Well, now,” I murmured. “This is flattering. And interesting.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said brusquely. “Will you do it, Mr. Cavell?”

“No.”

“No?” His face became very still. “You say ’no’? This, then, is the extent of your precious concern about your fellowmen? All this talk in Mordon——”

“You said yourself that my business wasn’t very brisk,” I interrupted. “I haven’t had a client for three weeks. For all indications to the contrary, I won’t have one for three months. And,” I added, “you said yourself I was the only choice.”

The thin mouth twisted in a sneer.

“You don’t positively refuse to go, then?”

“I don’t positively refuse.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and fifty pounds. Each way.”

“Your last word?”

“That’s it.”

“Mind if I say something, Cavell?” The man was losing his manners.

“Yes, I mind. Keep your speeches and moralities for your council. This is a business deal.”

He stared at me for a long moment, eyes hostile behind thick glasses, then reached again into his brief-case and brought out five flat packets of treasury notes, laid them neatly on the table before him and glanced up at me. “Two hundred and fifty pounds. Exactly.”

“Maybe the London branch of the council should get itself a new secretary,” I suggested. “Was it myself or the council that was to be defrauded of the extra £150?”

“Neither.” The tone came with the eyes, glacial both of them. He didn’t like me. “We offered a fair price, but in a matter of such importance were prepared to meet extortion. Take your money.”

“After you’ve taken off the rubber bands, stacked the notes together and counted them out, fifty fivers, in front of my eyes.”

“My God!” The cool meticulous speech had gone and something almost savage came to take its place. “No wonder you were kicked out of so many jobs.” He ripped off the bands, stacked the notes and counted them off separately. “There you are. Fifty. Satisfied?”

“Satisfied.” I opened my right-hand drawer, picked up the notes, address and flask, dropped them into the drawer and closed it just as Martin was finishing the securing of the straps on his brief-case. Something in the atmosphere, maybe an extra stillness from my side of the table, caused him to look up sharply and then he became as immobile as myself, except for his eyes, which continued to widen until they seemed to take up all space behind the rimless glasses.

“It’s a gun all right,” I assured him. “A Japanese Hanyatti nine-shot automatic, safety-catch off and indicator, I observe, registering full. Don’t worry about the scotch tape over the mouth of the barrel, that’s only to protect a highly delicate mechanism. The bullet behind will go through it, it’ll go through you and if you had a twin brother sitting behind you it would go through him also. Your forearms on the table.”

He put his forearms on tbe table. He kept pretty still, which is the way people usually do when they’re peering down into the barrel from a distance of three feet, but his eyes had gone back to normal quickly and he didn’t seem all that worried that I could notice. This troubled me, for if any man had the right to be worried it was Henry Martin. Maybe this made Henry Martin a very dangerous man.

“You have an unusual way of conducting business, Cavell.” No shake in the voice, just a dry contempt. “What is this, a hold-up?”

“Don’t be silly—and don’t you wish it were. I already have your money. You asked me earlier if I took you for a fool. The time and circumstances didn’t seem right for an immediate answer, but I can give it to you now. You are a fool. You’re a fool because you forgot that I worked in Mordon. I was security chief there. And the first job of any security chief is to know what goes on in his own bailiwick.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“You will. This vaccine here—it’s designed to give immunity against which particular virus?”

“I’m only an agent for the Council for World Peace.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that all the vaccines, up till now, have been made and stored exclusively in Horder Hall, Essex. The point is that if that flask came from Mordon it contains no vaccine. It probably contains one or other of the viruses.

“Secondly, I know that it is normally impossible for any man, Council for World Peace sympathiser or not, to take top secret viruses out of Mordon, no matter how clever or surreptitious he is. When the last man has left the laboratories fourteen hour time clocks come into operation and the opening combination over-riding those is known to only two men. If anything has been taken it has been taken by force and violence. That demands an immediate investigation.

“Thirdly, you said the Foreign Office was solidly on your side. If that’s the case, why all this cloak-and-dagger approach to me to smuggle vaccine through? The diplomatic bag to Warsaw is the obvious answer.

“Finally, and your biggest blunder, my friend, you forgot the fact that I have been engaged in one form or other of counter-espionage for quite some time. Every new body or organisation that’s set up in Britain automatically comes under the microscope. As did the Council for World Peace when it set up its headquarters here. I know one of the members, an elderly, stout, bald and short-sighted character who is the complete antithesis to you in every way. His name is Henry Martin and he’s the secretary of the London branch of the council. The real one.”

He looked at me steadily for a few moments, not scared, his forearms still resting on the table, then said quietly, “There doesn’t seem to be much more left to say, does there?”

“Not much.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Turn you over to the Special Branch. With you goes a tape of our conversation. Just as a routine precaution I switched on a recorder before you came into this room. Not evidence, I know, but the address, flask and your thumb-print on fifty fivers will be all the evidence they require.”

“It does look as if I made a mistake about you,” he admitted. “We can do a deal.”

“I can’t be bought. Not, at least, for fifty miserable fivers.”

A pause, then softly, “Five hundred?”

“No.”

“A thousand? A thousand pounds, Cavell, inside the hour.”

“Keep quiet.” I reached over the phone, laid the receiver on the table and began to dial with my left forefinger. I’d reached the third number when a sharp knock came to my office door.

I let the receiver lie and got to my feet, making no noise. The corridor door had been shut when Martin had come into my room. No one could open that corridor door without the bell chiming. I’d heard no chime; there had been no chime. But somebody was in the outer office now, just outside my door.

Martin was smiling. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was there. I didn’t like it. I moved my gun and said softly, “Face into that corner, Martin, hands clasped behind your neck.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said calmly. “That man outside the door is a mutual friend.”

“Do it now,” I said. He did. I crossed to the door, standing well to one side, and called out, “Who’s there?”

“Police, Cavell. Open up, please.”

“Police?” The word carried familiar overtones, but then there were a great number of people around who were able to imitate a great number of voices. I glanced at Martin, but he hadn’t moved. I called out, “Your credentials. Under the door with them.”

There was a movement on the other side of the door, then an oblong cardboard slid into view on the floor. No badge, no credentials, nothing like that, just a calling card bearing the words “D. R. Hardanger” and a Whitehall telephone number. The number of people who knew that this was the only form of identification that Superintendent Hardanger used would be very few. And the card matched the voice. I unlocked and opened the door.

Superintendent Hardanger it was, big, burly, red-faced, with the jowls of a bull-dog, dressed in the same faded grey raglan and black bowler that he’d worn in all the years I’d worked with him. I caught a glimpse of a smaller man behind him, a khaki-clad arm and leg, no more. I’d no time to see more for Hardanger had moved his sixteen stone of solid authority four feet into my office forcing me to take a couple of backward steps.

“All right, Cavell.” A flicker of a smile touched the abnormally light blue eyes. “You can put that gun away. You’re quite safe now. The police are here.”

I shook my head. “Sorry, Hardanger, but I’m no longer working for you. I have a licence for this gun and you’re in my office without permission.” I nodded towards the corner. “Search this character and then I’ll put my gun away. Not till then.”

Henry Martin, hands still behind his neck, turned slowly round. He grinned at Hardanger, who smiled back and said, “Shall I search you, John?”

“Rather not, sir,” Martin said briskly. “You know how ticklish I am.”

I stared at them, from Hardanger to Martin, then back again. I lowered my gun and said wearily, “All right, what gives?”

“I’m genuinely sorry about this, Cavell,” Hardanger said in his rough gravelly voice. “But necessary. How necessary, I’ll explain. This man’s name really is Martin—John Martin. Of the Special Branch. Inspector. Recently returned from Toronto. Want to see his credentials or will my word do?”

I crossed to my desk, put the gun away and brought out the flask, money and slip of paper with the Warsaw address. I could feel the tightness in my face but I kept my voice quiet.

“Take your damned props, Martin, and get out. You, too, Hardanger. I don’t know what this stupid charade, this farrago of rubbish, was for and I’ll be damned if you can make me care. Out! I don’t like smart alecs making a fool of me and I won’t play mouse to any man’s cat, not even the Special Branch’s.”

“Easy up now, Cavell,” Hardanger protested. “I told you it was necessary and——”

“Let me talk to him,” the man in khaki interrupted. He came round Hardanger and I could see him clearly for the first time. Army Officer, and no subaltern either, slight, spare, authoritative, the type I’m allergic to. “My name is Cliveden, Cavell. Major-General Cliveden. I must——”

“I was cashiered from the Army for taking a swing at a major-general,” I interrupted. “Think I’d hesitate to do it again now I’m a civilian? You, too. Out. Now.”

“I told you what he was like,” Hardanger muttered to no one in particular. He shrugged his shoulders heavily, thrust his hand into the pocket of his raglan coat and brought out a wrist-watch. “We’ll go. But first I thought you might like to have this. A keepsake. He had it in London for repair and it was delivered to the General’s office yesterday.”

“What are you talking about?” I said harshly.

“I’m talking about Neil Clandon. Your successor as security chief in Mordon. I believe he was one of your best friends.”

I made no move to take the watch from the outstretched hand.

“‘Was’, you said? Clandon?”

“Clandon. Dead. Murdered, if you like. When someone broke into the central laboratories in Mordon late last night—early this morning.”

I looked at the three of them and then turned away to stare out through the grimy window at the grey fog swirling along Gloucester Place. After a time I said, “You’d better come in.”

Neil Clandon had been found by a patrolling security guard shortly after two o’clock that morning, in the corridor beside the heavy steel door leading to number one lab in “E” block. That he was dead was beyond dispute. What he had died of was not yet known, for in an establishment staffed almost entirely by doctors no one had been allowed to approach the dead man. The strictness of the rule was absolute. When the alarm bells rang it was a job for the Special Branch and the Special Branch alone.

The senior guard had been summoned and had approached within six feet of the body. He had reported that Clandon had been violently ill before dying, and that he had obviously died in convulsions and great agony. The symptoms had all the hallmarks of prussic acid poisoning. Had the guard been able to get the typical bitter almond smell, this, of course, would have put the tentative diagnosis beyond reasonable doubt. But that, of course, had been impossible. All guards on internal patrol had to make their rounds in gas-tight suits with a closed circuit breathing apparatus.

The senior guard had noticed something else. The time clock setting on the steel door had been altered. Normally it was set to run from 6 p.m. till 8 a.m. Now it was set to run from midnight. Which meant that access to number one lab would be impossible before 2 p.m., except to those who knew the combination that overrode the time lock.

It was the soldier, not Hardanger, who supplied this information. I listened to him and said, “Why you? What’s your interest in all this?”

“Major-General Cliveden is the second-in-command of the Royal Army Medical Corps,” Hardanger explained. “Which automatically makes him the director of the Mordon Microbiological Research Establishment.”

“He wasn’t when I was there.”

“My predecessor has retired,” Cliveden said curtly, but the underlying worry was clear to see. “Ill health. First reports naturally came to me. I was in London. I notified the Superintendent immediately. And on my own initiative I ordered an oxy-acetylene team from Aldershot to rush there: they will open the door under Special Branch supervision.”

“An oxy-acetylene team.” I stared at him. “Are you quite mad?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Cancel it, man. Cancel it at once. What in God’s name made you do that? Don’t you know anything about that door? Apart from the fact that no acetylene equipment in existence could get through that special steel of that door inside hours, don’t you know that the door itself is lethal? That it’s filled with a near-lethal gas? That there’s a central insulator mounted plate inside the door that damn’ well is lethal—charged with two thousand volts?”

“I didn’t know that, Cavell.” His voice was low.

“I’ve only just taken over.”

“And even if they did get inside? Have you thought of what would happen then? You’re scared, aren’t you, Major-General Cliveden, you’re terrified at the thought that someone has already been inside. Maybe that someone was careless. Maybe that someone was very careless, maybe he knocked over a container or cracked a sealed culture tank. A tank or container, for instance, with botulinus toxin—which is one of the viruses both made and stored in number one lab. It takes a minimum of twelve hours exposure to air to oxidise the toxin and render it harmless. If anyone comes into contact with it before oxidisation, they’re dead men. Before midday, that is. And Clandon, had you thought of him? How do you know the botulinus didn’t get him? The symptoms are exactly the same as those of prussic acid poisoning. How do you know the two guards weren’t affected? The senior guard who spoke to you—if he had been affected, the botulinus would have got him as soon as he’d taken off his mask to speak to you. He’d have died in agonies a minute later. Have you checked that he’s still alive?”

Cliveden reached for the phone. His hand was shaking. While he was dialling, I said to Hardanger, “Right, Superintendent, the explanation.”

“Martin here?”

I nodded.

“Two good reasons. The first was that you are number one suspect.”

“Say that again.”

“You’d been sacked,” he said bluntly. “Left under a cloud. Your opinion of Mordon’s place in the scheme of things was well known. You have a reputation for taking the law into your own hands.” He smiled without humour. “I’ve had plenty of experience of that from you.”

“You’re loony. Would I murder my best friend?” I said savagely.

“You were the only outsider who knew the whole security set-up in Mordon. The only one, Cavell. If anyone could get into and out of that place it was you.” He paused for a significant moment. “And you are now the only man alive who knows the combinations for the various laboratory doors. The combinations, as you know, can only be altered in the factory where the doors are made. After your departure, the precaution of changing was not thought necessary.”

“Dr. Baxter, the civilian director, knows the combinations.”

“Dr. Baxter is missing. We can’t trace him anywhere. We had to find out fast how the land lay. This was the best way. The only way. Immediately after you left home this morning we checked with your wife. She said——”

“You’ve been round at my house.” I stared at him. “Bothering Mary? Questioning her? I rather think——”

“Don’t trouble,” Hardanger said dryly. “You’d get no satisfaction from breaking in false teeth. I wasn’t there, sent a junior officer. Silly of me, I admit, asking a bride of two months to turn in her husband. Of course she said you hadn’t left the house all night.”

I looked at him without speaking. His eyes were exactly on a level with mine. He said, “Are you wondering whether to haul off at me for even suggesting that Mary may be a liar or why she didn’t phone to tip you off?”

“Both.”

“She’s no liar. You forget how well I know her. And she didn’t tip you off because we disconnected your phone, both home and here. We also bugged this phone before you arrived this morning—I heard every word you said to Martin on the phone in your outer office.” He smiled. “You had me worried for a few minutes there.”

“How did you get in? I didn’t hear you. The bell didn’t go off.”

“The fuse box is in the outer corridor. All very illegal, I’m afraid.”

I nodded. “I’ll have to change that.”

“So you’re in the clear, Cavell. An Oscar for Inspector Martin, I should say. Twelve minutes flat to find out what we wanted to know. But we had to know.”

“Why? Why that way? A few hours leg-work by your men, checking taxis, restaurants, theatres and you’d have known I couldn’t possibly have been in Mordon last night.”

“I couldn’t wait.” He cleared his throat with unnecessary force. “Which brings me to my second reason. If you’re not the killer, then you’re the man I want to find the killer. Now that Clandon is dead, you are the only man who knows the entire security set-up at Mordon. No one else does. Damned awkward, but there it is. If anyone can find anything, you can.”

“Not to mention the fact that I’m the only man who can open that door now that Clandon is dead and Baxter missing.”

“There’s that too,” he admitted.

“There’s that, too,” I mimicked. “That’s all you really want. And when the door is open I can run along and be a good boy.”

“Not unless you want to.”

“You mean that? First Derry, now Clandon. I’d like to do something.”

“I know. I’ll give you a free hand.”

“The General won’t like it.” No one ever called Hardanger’s ultimate superior by his name: very few even knew it.

“I’ve already fixed it with the General. You’re right, he doesn’t like it. I suspect he doesn’t like you.” Hardanger grinned sourly. “Often the way with relatives.”

“You did that in advance? Well, thanks for the compliment.”

“You were the number one suspect. But I never suspected you. All the same, I had to be sure. So many of our best men have gone over the wall in the past few years.”

“When do we leave?” I said. “Now?” Cliveden had just replaced the receiver on its rest. His hand still wasn’t very steady.

“If you’re ready.”

“I will be in a moment.” Hardanger was a past master at keeping his expressions buttoned up, but there was a speculative curiosity in those eyes that he couldn’t hide. The sort of look he’d give a man who’d just put a foot wrong. I said to Cliveden, “The guards at the plant? Any word?”

“They’re all right. So it can’t have been botuli-nus that got Clandon. The central laboratories are completely sealed up.”

“And Dr. Baxter?”

“Still no signs of him. He——”

“Still no signs? That makes two of them now.

Coincidence, General. If that’s the word I want.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said irritably.

“Easton Derry. My predecessor in Mordon. He vanished a couple of months ago—just six days after he was the best man at my wedding and he still hasn’t turned up. Surely you knew?”

“How the hell should I?” A very testy little man indeed, I was glad he wasn’t a civilian doctor and myself one of his patients. “I’ve only been able to get down there twice since my appointment … Anyway, Baxter. He left the laboratories all right, checking out slightly later than usual. He didn’t return. He lives with a widowed sister in a bungalow near Alfringham, five miles away. He didn’t come home at all last night, she says.” He turned to Hardanger. “We must get down there immediately, Superintendent.”

“Right away, sir. Cavell is going to come with us.”

“Glad to hear it.” Cliveden said. He didn’t look it and I couldn’t blame him. You don’t make major-general without developing an army mind in the process and the army mind sees the world as a neat, orderly and regimented place with no place at all in it for private detectives. But he was trying to be courteous and making the best of a bad job for he went on, “We’ll need all the assistance we can get. Shall we go?”

“Just as soon as I’ve phoned my wife to let her know what’s happening—if her phone’s been reconnected.” Hardanger nodded. I reached for the receiver but Cliveden’s hand was on it first, pressing it firmly down on its cradle.

“No phoning, Cavell. Sorry. Must have absolute security on this. It’s imperative that no one—no one—knows that anything has happened at Mordon.”

I lifted his wrist, the phone came up in his hand and I took it from him. I said, “Tell him, Superintendent.”

Hardanger looked uncomfortable. As I dialled he said apologetically, “I’m afraid Cavell is no longer in the Army sir. Not under the jurisdiction of the Special Branch. He is—um—allergic to authority.”

“Under the Official Secrets Act we could demand——”

“Sorry, sir.” Hardanger shook his head heavily. “Classified information voluntarily disclosed to a civilian outwith a government department is no longer an official secret. No one made us tell Cavell anything and he never asked us to. He’s under no obligation. And we want his cooperation.”

I made my call, told Mary that no, I wasn’t under arrest, that I was going down to Mordon and would call her later in the day. After I hung up I took off my jacket, strapped on a felt shoulder holster and stuck the Hanyatti into it. It was a big gun, but it was a big jacket with plenty of room in it, unlike Inspector Martin I didn’t go in much for the Italian line. Hardanger watched me expressionlessly, Cliveden disapprovingly: twice he made to say something, twice he thought better of it. It was all very irregular indeed. But so was murder.

CHAPTER TWO

The Army had a helicopter waiting for us, but the fog was too heavy. Instead we went down to Wiltshire in a big Jaguar saloon driven by a plainclothes policeman who took far too much satisfaction in leaning with all his weight on both accelerator and siren button. But the fog lifted as we cleared Middlesex, the roads were fairly clear and we made it intact to Mordon by just after midday.

Mordon is an architectural monstrosity, a guaranteed blot on any landscape. Had the designer—if it had a designer—based it on an early nineteenth-century prison, which it exactly resembles he couldn’t have achieved an uglier or more repulsive structure. But Mordon is only ten years old.

Grim, grey and gaunt under the darkly lowering October skies of that day, Mordon consisted of four parellel rows of squat, flat-topped concrete buildings, three stories high, each row, in its repellent forbidding lifelessness, for all the world like condemned and abandoned Victorian tenements in the worst slums of a great city. But a fitting enough façade for the work that went on behind the walls.

Each row of buildings was about a quarter of a mile in length, with about two hundred yards separating the rows. The space between buildings and boundary fence, five hundred yards at the nearest approach, was completely open, completely clear. No trees, no bushes, no shrubs, not even a clump of flowers. A man can hide behind a bush. He might even be able to hide behind a clump of flowers. But he can’t hide behind a blade of grass two inches high—and nothing higher grew in the bleak desolation of the grounds of Mordon. The term boundary fence—not a wall, people can hide behind walls—was a misnomer. Any World War 2 concentration camp commandant would have sold his soul for Mordon: with fences like those a man could sleep soundly at nights.

The outer barbed-wire fence was fifteen feet high and sloped outwards at so sharp an angle that the top was four feet out of line with the foot. A similar fence, only sloping the other way, paralleled the outer for its entire perimeter at a distance of about twenty feet. The space between those fences was patrolled at night by alsatians and dobermann-pinschers, trained man-hunters—and if need be, man-killers—answerable only to their own Army handlers. Three feet inside the second fence and actually below its overhang, was a two-strand trip-wire fence, of so fine a metal as to be normally almost invisible—and certainly would be invisible to anyone climbing down at nighttime from the top of that second fence. And then, another ten feet away, was the last fence, each of its five strands running through insulators mounted on concrete posts. The electric current passing through those wires was supposed to be less than lethal if, that is, you were in good health.

To make sure that everyone got the general idea the Army had put up notice-boards at ten-yard intervals round the entire perimeter of the outer fence. There were five different types of notices. Four of them, black, on white, read, “DANGER KEEP OUT BY ORDER”: “WARNING GUARD DOGS IN USE”: “PROHIBITED PLACE” and “ELECTRIFIED FENCES”: the fifth, a violent red on yellow, said simply: “W. D. PROPERTY: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.” Only a madman or complete illiterate would have attempted to break his way into Mordon.

We came on the public ring road that completely surrounded the camp, bore right by the gorse-covered fields and after a quarter of a mile turned into the main entrance. The police driver stopped just short of the lowered boom and wound down his window as a sergeant approached. The sergeant had a machine-pistol slung over his shoulder and it wasn’t pointing at the ground either.

Then he caught sight of Cliveden, lowered his gun, gave a signal to a man we couldn’t see. The boom rose, the car moved on, halted before heavy steel crash-gates. We left the car, passed through a steel side door and made our way into a one-storey block marked “Reception.”

Three men waited for us there. Two I knew— Colonel Weybridge, deputy commandant of Mordon, and Dr. Gregori, Dr. Baxter’s chief assistant in “E”’ block. Weybridge, though technically under Cliveden’s command, was the real boss of Mordon: a tall, fresh-faced man with black hair and an incongruously iron-grey moustache, he was reputed to be an outstanding doctor. Mordon was his life: he was one of the few with his own living accommodation on the premises and it was said that he never passed outside the gates twice a year. Gregori was a tall, heavy, swarthy, dark-eyed man, an Italian and ex-professor of medicine from Turin, and a brilliant microbiologist greatly respected by his fellow scientists. The third man was a bulky, shapeless character in a bulky shapeless tweed suit who looked so much like a farmer that he had to be what he turned out to be—a policeman in plain clothes. Inspector Wylie, of the Wiltshire Constabulary.

Cliveden and Weybridge made the introductions, then Hardanger took over. Generals and Colonels or not, Army establishment or not, there was no question from the word “go“ as to who was in complete charge. Hardanger made it clear from the start.

He said bluntly, “Inspector Wylie, you shouldn’t be here. No member of any county constabulary has any right to be inside those gates. But I doubt if you knew that and I’m sure you’re not responsible for your presence here. Who is?”

“I am.” Colonel Weybridge’s voice was steady, but he was on the defensive. “The circumstances are unusual, to say the least.”

“Let me tell it,” Inspector Wylie put in. “Our headquarters got a call late last night, about eleven-thirty, from the guardhouse here, saying that one of your car crews—I understand jeeps patrol the ring road all night—had given chase to some unidentified man who seemed to have been molesting or attacking a girl just outside your grounds. A civilian matter, outwith Army jurisdiction, so they called us. The duty sergeant and constable were here by shortly after midnight, but found nothing and no one. I came along this morning and when I saw the fences had been cut—well, I assumed there was some connection between the two things.”

“The fences cut!” I interrupted. “The boundary fences? It’s not possible.”

“I’m afraid it is, Cavell,” Weybridge said gravely.

“The patrol cars,” I protested. “The dogs, the trip wires, the electric fences. How about them?”

“You’ll see yourself. The fences are cut, and that’s all that’s to it.” Weybridge wasn’t as calm as he seemed on the surface, not by a long way. I would have taken long odds that he and Gregori were badly frightened men.

“Anyway,” Inspector Wylie went on calmly, “I made inquiries at the gate. I met Colonel Weybridge there and he asked me to make inquiries—discreet inquiries—to try to trace Dr. Baxter.”

“You did that?” Hardanger asked Weybridge. The voice was speculative, the tone neutral. “Don’t you know your own standing orders? That all inquiries are to be handled by your own security chief or my office in London?”

“Clandon was dead and——”

“Oh, God!” Hardanger’s voice was a lash. “So now Inspector Wylie knows that Clandon is dead. Or did you know before, Inspector?”

“No, sir.”

“But you do now. How many other people have you told, Colonel Weybridge?”

“No one else.” His voice was stiff, his face pale.

“Thank heaven for that. Don’t think I’m carrying security to ridiculous lengths, Colonel, for it doesn’t matter what you think or what I think. All that matters is what one or two people in Whitehall think. They give the orders, we carry them out. The instructions for an emergency such as this are quite clear. We take over—completely. You wash your hands of it—completely. I want your co-operation, of course, but it must be cooperation on my terms.”

“What the superintendent means,” Cliveden said testily, “is that amateur detecting is not discouraged, it’s forbidden. I suppose that includes me too, Hardanger?”

“Don’t make my job more difficult than it is already, sir.”

“I won’t. But, as Commandant, I must ask for the right to be kept informed of all progress and the right to be present when number one lab in ‘ E’ block is opened up.”

“That’s fair,” Hardanger agreed.

“When?” Cliveden asked. “The lab, I mean.”

Hardanger looked at me. “Well? The twelve hours you spoke of are up.”

“I’m not sure.” I looked at Dr. Gregori. “Has the ventilation system been started up in number one?”

“No. Of course not. Nobody’s been near the place. We left everything strictly alone.”

“If anything had been, say, knocked over,” I went on carefully. “Would oxidisation be complete?”

“I doubt it. Air’s too static.”

I turned to Hardanger. “All those labs are specially ventilated by filtered air later cleaned in a closed circuit special compartment. I would like this switched on. Then maybe in an hour.”

Hardanger nodded. Gregori, dark eyes worried behind his thick lenses, phoned instructions then left with Cliveden and Weybridge. Hardanger turned to Inspector Wylie.

“Well, Inspector, it seems you’re in possession of information you shouldn’t have. No need to issue the usual dreadful warnings to you, I suppose.”

“I like my job,” Wylie smiled. “Don’t be too hard on old Weybridge, sir. Those medical men just aren’t security minded. He meant well.”

“The paths of the just—that’s me—are made thorny and difficult by those who mean well,” Hardanger said heavily. “What’s this about Baxter?”

“Seems he left here about 6.30 p.m. last night, sir. But later than usual, I gather, so he missed the special bus to Alfringham.”

“He checked out, of course?” I asked. Every scientist leaving Mordon had to sign the “Out” register and hand in his security tag.

“No doubt about that. He had to wait for the ordinary service bus that passed the road end at 6.48. Conductor and two passengers confirm that someone answering to our description—no names, of course—got on at the road end, but the conductor is quite positive that no one of that description got off at Alfringham Farm, where Dr. Baxter lives. He must have gone all the way to Alfringham, or Hardcaster, the terminus.”

“He just vanished,” Hardanger nodded. He looked consideringly at the burly quiet-eyed man. “Like to work with us on this, Wylie?”

“It would make a change from checking up on the old foot-and-mouth,” Wylie admitted. “But our super and the Chief Constable might have something to say about that.”

“They could be persuaded, I think. Your office is at Alfringham, isn’t it? I’ll call you there.”

Wylie left. As he passed through the doorway we caught sight of an army lieutenant, hand raised to knock on the door. Hardanger cocked an eye and said, “Come in.”

“Morning, sir. ‘Morning, Mr. Cavell.” The sandy-haired young lieutenant looked tired, but his voice was brisk and alert in spite of that. “Wilkinson, sir. Officer in charge of the guard patrols last night. Colonel said you might want to see me.”

“Considerate of the Colonel. I do. Hardanger, Superintendent Hardanger. Glad to meet you, Wilkinson. You the man who found Clandon last night?”

“Perkins—a corporal of the guard—found him. He called me and I had a look at him. Just a look. Then I sealed ‘E’ block, called the Colonel and he confirmed.”

“Good man,” Hardanger approved. “But we’ll come to that later. You were notified of the wire-cutting, of course?”

“Naturally, sir. With—with Mr. Clandon gone, I was in charge. We couldn’t find him, not anywhere. He must have been dead even then.”

“Quite. You investigated the wire-cutting, of course?”

“No, sir.”

“No? Why not? Your job, surely?”

“No, sir. It’s a job for an expert.” A half-smile touched the pale tired face. “We carry automatic machine-guns, Superintendent, not microscopes. It was pitch black. Besides, by the time a few pairs of regulation army boots had churned the place up there wouldn’t have been much left to investigate. I set a four man guard, sir, each man ten yards from the break, two inside and two out, with orders that no one should be allowed to approach.”

“Never looked to find such intelligence in the Army,” Hardanger said warmly. “That was first class, young man.” A faint touch of colour touched Wilkinson’s pale face as he tried hard not to show his pleasure. “Anything else you did?”

“Nothing that would help you, sir. I sent another jeep—there’s normally three on patrol at a time— round the entire perimeter of the fence to make a spotlight search for another break. But this was the only one. Then I questioned the crew of the jeep who’d made this wild-goose chase after the man who was supposed to have attacked the girl and warned them that the next time their—ah— chivalrous instincts got the better of them they would be sent back to their regiments. They’re not supposed to leave their jeeps, no matter what the provocation.”

“You think this episode of the distressed young lady was just a blind? To let someone nip in smartly and unobserved with a pair of wire-cutters?”

“What else, sir?”

“What else, indeed,” Hardanger sighed. “How many men usually employed in ‘E’ block, Lieutenant?”

“Fifty-five, sixty, sir.”

“Doctors?”

“A mixed bunch. Doctors, micro-biologists, chemists, technicians, Army and civilian. I don’t know too much about them, sir. We’re not encouraged to ask questions.”

“Where are they now? I mean, ’E’ block is sealed off.”

“In the refectory lounge. Some of them wanted to go home when they found ‘E’ block shut up but the Colonel—Colonel Weybridge—wouldn’t let them.”

“That’s convenient. Lieutenant, I’d be grateful if you’d lay on two orderlies or messengers or whatever. One for me, one for Inspector Martin here. Inspector Martin would like to talk to those ‘E’ block men, individually. Please make arrangements. If there are any difficulties you are free to say that you have the full authority of General Cliveden behind you. But first I’d like you to come along with us and identify us to your guards at this gap in the fence. Then tell all the guards, the men who man the jeeps and the dog-handlers to be at the reception office in twenty minutes. The ones who were on duty before midnight, I mean.”

Five minutes later Hardanger and I were alone at the break in the fences. The guards had withdrawn out of earshot and Wilkinson had left us.

The barbed wire on the outer fence was strung between curving reinforced concrete posts like junior editions of modern city lighting standards. There were about thirty strands on the fence, with roughly six inches between each pair. The fourth and fifth strands from the bottom had been cut then rejoined with heavy grey twine tied round the barbs nearest the cuts. It had taken a pretty sharp pair of eyes to discover the break.

There had been no rain for three days and there was no trace of footmarks. The ground was damp, but that was still from the heavy dew of the previous night. Whoever had cut those wires had left long before the dew had begun to settle.

“Your eyes are younger than mine,” Hardanger said. “Sawn or cut?”

“Snipped. Cutters or pliers. And have a look at the angle of the cut. Slight, but it’s there.”

Hardanger took one end of the wire in his hand and peered at it.

“From left at the front to right at the back,” he murmured. “The way a left-handed man would naturally hold cutters or pliers to obtain maximum leverage.”

“A left-handed man,” I agreed. “Or a right handed man who wanted to confuse us. So a man who’s either left-handed or clever or both.”

Hardanger looked at me in disgust and made his way slowly to the inner fence. No footprints, no marks between the fences. The inner fence had been cut in three places, whoever had wielded those cutters would have felt more secure from observation from the ring road. The point we had yet to establish was why he had felt so secure from the attention of the police dogs patrolling the area between the two fences.

The trip-wires under the overhang of the second fence were intact. Whoever had cut that fence had been lucky indeed in not stumbling over them. Or he’d known their exact location. Our friend with the pliers didn’t strike me as a man who would depend very much on luck.

And the method he’d adopted to get through the electric fence proved it. Unlike most such fences, where only the top wire carried the current all the way, the others being made live by a vertical joining wire cable at each set of insulators, this fence was live in every wire throughout. The alarm bell would be rung by the shorting of any of those wires to earth, as when someone touched them, or by the cutting of any of the wires. This hadn’t fazed our friend with the pliers—insulated pliers, quite obviously. The two strands of TRS cable lying on the ground between two posts showed this clearly enough. He’d bent one end of one strand on to the lowest insulator of one post, trailed it across the ground and done the same with the lowest insulator on the next post, so providing an alternate pathway for the current. He’d done the same with the pair of insulators above these, then simply cut away both lowermost wires and crawled through under the third wire.

“An ingenious beggar,” Hardanger commented. “Almost argues inside information, doesn’t it?”

“Or somebody just outside the outer fence with a powerful telescope or binoculars. The ring road is open to public traffic, remember. Wouldn’t be hard to sit in a car and see what type of electric fence it was: and I dare say if the conditions were right he could have seen the trip-wires on the inner fence glistening in the sun.”

“I dare say,” Hardanger said heavily. “Well, it’s no damn’ good us staying here and staring at this fence. Let’s get back and start asking questions.”

All the men Hardanger had asked to see were assembled in the reception hall. They were sitting on benches around the hall, fidgeting and restless. Some of them looked sleepy, all of them looked scared. I knew it would take Hardanger about half of one second to sum up their mental condition and act accordingly. He did. He took his seat behind a table and looked up under his shaggy brows, the pale blue eyes cold and penetrating and hostile. As an actor, he wasn’t all that far behind Inspector Martin.

“All right,” he said brusquely. “The jeep crew. The ones who made the wild-goose chase last night. Let’s have you.”

Three men—a corporal and two privates—rose slowly to their feet. Hardanger gave his attention to the corporal.

“Your name, please?”

“Muirfield, sir.”

“You in charge of the crew last night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Yes, sir. We’d completed a circuit of the ring road, stopped to report everything O.K. at the main gate and then left again. It would be about eleven-fifteen, sir, give or take a minute or two. About two hundred and fifty yards past the gates we saw this girl running into the headlights. She looked wild, dishevelled like, her hair all over the place. She was half-screaming, half-crying, a funny noise. I was driving. I stopped the jeep, jumped out, and the others came after me. I should have told them to stay where they——”

“Never mind about what you should have done. The story, man!”

“Well, we came up to her, sir. She’d mud on her face and her coat was torn. I said—”

“Ever seen her before?”

“No, sir.”

“Would you recognise her again?”

He hesitated. “I doubt it, sir. Her face was in a fair old mess.”

“She spoke to you?”

“Yes, sir. She said——”

“Recognise her voice? Any of you recognise her voice? Can you be quite sure of that?”

Three solemn shakes of their heads. They hadn’t recognised her voice.

“All right,” Hardanger said wearily. “She pitched the tale of the damsel in distress. At the psychological moment someone conveniently betrayed his presence and started running. You all took off after him. Catch a glimpse of him?”

“A glimpse, only, sir. Just a blur in the darkness. Could have been anyone.”

“He took off in a car, I understand. Just another blur, I take it?”

“Yes, sir. Not a car, sir. A closed van type, sir. A Bedford.”

“I see.” Hardanger stopped and stared at him. “A Bedford! How the devil do you know? It was dark, you said.”

“It was a Bedford,” Muirfield insisted. “I’d know the engine anywhere. And I’m a garage mechanic in civvy street.”

“He’s right, Superintendent,” I put in. “A Bedford does have a very distinctive engine note.”

“I’ll be back.” Hardanger was on his feet and it didn’t need any clairvoyance to see him heading for the nearest telephone. He glanced at me, nodded at the seated soldiers and left.

I said, pleasantly enough, “Who was the dog-handler in number one last night?” The circuit between the two barbed-wire fences were divided into four sections by wooden hurdles: number one was the section in which the break-in occurred. “You, Ferguson?”

A dark stocky private in his middle twenties had risen to his feet. Ferguson was regular Army, a born soldier, tough, aggressive, and not very bright.

“Me,” he said. There was truculence in his voice, not very much, but more waiting there if I wanted it.

“Where were you at eleven fifteen last night?”

“In number one. With Rollo. That’s my alsatian.”

“You saw the incident that Corporal Muirfield here has described?”

“’Course I saw it.”

“Lie number one, Ferguson. Lie number two and you’ll be returned to your regiment before the day is out.”

“I’m not lying.” His face was suddenly ugly. “And you can’t talk to me like that, Mister Cavell. You can’t threaten me any more. Don’t think we don’t all know you were sacked from here!”

I turned to the orderly. “Ask Colonel Weybridge to come here. At once, please.”

The orderly turned to go, but a big sergeant rose to his feet and stopped him.

“It’s not necessary, sir. Ferguson’s a fool. It’s bound to come out. He was at the switchboard having a smoke and a cup of cocoa with the gatehouse communications number. I was in charge. Never saw him there, but I knew about it and didn’t worry about it. Ferguson always left Rollo in number one—and that dog’s a killer, sir. It was safe enough.”

“It wasn’t, but thanks. You’ve been in the habit of doing this for some time, haven’t you, Ferguson?”

“I haven’t.” He was scowling, sullen. “Last night was the first——”

“If there was a rank lower than private,” I interrupted wearily, “you’d stay in it till the end of your days. Use what little sense you have. Do you think whoever arranged this decoy move and was standing by with his pliers ready to break in did it unless he knew for certain you wouldn’t be on patrol at that particular time? Probably after Mr. Clandon finished his 11 p.m. rounds visit to the main gate every night you went straight into the gatehouse for your smoke and cocoa. Isn’t that it?”

He stood staring down at the floor in stubborn silence until the sergeant said sharply, “For God’s sake, Fergie, use your loaf. Everybody else here can see it. So can you.”

Again silence, but this time a sullen nod of defeat.

“We’re getting someplace. When you came here you left your dog—Rollo—behind?”

“Yes, sir.” Ferguson’s days of truculent defiance were over.

“What’s he like?”

“He’d tear the throat out of any man alive, from the general downwards,” Ferguson said with satisfaction. “Except me, of course.”

“He didn’t tear out any throats last night,” I pointed out. “I wonder why?”

“He must have been got at,” Ferguson said defensively.

“What do you mean ‘got at’? Did you have a look at him before you turned him into his compound last night?”

“Look at him? ‘Course not. Why should I? When we saw the cut outer fence we thought whoever done it must have caught sight of Rollo and run for his life. That’s what I would have bloody well done. If——”

“Fetch the dog here,” I said. “But for God’s sake muzzle him first.” He left and while he was away Hardanger returned. I told him what I’d learned, and that I’d sent for the dog.

Hardanger asked, “What do you expect to find? Nothing, I think. A chloroform pad or something like that would leave no mark. Same if some sort of dart or sharply tipped weapon with one of those funny poisons had been chucked at him. Just a pinprick, that’s all there would be.”

“From what I hear of our canine pal,” I said, “I wouldn’t try to hold a chloroform pad against his head if you gave me the crown jewels. As for those funny poisons, as you call them, I don’t suppose one person in a hundred thousand could lay hands on one of them or know how to use them even if they did. Besides, throwing or firing any sharp-tipped weapon against a fast-moving, thick-coated target in the dark would be a very dicey proposition indeed. Our friend of last night doesn’t go in for dicey propositions, only for certainties.”

Ferguson was back in ten minutes, fighting to restrain a wolf-like animal that lunged out madly at anyone who came near him. Rollo had a muzzle on but even that didn’t make me feel too confident. I didn’t need any persuasion to accept the sergeant’s word that the dog was a killer.

“Does that hound always act like this?” I demanded.

“Not usually.” Ferguson was puzzled. “In fact, never. Usually perfectly behaved until I let him off the leash—then he’ll go for the nearest person no matter who he is. But he even had a go at me this afternoon—half-hearted, like, but nasty.”

It didn’t take long to discover the source of Rollo’s irritation. Rollo was suffering from what must have been a very severe headache indeed. The skin on the forehead, just above eye-level, had a swollen pulpy feeling to it and it took four men all their time to hold the dog down when I touched this area with the tips of my forefingers. We turned him over, and I parted the thick fur on the throat till I found what I was looking for—two triangular jagged tears, deep and very unpleasant looking, about three inches apart.

“You’d better give your pal here a couple of days off,” I said to Ferguson, “and some disinfectant for those gashes on his neck. I wish you luck when you’re putting it on. You can take him away.”

“No chloroform, no fancy poisons,” Hardanger admitted when we were alone. “Those gashes— barbed wire, hey?”

“What else? Just the right distance apart. Somebody pads his forearm, sticks it between a couple of strands of barbed wire and Rollo grabs it. He wouldn’t bark—those dogs are trained never to bark. As soon as he grabs he’s pulled through and down onto the barbed wire and can’t pull himself free unless he tears his throat out. And then someone clouts him at his leisure with something heavy and hard. Simple, old-fashioned, direct and very very effective. Whoever the character we’re after, he’s no fool.”

“He’s smarter than Rollo, anyway,” Hardanger conceded heavily.

CHAPTER THREE

When we went up to “E” block, accompanied by two of Hardanger’s assistants newly arrived from London, we found Cliveden, Weybridge, Gregori and Wilkinson waiting for us. Wilkinson produced the key to the heavy wooden door.

“No one been inside since you locked the place after seeing Clandon?” Hardanger asked.

“I can guarantee that, sir. Guards posted all the time.”

“But Cavell here asked for the ventilation system to be switched on. How could that be done without someone going inside?”

“Duplicate switches on the roof, sir. All fuse-boxes, junctions and electrical terminals are also housed on the roof. Means that the repair and maintenance electricians don’t even have to enter the main building.”

“You people don’t miss much,” Hardanger admitted. “Open up, please.”

The door swung back, we all filed through and turned down the long corridor to our left. Number one lab was right at the far end of the corridor, as least two hundred yards away, but that was the way we had to go: there was only the one entrance to the entire block. Security was all. On the way we had to pass through half a dozen doors, some opened by photo-electric cells, others by handles fifteen inches long. Elbow handles. Considering the nature of the burdens that some of the Mordon scientists carried from time to time, it was advisable to have both hands free all the time.

We came to number one lab—and Clandon. Clandon was lying just outside the massive steel door of the laboratory, but he wasn’t any more the Neil Clandon I used to know—the big, tough, kindly, humorous Irishman who’d been my friend over too many years. He looked curiously small now, small and huddled and defenceless, another man altogether. Not Neil Clandon any more. Even his face was the face of another man, eyes abnormally wide and starting as one who had passed far beyond the realms of sanity into a total and terror-induced madness, the lips strained cruelly back over clenched teeth in the appalling rictus of his dying agony. And no man who looked at that face, at the convulsively contorted limbs could doubt that Neil Clandon had died as terribly as man ever could.

They were all watching me, that I was vaguely aware of, but I was pretty good at telling my face what to do. I went forward and stooped low over him, sniffing, and found myself apologising to the dead man for the involuntary wrinkling distaste of nose and mouth. No fault of Neil’s. I glanced at Colonel Weybridge and he came forward and bent beside me for a moment before straightening. He looked at Wilkinson and said, “You were right, my boy. Cyanide.”

I pulled a pair of cotton gloves from my pocket. One of Hardanger’s assistants lifted his flash camera but I pushed his arm down and said, “No pictures. Neil Clandon’s not going into anyone’s morgue gallery. Too late for pictures anyway. If you feel all that like work why don’t you start on that steel door there? Fingerprints. It’ll be loaded with them—and not one of them will do you the slightest damn’ bit of good.”

The two men glanced at Hardanger. He hesitated, shrugged, nodded. I went though Neil Clandon’s pockets. There wasn’t much that could be of any use to me—wallet, cigarette case, a couple of books of matches and, in the left hand jacket pocket, a handful of transparent papers that had been wrapped round butterscotch sweets.

I said, “This is how he died. The very latest in confectionery—cyanide butterscotch. You can see the sweet he was eating on the floor there, beside his head. Have you such a thing as an analytical chemist on the premises, Colonel?”

“Of course.”

“He’ll find that sweet and possibly one of those butterscotch papers covered with cyanide. I hope your chemist isn’t the type who licks his fingers after touching sticky stuff. Whoever doctored this sweet knew of Clandon’s weakness for butterscotch. He also knew Clandon. Put it another way, Clandon knew him. He knew him well. He knew him so well and was so little surprised to find him here that he didn’t hesitate to accept a butterscotch from him. Whoever killed Clandon is not only employed in Mordon—he’s employed in this particular section of ‘E’ block. If he weren’t, Clandon would have been too damn’ busy suspecting him of everything under the sun even to consider accepting anything from him. Narrows the field of inquiry pretty drastically. The killer’s first mistake—and a big one.”

“Maybe,” Hardanger rumbled. “And maybe you’re oversimplifying and taking too much for granted. Assumptions. How do you know Clandon was killed here? You’ve said yourself we’re up against a clever man, a man who would be more likely than not to obscure things, to cause confusion, to cast suspicions in the wrong place by killing Clandon elsewhere and then dragging him here. And it’s asking too much to believe that he just happened to have a cyanide sweet in his pocket that he just happened to hand to Clandon when Clandon just happened to find him doing what he was doing.”

“About the second part I don’t know,” I said. “I should have thought myself that Clandon would have been highly suspicious of anyone he found here late at night, no matter who he was. But Clandon died right here, that’s for sure.” I looked at Cliveden and Weybridge. “How long for cyanide poisoning to take effect?”

“Practically instantaneous,” Cliveden said.

“And he was violently ill here,” I said. “So he died here. And look at those two faint scratches on the plaster of the wall. A lab check on his fingernails is almost superfluous; that’s where he clawed for support as he fell to the floor. Some ‘friend’ gave Clandon that sweet, and that’s why I’d like the wallet, cigarette case and books of matches printed. There’s just a chance in a thousand that the friend may have been offered a cigarette or a match, or that he went through Clandon’s wallet after he was dead. But I don’t think there’s even that chance in a thousand. But I think the prints on that door should be interesting. And informative. I’ll take a hundred to one in anything you like that the prints on that door will be exclusively of those entitled to pass through that door. What I really want to find out is whether there’s been any signs of deliberately smearing, as with a handkerchief or gloves, in the vicinity of the combination, time-lock or circular handle.”

“There will be,” Hardanger nodded. “If your assumption that this is strictly an inside job is correct, there will be. To bring in the possibility of outsiders.”

“There’s still Clandon,” I said.

Hardanger nodded again, turned away to watch his two men working on the door. Just then a soldier came up with a large fibre case and a small covered cage, placed it on the floor, saluted nobody in particular and left. I caught the inquiring lift of Cliveden’s eyebrow.

“When I go into the lab,” I said, “I go in alone. In that case is a gas-tight suit and closed circuit breathing apparatus. I’ll be wearing that. I lock the steel door behind me, open the inner door and take the hamster in this cage in with me. If he’s still alive after a few minutes—well, it’s clear inside.”

“A hamster?” Hardanger turned his attention from the door, moved across to the cage and lifted the cover. “Poor little beggar. Where did you acquire a hamster so conveniently?”

“Mordon is the easiest place in Britain to acquire a hamster conveniently. There must be a couple of hundred of them within a stone’s throw from here. Not to mention a few thousand guinea-pigs, rabbits, monkeys, parrots, mice and fowls. They’re bred and reared on Alfringham Farm— where Dr. Baxter has his cottage. Poor little beggar, as you say. They’ve a pretty short life and far from sweet one. The R.S.P.C.A. and the National Anti-Vivisection Society would sell their souls to get in here. The Official Secrets Act sees to it that they don’t. Mordon is their waking nightmare and I don’t blame them. Do you know that over a hundred thousand animals died inside these walls last year—many of them in agony. They’re a sweet bunch in Mordon.”

“Everyone is entitled to his opinions,” General Cliveden said coldly. “I don’t say I entirely disagree with you.” He smiled without humour. “The right place for airing such sentiments, Cavell, but the wrong time.”

I nodded, acknowledgement or apology, he could take it how he liked, and opened the fibre case. I straightened, gas-suit in hand, and felt my arm gripped. Dr. Gregori. The dark eyes were intense behind the thick glasses, the swarthy face tight with worry.

“Don’t go in there, Mr. Cavell.” His voice was low, urgent, almost desperate. “I beg of you, don’t go in there.”

I said nothing, just looked at him. I liked Gregori, as did all his colleagues without exception. But Gregori wasn’t in Mordon because he was a likeable man. He was there because he was reputed to be one of the most brilliant micro-biologists in Europe. An Italian professor of medicine, he’d been in Mordon just over eight months. The biggest catch Mordon had ever made, and it had been touch and go at that: it had taken cabinet conferences at the highest levels before the Italian government agreed to release him for an unspecified period. And if a man like Dr. Gregori was worried, maybe it was time that I was getting worried too.

“Why shouldn’t he go in there?” Hardanger demanded. “I take it you must have very powerful reasons, Dr. Gregori?”

“He has indeed,” Cliveden said. His face was as grave as his voice. “No man knows more about number one lab than Dr. Gregori. We were speaking of this a short time ago. Dr. Gregori admits candidly that he’s terrified and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that he’s got me pretty badly frightened, too. If Dr. Gregori had his way he’d cut through the block on either side of number one lab, built a five foot thick concrete wall and roof round it and seal it off for ever. That’s how frightened Dr. Gregori is. At the very least he wants this lab kept closed for a month.”

Hardanger gave Cliveden his usual dead-pan look, transferred it to Gregori, then turned to his two assistants. “Down the corridor till you’re out of earshot, please. For your own sakes, the less you know of this the better. You, too, Lieutenant. Sorry.” He waited until Wilkinson and the two men had gone, looked quizzically at Gregori and said, “So you don’t want number one lab opened, Dr. Gregori? Makes you number one on our suspect list, you know.”

“Please. I do not feel like smiling. And I do not feel like talking here.” He glanced quickly at Clandon, looked as quickly away. “I’m not a policeman— or a soldier. If you would——”

“Of course.” Hardanger pointed to a door a few yards down the passage. “What’s in there?”

“Just a store-room. I am so sorry to be so squeamish——”

“Come on.” Hardanger led the way and we went inside. Oblivious of the “No smoking” signs, Gregori had lit a cigarette and was smoking it in rapid, nervous puffs.

“I must not waste your time,” he said. “I will be as brief as I can. But I must convince you.” He paused, then went on slowly. “This is the nuclear age. This is the age when tens of millions go about their homes and their work in daily fear and dread of the thermo-nuclear holocaust which, they are all sure, may come any day, and must come soon. Millions cannot sleep at night for they dream too much—of our green and lovely world and their children lying dead in it.”

He drew deeply on his cigarette, stubbed it out, at once lit another. He said through the drifting smoke, “I have no such fears of a nuclear Armageddon and I sleep well at nights. Such war will never come. I listen to the Russians rattling their rockets, and I smile. I listen to the Americans rattling theirs, and I smile again. For I know that all the time the two giant powers are shaking their sabres in the scabbards, while they’re threatening each other with so many hundreds of megaton-carrying missiles, they are not really thinking of their missiles at all. They are thinking, gentlemen, of Mordon, for we—the British, I should say—have made it our business to ensure that the great nations understand exactly what is going on behind the fences of Mordon.” He tapped the brickwork beside him. “Behind this very wall here. The ultimate weapon. The world’s one certain guarantee of peace. The term ‘ultimate weapon’ has been used too freely, has come almost to lose its meaning. But the term, in this case, is precise and exact. If by ‘ultimate’ one means total annihilation.”

He smiled, a little self-consciously.

“I’m being melodramatic, a little? Perhaps. My Latin blood shall we say? But listen carefully, gentlemen, and try to understand the full significance of what I’m going to say. Not the General and Colonel, of course, they already know: but you, Superintendent, and you, Mr. Cavell.

“We have developed in Mordon here over forty different types of plague germs. I will confine myself to two. One of them is a derivative of the botulinus toxin—which we had developed in World War II. As a point of interest, a quarter of a million troops in England were inoculated against this toxin just before D-Day and I doubt whether any of them know to this day what they were inoculated against.

“We have refined this toxin into a fantastic and shocking weapon compared to which even the mightiest hydrogen bomb is a child’s toy. Six ounces of this toxin, gentlemen, distributed fairly evenly throughout the world, would destroy every man, woman and child alive on this planet today. No flight of fancy.” His voice was weighted with heavy emphasis, his face still and sombre. “This is simple fact. Give me an airplane and let me fly over London on a windless summer afternoon with no more than a gramme of botulinus toxin to scatter and by evening seven million Londoners would be dead. A thimbleful in its water reservoirs and London would become one vast charnel house. If God does not strike me down for using the term ‘ideal’ in this connection, then this is the ideal form of germ warfare. The botulinus toxin oxidises after twelve hours exposure to the atmosphere and becomes harmless. Twelve hours after country A releases a few grammes of botulinus over country B it can send its soldiers in without any fear of attack by either the toxin or the defending soldiers. For the defending soldiers would be dead. And the civilians, the men, the women, the children. They would all be dead. All dead.”

Gregori fumbled in his pocket for another cigarette. His hands were shaking and he made no attempt to conceal the fact. He was probably unaware of it.

I said, “But you used the term ‘ultimate weapon’, as if we alone possessed it. Surely the Russians and Americans——”

“They have it too. We know where Russia’s laboratories in the Urals are. We know where the Canadians manufacture it—the Canadians were leaders in the field until recently—and it’s no secret that there are four thousand scientists working on a crash programme in Fort Detrick in America to produce even more deadlier poisons, so hurried a crash programme that we know that scientists have died and eight hundred of them fallen ill over the past few years. They have all failed to produce this deadlier poison. Britain has succeeded which is why the eyes of the world are on Mordon.”

“Is it possible?” Hardanger’s tone was dry but his face was set. “A deadlier poison than this damn’ botulinus? Seems kind of superfluous to me.”

“Botulinus has its drawback,” Gregori said quietly. “From a military viewpoint that is. Botulinus you must breathe or swallow to become infected. It is not contagious. Also, we suspect that a few countries may have produced a form of vaccine against even the refined type of drug we have developed here. But there is no vaccine on earth to counteract the newest virus we have produced—and it’s as contagious as a bush-fire.

“This other virus is a derivative of the polio virus—infantile paralysis, if you will—but a virus the potency of which has been increased a million times by—well, the methods don’t matter and you wouldn’t understand. What does matter is this: unlike botulinus, this new polio virus is indestructible—extremes of heat and cold, oxidisation and poison have no effect upon it and its life span appears to be indefinite, although we believe it impossible—we hope it impossible—that any virus could live for more than a month in an environment completely hostile to growth and development; unlike botulinus it is highly contagious, as well as being fatal if swallowed or breathed; and, most terrible of all, we have been unable to discover a vaccine for it. I myself am convinced that we can never discover a vaccine against it.” He smiled without humour. “To this virus we have given a highly unscientific name, but one that describes it perfectly—the Satan Bug. It is the most terrible and terrifying weapon mankind has ever known or ever will know.”

“No vaccine?” Hardanger said. His tone wasn’t dry this time but his lips were. “No vaccine at all?”

“We have given up hope. Only a few days ago, as you will recall, Colonel Weybridge, Dr. Baxter thought he had found it—but we were completely wrong. There is no hope, none in the world. Now all our efforts are concentrated on evolving an attenuated strain with a limited life-span. In its present form, we obviously cannot use it. But when we do get a form with a limited life-span— and its death must be caused by oxidisation—then we have the ultimate weapon. When that day comes all the nations of the world may as well destroy their nuclear weapons. From a nuclear attack, no matter how intense, there will always be survivors. The Americans have calculated that even a full-scale Soviet nuclear attack on their country, with all the resources at Russia’s disposal, would cause no more than seventy million deaths—no more, I say!—with possibly several million others as a result of radiation. But half the nation would survive, and in a generation or two that nation would rise again. But a nation attacked by the Satan Bug would never rise again: for there would be no survivors.”

I hadn’t been wrong about Hardanger’s lips being dry, he was licking them to make speaking easier. Someone should see this, I thought. Hardanger scared. Hardanger truly and genuinely frightened. The penitentiaries of Britain were full of people who would never have believed it.

“And until then,” Hardanger said quietly. “Until you have evolved this limited life-strain?”

“Until then?” Gregori stared down at the concrete floor. “Until then? Let me put it this way. In its final form the Satan Bug is an extremely refined powder. I take a salt-spoon of this powder, go outside in the grounds of Mordon and turn the salt-spoon upside down. What happens? Every person in Mordon would be dead within an hour, the whole of Wiltshire would be an open tomb by dawn. In a week, ten days, all life would have ceased to exist in Britain. I mean all life. The Plague, the Black Death—was nothing compared with this. Long before the last man died in agony ships or planes or birds or just the waters of the North Sea would have carried the Satan Bug to Europe. We can conceive of no obstacle that can stop its eventual world-wide spread. Two months I would say, two months at the very most.

“Think of it, Superintendent, think of it. If you can, that is, for it is something really beyond our conception, beyond human imagination. The Lapp trapping in the far north of Sweden. The Chinese peasant tilling his rice-fields in the Yangtse valley. The cattle rancher on his station in the Australian outback, the shopper in Fifth Avenue, the primitive in Tierra del Fuego. Dead. All dead. Because I turned a salt-spoon upside down. Nothing, nothing, nothing can stop the Satan Bug. Eventually all forms of life will perish. Who, what will be the last to go? I cannot say. Perhaps the great albatross for ever winging its way round the bottom of the world. Perhaps a handful of Eskimos deep in the Arctic basin. But the seas travel the world over, and so also do the winds: one day, one day soon, they too would die.”

By this time I felt like lighting a cigarette myself and I did. If any enterprising company had got around to running a passenger rocket service to the moon by the time the Satan Bug got loose, they wouldn’t have to spend all that much on advertising.

“What I’m afraid of you see,” Gregori went on quietly, “is what we may find behind that door. I have not the mind of a detective, but I can see things when they lie plainly before me. Whoever broke his way into Mordon was a desperate man playing for desperate stakes. The end justified by any means—and the only ends to justify such terrible means would be some of the stocks in the virus cupboard.”

“Cupboard?” Hardanger drew down his bushy brows “Don’t you lock those damn’ germs away somewhere safe?”

“They are safe,” I said. “The lab walls are of reinforced concrete and panelled with heavy-gauge mild steel. No windows, of course. This door is the only way in. Why shouldn’t it be safe in a cupboard?”

“I didn’t know.” Hardanger turned back to Gregori. “Please go on.”

“That’s all.” Gregori shrugged. “A desperate man. A man in a great hurry. The key to the locker—just wood and glass—I have in my hands here. See? He would have to break in. In his haste and with the use of force who knows what damage he may not have done, what virus containers he might not have knocked over or broken? If one of those had been a Satan Bug container, and there are but three in existence … Maybe it’s only a very remote chance. But I say to you, in all sincerity and earnestness, if there was only one chance in a hundred million of a Satan Bug container having been broken, there is still more than ample justifcation for never opening that door again. For if one is broken and one cubic centimetre of tainted air escapes—” He broke off and lifted his hands helplessly. “Have we the right to take upon ourselves the responsibility of being the executioners of mankind?”

“General Cliveden?” Hardanger said.

“I’m afraid I agree. Seal it up.”

“Colonel Weybridge?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Weybridge took off his cap, ran his hand through the short dark hair. “Yes, I do now. Seal the damn’ place up.”

“Well. You’re the three men who should really know what they are talking about.” Hardanger pursed his lips for a moment, then glanced at me. “In the face of expert unanimity, it should be interesting to hear what Cavell thinks.”

“Cavell thinks they’re a pack of old women,” I said. “I think your minds are so gummed up with the idea of the Satan Bug on the loose that you’re incapable of thinking at all, far less thinking straight. Let’s look at the central fact—central supposition, rather. Dr. Gregori bases all his fears on the assumption that someone has broken in and stolen the viruses. He thinks there’s one chance in a thousand that one of the containers may have been broken, so if that door is opened there’s one chance in a thousand of menace to mankind. But if he has actually stolen the Satan Bug, then the menace to mankind becomes not one in a thousand— but a thousand to one. For heaven’s sake take the blinkers off for a moment and try to see that a man on the loose with the viruses presents an infinitely greater danger than the remote chance of his having broken one inside those doors. Simple logic says that we must guard against the greater danger. So we must get inside the room—how else can we begin to get any trace of the thief and killer, to try to guard against the infinitely greater danger? We must, I say.

“Or I must. I’m dressing up and taking that hamster in there. If the hamster survives, good and well. If he doesn’t I don’t come out. Fair enough?”

“Of all the damned arrogance,” Cliveden said coldly. “For a private detective, Cavell, you have an awful lot of gall. You might bear in mind that I’m the commandant in Mordon and I take all the decisions.”

“You did, General. But not any more. The Special Branch has taken over—completely. You know that.”

Hardanger ignored us both. Grasping at straws, he said to Gregori, “You mentioned that a special air filtration unit was working inside there. Won’t that have cleared the air?”

“With any other virus, yes. Not with the Satan Bug. It’s virtually indestructable, I tell you. And it’s a closed circuit filtration unit. The same air, washed and cleaned, is fed back in again. But you can’t wash away the Satan Bug.”

There was a long pause, then I said to Gregori, “If the Satan Bug or botulinus is loose in this lab, how long would it take to affect the hamster?”

“Fifteen seconds,” he said precisely. “In thirty seconds it will be in convulsions. In a minute, dead. There will be reflex muscle twitchings but it will be dead. That’s for the Satan Bug. For botulinus only slightly longer.”

“Don’t stop me from going in,” I said to Cliveden. “I’ll see what happens to the hamster. If he’s O.K., then I’ll wait another ten minutes. Then I’ll come out.”

“If you come out.” He was weakening. Cliveden was nobody’s fool. He was too clever not to have gone over what I had said and at least some of it must have made sense to him.

“If anything—any virus—has been stolen,” I said, “then whoever stole it is a madman. The Kennet, a tributary of the Thames, passes by only a few miles from here. How do you know that madman isn’t bent over the Kennet this instant, pouring those damned bugs into the water?”

“How do I know you won’t come out if that hamster does die?” Cliveden said desperately. “Good God, Cavell, you’re only human. If that hamster does die, do you expect me to believe that you’re going to remain in there till you die of starvation? Asphyxiation, rather, when the oxygen gives out? Of course you’re going to come out.”

“All right, General, suppose I come out. Would I still be wearing the gas-suit and breathing apparatus?”

“Obviously.” His voice was curt. “If you weren’t and that room was contaminated—well, you couldn’t come out. You’d be dead.”

“All right, again. This way.” I led the way out to the corridor, indicated the last corridor-door we’d passed through. “That door is gas-tight. I know that. So are those outside double windows. You stand at that corridor door—have it open a crack. The door of number one lab opens on it— you’ll see me as soon as I begin to come out. Agreed?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This.” I reached inside my jacket, pulled out the Hanyatti automatic, knocked the safety catch off. “You have this in your hand. If, when the lab door opens, I’m still wearing the suit and breathing apparatus, you can shoot me down. At fifteen feet and with nine shots you can hardly fail to. Then you shut the corridor door. Then the virus is still sealed inside ‘E’ block.”

He took the gun from me, slowly, reluctantly, uncertainly. But there was nothing uncertain about eyes and voice when finally he spoke.

“You know I shall use this, if I have to?”

“Of course I know it.” I smiled. But I didn’t feel much like it. “From what I’ve heard I’d rather die from a bullet than the Satan Bug.”

“I’m sorry I blew my top a minute ago,” he said quietly. “You’re a brave man, Cavell.”

“Don’t fail to mention the fact in my obituary in The Times. How about asking your men to finish off printing and photographing that door, Superintendent?”

* * *

Twenty minutes later the men were finished and I was all ready to go. The others looked at me with that peculiar hesitancy and indecision of people who think they should be making farewell speeches but find the appropriate words too hard to come by. A couple of nods, a half wave of a hand, and they’d left me. They all passed down the corridor and through the next door, except General Cliveden, who remained in the open doorway. From some obscure feeling of decency, he held my Hanyatti behind his body where I couldn’t see it.

The gas-suit was tight and constricting, the closed circuit breathing apparatus cut into the back of my neck and the high concentration of oxygen made my mouth dry. Or maybe my mouth was dry anyway. Three cigarettes in the past twenty minutes—a normal day’s quota for me, I preferred to take my slow poisoning in the form of a pipe—wouldn’t have helped any either. I tried to think of one compelling reason why I shouldn’t go through that door, but that didn’t help either, there were so many compelling reasons that I couldn’t pick and choose between them, so I didn’t even bother trying. I made a last careful check of suit, mask and oxygen cylinders, but I was only kidding myself, this was about my fifth last careful check. Besides, they were all watching me. I had my pride. I started spelling out the combination on the heavy steel door.

A fairly complicated and delicate operation at any time, the operation of opening that door was made doubly difficult by reinforced-rubber covered fingers and poor vision afforded by slanted goggles. But exactly a minute after I’d begun I heard the heavy thud as the last spin of the dial energised the powerful electro-magnets that withdrew the heavy central bolt: three complete turns of the big circular handle and the half-ton door eased slowly open under the full weight of my shoulder.

I picked up the hamster’s cage, eased in quickly through the opening door, checked its swing and closed it as swiftly as possible. Three turns of the inner circular handle and the vault door was locked again. The chances were that in so doing I had wiped off a fair number of prints but I wouldn’t have wiped off any prints that mattered.

The rubber-sealed frosted-glass door leading into the laboratory proper was at the other end of the tiny vestibule. Further delay would achieve nothing—nothing apart from prolonging my life, that was. I leaned on the fifteen-inch elbow handle, pressed open the door, passed inside and closed the door behind me.

No need to switch on any lights—the laboratory was already brilliantly illuminated by shadowless neon lighting. Whoever had broken into that lab had either figured that the Government was a big enough firm to stand the waste of electricity or he’d left in such a tearing hurry that he’d had no time to think of lights.

I’d no time to think of lights either. Nor had I the inclination. My sole and over-riding concern was with the immediate welfare of the tiny hamster inside the cage I was carrying.

I placed the cage on the nearest bench, whipped off the cover and stared at the little animal. No bound man seated on a powder keg ever watched the last few minutes of sputtering fuse with half the mesmerised fascination, the totally-exclusive concentration with which I stared at that hamster. The starving cat with up-raised paw by the mouse-hole, the mongoose waiting for the king-cobra to strike, the ruined gambler watching the last roll of the dice—compared to me, they were asleep on the job. If ever the human eye had the power of transfixion, that hamster should have been skewered alive.

Fifteen seconds, Gregori had said. Fifteen seconds only and if the deadly Satan Bug virus was present in the atmosphere of that lab the hamster would react. I counted off the seconds, each second a bell tolling towards eternity, and at exactly fifteen seconds the hamster twitched violently. Violently, but nothing compared to the way my heart behaved, a double somersault that seemed to take up all the space inside the chest wall, before settling down to an abnormally slow heavy thudding that seemed to shake my body with its every beat. Inside the rubber gloves the palms of my hands turned wet, ice-cold. My mouth was dry as last year’s ashes.

Thirty seconds passed. By this time, if the virus was loose, the hamster should have been in convulsions. But he wasn’t, not unless convulsions in a hamster took the form of sitting up on its hind legs and rubbing its nose vigorously with a couple of tiny irritated paws.

Forty-five seconds. A minute. Maybe Dr. Gregori had over-estimated the virulence of the virus. Maybe this was a hamster with an abnormally tough and resistant physique.

But Gregori didn’t strike me as the sort of scientist who would make any mistakes and this looked like a pretty puny hamster to me. For the first time since entering the room I started to use the breathing apparatus.

I swung the top of the cage back on its hinges and started to lift out the hamster. He was still in pretty good shape as far as I could tell, for he wriggled from my hand, jumped down on to the rubber-tiled floor and scurried away up a long passage between a table and a wall-bench, stopping at the far end to get on with scratching his nose again. I came to the conclusion that if a hamster could take it I could too: after all, I outweighed him by about five hundred to one. I unbuckled the straps behind my neck and pulled off the closed circuit breathing apparatus. I took a long deep lungful of air.

That was a mistake. I admit you can hardly heave a vast sigh of relief at the prospect of keeping on living yet awhile just by sniffing cautiously at the atmosphere, but that is what I ought to have done. I could understand now why the hamster had spent his time in rubbing his nose with such disgusted intensity. I felt my nostrils try to wrinkle shut in nauseated repugnance as the vile smell hit them. Sulphuretted hydrogen had nothing on it.

Holding my nose I started moving around the benches and tables. Within thirty seconds, in a passage at the top of the laboratory, I found what I was looking for, and what I didn’t want to find. The midnight visitor hadn’t forgotten to switch out the lights, he’d just left in such a tearing hurry that the thought of light switches would never even have crossed his mind. His one ambition in life would have been to get out of that room and close both doors tightly behind him just as quickly as was humanly possible.

Hardanger could call off his search for Dr. Baxter. Dr. Baxter was here, still clad in his white knee-length overall, lying on the rubber floor. Like Clandon, he’d obviously died in contorted agony. Unlike Clandon, whatever had killed him hadn’t been cyanide. I knew of no type of death associated with this strange blueness of the face, with the outpouring of so much fluid from eyes, ears and nose, above all with so dreadful a smell.

Even to look was revolting enough. The idea of making a closer approach was more repugnant still, but I forced myself to do it anyway.

I didn’t touch him. I didn’t know the cause of death, but I had a pretty fair idea, so I didn’t touch him. Instead I stooped low over the dead man and examined him as carefully as was possible in the circumstances. There was a small contused area behind the right ear, with a little blood where the skin had been broken, but no noticeable swelling. Death had supervened before a true bruise had had time to form.

A few feet behind him, lying on the floor at the base of the wall farthest from the door, were fragments of a dark blue curved glass and a red plastic top—the shattered remnants, obviously, of some container or other: there were no signs at all of what the container had once held.

A few feet away in this wall was an inset rubber-sealed glass door: behind this, I knew, lay what the scientists and technicians called the menagerie— one of four in Mordon. I pushed open the door and went inside.

It was a huge windowless room, as large, almost, as the laboratory itself. All the wall spaces and three room-length benches were taken up by literally hundreds of cages of all types—some of a sealed-glass construction with their own private air-conditioning and filtration units, but most of the standard openmesh type. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, mostly small, red and beady, turned to stare at me as I entered. There must have been between fifteen hundred and two thousand animals in that room altogether—mostly mice, ninety per cent of them mice, I should have guessed, but also about a hundred rabbits and the same of guinea pigs. From what I could see they all seemed in fair enough health: anyway all of them had clearly been affected in no way at all by what had happened next door. I made my way back to the lab, closing the communicating door behind me.

Almost ten minutes I’d been inside now, and nothing had happened to me yet. And the chances were remote that anything would happen now. I cornered the hamster, returned him to his cage, and left the lab to open the heavy steel outer door. Just in time I remembered that General Cliveden would be waiting not far from the door ready to fill me full of holes if I emerged still wearing the gas-suit—Cliveden would be understandably trigger-happy and could easily miss the fact that I’d removed the breathing appparatus. I climbed out of the gas-suit and opened the door.

General Cliveden had the automatic at eye level, at the full stretch of his arm, pointing towards the widening crack of the doorway and myself. I don’t say he was happy at the prospect of shooting me but he was ready enough for it all the same. And it was a bit late now to tell him that the Hanyatti had a hair-trigger. I said quickly, “It’s all right. The air is clear inside.”

He lowered his arm and smiled in relief. Not a very happy smile, but still a smile. Maybe the thought had come to him too late in the day that he himself should have volunteered to go inside instead of me.

“Are you perfectly sure, Cavell?” he asked.

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” I said irritably. “You’d better come inside.” I went back into the lab and waited for them.

Hardanger was first through the door. His nose wrinkled in involuntary disgust and he said, “What in hell’s name is causing that vile smell?”

“Botulinus!” It was Colonel Weybridge who supplied the answer and in the shadowless neon lighting his face seemed suddenly grey. He whispered again: “Botulinus.”

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“How do I——” He stared down at the floor and looked up to meet my eyes. “We had an accident a fortnight ago. A technician.”

“An accident,” I repeated, then nodded. “You would know the smell.”

“But what the devil——” Hardanger began.

“A dead man,” I explained. “Killed by botulinus. At the top of the room. It’s Dr. Baxter.”

No one spoke. They looked at me, then at each other, then followed me silently up the lab to where Baxter lay.

Hardanger stared down at the dead man. “So this is Baxter.” His voice held no expression at all. “You are quite sure? Remember he checked out of here about half-past six last night.”

“Maybe Dr. Baxter owned a pair of wire-cutters,” I suggested. “It’s Baxter all right. Someone coshed him and stood at the lab door and flung a botulinus container against this wall closing the lab door behind him immediately afterwards.”

“The fiend,” Cliveden said hoarsely. “The unspeakable fiend.”

“Or fiends,” I agreed. I moved across to Dr. Gregori who had sat down on a high stool. He had his elbows on a bench his face was sunk in his hands. The straining finger tips made pale splotches against the swarthy cheeks and his hands were shaking. I touched him on the shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Gregori. As you said, I know you’re neither soldier nor policeman. You shouldn’t have to meet with those things. But you must help us.”

“Yes of course,” he said dully. He looked up at me and the dark eyes were smudged and with tears in them. “He was—he was more than just a colleague. How can I help, Mr. Cavell?”

“The virus cupboard. Check it please.”

“Of course, of course. The virus cupboard. What on earth could I have been thinking of?” He stared down at Baxter in fascinated horror and it was quite obvious what he was thinking of. “At once, at once.”

He crossed to a wooden cupboard with a glazed front and tried to open it. A couple of determined tugs and then he shook his head.

“It’s locked. The door’s locked.”

“Well.” I was impatient. “You have the key, haven’t you?”

“The only key. Nobody could have got in without this key. Not without force. It—it hasn’t been touched.”

“Don’t be so damned silly. What do you think Baxter died of—influenza? Open that cupboard.”

He turned the key with unsteady fingers. No one was looking at Baxter now—we’d eyes only for Dr. Gregori. He opened both doors, reached up and brought down a small rectangular box. He opened the lid and stared inside. After a moment his shoulders sagged and he seemed different altogether, curiously deflated, head bowed very low.

“They’re gone,” he whispered. “All of them. All nine of them have been taken. Six of them were botulinus—he must have used one on Baxter!”

“And the others,” I said harshly to the bowed back. “The other three?”

“The Satan Bug,” he said fearfully. “The Satan Bug. It’s gone.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The management refectory canteen at Mordon had something of a reputation among the more gourmet-minded of the staff and the chef that had prepared our lunch was right on form: maybe the presence at our table of Dr. MacDonald, a colleague of Gregori’s in number one lab and president of the mess, had something to do with it. However it was, it seemed that I was the only person with an appetite at all that day. Hardanger only picked at his food and neither Cliveden nor Weybridge made hardly any better a showing. Gregori ate nothing at all, just sat staring at his plate. He excused himself abruptly in the middle of the meal and when he came back in five minutes he looked white and shaken. Probably, I thought, he’d been sick. Violent death wouldn’t be much in the line of a professor specialising in the cloistered work of chemical research.

The two fingerprint experts weren’t there. They were still hungry. Aided by three other detectives recruited locally through Inspector Wylie they’d spent over an hour and a half fingerprinting the entire inside of the laboratory and were now collating and tabulating their results. The handle of the heavy steel door and the areas adjoining the combination lock had been heavily smeared with a cotton or linen material—probably a handkerchief. So the possibility of an outsider having been at work couldn’t be entirely excluded.

Inspector Martin came in towards the end of the meal. He’d spent all his time until then taking statements from the temporarily jobless scientists and technicians barred from “E” block and he wasn’t finished yet by a long way. Every statement made by those interviewed about their activities the previous evening would have to be rigorously checked. He didn’t say how he was getting on and Hardanger, predictably, didn’t ask him.

After lunch I accompanied Hardanger to the main gate. From the sergeant on duty there we learnt who had been in charge of the checking-out clock the previous evening. After a few minutes a tall blond fresh-faced corporal appeared and saluted crisply.

“Corporal Norris, sir. You sent for me.”

“Yes,” Hardanger said. “Take a seat, please. I’ve sent for you, Norris, to ask you some questions about the murder of Dr. Harold Baxter.”

The shock tactics worked better than any amount of carefully delicate probing could have done. Norris, already in the purpose of lowering himself gingerly into his chair, sat down heavily, as if suddenly grateful to take the weight off his feet, and stared at Hardanger. The eyes widening in a gaze of shocked incredulity, the opened mouth would have been within the compass of any moderately competent actor. But the perceptible draining of colour from the cheeks was something else again.

“The murder of Dr. Baxter,” he repeated stupidly. “Dr. Baxter—he’s dead?”

“Murdered,” Hardanger said harshly. “He was murdered in his laboratory last night. We know for a fact, never mind how, that Dr. Baxter never left Mordon last night. But you checked him out. You say you checked him out. But you didn’t. You couldn’t have done. Who gave you his security tag and told you to forge his signature? Or maybe that someone did it himself. How much did they pay you, Norris?”

The corporal had been staring at Hardanger in numbed bewilderment. Then the numbness passed and his native Yorkshire toughness reasserted itself. He rose slowly to his feet, his face darkening.

“Look, sir,” he said softly. “I don’t know who you are. Someone pretty important, I suppose, a police inspector or one of those M.I.6 chaps. But I can tell you this. Say that to me just once again and I’ll knock your bloody head clean off.”

“I believe you would, too.” Hardanger was suddenly smiling. He turned to me. “Not guilty, eh?”

“He could hardly be that good,” I agreed.

“I hardly think so. Forgive me, Norris. I had to find out something, and I had to find out fast. I’m investigating a murder. Murder isn’t a nice business and sometimes I’ve got to use tactics that aren’t very nice either. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Norris said uncertainly. He was slightly mollified, but only slightly. “Dr. Baxter. How—I mean, who——?”

“Never mind that just now,” Hardanger said briskly. “You checked him out. In this book here. Eighteen thirty-two hours, it says. That right?”

“If the book says so, sir. That time stamp’s automatic.”

“You took his security tag from him—this one?”

He held it up.

“Yes, sir.”

“Didn’t happen to speak to him, did you?”

“As a matter of fact, sir, yes.”

“About what?”

“Just the weather and the like, sir. He was always very friendly to us chaps. And his cold. About his cold. He’d a pretty bad one. Coughing and blowing his nose all the time.”

“You saw him clearly?”

“Course I did. I’ve been guard here for eighteen months and I know Dr. Baxter as well as my own mother. Dressed in his usual—checked ulster, trilby and those heavy horn glasses of his.”

“You’d swear to it in court? That it was Dr. Baxter, I mean?”

He hesitated, then said, “I’d swear to it. And both my mates on duty saw him also. You can check with them.”

We checked, then left to return to the administrative block. I said, “Did you really think Baxter stayed behind last night?”

“No,” Hardanger admitted. “He left all right— and came back with his pliers. Either alone or with someone else. Which on the face of it, would appear to make Baxter a bad ’un. But it seems that an even badder ’un disposed of him. When thieves fall out, perhaps.”

“You thought the signature genuine?”

“As genuine as any signature can ever be. No one ever signs his signature the same way twice. I think I’ll get on to the General in London straight away. An all-out check on Baxter might turn up something very interesting. Especially past contacts.”

“You’ll be wasting your time. From the point of view of security Baxter was sitting in the hottest seat in Europe—boss of number one lab in Mordon. Every step he’s taken from the day he learnt to walk, every word he’s said since, every person he’s met—they would have checked and re-checked a hundred times. Baxter’s clean. He’s just too big a fish to get through the security mesh.”

“So were a number of other characters who are now either in jail or Moscow,” Hardanger said grimly. “I’m phoning London now. Then checking with Wylie to see if they’ve turned up anything on that Bedford that was used as a getaway car. Then I’m going to see how Martin and the fingerprint boys are getting on. Coming?”

“No. I’d like to check with the internal guards who were on duty last night and mooch around on my own a little.”

He shrugged. “I’ve no jurisdiction over you, Cavell. But if anything turns up—you’ll let me know?” he added suspiciously.

“Think I’m crazy? With a guy walking around with the Satan Bug in his vest pocket do you think I’m going to start a one-man war?”

He nodded, still a little suspiciously, and left me. I spent the next hour checking with the six internal guards who had been on duty before midnight the previous night and learnt what I had expected to learn—nothing. All of them were well-known to me, which was probably the real reason why Hardanger had wanted me down in Mordon, and all of them had been on duty in Mordon for at least three years. All of their stories tallied and none of it helped at all. With two guards I made a minute check of all windows and the entire roof area of “E” block and I was just wasting my time.

No one had seen Clandon from the time he left Lieutenant Wilkinson at the gatehouse, just after 11 p.m., till his body had been found. Normally, no one would have expected to see him, for after making his rounds Clandon retired for the night to the little concrete cottage he had to himself less than a hundred yards from “E” block. This cottage faced on the long glass corridor of the block, where, as a security precaution, the lights burned night and day. It was no great trick to guess that Clandon had seen something suspicious in “E” Block and gone to investigate. No other reason could have accounted for his presence outside number one laboratory.

I made my way to the gatehouse and asked for the register book showing the names and nature of business of all those who had checked in and out of Mordon the previous day. There were several hundred of those altogether, but all but a very few of them were staff regularly employed there. Groups of special visitors to Mordon were not infrequent: visiting scientists from the Commonwealth and Nato countries or an occasional small group of M.P.’s who were given to asking awkward questions in the Commons and were brought down to Mordon to see for themselves the sterling work being carried out there on the health front against anthrax, polio, Asian flu and other diseases: such groups were shown exactly what the Mordon authorities wanted them to be shown and usually came away no wiser than they had arrived. But, on that previous day, there had been no such groups of visitors: there had been fourteen callers altogether, all of them concerned with the delivery of various supplies. I copied down their names and the reasons for their visits, and left.

I phoned the local car-hire firm, asked for the indefinite hire of one of their cars and that it should be brought and left at the gates of Mordon. Another call to Alfringham, this time to the Waggoner’s Rest, and I was lucky enough to get a room. The last call was to London, to Mary. I told her to pack a suitcase for me and one for herself and bring them both down to the Waggoner’s Rest. There was a train from Paddington that would get her down by half-past six.

I left the gatehouse and went for a walk through the grounds. The air was cold and a chill October wind blowing, but I didn’t walk briskly. I paced slowly up and down beside the inner fence, head bowed, gazing down at my feet most of the time. Cavell lost in thought, or so I hoped any onlooker would think. I spent the better part of an hour there, paralleling the same quarter mile of fence all the time and at last I found what I was looking for. Or so I thought. Next circuit round I stopped to tie my shoe-lace and then there was no more doubt in my mind.

Hardanger was still in the administrative block when I found him. He and Inspector Martin were poring over freshly developed batches of photographic prints. Hardanger looked up and grunted, “How’s it going?”

“It’s not. Any progress with you?”

“No prints on Clandon’s wallet, cigarette case or books of matches—except his own, of course. Nothing of any interest on the doors. We’ve found the Bedford van—rather, Inspector Wylie’s men have found a Bedford van. Reported missing this afternoon by a chap called Hendry, an Alfringham carrier with three of those vans. Found less than an hour ago by a motor-cycle cop in the Hailem Woods. Sent my men across there to try it for prints.”

“It’s as good a way of wasting time as any.”

“Maybe. Do you know the Hailem Woods?”

I nodded, “Half-way between here and Alfringham there’s a ’B’ road forks off to the north. About a mile and a half along that road. There may have been woods there once, but they’ve gone now. You wouldn’t find a couple of dozen trees in the entire area now—outside gardens, that is. Residential, what’s called a good neighbourhood. This fellow Hendry—a check been made?”

“Yes. Nothing there. One of those solid citizens, not only the backbone of England but a personal friend of Inspector Wylie’s. They play darts for the same pub team. That,” Hardanger said heavily, “puts him beyond the range of all suspicion.”

“You’re getting bitter.” I nodded at the prints. “From number one lab, I take it. A first-class job. I wonder which of the prints belongs to the man who stays nearest to the spot where the Bedford was found.”

He gave me an up-from-under glance. “As obvious as that, is it?”

“Isn’t it? It would seem to leave him pretty well out. Dumping the evidence on your own door-step is as good a way as any of putting the noose round your own neck.”

“Unless that’s the way we’re intended to think. Fellow called Chessingham. Know him?”

“Research chemist. I know him.”

“Would you vouch for him?”

“In this business I wouldn’t vouch for St. Peter.

But I’d wager a month’s pay he’s clear.”

“I wouldn’t. We’re checking his story and we’ll see.”

“We’ll see. How many of the prints have you identified?”

“Fifteen sets altogether, as far as we can make out, but we’ve been able to trace only thirteen.”

I thought for a minute, then nodded. “That would be about right. Dr. Baxter, Dr. Gregori, Dr. MacDonald, Dr. Hartnell, Chessingham. Then the four technicians in that lab—Verity, Heath, Robinson and Marsh. Nine. Clandon. One of the night guards. And, of course, Cliveden and Weybridge. Running a check on them?”

“What do you think?” Hardanger said testily.

“Including Cliveden and Weybridge?”

“Cliveden and Weybridge!” Hardanger stared at me and Martin backed him up with another stare. “Are you serious, Cavell?”

“With someone running around with the Satan Bug in his pants pockets I don’t think it’s the time for being facetious, Hardanger. Nobody— nobody—is in the clear.” He gave me a long hard look but I ignored it and went on, “About those two sets of unidentified prints——”

“We’ll print every man in Mordon till we get them,” Hardanger said grimly.

“You don’t have to. Almost certainly they belong to a couple of men called Bryson and Chipperfield. I know them both.”

“Explain yourself.”

“They’re the two men in charge of running Alfringham Farm—the place that supplies all the animals for the experiments carried out here. They’re usually up here with a fresh supply of animals every week or so—the turnover in livestock is pretty heavy. They were here yesterday. I checked on the register book. Making a delivery to the animal room in number one laboratory.”

“You say you know them. What are they like?”

“Young. Steady, hard-working, very reliable. Live in adjacent cottages on the farm. Married to a couple of very nice girls. They have a kid apiece, a boy and a girl about six years old. Not the type, any of them, to get mixed up in anything wrong.”

“You guarantee them?”

“You heard what I said about St. Peter. I guarantee nothing and nobody. They’ll have to be checked. I’ll go if you like. After all, I have the advantage of knowing them.”

“You will?” Hardanger let me have his close look again. “Like to take Inspector Martin with you?”

“All one to me,” I assured him. It wasn’t, but I’d manners.

“Then in that case it’s not necessary,” Hardanger said. There were times, I thought, when Hardanger could be downright unpleasant. “Report back anything you find. I’ll lay on a car for you.”

“I already have one. Car-hire firm.”

He frowned. “That was unnecessary. Plenty of police and army cars available. You know that.”

“I’m a private citizen now. I prefer private transport.”

I found the car at the gate. Like so many rental machines it was a great deal older than its actual age. But at least it rolled and took the weight off my feet. I was glad to take the weight off my feet. My left leg hurt, quite badly, as it always did when I had to walk around for any length of time. Two eminent London surgeons had more than once pointed out to me the advantage of having my left foot removed and sworn that they could replace it with an artificial one not only indistinguishable from the genuine article but guaranteed pain-free. They had been quite enthusiastic about it but it wasn’t their foot and I preferred to hang on to it as long as possible.

I drove to Alfringham, spent five minutes there talking to the manager of the local dance-hall, and reached Alfringham Farm just as dusk was falling. I turned in through the gates, stopped the car outside the first of the two cottages, got out and rang the bell. After the third attempt I gave it up and drove to the second cottage. I’d get an answer there. Lights were burning behind the windows. I leaned on the bell and after some seconds the door opened. I blinked in the sudden wash of light, then recognised the man before me.

“Bryson,” I said. “How are you? Sorry to burst in like this but I’m afraid I’ve a very good reason.”

“Mr. Cavell!” Unmistakable surprise in his voice, all the more pronounced in the sudden conversational hush from the room behind him. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Thought you’d left these parts, I did. How are you, sir?”

“I’d like a few words with you. And with Chipperfield. But he’s not at home.”

“He’s here. With his missus. Turn about in each other’s house for our Saturday night get together.” He hesitated, exactly as I would have done if I’d settled down with some friends for a quiet drink and a stranger broke in. “Delighted to have you join us, sir.”

“I’ll keep you only a few minutes.” I followed Bryson into the brightly lit living-room beyond. A log fire burnt cheerfully in the fireplace and around it were a couple of small settees and a high chair or two. In the centre was a low table with some bottles and glasses. A comfortable, homely scene.

A man and two women rose as Bryson closed the door behind me. I knew all three—Chipperfield, a tall blond man, the outward antithesis in every way of the short stocky Bryson, and the two men’s wives, blonde and dark to match their husbands, but otherwise was a strong similarity—small, neat and pretty with identical hazel eyes. The similarity was hardly surprising—Mrs. Bryson and Mrs. Chipperfield were sisters.

After a couple of minutes, during which civilities had been exchanged and I’d been offered a drink and accepted for my sore leg’s sake, Bryson said, “How can we help you, Mr. Cavell?”

“We’re trying to clear up a mystery about Dr. Baxter,” I said quietly. “You might be able to help. I don’t know.”

“Dr. Baxter? In number one lab?” Bryson glanced at his brother-in-law. “Ted and me—we saw him only yesterday. Quite a chat with him, we had. Nothing wrong with him, sir, I hope?”

“He was murdered last night,” I said.

Mrs. Bryson clapped her hands to her mouth and choked off a scream. Her sister made some sort of unidentifiable noise and said, “No, oh no!” But I wasn’t watching them, I was watching Bryson and Chipperfield, and I didn’t have to be a detective to see that the news came as a complete shock and surprise to both of them.

I went on, “He was killed last night, before midnight, In his lab. Someone threw a deadly virus poison over him and he must have died in minutes. And in great agony. Then that someone found Mr. Clandon waiting outside the lab and disposed of him also—by cyanide poisoning.”

Mrs. Bryson rose to her feet, her face paper-white, her sister’s arms around her, blindly threw her cigarette into the fireplace and left the room. I could hear the sound of someone being sick in the bathroom.

“Dr. Baxter and Mr. Clandon dead? Murdered?” Bryson’s face was almost as pale as his wife’s had been. “I don’t believe it.” I looked at his face again. He believed it all right. He listened to the sounds coming from the bathroom and then said with as much angry reproach as his shaken state would allow, “You might have told us private, like, Mr. Cavell. Without the girls being here, I mean.”

“I’m sorry.” I tried to look sorry. “I’m not myself. Clandon was my best friend.”

“You did it on purpose,” Chipperfield said tightly. He was normally a likeable and affable young man, but there was nothing affable about him right then. He said shrewdly, “You wanted to see how we all took it. You wanted to know if we had anything to do with it. Isn’t that it, Mr. Cavell?”

“Between eleven o’clock and midnight last night,” I said precisely, “you and your brother-in-law here were up for exactly five dances at the Friday night hop in Alfringham. You’ve been going there practically every Friday night for years. I could even tell you the names of the dances, but I won’t bother. The point is that neither of you—nor your wives—left the hall for an instant during that hour. Afterwards you went straight into your Land-Rover and arrived back here shortly after twelve-twenty. We have established beyond all doubt that both murders took place between 11.15 and 11.45 p.m. So let’s have no more of your silly accusations, Chipperfield. There can be no shadow of suspicion about you two. If there was, you’d be in a police cell, not seeing me here drinking your whisky. Speaking of whisky——”

“Sorry, Mr. Cavell. Damned silly of me. Saying what I did, I mean.” Chipperfield’s relief showed in his face as he rose to his feet and poured more whisky into my glass. Some of it spilled on to the carpet, but he didn’t seem to notice. “But if you know we’ve nothing to do with it, what can we do to help?”

“You can tell me everything that happened when you were in ‘E‘ block yesterday,” I said. “Everything. What you did, what you saw, what Dr. Baxter said to you and you to him. Don’t miss out a thing, the tiniest detail.”

So they told me, taking it in turns, and I sat there looking at them with unwavering attention and not bothering to listen to a word they said. As they talked, the two women came in, Mrs. Bryson giving me a pale, shame-faced half-smile, but I didn’t notice it, I was too busy doing my close listening act. As soon as the first decent opportunity came I finished my whisky, rose and made to leave. Mrs. Bryson said something apologetic about her silliness, I said something suitably apologetic in return and Bryson said, “Sorry we haven’t been able to be of any real help, Mr. Cavell.”

“You have helped,” I said. “Police work is largely confined to the confirming and eliminating of possibilities. You’ve eliminated more than you would think. I’m sorry I caused such an upset, I realise this must be quite a shock to both your families, being so closely associated with Mordon. Speaking of families, where are the kids to night?”

“Not here, thank goodness,” Mr. Chipperfield said. “With their grandmother in Kent—the October holidays, you know, and they always go there then.”

“Best place for them, right now.” I agreed. I made my apologies again, cut the leave-taking short and left.

It was quite dark outside now. I made my way back down to the hired car, climbed in, drove out through the farm gates and turned left for the town of Alfringham. Four hundred yards beyond the gates I pulled into a convenient lay-by switched off engine and lights.

My leg was aching badly, now, and it took me almost fifteen minutes to get back to Bryson’s cottage. The living room curtains were drawn, but carelessly. I could see all I wanted to, without trouble. Mrs. Bryson was sitting on a settee, sobbing bitterly, with her husband’s free arm round her: the other held a tumbler of whisky and the tumbler was more than half full. Chipperfield, a similar glass in his hand, was staring into the fire, his face dark and sombre. Mrs. Chipperfield, on the settee, was facing me. I couldn’t see her face, only the fair hair shining in the lamplight as she bent over something held in her hand. I couldn’t see what it was but I didn’t have to. I could guess with the certainty of complete knowledge. I walked quietly away and took my time in making my way back to the car. I still had twenty-five minutes before the London train was due in Alfringham. The train—and Mary.

Mary Cavell was all my life. Two months, only, I’d been married to her, but I knew it would be that way till the end of my days. All my life. An easy thing for any man to say, easy and trite and meaningless and perhaps a little cheap. Until you saw her, that was. Then you would believe anything.

She was small and blonde and beautiful, with amazing green eyes. But it wasn’t that that made her special, you could reach out your arms in the streets of London in the evening rush hour and pick up half a dozen girls without really trying, all of them small and blonde and beautiful. Nor was it just the infectious happiness that left no one untouched, her irrepressible gaiety, her obvious delight in a life that she lived with the intensity of a tropical hummingbird. There was something else. There was a shining quality about her, in her face, in her eyes, in her voice, in everything she said and did, that made her the only person I’d ever known who’d never had an enemy, male or female. There is only one word to describe this quality—the old-fashioned and much maligned term “goodness.” She hated do-gooders, those she called the goody-goodies, but her own goodness surrounded her like a tangible, and visible magnetic field. A magnetic field that automatically drew to her more waifs and strays, more people broken in mind and body than a normal person would encounter in a dozen lifetimes. An old man dozing away his last days in the thin autumn sunshine on a park bench, a bird with a broken wing—they all came alike to Mary. Broken wings were her speciality, and I was only now beginning to realise that for every wing we saw her mend there was another the world knew nothing about. And, to make her perfect, she had the one drawback which kept her from being inhumanly perfect—she had an explosive temper that could erupt in a most spectacular fashion and to the accompaniment of the most shockingly appropriate language: but only when she saw the bird with the broken wing—or the person responsible for breaking it.

She was my wife and I still wondered why she married me. She could have chosen almost any man she’d ever known, but she’d chosen me. I think it was because I had a broken wing. The German tank-track that had crushed my leg in the mud at Caen, the gas-shell that had scarred one whole side of my face—Adonis would never have claimed it for his own, anyway—beyond hope of plastic surgery and left me with a left eye that could just barely tell the difference between night and day, that made me a bird with a broken wing.

The train came in and I saw her jumping down lightly from a compartment about twenty yards away, followed by a burly middle-aged character with a bowler hat and umbrella, carrying her suitcase, the dead image of the big city tycoon who spends his business hours grinding in the faces of the poor and evicting widows and orphans. I’d never seen him before and I was certain neither had Mary. She just had the effect on people: the most unlikely citizens fought each other for the privilege of helping her and the tycoon looked quite a fighter.

She came running down the platform to meet me and I braced myself for the shock of impact. There was nothing inhibited about Mary’s greetings and although I still wasn’t reconciled to the raised eyebrows of astonished fellow-travellers I was getting accustomed to them. I’d last seen her only this morning but I might have been a long lost loved one coming home for the first time after a generation in the Australian outback. I was setting her down on terra firma as the tycoon came up, dumped the cases, beamed at Mary, tipped his bowler, turned away, still beaming at her, and tripped over a railway barrow. When he’d got up and dusted himself he was still beaming. He tipped his bowler again and disappeared.

“You want to be careful how you smile at your boyfriends,” I said severely. “Want me to spend the rest of my life working to pay off claims for damages against you? That oppressor of the working class that just passed by—he’d have me wearing the same suit for the rest of my life.”

“He was a very nice man indeed.” She looked up at me, suddenly not smiling. “Pierre Cavell, you’re tired, worried stiff and your leg is hurting.”

“Cavell’s face is a mask,” I said. “Impossible to tell his feelings and thoughts—inscrutable, they call it. Ask anyone.”

“And you’ve been drinking whisky.”

“It was the long separation that drove me to it.” I led the way to the car. “We’re staying at the Waggoner’s Rest.”

“It sounds wonderful. Thatched roofs, oak beams, the inglenooks by the blazing fire.” She shivered. “It is cold. I can’t get there fast enough.”

We got there in three minutes. I parked the car outside a modernistic confection in gleaming glass and chrome. Mary looked at it, then at me and said, “This is the Waggoner’s Rest?”

“You can see what the neon sign says. Outdoor sanitation and boll-weevils in the bed-posts have gone out of fashion. And they’ll have central heating.”

The manager, at the moment doubling as receptionist, would have felt more at home in an eighteenth-century “Waggoner’s Rest.” Red-faced, shirt-sleeved and smelling powerfully of the breweries. He scowled at me, smiled at Mary and summoned a ten-year-old boy, presumably his son, who showed us to our room. It was clean enough and spacious enough and overlooked a back courtyard decked out in a poor imitation of a continental beer garden. More important, one of the windows overlooked the porchway leading into the court.

The door closed behind the boy and Mary came up to me. “How is that stupid leg of yours, Pierre? Honestly?”

“It’s not so good.” I’d given up trying to tell lies about myself to Mary, as far as I was concerned she was a human lie-detector. “It’ll ease up. It always does.”

“That arm-chair,” she ordered. “And the stool, so. You’re not using that leg again tonight.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to. Quite a bit. Damn’ nuisance, but it can’t be helped.”

“It can be helped,” she insisted. “You don’t have to do everything yourself. There are plenty of men——”

“Not this time, I’m afraid. I have to go out. Twice. I want you to come with me the first time, that’s why I wanted you here.”

She didn’t ask any questions. She picked up the phone, ordered whisky for me, sherry for herself. Old shirt-sleeves brought it up, huffing a bit after climbing the stairs. Mary smiled at him and said, “Could we have dinner in our room please?”

“Dinner?” Shirt-sleeves stiffened in outrage, his face going an imposible shade redder. “In your room? Dinner! That’s a good ’un! Where do you think you’ve landed—Claridges?” He brought his gaze down from the ceiling, where he’d been imploring heaven, and looked at Mary again.

He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, kept looking at her and I knew he was a lost man. “Claridges,” he repeated mechanically. “I well, I’ll see what can be done. Against the house rules, mind—you—but—it’ll be a pleasure, ma’am.”

He left. I said, “There should be a law against you. Pour me some whisky. And pass that phone.”

I made three calls. The first was to London, the second to Inspector Wylie and the third to Hardanger. He was still at Mordon. He sounded tired and irritated and I didn’t wonder. He’d had a long and probably frustrating day.

“Cavell?” His voice was almost a bark. “How did you get on with those two men you saw? At the farm, I mean.”

“Bryson and Chipperfield? Nothing there. There are two hundred witnesses who will swear that neither of them were within five miles of Mordon between eleven and midnight last night.”

“What are you talking about? Two hundred——”

“They were at a dance. Anything turned up in the statements made by our other suspects in number one lab?”

“Did you expect anything to turn up?” he said sourly. “Do you think the killer would have been so dumb as to leave himself without an alibi. They’ve all got alibis—and damn’ good ones. I’m still not convinced there wasn’t an outsider at work.”

“Chessingham and Dr. Hartnell. How strong are their stories?”

“Why those two?” His voice was a suspicious crackle.

“I’m interested in them. I’m going to see them tonight and I wondered what their stories were.”

“You’re not going to see anyone without my say-so, Cavell.” His voice was pretty close to a shout.

“I don’t want people blundering in——”

“I won’t blunder. I’m going, Hardanger. The General said I was to have a free hand, didn’t he? Blocking my way—which you can do—is not my idea of giving a free hand. The General wouldn’t like it, Hardanger.”

A silence. Hardanger was bringing himself under control. At last he said, in a quieter tone, “You gave me to believe that you didn’t suspect Chessingham.”

“I want to see him. He’s not only acute and observant, he’s more than usually friendly with Dr. Hartnell. It’s Hartnell I’m really interested in. He’s an outstanding research man, young and financially irresponsible. He thinks because he’s clever with bugs he can be the same on the stock market. Three months ago Hartnell put all his cash into a fly-by-night company who’d splurged their adverts in all the national dailies. He lost the lot. Then he mortgaged his house a few weeks before I left Mordon. I believe he lost most of that too, trying to recoup.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me before?” Hardanger demanded.

“It just suddenly came to me this evening.”

“It just suddenly came——” Hardanger’s voice cut off as if he had been strangled. Then he said, thoughtfully, “Isn’t that too easy? Jumping on Hartnell? Because he’s heading for the bankruptcy court?”

“I don’t know. As I say, he’s not clever at everything. I’ve got to find out. Both have alibis, of course?”

“Both were at home. Their families vouch for them. I want to see you later.” He’d given up. “I’ll be at the County in Alfringham.”

“I’m at the Waggoner’s Rest. A couple of minutes away. Could you come round to see us? About ten?”

“Us?”

“Mary came down this afternoon.”

“Mary?” There was surprise in his voice, suspicion that he didn’t get round to elaborating but, above all, pleasure. One good reason Hardanger had for not liking me too much was that I’d made off with the best secretary he’d ever had: she’d been with him three years and if any person could ever be said to be the apple of an eye like a basilisk it was Mary.

He said he would be around at ten.

CHAPTER FIVE

I drove out to Hailem Woods with Mary sitting strangely silent by my side. Over dinner I’d told her the whole story—the whole story. I’d never seen her scared before, but she was that now. Badly. Two frightened people in a car.

We reached Chessingham’s house about a quarter to eight. It was an old-fashioned, flat-roofed, stone-built affair with long narrow windows and a flight of stone steps leading up to the front door over a moat-like trench that ran right round the house and gave light to the basement. High trees, sighing in the cold night wind, surrounded the house on four sides and it was beginning to rain heavily. It was a place and a night in keeping with our mood.

Chessingham had heard the car and met us at the top of the steps. He looked pale and strained but there was nothing in that, everyone who was in anyway connected with “E” block had every reason for looking pale and strained that day.

“Cavell,” he said. He didn’t offer his hand, but opened the door wide and stood sideways to let us in. “I heard you were in Mordon. Must say I didn’t expect you out here though. I thought they asked me enough questions today as it was.”

“This is a pretty unofficial visit,” I assured him. “My wife, Chessingham. When I bring along my wife I leave the handcuffs at home.”

It wasn’t funny. He shook hands reluctantly with Mary and led us into an old-fashioned sitting-room with heavy Edwardian furniture, velvet drapes from ceiling to floor and a fire burning in a huge open fireplace. There were two people sitting in high-backed arm-chairs by the fire. One was a good-looking young girl of nineteen or twenty, slender, brown-haired and brown-eyed like Chessingham himself. His sister. The other, obviously, was his mother, but much older than I had expected his mother to be. A closer inspection showed that she wasn’t really so old, she just looked old. Her hair was white, her eyes had that curious glaze you sometimes see on old people who are coming to the end of their road, and the hands resting on her lap were thin and wrinkled and criss-crossed with blue veins. Not an old woman: a sick woman, a very sick woman, prematurely aged. But she sat very erect and there was a welcoming smile on her thin, rather aristocratic features.

“Mr. and Mrs. Cavell,” Chessingham said. “You’ve heard me speak of Mr. Cavell. My mother, my sister Stella.”

“How do you do, both of you?” Mrs. Chessingham had that assured direct no-nonsense voice that would have gone well with a Victorian drawing-room and a houseful of servants. She peered at Mary. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be, I’m afraid—but, my goodness, you are a beautiful girl. Come and sit beside me. How on earth did you manage it, Mr. Cavell?”

“I think she must have mistaken me for someone else,” I said.

“These things happen,” Mrs. Chessingham said precisely. For all their age, her eyes could still twinkle. She went on, “That was a dreadful thing that happened out at Mordon today, Mr. Cavell. Dreadful. I have been hearing all about it.” A pause, again the half-smile. “I hope you haven’t come to take Eric to jail already, Mr. Cavell. He hasn’t even had dinner yet. All this excitement, you know.”

“Your son’s only connection with this affair, Mrs. Chessingham, is that he is unfortunate enough to work in number one laboratory. Our only interest in him is his complete and final elimination as a suspect. Every narrowing of the field is an advancement of a kind.”

“He doesn’t have to be eliminated,” Mrs. Chessingham said with some asperity. “Eric has nothing to do with it. The idea is ridiculous.”

“Of course. You know that, I know that, but Superintendent Hardanger, who is in charge of investigations, doesn’t know that. All statements must be checked, no matter how unnecessary the checking. I had a great deal of difficulty in persuading the superintendent that I should come instead of one of his own officers.” I saw Mary’s eyes widen but she recovered herself quickly.

“And why did you do that, Mr. Cavell?” I was beginning to feel sorry for young Chessingham, he must have felt foolish and ineffectual with his mother taking command in this fashion.

“Because I know your son. The police don’t. Saves seventy-five per cent of the questioning straight away. And Special Branch detectives can ask a great number of brutal and unnecessary questions in a case like this.”

“I don’t doubt it. Nor do I doubt that you could be as ruthless as any man I’ve ever known if the occasion arose. But I know you won’t on this occasion.” She sighed and shifted her hands to the arms of her chair. “I hope you will excuse me. I am an old woman and not very well and so I have some privileges—dinner in bed is one.” She turned and smiled at Mary. “I’d like to talk to you, my child. I have so few callers—I make the most of them. Would you like to help me negotiate those dreadful stairs while Stella sees to the dinner?”

When we were alone Chessingham said: “Sorry about Mother. She does tend——”

“I think she’s a wonderful woman. No need to apologise.” His face lightened a little at that. “About your statement. You said you were at home all night. Mother and sister will of course vouch for that?”

“Of course.” He smiled. “They’d vouch for it whether I was at home or not.”

“I’d be surprised if they wouldn’t, after seeing them,” I nodded. “Your mother could say anything and she would be believed. Not your sister. She’s young and inexperienced and any competent policeman could break her down inside five minutes. If you were in any way involved, you’re too smart not to see that, so your story has to be true. Can they vouch for the entire night—up to eleven-fifteen, say?”

“No.” He frowned. “Stella went to bed about ten-thirty. After that I spent a couple of hours on the roof.”

“Chessingham’s observatory? I’ve heard of it. No one can prove you were up there?”

“No.” He frowned again, thinking. “Does it matter? I haven’t even a bicycle and there’s no public transport at that time of night. If I was here after ten-thirty I couldn’t have made it to Mordon by eleven-fifteen anyway. Four and a half miles, you know.”

“Do you know how the crime was carried out?” I asked. “I mean have you heard? By someone making a diversion to allow someone else to cut through the fences. The red herring got away in a Bedford van stolen from Alfringham.”

“I’d heard something like that. The police weren’t very communicative, but rumours get around.”

“Did you know that the van was found abandoned only one hundred and fifty yards from your house?”

“A hundred and fifty yards!” He seemed genuinely startled, then stared moodily into the fire. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

He thought briefly, then grinned. “I’m not as smart as you think. It’s not bad, it’s good. If I were driving that van I’d have had to go to Alfringham first for it—after leaving here at ten-thirty. Also, if I were the driver, then I obviously couldn’t have gone to Mordon—I’d have been making my supposed getaway. Thirdly, I wouldn’t have been so damned stupid as to park it at my front door. Fourthly, I can’t drive.”

“That’s pretty conclusive,” I admitted.

“I can make it even more conclusive,” he said excitedly. “Lord, I’m not thinking at all tonight. Come up to the observatory.”

We went up the stairs. We passed a door on the first floor and I could hear the subdued murmur of voices. Mrs. Chessingham and Mary talking. A Slingsby ladder led us up into a square hut affair built in the centre of the flat roof. One end of the hut was blanked off with plywood, an entrance covered by a hanging curtain. At the other end was a surprisingly large reflector telescope set in a perspex cupola.

“My only hobby,” Chessingham said. The strain had left his face to be replaced by the eager excitement of the enthusiast. “I’m a member of the British Astronomical Association, Jupiter Section, and a regular correspondent for a couple of astronomical journals—some of them depend almost exclusively on the work of amateurs like myself—and I can tell you that there’s nothing less amateurish than an amateur astronomer who’s been well and truly bitten by the bug. I wasn’t in bed till almost two o’clock this morning— I was making a series of photographs for The Astronomical Monthly of the Red Spot in Jupiter and the satellite Io occulting its own shadow.” He was smiling broadly in his relief now. “Here’s the letter commissioning me to do them—they’ve been pleased with some other stuff I’ve sent in.”

I glanced at the letter. It had to be genuine, of course.

“Got a set of six photographs. Beauties, too, although I say it myself. Here, I’ll let you see them.” He disappeared behind the curtain which I took to be the entrance of his darkroom and reappeared with a batch of obviously very new photographs. I took them. They looked terrible to me, just a bunch of greyish dots and streaks against a fuzzily dark background. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not bad.” I paused and said suddenly, “Could anyone tell from those pictures when they were taken?”

“That’s why I brought you up here. Take those to the Greenwich observatory, have them work out the precise latitude and longitude of this house and they could tell you within thirty seconds when each of these photographs were taken. Go on, take them with you.”

“No thanks.” I handed back the photographs and smiled at him. “I know when I’ve already wasted enough time—and I’ve wasted far too much. Send them to The Astronomical Monthly with my best wishes.”

We found Mary and Stella talking by the fireside. A few civilities, a polite refusal of a drink and we were on our way. Once in the car I turned the heater switch up as far as it would go but it didn’t seem to make any difference. The switch probably wasn’t attached to any heater. It was bitterly cold and raining heavily. I hoped the rain would ease.

I said to Mary, “What did you find out?”

“I hate this business,” she said intensely. “I hate it. This sneaking underhand approach to people. The lies—the lies to a lovely old person like Mrs. Chessingham. And to that nice girl. To think I worked all those years for the superintendent and never thought——”

“I know,” I said. “But you have to fight fire with fire. Think of this double murderer. Think of this man with the Satan Bug in his pocket. Think of——”

“I’m sorry. I really am sorry. It’s just that I’m afraid I was never cut out to be—well, never mind. I didn’t find out much. They have a maid—that’s why dinner was ready shortly after Stella rose. Stella lives at home—her brother insists on it, insists she spends all her time looking after her mother. Her mother is really pretty ill, I gathered from Stella. May go at any time— though she’s been told by her doctor that a transfer to a warm climate, like Greece or Spain, might add ten years to her life. Some dangerous combination of asthma and a heart condition. But her mother doesn’t want to go, says she’d rather die in Wiltshire than vegetate in Alicante. Something like that. That was all, I’m afraid.”

It was enough. It was more than enough. I sat without speaking, thinking maybe the surgeons who wanted to give me a new foot had the right of it, when Mary said abruptly, “And you? Learn anything?”

I told her what had happened. At the end she said, “I heard you telling the superintendent that you really wanted to see Chessingham to find out what you could from him about Dr. Hartnell. What did you find out?”

“Nothing. Never asked him.”

“You never—why on earth not?”

I told her why not.

* * *

Dr. Hartnell and his wife—they had no children— were at home. Both of them knew Mary—we’d met, socially, once, during the brief time Mary had been staying with me when I lived in Mordon— but they clearly didn’t regard our visit as a social call. Everyone I was meeting was nervous, very much on the defensive. I didn’t blame them. I’d have been nervous too if I thought someone was trying to hang a couple of murders round my neck.

I went through the spiel about how my visit was only a formality and the unpleasant experience I was sparing them by coming myself instead of letting one of Hardanger’s men do the questioning. Their activities in the earlier part of the evening were of no interest to me. I asked them about the later part and they told me. At nine-thirty, they said, they had sat down to watch television— specifically, The Golden Cavaliers, a TV version of a successful stage play that had just finished a long run in London.

“Did you see that?” Mary broke in. “So did I. Pierre was out late last night with a business friend and I turned it on. I thought it was wonderful.” For some minutes they discussed the play. I knew Mary had seen it and I knew she was finding out whether they also had really seen it and there was no question but that they had. After some time I said, “When did it finish?”

“About eleven.”

“And then?”

“A quick bite of supper and bed,” Hartnell said.

“By, say, eleven-thirty?”

“By that, at the latest.”

“Well, that’s perfectly satisfactory.” I heard Mary clear her throat and looked across casually. Her steepled fingers were resting lightly in her lap. I knew what that meant—Hartnell was lying. This I couldn’t understand—but I’d infinite faith in her judgement.

I glanced at the clock. I’d asked for a call at eight-thirty and now it was exactly that. Inspector Wylie was on time. The bell rang, Hartnell spoke into the phone then handed it to me. “For you, Cavell. The police, I think.”

I spoke, holding the ear-piece fractionally away from my head. Wylie had a naturally carrying voice and I’d asked him to be good and loud. He was. He said, “Cavell? Ah, you told me you were going to be there so I took a chance. This is urgent. Nasty spot of bother at Hailem Junction. Close tie-up with Mordon, if I’m not mistaken. Very unpleasant indeed. Can you get down there immediately?”

“As soon as I can. Where’s Hailem Junction?”

“Not half a mile from where you are. The bottom of the lane, turn right and pass The Green Man. Just there.”

I hung up, rose and hesitated. “That was Inspector Wylie. Some trouble at Hailem Junction. I wonder if I could leave Mary here for a few minutes? The Inspector said it was something unpleasant——”

“Of course.” With his alibi accepted Dr. Hartnell was almost jovial. “We’ll look after her, old man.”

I parked the car a couple of hundred yards down the lane, took my torch from the glove box and turned back towards Hartnell’s house. A quick look through the lit window and I knew I had nothing to fear from that quarter. Hartnell was pouring drinks and all three seemed to be talking animatedly, the way people do when the strain is off. I knew I could rely on Mary keeping them talking there indefinitely. Mrs. Hartnell, I noticed, was still sitting in the chair she’d been occupying on our arrival, she hadn’t even risen to greet us. Maybe her legs were troubling her—elastic stockings aren’t as undetectable as some manufacturers would like to think.

The garage was locked by a heavy padlock but the master locksmith who had been responsible for a tiny part of the training of myself and a score of others in the now distant past would have laughed at it. I didn’t laugh at it, I was no master locksmith, but even so I had it open in less than two minutes. I hardly cut myself at all.

Somewhere along the line Hartnell’s ill-advised plunge into the stock market had compelled him to sell his car and now his sole means of transport was a Vespa scooter, although I knew he used a bus to and from Mordon. The scooter was in good condition and looked as if it had been cleaned recently, but I wasn’t interested in the clean parts, only the dirty ones. I examined the machine closely and finally scraped off some of the dried mud under the front mudguard and put it in a polythene bag, which I sealed. I spent another two minutes looking around the garage, left and locked it.

Another quick check on the living-room showed the three of them sitting round the fire, drinking and talking. I made my way to the tool-shed behind the garage. Another padlock. From where I was I was now completely hidden from the house so I took the chance of having a good long look at the padlock. Then I picked it and went inside.

The shed was no bigger than seven by five and it took me no longer than ten seconds to find what I was after. There had been no attempt to conceal anything. I used another couple of polythene bags, closed and locked the door behind me and made my way back to the car. Soon afterwards I parked the car in Hartnell’s driveway. Hartnell answered the doorbell.

“That didn’t take you long, Cavell,” he said cheerfully as he led me into the lounge. “What was——” His smile died away as he saw my face. “Was there—is there something wrong?”

“I’m afraid there is,” I said coldly. “Something very far wrong. You’re in trouble, Dr. Hartnell. I’m afraid it looks to me like pretty bad trouble. Would you care to tell me about it?”

“Trouble?” His face tightened, but there was the shadow of fear in his eyes. “What the devil are you talking about, Cavell?”

“Come off it,” I said. “I put some value on my time if you don’t on yours. And it’s because I refuse to waste my time that I’m not going to hunt around for any fancy gentlemanly words to express myself. To be brief and blunt, Hartnell, you’re a fluent liar.”

“You’ve gone too far, damn you, Cavell!” His face was pale, his fists were clenched and you could see that he was actively considering having a go at me which, as a medical man forty pounds lighter than I was, he should have recognised as an unpromising course of action. “I won’t take that line of talk from any man.”

“You’ll have to take it from the prosecuting counsel in the Old Bailey, so you might as well have some practice in getting used to it. If you saw The Golden Cavaliers last night, as you claimed, you must have had the TV set balanced on the handlebars of your scooter. The police constable who saw you passing through Hailem late last night made no mention of a TV set.”

“I assure you, Cavell, I haven’t the faintest idea——”

“You make me ill,” I said disgustedly. “Lies I can forgive but stupidity, in a man of your calibre, no.” I looked at Mary. “About this play, The Golden Cavaliers? ”

She lifted her shoulders, in discomfort and distress. “All TV broadcasts in southern England were badly affected by electrical disturbances last night. There were three breakdowns in the play and it didn’t finish until twenty minutes to twelve.”

“You must have a very special TV set indeed,” I said to Hartnell. I crossed to a magazine stand and picked up a copy of the Radio Times, but before I could open it Hartnell’s wife spoke, a tremor in her voice.

“You needn’t bother, Mr. Cavell. Last night’s play was a repeat of Sunday afternoon’s. We saw the play on Sunday.” She turned to her husband. “Come on, Tom, you’ll only make it worse for yourself.”

Hartnell stared miserably at her, turned away, slumped down in a chair and drained his glass in a couple of gulps. He didn’t offer me any but I didn’t add lack of hospitality to his list of faults, maybe the time wasn’t right. He said, “I was out last night. I left here just after ten-thirty. I had a phone call from a man asking me to meet him in Alfringham.”

“Who was the man?”

“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t see him—he wasn’t there when I arrived.”

“It wouldn’t have been our old pal Ten-per-cent Tuffnell of Tuffnell and Hanbury, Consultants-at-Law?”

He stared at me. “Tuffnell—do you know Tuffnell?”

“The ancient legal firm of Tuffnell and Hanbury is known to the police of a dozen counties. They style themselves ‘Consultants-at-Law.’ Anybody can call themselves ‘Consultants-at-Law.’ There’s no sueh thing so the bona-fide legal eagles can’t take any action against them. Tuffnell’s only knowledge of law comes from the fairly frequent occasions on which he had been hauled before the Assize judges, usually on charges of bribery and corruption. They’re one of the biggest money-lending firms in the country and by all odds the most ruthless.”

“But how—how did you guess——?”

“No guess that it was Tuffnell. A certainty. Only a man with a powerful hold over you could have got you out at that time of night and Tuffnell has that hold. He not only holds the mortgage on your house but also your note of hand for another £500.”

“Who told you that?” Hartnell whispered.

“No one. I found out for myself. You don’t think you’re employed in the laboratory with the highest security rating in Britain without our knowing everything about you. We know more about your own past than you know yourself. That’s the literal truth. Tuffnell it was, eh?”

Hartnell nodded. “He told me he wanted to see me at eleven sharp. I protested, naturally, but he said that unless I did what I was told he’d not only foreclose on the mortgage but he’d have me in the bankruptcy court for that five hundred pounds.”

I shook my head. “You scientists are all the same. Outside the four walls of your lab you ought to be locked up. A man who lends you money does so at his own risk and has no legal recourse. So he wasn’t there?”

“No. I waited a quarter of an hour, then went to his house—a whacking great mansion with tennis courts, swimming pool and what have you,” Hartnell said bitterly. “I thought he might have made a mistake about the meeting place. He wasn’t there. There was nobody there. I went back to the Aifringham office and waited a little longer then came home. About midnight, it was.”

“Anybody see you? You see anybody? Anybody who can vouch for your story.”

“Nobody. Nobody at all. It was late at night and the roads were deserted—it was bitterly cold.” He paused, then brightened. “That policeman—he saw me.” His voice seemed to falter on the last words.

“If he saw you in Hailem you could equally well have turned off for Mordon after leaving it.” I sighed. “Besides, there was no policeman. You’re not the only one who tells lies. So you see the spot you’re in, Hartnell? A phone call for which we have only your word—no trace of the man alleged to have made it. Sixteen miles on your scooter, including a wait in a normally busy little town—and not a living soul saw you. Finally, you’re deeply and desperately in debt—so desperate that you would be willing to do anything. Even break into Mordon, if the financial inducements were high enough.”

He was silent for a moment, then pushed himself wearily to his feet. “I’m completely innocent, Cavell. But I see how it is—and I’m not all that a fool. So I’m going to be—what do you call it— detained in custody?”

I said, “What do you think, Mrs. Hartnell?”

She gave me a troubled half-smile and said hesitantly, “I don’t think so. I—well, I don’t know how a police officer talks to a man he’s about to arrest for murder, but you don’t talk the way I should imagine they do.”

I said dryly, “Maybe you should be working in number one lab instead of your husband. As an alibi, Hartnell, your story is too ridiculously feeble for words. Nobody in their right minds would believe it for an instant, which means maybe that I’m not in my right mind. I believe it.”

Hartnell exhaled a long sigh of relief, but his wife said with a strange mixture of hesitancy and shrewdness, “It could be a trap. You could think Tom guilty and be lulling him into——”

“Mrs. Hartnell,” I said. “With respects, you are abysmally ignorant of the facts of life as they appertain to the wilds of Wiltshire. Your husband may think no one saw him, but I can assure you that the way between here and Alfringham is alive with people between 10.30 and 11 p.m.— courting couples, gentlemen between pubs and homes upending their last bottles to prepare themselves for wifely wrath, old ladies and some not so old peering between not-quite-closed curtains. With a squad of detectives I could turn up a score of people by noon tomorrow—I’ll wager a dozen Alfringham citizens saw Dr. Hartnell waiting outside Tuffnell’s office last night. I’m not even going to bother finding out.”

Mrs. Hartnell said softly, “He means it, Tom.”

“I mean it. Somebody is trying to divert suspicion to you, Hartnell. I want you to remain at home for the next two days—I’ll fix it at Mordon. You’re to talk to no one—no one—during that time. Take to your bed if you have to, but talk to no one. Your absence from work, your indisposition will be thought peculiar in the circumstances and will make somebody think our suspicions are directed towards you. You understand?”

“Completely. I’m sorry I was such a fool, Cavell, but——”

“I wasn’t very nice myself. Good night.”

In my car Mary said wonderingly, “What on earth is happening to the legendary Cavell toughness?”

“I don’t know. Tell me.”

“You didn’t have to tell him that he wasn’t under suspicion. After he’d told his story you could just have said nothing and let him carry on to his work as usual. A man like that would be incapable of hiding the fact that he was worried to death and that would have suited your purpose of making the real murderer think we’re on to Hartnell just as well. But you couldn’t do it, could you?”

“I wasn’t like this before I got married. I’m a ruined man. Besides, if Hartnell really knew the evidence against him he’d go off his rocker.”

She was silent for some time. She was sitting on my left hand side and I can’t see people who are sitting to my left but I knew she was staring at me. Finally, she said, “I don’t understand.”

“I have three polythene bags in the rear seat. In one of them is a sample of dried red mud. Hartnell invariably takes the bus to work—but I found that mud, a peculiar reddish loam, under the front mudguard of his scooter: and the only place for miles around with that type of soil is a couple of fields near the main gates of Mordon. In the second bag is a hammer I found in his toolshed—it looks clean, but I’m betting that a couple of grey hairs sticking to the haft came from our canine pal Rollo, who was so grievously clouted last night. The third bag contains a pair of heavy insulated pliers. They’ve been perfectly cleaned, but a comparison, by electronic microscope, of some scratches on it and the broken ends of the barbed wire in Mordon should give some very interesting results.”

“You found all that?” she whispered.

“I found all that. Near-genius, I would say.”

“You’re worried to death, aren’t you?” Mary asked. I made no reply and she went on, “Even with all that you still don’t think he’s guilty? I mean, that anyone should go to such lengths——”

“Hartnell’s innocent. Of the killing, anyway. Someone picked the lock of his tool-shed last night. Unmistakable scratches, if you know what to look for.”

“Then why did you remove——”

“Two reasons. Because there are some policemen in this island who have been so rigidly indoctrinated with the belief that two and two must inevitably make four that they wouldn’t think twice of by-passing the Old Bailey and dragging Hartnell to the nearest old oak tree. The red mud, hammer and pliers together with Paul Revere’s moonlight ride—it’s pretty damning.”

“But—but you said yourself that if he had been out last night there would have been witnesses——”

“Eyewash. I called Dr. Hartnell a fluent liar but he isn’t in my class. At night all cats are grey. During the dark any motor-cyclist with heavy coat, crash helmet and goggles looks pretty much like any other motor-cyclist with heavy coat, crash helmet and goggles. But I didn’t see that there was anything to be gained by worrying Hartnell and his wife to death: if there was I wouldn’t have hesitated. Not with this madman running around with the Satan Bug. Besides, I want Hartnell not to be worried.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I don’t rightly know,” I confessed. “Hartnell wouldn’t kill a fly. But Hartnell is mixed up in something very fishy indeed.”

“What makes you say that? You said he’s clear.

Why——”

“I told you I don’t know,” I said irritably. “Call it a hunch, call it something the subconscious mind cottoned on to and hasn’t yet got around to transferring to some place where I’ll recognise it. Anyway, my second reason for filching exhibits A, B and C is that whoever planted the goods on Hartnell and started him on his wild-goose chase is going to be more than a little worried himself now. If the police either cleared Hartnell or clapped him in the hoosegow, our friend would know where he stood. But with Hartnell mysteriously and suspiciously remaining at home and the police at the same time making no mention of having found exhibits A, B and C, the killer’s going to be kept wondering just what the cops are up to. Indecision. Indecision hampers action and hampering action buys time. We need all the time we can get.”

“You have a low and devious mind, Pierre Cavell,” Mary said at length, “but I think that if I were innocent of a crime and the evidence proved beyond any doubt that I was guilty, I’d rather have you investigating my case than anyone alive. By the same token, if I were guilty of a crime and there was no possibility of any evidence pointing to me, I’d rather have anyone else in the world except you investigating it. Or so my father says and he should know. I know you’ll find this man, Pierre.”

I wished I could even begin to share her conviction. But I couldn’t even begin. I was sure of nothing, nothing at all, except that Hartnell wasn’t the blue-eyed innocent he appeared, nor his good wife, and that my leg was aching pretty fiercely. I wasn’t looking forward very much to the remainder of that night.

We were back in the Waggoner’s Rest just before ten o’clock. Hardanger was waiting for us in a deserted corner of the lounge along with a dark-suited unknown man who turned out to be a police stenographer. The superintendent was studying some papers and scowling away into the middle distance from time to time, but the craggy face broke into a beam of pleasure when he looked up and saw us. Mary, rather. He was genuinely fond of her and found it difficult to understand why she had thrown herself away on me.

I let them talk for a minute or two, looking at Mary’s face and listening to her voice and wishing vaguely for the hundredth time that I had tape and film to record the soft lilting cadences of the voice and the facinating shift and play of expression in case the day should ever come when that would be all I would have left of her. Then I cleared my throat to remind them that I was still here. Hardanger looked at me, touched an internal switch and the smile vanished.

“Turn up anything startling?” he asked.

“In a way. The hammer that laid out the alsatian guard dog, the pliers that cut the wire and apparent proof that Dr. Hartnell’s moped was in the vicinty of Mordon last night.”

He didn’t bat an eyelid. He said, “Let’s go up to your room.” We went, and once there Hardanger said to a man accompanying him, “Johnson, your notebook,” and to me, “From the beginning, Cavell.”

I told him everything that had happened that night exactly as it had been, omitting only what Mary had learned from Chessingham’s mother and sister. At the end, Hardanger said, “You are convinced that it’s a frame-up on Hartnell?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“Hadn’t it occurred to you that there might be a double twist to this? That Hartnell planted it on himself?”

“Yes. But it’s hardly possible. I know Hartnell. Outside his work he’s blundering, nervous, unstable and an ass—hardly the basic material for the ruthless calculating criminal. And he’d hardly go the length of picking his own padlock. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ve told him to stay at home meantime. Whoever stole the botulinus and the Satan Bug did so for a purpose. Inspector Wylie’s pretty keen to get into the act. Let him have his men keep a round-the-clock watch on the house to see that Hartnell stays put. Hartnell, even if guilty, wouldn’t be so mad as to keep the viruses in the house. If they’re elsewhere and he can’t get at them, that’s one worry less. I also want a check made on his supposed moped trip of last night.”

“There’ll be a watch kept and check made,” Hardanger promised. “Chessingham tip you off in any way about Hartnell?”

“Nothing useful. Just my own hunch. Hartnell was the only person I knew of in number one lab in a position to be blackmailed or coerced. The point is that someone else knows it too. He also knew that Tuffnell was from home. That other man is the man we want. How did he find out?”

“How did you find out?” Hardanger demanded.

“Tuffnell himself told me. I was here for a fortnight some months ago helping Derry check on a bunch of newly arrived scientists. I asked him to give me the names of all Mordon employees who were coming to him for financial assistance. Hartnell is only one of a dozen.”

“Did you ask or demand?”

“Demanded.”

“You know that’s illegal,” Hardanger said heavily. “On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that if he didn’t I’d enough information to put him behind bars for years to come.”

“Had you that information?”

“No. But a shady character like Tuffnell has always a great deal to hide. He co-operated. Tuffnell may have talked about Hartnell. Or his partner, Hanbury.”

“How about other members of his staff?”

“There are none. Not even a typist. In a business like that you can’t trust your own mother. Apart from them, Cliveden, Weybridge—possibly— Clandon and myself knew. And Easton Derry of course. No one else had access to the security files in Mordon. Derry and Clandon are gone. How about Cliveden?”

“That’s ridiculous. He was at a War Office meeting till after midnight last night. In London.”

“What’s ridiculous about Cliveden having this information and passing it on to someone else?” Hardanger was silent and I went on, “And Weybridge. What was he doing at zero hour last night?”

“Asleep.”

“Who told you? Himself?” Hardanger nodded and I went on, “Corroboration?”

Hardanger looked uncomfortable. “He lives alone in the officers’ block. He’s a widower with an orderly to look after him.”

“That helps. How about the other check?”

“Seven others,” Hardanger said. “One, as you said it would be, was a night guard. Been there only two days—and his transfer was a complete surprise to him. Sent from his regiment to take the place of a sick guard. Dr. Gregori was at home all last night—he lives in a kind of high-class boardinghouse outside Alfringham and half a dozen people will swear he was there until at least midnight. That lets him out. Dr. MacDonald was at home with friends. Very respectable friends. Playing cards. Two of the technicians. Verity and Heath, were at the dance in Alfringham last night. They seem in the clear. The other two, Robinson and Marsh, were out on a double date with their girl friends. Cinema, café, then back to their homes.”

“So you’ve turned up nothing at all?”

“Not a damn’ thing.”

“But how about the two technicians and their girl friends?” Mary asked. “Robinson and Marsh— they provide each other’s alibis. And there was a girl used as a decoy.”

“Nothing there,” I said. “Whoever is responsible for this lot is far too smart to fall into the elementary error of self-supporting alibis. If either of the two girls was a stranger to those parts there might just be possibly something in it. But if Robinson and Marsh haven’t changed their girl friends since the last time we checked on them then they’re just a couple of harmless local girls. The superintendent here would have had the truth out of them in five minutes flat. Probably two.”

“Two it was,” Hardanger agreed. “Nothing there. We’ve sent all their footwear to the lab for a check—that fine red loam soil gets into the tiniest cracks and would be a dead giveaway—but it’s purely routine. Nothing will come of it. You want a copy of all those statements and witnesses’ reports?”

“Please. What’s your next move?”

“What would yours be?” Hartnell countered.

“I’d have Tuffnell, Hanbury, Cliveden and Weybridge questioned to see if they’ve ever spoken to anyone about Hartnell’s financial difficulties. Then I’d have Gregori, MacDonald, Hartnell, Chessingham, Cliveden, Weybridge and the four technicians questioned—separately of course—about the extent of their social life with the others. Whether they had ever been in each others’ homes is a question that might be tossed in casually. And I’d have fingerprint squads move into all their houses at the same time to print as much of every house as possible. You’d have no trouble getting warrants for that little lot. If X maintains he’s never been in Y’s home and you find prints proving him a liar— well, someone is going to have some interesting explaining to do.”

“Including General Cliveden’s and Colonel Weybridge’s homes?” Hardanger asked grimly.

“I don’t care whose feelings are wounded. This is no time to consider anyone’s hurt pride.”

“It’s a long long shot,” Hardanger said. “Criminals with something to hide, particularly the connection between them, would never meet in each other’s homes anyway.”

“Can you afford to ignore even such a long shot?”

“Probably not,” Hardanger said. “Probably not.”

Twenty minutes after their departure with the polythene bags I climbed out of the window, clambered to the ground via the porch, picked up my car where I’d left it parked in a side street and set off for London.

CHAPTER SIX

It was exactly half past two in the morning when I was shown into the library of the General’sWest End flat. The General welcomed me in a red quilted dressing-gown and waved me to a seat. He hadn’t been to bed—I could see that—the dressing-gown meant nothing, he invariably wore it inside the house.

Six foot three and built to match, the General would never see seventy again, but his back was as straight, his complexion as fresh and his eyes as clear as a man thirty years his junior. He had thick iron-grey hair, iron-grey trimmed moustache, grey eyes and the cleverest brain of any man I’d ever met. I could see he had been doing some thinking with this brain and wasn’t any too pleased with the conclusions he’d arrived at.

“Well, Cavell.” His voice was clipped, incisive, vaguely military. “You’ve made a pretty mess of things.”

“Yes, sir.” He was the only man in the world who rated a “sir” from me.

“One of my best operatives, Neil Clandon, is dead. Another as good, Easton Derry, is probably also dead, though only listed missing. Dr. Baxter, a great scientist and a great patriot—and how badly we need both—is dead. Whose fault, Cavell?”

“Mine.” I looked at a convenient decanter. “I could do with a drink, sir.”

“There rarely has been a time when you couldn’t,” he said acidly, and then, just one degree less acidic, “Leg acting up?”

“A little. Sorry about this hour of night, sir. It was essential. How do you want it—the story?”

“Straight, quick and from the beginning.”

“Hardanger turned up at 9 a.m. Sent in an Inspector Martin, heavily disguised as God knows what, to test my loyalty first. I suppose you thought that one up too. You might have warned me.”

“I tried to,” he said impatiently. “I was too late. The news of Clandon’s death reached General Cliveden and Hardanger before it did me: I rang you up but your home and office phones were out of order.”

“Hardanger did that,” I nodded. “Anyway I passed the test. Hardanger was satisfied and asked me to come to Mordon. Said he’d suggested it to you and you’d been reluctant. It must have taken quite a bit of doing to suggest something to Hardanger and leave him with the impression that he’d thought it up himself.”

“It was. Never underestimate Hardanger. An outstanding policeman. He has no suspicions? You’re sure?”

“That this was a put-up job? That it was you who engineered me out of the Special Branch and into Mordon, and then out of Mordon again? He has no suspicions. I guarantee.”

“Right. The story.”

I didn’t waste words. That was one of the very first things an agent learnt about the General— never to waste words with him. In ten minutes he’d all the relevant facts and he’d never forget one of them.

“Almost word for word with Hardanger’s reports that have already been filed with me through official channels,” he commented. “Almost, I said. Good policemen concentrate only on relevancies. Your conclusions, Cavell?”

“What about the investigation I asked to be made down in Kent, sir?”

“Negative.” I swallowed some more whisky. I needed it.

“Hardanger suspects Dr. Baxter to be a case of the biter bit,” I said. “You know that already—he phoned asking for a security check on Baxter. He suspects Dr. Baxter, probably accompanied by another man, broke into Mordon and that thieves fell out as a result of which Dr. Baxter met his death at the hands of his fellow breaker and enterer, an action that may have been either spur-of-the-moment or premeditated. What Hardanger doesn’t know is that it was Dr. Baxter who first reported to Easton Derry, directly and privately, that minute amounts of rare and valuable viruses were disappearing from Mordon and asked for an investigation, or that it was Baxter who, as a result of our requests, had me removed from Mordon so that I could carry on investigations in London under cover of a private detective’s business.

“Hardanger is wrong on both counts. Dr. Baxter didn’t break into Mordon that night for the sufficient reason that he hadn’t left it earlier that evening. The man behind this killing—a man working with a considerable organisation, I should say—has kidnapped the children of Bryson and Chipperfield, the farm managers. The fact that the kids are not where their parents say they are, with their grandmother in Kent, is all the proof I want. Bryson and Chipperfield were given their choice— co-operation or dead children. They co-operated. They carried crates of animals into number one lab on the afternoon of the killings. They were old regulars— the guards would never have thought of inspecting the crates. Inside two of these crates were two men fairly skilfully made up to resemble Dr. Baxter and someone we can call X.

“Eight crates were carried in that afternoon and Bryson and Chipperfield followed their usual practice of not disturbing the lab work too much by bringing in all the crates first and leaving them in the corridor, just outside the lab, before carrying them all in. This, of course, is conclusive proof of highly-detailed inside information. While the crates were there, one of the men inside—the one disguised as X—nipped smartly out into the adjoining cloakroom used by the scientists and technicians in number one. He probably hid in a locker. The other man—the one disguised as Baxter—was carried into the animal room. A dozen places where a man could hide there.

“Our enquiries show that the scientists and technicians drifted off singly that evening—they usually did. One of them—X—takes his chance of going into a momentarily empty cloakroom and changes over places with the impostor to whom he hands his security tag. The fake X now leaves by the main gate, handing in his tag and forging the name. It was a pitch dark night and he’d only be one of hundreds crowding out. He was pretty safe.

“X goes back into the lab when the coast is clear and sticks a gun into Baxter. More likely this has already been done by the man dressed to impersonate Baxter. Anyway it doesn’t matter. Baxter was always the last to leave, he was responsible for setting the combination and so they nailed him. By and by the impostor ‘B’ takes off and hands in Baxter’s card at the gate.

“X, of course, can’t just pocket the viruses, knock off Baxter and remove himself. As far as the gate guard is concerned, X has already checked out. He can’t check out a second time. He knows it won’t be safe to move until the last of the security rounds have been finished at 11 p.m. He waits till then, takes the viruses, belts Baxter over the head with his gun-butt and leaves, throwing a virus toxin at the unconscious man. He has to kill Baxter, because Baxter knew who he was. He didn’t know, as we did, that Clandon was keeping a binocular watch every night on the corridor in ‘E’ block, but it’s highly likely that he suspected he might. He’s not the man who would leave anything to chance. He must have known that this was the one possibility that might upset his plans. Hence the cyanide sweet. When Clandon came up after X had shut the door, X must have spun some yarn and got Clandon to accept the sweet. He obviously knew Clandon well and Clandon knew him.”

The General rubbed his moustache thoughtfully. “Ingenious, if nothing else. Basically, you must be right. But there’s something wrong about that cyanide business. Far wrong. Clandon was looking for a man that had been stealing virus supplies and he must have suspected that X was the man. I just don’t see Clandon accepting this butterscotch. Besides, X was carrying a gun, probably silenced. Why not that? Why the cyanide?”

“I don’t know, sir.” I felt like adding that I hadn’t been there.

“How did you get on to this in the first place?”

“The dog, sir. It had a couple of barbed wire tears in its throat. It seemed likely that there might be blood on the wire itself. There was. It took me an hour to find it. On the inner wire. No one broke into Mordon that night: someone broke out.”

“Why didn’t Hardanger discover this?”

“He’d no reason to suspect what I did. I knew that Baxter hadn’t broken in and a check with the gate guard showed that Baxter had his face covered with a handkerchief and talked thickly through a cold when he left. That was enough. Besides, Hardanger’s men did get around to examining the wires. They concentrated on the outside one for an hour or so and then moved to the inner fence.”

“And found nothing?”

“There was nothing to find. I’d removed the blood.”

“You’re an unethical devil, Cavell.”

“Yes, sir.” That was good coming from him.

“Then a visit to Bryson and Chipperfield. A couple of steady reliable characters drinking like fish at five-thirty in the afternoon and spilling it when they poured. Mrs. Bryson smoking like a factory chimney—she’s never smoked in her life. General air of quiet desperation, well concealed. But all very obvious.”

“Suspects?”

“There’s General Cliveden and Colonel Weybridge. Cliveden was in London at the time of the killing but although he’s only been in Mordon two or three times since taking over he has two things against him. He has access to the security files and may have known of Hartnell’s financial troubles—and it was strange that such a gallant soldier didn’t volunteer to go into the lab instead of me. It was his place, not mine—he bosses Mordon.”

“The two words ‘gallant’ and ‘soldier’ are not necessarily synonymous,” the General said dryly. “Remember he’s a doctor, not a fighting man.”

“That’s so. I also remember that two of the handful of double V.C.’s ever won were won by doctors. It doesn’t matter. Same two arguments apply to Weybridge, with the additional two factors that he lives on the premises and has no alibi. Gregori, because he was too insistent for what I regarded as insufficient reason to have the placed sealed off for keeps. But the fact of the insistence itself, being so obvious, may remove suspicion, as does the fact that the virus locker door was opened by a key—and Gregori had what was thought to be the only key. What do we really know about Gregori, sir?”

“The lot. Every step he’s taken from the cradle. The fact that he’s not a British national made his screening twice as intensive as normal. That’s from our side. Before he came here he was doing highly secret work in Turin for the Italian government and you can imagine the thorough going over Gregori got from them. He’s absolutely in the clear.”

“Which should make me pretty reluctant to waste time on him. Only trouble is, judging from past records, everyone else seems in the clear also. Anyway, these are the first three suspects—and I think Hardanger is beginning to have ideas about one or more of these three.”

“The ideas he got from you, eh?”

“I don’t like it, sir. I don’t like it because Hardanger is as straight as they come and it goes against the grain to operate behind his back. I don’t like saying or doing things which amount to deliberately misleading and deceiving him. And I don’t like it because Hardanger is very smart indeed and to keep him from tumbling to me I’ve got to devote almost as much time to keeping Hardanger reasonably satisfied as to investigating the case itself.”

“Don’t think I like it either,” the General said heavily. “But it has to be. We’re up against clever and determined men whose main weapons are secrecy, cunning and——”

“And violence.”

“All right then. Secrecy, cunning and violence. We must meet and destroy them on their chosen ground. I must employ the best weapon that comes to my hand. I know of no man who could or would presume to instruct you in any of those three. Secrecy. Cunning. Violence.”

“I haven’t been very cunning so far.”

“You haven’t,” the General admitted. “On the other hand, when I said to you that you’d made a mess of things, I was being less than fair. The initiative invariably rests with the criminal. Anyway, what matters is that you are essentially a loner, a one man band, while Hardanger is just as essentially an organisation man. With an organisation comes delegation of authority, dispersal of concentration, blunting of initiative and lowered secrecy: and any and all of those mitigate against the chances of final success. Nevertheless the organisation is indispensable to you: it carries out all the groundwork and routine investigation that you couldn’t possibly do yourself and diverts attention and suspicion from yourself: as long as Hardanger, unwittingly or no, misleads the killer or killers as to the direction the inquiry is taking— well, that’s all I want out of him.”

“He’s not going to like it when he finds out, sir.”

“If he finds out, Cavell. And that’s for me to worry about.”

“Other suspects?”

“The four technicians. Barely possible. All of them were seen moving around during the evening at one time or another and on the assumption that the killer was holed up in the lab between six and eleven o’clock that lets them out. As far as the murders were concerned. Hardanger is carrying out a minute by minute check of their late evening movements—one of them might have been a decoy. So might a thousand others—the decoy doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with number one lab. Hartnell would appear to be in the clear—his alibi is so hopeless that it would seem to have to be genuine— but for all that I have a feeling that there’s something queer going on there and I’ll be calling on him again.

“Then there’s Chessingham—a very big question mark. As an assistant research chemist his salary is no shakes—but it seems he can afford to run a big house, have a maid and keep his sister at home to look after his mother. The maid’s been there only two months. His mother, incidentally, is in a very bad way from a health view-point. Her doctor says that a shift to a warmer climate might add years to her life. She herself maintains that she doesn’t want this shift, but that’s probably only because she doesn’t want to embarrass her son who she knows can’t afford it. Maybe Chessingham would like the money to send her abroad. I’m sure, in fact, They’re a pretty close family. I don’t want Hardanger on this. Can you arrange to have Chessingham’s bank account checked, a monitoring watch kept on all incoming and outgoing mail, a check made with local authorities to see whether a driving licence has ever been issued in his name, a check made with the army unit in which he did his National Service to see if he ever drove a vehicle and, finally, a check on all the local money-lenders to see if Chessingham’s on their books. He’s certainly not with Tuffnell and Hanbury, the biggest sharks in the area, but there are a dozen others within twenty miles—and Chessingham never strays far from home. He may be borrowing money by mail from some London firm.”

“Is that all you want?” The General was heavily ironic.

“I think it essential, sir.”

“Is it? How about this excellent alibi he provided—the pictures of the transit of Jupiter or whatever it was—that could prove his presence at home down to a second, more or less. Don’t you believe it?”

“I believe those pictures would show exactly when they were taken. I don’t necessarily believe that Chessingham was there when they were taken. He’s not only a fine scientist but an uncommonly clever lad with his hands. He built his own camera, radio and TV set. He built his own reflector telescope even hand-grinding the lenses. It would be no great trick for Chessingham to rig up a mechanism to take pictures automatically at pre-selected intervals. Or someone could have done it for him while he was elsewhere. Or the photographs themselves could have been taken elsewhere with a corresponding time allowance made for longitude differences so as to give the same effect. And Chessingham’s far too intelligent a bird not to have spotted right away that those photographs would have provided an alibi—yet he pretended that it only occurred to him while I was talking to him. He’d have thought it would have been too obvious and suspicious if it had all been cut and dried in advance.”

“You wouldn’t trust St. Peter himself, would you, Cavell?”

“I might. If there were sufficient independent witnesses to testify to any alibi he might have, that is. Giving anyone even the faintest shadow of the benefit of the doubt is the one luxury I can’t afford. You know that, sir. And Chessingham isn’t getting that shadow. Nor is Hartnell.”

“Hmm.” He peered at me under the tufted grey of his eyebrows and said inconsequentially, “Easton Derry vanished because he played it too close to the cuff. I wonder how much you are holding back from me, Cavell?”

“What makes you say that, sir?”

“God knows, I’m a fool to ask you. As if you’d tell me anyway.” He poured a whisky for himself but placed it on the mantelshelf without tasting it. “What’s behind all this, my boy?”

“Blackmail. Of one kind or another. Our friend with the Satan Bug and botulinus virus in his pants pocket has the finest blackmail weapon in history. He’s probably after money—very large sums of money. If the Government want back the bugs, it’ll cost them a fortune. Additional blackmail is that if the Government don’t come across he’ll sell the bugs to a foreign power. At least, that’s what I hope. What I’m afraid of is that we’re dealing with not a criminal but a crackpot mind. Don’t tell me that a crackpot couldn’t have organised all this—some crackpots are brilliant. If it is a crackpot it’ll be one of the ‘Mankind must abolish war or war will abolish Mankind’ brigade. In this case the threat would be on a smaller scale—you know ‘Britain must abolish Mordon or I’ll abolish Britain.’ That sort of thing. Probably a letter in the post right now to one of the big national dailies telling them he has the viruses and what he intends doing with them.”

The General picked up his whisky glass and stared down into it with all the rapt attention of a soothsayer looking for an answer in his crystal ball. “What makes you think that? About the letter, I mean?”

“He’d have to, sir. Pressure is the essence of blackmail. Our friend with the viruses must have the publicity. A terrified population—and how right they would be to be terrified—would bring such terrific pressure to bear that the Government would have to accede to any demands made upon them or go out of office at once.”

“Where were you between five minutes to ten and ten o’clock tonight?” he asked abruptly.

“Where was I——” I looked at him, long hard stare for long hard stare, then went on slowly, “In the Waggoner’s Rest in Alfringham. Speaking to Mary, Hardanger and a plain-clothes constable by the name of Johnson.”

“I’m getting old or senile or both.” The General shook his head irritably, then lifted a sheet of paper from the mantelshelf and handed it to me. “You’d better read this, Pierre.” The “Pierre” made it very bad indeed: and it was very very bad indeed. It couldn’t have been worse. A Reuter’s dispatch sheet, the message in typed capitals.

“Mankind must abolish war or war will abolish mankind,” the typescript began. “It is now in my power to abolish the most dreadful form of war this world has ever known or ever will know—bacteriological warfare. I have in my possession eight ampoules of botulinus toxin which I took from the Mordon Research Establishment, near Alfringham, Wiltshire, twenty-four hours ago. I regret that two men were killed last night, but have no deep sorrow: what are two lives when the lives of mankind are at stake?

“The contents of any of those ampoules, suitably dispersed could destroy all life in Britain. I shall fight fire with fire and destroy evil by forces of evil.

“Mordon must cease to exist. That stronghold of the anti-Christ must be utterly razed so that no stone be left standing. I order that all experiments in Mordon cease forthwith and that the buildings in which this evil work is carried out be dynamited and bull-dozed to rubble.

“You will broadcast acknowledgement and compliance on the B.B.C. news at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning.

“If I am disregarded I shall be compelled to take steps the effects of which I dare not contemplate. But those steps I shall take. It is the wish of One who is greater than all that war upon earth shall cease for ever and I am His chosen instrument.

“Mankind must be saved from Mankind.”

I read through it again and laid the sheet down. This was the real McCoy—no one outside Mordon knew that eight ampoules had been stolen. The General said, “Well? Well?”

“A nut,” I said. “Completely off his trolley. Mind you, he has a rather nifty line of prose.”

“Good God, Cavell!” The General’s face was set in hard lines, cold, grey eyes angry. “A communication like that and all you can do is—is to make feeble——”

“What do you want me to do, sir? Get out the sackcloth and ashes? Sure, it’s terrible—but we were expecting it—or something like it. If ever there was a time to use our heads and not our hearts—well, this is the time.”

“You’re right.” The voice was a sigh. “Of course you’re right. And damnably accurate in your forecast!”

“This came by phone call from Alfringham? Between five to ten and ten o’clock tonight?”

“Sorry about that too. I’m even ready to suspect myself. The message came to Reuter’s in London. Dictated at slow speed. Reuter’s thought it a hoax but telephoned Alfringham just in case. The news of the theft and murders hasn’t been officially released yet—typical army stupidity for half of Wiltshire knew about the murders hours ago and so does Fleet Street. All Reuter’s got was a denial but the reaction to their questions convinced them that they were on to something very hot indeed. For two hours, believe it or not, they argued back and forth as to whether or not this item should be released to the Press. The decision not to communicate came from the very top. They notified Scotland Yard, who notified me. By that time it was well after midnight. This is the original copy. A crackpot, you think?”

“A screw or two loose but all the rest of his mental machinery is working just fine. He knows he has to have publicity to generate sufficient terror to bring pressure to bear, and to generate even more terror he gives the impression that he doesn’t know three of the eight ampoules in his possession contain the Satan Bug. If the public really thought he had the Satan Bug and might use it in mistake they’d scream for him to be given anything on earth just so long as he returned it.”

“He may not know it is the Satan Bug.” I’d never seen the General like this before, hesitant and uncertain under the grimly worried mask. “We can’t assume he does.”

“I can. He knows. Whoever it is, he knows.

You’re going to keep this out of the papers?”

“It’ll buy us time. He must have publicity, as you say.”

“How about the actual crime itself? The break-in, the murders?”

“It’ll be in every paper in the country tomorrow— it’s already on the streets. Local Wiltshire correspondents got the tip-off early this evening. After that there was nothing we could do about it.”

“The reaction of the populace should be interesting.” I finished my whisky and rose. “I’ll be getting back, sir.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll tell you, sir. I should start on Bryson and Chipperfield but I’d be wasting my time. They won’t speak, they’ll be too terrified for their kids’ lives and besides, I’m convinced they wouldn’t have seen either the man who gave the orders or the men they carried inside. I’m going to start over again with the number one lab people. A couple of phone calls to Cliveden and Weybridge. Hinting darkly, trying to provoke a reaction. Then a visit to Chessingham, Hartnell, MacDonald, Gregori and the technicians. Nothing smart or sophisticated or clever. Put the wind up, suggesting I know more than I do. All I want is a basis for one tiny suspicion of any of them and I’ll take him into a deserted cellar and take him apart till I have all the truth.”

“What if you’re wrong about him?” The General seemed to be staring fixedly at a point just over my shoulder.

“I’ll put him together again. If I can,” I added indifferently.

“We have never operated it that way, Cavell.”

“We’ve never had a lunatic with the power to wipe us all out, either.”

“That’s so, that’s so.” He shook his head. “Who’s going to be the first object of your attentions?”

“Dr. MacDonald.”

“MacDonald. Why MacDonald?”

“Doesn’t it strike you as curious, sir, that of all the major dramatis personae, the only one without shadow of suspicion against him is Dr. MacDonald?

I find that very interesting. Maybe he forgot to frame himself when he was so busy framing everybody else, planting suspicion away from himself.

This is an uncommonly dirty world and I automatically suspect those as pure as the driven snow.”

The General gazed at me in a long silence, then glanced at his watch. “You might just manage a couple of hours’ sleep when you get back.”

“I’ll get all the sleep I want when I get the Satan Bug back.”

“A man can go only so long without sleep, Cavell.” The tone was very dry.

“It won’t take me long, sir. My promise. I’ll have the Satan Bug back in Mordon in thirty-six hours.”

“Thirty-six hours.” A long considering pause.

“With any other man I’d laugh in his face. I’ve learnt not to laugh in yours. But—thirty-six hours!” He shook his head, the General had been brought up in the old school and he was too polite to tell me that I was a fool or a braggart or a liar or all three.

“The Satan Bug, you say. How about—— How about the murderer?”

“Recovering the viruses is all that matters.

Whether the killer is himself killed or handed over to the cops doesn’t seem that important. Let him look out for himself.”

“I’m more worried about you looking out for yourself. Be very careful, Cavell—a hard thought for you to take, but he may be a cleverer and more dangerous man than yourself.” He reached out and touched me gently below the left shoulder. “I suppose you wear that Hanyatti in bed at night. You know you have no authority from me to use it?”

“I point it at people just to frighten them, sir.”

“Giving people heart attacks doesn’t come under the heading of frightening them. I won’t detain you, boy. How’s Mary?”

“Well, sir. She sent her love.”

“From Alfringham of course.” He forgot for the moment that I was about his only subordinate who didn’t curl up under his level stare, and let me have it with both barrels. “I’m not sure I like my daughter—my only child—being mixed up with something like mis.”

“I needed—I still need—someone I can trust.

That’s Mary. You know your own daughter as well as I do; she hates the business we’re in but the more she hates it the more impossible it is to keep her out of it. She thinks I shouldn’t be allowed out alone. She’d have been down in Alfringham within twenty-four hours anyway.”

The General looked at me for a moment then nodded heavily and showed me to the door.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dr. MacDonald was a big heavily-built man in his late forties, with that well-leathered and spuriously tough look you quite often find among a certain section of the unemployed landed gentry who spend a great deal of time in the open air, much of it mounted on large horses in pursuit of small foxes. He had sandy hair, sandy eyebrows, sandy moustache and the smooth, full, tight, reddish-tanned face indicative of a devotion to the table, a well-stocked cellar, a fresh Gillette every morning and an incipient heart condition. In his own rather arrogant and fleshy way MacDonald was a pretty good-looking and impressive character but, at the moment, he wasn’t looking his best. Not that anyone would be when rubbing sleep from gummed eyelids and welcoming the unexpected caller at 6.15 a.m. on a pitch dark, raining and bitterly cold October pre-dawn.

“Welcoming” perhaps was not the right word.

“What the bloody hell do you mean by coming hammering on my door in the middle of the bloody night?” MacDonald demanded. He clutched a dressing-gown more tightly about his shivering bulk and managed to prop an eye wide enough open to identify me in the faint wash of light coming from the porchway behind him.

“Cavell! What the devil’s the meaning of this?”

“I’m sorry, MacDonald.” Civility. Turning the other cheek. “Terrible hour, I know. But I must talk to you. It’s most urgent.”

“Nothing so damn’ urgent that you have to come hauling a man out of his bed at this time of night,” he said furiously. “I’ve already told the police all I know. Anything else you can see me about in Mordon. Sorry, Cavell. Good night! Or good morning!” He took a long step back and swung the door in my face.

I’d no more cheeks to turn. The sole of my right foot caught the door before it engaged on the latch and I kicked it open. Violently. The sudden transfer of weight to my bad leg didn’t do my left foot any good at all but it was nothing compared to what it did to MacDonald’s right elbow, which was where the flying door must have caught him, for when I passed inside he was clutching his elbow with his left hand and doing a dervish dance with language suitably geared to the occasion: he’d packed in the plummy Debrett accent in favour of broad Scots. For what he had to say, it was much more impressive. It was ten seconds before he was properly aware that I was standing there.

“Get out!” The voice was half-snarl, half-shout, the face twisted in malevolence. “Out of my house at once, you——” He got started on my forebears, but I cut him short.

“Two men are dead, MacDonald. There’s a madman on the loose with the power to turn that two into two million. Your convenience doesn’t enter into it. I want answers to questions. I want them now.”

“You want them? And who are you to want anything?” The heavy lips were curled into an expression that was half-sneer, half-grimace of pain and the Oxford-Sandhurst drawl was working again. “I know all about you, Cavell. Kicked out of Mordon because you couldn’t keep your big mouth shut. You’re only a so-called private detective, but I suppose you thought there might be better pickings going here than in the dirty little divorce cases you people specialise in. God knows how you managed to push your way into this but as far as I am concerned you can push straight out again. You have no authority to ask me anything. You’re not the police. Where are your credentials? Show me.” To say that he was making no attempt to mask the sneer on his face, the contempt in his voice would have been understating the case.

I hadn’t any credentials to show him so I showed him the Hanyatti instead. It might be enough, bluster is usually a façade that conceals nothing. But it wasn’t enough. Maybe there was more to Dr. MacDonald than I had thought.

“My God!” He laughed, not one of those laughs with a silvery tinkle of bells. An unpleasant laugh. “Guns! At six in the morning. Whatever next? Cheap melodramatic rubbish. I’ve got your number now, Cavell, by God I have. A little ring to Superintendent Hardanger will soon fix you, mister cheap little private detective.” Outside the demands of his job he was obviously no stickler for accuracy: cheap I may have been but I was a good couple of inches taller than he was and at least as heavy.

The phone was on the table beside me. He took two steps towards it and I took one towards him. The muzzle of the Hanyatti caught him just under the breast-bone and I stood aside as he jack-knifed and fell to the floor. It was brutal, high-handed, completely unjustifiable on the face of it and I didn’t like it one little bit: but I liked even less the idea of a madman with the Satan Bug in his possession. I had to use every second I had. By and by, when it was all over, I’d apologise to MacDonald. But not now.

He rolled around for a bit, clutching his mid-riff with both hands and whooping in pain as he tried to drag air into his lungs. After a minute or so he quietened down and struggled to his feet, still clutching his stomach, breathing very quickly, very shallowly, like someone who can’t get enough oxygen quickly enough. His face was grey and puffy and the bloodshot eyes held an expression that was pretty close to hatred. I didn’t blame him any.

“This is the end of the road for you, Cavell.” His voice came in hoarse gasps punctuated by half-sobbing inhalations. “You’ve gone too far this time. Unprovoked assault——”

He broke off, flinching, as he saw the barrel of the Hanyatti arching towards his face. Both hands were flung up in instinctive self-defence and he grunted in agony as my free hand caught him in the midriff again. He stayed down longer this time and when he finally dragged himself, trembling, to his feet, he was in pretty bad shape. His eyes were still burning mad but there was something else in them now as well. Fear. I took two quick steps towards him, lifting the Hanyatti high. MacDonald took two corresponding steps back then collapsed heavily on a settee as it caught him behind the knees. His face held rage and bewilderment and fear, lest I hit him again: It also held hatred for both of us, for me because I was doing what I was doing, for himself because he knew he was going to do what I said. MacDonald wasn’t ready to talk but he was going to all the same and both of us knew it.

“Where were you on the night Baxter and Clandon were killed?” I asked. I remained on my feet, the Hanyatti ready.

“Hardanger has my statement,” he said sullenly.

“At home. I’d had three friends in for bridge. Until almost midnight.”

“Friends?”

“A retired scientific colleague. The local doctor and vicar. Good enough for you, Cavell?” Maybe he was getting some of his courage back.

“Nobody more skilled at murders than doctors. And priests have been unfrocked before.” I looked down at my feet, at the smooth grey sweep of a wall-to-wall carpeting: if a man dropped his diamond tie-pin in that nap he’d have to call in a tracker dog. I said with no particular inflection, “Fancy line in floor-coverings you have here, Doctor. Five hundred quid wouldn’t have bought this little lot.”

“Being clever or just insolent, Cavell?” He was getting his courage back. I hoped he wasn’t going to be so foolish as to get too much of it back.

“Heavy silk drapes,” I went on. “Period furniture. Genuine crystal chandelier. A pretty big house and I’d wager the whole house is furnished on the same scale. The same expensive scale. Where does the money come from, Doctor? You do the pools? Or just a bingo expert?”

For a moment he looked as if he were about to tell me to mind my own damn’ business, so I half-lifted the Hanyatti again, not much, just enough to make him change his mind. He said stiffly, “I’m a bachelor with no dependants. I can afford to indulge my tastes.”

“Lucky you. Where were you last night between nine and eleven p.m.?”

He frowned and said, “At home.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” Apparently he’d decided that stiff indignation was his safest line.

“Witnesses?”

“I was alone.”

“All night?”

“All night. My housekeeper arrives at eight each morning.”

“That may be very unfortunate for you. No witnesses for last night, I mean.”

“What the devil are you trying to tell me?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

“You’ll know soon enough. You don’t run a car, do you, Doctor?”

“As it happens I do.”

“But you come to Mordon on an Army bus.”

“I prefer it that way. It’s no concern of yours.”

“True. What kind of car?”

“A sports car.”

“What kind of sports car?”

“A Bentley Continental.”

“A Continental. A sports car.” I gave him a long look but it was wasted. He was staring down at the carpet, maybe he had lost a diamond tie-pin there. “Your taste in cars is like your taste in rugs.”

“It’s an old car. Second-hand.”

“When did you buy it?”

He looked up abruptly. “What does it matter? What are you trying to get at, Cavell?”

“When did you buy it?”

“Ten weeks ago.” He was giving the carpet the once-over again. “Maybe three months ago.”

“An old car, you say. How old?”

“Four years.”

“Four years. They don’t give away four year old Continentals for box-tops. They give them away for about £5,000. Where did you get £5,000 from three months ago?”

“I didn’t. I paid £1,000 down. The rest over three years. It’s the way most people buy their cars you know.”

“An extended credit scheme aimed at capital conservation. That’s for people like you. For people like me they call it hire-purchase. Let’s see your hire-purchase agreement.”

He brought it: a quick glance showed that he had been speaking the truth. I said, “What’s your salary, Dr. MacDonald?”

“Just over £2,000. The government is not generous.” He wasn’t blustering or indignant any more. I wondered why.

“So that after taxation and living expenses you couldn’t possibly have as much as a thousand left at the end of the year. In three years, £3,000. Yet, according to this agreement, you’re going to pay off close to £4,500—balance plus interest—in three years. How do you propose to accomplish this mathematical impossibility?”

“I have two insurance policies maturing inside the next year. I’ll get them for you.”

“Don’t bother. Tell me, Doctor, why are you so worried, so nervous?”

“I’m not worried.”

“Don’t lie.”

“All right, so I’m lying. I am worried. I am nervous. The questions you are asking would make anyone nervous.”

Maybe he was right at that. I said: “Why should that make you worried, Doctor?”

“Why? He asks me why.” He glared up at me then went back to looking for his diamond pin. “Because I don’t like the trend of your questioning. I don’t like what you’re trying to prove. No man would.”

“What am I trying to prove?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head, not looking up. “You’re trying to establish that I live beyond my means. I don’t. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove.”

I said, “You’ve got the old tartan eyes this morning, Doctor, and if you don’t mind me saying so you stink of stale whisky. You have all the signs of a man who had a heavy session with the bottle last night and is paying the price now— not, I suppose, that a couple of belts on the solar plexus improved matters. Funny thing is, you’re listed on our books as a moderate social drinker. You’re no alcoholic. But you were alone last night—and social drinkers don’t drink alone. That’s why they’re social. But you were drinking alone, last night—drinking heavily, Doctor. I wonder why? Worried, perhaps? Worried even before Cavell and his worrisome questions ever came along.”

“I usually have a night-cap before retiring,” he said defensively. He was still staring at the carpet but his interest lay not in any tie-pin but in not letting me see his expressions on his face. “That doesn’t make me an alcoholic. What’s a night-cap?”

“Or two,” I agreed. “But when a night-cap turns out to be the better part of a bottle of whisky, it ceases to be a night-cap.” I glanced round the room then said, “Where’s your kitchen?”

“What do you——”

“Damn it, don’t waste my time!”

“Through there.”

I left the room and found myself in one of those gleaming stainless steel monstrosities that started out to be an operating theatre and changed its mind at the last moment. More evidence of money. And, on the gleaming sink, more evidence that Dr. MacDonald really had had an extended night-cap. A bottle of whisky, three-fifths empty with the torn lead seal still lying beside it. A dirty ashtray, full of mashed-up cigarettes. I turned as I heard a sound behind me. MacDonald was standing in the doorway.

“All right,” he said wearily. “So I was drinking. I was at it for two or three hours. I’m not used to those things, Cavell. I’m not a policeman. Or a soldier. Two horrible, ghastly murders.” He half-shuddered: if it was acting, it was brilliant acting.

“Baxter had been one of my best friends for years. And why was he killed? How do I know the killer hasn’t another victim lined up? And I know what this Satan Bug can do. Good God, man, I’d reason to be worried. Worried stiff.”

“So you had,” I agreed. “So you still have—even although I am getting pretty close to him. The killer I mean. And maybe he is after you next—it’s a thought to bear in mind.”

“You cold-hearted callous devil,” he ground out. “In God’s name get out and leave me alone.”

“I’m just going. Keep your doors locked, Doctor.”

“You’re going to hear more of this, Cavell.” Now that I’d announced my intention of leaving and had stuck the Hanyatti out of sight, he was recovering courage. “We’ll see if you’re so damned tough when you’re up in court on an assault charge.”

“Don’t talk rubbish,” I said shortly. “I never laid a finger on you. There’s no mark on you. It’s only your word against mine. Me, I’d take mine first any time.”

I left the house. I saw the dark bulk of the garage where the Bentley was presumably housed, but I didn’t give it a second glance or thought. When people want a nice, inconspicuous, unobstructive car for a stealthy and unobstructive mission, they don’t go around borrowing Bentley Continentals.

I stopped at a phone box and, on the pretext of wanting Gregori’s address made two unnecessary calls, to Weybridge first who couldn’t, as I knew he couldn’t, help me and to Cliveden who could and did. They were both pretty shirty about being disturbed at the crack of dawn, but they quietened down when I told them that I’d had to have the information immediately because my investigations had now reached such a critical stage that I might have the case tied up before the day was out. Both of them tried to question me on the progress I was making but I gave nothing away. That didn’t take much finesse, for I’d nothing to give away in any event.

At 7.15 a.m. I was leaning on the doorbell of Dr. Gregori’s house: more precisely the house in which he lived, a good-class boarding house run by a widow and her two daughters. Parked outside the front was a navy blue Fiat 2100. Gregori’s car. It was still pitch dark, still cold and wet. I felt very tired and my leg ached badly so that I had difficulty in concentrating on what had to be done.

The door opened and a plump woman, grey-haired and fiftyish, peered out into the darkness. This would be the landlady herself, Mrs. Whithorn, reputedly a cheerful and happy-go-lucky soul of devastating untidiness and unpunctuality, whose boarding-house was the most sought-after in the area: her reputation as a cook was enviable.

“Who on earth is it at this time of morning?” Her voice held a good-natured exasperation. “Not the police again, I hope?”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Whithorn. Cavell is my name. I’d like to see Dr. Gregori, please.”

“Poor Dr. Gregori. He’s already put up with enough from you people. But I suppose you’d better come in. I’ll go and see if he’s up yet.”

“Just tell me where his room is and I’ll find out for myself. If you please, Mrs. Whithorn.”

She demurred a bit, then reluctantly told me where to find him. Five yards along the big hall, down a side passage and I was outside his door— his name was on it. I knocked and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. Gregori must have been up, but only just. He wore a faded russet dressing-gown over his pyjamas and his swarthy face was swarthier than ever—he evidently hadn’t yet got round to shaving.

“Cavell,” he said. There was no particular warmth of welcome in his voice—people greeting the law at dawn are seldom in the most amiable frame of mind—but at least, unlike MacDonald, he was civil. “You’d better come in. And have a seat. You look worn out.”

I felt worn out. I eased myself into the offered chair and looked around. Gregori didn’t do himself as well as MacDonald in the way of furniture, but then it probably wasn’t his furniture in the first place. The room I was in was furnished as a small study—his bedroom would be through the communication door in the far wall.

A worn but still serviceable carpet, a couple of armchairs in the same category, one wall completely lined with bookcases, a heavy oak table with swivel chair, typewriter and piled-up papers and that was about it. In the stone hearth was the remains of last night’s fire, smooth white ash such as you get from burning beech.

The room, though cold, was rather stuffy— Gregori had obviously not as yet succumbed to the English madness of flinging open windows under any and all conditions—and I seemed to smell some peculiar odour in the air, so faint as to be unidentifiable.

“If I can be of any help to you, Mr. Cavell?”

Gregori prompted.

“Just routine inquiries, Dr. Gregori,” I said easily. “Most uncivilised hour, I know, but we feel that time is not on our side.”

“You have not been to bed?” he said shrewdly.

“Not yet. I’ve been busy—visiting. I’m afraid my choice of visiting hours doesn’t make me very popular. I’ve just come from Dr. MacDonald and I’m afraid he wasn’t at all pleased to be dragged out of his bed.”

“No? Dr. MacDonald,” Gregori said delicately, “is a somewhat impatient man.”

“You get on well with him? On friendly terms?”

“A colleague shall we say? I respect his work.

Why, Mr. Cavell?”

“Incurable nosiness. Tell me, Doctor, have you any alibi for last night.”

“Of course.” He looked puzzled. “I told it to Mr.

Hardanger in person. From eight until almost midnight I was at the birthday party for Mrs.

Whithorn’s daughter——”

“Sorry,” I interruped. “Last night—not the night before.”

“Aha.” He looked at me anxiously. “There have been—there have been no more killings?”

“No more,” I reassured him. “Well, Doctor?”

“Last night?” He half-smiled and shrugged. “An alibi? Had I known that an alibi would have been required of me I would not have failed to provide one. At what time, exactly, Mr. Cavell?”

“Let us say between 9.30 and 10.30 p.m.”

“Alas, no. No alibi, I fear. I was in my room here, working all night on my book. Work therapy, you might call it, Mr. Cavell, after the dreadful experience of yesterday.” He paused, then went on apologetically. “Well, not all night. From after dinner—about eight—till eleven. It was a good night for me in the circumstances—three whole pages.” He smiled again, differently. “For the type of book I’m writing, Mr. Cavell, a page an hour represents excellent progress.”

“And what type of book is that?”

“On inorganic chemistry.” He shook his head and added wistfully: “It is unlikely that the citizens will be besieging the bookshops in order to buy it. The reading public for my speciality is limited indeed.”

“That the book?” I nodded at the pile of papers on the desk.

“It is. One I began in Turin, more years ago than I care to remember. Examine it if you wish, Mr. Cavell. Not, I fear, that it would convey much to you. Apart from the rather abstruse nature of the subject-matter, it is in Italian—the language I prefer for writing.”

I didn’t tell him that I could read Italian almost as well as he spoke English. Instead I said, “You type directly on to paper?”

“But of course. My handwriting is that of the true scientist—almost completely indecipherable.

But a moment!” He rubbed a thoughtful palm across a blue and bristly chin. “The typewriter. It may have been heard.”

“That’s why I asked. You think it likely?”

“I don’t know. My rooms were specially chosen because of my typing—must not disturb the other guests, you understand. There are no bedrooms either above or on either side of me. Wait now, yes, yes, I’m almost certain I heard a television programme next door. At least,” more doubtfully.

“I think I did. Next door is what Mrs. Whithorn rather grandly calls her television lounge, but it is very poorly patronised, I fear, chiefly by Mrs.

Whithorn herself and her daughters, and that not frequently. But I’m sure I heard something. Well, almost sure. Shall we ask?”

We asked. We went along to the kitchen where Mrs. Whithorn and one of her daughters were preparing breakfast. The aroma of sizzling bacon made my leg feel weaker than ever.

One minute was enough. An hour-long vintage film had been shown on television the previous evening and Mrs. Whithorn and two of her three daughters had watched the entire performance.

The film had started precisely at ten and as they passed Dr. Gregori’s door into the lounge and after that had sat down they could hear him typing on his machine. Not loud, not loud enough to be annoying, but perfectly distinct. Mrs. Whithorn had commented at the time that it was a shame Dr. Gregori should have so little time for leisure and relaxation but she knew he would be eager to make up for the time lost at her daughter’s party, his first night off for weeks.

Dr. Gregori made no attempt to hide his satisfaction.

“I’m very much indebted to this elderly film shown last night. And to you, Mrs. Whithorn.” He smiled at me. “Your suspicions at rest, Mr. Cavell?”

“I never had any, Doctor. But that’s how policemen must work—by the elimination of even the most remote possibilities.”

Dr. Gregori saw me to the front door. It was still dark, still cold, still very wet indeed. The rain was bouncing high off the tarmac road. I was considering how best to introduce my now standard spiel about the remarkable progress I was making when Gregori himself said suddenly, “I am not asking you to betray any professional confidences, Mr. Cavell. But—well, do you think there is a chance that you’ll get this fiend? Are you making any progress at all?”

“More than I would have thought possible twelve hours ago. Investigations have led me pretty far in what I believe to be the right direction.

Very far, I might say—if it weren’t for the fact that I’m up against a brick wall.”

“Walls can be climbed, Mr. Cavell.”

“So they can. And this one will be.” I paused. “I don’t know whether I should have said what I did.

But I know you will keep it strictly to yourself.”

He gave me his earnest reassurances on that point and we parted. Half a mile away I stopped at the first call-box and got through to London.

“Been to bed yet, Cavell?” the General greeted me.

“No, sir.”

“Don’t feel too badly about it. Neither have I.

I’ve been very busy indeed making myself unpopular dragging people out of their beds in the middle of the night.”

“No more unpopular than I’ve made myself, sir.”

“I dare say. With any results?”

“Nothing special. Yourself, sir?”

“Chessingham. No record of a civilian driving licence having been issued to him at any time.

This may not be definite—it may have been issued to him in some place other than his own country although this would be unusual. As for his Army record, it turns out, strangely enough, that he was in the R.A.S.C.”

“The R.A.S.C.? Then the chances are that he did have a licence. Did you find out, sir?”

“The only fact that I have been able to establish about Chessingham’s Army career,” the General said dryly, “is that he actually was in the Army.

The wheels of the War Office grind uncommonly slow at any time but in the middle of the night they grind to a dead halt. We may have something by midday. What we do have now are some rather interesting figures supplied us less than half an hour ago by Chessingham’s bank manager.”

He gave me the figures and hung up. I climbed wearily into the car once more and headed for Chessingham’s house. Fifteen minutes’ drive and I was there. In the bleak half-light of dawn, the square-built house with its sunken basement looked more dreary and forbidding than ever. The way I was feeling didn’t help matters any. I squelched my way up the flight of worn steps over the moat and pressed the bell.

Stella Chessingham appeared. She was neatly and attractively dressed in a flowered housecoat and her hair was smoothly brushed but her face was pale and the brown eyes were tired. She didn’t look very happy when I told her I wanted to see her brother.

“I suppose you’d better come in,” she said reluctantly. “Mother’s still in bed. Eric’s at breakfast.”

He was. Bacon and egg again. My leg felt weaker than ever. Chessingham rose to his feet and said nervously, “Good morning, Mr. Cavell.”

I didn’t wish him good morning back. I gave him my cold impersonal stare, the kind only policemen and head waiters are allowed to use, and said, “I have to ask some more questions,

Chessingham. I’ve been up all night and I’m in no mood for evasions. Straight answers to straight questions. Our investigations during the night have opened up some very interesting lines of inquiry and the main line leads straight here.” I looked at his sister. “Miss Chessingham, I have no wish to distress you unnecessarily. It might be better if I interviewed your brother alone.”

She looked at me with wide-open eyes, licked her lips nervously, nodded and turned to go.

Chessingham said, “Stay here, Stella. I have nothing to hide from anybody. My sister knows everything about me, Mr. Cavell.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” The voice to match the stare. “If you wish to stay, Miss Chessingham, you may. Please remember afterwards that I asked you to go.” Both were pale now and very apprehensive indeed. On the basis of my ability to terrify people I could have had a job with a Central European Secret Police at any time.

I said, “What were you doing last night, Chessingham? Round about ten o’clock, shall we say?”

“Last night?” He blinked. “Why do I have to account for my movements for last night?”

“The questions come from me. Please give an answer.”

“I—well, I was at home. With Stella and Mother.”

“All night?”

“Of course.”

“There’s no ‘of course’. No visitors, no outsiders to testify to your presence here?”

“Just Stella and Mother.”

“Just Miss Chessingham. At ten o’clock your mother would be in bed.”

“Yes, in bed. I’d forgotten.”

“I’m not surprised. Forgetting is your strong line. You forgot to tell me last night that you had been in the R.A.S.C.”

“The R.A.S.C.?” He sat down at the table again, not to eat, and from the slight movements of his arms I could tell that one hand was gripping the other pretty strongly. “Yes, that’s right. How did you know that?”

“A little bird told me. The same bird told me that he had seen you driving an army vehicle.” I was sticking my neck out but I’d no option. Time was not on our side. “You said you couldn’t drive.”

“I can’t.” His eyes flickered to his sister and then back to me. “There’s a mistake. Someone is making a mistake.”

“That’s you, Chessingham—if you keep denying it. What if I can produce four independent witnesses by nightfall who will swear to it that they have seen you driving.”

“I may have tried once or twice. I’m—I’m not sure. I haven’t a driving licence.”

“You make me sick,” I said in disgust. “You’re speaking and behaving like a moron. You’re no moron, Chessingham. Stop beating about the bush and making a fool of yourself. You can drive.

Admit it. Miss Chessingham, your brother can drive, can’t he?”

“Leave Stella alone.” Chessingham’s voice was high, his face pale. “You’re right, damn you, I can drive—after a fashion.”

“I suppose you thought it very clever to abandon that Bedford van outside your house two nights ago? On the assumption that the police would never believe anyone capable of doing anything so obvious?”

“I was never near that van.” His voice was almost a shout. “I swear it! I swear I was never near that van. I got frightened when you came round last night and I said anything I could to—to strengthen my innocence.”

“Innocence.” I laughed my nasty policeman’s laugh. “The photographs of Jupiter that you said you took. How did you take them? Or did someone else take them? Or did you rig up an apparatus to take the pictures automatically while you were away at Mordon?”

“What in the name of God are you talking about?” He was getting frantic. “Apparatus? What damned apparatus? Search the house from top to bottom and see if you can find——”

“Don’t be so naive,” I interrupted. “Probably buried deep in the woods anywhere within fifty square miles of here.”

“Mr. Cavell!” Stella Chessingham stood in front of me, her hands so tight that they were shaking, her face mad. “You’re making a terrible mistake.

Eric has nothing to do with—with whatever it is.

This murder. Nothing, I tell you! I know.”

“Were you with him after half past ten the night before last? In his observatory? If you weren’t, young lady, you don’t know.”

“I know Eric! I know he’s completely incapable of——”

“Character testimonials are no good to me,” I said brusquely. “And if you know so much perhaps you can explain to me how £1,000 comes to have been deposited in your brother’s bank account in the past four months? Five hundred pounds on July 3rd, the same on October 3rd.

Can you explain?”

They looked at each other, sick fear in their eyes and making no attempt to conceal it. When Chessingham managed to speak, on his second or third attempt, his voice was hoarse and shaking.

“It’s a frame-up! Someone is trying to frame me.”

“Shut up and talk sense,” I said wearily. “Where did the money come from, Chessingham?”

He paused for a moment before replying, then said miserably, “From Uncle George.” His voice had dropped almost to a whisper and he was glancing apprehensively ceiling-wards.

“Decent of Uncle George,” I said heavily.

“Who’s he?”

“Mother’s brother.” His tone was still low. “The black sheep of the family, or so it seems. He said he was completely innocent of the crimes with which he had been charged but that the evidence against him had been so overwhelming that he’d fled the country.”

I glared at him. Double-talk at 8 a.m. after a sleepless night wasn’t much in my line. “What are you talking about? What crimes?”

“I don’t know.” Chessingham sounded desperate. “We’ve never seen him—he’s phoned me twice at Mordon. Mother has never mentioned him—we didn’t even know he existed until recently.”

“You knew about this, too?” I asked Stella.

“Of course I did.”

“Your mother?”

“Of course not,” Chessingham said. “I told you she never even mentioned his existence. Whatever he was accused of, it must have been something pretty bad. He said that if Mother knew where the money came from she’d call it tainted and refuse it. We—Stella and I—want to send her abroad for her health and that money is going to help.”

“It’s going to help you up the steps of the Old Bailey,” I said roughly. “Where was your mother born?”

“Alfringham.” It was Stella who answered, Chessingham didn’t seem capable of it.

“Maiden name?”

“Jane Barclay.”

“Where’s your phone? I’d like to use it.”

She told me and I went out to the hall and put a call through to the General. Almost fifteen minutes elapsed before I returned to the breakfast-room. Neither of the two appeared to have moved from the positions in which I left them.

“My God, you’re a bright pair,” I said wonderingly. “It would never have occurred to you, of course, to pay a visit to Somerset House. What would be the point? You knew you would be wasting your time. Uncle George never existed.

Your mother never had a brother. Not that that will be news to you. Come on now, Chessingham, you’ve had time to think up a better explanation than that one. You couldn’t possibly think up a worse one to account for the £1,000.”

He couldn’t think one up at all. He stared at me, his face grimly hopeless, then at his sister, then at the ground. I said, encouragingly, “Well, there’s no rush about it. You’ll have a few weeks to think up a better story. Meantime, I want to see your mother.”

“Leave my mother out of this, damn you.”

Chessingham had risen to his feet with such violence that his chair had gone over backwards.

“My mother’s a sick woman and an old one.

Leave her alone, you hear, Cavell?”

I said to Stella, “Please go and tell your mother I’m coming up in a minute.”

Chessingham started towards me, but his sister got in the way. “Don’t, Eric. Please.” She gave me a look that should have pinned me to the wall and said bitterly, “Don’t you see that Mr. Cavell is a man who always gets his own way?”

I got my own way. The interview with Mrs.

Chessingham took no more than ten minutes. It wasn’t just the most pleasant ten minutes of my life.

When I came downstairs both Chessingham and his sister were waiting in the hall. Stella came up to me, big brown eyes swimming in a pale and frightened face and said desperately, “You’re making a fearful mistake, Mr. Cavell, a terrible mistake.

Eric is my brother. I know him, I know him. I swear to you that he is completely innocent in everything.”

“He’ll have his chance to prove it.” There were times when I didn’t find any great difficulty in hating myself and this was one of those times.

“Chessingham, you would be wise to pack a case.

Enough stuff to last you for a few days at least.”

“You’re taking me with you?” He looked resigned, hopeless.

“I’ve neither the warrant or the authority for that. Somebody will come, never fear. Don’t be silly as to try to run. A mouse couldn’t get through the cordon round this house.”

“A—a cordon?” He stared. “You mean there are policemen round——”

“Think we want you to take the first plane out of the country?” I asked. “Like dear old Uncle George?” It was a good enough exit line and I left it at that.

* * *

The Hartnells were to be my next—and last—call before breakfast that morning. Half-way there I pulled up at an A.A. box on a deserted wooded stretch of road, unlocked the booth and put a call through to the Waggoner’s Rest. By and by Mary came on the phone and after she’d asked me how I felt and I’d said fine and she’d more or less called me a liar, I told her I would be back in the hotel shortly after nine o’clock, to have breakfast ready for me and to ask Hardanger to come round if he could.

I left the phone booth and although my car was only a few yards away I didn’t dawdle any in reaching it—the cold grey rain was still sheeting down. For all my haste, though, I suddenly stopped with the door half-open and stared through the rain at a character coming down the road towards me. From a distance of less than a hundred yards he appeared to be a middle-aged well-dressed citizen wearing a raincoat and trilby, but there all resemblance to a normal human being ended. He was making his way down the rain-filled gutter by hopping around on his right foot, arms outstretched to balance himself, kicking a rusty tin can ahead of him. With every combined hop and kick a gout of water went spraying up in the air.

I watched this performance for some time until I became conscious of the rain drumming heavily on my back and soaking through to my shoulders. Besides, even if he had escaped over a high wall, it was still rude to stare. Maybe if I were buried long enough in the wilds of Wiltshire, I, too, would take to playing hopscotch in the rain. Still with my eye on this apparition I eased quickly into the driving seat pulling the door to behind me and it was not until then that I discovered that the purpose of the hopscotch merchant was not to demonstrate the standard of loopiness in rural Wiltshire but to distract my attention from the back of my car where someone had been hiding crouched down on the floor.

I heard a slight noise behind me and started to twist but I was far too late, the black-jack must have been chopping down even as I heard the sound. My left foot was still on the wrong side of the steering column and, anyway, he was on my left or blind side. The black-jack made contact just below and behind my left ear with what must have been considerable force or accuracy or both for the agony and the oblivion were separated by only a hairsbreadth in time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I woke up. The term “waking up “implies a fairly rapid and one-way transition from a state of unconsciousness to that of consciousness and there was nothing either rapid or one-way about my progress through the twilight zone that separates those. One moment I was greyly aware that I was lying on something hard and wet, the next the awareness was gone. How long a time elapsed between the intervals of greyness I’d no means of knowing and even if I had my mind would have been too fuzzy to appreciate it. Gradually the spells of awareness became longer and longer until, eventually, there was no more darkness but I wasn’t all that sure that this was in any way an improvement or a desirable state of affairs for with returning comprehension came an all but paralysing pain that seemed to hold my head, neck and right hand side of my chest in an immense vice, a vice with some burly character inexorably tightening the handle. I felt the way a grain of wheat must feel after it had passed through a combine harvester.

Painfully I opened my good eye and swivelled it around until I located the source of the dim light. A grilled window high up on one wall, just below the roof. I was in a cellar of some kind, of the semi-sunk basement type featured in Chessingham’s house.

I’d made no mistake about the hardness of the floor. Or the wetness. Rough unfinished concrete with shallow pools of water on it and whoever had left me there had thoughtfully dumped me right in the centre of the largest puddle.

I was lying stretched out on the floor, partly on my back, partly on my right hand side with my arms behind my back in a ridiculously strained and uncomfortable position. I wondered vaguely why I chose to lie in this awkward position and found out when I tried to change it. Somebody had made a very efficient job of tying my hands behind my back and from the numbness in my forearms it was a fair guess that he’d used considerable weight in the tying of the knots.

I made to gather my legs under me to jerk myself up to a sitting position and discovered that they wouldn’t gather. I just couldn’t move them. I used their immobility to lever myself upwards to a sitting position, waited until the coruscating lights dancing before my eyes faded and vanished then peered forward and down. My legs were not only tied at the ankles, they were secured to a metal upright of a wine-bin which took up practically the entire length of the wall beneath the window. And not only was I tied, but I was tied with PVC plastic flex. If I’d needed any confirmation that a professional had been at work, I didn’t any more. Even a gorilla couldn’t snap PVC and nothing less than a pair of hefty pliers could possibly undo the knots: ringers were quite useless for the job.

Slowly, carefully—any rash movement and my head would have fallen off—I looked around the cellar. It was as featureless and just about as empty as any cellar could ever be—the window, the closed door, the wine-bin and me. It could have been worse. No one pouring in water to drown me, no one flooding the confined space with a lethal gas, no snakes, no black widow spiders. Just the cellar and me. But bad enough.

I hitched myself forwards towards the wine-bin and tried to snap the wire securing me to it by jerking my legs back as violently as I could but all I did was to add another pain to the overfull quota I had already. I struggled to free my hands, knowing before I began that I was only wasting my time, and gave up almost as soon as I had started. I wondered how long it would be before I died of starvation or thirst.

Take it easy, I said to myself. Think your way out of this, Cavell. So I thought, as best I could without my head hurting the way it did, but it didn’t seem to do much good, all I could think of was how sore and uncomfortable I was.

It was then that I saw the Hanyatti. I blinked, shook my head and cautiously looked again. No doubt about it, the Hanyatti, the top of the butt just visible three or four inches below and to the side of the left-hand lapel of my coat. I stared at it and it still didn’t go away. I wondered dimly how the man—men, certainly—who had dragged me there had missed it and it slowly came to me that they hadn’t missed it because they hadn’t looked for it in the first place. Policemen in Britain don’t carry guns. I was—more or less—a policeman. Hence I didn’t carry a gun.

I hunched up my left shoulder and reached my head as far down and to the left as possible, at the same time pushing the lapel away with the side of my face. On the third try I got my teeth to the butt but they just slipped off the rounded surface when I tried to get a purchase and lift the gun from its holster. Four times I repeated this manoeuvre and after the fourth attempt I gave up. Contorting my neck into that strained and unnatural position would have been uncomfortable enough in any event: added to the effects of the blackjack the only result this contortion was having was to make the cellar swim dizzily around me. At the same time the manoeuvre brought a sharply piercing pain to my right chest and I wondered drearily whether any of my ribs had been broken and were sticking into a lung. The way I felt I was prepared to believe anything.

A brief rest, then I had twisted up until I was in a kneeling position. I bent sharply from the waist, my head coming close to the concrete floor to give gravity an assist in freeing the Hanyatti from the holster. Nothing happened. I tried again, overdid the violence of the forward jerk and fell flat on my face. When my head finally cleared I repeated the process and this time the gun finally slid from the holster and clattered to the floor.

In the poor half-light of the cellar I knelt and peered anxiously at the gun. A character with a sadistic enough turn of mind might have considered it highly amusing to empty the gun and replace it in the holster. But I’d been spared the humorist. The loading indicator registered nine. The magazine was full.

I squirmed round on the floor, picked up the Hanyatti with my bound hands, slipped the safety catch and dragged the gun around to my right side as far as the unnaturally twisted position of my left shoulder would allow. The folds of my jacket kept getting in the way of the automatic but I strained and pushed until I could see about three inches of the barrel protruding beyond my side. I bent my knees and hitched myself forward until my feet were within fifteen inches of the muzzle.

For a brief moment I considered trying to shoot through the PVC that bound my ankles. But only for a brief moment. Buffalo Bill might have done it, but then Buffalo Bill had had binocular vision and I felt pretty certain he’d never performed any of his sharp-shooting feats in dim half-light with numbed hands bound behind his back. The chances were a thousand to one that the net result achieved would be the anticipation of those two London surgeons who wanted to remove my left foot. I decided to concentrate instead on the eighteen inch length of four twisted strands of PVC that attached my legs to the wine-bin.

I sighted as best I could and squeezed the trigger. Three things happened, instantaneously and simultaneously. The recoil from the gun together with the unnatural position in which I was holding it, made me feel as if my right thumb had broken: the reverberation of the sound in that confined space had the same effect on my eardrums: and I felt a wind ruffle my hair as the ricocheting bullet, soundless in flight in that echoing intensity of sound, came within half an inch of ending my problems for good and all. And a fourth thing happened. I missed.

Two seconds later I fired again. No hesitation. If there was a watchdog upstairs taking his ease he’d be charging down the cellar steps in a matter of moments to find out who was breaking up his happy home. Not only that, but I knew if I stopped to consider the chances of the ricochet being that half inch lower this time I never would get around to pulling that trigger.

Again the close thunder of the explosion and this time I was sure my right thumb had gone. But I hardly cared. The wire binding me to the wine-bin was neatly severed in half. Buffalo Bill couldn’t have done it any better.

I twisted, grabbed one of the wine-bin supports with my all but useless hands, hoisted myself shakily to my feet, rested my left elbow on a convenient shelf and stood there waiting, staring at the door. Anyone coming to investigate would have to pass through that door and, as a target, a man at six feet was going to be a much simpler proposition altogether than a wire at eighteen inches.

For a whole minute I stood there motionless apart from the trembling of my legs, straining to the utmost what little the gunshots had left me of my hearing. Nothing. I risked a couple of quick hops out to the centre of the cellar and peered up through the high window in case my gaoler was playing it careful and smart. Again nothing. Another couple of hops and I was by the door testing the handle with my elbow. Locked.

I turned my back on the door, scrabbled around with the muzzle of the Hanyatti until I’d found the lock, and pulled the trigger. With the second shot the door gave abruptly beneath my weight—it says much for the state of mind that I’d never even checked the position of the hinges to see whether the door opened inwards or outwards—and I fell heavily through the doorway on to the concrete passage-way outside. If there was anyone waiting out there with the hopeful intention of clobbering me, he’d never have a better chance.

No one clobbered me because there was no one waiting there to clobber me. Dazed and sick I pushed myself wearily to my feet, located a light switch and clicked it with my shoulder. The naked bulb, hanging at the end of a short flex above my head, remained dead. It could be a dud lamp, it could be a blown fuse, but my guess was that it meant no power at all: the air in that cellar had the musty lifelessness that bespoke long abandonment by whoever had once owned the house.

A flight of worn stone steps stretched up into the gloom. I hopped up the first two steps, teetered on the point of imbalance like a spinning top coming to rest but managed to twist round quickly and sit down before I toppled. Once down, it seemed the safe and prudent thing to do to keep my centre of gravity as low as possible by staying there, and I made it to the top of the stairs by jackknifing upwards on the seat of my pants and the soles of my shoes.

The door at the head of the cellar stairs was also locked but it wasn’t my door and I still had five shots left in the Hanyatti. The lock gave at the first shot and I stumbled out into the hallway beyond.

The hallway, high, wide, and narrow, featured what estate agents euphemistically call a wealth of exposed timbering—black, ugly, adze-cut oaken beams everywhere. Two doors on either side, both closed, a glass door at the far end, another beside me leading presumably to the rear of the house, a staircase above my head and an uneven parquet floor thickly covered with a dust streaked by the confused tracks of foot-prints leading from the glass door to the spot where I was standing. The finest feature of the hall was the fact that it was completely deserted. I knew now I was alone. But for how long I didn’t know. It seemed a poor idea to waste even a second.

I didn’t want to smear the tracks in the hall so I turned to the door beside me. For a change it was unlocked. I passed into another passage that gave on the domestic quarters—larder, pantry, kitchen, scullery. An old-fashioned house and a big one.

I went through those apartments, opening cupboards and pulling drawers out on to the floor, but I was wasting my time. No signs here of hasty abandonment like the keepers skipping out from the Flannan Isle lighthouse, the ex-owners had cleaned out the lot when they lit out. They hadn’t left as much as a safety pin, not that a safety pin would have been found of much value in cutting the PVC that bound hands and ankles.

The outside kitchen door was unlocked. I opened it and hopped out into the still heavily falling rain. I looked around me, but I could have been anywhere. An acre of overgrown garden completely run to seed, ten foot high hedges that hadn’t felt a clipper in years, and dripping pines and cypresses soughing under a dark and weeping sky. Wuthering Heights had nothing on it.

There were two wooden buildings not far away, one big enough to be a garage, the other less than half the size. I hopped my way towards the latter for the sound reason that it was the nearer of the two. The door hung crazily on twisted hinges and creaked dismally as I put my shoulder to the splintered wood.

It was a shed that had been obviously used as a workshop—to one side, below the filthy window, stood a massive work-bench with a rusty vice still bolted in position. If it wasn’t too rusted to turn and if I could find some cutting tool to jam into it, that vice would be useful indeed. Only, as far as I could see, there were no cutting tools of any description, no tools of any kind: as in the house, so here—the departing owners had been nothing if not thorough when it had come to the removal of their goods and chattels. The walls were completely bare.

They had left only one thing, and that because it was quite useless—a square plywood box half full of rubbish and wood-shaving. With the aid of a piece of wood I managed to tilt the box and spill its contents on the floor. With the stick I stirred the jumble of odds and ends—pieces of wood, rusty screws, bent pieces of metal, twisted nails-and, at last, a very old and rusty hacksaw blade.

It took me ten minutes to jam the blade into the vice—my hands were numbed to the point of almost paralytic uselessness—and another ten minutes to saw my way through the PVC binding my wrists. I could have done it in far less time but as, with my hands behind my back, I couldn’t see what I was doing, I had to go easy: I could have sawn through an artery or a tendon just as easily as through a wire and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. My hands were as lifeless as that.

They looked pretty lifeless too, when I’d severed the last PVC strand and brought them round to the front for examination, swollen to a size half as much again as normal with smooth, bluish-purple distended skin and the blood swelling slowly from torn skin on the inside of both wrists and most of my fingers. I hoped that the dark flaking rust on the blade of the hacksaw that had caused those cuts wasn’t going to give me blood-poisoning.

I sat on the side of the box for five minutes, cursing savagely as the mottled purple of my hands slowly began to vanish and the circulation to come pounding back with the almost intolerably exquisite agony of a thousand barbed needles tearing at the flesh. When I could at last hold the hacksaw blade in my hands, I cut the PVC on my ankles and cursed some more, just as colourfully as before, till the blood supply in my feet came back to something like normal. I pulled up my shirt to have a look at the right-hand side of my chest and just as quickly and roughly stuffed the shirt back under the waistband of my trousers. A prolonged inspection would only have made me feel twice as ill as I was already: in the few clear patches in the thick crust of blood that covered almost all of the side of my body the grotesquely swelling bruises were already turning all the kaleidoscopic colours of the rainbow. I thought sourly that if the man who had used me for football practice had chosen the left instead of the right side of my chest he’d have broken all his toes on the Hanyatti. It was as well that he hadn’t.

I had the Hanyatti in my hand as I left the tool-shed, but I didn’t really expect to have to use it. I didn’t go near the house—I knew I’d find nothing there except the footprints and that was a matter for Hardanger’s experts. From the front of the house a driveway curved away between dripping pines and I limped off down the weed-grown gravel. It would have to lead to a road of sorts.

A few paces then I stopped and tried to think as best I could with my thinking equipment in the poor shape it was. Whoever had clobbered and tied me up might want it to be known that I had been temporarily removed from the scene: it was just as possible, for all I knew to the contrary, that he didn’t. If he didn’t then he couldn’t have been able to afford to leave my car where it had been and would have removed it. Where? What simpler and more logical than to hide Cavell’s car where he had hidden Cavell? I headed back to the garage.

The car was there. I got in, slumped wearily back on the cushions, sat there for a few minutes, then climbed as wearily out again. If someone thought it would be to his advantage not to have people know I was out of commission, then it might equally well be to my advantage not to have that someone know that I was back in commission again. How this would be to my advantage I couldn’t even begin to guess at the moment, my mind was so gummed up by weakness and exhaustion and the beating I had taken that coherent thought was beyond me. All I knew was that I was dimly aware that it might be to my advantage and with the shape I was in and considering the lack of progress I was making I needed every advantage I could get. The car would be a dead giveaway. I started walking.

The driveway led to a road that was no more than a rutted track deep in water and viscous mud. I turned right, for the good enough reason that there was a long steep hill to the left, and after perhaps twenty minutes I came to a secondary road with a signpost reading “Netley Common: 2 miles.” Netley Common, I knew, was on the main London-Alfringham road, about ten miles from Alfringham, which meant I’d been taken at least six miles from the A.A. box where I had been laid out. I wondered why, maybe that had been the only deserted house with a cellar within six miles.

It took me over an hour to cover the two miles to Netley, partly because of the shape I was in anyway, partly because I kept hopping into bushes and behind the cover of trees whenever a car or a cyclist came along. Netley Common itself I bypassed by taking to the fields—empty of all signs of life on that teeming and bitter October morning—and finally reached the main road where I sank down, half-kneeling, half-lying, in a ditch behind the screen of some bushes. I felt like a water-logged doll coming apart at the seams. I was so exhausted that even my chest didn’t seem to be hurting any more. I was bone-chilled as a mortuary slab and shaking like a marionette in the hands of a frenzied puppeteer, I was growing old.

Twenty minutes later I had grown a great deal older. Traffic in rural Wiltshire is never up to Piccadilly standards at the best of times, but even so it was having an off-day. In that time only three cars and a bus had passed me and as they were all full or nearly so none of them was any use to me. What I wanted was a truck with only one man in it or, failing that, a car with just the driver, although how any man alone in a car would react when he saw the wild dishevelled figure of a lifer on the lam or a refugee from a canvas jacket was anybody’s guess.

The next car that came along had two men in it but I didn’t hesitate. I recognised the slow-moving, big, black Wolseley for what it was long before I could see the uniforms of the men inside. The car braked smoothly to a stop and a big burly sergeant, relief and concern in his face, was out and helping me to my feet as I stumbled up the bank. He had the arm and the build to carry weight and I let him take most of mine.

“Mr. Cavell?” He peered closely into my face. “It is Mr. Cavell?”

I felt I’d changed a lot in the past few hours but not all that much so I admitted I was.

“Thank God for that. There’s been half a dozen police cars and heaven only knows how many of the military out looking for you for the past two hours.” He helped me solicitously into the back seat. “Now you just take it easy, sir.”

“I’ll do just that.” I eased my squelching, sodden, mud-stained figure into a corner. “I’m afraid this seat will never be the same again, Sergeant.”

“Don’t you worry about that, sir—plenty more cars where this one came from,” he said cheerfully. He climbed in beside the constable at the wheel and picked up the microphone as the car moved off. “Your wife is waiting at the police station with Inspector Wylie.”

“Wait a minute,” I said quickly. “No hullaballoo about Cavell returning from the dead, Sergeant. Keep it quiet. I don’t want to be taken anywhere I can be recognised. Know of any quiet spot where I could be put up and stay without being seen?”

He twisted and stared at me. He said slowly, “I don’t understand.”

I made to say that it didn’t matter a damn whether he understood or not, but it wouldn’t have been fair. Instead I said, “It is important, Sergeant. At least I think so. Any hideaway you know of?”

“Well.” He hesitated. “It’s difficult, Mr. Cavell——”

“There’s my cottage, Sergeant,” the driver volunteered. “You know Jean’s away with her mother. Mr. Cavell could have that.”

“Is it quiet, has it a phone, and is it near Alfringham?” I asked.

“All three of them, sir.”

“Fine. Many thanks. Sergeant, please speak to your inspector. Privately. Ask him to come to this cottage as soon as possible with my wife. With Superintendent Hardanger, if he’s available. And have you—the Alfringham police, I mean—a doctor they can rely on? Who doesn’t talk out of turn, I mean?”

“We do that.” He peered at me. “A doctor?”

I nodded and pulled back my jacket. The rain of that morning had soaked me to the skin and the blood seeping through from the bruises, much diluted, had covered most of the shirt-front in a particularly unpleasant shade of, brownish-red. The sergeant took a quick look, turned and said softly to the driver, “Come on, Rollie boy. You’ve always wanted to make like Moss and now’s your chance. But keep your finger off that damned siren.”

Then he reached for the microphone and started talking in a low urgent voice.

“I’m not going into any damned hospital and that’s final,” I said irritably. With a couple of ham sandwiches and half a tumbler of whisky inside me I was feeling much more my old nasty self again. “Sorry, Doc, but there it is.”

“I’m sorry too.” The doctor bending over me in the bed in that police bungalow was a neat, methodical and precise man with a neat, methodical and precise voice. “I can’t make you go, more’s the pity. I would if I could, for you’re a pretty sick man in urgent need of radiological examination and hospital care. Two of your ribs seem cracked and a third is definitely fractured. How badly and how dangerously I can’t say. I don’t have X-ray eyes.”

“Not to worry,” I said reassuringly. “With the way you’ve strapped me up I can’t see any broken ribs sticking into a lung, or out through my skin for that matter of it.”

“Unless you yield to an irresistible compulsion to indulge in violent gymnastics,” the doctor said dryly, “we need not concern ourselves with the possibility of you stabbing yourself to death. What does concern me is the likelihood of pneumonia— broken bones plus the exhausting, unpleasant and very wet time you’ve been through provide an ideal breeding ground. Pneumonia together with broken ribs make for a very nasty condition. Cemeteries are full of people who could once have testified to that fact.”

“Make me laugh some more,” I said sourly.

“Mrs. Cavell.” He ignored me and looked at Mary, sitting still and pale on the other side of the bed. “Check respiration, pulse, temperature every hour. Any upward change in those—or difficulty in respiration—and please contact me at once. You have my number. Finally I must warn you and those gentlemen here “—he nodded to Hardanger and Wylie—”that if Mr. Cavell stirs from his bed inside the next seventy-two hours I refuse to regard myself as in any way medically responsible for his well-being.”

He picked up his tool-bag and took off. As the door closed behind him I swung my legs off the bed and started to pull on a clean shirt. It hurt, but not as much as I expected it would. Neither Mary nor Hardanger said anything and Wylie, seeing that they had no intention of speaking, said, “You want to kill yourself, Cavell? You heard what Dr. Whitelaw said. Why don’t you stop him, Superintendent?”

“He’s off his rocker,” Hardanger explained. “You’ll observe, Inspector, that not even his wife tries to stop him? Some things in this life are a complete and utter waste of time and making Cavell see sense is one of them.” He glared at me. “So you’ve been coming all over clever and lone-wolfish again, haven’t you? And you see what happens? Look at the bloody mess you’re in now. Literally. Look at it. And nothing to show. When in God’s name are you going to realise that our only hope lies in working together? The hell with your d’Artagnan methods, Cavell. System, method, routine, co-operation— that’s the only way you ever get anywhere against big crime. And damn’ well you know it.”

“I know it,” I agreed. “Patient skilled men working hard under patient skilled supervision. Sure, I’m with you. But not here. No room for patience now. Patient men take time and we have no time. You’ve made arrangements for an armed watch to be kept on this house I was in and to have your sleuths examine the footprints?”

He nodded. “Your story. Let’s waste no more time.”

“You’ll have it. Just as soon as you tell me why you haven’t bawled me out for wasting valuable police time in searching for me and why you haven’t tried to use your authority to make me stay in bed. Are we worried, Superintendent?”

“The newspapers have the story,” he said flatly. “About the break-in, the murders, the theft of the Satan Bug. We didn’t expect that last thing. They’re hysterical already. Screaming banner headlines in every national daily.” He pointed to a pile of newspapers on the floor beside him. “Want to see them?”

“And waste more time? I can guess. That’s not all that’s worrying you.”

“It isn’t. The General was on the phone—he was looking for you—half an hour ago. Six Gestetner duplicated letters delivered by special messengers this morning to the biggest concerns in Fleet Street. Character saying that his previous warning had been ignored: no acknowledgement of it on the 9 a.m. B.B.C. news. The walls of Mordon still stood, some rubbish like that. Said that within the next few hours he would give a demonstration proving (a) he had those viruses and (b) he was willing to use them.”

“Will the papers print it?”

“They’ll print it. First of all they—the editors— got together and contacted the Special Branch at Scotland Yard. The Assistant Commissioner got in touch with the Home Secretary and I gather there was some kind of emergency meeting. Anyway a Cabinet order not to print. Fleet Street, I gather, told the Government to take a running jump to itself and told the Government that it is the servant of the people and not vice versa, and that if the nation stood in deadly peril—and that on the face of it they certainly seemed to—the people had the right to know. They also reminded the Government that if they put one little foot wrong in this matter they would be out on their ears overnight. The London evening papers will be on the streets about now. I’ll bet the headlines are the biggest since VE day.”

“The ball’s up on the slates,” I nodded. I watched Mary, her face expressionless and carefully not looking at me, button my shirt-cuffs— with both wrists bandaged and my fingers heavily scratched it was a bit much for me—and went on, “Well, it’ll certainly provide the British public with a conversational change from the football pools, what so-and-so said on TV last night and the latest rock and roll sensation.” I went on to tell him of what happened during the night, omitting my trip to London to see the General.

At the end Hardanger said heavily, “Very, very interesting. Are you trying to tell me that you woke up in the middle of the night and—without telling Mary—started chasing and phoning around Wiltshire?”

“I’m telling you. The old secret police technique— and you can’t beat it: get them at their sleepiest and most apprehensive and you’re already half-way there. And I didn’t go to sleep in the first place. I went without telling because I knew damned well it would go so much against all your training and instincts that you wouldn’t hesitate to use force to stop me.”

“If I had,” he said coldly, “you might have a full set of ribs right now.”

“If you had, we wouldn’t have narrowed this list so much. Five of them. I let drop to all of them that we were getting pretty close to an answer and one of them was scared enough to panic and try to stop me.”

“You assume.”

“It’s a damned good assumption. Got a better? For a starter I suggest we haul in Chessingham straight away. There’s plenty on him and——”

“I forgot,” Hardanger interrupted. “You phoned the General last night——”

“Yes.” I didn’t even bother to look shame-faced.

“Wanted authority to hash about in my own way—knew you wouldn’t grant it.”

“Clever devil, aren’t you?” If he guessed I was lying there were no signs of it in his face. “You asked him to check on this fellow Chessingham, his service career. Seems he was a driver in the R.A.S.C.”

“That’s it then. Going to pull him in?”

“Yes. His sister?”

“She wouldn’t be guilty of anything other than covering up for her own flesh and blood. And the mother is in the clear. That’s for sure.”

“So. That leaves the four others you contacted this morning. You’d put them all in the clear?”

“I would not. Take Colonel Weybridge. The only certain facts we know about him are these: he has access to the security files and so would be in a position to blackmail Dr. Hartnell into co-operating——”

“You mentioned last night you thought Hartnell was in the clear.”

“I said I’d reservations about him. Secondly, why didn’t our gallant Colonel, like his gallant commanding officer, volunteer to go into the lab instead of me? Was it because he knew the botulinus virus was loose in there? Thirdly, he is the only one without an alibi for the time of the murder.”

“Good lord, Cavell, you’re not suggesting we pull in Colonel Weybridge? I can tell you we had a pretty nasty time from both Cliveden and Weybridge when we insisted on fingerprinting their quarters this morning. Cliveden actually phoned the Assistant Commissioner.”

“And got his head in his hands?”

“In a gentlemanly sort of way. He hates our guts now.”

“That helps. This fingerprinting of the suspects’ houses. Anything turned up yet?”

“Give them a chance,” Hardanger protested. “It’s not one o’clock yet. Be a couple of hours before they finish tabulating their results. And I can’t pull in Weybridge. The War Office would have my scalp in twenty-four hours.”

“If this lad with the Satan Bug starts chucking it around,” I said, “there won’t be any War Office in twenty-four hours. People’s feelings have ceased to be of any concern. Besides, you don’t have to throw him in the cooler. Confine him to his quarters, open arrest, house arrest, whatever you call it. Anything turned up in the past few hours?”

“A thousand stones and nothing under any of them,” Hardanger said grimly. “The hammer and pliers were definitely the ones used in the break-in. But we’d been sure of that anyway. Not a single useful print in the Bedford decoy van. The same for the telephone box which was used to make the call to Reuter’s last night. We’ve put your money-lending friend Tuffnell and his partner through the mill and had the Fraud Squad examine their books until we know as much about their business as they do themselves: we could have them both behind bars in a week but I just can’t be bothered. Anyway, Dr. Hartnell is definitely their only customer from number one lab. The London police are trying to trace the man who sent the letters to Fleet Street, if we’re wasting our time down here they might as well waste their time up there. Inspector Martin has spent the entire morning questioning everyone in number one lab about their social relations with each other and the only thing he has turned up so far is that Dr. Hartnell and Chessingham were on visiting terms. We already knew that. We’re having a check made on every known movement of every suspect in the past year and we have teams of men checking with the occupants of every house within three miles of Mordon to see if they noticed anything strange or out of the way on the night of the murders. Something is bound to turn up sometime. If you spread the net wide enough and the meshes are small enough. It always does.”

“Sure. In a couple of weeks. Or a couple of months. Our friend with the Satan Bug has promised to do his stuff in a few hours. Damn it, Superintendent, we can’t just wait for something to turn up. Organisation, no matter on how massive a scale, won’t do it. Method number two, lighting a meerschaum and making like Sherlock, isn’t going to get us far either. We have to provoke a reaction.”

“You already provoked a reaction,” Hardanger said sourly. “See where it got you? You want more reactions. How?”

“As a starter, investigate every financial transaction and every bank book entry of everyone working in number one, every entry in the past year—and don’t forget Weybridge and Cliveden. Let the suspects know. Then squads of policemen to every house. Search each house from top to bottom and have the searchers list every tiniest thing they find. This will not only worry the man we’re after—it might actually turn up something.”

“If we’re going to go that far,” Inspector Wylie put in, “we might as well throw the lot of them in the cooler. It’s one sure way of taking our man out of circulation.”

“Hopeless, Inspector. We may be dealing with a maniac but he’s a brilliant maniac. He’d have thought of that possibility months ago. He’s got an organisation—nobody in Mordon could possibly have delivered those letters in London this morning— and you can bet your pension that the first thing he’d have done after getting the viruses would be to get rid of them.”

“We’ll try stirring things up,” Hardanger said reluctantly. “Though where I’m going to find all the men to——”

“Pull them off the house-to-house questioning. It’s a waste of time.”

He nodded, again reluctantly, and spoke at length on the phone while I finished dressing. When he put the phone down he said to me, “I’m not going to waste my breath arguing. Go ahead and kill yourself. But you might think of Mary.”

“I’m thinking of her all right. I’m thinking that if our unknown friend gets careless with the Satan Bug there’ll soon be no Mary. There’ll be nothing.”

This seemed to be a pretty effective conversation stopper but after some time Wylie said thoughtfully, “If this unknown friend does give a demonstration I wonder if the Government really would close down Mordon.”

“Close it? Our pal wants it flattened to the ground. It’s impossible to guess what they will do. Things are only at the badly-scaring stage so far— no one’s out and out terrified.”

“Speak for yourself,” Hardanger said sourly. “And just what are you thinking of doing now, Cavell? If you’ll be kind enough to tell me,” he added with heavy irony.

“I’ll tell you. Don’t laugh, but I’m going to disguise my self.” I fingered the scars on my left cheek. “A little assistance from Mary and her war-paint and these will be gone. Horn-rim spectacles, a pencil moustache, grey suit, credentials identifying me as Inspector Gibson of the Metropolitan Police and I’m a changed man.”

“Who’s going to supply the credentials?” Hardanger asked suspiciously. “Me?”

“Not necessary. I always carry them around with me, anyway, just in case.” I ignored his stare and went on, “And then I’ll call again on our friend Dr. MacDonald. In his absence, if you understand. The good doctor, on a modest salary, manages to live like a minor Eastern potentate, everything except the harem, and maybe he discreetly keeps that somewhere else. Also drinking heavily because he’s worried stiff, about the Satan Bug and his own personal safety. I don’t believe him. So I’m calling on him.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Hardanger said heavily. “MacDonald is above suspicion. Long, distinguished and spotless record. Spent twenty mintues this morning going over it.”

“I’ve read it,” I said. “Some of the star turns in the Old Bailey over the past few years have had immaculate records—until the law caught up with them.”

“He’s a highly respected character locally,” Wylie put in. “Bit of a snob, associates only with the very best people, but everyone speaks very well of him.”

“And there’s more to his record than you’ve read, Cavell,” Hardanger went on. “In the report there’s only a brief mention of his wartime service in the Army but it so happens I’m a personal friend of the colonel who commanded Mac-Donald’s regiment in the last two years of the war. I rang him up. Dr. MacDonald, it seems, has been strangely reticent about himself. Did you know that as a second lieutenant in Belgium in 1940 he won the D.S.O. and the bar, that he finished up as a lieut-colonel in a tank regiment with a string of medals as long as your arm?”

“I didn’t and I don’t get it,” I admitted. “He struck me as a phoney-tough type, who, if ever he’d done any valorous deeds, wouldn’t have been backward about admitting them. He wanted me to think he was afraid: he didn’t want me to think he was brave. Why? Because he knew he had to justify his heavy drinking so he put it down to personal fear. But, in view of his record, it almost certainly wasn’t that. Queer item number one. Queer item number two—why wasn’t all this listed in his security report? Easton Derry compiled most of those dossiers—and Derry would be unlikely to overlook so large a gap in a man’s history.”

“I don’t know about that,” Hardanger admitted. “But this much is certain—if the report I had on MacDonald is correct then on the face of it it seems highly unlikely that a man so brave, selfless and patriotic could possibly be mixed up in anything like that.”

“This colonel of MacDonald’s regiment who told you about him—could you get him down here immediately?”

Hardanger let me have his cool speculative look. “Thinking he’s a phoney in every sense? That this man’s been substituted for the real MacDonald?”

“I don’t know what to think. We must have another squint at his record card and check that Deny really did compile it.”

“We can soon fix that,” Hardanger nodded. This time he was on the phone for almost ten minutes and when he’d finished with that so had Mary with my face and I was all ready to go. Hardanger said, “You look bloody awful but I wouldn’t recognise you if I saw you in the street. The file’s in the safe in my hotel. Shall we go there?”

I turned to leave the room. Hardanger took a look at the palms and fingers of my hands, still slowly welling blood from the hack-saw scratches. He said irritably, “Why didn’t you have the doctor bandage your fingers as well? Want to get blood poisoning?”

“Have you ever tried to use a gun with your fingers bandaged together?” I asked sourly.

“Well, man, a pair of gloves then. That’s ridiculous.”

“Just as bad. Couldn’t get a finger through the trigger guard.”

“Rubber gloves,” he said impatiently. “Plastic.”

“It’s a point,” I agreed. “Certainly it would hide those damn’ scratches.” I stared at him without seeing him then sat down heavily on the bed. “Hell’s bells!” I said softly.

I sat very still for a few seconds. Nobody spoke. I went on, speaking more to myself than anyone else, “Rubber gloves. To cover the scratches. Then why not elastic stockings? Why not?” I looked up vaguely and saw Hardanger glancing at Wylie, maybe thinking that they had let the doctor go too soon, but Mary came to my rescue.

She touched my arm and I turned to look at her. Her face was set and the big green eyes wide with apprehension and the birth of an unpleasant certainty.

“Mordon,” she whispered. “The fields round it. Gorse, they’re covered with gorse. And she was wearing elastic stockings, Pierre.”

“What in heaven’s name——” Hardanger began harshly.

“Inspector Wylie,” I interrupted. “How long would it take you to get an arrest warrant? Murder. Accessory.”

“No time at all,” he said grimly. He patted his breast pocket. “I have three of them here already signed. Like you said yourself, there are times when we can’t wait for the law. We fill’ em in. Murder, eh?”

“Accessory.”

“And the name?” Hardanger demanded. He still wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t be calling the doctor.

“Dr. Roger Hartnell,” I said.

CHAPTER NINE

“What in the name of God are you talking about?” Dr. Roger Hartnell, a young man with a face suddenly old and tired and strained, stared at us, then at his wife who was standing rigidly beside them, then back at us again. “Accessory after murder. What are you talking about, man?”

“It’s our belief that you know well enough what we are talking about,” Wylie said calmly. It was the Inspector’s bailiwick and it was he who had just read out the charge and was making the formal arrest. He went on, “I have to warn you that what you say now may be used against you at your trial. It would help us if you made a full confession now, I admit: but arrested men have their rights. You may wish to take legal advice before you speak.” Like hell he was going to take legal advice: he was going to talk before he left that house and Hardanger, Wylie and I all knew it.

“Will someone please explain what this—this nonsense is about?” Mrs. Hartnell said coldly. The slightly supercilious incomprehension, the well-bred distaste were done to a turn, but the hostile rigidity of the figure overdone, the gripping hands so tightly clasped that the tremor showed. And she was still wearing the elastic stockings.

“Gladly,” Wylie said. “Yesterday, Dr. Hartnell, you made a statement to Mr. Cavell here to——”

“Cavell?” Hartnell did some more staring. “That’s not Cavell.”

“I didn’t like my old face,” I said. “Do you blame me? Inspector Wylie is talking, Hartnell.”

“—to the effect,” Wylie went on, “that you made a late trip night before last to see Mr. Tuffnell. Intensive investigation has turned up several people who were in a position to have seen you had you travelled in the direction you said you did at the time you said you did. Not one of those people saw you. That’s point number one.” And quite a good point it was, too, even if the purest fiction: the check had been made all right, but not a single witness found to confirm or deny Hartnell’s story, which had been just as expected.

“Point number two,” Wylie went on. “Mud was found last night under the front mudguard of your motor-scooter, a mud which seems to be identical with the red loam found locally only outside Mordon. We suspect you went there early in the evening to reconnoitre. Your machine is at present being moved to police laboratories for tests. Point number——”

“My scooter!” Hartnell looked as if a bridge had fallen on him. “Mordon. I swear to——”

“Number three. Later that night you took your scooter—and wife—to a spot near Chessingham’s house. You almost gave yourself away to Mr. Cavell—you said that the policeman alleged to have seen you on your scooter could back up your story about the trip to Alfringham and then you remembered, almost too late, that if he had seen you he would also have seen your wife on the pillion seat. We found the imprint of your scooter’s wheels among bushes not twenty yards from where the Bedford had been abandoned. Careless, Doctor, very careless. I note you’re not protesting that one.” He couldn’t. We’d found the imprints less than twenty minutes previously.

“Points four and five. Hammer used to stun the guard dog. Pliers used to cut the Mordon fence. Both found last night in your tool-shed. Again by Mr. Cavell.”

“Why, you filthy, sneaking, thieving——“His face twisted, the hair-trigger control suddenly snapped and he flung himself at me, clawed hands outstretched. He didn’t get three feet, Hardanger and Wylie just moved in massively from either side and pinned him helplessly between their bulks. Hartnell struggled madly, uselessly, his insane fury increasing. “I took you in here, you—you swine! I entertained your wife. I did——” His voice weakened and faded and when it came again it was another man talking. “The hammer used to stun the dog? The pliers? Here? In my house? They were found here? How could they have been found here?” He couldn’t have been more bewildered if he’d heard the late Senator McCarthy declaring himself to be a lifelong Communist. “They couldn’t have been found here. What are they talking about, Jane?” He’d turned to his wife and his face was desperate.

“We’re talking of murder,” Wylie said flatly. “I didn’t expect your co-operation, Hartnell. Please come along, both of you.”

“There’s some terrible mistake. I—I don’t understand. A terrible mistake.” Hartnell stared as us, his face hunted. “I can clear it up, I’m sure I can clear it up. If you have to take anyone with you, take me. But don’t drag my wife along. Please.”

“Why not?” I said. “You didn’t hesitate to drag her along a couple of nights ago.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said wearily.

“Would you say the same thing, Mrs. Hartnell?” I asked. “In view of the statement made by your doctor, who saw you less than three weeks ago, that you are in perfect health?”

“What do you mean?” she demanded. She was under better control than her husband. “What are you getting at?”

“The fact that you went to a chemist’s in Alfringham yesterday and bought a pair of elastic stockings. The gorse outside Mordon is pretty vicious stuff, Mrs. Hartnell, and it was very dark when you ran off after decoying the soldiers from their truck. You were pretty badly scratched, weren’t you? And you had to cover those scratches, didn’t you. Policemen are just naturally suspicious—especially in a murder case.”

“This is entirely ridiculous.” Her voice was flat, mechanical. “How dare you insinuate——”

“You are wasting our time, madam!” Hardanger spoke for the first time, his voice sharp and authoritative. “We have a policewoman outside. Must I bring her in?” Silence. “Very well, then, I suggest we leave for the police station.”

“Could I have a few words with Dr. Hartnell, first?” I asked. “Alone, that is?”

Hardanger and Wylie exchanged glances. I’d already had their permission but I had to have it again to make things right—for them—if the need arose at the trial.

“Why?” Hardanger demanded.

“Dr. Hartnell and I used to know each other fairly well,” I said. “We were on fairly friendly terms. Time is desperately short. He might be willing to talk to me.”

“Talk to you?” It’s no easy feat to sneer and shout at the same moment, but Hartnell achieved it. “By God, never!”

“Time is indeed short,” Hardanger agreed sombrely. “Ten minutes, Cavell.” He nodded to Mrs. Hartnell. She hesitated, looked at her husband, then walked out, followed by Hardanger and Wylie. Hartnell made to follow but I swung across and blocked his way.

“Let me past.” His voice was low and ugly. “I’ve nothing to say to people like you.” He gave a short description of what he thought people like me were like, and when I showed no signs of stepping aside he swung back his right fist for a clumsy round-house swing that a blind octogenarian could have parried or avoided. I showed him my gun and he changed his mind.

“Have you a cellar in your house?” I asked.

“A cellar. Yes, we——” He broke off and his face was ugly again. “If you think you’re going to take me——”

I swung my left fist in imitation of his own cumbersome effort and when he lifted his right arm in defence I tapped him with the barrel of the Hanyatti, just enough to take the fight out of him, caught his left arm up behind his left shoulder and marched him down towards the rear of the house where a flight of steps led down to a cellar. I closed the door behind us and shoved him roughly on to a rough wooden bench. He sat there for some seconds, rubbing his head, then looked up at me.

“This is a put-up job,” he said hoarsely. “Hardanger and Wylie—they knew you were going to do this.”

“Hardanger and Wylie are hampered,” I said coldly. “They’re hampered by regulations concerning interrogation of suspects. They’re hampered by the thoughts of careers and pensions. I have no such thoughts. I’m a private individual.”

“And you think you’ll get away with this?” he said incredulously. “Do you seriously think I won’t talk about it?”

“By the time I have finished,” I said impersonally, “I doubt whether you will be able to talk. I’ll have the truth in fifteen minutes—and I won’t leave a mark. I’m an expert on torture, Hartnell— a group of Belgian quislings gave me a course of instruction over a period of three weeks. I was the subject. Try hard to believe I don’t care much if you are badly hurt.”

He looked at me. He was trying hard not to believe me but he wasn’t sure. There was nothing tough about Hartnell.

“Let’s try it the easy way first, though,” I said. “Let’s try it by reminding you that there’s a madman on the loose with the Satan Bug threatening to wipe out God knows how much of England if his conditions aren’t met—and his first demonstration is due any hour.”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded hoarsely.

I told him what Hardanger had told me and then went on, “If this madman wipes out any part of the country the nation will demand revenge. They’ll demand a scapegoat and public pressure will be so terrific that they’ll get their scapegoat. Surely you’re not so stupid as not to see that? Surely you’re not so stupid that you can’t visualise your wife Jane with the hangman’s knot under her chin as the executioner opens the trap-door. The fall, the jolt, the snapping of the vertebrae, the momentary reflex kicking of the feet—can you see your wife, Hartnell? Can you see what you are going to do to her? She is young to die. And death by hanging is a terrible death—and it’s still the prescribed penalty for a guilty accessory to murder for gain.”

He looked up at me, dull hate and misery in the sick eyes. In the half-light of the cellar his face was grey and there was the sheen of sweat on his forehead.

I went on, “You realise that you can retract any statement you make to me here. Without witnesses, a statement is valueless.” I paused and dropped my voice. “You’re deep in this, aren’t you?”

He nodded. He was staring at the floor.

“Who’s the killer? Who’s behind all this?”

“I don’t know. As God is my judge, I don’t know. A man rang me up and offered me money if I’d cause this diversion. Jane and myself. I thought he was crazy and if he wasn’t something stank about it … I refused. Next morning £200 arrived by post with a note to say there would be £300 more if I did what I was told. A—a fortnight went by and then he came on the phone again.”

“His voice. Did you recognise his voice?”

“It was deep and muffled. I’ve no idea who it was. I think he was talking with something over the mouthpiece.”

“What did he say?”

“The same as his note. There would be this other £300 if I did as he asked.”

“And?”

“I said I would.” He was still looking downwards. “I—I had already spent part of the money.”

“Received the extra £300?”

“Not yet.”

“How much have you spent of the £200 you received?”

“About forty.”

“Show me the rest of it.”

“It’s not here. Not in the house. I went out last night after you had been here and buried the remainder in the woods.”

“What was the money in? Denominations, I mean.”

“Fivers. Bank of England fivers.”

“I see. All very interesting, Doctor.” I crossed to the bench where he was sitting, screwed my hand into his hair, jerked his head savagely upwards, jammed the barrel of the Hanyatti into his solar plexus and, as he gasped in pain, brought up the barrel and thrust it between his teeth. For ten seconds I stood like that, motionless, while he stared up at me with eyes crazy with fear. I felt slightly sick.

“One chance is all you get from me, Hartnell,” I said in a low voice. “You’ve had that chance. Now the treatment. You rotten contemptible liar. Expect me to believe a crazy story like that? Do you think the brilliant mind behind this would have phoned asking you to make a diversion knowing very well that the chances were high that you would at once go to the police, put them and the Army at Mordon on their guard and so ruin all his plans? Do you think this man, in an area where automatic exchanges are not yet installed, would have spoken to you when any operator with time on her hands could have listened in to every word he said? Are you so naïve as to imagine that I would be so naïve as to believe that? Do you believe this man, with a genius for organisation, would leave everything, the success of all his plans, dependent on the last-minute factor of the strength of your greed? Do you believe he would pay in fivers, which can as often as not be traced and which could also have, if not his prints, then those of the cashier issuing them? Do you expect me to believe that he would offer £500 for the job when he could get a couple of experts from London to do it for a tenth of that. And, finally, do you think I’d believe your yarn about burying the money in the woods at night—so that come the dawn if you were told to dig them up by the police you would be unable to find them again?” I stood back, taking the gun from his face. “Or shall we go and look for that money now?”

“Oh, God, it’s useless.” He was completely crushed, his voice a moan. “I’m finished, Cavell, I’m finished. I’ve been borrowing all over the place and now I’m over two thousand in debt.”

“Cut the sob-story,” I said harshly. “It doesn’t interest me.”

“Tuffnell—the money-lender—was pressing me hard,” he went on dully. He wasn’t looking anywhere near me. “I’m mess secretary at Mordon. I’ve embezzled over six hundred pounds. Someone— God knows who or how—found out and sent me a note saying that if I didn’t co-operate he’d lay the facts before the police. I co-operated.”

I put the gun away. The ring of truth is far from having the bell-like clarity some innocents would believe, but I knew Hartnell was too beaten to prevaricate further. I said, “You have no clue at all as to the identity of the man sending the note?”

“No. And I swear I don’t know anything about the hammer or the pliers or the red mud on the scooter.”

My leg was now hurting so badly that they’d given me a police car and police driver but even so I didn’t enjoy the trip across to Dr. MacDonald’s house. Time was running out and all I could see was a brick wall. That evening there would appear in all the evening papers a carefully worded account of how two Mordon scientists had been arrested and charged with murder and that the final solution of the theft of the Satan Bug was only hours away, and while it might, we hoped, lull the suspicions of the real killers, it wasn’t advancing our cause very much. Blind men in a fog at midnight. And no leads, just no leads at all. Hardanger was going to open an intensive investigation in Mordon to find out who might have had access to the mess accounts: probably, I thought bitterly, only a couple of hundred people or so.

I was met at the door of Dr. MacDonald’s house by his housekeeper. She was in her middle thirties, more than passably goodlooking and gave her name as Mrs. Turpin. Her face was like thunder, the face of the faithful retainer powerless to defend her master’s property against ravage and assault. When I showed my false credentials and asked to be allowed in she said bitterly that another prying nosy-parker more or less couldn’t do any harm now.

The house appeared to be alive with plainclothes policemen. I identified myself to the man in charge, a detective-sergeant by the name of Carlisle.

“Found anything interesting yet, Sergeant?”

“Hard to say. Been here over an hour, starting from the top, and we’ve found nothing that strikes me as suspicious in itself. Dr. MacDonald does seem to do himself pretty well, I must say. And one of my men, Campbell, who’s dead keen on all this art rubbish says that a lot of the pictures, pottery and other junk about the place is worth a fair bit of anyone’s money. And you ought to see the dark-room he has in the attic: there’s a thousand quid’s worth of photographic equipment there if there’s a penny’s worth.”

“Dark-room? That might be interesting. Never heard that Dr. MacDonald was interested in photography.”

“Lord bless my soul, yes. He’s one of the best amateur photographers in the country. He’s the president of our photographic club in Alfringham. There’s a cabinet through in his study there that’s fair loaded with trophies. He makes no secret of that, I can assure you, sir.”

I left him and his men to their search—if they couldn’t find anything neither could I—and went upstairs to the dark-room. Carlisle hadn’t exaggerated any, Dr. MacDonald did himself as well in the way of cameras as he did in the other material things of life. But I didn’t spend much time there, I didn’t see how cameras came into the business at all. I made a mental note to bring an expert police photographer down from London to check the equipment in the one in a thousand chance that something might turn up, and then went down stairs to see Mrs. Turpin.

“I’m really most sorry about all this upset, Mrs. Turpin,” I said pleasantly. “Just pure routine, you know. Must be a pleasure for you to look after a beautiful place like this.”

“If you’ve got any questions to ask, ask them,” she snapped, “and none of your smart-alecky beating about the bush.”

That didn’t leave much room for finesse. I said, “How many years have you been with Dr. MacDonald?”

“Four. Ever since he came here. A finer gentleman you wouldn’t find anywhere. Why do you ask?”

“He has a great deal of valuable stuff here.” I listed about a dozen items, ranging from the magnificent carpeting to the paintings. “How long has he had those?”

“I don’t have to answer any questions, Mr. Inspector.” The helpful type.

“No,” I admitted. “You don’t. Especially if you wish to make things unpleasant for your employer.”

She glared at me, hesitated, then answered my questions. At least half the stuff MacDonald had brought with him four years ago. The rest he had bought at fairly regular intervals since. Mrs. Turpin was one of those formidable women with a photographic memory for all the more monumental irrelevancies of life, and she could more or less quote the date, hour and the weather conditions at the time of the delivery of each item. I knew I’d be wasting my time even trying to confirm her statements. If Mrs. Turpin said such and such was so and so, then it was and that was all there was to it.

This certainly helped to set MacDonald in the clear. No sudden suspicious influx of wealth in recent weeks or months, he’d been buying on this lavish scale over a period of years. Where he got the wherewithal to buy on this lavish scale I couldn’t guess, but it hardly seemed important now. As he’d said himself, as an independent bachelor without relatives, he could afford to live it up.

I moved back into the sitting-room and saw Carlisle coming towards me with a couple of large files in his hands.

“We’re giving Dr. MacDonald’s study a thorough going-over now, sir. Listing everything, of course, but I thought these might interest you. Seems to be some sort of official correspondence.”

It did interest me, but not in the way I expected. The more I turned up about MacDonald, the more innocuous he seemed. The file contained carbon copies of his letters to and replies from fellow-scientists and various scientific organisations throughout Europe, mainly the World Health Organisation. There was no doubt from these letters that MacDonald was a highly gifted and highly respected chemist and microbiologist, one of the top men in his own field. Almost half of his letters were addressed to certain affiliations of the W.H.O., particularly in Paris, Stockholm, Bonn and Rome. Nothing sinister or unpatriotic about that, this would be unclassified stuff and the frequent co-signature of Dr. Baxter on the carbon was guarantee enough of that. Besides, although it was supposed to be a secret, all the scientists in Mordon knew that their mail was under constant censorship. I glanced through the file again and put it aside as the phone rang.

It was Hardanger and he sounded fairly grim. What he had to say made me feel grim, too. A phone call to Alfringham had stated that if police investigations weren’t suspended for twenty-four hours something very unpleasant was going to happen to Pierre Cavell, who, as they would be aware, had disappeared. Proof that the caller knew where Cavell was would be forthcoming if police investigations were not halted by six o’clock that evening.

It wasn’t the first part of it that made me feel grim. I said, “Well, we were expecting something like it. With all the threats I was dropping at the crack of dawn today they must have thought that I was making too much progress for their comfort.”

“You flatter yourself, my friend,” Hardanger said in his gravelly voice. “You’re only a pawn. The call wasn’t made to the police but to your wife at the Waggoner’s Rest, telling her that if the General—he gave his full name, rank and address—didn’t pull in his horns then she, Mary, would receive a pair of ears in the mail tomorrow. The caller said that he was sure that though she had been married only a couple of months she would still be able to recognise her husband’s ears when she saw them.”

I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck and that had nothing to do with any imagined sensation of ear-cropping. I said carefully, “There are three things, Hardanger. The number of people in those parts who know we have been married only two months must be pretty few. The number of people who know that Mary is the General’s daughter must be even fewer. But the number of people who know the General’s true identity, apart from yourself and myself, can be counted on one hand. How in God’s name could any criminal in the land know the General’s true identity?”

“You tell me,” Hardanger said heavily. “This is the nastiest development of the lot. This man not only knows who the General is but knows that Mary is his only child and the apple of his eye, the one person in the world who might be able to bring pressure to bear on him. And she’d bring the pressure, all right: the abstract ideals of justice don’t matter a damn to women when their men’s lives are in danger. The whole thing stinks, Cavell.”

“To high heaven,” I agreed slowly. “Of treason— and treason in high places.”

“I don’t think we’d better talk about it over the phone,” Hardanger said quickly.

“No. Tried tracing the call?”

“Not yet. But I might as well waste time that way as any other.”

He hung up and I stood there staring at the silent telephone. The General was a personal appointee of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. His identity was also known to the chiefs of espionage and counter-espionage—it had to be. An Assistant Commissioner, Hardanger himself, the Commandant and security chief at Mordon—and that ended the list of those to whom the General’s identity was known. It was an ugly thought. I wondered vaguely how General Cliveden was going to enjoy the next couple of hours—I didn’t require any powers of telepathy to know where Hardanger would be heading as soon as he had put down that phone. Of all our suspects, only Cliveden knew the General’s identity. Maybe I should have been paying more attention to General Cliveden.

A shadow darkened the hall doorway. I glanced up to see three khaki-clad figures standing at the head of the outside steps. The man in the centre, a sergeant, had his hand raised to the bell-push but lowered it when he caught sight of me.

“I’m looking for an Inspector Gibson,” he said.

“Is he here?”

“Gibson?” I suddenly remembered that was me.

“I’m Inspector Gibson, Sergeant.”

“I’ve something here for you, sir.” He indicated the file under his arm. “I’ve been ordered to ask for your credentials first of all.”

I showed them and he handed over the file. He said, apologetically, “I’m under orders not to let that out of my sight, sir. Superintendent Hardanger said it came from Mr. Clandon’s records offices and I understand it’s highly confidential.”

“Of course.” Followed by the sergeant who was flanked by a couple of hefty privates, I walked into the living-room, ignoring the outraged glare of Mrs. Turpin who had belatedly appeared on the scene. I asked her to leave and she did, glowering savagely.

I broke the seal and opened the file. It contained a spare seal for re-sealing the cover and a copy of Dr. MacDonald’s security report. I’d seen the report before, of course, when I’d taken over as head of security from the vanished Easton Derry, but had paid no particular attention to it. I’d had no special reason to. But I had now.

There were seven pages of foolscap. I went through it three times. I didn’t miss a thing the first time and if possible even less the next two. I was looking for even the tiniest offbeat jarring note that might give me even the most insubstantial lead, Senator McCarthy sniffing out a Communist had nothing on me, but I found not the slightest trace of anything that might have been helpful. The only odd thing, as Hardanger had pointed out, was the extremely scanty information about MacDonald’s Army career, and to information Easton Derry—who had indeed compiled the report—must have had access. But nothing, except for a remark at the foot of a page that MacDonald, entering the Army as a private in the Territorials in 1938, had finished his Army career in Italy as a lieutenant-colonel in a tank division in 1945. The top of the following page held a reference to his appointment as a government chemist in north-east England early in 1946. This could have been just the way Easton Derry had compiled the report: or not.

With the blade of my penknife, and ignoring the sergeant’s scandalised look, I pried open the buckram corner holding the top left hand corners of the pages together. Under this was a thin wire staple, the kind of staple that comes with practically every kind of commercial stapler. I bent the ends back at right angles, slid the sheets off and examined them separately. No sheet had more than one pair—the original pair—of holes made by the stapler. If anyone had opened that staple to remove a sheet, he’d replaced it with exceptional care. On the face of it, it looked as if that file hadn’t been tampered with.

I became aware that Carlisle, the plain-clothes detective-sergeant, was standing beside me, holding a bundle of papers and folders. He said, “This might interest you, sir. I don’t know.”

“Just a moment.” I clipped the sheets together again, pushed them into the file-holder, resealed it and handed it back to the army sergeant who took himself off along with his two companions. I said to Carlisle, “What are those?”

“Photographs, sir.”

“Photographs? What makes you think I’ll be interested in photographs, Sergeant?”

“The fact that they were inside a locked steel box, sir. And the box was in the bottom drawer— also locked—of a kneehole desk. And here’s a bundle found in the same place—personal correspondence, I would say.”

“Much trouble in opening the steel box?”

“Not with the size of hacksaw I use, sir. We’ve just about tied it all up now, Inspector. Everything listed. If I might venture an opinion, you’ll find little of interest in the list.”

“Searched the whole house? Any basement?”

“Just about the filthiest coal-cellar you ever clapped eyes on.” Carlisle smiled. “From what I’ve seen of Dr. MacDonald’s personal tastes he doesn’t strike me as the type of man who would keep even coal in a coal-cellar if he could find a cleaner and more luxurious place for it.”

He left me to his finds. There were four albums. Three of them were of the innocuous squinting-into-the-sun type of family albums you can find in a million British homes. Most of the photographs were faded and yellow, taken in the days of MacDonald’s youth in the twenties and thirties. The fourth album, of much more recent origin, was a presentation given to MacDonald by colleagues in the World Health Organisation in recognition of his outstanding services to the W.H.O. over many years—an illuminated address pasted to the inside front board said so. It contained over fifty pictures of MacDonald and his colleagues taken in at least a dozen different European cities. Most of the photographs had been taken in France, Scandinavia and Italy, with a sprinkling from a few other countries. They had been mounted in chronological fashion, each picture with date and location caption, the last having been taken in Helsinki less than six months previously.

The photographs in the album didn’t interest me: what did interest me was one photograph that was missing. From its place in the album it had almost certainly been taken about eighteen months previously. Its caption had been all but obliterated by horizontal strokes made in the same white ink used for all captions. I switched on the light and peered closely at the obliteration. No question but that the place name had once started with a T. After that it was hard to say. The next letter could have been either an O or a D. O, I felt sure—there was no city in Europe beginning with TD. The remainder of the word was completely obliterated. TO … About six letters in length, possibly seven. But none of the letters projected below the line, so that cut out all words with p’s and g’s and j’s and so forth.

What cities or towns in Europe did I know beginning with the letters TO and six or seven letters in length? Not so very many, I realised, at least not of any size, and the W.H.O. didn’t hold its meetings in villages. Torquay—no good, letters projecting below. Totnes—too small. In Europe? Tornio in Sweden, Tondor in Denmark—again both relatively insignificant. Toledo, now—no one could call that a village: but MacDonald had never been to Spain. The best bets were probably either Tournai in Belgium or Toulon in France. Tournai? Toulon? For a moment or two I mulled the names over in my mind. I picked up the bundle of letters.

There must have been thirty or forty letters in the bundle, faintly scented and tied, of all things, with a blue ribbon. Of all the things I would have expected to find in Dr. MacDonald’s possession, this was the last. And, I would have bet a month’s salary, the most useless. They looked like love letters and I didn’t particularly relish the prospect of making myself conversant with the good doctor’s youthful indiscretions but just at that moment I would have read Homer in the original if I thought it would be any good to me. I untied the bow on the ribbon.

Exactly five minutes later I was speaking on the phone to the General.

“I want to interview a certain Mme. Yvette Peugot who was working in the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1945 and 1946. Not next week, not tomorrow, but now. This afternoon. Can you fix it, sir?”

“I can fix anything, Cavell,” the General said simply. “Less than two hours ago the Premier put the entire resources of all the services at our disposal. He’s as windy as hell. How urgent is this?”

“Maybe life-or-death urgent, sir. That’s what I’ve got to find out. This woman appears to have been on very intimate terms with MacDonald for about nine months towards and after the end of the war. It’s the one period of his life about which information is lacking. If she’s still alive and traceable she may be able to fill in this period.”

“Is that all?” The voice was flat, disappointment barely concealed. “What of the letters themselves?”

“Only read a couple so far, sir. Seem perfectly innocuous though not the sort of stuff I’d care to have read out in court if I had written it.”

“It seems very little to go on, Cavell.”

“A hunch, sir. More than that. It is possible that a page has been abstracted from the security dossier on MacDonald. The dates on those letters correspond to the missing page—if it is missing. And if it is I want to find out why.”

“Missing?” His voice crackled sharply over the wire. “How could a page from a security dossier possibly be missing? Who would have—or have had—access to those dossiers?”

“Easton, Clandon, myself—and Cliveden and Weybridge.”

“Precisely. General Cliveden.” A significant pause. “This recent threat to Mary to let her have your head on a charger: General Cliveden is the only man in Mordon who knows both who I am and the relationship between myself and Mary. One of the only two men with access to security dossiers. Don’t you think you should be concentrating on Cliveden?”

“I think Hardanger should be concentrating on Cliveden. I want to see Mme. Peugot.”

“Very well. Hold on.” I held on and after some minutes his voice came again. “Drive to Mordon. Helicopter there will fly you to Stanton airfield. Twin-seat jet night-fighter there. Forty minutes from Stanton to Paris. That suit you?”

“Fine. I’m afraid I’ve no passport with me, sir.”

“You won’t require it. If Mme. Peugot is still alive and still in Paris she’ll be waiting for you in Orly airport. That I promise. I’ll see you when I return—I’m leaving for Alfringham in thirty minutes.”

He hung up and I turned away, the bundle of letters in my hand. I caught sight of Mrs. Turpin by the open door, her face expressionless. Her eyes moved from mine down to the packet of letters in my hand, then met mine again. After a moment she turned and disappeared. I wondered how long she had been there, looking and listening.

The General was as good as his word all the way through. The helicopter was waiting for me at Mordon. The jet at Stanton took exactly thirty-five hair-raising minutes to reach Orly airport. And Mme. Peugot, accompanied by a Parisian police inspector, was waiting for me in a private room there. Somebody, I thought, had moved very fast indeed.

As it turned out, it hadn’t been so difficult to locate Mme. Peugot—now Madame Halle. She still worked in the same place as she had done in the later months of her acquaintanceship with MacDonald—the Pasteur Institute—and had readily agreed to come to the airport when the police had made plain the urgency. She was a dark, plump, attractive forty, and had readily smiling eyes. At that moment she was hesitant, unsure and slightly apprehensive, the normal reaction when police start taking an interest in you.

The French police officer made the introductions. I said, wasting no time, “We would be most grateful if you could give us some information about an Englishman whose acquaintance you made in the middle forties— ’45 and ’46, to be precise. A Dr. Alexander MacDonald.”

“Dr. MacDonald? Alex?” She laughed. “He’d be furious to hear himself described as an Englishman. At least, he would have been. In the days when I knew him he was the most ardent Scottish—what do you call it?”

“Nationalist?”

“Of course. A Scottish Nationalist. Fervent, I remember. Forever saying, ‘down with the old enemy’—England—and ‘up with the old Franco-Scottish alliance.’ But I do know he fought most gallantly for the old enemy in the last war, so perhaps he was not so terribly sincere.” She broke off and looked at me with an odd mixture of shrewdness and apprehension. “He—he’s not dead, is he?”

“No, madame, he is not.”

“But he is in trouble? Police trouble?” She was quick and clever, had seized at once on the almost imperceptible inflection in my voice.

“I’m afraid he may be. How and when did you first meet him, Madame Halle?”

“Two or three months before the war ended— the European war, I mean. Colonel MacDonald, as he was then, was sent to examine a munitions and chemical factory that had been run by the Germans for years at St. Denis. I was working in the research division of the same factory—not from choice, I assure you. I did not know then that Colonel MacDonald was himself a brilliant chemist. I took it upon myself to explain to him the various chemical processes and production lines and it wasn’t until I’d finished the tour of the factory that I found out that he knew far more about it than I did.” She smiled. “I think the gallant colonel had rather taken a fancy to me. And I to him.” I nodded. Judging from the highly combustible tone of her letters she was considerably understating the case.

“He remained for several months in the Paris area,” she continued. “I don’t quite know what his duties were, but they were mostly of a technical nature. Every free moment we had we spent together.” She shrugged. “It’s all so long ago, it seems another world. He returned to England for demobilisation and was back inside a week. He tried to find employment in Paris, but it was impossible. I think he eventually got some sort of research job with the British Government.”

“Did you ever know or hear or suspect anything shady or reprehensible about Colonel MacDonald?” I asked bluntly.

“Never. If I had I would not have associated with him.” The conviction of the words, the dignity of manner, made it impossible not to believe her. I had the sudden hollow feeling that perhaps the General had been right after all and that I was just wasting valuable time—if, on bitter reflection, my time could be called valuable—on a wild-goose chase. Cavell returning home with his tail between his legs.

“Nothing?” I persisted. “Not the slightest thing you can think of?”

“You wish to insult me, perhaps?” Her voice was quiet.

“I’m sorry.” I changed my approach. “May I ask if you were in love with him?”

“I take it Dr. MacDonald didn’t send you here,” she said calmly. “You must have learnt of me through my letters. You know the answer to your question.”

“Was he in love with you?”

“I know he was. At least he asked me to marry him. Ten times at least. That should show, no?”

“But you didn’t marry,” I said. “You lost touch with him. And if you were both in love and he asked you to marry him, may I ask why you refused? For you must have refused.”

“I refused for the same reason that our friendship ended. Partly, I’m afraid because, in spite of his protestations of love, he was an incurable philanderer, but mainly because there were profound differences between us and we were neither of us old enough or experienced enough to let our heads rule our hearts.”

“Differences? May I ask what differences, Madame Halle?”

“You are persistent, aren’t you? Does it matter?” She sighed. “I suppose it does to you. You’ll just keep on until you get the answer. There’s no secret about it and it’s all very unimportant and rather silly.”

“I’d still like to hear it.”

“No doubt. France, you will remember, was in a most confused state politically after the war. We had parties whose views could not have been more divergent, from the extreme right to the very furthest left. I am a good Catholic and I was of the Catholic party of the Right.” She smiled deprecatingly. “What you could call a true-blue Tory. Well, I’m afraid that Dr. MacDonald disagreed so violently with my political opinions that our friendship eventually became quite impossible. Those things happen, you know. When one is young, politics become so terribly important.”

“Dr. MacDonald didn’t share your Conservative viewpoint?”

“Conservative!” She laughed in genuine amusement. “Conservative, you say! Whether or not Alex was a genuine Scottish Nationalist I cannot say, but this much I can say with complete certainty: outside the walls of the Kremlin there never existed a more implacable and dedicated Communist. He was formidable.”

One hour and ten minutes later I walked into the lounge of the Waggoner’s Rest in Alfringham.

CHAPTER TEN

I’d had a phone call put through from Stanton airfield and both the General and Superintendent Hardanger were in the lounge waiting for me. Although it was still early evening the General had on the table before him the remains of what appeared to have been a pretty considerable whisky. I’d never before known him to have his first drink of the day before nine o’clock at night. His face was pale, set and strained and for the first time ever he was beginning to look his age, nothing I could put my finger on, just the slight sag of the shoulders, the indefinable air of weariness. There was something curiously pathetic about him, the pathos of a man with a broad and upright back who had suddenly, finally felt the burden of the weight he was carrying to be too much.

Hardanger didn’t look a great deal better either.

I greeted them both, collected a whisky from old shirt-sleeves, who was safely out of hearing range, and gladly took the weight off my feet. I said, “Where’s Mary?”

“Out visiting Stella Chessingham and her mother,” Hardanger said. “More broken wings for her to mend. Your surly friend behind the bar is just back from driving her there. She wanted to give them what sympathy and encouragement she could. I agreed with her that they must both be feeling pretty grim after young Chessingham’s arrest, but said I didn’t think it either necessary or wise. This was before the General came down. She wouldn’t listen to me. You know what your wife is like, Cavell. And your daughter, sir.”

“She’s wasting her time,” I said. “On this occasion. Young Chessingham is as innocent as the day he was born. I told his mother so at eight o’clock this morning—I had to, she’s a sick woman and the shock might have killed her— and she’d have told her daughter as soon as the van called for Chessingham. They don’t need either sympathy or consolation.”

“What!” Hardanger leant far forward in his seat, face dark with rising anger, his big hand threatening to crush the glass clasped inside it. “What the devil are you saying, Cavell? Innocent? Damn it all, there’s enough circumstantial evidence——”

“The only evidence against him is the fact that he very understandably told a lie about his driving and that the real murderer has been sending him money under a false name. To throw suspicion on him. To buy time. Always to buy time. I don’t know why it is but it is essential for this murderer to buy time. He buys time every time he throws suspicion on everyone else, and he’s so outstandingly clever that he’s managed to throw suspicion on practically everyone: he tried to buy time when he kidnapped me this morning. The thing is, he knew months before the crime— money was first paid into Chessingham’s account at the beginning of July—that it was going to be necessary to buy time. Why? Why buy time?”

“You fooled me, damn you,” Hardanger said harshly. “You trumped up this story——”

“I told you the facts as I had them.” I was in no mood to placate Hardanger. “If I’d said he was innocent, would you have arrested him? You know perfectly well you wouldn’t. But you did, and that has bought us time, because the murderer or murderers will read their evening papers and be convinced that we’re on the wrong track.”

“You’ll be saying next that Hartnell and his wife are being framed, too,” he said gratingly.

“As regards the hammer, pliers and mud on the scooter, of course they are. You know that. For the rest, Hartnell and wife are guilty as charged. But no court’s ever going to convict. A man’s blackmailed into having his wife shout and wave at a truck. Damn all criminal about that. All he’ll get is a couple of years on the entirely unrelated charge of embezzlement—if the Army choose to press the charge, which I doubt. But again his arrest is buying us time: the murderer’s planting of hammer and pliers were another method of buying them time. They don’t know we haven’t bought that one. Another point in our favour.”

Hardanger turned to the General. “Were you aware that Cavell was working behind my back, sir?”

The General frowned. “That’s pitching it a bit strongly, isn’t it, Superintendent? As for my being aware—damn it all, man, it was you who talked me into bringing Cavell into this.” Very adroit indeed. “I must admit he works in a highly unorthodox fashion. Which reminds me, Cavell. Dig up anything interesting about MacDonald in Paris?”

I didn’t answer for a moment. There was something off-hand, strangely indifferent in his manner, as if his mind was on other and more important things. I answered in kind.

“All depends what you call interesting, sir. I can give you with certainty the name of one of the men behind it all. Dr. Alexander MacDonald. And beyond all doubt he’s been a top-flight Communist espionage agent for the past fifteen years. If not more.”

That got them. They were the last two men on earth ever to go in for goggling, but they went in for it all the same. Just for a second. Then they stared at each other, then back at me. I told them in a minute flat what had happened. Hardanger said, “Oh, dear God!” very quietly and left to call a police car.

The General said, “You saw the police radio van outside?”

I nodded.

“We’re in constant touch with the Government and Scotland Yard.” He fished in an inside pocket and brought out two typewritten notes. “The first of those came in about two hours ago, the second only ten minutes ago.” I looked at them quickly and for the first time in my life realised that the phrase about blood running cold might have some basis in physical experience. I felt unaccountably cold, icy, even, and was glad to see Hardanger, back from ordering his car, bring three more whiskies from the bar. I knew now why both the General and Hardanger had looked so ill, so close to desperation, when I’d come in. I knew now and could understand why my trip to Paris had been a matter of relative indifference to them.

The first message had been delivered at almost the same time to Reuter’s and A.P. and was very brief. The florid style was unmistakable. It read: “The walls of the home of the anti-Christ still stand. My orders have been ignored. The responsibility is yours. I have taped a virus ampoule to a simple explosive device which will be detonated at 3.45 this afternoon in Lower Hampton, Norfolk. The wind is W.S.W. If the demolition of Mordon has not commenced by midnight tonight I shall be compelled to break another ampoule tomorrow. In the heart of the City of London. The carnage will be such as the world has never seen. Yours is the choice.”

“Lower Hampton is a hamlet of about 150 people four miles from the sea,” the General said. “The reference to the wind means that the virus would cover only four miles of land and then be blown out over the sea. Unless the wind changed. The message was received at 2.45 this afternoon. Nearest police cars were rushed to the area and all people in the village and as many as could be reached in the area between the village and the sea were evacuated to the west.” He broke off and stared at the table. “But that’s rich farming land. There are many farms and few cars. It was not possible to reach them all in time, I’m afraid. A hurried search was made in Lower Hampton for the bomb, but it was worse than the needle in the haystack. At 3.45 precisely a sergeant and two constables heard a small explosion and saw fire and smoke coming from the thatch of a disused cottage. They ran for their car and you can just imagine how they took off.”

My mouth felt as dry as ashes. I washed some of the ashes away by draining half a large whisky in one gulp.

The General went on: “At 4.20 an R.A.F. bomber, a photo-reconnaissance plane, took off from a base in East Anglia and flew over the area. The pilot was warned not to fly below 10,000 feet, but it’s a clear evening up there and with the kind of cameras they have in the Air Force today there was no trouble in making a close reconnaissance. The entire area was photographed—from two miles up it doesn’t take long to photograph a few square miles of territory—and the bomber landed half an hour after take off. The pictures were developed within minutes and examined by an expert. That second paper shows his findings.”

It was even briefer than the first. It read: “Over a wedge-shaped area, with its point at the village of Little Hampton and its base two and a half miles of sea-coast there are no discoverable signs of life, either around houses and farm buildings or in the fields. Dead cattle in fields estimated between three and four hundred. Three flocks of sheep, also apparently lifeless. At least seven human bodies identified. Characteristic postures of both men and cattle suggest death in contorted agony. Detailed analysis following.”

I finished the second half of my whisky in a second gulp. I might as well have been drinking soda pop for all the taste or the effect it had. I said, “What’s the Government going to do?”

“I don’t know,” the General said tonelessly. “Neither do they. They will make a decision by ten o’clock tonight—and now they’ll decide even faster when they hear your news. It completely alters everything. We thought we were dealing with some raving crackpot, however brilliant that crackpot: it seems instead, that we’re dealing with a Communist plot to destroy the most powerful weapon that Britain—or any other country for that matter—has ever had. Maybe it’s the beginnings of a plot to destroy Britain itself, I don’t know, damn it all I’ve just come to the thought and I haven’t had time to think about it. Could it be that the Communist world is planning a showdown with the West, that they’re convinced that they can strike so hard and so savagely that there’ll be no possibility of retaliation? Not, that is, once Mordon and its viruses are out of the way. God only knows. I think I’d rather be dealing with a crackpot any day. Besides, Cavell, we don’t know that your information is correct.”

“There’s only one way to find out, sir.” I rose to my feet. “I see the police driver is there. Shall we have a chat with MacDonald?”

We reached Mordon in eight minutes flat only to be told at the gate that MacDonald had checked out over two hours previously. Eight minutes later we pulled up at the front door of his home.

Dr. MacDonald’s house was dark and deserted. Mrs. Turpin, the housekeeper, should not have been gone for the night. But she was. MacDonald had also gone, not for the night but for ever. Our bird had flown.

MacDonald hadn’t even bothered to lock the door when leaving. He’d have been in too much of a hurry for that. We made our way into the hallway, switched on lights and looked quickly over the ground floor. No fires, no still warm radiators, no smell of cooking, no cigarette smoke still hanging in the air. Whoever had left hadn’t left by a back window as we had come in by the front door. He’d left a long long time ago. I felt old and sick and tired. And foolish. Because I knew now why he’d left in such a hurry.

We went over the house, not wasting time, starting from the attic dark-room. The battery of expensive photographic equipment was as I had seen it before, but this time I was seeing it in a new light. Given sufficient facts and sufficient time even Cavell could arrive at a conclusion. We went over his bedroom, but there were no signs of hasty packing or hasty departure. That was strange. People going on a journey from which they have no intention of returning usually take a bare minimum of supplies to tide them over, no matter what their hurry. An inspection of the bathroom was equally puzzling. Razor, brush, shaving cream, toothbrush—they were all still there. MacDonald’s old colonel, I thought inconsequentially, wasn’t going to be any too happy when he arrived to identify MacDonald and found no one left to identify.

Even more baffling was the kitchen. Mrs. Turpin, I knew, used to leave every night at six-thirty when MacDonald arrived home, leaving his dinner prepared. MacDonald had been in the habit of helping himself and leaving the dishes for his housekeeper the following morning. But there were no signs whatsoever of any food preparations. No roasts in the oven, no pots of still warm food, an electric stove so cold that it couldn’t have been used for hours.

I said, “The last of the plain-clothes men on the search job would have been gone by half past three at the latest. No reason why Mrs. Turpin shouldn’t have got on with the cooking of dinner for Dr. MacDonald—and MacDonald strikes me as a character who would be very huffed indeed if he didn’t find his chow ready. But she prepared none. Why?”

“She knew he wouldn’t be wanting any,” Hardanger said heavily. “From something she heard or saw this afternoon she knew our worthy doctor wouldn’t be wanting to linger too much around these parts after she’d told him what she’d heard or seen. Which argues connivance at or at least knowledge of MacDonald’s activities.”

“It’s my fault,” I said savagely. “That damn’ woman! She must have heard me telephoning the General about going to Paris. God only knows how long she was standing there in the doorway, watching me, seeing the letter in my hand. But I didn’t see her because she was on my blind side. She must have noticed that and the limp and told MacDonald by phone. And what I was talking about. He’d have known straight away that it must have been me, limp or no limp. It’s all my bloody fault,” I repeated. “It never crossed my mind to suspect her. I think we should have a talk with Mrs. Turpin. If she’s at home, that is.”

Hardanger moved off to a phone while the General accompanied me into MacDonald’s study. I moved over to the big old-fashioned knee-hole desk where MacDonald’s correspondence and photographic albums had been discovered. It was locked. I said to the General, “Back in a minute, sir,” and went outside.

There was nothing in the garage that would be of any use to me. Backing on the garage was a large tool-shed. I switched on the torch and looked round. Garden implements, a small pile of grey breeze-blocks, a pile of empty cement sacks, a work-bench and bicycle. No claw-hammer, which was what I was looking for, but I found the next best thing, a fairly heavy hatchet.

I went back to the study with this and crossed to the desk just as Hardanger came into the room.

“You going to smash that desk open?” he demanded.

“Let MacDonald object if he feels like it.” I swung the axe twice and the drawer splintered. The albums and the doctor’s correspondence with the World Health Organisation were still here. I opened the album at the page with the missing photograph and showed it to the General.

“A photograph our good friend didn’t seem to care to have around,” I said. “I have more than a vague, obscure feeling that it may be important. See that scratched out caption, something about six letters, some town certainly, starting with TO. I can’t get it. With any other kind of paper or with two different kinds of ink it would have been easy for the lab boys. But white ink on white ink on this porous blotting paper stuff? No good.”

“Not a chance.” Hardanger gave me a suspicious look. “Why is it important?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t worry about what the caption was. Did you find our dear Mrs. Turpin at home?”

“No reply. She lives alone, a widow, as I found out from the local station after I’d called her number. An officer has gone to check, but he’ll find nothing. I’ve put out an all-stations call for her.”

“That’ll help,” I said sourly. I went quickly through MacDonald’s correspondence, picking up replies from his W.H.O. correspondents in Europe. I knew what I was looking for, and it took me only two minutes to isolate half a dozen letters, from a Dr. John Weissmann in Vienna. I handed them across to the General and Hardanger. “Exhibit ‘ A’ for the Old Bailey when MacDonald’s en route to the gallows.”

The General looked at me, his face old and tired and expressionless. Hardanger said bluntly, “What are you talking about, Cavell?”

I hesitated and looked at the General. He said quietly, “It’ll be all right now, my boy. Hardanger will understand. And it’ll never go any further.”

Hardanger looked from me to the papers and then back to me again. “What will I understand? It’s time I understood. I knew from the beginning that there was something I couldn’t touch in this damned business. You accepted this job with too much alacrity in the first place.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It had to be this way. You know I’ve been in and out of a few jobs since the war—Army, police, Special Branch, Narcotics, Special Branch again, security chief in Mordon, and then private detective. None of it really meant anything. I’ve been working for the General here non-stop for the past sixteen years. Every time I was heaved out of a job—well, the General arranged it.”

“I’m not all that surprised,” Hardanger said heavily. I was glad to see he was more intrigued than angry. “I’ve had my suspicions.”

“That’s why you’re a superintendent,” the General murmured.

“Anyway, about a year ago, my predecessor in security in Mordon, Easton Derry, began having his suspicions. I won’t go into the where and the when of it, but he came to the conclusion that certain highly secret items in the bacteriological and virus line were being smuggled out of Mordon. His suspicions became certainties when Dr. Baxter approached him privately and said he was convinced that certain stuff was going astray.”

“Dr. Baxter!” Hardanger looked slightly stunned.

“Yes, Baxter. Sorry about that, too—but I told you, plain as I could, not to waste time on him. He said to Derry that although it wasn’t the top secret stuff that was going—that was impossible to get out of ‘A’ laboratory—it was nevertheless pretty important stuff. Very important stuff, indeed. Britain leads the world in the production of microbiological diseases for wartime use against men, animals and plants. You’ll never hear of this when the Parliamentary Estimates for Mordon Health Centre are being passed, but our scientists in Mordon have either discovered or refined to their purest and most deadly forms the germs for causing plague, typhus, smallpox, rabbit and undulant fever in man: hog cholera, fowl pest, Newcastle disease, rinderpest, foot-and-mouth, glanders and anthrax in livestock: and blights like the Japanese beetle, European corn borer, Mediterranean fruit fly, boll-weevil, citrus cancer, wheat rust and heaven knows what else in plants. All very useful in either limited or all-out warfare.”

“What’s all this got to do with Dr. MacDonald?” Hardanger demanded.

“I’m coming to it. Over two years ago our agents in Poland began taking an interest in the newly-built Lenin Museum on the outskirts of Warsaw. So far, this museum has never been opened to the public. It never will be—it’s the equivalent of Mordon, a purely microbiological research station. One of our agents—he’s a card-carrying member of the party—managed to get himself employed there and made the interesting discovery that the Poles were discovering and refining the various bugs I just mentioned a few weeks, or at most months, after they had been perfected in Mordon. The inference was too obvious to miss.

“Easton Derry started investigating. He made two mistakes: he played it too close to the cuff, without letting us know what was going on, and he unwittingly gave himself away. How, we’ve no idea. He may even have taken into his confidence, quite unknowingly, the man who was responsible for smuggling the stuff out of Mordon. MacDonald, for a certainty—it would be too much to expect two espionage agents operating at the same time. Anyway, someone became aware that Easton Derry was in danger of finding out too much. So Derry disappeared.

“The General here then made arrangements to have me removed from the Special Branch and introduced into Mordon as security officer. The first thing I did was to stake out a decoy duck. I had a steel flask of botulinus toxin, strength one—it was so labelled, introduced into a cupboard in number one lab annexe. The same day the flask disappeared. We had a VMF receiver installed at the gates, for the flask contained not toxin but a micro-wave battery-powered transistor sender. Anyone carrying that and coming within two hundred yards of the gate would have been picked up at once. You will understand,” I said dryly, “that anyone picking up a flask of botulinus toxin is unlikely to open it up to see if it really does contain toxin.

“We picked up no one. It wasn’t hard to guess what happened. After dark someone had strolled across to a deserted part of the boundary fence and chucked the flask into an adjacent field—it’s only a ten-yard throw to clear all the fences. Not because they had any suspicions of the contents but because this was the way it would usually be done—you know how often spot checks and searches are made of people leaving Mordon. By eight o’clock that evening we had micro-wave receivers installed at London Airport, Southend and Lydd airfields, the Channel ports and——”

“Wouldn’t the shock of having been flung over the fence have smashed the transmitter?” Hardanger objected.

“The American watch company that makes these transmitters would be most displeased if one did break,” I said. “They can be fired from a high velocity naval gun without being affected in the slightest. Anyway, late that night we picked up a signal in London Airport. Almost inevitably it was from a man boarding a B.E.A. flight to Warsaw. We took him and he told us he was a courier, picking up stuff about once a fortnight from an address in South London. He’d never actually seen his contact.”

“He told you that?” Hardanger said sourly. “I can imagine how you made him volunteer that information.”

“You’d be wrong. We told him—he was a naturalised British subject—ex-Czech—that espionage was a capital offence and he thought he was turning Queen’s evidence. He turned it pretty fast, too. It was his supplier from Mordon we wanted to nail, so I was duly thrown out of there and have been haunting this damn’ address and neighbourhood for the past three weeks. We couldn’t get anyone else to do the job because I was the only one who knew and who could identify all the scientists and technicians in Mordon. But no luck—except that Dr. Baxter reported that the disappearances had stopped. So we seemed to have stopped that leak—temporarily, anyway.

“But according to Baxter and our Polish informant, that wasn’t the only leak. We had learnt that the Lenin Museum had developed viruses that had not been stolen from Mordon—but which had been produced in Mordon. Someone, obviously, was sending them information on the breeding and development of those strains. And now we’ve found that out, too.” I tapped the papers, MacDonald’s correspondence with his W.H.O. contact in Vienna. “Not a new system, but almost impossible to detect. Micro-photography.”

“All that expensive photographic equipment upstairs?” the General murmured.

“Exactly. There’s a camera expert due from London to look at his stuff, but his journey’s hardly necessary now. Look at those letters from Dr. Weissmann. In every one you will note that the dot from an ‘i’ or a full stop is missing in the first paragraph. Weissmann typed a message, reduced it to the size of a dot by micro-miniature photography and stuck it on the letter in place of some other dot. All MacDonald had to do was to pry it loose and enlarge it. And he, of course, did the same in his correspondence with Weissmann. And he didn’t do it for pennies, either.” I glanced around the richly furnished hoom. “He’s earned a fortune over the years—and not a penny tax, either.”

There was a minute’s silence, then the General nodded. “That must be the right of it. At least MacDonald won’t be troubling us any more.” He looked up at me and smiled without humour. “When it comes to locking stable doors after the horse has taken off, we have few equals. There’s also another door I can lock for you, supposing it’s any use to you. The caption that’s been scratched out in this album.”

“Toulon? Tournai?”

“Neither.” He turned to the back board of the album. “This had been prepared for certain members of the W.H.O. by a firm called Gucci Zanolette, Via XX Settembre, Genoa. The word that has been scratched out is Torino—the Italian, of course, for Turin.”

Turin. Only a word, but he might as well have hit me with a sledge-hammer. It had about the same effect. Turin. I sat in a chair because all of a sudden I felt I had to sit, and after the first dazed shock started to wear off I managed to whip a few of the less lethargic brain cells out of their coma and started thinking again. It wasn’t much in the way of thinking, not as thinking went, for with the beating and the soaking I had received, the lack of sleep and food, I was a fair way below my best insofar as anything resembling active cerebration was concerned. Slowly, laboriously, I assembled a few facts in the befogged recesses of my mind, and no matter how I reassembled them those facts formed the same mosaic every time. Two and two always came out to four.

I rose heavily to my feet and said to the General, “It’s like the man says, sir. You speak more truly than you know.”

“Are you all right, Cavell?” There was sharp anxiety in the voice.

“I’m falling to pieces. My mind, such as it is, is still on its hinges. Or I think so. We’ll soon find out.”

Torch in hand, I turned and left the room. The General and Hardanger hesitated, then followed. I suppose they were exchanging all sorts of apprehensive glances, but I was past caring.

I’d already been in the garage and shed, so those weren’t the places to look. Somewhere in the shrubbery, I thought drearily—and it was still raining. In the hall I turned off into the kitchen and was about to make for the back door when I saw a flight of steps leading down to the cellar. I remembered vaguely that Sergeant Carlisle had made mention of this when he and his men had been searching the house that afternoon. I went down the flight of steps, opened the cellar door and switched on the overhead light. I stood aside to let the General and Hardanger into the cellar.

“It’s as you said, sir,” I murmured to the General. “MacDonald won’t be troubling us any more.”

Which was not quite accurate. MacDonald was going to give some trouble yet. To the police doctor, the undertaker and the man who would have to cut the rope by which he was suspended by the neck from the heavy iron ring in the overhead loading hatch. As he dangled there, feet just clear of the floor and brushing the legs of an overturned chair, he was the stuff that screaming nightmares are made of: eyes staring wide in the frenzied agony of death, bluish-purple face, swollen tongue protruding between blackened lips drawn far back in the snarling rictus of dissolution. No, not the stuff that dreams are made of.

“My good God!” The General’s voice was a hushed whisper. “MacDonald.” He gazed at the dangling figure then said slowly, “He must have known his time was running out.”

I shook my head. “Someone else decided for him that his time had run out.”

“Someone else——” Hardanger examined the dead man closely, his face giving nothing away. “His hands are free. His feet are free. He was conscious when he started to strangle. That chair was brought down from the kitchen. And yet you say——”

“He was murdered. Look at the streaks and marks in that coal dust a few feet from the chair, and that disturbed pile of coal with lumps kicked all over the cellar floor. Look at the weals and the blood on the inside of the thumbs.”

“He could have changed his mind at the last minute,” Hardanger rumbled. “Lots of them do. As soon as he started choking he probably grabbed the rope above his head and took the weight until he couldn’t hang on any more. That would account for the marks on his thumbs.”

“The marks on his thumbs were caused by twine or wire binding them together,” I said. “He was marched down here, almost certainly at gunpoint, and made to lie-down on the floor. He may have been blindfolded, I don’t know. Probably. Whoever killed him passed a rope through the ring and had the loop round MacDonald’s neck and had started hauling before MacDonald could do anything about it. That’s what caused all that mess in the coal dust—MacDonald trying to scrabble madly to his feet as the pressure tightened round his neck. With his thumbs bound behind his back he made it with the assistance of his executioner, but it wouldn’t have been easy. It only postponed death by seconds, the man on the end of the rope just kept on hauling. Can’t you see MacDonald almost tearing his thumbs off in an effort to free them? By and by he would be on tiptoe—but a man can’t stand on tiptoe for ever. When he was dead our pal on the heaving end got a chair and used it to help him lift MacDonald clear off the floor—MacDonald was a big heavy man. When he’d secured him there, he cut the twine on MacDonald’s thumbs and kicked over the chair—to make it look like suicide. It’s our old buy-time-at-any-price friend. If he could make us think that MacDonald did himself in because he thought the net was closing round him, then he hoped that we would believe that MacDonald was the king-pin in this business. But he wasn’t sure.”

“You’re guessing,” Hardanger said.

“No. Can you see a never-say-die character like MacDonald, not only a highly decorated officer who fought in a tank regiment for six years but also a nerveless espionage agent for many years after that, committing suicide when things started closing in on him? MacDonald thinking of giving up or giving in? He wouldn’t have known how to go about it, most probably. MacDonald was well and truly murdered—which he no doubt richly deserved to be anyway. But the real point is that he wasn’t murdered only so that our friend could cast more red herrings around and so buy more time: he had to die and our friend thought he might as well make it look like suicide while he was about it in the hope of stalling us further. I was guessing, Hardanger, but not any more.”

“MacDonald had to die?” Hardanger studied me through a long considering silence then said abruptly, “You seem fairly sure about all this.”

“I’m certain. I know.” I picked up the coal shovel and started heaving away some of the coal that was piled up against the back wall of the cellar. There must have been close on a couple of tons of the stuff reaching almost as high as the ceiling and I was in no condition for anything much more strenuous than brushing my teeth but I had to shift only a fraction of it: for every shovelful I scooped away from the base almost a hundred-weight of lumps came clattering down on to the floor.

“What do you expect to find under that lot?” Hardanger said with heavy sarcasm. “Another body?”

“Another body is exactly what I do expect to find. I expect to find the late Mrs. Turpin. The fact that she tipped off MacDonald about me and didn’t bother preparing dinner because she knew MacDonald wouldn’t be staying for dinner owing to the fact that he would be taking off for the high timber shows beyond all doubt that she was in cahoots with our pal here. What MacDonald knew, she knew. It would have been pointless to silence MacDonald if Mrs. Turpin had been left alive to squawk. So she was attended to.”

But wherever she had been attended to, it hadn’t been in the cellar. We went upstairs and while the General went to talk for quite a long time on the scrambler radio-phone in the police van that had followed us from Alfringham, Hardanger and I, with the assistance of two police drivers and a couple of torches, started to scour the grounds. It was no easy job, for the good doctor, who had done so well for himself in the way of furnishing his house, had also done himself pretty well in the way of buying himself privacy, for his policies, half garden, half parkland, extended to over four acres, the whole of it surrounded by an enormous beech hedge that would have stopped a tank.

It was dark and very cold with no wind, the heavy rain falling vertically through the thinning leaves of the dripping trees to the sodden earth beneath. The appropriate setting, I thought grimly, for a search for a murdered body: and there’s an awful lot of searching in four acres on a black and miserable night.

The beech hedge had been trimmed some time during the past month and the clipping piled up in a distant corner of the garden. We found Mrs. Turpin under this pile, not very deep down, just enough branches and twigs over her to hide her from sight. Lying beside her was the hammer I had failed to find in the tool-shed and it required only a glance at the back of her head to know the reason why the hammer was there. At a guess I would have said that the person who had tried to stove in my ribs had also wielded the hammer on Mrs. Turpin: my ribs, like the dead woman’s head, bore witness to the insensate and unreasoning ferocity of a broken and vicious mind.

Back in the house I broached MacDonald’s whisky supplies. He wouldn’t be wanting it any more and as he’d carefully pointed out to me that he had no relations and therefore no one to leave it to, it seemed a pity to waste it. We needed it, badly. I poured out hefty tots, one apiece for Hardanger and myself, the other two for the police drivers and if Hardanger took a dim view of this theft of property and contravention of standing orders by offering intoxicating liquor to policemen on duty he kept it to himself. He finished his whisky before any of us. The two policemen left just as the General returned from the radio van. He seemed to have aged a year for every minute since last I’d seen him, the lines about the nose and mouth more deeply trenched than ever.

“You found her?” He took the offered glass.

“We found her,” Hardanger acknowledged. “Dead, as Cavell said she would be. Murdered.”

“It hardly matters.” The General shivered suddenly and took a deep gulp of his whisky. “She’s only one. This time tomorrow—how many thousands? God knows how many thousands. This madman has sent another message. Usual Biblical language, walls of Mordon still standing, no signs of demolition, so has advanced his timetable. If demolition doesn’t start on Mordon by midnight he’s going to break a botulinus toxin ampoule in the heart of London, at four o’clock this morning, within a quarter of a mile of New Oxford Street.”

This seemed to call for some more whisky. Hardanger said, “He’s no madman, sir.”

“No.” The General rubbed his forehead wearily. “I told them what Cavell found out, what we think. They’re in a complete panic now. Do you know that some national dailies are already on the streets—just before six o’clock? Unprecedented, but so is the situation. The papers seem to be very accurately reflecting the terror of the people and are begging—or demanding—that the Government yield to this madman—for at the time of printing everyone thought it was just a crazed crackpot. Word of the wiping out of this segment of East Anglia is just beginning to come through on constant radio and TV news broadcasts and everyone is terrified out of their wits. Whoever is behind all this is a brilliant devil: a few hours and he has the nation on its knees. It’s the man’s frightening speed of operation, the lack of time-lag between threat and carrying out of threat that’s so terrifying. Especially with every paper and news broadcast plugging the theme that this madman doesn’t know the difference between the botulinus toxin and the Satan Bug and that it may very well be the Satan Bug he uses next time.”

“In fact,” I said, “all those who have been moaning and complaining so bitterly that life is hardly worth the living in the shadow of a nuclear holocaust have suddenly discovered that it might very well be worth living after all. You think the Government will give in?”

“I can’t say,” the General admitted. “I’m afraid I rather misjudged the Premier. I thought he was as windy as they come. I don’t know now. He’s toughened his attitude amazingly. Maybe he’s ashamed of his earlier panic-stricken reaction. Maybe he sees the chance to make his imperishable mark on history.”

“Maybe he’s like us,” I said. “Maybe he’s been drinking whisky, too.”

“Maybe. He’s at present consulting with the Cabinet. He says that if this is a Communist scheme he’ll be damned if he gives in. If the Communists are behind it, he says the last thing in the world we can afford to do is to give in for though not yielding to their demands that Mordon be demolished may bring death to many, yielding to their demands will bring eventual death to all. Myself, I think that attitude is the only one, and I agree with him when he says he’s ready to evacuate the city of London before he gives in.”

“Evacuate London?” Hardanger said in disbelief. “Ten million people in ten hours. Fantastic. The man’s mad. Impossible.”

“It’s not quite as drastic as all that, thank heaven. It’s a windless evening, the met. office forecasts a windless night and it’s raining heavily. It seems that an airborne virus is carried down to earth by heavy rain, having a much greater affinity for water than for air. The experts doubt whether in windless rainy conditions the virus will get more than a few hundred yards from its point of release. If the need arises they propose to evacuate the area between Euston Road and the Thames, from Portland Street and Regent Street in the west, to Gray’s Inn Road in the east.”

“That’s feasible enough,” Hardanger admitted.

“Place is practically deserted by night anyway— mainly a business, office and shop area. But this virus. It’ll be carried away by the rain. It’ll pollute the Thames. It may get into the drinking water. What’s to happen—are people to be told to refrain from washing or drinking until the twelve hour oxidisation period is up?”

“That’s what they say. Unless the water has been stored and covered beforehand, that is. My God, what’s going to come of it all? I’ve never felt so damned helpless in my life. We don’t seem to have a single solitary lead into this business. If only we had a suspicion, the slightest pointing finger as to whom was behind all this—well, by heaven, if we could get to him I’d turn my back and let Cavell here get to work on him.”

I drained my glass and put it down. “You mean that, sir?”

“What do you think?” He glanced up from his glass then stared at me with his tired grey eyes. “What do you mean? Cavell? Can you point a finger?”

“I can do better than that, sir. I know. I know who it is.”

The General was a great disappointment as far as reaction went. He always was. No gasps, no wide-eyed stares, no emotional pyrotechnics. He murmured: “Half of my kingdom, Pierre. Who?”

“The last proof,” I said. “The last proof and then I can say. We missed it and it was staring us in the face. At least, it was staring me in the face. And Hardanger. To think the country depends on people like us to safeguard them. Policemen, detectives. We couldn’t detect the holes in Gruyére cheese.” I turned to Hardanger. “We’ve just made a pretty thorough search of the garden. Agreed?”

“Agreed. So?”

“Hardly missed a square foot?” I persisted.

“Go on,” he rumbled impatiently.

“Did you see any signs of freshly-built masonry? Huts? Sheds? Walls? Fishponds? Decorative stonework? Any thing?”

He shook his head, his eyes wary. I was going off my rocker. “Nothing. There was nothing of the kind.”

“Then what happened to all the cement in the empty cement bags in the tool-shed? The ones we saw when we found the tarpaulin there? It didn’t vanish. And the few breeze-blocks we saw? Probably only the remainder of a fair stack of them. If outdoor masonry work wasn’t a hobby of MacDonald’s, then what would be the most likely place to find such masonry work? In a dining-room? In a bedroom?”

“Suppose you tell me, Cavell?”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you.” I left them, went out to the tool-shed and hunted around for a crowbar or pick. I could find neither. The nearest was a small sledge. It would have to do. I picked it up along with a bucket, went into the kitchen where the General and Hardanger were waiting for me, filled the bucket at the kitchen sink and led the way down the stairs to the cellar. Hardanger, apparently oblivious of the presence of the dead man dangling from the ceiling, said heavily, “What do you propose to demonstrate, Cavell? How to make coal briquettes?”

The telephone rang in the hallway upstairs. Automatically, we all looked at each other. Dr. MacDonald’s incoming calls might be very interesting. Hardanger said, “I’ll answer it,” and left.

We heard his voice on the phone, and then my name being called. I started up the stairs, conscious of the General following me.

Hardanger handed me the phone. “For you. Won’t give his name. Wants to speak to you personally.”

I took the receiver. “Cavell speaking.”

“So you are on the loose and the little lady wasn’t lying.” The words came over the wire like a deep, dark and throaty whisper. “Lay off, Cavell. Tell the General to lay off, Cavell. If you want to see the little lady alive again.”

These new synthetic resins are pretty tough so the receiver didn’t crush in my palm. It must have been pretty close, though. My heart did a long slow summersault and landed on its back with a thud. I kept my voice steady and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The beautiful Mrs. Cavell. I have her. She would like to speak to you.”

A moment’s silence, then her voice came. “Pierre? Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry——” Her voice broke off abruptly in a gasp followed by a scream of agony. Silence. Again the dark whisper, “Lay off, Cavell,” and then the click of a replaced receiver. I replaced mine, the receiver making a sharp staccato rattle against the rest. My hand was the hand of a man with the ague.

Shock or fear or both may have frozen my face into an expression of normalcy or maybe the make-up on my face didn’t transmit expression too well. Whichever it was, they didn’t notice anything amiss for the General said, “Who was it?” in a normal curious tone.

“I don’t know.” I paused and went on mechanically, “They’ve got Mary.”

The General had had his hand on the door. Now he dropped it to his side in a ridiculously slow-motion gesture that took almost ten seconds while something in his face died. Hardanger whispered something, something unprintable: his face was like a stone. Neither of them asked me to repeat what I had said, neither was in the slightest doubt as to what I had meant.

“They told us to lay off,” I went on in the same wooden voice. “Or they’d kill her. They have her, all right. She spoke a few words and then screamed. They must have hurt her, badly.”

Hardanger said, almost desperately, “How could he have known that you had escaped? Or even suspected? How——”

“Dr. MacDonald is how,” I said. “He knew— Mrs. Turpin told him—and the killer learnt from MacDonald.” I stared almost unseeingly at the General’s face, a face still impassive, but with all the life and animation gone from it. I went on, “I’m sorry. If anything happens to Mary it will be my fault. My own criminal folly and negligence.”

The General said, “What are we going to do, my boy?” The voice was tired and listless to match the dullness that had replaced the soldierly tire in his eye. “You know they are going to kill your wife. People like that always kill.”

“We’re wasting time,” I said harshly. “Two minutes, that’s all I need. To make sure.”

I ran down to the cellar, picked up the bucket and tossed half its contents against the opposite wall. The water spread and ran down quickly to the floor. As a cleaning agent it was a dead failure, making hardly any impression whatsoever on the ingrained coal dust of a score or more of years. With the General and Hardanger still watching uncomprehendingly I threw the remainder of the bucket’s contents against the rear wall, where the coal had been piled so high before my recent excavation. The water splashed off and ran down into the coal, leaving the wall almost as clear and clean and fresh as if it had been built only a few weeks previously. Hardanger glared at it, then at me then back at the wall again.

“My apologies, Cavell,” he said. “That would be why the coal was piled so high against the wall— to conceal the traces of recent work.”

I didn’t waste time speaking, time was now the one commodity we’d run clear out of: instead I picked up the sledgehammer and swung at the upper line of breeze work—the lower portion was solid concrete. One swing only. I felt as if someone had slid a six-inch stiletto between my right ribs. Maybe the doctor had been right, maybe my ribs weren’t as securely anchored as nature had intended. Without a word I handed the sledge to Hardanger and sat down wearily on the upturned bucket.

Hardanger weighed sixteen stone and in spite of the calm impassivity of his features he was just clear mad all the way through. With all the power and vicious determination that was in him he attacked that wall of breeze as if it were the archetype of all things evil on earth. The wall hadn’t a chance. On the third stroke the first block of breeze was splintered and dislodged and within thirty seconds he had hammered in a hole about two feet square. He stopped, looked at me and I rose to my feet like the old, old man I felt I was and switched on my torch. Together, we peered into the peephole.

Between the false wall and the real cellar wall behind there was a gap of under two feet and jammed at the bottom of this narrow space and half-covered with broken masonry, chips and dust from the fractured breeze-blocks lay the remains of what had once been a man. Broken, twisted, savagely mutilated, but still undoubtedly the remains of a man.

Hardanger said in a voice ominously calm and steady, “Do you know who this is, Cavell?”

“I know him. Easton Derry. My predecessor as security chief in Mordon.”

“Easton Derry.” The General was as unnaturally controlled as Hardanger. “How can you tell? His face is unrecognisable.”

“Yes. That ring on his left hand has a blue Cairngorm stone. Easton Derry always wore a ring with a blue Cairngorm. That’s Easton Derry.”

“What—what did this to him?” The General stared down at the half-naked body. “A road crash? Some—some wild animal?” For a long minute he stared down in silence at the dead man, then straightened and turned to me, the age and weariness in his face more accentuated than ever, but the old eyes bleak and icy and still. “A man did this to him. He was tortured to death.”

“He was tortured to death,” I said.

“And you know who did it?” Hardanger reminded me.

“I know who did it.”

Hardanger pulled a warrant form and pen from an inside pocket and stood waiting. I said, “You won’t need that, Superintendent. Not if I get to him first. In case I don’t make it out in the name of Dr. Giovanni Gregori. The real Dr. Gregori is dead.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Eight minutes later the big police Jaguar braked hard to a stop outside Chessingham’s house and for the third time in just under twenty-four hours I climbed the worn steps over the dried-out moat and pressed the bell. The General was close behind me; Hardanger was in the radio van, alerting the police of a dozen counties to be on the lookout for Gregori and his Fiat, to identify, follow but not for the present apprehend:Gregori, we felt, wouldn’t kill until desperate and we owed Mary at least that slender hope of life.

“Mr. Cavell!” The welcome Stella Chessingham gave me bore no resemblance to the one I had received from her at dawn that morning. The light was back in her eyes, the anxixety vanished from her face. “How nice! I—I’m so sorry about this morning, Mr. Cavell. I mean—it is true what my mother told me after they’d taken him away?”

“It’s perfectly true, Miss Chessingham.” I tried to smile, but with the way I felt and with my face still aching from the hasty scrubbing away of the now useless disguise before leaving MacDonald’s house, I was glad I couldn’t see what sort of attempt I’d made at it. As far as our respective positions were concerned, compared to twelve hours ago, the boot was on the other foot now, and with a vengeance. “I am sincerely sorry but it was at the time necessary. Your brother will be released tonight. You saw my wife this afternoon?”

“Of course. It was so sweet of her to come to see us. Won’t you and your—um—friend come in to see Mother? She’d be delighted I’m sure.”

I shook my head. “What time did my wife leave here?”

“About five-thirty, I should say. It was beginning to get dark and—has something happened to her?” she ended in a whisper.

“She’s been kidnapped by the murderer and held as hostage.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no, Mr. Cavell, no.” Her hand clutched her throat. “It—it’s not possible.”

“How did she leave here?”

“Kidnapped? Your wife kidnapped?” She stared at me, round-eyed in fear. “Why should anyone want——”

“For God’s sake answer my question,” I said savagely. “Had she hired a car, taxi, bus service— what was it?”

“A car,” she whispered. “A car came to pick her up. The man said you wanted to see her urgently …” Her voice trailed away as she realised the implications of what she was saying.

“What man?” I demanded. “What car?”

“A—a middle-aged man,” she faltered. “Swarthy. In a blue car. With another man in the back seat. I don’t know what kind except that—of course! It was a foreign car, a car with left-hand drive. Has she——”

“Gregori and his Fiat?” the General whispered. “But how in God’s name did he know that Mary was out here?”

“Simply by lifting the telephone,” I said bitterly. “He knew we were staying at the Waggoner’s Rest. He asked for Mary and asked if she was there and that fat fool behind the bar said why no, Mrs. Cavell wasn’t there, he himself had just driven her out to Mr. Chessingham’s house less than a couple of hours ago. It would be on Gregori’s way, so he stopped by to see. He’d everything to gain, nothing to lose.”

We didn’t even tell Stella Chessingham goodbye. We ran down the steps, intercepted Hardanger changing over from the radio van to the police Jaguar, and almost bundled him into the car. “Alfringham,” I said quickly. “The Fiat. He took it after all. I didn’t think he would take the chance——”

“He didn’t,” Hardanger ground out. “Had a report just now. He ditched it in the village of Grayling, not three miles from here, in a side street—and not twenty yards from the local constable’s cottage. The constable was just listening to our radio broadcast, lifted his eyes and there it was.”

“Empty, of course.”

“Empty. He wouldn’t have ditched it unless he’d another lined up. An all-station alert is out for stolen cars. It would be stolen in Grayling, hardly more than a hamlet, I understand. We’ll soon find out.”

We soon found out and it was ourselves that did the finding. Just two minutes later, running into Grayling, we saw a character doing a sort of war dance on the pavement and flagging us down with a furiously waving brief-case of sorts held in his right hand. The Jaguar stopped and Hardanger wound down his window.

“It’s monstrous,” the man with the brief-case shouted. “Thank God you’re here. An outrage, a damnable outrage! In broad daylight——”

“What’s the matter?” Hardanger cut in.

“My car. In broad daylight! Stolen, by God!

I was just paying a call in this house and——”

“How long were you in there?”

“Eh? How long? What the hell——”

“Answer me!” Hardanger roared.

“Forty minutes. But what——”

“What kind of car?”

“A Vanden Plas Princess 3-litre.” He was almost sobbing with rage. “Brand new, I tell you. Turquoise. Three weeks old——”

“Don’t worry,” Hardanger said curtly. The police Jaguar was already in motion. “We’ll get it back for you.” He wound up the window, leaving the man standing behind us, open-mouthed, and spoke to the sergeant in front.

“Alfringham. Then the London road. Cancel the call for the Fiat. It’s now a turquoise Vanden Plas Princess 3-litre. All stations. Locate, follow, but don’t close in.”

“Blue-green,” the General murmured. “Blue-green, not turquoise. It’s policemen you’re talking to, not their wives. Half of them would think you were talking about their Christmas dinner.”

“It all started with MacDonald,” I said. The big police car was hissing along the wet tarmac, the pine trees lining the road cartwheeling back into the pitch darkness behind, and it seemed easier to talk than to sit there going quietly crazy with worry. Besides, the General and Hardanger had been patient long enough. “We all know what MacDonald wanted, and it wasn’t just to serve the cause of the Communist world. Dr. MacDonald had only one deeply-felt and abiding interest in life—Dr. MacDonald. No question but that he was a genuine dyed-in-the-wool fellow-traveller at one time—Madame Halle did not strike me as a person who would make a mistake over anything—and I don’t see how he could otherwise have formed his contacts with the Communist world. He must have earned a great deal of money over the years—you’d only to look at the contents of his house—but he spent it fairly judiciously and wisely, not splashing it around too much at a time.”

“The Bentley Continental he had,” Hardanger said. “Wouldn’t you call that splashing it around a bit?”

“He’d that expense well covered, with a watertight explanation. But,” I acknowledged, “he got greedy. He was getting in so much money during the past few months that it was burning a hole in his pockets.”

“Working overtime sending samples to Warsaw and information to Vienna?” the General asked.

“No,” I said. “Blackmailing Gregori.”

“Sorry.” The General stirred wearily in his corner seat. “I’m not with you.”

“It’s not difficult,” I said. “Gregori—the man we know as Gregori—had two things: a beautiful plan and a stroke of very bad luck. You will remember that there was nothing sub rosa about Gregori’s arrival in this country—it sparked off a minor international crisis, the Italians being hopping mad that one of their top-notch bio-chemists should turn his back on his own country and go to work in Britain. Somebody—somebody with more than a smattering of chemistry and a fairly close resemblance to Gregori—read all about it and saw in Gregori’s impending departure for Britain the opportunity of a lifetime and made his preparation accordingly.”

“The real Gregori was murdered?” Hardanger asked.

“No question of that. The Gregori who set off from Turin with all his worldly wealth stacked in the back of his Fiat was not the Gregori who arrived in Britain. The original Gregori met with a very permanent accident en route and the impostor, no doubt with a few judicious alterations to his features to make his resemblance to the now dead man even closer, arrived in Britain in Gregori’s car complete with clothes, passport, photographs—the lot. So far, so very good.

“Now the bad luck. Apart from the reports of his work, the original Gregori was completely unknown in Britain—as a person, that is. There was probably only one man in Britain who knew him well—and by a one in a million chance Gregori found himself working in the very same laboratory as this man. MacDonald. Gregori didn’t know that. But MacDonald did—and knew that Gregori was a fake. Don’t forget that MacDonald had for many years been a delegate to the W.H.O. and I’ll wager anything you like that the original Gregori held a similar position for Italy.”

“Which accounts for the missing photographs in the album,” the General said slowly.

“The two of them—MacDonald and the original Gregori—standing arm in arm, no doubt. In Turin. Anyway, probably after weighing up the situation for a day or two, MacDonald told the spurious Gregori that he was on to him. We can guess what happened. Gregori would have produced a gun and said that it was just too bad but that he would have to silence him and MacDonald, nobody’s fool, would have produced a piece of paper and said that that would be just too bad because if he died suddenly his bank—or the police—had orders to open immediately a sealed envelope containing a copy of that paper, which would contain a few interesting facts about Gregori. Gregori would then have to put his gun away and they would have made a deal. A one-way deal. Gregori to pay MacDonald so much per month. Or else. Don’t forget MacDonald was now in a position to pin a murder rap on Gregori.”

“I don’t get it,” Hardanger said flatly. “It doesn’t make sense. Can you imagine the General here having two men working for him on the same project in, say, Warsaw, men who were not only unknown to each other but completely at cross purposes and potentially at each other’s throats. I’m afraid, Cavell, that I have a higher opinion of Communist intelligence than you seem to have.”

“I agree with Hardanger,” the General said.

“So do I,” I agreed. “All I said was that MacDonald was working for the Communists. I never once said that Gregori was or that this Satan Bug has anything to do with Communism. It was you and Hardanger who made that assumption.”

Hardanger bent forward to see me better. “You mean—you mean that Gregori is just a raving crack-pot after all?”

“If you still believe that,” I said nastily, “it’s time you had a long holiday. There was a very powerful and pressing reason why Gregori wanted the viruses and I’ll stake my life that he told MacDonald what it was. He would have had to ensure his co-operation. If he’d told MacDonald that he just wanted to take off with the botulinus I doubt if MacDonald would have touched the business. But if he’d offered him, say, £10,000, MacDonald would have changed his mind pretty fast, that being the kind of man MacDonald was.”

We were fairly into Alfringham now, the big police Jaguar with its siren switched on, doing twice the legal speed limit, dodging in and out among the thinning evening traffic. The driver was an expert, the pick of Hardanger’s own London men, and he knew exactly how much he and the car could do without killing the lot of us in the process.

“Stop the car!” Hardanger interrupted me suddenly. “That traffic policeman.” We were closing rapidly on Alfringham’s one and only set of traffic lights, apparently hand-controlled at what passed for Alfringham’s rush hour. A policeman, white cape glistening in the lamp-lit rain, was still standing by a control box attached to a lamp-post. The car stopped, and Hardanger, window wound down, beckoned the man across.

“Superintendent Hardanger, London,” he said abruptly. “Did you see a bluish-green Vanden Plas Princess pass this way this evening? An hour ago, slightly less?”

“As a matter of fact I did, sir. He was coming at a fair lick on the amber and I saw he would be on the intersection when it was red. I blew my whistle and he stopped just after he’d passed the second lights. I asked the driver what he thought he was up to and he said his back wheels had locked on the wet road when he tried to brake and when he took his foot off he was frightened to brake again, or brake hard, because his daughter was asleep in the back seat and might have been injured if he’d stopped too suddenly and she’d been flung forward. I looked in the back seat and she was asleep. Sound asleep, even our voices didn’t waken her. There was another man beside her. So—so I gave him a warning and waved him on …” His voice trailed away uncertainly.

“Exactly,” Hardanger roared. “Now you’re realising. Can’t you tell the difference between someone sleeping and someone being forced to fake sleep with a gun in her side? She slept on, forsooth,” he said fiercely. “You miserable nincompoop, I’ll have you drummed out of the Force!”

“Yes, sir.” The policeman, eyes staring unseeingly over the roof of the Jaguar, stood at rigid attention, a dead ringer for a guardsman on parade about to collapse with the thumbs still at the seams of the trousers. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Which way did he go?” Hardanger demanded. “London, sir,” the policeman said woodenly.

“It would be too much to expect you to have taken his number, I suppose,” Hardanger said with heavy sarcasm. ”

“xow 973, sir.”

“What!”

“xow 973.”

“Consider yourself reinstated,” Hardanger growled. He wound up the window and we were off again, the sergeant talking softly into the hand microphone. Hardanger said, “Bit rough on him, I suppose. If he had been smart enough to notice anything he’d have been twanging his harp by now instead of playing about with his traffic light buttons. Sorry for the interruption, Cavell.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I was glad of the interruption, glad of anything that would take my mind off Mary, Mary with a killer’s gun in her side. “MacDonald—I was speaking of MacDonald. Money mad—but also a pretty shrewd character. Very shrewd—he must be to have survived so long in the espionage racket. He knew the theft of the botulinus—I’m certain Gregori never mentioned his intention of taking the Satan Bug as well— would start off an intensive probing into the past life of all the suspects—those working in number one lab. He may also have suspected that his own espionage activities were liable to start a re-check on all scientists. He knew that all the known details of his life were down on his security record card and he was pretty certain that one or more of those details, the ones referring to his immediate post-war activities, wouldn’t stand up to rigorous examination. He knew the security chief, Derry, held those records. He told Gregori that there would be no dice, no co-operation, unless he saw that record first. MacDonald had no intention of being the fall guy in subsequent police investigations.”

“So Easton Derry—or what’s left of him—lies down in that cellar now,” the General said quietly.

“Yes. I’m only guessing now, but they’re pretty safe guesses. Apart from the records MacDonald wanted, Gregori also wanted something—the combination of number one lab door which was known only to Derry and Dr. Baxter. I think they arranged for MacDonald to ask Derry to call at his house, saying that he had something of importance to tell him. Derry came, and when he passed through MacDonald’s door he was already as good as dead. Gregori, who would have been waiting hidden, gun in hand, saw to it that he did die. First of all they took the keys from him, the keys to the safes in Derry’s house where the records were kept: the security chief had always to carry those keys on his person. Then they tried to make him tell the combination of number one lab door. At least, Gregori tried—I don’t see MacDonald having any part in this, although he must have known—or seen—what was going on. While Gregori may not be a crackpot, I think he must be some sort of psychopath—a man with a streak of sadistic blood-lust a yard wide. Look what he did to Derry, to the back of Mrs. Turpin’s head, not to mention my ribs and hanging MacDonald alive.”

“And defeated his own ends,” Hardanger said heavily. “He tortured and mutilated Derry so savagely that Derry died before he could talk. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out who this fake Gregori is. A man with his records and techniques is bound to have a record. Given his prints and cephalic index Interpol in Paris will identify him within the hour.” He leaned forward, gave instructions to the sergeant.

“Yes,” I said. “It won’t be hard. But it’s not important now. Having killed Derry before he could talk, Gregori had to find another way into number one lab. First of all they searched his house—and I would bet, incidentally, that they searched his private effects also and came across a photograph showing Derry as the best man at a wedding. My wedding. The General is in the photograph too, of course. That’s why they kidnapped me, then Mary. They knew. Anyway, they unlocked the safe, abstracted the dicey page from MacDonald’s dossier—and had a damned good look at the other dossiers while they were there. They found out about Dr. Hartnell’s financial troubles—and decided he could be blackmailed into helping them by acting as decoy from the break-out from Mordon. For, having failed to get the lab combination from Derry, Gregori had to devise a new plan to get the viruses.”

“Break-out?” Hardanger frowned. “Break-in, you mean.”

“Sorry, break-out.” While Hardanger sat there in the semi darkness in the back of the car looking at me with an expression I didn’t much care for, I told him the theory I’d expounded to the General in the early hours of that morning, about how two men had been smuggled into number one lab in crates, one disguised as the criminal ‘X’, the other as Baxter, both leaving at the normal time and handing in their security tags, while the real ‘X’ stayed there till eleven o’clock, first killing Baxter with the botulinus toxin, then Clandon with the cyanide butterscotch before breaking out, complete with viruses, through the wire fence.

“Very very interesting,” Hardanger said at the end. Professional interest and pique were in voice and face. He said, “My God, and you spoke of Easton Derry playing it too close to the cuff. I suppose you got a kick out of leading me up the garden path, damn you.”

“I didn’t lead you,” I said. “You went by yourself. We were on parallel paths, anyway.” I tried to think how, but I couldn’t. “The break-through came from you, not me. It was you who had the suspicions about the completeness of MacDonald’s dossier.”

The car radio crackled suddenly. The owner of the Vanden Plas, a doctor making a call, had gone to the local police station after we had left him and added the interesting fact that his tank had been almost empty. Hardanger curtly ordered sergeant and driver to keep their eyes open for the nearest garage, then turned to me. “Well, go on.” He was only half-mollified by my last remark and I didn’t blame him any for his annoyance.

“There’s not much. Gregori not only found out about Hartnell’s entanglements with Tuffnell, the money-lender, but he also made the discovery that Hartnell, as mess secretary, was embezzling mess funds. Don’t ask me how. After that——”

“I can tell you,” Hardanger broke in. “Too damn’ late as usual,” he added disgustedly. “MacDonald was mess-president in Mordon and finding out the financial trouble Hartnell was in would have made him suspicious. As president, of course, he would have access to the books—and he checked.”

“Of course, of course.” I was as disgusted as Hardanger. “I knew he was president. Just too damn’ obvious, I suppose. Good old Cavell. Anyway, after that Hartnell was at his mercy—and knowing from Hartnell’s dossier that Hartnell was bound to come under the microscope, he confused things still further by dumping the hammer and pliers used in the break-out in Hartnell’s place, smearing some red loam on his moped for good measure. If not Gregori, one of his assistants. Red herring number one. Red herring number two— posing as a mysterious Uncle George he made payments into Chessingham’s account weeks in advance of the crime. He knew, of course, that bank accounts would be one of the first subjects of police scrutiny.”

“Red herrings,” Hardanger said in bitter complaint. “Always those accursed red herrings. Why?”

“To buy time. I’m coming to that.”

“And then the two killings in Mordon and the theft of the viruses just as you suggested?” the General said.

“No.” I shook my head. “I was wrong on that.”

The General looked at me, his face not saying very much but saying a great deal all the same, and I continued, “My idea was that one of the number one lab scientists killed both Dr. Baxter and Clandon. Every single thing pointed unmistakably to that. I was wrong. I had to be wrong. We’ve checked and re-checked and every single scientist and technician in that lab had an unbreakable alibi for the night of the murder— unbreakable because they were true. Two men were smuggled in all right—maybe even three. I don’t know. We do know Gregori must have quite an organisation working for him. Three is possible. Say three. Only one of those men left at the usual knocking-off time—the one disguised as Baxter. The other two remained, but ‘X’ didn’t—he also took off at the normal time and arrived home to establish a nice cosy alibi for himself. ‘X’, of course, was almost certainly Gregori—MacDonald was a sleeping partner in this business. Gregori may or may not have taken the viruses with him— probably not, in case he was caught in one of the occasional spot-checks. Anyway, he certainly left behind him one botulinus ampoule—and one cyanide coated butterscotch. You will remember that none of us has been happy at the idea of Clandon meekly accepting the butterscotch from a potential suspect in the middle of the night.”

“But the botulinus, the cyanide. Why?” the General demanded. “They were completely unnecessary.”

“Not the way Gregori saw it. He ordered them to tap Baxter on the head and break open the virus ampoule as they left. Once outside the lab one of them probably acted as decoy while Clandon, who had been watching the corridor from the house, came haring across gun in hand. While he pointed his gun at one of the men the other appeared from behind and took his gun off him. They then forced the cyanide butterscotch into his mouth. God alone knows what Clandon thought it was: he was dead before he could find out.”

“The fiends,” the General murmured. “The ruthless fiends.”

“All done to give the impression that the killer was known to both Baxter and Clandon. And it certainly worked. The third major red herring and it put us completely on the wrong track. Buying time, always buying time. Gregori has a genius for deception. He fooled me, too, about the first phone call that was made to London at ten o’clock last night. He made it himself. Red herring number heaven knows what.”

“Gregori phoned?” Hardanger looked at me, hard. “He had an alibi for the time the call was made. You checked personally. Typing a book, or something.”

“You can’t beat Cavell when it comes to hindsight,” I said sourly. “The sound of a man typing undoubtedly came from his room. He’d prerecorded it on tape and switched on the recorder before he left via his ground-floor window. There was a peculiar smell in his room and a pile of white ashes in the fireplace when I visited him in his rooms in the early hours of this morning. The remains of the tape.”

“But why all the red herring——” Hardanger began, when the voice of the sergeant in the front seat cut in.

“Here’s a garage now.”

“Pull in,” Hardanger ordered. “Make inquiries.”

We pulled off the highway, the driver switching on his police siren. A noise to waken the dead but it didn’t waken up the filling-station attendant on duty. The sergeant up front didn’t hesitate. He was outside and into the brightly lit office within five seconds of our skidding to a halt. He came out almost immediately afterwards and disappeared round the back of the filling-station, and that was enough for me. I piled out of the back seat, Hardanger at my heels.

We found the attendant in a garage at the back of the station. He had been expertly bound and gagged by someone who had not stopped to consider the price of Scotch tape. The same someone, for good measure, had also cracked him over the back of the head with something heavy, but the attendant had recovered from that—more accurately, he had regained consciousness—by the time we got to him. He was a burly middle-aged character, and what was probably a normally red face anyway was crimson from rage and his struggles to free himself.

We cut the tape round wrists and ankles, pulled it none too gently off his face and helped him to a sitting position. He had some highly homicidal observations to make and even in our desperate urgency we had to allow him that, but after a few seconds Hardanger cut in sharply.

“Right. That’ll be enough. The man who did this is a murderer on the run and we’re police officers. Every second you sit and curse increases his chances of escaping. Tell us about it, quick and sharp.”

The attendant shook his head. I didn’t have to be a doctor to tell that he was still pretty groggy. He said, “A man, middle-aged, swarthy-looking character, came in here for petrol. Half past six, it was. He asked——”

“Half past six,” I interrupted. “Only twenty minutes ago. Are you sure?”

“I’m certain,” he said flatly. “He’d run out of petrol for his car, a mile, maybe two back, and he must have been hurrying some for he was pretty much out of breath. He asked me for a gallon in a can and when I turned to find one he let me have it over the head. When I came to I was in the garage in the back and tied as you saw me. I didn’t let on I was conscious. The first thing I saw was another man with a gun pointing at a girl—a blonde. The other guy, the bloke who had crowned me, was just backing the boss’s car out of the door and——”

“Make, colour and licence number of the car?” Hardanger snapped. He got them, and went on, “Stay here. Don’t move around. That’s a nasty crack. I’ll radio the Alfringham police and there’ll be a car out here pretty soon.” Ten seconds later we were on our way, leaving the attendant holding his head and staring after us.

“Twenty minutes,” I said, half listening to the sergeant speak rapidly and urgently into the telephone. “They’d have lost time pushing the car off the road to fox us, then they had a long walk to the garage. Twenty minutes.”

“They’ve had it,” Hardanger said confidently. “There’s a half-dozen police cars patrolling in the next thirty miles or so and they know those roads as only local county policemen do. And once one of those cars gets on Gregori’s tail—well, he’ll never shake them off.”

“Tell them to set up road-blocks,” I said. “Tell them to stop him at all costs.”

“Are you mad?” Hardanger said shortly. “Are you out of your mind, Cavell? Do you want your wife killed? Damn you, you know he’ll use her as a living shield. As it is, she’s safe. Gregori hasn’t seen a policeman—except that fellow on traffic duty—since he left MacDonald’s house. He’ll be half-believing now that we have called off the search. Can’t you see that, man?”

“Road-blocks,” I repeated. “Set up road-blocks. Where are the cars going to tail him to—the heart of London? Where he’s going to release his damn’ botulinus. Once in London they’ll lose him, they’re bound to lose him. Don’t you see, he has to be stopped somewhere? If he’s not, if he’s let loose in London——”

“But you yourself agreed——”

“That was before I knew for sure that he was headed for London.”

“General,” Hardanger appealed. “Can’t you make Cavell——”

“She’s my only child, Hardanger, and an old man shouldn’t be asked to decide life or death for his only child,” the General said tonelessly. “You know as well as any man what I think of Mary.” He paused, then went on in the same level voice. “I agree with Cavell. Please do as he suggests.”

Hardanger swore bitterly under his breath and leaned forward to speak to the sergeant. When he had finished, the General said calmly, “While we’re waiting, my boy, you might fill in a few remaining pieces in the jig-saw. I’m in no condition to fill them in for myself. The question the superintendent is always coming up with. The red herrings. All those red herrings. Why?”

“To buy time.” I was in no condition to fill in jig-saws myself, but what was left of my mind was still working just well enough to appreciate the reason behind the request—to try to take our minds off the car in front, the trapped and terrified girl at the mercy of ruthless and sadistic killers, to reduce the tearing anxiety, to ease the destructive tension that was slowly pulling tired minds and bodies to pieces. I went on, fumbling along mentally, “Our friend in the car up front had to buy time. The more false leads we followed and the more blind alleys we blundered into—and there were plenty—the more time it would take us to get around to inquiring in the really dangerous places. He overestimated us, but for all that we moved faster than he had expected—don’t forget that it’s only forty hours since the crime was discovered. But he knew that sooner or later we would get around to making inquiries in the one place he feared—MacDonald’s. He knew he might have to dispose of MacDonald sooner or later. And the later the better for within a few hours of MacDonald’s death a sealed envelope in a bank or police-station would be opened and then we’d be on to him like an express train. Whatever Gregori’s ultimate intentions are he would obviously have preferred to carry those out while still a respectable member of the Alfringham community instead of a wanted murderer on the run from half the police in Britain.”

“It’s difficult to threaten the Government—and the nation—with the law breathing down the back of your neck,” the General conceded. The old man’s detachment, his iron control, was almost more than human. “But why did MacDonald have to die?”

“Because of two things. Because he knew what Gregori’s ultimate end was and if MacDonald had lived to tell it, all his, Gregori’s, plans would have been ruined. And because of Mrs. Turpin. MacDonald was a pretty tough character and he might not have talked even when the police got on to him—after all, although he almost certainly had no hand in any killing, he was pretty deep in the mire himself. But Mrs. Turpin would have made him talk—if not, she’d have talked herself. Madame Halle gave me to understand in Paris that MacDonald was pretty much of a philanderer—and philanderers don’t change their ways easily. Not before eighty, anyway. Mrs. Turpin was a good-looking woman—and her fiercely protective attitude towards MacDonald was a dead giveaway. She was in love with him—whether he was with her I couldn’t guess and it doesn’t matter. If things had gone wrong she’d have had MacDonald turn Queen’s evidence and lower the boom on Gregori by betraying his plans. I think his evidence might have been so important, so vastly important, that either she or MacDonald or both would be convinced that at the most MacDonald would have received no more than a light sentence. With all hopes of his money from Gregori gone, I don’t think MacDonald would have hesitated between turning Queen’s evidence—if it was important enough he might even have received a free pardon—and being held as an accessory to murder for gain, which still calls for a walk to the gallows in this country. And if he had hesitated, Mrs. Turpin would have made up his mind for him.

“My guess—it’s only a guess but we can check at Mordon—is that Mrs. Turpin phoned MacDonald at the lab immediately after I had left and that Gregori either overheard or was told what had happened. He probably accompanied MacDonald home to see how the land lay—and it didn’t take him a couple of minutes to find out. The heat was on MacDonald and that could have been fatal for Gregori. To prevent that, Gregori had to make it fatal for MacDonald and Mrs. Turpin.”

“All neatly buttoned up, eh?” Hardanger said. His face was dead-pan, he was still a fair way from forgiving me.

“Net tightened and completely closed,” I agreed. “The only trouble is that the big fish has already escaped and what’s left is useless. But one thing we know. We can forget all this rubbish about demolishing Mordon. If that was Gregori’s plan it wouldn’t have helped or hindered him in the exexcution of it if MacDonald had talked, for the whole country knew of it already. Whatever it is is something on a much bigger, much more important scale, something that might have been foiled, probably would have been foiled had we known of it in advance.”

“Such as what?” Hardanger demanded.

“You tell me. I’m done with guessing for the day.” And I was through with guessing and talking for the day, except when necessity absolutely demanded it. Slumped back in the warmth and comfort of the deeply-cushioned seats, reaction was beginning to set in. The anaesthetising effect of the need for non-stop action and urgent thinking was beginning to wear off, and the more it wore off the older and more worn I felt. And the more pain. I thought of the widely-held belief that you can’t feel more than one pain at one time and wondered what misinformed idiot had started that one. I wondered what part of me was causing me the most pain, my foot, my ribs or my head, and came to the conclusion that my ribs won, by a short head. Was that a pun? The driver was reaching over ninety on the longer stretches of wet road, but he drove so smoothly and skilfully that even with my fear and anxiety for Mary I think I was beginning to doze off when the loudspeaker up front began to crackle.

First came the identification sign then the message, “Grey Humber saloon, answering description of wanted car, number not identified, has just turned left from London road to ‘B’ road to avoid block at Flemington cross-road, two and a half miles east of Crutchley. Am following.”

“Flemington cross-roads.” The voice of the sergeant in the front seat, an Alfringham man, held a rising note of excitement. “He’s on a blind road. It doesn’t lead anywhere except to Flemington and then back on to the main London road about three miles farther on again.”

“How far are we from what’s the name of the place—Crutchley?” Hardanger demanded.

“Near enough four miles, sir.”

“So that would make it between nine and ten miles to the junction where Gregori must rejoin the main London road. This side road through Flemington, the one he’s on. How long is it, how long would it take him?” “Five or six miles, sir. It’s pretty twisty. Maybe ten minutes if he kept his foot down and took chances all the way. The road is full of blind corners.”

“Do you think you could get there in ten minutes?” Hardanger asked the driver.

“I don’t know, sir.” He hesitated. “I don’t know the road.”

“I do,” the sergeant said confidently. “He’ll make it.”

He made it. The rain was sluicing vertically down, the roads were slippery, straight stretches were at a premium and I think we all added a few more grey hairs to our quota that night, but he made it. He made it with time to spare. From the constant stream of reports pouring in from police cars pursuing Gregori it was quite evident that the man at the wheel was anything but a skilful driver.

Our car braked to a halt, parked broadside on across the Flemington road, completely blocking the exit on to the main London road. We all climbed quickly out of the car while the sergeant trained the powerful roof spotlight up the side road in the direction from which Gregori’s stolen Humber would appear. We took up position in the pouring rain behind the Jaguar and, as a precaution, about ten feet back from it. In that blinding rain a misted windscreen or ineffective wipers could prevent the driver of a car travelling at high speed from seeing the Jaguar until it was too late. Especially if the driver was as incompetent as claimed.

I took a good look around me. Dick Turpin couldn’t have chosen a better spot for an ambush. The top and one side of the right-angle T junction were completely covered in dense beech woods. The third side of the T, illuminated by the still blazing headlights of the Jaguar, was open pastureland with a tree-lined farmhouse about two hundred yards away, and at less than half that distance, a barn and scattered farm-buildings. I could just make out a light from one of the windows in the farmhouse, blurred and misty through the heavy rain.

There was a deep ditch on one side of the Flemington road and I considered hiding myself there about the point where Gregori’s car would be forced to pull up, then rising and heaving a heavy rock through the driver’s window thereby eliminating fifty per cent of the opposition before they could even start anything. The only trouble was that I might also eliminate Mary—the fact that she hadn’t been in the front seat when Oregon had passed through Alfringham was no guarantee that she wasn’t there now. I decided to stay where I was.

Over the sound of the rain hissing whitely on the tarmac and drumming heavily on the roof of the car, we could suddenly hear the steadily rising note of an engine being revved up furiously and far from skilfully through the gears. Seconds later we caught sight of the first white wash of its headlights, the barred beams shining eerily through the boles of the beeches and the pale rods of rain. We dropped to our knees behind the shelter of the police Jaguar and I eased out the Hanyatti, slipping the safety catch.

Then all at once, to the accompaniment of a high-pitched grating of gears and mad revving of the engine that wouldn’t have got its driver very far at Le Mans, the car was round the last corner and heading straight for us. We could hear it accelerating as it came out of the corner, just over a hundred and fifty yards away: then came the abrupt cessation of engine noise succeeded almost immediately by the unmistakable tearing hissing sound of locked wheels sliding on a wet road. I could see the headlight beams of the approaching car swing wildly from one side to the other as the driver fought to retain control and I instinctively tensed waiting for the crash and the shock as the car ploughed into the side of the Jaguar blocking its path.

But the crash and the shock did not come. Owing everything to good luck and nothing whatsoever to good management, the driver managed to pull up less than five feet from the Jaguar, in the middle of the road and slewed only very slightly to the left. I straightened and walked up to the side of the police Jaguar, my eye screwed almost shut against the glare of the Humber’s headlights. Sharply outlined though I was in that blinding wash of light, I doubted whether the occupants of the car could see me—the spotlight on the roof of the Jaguar was a powerful one and shining directly into Gregori’s windscreen.

I’m no Annie Oakley with a gun but at a distance of ten feet and a target the size of a soup-plate I can hold my own with the worst. Two quick shots and the headlights of the Humber shattered and died. I walked round the front of the Jaguar, the others following, as a second car—the pursuing police car—pulled up behind Gregori’s. I was still rounding the nose of the Jaguar when the two right hand doors of the stolen car were flung wide and two men scrambled quickly out. For one second and one second only I had the game in my hands, I could have gunned them both down where they stood and the fact that I would have had to shoot one of them through the back wouldn’t have worried me at all, but like a fool I hesitated and was slow in bringing up my gun and then the second was gone and so was my last chance, for Mary was out of the car now, jerked out with a brutal violence that made her gasp in pain, and was held in front of Gregori while his gun pointed at me directly over her right shoulder. The other man was a squat broad-shouldered and very tough-looking Latin type with a pistol the size of a sawnoff cannon held in his hairy left hand. His left hand, I noticed. It had been a left-handed man who had used the wire-cutters to break out of Mordon. Here, probably, was the killer of both Baxter and Clandon. Nor had I any doubt but that he was the killer, when you’ve seen enough of them you recognise one instantly. They may look as normal, as happily innocuous, as the next man, but always, far back in the eyes, lies the glint of empty madness. It’s not something they have, it’s something they don’t have. This was such a man. And Gregori? Another? He was the same Gregori as I’d ever known, tall, swarthy, with grizzled hair and a quizzical expression on his face but at the same time a completely different man. He no longer wore his glasses.

“Cavell.” His voice was soft, colourless, conversational almost. “I had the chance to kill you weeks ago. I should have taken it. Negligence. I have known of you for a long time. I was warned of you. I didn’t listen.”

“The boy friend,” I said. My own gun was hanging by my side and I stared at the barrel in that hairy left hand: it pointed straight at my left eye. “Left-handed. The killer of Baxter and Clandon.”

“Indeed.” Gregori tightened his grip round Mary. Her fair hair was wildly dishevelled, her face streaked with mud and there was the beginning of an unpleasant bruise above her right eye—she must have tried a breakaway on the walk between abandoned car and garage—but she wasn’t scared much or if she was she was hiding it. “I was rightly warned. Henriques, my—as—lieutenant. He is also responsible for some other slight accidents, aren’t you, Henriques? Including the slight damage to yourself, Cavell.”

I nodded. It made sense. Henriques the hatchet-man. I looked at the hard bitter face and the empty eyes and I knew Gregori was telling the truth. Not that that made Gregori any more innocent. It just made him more understandable; master criminals of Gregori’s class almost never touched the physical side of their business.

Gregori glanced quickly at the two policemen who had come out of the pursuing car and gave Henriques a quick jerk of the head. Henriques swung his gun and lined it up on the two policemen. They stopped. I lifted my own gun and took a pace nearer Gregori.

“Don’t do it, Cavell,” Gregori said evenly. He pressed the muzzle of his gun into Mary’s side with such violence that she moaned with the pain of it. “I won’t hesitate to kill.”

I took another step forward. Four feet separated us. I said, “You won’t harm her. If you do, I’ll kill you. You know that. God only knows what it is that you have at stake, but it’s something almighty big to justify all the work and planning you’ve put in, the killing you’ve done. Whatever that is, you haven’t achieved it yet. You wouldn’t throw it all away just by shooting my wife, would you, Gregori?”

“Take me away from this horrible man, Pierre,” Mary murmured. Her voice was low and not steady. “I—I don’t care what he does.”

“He won’t do anything, my dear,” I said quietly. “He doesn’t dare to. And he knows it.”

“Quite the little psychologist, aren’t you?” Gregori said in the same conversational tone. Suddenly, completely unexpectedly, his back braced against the side of the car, he sent Mary catapulting towards me with a vicious thrust of both arms. I broke ground to lessen the impact, staggered back two steps before steadying us both and by the time I’d put her to one side and was bringing my gun up again Gregori was holding something in his outstretched hand. A glass ampoule with a blue sealed top. In the other hand he held the steel flask from which he’d just abstracted it. I looked at Gregori’s impassive face then back at the ampoule in his hand and I could feel the sudden moisture between my palm and the butt of the Hanyatti.

I turned my head and looked at the General, Hardanger and the two policemen behind me— both the General and Hardanger, I saw, with heavy pistols in their hands—faced front again and looked at the other two policemen under Henriques’ gun. I said slowly and distinctly, “Don’t do anything, anybody. That ampoule in Gregori’s hand contains the Satan Bug. You’ve all read the papers today. You all know what will happen if that glass breaks.”

They all knew, all right. We’d have made the figures in any waxworks look like characters with the St. Vitus’s dance doing the Twist. How long would it be, Gregori had said yesterday, before all life in Britain would become extinct if that refined polio virus escaped? I couldn’t remember. But not long. It didn’t matter much, anyway.

“Correct,” Gregori said calmly. “The crimson top for the botulinus virus, the blue top for the Satan Bug. When Cavell was gambling with his wife’s life just now there was an element of bluff involved. I would beg you to believe that I am not bluffing. tonight I hope to achieve something that I have set my heart on.” He paused and looked at us all individually, his eyes glittering emptily in the glare of the police searchlight. “If I am not permitted to go unmolested then I cannot achieve this object and have little wish to prolong this life of mine. I shall then smash this ampoule. I would beseech you all to believe that I am in the most complete and deadly earnest.”

I believed him implicitly. He was as mad as a hatter. I said, “Your lieutenant. Henriques. How does he feel about your casual attitude towards his life?”

“I have once saved Henriques from drowning and twice from the electric chair. His life is mine to dispose of as I see fit. He understands that. Besides, Henriques is a deaf mute.”

“You’re insane,” I said harshly. “You told us yesterday that neither fire nor ice, seas nor mountains, can stop the spread of the Satan Bug.”

“I believe that to be essentially correct. If I have to go it matters nothing to me if the rest of mankind accompanies me.”

“But——” I paused. “Good God, Gregori, no sane man, not even the most monstrous criminal in history, would ever dream of such, of such—— In the name of heaven, man, you can’t mean it.”

“It may be that I am not sane,” he said.

I didn’t doubt it. Not then. I watched him, gripped with fear and fascination such as I had never known, as he handled the ampoule carelessly then stooped swiftly and laid it on the wet road, under the sole of his left shoe. The left heel was still on the ground. I wondered briefly if a couple of heavy slugs from the Hanyatti would drive him over backwards, jerking his foot off the ampoule, but the thought died as it came. A madman could juggle carelessly with the lives of his fellow-men, but I had no justification of madness. Even had there been only one chance in ten million of being executioner instead of keeper, I could never have taken it.

“I have tested those ampoules in the laboratory— empty ones, I need hardly say,” Gregori went on conversationally, “and have discovered that a pressure of seven and a half pounds is sufficient to shatter them. Incidentally, I have taken the precaution of providing concentrated cyanide tablets for Henriques and myself: death from the Satan Bug, as we have observed from experiments on animals, is rather more prolonged than death from botulinus and most distressing. You will each come forward one at a time and hand me your guns, butt foremost, at arm’s length. You will take the greatest care to do nothing that might upset my balance, so transferring my weight to my left foot. You first, Cavell.”

I reversed the gun and handed it to him slowly and deliberately at the full extent of my arm, taking excruciating care indeed not to upset his balance. Our complete defeat, the fact that this madman and murderer would now escape and almost certainly achieve what evil and desperate ends he had in mind, just didn’t matter a single solitary damn then. The only thing that mattered was that Gregori’s balance should not be in the slightest upset.

One by one we all handed our guns over to him. After that he ordered us all to line up while Henriques, the deaf mute, passed along behind us searching swiftly and skilfully for further weapons. He found none. Then, and not until then, did Gregori carefully remove his foot from the ampoule, stoop, pick it up and slide it back inside its steel jacket.

“I think conventional weapons will serve us now,” he said pleasantly. “One is so much less liable to make mistakes of a—well—a permanent nature.” He picked up two of the guns that Henriques had piled on the bonnet of the Humber, checked that the safety catches of both were off. He beckoned to Henriques and spoke rapidly to him. It was a weird sight—because there was no sound— Gregori doing his speaking with exaggerated lip movements, in complete silence. I know a little lip-reading but could make out nothing: possibly he talked in a foreign language, not French or Italian. He stopped speaking and Henriques nodded comprehension, looking at us with a queer anticipation in his eyes. I didn’t like the look one bit: Henriques struck me as altogether a very nasty piece of work. Gregori pointed one of his guns at the two policemen who had been in the pursuing car.

“Off with your uniforms,” he said curtly.

“Now!”

The policemen looked at each other and one said through clenched teeth, “I’ll be damned if I will!”

“You’ll be dead if you don’t, you fool,” I said sharply. “Don’t you know what kind of men you are dealing with? Take it off.”

“I won’t take my clothes off for any man.” He swore bitterly.

“It’s an order!” Hardanger barked savagely, urgently. “It won’t give him much more trouble to remove your uniforms when there is a bullet between your eyes. Take it off,” he finished with slow and heavy emphasis.

Reluctantly, sullenly, the two officers did as they were told and stood there shivering in the cold heavy rain. Henriques collected the uniforms and threw them into the police Jaguar.

“Who operates the short-wave radio in this Jaguar?” Gregori said next. I felt as if somebody had run a skewer through my middle and given it a twist: but I had been expecting it, all the same.

“I do,” the sergeant admitted.

“Good. Get through to headquarters. Tell them that you have taken us and are proceeding to London. Tell them to call all police cars in the area back to their stations—except, of course, those on routine patrol duties.”

“Do as he says,” Hardanger said wearily. “I think you’re too intelligent to try any fancy stuff, Sergeant. Exactly as he says.”

So the sergeant did exactly as he was told. He didn’t have much option, not with the muzzle of one of Gregori’s pistols grinding into his left ear. When he had finished, Gregori nodded his satisfaction.

“That will do very well.” He watched Henriques climb into the stolen Humber. “Our car and the one belonging to our two shivering friends here will be driven into the woods and their distributors smashed for good measure. They won’t be found before dawn. With the search called off, the other police car and those two uniforms we should have little trouble in clearing this area. Then we switch cars.” He looked regretfully at the Jaguar. “When your H.Q. catch on to the fact that you are missing this car is going to become very hot property indeed. That leaves only the problem of what to do with you.”

He waited until Henriques had disposed of both cars, gazing out with empty disinterest under the dripping brim of fedora, then said, “Is there a portable searchlight in this Jaguar? I believe such equipment is standard. Sergeant?”

“We have a battery-powered light in the boot,” the sergeant said stolidly.

“Get it.” Gregori’s eyes and mouth crinkled into a smile, the kind of smile a tiger trapped in the bottom of a pit shows when the man who dug the hole trips and falls in beside him. “I can’t shoot you, though I wouldn’t hesitate if that house were not so near. I won’t try tapping you all on the head because I doubt if you would submit quietly to that. I can’t tie you up for I’m not in the habit of carrying on me sufficient ropes and gags to immobilise and silence eight people. But I suspect that one of those farm buildings there will offer all I require in the way of a temporary prison. Sergeant, switch off the car headlamps and then lead the way with your light to those buildings. The rest will follow in double file. Mrs. Cavell and I will bring up the rear. The gun in my hand will be pressed against her back and should any of you try to run for it or otherwise cause trouble I shall merely pull the trigger.”

I didn’t doubt him. None of us doubted him.

The farm buildings were deserted—of human life, that was. From the byre I could hear the moving and slow champing of the cows, but the evening milking was over. Gregori passed up the byre. He passed up the dairy, a stable now converted to a tractor shed, a large concreted pig-sty and a turnip shed. He hesitated over the barn and then found exactly what he wanted. I had to admit that it certainly suited his purpose.

A long narrow stone building with head-high embrasured windows that made one instinctively look for the crenellated battlements above, it looked more like an old-time private chapel than anything else: its true function couldn’t have been more different. It was a cider house, with a heavy old-fashioned oaken press at the far end, one long wall lined with duckboard shelving for apples, the other with bunged casks and covered vats of freshly made cider. The door, like the press, was made of solid oak and once the drop-bar on the outside was in position it would have taken a battering-ram to break it down.

We’d no battering ram, but we’d even better, we had desperation, resource and, between us all, a fair amount of intelligence. Surely Gregori wasn’t so crazy as to think that that cider house could hold us indefinitely? Surely he wasn’t so crazy as to think that our shouts wouldn’t be heard eventually either by passers-by on the road or the occupants of the farm itself, not much more than a hundred yards away? With a sudden dread conviction and heart-chilling finality that momentarily paralysed all reasoning I knew that Gergori was indeed not that crazy. He knew we would be making no assaults on the door, he knew we wouldn’t be shouting out for help because he knew beyond all question that none of us would ever be leaving the cider-house again except on a bier and covered by a blanket. Somebody with super-chilled icicles in lieu of fingers started playing Rachmaninoff up and down my spinal column.

“Get to the far end and stay there while I lock the door from the outside,” Gregori ordered. “Time does not permit of elaborate farewell speeches. Twelve hours from now when I’ve shaken the dust of this accursed country from my feet for the last time, I shall think of you all. Good-bye.”

I said steadily, “No magnanimous gestures towards a defeated enemy?”

“You beg, Cavell. I have time for one little thing more, time for the man who cost me so much, so nearly ruined all my plans.” He stepped forward, jammed the automatic he held in his left hand into my stomach and with the sights of the pistol he held in his right deliberately and viciously raked both sides of my face. I felt the skin tearing in thin lines of white-hot pain and the warm blood trickling down cold cheeks. Mary said something unintelligible in a high voice and tried to run to me, but Hardanger caught her in powerful arms and held her till her futile struggles ceased. Gregori stepped back and said, “That is for beggars Cavell”

I nodded. I didn’t even raise my hands to my face, anyway he couldn’t have disfigured it much more than it had been before. I said, “You might take Mrs. Cavell with you.”

“Pierre!” Mary’s voice was a sob, anguish in it, a cruelly hurt and stricken despair. “What are you saying!” Hardanger swore, softly and viciously, and the General looked at me in dumb incomprehension.

Gregori stood very still, dark expressionless eyes looking emptily into mine. Then he gave a queer little duck of the head and said, “It is my turn to beg. Forgive me. I did not know that you knew. I hope when my turn comes——” He broke off and turned to Mary. “It would be wrong. A beautiful child. I am not, Cavell, devoid of all human sentiment, at least not where women and children are concerned. For instance, the two children I was forced to abduct from Alfringham Farm have already been released and will be with their parents within the hour. Yes, yes, it would be wrong. Come, Mrs. Cavell.”

She came instead to me and touched my face lightly. “What is it, Pierre?” she whispered. No reproach in her voice, only love and wonder and compassion. “What is so wrong?”

“Good-bye, Mary,” I said. “Dr. Gregori doesn’t like to be kept waiting. I’ll see you soon.” She made to speak again, but Gregori had her by the arm, already leading her towards the door while the deaf mute, Henriques, watched us with mad eyes and a pistol in either hand, and then the door closed, the heavy bar dropped solidly into place and we were left there staring at each other by the light of the spot-lamp which still burned whitely on the floor.

“You lousy filthy swine,” Hardanger ground out savagely. “Why——”

“Shut up, Hardanger!” My voice was low, urgent, desperate. “Spread out. Watch those embrasures, the windows. Quickly! For God’s sake, hurry!”

I think there was something in my voice that would have moved an Egyptian mummy. Quickly, silently, the seven of us started to space out. I whispered, “He’s going to throw in something through a window. He’s going to throw in an ampoule of the botulinus toxin. Any second.” I knew it would take moments only for him to unscrew the top of the steel flask that held the ampoule. “Catch it. You must catch it. If that ampoule hits the floor or the wall we’re all dead men.”

Even as I finished, we heard a sudden movement outside, the shadow of an arm fell across the side of an embrasure and something came spinning into the room. Something that glittered and flashed in the light from the lamp on the floor. Something made of glass, with a red seal on top. A botulinus ampoule.

It came so swiftly, so unexpectedly and thrown at such a deliberately downward angle that no one had a chance. It spun across the room, struck at the precise junction of stone wall and stone floor and shattered into a thousand tinkling fragments.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I’ll never know what made me do it. I’ll never know why I reacted with what I can only regard now, looking back on it, as incredible swiftness. The split second that elapses between the downward sweep of the enemy club and the reflex up-flinging of your arm in defence—that was all the time it took me to react. It was automatic, instinctive, without any thought in the world—but there must have been thought behind it, an instantaneous form of reasoning below the level of awareness that didn’t have time to be transmitted to the surface mind in the form of conscious thought, for I did the one thing in the world that offered the only, the slenderest, the most desperate hope of survival.

Even as the ampoule came spinning through the air and I could see there was no chance on earth of its being intercepted, my hands were reaching out for the barrel of cider on the trestle by my side, and the tinkling of the shattered ampoule was still echoing in shocked silence in that tiny little room when I smashed down the barrel with all the strength of my arms and body exactly on the spot where the glass had made contact. The staves split and shattered as if they had been made of the thinnest ply and ten gallons of cider gurgled and flooded out over the wall and floor.

“More cider,” I shouted. “More cider. Pour it on the floor, down the side of the wall, spray it through the air above where that damned ampoule landed. For God’s sake don’t splash any cider on yourselves. Hurry! Hurry!”

“What the hell is all this in aid of?” Hardanger demanded. His normally ruddy face was pale and set and uncomprehending, but for all that he was already carefully tipping a small vat of cider on the floor. “What will this do?”

“It’s hygroscopic,” I said quickly. “The botu-linus, I mean. Seeks out water in preference to air every time, it has a hundred times the affinity for hydrogen that it has for nitrogen. You heard the General speak of it this evening.”

“This isn’t water.” Hardanger objected almost wildly. “This is cider.”

“God help us!” I said savagely. “Of course it’s cider. We haven’t got anything else here. I don’t know what the effect, the affinity will be. For the first time in your life, Hardanger, you’d better start praying that an alcohol has a high water content.” I tried to lift another, smaller cask but gasped and dropped it as a sharp spear of agony struck at the right side of my chest. For one terrible second I thought the virus had struck, the next I realised I must have displaced my strapped broken ribs when I hurled that barrel through the air. I wondered vaguely whether a broken rib had pierced the pleura or even a lung, and then forgot about it: in the circumstances, it hardly mattered any more.

How long to live? If some of the botulinus virus had escaped into the atmosphere, how long before the first convulsions? What had Gregori said about the hamster when we’d been talking outside number one lab yesterday? Fifteen seconds, yes, that was it, fifteen seconds for the Satan Bug and about the same for botulinus. For a hamster, fifteen seconds. For a human being? Heaven alone knew, probably thirty seconds at the most. At the very most. I stooped and lifted the portable lamp from the floor.

“Stop pouring,” I said urgently. “Stop it. That’s enough. Stand high: if you want to live, stand high. Don’t let any of that cider touch your shoes, touch any part of you, or you’re dead men.” I swung the lamp round as they scrambled high to avoid the amber tide of cider already flooding rapidly across the stone floor, and as I did I could hear the police engine of the Jaguar starting up. Gregori taking off with Henriques and Mary towards the realisation of his megalomaniac’s dream, secure in the knowledge that he was leaving a charnel house behind.

Thirty seconds were up. At least thirty seconds were up. No one twitching yet, far less in convulsions. More slowly this time, I played the lamp beam over each and every one of us, starting at strained staring faces and moving slowly down the feet. The beam steadied on one of the two constables whose clothes had been taken.

“Take off your right shoe,” I said sharply. “It’s been splashed. Not with your hand, you bloody idiot! Ease it off with the toe of the other shoe. Superintendent, the left arm of your jacket is wet.” Hardanger stood very still, not even looking at me, as I eased the jacket at the collar and slid it down carefully over arms and hands before dropping it to the floor.

“Are we—are we safe now, sir?” the sergeant asked nervously.

“Safe? I’d rather this damned place was alive with cobras and black widow spiders. No, we’re not safe. Some of this hellish toxin will escape to the atmosphere as soon as the first of those splashes on the wall or floor has dried up—there’s water vapour in the air, too, you know. My guess is that as soon as any of these splashes dry up we’ll all have had it inside a minute.”

“So we get out,” the General said calmly. “Fast. Is that the idea, my boy?”

“Yes, sir.” I glanced quickly round. “Two barrels on either side of the door. Two more in line with them and a bit back. Four men standing on those and swinging the cider-press between them. I can’t do it, something’s wrong with my ribs. That press must weigh three hundred pounds if it weighs an ounce. Think four of you could do it, Superintendent?”

“Think we can do it?” Hardanger growled. “I could do it myself, with one hand, if it meant getting out of this place. Come on, for God’s sake, let’s hurry.”

And hurry they did. Manoeuvring casks into position while having to stand on others was no easy trick, more especially as all the casks were full, but desperation and the fear that borders on overmastering panic gives men ability to perform feats of strength that they can never afterwards understand. In less than twenty seconds all four barrels were in position and, in another twenty, Hardanger, the sergeant and two constables, a pair on each side of the heavy ponderous cider-press, were starting on their back swing.

The door was made of solid oak, with heavy hinges to match and a draw-bar on the outside, but against that solid battering ram propelled by four powerful men with their lives at stake it might as well have been made of plywood: the shattered door was smashed completely off its hinges and the wine-press, released at the last moment, went cartwheeling through the doorway into the darkness beyond. Five seconds later the last of us had followed the cider-press.

“That farmhouse,” Hardanger said urgently. “Come on. They’ve probably got a telephone.”

“Wait!” There was twice the urgency in my voice. “We can’t do that. We don’t know that we’re not carrying the virus on us. We may be bringing death to all that family. Let’s give the rain time to wash off any virus that may be sticking to the outside.”

“Damn it, we can’t afford to wait,” Hardanger said fiercely. “Besides, if the virus didn’t get us in there it’s a certainty it won’t get us now. General?”

“I’m not sure,” the General said hesitantly. “I rather think you’re right. We’ve no time——”

He broke off in horror as one of the unclothed constables, the one whose shoe had been splashed by the cider, screamed aloud in agony, the scream deepening to a tearing rasping coughing moan: clutching hands clawed in a maniac frenzy at a suddenly stiffened straightened neck where the tendons stood out whitely like quivering wires: then he toppled and fell heavily to the muddy ground, silent now, the nails of his fingers tried to tear his throat open. His crew-mate, the other uniform-less constable, made some sort of unintelligible sound, moved forward and down to help his friend, then grunted in pain as my arm hooked around his neck.

“Don’t touch him!” I shouted hoarsely. “Touch him and you’ll die too. He must have picked up the toxin when he brushed his shoe with his hand then touched his mouth. Nothing on earth can save him now. Stand back. Keep well clear of him.”

He took twenty seconds to die, the kind of twenty seconds that will stay with a man in his nightmares till he draws his last breath on earth. I had seen many men die, but even those who had died in bullet and shrapnel-torn agony had done so peacefully and quietly compared to this man whose body, in the incredibly convulsive violence of its death throes, twisted and flung itself into the most fantastic and impossible contortions. Twice in the last shocking seconds before death he threw his racked and tortured body clear off the ground and so high in the air that I could have passed a table beneath him. And then, as abruptly and unexpectedly as it had begun, it was all over and he was no more than a strangely small and shapeless bundle of clothes lying face downwards in the muddy earth. My mouth was kiln-dry and full of the taste of salt, the ugly taste of fear.

I can’t say how long we stood there in the heavy cold rain, staring at the dead man. A long time, I think. And then we looked at each other, and each one of us knew that the others were capable of thinking only one thing. Who was next? In the pale wash of light from the lamp I still held in one hand, we all stared at each other, one half of our senses and minds outgoing and screwed up to the highest pitch of intensity and perception to detect the first signs of death in another, the other half turned inwards to detect the first signs in themselves. Then, all at once, I cursed savagely, perhaps at myself, or my cowardice, or at Gregori or at the botulinus virus, I don’t know, turned abruptly and headed for the byre, taking the lamp with me, leaving the others standing there round the dead man in the rain-filled pitchy darkness like darkly-petrified mourners at some age-old heathen midnight rites.

I was looking for a hose and I found one almost immediately. I carried it outside, screwed it on to a standing plug and turned the tap on full: the results in the way of volume and pressure would have done justice to any city hydrant. I clambered awkwardly on to a hay wagon that was standing nearby and said to the General, “Come on, sir, you first.”

He came directly under the earthward-pointed nozzle and the jet of water on head and shoulders from a distance of only a few inches made him stumble and all but fall. But he stuck it gamely for all of the half-minute that I insisted he remain under the hose, and by the time I was finished he was as sodden as if he’d spent the night in the river and shivering so violently that I could hear his teeth chatter above the hiss of the water: but by the time he was finished I knew that any toxin that might have been clinging to face or body would have been completely washed away. The other four all submitted to it in turn and then Hardanger did the same for me. The force of the water was such that it was like being belaboured by a non-stop series of far from lightweight clubs and the water itself was ice-cold: but when I thought of the man who had died and how he had died a few bruises and the risk of pneumonia didn’t even begin to be worth considering. When he had finished with me Hardanger switched off the water and said quietly, “Sorry, Cavell. You had the right of it.”

“It was my fault,” I said. I didn’t mean my voice to sound dull and lifeless but that was the way it came out, to my ears anyway. “I should have warned him. I should have told him not to touch his mouth or nose with his hand.”

“He should have thought of that himself,” Hardanger said, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. “He knew the dangers as well as you—they’ve been published in every paper in the land today.

Let’s go and see if the farmer has a phone. Not that it’ll make much difference now. Gregori knows that the police Jaguar is too hot to hang on to for a second longer than is necessary. He’s won all along the line, damn his black soul, and nothing is going to stop him now. Twelve hours he said. Twelve hours and then he would be done.”

“Twelve hours from now Gregori will be dead,” I said.

“What?” I could sense him staring at me. “What did you say?”

“He’ll be dead,” I repeated. “Before dawn.”

“It’s all right,” Hardanger said. Cavell’s mind had cracked at last, but let’s play it casual, let’s not any of us make a song and dance about it. He took my arm and started out for the lamp-lit rectangles which showed where the house stood. “The sooner this is over the sooner we’ll all get the rest and food and sleep we need.”

“I’ll rest and sleep when I’ve killed Gregori,” I said. “I’m going to kill him tonight. First I get Mary back. Then I’ll kill him.”

“Mary will be all right, Cavell.” Mary in that madman’s hands, that was what had sent Cavell’s last few remaining grey cells tottering over the brink, he thought. “He’ll let her go, he’ll have no reason to do anything to her. And you had to do what you did. You thought that if she stayed there with us in the cider house she would die. Isn’t that it, Cavell?”

“I’m sure the superintendent is right, my boy.” The General was walking on my other side now, and his voice was quiet because loud voices excite the unhinged. “She won’t be harmed.”

I said rudely, to both, “If I’m round the bend, what the hell does that make you two?”

Hardanger stopped, tightened his grip on my arm and peered at me. He knew that those whose minds have gone off the rails never talk about it, for the simple reason that they are unshakably convinced that their minds are still on the track. He said carefully, “I don’t think I understand.”

“You don’t. But you will.” I said to the General: “You must persuade the Cabinet to go on with this evacuation of the Central London area. Continuous radio and TV broadcasts. They’ll have no difficulty in persuading the people to leave, you can believe that. It shouldn’t cause much trouble—that area’s pretty well unlived in by night, anyway.” I turned again to Hardanger. “Have two hundred of your best men armed. A gun for me, too—and a knife. I know exactly what Gregori intends to do tonight. I know exactly what he hopes to achieve. I know exactly how he intends to leave the country—and exactly where he will be leaving from.”

“How do you know, my boy?” The General’s voice was so quiet that I could hardly hear above the drumming of the rain.

“Because Gregori talked too much. Sooner or later they all talk too much. Gregori was cagier than most, even when he was convinced that we would all be dead in a minute he still said very little. But that little was too much. And I think I’ve really known ever since we found MacDonald’s body.”

“You must have heard things that I didn’t hear,” Hardanger said sourly.

“You heard it all. You heard him say he was going to London, if he really wanted the bug set loose in London to have Mordon destroyed he’d have stayed in Mordon to see what happened and have had some stooge do the job in London. But he has no interest in seeing Mordon destroyed, he never had. There’s something he has to do in London. Another of his never-ending red herrings—the Communist red herring, of course, was purely fortuitous, he’d no hand in that at all. That’s the first thing. The second—that he was going to achieve some great ambition tonight. The third—that he had twice saved Henriques from the electric chair. That shows what kind of a man he is—and I don’t mean a criminal defence lawyer of the U.S. Bar Association—and what kind of ambition he has in mind: I’ll take long odds not only that he’s on the Interpol files but also that he’s an ex big-time American racketeer who has been deported to Italy—and the line of business in which he used to specialise would make very interesting reading, because the criminal leopards, even the biggest cats in the jungle, never change their spots. The fourth thing is that he expects to be clear of this country in twelve hours’ time. And the fifth thing is that this is Saturday night. Put all those things together and see what you get.”

“Suppose you tell us,” Hardanger said impatiently.

So I told them.

The rain still fell as vertically, as heavily as ever, just as heavily as when we had left that farmhouse some hours previously, where the torrential rain in conjunction with the quick evacuation of the area had robbed the botulinus toxin of all victims other than the unfortunate policeman who had died so terribly before our eyes. Now, at twenty minutes past three in the morning, the rain was ice-cold, but I didn’t really feel it. All I could feel was my exhaustion, the harsh stabbing pain in my right ribs that came with every breath I took and the continuous rending worry that, in spite of the confidence I’d shown to the General and Hardanger, I might be hopelessly wrong after all and Mary lost to me for ever. And even if I were right, she might still as easily be lost to me. With a conscious and almost desperate effort of will, I turned my mind to other things.

The high-walled courtyard where I’d been standing for the past three hours was dark and deserted, as dark and deserted as the heart of London itself. Evacuation of the centre of the city, the temporarily homeless going to prepared halls, ballrooms and theatres, had begun shortly after six o’clock, just after the last of the offices, businesses and shops had closed: it had been hastened by radio broadcasts at nine o’clock saying that, according to the latest message received, the time for the release of the botulinus toxin had been advanced from four a.m. to half past two: but there had been no hurry, no panic, no despair, in fact there would have been no sense of anything unusual happening had it not been for the unusual number of people carrying suitcases: the phlegmatic Londoners who had seen the City set on fire and suffered a hundred nights of mass area bombing during the war weren’t to be stampeded into anything for anybody.

Between half past nine and ten o’clock over a thousand troops had combed their methodical way through the heart of the city checking that every last man, woman and child had been moved to safety, that no one had been inadvertently overlooked. At half past eleven a darkened drifting police launch had nosed silently into the north bank of the river and put me ashore on the Embankment, just below Hungerford Bridge. At midnight troops and police, all of them armed, had completely sealed off the entire area, including the bridges across the Thames. At one o’clock a power failure on a large scale had blacked out the better part of a square mile of the city—the square mile cordoned off by troops and police.

Twenty past three. Fifty minutes after the timed release of the botulinus toxin. It was time to go. I eased the borrowed Webley in its ill-fitting holster, checked the knife that was strapped, handle downwards, to my left forearm, and moved out into the darkness. I’d never seen a picture of, far less visited, the new helicopter port on the North Bank, but an Inspector of the Metropolitan Police had briefed me so exhaustively that by the time he had finished I could have found my way up there blindfolded. And that, to all intents and purposes, was exactly what I was. Blind-folded. Blind. In that blacked-out city and on that weeping overcast night, the darkness was just one degree short of absolute.

I had been told that there were three different ways up to the heliport, perched on the roof of the station, a hundred feet above the streets of London. There were two lifts, but with the power failure those would be out of operation. Between those lifts was a glassed-in circular staircase without a shred of cover from top to bottom, using which would be as neat a way as any of committing suicide if there was a reception committee waiting and I could not see Gregori as a man who would leave his main line of approach unguarded. And then there was the third way, the fire-escape on the other side of the station. That was the only way in for me.

I walked two hundred yards from the courtyard along a narrow cobbled lane. When the wall gave way to a high wooden fence I reached for the top, pulled myself up, slipped quietly down on the other side and set off along the railway tracks.

The reference book compilers who assert that Clapham Junction has more sets of parallel tracks than any place in Britain wouldn’t go around making silly statements like that if they’d tried this lot on a pitch black October night with the sleety rain falling about their ears. There wasn’t a single piece of ironware in the whole interminable width of those tracks that I didn’t find that night, usually with my ankles and shins. Railway lines, wires, signalling gear, switch gear, hydrants, platforms where there shouldn’t have been platforms—I found them all. To add to my discomfort the burnt cork that had been so heavily rubbed into my face and hands was beginning to run, and burnt cork tastes exactly as you would expect it to taste: and when it gets in your eyes it hurts. The only hazard I didn’t have to contend with was live rails—the power had been switched off.

I found the fence on the other side of the track easily enough, just by walking into it. Once down in the lane on the other side I turned left and made my way towards the fire-escape which came down, I had been told, into a small recessed court. I found the court, crossed the entrance and flattened myself against the far wall. The fire-escape was there all right, just barely discernible twenty feet away against the fractionally lighter darkness of the sky, gaunt and stark and angular and zigzagging upwards out of sight. The first two or three flights of the fire-escape were invisible, lost against the darkness of high walls beyond.

For three minutes I stood there, showing as many signs of life as a wooden Indian. Then I heard it—even above the drumming of the sleet on my sodden shoulders and the sound of water running in the gutters, I heard it: the slight shuffle of a shoe on the pavement as someone changed his cramped position. The sound didn’t come again, but then I didn’t need to hear it again. Once was enough. Someone was standing directly under the lowermost platform of the fire-escape and if he turned out to be the soul of innocence doing it for his health’s sake it would be surprising, to say the least. It was also going to be unfortunate for him, but he wouldn’t be caring much when he was dead.

Finding this man here didn’t give me any feeling of dismay and frustration because of the possible threat and setback he offered, all it afforded me was the sense of profound satisfaction and relief that could not be described. I had gambled, but I had won. Dr. Gregori was doing exactly what I’d told the General and Hardanger he would be doing.

The knife came free of its sheath and I brushed the blade with the ball of my thumb. It had a point like a lancet and an edge like a scalpel. It was only a very little knife, but three and a half inches of steel can kill you just as dead as the longest stiletto or the heaviest broadsword. If you know where to hit, that is. I had a fair idea where to hit, and how. And at anything up to ten paces I was twice as accurate with a knife as with a gun.

I covered sixteen of the intervening twenty feet in just over ten seconds, making no more sound than the moonlit shadow of a drifting snowflake. And now I could see him, quite clearly. He was directly under the first platform of the fire-escape to get what shelter he could from the rain. His back was to the wall. His head was bowed, as if his chin was resting on his chest, as if he was half-asleep on his feet. He’d only to glance sideways under raised eyelids and he’d have had me.

He wasn’t going to remain so obligingly unseeing for an indefinite period. I twisted the knife until the blade pointed upwards, then found myself hesitating. Even with Mary’s life in the balance I found myself hesitating. Whoever this character was I’d little doubt but that he deserved to die anyway. But to knife an unsuspecting and half-asleep man, however much he deserved it? This wasn’t the war any more. I slid out the Webley, quiet as a mouse tiptoeing past a sleeping cat, caught the barrel and swung for a spot just below the dripping brim of his hat, just behind the left ear, and because I was feeling illogically angry about my uneasiness in knifing him I struck him very hard indeed. The sound was the sound of an axe sinking deep into the bole of a pine. I caught and lowered him gently to the ground. He wouldn’t wake up before dawn. Maybe he’d never waken again. It didn’t seem to matter. I started up the fire-escape.

There was no hurry, no haste, in my going. Haste could be the end of it all. I went up the steps slowly, one at a time, always staring upwards. I was too near the end of the road now to let rashness be the ruin of everything.

After the sixth or seventh flight of steps I slowed down even more, not because my leg and queer shortness of breath were troubling me, which they were, but because I had become suddenly aware of an area of diffused light in the darkness of the wall above me, where a light had no right to be. There shouldn’t have been any light anywhere, for all the lights of Central London were out.

If ghosts were allowed to have black faces— though I suspected mine was getting pretty streaky by this time—then I went up the next flight of steps like a ghost. As I approached the light I could see that it came not from a window but from a grille-work door set in the wall. Cautiously, I raised my head to the level of this door and peered inside.

It was on a level with the massive iron girders that spanned and supported the roof of the station. At least a dozen lights were burning inside the station, small, weak, isolated sources of illumination that served only to emphasise the depth of the gloom that lay over most of the huge and cavernous building. Six of the lights were directly above sets of hydraulic buffers at the end of tracks, and I suddenly realised why they were burning there: some lights are essential to the safe operation of a railway station and those must have been battery-powered lamps designed to come on in the event of a power failure. A prosaic enough explanation and, I was sure, the correct one.

I looked for some moments at the geometric tracery of soot-blackened girders that dwindled and vanished into impenetrable darkness at the farthest reaches of the station, then put a slight experimental pressure on the door. It gave under my hand. And the damned thing squeaked, like a gibbet creaking in the night wind. A gibbet with a corpse on it. I put the thought of corpses out of my mind and withdrew my hand from the door. Enough was enough.

But the door was sufficiently open to let me see a couple of vertical iron ladders leading away from the steel platform just inside. One led upwards to a long gangway immediately below the vast skylights, the other down to another gangway about the level of the highest of the lights inside the station: the former would be for the window-cleaners, the latter for the electricians. It was a great help to me to know that. I straightened. At least six flights of stairs to go yet before I started getting really interested.

The arm that locked round my throat and started throttling the life out of me belonged to a gorilla, a gorilla with a shirt and jacket on, but a gorilla for all that. In those first two hellish seconds of immobilised shock and pain I thought my neck was going to snap, and before I could even begin to react something hard and metallic smacked down on my right wrist and sent the Webley flying from my grasp. It struck the iron platform and then spun off into space.

I never heard it land on the roadway beneath. I was too busy fighting for my life. With my left hand—my right hand was momentarily paralysed and quite useless—I reached up, caught his wrist and tried to tear his arm away. I might as well have tried to tear a four-inch bough from an oak tree. He was phenomenally strong and he was squeezing the life out of me. And not slowly.

Something ground savagely into my back, just above the kidney. The unspoken order was clear as day but for all that I didn’t stop struggling, a few more seconds of that pressure and I knew my neck would go. I smashed my right foot against the grille door and sent us both staggering back against the outside platform rail. I felt his feet leave the platform as the rail struck him about hip-level, and for a moment we both teetered there on the point of imbalance, his arm still locked around my neck, then the pressures on neck and back were simultaneously released as he grabbed desperately for the rail to save himself.

I staggered away from him, whooping painfully for breath, and fell heavily against the next flight of steps leading upwards. I landed on my right side, just where the ribs were gone, and the world darkened and dimmed in a haze of pain and if I’d then let myself go, relaxed even for the briefest moment and yielded to the body’s clamorous demands for rest, I should have passed out. But passing out was the one luxury I couldn’t afford. Not with this character anyway. I knew who I had now. If he’d wanted merely to knock me out he could have tapped me over the head with his gun: if he’d wanted to kill me he could have shot me in the back or, if he’d no silencer and didn’t want noise, a tap on the head and a heave over the rail to the roadway sixty feet below would have served his purpose equally well. But this lad didn’t want anything so quiet and simple and painless. If I was to die, he wanted me to know I was dying: for me he wanted the tearing agony of death by violence, for himself the delight of savouring my agony. A vicious and evil sadist with a dark mind crimsoned by the lust for blood. Gregori’s hatchet-man, Henriques. The deaf mute with the crazy eyes.

Half-lying, half-standing against the steps, I twisted to face him as he came at me again. He was crouched low and he had his gun in front of him. But he didn’t want to use that gun. Not if he could help it. From a bullet you died too quickly, unless, of course, you were very careful with the placing of the bullet. Suddenly I knew this was just what he had in mind, the muzzle was ranging down my body as he searched for the spot where a bullet would mean that I would take quite some time dying, unpleasantly. I straightened my arms on the step behind me and if the scything upward sweep of my right foot had caught him where I had intended Henriques wouldn’t have worried me any more. But my vision was fuzzy and co-ordination poor. My foot glanced off his right thigh, swept on and struck his forearm, jarring the gun from his hand: the gun carried over the edge of the platform and clattered down a couple of steps on the flight below.

He turned like a cat to retrieve it and I was hardly any slower myself. As he leaned over the top step, scrabbled for and found his gun, I jumped and caught him with both feet. He grunted, an ugly hoarse sound, then crashed and cart-wheeled down the steps to the platform below. But he landed on his feet: and he still had the gun.

I didn’t hesitate. If I’d tried running up the remaining flights to the heliport on top of the station roof, he’d have caught me in seconds or picked me off at his leisure: even had I managed to reach the top, assuming that the days of miracles were not yet over, secrecy and silence would have vanished and Gregori would be waiting for me, I’d be trapped between two fires and everything would be over for Mary. It would have been just as suicidal to go down and meet him or wait for him where I was: I’d only the knife strapped to my left forearm and my numbed right hand was not sufficiently recovered to ease it out from its sheath, far less use it, and even had we both been weaponless, even had I been at my fittest and best, I doubt whether I could have coped with the dark violence of that phenomenally powerful deaf mute. And I was a very long way from my fittest and best. I went through the grille door like a rabbit bolting from its hole with a ferret only half a length behind.

Desperately I glanced round the tiny platform. Up the vertical ladder to the window cleaners’ catwalk or down to the electricians’? It took me all of half a second to realise I couldn’t do either. Not with one hand still out of commission and hope to reach either the top or bottom of the ladder before Henriques came through that door and picked me off in his own sweet time.

Six feet away from the platform was one of the giant girders that spanned the entire width of the station roof. I didn’t stop to think of it, subconsciously I must have known that if I had stopped to think, even for a second, I’d have chosen to remain there and have it out with Henriques on that platform, gun or no gun. But I didn’t stop. I ducked under the waist-high chain surrounding the platform and launched myself across that sixty foot drop.

My good foot landed fair and square on the girder, the other came just short and slipped off the thickly treacherous coating of soot deposited there by generations of steam locomotives. As my shin cracked painfully against the edge of the metal I grabbed the beam with my left hand and for two or three dreadful seconds I just teetered there while the great empty station swam dizzily around me. Then I steadied and was safe. For the moment. I rose shakily to my feet.

I didn’t crawl along the girder. I didn’t pussyfoot along with arms outstretched to aid my balance. I just put down my head and ran. The beam was only eight or nine inches wide, it was covered with this dangerous layer of soot and the two rows of smooth rivet-heads running along its entire length would have been my death had I stepped on their slippery convexities. But I ran. It took me seconds only to cover the seventy feet to the great central vertical girder that disappeared into the darkness above. I grabbed it, edged recklessly round, and stared back in the direction from which I’d come.

Henriques was on the platform by the grille door. His gun was extended at the full stretch of his right arm, pointing directly at me, but he was lowering it even as I looked: he’d seen me, all right, but too late to draw a bead before I’d vanished behind the shelter of the vertical girder.

He looked around him, seemed to hesitate. I stood where I was, clinging on to the girder while some of the numbness drained from my right hand, and while Henriques was making up his mind I cursed myself for my folly. All the way up that fire-escape from street level I’d never once thought to look behind. The deaf mute must have been making a round of the posted guards, found the unconscious man at the foot of the fire-escape and drawn the inevitable conclusions.

Henriques had made up his mind. The idea of the leap from the platform across to the girder didn’t appeal to him, and I couldn’t blame him. He swarmed up the iron ladder to the window cleaners’ catwalk above, moved over to a position directly above the girder I was standing on, crossed the catwalk rail and lowered himself until his feet were only inches above the girder. He dropped, steadying himself with his hands on the wall, turned carefully and started coming towards me, his hands outstretched like a tight-rope walker’s. I didn’t wait for him. I turned and started walking also.

I didn’t walk far for there wasn’t far to walk. The beam I was on stretched to the other side of the main hall of the station and there it ended, vanishing into the grimy brickwork. There was no convenient platform here. No catwalk above or below. Just the beam vanishing into the wall. And sixty feet below the dull gleam of rails and hydraulic buffers. Just myself and the girder and the blank wall. The end of the road and no way out. I turned and made ready to die.

Henriques had reached the vertical girder in the centre, had safely negotiated his way past it and was advancing on me. Fifty feet away he stopped and even in the gloom I could see the white glimmer of his teeth as he smiled. He had seen how it was with me, that I was trapped and quite at his mercy. It must have been one of the highlights in the life of that crazy man.

He started moving again, slowly closing the distance between us. Twenty feet away he stopped, stooped, lowered his hands to the girder and sat down, locking his legs securely under the beam. He was wearing a very smooth line in Italian sacking and all that soot wouldn’t be doing it any good at all but he didn’t seem to care. He raised his pistol, holding it with both hands, and pointed it at the middle of my body.

There was nothing I could do. With my hands at my back, bracing myself against the wall, I stiffened in futile preparation for the slamming rending impact of the shock. I stared at his hands and imagined I could see the fingers whiten. In spite of myself I winced and closed my eyes. Only for a second or two. When I opened them again he’d lowered the gun until his hand was resting on the beam and was grinning at me.

For sheer calculated sadism and feline cruelty I’d never met its equal. But I should have known it, I should have expected it. The monstrous madman who had forced a cyanide sweet down Clandon’s throat, who had strangled MacDonald alive at the end of a rope, who had pulped in the back of Mrs. Turpin’s head, who had tortured Easton Derry to death—and, for good measure, had stove in my ribs—such a man wasn’t going to pass up the exquisite pleasure of watching me die by inches, even although for once, the dying was to be by terror of the mind instead of agony of the body. I could visualise those empty eyes now hot and greedy for the suffering of others, I could almost visualise the wolf-like slavering of that twisted grinning mouth. He was the cat, I was the mouse, and he was going to play with me until he had extracted every last ounce of pleasure from his macabre game. And then, regretfully, he would shoot me, although he would still have that one last joy of seeing me fall and being smashed and mangled on the steel and concrete far below.

I had been very afraid. I’m no hero when I see that death is certain, when my murder is certain, nor do I believe anyone else is. I had been close to physical paralysis with that fear, and that numbness had extended to the mind, but now the petrifaction of body and mind vanished in a suddenly overwhelming warm flood of pure anger, anger that my life and the fate of Mary should be at the mercy of the whims of a sub-human creature like this.

I remembered my knife.

Slowly I brought together the hands behind my back until they were touching. The fingers of my right hand, painful still but no longer numb, reached up under my left sleeve and closed on the haft of the knife. Henriques lifted his gun again, pointing it at my head this time, his lips lifted back in a snarling smile, but I just kept on working away slowly till the knife was clear of the sheath. It was too soon for the deaf mute to kill me yet: there was still a great deal more of innocent pleasure to be extracted from his harmless game before he grew bored and blew the last whistle on me by leaning on the trigger.

Henriques lowered the gun a second time, shifted slightly to lock his ankles even more securely under the girder and dug into his jacket pocket with his left hand. He brought out a packet of cigarettes and a book of matches. He was smiling like a crazy man, because this was the zenith, the towering pinnacle of refinement of torture, the killer taking his luxuriantly insolent ease while the trembling terror-stricken victim waits, not knowing when the last moment will come, but knowing it must inevitably come: and he’d thought it all up by himself.

He got a cigarette into his mouth, bent over a match to strike it. The gun was still in his right hand. The match flared and for half a second of time he was blind.

Steel flickered and gleamed briefly in the weak backwash of light and Henriques coughed. The knife buried itself to the hilt in the base of his throat. He jerked violently, arching over backwards, as if a heavy electric shock had passed through the steel girder. The gun flew from his hand and curved earthwards in a long crazy curve. It seemed to take an age to fall and I couldn’t look away from it. I didn’t see it land, but I saw sparks on the line below as steel struck steel.

I looked back at Henriques. He’d straightened and bent slightly forward and was staring at me in perplexity. His right hand reached up and pulled the knife clear and in a moment his shirt front was saturated in the pumping blood. His face twisted in a snarl, a snarl already tinged with approaching dissolution, and he raised his right hand up and back over his shoulder. The blade no longer gleamed in the lamplight. He leaned back to give impetus to his throw, and then tiredness came into the dark and evil face and the knife slipped from his dying hand and clattered to the concrete below. The eyes closed and he slipped to one side, slipped right over until he was beneath the girder and held only by his locked ankles. How long he hung like that I couldn’t later say. It seemed a very long time. And then, at last, in a weird slow-motion sequence, the ankles slowly unlocked and he fell from sight. I didn’t see him fall, I couldn’t see him fall. But when at last I did look I saw him far below, his broken body hanging limply over the gleaming ram of a gigantic hydraulic buffer. For Henriques’ sake, wherever he was now, I hoped the shades of his victims weren’t waiting for him. I became vaguely aware that my cheek muscles were aching. I had been smiling down at the dead man. I had never felt less like smiling.

Sick and dizzy and trembling like an old man with the ague, I made my way back across the girder by crawling on my hands and knees. I took me a long time I think, and I’ll never be clear how I managed the six foot jump from girder to platform, even although it was easier this time for the chain was there for my hands to catch. I staggered through the grille door to the fire-escape and half-lowered myself, half-collapsed on to the platform. The night air of London had never smelted so sweet.

How long I lay there I don’t know. I can’t remember whether I was conscious or not most of the time. But it couldn’t have been long for when I looked at my watch it was still only ten minutes to four.

I pushed myself to my feet and made my way wearily down the fire-escape. When I reached street level I didn’t even bother looking for my Webley, it might have taken me long enough to find it, and the chances were that some part of its mechanism had been damaged in its long fall. I would have been very surprised if the guard I’d disposed of hadn’t been carrying a gun. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t know what make of automatic it was but it had a trigger and safety catch in the usual position and that was all I wanted. I started to climb the fire-escape again.

I made the last two flights to the roof of the station on my hands and knees. Not from the need of stealth or secrecy, I just couldn’t make it any other way. I was as far through as that. I rested for a bit with my back to the wall of the passenger lounge, then walked slowly across the concrete to the hangar in the far corner.

A faint wash of light shone weakly through the open doors: it would be invisible from below, for the hangar doors opened on to the centre of the heliport. The light came not from the hangar itself but from what was inside it—the big twenty-four-seater Voland Helicopter that the Inter-City Flights were now operating on their new routes.

I could see the control cabin thrust away over the nose of the helicopter, and it was from there that the light was coming. I could see the head and shoulders of the pilot, hatless and in a grey uniform jacket, in the left-hand seat. In the right-hand seat sat Dr. Gregori.

Circling the hangar I came to the side door and pushed it back slowly on its oiled tracks. It made no sound. The base of the short flight of portable steps leading up to the open passenger door in the centre of the helicopter’s fuselage was less than twenty feet away. I pulled the automatic, safety-catch off, from my coat pocket and crossed to the steps. If you could have heard a blade of grass growing then you could have heard me going up those steps.

The passenger cabin was also lit, but the illumination was poor—one single overhead lamp in line with the door. I poked my head cautiously through the doorway—and there, not three feet away, sitting with wrists bound to the arm-rests of the first of the backward-facing seats, was Mary. The bruise above her eye had swollen to duck-egg proportions, her face was scratched and deathly pale, but she was wide awake and staring directly at me. And she recognised me. With my soot-blackened and battered face I must have looked like a man from Mars, one, moreover, who’s just managed to walk away from the smashed-up remains of his flying saucer. But she recognised me immediately. Her lips parted, her eyes stared wide and I at once raised finger to mouth in the age-old gesture of silence. But I was too late, I was a lifetime too late. She had been sitting there in the black thrall of a hopeless and defeated misery and grief, with the bottom dropped from her life and nothing left to live for, and now her husband, whom she surely knew to be dead, had returned from the land of the dead, and the world was going to be all right again and if she had not reacted, immediately and instinctively, then she would not have been human.

“Pierre!” Her voice was part shock, part hope, all wonder and joy. “Oh, Pierre!”

I wasn’t looking at her. My eyes were on one place only—the entrance to the pilot’s cabin. So was my gun. From up front came the sound of a dull blow, then Gregori appeared, one hand clutching a gun, the other above his head to steady himself as he peered through the low archway. The eyes were narrowed but the rest of the face still and cold. The gun, curiously, was hanging by his side. I shifted mine slightly till it centred on his forehead and increased the tension on the trigger.

“The end of the road, Scarlatti,” I said. “And the end of my long wait for you. There’ll be nobody coming here tonight. Only me, Scarlatti. Only me.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Cavell!” Gregori hadn’t realised who I was until I had spoken and now the swarthy face paled and he stared at me like a man seeing a ghost which, for Gregori, was exactly what I was. “Cavell! It’s impossible!”

“Don’t you wish it were, Scarlatti? Into the cabin and don’t try lifting that gun.”

“Scarlatti?” He didn’t seem to have heard my order, the second shock had staggered his mind already reeling from the first. He whispered, “How do you know?”

“Five hours since Interpol and the F.B.I. gave us your life history. And quite a history it is. Enzo Scarlatti, one-time graduate research chemist who became the big-time Czar of American crime in the Mid-West. Extortion, robberies, killings, machines, drugs, the lot—the great king-pin and they could never lay a finger on you. But they got you in the end, didn’t they, Scarlatti? The usual, income-tax evasion. And then they deported you.”

I advanced two paces towards him, I didn’t want Mary in the line of fire when the war started.

“Right into the cabin, Scarlatti.”

He was still staring at me, but his face underwent a subtle change. The man’s resilience, his powers of mental recuperation, were fantastic. He said, slowly, “We must talk about this.”

“Later. Inside. Now. Or I’ll drop you where you stand.”

“No. You won’t. You’d like to, but not yet. I know when I look at death, Cavell. I’m looking at death now. You wish me to come and sit down in a chair and then you will kill me. But not until I am in that chair will you kill me.”

I took another step towards him and his left hand came into view. “This is what you are frightened of, isn’t it, Cavell? You were afraid that I might have one of those in my hand or on my person that would smash when I fell. Isn’t that it, Cavell?”

That was it indeed. I stared down at the ampoule in his hand, the little glass vial and the sealed blue plastic top. He went on, his face strained and tight, “I think you had better put that gun down, Cavell.”

“Not this time. As long as I have this gun pointing between your eyes you won’t try anything. The moment I put it down you let me have it with your own gun. And I know now what I didn’t know before. You won’t use that ampoule. I thought you were insane, Scarlatti, but I know now you were only using the threat of insanity to terrify us into doing what you wanted. But I know you now and I know your record. You may be crazy, but you’re crazy like a fox. You’re as sane as I am. You won’t use that thing. You value your own life, the success of your plans, too much.”

“Wrong, Cavell. I’ll use it. And I do value my life.” He glanced quickly over his shoulder and then turned back to me. “Eight months now since I entered Mordon. I could have had the vaccine out any time I liked. But I waited. Why? I waited till Baxter and MacDonald had successfully developed an attenuated strain of the Satan Bug, a strain still deadlier than the botulinus toxin but with an oxidisation life of only twenty-four hours. I waited till they had come across the precise combinations of heat, phenol, formalin and ultra-violet to produce a killer vaccine for this weakened strain.” He held the vial between finger and thumb. “In this glass, the attenuated Satan Bug, in my bloodstream the inactivated micro-organisms we have produced against it. The cyanide was bluff—I don’t need cyanide. You will understand why Baxter had to die—he knew about the new virus and vaccine.”

I understood.

“You will understand, also, that I am not afraid to use it. I will——”

He broke off, the swarthy face suddenly cold and grim. “What was that?” I’d heard it too, two short bursts of harshly metallic sound, like a riveter’s gun, only five times as fast.

“Why, don’t you know? That was the Merlin Mark 2, Scarlatti. The new type of rapid-fire machine carbine issued to Nato forces.” I looked at him consideringly. “Didn’t you hear what I said? There’s no one else coming tonight. Only me.”

“What are you saying?” he whispered. I could see his knuckles whiten as his left hand clenched involuntarily over the glass vial. “What are you talking about?”

“About all your friends that won’t be seeing their homes again for many years to come. About all the scum—the top scum, admittedly—of the criminal world, who have vanished so mysteriously in recent weeks from their haunts in London, America, France and Italy. All the top specialists in oxy-acetylene work, nitro-glycerine, combination twiddling and what have you. The world’s best at blowing and opening vaults and safes. We knew weeks ago, from Interpol, that those men had disappeared. We did not know that they had all been assembled together in the same place—here, in London.”

The dark glowing eyes stared into mine. The breath whistled thinly between his teeth. His face was like a wolf’s.

“The F.B.I. regard you as the best planner and organiser they’ve been up against since the war, Scarlatti. It’s quite a compliment, isn’t it? But deserved. You had us all fooled. This insistence on knocking down Mordon, this demonstration of the botulinus drug in East Anglia, this pretence that you were unaware that three of the vials you had stolen were of the Satan Bug strain, this apparent ignorance of the effects of the Satan Bug—you had us all convinced that we were dealing with a madman. We were sure that this threat against the square mile of London was to achieve the destruction of Mordon to satisfy the whims of a lunatic. Then we thought it was part of a Communist plot to destroy our last but most powerful line of defence. It was only a few hours ago that we realised that this threat against the heart of London, had one purpose and one purpose only—to empty the heart of London, to evacuate it so that not one person remained.

“In this small area of London are a score of the greatest banks in the world, banks bulging with the negotiable currencies of fifty nations, banks with fortunes in bullion, banks with safe-deposits containing jewels that would ransom a dozen millionaires. And you were going to take the lot, weren’t you, Scarlatti? Your men and equipment have been hidden in empty buildings or innocent-seeming vans since last evening. All they had to do was to walk into the banks during the hours of darkness after the last man had vanished. There would be no trouble. Every one of those banks has a double security system—guards and automatic alarms that ring in any of the local police stations. But the guards had to leave, hadn’t they—they didn’t want to die from botulinus toxin? As for the burglar alarms, some of your men with access to the electricity board’s wiring diagrams—that would cause no trouble—pulled the switches, blew the fuses, tripped the overload coils or cut the cables supplying electric power to this area. Which is why the city is in darkness. Which is why no alarm bells would ring in the police stations. You’re with me, Scarlatti?”

He was with me all right. His face was masked in hatred.

“After that it was easy,” I went on. “I suppose you kidnapped that poor devil of a pilot earlier in the day. You bring the stuff here, load it aboard the helicopter and make a fast take-off for the continent: it was the only way, you knew the entire area would be cordoned off and that there would be no other way to get the stuff out. Your men would just stay put until the scare was over, mingle with the returning crowds and disappear. As for the banks, no one would find out anything till at least three o’clock this coming afternoon, which will be the earliest that people would be allowed to return to the area. And as this is now Sunday it would probably have been Monday morning before the discovery of the looted banks was made. By which time you would have been a couple of continents away. But not now. It’s as I told you, Scarlatti: this is the end of the road.”

“You mean—you mean it’s all over?” Mary whispered behind me.

“It’s all over. By ten o’clock tonight, long before the troops had finished clearing the area, there were two hundred detectives scattered at strategic points all over the city—in banks or close to banks. Hidden. With instructions not to move before 3.45 this morning. It’s after four now. It’s all over. Every single one of those men was armed, with the latest Merlin sub-machine gun loaned from the Army, with specific instructions to shoot to kill if anyone batted an eyelid. That noise we heard a couple of minutes ago—someone must have batted an eyelid.”

“You’re lying.” Scarlatti’s face was twisted and vicious and his lips were working even when he wasn’t speaking. He went on in a hoarse whisper, “You’re making all this up.”

“You know better than that, Scarlatti. You know that I know too much that is true for the rest not to be true.”

He looked at me with murder in his eyes, then said softly and savagely, “Close the cabin door. Close it I say, or by God, I’ll end it all now.” He took two steps down the aisle, the vial of the Satan Bug virus lifted high above his head.

I watched him for a moment, then nodded. He’d nothing to lose now and I wasn’t going to throw away Mary’s life and my own—not to mention the pilot’s—over a thing like that. I moved back and closed the sliding passenger door. My eyes, my gun never left him.

He took another two steps forward, his left hand still high above his head. “And now your gun, Cavell. Now your gun.”

“Not my gun, Scarlatti.” I shook my head and wondered whether he wasn’t after all mad, or whether he was just a magnificent actor. “Not my gun. You know that. Then you’d kill us all, while you escaped. As long as I have this gun you won’t escape. You may smash that vial but I’ll get you before the Satan Bug gets me. Not my gun.”

He advanced again, his eyes wide and gleaming, the left hand moving back as if ready to throw. Maybe I was wrong, maybe he was crazy. “Your gun,” he screamed. “Now!”

I shook my head again, he said something in a high, wild voice and his left hand came arching over his shoulder, the back of his hand facing me instead of the front as I would have expected. Darkness flooded the cabin as his bunched fist smashed the single overhead light, a darkness momentarily illuminated by two stabs of orange flames as I squeezed the trigger twice, an illumination and reverberating roar followed by darkness again and sudden silence, and in the sudden silence a gasp of pain from Mary and Scarlatti saying, “My gun is in your wife’s throat, Cavell. She is about to die.”

He hadn’t been crazy after all.

I dropped my gun on the composition floor. It clattered loudly. I said, “You win, Scarlatti.”

“The main cabin switch,” he said. “By the left hand side of the door.”

I groped, found it and pulled it down. The entire cabin flooded with light from a dozen lamps. Scarlatti pulled himself up from the seat beside Mary where he’d flung himself as soon as he’d smashed the light, lifted the gun from her neck and pointed it at me. I lifted my bent arms and looked at his left hand. The vial was still intact, he’d taken a hellish risk, but it had been the only risk left to him. I noticed where the upper sleeve of his left arm was torn, I’d come pretty close to getting him. And pretty close to ending it all for us, too. If I’d have hit him, the vial would have been smashed. But then, I had thought it was going to be smashed anyway.

“Move back,” Scarlatti said quietly. His voice was controlled, conversational, he’d won his Oscar for the night and packed in the acting. “Right to the back of the cabin.”

I moved. He came forward, picked up my gun, stuck the vial in his pocket and gestured with both guns. “The pilot’s cabin. Into it.”

I went forward. As I passed Mary’s seat she looked up at me and smiled through the tangle of blonde hair that had fallen forward over her face. Her green eyes were masked in tears. I smiled back. As actors, not even Scarlatti could show us anything.

The pilot was slumped forward over the controls. That explained the sound I’d heard just after Mary had exclaimed at the sight of me. Before coming to investigate, Scarlatti had made sure that the pilot wouldn’t be giving him any trouble. The pilot was a big man, with black hair, and the part of his face I could see was tanned and sun-lined. At the back of his head a little blood oozed through the dark hair.

“Into the co-pilot’s seat,” Scarlatti ordered. “Wake that man up.”

“How the hell can I?” Under the unwavering eyes of the two pistol barrels I eased myself into the seat. “You coshed the poor devil.”

“Not hard,” he said. “Hurry up.”

I did what I could. I’d no option. I shook the pilot, slapped his face gently and spoke to him, but Scarlatti must have hit him harder than he thought. In the circumstances, I thought grimly, he hadn’t had much time for finesse. Scarlatti was becoming impatient and as nervous as a cat, staring out through the windscreens towards the hangar doors. For all he knew there was a regiment of soldiers or police out there in the darkness, he wasn’t to know that I’d begged and pleaded with the General and Hardanger to be allowed to go alone, secrecy and stealth not only offering the only chance of saving Mary’s life but also being far less liable to panic Scarlatti into indiscriminate use of the Satan Bug. I’d certainly done a great job.

After five minutes the pilot stirred and awoke. He was as tough as he looked, for he came out of the unconsciousness fighting mad and it was all I could do to hold him off until the ungentle nudging on the back of his neck from Scarlatti’s pistol let him know he was picking on the wrong man. He twisted round in his seat, recognised Scarlatti and said a few words to him that left no doubt but that he came from the other side of the Irish sea. What he had to say was interesting but irrelevant and unprintable. He broke off when Scarlatti stuck the barrel of a pistol into his face. Scarlatti had an unpleasant habit of sticking pistol barrels into people’s faces, but he was too old to be cured of it by now.

“Get this helicopter airborne,” Scarlatti ordered. “Now.”

“Airborne!” I protested. “He’s not fit to walk, far less fly.”

Scarlatti prodded him again. “You heard me.

Hurry.”

“I can’t.” The pilot was sullen and savage at the same moment. “It has to be towed out. Can’t start the engines in here. Exhaust fumes and fire regu-lations——”

“The hell with your regulations,” Scarlatti said. “She can roll under her own power. Don’t you think I checked, you fool? Get moving.”

The pilot had no option and he knew it. He started his engines and I winced as the deafening clamour echoed back at us from the narrow metallic confines of the hangar walls. The pilot couldn’t have liked it any more than I did: either that or he knew it was dangerous to linger. Whatever the reason he lost no time. He engaged the two giant rotors, moved the cyclic pitch to tilt the blades forwards and downwards and released the brakes. The helicopter began to roll.

Thirty seconds later we were airborne. Scarlatti, more relaxed now, reached for a rack above his head and handed me a square metal box. He reached again and this time brought down an ordinary close-mesh string bag.

“Open the box and transfer the contents into this bag,” he said curtly. “I advise you to be careful. You will see why.”

I saw why and I was very careful. I opened the box and there, packed in straw, lay five chromed steel flasks. Under his direction I opened each in turn and with infinite gentleness laid five glass ampoules inside the net bag. Two with blue tops— two vials of the Satan Bug. Three with red tops— three vials of botulinus toxin. Scarlatti handed me another blue-topped vial from his pocket. That made six altogether. I placed that in also, gingerly gathered up the string bag and handed it back to Scarlatti. It was cold inside that cabin but I was sweating as if I were in a steam bath and it took an effort of will to keep my hands steady. I caught a glimpse of the pilot looking at the bag and I can’t say he looked any happier than I felt. He knew all right.

“Excellent.” Scarlatti took the bag from me, reached back into the passenger aisle and placed the bag on the nearest seat. “You will be able to convince our friends that I am not only willing but ready to carry out my threat.”

”I don’t know what you are talking about.”

”You will. I want you to make a radio call and get in touch with your father-in-law and then give him a message.” He turned to the pilot. “You will keep circling above the heliport. We will be returning there shortly.”

I said, “I don’t know how to operate the damned radio.”

”You’ve just forgotten,” he said soothingly. He was getting too confident of himself for my liking. “You will remember. A man who has spent his life in his country’s intelligence service and cannot operate a transmitter? If I take a walk back into the passenger cabin and you hear your wife scream do you think you will remember then?”

”What do you want me to do?” I asked savagely.

“Get on the police wave-length. I don’t know what it is but you’re bound to. Tell them that unless they immediately release all my captured men—and the money they have—I shall be compelled to drop botulinus and Satan Bug toxins over London. I have no idea where they will fall, nor do I greatly care. Further, if any attempt is made to follow, trace or capture me or my men I shall use toxin regardless of consequences. Do you see a flaw, Cavell?”

I said nothing at once. I stared ahead through the highspeed windscreen wipers into the rain and darkness. Finally I said, “I see no flaw.”

“I’m a desperate man, Cavell,” he said with quiet intensity. “When they deported me from America they thought I was completely finished. Completely. A has-been. I was laughed out of America. I was—and am—determined to show them all how wrong they were, to bring off the biggest criminal coup of all time. When you intercepted us in that police car this evening much that I said was false. But this one thing was true: I shall achieve this ambition regardless of cost or shall die trying. I am not acting now. Nothing is going to stop me, nothing on this earth is going to thwart me at this very last moment. They should not have laughed at Enzo Scarlatti. I am in the most deadly earnest, Cavell. You believe me?”

“I believe you.”

“I shall not hesitate to do exactly as I threaten. You must convince them of that.”

“You’ve convinced me,” I said. “I can’t speak for the others. I’ll try.”

“You had better succeed,” he said evenly.

I succeeded. After a few minutes twiddling and dial-twisting I managed to get through on the police wave-length. There was a further delay while the call was relayed and rerouted by phone and then I heard Superintendent Hardanger’s voice.

“Cavell here,” I said. “I’m in a helicopter with——”

“Helicopter!” He swore. “I can hear the damn’ thing. Almost directly above. What in God’s name——”

“Listen! I’m here with Mary and a pilot of the Inter-City Lines, a Lieutenant——” I glanced at the man beside me.

“Buckley,” he said harshly.

“Lieutenant Buckley. Scarlatti has the drop on us all. He’s got a message for you, for the General.”

“So you fouled things up, Cavell,” Hardanger said savagely. “God above, I warned you——”

“Shut up,” I said wearily. “This is his message.

You’d better listen.” I told them what I’d been told to say and after a pause the General’s voice came through on the earphones. No reproaches, no time-wasting.

He said, “What chance that he’s bluffing?”

“Not one in the world. He’s in deadly earnest. He’ll wipe out half the city sooner than fail. What’s all the banknotes and bullion in the world compared to a million lives?”

“You sound as though you were afraid,” the General’s voice came softly.

“I’m afraid, sir. Not just for myself.”

”I understand. I’ll call back in a few minutes.”

I removed the earphones. I said, “A few minutes. He has to consult.”

“That is understandable.” He was leaning back negligently now, one shoulder against the doorway, but the guns as steady as ever. He hadn’t the shadow of a doubt about the outcome now. “I hold all the cards, Cavell.”

He wasn’t exaggerating any. He held all the cards all right, they couldn’t afford not to let him win. But far back in my mind was the first stirrings of hope that he might yet lose the last trick of all. A despairing one in a million hope, but then I was a man in the extremes of despair and willing to gamble on a one in a million chance. And it would all depend upon so many imponderable factors. Scarlatti’s state of mind, the confidence and fractional lowering of relaxation that might— just might—come with the knowledge that the day was finally his: Lieutenant Buckley’s acuteness, intelligence and co-operation: and my speed of reaction. The last was the biggest “if” of all: the way I felt, if Scarlatti could cope with an ailing nonagenarian, then he shouldn’t have much trouble with me.

The earphones crackled. I slipped them on and the General’s voice came through. He said without preamble, “Tell Scarlatti we agree.”

“Yes, sir. I’m most desperately sorry about it all.”

“You did what you could. That’s over. Our first concern now must be to save the innocent, not to punish the guilty.”

One of the earphones was knocked forward, none too gently, and Scarlatti said, “Well? Well?”

“He agrees,” I said wearily.

“Good. I’d expected nothing else. Find out how long the release of my men and money will take, when the police would expect to be clear of the area.”

I asked and told him the answer. “Half an hour.”

“Again excellent. Switch off that radio. We shall cruise around for that length of time and then descend.” He leaned back comfortably against the doorway and, for the first time, permitted himself to smile. “A small hold-up in the execution of my plans, Cavell, but the ultimate results will be the same. I cannot tell you how much I look forward to seeing tomorrow’s headlines in all the American newspapers which so contemptuously wrote me off as a nonentity and washed-up has-been when I was deported two years ago. It will be interesting to see how they set about eating their words.”

I swore at him without enthusiasm, and he smiled again. The more he smiled, the better for me. I hoped. I slumped down in my seat, huddled in bitter dejection, and said sullenly, “Any objection if I smoke?”

“None at all.” He put one pistol in his pocket and handed me cigarettes and matches. “With my compliments, Cavell.”

“I don’t carry exploding cigars around with me,” I growled.

“I don’t suppose you do.” He smiled again, he was really going to town tonight. “You know, Cavell, bringing this off gives me an immense satisfaction. But almost as much I get from outwitting an opponent like yourself. You have given me more trouble and more nearly caused my downfall than any man I have ever met.”

“Except the Income Tax Inspectors of America,” I said. “Go to hell, Scarlatti.”

He laughed. I drew heavily on my cigarette and at that moment the helicopter shuddered slightly as it lifted over some rising current of warmer air. This was my opening. I twisted in my seat and said to Scarlatti, half-peevishly, half-nervously, “I wish to God you’d sit down or hang on to something. If this chopper hits an air-pocket you might be thrown back on top of those damn’ toxins.”

“Relax, friend,” he said comfortably. He leaned his back against the doorway and crossed his legs. “You don’t get air-pockets in weather like this.”

But I wasn’t really listening to him. And I certainly wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at Buckley—and then I saw Buckley looking at me. Not a movement of the head, just a sideways shift of the eyes that Scarlatti, behind him, couldn’t see. He lowered one eyelid in a low wink, no question, the big Irishman caught on fast. He dropped one hand negligently from the controls and laid it on his leg. He rubbed his hand down his thigh till the fingers stretched out horizontally over his knee-cap. And then his fingers dipped sharply into a vertical position.

I nodded twice, slowly, staring out the windscreen so as not to give any significance to the action. It wouldn’t have meant anything to even the most suspicious and by now Scarlatti was too confident and content to go looking for signs of trouble where none existed. He wouldn’t be the first man who relaxed too much when the game seemed overwhelmingly as good as won—and finished up at the losing end when the final whistle blew. I glanced at Buckley and saw his lips frame the word “Now.” I nodded a third time and braced myself.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Scarlatti shift his position slightly as Buckley eased the helicopter a fraction upwards. His legs were still crossed. Suddenly Buckley thrust the cyclic pitch right forward, at the same time banking heavily, and Scarlatti, completely off-balance, pitched headlong forwards almost directly on top of me.

I’d twisted and half-risen to my feet as he came lurching towards me. My roundhouse right caught him a fraction too high, just on the breastbone, and his guns went flying wildly to clatter against instrument panel and windscreen.

Scarlatti went berserk. Not viciously fighting mad but completely berserk. Knees, feet, teeth, fists, head, elbows, he used the lot on me, smashiing me back in my seat and utterly ignoring the blows rained on him in return. He growled and screamed alternately like some wounded animal, battering at me with frightening power and speed and with everything he could bring to bear. I was twenty years younger and twenty pounds heavier but I couldn’t even begin to hold him. I felt the blood begin to hiss dangerously in my ears, my chest felt as if a giant vice were crushing it in half, and then, seconds before I knew I was going to pass out, the insensate battering suddenly stopped and he was gone.

Dazed, bleeding, half-crazed with pain, I tore myself out of the seat and went after him. The helicopter was still in its dive and Scarlatti was scrambling desperately up the aisle pulling at the seats to give him purchase against the force of gravity. And he could use only one hand: the other held the bag with the botulinus and Satan Bug viruses. Momentarily crazed Scarlatti may have been—almost certainly was—but there was still one corner of his mind working: he could no longer threaten us directly with the Satan Bug for, seconds after the release of the viruses the helicopter, with a dead pilot at the controls, would have crashed into the streets of London with Scarlatti, the only person left alive aboard it, hopelessly trapped.

He reached the door before I was half-way up the aisle. He grabbed the handle and tried to slide it open, but found it impossible against the pull of the plummeting plane. He braced his feet against the seat next to Mary’s and hauled with all the power he had, his swarthy face crimsoning with the effort. Slowly, inexorably, the door began to slide open: and I was still six feet away. Then abruptly, the floor levelled as Buckley brought the craft back on even keel, the door flew open and Scarlatti staggered and fell. A second later I was on him.

I wasn’t worried about Scarlatti. I was worried about what he held in his hand. I tore it from him, viciously, hearing one of his fingers break as it was caught in the mesh, then he’d leapt to his feet and I was fighting for my life—and fighting for it with one hand.

He was silent now, his face the face of a madman, and he was going to kill me. He caught me by the throat, shoved me violently backwards. I thrust my left foot behind to gain enough purchase on the side of the cabin to thrust him off and Mary screamed. My foot met no resistance, there was nothing behind me, only the open door. Instantly I flung wide both arms and stiffened my back and shoulders. Both forearms smashed with cruel force against the raised metal edges of the doorway and the upper edge was like a guillotine against the back of my neck. Momentarily the world was a red haze shot through with blinding flashes of light and then it cleared. Mary, sitting in the doorway seat just beside us, was staring at me with terror-stricken eyes, green and enormous in the dead-white face. And Scarlatti still had me by the throat. His face was inches from mine.

“I warned you, Cavell,” he shouted hoarsely. “I warned you. There’ll be a million dead tomorrow, Cavell. A million dead, and you killed them. You, not me.” He sobbed, sunk his hooked fingers deeper into my throat and started to thrust me out into the sky and the darkness.

There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even use one of my hands to fight him off, take away any one point of my supports and I’d be through that doorway. In front of me was Scarlatti’s face and whatever he had been in the past I knew he was insane now. My rigidly out-thrust arms were beginning to bend inwards at the shoulders, rubbing along the raised metal edges of the door, and my shoulders were afire with agony as Scarlatti thrust me farther and farther out into the darkness. I could feel the cold wind rushing by, the rain drumming against my back and side with the force of a howling storm. This was the way some people die. I tried to open my left hand so as at least not to take the Satan Bug down with me when I fell but I couldn’t even do that, my fingers were caught in the meshes and jammed against the metal.

It was then that Mary broke through her terror-ridden thrall. She was tied to the arms of her seat but her feet were free and suddenly she jackknifed herself and kicked up with both legs with all the strength that was in her. She was wearing Italian shoes and for the first time in my life I put up a prayer of thanksgiving for those sharply pointed monstrosities. Scarlatti cried out with pain as they caught him just behind the right knee, his leg sagged and for the one moment that was the only moment I would ever have, his grip on my throat slackened. With a convulsive jerk of arms and neck I braced myself forward, my left leg swinging high, and he staggered backward. And then I was clear of the door, chopping aside his snarling crouched figure as I passed him and ran up the aisle.

I didn’t run far. Buckley was coming through the doorway at the other end, a gun in his hands. I wondered dimly what in the name of God had kept him until now, it shouldn’t have taken more than ten seconds to set the helicopter on automatic pilot and scrabble around for a gun after he’d straightened out, and then I realised that no more time than that had passed since he had straightened out the helicopter. It had only seemed like an eternity, that was all.

He saw me coming, threw the gun to me. I caught it, taking care even at that moment not to let it strike anywhere near the viruses. I whirled, gun in hand, but Scarlatti wasn’t coming for me any more.

He was standing quietly by the doorway, still doubled over with pain. His eyes were on me, but they didn’t seem crazed any more. He straightened slowly and said, “Don’t bother to fire, Cavell.”

“I won’t fire,” I said.

“End of a dream,” he said conversationally. He was standing close to the doorway, the wind and the rain were driving in hard against him, but he didn’t even seem to notice it. “Maybe this is the way the dreams of people like myself always end.” He paused, then looked at me almost quizzically. “You never really expected to see me in the Old Bailey?”

“No,” I said. “I never really expected it.”

“Can you see a man like me on trial for my life?” he persisted.

“I can’t see it,” I said.

He nodded, as if in satisfaction. He took a step nearer the open doorway, then turned again. “But it would have been nice,” he said, “to see what they would have said in the New York Times.” His voice was almost sad. Then he turned away and stepped out into the darkness.

I cut Mary loose and chafed the blood back into her hands while Buckley went forward to contact the police and call off their Flying Squad cars. After a few minutes we both went forward, as Buckley drifted down towards the heliport, and I picked up the phones.

The General said, “So she is safe.”

“Yes, sir. She’s safe.”

“And Scarlatti is gone?”

“That’s it, sir. Scarlatti is gone. He just stepped out of the plane.”

Hardanger’s voice broke in, harsh and gravelly as ever. “Did he fall or was he pushed?”

“He fell.” I hung up the phones. I knew they would never believe me.

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear Is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear Is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

When Eight

Bells Toll

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First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1966

© 1966 by HarperCollinsPublishers

The author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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To Paul and Xenia

Contents

ONE - Dusk Monday – 3 a.m. Tuesday

TWO - Tuesday: 3 a.m. – dawn

THREE - Tuesday: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

FOUR - Wednesday: 5 a.m. – dusk

FIVE - Wednesday: dusk – 8.40 p.m.

SIX - Wednesday: 8.40 p.m. – 10.40 p.m.

SEVEN - Wednesday: 10.40 p.m. – Thursday: 2 a.m.

EIGHT - Thursday: 2 a.m. – 4.30 a.m.

NINE - Thursday: 4.30 a.m. – dawn

TEN - Thursday: noon – Friday: dawn

ONE

Dusk Monday – 3 a.m. Tuesday

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made. It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker’s more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser: but the highvelocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you.

In short when a Peacemaker’s bullet hits you in, say, the leg, you don’t curse, step into shelter, roll and light a cigarette onehanded then smartly shoot your assailant between the eyes. When a Peacemaker bullet hits your leg you fall to the ground unconscious, and if it hits the thigh-bone and you are lucky enough to survive the torn arteries and shock, then you will never walk again without crutches because a totally disintegrated femur leaves the surgeon with no option but to cut your leg off. And so I stood absolutely motionless, not breathing, for the Peacemaker Colt that had prompted this unpleasant train of thought was pointed directly at my right thigh.

Another thing about the Peacemaker: because of the very heavy and varying trigger pressure required to operate the semi-automatic mechanism, it can be wildly inaccurate unless held in a strong and steady hand. There was no such hope here. The hand that held the Colt, the hand that lay so lightly yet purposefully on the radio-operator’s table, was the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen. It was literally motionless. I could see the hand very clearly. The light in the radio cabin was very dim, the rheostat of the angled table lamp had been turned down until only a faint pool of yellow fell on the scratched metal of the table, cutting the arm off at the cuff, but the hand was very clear. Rock-steady, the gun could have lain no quieter in the marbled hand of a statue. Beyond the pool of light I could half sense, half see the dark outline of a figure leaning back against the bulkhead, head slightly tilted to one side, the white gleam of unwinking eyes under the peak of a hat. My eyes went back to the hand. The angle of the Colt hadn’t varied by a fraction of a degree. Unconsciously, almost, I braced my right leg to meet the impending shock. Defensively, this was a very good move, about as useful as holding up a sheet of newspaper in front of me. I wished to God that Colonel Sam Colt had gone in for inventing something else, something useful, like safety-pins.

Very slowly, very steadily, I raised both hands, palms outward, until they were level with my shoulders. The careful deliberation was so that the nervously inclined wouldn’t be deceived into thinking that I was contemplating anything ridiculous, like resistance. It was probably a pretty superfluous precaution as the man behind that immobile pistol didn’t seem to have any nerves and the last thought I had in my head was that of resistance. The sun was long down but the faint red after-glow of sunset still loomed on the northwest horizon and I was perfectly silhouetted against it through the cabin doorway. The lad behind the desk probably had his left hand on the rheostat switch ready to turn it up and blind me at an instant’s notice. And there was that gun. I was paid to take chances. I was paid even to step, on occasion, into danger. But I wasn’t paid to act the part of a congenital and suicidal idiot. I hoisted my hands a couple of inches higher and tried to look as peaceful and harmless as possible. The way I felt, that was no feat.

The man with the gun said nothing and did nothing. He remained completely still. I could see the white blur of teeth now. The gleaming eyes stared unwinkingly at me. The smile, the head cocked slightly to one side, the negligent relaxation of the body – the aura in that tiny cabin of a brooding and sardonic menace was so heavy as to be almost palpable. There was something evil, something frighteningly unnatural and wrong and foreboding in the man’s stillness and silence and cold-blooded cat-and-mouse indifference. Death was waiting to reach out and touch with his icy forefinger in that tiny cabin. In spite of two Scots grandparents I’m in no way psychic or fey or second-sighted, as far as extra-sensory perception goes I’ve about the same degree of receptive sensitivity as a lump of old lead. But I could smell death in the air.

‘I think we’re both making a mistake,’ I said. ‘Well, you are. Maybe we’re both on the same side.’ The words came with difficulty, a suddenly dry throat and tongue being no aid to clarity of elocution, but they sounded all right to me, just as I wanted them to sound, low and calm and soothing. Maybe he was a nut case. Humour him. Anything. Just stay alive. I nodded to the stool at the front corner of his desk. ‘It’s been a hard day. Okay if we sit and talk? I’ll keep my hands high, I promise you.’

The total reaction I got was nil. The white teeth and eyes, the relaxed contempt, that iron gun in that iron hand. I felt my own hands begin to clench into fists and hastily unclenched them again, but I couldn’t do anything about the slow bum of anger that touched me for the first time.

I smiled what I hoped was a friendly and encouraging smile and moved slowly towards the stool. I faced him all the time, the cordial smile making my face ache and the hands even higher than before. A Peacemaker Colt can kill a steer at sixty yards, God only knew what it would do to me. I tried to put it out of my mind, I’ve only got two legs and I’m attached to them both.

I made it with both still intact. I sat down, hands still high, and started breathing again. I’d stopped breathing but hadn’t been aware of it, which was understandable enough as I’d had other things on my mind, such as crutches, bleeding to death and such-like matters that tend to grip the imagination.

The Colt was as motionless as ever. The barrel hadn’t followed me as I’d moved across the cabin, it was still pointing rigidly at the spot where I’d been standing ten seconds earlier.

I moved fast going for that gun-hand, but it was no breakneck dive. I didn’t, I was almost certain, even have to move fast, but I haven’t reached the advanced age in which my chief thinks he honours me by giving me all the dirtiest jobs going by ever taking a chance: when I don’t have to.

I eat all the right foods, take plenty of exercise and, even although no insurance company in the world will look at me, their medical men would pass me any time, but even so I couldn’t tear that gun away. The hand that had looked like marble felt like marble, only colder. I’d smelled death all right, but the old man hadn’t been hanging around with his scythe at the ready, he’d been and gone and left this lifeless shell behind him. I straightened, checked that the windows were curtained, closed the door noiselessly, locked it as quietly and switched on the overhead light.

There’s seldom any doubt about the exact time of a murder in an old English country house murder story. After a cursory examination and a lot of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo, the good doctor drops the corpse’s wrist and says, ‘The decedent deceased at 11.57 last night’ or words to that effect, then, with a thin deprecatory smile magnanimously conceding that he’s a member of the fallible human race, adds, ‘Give or take a minute or two.’ The good doctor outside the pages of the detective novel finds it rather more difficult. Weight, build, ambient temperature and cause of death all bear so heavily and often unpredictably on the cooling of the body that the estimated time of death may well lie in a span of several hours.

I’m not a doctor, far less a good one, and all I could tell about the man behind the desk was that he had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in but not long enough for it to wear off. He was stiff as a man frozen to death in a Siberian winter. He’d been gone for hours. How many, I’d no idea.

He wore four gold bands on his sleeves, so that would seem to make him the captain. The captain in the radio cabin. Captains are seldom found in the radio cabin and never behind the desk. He was slumped back in his chair, his head to one side, the back of it resting against a jacket hanging from a hook on the bulkhead, the side of it against a wall cabinet. Rigor mortis kept him in that position but he should have slipped to the floor or at least slumped forward on to the table before rigor mortis had set in.

There were no outward signs of violence that I could see but on the assumption that it would be stretching the arm of coincidence a bit far to assume that he had succumbed from natural causes while preparing to defend his life with his Peacemaker I took a closer look. I tried to pull him upright but he wouldn’t budge. I tried harder, I heard the sound of cloth ripping, then suddenly he was upright, then fallen over to the left of the table, the right arm pivoting stiffly around and upwards, the Colt an accusing finger pointing at heaven.

I knew now how he had died and why he hadn’t fallen forward before. He’d been killed by a weapon that projected from his spinal column, between maybe the sixth and seventh vertebræ, I couldn’t be sure, and the handle of this weapon had caught in the pocket of the jacket on the bulkhead and held him there.

My job was one that had brought me into contact with a fair number of people who had died from a fair assortment of unnatural causes, but this was the first time I’d ever seen a man who had been killed by a chisel. A half-inch wood chisel, apparently quite ordinary in every respect except that its wooden handle had been sheathed by a bicycle’s rubber hand-grip, the kind that doesn’t show fingerprints. The blade was imbedded to a depth of at least four inches and even allowing for an edge honed to a razor sharpness it had taken a man as powerful as he was violent to strike that blow. I tried to jerk the chisel free, but it wouldn’t come. It often happens that way with a knife: bone or cartilage that has been pierced by a sharp instrument locks solid over the steel when an attempt is made to withdraw it. I didn’t try again. The chances were that the killer himself had tried to move it and failed. He wouldn’t have wanted to abandon a handy little sticker like that if he could help it. Maybe someone had interrupted him. Or maybe he had a large supply of half-inch wood chisels and could afford to leave the odd one lying around carelessly in someone’s back.

Anyway, I didn’t really want it. I had my own. Not a chisel but a knife. I eased it out of the plastic sheath that had been sewn into the inner lining of my coat, just behind the neck. It didn’t look so much, a four-inch handle and a little double-edged three-inch blade. But that little blade could slice through a two-inch manila with one gentle stroke and the point was the point of a lancet. I looked at it and looked at the inner door behind the radio table, the one that led to the radio-operator’s sleeping cabin, then I slid a little fountain-pen torch from my breast pocket, crossed to the outer door, switched off the overhead lamp, did the same for the table lamp and stood there waiting.

How long I stood there I couldn’t be sure. Maybe two minutes, maybe as long as five. Why I waited, I don’t know. I told myself I was waiting until my eyes became adjusted to the almost total darkness inside the cabin, but I knew it wasn’t that. Maybe I was waiting for some noise, the slightest imagined whisper of stealthy sound, maybe I was waiting for something, anything, to happen – or maybe I was just scared to go through that inner door. Scared for myself? Perhaps I was. I couldn’t be sure. Or perhaps I was scared of what I would find behind that door. I transferred the knife to my left hand – I’m right-handed but ambidextrous in some things – and slowly closed my fingers round the handle of the inner door.

It took me all of twenty seconds to open that door the twelve inches that was necessary for me to squeeze through the opening. In the very last half-inch the damned hinges creaked. It was a tiny sound, a sound you wouldn’t normally have heard two yards away. With my steel-taut nerves in the state they were in, a six-inch naval gun going off in my ear would have sounded muffled by contrast. I stood petrified as any graven image, the dead man by my side was no more immobile than I. I could hear the thump of my accelerating heartbeat and savagely wished the damned thing would keep quiet.

If there was anyone inside waiting to flash a torch in my face and shoot me, knife me or do a little fancy carving up with a chisel, he was taking his time about it. I treated my lungs to a little oxygen, stepped soundlessly and sideways through the opening. I held the flash at the full outstretch extent of my right arm. If the ungodly are going to shoot at a person who is shining a torch at them they generally aim in the very close vicinity of the torch as the unwary habitually hold a torch in front of them. This, as I had learnt many years previously from a colleague who’d just had a bullet extracted from the lobe of his left lung because of this very unwariness, was a very unwise thing to do. So I held the torch as far from my body as possible, drew my left arm back with the knife ready to go, hoping fervently that the reactions of any person who might be in that cabin were slower than mine, and slid forward the switch of the torch.

There was someone there all right, but I didn’t have to worry about his reactions. Not any more. He’d none left. He was lying face down on the bunk with that huddled shapeless look that belongs only to the dead. I made a quick traverse of the cabin with the pencil beam. The dead man was alone. As in the radio cabin, there was no sign of a struggle.

I didn’t even have to touch him to ascertain the cause of death. The amount of blood that had seeped from that half-inch incision in his spine wouldn’t have filled a teaspoon. I wouldn’t have expected to find more; when the spinal column has been neatly severed the heart doesn’t go on pumping long enough to matter a damn. There would have been a little more internal bleeding, but not much.

The curtains were drawn. I quartered every foot of the deck, bulkheads and furniture with my flash. I don’t know what I expected to find: what I found was nothing. I went out, closed the door behind me and searched the radio cabin with the same results. There was nothing more for me here, I had found all I wanted to find, all I had never wanted to find. And I never once looked at the faces of the two dead men. I didn’t have to, they were faces I knew as well as the face that looked back at me every morning out of my shaving mirror. Seven days previously they had dined with me and our chief in our favourite pub in London and they had been as cheerful and relaxed as men in their profession can ever be, their normal still watchfulness overlaid by the momentary savouring of the lighter side of life they knew could never really be for them. And I had no doubt they had gone on being as still and watchful as ever, but they hadn’t been watchful enough and now they were only still. What had happened to them was what inevitably happened to people in our trade, which would inevitably happen to myself when the time came. No matter how clever and strong and ruthless you were, sooner or later you would meet up with someone who was cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than yourself. And that someone would have a half-inch wood chisel in his hand and all your hardly won years of experience and knowledge and cunning counted for nothing for you never saw him coming and you never saw him coming because you had met your match at last and then you were dead.

And I had sent them to their deaths. Not willingly, not knowingly, but the ultimate responsibility had been mine. This had all been my idea, my brain-child and mine alone, and I’d overridden all objections and fast-talked our very doubtful and highly sceptical chief into giving if not his enthusiastic approval at least his grudging consent. I’d told the two men, Baker and Delmont, that if they played it my way no harm would come to them so they’d trusted me blindly and played it my way and now they lay dead beside me. No hesitation, gentlemen, put your faith in me, only see to it that you make your wills first of all.

There was nothing more to be done here now.

I’d sent two men to their deaths and that couldn’t be undone. It was time to be gone.

I opened that outer door the way you’d open the door to a cellar you knew to be full of cobras and black widow spiders. The way you would open the door, that is: were cobras and black widow spiders all I had to contend with aboard that ship, I’d have gone through that door without a second thought, they were harmless and almost lovable little creatures compared to some specimens of homo sapiens that were loose on the decks of the freighter Nantesville that night.

With the door opened at its fullest extent I just stood there. I stood there for a long time without moving a muscle of body or limbs, breathing shallowly and evenly, and when you stand like that even a minute seems half a lifetime. All my being was in my ears. I just stood there and listened. I could hear the slap of waves against the hull, the occasional low metallic rumble as the Nantesville worked against wind and tide on its moorings, the low moan of the strengthening night wind in the rigging and, once, the far-off lonely call of a curlew. Lonesome sounds, safe sounds, sounds of the night and nature. Not the sounds I was listening for. Gradually, these sounds too became part of the silence. Foreign sounds, sounds of stealth and menace and danger, there were none. No sound of breathing, no slightest scrape of feet on steel decks, no rustle of clothing, nothing. If there was anyone waiting out there he was possessed of a patience and immobility that was superhuman and I wasn’t worried about superhumans that night, just about humans, humans with knives and guns and chisels in their hands. Silently I stepped out over the storm sill.

I’ve never paddled along the night-time Orinoco in a dug-out canoe and had a thirty-foot anaconda drop from a tree, wrap a coil around my neck and start constricting me to death and what’s more I don’t have to go there now to describe the experience for I know exactly what it feels like. The sheer animal power, the feral ferocity of the pair of huge hands that closed round my neck from behind was terrifying, something I’d never known of, never dreamed of. After the first moment of blind panic and shocked paralysis, there was only one thought in my mind: it comes to us all and now it has come to me, someone who is cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than I am.

I lashed back with all the power of my right foot but the man behind me knew every rule in the book. His own right foot, travelling with even more speed and power than mine, smashed into the back of my swinging leg. It wasn’t a man behind me, it was a centaur and he was shod with the biggest set of horseshoes I’d ever come across. My leg didn’t just feel as if it had been broken, it felt as if it had been cut in half. I felt his left toe behind my left foot and stamped on it with every vicious ounce of power left me but when my foot came down his toe wasn’t there any more. All I had on my feet was a pair of thin rubber swimming moccasins and the agonising jar from the steel deck plates shot clear to the top of my head. I reached up my hands to break his little fingers but he knew all about that too for his hands were clenched into iron-hard balls with the second knuckle grinding into the carotid artery. I wasn’t the first man he’d strangled and unless I did something pretty quickly I wasn’t going to be the last either. In my ears I could hear the hiss of compressed air escaping under high pressure and behind my eyes the shooting lines and flashes of colour were deepening and brightening by the moment.

What saved me in those first few seconds were the folded hood and thick rubberised canvas neck ruff of the scuba suit I was wearing under my coat. But it wasn’t going to save me many seconds longer, the life’s ambition of the character behind me seemed to be to make his knuckles meet in the middle of my neck. With the progress he was making that wouldn’t take him too long, he was half-way there already.

I bent forward in a convulsive jerk. Half of his weight came on my back, that throttling grip not easing a fraction, and at the same time he moved his feet as far backwards as possible – the instinctive reaction to my move, he would have thought that I was making a grab for one of his legs. When I had him momentarily off-balance I swung round in a short arc till both our backs were towards the sea. I thrust backwards with all my strength, one, two, three steps, accelerating all the way. The Nantesville didn’t boast of any fancy teak guard-rails, just small-section chain, and the small of the strangler’s back took our combined charging weights on the top chain.

If I’d taken that impact I’d have broken my back or slipped enough discs to keep an orthopædic surgeon in steady employment for months. But no shouts of agony from this lad. No gasps, even. Not a whisper of sound. Maybe he was a deaf mute – I’d heard of several deaf mutes possessed of this phenomenal strength, part of nature’s compensatory process, I suppose.

But he’d been forced to break his grip, to grab swiftly at the upper chain to save us both from toppling over the side into the cold dark waters of Loch Houron. I thrust myself away and spun round to face him, my back against the radio office bulkhead. I needed that bulkhead, too -any support while my swimming head cleared and a semblance of life came back into my numbed right leg.

I could see him now as he straightened up from the guardrail. Not clearly – it was too dark for that – but I could see the white blur of face and hands and the general outline of his body.

I’d expected some towering giant of a man, but he was no giant – unless my eyes weren’t focusing properly, which was likely enough. From what I could see in the gloom he seemed a compact and well enough made figure, but that was all. He wasn’t even as big as I was. Not that that meant a thing – George Hackenschmidt was a mere five foot nine and a paltry fourteen stone when he used to throw the Terrible Turk through the air like a football and prance around the training ring with eight hundred pounds of cement strapped to his back just to keep him in trim. I had no compunction or false pride about running from a smaller man and as far as this character was concerned the farther and faster the better. But not yet. My right leg wasn’t up to it. I reached my hand behind my neck and brought the knife down, holding it in front of me, the blade in the palm of my hand so that he couldn’t see the sheen of steel in the faint starlight.

He came at me calmly and purposefully, like a man who knew exactly what he intended to do and was in no doubt at all as to the outcome of his intended action. God knows I didn’t doubt he had reason enough for his confidence. He came at me sideways so that my foot couldn’t damage him, with his right hand extended at the full stretch of his arm. A one track mind. He was going for my throat again. I waited till his hand was inches from my face then jerked my own right hand violently upwards. Our hands smacked solidly together as the blade sliced cleanly through the centre of his palm.

He wasn’t a deaf mute after all. Three short unprintable words, an unjustified slur on my ancestry, and he stepped quickly backwards, rubbed the back and front of his hand against his clothes then licked it in a queer animal-like gesture. He peered closely at the blood, black as ink in the starlight, welling from both sides of his hand.

‘So the little man has a little knife, has he?’ he said softly. The voice was a shock. With this caveman-like strength I’d have expected a cavemanlike intelligence and voice to match, but the words came in the calm, pleasant, cultured almost accentless speech of the well-educated southern Englishman. ‘We shall have to take the little knife from him, shan’t we?’ He raised his voice. ‘Captain Imrie?’ At least, that’s what the name sounded like.

‘Be quiet, you fool!’ The urgent irate voice came from the direction of the crew accommodation aft. ‘Do you want to –’

‘Don’t worry, Captain.’ The eyes didn’t leave me. ‘I have him. Here by the wireless office. He’s armed. A knife. I’m just going to take it away from him.’

‘You have him? You have him? Good, good, good!’ It was the kind of a voice a man uses when he’s smacking his lips and rubbing his hands together: it was also the kind of voice that a German or Austrian uses when he speaks English. The short guttural ‘gut’ was unmistakable. ‘Be careful. This one I want alive. Jacques! Henry! Kramer! All of you. Quickly! The bridge. Wireless office.’

‘Alive,’ the man opposite me said pleasantly, ‘can also mean not quite dead.’ He sucked some more blood from the palm of his hand. ‘Or will you hand over the knife quietly and peaceably? I would suggest –’

I didn’t wait for more. This was an old technique. You talked to an opponent who courteously waited to hear you out, not appreciating that half-way through some well-turned phrase you were going to shoot him through the middle when, lulled into a sense of temporary false security, he least expected it. Not quite cricket, but effective, and I wasn’t going to wait until it took effect on me. I didn’t know how he was coming at me but I guessed it would be a dive, either head or feet first and that if he got me down on the deck I wouldn’t be getting up again. Not without assistance. I took a quick step forward, flashed my torch a foot from his face, saw the dazzled eyes screw shut for the only fraction of time I’d ever have and kicked him.

It wasn’t as hard as it might have been, owing to the fact that my right leg still felt as if it were broken, nor as accurate, because of the darkness, but it was a pretty creditable effort in the circumstances and it should have left him rolling and writhing about the deck, whooping in agony. Instead he just stood there, unable to move, bent forward and clutching himself with his hands. He was more than human, all right. I could see the sheen of his eyes, but I couldn’t see the expression in them, which was just as well as I don’t think I would have cared for it very much.

I left. I remembered a gorilla I’d once seen in Basle Zoo, a big black monster who used to twist heavy truck tyres into figures of eight for light exercise. I’d as soon have stepped inside that cage as stay around that deck when this lad became more like his old self again. I hobbled forward round the corner of the radio office, climbed up a liferaft and stretched myself flat on the deck.

The nearest running figures, some with torches, were already at the foot of the companionway leading up to the bridge. I had to get right aft to the rope with the rubber-covered hook I’d swung up to swarm aboard. But I couldn’t do it until the midship decks were clear. And then, suddenly, I couldn’t do it all: now that the need for secrecy and stealth was over someone had switched on the cargo loading lights and the midships and foredecks were bathed in a brilliant dazzle of white. One of the foredeck arc lamps was on a jumbo mast, just for’ard of and well above where I was lying. I felt as exposed as a fly pinned to a white ceiling. I flattened myself on that deck as if I were trying to push myself through it.

They were up the companion way and by the radio office now. I heard the sudden exclamations and curses and knew they’d found the hurt man:

I didn’t hear his voice so I assumed he wasn’t able to speak yet.

The curt, authoritative German-accented voice took command.

‘You cackle like a flock of hens. Be silent. Jacques, you have your machine-pistol?’

‘I have my pistol, Captain.’ Jacques had the quiet competent sort of voice that I would have found reassuring in certain circumstances but didn’t very much care for in the present ones.

‘Go aft. Stand at the entrance to the saloon and face for’ard. Cover the midships decks. We will go to the fo’c’sle and then come aft in line abreast and drive him to you. If he doesn’t surrender to you, shoot him through the legs. I want him alive.’

God, this was worse than the Peacemaker Colt. At least that fired only one shot at a time. I’d no idea what kind of machine-pistol Jacques had, probably it fired bursts of a dozen or more. I could feel my right thigh muscle begin to stiffen again, it was becoming almost a reflex action now.

‘And if he jumps over the side, sir?’

‘Do I have to tell you, Jacques?’

‘No, sir.’

I was just as clever as Jacques was. He didn’t have to tell me either. That nasty dry taste was back in my throat and mouth again. I’d a minute left, no more, and then it would be too late. I slid silently to the side of the radio office roof, the starboard side, the side remote from the spot where Captain Imrie was issuing curt instructions to his men, lowered myself soundlessly to the deck and made my way to the wheelhouse.

I didn’t need my torch in there, the backwash of light from the big arc-lamps gave me all the illumination I wanted. Crouching down, to keep below window level, I looked around and saw what I wanted right away – a metal box of distress flares.

Two quick flicks of the knife severed the lashings that secured the flare-box to the deck. One piece of rope, perhaps ten feet in all, I left secured to a handle of the box. I pulled a plastic bag from the pocket of my coat, tore off the coat and the yachtsman’s rubber trousers that I was wearing over my scuba suit, stuffed them inside and secured the bag to my waist. The coat and trousers had been essential. A figure in a dripping rubber diving suit walking across the decks of the Nantesville would hardly have been likely to escape comment whereas in the dusk and with the outer clothing I had on I could have passed for a crewman and, indeed, had done so twice at a distance: equally important, when I’d left the port of Torbay in my rubber dinghy it had been broad daylight and the sight of a scubaclad figure putting to sea towards evening wouldn’t have escaped comment either, as the curiosity factor of the inhabitants of the smaller ports of the Western Highlands and Islands did not, I had discovered, lag noticeably behind that of their mainland brethren. Some would put it even more strongly than that.

Still crouching low, I moved out through the wheelhouse door on to the starboard wing of the bridge. I reached the outer end and stood up straight. I had to, I had to take the risk, it was now or never at all, I could hear the crew already beginning to move forward to start their search. I lifted the flare-box over the side eased it down the full length of the rope and started to swing it slowly, gently, from side to side, like a leadsman preparing to cast his lead.

The box weighed at least forty pounds, but I barely noticed the weight. The pendulum arc increased with every swing I made. It had reached an angle of about forty-five degrees on each swing now, pretty close to the maximum I could get and both time and my luck must be running out, I felt about as conspicuous as a trapeze artist under a dozen spotlights and just about as vulnerable too. As the box swung aft on its last arc I gave the rope a final thrust to achieve all the distance and momentum I could, opened my hands at the extremity of the arc and dropped down behind the canvas winddodger. It was as I dropped that I remembered I hadn’t holed the damned box, I had no idea whether it would float or sink but I did have a very clear idea of what would happen to me if it didn’t sink. One thing for sure, it was too late to worry about it now.

I heard a shout come from the main deck, some twenty or thirty feet aft of the bridge. I was certain I had been seen but I hadn’t. A second after the shout came a loud and very satisfactory splash and a voice I recognised as Jacques’s shouting: ‘He’s gone over the side. Starboard abaft the bridge. A torch quick!’ He must have been walking aft as ordered, seen this dark blur falling, heard the splash and come on the inevitable conclusion. A dangerous customer who thought fast, was Jacques. In three seconds he’d told his mates all they required to know: what had happened, where and what he wanted done as the necessary preliminary to shooting me full of holes.

The men who had been moving forward to start the sweep for me now came running aft, pounding along the deck directly beneath where I was crouching on the wing of the bridge.

‘Can you see him, Jacques?’ Captain Imrie’s voice, very quick, very calm.

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘He’ll be up soon.’ I wished he wouldn’t sound so damned confident. ‘A dive like that must have knocked most of the breath out of him. Kramer, two men and into the boat. Take lamps and circle around. Henry, the box of grenades. Carlo, the bridge, quick. Starboard searchlight.’

I’d never thought of the boat, that was bad enough, but the grenades! I felt chilled. I knew what an underwater explosion, even a small explosion, can do to the human body, it was twenty times as deadly as the same explosion on land. And I had to, I just had to, be in that water in minutes. But at least I could do something about that searchlight, it was only two feet above my head. I had the power cable in my left hand, the knife in my right and had just brought the two into contact when my mind stopped thinking about those damned grenades and started working again. Cutting that cable would be about as clever as leaning over the wind-dodger and yelling ‘Here I am, come and catch me’ – a dead giveaway that I was still on board. Clobbering Carlo from behind as he came up the ladder would have the same effect. And I couldn’t fool them twice. Not people like these. Hobbling as fast as I could I passed through the wheelhouse on to the port wing, slid down the ladder and ran towards the forepeak. The foredeck was deserted.

I heard a shout and the harsh chatter of some automatic weapon – Jacques and his machine-pistol, for a certainty. Had he imagined he’d seen something, had the box come to the surface, had he actually seen the box and mistaken it for me in the dark waters? It must have been the last of these – he wouldn’t have wasted ammunition on anything he’d definitely recognised as a box. Whatever the reason, it had all my blessing. If they thought I was floundering about down there, riddled like a Gruyère cheese, then they wouldn’t be looking for me up here.

They had the port anchor down. I swung over the side on a rope, got my feet in the hawse-pipe, reached down and grabbed the chain. The international athletics board should have had their stopwatches on me that night, I must have set a new world record for shinning down anchor chains.

The water was cold but my exposure suit took care of that. It was choppy, with a heavy tide running, both of which suited me well. I swam down the port side of the Nantesville, underwater for ninety per cent of the time and I saw no one and no one saw me: all the activity was on the starboard side of the vessel.

My aqualung unit and weights and flippers were where I had left them, tied to the top of the rudder post – the Nantesville was not much more than half-way down to her marks and the top of the post not far under water. Fitting on an aqualung in choppy seas with a heavy tide running isn’t the easiest of tasks but the thought of Kramer and his grenades was a considerable help. Besides, I was in a hurry to be gone for I had a long way to go and many things to do when I arrived at my destination.

I could hear the engine note of the lifeboat rising and falling as it circled off the ship’s starboard side but at no time did it come within a hundred feet of me. No more shots were fired and Captain Imrie had obviously decided against using the grenades. I adjusted the weights round my waist, dropped down into the dark safety of the waters, checked my direction on my luminous wrist compass and started to swim. After five minutes I came to the surface and after another five felt my feet ground on the shore of the rocky islet where I’d cached my rubber dinghy.

I clambered up on the rocks and looked back. The Nantesville was ablaze with light. A searchlight was shining down into the sea and the lifeboat still circling around. I could hear the steady clanking of the anchor being weighed. I hauled the dinghy into the water, climbed in, unshipped the two stubby oars and paddled off to the southwest. I was still within effective range of the searchlight but its chances of picking up a black-clad figure in a low-silhouette black dinghy on those black waters were remote indeed.

After a mile I shipped the oars and started up the outboard. Or tried to start it up. Outboards always work perfectly for me, except when I’m cold, wet and exhausted. Whenever I really need them, they never work. So I took to the stubby oars again and rowed and rowed and rowed, but not for what seemed any longer than a month. I arrived back at the Firecrest at ten to three in the morning.

TWO

Tuesday: 3 a.m. – dawn

‘Calvert?’ Hunslett’s voice was a barely audible murmur in the darkness.

‘Yes.’ Standing there above me on the Firecrest’s deck, he was more imagined than seen against the blackness of the night sky. Heavy clouds had rolled in from the south-west and the last of the stars were gone. Big heavy drops of cold rain were beginning to spatter off the surface of the sea. ‘Give me a hand to get the dinghy aboard.’

‘How did it go?’

‘Later. This first.’ I climbed up the accommodation ladder, painter in hand. I had to lift my right leg over the gunwale. Stiff and numb and just beginning to ache again, it could barely take my weight. ‘And hurry. We can expect company soon.’

‘So that’s the way of it,’ Hunslett said thoughtfully, ‘Uncle Arthur will be pleased about this.’

I said nothing to that. Our employer, Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason, K.C.B. and most of the rest of the alphabet, wasn’t going to be pleased at all. We heaved the dripping dinghy inboard, unclamped the outboard and took them both on to the foredeck.

‘Get me a couple of waterproof bags,’ I said. ‘Then start getting the anchor chain in. Keep it quiet – leave the brake pawl off and use a tarpaulin.’

‘We’re leaving?’

‘We would if we had any sense. We’re staying. Just get the anchor up and down.’

By the time he’d returned with the bags I’d the dinghy deflated and in its canvas cover. I stripped off my aqualung and scuba suit and stuffed them into one of the bags along with the weights, my big-dialled waterproof watch and the combined wrist-compass and depth-gauge. I put the outboard in the other bag, restraining the impulse just to throw the damn’ thing overboard: an outboard motor was a harmless enough object to have aboard any boat, but we already had one attached to the wooden dinghy hanging from the davits over the stern.

Hunslett had the electric windlass going and the chain coming in steadily. An electric windlass is in itself a pretty noiseless machine: when weighing anchor all the racket comes from four sources – the chain passing through the hawse-pipe, the clacking of the brake pawl over the successive stops, the links passing over the drum itself and the clattering of the chain as it falls into the chain locker. About the first of these we could do nothing: but with the brake pawl off and a heavy tarpaulin smothering the sound from the drum and chain locker, the noise level was surprisingly low. Sound travels far over the surface of the sea, but the nearest anchored boats were almost two hundred yards away – we had no craving for the company of other boats in harbour. At two hundred yards, in Torbay, we felt ourselves uncomfortably close: but the sea-bed shelved fairly steeply away from the little town and our present depth of twenty fathoms was the safe maximum for the sixty fathoms of chain we carried.

I heard the click as Hunslett’s foot stepped on the deck-switch. ‘She’s up and down.’

‘Put the pawl in for a moment. If that drum slips, I’ll have no hands left.’ I pulled the bags right for’ard, leaned out under the pulpit rail and used lengths of heaving line to secure them to the anchor chain. When the lines were secure I lifted the bags over the side and let them dangle from the chain.

‘I’ll take the weight,’ I said. ‘Lift the chain off the drum – we’ll lower it by hand.’

Forty fathoms is 240 feet of chain and letting that lot down to the bottom didn’t do my back or arms much good at all, and the rest of me was a long way below par before we started. I was pretty close to exhaustion from the night’s work, my neck ached fiercely, my leg only badly and I was shivering violently. I know of various ways of achieving a warm rosy glow but wearing only a set of underclothes in the middle of a cold, wet and windy autumn night in the Western Isles is not one of them. But at last the job was done and we were able to go below. If anyone wanted to investigate what lay at the foot of our anchor chain he’d need a steel articulated diving suit.

Hunslett pulled the saloon door to behind us, moved around in the darkness adjusting the heavy velvet curtains then switched on a small table lamp. It didn’t give much light but we knew from experience that it didn’t show up through the velvet, and advertising the fact that we were up and around in the middle of the night was the last thing I wanted to do.

Hunslett had a dark narrow saturnine face, with a strong jaw, black bushy eyebrows and thick black hair – the kind of face which is so essentially an expression in itself that it rarely shows much else. It was expressionless now and very still.

‘You’ll have to buy another shirt,’ he said. ‘Your collar’s too tight. Leaves marks.’

I stopped towelling myself and looked in a mirror. Even in that dim light my neck looked a mess. It was badly swollen and discoloured, with four wicked-looking bruises where the thumbs and forefinger joints had sunk deep into the flesh. Blue and green and purple they were, and they looked as if they would be there for a long time to come.

‘He got me from behind. He’s wasting his time being a criminal, he’d sweep the board at the Olympic weight-lifting. I was lucky. He also wears heavy boots.’ I twisted around and looked down at my right calf. The bruise was bigger than my fist and if it missed out any of the colours of the rainbow I couldn’t offhand think which one. There was a deep red gash across the middle of it and blood was ebbing slowly along its entire length. Hunslett gazed at it with interest.

‘If you hadn’t been wearing that tight scuba suit, you’d have most like bled to death. I better fix that for you.’

‘I don’t need bandages. What I need is a Scotch. Stop wasting your time. Oh, hell, sorry, yes, you’d better fix it, we can’t have our guests sloshing about ankle deep in blood.’

‘You’re very sure we’re going to have guests?’

‘I half expected to have them waiting on the doorstep when I got back to the Firecrest. We’re going to have guests, all right. Whatever our pals aboard the Nantesville may be, they’re no fools. They’ll have figured out by this time that I could have approached only by dinghy. They’ll know damn’ well that it was no nosey-parker local prowling about the ship – local lads in search of a bit of fun don’t go aboard anchored ships in the first place. In the second place the locals wouldn’t go near Beul nan Uamh – the mouth of the grave – in daylight, far less at night time. Even the Pilot says the place has an evil reputation. And in the third place no local lad would get aboard as I did, behave aboard as I did or leave as I did. The local lad would be dead.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder. And?’

‘So we’re not locals. We’re visitors. We wouldn’t be staying at any hotel or boarding-house – too restricted, couldn’t move. Almost certainly we’ll have a boat. Now, where would our boat be? Not to the north of Loch Houron for with a forecast promising a south-west Force 6 strengthening to Force 7, no boat is going to be daft enough to hang about a lee shore in that lot. The only holding ground and shallow enough sheltered anchorage in the other direction, down the Sound for forty miles, is in Torbay – and that’s only four or five miles from where the Nantesville was lying at the mouth of Loch Houron. Where would you look for us?’

‘I’d look for a boat anchored in Torbay. Which gun do you want?’

‘I don’t want any gun. You don’t want any gun. People like us don’t carry guns.’

‘Marine biologists don’t carry guns,’ he nodded. ‘Employees of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries don’t carry guns. Civil Servants are above reproach. So we play it clever. You’re the boss.’

‘I don’t feel clever any more. And I’ll take long odds that I’m not your boss any more. Not after Uncle Arthur hears what I have to tell him.’

‘You haven’t told me anything yet.’ He finished tying the bandage round my leg and straightened. ‘How’s that feel?’

I tried it. ‘Better. Thanks. Better still when you’ve taken the cork from that bottle. Get into pyjamas or something. People found fully dressed in the middle of the night cause eyebrows to go up.’ I towelled my head as vigorously as my tired arms would let me. One wet hair on my head and eyebrows wouldn’t just be lifting, they’d be disappearing into hairlines. ‘There isn’t much to tell and all of it is bad.’

He poured me a large drink, a smaller one for himself, and added water to both. It tasted the way Scotch always does after you’ve swum and rowed for hours and damn’ near got yourself killed in the process.

‘I got there without trouble. I hid behind Carrara Point till it was dusk and then paddled out to the Bogha Nuadh. I left the dinghy there and swam underwater as far as the stern of the ship. It was the Nantesville all right. Name and flag were different, a mast was gone and the white superstructure was now stone – but it was her all right. Near as dammit didn’t make it – it was close to the turn of the tide but it took me thirty minutes against that current. Must be wicked at the full flood or ebb.’

‘They say it’s the worst on the West Coast -worse even than Coirebhreachan.’

‘I’d rather not be the one to find out. I had to hang on to the stern post for ten minutes before I’d got enough strength back to shin up that rope.’

‘You took a chance.’

‘It was near enough dark. Besides,’ I added bitterly, ‘there are some precautions intelligent people don’t think to take about crazy ones. There were only two or three people in the after accommodation. Just a skeleton crew aboard, seven or eight, no more. All the original crew have vanished completely’

‘No sign of them anywhere?’

‘No sign. Dead or alive, no sign at all. I had a bit of bad luck. I was leaving the after accommodation to go to the bridge when I passed someone a few feet away. I gave a half wave and grunted something and he answered back, I don’t know what. I followed him back to the quarters. He picked up a phone in the crew’s mess and I heard him talking to someone, quick and urgent. Said that one of the original crew must have been hiding and was trying to get away. I couldn’t stop him – he faced the door as he was talking and he had a gun in his hand. I had to move quickly. I walked to the bridge structure –’

‘You what? When you knew they were on to you? Mr Calvert, you want your bloody head examined.’

‘Uncle Arthur will put it less kindly. It was the only chance I’d ever have. Besides, if they thought it was only a terrified member of the original crew they wouldn’t have been so worried: if this guy had seen me walking around dripping wet in a scuba suit he’d have turned me into a colander.

He wasn’t sure. On the way for’ard I passed another bloke without incident – he’d left the bridge superstructure before the alarm had been given, I suppose. I didn’t stop at the bridge. I went right for’ard and hid behind the winchman’s shelter. For about ten minutes there was a fair bit of commotion and a lot of flash-light work around the bridge island then I saw and heard them moving aft – must have thought I was still in the after accommodation.

‘I went through all the officers’ cabins in the bridge island. No one. One cabin, an engineer’s, I think, had smashed furniture and a carpet heavily stained with dry blood. Next door, the captain’s bunk had been saturated with blood.’

‘They’d been warned to offer no resistance.’

‘I know. Then I found Baker and Delmont.’

‘So you found them. Baker and Delmont.’ Hunslett’s eyes were hooded, gazing down at the glass in his hand. I wished to God he’d show some expression on that dark face of his.

‘Delmont must have made a last-second attempt to send a call for help. They’d been warned not to, except in emergency, so they must have been discovered. He’d been stabbed in the back with a half-inch wood chisel and then dragged into the radio officer’s cabin which adjoined the radio office. Some time later Baker had come in. He was wearing an officer’s clothes – some desperate attempt to disguise himself, I suppose. He’d a gun in his hand, but he was looking the wrong way and the gun was pointing the wrong way. The same chisel in the back.’

Hunslett poured himself another drink. A much larger one. Hunslett hardly ever drank. He swallowed half of it in one gulp. He said: ‘And they hadn’t all gone aft. They’d left a reception committee.’

‘They’re very clever. They’re very dangerous. Maybe we’ve moved out of our class. Or I have. A one-man reception committee, but when that one man was this man, two would have been superfluous. I know he killed Baker and Delmont. I’ll never be so lucky again.’

‘You got away. Your luck hadn’t run out.’

And Baker’s and Delmont’s had. I knew he was blaming me. I knew London would blame me. I blamed myself. I hadn’t much option. There was no one else to blame.

‘Uncle Arthur,’ Hunslett said. ‘Don’t you think –’

‘The hell with Uncle Arthur. Who cares about Uncle Arthur? How in God’s name do you think I feel?’ I felt savage and I know I sounded it. For the first time a flicker of expression showed on Hunslett’s face. I wasn’t supposed to have any feelings.

‘Not that,’ he said. ‘About the Nantesville. Now that she’s been identified as the Nantesville, now we know her new name and flag – what were they, by the way?’

‘Alta Fjord. Norwegian. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter. We radio Uncle Arthur –’ ‘And have our guests find us in the engine-room with earphones round our heads. Are you mad?’

‘You seem damned sure they’ll come.’

‘I am sure. You too. You said so.’

‘I agreed this is where they would come. If they come.’

‘If they come. If they come. Good God, man, for all that they know I was aboard that ship for hours. I may have the names and full descriptions of all of them. As it happens I couldn’t identify any of them and their names may or may not mean anything. But they’re not to know that. For all they know I’m on the blower right now bawling out descriptions to Interpol. The chances are at least even that some of them are on file. They’re too good to be little men. Some must be known.’

‘In that case they’d be too late anyway. The damage would be done.’

‘Not without the sole witness who could testify against them?’

‘I think we’d better have those guns out.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t blame me for trying?’

‘No.’

‘Baker and Delmont. Think of them.’

‘I’m thinking of nothing else but them. You don’t have to stay.’

He set his glass down very carefully. He was really letting himself go to-night, he’d allowed that dark craggy face its second expression in ten minutes and it wasn’t a very encouraging one. Then he picked up his glass and grinned.

‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ he said kindly. ‘Your neck – that’s what comes from the blood supply to the brain being interrupted. You’re not fit to fight off a teddy-bear. Who’s going to look after you if they start playing games?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I meant it. I’d worked with Hunslett maybe ten times in the ten years I’d known him and it had been a stupid thing for me to say. About the only thing Hunslett was incapable of was leaving your side in time of trouble. ‘You were speaking of Uncle?’

‘Yes. We know where the Nantesville is. Uncle could get a Navy boat to shadow her, by radar if –’

‘I know where she was. She upped anchor as I left. By dawn she’ll be a hundred miles away – in any direction.’

‘She’s gone? We’ve scared them off? They’re going to love this.’ He sat down heavily, then looked at me. ‘But we have her new description –’ ‘I said that didn’t matter. By to-morrow she’ll have another description. The Hokomaru from Yokohama, with green topsides, Japanese flag, different masts –’

‘An air search. We could –’

‘By the time an air search could be organised they’d have twenty thousand square miles of sea to cover. You’ve heard the forecast. It’s bad. Low cloud – and they’d have to fly under the low cloud. Cuts their effectiveness by ninety per cent. And poor visibility and rain. Not a chance in a hundred, not one in a thousand of positive identification. And if they do locate them – if – what then? A friendly wave from the pilot? Not much else he can do.’

‘The Navy. They could call up the Navy ’

‘Call up what Navy? From the Med? Or the Far East? The Navy has very few ships left and practically none in those parts. By the time any naval vessel could get to the scene it would be night again and the Nantesville to hell and gone. Even if a naval ship did catch up with it, what then? Sink it with gunfire – with maybe the twenty-five missing crew members of the Nantesville locked up in the hold?’

‘A boarding party?’

‘With the same twenty-five ex-crew members lined up on deck with pistols at their backs and Captain Imrie and his thugs politely asking the Navy boys what their next move was going to be?’

‘I’ll get into my pyjamas,’ Hunslett said tiredly. At the doorway he paused and turned. ‘If the Nantesville had gone, her crew – the new crew -have gone too and we’ll be having no visitors after all. Had you thought of that?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t really believe it either.’

They came at twenty past four in the morning. They came in a very calm and orderly and law-abiding and official fashion, they stayed for forty minutes and by the time they had left I still wasn’t sure whether they were our men or not.

Hunslett came into my small cabin, starboard side forward, switched on the light and shook me. ‘Wake up,’ he said loudly. ‘Come on. Wake up.’

I was wide awake. I hadn’t closed an eye since I’d lain down. I groaned and yawned a bit without overdoing it then opened a bleary eye. There was no one behind him.

‘What is it? What do you want?’ A pause. ‘What the hell’s up? It’s just after four in the morning.’

‘Don’t ask me what’s up,’ Hunslett said irritably. ‘Police. Just come aboard. They say it’s urgent.’

‘Police? Did you say, “police”?’

‘Yes. Come on, now. They’re waiting.’

‘Police? Aboard our boat? What –’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! How many more nightcaps did you have last night after I went to bed? Police. Two of them and two customs. It’s urgent, they say.’

‘It better bloody well be urgent. In the middle of the bloody night. Who do they think we are – escaped train robbers? Haven’t you told them who we are? Oh, all right, all right, all right! I’m coming.’

Hunslett left, and thirty seconds afterwards I joined him in the saloon. Four men sat there, two police officers and two customs officials. They didn’t look a very villainous bunch to me. The older, bigger policeman got to his feet. A tall, burly, brown-faced sergeant in his late forties, he looked me over with a cold eye, looked at the near-empty whisky bottle with the two unwashed glasses on the table, then looked back at me. He didn’t like wealthy yachtsmen. He didn’t like wealthy yachtsmen who drank too much at nighttime and were bleary-eyed, bloodshot and tousle-haired at the following crack of dawn. He didn’t like wealthy effete yachtsmen who wore red silk dragon Chinese dressing-gowns with a Paisley scarf to match tied negligently round the neck. I didn’t like them very much myself, especially the Paisley scarf, much in favour though it was with the yachting fraternity: but I had to have something to conceal those bruises on my neck.

‘Are you the owner of this boat, sir?’ the sergeant inquired. An unmistakable West Highland voice and a courteous one, but it took him all his time to get his tongue round the ‘sir.’

‘If you would tell me what makes it any of your damn’ business,’ I said unpleasantly, ‘maybe I’ll answer that and maybe I won’t. A private boat is the same as a private house, Sergeant. You have to have a warrant before you shove your way in. Or don’t you know the law?’

‘He knows the law,’ one of the customs men put in. A small dark character, smooth-shaven at four in the morning, with a persuasive voice, not West Highland. ‘Be reasonable. This is not the sergeant’s job. We got him out of bed almost three hours ago. He’s just obliging us.’

I ignored him. I said to the sergeant: ‘This is the middle of the night in a lonely Scottish bay. How would you feel if four unidentified men came aboard in the middle of the night?’ I was taking a chance on that one, but a fair chance. If they were who I thought they might be and if I were who they thought I might be, then I’d never talk like that. But an innocent man would. ‘Any means of identifying yourselves?’

‘Identifying myself?’ The sergeant stared coldly at me. ‘I don’t have to identify myself. Sergeant MacDonald. I’ve been in charge of the Torbay police station for eight years. Ask any man in Torbay. They all know me.’ If he was who he claimed to be this was probably the first time in his life that anyone had asked him for identification. He nodded to the seated policeman. ‘Police-Constable MacDonald.’

‘Your son?’ The resemblance was unmistakable. ‘Nothing like keeping it in the family, eh, Sergeant?’ I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but I felt I’d been an irate householder long enough. A degree less truculence was in order. ‘And customs, eh? I know the law about you, too. No search warrants for you boys. I believe the police would like your powers. Go anywhere you like and ask no one’s permission beforehand. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’ It was the younger customs man who answered. Medium height, fair hair, running a little to fat, Belfast accent, dressed like the other in blue overcoat, peaked hat, brown gloves, smartly creased trousers. ‘We hardly ever do, though. We prefer cooperation. We like to ask.’

‘And you’d like to ask to search this boat, is that it?’ Hunslett said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why?’ I asked. Puzzlement now in my voice. And in my mind. I just didn’t know what I had on my hands. ‘If we’re all going to be so courteous and co-operative, could we have any explanation?’

‘No reason in the world why not, sir.’ The older customs man was almost apologetic. ‘A truck with contents valued at £12,000 was hi-jacked on the Ayrshire coast last night – night before last, that is, now. In the news this evening. From information received, we know it was transferred to a small boat. We think it came north.’

‘Why?’

‘Sorry, sir. Confidential. This is the third port we’ve visited and the thirteenth boat – the fourth in Torbay – that we’ve been on in the past fifteen hours. We’ve been kept on the run, I can tell you.’ An easy friendly voice, a voice that said: ‘You don’t really think we suspect you. We’ve a job to do, that’s all.’

‘And you’re searching all boats that have come up from the south. Or you think have come from there. Fresh arrivals, anyway. Has it occurred to you that any boat with hi-jacked goods on board wouldn’t dare pass through the Crinan canal? Once you’re in there, you’re trapped. For four hours. So he’d have to come round the Mull of Kintyre. We’ve been here since this afternoon. It would take a pretty fast boat to get up here in that time.’

‘You’ve got a pretty fast boat here, sir,’ Sergeant MacDonald said. I wondered how the hell they managed it, from the Western Isles to the East London docks every sergeant in the country had the same wooden voice, the same wooden face, the same cold eye. Must be something to do with the uniform. I ignored him.

‘What are we – um – supposed to have stolen?’

‘Chemicals. It was an I.C.I. truck.’

‘Chemicals?’ I looked at Hunslett, grinned, then turned back to the customs officer. ‘Chemicals, eh? We’re loaded with them. But not £12,000 worth, I’m afraid.’

There was a brief silence. MacDonald said: ‘Would you mind explaining, sir?’

‘Not at all.’ I lit a cigarette, the little mind enjoying its big moment, and smiled. ‘This is a government boat, Sergeant MacDonald. I thought you would have seen the flag. Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. We’re marine biologists. Our after cabin is a floating laboratory. Look at our library here.’ Two shelves loaded with technical tomes. ‘And if you’ve still any doubt left I can give you two numbers, one in Glasgow, one in London, that will establish our bona fides. Or phone the lock-master in the Crinan sea-basin. We spent last night there.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The lack of impression I had made on the sergeant was total. ‘Where did you go in your dinghy this evening?’

‘I beg your pardon, Sergeant?’

‘You were seen to leave this boat in a black rubber dinghy about five o’clock this evening.’ I’d heard of icy fingers playing up and down one’s spine but it wasn’t fingers I felt then, it was a centipede with a hundred icy boots on. ‘You went out into the Sound. Mr McIlroy, the postmaster, saw you.’

‘I hate to impugn the character of a fellow civil servant but he must have been drunk.’ Funny how an icy feeling could make you sweat. ‘I haven’t got a black rubber dinghy. I’ve never owned a black rubber dinghy. You just get out your little magnifying glass, Sergeant, and if you can find a black rubber dinghy I’ll make you a present of the brown wooden dinghy, which is the only one we have on the Firecrest.’

The wooden expression cracked a little. He wasn’t so certain now. ‘So you weren’t out?’

‘I was out. In our own dinghy. I was just round the corner of Garve Island there, collecting some marine samples from the Sound. I can show them to you in the after cabin. We’re not here on holiday, you know.’

‘No offence, no offence.’ I was a member of the working classes now, not a plutocrat, and he could afford to thaw a little. ‘Mr McIlroy’s eyesight isn’t what it was and everything looks black against the setting sun. You don’t look the type, I must say, who’d land on the shores of the Sound and bring down the telephone wires to the mainland.’

The centipede started up again and broke into a fast gallop. Cut off from the mainland. How very convenient for somebody. I didn’t spend any time wondering who had brought the wires down – it had been no act of God, I was sure of that.

‘Did you mean what I thought you to mean, Sergeant?’ I said slowly. ‘That you suspected me –’

‘We can’t take chances, sir.’ He was almost apologetic now. Not only was I a working man, I was a man working for the Government. All men working for the Government are ipso facto respectable and trustworthy citizens.

‘But you won’t mind if we take a little look round?’ The darkhaired customs officer was even more apologetic. ‘The lines are down and, well, you know …’ His voice trailed off and he smiled. ‘If you were the hi-jackers – I appreciate now that it’s a chance in a million, but still – and if we didn’t search – well, we’d be out of a job to-morrow. Just a formality.’

‘I wouldn’t want to see that happen, Mr -ah –’

‘Thomas. Thank you. Your ship’s papers? Ah, thank you.’ He handed them to the younger man.

‘Let’s see now. Ah, the wheelhouse. Could Mr Durran here use the wheelhouse to make copies? Won’t take five minutes.’

‘Certainly. Wouldn’t he be more comfortable here?’

‘We’re modernised now, sir. Portable photocopier. Standard on the job. Has to be dark. Won’t take five minutes. Can we begin in this laboratory of yours?’

A formality, he’d said. Well, he was right there, as a search it was the least informal thing I’d ever come across. Five minutes after he’d gone to the wheelhouse Durran came aft to join us and he and Thomas went through the Firecrest as if they were looking for the Koh-i-noor. To begin with, at least. Every piece of mechanical and electrical equipment in the after cabin had to be explained to them. They looked in every locker and cupboard. They rummaged through the ropes and fenders in the large stern locker aft of the laboratory and I thanked God I hadn’t followed my original idea of stowing the dinghy, motor and scuba gear in there. They even examined the after toilet. As if I’d be careless enough to drop the Koh-i-noor in there.

They spent most time of all in the engine-room. It was worth examining. Everything looked brand new, and gleamed. Two big 100 h.p. diesels, diesel generator, radio generator, hot and cold water pumps, central heating plant, big oil and water tanks and the two long rows of lead-acid batteries. Thomas seemed especially interested in the batteries.

‘You carry a lot of reserve there, Mr Petersen,’ he said. He’d learnt my name by now, even though it wasn’t the one I’d been christened with. ‘Why all the power?’

‘We haven’t even got enough. Care to start those two engines by hand? We have eight electric motors in the lab. – and the only time they’re used, in harbour, we can’t run either the engines or generators to supply juice. Too much interference. A constant drain.’ I was ticking off my fingers. ‘Then there’s the central heating, hot and cold water pumps, radar, radio, automatic steering, windlass, power winch for the dinghy, echo-sounder, navigation lights –’

‘You win, you win.’ He’d become quite friendly by this time. ‘Boats aren’t really in my line. Let’s move forward, shall we?’

The remainder of the inspection, curiously, didn’t take long. In the saloon I found that Hunslett had persuaded the Torbay police force to accept the hospitality of the Firecrest. Sergeant MacDonald hadn’t exactly become jovial, but he was much more human than when he’d come on board. Constable MacDonald, I noticed, didn’t seem so relaxed. He looked positively glum. Maybe he didn’t approve of his old man consorting with potential criminals.

If the examination of the saloon was cursory, that of the two forward cabins was positively perfunctory. Back in the saloon, I said:

‘Sorry I was a bit short, gentlemen. I like my sleep. A drink before you go?’

‘Well.’ Thomas smiled. ‘We don’t want to be rude either. Thank you.’

Five minutes and they were gone. Thomas didn’t even glance at the wheelhouse – Durran had been there, of course. He had a quick look at one of the deck lockers but didn’t bother about the others. We were in the clear. A civil good-bye on both sides and they were gone. Their boat, a big indeterminate shape in the darkness, seemed to have plenty of power.

‘Odd,’ I said.

‘What’s odd?’

‘That boat. Any idea what it was like?’

‘How could I?’ Hunslett was testy. He was as short of sleep as I was. ‘It was pitch dark.’

‘That’s just the point. A gentle glow in their wheelhouse – you couldn’t even see what that was like – and no more. No deck lights, no interior lights, no navigation lights even.’

‘Sergeant MacDonald has been looking out over this harbour for eight years. Do you need light to find your way about your own living-room after dark?’

‘I haven’t got twenty yachts and cruisers in my living-room swinging all over the place with wind and tide. And wind and tide doesn’t alter my own course when I’m crossing my living-room. There are only three boats in the harbour carrying anchor lights. He’ll have to use something to see where he’s going.’

And he did. From the direction of the receding sound of engines a light stabbed out into the darkness. A five-inch searchlight, I would have guessed. It picked up a small yacht riding at anchor less than a hundred yards ahead of it, altered to starboard, picked up another, altered to port, then swung back on course again.

‘“Odd” was the word you used,’ Hunslett murmured. ‘Quite a good word, too, in the circumstances. And what are we to think of the alleged Torbay police force?’

‘You talked to the sergeant longer than I did. When I was aft with Thomas and Durran.’

‘I’d like to think otherwise,’ Hunslett said inconsequentially. ‘It would make things easier, in a way. But I can’t. He’s a genuine oldfashioned cop and a good one, too. I’ve met too many. So have you.’ ‘A good cop and an honest one,’ I agreed. ‘This is not his line of country and he was fooled. It is our line of country and we were fooled. Until now, that is.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘Thomas made one careless remark. An offbeat remark. You didn’t hear it – we were in the engine-room.’ I shivered, maybe it was the cold night wind. ‘It meant nothing – not until I saw that they didn’t want their boat recognised again. He said: ‘Boats aren’t really in my line.’ Probably thought he’d been asking too many questions and wanted to reassure me. Boats not in his line – a customs officer and boats not in his line. They only spend their lives aboard boats, examining boats, that’s all. They spend their lives looking and poking in so many odd corners and quarters that they know more about boats than the designers themselves. Another thing, did you notice how sharply dressed they were? A credit to Carnaby Street.’

‘Customs officers don’t usually go around in oil-stained overalls.’

‘They’ve been living in those clothes for twenty-four hours. This is the what – the thirteenth boat they’ve searched in that time. Would you still have knife-edged creases to your pants after that lot? Or would you say they’d only just taken them from the hangers and put them on?’

‘What else did they say? What else did they do?’ Hunslett spoke so quietly that I could hear the note of the engines of the customs’ boat fall away sharply as their searchlight lit up the low-water stone pier, half a mile away. ‘Take an undue interest in anything?’

‘They took an undue interest in everything. Wait a minute, though, wait a minute. Thomas seemed particularly intrigued by the batteries, by the large amount of reserve electrical power we had.’

‘Did he now? Did he indeed? And did you notice how lightly our two customs friends swung aboard their launch when leaving?’

‘They’ll have done it a thousand times.’

‘Both of them had their hands free. They weren’t carrying anything. They should have been carrying something.’

‘The photo-copier. I’m getting old.’

‘The photo-copier. Standard equipment my ruddy foot. So if our fair-haired pal wasn’t busy photo-copying he was busy doing something else.’

We moved inside the wheelhouse. Hunslett selected the larger screw-driver from the tool-rack beside the echo-sounder and had the face-plate off our R.T.D./D.F. set inside sixty seconds. He looked at the interior for five seconds, looked at me for the same length of time, then started screwing the face-plate back into position. One thing was certain, we wouldn’t be using that transmitter for a long time to come.

I turned away and stared out through the wheelhouse windows into the darkness. The wind was still rising, the black sea gleamed palely as the whitecaps came marching in from the south-west, the Firecrest snubbed sharply on her anchor chain and, with the wind and the tide at variance, she was beginning to corkscrew quite noticeably now. I felt desperately tired. But my eyes were still working. Hunslett offered me a cigarette. I didn’t want one, but I took one. Who knew, it might even help me to think. And then I had caught his wrist and was staring down at his palm.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘The cobbler should stick to his last.’ ‘He what?’

‘Wrong proverb. Can’t think of the right one. A good workman uses only his own tools. Our pal with the penchant for smashing valves and condensers should have remembered that. No wonder my neck was twitching when Durran was around. How did you cut yourself?’

‘I didn’t cut myself.’

‘I know. But there’s a smear of blood on your palm. He’s been taking lessons from Peter Sellers, I shouldn’t wonder. Standard southern English on the Nantesville, northern Irish on the Firecrest. I wonder how many other accents he has up his sleeve – behind his larynx, I should say. And I thought he was running to a little fat. He’s running to a great deal of muscle. You noticed he never took his gloves off, even when he had that drink?’

‘I’m the best noticer you ever saw. Beat me over the head with a club and I’ll notice anything.’ He sounded bitter. ‘Why didn’t they clobber us? You, anyway? The star witness?’

‘Maybe we have moved out of our class. Two reasons. They couldn’t do anything with the cops there, genuine cops as we’ve both agreed, not unless they attended to the cops too. Only a madman would deliberately kill a cop and whatever those boys may lack it isn’t sanity.’

‘But why cops in the first place?’

‘Aura of respectability. Cops are above suspicion. When a uniformed policeman shoves his uniformed cap above your gunwale in the dark watches of the night, you don’t whack him over the head with a marline-spike. You invite him aboard. All others you might whack, especially if we had the bad consciences we might have been supposed to have.’

‘Maybe. It’s arguable. And the second point?’

‘They took a big chance, a desperate chance, almost, with Durran. He was thrown to the wolves to see what the reaction would be, whether either of us recognised him.’

‘Why Durran?’

‘I didn’t tell you. I shone a torch in his face. The face didn’t register, just a white blur with screwed-up eyes half-hidden behind an upflung hand. I was really looking lower down, picking the right spot to kick him. But they weren’t to know that. They wanted to find out if we would recognise him. We didn’t. If we had done we’d either have started throwing the crockery at him or yelped for the cops to arrest them – if we’re against them then we’re with the cops. But we didn’t. Not a flicker of recognition. Nobody’s as good as that. I defy any man in the world to meet up again in the same night with a man who has murdered two other people and nearly murdered himself without at least twitching an eyebrow. So the immediate heat is off, the urgent necessity to do us in has become less urgent. It’s a safe bet that if we didn’t recognise Durran, then we recognised nobody on the Nantesville and so we won’t be burning up the lines to Interpol.’

‘We’re in the dear?’

‘I wish to God we were. They’re on to us.’

‘But you said ’

‘I don’t know how I know,’ I said irritably. ‘I know. They went through the after end of the Firecrest like a Treble Chance winner hunting for the coupon he’s afraid he’s forgotten to post. Then halfway through the engine-room search – click! – just like that and they weren’t interested any more. At least Thomas wasn’t. He’d found out something. You saw him afterwards in the saloon, the fore cabins and the upper deck. He couldn’t have cared less.’

‘The batteries?’

‘No. He was satisfied with my explanation. I could tell. I don’t know why, I only know I’m sure.’

‘So they’ll be back.’

‘They’ll be back.’

‘I get the guns out now?’

‘There’s no hurry. Our friends will be sure we can’t communicate with anyone. The mainland boat calls here only twice a week. It came to-day and won’t be back for four days. The lines to the mainland are down and if I thought for a moment they would stay down I should be back in kindergarten. Our transmitter is out. Assuming there are no carrier pigeons in Torbay, what’s the only remaining means of communication with the mainland?’

‘There’s the Shangri-la.’ The Shangri-la, the nearest craft to ours, was white, gleaming, a hundred and twenty feet long and wouldn’t have left her owner a handful of change from a quarter of a million pounds when he’d bought her. ‘She’ll have a couple of thousand quids’ worth of radio equipment aboard. Then there are two, maybe three yachts big enough to carry transmitters. The rest will carry only receivers, if that.’

‘And how many transmitters in Torbay harbour will still be in operating condition to-morrow?’

‘One.’

‘One. Our friends will attend to the rest. They’ll have to. We can’t warn anyone. We can’t give ourselves away.’

‘The insurance companies can stand it.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘This would be a nice time to wake up Uncle Arthur.’

‘I can’t put it off any longer.’ I wasn’t looking forward to talking to Uncle Arthur.

Hunslett reached for a heavy coat, pulled it on, made for the door and stopped. ‘I thought I’d take a walk on the upper deck. While you’re talking. Just in case. A second thought – I’d better have that gun now. Thomas said they’d already checked three boats in the harbour. MacDonald didn’t contradict him, so it was probably true. Maybe there are no serviceable transmitters left in Torbay now. Maybe our friends just dumped the cops ashore and are coming straight back for us.’

‘Maybe. But those yachts are smaller than the Firecrest. Apart from us, there’s only one with a separate wheelhouse. The others will carry transmitters in the saloon cabin. Lots of them sleep in their saloon cabins. The owners would have to be banged on the head first before the radios could be attended to. They couldn’t do that with MacDonald around.’

‘You’d bet your pension on that? Maybe MacDonald didn’t always go aboard.’

‘I’ll never live to collect my pension. But maybe you’d better have that gun.’

The Firecrest was just over three years old. The Southampton boatyard and marine-radio firm that had combined to build her had done so under conditions of sworn secrecy to a design provided by Uncle Arthur. Uncle Arthur had not designed her himself although he had never said so to the few people who knew of the existence of the boat. He’d pinched the idea from a Japanese-designed Indonesianowned fishing craft that had been picked up with engine failure off the Malaysian coast. Only one engine had failed though two were installed, but still she had been not under command, an odd circumstance that had led the alert Engineer Lieutenant on the frigate that had picked her up to look pretty closely at her: the net result of his investigation, apart from giving this splendid inspiration to Uncle Arthur, was that the crew still languished in a Singapore prisoner of war camp.

The Firecrest’s career had been chequered and inglorious. She had cruised around the Eastern Baltic for some time, without achieving anything, until the authorities in Memel and Leningrad, getting tired of the sight of her, had declared the Firecrest persona non grata and sent her back to England. Uncle Arthur had been furious, especially as he had to account to a parsimonious Under-Secretary for the considerable expense involved. The Waterguard had tried their hand with it at catching smugglers and returned it without thanks. No smugglers. Now for the first time ever it was going to justify its existence and in other circumstances Uncle Arthur would have been delighted. When he heard what I had to tell him he would have no difficulty in restraining his joy.

What made the Firecrest unique was that while she had two screws and two propeller shafts, she had only one engine. Two engine casings, but only one engine, even although that one engine was a special job fitted with an underwater bypass exhaust valve. A simple matter of disengaging the fuel pump coupling and unscrewing four bolts on top – the rest were dummies – enabled the entire head of the diesel starboard engine to be lifted clear away, together with the fuel lines and injectors. With the assistance of the seventy foot telescopic radio mast housed inside our aluminium foremast, the huge gleaming transmitter that took up eighty per cent of the space inside the starboard engine casing could have sent a signal to the moon, if need be: as Thomas had observed, we had power and to spare. As it happened I didn’t want to send a signal to the moon, just to Uncle Arthur’s combinex office and home in Knightsbridge.

The other twenty per cent of space was taken up with a motley collection of material that even the Assistant Commissioner in New Scotland Yard wouldn’t have regarded without a thoughtful expression on his face. There were some packages of pre-fabricated explosives with amatol, primer and chemical detonator combined in one neat unit with a miniature timing device that ranged from five seconds to five minutes, complete with sucker clamps. There was a fine range of burglar’s house-breaking tools, bunches of skeleton keys, several highly sophisticated listening devices, including one that could be shot from a Very-type pistol, several tubes of various harmless-looking tablets which were alleged, when dropped in some unsuspecting character’s drink, to induce unconsciousness for varying periods, four pistols and a box of ammunition. Anyone who was going to use that lot in one operation was in for a busy time indeed. Two of the pistols were Lugers, two were 4.25 German Lilliputs, the smallest really effective automatic pistol on the market. The Lilliput had the great advantage that it could be concealed practically anywhere on your person, even upside down in a spring-loaded clip in your lower left sleeve – if, that was, you didn’t get your suits cut in Carnaby Street.

Hunslett lifted one of the Lugers from its clamp, checked the loading indicator and left at once. It wasn’t that he was imagining that he could already hear stealthy footsteps on the upper deck, he just didn’t want to be around when Uncle Arthur came on the air. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t really want to be around then either.

I pulled out the two insulated rubber cables, fitted the powerfully spring-loaded saw-toothed metal clamps on to the battery terminals, hung on a pair of earphones, turned on the set, pulled another switch that actuated the call-up and waited. I didn’t have to tune in, the transmitter was permanently pre-set, and pre-set on a V.H.F. frequency that would have cost the licence of any ham operator who dared wander anywhere near it for transmission purposes.

The red receiver warning light came on. I reached down and adjusted the magic eye control until the green fans met in the middle.

‘This is station SPFX,’ a voice came. ‘Station SPFX.’

‘Good morning. This is Caroline. May I speak to the manager, please?’

‘Will you wait, please?’ This meant that Uncle Arthur was in bed. Uncle Arthur was never at his best on rising. Three minutes passed and the earphones came to life again.

‘Good morning, Caroline. This is Annabelle.’

‘Good morning. Location 481, 281.’ You wouldn’t find those references in any Ordnance Survey Map, there weren’t a dozen maps in existence with them. But Uncle Arthur had one. And so had I.

There was a pause, then: ‘I have you, Caroline. Proceed.’

‘I located the missing vessel this afternoon. Four or five miles north-west of here. I went on board to-night.’

‘You did what, Caroline?’

‘Went on board. The old crew has gone home. There’s a new crew aboard. A smaller crew.’

‘You located Betty and Dorothy?’ Despite the fact that we both had scramblers fitted to our radio phones, making intelligible eavesdropping impossible, Uncle Arthur always insisted that we spoke in a roundabout riddle fashion and used code names for his employees and himself. Girls’ names for our surnames, initials to match. An irritating foible, but one that we had to observe. He was Annabelle, I was Caroline, Baker was Betty, Delmont, Dorothy and Hunslett, Harriet. It sounded like a series of Caribbean hurricane warnings.

‘I found them.’ I took a deep breath. ‘They won’t be coming home again, Annabelle.’

‘They won’t be coming home again,’ he repeated mechanically. He was silent for so long that I began to think that he had gone off the air. Then he came again, his voice empty, remote. ‘I warned you of this, Caroline.’

‘Yes, Annabelle, you warned me of this.’

‘And the vessel?’

‘Gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know. Just gone. North, I suppose.’

‘North, you suppose.’ Uncle Arthur never raised his voice, when he went on it was as calm and impersonal as ever, but the sudden disregard of his own rules about circumlocution betrayed the savage anger in his mind. ‘North where? Iceland? A Norwegian fjord? To effect a trans-shipment of cargo anywhere in a million square miles between the mid-Atlantic and the Barents Sea? And you lost her. After all the time, the trouble, the planning, the expense, you’ve lost her!’ He might have spared me that bit about the planning, it had been mine all the way. ‘And Betty and Dorothy.’ The last words showed he’d taken control of himself again.

‘Yes, Annabelle, I’ve lost her.’ I could feel the slow anger in myself. ‘And there’s worse than that, if you want to listen to it.’

‘I’m listening.’

I told him the rest and at the end of it he said: ‘I see. You’ve lost the vessel. You’ve lost Betty and Dorothy. And now our friends know about you, the one vital element of secrecy is gone for ever and every usefulness and effectiveness you might ever have had is completely negated.’ A pause. ‘I shall expect you in my office at nine p.m. to-night. Instruct Harriet to take the boat back to base.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The hell with his Annabelle. ‘I had expected that. I’ve failed. I’ve let you down. I’m being pulled off.’

‘Nine o’clock to-night, Caroline. I’ll be waiting.’

‘You’ll have a long wait, Annabelle.’

‘And what might you mean by that?’ If Uncle Arthur had had a low silky menacing voice then he’d have spoken those words in a low silky menacing voice. But he hadn’t, he’d only this flat level monotone and it carried infinitely more weight and authority than any carefully modulated theatrical voice that had ever graced a stage.

‘There are no planes to this place, Annabelle. The mail-boat doesn’t call for another four days. The weather’s breaking down and I wouldn’t risk our boat to try to get to the mainland. I’m stuck here for the time being, I’m afraid.’

‘Do you take me for a nincompoop, sir?’ Now he was at it. ‘Go ashore this morning. An air-sea rescue helicopter will pick you up at noon. Nine p.m. at my office. Don’t keep me waiting.’

This, then, was it. But one last try. ‘Couldn’t you give me another twenty-four hours, Annabelle?’

‘Now you’re being ridiculous. And wasting my time. Good-bye.’

‘I beg of you, sir.’

‘I’d thought better of you than that. Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye. We may meet again sometime. It’s not likely. Good-bye.’

I switched the radio off, lit a cigarette and waited. The call-up came through in half a minute. I waited another half-minute and switched on. I was very calm. The die was cast and I didn’t give a damn.

‘Caroline? Is that you, Caroline?’ I could have sworn to a note of agitation in his voice. This was something for the record books.

‘Yes.’

‘What did you say? At the end there?’

‘Good-bye. You said good-bye. I said good-bye.’

‘Don’t quibble with me, sir! You said –’

‘If you want me aboard that helicopter,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to send a guard with the pilot. An armed guard. I hope they’re good. I’ve got a Luger, and you know I’m good. And if I have to kill anyone and go into court, then you’ll have to stand there beside me because there’s no single civil action or criminal charge that even you, with all your connections, can bring against me that would justify the sending of armed men to apprehend me, an innocent man. Further, I am no longer in your employment. The terms of my civil service contract state clearly that I can resign at any moment, provided that I am not actively engaged on an operation at that moment. You’ve pulled me off, you’ve recalled me to London. My resignation will be on your desk as soon as the mail can get through. Baker and Delmont weren’t your friends. They were my friends. They were my friends ever since I joined the service. You have the temerity to sit there and lay all the blame for their deaths on my shoulders when you know damn’ well that every operation must have your final approval, and now you have the final temerity to deny me a one last chance to square accounts. I’m sick of your damned soulless service. Good-bye.’

‘Now wait a moment, Caroline.’ There was a cautious, almost placatory note to his voice. ‘No need to go off half-cocked.’ I was sure that no one had ever talked to Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason like that before but he didn’t seem particularly upset about it. He had the cunning of a fox, that infinitely agile and shrewd mind would be examining and discarding possibilities with the speed of a computer, he’d be wondering whether I was playing a game and if so how far he could play it with me without making it impossible for me to retreat from the edge of the precipice. Finally he said quietly: ‘You wouldn’t want to hang around there just to shed tears. You’re on to something.’

‘Yes, sir, I’m on to something.’ I wondered what in the name of God I was on to.

‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours, Caroline.’

‘Forty-eight.’

‘Forty-eight. And then you return to London. I have your word?’

‘I promise.’

‘And Caroline?’

‘Sir?’

‘I didn’t care for your way of talking there. I trust we never have a repetition of it.’

‘No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Forty-eight hours. Report to me at noon and midnight.’ A click. Uncle Arthur was gone.

The false dawn was in the sky when I went on deck. Cold heavy slanting driving rain was churning up the foam-flecked sea. The Firecrest, pulling heavily on her anchor chain, was swinging slowly through an arc of forty degrees, corkscrewing quite heavily now on the outer arc of the swing, pitching in the centre of them. She was snubbing very heavily on the anchor and I wondered uneasily how long the lengths of heaving line securing the dinghy, outboard and scuba gear to the chain could stand up to this sort of treatment.

Hunslett was abaft the saloon, huddling in what little shelter it afforded. He looked up at my approach and said: ‘What do you make of that?’ He pointed to the palely gleaming shape of the Shangri-la, one moment on our quarter, the next dead astern as we swung on our anchor. Lights were burning brightly in the fore part of her superstructure, where the wheelhouse would be.

‘Someone with insomnia,’ I said. ‘Or checking to see if the anchor is dragging. What do you think it is – our recent guests laying about the Shangri-la radio installation with crow-bars? Maybe they leave lights on all night.’

‘Came on just ten minutes ago. And look, now – they’re out. Funny. How did you get on with Uncle?’

‘Badly. Fired me, then changed his mind. We have forty-eight hours.’

‘Forty-eight hours? What are you going to do in forty-eight hours?’

‘God knows. Have some sleep first. You too. Too much light in the sky for callers now.’

Passing through the saloon, Hunslett said, apropos of nothing: ‘I’ve been wondering. What did you make of P.C. MacDonald? The young one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, glum, downcast. Heavy weight on his shoulders.’

‘Maybe he’s like me. Maybe he doesn’t like getting up in the middle of the night. Maybe he has girl trouble and if he has I can tell you that P.C. MacDonald’s love-life is the least of my concerns. Good night.’

I should have listened to Hunslett more. For Hunslett’s sake.

THREE

Tuesday: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

I need my sleep, just like anyone else. Ten hours, perhaps only eight, and I would have been my own man again. Maybe not exuding brightness, optimism and cheerfulness, the circumstances weren’t right for that, but at least a going concern, alert, perceptive, my mind operating on what Uncle Arthur would be by now regarding as its customary abysmal level but still the best it could achieve. But I wasn’t given that ten hours. Nor even the eight. Exactly three hours after dropping off I was wide awake again. Well, anyway, awake. I would have had to be stone deaf, drugged or dead to go on sleeping through the bawling and thumping that was currently assailing my left ear from what appeared to be a distance of not more than twelve inches.

‘Ahoy, there, Firecrest! Ahoy there!’ Thump, thump, thump on the boat’s side. ‘Can I come aboard? Ahoy, there! Ahoy, ahoy, ahoy!’

I cursed this nautical idiot from the depths of my sleep-ridden being, swung a pair of unsteady legs to the deck and levered myself out of the bunk. I almost fell down, I seemed to have only one leg left, and my neck ached fiercely. A glance at the mirror gave quick external confirmation of my internal decrepitude. A haggard unshaven face, unnaturally pale, and bleary bloodshot eyes with dark circles under them. I looked away hurriedly, there were lots of things I could put up with first thing in the morning, but not sights like that.

I opened the door across the passage. Hunslett was sound asleep and snoring. I returned to my own cabin and got busy with the dressing-gown and Paisley scarf again. The iron-lunged thumping character outside was still at it, if I didn’t hurry he would be roaring out ‘avast there’ any moment. I combed my hair into some sort of order and made my way to the upper deck.

It was a cold, wet and windy world. A grey, dreary, unpleasant world, why the hell couldn’t they have let me sleep on. The rain was coming down in slanting sheets, bouncing inches high on the decks, doubling the milkiness of the spume-flecked sea. The lonely wind mourned through the rigging and the lower registers of sound and the steep-sided wind-truncated waves, maybe three feet from tip to trough, were high enough to make passage difficult if not dangerous for the average yacht tender.

They didn’t make things in the slightest difficult or dangerous for the yacht tender that now lay alongside us. It maybe wasn’t as big – it looked it at first sight – as the Firecrest, but it was big enough to have a glassed-in cabin for’ard, a wheel-house that bristled and gleamed with controls and instrumentation that would have been no disgrace to a VC-10 and, abaft that, a sunken cockpit that could have sunbathed a football team without overcrowding. There were three crewmen dressed in black oilskins and fancy French navy hats with black ribbons down the back, two of them each with a boat-hook round one of the Firecrest’s guardrail stanchions. Half a dozen big inflated spherical rubber fenders kept the Firecrest from rubbing its plebeian paintwork against the whitely-varnished spotlessness of the tender alongside and it didn’t require the name on the bows or the crew’s hats to let me know that this was the tender that normally took up most of the after-deck space on the Shangri-la.

Amidships a stocky figure, clad in a white vaguely naval brassbuttoned uniform and holding above his head a golf umbrella that would have had Joseph green with envy, stopped banging his gloved fist against the Firecrest’s planking and glared up at me.

‘Ha!’ I’ve never actually heard anyone snort out a word but this came pretty close to it. ‘There you are at last. Took your time about it, didn’t you? I’m soaked, man, soaked!’ A few spots of rain did show up quite clearly on the white seersucker. ‘May I come aboard?’ He didn’t wait for any permission, just leaped aboard with surprising nimbleness for a man of his build and years and nipped into the Firecrest’s wheelhouse ahead of me, which was pretty selfish of him as he still had his umbrella and all I had was my dressing-gown. I followed and closed the door behind me.

He was a short, powerfully built character, fifty-five I would have guessed, with a heavily–tanned jowled face, close-cropped irongrey hair with tufted eyebrows to match, long straight nose and a mouth that looked as if it had been closed with a zip-fastener. A good-looking cove, if you liked that type of looks. The dark darting eyes looked me up and down and if he was impressed by what he saw he made a heroic effort to keep his admiration in check.

‘Sorry for the delay,’ I apologised. ‘Short of sleep. We had the customs aboard in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get off after that.’ Always tell everyone the truth if there’s an even chance of that truth coming out anyway, which in this case there was: gives one a reputation for forthright honesty.

‘The customs?’ He looked as if he intended to say ‘pshaw’ or ‘fiddlesticks’ or something of that order, then changed his mind and looked up sharply. ‘An intolerable bunch of busybodies. And in the middle of the night. Shouldn’t have let them aboard. Sent them packing. Intolerable.

What the deuce did they want?’ He gave the distinct impression of having himself had some trouble with the customs in the past.

‘They were looking for stolen chemicals. Stolen from some place in Ayrshire. Wrong boat.’

‘Idiots!’ He thrust out a stubby hand, he’d passed his final judgment on the unfortunate customs and the subject was now closed. ‘Skouras. Sir Anthony Skouras.’

‘Petersen.’ His grip made me wince, less from the sheer power of it than from the gouging effects of the large number of thickly encrusted rings that adorned his fingers. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some on his thumbs but he’d missed out on that. I looked at him with new interest. ‘Sir Anthony Skouras. I’ve heard of you of course.’

‘Nothing good. Columnists don’t like me because they know I despise them. A Cypriot who made his shipping millions through sheer ruthlessness, they say. True. Asked by the Greek Government to leave Athens. True. Became a naturalised British citizen and bought a knighthood. Absolutely true. Charitable works and public services. Money can buy anything. A baronetcy next but the market’s not right at the moment. Price is bound to fall. Can I use your radio transmitter? I see you have one.’

‘What’s that?’ The abrupt switch had me off-balance, no great achievement the way I was feeling.

‘Your radio transmitter, man! Don’t you listen to the news? All those major defence projects cancelled by the Pentagon. Price of steel tumbling. Must get through to my New York broker at once!’

‘Sorry. Certainly you may – but, but your own radio-telephone? Surely –’

‘It’s out of action.’ His mouth became more tight-lipped than ever and the inevitable happened: it disappeared. ‘It’s urgent, Mr Petersen.’

‘Immediately. You know how to operate this model?’

He smiled thinly, which was probably the only way he was capable of smiling. Compared to the cinema-organ job he’d have aboard the Shangri-la, asking him if he could operate this was like asking the captain of a transatlantic jet if he could fly a Tiger Moth. ‘I think I can manage, Mr Petersen.’

‘Call me when you’re finished. I’ll be in the saloon.’ He’d be calling me before he’d finished, he’d be calling me before he’d even started. But I couldn’t tell him. Word gets around. I went down to the saloon, contemplated a shave and decided against it. It wouldn’t take that long.

It didn’t. He appeared at the saloon door inside a minute, his face grim.

‘Your radio is out of order, Mr Petersen.’

‘They’re tricky to operate, some of those older jobs,’

I said tactfully. ‘Maybe if I –’ ‘I say it’s out of order. I mean it’s out of order.’

‘Damned odd. It was working –’

‘Would you care to try it, please?’

I tried it. Nothing. I twiddled everything I could lay hands on. Nothing.

‘A power failure, perhaps,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll check –’

‘Would you be so good as to remove the faceplate, please?’

I stared at him in perplexity, switching the expression, after a suitable interval, to shrewd thoughtfulness. ‘What do you know, Sir Anthony, that I don’t?’

‘You’ll find out.’

So I found out and went through all the proper motions of consternation, incredulity and tight-lipped indignation. Finally I said: ‘You knew. How did you know?’

‘Obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Your transmitter,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s more than just out order. You had the same midnight caller.’

‘And the Orion.’ The mouth vanished again. ‘The big blue ketch lying close in. Only other craft in the harbour apart from us with a radio transmitter. Smashed. Just come from there.’

‘Smashed? Theirs as well? But who in God’s name – it must be the work of a madman.’

‘Is it? Is it the work of a madman? I know something of those matters. My first wife -’ He broke off abruptly and gave an odd shake of the head, then went on slowly: ‘The mentally disturbed are irrational, haphazard, purposeless, aimless in their behaviour patterns. This seems an entirely irrational act, but an act with a method and a purpose to it. Not haphazard. It’s planned. There’s a reason. At first I thought the reason was to cut off my connection with the mainland. But it can’t be that. By rendering me temporarily incommunicado nobody stands to gain, I don’t stand to lose.’

‘But you said the New York Stock –’

‘A bagatelle,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Nobody likes to lose money.’ Not more than a few millions anyway. ‘No, Mr Petersen, I am not the target. We have here an A and a B. A regards it as vital that he remains in constant communication with the mainland. B regards it as vital that A doesn’t. So B takes steps. There’s something damned funny going on in Torbay. And something big. I have a nose for such things.’

He was no fool but then not many morons have ended up as multimillionaires. I couldn’t have put it better myself. I said: ‘Reported this to the police yet?’

‘Going there now. After I’ve made a phone call or two.’ The eyes suddenly became bleak and cold. ‘Unless our friend has smashed up the two public call boxes in the main street.’

‘He’s done better than that. He’s brought down the lines to the mainland. Somewhere down the Sound. No one knows where.’

He stared at me, wheeled to leave, then turned, his face empty of expression. ‘How did you know that?’ The tone matched the face.

‘Police told me. They were aboard with the customs last night.’

‘The police? That’s damned odd. What were the police doing here?’ He paused and looked at me with his cold measuring eyes. ‘A personal question, Mr Petersen. No impertinence intended. A question of elimination. What are you doing here? No offence.’

‘No offence. My friend and I are marine biologists. A working trip. Not our boat – the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.’ I smiled. ‘We have impeccable references, Sir Anthony.’

‘Marine biology, eh? Hobby of mine, you might say. Layman, of course. Must have a talk sometime.’ He was speaking absentmindedly, his thoughts elsewhere. ‘Could you describe the policeman, Mr Petersen?’

I did and he nodded. ‘That’s him all right. Odd, very odd. Must have a word with Archie about this.’

‘Archie?’

‘Sergeant MacDonald. This is my fifth consecutive season’s cruising based on Torbay. The South of France and the ægean can’t hold a candle to these waters. Know quite a few of the locals pretty well by this time. He was alone?’

‘No. A young constable. His son, he said. Melancholy sort of lad.’

‘Peter MacDonald. He has reason for his melancholy, Mr Petersen. His two young brothers, sixteen years old, twins, died a few months back.

At an Inverness school, lost in a late snow-storm in the Cairngorms. The father is tougher, doesn’t show it so much. A great tragedy. I knew them both. Fine boys.’

I made some appropriate comment but he wasn’t listening.

‘I must be on my way, Mr Petersen. Put this damned strange affair in MacDonald’s hand. Don’t see that he can do much. Then off for a short cruise.’

I looked through the wheelhouse windows at the dark skies, the white-capped seas, the driving rain. ‘You picked a day for it.’

‘The rougher the better. No bravado. I like a mill-pond as well as any man. Just had new stabilisers fitted in the Clyde – we got back up here only two days ago – and it seems like a good day to try them out.’ He smiled suddenly and put out his hand. ‘Sorry to have barged in. Taken up far too much of your time. Seemed rude, I suppose. Some say I am. You and your colleague care to come aboard for a drink to-night? We eat early at sea. Eight o’clock, say? I’ll send the tender.’ That meant we didn’t rate an invitation to dinner, which would have made a change from Hunslett and his damned baked beans, but even an invitation like this would have given rise to envious tooth-gnashing in some of the stateliest homes in the land: it was no secret that the bluest blood in England, from Royalty downwards, regarded a holiday invitation to the island Skouras owned off the Albanian coast as the conferment of the social cachet of the year or any year. Skouras didn’t wait for an answer and didn’t seem to expect one. I didn’t blame him. It would have been many years since Skouras had discovered that it was an immutable law of human nature, human nature being what it is, that no one ever turned down one of his invitations.

‘You’ll be coming to tell me about your smashed transmitter and asking me what the devil I intend to do about it,’ Sergeant MacDonald said tiredly. ‘Well, Mr Petersen, I know all about it already. Sir Anthony Skouras was here half an hour ago Sir Anthony had a lot to say. And Mr Campbell, the owner of the Orion, has just left. He’d a lot to say, too.’

‘Not me, Sergeant. I’m a man of few words.’ I gave him what I hoped looked like a self-deprecatory smile. ‘Except, of course, when the police and customs drag me out of bed in the middle of the night. I take it our friends have left?’

‘Just as soon as they’d put us ashore. Customs are just a damn’ nuisance.’ Like myself, he looked as if he could do with some hours’ sleep. ‘Frankly, Mr Petersen, I don’t know what to do about the broken radio-transmitters. Why on earth – who on earth would want to do a daft vicious thing like that?’

‘That’s what I came to ask you.’

‘I can go aboard your boat,’ MacDonald said slowly. ‘I can take out my note-book, look around and see if I can’t find any clues. I wouldn’t know what to look for. Maybe if I knew something about fingerprinting and analysis and microscopy I might just find out something. But I don’t. I’m an island policeman, not a one-man Flying Squad. This is C.I.D. work and we’d have to call in Glasgow. I doubt if they’d send a couple of detectives to investigate a few smashed radio valves.’

‘Old man Skouras draws a lot of water.’

‘Sir?’

‘He’s powerful. He has influence. If Skouras wanted action I’m damned sure he could get it. If the need arose and the mood struck him I’m sure he could be a very unpleasant character indeed.’

‘There’s not a better man or a kinder man ever sailed into Torbay,’ MacDonald said warmly. That hard brown face could conceal practically anything that MacDonald wanted it to conceal but this time he was hiding nothing. ‘Maybe his ways aren’t my ways. Maybe he’s a hard, aye, a ruthless businessman. Maybe, as the papers hint, his private life wouldn’t bear investigation. That’s none of my business. But if you were to look for a man in Torbay to say a word against him, you’ll have a busy time on your hands, Mr Petersen.’

‘You’ve taken me up wrongly. Sergeant,’ I said mildly. ‘I don’t even know the man.’

‘No. But we do. See that?’ He pointed through the side window of the police station to a large Swedish-style timber building beyond the pier. ‘Our new village hall. Town hall, they call it. Sir Anthony gave us that. Those six wee chalets up the hill there? For old folks. Sir Anthony again -every penny from his own pocket. Who takes all the schoolchildren to the Oban Games – Sir Anthony on the Shangri-la. Contributes to every charity going and now he has plans to build a boatyard to give employment to the young men of Torbay – there’s not much else going since the fishing-boats left.’

‘Well, good for old Skouras,’ I said. ‘He seems to have adopted the place. Lucky Torbay. I wish he’d buy me a new radio-transmitter.’

‘I’ll keep my eyes and ears open, Mr Petersen. I can’t do more. If anything turns up I’ll let you know at once.’

I told him thanks, and left. I hadn’t particularly wanted to go there, but it would have looked damned odd if I hadn’t turned up to add my pennyworth to the chorus of bitter complaint.

I was very glad that I had turned up.

The midday reception from London was poor. This was due less to the fact that reception is always better after dark than to the fact that I couldn’t use our telescopic radio mast: but it was fair enough and Uncle’s voice was brisk and businesslike and clear.

‘Well, Caroline, we’ve found our missing friends,’ he said.

‘How many?’ I asked cautiously. Uncle Arthur’s ambiguous references weren’t always as clear as Uncle Arthur imagined them to be.

‘All twenty-five.’ That made it the former crew of the Nantesville. ‘Two of them are pretty badly hurt but they’ll be all right.’ That accounted for the blood I had found in the captain’s and one of the engineers’ cabins.

‘Where?’ I asked.

He gave me a map reference. Just north of Wexford. The Nantesville had sailed from Bristol, she couldn’t have been more than a few hours on her way before she’d run into trouble.

‘Exactly the same procedure as on the previous occasions,’ Uncle Arthur was saying. ‘Held in a lonely farmhouse for a couple of nights. Plenty to eat and drink and blankets to keep the cold out. Then they woke up one morning and found their guards had gone.’

‘But a different procedure in stopping the – our friend?’ I’d almost said Nantesville and Uncle Arthur wouldn’t have liked that at all.

‘As always. We must concede them a certain ingenuity, Caroline. After having smuggled men aboard in port, then using the sinking fishing-boat routine, the police launch routine and the yacht with the appendicitis case aboard, I thought they would be starting to repeat themselves. But this time they came up with a new one – possibly because it’s the first time they’ve hi-jacked a ship during the hours of darkness. Carley rafts, this time, with about ten survivors aboard, dead ahead of the vessel. Oil all over the sea. A weak distress flare that couldn’t have been seen a mile away and probably was designed that way. You know the rest.’

‘Yes, Annabelle.’ I knew the rest. After that the routine was always the same. The rescued survivors, displaying a marked lack of gratitude, would whip out pistols, round up the crew, tie black muslin bags over their heads so that they couldn’t identify the vessel that would appear within the hour to take them off, march them on board the unknown vessel, land them on some lonely beach during the dark then march them again, often a very long way indeed, till they arrived at their prison. A deserted farmhouse. Always a deserted farmhouse. And always in Ireland, three times in the north and now twice in the south. Meantime the prize crew sailed the hi-jacked vessel to God alone knew where and the first the world knew of the disappearance of the pirated vessel was when the original crew, released after two or three days’ painless captivity, would turn up at some remote dwelling and start hollering for the nearest telephone.

‘Betty and Dorothy,’ I said. ‘Were they still in safe concealment when the crew were taken off?’

‘I imagine so. I don’t know. Details are still coming in and I understand the doctors won’t let anyone see the captain yet.’ Only the captain had known of the presence aboard of Baker and Delmont. ‘Forty-one hours now, Caroline. What have you done?’

For a moment I wondered irritably what the devil he was talking about. Then I remembered. He’d given me forty-eight hours. Seven were gone.

‘I’ve had three hours’ sleep.’ He’d consider that an utter waste of time, his employees weren’t considered to need sleep. ‘I’ve talked to the constabulary ashore. And I’ve talked to a wealthy yachtsman, next boat to us here. We’re paying him a social call to-night.’

There was a pause. ‘You’re doing what to-night, Caroline?’

‘Visiting. We’ve been invited. Harriet and I. For drinks.’

This time the pause was markedly longer. Then he said: ‘You have forty-one hours, Caroline.’

‘Yes, Annabelle.’

‘We assume you haven’t taken leave of your senses.’

‘I don’t know how unanimous informed opinion might be about that. I don’t think I have.’

‘And you haven’t given up? No, not that. You’re too damn’ stiffnecked and – and –’

‘Stupid?’

‘Who’s the yachtsman?’

I told him. It took me some time, partly because I had to spell out names with the aid of his damned code-book, partly because I gave him a very full account of everything Skouras had said to me and everything Sergeant MacDonald had said about Skouras. When his voice came again it was cagey and wary. As Uncle Arthur couldn’t see me I permitted myself a cynical grin. Even Cabinet Ministers found it difficult to make the grade as far as Skouras’s dinner-table, but the Permanent Under-Secretaries, the men with whom the real power of government lies, practically had their own initialled napkin rings. Under-Secretaries were the bane of Uncle Arthur’s life.

‘You’ll have to watch your step very carefully here, Caroline.’

‘Betty and Dorothy aren’t coming home any more, Annabelle. Someone has to ay. I want someone to pay. You want someone to pay. We all do.’

‘But it’s inconceivable that a man in his position, a man of his wealth –’

‘I’m sorry, Annabelle. I don’t understand.’

‘A man like that. Dammit all, I know him well, Caroline. We dine together. First-name terms. Know his present wife even better. Ex-actress. A philanthropist like that. A man who’s spent five consecutive seasons there. Would a man like that, a millionaire like that, spend all that time, all that money, just to build up a front –’

‘Skouras?’ I used the code name. Interrogatory, incredulous, as if it had just dawned upon me what Uncle Arthur was talking about. ‘I never said I suspected him, Annabelle. I have no reason to suspect him.’

‘Ah!’ It’s difficult to convey a sense of heartfelt gladness, profound satisfaction and brow-mopping relief in a single syllable, but Uncle Arthur managed it without any trouble. ‘Then why go?’ A casual eavesdropper might have thought he detected a note of pained jealousy in Uncle Arthur’s voice, and the casual eavesdropper would have been right. Uncle Arthur had only one weakness in his makeup – he was a social snob of monumental proportions.

‘I want aboard. I want to see this smashed transmitter of his.’

‘Why?’

‘A hunch, let me call it, Annabelle. No more.’

Uncle Arthur was going in for the long silences in a big way to-day. Then he said: ‘A hunch? A hunch? You told me this morning you were on to something.’

‘There’s something else. I want you to contact the Post Office Savings Bank, Head Office, in Scotland. After that, the Records files of some Scottish newspapers. I suggest The Glasgow Herald, the Scottish Daily Express and, most particularly, the West Highland weekly, the Oban Times.’

‘Ah!’ No relief this time, just satisfaction. ‘This is more like it, Caroline. What do you want and why?’

So I told him what I wanted and why, lots more of the fancy code work, and when I’d finished he said: ‘I’ll have my staff on to this straight away. I’ll have all the information you want by midnight.’

‘Then I don’t want it, Annabelle. Midnight’s too late for me. Midnight’s no use to me.’

‘Don’t ask the impossible, Caroline.’ He muttered something to himself, something I couldn’t catch, then: ‘I’ll pull every string, Caroline. Nine o’clock.’

‘Four o’clock, Annabelle.’

‘Four o’clock this afternoon?’ When it came to incredulity he had me whacked to the wide. ‘Four hours’ time? You have taken leave of your senses.’

‘You can have ten men on it in ten minutes. Twenty in twenty minutes. Where’s the door that isn’t open to you? Especially the door of the Assistant Commissioner. Professionals don’t kill for the hell of it. They kill because they must. They kill to gain time. Every additional hour is vital to them. And if it’s vital to them, how much more so is it to us? Or do you think we’re dealing with amateurs, Annabelle?’

‘Call me at four,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll see what I have for you. What’s your next move, Caroline?’

‘Bed,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get some sleep.’

‘Of course. Time, as you said, is of the essence. You mustn’t waste it, must you, Caroline?’ He signed off. He sounded bitter. No doubt he was bitter. But then, insomnia apart, Uncle Arthur could rely on a full quota of sleep during the coming night. Which was more than I could. No certain foreknowledge, no second sight, just a hunch, but not a small one, the kind of hunch you couldn’t have hidden behind the Empire State Building. Just like the one I had about the Shangri-la.

I only just managed to catch the last fading notes of the alarm as it went off at ten minutes to four. I felt worse than I had done when we’d lain down after a miserable lunch of corned beef and reconstituted powdered potatoes – if old Skouras had had a spark of human decency, he’d have made that invitation for dinner. I wasn’t only growing old, I felt old. I’d been working too long for Uncle Arthur. The pay was good but the hours and working conditions – I’d have wagered that Uncle Arthur hadn’t even set eyes on a tin of corned beef since the Second World War – were shocking. And all this constant worrying, chiefly about life expectancy, helped wear a man down.

Hunslett came out of his cabin as I came out of mine. He looked just as old as I did. If they had to rely on a couple of ageing crocks like us, I thought morosely, the rising generation must be a pretty sorry lot.

Passing through the saloon, I wondered bitterly about the identity of all those characters who wrote so glibly about the Western Isles in general and the Torbay area in particular as being a yachtsman’s paradise without equal in Europe. Obviously, they’d never been there. Fleet Street was their home and home was a place they never left, not if they could help it. An ignorant bunch of travel and advertising copy writers who regarded King’s Cross as the northern limits of civilisation. Well, maybe not all that ignorant, at least they were smart enough to stay south of King’s Cross.

Four o’clock on an autumn afternoon, but already it was more night than day. The sun wasn’t down yet, not by a very long way, but it might as well have been for all the chance it had of penetrating the rolling masses of heavy dark cloud hurrying away to the eastwards to the inky blackness of the horizon beyond Torbay. The slanting sheeting rain that foamed whitely across the bay further reduced what little visibility there was to a limit of not more than four hundred yards. The village itself, half a mile distant and nestling in the dark shadow of the steeply-rising pine-covered hills behind, might never have existed. Off to the north-west I could see the navigation lights of a craft rounding the headland, Skouras returning from his stabiliser test run. Down in the Shangri-la’s gleaming galley a master chef would be preparing the sumptuous evening meal, the one to which we hadn’t been invited. I tried to put the thought of that meal out of my mind, but I couldn’t, so I just put it as far away as possible and followed Hunslett into the engine-room.

Hunslett took the spare earphones and squatted beside me on the deck, note-book on his knee. Hunslett was as competent in shorthand as he was in everything else. I hoped that Uncle Arthur would have something to tell us, that Hunslett’s presence there would be necessary. It was.

‘Congratulations, Caroline,’ Uncle Arthur said without preamble. ‘You really are on to something.’ As far as it is possible for a dead flat monotone voice to assume an overtone of warmth, then Uncle Arthur’s did just that. He sounded positively friendly. More likely it was some freak of transmission or reception but at least he hadn’t started off by bawling me out.

‘We’ve traced those Post Office Savings books,’ he went on. He rattled off book numbers and details of times and amounts of deposits, things of no interest to me, then said: ‘Last deposits were on December 27th. Ten pounds in each case. Present balance is £78 14s. 6d. Exactly the same in both. And those accounts have not been closed.’

He paused for a moment to let me congratulate him, which I did, then continued.

‘That’s nothing, Caroline. Listen. Your queries about any mysterious accidents, deaths, disappearances off the west coasts of Inverness-shire or Argyll, or anything happening to people from that area. We’ve struck oil, Caroline, we’ve really struck oil. My God, why did we never think of this before. Have your pencil handy?’

‘Harriet has.’

‘Here we go. This seems to have been the most disastrous sailing season for years in the west of Scotland. But first, one from last year. The Pinto, a well-found sea-worthy forty-five foot motor cruiser left Kyle of Lochalsh for Oban at eight a.m. September 4th. She should have arrived that afternoon. She never did. No trace of her has ever been found.’

‘What was the weather at the time, Annabelle?’

‘I thought you’d ask me that, Caroline.’ Uncle Arthur’s combination of modesty and quiet satisfaction could be very trying at times. ‘I checked with the Met. office. Force one, variable. Flat calm, cloudless sky. Then we come to this year. April 6th and April 26th. The Evening Star and the Jeannie Rose. Two East Coast fishing boats – one from Buckie, the other from Fraserburgh.’

‘But both based on the west coast?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t try to steal my thunder,’ Uncle Arthur complained. ‘Both were based on Oban. Both were lobster boats. The Evening Star, the first one to go, was found stranded on the rocks off Islay. The Jeannie Rose vanished without trace. No member of either crew was ever found. Then again on the 17th of May. This time a well-known racing yacht, the Cap Gris Nez, an English built and owned craft, despite her name, highly experienced skipper, navigator and crew, all of them long-time and often successful competitors in R.O.R.C. races. That class. Left Londonderry for the north of Scotland in fine weather. Disappeared. She was found almost a month later – or what was left of her – washed up on the Isle of Skye.’

‘And the crew?’

‘Need you ask? Never found. Then the last case, a few weeks ago – August 8th. Husband, wife, two teenage children, son and daughter. Converted lifeboat, the Kingfisher. By all accounts a pretty competent sailor, been at it for years. But he’d never done any night navigation, so he set out one calm evening to do a night cruise. Vanished. Boat and crew.’

‘Where did he set out from?’

‘Torbay.’

That one word made his afternoon. It made mine, too. I said: ‘And do you still think the Nantesville is hell and gone to Iceland or some remote fjord in northern Norway?’

‘I never thought anything of the kind.’ Uncle’s human relationship barometer had suddenly swung back from friendly to normal, normal lying somewhere between cool and glacial. ‘The significance of the dates will not have escaped you?’

‘No, Annabelle, the significance has not escaped me.’ The Buckie fishing-boat, the Evening Star, had been found washed up on Islay three days after the S.S. Holmwood had vanished off the south coast of Ireland. The Jeannie Rose had vanished exactly three days after the M.V. Antara had as mysteriously disappeared in the St George’s Channel. The Cap Gris Nez, the R.O.R.C. racer that had finally landed up on the rocks of the island of Skye had vanished the same day as the M.V. Headley Pioneer had disappeared somewhere, it was thought, off Northern Ireland. And the converted lifeboat. Kingfisher, had disappeared, never to be seen again, just two days after the S.S. Hurricane Spray had left the Clyde, also never to be seen again. Coincidence was coincidence and I classed those who denied its existence with intellectual giants like the twentieth-century South African president who stoutly maintained that the world was flat and that an incautious step would take you over the edge with results as permanent as they would be disastrous: but this was plain ridiculous. The odds against such a perfect matching of dates could be calculated only in astronomical terms: while the complete disappearance of the crews of four small boats that had come to grief in so very limited an area was the final nail in the coffin of coincidence. I said as much to Uncle.

‘Let us not waste time by dwelling upon the obvious, Caroline,’ Uncle said coldly, which was pretty ungracious of him as the idea had never even entered his head until I had put it there four hours previously. ‘The point is – what is to be done? Islay to Skye is a pretty big area. Where does this get us?’

‘How much weight can you bring to bear to secure the co-operation of the television and radio networks?’

There was a pause, then: ‘What do you have in mind, Caroline?’ Uncle at his most forbidding.

‘An insertion of an item in their news bulletins.’

‘Well.’ An even longer pause. ‘It was done daily during the war, of course. I believe it’s been done once or twice since. Can’t compel them, of course – they’re a stuffy lot, both the B.B.C. and the I.T.A.’ His tone left little doubt as to his opinion of those diehard reactionaries who brooked no interference, an odd reaction from one who was himself a past-master of brookmanship of this nature. ‘If they can be persuaded that it’s completely apolitical and in the national interest there’s a chance. What do you want?’

‘An item that a distress signal has been received from a sinking yacht somewhere south of Skye. Exact position unknown. Signals ceased, the worst feared, an air-sea search to be mounted at first light to-morrow. That’s all.’

‘I may manage it. Your reason, Caroline?’

‘I want to look around. I want an excuse to move around without raising eyebrows.’

‘You’re going to volunteer the Firecrest for this search and then poke around where you shouldn’t?’

‘We have our faults, Annabelle, Harriet and I, but we’re not crazy. I wouldn’t take this tub across the Serpentine without a favourable weather forecast. It’s blowing a Force 7 outside. And a boat search would take a lifetime too long in those parts. What I had in mind was this. At the very eastern tip of Torbay Island, about five miles from the village, there’s a small deserted sandy cove, semicircular and well protected by steep bluffs and pine trees. Will you please arrange to have a long-range helicopter there exactly at dawn.’

‘And now it’s your turn to think I am crazy,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly. That remark about the sea-keeping qualities of his own brainchild, the Firecrest, would have rankled badly. ‘I’m supposed to snap my fingers and hey presto! a helicopter will be there at dawn.’

‘That’s fourteen hours from now, Annabelle. At five o’clock this morning you were prepared to snap your fingers and have a helicopter here by noon. Seven hours. Exactly half the time. But that was for something important, like getting me down to London to give me the bawling out of a lifetime before firing me.’

‘Call me at midnight, Caroline. I hope to God you know what you are doing.’

I said: ‘Yes, sir,’ and hung up. I didn’t mean, Yes, sir, I knew what I was doing, I meant, Yes, sir, I hoped to God I knew what I was doing.

If the carpet in the Shangri-la’s saloon had cost a penny under five thousand pounds, then old Skouras must have picked it up secondhand somewhere. Twenty by thirty, bronze and russet and gold, but mainly gold, it flowed across the deck like a field of ripe corn, an illusion heightened both by its depth and the impediment it offered to progress. You had to wade through the damn’ thing. I’d never seen an item of furnishing like it in my life except for the curtains that covered two-thirds of the bulkhead space. The curtains made the carpet look rather shoddy. Persian or Afghanistan, with a heavy gleaming weave that gave a shimmering shot-silk effect with every little movement of the Shangri-la, they stretched all the way from deckhead to deck. What little of the bulkheads that could be seen were sheathed in a satiny tropical hardwood, the same wood as was used for the magnificent bar that took up most of the after bulkhead of the saloon. The opulently upholstered settees and armchairs and bar-stools, dark green leather with gold piping, would have cost another fortune, even the trade-in value of the beaten copper tables scattered carelessly about the carpet would have fed a family of five for a year. At the Savoy Grill.

On the port bulkhead hung two Cézannes, on the starboard two Renoirs. The pictures were a mistake. In that room they didn’t have a chance. They’d have felt more at home in the galley.

So would I. So, I was pretty sure, would Hunslett. It wasn’t merely that our sports coats and Paisley scarves clashed violently with the decor in general and the black ties and dinner jackets of our host and his other guests in particular. It wasn’t even that the general run of conversation might have been specifically designed to reduce Hunslett and myself to our proper status of artisans and pretty inferior artisans at that. All this talk about debentures and mergers and cross-options and takeovers and millions and millions of dollars has a pretty demoralising effect on the lower classes, but you didn’t need to have the I.Q. of a genius to realise that this line of talk wasn’t being aimed specifically at us; to the lads with the black ties, debentures and takeovers were the stuff and staff of life and so a principal staple of conversation. Besides, this wish to be somewhere else obviously didn’t apply only to us: at least two others, a bald-headed, goatee-bearded merchant banker by the name of Henri Biscarte and a big bluff Scots lawyer by the name of MacCallum were just as uncomfortable as I felt, but showed it a great deal more.

A silent movie picture of the scene would have given no clue as to what was wrong. Everything was so very comfortable, so very civilised. The deep armchairs invited complete relaxation. A blazing if superfluous log-fire burned in the hearth. Skouras was the smiling and genial host to the life. The glasses were never empty – the press of an unheard bell brought a white-jacketed steward who silently refilled glasses and as silently departed again. All so urbane, so wealthy, so pleasantly peaceful. Until you cut in the movie soundtrack, that was. That was when you wished you were in the galley.

Skouras had his glass refilled for the fourth time in the forty-five minutes we had been there, smiled at his wife sitting in the armchair across the fire from him, lifted his glass in a toast. ‘To you, my dear. To your patience with putting up with us all so well. A most boring trip for you, most boring. I congratulate you.’

I looked at Charlotte Skouras. Everybody looked at Charlotte Skouras. There was nothing unusual in that, millions of people had looked at Charlotte Skouras when she had been the most soughtafter actress in Europe. Even in those days she’d been neither particularly young nor beautiful, she didn’t have to be because she’d been a great actress and not a beautiful but bone-headed movie star. Now she was even older and less good-looking and her figure was beginning to go. But men still looked at her. She was somewhere in her late thirties, but they would still be looking at her when she was in her bath-chair. She had that kind of face. A worn face, a used face, a face that had been used for living and laughing and thinking and feeling and suffering, a face with brown tired wise-knowing eyes a thousand years old, a face that had more quality and character in every little line and wrinkle – and heaven only knew there was no shortage of these – than in a whole battalion of the fringe-haired darlings of contemporary society, the ones in the glossy magazines, the ones who week after week stared out at you with their smooth and beautiful faces, with their beautiful and empty eyes. Put them in the same room as Charlotte Skouras and no one would ever have seen them. Mass-produced carbon copies of chocolate boxes are no kind of competition at all for a great painter’s original in oils.

‘You are very kind, Anthony’ Charlotte Skouras had a deep slow slightly-foreign accented voice, and, just then, a tired strained smile that accorded well with the darkness under the brown eyes. ‘But I am never bored. Truly. You know that.’

‘With this lot as guests?’ Skouras’s smile was as broad as ever. ‘A Skouras board meeting in the Western Isles instead of your blueblooded favourites on a cruise in the Levant? Take Dollmann here.’ He nodded to the man by his side, a tall thin bespectacled character with receding thin dark hair who looked as if he needed a shave but didn’t. John Dollmann, the managing director of the Skouras shipping lines. ‘Eh, John? How do you rate yourself as a substitute for young Viscount Horley? The one with sawdust in his head and fifteen million in the bank?’

‘Poorly, I’m afraid. Sir Anthony.’ Dollmann was as urbane as Skouras himself, as apparently unconscious of anything untoward in the atmosphere. ‘Very poorly. I’ve a great deal more brains, a great deal less money and I’ve no pretensions to being a gay and witty conversationalist.’

‘Young Horley was rather the life and soul of the party, wasn’t he? Especially when I wasn’t around,’ Skouras added thoughtfully. He looked at me. ‘You know him, Mr Petersen?’

‘I’ve heard of him. I don’t move in those circles, Sir Anthony.’ Urbane as all hell, that was me.

‘Um.’ Skouras looked quizzically at the two men sitting close by myself. One, rejoicing in the good Anglo-Saxon name of Hermann Lavorski, a big jovial twinkling-eyed man with a great booming laugh and an inexhaustible supply of risqué stories, was, I’d been told, his accountant and financial adviser. I’d never seen anyone less like an accountant and finance wizard, so that probably made him the best in the business. The other, a middle-aged, balding, Sphinxfaced character with a drooping handle-bar moustache of the type once sported by Wild Bill Hickock and a head that cried out for a bowler hat, was Lord Charnley, who, in spite of his title, found it necessary to work as a broker in the City to make ends meet. ‘And how would you rate our two good friends here, Charlotte?’ This with another wide and friendly smile at his wife.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’ Charlotte Skouras looked at her husband steadily, not smiling.

‘Come now, come now, of course you do understand. I’m still talking about the poor company I provide for so young and attractive a woman as you.’ He looked at Hunslett. ‘She is a young and atractive woman, don’t you think, Mr Hunslett?’

‘Well, now.’ Hunslett leaned back in his armchair, fingers judiciously steepled, an urbanely sophisticated man entering into the spirit of things. ‘What is youth, Sir Anthony? I don’t know.’ He smiled across at Charlotte Skouras. ‘Mrs Skouras will never be old. As for attractive – well, it’s a bit superfluous to ask that. For ten million European men – and for myself – Mrs Skouras was the most attractive actress of her time.’

‘Was, Mr Hunslett? Was?’ Old Skouras was leaning forward in his chair now, the smile a shadow of its former self. ‘But now, Mr Hunslett?’

‘Mrs Skouras’s producers must have employed the worst cameramen in Europe.’ Hunslett’s dark, saturnine face gave nothing away. He smiled at Charlotte Skouras. ‘If I may be pardoned so personal a remark.’

If I’d had a sword in my hand and the authority to use it, I’d have knighted Hunslett on the spot. After, of course, having first had a swipe at Skouras.

‘The days of chivalry are not yet over,’ Skouras smiled. I saw MacCallum and Biscarte, the bearded banker, stir uncomfortably in their seats. It was damnably awkward. Skouras went on: ‘I only meant, my dear, that Charnley and Lavorski here are poor substitutes for sparkling young company like Welshblood, the young American oil man, or Domenico, that Spanish count with the passion for amateur astronomy. The one who used to take you on the afterdeck to point out the stars in the ægean.’ He looked again at Charnley and Lavorski. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, you just wouldn’t do at all.’

‘I don’t know if I’m all that insulted,’ Lavorski said comfortably. ‘Charnley and I have our points. Um – I haven’t seen young Domenico around for quite some time.’ He’d have made an excellent stage feed man, would Lavorski, trained to say his lines at exactly the right time.

‘You won’t see him around for a very much longer time,’ Skouras said grimly. ‘At least not in my yacht or in any of my houses.’ A pause. ‘Or near anything I own. I promised him I’d see the colour of his noble Castilian blood if I ever clapped eyes on him again.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘I must apologise for even bringing that nonentity’s name into the conversation. Mr Hunslett. Mr Petersen. Your glasses are empty.’

‘You’ve been very kind, Sir Anthony. We’ve enjoyed ourselves immensely.’ Bluff old, stupid old Calvert, too obtuse to notice what was going on. ‘But we’d like to get back. It’s blowing up badly to-night and Hunslett and I would like to move the Firecrest into the shelter of Garve Island.’ I rose to a window, pulling one of his Afghanistan or whatever curtains to one side. It felt as heavy as a stage fire curtain, no wonder he needed stabilisers with all that topweight on. ‘That’s why we left our riding and cabin lights on. To see if we’d moved. She dragged a fair bit earlier this evening.’

‘So soon? So soon?’ He sounded genuinely disappointed. ‘But of course, if you’re worried -’ He pressed a button, not the one for the steward, and the saloon door opened. The man who entered was a small weatherbeaten character with two gold stripes on his sleeves. Captain Black, the Shangri-la’s captain. He’d accompanied Skouras when we’d been briefly shown around the Shangri-la after arriving aboard, a tour that had included an inspection of the smashed radio transmitter. No question about it, their radio was well and truly out of action.

‘Ah, Captain Black. Have the tender brought alongside at once, will you. Mr Petersen and Mr Hunslett are anxious to get back to the Firecrest as soon as possible.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid there’ll be a certain delay, Sir Anthony.’

‘Delay?’ Old Skouras could put a frown in his voice without putting one on his face.

‘The old trouble, I’m afraid,’ Captain Black said apologetically.

‘Those bloody carburettors,’ Skouras swore. ‘You were right, Captain Black, you were right. Last tender I’ll ever have with petrol engines fitted. Let me know as soon as she’s all right. And detail one of the hands to keep an eye on the Firecrest to see that she doesn’t lose position. Mr Petersen’s afraid she’ll drag.’

‘Don’t worry, sir.’ I didn’t know whether Black was speaking to Skouras or myself. ‘She’ll be all right.’

He left. Skouras spent some time in extolling diesel engines and cursing petrol ones, pressed some more whisky on Hunslett and myself and ignored my protests, which were based less on any dislike of whisky in general or Skouras in particular than on the fact that I didn’t consider it very good preparation for the night that lay ahead of me. Just before nine o’clock he pressed a button by his arm rest and the doors of a cabinet automatically opened to reveal a 23-inch TV set.

Uncle Arthur hadn’t let me down. The newscaster gave quite a dramatic account of the last message received from the T.S.D.Y. Moray Rose, reported not under command and making water fast somewhere to the south of the Island of Skye. A full-scale air and sea search, starting at dawn the next day, was promised.

Skouras switched the set off. ‘The sea’s crowded with damn’ fools who should never be allowed outside a canal basin. What’s the latest on the weather? Anyone know?’

‘There was a Hebrides Force 8 warning on the 1758 shipping forecast,’ Charlotte Skouras said quietly. ‘South-west, they said.’

‘Since when did you start listening to forecasts?’ Skouras demanded. ‘Or to the radio at all? But of course, my dear, I’d forgotten. Not so much to occupy your time these days, have you? Force 8 and south-west, eh? And the yacht would be coming down from the Kyle of Lochalsh, straight into it. They must be mad. And they have a radio – they sent a message. That makes them stark staring lunatics. Whether they didn’t listen to the forecast or whether they listened and still set out, they must have been lunatics. Get them everywhere.’

‘Some of those lunatics may be dying, drowning now. Or already drowned,’ Charlotte Skouras said. The shadows under the brown eyes seemed bigger and darker than ever, but there was still life in those brown eyes.

For perhaps five seconds Skouras, face set, stared at her and I felt that if I snapped my fingers there would be a loud tinkling or crashing sound, the atmosphere was as brittle as that. Then he turned away with a laugh and said to me: ‘The little woman, eh, Petersen? The little mother – only she has no children. Tell me, Petersen, are you married?’

I smiled at him while debating the wisdom of throwing my whisky glass in his face or clobbering him with something heavy, then decided against it. Apart from the fact that it would only make matters worse, I didn’t fancy the swim back to the Firecrest. So I smiled and smiled, feeling the knife under the cloak, and said: ‘Afraid not. Sir Arthur.’

‘Afraid not? Afraid not?’ He laughed his hearty good-fellowship laugh, the kind I can’t stand, and went on cryptically: ‘You’re not so young to be sufficiently naive to talk that way, come now, are you, Mr Petersen?’

‘Thirty-eight and never had a chance,’ I said cheerfully. ‘The old story, Sir Anthony. The ones I’d have wouldn’t have me. And viceversa.’ Which wasn’t quite true. The driver of a Bentley with, the doctors had estimated, certainly not less than a bottle of whisky inside him, had ended my marriage before it was two months old – and also accounted for the savagely scarred left side of my face. It was then that Uncle Arthur had prised me from my marine salvage business and since then no girl with any sense would ever have contemplated marrying me if she’d known what my job was. What made it even more difficult was the fact that I couldn’t tell her in the first place. And the scars didn’t help.

‘You don’t look a fool to me,’ Skouras smiled. ‘If I may say so without offence.’ That was rich, old Skouras worrying about giving offence. The zip-fastener of a mouth softened into what, in view of his next words, I correctly interpreted in advance as being a nostalgic smile. ‘I’m joking, of course. It’s not all that bad. A man must have his fun. Charlotte?’

‘Yes?’ The brown eyes wary, watchful.

‘There’s something I want from our stateroom. Would you –?’

‘The stewardess. Couldn’t she –?’

‘This is personal, my dear. And, as Mr Hunslett has pointed out, at least by inference, you’re a good deal younger than I am.’ He smiled at Hunslett to show that no offence was intended. ‘The picture on my dressing-table.’

‘What!’ She suddenly sat forward in her armchair, hands reaching for the fronts of the arm rests as if about to pull herself to her feet. Something touched a switch inside Skouras and the smiling eyes went bleak and hard and cold, changing their direction of gaze fractionally. It lasted only a moment because his wife had caught it even before I did, because she sat forward abruptly, smoothing down the short sleeves of her dress over sun–tanned arms. Quick and smooth, but not quite quick enough. For a period of not more than two seconds the sleeves had ridden nearly all the way up to her shoulders – and nearly four inches below those shoulders each arm had been encircled by a ring of bluish-red bruises. A continuous ring. Not the kind of bruises that are made by blows or finger pressure. The kind that are made by a rope.

Skouras was smiling again, pressing the bell to summon the steward. Charlotte Skouras rose without a further word and hurried quickly from the room. I could have wondered if I’d only imagined this momentary tableau I’d seen, but I knew damned well I hadn’t. I was paid not to have an imagination of that kind.

She was back inside a moment, a picture frame maybe six by eight in her hand. She handed it to Skouras and sat down quickly in her own chair. This time she was very careful with the sleeves, without seeming to be.

‘My wife, gentlemen,’ Skouras said. He rose from his armchair and handed round a photograph of a dark-eyed, dark-haired woman with a smiling face that emphasised the high Slavonic cheek-bones. ‘My first wife. Anna. We were married for thirty years. Marriage isn’t all that bad. That’s Anna, gentlemen.’

If I’d a gramme of human decency left in me I should have knocked him down and trampled all over him. For a man to state openly in company that he kept the picture of his former wife by his bedside and then impose upon his present wife the final and utter humiliation and degradation of fetching it was beyond belief. That and the rope-burns on his present wife’s arms made him almost too good for shooting. But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do anything about it. The old coot’s heart was in his voice and his eyes. If this was acting, it was the most superb acting I had ever seen, the tear that trickled down from his right eye would have rated an Oscar any year since cinema had begun. And if it wasn’t acting then it was just the picture of a sad and lonely man, no longer young, momentarily oblivious of this world, gazing desolately at the only thing in this world that he loved, that he ever had loved or ever would love, something gone beyond recall. And that was what it was.

If it hadn’t been for the other picture, the picture of the still, proud, humiliated Charlotte Skouras staring sightlessly into the fire, I might have felt a lump in my own throat. As it happened, I’d no difficulty in restraining my emotion. One man couldn’t, however, but it wasn’t sympathy for Skouras that got the better of him. MacCallum, the Scots lawyer, pale-faced with outrage, rose to his feet, said something in a thick voice about not feeling well, wished us good night and left. The bearded banker left on his heels. Skouras didn’t see them go, he’d fumbled his way back to his seat and was staring before him, his eyes as sightless as those of his wife. Like his wife, he was seeing something in the depths of the flames. The picture lay face down on his knee. He didn’t even look up when Captain Black came in and told us the tender was ready to take us back to the Firecrest.

When the tender had left us aboard our own boat we waited till it was half-way back to the Shangri-la, closed the saloon door, unbuttoned the studded carpet and pulled it back. Carefully I lifted a sheet of newspaper and there, on the thin film of flour spread out on the paper below it, were four perfect sets of footprints. We tried our two for’ard cabins, the engine-room and the after cabin, and the silk threads we’d so laboriously fitted before our departure to the Shangri-la were all snapped.

Somebody, two at least to judge from the footprints, had been through the entire length of the Firecrest. They could have had at least a clear hour for the job, so Hunslett and I spent a clear hour trying to find out why they had been there. We found nothing, no reason at all.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least we know now why they were so anxious to have us aboard the Shangri-la.’

‘To give them a clear field here? That’s why the tender wasn’t ready – it was here.’

‘What else?’

‘There’s something else. I can’t put my finger on it. But there’s something else.’

‘Let me know in the morning. When you call Uncle at midnight, ask him to dig up what information he can on those characters on the Shangri-la and about the physician who attended the late Lady Skouras. There’s a lot I want to know about the late Lady Skouras.’ I told him what I wanted to know. ‘Meantime, let’s shift this boat over to Garve Island. I’ve got to be up at three-thirty -you’ve all the time for sleep in the world.’

I should have listened to Hunslett. Again I should have listened to Hunslett. And again for Hunslett’s sake. But I didn’t know then that Hunslett was to have time for all the sleep in the world.

FOUR

Wednesday: 5 a.m. – dusk

As the saying went in those parts, it was as black as the earl of hell’s waistcoat. The sky was black, the woods were black, and the icy heavy driving rain reduced what little visibility there was to just nothing at all. The only way to locate a tree was to walk straight into it, the only way to locate a dip in the ground was to fall into it. When Hunslett had woken me at three-thirty with a cup of tea he told me that when he’d been speaking to Uncle Arthur at midnight – I’d been asleep – he was left in no doubt that although the helicopter had been laid on Uncle had been most unenthusiastic and considered the whole thing a waste of time. It was a rare occasion indeed when I ever felt myself in total agreement with Uncle Arthur but this was one of those rare occasions.

It was beginning to look as if I’d never even find that damned helicopter anyway. I wouldn’t have believed that it could have been so difficult to find one’s way across five miles of wooded island at night-time. It wasn’t even as if I had to contend with rivers or rushing torrents or cliffs or precipitous clefts in the ground or any kind of dense or tangled vegetation. Torbay was just a moderately wooded gently sloping island and crossing from one side to the other of it would have been only an easy Sunday afternoon stroll for a fairly active octogenarian. I was no octogenarian, though I felt like one, but then this wasn’t a Sunday afternoon.

The trouble had started from the moment I’d landed on the Torbay shore opposite Garve Island. From the moment I’d tried to land. Wearing rubber-soled shoes and trying to haul a rubber dinghy over slippery seaweed-covered rocks, some as much as six feet in diameter, to a shore-line twenty interminable yards away is, even in broad daylight, a bone-breaking job: in pitch darkness it’s almost as good a way as any for a potential suicide to finish off the job with efficiency and dispatch. The third time I fell I smashed my torch. Several bone-jarring bruises later my wrist-compass went the same way. The attached depth-gauge, almost inevitably, remained intact. A depth-gauge is a great help in finding your way through a trackless wood at night.

After deflating and caching the dinghy and pump I’d set off along the shore-line remote from the village of Torbay. It was logical that if I followed this long enough I’d be bound to come to the sandy cove at the far end of the island where I was to rendezvous with the helicopter. It was also logical that, if the tree line came right down to the shore, if that shore was heavily indented with little coves and if I couldn’t see where I was going, I’d fall into the sea with a fair degree of regularity. After I’d hauled myself out for the third time I gave up and struck inland. It wasn’t because I was afraid of getting wet – as I hadn’t seen much point in wearing a scuba suit for walking through a wood and sitting in a helicopter I’d left it aboard and was already soaked to the skin. Nor was it because of the possibility that the hand distress flares I’d brought along for signalling the helicopter pilot, wrapped though they were in oilskin, might not stand up to this treatment indefinitely. The reason why I was now blundering my blind and painful way through the wood was that if I’d stuck to the shoreline my rate of progress there wouldn’t have brought me to the rendezvous before midday.

My only guides were the wind-lashed rain and the lie of the land. The cove I was heading for lay to the east, the near-gale force wind was almost due west, so as long as I kept that cold stinging rain on the back of my neck I’d be heading in approximately the right direction: as a check on that, the Island of Torbay has a spinal hog’s back, covered in pines to the top, running its east-west length and when I felt the land falling away to one side or the other it meant I was wandering. But the rain-laden wind swirled unpredictably as the wood alternately thinned and became dense again, the hog’s back had offshoots and irregularities and as a result of the combination of the two I lost a great deal of time. Half an hour before dawn – by my watch, that was, it was still as black as the midnight hour – I was beginning to wonder if I could possibly make it in time.

And I was beginning to wonder if the helicopter could make it either. There was no doubt in my mind that it could land – that eastern cove was perfectly sheltered – but whether it could get there at all was another question. I had a vague idea that helicopters were unmanageable above certain wind speeds but had no idea what those wind speeds were. And if the helicopter didn’t turn up, then I was faced with the long cold wet trudge back to where I had hidden the dinghy and then an even longer, colder and hungry wait until darkness fell at night and I could get out to the Firecrest unseen. Even now, I had only twenty-four hours left. By nightfall I would have only twelve. I began to run.

Fifteen minutes and God knows how many iron-hard tree trunks later I heard it, faint and intermittent at first, then gradually swelling in strength – the clattering roar of a helicopter engine. He was early, damn him, he was far too early, he’d land there, find the place deserted and take off for base again. It says much for my sudden desperate state of mind that it never occurred to me how he could even begin to locate, far less land in, that sandy cove in a condition of darkness that was still only a degree less than total. For a moment I even contemplated lighting a flare to let the pilot know that I was at least there or thereabouts and had the flare half-way out of my pocket before I shoved it back again. The arrangement had been that the flare would be lit only to show the landing strip in the sand: if I lit one there and then he might head for it, strike the tops of the pine trees and that would be the end of that.

I ran even faster. It had been years since I’d run more than a couple of hundred yards and my lungs were already wheezing and gasping like a fractured bellows in a blacksmith’s shop. But I ran as hard as I could. I cannoned into trees, I tripped over roots, fell into gullies, had my face whipped time and again by low-spreading branches, but above all I cannoned into those damned trees. I stretched my arms before me but it did no good, I ran into them all the same. I picked up a broken branch I’d tripped over and held it in front of me but no matter how I pointed it the trees always seemed to come at me from another direction. I hit every tree in the Island of Torbay. I felt the way a bowling ball must feel after a hard season in a bowling alley, the only difference, and a notable one, being that whereas the ball knocked the skittles down, the trees knocked me down. Once, twice, three times I heard the sound of the helicopter engine disappearing away to the east, and the third time I was sure he was gone for good. But each time it came back. The sky was lightening to the east now, but still I couldn’t see the helicopter: for the pilot, everything below would still be as black as night.

The ground gave way beneath my feet and I fell. I braced myself, arms outstretched, for the impact as I struck the other side of the gully. But my reaching hands found nothing. No impact. I kept on falling, rolling and twisting down a heathery slope, and for the first time that night I would have welcomed the appearance of a pine tree, any kind of tree, to stop my progress. I don’t know how many trees there were on that slope, I missed the lot. If it was a gully, it was the biggest gully on the Island of Torbay. But it wasn’t a gully at all, it was the end of Torbay. I rolled and bumped over a sudden horizontal grassy bank and landed on my back in soft wet sand. Even while I was whooping and gasping and trying to get my knocked-out breath back into my lungs I still had time to appreciate the fortunate fact that kindly providence and a few million years had changed the jagged rocks that must once have fringed that shore into a nice soft yielding sandy beach.

I got to my feet. This was the place, all right. There was only one such sandy bay, I’d been told, in the east of the Isle of Torbay and there was now enough light for me to see that this was indeed just that, though a lot smaller than it appeared on the chart. The helicopter was coming in again from the east, not, as far as I could judge, more than three or four hundred feet up. I ran half-way down to the water’s edge, pulled a hand flare from my pocket, slid away the waterproof covering and tore off the ignition strip. It flared into life at once, a dazzling blue-white magnesium light so blinding that I had to clap my free hand over my eyes. It lasted for only thirty seconds, but that was enough. Even as it fizzled and sputtered its acrid and nostril-wrinkling way to extinction the helicopter was almost directly overhead. Two vertically-downward pointing searchlights, mounted fore and aft on the helicopter, switched on simultaneously, interlocking pools of brilliance on the pale white sand. Twenty seconds later the skids sank into the soft sand, the rackety clangour of the motor died away and the blades idled slowly to a stop. I’d never been in a helicopter in my life but I’d seen plenty: in the half-darkness this looked like the biggest one I’d ever seen

The right-hand door opened and a torch shone in my face as I approached. A voice, Welsh as the Rhondda Valley, said: ‘Morning. You Calvert?’

‘Me. Can I come aboard?’

‘How do I know you’re Calvert?’

‘I’m telling you. Don’t come the hard man, laddie. You’ve no authority to make an identification check.’

‘Have you no proof? No papers?’

‘Have you no sense? Haven’t you enough sense to know that there are some people who never carry any means of identification? Do you think I just happened to be standing here, five miles from nowhere, and that I just happened to be carrying flares in my pocket? You want to join the ranks of the unemployed before sunset?’ A very auspicious beginning to our association.

‘I was told to be careful.’ He was as worried and upset as a cat snoozing on a sun-warmed wall. Still a marked lack of cordiality. ‘Lieutenant Scott Williams, Fleet Air Arm. Takes an admiral to sack me. Step up.’

I stepped up, closed the door and sat. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He flicked on an overhead light and said: ‘What the hell’s happened to your face?’

‘What’s the matter with my face?’

‘Blood. Hundreds of little scratches.’

‘Pine needles.’ I told him what had happened. ‘Why a machine this size? You could ferry a battalion in this one.’

‘Fourteen men, to be precise. I do lots of crazy things, Calvert, but I don’t fly itsy-bitsy two-bit choppers in this kind of weather. Be blown out of the sky. With only two of us, the long-range tanks are full.’

‘You can fly all day?’

‘More or less. Depends how fast we go. What do you want from me?’

‘Civility, for a start. Or don’t you like early morning rising?’

‘I’m an Air-Sea Rescue pilot, Calvert. This is the only machine on the base big enough to go out looking in this kind of weather. And I should be out looking, not out on some cloak-and-dagger joy-ride. I don’t care how important it is, there’s people maybe clinging to a life-raft fifty miles out in the Atlantic. That’s my job. But I’ve got my orders. What do you want?’

‘The Moray Rose?’

‘You heard? Yes, that’s her.’

‘She doesn’t exist. She never has existed.’

‘What are you talking about? The news broadcasts -’

‘I’ll tell you as much as you need to know, Lieutenant. It’s essential that I be able to search this area without arousing suspicion. The only way that can be done is by inventing an ironclad reason. The foundering Moray Rose is that reason. So we tell the tale.’

‘Phoney?’

‘Phoney.’

‘You can fix it?’ he said slowly. ‘You can fix a news broadcast?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe you could get me fired at that.’ He smiled for the first time. ‘Sorry, sir. Lieutenant Williams – Scotty to you – is now his normal cheerful willing self. What’s on?’

‘Know the coast-lines and islands of this area well?’

‘From the air?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been here twenty months now. Air-Sea Rescue and in between army and navy exercises and hunting for lost climbers. Most of my work is with the Marine Commandos. I know this area at least as well as any man alive.’

‘I’m looking for a place where a man could hide a boat. A fairly big boat. Forty feet – maybe fifty. Might be in a big boathouse, might be under over-hanging trees up some creek, might even be in some tiny secluded harbour normally invisible from the sea. Between Islay and Skye.’

‘Well, now, is that all. Have you any idea how many hundreds of miles of coastline there is in that lot, taking in all the islands? Maybe thousands? How long do I have for this job? A month?’

‘By sunset to-day. Now, wait. We can cut out all centres of population, and by that I mean anything with more than two or three houses together. We can cut out known fishing grounds. We can cut out regular steamship routes. Does that help?’

‘A lot. What are we really looking for?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘Okay, okay, so mine is not to reason why. Any idea where you’d like to start, any ideas for limiting the search?’

‘Let’s go due east to the mainland. Twenty miles up the coast, then twenty south. Then we’ll try Torbay Sound and the Isle of Torbay. Then the islands farther west and north.’

Torbay Sound has a steamer service.’

‘Sorry, I should have said a daily service. Torbay has a bi-weekly service.’

‘Fasten your seat-belt and get on those earphones. We’re going to get thrown around quite a bit to-day. I hope you’re a good sailor.’

‘And the earphones?’ They were the biggest I’d ever seen, four inches wide with inch-thick linings of what looked like sorbo rubber. A spring loaded swing microphone was attached to the headband.

‘For the ears,’ the lieutenant said kindly. ‘So that you don’t get perforated drums. And so you won’t be deaf for a week afterwards. If you can imagine yourself inside a steel drum in the middle of a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering outside, you’ll have some idea of what the racket is like once we start up.’

Even with the earphone muffs on, it sounded exactly like being in a steel drum in a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering on the outside. The earphones didn’t seem to have the slightest effect at all, the noise came hammering and beating at you through every facial and cranial bone, but on the one and very brief occasion when I cautiously lifted one phone to find out what the noise was like without them and if they were really doing any good at all, I found out exactly what Lieutenant Williams meant about perforated drums. He hadn’t been joking. But even with them on, after a couple of hours my head felt as if it were coming apart. I looked occasionally at the dark lean face of the young Welshman beside me, a man who had to stand this racket day in, day out, the year round. He looked quite sane to me. I’d have been in a padded cell in a week.

I didn’t have to be in that helicopter a week. Altogether, I spent eight hours’ flying time in it and it felt like a leap year.

Our first run northwards up the mainland coast produced what was to be the first of many false alarms that day. Twenty minutes after leaving Torbay we spotted a river, a small one but still a river, flowing into the sea. We followed it upstream for a mile, then suddenly the trees, crowding down close to the banks on both sides, met in the middle where the river seemed to run through some rocky gorge.

I shouted into the microphone: ‘I want to see what’s there.’

Williams nodded. ‘We passed a place a quarter of a mile back. I’ll set you down.’

‘You’ve got a winch. Couldn’t you lower me?’

‘When you know as much as I do about the effect of forty to fifty miles an hour winds in steep-sided valley,’ he said, ‘you’ll never talk about such things. Not even in a joke. I want to take this kite home again.’

So he turned back and set me down without much difficulty in the shelter of a bluff. Five minutes later I’d reached the beginning of the overhanging stretch. Another five minutes and I was back in the helicopter.

‘What luck?’ the lieutenant asked.

‘No luck. An ancient oak tree right across the river, just at the entrance to the overhang.’

‘Could be shifted.’

‘It weighs two or three tons, it’s imbedded feet deep in the mud and it’s been there for years.’

‘Well, well, we can’t be right first time, every time.’

A few more minutes and another river mouth. It hardly looked big enough to take a boat of any size, but we turned up anyway. Less than half a mile from its mouth the river foamed whitely as it passed through rapids. We turned back.

By the time it was fully daylight we had reached the northern limit of possibility in this area. Steep-sided mountains gave way to precipitous cliffs that plunged almost vertically into the sea.

‘How far does this go north?’ I asked.

‘Ten, twelve miles to the head of Loch Lairg.’

‘Know it?’

‘Flown up there a score of times.’

‘Caves?’

‘Nary a cave.’

I hadn’t really thought that there would be. ‘How about the other side?’ I pointed to the west where the mountainous shore-line, not five miles away yet barely visible through the driving rain and low scudding cloud, ran in an almost sheer drop from the head of Loch Lairg to the entrance to Torbay Sound.

‘Even the gulls can’t find a foothold there. Believe me.’

I believed him. We flew back the way we had come as far as our starting point on the coast, then continued southwards. From the Isle of Torbay to the mainland the sea was an almost unbroken mass of foaming white, big white-capped rollers marching eastwards across the darkened firth, long creamy lines of spume torn from the wavetops veining the troughs between. There wasn’t a single craft in sight, even the big drifters had stayed at home, it was as bad as that. In that buffeting gale-force wind our big helicopter was having a bad time of it now, violently shaking and swaying like an out-of-control express train in the last moments before it leaves the track: one hour’s flying in those conditions had turned me against helicopters for life. But when I thought of what it would be like down there in a boat in that seething maelstrom of a firth I could feel a positive bond of attachment growing between me and that damned helicopter.

We flew twenty miles south – if the way we were being jarred and flung through the air could be called flying – but covered sixty miles in that southing. Every little sound between the islands and the mainland, every natural harbour, every sea-loch and inlet had to be investigated. We flew very low most of the time, not much above two hundred feet: sometimes we were forced down to a hundred feet – so heavy was the rain and so powerful the wind now battering against the streaming windscreen that the wipers were almost useless and we had to get as low as possible to see anything at all. As it was, I don’t think we missed a yard of the coastline of the mainland or the close in-shore islands. We saw everything. And we saw nothing.

I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. The day wearing on and nothing achieved. I said: ‘How much more of this can the helicopter stand?’

‘I’ve been 150 miles out over the Atlantic in weather a damn’ sight worse than this.’ Lieutenant Williams showed no signs of strain or anxiety or fatigue, if anything he seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘The point is how much more can you stand?’

‘Very little. But we’ll have to. Back to where you picked me up and we’ll make a circuit of the coast of Torbay. South coast first, then north up the west coast, then east past Torbay and down the southern shore of the Sound.’

‘Yours to command.’ Williams brought the helicopter round to the north-west in a swinging side-slipping movement that didn’t do my stomach any good. ‘You’ll find coffee and sandwiches in that box there.’ I left the sandwiches and coffee where they were.

It took us almost forty minutes to cover the twenty-five miles to the eastern tip of the Isle of Torbay, that wind took us two steps back for every three forward. Visibility was so bad that Williams flew on instruments the whole way and with that violent cross-wind blowing he should have missed our target by miles. Instead he hit that sandy cove right on the nose as if he’d been flying in on a radio beacon. I was beginning to have a very great deal of confidence in Williams, a man who knew exactly what he was doing: I was beginning to have no confidence at all in myself and to wonder if I had any idea in the world what I was doing. I thought about Uncle Arthur and quickly decided I’d rather think about something else.

‘There,’ Williams pointed. We were about halfway along the south coast of Torbay. ‘A likely setup, wouldn’t you say?’

And a likely set-up it was. A large white three-story stone-built Georgian house, set in a clearing about a hundred yards back from and thirty yards above the shore. There are dozens of such houses scattered in the most unlikely positions in some of the most barren and desolate islands in the Hebrides. Heaven only knew who built them, why or how. But it wasn’t the house that was the focal point of interest in this case, it was the big boathouse on the edge of a tiny land-locked harbour. Without a further word from me Williams brought the big machine down neatly in the shelter of the trees behind the house.

I unwrapped the polythene bag I’d been carrying under my shirt. Two guns. The Luger I stuck in my pocket, the little German Lilliput I fixed to the spring clip in my left sleeve. Williams stared unconcernedly ahead and began to whistle to himself.

Nobody had lived in that house for years. Part of the roof had fallen in, years of salt air erosion had removed all paintwork and the rooms, when I looked in through the cracked and broken windows, were bare and crumbling with long strips of wall-paper lying on the floor. The path down to the little harbour was completely overgrown with moss. Every time my heel sunk into the path a deep muddy mark was left behind, the first made there for a long long time. The boat-shed was big enough, at least sixty by twenty, but that was all that could be said for it. The two big doors had three hinges apiece and two huge padlocks where they met in the middle. Padlocks and hinges alike were almost eaten through by rust. I could feel the heavy tug of the Luger in my pocket and the weight made me feel faintly ridiculous. I went back to the helicopter.

Twice more in the next twenty minutes we came across almost identical situations. Big white Georgian houses with big boathouses at their feet. I knew they would be false alarms but I had to check them both. False alarms they were. The last occupants of those houses had been dead before I’d been born. People had lived in those houses once, people with families, big families, people with money and ambition and confidence and no fear at all of the future. Not if they had built houses as big as those. And now the people were gone and all that was left were those crumbling, mouldering monuments to a misplaced faith in the future. Some years previously I’d seen houses in plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, houses widely dissimilar but exactly the same, white-porticoed ante-bellum houses hemmed in by evergreen live oaks and overgrown with long grey festoons of Spanish moss. Sadness and desolation and a world that was gone for ever.

The west coast of the Isle of Torbay yielded nothing. We gave the town of Torbay and Garve Island a wide berth and flew eastwards down the southern shore of the Sound with the gale behind us. Two small hamlets, each with its disintegrating pier. Beyond that, nothing.

We reached the sandy cove again, flew north till we reached the northern shore of the Sound, then westwards along this shore. We stopped twice, once to investigate a tree-overhung landlocked harbour less than forty yards in diameter, and again to investigate a small complex of industrial buildings which had once, so Williams said, produced a fine-quality sand that had been one of the ingredients in a famous brand of toothpaste. Again, nothing.

At the last place we stopped for five minutes. Lieutenant Williams said he was hungry. I wasn’t. I’d become used to the helicopter by now but I wasn’t hungry. It was midday. Half our time gone and nothing accomplished. And it was beginning to look very much as if nothing was going to be accomplished. Uncle Arthur would be pleased. I took the chart from Williams.

‘We have to pick and choose,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to take a chance. We’ll go up the Sound to Dolman Head, opposite Garve Island, then go up Loch Hynart.’ Loch Hynart was a seven mile long loch, winding and many-islanded, that ran more or less due east, nowhere more than half a mile wide, deep into the heart of the mountain massif. ‘Back to Dolman Point again then along the southern shore of the mainland peninsula again as far as Carrara Point. Then east along the southern shore of Loch Houron.’

‘Loch Houron,’ Williams nodded. ‘The wildest waters and the worst place for boats in the West of Scotland. Last place I’d go looking, Mr Calvert, that’s for sure. From all accounts you’ll find nothing there but wrecks and skeletons. There are more reefs and skerries and underwater rocks and overfalls and whirlpools and tidal races in twenty miles there than in the whole of the rest of Scotland. Local fishermen won’t go near the place.’ He pointed at the chart. ‘See this passage between Dubh Sgeir and Ballara Island, the two islands at the mouth of Loch Houron? That’s the most feared spot of all. You should see the grip the fishermen get on their whisky glasses when they talk about it. Beul nan Uamh, it’s called. The mouth of the grave.’

They’re a cheery lot, hereabouts. It’s time we were gone.’

The wind blew as strongly as ever, the sea below looked as wicked as ever, but the rain had stopped and that made our search all that much easier. The stretch of the Sound from the sand quarry to Dolman Point yielded nothing. Neither did Loch Hynart. Between Loch Hynart and Carrara Point, eight miles to the west, there were only two tiny hamlets crouched against the water’s edge, their backs to the barren hills behind, their inhabitants – if there were any inhabitants – subsisting on God alone knew what. Carrara Point was storm-torn desolation itself. Great jagged broken fissured cliffs, huge fanged rocks rising from the sea, massive Atlantic breakers smashing in hundred foot high spray against the cliffs, the rocks and the tiny-seeming lighthouse at the foot of the cliffs. If I were Sir Billy Butlin looking for the site for my latest holiday camp, I wouldn’t have spent too much time on Carrara Point.

We turned north now, then north-east, then east, along the southern shore of Loch Houron.

Many places have evil reputations. Few, at first seeing, live up to those reputations. But there are a few. In Scotland, the Pass of Glencoe, the scene of the infamous massacre, is one of them. The Pass of Brander is another. And Loch Houron was beyond all doubt another.

It required no imagination at all to see this as a dark and deadly and dangerous place. It looked dark and deadly and dangerous. The shores were black and rocky and precipitous and devoid of any form of vegetation at all. The four islands strung out in a line to the east were a splendid match for the hospitable appearance of the shores. In the far distance the northern and the southern shores of the loch came close together and vanished in a towering vertical cleft in the sinister brooding mountains. In the lee of the islands the loch was black as midnight but elsewhere it was a seething boiling white, the waters wickedly swirling, churning, spinning in evil-looking whirlpools as it passed across overfalls or forced its way through the narrow channels between the islands or between the islands and the shore. Water in torment. In the Beul nan Uamh – the mouth of the grave – between the first two islands the rushing leaping milkwhite waters looked like floodwater in the Mackenzie river rapids in springtime, when the snows melt. A yachtsman’s paradise. Only a madman would take his boat into these waters.

Apparently there were still a few madmen around. We’d just left the first of the islands, Dubh Sgeir, to port, when I caught sight of a narrow break in the cliffs on the southern mainland. A small rock-girt bay, if bay it could be called, about the size of a couple of tennis courts, almost completely enclosed from the sea, the entrance couldn’t have been more than ten yards wide. I glanced at the chart – Little Horseshoe Bay, it was called. Not original, but very apt. There was a boat in there, a fairly big one, a converted M.F.V. by the looks of her, anchored fore and aft in the middle of the bay. Behind the bay was a little plateau, mossy or grass-covered, I couldn’t tell which, and, behind that, what looked like a dried-up river bed rising steeply into the hills behind. On the little plateau were four khaki-coloured tents, with men working at them.

‘This could be it?’ Williams said.

‘This could be it.’

This wasn’t it. A glance at the thin, wispy-bearded, pebblebespectacled lad who came hurrying forward to greet me when I stepped on to the ground was all the proof I required that this was indeed not it. Another glance at the seven or eight bearded, scarved and duffel-coated characters behind him who had not, as I’d thought, been working but were struggling to prevent their tents from being blown away by the wind, was almost superfluous proof. That lot couldn’t have hi-jacked a rowing boat. The M.F.V., I could see now, was down by the stern and listing heavily to starboard.

‘Hallo, hallo, hallo,’ said the character with the wispy beard. ‘Good afternoon, good afternoon. By Jove, are we glad to see you!’

I looked at him, shook the outstretched hand, glanced at the listing boat and said mildly: ‘You may be shipwrecked, but those are hardly what I’d call desperate straits. You’re not on a deserted island. You’re on the mainland. Help is at hand!’

‘Oh, we know where we are all right.’ He waved a deprecating hand. ‘We put in here three days ago but I’m afraid our boat was holed in a storm during the night. Most unfortunate, most inconvenient.’

‘Holed as she lay there? Just as she’s moored now?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Bad luck. Oxford or Cambridge?’

‘Oxford, of course.’ He seemed a bit huffed at my ignorance. ‘Combined geological and marine biological party.’

‘No shortage of rocks and sea-water hereabouts,’ I agreed. ‘How bad is the damage?’

‘A holed plank. Sprung. Too much for us, I’m afraid.’

‘All right for food?’

‘Of course.’

‘No transmitter?’

‘Receiver only’

‘The helicopter pilot will radio for a shipwright and engineer to be sent out as soon as the weather moderates. Good-bye.’

His jaw fell about a couple of inches. ‘You’re off? Just like that?’

‘Air-Sea Rescue. Vessel reported sinking last night.’

‘Ah, that. We heard.’

‘Thought you might be it. Glad for your sakes you’re not. We’ve a lot of ground to cover yet.’

We continued eastwards towards the head of Loch Houron. Half-way there I said: ‘Far enough. Let’s have a look at those four islands out in the loch. We’ll start with the most easterly one first of all – what’s it called, yes, Eilean Oran – then make our way back towards the mouth of Loch Houron again.’

‘You said you wanted to go all the way to the top.’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘You’re the man who pays the piper,’ he said equably. He was a singularly incurious character, was young Lieutenant Williams. ‘Northward ho for Eilean Oran.’

We were over Eilean Oran in three minutes. Compared to Eilean Oran, Alcatraz was a green and lovely holiday resort. Half a square mile of solid rock and never a blade of grass in sight. But there was a house. A house with smoke coming from its chimney. And beside it a boatshed, but no boat. The smoke meant an inhabitant, at least one inhabitant, and however he earned his living he certainly didn’t do it from tilling the good earth. So he would have a boat, a boat for fishing for his livelihood, a boat for transportation to the mainland, for one certain thing among the manifold uncertainties of this world was that no passenger vessel had called at Eilean Oran since Robert Fulton had invented the steamboat. Williams set me down not twenty yards from the shed.

I rounded the corner of the boat-house and stopped abruptly. I always stop abruptly when I’m struck in the stomach by a batteringram. After a few minutes I managed to whoop enough air into my lungs to let me straighten up again.

He was tall, gaunt, grey, in his middle sixties. He hadn’t shaved for a week or changed his collar-less shirt in a month. It wasn’t a battering-ram he’d used after all, it was a gun, none of your fancy pistols, just a good old-fashioned double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, the kind of gun that at close range – six inches in this case – can give points even to the Peacemaker Colt when it comes to blowing your head off. He had it aimed at my right eye. It was like staring down the Mersey tunnel. When he spoke I could see he’d missed out on all those books that laud the unfailing courtesy of the Highlander.

‘And who the hell are you?’ he snarled.

‘My name’s Johnson. Put that gun away. I –’

‘And what the hell do you want here?’

‘How about trying the ‘Ceud Mile Failte’ approach?’ I said. ‘You see it everywhere in those parts. A hundred thousand welcomes –’

‘I won’t ask again, mister.’

‘Air-Sea Rescue. There’s a missing boat –’

‘I haven’t seen any boat. You can just get to hell off my island.’ He lowered his gun till it pointed at my stomach, maybe because he thought it would be more effective there or make for a less messy job when it came to burying me. ‘Now!’

I nodded to the gun. ‘You could get prison for this.’

‘Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. All I know is that I don’t like strangers on my island and that Donald MacEachern protects his own.’

‘And a very good job you make of it, too, Donald,’ I said approvingly. The gun moved and I said quickly: ‘I’m off. And don’t bother saying “haste ye back” for I won’t be.’

As we rose from the island Williams said: ‘I just caught a glimpse. That was a gun he had there?’

‘It wasn’t the outstretched hand of friendship they’re always talking about in those parts,’ I said bitterly.

‘Who is he? What is he?’

‘He’s an undercover agent for the Scottish Tourist Board in secret training to be their goodwill ambassador abroad. He’s not any of those I’m looking for, that I know. He’s not a nut case, either – he’s as sane as you are. He’s a worried man and a desperate one.’

‘You didn’t look in the shed. You wanted to find out about a boat. Maybe there was someone pointing a gun at him.’

‘That was one of the thoughts that accounted for my rapid departure. I could have taken the gun from him.’

‘You could have got your head blown off.’

‘Guns are my business. The safety catch was in the “On” position.’

‘Sorry.’ Williams’s face showed how out of his depth he was, he wasn’t as good at concealing his expression as I was. ‘What now?’

‘Island number two to the west here.’ I glanced at the chart. ‘Craigmore.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time going there.’ He sounded very positive. ‘I’ve been there. Flew out a badly injured man to a Glasgow hospital.’

‘Injured how?’

‘He’d cut himself to the thigh-bone with a flensing knife. Infection had set in.’

‘A flensing knife? For whales? I’d never heard -’

‘For sharks. Basking sharks. They’re as common as mackerel hereabouts. Catch them for their livers – you can get a ton of liver oil from a good-sized one.’ He pointed to the chart, to a tiny mark on the north coast. ‘Craigmore village. Been abandoned, they say, from before the First World War. We’re coming up to it now. Some of those old boys built their homes in the damnedest places.’

Some of those old boys had indeed built their homes in the damnedest places. If I’d been compelled to build a home either there or at the North Pole I’d have been hard put to it to make a choice. A huddle of four small grey houses built out near the tip of a foreland, several wicked reefs that made a natural breakwater, an even more wicked-looking entrance through the reefs and two fishing boats swinging and rolling wildly at anchor inside the reefs. One of the houses, the one nearest the shore, had had its entire seaward wall cut away. On the twenty or thirty feet of sloping ground that separated the house from the sea I could see three unmistakable sharks. A handful of men appeared at the open end of the house and waved at us.

‘That’s one way of making a living. Can you put me down?’

‘What do you think, Mr Calvert?’

‘I don’t think you can.’ Not unless he set his helicopter down on top of one of the little houses, that was. ‘You winched this sick man up?’

‘Yes. And I’d rather not winch you down, if you don’t mind. Not in this weather and not without a crewman to help me. Unless you’re desperate.’

‘Not all that desperate. Would you vouch for them?’

‘I’d vouch for them. They’re a good bunch. I’ve met the boss, Tim Hutchinson, an Aussie about the size of a house, several times. Most of the fishermen on the west coast would vouch for them.’

‘Fair enough. The next island is Ballara.’

We circled Ballara once. Once was enough. Not even a barnacle would have made his home in Ballara.

We were over the channel between Ballara and Dubh Sgeir now and the Beul nan Uamh was a sight to daunt even the stoutest-hearted fish. It certainly daunted me, five minutes in that lot whether in a boat or scuba suit and that would have been that. The ebb-tide and the wind were in head-on collision and the result was the most spectacular witches’ cauldron I’d ever seen. There were no waves as such, just a bubbling swirling seething maelstrom of whirlpools, overfalls and races, running no way and every way, gleaming boiling white in the overfalls and races, dark and smooth and evil in the hearts of the whirlpools. Not a place to take Aunty Gladys out in a row-boat for a gentle paddle in the quiet even fall.

Oddly enough, close in to the east and south coast of Dubh Sgeir, one could have taken Aunty Gladys out. In those tidal races between islands a common but not yet clearly understood phenomenon frequently leaves an undisturbed stretch of water close in to one or other of the shores, calm and smooth and flat, a millpond with a sharply outlined boundary between it and the foaming races beyond. So it was here. For almost a mile between the most southerly and easterly headlands of Dubh Sgeir, for a distance of two or three hundred yards out from the shore, the waters were black and still. It was uncanny.

‘Sure you really want to land here?’ Williams asked.

‘Is it tricky?’

‘Easy. Helicopters often land on Dubh Sgeir. Not mine – others. It’s just that you’re likely to get the same reception here as you got on Eilean Oran. There are dozens of privately owned islands off the West Coast and none of them like uninvited visitors. The owner of Dubh Sgeir hates them.’

This world-famous Highland hospitality becomes positively embarrassing at times. The Scotsman’s home is his castle, eh?’

‘There is a castle here. The ancestral home of the Clan Dalwhinnie. I think.’

‘Dalwhinnie’s a town, not a clan.’

‘Well, something unpronounceable.’ That was good, considering that he like as not hailed from Rhosllanerchrugog or Pontrhydfendgaid. ‘He’s the clan chief. Lord Kirkside. Ex-Lord Lieutenant of the shire. Very important citizen but a bit of a recluse now. Seldom leaves the place except to attend Highland Games or go south about once a month to flay the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Lords.’

‘Must be difficult for him to tell which place he’s at, at times. I’ve heard of him. Used to have a very low opinion of the Commons and made a long speech to that effect every other day.’

‘That’s him. But not any more. Lost his older son – and his future son-in-law – in an air accident some time ago. Took the heart from the old boy, so they say. People in these parts think the world of him.’

We were round to the south of Dubh Sgeir now and suddenly the castle was in sight. Despite its crenellated battlements, round towers and embrasures, it didn’t begin to rank with the Windsors and Balmorals of this world. A pocket castle. But the side had the Windsors and Balmorals whacked to the wide. It grew straight out of the top of a hundred and fifty foot cliff and if you leaned too far out of your bedroom window the first thing to stop your fall would be the rocks a long long way down. You wouldn’t even bounce once.

Below the castle and a fair way to the right of it a cliff-fall belonging to some bygone age had created an artificial foreshore some thirty yards wide. From this, obviously at the cost of immense labour, an artificial harbour had been scooped out, the boulders and rubble having been used for the construction of a horseshoe breakwater with an entrance of not more than six or seven yards in width. At the inner end of this harbour a boathouse, no wider than the harbour entrance and less than twenty feet in length, had been constructed against the cliff face, A boathouse to berth a good-sized row-boat, no more.

Williams took his machine up until we were two hundred feet above the castle. It was built in the form of a hollow square with the landward side missing. The seaward side was dominated by two crenellated towers, one topped by a twenty-foot flagpole and flag, the other by an even taller TV mast. Aesthetically, the flagpole had it every time. Surprisingly the island was not as barren as it had appeared from the sea. Beginning some distance from the castle and extending clear to the cliff-bound northern shore of the island ran a two hundred yard wide stretch of what seemed to be flat smooth turf, not the bowling green standard but undoubtedly grass of the genuine variety as testified to by the heads down position of a handful of goats that browsed close to the castle.

Williams tried to land on the grass but the wind was too strong to allow him to hold position: he finally put down in the eastern lee of the castle, close but not too close to the cliff edge.

I got out, keeping a wary eye on the goats, and was rounding the landward corner of the castle when I almost literally bumped into the girl.

I’ve always known what to look for in a suddenly-encountered girl in a remote Hebridean Island. A kilt, of course, a Hebridean girl without a kilt was unthinkable, a Shetland two-piece and brown brogues: and that she would be a raven-haired beauty with wild, green, fey eyes went without saying. Her name would be Deirdre. This one wasn’t like that at all, except for the eyes, which were neither green nor fey but certainly looked wild enough. What little I could see of them, that was. Her blonde hair was cut in the uniform peekaboo scalloped style of the day, the one where the long side hair meets under the chin and the central fringe is hacked off at eyebrow level, a coiffure which in any wind above Force I allows no more than ten per cent of the face to be seen at any one time. Below hair level she wore a horizontally striped blue and white sailor’s jersey and faded blue denim pants that must have been fixed on with a portable sewing machine as I didn’t see how else she could have got into them. Her tanned feet were bare. It was comforting to see that the civilising influence of television reached even the remoter outposts of empire.

I said: ‘Good afternoon, Miss – um –’

‘Engine failure?’ she asked coldly.

‘Well, no –’

‘Mechanical failure? Of any kind? No? Then this is private property. I must ask you to leave. At once, please.’

There seemed to be little for me here. An outstretched hand and a warm smile of welcome and she’d have been on my list of suspects at once. But this was true to established form, the weary stranger at the gates receiving not the palm of the hand but the back of it. Apart from the fact that she lacked a blunderbuss and had a much better figure, she had a great deal in common with Mr MacEachern. I bent forward to peer through the windblown camouflage of blonde hair. She looked as if she had spent most of the night and half the morning down in the castle wine cellars. Pale face, pale lips, dark smudges under the blue-grey eyes. But clear blue-grey eyes.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing. The end of a dream. Deirdre would never have talked like that. Where’s your old man?’

‘My old man?’ The one eye I could see had the power turned up to its maximum shrivelling voltage. ‘You mean my father?’

‘Sorry. Lord Kirkside.’ It was no feat to guess that she was Lord Kirkside’s daughter, hired help are too ignorant to have the execrable manners of their aristocratic betters.

‘I’m Lord Kirkside.’ I turned round to see the owner of the deep voice behind me, a tall rugged-looking character in his fifties, hawk nose, jutting grey eyebrows and moustache, grey tweeds, grey deerstalker, hawthorn stick in hand. ‘What’s the trouble. Sue?’

Sue. I might have known. Exit the last vestige of the Hebridean dream. I said: ‘My name is Johnson. Air-Sea Rescue. There was a boat, the Moray Rose, in bad trouble somewhere south of Skye. If she’d been not under command but still afloat she might have come drifting this way. We wondered –’

‘And Sue was going to fling you over the cliff before you had a chance to open your mouth?’ He smiled down affectionately at his daughter. ‘That’s my Sue. I’m afraid she doesn’t like newspapermen.’

‘Some do and some don’t. But why pick on me?’

‘When you were twenty-one could you, as the saying goes, tell a newspaperman from a human being? I couldn’t. But I can now, a mile away. I can also tell a genuine Air-Sea Rescue helicopter when I see one. And so should you too, young lady. I’m sorry, Mr Johnson, we can’t help you. My men and I spent several hours last night patrolling the cliff-tops to see if we could see anything. Lights, flares, anything. Nothing, I’m afraid.’

‘Thank you, sir. I wish we had more voluntary co-operation of this kind.’ From where I stood I could see, due south, the gently rocking masts of the Oxford field expedition’s boat in Little Horseshoe Bay. The boat itself and the tents beyond were hidden behind the rocky eastern arm of the bay. I said to Lord Kirkside: ‘But why newspapermen, sir? Dubh Sgeir isn’t quite as accessible as Westminster.’

‘Indeed, Mr Johnson.’ He smiled, not with his eyes. ‘You may have heard of – well, of our family tragedy. My elder boy, Jonathon, and John Rollinson – Sue’s fiancé.’

I knew what was coming. And after all those months she had those smudges under her eyes. She must have loved him a lot. I could hardly believe it.

‘I’m no newspaperman, sir. Prying isn’t my business.’ It wasn’t my business, it was my life, the raison d’être for my existence. But now wasn’t the time to tell him.

‘The air accident. Jonathan had his own private Beechcraft.’ He waved towards the stretch of green turf running to the Northern cliffs. ‘He took off from here that morning. They – the reporters -wanted on-the-spot reporting. They came by helicopter and boat – there’s a landing stage to the west.’ Again the mirthless smile. ‘They weren’t well received. Care for a drink? You and your pilot?’ Lord Kirkside, for all the reputation Williams had given him, seemed to be cast in a different mould from his daughter and Mr Donald MacEachern: on the other hand, as the Archbishop of Canterbury knew to his cost, Lord Kirkside was a very much tougher citizen than either his daughter or Mr MacEachern.

‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. But we haven’t many hours of daylight left.’

‘Of course, of course. How thoughtless of me. But you can’t have much hope left by this time.’

‘Frankly, none. But, well, you know how it is, sir.’

‘We’ll cross our fingers for that one chance in a million. Good luck, Mr Johnson.’ He shook my hand and turned away. His daughter hesitated then held out her hand and smiled. A fluke of the wind had blown the hair off her face, and when she smiled like that, sooty eyes or not, the end of Deirdre and the Hebridean dream didn’t seem to be of so much account after all. I went back to the helicopter.

‘We’re getting low on both fuel and time,’ Williams said. ‘Another hour or so and we’ll have the dark with us. Where now, Mr Calvert?’

‘North. Follow this patch of grass – seems it used to be used as a light aircraft runway – out over the edge of the cliff. Take your time.’

So he did, taking his time as I’d asked him, then continued on a northward course for another ten minutes. After we were out of sight of watchers on any of the islands we came round in a great half circle to west and south and east and headed back for home.

The sun was down and the world below was more night than day as we came in to land on the sandy cove on the eastern side of the Isle of Torbay. I could just vaguely distinguish the blackness of the tree-clad island, the faint silvery gleam of the sand and the semicircular whiteness where the jagged reef of rocks fringed the seaward approach to the cove. It looked a very dicey approach indeed to me but Williams was as unworried as a mother at a baby-show who has already slipped the judge a five-pound note. Well, if he wasn’t going to worry, neither was I: I knew nothing about helicopters but I knew enough about men to recognise a superb pilot when I sat beside one. All I had to worry about was that damned walk back through those Stygian woods. One thing, I didn’t have to run this time.

Williams reached up his hand to flick on the landing lights but the light came on a fraction of a second before his fingers touched the switch. Not from the helicopter but from the ground. A bright light, a dazzling light, at least a five-inch searchlight located between the high-water line of the cove and the tree-line beyond. For a moment the light wavered, then steadied on the cockpit of the helicopter, making the interior bright as the light from the noon-day sun. I twisted my head to one side to avoid the glare. I saw Williams throw up a hand to protect his eyes, then slump forward wearily, dead in his seat, as the white linen of his shirt turned to red and the centre of his chest disintegrated. I flung myself forwards and downwards to try to gain what illusory shelter I could from the cannonading submachine shells shattering the windscreen. The helicopter was out of control, dipping sharply forwards and spinning slowly on its axis. I reached out to grab the controls from the dead man’s hands but even as I did the trajectory of the bullets changed, either because the man with the machine-gun had altered his aim or because he’d been caught off-balance by the sudden dipping of the helicopter. An abruptly mad cacophony of sound, the iron clangour of steel-nosed bullets smashing into the engine casing mingled with the banshee ricochet of spent and mangled shells. The engine stopped, stopped as suddenly as if the ignition had been switched off. The helicopter was completely out of control, lifeless in the sky. It wasn’t going to be in the sky much longer but there was nothing I could do about it. I braced myself for the jarring moment of impact when we struck the water, and when the impact came it was not just jarring, it was shattering to a degree I would never have anticipated. We’d landed not in the water but on the encircling reef of rocks.

I tried to get at the door but couldn’t make it, we’d landed nose down and facing seawards on the outside of the reefs and from the position where I’d been hurled under the instrument panel the door was above and beyond my reach. I was too dazed, too weak, to make any real effort to get at it. Icy water poured in through the smashed windscreen and the fractured floor of the fuselage. For a moment everything was as silent as the grave, the hiss of the flooding waters seemed only to emphasise the silence then the machine-gun started again. The shells smashed through the lower after part of the fuselage behind me and went out through the top of the windscreen above me. Twice I felt angry tugs on the right shoulder of my coat and I tried to bury my head even more deeply into the freezing waters. Then, due probably to a combination of an accumulation of water in the nose and the effect of the fusillade of bullets aft, the helicopter lurched forwards, stopped momentarily, then slid off the face of the reef and fell like a stone, nose first, to the bottom of the sea.

FIVE

Wednesday: dusk – 8.40 p.m.

Among the more ridiculous and wholly unsubstantiated fictions perpetuated by people who don’t know what they are talking about is the particularly half-witted one that death by drowning is peaceful easy and, in fact, downright pleasant. It’s not. It’s a terrible way to die. I know, because I was drowning and I didn’t like it one little bit. My ballooning head felt as if it were being pumped full of compressed air, my ears and eyes ached savagely, my nostrils, mouth and stomach were full of sea water and my bursting lungs felt as if someone had filled them with petrol and struck a match. Maybe if I opened my mouth, maybe if to relieve that flaming agony that was my lungs I took that one great gasping breath that would be the last I would ever take, maybe then it would be quiet and pleasant and peaceful. On the form to date, I couldn’t believe it.

The damned door was jammed. After the beating the fuselage had taken, first of all in smashing into the reef and then into the sea-bed it would be a miracle if it hadn’t jammed. I pushed the door, I pulled at it, I beat at it with my clenched fists. It stayed jammed. The blood roared and hissed in my ears, the flaming vice around my chest was crushing my ribs and lungs, crushing the life out of me. I braced both feet on the instrument panel, laid both hands on the door handle. I thrust with my legs and twisted with my hands, using the power and the leverage a man can use only when he knows he is dying. The door handle sheared, the thrust of my legs carried me backwards and upwards toward the after end of the fuselage and suddenly my lungs could take no more. Death couldn’t be worse than this agony. The air rushed out through my water-filled mouth and nostrils and I sucked in this one great gasping breath, this lungful of sea-water, this last I would ever take.

It wasn’t a lungful of water, it was a lungful of air. Noxious compressed air laden with the fumes of petrol and oil, but air for all that. Not the tangy salt-laden air of the Western Isles, not the wine-laden air of the ægean, the pine-laden air of Norway or the sparkling champagne air of the high Alps. All those I’d tasted and all of them put together were a thin and anæmic substitute for this marvellous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and petrol and oil that had been trapped in an air pocket under the undamaged upper rear part of the helicopter’s fuselage, the only part of the plane that hadn’t been riddled by machine-gun bullets. This was air as it ought to be.

The water level was around my neck. I took half a dozen deep whooping breaths, enough to ease the fire in my lungs and the roaring and hissing and dizziness in my head to tolerable levels, then pushed myself backwards and upwards to the extreme limit of the fuselage. The water was at chest level now. I moved a hand around in the blind darkness to try to estimate the amount of air available to me. Impossible to judge accurately, but enough, I guessed, compressed as it was, to last for ten to fifteen minutes.

I moved across to the left of the fuselage, took a deep breath and pushed myself forwards and downwards. Eight feet behind the pilot’s seat was the passenger door, maybe I could force that. I found it right away, not the door but the opening where the door had been. The impart that had jammed the door on the righthand side where I’d been had burst this door open. I pushed myself back to the upper part of the fuselage again and helped myself to a few more deep breaths of that compressed air. It didn’t taste quite so good as it had done the first time.

Now that I knew I could go at any time, I was in no hurry to leave. Up above, guns in hand, those men would be waiting and if there was one outstanding attribute that characterised their attitude to work on hand, it was a single-minded thoroughness. Where those lads were concerned, a job half done was no job at all. They could only have come there by boat and that boat would have been very nearby. By this time it would be even nearer by, it would be sitting directly over the spot where the helicopter had gone down and the crew wouldn’t be sitting around with drinks in their hands congratulating themselves on their success, they’d be lining the side with searchlights or flashes and waiting to see if anyone would break surface. With their guns in their hands.

If I ever got back to the Firecrest again, if I ever got in touch with Uncle Arthur again, I wondered dully what I would say to him. Already I’d lost the Nantesville, already I’d been responsible for the deaths of Baker and Delmont, already I’d given away to the unknown enemy the secret of my identity – if that hadn’t been obvious after the fake customs officers had smashed our transmitter it was bitterly obvious now – and now I’d lost Lieutenant Scott Williams his life and the Navy a valuable helicopter. Of Uncle Arthur’s forty-eight hours only twelve were left now, and nothing could be more certain than when Uncle Arthur had finished with me, I wouldn’t be allowed even those twelve hours. After Uncle Arthur had finished with me my days as an investigator would be finished, and finished for ever; with the kind of references he’d give me I wouldn’t even qualify as a store detective in a street barrow. Not that it would make any difference what Uncle Arthur thought now. Baker and Delmont and Williams were gone. There was a heavy debt that had to be paid and the matter was out of Uncle Arthur’s hands now. On the form to date, I thought bleakly, there wasn’t one bookmaker in the land who would have given odds of one in a thousand of that debt ever being repaid. Only a fool bets against a certainty.

I wondered vaguely how long the men up top would wait – my conviction that they would be waiting was absolute. And then I felt a dry salty taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with the steadily deteriorating quality of air. It was pretty foul by this time, but a man can survive a surprisingly long time in foul air and there was enough oxygen left in that heavily tainted atmosphere to last me for a good few minutes yet.

The question was not how long they would wait but how long I could wait. Or had I already waited too long? I could feel the panic in my throat like some solid lump in my windpipe completely obstructing my breathing and had to make a conscious physical effort to force it down.

I tried to recall all I could from my marine salvage days. How long had I been under water and how deep down was I? How long had that dive down from the surface of the sea to the bottom taken?

Under those conditions time loses all meaning. Say forty seconds. Just over half-way down I’d taken my last gulp of air before the water in the fuselage had flooded over my head. And then a minute, probably a minute and a half, fighting with that jammed door. Since then a minute to recover, half a minute to locate that open door, and then how long since? Six minutes, seven? Not less than seven. I couldn’t reckon on a total of less than ten minutes. The lump was back in my throat again.

How deep was I? That was the life-or-death question. I could tell from the pressure that I was pretty deep. But how deep? Ten fathoms? Fifteen? Twenty? I tried to recall the chart of Torbay Sound. There were eighty fathoms in the deepest channel and the channel was pretty close to the southern shore at this point, so that the water was steep-to. God above, I might even be in twenty-five fathoms. If I was, well that was it. Finish. How did the decompression tables go again? At thirty fathoms a man who has been under water for ten minutes requires to spend eighteen minutes for decompression stops on the way up. When you breathe air under pressure, the excess nitrogen is stored in the tissues: when you begin to surface this nitrogen is carried by the bloodstream to the lungs and is eliminated in respiration: and if you rise too rapidly respiration can’t cope with it and nitrogen bubbles form in the blood, causing the agonising and crippling diver’s bends. Even at twenty fathoms I’d require a six-minute halt for decompression on the way up and if there was one certain fact in life it was that decompression stops were out for me. I’d be a broken man. What I did know for certain was that every additional second I remained there would make the bends all the more agonising and crippling when they finally struck. All at once the prospect of surfacing beneath the steady guns and the pitiless eyes of the men above seemed positively attractive compared to the alternative. I took several deep breaths to get as much oxygen as possible into my blood-stream, exhaled to the fullest extent, took a long final breath to fill every last cubic millimetre in every last nook and cranny in my lungs, dived under the water, pushed my way out through the doorway and made for the surface.

I’d lost count of time on the way down and I now lost all count of time on the way up. I swam slowly and steadily using enough power to assist my progress through the water, but not so much as prematurely to use up all the stored oxygen. Every few seconds I let a little air escape from my mouth, not much, just enough to ease the pressure in my lungs. I looked up but the waters above me were as black as ink, there could have been fifty fathoms above my head for any trace of light I could see. And then suddenly, quite some time before the air supply was exhausted and before my lungs had begun to hurt again, the water was a shade less than pitch black and my head struck something hard and unyielding. I grabbed it, held on, surfaced, sucked in some lungfuls of that cold, salt, wonderful air and waited for the decompression pains to start, those sharply agonising twinges in the joints of the limbs. But none came. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen fathoms down and even then I should have felt something. It had probably been something nearer ten.

During the past ten minutes my mind had taken as much a beating as any other part of me but it would have to have been in very much poorer shape than it was for me not to recognise what I was clinging to. A boat’s rudder, and if any confirmation had been required the milkily phosphorescent water being turned up by the two slowly turning screws a couple of feet ahead of me would have been all that was required. I’d surfaced right under their boat. I was lucky. I might have surfaced right under one of their propellers and had my head cut in half. Even now, if the man at the wheel suddenly decided to go astern I’d be sucked into the vortex of one or other of the screws and end up like something that had passed through a turnip-cutting machine. But I’d been through too much to cross any bridges before I came to them.

Off to port I could see, sharply illuminated by a couple of powerful lights from the boat’s deck, the reef where we’d crashed. We were about forty yards away and, relative to the reefs, stationary in the water, the engines turning just enough to maintain the boat’s position against the effect of wind and tide. Now and again a searchlight patrolled the dark waters all around. I couldn’t see anything of the men on deck, but I didn’t have to be told what they were doing, they were waiting and watching and the safety catches would be off. Nor could I see anything of the boat itself but I made up my mind that, even though I couldn’t recognise it, I’d know it if I ever came across it again. I took out the knife from the sheath behind my neck and cut a deep vee notch in the trailing edge of the rudder.

For the first time, I heard voices. I heard four voices and I had no difficulty in the world in identifying any of them. If I lived to make Methuselah look a teenager I’d never forget any one of them.

‘Nothing on your side, Quinn?’ Captain Imrie, the man who had organised the manhunt for me aboard the Nantesville.

‘Nothing on my side, Captain.’ I could feel the hairs rise on the nape of my neck. Quinn. Durran. The bogus customs officer. The man who had almost, but not quite, strangled me to death.

‘Your side, Jacques?’ Captain Imrie again.

‘Nothing, sir.’ The machine-pistol specialist. ‘Eight minutes since we’ve been here, fifteen since they went under. A man would require pretty good lungs to stay down that long, Captain.’

‘Enough,’ Imrie said. ‘There’ll be a bonus for all of us for this night’s work. Kramer?’

‘Captain Imrie?’ A voice as guttural as Imrie’s own.

‘Full ahead. Up the Sound.’

I thrust myself backwards and dived deep. The waters above my head boiled into turbulent, phosphorescent life. I stayed deep, maybe ten feet down, heading for the reef. How long I swam like that, I don’t know. Certainly less than a minute, my lungs weren’t what they used to be, not even what they had been fifteen minutes ago: but when I was forced to the surface, I’d my dark oilskin over my head.

I needn’t have bothered. I could see the faintly shimmering outline of the disappearing wake, no more. The searchlights were extinguished; when Captain Imrie decided a job was finished, then that job was finished. Predictably, the boat was in complete darkness with neither interior nor navigation lights showing.

I turned and swam slowly towards the reef. I reached a rock and clung to it until a measure of strength returned to my aching muscles, to my exhausted body. I would not have believed that fifteen minutes could have taken so much out of a man. I stayed there for five minutes. I could have stayed there for an hour. But time was not on my side. I slipped into deep water again and made for the shore.

Three times I tried and three times I failed to pull myself up from the rubber dinghy over the gunwale of the Firecrest. Four feet, no more. Just four feet. A Matterhorn. A ten-year-old could have done it. But not Calvert. Calvert was an old, old man.

I called out for Hunslett, but Hunslett did not come. Three times I called, but he did not come. The Firecrest was dark and still and lifeless. Where the hell was he? Asleep? Ashore? No, not ashore, he’d promised to stay aboard in case word came through at any time from Uncle Arthur. Asleep, then, asleep in his cabin. I felt the blind unreasoning anger rise. This was too much, after what I had been through this was too much. Asleep. I shouted at the top of my voice and hammered feebly on the steel hull with the butt of my Luger. But he didn’t come.

The fourth time I made it. It was touch and go, but I made it. For a few seconds, dinghy painter in hand, I teetered on my stomach on the edge of the gunwale then managed to drag myself aboard. I secured the painter and went in search of Hunslett. There were words I wished to have with Hunslett.

I never used them. He wasn’t aboard. I searched the Firecrest from forepeak to the after storage locker, but no Hunslett. No signs of a hasty departure, no remnants of a meal on the saloon table or unwashed dishes in the galley, no signs of any struggle, everything neat and in good order. Everything as it ought to have been. Except that there was no Hunslett.

For a minute or two I sat slumped in the saloon settee trying to figure out a reason for his absence, but only for a minute or two. I was in no condition to figure out anything. Wearily I made my way out to the upper deck and brought dinghy and outboard over the side. No fancy tricks about securing them to the anchor chain this time: apart from the fact that it was, the way I felt, physically impossible, the time for that was past. I deflated the dinghy and stowed it, along with the outboard, in the after locker. And if someone came aboard and started looking? If someone came aboard and started looking he’d get a bullet through him. I didn’t care if he claimed to be a police superintendent or an assistant commissioner or the top customs official in the country, he’d get a bullet through him, in the arm or leg, say, and I’d listen to his explanations afterwards. If it was one of my friends, one of my friends from Nantesville or the reef back there, he got it through the head.

I went below. I felt sick. The helicopter was at the bottom of the sea. The pilot was down there with it, half his chest shot away by machine-gun bullets. I’d every right to feel sick. I stripped off my clothes and towelled myself dry and the very action of towelling seemed to drain away what little strength was left to me. Sure I’d had a hard time in the last hour, all this running and slipping and stumbling through the dark woods, locating and blowing up the dinghy and dragging it over those damned seaweed covered boulders had taken it out of me, but I was supposed to be fit, it shouldn’t have left me like this. I was sick, but the sickness was in the heart and mind, not in the body.

I went into my cabin and laboriously dressed myself in fresh clothes, not forgetting the Paisley scarf. The rainbow coloured bruises that Quinn had left on my neck had now swollen and spread to such an extent that I had to bring the scarf right up to the lobes of my ears to hide them. I looked in the mirror. It might have been my grandfather staring back at me. My grandfather on his deathbed. My face had that drawn and waxy look that one normally associates with approaching dissolution. Not an all-over waxiness though, there was no blood on my face now but the pine needles had left their mark, I looked like someone with galloping impetigo. I felt like someone with galloping bubonic plague.

I checked that the Luger and the little Lilliput – I’d put them both back in their waterproof covering after leaving Dubh Sgeir – were still in working order. They were. In the saloon I poured myself a stiff three fingers of whisky. It went down my throat like a ferret down a burrow after a rabbit, one moment there, the next vanished in the depths. The weary old red corpuscles hoisted themselves to their feet and started trudging around again. It seemed a reasonable assumption that if I encouraged them with some more of the same treatment they might even break into a slow gallop and I had just closed my hand around the bottle when I heard the sound of an approaching engine. I put the bottle back in the rack, switched out the saloon lights – although they would have been invisible from outside through the velvet curtains – and took up position behind the open saloon door.

I was pretty sure the precautions were unnecessary, ten to one this was Hunslett coming back from shore, but why hadn’t he taken the dinghy, still slung on the davits aft? Probably someone, for what Hunslett had regarded as an excellent reason, had persuaded him to go ashore and was now bringing him back.

The motor-boat’s engine slowed, went into neutral, astern, then neutral again. A slight bump, the murmur of voices, the sound of someone clambering aboard and then the engine opening up again.

The footfalls passed over my head as the visitor – there was only one set of footfalls – made his way towards the wheelhouse door. The springy confident step of a man who knew what he was about. There was only one thing wrong with that springy confident step. It didn’t belong to Hunslett. I flattened myself against the bulkhead, took out the Luger, slid off the safety catch and prepared to receive my visitor in what I had now come to regard as the best traditions of the Highlands.

I heard the click as the wheelhouse door opened, the louder click as it was shut by a firm hand. A pool of light from a flashlamp preceded the visitor down the four steps from the wheel-house to the saloon. He paused at the foot of the steps and the light moved away as he made to locate the light-switch. I stepped round the door and did three things at once – I hooked an arm around his neck, brought up a far from gentle knee into the small of his back and ground the muzzle of the Luger into his right ear. Violent stuff, but not unnecessarily violent stuff, it might have been my old friend Quinn. The gasp of pain was enough to show that it wasn’t.

‘This isn’t a hearing aid you feel, friend. It’s a Luger pistol. You’re one pound pressure from a better world. Don’t make me nervous.’

The better world seemed to have no appeal for him. He didn’t make me nervous. He made an odd gurgling noise in his throat, he was trying either to speak or breathe, but he stood motionless, head and back arched. I eased the pressure a little.

‘Put that light switch on with your left hand. Slowly. Carefully.’

He was very slow, very careful. The saloon flooded with light.

‘Raise your hands above your head. As high as you can reach.’

He was a model prisoner, this one, he did exactly as he was told. I turned him round, propelled him into the centre of the room and told him to face me.

He was of medium height, nattily dressed in an astrakhan coat and a fur Cossack hat. He had a beautifully trimmed white beard and moustache, with a perfectly symmetrical black streak in the centre of the beard, the only one of its kind I had ever seen. The tanned face was red, either from anger or near-suffocation. From both, I decided. He lowered his hands without permission, sat on the settee, pulled out a monocle, screwed it into his right eye and stared at me with cold fury. I gave him look for look, stare for stare, pocketed the Luger, poured a whisky and handed it to Uncle Arthur. Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason, K.C.B. and all the rest of the alphabet.

‘You should have knocked, sir,’ I said reproachfully.

‘I should have knocked.’ His voice sounded half-strangled, maybe I had exerted more pressure than had been necessary. ‘Do you always greet your guests this way?’

‘I don’t have guests, sir. I don’t have friends, either. Not in the Western Isles. All I have is enemies. Anyone who comes through that door is an enemy. I didn’t expect to see you here, sir.’

‘I hope not. In view of that performance, I hope not.’ He rubbed his throat, drank some whisky and coughed. ‘Didn’t expect to be here myself. Do you know how much bullion was aboard the Nantesville?’

‘Close on a million, I understand.’

‘That’s what I understood. Eight millions! Think of it, eight million pounds’ worth. All this gold that’s being shovelled back from Europe into the vaults at Fort Knox usually goes in small lots, 108 lb. ingots at a time. For safety. For security. In case anything goes wrong. But the Bank knew that nothing could go wrong this time, they knew our agents were aboard, they were behind with their payments, so they cleverly loaded fourteen hundred and forty ingots without telling anyone. Eight million. The Bank is hopping mad. And everyone is taking it out on me.’

And he’d come up here to take it out on me. I said: ‘You should have let me know. That you were coming.’

‘I tried to. You failed to keep your noon-day schedule. The most elementary of crimes, Calvert, and the most serious. You failed to keep a schedule. You or Hunslett. Then I knew things were going from bad to worse. I knew I had to take over myself. So I came by plane and R.A.F. rescue launch.’ That would have been the highspeed launch I’d seen taking a bad battering in the Sound as we had headed down towards the cove. ‘Where’s Hunslett?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘You don’t know?’ He was using his quiet unemphatic tone, the one I didn’t care for very much. ‘You’re out of your depth in this one, Calvert, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid he’s been removed by force. I’m not sure how. What have you been doing in the past two hours, sir?’

‘Explain yourself.’ I wished he’d stop screwing that damned monocle into his eye. It was no affectation, that monocle, he was nearly blind on that side, but it was an irritating mannerism. At that moment, anything would have irritated me.

‘That R.A.F. launch that dropped you off here just now. It should have been here at least two hours ago. Why didn’t you come aboard then?’

‘I did. We almost ran the Firecrest down in the darkness as we came round the headland. No one here. So I went and had some dinner. Nothing but baked beans aboard this damned boat as far as I could see.’

‘The Columbia hotel wouldn’t offer you much more. Toast below the beans, if you were lucky’ The Columbia was Torbay’s only hotel.

‘I had smoked trout, filet mignon and an excellent bottle of hock. I dined aboard the Shangri-la.’ This with the slight hint of a smile. Uncle Arthur’s Achilles’ heel was showing again: Uncle Arthur loved a lord like nobody’s business, and a knight with a seven-figure income was as good as a lord any day.

‘The Shangri-la?’ I stared at him, then remembered. ‘Of course. You told me. You know Lady Skouras well. No, you said you knew her very well and her husband well. How is my old Sir Anthony?’

‘Very well,’ he said coldly. Uncle Arthur had as much humour as the next man, but discussing titled millionaires in tones of levity was not humorous.

‘And Lady Skouras?’

He hesitated. ‘Well –’

‘Not so well. Pale, drawn, unhappy, with dark smudges under her eyes. Not unlike myself. Her husband mistreats her and mistreats her badly. Mentally and physically. He humiliated her in front of a group of men last night. And she had rope burns on her arms. Why would she have rope burns on her arms, Sir Arthur?’

‘Impossible. Quite fantastic. I knew the former Lady Skouras, the one who died this year in hospital. She –’ ‘She was undergoing treatment in a mental hospital. Skouras as good as told me.’

‘No matter. She adored him. He adored her. A man can’t change like that. Sir Anthony – Sir Anthony’s a gentleman.’

‘Is he? Tell me how he made his last millions. You saw Lady Skouras, didn’t you?’

‘I saw her,’ he said slowly. ‘She was late. She arrived with the filet mignon.’ He didn’t seem to find anything funny in that. ‘She didn’t look very well and she’s a bruise on her right temple. She’d fallen climbing aboard from the tender and hit her head against a guardrail.’

‘Hit her head against her husband’s fist, more like. To get back to the first time you boarded the Firecrest this evening. Did you search it?’

‘I searched it. All except the after cabin. It was locked. I assumed there was something in there you didn’t want chance callers to see.’

‘There was something in there that callers, not chance, didn’t want you to see,’ I said slowly.

‘Hunslett. Hunslett under guard. They were waiting for word of my death, then they’d have killed Hunslett or kept him prisoner. If word came through that I hadn’t been killed, then they’d have waited until my return and taken me prisoner too. Or killed us both. For by then they would have known that I knew too much to be allowed to live. It takes time, a long time, to open up a strong-room and get all those tons of gold out and they know their time is running out. They’re desperate now. But they still think of everything.’ ‘They were waiting for word of your death,’ Uncle Arthur said mechanically. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘That helicopter you laid on for me, sir. We were shot down tonight after sunset. The pilot’s dead and the machine is at the bottom of the sea. They believe me to be dead also.’

‘I see. You go from strength to strength, Calvert.’ The absence of reaction was almost total, maybe he was getting punch-drunk by this time, more likely he was considering the precise phrascology that would return me to the ranks of the unemployed with economy and dispatch. He lit a long, thin and very black cheroot and puffed meditatively. ‘When we get back to London remind me to show you my confidential report on you.’

‘Yes, sir.’ So this was how it was coming.

‘I was having dinner with the Under-Secretary just forty-eight hours ago. One of the things he asked me was which country had the best agents in Europe. Told him I’d no idea. But I told him who I thought, on the balance of probabilities, was the best agent in Europe. Philip Calvert.’

‘That was very kind of you, sir.’ If I could remove that beard, whisky, cheroot and monocle, at least three of which were obscuring his face at any given moment, his expression might have given me some faint clue as to what was going on in that devious mind. ‘You were going to fire me thirty-six hours ago.’

‘If you believe that,’ Uncle Arthur said calmly, ‘you’ll believe anything.’ He puffed out a cloud of foul smoke and went on: ‘One of the comments in your report states: “Unsuitable for routine investigation. Loses interest and becomes easily bored. Operates at his best only under extreme pressure. At this level he is unique.” It’s on the files, Calvert. I don’t cut off my right hand.’

‘No, sir. Do you know what you are, sir?’

‘A Machiavellian old devil,’ Uncle Arthur said with some satisfaction. ‘You know what’s going on?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Pour me another whisky, my boy, a large one, and tell me what’s happened, what you know and what you think you know.’

So I poured him another whisky, a large one, and told him what had happened, what I knew and as much of what I thought I knew as seemed advisable to tell him.

He heard me out, then said: ‘Loch Houron, you think?’

‘Loch Houron it must be. I spoke to no one else, anywhere else, and to the best of my knowledge no one else saw me. Someone recognised me. Or someone transmitted my description. By radio. It must have been by radio. The boat that was waiting for Williams and myself came from Torbay or somewhere near Torbay, a boat from Loch Houron could never have made it to the eastern end of the Sound of Torbay in five times the time we took. Somewhere near here, on land or sea, is a transceiver set. Somewhere out on Loch Houron there’s another.’

‘This University expedition boat you saw on the south shore of Loch Houron. This alleged University expedition. It would have a radio transmitter aboard.’

‘No, sir. Boys with beards.’ I rose, pulled back the saloon curtains on both sides, then sat down again. ‘I told you their boat was damaged and listing. She’d been riding moored fore and aft in plenty of water. They didn’t hole it themselves and it wasn’t holed by any art of nature. Somebody kindly obliged. Another of those odd little boating incidents that occur with such profusion up and down the west coast.’

‘Why did you pull those curtains back?’

‘Another of those odd little boating incidents, sir. One that’s about to happen. Some time tonight people will be coming aboard. Hunslett and I, those people think, are dead. At least, I’m dead and Hunslett is dead or a prisoner. But they can’t leave an abandoned Firecrest at anchor to excite suspicion and invite investigation. So they’ll come in a boat, up anchor, and take the Firecrest out into the Sound, followed by their own boat. Once there, they’ll slice through the flexible salt-water cooling intake, open the salt-water cock, take to their own boat and lift their hats as the Firecrest goes down to join the helicopter. As far as the big wide innocent world is concerned, Hunslett and I will just have sailed off into the sunset.’

‘And the gulfs will have washed you down,’ Uncle Arthur nodded. ‘You are very sure of this, Calvert?’

‘You might say I’m absolutely certain.’

‘Then why open those blasted curtains?’

‘The scuttling party may be coming from anywhere and they may not come for hours. The best time to scuttle a boat in close waters is at slack tide, when you can be sure that it will settle exactly where you want it to settle, and slack tide is not until one o’clock this morning. But if someone comes panting hotfoot aboard soon after those curtains are opened, then that will be proof enough that the radio transmitter we’re after, and our friends who are working the transmitter, are somewhere in this bay, ashore or afloat.’

‘How will it be proof?’ Uncle Arthur said irritably. ‘Why should they come, as you say, panting hotfoot?’

‘They know they have Hunslett. At least, I assume they have, I can’t think of any other reason for his absence. They think they know I’m dead, but they can’t be sure. Then they see the beckoning oil lamp in the window. What is this, they say to themselves, Calvert back from the dead? Or a third, or maybe even a third and a fourth colleague of Calvert and Hunslett that we wot not of? Whether it’s me or my friends, they must be silenced. And silenced at once. Wouldn’t you come panting hotfoot?’

‘There’s no need to treat the matter with levity,’ Uncle Arthur complained.

‘In your own words, sir, if you can believe that, you can believe anything.’

‘You should have consulted me first, Calvert.’ Uncle Arthur shifted in his seat, an almost imperceptible motion, though his expression didn’t change. He was a brilliant administrator, but the more executive side of the business, the sandbagging and pushing of people off high cliffs, wasn’t exactly in his line. ‘I’ve told you that I came to take charge.’

‘Sorry, Sir Arthur. You’d better change that report, hadn’t you? The bit about the best in Europe, I mean.’

‘Touché, touché, touché,’ he grumbled. ‘And they’re corning at us out of the dark, is that it? On their way now. Armed men. Killers. Shouldn’t we -shouldn’t we be preparing to defend ourselves? Dammit, man, I haven’t even got a gun.’

‘You won’t need one. You may not agree with me.’ I handed him the Luger. He took it, checked the indicator and that the safety catch moved easily, then sat there holding it awkwardly in his hand.

‘Shouldn’t we move, Calvert? We’re sitting targets here.’

‘They won’t be here for some time. The nearest house or boat is a mile away to the east. They’ll be pushing wind and tide and they daren’t use a motor. Whether they’re rowing a boat or paddling a rubber dinghy they have a long haul ahead of them. Time’s short, sir. We have a lot to do to-night. To get back to Loch Houron. The expedition’s out, they couldn’t pirate a dinghy, far less five oceangoing freighters. Our friend Donald MacEachern acts in a highly suspicious fashion, he’s got the facilities there, he’s dead worried and he might have had half a dozen guns at his back while he had his in my front. But it was all too good to be true, professionals wouldn’t lay it on the line like that.’

‘Maybe that’s how professionals would expect a fellow-professional to react. And you said he’s worried.’

‘Maybe the fish aren’t biting. Maybe he’s involved, but not directly. Then there’s the shark-fishers. They have the boats, the facilities and, heaven knows, they’re tough enough. Against that, they’ve been based there for years, the place is littered with sharks – it should be easy enough to check if regular consignments of liver oil are sent to the mainland – and they’re well known and well thought of along the coast. They’ll bear investigating. Then there’s Dubh Sgeir. Lord Kirkside and his lovely daughter Sue.’

‘Lady Susan,’ Uncle Arthur said. It’s difficult to invest an impersonal, inflectionless voice with cool reproach, but he managed it without any trouble. ‘I know Lord Kirkside, of course’ – his tone implied that it would be remarkable if he didn’t – ‘and while I may or may not be right about Sir Anthony, and I will lay you a hundred to one, in pounds, that I am, I’m convinced that Lord Kirkside is wholly incapable of any dishonest or illegal action.’

‘Me, too. He’s a very tough citizen, I’d say, but on the side of the angels.’

‘And his daughter? I haven’t met her.’

‘Very much a girl of to-day. Dressed in the modern idiom, speaks in the modern idiom, I’m tough and I’m competent and I can take care of myself, thank you. She’s not tough at all, just a nice old-fashioned girl in new-fashioned clothes.’

‘So that clears them.’ Uncle Arthur sounded relieved. ‘That leaves us the expedition, in spite of your sneers, or MacEachern’s place, or the shark-fishers. I go for the shark-fishers myself.’

I let him go for wherever he wanted to. I thought it was time I went to the upper deck and told him so.

‘It won’t be long now?’

‘I shouldn’t think so, sir. We’ll put out the lights in the saloon here – it would look very odd if they peered in the windows and saw no one here. We’ll put on the two sleeping-cabin lights and the stem light. That will destroy their night-sight. The after deck will be bathed in light. For’ard of that, as far as they are concerned, it will be pitch dark. We hide in the dark.’

‘Where in the dark?’ Uncle Arthur didn’t sound very confident.

‘You stand inside the wheelhouse. All wheel-house doors are hinged for’ard and open outwards. Keep your hand on the inside handle. Lightly. When you feel it begin to turn, a very slow and stealthy turn, you can bet your boots, wait till the door gives a fraction, then kick the rear edge, just below the handle, with the sole of your right foot and with all the weight you have. If you don’t break his nose or knock him overboard you’ll at least set him in line for a set of false teeth. I’ll take care of the other or others.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll be on the saloon roof. It’s three feet lower than the loom of the stem light even if they approach from the wheelhouse roof so they can’t see me silhouetted against the loom of the stem light even if they approach from the bows.’

‘But what are you going to do?’

‘Clobber him or them. A nice big Stilson from the engine-room with a rag round it will do nicely.’

‘Why don’t we just dazzle them with torches and tell them to put their hands up?’ Uncle Arthur clearly didn’t care for my proposed modus operandi.

‘Three reasons. These are dangerous and deadly men and you never give them warning. Not the true sporting spirit, but it helps you survive. Then there will almost certainly be night-glasses trained on the Firecrest at this very moment. Finally, sound carries very clearly over water and the wind is blowing towards Torbay. Shots, I mean.’

He said no more. We took up position and waited. It was still raining heavily with the wind still from the west. For once the rain didn’t bother me, I’d a full set of oilskins on. I just lay there, spreadeagled on the saloon coach-roof, occasionally easing the fingers of my hands, the right round the Stilson, the left round the little knife. After fifteen minutes they came. I heard the gentle scuff of rubber on our starboard side – the side of the wheelhouse door. I pulled on the cord which passed through the rear window of the wheelhouse. The cord was attached to Uncle Arthur’s hand.

There were only two of them. My eyes were perfectly tuned to the dark by this time and I could easily distinguish the shape of the first man coining aboard just below where I lay. He secured a painter and waited for his mate. They moved forward together.

The leading man gave a cough of agony as the door smashed, fair and square, as we later established, into his face. I wasn’t so successful, the second man had cat-like reactions and had started to drop to the deck as the Stilson came down. I caught him on back or shoulder, I didn’t know which, and dropped on top of him. In one of his hands he’d have either a gun or knife and if I’d wasted a fraction of a second trying to find out which hand and what he had in it, I’d have been a dead man. I brought down my left hand and he lay still.

I passed the other man lying moaning in agony in the scuppers, brushed by Uncle Arthur, pulled the saloon curtains to and switched on the lights. I then went out, half-pulled, half-lifted the moaning man through the wheelhouse door, down the saloon steps and dropped him on the carpet. I didn’t recognise him. That wasn’t surprising, his own mother or wife wouldn’t have recognised him. Uncle Arthur was certainly a man who believed in working with a will and he’d left the plastic surgeon a very tricky job.

‘Keep your gun on him, sir,’ I said. Uncle Arthur was looking down at his handiwork with a slightly dazed expression. What one could see of his face behind the beard seemed slightly paler than normal. ‘If he breathes, kill him.’

‘But – but look at his face, man. We can’t leave –’

‘You look at this, sir.’ I stooped and picked up the weapon that had fallen from the man’s hand as I’d dropped him to the floor. ‘This is what is technically known to the United States’ police departments as a whippet. A shot-gun with two-thirds of the barrel and two-thirds of the stock sawn off. If he’d got you first, you wouldn’t have any face left at all. I mean that literally. Do you still feel like playing Florence Nightingale to the fallen hero?’ That wasn’t at all the way one should talk to Uncle Arthur, there would be a few more entries in the confidential report when we got back. If we got back. But I couldn’t help myself, not then. I passed by Uncle Arthur and went out.

In the wheelhouse I picked up a small torch, went outside and shone it down into the water, hooding it with my hand so that the beam couldn’t have been seen fifty yards away. They had a rubber dinghy, all right – and an outboard motor attached. The conquering heroes, bathed in that warm and noble glow of satisfaction that comes from the comforting realisation of a worthwhile job well done, had intended to make it home the easy way.

Looping a heaving line round the outboard’s cylinder head and hauling alternately on the heaving line and painter, I had both dinghy and outboard up and over in two minutes. I unclamped the outboard, lugged the dinghy round to the other side of the superstructure, the side remote from the inner harbour, and examined it carefully in the light of the torch. Apart from the manufacturer’s name there was no mark on it, nothing to indicate to which craft it belonged. I sliced it to ribbons and threw it over the side.

Back in the wheelhouse, I cut a twenty-foot length from a roll of P.V.C. electric wiring cable, went outside again and lashed the outboard to the dead man’s ankles. I searched his pockets. Nothing, I’d known there would be nothing, I was dealing with professionals. I hooded the torch and looked at his face. I’d never seen him before. I took from him the pistol still clutched in his right hand, undid the spring clips holding the guard-chains in place above the gunwale slots for our companion-way ladder, then eased, first the outboard, and then the man, over the side. They vanished into the dark waters of Torbay harbour without the whisper of a splash. I went inside, closing wheelhouse and saloon doors behind me.

Uncle Arthur and the injured man had reversed positions by this time. The man was on his feet now, leaning drunkenly against the bulkhead, dabbing his face with a blood-stained towel Uncle Arthur must have found, and moaning from time to time. I didn’t blame him, if I’d a broken nose, most of my front teeth displaced and a jaw that might or might not have been fractured, I’d have been moaning too. Uncle Arthur, gun in one hand and some more of my Scotch in the other, was sitting on the settee and contemplating his bloody handiwork with an odd mixture of satisfaction and distaste. He looked at me as I came in, nodded towards the prisoner.

‘Making a fearful mess of the carpet,’ he complained. ‘What do we do with him?’

‘Hand him over to the police.’

‘The police? You had your reservations about the police, I thought.’

‘Reservations is hardly the word. We have to make the break some time.’

‘Our friend outside, as well?’

‘Who?’

‘This fellow’s – ah – accomplice.’

‘I threw him over the side.’

Uncle Arthur made the mess on the carpet even worse. He spilt whisky all over it. He said: ‘You what?’

‘There’s no worry.’ I pointed downwards. ‘Twenty fathoms and thirty pounds of metal attached to his ankles.’

‘At – at the bottom of the sea?’

‘What did you expect me to do with him? Give him a state funeral? I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you, he was dead. I had to kill him.’

‘Had to? Had to?’ He seemed upset. ‘Why, Calvert?’

‘There’s no “why.” There’s no justification needed. I killed him or he killed me, and then you, and now we’d both be where he is. Do you have to justify killing men who have murdered at least three times, probably oftener? And if that particular character wasn’t a murderer, he came to-night to murder. I killed him with as little thought and compunction and remorse as I’d have tramped on a black widow spider.’

‘But you can’t go around acting like a public executioner.’

‘I can and I will. As long as it’s a choice between them and me.’

‘You’re right, you’re right.’ He sighed. ‘I must confess that reading your reports of an operation is quite different from being with you on one. But I must also confess that it’s rather comforting having you around at times like this. Well, let’s put this man in cells.’

‘I’d like to go to the Shangri-la first, sir. To look for Hunslett.’

‘I see. To look for Hunslett. Has it occurred to you, Calvert, that if they are hostile to us, as you admit is possible, that they may not let you look for Hunslett?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s not my intention to go through the Shangri-la, a gun in each hand, searching for him. I wouldn’t get five feet. I’m just going to ask for him, if anyone has seen him. Assuming they really are the bandits, don’t you think it might be most instructive, sir, to observe their reactions when they see a dead man walking aboard, especially a dead man coming alongside from a boat to which they’d shortly beforehand dispatched a couple of killers? And don’t you think it will become more and more instructive to watch them as time passes by with no sign of First and Second Murderers entering left?’

‘Assuming they are the bandits, of course.’

‘I’ll know before we say good-bye to them.’

‘And how do we account for our knowing one another?’

‘If they’re white as the driven snow, we don’t have to account to them. If they’re not, they won’t believe a damned word either of us say anyway.’

I collected the roll of flex from the wheelhouse and led our prisoner to the after cabin. I told him to sit down with his back to one of the bulkhead generators and he did. Resistance was the last thought in his mind. I passed a few turns of flex round his waist and secured him to the generator: his feet I secured to one of the stanchions. His hands I left free. He could move, he could use the towel and the bucket of cold fresh water I left to administer first aid to himself whenever he felt like it. But he was beyond reach of any glass or sharp instrument with which he could either free himself or do himself in. On the latter score I wasn’t really worried one way or another.

I started the engines, weighed anchor, switched on the navigation lights and headed for the Shangri-la. Quite suddenly, I wasn’t tired any more.

SIX

Wednesday: 8.40 p.m. – 10.40 p.m.

Less than two hundred yards from the Shangri-la the anchor clattered down into fifteen fathoms of water. I switched off the navigation lights, switched on all the wheelhouse lights, passed into the saloon and closed the door behind me.

‘How long do we sit here?’ Uncle Arthur asked.

‘Not long. Better get into your oilskins now, sir. Next really heavy shower of rain and we’ll go.’

‘They’ll have had their night-glasses on us all the way across the bay, you think?’

‘No question of that. They’ll still have the glasses on us. They’ll be worried stiff, wondering what the hell has gone wrong, what’s happened to the two little playmates they sent to interview us. If they are the bandits.’

‘They’re bound to investigate again.’

‘Not yet. Not for an hour or two. They’ll wait for their two friends to turn up. They may think that it took them longer than expected to reach the Firecrest and that we’d upped anchor and left before they got there. Or they may think they’d trouble with their dinghy’ I heard the sudden drumming of heavy rain on the coach-roof. ‘It’s time to go.’

We left by the galley door, felt our way aft, quietly lowered the dinghy into the water and climbed down the transom ladder into it. I cast off. Wind and tide carried us in towards the harbour. Through the driving rain we could dimly see the Shangri-la’s riding light as we drifted by about a hundred yards from her port side. Halfway between the Shangri-la and the shore I started up the outboard motor and made back towards the Shangri-la.

The big tender was riding at the outer end of a boom which stretched out from the Shangri-la’s starboard side about ten feet for’ard of the bridge. The stern of the tender was about fifteen out from the illuminated gangway. I approached from astern, upwind, and closed in on the gangway. An oilskinned figure wearing one of the Shangri-la’s crew’s fancy French sailor hats came running down the gangway and took the painter.

‘Ah, good-evening, my man,’ Uncle Arthur said. He wasn’t putting on the style, it was the way he talked to most people. ‘Sir Anthony is aboard?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I wonder if I could see him for a moment?’

‘If you could wait a –’ The sailor broke off and peered at Sir Arthur. ‘Oh, it’s – it’s the Admiral, sir.’

‘Admiral Arnford-Jason. Of course – you’re the fellow who ran me ashore to the Columba after dinner.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll show you to the saloon, sir.’

‘My boat will be all right here for a few moments.’ The unspoken implication was that I was his chauffeur.

‘Perfectly, sir.’

They climbed the gangway and went aft. I spent ten seconds examining the portable lead that served the gangway light, decided that it would offer much resistance to a good hefty tug, then followed the two men aft. I passed by the passage leading to the saloon and hid behind a ventilator. Almost at once the sailor emerged from the passage and made his way for’ard again. Another twenty seconds and he’d be yelling his head off about the mysteriously vanished chauffeur. I didn’t care what he did in twenty seconds.

When I reached the partly open saloon door I heard Sir Arthur’s voice.

‘No, no, I really am most sorry to break in upon you like this. Well, yes, thank you, small one if you will. Yes, soda, please.’ Uncle Arthur really was having a go at the whisky to-night. ‘Thank you, thank you. Your health, Lady Skouras. Your health, gentlemen. Mustn’t delay you. Fact is, I wonder if you can help us. My friend and I are most anxious, really most anxious. I wonder where he is, by the way? I thought he was right behind –’

Cue for Calvert. I turned down the oilskin collar that had been obscuring the lower part of my face, removed the sou-wester that had been obscuring most of the upper part of my face, knocked politely and entered. I said: ‘Good evening, Lady Skouras. Goodevening, gentlemen. Please forgive the interruption, Sir Anthony.’

Apart from Uncle Arthur there were six of them gathered round the fire at the end of the saloon. Sir Anthony standing, the others seated. Charlotte Skouras, Dollmann, Skouras’s managing director, Lavorski, his accountant, Lord Charnley, his broker and a fifth man I didn’t recognise. All had glasses in their hands.

Their reaction to my sudden appearance, as expressed by their faces, was interesting. Old Skouras showed a half-frowning, halfspeculative surprise. Charlotte Skouras gave me a strained smile of welcome: Uncle Arthur hadn’t been exaggerating when he spoke of that bruise, it was a beauty. The stranger’s face was noncommittal, Lavorski’s inscrutable, Dollmann’s rigid as if carved from marble and Lord Charnley’s for a fleeting moment that of a man walking through a country churchyard at midnight when someone taps him on the shoulder. Or so I thought. I could have imagined it. But there was no imagination about the sudden tiny snapping sound as the stem of the glass fell soundlessly on to the carpet. A scene straight from Victorian melodrama. Our aristocratic broker friend had something on his mind. Whether the others had or not it was difficult to say. Dollmann, Lavorski and, I was pretty sure, Sir Anthony could make their faces say whatever they wanted them to say.

‘Good lord, Petersen!’ Skouras’s tone held surprise but not the surprise of a person welcoming someone back from the grave. ‘I didn’t know you two knew each other.’

‘My goodness, yes. Petersen and I have been colleagues for years, Tony, unesco, you know.’ Uncle Arthur always gave out that he was a British delegate to unesco, a cover that gave him an excellent reason for his frequent trips abroad. ‘Marine biology may not be very cultural, but it’s scientific and educational enough. Petersen’s one of my star performers. Lecturing, I mean. Done missions for me in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.’ Which was true, enough, only they weren’t lecture missions. ‘Didn’t even know he was here until they told me at the hotel. But dear me, dear me, mustn’t talk about ourselves. It’s Hunslett. Petersen’s colleague. And mine in a way. Can’t find him anywhere. Hasn’t been in the village. Yours is the nearest boat. Have you seen anything of him, anything at all?’

‘Afraid I haven’t,’ Skouras said. ‘Anybody here? No? Nobody?’ He pressed a bell and a steward appeared. Skouras asked him to make inquiries aboard and the steward left. ‘When did he disappear, Mr Petersen?’

‘I’ve no idea. I left him carrying out experiments. I’ve been away all day collecting specimens, Jellyfish.’ I laughed deprecatingly and rubbed my inflamed face. ‘The poisonous type, I’m afraid. No sign of him when I returned.’

‘Could your friend swim, Mr Petersen?’ the stranger asked. I looked at him, a dark thickset character in his middle forties, with black snapping eyes deepset in a tanned face. Expressionless faces seemed to be the order of the day there, so I kept mine expressionless. It wasn’t easy.

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m afraid you’re thinking along the same lines as myself. We’ve no guard rails aft. A careless step ’ I broke off as the steward re-entered and reported that no one had seen a sign of Hunslett, then went on: ‘I think I should report this to Sergeant MacDonald at once.’

Everybody else seemed to think so, too, so we left. The cold slanting rain was heavier than ever. At the head of the gangway I pretended to slip, flung my arms about wildly for a bit then toppled into the sea, taking the gangway wandering lead with me. What with the rain, the wind and the sudden darkness there was quite a bit of confusion and it was the better part of a minute before I was finally hauled on to the landing stage of the companionway. Old Skouras was commiseration itself and offered me a change of clothes at once but I declined politely and went back to the Firecrest with Uncle Arthur. Neither of us spoke on the way back.

As we secured the dinghy I said: ‘When you were at dinner on the Shangri-la you must have given some story to account for your presence here, for your dramatic appearance in an R.A.F. rescue launch.’

‘Yes. It was a good one. I told them a vital unesco conference in Geneva was being deadlocked because of the absence of a certain Dr Spenser Freeman. It happens to be true. In all the papers to-day. Dr Freeman is not there because it suits us not to have him there. No one knows that, of course. I told them that it was of vital national importance that he should be there, that we’d received information that he was doing field research in Torbay and that the Government had sent me here to get him back.’

‘Why send the launch away? That would seem odd.’

‘No. If he’s somewhere in the wilds of Torbay I couldn’t locate him before daylight. There’s a helicopter, I said, standing by to fly him out. I’ve only to lift the phone to have it here in fifty minutes.’

‘And of course, you weren’t to know that the telephone lines were out of order. It might have worked if you hadn’t called at the Firecrest in the rescue launch before you went to the Shangri-la. You weren’t to know that our friends who were locked in the after cabin when you went aboard would report back that they’d heard an R.A.F. rescue launch here at such and such a time. They might have seen it through a porthole, but even that wouldn’t be necessary, the engines are unmistakable. So now our friends know you’re lying like a trooper. The chances are that they’ve now a very shrewd idea as to who exactly you are. Congratulations, sir. You’ve now joined the category I’ve been in for years – no insurance company in the world would issue you a life policy even on a ninety-nine per cent premium.’

‘Our trip to the Shangri-la has removed your last doubts about our friends out there?’

‘Yes, sir. You saw the reaction of our belted broker. Lord Charnley. And him an aristocrat to boot!’

‘A small thing to base a big decision on, Calvert,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly.

‘Yes, sir.’ I fished my scuba suit from the after locker and led the way below. ‘I didn’t fall into the water by accident. By accident on purpose. I didn’t mention that when I was hanging on to the boat’s rudder off the reef this evening I cut a notch in it. A deep vee notch. The Shangri-la’s tender has a deep vee notch in it. Same notch, in fact. Same boat.’

‘I see. I see indeed.’ Uncle Arthur sat on the settee and gave me the combination of the cold blue eye and the monocle. ‘You forgot to give me advance notification of your intentions.’

‘I didn’t forget.’ I started to change out of my soaking clothes. ‘I’d no means of knowing how good an actor you are, sir.’

‘I’ll accept that. So that removed your last doubts.’

‘No, sir. Superfluous confirmation, really. I knew before then. Remember that swarthy character sitting beside Lavorski who asked me if Hunslett could swim. I’ll bet a fortune to a penny that he wasn’t at the Shangri-la’s dinner table earlier on.’

‘You would win. How do you know?’

‘Because he was in command of the crew of the boat who shot down the helicopter and killed Williams and hung around afterwards waiting to have a go at me. His name is Captain Imrie. He was the captain of the prize crew of the Nantesville.’

Uncle Arthur nodded, but his mind was on something else. It was on the scuba suit I was pulling on.

‘What the hell do you think you’re going to do with that thing?’ he demanded.

‘Advance notification of intentions, sir. Won’t be long. I’m taking a little trip to the Shangri-la. The Shangri-la’s tender, rather. With a little homing device and a bag of sugar. With your permission, sir.’

‘Something else you forgot to tell me, hey, Calvert? Like that breaking off the Shangri-la’s gangway light was no accident?’

‘I’d like to get there before they replace it, sir.’

‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.’ Uncle Arthur shook his head. For a moment I thought he was referring to the dispatch with which I had made the uneventful return trip to the Shangri-la’s tender, but his next words showed that his mind was on higher and more important things. ‘That Tony Skouras should be up to his neck in this. There’s something far wrong. I just can’t believe it. Good God, do you know he was up for a peerage in the next List?’

‘So soon? He told me he was waiting for the price to come down.’

Uncle Arthur said nothing. Normally, he would have regarded such a statement as a mortal insult, as he himself automatically collected a life peerage on retirement. But nothing. He was as shaken as that.

‘I’d like nothing better than to arrest the lot of them,’ I said. ‘But our hands are tied. We’re helpless. But now that I know what we do know I wonder if you would do me a favour before we go ashore, sir. There are two things I want to know. One is whether Sir Anthony really was down at some Clyde shipyard a few days ago having stabilisers fitted – a big job few yards would tackle in a yacht that size. Should find out in a couple of hours. People tell silly and unnecessary lies. Also I’d like to find out if Lord Kirkside has taken the necessary steps to have his dead son’s title – he was Viscount somebody or other – transferred to his younger son.’

‘You get the set ready and I’ll ask them anything you like,’ Uncle Arthur said wearily. He wasn’t really listening to me, he was still contemplating with stunned disbelief the possibility that his future fellow peer was up to the neck in skullduggery on a vast scale. ‘And pass me that bottle before you go below.’

At the rate Uncle Arthur was going, I reflected, it was providential that the home of one of the most famous distilleries in the Highlands was less than half a mile from where we were anchored. I lowered the false head of the starboard diesel to the engineroom deck as if it weighed a ton. I straightened and stood there for a full minute, without moving. Then I went to the engine-room door.

‘Sir Arthur?’

‘Coming, coming.’ A few seconds and he was at the doorway, the glass of whisky in his hand.

‘All connected up?’

‘I’ve found Hunslett, sir.’

Uncle Arthur moved slowly forward like a man in a dream.

The transmitter was gone. All our explosives and listening devices and little portable transmitters were gone. That had left plenty of room. They’d had to double him up to get him in, his head was resting on his forearms and his arms on his knees, but there was plenty of room. I couldn’t see his face. I could see no marks of violence. Half-sitting, half-lying there he seemed curiously peaceful, a man drowsing away a summer afternoon by a sun-warmed wall. A long summer afternoon because for ever was a long time. That’s what I’d told him last night, he’d all the time in the world for sleep.

I touched his face. It wasn’t cold yet. He’d been dead two to three hours, no more. I turned his face to see if I could find how he had died. His head lolled to one side like that of a broken rag doll. I turned and looked at Sir Arthur. The dreamlike expression had gone, his eyes were cold and bitter and cruel. I thought vaguely of the tales I’d heard, and largely discounted, of Uncle Arthur’s total ruthlessness. I wasn’t so ready to discount them now. Uncle Arthur wasn’t where he was now because he’d answered an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, he’d have been hand-picked by two or three very clever men who would have scoured the country to find the one man with the extraordinary qualifications they required. And they had picked Uncle Arthur, the man with the extraordinary qualifications, and total ruthlessness must have been one of the prime requisites. I’d never really thought of it before.

He said: ‘Murdered, of course.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How?’

‘His neck is broken, sir.’

‘His neck? A powerful man like Hunslett?’

‘I know a man who could do it with one twist of his hands. Quinn. The man who killed Baker and Delmont. The man who almost killed me.’

‘I see.’ He paused, then went on, almost absently: ‘You will, of course, seek out and destroy this man. By whatever means you choose. You can reconstruct this, Calvert?’

‘Yes, sir.’ When it came to reconstruction when it was too damn’ late, I stood alone. ‘Our friend or friends boarded the Firecrest very shortly after I had left this morning. That is, before daylight. They wouldn’t have dared try it after it was light. They overpowered Hunslett and kept him prisoner. Confirmation that he was held prisoner all day comes from the fart that he failed to meet the noonday schedule. They still held him prisoner when you came aboard. There was no reason why you should suspect that there was anyone aboard – the boat that put them aboard before dawn would have gone away at once. They couldn’t leave one of the Shangri-la’s boats lying alongside the Firecrest all day.’

‘There’s no necessity to dot i’s and cross t’s.’

‘No, sir. Maybe an hour or so after you departed the Shangri-la’s tender with Captain Imrie, Quinn and company aboard turns up: they report that I’m dead. That was Hunslett’s death warrant. With me dead they couldn’t let him live. So Quinn killed him. Why he was killed this way I don’t know. They may have thought shots could be heard, they may not have wanted to use knives or blunt instruments in case they left blood all over the deck. They were intending to abandon the boat till they came back at night, at midnight, to take it out to the Sound and scuttle it and someone might have come aboard in the interim. My own belief is that he was killed this way because Quinn is a psychopath and compulsive killer and liked doing it this way.’

‘I see. And then they said to themselves: “Where can we hide Hunslett till we come back at midnight? Just in case someone does come aboard.” And then they said: “Ha! We know. We’ll hide him in the dummy diesel.” So they threw away the transmitter and all the rest of the stuff – or took it with them. It doesn’t matter. And they put Hunslett inside.’ Uncle Arthur had been speaking very quietly throughout and then suddenly, for the first time I’d ever known it, his voice became a shout. ‘How in the name of God did they know this was a dummy diesel, Calvert? How could they have known?’ His voice dropped to what was a comparative whisper. ‘Someone talked, Calvert. Or someone was criminally careless.’

‘No one talked, sir. Someone was criminally careless. I was. If I’d used my eyes Hunslett wouldn’t be lying there now. The night the two bogus customs officers were aboard I knew that they had got on to something when we were in the engine-room here. Up to the time that they’d inspected the batteries they’d gone through the place with a tooth-comb. After that they didn’t give a damn. Hunslett even suggested that it was something to do with the batteries but I was too clever to believe him.’ I walked to the work-bench, picked up a torch and handed it to Uncle Arthur. ‘Do you see anything about those batteries that would excite suspicion?’

He looked at me, that monocled eye still ice-cold and bitter, took the torch and examined the batteries carefully. He spent all of two minutes searching, then straightened.

‘I see nothing,’ he said curtly.

‘Thomas – the customs man who called himself Thomas – did. He was on to us from the start. He knew what he was looking for. He was looking for a powerful radio transmitter. Not the tuppence ha’penny job we have up in the wheelhouse. He was looking for signs of a power take-off from those batteries. He was looking for the marks left by screw clamps or by a pair of saw-toothed, powerfully spring-loaded crocodile clips.’

Uncle Arthur swore, very quietly, and bent over the batteries again. This time his examination took only ten seconds.

‘You make your point well, Calvert.’ The eyes were still bitter, but no longer glacial.

‘No wonder they knew exactly what I was doing to-day,’ I said savagely. ‘No wonder they knew that Hunslett would be alone before dawn, that I’d be landing at that cove this evening. All they required was radio confirmation from someone out in Loch Houron that Calvert had been snooping around there and the destruction of the helicopter was a foregone conclusion. All this damned fol-de-rol about smashing up radio transmitters and making us think that we were the only craft left with a transmitter. God, how blind can you be?’

‘I assume that there’s some logical thought behind this outburst,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly.

‘That night Hunslett and I were aboard the Shangri-la for drinks. I told you that when we returned we knew that we’d had visitors. We didn’t know why, then. My God!’

‘You’ve already been at pains to demonstrate the fact that I was no brighter than yourself about the battery. It’s not necessary to repeat the process –’

‘Let me finish,’ I interrupted. Uncle Arthur didn’t like being interrupted. ‘They came down to the engine-room here. They knew there was a transmitter. They looked at that starboard cylinder head. Four bolts – the rest are dummies – with the paint well and truly scraped off. The port cylinder head bolts without a flake of paint missing. They take off this head, wire into the transceiver lines on the output side of the scrambler and lead out to a small radio transmitter hidden, like as not, behind the battery bank there. They’d have all the equipment with them for they knew exactly what they wanted to do. From then on they could listen in to our every word. They knew all our plans, everything we intended to do, and made their own plans accordingly. They figured – and how right they were – that it would be a damn’ sight more advantageous for them to let Hunslett and I have our direct communication with you and so know exactly what was going on than to wreck this set and force us to find some other means of communication that they couldn’t check on.’

‘But why – but why destroy the advantage they held by – by -’ He gestured at the empty engine casing.

‘It wasn’t an advantage any longer,’ I said tiredly. ‘When they ripped out that set Hunslett was dead and they thought Calvert was dead. They didn’t need the advantage any more.’

‘Of course, of course. My God, what a fiendish brew this is.’ He took out his monocle and rubbed his eye with the knuckle of his hand. ‘They’re bound to know that we will find Hunslett the first time we attempt to use this radio. I am beginning to appreciate the weight of your remark in the saloon that we might find it difficult to insure ourselves. They cannot know how much we know, but they cannot afford to take chances. Not with, what is it now, a total of seventeen million pounds at stake. They will have to silence us.’

‘Up and off is the only answer,’ I agreed. ‘We’ve been down here too long already, they might even be on their way across now. Don’t let that Luger ever leave your hand, sir. We’ll be safe enough under way. But first we must put Hunslett and our friend in the after cabin ashore.’

‘Yes. Yes, we must put them ashore first.’

At the best of times, weighing anchor by electric windlass is not a job for a moron, even an alert moron. Even our small windlass had a pull of over 1,400 pounds. A carelessly placed hand or foot, a flapping trouser leg or the trailing skirts of an oilskin, any of those being caught up between chain and drum and you can be minus a hand or foot before you can cry out, far less reach the deck switch which is invariably placed abaft the windlass. Doing this on a wet slippery deck is twice as dangerous. Doing it on a wet slippery deck, in total darkness, heavy rain and with a very unstable boat beneath your feet, not to mention having the brake pawl off and the winch covered by a tarpaulin, is a highly dangerous practice indeed. But it wasn’t as dangerous as attracting the attention of our friends on the Shangri-la.

Perhaps it was because of my total absorption in the job on hand, perhaps because of the muffled clank of the anchor coming inboard, that I didn’t locate and identify the sound as quickly as I might. Twice I’d thought I’d heard the far-off sound of a woman’s voice, twice I’d vaguely put it down to late-night revelry on one of the smaller yachts in the bay – it would require an I.B.M. computer to work out the gallonage of gin consumed in British yacht harbours after the sun goes down. Then I heard the voice again, much nearer this time, and I put all thought of revelry afloat out of my mind. The only cry of desperation ever heard at a yacht party is when the gin runs out: this soft cry had a different quality of desperation altogether. I stamped on the deck switch, and all sound on the fo’c’sle ceased. The Lilliput was in my hand without my knowing how it had got there.

‘Help me!’ The voice was low and urgent and desperate. ‘For God’s sake, help me.’

The voice came from the water, amidships on the port side. I moved back silently to where I thought the voice had come from and stood motionless. I thought of Hunslett and I didn’t move a muscle. I’d no intention of helping anyone until I’d made sure the voice didn’t come from some dinghy – a dinghy with two other passengers, both carrying machineguns. One word, one incautious flash of light, a seven pound pull on a trigger and Calvert would be among his ancestors if, that was, they would have anything to do with such a bloody fool of a descendant.

‘Please! Please help me! Please!’

I helped her. Not so much because the desperation in the voice was unquestionably genuine as because of the fact that it as unquestionably belonged to Charlotte Skouras.

I pushed through between the scuppers and the lowest guardrail, a rubber tyre fender that was permanently attached to one of the guardrail stanchions and lowered it to water-level. I said: ‘Lady Skouras?’

‘Yes, yes, it’s me. Thank God, thank God!’ Her voice didn’t come just as easily as that, she was gasping for breath and she’d water in her mouth.

‘There’s a fender at the boat’s side. Catch it.’

A moment or two, then: ‘I have it.’

‘Can you pull yourself up?’

More splashing and gasping, then: ‘No. No, I can’t do it.’

‘No matter. Wait.’ I turned round to go for Uncle Arthur but he was already by my side. I said softly in his ear: ‘Lady Skouras is down there in the water. It may be a trap. I don’t think so. But if you see a light, shoot at it.’

He said nothing but I felt his arm move as he took the Luger from his pocket. I stepped over the guard-rail and lowered myself till my foot came to rest on the lower part of the tyre. I reached down and caught her arm. Charlotte Skouras was no slender sylph-like figure, she had some bulky package tied to her waist, and I wasn’t as fit as I’d been a long, long time ago, say about forty-eight hours, but with a helping hand from Uncle Arthur I managed to get her up on deck. Between us, we half carried her to the curtained saloon and set her down on the settee. I propped a cushion behind her head and took a good look at her.

She’d never have made the front cover of Vogue. She looked terrible. Her dark slacks and shirt looked as if they had spent a month in the sea instead of probably only a few minutes. The long tangled auburn hair was plastered to her head and cheeks, her face was dead-white, the big brown eyes, with the dark half-circles, were wide open and frightened and both mascara and lipstick had begun to run. And she hadn’t been beautiful to start with. I thought she was the most desirable woman I’d ever seen. I must be nuts.

‘My dear Lady Skouras, my dear Lady Skouras!’ Uncle Arthur was back among the aristocracy and showed it. He knelt by her side, ineffectually dabbing at her face with a handkerchief. ‘What in God’s name has happened? Brandy, Calvert, brandy! Don’t just stand there, man. Brandy!’

Uncle Arthur seemed to think he was in a pub but, as it happened, I did have some brandy left. I handed him the glass and said: ‘If you’ll attend to Lady Skouras, sir, I’ll finish getting the anchor up.’

‘No, no!’ She took a gulp of the brandy, choked on it and I had to wait until she had finished coughing before she went on. ‘They’re not coming for at least two hours yet. I know. I heard. There’s something terrible going on, Sir Arthur. I had to come, I had to come.’

‘Now, don’t distress yourself. Lady Skouras, don’t distress yourself,’ Uncle Arthur said, as if she weren’t distressed enough already. ‘Just drink this down, Lady Skouras.’

‘No, not that!’ I got all set to take a poor view of this, it was damned good brandy, then I realised she was talking of something else. ‘Not Lady Skouras. Never again! Charlotte. Charlotte Meiner. Charlotte.’

One thing about women, they always get their sense of priorities right. There they were on the Shangri-la, rigging up a home-made atom bomb to throw through our saloon windows and all she could think was to ask us to call her ‘Charlotte.’ I said: ‘Why did you have to come?’

‘Calvert!’ Uncle Arthur’s voice was sharp. ‘Do you mind? Lady – I mean, Charlotte – has just suffered a severe shock. Let her take her time to –’

‘No.’ She struggled to an upright sitting position and forced a wan smile, half-scared, half-mocking. ‘No, Mr Petersen, Mr Calvert, whatever your name, you’re quite right. Actresses tend to over-indulge their emotions. I’m not an actress any longer.’ She took another sip of the brandy and a little colour came back to her face. ‘I’ve known for some time that something was very far wrong aboard the Shangri-la. Strange men have been aboard. Some of the old crew were changed for no reason. Several times I’ve been put ashore with the stewardess in hotels while the Shangri-la went off on mysterious journeys. My husband – Sir Anthony – would tell me nothing. He has changed terribly since our marriage – I think he takes drugs. I’ve seen guns. Whenever those strange men came aboard I was sent to my stateroom after dinner.’ She smiled mirthlessly. ‘It wasn’t because of any jealousy on my husband’s part, you may believe me. The last day or two I sensed that everything was coming to a climax.

To-night, just after you were gone, I was sent to my stateroom. I left, but stayed out in the passage. Lavorski was talking. I heard him saying: “If your admiral pal is a unesco delegate, Skouras, then I’m King Neptune. I know who he is. We all know who he is. It’s too late in the day now and they know too much. It’s them or us.” And then Captain Imrie – how I hate that man! – said: “I’ll send Quinn and Jacques and Kramer at midnight. At one o’clock they’ll open the sea-cocks in the Sound”.’

‘Charming friends your husband has,’ I murmured.

She looked at me, half-uncertainly, half-speculatively and said: ‘Mr Petersen or Mr Calvert – and I heard Lavorski call you Johnson ’

‘It is confusing,’ I admitted. ‘Calvert. Philip Calvert.’

‘Well, Philip,’ – she pronounced it the French way and very nice it sounded too – ‘you are one great bloody fool if you talk like that. You are in deadly danger.’

‘Mr Calvert,’ Uncle Arthur said sourly – it wasn’t her language he disapproved of, it was this Christian name familiarity between the aristocracy and the peasants – ‘is quite aware of the danger. He has unfortunate mannerisms of speech, that’s all. You are a very brave woman, Charlotte.’ Blue-bloods first-naming each other was a different thing altogether. ‘You took a great risk in eavesdropping. You might have been caught.’

‘I was caught, Sir Arthur.’ The smile showed up the lines on either side of her mouth but didn’t touch her eyes. ‘That is another reason why I am here. Even without the knowledge of your danger, yes, I would have come. My husband caught me. He took me into my stateroom.’ She stood up shakily, turned her back to us and pulled up the sodden dark shirt. Right across her back ran three great blue-red weals. Uncle Arthur stood stock-still, a man incapable of movement. I crossed the saloon and peered at her back. The weals were almost an inch wide and running half-way round her body. Here and there were tiny blood-spotted punctures. Lightly I tried a finger on one of the weals. The flesh was raised and puffy, a fresh weal, as lividly-genuine a weal as ever I’d clapped eyes on. She didn’t move. I stepped back and she turned to face us.

‘It is not nice, is it? It does not feel very nice.’ She smiled and again that smile. ‘I could show you worse than that.’

‘No, no, no,’ Uncle Arthur said hastily. ‘That will not be necessary.’ He was silent for a moment, then burst out: ‘My dear Charlotte, what you must have suffered. It’s fiendish, absolutely fiendish. He must be – he must be inhuman. A monster. A monster, perhaps under the influence of drugs. I would never have believed it!’ His face was brick-red with outrage and his voice sounded as if Quinn had him by the throat. Strangled. ‘No one would ever have believed it!’

‘Except the late Lady Skouras,’ she said quietly. ‘I understand now why she was in and out of mental homes several times before she died.’ She shrugged. ‘I have no wish to go the same way. I am made of tougher stuff than Madeleine Skouras. So I pick up my bag and run away’ She nodded at the small polythene bag of clothes that had been tied to her waist. ‘Like Dick Whittington, is it not?’

‘They’ll be here long before midnight when they discover you’re gone,’ I observed.

‘It may be morning before they find out. Most nights I lock my cabin door. To-night I locked it from the outside.’

‘That helps,’ I said. ‘Standing about in those sodden clothes doesn’t. There’s no point in running away only to die of pneumonia. You’ll find towels in my cabin. Then we can get you a room in the Columba Hotel.’

‘I had hoped for better than that.’ The fractional slump of the shoulders was more imagined than seen, but the dull defeat in the eyes left nothing to the imagination. ‘You would put me in the first place they would look for me. There is no safe place for me in Torbay. They will catch me and bring me back and my husband will take me into that stateroom again. My only hope is to run away. Your only hope is to run away. Please. Can we not run away together?’

‘No.’

‘A man not given to evasive answers, is that it?’ There was a lonely dejection, a proud humiliation about her that did very little for my self-respect. She turned towards Uncle Arthur, took both his hands in hers and said in a low voice: ‘Sir Arthur. I appeal to you as an English gentleman.’ Thumbs down on Calvert, that foreign-born peasant. ‘May I stay? Please?’

Uncle Arthur looked at me, hesitated, looked at Charlotte Skouras, looked into those big brown eyes and was a lost man.

‘Of course you may stay, my dear Charlotte.’ He gave a stiff old-fashioned bow which, I had to admit, went very well with the beard and the monocle. ‘Yours to command, my dear lady’

‘Thank you. Sir Arthur.’ She smiled at me, not with triumph or satisfaction, just an anxious-to-be-friendly smile. ‘It would be nice, Philip, to have the consent – what do you say? – unanimous.’

‘If Sir Arthur wishes to expose you to a vastly greater degree of risk aboard this boat than you would experience in Torbay, that is Sir Arthur’s business. As for the rest, my consent is not required. I’m a well-trained civil servant and I obey orders.’

‘You are gracious to a fault,’ Uncle Arthur said acidly.

‘Sorry, sir.’ I’d suddenly seen the light and a pretty dazzling beam it was too. ‘I should not have called your judgment in question. The lady is very welcome. But I think she should remain below while we are alongside the pier, sir.’

‘A reasonable request and a wise precaution,’ Uncle Arthur said mildly. He seemed pleased at my change of heart, at my proper deference to the wishes of the aristocracy.

‘It won’t be for long.’ I smiled at Charlotte Skouras. ‘We leave Torbay within the hour.’

‘What do I care what you charge him with?’ I looked from Sergeant MacDonald to the broken-faced man with the wet blood-stained towel, then back to MacDonald again. ‘Breaking and entering. Assault and battery. Illegal possession of a dangerous weapon with intent to create a felony – murder. Anything you like.’

‘Well, now. It’s just not quite as easy as that.’ Sergeant MacDonald spread his big brown hands across the counter of the tiny police station and looked at the prisoner and myself in turn. ‘He didn’t break and enter, you know, Mr Petersen. He boarded. No law against that. Assault and battery? It looks as if he has been the victim and not the perpetrator. And what kind of weapon was he carrying, Mr Petersen?’

‘I don’t know. It must have been knocked overboard.’

‘I see. Knocked overboard, was it? So we have no real proof of any felonious intent.’

I was becoming a little tired of Sergeant MacDonald. He was fast enough to co-operate with bogus customs officers but with me he was just being deliberately obstructive. I said: ‘You’ll be telling me next that it’s all a product of my fevered imagination. You’ll be telling me next that I just stepped ashore, grabbed the first passerby I saw, hit him in the face with a four-by-two then dragged him up here inventing this tale as I went. Even you can’t be so stupid as to believe that.’

The brown face turned red and, on the counter, the brown knuckles turned ivory. He said softly: ‘You’ll kindly not talk to me like that.’

‘If you insist on behaving like a fool I’ll treat you as such. Are you going to lock him up?’

‘It’s only your word against his.’

‘No. I had a witness. He’s down at the old pier now, if you want to see him. Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason. A very senior civil servant.’

‘You had a Mr Hunslett with you last time I was aboard your boat.’

‘He’s down there, too.’ I nodded at the prisoner. ‘Why don’t you ask a few questions of our friend here?’

‘I’ve sent for the doctor. He’ll have to fix his face first. I can’t understand a word he says.’

‘The state of his face doesn’t help,’ I admitted. ‘But the main trouble is that he speaks Italian.’

‘Italian, is it? I’ll soon fix that. The owner of the Western Isles cafe is an Italian.’

‘That helps. There are four little questions he might put to our pal here. Where is his passport, how he arrived in this country, who is his employer and where does he live.’

The sergeant looked at me for a long moment then said slowly: ‘It’s a mighty queer marine biologist that you are, Mr Petersen.’

‘And it’s a mighty queer police sergeant that you are, Mr MacDonald. Good night.’

I crossed the dimly-lit street to the sea-wall and waited in the shadow of a phone booth. After two minutes a man with a small bag came hurrying up the street and turned into the police station. He was out again in five minutes, which wasn’t surprising: there was little a G.P. could do for what was plainly a hospital job.

The station door opened again and Sergeant MacDonald came hurrying out, long black mackintosh buttoned to the neck. He walked quickly along the sea wall, looking neither to left nor right, which made it very easy for me to follow him, and turned down the old stone pier. At the end of the pier he flashed a torch, went down a flight of steps and began to haul in a small boat. I leaned over the pier wall and switched on my own torch.

‘Why don’t they provide you with a telephone or radio for conveying urgent messages?’ I asked. ‘You could catch your death of cold rowing out to the Shangri-la on a night like this.’

He straightened slowly and let the rope fall from his hands. The boat drifted out into the darkness. He came up the steps with the slow heavy tread of an old man and said quietly: ‘What did you say about the Shangri-la?’

‘Don’t let me keep you. Sergeant,’ I said affably. ‘Duty before the idle social chit-chat. Your first duty is to your masters. Off you go, now, tell them that one of their hirelings has been severely clobbered and that Petersen has very grave suspicions about Sergeant MacDonald.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ he said emptily. ‘The Shangri-la – I’m not going anywhere near the Shangri-la.’

‘Where are you going, then? Do tell. Fishing? Kind of forgotten your tackle, haven’t you?’

‘And how would you like to mind your own damn’ business?’ MacDonald said heavily.

‘That’s what I’m doing. Come off it, Sergeant. Think I give a damn about our Italian pal? You can charge him with playing tiddleywinks in the High Street for all I care. I just threw him at you, together with a hint that you yourself were up to no good, to see what the reaction would be, to remove the last doubts in my mind. You reacted beautifully.’

‘I’m maybe not the cleverest, Mr Petersen,’ he said with dignity. ‘Neither am I a complete idiot. I thought you were one of them or after the same thing as them.’ He paused. ‘You’re not. You’re a Government agent.’

‘I’m a civil servant.’ I nodded to where the Firecrest lay not twenty yards away. ‘You’d better come to meet my boss.’

‘I don’t take orders from Civil Servants.’

‘Suit yourself,’ I said indifferently, turned away and looked out over the sea-wall. ‘About your two sons, Sergeant MacDonald. The sixteen-year-old twins who, I’m told, died in the Cairngorms some time back.’

‘What about my sons?’ he said tonelessly.

‘Just that I’m not looking forward to telling them that their own father wouldn’t lift a finger to bring them back to life again.’

He just stood there in the darkness, quite still, saying nothing. He offered no resistance when I took his arm and led him towards the Firecrest.

Uncle Arthur was at his most intimidating and Uncle Arthur in full intimidating cry was a sight to behold. He’d made no move to rise when I’d brought MacDonald into the saloon and he hadn’t ask him to sit. The blue basilisk stare, channelled and magnified by the glittering monocle, transfixed the unfortunate sergeant like a laser beam.

‘So your foot slipped, Sergeant,’ Uncle Arthur said without preamble. He was using his cold, flat, quite uninflected voice, the one that curled your hair. ‘The fact that you stand here now indicates that. Mr Calvert went ashore with a prisoner and enough rope for you to hang yourself and you seized it with both hands. Not very clever of you. Sergeant. You should not have tried to contact your friends.’

‘They are no friends of mine, sir,’ MacDonald said bitterly.

‘I’m going to tell you as much as you need to know about Calvert – Petersen was a pseudonym – and myself and what we are doing.’ Uncle Arthur hadn’t heard him. ‘If you ever repeat any part of what I say to anyone, it will cost you your job, your pension, any hope that you will ever again, in whatever capacity, get another job in Britain and several years in prison for contravention of the Official Secrets Act. I myself will personally formulate the charges.’ He paused then added in a masterpiece of superfluity: ‘Do I make myself clear?’

‘You make yourself very clear,’ MacDonald said grimly.

So Uncle Arthur told him all he thought MacDonald needed to know, which wasn’t much, and finished by saying: ‘I am sure we can now count on your hundred per cent co-operation, Sergeant.’

‘Calvert is just guessing at my part in this,’ he said dully.

‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘You knew those customs officers were bogus. You knew they had no photocopier with them. You knew their only object in coming aboard was to locate and smash that set – and locate any other we might have. You knew they couldn’t have gone back to the mainland in that launch – it was too rough. The launch, was, in fact, the Shangri-la’s tender – which is why you left without lights – and no launch left the harbour after your departure. We’d have heard it. The only life we saw after that was when they switched on their lights in the Shangri-la’s wheelhouse to smash up their own radio – one of their own radios, I should have said. And how did you know the telephone lines were down in the Sound? You knew they were down, but why did you say the Sound? Because you knew they had been cut there. Then, yesterday morning, when I asked you if there was any hope of the lines being repaired, you said no. Odd. One would have thought that you would have told the customs boys going back to the mainland to contact the G.P.O. at once. But you knew they weren’t going back there. And your two sons, Sergeant, the boys supposed to be dead, you forgot to close their accounts. Because you knew they weren’t dead.’

‘I forgot about the accounts,’ MacDonald said slowly. ‘And all the other points – I’m afraid I’m not good at this sort of thing.’ He looked at Uncle Arthur. ‘I know this is the end of the road for me. They said they would kill my boys, sir.’

‘If you will extend us your full co-operation,’ Uncle Arthur said precisely, ‘I will personally see to it that you remain the Torbay police sergeant until you’re falling over your beard. Who are “they”?’

‘The only men I’ve seen is a fellow called Captain Imrie and the two customs men – Durran and Thomas. Durran’s real name is Quinn. I don’t know the others’ names. I usually met them in my house, after dark. I’ve been out to the Shangri-la only twice. To see Imrie.’

‘And Sir Anthony Skouras?’

‘I don’t know.’ MacDonald shrugged helplessly. ‘He’s a good man, sir, he really is. Or I thought so. Maybe he is mixed up in this. Anyone can fall into bad company. It’s very strange, sir.’

‘Isn’t it? And what’s been your part in this?’

‘There’s been funny things happening in this area in the past months. Boats have vanished. People have vanished. Fishermen have had their nets torn, in harbour, and yacht engines have been mysteriously damaged, also in harbour. This is when Captain Imrie wants to prevent certain boats from going certain places at the wrong time.’

‘And your part is to investigate with great diligence and a total lack of success,’ Uncle Arthur nodded. ‘You must be invaluable to them. Sergeant. A man with your record and character is above suspicion. Tell me. Sergeant, what are they up to?’

‘Before God, sir, I have no idea.’

‘You’re totally in the dark?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t doubt it. This is the way the very top men operate. And you will have no idea where your boys are being held?’

‘No, sir.’

‘How do you know they’re alive?’

‘I was taken out to the Shangri-la three weeks ago. My sons had been brought there from God only knows where. They were well.’

‘And are you really so naive as to believe that your sons will be well and will be returned alive when all this is over? Even although your boys will be bound to know who their captors are and would be available for testimony and identification if the time came for that?’

‘Captain Imrie said they would come to no harm. If I co-operated. He said that only fools ever used unnecessary violence.’

‘You are convinced, then, they wouldn’t go to the length of murder?’

‘Murder! What are you talking about, sir?’

‘Calvert?’

‘Sir?’

‘A large whisky for the sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir.’ When it came to lashing out with my private supplies Uncle Arthur was generous to a fault. Uncle Arthur paid no entertainment allowance. So I poured the sergeant a large whisky and, seeing that bankruptcy was inevitable anyway, did the same for myself. Ten seconds later the sergeant’s glass was empty. I took his arm and led him to the engine-room. When we came back to the saloon in a minute’s time the sergeant needed no persuading to accept another glass. His face was pale.

‘I told you that Calvert carried out a helicopter reconnaissance to-day,’ Uncle Arthur said conversationally. ‘What I didn’t tell you was that his pilot was murdered this evening. I didn’t tell you that two other of my best agents have been killed in the last sixty hours. And now, as you’ve just seen, Hunslett. Do you still believe. Sergeant, that we are dealing with a bunch of gentlemanly lawbreakers to whom human life is sacrosanct?’

‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ Colour was back in the brown cheeks again and the eyes were cold and hard and a little desperate.

‘You and Calvert will take Hunslett ashore to your office. You will call in the doctor and ask for an official post-mortem – we must have an official cause of death. For the trial. The other dead men are probably beyond recovery. You will then row out to the Shangri-la and tell Imrie that we brought Hunslett and the other man – the Italian – to your office. You will tell them that you heard us say that we must go to the mainland for new depth-sounding equipment and for armed help and that we can’t be back for two days at least. Do you know where the telephone lines are cut in the Sound?’

‘Yes, sir. I cut them myself.’

‘When you get back from the Shangri-la get out there and fix them. Before dawn. Before dawn to-morrow you, your wife and son must disappear. For thirty-six hours. If you want to live. That is understood?’

‘I understand what you want done. Not why you want it done.’

‘Just do it. One last thing. Hunslett has no relations – few of my men have – so he may as well be buried in Torbay. Knock up your local undertaker during the night and make arrangements for the funeral on Friday. Calvert and I would like to be there.’

‘But – but Friday? That’s just the day after tomorrow’

‘The day after to-morrow. It will be all over then. You’ll have your boys back home.’

MacDonald looked at him in long silence, then said slowly: ‘How can you be sure?’

‘I’m not sure at all.’ Uncle Arthur passed a weary hand across his face and looked at me. ‘Calvert is. It’s a pity, Sergeant, that the Secrets Act will never permit you to tell your friends that you once knew Philip Calvert. If it can be done, Calvert can do it. I think he can. I certainly hope so.’

‘I certainly hope so, too,’ MacDonald said sombrely.

Me too, more than either of them, but there was already so much despondency around that it didn’t seem right to deepen it, so I just put on my confident face and led MacDonald back down to the engine-room.

SEVEN

Wednesday: 10.40 p.m. – Thursday: 2 a.m.

Three of them came to kill us, not at midnight as promised, but at 10.40 p.m. that night. Had they come five minutes earlier then they would have got us because five minutes earlier we were still tied up to the old stone pier. And had they come and got us that five minutes earlier, then the fault would have been mine for, after leaving Hunslett in the police station I had insisted that Sergeant MacDonald accompany me to use his authority in knocking up and obtaining service from the proprietor of the only chemist’s shop in Torbay. Neither of them had been too keen on giving me the illegal help I wanted and it had taken me a full five minutes and the best part of my extensive repertoire of threats to extract from the very elderly chemist the minimum of reluctant service and a small green-ribbed bottle informatively labelled ‘The Tablets.’ But I was lucky and I was back aboard the Firecrest just after 10.30 p.m.

The west coast of Scotland doesn’t go in much for golden Indian summers and that night was no exception. Apart from being cold and windy, which was standard, it was also black as sin and bucketing heavily, which if not quite standard was at least not so unusual as to excite comment. A minute after leaving the pier I had to switch on the searchlight mounted on the wheelhouse roof. The western entrance to the Sound from Torbay harbour, between Torbay and Garve Island, is a quarter of a mile wide and I could have found it easily on a compass course: but there were small yachts, I knew, between the pier and the entrance and if any of them was carrying a riding light it was invisible in that driving rain.

The searchlight control was on the wheelhouse deckhead. I moved it to point the beam down and ahead, then traversed it through a forty-degree arc on either side of the bows.

I picked up the first boat inside five seconds, not a yacht riding at its moorings but a rowing dinghy moving slowly through the water. It was fine on the port bow, maybe fifty yards away. I couldn’t identify the man at the oars, the oars wrapped at their middle with some white cloth to muffle the sound of the rowlocks, because his back was towards me. A very broad back. Quinn. The man in the bows was sitting facing me. He wore oilskins and a dark beret and in his hand he held a gun. At fifty yards it’s almost impossible to identify any weapon, but his looked like a German Schmeisser machine-pistol. Without a doubt Jacques, the machine-gun specialist. The man crouched low in the stern-sheets was quite unidentifiable, but I could see the gleam of a short gun in his hand. Messrs. Quinn, Jacques and Kramer coming to pay their respects as Charlotte Skouras had said they would. But much ahead of schedule.

Charlotte Skouras was on my right in the darkened wheelhouse. She’d been there only three minutes, having spent all our time alongside in her darkened cabin with the door closed. Uncle Arthur was on my left, descrating the clean night air with one of his cheroots. I reached up for a clipped torch and patted my right hand pocket to see if the Lilliput was still there. It was.

I said to Charlotte Skouras: ‘Open the wheel-house door. Put it back on the catch and stand clear.’ Then I said to Uncle Arthur: ‘Take the wheel, sir. Hard a-port when I call. Then back north on course again.’

He took the wheel without a word. I heard the starboard wheelhouse door click on its latch. We were doing no more than three knots through the water. The dinghy was twenty-five yards away, the men in the bows and stern holding up arms to shield their eyes from our searchlight. Quinn had stopped rowing. On our present course we’d leave them at least ten feet on our port beam. I kept the searchlight steady on the boat.

Twenty yards separated us and I could see Jacques lining up his machine-pistol on our light when I thrust the throttle lever right open. The note of the big diesel exhaust deepened and the Firecrest began to surge forward.

‘Hard over now,’ I said.

Uncle Arthur spun the wheel. The sudden thrust of our single port screw boiled back against the port-angled rudder, pushing the stern sharply starboard. Flame lanced from Jacques’ machine-pistol, a silent flame, he’d a silencer on. Bullets ricocheted off our aluminium foremast but missed both light and wheelhouse. Quinn saw what was coming and dug his oars deep but he was too late. I shouted ‘Midships, now,’ pulled the throttle lever back to neutral and jumped out through the starboard doorway on to the deck.

We hit them just where Jacques was sitting, breaking off the dinghy’s bows, capsizing it and throwing the three men into the water. The overturned remains of the boat and a couple of struggling figures came slowly down the starboard side of the Firecrest. My torch picked up the man closer in to our side. Jacques, with the machine-pistol held high above his head, instinctively trying to keep it dry though it must have been soaked when he had been catapulted into the water. I held gun-hand and torch-hand together, aiming down the bright narrow beam. I squeezed the Lilliput’s trigger twice and a bright crimson flower bloomed where his face had been. He went down as if a shark had got him, the gun in the stiffly-upstretched arms. It was a Schmeisser machine-pistol all right. I shifted the torch. There was only one other to be seen in the water and it wasn’t Quinn, he’d either dived under the Firecrest or was sheltering under the upturned wreck of the dinghy. I fired twice more at the second figure and he started to scream. The screaming went on for two or three seconds, then stopped in a shuddering gurgle. I heard the sound of someone beside me on the deck being violently sick over the side. Charlotte Skouras. But I’d no time to stay and comfort Charlotte Skouras, she’d no damned right to be out on deck anyway. I had urgent matters to attend to, such as preventing Uncle Arthur from cleaving Torbay’s old stone pier in half. The townspeople would not have liked it. Uncle Arthur’s idea of midships differed sharply from mine, he’d brought the Firecrest round in a three-quarter circle. He would have been the ideal man at the helm of one of those ramheaded Phoenician galleys that specialised in cutting the opposition in two, but as a helmsman in Torbay harbour he lacked something. I jumped into the wheelhouse, pulled the throttle all the way to astern and spun the wheel to port. I jumped out again and pulled Charlotte Skouras away before she got her head knocked off by one of the barnacle-encrusted piles that fronted the pier. Whether or not we grazed the pier was impossible to say but we sure as hell gave the barnacles a nasty turn.

I moved back into the wheelhouse, taking Charlotte Skouras with me. I was breathing heavily. All this jumping in and out through wheel-house doors took it out of a man. I said: ‘With all respects, sir, what the hell were you trying to do?’

‘Me?’ He was as perturbed as a hibernating bear in January. ‘Is something up, then?’

I moved the throttle to slow ahead, took the wheel from him and brought the Firecrest round till we were due north on a compass bearing. I said: ‘Keep it there, please,’ and did some more traversing with the searchlight. The waters around were black and empty, there was no sign even of the dinghy. I’d expected to see every light in Torbay lit up like a naval review, those four shots, even the Lilliput’s sharp, light-weighted cracks, should have had them all on their feet. But nothing, no sign, no movement at all. The gin bottle levels would be lower than ever. I looked at the compass: north-twenty-west. Like the honey-bee for the flower, the iron filing for the magnet, Uncle Arthur was determinedly heading straight for the shore again. I took the wheel from him, gently but firmly, and said: ‘You came a bit close to the pier back there, sir.’

‘I believe I did.’ He took out a handkerchief and wiped his monocle. ‘Damn’ glass misted up just at the wrong moment. I trust, Calvert, that you weren’t just firing at random out there.’ Uncle Arthur had become a good deal more bellicose in the past hour or so: he’d had a high regard for Hunslett.

‘I got Jacques and Kramer. Jacques was the handy one with the automatic arms. He’s dead. I think Kramer is too. Quinn got away.’ What a set-up, I thought bleakly, what a set-up. Alone with Uncle Arthur on the high seas in the darkness of the night. I’d always known that his eyesight, even in optimum conditions, was pretty poor: but I’d never suspected that, when the sun was down, he was virtually blind as a bat. But unfortunately, unlike the bat, Uncle Arthur wasn’t equipped with a built-in radar which would enable him to shy clear of rocks, headlands, islands and such-like obstructions of a similarly permanent and final nature with which we might go bump in the dark. To all intents and purposes I was singlehanded. This called for a radical revision in plans only I didn’t see how I could radically revise anything.

‘Not too bad,’ Uncle Arthur said approvingly. ‘Pity about Quinn, but otherwise not too bad at all. The ranks of the ungodly are being satisfactorily depleted. Do you think they’ll come after us?’

‘No. For four reasons. One, they won’t know yet what has happened. Two, both their sorties this evening have gone badly and they won’t be in a hurry to try any more boarding expeditions for some time. Three, they’d use the tender for this job, not the Shangri-la and if they get that tender a hundred yards I’ve lost all faith in demerara sugar. Four, there’s mist or fog coming up. The lights of Torbay are obscured already. They can’t follow us because they can’t find us.’

Till that moment the only source of illumination we’d had in the wheelhouse had come from the reflected light of the compass lamp. Suddenly the overhead light came on. Charlotte Skouras’s hand was on the switch. Her face was haggard and she was staring at me as if I were the thing from outer space. Not one of those admiring affectionate looks.

‘What kind of man are you, Mr Calvert?’ No ‘Philip’ this time. Her voice was lower and huskier than ever and it had a shake in it. ‘You – you’re not human. You kill two men and go on speaking calmly and reasonably as if nothing had happened. What in God’s name are you, a hired killer? It’s – it’s unnatural. Have you no feelings, no emotions, no regrets?’

‘Yes, I have. I’m sorry I didn’t kill Quinn too.’

She stared at me with something like horror in her face, then switched her gaze to Uncle Arthur. She said to him and her voice was almost a whisper: ‘I saw that man, Sir Arthur. I saw his face being blown apart by the bullets. Mr Calvert could have – could have arrested him, held him up and handed him over to the police. But he didn’t. He killed him. And the other. It was slow and deliberate. Why, why, why?’

‘There’s no “why” about it, my dear Charlotte.’ Sir Arthur sounded almost irritable. ‘There’s no justification needed. Calvert killed them or they killed us. They came to kill us. You told us that yourself. Would you feel any conpunction at killing a poisonous snake? Those men were no better than that. As for arresting them!’ Uncle Arthur paused, maybe for the short laugh he gave, maybe because he was trying to recall the rest of the homily I’d delivered to him earlier that evening. ‘There’s no intermediate stage in this game. It’s kill or be killed. These are dangerous and deadly men and you never give them warning.’ Good old Uncle Arthur, he’d remembered the whole lecture, practically word for word.

She looked at him for a long moment, her face uncomprehending, looked at me then slowly turned and left the wheelhouse.

I said to Uncle Arthur: ‘You’re just as bad as I am.’

She reappeared again exactly at midnight, switching on the light as she entered. Her hair was combed and neat, her face was less puffy and she was dressed in one of those synthetic fibre dresses, white, ribbed and totally failing to give the impression that she stood in need of a good meal. From the way she eased her shoulders I could see that her back hurt. She gave me a faint tentative smile. She got none in return.

I said: ‘Half an hour ago, rounding Carrara Point, I near as dammit carried away the lighthouse. Now I hope I’m heading north of Dubh Sgeir but I may be heading straight into the middle of it. It couldn’t be any blacker if you were a mile down in an abandoned coal mine, the fog is thickening, I’m a not very experienced sailor trying to navigate my way through the most dangerous waters in Britain and whatever hope we have of survival depends on the preservation of what night-sight I’ve slowly and painfully built up over the past hour or so. Put out that damned light!’

‘I’m sorry.’ The light went out. ‘I didn’t think.’

‘And don’t switch on any other lights either. Not even in your cabin. Rocks are the least of my worries in Loch Houron.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘And I’m sorry about earlier on. That’s why I came up. To tell you that. About the way I spoke and leaving so abruptly, I mean. I’ve no right to sit on judgment on others – and I think my judgment was wrong. I was just – well, literally shocked. To see two men killed like that, no, not killed, there’s always heat and anger about killing, to see two men executed like that, because it wasn’t kill or be killed as Sir Arthur said, and then see the person who did it not care …’ Her voice faded away uncertainly.

‘You might as well get your facts and figures right, my dear,’ Uncle Arthur said. ‘Three men, not two. He killed one just before you came on board to-night. He had no option. But Philip Calvert is not what any reasonable man would call a killer. He doesn’t care in the way you say, because if he did he would go mad. In another way, he cares very much. He doesn’t do this job for money. He’s miserably paid for a man of his unique talents.’ I made a mental note to bring this up next time we were alone. ‘He doesn’t do it for excitement, for – what is the modem expression? – kicks: a man who devotes his spare time to music, astronomy and philosophy does not live for kicks. But he cares. He cares for the difference betwen right and wrong, between good and evil, and when that difference is great enough and the evil threatens to destroy the good then he does not hesitate to take steps to redress the balance. And maybe that makes him better than either you or me, my dear Charlotte.’

‘And that’s not all of it either,’ I said. ‘I’m also renowned for my kindness to little children.’

‘I’m sorry, Calvert,’ Uncle Arthur said. ‘No offence and no embarrassment, I hope. But if Charlotte thought it important enough to come up here and apologise, I thought it important enough to set the record straight.’

‘That’s not all Charlotte came up for,’ I said nastily, ’If that’s what she came up for in the first place. She came up here because she’s consumed with feminine curiosity. She wants to know where we are going.’

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked.

‘Don’t strike the match in front of my eyes.’

She lit the cigarette and said: ‘Consumed with curiosity is right. What do you think? Not about where we’re going, I know where we’re going. You told me. Up Loch Houron. What I want to know is what is going on, what all this dreadful mystery is about, why all the comings and goings of strange men aboard the Shangri-la, what is so fantistically important to justify the deaths of three men in one evening, what you are doing here, what you are, who you are. I never really thought you were a unesco delegate, Sir Arthur. I know now you’re not. Please. I have the right to know, I think.’

‘Don’t tell her,’ I advised.

‘Why ever not?’ Uncle Arthur said huffily. ‘As she says, she is deeply involved, whether she wants it or not. She does have the right to know. Besides, the whole thing will be public knowledge in a day or two.’

‘You didn’t think of that when you threatened Sergeant MacDonald with dismissal and imprisonment if he contravened the Official Secrets Act.’

‘Merely because he could ruin things by talking out of turn,’ he said stiffly. ‘Lady – I mean, Charlotte – is in no position to do so. Not, of course,’ he went on quickly, ‘that she would ever dream of doing so. Preposterous. Charlotte is an old and dear friend, a trusted friend, Calvert. She shall know.’

Charlotte said quietly: ‘I have the feeling that our friend Mr Calvert does not care for me overmuch. Or maybe he just does not care for women.’

‘I care like anything,’ I said. ‘I was merely reminding the admiral of his own dictum: ‘Never, never, never – I forget how many nevers, I think there were four or five – tell anyone anything unless it’s necessary, essential and vital. In this case it’s none of the three.’

Uncle Arthur lit another vile cheroot and ignored me. His dictum was not meant to refer to confidential exchanges between members of the aristocracy. He said: ‘This is the case of the missing ships, my dear Charlotte. Five missing ships, to be precise. Not to mention a fair scattering of very much smaller vessels, also missing or destroyed.

‘Five ships, I said. On 5th April of this year the S.S. Holmwood disappeared off the south coast of Ireland. It was an act of piracy. The crew was imprisoned ashore, kept under guard for two or three days, then released unharmed. The Holmwood was never heard of again. On 24th April, the M.V. Antara vanished in St George’s Channel. On 17th May, the M.V. Headley Pioneer disappeared off Northern Ireland, on 6th August the S.S. Hurricane Spray disappeared after leaving the Clyde and finally, last Saturday, a vessel called the Nantesville vanished soon after leaving Bristol. In all cases the crews turned up unharmed.

‘Apart from their disappearances and the safe reappearances of their crews, those five vessels all had one thing in common – they were carrying extremely valuable and virtually untraceable cargoes. The Holmwood had two and a half million pounds of South African gold aboard, the Antara had a million and a half pounds’ worth of uncut Brazilian diamonds for industrial use, the Headley Pioneer had close on two million pounds’ worth of mixed cut and uncut Andean emeralds from the Muzo mines in Columbia, the Hurricane Spray, which had called in at Glasgow en route from Rotterdam to New York, had just over three million pounds’ worth of diamonds, nearly all cut, and the last one, the Nantesville,’ – Uncle Arthur almost choked over this one – ‘had eight million pounds in gold ingots, reserves being called in by the U.S. Treasury.

‘We had no idea where the people responsible for these disappearances were getting their information. Such arrangements as to the decision to ship, when, how and how much, are made in conditions of intense secrecy. They, whoever “they” are, had impeccable sources of information. Calvert says he knows those sources now. After the disappearance of the first three ships and about six million pounds’ worth of specie it was obvious that a meticulously organised gang was at work.’

‘Do you mean to say – do you mean to say that Captain Imrie is mixed up in this?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Mixed up is hardly the word,’ Uncle Arthur said dryly. ‘He may well be the directing mind behind it all.’

‘And don’t forget old man Skouras,’ I advised. ‘He’s pretty deep in the mire, too – about up to his ears, I should say.’

‘You’ve no right to say that,’ Charlotte said quickly.

‘No right? Why ever not? What’s he to you and what’s all this defence of the maestro of the bull-whip? How’s your back now?’

She said nothing. Uncle Arthur said nothing, in a different kind of way, then went on:

‘It was Calvert’s idea to hide two of our men and a radio signal transmitter on most of the ships that sailed with cargoes of bullion or specie after the Headley Pioneer had vanished. We had no difficulty, as you can imagine, in securing the cooperation of the various exporting and shipping companies and governments concerned. Our agents – we had three pairs working – usually hid among the cargo or in some empty cabin or machinery space with a food supply. Only the masters of the vessels concerned knew they were aboard. They delivered a fifteen-second homing signal at fixed – very fixed – but highly irregular intervals. Those signals were picked up at selected receiving stations round the west coast – we limited our stations to that area for that was where the released crews had been picked up – and by a receiver aboard this very boat here. The Firecrest, my dear Charlotte, is a highly unusual craft in many respects.’ I thought he was going to boast, quietly of course, of his own brilliance in designing the Firecrest but he remembered in time that I knew the truth.

‘Between 17th May and 6th August nothing happened. No piracy. We believe they were deterred by the short, light nights. On 6th August, the Hurricane Spray disappeared. We had no one aboard that vessel – we couldn’t cover them all. But we had two men aboard the Nantesville, the ship that sailed last Saturday. Delmont and Baker. Two of our best men. The Nantesville was forcibly taken just off the Bristol Channel. Baker and Delmont immediately began the scheduled transmissions. Cross-bearings gave us a completely accurate position at least every half-hour.

‘Calvert and Hunslett were in Dublin, waiting. As soon –’

‘That’s right,’ she interrupted. ‘Mr Hunslett. Where is he? I haven’t seen –’

‘In a moment. The Firecrest moved out, not following the Nantesville, but moving ahead of its predicted course. They reached the Mull of Kintyre and had intended waiting till the Nantesville approached there but a south-westerly gale blew up out of nowhere and the Firecrest had to run for shelter. When the Nantesville reached the Mull of Kintyre area our radio beacon fixes indicated that she was still on a mainly northerly course and that it looked as if she might pass up the Mull of Kintyre on the outside – the western side. Calvert took a chance, ran up Loch Fyne and through the Crinan Canal. He spent the night in the Crinan sea-basin. The sea-lock is closed at night. Calvert could have obtained the authority to have it opened but he didn’t want to: the wind had veered to westerly late that evening and small boats don’t move out of Crinan through the Dorus Mor in a westerly gusting up to Force 9. Not if they have wives and families to support – and even if they haven’t.

‘During the night the Nantesville turned out west into the Atlantic. We thought we had lost her. We think we know now why she turned out: she wanted to arrive at a certain place at a certain state of the tide in the hours of darkness, and she had time to kill. She went west, we believe, firstly because it was the easiest way to ride out the westerly gale and, secondly, because she didn’t want to be seen hanging around the coast all of the next day and preferred to make a direct approach from the sea as darkness was falling.

‘The weather moderated a fair way overnight. Calvert left Crinan at dawn, almost at the very minute the Nantesville turned back east again. Radio transmissions were still coming in from Baker and Delmont exactly on schedule. The last transmission came at 1022 hours that morning: after that, nothing.’

Uncle Arthur stopped and the cheroot glowed fiercely in the darkness. He could have made a fortune contracting out to the cargo shipping companies as a one-man fumigating service. Then he went on very quickly as if he didn’t like what he had to say next, and I’m sure he didn’t.

‘We don’t know what happened. They may have betrayed themselves by some careless action. I don’t think so, they were too good for that. Some member of the prize crew may just have stumbled over their hiding-place. Again it’s unlikely, and a man who stumbled over Baker and Delmont wouldn’t be doing any more stumbling for some time to come. Calvert thinks, and I agree with him, that by the one unpredictable chance in ten thousand, the prize crew’s radio-operator happened to be traversing Baker and Delmont’s wave-band at the very moment they were sending their fifteen second transmission. At that range he’d about have his head blasted off and the rest was inevitable.

‘A plot of the Nantesville’s fixes between dawn and the last transmission showed her course as 082° true. Predicted destination – Loch Houron. Estimated time of arrival – sunset. Calvert had less than a third of the Nantesville’s distance to cover. But he didn’t take the Firecrest into Loch Houron because he was pretty sure that Captain Imrie would recognise a radio beacon transmitter when he saw one and would assume that we had his course. Calvert was also pretty sure that if the Nantesville elected to continue on that course – and he had a hunch that it would – any craft found in the entrance to Loch Houron would receive pretty short shrift, either by being run down or sunk by gunfire. So he parked the Firecrest in Torbay and was skulking around the entrance to Loch Houron in a frogman’s suit and with a motorised rubber dinghy when the Nantesville turned up. He went aboard in darkness. The name was changed, the flag was changed, one mast was missing and the superstructure had been repainted. But it was the Nantesville.

‘Next day Calvert and Hunslett were stormbound in Torbay but on Wednesday Calvert organised an air search for the Nantesville or some place where she might have been hidden. He made a mistake. He considered it extremely unlikely that the Nantesville would still be in Loch Houron because Imrie knew that we knew that he had been headed there and therefore would not stay there indefinitely, because the chart showed Loch Houron as being the last place in Scotland where anyone in their sane minds would consider hiding a vessel and because, after Calvert had left the Nantesville that evening, she’d got under way and started to move out to Carrara Point. Calvert thought she’d just stayed in Loch Houron till it was dark enough to pass undetected down the Sound of Torbay or round the south of Torbay Island to the mainland. So he concentrated most of his search on the mainland and on the Sound of Torbay and Torbay itself. He thinks now the Nantesville is in Loch Houron. We’re going there to find out.’ His cheroot glowed again. ‘And that’s it, my dear. Now, with your permission, I’d like to spend an hour on the saloon settee. Those nocturnal escapades.’ He sighed, and finished: ‘I’m not a boy any longer. I need my sleep.’

I liked that. I wasn’t a boy any longer either and I didn’t seem to have slept for months. Uncle Arthur, I knew, always went to bed on the stroke of midnight and the poor man had already lost fifteen minutes. But I didn’t see what I could do about it. One of my few remaining ambitions in life was to reach pensionable age and I couldn’t make a better start than by ensuring that Uncle Arthur never laid hands on the wheel of the Firecrest.

‘But surely that’s not it,’ Charlotte protested. ‘That’s not all of it. Mr Hunslett, where’s Mr Hunslett? And you said Mr Calvert was aboard the Nantesville. How on earth did he –?’

‘There are some things you are better not knowing, my dear. Why distress yourself unnecessarily? Just leave this to us.’

‘You haven’t had a good look at me recently, have you. Sir Arthur?’ she asked quietly.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It may have escaped your attention but I’m not a child any more. I’m not even young any more. Please don’t treat me as a juvenile. And if you want to get to that settee to-night –’

‘Very well. If you insist. The violence, I’m afraid, has not all been one-sided. Calvert, as I said, was about the Nantesville. He found my two operatives, Baker and Delmont.’ Uncle Arthur had the impersonal emotionless voice of a man checking his laundry list. ‘Both men had been stabbed to death. This evening the pilot of Calvert’s helicopter was killed when the machine was shot down in the Sound of Torbay. An hour after that Hunslett was murdered. Calvert found him in the Firecrest’s engine-room with a broken neck.’

Uncle Arthur’s cheroot glowed and faded at least half a dozen times before Charlotte spoke. The shake was back in her voice. ‘They are fiends. Fiends.’ A long pause, then: ‘How can you cope with people like that?’

Uncle Arthur puffed a bit more then said candidly: ‘I don’t intend to try. You don’t find generals slugging it out hand-to-hand in the trenches. Calvert will cope with them. Good night, my dear.’

He pushed off. I didn’t contradict him. But I knew that Calvert couldn’t cope with them. Not any more, he couldn’t. Calvert had to have help. With a crew consisting of a myopic boss and a girl who, every time I looked at her, listened to her or thought of her, started the warning bells clanging away furiously in the back of my head, Calvert had to have a great deal of help. And he had to have it fast.

After Uncle Arthur had retired, Charlotte and I stood in silence in the darkened wheelhouse. But a companionable silence. You can always tell. The rain drummed on the wheelhouse roof. It was as dark as it ever becomes at sea and the patches of white fog were increasing in density and number. Because of them I had cut down to half speed and with the loss of steerage way and that heavy westerly sea corning up dead astern. I’d normally have been hard put to it to control the direction of the Firecrest: but I had the auto-pilot on and switched to ‘Fine’ and we were doing famously. The auto-pilot was a much better helmsman than I was. And streets ahead of Uncle Arthur.

Charlotte said suddenly: ‘What is it you intend to do to-night?’

‘You are a gourmand for information. Don’t you know that Uncle Arthur – sorry. Sir Arthur – and I are engaged upon a highly secret mission? Security is all.’

‘And now you’re laughing at me – and forgetting I’m along on this secret mission too.’

‘I’m glad you’re along and I’m not laughing at you, because I’ll be leaving this boat once or twice to-night and I have to have somebody I can trust to look after it when I’m away.’

‘You have Sir Arthur.’

‘I have, as you say, Sir Arthur. There’s no one alive for whose judgment and intelligence I have greater respect. But at the present moment I’d trade in all the judgment and intelligence in the world for a pair of sharp young eyes. Going by to-night’s performance. Sir Arthur shouldn’t be allowed out without a white stick. How are yours?’

‘Well, they’re not so young any more, but I think they’re sharp enough.’

‘So I can rely on you?’

‘On me? I – well, I don’t know anything about handling boats.’

‘You and Sir Arthur should make a great team.

I saw you star once in a French film about -’

‘We never left the studio. Even in the studio pool I had a stand-in.’

‘Well, there’ll be no stand-in to-night.’ I glanced out through the streaming windows. ‘And no studio pool. This is the real stuff, the genuine Atlantic. A pair of eyes, Charlotte, that’s all I require. A pair of eyes. Just cruising up and down till I come back and seeing that you don’t go on the rocks. Can you do that?’

‘Will I have any option?’

‘Nary an option.’

‘Then I’ll try. Where are you going ashore?’

‘Eilean Oran and Craigmore. The two innermost islands in Loch Houron. If,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I can find them.’

‘Eilean Oran and Craigmore.’ I could have been wrong, but I thought the faint French accent a vast improvement on the original Gaelic pronunciation. ‘It seems so wrong. So very wrong. In the middle of all this hate and avarice and killing. These names – they breathe the very spirit of romance.’

‘A highly deceptive form of respiration, my dear.’ I’d have to watch myself, I was getting as bad as Uncle Arthur. ‘Those islands breathe the very spirit of bare, bleak and rocky desolation. But Eilean Oran and Craigmore hold the key to everything. Of that I’m very sure.’

She said nothing. I stared out through the highspeed Kent clearview screen and wondered if I’d see Dubh Sgeir before it saw me. After a couple of minutes I felt a hand on my upper arm and she was very close to me. The hand was trembling. Wherever she’d come by her perfume it hadn’t been bought in a supermarket or fallen out of a Christmas cracker. Momentarily and vaguely I wondered about the grievous impossibility of ever understanding the feminine mind: before fleeing for what she had thought to be her life and embarking upon a hazardous swim in the waters of Torbay harbour, she hadn’t forgotten to pack a sachet of perfume in her polythene kit-bag. For nothing was ever surer than that any perfume she’d been wearing had been well and truly removed before I’d fished her out of Torbay harbour.

‘Philip?’

Well, this was better than the Mr Calvert stuff. I was glad Uncle Arthur wasn’t there to have his aristocratic feelings scandalised. I said: ‘Uh-huh?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She said it as if she meant it and I supposed I should have tried to forget that she was once the best actress in Europe. ‘I’m truly sorry. About what I said – about what I thought – earlier on. For thinking you were a monster. The men you killed, I mean. I – well, I didn’t know about Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and the helicopter pilot. All your friends. I’m truly sorry, Philip. Truly.’

She was overdoing it. She was also too damn’ close. Too damn’ warm. You’d have required a pile-driver in top condition to get a cigarette card between us. And that perfume that hadn’t fallen out of a cracker – intoxicating, the ad-boys in the glossies would have called it. And all the time the warning bells were clanging away like a burglar alarm with the St Vitus’s dance. I made a manful effort to do something about it. I put my mind to higher things.

She said nothing. She just squeezed my arm a bit more and even the pile-driver would have gone on strike for piece-work rates. I could hear the big diesel exhaust thudding away behind us, a sound of desolate reassurance. The Firecrest swooped down the long overtaking combers then gently soared again. I was conscious for the first time of a curious meteorological freak in the Western Isles. A marked rise in temperature after midnight. And I’d have to speak to the Kent boys about their guarantee that their clearview screen wouldn’t mist up under any conditions, but maybe that wasn’t fair, maybe they’d never visualised conditions like this. I was just thinking of switching off the auto-pilot to give me something to do when she said: ‘I think I’ll go below soon. Would you like a cup of coffee first?’

‘As long as you don’t have to put on a light to do it. And as long as you don’t trip over Uncle Arthur – I mean. Sir -’

‘Uncle Arthur will do just fine,’ she said. ‘It suits him.’ Another squeeze of the arm and she was gone.

The meteorological freak was of short duration. By and by the temperature dropped back to normal and the Kent guarantee became operative again. I took a chance, left the Firecrest to its own devices and nipped aft to the stern locker. I took out my scuba diving equipment, together with air-cylinders and mask, and brought them for’ard to the wheelhouse.

It took her twenty-five minutes to make the coffee. Calor gas has many times the calorific efficiency of standard domestic coal gas and, even allowing for the difficulties of operating in darkness, this was surely a world record for slowness in making coffee at sea. I heard the clatter of crockery as the coffee was brought through the saloon and smiled cynically to myself in the darkness. Then I thought of Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and Williams, and I wasn’t smiling any more.

I still wasn’t smiling when I dragged myself on to the rocks of Eilean Oran, removed the scuba equipment and set the big, rectangularbased, swivel-headed torch between a couple of stones with its beam staring out to sea. I wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t for the same reason that I hadn’t been smiling when Charlotte had brought the coffee to the wheelhouse just over half an hour ago, I wasn’t smiling because I was in a state of high apprehension and I was in a state of high apprehension because for ten minutes before leaving the Firecrest I’d tried to instruct Sir Arthur and Charlotte in the technique of keeping a boat in a constant position relative to a fixed mark on the shore.

‘Keep her on a due west compass heading,’ I’d said. ‘Keep her bows on to the sea and wind. With the engine at “Slow” that will give you enough steerage way to keep your head up. If you find yourselves creeping too far forwards, come round to the south’ – if they’d come round to the north they’d have found themselves high and dry on the rock shores of Eilean Oran – ‘head due east at half speed, because if you go any slower you’ll broach to, come sharply round to the north then head west again at slow speed. You can see those breakers on the south shore there. Whatever you do, keep them at least two hundred yards away on the starboard hand when you’re going west and a bit more when you’re going east.’

They had solemnly assured me that they would do just that and seemed a bit chuffed because of what must have been my patent lack of faith in them both, but I’d reason for my lack of faith for neither had shown any marked ability to make a clear distinction between shore breakers and the north-south line of the foaming tops of the waves rolling eastwards towards the mainland. In desperation I’d said I’d place a fixed light on the shore and that that would serve as a permanent guide. I just trusted to God that Uncle Arthur wouldn’t emulate the part of an eighteenth-century French sloop’s skipper vis-à-vis the smugglers’ lamp on a rock-girt Cornish shore and run the damned boat aground under the impression that he was heading for a beacon of hope. He was a very clever man, was Uncle Arthur, but the sea was not his home.

The boatshed wasn’t quite empty, but it wasn’t far off it. I flashed my small torch around its interior and realised that MacEachern’s boatshed wasn’t the place I was after. There was nothing there but a weather-beaten, gunwale-splintered launch, with, amidships, an unboxed petrol engine that seemed to be a solid block of rust.

I came to the house. On its northern side, the side remote from the sea, a light shone through a small window. A light at half-past one in the morning. I crawled up to this and hitched a wary eye over the window-sill. A neat, clean, well-cared-for small room, with lime-washed walls, mat-covered stone floor and the embers of a driftwood fire smouldering in an ingle-nook in the corner. Donald MacEachern was sitting in a cane-bottomed chair, still unshaven, still in his month-old shirt, his head bent, staring into the dull red heart of the fire. He had the look of a man who was staring into a dying fire because that was all that was left in the world for him to do. I moved round to the door, turned the handle and went inside.

He heard me and turned around, not quickly, just the way a man would turn who knows there is nothing left on earth that can hurt him. He looked at me, looked at the gun in my hand, looked at his own twelve-bore hanging on a couple of nails on the wall then sank back into his chair again.

He said tonelessly: ‘Who in the name of God are you?’

‘Calvert’s my name. I was here yesterday.’ I pulled off my rubber hood and he remembered all right. I nodded to the twelve-bore. ‘You won’t be needing that gun to-night, Mr MacEachern. Anyway, you had the safety catch on.’

‘You don’t miss much,’ he said slowly. ‘There were no cartridges in the gun.’

‘And no one standing behind you, was there?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said tiredly.

‘Who are you, man? What do you want?’

‘I want to know why you gave me the welcome you did yesterday.’ I put the gun away. ‘It was hardly friendly, Mr MacEachern.’

‘Who are you, sir?’ He looked even older than he had done yesterday, old and broken and done.

‘Calvert. They told you to discourage visitors, didn’t they, Mr MacEachern?’ No answer. ‘I asked some questions to-night of a friend of yours. Archie MacDonald. The Torbay police sergeant. He told me you were married. I don’t see Mrs MacEachern.’

He half rose from his cane chair. The old bloodshot eyes had a gleam to them. He sank back again and the eyes dimmed.

‘You were out in your boat one night, weren’t you, Mr MacEachern? You were out in your boat and you saw too much. They caught you and they took you back here and they took Mrs MacEachern away and they told you that if you ever breathed a word to anyone alive you would never see your wife that way again. Alive, I mean. They told you to stay here in case any chance acquaintances or strangers should call by and wonder why you weren’t here and raise the alarm, and just to make sure that you wouldn’t be tempted to go the mainland for help – although heaven knows I would have thought there would be no chance in the world of you being as mad as that – they immobilised your engine. Saltwater impregnated sacks, I shouldn’t wonder, so that any chance caller would think it was due to neglect and disuse, not sabotage.’

‘Aye, they did that.’ He stared sightlessly into the fire, his voice the sunken whisper of a man who is just thinking aloud and hardly aware that he is speaking. ‘They took her away and they ruined my boat. And I had my life saving in the back room there and they took that too. I wish I’d had a million pounds to give them. If only they had left my Mairi. She’s five years older than myself.’ He had no defences left.

‘What in the name of God have you been living on?’

‘Every other week they bring me tinned food, not much, and condensed milk. Tea I have, and I catch a fish now and then off the rocks.’ He gazed into the fire, his forehead wrinkling as if he were suddenly realising that I brought a new dimension into his life. ‘Who are you, sir? Who are you? You’re not one of them. And you’re not a policeman, I know you’re not a policeman. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen policemen. But you are a very different kettle of fish.’ There were the stirrings of life in him now, life in his face and in his eyes. He stared at me for a full minute, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable under the gaze of those faded eyes, when he said: ‘I know who you are. I know who you must be. You are a Government man. You are an agent of the British Secret Service.’

Well, by God, I took off my hat to the old boy. There I was, looking nondescript as anything and buttoned to the chin in a scuba suit, and he had me nailed right away. So much for the inscrutable faces of the guardians of our country’s secrets. I thought of what Uncle Arthur would have said to him, the automatic threats of dismissal and imprisonment if the old man breathed a word. But Donald MacEachern didn’t have any job to be dismissed from and after a lifetime in Eilean Oran even a maximum security prison would have looked like a hostelry to which Egon Ronay would have lashed out six stars without a second thought, so as there didn’t seem to be much point in threatening him I said instead, for the first time in my life: ‘I am an agent of the Secret Service, Mr MacEachern. I am going to bring your wife back to you.’

He nodded very slowly, then said: ‘You will be a very brave man, Mr Calvert, but you do not know the terrible men who will wait for you.’

‘If I ever earn a medal, Mr MacEachern, it will be a case of mistaken identification, but, for the rest, I know very well what I am up against. Just try to believe me, Mr MacEachern. It will be all right. You were in the war, Mr MacEachern.’

‘You know. You were told?’

I shook my head. ‘Nobody had to tell me.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ The back was suddenly very straight. ‘I was a soldier for twenty-two years. I was a sergeant in the 51st Highland Division.’

‘You were a sergeant in the 51st Highland Division,’ I repeated. ‘There are many people, Mr MacEachern, and not all of them Scots, who maintain that there was no better in the world.’

‘And it is not Donald MacEachern who would be disagreeing with you, sir.’ For the first time the shadow of a smile touched the faded eyes. ‘There were maybe one or two worse. You make your point, Mr Calvert. We were not namely for running away, for losing hope, for giving up too easily.’ He rose abruptly to his feet. ‘In the name of God, what am I talking about? I am coming with you, Mr Calvert.’

I rose to my feet and touched my hands to his shoulders. ‘Thank you, Mr MacEachern, but no. You’ve done enough. Your fighting days are over. Leave this to me.’

He looked at me in silence, then nodded. Again the suggestion of a smile. ‘Aye, maybe you’re right. I would be getting in the way of a man like yourself. I can see that.’ He sat down wearily in his chair.

I moved to the door. ‘Good night, Mr MacEachern. She will soon be safe.’

‘She will soon be safe,’ he repeated. He looked up at me, his eyes moist, and when he spoke his voice held the same faint surprise as his face. ‘You know, I believe she will.’

‘She will. I’m going to bring her back here personally and that will give me more pleasure than anything I’ve ever done in my life. Friday morning, Mr MacEachern.’

‘Friday morning? So soon? So soon?’ He was looking at a spot about a billion light years away and seemed unaware that I was standing by the open door. He smiled, a genuine smile of delight, and the old eyes shone. ‘I’ll not sleep a wink tonight, Mr Calvert. Nor a wink to-morrow night either.’

‘You’ll sleep on Friday,’ I promised. He couldn’t see me any longer, the tears were running down his grey unshaven cheeks, so I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him alone with his dreams.

EIGHT

Thursday: 2 a.m. – 4.30 a.m.

I had exchanged Eilean Oran for the island of Craigmore and I still wasn’t smiling. I wasn’t smiling for all sorts of reasons. I wasn’t smiling because Uncle Arthur and Charlotte Skouras together made a nautical combination that terrified the life out of me, because the northern tip of Craigmore was much more exposed and reefhaunted than the south shore of Eilean Oran had been, because the fog was thickening, because I was breathless and bruised from big combers hurling me on to unseen reefs on my swim ashore, because I was wondering whether I had any chance in the world of carrying out my rash promise to Donald MacEachern. If I thought a bit more I’d no doubt I could come up with all sorts of other and equally valid reasons why I wasn’t smiling, but I hadn’t the time to think any more about it, the night was wearing on and I’d much to do before the dawn.

The nearest of the two fishing boats in the little natural harbour was rolling quite heavily in the waves that curled round the reef forming the natural breakwater to the west so I didn’t have to worry too much about any splashing sound I might make as I hauled myself up on deck. What I did have to worry about was that damned bright light in its sealed inverted glass by the flensing shed, it was powerful enough to enable me to be seen from the other houses on shore… . But my worry about it was a little thing compared to my gratitude for its existence. Out in the wild blue yonder Uncle Arthur could do with every beacon of hope he could find.

It was a typical M.F.V., about forty-five feet long and with the general look of a boat that could laugh at a hurricane. I went through it in two minutes. All in immaculate condition, not a thing aboard that shouldn’t have been there. Just a genuine fishing boat. My hopes began to rise. There was no other direction they could go. The second M.F.V. was the mirror image of the first, down to the last innocuous inch. It wouldn’t be true to say that my hopes were now soaring, but at least they were getting up off the ground where they’d been for a long time.

I swam ashore, parked my scuba equipment above the highwater mark and made my way to the flensing shed, keeping its bulk between the light and myself as I went. The shed contained winches, steel tubs and barrels, a variety of ferocious weapons doubtless used for flensing, rolling cranes, some unidentifiable but obviously harmless machinery, the remains of some sharks and the most fearful smell I’d ever come across in my life. I left, hurriedly.

The first of the cottages yielded nothing. I flashed a torch through a broken window. The room was bare, it looked as if no one had set foot there for half a century, it was only too easy to believe Williams’s statement that this tiny hamlet had been abandoned before the First World War. Curiously, the wall-paper looked as if it had been applied the previous day – a curious and largely unexplained phenomenon in the Western Isles. Your grandmother – in those days grandpa would have signed the pledge sooner than lift a finger inside the house – slapped up some wall-paper at ninepence a yard and fifty years later it was still there, as fresh as the day it had been put up.

The second cottage was as deserted as the first.

The third cottage, the one most remote from the flensing shed, was where the shark-fishers lived. A logical and very understandable choice, one would have thought, the farther away from that olfactory horror the better. Had I the option, I’d have been living in a tent on the other side of the island. But that was a purely personal reaction. The stench of that flensing shed was probably to the sharkfishers, as is the ammonia-laden, nostril-wrinkling, wholly awful mist – liquid manure – to the Swiss farmers: the very breath of being. The symbol of success. One can pay too high a price for success.

I eased open the well-oiled – shark-liver oil, no doubt – door and passed inside. The torch came on again. Grandma wouldn’t have gone very much on this front parlour but grandpa would cheerfully have sat there watching his beard turn white through the changing seasons without ever wanting to go down to the sea again. One entire wall was given up to food supplies, a miserable couple of dozen crates of whisky and score upon scores of crates of beer. Australians, Williams had said. I could well believe it. The other three walls – there was hardly a scrap of wall-paper to be seen – was devoted to a form of art, in uninhibited detail and glorious Technicolor, of a type not usually to be found in the better-class museums and art galleries. Not grandma’s cup of tea at all.

I skirted the furniture which hadn’t come out of Harrods and opened the interior door. A short corridor lay beyond. Two doors to the right, three to the left. Working on the theory that the boss of the outfit probably had the largest room to himself, I carefully opened the first door to the right.

The flash-light showed it to be a surprisingly comfortable room. A good carpet, heavy curtains, a couple of good armchairs, bedroom furniture in oak, a double bed and a bookcase. A shaded electric light hung above the bed. Those rugged Australians believed in their home comforts. There was a switch beside the door. I touched it and the overhead lamp came on.

There was only one person in the double bed but even at that he was cramped in it. It’s hard to gauge a man’s height when he’s lying down but if this lad tried to stand up in a room with a ceiling height of less than six feet four inches, he’d finish up with concussion. His face was towards me but I couldn’t see much of it, it was hidden by a head of thick black hair that had fallen over his brows and the most magnificently bushy black beard I’d ever clapped eyes on. He was sound asleep.

I crossed to the bed, prodded his ribs with the gun barrel and a pressure sufficient to wake a lad of his size and said: ‘Wake up.’

He woke up. I moved a respectful distance away. He rubbed his eyes with one hairy forearm, got his hands under him and heaved himself to a sitting position. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him wearing a bearskin, but no, he was wearing a pair of pyjamas in excellent taste, I might have chosen the colour myself.

Law-abiding citizens woken in the dark watches of the night by a gun-pointing stranger react in all sorts of ways, varying from terror to apoplectically-purple outrage. The man in the beard didn’t react in any of the standard ways at all. He just stared at me from under dark overhanging cliffs of eyebrows and the expression in the eyes was that of a Bengal tiger mentally tucking in his napkin before launching himself on the thirty-foot leap that is going to culminate in lunch. I stepped back another couple of paces and said: ‘Don’t try it.’

‘Put that gun away, sonny boy,’ he said. The deep rumbling voice seemed to come from the innermost recesses of the Carlsbad cavern. ‘Put it away or I’ll have to get up and clobber you and take it from you.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ I complained, then added politely: ‘If I put it away, will you clobber me?’

He considered this for a moment, then said: ‘No.’ He reached out for a big black cigar and lit it, his eyes on me all the time. The acrid fumes reached across the room and as it isn’t polite for a guest in another’s house to rush to open the nearest window without permission I didn’t but it was a near thing. No wonder he’d never notice the stench from the flensing shed: compared to this, Uncle Arthur’s cheroots came into the same category as Charlotte’s perfume.

‘My apologies for the intrusion. Are you Tim Hutchinson?’

‘Yeah. And you, sonny boy?’

‘Philip Calvert. I want to use one of your boat’s transmitters to contact London. I also need your help. How urgently you can’t imagine. A good many lives and millions of pounds can be lost in the next twenty-four hours.’

He watched a particularly noxious cloud of this Vesuvian poison gas drift up to the cringing ceiling, then bent his eyes on me again. ‘Ain’t you the little kidder, now, sonny boy.’

‘I’m not kidding, you big black ape. And, while we’re at it, we’ll dispense with the “sonny boy,” Timothy’

He bent forward, the deep-set, coal-black eyes, not at all as friendly as I would have liked, then relaxed with a laugh. ‘Touché, as my French governess used to say. Maybe you ain’t kidding at that. What are you, Calvert?’

In for a penny, in for a pound. This man would grant his cooperation for nothing less than the truth. And he looked like a man whose co-operation would be very well worth having. So, for the second time that night and the second time in my life, I said: ‘I’m an agent of the British Secret Service.’ I was glad that Uncle Arthur was out there fighting for his life on the rolling deep, his blood pressure wasn’t what it ought to have been and a thing like this, twice in one night, could have been enough to see him off.

He considered my reply for some time, then said: ‘The Secret Service. I guess you have to be at that. Or a nut case. But you blokes never tell.’

‘I had to. It would have been obvious anyway when I tell you what I have to tell you.’

‘I’ll get dressed. Join you in the front room in two minutes. Help yourself to a Scotch there.’ The beard twitched and I deduced from this that he was grinning. ‘You should find some, somewhere.’

I went out, found some somewhere and was conducting myself on the grand tour of the Craigmore art gallery when Tim Hutchinson came in. He was dressed all in black, trousers, sailor’s jersey, mackinaw and seaboots. Beds were deceptive, he’d probably passed the six foot four mark when he was about twelve and had just stopped growing. He glanced at the collection and grinned.

‘Who would have thought it?’ he said. ‘The Guggenheim and Craigmore. Hotheds of culture, both of them. Don’t you think the one with the ear-rings looks indecently overdressed?’

‘You must have scoured the great galleries of the world,’ I said reverently.

‘I’m no connoisseur. Renoir and Matisse are my cup of tea.’ It was so unlikely that it had to be true. ‘You look like a man in a hurry. Just leave out all the inessentials.’

I left out the inessentials, but not one of the essentials. Unlike MacDonald and Charlotte, Hutchinson got not only the truth but the whole truth.

‘Well, if that isn’t the most goddamned story any man ever heard. And right under our bloody noses.’ It was hard to tell at times whether Hutchinson was Australian or American – I learnt later that he’d spent many years tuna-fishing in Florida. ‘So it was you in that chopper this afternoon. Brother, you’ve had a day and then some. I retract that “sonny boy” crack. One of my more ill-advised comments. What do you want, Calvert?’

So I told him what I wanted, his own personal assistance that night, the loan of his boats and crews for the next twenty-four hours and the use of a radio transmitter immediately. He nodded.

‘Count on us. I’ll tell the boys. You can start using that transmitter right away’ ‘I’d rather go out with you to our boat right away,’ I said, ‘leave you there and come back in myself to transmit.’

‘You lack a mite confidence in your crew, hey?’

‘I’m expecting to see the bows of the Firecrest coming through that front door any minute.’

‘I can do better than that. I’ll roust out a couple of the boys, we’ll take the Charmaine – that’s the M.F.V. nearest the flensing shed – out to the Firecrest, I’ll go aboard, we’ll cruise around till you get your message off, then you come aboard the Firecrest while the boys take the Charmaine back again.’

I thought of the maelstrom of white breakers outside the mouth of the alleged harbour. I said: ‘It won’t be too dangerous to take an M.F.V. out on a night like this?’

‘What’s wrong with a night like this? It’s a fine fresh night. You couldn’t ask for better. This is nothing, I’ve seen the boys take a boat out there, six o’clock in a black December evening, into a full gale.’

‘What kind of emergency was that?’

‘A serious one, admittedly’ He grinned. ‘We’d run out of supplies and the boys wanted to get to Torbay before the pubs shut. Straight up, Calvert.’

I said no more. It was obviously going to be a great comfort to have Hutchinson around with me for the rest of the night. He turned towards the corridor and hesitated: ‘Two of the boys are married. I wonder –’

‘There’ll be no danger for them. Besides, they’ll be well rewarded for their work.’

‘Don’t spoil it, Calvert.’ For a man with such a deep rumbling voice he could make it very soft at times. ‘We don’t take money for this kind of work.’

‘I’m not hiring you,’ I said tiredly. I’d quite enough people fighting me already without Tim Hutchinson joining their ranks. ‘There’s an insurance reward. I have been instructed to offer you half.’

‘Ah, now, that’s very different indeed. I’ll be delighted to relieve the insurance companies of their excess cash at any time. But not half, Calvert, not half. Not for a day’s work, not after all you’ve done. Twenty-five per cent to us, seventy-five per cent to you and your friends.’

‘Half is what you get. The other half will be used to pay compensation for those who have suffered hardship. There’s an old couple on Eilean Oran, for instance, who are going to be wealthy beyond their dreams for the rest of their days.’

‘You get nothing?’

‘I get my salary, the size of which I’d rather not discuss, as it’s a sore point. Civil Servants are not permitted to accept gratuities.’

‘You mean to say you get beaten up, shot down, half-drowned and suffered another couple of murder attempts just for a lousy pay cheque? What makes you tick, Calvert? Why the hell do you do it?’

‘That’s not an original question. I ask myself the same question about twenty times a day, rather more often recently. It’s time we were gone.’

‘I’ll get the boys up. They’ll be tickled pink by those gold watches or whatever the insurance boys will be handing over. Engraved, of course. We insist on that.’

‘The reward will be in cash, not kind. Depends how much of the stolen goods are recovered. We’re pretty sure to recover all the Nantesville’s cargo. Chances are that we’ll recover the lot. The award is ten per cent. Yours will be five. The minimum you and your boys will pick up will be four hundred thousand pounds: the maximum will be eight hundred and fifty. Thousand pounds, I mean.’

‘Say that in English.’ He looked as if the London Post Office Tower had fallen on top of him. So I said it again, and after a time he looked as if only a telegraph pole had fallen on him and said carefully: ‘At rates like that, a man might expect a fair bit of cooperation. Say no more. Put right out of your head any thoughts you had of advertising in the Telegraph. Tim Hutchinson is your man.’

And Tim Hutchinson was undoubtedly my man. On a night like that, dark as doomsday, rain sluicing down and a thickening mist making it impossible – for me, at least – to tell the difference between a naturally breaking sea and a wave foaming over a reef, Tim Hutchinson was my man. Cheap at half a million.

He was one of that rare breed, that very rare breed, of naturals to whom the sea is truly home. Twenty years’ daily polishing and refining in every conceivable condition a rarely-bestowed gift with which you must be born in the first place and anyone can be like this. Just as the great Grand Prix drivers, the Carraciolas and Nuvolaris and Clarks, operate on a level incomprehensible to highly competent drivers of very fast cars, so Hutchinson operated on a level incomprehensible to the finest of amateur yachtsmen. Search your ocean racing clubs and Olympic yachting teams the world over and you will not find men like this. They are to be found, and even then so very seldom, only in the ranks of the professional deep-sea fishermen.

Those huge hands on throttle and wheel had the delicacy of a moth. He had the night-sight of a barn owl and an ear which could infallibly distinguish between waves breaking in the open sea, on reefs or on shores: he could invariably tell the size and direction of seas coming at him out of the darkness and mist and touch wheel or throttle as need be: he had an inbuilt computer which provided instant correlation of wind, tide, current and our own speed and always let him know exactly where he was. And I’ll swear he could smell land, even on a lee shore and with the rest of us suffering olfactory paralysis from the fumes of the big black cigars which seemed to be an inseparable part of the man. It required only ten minutes beside him to realise that one’s ignorance of the sea and ships was almost total. A chastening discovery.

He took the Charmaine out through the Scylla and Charybdis of that evil alleged harbour entrance under full throttle. Foaming white-fanged reefs reached out at us, bare feet away, on either side. He didn’t seem to notice them. He certainly didn’t look at them. The two ‘boys’ he’d brought with him, a couple of stunted lads of about six foot two or thereabouts, yawned prodigiously. Hutchinson located the Firecrest a hundred yards before I could even begin to imagine I could see any shape at all and brought the Charmaine alongside as neatly as I could park my car by the kerb in broad daylight – on one of my better days, that was. I went aboard the Firecrest to the vast alarm of Uncle Arthur and Charlotte who’d heard no whisper of our arrival, explained the situation, introduced Hutchinson and went back aboard the Charmaine. Fifteen minutes later, the radio call over, I was back aboard the Firecrest.

Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson were already thick as thieves. The bearded Australian giant was extremely courteous and respectful, calling Uncle Arthur ‘Admiral’ every other sentence while Uncle Arthur was plainly delighted and vastly relieved to have him on board. If I felt this was a slight on my own seaman-like qualities, I was undoubtedly correct.

‘Where are we off to now?’ Charlotte Skouras asked. I was disappointed to see that she was just as relieved as Uncle Arthur.

‘Dubh Sgeir,’ I said. ‘To pay a call on Lord Kirkside and his charming daughter.’

‘Dubh Sgeir!’ She seemed taken aback. ‘I thought you said the answer lay in Eilean Oran and Craigmore?’

‘So I did. The answers to some essential preliminary questions. But the end of the road lies in Dubh Sgeir. And the foot of the rainbow.’

‘You talk in riddles,’ she said impatiently.

‘Not to me, he doesn’t,’ Hutchinson said jovially. ‘The foot of the rainbow, ma’am. That’s where the pot of gold lies.’

‘Here and now I’d settle for a pot of coffee,’ I said. ‘Coffee for four and I’ll make it with my own fair hands.’

‘I think I would rather go to bed,’ Charlotte said. ‘I am very tired.’

‘You made me drink your coffee,’ I said threateningly. ‘Now you drink mine. Fair’s fair.’

‘If you are quick, then.’

I was quick. I’d four cups on a little tin tray in nothing flat, a powerful mixture of instant coffee, milk and sugar in all of them and a little something extra in one of them. There were no complaints about the coffee. Hutchinson drained his cup and said: ‘Can’t see why you three shouldn’t get your heads down for a little. Unless you think I need help?’

No one thought he needed help. Charlotte Skouras was the first to go, saying she felt very sleepy, which I didn’t doubt. She sounded it. Uncle Arthur and I left a moment later, Tim Hutchinson promising to call me when we neared the landing stage on the west side of Dubh Sgeir. Uncle Arthur wrapped himself in a rug on the saloon settee. I went to my own cabin and lay down.

I lay for three minutes then rose, picked up a three-cornered file, softly opened my cabin door and as softly knocked on Charlotte’s door. There was no reply, so I opened the door, passed in, silently closed it and switched on the lights.

She was asleep all right, she was a million miles away. She hadn’t even managed to make it to bed, she was lying on the carpet, still fully clothed. I put her on the bunk and pulled a couple of blankets over her. I pushed up a sleeve and examined the mark left by the rope burn.

It wasn’t a very big cabin and it took me only a minute to find what I was looking for.

It made a pleasant change and a very refreshing one to transfer myself from the Firecrest to land without that damned clammy scuba suit impeding every stroke or step of the way.

How Tim Hutchinson located that old stone pier in the rain, the fog and the darkness was something that would have been for ever beyond me – if he hadn’t told me later that night. He sent me to the bows with a torch in my hand and damned if the thing didn’t loom out of the darkness as if he’d gone in on a radio bearing. He went into reverse, brought the bows, plunging heavily in the deep troughs, to within two feet of the pier, waited till I picked my moment to jump off then went full astern and disappeared into the fog and darkness. I tried to imagine Uncle Arthur executing that lot, but my imagination wasn’t up to it. It boggled. Uncle Arthur, thank heaven, slept the sleep of the just. Drake was in his hammock and a thousand miles away, dreaming all the time of W.C.I.

The path from the landing stage to the plateau above was steep and crumbling and someone had carelessly forgotten to equip it with a handrail on the seaward side. I was in no way heavily burdened. All I was carrying apart from the weight of my own years was a torch, gun and coil of rope – I’d neither the intention nor the expectation of doing a Douglas Fairbanks on the outer battlements of the Dubh Sgeir castle, but experience had taught me that a rope was the most essential piece of equipment to carry along on a jaunt on a precipitously walled island – but even so I was breathing pretty heavily by the time I reached the top.

I turned not towards the castle but north along the grass strip that led to the cliff at the northern end of the island. The strip that Lord Kirkside’s elder son had taken off from in his Beechcraft on the day when he and his brother-in-law to be had died, the strip that Williams and I had flown along less than twelve hours previously after our talk with Lord Kirkside and his daughter, the strip at the abrupt northern end of which I’d imagined I’d seen what I’d wanted to see, but couldn’t be sure. Now I was going to make sure.

The strip was smooth and flat and I made good time without having to use the big rubber torch I had with me. I didn’t dare use it anyway, not so close to the castle. There was no light to be seen from there but that was no guarantee that the ungodly weren’t maintaining a sleepless watch on the battlements. If I were the ungodly, I’d have been maintaining a sleepless watch on the battlements. I stumbled over something warm and soft and alive and hit the ground hard.

My nerves weren’t what they had been forty-eight hours ago and my reactions were comparatively fast. I had the knife in my hand and was on to him before he could get to his feet. To his four feet. He had about him the pungent aroma of a refugee from Tim Hutchinson’s flensing shed. Well might they say why stinks the goat on younger hill who seems to dote on chlorophyll. I said a few conciliatory words to our four-footed friend and it seemed to work for he kept his horns to himself. I went on my way.

This humiliating sort of encounter, I’d noticed, never happened to the Errol Flynns of this world. Moreover, if Errol Flynn had been carrying a torch a little fall like that would not have smashed it. Had he been carrying only a candle it would still have kept burning brightly in the darkness. But not my torch. Not my rubber encased, rubber mounted bulb, plexi-glass guaranteed unbreakable torch. It was kaput. I fished out the little pencil torch and tried it inside my jacket. I could have spared myself the caution, a glow-worm would have sneered at it. I stuck it back in my pocket and kept going.

I didn’t know how far I was from the precipitous end of the cliff and I’d no intention of finding out the hard way. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled forward, the glow-worm leading the way. I reached the cliff edge in five minutes and found what I was looking for almost at once. The deep score on the cliff edge was almost eighteen inches in width and four in depth in the centre. The mark was fresh but not too fresh. The grass had grown in again in most places. The time factor would be just about right. It was the mark that had been left by the tail fuselage of the Beech-craft plane when, with no one aboard, it had been started up, throttle opened and then the chocks removed. It hadn’t had enough speed to become airborne and had fallen over the cliff edge, ripping this score in the earth as it had gone. That was all I needed, that and the holed hull of the Oxford expedition boat and the dark circles under the blue eyes of Susan Kirkside. Here was certainty.

I heard a slight noise behind me. A moderately fit five-year-old grabbing me by the ankles could have had me over the edge with nothing I could do to prevent it. Or maybe it was Billy the Kid back to wreak vengeance for the rude interruption of his night’s sleep. I swung round with torch and gun at the ready. It was Billy the Kid, his yellow eyes staring balefully out of the night. But his eyes belied him, he was just curious or friendly or both. I moved back slowly till I was out of butting range, patted him weakly on the head and left. At this rate I’d die of heart failure before the night was out.

The rain had eased by this time and the wind fallen away quite a bit, but to compensate for this the mist was worse than ever. It swirled clammily around me and I couldn’t see four feet in front of my face. I wondered grimly how Hutchinson was getting on in this lot, but put him quickly out of my mind. I’d no doubt he was a damned sight better at his job than I was at mine. I kept the wind on my right cheek and continued towards the castle. Under my rubbercanvas raincoat my last suit was sodden. The Civil Service was going to be faced with a cleaner’s bill of some note.

I nearly walked into the castle wall but saw its loom just in time. I didn’t know whether I was to the right or the left of the entrance gate on the landward side, so I felt my way cautiously to the left to find out. After about ten feet the wall fell away at right angles to another wall. That meant I’d arrived at the left or eastern side of the gate. I began to feel my way to the right.

It was as well I had come upon the castle wall where I had done: had I arrived at the right-hand side, I’d have been upwind of the central gate and would never have smelled the tobacco smoke. It wasn’t much as tobacco went, nothing like as robust as Uncle Arthur’s cheroots and positively anæmic as compared to Tim Hutchinson’s portable poison-gas factories, but tobacco smoke for all that. Someone at the entrance gate was smoking a cigarette. It was axiomatic that sentries should never smoke cigarettes. This I could deal with. They’d never trained me on how to handle billy goats on the edge of a precipice but on this subject they had become boringly repetitive.

I held the gun by the barrel and moved quietly forwards. He was leaning against the corner of the entrance, a hardly-seen shape, but his position outlined clearly enough by the movement of his cigarette end. I waited till he brought it to his mouth for the third time, and when it was glowing at its brightest and his night vision consequently most affected I took one step forward and brought the butt down where by extension of the curve and subsequent glow of the cigarette end the back of the head of a normal man ought to have been. Fortunately, he was a normal man.

He fell back against me. I caught him and something jabbed painfully into my ribs. I let him finish the trip down on his own and removed this item that had become stuck in my coat. A bayonet, and, what was more, a bayonet with a very nasty point to it. Attached to the bayonet was a Lee Enfield .303. Very military. It seemed unlikely that this was just a routine precaution. Our friends were becoming worried and I had no means of knowing how much they knew or guessed. Time was running very short for them, almost as short as it was for me. In a few hours it would be dawn.

I took the rifle and moved cautiously towards the edge of the cliff, the bayonet prodding the earth ahead of me as I went. By this time I was becoming quite adept at not falling over the edges of precipices and, besides, with a rifle and bayonet stretched out in advance you have five-feet notification of where eternity begins. I found the edge, stepped back, reversed the rifle, made two parallel scores in the sodden turf about a foot apart and eighteen inches in length, terminating on the very edge. I wiped the butt clean and placed the rifle on the ground. When the dawn came, the sentry changed and a search made, I trusted the proper conclusions would be drawn.

I hadn’t hit him as hard as I’d thought, he was beginning to stir and moan feebly by the time I got back to him. This was all to the good, the alternative would have been to carry him and I was in no fit state to carry anyone. I stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth and the moaning stopped. Bad practice, I knew, for a gagged man with a head cold or nasal obstruction can die of suffocation in four minutes, but I hadn’t the facilities to carry out a sinus examination, and, more importantly, it was his health or mine.

He was up on his feet in two minutes. He didn’t try to run away or offer resistance, for by this time he had his ankles on a short hobble, his hands tied securely behind his back and the barrel of an automatic pressing into the side of his neck. I told him to walk, and he walked. Two hundred yards away, at the head of the path leading down to the landing stage, I led him off to one side, tied his wrists and ankles together and left him there. He seemed to be breathing without too much difficulty.

There were no other sentries, at least not on the main gate. I crossed the hollow square of a courtyard and came to the main door. It was closed but not locked. I passed inside and said a few hard things to myself about myself for not having searched that sentry for the torch he would almost certainly have been carrying. The window curtains must have been drawn and the darkness inside that hall was total. I didn’t much fancy moving around a Scottish baronial hall in total darkness, the risk of bringing down a suit of armour with a resounding metallic crash or impaling oneself on targes, claymores or a royal set of antlers must be high. I took out my pencil flash but the glow worm inside was breathing its last, even when hard-pressed against the face of my wrist-watch it was impossible to tell the time. It was impossible to see the wrist-watch.

From the air, yesterday, I’d seen that the castle had been built in perfect symmetry round three sides of a hollow square. It was a reasonable assumption then that if the main door was in the middle of the central or seaward-facing section then the main staircase would be directly opposite. It seemed likely that the middle of the hall would offer a passage unimpeded by either claymores or antlers.

It did. The stairs were where they should have been. Ten wide shallow steps and then the stairs branched both right and left. I chose the right-hand side because above me, on that side, I could see a faint loom of light. Six steps on the second flight of stairs, another right turn, eight more steps and then I was on the landing. Twenty-four steps and never a creak. I blessed the architect who had specified marble.

The light was much stronger now. I advanced towards its source, a door no more than an inch ajar, and applied a wary eye to the crack. All I could see was the corner of a wardrobe, a strip of carpet, the corner of the foot of a bed and, on the last, a muddy boot. A low-register cacophony of sound emerged, reminiscent of a boiler factory in the middle distance. I pushed the door and walked inside.

I’d come to see Lord Kirkside, and whoever this was it wasn’t Lord Kirkside, for whatever Lord Kirkside was in the habit of doing I was fairly certain that he didn’t go to bed in boots, braces and cloth cap, with a bayoneted rifle lying on the blankets beside him, which was what this character had done. I couldn’t see his face, because the cloth cap reached as far as his nose. On the bedside table beside him lay a torch and a half-empty whisky bottle. No glass, but from what little I could see of him I would have judged that he was, anyhow, one of those characters whose direct and simple enjoyment of life has not been impaired by the effete conventions of modern civilisation. The faithful watchman prudently preparing himself for the rigours of the West Highland night before taking his turn at sentry-go. But he wouldn’t be making it at the appointed hour for there was no one now to call him. From the look of it, he’d be lucky to make it for lunch.

It was just possible that he might wake himself up, those stentorian snores wouldn’t have gone unremarked in a mortuary. He had about him the look of a man who, on regaining consciousness, would find himself in need of thirst-quenching nourishment, so I unscrewed the bottle top, dropped in half a dozen of the tablets supplied by my pharmaceutical friend in Torbay, replaced the top, took the torch and left.

Behind the next door to the left lay a bathroom. A filthy basin with, above it, a water-stained mirror, two shaving brushes covered with lather, a jar of shaving cream with the top off, two unwashed razors and, on the floor, two towels that might just possibly have been white at some distant æon in the past. The interior of the bath was immaculate. Here was where the watchman performed his rudimentary ablutions.

The next room was a bedroom as dirty and disorderly as the watchman’s. It was a fair guess that this was the home of the man I’d left lying out among the gorse and stones on the hillside.

I moved across to the left-hand side of the central block – Lord Kirkside would have his room somewhere in that block. He did, but he wasn’t at home. The first room beyond the sleeping warrior’s was his all right, a glance at the contents of the nearest wardrobe confirmed this. But his bed hadn’t been slept in.

Predictably in this symmetrically designed house, the next room was a bathroom. The watchman wouldn’t have felt at all at home in here, this antiseptic cleanliness was the hall-mark of an effete aristocracy. A medicine cabinet was fixed to the wall. I took out a tin of Elastoplast and covered the face of the torch till I was left with a hole no more than the size of a sixpence. I put the tin in my pocket.

The next door was locked but locks, in the days when the Dubh Sgeir Castle had been built, were pretty rudimentary affairs. I took from my pocket the best skeleton key in the world – an oblong of stiff celluloid. I shoved it between door and jamb at bolt level pulled the door handle back in the direction of the hinges, eased in the celluloid, released the handle, repeated the process and stood stock-still. That click might have wakened my watchman friend, it should certainly have wakened the person inside. But I heard no sound of movement.

I opened the door a fraction of an inch and went through the stock-still standing process once more. There was a light on inside the room. I changed the torch for the gun, went on my knees, crouched low and abruptly opened the door wide. I stood up, closed and locked the door and crossed over to the bed.

Susan Kirkside wasn’t snoring but she was just as deep in sleep as the man I’d just left. She had a blue silk band round her hair, and all of her face was visible, a sight that must have been rare indeed during her waking hours. Twenty-one, her father had said she was, but lying there asleep, smudged eyes and all, she looked no older than seventeen. A magazine had slipped from her hands to the floor. On the bedside table was a half-empty glass of water and beside that a bottle containing a commercial brand of Nembutal tablets. Oblivion appeared to be a pretty hard thing to come by in Dubh Sgeir and I’d no doubt Susan Kirkside found it more difficult than most.

I picked up a towel from a basin in the corner of the room, removed the worst of the moisture and dirt from head and face, combed my hair into some semblance of order and gave my kindly reassuring smile a try-out in the mirror. I looked like someone from the pages of the Police Gazette.

It took almost two minutes to shake her awake or, at least, to pull her up from the dark depths of oblivion to a state of semi-awareness. Full consciousness took another minute, and it was probably this that saved me from a screaming match, she had time to adjust herself to the slow realisation of the presence of a stranger in the middle of the night. Mind you, I had my kindly smile going full blast till my face ached, but I don’t think it helped much.

‘Who are you? Who are you?’ Her voice was shaking, the blue eyes, still misted with sleep, wide open and scared. ‘Don’t you touch me! Don’t you – I’ll scream for help – I’ll –’

I took her hands just to show her that there was touching and touching. ‘I won’t touch you. Sue Kirkside. And a fat lot of good screaming for help would do around these parts. Don’t scream, there’s a good girl. In fact, don’t even talk above a whisper. I don’t think it would be very wise or safe, do you?’

She stared at me for a few seconds, her lips moving as if she were about to speak, but the fear slowly leaving her eyes. Suddenly she sat bolt upright. ‘You’re Mr Johnson. The man from the helicopter.’

‘You should be more careful,’ I said reproachfully. ‘They’d have you arrested for that in the Folies-Bergère.’ Her free hand hauled the blankets up to her chin and I went on: ‘My name is Calvert. I work for the Government. I’m a friend. I think you need a friend, don’t you, Susan? You and your old man – Lord Kirkside, that is.’

‘What do you want?’ she whispered. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m here to end your troubles,’ I said. ‘I’m here to cadge an invitation to your wedding to the Honourable John Rollinson. Make it about the end of next month, will you? I’m due some leave, then.’

‘Go away from here.’ Her voice was low and desperate. ‘Go away from here or you’ll ruin everything. Please, please, please go away. I’m begging you, I’m begging you. Go away. If you’re a friend, go away. Please, oh please go away!’

It seemed that she wanted me to leave. I said: ‘It appears that they have you pretty well brainwashed. If you believe their promise, you’ll believe anything in the world. They won’t let you go, they daren’t let you go, they’ll destroy every shred and trace of evidence that might ever point a finger at them. That includes anyone who has ever had anything to do with them.’

‘They won’t, they won’t. I was with Mr Lavorski when he promised Daddy that no one would come to any harm. He said they were businessmen, and killing was no part of business. He meant it.’

‘Lavorski, is it? It had to be.’ I looked at the earnest scared face. ‘He may have meant it when he said it. He wouldn’t have mentioned that they’ve murdered four people in the last three days, or that they have tried to murder me four times in the last three days.’

‘You’re lying! You’re making this up. Things like that – things like that don’t happen any more. For pity’s sake leave us alone!’

‘There speaks the true daughter of the old Scottish clan chieftain.’ I said roughly. ‘You’re no good to me. Where’s your father?’

‘I don’t know. Mr Lavorski and Captain Imrie – he’s another of them – came for him at eleven to-night. Daddy didn’t say where he was going. He tells me nothing.’ She paused and snatched her hands away. Faint red patches stained her cheeks. ‘What do you mean, I’m no good to you?’

‘Did he say when he would be back?’

‘What do you mean I’m no good to you?’

‘Because you’re young and not very clever and you don’t know too much about this world and you’ll believe anything a hardened criminal will tell you. But most especially because you won’t believe me. You won’t believe the one person who can save you all. You’re a stupid and pigheaded young fool, Miss Kirkside. If it wasn’t that he was jumping from the frying-pan into the fire, I’d say the Honourable Rollinson has had a lucky escape.’

‘What do you mean?’ It is hard for a mobile young face to be expressionless, but hers was then.

‘He can’t marry you when he is dead,’ I said brutally. ‘And he is going to die. He’s going to die because Sue Kirkside let him die. Because she was too blind to know truth when she saw it.’ I had what was, for me, an inspiration. I turned down my collar and pulled my scarf away. ‘Like it?’ I asked.

She didn’t like it at all. The red faded from her cheeks. I could see myself in her dressing-table mirror and I didn’t like it either. Quinn’s handiwork was in full bloom. The kaleidoscope of colour now made a complete ring round my neck.

‘Quinn?’ she whispered.

‘You know his name. You know him?’

‘I know them all. Most of them, anyway. Cook said that one night, after he’d too much to drink, he’d been boasting in the kitchen about how he’d once been the strong man in a stage act. He’d an argument one night with his partner. About a woman. He killed his partner. That way.’ She had to make a physical effort to turn her eyes away from my neck. ‘I thought – I thought it was just talk.’

‘And do you still think our pals are unpaid missionaries for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge?’ I sneered. ‘Do you know Jacques and Kramer?’

She nodded.

‘I killed them both to-night. After they had killed a friend of mine. They broke his neck. Then they tried to kill my boss and myself. And I killed another. He came out of the dark to murder us. I think his name was Henry. Do you believe me now? Or do you still think we’re all dancing round the old maypole on the village green, singing ring-a-ring-o’-roses as we go?’

The shock treatment worked almost too well. Her face wasn’t pale now, it was ashen. She said: ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

‘Later,’ I said coldly. What little self-regard I had was down among my shoe-laces, what I would have liked to do was to take her in my arms and say: ‘There, there, now, don’t you worry your pretty head, just you leave everything to your old Uncle Philip and all will be well at the end of the day’ In fact, it was damned hard not to do it. Instead, what I said, still in the same nasty voice, was: ‘We’ve no time for those little fol-de-rols. You want to get married, don’t you? Did your father say when he would be back?’

She looked at the wash-basin in the corner of the room as if she were still making up her mind whether to be sick or not then pulled her eyes back to me and whispered: ‘You’re just as bad as they are. You’re a terrible man. You’re a killer.’

I caught her shoulders and shook them. I said savagely: ‘Did he say when he would be back?’

‘No.’ Her eyes were sick with revulsion. It was a long time since any woman had looked at me like that. I dropped my hands.

‘Do you know what those men are doing here?’

‘No.’

I believed her. Her old man would know, but he wouldn’t have told her. Lord Kirkside was too astute to believe that their uninvited guests would just up and leave them unharmed. Maybe he was just desperately gambling that if he told his daughter nothing and if he could swear she knew nothing then they would leave her be. If that was what he thought, he was in urgent need of an alienist. But that was being unjust, if I stood in his shoes – or, more accurately, was swimming in the murky waters he was in – I’d have grabbed at any straw.

‘It’s obvious that you know that your fiancé is still alive,’ I went on. ‘And your elder brother. And others. They’re being held here, aren’t they?’

She nodded silently. I wished she wouldn’t look at me like that.

‘Do you know how many?’

‘A dozen. More than that. And I know there are children there. Three boys and a girl.’

That would be right. Sergeant MacDonald’s two sons and the boy and the girl that had been aboard the converted lifeboat that had disappeared after setting off on the night cruise from Torbay. I didn’t believe a word that Lavorski had said to Susan about their reverence for human life. But I wasn’t surprised that the people in the boats who had accidentally stumbled across his illegal operations were still alive. There was a very good reason for this.

‘Do you know where they are kept? There should be any amount of handy dungeons in Dubh Sgeir castle.’

‘There are cellars deep underground. I’ve never been allowed to go near them in the past four months.’

‘This is your big chance come at last. Get your clothes on and take me there.’

‘Go down to the cellars?’ Aghast was the word for her expression. ‘Are you mad? Daddy tells me there are at least three men on guard duty all night long.’ There were only two men now but her opinion of me was low enough already so I kept quiet. ‘They’re armed. You must be mad. I’m not going!’

‘I didn’t think you would. You’ll let your boy friend die just because you’re a contemptible little coward.’ I could almost taste the self-loathing in my mouth. ‘Lord Kirkside and the Honourable Rollinson. What a lucky father. What a fortunate fiancé.’

She hit me, and I knew I had won. I said without touching my face: ‘Don’t do that. You’ll waken up the guard. Get your clothes on.’

I rose, sat on the footboard of the bed and contemplated the door and higher things while she changed. I was becoming tired of women telling me what a horrible character I was.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

She was back in her uniform of pirate’s jersey and the denims she’d outgrown when she was about fifteen. Thirty seconds flat and nary a sound of a portable sewing machine. Baffling, that’s what it was.

NINE

Thursday: 4.30 a.m. – dawn

We went down the stairs hand in hand. I may have been the last man in the world she would have elected to be alone with on a desert island, but she clung on pretty tightly all the same.

At the foot of the steps we turned right. I flicked on the torch every few yards but it wasn’t really necessary, Susan knew every yard of the way. At the end of the hall we turned left along the eastern wing. Eight yards and we stopped at a door on the right-hand side.

‘The pantry,’ she whispered. ‘The kitchen is beyond that.’

I stooped and looked through the keyhole. Beyond was darkness. We passed through the doorway, then into an archway giving on to the kitchen. I flashed the tiny beam around the room. Empty.

There were three guards, Susan had said. The outside man, for whom I had accounted. The lad who patrolled the battlements. No, she didn’t know what he did, but it was a good guess that he wasn’t studying astronomy or guarding against parachutists. He’d have night glasses to his eyes and he’d be watching for fishing vessels, naval craft or fishery cruisers that might happen by and interrupt honest men at their work. He wouldn’t see much on a night like this. And the third man, she said, guarded the back kitchen premises, the only entrance to the castle apart from the main gate – and the unfortunates in their cellars down below.

He wasn’t in the kitchen premises, so he would be in the cellars down below.

A flight of steps led from the scullery beyond the kitchen down to a stone-flagged floor. To the right of this floor I could see the loom of light. Susan raised a finger to her lips and we made our way soundlessly down to the foot of the steps. I slid a cautious eye round the corner of this passageway.

It wasn’t passageway, it was the damnedest flight of steps I’d ever come across. They were lit by two or three far-spaced and very weak electric bulbs, the walls coming together towards the foot like a pair of railway lines disappearing into the distance. Maybe fifty feet – or seventy steps – down, where the first light was, another passageway branched off to the right. There was a stool at the corner of the small stone landing there, and sitting on the stool a man. Across his knees lay a rifle. They certainly went in for the heavy artillery.

I drew back. I murmured to Susan: ‘Where in hell’s name do those steps lead to?’

‘The boathouse, of course.’ A surprised whisper. ‘Where else?’

Where else, indeed. Brilliant work, Calvert, brilliant work. You’d skirted the south side of the Dubh Sgeir in the helicopter, you’d seen the castle, you’d seen the boathouse, you’d seen nary a handhold on the sheer cliff separating them, and you’d never raised an eyebrow at the glaring obviousness of the fact that ne’er the twain did meet.

‘Those are the cellars in that passage going off to the right?’ She nodded. ‘Why so far down? It’s a long walk to collect the bubbly’

‘They’re not really wine-cellars. They used to be used as water reservoirs.’

‘No other way of getting down there?’

‘No. Only this way’

‘And if we take five steps down this way he shoots us full of holes with his Lee Enfield. Know who it is?’

‘Harry. I don’t know his other name. He’s an Armenian, Daddy says. People can’t pronounce his real name. He’s young and smooth and greasy – and detestable.’

‘He had the effrontery to make a pass at the chieftain’s daughter?’

‘Yes. It was horrible.’ She touched her lips with the back of her hand. ‘He stank of garlic’

‘I don’t blame him. I’d do it myself if I didn’t feel my pension creeping up on me. Call him up and make amends.’

‘What?’

‘Tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you misjudged his noble character. Tell him your father is away and this is the first chance you’ve had of speaking to him. Tell him anything.’

‘No!’

‘Sue!’

‘He’ll never believe me,’ she said wildly.

‘When he gets within two feet of you, he’ll forget all about the reasoning why. He’s a man, isn’t he?’

‘You’re a man. And you’re only six inches away.’ The eternal female illogic.

‘I’ve told you how it is, it’s my pension coming between us. Quickly!’

She nodded reluctantly and I disappeared into the shadows of the nearest cellar, reversed gun in hand. She called and he came a-running, his rifle at the ready. When he saw who it was, he forgot all about his rifle. Susan started to speak her lines but she might have saved her breath. Harry, if nothing else, was an impetuous young man. That wild Armenian blood. I stepped forwards, arm swinging, and lowered him to the ground. I tied him up and, as I’d run out of handkerchiefs, ripped away part of his shirt-front and used it as a gag. Susan giggled, a giggle with a note of hysteria.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Harry. He’s what they call a snappy dresser. That’s a silk shirt. You’re no respecter of persons, Mr Calvert.’

‘Not persons like Harry. Congratulations. Wasn’t so bad, was it?’

‘It was still horrible.’ Again the hand to the mouth. ‘He’s reeking of whisky’

‘Youngsters have odd tastes,’ I said kindly. ‘You’ll grow out of it. At least it must have been an improvement on the garlic.’

The boathouse wasn’t really a boathouse at all, it was a large vaulting cave formed in a cleft in a natural fault in the cliff strata. At the inner end of the cave longitudinal tunnels stretched away on either side paralleling the coastline, until they vanished beyond the reach of my torch. From the air, the boathouse in the small artificial harbour, a structure of about twenty feet by twenty, had seemed incapable of housing more than two or three fair-sized rowing boats. Inside it was big enough to berth a boat the size of the Firecrest, and then leave room to spare. Mooring bollards, four in number, lined the eastern side of the boat-house. There were signs of recent work where the inner end of the cave had been lengthened in the direction of the longitudinal tunnels to increase the berthing space and provide a bigger working platform, but otherwise it was as it must have been for hundreds of years. I picked up a boat-hook and tried to test the depth, but couldn’t find bottom. Any vessel small enough to be accommodated inside could enter and leave at any state of the tide. The two big doors looked solid but not too solid. There was a small dry-land doorway on the eastern side.

The berth was empty, as I had expected to find it. Our friends were apprehensive and on piecework rates. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they were working at, the working platform was liberally stacked with the tools of their trade: an oil engine-driven air compressor with a steel reservoir with outlet valves, a manuallyoperated, two-cylinder double-acting air pump with two outlets, two helmets with attached corselets, flexible, non-collapsible air tubes with metal couplings, weighted boots, diving dresses, life-cum-telephone lines, lead weights and scuba equipment such as I had myself, with a stack of compressed air cylinders at the ready.

I felt neither surprise nor elation, I’d known this must exist for the past forty-eight hours although I’d become certain of the location only that night. I was faintly surprised perhaps, to see all this equipment here, for this would surely be only the spares. But I shouldn’t have been even vaguely surprised. Whatever this bunch lacked, it wasn’t a genius for organisation.

I didn’t see that night, nor did I ever see, the cellars where the prisoners were housed. After I’d huffed and puffed three-quarters of the way up that interminable flight of steps, I turned left along the passageway where we’d first seen Harry taking his ease. After a few yards the passageway broadened out into a low damp chamber containing a table made of beer-cases, some seats of the same and, in one corner, some furniture that hadn’t yet been drunk. A bottle of whisky, nearly full, stood on the table: Harry’s remedy for garlic halitosis.

Beyond this chamber was a massive wooden door secured by an equally massive-looking lock with the key missing. All the celluloid in the world wouldn’t open this lot but a beehive plastic explosive would do a very efficient job indeed. I made another of the many mental notes I’d made that night and went up the stairs to rejoin Susan.

Harry had come to. He was saying something in his throat which fortunately couldn’t get past his silk-shirted gag to the delicate ears of the chieftain’s young daughter, his eyes, to mint a phrase, spoke volumes and he was trying as best he could to do a Houdini with the ropes round his legs and arms. Susan Kirkside was pointing a rifle in his general direction and looking very apprehensive. She needn’t have bothered, Harry was trussed like a turkey.

‘These people down in the cellars,’ I said. ‘They’ve been there for weeks, some for months. They’ll be blind as bats and weak as kittens by the time they get out.’

She shook her head. ‘I think they’ll be all right. They’re taken out on the landing strip there for an hour and a half every morning under guard. They can’t be seen from the sea. We’re not allowed to watch. Or not supposed to. I’ve seen them often. Daddy insisted on it. And Sir Anthony.’

‘Well, good old Daddy.’ I stared at her. ‘Old man Skouras. He comes here?’

‘Of course.’ She seemed surprised at my surprise. ‘He’s one of them. Lavorski and this man Dollmann, the men that do all the arranging, they work for Sir Anthony. Didn’t you know? Daddy and Sir Anthony are friends – were friends – before this. I’ve been in Sir Anthony’s London home often.’

‘But they’re not friends now?’ I probed keenly.

‘Sir Anthony has gone off his head since his wife died,’ Susan said confidently. I looked at her in wonder and tried to remember when I’d last been so authoritatively dogmatic on subjects I knew nothing about. I couldn’t remember. ‘He married again, you know. Some French actress or other. That wouldn’t have helped. She’s no good. She caught him on the rebound.’

‘Susan,’ I said reverently, ‘you’re really wonderful. I don’t believe you’ll ever understand what I mean by my pension coming between us. You know her well?’

‘I’ve never met her.’

‘You didn’t have to tell me. And poor old Sir Anthony – he doesn’t know what he’s doing, is that it?’

‘He’s all mixed up,’ she said defensively. ‘He’s sweet, really he is. Or was.’

‘All mixed up with the deaths of four men, not to mention three of his own,’ I said. Sergeant MacDonald thought him a good man. Susan thought him sweet. I wondered what she would say if she saw Charlotte Skouras’s back. ‘How do the prisoners do for food?’

‘We have two cooks. They do it all. The food is brought down to them.’

‘What other staff?’

‘No other staff. Daddy was made to sack them all four months ago.’

That accounted for the state of the watchman’s bathroom. I said: ‘My arrival in the helicopter here yesterday afternoon was duly reported by radio to the Shangri-la. A man with a badly scarred face. Where’s the radio transmitter?’

‘You know everything, don’t you?’

‘Know-all Calvert. Where is it?’

‘Off the hall. In the room behind the stairs. It’s locked.’

‘I have keys that’ll open the Bank of England. Wait a minute.’ I went down to the guard’s room outside the prisoners’ cellar, brought the whisky bottle back up to where Susan was standing and handed it to her. ‘Hang on to this.’

She looked at me steadily. ‘Do you really need this?’

‘Oh my God, sweet youth,’ I said nastily. ‘Sure I need it. I’m an alcoholic’

I untied the rope round Harry’s ankles and helped him to his feet. He repaid this Samaritan gesture by swinging at me with his right foot but fifteen minutes on the floor hadn’t helped his circulation or reactions any and I forestalled him with the same manoeuvre. When I helped him up the second time there was no fight left in him.

‘Did you – did you really have to do that?’ The revulsion was back in her eyes.

‘Did I – did you see what he tried to do to me?’ I demanded.

‘You men are all the same,’ she said.

‘Oh, shut up!’ I snarled. I was old and sick and tired and I’d run right out of the last of my witty ripostes.

The transceiver was a beauty, a big gleaming-metallic RCA, the latest model as used in the naval vessels of a dozen nationalities. I didn’t waste any time wondering where they had obtained it, that lot were fit for anything. I sat down and started tuning the set, then looked up at Susan. ‘Go and fetch me one of your father’s razor blades.’

‘You don’t want me to hear, is that it?’

‘Think what you like. Just get it.’

If she’d been wearing a skirt she’d have flounced out of the room. With what she was wearing flouncing was out of the question. The set covered every transmission frequency from the bottom of the long wave to the top of the V.H.F. It took only two minutes to raise SPFX. It was manned night and day the year round. It really was most considerate of the ungodly to provide me with such a magnificent instrument.

Sue Kirkside was back before I started speaking. I was ten minutes on the microphone altogether. Apart from code-names and map references I used plain English throughout. I had to, I’d no book, and time was too short anyway. I spoke slowly and clearly, giving precise instructions about the movements of men, the alignment of radio frequencies, the minutes details of the layout of Dubh Sgeir castle and asking all-important questions about recent happenings on the Riviera. I didn’t repeat myself once, and I asked for nothing to be repeated to me, because every word was being recorded. Before I was half-way through, Susan’s eyebrows had disappeared up under the blonde fringe and Harry was looking as if he had been sandbagged. I signed off, reset the tuning band to its original position and stood up.

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I’m off.’

‘You’re what?’ The grey-blue eyes were wide, the eyebrows still up under the fringe, but with alarm, this time, not astonishment. ‘You’re leaving? You’re leaving me here?’

‘I’m leaving. If you think I’d stay a minute longer in this damned castle than I have to, you must be nuts. I’ve played my hand far enough already. Do you think I want to be around here when the guards change over or when the toilers on the deep get back here?’

‘Toilers on the deep? What do you mean?’

‘Skip it.’ I’d forgotten she knew nothing about what our friends were doing. ‘It’s Calvert for home.’

‘You’ve got a gun,’ she said wildly. ‘You could – you could capture them, couldn’t you?’

‘Capture who?’ The hell with the grammar.

‘The guards. They’re on the second floor. They’ll be asleep.’

‘How many?’

‘Eight or nine. I’m not sure.’

‘Eight or nine, she’s not sure! Who do you think I am, Superman? Stand aside, do you want me to get killed? And, Susan, tell nothing to anybody. Not even Daddy. Not if you want to see Johnny-boy walk down that aisle. You understand?’

She put a hand on my arm and said quietly but with the fear still in her face: ‘You could take me with you.’

‘I could. I could take you with me and ruin everything. If I as much as fired a single shot at any of the sleeping warriors up top, I’d ruin everything. Everything depends on their never knowing that anybody was here to-night. If they suspected that, just had a hint of a suspicion of that, they’d pack their bags and take off into the night. To-night. And I can’t possibly do anything until to-morrow night. You understand, of course, that they wouldn’t leave until after they had killed everyone in the cellar. And your father, of course. And they’d stop off at Torbay and make sure that Sergeant MacDonald would never give evidence against them. Do you want that, Susan? God knows I’d love to take you out of here, I’m not made of Portland cement, but if I take you the alarm bells will ring and then they’ll pull the plug. Can’t you see that? If they come back and find you gone, they’ll have one thought and one thought only in their minds: our little Sue has left the island. With, of course, one thought in mind. You must not be missing.’

‘All right.’ She was calm now. ‘But you’ve overlooking something.’

‘I’m a great old overlooker. What?’

‘Harry. He’ll be missing. He’ll have to be. You can’t leave him to talk.’

‘He’ll be missing. So will the keeper of the gate. I clobbered him on the way in.’ She started to get all wide-eyed again but I held up my hand, stripped off coat and wind-breaker, unwrapped the razor she’d brought me and nicked my forearm, not too deeply, the way I felt I needed all the blood I had, but enough to let me smear the bottom three inches of the bayonet on both sides. I handed her the tin of Elastoplast and without a word she stuck a strip across the incision. I dressed again and we left, Susan with the whisky bottle and torch, myself with the rifle, shepherding Harry in front of me. Once in the hall I relocked the door with the skeleton key I’d used to open it.

The rain had stopped and there was hardly any wind, but the mist was thicker than ever and the night had turned bitterly cold. The Highland Indian summer was in full swing. We made our way through the courtyard across to where I’d left the bayonet lying on the cliff edge, using the torch, now with the Elastoplast removed from its face, quite freely, but keeping our voices low. The lad maintaining his ceaseless vigil on the battlements couldn’t have seen us five yards away with the finest night-glasses in the world, but sound in heavy mist has unpredictable qualities, it can be muffled, it can be distorted, or it can occasionally be heard with surprising clarity, and it was now too late in the day to take chances.

I located the bayonet and told Harry to lie face down in the grass; if I’d left him standing he just might have been tempted to kick me over the edge. I gouged the grass in assorted places with heel and toe, made a few more scores with the butt of a bayonet, stuck the blade of the gatekeeper’s bayonet in the ground at a slight angle so that the rifle was just clear of the ground, laid Harry down so that the blood-stained bayonet tip was also just clear of the ground, so preventing the blood from running off among the wet grass, scattered most of the contents of the whisky bottle around and carefully placed the bottle, about a quarter full now, close to one of the bayonets. I said to Susan: ‘And what happened here do you think?’

‘It’s obvious. They had a drunken fight and both of them slipped on the wet grass over the edge of the cliff.’

‘And what did you hear?’

‘Oh! I heard the sound of two men shouting in the hall. I went on to the landing and I heard them shouting at the tops of their voices. I heard the one tell Harry to get back to his post and Harry saying, no, by God, he was going to settle it now. I’ll say both men were drunk, and I won’t repeat the kind of language they were using. The last I heard they were crossing the courtyard together, still arguing.’

‘Good girl. That’s exactly what you heard.’

She came with us as far as the place where I’d left the gate-keeper. He was still breathing. I used most of what rope I’d left to tie them together at the waist, a few feet apart, and wrapped the end of it in my hand. With their arms lashed behind their backs they weren’t going to have much balancing power and no holding power at all on the way down that steep and crumbling path to the landing stage. If either slipped or stumbled I might be able to pull them back to safety with a sharp tug. There was going to be none of this Alpine stuff with the rope around my waist also. If they were going to step out into the darkness they were going to do it without me.

I said: ‘Thank you, Susan. You have been a great help. Don’t take any more of those Nembutal tablets to-night. They’d think it damn’ funny if you were still asleep at midday to-morrow.’

‘I wish it were midday the next day. I won’t let you down, Mr Calvert. Everything is going to be all right, isn’t it?’

‘Of course.’

There was a pause, then she said: ‘You could have pushed these two over the edge if you wanted to, couldn’t you. But you didn’t. You could have cut Harry’s arm, but you cut your own. I’m sorry for what I said, Mr Calvert. About you being horrible and terrible. You do what you have to do.’ Another pause. ‘I think you’re rather wonderful.’

‘They all come round in the end,’ I said, but I was talking to myself, she’d vanished into the mist. I wished drearily that I could have agreed with her sentiments, I didn’t feel wonderful at all, I just felt dead tired and worried stiff for with all the best planning in the world there were too many imponderables and I wouldn’t have bet a brass farthing on the next twenty-four hours. I got some of the worry and frustration out of my system by kicking the two prisoners to their feet.

We went slowly down that crumbling treacherous path in single file, myself last, torch in my left hand, rope tightly – but not too tightly – in my right hand. I wondered vaguely as we went why I hadn’t nicked Harry instead of myself. It would have been so much more fitting, Harry’s blood on Harry’s bayonet.

‘You had a pleasant outing, I trust?’ Hutchinson asked courteously.

‘It wasn’t dull. You would have enjoyed it.’ I watched Hutchinson as he pushed the Firecrest into the fog and the darkness. ‘Let me into a professional secret. How in the world did you find your way back into this pier to-night? The mist is twice as bad as when I left. You cruise up and down for hours, impossible to take any bearings, there’s the waves, tide, fog, currents – and yet there you are, right on the nose, to the minute. It can’t be done.’

‘It was an extraordinary feat of navigation,’ Hutchinson said solemnly. ‘There are such things as charts, Calvert, and if you look at that large-scale one for this area you’ll see an eight fathom bank, maybe a cable in length, lying a cable and a half out to the west of the old pier there. I just steamed out straight into wind and tide, waited till the depth-sounder showed I was over the bank and dropped the old hook. At the appointed hour the great navigator lifts his hook and lets wind and tide drift him ashore again. Not many men could have done it.’

‘I’m bitterly disappointed,’ I said. ‘I’ll never think the same of you again. I suppose you used the same technique on the way in?’

‘More or less. Only I used a series of five banks and patches. My secrets are gone for ever. Where now?’

‘Didn’t Uncle Arthur say?’

‘You misjudge Uncle Arthur. He says he never interferes with you in – what was it? – the execution of a field operation. “I plan,” he said. “I co-ordinate. Calvert finishes the job”.’

‘He has his decent moments,’ I admitted.

‘He told me a few stories about you in the past hour. I guess it’s a privilege to be along.’

‘Apart from the four hundred thousand quid or whatever?’

‘Apart, as you say, from the green men. Where to, Calvert?’

‘Home. If you can find it in this lot.’

‘Craigmore? I can find it.’ He puffed at his cigar and held the end close to his eyes. ‘I think I should put this out. It’s getting so I can’t even see the length of the wheelhouse windows, far less beyond them. Uncle Arthur’s taking his time, isn’t he?’

‘Uncle Arthur is interrogating the prisoners.’

‘I wouldn’t say he’d get much out of that lot.’

‘Neither would I. They’re not too happy’

‘Well, it was a nasty jump from the pier to the foredeck. Especially with the bows plunging up and down as they were. And more especially with their arms tied behind their backs.’

‘One broken ankle and one broken forearm,’ I said. ‘It could have been worse. They could have missed the foredeck altogether.’

‘You have a point,’ Hutchinson agreed. He stuck his head out the side window and withdrew it again. ‘It’s not the cigar,’ he announced. ‘No need to quit smoking. Visibility is zero, and I mean zero. We’re flying blind on instruments. You may as well switch on the wheelhouse lights. Makes it all that easier to read the charts, depth-sounder and compass and doesn’t affect the radar worth a damn.’ He stared at me as the light came on. ‘What the hell are you doing in that flaming awful outfit?’

‘This is a dressing-gown,’ I explained. ‘I’ve three suits and all three are soaked and ruined. Any luck, sir?’ Uncle Arthur had just come in to the wheelhouse.

‘One of them passed out.’ Uncle Arthur wasn’t looking very pleased with himself. ‘The other kept moaning so loudly that I couldn’t make myself heard. Well, Calvert, the story.’

‘The story, sir? I was just going to bed. I’ve told you the story.’

‘Half a dozen quick sentences that I couldn’t hear above their damned caterwauling,’ he said coldly. ‘The whole story, Calvert.’

‘I’m feeling weak, sir.’

‘I’ve rarely known a time when you weren’t feeling weak, Calvert. You know where the whisky is.’

Hutchinson coughed respectfully. ‘I wonder if the admiral would permit –’

‘Certainly, certainly,’ Uncle Arthur said in a quite different tone. ‘Of course, my boy’ The boy was a clear foot taller than Uncle Arthur. ‘And while you’re at it, Calvert, you might bring one for me, too, a normal-sized one.’ He had his nasty side to him, had Uncle Arthur.

I said ‘good night’ five minutes later. Uncle Arthur wasn’t too pleased, I’d the feeling he thought I’d missed out on the suspense and fancy descriptions, but I was as tired as the old man with the scythe after Hiroshima. I looked in on Charlotte Skouras, she was sleeping like the dead. I wondered about that chemist back in Torbay, he’d been three parts asleep, myopic as a bam owl and crowding eighty. He could have made a mistake. He could have had only a minimal experience in the prescribing of sleep-inducing drugs for those who lived in the land of the Hebridean prayer: ‘Would that the peats might cut themselves and the fish jump on the shore, that I upon my bed might lie, and sleep for ever more.’

But I’d done the old boy an injustice. After what was, to me, our miraculous arrival in Craigmore’s apology for a harbour it had taken me no more than a minute to shake Charlotte into something resembling wakefulness. I told her to get dressed – a cunning move this to make her think I didn’t know she was still dressed – and come ashore. Fifteen minutes after that we were all inside Hutchinson’s house and fifteen minutes still later, when Uncle Arthur and I had roughly splinted the prisoners’ fractures and locked them in a room illuminated only by a sky-light that would have taken Houdini all his time to wriggle through, I was in bed in another tiny box-room that was obviously the sleeping-quarters of the chairman of the Craigmore’s art gallery selection committee, for he’d kept all the best exhibits to himself. I was just dropping off to sleep, thinking that if the universities ever got around to awarding Ph.D.s to house agents, the first degree would surely go to the first man who sold a Hebridean hut within sniffing distance of a flensing shed, when the door opened and the lights came on. I blinked open exhausted eyes and saw Charlotte Skouras softly closing the door behind her.

‘Go away’ I said. ‘I’m sleeping.’

‘May I come in?’ she asked. She gazed around the art gallery and her lips moved in what could have been the beginnings of a smile. ‘I would have thought you would have gone to sleep with the lights on to-night.’

‘You should see the ones behind the wardrobe doors,’ I boasted. I slowly opened my eyes as far as I could without mechanical aid. ‘Sorry, I’m tired. What can I do? I’m not at my best receiving lady callers in the middle of the night.’

‘Uncle Arthur’s next door. You can always scream for help if you want to.’ She looked at a moth-eaten armchair. ‘May I sit down?’

She sat down. She still wore that uncrushable white dress and her hair was neatly combed, but that was about all you could say for her. Attempts at humour there might have been in her voice, but there was none in her face and none in her eyes. Those brown, wise, knowing eyes, eyes that knew all about living and loving and laughter, the eyes that had once made her the most sought-after actress of her time now held only sadness and despair. And fear. Now that she had escaped from her husband and his accomplices, there should have been no need for fear. But it was there, half-buried in the tired brown eyes, but there. Fear was an expression I knew. The lines round the eyes and mouth that looked so right, so inevitable, when she smiled or laughed – in the days when she had smiled and laughed – looked as if they had been etched by time and suffering and sorrow and despair into a face that had never known laughter and love. Charlotte Skouras’s face, without the Charlotte Meiner of old behind it, no longer looked as if it belonged to her. A worn, a weary and an alien face. She must have been about thirty-five, I guessed, but she looked a deal older. And yet when she sat in that chair, almost huddled in that chair, the Craigmore art gallery no longer existed.

She said flatly: ‘You don’t trust me, Philip.’

‘What on earth makes you say that? Why shouldn’t I?’

‘You tell me. You are evasive, you will not answer questions. No, that is wrong, you will and you do answer questions, but I know enough of men to know that the answers you give me are the ones you want to give me and not the ones I should hear. Why should this be, Philip? What have I done that you should not trust me?’

‘So the truth is not in me? Well, I suppose I do stretch it a bit at times, I may even occasionally tell a lie. Strictly in the line of business, of course. I wouldn’t lie to a person like you.’ I meant it and intended not to – unless I had to do it for her sake, which was different.

‘Why should you not lie to a person like me?’

‘I don’t know how to say it. I could say I don’t usually lie to lovely and attractive women for whom I have a high regard, and then you’d cynically say I was stretching the truth till it snapped, and you’d be wrong because it is the truth, if truth lies in the eye of the beholder. I don’t know if that sounds like an insult, it’s never meant to be. I could say it’s because I hate to see you sitting there all washed up and with no place to go and no one to turn to at the one time in your life you need some place to go and someone to turn to, but I suppose again that might sound like an insult. I could say I don’t lie to my friends, but that again would be an insult, the Charlotte Skourases of this world don’t make friends with government hirelings who kill for their wages. It’s no good. I don’t know what to say, Charlotte, except that it doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not as long as you believe that no harm will come to you from me and, as long as I’m near you, no harm will come to you from anyone else either. Maybe you don’t believe that either, maybe your feminine intuition has stopped working.’

‘It is working – what you say? – overtime. Very hard indeed.’ The brown eyes were still and the face without expression. ‘I do think I could place my life in your hands.’

‘You might not get it back again.’

‘It’s not worth all that much. I might not want it back.’

She looked at me for a long moment when there was no fear in her eyes, then stared down at her folded hands. She gazed at them so long that I finally looked in the same direction myself, but there was nothing wrong with her hands that I could see. Finally she looked up with an almost timid half-smile that didn’t belong to her at all.

‘You are wondering why I came,’ she asked.

‘No. You’ve told me. You want me to tell you a story. Especially the beginning and end of the story.’

She nodded. ‘When I began as a stage actress, I played very small parts, but I knew what the play was all about. In this real-life play, I’m still playing a very small part. Only, I no longer know what the play is all about. I come on for three minutes in Act 2, but I have no idea what has gone before. I’m back for another minute in Act 4, but I’ve no idea in the world what’s happened between Acts 2 and 4. And I cannot begin to imagine how it will all end.’ She half-lifted her arms, turning the palms upwards. ‘You cannot imagine how frustrating this can be for a woman.’

‘You really know nothing of what has gone before this?’

‘I ask you to believe me.’

I believed her. I believed her because I knew it to be true.

‘Go to the front room and bring me, as they say in these parts, a refreshment,’ I said. ‘I grow weaker by the hour.’

So she rose obediently and went to the front room and brought me the refreshment which gave me just enough strength to tell her what she wanted to know.

‘They were a triumvirate,’ I said, which if not strictly accurate, was close enough to the truth for my explanation. ‘Sir Anthony, Lavorski, who, I gather, was not only his public and private accountant, but his overall financial director as well, and John Dollmann, the managing director of the shipping companies – they were split up for tax reasons – associated with your husband’s oil companies. I thought that MacCallum, the Scots lawyer, and Jules Biscarte, the lad with the beard who owns one of the biggest merchant banks in Paris, was in with them too. But they weren’t. At least not Biscarte. I think he was invited aboard ostensibly to discuss business but actually to provide our triumvirate with information that would have given them the basis for their next coup, but he didn’t like the way the wind was blowing and shied off. I know nothing about MacCallum.’

‘I know nothing about Biscarte,’ Charlotte said. ‘Neither he nor Mr MacCallum stayed aboard the Shangri-la, they were at the Columba hotel for a few days and were invited out twice for dinner. They haven’t been aboard since the night you were there.’

‘Among other things they didn’t care for your husband’s treatment of you.’

‘I didn’t care for it myself. I know what Mr MacCallum was doing aboard. My husband was planning to build a refinery in the Clyde estuary this coming winter and MacCallum was negotiating the lease for him. My husband said that, by the end of the year, he expected to have a large account of uncommitted capital for investment.’

‘I’ll bet he did, that’s as neat a phrase for the proceeds of grand larceny as ever I’ve come across. Lavorski, I think we’ll find, was the instigator and guiding brain behind all this. Lavorski it would have been who discovered that the Skouras empire was badly in need of some new lifeblood in the way of hard cash and saw the way of putting matters right by using means they already had close to hand.’

‘But – but my husband was never short of money,’ Charlotte objected.

‘He had the best of everything, yachts, cars, houses –’ ‘He was never short in that sense. Neither were half the millionaires who jumped off the New York skyscrapers at the time of the stock market crash. Do be quiet, there’s a good girl, you know nothing about high finance.’ Coming from a character who eked out a bare living from an inadequate salary, I reflected, that was very good indeed. ‘Lavorski struck upon the happy idea of piracy on a grand scale – vessels carrying not less than a million pounds’ worth of specie at a time.’

She stared at me, her lips parted. I wished I had teeth like that, instead of having had half of them knocked out by Uncle Arthur’s enemies over the years. Uncle Arthur, I mused bitterly, was twenty-five years older than I was and was frequently heard to boast that he’d still to lose his first tooth. She whispered: ‘You’re making all this up.’

‘Lavorski made it all up. I’m just telling you, I wouldn’t have the brains to think of something like that. Having thought up this splendid scheme for making money, they found themselves with three problems to solve: how to discover when and where large quantities of specie were being shipped, how to seize those ships and how to hide them while they opened the strong-room – a process which in ships fitted with the most modern strongrooms can take anything up to a day – and removed said specie.

‘Problem number one was easy. I have no doubt that they may have suborned high-ranking banking officials – the fact that they tried it on with Biscarte is proof of that – but I don’t think it will ever be possible to bring those men to justice. But it will be possible to arrest and very successfully indict their ace informant, their trump card, our good friend the belted broker. Lord Charnley. To make a real good-going success of piracy you require the co-operation of Lloyd’s. Well, that’s an actionable statement, the co-operation of someone in Lloyd’s. Someone like Lord Charnley. He is, by profession, a marine underwriter at Lloyd’s. Stop staring at me like that, you’re putting me off.

‘A large proportion of valuable marine cargoes are insured at Lloyd’s. Charnley would know of at least a number of those. He would know the amount, the firm or bank of dispatch, and possibly the date of dispatch and vessel.’

‘But Lord Charnley is a wealthy man,’ she said.

‘Lord Charnley gives the appearance of being a wealthy man,’ I corrected. ‘Granted, he had to prove that he was a man of substance to gain admission to the old club, but he may have backed the wrong insurance horses or played the stock market. He either needed money or wanted money. He may have plenty but money is like alcohol, some people can take it and some can’t, and with those who can’t the more money they have the more they require.

‘Dollmann solved problem two – the hi-jacking of the specie. I shouldn’t imagine this strained his resources too far. Your husband ships his oil into some very odd and very tough places indeed and it goes without saying that he employs some very odd and very tough people to do it. Dollmann wouldn’t have recruited the hi-jacking crew himself, he probably singled out our good friend Captain Imrie, who will prove to have a very interesting history, and gave him the authority to go through the Skouras fleets and hand-pick suitable men for the job. Once the hi-jacking crew was assembled and ready, Messrs. Skouras, Lavorski and Dollmann waited till the victim was on the high seas, dumped you and the stewardess in a hotel, embarked the lads on the Shangri-la, intercepted the specie-carrying vessel and by one of a series of ruses I’ll tell you about later, succeded in boarding it and taking over. Then the Shangri-la landed the captured crew under guard while the prize crew sailed the hi-jacked vessel to the appointed hiding-place.’

‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true,’ she murmured. It was a long time since I’d seen any woman wringing her hands but Charlotte Skouras was doing it then. Her face was quite drained of colour. She knew that what I was saying was true and she’d never heard of any of it before. ‘Hiding place, Philip? What hiding place?’

‘Where would you hide a ship, Charlotte?’

‘How should I know?’ She shrugged tiredly. ‘My mind is not very clear to-night. Up in the Arctic perhaps, or in a lonely Norwegian fjord or some desert island. I can’t think any more, Philip. There cannot be many places. A ship is a big thing.’

‘There are millions of places. You can hide a ship practically anywhere in the world. All you have to do is to open the bilge-valves and engine-room non-return valves to the bilges and detonate a couple of scuttling charges.’

‘You mean – you mean that -’

‘I mean just that. You send it to the bottom. The west side of the Sound to the east of Dubh Sgeir island, a cheery stretch of water rejoicing in the name of Beul nan Uamh – the mouth of the grave – must be the most densely packed marine graveyard in Europe to-day. At dead slack water the valves were opened at a very carefully selected spot in the Beul nan Uamh and down they went, all five of them, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. Tide tables show that, coincidentally, most of them were sunk at or near midnight. Cease upon the midnight, as the poet says, only in this case with a very great deal of pain, at least for the underwriters involved. Beul nan Uamh. Odd, I never thought of it before. A very apt name indeed. The mouth of the grave. Damn’ place is printed far too large in the chart, it doesn’t have to be very obvious to be too obvious for Calvert.’

She hadn’t been listening to my meanderings. She said: ‘Dubh Sgeir? But – but that’s the home of Lord Kirkside.’

‘It’s not but, it’s because. The hiding place was picked either by your husband, or, if someone else, then the arrangement was made through your husband. I never knew until recently that your husband was an old drinking pal of Lord Kirkside. I saw him yesterday, but he wouldn’t talk. Nor would his charming daughter.’

‘You do move around. I’ve never met the daughter.’

‘You should. She thinks you’re an old gold-digging hag. A nice kid really. But terrified, terrified for her life and those of others.’

‘Why on earth should she be?’

‘How do you think our triumvirate got Lord Kirkside to agree to their goings-on?’

‘Money. Bribery.’

I shook my head. ‘Lord Kirkside is a Highlander and a gendeman. It’s a pretty fierce combination. Old Skouras could never lay hands on enough money to bribe Lord Kirkside to pass the uncollected fares box on a bus, if he hadn’t paid. A poor illustration, Lord Kirkside wouldn’t recognise a bus even if it ran over him, but what I mean is, the old boy is incorruptive. So your charming friends kidnapped old Kirkside’s elder son – the younger lives in Australia – and just to make sure that Susan Kirkside wouldn’t be tempted to do anything silly, they kidnapped her fiancé. A guess, but a damned good one. They’re supposed to be dead.’

‘No, no,’ she whispered. Her hand was to her mouth and her voice was shaking. ‘My God, no!’

‘My God, yes. It’s logical and tremendously effective. They also kidnapped Sergeant MacDonald’s sons and Donald MacEachern’s wife for the same reason. To buy silence and co-operation.’

‘But – but people just can’t disappear like that.’

‘We’re not dealing with street corner boys, we’re dealing with criminal master-minds. Disappearances are rigged to look like accidental death. A few other people have disappeared also, people who had the misfortune to be hanging around in small private boats while our friends were waiting for the tide to be exactly right before opening the sea-cocks on the hijacked ships.’

‘Didn’t it arouse police suspicion? Having so many small boats disappear in the same place.’

‘They sailed or towed two of those boats fifty or more miles away and ran them on the rocks. Another could have disappeared anywhere. The fourth did set sail from Torbay and disappeared, but the disappearance of one boat is not enough to arouse suspicion.’

‘It must be true, I know it must be true.’ She shook her head as if she didn’t believe it was true at all. ‘It all fits so well, it explains so many things and explains them perfectly. But – but what’s the good of knowing all this now? They’re on to you, they know you know that something is far wrong and that that something is in Loch Houron. They’ll leave –’

‘How do they know we suspect Loch Houron?’

‘Uncle Arthur told me in the wheelhouse last night.’ Surprise in her voice. ‘Don’t you remember?’

I hadn’t remembered. I did now. I was half-dead from lack of sleep. A stupid remark. Perhaps even a give-away remark. I was glad Uncle Arthur hadn’t heard that one.

‘Calvert nears the sunset of his days,’ I said. ‘My mind’s going. Sure they’ll leave. But not for forty-eight hours yet. They will think they have plenty of time, it’s less than eight hours since we instructed Sergeant MacDonald to tell them that we were going to the mainland for help.’

‘I see,’ she said dully. ‘And what did you do on Dubh Sgeir tonight, Philip?’

‘Not much. But enough.’ Another little white lie. ‘Enough to confirm my every last suspicion. I swam ashore to the little harbour and picked the side door of the boathouse. It’s quite a boat-house. Not only is it three times as big on the inside as it is from the outside, but it’s stacked with diving equipment.’

‘Diving equipment?’

‘Heaven help us all, you’re almost as stupid as I am. How on earth do you think they recover the stuff from the sunken vessels? They use a diving-boat and the Dubh Sgeir boathouse is its home.’

‘Was – was that all you found out?’

‘There was nothing more to find out. I had intended taking a look round the castle – there’s a long flight of steps leading up to it from the boatyard inside the cliff itself – but there was some character sitting about three parts of the way up with a rifle in his hand. A guard of some sort. He was drinking out of some sort of bottle, but he was doing his job for all that. I wouldn’t have got within a hundred steps of him without being riddled. I left.’

‘Dear God,’ she murmured. ‘What a mess, what a terrible mess. And you’ve no radio, we’re cut off from help. What are we going to do? What are you going to do, Philip?’

‘I’m going there in the Firecrest this coming night, that’s what I’m going to do. I have a machine-gun under the settee of the saloon in the Firecrest and Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson will have a gun apiece. We’ll reconnoitre. Their time is running short and they’ll want to be gone to-morrow at the latest. The boathouse doors are ill-fitting and if there’s no light showing that will mean they still haven’t finished their diving. So we wait till they have finished and come in. We’ll see the light two miles away when they open the door to let the diving-boat in to load up all the stuff they’ve cached from the four other sunken ships. The front doors of the boathouse will be closed, of course, while they load up. So we go in through the front doors. On the deck of the Firecrest. The doors don’t look all that strong to me. Surprise is everything. We’ll catch them napping. A sub-machine-gun in a small enclosed space is a deadly weapon.’

‘You’ll be killed, you’ll be killed!’ She crossed to and sat on the bed-side, her eyes wide and scared. ‘Please, Philip! Please, please don’t. You’ll be killed, I tell you. I beg of you, don’t do it!’ She seemed very sure that I would be killed.

‘I have to, Charlotte. Time has run out. There’s no other way’

‘Please.’ The brown eyes were full of unshed tears. This I couldn’t believe: ‘Please, Philip. For my sake.’

‘No.’ A tear-drop fell at the corner of my mouth, it tasted as salt as the sea. ‘Anything else in the world. But not this.’

She rose slowly to her feet and stood there, arms hanging limply by her side, tears trickling down her cheeks. She said dully: ‘It’s the maddest plan I’ve ever heard in my life,’ turned and left the room, switching off the light as she went.

I lay there staring into the darkness. There was sense in what the lady said. It was, I thought, the maddest plan I’d ever heard in my life. I was damned glad I didn’t have to use it.

TEN

Thursday: noon – Friday: dawn

‘Let me sleep.’ I said. I kept my eyes shut. ‘I’m a dead man.’

‘Come on, come on.’ Another violent shake, a hand like a power shovel. ‘Up!’

‘Oh, God!’ I opened the corner of one eye. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Just after noon. I couldn’t let you sleep any more.’

‘Noon! I asked to be shaken at five. Do you know –’

‘Come here.’ He moved to the window, and I swung my legs stiffly out of bed and followed him. I’d been operated on during my sleep, no anæsthetic required in the condition I was in, and someone had removed the bones from my legs. I felt awful. Hutchinson nodded towards the window. ‘What do you think of that?’

I peered out into the grey opaque world. I said irritably: ‘What do you expect me to see in that damn’ fog?’

‘The fog.’

‘I see,’ I said stupidly. ‘The fog.’

‘The two a.m. shipping forecast,’ Hutchinson said. He gave the impression of exercising a very great deal of patience. ‘It said the fog would clear away in the early morning. Well, the goddamned fog hasn’t cleared away in the early morning.’

The fog cleared away from my befuddled brain. I swore and jumped for my least sodden suit of clothing. It was damp and clammy and cold but I hardly noticed these things, except subconsciously, my conscious mind was frantically busy with something else. On Monday night they’d sunk the Nantesville at slack water but there wasn’t a chance in a thousand that they would have been able to get something done that night or the Tuesday night, the weather had been bad enough in sheltered Torbay harbour, God alone knew what it would have been like in Beul nan Uamh. But they could have started last night, they had started last night for there had been no diving-boat in the Dubh Sgeir boathouse, and reports from the Nantesville’s owners had indicated that the strongroom was a fairly antiquated one, not of hardened steel, that could be cut open in a couple of hours with the proper equipment. Lavorski and company would have the proper equipment. The rest of last night, even had they three divers and reliefs working all the time, they could have brought up a fair proportion of the bullion but I’d been damn’ sure they couldn’t possibly bring up all eighteen tons of it. Marine salvage had been my business before Uncle Arthur had taken me away. They would have required another night or at least a good part of the night, because they only dared work when the sun was down. When no one could see them. But no one could see them in dense fog like this. This was as good as another night thrown in for free.

‘Give Uncle Arthur a shake. Tell him we’re on our way. In the Firecrest.’

‘He’ll want to come.’

‘He’ll have to stay. He’ll know damn’ well he’ll have to stay. Beul nan Uamh, tell him.’

‘Not Dubh Sgeir? Not the boathouse?’

‘You know damn’ well we can’t move in against that until midnight.’

‘I’d forgotten,’ Hutchinson said slowly. ‘We can’t move in against it until midnight.’

The Beul nan Uamh wasn’t living up to its fearsome reputation. At that time in the afternoon it was dead slack water and there was only the gentlest of swells running up from the southwest. We crossed over from Ballara to the extreme north of the eastern shore of Dubh Sgeir and inched our way southward with bare steerage way on. We’d cut the by-pass valve into the underwater exhaust and, even in the wheelhouse, we could barely hear the throb of the diesel. Even with both wheelhouse doors wide open, we could just hear it and no more. But we hadn’t the wheelhouse doors open for the purpose of hearing our own engine.

By this time we were almost half-way down the eastern patch of miraculously calm water that bordered the normal mill-race of Beul nan Uamh, the one that Williams and I had observed from the helicopter the previous afternoon. For the first time, Hutchinson was showing something approaching worry. He never spared a glance through the wheelhouse windows, and only a very occasional one for the compass: he was navigating almost entirely by chart and depth-sounder.

‘Are you sure it’ll be this fourteen-fathom ledge, Calvert?’

‘It has to be. It damn’ well has to be. Out to the seven-fathom mark there the sea-bottom is pretty flat, but there’s not enough depth to hide superstructure and masts at low tide. From there to fourteen it’s practically a cliff. And beyond the fourteen-fathom ledge it goes down to thirty-five fathom, steep enough to roll a ship down there. You can’t operate at those depths without very special equipment indeed.’

‘It’s a damn’ narrow ledge,’ he grumbled. ‘Less than a cable. How could they be sure the scuttled ship would fetch up where they wanted it to?’

‘They could be sure. In dead slack water, you can always be sure.’

Hutchinson put the engine in neutral and went outside. We drifted on quietly through the greyly opaque world. Visibility didn’t extend beyond our bows. The muffled beat of the diesel served only to enhance the quality of ghostly silence. Hutchinson came back into the wheelhouse, his vast bulk moving as unhurriedly as always.

‘I’m afraid you’re right. I hear an engine.’

I listened, then I could hear it too, the unmistakable thudding of an air compressor. I said: ‘What do you mean afraid?’

‘You know damn’ well.’ He touched the throttle, gave the wheel a quarter turn to port and we began to move out gently into deeper water. ‘You’re going to go down.’

‘Do you think I’m a nut case? Do you think I want to go down? I bloody well don’t want to go down – and you bloody well know that I have to go down. And you know why. You want them to finish up here, load up in Dubh Sgeir and the whole lot to be hell and gone before midnight?’

‘Half, Calvert. Take half of our share. God, man, we do nothing.’

‘I’ll settle for a pint in the Columba Hotel in Torbay. You just concentrate on putting this tub exactly where she ought to be. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life swimming about the Atlantic when I come back up from the Nantesville.’

He looked at me, the expression in his eyes saying ‘if,’ not ‘when,’ but kept quiet. He circled round to the south of the diving-boat – we could faintly hear the compressor all the way – then slightly to the west. He turned the Firecrest towards the source of the sound, manoeuvring with delicacy and precision. He said: ‘About a cable length.’

‘About that. Hard to judge in fog.’

‘North twenty-two east true. Let go the anchor.’

I let go the anchor, not the normal heavy Admiralty type on the chain but a smaller CQR on the end of forty fathoms of rope. It disappeared silently over the side and the Terylene as silently slid down after it. I let out all forty fathoms and made fast. I went back to the wheelhouse and strapped the cylinders on my back.

‘You won’t forget, now,’ Hutchinson said. ‘When you come up, just let yourself drift. The ebb’s just setting in from the nor’-nor’-east and will carry you back here. I’D keep the diesel ticking, you’ll be able to hear the underwater exhaust twenty yards away. I hope to hell the mist doesn’t clear. You’ll just have to swim for Dubh Sgeir.’

‘That will be ducky. What happens to you if it clears?’

‘I’ll cut the anchor rope and take off.’

‘And if they come after you?’

‘Come after me? Just like that? And leave two or three dead divers down inside the Nantesville?’

‘I wish to God,’ I said irritably, ‘that you wouldn’t talk about dead divers inside the Nantesville.’

There were three divers aboard the Nantesville, not dead but all working furiously, or as furiously as one can work in the pressurised slow-motion world of the undersea.

Getting down there had been no trouble. I’d swum on the surface towards the diving-boat, the compressor giving me a clear bearing all the time, and dived when only three yards away. My hands touched cables, life-lines and finally an unmistakable wire hawser. The wire hawser was the one for me.

I stopped my descent on the wire when I saw the dim glow of light beneath me. I swam some distance to one side then down until my feet touched something solid. The deck of the Nantesville. I moved cautiously towards the source of the light.

There were two of them, standing in their weighted boots at the edge of an open hatchway. As I’d expected, they were wearing not my self-contained apparatus, but regular helmet and corselet diving gear, with air-lines and life-lines, the life-lines almost certainly with telephone wires imbedded inside them. Self-contained diving equipment wouldn’t have been much use down here, it was too deep for oxygen and compressed-air stores too limited. With those suits they could stay down an hour and a half, at least, although they’d have to spend thirty to forty minutes on decompression stops on the way up. I wanted to be gone in less than that, I wanted to be gone that very moment, my heart was banging away against my chest wall like a demented pop drummer with the ague but it was only the pressure of the water, I told myself, it couldn’t be fear, I was far too brave for that.

The wire rope I’d used to guide me down to the Nantesville, terminated in a metal ring from which splayed out four chains to the corners of a rectangular steel mesh basket. The two divers were loading this basket with wire- and wood-handled steel boxes that they were hauling up from the hold at the rate of, I guessed, about one every minute. The steel boxes were small but obviously heavy: each held four 28-lb ingots of gold. Each box held a fortune. There were three hundred and sixty such fortunes aboard the Nantesville.

I tried to calculate the overall rate of unloading. The steel basket held sixteen boxes. Sixteen minutes to load. Another ten minutes to winch up to the diving-boat, unload and lower again. Say forty an hour. In a ninety-minute stretch, about sixty. But after ninety minutes they would have to change divers. Forty minutes, including two decompression stops of, say, twelve and twenty-four minutes, to get to the surface, then twenty minutes to change over and get other divers down. An hour at least. So, in effect, they were clearing sixty boxes every two and a half hours, or twenty-four an hour. The only remaining question was, how many boxes were left in the Nantesville’s strongroom?

I had to find out and I had to find out at once. I’d had only the two compressed air-cylinders aboard the Firecrest and already their two hundred atmospheres were seriously depleted. The wire hawser jerked and the full basket started to rise, the divers guiding it clear of the superstructure with a trailing guide rope. I moved forward from the corner of the partially opened hatch remote from where they were standing and cautiously wriggled over and down. With excessive caution, I supposed: their lamp cast only a small pool of light and they couldn’t possibly have seen me from where I was standing. I felt my hands – already puffed and numbed by the icy water – touch a life-line and air-line and quickly withdrew them. Below and to my right I could see another faint pool of light. A few cautious strokes and I could see the source of the light.

The light was moving. It was moving because it was attached to the helmet of a diver, angled so as to point down at an angle of forty-five degrees. The diver was inside the strongroom.

They hadn’t opened that strongroom with any Yale key. They’d opened it with underwater torches cutting out a roughly rectangular section in the strongroom’s side, maybe six feet by four.

I moved up to this opening and pushed my head round the side. Beyond the now stooping diver was another light suspended from the deck-head. The bullion boxes were neatly stacked in racks round the side and it was a five-second job to estimate their number. Of the three hundred and sixty bullion boxes, there were about one hundred and twenty left.

Something brushed my arm, pulled past my arm. I glanced down and saw that it was a rope, a nylon line, that the diver was pulling in to attach to the handle of one of the boxes. I moved my arm quickly out of the way.

His back was towards me. He was having difficulty in fastening the rope but finally secured it with two half hitches, straightened and pulled a knife from his waist sheath. I wondered what the knife was for.

I found out what the knife was for. The knife was for me. Stooped over as he had been, he could just possibly have caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye: or he might have felt the sudden pressure, then release of pressure, on the nylon rope: or his sixth sense was in better working condition than mine. I won’t say he whirled round, for in a heavy diving suit at that depth the tempo of movement becomes slowed down to that of a slow-motion film.

But he moved too quickly for me. It wasn’t my body that was slowing down as much as my mind. He was completely round and facing me, not four feet away, and I was still where I’d been when he’d first moved, still displaying all the lightning reactions and coordinated activity of a bag of cement. The six-inch-bladed knife was held in his lowered hand with thumb and forefinger towards me, which is the way that only nasty people with lethal matters on their minds hold knives, and I could see his face clearly. God knows what he wanted the knife for, it must have been a reflex action, he didn’t require a knife to deal with me, he wouldn’t have required a knife to deal with two of me.

It was Quinn.

I watched his face with a strangely paralysed intentness. I watched his face to see if the head would jerk down to press the telephone call-up buzzer with his chin. But his head didn’t move, Quinn had never required any help in his life and he didn’t require any now. Instead his lips parted in a smile of almost beatific joy. My mask made it almost impossible for my face to be recognised but he knew whom he had, he knew whom he had without any doubt in the world. He had the face of a man in the moment of supreme religious ecstasy. He fell slowly forwards, his knees bending, till he was at an angle of almost forty-five degrees and launched himself forward, his right arm already swinging far behind his back.

The moment of thrall ended. I thrust off backwards from the strong-room’s outer wall with my left foot, saw the airhose come looping down towards me as Quinn came through the jagged hole, caught it and jerked down with all my strength to pull him off-balance. A sharp stinging pain burned its way upwards from my lower ribs to my right shoulders. I felt a sudden jerk in my right hand. I fell backwards on to the floor of the hold and then I couldn’t see Quinn any more, not because the fall had dazed me nor because Quinn had moved, but because he had vanished in the heart of an opaque, boiling, mushrooming cloud of dense air-bubbles. A non-collapsible air-hose can, and often has to, stand up to some pretty savage treatment, but it can’t stand up to the wickedly slicing power of a razor-sharp knife in the hands of the strongest man I’d ever known. Quinn had cut his own air-hose, had slashed it cleanly in two.

No power on earth could save Quinn now. With a pressure of forty pounds to the square inch on that severed air-line, he would be drowning already, his suit filling up with water and weighting him down so that he could never rise again. Almost without realising what I was doing I advanced with the nylon rope still in my hands and coiled it any old way round the madly threshing legs, taking great care indeed to keep clear of those flailing arms, for Quinn could still have taken me with him, could have snapped my neck like a rotten stick. At the back of my mind I had the vague hope that when his comrades investigated, as they were bound to do immediately – those great clouds of bubbles must have already passed out through the hold on their way to the surface – they would think he’d become entangled and tried to cut himself free. I did not think it a callous action then nor do I now. I had no qualms about doing this to a dying man, and no compunction: he was doomed anyway, he was a psychopathic monster who killed for the love of it and, most of all, I had to think of the living who might die, the prisoners in the cellars of the Dubh Sgeir castle. I left him threshing there, dying there, and swam up and hid under the deck-head of the hold.

The two men who had been on deck were already on their way down, being slowly lowered on their life-lines. As soon as their helmets sunk below my level I came up through the hatchway, located the wire hawser and made my way up. I’d been down for just under ten minutes so when my wrist depth-gauge showed a depth of two fathoms I stopped for a three-minute decompression period. By now, Quinn would be dead.

I did as Hutchinson had told me, drifted my way back to the Firecrest – there was no hurry now – and located it without difficulty. Hutchinson was there to help me out of the water and I was glad of his help.

‘Am I glad to see you, brother,’ he said. ‘Never thought the day would come when Tim Hutchinson would die a thousand deaths, but die a thousand deaths he did. How did it go?’

‘All right. We’ve time. Five or six hours yet.’

‘I’ll get the hook up.’ Three minutes later we were on our way and three minutes after that we were out near enough in the midchannel of the Beul nan Uamh, heading north-north-east against the gathering ebb. I could hear the helm going on auto-pilot and then Hutchinson came through the door into the lit saloon, curtains tightly if, in that fog, unnecessarily drawn, where I was rendering some first aid to myself, just beginning to tape up a patch of gauze over the ugly gash that stretched all the way from lowest rib to shoulder. I couldn’t see the expression behind the darkly-luxuriant foliage of that beard, but his sudden immobility was expression enough. He said, quietly: ‘What happened, Calvert?’

‘Quinn. I met him in the strongroom of the Nantesville.’

He moved forward and in silence helped me to tape up the gauze. When it was finished, and not until then, he said: ‘Quinn is dead.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Quinn is dead. He cut his own air-hose.’ I told him what had happened and he said nothing. He didn’t exchange a dozen words all the way back to Craigmore. I knew he didn’t believe me. I knew he never would.

Neither did Uncle Arthur. He’d never believe me till the day he died. But his reaction was quite different, it was one of profound satisfaction. Uncle Arthur was, in his own avuncular fashion, possessed of an absolute ruthlessness. Indeed, he seemed to take half the credit for the alleged execution. ‘It’s not twenty-four hours,’ he’d announced at the tea-table, ‘since I told Calvert to seek out and destroy this man by whatever means that came to hand. I must confess that I never thought the means would consist of the blade of a sharp knife against an air-hose. A neat touch, my boy, a very neat touch indeed.’

Charlotte Skouras believed me. I don’t know why, but she believed me. While she was stripping off my makeshift bandage, cleaning the wound and re-bandaging it very efficiently, a process I suffered with unflinching fortitude because I didn’t want to destroy her image of a secret service agent by bellowing out loud at the top of my voice, I told her what had happened and there was no doubt that she believed me without question. I thanked her, for bandage and belief, and she smiled.

Six hours later, twenty minutes before our eleven p.m. deadline for taking off in the Firecrest, she was no longer smiling. She was looking at me the way women usually look at you when they have their minds set on something and can see that they are not going to get their own way: a rather less than affectionate look.

‘I’m sorry, Charlotte,’ I said. ‘I’m genuinely sorry, but it’s not on. You are not coming with us, and that’s that.’ She was dressed in dark slacks and sweater, like one who had – or had had – every intention of coming with us on a midnight jaunt. ‘We’re not going picnicking on the Thames. Remember what you said yourself this morning. There will be shooting. Do you think I want to see you killed?’

‘I’ll stay below,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll stay out of harm’s way. Please, Philip, let me come.’

‘No.’

‘You said you’d do anything in the world for me. Remember?’

‘That’s unfair, and you know it. Anything to help you, I meant. Not anything to get you killed. Not you, of all people.’

‘Of all people? You think so much of me?’

I nodded.

‘I mean so much to you?’

I nodded again. She looked at me for a long time, her eyes wide and questioning, her lips moving as if about to speak and yet not speaking, then took a step forward, latched her arms around my neck and tried to break it. At least, that was the way it felt, the dead Quinn’s handiwork was still with me, but it wasn’t that at all, she was clinging to me as she might cling to a person who she knew she would never see again. Maybe she was fey, maybe she had second sight, maybe she could see old Calvert floating, face down, in the murky waters of the Dubh Sgeir boathouse. When I thought about it I could see it myself, and it wasn’t an attractive sight at all. I was beginning to have some difficulty with my breathing when she suddenly let me go, half-led, half-pushed me from the room and closed the door behind me. I heard the key turn in the lock.

‘Our friends are at home,’ Tim Hutchinson said. We’d circled far to the south of Dubh Sgeir, close in to the southern shore of Loch Houron and were now drifting quickly on the flood tide, engines stopped, in an east by northerly direction past the little man-made harbour of Dubh Sgeir. ‘You were right, Calvert. They’re getting all ready for their moonlit flitting.’

‘Calvert is usually right,’ Uncle Arthur said in his best trainedhim-myself voice. ‘And now, my boy?’

The mist had thinned now, giving maybe a hundred yards’ visibility. I looked at the T-shaped crack of light showing where the boathouse doors didn’t quite meet each other in the middle and where the tops of the doors sagged away from the main structure.

‘Now it is,’ I said. I turned to Hutchinson. ‘We’ve all of a fifteen foot beam. That entrance is not more than twenty wide. There’s not a beacon or a mark on it. There’s a four knot tide running. You really think it can be done – taking her through that entrance at four or five knots, fast enough to smash open those doors, without piling ourselves up on the rocks on the way in?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’ He pressed the starter button and the warm diesel caught fire at once, its underpass exhaust barely audible. He swung her round to the south on minimum revs, continued on this course for two cables, westwards for the same distance, curved round to the north, pushed the throttle wide open and lit a cigar. Tim Hutchinson preparing for action. In the flare of the match the dark face was quiet and thoughtful, no more.

For just over a minute there was nothing to be seen, just the darkness and patches of grey mist swirling past our bows. Hutchinson was heading a few degrees west of north, making allowance for the set of the tide. All at once we could see it, slightly off the starboard bow as it had to be to correct for the tide, that big T-shaped light in the darkness, fairly jumping at us. I picked up the sub-machineguns, opened and latched back the port wheelhouse door and stood there, gun in left hand, door-jamb in right, with one foot on the outside deck and the other still in the wheel-house. Uncle Arthur, I knew, was similarly positioned on the starboard side. We were as firmly braced as it was possible to be. When the Firecrest stopped, it would stop very suddenly indeed.

Forty yards away, Hutchinson eased the throttle and gave the wheel a touch to port. That bright ‘I was even farther round on our starboard side now, but directly in line with us and the patch of dark water to the west of the almost phosphorescently foaming whiteness that marked the point where the flood tide ripped past the outer end of the eastern breakwater. Twenty yards away he pushed the throttle open again, we were heading straight for where the unseen west breakwater must be, we were far too far over to port, it was impossible now that we could avoid smashing bow first into it, then suddenly Hutchinson had the wheel spinning to starboard, the tide pushing him the same way, and we were through and not an inch of Uncle Arthur’s precious paint-work had been removed. Hutchinson had the engine in neutral. I wondered briefly whether, if I practised for the rest of my life, I could effect a manoeuvre like that: I knew damned well that I couldn’t.

I’d told Hutchinson that the bollards were on the starboard side of the boathouse, so that the diving-boat would be tied up on that side. He angled the boat across the tiny harbour towards the righthand crack of light, spun the wheel to port till we were angling in towards the central crack of light and put the engine full astern. It was no part of the plan to telescope the Firecrest’s bows against the wall of the boathouse and send it – and us – to the bottom.

As an entrance it erred, if anything, on the spectacular side. The doors, instead of bursting open at their central hasps, broke off at the hinges and we carried the whole lot before us with a thunderous crash. This took a good knot off our speed. The aluminium foremast, with Uncle Arthur’s fancy telescopic aerial inside, almost tore the tabernacle clear of the deck before it sheared off, just above wheelhouse level, with a most unpleasant metallic shrieking. That took another knot off. The screw, biting deep in maximum revs astern, took off yet another knot, but we still had a fair way on when, amid a crackling, splintering of wood, partly of our planking but mainly of the doors, and the screeching of the rubber tyres on our well-fendered bows, we stopped short with a jarring shock, firmly wedged between the port quarter of the diving-boat and the port wall of the boathouse. Uncle Arthur’s feelings must have been almost as bruised and lacerated as the planking of his beloved Firecrest. Hutchinson moved the throttle to slow ahead to keep us wedged in position and switched on the five-inch searchlight, less to illuminate the already sufficiently welllit shed than to dazzle bystanders ashore. I stepped out on the deck with the machine-pistol in my hands.

We were confronted, as the travel books put it, with a scene of bustling activity, or, more precisely, what had been a scene of bustling activity before our entrance had apparently paralysed them all in whatever positions they had been at the time. On the extreme right three faces stared at us over the edge of the hold of the diving-boat, a typical forty-five-foot M.F.V. about the same size as the Charmaine. Two men on deck were frozen in the act of lifting a box across to the hold. Another two were standing upright, one with his hands stretched above his head, waiting for another box swinging gently from a rope suspended from a loading boom. That box was the only moving thing in the boathouse. The winchman himself, who bore an uncommon resemblance to Thomas, the bogus customs officer, one lever against his chest and another held in his outstretched right hand, looked as if the lavas of Vesuvius had washed over him twenty centuries ago and left him frozen for ever. The others, backs bent, were standing on the wall at the head of the boathouse, holding a rope attached to a very large box which two frogmen were helping to lift clear of the water. When it came to hiding specie, they had one-track minds. On the extreme left stood Captain Imrie, presumably there to supervise operations, and, beside him, his patrons, Lavorski and Dollmann. This was the big day, this was the culmination of all their dreams, and they weren’t going to miss a moment of it.

Imrie, Lavorski and Dollmann were the ones for me. I moved forward until I could see the barrel of the machine-gun and until they could also see that it was pointing at them.

‘Come close,’ I said. ‘Yes, you three. Captain Imrie, speak to your men. Tell them that if they move, if they try anything at all, I’ll kill all three of you. I’ve killed four of you already. If I double the number, what then? Under the new laws you get only fifteen years. For murderous vermin, that is not enough. I’d rather you died here. Do you believe me. Captain Imrie?’

‘I believe you.’ The guttural voice was deep and sombre. ‘You killed Quinn this afternoon.’

‘He deserved to die.’

‘He should have killed you that night on the Nantesville,’ Imrie said. ‘Then none of this would have happened.’

‘You will come aboard our boat one at a time,’ I said. ‘In this situation, Captain Imrie, you are without question the most dangerous man. After you, Lavorski, then –’

‘Please keep very still. Terribly still.’ The voice behind me was totally lacking in inflection, but the gun pressed hard against my spine carried its own message, one not easily misunderstood. ‘Good. Take a pace forward and take your right hand away from the gun.’

I took a pace forward and removed my right hand. This left me holding the machine-pistol by the barrel.

‘Lay the gun on the deck.’

It obviously wasn’t going to be much use to me as a club, so I laid it on the deck. I’d been caught like this before, once or twice, and just to show that I was a true professional I raised my hands high and turned slowly round.

‘Why, Charlotte Skouras!’ I said. Again I knew what to do, how to act, the correct tone for the circumvented agent, bantering but bitter. ‘Fancy meeting you here. Thank you very much my dear.’ She was still dressed in the dark sweater and slacks, only they weren’t quite as spruce as the last time I’d seen them. They were soaking wet. Her face was dead white and without expression. The brown eyes were very still. ‘And how in God’s name did you get here?’

‘I escaped through the bedroom window and swam out. I hid in the after cabin.’

‘Did you indeed? Why don’t you change out of those wet clothes?’ She ignored me. She said to Hutchinson: ‘Turn off that searchlight.’

‘Do as the lady says,’ I advised.

He did as the lady said. The light went out and we were all now in full view of the men ashore. Imrie said: ‘Throw that gun over the side, Admiral.’

‘Do as the gentleman says,’ I advised.

Uncle Arthur threw the gun over the side. Captain Imrie and Lavorski came walking confidently towards us. They could afford to walk confidently, the three men in the hold, the two men who had suddenly appeared from behind the diving-boat’s wheelhouse and the winch-driver – a nice round total of six – had suddenly sprouted guns. I looked over this show of armed strength and said slowly: ‘You were waiting for us.’

‘Certainly we were waiting for you,’ Lavorski said jovially. ‘Our dear Charlotte announced the exact time of your arrival. Haven’t you guessed that yet, Calvert?’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Charlotte, you fool. By heavens, I believe we have been grievously guilty of over-estimating you.’

‘Mrs Skouras was a plant,’ I said.

‘A bait,’ Lavorski said cheerfully. I wasn’t fooled by his cheerfulness, he’d have gone into hysterics of laughter when I came apart on the rack. ‘Swallowed hook, line, and sinker. A bait with a highly effective if tiny transmitter and a gun in a polythene bag. We found the transmitter in your starboard engine.’ He laughed again until he seemed in danger of going into convulsions. ‘We’ve known of every move you’ve made since you left Torbay. And how do you like that, Mr Secret Agent Calvert?’

‘I don’t like it at all. What are you going to do with us?’

‘Don’t be childish. What are you going to do with us, asks he naïvely. I’m afraid you know all too well. How did you locate this place?’

‘I don’t talk to executioners.’

‘I think we’ll shoot the admiral through the foot, to begin with,’ Lavorski beamed. ‘A minute afterwards through the arm, then the thigh –’

‘All right. We had a radio-transmitter aboard the Nantesville.’

‘We know that. How did you pin-point Dubh Sgeir?’

‘The boat belonging to the Oxford geological expedition. It is moored fore and aft in a little natural harbour south of here. It’s well clear of any rock yet it’s badly holed. It’s impossible that it would be holed naturally where it lay. It was holed unnaturally shall we say. Any other boat you could have seen coming from a long way off, but that boat had only to move out to be in full sight of the boathouse – and the anchored diving-boat. It was very clumsy.’

Lavorski looked at Imrie, who nodded. ‘He would notice that. I advised against it at the time. Was there more, Calvert?’

‘Donald MacEachern on Eilean Oran. You should have taken him, not his wife. Susan Kirkside – you shouldn’t have allowed her out and about, when did you last see a fit young twenty-one-year-old with blue shadows that size under her eyes? A fit young twenty-one-year-old with nothing in the world to worry about, that is? And you should have disguised that mark made by the tail fuselage of the Beechcraft belonging to Lord Kirkside’s elder son when you ran it over the edge of the north cliff. I saw it from the helicopter.’

‘That’s all?’ Lavorski asked. I nodded, and he looked again at Imrie.

‘I believe him,’ Imrie said. ‘No one talked. That’s all we need to know. Calvert first, Mr Lavorski?’ They were certainly a brisk and business-like outfit.

I said quickly: ‘Two questions. The courtesy of two answers. I’m a professional. I’d like to know. I don’t know if you understand.’

‘And two minutes,’ Lavorski smiled. ‘Make it quick. We have business on hand.’

‘Where is Sir Anthony Skouras? He should be here.’

‘He is. He’s up in the castle with Lord Kirkside and Lord Charnley. The Shangri-la’s tied up at the west landing stage.’

‘Is it true that you and Dollmann engineered the whole plan, that you bribed Charnley to betray insurance secrets, that you – or Dollmann, rather – selected Captain Imrie to pick his crew of cutthroats, and that you were responsible for the capture and sinking of the ships and the subsequent salvaging of the cargoes. And, incidentally, the deaths, directly or indirectly, of our men?’

‘It’s late in the day to deny the obvious.’ Again Lavorski’s booming laugh. ‘We think we did rather well, eh, John?’

‘Very well indeed,’ Dollmann said coldly. ‘We’re wasting time.’

I turned to Charlotte Skouras. The gun was still pointing at me. I said: ‘I have to be killed, it seems. As you will be responsible for my death, you might as well finish the job.’ I reached down, caught the hand with the gun in it and placed it against my chest, letting my own hand fall away. ‘Please do it quickly’

There was no sound to be heard other than the soft throb of the Firecrest’s diesel. Every pair of eyes in that boatshed was on us, my back was to them all, but I knew it beyond any question. I wanted every pair of eyes in that boatshed on us. Uncle Arthur took a step inside the starboard door and said urgently: ‘Are you mad, Calvert? She’ll kill you! She’s one of them.’

The brown eyes were stricken, there was no other expression for it, the eyes of one who knows her world is coming to an end. The finger came off the trigger, the hand opened slowly and the gun fell to the deck with a clatter that seemed to echo through the boatshed and the tunnels leading off on either side. I took her left arm and said: ‘It seems Mrs Skouras doesn’t feel quite up to it. I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else to –’

Charlotte Skouras cried out in sharp pain as her legs caught the wheelhouse sill and maybe I did shove her through that doorway with, unnecessary force, but it was too late in the day to take chances now. Hutchinson had been waiting and caught her as she fell, dropping to his knees at the same time. I went through that door after her like an international rugby three-quarter diving for the line with a dozen hands reaching out for him, but even so Uncle Arthur beat me to it. Uncle Arthur had a lively sense of self-preservation. Even as I fell, my hand reached out for the loudhailer that had been placed in position on the wheelhouse deck.

‘Don’t fire!’ The amplified voice boomed cavernously against the rock-faces and the wooden walls of the boatshed. ‘If you shoot, you’ll die! One shot, and you may all die. There’s a machine-gun lined up on the back of every man in this boathouse. Just turn round, very very slowly, and see for yourselves.’

I half rose to my feet, hoisted a wary eye over the lower edge of a wheelhouse window, got the rest of the way to my feet, went outside and picked up the machine-gun on the deck.

Picking up that machine-gun was the most superfluous and unnecessary action I had performed for many a long day. If there was one thing that boathouse was suffering from at the moment it was a plethora of machine-guns. There were twelve of them in all, shoulder-slung machine-pistols, in twelve of the most remarkably steady pairs of hands I’d ever seen. The twelve men were ranged in a rough semicircle round the inner end of the boathouse, big, quiet, purposeful-looking men dressed in woollen caps, grey-and-black camouflaged smocks and trousers and rubber boots. Their hands and faces were the colour of coal. Their eyes gleamed whitely, like performers in the Black and White Minstrel show, but with that every hint of light entertainment ended.

‘Lower your hands to your sides and let your guns fall.’ The order came from a figure in the middle of the group, a man indistinguishable from the others. ‘Do please be very careful. Slowly down, drop the guns, utter stillness. My men are very highly trained commandos. They have been trained to shoot on suspicion. They know only how to kill. They have not been trained to wound or cripple.’

They believed him. I believed him. They dropped their guns and stood very still indeed.

‘Now clasp your hands behind your necks.’

They did. All but one. Lavorski. He wasn’t smiling any more and his language had little to recommend it.

That they were highly trained I could believe. No word or signal passed. The commando nearest Lavorski walked towards him on soundless soles, machine-pistol across his chest. The butt seemed to move no more than three inches. When Lavorski picked himself up the lower part of his face was covered in blood and I could see the hole where some teeth had been. He clasped his hands behind his neck.

‘Mr Calvert?’ the officer asked.

‘Me,’ I said.

‘Captain Rawley, sir. Royal Marine Commandos.’

‘The castle. Captain?’

‘In our hands.’

‘The Shangri-la?’

‘In our hands.’

‘The prisoners?’

‘Two men are on their way up, sir.’

I said to Imrie: ‘How many guards?’

He spat and said nothing. The commando who had dealt with Lavorski moved forward, machine-pistol high. Imrie said: ‘Two.’

I said to Rawley: ‘Two men enough?’

‘I hope, sir, that the guards will not be so foolish as to offer resistance.’

Even as he finished speaking the flat rapid-fire chatter of a submachine-gun came echoing down the long flight of stone steps. Rawley shrugged.

They’ll never learn to be wise now. Robinson?’ This to a man with a waterproof bag over his shoulder. ‘Go up and open the cellar door. Sergeant Evans, line them up in two rows against the wall there, one standing, one sitting.’

Sergeant Evans did. Now that there was no danger of being caught in cross-fire we landed and I introduced Uncle Arthur, full military honours and all, to Captain Rawley. Captain Rawley’s salute was something to see. Uncle Arthur beamed. Uncle Arthur took over.

‘Capitally done, my boy!’ he said to Rawley. ‘Capitally. There’ll be a little something for you in this New Year’s List. Ah! Here come some friends.’

They weren’t all exactly friends, this group that appeared at the bottom of the steps. There were four tough but dispirited looking characters whom I’d never seen before, but unquestionably Imrie’s men, closely followed by Sir Anthony Skouras and Lord Charnley. They, in their turn, were closely followed by four commandos with the very steady hands that were a hallmark of Rawley’s men. Behind them came Lord Kirkside and his daughter. It was impossible to tell what the black-faced commandos were thinking, but the other eight had the same expression on their faces, dazed and utter bewilderment.

‘My dear Kirkside! My dear fellow!’ Uncle Arthur hurried forward and shook him by the hand, I’d quite forgotten that they knew one another. ‘Delighted to see you safe and sound, my dear chap. Absolutely delighted. It’s all over now.’

‘What in God’s name is happening?’ Lord Kirkside asked.

‘You – you’ve got them? You have them all? Where is my boy? Where is Rollinson? What –?’

An explosive crack, curiously muffled, came down the flight of steps. Uncle Arthur looked at Rawley, who nodded. ‘Plastic explosive, sir.’

‘Excellent, excellent,’ Uncle Arthur beamed. ‘You’ll see them any minute, Kirkside.’ He crossed over to where old Skouras was lined up against the wall, hands clasped behind his neck, reached up both his own, pulled Skouras’s arms down and shook his right hand as if he were attempting to tear it off.

‘You’re lined up with the wrong team, Tony, my boy.’ This was one of the great moments of Uncle Arthur’s life. He led him across to where Lord Kirkside was standing. ‘It’s been a frightful nightmare, my boy, a frightful nightmare. But it’s all over now’

‘Why did you do it?’ Skouras said dully. ‘Why did you do it? God, oh God, you don’t know what you’ve done.’

‘Mrs Skouras? The real Mrs Skouras?’ There is the ham actor in all of us, but more than most in Uncle Arthur. He pushed back his sleeve and studied his watch carefully. ‘She arrived in London by air from Nice just over three hours ago. She is in the London Clinic.’

‘What in God’s name do you mean? You don’t know what you are saying. My wife –’

‘Your wife is in London. Charlotte here is Charlotte Meiner and always was.’ I looked at Charlotte. A total incomprehension and the tentative beginnings of a dazed hope. ‘Earlier this year, blazing the trail for many kidnappings that were to follow, your friends Lavorski and Dollmann had your wife seized and hidden away to force you to act with them, to put your resources at their disposal. I think they felt aggrieved, Tony, that you should be a millionaire while they were executives: they had it all worked out, even to having the effrontery of intending to invest the proceeds in your empire. However. Your wife managed to escape, so they seized her cousin and best friend, Charlotte – a friend upon whom, shall we say, your wife was emotionally very dependent – and threatened to kill her unless they got Mrs Skouras back again. Mrs Skouras surrendered immediately. This gave them the bright idea of having two swords of Damocles hanging over your head, so, being men of honour, they decided to keep Charlotte as well as your imprisoned wife. Then, they knew, you would do exactly as they wanted, when and as they wanted. To have a good excuse to keep both you and Charlotte under their surveillance at the same time and to reinforce the idea that your wife was well and truly dead, they gave out that you had been secretly married.’ Uncle Arthur was a kind man: no mention of the fact that it was common knowledge that, at the time of her alleged death, brain injuries sustained by Mrs Skouras in a car crash two years previously had become steadily worse and it was known that she would never leave hospital again.

‘How on earth did you guess that?’ Lord Kirkside asked.

‘No guess. Must give my lieutenants their due,’ Uncle Arthur said in his best magnanimous taught-’em-all-I-know voice. ‘Hunslett radioed me at midnight on Tuesday. He gave me a list of names of people about whom Calvert wanted immediate and exhaustive inquiries made. That call was tapped by the Shangri-la but they didn’t know what Hunslett was talking about because in our radio transmissions all proper names are invariably coded. Calvert told me later that when he’d seen Sir Anthony on Tuesday night he thought Sir Anthony was putting on a bit of an act. He said it wasn’t all act. He said Sir Anthony was completely broken and desolated by the thought of his dead wife. He said he believed the original Mrs Skouras was still alive, that it was totally inconceivable that a man who so patently cherished the memory of his wife should have married again two or three months later, that he could only have pretended to marry again for the sake of the one person whom he ever and so obviously loved.

‘I radioed France. Riviera police dug up the grave in Beaulieu where she had been buried near the nursing home where she’d died. They found a coffin full of logs. You knew this, Tony.’

Old Skouras nodded. He was a man in a dream.

‘It took them half an hour to find out who had signed the death certificate and most of the rest of the day to find the doctor himself. They charged him with murder. This can be done in France on the basis of a missing body. The doctor wasted no time at all in taking them to his own private nursing home, where Mrs Skouras was in a locked room. The doctor, matron and a few others are in custody now. Why in God’s name didn’t you come to us before?’

‘They had Charlotte and they said they would kill my wife out of hand. What – what would you have done?’

‘God knows,’ Uncle Arthur said frankly. ‘She’s in fair health, Tony. Calvert got radio confirmation at five a.m.’ Uncle Arthur jerked a thumb upwards. ‘On Lavorski’s big transceiver in the castle.’

Both Skouras and Lord Kirkside had their mouths open. Lavorski, blood still flowing from his mouth, and Dollmann looked as if they had been sandbagged. Charlotte’s eyes were the widest wide I’d ever seen. She was looking at me in a very peculiar way.

‘It’s true,’ Susan Kirkside said. ‘I was with him. He told me to tell nobody.’ She crossed to take my arm and smiled up at me. ‘I’m sorry again for what I said last night. I think you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever known. Except Roily, of course.’ She turned round at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and promptly forgot all about the second most wonderful man she’d ever known.

‘Roily!’ she cried. ‘Roily!’ I could see Roily bracing himself.

They were all there, I counted them, Kirkside’s son, the Hon. Rollinson, the policeman’s sons, the missing members of the small boats and, behind them all, a small brown-faced old woman in a long dark dress with a black shawl over her head. I went forward and took her arm.

‘Mrs MacEachern,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you home soon. Your husband is waiting.’

‘Thank you, young man,’ she said calmly. ‘That will be very nice.’ She lifted her arm and held mine in a proprietorial fashion.

Charlotte Skouras came and held my other arm, not in quite so proprietorial a fashion, but there for everyone to see. I didn’t mind. She said: ‘You were on to me? You were on to me all the time?’

‘He was,’ Uncle Arthur said thoughtfully. ‘He just said he knew. You never quite got round to explaining that bit, Calvert.’

‘It wasn’t difficult, sir – if you know all the facts, that is,’ I added hastily. ‘Sir Anthony put me on to you. That visit he paid me on the Firecrest to allay any suspicion we might have had about our smashed radio set only served, I’m afraid, to make me suspicious. You wouldn’t have normally come to me, you’d have gone ashore immediately to the police or to a phone, sir. Then, in order to get me talking about the cut telephone wires, you wondered if the radio-wrecker, to complete our isolation from the mainland, had smashed the two public call boxes. From a man of your intelligence, such a suggestion was fatuous, there must be scores of houses in Torbay with their private phone. But you thought it might sound suspicious if you suggested cut lines, so you didn’t. Then Sergeant MacDonald gave me a glowing report about you, said you were the most respected man in Torbay and your public reputation contrasted so sharply with your private behaviour in the Shangri-la on Tuesday night – well, I just couldn’t buy it.

‘That nineteenth-century late Victorian melodrama act that you and Charlotte put on in the saloon that night had me fooled for all of five seconds. It was inconceivable that any man so devoted to his wife could be vicious towards another obviously nice woman –’

‘Thank you kindly, sir,’ Charlotte murmured.

‘It was inconceivable that he send her for his wife’s photograph, unless he had been ordered to do so. And you had been ordered to do so, by Lavorski and Dollmann. And it was inconceivable that she would have gone – the Charlotte Meiner I knew would have clobbered you over the head with a marline spike. Ergo, if you weren’t what you appeared to be, neither were you, Charlotte.

‘The villains, they thought, were laying a foundation for an excellent reason for your flight from the wicked baron to the Firecrest, where you could become their eyes and ears and keep them informed of all our plans and moves, because they’d no idea how long their secret little transmitter in the engine-room would remain undetected. After they knew we’d found Hunslett – they’d removed the transmitter by that time – it was inevitable that they would try to get you aboard the Firecrest. So they laid a little more groundwork by giving you a bruised eye – the dye is nearly off already – and some wicked weals across your back and dumped you into the water with your little polythene kitbag with the micro-transmitter and gun inside it. Do this, they said, or Mrs Skouras will get it.’

She nodded. ‘They said that.’

‘I have twenty-twenty eyesight. Sir Arthur hasn’t – his eyes were badly damaged in the war. I had a close look at those weals on your back. Genuine weals. Also genuine pinpricks where the hypodermic with the anesthetic had been inserted before the lashes were inflicted. To that degree, at least, someone was humane.’

‘I could stand most things,’ Skouras said heavily. ‘I couldn’t stand the thought of – the thought of –’

‘I guessed you had insisted on the anesthetic, sir. No, I knew. The same way that I knew that you had insisted that the crews of all those small yachts be kept alive or the hell with the consequences. Charlotte, I ran a finger-nail down one of those weals. You should have jumped through the saloon roof. You never batted an eyelid. After submersion in salt water. After that, I knew.

‘I have devious reasons for the things I do. You told us that you had come to warn us of our deadly danger – as if we didn’t know. I told you we were leaving Torbay within the hour, so off you trotted to your little cabin and told them we were going to leave within the hour. So Quinn, Jacques and Kramer came paddling across well in advance of the time you’d told us they would be coming, trusting we would have been lulled into a sense of false security. You must love Mrs Skouras very much, Charlotte. A clear-cut choice, she or us, and you made your choice. But I was waiting for them, so Jacques and Kramer died. I told you we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, so off you trotted down to your little cabin and told them we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, which wouldn’t have worried them at all. Later on I told you we were going to Dubh Sgeir. So off you trotted down to your little cabin again, but before you could tell them anything you passed out on your cabin deck, possibly as a result of a little night-cap I’d put in your coffee. I couldn’t have you telling your friends here that I was going to Dubh Sgeir, could I now? They would have had a reception committee all nicely organised.’

‘You – you were in my cabin? You said I was on the floor?’

‘Don Juan has nothing on me. I flit in and out of ladies’ bedrooms like anything. Ask Susan Kirkside. You were on the floor. I put you to bed. I looked at your arms, incidentally, and the rope marks were gone. They’d used rubber bands, twisted pretty tightly, just before Hunslett and I had arrived?’

She nodded. She looked dazed.

‘I also, of course, found the transmitter and gun. Then, back in Craigmore, you came and pumped me for some more information. And you did try to warn me, you were about torn in half by that time. I gave you that information. It wasn’t the whole truth, I regret, but it was what I wanted you to tell Lavorski and company, which,’ I said approvingly, ‘like a good little girl you did. Off you trotted to your little whitewashed bedroom –’

‘Philip Calvert,’ she said slowly, ‘you are the nastiest, sneakingest, most low-down double-crossing ’

‘There are some of Lavorski’s men aboard the Shangri-la,’ old Skouras interrupted excitedly. He had rejoined the human race. ‘They’ll get away –’

They’ll get life,’ I said. ‘They’re in irons, or whatever Captain Rawley’s men here are in the habit of using.’

‘But how did you – how did you know where the Shangri-la was? In the darkness, in the mist, it’s impossible –’

‘How’s the Shangri-la’s tender working?’ I asked.

‘The what? The Shangri-la’s – what the devil –?’ He calmed down. ‘It’s not working. Engines out of order.’

‘Demerara sugar has that effect upon them,’ I explained. ‘Any sugar has, in fact, when dumped in the petrol tanks, but demerara was all I could lay hands on that Wednesday night after Sir Arthur and I had left you but before we took the Firecrest in to the pier. I went aboard the tender with a couple of pounds of the stuff. I’m afraid you’ll find the valves are ruined. I also took with me a homing signal transmitter, a transistorised battery-powered job, which I attached to the inner after bulkhead of the anchor locker, a place that’s not looked at once a year. So, when you hauled the incapacitated tender aboard the Shangri-la – well, we knew where the Shangri-la was.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t follow, Calvert.’

‘Look at Messrs. Dollmann, Lavorski and Imrie. They follow all right. I know the exact frequency that transmitter sends on – after all, it was my transmitter. One of Mr Hutchinson’s skippers was given this frequency and tuned in to it. Like all M.F.V.s it has a loop aerial for direction finding, he just had to keep turning the loop till the signal was at full strength. He couldn’t miss. He didn’t miss.’

‘Mr Hutchinson’s skippers?’ Skouras said carefully. ‘M.F.V.s you said?’

It was as well, I reflected, that I wasn’t overly troubled with selfconsciousness, what with Mrs MacEachern on one hand, Charlotte on the other, and every eye, a large proportion of them hostile to a degree, bent upon me, it could have been embarrassing to a degree. ‘Mr Hutchinson has two shark-fishing boats. Before I came to Dubh Sgeir last night I radioed from one of his boats asking for help – the gentlemen you see here. They said they couldn’t send boats or helicopters in this weather, in almost zero visibility. I told them the last thing I wanted was their damned noisy helicopters, secrecy was everything, and not to worry about the sea transport, I knew some men for whom the phrase “zero visibility” was only a joke. Mr Hutchinson’s skippers. They went to the mainland and brought Captain Rawley and his men back here. I didn’t think they’d arrive until late at night, that’s why Sir Arthur and I were afraid to move before midnight. What time did you get here, Captain Rawley?’

‘Nine-thirty.’

‘So early? I must admit it was a bit awkward without a radio. Then ashore in your little rubber boats, through the side door, waited until the diving-boat came back – and waited and waited.’

‘We were getting pretty stiff, sir.’

Lord Kirkside cleared his throat. Maybe he was thinking of my nocturnal assignation with his daughter.

‘Tell me this, Mr Calvert. If you radioed from Mr Hutchinson’s boat in Craigmore, why did you have to radio again from here later that night?’

‘If I didn’t, you’d be down among the dead men by this time. I spent the best part of fifteen minutes giving highly detailed descriptions, of Dubh Sgeir externally and of the castle and boat-house layout internally. Everything that Captain Rawley and his men have done had to be done in total darkness. You’ll keep an eye on our friends, Captain Rawley? A fishery cruiser will be off Dubh Sgeir shortly after dawn.’

The Marines herded them off into the left-hand cave, set three powerful lights shining into the prisoners’ faces and mounted a fourman guard with machine-pistols at the ready. Our friends would undoubtedly keep until the fishery cruiser came in the morning.

Charlotte said slowly: ‘That was why Sir Arthur remained behind this afternoon when you and Mr Hutchinson went to the Nantesville? To see that I didn’t talk to the guards and find out the truth?’

‘Why else?’

She took her arm away and looked at me without affection. ‘So you put me through the hoop,’ she said quietly. ‘You let me suffer like this for thirty hours while you knew all the time.’

‘Fair’s fair. You were doing me down, I was doing you down.’

‘I’m very grateful to you,’ she said bitterly.

‘If you aren’t you damn’ well ought to be,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly. This was one for the books, Uncle Arthur talking to the aristocracy, even if only the aristocracy by marriage, in this waspish tone. ‘If Calvert won’t speak for himself, I will.

‘Point one: if you hadn’t kept on sending your little radio messages, Lavorski would have thought that there was something damned fishy going on and might well have left the last ton or two of gold in the Nantesville and taken off before we got here. People like Lavorski have a highly attuned sixth sense of danger. Point two: they wouldn’t have confessed to their crimes unless they thought we were finished. Point three: Calvert wanted to engineer a situation where all attention was on the Firecrest so that Captain Rawley and his men could move into position and so eliminate all fear of unnecessary bloodshed – maybe your blood, my dear Charlotte. Point four, and more important: if you hadn’t been in constant radio contact with them, advising them of our impending arrival right up to the moment we came through those doors – we’d even left the saloon door open so that you could clearly overhear us and know all we were doing – there would have been a pitched battle, guns firing as soon as those doors were breached, and who knows how many lives would have been lost. But they knew they were in control, they knew the trap was set, they knew you were aboard with that gun to spring the trap. Point five, and most important of all: Captain Rawley here was hidden almost a hundred yards away along the cross tunnel and the detachment up above were concealed in a store-room in the castle. How do you think they knew when to move in and move in simultaneously? Because, like all commandos, they had portable radio sets and were listening in to every word of your running commentary. Don’t forget your transmitter was stolen from the Firecrest. It was Calvert’s transmitter, my dear. He knew the transmitting frequency to the mainland last night. That was after he had – um – given you a little something to drink and checked your transmitter before using the one up in the castle last night.’

Charlotte said to me: ‘I think you are the most devious and detestable and untrustworthy man I’ve ever met.’ Her eyes were shining, whether from tears or whatever I didn’t know. I felt acutely embarrassed and uncomfortable. She put her hand on my arm and said in a low-voice: ‘You fool, oh, you fool! That gun might have gone off. I – I might have killed you, Philip!’

I patted her hand and said: ‘You don’t even begin to believe that yourself.’ In the circumstances, I thought it better not to say if that gun had gone off I’d never have trusted a three-cornered file again.

The grey mist was slowly clearing away and the dawn coming up on the quiet dark sea when Tim Hutchinson eased the Firecrest in towards Eilean Oran.

There were only four of us on the boat, Hutchinson, myself, Mrs MacEachern and Charlotte. I’d told Charlotte to find a bed in Dubh Sgeir castle for the night, but she’d simply ignored me, helped Mrs MacEachern on to the Firecrest and had made no move to go ashore again. Very self-willed, she was, and I could see that this was going to cause a lot of trouble in the years to come.

Uncle Arthur wasn’t with us, a team of wild horses couldn’t have dragged Uncle Arthur aboard the Firecrest that night. Uncle Arthur was having his foretaste of Paradise, sitting in front of a log fire in the Dubh Sgeir castle drawing-room, knocking back old Kirkside’s superlative whisky and retailing his exploits to a breathless and spellbound aristocracy. If I were lucky, maybe he’d mention my name a couple of times in the course of his recounting of the epic. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t.

Mrs MacEachern wasn’t having her foretaste of Paradise, she was there already, a calm dark old lady with a wrinkled brown face who smiled and smiled and smiled all the way to her home on Eilean Oran. I hoped to God old Donald MacEachern had remembered to change his shirt.

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Where Eagles Dare

An Imprint of Sterling Publishing

387 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10016

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1967

© 1967 by Devoran Trustees Ltd

The author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9250-2 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4027-9251-9 (ebook)

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To Geoff and Gina

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

ONE

The vibrating clangour from the four great piston engines set teeth on edge and made an intolerable assault on cringing ear-drums. The decibel-level, Smith calculated, must have been about that found in a boiler factory, and one, moreover, that was working on overtime rates, while the shaking cold in that cramped, instrument-crowded flight-deck was positively Siberian. On balance, he reflected, he would have gone for the Siberian boiler factory any time because, whatever its drawbacks, it wasn’t liable to fall out of the sky or crash into a mountainside which, in his present circumstances, seemed a likely enough, if not imminent contingency for all that the pilot of their Lancaster bomber appeared to care to the contrary. Smith looked away from the darkly opaque world beyond the windscreens where the wipers fought a useless battle with the driving snow and looked again at the man in the left-hand captain’s seat.

Wing Commander Cecil Carpenter was as completely at home in his environment as the most contented oyster in his shell in Whitstable Bay. Any comparison with a Siberian boiler factory he would have regarded as the ravings of an unhinged mind. Quite clearly, he found the shuddering vibration as soothing as the ministrations of the gentlest of masseurs, the roar of the engines positively soporific and the ambient temperature just right for a man of his leisured literary tastes. Before him, at a comfortable reading distance, a book rested on a hinged contraption which he had swung out from the cabin’s side. From what little Smith could occasionally see of the lurid cover, depicting a blood-stained knife plunged into the back of a girl who didn’t seem to have any clothes on, the Wing Commander held the more serious contemporary novelists in a fine contempt. He turned a page.

‘Magnificent,’ he said admiringly. He puffed deeply on an ancient briar that smelt like a fumigating plant. ‘By heavens, this feller can write. Banned, of course, young Tremayne’ – this to the fresh-faced youngster in the co-pilot’s seat – ‘so I can’t let you have it till you grow up.’ He broke off, fanned the smoke-laden air to improve the visibility, and peered accusingly at his co-pilot. ‘Flying Officer Tremayne, you have that look of pained apprehension on your face again.’

‘Yes, sir. That’s to say, no, sir.’

‘Part of the malaise of our time,’ Carpenter said sorrowfully. ‘The young lack so many things, like appreciation of a fine pipe tobacco or faith in their commanding officers.’ He sighed heavily, carefully marked the place in his book, folded the rest away and straightened in his seat. ‘You’d think a man would be entitled to some peace and quiet on his own flight-deck.’

He slid open his side-screen. An icy gust of snow-laden wind blew into the flight-deck, carrying with it the suddenly deepened roar from the engines. Carpenter grimaced and thrust his head outside, shielding his eyes with a gauntleted right hand. Five seconds later he shook his head dispiritedly, screwed his eyes shut as he winced in what appeared to be considerable pain, withdrew his head, closed the screen, brushed the snow away from his flaming red hair and magnificent handlebar moustache, and twisted round to look at Smith.

‘It is no small thing, Major, to be lost in a blizzard in the night skies over war-torn Europe.’

‘Not again, sir,’ Tremayne said protestingly.

‘No man is infallible, my son.’

Smith smiled politely. ‘You mean you don’t know where we are, sir?’

‘How should I?’ Carpenter slid down in his seat, half-closed his eyes and yawned vastly. ‘I’m only the driver. We have a navigator and the navigator has a radar set and I’ve no faith in either of them.’

‘Well, well,’ Smith shook his head. ‘To think that they lied to me at the Air Ministry. They told me you’d flown some three hundred missions and knew the continent better than any taxi driver knows his London.’

‘A foul canard put about by unfriendly elements who are trying to prevent me from getting a nice safe job behind a desk in London.’ Carpenter glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll give you exactly thirty minutes’ warning before we shove you out over the dropping zone.’ A second glance at his watch and a heavy frown. ‘Flying Officer Tremayne, your gross dereliction of duty is endangering the entire mission.’

‘Sir?’ An even deeper apprehension in Tremayne’s face.

‘I should have had my coffee exactly three minutes ago.’

‘Yes, sir. Right away, sir.’

Smith smiled again, straightened from his cramped position behind the pilots’ seats, left the flight-deck and moved aft into the Lancaster’s fuselage. Here in this cold, bleak and forbidding compartment, which resembled nothing so much as an iron tomb, the impression of the Siberian boiler factory was redoubled. The noise level was so high as to be almost intolerable, the cold was intense and metal-ribbed metal walls, dripping with condensation, made no concessions whatsoever to creature comfort. Nor did the six metal-framed canvas seats bolted to the floor, functionalism gone mad. Any attempt to introduce those sadistically designed instruments of torture in HM penitentiaries would have caused a national outcry.

Huddled in those six chairs sat six men, probably, Smith reflected, the six most miserable men he’d ever seen. Like himself, each of the six was dressed in the uniform of the German Alpine Corps. Like himself, each man wore two parachutes. All were shivering constantly, stamping their feet and beating their arms, and their frozen breath hung heavy in the ice-chill air. Facing them, along the upper starboard side of the fuselage, ran a taut metal wire which passed over the top of the doorway. On to this wire were clipped snap-catches, wires from which led down to folded parachutes resting on top of an assortment of variously shaped bundles, the contents of only one of which could be identified by the protruding ends of several pairs of skis.

The nearest parachutist, a dark intense man with Latin features, looked up at Smith’s arrival. He had never, Smith thought, seen Edward Carraciola look quite so unhappy.

‘Well?’ Carraciola’s voice was just as unhappy as his face. ‘I’ll bet he’s no more bloody idea where we are than I have.’

‘He does seem to navigate his way across Europe by opening his window and sniffing the air from time to time,’ Smith admitted. ‘But I wouldn’t worry –’

He broke off as a sergeant air-gunner entered from the rear, carrying a can of steaming coffee and enamel mugs.

‘Neither would I, sir.’ The sergeant smiled tolerantly. ‘The Wing Commander has his little ways. Coffee, gentlemen? Back at base he claims that he reads detective novels all the time and depends upon one of the gunners telling him from time to time where we are.’

Smith cradled frozen hands round the coffee mug. ‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Of course, sir.’ He seemed genuinely surprised, then nodded to the metal rungs leading to the upper machine-gun turret. ‘Just nip up there, sir, and look down to your right.’

Smith lifted an enquiring eyebrow, handed over his mug, climbed the ladder and peered down to his right through the Perspex dome of the turret cupola. For a few seconds only the darkness filled his eyes then gradually, far below and seen dimly through the driving snow, he could make out a ghostly luminescence in the night, a luminescence which gradually resolved itself into a criss-cross pattern of illuminated streets. For a brief moment only Smith’s face registered total disbelief then quickly returned to its normal dark stillness.

‘Well, well.’ He retrieved his coffee. ‘Somebody should tell them down there. The lights are supposed to be out all over Europe.’

‘Not in Switzerland, sir,’ the sergeant explained patiently. ‘That’s Basle.’

‘Basle?’ Smith stared at him. ‘Basle! Good God, he’s gone seventy or eighty miles off course. The flight plan routed us north of Strasbourg.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant air-gunner was unabashed. ‘The Wing Commander says he doesn’t understand flight plans.’ He grinned, half apologetically. ‘To tell the truth, sir, this is our milk-run into the Vorarlberg. We fly east along the Swiss frontier, then south of Schaffhausen –’

‘But that’s over Swiss territory!’

‘Is it? On a clear night you can see the lights of Zurich. They say Wing Commander Carpenter has a room permanently reserved for him there in the Baur-au-Lac.’

‘What?’

‘He says if it’s a choice between a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and internment in Switzerland he knows which side of the frontier he’s coming down on … After that we fly down the Swiss side of Lake Constance, turn east at Lindau, climb to eight thousand to clear the mountains and it’s only a hop, skip and jump to the Weissspitze.’

‘I see,’ Smith said weakly. ‘But – but don’t the Swiss object?’

‘Frequently, sir. Their complaints always seem to coincide with the nights we’re around those parts. Wing Commander Carpenter claims it’s some ill-intentioned Luftwaffe pilot trying to discredit him.’

‘What else?’ Smith asked, but the sergeant was already on his way to the flight-deck. The Lancaster lurched as it hit an infrequent air pocket, Smith grabbed a rail to steady himself and Lieutenant Morris Schaffer, of the American Office of Strategic Services and Smith’s second-in-command, cursed fluently as the better part of a cup of scalding coffee emptied itself over his thigh.

‘That’s all I need,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ve no morale left. I wish to God we would crash-land in Switzerland. Think of all those lovely Wiener-schnitzels and Apfelstrudels. After a couple of years living among you Limeys, Spam and powdered eggs and an ounce of margarine a day, that’s what Mama Schaffer’s little boy requires. Building up.’

‘You’d also live a damn’ sight longer, friend,’ Carraciola observed morosely. He transferred his gaze to Smith, gave him a long considering look. ‘The whole set-up stinks, Major.’

‘I don’t think I understand,’ Smith said quietly. ‘Suicidal, is what I mean. What a bunch. Just look at us.’ He gestured to the three men sitting nearest to him on his left: Olaf Christiansen, a flaxen-haired first cousin of Leif Ericsson, Lee Thomas, a short dark Welshman – both those men seemed slightly amused – and Torrance-Smythe, as languidly aristocratic-looking as any ci-devant French count that ever rode a tumbrel, a doleful ex-Oxford don who clearly wished he were back among the University cloisters. ‘Christiansen, Thomas, old Smithy and myself. We’re just a bunch of civil servants, filing clerks –’

‘I know very well what you are,’ Smith said quietly.

‘Or yourself.’ In the de-synchronized thunder of the engines the soft-voiced interruption had gone unnoticed. ‘A major in the Black Watch. No doubt you cut quite a dash playing the bagpipes at El Alamein, but why the hell you to command us? No offence. But this is no more in your line than it is ours. Or Lieutenant Schaffer here. An airborne cowboy –’

‘I hate horses,’ Schaffer said loudly. ‘That’s why I had to leave Montana.’

‘Or take George here.’ Carraciola jerked a thumb in the direction of the last member of the party, George Harrod, a stocky army sergeant radio-operator with an expression of profound resignation on his face. ‘I’ll bet he’s never as much as made a parachute jump in his life before.’

‘I have news for you,’ Harrod said stoically. ‘I’ve never even been in a plane before.’

‘He’s never even been in a plane before,’ Carraciola said despairingly. ‘My God, what a bunch of no-hopers! All we need is a team composed of specialist Alpinists, Commandos, mountaineers and safe-breakers and what do we have?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘We have us.’

Smith said gently: ‘We were all the Colonel could get. Be fair. He told us yesterday that the one thing in the world that he didn’t have was time.’

Carraciola made no reply, none of the others spoke, but Smith didn’t have to be any clairvoyant to know what was in the minds of all of them. They were thinking what he was thinking, like himself they were back several hours in time and several hundred miles in space in that Admiralty Operations Room in London where Vice-Admiral Rolland, ostensibly Assistant Director of Naval Operations but in fact the long-serving head of MI6, the counter-espionage branch of the British Secret Service, and his deputy, Colonel Wyatt-Turner, had gravely and reluctantly briefed them on what they had as gravely and reluctantly admitted to be a mission born from the sheerest desperation.

‘Deucedly sorry and all that, chaps, but time is of the essence.’ Wyatt-Turner, a big, red-faced, heavily moustached colonel, tapped his cane against a wall-map of Germany, pointing to a spot just north of the Austrian border and a little west of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. ‘Our man was brought down here at 2 a.m. this morning but SHAEF, in their all-knowing wisdom, didn’t let us know until 10 a.m. Damned idiots! Damned idiots for not letting us know until so late and double-damned idiots for ignoring our advice in the first place. Gad, will they never learn to listen to us?’ He shook his head in anger, tapped the map again. ‘Anyway, he’s here. Schloss Adler. The castle of the eagle. Believe me, it’s well named, only an eagle could get there. Our job –’

Smith said: ‘How are you so sure he’s there, sir?’

‘We’re sure. Mosquito he was in crash-landed only ten miles away. The pilot got off a radio message just before a German patrol closed in.’ He paused, smiled grimly, continued: ‘Schloss Adler, Major Smith, is the combined HQ of the German Secret Service and the Gestapo in South Germany. Where else would they take him?’

‘Where indeed? How was he brought down, sir?’

‘Through the most damnable ill-luck. We carried out a saturation raid on Nürnberg last night and there shouldn’t have been a German fighter within a hundred miles of the Austrian border. But a wandering Messerschmitt patrol got him. That’s unimportant. What’s important is getting him out before he talks.’

‘He’ll talk,’ Thomas said sombrely. ‘They all do. Why did they disregard our advice, sir? We told them two days ago.’

‘The whys don’t matter,’ Wyatt-Turner said tiredly. ‘Not any more. The fact that he’ll talk does. So we get him out. You get him out.’

Torrance-Smythe cleared his throat delicately. ‘There are paratroops, sir.’

‘Scared, Smithy?’

‘Naturally, sir.’

‘The Schloss Adler is inaccessible and impregnable. It would require a battalion of paratroops to take it.’

‘Of course,’ Christiansen said, ‘the fact that there’s no time to mount a massed paratroop attack has no bearing on the matter.’ Christiansen appeared positively cheerful, the proposed operation obviously appealed vastly to him.

Wyatt-Turner gave him the benefit of his icy blue stare then decided to ignore him.

‘Secrecy and stealth are the only hope,’ he went on. ‘And you gentlemen are – I trust – secretive and stealthy. You are experts at that and experts at survival behind enemy lines where all of you have spent considerable periods of time, Major Smith, Lieutenant Schaffer and Sergeant Harrod here in their professional capacities, the rest of you in – um – other duties. With the –’

‘That was a damned long time ago, sir,’ Carraciola interrupted. ‘At least for Smithy, Thomas, Christiansen and myself. We’re out of touch now. We don’t know the latest developments in weapons and combat techniques. And God only knows we’re out of training. After a couple of years behind a desk it takes me all my time to run fifty yards after a bus.’

‘You’ll have to get fit fast, won’t you?’ Wyatt-Turner said coldly. ‘Besides, what matters most is, that with the exception of Major Smith, you all have an extensive knowledge of Western Europe. You all speak fluent German. You’ll find your combat training – on the level you’ll be engaged in – as relevant today as it was five years ago. You are men with exceptional records of resourcefulness, ability and ingenuity. If anyone has a chance, you have. You’re all volunteers, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Carraciola echoed, his face carefully deadpan. Then he looked speculatively at Wyatt-Turner. ‘There is, of course, another way, sir.’ He paused, then went on very quietly indeed. ‘A way with a hundred per cent guarantee of success.’

‘Neither Admiral Rolland nor I claim to be infallible,’ Wyatt-Turnersaidslowly.‘Wehavemissedan alternative? You have the answer to our problems?’

‘Yes. Whistle up a Pathfinder squadron of Lancasters with 10-ton blockbuster bombs. Do you think anyone in the Schloss Adler would ever talk again?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Admiral Rolland spoke gently and for the first time, moving from the wall-map to join the group. Admiral Rolland always spoke gently. When you wielded the almost incredible range of power that he did, you didn’t have to talk loudly to make yourself heard. He was a short, grey-haired man, with a deeply trenched face and an air of immense authority. ‘No,’ he repeated, ‘I don’t think so. Nor do I think that your grasp of the realities of the situation is any match for your total ruthlessness. The captured man, Lieutenant General Carnaby, is an American. If we were to destroy him General Eisenhower would probably launch his Second Front against us instead of against the Germans.’ He smiled deprecatingly, as though to remove rebuke from his voice. ‘There are certain – um – niceties to be observed in our relationship with our Allies. Wouldn’t you agree?’

Carraciola didn’t agree or disagree. He had, apparently, nothing to say. Neither did anyone else. Colonel Wyatt-Turner cleared his throat.

‘That’s it then, gentlemen. Ten o’clock tonight at the airfield. No more questions, I take it?’

‘Yes, sir, there bloody well is, begging the Colonel’s pardon, sir.’ Sergeant George Harrod not only sounded heated, he looked it, too. ‘What’s all this about? Why’s this geezer so bloody important? Why the hell do we have to risk our necks –’

‘That’ll do, Sergeant.’ Wyatt-Turner’s voice was sharp, authoritative. ‘You know all you require to know –’

‘If we’re sending a man to what may be his death, Colonel, I think he has the right to know why,’ Admiral Rolland interrupted gently, almost apologetically. ‘The rest know. He should too. It’s painfully simple, Sergeant. General Carnaby is the overall co-ordinator of planning for the exercise known as Operation Overlord – the Second Front. It would be absolutely true to say that he knows more about the Allied preparations for the Second Front than any man alive.

‘He set off last night to meet his opposite numbers in the Middle East, Russia and the Italian Front to co-ordinate final plans for the invasion of Europe. The rendezvous was in Crete – the only meeting point the Russians would accept. They haven’t a plane fast enough to out-run the German fighters. The British Mosquito can – but it didn’t last night.’

Silence lay heavy in the austere operations room. Harrod rubbed his hand across his eyes, then shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. When he spoke again all the truculence, all the anger had vanished from his voice. His words came very slowly.

‘And if the General talks –’

‘He’ll talk,’ Rolland said. The voice was soft, but it carried total conviction. ‘As Mr Thomas has just said, they all talk. He won’t be able to help himself. A mixture of mescalin and scopolamine.’

‘And he’ll tell them all the plans for the Second Front.’ The words came as from a man in a dream. ‘When, where, how – Good God, sir, we’ll have to call the whole thing off!’

‘Precisely. We call it off. No Second Front this year. Another nine months on the war, another million lives needlessly lost. You understand the urgency, Sergeant, the sheer desperate urgency of it all?’

‘I understand, sir. Now I understand.’ Harrod turned to Wyatt-Turner. ‘Sorry I spoke like that, sir. I’m afraid – well, I’m a bit edgy, sir.’

‘We’re all a bit edgy, Sergeant. Well, the airfield at ten o’clock and we’ll check the equipment.’ He smiled without humour. ‘I’m afraid the uniforms may not fit too well. This is early closing day in Savile Row.’

Sergeant Harrod huddled more closely into his bucket seat, beat freezing hands against freezing shoulders, morosely surveyed his uniform, wrinkled like an elephant’s legs and about three sizes too big for him, then raised his voice above the clamour of the Lancaster’s engines.

‘Well,’ he said bitterly, ‘he was right about the bloody uniforms, anyway.’

‘And wrong about everything else,’ Carraciola said heavily. ‘I still say we should have sent in the Lancasters.’

Smith, still standing against the starboard fuselage, lit a cigarette and eyed him speculatively. He opened his mouth to speak when it occurred to him that he had seen men in more receptive mood. He looked away without saying anything.

In the flight-deck, now slid so impossibly far forward in his seat that the back of his head rested on the back of his seat, Wing Commander Carpenter was still deeply and contentedly pre-occupied with pipe, coffee and literature. Beside him, Flying Officer Tremayne was obviously failing to share his mood of pleasurable relaxation. He was, in fact, keeping a most anxious watch, his eyes constantly shifting from the instrument panel to the opaque darkness beyond the windscreen to the recumbent figure of his superior officer who appeared to be in danger of dropping off to sleep at any moment. Suddenly Tremayne sat far forward in his seat, stared for long seconds through the windscreen ahead of him then turned excitedly to Carpenter.

‘There’s Schaffhausen down there, sir!’

Carpenter groaned heavily, closed his book, swung back the hinged book-rest, finished his coffee, levered himself upright with another groan, slid open his side-screen and made an elaborate pretence of examining the loom of light far below, without, however, actually going to the lengths of exposing his face to the wind and the driving snow outside. He closed the screen and looked at Tremayne.

‘By heavens,’ he said admiringly, ‘I believe you’re right. It’s a great comfort to have you along, my boy, a great comfort.’ He switched on the intercom while Tremayne looked suitably abashed. ‘Major Smith? Yes. Thirty minutes to go.’ He switched off and turned again to Tremayne. ‘Right. South-east down the old Bodensee. And for God’s sake keep to the Swiss side.’

Smith hung up the headphones and looked quizzically at the six seated men.

‘That’s it, then. Half an hour. Let’s hope it’s warmer down there than it is up here.’

No one had any comment to make on that. No one seemed to have any hope either. Soundlessly, wordlessly, they looked without expression at one another, then pulled themselves stiffly to their frozen feet. Then very slowly, very awkwardly, their numbed hands and cramped conditions making things almost impossibly awkward for them, they prepared themselves for the drop. They helped each other strap loads on their backs, beneath the high-mounted parachutes, then struggled into their white waterproof snow trousers. Sergeant Harrod went one better. He pulled a voluminous snow-smock over his head, zipped it up with difficulty and drew the hood over his head. He turned round questioningly as a hand tapped the hummocked outline below his white smock.

‘I hardly like to say this,’ Schaffer said diffidently, ‘but I really don’t reckon your radio is going to stand the shock of landing, Sergeant.’

‘Why not?’ Harrod looked more lugubrious than ever. ‘It’s been done before.’

‘Not by you, it hasn’t. By my reckoning you’re going to hit the ground with a terminal velocity of a hundred and eighty miles an hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think you’re going to experience some difficulty in opening your chute.’

Harrod looked at him, looked at his other five smockless companions, then nodded slowly and touched his own smock.

‘You mean I put this on after we reach the ground?’

‘Well,’ Schaffer said consideringly, ‘I really think it would help.’ He grinned at Harrod, who grinned back almost cheerfully. Even Carraciola’s lips twitched in the beginnings of a smile. The release of tension within that frozen fuselage was almost palpable.

‘Well, well, time I earned my wing-commander’s pay while you stripling pilots sit and gaze in rapt admiration.’ Carpenter studied his watch. ‘Two fifteen. Time we changed places.’

Both men unhooked their safety belts and awkwardly changed over. Carpenter fastidiously adjusted the right-hand seat’s back rest until it was exactly right for him, manoeuvred his parachute to its position of maximum comfort, fastened his seatbelt, unhooked and adjusted on his head a combined earphones and microphone set and made a switch.

‘Sergeant Johnson?’ Carpenter never bothered with the regulation call-up formalities. ‘Are you awake?’

Back in the navigator’s tiny and extremely uncomfortable recess, Sergeant Johnson was very much awake. He had been awake for hours. He was bent over a glowing greenish radar screen, his eyes leaving it only to make rapid reference to the charts, an Ordnance map, a picture and a duplicate compass, altimeter and air-speed indicator. He reached for the switch by his side.

‘I’m awake, sir.’

‘If you fly us into the side of the Weissspitze,’ Carpenter said threateningly, ‘I’ll have you reduced to aircraftman. Aircraftman second class, Johnson.’

‘I wouldn’t like that. I make it nine minutes, sir.’

‘For once we’re agreed on something. So do I.’ Carpenter switched off, slid open the starboard screen and peered out. Although there was just the faintest wash of moonlight in the night sky, visibility might as well have been zero. It was a greyly opaque world, a blind world, with nothing to be seen but the thinly driving snow. He withdrew his head, brushed away the snow from his huge moustache, closed the screen, looked regretfully at his pipe and carefully put it away in his pocket.

For Tremayne, the stowage of the pipe was the final proof that the Wing Commander was clearing the decks for action. He said unhappily: ‘A bit dicey, isn’t it, sir? Locating the Weissspitze in this lot, I mean?’

‘Dicey?’ Carpenter sounded almost jovial. ‘Dicey? I don’t see why? It’s as big as a mountain. In fact, it is a mountain. We can’t miss it, my dear boy.’

‘That’s what I mean.’ He paused, a pause with more meaning in it. ‘And this plateau on the Weissspitze that we have to drop them on. Only three hundred yards wide, sir. Mountain above it, cliff below it. And those adiabatic mountain winds, or whatever you call them, blowing in any old unpredictable direction. A fraction to the south and we’ll hit the mountain, a fraction to the north and they’ll fall down that whacking great cliff and like as not all break their necks. Three hundred yards!’

‘What do you want?’ Carpenter demanded expansively. ‘Heathrow Airport? Three hundred yards? All the room in the world, my boy. We land this old crate on runways a tenth of that width.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ve always found runway landing lights a great help, sir. At seven thousand feet up the side of the Weissspitze –’

He broke off as a buzzer rang. Carpenter made a switch.

‘Johnson?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Johnson was huddled more closely than ever over his radar screen where the revolving scanner-line had picked up a white spot immediately to the right of centre of the screen. ‘I have it, sir. Right where it should be.’ He looked away from the screen and made a quick check on the compass. ‘Course oh-nine-three, sir.’

‘Good lad.’ Carpenter smiled at Tremayne, made a tiny course alteration and began to whistle softly to himself. ‘Have a look out your window, laddie. My moustache is beginning to get all waterlogged.’

Tremayne opened his window, strained his head as far as possible, but still there was only this grey and featureless opacity. He withdrew his head, silently shook it.

‘No matter. It must be there somewhere,’ Carpenter said reasonably. He spoke into the intercom. ‘Sergeant? Five minutes. Hook up.’

‘Hook up!’ The sergeant air-gunner repeated the order to the seven men standing in line along the starboard side of the fuselage. ‘Five minutes.’

Silently they clipped their parachute snap-catches on to the overhead wire, the sergeant air-gunner carefully checking each catch. Nearest the door and first man to jump was Sergeant Harrod. Behind him stood Lieutenant Schaffer whose experiences with the OSS had made him by far the most experienced parachutist of the group and whose unenviable task it was to keep an eye on Harrod. He was followed by Carraciola, then Smith – as leader he preferred to be in the middle of the group – then Christiansen, Thomas and Torrance-Smythe. Behind Torrance-Smythe two young aircraftmen stood ready to slide packaged equipment and parachutes along the wire and heave them out as swiftly as possible after the last man had jumped. The sergeant air-gunner took up position by the door. The tension was back in the air again.

Twenty-five feet forward of where they were standing, Carpenter slid open his side-screen for the fifth time in as many minutes. The now downward drooping moustache had lost much of its splendid panache but the Wing Commander had obviously decided that there were more urgent considerations in life than waterlogged moustaches. He was wearing goggles now, continuously brushing away snow and moisture with a chamois leather, but the view ahead – or lack of view – remained obstinately the same, still that greyly driving snow looming out of and vanishing into that greyly impenetrable opacity, still nothingness. He closed the screen.

A call-up buzzer rang. Carpenter made a switch, listened, nodded.

‘Three minutes,’ he said to Tremayne. ‘Oh-nine-two.’

Tremayne made the necessary minute course adjustment. He no longer looked through the side-screen, he no longer even looked at the screen ahead of him. His whole being was concentrated upon flying that big bomber, his all-exclusive attention, his total concentration, on three things only: the compass, the altimeter, and Carpenter. A degree too far to the south and the Lancaster would crash into the side of the Weissspitze: a couple of hundred feet too low and the same thing would happen: a missed signal from Carpenter and the mission was over before it had begun. The young, the absurdly young face was expressionless, the body immobile as he piloted the Lancaster with a hair-trigger precision that he had never before achieved. Only his eyes moved, in a regular, rhythmic, unvarying pattern: the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter, the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter: and never longer than a second on each.

Again Carpenter slid open his side-screen and peered out. Again he had the same reward, the opacity, the grey nothingness. With his head still outside he lifted his left hand, palm downwards, and made a forward motion. Instantly Tremayne’s hand fell on the throttle levers and eased them forward. The roar of the big engines died away to a more muted thunder.

Carpenter withdrew his head. If he was concerned, no trace of it showed in his face. He resumed his soft whistling, calmly, almost leisurely, scanned the instrument panel, then turned his head to Tremayne. He said conversationally:

‘When you were in flying school, ever hear tell of a strange phenomenon known as stalling speed?’

Tremayne started, glanced hurriedly at the instrument panel and quickly gave a fraction more power to the engines. Carpenter smiled, looked at his watch and pressed a buzzer twice.

The bell rang above the head of the sergeant air-gunner standing by the fuselage door. He looked at the tense, expectant faces before him and nodded.

‘Two minutes, gentlemen.’

He eased the door a few inches to test whether it was moving freely. With the door only fractionally open the suddenly deepened roar from the engines was startling but nowhere nearly as dismaying as the snow-laden gust of icy wind that whistled into the fuselage. The parachutists exchanged carefully expressionless glances, glances correctly interpreted by the sergeant who closed the door and nodded again.

‘I agree, gentlemen. No night for man nor beast.’

Wing Commander Carpenter, his head once again poked through the side-screen, didn’t think so either. Five seconds’ exposure to that arctic wind and driving snow and your face was full of porcupine quills: fifteen seconds and the totally numbed skin conveyed no sensation at all, it was when you withdrew your head and waited for the exquisite pain of returning circulation that the fun really started: but this time Carpenter was determined not to withdraw his head until he had complete justification for doing so: and the only justification would be the sighting of the Weissspitze. Mechanically, industriously, he rubbed the chamois leather across his goggles, stared unblinkingly into the greyly swirling gloom and hoped that he saw the Weisspitze before the Weissspitze saw him.

Inside, Tremayne’s eyes continued on their rhythmic, unvarying pattern of movement: the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter, the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter. But now his gaze was resting fractionally longer on Carpenter each time, waiting for the sudden signal that would galvanize him into throwing the big Lancaster into a violent bank to port, the only avoiding action they could possibly take. Carpenter’s left hand was moving, but he wasn’t giving any signal, the fingers of his left hand were drumming gently on his knee. This, Tremayne suddenly and incredulously realized, was probably the highest state of excitement that Carpenter was capable of achieving.

Ten seconds passed. Five. And another five. Tremayne was conscious that, even in that ice-cold cabin, the sweat was pouring down his face. The urge to pull the bomber away to the left, to avoid the shattering, annihilating collision that could be only seconds away now, was almost overpowering. He was aware of a fear, a fear bordering on a reason-abdicating panic, such as he had never previously guessed at, let alone experienced. And then he became aware of something else. The drumming of Carpenter’s left fingers had abruptly ceased.

Carpenter had it now. It was more imagined than real, more guessed at than seen, but he had it now. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, ahead and a little to the right of the direction of flight, he became aware of something more solidly tangible than wishful thinking beginning to materialize out of the nothingness. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t materializing any more, it was solidly, unmistakably there, the smooth, unbroken side of an almost vertically towering mountain soaring up at a dizzy 80° until it vanished in the grey darkness above. Carpenter withdrew his head, leaving the screen open this time, and pressed his head-switch.

‘Sergeant Johnson?’ The words came out stiffly, mechanically, not because of any crisis of emotion that the Wing Commander was passing through but because his entire face, lips included, was so frozen that he could no longer articulate properly.

‘Sir?’ Johnson’s voice over the intercom was disembodied, empty, but even the metallic impersonality of that single word could not disguise the bowtaut tension behind it.

Carpenter said: ‘I think Flying Officer Johnson a much nicer name.’

‘Sir?’

‘Relax. I have it. You can go back to sleep.’ He switched off, took a quick look through the side-screen, reached up and touched an overhead switch.

Above the starboard door in the fuselage, a red light came on. The sergeant air-gunner laid his hand on the door.

‘One minute, gentlemen.’ He jerked the door wide open, securing it on its standing latch, and a miniature blizzard howled into the belly of the Lancaster. ‘When the red light turns green –’

He left the sentence unfinished, partly because those few words were crystal clear in themselves, partly because he had to shout so loudly to make himself heard over the combined roar of wind and engines that any superfluity of words was only that much wasted effort.

No one else said anything, mainly because of the near impossibility of making oneself heard. In any event, the parachutists’ silently exchanged glances conveyed more eloquently than words the very obvious thought that was in the minds of all of them: if it was like that inside, what the hell was it like outside? At a gesture from the sergeant, they moved up in line to the open door, Sergeant Harrod in the lead. On his face was the expression of a Christian martyr meeting his first and last lion.

The Lancaster, like some great black pterodactyl from out of the primeval past, roared on through the driving snow alongside the smoothly precipitous side of the Weissspitze. That sheer wall of ice-encrusted rock seemed very close indeed. Tremayne was convinced that it was impossibly close. He stared through the still open screen by Carpenter’s head and would have sworn that the starboard wing-tip must be brushing the side of the mountain. Tremayne could still feel the sweat that bathed his face but his lips were as dry as ashes. He licked them, surreptitiously, so that Carpenter would not see him, but it didn’t do any good at all: as dry as ashes they remained.

Sergeant Harrod’s lips weren’t dry, but that was only because his face was taking the full brunt of the horizontally driving snowstorm that lashed along the bomber’s fuselage. Otherwise, he shared Tremayne’s sentiments and apprehensions to a very marked degree. He stood in the doorway, gripping the fuselage on each side to hold him in position against the gale of wind, his storm-lashed face showing no fear, just a peculiarly resigned expression. His eyes were turned to the left, looking forward with an almost hypnotized fixity at that point in space where it seemed that at any second now the star-board wing-tip must strike against the Weissspitze.

Inside the fuselage, the red lamp still burned. The sergeant air-gunner’s hand fell on Harrod’s shoulder in an encouraging gesture. It took Harrod all of three seconds to free himself from his thrall-like fixation with that starboard wing-tip and take a half step back inside. He reached up and firmly removed the sergeant’s hand.

‘Don’t shove, mate.’ He had to shout to make himself heard. ‘If I’m to commit suicide, let me do it in the old-fashioned way. By my own hand.’ He again took up position by the open door.

At the same instant Carpenter took a last quick look through the side-screen and made the gesture that Tremayne had been waiting for, been praying for, a slight turning motion of the left hand. Quickly Tremayne banked the big bomber, as quickly straightened up again.

Slowly, the mountain-side fell away. The mountain-brushing episode had been no mere bravado or folly, Carpenter had been deliberately lining up for his pre-determined course across the narrow plateau. Once again, and for the last time, he had his head outside, while his left hand slowly – interminably slowly, it seemed to Tremayne – reached up for the button on the bulkhead above the screen, located it, paused, then pressed it.

Sergeant Harrod, head craned back at a neck-straining angle, saw the red light turn to green, brought his head down, screwed shut his eyes and, with a convulsive jerk of his arms, launched himself out into the snow and the darkness, not a very expert launching, for instead of jumping out he had stepped out and was already twisting in mid-air as the parachute opened. Schaffer was the next to go, smoothly, cleanly, feet and knees together, then Carraciola followed by Smith.

Smith glanced down below him and his lips tightened. Just dimly visible in the greyness beneath, Harrod, a very erratic human pendulum, was swinging wildly across the sky. The parachute cords were already badly twisted and his clumsily desperate attempts to untwist them resulted only in their becoming more entangled than ever. His left-hand cords were pulled too far down, air was spilling from the parachute, and, still swaying madly, he was side-slipping to his left faster than any man Smith had ever seen side-slip a parachute before. Smith stared after the rapidly disappearing figure and hoped to God that he didn’t side-slip his way right over the edge of the precipice.

Grim-faced, he stared upwards to see how the others had fared. Thank God, there was no worry there. Christiansen, Thomas and Smithy all there, so close as to be almost touching, all making perfectly normal descents.

Even before the last of the parachutists, Torrance-Smythe, had cleared the doorway, the sergeant air-gunner was running towards the after end of the fuselage. Swiftly he flung aside a packing-case, dragging a tarpaulin away, reached down and pulled a huddled figure upright. A girl, quite small, with wide dark eyes and delicate features. One would have looked for the figure below to be as petite as the features, but it was enveloped in bulky clothes over which had been drawn a snow-suit. Over the snow-suit she wore a parachute. She was almost numb with cold and cramp but the sergeant had his orders.

‘Come on, Miss Ellison.’ His arm round her waist, he moved quickly towards the doorway. ‘Not a second to lose.’

He half led, half carried her there, where an aircraftman was just heaving the second last parachute and container through the doorway. The sergeant snapped the parachute catch on to the wire. Mary Ellison half-turned as if to speak to him, then turned away abruptly and dropped out into the darkness. The last parachute and container followed at once.

For a long moment the sergeant stared down into the darkness. Then he rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand, shook his head in disbelief, stepped back and pulled the heavy door to. The Lancaster, its four engines still on reduced power, droned on into the snow and the night. Almost immediately, it was lost to sight and, bare seconds later, the last faint throb of its engines died away in the darkness.

TWO

Smith reached his hands far up into the parachute shrouds, hauled himself sharply upwards and made a perfect knees-bent, feet-together landing in about two feet of snow. The wind tugged fiercely at his parachute. He struck the quick release harness clasp, collapsed the parachute, pulled it in, rolled it up and pressed it deeply into the snow, using for weight the pack he had just shrugged off his shoulders.

Down there at ground level – if seven thousand feet up on the Weissspitze could be called ground level – the snowfall was comparatively slight compared to that blizzard they’d experienced jumping from the Lancaster but, even so, visibility was almost as bad as it had been up above, for there was a twenty-knot wind blowing and the dry powdery snow was drifting quite heavily. Smith made a swift 360° sweep of his horizon but there was nothing to be seen, nobody to be seen.

With fumbling frozen hands he clumsily extracted a torch and whistle from his tunic. Facing alternately east and west, he bleeped on the whistle and flashed his torch. The first to appear was Thomas, then Schaffer, then, within two minutes altogether, all of the others with the exception of Sergeant Harrod.

‘Pile your chutes there and weight them,’ Smith ordered. ‘Yes, bed them deep. Anyone seen Sergeant Harrod?’ A shaking of heads. ‘Nobody? No sight of him at all?’

‘Last I saw of him,’ Schaffer said, ‘he was going across my bows like a destroyer in a heavy sea.’

‘I saw a bit of that,’ Smith nodded. ‘The shrouds were twisted?’

‘Put a corkscrew to shame. But I’d have said there was no danger of the chute collapsing. Not enough time. We were almost on the ground before I lost sight of him.’

‘Any idea where he landed, then?’

‘Roughly. He’ll be all right, Major. A twisted ankle, a bump on the head. Not to worry.’

‘Use your torches,’ Smith said abruptly. ‘Spread out. Find him.’

With two men on one side of him, three on the other, all within interlocking distance of their torch beams, Smith searched through the snow, his flashlight raking the ground ahead of him. If he shared Schaffer’s optimism about Harrod, his face didn’t show it. It was set and grim. Three minutes passed and then came a shout from the right. Smith broke into a run.

Carraciola it was who had called and was now standing at the farther edge of a wind-swept outcrop of bare rock, his torch shining downwards and slightly ahead. Beyond the rock the ground fell away abruptly to a depth of several feet and in this lee a deep drift had formed. Half-buried in its white depths, Sergeant Harrod lay spread-eagled on his back, his feet almost touching the rock, his face upturned to the falling snow, his eyes open. He did not seem to notice the snow falling on his eyes.

They were all there now, staring down at the motionless man. Smith jumped down into the drift, dropped to his knees, slid an arm under Harrod’s shoulders and began to lift him to a sitting position. Harrod’s head lolled back like that of a broken rag doll. Smith lowered him back into the snow and felt for the pulse in the throat. Still kneeling, Smith straightened, paused for a moment with bent head then climbed wearily to his feet.

‘Dead?’ Carraciola asked.

‘He’s dead. His neck is broken.’ Smith’s face was without expression. ‘He must have got caught up in the shrouds and made a bad landing.’

‘It happens,’ Schaffer said. ‘I’ve known it happen.’ A long pause, then: ‘Shall I take the radio, sir?’

Smith nodded. Schaffer dropped to his knees and began to fumble for the buckle of the strap securing the radio to Harrod’s back.

Smith said: ‘Sorry, no, not that way. There’s a key around his neck, under his tunic. It fits the lock under the flap of the breast buckle.’

Schaffer located the key, unlocked the buckle after some difficulty, eased the straps off the dead man’s shoulders and finally managed to work the radio clear. He rose to his feet, the radio dangling from his hand, and looked at Smith.

‘Second thoughts, what’s the point. Any fall hard enough to break his neck wouldn’t have done the innards of this radio any good.’

Wordlessly, Smith took the radio, set it on the rock, extended the antenna, set the switch to ‘Transmit’, and cranked the call-up handle. The red telltale glowed, showing the transmission circuit to be in order. Smith turned the switch to receive, turned up the volume, moved the tuning knob, listened briefly to some static-laden music, closed up the radio set and handed it back to Schaffer.

‘It made a better landing than Sergeant Harrod,’ Smith said briefly. ‘Come on.’

‘We bury him, Major?’ Carraciola asked.

‘No need.’ Smith shook his head and gestured with his torch at the drifting snow. ‘He’ll be buried within the hour. Let’s find the supplies.’

‘Now, for God’s sake don’t lose your grip!’ Thomas said urgently.

‘That’s the trouble with you Celts,’ Schaffer said reprovingly. ‘No faith in anyone. There is no cause for alarm. Your life is in the safe hands of Schaffer and Christiansen. Not to worry.’

‘What else do you think I’m worrying about?’

‘If we all start sliding,’ Schaffer said encouragingly, ‘we won’t let you go until the last possible minute.’

Thomas gave a last baleful glance over his shoulder and then began to edge himself out over the black lip of the precipice. Schaffer and Christiansen had an ankle apiece, and they in turn were anchored by the others. As far as the beam of Thomas’s torch could reach, the cliff stretching down into the darkness was absolutely vertical, black naked rock with the only fissures in sight blocked with ice and with otherwise never a handor foot-hold.

‘I’ve seen all I want to,’ he said over his shoulder. They pulled him back and he edged his way carefully up to their supply pile before getting to his feet. He prodded the pack with the skis protruding from one end.

‘Very handy,’ he said morosely. ‘Oh, very handy for this lot indeed.’

‘As steep as that?’ Smith asked.

‘Vertical. Smooth as glass and you can’t see the bottom. How deep do you reckon it is, Major?’

‘Who knows?’ Smith shrugged. ‘We’re seven thousand feet up. Maps never give details at this altitude. Break out that nylon.’

The proper supply pack was located and the nylon produced, one thousand feet of it coiled inside a canvas bag as it had come from the makers. It had very little more diameter than a clothes-line but its wire core made it immensely strong and every yard of it had been fully tested to its rated breaking strain – its actual breaking strain was much higher – before leaving the factory. Smith tied a hammer to one end, and with two of the men holding him securely, paid it out over the edge, counting his arm spans as he let it go. Several times the hammer snagged on some unseen obstruction but each time Smith managed to swing it free. Finally the rope went completely slack and, despite all Smith’s efforts, it remained that way.

‘Well.’ Smith moved back from the edge. ‘That seems to be about it.’

‘And if it isn’t, hey?’ Christiansen asked. ‘If it’s caught on a teensy-weensy ledge a thousand feet above damn all?’

‘I’ll let you know,’ Smith said shortly.

‘You measured it off,’ Carraciola said. ‘How deep?’

‘Two hundred feet.’

‘Eight hundred feet left, eh?’ Thomas grinned. ‘We’ll need it all to tie up the garrison of the Schloss Adler.’

No one was amused. Smith said: ‘I’ll need a piton and two walkie-talkies.’

Fifteen feet back from the edge of the cliff they cleared away the snow and hammered an angled piton securely into the bare rock. Smith made a double bowline at one end of the nylon, slipped his legs through the loops, unclasped his belt then fastened it tightly round both himself and the rope and slipped a walkie-talkie over his shoulder. The rope was then passed round the piton and three men, backs to the cliff, wrapped it round their hands and prepared to take the weight. Schaffer stood by with the other walkie-talkie.

Smith checked that there were no sharp or abrasive edges on the cliff-top, wriggled cautiously over and gave the signal to be lowered. The descent itself was simple. As Thomas had said, it was a vertical drop and all he had to do was to fend himself off from the face as the men above paid out the rope. Once only, passing an overhang, he spun wildly in space, but within ten seconds regained contact with the rock face again. Mountaineering made easy, Smith thought. Or it seemed easy: perhaps, he thought wryly, it was as well that he couldn’t see what stretched beneath him.

His feet passed through eighteen inches of snow and rested on solid ground. He flashed his torch in a semi-circle, from cliff wall to cliff wall. If it was a ledge, it was a very big one for, as far as his eye and torch could reach, it appeared to be a smooth plateau sloping gently outwards from the cliff. The cliff wall itself was smooth, unbroken, except for one shallow fissure, a few feet wide, close by to where he stood. He climbed out of the double bowline and made the switch on the walkie-talkie.

‘OK so far. Haul up the rope. Supplies first, then yourselves.’

The rope snaked upwards into the darkness. Within five minutes all the equipment had been lowered in two separate loads. Christiansen appeared soon afterwards.

‘What’s all the fuss about this Alpine stuff, then?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘My grandmother could do it.’

‘Maybe we should have brought your grandmother along instead,’ Smith said sourly. ‘We’re not down yet. Take your torch and find out how big this ledge is and the best way down and for God’s sake don’t go falling over any precipices.’

Christiansen grinned and moved off. Life was for the living and Christiansen gave the impression of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. While he was away reconnoitring, all the others came down in turn until only Schaffer was left. His plaintive voice came over the walkie-talkie.

‘And how am I supposed to get down? Hand over hand for two hundred feet? Frozen hand over frozen hand for two hundred feet on a rope this size? You’d better stand clear. Somebody should have thought of this.’

‘Somebody did,’ Smith said patiently. ‘Make sure the rope is still round the piton then kick the other eight hundred feet over the edge.’

‘There’s always an answer.’ Schaffer sounded relieved.

They had just lowered him to the ground when Christiansen returned.

‘It’s not so bad,’ he reported. ‘There’s another cliff ahead of us, maybe fifty yards away, curving around to the east. At least I think it’s a cliff. I didn’t try to find out how deep or how steep. I’m married. But the plateau falls away gently to the west there. Seems it might go on a fair way. Trees, too. I followed the line of them for two hundred yards.’

‘Trees? At this altitude?’

‘Well, no masts for a tall ship. Scrub pine. They’ll give shelter, hiding.’

‘Fair enough,’ Smith nodded. ‘We’ll bivouac there.’

‘So close?’ The surprised tone in Schaffer’s voice showed that he didn’t think much of the idea. ‘Shouldn’t we get as far down this mountain as possible tonight, Major?’

‘No need. If we start at first light we’ll be well below the main tree line by dawn.’

‘I agree with Schaffer,’ Carraciola said reasonably. ‘Let’s get as much as we can behind us. What do you think, Olaf?’ This to Christiansen.

‘It doesn’t matter what Christiansen thinks.’ Smith’s voice was quiet but cold as the mountain air itself. ‘Nor you, Carraciola. This isn’t a roundtable seminar, it’s a military operation. Military operations have leaders. Like it or not, Admiral Rolland put me in charge. We stay here tonight. Get the stuff across.’

The five men looked speculatively at one another, then stooped to lift the supplies. There was no longer any question as to who was in charge.

‘We pitch the tents right away, boss?’ Schaffer asked.

‘Yes.’ In Schaffer’s book, Smith reflected, ‘boss’ was probably a higher mark of respect than either ‘Major’ or ‘sir’. ‘Then hot food, hot coffee and a try for London on the radio. Haul that rope down, Christiansen. Come the dawn, we don’t want to start giving heart attacks to any binocular-toting characters in the Schloss Adler.’

Christiansen nodded, began to haul on the rope. As the free end rose into the air, Smith gave a shout, jumped towards Christiansen and caught his arm. Christiansen, startled, stopped pulling and looked round.

‘Jesus!’ Smith drew the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘That was a close one.’

‘What’s up?’ Schaffer asked quickly.

‘Two of you. Hoist me up. Quickly! Before that damn rope disappears.’

Two of them hoisted him into the air. Smith reached up and caught the dangling end of the rope, dropped to earth, taking the rope with him and then very carefully, very securely, tied it to the other end of the rope.

‘Now that you’ve quite finished –’ Torrance-Smythe said politely.

‘The radio.’ Smith let out a long sigh of relief. ‘There’s only one list of frequencies, call signs and code. Security. And that one list is inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’

‘Mind if I mop my brow, too, boss?’ Schaffer enquired.

‘I’ll go get it for you if you like,’ Christiansen volunteered.

‘Thanks. But it’s my fault and I’ll get it. Besides, I’m the only person here who’s done any climbing – or so I believe from Colonel Wyatt-Turner – and I think you’d find that cliff rather more awkward to climb than descend. No hurry. Let’s bivouac and eat first.’

‘If you can’t do better than this, Smithy,’ Schaffer said to Torrance-Smythe, ‘you can have a week’s notice. Starting from a week ago.’ He scraped the bottom of his metal plate and shuddered. ‘I was brought up in a Christian home, so I won’t tell you what this reminds me of.’

‘It’s not my fault,’ Torrance-Smythe complained. ‘They packed the wrong size tin-openers.’ He stirred the indeterminate-looking goulash in the pot on top of the butane stove and looked hopefully at the men seated in a rough semicircle in the dimly-lit tent. ‘Anyone for any more?’

‘That’s not funny,’ Schaffer said severely.

‘Wait till you try his coffee,’ Smith advised, ‘and you’ll be wondering what you were complaining about.’ He rose, poked his head through the door to take a look at the weather, looked inside again. ‘May take me an hour. But if it’s been drifting up there …’

The seated men, suddenly serious, nodded. If it had been drifting up there it might take Smith a very long time indeed to locate Sergeant Harrod.

‘It’s a bad night,’ Schaffer said. ‘I’ll come and give you a hand.’

‘Thanks. No need. I’ll haul myself up and lower myself down. A rope round a piton is no elevator, but it’ll get me there and back and two are no better than one for that job. But I’ll tell you what you can do.’ He moved out and reappeared shortly afterwards carrying the radio which he placed in front of Schaffer. ‘I don’t want to go all the way up there to get the code-book just to find that some hob-nailed idiot has fallen over this and given it a heart attack. Guard it with your life, Lieutenant Schaffer.’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Schaffer said solemnly.

With a hammer and a couple of spare pitons hanging from his waist, Smith secured himself to the rope, with double bowline and belt as before, grabbed the free end of the rope and began to haul himself up. Smith’s statement to the others that this was a job for a mountaineer seemed hardly accurate for the amount of mountaineering skill required was minimal. It was gruelling physical labour, no more. Most of the time, with his legs almost at right angles to his body, he walked up the vertical cliff face: on the stretch of the overhang, with no assistance for his arms, he twice had to take a turn of the free end of the rope and rest until the strength came back to aching shoulder and forearm muscles: and by the time he finally dragged himself, gasping painfully and sweating like a man in a sauna bath, over the edge of the cliff, exhaustion was very close indeed. He had overlooked the crippling effect of altitude to a man unaccustomed to it.

He lay face down for several minutes until breathing and pulse returned to something like normal – or what was normal for seven thousand feet – rose and examined the piton round which the nylon passed. It seemed firm enough but, for good measure, he gave it another few heavy blows with the hammer, undid the double bowline round his legs and secured the end of the rope to the piton with a round turn and two half-hitches, hauling on the rope until the knot locked tight.

He moved a few feet farther away from the cliff edge, cleared away the snow and lightly hammered in one of the spare pitons he had brought with him. He tested it with his hand to see if it broke clear easily. It did. He tapped it in lightly a second time and led round it the part of the rope that was secured to the firmly anchored first piton. Then he walked away, moving up the gently sloping plateau, whistling ‘Lorelei’. It was, as Smith himself would have been the first to admit, a far from tuneful whistle, but recognizable for all that. A figure appeared out of the night and came running towards him, stumbling and slipping in the deep snow. It was Mary Ellison. She stopped short a yard away and put her hands on her hips.

‘Well!’ He could hear her teeth chattering uncontrollably with the cold. ‘You took your time about it, didn’t you?’

‘Never wasted a minute,’ Smith said defensively. ‘I had to have a hot meal and coffee first.’

‘You had to have – you beast, you selfish beast!’ She took a quick step forward and flung her arms around his neck. ‘I hate you.’

‘I know.’ He pulled off a gauntlet and gently touched her disengaged cheek. ‘You’re frozen.’

‘You’re frozen, he says! Of course I’m frozen. I almost died in that plane. Why couldn’t you have supplied some hot water bottles – or – or an electrically heated suit or – or something? I thought you loved me!’

‘I can’t help what you think,’ Smith said kindly, patting her on the back. ‘Where’s your gear?’

‘Fifty yards. And stop patting me in that – that avuncular fashion.’

‘Language, language,’ Smith said. ‘Come on, let’s fetch it.’

They trudged upwards through the deep snow, Mary holding his arm tightly. She said curiously: ‘What on earth excuse did you give for coming back up here? Lost a cuff-link?’

‘There was something I had to come for, something apart from you, although I gave a song-and-dance act of having forgotten about it until the last moment, until it was almost too late. The radio code-book inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’

‘He – he lost it? He dropped it? How – how could he have been so criminally careless!’ She stopped, puzzled. ‘Besides, it’s chained –’

‘It’s still inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic,’ Smith said sombrely. ‘He’s up here, dead.’

‘Dead?’ She stopped and clutched him by the arms. After a long pause, she repeated: ‘He’s dead! That – that nice man. I heard him saying he’d never jumped before. A bad landing?’

‘So it seems.’

They located the kit-bag in silence and Smith carried it back to the edge of the cliff. Mary said: ‘And now? The code-book?’

‘Let’s wait a minute. I want to watch this rope.’

‘Why the rope?’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Mary said resignedly. ‘I’m only a little girl. I suppose you know what you’re doing.’

‘I wish to God I did,’ Smith said feelingly.

They waited, again in silence, side by side on the kit-bag. Both stared at the rope in solemn concentration as if nylon ropes at seven thousand feet had taken on a special meaningfulness denied nylon ropes elsewhere. Twice Smith tried to light a cigarettee and twice it sputtered to extinction in the drifting snow. The minutes passed, three, maybe four: they felt more like thirty or forty. He became conscious that the girl beside him was shivering violently – he guessed that she had her teeth clamped tight to prevent their chattering – and was even more acutely conscious that his entire left side – he was trying to shelter her from the wind and snow – was becoming numb. He rose to leave when suddenly the rope gave a violent jerk and the piton farther from the cliff edge was torn free. The loop of the rope slid quickly down past the piton to which it was anchored and kept on going till it was brought up short by its anchor. Whatever pressure was on the rope increased until the nylon bit deeply into the fresh snow on the cliff edge. Smith moved across and tested the pressure on the rope, at first gingerly and tentatively then with all his strength. The rope was bar-taut and remained bar-taut. But the piton held.

‘What – what on earth –’ Mary began, then broke off. Her voice was an unconscious whisper.

‘Charming, charming,’ Smith murmured. ‘Someone down there doesn’t like me. Surprised?’

‘If – if that spike hadn’t held we’d never have got down again.’ The tremor in her voice wasn’t all due to the cold.

‘It’s a fair old jump,’ Smith conceded.

He took her arm and they moved off. The snow was heavier now and even with the aid of their torches visibility was no more than six feet, but, by using the rocky outcrop as a bearing, it took Smith no more than two minutes to locate Sergeant Harrod, now no more than a featureless mound buried in the depths of the snow-drift. Smith brushed aside the covering shroud of white, undid the dead man’s tunic, recovered the codebook, hung the chain round his neck and buttoned the book securely inside his own Alpenkorps uniform.

Then came the task of turning Sergeant Harrod over on his side. Unpleasant Smith had expected it to be, and it was: impossible he hadn’t expected it to be, and it wasn’t – not quite. But the effort all but defeated him, and the dead man was stiff as a board, literally frozen solid into the arms outflung position into which he had fallen. For the second time that night Smith could feel the sweat mingling with the melted snow on his face. But by and by he had him over, the frozen right arm pointing up into the snow-filled sky. Smith knelt, brought his torch close and carefully examined the back of the dead man’s head.

‘What are you trying to do?’ Mary asked. ‘What are you looking for?’ Again her voice was a whisper.

‘His neck is broken. I want to find out just how it was broken.’ He glanced up at the girl. ‘You don’t have to look.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She turned away. ‘I’m not going to.’

The clothes, like the man, were frozen stiff. The hood covering Harrod’s head crackled and splintered in Smith’s gauntleted hands as he pulled it down, exposing the back of the head and neck. Finally, just below the collar of the snow-smock, Smith found what he was searching for – a red mark at the base of the neck where the skin was broken. He rose, caught the dead man’s ankles and dragged him a foot or two down the slope.

‘What now?’ In spite of herself Mary was watching again, in reluctant and horrified fascination. ‘What are you looking for now?’

‘A rock,’ Smith said briefly. There was a cold edge to the words and although Mary knew it wasn’t intended for her, it was an effective discouragement to any further questioning.

Smith cleared the snow for two feet around where Harrod’s head had lain. With hand and eyes he examined the ground with meticulous care, rose slowly to his feet, took Mary’s arm and began to walk away. After a few steps he hesitated, stopped, turned back to the dead man and turned him over again so that the right arm was no longer pointing towards the sky.

Half-way back to the cliff edge, Smith said abruptly:

‘Something struck Harrod on the back of the neck. I thought it might have been a rock. But there was no rock where he lay, only turf.’

‘There was a rocky outcrop nearby.’

‘You don’t break your neck on a rocky outcrop, then stand up and jump out into a snowdrift. Even had he rolled over into the drift, he could never have finished with his head seven feet out from the rock. He was struck by some hard metallic object, either the butt of a gun or the haft of a knife. The skin is broken but there is no bruising for the neck was broken immediately afterwards. When he was unconscious. To make us think it was an accident. It must have happened on the rock – there was no disturbance in the snow round Harrod – and it must have happened while he was upright. A tap on the neck, a quick neck-twist, then he fell or was pushed over the edge of the outcrop. Wonderful stuff, stone,’ Smith finished bitterly. ‘It leaves no footprints.’

Mary stopped and stared at him.

‘Do you realize what you’re saying?’ She caught his speculative and very old-fashioned look, took his arm and went on quickly: ‘No, I mean the implications. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, of course you do, John, I – I’m scared. Even all those months with you in Italy – well, you know, nothing like this –’ She broke off, then continued: ‘Couldn’t there – couldn’t there be some other explanation?’

‘Like he hit himself on the back of the head or the abominable snowman got him?’

She looked at him steadily, her dark eyes far too large in what could be seen of her hooded face. ‘I don’t deserve that, John. I am frightened.’

‘Me, too.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Well, if I’m not, it’s damn well time I started to be.’

Smith checked his descent when he estimated he was about forty feet from the base of the cliff. He took two turns of the nylon round his left leg, clamped it with his right, took a turn round his left arm, pulled off his right gauntlet with his teeth, stuffed it inside his tunic, eased out his Luger, slid the safety catch and went on his way again, checking his speed of descent with his gauntleted hand. It was a reasonable enough expectation that whoever had tried to pull down the rope would be waiting there to finish off the job.

But there was no reception committee waiting, not, at least, at the spot where he touched down. He traversed a quick circle with his torch. There was nobody there and nothing there and the footprints that must have been there were long obscured by the drifting snow. Gun in one hand, torch in the other, he moved along the cliff face for thirty yards then moved out in a semi-circle until he arrived back at the cliff-face. The rope-puller had evidently opted for discretion. Smith returned to the rope and jerked it. In two minutes he had Mary’s kit-bag down and, a few minutes later, Mary herself. As soon as she had stepped out of the double bowline, Smith undid the knot, pulled the rope down from the top of the cliff and coiled it. So numbed and frozen were his hands by this time that the operation took him nearly fifteen minutes.

Rope over one shoulder, her kit-bag on the other, Smith led Mary to the fissure in the cliff side.

‘Don’t pitch the tent,’ Smith said. ‘Unroll it, put your sleeping bag on one half, get into it and pull the other half of the tent over you. Half an hour and you’ll be covered with drifting snow. The snow will not only keep you warm, it’ll hide you from any somnambulists. I’ll be along in the morning before we leave.’

He walked away, stopped, looked back. Mary was still standing where he had left her, looking after him. There was no sag to her shoulders, no particular expression to her face, but for all that she looked oddly defenceless, lonely and forlorn, a quality as indefinable as it was unmistakable. Smith hesitated, then went back to her, unrolled her tent and sleeping bag, waited till she had climbed in, zipped up the bag and pulled the other half of the tent up to her chin. She smiled at him. He fixed the sleeping bag hood, pulled a corner of the tent over it and left, all without saying a word.

Locating his own tent was simple enough, a steady light burnt inside it. Smith beat the snow from his clothes, stooped and entered. Christiansen, Thomas and Carraciola were in their sleeping bags and were asleep or appeared to be. Torrance-Smythe was checking over their store of plastic explosives, fuses, detonators and grenades, while Schaffer was reading a paper-back – in German – smoking a cigarette – also German – and faithfully guarding the radio. He put down the book and looked at Smith.

‘OK?’

‘OK.’ Smith produced the code-book from his tunic. ‘Sorry I was so long, but I thought I’d never find him. Drifting pretty badly up there.’

‘We’ve arranged to take turns on watch,’ Schaffer said. ‘Half an hour each. It’ll be dawn in three hours.’

Smith smiled. ‘What are you guarding against in these parts?’

‘The abominable snowman.’

The smile left Smith’s face as quickly as it had come. He turned his attention to Harrod’s codebook and spent about ten minutes in memorizing call-up signals and wave-frequencies and writing a message out in code. Before he had finished Schaffer had turned into his sleeping bag, leaving Torrance-Smythe on watch. Smith folded the message, tucked it in a pocket, rose, took the radio and a rubber ground-sheet to protect it from the snow.

‘I’m going to move out a bit,’ he said to Torrance-Smythe. ‘Reception is lousy among trees. Besides, I don’t want to wake everyone up. Won’t be long.’

Two hundred yards from the tent, after having stopped twice and changed direction twice, Smith knelt with his back – and the rubber ground-sheet – to the drifting snow. He extended a fourteen feet telescopic aerial, adjusted a pre-selected call-up and cranked a handle. Four times he cranked the handle and on the fifth he got results. Someone was keeping a very close radio watch indeed.

‘This is Danny Boy,’ the set speaker crackled. The signal was faint and intermittent, but just comprehensible. ‘Danny Boy replying to you. Over.’

Smith spoke into the mouth microphone. ‘This is Broadsword. Can I speak to Father Machree or Mother Machree? Over.’

‘Sorry. Unavailable. Over.’

‘Code,’ Smith said. ‘Over.’

‘Ready.’

Smith extracted the paper from his pocket and shone his torch on it. There were two lines containing meaningless jumbles of letters and, below that, the plain language translation, which read: ‘SAFE LANDING HARROD DEAD WEATHER FINE PLEASE AWAIT MESSAGE 0800 GMT. Smith read off the corresponding code figures and finished off: ‘Have that delivered to Father Machree by 0700. Without fail.’

Torrance-Smythe looked up at Smith’s return.

‘Back already?’ Surprise in his voice. ‘You got through?’

‘Not a chance,’ Smith said disgustedly. ‘Too many bloody mountains around.’

‘Didn’t try for very long, did you?’

‘Two and a half minutes.’ It was Smith’s turn to look surprised. ‘Surely you know that’s the safe maximum?’

‘You think there may be radio monitoring stations hereabouts?’

‘Oh, no, not at all.’ Smith’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘You wouldn’t expect to find radio monitors in the Schloss Adler, would you now?’

‘Well, now.’ Torrance-Smythe smiled tiredly. ‘I believe someone did mention it was the southern HQ of the German Secret Service. Sorry, Major. It’s not that I’m growing old, though there’s that, too. It’s just that what passes for my mind is so gummed up by cold and lack of sleep that I think it’s stopped altogether.’

Smith pulled off his boots and snow-suit, climbed into his sleeping bag and pulled the radio close to him.

‘Then it’s time you had some sleep. My explosives expert is going to be no good to me if he can’t tell a detonator from a door-knob. Go on. Turn in. I’ll keep watch.’

‘But we had arranged –’

‘Arguments, arguments,’ Smith sighed. ‘Insubordination on every hand.’ He smiled. ‘Straight up, Smithy, I’m wide awake. I know I won’t sleep tonight.’

One downright lie, Smith thought, and one statement of incontrovertible truth. He wasn’t wide awake, he was physically and mentally exhausted and on the slightest relaxation of will-power oblivion would have overtaken him in seconds. But that he wouldn’t sleep that night was beyond doubt: no power on earth would have let him sleep that night but, in the circumstances, it was perhaps wiser not to say so to Torrance-Smythe.

THREE

The pre-dawn greyness was in the sky. Smith and his men had broken camp. Tent and sleeping bags were stored away and the cooking utensils – after a very sketchy breakfast scarcely deserving of the name – were being thrust into haversacks. There was no conversation, none at all: it wasn’t a morning for speaking. All of them, Smith thought, looked more drawn, more exhausted, than they had done three hours ago: he wondered how he himself, who had had no sleep at all, must look. It was as well, he reflected, that mirrors were not part of their commando equipment. He looked at his watch.

‘We’ll leave in ten minutes,’ he announced. ‘Should give us plenty of time to be down in the tree line before sun-up. Assuming there are no more cliffs. Back in a moment. Visibility is improving and I think I’ll go recce along the cliff edge. With any luck, maybe I can see the best way down.’

‘And if you haven’t any luck?’ Carraciola asked sourly.

‘We’ve still that thousand feet of nylon rope,’ Smith said shortly.

He pulled on his snow-suit and left, angling off in the direction of the cliff. As soon as he was beyond the belt of the scrub pines and out of sight of the camp he changed direction uphill and broke into a run.

A single eye appeared under a lifted corner of snow-covered canvas as Mary Ellison heard the soft crunch of running footsteps in the snow. She heard the first two bars of a tuneless whistling of ‘Lorelei’, unzipped her sleeping bag and sat up. Smith was standing above her.

‘Not already!’ she said protestingly.

‘Yes, already. Come on. Up!’

‘I haven’t slept a wink.’

‘Neither have I. I’ve been watching that damned radio all night – and watching to check that no somnambulists took a stroll in this direction.’

‘You kept awake. You did that for me?’

‘I kept awake. We’re off. Start in five minutes. Leave your tent and kit-bag here, you won’t be requiring them again. Take some food, something to drink, that’s all. And for God’s sake, don’t get too close to us.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll stop at 7 a.m. Check your watch. Exactly 7 a.m. And don’t bump into us.’

‘What do you think I am?’ But Smith didn’t tell her what he thought she was. He had already gone.

A thousand feet farther down the side of the Weissspitze the trees were something worth calling trees, towering conifers that soared sixty and seventy feet up into the sky. Into the clear sky, for the snow had stopped falling now. It was dawn.

The slope of the Weissspitze was still very steep, perhaps one in four or five. Smith, with his five men strung out behind him in single file, slipped and stumbled almost constantly: but the deep snow, Smith reflected, at least cushioned their frequent falls and as a mode of progress it was a damn sight preferable to shinning down vertical cliff-faces on an impossibly thin clothes-line. The curses of his bruised companions were almost continuous but serious complaints were marked by their total absence: there was no danger, they were making excellent time and they were now completely hidden in the deep belt of trees.

Two hundred yards behind them Mary Ellison carefully picked her way down the tracks made by the men below her. She slipped and fell only very occasionally for, unlike the men, she was carrying no over-balancing gear on her back. Nor had she any fear of being observed, of coming too close to Smith and the others: in still, frosty air on a mountain sound carries with a preternatural clarity and from the sound of the voices farther down the slope she could judge her distance from them to a nicety. For the twentieth time she looked at her watch: it was twenty minutes to seven.

Some time later, for much more than the twentieth time, Smith checked his watch again. It was exactly 7 o’clock. The dawn had gone and the light of full day-time filtered down through the snow-bent boughs of the conifers. Smith stopped and held up his hand, waiting until the other five had caught up with him.

‘We must be half-way down now.’ He shrugged off the heavy pack on his back and lowered it gratefully into the snow. ‘I think it’s time we had a look at the scenery.’

They piled their gear and moved off to their right. Within a minute the pines started to thin out and at a signal from Smith they all dropped to hands and knees and crawled forward the last few yards towards the edge of the belt of pines. Smith carried a telescope in his hand: Christiansen and Thomas both wore binoculars. Zeiss binoculars. Admiral Rolland had left nothing to chance. Beyond the last of the pines a mound of snow obstructed their view of the valley below. Shrouded from top to toe, in the all-enveloping white of their snow-smocks, they completed the last few feet on their elbows and knees.

What lay below them was something out of a fairy tale, an impossibly beautiful scene from an impossibly beautiful fairy tale, a fairy tale set aeons back in the never-never land of the age of dreams, a kindlier land, a nobler land than man had ever known since first he had set his hand against his brother. A land that never was, Smith thought, a land that never was: but there it lay before them, the golden land that never was, the home of that most dreaded organization in the entire world, the German Gestapo. The impeccable incongruity of it all, Smith reflected, passed all belief.

The valley was bowl-shaped, open to the north, hemmed in by steeply rising hills to the east and west, closed off by the towering bulk of the Weissspitze to the south.

A scene of fantastic beauty. Nine thousand, seven hundred and ten feet in height, the second highest mountain in Germany, the Weissspitze soared up menacingly like another north wall of the Eiger, its dazzling whiteness caught in the morning sun, its starkly lovely outline sharply etched against the now cloudless blue of the sky. High up near the cone-shaped summit could be seen the line of black rock marking the cliff Smith and his men had descended during the night with, just below it, a much greater cliff-face on the plateau above which they had spent the night.

Directly opposite where they lay, and almost exactly on the same level, was the Schloss Adler itself. The castle of the eagle had been aptly named, an impregnable fortress, an inaccessible eyrie set between mountain and sky.

Just below the spot where the steep-sided slopes of the Weissspitze began to flatten out northwards into the head of the valley, a geological freak, known as a volcanic plug, jutted two hundred vertical feet up into the sparkling, ice-cold air. It was on this that the Schloss Adler had been built. The northern, western and eastern sides of this volcanic plug were sheer, perpendicular walls of rock, walls that swept up smoothly, without intermission or break into the structure of the castle itself: from where they lay, it was impossible to say where the one ended and the other began. To the south, a steeply-sloping ridgeback connected the plug to the equally sloping ramparts of the Weissspitze.

The castle itself was another dream, the dream of the apotheosis of medievalism. This dream, Smith was aware, was as illusory as the golden age of its setting. It wasn’t medieval at all, it had been built as late as the mid-nineteenth century to the express order of one of the madder of the Bavarian monarchs who had suffered from a comprehensive list of delusions, of which grandeur had not been the least. But, delusions or not, he had had, as the deluded so often have – to the dismay and consternation of their allegedly saner brethren – impeccable taste. The castle was perfect for the valley, the valley for the castle. Any other combination would have been inconceivable.

The Schloss Adler was built in the form of a hollow square. It was towered, battlemented and crenellated, its most imposing aspects, two perfectly circular towers, the one to the east higher than that to the west, facing down the valley towards the north. Two smaller, but still magnificent towers, lay at the southern corners, facing the looming bulk of the Weissspitze. From where Smith lay, at some slight level above that of the castle, he could just see into the open square in its middle, outside access to which was obtained by a pair of huge iron gates at the rear. The sun had not yet climbed sufficiently high above the eastern hills for its rays to strike the castle directly, but, for all that, its incredibly white walls gleamed and glittered as if made of the most iridescent marble.

Below the soaring northern ramparts of the castle the valley fell away steeply to the Blau See, beautiful pine-fringed jewel of a lake of the deepest and most sparkling blue, a colour which with the green of the pines, the white dazzle of the snow and the brilliant, lighter blue of the sky above formed a combination of breath-taking loveliness, Impossibly lovely, Smith thought, a completely faithful colour reproduction of the scene would have had everybody shouting ‘fake’.

From where they lay they could see that the belt of pines in which they lay hidden extended almost all the way down to the lake. Getting down there unobserved would be no problem at all. An almost exactly matching line of pines swept down the opposite – the eastern – side of the valley. From the lake those two long sweeps of pines, climbing steadily upwards as they marched to the south, must have appeared like a pair of great curving horns almost meeting at the top of the lower of the two cliff-faces on the Weissspitze.

A small village lay at the head of the lake. Basically it consisted of a single wide street, perhaps two hundred yards in length, a railway station, two inevitable churches perched on two inevitable knolls and a thin scattering of houses climbing up the steep slopes on either side of the village. From the southern end of the village a road curved up the far side of the valley till it reached the ridge-back to the south of the castle: this ridgeback it ascended by a series of hairpin bends, the last of which led to the great doors guarding the forecourt at the back of the castle. The road, just then, was completely blocked by snow and sole access to the castle was obviously by means of the Luftseilbahn, an aerial cableway. Two cables stretched from the village straight up to the castle, crossing three supporting pylons en route. Even as they watched, a cable-car was completing the last section of its journey up to the castle. At a distance of not much more than a hundred feet from the glittering walls of the Schloss Adler it appeared to be climbing almost vertically.

On the Blau See, about a mile beyond the village, lay a very large group of regularly spaced huts, arranged in rectangular patterns. It bore an uncommonly close resemblance to a military encampment.

‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ With an almost physical effort of will, Schaffer forced himself to look away and Smith could see the wonder reflected in his eyes. ‘Is this for real, boss?’

It wasn’t a question that called for an answer. Schaffer had summed up their collective feeling pretty well and there was nothing that anyone could add that wouldn’t seem and sound superfluous. Prone in the snow, they watched in silence as the cable-car climbed agonizingly slowly up the last fifty feet towards the castle. It seemed as if it would never make it and Smith could almost palpably sense the empathy of his companions and himself as they willed that little car on the last few feet of its journey. But make it it did and it disappeared from sight under the roof of the cable header station that had been built into the western foot of the castle. The tension relaxed and Schaffer cleared his throat.

‘Boss,’ he said diffidently, ‘there are a couple of minor points that occur to me. Requiring elucidation, one might say. First of all, if I didn’t know better I’d say that was a military barracks down by that little old lake there.’

‘You don’t know better. That is a military barracks down by that little old lake there. And no ordinary military barracks either, I might say. That’s the training HQ of the Jäger battalions of the Wehrmacht’s Alpenkorps.’

‘Oh, my gosh! The Alpine Corps! If I’d known this I’d never have come along. The Alpine Corps! Why didn’t someone tell Ma Schaffer’s nearest and dearest?’

‘I thought you knew,’ Smith said mildly. ‘Why do you think we’re not dressed as German sailors or Red Cross nurses?’

Schaffer unzipped his snow-smock, minutely examined his Alpenkorps uniform as if seeing it for the first time, then zipped it up again. He said carefully: ‘You mean to say we’re going to mingle, careless like, with the German Army.’ He paused, looked wide-eyed at Smith’s smiling nod, then went on incredulously: ‘But – but we’ll be recognized as strangers!’

‘Training troops come and go all the time,’ Smith said offhandedly. ‘What’s six new faces among six hundred new faces?’

‘This is terrible,’ Schaffer said, gloomily.

‘Worse than horses?’ Smith smiled. ‘After all, the Alpenkorps don’t buck and trample all over you.’

‘Horses don’t carry machine-guns,’ Schaffer said morosely.

‘And your second point?’

‘Ah, yes. The second point. There’s the little matter of the old Schloss itself. Kinda forgotten our helicopter, haven’t we? How do we get in?’

‘A good point,’ Smith conceded. ‘We’ll have to think about it. But I’ll tell you this. If Colonel Wyatt-Turner can penetrate the German High Command and, more important, get away again, this should be a piece of cake for us.’

‘He did what?’ Schaffer demanded.

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘How should I know?’ Schaffer was irritated. ‘Never met the guy till yesterday.’

‘He spent the years ’40 to ’43 inside Germany. Served in the Wehrmacht for part of the time. Ended up in the GHQ in Berlin. Says he knows Hitler quite well.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned.’ Schaffer paused for a long moment, finally arrived at a conclusion. ‘The guy,’ he said moodily, ‘must be nuts.’

‘Maybe. But if he can do it, we can. We’ll figure a way. Let’s get back among the trees.’

They inched their way back into cover, leaving Christiansen behind with Smith’s telescope to keep watch. After they’d made a temporary camp, heated and drunk some coffee, Smith announced his intention of trying to contact London again.

He unpacked the radio and sat down on a kit-bag a few feet distant from the others. The switch that cut in the transmitter circuit was on the left-hand side of the radio, the side remote from where the other four men were sitting. Smith switched on with a loud positive click, cranked the call-up handle with his left hand. With the very first crank his left hand moved the transmitting switch from ‘On’ to ‘Off’, the whirring of the call-up blanketing the sound. Smith cranked away diligently at intervals, stopping from time to time to make minute adjustments to the controls, then finally gave up and sat back, shaking his head in disgust.

‘You’ll never make it with all those trees around,’ Torrance-Smythe observed.

‘That must be it,’ Smith agreed. ‘I’ll try the other side of the wood. Might have better luck there.’

He slung the transmitter over his shoulder and trudged off through the deep snow, cutting straight across to the other side of the belt of pines. When he thought he was safely out of eyeshot of the men at the camp, he checked with a quick look over his shoulder. They were out of sight. He turned more than ninety degrees left and hurried up the hill until he cut the tracks that he and his men had made on the way down. He followed the tracks uphill, whistling ‘Lorelei’, but whistling softly: in that frosty air, sound travelled dangerously far. He stopped whistling when Mary appeared from where she had been hiding behind a fallen pine.

‘Hallo, darling,’ she said brightly.

‘We’ll have less of the “darlings”,’ Smith said briskly. ‘It’s 8 a.m. Father Machree awaits. And keep your voice down.’

He sat on the fallen tree, cranked the handle and established contact almost immediately. The transmission from London was still very faint but clearer than it had been in the earlier hours of the morning.

‘Father Machree is waiting,’ the radio crackled. ‘Hold. Hold.’

Smith held and the unmistakable voice of Admiral Rolland took over from the London operator.

‘Position please, Broadsword.’

Smith consulted the piece of paper in his hand, again in code and plain language. The message read: WOODS DUE WEST CASTLE DESCENDING W. H. THIS EVENING. Smith read out the corresponding code letters.

There was a pause, presumably while Rolland was having the message decoded, then his voice came again.

‘Understood. Proceed. Harrod killed accidentally?’

‘No. Over.’

‘By the enemy? Over.’

‘No. What is the weather report? Over.’

‘Deteriorating. Freshening winds, strong later. Snow. Over.’

Smith looked up at the still and cloudless sky above. He assumed that Rolland hadn’t got his forecasts mixed up. He said: ‘Time of next broadcast uncertain. Can you stand by? Over.’

‘Am remaining HQ until operation complete,’ Rolland said. ‘Good luck. Good-bye.’

Smith closed up the radio and said thoughtfully to Mary: ‘I didn’t much care for the way he said good-bye there.’

In the Naval Operations room in Whitehall, Admiral Rolland and Colonel Wyatt-Turner, one on either side of the radio operator manning a huge transceiver, looked at each other with heavy faces.

‘So the poor devil was murdered,’ Wyatt-Turner said flatly.

‘A high price to pay for confirmation that we were right,’ Rolland said sombrely. ‘Poor devil, as you say. The moment we gave him that radio to carry we signed a death-warrant. I wonder who’s next. Smith himself?’

‘Not Smith.’ Wyatt-Turner shook his head positively. ‘Some people have a sixth sense. Smith has a seventh, eighth and ninth and a built-in radar set for danger. Smith can survive under any circumstances I can conceive of. I didn’t pick him with a pin, sir. He’s the best agent in Europe.’

‘Except possibly yourself. And don’t forget, Colonel, there may possibly be circumstances that even you can’t conceive of.’

‘Yes, that’s so.’ He looked directly at Rolland. ‘What do you reckon his chances are?’

‘Chances?’ Rolland’s eyes were remote, unseeing. ‘What do you mean, chances? He doesn’t have any.’

Almost precisely the same thought was in Smith’s mind as he lit a cigarette and looked at the girl beside him, careful not to let his thoughts show in his face. Not until that first sight he’d just had of the castle had the full realization of the apparent impossibility of their task struck him. Had he known what the precise physical situation had been, he doubted very much whether he would have come. Deep in the furthest recesses of his mind, he knew, although he would not admit it to himself, that there really was no room for the element of doubt. He wouldn’t have come. But he had come. He was here and he had better do something about it.

He said to Mary: ‘Have you had a squint at the old Schloss yet?’

‘It’s a fantastic place. How on earth do we ever get General Carnaby out of there?’

‘Easy. We’ll take a walk up there tonight, get inside and take him away.’

Mary stared at him in disbelief and waited for him to amplify his statement. He didn’t. Finally, she said: ‘That’s all?’

‘That’s all.’

‘The simplicity of true genius. You must have spent a lot of time working that one out.’ When he still didn’t reply, she went on, elaborately sarcastic: ‘In the first place, of course, there’ll be no trouble about getting in. You just go up to the main door and knock.’

‘More or less. Then the door – or window – opens, I smile at you, say thank you and pass inside.’

‘You what?’

‘I smile and say thank you. Even in wartime, there’s no reason why the little courtesies –’

‘Please!’ She was thoroughly exasperated now. ‘If you can’t talk sense –’

‘You are going to open the door for me,’ Smith explained patiently.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘The staff shortage in Germany is acute. The Schloss Adler is no exception. You’re just the type they’re looking for. Young, intelligent, good-looking, you can cook, polish, sew on Colonel Kramer’s buttons –’

‘Who’s Colonel Kramer?’ Her tone as much as her face showed the bewilderment in her mind.

‘Deputy Chief of the German Secret Service.’

Mary said with conviction: ‘You must be mad.’

‘If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be doing this job.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve been gone too long and I fear that I’m surrounded by the odd suspicious mind. We move off at five. Exactly five. Down in the village there’s a Gasthaus on the east side of the main street called “Zum Wilden Hirsch.” “The Wild Deer.” Remember it, “Zum Wilden Hirsch.” We don’t want you wandering into the wrong pub. Behind it there’s a shed used as a beer cellar. It’s always kept locked but there will be a key in the door tonight. I’ll meet you there at exactly eight o’clock.’

He turned to go, but she caught him by the arm.

‘How do you know all this?’ she asked tensely. ‘About the Gasthaus and the bottle store and the key being there and about Colonel Kramer and –’

‘Ah, ah!’ Smith shook his head admonishingly and touched her lips with his forefinger.

‘Hand-book for spies, golden rule number one.’ She drew away from him and stared down at the snow-covered ground, her voice low and bitter. ‘Never ever ever tell anyone anything unless you have to.’ She paused and looked up. ‘Not even me?’

‘Especially not you, poppet.’ He patted her lightly on the cheek. ‘Don’t be late.’

He walked away down the slope leaving her looking after him with an expressionless face.

Lieutenant Schaffer lay stretched out and almost buried in the deep snow, half-hidden behind the bole of a pine, with a telescope to his eye. He twisted as he heard the soft crunch of snow behind him and saw Smith approaching on his hands and knees.

‘Couldn’t you knock or something?’ Schaffer asked irritably.

‘Sorry. Something you wanted to show me, so the boys say.’

‘Yeah.’ Schaffer handed Smith the telescope. ‘Take a gander at this lot. Thought it might interest you.’

Smith took the telescope and fingered the very precise adjustment until he achieved maximum definition.

‘Lower down,’ Schaffer said. ‘At the foot of the rock.’

Smith traversed the telescope down the sides of the Schloss Adler and the sheer walls of the volcanic plug until the fine cross-hairs came to rest on the snow-covered slopes at the foot. Moving across the slope he could see two soldiers with slung machine-carbines and, not on leashes, four dogs.

‘My, my,’ Smith murmured thoughtfully. ‘I see what you mean.’

‘Those are Doberman pinschers, boss.’

‘Well, they aren’t toy poodles and that’s a fact,’ Smith agreed. He moved the telescope a little way up the walls of the volcanic plug, held it there.

‘And floodlights?’ he added softly.

He lowered the telescope again, past the patrolling soldiers and dogs, till it came to rest on a high wire fence that appeared to go all the way around the base of the volcanic plug.

‘And a dinky little fence.’

‘Fences,’ Schaffer said pontifically, ‘are made to be cut or climbed.’

‘You try cutting or climbing this one, laddie, and you’ll be cooked to a turn in nothing flat. A standard design, using a standard current of 2,300 volt, single-phase, 60 cycle AC. All the best electric chairs have it.’

Schaffer shook his head. ‘Amazing the lengths some folks will go to protect their privacy.’

‘Fences, floods and Dobermans,’ Smith said. ‘I don’t think that combination will stop us, do you, Lieutenant?’

‘Of course not. Stop us? Of course not!’ He paused for some moments, then burst out: ‘How in God’s name do you propose –’

‘We’ll decide when the time comes,’ Smith said easily.

‘You mean you’ll decide,’ Schaffer said complainingly. ‘Play it pretty close to the cuff, don’t you?’

‘That’s because I’m too young to die.’

‘Why me, for God’s sake?’ Schaffer demanded after a long pause. ‘Why pick me for this job? This isn’t my line of country, Major.’

‘God knows,’ Smith said frankly. ‘Come to that, why me?’

Schaffer was in the middle of giving him a long and pointedly disbelieving look when he suddenly stiffened and cocked his head up to the sky in the direction of the unmistakably rackety whirr of a helicopter engine. Both men picked it up at once. It was coming from the north, over the Blau See, and heading directly towards them. It was a big military version and, even at that distance, the swastika markings were clearly distinguishable. Schaffer started to move backwards towards the line of pines.

‘Exit Schaffer,’ he announced hurriedly. ‘The bloodhounds are out for us.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Smith said. ‘Stay where you are and pull your smock over your head.’

Quickly they pulled their white smocks over their heads until only their eyes, and Smith’s telescope, partly buried in the snow, could be seen. From thirty yards in any direction, including straight up, they must have been quite invisible.

The helicopter swept up the valley still maintaining a course directly towards the spot where the two men lay hidden. When it was only a few hundred yards away even Smith began to feel uneasy and wondered if by some evil mischance the enemy knew or suspected their presence. They were bound to have heard the engines of the Lancaster, muted though they had been, during the night. Had some suspicious and intelligent character – and there would be no lack of those in the Schloss Adler – come up with the right answer to the question of the presence of this errant bomber in one of the most unlikely places in all Germany? Could picked members of the Alpenkorps be combing the pine woods even at that moment – and he, Smith, had been so confident that he hadn’t even bothered to post a guard. Then, abruptly, when the helicopter was almost directly overhead, it side-slipped sharply to its left, sank down over the castle courtyard, hovered for a few moments and slowly descended. Smith surreptitiously mopped his forehead and applied his eye to the telescope.

The helicopter had landed. The rotor stopped, steps descended and a man climbed down to the courtyard floor. From his uniform, Smith decided, a very senior officer. Then he suddenly realized that it was a very very senior officer indeed. His face tightened as he pushed the telescope across to Schaffer. ‘Take a good look,’ he advised.

Schaffer took a good look, lowered the telescope as the man passed through a doorway. ‘Pal of yours, boss?’

‘I know him. Reichsmarschall Julius Rosemeyer. The Wehrmacht Chief of Staff.’

‘My very first Reichsmarschall and me without my telescopic rifle,’ Schaffer said regretfully. ‘I wonder what his highness wants.’

‘Same as us,’ Smith said briefly.

‘General Carnaby?’

‘When you’re going to ask the Allies’ overall co-ordinator of planning a few questions about the Second Front you don’t send just the corporal of the guard to interview him.’

‘You don’t think they might have come to take old Carnaby away?’ Schaffer asked anxiously.

‘Not a chance. The Gestapo never gives up its prisoners. In this country the Wehrmacht does what the Gestapo says.’

‘Or else?’

‘Or else. Off you go – they’ve more coffee on the brew back there. Send someone to relieve me in an hour.’

Admiral Rolland’s weather forecast for the area turned out to be perfectly correct. As the endless shivering hours dragged slowly by the weather steadily deteriorated. By noon the sun was gone and a keen wind sprang up from the east. By early afternoon snow had begun to fall from the darkened sky, slowly at first then with increasing severity as the east wind steadily increased in strength and became bitingly cold. It looked like being a bad night, Smith thought. But a bad night that reduced visibility to near-zero and kept people indoors was what they wanted: it would have been difficult for them to saunter up to the Schloss Adler bathed in the warm light of a harvest moon. Smith checked his watch.

‘Time to go.’ He climbed stiffly to his feet and beat his arms to restore circulation. ‘Call Thomas, will you.’

Rucksacks and kit-bags were slung and shouldered. Thomas, who had been keeping watch, appeared carrying Smith’s telescope. Thomas was very far from being his usual cheerful self, and it wasn’t just the fact that he’d spent the last hour exposed to the full force of wind and snow that had left him in such ill-humour.

‘Is that damned radio working yet?’ he asked Smith.

‘Not a hope. Six tries, six failures. Why?’

‘I’ll tell you why,’ Thomas said bitterly. ‘Pity we couldn’t get the Admiral to change his mind about the paratroops. A full troop train just got in, that’s all.’

‘Well, that’s fine,’ Smith said equably. ‘The old hands will think we’re new boys and the new boys will think we’re old hands. Very convenient.’

Thomas looked thoughtfully at Smith.

‘Very, very convenient.’ He hesitated, then went on: ‘How about loosening up a bit, Major?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come off it,’ Carraciola said roughly. ‘You know damn well what he means. It’s our lives. Why do we have to go down into that damned village? And how do you intend to get Carnaby out? If we’re to commit suicide, tell us why. You owe us that.’

‘I owe you nothing,’ Smith said flatly. ‘I’ll tell you nothing. And if you know nothing you can’t talk. You’ll be told when the time comes.’

‘You, Smith,’ Torrance-Smythe said precisely, ‘are a cold-blooded devil.’

‘It’s been said before,’ Smith said indifferently.

The village railway station was a small, two-track, end-of-the-line depot. Like all end-of-the-line depots it was characterized by rust, dilapidation, the barest functionalism of design and an odd pessimistically-expectant air of waiting for someone to come along and finish it off properly. At any time, its air of desolation was total. That night, completely deserted, with a high, gusting wind driving snow through pools of light cast by dim and swaying electric lamps, the ghostly impression of a place abandoned by man and by the world was almost overwhelming. It suited Smith’s purpose perfectly.

He led his five snow-smock clad men quickly across the tracks and into the comparative shelter of the station buildings. They filed silently past the closed bookstall, the freight office, the booking office, flitted quickly into the shadows beyond and stopped.

Smith lowered the radio, shrugged off his rucksack, removed snow-smock and trousers and sauntered casually alongside the tracks – the thrifty Bavarians regarded platforms as a wasteful luxury. He stopped outside a door next to a bolted hatch which bore above it the legend GEPACK ANNAHME. He tried the door. It was locked. He made a quick survey to check that he was unobserved, stooped, examined the keyhole with a pencil-flash, took a bunch of oddly shaped keys from his pockets and had the door opened in seconds. He whistled softly and was almost at once joined by the others, who filed quickly inside, already slipping off their packs as they went. Schaffer, bringing up the rear, paused and glanced up at the sign above the hatch.

‘My God!’ He shook his head. ‘The left luggage office!’

‘Where else?’ Smith asked reasonably. He ushered Schaffer in, closed and locked the door behind him. Hooding his pencil torch until only a finger-width beam emerged, he passed by the luggage racks till he came to the far end of the room where a bay window was set in the wall. It was a perfectly ordinary sash window and he examined it very minutely, careful that at no time the pinpoint of light touched the glass to shine through to the street beyond. He turned his attention to the vertical wooden planking at the side of the window, took out his sheath knife and levered a plank away to expose a length of twin-cored flex stapled vertically to the wall. He split the cores, sliced through each in turn, replaced the plank and tested the lower sash of the window. It moved easily up and down.

‘An interesting performance,’ Schaffer observed. ‘What was all that in aid of?’

‘It’s not always convenient to enter by the front door. Or, come to that, leave by it either.’

‘A youth mis-spent in philandering or burgling,’ Schaffer said sadly. ‘How did you know it was wired for sound?’

‘Even a small country station will have valuables stored in its left luggage office from time to time,’ Smith said patiently. ‘But it will not have a fulltime baggage attendant. The attendant, booking clerk, ticket-collector, porter and station-master are probably all one man. So it’s kept locked. But there’s no point in barring the front door if your bag-snatcher can climb in through the back window. So your back window is grilled or wired. No grille – and a badly-fitting plank. Obvious.’

‘Obvious to you, maybe,’ Carraciola said sourly. ‘All this – ah – expertise with skeleton keys and burglar alarms. The Black Watch you said you were in?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Very odd training they give you in those Scottish regiments. Very odd indeed.’

‘“Thorough” is the word you’re searching for,’ Smith said kindly. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

‘Let’s do that,’ Carraciola said heavily. ‘Remind me to get mine down in one go or ten gets you one that I’ll never live to finish it.’

‘It would be a shame to waste good beer,’ Smith agreed. He waited until the last man was out, locked the door behind him and rejoined them as they walked out of the main station entrance under the ‘Bahnhof’ sign. They were now no longer carrying rucksacks or wearing snow-smocks. All were dressed in the uniforms of soldiers of a Jäger battalion, Smith as a major, Schaffer as a lieutenant and the other four as sergeants. Their uniforms were no longer as immaculately crease-free as they might have been nor for that matter, as Sergeant Harrod had observed, did they fit as well as they might have done. But in a village street or crowded bar, at night-time, they should pass muster. Or so Smith devoutly hoped.

It was a typical main street in a typical high alpine village. The buildings lining either side of the street, solid, rugged, four-square buildings, looked as if they had been defying the bitter Bavarian winters for a long long time and intended going on doing so for as long again. Nearly all the houses were of the wooden chalet type, with great sweeping eaves and balconies running the full width of the front of the houses. A few were of comparatively modern construction, with shingled walls, large double-glazed windows and fancy wrought-iron grille-work, but most were very old and low, planked with rough adze-cut wood, and having the interlocking wall-beams projecting at the corners.

There were no street lamps but neither was there any attempt at a blackout. Elongated rectangles of light from uncurtained windows patterned the snow-packed streets. Beyond the far or southern end of the street, intermittently seen through the sweeping curtains of snow, a cluster of bright lights seemed to hang suspended in the sky. Instinctively, almost, Smith stopped to gaze at this distant constellation and his men stopped with him. The lights of the Schloss Adler, the castle of the eagle, seemed impossibly remote, as unattainable as the mountains of the moon. Wordlessly, the men looked at them in long silence, then at one another, then, by mutual and still silent consent, moved on their way again, their boots crunching crisply in the beaten snow, their frozen breaths wisping away in the chill night wind.

The main street – the only street – was deserted, quite empty of life. Inevitably so, on so bitter a night. But if the street was deserted, the village was anything but: the sounds of laughter and singing and the babel of voices filled the night air and the nose-to-tail row of parked German trucks along one side of the street showed clearly enough just who was responsible for the singing and the laughter. For the training troops in the military barracks on the Blau See there was only one centre of entertainment for twenty miles around and this village was it: the Gasthäuser and Weinstuben were jammed to the doors with soldiers of the Alpenkorps, probably the most highly trained combat troops in Europe.

Schaffer said plaintively: ‘I don’t really feel like a drink, boss.’

‘Nonsense,’ Smith said encouragingly. ‘You’re just shy at the thought of meeting strangers.’ He stopped in front of a Gasthaus with the legend ‘Drei Könige’ above the door. ‘Here’s a likely looking place, now. Hang on a minute.’

He climbed the steps, opened the door and looked inside. Down in the street the other five looked at one another, the same mingled apprehension and expectancy mirrored in every eye. Austrian Schrammel music, hauntingly and nostalgically evocative of a kindlier and happier age, flooded through the open doorway. The expressions on the faces of the men below didn’t change. There was a time and a place for Schrammel music and this wasn’t it.

Smith shook his head, closed the door and rejoined his men.

‘Packed,’ he said. ‘Not even standing room.’ He nodded across the street to another hostelry, the ‘Eichhof’, a small, squat, beetle-browed building with adze-cut beams and an air of advanced dilapidation. ‘Let’s see what this has to offer.’

But the ‘Eichhof’ had nothing to offer. Regretfully but firmly Smith closed its front door and turned away.

‘Jammed,’ he announced. ‘Besides, a low-class dump unsuitable for officers and NCOs of the Wehrmacht. But this next place looks more promising, don’t you think?’

From the pointed silence it was apparent that the other five didn’t think anything of the kind, and, in fact, apart from the factor of size, the third Weinstube looked remarkably like the ones Smith had just passed up. ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’, it was called, and above the sign was a snow-shrouded wooden carving of a wild deer.

Smith walked up the half-dozen steps to the front door and opened it. He winced as the blast of sound reached him, an almost physical assault upon the ear-drums. Heaven knew the last two Weinstuben had been clamorous enough but compared to this place they now seemed, in retrospect, to have been invested in a cathedral silence. To the blaring accompaniment of a battery of discordant accordions what appeared, from the sheer volume of sound, to be an entire regiment were giving ‘Lili Marlene’ all they had. Smith glanced at his men, nodded and passed inside.

As the others followed, Schaffer paused in the doorway as Christiansen took his arm and said wonderingly: ‘You think he thinks this isn’t packed?’

‘They must,’ Schaffer conceded, ‘have had them packed six deep in the other joints.’

FOUR

They weren’t exactly stacked six deep inside ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’ but they might well have been if the music-swaying crowd of elbow-jostling customers had assumed the horizontal instead of the perpendicular. He had never, Smith thought, seen so many people in one bar before. There must have been at least four hundred of them. To accommodate a number of that order called for a room of no ordinary dimensions, and this one wasn’t. It was a very big room indeed. It was also a very very old room.

The floor of knotted pine sagged, the walls sagged and the massive smoke-blackened beams on the roof seemed to be about ready to fall down at any moment. In the middle of the room stood a huge black wood-burning stove, a stove stoked with such ferocious purpose that the cast-iron top cover glowed dull red. From just below the cover two six-inch twenty-foot long black-enamelled stove pipes led off to points high up on opposite sides of the room – a primitive but extremely efficient form of central heating. The three-sided settees – half booths – lining three walls of the room were oak darkened by age and smoke and unknown centuries of customers, each booth having recessed holes for stowing newspapers rolled round slats of wood. The twenty or so tables scattered across the floor had hand-cut wooden tops of not less than three inches in thickness with chairs to match. Most of the back of the room was taken up by a solid oaken bar with a coffee-machine at one end, and, behind the bar, swing doors that presumably led to the kitchen. What little illumination there was in the room came from ceiling-suspended and very sooty oil lamps, each one with its generations-old patch of coal-black charred wood in the roof above.

Smith transferred his attention from the room to the customers in the room, a clientele of a composition such as one might expect to find in a high Alpine village with a military encampment at its back door. In one corner were a group of obvious locals, men with still, lean, aquiline, weather-beaten faces, unmistakably men of the mountains, many of them in intricately embroidered leather jackets and Tyrolean hats. They spoke little and drank quietly, as did another small group at the back of the room, perhaps a dozen or so nondescript civilians, clearly not locals, who drank sparingly from small Schnapps glasses. But ninety per cent of the customers were soldiers of the German Alpenkorps, some seated, many more standing, but all giving of their very best with ‘Lili Marlene’, and nearly all of them enthusiastically waving their pewter-capped litre Steinbechers in the air, happily oblivious, in that moment of tearfully nostalgic romanticism, of the fact that the amount of beer finding its way to comrades’ uniforms and the floor was about the equivalent of a moderately heavy rainstorm.

Behind the bar was the obvious proprietor, a gargantuan three-hundred pounder with an impassive moon-like face and several girls busy filling trays with Steinbechers. Several others moved about the room, collecting or serving beer-mugs. One of them approaching in his direction caught Smith’s eye.

It would have been surprising if she hadn’t. It would have been surprising if she hadn’t caught the attention of every man there. But there was no surprise. She did. She would have won any Miss Europe contest hands down if she had had a face other than her own which, though pleasant and plump, was rather plain. But any possible lack of attraction in that cheerfully smiling face was more than over-compensated for elsewhere. She was dressed in a gaily-patterned dirndl and Tyrolean blouse, had a hand-span waist, an hour-and-a-half-glass figure and an obvious predilection for low-cut blouses, that in terms of attracting local custom, must have been worth a fortune to the gigantic proprietor behind the bar. She drew a great deal of attention from the assembled soldiery, not all of it just consisting of admiring glances: if she weren’t wearing armour-plating, Smith reflected, she must be permanently black and blue. She approached Smith, brushed back her blonde hair and smiled, the gesture as provocative as the smile.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘Dark beer, please,’ Smith said politely. ‘Six.’

‘With pleasure, sir.’ Again the provocative smile, this time accompanied by a half-appraising, half-lingering look from cornflower blue eyes, then she turned and walked away, if her method of locomotion could strictly be described as walking. Schaffer, a slightly dazed expression on his face, stared after her, then caught Smith by the arm.

‘Now I know why I left Montana, boss.’ His voice held something of the dazed quality on his face. ‘It wasn’t because of the horses after all.’

‘Your mind on the job if you don’t mind, Lieutenant.’ Smith looked thoughtfully after the girl, rubbed his chin and said slowly: ‘Barmaids know more about what’s going on in their own manor than any chief of police – and that one looks as if she might know more than most. Yes, I’ll do that.’

‘Do what?’ Schaffer asked suspiciously.

‘Try to get next to her.’

‘I saw her first,’ Schaffer said plaintively.

‘You can have the next dance,’ Smith promised. The levity of the words was belied by the cool watchful expression on his face as his eyes constantly travelled the room. ‘When you get your drinks, circulate. See if you can hear any mention of Carnaby or Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer.’

He caught sight of an empty chair by a corner table, moved across and sat in it, nodding politely to a rather bleary-eyed Alpenkorps captain deep in what appeared to be rather patronizing conversation with two lieutenants. The captain showed no more than a brief recognition of his presence and, as far as Smith could tell, no other person present was showing the slightest interest in either himself or his companions. The accordion band finished its stint more or less on the same note and at the same time and the singing of ‘Lili Marlene’ died away. For long seconds there was a profound and nostalgic silence, four hundred men alone with Lili Marlene under the barrack gate lantern, then, as if on cue, a babel of voices broke out all over the room: four hundred men with unfinished litre mugs do not remain sentimental for overly long.

He caught sight of the girl returning with six Steinbechers on a tray, pushing her way through the crowd and fending off admirers with a practised hand. She gave drinks to Smith’s men who immediately but unostentatiously broke up and began to wander away into different parts of the room. The girl looked around, located Smith, smiled brightly, crossed to his table, and put the Steinbecher on it. Before she could straighten, Smith put his arm around her waist and pulled her on to his knee. The Jäger captain across the table broke off his conversation, stared across in startled disapproval, opened his mouth as if to speak, caught Smith’s discouraging glance, decided to mind his own business and resumed his conversation. Smith, in his turn, looked away, squeezed the girl’s waist, patted her knee and smiled what he hoped was a winning smile.

‘And what might your name be, my Alpine rose?’ His voice had a slightly slurred edge to it.

‘Heidi.’ She struggled to rise, but didn’t really put her heart into it. ‘Please, Major. I have work to do.’

‘There is no more important work than entertaining soldiers of the Fatherland,’ Smith said loudly. Holding Heidi firmly to forestall any attempt at escape, he took a long pull at his beer, then continued, quietly now, the mug still in front of his face: ‘Shall I sing you a song?’

‘What song?’ Heidi asked warily. ‘I hear too much singing.’

‘I whistle better than I sing. Listen.’ He whistled, very softly the first two bars of ‘Lorelei’. ‘Do you like that?’

Heidi stiffened and stared but immediately relaxed and smiled at him coquettishly.

‘It’s very nice, Major. And I’m sure you have a beautiful singing voice, too.’

Smith put his Steinbecher down with an unsteady bang that brought more disapproval from the other side of the table then lifted his hand to wipe the froth from his lips. Heidi smiled down at him, but the wary eyes weren’t smiling.

Smith said from behind his hand: ‘The men at the bar? The civilians? Don’t turn round.’

‘Gestapo.’ She made another apparently futile attempt to free herself. ‘From the castle.’

‘One’s a lip-reader.’ Smith had the Steinbecher in front of his face again. ‘I can tell. They’re watching. Your room in five minutes. Hit me good and hard.’

Heidi stared at him in bewilderment, then yelped in pain as he pinched her, far from gently. She drew back, her right hand came over in a round-house swing and the sound of the slap could be heard clear across the crowded room, cutting sharply through the deep buzz of conversation. The voices died away, Steinbechers remained poised half-way towards lips, and every eye in the room turned until it was focused on the scene of the disturbance. Smith now had the exclusive and undivided attention of close on four hundred German soldiers which was exactly how he wanted it: no man anxious to avoid attention at all costs would ever do anything to incur the slightest risk of drawing that unwanted attention.

Heidi pushed herself to her feet, rubbed herself tenderly, snatched up the note which Smith had earlier placed on the table and stalked haughtily away. Smith, his already reddening face discomfited and tight in anger, rose, made to leave the table then halted when confronted by the Jäger captain who had already risen from his side of the table. He was a spruce, erect youngster, very much of the Hitler Jugend type, punctilious and correct but at that moment rather suffering from the effect of too many Steinbechers. Beneath the redly-dulled eyes lay a gleam which bespoke the not uncommon combination of self-importance and officious self-righteousness.

‘Your conduct does not become an officer of the Wehrmacht,’ he said loudly.

Smith did not reply at once. The embarrassed anger faded from his face to be replaced by an expressionlessly penetrating stare. He gazed unwinkingly into the captain’s eyes for so long that the other finally looked away. When Smith’s voice came it was too quiet to be heard even at the next table.

‘Herr Major, when you talk to me, little man.’ The tone was glacial: so now were also the eyes. ‘Major Bernd Himmler. You may have heard of me?’

He paused significantly and the young captain seemed to shrink perceptibly before his eyes. Himmler, head of the Gestapo, was the most feared man in Germany. Smith could have been any relative of Himmler, possibly even his son.

‘Report to me at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning,’ Smith said curtly. He swung away without waiting for an answer. The Alpenkorps captain, suddenly very sober indeed, nodded wordlessly and sank wearily into his chair. As Smith strode towards the door the hubbub of conversation resumed. For the soldiers stationed in that remote military outpost, drinking beer, very large quantities of beer, was the only pastime: such incidents were no sooner seen than forgotten.

On his way to the door Smith stopped briefly by Schaffer and said: ‘Well, I fouled that one up.’

‘You could have handled it differently,’ Schaffer conceded, then went on curiously: ‘What did you say to him? The young Alpine Corps captain, I mean.’

‘I gave him to understand that I was Himmler’s son.’

‘The Gestapo boss?’ Schaffer asked incredulously. ‘God above, you took a chance.’

‘I couldn’t afford to take a chance,’ Smith said cryptically. ‘I’ll go try the “Eichhof”. Better luck there, maybe. Back in ten minutes. Less.’

He left Schaffer looking uncertainly after him, made an urgent negative move of his hand towards Carraciola, who was approaching him, and passed outside. He moved a few paces along the wooden boardwalk, stopped and glanced briefly up and down the snow-filled street. It was deserted in both directions. He turned and walked quickly up a narrow alleyway which paralleled the side of ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’. At the rear stood a small wooden hut. Smith checked again that he was unobserved, opened the door quietly.

‘Eight o’clock,’ he said into the darkness. ‘Come on.’

There was a rustle of clothes and Mary appeared in the doorway. She was shivering violently, her face blue-tinged with the extreme cold. She looked questioningly at Smith but he took her arm without a word and led her quickly to the back door of the Gasthaus. They entered a small hallway, dimly lit by an oil lamp, crossed it, climbed a flight of stairs, moved along a corridor and stopped at the second door on the right. They passed swiftly inside, Smith closing the door behind him.

It was a small room, plainly furnished, but from the chintz soft furnishings and toilet articles on a dressing-table, very obviously a feminine room. Mary sat down on the bed, hugging herself tightly to try to restore some warmth and looked up at Smith without any admiration in her face.

‘I hope you’re enjoying your little game,’ she said bitterly. ‘Seem to know your way around, don’t you?’

‘Instinct,’ Smith explained. He stooped over the low-burning oil lamp by the bed, turned up the flame, glanced briefly about the room, located a battered leather case in one corner, swung it to the bed and snapped open the lid. The case contained women’s clothing. He pulled Mary to her feet and said: ‘Don’t waste time. Take off your clothes. And when I say that, I mean your clothes. Every last stitch. Then get into that top outfit there. You’ll find everything you need.’

Mary stared at him.

‘Those clothes? Why on earth must I –’

‘Don’t argue. Now!’

‘Now it is,’ she said resignedly. ‘You might at least turn your back.’

‘Relax,’ Smith said wearily. ‘I have other things on my mind.’ He crossed to the window, stood peering out through a crack in the chintz curtains and went on: ‘Now, hurry. You’re supposed to be coming off the bus from Steingaden that arrives in twenty minutes’ time. You’ll be carrying that case, which contains the rest of your clothes. Your name is Maria Schenk, you’re from Düsseldorf, a cousin of a barmaid that works here, and you’ve had TB and been forced to give up your factory job and go to the mountains for your health. So you’ve got this new job, through this barmaid, in the Schloss Adler. And you have identity papers, travel permit, references and letters in appropriately postmarked envelopes to prove all of it. They’re in that handbag in the case. Think you got all that?’

‘I – I think so,’ she said uncertainly. ‘But if you’d only tell me –’

‘For God’s sake!’ Smith said impatiently. ‘Time, girl, time! Got it or not?’

‘Maria Schenk, Düsseldorf, factory, TB, cousin here, Steingaden – yes, I have it.’ She broke off to pull a ribbed blue wool dress over her head, smoothed it down and said wonderingly: ‘It’s a perfect fit! You’d think this dress was made for me!’

‘It was made for you.’ Smith turned round to inspect her. ‘36–26–36 or whatever. We – um – broke into your flat and borrowed a dress to use as a model. Thorough, that’s us.’

‘You broke into my flat?’ she asked slowly.

‘Well, now you wouldn’t want to go around like a refugee from a jumble sale,’ Smith said reasonably. He looked at the dress with an approving eye. ‘Does something for you.’

‘I’d like to do something for you,’ she said feelingly. Her eyes mirrored her bafflement, her total lack of understanding. ‘But – but it must have taken weeks to prepare those clothes – and those papers!’

‘Like enough,’ Smith agreed. ‘Our Forgery Section did a very special job on those papers. Had to, to get you into the lion’s den.’

‘Weeks,’ Mary said incredulously. ‘Weeks! But General Carnaby’s plane crashed only yesterday morning.’ She stared at him, registering successive expressions of confusion, accusation and, finally, downright anger. ‘You knew it was going to crash!’

‘Right first time, my poppet,’ Smith said cheerfully. He gave her an affectionate pat. ‘We rigged it.’

‘Don’t do that,’ she snapped, then went on carefully, her face still tight with anger: ‘There really was a plane crash?’

‘Guaranteed. The plane crash-landed on the airfield HQ of the Bavarian Mountain Rescue pilots. Place called Oberhausen, about five miles from here. The place we’ll be leaving from, incidentally.’

‘The place we’ll be leaving –’ She broke off, gazed at him a long moment then shook her head almost in despair. ‘But – but in the plane I overheard you telling the men that if the mission failed or you had to split up that you were all to make a rendezvous at Frauenfeld, over the Swiss border.’

‘Did you now?’ There was mild interest in Smith’s voice. ‘I must be getting confused. Anyway, this Mosquito put down on the Oberhausen airfield riddled with machine-gun bullet holes. British machine-gun bullet holes, but what the hell, holes are holes.’

‘And you’d risk the life of an American general – and all the plans for the Second Front –’

‘Well, now, that’s why I’m in such a hurry to get inside the Schloss Adler.’ Smith cleared his throat. ‘Not before they get his secrets out of him but before they find out that he’s not an American general and knows no more about the Second Front than I do about the back of the moon.’

‘What! He’s a plant?’

‘Name of Jones,’ Smith nodded. ‘Cartwright Jones. American actor. As a Thespian he’s pretty second rate but he’s a dead ringer for Carnaby.’

She looked at him with something like horror in her eyes.

‘You’d risk an innocent –’

‘He’s getting plenty,’ Smith interrupted. ‘Twenty-five thousand dollars for a one-night stand. The peak of his professional career.’

There came a soft double knock on the door. A swift sliding movement of Smith’s hand and a gun was suddenly there, a Mauser automatic, cocked and ready to go. Another swift movement and he was silently by the door, jerking it open. Smith put his gun away. Heidi came in, Smith shutting the door behind her.

‘Well, cousins, here we are,’ he announced. ‘Mary – now Maria – and Heidi. I’m off.’

‘You’re off!’ Mary said dazedly. ‘But – but what am I supposed to do?’

‘Heidi will tell you.’

Mary looked uncertainly at the other girl. ‘Heidi?’

‘Heidi. Our top secret agent in Bavaria since 1941.’

‘Our – top –’ Mary shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it!’

‘Nobody would.’ Smith surveyed Heidi’s opulent charms with an admiring eye. ‘Brother, what a disguise!’

Smith opened the back door of the Gasthaus with a cautious hand, moved swiftly outside and remained stock-still in the almost total darkness, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the change of light. The snow, he thought, was heavier than when they had first entered ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’ and the wind had certainly freshened. It was bitingly cold.

Satisfied that he was unobserved, Smith turned to the left, took two steps and bit off an exclamation as he tripped over some unseen object and fell his length in the snow. He rolled over three times in the snow just in case any bystander might have a knife or gun and homicidal ideas about using them, then got to his feet with cat-like speed, his Mauser in one hand, his pencil-flash in the other. He snapped on the torch and swung round in a 360° turn. He was alone.

Alone, that was, but for the crumpled form over which he had tripped, an Alpenkorps sergeant lying face-down in the snow, a form lying still and curiously relaxed in that huddled shapelessness of death.

Smith stooped and rolled the figure over to expose the great red stain in the snow where the body had been lying. The pencil-flash rested briefly on the front of the tunic, a tunic gashed and soaked in blood. The beam of the torch moved up to the face. No more cloisters for this don, Smith thought in irrational emptiness, no more honey still for tea, and the fault is all mine and I can see it in his face. The already dulled and faded eyes of Torrance-Smythe stared up at him in the sightless reproach of death.

Smith straightened to his feet, his face remote and withdrawn, and quartered the immediate ground area with his light. There were no signs of a struggle but struggle there must have been, for some tunic buttons had been ripped off and the high collar torn open. Smithy had not died easily. Flash still in hand, Smith walked slowly along to the mouth of the narrow alleyway, then stopped. A confusion of foot-prints, dark smears of blood in the trodden snow, dark bare patches on the wooden walls of the Gasthaus where struggling men had staggered heavily against it – here was where the struggle had been. Smith switched off the light, returned both torch and gun to their hiding-places and stepped out into the street. On the one side was ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’ with the sound of singing once again emanating from it, on the other side a brightly-lit telephone kiosk outside a Post Office. In the kiosk, talking animatedly on the telephone, was a uniformed figure, a soldier Smith had never seen before. The street itself was deserted.

Schaffer leaned negligently against the bar, the picture of complete and careless relaxation. His face belied him. It was grim and shocked and he was savagely shredding a cigarette between his fingers.

‘Smithy!’ Schaffer’s voice was a low and vicious whisper. ‘Not Smithy! You sure, boss?’

‘I’m sure.’ Smith’s face still held the same remote and withdrawn expression, almost as if all feeling had been drained from him. ‘You say he left in a hurry three minutes after I’d gone. So he wasn’t after me. Who else left?’

‘No idea.’ Schaffer snapped the cigarette in half, dropped it to the floor. ‘The place is packed. And there’s another door. I can’t believe it. Why old Smithy? Why Torrance-Smythe. He was the cleverest of us all.’

‘That’s why he’s dead,’ Smith said sombrely. ‘Now listen carefully. It’s time you knew the score.’

Schaffer looked at him steadily and said: ‘It’s more than time.’

Smith began to speak in a very low voice, in fluent completely idiomatic German, careful that his back was turned to the Gestapo officers at the far end of the bar. After a minute or two he saw Heidi returning to the room through the doorway behind the bar but ignored her as she ignored him. Almost immediately afterwards a gradual diminution in the babel of talk, followed by an almost complete silence, made him fall quiet himself and follow the direction of the gaze of hundreds of soldiers all of whom were looking towards the door.

There was reason for the silence, especially good reason, Smith thought, for soldiers almost totally cut off from womankind. Mary Ellison, clad in a belted rain-coat, with a scarf over her head and a battered suitcase in her hand, was standing in the doorway. The silence seemed to deepen. Women are rare at any time in a high Alpine Gasthaus, unaccompanied young women even rarer and beautiful young women on their own virtually unknown. For some moments Mary stood there uncertainly, as if unsure of her welcome or not knowing what to do. Then she dropped her bag, and her face lit up as she caught sight of Heidi, a face transformed with joy. Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, Smith thought inconsequentially. With a face and a figure and an acting talent like that, she could have had Hollywood tramping a path of beaten gold to her doorstep … Through the silent room she and Heidi ran toward one another and embraced.

‘My dear Maria! My dear Maria!’ There was a break in Heidi’s voice that made Smith reflect that Hollywood might have been well advised to tramp out two paths of beaten gold. ‘So you came after all!’

‘After all these years!’ Mary hugged the other girl and kissed her again. ‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Cousin Heidi! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! Of course I came. Why ever not?’

‘Well!’ Heidi made no effort to lower her voice as she looked around significantly. ‘They’re a pretty rough lot, hereabouts. You should carry a gun, always. Hunter battalion, they call themselves. They’re well named!’

The soldiers broke out into a roar of laughter and the normal hubbub of sound resumed almost at once. Arm in arm, Heidi led Mary across to the small group of civilians standing at the far end of the bar. She stopped in front of the man in the centre of the group, a dark, wiry, intelligent-faced man who looked very very tough indeed, and performed the introductions.

‘Maria, this is Captain von Brauchitsch. He – um – works in the Schloss Adler. Captain, my cousin, Maria Schenk.’

Von Brauchitsch bowed slightly.

‘You are fortunate in your cousins, Heidi. We were expecting you, Miss Schenk.’ He smiled. ‘But not someone as beautiful as this.’

Mary smiled in turn, her face puzzled. ‘You were expecting –’

‘He was expecting,’ Heidi said dryly. ‘It is the captain’s business to know what is going on.’

‘Don’t make me sound so sinister, Heidi. You’ll frighten Miss Schenk.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The next cable-car leaves in ten minutes. If I might escort the young lady –’

‘The young lady is going to my room first,’ Heidi said firmly. ‘For a wash-up and a Kaffee-Schnapps. Can’t you see that she’s half-dead with cold?’

‘I do believe her teeth are chattering,’ von Brauchitsch said with a smile. ‘I thought it might have been me. Well, the cable-car after the next one, then.’

‘And I’m going with her,’ Heidi announced.

‘Both of you?’ Von Brauchitsch shook his head and smiled again. Von Brauchitsch was always smiling. ‘My lucky night.’

‘Permits, travel documents, identity cards and letters you have,’ Heidi said. She fished up some papers from the recesses of her Tyrolean blouse and handed them to Mary who was sitting across from her on the bed in her room. ‘Plan of the castle and instructions. Do your homework well then give them back to me. I’ll take them up. You might be searched – they’re a suspicious bunch up there. And drink up that Schnapps – first thing von Brauchitsch will do is to smell your breath. Just to check. He checks everything. He’s the most suspicious of the lot.’

‘He seemed a very pleasant man to me,’ Mary said mildly.

‘He’s a very unpleasant Gestapo officer,’ Heidi said dryly. When Heidi returned to the bar, Smith and Schaffer had been rejoined by Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. All five appeared to be carefree in their drinking and chatting inconsequentially, but their low and urgent voices were evidence enough of the desperate worry in their minds. Or in the minds of some of them.

‘You haven’t seen old Smithy, then?’ Smith asked quietly. ‘None of you saw him go? Then where in hell has he got to?’

There was no reply, but the shrugs and worried frowns were reply enough. Christiansen said: ‘Shall I go and have a look?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Smith said. ‘I’m afraid it’s too late to go anywhere now.’

Both doors of ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’ had suddenly burst open and half a dozen soldiers were coming quickly in through either door. All had slung machine-carbines, Schmeissers, at the ready. They fanned out along the walls and waited, machine-carbines horizontal, fingers on triggers, their eyes very calm, very watchful.

‘Well, well,’ Christiansen murmured. ‘It was a nice war.’

The sudden and total silence was emphasized rather than broken by the crisp footfalls on the wooden floor as a full colonel of the Wehrmacht came striding into the room and looked coldly around him. The gargantuan proprietor of the Gasthaus came hurrying round from the back of the bar, tripping over chairs in the anxiety and fear limned so unmistakably clearly in his round pumpkin of a face.

‘Colonel Weissner!’ It required no acute ear to catch the shake in the proprietor’s voice. ‘What in God’s name –’

‘No fault of yours, mein Herr.’ The colonel’s words were reassuring which was more than the tone of his voice was. ‘But you harbour enemies of the state.’

‘Enemies of the state.’ In a matter of seconds the proprietor’s complexion had changed from a most unbecoming puce to an even more unbecoming washed-out grey while his voice now quavered like a high-C tuning fork. ‘What? I? I, Josef Wartmann –’

‘Please.’ The Colonel held up his hand for silence. ‘We are looking for four or five Alpenkorps deserters from the Stuttgart military prison. To escape, they killed two officers and a guardroom sergeant. They were known to be heading this way.’

Smith nodded and said in Schaffer’s ear: ‘Very clever. Very clever indeed.’

‘Now then,’ Weissner continued briskly. ‘If they’re here, we’ll soon have them. I want the senior officers present of drafts thirteen, fourteen and fifteen to come forward.’ He waited until two majors and a captain came forward and stood at attention before him. ‘You know all your officers and men by sight?’

The three officers nodded.

‘Good. I wish you –’

‘No need, Colonel.’ Heidi had come round from behind the bar and now stood before Weissner, hands clasped respectfully behind her back. ‘I know the man you’re after. The ringleader.’

‘Ah!’ Colonel Weissner smiled. ‘The charming –’

‘Heidi, Herr Colonel. I have waited table on you up in the Schloss Adler.’

Weissner bowed gallantly. ‘As if one could ever forget.’

‘That one.’ Her face full of a combination of righteous indignation and devotion to duty, Heidi pointed a dramatically accusing finger at Smith. ‘That’s the one, Herr Colonel. He – he pinched me!’

‘My dear Heidi!’ Colonel Weissner smiled indulgently. ‘If we were to convict every man who ever harboured thoughts of –’

‘Not that, Herr Colonel. He asked me what I knew or had heard about a man called General Cannabee – I think.’

‘General Carnaby!’ Colonel Weissner was no longer smiling. He glanced at Smith, motioned guards to close in on him, then glanced back at Heidi. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘Herr Colonel!’ Heidi was stiff with outraged dignity. ‘I hope I am a good German. And I value my engagements at the Schloss Adler.’ She half-turned and pointed across the room. ‘Captain von Brauchitsch of the Gestapo will vouch for me.’

‘No need. We will not forget this, my dear child.’ He patted her affectionately on the cheek, then turned to Smith, the temperature of his voice dropping from warm to sub-zero. ‘Your accomplices, sir, and at once.’

‘At once, my dear Colonel?’ The look he gave Heidi was as glacial as the Colonel’s voice. ‘Surely not. Let’s get our priorities straight. First, her thirty pieces of silver. Then us.’

‘You talk like a fool,’ Colonel Weissner said contemptuously. ‘Heidi is a true patriot.’

‘I’m sure she is,’ Smith said bitterly.

Mary, her face still and shocked, stared down from the uncurtained crack in Heidi’s dark room as Smith and the four others were led out of the front door of ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’ and marched off down the road under heavy escort to where several command cars were parked on the far side of the street. Brusquely, efficiently, the prisoners were bundled into two of the cars, engines started up and within a minute both cars were lost to sight round a bend in the road. For almost a minute afterwards Mary stood there, staring out unseeingly on the swirling snow, then pulled the curtains together and turned back towards the darkened room.

She said in a whisper: ‘How did it happen?’

A match scratched as Heidi lit and turned up the flame of the oil lamp.

‘I can’t guess.’ Heidi shrugged. ‘Someone, I don’t know who, must have tipped Colonel Weissner off. But I put the finger on him.’

Mary stared at her. ‘You – you –’

‘He’d have been found out in another minute anyway. They were strangers. But it strengthens our hand. I – and you – are now above suspicion.’

‘Above suspicion!’ Mary looked at her in disbelief then went on, almost wildly: ‘But there’s no point in going ahead now!’

‘Is there not?’ Heidi said thoughtfully. ‘Somehow, I feel sorrier for Colonel Weissner than I do for Major Smith. Is not our Major Smith a man of resource? Or do our employers in Whitehall lie to us? When they told me he was coming here, they told me not to worry, to trust him implicitly. A man of infinite resource – those were their exact words – who can extricate himself from positions of utmost difficulty. They have a funny way of talking in Whitehall. But already I trust him. Don’t you?’

There was no reply. Mary stared at the floor, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Heidi touched her arm and said softly, ‘You love him as much as that?’

Mary nodded in silence.

‘And does he love you?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. He’s been too long in this business – even if he did know,’ she said bitterly, ‘he probably wouldn’t tell himself.’

Heidi looked at her for a moment, shook her head and said: ‘They should never have sent you. How can you hope to –’ She broke off, shook her head again, and went on: ‘It’s too late now. Come on. We mustn’t keep von Brauchitsch waiting.’

‘But – but if he doesn’t come? If he can’t escape – and how can he escape?’ She gestured despairingly at the papers-lying on the bed. ‘They’re bound to check with Düsseldorf first thing in the morning about those forged references.’

Heidi said without any particular expression in her voice: ‘I don’t think he’d let you down, Mary.’

‘No,’ Mary said dolefully. ‘I don’t suppose he would.’

The big black Mercedes command car swept along the snow-packed road that paralleled the Blau See, the windscreen wipers just coping with the thickly-swirling snow that rushed greyly back at the windscreen through powerful headlight beams. It was an expensive car and a very comfortable one, but neither Schaffer up front nor Smith in the rear seat experienced any degree of comfort whatsoever, either mental or physical. On the mental side there was the bitter prospect of the inevitable firing squad and the knowledge that their mission was over even before it had properly begun: on the physical side they were cramped in the middle of their seats, Schaffer flanked by driver and guard, Smith by Colonel Weissner and guard, and both Smith and Schaffer were suffering from pain in the lower ribs: the owners of the Schmeisser machine-pistols, the muzzles of which were grinding into the captives’ sides, had no compunction about letting their presence be known.

They were now, Smith estimated, half-way between village and barracks. Another thirty seconds and they would be through the barrack gates. Thirty seconds. No more.

‘Stop this car!’ Smith’s voice was cold, authoritative with an odd undertone of menace. ‘Immediately, do you hear? I must think.’

Colonel Weissner, startled, turned and stared at him. Smith ignored him completely. His face reflected an intensely frowning concentration, a thin-lipped anger barely under control, the face of a man to whom the thought of disobedience of his curt instruction was unthinkable: most certainly not the face of a man going to captivity and death. Weissner hesitated, but only fractionally. He gave an order and the big car began to slow.

‘You oaf! You utter idiot!’ Smith’s tone, shaking with anger, was low and vicious, so low that only Weissner could hear it. ‘You’ve almost certainly ruined everything and, by God, if you have, Weissner, you’ll be without a regiment tomorrow!’

The car pulled into the roadside and stopped. Ahead, the red tail lights of the command car in front vanished into a snow-filled darkness. Weissner said brusquely, but with a barely perceptible tremor of agitation in his voice: ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

‘You knew about this American general, Carnaby?’ Smith’s face, eyes narrowed and teeth bared in anger, was within six inches of Weissner’s. ‘How?’ He almost spat the word out.

‘I dined in the Schloss Adler last night. I –’

Smith looked at him in total incredulity.

‘Colonel Paul Kramer told you? He actually talked to you about him?’ Weissner nodded wordlessly. ‘Admiral Canaris’ Chief of Staff! And now everybody knows. God in heaven, heads will roll for this.’ He screwed the heels of his palms into his eyes, lowered his hands wearily to his thighs, gazed ahead unseeingly and shook his head, very slowly. ‘This is too big, even for me.’ He fished out his pass and handed it to Weissner, who examined it in the beam of a none too steady torch. ‘Back to the barracks at once! I must get through to Berlin immediately. My uncle will know what to do.’

‘Your uncle?’ By what seemed a great effort of will Weissner looked up from the pass he held in his hand: his voice was no steadier than the torch. ‘Heinrich Himmler?’

‘Who do you think?’ Smith snarled. ‘Mickey Mouse?’ He dropped his voice to a low murmur. ‘I trust you never have the privilege of meeting him, Colonel Weissner.’ He gave Weissner the benefit of a long and speculative look singularly lacking in any encouragement, then turned away and prodded the driver, none too lightly, in the back. ‘The barracks – and make it quick!’

The car moved off. Anything that the nephew of the dreaded Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the Gestapo, said was good enough for the driver.

Smith turned to the guard by his side. ‘Take that damned thing out of my ribs!’

Angrily, he snatched the gun away. The guard, who had also heard of Himmler, meekly yielded up the machine-pistol. One second later he was doubled up in helpless retching agony as the butt of the Schmeisser smashed into his stomach and another second later Colonel Weissner was pinned against the window of his Mercedes as the muzzle of the Schmeisser ground into his right ear.

Smith said: ‘If your men move, you die.’

‘Okay.’ Schaffer’s calm voice from the front seat. ‘I have their guns.’

‘Stop the car,’ Smith ordered.

The car came to a halt. Through the windscreen Smith could see the lights of the barracks guardroom, now less than two hundred yards away. He gave Weissner a prod with the Schmeisser muzzle.

‘Out!’

Weissner’s face was a mask of chagrined rage but he was too experienced a soldier even to hesitate. He got out.

‘Three paces from the car,’ Smith said. ‘Face down in the snow. Hands clasped behind your head. Schaffer, your gun on your guard. Out beside the Colonel, you.’ This with his gun muzzle in the driver’s neck.

Twenty seconds later, Schaffer at the wheel, they were on their way, leaving three men face downwards in the snow and the fourth, Smith’s erstwhile guard, still doubled up in agony by the roadside.

‘A creditable effort, young Himmler,’ Schaffer said approvingly.

‘I’ll never be that lucky again,’ Smith said soberly. ‘Take your time passing the barracks. We don’t want any of the sentries getting the wrong idea.’

At a steady twenty miles an hour they passed the main gates and then the secondary gates, apparently, as far as Smith could see, without exciting any comment. Just behind the three-pointed star on the car’s radiator flew a small triangular pennant, the Camp Commandant’s personal standard, and no one, it was safe to assume, would question the comings and goings of Colonel Weissner.

For half a mile or so beyond the secondary gates the road ran northwards in a straight line with, on the left, a sheer hundred-foot cliff dropping down into the waters of the Blau See, and, to the right, a line of pines, not more than fifty yards wide, backing up against another vertical cliff-face which soared up until lost in the snow and the darkness.

At the end of the half-mile straight, the road ahead swept sharply to the right to follow an indentation in the Blau See’s shore-line, a dangerous corner marked by white fencing which would normally have been conspicuous enough by night-time but which was at the moment all but invisible against the all-enveloping background of snow. Schaffer braked for the corner. A thoughtful expression crossed his face and he applied still heavier pressure to the brake pedal and glanced at Smith.

‘An excellent idea.’ It was Smith’s turn to be approving. ‘We’ll make an agent out of you yet.’

The Mercedes stopped. Smith gathered up the Schmeissers and pistols they had taken from Weissner and his men and got out. Schaffer wound down the driver’s window, released the handbrake, engaged gear and jumped out as the car began to move. With his right arm through the window Schaffer walked and then, as the car began to gather speed, ran along beside the Mercedes, his hand on the steering wheel. Twenty feet from the cliff edge he gave a last steering correction, jerked the quadrant hand throttle wide open and leapt aside as the car accelerated. The wooden fence never had a chance. With a splintering crash barely audible above the roaring of the engine at maximum revs in first gear, the Mercedes went through the barrier as if it had been made of cardboard, shot out over the edge of the cliff and disappeared from sight.

Smith and Schaffer reached the safety of an unbroken stretch of fencing and peered down just in time to see the car, upside down now and its headlamps still blazing, strike the surface of the lake with an oddly flat explosive sound, like distant gunfire. A column of water and weirdly phosphorescent spray reached half-way up the cliff side. When it subsided, they could at once locate from an underwater luminescence the position of the sinking car: the headlamps were still burning. Smith and Schaffer looked at each other then Smith thoughtfully removed his peaked cap and sent it sailing over the edge. The strong gusting wind blew the cap in against the cliff-face, but it tumbled on down and landed, inside up, on still surfacing bubbles iridescently glittering from the light now far below. Then the light went out.

‘So who cares?’ Schaffer straightened up from the fencing and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Wasn’t our car. Back to the village, hey?’

‘Not on your life,’ Smith said emphatically. ‘And I mean that – literally. Come on. Other way.’

Clutching their recently acquired weapons, they ran round the corner in the direction in which the car had been travelling. They had covered less than seventy yards when they heard the sound of car engines and saw wavering beams lighting up the splintered fence. Seconds later Smith and Schaffer were off the road, hidden in the pines and moving slowly back in the direction of a command car and two armoured cars that had now pulled up at the broken barrier.

‘That’s it, then, Herr Colonel.’ An Alpenkorps sergeant with shoulder-slung gun peered gingerly over the edge of the cliff. ‘Going too fast, saw it too late – or never saw it at all. The Blau See is over a hundred metres deep here, Herr Colonel. They’re gone.’

‘Maybe they’re gone and maybe they’re not. I wouldn’t trust that lot as far as my front door.’ Colonel Weissner’s voice carried clearly and sounded bitter. ‘They may have faked it and doubled back. Send one party of men straight into the pines there as far as the cliff wall. Five metre spacing. Let them use their torches. Then another party of men five hundred metres in the car back towards the camp. You go with them, Sergeant. Again spread out to the cliff-face. Let them come together. And be quick.’

Schaffer, from his hiding-place behind the bole of a pine, looked thoughtfully at Smith.

‘I have to concede a point, boss, it’s perhaps as well we didn’t go straight back to the village. Cunning old devil, isn’t he?’

‘And what does that make me?’ Smith murmured.

‘Okay, okay. I’ll concede that point, too.’

Five minutes passed. Comparatively little of the falling snow penetrated the thickly-matted branches of the pines and the two men could clearly see the occasional flicker of torches as the line of men nearest them moved away to the south, their lights probing behind tree-trunks and under windfalls as they searched for the two escaped prisoners. Colonel Weissner paced up and down, slowly, beside his command car, his head bowed as if immersed in thought. From time to time he consulted his watch. As Smith watched, he moved out to the unbroken fencing and remained there, peering down towards the surface of the Blau See.

By and by Smith and Schaffer could hear the distant sound of muffled voices and within a minute the sergeant moved into the beam of the command car headlamps, approached Colonel Weissner and saluted.

‘Not even a footprint, Herr Colonel.’

Weissner straightened and turned.

‘There wouldn’t be,’ he said sombrely. ‘I’ve just seen a hat floating in the water. A squalid end for such brave men, Sergeant. A squalid end.’

FIVE

The cable-car moved slowly out of the lower station at the beginning of its long climb up to the castle. An impossible climb, Mary thought, a dangerous and impossible climb. Peering through the front windows she could just distinguish the outline of the first pylon through the thinly-driving snow. The second and third pylons were invisible, but the intermittently shining cluster of lights suspended impossibly high in the sky showed clearly enough where they had to go. People have made it before, she thought dully, we’ll probably make it, too. The way she felt then, with the bottom gone from her world, she didn’t particularly care whether she made it or not.

The cable-car was a twelve-passenger vehicle, painted bright red outside, well-lit inside. There were no seats, only grab-rails along the two sides. That the grab-rails were very necessary became immediately and alarmingly obvious. The wind was now very strong and the car began to sway alarmingly only seconds after clearing the shelter of the lower station.

Apart from two soldiers and an apparent civilian, the only other passengers consisted of von Brauchitsch, Mary and Heidi, the last now with a heavy woollen coat and cossack fur hat over her ordinary clothes. Von Brauchitsch, holding on to the grabrail with one hand, had his free arm round Mary’s shoulders. He gave them a reassuring squeeze and smiled down at her.

‘Scared?’ he asked.

‘No.’ And she wasn’t, she hadn’t enough emotion left to be scared, but even with no hope left she was supposed to be a professional. ‘No, I’m not scared. I’m terrified. I feel sea-sick already. Does – does this cable ever break?’

‘Never.’ Von Brauchitsch was reassurance itself. ‘Just hang on to me and you’ll be all right.’

‘That’s what he used to say to me,’ Heidi said coldly.

‘Fräulein,’ von Brauchitsch explained patiently, ‘I am gifted beyond the average, but I haven’t yet managed to grow a third arm. Guests first.’

With a cupped cigarette in his hand, Schaffer leaned against the base of an unmistakable telephone pole and gazed thoughtfully into the middle distance. There was reason both for the hooded cigarette and the thoughtful expression. Less than a hundred yards away from where he stood at the edge of the pines bordering the road running alongside the shore of the Blau See he could see guards, clearly illuminated by over-head lights, moving briskly to and fro in the vicinity of the barrack gates. Dimly seen behind them were the outline of the barracks themselves.

Schaffer shifted his stance and gazed upwards. The snow was almost gone now, the moon was threatening to break through, and he had no difficulty at all in distinguishing the form of Smith, his legs straddled across the lowest cross-bar.

Smith was busily employed with a knife, a specially designed commando knife which, among other advanced features, had a built-in wire-cutter. Carefully, methodically, he brought the wire-cutter to bear. With eight consecutive snips eight consecutive telephone wires fell to the ground. Smith closed and pocketed his knife, disentangled his legs from the cross-bar, wrapped his arms round the pole and slid down to the ground. He grinned at Schaffer.

‘Every little helps,’ he said.

‘Should hold them for a while,’ Schaffer agreed. Once more they gathered up their guns and moved off to the east, vanishing into the pine woods which bordered the rear of the barracks.

The cable-car swayed more alarmingly than ever. It had now entered upon the last near-vertical lap of its journey. With von Brauchitsch’s arm still around her shoulders, with her face still pressed against the front windows of the car, Mary stared up at the towering battlements, white as the driving snow, and thought that they reached up almost to the clouds themselves. As she watched, a break came in the wisping clouds and the whole fairy-tale castle was bathed in bright moonlight. Fear touched her eyes, she moistened her lips and gave an involuntary shiver. Nothing escaped von Brauchitsch’s acute perception. He gave her shoulders another reassuring squeeze, perhaps the twentieth in that brief journey.

‘Not to worry, Fräulein. It will be all right.’

‘I hope so.’ Her voice was the ghost of a whisper.

The same unexpected moonlight almost caught Smith and Schaffer. They had just crossed the station tracks and were moving stealthily along towards the left luggage office when the moon broke through. But they were still in the shadows of the over-hanging station roof. They pressed back into those shadows and peered along the tracks, past the hydraulic bumpers which marked the end of the line. Clearly now, sharply-limned as if in full daylight, red etched against the white, they could see one cable-car approaching the lower station, the other climbing the last few vertical feet towards the header station and, above that, the dazzling outline of the Schloss Adler glittering under the bright moon.

‘That helps,’ Schaffer said bitterly. ‘That helps a lot.’

‘Sky’s still full of clouds,’ Smith said mildly. He bent to the keyhole of the left luggage office, used his skeleton keys and moved inside. Schaffer followed, closing the door.

Smith located their rucksacks, cut a length of rope from the nylon, wrapped it round his waist and began stuffing some hand grenades and plastic explosives into a canvas bag. He raised his head as Schaffer diffidently cleared his throat.

‘Boss?’ This with an apprehensive glance through the window.

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Boss, has it occurred to you that Colonel Weissner probably knows all about this cache by this time? What I mean is, we may have company soon.’

‘We may indeed,’ Smith admitted. ‘Surprised if we don’t have. That’s why I’ve cut this itsy-bitsy piece of rope off the big coil and why I’m taking the explosives and grenades only from my rucksack and yours. It’s a very big coil – and no one knows what’s inside our rucksacks. So it’s unlikely that anything will be missed.’

‘But the radio –’

‘If we broadcast from here we might be caught in the act. If we take it away and they find it gone they’ll know that that car at the bottom of the Blau See is empty. Is that it?’

‘More or less.’

‘So we compromise. We remove it, but we return it here after we’ve broadcast from a safe place.’

‘What do you mean “safe place”,’ Schaffer demanded plaintively. The darkly saturnine face was unhappy. ‘There isn’t a safe place in Bavaria.’

‘There’s one not twenty yards away. Last place they’d look.’ He tossed Schaffer a bunch of skeleton keys. ‘Ever been inside a Bavarian ladies’ cloakroom?’

Schaffer fielded the keys, stared at Smith, shook his head and left. Quickly he moved down the tracks, his torch flashing briefly on and off. Finally his torched settled on a doorway with, above it, the legend DAMEN.

Schaffer looked at it, pursed his lips, shrugged his shoulders and got to work on the lock.

Slowly, with apparently infinite labour, the cable-car completed the last few feet of its ascent and passed in under the roof of the Schloss Adler header station. It juddered to a halt, the front door opened and the passengers disembarked. They moved from the header station – built into the northwest base of the castle – up through a steeply-climbing twenty-five foot tunnel which had heavy iron doors and guards at either end. Passing the top gateway, they emerged into a courtyard, the entrance of which was sealed off by a massively-barred iron gate guarded by heavily armed soldiers and Doberman pinschers. The courtyard itself was brightly illuminated by the light of dozens of uncurtained interior windows. In the very centre of the courtyard stood the helicopter which had that morning brought Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer to the Schloss Adler, Under the cover of a heavy tarpaulin – momentarily unnecessary because of the cessation of the snow – a dungareed figure, possibly the pilot, worked on the helicopter engine with the aid of a small but powerful arc-lamp.

Mary turned to von Brauchitsch, still holding a proprietary grip on her arm, and smiled ruefully.

‘So many soldiers. So many men – and, I’m sure, so few women. What happens if I want to escape from the licentious soldiery?’

‘Easy.’ Von Brauchitsch really did have, Mary thought dully, a most charming smile. ‘Just jump from your bedroom window. One hundred metres straight down and there you are. Free!’

The ladies’ cloakroom in the station was a superlatively nondescript place, bleakly furnished with hard-backed benches, chairs, deal tables and a sagging wooden floor. The Spartans would have turned up their noses at it, in its sheer lack of decorative inspiration it could have been surpassed only by its counterpart in England. The expiring remains of a fire burnt dully in a black enamel stove.

Smith was seated by the central table, radio beside him, consulting a small book by the light of a hooded pencil-flash and writing on a slip of paper. He checked what he had written, straightened and handed the book to Schaffer.

‘Burn it. Page by page.’

‘Page by page? All?’ Surprise in the saturnine face. ‘You won’t be requiring this any more?’

Smith shook his head and began to crank the radio handle.

There was a very much better fire in the Operations Room in Whitehall, a pine-log fire with a healthy crackle and flames of a respectable size. But the two men sitting on either side of the fire were a great deal less alert than the two men sitting by the dying embers of the fire in the Bavarian Alps. Admiral Rolland and Colonel Wyatt-Turner were frankly dozing, eyes shut, more asleep than awake. But they came to full wakefulness, jerking upright, almost instantly, when the long-awaited call-sign came through on the big transceiver manned by the civilian operator at the far end of the room. They glanced at each other, heaved themselves out of their deep arm-chairs.

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy.’ The voice on the radio was faint but clear. ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. You hear me? Over.’

The civilian operator spoke into his microphone, ‘We hear you. Over.’

‘Code. Ready? Over.’

‘Ready. Over.’

Rolland and Wyatt-Turner were by the operator’s shoulder now, his eyes fixed on his pencil as he began to make an instantaneous transcription of the meaningless jumble of letters beginning to come over the radio. Swiftly the message was spelt out: TORRANCE-SMYTHE MURDERED. THOMAS CHRISTIANSEN AND CARRACIOLA CAPTURED.

As if triggered by an unheard signal, the eyes of Rolland and Wyatt-Turner lifted and met. Their faces were strained and grim. Their eyes returned to the flickering pencil.

ENEMY BELIEVE SCHAFFER AND SELF DEAD, the message continued. EFFECTING ENTRY INSIDE THE HOUR. PLEASE HAVE TRANSPORT STANDING BY NINETY MINUTES. OVER.

Admiral Rolland seized the microphone from the operator.

‘Broadsword! Broadsword! Do you know who I am, Broadsword?’

‘I know who you are, sir. Over.’

‘Pull out, Broadsword. Pull out now. Save yourselves. Over.’

‘You – must – be – joking.’ The words were spoken in slow motion, a perceptible pause between each pair. ‘Over.’

‘You heard me.’ Rolland’s voice was almost as slow and distinct. ‘You heard me. That was an order, Broadsword.’

‘Mary is already inside. Over and out.’

The transceiver went dead.

‘He’s gone, sir,’ the operator said quietly.

‘He’s gone,’ Rolland repeated mechanically. ‘Dear God, he’s gone.’

Colonel Wyatt-Turner moved away and sat down heavily in his chair by the fire. For such a big, burly man he appeared curiously huddled and shrunken. He looked up dully as Admiral Rolland sank into the opposite chair.

‘It’s all my fault.’ The Colonel’s voice was barely distinguishable. ‘All my fault.’

‘We did what we had to do. All our fault, Colonel. It was my idea.’ He gazed into the fire. ‘Now this – this on top of everything else.’

‘Our worst day,’ Wyatt-Turner agreed heavily. ‘Our worst day ever. Maybe I’m too old.’

‘Maybe we’re all too old.’ With his right forefinger Rolland began to tick off the fingers of his left hand. ‘HQ Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. Secret alarm triggered. Nothing missing.’

‘Nothing taken,’ Wyatt-Turner agreed wearily. ‘But the vigil emulsion plates show photostatic copies taken.’

‘Two. Southampton. Barge-movement duplicates missing. Three, Plymouth. Time-lock in the naval HQ inoperative. We don’t know what this means.’

‘We can guess.’

‘We can guess. Dover. Copy of a section of the Mulberry Harbour plans missing. An error? Carelessness? We’ll never know. Five, Bradley’s HQ guard sergeant missing. Could mean anything.’

‘Could mean everything. All the troop movements for Overlord’s Omaha beach are there.’

‘Lastly, seven OS reports today. France, Belgium, Netherlands. Four demonstrably false. Other three unverifiable.’

For long moments there was a heavy, a defeated silence, finally broken by Wyatt-Turner.

‘If there was ever any doubt, there’s none now.’ He spoke without looking up, his eyes gazing emptily into the fire. ‘The Germans have almost total penetration here – and we have almost none on the continent. And now this – Smith and his men, I mean.’

‘Smith and his men,’ Rolland echoed. ‘Smith and his men. We can write them off.’

Wyatt-Turner dropped his voice, speaking so softly that the radio operator couldn’t overhear.

‘And Operation Overlord, sir?’

‘Operation Overlord,’ Rolland murmured. ‘Yes, we can write that off, too.’

‘Intelligence is the first arm of modern warfare,’ Wyatt-Turner said bitterly. ‘Or has someone said that before?’

‘No intelligence, no war.’ Admiral Rolland pressed an intercom button. ‘Have my car brought round. Coming, Colonel? To the airfield?’

‘And a lot farther than that. If I have your permission, sir.’

‘We’ve discussed it.’ Admiral Rolland shrugged. ‘I understand how you feel. Kill yourself if you must.’

‘I’ve no intention.’ Wyatt-Turner crossed to a cupboard and took out a Sten gun, turned to Rolland and smiled: ‘We may encounter hostiles, sir.’

‘You may indeed.’ There was no answering smile on the Admiral’s face.

‘You heard what the man said?’ Smith switched off the transmitter, telescoped the aerial and glanced across at Schaffer. ‘We can pull out now.’

‘Pull out now? Pull out now?’ Schaffer was outraged. ‘Don’t you realize that if we do they’ll get to Mary inside twelve hours.’ He paused significantly, making sure he had all Smith’s attention. ‘And if they get to her they’re bound to get to Heidi ten minutes later.’

‘Come off it, Lieutenant,’ Smith said protestingly. ‘You’ve only seen her once, for five minutes.’

‘So?’ Schaffer was looking positively belligerent. ‘How often did Paris see Helen of Troy? How often did Antony see Cleopatra. How often did Romeo––’ He broke off then went on defiantly: ‘And I don’t care if she is a traitor spying on her own people.’

‘She was born and brought up in Birmingham,’ Smith said wearily.

‘So who cares? I draw the line at nothing. Even if she is a Limey––’ He paused. ‘English?’

‘Come on,’ Smith said. ‘Let’s return this radio. We may have callers soon.’

‘We mustn’t be raising too many eyebrows,’ Schaffer agreed.

They returned the radio, locked the left luggage office and were just moving towards the station exit when they were halted by the sound of truck engines and a siren’s ululation. They pressed back against a wall as headlights lit up the station entrance. The leading truck came to a skidding halt not ten yards away.

Schaffer looked at Smith. ‘Discretion, I think?’

‘Discretion, indeed. Behind the booking office.’

The two men moved swiftly alongside the tracks and hid in the deep shadows behind the booking office. A sergeant, the one who had organized the search along the Blau See, came running through the entrance, followed by four soldiers, located the left luggage office, tried the door handle, reversed his machine-pistol and hammered the lock without effect, reversed his gun again, shot away the lock and passed inside, torch in hand. He appeared at the doorway almost at once.

‘Tell the captain. They didn’t lie. The Engländers’ gear is here!’ One of the soldiers left and the sergeant said to the three remaining men: ‘Right. Get their stuff out and load it up.’

‘There goes my last pair of cotton socks,’ Schaffer murmured mournfully as their rucksacks were taken away. ‘Not to mention my toothbrush and –’

He broke off as Smith caught his arm. The sergeant had stopped the man carrying the radio, taken it from him, placed his hand on it and stood quite still. He was directly under one of the small swinging electric lights and the expression on his face could clearly be seen to change from puzzlement to disbelief to complete and shocked understanding.

‘Kapitän!’ the sergeant shouted. ‘Kapitän.’

An officer came hurrying through the station entrance.

‘The radio, Kapitän! It’s warm, very warm! It’s been in use inside the last five minutes.’

‘In the last five minutes? Impossible!’ He stared at the sergeant. ‘Unless –’

‘Yes, Herr Kapitän. Unless.’

‘Surround the station,’ the officer shouted. ‘Search every room.’

‘Oh God!’ Schaffer moaned. ‘Why can’t they leave us alone?’

‘Quickly,’ Smith said softly. He took Schaffer’s arm and they moved through the dark shadows till they reached the ladies’ cloakroom. Careful not to rattle his skeleton keys, Smith had the door open in seconds. They passed inside and locked the door behind them.

‘This won’t look so good in my obituary,’ Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words.

‘What won’t?’

‘Gave his life for his country in a ladies’ lavatory in Upper Bavaria. How can a man RIP with that on his mind? … What’s our friend outside saying?’

‘If you shut up we might hear.’

‘And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere.’ The German captain was barking out his commands in the best parade-ground fashion. ‘If a door is locked, break it open. If you can’t break it open, shoot the lock away. And if you don’t want to die in the next five minutes, never forget that these are violent and extremely dangerous men almost certainly armed with stolen Schmeisser machine-pistols, apart from their own weapons. Make no attempt to capture them. Shoot on sight and shoot to kill.’

‘You heard?’ Smith said.

‘I’m afraid I did.’ There was a perceptible click as Schaffer cocked his machine-pistol.

They stood side-by-side in the darkness listening to the sounds of the search, the calling of voices, the hammering of rifle butts on wood, the splintering of yielding doors, the occasional short burst of machine-gun fire where a door, presumably, had failed to yield to more conventional methods of persuasion. The sounds of the approaching search grew very close.

‘They’re getting warm,’ Schaffer murmured.

Schaffer had underestimated the temperature. Just as he finished speaking an unseen hand closed on the outer door handle and rattled the door furiously. Smith and Schaffer moved silently and took up position pressed close against the wall, one on either side of the door.

The rattling ceased. A heavy crashing impact from the outside shook the door on its hinges. A second such impact and the woodwork in the jamb by the lock began to splinter. Two more would do it, Smith thought, two more.

But there were no more.

‘Gott in Himmel, Hans!’ The voice beyond the door held – or appeared to hold – a mixture of consternation and outrage. ‘What are you thinking of? Can’t you read?’

‘Can’t I –’ The second voice broke off abruptly-and when it came again it was in tones of defensive apology. ‘DAMEN! Mein Gott! DAMEN!’ A pause. ‘If you had spent as many years on the Russian Front as I have –’ His voice faded as the two men moved away.

‘God bless our common Anglo-Saxon heritage,’ Schaffer murmured fervently.

‘What are you talking about?’ Smith demanded. He had released his tense grip on the Schmeisser and realized that the palms of his hands were damp.

‘This misplaced sense of decency,’ Schaffer explained.

‘A far from misplaced and highly developed sense of self-preservation,’ Smith said dryly. ‘Would you like to come searching for a couple of reputed killers, like us, knowing that the first man to find us would probably be cut in half by a burst of machine-gun fire? Put yourself in their position. How do you think those men feel. How would you feel?’

‘I’d feel very unhappy,’ Schaffer said candidly.

‘And so do they. And so they seize on any reasonable excuse not to investigate. Our two friends who have just left have no idea whatsoever whether we’re in here or not and, what’s more, the last thing they want to do is to find out.’

‘Stop making with the old psychology. All that matters is that Schaffer is saved. Saved!’

‘If you believe that,’ Smith said curtly, ‘you deserve to end up with a blindfold round your eyes.’

‘How’s that again?’ Schaffer asked apprehensively.

‘You and I,’ Smith explained patiently, ‘are not the only people who can put ourselves in the places of the searchers. You can bet your life that the captain can and more than likely the sergeant, too – you saw how quickly he caught on to the damn’ radio. By and by one or other is going to come by, see this closed and undamaged door, blow his top and insist on a few of his men being offered the chance to earn a posthumous Iron Cross. What I mean is, Schaffer is not yet saved.’

‘What do we do, boss?’ Schaffer said quietly. ‘I don’t feel so funny any more.’

‘We create a diversion. Here are the keys – this one. Put it in the lock and hold it ready to turn. We’ll be leaving in a hurry – troops of this calibre can’t be fooled for long.’

He dug into his knapsack, fished out a hand grenade, crossed the cloakroom into the washroom and, in almost total darkness, felt his way across it to where the window at the back should have been, finally located it from the source of a faint wash of light. He pressed his nose against the glass but could see nothing, cursed softly as he realized a washroom window would always certainly be frosted, located the latch and slowly swung the window wide. With infinite caution, a fraction of an inch at a time, he thrust his head slowly through the window.

Nobody blew his head off. There were soldiers immediately to be seen, it was true, soldiers armed and at the ready, but they weren’t looking in his direction: there were five of them, spread out in an arc of a circle, perhaps fifteen yards from the station entrance, and every machine-pistol was trained on that entrance. Waiting for the rabbits to bolt, Smith thought.

What was of much more interest was the empty truck parked only feet away from the window where he was: it was the reflected light from its side-lights that had enabled him to locate the window. Hoping that the truck was built along conventional lines, Smith armed the grenade, counted three, lobbed it under the back wheels of the truck and ducked behind the shelter of the washroom wall.

The two explosions – grenade and petrol tank – went off so almost simultaneously as to be indistinguishable in time. Shattered glass from the window above showered down on his head and his ear-drums hurt fiercely both from the roar of sound and the proximity to the explosive shock-wave. Smith made no attempt to inspect the damage he had done, less from the urgent need for haste to leave there than from the very obvious fact that the remains of the truck outside had burst into flames and to have lifted his head above that window-sill would have been a swift form of illuminated suicide: not that he could have done so in any event for the wind-driven flames from the truck were already beginning to lick through the shattered washroom window. On hands and knees Smith scuttled across the washroom floor, not rising till he had reached the cloakroom. Schaffer, who had his hand on the key and the door already open a fraction of an inch turned at Smith’s approach.

‘To the hills, boss?’ he enquired.

‘To the hills.’

The track-side of the station was, predictably, deserted: those who had not automatically run to investigate the source of the explosion would have as automatically assumed that the explosion was in some way connected with an escape attempt or resistance on the part of the hunted men. However it was, the result was the satisfactory same.

They ran along the tracks till they came to the bumpers at the end of the line, skirted these and continued running until they were safely among the scatter of houses that rose steeply up the hill-side on the eastern side of the village. They stopped to take breath and looked back the way they had come.

The station was on fire, not yet heavily on fire, but, with flames rising six to eight feet and black smoke billowing into the night sky, obviously already beyond any hope of extinction.

Schaffer said: ‘They’re not going to be very pleased.’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘What I mean is, they’re really going to go after us now. With everything they have. They’ve Doberman pinschers up at the castle and I’ve no doubt they have them at the camp too. They’ve only to bring them to the station, sniff our gear, have them circle the station, pick up our scent and that’s it. Smith and Schaffer torn to shreds. I’ll take on the Alpenkorps by numbers, but I draw the line at Doberman pinschers, boss.’

‘I thought it was horses you were scared of?’ Smith said mildly.

‘Horses, Doberman pinschers, you name it, I’m scared of it. All it’s got to have is four feet.’ He looked gloomily at the burning station. ‘I’d make a rotten vet.’

‘No worry,’ Smith assured him. ‘We won’t be here long enough for any of your four-footed pals to come bothering you.’

‘No?’ Schaffer looked at him suspiciously.

‘The castle,’ Smith said patiently. ‘That’s what we’re here for. Remember?’

‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ The flames from the blazing station were now licking thirty, forty feet up in the air. ‘You gone and ruined a perfectly good station, you know that?’

‘As you would say yourself,’ Smith reminded him, ‘it wasn’t our station to start with. Come on. We’ve a call to make then we’ll go see what kind of reception awaits us at the Schloss Adler.’

Mary Ellison was just at that moment discovering what the reception in the Schloss Adler was like. In her case it was none too pleasant. Von Brauchitsch and Heidi beside her, she was gazing around the great hall of the castle, stone walls, stone flags, a dark oaken roof, when a door at the end of the hall opened and a girl came towards them. There was an arrogance, a crisp authority about her: she marched, rather than walked.

But a very beautiful girl, Mary had to admit to herself, big, blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful. She could have been a pin-up girl for the Third Reich. At the moment, the blue eyes were very cold.

‘Good-evening, Anne-Marie,’ von Brauchitsch said. There was a marked lack of cordiality in his voice. ‘This is the new girl, Fräulein Maria Schenk. Maria, this is the Colonel’s secretary, in charge of all female staff.’

‘Took your time about getting here, didn’t you, Schenk?’ If Anne-Marie had a soft, lilting, mellifluous voice she wasn’t bothering to use it just then. She turned to Heidi and gave her an icy up-and-down. ‘And why you? Just because we let you wait table when the Colonel has company –’

‘Heidi is this girl’s cousin,’ von Brauchitsch interrupted brusquely. ‘And she has my permission.’ The cold implication that she should confine herself to her duties was unmistakable.

Anne-Marie glared at him but made no attempt to press the point. Very few people would have done. Von Brauchitsch was just that sort of person.

‘In here, Schenk.’ Anne-Marie nodded to a side door. ‘I have a few questions to ask.’

Mary looked at Heidi, then at von Brauchitsch, who shrugged and said: ‘Routine investigation, Fräulein. I’m afraid you must.’

Mary preceded Anne-Marie through the doorway. The door was firmly closed behind them. Heidi and von Brauchitsch looked at each other. Heidi compressed her lips and the expression that momentarily flitted over her face about matched the one Anne-Marie had been wearing: von Brauchitsch made the age-old helpless gesture of lifting his shoulders high, palms of the hands turned up.

Within half a minute the reason for von Brauchitsch’s helpless gesture became obvious. Through the door there came first the sound of a raised voice, a brief scuffle then a sharp cry of pain. Von Brauchitsch exchanged another resigned glance with Heidi, then turned as he heard heavy footsteps behind him. The man approaching was burly, weather-beaten, middle-aged and in civilian clothes: but although not in uniform he could never have been mistaken for anything other than an army officer. The heavy blue-shaven jowls, bull-neck, close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes made him almost a caricature of the World War I Prussian Uhlan cavalry officer. That he was by no means as fossilized as he appeared was quite evident from the distinctly respectful manner in which von Brauchitsch addressed him.

‘Good evening, Colonel Kramer.’

‘Evening, Captain. Evening, Fräulein.’ He had an unexpectedly gentle and courteous voice. ‘You wear an air of expectancy?’

Before either could answer, the door opened and Anne-Marie and Mary entered: Mary gave the impression of having been pushed into the room. Anne-Marie was slightly flushed and breathing rather heavily, but otherwise her beautiful Aryan self. Mary’s clothes were disordered, her hair dishevelled and it was obvious that she had been crying. Her cheeks were still tear-stained.

‘We’ll have no more trouble with her,’ Anne-Marie announced with satisfaction. She caught sight of Kramer and the change in her tone was perceptible. ‘Interviewing new staff, Colonel.’

‘In your usual competent fashion, I see,’ Colonel Kramer said dryly. He shook his head. ‘When will you learn that respectable young girls do not like being forcibly searched and having their under-clothes examined to see if they were made in Piccadilly or Gorki Street?’

‘Security regulations,’ Anne-Marie said defensively.

‘Yes, yes.’ Kramer’s voice was brusque. ‘But there are other ways.’ He turned away impatiently. The engaging of female staff was not the problem of the deputy chief of the German Secret Service. While Heidi was helping Mary to straighten her clothes, he went on, to von Brauchitsch: ‘A little excitement in the village tonight?’

‘Nothing for us.’ Von Brauchitsch shrugged. ‘Deserters.’

Kramer smiled.

‘That’s what I told Colonel Weissner to say. I think our friends are British agents.’

‘What!’

‘After General Carnaby, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Kramer said carelessly. ‘Relax, Captain. It’s over. Three of them are coming up for interrogation within the hour. I’d like you to be present later on. I think you’ll find it most entertaining and– ah– instructive.’

‘There were five of them, sir. I saw them myself when they were rounded up in “Zum Wilden Hirsch”.’

‘There were five,’ Colonel Kramer corrected. ‘Not now. Two of them – the leader and one other – are in the Blau See. They commandeered a car and went over a cliff.’

Mary, her back to the men and Anne-Marie, smoothed down her dress and slowly straightened. Her face was stricken. Anne-Marie turned, saw Mary’s curiously immobile position and was moving curiously towards her when Heidi took Mary’s arm and said quickly: ‘My cousin looks ill. May I take her to her room?’

‘All right.’ Anne-Marie waved her hand in curt dismissal. ‘The one you use when you are here.’

The room was bleak, monastic, linoleum-covered, with a made-up iron bed, chair, tiny dressing-table, a hanging cupboard and nothing else. Heidi locked the door behind them.

‘You heard?’ Mary said emptily. Her face was as drained of life as her voice.

‘I heard – and I don’t believe it.’

‘Why should they lie?’

‘They believe it.’ Heidi’s tone was impatient, almost rough. ‘It’s time you stopped loving and started thinking. The Major Smiths of this world don’t drive over cliff edges.’

‘Talk is easy, Heidi.’

‘So is giving up. I believe he is alive. And if he is, and if he comes here and you’re gone or not there to help him, you know what he’ll be then?’ Mary made no reply, just gazed emptily into Heidi’s face. ‘He’ll be dead. He’ll be dead because you let him down. Would he let you down?’

Mary shook her head dumbly.

‘Now then,’ Heidi went on briskly. She reached first under her skirt then down the front of her blouse and laid seven objects on the table. ‘Here we are. Lilliput .21 automatic, two spare magazines, ball of string, lead weight, plan of the castle and the instructions.’ She crossed to a corner of the room, raised a loose floor-board, placed the articles beneath it and replaced the board. ‘They’ll be safe enough there.’

Mary looked at her for a long moment and showed her first spark of interest in an hour.

‘You knew that board was loose,’ she said slowly.

‘Of course. I loosened it myself, a fortnight ago.’

‘You – you knew about this as far back as then?’

‘Whatever else?’ Heidi smiled. ‘Good luck, cousin.’

Mary sank on to the bed and sat there motionless for ten minutes after Heidi had gone, then rose wearily to her feet and crossed to her window. Her window faced to the north and she could see the line of pylons, the lights of the village and, beyond that, the darkened waters of the Blau See. But what dominated the entire scene were the redly-towering flames and billowing clouds of black smoke reaching up from some burning building at the far end of the village. For a hundred yards around it night had been turned into day and even if there had been a local fire brigade to hand it would have been clearly impossible for them to approach anywhere near the flames. When that fire went out all that would be left would be smoking ashes. Mary wondered vaguely what it might mean.

She opened her window and leaned out, but cautiously. Even for a person as depressed as she was, there was no temptation to lean too far: castle walls and volcanic plug stretched vertically downwards for almost three hundred feet. She felt slightly dizzy.

To the left and below a cable-car left the castle header station and started to move down to the valley below. Heidi was in that car, leaning out a partially opened window and hopefully waving but Mary’s eyes had again blurred with tears and she did not see her. She closed the window, turned away, lay down heavily on the bed and wondered again about John Smith, whether he were alive or dead. And she wondered again about the significance of that fire in the valley below.

Smith and Schaffer skirted the backs of the houses, shops and Weinstuben on the east side of the street, keeping to the dark shadows as far as it was possible. Their precautions, Smith realized, were largely superfluous: the undoubted centre of attraction that night was the blazing station and the street leading to it was jammed with hundreds of soldiers and villagers. It must, Smith thought, be a conflagration of quite some note, for although they could no longer see the fire itself, only the red glow in the sky above it, they could clearly hear the roaring crackle of the flames, flames three hundred yards away and with the wind blowing in the wrong direction. As a diversion, it was a roaring success.

They came to one of the few stone buildings in the village, a large barn-like affair with double doors at the back. The yard abutting the rear doors looked like an automobile scrapyard. There were half-a-dozen old cars lying around, most of them without tyres, some rusted engines, dozens of small useless engine and body parts and a small mountain of empty oil drums. They picked their way carefully through the debris and came to the doors.

Schaffer used skeleton keys to effect and they were inside, doors closed and both torches on, inside fifteen seconds.

One side of the garage was given over to lathes or machine tools of one kind or another, but the rest of the floor space was occupied by a variety of vehicles, mostly elderly. What caught and held Smith’s immediate attention, however, was a big yellow bus parked just inside the double front doors. It was a typically Alpine post-bus, with a very long overhang at the back to help negotiate mountain hairpin bends: the rear wheels were so far forward as to be almost in the middle of the bus. As was also common with Alpine post-buses in winter, it had a huge angled snow-plough bolted on to the front of the chassis. Smith looked at Schaffer.

‘Promising, you think?’

‘If I was optimistic enough to think we’d ever get back to this place,’ Schaffer said sourly, ‘I’d say it was very promising. You knew about this?’

‘What do you think I am? A bus-diviner? Of course I knew about it.’

Smith climbed into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. Smith switched on and watched the fuel gauge climb up to the half-full mark. He located the headlamps switch and turned it on. They worked. He pressed the starter button and the engine caught at once. Smith killed it immediately. Schaffer watched the performance with interest.

‘I suppose you know you need a PSV licence to drive one of those, boss?’

‘I have one around somewhere. Leave half the explosives in the back of the bus. And hurry. Heidi might be down with the next car.’

Smith climbed down from the driver’s seat, went to the front doors, unbolted both, top and bottom, and pushed gently. The doors gave an inch, then stopped.

‘Padlocked,’ Smith said briefly.

Schaffer surveyed the massive steel plough on the front of the bus and shook his head sorrowfully.

‘Poor old padlock,’ he said.

The snow had stopped but the wind from the west was now very strong. The cold was intense. Masses of ragged dark cloud hurried across the sky and the entire valley was alternately cast into the deepest shadow or bathed in contrastingly dazzling light as the moon was alternately obscured by the clouds or shone through the shifting gaps between them. But there was no alternating light and shade at the far end of the village: the station still burnt furiously enough to render the moon’s best efforts pretty ineffectual.

A cable-car was coming slowly down the valley, less than a hundred yards now from the lower station. Impelled by the powerfully gusting wind, it swung wildly, terrifyingly, across the night sky. But as it approached the end of its journey the motion quickly dampened down and disappeared altogether as it approached the station.

The cable-car jerked to a stop. Heidi, the only passenger, climbed out: understandably enough, she was looking rather pale. She walked down the steps at the back of the station, reached ground level then stopped dead as she heard the softly-whistled first few notes of ‘Lorelei’. She whirled round, then slowly approached two shapes, clad all in white, huddled by the side of the station.

‘The Major Smiths of this world don’t drive off cliff-tops,’ she said calmly. She paused, then stepped forward suddenly and gave each man a quick hug and kiss on the cheek. ‘But you had me a little worried there.’

‘You just keep on worrying like that,’ Schaffer said. ‘No need to worry about him, though.’

Heidi waved a hand in the direction of the other end of the village. From the cable-car station on the lower slopes they had an excellent if distant view of the fire. ‘Are you responsible for this?’ she asked.

‘It was a mistake,’ Smith explained.

‘Yeah. His hand slipped,’ Schaffer added.

‘You two should audition for a turn on vaudeville,’ Heidi said dryly. Suddenly serious she said: ‘Mary thinks you’re both gone.’

‘Weissner doesn’t,’ Smith said. ‘The car that went over the cliff went without us. They’re on to us.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ she murmured. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed the size of the fire.’ She paused, then went on bleakly: ‘They’re not the only ones who are on to you. Kramer knows you’re British agents after General Carnaby.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Smith said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what little bird has been whispering in Kramer’s shell-like ear. One with a very long-range voice, methinks.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Nothing. It’s not important.’

‘It’s not important! But don’t you see?’ Her voice was imploring, almost despairing. ‘They know – or will any minute – that you’re alive. They know who you are. They’ll be expecting you up there.’

‘Ah, but you overlook the subtleties, my dear Heidi,’ Schaffer put in. ‘What they don’t know is that we are expecting them to be expecting us. At least, that’s what I think I mean.’

‘You’re whistling in the dark, Lieutenant. And one last thing: your friends are being brought up to the castle any time now.’

‘For interrogation?’ Smith asked.

‘I don’t expect they’ve been asked up for tea,’ she said acidly.

‘Fair enough,’ Smith nodded. ‘We’ll go up with them.’

‘In the same car?’ The words didn’t question Smith’s sanity, but the tone and expression did.

‘Not “in”. With.’ Smith peered at his watch. ‘The post-bus in Sulz’s garage. Be there in eighty minutes. And oh! – bring a couple of crates of empty beer bottles.’

‘Bring a couple of – oh, all right.’ She shook her head in conviction. ‘You’re both mad.’

‘Shines through in our every word and gesture,’ Schaffer agreed, then, suddenly serious, added: ‘Say a prayer for us, honey. And if you don’t know any prayers, keep your fingers crossed till they ache.’

‘Please come back,’ she said. There was a catch in her voice. She hesitated, made to say more, turned and walked quickly away. Schaffer looked after her admiringly as she walked down the street.

‘There goes the future Mrs Schaffer,’ he announced. ‘Bit tetchy and snappy, perhaps.’ He pondered. ‘But funny, I thought she was near crying at the end there.’

‘Maybe you’d be tetchy and snappy and tearful if you’d been through what she’s been in the past two and a half years,’ Smith said sourly.

‘Maybe she’d be less tetchy and tearful if she knew a bit more about what’s going on.’

‘I haven’t the time to explain everything to everybody.’

‘You can say that again. Devious, boss. That’s the word for you.’

‘Like enough.’ Smith glanced at his watch. ‘I wish to God they’d hurry up.’

‘Speak for yourself.’ Schaffer paused. ‘When we – well, if we – get away, is she coming with us?’

‘Is who coming with us?’

‘Heidi, of course!’

‘Heidi, of course. If we make it – and we can only do it through Mary, and Mary was introduced by –’

‘Say no more.’ He stared after the retreating figure and shook his head. ‘She’ll be a sensation in the Savoy Grill,’ he said dreamily.

SIX

The seconds crawled by and became minutes, and the minutes in turn piled up with agonizing slowness until almost quarter of an hour had passed. Brilliant moonshine and a contrastingly almost total darkness had alternated a score of times as the low, tattered, black clouds scudded across the valley, and the cold deepened until it reached down into the bones of the two watchers in the shadows. And still they waited. They waited because they had to: they couldn’t reach the Schloss Adler without company and company was a long time in coming.

And they waited in silence, each man alone with his own thoughts. What was in Schaffer’s mind Smith couldn’t guess. Probably he was blissfully envisaging himself as the instigator of a series of uncontrollable stampedes in a selection of the better known hostelries in the West End of London. Smith’s own thoughts were much more pragmatic and concerned solely with the immediate future. He was becoming concerned, and seriously concerned, about the intense cold and how it would affect their chances of making the trip up to the castle intact. Stamp their feet and flail their arms as they might, that numbing cold tightened its grip on them with every minute that passed. What they were about to do needed both physical strength and quick reactions in full measure, and that glacial cold was swiftly draining them of both. Briefly and bleakly he wondered what odds any reasonable bookmaker would have given against their chances of reaching the castle but dismissed the thought still-born. When no other option offered there was no point in figuring the percentages, and, besides, they were due to find out immediately: the long-awaited company was at hand.

Two Alpenkorps command cars, the leading one with wailing siren and flashing headlamps, swept up the village street just as the moon broke through the cloud-wrack once again, flooding the valley with light. Smith and Schaffer looked up at the moon, then at each other and then, wordlessly, moved back and pressed more deeply into the shadows on the west side of the lower station. The two metallic clicks seemed unnaturally loud as they eased forward the safety catches of their Schmeisser machine-pistols.

Engines stopped and headlamps faded and died almost on the same instant as the two cars pulled up beneath the steps. Men hurried out and lined up briefly before advancing single file up the station steps. A dozen altogether, Smith counted, an officer, eight guards and Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. All eight guards had their guns at the ready, which seemed a rather superfluous precaution as the three prisoners had their hands manacled behind their backs. Ergo, the guns weren’t there to guard the prisoners but against any rescue attempt by Smith and Schaffer. He and Schaffer, Smith thought wryly, must be acquiring quite a reputation for themselves. But, nonetheless, a reassuring spectacle: if the Germans had known the true reason for his, Smith’s, presence in Bavaria, they would also have known that they could have taken the three prisoners up with only a pea-shooter for protection and still have remained free from molestation.

The last of the twelve men passed inside the lower station. Smith touched Schaffer’s arm. They slung their Schmeissers, scrambled quickly but quietly on to the ice-covered and steeply-sloping roof of the station and silently and with no little difficulty crawled forwards and upwards to the front edge of the roof under which the cable-car would appear as it moved out at the beginning of its long haul towards the castle. They were, Smith knew, terribly exposed: snow-suits or not, a casual passer-by in the street below had only to glance upwards and their detection was certain. Fortunately, there appeared to be no casual passers-by: the free entertainent provided by the burning station was drawing a full house. And then, as the cable began to move, the moon disappeared behind clouds.

They waited, tensely, till the leading edge of the cable-car appeared, swung their legs over the lip of the roof, waited till the suspension bracket passed beneath them, reached down for the cable, allowed themselves to be pulled off the roof, fell across the cable and lowered themselves gently until their feet touched the roof of the cable-car.

Mary walked slowly along the dimly-lit, stone-flagged passage, counting off doors as she went. Outside the fifth she stopped, put her ear to it, stooped, glanced through the keyhole, knocked quietly and waited for a response. There was none. She knocked again, more loudly, with the same result. She turned the handle and found the door locked. From her small handbag she produced a set of skeleton keys. When the door yielded, she slipped quickly inside, closed the door and switched on the light.

The room was a considerable improvement on the one she had been given, although furnished with the same regulation iron bedstead. It was close-carpeted, boasted a couple of arm-chairs, and had a small chair with an Oberleutnant’s uniform on it, a large wardrobe and a chest of drawers with a holstered belt, gun and binoculars resting on its glass top.

Mary locked the door, withdrew the key, crossed the room, lifted the lower sash window and looked down. She was, she saw, directly above the roof of the cable-car header station, a very steeply downward sloping roof the upper edge of which was built into the castle wall itself. She withdrew her head, removed from her handbag a ball of string with a heavy bolt attached to one end, laid it on the bed, picked up the binoculars and took up station by the window. Shivering in the bitter night wind, she adjusted the focus of the field-glasses, then traversed down the line of the aerial cables. And then she had it, dimly seen but unmistakable, the squat black outline of the cable-car, now half-way between the bottom and middle pylons, swaying madly, frighteningly, across the sky in the high and gusting wind.

Smith and Schaffer lay stretched out on the roof, clutching desperately to the suspension bracket, the only anchorage available. The roof was solidly coated with white-sheeted ice, they could find no purchase anywhere for their feet, and their bodies slid uncontrollably in all directions with the violent buffeting of the car beneath them. The sheer physical strain on hands and arms and shoulders was even worse than Smith had feared: and the worst was yet to come.

Schaffer twisted his head and peered downwards. It was a dizzy, vertiginous and frankly terrifying spectacle. The entire valley below seemed to be swinging through a forty-five degree arc. One second he was looking at the line of pines that bordered the western slope of the valley, then the floor of the valley rushed by beneath them and seconds later he was staring at the line of pines that swept up the eastern side of the valley. He twisted his head upwards, but that was no improvement; the lights of the Schloss Adler careened wildly through the same dizzy arc: it was like being on a combination of a roller-coaster, big dipper and runaway Ferris wheel with the notable exception, Schaffer thought bleakly, that the coaster, dipper and Ferris wheel were provided with safety belts and other securing devices designed to prevent the occupant from parting company with his machine. The wind howled its high and lonely threnody through the cables and the suspension bracket. Schaffer looked away, screwed his eyes shut, lowered his head between his outstretched arms and moaned.

‘Still think the horse the world’s worst form of transport?’ Smith asked. His lips were close to Schaffer’s ear.

‘Give me my boots and saddle,’ Schaffer said, then, even more despairingly, ‘Oh, no! Not again!’

Once more, without any warning, the moon had broken through, flooding the two men in its pale cold light. Gauging the time when the strain on their arms was least, they pulled the snow hoods far over their heads and tried to flatten themselves even more closely on to the roof.

In the Schloss Adler two people were watching the wild upward progress of the cable-car, now brilliantly illuminated by the moon. Through Mary’s field-glasses two clearly distinguishable shapes of men could be seen stretched out on the cable-car roof. For half a minute she kept the glasses trained on them, then slowly turned away, her eyes wide, almost staring, her face empty of expression. Fifty feet above her head a sentry with slung gun patrolling the battlements stopped and gazed down at the cable-car crawling up the valley. But he didn’t gaze for long. Although booted, gauntleted and muffled to the ears, he shook with the cold. It was no night for idle spectating. He looked away indifferently and resumed his brisk sentry-go.

Indifference was a quality that was conspicuously lacking on top of the cable-car. The cable-car was on the last lap now, the section between the last pylon and the castle header station. Soon the moment of truth. A minute from then, Smith thought, and they could both well be lying broken and lifeless on the rocks two hundred feet below.

He twisted his head upwards. The cold moon still sailed across a clear gap in the sky but was closing rapidly towards another bank of cloud. The castle battlements, with the header station at the base, seemed almost vertically above his head. So steeply was the car rising on this last section that the volcanic plug itself was now less than fourteen yards away. His gaze followed the volcanic plug downwards till it reached its base: down there, on the slopes below, patrolling guards and their Doberman pinschers were barely the size of beetles.

‘Suits her, doesn’t it?’ Schaffer said suddenly. Harsh edges of strain blurred his voice and his face was tight and desperate. ‘A lovely name.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Smith demanded.

‘Heidi.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Smith stared up at the rapidly closing header station. ‘Her name is Ethel.’

‘You didn’t have to tell me.’ Schaffer tried to sound aggrieved but it didn’t quite come off. He followed Smith’s upward gaze and, after a long pause, said very slowly: ‘Jesus! Look at the slope of that goddamned roof!’

‘I’ve been looking.’ Smith eased his knife from its sheath and made a quick grab at the suspension bracket as a particularly violent swing almost broke his grip with his other hand. ‘Get your knife ready. And for God’s sake don’t lose it.’

The moon slid behind a black patch of cloud and the valley was flooded with darkness. Slowly, carefully, as the cable-car approached the header station and the swaying motion dampened down, Smith and Schaffer eased their way to the after end of the car, rose gingerly but swiftly to their feet and grabbed the cable with their free hands while their feet tried to find what precarious hold they could on the treacherously ice-sheathed roof.

The front of the car passed under the lip of the header station roof. A moment later the suspension bracket followed and Smith lunged forward and upwards, flinging himself bodily on to the roof. His right arm struck downwards and the knife blade pierced the coating of ice and imbedded itself firmly in the wood beneath. Less than a second later Schaffer had landed beside him, the downward arcing knife making contact at exactly the same instant as himself.

The blade broke off at the hilt. Schaffer opened his hand, dropped the haft and clawed desperately at the ice. The dragging nails ripped through the encrusting ice, quite failing to hold him. He reached his left hand to his mouth, tore off the gauntlet and dug both hands in with all the strength that was in him. He slowed, but not enough. His scrabbling toes failed to find any more purchase and he knew he was sliding out over the edge – and that when he went the first thing to halt his fall would be the rock-pile two hundred and fifty feet beneath at the base of the volcanic plug.

Smith had been badly winded by his fall. Several seconds elapsed before he realized that Schaffer wasn’t where he should have been – lying on the roof beside him. He twisted round, saw the white blur of Schaffer’s strained and desperate face, had a vague impression of Schaffer’s eight finger-nails scoring their way through the ice as his body, already up to mid-thigh, slid inexorably over the edge and brought his left hand flashing down with a speed and power that, even in those circumstances, made Schaffer grunt in pain as the vice-like grip clamped over his right wrist.

For some seconds they lay like that, spread-eagled and motionless on the sloping roof, the lives of both dependent on the slim imbedded blade of Smith’s knife; then Schaffer, urged by Smith’s quivering left arm, began to inch his way slowly upwards. Thirty seconds later and he was level with Smith.

‘This is a knife I have, not an ice-axe,’ Smith said hoarsely. ‘Won’t take much more of this. Have you another knife?’

Schaffer shook his head. Momentarily, speech was beyond him.

‘Piton?’

The same shake of the head.

‘Your torch?’

Schaffer nodded, reached under the cumbersome snow-smock with his left hand and eventually managed to wriggle his torch free.

‘Unscrew the bottom,’ Smith said. ‘Throw it away – and the battery.’ Schaffer brought his left hand across to where his right was pinioned by Smith, removed base and battery, flattened the now empty cylinder base a little, reversed his grip and gouged the torch into the ice, downwards and towards himself. He moved his right hand and Smith released his grip. Schaffer remained where he was. Smith smiled and said: ‘Try holding me.’

Schaffer caught Smith’s left wrist. Tentatively, his hand still hooked in readiness, Smith removed his hand from the haft of the knife. Schaffer’s imbedded torch held firm. Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence as the sharp blade cut through the protective sheathing of ice, Smith carved out a secure handhold in the wooden roof of the station, passed his knife to Schaffer, wriggled out of his snow-smock, undid a few turns of the knotted rope round his waist and secured the free end to Schaffer’s belt. He said: ‘With the knife and torch, think you can make it?’

‘Can I make it?’ Schaffer tested both knife and torch and smiled, a pretty strained effort, but his first for some time. ‘After what I’ve been through – well, ever seen a monkey go up a coconut palm tree?’

Fifty feet above their heads, Mary withdrew from the window and laid the binoculars on the chest of drawers. Her hands shook and the metal of the binoculars rattled like castanets against the glass top. She returned to the window and began to pay out the weighted string.

Smith came up the last few feet of the sloping roof at the end of the rope, caught Schaffer’s hand, stood upright on the flat inner section of the roof and at once began to unwind the rest of the knotted rope from his waist. Schaffer, although the temperature was far below freezing, wiped his brow like a man in a heat-wave.

‘Brother!’ He mopped his brow some more. ‘If I can ever do you a favour, like lending you a carfare –’

Smith grinned, clapped his shoulder, reached up into the gloom, caught the weighted end of the suspended string and quickly bent the nylon on to it. He gave two gentle tugs and the rope began to move upwards as Mary hauled it in through the window. Smith waited until two more gentle return tugs indicated that the rope was securely fastened and began to climb.

He was half-way up to the window when the moon broke through. In his Alpenkorps uniform he was perfectly silhouetted against the gleaming white of the castle walls. He hung there motionless, not daring to move, not so much as even daring to glance upwards or downwards lest the movement attract some hostile attention.

Twenty-five feet below him Schaffer peered cautiously over the edge of the header station roof. The guards and dogs were still patrolling the area round the base of the volcanic plug. They had only to give one casual upwards glance and Smith’s discovery was inevitable. Then some hair-prickling sixth sense made Shaffer look sharply upwards and he became very still indeed. The sentry, another circuit of the battlements completed, was standing with hands splayed out on the parapet, gazing out over the valley, perhaps watching the now dying flames from the burnt-out station: he had to lower his eyes only a fraction and that was that. Slowly, with his right hand, Schaffer brought up the Luger with the long perforated silencer screwed to its muzzle and laid it, in the best police fashion, across his left wrist. He had no doubt he could kill his man with one shot, the only question was when best to do it, how to weigh the balance of possibilities. If he waited until the man sighted them, he might give a warning shout or thrust himself back into cover before Schaffer could kill him. If he shot the sentry before he sighted them, then there would be no question of either escape or warning. But there was the possibility that the man might pitch forward over the battlements, crash off the roof of the header station and fall into the valley below, close by the patrolling men and dogs. A possibility only, Schaffer decided, not a probability: the slamming effect of the Luger shell would almost certainly knock him backwards off his feet. Schaffer had never before gunned down an unsuspecting man, but he coldly prepared to do so now. He lined up the luminous sight on the man’s breast-bone and began to squeeze the trigger.

The moon went behind a cloud.

Slowly, stiffly, Schaffer lowered his gun. Schaffer, once again, wiped sweat from his forehead. He had the feeling that he wasn’t through with brow-mopping for the night.

Smith reached the window, clambered over the sill, gave the rope two tugs as a signal for Schaffer to start climbing and passed into the room. It was almost totally dark inside, he’d just time to make out the iron bedstead which had been dragged to the window as anchorage for the rope when a pair of arms wound tightly round his neck and someone started murmuring incoherently in his ear.

‘Easy on, easy on,’ Smith protested. He was still breathing heavily and needed all the air he could get, but summoned enough energy to bend and kiss her. ‘Unprofessional conduct, what’s more. But I won’t report it this time.’

She was still clinging to him, silent now, when Lieutenant Schaffer made his appearance, dragging himself wearily over the sill and collapsing on the iron bedstead. He was breathing very heavily indeed and had about him the air of one who has suffered much.

‘Have they no elevators in this dump?’ he demanded. It took him two breaths to get the words out.

‘Out of training,’ Smith said unsympathetically. He crossed to the door and switched on the light, hurriedly switched it off again. ‘Damn. Get the rope in then pull the curtains.’

‘This is the way they treated them in the Roman galleys,’ Schaffer said bitterly. But he had the rope inside and the curtains closed in ten seconds. As Smith was manoeuvering the bed back into its original position, Schaffer was stuffing the nylon into their canvas bag, a bag, which, in addition to snowsuits and Schmeissers, contained some hand grenades and a stock of plastic explosives. He had just finished tying the neck of the bag when a key scraped in the lock.

Smith motioned Mary to stay where she was as he moved quickly to take up position behind the door: Schaffer, for all his alleged exhaustion, had dropped flat to the floor behind the bed with all the speed and silence of a cat. The door opened and a young Oberleutnant strode into the room, stopping short as he saw Mary, her hand to her mouth. His face registered astonishment, an astonishment almost immediately replaced by an anticipatory half-smile as he stepped forward beyond the opened door. Smith’s arm came down and the young officer’s eyes turned up in his head.

Smith studied the plans of the castle given him by Mary while Schaffer trussed up the Oberleutnant with the nylon, gagged him with tape and shoved him, jack-knifed, into the bottom of the cupboard. For good measure he pulled the top of the bed against the door.

‘Ready when you are, boss.’

‘That’s now. I have my bearings. First left, down the stairs, third left. The gold drawing-room. Where Colonel Kramer holds court. Complete with minstrels’ gallery.’

‘What’s a minstrels’ gallery?’ Schaffer enquired.

‘A gallery for minstrels. Then the next right-hander takes us to the east wing. Down again, second left. Telephone exchange.’

‘Why there?’ Schaffer asked. ‘We’ve already cut the lines.’

‘Not the ones between here and the barracks, we haven’t. Want them to whistle up a regiment of Alpenkorps?’ He turned to Mary. ‘Helicopter still here?’

‘It was when I arrived.’

‘The helicopter?’ Schaffer showed his puzzlement. ‘What gives with the whirlybird, then?’

‘This gives with the whirlybird. They could use it either to whip Carnaby out of here – they might just be nervous if they think we’re on the loose – or they might use it to block our getaway.’

‘If we get away.’

‘There’s that. How are you on immobilizing helicopters, Lieutenant Schaffer? Your report states that you were an up-and-coming racing driver and a very competent mechanic before they scraped the bottom of the barrel and dragged you in.’

‘I volunteered,’ Schaffer said with dignity. ‘About the competence, I dunno. But give me a four-pound hammer and I’ll sure as little fishes immobilize anything from a bull-dozer to a bicycle.’

‘And without the four-pounder? This is not a boilermakers’ convention.’

‘I have been known to use finesse.’

Smith said to Mary: ‘How can we get a sight of this machine?’

‘Just five paces that way.’ She pointed to the door. ‘Every passage window in the Schloss Adler opens on to the courtyard.’

Smith opened the door, glanced up and down the passage and crossed to an opposite window. Schaffer was by his side.

The comings and goings of the moon made no difference to the state of illumination in the Schloss Adler courtyard. Two big overhead arc lamps burned by the heavily-barred entrance gates. A third burned at the opposite end of the courtyard, over the main doorway leading into the castle itself. At a height of about ten feet, four waterproof storm lamps were fastened to the east and west walls of the courtyard. Lights burned from a dozen windows on the east and northern sides. And the brightest light of all came from an arc-lamp that had been rigged above the helicopter and under the temporary protection of a stretched tarpaulin. A figure in green overalls and a high-peaked cap was working on the helicopter’s engine. Smith touched Schaffer’s arm and they moved back into the room where Mary was waiting, closing the door behind them.

‘Seems a straightforward operation,’ Schaffer said. ‘Fixing it so that the chopper doesn’t fly again, I mean. I cross to the main gates, overpower the four men on guard, strangle the four Doberman pinschers, knock off two or three other characters – armed characters – who appear to be patrolling the place all the time, overpower about twenty soldiers who appear to be drinking beer in some sort of canteen across the way, dispose of the guy who’s working on the engine and then immobilize the chopper. I mean, just immobilizing the chopper itself wouldn’t be anything, really, would it?’

‘We’ll think of something,’ Smith said soothingly.

‘I’ll bet you think of something,’ Schaffer said moodily. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’

‘Time’s a-wasting. We won’t be needing those any more.’

Smith folded the plan, handed it to Mary, then frowned as she put it in her bag. ‘You know better than that. The Lilliput: it should be on your person, not in the bag. Here.’ He handed her the Mauser he’d taken from Colonel Weissner. ‘This in your bag. Hide the Lilliput on you.’

‘When I get to my room I will,’ she said primly.

‘All those leering Yankee lieutenants around,’ Schaffer said sadly. ‘Thank heavens I’m a changed man.’

‘His mind is set on higher things,’ Smith explained. He glanced at his watch. ‘Give us thirty minutes.’

They slipped cautiously through the doorway then strode briskly and confidently along the passage, making no attempt to conceal their presence. The bag with the Schmeissers, rope, grenades and explosives Smith swung carelessly from one hand. They passed a bespectacled soldier carrying a sheaf of papers and a girl carrying a laden tray, neither of whom paid any attention to them. They turned right at the end of the passage, reached a circular flight of stairs and went down three floors until they came to the level of the courtyard. A short broad passage, with two doors on either side, took them to the main door leading out to the courtyard.

Smith opened the door and looked out. The scene was very much as Schaffer had feelingly described it, with far too many armed guards and police dogs around for anyone’s peace of mind. The overalled mechanic was still at work on the helicopter’s engine. Smith quietly closed the door and turned his attention to the nearest right-hand door in the passage. It was locked. He said to Schaffer: ‘Keep an eye open at the end of the passage there.’

Schaffer went. As soon as he was in position, Smith brought out skeleton keys. The third key fitted and the door gave under his hand. He signalled Schaffer to return.

With the door closed and locked behind them, they looked around the room, a room faintly but for their purposes adequately lit by the backwash of light shining through the unshuttered window from the courtyard. It was, quite apparently, the fire-fighting HQ of the castle. The walls were hung with drums of rolled hoses, asbestos suits, helmets and fire-axes: wheeled handpumps, CO_2 cylinders and a variety of smaller cylinders for fighting oil and electrical fires took up much of the floor space.

‘Ideal,’ Smith murmured.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ Schaffer agreed. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘If we leave anyone in here,’ Smith explained, ‘he’s unlikely to be discovered unless there’s an actual outbreak of fire. Agreed? So.’ He took Schaffer by the arm and led him to the window. ‘The lad working on the chopper there. About your size, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Schaffer said. ‘And if you’ve got in mind what I think you have in mind, then I don’t want to know, either.’

Smith drew the shutters, crossed to the door and switched on the overhead light.

‘You got any better ideas?’

‘Give me time,’ he complained.

‘I can’t give you what we haven’t got. Take your jacket off and keep your Luger lined up on that door. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Smith left, closing but not locking the door behind him. He passed through the outer doorway, walked a few paces across the courtyard, halted at the base of a set of steps leading up to the helicopter and looked up at the man working above him, a tall rangy man with a thin intelligent face and a lugubrious expression on it. If he’d been working bare-handed with metal tools in that freezing temperature, Smith thought, he’d have had a lugubrious expression on his face, too.

‘You the pilot?’ Smith asked.

‘You wouldn’t think so, would you?’ the over-alled man said bitterly. He laid down a spanner and blew on his hands. ‘Back in Tempelhof I have two mechanics for this machine, one a farm-hand from Swabia, the other a blacksmith’s assistant from the Harz. If I want to keep alive I do my own mechanics. What do you want?’

‘Not me. Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer. The phone.’

‘The Reichsmarschall?’ The pilot was puzzled. ‘I was speaking to him less than fifteen minutes ago.’

‘A call just came through from the Chancellory in Berlin. It seems urgent.’ Smith let a slight note of impatience creep into his voice. ‘You better hurry. Through the main door there, then the first on the right.’

Smith stood aside as the pilot clambered down, looked casually around him. A guard with a leashed Doberman was no more than twenty feet away, but paying no attention to them: with his pinched bluish face sunk deep in his upturned collar, his hands thrust down into his great-coat pockets and his frozen breath hanging heavily in the air, he was too busy concentrating on his own miseries to have time to spare for ridiculous suspicions. Smith turned to follow the pilot through the main door, unobtrusively unholstering his Luger and gripping it by the barrel.

Smith hadn’t intended chopping down the pilot with his gun butt but was left with no option. As soon as the pilot had passed through the side door and seen Schaffer’s Luger pointing at his chest from a distance of four feet his shoulders lifted – the preliminary, Smith knew, not to violence or resistance but to a shout for help. Schaffer caught him as he pitched forward and lowered him to the floor.

Quickly they unzipped the overall from the unconscious man, bound and gagged him and left him lying in a corner. The overall was hardly a perfect fit for Schaffer, but, then, overalls are rarely a perfect fit for anybody. Schaffer switched the pilot’s hat for his own, pulled the peak low over his eyes and left.

Smith switched off the light, unshuttered the window, raised the lower sash and stood, Luger in hand, just far enough back from the window so as not to be seen from outside. Schaffer was already climbing the steps up to the helicopter. The guard was now only feet from the base of the ladder. He’d his hands out of his pockets now and was flailing his arms across his shoulders in an attempt to keep warm.

Thirty seconds later Schaffer climbed down the ladder again, carrying some piece of equipment in his left hand. He reached the ground, lifted the piece of equipment for a closer inspection, shook his head in disgust, lifted his right hand in a vague half-greeting to the uncaring German guard and headed for the main door again. By the time he reached the fire-fighting room, Smith had the window shuttered again and the light on.

‘That was quick,’ Smith said approvingly.

‘Fear lent him wings, as the saying goes,’ Schaffer said sourly. ‘I’m always quick when I’m nervous. Did you see the size of the teeth in that great slavering monster out there?’ He held up the piece of equipment for inspection, dropped it to the floor and brought his heel down on it. ‘Distributor cap. I’ll bet they haven’t another in Bavaria. Not for that engine. And now, I suppose, you want me to go and impersonate the telephone operator.’

‘No. We don’t want to exhaust all your Thespian stamina.’

‘My what?’ Schaffer asked suspiciously. ‘That sounds kinda like a nasty crack to me.’

‘Your acting resources. The only other impersonation you’ll be called to make tonight is that of Lieutenant Schaffer, OSS, the innocent American abroad.’

‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Schaffer said bitterly. He draped the overalls he’d just removed over the unconscious pilot. ‘A cold night. Anyway, the telephone exchange.’

‘Soon. But I’d like to check first how far they’ve got with old Carnaby-Jones. Let’s take a look.’

Two floors higher up and midway along the central passage Smith stopped outside a doorway. At a nod from him, Schaffer reached for a light switch. Except for a faint glow of light at either end, the passage was now completely dark. Smith laid a gentle hand on the door-knob and quietly eased the door open. Fifteen inches, no more. Both men swiftly slid through the narrow gap, Smith quickly and softly closing the door to again.

The room, if so enormous a chamber could be called a room, must have been at least seventy feet long by thirty wide. The farther end of the room was brightly and warmly lit by three large chandeliers: comparatively, the end of the room where Smith and Schaffer stood was shrouded in near darkness.

They stood, not on the floor, but on a platform some dozen feet above the floor. It was a massive and grotesquely carved oaken minstrels’ gallery which completely spanned the thirty-foot width of that end and ran perhaps a quarter of the way down both the longer sides of the room. There were rows of wooden benches, an organ on one side of the door through which they had just passed, a battery of organ pipes on the other. Whoever had built that place had obviously liked the organ and choir-singing: or maybe he just thought he did. From the centre of the front of the gallery, opposite the rear door, a flight of steps with intricately scrolled wooden banisters led down to what was very obviously the gold drawing-room.

It was aptly named, Smith thought. Everything in it was gold or golden or gilt. The enormous wall-to-wall carpet was deep gold in colour, the thickness of the pile would have turned a polar bear green with envy. The heavy baroque furniture, all twisted snakes and gargoyles’ heads, was gilt, the huge couches and chairs covered in a dusty gold lamé. The chandeliers were gilded and, above the enormous white and gilt-plated fireplace, in which a crackling pine log fire burned, hung an almost equally enormous white and gilt-plated mirror. The great heavy curtains could have been made from beaten gold. The ceiling-high oak panelling was a mistake, it continued to look obstinately like oak panelling, maybe the original covering gold paint had worn off. All in all, Smith reflected, it was a room only a mad Bavarian monarch could have conceived of, far less lived in.

Three men were seated comfortably round the great fire, to all appearances having an amicable discussion over after-dinner coffee and brandy, which was being served to them from – almost inevitably – a golden trolley by Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie, like the panelling, was a disappointment: instead of a gold lamé dress she wore a long white silk sheath gown which, admittedly, went very well with her blonde colouring and snow-tan. She looked as if she were about to leave for the opera.

The man with his back to him Smith had never seen before but, because he immediately recognized who the other men were, knew who this man must be: Colonel Paul Kramer, Deputy Chief of the German Secret Service, regarded by MI6 as having the most brilliant and formidable brain in German Intelligence. The man to watch, Smith knew, the man to fear. It was said of Kramer that he never made the same mistake twice – and that no one could remember when he’d last made a mistake for the first time.

As Smith watched, Colonel Kramer stirred, poured some more brandy from a Napoleon bottle by his side and looked first at the man on his left, a tall, ageing, but still good-looking man in the uniform of a Reichsmarschall of the Wehrmacht – at that moment, wearing a very glum expression on his face – and then at the man seated opposite, an iron-grey-haired and very distinguished looking character in the uniform of a lieutenant-general of the US Army. Without a comptometer to hand, it was difficult to say which of the two generals was wearing the more decorations.

Kramer sipped his brandy and said wearily: ‘You make things very difficult for me, General Carnaby. Very, very difficult indeed.’

‘The difficulties are of your own making, my dear Kramer,’ Cartwright Jones said easily. ‘Yours and General Rosemeyer’s here … There is no difficulty.’ He turned to Anne-Marie and smiled. ‘If I might have some more of that excellent brandy, my dear. My word, we’ve nothing like this in SHAEF. Marooned in your Alpine redoubt or not, you people know how to look after yourselves.’

In the gloom at the back of the minstrels’ gallery, Schaffer nudged Smith with his elbow.

‘What gives with old Carnaby-Jones knocking back the Napoleon, then?’ he asked in a low indignant murmur. ‘Why isn’t he being turned on a spit or having the French fits coming out of scopolamine?’

‘Sssh!’ Smith’s nudge carried a great deal more weight and authority than Schaffer’s had done.

Jones smiled his thanks as Anne-Marie poured him some more brandy, sipped from the glass, sighed in satisfaction and continued: ‘Or have you forgotten, General Rosemeyer, that Germany is also a signatory to The Hague conventions?’

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Rosemeyer said uncomfortably. ‘And if I had my way … General, my hands are tied. I have my orders from Berlin.’

‘And you can tell Berlin all they’re entitled to know,’ Jones said easily. ‘I am General – Lieutenant General – George Carnaby, United States Army.’

‘And Chief Co-ordinator of Planning for the Second Front,’ Rosemeyer added morosely.

‘The Second Front?’ Jones asked with interest. ‘What’s that?’

Rosemeyer said heavily and with earnest gravity: ‘General, I’ve done all I can. You must believe me. For thirty-six hours now, I’ve held off Berlin. I’ve persuaded – I’ve tried to persuade the High Command that the mere fact of your capture will compel the Allies to alter all their invasion plans. But this, it seems, is not enough. For the last time, may I request –’

‘General George Carnaby,’ Jones said calmly. ‘United States Army.’

‘I expected nothing else,’ Rosemeyer admitted tiredly. ‘How could I expect anything else from a senior army officer? I’m afraid the matter is now in Colonel Kramer’s hands.’

Jones sipped some more brandy and eyed Kramer thoughtfully. ‘The Colonel doesn’t seem very happy about it either.’

‘I’m not,’ Kramer said. ‘But the matter is out of my hands, too. I also have my orders. Anne-Marie will attend to the rest of it.’

‘This charming young lady?’ Jones was politely incredulous. ‘A maestro of the thumb-screw?’

‘Of the hypodermic syringe,’ Kramer said shortly. ‘She used to be a trained nurse.’ A bell rang and Kramer picked up a phone by his side. ‘Yes? Ah! They have, of course, been searched? Very good. Now.’ He looked across at Jones. ‘Well, well, well. Some interesting company coming up, General. Very interesting indeed. Parachutists. A rescue team – for you. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to meet one another.’

‘I really can’t imagine what you’re talking about,’ Jones said idly.

‘The rescue team we’ve seen before,’ Smith murmured to Schaffer. ‘And no doubt we’ll be renewing old acquaintances before long. Come on.’

‘What? Now?’ Schaffer jerked an urgent thumb in the direction of Jones. ‘Just when they’re going to get to work on him?’

‘Out of your social depth, Lieutenant,’ Smith whispered. ‘They’re civilized. First, they finish the brandy. Then the works.’

‘It’s like I said,’ Schaffer said mournfully. ‘I’m from Montana.’

The two men left as quietly as they had come and as quietly closed the door behind them. Against the loom of light at either end of the corridor, they could see that the passage-way was clear. Smith switched on the light. They walked briskly along the passage, dropped down a flight of stairs, turned left and halted outside a doorway which bore above it the legend TELEFON ZENTRALE.

‘Telephone exchange,’ Schaffer said.

Smith shook his head in admiration, put his ear to the door, dropped to one knee, peered through the keyhole and, while still in that position, softly tried the handle. Whatever slight sound he made was masked by the muffled sound of a voice speaking over a telephone. The door was locked. Smith slowly released the handle, straightened and shook his head.

‘Suspicious bunch of devils,’ Schaffer said sourly. ‘The skeletons.’

‘The operator would hear us. Next door.’

Next door wasn’t locked. The door gave before Smith’s pressure on the handle. The room beyond was in total darkness and appeared to be empty.

‘Moment, bitte!’ a cold voice said behind them.

Quickly, but not too quickly, Smith and Schaffer turned round. A few feet away stood a soldier, levelled carbine in his hand, his eyes moving in active suspicion from the two men to the kit-bag in Smith’s hands. Smith glared at the man, raised an imperative forefinger to his lips.

‘Dummkopf!’ Smith’s voice was a low furious whisper through clenched teeth. ‘Silenz! Engländer!’

He turned away impatiently and peered tensely through the partly-opened doorway. Again he held up an imperious hand that commanded silence. After a few more seconds he straightened, lips compressed, looked significantly at Schaffer and moved slightly to one side. Schaffer took his position and started peering in turn. Curiosity, Smith could see, was replacing suspicion in the soldier’s face. Schaffer straightened and said softly: ‘What in God’s name do we do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Smith said in a worried whisper. ‘Colonel Kramer told me he wanted them alive. But –’

‘What is it?’ the soldier demanded in a voice as low as their own. With the mention of Colonel Kramer the last of his suspicions had gone. ‘Who is it?’

‘You still here,’ Smith said irritably. ‘All right, go on. Have a look. But be quick!’

The soldier, his face and eyes now alight with intense curiosity and what might have been dreams of rapid promotion, moved forward on tiptoe as Schaffer courteously stepped to one side to let him see. A pair of Lugers grinding simultaneously into both temples effectively put an end to any idea of rapid military advancement that he might briefly have entertained. He was propelled, stumbling, into the room and, by the time he’d picked himself up and turned round, the door was closed, the light on and both pistols lined at his head.

‘Those are silencers you see on our guns,’ Smith said quietly. ‘No heroics, no shooting. Dying for the Fatherland is one thing, dying uselessly for no reason at all is another and very stupid thing. Don’t you agree?’

The soldier looked at them, calculated his chances, accepted the fact that he had none and nodded. Schaffer produced a length of rope and said: ‘You may be over-eager, son, but you’re no fool. Lie down with your hands behind your back.’

The room, Smith saw, was small and lined with metal shelves and filing cabinets. Some sort of storage room for office records. The chances of anyone coming along weren’t high and it was, anyway, a chance they had to take. He waited till Schaffer had bound and gagged the prisoner, put his Luger away, helped Schaffer to bind the man to two of the metal poles supporting the shelves, turned to the window, slid up the lower sash and peered out.

The valley to the north stretched out before him, the lights of the village and the smouldering embers of the railway station visible through very gently falling snow. Smith looked to his right. The lighted window of the telephone exchange was only a few feet away. From the window a heavy lead-sheathed cable attached to a wire almost equally as heavy stretched down the castle wall into the darkness.

‘That the one?’ Schaffer was by his side now.

‘That’s the one. Let’s have the rope.’

Smith eased his legs into a double bowline, wriggled over the window-sill and cautiously lowered himself to the full extent of his arms while Schaffer, standing by the window with the rope belayed round one of the stanchions of the shelving, took the strain. Smith released his grip on the sill and was lowered jerkily by Schaffer till he was about ten or twelve feet down. Then, using a free hand and both feet to fend himself off from the wall he began to swing himself in a pendulum arc across the face of the castle, an assist from Schaffer up above adding momentum to his swing. On the fifth swing the fingers of his left hand hooked round the lead cable and wire. As Schaffer eased off tension on the rope Smith got both hands round the cable and quickly climbed up the few feet to the window above. He was almost certain that the lead cable he had in his hands was the telephone outlet, but only almost: he had no desire to slice the blade of his knife through high-powered electricity supply lines.

He hitched a wary eye over the window-sill, saw that the telephone operator, his back almost directly to him, was talking animatedly on the phone, lifted himself another six inches, observed a cable of what appeared to be exactly similar dimensions to the one he was holding running along the skirting-board to some point behind the exchange and then not reappearing again. He lowered himself a couple of feet, grasped cable and wire firmly with his left hand, inserted the point of his knife between cable and wire a few inches below that and started sawing. A dozen powerful saw-cuts and he was through.

He replaced the knife in its sheath, hoisted himself up again and had another look through the window. The operator was still animated, but this time not with his voice but with a hand which he was using furiously to crank a handle at the side of the exchange. After a few seconds of this profitless exercise he gave up and just sat there staring at the switchboard and shaking his head in bafflement. Smith made a signal to Schaffer, released his grip on the cable and swung back across the castle wall.

Mary glanced at her watch for the tenth time in less than as many minutes, stubbed out the half-cigarette she’d been nervously smoking, rose from her chair, opened her handbag, checked that the safety catch of the Mauser inside was in the off position, closed the bag and crossed the room. She had just turned the handle and begun to open the door when knuckles rapped on the outside. She hesitated, glanced at the bag in her hand and looked round almost wildly to see where she could dispose of it. But it was too late to dispose of anything. The door opened and a cheerfully smiling von Brauchitsch stood framed in the doorway.

‘Ah, Fräulein!’ He glanced at the bag and smiled again. ‘Lucky me! Just in time to escort you wherever you’re going.’

‘To escort me –’ She broke off and smiled. ‘My business is of no consequence. It can wait. You wanted to see me, Captain?’

‘Naturally.’

‘What about?’

‘What about, she says! About nothing, that’s what. Unless you call yourself nothing. Just to see you. Is that a crime? The prettiest girl we’ve seen –’ He smiled again, this man who was always smiling, and took her arm. ‘Come, a little Bavarian hospitality. Coffee. We have an armoury that’s been converted into the finest Kaffeestube –’

‘But – but my duties?’ Mary said uncertainly. ‘I must see the Colonel’s secretary –’

‘That one! Let her wait!’ There was a marked lack of cordiality in von Brauchitsch’s voice. ‘You and I have a lot to talk about.’

‘We have?’ It was impossible to resist the infectious smile, not to reply in kind. ‘Such as?’

‘Düsseldorf.’

‘Düsseldorf?’

‘Of course! That’s my home town, too.’

‘Your home town, too!’ She smiled again and gave his arm the briefest of squeezes. ‘How small a world. That will be nice.’

She wondered vaguely, as she walked along, how one could smile and smile and, inside, feel as chilled as the tomb.

SEVEN

For the second time in fifteen minutes Smith and Schaffer stopped at the doorway outside the gold room’s minstrels’ gallery, switched out the passage light, paused, listened, then passed silently inside. This time, however, Smith reached through the crack of the almost closed door and switched the light back on again. He did not expect to be using that door again, that night or any other night, and he had no wish to raise any eyebrows, however milli-metric the raising: survival was a matter of the infinitely careful consideration of all possible dangers, no matter how remote that possibility might at times appear.

This time, Smith and Schaffer did not remain at the back of the minstrels’ gallery. They moved slowly to the front, till they had come to the head of the broad flight of stairs leading down to the floor of the gold room and then sat down on the front oaken benches, one on each side of the gallery’s passage-way. They were still shrouded in deep gloom, completely invisible from below.

Colonel Kramer’s stock of VSOP Napoleon brandy was certainly taking a beating that night, Smith reflected. The Colonel, Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer, Jones and Anne-Marie had been joined by three others – Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. Those last three were no longer manacled and under heavy guard. On the contrary there was no sign of any guard, and the three men were sitting deeply relaxed and side by side on one of the massive gold lamé-covered couches, glasses of brandy, and no small ones at that, in their hands. Even Anne-Marie now held a glass in her hand. It appeared to be an occasion for a celebration of some note.

Kramer lifted his glass towards the three men seated on the couch.

‘Your health, gentlemen. Your very good health.’ He turned to the Reichsmarschall. ‘Three of the best in Europe, sir.’

‘I suppose they are necessary,’ Rosemeyer said in resigned distaste. ‘At least, their courage is beyond dispute. Your health, gentlemen.’

‘Your health, gentlemen,’ Jones said bitterly. He sat forward in his chair and hurled his glass into the fire. The glass shattered and there was a momentary tongue of flame as the brandy ignited. ‘That’s how I drink the health of double agents.’

Schaffer leaned across the passage-way and whispered: ‘I thought you said he couldn’t act?’

‘Nobody’s ever paid him twenty-five thousand bucks a night before,’ Smith said sardonically.

‘Tut, tut, General. Best Venetian glass.’ Kramer shook his head deprecatingly then smiled. ‘But an understandable fit of pique. When your heroic rescuers turn out to be, well, birds of a different feather –’

‘Double agents!’ In his contempt, Jones almost spat out the words.

Kramer smiled again, tolerantly, and turned to the three men on the couch.

‘And the return trip, gentlemen? As well organized as your outward journey?’

‘That’s about the one thing the close-mouthed so-and-so told us,’ Carraciola said with some bitterness. ‘A Mosquito bomber is to come to pick us up. Salen, a little village north of Frauenfeld in Switzerland. There’s a little civilian airfield just to the north of Salen.’

Schaffer bent across the passage again and said in an admiring whisper: ‘You really are a fearful liar.’

‘So Salen it is,’ Kramer was saying. ‘We know all about it. The Swiss are very good at looking the wrong way when it suits them: but for reasons of our own we find it convenient not to protest too much. Odd things happen at Salen … However. A little message to London. Arrange pick-up times and so forth. Then a helicopter to the border – so much easier than walking, gentlemen – a rubber dinghy for the Rhine and then a short walk. You’ll be back in Whitehall, reporting General Carnaby’s transfer to Berlin, before you know it.’

‘Back in London?’ Thomas shook his head in slow emphasis. ‘Not on your nelly, Colonel. With Smith and that Yank still at large? What happens if they find out what’s really happening? What happens if they remain at large? What happens if they get a message through to London –’

‘What do you take us for?’ Kramer said tiredly. ‘You will also, of course, be reporting the unfortunate demise of your leader. As soon as we located that still-warm radio set in the left luggage office we put on bloodhounds from the barracks. Your precious Major Smith was the last man to handle that set and he left a pretty clear trail. The hounds traced him along the east side of the village as far as a garage and then up to the lower station of the Luftseilbahn.’

‘The cable-car?’ Thomas was frankly disbelieving.

‘The cable-car. Our Major Smith is either a very foolhardy or a very dangerous man– I must confess I know nothing of him. And there, at the lower station, the hounds completely lost the scent. The handlers circled the station with the hounds and then brought them into the cable-car itself. But the trail was cold. Our quarry appeared to have vanished into thin air.

‘It was then that one of the searchers had the original idea of examining the thin air, so to speak. He climbed up and examined the roof of the lower station. Surprise, surprise, unmistakable signs in the snow and ice that two men had been up there before him. From that it was only a logical step to examine the roof of the cable-car itself, and sure enough –’

‘They’re inside!’ Christiansen exclaimed.

‘And won’t get out again.’ Colonel Kramer leaned back comfortably in his chair. ‘Have no fear, gentlemen. Every exit is blocked – including the header station. We’ve doubled the guards outside and the rest have just begun to carry out a floor to floor search.’

In the gloom of the minstrels’ gallery Smith and Schaffer exchanged thoughtful glances.

‘I don’t know,’ Thomas said uneasily. ‘He’s a resourceful devil –’

Kramer held up a hand.

‘Fifteen minutes. I guarantee it.’ He shifted his glance to Jones. ‘I don’t pretend to look forward to this, General, but shall we get on with your – ah – medication?’

Jones glared at Carraciola, Christiansen and Thomas and said, very slowly and distinctly: ‘You – bloody – swine!’

‘Against all my principles, General Carnaby,’ Rosemeyer said uncomfortably. ‘But if we could only dispense with force –’

‘Principles? You make me sick!’ Jones stood up and made a strangled noise in his throat. ‘The hell with you all! The Hague Conventions! Principles! Officers and gentlemen of the Third bloody Reich!’ He stripped off his uniform jacket, rolled up a sleeve and sat down again.

There was a brief and uncomfortable silence, then Kramer nodded to Anne-Marie who put down her glass and moved off to a side door leading off the gold drawing-room. It was obvious to everyone that Anne-Marie wasn’t feeling in the least uncomfortable: the half-smile on her face was as near to that of pleasurable anticipation as she could permit herself in the presence of Rosemeyer and Kramer.

Again Smith and Schaffer exchanged glances, no longer thoughtful glances, but the glances of men who know what they have to do and are committed to doing it. Carefully, silently, they eased themselves up from the choir-stalls, adjusted the straps of their shoulder-slung Schmeissers until the machine-pistols were in the horizontal position then started slowly down the stairs, well apart and as close as possible to their respective banisters, to minimize the danger of creaking treads.

They were half-way down, just beginning to emerge from the dark gloom of the gallery, when Anne-Marie re-entered the room. She was carrying a small stainless steel tray: on the tray were a glass beaker, a phial containing some colourless liquid and a hypodermic syringe. She set the tray down on an occasional table close to Jones and broke the phial into the narrow beaker.

Smith and Schaffer had reached the foot of the stairs and were now advancing towards the group round the fireplace. They had now completely emerged from the shadows, and were in full view of anyone who cared to turn his head. But no one cared to turn his head, every seated person in the drawing-room was engrossed in the scene before him, watching in varying degrees of willing or unwilling fascination as Anne-Marie carefully filled the hypodermic syringe and held it up to the light to examine it. Smith and Schaffer continued to advance, their footfalls soundless on the luxuriously deep pile of the gold carpet.

Carefully, professionally, but with the trace of the smile still on her lips, Anne-Marie swabbed an area of Jones’s forearm with cotton wool soaked in alcohol and then, as the watchers unconsciously bent forward in their seats, picked up Jones’s wrist in one hand and the hypodermic in the other. The hypodermic hovered over the swabbed area as she located the vein she wanted.

‘Just a waste of good scopolamine, my dear,’ Smith said. ‘You won’t get anything out of him.’

There was a moment’s frozen and incredulous stillness, the hypodermic syringe fell soundlessly to the floor, then everyone whirled round to stare at the two advancing figures, carbines moving gently from side to side. Predictably, Colonel Kramer was the first to recover and react. Almost imperceptibly, his hand began to drift to a button on a panel beside his chair.

‘That button, Colonel,’ Smith said conversationally.

Slowly, reluctantly, Kramer’s hand retreated from the button.

‘On the other hand,’ Smith went on cordially, ‘why not? By all means, if you wish.’

Kramer glanced at him in narrow-eyed and puzzled suspicion.

‘You will notice, Colonel,’ Smith continued by way of explanation, ‘that my gun is not pointing at you. It is pointed at him’ – he swung his gun to cover Carraciola – ‘at him,’ – the gun moved to Thomas – ‘at him,’ – it covered Christiansen – ‘and at him!’ Smith swung round abruptly and ground the muzzle of the Schmeisser into Schaffer’s ribs. ‘Drop that gun! Now!’

‘Drop the gun?’ Schaffer stared at him in shock and baffled consternation. ‘What in the name of God –’

Smith stepped swiftly forward and, without altering his grip on his gun, lifted the barrel sharply upwards and drove the butt of the Schmeisser into Schaffer’s stomach. Schaffer grunted in agony, doubled forward with both hands clutched over his midriff, then, seconds later, obviously in great pain, began to straighten slowly. Glaring at Smith, the dark eyes mad in his face, he slipped the shoulder strap and the Schmeisser fell to the carpet.

‘Sit there.’ With the muzzle of his gun Smith gestured to a chair half-way between Rosemeyer’s and the couch where the three men were sitting.

Schaffer said slowly, painfully: ‘You goddamned lousy, dirty, double-crossing –’

‘That’s what they all say. You’re not even original.’ The contempt in Smith’s voice gave way to menace. ‘That chair, Schaffer.’

Schaffer lowered himself with difficulty into his chair, rubbed his solar plexus and said, ‘You –. If I live to be a hundred –’

‘If you live to be a hundred you’ll do nothing,’ Smith said contemptuously. ‘In your own idiom, Schaffer, you’re a punk and a pretty second-rate one at that.’ He settled himself comfortably in a chair beside Colonel Kramer. ‘A simple-minded American,’ he explained carelessly. ‘Had him along for local colour.’

‘I see,’ Kramer said. It was obvious that he did not see. He went on uncertainly: ‘If we might have an explanation –’

Smith waved him negligently to silence.

‘All in good time, my dear Kramer, all in good time. As I was saying, my dear Anne-Marie –’

‘How did you know her name was Anne-Marie?’ Kramer asked sharply.

Smith smiled enigmatically, ignored him completely, and continued: ‘As I was saying, scopolamine is a waste of time. All scopolamine will do, as you’re all aware, is to reveal the truth about our friend here, which is that he is not Lieutenant General George Carnaby, Chief Coordinator of Planning for the Second Front, but a certain Cartwright Jones, an American actor being paid precisely twenty-five thousand dollars to impersonate General Carnaby.’ He looked over to Jones and bowed. ‘My congratulations, Mr Jones. A very creditable performance. Pity you’ll have to spend the rest of the war in a concentration camp.’

Kramer and Rosemeyer were on their feet, the others leaning far forward on the couch, an almost exactly identical expression of disbelief showing in every face. If Cartwright Jones had been earth’s first visitor from outer space he couldn’t possibly have been the object of more incredulous consternation.

‘Well, well, well,’ Smith said with interest. ‘Surprise, surprise, surprise.’ He tapped Kramer on the arm and gestured in the direction of Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. ‘Odd, wouldn’t you say, Kramer? They seem just as astonished as you are?’

‘Is this true?’ Rosemeyer demanded hoarsely of Jones. ‘What he says? Do you deny –’

In a voice that was no more than a whisper, Jones said: ‘How – how in God’s name – who are you, sir?’

‘A stranger in the night.’ Smith waved a hand. ‘Dropped in in the passing, you might say. Maybe the Allies will let you have that twenty-five thousand after the war. I wouldn’t bank on it though. If international law allows you to shoot a captured enemy soldier dressed as a civilian, maybe the opposite holds good too.’ Smith stretched and politely patted a yawn to extinction. ‘And now, Anne-Marie, if I could – with your permission, my dear Kramer – have a glass of that excellent Napoleon. Clinging to the roofs of cable-cars works the devil with my circulation.’

The girl hesitated, looked at Kramer and Rosemeyer, found neither encouragement nor discouragement, shrugged, poured a glass and handed it to Smith, who sniffed the bouquet approvingly, drank a little and bowed again to Jones.

‘My congratulations, sir. You are a connoisseur.’ He sipped again, turned to Kramer and said sadly: ‘To think you have been wasting such excellent liquor on enemies of the Third Reich.’

‘Don’t listen to him, Colonel Kramer, don’t listen to him!’ Carraciola shouted wildly. ‘It’s a bluff! He’s just trying –’

Smith lined up his gun on Carraciola’s chest and said softly: ‘Keep quiet or I’ll make you quiet, you damned traitor. You’ll have your chance – and we’ll see who’s bluffing.’ He lowered his gun to his knees and went on tiredly: ‘Colonel Kramer, I don’t fancy talking and having to keep a gun on this unlovely trio all the time. Have you a guard you can trust? A man who won’t talk afterwards, I mean?’

He sat back in his chair, sipped his brandy and ignored the malevolent stares from his four erstwhile colleagues. Kramer looked at him for a very long moment, then nodded thoughtfully and reached for a phone.

The armoury – now converted into a Kaffeestube– of the Schloss Adler was very much in keeping with the remainder of the castle, something out of a medieval dream or nightmare, according to how individual tastes and inclinations lay. It was a large, darkly-panelled, stone-flagged room with enormous adze-cut smoke-blackened beams and walls behung with ancient and rusty suits of armour, ancient and rusty weapons of all kinds and scores of armorial bearings, some of which could have been genuine. Three-sided half booths lined the walls and half-a-dozen slab-topped monastery refectory tables, flanked by massive oak benches, paralleled the shorter axis of the room. The oil lamps, suspended by iron chains from the ceiling, were turned low, lending the atmosphere in the armoury an air of intimacy or brooding menace, according to one’s original mood on entering. There was no doubt in Mary’s mind as to its effect upon her. Her gaze followed half-a-dozen heavily armed and jack-booted men who were just leaving the armoury, then came back reluctantly to the man sitting close beside her in the corner booth.

‘Well, what did I tell you?’ von Brauchitsch said expansively. ‘Coffee to match the surroundings!’

Coffee to match the surroundings, Mary thought, would have tasted of hemlock. She said: ‘What did those men want? They seemed to be looking for someone.’

‘Forget them. Concentrate on von Brauchitsch.’

‘But you spoke to them. What did they want?’

‘They say there are spies in the castle!’ Von Brauchitsch threw his head back, laughed, and spread his hands palms up. ‘Imagine! Spies in the Schloss Adler! The Gestapo HQ! They must have flown in on their broomsticks. The military commandant is an old woman. He has spies in about once a week. Now what was I saying about Düsseldorf?’ He broke off, glancing at her empty coffee cup. ‘My apologies, my dear Fräulein. Come, more coffee.’

‘No, really. I must go.’

Von Brauchitsch laughed again and put his hand on hers.

‘Go where? There is nowhere to go inside the Schloss Adler. Nonsense, nonsense.’ He turned in his seat and called: ‘Fräulein! Two more coffees. And with Schnapps, this time.’

While he was ordering, Mary glanced quickly at her watch and a momentary expression of desperation crossed her face, but by the time von Brauchitsch turned back she was smiling sweetly at him. She said: ‘You were saying about Düsseldorf –’

The company in the gold drawing-room had now been increased by one, a tall, cold-faced and hardeyed sergeant who held a carbine cradled in a pair of strong and very capable-looking hands. He was standing behind the couch on which Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen were seated, and he was giving them his entire attention, apart from a frequent sideways glance at Schaffer. He had about him a reassuring air of competence.

‘A very much more civilized arrangement,’ Smith said approvingly. He rose, leaving his Schmeisser lying on the floor, crossed to the brandy decanter on the sideboard, poured himself another drink and made his way back to the fireplace where he placed his glass on the mantelpiece.

‘This will take but minutes, only,’ Smith said in a soft and ominous voice. ‘Anne-Marie, bring in three more capsules of scopolamine.’ He smiled at her. ‘And I needn’t remind you to bring the hypodermics.’

‘Colonel Kramer!’ Carraciola said desperately. ‘This is madness! Are you going to allow –’

‘Guard!’ Smith’s voice was harsh. ‘If that man talks again, silence him!’

The guard jabbed his carbine muzzle none too lightly into Carraciola’s back. Carraciola subsided, fuming, his fists clenched till the ivory showed.

‘What do you take Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer and Colonel Kramer for?’ Smith demanded cuttingly. ‘Credulous fools? Little children? Imbeciles of your own calibre, who imagine you can get away with a cretinous masquerade of this nature? The scopolamine will be used after I have established my own bona-fides and after I have disproved yours. Anne-Marie?’

Anne-Marie smiled and marched away. It was not every night that she got the chance to administer three injections of scopolamine. Then she stopped and turned, eyebrows raised in interrogation, as Smith called her name again.

‘One moment, Fräulein.’ Smith, brandy glass in hand, was staring unseeingly into the middle distance and the watchers could see a slow smile coming to his face, a smile obviously heralding the birth of a new idea and one that pleased him very much. ‘Of course, of course,’ Smith said softly. ‘And bring three note-books will you, my dear?’

‘Three note-books?’ Colonel Kramer’s tone was neutral, his eyes watchful. ‘Three capsules? You give the impression that we have four enemies of the Reich here.’

‘Only three enemies that matter,’ Smith said in weary patience. ‘The American?’ The fact that he neither bothered to glance at Schaffer nor even permit a trace of contempt to creep into his voice showed unmistakably his opinion of the American. ‘He doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. Now then.’ He picked up a cigar from an inlaid marquetry box, lit it and sipped some more brandy. ‘Let’s be fair and establish my bona-fides first. Pointers first, then proof. In the best judicial fashion.

‘First, why did I invite another guard in and lay down my own gun?’ He paused and went on sarcastically: ‘Of course! Because I wanted to increase the odds against myself. Secondly, why didn’t I kill Colonel Weissner and his men when I had them at my mercy – if, that is, I’m an enemy of the Third Reich – earlier this evening? I had some difficulty, I might tell you, in restraining our fire-eating young American here from turning himself into a one-man firing squad. Very aggressive, he was.’

‘I’ll damned well tell you why,’ Carraciola said viciously. ‘Because you knew the shots would be heard!’

Smith sighed, lifted the flap of his jacket, produced an automatic and fired. The sound of the impact of the bullet thudding into the couch inches from Carraciola’s shoulder completely blanketed the soft plop made by the automatic itself. Smith carelessly threw the silenced Luger into a nearby empty chair and smiled quizzically at Carraciola.

‘Didn’t know I had that, did you? I didn’t kill Colonel Weissner because German does not kill German.’

‘You are German?’ Kramer’s eyes were still watchful but the tone perhaps a shade less neutral.

‘Johann Schmidt, at your service.’ This with a little bow and click of the heels. ‘Captain John Smith of the Black Watch.’

‘From the Rhineland, by your accent?’

‘Heidelberg.’

‘But that is my home town.’

‘Indeed?’ Smith smiled his interest. ‘Then I think we have a mutual friend.’

Momentarily, a faraway look came to Kramer’s eyes and he said softly, apparently apropos of nothing: ‘The columns of Charlemagne.’

‘Ah, and the fountain in the courtyard of the dear old Friedrichsbau,’ Smith said nostalgically. He glanced at Kramer, and the nostalgia gave way to a pseudo-mournful reproof. ‘How could you, my dear Colonel? To proceed. Why – third point, I think – why did I stage this elaborate car accident – because I knew those three impostors wouldn’t dare come into the open until they thought I was dead. Anyway, if I were the impostor, would I have come back when I knew the game was up? Anyway, to come back for what?’ He smiled wearily and nodded at Jones. ‘To rescue another impostor?’

Kramer said thoughtfully: ‘I must say I’m rather beginning to look forward to hearing what our three friends here have to say.’

‘I’ll tell you now what I’ve bloody well got to say.’ Christiansen was on his feet, ignoring the guard’s gun, his voice shaking with fury. ‘He’s fooling you, he’s fooling all of us. He’s a damned liar and you’re too damned stupid to see the wool over your eyes. A tissue of – lies, from beginning to end –’

‘That will do!’ Kramer’s hand was up, his eyes bleak, his tone icy. ‘You condemn yourselves from your own mouths. Every statement made so far by this officer is demonstrably true. Sergeant Hartmann’ – this to the guard with the carbine – ‘if any of those men speak again, do you think you could silence him without silencing him permanently?’

Hartmann produced a small woven-leather truncheon from his tunic and slipped the looped thong over his wrist.

‘You know I can, Herr Colonel.’

‘Good. Pray continue, Captain Schmidt.’

‘Thank you. I hadn’t finished.’ Smith felt like pouring himself another brandy, a celebration brandy or, alternatively, pinning a medal on Christiansen for having so unerringly if unwittingly exposed the chink in Kramer’s armour, a wounded intellectual vanity, the lacerated professional pride of a brilliant man being reminded of his capacity for being duped by one of those who had already duped him. ‘For the same excellent reason I came here by the roof of the cable-car – they’d never have come into the open if they’d known I was here – and alive. Incidentally, Kramer, hasn’t it occurred to you that it’s impossible to enter the Schloss Adler from the roof of the header station without the assistance of a rope and someone inside?’

‘Damnation!’ Coming so soon after Christiansen’s reminder of his fallibility, Smith’s question left Kramer’s self-confidence badly shaken. ‘I never thought –’

‘Von Brauchitsch,’ Smith said carelessly. ‘He had his orders direct from Berlin.’ He placed his glass on the mantelpiece, walked across and stood before the three spies. ‘Tell me, how did I know Jones was an impostor? Why did you not know he was one? And if I’m not what I claim to be then what in God’s name am I doing here at all? Perhaps you would like to explain that?’

The three men glared up at him in baleful silence.

‘Perhaps they would indeed,’ Kramer said heavily. He came and stood by Smith, staring down at the three men with an oddly expressionless gaze that was more disturbing than any show of anger could ever have been. After another and longer silence he said: ‘Captain Schmidt, this has gone far enough.’

‘Not yet.’

‘I require no more,’ Kramer persisted.

‘I promised you proof – those were but the pointers. A proof to satisfy the Deputy Chief of the German Secret Service – and that proof is in three parts. A yes or no, Colonel Kramer, if you please. Do you or do you not know the name of our top man in Britain?’ Kramer nodded. ‘Then suppose we ask them?’

The three men on the couch looked at each other, then at Smith. They looked in silence. Thomas licked dry lips, a movement that did not go unnoticed by Kramer. Smith produced a small red note-book from his tunic pocket, removed a rubber band, tore out the central page, then carefully replaced the band on the book and the book in his pocket. He wrote something on the page and handed it to Kramer, who glanced at it and nodded. Smith took the paper from him, walked across to the fire and burned it.

‘Now then,’ Smith said. ‘You have here, in the Schloss Adler, the most powerful radio transmitter in Central Europe –’

‘You are singularly well-informed, Captain Schmidt,’ Kramer said wryly.

‘Smith. I live Smith. I breathe Smith. I am Smith. Put a radio-telephone call through to Field-Marshal Kesselring’s HQ in Northern Italy. Ask for his Chief of Military Intelligence.’

Kramer said softly: ‘The mutual friend you mentioned?’

‘An old alumnus of Heidelberg University,’ Smith nodded. ‘Colonel Wilhelm Wilner.’ He smiled. ‘Willi-Willi.’

‘You know that? Then it will not be necessary to call him.’

‘Admiral Canaris would like you to.’

‘And you know my chief, too?’ Kramer’s voice was even softer.

‘My self-esteem urges me to say that I do – but modesty and the truth compels me to admit I don’t,’ Smith said disarmingly. ‘I just work for him.’

‘I’m convinced already, convinced beyond all doubt,’ Rosemeyer said. ‘But do as he says, Colonel.’

Kramer did as he was told. He put a call through to the radio room, hung up and waited patiently. Smith lay back in his arm-chair, brandy in one hand, cigar in the other, the picture of relaxed confidence. If Schaffer and the three men on the couch beside him were either relaxed or confident they entirely failed to show it. Behind them their guard watched his four charges hopefully, as if eager to show his expertise with a blackjack. If either Rosemeyer or Jones were thinking any thoughts at all, those thoughts didn’t break through to the surface. Anne-Marie, not quite knowing what was going on, hovered around indecisively, a tentative smile of anticipation still on her face. She was the only person who moved during the period of waiting and that only because Smith crooked a finger at her and indicated his empty brandy glass: so complete was the ascendancy he had achieved that she obeyed the unspoken command without hesitation and brought back a very generous measure of brandy which she set down by his side-table to the accompaniment of a winning smile. Smith gave her a winning smile in return. But no one spoke, not once, during that seemingly interminable wait.

The phone bell rang.

Kramer lifted it and, after a few preliminary exchanges, presumably with operators, said: ‘Colonel Wilhelm Wilner. My dear friend, Willi-Willi. How are you.’ After the introductory courtesies were over, Kramer said: ‘We have an agent here who claims to know you. A Captain John Smith. Have you ever – ah, so you know him? Good, good!’ A pause, then he continued: ‘Could you describe him?’

He listened intently, looking at Smith as a voice crackled over the receiver. Suddenly he beckoned to Smith, who rose and crossed over to where Kramer was sitting.

‘Your left hand,’ Kramer said to Smith, took it in his own, then spoke into the phone. ‘Yes, the tip of the little finger is missing … and the right forearm has what?’ Smith bared his right forearm without being told. ‘Yes, yes, two parallel scars, three centimetres apart … What’s that? … Tell him he’s a traitor?’

‘And tell him he’s a renegade,’ Smith smiled.

‘And you’re a renegade,’ Kramer said on the phone. ‘Chambertin, you say. Ah! Thank you, thank you. Good-bye, my old friend.’ He replaced the receiver.

‘We both prefer French wine,’ Smith said apologetically and by way of explanation.

‘Our top double agent in the Mediterranean,’ Kramer said wonderingly. ‘And I’d never even heard of you.’

‘Maybe that’s why he is what he is,’ Rosemeyer said dryly.

‘I’ve been lucky.’ Smith shrugged, then said briskly: ‘Well, then. My credentials?’

‘Impeccable,’ Kramer said. ‘My God, they’re impeccable.’

‘So,’ Smith said grimly. ‘Now for our friends’ credentials. As you know, Christiansen, Thomas and Carraciola – the real Christiansen, Thomas and Carraciola – while working for –’

‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ Christiansen shouted. He was on his feet, his face suffused with uncontrollable anger. The real Christiansen –’ His eyes turned up as Hartmann’s blackjack caught him behind the ear and he sagged to the floor.

‘He was warned,’ Kramer said grimly. ‘You didn’t hit him too hard, Sergeant?’

‘A two-minute tap,’ Hartmann said reassuringly.

‘Good. I think you may now proceed without interruption, my dear Schmidt.’

‘Smith,’ Smith corrected him. ‘As I was saying, our real agents while working for the British counter-espionage have not only been responsible for the deep infiltration of the German Secret Service into the British espionage network in France and the Low Countries but have also set up an excellent chain of spies in England – a most successful ring, as Admiral Canaris well knows.’

‘It’s not my territory,’ Kramer said. ‘But that, of course, I know.’

Smith said coldly: ‘To your feet, you impostors, and sit at the table there. Sergeant, lend a hand to that man on the floor there. He appears to be coming round.’

Their faces baffled and uncomprehending, Carraciola and Thomas made their way towards the table and sat down, where they were shortly joined by a very shaky and sick-looking Christiansen. The sergeant remained by him just long enough to ensure that he didn’t fall off his chair, then took three paces back and covered them all with his carbine again.

From the other side of the table Smith flung down in front of the three men the little notebooks that Anne-Marie had brought. Then he produced his own elastic-banded note-book from his pocket and laid it on the small table beside Kramer.

‘If they are who they claim to be,’ Smith said quietly, ‘it would be reasonable, would it not, my dear Kramer, to expect them to be able to write the names and the addresses or contacts of our agents in England and of the British agents who have been supplanted on the Continent by our men.’ He paused significantly. ‘And then compare their lists with the genuine one in my book there.’

‘It would indeed,’ Kramer said slowly. ‘Proof at one stroke. Masterly, my dear Captain Schmidt – Smith, I mean.’ He smiled, almost wanly. ‘I’m afraid I’m not myself tonight. But tell me, Captain.’ He touched the banded note-book by his side. ‘This list of agents – I mean, carrying it around on your person. Does this not contravene every rule we have?’

‘Of course it does. Rules can only be broken by the man who made them. You think that even I would dare without his authority? Admiral Walter Canaris will be in his Berlin office now.’ Smith nodded towards the telephone.

‘What do you take me for.’ Kramer smiled and turned to the three men at the table. ‘Well, you heard.’

‘There’s something terribly far wrong –’ Carraciola began despairingly.

‘There is indeed,’ Kramer interrupted bleakly.

‘I don’t doubt Smith’s bona-fides.’ Carraciola was almost in anguish now. ‘Not any more. But there’s been some ghastly mistake –’

‘You are the ones who have made it,’ Smith said curtly.

‘Write,’ Kramer commanded. ‘Sergeant Hartmann.’

Sergeant Hartmann stepped forward, his leather-thonged blackjack at the ready. The three men bent their heads and wrote.

EIGHT

The armoury was almost deserted now. Some time previously, a couple of sergeants had entered, moved around among the coffee tables and taken at least a score of grumbling men away for unspecified duties. Mary did not have to guess at what those unspecified duties might be. She glanced secretly at her watch for what must have been the twentieth time, rubbed her forehead wearily, rose to her feet and smiled palely at von Brauchitsch.

‘I’m so sorry, Captain. I must go. I really must go. A most dreadful headache.’

‘I am sorry, my dear Maria.’ A troubled contrition had replaced his habitual smile. ‘You should have told me earlier. You don’t look at all well. A long journey from the Rhineland, then all this Schnapps –’

‘I’m afraid I’m not used to it,’ Mary said ruefully. ‘I’ll be all right when I’ve lain down.’

‘Of course, of course. Come, my dear, let me escort you to your room.’

‘No, no!’ Then, realizing she had spoken with uncalled-for vehemence, she smiled again and touched his hand. ‘I’ll be all right. Really I will.’

‘Captain von Brauchitsch knows what’s best.’ The face was serious but friendly, the voice authoritative but with an underlying tone of humour, and Mary knew there was no answer to it. ‘I positively insist. Come along.’

He tucked her arm protectively under his and led her from the armoury.

Arm in arm they walked along the passage-way leading from the armoury-cum-Kaffeestube towards the central block of the castle. The passage-way, in contrast to the last time they had walked along there, was completely deserted and Mary commented on the fact.

‘It’s the witches on their broomsticks,’ von Brauchitsch laughed. ‘The commandant hasn’t caught them yet, but give him another few years and you never know. All those poor souls you saw being hauled out of the armoury are now probably poking about the eaves or climbing up the flagpoles. You never know where spies get to nowadays.’

‘You seem to treat the possibility lightly enough,’ Mary said.

‘I’m a Gestapo officer. I’m paid and trained to use my head, not an overheated imagination,’ he said curtly, then squeezed her arm and apologized. ‘Sorry, that tone of voice was aimed at someone else, not you.’ He halted abruptly, peered out of a window into the courtyard and said: ‘Now that is strange.’

‘What’s strange?’

‘The helicopter there,’ von Brauchitsch said thoughtfully. ‘Army regulations state that High Command helicopters must be kept in instant readiness at all times. But that one has part of its engine cover dismantled and a tarpaulin stretched in position over it. Wouldn’t call that instant readiness, would you?’

‘I suppose helicopters need repairing from time to time the same as any other machine.’ Her throat was suddenly dry and she wished von Brauchitsch wouldn’t hold her so closely: he was bound to notice her accelerating heart-beat. ‘What’s so unusual about that?’

‘What’s so unusual is that there was no one working on that machine almost half an hour ago when we first passed by here,’ von Brauchitsch said. ‘Unheard of for a Reichsmarschall’s personal pilot to walk away and leave a job half done.’

‘Would it be unheard of for him to take a piece of mechanism inside and repair it under cover?’ Mary asked sweetly. ‘Or perhaps you haven’t seen a thermometer tonight?’

‘I’m getting as bad as the old commandant and his witchhunts,’ von Brauchitsch said sadly. He moved on, shaking his head. ‘You see before you a horrible example of the dangers of being too long in my business: the obvious answer is far too obvious for shrewd and cunning intellects like ours. I must remember that later on tonight.’

‘You’re going to exercise this great mind again tonight?’ Mary asked lightly.

‘In there, as a matter of fact.’ Von Brauchitsch nodded as they passed by an ornate door. ‘The gold drawing-room.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘In twenty minutes! So soon! Your charming company, Fräulein.’

‘Thank you, kind sir. You – you have an appointment?’ Her heart was back at its old tricks again.

‘An evening of musical appreciation. Even the Gestapo has its finer side. We are going to listen to a nightingale sing.’ He quickened his pace. ‘Sorry, Fräulein, but I’ve just remembered I’ve one or two reports to prepare.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve kept you from your work, Captain,’ she said demurely. How much does he know, she thought wildly, how much does he suspect, what action has he suddenly decided to take? The von Brauchitschs of this world didn’t just suddenly remember anything for the excellent reason that they never forgot it in the first place. ‘It’s been most kind of you.’

‘The pleasure was one-sided,’ von Brauchitsch protested gallantly. ‘Mine and mine alone.’ He stopped outside her bedroom door, took her hand in his and smiled. ‘Goodnight, my dear Maria. You really are the most charming girl.’

‘Goodnight.’ She returned smile for smile. ‘And thank you.’

‘We really must get to know each other better,’ von Brauchitsch said in farewell. He opened her door, bowed, kissed her hand, gently closed the door behind her and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Very much better, my dear Maria,’ he said softly to himself. ‘Very much better indeed.’

Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen bent over their note-books and scribbled furiously. At least the first two did: Christiansen had not yet recovered from the blow on the head and was making heavy weather of his writing. Kramer, who was standing apart with Smith and talking to him in low tones, looked at them in curiosity and with just a trace of uneasiness.

‘They seem to be finding plenty of inspiration from somewhere,’ he said carefully.

‘The spectacle of an open grave is often thought-provoking,’ Smith said cynically.

‘I am afraid I don’t quite follow.’

‘Do you know what those men will be fifteen minutes from now?’

‘I’m tired,’ Kramer said. He sounded it. ‘Please don’t play with words, Captain Schmidt.’

‘Smith. In fifteen minutes they’ll be dead. And they know it. They’re fighting desperately for extra minutes to live: when you have as little time left as they have, even a minute is a prize snatched from eternity. Or the last despairing fling of the ruined gambler. Call it what you like.’

‘You wax lyrical, Captain,’ Kramer grumbled. He paced up and down for almost a minute, no longer troubling to watch the men at the table, then stopped and planted himself squarely in front of Smith. ‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ve been on the spit long enough. I confess I’m baffled. Out with it. What in God’s name is behind all this?’

‘The simplicity of true genius, my dear Kramer. Admiral Rolland, the head of MI6. And he is a genius, make no mistake.’

‘So he’s a genius,’ Kramer said impatiently. ‘Well?’

‘Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen were caught three weeks ago. Now, as you are aware, they were concerned only with north-west Europe and were not known here.’

‘By reputation, they were.’

‘Yes, yes. But only that. Admiral Rolland reckoned that if three fully-briefed men impersonated our three captured men and were despatched here for a perfectly plausible reason, they would be persona grata of some note, honoured guests and completely accepted by you. And, of course, once they were accepted by you, they could operate inside the Schloss Adler with complete security and safety.’

‘And?’

‘Well, don’t you see?’ It was Smith’s turn to be impatient. ‘Rolland knew that if General Carnaby –’ he broke off and scowled across the room at Carnaby-Jones – ‘or that impostor masquerading as General Carnaby were taken here, his opposite number in the German Army would be sent to interrogate him.’ Smith smiled. ‘Even in Britain they are aware that the prophet must go to the mountain, not the mountain to the prophet: the Army calls upon the Gestapo, not vice versa.’

‘Go on, go on!’

‘The Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, Reichsmarschall Julius Rosemeyer, would have been just as priceless to the Allies as General Carnaby to us.’

‘The Reichsmarschall!’ Kramer spoke in a shocked whisper, his eyes straying across the room to Rosemeyer. ‘Kidnap!’

‘Your precious trusted agents there,’ Smith said savagely. ‘And they would have got away with it.’

‘My God! God in heaven! It’s – it’s diabolical!’

‘Isn’t it?’ Smith said. ‘Isn’t it just?’

Kramer left him abruptly, crossed the room to Rosemeyer and sat down in the chair beside him. For perhaps two minutes they talked together in low tones, occasionally glancing in Smith’s direction. Kramer it was, Smith could see, who did most of the talking, Rosemeyer who did all of the reacting. Kramer, Smith reflected, must be putting it across rather well: a printed diagram could have been no clearer than the successive expressions of curiosity, puzzlement, astonishment and, finally, shocked realization that reflected on Rosemeyer’s face. After some seconds’ silence, both men rose to their feet and walked across to where Smith stood. The Reichsmarschall, Smith saw, was a little paler than normal, and when he spoke it required neither a sensitive ear nor imagination to detect a slight tremor in his voice.

He said: ‘This is an incredible story, Captain Smith, incredible. But inevitable. It must be. The only explanation that can cover all the facts, put all the pieces of the jig-saw together.’ He attempted a smile. ‘To change the metaphor, I must say that it comes as a considerable shock to find that one is the missing key in a baffling code. I am eternally in your debt, Captain Smith.’

‘Germany is eternally in your debt,’ Kramer said. ‘You have done her a great service. We shall not forget this. I am sure the Führer will personally wish to honour you with some mark of his esteem.’

‘You are too kind, gentlemen,’ Smith murmured. ‘To do my duty is reward enough.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Perhaps our Führer will give me two or three weeks’ leave – the way I feel tonight my nerves aren’t what they were. But if you gentlemen will excuse me – my present task is not yet completed.’

He moved away and walked slowly up and down, brandy glass in hand, behind the three men bent over the table. From time to time he glanced at one of the note-books and smiled in weary cynicism, neither the smile nor the significance of the smile going unremarked by anyone in the room except the three writing men. He stopped behind Thomas, shook his head in disbelief and said, ‘My God!’

‘Let’s finish it now!’ Rosemeyer demanded impatiently.

‘If you please, Reichsmarschall, let us play this charade out to the bitter end.’

‘You have your reasons?’

‘I most certainly have.’

Briskly, but not hurriedly, von Brauchitsch walked away from Mary’s room, his footfalls echoing crisply on the stone-flagged corridor. Once round the corner of the corridor he broke into a run.

He reached the courtyard and ran across to the helicopter. There was no one there. Quickly he ran up a few steps and peered through the Perspex cupola of the cockpit. He reached ground again and hailed the nearest guard, who came stumbling across, a leashed Doberman trailing behind him.

‘Quickly,’ von Brauchitsch snapped. ‘Have you seen the pilot?’

‘No, Herr Major,’ the guard answered nervously. He was an elderly man, long past front-line service, and held the Gestapo in great fear. ‘Not for a long time.’

‘What do you mean by a long time?’ von Brauchitsch demanded.

‘I don’t know. That’s to say,’ the guard added hastily, ‘half an hour. More. Three-quarters, I would say, Herr Major.’

‘Damnation,’ von Brauchitsch swore. ‘So long. Tell me, when the pilot is carrying out repairs is there a place near here he uses as a work-shop?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The guard was eager to oblige with some positive information. ‘That door there, sir. The old grain store.’

‘Is he in there now?’

‘I don’t know, Herr Major.’

‘You should know,’ von Brauchitsch said coldly. ‘It’s your job to keep your eyes open. Well, just don’t stand there, oaf! Go and find out!’

The elderly guard trotted away while von Brauchitsch, shaking his head angrily over his impatience with the old soldier, crossed the courtyard and questioned the guards at the gate, three tough, competent, young storm-troopers who, unlike the patrol guard, could be guaranteed not to miss anything. He received the same negative answer there.

He strode back towards the helicopter and intercepted the elderly guard running from the old grain store.

‘There’s nobody there, Herr Major.’ He was slightly out of breath and highly apprehensive at being the bearer of what might be ill news. ‘It’s empty.’

‘It would be,’ von Brauchitsch nodded. He patted the old shoulder and smiled. ‘No fault of yours, my friend. You keep a good watch.’

Unhurriedly, almost, now, he made for the main entrance door, pulling out a set of master keys as he went. He struck oil with the first door he opened. The pilot lay there, still unconscious, the smashed distributor cap lay beside him, the pair of overalls lying on top of him a mute but entirely sufficient explanation of the way in which the distributor cap had been removed without detection. Von Brauchitsch took a torch from a long rack on the wall, cut the pilot’s bonds, freed his gag and left him lying there with the door wide open. The passage outside was a heavily travelled one, and someone was bound to be along soon.

Von Brauchitsch ran up the stairs to the passage leading to the bedrooms, slowed down, walked easily, casually past Mary’s bedroom and stopped at the fifth door beyond that. He used his master keys and passed inside, switching on the light as he went in. He crossed the room, lifted the lower sash window and nodded when he saw that nearly all the snow on the sill had been brushed or rubbed away. He leaned farther out, switched on his torch and flashed the beam downwards. The roof of the header station was fifty feet directly below and the markings and footprints in the snow told their own unmistakable story.

Von Brauchitsch straightened, looked at the odd position of the iron bedstead against the wardrobe door and tugged the bed away. He watched the wardrobe door burst open and the bound and gagged figure inside roll to the floor without as much as hoisting an eyebrow. This had been entirely predictable. From the depths of the bound man’s groans it was obvious that he was coming round. Von Brauchitsch cut him free, removed his gag and left. There were more urgent matters demanding his attention than holding the hands of young Oberleutnants as they held their heads and groaned their way back to consciousness.

He stopped outside Mary’s room, put his ear to the door and listened. No sound. He put his eye to the keyhole and peered. No light. He knocked. No reply. He used his master keys and passed inside. No Mary.

‘Well, well, well,’ von Brauchitsch murmured. ‘Very interesting indeed.’

‘Finished?’ Smith asked.

Thomas nodded. Christiansen and Carraciola glowered. But all three were sitting back and it was obvious that all three were, in fact, finished. Smith walked along behind them, reaching over their shoulders for the note-books. He took them across the room and laid them on the little table by Kramer’s chair.

‘The moment of truth,’ Smith said quietly. ‘One book should be enough.’

Kramer, reluctantly almost, picked up the top book and began to read. Slowly he began to leaf his way through the pages. Smith drained his glass and sauntered unconcernedly across the room to the decanter on the sideboard. He poured some brandy, carefully recapped the bottle, walked a few aimless steps and halted. He was within two feet of the guard with the carbine.

He sipped his brandy and said to Kramer: ‘Enough?’

Kramer nodded.

‘Then compare it with my original.’

Kramer nodded. ‘As you say, the moment of truth.’

He picked up the note-book, slid off the rubber band and opened the cover. The first page was blank. So was the next. And the next … Frowning, baffled, Kramer lifted his eyes to look across the room to Smith.

Smith’s brandy glass was falling to the ground as Smith himself, with a whiplash violent movement of his body brought the side of his right hand chopping down on the guard’s neck. The guard toppled as if a bridge had fallen on him. Glasses on the sideboard tinkled in the vibration of his fall.

Kramer’s moment of utter incomprehension vanished. The bitter chagrin of total understanding flooded his face. His hand stretched out towards the alarm button.

‘Uh-uh! Not the buzzer, Mac!’ The blow that had struck down the guard had held no more whiplash than the biting urgency in Schaffer’s voice. He was stretched his length on the floor where he’d dived to retrieve the Schmeisser now trained, rock steady, on Kramer’s heart. For the second time that night, Kramer’s hand withdrew from the alarm button.

Smith picked up the guard’s carbine, walked across the room and changed it for his silenced Luger. Schaffer, his gun still trained on Kramer, picked himself up from the floor and glared at Smith.

‘A second-rate punk,’ he said indignantly. ‘A simple-minded American. That’s what you said. Don’t know what goddamned day of the week it is, do I?’

‘All I could think of on the spur of the moment,’ Smith said apologetically.

‘That makes it even worse,’ Schaffer complained. ‘And did you have to clobber me so goddamned realistically?’

‘Local colour. What are you complaining about? It worked.’ He walked across to Kramer’s table, picked up the three note-books and buttoned them securely inside his tunic. He said to Schaffer: ‘Between them, they shouldn’t have missed anything … Well, time to be gone. Ready, Mr Jones?’

‘And hurry about it,’ Schaffer added. ‘We have a street-car to catch. Well, anyhow, a cable-car.’

‘It’s a chicken farm in the boondocks for me.’ Jones looked completely dazed and he sounded exactly the same way. ‘Acting? My God, I don’t know anything about it.’

‘This is all you want?’ Kramer was completely under control again, calm, quiet, the total professional. ‘Those books? Just those books?’

‘Well, just about.’ Lots of nice names and addresses. A bedtime story for MI6.’

‘I see.’ Kramer nodded his understanding. ‘Then those men are, of course, what they claim to be?’

‘They’ve been under suspicion for weeks. Classified information of an invaluable nature was going out and false – and totally valueless – information was coming in. It took two months’ work to pinpoint the leakages and channels of false information to one or more of the departments controlled by those men. But we knew we could never prove it on them – we weren’t even sure if there was more than one traitor and had no idea who that one might be – and, in any event, proving it without finding out their contacts at home and abroad would have been useless. So we – um – thought this one up.’

‘You mean, you thought it up, Captain Smith,’ Rosemeyer said.

‘What does it matter?’ Smith said indifferently.

‘True. It doesn’t. But something else does.’ Rosemeyer smiled faintly. ‘When Colonel Kramer asked you if the books were all you wanted, you said ‘just about’. Indicating that there was possibly something else. It is your hope to kill two birds with one stone, to invite me to accompany you?’

‘If you can believe that, Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer,’ Smith said unkindly, ‘it’s time you handed your baton over to someone else. I have no intention of binding you hand and foot and carrying you over the Alps on my shoulder. The only way I could take you is at the point of a gun and I very much fear that you are a man of honour, a man to whom the safety of his skin comes a very long way behind his loyalty to his country. If I pointed this gun at you and said to get up and come with us or be gunned down, nobody in this room doubts that you’d just keep on sitting. So we must part.’

‘You are as complimentary as you are logical.’ Rosemeyer smiled, a little, bitter smile. ‘I wish the logic had struck me as forcibly when we were discussing this very subject a few minutes ago.’

‘It is perhaps as well it didn’t,’ Smith admitted.

‘But – but Colonel Wilner?’ Kramer said. ‘Field-Marshal Kesselring’s Chief of Intelligence. Surely he’s not –’

‘Rest easy. Willi-Willi is not on our pay-roll. What he said he believed to be perfectly true. He believes me to be the top double agent in Italy. I’ve been feeding him useless, false and out-of-date information for almost two years. Tell him so, will you?’

‘Kind of treble agent, see?’ Schaffer said in a patient explaining tone. ‘That’s one better than double.’

‘Heidelberg?’ Kramer asked.

‘Two years at the University. Courtesy of the – um – Foreign Office.’

Kramer shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand –’

‘Sorry. We’re going.’

‘In fact, we’re off,’ Schaffer said. ‘Read all about it in the post-war memoirs of Pimpernel Schaffer –’

He broke off as the door opened wide. Mary stood framed in the doorway and the Mauser was very steady in her hand. She let it fall to her side with a sigh of relief.

‘Took your time about getting here, didn’t you?’ Smith said severely. ‘We were beginning to get a little worried about you.’

‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t get away. Von Brauchitsch –’

‘No odds, young lady.’ Schaffer made a grandiose gesture with his right arm. ‘Schaffer was here.’

‘The new girl who arrived tonight!’ Kramer whispered. He looked slightly dazed. ‘The cousin of that girl from the –’

‘None else,’ Smith said. ‘She’s the one who has been helping me to keep Willi-Willi happy for a long time past. And she’s the one who opened the door for us tonight.’

‘Boss,’ Schaffer said unhappily. ‘Far be it for me to rush you –’

‘Coming now,’ Smith smiled at Rosemeyer. ‘You were right, the books weren’t all I wanted. You were right, I did want company. But unlike you, Reichsmarschall, those I want have a high regard for their own skins and are entirely without honour. And so they will come.’ His gun waved in the direction of Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. ‘On your feet, you three. You’re coming with us.’

‘Coming with us?’ Schaffer said incredulously. ‘To England?’

‘To stand trial for treason. It’s no part of my duties to act as public executioner … God alone knows how many hundreds and thousands of lives they’ve cost already. Not to mention Torrance-Smythe and Sergeant Harrod.’ He looked at Carraciola, and his eyes were very cold. ‘I’ll never know, but I think you were the brains. It was you who killed Harrod back up there on the mountain. If you could have got that radio code-book you could have cracked our network in South Germany. That would have been something, our network here has never been penetrated. The radio code-book was a trap that didn’t spring … And you got old Smithy. You left the pub a couple of minutes after I did tonight and he followed you. But he couldn’t cope with a man –’

‘Drop those guns.’ Von Brauchitsch’s voice was quiet and cold and compelling. No one had heard or seen the stealthy opening of the door. He stood just inside, about four feet from Mary and he had a small-calibre automatic in his right hand. Smith whirled round, his Luger lining up on the doorway, hesitated a fatal fraction of a second because Mary was almost directly in line with von Brauchitsch. Von Brauchitsch, his earlier gallantry of the evening abruptly yielding to a coldly professional assessment of the situation, had no such inhibitions. There was a sharp flat crack, the bullet passed through Mary’s sleeve just above the elbow and Smith exclaimed in pain as he clutched his bleeding hand and heard his flying Luger strike against some unidentified furniture. Mary tried to turn round but von Brauchitsch was too quick and too strong. He jumped forward, hooked his arm round her and caught her wrist with the gun and thrust his own over her shoulder. She tried to struggle free. Von Brauchitsch squeezed her wrist, she cried out in pain, her hand opened and her gun fell to the floor. Von Brauchitsch seemed to notice none of this, his unwinking right eye, the only vulnerable part of him that could be seen behind Mary, was levelled along the barrel of his automatic.

Schaffer dropped his gun.

‘You shouldn’t have tried it,’ von Brauchitsch said to Smith. ‘An extremely silly thing to do … In your circumstances, I’d have done exactly the same silly thing.’ He looked at Kramer. ‘Sorry for the delay, Herr Colonel. But I thought the young lady was very anxious and restive. And she knows precious little about her native Düsseldorf. And she doesn’t know enough not to let people hold her hand when she’s telling lies – as she does most of the time.’ He released the girl and half turned her round, smiling down at her. ‘A delightful hand, my dear – but what a fascinating variation of pulse rates.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t care.’ Kramer gave vent to a long luxurious sigh and drooped with relief. ‘Well done, my boy, well done. My God! Another minute––’ He heaved himself to his feet, crossed over to Schaffer, prudently keeping clear of von Brauchitsch’s line of fire, searched him for hidden weapons, found none, did the same to Smith with the same results, handed him a white handkerchief to stem the flow of blood, looked at Mary and hesitated. ‘Well, I don’t see how she very well can be, but … I wonder. Anne-Marie?’

‘Certainly, Herr Colonel. It will be a pleasure. We’ve met before and she knows my methods. Don’t you, my dear?’ With a smile as nearly wolf-like as any beautiful Aryan could give, Anne-Marie walked across to Mary and struck her viciously across the face. Mary cried in pain, staggered back against the wall and crouched there, eyes too wide in a pale face, palms pressed behind her for support from the wall, a trickle of blood coming from the corner of her mouth. ‘Well?’ Anne-Marie demanded. ‘Have you a gun?’

‘Anne-Marie!’ There was protest and aversion in Kramer’s face. ‘Must you –’

‘I know how to deal with cheap little spies like her!’ She turned to Mary and said: ‘I’m afraid they don’t like watching how I get results. In there!’

She caught Mary by the hair, pulled her to the side door, opened it and pushed her violently inside. The sound of her body crashing to the floor and another gasp of pain came together. Anne-Marie closed the door behind them.

For the next ten seconds or so there could be clearly heard the sound of blows and muffled cries of pain. Von Brauchitsch waved Smith and Schaffer back with his gun, advanced, hitched a seat on the edge of one of the big arm-chairs, winced as he listened to the sound of the struggle and said to Kramer dryly: ‘I somehow think the young lady would have preferred me to search her. There’s a limit to the value of false modesty.’

‘I’m afraid Anne-Marie sometimes lets her enthusiasm carry her away,’ Kramer conceded. His mouth was wrinkled in distaste.

‘Sometimes?’ Von Brauchitsch winced again as more sounds filtered through the door, the crash of a body against a wall, a shriek of pain, low sobbing moans, then silence. ‘Always. When the other girl is as young and beautiful as herself.’

‘It’s over now,’ Kramer sighed. ‘It’s all over now.’ He looked at Smith and Schaffer. ‘We’ll fix that hand first, then – well, one thing about the Schloss Adler, there is no shortage of dungeons.’ He broke off, the fractional widening of his eyes matching a similar slumping of his shoulders, and he said carefully to von Brauchitsch: ‘You are far too good a man to lose, Captain. It would seem that we were wasting our sympathy on the wrong person. There’s a gun four feet from you pointing at the middle of your back.’

Von Brauchitsch, his gun-hand resting helplessly on his thigh, turned slowly round and looked over his shoulder. There was indeed a gun pointing at the middle of his back, a Lilliput .21 automatic, and the hand that held it was disconcertingly steady, the dark eyes cool and very watchful. Apart from the small trickle of blood from her cut lip and rather dishevelled hair, Mary looked singularly little the worse for wear.

‘It’s every parent’s duty,’ Schaffer said pontifically, ‘to encourage his daughter to take up Judo.’ He took the gun from von Brauchitsch’s unresisting hand, retrieved his own Schmeisser, walked across to the main door and locked it. ‘Far too many folk coming in here without knocking.’ On his way back he looked through the opened door of the room, whistled, grinned and said to Mary: ‘It’s a good job I have my thoughts set on someone else. I wouldn’t like to be married to you if you lost your temper. That’s a regular sick-bay dispensary in there. Fix the Major’s hand as best you can. I’ll watch them.’ He hoisted his Schmeisser and smiled almost blissfully: ‘Oh, brother, how I’ll watch them.’

And he watched them. While Mary attended to Smith’s injured hand in the small room where Anne-Marie had so lately met her Waterloo, Schaffer herded his six charges into one of the massive couches, took up position by the mantelpiece, poured himself some brandy, sipped it delicately and gave the prisoners an encouraging smile from time to time. There were no answering smiles. For all Schaffer’s nonchalance and light-hearted banter there was about him not only a coldly discouraging competence with the weapon in his hand but also the unmistakable air of one who would, when the need arose and without a second’s hesitation, squeeze the trigger and keep on squeezing it. Being at the wrong end of a Schmeisser machine-pistol does not make for an easy cordiality in relationships.

Smith and Mary emerged from the side room, the latter carrying a cloth-covered tray. Smith was pale and had his right hand heavily bandaged. Schaffer looked at the hand then lifted an enquiring eyebrow to Mary.

‘Not so good.’ She looked a little pale herself. ‘Forefinger and thumb are both smashed. I’ve patched it as best I can but I’m afraid it’s a job for a surgeon.’

‘If I can survive Mary’s first aid,’ Smith said philosophically, ‘I can survive anything. We have a more immediate little problem here.’ He tapped his tunic. ‘Those names and addresses here. Might be an hour or two before we get them through to England and then another hour or two before those men can be rounded up.’ He looked at the men seated on the couch. ‘You could get through to them in a lot less than that and warn them. So we have to ensure your silence for a few hours.’

‘We could ensure it for ever, boss,’ Schaffer said carelessly.

‘That won’t be necessary. As you said yourself, it’s a regular little dispensary in there.’ He removed the tray cloth to show bottles and hypodermic syringes. He held up a bottle in his left hand. ‘Nembutal. You’ll hardly feel the prick.’

Kramer stared at him. ‘Nembutal? I’ll be damned if I do.’

Smith said in a tone of utter conviction: ‘You’ll be dead if you don’t.’

NINE

Smith halted outside the door marked RADIO RAUM, held up his hand for silence, looked at the three scowling captives and said: ‘Don’t even think of tipping anyone off or raising the alarm. I’m not all that keen on taking you back to England. Lieutenant Schaffer, I think we might immobilize those men a bit more.’

‘We might at that,’ Schaffer agreed. He went behind each of the three men in turn, ripped open the top buttons on their tunics and pulled the tunics down their backs until their sleeves reached their elbows and said in the same soft voice: ‘That’ll keep their hands out of trouble for a little.’

‘But not their feet. Don’t let them come anywhere near you,’ Smith said to Mary. ‘They’ve nothing to lose. Right, Lieutenant, when you’re ready.’

‘Ready now.’ Carefully, silently, Schaffer eased open the door of the radio room. It was a large, well-lit, but very bleak room, the two main items of furniture being a massive table by the window on the far wall and, on the table, an almost equally massive transceiver in gleaming metal: apart from two chairs and a filing cabinet the room held nothing else, not even as much as a carpet to cover the floor-boards.

Perhaps it was the lack of a carpet that betrayed them. For the first half of Schaffer’s stealthy advance across the room the operator, his back to them, sat smoking a cigarette in idle unconcern, listening to soft Austrian Schrammel music coming in over his big machine: suddenly, alerted either by the faintest whisper of sound from a creaking floorboard or just by some sixth sense, he whirled round and jumped to his feet. And he thought as quickly as he moved. Even as he raised his arms high in apparently eager surrender, he appeared to move slightly to his right, shifting the position of his right foot. There came the sudden strident clamour of an alarm bell ringing in the passage outside, Schaffer leapt forward, his Schmeisser swinging, and the operator staggered back against his transceiver then slid unconscious to the floor. But Schaffer was too late. The bell rang and kept on ringing.

‘That’s all I need!’ Smith swore bitterly. ‘That’s all I bloody well need!’ He ran through the radio room door out into the passage, located the glass-cased alarm bell some feet away and struck it viciously with the butt of his Schmeisser. The shattered glass tinkled to the floor and the clangour abruptly ceased.

‘Inside!’ Smith gestured to the open doorway of the radio room. ‘All of you. Quickly.’ He ushered them all inside, looked around, saw a side door leading off to the right and said to Mary: ‘Quickly. What’s in there? Schaffer!’

‘Horatio hold the bridge,’ Schaffer murmured. He moved across and took up position at the radio room door. ‘We could have done without this, boss.’

‘We could do without a lot of things in this world,’ Smith said wearily. He glanced at Mary. ‘Well?’

‘Storage rooms for radio spares, looks like.’

‘You and Jones take those three in there. If they breathe, kill them.’

Jones looked down at the gun held gingerly in his hand and said: ‘I am not a serviceman, sir.’

‘I have news for you,’ Smith said. ‘Neither am I.’

He crossed hurriedly to the transceiver, sat down and studied the confusing array of dials, knobs and switches. For fully twenty seconds he sat there, just looking.

Schaffer said from the doorway: ‘Know how to work it, boss?’

‘A fine time to ask me,’ Smith said. ‘We’ll soon find out, won’t we?’ He switched the machine to ‘Send’, selected the ultra short wave band and lined up his transmitting frequency. He opened another switch and picked up a microphone.

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy,’ he said. ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?’

Nobody heard him or gave indication of hearing him. Smith altered the transmitting frequency fractionally and tried again. And again. And again. After the sixth or seventh repetition, Smith started as a crash of machine-pistol fire came from the doorway. He twisted round. Schaffer was stretched full length on the floor, smoke wisping from the barrel of his Schmeisser.

‘We got callers, boss,’ Schaffer said apologetically. ‘Don’t think I got any but I sure as hell started their adrenaline moving around.’

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy,’ Smith said urgently, insistingly. ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. For God’s sake, why don’t they answer?’

‘They can’t come round the corner of the passage without being sawn in half.’ Schaffer spoke comfortably from his uncomfortable horizontal position on the floor. ‘I can hold them off to Christmas. So what’s the hurry?’

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Broadsword calling Danny Boy. How long do you think it’s going to be before someone cuts the electricity?’

‘For God’s sake, Danny Boy,’ Schaffer implored. ‘Why don’t you answer? Why don’t you answer?’

‘Danny Boy calling Broadsword.’ The voice on the radio was calm and loud and clear, so free from interference that it might have come from next door. ‘Danny Boy –’

‘One hour, Danny Boy,’ Smith interrupted. ‘One hour. Understood? Over.’

‘Understood. You have it, Broadsword?’ The voice was unmistakably that of Admiral Rolland. ‘Over.’

‘I have it,’ Smith said. ‘I have it all.’

‘All sins are forgiven. Mother Machree coming to meet you. Leaving now.’

There came another staccato crash of sound as Schaffer loosed off another burst from his Schmeisser. Admiral Rolland’s voice on the radio said: ‘What was that?’

‘Static,’ Smith said. He didn’t bother to switch off. He rose, took three paces back and fired a two-second burst from his machine-pistol, his face twisting in pain as the recoil slammed into his shattered hand. No one would ever use that particular radio again. He glanced briefly at Schaffer, but only briefly: the American’s face, though thoughtful, was calm and unworried: there were those who might require helpful words, encouragement and reassurance, but Schaffer was not one of them. Smith moved swiftly across to the window and lifted the lower sash with his left hand.

The moon was almost obscured behind some darkly drifting cloud. A thin weak light filtered down into the half-seen obscurity of the valley below. Once again the snow was beginning to fall, gently. The air was taut, brittle, in the intensity of its coldness, an Arctic chill that bit to the bone. The icy wind that gusted through the room could have come off the polar ice-cap.

They were on the east side of the castle, Smith realized, the side remote from the cable-car header station. The base of the volcanic plug was shrouded in a gloom so deep that it was impossible to be sure whether or not the guards and Dobermans were patrolling down there: and, for the purposes of present survival, it didn’t really matter. Smith withdrew from the window, pulled the nylon from the kitbag, tied one end securely to the metal leg of the radio table, threw the remainder of the rope out into the night then, with his left hand, thoroughly scuffed and rubbed away the frozen encrusted snow on both the window-sill and for two or three feet beneath it: it would, he thought, have to be a hypercritical eye that didn’t immediately register the impression that there had been fairly heavy and recent traffic over the sill. He wondered, vaguely, whether the rope reached as far as the ground and dismissed the thought as soon as it had occurred to him: again, it didn’t really matter.

He crossed the room to where Schaffer lay spread-eagled in the doorway. The key was in the lock on the inside of the door and the lock, he observed with satisfaction, was on the same massive scale as everything else in the Schloss Adler. He said to Schaffer: ‘Time to close the door.’

‘Let’s wait till they show face again then discourage them some more,’ Schaffer suggested. ‘It’s been a couple of minutes since the last lad peeked his head round the corner there. Another peek, another salvo from Schaffer and it might give us another couple of minutes’ grace – enough time to make it feasible for us to have shinned down that little rope there and made our getaway.’

‘I should have thought of that.’ An icy snow-laden gust of wind blew across the room, from open window through open door, and Smith shivered. ‘My God, it’s bitter!’

‘Loss of blood,’ Schaffer said briefly, then added, unsympathetically: ‘And all that brandy you guzzled back there. When it comes to opening pores –’

He broke off and lay very still, lowering his head a fraction to sight along the barrel of his Schmeisser. He said softly: ‘Give me your torch, boss.’

‘What is it?’ Smith whispered. He handed Schaffer the torch.

‘Discretion,’ Schaffer murmured. He switched on the torch and placed it on the floor, pushing it as far away from himself as he could. ‘I reckon if I were in their place I’d be discreet, too. There’s a stick poking round the corner of the passage and the stick has a mirror tied to it. Only, they haven’t got it angled right.’

Smith peered cautiously round the door jamb, just in time to see stick and suspended mirror being withdrawn from sight, presumably to make adjustments. A few seconds later and the stick appeared again, this time with the mirror angled at more or less forty-five degrees. Mirror and stick disintegrated under the flatly staccato hammering of Schaffer’s machine-pistol. Schaffer stood up, took careful aim at the single overhead light illuminating the passage and fired one shot. Now the sole light in the passage came from the torch on the floor, the light from which would not only effectively conceal from the Germans at the far end of the passage what was going on at the radio room door but, indeed, make it very difficult to decide whether or not the door itself was open or shut.

Smith and Schaffer moved back into the radio room, soundlessly closed the door behind them and as soundlessly turned the key in the lock. Schaffer used the leverage of his Schmeisser to bend the key so that it remained firmly jammed in the wards of the lock.

They waited. At least two minutes passed, then they heard the sound of excited voices at the far end of the passage followed almost at once by the sound of heavy boots pounding down the passage. They moved away from the door, passed inside the radio spares room, leaving just a sufficient crack in the doorway to allow a faint backwash of light to filter through. Smith said softly: ‘Mary, you and Mr Jones for Thomas there. A gun in each temple.’ He took Christiansen for himself, forced him to kneel and ground his gun into the back of his neck. Schaffer backed Carraciola against a wall, the muzzle of his Schmeisser pressed hard against his teeth. At the other end of the machine-pistol Schaffer smiled pleasantly, his teeth a pale gleam in the near darkness. The stillness inside the little room was complete.

The half-dozen Germans outside the radio room door bore no resemblance to the elderly guard von Brauchitsch had interrogated in the courtyard. They were élite soldiers of the Alpenkorps, ruthless men who had been ruthlessly trained. No one made any move to approach the door handle or lock: the machine-like efficiency with which they broached that door without risk to themselves was clearly the result of a well-drilled procedure for handling situations of precisely this nature.

At a gesture from the Oberleutnant in charge, a soldier stepped forward and with two diagonal sweeps emptied the magazine of his machine-pistol through the door. A second used his machine-pistol to stitch a neat circle in the wood, reversed his gun and knocked in the wooden circle with the butt. A third armed two grenades and lobbed them accurately through the hole provided while a fourth shot away the lock. The soldiers pressed back on each side of the door. The two flat cracks of the exploding grenades came almost simultaneously and smoke came pouring through the circular hole in the door.

The door was kicked open and the men rushed inside. There was no longer any need to take precautions – any men who had been in the same confined space as those two exploding grenades would be dead men now. For a moment there was confusion and hesitation until the blue acrid smoke was partially cleared away by the powerful cross-draught then the Oberleutnant, locating the source of this draught with the aid of a small hand-torch, ran across to the open window, checked at the sight of the rope disappearing over the sill, leaned out the window, rubbed his now-streaming eyes and peered downwards along the beam of his torch. The beam reached perhaps half-way down the side of the volcanic plug. There was nothing to be seen. He caught the rope in his free hand and jerked it savagely: it was as nearly weightless as made no difference. For a moment he focused his torch on the disturbed snow on the window-ledge then swung back into the room.

‘Gott in Himmel!’ he shouted. ‘They’ve got away. They’re down already! Quickly, the nearest phone!’

‘Well, now.’ Schaffer listened to the fading sound of running footsteps, removed the muzzle of his Schmeisser from Carraciola’s teeth and smiled approvingly. ‘That was a good boy.’ Gun in Carraciola’s back, he followed Smith out into the wrecked radio room and said thoughtfully: ‘It isn’t going to take them too long to find out there are no footprints in the snow down there.’

‘It’s going to take them even less time to discover that this rope is gone.’ Swiftly, ignoring the stabbing pain in his right hand, Smith hauled the nylon in through the window. ‘We’re going to need it. And we’re going to need some distractions.’

‘I’m distracted enough as it is,’ Schaffer said.

‘Take four or five plastic explosives, each with different fuse length settings. Chuck them into rooms along the corridor there.’

‘Distractions coming up.’ Schaffer extracted some plastic explosives from the kit-bag, cut the slow-burning RDX fuses off to varying lengths, crimped on the chemical igniters, said, ‘Consider it already done,’ and left.

The first three rooms he came to were locked and he wasted neither time nor the precious ammunition of his silenced Luger in trying to open them. But each of the next five rooms was unlocked. In the first three, all bedrooms, he placed charges in a Dresden fruit bowl, under an officer’s cap and under a pillow: in the fourth room, a bathroom, he placed it behind a WC and in the fifth, a store-room, high up on a shelf beside some highly inflammable-looking cardboard cartons.

Smith, meanwhile, had ushered the others from the still smoke-filled, eye-watering, throat-irritating atmosphere of the radio room into the comparatively purer air of the passage-way beyond, and was waiting the return of Schaffer when his face became suddenly thoughtful at the sight of some fire-fighting gear – a big CO_2 extinguisher, buckets of sand and a fireman’s axe – on a low platform by the passage wall.

‘You are slipping, Major Smith.’ Mary’s eyes were red-rimmed and her tear-streaked face white as paper, but she could still smile at him. ‘Distractions, you said. I’ve had the same thought myself, and I’m only me.’

Smith gave her a half-smile, the way his hand hurt he felt he couldn’t afford the other half, and tried the handle of a door beside the low platform, a door lettered AKTEN RAUM – Records Office. Such a door, inevitably, was locked. He took the Luger in his left hand, placed it against the lock, squeezed the trigger and went inside.

It certainly looked like a Records Office. The room was heavily shelved and piled ceiling-high with files and papers. Smith crossed to the window, opened it wide to increase the draught then scattered large piles of paper on the floor and put a match to them. The paper flared up at once, the flames feet high within seconds.

‘Kinda forgot this, didn’t you?’ Schaffer had returned and was bearing with him the large CO_2 cylinder. He crossed to the window. ‘Gardyloo or mind your heads or whatever the saying is.’

The cylinder disappeared through the open window. The room was already so furiously ablaze that Schaffer had difficulty in finding his way back to the door again. As he stumbled out, his clothes and hair singed and face smoke-blackened, a deep-toned bell far down in the depths of the Schloss Adler began to ring with a strident urgency. ‘For God’s sake, what next,’ Schaffer said in despair. ‘The fire brigade?’

‘Just about,’ Smith said bitterly. ‘Damn it, why couldn’t I have checked first? Now they know where we are.’

‘A heat-sensing device linked to an indicator?’

‘What else? Come on.’

They ran along the central passage-way driving the prisoners in front of them, dropped down a central flight of stairs and were making for the next when they heard the shouting of voices and the clattering of feet on treads as soldiers came running up from the castle courtyard.

‘Quickly! In behind there!’ Smith pointed to a curtained alcove. ‘Hurry up! Oh, God – I’ve forgotten something!’ He turned and ran back the way he had come.

‘Where the hell has he –’ Schaffer broke off as he realized the approaching men were almost upon them, whirled and jabbed the nearest prisoner painfully with the muzzle of his Schmeisser. ‘In that alcove. Fast.’ In the dim light behind the curtains he changed his machine-pistol for the silenced Luger. ‘Don’t even think of touching those curtains. With the racket that bell’s making, they won’t even hear you die.’

Nobody touched the curtains. Jack-booted men, gasping heavily for breath, passed by within feet of them. They clattered furiously up the next flight of stairs, the one Smith and the others had just descended, and then the footsteps stopped abruptly. From the next shouted words it was obvious that they had just caught sight of the fire and had abruptly and for the first time realized the magnitude of the task they had to cope with.

‘Emergency! Sergeant, get on that phone!’ It was the voice of the Oberleutnant who had led the break-in to the radio room. ‘Fire detail at the double! Hoses, more CO_2 cylinders. Where in God’s name is Colonel Kramer. Corporal! Find Colonel Kramer at once.’

The corporal didn’t answer, the sound of jutting heels striking the treads as he raced down the stairs was answer enough. He ran by the alcove and ran down the next flight of stairs until the sound of his footfalls was lost in the metallic clamour of the alarm bell. Schaffer risked a peep through a crack in the curtains just as Smith came running up on tiptoe.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Schaffer’s voice was low and fierce.

‘Come on, come on! Out of it!’ Smith said urgently. ‘No, Jones, not down that flight of stairs, you want to meet a whole regiment of Alpenkorps coming up it? Along the passage to the west wing. We’ll use the side stairs. For God’s sake, hurry. This place will be like Piccadilly Circus in a matter of seconds.’

Schaffer pounded along the passage beside Smith and when he spoke again the anxiety-born fierceness of tone had a certain plaintive quality to it. ‘Well, where the bloody hell have you been?’

‘The man we left tied up in the room beside the telephone exchange. The Records Office is directly above. I just remembered. I cut him free and dragged him out to the passage. He’d have burnt to death.’

‘You did that, did you?’ Schaffer said wonderingly. ‘You do think of the most goddamned unimportant things, don’t you?’

‘It’s a point of view. Our friend lying in the passage back there wouldn’t share your sentiments. Right, down those stairs and straight ahead. Mary, you know the door.’

Mary knew the door. Fifteen paces from the foot of the stairs she stopped. Smith spared a glance through the passage window on his left. Already smoke and flame were showing through the windows and embrasures in the north-east tower of the castle. In the courtyard below, dozens of soldiers were running around, most of them without what appeared to be any great sense of purpose or direction. One man there wasn’t running. He was the overalled helicopter pilot and he was standing very still indeed, bent low over the engine. As Smith watched he slowly straightened, lifted his right arm and shook his fist in the direction of the burning tower.

Smith turned away and said to Mary: ‘Sure this is the room? Two storeys below the window we came in?’

Mary nodded. ‘No question. This is it.’

Smith tried the door handle: the room was locked. The time for skeleton keys and such-like finesse was gone: he placed the barrel of his Luger against the lock.

The corporal despatched by his Oberleutnant to locate Colonel Kramer was faced by the same problem when he turned the handle of the gold drawing-room, for when Smith and the others had left there for the last time Schaffer had locked the door and thoughtfully thrown the key out a convenient passage window. The corporal first of all knocked respectfully. No reply. He knocked loudly, with the same lack of result. He depressed the handle and used his shoulder and all he did was to hurt his shoulder. He battered at the lock area with the butt of his Schmeisser but the carpenters who had built the Schloss Adler doors had known what they were about. He hesitated, then brought his machine-pistol right way round and fired a burst through the lock, praying to heaven that Colonel Kramer wasn’t sleeping in a chair in direct line with the keyhole.

Colonel Kramer was sleeping all right, but nowhere near the direct line of the keyhole. He was stretched out on the gold carpet with a considerately-placed pillow under his head. The corporal advanced slowly into the drawing-room, his eyebrows reaching for his hair and his face almost falling apart in shocked disbelief. Reichs-marschall Rosemeyer was stretched out beside the Colonel. Von Brauchitsch and a sergeant were sprawled in armchairs, heads lolling on their shoulders, while Anne-Marie – a very dishevelled and somewhat bruised-looking Anne-Marie – was stretched out on one of the big gold-lamé couches.

Like a man in a daze, still totally uncomprehending, the corporal approached Kramer, knelt by his side and then shook him by the shoulder, with gentle respect at first and then with increasing vigour. After some time it was borne in upon him that he could shake the Colonel’s shoulder all night and that would be all he would have for it.

And then, illogically and for the first time, he noticed that all the men were without jackets, and that everyone, including Anne-Marie, had their left sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He looked slowly around the drawing-room and went very still as his gaze rested on a tray with bottles, beakers and hypodermic syringes. Slowly, on the corporal’s face, shocked incomprehension was replaced by an equally shocked understanding. He took off through the doorway like the favourite in the Olympics 100 metres final.

Schaffer tied the nylon rope round the head of the iron bedstead, tested the security of the knot, lifted the lower sash window, pushed the rope through and peered unhappily down the valley. At the far end of the village a pulsating red glow marked the smouldering embers of what had once been the railway station. The lights of the village itself twinkled clearly. Immediately below and to the right of where he stood could be seen four patrolling guards with as many dogs – Kramer hadn’t spoken idly when he’d said the outside guards had been doubled – and the ease with which he could spot them Schaffer found all too readily understandable when he twisted his head and stared skywards through the thinly driving snow. The moon had just emerged from behind a black bar of cloud and was sailing across a discouragingly large stretch of empty sky. Even the stars could be seen.

‘I’m going to feel a mite conspicuous out there, boss,’ Schaffer said complainingly. ‘And there’s a wolf-pack loose down below there.’

‘Wouldn’t matter if they had a battery of searchlights trained on this window,’ Smith said curtly. ‘Not now. We’ve no option. Quickly!’

Schaffer nodded dolefully, eased himself through the window, grasped the rope and halted momentarily as a muffled explosion came from the eastern wing of the castle.

‘Number one,’ Schaffer said with satisfaction. ‘Bang goes a bowl of Dresden fruit – or a Dresden bowl of fruit. I do hope,’ he added anxiously, ‘that there’s nobody using the toilet next door to where that bang just went off.’

Smith opened his mouth to make impatient comment but Schaffer was already gone. Fifteen feet only and he was standing on the roof of the header station. Smith eased himself awkwardly over the sill, wrapped the rope round his right forearm, took the strain with his left hand and looked at Mary. She gave him an encouraging smile, but there was nothing encouraging about her expression when she transferred her gaze back to the three men who were lined up facing a wall, their hands clasped behind their necks. Carnaby-Jones was also covering them but, in his case, he held the gun as if it might turn and bite him at any moment.

Smith joined Schaffer on the roof of the header station. Both men crouched low to minimize the chances of being spotted from below. For the first ten feet out from the wall the roof was quite flat then dropped away sharply at an angle of thirty degrees. Smith thoughtfully regarded this steep slope and said: ‘We don’t want a repeat performance of what happened to us last time we were out there. We could do with a good piton to hammer into the castle wall here. Or the roof. Some sort of belay for our rope.’

‘Pitons we don’t need. Look at this.’ With his bare hands Schaffer scraped at the snow-encrusted roof of the header station to reveal a fine wire netting and, below that, iron bars covering a pane of plate glass perhaps two feet by one. ‘Skylights, I believe they’re called. Those bars look pretty firm to me.’

He laid both hands on one of the bars and tugged firmly. It remained secure. Smith laid his left hand on the same bar and they pulled together. It still remained secure. Schaffer grinned in satisfaction, passed the rope round the bar and made no mistake about the knot he tied. Smith sat down on the roof and put his hand to the rope. Schaffer caught his wrist and firmly broke Smith’s grip.

‘No, you don’t.’ Schaffer lifted Smith’s right hand: the thick wrapping of bandages was already sodden, saturated with blood. ‘You can win your VC next time out. This time, you’d never make it. This one is on me.’ He paused and shook his head in wonder. ‘My God, Schaffer, you don’t know what you’re saying.’

He removed the kit-bag he’d been carrying round his neck, crawled to the break in the roof, gripped the rope and slid smoothly down the sloping surface. As he approached the roof edge he turned round with infinite care until he was pointing head downwards. Slowly, inch by almost imperceptible inch, the rope above him caught securely between his feet, he lowered himself still farther until his head was projecting over the edge of the roof. He peered downwards.

He was, he discovered, directly above one of the cables. Two hundred feet below, but to his left, this time, guards and Dobermans were floundering uphill through the deep snow at the best speed they could make, heading for the main entrance, to the castle courtyard. The word had gone out, Schaffer realized, and every available man was being pulled in either to fight the fire or to help in the search for the men who had started the fire. Which meant, Schaffer concluded, that some of the garrison must have checked the state of the ground beneath the radio room window and found there nothing but virgin and undisturbed snow …

He twisted his head and looked upwards. There was no sign of any guard patrolling the battlements, which was what he would have expected: there was no point in keeping a posted lookout for an enemy without when every indication pointed to the fact that the enemy was still within.

Schaffer eased himself downwards another perilous six inches till head and shoulders were over the edge of the roof. Only two things mattered now: was there a winch attendant or guard inside the header station and, if there were, could he, Schaffer, hold on to the rope with one hand while with the other he wriggled his Luger free and shot the guard? Schaffer doubted it. His OSS training had been wide-ranging and intensive but no one had ever thought it necessary that they should master the techniques of a high-wire circus acrobat. His mouth very dry and his heart pounding so heavily as to threaten to dislodge his precarious hand- and toe-holds, Schaffer craned his head and looked inside.

There was neither guard nor winch attendant inside: or, if there were any such, he was so well concealed that Schaffer couldn’t see him. But logic said that no one would be hiding there for there was no conceivable reason why anyone should be hiding: logic also said that any person who might have been there would, like the patrolling guards below and the sentry on the battlements, have been called inside the castle to help fight fire and enemy. All Schaffer could see was a cable-car, heavy winching machinery and heavy banks of lead-acid batteries: he was soon convinced that that was all that there was to see. No cause for concern.

But what he did see, something that did dismay him considerably, was that there was only one way for him to get into the station. There was no possibility of his sliding down the rope on to the floor of the station for the excellent reason that the roof of the station, in typically Alpine eaves fashion, overhung the floor by at least six feet. The only way in was by dropping down on to the Luftseilbahn’s heavy steel cable then over-handing himself up inside the station. Schaffer wasted no time in considering whether this was physically possible. It had to be possible. There was no other way in.

Carefully and with no little difficulty Schaffer inched himself back up the rope and the slope of the roof until he was about three feet clear of the edge. He eased his foot-grip on the rope and swung round through 180° until he was once more facing up the slope with his legs now dangling over the edge. He looked up. The crouched figure of Smith showed tension in every line although the face was as expressionless as ever. Schaffer lifted one hand, made a circle with thumb and forefinger, then eased himself over the edge until his searching feet found the cable.

He eased himself farther until he was sitting astride the cable, transferred his grip to the cable and swung down until he was suspended by hands and feet and looked up towards the moon. As a view, Schaffer reflected, it was vastly preferable to contemplating that two hundred foot drop down into the valley below. He started to climb.

He almost failed to make it. For every six inches he made up the cable, he slid back five. The cable was covered by a diabolically slippery coating of oil and sheath ice and only by clenching his fists till his forearms ached could he make any kind of progress at all and the fact that the cable stretched up at forty-five degrees made the difficult the well-nigh impossible. Such a means of locomotion would have been suicidal for the virtually one-handed Smith and quite impossible for either Mary or Carnaby-Jones. Once, after he had made about twelve feet, Schaffer looked down to gauge his chances if he let go and dropped down to the floor beneath, and rapidly concluded that the chances were either that he would break both legs or, if he landed at all awkwardly, would pitch out two hundred feet down to the valley below. As Schaffer later recounted it, this last possibility combined with the vertiginous view of the long long way to the floor of the valley, did him more good than an extra pair of arms. Ten seconds later, sweating and gasping like a long distance runner and very close to the last stages of exhaustion, he hauled himself on to the roof of the cable-car.

He lay there for a full minute until the trembling in his arms eased and pulse and breathing rates returned to not more than a man in a high fever might expect to have, lowered himself quietly and wearily to the floor, took out his Luger, slid the safety catch and began to make a quick check that the header station really was empty of the enemy, a superfluous precaution, reason told him, any concealed person would have been bound both to see and hear his entry, but instinct and training went deeper than reason. There was no one there. He looked behind winches, electric motors and batteries. He had the place to himself.

The next thing was to ensure that he continued to have the place to himself. At the lower end of the sloping archway leading up to the castle courtyard, the heavy iron door stood wide. He passed through this doorway and padded softly up the cobbled pathway until he came to the courtyard exit. Here, too, was another iron gate, as wide open as the other. Schaffer moved as far forward as the shadowing safety of the tunnel’s overhang permitted and looked cautiously around the scene before him.

There was certainly, he had to admit, plenty to be seen and under more auspicious circumstances it would have done his heart good. The courtyard scene was as frenzied as the earlier glimpse they had had from the passage, but this time the action was much more purposive and controlled. Shouting, gesticulating figures were supervising the unrolling of hoses, the coupling-up of hydrants, the relays of men carrying extinguishers and buckets of sand. The main gates stood open and unguarded, even the sentries must have been pressed into action: not that the unguarded doors offered any warmly beckoning escape route. Only a suicide would have tried making his escape through a courtyard crowded with sixty or seventy scurrying Alpenkorps troops.

Over to his left the helicopter still stood forlorn and useless. There was no sign of the pilot. Suddenly a loud flat explosion echoed inside the confining walls of the square. Schaffer lifted his head to locate its source, saw fresh clouds of smoke billowing from an upper window in the east wing and briefly wondered which of his diversionary explosives that might be. But only for a brief moment. Some instinct made him glance to his right and his face went very still. The men he’d seen floundering up the slope outside, guards with the Doberman pinschers, were coming through the main gate, the clouds of frozen breath trailing in the air behind them evidence enough of their exhausting run uphill through that knee-high snow. Schaffer backed away slowly and silently: German soldiers he could cope with or avoid but Dobermans were out of his class. He swung the heavy iron door to, careful not to make the least whisper of sound, slid home two heavy bolts, ran quickly down the arched passage-way, closed and padlocked the lower door and put the key in his pocket.

He looked up, startled, at a loud crashing of glass and the subsequent tinkle as the shattered fragments tinkled to the floor. Automatically, the barrel of his Luger followed his glance.

‘Put that cannon away,’ Smith said irritably. Schaffer could clearly see his face now, pressed close to the iron bars. ‘Who do you think is up here – Kramer and company?’

‘It’s my nerves,’ Schaffer explained coldly. ‘You haven’t been through what Lieutenant Schaffer’s just been through. How are things up there?’

‘Carraciola and friends are face down on the roof, freezing to death in the snow and Mary has the Schmeisser on them. Jones is still up there. Won’t even put his head outside. Says he’s no head for heights. I’ve given up arguing with him. How are things your end?’

‘Quiet. If anyone is having any passing thoughts about the cable-car, there are no signs of it. Both doors to the courtyard are locked. They’re iron and even if someone does start having suspicious thoughts, they should hold them for a while. And, boss, the way I came in is strictly for the birds. And I mean strictly. What you need is wings. Your hand the way it is you could never make it. Mary and the old boy couldn’t try it. Carraciola and the rest – well, who cares about Carraciola and the rest.’

‘What winch controls are there?’ Smith asked.

‘Well, now.’ Schaffer approached the winch. ‘A small lever marked “Normal” and “Notfall” –’

‘Are there batteries down there?’ Smith interrupted.

‘Yeah. Any amount.’

‘Put the lever to “Notfall” – “Emergency.” They could cut off the main power from inside the castle.’

‘OK, it’s done. Then there are Start and Stop buttons, a big mechanical handbrake and a gear lever affair marked “Forwards” and “Backwards”. With a neutral position.’

‘Start the motor,’ Smith ordered. Schaffer pressed the ‘Start’ button and a generator whined into life, building up to its maximum revolutions after perhaps ten seconds. ‘Now release the brake and select forward gear. If it works, stop the car and try the other gear.’

Schaffer released the brake and engaged gear, sliding the gear handle progressively over successive stops. The car moved forward, gently at first, but gathering speed until it was clear of the header station roof. After a few more feet Schaffer stopped the car, engaged reverse gear and brought the car back up into its original position. He looked up at Smith. ‘Smooth, huh?’

‘Lower it down till it’s half-way past the edge of the roof. We’ll slide down the rope on to the top of the cable-car then you can bring us up inside.’

‘Must be all the fish you eat,’ Schaffer said admiringly. He set the car in motion.

‘I’m sending Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen down first,’ Smith said. ‘I wouldn’t care for any of us to be on the top of the same cable-car as that lot. Think you can hold them till we get down?’

‘You don’t improve morale by being insulting to subordinate officers,’ Schaffer said coldly.

‘I didn’t know you’d any left. While you’re doing that I’ll have another go at persuading Juliet up there to come and join us.’ He prodded Carraciola with a far from gentle toe. ‘You first. Down that rope and on to the top of the cable-car.’

Carraciola straightened until he was kneeling, glanced down the slope of the roof to the depths of the valley beyond.

‘You’re not getting me on that lot. Not ever.’ He shook his head in finality, then stared up at Smith, his black eyes implacable in their hate. ‘Go on, shoot me. Kill me now.’

‘I’ll kill you if you ever try to escape,’ Smith said. ‘Don’t you know that, Carraciola?’

‘Sure I know it. But you won’t kill me in cold blood, just standing here. You’re a man of principle, aren’t you, Major? Ethics, that’s the word. The kind of noble sucker who risks his life to free an enemy soldier who might burn to death. Why don’t you shoot, Major?’

‘Because I don’t have to.’ With his left hand Smith grabbed Carraciola’s hair and jerked his head back till Carraciola, gasping with the pain of it, was staring skywards, while he reversed the grip on his Luger and raised it high. Nausea and pain flooded through him as the ends of the broken fingerbone grated together, but none of this showed in his face. ‘I just knock you out, tie a rope round your waist and lower you down over the edge, maybe eight or ten feet. Schaffer eases out the car till it touches you, then he climbs in the back door, goes to the front door and hauls you inside. You can see my right hand’s not too good, maybe I won’t be able to tie a secure enough knot round you, maybe I won’t be able to hold you, maybe Schaffer might let you go when he’s hauling you inside. I don’t much care, Carraciola.’

‘You double-dealing bastard!’ Tears of pain filled Carraciola’s eyes and his voice was low and venomous. ‘I swear to God I’ll live to make you wish you’d never met me.’

‘Too late.’ Smith thrust him away contemptuously and Carraciola had to grab wildly at the rope to prevent himself from sliding over the break of the roof. ‘I’ve been wishing that ever since I found out who and what you really are. Vermin soil my hands. Move now or I damn well will shoot you. Why the hell should I bother taking you back to England?’

Carraciola believed him. He slid down the rope until first his feet then his hands found the security of the supporting bracket of the cable-car. Smith gestured with his gun towards Thomas. Thomas went without a word. Ten seconds later Christiansen followed him. Smith watched the cable-car begin to move up inside the station, then looked upwards to the window from which the rope dangled.

‘Mr Jones?’

‘I’m still here.’ Carnaby-Jones’s voice had a quaver to it and he didn’t as much as venture to risk a glance over the window-sill.

‘Not for much longer, I hope,’ Smith said seriously. ‘They’ll be coming for you, Mr Jones. They’ll be coming any moment now. I hate to say this, but I must. It is my duty to warn you what will happen to you, an enemy spy. You’ll be tortured, Mr Jones – not simply everyday tortures like pulling out your teeth and toe-nails, but unspeakable tortures I can’t mention with Miss Ellison here – and then you’ll finish in the gas chambers. If you’re still alive.’

Mary clutched his arm. ‘Would they – would they really do that?’

‘Good God, no!’ Smith stared at her in genuine surprise.

‘What on earth would they want to do that for?’ He raised his voice again: ‘You’ll die in a screaming agony, Mr Jones, an agony beyond your wildest nightmares. And you’ll take a long time dying. Hours. Maybe days. And screaming. Screaming all the time.’

‘What in God’s name am I to do?’ The desperate voice from above was no longer quavering, it vibrated like a broken bed-spring. ‘What can I do?’

‘You can slide down that rope,’ Smith said brutally. ‘Fifteen feet. Fifteen little feet, Mr Jones. My God, you could do that in a pole vault.’

‘I can’t.’ The voice was a wail. ‘I simply can’t.’

‘Yes, you can,’ Smith urged. ‘Grab the rope now, close your eyes, out over the sill and down. Keep your eyes closed. We can catch you.’

‘I can’t! I can’t!’

‘Oh God!’ Smith said despairingly. ‘Oh, my God! It’s too late now.’

‘It’s too – what in heaven’s name do you mean?’

‘The lights are going on along the passage,’ Smith said, his voice low and tense. ‘And that window. And the next. They’re coming for you, Mr Jones, they’re coming now. Oh God, when they strip you off and strap you down on the torture table –’

Two seconds later Carnaby-Jones was over the sill and sliding down the nylon rope. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Mary said, admiringly: ‘You really are the most fearful liar ever.’

‘Schaffer keeps telling me the same thing,’ Smith admitted. ‘You can’t all be wrong.’

The cable-car, with the three men clinging grimly to the suspension bracket, climbed slowly up into the header station and jerked to a halt. One by one the three men, under the persuasion of Schaffer’s gently waving Luger, lowered themselves the full length of their arms and dropped the last two or three feet to the floor. The last of them, Thomas, seemed to land awkwardly, exclaimed in muffled pain and fell heavily sideways. As he fell, his hands shot out and grabbed Schaffer by the ankles. Schaffer, immediately off-balance, flung up his arms in an attempt to maintain equilibrium and, before he could even begin to bring his arms down again, was winded by a diving rugby tackle by Christiansen. He toppled backwards, his back smashing into a generator with an impact that drove from his lungs what little breath had been left in them. A second later and Christiansen had his gun, driving the muzzle cruelly into a throat gasping for air.

Carraciola was already at the lower iron door, shaking it fiercely. His eye caught sight of the big padlock in its hasp. He swung round, ran back towards Schaffer, knocked aside the gun in Christiansen’s hand and grabbed Schaffer by the throat.

‘That padlock. Where’s the key to that bloody padlock?’ The human voice can’t exactly emulate the hiss of a snake, but Carraciola’s came pretty close to it then. ‘That door has been locked from the inside. You’re the only person who could have done it. Where is that key?’

Schaffer struggled to a sitting position, feebly pushing aside Carraciola’s hand. ‘I can’t breathe!’ The moaning, gasping breathing lent credence to the words. ‘I can’t breathe. I – I’m going to be sick.’

‘Where is that damned key?’ Carraciola demanded.

‘Oh God, I feel ill!’ Schaffer hoisted himself slowly to a kneeling position, his head bent, retching sounds coming from his throat. He shook his head from side to side, as if to clear away the muzziness, then slowly raised it, his eyes unfocused. He mumbled: ‘What do you want? What did you say?’

‘The key!’ If the need for silence hadn’t been paramount, Carraciola’s voice would have been a frustrated scream of rage. Half-a-dozen times, in brutal and rapid succession, he struck Schaffer across the face with the palm and back of his hand. ‘Where is that key?’

‘Easy on, easy on!’ Thomas caught Carraciola’s hand. ‘Don’t be such a damned fool. You want him to talk, don’t you?’

‘The key. Yes, the key.’ Schaffer hoisted himself wearily to his feet and stood there swaying, eyes half-closed, face ashen, blood trickling from both corners of his mouth. ‘The batteries there, I think I hid them behind the batteries. I don’t know, I can’t think. No, wait.’ The words came in short, anguished gasps. ‘I didn’t. I meant to, but I didn’t.’ He fumbled in his pockets, eventually located the key and brought it out, offering it vaguely in Carraciola’s direction. Carraciola, the beginnings of a smile on his face, reached out for the key but, before he could reach it Schaffer abruptly straightened and with a convulsive jerk of his arm sent the key spinning through the open end of the station to land in the valley hundreds of feet below. Carraciola stared after the vanished key in total incredulity then, his suffused and enraged face mute evidence of his complete loss of self-control, stooped, picked up Schaffer’s fallen Schmeisser and swung it viciously across the American’s head and face. Schaffer fell like a tree.

‘Well,’ Thomas said acidly. ‘Now that we’ve got that out of our systems, we can shoot the lock away.’

‘You can commit suicide with ricochets – that door’s iron, man.’ Carraciola had indeed got it out of his system for he was back on balance again. He paused, then smiled slowly. ‘What the hell are we all thinking of? Let’s play it clever. If we did get through that door the first thing we’d probably collect would be a chestful of machine-gun bullets. Remember, the only people who know who we really are have bloody great doses of Nembutal inside them and are liable to remain unconscious for a long time. To the rest of the garrison we’re unknowns – and to the few who saw us arrive, we’re prisoners. In both cases we’re automatically enemies.’

‘So?’ Thomas was impatient.

‘So, as I say, we play it clever. We go down in this cable-car and play it clever again. We phone old Weissner. We ask him to phone the Schloss Adler, tell him where Smith is and, in case Smith does manage to get down to the village on the other cable-car after us, we ask him to have a reception committee waiting for him at the lower station. Then we go to the barracks – they’re bound to have a radio there – and get in touch with you know who. Flaws?’

‘Nary a flaw.’ Christiansen grinned. ‘And then we all live happily ever afterwards. Come on, what are we waiting for?’

‘Into the cable-car, you two.’ Carraciola waited until they had boarded, walked across the floor until he was directly under the smashed skylight and called: ‘Boss!’ Schaffer’s silenced Luger was in his hand.

On the roof above Smith stiffened, handed the trembling Carnaby-Jones – his eyes were still screwed shut – over to the care of Mary, took two steps towards the skylight and stopped. It was Wyatt-Turner who had said of Smith that he had a built-in radar set against danger and Carraciola’s voice had just started it up into instantaneous operation and had it working with a clarity and precision that would have turned Decca green with envy.

‘Schaffer?’ Smith called softly. ‘Lieutenant Schaffer? Are you there?’

‘Right here, boss.’ Mid-west accent, Schaffer to the life. Smith’s radar-scope went into high and had it been geared to warning bells he’d have been deafened for life. He dropped to hands and knees and crawled soundlessly forward. He could see the floor of the station now. The first thing that came into his vision was a bank of batteries, then an outflung hand, then, gradually the rest of the spread-eagled form of Schaffer. Another few inches forward and he sensed as much as saw a long finger pointing in his direction and flung himself to one side. The wind from the Luger’s shell riffled his hair. Down below someone cursed in anger and frustration.

‘That’s the last chance you’ll ever have, Carraciola,’ Smith said. From where he lay he could just see Schaffer’s face – or the bloody mask that covered his face. It was impossible to tell whether he was alive or dead. He looked dead.

‘Wrong again. Merely the postponement of a pleasure. We’re leaving now, Smith. I’m going to start the motor. Want Schaffer to get his – Christiansen has the Schmeisser on him. Don’t try anything.’

‘You make for that control panel,’ Smith said, ‘and your first step into my line of vision will be your last. I’ll cut you down, Carraciola. Schaffer’s dead. I can see he’s dead.’

‘He’s damn all of the kind dead. He’s just been clobbered by a gun butt.’

‘I’ll cut you down,’ Smith said monotonously.

‘Goddamn it, I tell you he’s not dead!’ Carraciola was exasperated now.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ Smith said quietly. ‘If I don’t, the first guards through that door surely will. You can see what we’ve done to their precious Schloss Adler – it’s well alight. Can’t you guess the orders that have gone out – shoot on sight. Any stranger, shoot on sight – and shoot to kill. You’re a stranger, Carraciola.’

‘For God’s sake, will you listen to me?’ There was desperation in the voice now. ‘I can prove it. He is alive. What can you see from up there?’

The signal strengths of Smith’s danger radar set began to fade. He said: ‘I can see Schaffer’s head.’

‘Watch it, then.’ There was a thud and a silenced Luger bounced to a stop a few inches from Schaffer’s head. A moment later Carraciola himself came into Smith’s field of vision. He looked up at Smith and at the Schmeisser muzzle staring down at him and said: ‘You won’t be needing that.’ He stooped over Schaffer, pinched his nose with one hand and clamped his other hand over the mouth. Within seconds the unconscious man, fighting for the air that would not come, began to move his head and to raise feeble hands in the direction of his face. Carraciola took his hands away, looked up at Smith and said: ‘Don’t forget, Christiansen has still that Schmeisser on him.’

Carraciola walked confidently across to the control panel, made the generator switch, released the mechanical handbrake and engaged gear, pushing the lever all the way across. The cable-car leapt forward with a violent jerk. Carraciola ran for it, jumped inside, turned and slammed the door of the cable-car.

On the roof above, Smith laid down his useless Schmeisser and pushed himself wearily to his feet. His face was bleak and bitter.

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ Mary said. Her voice was unnaturally calm. ‘Finish. All finish. Operation Overlord – and us. If that matters.’

‘It matters to me.’ Smith took out his silenced automatic and held it in his good left hand. ‘Keep an eye on Junior here.’

TEN

‘No!’ For perhaps two dazed, incredulous seconds that were the longest seconds she had ever known, Mary had quite failed to gather Smith’s intention: when shocked understanding did come, her voice rose to a scream. ‘No! No! For God’s sake, no!’

Smith ignored the heart-broken voice, the desperate clutching hand and walked to the end of the flat section of the roof. At the lower edge of the steeply sloping roof section the leading edge of the cable-car had just come into view: a cable-car with, inside it, three men who were exchanging delighted grins and thumping one another joyously on the back.

Smith ran down the ice-coated pitch of the roof, reached the edge and jumped. The cable-car was already seven or eight feet beyond him and almost as far below. Had the cable-car not been going away from him he must surely have broken both legs. As it was, he landed with a jarring teeth-rattling crash, a crash that caused the cable-car to shudder and sway and his legs to buckle and slide from beneath him on the ice-coated roof. His injured right hand failed to find a purchase on the suspension bracket and in his blindly despairing grab with his left hand he was forced to drop his Luger. It slid to the edge of the roof and fell away into the darkness of the valley below. Smith wrapped both arms round the suspension bracket and fought to draw some whooping gasps of air into his starving lungs: he had been completely winded by the fall.

In their own way, the three men inside the cable-car were as nearly stunned as Smith himself. The smiles had frozen on their faces and Christiansen’s arm was still poised in mid-air where it had been arrested by the sound and the shock of Smith’s landing on the cable-car roof. Carraciola, predictably, was the first to recover and react. He snatched the Schmeisser from Christiansen and pointed it upwards.

The cable-car was now forty to fifty feet clear of the castle and the high wind was beginning to swing it, pendulum-like, across the sky. Smith, weakened by the impact of the fall, the pain in his hand and the loss of blood, hung on grimly and dizzily to the suspension bracket, his body athwart the roof of the car. He felt sick and exhausted and there seemed to be a mist in front of his eyes.

From shoulder to knee and only inches from his body a venomous burst of machine-pistol fire stitched a pattern of holes in the cable-car roof: the mists cleared away from Smith’s eyes more quickly than he would have believed possible. A Schmeisser magazine held far more shells than that. They would wait a second or two to see if a falling body passed any of the side windows – with that violently swinging transverse movement it was virtually impossible for anyone to fall off over the leading or trailing ends of the car – and if none came, then they would fire again. But where? What would be the next area of roof chosen for treatment? Would the gunman fire at random or to a systematic pattern? It was impossible to guess. Perhaps at that very moment the muzzle of the Schmeisser was only two inches from the middle of his spine. The very thought was enough to galvanize Smith into a quick roll that stretched him out over the line of holes that had just been made. It was unlikely that the gunman would fire in exactly the same place again, but even that was a gamble, the gunman might figure just as Smith was doing and traverse the same area again. But he wasn’t figuring the same as Smith, the next burst was three feet away towards the trailing end of the car.

Using the suspension bracket as support, Smith pulled himself to his feet until he was quite vertical, hanging on to the cable itself. This way, the possible target area was lessened by eighty per cent. Quickly, soundlessly, sliding his hands along the cable, he moved forward until he was standing at the very front of the car.

The cable-car’s angle of arc through the sky was increasing with every swing of the pendulum. The purchase for his feet was minimal, all the strain came on his arms, and by far the greater part of that on his sound left arm. There was nothing smoothly progressive about the cable-car’s sideways motion through the sky; it jumped and jerked and jarred and jolted like a Dervish dancer in the last seconds before total collapse. The strain on the left arm was intolerable, it felt as if the shoulder sinews were being torn apart: but shoulder sinews are reparable whereas the effects of a Schmeisser blast at point blank range were not. And it seemed, to Smith, highly unlikely that anybody would waste a burst on the particular spot where he was standing, the obvious position for any roof passenger who didn’t want to be shaken off into the valley below was flat out on the roof with his arms wrapped for dear life round one of the suspension arm’s support brackets.

His reasoning was correct. There were three more bursts, none of which came within feet of him, and then no more. Smith knew that he would have to return to the comparative security of the suspension arm and return there soon. He was nearly gone. The grip of his left hand on the cable was weakening, this forced him to strengthen the grip of his right hand and the resulting agony that travelled like an electric shock from his hand up his arm clear to the right hand side of his head served only to compound the weakness. He would have to get back, and he would have to get back now. He prayed that the Schmeisser’s magazine was empty.

And then, and for another reason, he knew that he had no option but to go now: and he knew his prayer hadn’t been answered. The leading door of the cable-car opened and a head and a hand appeared. The head was Carraciola’s: the hand held the Schmeisser. Carraciola was looking upwards even as he leaned out and he saw Smith immediately: he leaned farther out still, swung the Schmeisser one-handedly until the stock rested on his shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

Under the circumstance accurate aiming was impossible but at a distance of four feet accurate aiming was the last thing that mattered. Smith had already let go of the cable and was flinging himself convulsively backward when the first of the bullets ripped off his left hand epaulette. The second grazed his left shoulder, a brief burning sensation, but the rest of the burst passed harmlessly over his head. He landed heavily, stretched out blindly, located and grasped one of the suspension arms and scuttled crab-like round the base of the suspension arm until he had it and what little pathetic cover it offered between him and Carraciola.

For Carraciola was coming after him and Carraciola was coming to mak’ siccar. He had the gun still in his hand and that gun could have very few shells indeed left in the magazine: it would be no part of Carraciola’s plan to waste any of those shells. Even as Smith watched, Carraciola seemed to rise effortlessly three feet into the air – a feat of levitation directly attributable to the powerful boost given him by Thomas and Christiansen – jack-knifed forward at hip level and flattened his body on top of the cable-car roof: his legs still dangled over the leading edge. A suicidal move, Smith thought in brief elation, Carraciola had made a fatal mistake: with neither hand-hold nor purchase on that ice-coated roof, he must slide helplessly over the edge at the first jerk or jolt of the cable-car. But the elation was brief indeed for Carraciola had made no mistake. He had known what Smith hadn’t: where to find a secure lodgment for his hand on the smooth expanse of that roof. Within seconds his scrabbling fingers had found safety – a gash in the cable-car roof that had been torn open by one of the bursts from the Schmeisser. Carraciola’s fingers hooked securely and he pulled himself forward until he was in a kneeling position, his toes hooked over the leading edge.

Smith reached up with his wounded hand and clawed desperately for a grenade in the canvas bag slung over his left shoulder, at the same time pushing himself as far back as his anchoring left hand, clutched round a suspension bracket, would permit: at that range a grenade could do almost as much damage to himself as to Carraciola. His legs slid back until his feet projected over the trailing edge and he cried out in pain as a tremendous pressure, a bone-breaking, skin-tearing pressure, was applied to his shins, half-way between knees and feet: someone had him by the ankles and that someone seemed determined to separate his feet from the rest of his body. Smith twisted his head round but all he could see was a pair of hands round his ankles, knuckles bone-white in the faint wash of moonlight. And no one man’s weight, Smith realized, could have caused that agonizing pain in his shins. His companion must have had him by the waist, whether to increase the pressure or to ensure his safety if Smith did slide over the end. The reasons were immaterial: the effect was the same. He tried to draw up his legs but with a pinning weight of well over 200 lbs, any movement was quite impossible.

Smith risked a quick glance forward, but Carraciola hadn’t moved, the cable-car was now half-way between the header station and the top pylon, the pendulum swing was at its maximum and Carraciola, still in his kneeling position, was hanging on for his life. Smith abandoned his attempt to reach for a grenade which could now serve no purpose whatsoever, unsheathed his knife, clasped the haft in the three good fingers of his right hand, twisted round and tried to strike at those hands that were causing him such excruciating agony. He couldn’t get within fifteen inches of them.

His legs were breaking: his left arm was breaking: and his clenched grip on the support was slowly beginning to open. He had only seconds to go, Smith knew, and so he had nothing in the world to lose. He changed his grip on his knife, caught the tip of the blade between his broken thumb and the rest of his fingers, turned and threw the knife as powerfully and as accurately as his smashed hand and pain-dimmed eyes would permit. The stinging pain in his left ankle and the scream of pain from the trailing door were simultaneous: immediately, all the pressure on his ankles vanished: a second later, Christiansen, whom Thomas had managed to drag back inside the cable-car, was staring stupidly at the knife that transfixed his right wrist.

In that one instant Smith had won and he had lost. Or so it most surely seemed, for he was defenceless now: Carraciola had bided his time, calculated his chances and flung himself forward until he had reached the safety of the suspension bracket. Now he pulled himself slowly to his feet, his left arm round the suspension arm itself, his left leg twined securely round one of the brackets. The Schmeisser pointed into Smith’s face.

‘Only one bullet left.’ Carraciola’s smile was almost pleasant. ‘I had to make sure, you see.’

Perhaps he hadn’t lost, Smith thought, perhaps he hadn’t lost after all. Because of the pinioning effect of Christiansen’s hands on his ankles he’d been unaware, until now, how much less difficult it had become to maintain position on that ice-sheathed roof, unaware how much the pendulum swaying of the cable-car had been reduced. And it seemed that, even now, Carraciola was still unaware of it, or, if the change of motion had registered with him, the reason for it had not. With a conscious effort of will Smith shifted his by now half-hypnotized gaze from the staring muzzle of the Schmeisser to a point just over Carraciola’s shoulder. The suspension arm of the first pylon was less than twenty feet away.

‘Too bad, Smith.’ Carraciola steadied the barrel of his machine-pistol. ‘Comes to us all. Be seeing you.’

‘Look behind you,’ Smith said.

Carraciola half-smiled in weary disbelief that anyone should try that ancient one on him. Smith glanced briefly, a second time, over Carraciola’s shoulder, winced and looked away. The disbelief vanished from Carraciola’s face as if a light had been switched off. Some sixth sense or instantaneous flash of comprehension or just some sudden certainty of knowledge made him twist round and glance over his shoulder. He cried out in terror, the last sound he ever made. The steel suspension arm of the pylon smashed into his back. Both his back and inter-twined leg broke with a simultaneous crack that could have been heard a hundred yards away. One second later he was swept from the roof of the cable-car, but by that time Carraciola was already dead. From the open rearward door of the car, Thomas and Christiansen, their shocked faces mirroring their stunned disbelief, watched the broken body tumbling down into the darkness of the valley below.

Shaking like a man with the ague and moving like an old man in a dream, Smith slowly and painfully hauled himself forward until he was in a sitting position with an arm and leg wound round one of the after arms of the supporting bracket. Still in the same dream-like slow motion he lifted his head and gazed down the valley. The other cable-car, moving up-valley on its reciprocal course, had just passed the lower-most of the three pylons. With luck, his own cable-car might be the first to arrive at the central pylon. With luck. Not, of course, that the question of luck entered into it any more: he had no options or alternatives left, he had to do what he had to do and luck was the last factor to be taken into consideration.

From his kit-bag Smith extracted two packets of plastic explosives and wedged them firmly between the roof of the car and the two after arms of the suspension bracket, making sure that the tear strip igniters were exposed and ready to hand. Then he braced himself, sitting upright, against the suspension bracket, using both arms and legs to anchor himself and prepared to sit it out once more as the cable-car, approaching midsection of its second lap between the first and central pylons, steadily increased its swaying angle of arc across the night sky.

It was foolish of him, he knew, to sit like that. The snow had momentarily stopped, and the full moon, riding palely in an empty sky, was flooding the valley with a wash of ghostly light. Sitting as he was he must, he realized, be clearly visible from either the castle or the lower station: but apart from the fact that he doubted whether concealment mattered any longer he knew there was nothing he could do about it, there wasn’t the strength left in his one good arm to allow him to assume the prone spread-eagled position that he and Schaffer had used on the way up.

He wondered about Schaffer, wondered about him in a vaguely woolly detached way for which exhaustion, loss of blood and the bitter cold were almost equally responsible. He wondered about the others, too, about the elderly man and the girl perched on top of the header station roof, about the two men inside the cable-car: but Mary and Carnaby-Jones were helpless to do anything to help and the chances of the unarmed Thomas and Christiansen carrying out another roof-top sortie were remote indeed; Carraciola had carried a Schmeisser, and they had seen what had happened to Carraciola. Schaffer, it was Schaffer who mattered.

Schaffer was feeling even more vague and woolly than Smith, if for different reasons. He was waking, slowly and painfully, from a very bad dream and in this dream he could taste salt in his mouth and hear a soft urgent feminine voice calling his name, calling it over and over again. In normal times Schaffer would have been all for soft feminine voices, urgent or not, but he wished that this one would stop for it was all part of the bad dream and in this bad dream someone had split his head in half and he knew the pain wouldn’t go until he woke up. He moaned, put the palms of his hands on the floor and tried to prop himself up. It took a long time, it took an eternity, for someone had laid one of the girders from the Forth bridge across his back, but at last he managed to straighten both his arms, his head hanging down between them. His head didn’t feel right, it didn’t even feel like his head, for, apart from the fact that there seemed to be a butcher’s cleaver stuck in it, it seemed to be stuffed with cotton wool, grey and fuzzy round the edges. He shook his head to clear it and this was a mistake for the top of his head fell off. Or so it felt to Schaffer as the blinding coruscation of multi-coloured lights before his eyes arranged themselves into oddly kaleidoscopic patterns. He opened his eyes and the patterns dimmed and the lights began to fade: gradually, beneath his eyes the pattern of floorboards began to resolve themselves, and, on the board, the outlines of hands. His own hands.

He was awake, but this was one of those bad dreams which stayed with you even when you were awake. He could still taste salt – the salt of blood – his head still felt as if one incautious shake would have it rolling across the floor and that soft and urgent voice was still calling.

‘Lieutenant Schaffer! Lieutenant Schaffer! Wake up, Lieutenant, wake up! Can you hear me?’

He’d heard that voice before, Schaffer decided, but he couldn’t place it. It must have been a long time ago. He twisted his head to locate the source of the voice – it seemed to come from above – and the kaleidoscopic whirligig of colours was back in position again, revolving more quickly than ever. Head-shaking and head-twisting, Schaffer decided, were contra-indicated. He returned his head slowly to its original position, managed to get his knees under him, crawled forward in the direction of some dimly-seen piece of machinery and hauled himself shakily to his feet.

‘Lieutenant! Lieutenant Schaffer! I’m up here.’

Schaffer turned and lifted his head in an almost grotesque slow motion and this time the whole universe of brightly dancing stars was reduced to the odd constellation or two. He recognized the voice from the distant past now, it was that of Mary Ellison, he even thought he recognized the pale strained face looking down from above, but he couldn’t be sure, his eyes weren’t focusing as they should. He wondered dizzily what the hell she was doing up there staring down at him through what appeared to be the bars of a shattered sky-light: his mind, he dimly realized, was operating with all the speed and subtle fluency of a man swimming upstream against a river of black molasses.

‘Are you – are you all right?’ Mary asked.

Schaffer considered this ridiculous question carefully. ‘I expect I shall be,’ he said with great restraint. ‘What happened?’

‘They hit you with your own gun.’

‘That’s right.’ Schaffer nodded and immediately wished he hadn’t. He gingerly fingered a bruise on the back of his head. ‘In the face. I must have struck my head as –’ He broke off and turned slowly to face the door. ‘What was that?’

‘A dog. It sounded like a dog barking.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ His voice slurred and indistinct, he staggered drunkenly across to the lower iron door and put his ear to it. ‘Dogs,’ he said. ‘Lots of dogs. And lots and lots of hammering. Sledge-hammers, like enough.’ He left the door and walked back to the centre of the floor, still staggering slightly. ‘They’re on to us and they’re coming for us. Where’s the Major?’

‘He went after them.’ The voice was empty of all feeling. ‘He jumped on to the top of the cable-car.’

‘He did, eh?’ Schaffer received the news as if Smith’s action had been the most natural and inevitable thing in the world. ‘How did he make out?’

‘How did he make –’ There was life back in her voice now, a shocked anger at Schaffer’s apparent callousness. She checked herself and said: ‘There was a fight and I think someone fell off the roof. I don’t know who it was.’

‘It was one of them,’ Schaffer said positively.

‘One of – how can you say that?’

‘The Major Smiths of this world don’t drive over the edge of a cliff. Quotation from the future Mrs Schaffer. The Major Smiths of this world don’t fall off the roofs of cable-cars. Quotation from the future Mrs Schaffer’s future husband.’

‘You’re recovering,’ Mary said coldly. ‘But I think you’re right. There’s still someone sitting on top of the cable-car and it wouldn’t be one of them, would it?’

‘How do you know there’s someone sitting –’

‘Because I can see him,’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s bright moonlight. Look for yourself.’

Schaffer looked for himself, then rubbed a weary forearm across aching eyes. ‘I have news for you, love,’ he said. ‘I can’t even see the damn’ cable-car.’

The cable-car was ten yards away from the central pylon. Smith, upright now, stooped, tore off the two friction fuses, straightened and, holding the cable in his left hand, took up position just on the inner side of the car roof. At the last moment he released his grip on the cable and stretched both arms out before him to break the impact of his body against the suspension arm. The ascending car on the other cable was now almost as close to the central pylon as his own. It didn’t seem possible that he could make it in time.

The impact of the horizontal suspension arm drove the thought from his mind and all the breath from his body; had it not been for the buffering effect of his outstretched arms, Smith was sure, some of his ribs must have gone. As it was, he was almost completely winded but he forced himself to ignore the pain and his heaving lungs’ demand for oxygen, swung his feet up till they rested on the lower cross-girder, hooked his hands round the upper girder and made his way quickly across to the other side. At least, his hands and his feet moved quickly, but the steel was so thickly coated in clear smooth ice that his scrabbling feet could find almost no purchase whatsoever on the lower girder. He had reached no farther than the middle when the ascending car began to pass under its suspension arm. For the first time that night Smith blessed the brightness of the moon. He took two more slipping, sliding steps and launched himself towards the ice-coated cable that glittered so brightly in the pale moonlight.

His left hand caught the cable, his right arm hooked over it and the cable itself caught him high up on the chest. He had made no mistake about the location of his hand and arm, but his sliding take-off had caused his body to fall short and the cable slid up under his chin with a jerk that threatened to decapitate him. His legs swung out far beneath him, swung back and touched the roof as he lowered himself to the full extent of his left arm. He released his grip on the cable, dropped on all fours and reached out blindly but successfully for one of the arms of the suspension bracket. For long seconds he knelt there, retching uncontrollably as he was flooded by the nausea and pain from his throat and still winded lungs: then, by and by, the worst of it passed and he lay face down on the roof as the cable-car began to increase its pendulum swing with the increasing distance from the central pylon. He would not have believed that a man could be so totally exhausted and yet still have sufficient residual strength and sufficient self-preservation instinct to hang on to that treacherous and precarious hand-hold on that ice-coated roof.

Long seconds passed and some little measure of strength began to return to his limbs and body. Wearily, he hauled himself up into a sitting position, twisted round and gazed back down the valley.

The cable-car he had so recently abandoned was now hardly more than fifty yards from the lowermost pylon. Thomas and Christiansen sat huddled in the middle, the latter wrapping a makeshift bandage round his injured hand. Both fore and aft doors were still open as they were when the abortive attack on Smith had been made. That neither of the two men had ventured near the extremities of the car to try to close either of the doors was proof enough of the respect, if not fear, in which Smith was now held.

From the roof of the cable-car came a brilliant flash of light, magnesium-blinding in its white intensity: simultaneously there came the sound of two sharp explosions, so close together as to be indistinguishable in time. The two rear supports of the suspension bracket broke and the car, suspended now by only the two front supports, tilted violently, the front going up, the rear down.

Inside, the angle of the floor of the car changed in an instant from the horizontal to at least thirty degrees. Christiansen was flung back towards the still open rear door. He grabbed despairingly at the side – but he grabbed with his wounded hand. Soundlessly, he vanished through the open doorway and as soundlessly fell to the depths of the valley below.

Thomas, with two sound hands and faster reactions, had succeeded in saving himself – for the moment. He glanced up and saw where the roof was beginning to buckle and break as the forward two suspension arm support brackets, now subjected to a wrenching lateral pressure they had never been designed to withstand, began to tear their retaining bolts free. Thomas struggled up the steeply inclined floor till he stood in the front doorway: because of the tilt of the car, now almost 45° as the front supports worked loose, the leading edge of the roof was almost touching the cable. Thomas reached up, grabbed the cable with both hands, and had just cleared his legs from the doorway when the two front supports tore free from the roof in a rending screech of metal. The cable-car fell away, slowly turning end over end.

Despite the cable’s violent buffeting caused by the sudden release of the weight of the car, Thomas had managed to hang on. He twisted round and saw the suspension arm of the lowest pylon only feet away. The sudden numbing of all physical and mental faculties was accurately and shockingly reflected in the frozen fear of his face, the lips drawn back in a snarling rictus of terror. The knuckles of the hands gleamed like burnished ivory. And then, suddenly, there were no hands there, just the suspension arm and the empty wire and a long fading scream in the night.

As his cable-car approached the header station, Smith edged well forward to clear the lip of the roof. From where he crouched it was impossible to see the east wing of the Schloss Adler but if the columns of dense smoke now drifting across the valley were anything to go by, the fire seemed to have an unshakable hold. Clouds were again moving across the moon and this could be both a good thing and a bad thing: a good thing in that it would afford them cover and help obscure those dense clouds of smoke, a bad thing in that it was bound to high-light the flames from the burning castle. It could only be a matter of time, Smith reflected, before the attention of someone in the village or the barracks beyond was caught by the fire or the smoke. Or, he thought grimly, by the increasing number of muffled explosions coming from the castle itself. He wondered what might be the cause of them: Schaffer hadn’t had the time to lay all those distractions.

The roof of the cable-car cleared the level of the floor of the header station and Smith sagged in relief as he saw the figure standing by the controls of the winch. Schaffer. A rather battered and bent Schaffer, it was true, an unsteady Schaffer, a Schaffer with one side of his face masked in blood, a Schaffer who from his peering and screwed-up expression had obviously some difficulty in focusing his gaze. But undoubtedly Schaffer and as nearly a going concern as made no odds. Smith felt energy flow back into him, he hadn’t realized just how heavily he had come to depend on the American: with Schaffer by his side it was going to take a great deal to stop them now.

Smith glanced up as the roof of the header station came into view. Mary and Carnaby-Jones were still there, pressed back against the castle wall. He lifted a hand in greeting, but they gave no sign in return. Ghosts returning from the dead, Smith thought wryly, weren’t usually greeted by a wave of the hand.

Schaffer, for all the trouble he was having with his eyes and his still obviously dazed condition, seemed to handle the winch controls immaculately. It may have been – and probably was – the veriest fluke, but he put the gear lever in neutral and applied the brake to bring the cable-car to rest exactly half-way in under the lip of the roof. First Mary and then Jones came sliding down the nylon rope on to the roof of the car, Jones with his eyes screwed tightly shut. Neither of them spoke a word, not even when Schaffer had brought them up inside and they had slid down on to the floor of the station.

‘Hurry! Hurry!’ Smith flung open the rear door of the cable car. ‘Inside, all of you!’ He retrieved Schaffer’s Luger from the floor, then whirled round as he heard the furious barking of dogs followed by the sound of heavy sledges battering against the iron door leading from the station. The first of the two defences must have been carried away: now the second was under siege.

Mary and a stumbling Schaffer were already inside the cable-car. Jones, however, had made no move to go. He stood there, Smith’s Schmeisser in his hand, listening to the furious hammering on the door. His face seemed unconcerned. He said, apologetically: ‘I’m not very good at heights, I’m afraid. But this is different.’

‘Get inside!’ Smith almost hissed the words.

‘No.’ Jones shook his head. ‘You hear. They’ll be through any minute. I’ll stay.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Smith shouted in exasperation.

‘I’m twenty years older than any of you.’

‘Well, there’s that.’ Smith nodded consideringly, held out his right hand, said, ‘Mr Jones. Good luck,’ brought across his left hand and half-dragged, half-carried the dazed Jones into the cable-car. Smith moved quickly across to the controls, engaged gear all the way, released the handbrake and ran after the moving car.

As they moved out from below the roof of the station, the sound of the assault on the inner door seemed to double in its intensity. In the Schloss Adler, Smith reflected, there would be neither pneumatic chisels nor oxy-acetylene equipment for there could be no conceivable call for either, but, even so, it didn’t seem to matter: with all the best will in the world a couple of iron hasps couldn’t for long withstand an attack of that nature. Thoughtfully, Smith closed the rear door. Schaffer was seated, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. Mary was kneeling on the floor, Jones’s head in her lap, looking down at the handsome silvery-haired head. He couldn’t see her expression but was dolefully certain that she was even then preparing a homily about the shortcomings of bullies who went around clobbering elderly and defenceless American actors. Almost two minutes passed in complete silence before Carnaby-Jones stirred, and, when he did, Mary herself stirred and looked up at Smith. To his astonishment, she had a half-smile on her face.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve counted ten. In the circumstances, it was the only argument to use.’ She paused and the smile faded. ‘I thought you were gone then.’

‘You weren’t the only one. After this I retire. I’ve used up a lifetime’s luck in the past fifteen minutes. You’re not looking so bright yourself.’

‘I’m not feeling so bright.’ Her face was pale and strained as she braced herself against the wild lurching of the cable-car. ‘If you want to know, I’m seasick. I don’t go much on this form of travel.’

Smith tapped the roof. ‘You want to try travelling steerage on one of those,’ he said feelingly. ‘You’d never complain about first-class travel again. Ah! Pylon number two coming up. Almost half-way.’

‘Only half-way.’ A pause. ‘What happens if they break through that door up there?’

‘Reverse the gear lever and up we go.’

‘Like it or not?’

‘Like it or not.’

Carnaby-Jones struggled slowly to a sitting position, gazed uncomprehendingly around him until he realized where he was, rubbed his jaw tenderly and said to Smith: ‘That was a dirty trick.’

‘It was all of that,’ Smith acknowledged. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not.’ Jones smiled shakily. ‘Somehow, I don’t really think I’m cut out to be a hero.’

‘Neither am I, brother, neither am I,’ Schaffer said mournfully. He lifted his head from his hands and looked slowly around. His eyes were still glassy and only partially focusing but a little colour was returning to his right cheek, the one that wasn’t masked in blood. ‘Our three friends. What became of our three friends?’

‘Dead.’

‘Dead?’ Schaffer groaned and shook his head. ‘Tell me about it sometime. But not now.’

‘He doesn’t know what he’s missing,’ Smith said unsympathetically. ‘The drama of it all escapes him, which is perhaps just as well. Is the door up above there still standing or are the hinges or padlocks going? Is someone rushing towards the winch controls – Is there –’

‘Stop it!’ Mary’s voice was sharp, high-pitched and carried overtones of hysteria. ‘Stop talking like that!’

‘Sorry,’ Smith said contritely. He reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘Just whistling in the dark, that’s all. Here comes the last pylon. Another minute or so and we’re home and dry.’

‘Home and dry,’ Schaffer said bitterly. ‘Wait till I have that Savoy Grill menu in my hand. Then I’ll be home and dry.’

‘Some people are always thinking of their stomachs,’ Smith observed. At that moment he was thinking of his own and it didn’t feel any too good. No stomach does when it feels as if it has a solid lead ball, a chilled lead ball lodged in it with an icy hand squeezing from the outside. His heart was thumping slowly, heavily, painfully in his chest and he was having difficulty in speaking for all the saliva seemed to have evaporated from his mouth. He became suddenly aware that he was unconsciously leaning backward, bracing himself for the moment when the cable-car jerked to a stand-still then started climbing back up to the Schloss Adler again. I’ll count to ten, he said to himself, then if we get that far without being checked, I’ll count to nine, and then – And then he caught sight of Mary’s face, a dead-white, scared and almost haggard face that made her look fifteen years older than she was, and felt suddenly ashamed of himself. He sat on the bench, and squeezed her shoulder. ‘We’ll be all right,’ he said confidently. All of a sudden he found it easy to speak again. ‘Uncle John has just said so, hasn’t he? You wait and see.’

She looked up at him, trying to smile. ‘Is Uncle John always right?’

‘Always,’ Smith said firmly.

Twenty seconds passed. Smith rose to his feet, walked to the front of the cable-car and peered down. Though the moon was obscured he could just dimly discern the shape of the lower station. He turned to look at the others. They were all looking at him.

‘Not much more than a hundred feet to go,’ Smith said. ‘I’m going to open that door in a minute. Well, a few seconds. By that time we won’t be much more than fifteen feet above the ground. Twenty, at the most. If the car stops, we jump. There’s two or three feet of snow down there. Should cushion our fall enough to give an even chance of not breaking anything.’

Schaffer parted his lips to make some suitable remark, thought better of it and returned head to hands in weary silence. Smith opened the leading door, did his best to ignore the icy blast of wind that gusted in through the opening, and looked vertically downwards, realizing that he had been over-optimistic in his assessment of the distance between cable-car and ground. The distance was at least fifty feet, a distance sufficient to arouse in even the most optimistic mind dismaying thoughts of fractured femurs and tibias. And then he dismissed the thought, for an even more dismaying factor had now to be taken into consideration: in the far distance could be heard the sound of sirens, in the far distance could be seen the wavering beams of approaching headlamps. Schaffer lifted his head. The muzziness had now left him, even if his sore head had not.

‘Enter, left, reinforcements,’ he announced. ‘This wasn’t on the schedule, boss. Radio gone, telephone gone, helicopter gone –’

‘Just old-fashioned.’ Smith pointed towards the rear window. ‘They’re using smoke signals.’

‘Jeez!’ Schaffer stared out the rear windows, his voice awestruck. ‘For stone, it sure burns good!’

Schaffer was in no way exaggerating. For stone, it burnt magnificently. The Schloss Adler was well and truly alight, a conflagration in which smoke had suddenly become an inconsiderable and, indeed, a very minor element. It was wreathed in flames, almost lost to sight in flames, towering flames that now reached up almost to the top of the great round tower to the north-east. Perched on its volcanic plug half-way up the mountain-side against the dimly seen backdrop of the unseen heights of the Weissspitze, the blazing castle, its effulgence now beginning to light up the entire valley and quite drowning out the pale light of a moon again showing through, was an incredibly fantastic sight from some equally incredible and fantastic fairy tale.

‘One trusts that they are well insured,’ Schaffer said. He was on his feet now, peering down towards the lower station. ‘How far, boss? And how far down?’

‘Thirty feet. Maybe twenty-five. And fifteen feet down.’ The lights of the leading cars were passing the still smouldering embers of the station. ‘We have it made, Lieutenant Schaffer.’

‘We have it made.’ Schaffer cursed and staggered as the car jerked to a violent and abrupt stop. ‘Almost, that is.’

‘All out!’ Smith shouted. ‘All out!’

‘There speaks the eternal shop steward,’ Schaffer said. ‘Stand back, I’ve got two good hands.’ He brushed by Smith, clutched the door jamb with his left hand, pulled Mary towards him, transferred his grip from waist to wrist and dropped her out through the leading door, lowering her as far as the stretch of his left arm would permit. When he let her go, she had less than three feet to fall. Within three seconds he had done the same with Carnaby-Jones. The cable-car jerked and started to move back up the valley. Schaffer practically bundled Smith out of the car, wincing in pain as he momentarily took all of Smith’s two hundred pound weight, then slid out of the doorway himself, hung momentarily from the doorway at the full stretch of his arms, then dropped six feet into the soft yielding snow. He staggered, but maintained balance.

Smith was beside him. He had fished out a plastic explosive from the bag on his back and torn off the friction fuse. He handed the package to Schaffer and said: ‘You have a good right arm.’

‘I have a good right arm. Horses, no. Baseball, yes.’ Schaffer took aim and lobbed the explosive neatly through the doorway of the disappearing cable-car. ‘Like that?’

‘Like that. Come on.’ Smith turned and, catching Mary by the arm while Schaffer hustled Carnaby-Jones along, ran down the side of the lower station and into the shelter of the nearest house bare seconds before a command car, followed by several trucks crammed with soldiers, slid to a skidding halt below the lower station. Soldiers piled out of the trucks, following an officer, clearly identifiable as Colonel Weissner, up the steps into the lower station.

The castle burned more fiercely than ever, a fire obviously totally out of control. Suddenly, there was the sharp crack of an explosion and the ascending cable-car burst into flames. The car, half-way up to the first pylon, swung in great arcs across the valley, its flames fanned by the wind, and climbed steadily upwards into the sky until its flame was lost in the greater flame of the Schloss Adler.

Crouched in the shelter of the house, Schaffer touched Smith’s arm. ‘Sure you wouldn’t like to go and burn down the station as well?’

‘Come on,’ Smith said. ‘The garage.’

ELEVEN

Colonel Wyatt-Turner leaned over in the co-pilot’s seat, pressed his face against the side-screen and stared down unhappily at the ground. The Mosquito bomber, all engines and plywood, was, he was well aware, the fastest warplane in the world: even so, he hadn’t been prepared for anything quite so fast as this.

Normal flying, of course, imparts no sensation of speed, but then, Wing Commander Carpenter wasn’t engaged in normal flying; he was engaged in what Wyatt-Turner regarded as highly abnormal flying and flying, moreover, that was liable to bring them to disaster at any second. Carpenter was giving a ground-level performance of some spectacular note, skimming across fields, brushing tree-tops, skirting small hills that stood in his way, and Wyatt-Turner didn’t like any of it one little bit. What he liked even less was the appalling speed of their own moon-shadow flitting over the ground beneath them; and what he liked least of all was the increasing number of occasions on which plane and shadow came within almost touching distance of each other. In an effort to keep his mind off what must inevitably happen when and if the gap were finally closed he withdrew his almost mesmerized stare and glanced at his watch.

‘Twenty-five minutes.’ He looked at the relaxed figure in the pilot’s seat, at the world-weary face that contrasted so oddly with the magnificent panache of the red handlebar moustache. ‘Can you make it in time?’

‘I can make it,’ Carpenter said comfortably. ‘Point is, will they?’

‘God only knows. I don’t see how they can. Both the Admiral and I are convinced that they’re trapped in the Schloss Adler. Besides, the whole countryside must be up in arms by this time. What chance can they have?’

‘And that is why you came?’

‘I sent them,’ Wyatt-Turner said emptily. He glanced through the side-screen and recoiled as plane and shadow seemed to touch as they skimmed over the top of a pine forest. He said plaintively: ‘Must you fly so close to the damned ground?’

‘Enemy radar, old chap,’ Carpenter said soothingly. ‘We’re safer down here among the bushes.’

Smith, with Mary and Jones behind him and Schaffer bringing up the rear, skirted the backs of the houses on the east side of the village street and cautiously made their way through the automobile junkyard to the rear double doors of Sulz’s garage. Smith had his skeleton keys in his hand and was just reaching for the padlock when one of the doors opened quietly inwards. Heidi stood there. She stared at them as if they were creatures from another world, then up at the burning castle, then wordlessly, questioningly, at Smith.

‘All here in black and white.’ Smith patted his tunic. ‘Into the bus.’

Smith waited till they had filed through the door, closed it, crossed to a small barred window at the front of the garage and peered out cautiously.

The street was packed with a milling crowd of people, most of them soldiers, nearly all unarmed men who had come hurrying out from the various Weinstuben to watch the burning Schloss Adler. But there were plenty of armed soldiers nearby – two truck-loads not thirty yards from the garage, not to mention three more truck-loads even farther up the street at the foot of the lower station. Farther down the street a motor-cycle patrol was parked outside ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’. The one real physical obstacle in the way of their escape was a small command car, manned, parked directly outside the doors of Sulz’s garage. Smith looked at the car thoughtfully, decided that this was an obstacle that could be overcome. He withdrew from the window and crossed over to the doors to check that the four bolts were still withdrawn.

Mary and Carnaby-Jones had already made their way into the bus. As Heidi went to follow, Schaffer caught her by the shoulders, kissed her briefly and smiled at her. She looked at him in surprise.

‘Well, aren’t you glad to see me?’ Schaffer demanded. ‘I’ve had a terrible time up there. Good God, girl, I might have been killed.’

‘Not as handsome as you were two hours ago.’ She smiled, gently touched his face where Carra-ciola’s handiwork with the Schmeisser had left its bloody mark, and added over her shoulder as she climbed into the bus: ‘And that’s as long as you’ve known me.’

‘Two hours! I’ve aged twenty years tonight. And that, lady, is one helluva long courtship. Oh, God!’ He watched in wearily resigned despair as Smith climbed into the driver’s seat and switched on the ignition. ‘Here we go for another twenty. On the floor, everyone.’

‘How about you?’ Heidi asked.

‘Me?’ Schaffer’s surprise seemed genuine. He smashed the front window with the butt of the Schmeisser, reversed the gun, released the trigger and knelt on the floor. ‘I’m the conductor. It’s against regulations.’

The middle finger of Smith’s blood-stained, bandaged hand reached for the starter button and the big diesel caught at once. Smith started to back towards the rear of the garage. Two perfectly good cars, a Mercedes and an Opel, lay in his way and by the time that Smith – whose expression betrayed no awareness of their presence – reached the back of the garage neither were fit for anything other than the scrap-heap that lay beyond the rear doors. Smith stopped, engaged first gear, revved up the engine and let in the clutch with a bang. The bus jerked forward, gathering speed as it went.

Smith aimed the angled point of the massive snow-plough at the junction of the double doors and for all the resistance the doors offered they might have been made of brown paper. With a splintering crash that sent shattered door-planks flying through the air like so much confetti, the bus roared out into the street, Smith spinning the wheel violently to the right as they careened into the crowded thoroughfare.

Crowded the thoroughfare might have been, but the pedestrians, the rubber-neckers gazing at the funeral pyre of the Schloss Adler, had had at least sufficient warning given them by the accelerating clamour of the post-bus’s diesel to fling themselves clear as the bus came crashing through the doors. But the command car had no such opportunity for escape. Before either of the two occupants of the front seat – a sergeant with his hands resting lightly on the wheel, a major with a radio telephone in one hand, a thin cigar with a long ash in the other – were properly aware of what was happening, their car was swept up and carried away on the post-bus’s snow-plough. For fifteen, perhaps even twenty yards, the command car was carried along, precariously balanced, on the broad blade of the snow-plough, before dropping off to one side. Miraculously enough, it landed on even keel, all four wheels still on the ground. The dazed major still had the telephone in one hand, the cigar in the other: he hadn’t even lost the ash from his cigar.

Farther down the street, outside ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’, a group of Alpenkorps motor-cyclists standing just outside the door stared incredulously up the street. Their first reaction, their immediate conclusion was either that Zep Salzmann, the highly popular driver of the post-bus, had gone mad or that the accelerator had jammed on the floor-boards. Disillusionment was rapid. They heard the unmistakable sound of an engine changing up quickly through the gears and caught a brief glimpse of Smith hunched over the steering wheel and of Schaffer crouched behind, the Schmeisser sticking out through the right-hand shattered windscreen: then the post-bus’s headlamps switched on and they could see no more. But they had seen enough. One quick command from their sergeant and the motor-cycle patrol leapt for their machines, began to kick them into life.

But Smith also had seen enough. He blew a warning blast on his town horn, twisted the wheel and slewed the bus into the side of the street. His intentions were unmistakable and the motor-cycle patrol’s decision to elect for discretion in lieu of suicidal valour was as immediate as it was automatic. They frantically abandoned their machines and flung themselves for their lives up the steps of ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’.

There was a thunderous series of metallic bangs interspersed with the eldritch screeches of torn and tortured metal as the snow-plough smashed into the motor-cycles and swept them along in its giant maw. As Smith straightened out into the middle of the road again several of them slid off the angled blade and crashed with a great splintering of wood and buckling of metal into the boarded sidewalk: the machines were no longer recognizable as motor-cycles. Two of them, however, still remained perched on the blade.

The post-bus was still accelerating with Smith’s accelerator foot flat on the floor-boards. The headlamps were flashing rapidly, alternately main beam and dipped, and the streets ahead were clearing with corresponding rapidity: but the moment when the last few straggling pedestrians were galvanized into jumping for safety came when Smith switched on the Alpine horn.

In the mountains, the Alpine post-bus has absolute priority over every other vehicle in the road and its penetrating and stentorian three-toned post-horn is the symbol of its total authority, of its unquestioned right to complete priority at all times. The sound of that horn – whether the post-bus is in sight or not – is the signal for all vehicles or pedestrians to stop or move well into the side of the road, a signal that is immediately and automatically obeyed, for the absolute entitlement to the right of way of the official post-bus is deeply ingrained into the minds of all Alpine dwellers, and has been from earliest childhood. A magic wand might have made a better job of clearing that village street, but not all that much better; vehicles and pedestrians alike pressed into the sides of the street as if some powerful magnetic affinity had just been developed between them and the walls of the houses. The expression on faces ranged from astonishment to blank incomprehension. Hostility there was none: there had been no time for any to develop for events were moving far too swiftly and comprehension hadn’t even begun to overtake the events. The bus had now reached the end of the village street and still not one shot had been fired.

At the sharp left-hand corner at the foot of the street the two remaining motor-cycles slid off the snow-plough and smashed into a low stone wall: two more absolute certainties, Smith thought inconsequentially, for the automobile cemetery behind Sulz’s garage. Ahead of him now he could see the road stretch almost arrow-straight alongside the dark waters of the Blau See. He switched off the Alpine horn button, changed his mind and switched it on again: that horn was worth a pair of machine-guns any day.

‘Don’t you know any other tunes?’ Schaffer asked irritably. He shivered in the icy blast from the smashed front window, and sat on the floor to get what little shelter he could. ‘Give me a call when you require my services. A mile from now, I’d say.’

‘What do you mean, a mile from now?’

‘The barrack gates. That guy in the command car had a radio phone.’

‘He had, had he?’ Smith spared him a brief glance. ‘Why didn’t you shoot him?’

‘I’m a changed man, boss.’ Schaffer sighed. ‘Something splendid has just come into my life.’

‘Besides, you didn’t have a chance.’

‘Besides, as you say, I didn’t have a chance.’ Schaffer twisted round and looked through the rear windows of the bus for signs of pursuit, but the road behind them was empty. For all that, Schaffer reflected, the rearward view was one not lacking in interest: the Schloss Adler, now completely enveloped in flames, a reddish-white inferno by this time lighting up for half a mile around the startling incongruity of its snow and ice covered setting, was clearly beyond saving: arsonist’s dream or fireman’s nightmare, the castle was finished: before dawn it would be an empty and desolate shell, a gaunt and blackened ruin to haunt and desecrate for generations to come the loveliest fairy-tale valley he had ever seen.

Schaffer shortened his gaze and tried to locate the three others, but all were on the floor, under seats and completely concealed. He cursed as the shaking and shuddering bus lurched violently, throwing him against the right-hand front door, then straightened and peered at the illuminated dashboard.

‘God save us all,’ he said piously. ‘Ninety!’

‘Kilometres,’ Smith said patiently.

‘Ah!’ Schaffer said as he watched Smith’s foot move quickly from accelerator to brake, hoisted a wary eye over the lower edge of the shattered windscreen and whistled softly. The barrack gates were barely two hundred yards away: both the area around the guard-house and the parade ground beyond were brilliantly illuminated by overhead flood-lamps: scores of armed soldiers seemed to be running around in purposeless confusion, a totally erroneous impression as Schaffer almost immediately realized. They were running towards and scrambling aboard trucks and command cars and they weren’t wasting any time about it either.

‘A hive of activity and no mistake,’ Schaffer observed. ‘I wonder––’ He broke off, his eyes widening. A giant tank came rumbling into view past the guard-house, turned right on to the road, stopped, swivelled 180° on its tracks, completely blocking the road: the gun turret moved fractionally until it was lined up on the headlights of the approaching bus. ‘Oh, my gosh!’ Schaffer’s shocked whisper was just audible over the fading sound of the post-bus’s diesel. ‘A Tiger tank. And that’s an 88-millimetre cannon, boss.’

‘It’s not a pop-gun, and that’s a fact,’ Smith agreed. ‘Flat on the floor.’ He reached forward, pulled a switch, and the eighteen-inch long semaphore indicator began to wave gently up and down. Smith first dipped his main headlights, then switched them off altogether, covering the last thirty yards on sidelamps alone and praying that all those signs of peaceful normality might help to keep nervous fingers away from the firing button of the most lethal tank cannon ever devised.

The fingers, for whatever reason, left the button alone. Smith slowed to a walking pace, turned right through the guard-house gates and stopped. Taking care to keep his injured right hand well out of sight, he wound down his window and leaned out, left elbow over the sill as three guards, led by a sergeant and all with machine-pistols at the ready, closed in on the driver’s cab.

‘Quickly!’ Smith shouted. ‘Telephone. Surgeon to the sick-bay.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Colonel Weissner. They got him twice. Through the lungs. For God’s sake, don’t just stand there!’

‘But – but the post-bus!’ the sergeant protested. ‘We had a call from –’

‘Drunk, by God!’ Smith swore savagely. ‘He’ll be court-martialled in the morning.’ His voice dropped menacingly. ‘And you, if the Colonel dies. Move!’

Smith engaged gear and drove off, still at walking pace. The sergeant, reassured by the sight of a major’s uniform, the fact that the bus was moving into the barracks, the slow speed with which it was moving and, above all, by the authoritative clamour of the Alpine horn which Smith still had not switched off, ran for the nearest phone.

Still crawling along in first gear, Smith carefully edged the post-bus through the press of men and machines, past a column of booted and gauntleted soldiers mounted on motor-cycles, past armoured vehicles and trucks, all with engines already running, some already moving towards the gates – but not moving as quickly towards the gates as Smith would have wished. Ahead of the post-bus was a group of officers, most of them obviously senior, talking animatedly. Smith slowed down the bus even more and leaned from the window.

‘They’re trapped!’ he called excitedly. ‘Upstairs in “Zum Wilden Hirsch”. They’ve got Colonel Weissner as hostage. Hurry, for God’s sake!’

He broke off as he suddenly recognized one of the officers as the Alpenkorps captain to whom in his temporary capacity of Major Bernd Himmler, he’d spoken in ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’ earlier that evening. A second later the recognition was mutual, the captain’s mouth fell open in total incredulity and before he had time to close it Smith’s foot was flat on the accelerator and the bus heading for the southern gates, soldiers flinging themselves to both sides to avoid the scything sweep of the giant snow-plough. Such was the element of surprise that fully thirty yards had been covered before most of the back windows of the bus were holed and broken, the shattering of glass mingling with the sound of the ragged fusillade of shots from behind. And then Smith, wrenching desperately on the wheel, came careering through the southern gates back on to the main road, giving them at least temporary protection from the sharp-shooters on the parade ground.

But they had, it seemed, only changed from the frying pan to the fire. Temporary protection they might have obtained from one enemy – but from another and far deadlier enemy they had no protection at all. Smith all but lost control of the bus as something struck a glancing blow low down on his cab door, ricocheted off into the night with a viciously screaming whine and exploded in a white flash of snow-flurried light less than fifty yards ahead.

‘The Tiger tank,’ Schaffer shouted. ‘That goddamned 88-millimetre –’

‘Get down!’ Smith jack-knifed down and to one side of the wheel until his eyes were only an inch above the foot of the windscreen. ‘That one was low. The next one –’

The next one came through the top of the back door, traversed the length of the bus and exited through the front of the roof, just above the windscreen. This time there was no explosion.

‘A dud?’ Schaffer said hopefully. ‘Or maybe a dummy practice –’

‘Dummy nothing!’ Upright again, Smith was swinging the bus madly, dangerously, from side to side of the road in an attempt to confuse the tank gunner’s aim. ‘Armour-piercing shells, laddie, designed to go through two inches of steel plate in a tank before they explode.’ He winced and ducked low as a third shell took out most of the left-hand windows of the bus, showering himself and Schaffer with a flying cloud of shattered glass fragments. ‘Just let one of those shells strike chassis member, instead of thin sheet metal, or the engine block, or the snow-plough –’

‘Don’t!’ Schaffer begged. ‘Just let it creep up on me all unbeknownst, like.’ He paused, then continued: ‘Taking his time, isn’t he? Lining up for the Sunday one.’

‘No.’ Smith glanced in the rear-view mirror and steadied the wildly swaying bus up on a steadier course. ‘Never thought I’d be glad to see a few carloads or truck-loads of Alpenkorps coming after me.’ He changed into top gear and pushed the accelerator to the floor. ‘I’m happy to make an exception this time.’

Schaffer turned and looked through the shattered rear windows. He could count at least three pairs of headlights on the road behind them, with two others swinging out through the southern gates: between them, they effectively blotted the post-bus from the view of the tank gunner.

‘Happy isn’t the word for it. Me, I’m ecstatic. Tiger tanks are one thing but little itsy-bitsy trucks are another.’ Schaffer strode rapidly down the central aisle, passing by Mary, Heidi and Carnaby-Jones, all of whom were struggling rather shakily to their feet, and looked at the crates stacked in the rear seats.

‘Six crates!’ he said to Heidi. ‘And we asked for only two. Honey, you’re going to make me the happiest man alive.’ He opened the rear door and began to empty the contents of the crates on to the road. A few of the bottles just bounced harmlessly on ridges of hard-packed snow, but the speed of the bus was now such that most of them shattered on impact.

The first of the two leading pursuit cars was within three hundred yards of the bus when it ran into the area of broken glass. From Schaffer’s point of view it was impossible to tell what exactly happened, but such indications as could be gathered by long-range sight and sound were satisfying enough. The headlights of the leading car suddenly began to slew violently from side to side, the screeching of brakes was clearly audible above the sound of the post-bus’s diesel, but not nearly as loud as the rending crash of metal as the second car smashed into the rear of the first. For a few seconds both cars seemed locked together, then they skidded wildly out of control, coming to rest with the nose of the first car in the right-hand ditch, the tail of the second in the left-hand ditch. The headlamps of both cars had failed just after the moment of impact but there was more than sufficient illumination from the lamps of the first of the trucks coming up behind them to show that the road was completely blocked.

‘Neat,’ Schaffer said admiringly. ‘Very neat, Schaffer.’ He called to Smith: ‘That’ll hold them, boss.’

‘Sure, it’ll hold them,’ Smith said grimly. ‘It’ll hold them for all of a minute. You can’t burst heavy truck tyres that way and it won’t take them long to bull-doze those cars out of the way. Heidi?’

Heidi walked forward, shivering in the icy gale blowing through both the shattered front and side windows. ‘Yes, Major?’

‘How far to the turn off?’

‘A mile.’

‘And to the wooden bridge – what do you call it, Zur Alten Brücke?’

‘Another mile.’

‘Three minutes. At the most, that.’ He raised his voice. ‘Three minutes, Lieutenant. Can you do it?’

‘I can do it.’ Schaffer was already lashing together packages of plastic explosives. He used transparent adhesive tape, leaving long streamers dangling from the bound packages. He had just secured the last package in position when he lurched heavily as the post-bus, now clear of the Blau See and running through a pine forest, swung abruptly to the left on to a side road.

‘Sorry,’ Smith called. ‘Almost missed that one. Less than a mile, Lieutenant.’

‘No panic,’ Schaffer said cheerfully. He fished out a knife to start cutting the fuses to their shortest possible length, then went very still indeed as he glanced through where the rear windows had once been. In the middle distance were the vertically wavering beams of powerful headlights, closing rapidly. The cheerfulness left Schaffer’s voice. ‘Well, maybe there is a little bit of panic, at that. I’ve got bad news, boss.’

‘And I have a rear mirror. How far, Heidi?’

‘Next corner.’

While Schaffer worked quickly on the fuses, Smith concentrated on getting the post-bus round the next corner as quickly as possible without leaving the road. And then they were on and round the corner and the bridge was no more than a hundred yards away.

It was not, Smith thought, a bridge he would have chosen to have crossed with a bicycle, much less a six ton bus. Had it been a bridge crossing some gently meandering stream, then, yes, possibly: but not a bridge such as this one was, a fifty-foot bridge surfaced with untied railway sleepers, spanning a ravine two hundred feet in depth and supported by trestles, very ancient wooden trestles which, from what little he could see of them from his acute angle of approach, he wouldn’t have trusted to support the tables at the vicar’s garden party.

Smith hit this elderly and decrepit edifice at forty miles per hour. A more cautious and understandable approach might have been to crawl over it at less than walking pace but Smith’s conviction that the less time he spent on each ancient sleeper the better was as instantaneous as it was complete. The heavy snow chains on each tyre bit into and dislodged each successive sleeper with a terrifying rumble, the post-bus bounced up and down as if on a giant cake-walk while the entire structure of the bridge swayed from side to side like the bridge of a destroyer at speed in a heavy cross-sea. It had been Smith’s original intention to stop in the middle of the bridge but once embarked upon the crossing he would no more have done so than dallied to pick up an edelweiss in the path of an Alpine avalanche. Ten feet from the edge of the bridge he stamped on the brakes and skidded to a sliding halt, on solid ground again, in less than twenty yards.

Schaffer already had the back door open and the two packages of plastic explosives in his hands before the bus stopped. Five seconds after hitting the road he was back on the bridge again, skipping nimbly over a dozen dislodged sleepers until he had arrived at the main supports of the central trestle. It took him less than twenty seconds to tape one package to the right-hand support, cross the bridge and tape the second package to the left-hand support. He heard the deepening roar of a rapidly approaching engine, glanced up, saw the swathe of unseen headlamp beams shining round the corner they had just passed, tore off the ignition fuse, crossed the bridge, tore off the other and raced for the bus. Smith already had the bus in gear and was moving away when Schaffer flung himself through the back doorway and was hauled inside by helping hands.

Schaffer twisted round till he was sitting on the passage-way, his legs dangling through the open doorway, just in time to see the headlamps of the pursuing car sweep into sight round the corner. It was now less than a hundred yards from the bridge, and accelerating. For a brief, almost panic-stricken, moment, Schaffer wondered wildly if he had cut the fuses short enough, he hadn’t realized the following car had been quite as close as it was: and from the tense and strained expressions on the faces of the two girls and the man beside him, expressions sensed rather than seen, he knew that exactly the same thought was in their minds.

The two loud, flat detonations, each fractionally preceded by the brilliant white flash characteristic of the plastic explosive, came within one second of each other. Baulks of timber and railway sleepers were hurled forty feet into the air, spinning lazily around in a curious kind of slow motion, many of them falling back again on to the now tottering support structure with an impact sufficient to carry away the central trestle. One moment, a bridge: the next, an empty ravine with, on the far side of it, the wildly swinging headlamp beams as the driver flung his car from side to side in a nothing-to-be-lost attempt to prevent the car from sliding over the edge of the ravine. It seemed certain that he must fail until the moment when the car, sliding broadside on along the road, struck a large rock, rolled over twice and came to a halt less than six feet from the edge of the ravine.

Schaffer shook his head in wonder, rose, closed the rear door, sat in the back seat, lit a cigarette, tossed the spent match through the smashed rear window and observed: ‘You’re a lucky lot to have me around.’

‘All this and modesty, too,’ Heidi said, admiringly.

‘A rare combination,’ Schaffer acknowledged. ‘You’ll find lots of other pleasant surprises in store for you as we grow old together. How far to this airfield now?’

‘Five miles. Perhaps eight minutes. But this is the only road in. With the bridge gone, there’s no hurry now.’

‘That’s as maybe. Schaffer is anxious to be gone. Tell me, honey, were all those beer bottles empty?’

‘The ones we threw away were.’

‘I just simply don’t deserve you,’ Schaffer said reverently.

‘We’re thinking along the same lines at last,’ Heidi said acidly.

Schaffer grinned, took two beer bottles and went forward to relieve Smith, who moved out only too willingly with the bus still in motion. Smith’s right hand, Schaffer saw, hadn’t a scrap of bandage left that wasn’t wholly saturated in blood and the face was very pale. But he made no comment.

Three minutes later they were out of the forest, running along through open farm-land, and five minutes after that, acting on Heidi’s directions, Schaffer swung the bus through a narrow gateway on the left-hand side of the road. The headlamps successively illuminated two small hangars, a narrow, cleared runway stretching into the distance and, finally, a bullet-riddled Mosquito bomber with a crumpled under-carriage.

‘Ain’t that a beautiful sight, now?’ Schaffer nodded at the damaged plane. ‘Carnaby-Jones’s transport?’

Smith nodded. ‘It began with a Mosquito and it will end – we hope – in a Mosquito. This is Oberhausen airfield. HQ of the Bavarian Mountain Rescue pilots.’

‘Three cheers for the Bavarian Mountain Rescue pilots.’ Schaffer stopped the bus facing up the length of the runway, switched off the lights and turned off the engine. They sat silently in the darkness, waiting.

Colonel Wyatt-Turner glanced through the side-screen and breathed with relief as, for the first time that night, the ground fell away sharply beneath the Mosquito. He said sarcastically: ‘Losing your nerve, Wing Commander?’

‘I lost that September 3rd, 1939,’ Carpenter said cheerfully. ‘Got to climb. Can’t expect to see any recognition signals down among the bushes there.’

‘You’re sure we’re on the right course?’

‘No question. That’s the Weissspitze there. Three minutes’ flying time.’ Carpenter paused and went on thoughtfully. ‘Looks uncommon like Guy Fawkes night up there, don’t you think.’

The Wing Commander was hardly exaggerating. In the far distance the silhouette of the Weissspitze was but dimly seen, but there was no mistaking the intensity of the great fire blazing half-way up the mountain-side. Occasionally, great gouts of red flame and what looked like gigantic fireworks could be seen soaring high above the main body of the fire.

‘Explosives or boxes of ammunition going up, I’d say,’ Carpenter said pensively. ‘That’s the Schloss Adler, of course. Were any of your boys carrying matches?’

‘They must have been.’ Wyatt-Turner stared impassively at the distant blaze. ‘It’s quite a sight.’

‘It’s all of that,’ Carpenter agreed. He touched Wyatt-Turner’s arm and pointed forwards and down. ‘But there’s a sight that’s finer far, the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.’

Wyatt-Turner followed the pointing finger. Less than two miles away, about five hundred feet below, a pair of headlamps were flashing regularly on and off, once every two seconds. With a conscious effort of will he looked away and glanced briefly at Carpenter, but almost at once was back on the flashing headlamps. He stared at them hypnotically and shook his head in slow and total disbelief.

Schaffer had the headlights switched on main beam, illuminating the runway, and the post-bus engine running as the black squat shape of the Mosquito, air-brakes fully extended, lined up for its approach to the runway, and had the bus itself moving, accelerating quickly through the gears, as the Mosquito sank down over the top of the bus and settled down beautifully without the slightest suspicion of a bounce.

Within a minute Schaffer brought the bus to a skidding halt only yards from the now stationary plane. Half a minute later, with all five of them safely inside the plane, Carpenter had the Mosquito turned through 180° and was standing hard on the brakes as he brought the engines up to maximum revolutions. And then they were on their way, gathering speed so rapidly that they were air-borne two hundred yards before the end of the runway. For the first mile of their climb Carpenter kept the plane heading almost directly towards the blazing castle that now redly illuminated the entire valley, then the funeral pyre of the Schloss Adler vanished for the last time as the Mosquito banked and headed for the north-west and home.

TWELVE

Wing Commander Carpenter took the Mosquito up to five thousand feet and kept it there. The time for dodging around among the bushes was past for, on the outward journey, Carpenter had been concerned only that no German station pick him up long enough to form even a rough guess as to where he was going. But now he didn’t care if every radar station in the country knew where he was going: he was going home to England, mission accomplished, and there wasn’t a warplane in Europe that could catch him. Wing Commander Carpenter pulled luxuriously at his evil-smelling briar. He was well content.

His five newly-acquired passengers were, perhaps, a fraction less content. They lacked Carpenter’s well-upholstered pilot’s seat. The interior of the Mosquito made no concessions whatsoever to passenger comfort. It was bleak, icy, cramped – it didn’t require much space to carry a 4,000 lb bomb load, the Mosquito’s maximum – and totally devoid of seating in any form. The three men and the two girls squatted uncomfortably on thin palliasses, the expressions on their faces pretty accurately reflecting their acute discomfort. Colonel Wyatt-Turner, still holding across his knees the Sten gun he’d had at the ready in case any trouble had developed on the ground or the flashing lights of the truck had been a German ruse, was sitting sideways in the co-pilot’s seat so that he could see and talk to the pilot and the passengers at the same time. He had accepted without question or apparent interest Smith’s brief explanation of the two girls’ presence as being necessary to escape Gestapo vengeance. Colonel Wyatt-Turner had other and weightier matters on his mind.

Smith looked up from the bleeding mangled hand that Mary was re-bandaging with the plane’s first aid kit and said to the Colonel: ‘It was good of you to come in person to meet us, sir.’

‘It wasn’t good of me at all,’ Wyatt-Turner said frankly. ‘I’d have gone mad if I’d stayed another minute in London – I had to know. It was I who sent you all out here.’ He sat without speaking for some time, then went on heavily: ‘Torrance-Smythe gone, Sergeant Harrod, and now, you say, Carraciola, Christiansen and Thomas. All dead. A heavy price, Smith, a terrible price. My best men.’

‘All of them, sir?’ Smith asked softly.

‘I’m getting old.’ Wyatt-Turner shook his head wearily and drew a hand across his eyes. ‘Did you find out who –’

‘Carraciola.’

‘Carraciola! Ted Carraciola? Never! I can’t believe it.’

‘And Christiansen.’ Smith’s voice was still quiet, still even. ‘And Thomas.’

‘And Christiansen? And Thomas?’ He looked consideringly at Smith. ‘You’ve been through a lot, Major Smith. You’re not well.’

‘I’m not as well as I was,’ Smith admitted. ‘But I was well enough when I killed them.’

‘You – you killed them?’

‘I’ve killed a traitor before now. You know that.’

‘But – but traitors! All three of them. Impossible. I can’t believe it! I won’t believe it!’

‘Then maybe you’ll believe this, sir.’ Smith produced one of the note-books from his tunic and handed it to Wyatt-Turner. ‘The names and addresses or contacts of every German agent in southern England and the names of all British agents in north-west Europe who have been supplanted by German agents. You will recognize Carraciola’s writing. He wrote this under duress.’

Slowly, like a man in a dream, Wyatt-Turner reached out and took the note-book. For three minutes he examined the contents, leafing slowly, almost reluctantly through the pages, then finally laid the book down with a sigh.

‘This is the most important document in Europe, the most important document I have ever seen.’ Wyatt-Turner sighed. ‘The nation is deeply in your debt, Major Smith.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Or would have been. It’s a great pity it will never have the chance to express its gratitude.’ He lifted the Sten from his knees and pointed it at Smith’s heart. ‘You will do nothing foolish, will you, Major Smith?’

‘What in God’s name –’ Carpenter twisted in his seat and stared at Wyatt-Turner in startled and total disbelief.

‘Concentrate on your flying, my dear Wing Commander.’ Wyatt-Turner waved the Sten gently in Carpenter’s direction. ‘Your course will do for the present. We’ll be landing at Lille airport within the hour.’

‘The guy’s gone nuts!’ Schaffer’s voice was a shocked whisper.

‘If he has,’ Smith said dryly, ‘he went nuts some years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most dangerous spy in Europe, the most successful double agent of all time.’ He paused for reaction, but the silence remained unbroken: the enormity of the revelation of Wyatt-Turner’s duplicity was too great for immediate comprehension. Smith continued: ‘Colonel Wyatt-Turner, you will be court-martialled this afternoon, sentenced, removed to the Tower then taken out, blindfolded and shot at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘You knew?’ Wyatt-Turner’s affable self-confidence had completely deserted him and his voice, low and strained, was barely distinguishable above the clamour of the engines. ‘You knew about me?’

‘I knew about you,’ Smith nodded. ‘But we all knew about you, didn’t we, Colonel? Three years, you claimed, behind the German lines, served with the Wehrmacht and finally penetrated the Berlin High Command. Sure you did. With the help of the Wehrmacht and the High Command. But when the tide of war turned and you could no longer feed the Allies with false and misleading reports about proposed German advances, then you were allowed to escape back to England to feed the Germans true and accurate reports about Allied plans – and give them all the information they required to round up British agents in north-west Europe. How many million francs do you have in your numbered account in Zurich, Colonel?’

Wing Commander Carpenter stared straight ahead through the windscreen and said very slowly: ‘Frankly, old chap, this is preposterous.’

‘Try batting an eyelid and see just how preposterous that Sten gun is,’ Smith suggested. He looked at Wyatt-Turner again. ‘You underestimated Admiral Rolland, I’m afraid. He’s had his suspicions about you and the four section leaders of Department C for months. But he was wrong about Torrance-Smythe.’

‘Guess away.’ Wyatt-Turner had recovered his composure and most of his self-confidence. ‘It’ll pass the time till we get to Lille.’

‘Unfortunately for you, there is no guess-work. Admiral Rolland recalled me – and Mary – from Italy: he could no longer be sure of anyone in London. You know how corruption spreads? Played it very clever, did the Admiral. He told you he had his suspicions about one of his section leaders, but didn’t know which. So, when General Carnaby crashed, he put up to you the idea of sending the section officers to the rescue – and made damn sure that you never once had the opportunity of talking to any of them in private before they took off.’

‘That – that was why I was called in?’ Schaffer looked as if he had been sand-bagged. ‘Because you couldn’t trust –’

‘For all we knew, MI6 was riddled … Well, Colonel, you weren’t too happy until Rolland asked you to pick the leader. So you picked me. Rolland knew you would. You’d only just met me for the first time, but you knew from Kesselring’s military intelligence chief, through your pal Admiral Canaris, that I was their top double agent. Or thought you did. Rolland was the only man on either side who knew I wasn’t. For you, I was the ideal choice. Rolland made certain that you didn’t have the chance of talking to me either, but you weren’t worried. You knew that I would know what to do.’ Smith smiled bleakly. ‘I’m happy to say I did. It must have been quite a shock to your system this afternoon when he told you what I really was.’

‘You knew that? You knew all that?’ Wyatt-Turner’s new-found composure had vanished, his voice was quiet and vicious. He lifted the Sten slightly. ‘What goes on, Smith?’

‘All pre-arranged to force your hand. We had everything – except proof – about you. I got that proof this evening. Colonel Kramer knew that we were coming, knew we were after General Carnaby.’ He nodded towards Jones. ‘Incidentally, meet Cartwright Jones, an American actor.’

‘What?’ Wyatt-Turner forced out the word as if a pair of powerful hands were squeezing on his windpipe.

‘General Carnaby is spending a quiet weekend at the Admiral’s country house in Wiltshire. As a stand-in, Mr Jones was quite admirable. He had them all as deceived as that faked plane crash – you will have realized by now that it was a deliberate crash-landing.’ Wyatt-Turner tried to speak, but the words failed to come: his mouth was working and the colour had drained from his ruddy face. ‘And why did Kramer know? He knew because you had informed Berlin as soon as Rolland had put the plan to you. Nobody else had the chance to. And he knew that we would be in “Zum Wilden Hirsch” this evening. He knew because I told you on the radio broadcast this morning and you lost no time in passing the good word on.’

‘Are you sure?’ Heidi asked. ‘Couldn’t the informant have been whichever of the men – Carraciola or Christiansen or Thomas – who killed Torrance-Smythe. There’s a phone box just outside the inn.’

‘I know. No, he didn’t have time. I left the inn for exactly seven minutes. Three minutes after I’d left, Torrance-Smythe did the same – to follow one of the three others he’d just seen leaving. Smithy was clever and he knew something was far wrong. He –’

‘How did he know?’ Schaffer demanded.

‘We’ll never be sure. I think we’ll find that he was a highly-skilled lip-reader. Anyway, he caught the man he’d seen leaving in the phone booth outside the Post Office – before he’d had time to get through to either Weissner or Kramer. There was a fight to the death. By the time the killer had dragged Smithy around to the back and returned to the booth, someone else was occupying it. I saw him. So the killer had to go back into the inn. Kramer it was who told Weissner – and the Colonel here who told Kramer.’

‘Very interesting.’ There was a sneer in Wyatt-Turner’s voice, but a sneer belied by the deep unease in his face. ‘Fascinating, in fact. Quite finished, Major Smith?’

‘Finished.’ Smith sighed. ‘You just had to come to meet us, hadn’t you, Colonel? This was the last door to life left open to you. In my final broadcast I told the Admiral “I have it all”. He told you what that meant – all the names, all the addresses. We could never have got at you through Carraciola, Christiansen or Thomas – they were too close to you in MI6, you were too cagey and they never knew who they were working for. You used intermediaries – and all their names are in that book. You knew they’d put the finger on you – when it’s a choice between taking a walk to the gallows and talking – well, it’s not much of a choice, is it?’

Wyatt-Turner didn’t answer. He turned to Carpenter and said: ‘Lay off a course for Lille airport.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Smith said.

Wyatt-Turner lined his Sten on Smith. ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you now.’

‘I can do that,’ Smith nodded. ‘Why do you think that Admiral Rolland accompanied you to the airport. He never has before.’

‘Go on.’ Wyatt’s voice was hard, abrupt, but his eyes were sick, sick with the sudden certainty of defeat and death.

‘To make quite certain that you took that Sten and only that Sten with you. Tell me, can you see two parallel scores where the stock meets the barrel?’

Wyatt-Turner stared at him for a long moment then glanced down quickly at the Sten. There were two unmistakable parallel scratches exactly where Smith had said they would be. Wyatt-Turner looked up again, his face contorted, desperation replacing the sickness in his eyes.

‘That’s right,’ Smith said. ‘I personally filed off the firing pin exactly thirty-six hours ago.’ With his left hand Smith reached awkwardly under his tunic flap and brought out his silenced Luger. Wyatt-Turner, with his Sten lined up on Smith’s head and the muzzle less than three feet from Smith’s face, squeezed the trigger time and again, and each convulsive contraction of his forefinger was rewarded by a dry and empty click. With a stunned almost uncomprehending expression on his face, Wyatt-Turner slowly lowered the Sten to the floor, then quickly whirled in his seat, jerked open the door and threw the note-book out into the night. He turned and smiled bleakly at Smith.

‘The most important document in Europe, I believe I called it.’

‘So you did.’ Smith handed his gun to Schaffer, reached under his tunic and brought out two more books. ‘Duplicates.’

‘Duplicates!’ The smile slowly faded from the heavily-jowled face, leaving it frozen in defeat. ‘Duplicates,’ he whispered. He looked slowly around them all and then finally back at Smith, who had retrieved his gun from Schaffer. He said: ‘Are you going to shoot me?’

‘No.’

Wyatt-Turner nodded, slid back the door to its widest extent and said: ‘Can you really see me in the Tower?’ He stepped forward into the doorway.

‘No.’ Smith shook his head. ‘No, I can’t see that.’

‘Mind the step,’ said Schaffer. His voice was cold and empty, his face was carved from stone.

‘Well, now, time to make a call.’ Smith slid shut the door, scrambled painfully into the co-pilot’s seat and looked at Mary. ‘The Admiral must be getting worried by this time.’

‘Time to make a call,’ Mary repeated mechanically. She stared at him as if seeing a ghost. ‘How can you sit there – just after – how can you be so calm?’

‘Because it’s no shock to me, silly. I knew he was going to die.’

‘You knew – of course, of course,’ she murmured.

‘Now then,’ Smith went on, deliberately brisk-voiced as he took her hand. ‘You realize what this means, don’t you?’

‘Do I realize what what means?’ She was still ashen-faced.

‘You and I are all washed up,’ Smith explained patiently. ‘Finished. In Italy, in north-west Europe. I won’t even be allowed to fight as a soldier because if I were captured I’d still be shot as a spy.’

‘So?’

‘So, for us, the war is over. For the first time we can think of ourselves. OK?’ He squeezed her hand and she smiled shakily in reply. ‘OK Wing Commander, may I use your radio?’

‘So that’s the way he went.’ Admiral Rolland, telephone in hand and standing by the big transceiver in his London Operations HQ, looked old and very very tired. ‘Maybe it’s all for the best, Smith. And you have all the information you want?’

Smith’s voice crackled over the earphone. ‘Everything, sir.’

‘Magnificent, magnificent! I have all the police forces in the country alerted. As soon as we get that book … There’s a car waiting for you at the airport. See you in an hour.’

‘Yes, sir. There’s one thing, sir, a small thing. I want to get married this morning.’

‘You what?’ Grey bushy eyebrows lifted towards the mane of white hair.

‘I want to get married,’ Smith explained slowly and patiently. ‘To Miss Mary Ellison.’

‘But you can’t,’ Rolland protested. ‘This morning! Impossible! There are such things as banns, permits, the registrar’s office will be shut today –’

‘After all I’ve done for you,’ Smith interrupted reproachfully.

‘Blackmail, sir! You play on an old man’s gratitude. Downright blackmail!’ Rolland banged down the phone, smiled tiredly and picked up another phone. ‘Operator? Put me through to the Forgery Section.’

Wing Commander Carpenter, his pipe well alight and by his elbow a cup of coffee newly poured from a vacuum flask, was his old imperturbable self again. Smith talked quietly to Mary while Jones had his eyes closed and appeared to be asleep. Farther aft in the fuselage, Schaffer had his arm around Heidi, who was making no attempt to fight him off.

‘Right,’ Schaffer said. ‘So we go to this pub tonight, see –’

‘You said the Savoy Grill,’ Heidi reminded him.

‘A rose by any other name … So we go to this pub, and we’ll have pâté , smoked trout, sirloin of Aberdeen-Angus –’

‘Aberdeen-Angus!’ Heidi looked at him in amusement. ‘Forgotten the war, haven’t you? Forgotten rationing? More like a sirloin of horse meat.’

‘Honey.’ Schaffer took her hands and spoke severely and earnestly. ‘Honey, don’t ever again mention that word to me. I’m allergic to horses.’

‘You eat them?’ Heidi gazed at him in astonishment. ‘In Montana?’

‘I fall off them,’ Schaffer said moodily. ‘Everywhere.’

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Puppet on a Chain

To Fred and Ina

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1969

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1969

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9348-6

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

ONE

‘We shall be arriving in Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, in just a few minutes.’ Mellifluous, accentless, the Dutch stewardess’s voice could have been precisely duplicated on any of a dozen European airlines. ‘Please fasten your seatbelts and extinguish your cigarettes. We hope you have enjoyed your flight: we are sure you will enjoy your stay in Amsterdam.’

I’d spoken briefly to the stewardess on the way across. A charming girl, but given to a certain unwarranted optimism in her outlook on life in general and I had to take issue with her on two points: I hadn’t enjoyed the flight and I didn’t expect to enjoy my stay in Amsterdam. I hadn’t enjoyed the flight because I hadn’t enjoyed any flight since that day two years ago when the engines of a DC 8 had failed only seconds after take-off and led to the discovery of two things: that an unpowered jet has the gliding characteristics of a block of concrete and that plastic surgery can be very long, very painful, very expensive and occasionally not very successful. Nor did I expect to enjoy Amsterdam even though it is probably the most beautiful city in the world with the friendliest inhabitants you’ll find anywhere: it’s just that the nature of my business trips abroad automatically precludes the enjoyment of anything.

As the big KLM DC 8 — I’m not superstitious, any plane can fall out of the sky — sank down, I glanced round its crowded interior. The bulk of the passengers, I observed, appeared to share my belief in the inherent madness of flying: those who weren’t using their finger-nails to dig holes in KLM’s upholstery were either leaning back with excessive nonchalance or chattering with the bright gay animation of those brave spirits who go to their impending doom with a quip on their smiling lips, the type who would have waved cheerfully to the admiring throngs as their tumbril drew up beside the guillotine. In short, a pretty fair cross-section of humanity. Distinctly lawabiding. Definitely non-villainous. Ordinary: even nondescript.

Or perhaps that’s unfair — the nondescript bit, I mean. To qualify for that rather denigrating description there must exist comparative terms of reference to justfy its use: unfortunately for the remainder of the passengers there were two others aboard that plane who would have made anyone look nondescript.

I looked at them three seats behind me on the other side of the aisle. This was hardly a move on my part to attract any attention as most of the men within eyeing distance of them had done little else but look at them since leaving Heathrow Airport: not to have looked at them at all would have been an almost guaranteed method of attracting attention.

Just a couple of girls sitting together. You can find a couple of girls sitting together almost anywhere but you’d have to give up the best years of your life to the search of finding a couple like those. One with hair as dark as a raven’s wing, the other a shining platinum blonde, both clad, albeit marginally, in mini-dresses, the dark one in an all-white silk affair, the blonde all in black, and both of them possessed as far as one could — see and one could see a great deal — of figures that demonstrated clearly the immense strides forward made by a select few of woman-kind since the days of Venus di Milo. Above all, they were strikingly beautiful, but not with that vapid and empty brand of unformed good looks which wins the Miss World contest: curiously alike, they had the delicately formed bone structure, the cleanly cut features, and the unmistakable quality of intelligence which would keep them still beautiful twenty years after the faded Miss Worlds of yesterday had long since given up the unequal competition.

The blonde girl smiled at me, a smile at once pert and provocative, but friendly. I gave her my impassive look, and as the trainee plastic surgeon who had worked his will on me hadn’t quite succeeded in matching up the two sides of my face, my impassive expression is noticeably lacking in encouragement, but still she smiled at me. The dark girl nudged her companion, who looked away from me, saw the reproving frown, made a face and stopped smiling. I looked away.

We were less than two hundred yards from the end of the runway now and to take my mind off the near-certainty of the undercarriage crumpling as soon as it touched the tarmac, I leaned back, closed my eyes and thought about the two girls. Whatever else I lacked, I reflected, no one could claim that I picked my assistants without regard to some of the more aesthetic aspects of life. Maggie, the dark girl, was twenty-seven and had been with me for over five years now: she was clever to just short of the point of being brilliant, she was methodical, painstaking, discreet, reliable and almost never made a mistake — in our business there is no such thing as a person who never makes mistakes. More important, Maggie and I were fond of each other and had been for years, an almost essential qualification where a momentary loss of mutual faith and interdependence could have consequences of an unpleasant and permanent nature: but we weren’t, so far as I knew, too fond of each other, for that could have been equally disastrous.

Belinda, blonde, twenty-two, Parisian, half French, half English, on her first operational assignment, was an almost totally unknown quantity to me. Not an enigma, just unknown as a person: when the Sûreté lend you one of their agents, as they had lent Belinda to me, the accompanying dossier on that agent is so overwhelmingly comprehensive that no relevant fact in that person’s background or past is left unmentioned. On a personal basis all I had been able to gather so far was that she was markedly lacking in that respect – if not unstinted admiration – that the young should accord to their elders and professional superiors, which in this case was myself. But she had about her that air of quietly resourceful competence which more than outweighed any reservations she might hold about her employer.

Neither girl had ever been to Holland before, which was one of the main reasons why they were accompanying me there: apart from which, lovely young girls in our unlovely profession are rarer than fur coats in the Congo and hence all the more unlikely to attract the attention of the suspicious and the ungodly.

The DC 8 touched down, the undercarriage remained in one piece, so I opened my eyes and began to think of matters of more immediate urgency. Duclos. Jimmy Duclos was waiting to meet me at Schiphol Airport and Jimmy Duclos had something of importance and urgency to convey to me. Too important to send, even though coded, through normal channels of communication: too urgent to wait even for the services of a diplomatic courier from our embassy in The Hague. The probable content of the message I did not concern myself with: I’d know it in five minutes. And I knew it would be what I wanted. Duclos’s sources of information were impeccable, the information itself always precise and one hundred per cent accurate. Jimmy Duclos never made mistakes – not, at least, of this nature.

The DC 8 was slowing down now and I could already see the crocodile disembarkation tube angling out from the side of the main building ready to line up with the plane’s exit when it came to a halt. I unfastened my seatbelt, rose, glanced at Maggie and Belinda without expression or recognition and headed for the exit while the plane was still moving, a manoeuvre frowned upon by the airline authorities and certainly, in this case, by other passengers in the plane whose expressions clearly indicated that they were in the presence of a big-headed and churlish boor who couldn’t wait to take his turn along with the rest of longsuffering and queueing mankind. I ignored them. I had long ago resigned myself to the realization that popularity was never to be my lot.

The stewardess smiled at me, though, but this was no tribute to either my appearance or personality. People smile at other people when they are impressed or apprehensive or both. Whenever I travel aboard a plane except when on holiday – which is about once every five years – I hand the stewardess a small sealed envelope for transmission to the plane’s captain and the captain, usually as anxious as the next man to impress a pretty girl, generally divulges the contents to her, which is a lot of fol-de-rol about complete priority under all circumstances and invariably wholly unnecessary except that it ensures one of impeccable and immediate lunch, dinner and bar service. Wholly necessary, though, was another privilege that several of my colleagues and I enjoyed – diplomatic-type immunity to Customs search, which was just as well as my luggage usually contained a couple of efficient pistols, a small but cunningly-designed kit of burglar’s tools and some few other nefarious devices generally frowned upon by the immigration authorities of the more advanced countries. I never wore a gun aboard a plane, for apart from the fact that a sleeping man can inadvertently display a shoulder-holstered gun to a seat companion, thereby causing a whole lot of unnecessary consternation, only a madman would fire a gun within the pressurized cabin of a modern plane. Which accounts for the astonishing success of the sky-jackers: the results of implosion tend to be very permanent indeed.

The exit door opened and I stepped out into the corrugated disembarkation tube. Two or three airport employees politely stood to one side while I passed by and headed for the far end of the tube which debouched on to the terminal floor and the two contra-moving platforms which brought passengers to and from the immigration area.

There was a man standing at the end of the outward-bound moving platform with his back to it. He was of middle height, lean and a great deal less than prepossessing. He had dark hair, a deeply-trenched swarthy face, black cold eyes and a thin slit where his mouth should have been: not exactly the kind of character I would have encouraged to come calling on my daughter. But he was respectably enough dressed in a black suit and black overcoat and – although this was no criterion of respectability – was carrying a large and obviously brand-new airline bag.

But non-existent suitors for non-existent daughters were no concern of mine. I’d moved far enough now to look up the outward-bound moving platform, the one that led to the terminal floor where I stood. There were four people on the platform and the first of them, a tall, thin, grey-suited man with a hairline moustache and all the outward indications of a successful accountant, I recognized at once. Jimmy Duclos. My first thought was that he must have considered his information to be of a vital and urgent nature indeed to come this length to meet me. My second thought was that he must have forged a police pass to get this far into the terminal and that made sense for he was a master forger. My third thought was that it would be courteous and friendly to give him a wave and a smile and so I did. He waved and smiled back.

The smile lasted for all of a second, then jelled almost instantly into an expression of pure shock. It was then I observed, almost sub-consciously, that the direction of his line of sight had shifted fractionally.

I turned round quickly. The swarthy man in the dark suit and coat no longer had his back to the travelator. He had come through 189° and was facing it now, his airline bag no longer dangling from his hand but held curiously high under his arm.

Still not knowing what was wrong, I reacted instinctively and jumped at the man in the black coat. At least, I started to jump. But it had taken me a whole long second to react and the man immediately – and I mean immediately – proceeded to demonstrate to both his and my total conviction that a second was what he regarded as being ample time to carry out any violent manoeuvre he wished. He’d been prepared, I hadn’t, and he proved to be very violent indeed. I’d hardly started to move when he swung round in a viciously convulsive quarter-circle and struck me in the solar plexus with the edge of his airline bag.

Airline bags are usually soft and squashy. This one wasn’t. I’ve never been struck by a pile-driver nor have any desire to be, but I can make a fair guess now as to what the feeling is likely to be. The physical effect was about the same. I collapsed to the floor as if some giant hand had swept my feet from beneath me, and lay there motionless. I was quite conscious. I could see, I could hear, I could to some extent appreciate what was going on around me. But I couldn’t even writhe, which was all I felt like doing at the moment. I’d heard of numbing mental shocks: this was the first time I’d ever experienced a totally numbing physical shock.

Everything appeared to happen in the most ridiculous slow motion. Duclos looked almost wildly around him but there was no way he could get off that travelator. To move backwards was impossible, for three men were crowded close behind him, three men who were apparently quite oblivious of what was going on – it wasn’t until later, much later, that I realized that they must be accomplices of the man in the dark suit, put there to ensure that Duclos had no option other than to go forward with that moving platform and to his death. In retrospect, it was the most diabolically cold-blooded execution I’d heard of in a lifetime of listening to stories about people who had not met their end in the way their Maker had intended.

I could move my eyes, so I moved them. I looked at the airline bag and at one end, from under the flap, there protruded the colander-holed cylinder of a silencer. This was the pile-driver that had brought about my momentary paralysis – I hoped it was momentary – and from the force with which he had struck me I wondered he hadn’t bent it into a U-shape. I looked up at the man who was holding the gun, his right hand concealed under the flap of the bag. There was neither pleasure nor anticipation in that swarthy face, just the calm certainty of a professional who knew how good he was at his job. Somewhere a disembodied voice announced the arrival of flight KL 132 from London – the plane we had arrived on. I thought vaguely and inconsequentially that I would never forget that flight number, but then it would have been the same no matter what flight I’d used for Duclos had been condemned to die before he could ever see me.

I looked at Jimmy Duclos and he had the face of a man condemned to die. His expression was desperate but it was a calm and controlled desperation as he reached deep inside the hampering folds of his coat. The three men behind him dropped to the moving platform and again it was not until much later that the significance of this came upon me. Duclos’s gun came clear of his coat and as it did there was a muted thudding noise and a hole appeared half-way down the left lapel of his coat. He jerked convulsively, then pitched forward and fell on his face: the travelator carried him on to the terminal area and his dead body rolled against mine.

I won’t ever be certain whether my total inaction in the few seconds prior to Duclos’s death was due to a genuine physical paralysis or whether I had been held in thrall by the inevitability of the way in which he died. It is not a thought that will haunt me for I had no gun and there was nothing I could have done. I’m just slightly curious, for there is no question that the touch of his dead body had an immediately revivifying effect upon me.

There was no miraculous recovery. Waves of nausea engulfed me and now that the initial shock of the blow was wearing off my stomach really started to hurt. My forehead ached, and far from dully, from where I must have struck my head on the floor as I had fallen. But a fair degree of muscular control had returned and I rose cautiously to my feet, cautiously because, due to the nausea and dizziness, I was quite prepared to make another involuntary return to the floor at any moment. The entire terminal area was swaying around in the most alarming fashion and I found that I couldn’t see very well and concluded that the blow to my head must have damaged my eyesight, which was very odd as it had appeared to work quite effectively while I was lying on the floor. Then I realized that my eyelids were gumming together and an exploratory hand revealed the reason for this: blood, what briefly but wrongly appeared to me to be a lot of blood, was seeping down from a gash just on the hairline of the forehead. Welcome to Amsterdam, I thought, and pulled out a handkerchief: two dabs and my vision was twenty-twenty again.

From beginning to end the whole thing could have taken no more than ten seconds but already there was a crowd of anxious people milling around as always happens in cases like this: sudden death, violent death, is to man what the opened honey-pot is to bees – the immediate realization of the existence of either calls them forth in spectacular numbers from areas which, seconds previously, appeared to be devoid of all life.

I ignored them, as I ignored Duclos. There was nothing I could do for him now nor he for me, for a search of his clothes would have revealed nothing: like all good agents Duclos never committed anything of value to paper or tape but just filed it away in a highly-trained memory.

The dark and deadly man with the deadly gun would have made good his escape by this time: it was purely the routine and now ingrained instinct of checking even the uncheckable that made me glance towards the immigration area to confirm that he had indeed disappeared.

The dark man had not yet made good his escape. He was about two-thirds of the way along towards the immigration area, ambling unconcernedly along the in-bound moving platform, casually swinging his airline bag, and seemingly unaware of the commotion behind him. For a moment I stared at him, not comprehending, but only for a moment: this was the way the professional made good his escape. The professional pickpocket at Ascot who has just relieved the grey-top-hatted gentleman by his side of his wallet doesn’t plunge away madly through the crowd to the accompaniment of cries of ‘Stop thief’ and the certainty of rapid apprehension: he is more likely to ask his victim his tip for the next race. A casual unconcern, a total normality, that was how the honours graduates in crime did it. And so it was with the dark man. As far as he was concerned I was the only witness to his action, for it was now that I belatedly realized for the first time the part the other three men had played in Duclos’s death — they were still in the cluster of people round the dead man but there was nothing I or anybody else could ever prove against them. And, as far as the dark man knew, he’d left me in a state in which I’d be unable to provide him with any trouble for some considerable time to come.

I went after him.

My pursuit didn’t even begin to verge on the spectacular. I was weak, giddy and my midriff ached so wickedly that I found it impossible to straighten up properly, so that the combination of my weaving staggering run along that moving platform with my forward inclination of about thirty degrees must have made me look like nothing as much as a nonagenarian with lumbago in pursuit of God knows what.

I was half-way along the travelator, with the dark man almost at its end, when instinct or the sound of my running feet made him whirl round with the same catlike speed he’d shown in crippling me seconds before. It was immediately clear that he had no difficulty in distinguishing me from any nonagenarians he might have known, for his left hand immediately jerked up his airline bag while the right slid under the flap. I could see that what had happened to Duclos was going to happen to me — the travelator would discharge me or what was left of me to the floor at the end of its track: an ignominious way to die.

I briefly wondered what folly had prompted me, an unarmed man, to come in pursuit of a proven killer with a silenced pistol and was on the point of throwing myself flat on the platform when I saw the silencer waver and the dark man’s unwinking gaze switch slightly to the left. Ignoring the probability of being shot in the back of the head, I swung round to follow his line of sight.

The group of people surrounding Duclos had temporarily abandoned their interest in him and transferred it to us: in view of what they must have regarded as my unhinged performance on the travelator it would have been odd if they hadn’t. From the brief glance I had of their faces, their expressions ranged from astonishment to bafflement: there were no traces of understanding. Not in that particular knot of people. But there was understanding in plenty and a chilling purposefulness in the faces of the three men who had followed Duclos to his death: they were now walking briskly up the in-bound travelator behind me, no doubt bent on following me to my death.

I heard a muffled exclamation behind me and turned again. The travelator had reached the end of its track, obviously catching the dark man off guard, for he was now staggering to retain his balance. As I would have expected of him by then he regained it very quickly, turned his back on me and began to run: killing a man in front of a dozen witnesses was a different matter entirely from killing a man in front of one unsupported witness, although I felt obscurely certain that he would have done so had he deemed it essential and the hell with the witnesses. I left the wondering why to later. I started to run again, this time with a deal more purpose, more like a lively septuagenarian.

The dark man, steadily outdistancing me, ran headlong through the immigration hall to the obvious confusion and consternation of the immigration officials, for people are not supposed to rush through immigration halls, they are supposed to stop, show their passports and give a brief account of themselves, which is what immigration halls are for. By the time it came to my turn to run the gamut, the dark man’s hurried departure combined with my weaving staggering run and blood-streaked face had clearly alerted them to the fact that there was something amiss, for two of the immigration officials tried to detain me but I brushed by them – ‘brushed’ was not the word they used in their later complaints – and passed through the exit door the dark man had just used.

At least, I tried to pass through it, but the damned door was blocked by a person trying to enter. A girl, that was all I’d the time or the inclination to register, just any girl. I dodged to the right and she dodged to the left, I dodged to my left, she dodged to her right. Check. You can see the same performance take place practically any minute on any city pavement when two overpolite people, each bent on giving the right of way to the other, side-step with such maladroit effectiveness that they succeed only in blocking each other’s way: given the right circumstances where two really super-sensitive souls encounter each other the whole embarrassing fandango can continue almost indefinitely.

I’m as quick an admirer of a well-executed pas de deux as the next man but I was in no mood to be detained indefinitely and after another bout of abortive side-stepping I shouted ‘Get out of my damned way’ and ensured that she did so by catching her by the shoulder and shoving her violently to one side. I thought I heard a bump and exclamation of pain, but I ignored it: I’d come back and apologize later.

I was back sooner than I expected. The girl had cost me not more than a few seconds, but those few seconds had been more than enough for the dark man. When I reached the concourse, the inevitably crowded concourse, there was no sign whatsoever of him, it would have been difficult to identify a Red Indian chief in full regalia among those hundreds of apparently aimlessly milling people. And it would be pointless to alert the airport security police, by the time I’d established my bona fides he’d be half-way to Amsterdam: even had I been able to get immediate action, their chances of apprehending the dark man would have been remote: highly skilled professionals were at work here, and such men always had the options on their escape routes wide open. I retraced my steps, this time at a leaden trudge, which was by now all I could muster. My head ached viciously but compared to the condition of my stomach I felt it would have been wrong to complain about my head. I felt awful and a glimpse of my pale and blood-smeared face in a mirror did nothing to make me feel any better.

I returned to the scene of my ballet performance where two large uniformed men, with holstered pistols, seized me purposefully by the arms.

‘You’ve got the wrong man,’ I said wearily, ‘so kindly take your damned hands off me and give me room to breathe.’ They hesitated, looked at each other, released me and moved away: they moved away nearly all of two inches. I looked at the girl who was being talked to gently by someone who must have been a very important airport official for he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I looked at the girl again because my eyes ached as well as my head and it was easier looking at her than at the man by her side.

She was dressed in a dark dress and dark coat with the white roll of a polo-necked jumper showing at the throat. She would have been about in her mid-twenties, and her dark hair, brown eyes, almost Grecian features and the olive blush to her complexion made it clear she was no native of those parts. Put her alongside Maggie and Belinda and you’d have to spend not only the best years of your life but also most of the declining ones to find a trio like them, although, admittedly, this girl was hardly looking at her best at that moment: her face was ashen and she was dabbing with a large white handkerchief, probably borrowed from the man at her side, at the blood oozing from an already swelling bruise on her left temple.

‘Good God!’ I said. I sounded contrite and I felt it for no more than the next man am I given to the wanton damaging of works of art. ‘Did I do that?’

‘Of course not.’ Her voice was low and husky but maybe that was only since I’d knocked her down. ‘I cut myself shaving this morning.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I was chasing a man who’s just killed someone and you got in my way. I’m afraid he escaped.’

‘My name is Schroeder. I work here.’ The man by the girl’s side, a tough and shrewd-looking character in perhaps his mid-fifties, apparently suffered from the odd self-depreciation which unaccountably afflicts so many men who have reached positions of considerable responsibility. ‘We have been informed of the killing. Regrettable, most regrettable. That this should happen in Schiphol Airport!’

‘Your fair reputation,’ I agreed. ‘I hope the dead man is feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself.’

‘Such talk doesn’t help,’ Schroeder said sharply. ‘Did you know the dead man?’

‘How the hell should I? I’ve just stepped off the plane. Ask the stewardess, ask the captain, ask a dozen people who were aboard the plane. KL 132 from London, arrival time 1555.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Good God! Only six minutes ago.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’ Schroeder not only looked shrewd, he was shrewd.

‘I wouldn’t know him even if I saw him now.’

‘Mm. Has it ever occurred to you, Mr – ah—’

‘Sherman.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Mr Sherman, that normal members of the public don’t set off in pursuit of an armed killer?’

‘Maybe I’m sub-normal.’

‘Or perhaps you carry a gun, too?’

I unbuttoned my jacket and held the sides wide.

‘Did you – by any chance – recognize the killer?’

‘No.’ But I’d never forget him, though. I turned to the girl. ‘May I ask you a question, Miss—’

‘Miss Lemay,’ Schroeder said shortly.

‘Did you recognize the killer? You must have had a good look at him. Running men invariably attract attention.’

‘Why should I know him?’

I didn’t try to be shrewd as Schroeder had been. I said: ‘Would you like to have a look at the dead man? Maybe might recognize him?’

She shuddered and shook her head.

Still not being clever, I said: ‘Meeting someone?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your standing at the immigration exit.’

She shook her head again. If a beautiful girl can look ghastly, then she looked ghastly.

‘Then why be here? To see the sights? I should have thought the immigration hall in Schiphol was the most unsightly place in Amsterdam.’

‘That’ll do.’ Schroeder was brusque. ‘Your questions are without point and the young lady is clearly distressed.’ He gave me a hard look to remind me that I was responsible for her distress. ‘Interrogation is for police officers.’

‘I am a police officer.’ I handed over my passport and warrant card and as I did Maggie and Belinda emerged from the exit. They glanced in my direction, broke step and stared at me with a mixture of concern and consternation as well they might considering the way I felt and undoubtedly looked, but I just scowled at them, as a selfconscious and injured man will scowl at anyone, who stares at him, so they hurriedly put their faces straight again and moved on their way. I returned my attention to Schroeder, who was now regarding me with a quite different expression on his face.

‘Major Paul Sherman, London Bureau of Interpol. This makes a considerable difference, I must say. It also explains why you behaved like a policeman and interrogate like a policeman. But I shall have to check your credentials, of course.’

‘Check whatever you like with whoever you like,’ I said, assuming that Mr Schroeder’s English grammar wouldn’t be up to picking faults in my syntax. ‘I suggest you start with Colonel Van de Graaf at the Central HQ.’

‘You know the Colonel?’

‘It’s just a name I picked out of my head. You’ll find me in the bar.’ I made to move off, then checked as the two big policemen made to follow me. I looked at Schroeder. ‘I’ve no intention of buying drinks for them.’

‘It’s all right,’ Schroeder said to the two men. ‘Major Sherman will not run away.’

‘Not as long as you have my passport and warrant card,’ I agreed. I looked at the girl. ‘I am sorry, Miss Lemay. This must have been a great shock to you and it’s all my fault. Will you come and have a drink with me? You look as if you need one.’

She dabbed her cheek some more and looked at me in a manner that demolished all thoughts of instant friendship.

‘I wouldn’t even cross the road with you,’ she said tonelessly. The way she said it indicated that she would willingly have gone half-way across a busy street with me and then abandoned me there. If I had been a blind man.

‘Welcome to Amsterdam,’ I said drearily and trudged off in the direction of the nearest bar.

TWO

I don’t normally stay at five-star hotels for the excellent reason that I can’t afford to, but when I’m abroad I have a practically unlimited expense account about which questions are seldom asked and never answered, and as those foreign trips tend to be exhausting affairs I see no reason to deny myself a few moments of peace and relaxation in the most comfortable and luxurious hotels possible.

The Hotel Rembrandt was undoubtedly one such. It was rather a magnificent if somewhat ornate edifice perched on a corner of one of the innermost ring canals of the old city: its splendidly carved balconies actually overhung the canal itself so that any careless sleepwalker could at least be reassured that he wouldn’t break his neck if he toppled over the edge of his balcony – not, that is, unless he had the misfortune to land on top of one of the glass-sided canal touring boats which passed by at very frequent intervals: a superb eye-level view of those same boats could be had from the ground-floor restaurant which claimed, with some justification, to be the best in Holland.

My yellow Mercedes cab drew up at the front door and while I was waiting for the doorman to pay the cab and get my bag my attention was caught by the sound of ‘The Skaters’ Waltz’ being played in the most excrutiatingly off-key, tinny and toneless fashion I’d ever heard. The sound emanated from a very large, high, ornately painted and obviously very ancient mechanical barrel-organ parked across the road in a choice position to obstruct the maximum amount of traffic in that narrow street. Beneath the canopy of the barrel-organ, a canopy which appeared to have been assembled from the remnants of an unknown number of faded beach umbrellas, a row of puppets, beautifully made and, to my uncritical eye, exquisitely gowned in a variety of Dutch traditional costumes, jiggled up and down on the ends of rubber-covered springs: the motive power for the jiggling appeared to derive purely from the vibration inherent in the operation of this museum piece itself.

The owner, or operator, of this torture machine was a very old and very stooped man with a few straggling grey locks plastered to his head. He looked old enough to have built the organ himself when he was in his prime, but not, obviously, when he was in his prime as a musician. He held in his hand a long stick to which was attached a round tin can which he rattled continuously and was as continuously ignored by the passers-by he solicited, so I thought of my elastic expense account, crossed the street and dropped a couple of coins in his box. I can’t very well say that he flashed me an acknowledging smile but he did give me a toothless grin and, as token of gratitude, changed into high gear and started in on the unfortunate Merry Widow. I retreated in haste, followed the porter and my bag up the vestibule steps, turned on the top step and saw that the ancient was giving me a very old-fashioned look indeed: not to be outdone in courtesy I gave him the same look right back and passed inside the hotel.

The assistant manager behind the reception desk was tall, dark, thin-moustached, impeccably tail-coated and his broad smile held all the warmth and geniality of that of a hungry crocodile, the kind of smile you knew would vanish instantly the moment your back was half-turned to him but which would be immediately in position, and more genuinely than ever, no matter how quickly you turned to face him again.

‘Welcome to Amsterdam, Mr Sherman,’ he said. ‘We hope you will enjoy your stay.’

There didn’t seem any ready reply to this piece of fatuous optimism so I just kept silent and concentrated on filling in the registration card. He took it from me as if I were handing him the Cullinan diamond and beckoned to a bell-boy, who came trotting up with my case, leaning over sideways at an angle of about twenty degrees.

‘Boy! Room 616 for Mr Sherman.’

I reached across and took the case from the hand of the far from reluctant ‘boy’. He could have been – barely – the younger brother of the organ-grinder outside.

‘Thank you.’ I gave the bell-boy a coin. ‘But I think I can manage.’

‘But that case looks very heavy, Mr Sherman.’ The assistant manager’s protesting solicitude was even more sincere than his welcoming warmth. The case was, in fact, very heavy, all those guns and ammunition and metal tools for opening up a variety of things did tot up to a noticeable poundage, but I didn’t want any clever character with clever ideas and even cleverer keys opening up and inspecting the contents of my bag when I wasn’t around. Once inside an hotel suite there are quite a few places where small objects can be hidden with remote risk of discovery and the search is seldom assiduously pursued if the case is left securely locked in the first place …

I thanked the assistant manager for his concern, entered the near-by lift and pressed the sixth-floor button. Just as the lift moved off I glanced through one of the small circular peephole windows inset in the door. The assistant manager, his smile now under wraps, was talking earnestly into a telephone.

I got out at the sixth floor. Inset in a small alcove directly opposite the lift gates was a small table with a telephone on it, and, behind the table, a chair with a young man with gold-embroidered livery in it. He was an unprepossessing young man, with about him that vague air of indolence and insolence which is impossible to pin down and about which complaint only makes one feel slightly ridiculous: such youths are usually highly-specialized practitioners in the art of injured innocence.

‘Six-one-six?’ I asked.

He crooked a predictably languid thumb. ‘Second door along.’ No ‘sir’, no attempt to get to his feet. I passed up the temptation to clobber him with his own table and instead promised myself the tiny, if exquisite, pleasure of dealing with him before I left the hotel.

I asked: ‘You the floor-waiter?’

He said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and got to his feet. I felt a twinge of disappointment.

‘Get me some coffee.’

I’d no complaints with 616. It wasn’t a room, but a rather sumptuous suite. It consisted of a hall, a tiny but serviceable kitchen, a sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom. Both sitting-room and bedroom had doors leading on to the same balcony. I made my way out there.

With the exception of an excruciating, enormous and neon-lit monstrosity of a sky-high advertisement for an otherwise perfectly innocuous cigarette, the blaze of coloured lights coming up over the darkening streets and skline of Amsterdam belonged to something out of a fairy tale, but my employers did not pay me – and give me that splendid expense allowance – just for the privilege of mooning over any city skyline, no matter how beautiful. The world I lived in was as remote from the world of fairy tales as the most far-flung galaxy on the observable rim of the universe. I turned my attention to more immediate matters.

I looked down towards the source of the far from muted traffic roar that filled all the air around. The broad highway directly beneath me – and about seventy feet beneath me – appeared to be inextricably jammed with clanging tramcars, hooting vehicles and hundreds upon hundreds of motor-scooters and bicycles, all of whose drivers appeared to be bent on instant suicide. It appeared inconceivable that any of those two-wheeled gladiators could reasonably expect any insurance policy covering a life expectancy of more than five minutes, but they appeared to regard their imminent demise with an insouciant bravado which never fails to astonish the newcomer to Amsterdam. As an afterthought, I hoped that if anyone was going to fall or be pushed from the balcony it wasn’t going to be me.

I looked up. Mine was obviously – as I had specified the top storey of the hotel. Above the brick wall separating my balcony from that of the suite next door, there was some sort of stonecarved baroque griffin supported on a stone pier. Above that again – perhaps thirty inches above – ran the concrete coaming of the roof. I went inside.

I took from the inside of the case all the things I’d have found acutely embarrassing to be discovered by other hands. I fitted on a felt-upholstered underarm pistol which hardly shows at all if you patronize the right tailor, which I did, and tucked a spare magazine in a back trouser pocket. I’d never had to fire more than one shot from that gun, far less have to fall back on the spare magazine, but you never know, things were getting worse all the time. I then unrolled the canvas-wrapped array of burglarious instruments this belt again, and with the help of an understanding tailor again, is invisible when worn round the waist – and from this sophisticated plethora extracted a humble but essential screwdriver. With this I removed the back of the small portable fridge in the kitchen – it’s surprising how much empty space there is behind even a small fridge – and there cached all I thought it advisable to cache. Then I opened the door to the corridor. The floorwaiter was still at his post.

‘Where’s my coffee?’ I asked. It wasn’t exactly an angry shout but it came pretty close to it.

This time I had him on his feet first time out.

‘It come by dumb-waiter. Then I bring.’

‘You better bring fast.’ I shut the door. Some people never learn the virtues of simplicity, the dangers of over-elaboration. His phoney attempts at laboured English were as unimpressive as they were pointless.

I took a bunch of rather oddly shaped keys from my pocket and tried them, in succession, on the other door. The third fitted – I’d have been astonished if none had. I pocketed the keys, went to the bathroom and had just turned the shower up to maximum when the outer doorbell rang, followed by the sound of the door opening. I turned off the shower, called to the floor-waiter to put the coffee on the table and turned the shower on again. I hoped that the combination of the coffee and the shower might persuade whoever required to be persuaded that here was a respectable guest unhurriedly preparing for the leisurely evening that lay ahead but I wouldn’t have bet pennies on it. Still, one can but try.

I heard the outer door close but left the shower running in case the waiter was leaning his ear against the door – he had the look about him of a man who would spend much of his time leaning against doors or peering through keyholes. I went to the front door and stooped. He wasn’t peering through this particular keyhole. I opened the door fractionally, taking my hand away, but no one fell into the hallway, which meant that either no one had any reservations about me or that someone had so many that he wasn’t going to run any risks of being found out: a great help either way. I closed and locked the door, pocketed the bulky hotel key, poured the coffee down the kitchen sink, turned off the shower and left via the balcony door: I had to leave it wide open, held back in position by a heavy chair: for obvious reasons, few hotel balcony doors have a handle on the outside.

I glanced briefly down to the street, across at the windows of the building opposite, then leaned over the concrete balustrade and peered to left and right to check if the occupants of the adjoining suites were peering in my direction. They weren’t. I climbed on to the balustrade, reached for the ornamental griffin so grotesquely carved that it presented a number of excellent handholds, then reached for the concrete coaming of the roof and hauled myself up top. I don’t say I liked doing it but I didn’t see what else I could do.

The flat grass-grown roof was, as far as could be seen, deserted. I rose and crossed to the other side, skirting TV aerials, ventilation outlets and those curious miniature green-houses which in Amsterdam serve as skylights, reached the other side and peered cautiously down. Below was a very narrow and very dark alley, for the moment, at least, devoid of life. A few yards to my left I located the fire-escape and descended to the second floor. The escape door was locked, as nearly all such doors are from the inside, and the lock itself was of the double-action type, but no match for the sophisticated load of ironmongery I carried about with me.

The corridor was deserted. I descended to the ground floor by the main stairs because it is difficult to make a cautious exit from a lift which opens on to the middle of the reception area. I needn’t have bothered. There was no sign of the assistant manager, the bell-boy or the doorman and, moreover, the hall was crowded with a new batch of plane arrivals besieging the reception desk. I joined the crowd at the desk, politely tapped a couple of shoulders, reached an arm through, deposited my room key on the desk, walked unhurriedly to the bar, passed as unhurriedly through it and went out by the side entrance.

Heavy rain had fallen during the afternoon and the streets were still wet, but there was no need to wear the coat I had with me so I carried it slung over my arm and strolled along hatless, looking this way and that, stopping and starting again as the mood took me, letting the wind blow me where it listeth, every inch, I hoped, the tourist sallying forth for the first time to savour the sights and sounds of night-time Amsterdam.

It was while I was ambling along the Herengracht, dutifully admiring the façades of the houses of the merchant princes of the seventeenth century, that I first became sure of this odd tingling feeling in the back of the neck. No amount of training or experience will ever develop this feeling. Maybe it has something to do with ESP. Maybe not. Either you’re born with it or you aren’t. I’d been born with it.

I was being followed.

The Amsterdamers, so remarkably hospitable in every other way, are strangely neglectful when it comes to providing benches for their weary visitors – or their weary citizens, if it comes to that – along the banks of their canals. If you want to peer out soulfully and restfully over the darkly gleaming waters of their night-time canals the best thing to do is to lean against a tree, so I leaned against a convenient tree and lit a cigarette.

I stood there for several minutes, communing, so I hoped it would seem, with myself, lifting the cigarette occasionally, but otherwise immobile. Nobody fired silenced pistols at me, nobody approached me with a sandbag preparatory to lowering me reverently into the canal. I’d given him every chance but he’d taken no advantage of it. And the dark man in Schiphol had had me in his sights but hadn’t pulled the trigger. Nobody wanted to do away with me. Correction. Nobody wanted to do away with me yet. It was a crumb of comfort, at least.

I straightened, stretched and yawned, glancing idly about me, a man awakening from a romantic reverie. He was there all right, not leaning as I was with my back to the tree but with his shoulder to it so that the tree stood between him and myself, but it was a very thin tree and I could clearly distinguish his front and rear elevations.

I moved on and turned right into the Leidestraat and dawdled along this doing some inconsequential window-shopping as I went. At one point I stepped into a shop doorway and gazed at some pictorial exhibits of so highly intrinsic an artistic nature that, back in England, they’d have had the shop-owner behind bars in nothing flat. Even more interestingly, the window formed a near-perfect mirror. He was about twenty yards away now, peering earnestly into the shuttered window of what might have been a fruit shop. He wore a grey suit and a grey sweater and that was all that could be said about him: a grey nondescript anonymity of a man.

At the next corner I turned right again, past the flower market on the banks of the Singel canal. Half-way along I stopped at a stall, inspected the contents, and bought a carnation: thirty yards away the grey man was similarly inspecting a stall but either he was mean-souled or hadn’t an expense account like mine, for he bought nothing, just stood and looked.

I had thirty yards on him and when I turned right again into the Vijzelstraat I strode along very briskly indeed until I came to the entrance of an Indonesian restaurant. I turned in, closing the door behind me. The doorman, obviously a pensioner, greeted me civilly enough but made no attempt to rise from his stool.

I looked through the door and within just a few seconds the grey man came by. I could see now that he was more elderly than I had thought, easily in his sixties, and I must admit that for a man of his years he was putting up a remarkable turn of speed. He looked unhappy.

I put on my coat and mumbled an apology to the doorman. He smiled and said ‘Good night’ as civilly as he had said ‘Good evening’. They were probably full up anyway. I went outside, stood in the doorway, took a folded trilby from one pocket and a pair of wire spectacles from the other and put them both on. Sherman, I hoped, transformed.

He was about thirty yards distant now, proceeding with a curious scuttling action, stopping every now and again to peer into a doorway. I took life and limb in hand, launched myself across the street and arrived at the other side intact but unpopular. Keeping a little way behind, I paralleled the grey man for about another hundred yards when he stopped. He hesitated, then abruptly began to retrace his steps, almost running now, but this time stopping to go inside every place that was open to him. He went into the restaurant I’d so briefly visited and came out in ten seconds. He went in the side entrance of the Hotel Carlton and emerged from the front entrance, a detour that could not have made him very popular as the Hotel Carlton does not care overmuch for shabby old men with roll-neck sweaters using their foyer as a short cut. He went into another Indonesian restaurant at the end of the block and reappeared wearing the chastened expression of a man who has been thrown out. He dived into a telephone-box and when he emerged he looked more chastened than ever. From there he took up his stance on the central reservation tram stop on the Muntplein. I joined the queue.

The first tram along, a three-coach affair, bore the number ‘16’ and the destination board ‘Central Station’. The grey man boarded the first coach. I entered the second and moved to the front seat where I could keep a watchful eye on him, at the same time positioning myself so as to present as little as possible of myself to his view should he begin to interest himself in his fellow passengers. But I needn’t have worried; his lack of interest in his fellow passengers was absolute. From the continual shift and play of expression, all unhappy, on his face, and the clasping and unclasping of his hands, here clearly was a man with other and more important things on his mind, not least of which was the degree of sympathetic understanding he could expect from his employers.

The man in grey got off at the Dam. The Dam, the main square in Amsterdam, is full of historical landmarks such as the Royal Palace and the New Church which is so old that they have to keep shoring it up to prevent it from collapsing entirely, but neither received as much as a glance from the grey man that night. He scuttled down a side-street by the Hotel Krasnapolsky, turned left, in the direction of the docks, along the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, then turned right again and dipped into a maze of side-streets that obviously penetrated more and more deeply into the warehouse area of the town, one of the few areas not listed among the tourist attractions of Amsterdam. He was the easiest man to follow I’d ever come across. He looked neither to left nor right, far less behind him. I could have been riding an elephant ten paces behind him and he’d never have noticed.

I stopped at a corner and watched him make his way along a narrow, ill-lit and singularly unlovely street, lined exclusively by warehouses on both sides, tall five-storey buildings whose gabled roofs leaned out towards those on the other side of the street, lending an air of claustrophobic menace, of dark foreboding and brooding watchfulness which I didn’t much care for at all.

From the fact that the grey man had now broken into a shambling run I concluded that this excessive demonstration of zeal could only mean that he was near journey’s end, and I was right. Half-way along the street he ran up a set of handrailed steps, produced a key, opened a door and disappeared inside a warehouse. I followed at my leisure, but not too slowly, and glanced incuriously at the nameplate above the door of the warehouse: ‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’, the legend read. I’d never heard of the firm, but it was a name I’d be unlikely to forget. I passed on without breaking step.

It wasn’t much of a hotel room, I had to admit, but then it wasn’t much of a hotel to begin with. Just as the outside of the hotel was small and drab and paint-peeling and unprepossessing, so was the interior of the room. The few articles of furniture the room contained, which included a single bed and a sofa which obviously converted into a bed, had been sadly overtaken by the years since the long-dead days of their prime, if they’d ever had a prime. The carpet was threadbare, but nowhere near as threadbare as the curtains and bed coverlet: the tiny bathroom leading off the room had the floor space of a telephone-box. But the room was saved from complete disaster by a pair of redeeming features that would have lent a certain aura of desirability to even the bleakest of prison cells. Maggie and Belinda, perched side by side on the edge of the bed, looked at me without enthusiasm as I lowered myself wearily on to the couch.

‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’ I said. ‘All alone in wicked Amsterdam. Everything all right?’

‘No.’ There was a positive note in Belinda’s voice.

‘No?’ I let my surprise show.

She gestured to indicate room. ‘Well, I mean, look at it.’

I looked at it. ‘So?’

‘Would you live here?’

‘Well, frankly, no. But then five-star hotels are for managerial types like myself. For a couple of struggling typists these quarters are perfectly adequate. For a couple of young girls who are not the struggling typists they appear to be this provides about as complete a degree of anonymity of background as you can hope to achieve.’ I paused. ‘At least, I hope. I assume you’re both in the clear. Anyone on the plane you recognized?’

‘No.’ They spoke in unison with an identical shake of the head.

‘Anyone in Schiphol you recognized?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone take any particular interest in you at Schiphol?’

‘No.’

‘This room bugged?’

‘No.’

‘Been out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Been followed?’

‘No.’

‘Room searched in your absence?’

‘No.’

‘You look amused, Belinda,’ I said. She wasn’t exactly giggling but she was having a little difficulty with her facial muscles. ‘Do tell. I need cheering up.’

‘Well.’ She was suddenly thoughtful, perhaps recalling that she hardly knew me at all. ‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry about what, Belinda?’ An avuncular and encouraging tone which had the odd effect of making her wriggle uncomfortably.

‘Well, all those cloak-and-dagger precautions for a couple of girls like us. I don’t see the need—’

‘Do be quiet, Belinda!’ That was Maggie, quicksilver as ever in the old man’s defence though God knew why. I’d had my professional successes that, considered by themselves, totted up to a pretty impressive list but a list that, compared to the quota of failures, paled into a best-forgotten insignificance. ‘Major Sherman,’ Maggie went on severely, ‘always knows what he is doing.’

‘Major Sherman,’ I said frankly, ‘would give his back teeth to believe in that.’ I looked at them speculatively. ‘I’m not changing the subject, but how about some of the old commiseration for the wounded master?’

‘We know our place,’ Maggie said primly. She rose, peered at my forehead and sat down again. ‘Mind you, it does seem a very small piece of sticking plaster for what seemed such a lot of blood.’

‘The managerial classes bleed easily, something to do with sensitive skins, I understand. You heard what happened?’

Maggie nodded. ‘This dreadful shooting, we heard you tried—’

‘To intervene. Tried, as you so rightly said.’ I looked at Belinda. ‘You must have found it terribly impressive, first time out with your new boss and he gets clobbered the moment he sets loot in a foreign country.’

She glanced involuntarily at Maggie, blushed platinum blondes of the right sort blush very easily – and said defensively: ‘Well, he was too quick for you.’

‘He was all of that,’ I agreed. ‘He was also too quick for Jimmy Duclos.’

‘Jimmy Duclos?’ They had a gift for speaking in unison.

‘The dead man. One of our very best agents and a friend of mine for many years. He had urgent and, I assume, vital information that he wished to deliver to me in person in Schiphol. I was the only person in England who knew he would be there. But someone in this city knew. My rendezvous with Duclos was arranged through two completely unconnected channels, but someone not only knew I was coming but also knew the precise flight and time and so was conveniently on hand to get to Duclos before he could get to me. You will agree, Belinda, that I wasn’t changing the subject? You will agree that if they knew that much about me and one of my associates, they may be equally well informed about some other of my associates.’

They looked at each other for a few moments, then Belinda said in a low voice: ‘Duclos was one of us?’

‘Are you deaf?’ I said irritably.

‘And that we – Maggie and myself, that is—’

‘Precisely.’

They seemed to take the implied threats to their lives fairly calmly, but then they’d been trained to do a job and were here to do a job and not fall about in maidenly swoons. Maggie said: ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’

I nodded.

‘And I’m sorry if I was silly,’ Belinda said. She meant it too, all contrition, but it wouldn’t last. She wasn’t the type. She looked at me, extraordinary green eyes under dark eyebrows and said slowly: ‘They’re on to you, aren’t they?’

‘That’s my girl,’ I said approvingly. ‘Worrying about her boss. On to me? Well, if they’re not they have half the staff at the Hotel Rembrandt keeping tabs on the wrong man. Even the side entrances are watched: I was tailed when I left tonight.’

‘He didn’t follow you far.’ Maggie’s loyalty could be positively embarrassing.

‘He was incompetent and obvious. So are the others there. People operating on the fringes of junky-land frequently are. On the other hand they may be deliberately trying to provoke a reaction. If that’s their intention, they’re going to be wildly successful.’

‘Provocation?’ Maggie sounded sad and resigned. Maggie knew me.

‘Endless. Walk, run, or stumble into everything. With both eyes tightly shut.’

‘This doesn’t seem a very clever or scientific way of investigation to me,’ Belinda said doubtfully. Her contrition was waning fast.

‘Jimmy Duclos was clever. The cleverest we had. And scientific. He’s in the city mortuary.’

Belinda looked at me oddly. ‘You will put your neck under the block?’

‘On the block, dear,’ Maggie said absently. ‘And don’t go on telling your new boss what he can and can’t do.’ But her heart wasn’t in her words for the worry was in her eyes.

‘It’s suicide,’ Belinda persisted.

‘So? Crossing the streets in Amsterdam is suicide – or looks like it. Tens of thousands of people do it every day.’ I didn’t tell them that I had reason to believe that my early demise did not head the list of the ungodly priorities, not because I wished to improve my heroic image, but because it would only lead to the making of more explanations which I did not at the moment wish to make.

‘You didn’t bring us here for nothing,’ Maggie said.

‘That’s so. But any toe-tramping is my job. You keep out of sight. Tonight, you’re free. Also tomorrow, except that I want Belinda to take a walk with me tomorrow evening. After that, if you’re both good girls, I’ll take you to a naughty nightclub.’

‘I come all the way from Paris to go to a naughty night-club?’ Belinda was back at being amused again. ‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you some things about nightclubs you don’t know. I’ll tell you why we’re here. In fact,’ I said expansively, ‘I’ll tell you everything.’ By ‘everything’ I meant everything I thought they needed to know, not everything there was to tell: the differences were considerable. Belinda looked at me with anticipation. Maggie with a wearily affectionate scepticism, but then Maggie knew me. ‘But first, some Scotch.’

‘We have no Scotch, Major.’ Maggie had a very puritanical side to her at times.

‘Not even au fait with the basic principles of intelligence. You must learn to read the right books.’ I nodded to Belinda. ‘The phone. Get some. Even the managerial classes must relax occasionally.’

Belinda stood up, smoothing down her dark dress and looking at me with a sort of puzzled disfavour. She said slowly: ‘When you spoke about your friend in the mortuary I watched and you showed nothing. He’s still there and now you are – what is the word – flippant. Relaxing, you say. How can you do this?’

‘Practice. And a siphon of soda.’

THREE

It was classical night that night at the Hotel Rembrandt with the barrel-organ giving forth a rendition of an excerpt from Beethoven’s Fifth that would have had the old composer down on his knees giving eternal thanks for his almost total deafness. Even at fifty yards, the distance from which I was prudently observing through the now gently drizzling rain, the effect was appalling: it was an extraordinary tribute to the tolerance of the people of Amsterdam, city of music-lovers and home of the world-famous Concertgebouw, that they didn’t lure the elderly operator into a convenient tavern and, in his absence, trundle his organ into the nearest canal. The ancient was still rattling his can at the end of his stick, a purely reflex action for there was no one about that night, not even the doorman, who had either been driven inside by the rain or was a music-lover.

I turned down the side-street by the bar entrance. There was no figure lurking about adjacent doorways or in the entrance to the bar itself, nor had I expected to find any. I made my way round to the alley and the fire-escape, climbed up to the roof, crossed it and located the stretch of coaming that directly overhung my own balcony.

I peered over the edge. I could see nothing, but I could smell something. Cigarette smoke, but not emanating from a cigarette made by one of the more reputable tobacco companies, who don’t include reefers among their marketable products. I leaned further out to almost the point of imbalance and then I could see things, not much, but enough: two pointed toe-caps and, for a moment, the arcing, glowing tip of a cigarette, obviously on the downswing of an arm.

I withdrew in caution and with silence, rose, re-crossed to the fire-escape, descended to the sixth-floor, let myself through the fire-escape door, locked it again, walked quietly along to the door of Room 616 and listened. Nothing. I opened the door quietly with the skeleton I’d tried earlier and went inside, closing the door as quickly as I could: otherwise indetectable draughts can eddy cigarette smoke in a way to attract the attention of the alert smoker. Not that junkies are renowned for their alertness.

This one was no exception. Predictably enough, it was the floor-waiter. He was sitting comfortably in an armchair, feet propped up on the balcony sill, smoking a cigarette in his left hand: his right lay loosely on his knee and cradled a gun.

Normally, it is very difficult to approach anyone, no matter how soundlessly, from behind without some form of sixth sense giving them warning of your approach: but many drugs have a depressive influence on this instinct and what the floorwaiter was smoking was one of them.

I was behind him with my gun at his right ear and he still didn’t know I was there. I touched him on the right shoulder. He swung round with a convulsive jerk of his body and cried out in pain as his movement gouged the barrel of my gun into his right eye. He lifted both hands to his momentarily injured eye and I took the gun from him without resistance, pocketed it, reached for his shoulder and jerked hard. The waiter catapulted over backwards, completing a somersault, and landing very heavily on his back and the back of his head. For maybe ten seconds he lay there, quite dazed, then propped himself up on one arm. He was making a curious hissing sound, his bloodless lips had vanished to reveal tobacco-stained teeth set in a vulpine snarl and his eyes were dark with hate. I didn’t see much chance of our having a friendly get-together.

‘We do play rough, don’t we?’ he whispered. Junkies are great patronizers of the violent cinema and their dialogue is faultless.

‘Rough?’ I was surprised. ‘Oh, dear me, no. Later we play rough. If you don’t talk.’ Maybe I went to the same cinema as he did. I picked up the cigarette that lay smouldering on the carpet, sniffed at it in disgust and squashed it out in an ashtray. The waiter rose unsteadily, still shaken and unsteady on his feet, and I didn’t believe any of it. When he spoke again, the snarl had gone from his face and voice. He had decided to play it cool, the calm before the storm, an old and worn-out script, maybe we should both start attending the opera instead.

‘What would you like to talk about?’ he asked.

‘About what you’re doing in my room for a start. And who sent you here.’

He smiled wearily. ‘The law has already tried to make me tell things. I know the law. You can’t make me talk. I’ve got my rights. The law says so.’

‘The law stops right outside my front door here. This side of that door we’re both beyond the law. You know that. In one of the great civilized cities of the world you and I are living in our own little jungle. But there’s a law there too. Kill or be killed.’

Maybe it was my own fault for putting ideas in his head. He dived hard and low to get under my gun but not low enough for his chin to get under my knee. It hurt my knee quite badly and by that token should have laid him out, but he was tough, grabbed at the only leg I had left in contact with the ground and brought us both down. My gun went spinning and we rolled about on the floor for a bit, belabouring each other enthusiastically. He was a strong boy, too, as strong as he was tough, but he laboured under two disadvantages: a strict training on marijuana had blunted the honed edge of his physical fitness, and though he had a highly developed instinct for dirty fighting he’d never really been trained to it. By and by we were on our feet again with my left hand pushing his right wrist somewhere up between his shoulder-blades.

I pushed his wrist higher and he screamed as if in agony, which he might well have been as his shoulder was making a peculiar cracking noise, but I couldn’t be sure so I pushed a bit higher and removed all doubt, then thrust him out on to the balcony in front of me and forced him over the balustrade until his feet were clear of the ground and he was hanging on to the balustrade with his free left hand as if his life depended on it, which indeed it did.

‘You an addict or a pusher?’ I enquired.

He mouthed an obscenity in Dutch, but I know Dutch, including all the words I shouldn’t. I put my right hand over his mouth for the sort of sound he was about to make could be heard even above the roar of the traffic, and I didn’t want to alarm the citizens of Amsterdam unnecessarily. I eased the pressure and removed my hand.

‘Well?’

‘A pusher.’ His voice was a sobbing croak. ‘I sell them.’

‘Who sent you?’

‘No! No! No!’

‘Your decision. When they pick what’s left of you from the pavement there they’ll think you’re just another cannabis smoker who got too high and took a trip into the wild blue yonder.’

‘That’s murder!’ He was still sobbing, but his voice was only a husky whisper now, maybe the view was making him dizzy. ‘You wouldn’t—’

‘Wouldn’t I? Your people killed a friend of mine this afternoon. Exterminating vermin can be a pleasure. Seventy feet’s a long drop and not a mark of violence. Except that every bone in your body will be broken. Seventy feet. Look!’

I heaved him a bit further over the balustrade so that he could have a better look and had to use both hands to haul him back again.

‘Talk?’

He made a hoarse sound in his throat, so I hauled him off the balustrade and pushed him inside to the centre of the room. I said, ‘Who sent you?’

I’ve said he was tough, but he was a great deal tougher than I had ever imagined. He should have been fear-stricken and in agony, and I have no doubt that he was both, but that didn’t stop him from whirling round convulsively to his right in a full circle and breaking free from my grip. The sheer unexpectedness of it had caught me off guard. He came at me again, a knife that had suddenly appeared in his left hand curving upwards in a wicked arc and aimed for a point just below the breastbone. Normally, he would probably have done a nice job of carving but the circumstances were abnormal: his timing and reactions were gone. I caught and clamped his knife wrist in both my hands, threw myself backwards, straightened a leg under him as I jerked his arm down and sent him catapulting over me. The thud of his landing shook the room and probably quite a few adjacent rooms at that.

I twisted and got to my feet in one motion but the need for haste was gone. He was on the floor on the far side of the room, his head resting on the balcony sill. I lifted him by his lapels and his head lolled back till it almost touched his shoulderblades. I lowered him to the floor again. I was sorry he was dead, because he’d probably had information that could have been invaluable to me, but that was the only reason I was sorry.

I went through his pockets, which held a good number of interesting articles but only two that were of interest to me: a case half full of handmade reefers and a couple of scraps of paper. One paper bore the typed letters and figures MOO 144, the other two numbers – 910020 and 2789. Neither meant a thing to me but on the reasonable assumption that the floor-waiter wouldn’t have been carrying them on his person unless they had some significance for him I put them away in a safe place that had been provided for me by my accommodating tailor, a small pocket that had been let into the inside of the right trouser-leg about six inches above the ankle.

I tidied up what few signs of struggle there had been, took the dead man’s gun, went out on the balcony, leaned out over the balustrade and spun the gun upwards and to the left. It cleared the coaming and landed soundlessly on the roof about twenty feet away. I went back inside, flushed the reefer end down the toilet, washed the ashtray and opened every door and window to let the sickly smell evaporate as soon as possible. Then I dragged the waiter across to the tiny hall and opened the door on to the passage.

The hallway was deserted. I listened intently, but could hear nothing, no sound of approaching footfalls. I crossed to the lift, pressed the button, waited for the lift to appear, opened the door a crack, inserted a matchbox between jamb and door so that the latter couldn’t close and complete the electrical circuit then hurried back to my suite. I dragged the waiter across to the lift, opened the door, dumped him without ceremony on the lift floor, withdrew the matchbox and let the door swing to. The lift remained where it was: obviously, no one was pressing the button of that particular lift at that particular moment.

I locked the outside door to my suite with the skeleton and made my way back to the fire-escape, by now an old and trusted friend. I reached street level unobserved and made my way round to the main entrance. The ancient at the barrel-organ was playing Verdi now and Verdi was losing by a mile. The operator had his back to me as I dropped a guilder into his tin can. He turned to thank me, his lips parted in a toothless smile, then he saw who it was and his jaw momentarily dropped open. He was at the very bottom of the heap and no one had bothered to inform him that Sherman was abroad. I gave him a kindly smile and passed into the foyer.

There were a couple of uniformed staff behind the desk, together with the manager, whose back was at the moment towards me. I said loudly: ‘Six-one-six, please.’

The manager turned round sharply, his eyebrows raised high but not high enough. Then he gave me his warmhearted crocodile smile.

‘Mr Sherman. I didn’t know you were out.’

‘Oh yes, indeed. Pre-dinner constitutional. Old English custom, you know.’

‘Of course, of course.’ He smiled at me archly as if there was something vaguely reprehensible about this old English custom, then allowed a slightly puzzled look to replace the smile. He was as phoney as they come. ‘I don’t remember seeing you go out.’

‘Well, now,’ I said reasonably, ‘you can’t be expected to attend to all of your guests all of the time, can you?’ I gave him his own phoney smile back again, took the key and walked towards the bank of lifts. I was less than half-way there when I was brought up short, as a piercing scream cut through the foyer and brought instant silence, which lasted only long enough for the woman who had screamed to draw a deep breath and start in again. The source of this racket was a middle-aged, flamboyantly dressed female, a caricature of the American tourist abroad, who was standing in front of a lift, her mouth opened in a rounded ‘O’, her eyes like saucers. Beside her a portly character in a seer-sucker suit was trying to calm her, but he didn’t look any too happy himself and gave the impression that he wouldn’t have minded doing a little screaming himself.

The assistant manager rushed past me and I followed more leisurely. By the time I reached the lift the assistant manager was on his knees, bent over the sprawled-out form of the dead waiter.

‘My goodness,’ I said. ‘Is he ill, do you think?’

‘Ill? Ill?’ The assistant manager glared at me. ‘Look at the way his neck is. The man’s dead.’

‘Good God, I do believe you’re right.’ I stooped and peered more closely at the waiter. ‘Haven’t I seen this man somewhere before?’

‘He was your floor-waiter,’ the assistant manager said, which is not an easy remark to make with your teeth clamped together.

‘I thought he looked familiar. In the midst of life—’ I shook my head sadly. ‘Where’s the restaurant?’

‘Where’s the – where’s the—’

‘Never mind,’ I said soothingly, ‘I can see you’re upset. I’ll find it myself.’

The restaurant of the Hotel Rembrandt may not be, as the owners claim, the best in Holland, but I wouldn’t care to take them to court on a charge of misrepresentation. From the caviare to the fresh out-of-season strawberries – I wondered idly whether to charge this in the expense account as entertainment or bribes – the food was superb. I thought briefly, but not guiltily, about Maggie and Belinda, but such things had to be. The red plush sofa on which I was sitting was the ultimate in dining comfort, so I leaned back in it, lifted my brandy glass and said, ‘Amsterdam!’

‘Amsterdam!’ said Colonel Van de Graaf. The Colonel, deputy head of the city’s police, had joined me, without invitation, only five minutes previously. He was sitting in a large chair which seemed too small for him. A very broad man of only medium height, he had iron-grey hair, a deeply-trenched, tanned face, the unmistakable cast of authority and an air about him of almost dismaying competence. He went on dryly: ‘I’m glad to see you enjoying yourself, Major Sherman, after such an eventful day.’

‘Gather ye rosebuds while you may, Colonel life is all too short. What events?’

‘We have been unable to discover very much about this man, James Duclos, who was shot and killed at the airport today.’ A patient man and not one to be easily drawn, was Colonel de Graaf. ‘We know only that he arrived from England three weeks ago, that he checked into the Hotel Schiller for one night and then disappeared. He seems, Major Sherman, to have been meeting your plane. Was this, one asks, just coincidence?’

‘He was meeting me.’ De Graaf was bound to find out sooner or later. ‘One of my men. I think he must have got hold of a forged police pass from somewhere – to get past immigration, I mean.’

‘You surprise me.’ He sighed heavily and didn’t seem in the least surprised. ‘My friend, it makes it very difficult for us if we don’t know those things. I should have been told about Duclos. As we have instructions from Interpol in Paris to give you every possible assistance, don’t you think it would be better if we can work together? We can help you – you can help us.’ He sipped some brandy. His grey eyes were very direct. ‘One would assume that this man of yours had information – and now we have lost it.’

‘Perhaps. Well, let’s start by you helping me. Can you see if you have a Miss Astrid Lemay on your files? Works in a night-club but she doesn’t sound Dutch and she doesn’t look Dutch so you may have something on her.’

‘The girl you knocked down at the airport? How do you know she works in a night-club.’

‘She told me,’ I said unblushingly.

He frowned. ‘The airport officials made no mention of any such remark to me.’

‘The airport officials are a bunch of old women.’

‘Ah!’ It could have meant anything. ‘This information I can obtain. Nothing more?’

‘Nothing more.’

‘One other little event we have not referred to.’

‘Tell me.’

‘The sixth-floor waiter – an unsavoury fellow about whom we know a little – was not one of your men?’

‘Colonel!’

‘I didn’t for a moment think he was. Did you know that he died of a broken neck?’

‘He must have had a very heavy fall,’ I said sympathetically.

De Graaf drained his brandy and stood up.

‘We are not acquainted with you, Major Sherman, but you have been too long in Interpol and gained too much of a European reputation for us not to be acquainted with your methods. May I remind you that what goes in Istanbul and Marseilles and Palermo – to name but a few places – does not go in Amsterdam?’

‘My word,’ I said. ‘You are well informed.’

‘Here, in Amsterdam, we are all subject to the law.’ He might not have heard me. ‘Myself included. You are no exception.’

‘Nor would I expect to be,’ I said virtuously. ‘Well then, co-operation. The purpose of my visit. When can I talk to you?’

‘My office, ten o’clock.’ He looked around the restaurant without enthusiasm. ‘Here is hardly the time and place.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘The Hotel Rembrandt,’ said de Graaf heavily, ‘is a listening-post of international renown.’

‘You astonish me,’ I said.

De Graaf left. I wondered why the hell he thought I’d chosen to stay in the Hotel Rembrandt.

Colonel de Graaf’s office wasn’t in the least like the Hotel Rembrandt. It was a large enough room, but bleak and bare and functional, furnished mainly with steel-grey filing cabinets, a steel-grey table and steel-grey seats which were as hard as steel. But at least the decor had the effect of making you concentrate on the matter on hand: there was nothing to distract the mind or eye. De Graaf and I, after ten minutes preliminary discussion, were concentrating, although I think it came more easily to de Graaf than it did to me. I had lain awake to a late hour the previous night and am never at my best at ten a.m. on a cold and blustery morning.

‘All drugs,’ de Graaf agreed. ‘Of course we’re concerned with all drugs – opium, cannabis, amphetamine, LSD, STP, cocaine, amyl acetate – you name it, Major Sherman, and we’re concerned in it. They all destroy or lead on to destruction. But in this instance we are confining ourselves to the really evil one – heroin. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’ The deep incisive voice came from the doorway. I turned round and looked at the man who stood there, a tall man in a well-cut dark business suit, cool penetrating grey eyes, a pleasant face that could stop being pleasant very quickly, very professional-looking. There was no mistaking his profession. Here was a cop and not one to be taken lightly either.

He closed the door and walked across to me with the light springy step of a man much younger than one in his middle forties, which he was at least. He put out his hand and said: ‘Van Gelder. I’ve heard a lot about you, Major Sherman.’

I thought this one over, briefly but carefully, decided to refrain from comment. I smiled and shook his hand.

‘Inspector van Gelder,’ de Graaf said. ‘Head of our narcotics bureau. He will be working with you, Sherman. He will offer you the best cooperation possible.’

‘I sincerely hope we can work well together.’ Van Gelder smiled and sat down. ‘Tell me, what progress your end? Do you think you can break the supply ring in England?’

‘I think we could. It’s a highly organized distributive pipeline, very highly integrated with almost no cut-offs – and it’s because of that that we have been able to identify dozens of their pushers and the half-dozen or so main distributors.’

‘You could break the ring but you won’t. You’re leaving it strictly alone?’

‘What else, Inspector? We break them up and the next distribution ring will be driven so far underground that we’ll never find it. As it is, we can pick them up when and if we want to. The thing we really want to find out is how the damned stuff gets in – and who’s supplying it.’

‘And you think – obviously, or you wouldn’t be here – that the supplies come from here? Or hereabouts?’

‘Not hereabouts. Here. And I don’t think. I know. Eighty per cent of those under surveillance – and I refer to the distributors and their intermediaries – have links with this country. To be precise, with Amsterdam – nearly all of them. They have relatives here, or they have friends. They have business contacts here or personally conduct business here or they come here on holiday. We’ve spent five years on building up this dossier.’

De Graaf smiled. ‘On this place called “here”.’

‘On Amsterdam, yes.’

Van Gelder asked: ‘There are copies of this dossier?’

‘One.’

‘With you?’

‘Yes.’

‘On you?’

‘In the only safe place.’ I tapped my head.

‘As safe a place as any,’ de Graaf approved, then added thoughtfully: ‘As long, of course, that you don’t meet up with people who might be inclined to treat you the way you treat them.’

‘I don’t understand, Colonel.’

‘I speak in riddles,’ de Graaf said affably. ‘All right, I agree. At the moment the finger points at the Netherlands. Not to put too fine a point on it, as you don’t put too fine a point on it, at Amsterdam. We, too, know our unfortunate reputation. We wish it was untrue. But it isn’t. We know the stuff comes in in bulk. We know it goes out again all broken up – but from where or how we have no idea.’

‘It’s your bailiwick,’ I said mildly.

‘It’s what?’

‘It’s your province. It’s in Amsterdam. You run the law in Amsterdam.’

‘Do you make many friends in the course of a year?’ van Gelder enquired politely.

‘I’m not in this business to make friends.’

‘You’re in this business to destroy people who destroy people,’ de Graaf said pacifically. ‘We know about you. We have a splendid dossier on you. Would you like to see it?’

‘Ancient history bores me.’

‘Predictably.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Look, Sherman, the best police forces in the world can come up against a concrete wall. That’s what we have done – not that I claim we’re the best. All we require is one lead – one single solitary lead … Perhaps you have some idea, some plan?’

‘I arrived only yesterday.’ I fished inside the inside of my lower right trouser-leg and gave the Colonel the two scraps of paper I’d found in the dead floorwaiter’s pockets. ‘Those figures. Those numbers. They mean anything to you?’

De Graaf gave them a cursory glance, held them up before a bright desk-lamp, laid them down on the desk. ‘No.’

‘Can you find out? If they have any meaning?’

‘I have a very able staff. By the way, where did you get these?’

‘A man gave them to me.’

‘You mean you got them from a man.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘There could be a very great difference,’ De Graaf leaned forward, face and voice very earnest. ‘Look, Major Sherman, we know about your technique of getting people off balance and keeping them there. We know about your propensity for stepping outside the law—’

‘Colonel de Graaf!’

‘A well-taken point. You’re probably never inside it to start with. We know about this deliberate policy admittedly as effective as it is suicidal – of endless provocation, waiting for something, for somebody to break. But please, Major Sherman, please do not try to provoke too many people in Amsterdam. We have too many canals.’

‘I won’t provoke anyone,’ I said. ‘I’ll be very careful.’

‘I’m sure you will.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘And now, I believe, van Gelder has a few things to show you.’

Van Gelder had. He drove me in his own black Opel from the police HQ in the Marnixstraat to the city mortuary and by the time I left there I was wishing he hadn’t.

The city mortuary lacked the old-world charm, the romance and nostalgic beauty of old Amsterdam. It was like the city mortuary in any big town, cold – very cold – and clinical and inhuman and repelling. The central block had down its centre two rows of white slabs of what appeared to be marble and almost certainly wasn’t, while the sides of the room were lined with very large metal doors. The principal attendant here, resplendent in an immaculately starched white coat, was a cheerful, rubicund, genial character who appeared to be in perpetual danger of breaking out into gales of laughter, a very odd characteristic indeed, one would have thought, to find in a mortuary attendant until one recalled that more than a handful of England’s hangmen in the past were reckoned to be the most rollicking tavern companions one could ever hope to have.

At a word from van Gelder, he led us to one of the big metal doors, opened it and pulled out a wheeled metal rack that ran smoothly on steel runners. A white-sheeted form lay on this rack.

‘The canal he was found in is called the Croquiskade,’ van Gelder said. He seemed quite unemotional about it. ‘Not what you might call the Park Lane of Amsterdam – it’s down by the docks. Hans Gerber. Nineteen. I won’t show you his face – he’s been too long in the water. The fire brigade found him when they were fishing out a car. He could have been there another year or two. Someone had twisted a few old lead pipes about his middle.’

He lifted a corner of the sheet to expose a flaccid emaciated arm. It looked for all the world as if someone had trodden all over it with spiked climbing boots. Curious purple lines joined many of those punctures and the whole arm was badly discoloured. Van Gelder covered it up without a word and turned away. The attendant wheeled the rack inside again, closed the door, led us to another door and repeated the performance of wheeling out another corpse, smiling hugely the while like a bankrupt English duke showing the public round his historic castle.

‘I won’t show you this one’s face either,’ van Gelder said. ‘It is not nice to look on a boy of twenty-three who has the face of a man of seventy.’ He turned to the attendant. ‘Where was this one found?’

‘The Oosterhook,’ the attendant beamed. ‘On a coal barge.’

Van Gelder nodded. ‘That’s right. With a bottle – an empty bottle – of gin beside him. The gin was all inside him. You know what a splendid combination gin and heroin is.’ He pulled back the sheet to reveal an arm similar to the one I’d just seen. ‘Suicide – or murder?’

‘It all depends.’

‘On?’

‘Whether he bought the gin himself. That would make it suicide – or accidental death. Someone could have put the full bottle in his hand. That would make it murder. We had a case just like it last month in the Port of London. We’ll never know.’

At a nod from van Gelder, the attendant led us happily to a slab in the middle of the room. This time van Gelder pulled back the sheet from the top. The girl was very young and very lovely and had golden hair.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ van Gelder asked. ‘Not a mark on her face. Julia Rosemeyer from East Germany. All we know of her, all we will ever know of her. Sixteen, the doctors guess.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Fell six stories to a concrete pavement.’

I thought briefly of the ex-floor-waiter and how much better he would have looked on this slab, then asked: ‘Pushed?’

‘Fell. Witnesses. They were all high. She’d been talking all night about flying to England. She had some obsession about meeting the Queen. Suddenly she scrambled on to the parapet of the balcony, said she was flying to see the Queen – and, well, she flew. Fortunately, there was no one passing beneath at the time. Like to see more?’

‘I’d like to have a drink at the nearest pub, if you don’t mind.’

‘No.’ He smiled but there wasn’t anything humorous about it. ‘Van Gelder’s fireside. It’s not far. I have my reasons.’

‘Your reasons?’

‘You’ll see.’

We said goodbye and thanks to the happily smiling attendant, who looked as if he would have liked to say, ‘Haste ye back’ but didn’t. The sky had darkened since early morning and big heavy scattered drops of rain were beginning to fall. To the east the horizon was livid and purple, more than vaguely threatening and foreboding. It was seldom that a sky reflected my mood as accurately as this.

Van Gelder’s fireside could have given points to most English pubs I knew: an oasis of bright cheerfulness compared to the sheeting rain outside, to the rippled waves of water running down the windows, it was warm and cosy and comfortable and homely, furnished in rather heavy Dutch furniture with over-stuffed armchairs, but I have a strong partiality for over-stuffed armchairs: they don’t mark you so much as the understuffed variety. There was a russet carpet on the floor and the walls were painted in different shades of warm pastel colours. The fire was all a fire ever should be and van Gelder, I was happy to observe, was thoughtfully studying a very well-stocked glass liquor cupboard.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you took me to that damned mortuary to make your point. I’m sure you made it. What was it?’

‘Points, not point. The first one was to convince you that we here are up against an even more vicious problem than you have at home. There’s another half-dozen drug addicts in the mortuary there and how many of them died a natural death is anyone’s guess. It’s not always as bad as this, those deaths seem to come in waves, but it still represents an intolerable loss of life and mainly young life at that: and for every one there, how many hundred hopeless addicts are there in the streets?’

‘Your point being that you have even more incentive than I to seek out and destroy those people – and that we are attacking a common enemy, a central source of supply?’

‘Every country has only one king.’

‘And the other point?’

‘To reinforce Colonel de Graaf’s warning. Those people are totally ruthless. Provoke them too much, get too close to them – well, there’s still a few slabs left in the mortuary.’

‘How about that drink?’ I said.

A telephone bell rang in the hallway outside. Van Gelder murmured an apology and went to answer it. Just as the door closed behind him a second door leading to the room opened and a girl entered. She was tall and slender and in her early twenties and was dressed in a dragon-emblazoned multi-hued housecoat that reached almost to her ankles. She was quite beautiful, with flaxen hair, an oval face and huge violet eyes that appeared to be at once humorous and perceptive, so striking in overall appearance that it was quite some time before I remembered what passed for my manners and struggled to my feet, no easy feat from the depths of that cavernous armchair.

‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Paul Sherman.’ It didn’t sound much but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Almost as if embarrassed, the girl momentarily sucked the tip of her thumb, then smiled to reveal perfect teeth.

‘I am Trudi. I do not speak good English.’ She didn’t either, but she’d the nicest voice for speaking bad English I’d come across in a long time. I advanced with my hand out, but she made no move to take it: instead she put her hand to her mouth and giggled shyly. I am not accustomed to have fully-grown girls giggle shyly at me and was more than a little relieved to hear the sound of the receiver being replaced and van Gelder’s voice as he entered from the hall.

‘Just a routine report on the airport business. Nothing to go on yet—’

Van Gelder saw the girl, broke off, smiled and advanced to put his arm round her shoulders.

‘I see you two have met each other.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘not quite—’ then broke off in turn as Trudi reached up and whispered in his ear, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. Van Gelder smiled and nodded and Trudi went quickly from the room. The puzzlement must have shown in my face, for van Gelder smiled again and it didn’t seem a very happy smile to me.

‘She’ll be right back, Major. She’s shy at first, with strangers. Just at first.’

As van Gelder had promised, Trudi was back almost immediately. She was carrying with her a very large puppet, so wonderfully made that at first glance it could have been mistaken for a real child. It was almost three feet in length with a white wimple hat covering flaxen curls of the same shade as Trudi’s own and was wearing an ankle-length billowy striped silk dress and a most beautifully embroidered bodice. Trudi clasped this puppet as tightly as if it had been a real child. Van Gelder again put his arm round her shoulders.

‘This is my daughter, Trudi. A friend of mine, Trudi. Major Sherman, from England.’

This time she advanced without any hesitation, put her hand out, made a small bobbing motion like the beginnings of a curtsy, and smiled.

‘How do you do, Major Sherman?’

Not to be outdone in courtesy I smiled and bowed slightly. ‘Miss van Gelder. My pleasure.’

‘My pleasure.’ She turned and looked enquiringly at van Gelder.

‘English is not one of Trudi’s strong points,’ van Gelder said apologetically. ‘Sit down, Major, sit down.’

He took a bottle of Scotch from the sideboard, poured drinks for myself and himself, handed me mine and sank into his chair with a sigh. Then he looked up at his daughter, who was gazing steadily at me in a way that made me feel more than vaguely uncomfortable.

‘Won’t you sit down, my dear?’

She turned to van Gelder, smiled brightly, nodded and handed the huge puppet to him. He accepted it so readily that he was obviously used to this sort of thing.

‘Yes, Papa,’ she said, then without warning but at the same time as unaffectedly as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she sat down on my knee, put an arm around my neck and smiled at me. I smiled right back, though, for just that instant, it was a Herculean effort.

Trudi regarded me solemnly and said: ‘I like you.’

‘And I like you too, Trudi.’ I squeezed her shoulder to show her how much I liked her. She smiled at me, put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. I looked at the top of the blonde head for a moment, then glanced in mild enquiry at van Gelder. He smiled, a smile full of sorrow.

‘If I do not wound you, Major Sherman, Trudi loves everyone.’

‘All girls of a certain age do.’

‘You are a man of quite extraordinary perception.’

I didn’t think it called for any great perception at all to make the remark I had just made, so I didn’t answer, just smiled and turned again to Trudi. I said, very gently: ‘Trudi?’

She said nothing. She just stirred and smiled again, a curiously contented smile that for some obscure reason made me feel more than a little of a fraud, closed her eyes even more tightly and snuggled close to me.

I tried again. “Trudi. I’m sure you must have beautiful eyes. Can I see them?’

She thought this over for a bit, smiled again, sat up, held herself at straight arm’s length with her hands on my shoulders, then opened her eyes very wide as a child would do on such a request.

The huge violet eyes were beautiful, no doubt about that. But they were something else also. They were glazed and vacant and did not seem to reflect the light: they sparkled, a sparkle that would have deceptively highlit any still photograph taken of her, for the sparkle was superficial only: behind lay a strange quality of opacity.

Still gently, I took her right hand from my shoulder and pushed the sleeve up as far as the elbow. If the rest of her were anything to go by it should have been a beautiful forearm but it wasn’t: it was shockingly mutilated by the punctures left by a countless number of hypodermic needles. Trudi, her lips trembling, looked at me in dismay as if fearful of reproach, snatched down the sleeve of her dress, flung her arms about me, buried her face in my neck and started to cry. She cried as if her heart was breaking. I patted her as soothingly as one can pat anyone who seems bent on choking you and looked over at van Gelder.

‘Now I know your reasons,’ I said. ‘For insisting I come here.’

‘I’m sorry. Now you know.’

‘You make a third point?’

‘I make a third point. God alone knows I wish I didn’t have to. But you will understand that in all fairness to my colleagues I must let them know these things.’

‘De Graaf knows?’

‘Every senior police officer in Amsterdam knows,’ van Gelder said simply. ‘Trudi!’

Trudi’s only reaction was to cling even more tightly. I was beginning to suffer from anoxia.

‘Trudi!’ Van Gelder was more insistent this time. ‘Your afternoon’s sleep. You know what the doctor says. Bed!’

‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘No bed.’

Van Gelder sighed and raised his voice: ‘Herta!’

Almost as if she had been waiting for her cue – which she probably had been, listening outside the door – a most outlandish creature entered the room. As far as health farms were concerned, she was the challenge to end all challenges. She was a huge and enormously fat waddling woman – to describe her method of locomotion as walking would have been a gross inaccuracy – dressed in exactly the same type of clothes as Trudi’s puppet was wearing. Long blonde pigtails tied with bright ribbon hung down her massive front. Her face was old – she had to be at least over seventy – deeply trenched and had the texture and appearance of cracked brown leather. The contrast between the gaily hued clothes and the blonde pigtails on the one hand and the enormous old hag that wore them on the other, was bizarre, horrible, so grotesque as to be almost obscene, but the contrast appeared to evoke no such responses in either van Gelder or Trudi.

The old woman crossed the room – for all her bulk and waddling gait she made ground quite quickly – nodded a curt acknowledgment to me and, without saying a word, laid a kindly but firm hand on Trudi’s shoulder. Trudi looked up at once, her tears gone as quickly as they had come, smiled, nodded docilely, disengaged her arms from my neck and rose. She crossed to van Gelder’s chair, recovered her puppet, kissed him, crossed to where I was sitting, kissed me as unaffectedly as a child saying good night, and almost skipped from the room, the waddling Herta close behind. I exhaled a long sigh and just managed to refrain from mopping my brow.

‘You might have warned me,’ I complained. ‘About Trudi and Herta. Who is she anyway – Herta, I mean? A nurse?’

‘An ancient retainer, you’d say in English.’ Van Gelder took a large gulp of his whisky as if he needed it and I did the same for I needed it even more: after all he was used to this sort of thing. ‘My parents’ old housekeeper – from the island of Huyler in the Zuider Zee. As you may have noticed, they are a little – what do you say – conservative in their dress. She’s been with us for only a few months – but, well, you can see how she is with Trudi.’

‘And Trudi?’

‘Trudi is eight years old. She has been eight years old for the past fifteen years, she always will be eight years old. Not my daughter, as you may have guessed – but I could never love a daughter more. My brother’s adopted daughter. He and I worked in Curaçao until last year – I was in narcotics, he was the security officer for a Dutch oil company. His wife died some years ago – and then he and my wife were killed in a car crash last year. Someone had to take Trudi. I did. I didn’t want her – and now I couldn’t live without her. She will never grow up, Mr Sherman.’

And all the time his subordinates probably thought that he was just their lucky superior with no other thought or concern in his mind than to put as many malefactors behind bars as possible. Sympathetic comment and commiseration were never my forte, so I said: ‘This addiction – when did it start?’

‘God knows. Years ago. Years before my brother found out.’

‘Some of those hypo punctures are recent.’

‘She’s on withdrawal treatment. Too many injections, you would say?’

‘I would say.’

‘Herta watches her like a hawk. Every morning she takes her to the Vondel Park – she loves to feed the birds. In the afternoon Trudi sleeps. But sometimes in the evening Herta gets tired – and I am often from home in the evening.’

‘You’ve had her watched?’

‘A score of times. I don’t know how it’s done.’

‘They get at her to get at you?’

‘To bring pressure to bear on me. What else? She has no money to pay for fixes. They are fools and do not realize that I must see her die slowly before my eyes before I can compromise myself. So they keep trying.’

‘You could have a twenty-four-hour guard placed on her.’

‘And then that would make it official. Such an official request is brought to the automatic notice of the health authorities. And then?’

‘An institution,’ I nodded. ‘For the mentally retarded. And she’d never come out again.’

‘She’d never come out again.’

I didn’t know what to say except goodbye, so I did that and left.

FOUR

I spent the afternoon in my hotel room going over the carefully documented and cross-indexed files and case histories which Colonel de Graaf’s office had given me. They covered every known case of drug-taking and drug prosecutions, successful or not, in Amsterdam in the past two years. They made very interesting reading if, that is, your interest lay in death and degradation and suicide and broken homes and ruined careers. But there was nothing in it for me. I spent a useless hour trying to rearrange and reassemble the various cross-indexes but no significant pattern even began to emerge. I gave up. Highly trained minds like de Graaf’s and van Gelder’s would have spent many, many hours in the same fruitless pastime, and if they had failed to establish any form of pattern there was no hope for me.

In the early evening I went down to the foyer and handed in my key. The smile of the assistant manager behind the desk lacked a little of the sabre-toothed quality of old, it was deferential, even apologetic: he’d obviously been told to try a new tack with me.

‘Good evening, good evening, Mr Sherman.’ An affable ingratiation that I cared for even less than his normal approach. ‘I’m afraid I must have sounded a little abrupt last evening, but you see—’

‘Don’t mention it, my dear fellow, don’t mention it.’ I wasn’t going to let any old hotel manager outdo me in affability. ‘It was perfectly understandable in the circumstances. Must have come as a very great shock to you.’ I glanced through the foyer doors at the falling rain. ‘The guide-books didn’t mention this.’

He smiled widely as if he hadn’t heard the same inane remark a thousand times before, then said cunningly: ‘Hardly the night for your English constitutional, Mr Sherman.’

‘No chance anyway. It’s Zaandam for me tonight.’

‘Zaandam.’ He made a face. ‘My commiserations, Mr Sherman.’ He evidently knew a great deal more about Zaandam than I did, which was hardly surprising as I’d just picked the name from a map.

I went outside. Rain or no rain, the barrel-organ was still grinding and screeching away at the top of its form. It was Puccini who was on the air tonight and he was taking a terrible beating. I crossed to the organ and stood there for some time, not so much listening to the music, for there was none to speak of, but looking without seeming to look at a handful of emaciated and ill-dressed teen-agers – a rare sight indeed in Amsterdam where they don’t go in for emaciation very much – who leaned their elbows on the barrel-organ and seemed lost in rapture. My thoughts were interrupted by a gravelly voice behind me.

‘Mynheer likes music?’ I turned. The ancient was smiling at me in a tentative sort of fashion.

‘I love music.’

‘So do I, so do I.’ I peered at him closely, for in the nature of things his time must be close and there could be no forgiveness for that remark. I smiled at him, one music-lover to the other.

‘I shall think of you tonight. I’m going to the opera.’

‘Mynheer is kind.’

I dropped two coins in the tin can that had mysteriously appeared under my nose.

‘Mynheer is too kind.’

Having the suspicions I did about him, I thought the same myself, but I smiled charitably and, recrossing the street, nodded to the doorman: with the masonic legerdemain known only to doormen, he materialized a taxi out of nowhere. I told him ‘Schiphol Airport’ and got inside.

We moved off. We did not move off alone. At the first traffic lights, twenty yards from the hotel, I glanced through the tinted rear window. A yellow-striped Mercedes taxi was two cars behind us, a taxi I recognized as one that habitually frequented the rank not far from the hotel. But it could have been coincidence. The lights turned to green and we made our way into the Vijzelstraat. So did the yellow-striped Mercedes.

I tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Stop here, please. I want to buy some cigarettes.’ I got out. The Mercedes was right behind us, stopped. No one got in, no one got out. I went into an hotel foyer, bought some cigarettes I didn’t need and came out again. The Mercedes was still there. We moved off and after a few moments I said to the driver: ‘Turn right along the Prinsengracht.’

He protested. ‘That is not the way to Schiphol.’

‘It’s the way I want to go. Turn right.’

He did and so did the Mercedes.

‘Stop.’ He stopped. The Mercedes stopped. Coincidence was coincidence but this was ridiculous. I got out, walked back to the Mercedes and opened the door. The driver was a small man with a shiny blue suit and a disreputable air. ‘Good evening. Are you for hire?’

‘No.’ He looked me up and down, trying out first the air of easy insouciance, then that of insolent indifference, but he wasn’t right for either part.

‘Then why are you stopped?’

‘Any law against a man stopping for a smoke?’

‘None. Only you’re not smoking. You know the Police HQ in the Marnixstraat?’ The sudden lack of enthusiasm in his expression made it quite clear that he knew it all too well. ‘I suggest you go there and ask for either Colonel de Graaf or Inspector van Gelder and tell them that you have a complaint to lodge about Paul Sherman, Room 616, Hotel Excelsior.’

‘Complaint?’ he said warily. ‘What complaint?’

‘Tell them that he took the car keys from your ignition and threw them into the canal.’ I took the car keys from the ignition and threw them into the canal and a very satisfactory plop they made too as they vanished for ever into the depths of the Prinsengracht. ‘Don’t follow me around,’ I said and closed the door in a manner befitting the end of our brief interview, but Mercedes are well made cars and the door didn’t fall off.

Back in my own taxi I waited till we were back on the main road again, then stopped the taxi. ‘I’ve decided to walk,’ I said and paid what was owing.

‘What! To Schiphol?’

I gave him the sort of tolerant smile one might expect to receive from a long-distance walker whose prowess has been called in question, waited till he had moved from sight, hopped on a 16 tram and got off at the Dam. Belinda, dressed in a dark coat and with a dark scarf over her blonde hair, was waiting for me in the tram shelter. She looked damp and cold.

‘You’re late,’ she said accusingly.

‘Never criticize your boss, even by implication. The managerial classes always have things to attend to.’

We crossed the square, retracing the steps the grey man and I had taken the previous night, down the alley by the Krasnapolsky and along the tree-lined Oudezijds Voorburgwal, an area that is one of the cultural highlights of Amsterdam, but Belinda seemed in no mood for culture. A mercurial girl, she seemed withdrawn and remote that night, and the silence was hardly companionable. Belinda had something on her mind and if I were beginning to become any judge of Belinda my guess was that she would let me know about it sooner rather than later. I was right.

She said abruptly: ‘We don’t really exist for you, do we?’

‘Who doesn’t exist?’

‘Me, Maggie, all the people who work for you. We’re just ciphers.’

‘Well, you know how it is,’ I said pacifically. ‘Ship’s captain never mingles socially with the crew.’

‘That’s what I mean. That’s what I say — we don’t really exist for you. We’re just puppets to be manipulated so that the master puppeteer can achieve certain ends. Any other puppets would do as well.’

I said mildly: ‘We’re here to do very nasty and unpleasant jobs and achieving that end is all that matters. Personalities don’t enter into it. You forget that I am your boss, Belinda. I really don’t think that you should be talking to me like that.’

‘I’ll talk to you any way I like.’ Not only mercurial but a girl of spirit; Maggie would never have dreamed of talking to me like that. She considered her last remark, then said more quietly: ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken like that. But do you have to treat us in this – this detached and remote fashion and never make contact with us? We are people, you know – but not for you. You’d pass me in the street tomorrow and not recognize me. You don’t notice us.’

‘Oh, I notice all right. Take yourself, for instance.’ I carefully refrained from looking at her as we walked along although I knew she was observing me pretty closely. ‘New girl to Narcotics. Limited experience Deuxième Bureau, Paris. Dressed in navy coat, navy scarf spotted with little white edelweiss, knitted white knee-stockings, sensible flat-heeled navy shoes, buckled, five feet four, a figure, to quote a famous American writer, to make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window, a quite beautiful face, platinum blonde hair that looks like spun silk when the sun shines through it, black eyebrows, green eyes, perceptive and, best of all, beginning to worry about her boss, especially his lack of humanity. Oh, I forgot. Cracked finger-nail polish, third finger, left hand, and a devastating smile enhanced – if, that is to say, that’s possible – by a slightly crooked left upper eye-tooth.’

‘Wow!’ She was at a momentary loss for words, which I was beginning to guess was not at all in character. She glanced at the finger-nail in question and the polish was cracked, then turned to me with a smile that was just as devastating as I’d said it was. ‘Maybe you do at that.’

‘Do at what?’

‘Care about us.’

‘Of course I care.’ She was beginning to confuse me with Sir Galahad and that could be a bad thing. ‘All my operatives, Category Grade I, young, female, good-looking, are like daughters to me.’

There was a long pause, then she murmured something, very sotto voce indeed, but it sounded to me very like ‘Yes, Papa.’

‘What was that?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

We turned into the street which housed the premises of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler. This, my second visit to the place, more than confirmed the impression I had formed the previous night. It seemed darker than ever, bleaker and more menacing, cobbles and pavement more cracked than before, the gutters more choked with litter. Even the gabled houses leaned closer towards one another: this time tomorrow and they would be touching.

Belinda stopped abruptly and clutched my right arm. I glanced at her. She was staring upwards, her eyes wide, and I followed her gaze where the gabled warehouses marched away into the diminishing distance, their hoisting beams clearly silhouetted against the night sky. I knew she felt there was evil abroad: I felt it myself.

This must be the place,’ she whispered. ‘I know it must be.’

‘This is the place,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘What’s wrong?’

She snatched her hand away as if I had just said something wounding, but I regained it, tucked her arm under mine and held on firmly to her hand. She made no attempt to remove it.

‘It’s – it’s so creepy. What are those horrible things sticking out under the gables?’

‘Hoisting beams. In the old days the houses here were rated on the width of the frontage, so the thrifty Dutch made their houses uncommonly narrow. Unfortunately, this made their staircases even narrower still. So, the hoisting beams for the bulky stuff – grand pianos up, coffins down, that sort of thing.’

‘Stop it!’ She lifted her shoulders and shuddered involuntarily. ‘This is a horrible place. Those beams – they’re like the gallows they hang people from. This is a place where people come to die.’

‘Nonsense, my dear girl,’ I said heartily. I could feel stiletto-tipped fingers of ice play Chopin’s Death March up and down my spine and was suddenly filled with longing for that dear old nostalgic music from the barrel-organ outside the Rembrandt: I was probably as glad to hang on to Belinda’s hand as she was to mine. ‘You mustn’t fall prey to those Gallic imaginings of yours.’

‘I’m not imagining things,’ she said sombrely, then shivered again. ‘Did we have to come to this awful place?’ She was shivering violently now, violently and continuously, and though it was cold it wasn’t as cold as all that.

‘Can you remember the way we came?’ I asked. She nodded, puzzled and I went on: ‘You make your way back to the hotel and I’ll join you later.’

‘Back to the hotel?’ She was still puzzled.

‘I’ll be all right. Now, off you go.’

She tore her hand free from mine and before I could realize what was happening she was gripping both my lapels in her hands and giving me a look that was clearly designed to shrivel me on the spot. If she was shaking now it was with anger: I’d never realized that so beautiful a girl could look so furious. ‘Mercurial’ was no word for Belinda, just a pale and innocuous substitute for the one I really wanted. I looked down at the fists gripping my lapels. The knuckles were white. She was actually trying to shake me.

‘Don’t ever say anything like that to me again.’ She was furious, no doubt about it.

There was a brief but spirited conflict between my ingrained instinct for discipline and the desire to put my arms round her: discipline won, but it was a close run thing. I said humbly: ‘I’ll never say anything like that to you again.’

‘All right.’ She released my sadly crushed lapels and grabbed my hand instead. ‘Well, come on, then.’ Pride would never let me say that she dragged me along but to the detached onlooker it must have seemed uncommonly like it.

Fifty paces further along and I stopped. ‘Here we are.’

Belinda read the nameplate: ‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler.’

‘Topping the bill at this week’s Palladium.’ I climbed the steps and got to work on the lock. ‘Watch the street.’

‘And then what do I do?’

‘Watch my back.’

A determined wolf-cub with a bent hairpin would have found that lock no deterrent. We went inside and I closed the door behind us. The torch I had was small but powerful: it didn’t have much to show us on that first floor. It was piled almost ceiling high with empty wooden boxes, paper, cardboard, bales of straw and baling and binding machinery. A packing station, nothing else.

We climbed up the narrow winding wooden steps to the next floor. Half-way up I glanced round and saw that Belinda, too, was glancing apprehensively behind her, her torch swivelling and darting in a dozen different directions.

The next floor was given over entirely to vast quantities of Dutch pewter, windmills, dogs, pipes and a dozen other articles associated solely with the tourist souvenir trade. There were tens of thousands of those articles, on shelves along the walls or on parallel racks across the warehouse, and although I couldn’t possibly examine them all, they all looked perfectly innocuous to me. What didn’t look quite so innocuous, however, was a fifteen by twenty room that projected from one corner of the warehouse, or, more precisely, the door that led into that room, although obviously it wasn’t going to lead into that room tonight. I called Belinda over and shone my torch on the door. She stared at it, then stared at me and I could see the puzzlement in the reflected wash of light.

‘A time-lock,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone want a time-lock on a simple office door?’

‘It’s not a simple office door,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s made of steel. By the same token you can bet those simple wooden walls are lined with steel and that the simple old rustic window overlooking the street is covered with close-meshed bars set in concrete. In a diamond warehouse, yes, you could understand it. But here? Why, they’ve nothing to hide here.’

‘It looks as if we may have come to the right place,’ Belinda said.

‘Did you ever doubt me?’

‘No, sir.’ Very demure. ‘What is this place, anyway?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it – a wholesaler in the souvenir trade. The factories or the cottage industries or whatever send their goods in bulk for storage here and the warehouse supplies the shops on demand. Simple, isn’t it? Harmless, isn’t it?’

‘But not very hygienic.’

‘How’s that again?’

‘It smells horrible.’

‘Cannabis does to some people.’

‘Cannabis!’

‘You and your sheltered life. Come on.’

I led the way up to the third floor, waited for Belinda to join me. ‘Still guarding the master’s back?’ I enquired.

‘Still guarding the master’s back,’ she said mechanically. True to form, the fire-breathing Belinda of a few minutes ago had disappeared. I didn’t blame her. There was something inexplicably sinister and malevolent about this old building. The sickly smell of cannabis was even stronger now but there appeared to be nothing on this floor even remotely connected with it. Three sides of the entire floor, together with a number of transverse racks, were given over entirely to pendulum clocks, all of them, fortunately, stopped. They covered the whole gamut of shape, design and size and varied in quality from small, cheap, garishly-painted models for the tourist trade, nearly all made from yellow pine, to very large, beautifully made and exquisitely designed metal clocks that were obviously very old and expensive, or modern replicas of those, which couldn’t have been all that much cheaper.

The fourth side of the floor came, to say the least, as a considerable surprise. It was given up to, of all things, row upon row of Bibles. I wondered briefly what on earth Bibles were doing in a souvenir warehouse, but only briefly: there were too many things I didn’t understand.

I picked one of them up and examined it. Embossed in gold on the lower half of the leather cover were the words The Gabriel Bible … I opened it and on the fly-leaf was the printed inscription: ‘With the Compliments of the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society.’

‘There’s one of those in our hotel room,’ Belinda said.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised if there’s one of those in most of the hotel rooms in the city. Question is, what are they doing here? Why not in a publisher’s or stationer’s warehouse, where you would expect to find them? Queer, isn’t it?’

She shivered. ‘Everything here is queer.’

I clapped her on the back. ‘You’ve got a cold coming on, that’s what it is. I’ve warned you before about these mini-skirts. Next floor.’

The next floor was given over entirely to the most astonishing collection of puppets imaginable. Altogether, their number must have run into thousands. They ranged in size from tiny miniatures to models even bigger than the one Trudi had been carrying: all, without exception, were exquisitely modelled, all beautifully dressed in a variety of traditional Dutch costumes. The bigger puppets were either free-standing or supported by a metal stay: the smaller ones dangled by strings from overhead rails. The beam of my torch finally focused on a group of dolls all dressed in the same particular costume.

Belinda had forgotten about the importance of minding my back: she’d resumed her arm-clutching again.

‘It’s – it’s so eerie. They’re so alive, so watchful.’ She looked at the dolls spot-lit by the beam of my torch. ‘Something special about those?’

‘There’s no need to whisper. They may be looking at you but I assure you they can’t hear you. Those puppets there. Nothing special really, just that they come from the island of Huyler out in the Zuider Zee. Van Gelder’s housekeeper, a charming old beldam who’s lost her broomstick, dresses like that.’

‘Like that?’

‘It’s hard to imagine,’ I admitted. ‘And Trudi has a big puppet dressed in exactly the same way.’

‘The sick girl?’

‘The sick girl.’

‘There’s something terribly sick about this place.’ She let go of my arm and got back to the business of minding my back again. Seconds later I heard the sound of her sharply indrawn breath and turned round. She had her back to me, not more than four feet away, and as I watched she started to walk slowly and silently backwards, her eyes evidently lined up on something caught in the beam of her torch, her free hand reaching out gropingly behind her. I took it and she came close to me, still not turning her head.

She spoke in an urgent whisper.

‘There’s somebody there. Somebody watching.’

I glanced briefly along the beam of her torch but could see nothing, but then hers wasn’t a very powerful torch compared to the one I carried. I looked away, squeezed her hand to attract her attention, and when she turned round I looked questioningly at her.

‘There is someone there.’ Still the same insistent whisper, the green eyes wide. ‘I saw them. I saw them.’

‘Them?’

‘Eyes. I saw them!’

I never doubted her. Imaginative girl she might be, but she’d been trained and highly trained not to be imaginative in the matter of observation. I brought up my own torch, not as carefully as I might have done, for the beam struck her eyes in passing, momentarily blinding her and as she raised a reflex hand to her eyes I settled the beam on the area she just indicated. I couldn’t see any eyes, but what I did see was two adjacent puppets swinging so gently that their motion was almost imperceptible. Almost, but not quite – and there wasn’t a draught, a breath of air, stirring in that fourth floor of the warehouse.

I squeezed her hand again and smiled at her. ‘Now, Belinda—’

‘Don’t you “now Belinda” me!’ Whether this was meant to be a hiss or a whisper with a tremor in it I couldn’t be sure. ‘I saw them. Horrible staring eyes. I swear I saw them. I swear it.’

‘Yes, yes, of course, Belinda—’

She moved to face me, frustration in the intent eyes as if she suspected me of sounding as if I were trying to humour her, which I was. I said, ‘I believe you, Belinda. Of course I believe you.’ I hadn’t changed my tone.

‘Then why don’t you do something about it?’

‘Just what I’m going to do. I’m going to get the hell out of here.’ I made a last unhurried inspection with my torch, as if nothing had happened, then turned and took her arm in a protective fashion. ‘Nothing for us here and we’ve both been too long in here. A drink, I think, for what’s left of our nerves.’

She stared at me, her face reflecting a changing pattern of anger and frustration and incredulity and, I suspected, more than a little relief. But the anger was dominant now: most people become angry when they feel they are being disbelieved and humoured at the same time.

‘But I tell you—’

‘Ah ah!’ I touched my lips with my forefinger. ‘You don’t tell me anything. The boss, remember, always knows best …’

She was too young to go all puce and apoplectic, but the precipitating emotions were there all the same. She glared at me, apparently decided that there were no words to meet the situation, and started off down the stairs, outrage in every stiff line of her back. I followed and my back wasn’t quite normal either, it had a curious tingling feeling to it that didn’t go away until I had the front door to the warehouse safely locked behind me.

We walked quickly up the street, keeping about three feet apart: it was Belinda who maintained the distance, her attitude clearly proclaiming that the hand-holding and the arm-clutching were over for the night and more likely for keeps. I cleared my throat.

‘He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.’

She was so seething with anger that she didn’t get it.

‘Please don’t talk to me,’ she snapped so I didn’t, not, at least, till I came to the first tavern in the sailors’ quarter, an unsalubrious dive rejoicing in the name of ‘The Cat o’ Nine Tails’. The British Navy must have stopped by here once. I took Belinda’s arm and guided her inside. She wasn’t keen, but she didn’t fight about it.

It was a smoky airless drinking den and that was about all you could say about it. Several sailors, resentful of this intrusion by a couple of trippers of what they probably rightly regarded as their own personal property, scowled at me when I came in, but I was in a much better scowling mood than they were and after the first disparaging reception they left us strictly alone. I led Belinda to a small table, a genuine antique wooden table whose original surface hadn’t been touched by soap or water since time immemorial.

‘I’m having Scotch,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Scotch,’ she said huffily.

‘But you don’t drink Scotch.’

‘I do tonight.’

She was half right. She knocked back half of her glass of neat Scotch in a defiant swig and then started spluttering, coughing and choking so violently that I saw I could have been wrong about her developing symptoms of apoplexy. I patted her helpfully on the back.

‘Take your hand away,’ she wheezed.

I took my hand away.

‘I don’t think I can work with you any more, Major Sherman,’ she said after she’d got her larynx in working order again.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I can’t work with people who don’t trust me, who don’t believe me. You not only treat us like puppets, you treat us like children.’

‘I don’t regard you as a child,’ I said pacifically. I didn’t either.

‘“I believe you, Belinda,”’ she mimicked bitterly. ‘“Of course I believe you, Belinda”. You don’t believe Belinda at all.’

‘I do believe Belinda,’ I said. ‘I do believe I care for Belinda after all. That’s why I took Belinda out of there.’

She stared at me. ‘You believe – then why—’

‘There was someone there, hidden behind that rack of puppets. I saw two of the puppets sway slightly. Someone was behind the rack, watching, waiting to see, I’m certain, what, if anything, we found out. He’d no murderous intent or he’d have shot us in the back when we were going down the stairs. But if I’d reacted as you wanted me to, then I’d have been forced to go look for him and he’d have gunned me down from his place of concealment before I’d even set eyes on him. And then he’d have gunned you down, for he couldn’t have any witnesses, and you’re really far too young to die yet. Or maybe I could have played hide-and-seek with him and stood an even chance of getting him – if you weren’t there. But you were, you haven’t a gun, you’ve no experience at all in the nasty kind of games we play and you were as good as a hostage to him. So I took Belinda out of there. There now, wasn’t that a nice speech?’

‘I don’t know about the speech.’ Mercurial as ever, there were tears in her eyes. ‘I only know it’s the nicest thing anybody ever said about me.’

‘Fiddlesticks!’ I drained my Scotch, finished hers off for her and took her back to her hotel. We stood in the foyer entrance for a moment, sheltering from the now heavily falling rain and she said: ‘I’m sorry. I was such a fool. And I’m sorry for you too.’

‘For me?’

‘I can see now why you’d rather have puppets than people working for you. One doesn’t cry inside when a puppet dies.’

I said nothing. I was beginning to lose my grip on this girl, the old master-pupil relationship wasn’t quite what it used to be.

‘Another thing,’ she said. She spoke almost happily.

I braced myself.

‘I won’t ever be afraid of you any more.’

‘You were afraid? Of me?’

‘Yes, I was. Really. But it’s like the man said—’

‘What man?’

‘Shylock, wasn’t it. You know, cut me and I bleed—’

‘Oh, do be quiet!’

She kept quiet. She just gave me that devastating smile again, kissed me without any great haste, gave me some more of the same smile and went inside. I watched the glass swing-doors until they came to a rest. Much more of this, I thought gloomily, and discipline would be gone to hell and back again.

FIVE

I walked two or three hundred yards till I was well clear of the girls’ hotel, picked up a taxi and was driven back to the Rembrandt. I stood for a moment under the foyer canopy, looking at the barrel-organ across the road. The ancient was not only indefatigable but apparently also impermeable, rain meant nothing to him, nothing except an earthquake would have stopped him from giving his evening performance. Like the old trouper who feels that the show must go on, he perhaps felt he had a duty to his public, and a public he incredibly had, half a dozen youths whose threadbare clothes gave every indication of being completely sodden, a group of acolytes lost in the mystic contemplation of the death agonies of Strauss, whose turn it was to be stretched on the rack tonight. I went inside.

The assistant manager caught sight of me as I turned from hanging up my coat. His surprise appeared to be genuine.

‘Back so soon? From Zaandam?’

‘Fast taxi,’ I explained and passed through to the bar, where I ordered a jonge Genever and a Pils and drank both slowly while I considered the relationship between fast men with fast guns and pushers and sick girls and hidden eyes behind puppets and people and taxis who followed me everywhere I went and policemen being blackmailed and venal managers and door-keepers and tinny barrel-organs. It all added up to nothing. I wasn’t, I felt sure, being provocative enough and was coming to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing else for it but a visit to the warehouse again later that night – without, of course, ever letting Belinda know about it – when I happened to look up for the first time at the mirror in front of me. I wasn’t prompted by instinct or anything of the kind, it was just that my nostrils had been almost unconsciously titillated for some time past by a perfume that I’d just identified as sandalwood, and as I am rather partial to it, I just wanted to see who was wearing it. Sheer old-fashioned nosiness.

The girl was sitting at a table directly behind me, a drink on the table before her, a paper in her hand. I could have thought that I imagined that her eyes dropped to the paper as soon as I had glanced up to the mirror, but I wasn’t given to imagining things like that. She had been looking at me. She seemed young, was wearing a green coat and had a blonde mop of hair that, in the modern fashion, had every appearance of having been trimmed by a lunatic hedge-cutter. Amsterdam seemed to be full of blondes who were forced on my attention in one way or another.

I said ‘The same again’ to the bartender, placed the drinks on a table close to the bar, left them there and walked slowly towards the foyer, passed the girl like one deep lost in thought, not even looking at her, went through the front door and out into the street. Strauss had succumbed but not the ancient, who to demonstrate his catholicity of taste was now giving a ghoulish rendering of ‘The bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’. If he tried that lot on in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow both he and his barrel-organ would be but a faded memory inside fifteen minutes. The youthful acolytes had vanished, which could have meant that they were either very anti-Scottish or very pro-Scottish indeed. In point of fact their absence, as I was to discover later, meant something else entirely: the evidence was all there before me and I missed it and because I missed it, too many people were going to die.

The ancient saw me and registered his surprise.

‘Mynheer said that he—’

‘He was going to the opera. And so I did.’ I shook my head sadly. ‘Prima-donna reaching for a high E. Heart attack.’ I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘No panic. I’m only going as far as the phone-box there.’

I dialled the girls’ hotel. I got through to the desk immediately and then, after a long wait, to the girls’ room. Belinda sounded peevish.

‘Hullo. Who is it?’

‘Sherman. I want you over here at once.’

‘Now?’ Her voice was a wail. ‘But I’m in the middle of a bath.’

‘Regrettably, I can’t be in two places at once. You’re clean enough for the dirty work I have in hand. And Maggie.’

‘But Maggie’s asleep.’

‘Then you’d better wake her up, hadn’t you? Unless you want to carry her.’ Injured silence. ‘Be here at my hotel in ten minutes. Hang about outside, about twenty yards away.’

‘But it’s bucketing rain!’ She was still at the wailing.

‘Ladies of the street don’t mind how damp they get. Soon there’ll be a girl leaving here. Your height, your age, your figure, your hair—’

‘There must be ten thousand girls in Amsterdam who—’

‘Ah – But this one is beautiful. Not as beautiful as you are, of course, but beautiful. She’s also wearing a green coat – to go with her green umbrella – sandalwood perfume and, on her left temple, a fairly well camouflaged bruise that I gave her yesterday afternoon.’

‘A fairly well you didn’t tell us anything about assaulting girls.’

‘I can’t remember every irrelevant detail. Follow her. When she gets to her destination, one of you stay put, the other report back to me. No, you can’t come here, you know that. I’ll be at the Old Bell at the far corner of the Rembrandtplein.’

‘What will you be doing there?’

‘It’s a pub. What do you think I’ll be doing?’

The girl in the green coat was still sitting there at the same table when I returned. I went to the reception desk first, asked for and got some notepaper and took it across to the table where I’d left my drinks. The girl in green was no more than six feet away, at right angles, and so should have had an excellent view of what I was doing while herself remaining comparatively free from observation.

I took out my wallet, extracted my previous night’s dinner bill, smoothed it out on the table before me and started to make notes on a piece of paper. After a few moments I threw my pen down in disgust, screwed up the paper and flung it into a convenient waste-basket. I started on another sheet of paper and appeared to reach the same unsatisfactory conclusion. I did this several times more, then screwed my eyes shut and rested my head on my hands for almost five minutes, a man, it must have seemed, lost in the deepest concentration. The fact was, that I wasn’t in too much of a hurry. Ten minutes, I’d said to Belinda, but if she managed to get out of a bath, get dressed and be across here with Maggie in that time, I knew even less than I thought I did about women.

For a time I resumed the scribbling, the crumpling and the throwing away and by that time twenty minutes had elapsed. I finished the last of my drink, rose, said goodnight to the barman and went away. I went as far as the wine plush curtains that screened the bar from the foyer and waited, peering cautiously round the edge of the curtain. The girl in green rose to her feet, crossed to the bar, ordered herself another drink and then casually sat down in the chair I had just vacated, her back to me. She looked around, also casually, to make sure that she was unobserved, then just as casually reached down into the waste-basket and picked up the top sheet of crumpled paper. She smoothed it out on the table before her as I moved soundlessly up to her chair. I could see the side of her face now and I could see that it had gone very still. I could even read the message she had smoothed out on the table. It read: ONLY NOSY YOUNG GIRLS LOOK IN WASTEPAPER BASKETS.

‘All the other papers have the same secret message,’ I said. ‘Good evening, Miss Lemay.’

She twisted round and looked up at me. She’d camouflaged herself pretty well to conceal the natural olive blush of her complexion, but all the paint and powder in the world was useless to conceal the blush that spread from her neck all the way up to the forehead.

‘My word,’ I said. ‘What a charming shade of pink.’

‘I am sorry. I do not speak English.’

I very gently touched the bruise and said kindly: ‘Concussive amnesia. It’ll pass. How’s the head, Miss Lemay?’

‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘Do not speak English. You said that. But you understand it well enough, don’t you? Especially the written word. My word, for an ageing character like myself it’s refreshing to see that the young girls of today can blush so prettily. You do blush prettily, you know.’

She rose in confusion, twisting and crushing the papers in her hand. On the side of the ungodly she might be – and who but those on the side of the ungodly would have tried, as no question she had tried, to block my pursuit in the airport – but I couldn’t hold back a twinge of pity. There was something forlorn and defenceless about her. She could have been a consummate actress, but then consummate actresses would have been earning a fortune on the stage or screen. Then, unaccountably, I thought of Belinda. Two in the one day were two too many. I was going soft in the head. I nodded at the papers.

‘You may retain those, if you wish,’ I said nastily.

‘Those.’ She looked at the papers. ‘I don’t want to—’

‘Ha! The amnesia is wearing off.’

‘Please, I—’

‘Your wig’s slipped, Miss Lemay.’

Automatically her hands reached up and touched her hair, then she slowly lowered them to her sides and bit her lip in chagrin. There was something close to desperation in the brown eyes. Again I had the unpleasant sensation of not feeling very proud of myself.

‘Please leave me,’ she said, so I stepped to one side to let her pass. For a moment she looked at me and I could have sworn there was a beseeching look in her eyes and her face was puckering slightly almost as if she were about to cry, then she shook her head and hurried away. I followed more slowly, watched her run down the steps and turn in the direction of the canal. Twenty seconds later Maggie and Belinda passed by in the same direction. Despite the umbrellas they held, they looked very wet indeed and most unhappy. Maybe they’d got there in ten minutes after all.

I went back to the bar which I’d had no intention of leaving in the first place although I’d had to convince the girl that I was. The bar-tender, a friendly soul, beamed, ‘Good evening again, sir. I thought you had gone to bed.’

‘I wanted to go to bed. But my taste-buds said, No, another jonge Genever.’

‘One should always listen to one’s taste-buds, sir,’ the bar-tender said gravely. He handed over the little glass. ‘Prost, sir!’ I lifted my glass and got back to my thinking. I thought about naïveté and how unpleasant it was to be led up garden paths and whether young girls could blush to order. I thought I’d heard of certain actresses that could but wasn’t sure, so I called for another Genever to jog my memory.

The next glass I lifted in my hand was of a different order altogether, a great deal heavier and containing a great deal darker liquid. It was, in fact, a pint pot of Guinness, which might seem to be a very odd thing to find in a continental tavern, as indeed it was. But not in this one, not in the Old Bell, a horse-brass-behung hostelry more English than most English hostelries could ever hope to be. It specialized in English beers – and, as my glass testified, Irish stout.

The pub was well patronized but I had managed to get a table to myself facing the door, not because I have any Wild West aversion to sitting with my back to the door but because I wanted to spot Maggie or Belinda, whichever it was, when she came in. In the event it was Maggie. She crossed to my table and sat down. She was a very bedraggled Maggie and despite scarf and umbrella her raven hair was plastered to her cheeks.

‘You all right?’ I asked solicitously.

‘If you call all right being soaked to the skin, then yes.’ It wasn’t at all like my Maggie to be as waspish as this: she must be very wet indeed.

‘And Belinda?’

‘She’ll survive too. But I think she worries too much about you.’ She waited pointedly until I’d finished taking a long satisfying swig at the Guinness. ‘She hopes you aren’t overdoing things.’

‘Belinda is a very thoughtful girl.’ Belinda knew damn well what I was doing.

‘Belinda’s young,’ Maggie said.

‘Yes, Maggie.’

‘And vulnerable.’

‘Yes, Maggie.’

‘I don’t want her hurt, Paul.’ This made me sit up, mentally, anyway. She never called me ‘Paul’ unless we were alone, and even then only when she was sufficiently lost in thought or emotion to forget about what she regarded as the proprieties. I didn’t know what to make of her remark and wondered what the hell the two of them might have been talking about. I was beginning to wish I’d left the two of them at home and brought along a couple of Dobermann Pinschers instead. At least a Dobermann would have made short work of our lurking friend in Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s.

‘I said—’ Maggie began.

‘I heard what you said.’ I drank some more stout. ‘You’re a very dear girl, Maggie.’

She nodded, not to indicate any agreement with what I said, just to show that for some obscure reason she found this a satisfactory answer and sipped some of the sherry I’d got for her. I skated swiftly back on to thick ice.

‘Now. Where is our other lady-friend that you’ve been following?’

‘She’s in church.’

‘What!’ I spluttered into my tankard.

‘Singing hymns.’

‘Good God! And Belinda?’

‘She’s in church, too.’

‘Is she singing hymns?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t go inside.’

‘Maybe Belinda shouldn’t have gone in either.’

‘What safer place than a church?’

‘True. True.’ I tried to relax but felt uneasy.

‘One of us had to stay.’

‘Of course.’

‘Belinda said you might like to know the name of the church.’

‘Why should I—’ I stared at Maggie. ‘The First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society?’ Maggie nodded. I pushed back my chair and rose. ‘Now you tell me. Come on.’

‘What? And leave all that lovely Guinness that is so good for you?’

‘It’s Belinda’s health I’m thinking of, not mine.’

We left, and as we left it suddenly occurred to me that the name of the church had meant nothing to Maggie. It had meant nothing to Maggie because Belinda hadn’t told her when she got back to the hotel and she hadn’t told her because Maggie had been asleep. And I’d wondered what the hell the two of them might have been talking about. They hadn’t been talking about anything. Either this was very curious or I wasn’t very clever. Or both.

As usual it was raining and as we passed along the Rembrandtplein by the Hotel Schiller, Maggie gave a well-timed shiver.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s a taxi. In fact, lots of taxis.’

‘I wouldn’t say that there’s not a taxi in Amsterdam that’s not in the pay of the ungodly,’ I said with feeling, ‘but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it. It’s not far.’

Neither was it – by taxi. By foot it was a very considerable way indeed. But I had no intention of covering the distance on foot. I led Maggie down the Thorbeckeplein, turned left, right and left again till we came out on the Amstel. Maggie said: ‘You do seem to know your way around, don’t you, Major Sherman?’

‘I’ve been here before.’

‘When?’

‘I forget. Last year, sometime.’

‘When last year?’ Maggie knew or thought she knew all my movements over the past five years and Maggie could be easily piqued. She didn’t like what she called irregularities.

‘In the spring, I think it was.’

‘Two months, maybe?’

‘About that.’

‘You spent two months in Miami last spring,’ she said accusingly. ‘That’s what the records say.’

‘You know how I get my dates mixed up.’

‘No, I don’t.’ She paused. ‘I thought you’d never seen Colonel de Graaf and van Gelder before?’

‘I hadn’t.’

‘But—’

‘I didn’t want to bother them.’ I stopped by a phone-box. ‘A couple of calls to make. Wait here.’

‘I will not!’ A very heady atmosphere, was Amsterdam’s. She was getting as bad as Belinda. But she had a point the slanting rain was sheeting down very heavily now. I opened the door and let her precede me into the booth. I called a near-by cab company whose number I knew, started to dial another number.

‘I didn’t know you spoke Dutch,’ Maggie said.

‘Neither do our friends. That’s why we may get an honest taxi-driver.’

‘You really don’t trust anyone, do you?’ Maggie said admiringly.

‘I trust you, Maggie.’

‘No, you don’t. You just don’t want to burden my beautiful head with unnecessary problems.’

‘That’s my line,’ I complained. De Graaf came on the phone. After the usual courtesies I said: ‘Those scraps of paper? No luck yet? Thank you, Colonel de Graaf, I’ll call back later.’ I hung up.

‘What scraps of paper?’ Maggie asked.

‘Scraps of paper I gave him.’

‘Where did you get them from?’

‘A chap gave them to me last night.’

Maggie gave me her old-fashioned resigned look but said nothing. After a couple of minutes a taxi came along. I gave him an address in the old city and when we got there walked with Maggie down a narrow street to one of the canals in the dock area. I stopped at the corner.

This is it?’

‘This is it,’ said Maggie.

‘This’ was a little grey church about fifty yards away along the canal bank. It was an ancient sway-backed crumbling edifice that appeared to be maintained in the near-vertical by faith alone, for to my untrained eye it looked to be in imminent danger of toppling into the canal. It had a short square stone tower, at least five degrees off the perpendicular, topped by a tiny steeple that leaned dangerously in the other direction. The time was ripe for the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society to launch a major fund-raising drive.

That some of the adjacent buildings had been in even greater danger of collapse was evidenced by the fact that a large area of building on the canal side beyond the church had already been demolished: a giant crane, with the most enormous boom I had ever seen almost lost in the darkness above, stood in the middle of this cleared lot where rebuilding had already reached the stage of the completion of the reinforced foundations.

We walked slowly along the canal side towards the church. Clearly audible now was the sound of organ music and of women singing. It sounded very pleasant and safe and homely and nostalgic, the music drifting out over the darkened waters of the canal.

‘The service seems to be still in progress,’ I said. ‘You go in there—’

I broke off and did a double-take at a blonde girl in a belted white raincoat who was just walking by.

‘Hey!’ I said.

The blonde girl had it all buttoned up about what to do when accosted by strange men in a lonely street. She took one look at me and started to run. She didn’t get very far. She slipped on the wet cobbles, recovered, but only made another two or three paces before I caught up with her. She struggled briefly to escape, then relaxed and flung her arms about my neck. Maggie joined us, that old puritanical look on her face again.

‘A very old friend, Major Sherman?’

‘Since this morning. This is Trudi. Trudi van Gelder.’

‘Oh.’ Maggie laid a reassuring hand on Trudi’s arm but Trudi ignored her, tightened her grip around my neck and gazed admiringly into my face from a distance of about four inches.

‘I like you,’ Trudi announced. ‘You’re nice.’

‘Yes, I know, you told me. Oh hell!’

‘What to do?’ Maggie asked.

‘What to do. I’ve got to get her home. I’ve got to take her home. Put her in a taxi and she’d skip at the first traffic lights. A hundred to one the old battle-axe who’s supposed to be guarding her has dozed off and by this time her father’s probably scouring the town. He’d find it cheaper to use a ball and chain.’

I unlocked Trudi’s arms, not without some difficulty, and pushed up the sleeve of her left arm. I looked first of all at her arm, then at Maggie whose eyes widened and then lips pursed as she saw the unlovely pattern left by the hypodermic needles. I pulled down the sleeve – instead of breaking into tears as she had done last time Trudi just stood there and giggled as if it were all great fun – and examined the other forearm. I pulled that sleeve down too.

‘Nothing fresh,’ I said.

‘You mean there’s nothing fresh that you can see,’ Maggie said.

‘What do you expect me to do? Make her stand here in this icy rain and do a strip-tease on the banks of the canal to that organ music? Wait a moment.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to think,’ I said patiently.

So I thought, while Maggie stood there with an expression of dutiful expectation on her face and Trudi clutched my arm in a proprietorial fashion and gazed adoringly up at me. Finally, I said:

‘You haven’t been seen by anybody in there?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘But Belinda has, of course.’

‘Of course. But not so she would be recognized again. All the people in there have their heads covered. Belinda’s wearing a scarf and the hood of her coat and she’s sitting in shadow I saw that from the doorway.’

‘Get her out. Wait till the service is over, then follow Astrid. And try to memorize the faces of as many as possible of those who are attending the service.’

Maggie looked doubtful. ‘I’m afraid that’s going to be difficult.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, they all look alike.’

‘They all what are they, Chinese or something?’

‘Most of them are nuns, carrying Bibles and those beads at their waists, and you can’t see their hair, and they have those long black clothes and those white—’

‘Maggie—’ I restrained myself with difficulty – ‘I know what nuns look like.’

‘Yes, but there’s something else. They’re nearly all young and good-looking some very good-looking—’

‘You don’t have to have a face like a bus smash to be a nun. Phone your hotel and leave the number of wherever you happen to finish up. Come on, Trudi. Home.’

She went with me docilely enough, by foot first and then by taxi, where she held my hand all the time and talked a lot of bright nonsense in a very vivacious way, like a young child being taken out on an unexpected treat. At van Gelder’s house I asked the taxi to wait.

Trudi was duly scolded by both van Gelder and Herta with that vehemence and severity that always cloaks profound relief, then Trudi was led off, presumably to bed. Van Gelder poured a couple of drinks with the speed of a man who feels he requires one and asked me to sit down. I declined.

‘I’ve a taxi outside. Where can I find Colonel de Graaf at this time of night? I want to borrow a car from him, preferably a fast one.’

Van Gelder smiled. ‘No questions from me, my friend. You’ll find the Colonel at his office I know he’s working late tonight.’ He raised his glass. ‘A thousand thanks. I was a very, very worried man.’

‘You had a police alert out for her?’

‘An unofficial police alert.’ Van Gelder smiled again, but wryly. ‘You know why. A few trusted friends but there are nine hundred thousand people in Amsterdam.’

‘Any idea why she was so far from home?’

‘At least there’s no mystery about that. Herta takes her there often – to the church, I mean. All the Huyler people in Amsterdam go there. It’s a Huguenot church – there’s one in Huyler as well, well, not so much a church, some sort of business premises they use on Sundays as a place of worship. Herta takes her there too – the two of them go out to the island often. The churches and the Vondel Park – those are the only outings the child has.’

Herta waddled into the room and van Gelder looked at her anxiously. Herta, with what might conceivably have passed for an expression of satisfaction on her leathery features, shook her head and waddled out again.

‘Well, thank God for that.’ Van Gelder drained his glass. ‘No injections.’

‘Not this time.’ I drained my glass in turn, said goodbye and left.

I paid off the taxi in the Marnixstraat. Van Gelder had phoned ahead to say I was coming and Colonel de Graaf was waiting for me. If he was busy, he showed no signs of it. He was engaged in his usual occupation of overflowing the chair he was sitting in, the desk in front of him was bare, his fingers were steepled under his chin and as I entered he brought his eyes down from a leisured contemplation of infinity.

‘One assumes you make progress?’ he greeted me.

‘One assumes wrongly, I’m afraid.’

‘What? No vistas of broad highways leading to the final solution?’

‘Cul-de-sacs only.’

‘Something about a car, I understand from the Inspector.’

‘Please.’

‘May one enquire why you wish this vehicle?’

‘To drive up the cul-de-sacs. But that’s not really what I came to ask you about.’

‘I hardly thought it was.’

‘I’d like a search warrant.’

‘What for?’

‘To make a search,’ I said patiently. ‘Accompanied by a senior officer or officers, of course, to make it legal.’

‘Who? Where?’

‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler. Souvenir warehouse. Down by the docks I don’t know the address.’

‘I’ve heard of them.’ De Graaf nodded. ‘I know nothing against them. Do you?’

‘No.’

‘So what makes you so curious about them?’

‘I honest to God don’t know. I want to find out why I am so curious. I was in their place tonight—’

‘They’re closed at night-time, surely.’

I dangled a set of skeleton keys in front of his eyes.

‘You know it’s a felony to be in possession of such instruments,’ de Graaf said severely.

I put the keys back in my pocket. ‘What instruments?’

‘A passing hallucination,’ de Graaf said agreeably.

‘I’m curious about why they have a time-lock on the steel door leading to their office. I’m curious about the large stocks of Bibles carried on their premises.’ I didn’t mention the smell of cannabis or the lad lurking behind the puppets. ‘But what I’m really interested in getting hold of is their list of suppliers.’

‘A search warrant we can arrange on any pretext,’ de Graaf said. ‘I’ll accompany you myself. Doubtless you’ll explain your interest in greater detail in the morning. Now about this car. Van Gelder has an excellent suggestion. A specially-engined police car, complete with everything from two-way radio to handcuffs, but to all appearance a taxi, will be here in two minutes. Driving a taxi, you understand, poses certain problems.’

‘I’ll try not to make too much on the side. Have you anything else for me?’

‘Also in two minutes. Your car is bringing some information from the Records Office.’

Two minutes it was and a folder was delivered to de Graaf’s desk. He looked through some papers.

‘Astrid Lemay. Her real name, perhaps oddly enough. Dutch father, Grecian mother. He was a vice-consul in Athens, now deceased. Whereabouts of mother unknown. Twenty-four. Nothing known against her – nothing much known for her, either. Must say the background is a bit vague. Works as a hostess in the Balinova night-club, lives in a small flat near-by. Has one known relative, brother George, aged twenty. Ah! This may interest you. George, apparently, has spent six months as Her Majesty’s guest.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Assault and attempted robbery, very amateurish effort, it seems. He made the mistake of assaulting a plain-clothes detective. Suspected of being an addict – probably trying to get money to buy more. All we have.’ He turned to another paper. ‘This MOO 144 number you gave me is the radio call-sign for a Belgian coaster, the Marianne, due in from Bordeaux tomorrow. I have a pretty efficient staff, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘When does it arrive?’

‘Noon. We search it?’

‘You wouldn’t find anything. But please don’t go near it. Any ideas on the other two numbers?’

‘Nothing, I’m afraid on 910020. Or on 2798.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Or could that be 797 twice – you know. 797797?’

‘Could be anything.’

De Graaf took a telephone directory from a drawer, put it away again, picked up a phone. ‘A telephone number,’ he said. ‘797797. Find out who’s listed under that number. At once, please.’

We sat in silence till the phone rang. De Graaf listened briefly, replaced the receiver.

‘The Balinova night-club,’ he said.

‘The efficient staff has a clairvoyant boss.’

‘And where does this clairvoyance lead you to?’

‘The Balinova night-club.’ I stood up. ‘I have a rather readily identifiable face, wouldn’t you say, Colonel?’

‘It’s not a face people forget. And those white scars. I don’t think your plastic surgeon was really trying.’

‘He was trying all right. To conceal his almost total ignorance of plastic surgery. Have you any brown stain in this HQ?’

‘Brown stain?’ He blinked at me, then smiled widely. ‘Oh no, Major Sherman! Disguise! In this day and age? Sherlock Holmes has been dead these many years.’

‘If I’d half the brains Sherlock had,’ I said heavily. ‘I wouldn’t be needing any disguise.’

SIX

The yellow and red taxi they’d given me appeared, from the outside, to be a perfectly normal Opel, but they seemed to have managed to put an extra engine into it. They’d put a lot of extra work into it too. It had a pop-up siren, a pop-up police light and a panel at the back which fell down to illuminate a ‘Stop’ sign. Under the front passenger seats were ropes and first-aid kits and tear-gas canisters: in the door pockets were handcuffs with keys attached. God alone knew what they had in the boot. Nor did I care. All I wanted was a fast car, and I had one.

I pulled up in a prohibited parking area outside the Balinova night-club, right opposite where a uniformed and be-holstered policeman was standing. He nodded almost imperceptibly and walked away with measured stride. He knew a police taxi when he saw one and had no wish to explain to the indignant populace why a taxi could get away with an offence that would have automatically got them a ticket.

I got out, locked the door, and crossed the pavement to the entrance of the night-club which had above it the flickering neon sign ‘Balinova’ and the outlined neon figures of two hula-hula dancers, although I failed to grasp the connection between Hawaii and Indonesia. Perhaps they were meant to be Balinese dancers, but if that were so they had the wrong kind of clothes on – or off. Two large windows were set one on either side of the entrance, and these were given up to an art exhibition of sorts which gave more than a delicate indication of the nature of the cultural delights and more esoteric scholarly pursuits that were to be found within. The occasional young lady depicted as wearing ear-rings and bangles and nothing else seemed almost indecently overdressed. Of even greater interest, however, was the coffee-coloured countenance that looked back at me from the reflection in the glass: if I hadn’t known who I was, I wouldn’t have recognized myself. I went inside.

The Balinova, in the best time-honoured tradition, was small, stuffy, smoky and full of some indescribable incense, the main ingredient of which seemed to be burnt rubber, which was probably designed to induce in the customers the right frame of mind for the maximum enjoyment of the entertainment being presented to them but which had, in fact, the effect of producing olfactory paralysis in the space of a few seconds. Even without the assistance of the drifting clouds of smoke the place was deliberately ill-lit, except for the garish spot-light on the stage which, as was again fairly standard, was no stage at all but merely a tiny circular dance floor in the centre of the room.

The audience was almost exclusively male, running the gamut of ages from goggle-eyed teenagers to sprightly and beady-eyed octogenarians whose visual acuity appeared to have remained undimmed with the passing of the years. Almost all of them were well-dressed, for the better-class Amsterdam night-clubs those which still manage to cater devotedly to the refined palates of the jaded connoisseurs of certain of the plastic arts – are not for those who are on relief. They are, in a word, not cheap and the Balinova was very, very expensive, one of the extremely few clip joints in the city. There were a few women present, but only a few. To my complete lack of surprise, Maggie and Belinda were seated at a table near the door, with some sickly-coloured drinks before them. Both of them wore aloof expressions, although Maggie’s was unquestionably the more aloof of the two.

My disguise, at the moment, seemed completely superfluous. Nobody looked at me as I entered and it was quite clear that nobody even wanted to look at me, which was understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances, as the audience were almost splitting their pebble glasses in their eagerness to miss none of the aesthetic nuances or symbolic significances of the original and thought-compelling ballet performance taking place before their enraptured eyes, in which a shapely young harridan in a bubble-bath, to the accompaniment of the discordant thumpings and asthmatic wheezings of an excruciating band that would not otherwise have been tolerated in a boiler factory, endeavoured to stretch out for a bath-towel that had been craftily placed about a yard beyond her reach. The air was electric with tension as the audience tried to figure out the very limited number of alternatives that were open to the unfortunate girl. I sat down at the table beside Belinda and gave her what, in the light of my new complexion, must have been a pretty dazzling smile. Belinda moved a rapid six inches away from me, lifting her nose a couple of inches higher in the air.

‘Hoity-toity,’ I said. Both girls turned to stare at me and I nodded towards the stage. ‘Why doesn’t one of you go and help her?’

There was a long pause, then Maggie said with great restraint: ‘What on earth has happened to you?’

‘I am in disguise. Keep your voice down.’

‘But – but I phoned the hotel only two or three minutes ago,’ Belinda said.

‘And don’t whisper either. Colonel de Graaf put me on to this place. She came straight back here?’

They nodded.

‘And hasn’t gone out again?’

‘Not by the front door,’ Maggie said.

‘You tried to memorize the faces of the nuns as they came out? As I told you to?’

‘We tried,’ Maggie said.

‘Notice anything odd, peculiar, out of the ordinary about any of them?’

‘No, nothing. Except,’ Belinda added brightly, ‘that they seem to have very good-looking nuns in Amsterdam.’

‘So Maggie has already told me. And that’s all?’

They looked at each other, hesitating, then Maggie said: ‘There was something funny. We seemed to see a lot more people going into that church than came out.’

‘There were a lot more people in that church than came out,’ Belinda said. ‘I was there, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said patiently. ‘What do you mean by “a lot”?’

‘Well,’ Belinda said defensively, ‘a good few.’

‘Ha! So now we’re down to a good few. You both checked, of course, that the church was empty?’

It was Maggie’s turn to be defensive. ‘You told us to follow Astrid Lemay. We couldn’t wait.’

‘Has it occurred to you that some may have remained behind for private devotions? Or that maybe you’re not very good counters?’

Belinda’s mouth tightened angrily but Maggie put a hand on hers.

‘That’s not fair, Major Sherman.’ And this was Maggie talking. ‘We may make mistakes, but that’s not fair.’ When Maggie talked like that, I listened.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie. I’m sorry, Belinda. When cowards like me get worried they take it out on people who can’t hit back.’ They both at once gave me that sweetly sympathetic smile that would normally have had me climbing the walls, but which I found curiously affecting at that moment, maybe that brown stain had done something to my nervous system. ‘God only knows I make more mistakes than you do.’ I did, and I was making one of my biggest then: I should have listened more closely to what the girls were saying.

‘And now?’ Maggie asked.

‘Yes, what do we do now?’ Belinda said.

I was clearly forgiven. ‘Circulate around the night-clubs hereabouts. Heaven knows there’s no shortage of them. See if you can recognize anyone there – performer, staff, maybe even a member of the audience – who looks like anyone you saw in the church tonight.’

Belinda stared at me in disbelief. ‘Nuns in a night-club?’

‘Why not? Bishops go to garden parties, don’t they?’

‘It’s not the same thing—’

‘Entertainment is entertainment the world over,’ I said pontifically. ‘Especially check for those who are wearing long-sleeved dresses or those fancy elbow-length gloves.’

‘Why those?’ Belinda asked.

‘Use your head. See – if you do find anyone if you can find out where they live. Be back in your hotel by one o’clock. I’ll see you there.’

‘And what are you going to do?’ Maggie asked.

I looked leisurely around the club. ‘I’ve got a lot of research to do here yet.’

‘I’ll bet you have,’ Belinda said.

Maggie opened her mouth to speak but Belinda was saved the inevitable lecture by the reverential ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and gasps of unstinted admiration, freely given, that suddenly echoed round the club. The audience were almost out of their seats. The distressed artiste had resolved her dreadful dilemma by the simple but ingenious and highly effective expedient of tipping the tin bath over and using it, tortoise-shell fashion, to conceal her maidenly blushes as she covered the negligible distance towards the salvation of the towel. She stood up, swathed in her towel, Venus arising from the depths, and bowed with regal graciousness towards the audience, Madame Melba taking her final farewell of Covent Garden. The ecstatic audience whistled and called for more, none more so than the octogenarians, but in vain: her repertoire exhausted, she shook her head prettily and minced off the stage, trailing clouds of soap-bubbles behind her.

‘Well, I never!’ I said admiringly. ‘I’ll bet neither of you two would have thought of that.’

‘Come, Belinda,’ Maggie said. ‘This is no place for us.’

They rose and left. As Belinda passed she gave a twitch of her eyebrows which looked suspiciously like a wink, smiled sweetly, said, ‘I rather like you like that,’ and left me pondering suspiciously as to the meaning of her remark. I followed their progess to the exit to see if anyone followed them, and followed they were, first of all by a very fat, very heavily built character with enormous jowls and an air of benevolence, but this was hardly of any significance as he was immediately followed by several dozen others. The highlight of the evening was over, great moments like those came but seldom and the summits were to be rarely scaled again – except three times a night, seven nights a week – and they were off to greener pastures where hooch could be purchased at a quarter of the price.

The club was half-empty now, the pall of smoke thinning and the visibility correspondingly improving. I looked around but in this momentary lull in the proceedings saw nothing of interest. Waiters circulated. I ordered a Scotch and was given a drink that rigorous chemical analysis might have found to contain a trace element of whisky. An old man mopped the tiny dance floor with the deliberate and stylized movements of a priest performing sacred rites. The band, mercifully silent, enthusiastically quaffed beer presented them by some tone-deaf customer. And then I saw the person I’d come to see, only it looked as if I wouldn’t be seeing her for very long.

Astrid Lemay was standing in an inner doorway at the back end of a room, pulling a wrap around her shoulders while another girl whispered in her ear; from their tense expressions and hurried movements it appeared to be a message of some urgency. Astrid nodded several times, then almost ran across the tiny dance floor and passed through the front entrance. Somewhat more leisurely, I followed her.

I closed up on her and was only a few feet behind as she turned into the Rembrandtplein. She stopped. I stopped, looked at what she was looking at and listened to what she was listening to.

The barrel-organ was parked in the street outside a roofed-in, overhead-heated but windowless sidewalk café. Even at that time of night the café was almost full and the suffering customers had about them the look of people about to pay someone large sums of money to move elsewhere. This organ appeared to be a replica of the one outside the Rembrandt, with the same garish colour scheme, multi-coloured canopy and identically dressed puppets dancing at the end of their elasticized strings, although this machine was clearly inferior, mechanically and musically, to the Rembrandt one. This machine, too, was manned by an ancient, but this one sported a foot-long flowing grey beard that had neither been washed nor combed since he’d stopped shaving and who wore a stetson hat and a British Army great-coat which fitted snugly around his ankles. Amidst the clankings, groanings and wheezings emitted by the organ I thought I detected an excerpt from La Bohème, although heaven knew that Puccini never made the dying Mimi suffer the way she would have suffered had she been in the Rembrandtplein that night.

The ancient had a close and apparently attentive audience of one. I recognized him as being one of the group I had seen by the organ outside the Rembrandt. His clothes were threadbare but neatly kept, his lanky black hair tumbled down to his painfully thin shoulders, the blades of which protruded through his jacket like sticks. Even at that distance of about twenty feet I could see that his degree of emaciation was advanced. I could see only part of one side of the face, but that little showed a cadaverously sunken cheek with skin the colour of old parchment.

He was leaning on the end of the barrel-organ, but not from any love of Mimi. He was leaning on the barrel-organ because if he hadn’t leaned on something he would surely have fallen down. He was obviously a very sick young man indeed with total collapse only one unpremeditated move away. Occasionally his whole body was convulsed by uncontrollable spasms of shaking: less frequently he made harsh sobbing or guttural noises in his throat. Clearly the old man in the great-coat did not regard him as being very good for business for he kept hovering around him indecisively, making reproachful clucking noises and ineffectual movements of his arms, very much like a rather demented hen. He also kept glancing over his shoulder and apprehensively round the square as if he were afraid of something or someone.

Astrid walked quickly towards the barrel-organ with myself close behind. She smiled apologetically at the bearded ancient, put her arm around the young man and pulled him away from the organ. Momentarily he tried to straighten up and I could see that he was a pretty tall youngster, at least six inches taller than the girl: his height served only to accentuate his skeleton frame. His eyes were staring and glazed and his face the face of a man dying from starvation, his cheeks so incredibly hollowed that one would have sworn that he could have no teeth. Astrid tried to half lead, half carry him away, but though his emaciation had reached a degree where he could scarcely be any heavier than the girl, if at all, his uncontrollable lurching made her stagger across the pavement.

I approached them without a word, put my arm round him – it was like putting my arm round a skeleton – and took his weight off Astrid. She looked at me and the brown eyes were sick with anxiety and fear. I don’t suppose my sepia complexion gave her much confidence either.

‘Please!’ Her voice was beseeching. ‘Please leave me. I can manage.’

‘You can’t. He’s a very sick boy, Miss Lemay.’

She stared at me. ‘Mr Sherman!’

‘I’m not sure if I like that,’ I said reflectively. ‘An hour or two ago you’d never seen me, never even knew my name. But now that I’ve gone all sun-tanned and attractive – Oops!’

George, whose rubbery legs had suddenly turned to jelly, had almost slipped from my grip. I could see that the two of us weren’t going to get very far waltzing like this along the Rembrandtplein, so I stooped down to hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift. She caught my arm in panic.

‘No! Don’t do that! Don’t do that!’

‘Why ever not?’ I said reasonably. ‘It’s easier this way.’

‘No, no! If the police see you they will take him away.’

I straightened, put my arm around him again and tried to maintain him as near to the vertical as was possible. ‘The hunter and the hunted,’ I said. ‘You and van Gelder both.’

‘Please?’

‘And of course, brother George is—’

‘How do you know his name?’ she whispered.

‘It’s my business to know things,’ I said loftily. ‘As I was saying, brother George is under the further disadvantage of not being exactly unknown to the police. Having an ex-convict for a brother can be a distinct disadvantage.’

She made no reply. I doubt if I’ve ever seen anyone who looked so completely miserable and defeated.

‘Where does he live?’ I asked.

‘With me, of course.’ The question seemed to surprise her. ‘It’s not far.’

It wasn’t either, not more than fifty yards down a sidestreet – if so narrow and gloomy a lane could be called a street – past the Balinova. The stairs up to Astrid’s flat were the narrowest and most twisted I had ever come across, and with George slung over my shoulder I had difficulty in negotiating them. Astrid unlocked the door to her flat, which proved to be hardly larger than a rabbit-hutch, consisting, as far as I could see, of a tiny sitting-room with an equally tiny bedroom leading off it. I went through to the bedroom, laid George on the narrow bed, straightened and mopped my brow.

‘I’ve climbed better ladders than those damned stairs of yours,’ I said feelingly.

‘I’m sorry. The girls’ hostel is cheaper, but with George … They don’t pay very highly at the Balinova.’

It was obvious from the two tiny rooms, neat but threadbare like George’s clothes, that they paid very little. I said: ‘People in your position are lucky to get anything.’

‘Please?’

‘Not so much of the “please” stuff. You know damned well what I mean. Don’t you. Miss Lemay – or may I call you Astrid?’

‘How do you know my name?’ Off-hand I couldn’t ever recall having seen a girl wring her hands but that’s what she was doing now. ‘How – how do you know things about me?’

‘Come off it,’ I said roughly. ‘Give some credit to your boy-friend.’

‘Boy-friend? I haven’t got a boy-friend.’

‘Ex-boy-friend, then. Or does “late boy-friend” suit you better?’

‘Jimmy?’ she whispered.

‘Jimmy Duclos,’ I nodded. ‘He may have fallen for you – fatally fallen for you – but he’d already told me something about you. I even have a picture of you.’

She seemed confused. ‘But – but at the airport—’

‘What did you expect me to do – embrace you? Jimmy was killed at the airport because he was on to something. What was that something?’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you.’

‘Can’t? Or won’t?’

She made no reply.

‘Did you love him, Astrid? Jimmy?’

She looked at me dumbly, her eyes glistening. She nodded slowly.

‘And you won’t tell me?’ Silence. I sighed and tried another tack. ‘Did Jimmy Duclos tell you what he was?’

She shook her head.

‘But you guessed?’

She nodded.

‘And told someone what you guessed.’

This got her. ‘No! No! I told nobody. Before God, I told nobody!’ She’d loved him, all right, and she wasn’t lying.

‘Did he ever mention me?’

‘No.’

‘But you know who I am?’

She just looked at me, two big tears trickling slowly down her cheeks.

‘You know damn well that I run Interpol’s narcotics bureau in London.’

More silence. I caught her shoulders and shook her angrily. ‘Well, don’t you?’

She nodded. A great girl for silences.

‘Then if Jimmy didn’t tell you, who did?’

‘Oh God! Please leave me alone!’ A whole lot of other tears were chasing the first two down her cheeks now. It was her day for crying and mine for sighing, so I sighed and changed my tack again and looked through the door at the boy on the bed.

‘I take it,’ I said, ‘that George is not the breadwinner of the family?’

‘George cannot work.’ She said it as if she were stating a simple law of nature. ‘He hasn’t worked for over a year. But what has George to do with this?’

‘George has everything to do with it.’ I went and bent over him, looked at him closely, lifted an eyelid and dropped it again. ‘What do you do for him when he’s like this?’

‘There is nothing one can do.’

I pushed the sleeve up George’s skeleton-like arm. Punctured, mottled and discoloured from innumerable injections, it was a revolting sight: Trudi’s had been nothing compared to this. I said: ‘There’s nothing anyone will ever be able to do for him. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I know that.’ She caught my speculative look, stopped dabbing her face with a lace handkerchief about the size of a postage stamp and smiled bitterly. ‘You want me to roll up my sleeve.’

‘I don’t insult nice girls. What I want to do is to ask you some simple questions that you can answer. How long has George been like this?’

‘Three years.’

‘How long have you been in the Balinova?’

‘Three years.’

‘Like it there?’

‘Like it?’ This girl gave herself away every time she opened her mouth. ‘Do you know what it is to work in a night-club – a night-club like that? Horrible, nasty, lonely old men leering at you—’

‘Jimmy Duclos wasn’t horrible or nasty or old.’

She was taken aback. ‘No. No, of course not. Jimmy—’

‘Jimmy Duclos is dead, Astrid. Jimmy is dead because he fell for a night-club hostess who’s being blackmailed.’

‘Nobody’s blackmailing me.’

‘No? Then who’s putting the pressure on you to keep silent, to work at a job you obviously loathe? And why are they putting pressure on you? Is it because of George here? What has he done or what do they say he has done? I know he’s been in prison, so it can’t be that. What is it, Astrid, that made you spy on me? What do you know of Jimmy Duclos’s death? I know how he died. But who killed him and why?’

‘I didn’t know he’d be killed!’ She sat down on the bed-sofa, her hands covering her face, her shoulders heaving. ‘I didn’t know he would be killed.’

‘All right, Astrid.’ I gave up because I was achieving nothing except a mounting dislike for myself. She’d probably loved Duclos, he was only a day dead and here was I lacerating bleeding wounds. ‘I’ve known too many people walk in the fear of death to even try to make you talk. But think about it, Astrid, for God’s sake and your own sake, think about it. It’s your life, and that’s all that’s left for you to worry about now. George has no life left.’

‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing I can say.’ Her face was still in her hands. ‘Please go.’

I didn’t think there was anything more I could do or say either, so I did as she asked and left.

Clad only in trousers and singlet I looked at myself in the tiny mirror in the tiny bathroom. All traces of the stain seemed to have been removed from my face, neck and hands, which was more than I could say for the large and once-white towel I held in my hands. It was sodden and stained beyond recovery to a deep chocolate colour.

I went through the door into the bedroom that was hardly big enough to take the bed and the bed-settee it contained. The bed was occupied by Maggie and Belinda, both sitting upright, both looking very fetching in very attractive nightdresses which appeared to consist mainly of holes. But I’d more urgent problems on my mind at the moment than the way in which some night-wear manufacturers skimped on their material.

‘You’ve ruined our towel,’ Belinda complained.

‘Tell them you were removing your make-up.’ I reached for my shirt, which was a deep russet colour all round the inside of the neck-band, but there was nothing I could do about that. ‘So most of the night-club girls live in this Hostel Paris?’

Maggie nodded. ‘So Mary said.’

‘So Mary said.’

‘Mary?’

‘This nice English girl working in the Trianon.’

‘There are no nice English girls working in the Trianon, only naughty English girls. Was she one of the girls in church?’ Maggie shook her head. ‘Well, that at least bears out what Astrid said.’

‘Astrid?’ Belinda said. ‘You spoke to her?’

‘I passed the time of day with her. Not very profitably, I’m afraid. She wasn’t communicative.’ I told them briefly how uncommunicative she’d been, then went on: ‘Well, it’s time you two started doing a little work instead of hanging about night-clubs.’ They looked at each other, then coldly at me. ‘Maggie, take a stroll in the Vondel Park tomorrow. See if Trudi is there you know her. Don’t let her see you she knows you. See what she does, if she meets anyone, talks to anyone: it’s a big park but you should have little difficulty in locating her if she’s there she’ll be accompanied by an old dear who’s about five feet round the middle. Belinda, keep tabs on that hostel tomorrow evening. If you recognize any girl who was in the church, follow her and see what she’s up to.’ I shrugged into my very damp jacket. ‘Good night.’

‘That was all? You’re off?’ Maggie seemed faintly surprised.

‘My, you are in a hurry,’ Belinda said.

‘Tomorrow night,’ I promised, ‘I’ll tuck you both in and tell you all about Goldilocks and the three bears. Tonight I have things to attend to.’

SEVEN

I parked the police car on top of a ‘No parking’ sign painted on the road and walked the last hundred yards to the hotel. The barrel-organ had gone to wherever barrel-organs go in the watches of the night, and the foyer was deserted except for the assistant manager who was sitting dozing in a chair behind the desk. I reached over, quietly unhooked the key and walked up the first two flights of stairs before taking the lift in case I waked the assistant manager from what appeared to be a sound – and no doubt well-deserved – sleep.

I took off my wet clothes – which meant all of them – showered, put on a dry outfit, went down by lift and banged my room key noisily on the desk. The assistant manager blinked himself awake, looked at me, his watch and the key in that order.

‘Mr Sherman. I – I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Hours ago. You were asleep. This quality of childlike innocence—’

He wasn’t listening to me. For a second time he peered fuzzily at his watch.

‘What are you doing, Mr Sherman?’

‘I am sleep-walking.’

‘It’s half-past two in the morning!’

‘I don’t sleep-walk during the day,’ I said reasonably. I turned and peered through the vestibule. ‘What? No doorman, no porter, no taxi-man, no organ-grinder, not a tail or shadow in sight. Lax. Remiss. You will be held to account for this negligence.’

‘Please?’

‘Eternal vigilance is the price of admiralty.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘I’m not sure I do either. Are there any barbers open at this time of night?’

‘Are there any – did you say—’

‘Never mind. I’m sure I’ll find one somewhere.’

I left. Twenty yards from the hotel I stepped into a doorway, cheerfully prepared to clobber anyone who seemed bent on following me, but after two or three minutes it became clear that no one was. I retrieved my car and drove down towards the docks area, parking it some distance and two streets away from the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society. I walked down to the canal.

The canal, lined with the inevitable elm and lime trees, was dark and brown and still and reflected no light at all from the dimly-lit narrow streets on either side. Not one building on either side of the canal showed a light. The church looked more dilapidated and unsafe than ever and had about it that strange quality of stillness and remoteness and watchfulness that many churches seem to possess at night. The huge crane with its massive boom was silhouetted menacingly against the night sky. The absence of any indication of life was total. All that was lacking was a cemetery.

I crossed the street, mounted the steps and tried the church door. It was unlocked. There was no reason why it should have been locked but I found it vaguely surprising that it wasn’t. The hinges must have been well-oiled for the door opened and closed soundlessly.

I switched on the torch and made a quick 360° traverse. I was alone. I made a more methodical inspection. The interior was small, even smaller than one would have guessed from outside, blackened and ancient, so ancient that I could see that the oaken pews had originally been fashioned by adzes. I lifted the beam of the torch but there was no balcony, just half-a-dozen small dusty stained-glass windows that even on a sunny day could have admitted only a minimal quantity of light. The entrance door was the only external door to the church. The only other door was in a corner at the top end of the church, half-way between the pulpit and an antique bellows-operated organ.

I made for this door, laid my hand on the knob and switched off the torch. This door creaked, but not loudly. I stepped forward cautiously and softly and it was as well that I did for what I stepped on was not another floor beyond but the first step in a flight of descending stairs. I followed those steps down, eighteen of them in a complete circle and moved forward gingerly, my hand extended in front of me to locate the door which I felt must be in front of me. But there was no door in front of me. I switched on my torch.

The room I found myself in was about half the size of the church above. I made another quick circuit with the torch. There were no windows here, just two naked overhead lights. I located the switch and switched it on. The room was even more blackened than the church proper. The rough wooden floor was filthy with the trampled dirt of countless years. There were some tables and chairs in the centre of the room and the two side walls were lined with half-booths, very narrow and very high. The place looked like a medieval cafe.

I felt my nostrils twitch involuntarily at a well-remembered and unloved smell. It could have come from anywhere but I fancied it came from the row of booths on my right. I put my torch away, took my pistol from its felt underarm holster, dug in a pocket for a silencer and screwed it on. I walked cat-footed across the room and my nose told me that I was heading in the right direction. The first booth was empty. So was the second. Then I heard the sound of breathing. I moved forward with millimetric stealth and my left eye and the barrel of the pistol went round the corner of the third booth at the same instant.

My precautions were unnecessary. No danger offered here. Two things rested on the narrow deal table, an ashtray with a cigarette end burnt away to the butt, and the arms and head of a man who was slumped forward, sound asleep, his face turned away from me. I didn’t have to see his face. George’s gaunt frame and threadbare clothes were unmistakable. Last time I’d seen him I’d have sworn that he would have been unable to stir from his bed for the next twenty-four hours – or I would have sworn, had he been a normal person. But junkies in an advanced state of addiction are as far from normal as any person can ever become and are capable of astonishing if very brief feats of recovery. I left him where he was. For the moment, he presented no problem.

There was a door at the end of this room between the two rows of booths. I opened it, with rather less care than previously, went inside, located a switch and pressed it.

This was a wide but very narrow room, running the full width of the church but no more than ten feet across. Both sides of the room were lined with shelves and those shelves were stacked high with Bibles. It came as no surprise to discover that they were replicas of those I had examined in the warehouse of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, the ones that the First Reformed Church handed out with such liberality to the Amsterdam hotels. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by having another look at them so I stuck my gun in my belt and went ahead and looked at them anyway. I picked several at random from the front row on a shelf and flicked through them: they were as innocuous as Bibles can be, which is as innocuous as you can get. I jerked into the second row and the same cursory examination yielded up the same result. I pushed part of the second row to one side and picked up a Bible from the third row.

This copy may or may not have been innocuous, depending upon your interpretation of the reason for its savagely multilated state, but as a Bible as such it was a complete failure because the hole that had been smoothly scooped out from its centre extended almost the entire width of the book: the hole itself was about the size and shape of a large fig. I examined several more Bibles from the same row: all had the same hollowed out centre, obviously machine-made. Keeping one of the mutilated copies to one side, I replaced the other Bibles as I had found them and moved towards the door opposite the one by which I’d entered the narrow room. I opened it and pressed the light switch.

The First Reformed Church, I had to admit, had certainly done their level and eminently successful best to comply with the exhortations of the avant-garde clergy of today that it was the Church’s duty to keep abreast with and participate in the technological age in which we live. Conceivably, they might have expected to be taken a degree less literally, but then unspecified exhortation, when translated into practice, is always liable to a certain amount of executive misdirection, which appeared to be what had happened in this case: this room, which took up nearly half the basement area of the church, was, in fact, a superbly equipped machine shop.

To my untrained eye, it had everything – lathes, milling machines, presses, crucibles, moulds, a furnace, a large stamping machine and benches to which were bolted a number of smaller machines whose purpose was a mystery to me. One end of the floor was covered with what appeared to be brass and copper shavings, for the main part lying in tightly twisted coils. In a bin in one corner lay a large and untidy heap of lead pipes, all evidently old, and some rolls of used lead roof sheathing. Altogether, a highly functional place and one clearly devoted to manufacture: what the end products were was anyone’s guess for certainly no examples of them were lying around.

I was half-way along the room, walking slowly, when I as much imagined as heard the very faintest sensation of sound from about the area of the doorway I’d just passed through: and I could feel again that uncomfortable tingling sensation in the back of my neck: someone was examining it, and with no friendly intent, from a distance of only a very few yards.

I walked on unconcernedly, which is no easy thing to do when the chances are good that the next step you take may be anticipated by a .38 bullet or something equally lethal in the base of the skull, but walk I did, for to turn round armed with nothing but a hollowed-out Bible in my left hand – my gun was still in my belt – seemed a sure way of precipitating that involuntary pressure of the nervous trigger-finger. I had behaved like a moron, with a blundering idiocy for which I would have bawled out anyone else, and it looked very much as if I might pay the moron’s price. The unlocked main door, the unlocked door leading to the basement, the access free and open to anyone who might care to investigate bespoke only one thing: the presence of a quiet man with a gun whose job it was not to prevent entry but to prevent departure in the most permanent way. I wondered where he had been hiding, perhaps in the pulpit, perhaps in some side door leading off the stairs, the existence or otherwise of which I’d been too careless to investigate.

I reached the end of the room, glanced slightly to my left behind the end lathe, made a slight murmur of surprise and stooped low behind the lathe. I didn’t stay in that position for more than two seconds for there seemed little point in postponing what I knew must be inevitable: when I lifted the top of my head quickly above the lathe, the barrel of my silenced gun was already lined up with my right eye.

He was no more than fifteen feet away, advancing on soundless rubber moccasins, a wizened, rodent-faced figure of a man, with a paper-white face and glowing dark-coal eyes. What he was pointing in the general direction of the lathe in front of me was far worse than any .38 pistol, it was a blood-chilling whippet, a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun sawn off at both barrels and stock, probably the most lethally effective shortrange weapon ever devised.

I saw him and squeezed the trigger of my gun in the same moment, for if anything was certain it was that I would never be given a second moment.

A red rose bloomed in the centre of the wizened man’s forehead. He took one step back, the reflex step of a man already dead, and crumpled to the floor almost as soundlessly as he had been advancing towards me, the whippet still clutched in his hand. I switched my eyes towards the door but if there were any reinforcements to hand they were prudently concealing the fact. I straightened and went quickly across the room to where the Bibles were stored, but there was no one there nor was there in any of the booths in the next room where George was still lying unconscious across his table.

I hauled George none too gently from his seat, got him over my shoulder, carried him upstairs to the church proper and dumped him unceremoniously behind the pulpit where he would be out of sight of anyone who might glance in casually from the main door, although why anyone should take it into his head to glance in at that time of night I couldn’t imagine. I opened the main door and glanced out, although far from casually, but the canal street was deserted in both directions.

Three minutes later I had the taxi parked not far from the church. I went inside, retrieved George, dragged him down the steps and across the road and bundled him into the back seat of the taxi. He promptly fell off the seat on to the floor and as he was probably safer in that position I left him there, quickly checked that no one was taking any interest in what I was doing and went back inside the church again.

The dead man’s pockets yielded nothing except a few homemade cigarettes which accorded well enough with the fact that he had obviously been hopped to the eyes when he had come after me with the whippet. I took the whippet in my left hand, seized the dead man by the collar of his coat – any other method of conveying him from there would have resulted in a blood-stained suit and this was the only serviceable suit I’d left – and dragged him across the basement and up the stairs, closing doors and putting out lights as I went.

Again the cautious reconnaissance at the church main door, again the deserted street. I dragged the man across the street into what little cover was offered by the taxi and lowered him into the canal as soundlessly as he would doubtless have lowered me if he’d been a bit handier with the whippet, which I now lowered into the canal after him. I went back to the taxi and was about to open the driver’s door when a door of the house next to the church swung wide and a man appeared, who looked around uncertainly and then made his way across to where I was standing.

He was a big, burly character dressed in what appeared to be some kind of voluminous nightgown with a bathing wrap over it. He had rather an impressive head, with a splendid mane of white hair, a white moustache, a pink-cheeked healthy complexion and, at that moment, an air of slightly bemused benevolence.

‘Can I be of help?’ He had the deep resonant modulated voice of one obviously accustomed to hearing quite a lot of it. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘What should be wrong?’

‘I thought I heard a noise coming from the church.’

‘The church?’ It was my turn to look bemused.

‘Yes. My church. There.’ He pointed to it in case I couldn’t recognize a church when I saw one. ‘I’m the pastor. Goodbody. Dr Thaddeus Goodbody. I thought some intruder was perhaps moving around—’

‘Not me, Reverend. I haven’t been inside a church for years.’

He nodded as if he weren’t at all surprised. ‘We live in a godless age. A strange hour to be abroad, young man.’

‘Not for a taxi-driver on the night shift.’

He looked at me with an unconvinced expression and peered into the back of the taxi. ‘Merciful heavens. There’s a body on the floor.’

‘There isn’t a body on the floor. There’s a drunken sailor on the floor and I’m taking him back to his ship. He just fell to the floor a few seconds ago so I stopped to get him back on his seat again. I thought,’ I added virtuously, ‘that it would be the Christian thing to do. With a corpse, I wouldn’t bother.’

My professional appeal availed nothing. He said, in the tone which he presumably kept for reproaching the more backsliding of his flock: ‘I insist on seeing for myself.’

He pressed firmly forward and I pressed him firmly back again. I said: ‘Don’t make me lose my licence. Please.’

‘I knew it! I knew it! Something is far amiss. So I can make you lose your licence?’

‘Yes. If I throw you into the canal then I’ll lose my licence. If, that is,’ I added consideringly, ‘you manage to climb back out again.’

‘What! The canal! Me? A man of God? Are you threatening me with violence, sir?’

‘Yes.’

Dr Goodbody backed off several rapid paces.

‘I have your licence, sir. I shall report you—’

The night was wearing on and I wanted some sleep before the morning, so I climbed into the car and drove off. He was shaking his fist at me in a fashion that didn’t say much for his concept of brotherly love and appeared to be delivering himself of some vehement harangue but I couldn’t hear any of it. I wondered if he would lodge a complaint with the police and thought that the odds were against it.

I was getting tired of carrying George up stairs. True, he weighed hardly anything at all, but what with the lack of sleep and dinner I was a good way below par and, moreover, I’d had my bellyful of junkies. I found the door to Astrid’s tiny flat unlocked, which was what I would have expected to find if George had been the last person to use it. I opened it, switched on the light, walked past the sleeping girl, and deposited George none too gently on his own bed. I think it must have been the noise the mattress made and not the bright overhead light in her room that wakened Astrid: in any event, she was sitting up in her bed-settee and rubbing eyes still bemused from sleep as I returned to her room. I looked down at her in what I hoped was a speculative fashion and said nothing.

‘He was asleep, then I went to sleep,’ she said defensively. ‘He must have got up and gone out again.’ When I treated this masterpiece of deduction with the silence it deserved she went on almost desperately: ‘I didn’t hear him go out. I didn’t. Where did you find him?’

‘You’d never guess, I’m sure. In a garage, over a barrel-organ, trying to get the cover off. He wasn’t making much progress.’

As she had done earlier that night, she buried her face in her hands: this time she wasn’t crying, although I supposed drearily that it would be only a matter of time.

‘What’s so upsetting about that?’ I asked. ‘He’s very interested in barrel-organs, isn’t he, Astrid? I wonder why. It is curious. He’s musical, perhaps?’

‘No. Yes. Ever since he was a little boy—’

‘Oh, be quiet. If he was musical he’d rather listen to a pneumatic drill. There’s a very simple reason why he dotes on those organs. Very simple and both you and I know what it is.’

She stared at me, not in surprise: her eyes were sick with fear. Wearily, I sank down on the edge of the bed and took both her hands in mine.

‘Astrid?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re almost as accomplished a liar as I am. You didn’t go looking for George because you knew damn well where George was and you know damn well where I found him, in a place where he was safe and sound, in a place where the police would never find him because they would never think to look for anyone there.’ I sighed. ‘A smoke is not the needle, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.’

She looked at me with a stricken face, then got back to burying her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook as I knew they would. How obscure or what my motives were I didn’t know, I just couldn’t sit there without holding out at least a tentatively comforting hand and when I did she looked up at me numbly through tear-filled eyes, reached up her hands and sobbed bitterly on my shoulder. I was becoming accustomed to this treatment in Amsterdam but still far from reconciled to it, so I tried to ease her arms gently away but she only tightened them the more. It had, I knew, nothing whatsoever to do with me: for the moment she needed something to cling to and I happened to be there. Gradually the sobs eased and she lay there, her tear-stained face defenceless and full of despair.

I said: ‘It’s not too late, Astrid.’

‘That’s not true. You know as well as I know, it was too late from the beginning.’

‘For George, yes, it is. But don’t you see I’m trying to help you?’

‘How can you help me?’

‘By destroying the people who have destroyed your brother. By destroying the people who are destroying you. But I need help. In the end, we all need help you, me, everyone. Help me and I’ll help you. I promise you, Astrid.’

I wouldn’t say that the despair in her face was replaced by some other expression but at least it seemed to become a degree less total as she nodded once or twice, smiled shakily and said: ‘You seem very good at destroying people.’

‘You may have to be, too,’ I said and I gave her a very small gun, a Lilliput, the effectiveness of which belies its tiny .21 bore.

I left ten minutes later. As I came out into the street I saw two shabbily dressed men sitting on a step in a doorway almost opposite, arguing heatedly but not loudly so I transferred my gun to my pocket and walked across to where they were. Ten feet away I sheered off for the pungent odour of rum in the air was so overwhelming as to give rise to the thought that they hadn’t so much been drinking the stuff but were newly arisen from immersion in a vat of the best Demerara. I was beginning to see spooks in every flickering shadow and what I needed was sleep, so I collected the taxi, drove back to the hotel and went to sleep.

EIGHT

Remarkably, the sun was shining when my portable alarm went off the following morning – or the same morning. I showered, shaved, dressed, went downstairs and breakfasted in the restaurant with such restoring effect that I was able to smile at and say a civil good morning to the assistant manager, the doorman and the barrel-organ attendant in that order. I stood for a minute or two outside the hotel looking keenly around me with the air of a man waiting for his shadow to turn up, but it seemed that discouragement had set in and I was able to make my unaccompanied way to where I’d left the police taxi the previous night. Even though, in broad daylight, I’d stopped staring at shadows I opened the hood all the same but no one had fixed any lethal explosive device during the night so I drove off and arrived at the Marnixstraat HQ at precisely ten o’clock, the promised time.

Colonel de Graaf, complete with search warrant, was waiting for me in the street. So was Inspector van Gelder. Both men greeted me with the courteous restraint of those who think their time is being wasted but are too polite to say so and led me to a chauffeur-driven police car which was a great deal more luxurious than the one they’d given me.

‘You still think our visit to Morgenstern and Muggenthaler is desirable?’ de Graaf asked. ‘And necessary?’

‘More so than ever.’

‘Something has happened? To make you feel that way?’

‘No,’ I lied. I touched my head. ‘I’m fey at times.’

De Graaf and van Gelder looked briefly at each other. ‘Fey?’ de Graaf said carefully.

‘I get premonitions.’

There was another brief interchange of glances to indicate their mutal opinion of police officers who operated on this scientific basis, then de Graaf said, circumspectly changing the topic: ‘We have eight plain-clothes officers standing by down there in a plain van. But you say you don’t really want the place searched?’

‘I want it searched all right rather, I want to give the appearance of a search. What I really want are the invoices giving a list of all the suppliers of souvenir items to the warehouse.’

‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ van Gelder said. He sounded grave.

‘You hope,’ I said. ‘How do you think I feel?’

Neither of them said how they thought I felt, and as it seemed that the line of conversation was taking an unprofitable turn we all kept quiet until we arrived at our destination. We drew up outside the warehouse behind a nondescript grey van and got out and as we did a man in a dark suit climbed down from the front of the grey van and approached us. His civilian suit didn’t do much for him as disguise went: I could have picked him out as a cop at fifty yards.

He said to de Graaf: ‘We’re ready, sir.’

‘Bring your men.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The policeman pointed upwards. ‘What do you make of that sir?’

We followed the direction of his arm. There was a wind blowing gustily that morning, nothing much but enough to give a slow if rather erratic pendulum swing to a gaily coloured object suspended from the hoisting beam at the top of the warehouse: it swung through an arc of about four feet and was, in its setting, one of the most gruesome things I had ever encountered.

Unmistakably, it was a puppet, and a very large puppet at that, well over three feet tall and dressed, inevitably, in the usual immaculate and beautifully tailored traditional Dutch costume, the long striped skirt billowing coquettishly in the wind. Normally, wires or ropes are used to pass through the pulleys of hoisting beams but in this instance someone had elected to use a chain instead: the puppet was secured to the chain by what could be seen, even at that elevation, to be a wicked-looking hook, a hook that was fractionally too small for the neck it passed round, so small that it had obviously had to be forced into position for the neck had been crushed at one side so that the head leaned over at a grotesque angle, almost touching the right shoulder. It was, after all, no more than a mutilated doll: but the effect was horrifying to the point of obscenity. And obviously I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

‘What a macabre sight.’ De Graaf sounded shocked and he looked it too. ‘What in the name of God is that for? What – what’s the point of it, what’s the purpose behind it? What kind of sick mind could perpetrate an – an obscenity like that?’

Van Gelder shook his head. ‘Sick minds are everywhere and Amsterdam has its fair share. A jilted sweetheart, a hated mother-in-law—’

‘Yes, yes, those are legion. But this this is abnormality to the point of insanity. To express your feelings in this terrible way.’ He looked at me oddly, as if he were having second thoughts about the purposelessness of this visit. ‘Major Sherman, doesn’t it strike you as very strange—’

‘It strikes me the way it strikes you. The character responsible has a cast-iron claim to the first vacancy in a psychotic ward. But that isn’t why I came here.’

‘Of course not, of course not.’ De Graaf had a last long look at the dangling puppet, as if he could hardly force himself to look away, then gestured abruptly with his head and led the way up the steps towards the warehouse. A porter of sorts took us to the second floor and then to the office in the corner which, unlike the last time I had seen it, now had its time-locked door hospitably open.

The office, in sharp contrast to the warehouse itself, was spacious and uncluttered and modem and comfortable, beautifully carpeted and draped in different shades of lime and equipped with very expensive up-to-the-minute Scandinavian furniture more appropriate to a luxurious lounge than to a dock-side office. Two men seated in deep armchairs behind separate large and leather-covered desks rose courteously to their feet and ushered de Graaf, van Gelder and myself into other and equally restful armchairs while they themselves remained standing. I was glad they did, for this way I could have a better look at them and they were both, in their way, very similar, well worth looking at. But I didn’t wait more than a few seconds to luxuriate in the warmth of their beaming reception.

I said to de Graaf: ‘I have forgotten something very important. It is imperative I make a call on a friend immediately.’ It was, too: I don’t often get this chilled and leaden feeling in the stomach but when I do I’m anxious to take remedial action with the least delay.

De Graaf looked his surprise. ‘A matter so important, it could have slipped your mind?’

‘I have other things on my mind. This just came into it.’ Which was the truth.

‘A phone call, perhaps—’

‘No, no. Must be personal.’

‘You couldn’t tell me the nature—’

‘Colonel de Graaf!’ He nodded in quick understanding, appreciating the fact that I wouldn’t be likely to divulge State secrets in the presence of the proprietors of a warehouse about which I obviously held serious reservations. ‘If I could borrow your car and driver—’

‘Certainly,’ he said unenthusiastically.

‘And if you could wait till I come back before—’

‘You ask a great deal, Mr Sherman.’

‘I know. But I’ll only be minutes.’

I was only minutes. I had the driver stop at the first café we came to, went inside and used their public telephone. I heard the dialling tone and could feel my shoulders sag with relief as the receiver at the other end, after relay through an hotel desk, was picked up almost immediately. I said: ‘Maggie?’

‘Good morning, Major Sherman.’ Always polite and punctilious was Maggie and I was never more glad to hear her so.

‘I’m glad I caught you. I was afraid that you and Belinda might already have left she hasn’t left, has she?’ I was much more afraid of several other things but this wasn’t the time to tell her.

‘She’s still here,’ Maggie said placidly.

‘I want you both to leave your hotel at once. When I say at once, I mean within ten minutes. Five, if possible.’

‘Leave? You mean—’

‘I mean pack up, check out and don’t ever go near it again. Go to another hotel. Any hotel … No, you blithering idiot, not mine. A suitable hotel. Take as many taxis as you like, make sure you’re not followed. Telephone the number to the office of Colonel de Graaf in the Marnixstraat. Reverse the number.’

‘Reverse it?’ Maggie sounded shocked. ‘You mean you don’t trust the police either?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “either” but I don’t trust anyone, period. Once you’ve booked in, go look for Astrid Lemay. She’ll be home — you have the address — or in the Balinova. Tell her she’s to come to stay at your hotel till I tell her it’s safe to move.’

‘But her brother—’

‘George can stay where he is. He’s in no danger.’ I couldn’t remember later whether that statement was the sixth or seventh major mistake I’d made in Amsterdam. ‘She is. If she objects, tell her you’re going, on my authority, to the police about George.’

‘But why should we go to the police—’

‘No reason. But she’s not to know that. She’s so terrified that at the very mention of the word “police”—’

‘That’s downright cruel,’ Maggie interrupted severely.

‘Fiddlesticks!’ I shouted and banged the phone back on its rest.

One minute later I was back in the warehouse and this time I had leisure to have a longer and closer look at the two proprietors. Both of them were almost caricatures of the foreigner’s conception of the typical Amsterdamer. They were both very big, very fat, rubicund and heavily jowled men who, in the first brief introduction I had had to them, had had their faces deeply creased in lines of good-will and joviality, an expression that was now conspicuously lacking in both. Evidently, de Graaf had become impatient even with my very brief absence and had started the proceedings without me. I didn’t reproach him and, in return, he had the tact not to enquire how things had gone with me. Both Muggenthaler and Morgenstern were still standing in almost the identical positions in which I’d left them, gazing at each other in consternation and dismay and complete lack of understanding. Muggenthaler, who was holding a paper in his hand, let it fall to his side with a gesture of total disbelief.

‘A search warrant.’ The overtones of pathos and heart-break and tragedy would have moved a statue to tears; had he been half his size he’d have been a natural for Hamlet.

‘A search warrant for Morgenstern and Muggenthaler! For a hundred and fifty years our two families have been respected, no, honoured tradesmen in the city of Amsterdam. And now this!’ He groped behind him and sank into a chair in what appeared to be some kind of stupor, the paper falling from his hand. ‘A search warrant!’

‘A search warrant,’ Morgenstern intoned. He, too, had found it necessary to seek an armchair. ‘A search warrant, Ernest. A black day for Morgenstern and Muggenthaler! My God! The shame of it! The ignominy of it! A search warrant!’

Muggenthaler waved a despairingly listless hand. ‘Go on, search all you want.’

‘Don’t you want to know what we’re searching for?’ de Graaf asked politely.

‘Why should I want to know?’ Muggenthaler tried to raise himself to a momentary state of indignation, but he was too stricken. ‘In one hundred and fifty years—’

‘Now, now, gentlemen,’ de Graaf said soothingly, ‘don’t take it so hard. I appreciate the shock you must feel and in my own view we’re on a wild goose chase. But an official request has been made and we must go through the official motions. We have information that you have illicitly obtained diamonds—’

‘Diamonds!’ Muggenthaler stared in disbelief at his partner. ‘You hear that, Jan? Diamonds?’ He shook his head and said to de Graaf: ‘If you find some, give me a few, will you?’

De Graaf was unaffected by the morose sarcasm. ‘And, much more important, diamond-cutting machinery.’

‘We’re crammed from floor to ceiling with diamond-cutting machinery,’ Morgenstern said heavily. ‘Look for yourselves.’

‘And the invoice books?’

‘Anything, anything,’ Muggenthaler said wearily.

‘Thank you for your co-operation.’ De Graaf nodded to van Gelder, who rose and left the room. De Graaf went on confidentially: ‘I apologize, in advance, for what is, I’m sure, a complete waste of time. Candidly, I’m more interested in that horrible thing dangling by a chain from your hoisting beam. A puppet.’

‘A what?’ Muggenthaler demanded.

‘A puppet. A big one.’

‘A puppet on a chain.’ Muggenthaler looked both flabbergasted and horrified, which is not an easy thing to achieve. ‘In front of our warehouse? Jan!’

It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say that we raced up the stairs, for Morgenstern and Muggenthaler weren’t built along the right lines, but we made pretty good time for all that. On the third floor we found van Gelder and his men at work and at a word from de Graaf van Gelder joined us. I hoped his men didn’t wear themselves out looking, for I knew they’d never find anything. They’d never even come across the smell of cannabis which had hung so heavily on that floor the previous night, although I felt that the sickly-sweet smell of some powerful flower-based air-freshener that had taken its place could scarcely be described as an improvement. But it hardly seemed the time to mention it to anyone.

The puppet, its back to us and the dark head resting on its right shoulder, was still swaying gently in the breeze. Muggenthaler, supported by Morgenstern and obviously feeling none too happy in his precarious position, reached out gingerly, caught the chain just above the hook and hauled it in sufficiently for him, not without considerable difficulty, to unhook the puppet from the chain. He held it in his arms and stared down at it for long moments, then shook his head and looked up at Morgenstern.

‘Jan, he who did this wicked thing, this sick, sick joke – he leaves our employment this very day.’

‘This very hour,’ Morgenstern corrected. His face twisted in repugnance, not at the puppet, but at what had been done to it. ‘And such a beautiful puppet!’

Morgenstern was in no way exaggerating. It was indeed a beautiful puppet and not only or indeed primarily because of the wonderfully cut and fitted bodice and gown. Despite the fact that the neck had been broken and cruelly gouged by the hook, the face itself was arrestingly beautiful, a work of great artistic skill in which the colours of the dark hair, the brown eyes and the complexion blended so subtly and in which the delicate features had been so exquisitely shaped that it was hard to believe that this was the face of a puppet and not that of a human being with an existence and distinctive personality of her own. Nor was I the only person who felt that way.

De Graaf took the puppet from Muggenthaler and gazed at it. ‘Beautiful,’ he murmured. ‘How beautiful. And how real, how living. This lives.’ He glanced at Muggenthaler. ‘Would you have any idea who made this puppet?’

‘I’ve never seen one like it before. It’s not one of ours, I’m sure, but the floor foreman is the man to ask. But I know it’s not ours.’

‘And this exquisite colouring,’ de Graaf mused. ‘It’s so right for the face, so inevitable. No man could have created this from his own mind. Surely, surely, he must have worked from a living model, from someone he knew. Wouldn’t you say so, Inspector?’

‘It couldn’t have been done otherwise,’ van Gelder said flatly.

‘I’ve the feeling, almost, that I’ve seen this face before,’ de Graaf continued. ‘Any of you gentlemen ever seen a girl like this?’

We all shook our heads slowly and none more slowly than I did. The old leaden feeling was back in my stomach again but this time the lead was coated with a thick layer of ice. It wasn’t just that the puppet bore a frighteningly accurate resemblance to Astrid Lemay: it was so lifelike, it was Astrid Lemay.

Fifteen minutes later, after the thorough search carried out in the warehouse had produced its predictably total negative result, de Graaf took his farewell of Muggenthaler and Morgenstern on the steps of the warehouse, while van Gelder and I stood by. Muggenthaler was back at his beaming while Morgenstern stood by his side, smiling with patronizing satisfaction. De Graaf shook hands warmly with both in turn.

‘Again, a thousand apologies.’ De Graaf was being almost effusive. ‘Our information was about as accurate as it usually is. All records of this visit will be struck from the books.’ He smiled broadly. ‘The invoices will be returned to you as soon as certain interested parties have failed to find all the different illicit diamond suppliers they expected to find there. Good morning, gentlemen.’

Van Gelder and I said our farewell in turn and I shook hands especially warmly with Morgenstern and reflected that it was just as well that he lacked the obvious ability to read thoughts and had unluckily come into this world without any inborn ability to sense when death and danger stood very close at hand: for Morgenstern it was who had been at the Balinova night-club last night and had been the first to leave after Maggie and Belinda had passed out into the street.

We made the journey back to the Marnixstraat in partial silence, by which I mean that de Graaf and van Gelder talked freely but I didn’t. They appeared to be much more interested in the curious incident of the broken puppet than they were in the ostensible reason for our visit to the warehouse, which probably demonstrated quite clearly what they thought of the ostensible reason, and as I hardly liked to intrude to tell them that they had their priorities right, I kept silent,

Back in his office, de Graaf said: ‘Coffee? We have a girl here who makes the best coffee in Amsterdam.’

‘A pleasure to be postponed. Too much of a hurry, I’m afraid.’

‘You have plans? A course of action, perhaps?’

‘Neither. I want to lie on my bed and think.’

‘Then why—’

‘Why come up here in the first place? Two small requests. Find out, please, if any telephone message has come through for me.’

‘Message?’

‘From this person I had to go to see when we were down in the warehouse.’ I was getting so that I could hardly tell whether I was telling the truth or lying.

De Graaf nodded, picked up a phone, talked briefly, wrote down a long screed of letters and figures and handed the paper to me. The letters were meaningless: the figures, reversed, would be the girls’ new telephone number. I put the paper in my pocket.

‘Thank you. I’ll have to decode this.’

‘And the second small request?’

‘Could you lend me a pair of binoculars?’

‘Binoculars?’

‘I want to do some bird-watching,’ I explained.

‘Of course,’ van Gelder said heavily. ‘You will recall, Major Sherman, that we are supposed to be co-operating closely?’

‘Well?’

‘You are not, if I may say so, being very communicative.’

‘I’ll communicate with you when I’ve something worth communicating. Don’t forget that you’ve been working on this for over a year. I haven’t been here for two days yet. Like I say, I have to go and lie down and think.’

I didn’t go and lie down and think. I drove to a telephone-box which I judged to be a circumspect distance from the police headquarters and dialled the number de Graaf had given me.

The voice at the other end of the line said: ‘Hotel Touring.’

I knew it but had never been inside it: it wasn’t the sort of hotel that appealed to my expense account, but it was the sort of hotel I would have chosen for the two girls.

I said: ‘My name is Sherman. Paul Sherman. I believe two young ladies registered with you this morning. Could I speak to them, please?’

‘I’m sorry, they are out at present.’ There was no worry there; if they weren’t out locating or trying to locate Astrid Lemay they would be carrying out the assignment I’d given them in the early hours of the morning. The voice at the other end anticipated my next question. ‘They left a message for you, Mr Sherman. I am to say that they failed to locate your mutual friend and are now looking for some other friends. I’m afraid it’s a bit vague, sir.’

I thanked him and hung up. ‘Help me,’ I’d said to Astrid, ‘and I’ll help you.’ It was beginning to look as if I were helping her all right, helping her into the nearest canal or coffin. I jumped into the police taxi and made a lot of enemies in the brief journey to the rather unambitious area that bordered on the Rembrandtplein.

The door to Astrid’s flat was locked but I still had my belt of illegal ironmongery around my waist. Inside, the flat was as I’d first seen it, neat and tidy and threadbare. There were no signs of violence, no signs of any hurried departure. I looked in the few drawers and closets there were and it seemed to me that they were very bare of clothes indeed. But then, as Astrid had pointed out, they were very poor indeed, so that probably meant nothing. I looked everywhere in the tiny flat where a message of some sort could have been left, but if any had been, I couldn’t find it: I didn’t believe any had been. I locked the front door and drove to the Balinova nightclub.

For a night-club those were still the unearthly early hours of the morning and the doors, predictably, were locked. They were strong doors and remained unaffected by the hammering and the kicking that I subjected them to, which, luckily, was more than could be said for one of the people inside whose slumber I must have so irritatingly disturbed, for a key turned and the door opened a crack. I put my foot in the crack and widened it a little, enough to see the head and shoulders of a faded blonde who was modestly clutching a wrap high at her throat: considering that the last time I had seen her she had been clad in a thin layer of transparent soap bubbles I thought that this was overdoing it a little.

‘I wish to see the manager, please.’

‘We don’t open till six o’clock.’

‘I don’t want a reservation. I don’t want a job. I want to see the manager. Now.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘So. I hope your next job is as good as this one.’

‘I don’t understand.’ No wonder they had the lights so low last night in the Balinova, in daylight that raddled face would have emptied the place like a report that one of the customers had bubonic plague. ‘What do you mean, my job?’

I lowered my voice, which you have to do when you speak with solemn gravity. ‘Just that you won’t have any if the manager finds that I called on a matter of the greatest urgency and you refused to let me see him.’

She looked at me uncertainly then said: ‘Wait here.’ She tried to close the door but I was a lot stronger than she was and after a moment she gave up and went away. She came back inside thirty seconds accompanied by a man still dressedin evening clothes.

I didn’t take to him at all. Like most people, Idon’t like snakes and this was what this man irresistiblyreminded me of. He was very tall and verythin and moved with a sinuous grace. He waseffeminately elegant and dandified and had theunhealthy pallor of a creature of the night. Hisface was of alabaster, his features smooth, his lipsnon-existent: the dark hair, parted in the middle,was plastered flat against his skull. His dress suitwas elegantly cut but he hadn’t as good a tailoras I had: the bulge under the left armpit was quiteperceptible. He held a jade cigarette-holder in athin, white, beautifully manicured hand: his faceheld an expression, which was probably permanent,of quietly contemptuous amusement. Justto have him look at you was a good enough excuseto hit him. He blew a thin stream of cigarettesmoke into the air.

‘What’s all this, my dear fellow?’ He lookedFrench or Italian, but he wasn’t: he was English. ‘We’re not open, you know.’

‘You are now,’ I pointed out. ‘You the manager?’

‘I’m the manager’s representative. If you careto call back later—’ he puffed some more of hisobnoxious smoke into the air - ‘much later, then we’ll see—’

‘I’m a lawyer from England and on urgent business.’ I handed him a card saying I was a lawyer from England. ‘It is essential that I see the manager at once. A great deal of money is involved.’

If such an expression as he wore could be said to soften, then his did, though you had to have a keen eye to notice the difference. ‘I promise nothing, Mr Harrison.’ That was the name on the card. ‘Mr Durrell may be persuaded to see you.’

He moved away like a ballet dancer on his day off and was back in moments. He nodded to me and stood to one side to let me precede him down a large and dimly lit passage, an arrangement which I didn’t like but had to put up with. At the end of the passage was a door opening on a brightly lit room, and as it seemed to be intended that I should enter without knocking — I did just that. I noted in passing that the door was of the type that the vaults manager – if there is such a person – of the Bank of England would have rejected as being excessive to his requirements.

The interior of the room looked more than a little like a vault itself. Two large safes, tall enough for a man to walk into, were let into one wall. Another wall was given over to a battery of lockable metal cabinets of the rental left-luggage kind commonly found in railway stations. The other two walls may well have been windowless but it was impossible to be sure: they were completely covered with crimson and violet drapes.

The man sitting behind the large mahogany desk didn’t look a bit like a bank manager, at any rate a British banker, who typically has a healthy outdoor appearance about him owing to his penchant for golf and the short hours he spends behind his desk. This man was sallow, about eighty pounds overweight, with greasy black hair, a greasy complexion and permanently bloodshot yellowed eyes. He wore a well-cut blue alpaca suit, a large variety of rings on both hands and a welcoming smile that didn’t become him at all.

‘Mr Harrison?’ He didn’t try to rise: probably experience had convinced him that the effort wasn’t worth it. ‘Pleased to meet you. My name is Durrell.’

Maybe it was, but it wasn’t the name he had been born with: I thought him Armenian, but couldn’t be sure. But I greeted him as civilly as if his name had been Durrell.

‘You have some business to discuss with me?’ he beamed. Mr Durrell was cunning and knew that lawyers didn’t come all the way from England without matters of weighty import, invariably of a financial nature, to discuss.

‘Well, not actually with you. With one of your employees.’

The welcoming smile went into cold storage. ‘With one of my employees?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why bother me?’

‘Because I couldn’t find her at her home address. I am told she works here.’

‘She?’

‘Her name is Astrid Lemay.’

‘Well, now.’ He was suddenly more reasonable, as if he wanted to help. ‘Astrid Lemay? Working here.’ He frowned thoughtfully. ‘We have many girls, of course – but that name?’ He shook his head.

‘But friends of hers told me,’ I protested.

‘Some mistake. Marcel?’

The snakelike man smiled his contemptuous smile. ‘No one of that name here.’

‘Or ever worked here?’

Marcel shrugged, walked across to a filing cabinet, produced a folder and laid it on the desk, beckoning to me. ‘All the girls who work here or have done in the past year. Look for yourself.’

I didn’t bother looking. I said: ‘I’ve been misinformed. My apologies for disturbing you.’

‘I suggest you try some of the other night-clubs.’ Durrell, in the standard tycoon fashion, was already busy making notes on a sheet of paper to indicate that the interview was over. ‘Good day, Mr Harrison.’

Marcel had already moved to the doorway. I followed, and as I passed through, turned and smiled apologetically. ‘I’m really sorry—’

‘Good day.’ He didn’t even bother to lift his head. I did some more uncertain smiling, then courteously pulled the door to behind me. It looked a good solid soundproof door.

Marcel, standing just inside the passageway, gave me his warm smile again and, not even condescending to speak, contemptuously indicated that I should precede him down the passageway. I nodded, and as I walked past him I hit him in the middle with considerable satisfaction and a great deal of force, and although I thought that was enough I hit him again, this time on the side of the neck. I took out my gun, screwed on the silencer, took the recumbent Marcel by the collar of his jacket and dragged him towards the office door which I opened with my gun-hand.

Durrell looked up from his desk. His eyes widened as much as eyes can widen when they’re almost buried in folds of fat. Then his face became very still, as faces become when the owners want to conceal their thoughts or intentions.

‘Don’t do it,’ I said. ‘Don’t do any of the standard clever things. Don’t reach for a button, don’t press any switches on the floor, and don’t, please, be so naive as to reach for the gun which you probably have in the top right-hand drawer, you being a right-handed man.’

He didn’t do any of the standard clever things.

‘Push your chair back two feet.’

He pushed his chair back two feet. I dropped Marcel to the floor, reached behind me, closed the door, turned the very fancy key in the lock, then pocketed the key. I said: ‘Get up.’

Durrell got up. He stood scarcely more than five feet high. In build, he closely resembled a bullfrog. I nodded to the nearer of the two large safes.

‘Open it.’

‘So that’s it.’ He was good with his face but not so good with his voice. He wasn’t able to keep that tiny trace of relief out of his voice. ‘Robbery, Mr Harrison.’

‘Come here,’ I said. He came. ‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Know who you are?’ A look of puzzlement. ‘You just told me—’

‘That my name is Harrison. Who am I?’

‘I don’t understand.’

He screeched with pain and fingered the already bleeding welt left by the silencer of my gun.

‘Who am I?’

‘Sherman.’ Hate was in the eyes and the thick voice. ‘Interpol.’

‘Open that door.’

‘Impossible. I have only half the combination. Marcel here has—’

The second screech was louder, the weal on the other cheek comparably bigger.

‘Open that door.’

He twiddled with the combination and pulled the door open. The safe was about 30 inches square, of a size to hold a great deal of guilders, but then, if all the tales about the Balinova were true, tales that whispered darkly of gaming-rooms and much more interesting shows in the basement and the brisk retail of items not commonly found in ordinary retail shops, the size was probably barely adequate.

I nodded to Marcel. ‘Junior, here. Shove him inside.’

‘In there?’ He looked horrified.

‘I don’t want him coming to and interrupting our discussion.’

‘Discussion?’

‘Open up.’

‘He’ll suffocate. Ten minutes and—’

‘The next time I have to ask it will be after I put a bullet through your kneecap so that you’ll never walk without a stick again. Believe me?’

He believed me. Unless you’re a complete fool, and Durrell wasn’t, you can always tell when a man means something. He dragged Marcel inside, which was probably the hardest work he’d done in years, because he had to do quite a bit of bending and pushing to get Marcel to fit on the tiny floor of the safe in such a way that the door could be closed. The door was closed.

I searched Durrell. He’d no offensive weapon on him. The right-hand drawer of his desk predictably yielded up a large automatic of a type unknown to me, which was not unusual as I’m not very good with guns except when aiming and firing them.

‘Astrid Lemay,’ I said. ‘She works here.’

‘She works here.’

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know. Before God, I don’t know.’ The last was almost in a scream as I’d lifted the gun again.

‘You could find out.’

‘How could I find out?’

‘Your ignorance and reticence do you credit,’ I said. ‘But they are based on fear. Fear of someone, fear of something. But you’ll become all knowledgeable and forthcoming when you learn to fear something else more. Open that safe.’

He opened the safe. Marcel was still unconscious.

‘Get inside.’

‘No.’ The single word came out like a hoarse scream. ‘I tell you, it’s airtight, hermetically sealed. Two of us in there – we’ll be dead in minutes if I go in there.’

‘You’ll be dead in seconds if you don’t.’

He went inside. He was shaking now. Whoever this was, he wasn’t one of the king-pins: whoever masterminded the drug racket was a man – or men – possessed of a toughness and ruthlessness that was absolute and this man was possessed of neither.

I spent the next five minutes without profit in going through every drawer and file available to me. Everything I examined appeared to be related in one way or another to legitimate business dealing, which made sense, for Durrell would be unlikely to keep documents of a more incriminating nature where the office cleaner could get her hands on them. After five minutes I opened the safe door.

Durrell had been wrong about the amount of breathable air available inside that safe. He’d overestimated. He was semi-collapsed with his knees resting on Marcel’s back, which made it fortunate for Marcel that he was still unconscious. At least, I thought he was unconscious. I didn’t bother to check. I caught Durrell by the shoulder and pulled. It was like pulling a bull moose out of a swamp, but he came eventually and rolled out on to the floor. He lay there for a bit, then pushed himself groggily to his knees. I waited patiently until the laboured stertorous whooping sound dropped to a mere gasping wheeze and his complexion ran through the spectrum from a bluish-violet colour to what would have been a becomingly healthy pink had I not known that his normal complexion more resembled the colour of old newspaper. I prodded him and indicated that he should get to his feet and he managed this after a few tries.

‘Astrid Lemay?’ I said.

‘She was here this morning.’ His voice came as a hoarse whisper but audible enough all the same. ‘She said that very urgent family matters had come up. She had to leave the country.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, with her brother.’

‘He was here?’

‘No.’

‘Where did she say she was going?’

‘Athens. She belonged there.’

‘She came here just to tell you this?’

‘She had two months’ back pay due. She needed it for the fare.’

I told him to get back inside the safe. I had a little trouble with him, but he finally decided that it offered a better chance than a bullet, so he went. I didn’t want to terrify him any more. I just didn’t want him to hear what I was about to say.

I got through to Schiphol on a direct line, and was finally connected with the person I wanted.

‘Inspector van Gelder, Police HQ here,’ I said. ‘An Athens flight this morning. Probably KLM. I want to check if two people, names Astrid Lemay and George Lemay, were on board. Their descriptions are as follows – what was that?’

The voice at the other end told me that they had been aboard. There had been some difficulty, apparently, about George being allowed on the flight as his condition was such that both medical and police authorities at the airport had questioned the wisdom of it, but the girl’s pleading had prevailed. I thanked my informant and hung up.

I opened the door of the safe. It hadn’t been shut more than a couple of minutes this time and I didn’t expect to find them in such bad shape and they weren’t. Durrell’s complexion was no more than puce, and Marcel had not only recovered consciousness but recovered it to the extent of trying to lug out his underarm gun, which I had carelessly forgotten to remove. As I took the gun from him before he could damage himself with it, I reflected that Marcel must have the most remarkable powers of recuperation. I was to remember this with bitter chagrin on an occasion that was to be a day or so later and very much more inauspicious for me.

I left them both sitting on the floor, and as there didn’t seem to be anything worthwhile to say none of the three of us said it. I unlocked the door, opened it, closed and locked it behind me, smiled pleasantly at the faded blonde and dropped the key through a street grille outside the Balinova. Even if there wasn’t a spare key available, there were telephones and alarm bells still operating from inside that room and it shouldn’t take an oxyacetylene torch more than two or three hours to open it. There should be enough air inside the room to last that time. But it didn’t seem very important one way or another.

I drove back to Astrid’s flat and did what I should have done in the first place – asked some of her immediate neighbours if they had seen her that morning. Two had, and their stories checked. Astrid and George with two or three cases had left two hours previously in a taxi.

Astrid had skipped and I felt a bit sad and empty about it, not because she had said she would help me and hadn’t but because she had closed the last escape door open to her.

Her masters hadn’t killed her for two reasons. They knew I could have tied them up with her death and that would be coming too close to home. And they didn’t have to because she was gone and no longer a danger to them: fear, if it is sufficiently great, can seal lips as effectively as death.

I’d liked her and would have liked to see her happy again. I couldn’t blame her. For her, all the doors had been closed.

NINE

The view from the top of the towering Havengebouw, the skyscraper in the harbour, is unquestionably the best in Amsterdam. But I wasn’t interested in the view that morning, only in the facilities this vantage point had to offer. The sun was shining, but it was breezy and cool at that altitude and even at sea-level the wind was strong enough to ruffle the blue-grey waters into irregular wavy patterns of white horses.

The observation platform was crowded with tourists, for the most part with wind-blown hair, binoculars and cameras, and although I didn’t carry any camera I didn’t think I looked different from any other tourist. Only my purpose in being up there was.

I leaned on my elbows and gazed out to sea. De Graaf had certainly done me proud with those binoculars, they were as good as any I had ever come across and with the near-perfect visibility that day the degree of definition was all that I could ever have wished for.

The glasses were steadied on a coastal steamer of about a thousand tons that was curving into harbour. Even when I first picked her up I could detect the large rust-streaked patches on the hull and see that she was flying the Belgian flag. And the time, shortly before noon, was right. I followed her progress and it seemed to me that she was taking a wider sweep than one or two vessels that had preceded her and was going very close indeed to the buoys that marked the channel: but maybe that was where the deepest water lay.

I followed her progress till she closed on the harbour and then I could distinguish the rather scarred name on the rusty bows. Marianne the name read. The captain was certainly a stickler for punctuality, but whether he was such a stickler for abiding by the law was another question.

I went down to the Havenrestaurant and had lunch. I wasn’t hungry but meal-times in Amsterdam, as my experience had been since coming there, tended to be irregular and infrequent. The food in the Havenrestaurant is well spoken of and I’ve no doubt it merits its reputation: but I don’t remember what I had for lunch that day.

I arrived at the Hotel Touring at one-thirty. I didn’t really expect to find that Maggie and Belinda had returned yet and they hadn’t. I told the man behind the desk that I’d wait in the lounge, but I don’t much fancy lounges, especially when I had to study papers like the papers I had to study from the folder we’d taken from Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s, so I waited till the desk was momentarily unmanned, took the lift to the fourth floor and let myself into the girls’ room. It was a fractionally better room than the previous one they’d had, and the couch, which I immediately tested, was fractionally softer, but there wasn’t enough in it to make Maggie and Belinda turn cartwheels for joy, apart from the fact that the first cartwheel in any direction would have brought them up against a solid wall.

I lay on that couch for over an hour, going through all the warehouse’s invoices and a very unexciting and innocuous list of invoices they turned out to be. But there was one name among all the others that turned up with surprising frequency and as its products matched with the line of my developing suspicions, I made a note of its name and map location.

A key turned in the lock and Maggie and Belinda entered. Their first reaction on seeing me seemed to be one of relief, which was quickly followed by an unmistakable air of annoyance. I said mildly: ‘Is there something up, then?’

‘You had us worried,’ Maggie said coldly. ‘The man at the desk said you were waiting for us in the lounge and you weren’t there.’

‘We waited half an hour.’ Belinda was almost bitter about it. ‘We thought you had gone.’

‘I was tired. I had to lie down. Now that I’ve apologized, how did your morning go?’

‘Well—’ Maggie didn’t seem very mollified ‘we had no luck with Astrid—’

‘I know. The man at the desk gave me your message. We can quit worrying about Astrid. She’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ they said.

‘Skipped the country.’

‘Skipped the country?’

‘Athens.’

‘Athens?’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep the vaudeville act for later. ‘She and George left Schiphol this morning.’

‘Why?’ Belinda asked.

‘Scared. The bad men were leaning on her from one side and the good guy – me – on the other. So she lit out.’

‘How do you know she’s gone?’ Maggie enquired.

‘A man at the Balinova told me.’ I didn’t elaborate, if they’d any illusions left about the nice boss they had I wanted them to keep them. ‘And I checked with the airport.’

‘Mm.’ Maggie was unimpressed by my morning’s work, she seemed to have the feeling that it was all my fault that Astrid had gone and as usual she was right. ‘Well, Belinda or me first?’

‘This first.’ I handed her the paper with the figures 910020 written on it. ‘What does it mean?’

Maggie looked at it, turned it upside down and looked at the back. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Let me see it,’ Belinda said brightly. ‘I’m good at anagrams and cross-words.’ She was, too. Almost at once she said: ‘Reverse it. 020019. Two a.m. on the 19th, which is tomorrow morning.’

‘Not bad at all,’ I said indulgently. It had taken me half an hour to work it out.

‘What happens then?’ Maggie asked suspiciously.

‘Whoever wrote those figures forgot to explain that,’ I said evasively, for I was getting tired of telling outright lies. ‘Well, Maggie, you.’

‘Well.’ She sat down and smoothed out a lime-green cotton dress which looked as if it had shrunk an awful lot with repeated washing. ‘I put on this new dress to the park because Trudi hadn’t seen it before and the wind was blowing so I had a scarf over my head and–’

‘And you were wearing dark glasses.’

‘Right.’ Maggie wasn’t an easy girl to throw off stride. ‘I wandered around for half an hour, dodging pensioners and prams most of the time. Then I saw her – or rather I saw this enormous fat old – old–’

‘Beldam?’

‘Beldam. Dressed like you said she would be. Then I saw Trudi. Long-sleeved white cotton dress, couldn’t keep still, skipped about like a lamb.’ Maggie paused and said reflectively: ‘She really is a rather beautiful girl.’

‘You have a generous soul, Maggie.’

Maggie took the hint. ‘By and by they sat down on a bench. I sat on another about thirty yards away, just looking over the top of a magazine. A Dutch magazine.’

‘A nice touch,’ I approved.

‘Then Trudi started plaiting the hair of this puppet–’

‘What puppet?’

‘The puppet she was carrying,’ Maggie said patiently. ‘If you keep on interrupting I find it difficult to remember all the details. While she was doing this a man came up and sat beside them. A big man in a dark suit with a priest’s collar, white moustache, marvellous white hair. He seemed a very nice man.’

‘I’m sure he was,’ I said mechanically. I could well imagine the Rev. Thaddeus Goodbody as a man of instant charm except, perhaps, at half-past three in the morning.

‘Trudi seemed very fond of him. After a minute or two, she reached an arm round his neck and whispered something in his ear. He made a great play of being shocked but you could see he wasn’t really, for he reached a hand into his pocket and pressed something into her hand. Money, I suppose.’ I was on the point of asking if she was sure it wasn’t a hypodermic syringe, but Maggie was far too nice for that. ‘Then she rose, still clutching this puppet, and skipped across to an ice-cream van. She bought an ice-cream cornet – and then she started walking straight towards me.’

‘You left?’

‘I held the magazine higher,’ Maggie said with dignity. ‘I needn’t have bothered. She headed past me towards another open van about twenty feet away.’

‘To admire the puppets?’

‘How did you know?’ Maggie sounded disappointed.

‘Every second van in Amsterdam seems to sell puppets.’

‘That’s what she did. Fingered them, stroked them. The old man in charge tried to look angry but who could be angry with a girl like that? She went right round the van, then went back to the bench. She kept on offering the cornet to the puppet.’

‘And didn’t seem upset when the puppet didn’t want any. What were the old girl and the pastor doing the while?’

‘Talking. They seemed to have a lot to talk about. Then Trudi got back and they all talked some more, then the pastor patted Trudi on the back, they all rose, he took his hat off to the old girl, as you call her, and they all went away.’

‘An idyllic scene. They went away together?’

‘No. The pastor went by himself.’

‘Try to follow any of them?’

‘No.’

‘Good girl. Were you followed?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘There was a whole crowd of people leaving at the same time as I did. Fifty, sixty, I don’t know. It would be silly for me to say that I was sure nobody had an eye on me. But nobody followed me back here.’

‘Belinda?’

‘There’s a coffee-shop almost opposite the Hostel Paris. Lots of girls came and went from the hostel but I was on my fourth cup before I recognized one who’d been in the church last night. A tall girl with auburn hair, striking, I suppose you would call her—’

‘How do you know what I’d call her? She was dressed like a nun last night.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you couldn’t have seen that she had auburn hair.’

‘She had a mole high up on her left cheekbone.’

‘And black eyebrows?’ Maggie put in.

‘That’s her,’ Belinda agreed. I gave up. I believed them. When one good-looking girl examines another good-looking girl her eyes are turned into long-range telescopes. ‘I followed her to the Kalverstraat,’ Belinda continued. ‘She went into a big store. She seemed to walk haphazardly through the ground floor but she wasn’t being haphazard really for she fetched up pretty quickly at a counter marked” SOUVENIRS: EXPORT ONLY“. The girl examined the souvenirs casually but I knew she was far more interested in the puppets than anything else.’

‘Well, well, well,’ I said. ‘Puppets again. How did you know she was interested?’

‘I just knew,’ Belinda said in the tone of one trying to describe various colours to a person who has been blind from birth. ‘Then after a while she started to examine a particular group of puppets very closely. After shilly-shallying for a while she made her choice, but I knew she wasn’t shilly-shallying.’ I kept prudent silence. ‘She spoke to the assistant who wrote something on a piece of paper.’

‘The time it would—’

‘The time it would take to write the average address.’ She’d carried on blandly as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘Then the girl passed over money and left.’

‘You followed her?’

‘No. Am I a good girl too?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I wasn’t followed.’

‘Or watched? In the store, I mean. By, for instance, any big fat middle-aged man.’

Belinda giggled. ‘Lots of big—’

‘All right, all right, so lots of big fat middle-aged men spend a lot of time watching you. And lots of young thin ones, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’ I paused consideringly. ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee, I love you both.’

They exchanged glances. ‘Well,’ Belinda said, ‘that is nice.’

‘Professionally speaking, dear girls, professionally speaking. Excellent reports from both, I must say. Belinda, you saw the puppet the girl chose?’

‘I’m paid to see things,’ she said primly.

I eyed her speculatively, but let it go. ‘Quite. It was a Huyler costumed puppet. Like the one we saw in the warehouse.’

‘How on earth — did you know?’

‘I could say I’m psychic. I could say “genius”. The fact of the matter is that I have access to certain information that you two don’t.’

‘Well, then, share it with us.’ Belinda, of course.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there are men in Amsterdam who could take you and put you in a quiet dark room and make you talk.’

There was a long pause, then Belinda said: ‘And you wouldn’t?’

‘I might at that,’ I admitted. ‘But they wouldn’t find it so easy to get me into that quiet dark room in the first place.’ I picked up a batch of the invoices. ‘Either of you ever heard of the Kasteel Linden. No? Neither had I. It seems, however, that they supply our friends Morgenstern and Muggenthaler with a large proportion of pendulum clocks.’

‘Why pendulum clocks?’ Maggie asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I lied frankly. ‘There may be a connection. I’d asked Astrid to try to trace the source of a certain type of clock – she had, you understand, a lot of underworld connections that she didn’t want. But she’s gone now. I’ll look into it tomorrow.’

‘We’ll do it today.’ Belinda said. ‘We could go to this Kasteel place and—’

‘You do that and you’re on the next plane back to England. Alternatively, I don’t want to waste time dragging you up from the bottom of the moat that surrounds this castle. Clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ they said meekly and in unison. It was becoming distressingly and increasingly plain that they didn’t regard my bite as being anywhere near as bad as my bark.

I gathered the papers and rose. ‘The rest of the day is yours. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

Oddly, they didn’t seem too happy about getting the rest of the day to themselves. Maggie said: ‘And you?’

‘A car trip to the country. To clear my head. Then sleep, then maybe a boat trip tonight.’

‘One of those romantic night cruises on the canals?’ Belinda tried to speak lightly but it didn’t come off. She and Maggie appeared to be on to something I’d missed. ‘You’ll need someone to watch your back, won’t you? I’ll come.’

‘Another time. But don’t you two go out on the canals. Don’t go near the canals. Don’t go near the night-clubs. And, above all, don’t go near the docks or that warehouse.’

‘And don’t you go out tonight either.’ I stared at Maggie. Never in five years had she spoken so vehemently, so fiercely even: and she’s certainly never told me what to do. She caught my arm, another unheard-of thing. ‘Please.’

‘Maggie!’

‘Do you have to take that boat trip tonight?’

‘Now, Maggie—’

‘At two o’clock in the morning?’

‘What’s wrong, Maggie? It’s not like you to—’

‘I don’t know. Yes, I do know. Somebody seems to be walking over my grave with hob-nailed boots.’

‘Tell him to mind how he goes.’

Belinda took a step towards me. ‘Maggie’s right. You mustn’t go out tonight.’ Her face was tight with concern.

‘You, too, Belinda?’

‘Please.’

There was a strange tension in the room which I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Their faces were pleading, a curious near-desperation in their eyes, much as if I’d just announced that I was going to jump off a cliff.

Belinda said: ‘What Maggie means is, don’t leave us.’

Maggie nodded. ‘Don’t go out tonight. Stay with us.’

‘Oh, hell!’ I said. ‘Next time I need help abroad I’m going to bring a couple of big girls with me.’ I made to move past them towards the door, but Maggie barred the way, reached up and kissed me. Only seconds later Belinda did the same.

‘This is very bad for discipline,’ I said. Sherman out of his depth. ‘Very bad indeed.’

I opened the door and turned to see if they agreed with me. But they said nothing, just stood there looking curiously forlorn. I shook my head in irritation and left.

On the way back to the Rembrandt I bought brown paper and string. In the hotel room I used this to wrap up a complete kit of clothes that was now more or less recovered from the previous night’s soaking, printed a fictitious name and address on it and took it down to the desk. The assistant manager was in position.

‘Where’s the nearest post office?’ I asked.

‘My dear Mr Sherman—’ The punctiliously friendly greeting was automatic but he’d stopped smiling by this time – ‘we can attend to that for you.’

‘Thank you, but I wish to register it personally.’

‘Ah, I understand.’ He didn’t understand at all, which was that I didn’t want brows raised or foreheads creased over the sight of Sherman leaving with a large brown parcel under his arm. He gave me the address I didn’t want.

I put the parcel in the boot of the police car and drove through the city and the suburbs until I was out in the country, heading north. By and by I knew I was running alongside the waters of the Zuider Zee but I couldn’t see them because of the high retaining dyke to the right of the road. There wasn’t much to see on the left hand either: the Dutch countryside is not designed to send the tourist into raptures.

Presently I came to a signpost reading ‘Huyler 5 km’, and a few hundred yards further on turned left off the road and stopped the car soon after in the tiny square of a tiny picture-postcard village. The square had its post office and outside the post office was a public telephone-box. I locked the boot and doors of the car and left it there.

I made my way back to the main road, crossed it and climbed up the sloping grass-covered dyke until I could look out over the Zuider Zee. A fresh breeze sparkled the waters blue and white under the late afternoon sun, but, scenically, one couldn’t say much more for that stretch of water, for the encompassing land was so low that it appeared, when it appeared at all, as no more than a flat dark bar on the horizon. The only distinctive feature anywhere to be seen was an island to the north-east, about a mile off-shore.

This was the island of Huyler and it wasn’t even an island. It had been, but some engineers had built a causeway out to it from the mainland to expose the islanders more fully to the benefits of civilization and the tourist trade. Along the top of this causeway a tarmac highway had been laid.

Nor did the island itself even deserve the description of distinctive. It was so low-lying and flat that it seemed that a wave of any size must wash straight over it, but its flatness was relieved by scattered farm-houses, several big Dutch barns and, on the western shore of the island, facing towards the mainland, a village nestling round a tiny harbour. And, of course, it had its canals. That was all there was to be seen, so I left, regained the road, walked along till I came to a bus stop and caught the first bus back to Amsterdam.

I elected for an early dinner, for I did not expect to have much opportunity to eat later that night and I had the suspicion that whatever the fates had in store for me that night had better not be encountered on a full stomach. And then I went to bed, for I didn’t anticipate having any sleep later that night either.

The travel alarm awoke me at half-past midnight. I didn’t feel particularly rested. I dressed carefully in a dark suit, navy roll-neck jersey, dark rubber-soled canvas shoes and a dark canvas jacket. The gun I wrapped in a zipped oilskin bag and jammed into the shoulder-holster. Two spare magazines went into a similar pouch and I secured those in a zipped pocket of the canvas jacket. I looked longingly at the bottle of Scotch on the side-board and decided against it. I left.

I left, as was by now second nature to me, by the fire-escape. The street below, as usual, was deserted and I knew that nobody followed me as I left the hotel. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to follow me for those who wished me ill knew where I was going and where they could expect to find me. I knew they knew. What I hoped was that no one knew that I knew.

I elected to walk because I didn’t have the car any more and because I had become allergic to taxis of Amsterdam. The streets were empty, at least the streets I chose were. It seemed a very quiet and peaceful city.

I reached the docks area, located myself, and moved on till I stood in the dark shadow of a storage shed. The luminous dial of my watch told me that it was twenty minutes to two. The wind had increased in strength and the air had turned much colder, but there was no rain about although there was rain in the air. I could smell it over the strong nostalgic odours of sea and tar and ropes and all the other things that make dockside areas smell the same the world over. Tattered dark clouds scudded across the only fractionally less dark sky, occasionally revealing a glimpse of a pale high half-moon, more often obscuring it, but even when the moon was hidden the darkness was never absolute, for above there were always rapidly changing patches of starlit sky.

In the brighter intervals I looked out across the harbour that stretched away into first dimness and then nothingness. There were literally hundreds of barges to be seen in this, one of the great barge harbours of the world, ranging in size from tiny twenty-footers to the massive Rhine barges, all jammed in a seemingly inextricable confusion. The confusion, I knew, was more apparent than real. Close packed the barges undoubtedly were but, although it would call for the most intricate manoeuvring, each barge had, in fact, access to a narrow sea lane, which might intersect with two or three progressively larger lanes before reaching the open water beyond. The barges were connected to land by a series of long wide floating gangways, which in turn had other and narrower gangways attached at right angles to them.

The moon went behind a cloud. I moved out of the shadows on to one of the main central gangways, my rubber shoes quite soundless on the wet wood, and even had I been clumping along in hob-nailed boots I question whether anyone – other than those who were ill-intentioned to me – would have paid any heed, because although all the barges were almost certainly inhabited by their crews and in many cases their crews and families, there were only one or two scattered cabin lights to be seen among all the hundreds of craft lying there: and apart from the faint threnody of the wind and the soft creaking and rubbing as the wind made the barges work gently at their moorings, the silence was total. The barge harbour was a city in itself and the city was asleep.

I’d traversed about a third of the length of the main gangway when the moon broke through. I stopped and looked round.

About fifty yards behind me two men were walking purposefully and silently towards me. They were but shadows, silhouettes, but I could see that the silhouettes of their right arms were longer than those of their left arms. They were carrying something in their right hands. I wasn’t surprised to see those objects in their hands just as I hadn’t been surprised to see the men themselves.

I glanced briefly to my right. Two more men were advancing steadily from land on the adjacent paralleling gangway to the right. They were abreast with the two on my own gangway.

I glanced to the left. Two more of them, two more moving dark silhouettes. I admired their co-ordination.

I turned and kept on walking towards the harbour. As I went, I extracted the gun from its holster, removed the waterproof covering, zipped up the covering again and replaced it in a zipped pocket. The moon went behind a cloud. I began to run, and as I did so I glanced over my shoulder. The three pairs of men had also broken into a run. I made another five yards and glanced over my shoulder again. The two men on my gangway had stopped and were lining up their guns on me, or seemed to be, because it was difficult to see in the starlight, but a moment later I was convinced they had for narrow red flames licked out in the darkness although there was no sound of shots, which was perfectly understandable for no man in his right senses was going to upset hundreds of tough Dutch, German and Belgian bargees if he could possibly help it. They appeared, however, to have no objection to upsetting me. The moon came out again and I started to run a second time.

The bullet that hit me did more damage to my clothes than it did to me although the swift burning pain on the outside of my upper right arm made me reach up involuntarily to clasp it. Enough was enough. I swerved off the main gangway, jumped on to the bows of a barge that was moored by a small gangway at right angles and ran silently along the deck till I got in the shelter of the wheelhouse aft. Once in shelter, I edged a cautious eye round the corner.

The two men on the central gangway had stopped and were making urgent sweeping motions to their friends on the right, indicating that I should be outflanked and, more likely than not, shot in the back. They had, I thought, very limited ideas about what constituted fair play and sportsmanship: but there was no questioning their efficiency. Quite plainly, if they were going to get me at all – and I rated their chances as good – it was going to be by this encircling or outflanking method and it would obviously be a very good thing for me if I could disabuse them of this idea as soon as I could; so I temporarily ignored the two men on the central gangway, assuming, and correctly, I hoped, that they would remain where they were and wait for the outflankers to catch me unawares, and turned round to face the left gangway.

Five seconds and they were in view, not running, but walking deliberately and peering into the moon-shadows cast by the wheelhouses and cabins of the barges, which was a very foolhardy or just simply foolish thing to do because I was in the deepest shadow I could find while they, by contrast, were almost brutally exposed by the light of the half-moon and I saw them long before they ever saw me. I doubt whether they ever saw me. One of them, for a certainty, did not, for he never saw anything again: he must have been dead before he struck the gangway and slid with a curious absence of noise, no more than a sibilant splash, into the harbour. I lined up for a second shot, but the other man had reacted very quickly indeed and flung himself backwards out of my line of sight before I could squeeze the trigger again. It occurred to me, for no reason at all, that my sportsmanship was on an even lower level than theirs, but I was in the mood for sitting ducks that night.

I turned and moved for’ard again and peered round the edge of the wheelhouse. The two men on the central gangway hadn’t moved. Perhaps they didn’t know what had happened. They were a very long way away for an accurate pistol shot by night, but I took a long steady careful aim and tried anyway. But this duck was too far away. I heard a man give an exclamation and clutch his leg, but from the alacrity with which he followed his companion and jumped from the gangway into the shelter of a barge he couldn’t have been badly hurt. The moon went behind a cloud again, a very small cloud, but the only cloud for the next minute or so and they had me pin-pointed. I scrambled along the barge, regained the main gangway and started to run further out into the harbour.

I hadn’t got ten yards when that damned moon made its presence felt again. I flung myself flat, landing so that I faced inshore. To my left the gangway was empty which was hardly surprising as the confidence of the remaining man there must have been badly shaken. I glanced to my right. The two men there were much closer than the two who had just so prudently vacated the central gangway and from the fact that they were still walking forward in a purposeful and confident manner it was apparent that they did not yet know that one of their number was at the bottom of the harbour, but they were as quick to learn the virtue of prudence as the other three had been, for they disappeared from the gangway very quickly when I loosed off two quick and speculative shots at them, both of which clearly missed. The two men who had been on the central gangway were making a cautious attempt to regain it, but they were too far away to worry me or I them.

For another five minutes this deadly game of hide-and-seek went on, running, taking cover, loosing off a shot, then running again, while all the time they closed in inexorably on me. They were being very circumspect now, taking the minimum of chances and using their superior numbers cleverly to advantage, one or two engaging my attention while the others scuttled forward from the shelter of one barge to the next. I was soberly and coldly aware that if I didn’t do something different and do it very soon, there could be only one end to this game, and that it must come soon.

Of all the inappropriate times to do so, I chose several of the brief occasions I spent sheltering behind cabins and wheelhouses to think about Belinda and Maggie. Was this, I wondered, why they couldn’t see me now, for not only would they have known they had behaved so queerly the last time I had seen them? Had they guessed, or known by some peculiarly feminine intuitive process, that something like this was going to happen to me and known what the end would be and been afraid to tell me? It was as well, I thought, that they had been right but their faith in the infallibiliy of their boss would have been sadly shaken. I felt desperate and I supposed I must have looked pretty much the same way; I’d expected to find a man with a quick gun or a quicker knife lying in wait for me and I think I could have coped with that, with luck even with two of them: but I had not expected this. What had I said to Belinda outside the warehouse? – ‘He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.’ But now I had no place to run to for I was only twenty yards short of the end of the main gangway. It was a macabre feeling to be hunted to death like a wild animal or a dog with rabies while hundreds of people were sleeping within a hundred yards of me and all I had to do to save myself was to unscrew my silencer and fire two shots in the air and within seconds the entire barge harbour would have been in life-saving uproar. But I couldn’t bring myself to do this, for what I had to do had to be done tonight and I knew this was the last chance I would ever have. My life in Amsterdam after tonight wouldn’t be worth a crooked farthing. I couldn’t bring myself to do it if there was left to me even the slenderest chance imaginable. I didn’t think there was, not what a sane man would call a chance. I don’t think I was quite sane then.

I looked at my watch. Six minutes to two. In yet another way, time had almost run out. I looked at the sky. A small cloud was drifting towards the moon and this would be the minute they would choose for the next and almost certainly last assault: it would have to be the moment I chose for my next and almost certainly last attempt to escape. I looked at the deck of the barge: its cargo was scrap and I picked up a length of metal. I again gauged the direction of that dark little cloud, which seemed to have grown even littler. Its centre wasn’t going to pass directly across the moon but it would have to do.

I’d five shots left in my second magazine and I fired them off in quick succession at where I knew or guessed my pursuers had taken cover. I hoped this might hold them for a few seconds but I don’t think I really believed it. Quickly I shoved the gun back in its waterproof covering, zipped it up and for extra security stowed it not in its holster but in a zipped pocket of my canvas coat, ran along the barge for a few steps, stepped on the gunwale and threw myself on to the main gangway. I scrambled desperately to my feet and as I did I realized that the damned cloud had missed the moon altogether.

I suddenly felt very calm because there were no options open to me now. I ran, because there was nothing else in the world I could do, weaving madly from side to side to throw my wouldbe executioners off aim. Half a dozen times in not three seconds I heard soft thudding sounds – they were as close to me as that now – and twice felt hands that I could not see tugging fiercely at my clothes. Suddenly I threw my head back, flung both arms high in the air and sent the piece of metal spinning into the water and had crashed heavily to the gangway even before I heard the splash. I struggled drunkenly and briefly to my feet, clutched my throat, and toppled over backwards into the canal. I took as deep a breath as possible and held it against the impact.

The water was cold, but not icily so, opaque and not very deep. My feet touched mud and I kept them touching mud. I began to exhale, very slowly, very carefully, husbanding my air reserves which probably weren’t very much as I didn’t go in for this sort of thing very often. Unless I had miscalculated the eagerness of my pursuers to do away with me – and I hadn’t – the two men on the central gangway would have been peering hopefully down at the spot where I had disappeared within five seconds of my disappearance. I hoped that they drew all the wrong conclusions from the slow stream of bubbles drifting to the top of the water and I hoped they drew them soon, for I couldn’t keep up this kind of performance very much longer.

After what seemed about five minutes but was probably not more than thirty seconds I stopped exhaling and sending bubbles to the surface for the excellent reason that I had no more air left in my lungs to exhale. My lungs were beginning to hurt a little now. I could almost hear my heart – I could certainly feel it – thudding away in an empty chest, and my ears ached. I pushed clear of the mud and swam to my right and hoped to God I’d got myself orientated right. I had. My hand came in contact with the keel of a barge and I used the purchase obtained to pass quickly under, then swam up to the surface.

I don’t think I could have stayed below for even a few seconds longer without swallowing water. As it was, when I broke surface it took considerable restraint and will-power to prevent me from drawing in a great lungful of air with a whoop that could have been heard half-way across the harbour, but in certain circumstances, such as when your life depends on it, one can exercise a very considerable amount of will-power indeed and I made do with several large but silent gulps of air.

At first I could see nothing at all, but this was just because of the oily film on the surface of the water that had momentarily glued my eyelids together. I cleared this but still there wasn’t much to see, just the dark hull of the barge I was hiding behind, the main gangway in front of me, and another parallel barge about ten feet distant. I could hear voices, a soft murmuring of voices. I swam silently to the stern of the barge, steadied myself by the rudder and peered cautiously round the stern. Two men, one with a torch, were standing on the gangway peering down at the spot where I had so recently disappeared: the waters were satisfactorily dark and still.

The two men straightened. One of them shrugged and made a gesture with the palms of both hands held upwards: the second man nodded agreement and rubbed his leg tenderly. The first man lifted his arms and crossed them above his head twice, first to his left, then to his right. Just as he did so there was a staccato and spluttering coughing sound as a marine diesel, somewhere very close indeed, started up. It was obvious that neither of the two men cared very much for this new development, for the man who had made the signal at once grabbed the arm of the other and led him away, hobbling badly, at the best speed he could muster.

I hauled myself aboard the barge, which sounds a very simple exercise indeed, but when a sheer-sided bull is four feet clear of the water this simple exercise can turn out to be a near-impossibility and so it turned out for me. But I made it eventually with the aid of the stern-rope, flopped over the gunwale and lay there for a full half minute, gasping away like a stranded whale, before a combination of the beginnings of recovery from complete exhaustion and a mounting sense of urgency had me on my feet again and heading towards the barge’s bows and the main gangway.

The two men who had been so lately bent on my destruction and were now no doubt full of that righteous glow which comes from the satisfaction of a worthwhile job well done were now no more than two vaguely discerned shadows disappearing into the even deeper shadows of the storage sheds on shore. I pulled myself on to the gangway and crouched there for a moment until I had located the source of the diesel, then stooped, ran quickly along the gangway till I came to the place where the barge was secured to a side gangway, first dropping to my hands and knees, then inching along on knees and elbows before peering over the edge of the gangway.

The barge was at least seventy feet in length, broad in proportion and as totally lacking in grace of design as it was possible to be. The for’ard threequarters of the barge was given up entirely to battened holds, then after that came the wheelhouse and, right aft and joined to the wheelhouse, the crew accommodation. Yellow lights shone through the curtained windows. A large man in a dark peaked cap was leaning out of a wheelhouse window talking to a crew member who was about to clamber on to the side gangway to cast off.

The stern of the barge was hard against the main gangway on which I was lying. I waited till the crew member had climbed on to the side gangway and was walking away to cast off for’ard, then slithered down soundlessly on to the stern of the barge and crouched low behind the cabin until I heard the sound of ropes being thrown aboard and the hollow thump of feet on wood as the man jumped down from the side gangway. I moved silently for’ard until I came to an iron ladder fitted to the fore end of the cabin, climbed up this and edged for’ard in a prone position till I was stretched flat on the stepped wheelhouse roof. The navigation lights came on but this was no worry: they were so positioned on either side of the wheelhouse roof that they had the comforting effect of throwing the position in which I lay into comparatively deeper shadow.

The engine note deepened and the side gangway slowly dropped astern. I wondered bleakly if I had stepped from the frying-pan into the fire.

TEN

I had been pretty certain that I would be putting out to sea that night and anyone who did that under the conditions I expected to experience should also have catered for the possibility of becoming very wet indeed; if I had used even a modicum of forethought in that respect I should have come along fully fitted out with a waterproof scuba suit: but the thought of a waterproof scuba suit had never even crossed my mind and I had no alternative now but to lie where I was and pay the price for my negligence.

I felt as if I were rapidly freezing to death. The night wind out in the Zuider Zee was bitter enough to have chilled even a warmly clad man who was forced to lie motionless, and I wasn’t warmly clad. I was soaked to the skin with sea-water and that chilling wind had the effect of making me feel that I had turned into a block of ice – with the difference that a block of ice is inert while I shivered continuously like a man with black-water fever. The only consolation was that I didn’t give a damn if it rained: I couldn’t possibly become any wetter than I was already.

With numbed and frozen fingers that wouldn’t stay steady I unzipped my jacket pockets, took both the gun and the remaining magazine from their waterproof coverings, loaded the gun and stuck it inside my canvas coat. I wondered idly what would happen if, in an emergency, I found that my trigger finger had frozen solid, so I pushed my right hand inside my sodden jacket. The only effect this had was to make my hand feel colder than ever, so I took it out again.

The lights of Amsterdam were dropping far behind now and we were well out into the Zuider Zee. The barge, I noticed, seemed to be following the same widely curving course as the Marianne had done when she had come into harbour at noon on the previous day. It passed very close indeed to a couple of buoys and, looking over the bows, it seemed to me as if it was on a collision course with a third buoy about four hundred yards ahead. But I didn’t doubt for a minute that the barge skipper knew just exactly what he was doing.

The engine note dropped as the revolutions dropped and two men emerged on deck from the cabin — the first crew to appear outside since we’d cleared the barge harbour. I tried to press myself even closer to the wheelhouse roof, but they didn’t come my way, they headed towards the stern. I twisted round the better to observe them.

One of the men carried a metal bar to which was attached a rope at either end. The two men, one on either side of the poop, paid out a little of their lines until the bar must have been very close to water level. I twisted and looked ahead. The barge, moving very slowly now, was no more than twenty yards distant from the flashing buoy and on a course that would take it within twenty feet of it. I heard a sharp word of command from the wheelhouse, looked aft again and saw that the two men were beginning to let the lines slip through their fingers, one man counting as he did so. The reason for the counting was easy to guess. Although I couldn’t see any in the gloom, the ropes must have been knotted at regular intervals to enable the two men who were paying them out to keep the iron bar at right angles to the barge’s passage through the water.

The barge was exactly abreast the buoy when one of the men called out softly and at once, slowly but steadily, they began to haul their lines inboard. I knew now what was going to happen but I watched pretty closely all the same. As the two men continued to pull, a two-foot cylindrical buoy bobbed clear of the water. This was followed by a four-bladed grapnel, one of the flukes of which was hooked round the metal bar. Attached to this grapnel was a rope. The buoy, grapnel and metal bar were hauled aboard, then the two men began to pull on the grapnel rope until eventually an object came clear of the water and was brought inboard. The object was a grey, metal-banded metal box, about eighteen inches square and twelve deep. It was taken immediately inside the cabin, but even before this was done the barge was under full power again and the buoy beginning to drop rapidly astern. The entire operation had been performed with the ease and surety which bespoke a considerable familiarity with the technique just employed.

Time passed, and a very cold, shivering and miserable time it was too. I thought it was impossible for me to become any colder and wetter than I was but I was wrong, for about four in the morning the sky darkened and it began to rain and I had never felt rain so cold. By this time what little was left of my body heat had managed partially to dry off some of the inner layers of clothing, but from the waist down – the canvas jacket provided reasonable protection – it just proved to have been a waste of time. I hoped that when the time came that I had to move and take to the water again I wouldn’t have reached that state of numbed paralysis where all I could do was sink.

The first light of the false dawn was in the sky now and I could vaguely distinguish the blurred outlines of land to the south and east. Then it became darker again and for a time I could see nothing, and then the true dawn began to spread palely from the east and I could see land once more and gradually came to the conclusion that we were fairly close in to the north shore of Huyler and about to curve away to the south-west and then south towards the island’s little harbour.

I had never appreciated that those damned barges moved so slowly. As far as the coastline of Huyler was concerned, the barge seemed to be standing still in the water. The last thing I wished to happen was to approach the Huyler shore in broad daylight and give rise to comment on the part of the inevitable ship-watchers as to why a crew member should be so eccentric as to prefer the cold roof of the wheelhouse to the warmth inside. I thought of the warmth inside and put the thought out of my mind.

The sun appeared over the far shore of the Zuider Zee but it was no good to me, it was one of those peculiar suns that were no good at drying out clothes and after a little I was glad to see that it was one of those early-morning suns that promised only to deceive, for it was quickly overspread by a pall of dark cloud and soon that slanting freezing rain was hard at work again, stopping what little circulation I had left. I was glad because the cloud had the effect of darkening the atmosphere again and the rain might persuade the harbour rubber-neckers to stay at home.

We were coming towards journey’s end. The rain, now mercifully, had strengthened to the extent where it was beginning to hurt my exposed face and hands and was hissing whitely into the sea: visibility was down to only a couple of hundred yards and although I could see the end of the row of navigation marks towards which the barge was now curving, I couldn’t see the harbour beyond.

I wrapped the gun up in its waterproof cover and jammed it in its holster. It would have been safer, as I’d done previously, to have put it in the zipped pocket of my canvas jacket, but I wasn’t going to take the canvas jacket with me. At least, not far: I was so numbed and weakened by the long night’s experience that the cramping and confining effects of that cumbersome jacket could have made all the difference between my reaching shore or not: another thing I’d carelessly forgotten to take with me was an inflatable life jacket or belt.

I wriggled out of the canvas jacket and balled it up under my arm. The wind suddenly felt a good deal icier than ever but the time for worrying about that was gone. I slithered along the wheelhouse roof, slid silently down the ladder, crawled below the level of the now uncurtained cabin windows, glanced quickly for’ard — an unnecessary precaution, no one in his right mind would have been out on deck at that moment unless he had to — dropped the canvas jacket overboard, swung across the stern-quarter, lowered myself to the full length of my arms, checked that the screw was well clear of my vicinity, and let go.

It was warmer in the sea than it had been on the wheelhouse roof, which was as well for me as I felt myself to be almost frighteningly weak. It had been my intention to tread water until the barge had entered harbour, or at least, under these prevailing conditions, it had disappeared into the murk of the rain, but if ever there was a time for dispensing with refinements this was it. My primary concern, my only concern at the moment, was survival. I ploughed on after the fast receding stern of the barge with the best speed I could muster.

It was a swim, not more than ten minutes in duration, that any six-year-old in good training could have accomplished with ease, but I was way below that standard that morning, and though I can’t claim it was a matter of touch and go, I couldn’t possibly have done it a second time. When I could clearly see the harbour wall I sheered off from the navigation marks, leaving them to my right, and finally made shore.

I sloshed my way up the beach and, as if by a signal, the rain suddenly stopped. Cautiously, I made my way up the slight eminence of earth before me, the top of which was level with the top of the harbour wall, stretched myself flat on the soaking ground and cautiously lifted my head.

Immediately to the right of me were the two tiny rectangular harbours of Huyler, the outer leading by a narrow passage to the inner. Beyond the inner harbour lay the pretty picture-postcard village of Huyler itself, which, with the exception of the one long and two short straight streets lining the inner harbour itself, was a charming maze of twisting roads and a crazy conglomeration of, mainly, green and white painted houses mounted on stilts as a precaution against flood-water. The stilts were walled in for use as cellars, the entrance to the houses being by outside wooden stairs to the first floor.

I returned my attention to the outer harbour. The barge was berthed alongside its inner wall and the unloading of the cargo was already busily under way. Two small shore derricks lifted a succession of crates and sacks from the unbattened holds, but I had no interest in those crates and sacks, which were certainly perfectly legitimate cargo, but in the small metal box that had been picked up from the sea and which I was equally certain was the most illegitimate cargo imaginable. So I let the legitimate cargo look after itself and concentrated my attention on the cabin of the barge. I hoped to God I wasn’t already too late, although I could hardly see how I could have been.

I wasn’t, but it had been a near thing. Less than thirty seconds after I had begun my surveillance of the cabin, two men emerged, one carrying a sack over his shoulder. Although the sack’s contents had clearly been heavily padded, there was an unmistakable angularity to it that left me in little doubt that this was the case that interested me.

The two men went ashore. I watched them for a few moments to get a general idea of the direction they were taking, slid back down the muddy bank – another item on my expense account, my suit had taken a terrible beating that night – and set off to follow the two men.

They were easy to follow. Not only had they plainly no suspicion that they were being followed, those narrow and crazily winding lanes made Huyler a shadow’s paradise. Eventually the two men brought up at a long, low building on the northern outskirts of the village. The ground floor – or cellar as it would be in this village – was made of concrete. The upper storey, reached by a set of wooden steps similar to another concealing set of steps from which I was watching at a safe distance of forty yards, had tall and narrow windows with bars so closely set that a cat would have had difficulty in penetrating, the heavy door had two metal bars across it and was secured by two large padlocks. Both men mounted the stairs, the unburdened man unlocking the two padlocks and opening the door, then both passed inside. They reappeared again within twenty seconds, locked the door behind them and left. Both men were now unburdened.

I felt a momentary pang of regret that the weight of my burglar’s belt had compelled me to leave it behind that night, but one does not go swimming with considerable amounts of metal belted around one’s waist. But the regret was only momentary. Apart from the fact that fifty different windows overlooked the entrance to this heavily barred building and the fact that a total stranger would almost certainly be instantly recognizable to any of the villagers in Huyler, it was too soon yet to show my hand: minnows might make fair enough eating but it was the whales I was after and I needed the bait in that box to catch them.

I didn’t need a street guide to find my way out of Huyler. The harbour lay to the west, so the terminus of the causeway road must lie to the east. I made my way along a few narrow winding lanes, in no mood to be affected by the quaint old-world charm that drew so many tens of thousands of tourists to the village each summer, and came to a small arched bridge that spanned a narrow canal. The first three people I’d seen in the village so far, three Huyler matrons dressed in their traditional flowing costumes, passed me by as I crossed the bridge. They glanced at me incuriously, then as indifferently looked away again as if it were the most natural thing in the world to meet in the streets of Huyler in the early morning a man who had obviously been recently immersed in the sea.

A few yards beyond the canal lay a surprisingly large car park – at the moment it held only a couple of cars and half a dozen bicycles, none of which had padlock or chain or any other securing device. Theft, apparently, was no problem on the island of Huyler, a fact which I found hardly surprising: when the honest citizens of Huyler went in for crime they went in for it in an altogether bigger way. The car park was devoid of human life nor had I expected to find an attendant at that hour. Feeling guiltier about it than about any other action I had performed since arriving at Schiphol Airport, I selected the most roadworthy of the bicycles, trundled it up to the locked gate, lifted it over, followed myself, and pedalled on my way. There were no cries of ‘Stop thief!’ or anything of the kind.

It was years since I’d been on a bicycle, and though I was in no fit state to recapture that first fine careless rapture I got the hang of it again quickly enough, and while I hardly enjoyed the trip it was at least better than walking and had the effect of getting some of my red corpuscles on the move again.

I parked the bicycle in the tiny village square where I’d left the police taxi – it was still there – and looked thoughtfully first at the telephone-box, then at my watch: I decided it was still too early, so I unlocked the car and drove off.

Half a mile along the Amsterdam road I came to an old Dutch barn standing well apart from its farm-house. I stopped the car on the road in such a position that the barn came between it and anyone who might chance to look out from the farm-house. I unlocked the boot, took out the brown paper parcel, made for the barn, found it unlocked, went inside and changed into a completely dry set of clothing. It didn’t have the effect of transforming me into a new man, I still found it impossible to stop shivering, but at least I wasn’t sunk in the depths of that clammily ice-cold misery that I’d been in for hours past.

I went on my way again. After only another half-mile I came to a roadside building about the size of a small bungalow whose sign defiantly claimed that it was a motel. Motel or not, it was open, and I wanted no more. The plump proprietress asked if I wanted breakfast, but I indicated that I had other and more urgent needs. They have in Holland the charming practice of filling your glass of jonge Genever right to the very brim and the proprietress watched in astonishment and considerable apprehension as my shaking hands tried to convey the liquid to my mouth. I didn’t lose more than half of it in spillage, but I could see she was considering calling either police or medical aid to cope with an alcoholic with the DT’s or a drug addict who had lost his hypodermic, whichever the case might be, but she was a brave woman and supplied me with my second jonge Genever on demand. This time I didn’t lose more than a quarter of it, and third time round not only did I spill hardly a drop but I could distinctly feel the rest of my layabout red corpuscles picking up their legs and giving themselves a brisk workout. With the fourth jonge Genever my hand was steady as a rock.

I borrowed an electric razor, then had a gargantuan breakfast of eggs and meat and ham and cheeses, about four different kinds of bread and half a gallon, as near as dammit, of coffee. The food was superb. Fledgling motel it might have been, but it was going places. I asked to use the phone.

I got through to the Hotel Touring in seconds, which was a great deal less time than it took for the desk to get any reply from Maggie’s and Belinda’s room. Finally, a very sleepy-voiced Maggie said: ‘Hullo. Who is it?’ I could just see her standing there, stretching and yawning.

‘Out on the tiles last night, eh?’ I said severely.

‘What?’ She still wasn’t with me.

‘Sound asleep in the middle of the day.’ It was coming up for eight a.m. ‘Nothing but a couple of mini-skirted layabouts.’

‘Is it – is it you?’

‘Who else but the lord and master?’ The jonge Genevers were beginning to make their delayed effect felt.

‘Belinda! He’s back!’ A pause. ‘Lord and master, he says.’

‘I’m so glad!’ Belinda’s voice. ‘I’m so glad. We—’

‘You’re not half as glad as I am. You can get back to your bed. Try to beat the milkman to it tomorrow morning.’

‘We didn’t leave our room.’ She sounded very subdued. ‘We talked and worried and hardly slept a wink and we thought—’

‘I’m sorry. Maggie? Get dressed. Forget about the foam baths and breakfast. Get—’

‘No breakfast? I’ll bet you had breakfast.’ Belinda was having a bad influence on this girl.

‘I had.’

‘And stayed the night in a luxury hotel?’

‘Rank hath its privileges. Get a taxi, drop it on the outskirts of the town, phone for a local taxi and come out towards Huyler.’

‘Where they make the puppets?’

‘That’s it. You’ll meet me coming south in a yellow and red taxi.’ I gave her the registration number. ‘Have your driver stop. Be as fast as you can.’

I hung up, paid up and went on my way. I was glad I was alive. Glad to be alive. It had been the sort of night that didn’t look like having any morning, but here I was and I was glad. The girls were glad. I was warm and dry and fed, the jonge Genever was happily chasing the red corpuscles in a game of merry-go-round, all the coloured threads were weaving themselves into a beautiful pattern and by day’s end it would be over. I had never felt so good before.

I was never to feel so good again.

Nearing the suburbs I was flagged down by a yellow taxi. I stopped and crossed the road just as Maggie got out. She was dressed in a navy skirt and jacket and white blouse and if she’d spent a sleepless night she certainly showed no signs of it. She looked beautiful, but then she always looked that way: there was something special about her that morning.

‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘What a healthy-looking ghost. May I kiss you?’

‘Certainly not,’ I said with dignity. ‘Relationships between employer and employed are—’

‘Do be quiet, Paul.’ She kissed me without permission. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Go out to Huyler. Plenty of places down by the harbour where you can get breakfast. There’s a place I want you to keep under fairly close but not constant surveillance.’ I described the window-barred building and its location. ‘Just try to see who goes in and out of that building and what goes on there. And remember, you’re a tourist. Stay in company or as close as you can to company all the time. Belinda’s still in her room?’

‘Yes.’ Maggie smiled. ‘Belinda took a phone call while I was dressing. Good news, I think.’

‘Who does Belinda know in Amsterdam?’ I said sharply. ‘Who called?’

‘Astrid Lemay.’

‘What in God’s name are you talking about? Astrid’s skipped the country. I’ve got proof.’

‘Sure she skipped it.’ Maggie was enjoying herself. ‘She skipped it because you’d given her a very important job to do and she couldn’t do it because she was being followed everywhere she went. So she skipped out, got off at Paris, got a refund on her Athens ticket and skipped straight back in again. She and George are staying in a place outside Amsterdam with friends she can trust. She says to tell you she followed that lead you gave her. She says to tell you she’s been out to the Kasteel Linden and that—’

‘Oh my God!’ I said. ‘Oh my God!’ I looked at Maggie standing there, the smile slowly dying on her lips and for one brief moment I felt like turning savagely on her, for her ignorance, for her stupidity, for her smiling face, for her empty talk of good news, and then I felt more ashamed of myself than I had ever done in my life, for the fault was mine, not Maggie’s, and I would have cut off my hand sooner than hurt her, so instead I put my arm round her shoulders and said: ‘Maggie, I must leave you.’

She smiled at me uncertainly. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

‘Maggie?’

‘Yes, Paul?’

‘How do you think Astrid Lemay found out the telephone number of your new hotel?’

‘Oh, dear God!’ she said, for now she understood.

I ran across to my car without looking back, started up and accelerated through the gears like a man possessed, which I suppose I really was. I operated the switch that popped up the blue flashing police light and turned on the siren, then clamped the earphones over my head and started fiddling desperately with the radio control knobs. Nobody had ever shown me how to work it and this was hardly the time to learn. The car was full of noise, the high-pitched howling of the over-stressed engine, the clamour of the siren, the static and crackle of the earphones and, what seemed loudest of all to me, the sound of my harsh and bitter and futile swearing as I tried to get that damned radio to work. Then suddenly the crackling ceased and I heard a calm assured voice.

‘Police headquarters,’ I shouted. ‘Colonel de Graaf. Never mind who the hell I am. Hurry, man, hurry!’ There was a long and infuriating silence as I weaved through the morning rush-hour traffic and then a voice on the earphones said: ‘Colonel de Graaf is not in his office yet.’

‘Then get him at home!’ I shouted. Eventually they got him at home. ‘Colonel de Graaf? Yes, yes, yes. Never mind that. That puppet we saw yesterday. I have seen a girl like that before. Astrid Lemay.’ De Graaf started to ask questions but I cut him short. ‘For God’s sake, never mind that. The warehouse – I think she’s in desperate danger. We’re dealing with a criminal maniac. For God’s sake, hurry.’

I threw the earphones down and concentrated on driving and cursing myself. If you want a candidate for easy outwitting, I thought savagely, Sherman’s your man. But at the same time I was conscious that I was being at least a degree unfair to myself: I was up against a brilliantly directed criminal organization, that was for sure, but an organization that contained within it an unpredictable psychopathic element that made normal prediction almost impossible. Sure, Astrid had sold Jimmy Duclos down the river, but it had been Duclos or George, and George was a brother. They’d sent her to get to work on me, for she herself could have had no means of knowing that I was staying at the Rembrandt, but instead of enlisting my aid and sympathy she’d chickened out at the last moment and I’d had her traced and that was when the trouble had begun, that was when she had begun to become a liability instead of an asset. She had begun seeing me – or I her – without their ostensible knowledge. I could have been seen taking George away from that barrel-organ in the Rembrandtplein or at the church or by those two drunks outside her flat who weren’t drunks at all.

They’d eventually decided that it was better to have her out of the way, but not in such a fashion that would make me think that harm had come to her because they probably thought, and rightly, that if I thought she’d been taken prisoner and was otherwise in danger I’d have abandoned all hope of achieving my ultimate objective and done what they knew now was the very last thing I wanted to do – go to the police and lay before them all I knew, which they probably suspected was a great deal. This, too, was the last thing they wanted me to do because although by going to the police I would have defeated my own ultimate ends, I could so severely damage their organization that it might take months, perhaps years, to build it up again. And so Durrell and Marcel had played their part yesterday morning in the Balinova while I had overplayed mine to the hilt and had convinced me beyond doubt that Astrid and George had left for Athens. Sure they had. They’d left all right, been forced off the plane at Paris and forced to return to Amsterdam. When she’d spoken to Belinda, she’d done so with a gun at her head.

And now, of course, Astrid was no longer of any use to them. Astrid had gone over to the enemy and there was only one thing to do with people like that. And now, of course, they need no longer fear any reaction from me, for I had died at two o’clock that morning down in the barge harbour. I had the key to it all now, because I knew why they had been waiting. But I knew the key was too late to save Astrid.

I hit nothing and killed no one driving through Amsterdam, but that was only because its citizens have very quick reactions. I was in the old town now, nearing the warehouse and travelling at high speed down the narrow one-way street leading to it when I saw the police barricade, a police car across the street with an armed policeman at each end of it. I skidded to a halt. I jumped out of the car and a policeman approached me.

‘Police,’ he said, in case I thought he was an insurance salesman or something. ‘Please go back.’

‘Don’t you recognize one of your own cars?’ I snarled. ‘Get out of my damned way.’

‘No one is allowed into this street.’

‘It’s all right.’ De Graaf appeared round the corner and if I hadn’t known from the police car the expression on his face would have told me. ‘It’s not a very pleasant sight. Major Sherman.’

I walked past him without speaking, rounded the comer and looked upwards. From this distance the puppet-like figure swinging lazily from the hoisting beam at the top of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s warehouse looked hardly larger than the puppet I had seen yesterday morning, but then I had seen that one from directly underneath, so this one had to be bigger, much bigger. It was dressed in the same traditional costume as had been the puppet that had swayed to and fro there only so short a time ago: I didn’t have to get any closer to know that the puppet’s face of yesterday would be a perfect replica of the face that was there now. I turned away and walked round the corner, de Graaf with me.

‘Why don’t you take her down?’ I asked. I could hear my own voice coming as if from a distance, abnormally, icily calm and quite toneless.

‘It’s a job for a doctor. He’s gone up there now.’

‘Of course.’ I paused and said: ‘She can’t have been there long. She was alive less than an hour ago. Surely the warehouse was open long before—’

‘This is Saturday. They don’t work on Saturdays.’

‘Of course,’ I repeated mechanically. Another thought had come into my head, a thought that struck an even deeper fear and chill into me. Astrid, with a gun at her head, had phoned the Touring. But she had phoned with a message for me, and that message had been meaningless and could or should have achieved nothing, for I was lying at the bottom of the harbour. It could only have had a purpose if the message had been relayed to me. It would have only been made if they knew I was still alive. How could they have known I was still alive? Who could have conveyed the information that I was still alive? Nobody had seen me – except the three matrons on Huyler. And why should they concern themselves—

There was more. Why should they make her telephone me and then put themselves and their plans in jeopardy by killing Astrid after having been at such pains to convince me that she was alive and well? Suddenly, certainly, I knew the answer. They had forgotten something. I’d forgotten something. They forgot what Maggie had forgotten, that Astrid did not know the telephone number of their new hotel: and I’d forgotten that neither Maggie nor Belinda had ever met Astrid or heard her speak. I walked back round the corner. Below the gable of the warehouse the chain and hook still stirred slightly: but the burden was gone.

I said to de Graaf: ‘Get the doctor.’ He appeared in two minutes, a youngster, I should have thought, fresh out of medical school and looking paler, I suspected, than he normally did.

I said harshly: ‘She’s been dead for hours, hasn’t she?’

He nodded. ‘Four, five, I can’t be sure.’

‘Thank you.’ I walked away back round the corner, de Graaf accompanying me. His face held a score of unasked questions, but I didn’t feel like answering any of them.

‘I killed her,’ I said. ‘I think I may have killed someone else, too.’

‘I don’t understand,’ de Graaf said.

‘I think I have sent Maggie to die.’

‘Maggie?’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you. I had two girls with me, both from Interpol. Maggie was one of them. The other is at the Hotel Touring.’ I gave him Belinda’s name and telephone number. ‘Contact her for me, will you, please? Tell her to lock her door and stay there till she hears from me and that she is to ignore any phone or written message that does not contain the word “Birmingham”. Will you do it personally, please?’

‘Of course.’

I nodded at de Graaf’s car. ‘Can you get through on the radio telephone to Huyler?’

He shook his head.

‘Then police headquarters, please.’ As de Graaf spoke to his driver, a grim-faced van Gelder came round the corner. He had a handbag with him.

‘Astrid Lemay’s?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘Give it to me, please.’

He shook his head firmly. ‘I can’t do that. In a case of murder—’

‘Give it to him,’ de Graaf said.

‘Thank you,’ I said to de Graaf: ‘Five feet four, long black hair, blue eyes, very good-looking, navy skirt and jacket, white blouse and white handbag. She’ll be in the area—’

‘One moment.’ De Graaf leaned towards his driver, then said: ‘The lines to Huyler appear to be dead. Death does seem to follow you around, Major Sherman.’

‘I’ll call you later this morning,’ I said, and turned for my car.

‘I’ll come with you,’ van Gelder said.

‘You have your hands full here. Where I’m going I don’t want any policemen.’

Van Gelder nodded. ‘Which means you are going to step outside the law.’

‘I’m already outside the law. Astrid Lemay is dead. Jimmy Duclos is dead. Maggie may be dead. I want to talk to people who make other people dead.’

‘I think you should give us your gun,’ van Gelder said soberly.

‘What do you expect me to have in my hands when I talk to them? A Bible? To pray for their souls? First you kill me, van Gelder, then you take away the gun.’

De Graaf said: ‘You have information and you are withholding it from us?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is not courteous, wise or legal.’

I got into my car. ‘As for the wisdom, you can judge later. Courtesy and legality no longer concern me.’

I started the engine and as I did van Gelder made a move towards me and I heard de Graaf saying: ‘Leave him be. Inspector, leave him be.’

ELEVEN

I didn’t make many friends on the way back out to Huyler but then I wasn’t in the mood for making friends. Under normal circumstances, driving in the crazy and wholly irresponsible way I did, I should have been involved in at least half a dozen accidents, all of them serious, but I found that the flashing police light and siren had a near-magical effect of clearing the way in front of me. At a distance up to half a mile approaching vehicles or vehicles going in the same direction as I was would slow down or stop, pulling very closely into the side of the road. I was briefly pursued by a police car that should have known better, but the police driver lacked my urgency of motivation and he was clearly and sensibly of the opinion that there was no point in killing himself just to earn his weekly wage. There would be, I knew, an immediate radio alert, but I had no fear of road blocks or any such form of molestation: once the licence plate number was received at HQ I’d be left alone.

I would have preferred to complete the journey in another car or by bus, for one quality in which a yellow and red taxi is conspicuously lacking is unobtrusiveness, but haste was more important than discretion. I compromised by driving along the final stretch of the causeway at a comparatively sedate pace: the spectacle of a yellow and red taxi approaching the village at speed of something in the region of a hundred miles an hour would have given rise to some speculation even among the renownedly incurious Dutch.

I parked the car in the already rapidly filling carpark, removed my jacket, shoulder-holster and tie, upended my collar, rolled up my sleeves, and emerged from the car with my jacket hung carelessly over my left arm: under the jacket I carried my gun with the silencer in place.

The notoriously fickle Dutch weather had changed dramatically for the better. Even as I had left Amsterdam the skies had been clearing and now there were only drifting cotton-wool puffs in an otherwise cloudless sky and the already hot sun was drawing up steam from the houses and adjoining fields. I walked leisurely but not too leisurely towards the building I’d asked Maggie to keep under observation. The door stood wide open now and at intervals I could see people, all women in their traditional costumes, moving around the interior: occasionally one emerged and went into the village, occasionally a man came out with a carton which he would place on a wheelbarrow and trundle into the village. This was the home of a cottage industry of some sort: what kind of industry was impossible to judge from the outside. That it appeared to be an entirely innocuous industry was evidenced by the fact that tourists who occasionally happened by were smilingly invited to come inside and look around. All the ones I saw go inside came out again, so clearly it was the least sinister of places. North of the building stretched an almost unbroken expanse of hayfields and in the distance I could see a group of traditionally dressed matrons tossing hay in the air to dry it off in the morning sun. The men of Huyler, I reflected, seemed to have it made: none of them appeared to do any work at all.

There was no sign of Maggie. I wandered back into the village, bought a pair of tinted spectacles – heavy dark spectacles instead of acting as an aid to concealment tend to attract attention, which is probably why so many people wear them – and a floppy straw hat that I wouldn’t have been seen dead in outside Huyler. It was hardly what one could call a perfect disguise, for nothing short of stain could ever conceal the white scars on my face, but at least it helped to provide me with a certain degree of anonymity and I didn’t think I looked all that different from scores of other tourists wandering about the village.

Huyler was a very small village, but when you start looking for someone concerning whose whereabouts you have no idea at all and when that someone may be wandering around at the same time as you are, then even the smallest village can become embarrassingly large. As briskly as I could without attracting attention, I covered every lane in Huyler and saw no trace of Maggie.

I was in a pretty fair way towards quiet desperation now, ignoring the voice in my mind that told me with numbing certainty that I was too late, and feeling all the more frustrated by the fact that I had to conduct my search with at least a modicum of leisure. I now started on a tour of all the shops and cafés although, if Maggie were still alive and well, I hardly expected to find her in any of those in view of the assignment I had given her. But I couldn’t afford to ignore any possibility.

The shops and cafés round the inner harbour yielded nothing – and I covered every one of them. I then moved out in a series of expanding concentric circles, as far as one can assign so geometrical a term in the maze of haphazard lanes that was Huyler. And it was on the outermost of these circles that I found Maggie, finding her alive, well and totally unscathed: my relief was hardly greater than my sense of foolishness.

I found her where I should have thought to find her right away if I had been using my head as she had been. I’d told her to keep the building under surveillance but at the same time to keep in company and she was doing just that. She was inside a large crowded souvenir shop, fingering some of the articles for sale, but not really looking at them: she was looking fixedly, instead, at the large building less than thirty yards away, so fixedly, that she quite failed to notice me. I took a step to go inside the door to speak to her when I suddenly saw something that held me quite still and made me look as fixedly as Maggie was, although not in the same direction.

Trudi and Herta were coming down the street. Trudi, dressed in a sleeveless pink frock and wearing long white cotton gloves, skipped along in her customary childish fashion, her blonde hair swinging, a smile on her face: Herta, clad in her usual outlandish dress, waddled gravely alongside, carrying a large leather bag in her hand.

I didn’t stand on the order of my going. I stepped quickly inside the shop: but not in Maggie’s direction, whatever else happened I didn’t want those two to see me talking to her: instead I took up a strategic position behind a tall revolving stand of picture-postcards and waited for Herta and Trudi to pass by.

They didn’t pass by. They passed by the front door, sure enough, but that was as far as they got, for Trudi suddenly stopped, peered through the window where Maggie was standing and caught Herta by the arms. Seconds later she coaxed the plainly reluctant Herta inside the shop, took her arm away from Herta who remained hovering there broodingly like a volcano about to erupt, stepped forward and caught Maggie by the arm.

‘I know you,’ Trudi said delightedly. ‘I know you!’

Maggie turned and smiled. ‘I know you too. Hullo, Trudi.’

‘And this is Herta.’ Trudi turned to Herta, who clearly approved of nothing that was taking place. ‘Herta, this is my friend, Maggie.’

Herta scowled in acknowledgment.

Trudi said: ‘Major Sherman is my friend.’

‘I know that,’ Maggie smiled.

‘Are you my friend, Maggie?’

‘Of course I am, Trudi.’

Trudi seemed delighted. ‘I have lots of other friends. Would you like to see them?’ She almost dragged Maggie to the door and pointed. She was pointing to the north and I knew it could be only at the haymakers at the far end of the field. ‘Look. There they are.’

‘I’m sure they’re very nice friends,’ Maggie said politely.

A picture-postcard hunter edged close to me, as much as to indicate that I should move over and let him have a look: I’m not quite sure what kind of look I gave him but it certainly was sufficient to make him move away very hurriedly.

‘They are lovely friends,’ Trudi was saying. She nodded at Herta and indicated the bag she was carrying. ‘When Herta and I come here we always take them out food and coffee in the morning.’ She said impulsively: ‘Come and see them, Maggie,’ and when Maggie hesitated said anxiously: ‘You are my friend, aren’t you?’

‘Of course, but—’

‘They are such nice friends,’ Trudi said pleadingly. ‘They are so happy. They make music. If we are very good, they may do the hay dance for us.’

‘The hay dance?’

‘Yes, Maggie. The hay dance. Please, Maggie. You are all my friends. Please come. Just for me, Maggie?’

‘Oh, very well.’ Maggie was laughingly reluctant. ‘Just for you, Trudi. But I can’t stay long.’

‘I do like you, Maggie.’ Trudi squeezed Maggie’s arm. ‘I do like you.’

The three of them left. I waited a discreet period of time, then moved cautiously out of the shop. They were already fifty yards away, past the building I’d asked Maggie to watch and out into the hayfield. The haymakers were at least six hundred yards away, building their first haystack of the day close in to what looked, even at that distance, to be a pretty ancient and decrepit Dutch barn. I could hear the chatter of voices as the three of them moved out over the stubbled hay and all the chatter appeared to come from Trudi, who was back at her usual gambit of gambolling like a spring lamb. Trudi never walked: she always skipped.

I followed, but not skipping. A hedgerow ran alongside the edge of the field and I prudently kept this between myself and Herta and the two girls, trailing thirty or forty yards behind. I’ve no doubt that my method of locomotion looked almost as peculiar as Trudi’s because the hedgerow was less than five feet in height and I spent most of the six hundred yards bent forward at the hips like a septuagenarian suffering from a bout of lumbago.

By and by the three of them reached the old barn and sat down on the west side, in the shadow from the steadily strengthening sun. I got the barn between them and the haymakers on the one hand and myself on the other, ran quickly across the intervening space and let myself in by a side door.

I hadn’t been wrong about the barn. It must have been at least a century old and appeared to be in a very dilapidated condition indeed. The floor-boards sagged, the wooden walls bulged at just about every point where they could bulge and some of the original air-filtering cracks between the horizontal planks had warped and widened to the extent that one could almost put one’s head through them.

There was a loft to the barn, the floor of which appeared to be in imminent danger of collapse: it was rotted and splintered and riddled with woodworm; even an English house-agent would have had difficulty in disposing of the place on the basis of its antiquity. It didn’t look as if it could support an averagely-built mouse, far less my weight, but the lower part of the barn was of little use for observation, and besides, I didn’t want to peer out of one of those cracks in the wall and find someone else peering in about two inches away, so I reluctantly took the crumbling flight of wooden steps that led up to the loft.

The loft, the east side of which was still half full of last year’s hay, was every bit as dangerous as it looked but I picked my steps with caution and approached the west side of the barn. This part of the barn had an even better selection of gaps between the planks and I eventually located the ideal one, at least six inches in width and affording an excellent view. I could see the heads of Maggie, Trudi and Herta directly beneath: I could see the matrons, about a dozen in all, assiduously and expertly building a haystack, the tines of their long-handled hayforks gleaming in the sun: I could even see part of the village itself, including most of the car park. I had a feeling of unease and could not understand the reason for this: the haymaking scene taking place out on the field there was as idyllic as even the most bucolic-minded could have wished to see. I think the odd sense of apprehension sprang from the least unlikely source, the actual haymakers themselves, for not even here, in their native setting, did those flowing striped robes, those exquisitely embroidered dresses and snowy wimple hats appear quite natural. There was a more than faintly theatrical quality about them, an aura of unreality. I had the feeling, almost, that I was witnessing a play being staged for my benefit.

About half an hour passed during which the matrons worked away steadily and the three sitting beneath me engaged in only desultory conversation: it was that kind of day, warm and still and peaceful, the only sounds being the swish of the hayforks and the distant murmuring of bees, that seems to make conversation of any kind unnecessary. I wondered if I dared risk a cigarette and decided I dared: I fumbled in the pocket of my jacket for matches and cigarettes, laid my coat on the floor with the silenced gun on top of it, and lit the cigarette, careful not to let any of the smoke escape through the gaps in the planks.

By and by Herta consulted a wristwatch about the size of a kitchen alarm clock and said something to Trudi, who rose, reached down a hand and pulled Maggie to her feet. Together they walked towards the haymakers, presumably to summon them to their morning break, for Herta was spreading a chequered cloth on the ground and laying out cups and unwrapping food from folded napkins.

A voice behind me said: ‘Don’t try to reach for your gun. If you do, you’ll never live to touch it.’

I believed the voice. I didn’t try to reach for my gun.

‘Turn round very slowly.’

I turned round very slowly. It was that kind of voice.

‘Move three paces away from the gun. To your left.’

I couldn’t see anyone. But I heard him all right. I moved three paces away. To the left.

There was a stirring in the hay on the other side of the loft and two figures emerged: the Reverend Thaddeus Goodbody and Marcel, the snakelike dandy I’d clobbered and shoved in the safe in the Balinova. Goodbody didn’t have a gun in his hand, but then, he didn’t need one: the blunderbuss Marcel carried in his was as big as two ordinary guns and, to judge from the gleam in the flat black unwinking eyes, he was busily searching for the remotest thread of an excuse to use it. Nor was I encouraged by the fact that his gun had a silencer to it: this meant that they didn’t care how often they shot me, nobody would hear a thing.

‘Most damnably hot in there,’ Goodbody said complainingly. ‘And ticklish.’ He smiled in that fashion that made little children want to take him by the hand. ‘Your calling leads you into the most unexpected places, I must say, my dear Sherman.’

‘My calling?’

‘Last time I met you, you were, if I remember correctly, purporting to be a taxi-driver.’

‘Ah, that time. I’ll bet you didn’t report me to the police after all.’

‘I did have second thoughts about it,’ Goodbody conceded generously. He walked across to where my gun lay and picked it up distastefully before throwing it into the hay. ‘Crude, unpleasant weapons.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I agreed. ‘You now prefer to introduce an element of refinement into your killing.’

‘As I am shortly about to demonstrate.’ Goodbody wasn’t bothering to lower his voice but he didn’t have to, the Huyler matrons were at their morning coffee now and even with their mouths full they all appeared capable of talking at once. Goodbody walked across to the hay, unearthed a canvas bag and produced a length of rope. ‘Be on the alert, my dear Marcel. If Mr Sherman makes the slightest move, however harmless it may seem, shoot him. Not to kill. Through the thigh.’

Marcel licked his lips. I hoped he wouldn’t consider the movement of my shirt, caused by the accelerated pumping of my heart, as one that could be suspiciously interpreted. Goodbody approached circumspectly from the rear, tied the rope firmly round my right wrist, passed the rope over a rafter and then, after what seemed an unnecessarily lengthy period of readjustment, secured the rope round my left wrist. My hands were held at the level of my ears. Goodbody brought out another length of rope.

‘From my friend Marcel here,’ Goodbody said conversationally, ‘I have learned that you have a certain expertise with your hands. It occurs to me that you might be similarly gifted with your feet.’ He stooped and fastened my ankles together with an enthusiasm that boded ill for the circulation of my feet. ‘It further occurs to me that you might have comment to make on the scene you are about to witness. We would prefer to do without the comment.’ He stuffed a far from clean handkerchief into my mouth and bound it in position with another one. ‘Satisfactory, Marcel, you would say?’

Marcel’s eyes gleamed. ‘I have a message to deliver to Sherman from Mr Durrell.’

‘Now, now, my dear fellow, not so precipitate. Later, later. For the moment, we want our friend to be in full possession of his faculties, eyesight undimmed, hearing unimpaired, the mind at its keenest to appreciate all the artistic nuances of the entertainment we have arranged for his benefit.’

‘Of course, Mr Goodbody,’ Marcel said obediently. He was back at his revolting lip-licking. ‘But afterwards—’

‘Afterwards,’ Goodbody said generously, ‘you may deliver as many messages as you like. But remember I want him still alive when the barn burns down tonight. It is a pity that we shall be unable to witness it from close quarters.’ He looked genuinely sad. ‘You and that charming young lady out there – when they find your charred remains among the embers – well, I’m sure they’ll draw their own conclusions about love’s careless young dream. Smoking in barns, as you have just done, is a most unwise practice. Most unwise. Goodbye, Mr Sherman, and I do not mean au revoir. I think I must observe the hay dance from closer range. Such a charming old custom. I think you will agree.’

He left, leaving Marcel to his lip-licking. I didn’t much fancy being left alone with Marcel, but that was hardly of any importance in my mind at that moment. I twisted and looked through the gap in the planking.

The matrons had finished their coffee and were lumbering to their feet. Trudi and Maggie were directly beneath where I was standing.

‘Were the cakes not nice, Maggie?’ Trudi asked. ‘And the coffee?’

‘Lovely, Trudi, lovely. But I have been too long away. I have shopping to do. I must go now.’ Maggie paused and looked up. ‘What’s that?’

Two piano accordions had begun to play, softly, gently. I could see neither of the musicians: the sound appeared to come from the far side of the haystack the matrons had just finished building.

Trudi jumped to her feet, clapping her hands excitedly. She reached down and pulled Maggie to hers.

‘It’s the hay dance!’ Trudi cried, a child having her birthday treat. ‘The hay dance! They are going to do the hay dance! They must like you too, Maggie. They do it for you! You are their friend now.’

The matrons, all of them middle-aged or older, with faces curiously, almost frighteningly lacking in expression, began to move with a sort of ponderous precision. Shouldering their hayforks like rifles, they formed a straight line and began to clump heavily to and fro, their beribboned pigtails swinging as the music from the accordions swelled in volume. They pirouetted gravely, then resumed their rhythmic marching to and fro. The straight line, I saw, was now gradually curving into the shape of a half moon.

‘I’ve never seen a dance like this before.’ Maggie’s voice was puzzled. I’d never seen a dance like it either and I knew with a sick and chilling certainty that I would never want to see one again – not, it seemed now, that I would ever have the chance to see one again.

Trudi echoed my thoughts, but their sinister implication escaped Maggie.

‘And you will never see a dance like this again, Maggie,’ she said. ‘They are only starting. Oh, Maggie, they must like you – see, they want you!’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, Maggie. They like you. Sometimes they ask me. Today, you.’

‘I must go, Trudi.’

‘Please, Maggie. For a moment. You don’t do anything. You just stand facing them. Please, Maggie. They will be hurt if you don’t do this.’

Maggie laughed protestingly, resignedly. ‘Oh, very well.’

Seconds later a reluctant and very embarrassed Maggie was standing at the focal point as a semicircle of hayfork-bearing matrons advanced and retreated towards and from her. Gradually the pattern and the tempo of the dance changed and quickened as the dancers now formed a complete circle about Maggie. The circle contracted and expanded, contracted and expanded, the women bowing gravely as they approached most closely to Maggie, then flinging their heads and pigtails back as they stamped away again.

Goodbody came into my line of view, his smile gently amused and kindly as he participated vicariously in the pleasure of the charming old dance taking place before him. He stood beside Trudi, and put a hand on her shoulder: she smiled delightedly up at him.

I felt I was going to be sick. I wanted to look away, but to look away would have been an abandonment of Maggie and I could never abandon Maggie: but God only knew that I could never help her now. There was embarrassment in her face, now, and puzzlement: and more than a hint of uneasiness. She looked anxiously at Trudi through a gap between two of the matrons: Trudi smiled widely and waved in gay encouragement.

Suddenly the accordion music changed. What had been a gently lilting dance tune, albeit with a military beat to it, increased rapidly in volume as it changed into something of a different nature altogether, something that went beyond the merely martial, something that was harsh and primitive and savage and violent. The matrons, having reached their fully expanded circle, were beginning to close in again. From my elevation I could still see Maggie, her eyes wide now and fear showing in her face: she leaned to one side to look almost desperately for Trudi. But there was no salvation in Trudi: her smile had gone now, her cotton-clad hands were clasped tightly together and she was licking her lips slowly, obscenely. I turned to look at Marcel, who was busy doing the same thing: but he still had his gun on me, and watched me as closely as he watched the scene outside. There was nothing I could do.

The matrons were now stamping their way inwards. Their moonlike faces had lost their expressionless quality and were now pitiless, implacable, and the deepening fear in Maggie’s eyes gave way to terror, her eyes staring as the music became more powerful, more discordant still. Then abruptly, with military precision, the shoulder-borne pitchforks were brought sweeping down until they were pointed directly at Maggie. She screamed and screamed again but the sound she made was barely audible above the almost insanely discordant crescendo of the accordions. And then Maggie was down and, mercifully, all I could see was the back view of the matrons as their forks time and again jerked high and stabbed down convulsively at something that now lay motionless on the ground. For the space of a few moments I could look no longer. I had to look away, and there was Trudi, her hands opening and closing, her mesmerized entranced face with a hideous animal-like quality to it: and beside her the Reverend Goodbody, his face as benign and gently benevolent as ever, an expression that belied his staring eyes. Evil minds, sick minds that had long since left the borders of sanity far behind.

I forced myself to look back again as the music slowly subsided, losing its primeval atavistic quality. The frenzied activities of the matrons had subsided, the stabbing had ceased, and as I watched one of the matrons turned aside and picked up a forkful of hay. I had a momentary glimpse of a crumpled figure with a white blouse no longer white lying on the stubble, then a forkful of hay covered her from sight. Then came another forkful and another and another, and as the two accordions, soft and gentle and muted now, spoke nostalgically of old Vienna, they built a haystack over Maggie. Dr Goodbody and Trudi, she again smiling and chattering gaily, walked off arm in arm towards the village.

Marcel turned away from the gap in the planks and sighed. ‘Dr Goodbody manages those things so well, don’t you think? The flair, the sensitivity, the time, the place, the atmosphere – exquisitely done, exquisitely done.’ The beautifully modulated Oxbridge accent emanating from that snake’s head was no less repellent than the context in which the words were used: he was like the rest of them, quite mad.

He approached me circumspectly from the back, undid the handkerchief which had been tied round my head and plucked out the filthy lump of cotton that had been shoved into my mouth. I didn’t think that he was being motivated by any humanitarian considerations, and he wasn’t. He said offhandedly: ‘When you scream, I want to hear it. I don’t think the ladies out there will pay too much attention.’

I was sure they wouldn’t. I said: ‘I’m surprised Dr Goodbody could drag himself away.’ My voice didn’t sound like any voice I’d ever used before: it was hoarse and thick and I’d difficulty in forming the words as if I’d damaged my larynx.

Marcel smiled. ‘Dr Goodbody has urgent things to attend to in Amsterdam. Important things.’

‘And important things to transport from here to Amsterdam.’

‘Doubtless.’ He smiled again and I could almost see his hood distending. ‘Classically, my dear Sherman, when a person is in your position and has lost out and is about to die, it is customary for a person in my position to explain, in loving detail, just where the victim went wrong. But apart from the fact that your list of blunders is so long as to be too tedious to ennumerate, I simply can’t be bothered. So let’s get on with it, shall we?’

‘Get on with what?’ Here it comes now, I thought, but I didn’t much care: it didn’t seem to matter much any more.

‘The message from Mr Durrell, of course.’ Pain sliced like a butcher’s cleaver through my head and the side of my face as he slashed the barrel of his gun across it. I thought my left cheekbone must be broken, but couldn’t be sure: but my tongue told me that two at least of my teeth had been loosened beyond repair.

‘Mr Durrell,’ Marcel said happily, ‘told me to tell you that he doesn’t like being pistol-whipped.’ He went for the right side of my face this time, and although I saw and knew it was coming and tried to jerk my head back I couldn’t get out of the way. This one didn’t hurt so badly, but I knew I was badly hurt from the temporary loss of vision that followed the brilliant white light that seemed to explode just in front of my eyes. My face was on fire, my head was coming apart, but my mind was strangely clear. Very little more of this systematic clubbing, I knew, and even a plastic surgeon would shake his head regretfully: but what really mattered was that with very little more of this treatment I would lose consciousness, perhaps for hours. There seemed to be only one hope: to make his clubbing unsystematic.

I spat out a tooth and said: ‘Pansy.’

For some reason this got him. The veneer of civilized urbanity couldn’t have been thicker than an onion skin to begin with and it just didn’t slough off, it vanished in an instant of time and what was left was a mindless beserker savage who attacked me with the wanton, unreasoning and insensate fury of the mentally unhinged, which he almost certainly was. Blows rained from all directions on my head and shoulders, blows from his gun and blows from his fists and when I tried to protect myself as best I could with my forearms he switched his insane assault to my body. I moaned, my eyes turned up, my legs turned to jelly and I would have collapsed had I been in a position to: as it was, I just hung limply from the rope securing my wrists.

Two or three more agony-filled seconds elapsed before he recovered himself sufficiently to realize that he was wasting his time: from Marcel’s point of view there could be little point in inflicting punishment on a person who was beyond feeling the effects of it. He made a strange noise in his throat which probably indicated disappointment more than anything else, then just stood there breathing heavily. What he was contemplating doing next I couldn’t guess for I didn’t dare open my eyes.

I heard him move away a little and risked a quick glance from the corner of my eye. The momentary madness was over and Marcel, who was obviously as opportunistic as he was sadistic, had picked up my jacket and was going through it hopefully but unsuccessfully, for wallets carried in the inner breast pocket of a jacket invariably fall out when that jacket is carried over the arm and I’d prudently transferred my wallet with its money, passport and driving licence to my hip pocket. Marcel wasn’t long in arriving at the right conclusion for almost immediately I heard his footsteps and felt the wallet being removed from my hip pocket.

He was standing by my side now. I couldn’t see him, but I was aware of this. I moaned and swung helplessly at the end of the rope that secured me to the rafter. My legs were trailed out behind me, the upper parts of the toes of my shoes resting on the floor. I opened my eyes, just a fraction.

I could see his feet, not more than a yard from where I was. I glanced up, for the fleeting part of a second. Marcel, with an air of concentration and pleased surprise was engrossed in the task of transferring the very considerable sums of money I carried in my wallet to his own pocket. He held the wallet in his left hand, while his gun dangled by the trigger-guard from the crooked middle finger of the same hand. He was so absorbed that he didn’t see my hands reach up to get a better purchase on the securing ropes.

I jack-knifed my body convulsively forward and upwards with all the hate and the fury and the pain that was in me and I do not think that Marcel ever saw my scything feet coming. He made no sound at all, just jack-knifed forward in turn as convulsively as I had done, fell against me and slithered slowly to the floor. He lay there and his head rolled from side to side whether in unconscious reflex or in the conscious reflex of a body otherwise numbed in a paroxysm of agony I could not say but I was in no way disposed to take chances. I stood upright, took a long step back as far as my bonds would permit and came at him again. I was vaguely surprised that his head still stayed on his shoulders: it wasn’t pretty but then I wasn’t dealing with pretty people.

The gun was still hooked round the middle finger of his left hand. I pulled it off with the toes of my shoes. I tried to get a purchase on the gun between my shoes but the friction coefficient between the metal and the leather was too low and the gun kept sliding free. I removed my shoes by dragging the heels against the floor and then, a much longer process, my socks by using the same technique. I abraded a fair amount of skin and collected my quota of wooden splinters in so doing, but was conscious of no real sensation of hurt: the pain in my face made other minor irritation insignificant to the point of non-existence.

My bare feet gave me an excellent purchase on the gun. Keeping them tightly clamped together I brought both ends of the rope together and hauled myself up till I reached the rafter. This gave me four feet of slack rope to play with, more than enough. I hung by my left hand, reached down with my right while I doubled up my legs. And then I had the gun in my hand.

I lowered myself to the floor, held the rope pinioning my left wrist taut and placed the muzzle of the gun against it. The first shot severed it as neatly as any knife could have done. I untied all the knots securing me, ripped off the front of Marcel’s snow-white shirt to wipe my bloodied face and mouth, retrieved my wallet and money and left. I didn’t know whether Marcel was alive or dead, he looked very dead to me but I wasn’t interested enough to investigate.

TWELVE

It was early afternoon when I got back to Amsterdam and the sun that had looked down on Maggie’s death that morning had symbolically gone into hiding. Heavy dark cloud rolled in from the Zuider Zee. I could have reached the city an hour earlier than I did, but the doctor in the outpatients department of the suburban hospital where I’d stopped by to have my face fixed had been full of questions and annoyed at my insistence that sticking-plaster – a large amount of it, admittedly – was all I required at the moment and that the stitching and the swathes of white bandaging could wait until later. What with the plaster and assorted bruises and a half-closed left eye I must have looked like the sole survivor from an express train crash, but at least I wasn’t bad enough to send young children screaming for their mothers.

I parked the police taxi not far from a hire-garage where I managed to persuade the owner to let me have a small black Opel. He wasn’t very keen, as my face was enough to give rise in anyone’s mind to doubts about my past driving record, but he let me have it in the end. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall as I drove off, stopped by the police car, picked up Astrid’s handbag and two pairs of handcuffs for luck, and went on my way.

I parked the car in what was by now becoming a rather familiar side-street to me and walked down towards the canal. I poked my head around the corner and as hastily withdrew it again: next time I looked I merely edged an eye round.

A black Mercedes was parked by the door of the Church of the American Huguenot Society. Its capacious boot was open and two men were lifting an obviously very heavy box inside: there were already two or three similar boxes deeper inside the boot. One of the men was instantly identifiable as the Reverend Goodbody: the other man, thin, of medium height, clad in a dark suit and with dark hair and a very swarthy face, was as instantly recognizable: the dark and violent man who had gunned down Jimmy Duclos in Schiphol Airport. For a moment or two I forgot about the pain in my face. I wasn’t positively happy at seeing this man again but I was far from dejected as he had seldom been very far from my thoughts. The wheel, I felt, was coming full circle.

They staggered out from the church with one more box, stowed it away and closed the boot. I headed back for my Opel and by the time I’d brought it down to the canal Goodbody and the dark man were already a hundred yards away in the Mercedes. I followed at a discreet distance.

The rain was falling in earnest now as the black Mercedes headed west and south across the city. Though not yet mid-afternoon, the sky was as thunderously overcast as if dusk, still some hours away, was falling. I didn’t mind, it made for the easiest of shadowing: in Holland it is required that you switch your lights on in heavy rain, and in those conditions one car looked very like the dark shapeless mass of the next.

We cleared the last of the suburbs and headed out into the country. There was no wild element of pursuit or chase about our progress. Goodbody, though driving a powerful car, was proceeding at a very sedate pace indeed, hardly surprising, perhaps, in view of the very considerable weight he was carrying in the boot. I was watching road signs closely and soon I was in no doubt as to where we were heading: I never really had been.

I thought it wiser to arrive at our mutual destination before Goodbody and the dark man did, so I closed up till I was less than twenty yards behind the Mercedes. I had no worry about being recognized by Goodbody in his driving mirror for he was throwing up so dense a cloud of spray that all he could possibly have seen following him was a pair of dipped headlamps. I waited till I could see ahead what seemed to be a straight stretch of road, pulled out and accelerated past the Mercedes. As I drew level Goodbody glanced briefly and incuriously at the car that was overtaking him, then looked as incuriously away again. His face had been no more than a pale blur to me and the rain was so heavy and the spray thrown up by both cars so blinding that I knew it was impossible that he could have recognized me. I pulled ahead and got into the right-hand lane again, not slackening speed.

Three kilometres further on I came to a righthand fork which read ‘Kasteel Linden 1 km’. I turned down this and a minute later passed an imposing stone archway with the words ‘Kasteel Linden’ engraved in gilt above it. I carried on for perhaps another two hundred yards, then turned off the road and parked the Opel in a deep thicket.

I was going to get very wet again but I didn’t seem to have much in the way of options. I left the car and ran across some thinly wooded grassland till I came to a thick belt of pines that obviously served as some kind of wind-break for a habitation. I made my way through the pines, very circumspectly, and there was the habitation all right: the Kasteel Linden. Oblivious of the rain beating down on my unprotected back, I stretched out in the concealment of long grass and some bushes and studied the place.

Immediately before me stretched a circular gravelled driveway which led off to my right to the archway I’d just passed. Beyond the gravel lay the Kasteel Linden itself, a rectangular four-storeyed building, windowed on the first two storeys, embrasured above, with the top turreted and crenellated in the best medieval fashion. Encircling the castle was a continuous moat fifteen feet in width and, according to the guide-book, almost as deep. All that was lacking was a drawbridge, although the chain pulleys for it were still to be seen firmly embedded in the thick masonry of the walls: instead, a flight of about twenty wide and shallow stone steps spanned the moat and led to a pair of massive closed doors, which seemed to be made of oak. To my left, about thirty yards distant from the castle, was a rectangular, one-storey building in brick and obviously of fairly recent construction.

The black Mercedes appeared through the gateway, crunched its way on to the gravel and pulled up close to the rectangular building. While Goodbody remained inside the car, the dark man got out and made a complete circuit of the castle: Goodbody never had struck me as the kind of man to take chances. Goodbody got out and together the two men carried the contents of the boot into the building: the door had been locked but obviously Goodbody had the right key for it and not a skeleton either. As they carried the last of the boxes inside the door closed behind them.

I rose cautiously to my feet and moved around behind the bushes until I came to the side of the building. Just as cautiously I approached the Mercedes and looked inside. But there was nothing worthy of remark there – not what I was looking for anyway. With an even greater degree of caution I tip-toed up to a side window of the building and peered inside.

The interior was clearly a combination of workshop, store and display shop. The walls were hung with old-fashioned – or replicas of old-fashioned – pendulum clocks of every conceivable shape, size and design. Other clocks and a very large assortment of parts of other clocks lay on four large work-tables, in the process of manufacture or reassembly or reconstruction. At the far end of the room lay several wooden boxes similar to the ones that Goodbody and the dark man had just carried inside: those boxes appeared to be packed with straw. Shelves above those boxes held a variety of other clocks each having lying beside it its own pendulum, chain and weights.

Goodbody and the dark man were working beside those shelves. As I watched, they delved into one of the open boxes and proceeded to bring out a series of pendulum weights. Goodbody paused, produced a paper and proceeded to study it intently. After some time Goodbody pointed at some item on this paper and said something to the dark man, who nodded and went on with his work: Goodbody, still studying the paper as he went, passed through a side door and disappeared from sight. The dark man studied another paper and began arranging pairs of identical weights beside each other.

I was beginning to wonder where Goodbody had got to when I found out. His voice came from directly behind me.

‘I am glad you haven’t disappointed me, Mr Sherman.’

I turned round slowly. Predictably, he was smiling his saintly smile and, equally predictably, he had a large gun in his hand.

‘No one is indestructible, of course,’ he beamed, ‘but you do have a certain quality of resilience, I must confess. It is difficult to underestimate policemen, but I may have been rather negligent in your case. Twice in this one day I had thought I had got rid of your presence, which, I must admit was becoming something of an embarrassment to me. However, I’m sure third time, for me, will prove lucky. You should have killed Marcel, you know.’

‘I didn’t?’

‘Come, come, you must learn to mask your feelings and not let your disappointment show through. He recovered for a brief moment but long enough to attract the attention of the good ladies in the field. But I fear he has a fractured skull and some brain haemorrhage. He may not survive.’ He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘But he appears to have given a good account of himself.’

‘A fight to the death,’ I agreed. ‘Must we stand in the rain?’

‘Indeed not.’ He ushered me into the building at the point of his gun. The dark man looked around with no great surprise: I wondered how long had elapsed since they had the warning message from Huyler.

‘Jacques,’ Goodbody said. ‘This is Mr Sherman – Major Sherman. I believe he is connected with Interpol or some other such futile organization.’

‘We’ve met,’ Jacques grinned.

‘Of course. How forgetful of me.’ Goodbody pointed his gun at me while Jacques took mine away.

‘Just the one,’ he reported. He raked the sights across my cheek, tearing some of the plaster away, and grinned again. ‘I’ll bet that hurts, eh?’

‘Restrain yourself, Jacques, restrain yourself,’ Goodbody admonished. He had his kindly side to him; if he’d been a cannibal he’d probably have knocked you over the head before boiling you alive. ‘Point his gun at him, will you?’ He put his own away. ‘I must say I never did care for those weapons. Crude, noisy, lacking a certain delicacy—’

‘Like hanging a girl from a hook?’ I asked. ‘Or stabbing one to death with pitchforks.’

‘Come, come, let us not distress ourselves.’ He sighed. ‘Even the best of you people are so clumsy, so obvious. I had, I must confess, expected rather more from you. You, my dear fellow, have a reputation which you’ve totally failed to live up to. You blunder around. You upset people, fondly imagining you are provoking reactions in the process. You let yourself be seen in all the wrong places. Twice you go to Miss Lemay’s flat without taking precautions. You rifle pockets of pieces of paper that were put there for you to discover, and there was no need,’ he added reproachfully, ‘to kill the waiter in the process. You walk through Huyler in broad daylight – every person in Huyler, my dear Sherman, is a member of my flock. You even left your calling card in the basement of my church the night before last – blood. Not that I bear you any ill-will for that, my dear fellow – I was in fact contemplating getting rid of Henri, who had become rather a liability to me, and you solved the problem rather neatly. And what do you think of our unique arrangements here – those are all reproductions for sale …’

‘My God,’ I said. ‘No wonder the churches are empty.’

‘Ah! But one must savour those moments, don’t you think? Those weights there. We measure and weigh them and return at suitable times with replacement weights like those we brought tonight. Not that our weights are quite the same. They have something inside them. Then they’re boxed, Customs inspected, sealed and sent on with official Government approval to certain – friends – abroad. One of my better schemes, I always maintain.’

Jacques cleared his throat deferentially. ‘You said you were in a hurry, Mr Goodbody.’

‘Ever the pragmatist, Jacques, ever the pragmatist. But you’re right, of course. First we attend to our – ah – ace investigator, then to business. See if the coast is clear.’

Goodbody distastefully produced his pistol again while Jacques made a quiet reconnaissance. He returned in a few moments, nodding, and they made me precede them out of the door, across the gravel and up the steps over the moat to the massive oaken door. Goodbody produced a key of the right size to open the door and we passed inside. We went up a flight of stairs, along a passage and into a room.

It was a very big room indeed, almost literally festooned with hundreds of clocks. I’d never seen so many clocks in one place and certainly, I knew, never so valuable a collection of clocks. All, without exception, were pendulum clocks, some of a very great size, all of great age. Only a very few of them appeared to be working, but, even so, their collective noise was barely below the level of toleration. I couldn’t have worked in that room for ten minutes.

‘One of the finest collections in the world,’ Goodbody said proudly as if it belonged to him, ‘if not the finest. And as you shall see – or hear – they all work.’

I heard his words but they didn’t register. I was staring at the floor, at the man lying there with the long black hair reaching down to the nape of his neck, at the thin shoulder-blades protruding through the threadbare jacket. Lying beside him were some pieces of single-core rubber-insulated electrical cable. Close to his head lay a pair of sorborubber-covered earphones.

I didn’t have to be a doctor to know that George Lemay was dead.

‘An accident,’ Goodbody said regretfully, ‘a genuine accident. We did not mean it to happen like this. I fear the poor fellow’s system must have been greatly weakened by the privations he has suffered over the years.’

‘You killed him,’ I said.

‘Technically, in a manner of speaking, yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because his high-principled sister – who has erroneously believed for years that we have evidence leading to the proof of her brother’s guilt as a murderer – finally prevailed upon him to go to the police. So we had to remove them from the Amsterdam scene temporarily – but not, of course, in such a way as to upset you. I’m afraid. Mr Sherman, that you must hold yourself partly to blame for the poor lad’s death. And for that of his sister. And for that of your lovely assistant – Maggie, I think her name was.’ He broke off and retreated hastily, holding his pistol at arm’s length. ‘Do not throw yourself on my gun. I take it you did not enjoy the entertainment? Neither, I’m sure, did Maggie. And neither, I’m afraid, will your other friend Belinda, who must die this evening. Ah! That strikes deep, I see. You would like to kill me, Mr Sherman.’ He was smiling still, but the flat staring eyes were the eyes of a madman.

‘Yes,’ I said tonelessly, ‘I’d like to kill you.’

‘We have sent her a little note.’ Goodbody was enjoying himself immensely. ‘Code word “Birmingham”, I believe … She is to meet you at the warehouse of our good friends Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, who will now be above suspicion for ever. Who but the insane would ever contemplate perpetrating two such hideous crimes on their own premises? So fitting, don’t you think? Another puppet on a chain. Like all the thousands of other puppets throughout the world – hooked and dancing to our tune.’

I said: ‘You know, of course, that you are quite mad?’

‘Tie him up,’ Goodbody said harshly. His urbanity had cracked at last. The truth must have hurt him.

Jacques bound my wrists with the thick rubber-covered flex. He did the same for my ankles, pushed me to one side of the room and attached my wrists by another length of rubber cable to an eyebolt on the wall.

‘Start the clocks!’ Goodbody ordered. Obediently, Jacques set off around the room starting the pendulums to swing: significantly, he didn’t bother about the smaller clocks.

‘They all work and they all chime, some most loudly,’ Goodbody said with satisfaction. He was back on balance again, urbane and unctuous as ever. ‘Those earphones will amplify the sound about ten times. There is the amplifier there and the microphone there, both, as you can see, well beyond your reach. The earphones are unbreakable. In fifteen minutes you will be insane, in thirty minutes unconscious. The resulting coma lasts from eight to ten hours. You will wake up still insane. But you won’t wake up. Already beginning to tick and chime quite loudly, aren’t they?’

‘This is how George died, of course. And you will watch it all happen. Through the top of that glass door, of course. Where it won’t be so noisy.’

‘Regrettably, not all. Jacques and I have some business matters to attend to. But we’ll be back for the most interesting part, won’t we, Jacques?’

‘Yes, Mr Goodbody,’ said Jacques, still industriously swinging pendulums.

‘If I disappear—’

‘Ah, but you won’t. I had intended to have you disappear last night in the harbour but that was crude, a panic measure lacking the hallmark of my professionalism. I have come up with a much better idea, haven’t I, Jacques?’

‘Yes, indeed, Mr Goodbody.’ Jacques had now almost to shout to make himself heard.

‘The point is you’re not going to disappear, Mr Sherman. Oh, dear me, no. You’ll be found, instead, only a few minutes after you’ve drowned.’

‘Drowned?’

‘Precisely. Ah, you think, then the authorities will immediately suspect foul play. An autopsy. And the first thing they see are forearms riddled with injection punctures – I have a system that can make two-hour-old punctures look two months old. They will proceed further and find you full of dope – as you will be. Injected when you are unconscious about two hours before we push you, in your car, into a canal, then call the police. This they will not believe. Sherman, the intrepid Interpol narcotics investigator? Then they go through your luggage. Hypodermics, needles, heroin, in your pockets traces of cannabis. Sad, sad. Who would have thought it? Just another of those who hunted with the hounds and ran with the hare.’

‘I’ll say this much for you,’ I said, ‘you’re a clever madman.’

He smiled, which probably meant he couldn’t hear me above the increasing clamour of the clocks. He clamped the sorbo-rubber earphones to my head and secured them immovably in position with literally yards of Scotch tape. Momentarily the room became almost hushed – the earphones were acting as temporary sound insulators. Goodbody crossed the room towards the amplifier, smiled at me again and pulled a switch.

I felt as if I had been subjected to some violent physical blow or a severe electrical shock. My whole body arched and twisted in convulsive jerks and I knew what little could be seen of my face under the plaster and Scotch tape must be convulsed in agony. For I was in agony, an agony a dozen times more piercing and unbearable than the best – or the worst – that Marcel had been able to inflict upon me. My ears, my entire head, were filled with this insanely shrieking banshee cacophony of sound. It sliced through my head like white-hot skewers, it seemed to be tearing my brain apart. I couldn’t understand why my eardrums didn’t shatter. I had always heard and believed that a loud enough explosion of sound, set off close enough to your ears, can deafen you immediately and for life: but it wasn’t working in my case. As it obviously hadn’t worked in George’s case. In my torment I vaguely remembered Goodbody attributing George’s death to his weakened physical condition.

I rolled from side to side, an instinctive animal reaction to escape from what is hurting you, but I couldn’t roll far, Jacques had used a fairly short length of rubber cable to secure me to the eyebolt and I could roll no more than a couple of feet in either direction. At the end of one roll I managed to focus my eyes long enough to see Goodbody and Jacques, now both outside the room, peering at me with interest through the glass-topped door: after a few seconds Jacques raised his left wrist and tapped his watch. Goodbody nodded in reluctant agreement and both men hurried away. I supposed in my blinding sea of pain that they were in a hurry to come back to witness the grand finale.

Fifteen minutes before I was unconscious, Goodbody had said. I didn’t believe a word of it, nobody could stand up to this for two or three minutes without being broken both mentally and physically. I twisted violently from side to side, tried to smash the earphones on the floor or to tear them free. But Goodbody had been right, the earphones were unbreakable and the Scotch tape had been so skilfully and tightly applied that my efforts to tear the phones free resulted only in reopening the wounds on my face.

The pendulums swung, the clocks ticked, the chimes rang out almost continuously. There was no relief, no let-up, not even the most momentary respite from this murderous assault on the nervous system that triggered off those uncontrollable epileptic convulsions. It was one continuous electric shock at just below the lethal level and I could now all too easily give credence to tales I had heard of patients undergoing electric shock therapy who had eventually ended up on the operating table for the repair of limbs fractured through involuntary muscular contraction.

I could feel my mind going, and for a brief period I tried to help the feeling along. Oblivion, anything for oblivion. I’d failed, I’d failed all along the line, everything I’d touched had turned to destruction and death. Maggie was dead, Duclos was dead, Astrid was dead and her brother George. Only Belinda was left and she was going to die that night. A grand slam.

And then I knew. I knew I couldn’t let Belinda die. That was what saved me, I knew I could not let her die. Pride no longer concerned me, my failure no longer concerned me, the total victory of Goodbody and his evil associates was of no concern to me. They could flood the world with their damned narcotics for all I cared. But I couldn’t let Belinda die.

Somehow I pushed myself up till my back was against the wall. Apart from the frequent convulsions, I was vibrating in every limb in my body, not just shaking like a man with the ague, that would have been easily tolerated but vibrating as a man would have been had he been tied to a giant pneumatic drill. I could no longer focus for more than a second or two, but I did my best to look fuzzily, desperately around to see if there was anything that offered any hope of salvation. There was nothing. Then, without warning, the sound in my head abruptly rose to a shattering crescendo – it was probably a big clock near the microphones striking the hour – and I fell sideways as if I’d been hit on the temple by a two-by-four. As my head struck the floor it also struck some projection low down on the skirting board.

My focusing powers were now entirely gone, but I could vaguely distinguish objects not less than a few inches away and this one was no more than three. It says much for my now almost completely incapacitated mind that it took me several seconds to realize what it was, but when I did I forced myself into a sitting position again. The object was an electrical wall-socket.

My hands were bound behind my back and it took me for ever to locate and take hold of the two free ends of the electrical cable that held me prisoner. I touched their ends with my fingertips: the wire core was exposed in both cases. Desperately, I tried to force the ends into the sockets – it never occurred to me that it might have been a shuttered plug, although it would have been unlikely in so old a house as this – but my hands shook so much that I couldn’t locate them. I could feel consciousness slipping away. I could feel the damned plug, I could feel the sockets with my fingertips, but I couldn’t match the ends of the wire with the holes. I couldn’t see any more, I had hardly any feeling left in my fingers, the pain was beyond human tolerance and I think I was screaming soundlessly in my agony when suddenly there was a brilliant bluish-white flash and I fell sideways to the floor.

How long I lay there unconscious I could not later tell: it must have been at least a matter of minutes. The first thing I was aware of was the incredible glorious silence, not a total silence, for I could still hear the chiming of clocks, but a muffled chiming only for I had blown the right power fuse and the earphones were again acting as insulators. I sat up till I was in a half-reclining position. I could feel blood trickling down my chin and was to find later that I’d bitten through my lower lip: my face was bathed in sweat, my entire body felt as if it had been on the rack. I didn’t mind any of it, I was conscious of only one thing: the utter blissfulness of silence. Those lads in the Noise Abatement Society knew what they were about.

The effects of this savage punishment passed off more swiftly than I would have expected, but far from completely: that pain in my head and eardrums and the overall soreness of my body would be with me for quite a long time to come – that I knew. But the effects weren’t wearing off quite as quickly as I thought, because it took me over a minute to realize that if Goodbody and Jacques came back that moment and found me sitting against the wall with what was unquestionably an idiotic expression of bliss on my face, they wouldn’t be indulging in any half measures next time round. I glanced quickly up at the glass-topped door but there were no raised eyebrows in sight yet.

I stretched out on the floor again and resumed my rolling to and fro. I was hardly more than ten seconds too soon, for on my third or fourth roll towards the door I saw Goodbody and Jacques thrust their heads into view. I stepped up my performance, rolled about more violently than ever, arched my body and flung myself so convulsively to and fro that I was suffering almost as much as I had been when I was undergoing the real thing. Every time I rolled towards the door I let them see my contorted face, my eyes either staring wide or screwed tightly shut in agony and I think that my sweat-sheened face and the blood welling from my lip and from one or two of the reopened gashes that Marcel had given must have added up to a fairly convincing spectacle. Goodbody and Jacques were both smiling broadly, although Jacques’s expression came nowhere near Goodbody’s benign saintliness.

I gave one particularly impressive leap that carried my entire body clear of the ground and as I near as a toucher dislocated my shoulder as I landed I decided that enough was enough – I doubt if even Goodbody really knew the par for the course – and allowed my strugglings and writhings to become feebler and feebler until eventually, after one last convulsive jerk, I lay still.

Goodbody and Jacques entered. Goodbody strode across to switch off the amplifier, smiled beautifully and switched it on again: he had forgotten that his intention was not only to render me unconscious but insane. Jacques, however, said something to him, and Goodbody nodded reluctantly and switched off the amplifier again – perhaps Jacques, activated not by compassion but the thought that it might make it difficult for them if I were to die before they injected the drugs, had pointed this out – while Jacques went around stopping the pendulums of the biggest clocks. Then both came across to examine me. Jacques kicked me experimentally in the ribs but I’d been through too much to react to that.

‘Now, now, my dear fellow—’ I could faintly hear Goodbody’s reproachful voice – ‘I approve your sentiments but no marks, no marks. The police wouldn’t like it.’

‘But look at his face,’ Jacques protested.

‘That’s so,’ Goodbody agreed amicably. ‘Anyway, cut his wrists free – wouldn’t do to have gouge marks showing on them when the fire brigade fish him out of the canal: and remove those earphones and hide them.’ Jacques did both in the space of ten seconds: when he removed the earphones it felt as if my face was coming with it: Jacques had a very cavalier attitude towards Scotch tape.

‘As for him—’ Goodbody nodded at George Lemay – ‘dispose of him. You know how. I’ll send Marcel out to help you bring Sherman in.’ There was silence for a few moments. I knew he was looking down at me, then Goodbody sighed. ‘Ah, me. Ah, me. Life is but a walking shadow.’

With that, Goodbody took himself off. He was humming as he went, and as far as one can hum soulfully, Goodbody was giving as soulful a rendition of ‘Abide with me’ as ever I had heard. He had a sense of occasion, had the Reverend Goodbody.

Jacques went to a box in the corner of the room, produced half a dozen large pendulum weights and proceeded to thread a piece of rubber cable through their eyelets and attach the cable to George’s waist: Jacques was leaving little doubt as to what he had in mind. He dragged George from the room out into the corridor and I could hear the sound of the dead man’s heels rubbing along the floor as Jacques dragged him to the front of the castle. I rose, flexed my hands experimentally, and followed.

As I neared the doorway I could hear the sound of the Mercedes starting up and getting under way. I looked round the corner. Jacques, with George lying on the floor beside him, had the window open and was giving a sketchy salute: it could only have been to the departing Goodbody.

Jacques turned from the window to attend to George’s last rites. Instead he stood there motionless, his face frozen in total shock. I was only five feet from him and I could tell even from his stunned lack of expression that he could tell from mine that he had reached the end of his murderous road. Frantically, he scrabbled for the gun under his arm, but for what may well have been the first and was certainly the last time in his life Jacques was too slow, for that moment of paralysed incredulity had been his undoing. I hit him just beneath the ribs as his gun came clear and when he doubled forward wrested the gun from his almost unresisting hand and struck him savagely with it across the temple. Jacques, unconscious on his feet, took one involuntary step back, the window-sill caught him behind the legs and he began to topple outwards and backwards in oddly slow motion. I just stood there and watched him go, and when I heard the splash and only then, I went to the window and looked out. The roiled waters of the moat were rippling against the bank and the castle walls and from the middle of the moat a stream of bubbles ascended. I looked to the left and could see Goodbody’s Mercedes rounding the entrance arch to the castle. By this time, I thought, he should have been well into the fourth verse of ‘Abide with me’.

I withdrew from the window and walked downstairs. I went out, leaving the door open behind me. I paused briefly on the steps over the moat and looked down, and as I did the bubbles from the bottom of the moat gradually became fewer and smaller and finally ceased altogether.

THIRTEEN

I sat in the Opel, looked at my gun which I’d recovered from Jacques, and pondered. If there was one thing that I had discovered about that gun it was that people seemed to be able to take it from me whenever they felt so inclined. It was a chastening thought but one that carried with it the inescapable conclusion that what I needed was another gun, a second gun, so I brought up Astrid’s handbag from under the seat and took out the little Lilliput I had given her. I lifted my left trouser-leg a few inches, thrust the little gun barrel downwards, inside my sock and the inside top of my shoe, pulled the sock up and the trouser-leg down. I was about to close the bag when I caught sight of the two pairs of handcuffs. I hesitated, for on the form to date the likelihood was that, if I took them with me, they’d end up on my own wrists, but as it seemed too late in the day now to stop taking the chances that I’d been taking all along ever since I’d arrived in Amsterdam, I put both pairs in my left-hand jacket pocket and the duplicate keys in my right.

When I arrived back in the old quarter of Amsterdam, having left my usual quota of fist-shaking and police-telephoning motorists behind me, the first shades of early darkness were beginning to fall. The rain had eased, but the wind was steadily gaining in strength, ruffling and eddying the waters of the canals.

I turned into the street where the warehouse was. It was deserted, neither cars nor pedestrians in sight. That is to say, at street level it was deserted: on the third floor of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s premises a burly shirt-sleeved character was leaning with his elbows on the sill of an open window, and from the way in which his head moved constantly from side to side it was apparent that the savouring of Amsterdam’s chilly evening air was not his primary purpose for being there. I drove past the warehouse and made my way up to the vicinity of the Dam where I called de Graaf from the public phone-box.

‘Where have you been?’ de Graaf demanded. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing that would interest you.’ It must have been the most unlikely statement I’d ever made. ‘I’m ready to talk now.’

‘Talk.’

‘Not here. Not now. Not over the telephone. Can you and van Gelder come to Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s place now.’

‘You’ll talk there?’

‘I promise you.’

‘We are on our way,’ de Graaf said grimly.

‘One moment. Come in a plain van and park further along the street. They have a guard posted at one of the windows.’

‘They?’

‘That’s what I’m going to talk to you about.’

‘And the guard?’

‘I’ll distract him. I’ll think up a diversion of some kind.’

‘I see.’ De Graaf paused and went on heavily: ‘On your form to date I shudder to think what form the diversion will take.’ He hung up.

I went into a local ironmongery store and bought a ball of twine and the biggest Stilson wrench they had on their shelves. Four minutes later I had the Opel parked less than a hundred yards from the warehouse, but not in the same street.

I made my way up the very narrow and extremely ill-lit service alley between the street in which the warehouse stood and the one running parallel to it. The first warehouse I came to on my left had a rickety wooden fire-escape that would have been the first thing to burn down in a fire but that was the first and last. I went at least fifty yards past the building I reckoned to be Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s, and nary another fire-escape did I come to: knotted sheets must have been at a premium in that part of Amsterdam.

I went back to the one and only fire-escape and made my way up to the roof. I took an instant dislike to this roof as I did to all the other roofs I had to cross to arrive at the one I wanted. All the ridgepoles ran at right angles to the street, the roofs themselves were steeply pitched and treacherously slippery from the rain and, to compound the difficulties, the architects of yesteryear, with what they had mistakenly regarded as the laudable intention of creating a diversity of skyline styles, had craftily arranged matters so that no two roofs were of precisely the same design or height. At first I proceeded cautiously, but caution got me nowhere and I soon developed the only practical method of getting from one ridgepole to the next – running down one steeply pitched roof-side and letting the momentum carry me as far as possible up the other side before falling flat and scrabbling the last few feet up on hands and knees. At last I came to what I thought would be the roof I wanted, edged out to street level, leaned out over the gable and peered down.

I was right first time, which made a change for me. The shirt-sleeved sentry, almost twenty feet directly below me, was still maintaining his vigil. I attached one end of the ball of twine securely to the hole in the handle of the Stilson, lay flat so that my arm and the cord would clear the hoisting beam and lowered the Stilson about fifteen feet before starting to swing it in a gentle pendulum arc which increased with every movement of my hand. I increased it as rapidly as possible, for only feet beneath me a bright light shone through the crack between the two loading doors in the top storey and I had no means of knowing how long those doors would remain unopened.

The Stilson, which must have weighed at least four pounds, was now swinging through an arc of almost 90°. I lowered it three more feet and wondered how long it would be before the guard would become puzzled by the soft swish of sound that it must inevitably be making in its passage through the air, but at that moment his attention was fortunately distracted. A blue van had just entered the street and its arrival helped me in two ways: the watcher leaned further out to investigate this machine and at the same time the sound of its engine covered any intimation of danger from the swinging Stilson above.

The van stopped thirty yards away and the engine died. The Stilson was at the outer limit of its swing. As it started to descend I let the cord slip another couple of feet through my fingers. The guard, aware suddenly but far too late that something was amiss, twisted his head round just in time to catch the full weight of the Stilson on the forehead. He collapsed as if a bridge had fallen on him and slowly toppled backwards out of sight.

The door of the van opened and de Graaf got out. He waved to me. I made two beckoning gestures with my right arm, checked to see that the small gun was still firmly anchored inside my sock and shoe, lowered myself till my stomach was resting on the hoisting beam, then transferred my position till I was suspended by hands. I took my gun from its shoulder-holster, held it in my teeth, swung back, just once, then forwards, my left foot reaching for the loading sill, and my right foot kicking the doors open as I reached out my hands to get purchase on the door jambs. I took the gun in my right hand.

There were four of them there, Belinda, Goodbody and the two partners. Belinda, whitefaced, struggling, but making no sound, was already clad in a flowing Huyler costume and embroidered bodice, her arms held by the rubicund, jovially good-natured Morgenstern and Muggenthaler whose beaming avuncular smiles now began to congeal in almost grotesque slow motion: Goodbody, who had had his back to me and had been adjusting Belinda’s wimpled headgear to his aesthetic satisfaction, turned round very slowly. His mouth fell slowly open, his eyes widened and the blood drained from his face until it was almost the colour of his snowy hair.

I took two steps into the loft and reached an arm for Belinda. She stared at me for unbelieving seconds, then shook off the nerveless hands of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler and came running to me. Her heart was racing like a captive bird’s but she seemed otherwise not much the worse for what could only have been the most ghastly experience.

I looked at the three men and smiled as much as I could without hurting my face too much. I said: ‘Now, you know what death looks like.’

They knew all right. Their faces frozen, they stretched their hands upwards as far as they could. I kept them like that, not speaking, until de Graaf and van Gelder came pounding up the stairs and into the loft. During that time nothing happened. I will swear none of them as much as blinked. Belinda had begun to shake uncontrollably from the reaction, but she managed to smile wanly at me and I knew she would be all right: Paris Interpol hadn’t just picked her out of a hat.

De Graaf and van Gelder, both with guns in their hands, looked at the tableau. De Graaf said: ‘What in God’s name do you think you are about, Sherman? Why are those three men—’

‘Suppose I explain?’ I interrupted reasonably.

‘It will require some explanation,’ van Gelder said heavily. ‘Three well-known and respected citizens of Amsterdam—’

‘Please don’t make me laugh,’ I said. ‘It hurts my face.’

‘That too,’ de Graaf said. ‘How on earth—’

‘I cut myself shaving.’ That was Astrid’s line, really, but I wasn’t at my inventive best. ‘Can I tell it?’

De Graaf sighed and nodded.

‘In my way?’

He nodded again.

I said to Belinda: ‘You know Maggie’s dead?’

‘I know she’s dead.’ Her voice was a shaking whisper, she wasn’t as recovered as I’d thought. ‘He’s just told me. He told me and he smiled.’

‘It’s his Christian compassion shining through. He can’t help it. Well,’ I said to the policeman, ‘take a good look, gentlemen. At Goodbody. The most sadistically psychopathic killer I’ve ever met – or heard of, for that matter. The man who hung Astrid Lemay on a hook. The man who had Maggie pitchforked to death in a hayfield in Huyler. The man—’

‘You said pitchforked?’ De Graaf asked. You could see his mind couldn’t accept it.

‘Later. The man who drove George Lemay so mad that he killed him. The man who tried to kill me the same way; the man who tried to kill me three times today. The man who puts bottles of gin in the hands of dying junkies. The man who drops people into canals with lead piping wrapped round their waists after God knows what suffering and tortures. Apart from being the man who brings degradation and dementia and death to thousands of crazed human beings throughout the world. By his own admission, the master puppeteer who dangles a thousand hooked puppets from the end of his chains and makes them all dance to his tune. The dance of death.’

‘It’s not possible,’ van Gelder said. He seemed dazed. ‘It can’t be. Dr Goodbody? The pastor of—’

‘His name is Ignatius Catanelli and he’s on our files. An ex-member of an Eastern Seaboard cosa nostra. But even the Mafia couldn’t stomach him. By their lights they never kill wantonly, only for sound business reasons. But Catanelli killed because he’s in love with death. When he was a little boy he probably pulled the wings off flies. But when he grew up, flies weren’t enough for him. He had to leave the States, for the Mafia offered only one alternative.’

‘This – this is fantastic.’ Fantastic or not the colour still wasn’t back in Goodbody’s cheeks. ‘This is outrageous. This is—’

‘Be quiet,’ I said. ‘We have your prints and cephalic index. I must say that he has, in the American idiom, a sweet set-up going for him here. Incoming coasters drop heroin in a sealed and weighted container at a certain off-shore buoy. This is dragged up by barge and taken to Huyler, where it finds its way to a cottage factory there. This cottage factory makes puppets, which are then transferred to the warehouse here. What more natural – except that the very occasional and specially marked puppet contains heroin.’

Goodbody said: ‘Preposterous, preposterous. You can’t prove any of this.’

‘As I intend to kill you in a minute or two I don’t have to prove anything. Ah yes, he had his organization, had friend Catanelli. He had everybody from barrel-organ players to strip-tease dancers working for him – a combination of blackmail, money, addiction and the final threat of death made them all keep the silence of the grave.’

‘Working for him?’ De Graaf was still a league behind me. ‘In what way?’

‘Pushing and forwarding. Some of the heroin – a relatively small amount – was left here in puppets: some went to the shops, some to the puppet van in the Vondel Park – and other vans, for all I know. Goodbody’s girls went to the shops and purchased those puppets – which were secretly marked – in perfectly legitimate stores and had them sent to minor heroin suppliers, or addicts, abroad. The ones in the Vondel Park were sold cheap to the barrel-organ men – they were the connections for the down-and-outs who were in so advanced a condition that they couldn’t be allowed to appear in respectable places – if, that is to say, you call sleazy dives like the Balinova a respectable place.’

‘Then how in God’s name did we never catch on to any of this?’ de Graaf demanded.

‘I’ll tell you in a moment. Still about the distribution. An even larger proportion of the stuff went from here in crates of Bibles – the ones which our saintly friend here so kindly distributed gratis all over Amsterdam. Some of the Bibles had hollow centres. The sweet young things that Goodbody here, in the ineffable goodness of his Christian heart, was trying to rehabilitate and save from a fate worse than death, would turn up at his services with Bibles clutched in their sweet little hands – some of them, God help us, fetchingly dressed as nuns – then go away with different Bibles clutched in their sweet little hands and then peddle the damned stuff in the night-clubs. The rest of the stuff – the bulk of the stuff – went to the Kasteel Linden. Or have I missed something, Goodbody?’

From the expression on his face, it was pretty evident that I hadn’t missed out much of importance, but he didn’t answer me. I lifted my gun slightly and said: ‘Now, I think, Goodbody.’

‘No one’s taking the law into his own hands here!’ de Graaf said sharply.

‘You can see he’s trying to escape,’ I said reasonably. Goodbody was standing motionless: he couldn’t possibly have reached his fingers up another millimetre.

Then, for the second time that day, a voice behind me said: ‘Drop that gun, Mr Sherman.’

I turned slowly and dropped my gun. Anybody could take my gun from me. This time it was Trudi, emerging from shadows and only five feet away with a Luger held remarkably steadily in her right hand.

‘Trudi!’ De Graaf stared at the young happily-smiling blonde girl in shocked incomprehension. ‘What in God’s name—’ He broke off his words and cried out in pain instead as the barrel of van Gelder’s gun smashed down on his wrist. De Graaf’s gun clattered to the floor and as he turned to look at the man who had struck him de Graaf’s eyes held only stupefaction. Goodbody, Morgenstern and Muggenthaler lowered their hands, the last two producing guns of their own from under their pockets: so vastly voluminous was the yardage of cloth required to cover their enormous frames that they, unlike myself, did not require the ingenuity of specialized tailors to conceal the outline of their weapons.

Goodbody produced a handkerchief, mopped a brow which stood in urgent need of mopping, and said querulously to Trudi: ‘You took your time about coming forward, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, I enjoyed it!’ She giggled, a happy and carefree sound that would have chilled the blood of a frozen flounder. ‘I enjoyed every moment of it!’

‘A touching pair, aren’t they?’ I said to van Gelder. ‘Herself and her saintly pal here. This quality of trusting child-like innocence—

‘Shut up,’ van Gelder said coldly. He approached, ran his hand over me for weapons, found none. ‘Sit on the floor. Keep your hands where I can see them. You, too, de Graaf.’

We did as we were told. I sat cross-legged, my forearms on my thighs, my dangling hands close to my ankles. De Graaf stared at me, his face a mirror for his absolute lack of understanding.

‘I was coming to this bit,’ I said apologetically. ‘I was just on the point of telling you why you’ve made so little progress yourselves in tracing the source of those drugs. Your trusted lieutenant, Inspector van Gelder, made good and sure that no progress was made.’

‘Van Gelder?’ De Graaf, even with all the physical evidence to the contrary before him, still couldn’t conceive of a senior police officer’s treachery. ‘How can this be? It can’t be.’

‘That’s not a lollipop he’s pointing at you,’ I said mildly. Van Gelder’s the boss, van Gelder’s the brain. He’s the Frankenstein, all right: Goodbody’s just the monster that’s run out of control. Right, van Gelder?’

‘Right!’ The baleful glance van Gelder directed at Goodbody didn’t augur too well for Goodbody’s future, although I didn’t believe he had one anyway.

I looked at Trudi without affection. ‘And as for your little Red Riding-hood, van Gelder, this sweet little mistress of yours—’

‘Mistress?’ De Graaf was so badly off balance that he no longer even looked stunned.

‘You heard. But I think van Gelder has rather fallen out of love with her, haven’t you, van Gelder? She has, shall we say, become too much of a psychopathic soulmate for the Reverend here.’ I turned to de Graaf. ‘Our little rosebud is no addict. Goodbody knows how to make those marks on her arms look real. He told me so. Her mental age is not eight, it’s older than sin itself. And twice as evil.’

‘I don’t know.’ De Graaf sounded tired. ‘I don’t understand—’

‘She served three useful purposes,’ I said. ‘With van Gelder having a daughter like that, who would ever doubt that he was a dedicated enemy of drugs and all the evil men who profit by them? She was the perfect go-between for van Gelder and Goodbody – they never made contact, not even on the phone. And, most important, she was the vital link in the drug supply line. She took her puppet out to Huyler, switched it there for one loaded with heroin, took it back to the puppet van in the Vondel Park and switched it again. The van, of course, brought it here when it returned for more supplies. She is a very endearing child, is our Trudi. But she shouldn’t have used belladonna to give her eyes that glazed addict look. I didn’t catch on at the time, but give me time and clobber me over the head with a two-by-four and eventually I’ll catch on to anything. It wasn’t the right look, I’ve talked to too many junkies who had the right look. And then I knew.’

Trudi giggled again and licked her lips. ‘Can I shoot him now? In the leg. High up?’

‘You’re a charming little morsel,’ I said, ‘but you should get your priorities right. Why don’t you look around you?’

She looked around her. Everybody looked around him. I didn’t, I just looked straight at Belinda, then nodded almost imperceptibly at Trudi, who was standing between her and the open loading doors. Belinda, in turn, glanced briefly at Trudi and I knew she understood.

‘You fools!’ I said contemptuously. ‘How do you think I got all my information? I was given it! I was given it by two people who got scared to death and sold you down the river for a free pardon. Morgenstern and Muggenthaler.’

There were some pretty inhuman characters among those present, no doubt about that, but they were all human in their reactions. They all stared in consternation at Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, who stood there with unbelieving eyes and mouths agape and it was with mouths agape that they died, for they were both carrying guns and the gun I now had in my hand was very small and I couldn’t afford just to wound them. In the same moment of time Belinda flung herself back against an off-guard Trudi, who staggered backwards, teetered on the edge of the loading sill, then fell from sight.

Her thin wailing scream had not yet ended when de Graaf reached up desperately for van Gelder’s gun hand, but I’d no time to see how de Graaf made out, for I’d pushed myself to my toes, still in a crouching position and launched myself in a low dive for Goodbody, who was struggling to get his gun out. Goodbody pitched backwards with a crash that spoke well for the basic soundness of the warehouse floors, which remained where they were, and a second later I’d twisted round behind his back and had him making strange croaking noises in his throat, because I’d my arm hooked around his neck as if I were trying to make the front and back ends meet.

De Graaf was lying on the floor, blood streaming from a cut on his forehead. He was moaning a little. Van Gelder led a struggling Belinda in front of him, using her as a shield, just as I was using Goodbody as a shield. Van Gelder was smiling. Both our guns were pointing at each other.

‘I know the Shermans of this world.’ Van Gelder’s tone was calm, conversational. ‘They’d never risk hurting an innocent person – especially a girl so lovely as this. As for Goodbody there, I don’t care if he’s shot as full of holes as a colander. I make a point?’

I looked at the right side of Goodbody’s face, which was the only part of it I could see. Its colour, varied between purple and mauve, and whether this was because he was being slowly strangled by me or because of his reaction to his erstwhile partner’s ready and callous abandonment of him was difficult to say. Why I looked at him I don’t know, the last thought in my mind was to weigh up the respective value of Belinda and Goodbody as hostages: as long as van Gelder had Belinda as a hostage he was as safe as a man in a church. Well, any church, that was, except the Reverend Goodbody’s.

‘You make a point,’ I said.

‘I make another point,’ van Gelder went on. ‘You have a pop-gun there. I have a police Colt.’ I nodded. ‘So, my safe-conduct.’ He began to move towards the head of the stairs, keeping Belinda between us. ‘There’s a blue police van at the foot of the street. My van. I’m taking that. On the way there I’m going to smash the office telephones. If, when I reach the van, I do not see you at the loading door there, then I shall no longer require her. You understand?’

‘I understand. And if you kill her wantonly, you will never be able to sleep easy again. You know that.’

He said, ‘I know that,’ and disappeared walking backwards down the stairs, dragging Belinda behind him. I paid no attention to his going. I saw de Graaf sitting up and taking a handkerchief to his bleeding forehead, so apparently he was still able to fend for himself. I released my throttling grip on Goodbody’s neck, reached over and took his gun away, then, still seated behind him, brought out the handcuffs and secured both his wrists, one to the wrist of the dead Morgenstern, the other to the wrist of the dead Muggenthaler. I then rose, walked round to the front of Goodbody and helped a very shaky de Graaf to a chair. I looked back at Goodbody, who was staring at me with a face carved in a rictus of terror. When he spoke his normally deep, pontifical voice was almost an insane scream.

‘You’re not going to leave me like this!’

I surveyed the two massive merchants to whom he was chained.

‘You can always tuck one under either arm and make good your escape.’

‘In God’s name, Sherman—’

‘You put Astrid on a hook. I told her I would help her and you put her on a hook. You had Maggie pitchforked to death. My Maggie. You were going to hang Belinda on a hook. My Belinda. You’re the man who loves death. Try it at close quarters for a change.’ I moved towards the loading door, checked and looked at him again. ‘And if I don’t find Belinda alive, I’m not coming back.’

Goodbody moaned like some stricken animal and gazed with a horrified and shuddering revulsion at the two dead men who made him prisoner. I walked to the loading doors and glanced down.

Trudi was lying spreadeagled on the pavement below. I didn’t spare her a second glance. Across the street van Gelder was leading Belinda towards the police van. At the door of the van he turned, looked up, saw me, nodded and opened the door.

I turned away from the loading doors, crossed to the still groggy de Graaf, helped him to his feet and towards the head of the stairs. There, I turned and looked back at Goodbody. His eyes were staring in a fear-crazed face and he was making strange hoarse noises deep in his throat. He looked like a man lost for ever in a dark and endless nightmare, a man pursued by fiends and knowing he can never escape.

FOURTEEN

Darkness had almost fallen on the streets of Amsterdam. The drizzle was only light, but penetratingly cold as it was driven along by the high gusting wind. In the gaps between the wind-torn clouds the first stars winked palely: the moon was not yet up.

I sat waiting behind the driving wheel of the Opel, parked close to a telephone-box. By and by the box door opened and de Graaf, dabbing with his handkerchief at the blood still oozing from the gash on his forehead, came out and entered the car. I glanced up at him interrogatively.

The area will be completely cordoned within ten minutes. And when I say cordoned, I mean escape-proof. Guaranteed.’ He mopped some more blood. ‘But how can you be so sure—’

‘He’ll be there.’ I started the engine and drove off. ‘In the first place, van Gelder will figure it’s the last place in Amsterdam we’d ever think of looking for him. In the second place Goodbody, only this morning, removed the latest supply of heroin from Huyler. In one of those big puppets, for a certainty. The puppet wasn’t in his car out at the castle, so it must have been left in the church. He’d no time to take it anywhere else. Besides, there’s probably another fortune of the stuff lying about the church. Van Gelder’s not like Goodbody and Trudi. He’s not in the game for the kicks. He’s in it for the money – and he’s not going to pass up all that lovely lolly.’

‘Lolly?’

‘Sorry. Money. Maybe millions of dollars’ worth of the stuff.’

‘Van Gelder.’ De Graaf shook his head very slowly. ‘I can’t believe it. A man like that! With a magnificent police record.’

‘Save your sympathy for his victims,’ I said harshly. I hadn’t meant to speak like that to a sick man but I was still a sick man myself: I doubted whether the condition of my head was even fractionally better than that of de Graaf. ‘Van Gelder’s worse than any of them. You can at least say for Goodbody and Trudi that their minds were so sick and warped and diseased that they were no longer responsible for their actions. But van Gelder isn’t sick that way. He does it all cold-bloodedly for money. He knows the score. He knew what was going on, how his psychopathic pal Goodbody was behaving. And he tolerated it. If he could have kept the racket going on for ever, he’d have tolerated Goodbody’s lethal aberrations for ever. I looked at de Graaf speculatively. ‘You know that his brother and wife were killed in a car smash in Curacao?’

De Graaf paused before replying. ‘It was not a tragic accident?’

‘It was not a tragic accident. We’ll never prove it, but I’d wager my pension that it was caused by a combination of his brother, who was a trained security officer, finding out too much about him and van Gelder’s desire to be rid of a wife who was coming between him and Trudi – in the days before Trudi’s more lovable qualities came to the surface. My point is that the man’s an ice-cold calculator, quite ruthless and totally devoid of what we’d regard as normal human feelings.’

‘You’ll never live to collect your pension,’ de Graaf said sombrely.

‘Maybe not. But I was right about one thing.’ We’d turned into the canal street of Goodbody’s church and there, directly ahead, was the plain blue police van. We didn’t stop, but drove past it, parked at the door of the church and got out. A uniformed sergeant came down the steps to greet us and any reactions he had caused by the sight of the two crocks in front of him he hid very well.

‘Empty, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve even been up the belfry.’

De Graaf turned away and looked at the blue van.

‘If Sergeant Gropius says there’s no one there, then there’s no one there.’ He paused, then said slowly: ‘Van Gelder’s a brilliant man. We know that now. He’s not in the church. He’s not in Goodbody’s house. My men have both sides of the canal and the street sealed off. So, he’s not here. He’s elsewhere.’

‘He’s elsewhere, but he’s here,’ I said. ‘If we don’t find him, how long will you keep the cordon in position?’

‘Till we’ve searched and then double-checked every house in the street. Two hours, maybe three.’

‘And then he could walk away?’

‘He could. If he was here.’

‘He’s here,’ I said with certainty. ‘It’s Saturday evening. Do the building workers turn out on Sundays?’

‘No.’

‘So that gives him thirty-six hours. Tonight, even tomorrow night, he comes down and walks away.’

‘My head.’ Again de Graaf dabbed at his wound. ‘Van Gelder’s gun butt was very hard. I’m afraid—’

‘He’s not down here,’ I said patiently. ‘Searching the house is a waste of time. And I’m damned certain he’s not at the bottom of the canal holding his breath all the time. So where can he be?’

I looked speculatively up into the dark and wind-torn sky. De Graaf followed my line of sight. The shadowy outline of the towering crane seemed to reach up almost to the clouds, the tip of its massive horizontal boom lost in the surrounding darkness. The great crane had always struck me as having a weirdly menacing atmosphere about it: tonight probably because of what I had in mind it looked awesome and forbidding and sinister to a degree.

‘Of course,’ de Graaf whispered. ‘Of course.’

I said: ‘Well, then, I’d better be going.’

‘Madness! Madness! Look at you, look at your face. You’re not well.’

‘I’m well enough.’

‘Then I’m coming with you,’ de Graaf said determinedly.

‘No.’

‘I have young, fit police officers—’

‘You haven’t the moral right to ask any of your men, young and fit or not, to do this. Don’t argue. I refuse. Besides, this is no case for a frontal assault. Secrecy, stealth – or nothing.’

‘He’s bound to see you.’ Unwillingly or not, de Graaf was coming round to my point of view.

‘Not bound to. From his point of view everything below must be in darkness.’

‘We can wait,’ he urged. ‘He’s bound to come down. Some time before Monday morning he’s bound to come down.’

‘Van Gelder takes no delight in death. That we know. But he’s totally indifferent to death. That we know also. Lives – other people’s lives – mean nothing to him.’

‘So?’

‘Van Gelder is not down here. But neither is Belinda. So she’s up there with him – and when he does come down he’ll bring his living shield with him. I won’t be long.’

He made no further effort to restrain me. I left him by the church door, crossed into the building lot, reached the body of the crane and began to climb the endless series of diagonally placed ladders located within the lattice framework of the crane. It was a long climb and one that, in my present physical condition, I could well have done without, but there was nothing particularly exhausting or dangerous about it. Just a long and very tiring climb: the dangerous bit still lay ahead. About threequarters of the way up I paused to catch my breath and looked down.

There was no particular impression of height for the darkness was too complete, the faint street lamps along the canal were only pinpoints of light and the canal itself but a dully gleaming ribbon. It all seemed so remote, so unreal. I couldn’t make out the shape of any of the individual houses: all I could discern was the weathercock on the tip of the church steeple and even that was a hundred feet beneath me.

I looked up. The control cabin of the crane was still fifty feet above me, a vaguely seen rectangular darkness against a sky almost as dark. I started to climb again.

Ten feet only separated me from the trapdoor inset in the floor of the cabin when a gap appeared in the clouds and a low moon shone through, a half-moon only, but the contrasting brightness bathed the yellow-painted crane and its massive boom in an oddly garish flood of light that highlit every girder and cross-member of the structures. It also highlit me and had the peculiar effect of making me feel as aircraft pilots feel when caught up in a search-light, of being pinned to a wall. I looked up again and could see every rivethead in the trapdoor and the thought occurred to me that if I could see so well upwards anyone inside could see just as well downwards, and as the more time spent in that exposed position increased the chances of discovery I took my gun from its holster and crept silently up the last few steps of the ladder. I was less than four feet away when the trapdoor lifted a little and a long and very ugly-looking gun barrel protruded through the crack. I should, I know, have felt the chagrin and sickness which comes with the despair of the knowledge of ultimate defeat, but I’d been through too much that day, I’d used up all my emotions, and I accepted the inevitable with a fatalism that surprised even myself. It wasn’t any question of willing submission, give me half a chance and I’d have shot it out with him. But I had no chance at all and I just accepted that.

‘This is a twenty-four-shot riot gun,’ van Gelder said. His voice had a metallically cavernous ring to it with sepulchral overtones that didn’t seem at all out of place. ‘You know what that means?’

‘I know what that means.’

‘Let me have your gun, butt first.’

I handed over my gun with the good grace and expertise that came from long experience of handing over guns.

‘Now that little gun in your sock.’

I handed over the little gun in my sock. The trapdoor opened and I could see van Gelder quite clearly in the moonlight shining through the cabin windows.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of room.’

I clambered up into the cabin. As van Gelder had said, there was plenty of room, the cabin could have accommodated a dozen people at a pinch. Van Gelder, his usual calm and unruffled self, carried a shoulder-slung and very unpleasant-looking automatic gun. Belinda sat on the floor in a corner, pale-faced and exhausted, with a large Huyler puppet lying beside her. Belinda tried to smile at me but her heart wasn’t in it: she had that defenceless and forlorn air about her that near as a toucher had me at van Gelder’s throat, gun or no gun, but sanity and a swift estimate of the distance involved made me settle for lowering the trapdoor gently and straightening up in an equally circumspect manner. I looked at the gun.

‘I suppose you got that from the police car?’ I said.

‘You suppose right.’

‘I should have checked on that.’

‘You should.’ Van Gelder sighed. ‘I knew you would come, but you’ve come a long way for nothing. Turn round.’

I turned round. The blow that struck the back of my head was delivered with nothing like the vigour and the pride in his handiwork that Marcel had displayed, but it was still enough to stun me for a moment and bring me to my knees. I was vaguely conscious of something cold and metallic encircling my left wrist and when I began to take an active interest in what was going on around me again I found that I was sitting almost shoulder to shoulder with Belinda, handcuffed to her right wrist and with the chain passing through the metal hand grip above the trapdoor. I rubbed the back of my head tenderly: what with the combined efforts of Marcel and Goodbody and now van Gelder, it had had a rough passage that day and ached abominably just about wherever a head could ache.

‘Sorry about the head,’ van Gelder said. ‘But I’d as soon have put handcuffs on a conscious tiger. Well, the moon’s almost obscured. One minute and I’ll be gone. Three minutes and I’ll be on terra firma.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘You’re going down?’

‘What else? But not quite in the way you imagine. I’ve seen the police cordon getting in position – but no one seems to have caught on to the fact that the tip of the crane extends over the canal and at least sixty feet beyond the cordon. I have already lowered the hook to ground level.’

My head hurt too much for me to come up with a suitable comment: in the circumstances, there probably was none. Van Gelder slung his gun crosswise over one shoulder and secured the puppet with cord over his other shoulder. Then he said softly: ‘Ah, the moon is gone.’

It was. Van Gelder was only a vaguely seen shadow as he crossed to the door let into the front of the cabin near the control panel, opened it and stepped outside.

‘Goodbye, van Gelder,’ I said. He said nothing. The door closed and we were alone. She caught my handcuffed hand.

‘I knew you would come,’ she whispered, then, with a flash of the old Belinda: ‘But you did take your time about it didn’t you?’

‘It’s like I told you the managerial classes always have things to attend to.’

‘And did you did you have to say goodbye to a man like that?’

‘I thought I’d better – I’ll never see him again. Not alive.’ I fumbled in my right-hand pocket. ‘Who would have thought it? Van Gelder, his own executioner.’

‘Please?’

‘It was his idea to lend me a police taxi – so that I would be instantly recognizable and easily tailed wherever I went. I had handcuffs – I used them to secure Goodbody. And keys for the handcuffs. These.’

I unlocked the handcuffs, rose and crossed to the front of the cabin. The moon was behind a cloud, true enough, but van Gelder had overestimated the density of the cloud: admittedly, there was no more than a pale wash of light in the sky but enough to let me see van Gelder, about forty feet out now, the tails of his jacket and the gown of the puppet being tugged by the high wind, as he scuttled like a giant crab across the lattice framework of the boom.

My pencil flash was one of the few things that hadn’t been taken from me that day. I used it to locate an overhead breaker and pulled the lever down. Lights glowed in the control panel and I studied it briefly. I was aware that Belinda was now standing by my side.

‘What are you going to do?’ She was back at her whispering again.

‘Do I have to explain?’

‘No! No! You can’t!’ I don’t think she knew exactly what I intended to do, but from what must have been some element of irrevocable finality in my voice she clearly guessed that the results of whatever action I took would be of a very permanent nature. I looked again at van Gelder, who was by now threequarters of the way out towards the tip of the boom, then turned to Belinda and put my hands on her shoulders.

‘Look. Don’t you know that we can never prove anything against van Gelder? Don’t you know he may have destroyed a thousand lives? And don’t you know he’s carrying enough heroin with him to destroy another thousand?’

‘You could turn the boom! So that he comes down inside the police cordon.’

‘They’ll never take van Gelder alive. I know that, you know that, we all know that. And he has a riot gun with him. How many good men do you want to die, Belinda?’

She said nothing and turned away. I looked out again. Van Gelder had reached the tip of the boom and van Gelder was wasting no time, for immediately he swung out and down, wrapped his hands and legs around the cable and started to slide, moving with an almost precipitate haste for which there was ample justification: the cloud band was thinning rapidly and the intensity of light in the sky increasing by the moment.

I looked down and for the first time could see the streets of Amsterdam, but it was no longer Amsterdam, just a toy town with tiny streets and canals and houses, very much like those scaled-down railroad models that one sees in big stores at Christmas time.

I looked behind me. Belinda was sitting on the floor again, her face in her hands: she was making doubly certain that she couldn’t see what was going to happen. I looked towards the cable again, and this time I had no difficulty at all in seeing van Gelder clearly, for the moon had come from behind the cloud.

He was about half-way down now, beginning to sway from side to side as the high wind caught at him, increasing the arc of his pendulum with the passing of every moment. I reached for a wheel and turned it to the left.

The cable started to ascend, van Gelder ascending with it: astonishment must have momentarily frozen him to the cable. Then he clearly realized what was happening and he started sliding downwards at a much accelerated speed, at least three times that at which the cable was ascending.

I could see the giant hook at the end of the cable now, not forty feet below van Gelder. I centred the wheel again and again van Gelder clung motionless to the cable. I knew I had to do what I had to do but I wanted it over and done as quickly as was humanly possible. I turned the wheel to the right, the cable started to descend at full speed, then abruptly centred the wheel again. I could feel the shuddering jerk as the cable brought up to an abrupt standstill. Van Gelder’s grip broke and in that moment I closed my eyes. I opened them, expecting to find an empty cable and van Gelder vanished from sight, but he was still there, no longer clinging to the cable: he was lying, face down, impaled on the giant hook, swaying to and fro in ponderous arcs, fifty feet above the houses of Amsterdam. I turned away, crossed to where Belinda sat, knelt and took her hands from her face. She looked up at me, I had expected to find revulsion in her face, but there was none, only sadness and weariness and that little-girl-lost expression on her face again.

‘It’s all over?’ she whispered.

‘It’s all over.’

‘And Maggie’s dead.’ I said nothing. ‘Why should Maggie be dead and not me?’

‘I don’t know, Belinda.’

‘Maggie was good at her job, wasn’t she?’

‘Maggie was good.’

‘And me?’ I said nothing. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said dully. ‘I should have pushed van Gelder down the stairs in the warehouse, or crashed his van, or pushed him in the canal, or knocked him off the steps on the crane or – or—’ She said wonderingly: ‘He didn’t have his gun on me at any time.’

‘He didn’t have to, Belinda.’

‘You knew?’

‘Yes.’

‘Category Grade I, female operative,’ she said bitterly. ‘First job in narcotics—’

‘Last job in narcotics.’

‘I know.’ She smiled wanly. ‘I’m fired.’

‘That’s my girl,’ I said approvingly. I pulled her to her feet. ‘At least you know the regulations, or the one that concerns you anyway. She stared at me for a long moment, then the slow smile came for the first time that night. ‘That’s the one,’ I said. ‘Married women are not permitted to remain in the service.’ She buried her face in my shoulder, which at least spared her the punishment of having to look at my sadly battered face.

I looked past the blonde head at the world beyond and below. The great hook with its grisly load was swaying wildly now and at the extremity of one of the swings both gun and puppet slipped from van Gelder’s shoulders and fell away. They landed on the cobbles on the far side of the deserted canal street, the riot gun and the beautiful puppet from Huyler, over which the shadow, like the giant pendulum of a giant clock, of the cable, the hook and its burden, swung in everincreasing arcs across the night skies of Amsterdam.

About the Author

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D. Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Caravan to Vaccarès

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STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of

Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1970

© 1970 by HarperCollinsPublishers

The author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

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To Jean-André and Emanuela Charial

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

They had come a long way, those gypsies encamped for their evening meal on the dusty greensward by the winding mountain road in Provence. From Transylvania they had come, from the pustas of Hungary, from the High Tatra of Czechoslovakia, from the Iron Gate, even from as far away as the gleaming Rumanian beaches washed by the waters of the Black Sea. A long journey, hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way. Above all, one would have thought, even for those nomadic travellers par excellence, a tiring journey.

No traces of any such tiredness could be seen in the faces of the gypsies, men, women and children all dressed in their traditional finery, who sat or squatted in a rough semi-circle round two glowing coke braziers, listening in quietly absorbed melancholy to the hauntingly soft and nostalgic tsigane music of the Hungarian steppes. For this apparent lack of any trace of exhaustion there could have been a number of reasons: as the very large, modern, immaculately finished and luxuriously equipped caravans indicated, the gypsies of today travel in a degree of comfort unknown to their forebears who roamed Europe in the horse-drawn, garishly-painted and fiendishly uncomfortable covered-wagon caravans of yesteryear: they were looking forward that night to the certainty of replenishing coffers sadly depleted by their long haul across Europe – in anticipation of this they had already changed from their customary drab travelling clothes: only three days remained until the end of their pilgrimage, for pilgrimage this was: or perhaps they just had remarkable powers of recuperation. Whatever the reason, their faces reflected no signs of weariness, only gentle pleasure and bitter-sweet memories of faraway homes and days gone by.

But one man there was among them whose expression – or lack of it – would have indicated to even the most obtusely unobservant that, for the moment at least, his lack of musical appreciation was total and his thoughts and intentions strictly confined to the present. His name was Czerda and he was sitting on the top of the steps of his caravan, apart from and behind the others, a halfseen shadow on the edge of darkness. Leader of the gypsies and hailing from some unpronounceable village in the delta of the Danube, Czerda was of middle years, lean, tall and powerfully built, with about him that curiously relaxed but instantly identifiable stillness of one who can immediately transform apparent inertia into explosive action. He was dressed all in black and had black hair, black eyes, black moustache and the face of a hawk. One hand, resting limply on his knee, held a long thin smouldering black cigar, the smoke wisping up into his eyes, but Czerda did not seem to notice or care.

His eyes were never still. Occasionally he glanced at his fellow-gypsies, but only briefly, casually, dismissively. Now and again he looked at the range of the Alpilles, their gaunt forbidding limestone crags sleeping palely in the brilliant moonlight under a star-dusted sky, but for the most part he glanced alternately left and right along the line of parked caravans. Then his eyes stopped roving, although no expression came to replace the habitual stillness of that face. Without haste he rose, descended the steps, ground his cigar into the earth and walked soundlessly to the end of the row of caravans.

The man who stood waiting in the shadows was a youthful, scaled-down replica of Czerda himself. Not quite so broad, not quite so tall, his swarthily aquiline features were cast in a mould so unmistakably similar to that of the older man that it was unthinkable that he could be anything other than his son. Czerda, clearly a man not much given to superfluous motion or speech, raised a questioning eyebrow: his son nodded, led him out on to the dusty roadway, pointed and made a downward slicing, chopping motion with his hand.

From where they stood and less than fifty yards away soared an almost vertical outcrop of white limestone rock, but an outcrop which has no parallel anywhere in the world, for its base was honeycombed with enormous rectangular entrances, cut by the hand of man – no feat of nature could possibly have reproduced the sharply geometrical linearity of those apertures in the cliff face: one of those entrances was quite huge, being at least forty feet in height and no less in width.

Czerda nodded, just once, turned and looked down the road to his right. A vague shape detached itself from shadow and lifted an arm.

Czerda returned the salute and pointed towards the limestone bluff. There was no acknowledgment and clearly none was necessary, for the man at once disappeared, apparently into the rock face. Czerda turned to his left, located yet another man in the shadows, made a similar gesture, accepted a torch handed him by his son and began to walk quickly and quietly towards the giant entrance in the cliff face. As they went, moonlight glinted on the knives both men held in their hands, very slender knives, long-bladed and curved slightly at the ends. As they passed through the entrance of the cave they could still distinctly hear the vioinists change both mood and tempo and break into the lilting cadences of a gypsy dance.

Just beyond the entrance the interior widened out and heightened until it was like the inside of a great cathedral or a giant tomb of antiquity. Both Czerda and his son switched on their torches, the powerful beams of which failed to penetrate the farthest reaches of this awesome man-made cave, and man-made it unquestionably was, for clearly visible on the towering side-walls were the thousands of vertical and horizontal scores where long-dead generations of Provençals had sawn away huge blocks of the limestone for building purposes.

The floor of this entrance cavern – for, vast though it was, it was no more than that – was pitted with rectangular holes, some of them large enough to hold a motor car, others wide and deep enough to bury a house. Scattered in a few odd corners were mounds of rounded limestone rock but, for the most part, the floor looked as if it had been swept only that day. To the right and left of the entrance cavern led off two other huge openings, the darkness lying beyond them total, impenetrable. A doom-laden place, implacable in its hostility, forebodng, menacing, redolent of death. But Czerda and his son seemed unaware of any of this, quite unmoved: they turned and walked confidently towards the entrance to the right-hand chamber.

Deep inside the heart of this vast warren, a slight figure, a barely distinguishable blur in the pale wash of moonlight filtering down through a crack in the cavern roof, stood with his back to a limestone wall, fingers splayed and pressed hard against the clammy rock behind him in the classically frozen position of the fugitive at bay. A youth, no more than twenty, he was clad in dark trousers and a white shirt. Around his neck he wore a silver crucifix on a slender silver chain. The crucifix rose and fell, rose and fell with metronomic regularity as the air rasped in and out of his throat and his heaving lungs tried vainly to satisfy the demands of a body that couldn’t obtain oxygen quickly enough. White teeth showed in what could have been a smile but was no smile, although frozen lips drawn back in the rictus of terror can look like one. The nostrils were distended, the dark eyes wide and staring, his face as masked in sweat as if it had been smeared with glycerine. It was the face of a boy with two demons riding on his shoulders: almost at the end of his physical resources, the knowledge of the inevitability of death had triggered off the unreasoning and irrecoverable panic that pushes a man over the edge of the abyss into the mindless depths of madness.

Momentarily, the fugitive’s breathing stopped entirely as he caught sight of two dancing pools of light on the floor of the cavern. The wavering beams, steadily strengthening, came from the left-hand entrance. For a moment the young gypsy stood as one petrified, but if reason had deserted him the instinct for survival was still operating independently, for with a harsh sobbing sound he pushed himself off the wall and ran towards the right-hand entrance to the cavern, canvas-soled shoes silent on the rocky floor. He rounded the corner, then slowed down suddenly, reached out groping hands in front of him as he waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the deeper darkness, then moved on slowly into the next cavern, his painfully gasping breathing echoing back in eerie whispers from the unseen walls around him.

Czerda and his son, their torch beams, as they advanced, ceaselessly probing through an arc of 180 degrees, strode off confidently through the archway linking the entrance cavern to the one just vacated by the fugitive. At a gesture from Czerda, both men stopped and deliberately searched out the furthermost recesses of the cavern: it was quite empty. Czerda nodded, almost as if in satisfaction, and gave a peculiar, lowpitched two-tone whistle.

In his hiding-place, which was no hiding-place at all, the gypsy appeared to shrink. His terrified eyes stared in the direction of his imagined source of the whistle. Almost at once, he heard an identical whistle, but one which emanated from another part of this subterranean labyrinth. Automatically, his eyes lined up to search out the source of this fresh menace, then he twisted his head to the right as he heard a third whistle, exactly the same in timbre and volume as the previous two. His staring eyes tried desperately to locate this third danger, but there was nothing to be seen but the all-encompassing darkness and no sound at all to break the brooding silence except the far-off keening of the gypsy violins, a far-off reminder of another safer and saner world that served only to intensify the sinister stillness inside that vaulted place of horror.

For a few moments he stood, fear-crazed now and wholly irresolute, then, within the space of as many seconds, the three double whistles came again, but this time they were all closer, much closer, and when he again saw the faint wash of light emanating from the two torches he had seen earlier, he turned and ran blindly in the only direction which seemed to afford a momentary respite, careless or oblivious of the fact that he might run into a limestone wall at any-moment. Reason should have told him this but he was now bereft of reason: it was but instinct again, the ageold one that told him that a man does not die before he has to.

He had taken no more than half-a-dozen steps when a powerful torch snapped on less than ten yards ahead of him. The fugitive stopped abruptly, staggering but not falling, lowered the forearm that he had flung up in automatic reflex to protect his eyes and stared for the first time, with narrowed eyes, in a barely conscious attempt to identify the extent and immediacy of this fresh danger confronting him, but all his shrinking eyes could make out was the vaguely discernible bulk of the shapeless figure of the man behind the torch. Then slowly, very slowly, the man’s other hand came forward until it was brightly lit by the beam of the torch: the hand held an evilly curved knife that glittered brilliantly in the torch-light. Knife and torch began to move slowly forward.

The fugitive whirled around, took two steps, then stopped as abruptly as he had before. Two other torches, knives again showing in their powerful beams, were scarcely further away than the man behind him. What was so terrifying, so nervedestroying, about the measured advances of all three was the unhurriedly remorseless certainty.

‘Come now, Alexandre,’ Czerda said pleasantly. ‘We’re all old friends, aren’t we? Don’t you want to see us any more?’

Alexandre sobbed and flung himself to his right in the direction where the light from the three torches showed the entrance to yet another cavern. Panting as a deer does just before the hounds drag it down, he half-tumbled, half-ran through the entrance. None of his three pursuers made any attempt to cut him off or run after him: they merely followed, again walking with that same purposeful lack of haste.

Inside this third cavern, Alexandre stopped and looked wildly around. A small cavern this time, small enough to let him see that all the walls here were solid, hostilely and uncompromisingly solid, without as much as the tiniest aperture to offer any hope of furtherflight. The only exit was by the way he had come in and this was the end of the road.

Then the realization gradually penetrated his mind, numbed though it was, that there was something different about this particular cavern. His pursuers with their torches were not yet in sight, so how was it that he could see so well? Not clearly, there wasn’t enough light for that, but well enough in contrast with the Stygian darkness of the cavern he had just left behind.

Almost at his feet there lay a huge pile of rock and rubble, clearly the result of some massive fall or cave-in in the past. Instinctively, Alexandre glanced upwards. The rubble, piled at an angle of about forty degrees from the horizontal, didn’t seem to have a summit. It just stretched on and on and Alexandre’s gradually lifting eyes could see that it stretched upwards for a vertical height of at least sixty feet before it ended. And where it ended it had to end – for there, at the very top, was a circular patch of star-studded sky. That was where the light came from, he dimly realized, from some roof collapse of long ago.

His body was already beyond exhaustion but now some primeval drive had taken over and the body was no longer its own master, in much the same way as his mind had lost control of it. Without a glance to see whether his pursuers were in sight or not, Alexandre flung himself at the great rock pile and began to claw his way upwards.

The rock pile was unstable and dangerous to a degree, a secure footing impossible to obtain, he slid a foot backwards for every eighteen inches of upward progress made, but for all that the momentum induced by his frenzied desperation overcame the laws of gravity and friction co-efficients and he made steady if erratic progress up that impossibly crumbling slope that no man in his normal senses would ever have attempted.

About one third of the way up, conscious of an increase in the amount of illumination beneath him, he paused briefly and looked downwards. There were three men standing at the foot of the rubble now, lit torches still in their hands. They were gazing up towards him but making no attempt to follow. Oddly enough, their torch beams were not pointing up towards him but were directed towards the floor at their feet. Even had his confused mind been able to register this oddity Alexandre had no time to consider it, for he felt his precarious hand- and foot-holds giving way beneath him and started scrabbling his way upwards again.

His knees ached abominably, his shins were flayed, his fingernails broken, the palms of his bleeding hands open almost to the bone. But still Alexandre climbed on.

About two-thirds of the way up he was forced to pause a second time not because he chose to but because, for the moment, his bleeding limbs and spent muscles could take him no farther. He glanced downwards and the three men at the foot of the rockfall were as they had been before, immobile, their torches still pointed at their feet, all three gazing upwards. There was an intensity in their stillness, a curious aura of expectancy. Vaguely, somewhere deep in the befogged recesses of what little was left of his mind, Alexandre wondered why. He turned his head and looked up to the starry sky above and then he understood.

A man, highlit under the bright moon, was seated on the rim of the rockfall. His face was partly in shadow but Alexandre had little difficulty in making out the bushy moustache, the gleam of white teeth. He looked as if he was smiling. Maybe he was smiling. The knife in his left hand was as easily visible as the torch in his right. The man pressed the button of his torch as he came sliding over the rim.

Alexandre’s face showed no reaction for he had nothing left to react with. For a few moments he remained immobile as the man with the moustache came sliding down towards him, triggering off a small avalanche of boulders as he came, then tried to fling himself despairingly to one side to avoid the impact and the knife of his pursuer, but because of his frantic haste and the fact that he was now being severely buffeted about the body by the bounding limestone rocks he lost his footing and began to slide helplessly downwards, rolling over and over quite uncontrollably with no hope in the world of stopping himself. So treacherously loose had the surface of the rockfall become that even his pursuer was able to preserve his balance only by taking huge bounding leaps down the rockfall and the volume of the torrent of stones now crashing on to the floor of the cavern was indicated clearly enough by the alacrity with which the three men at the foot of the rockfall moved back at least ten paces. As they did so they were joined by a fourth man who had just come through the cavern entrance, then immediately afterwards by Alexandre’s pursuer, whose great leaping steps had taken him past the still tumbling boy.

Alexandre landed heavily on the floor, arms instinctively clutched over his head to protect it from the cascading stones that continued to strike his body for a period of several seconds until the rain of rocks ceased. For as long again he remained dazed, uncomprehending, then he propped himself to his hands and knees before rising shakily to his feet. He looked at the semi-circle of five men, each with a knife in hand, closing in inexorably on him and now his mind was no longer uncomprehending. But he no longer had the look of a hunted animal, for he had already been through all the terrors of death and he was now beyond that. Now, unafraid, for there was nothing left of which to be afraid, he could look into the face of death. He stood there quietly and waited for it to come to him.

Czerda stooped, laid a final limestone rock on top of the mound that had now grown at the foot of the rockfall, straightened, looked at the handiwork of his men and himself, nodded in apparent satisfaction and gestured towards the others to leave the cavern. They left. Czerda took one last look at the oblong mound of stones, nodded again, and followed.

Once outside the entrance cave and into what now appeared to be the intolerably harsh glare of bright moonlight that bathed the Alpilles, Czerda beckoned to his son who slowed his pace and let the others precede them.

Czerda asked quietly: ‘Any more would-be informers amongst us, do you think, Ferenc?’

I don’t know.’ Ferenc shrugged his doubt. ‘Josef and Pauli I do not trust. But who can be sure?’

‘But you will watch them, Ferenc, won’t you? As you watched poor Alexandre.’ Czerda crossed himself. ‘God rest his soul.’

‘I will watch them, Father.’ Ferenc dismissed the answer to the question as being too obvious for further elaboration. ‘We’ll be at the hotel inside the hour. Do you think we shall make much money tonight?’

‘Who cares what pennies the idle and foolish rich throw our way? Our paymaster is not in that damned hotel, but that damned hotel we have visited for a generation and must keep on visiting.’ Czerda sighed heavily. ‘Appearances are all, Ferenc, my son, appearances are all. That you must never forget.’

‘Yes, Father,’ Ferenc said dutifully. He hastily stuck his knife out of sight.

Unobtrusively, unseen, the five gypsies made their way back to the encampment and sat down, at a discreet distance from one another, just outside the perimeter of an audience still lost in the sadly-happy rapture of nostalgia as the volume and pace of the violin music mounted to a crescendo. The braziers were burning low now, a faint red glow barely visible in the bright moonlight. Then, abruptly and with a splendid flourish, the music ceased, the violinists bowed low and the audience called out their appreciation and clapped enthusiastically, none more so than Czerda who buffeted his palms together as if he had just heard Heifetz giving of his best in the Carnegie Hall. But even as he clapped, his eyes wandered, away from the violinists, away from the audience and the gypsy camp, until he was gazing again at the honeycombed face of the limestone cliffs where a cave had so lately become a tomb.

CHAPTER 1

‘The cliff battlements of Les Baux, cleft and rent as by a giant axe, and the shattered, gaunt and terrible remnants of the ancient fortress itself are the most awesomely desolate of all ruins in Europe.’ Or so the local guide-book said. It went on: ‘Centuries after its death Les Baux is still an open tomb, a dreadful and dreadfully fitting memorial to a medieval city that lived most violently and perished in agony: to look upon Les Baux is to look upon the face of death imperishably carved in stone.’

Well, it was pitching it a bit high, perhaps, guide-books do tend towards the hyperbolic, but the average uncertified reader of the guide would take the point and turn no somersaults if some wealthy uncle had left him the place in his will. It was indisputably the most inhospitable, barren and altogether uninviting collection of fractured and misshapen masonry in western Europe, a total and awesome destruction that was the work of seventeenth-century demolition squads who had taken a month and heaven alone knew how many tons of gunpowder to reduce Les Baux to its present state of utter devastation: one would have been equally prepared to believe that the same effect had been achieved in a couple of seconds that afternoon with the aid of an atom bomb: the annihilation of the old fortress was as total as that. But people still lived up there, lived and worked and died.

At the foot of the western vertical cliff face of Les Baux lay a very fittingly complementary feature of the landscape which was sombrely and justifiably called the Valley of Hell, partly because the barren desolation of its setting between the battlements of Les Baux to the east and a spur of the Alpilles to the west, partly because in summer time this deeply-sunk gorge, which opened only to the south, could become almost unbearably hot.

But there was one area, right at the northern extremity of this grim cul-de-sac, that was in complete and unbelievably startling contrast to the bleakly forlorn wastes that surrounded it, a green and lovely and luxurious oasis that, in the context, could have been taken straight out of the pages of a fairy-tale book.

It was, in brief, an hotel, an hotel with gratefully tree-lined precincts, exotically designed gardens and a gleamingly blue swimming pool. The gardens lay to the south, the immaculate pool was in the centre, beyond that a large tree-shaded patio and finally the hotel itself with its architectural ancestry apparently stemming from a cross between a Trappist monastery and a Spanish hacienda. It was, in point of fact, one of the best and – almost by definition – one of the most exclusive and expensive hotel-restaurants in Southern Europe: The Hotel Baumanière.

To the right of the patio, approached by a flight of steps, was a very large forecourt and leading off from this to the south, through an archway in a magnificently sculptured hedge, was a large and rectangular parking area, all the parking places being more than adequately shaded from the hot summer sun by closely interwoven wicker-work roofing.

The patio was discreetly illuminated by all but invisible lights hung in the two large trees which dominated most of the area, overhanging the fifteen tables scattered in expensively sophisticated separation across the stone flags. Even the tables were something to behold. The cutlery gleamed. The crockery shone. The crystal glittered. And one did not have to be told that the food was superb, that the Châteauneuf had ambrosia whacked to the wide: the absorbed silence that had fallen upon the entranced diners could be matched only by the reverential hush one finds in the great cathedrals of the world. But even in this gastronomical paradise there existed a discordant note.

This discordant note weighed about 220 pounds and he talked all the time, whether his mouth was full or not. Clearly, he was distracting all the other guests, he’d have distracted them even if they had been falling en masse down the north face of the Eiger. To begin with, his voice was uncommonly loud, but not in the artificial fashion of the nouveau riche or the more impoverished members of the lesser aristocracy who feel it incumbent upon them to call to the attention of the lesser orders of the existence of another and superior strain of Homo sapiens. Here was the genuine article: he didn’t give a damn whether people heard him or not. He was a big man, tall, broad and heavily built: the buttons anchoring the straining folds of his double-breasted dinner-jacket must have been sewn on with piano wire. He had black hair, a black moustache, a neatly-trimmed goatee beard and a black-beribboned monocle through which he was peering closely at the large menu-card in his hand. His table companion was a girl in her mid-twenties, clad in a blue mini-dress and quite extravagantly beautiful in a rather languorous fashion. At that moment she was gazing in mild astonishment at her bearded escort who was clapping his hands imperiously, an action which resulted in the most instantaneous appearance of a dark-jacketed restaurant manager, a white-tied head waiter and a black-tied assistant waiter.

‘Encore,’ said the man with the beard. In retrospect, his gesture of summoning the waiting staff seemed quite superfluous: they could have heard him in the kitchen without any trouble.

‘Of course.’ The restaurant manager bowed. ‘Another entrecôte for the Duc de Croytor. Immediately.’ The head waiter and his assistant bowed in unison, turned and broke into a discreet trot while still less than twelve feet distant. The blonde girl stared at the Duc de Croytor with a bemused expression on her face.

‘But, Monsieur le Duc – ’

‘Charles to you,’ the Duc de Croytor interrupted firmly. ‘Titles do not impress me even although hereabouts I’m referred to as Le Grand Duc, no doubt because of my impressive girth, my impressive appetite and my viceregal manner of dealing with the lower orders. But Charles to you, Lila, my dear.’

The girl, clearly embarrassed, said something in a low voice which apparently her companion couldn’t hear for he lost no time in letting his ducal impatience show through.

‘Speak up, speak up! Bit deaf in this ear, you know.’

She spoke up. ‘I mean – you’ve just had an enormous entrecôte steak.’

‘One never knows when the years of famine will strike,’ Le Grand Duc said gravely. ‘Think of Egypt. Ah!’

An impressively escorted head waiter placed a huge steak before him with all the ritual solemnity of the presentation of crown jewels except that, quite clearly, both the waiter and Le Grand Duc obviously regarded the entrecôte as having the edge on such empty baubles any time. An assistant waiter set down a large ashet of creamed potatoes and another of vegetables while yet another waiter reverently placed an ice bucket containing two bottles of rosé on a serving table close by.

‘Bread for Monsieur le Duc?’ the restaurant manager enquired.

‘You know very well I’m on a diet.’ He spoke as if he meant it, too, then, clearly as an after-thought, turned to the blonde girl. ‘Perhaps Mademoiselle Delafont – ’

‘I couldn’t possibly.’ As the waiters left she gazed in fascination at his plate. ‘In twenty seconds – ’

‘They know my little ways,’ Le Grand Duc mumbled. It is difficult to speak clearly when one’s mouth is full of entrecôte steak.

‘And I don’t.’ Lila Delafont looked at him speculatively. I don’t know, for instance, why you should invite me – ’

‘Apart from the fact that no one ever denies Le Grand Duc anything, four reasons.’ When you’re a Duke you can interrupt without apology. He drained about half a pint of wine and his enunciation improved noticeably. ‘As I say, one never knows when the years of famine will strike.’ He eyed her appreciatively so that she shouldn’t miss his point. ‘I knew – I know – your father, the Count Delafont well – my credentials are impeccable. You are the most beautiful girl in sight. And you are alone.’

Lila, clearly embarrassed, lowered her voice, but it was no good. By this time the other diners clearly regarded it as lèse-majesté to indulge in any conversation themselves while the Duc de Croytor was holding the floor, and the silence was pretty impressive.

‘I’m not alone. Nor the most beautiful girl in sight. Neither.’ She smiled apologetically, as if afraid she had been overheard, and nodded in the direction of a near-by table. ‘Not while my friend Cecile Dubois is here.’

‘The girl you were with earlier this evening?’

‘Yes.’

‘My ancestors and I have always preferred blondes.’ His tone left little room for doubt that brunettes were for the plebs only. Reluctantly, he laid down his knife and fork and peered sideways. ‘Passable, passable, I must say.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper that couldn’t have been heard more than twenty feet away. ‘Your friend, you say. Then who’s that dissipatedlooking layabout with her?’

Seated at a table about ten feet away and clearly well within earshot of Le Grand Duc, a man removed his horn-rimmed glasses and folded them with an air of finality: he was conservatively and expensively dressed in grey gaberdine, was tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired and just escaped being handsome because of the slightly battered irregularity of his deeply tanned face. The girl opposite him, tall, dark, smiling and with amusement in her green eyes, put a restraining hand on his wrist.

‘Please, Mr Bowman. It’s not worth it, is it?

Really?’

Bowman looked into the smiling face and subsided. ‘I am strongly tempted, Miss Dubois, strongly tempted.’ He reached for his wine but his hand stopped half-way. He heard Lila’s voice, disapproving, defensive.

‘He looks more like a heavy-weight boxer to me.’

Bowman smiled at Cecile Dubois and raised his glass.

‘Indeed.’ Le Grand Duc quaffed another half goblet of rosé. ‘One about twenty years past his prime.’

Wine spilled on the table as Bowman set down his glass with a force that should have shattered the delicate crystal. He rose abruptly to his feet, only to find that Cecile, in addition to all her other obviously fine points, was possessed of a set of excellent reflexes. She was on her feet as quickly as he was, had insinuated herself between Bowman and Le Grand Duc’s table, took his arm and urged him gently but firmly in the direction of the swimming pool: they looked for all the world like a couple who had just finished dinner and decided to go for a stroll for the digestion’s sake.

Bowman, though with obvious reluctance, went along with this. He had about him the air of a man for whom the creation of a disturbance with Le Grand Duc would have been a positive pleasure but who drew the line at having street brawls with young ladies.

‘I’m sorry.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘But Lila is my friend. I didn’t want her embarrassed.’

‘Ha! You didn’t want her embarrassed. Doesn’t matter, I suppose, how embarrassed I am?’

‘Oh, come on. Just sticks and stones, you know. You really don’t look the least little bit dissipated to me.’ Bowman stared at her suspiciously, but there was no malicious amusement in her eyes: she was pursing her lips in mock but friendly seriousness. ‘Mind you, I can see that not everyone would like to be called a layabout. By the way, what do you do? Just in case I have to defend you to the Dulce – verbally, that is.’

‘Hell with the Duke.’

‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

‘And a very good question it is too.’ Bowman paused reflectively, took off his glasses and polished them. ‘Fact is, I don’t do anything.’

They were now at the farther end of the pool. Cecile took her hand away from his arm and looked at him without any marked enthusiasm.

‘DO you mean to tell me, Mr Bowman – ’

‘Call me Neil. All my friends do.’

‘You make friends very easily, don’t you?’ she asked with inconsequential illogic.

‘I’m like that,’ Bowman said simply.

She wasn’t listening or, if she was, she ignored him. ‘Do you mean to tell me you never work? You never do anything!’

‘Never.’

‘You’ve no job?’ You’ve been trained for nothing? You can’t do anything?’

‘Why should I spin and toil?’ Bowman said reasonably. ‘My old man’s made millions. Still making them, come to that. Every other generation should take it easy, don’t you think – a sort of recharging of the family batteries. Besides, I don’t need a job. Far be it from me,’ he finished piously, ‘to deprive some poor fellow who really needs it.’

‘Of all the specious arguments … How could I have misjudged a man like that?’

‘People are always misjudging me,’ Bowman said sadly.

‘Not you. The Duke. His perception.’ She shook her head, but in a way that looked curiously more like an exasperated affection than cold condemnation. ‘You really are an idle layabout, Mr Bowman.’

‘Neil.’

‘Oh, you’re incorrigible.’ For the first time, irritation.

‘And envious.’ Bowman took her arm as they approached the patio again and because he wasn’t smiling she made no attempt to remove it. ‘Envious of you. Your spirit, I mean. Your yearlong economy and thrift. For you two English girls to be able to struggle by here at £200 a week each on your typists’ salaries or whatever – ’

‘Lila Delafont and I are down here to gather material for a book.’ She tried to be stiff but it didn’t become her.

‘On what?’ Bowman asked politely. ‘Provençal cookery? Publishers don’t pay that kind of speculative advance money. So who picks up the tab? Unesco? The British Council?’ Bowman peered at her closely through his horn-rimmed glasses but clearly she wasn’t the lip-biting kind. ‘Let’s all pay a silent tribute to good old Daddy, shall we? A truce, my dear. This is too good to spoil. Beautiful night, beautiful food, beautiful girl.’ Bowman adjusted his spectacles and surveyed the patio. ‘Your girl-friend’s not bad either. Who’s the slim Jim with her?’

She didn’t answer at once, probably because she was momentarily hypnotized by the spectacle of Le Grand Duc holding an enormous balloon glass of rosé in one hand while with the other he directed the activities of a waiter who appeared to be transferring the contents of the dessert trolley on to the plate before him. Lila Delafont’s mouth had fallen slightly open.

‘I don’t know. He says he’s a friend of her father.’ She looked away with some difficulty, saw and beckoned the passing restaurant manager. ‘Who’s the gentleman with my friend?’

The Duc de Croytor, madam. A very famous winegrower.’

‘A very famous wine-drinker, more like.’ Bowman ignored Cecile’s disapproving look. ‘Does he come here often?’

‘For the past three years at this time.’

‘The food is especially good at this time!’

‘The food, sir, is superb here at any time.’ The Baumaniere’s manager wasn’t amused. ‘Monsieur le Duc comes for the annual gypsy festival at Saintes-Maries.’

Bowman peered at the Duc de Croytor again. He was spooning down his dessert with a relish matched only by his speed of operation.

‘You can see why he has to have an ice-bucket,’ Bowman observed. ‘To cool down his cutlery. Don’t see any signs of gypsy blood there.’

‘Monsieur le Duc is one of the foremost folklorists in Europe,’ the manager said severely, adding with a suave side-swipe: ‘The study of ancient customs, Mr Bowman. For centuries, now, the gypsies have come from all over Europe, at the end of May, to worship and venerate the relics of Sara, their patron saint. Monsieur le Duc is writing a book about it.’

‘This place,’ Bowman said, ‘is hotching with the most unlikely authors you ever saw.’

‘I do not understand, sir.’

I understand all right.’ The green eyes, Bowman observed, could also be very cool.

‘There’s no need – what on earth is that?’

The at first faint then gradually swelling sound of many engines in low gear sounded like a tank regiment on the move. They glanced down towards the forecourt as the first of many gypsy caravans came grinding up the steeply winding slope towards the hotel. Once in the forecourt the leading caravans began arranging themselves in neat rows round the perimeter while others passed through the archway in the hedge towards the parking lot beyond. The racket, and the stench of diesel and petrol fumes, while not exactly indescribable or unsupportable, were in marked contrast to the peaceful luxury of the hotel and disconcerting to a degree, this borne out by the fact that Le Grand Duc had momentarily stopped eating. Bowman looked at the restaurant manager, who was gazing up at the stars and obviously communing with himself.

‘Monsieur le Duc’s raw material?’Bowman asked.

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘And now? Entertainment? Gypsy violin music? Street roulette? Shooting galleries? Candy stalls? Palm reading?’

‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

‘My God!’

Cecile said distinctly: ‘Snob!’

‘I fear, madam,’ the restaurant manager said distantly, ‘that my sympathies lie with Mr Bowman. But it is an ancient custom and we have no wish to offend either the gypsies or the local people.’ He looked down at the forecourt again and frowned. ‘Excuse me, please.’

He hurried down the steps and made his way across the forecourt to where a group of gypsies appeared to be arguing heatedly. The main protagonists appeared to be a powerfully built hawkfaced gypsy in his middle forties and a clearly distraught and very voluble gypsy woman of the same age who seemed to be very close to tears.

‘Coming?’ Bowman asked Cecile.

‘What! Down there?’

‘Snob!’

‘But you said – ’

‘Idle layabout I may be but I’m a profound student of human nature.’

‘You mean you’re nosey?’

‘Yes.’

Bowman took her reluctant arm and made to move off, then stepped courteously to one side to permit the passage of a bustling Le Grand Due, if a man of his build could be said to bustle, followed by a plainly reluctant Lila. He carried a notebook and had what looked to be a folklorist’s gleam in his eye. But bent though he was on the pursuit of knowledge he hadn’t forgotten to fortify himself with a large red apple at which he was munching away steadily. Le Grand Duc looked like the sort of man who would always get his priorities right.

Bowman, a hesitant Cecile beside him, followed rather more leisurely. When they were half way down the steps a jeep was detached from the leading caravan, three men piled aboard and the jeep took off down the hill at speed. As Bowman and the girl approached the knot of people where the gypsy was vainly trying to calm the now sobbing woman, the restaurant manager broke away from them and hurried towards the steps. Bowman barred his way.

‘What’s up?’

‘Woman says her son has disappeared. They’ve sent a search party back along the road.’

‘Oh?’ Bowman removed his glasses. ‘But people don’t disappear just like that.’

‘That’s what I say. That’s why I’m calling the police.’

He hurried on his way. Cecile, who had followed Bowman without any great show of enthusiam, said: ‘What’s all the fuss! Why is that woman crying?’

‘Her son’s disappeared.’

‘And?’

‘That’s all.’

‘You mean that nothing’s happened to him?’

‘Not that anyone seems to know.’

‘There could be a dozen reasons. Surely she doesn’t have to carry on like that.’

‘Gypsies,’ Bowman said by way of explanation. ‘Very emotional. Very attached to their offspring. Do you have any children!’

She wasn’t as calmly composed as she looked. Even ih the lamplight it wasn’t difficult to see the red touching her cheeks. She said: ‘That wasn’t fair.’

Bowman blinked, looked at her and said: ‘No, it wasn’t. Forgive me. I didn’t mean it that way. If you had kids and one was missing, would you react like that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘I’d be worried, of course.’ She wasn’t a person who could maintain anger or resentment for more than a fleeting moment of time. ‘Maybe I’d be worried stiff. But I wouldn’t be so – so violently grief-stricken, so hysterical, well not unless – ’

‘Unless what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean, if I’d reason to believe that – that – ’

‘Yes?’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’

‘I’ll never know what women mean,’ Bowman said sadly, ‘but this time I can guess.’

They moved on and literally bumped into Le Grand Duc and Lila. The girls spoke and introductions, Bowman saw, were inevitable and in order. Le Grand Duc shook his hand and said, ‘Charmed, charmed,’ but it was plain to see that he wasn’t in the least bit charmed, it was just that the aristocracy knew how to behave. He hadn’t, Bowman noted, the soft flabby hand one might have expected: the hand was hard and the grip that of a strong man carefully not exerting too much pressure.

‘Fascinating,’ he announced. He addressed himself exclusively to the two girls. ‘Do you know that all those gypsies have come from the far side of the Iron Curtain? Hungarian or Rumanian, most of them. Their leader, fellow called Czerda – met him last year, that’s him with that woman there – has come all the way from the Black Sea.’

‘But how about frontiers?’ Bowman asked. ‘Especially between East and West.’

‘Eh? What? Ah?’ He finally became aware of Bowman’s presence. ‘They travel without let or hindrance, most of all when people know that they are on their annual pilgrimage. Everyone fears them, thinks that they have the evil eye, that they put spells and curses on those who offend them: the Communists believe it as much as anyone, more, for all I know. Nonsense, of course, sheer balderdash. But it’s what people believe that matters. Come, Lila, come. I have the feeling that they are going to prove in a most co-operative mood tonight.’

They moved off. After a few paces the Duke stopped and glanced round. He looked in their direction for some time, then turned away, shaking his head. ‘A pity,’ he said to Lila in what he probably imagined to be sotto voce, ‘about the colour of her hair.’ They moved on.

‘Never mind,’ Bowman said kindly. ‘I like you as you are.’ She compressed her lips, then laughed. Grudges were not for Cecile Dubois.

‘He’s right, you know.’ She took his arm, all was forgiven, and when Bowman was about to point out that the Duke’s convictions about the intrinsic superiority of blonde hair did not carry with it the stamp of divine infallibility, she went on, gesturing around her: ‘It really is quite fascinating.’

‘If you like the atmosphere of circuses and fairgrounds,’ Bowman said fastidiously, ‘both of which I will go a long way to avoid, I suppose it is. But I admire experts.’

And that the gypsies were unquestionably experts at the particular task on hand was undeniable. The speed and coordinated skill with which they assembled their various stalls and other media of entertainment were remarkable. Within minutes and ready for operation they had assembled roulette stands, a shooting gallery, no fewer than four fortune-tellers’ booths, a food stall, a candy stall, two clothing stalls selling brilliantly-hued gypsy clothes and, oddly enough, a large cage of mynah birds clearly possessed of that species’ usual homicidal outlook on life. A group of four gypsies, perched on the steps of a caravan, began to play soulful mid-European music on their violins. Aready the areas of the forecourt and car-park were almost uncomfortably full of scores of people circulating slowly around, guests from the hotel, guests, one supposed, from other hotels, villagers from Les Baux, a good number of gypsies themselves. As variegated a cross-section of humanity as one could hope to find, they shared, for the moment, what appeared to be a marked unanimity of outlook – all, from Le Grand Duc downwards, were clearly enjoying themselves with the noteable exception of the restaurant manager who stood on the top of the forecourt steps surveying the scene with the broken-hearted despair and martyred resignation of a Bing watching the Metropolitan being taken over by a hippie festival.

A policeman appeared at the entrance to the forecourt. He was large and red and perspiring freely, and clearly regarded the pushing of ancient bicycles up precipitous roads as a poor way of spending a peacefully warm May evening. He propped his bicycle against a wall just as the sobbing gypsy woman put her hands to her face, turned and ran towards a green-and-white painted caravan.

Bowman nudged Cecile. ‘Let’s just saunter over there and join them, shall we?’

‘I will not. It’s rude. Besides, gypsies don’t like people who pry.’

‘Prying? Since when is concern about a missing man prying? But suit yourself.’

As Bowman moved off the jeep returned, skidding to an unnecessary if highly dramatic stop on the gravel of the court. The young gypsy at the wheel jumped out and ran towards Czerda and the policeman. Bowman wasn’t far behind, halting a discreet number of feet away.

‘No luck, Ferenc?’ Czerda asked.

‘No sign anywhere, Father. We searched all the area.’

The policeman had a black notebook out. ‘Where was he last seen?’

‘Less than a kilometre back, according to his mother,’ Czerda said. ‘We stopped for our evening meal not far from the caves.’

The policeman asked Ferenc: ‘You searched in there?’

Ferenc crossed himself and remained silent. Czerda said: ‘That’s no question to ask and you know it. No gypsy would ever enter those caves. They have an evil reputation. Alexandre – that’s the name of the missing boy – would never have gone there.’

The policeman put his book away. ‘I wouldn’t go in there myself. Not at this time of night. The local people believe it’s cursed and haunted and – well – I was born here. Tomorrow, when it’s daylight – ’

‘He’ll have turned up long before them,’ Czerda said confidently. ‘Just a lot of fuss about nothing.’

‘Then that woman who just left – she is his mother – ’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why is she so upset?’

‘He’s only a boy and you know what mothers are.’ Czerda half-shrugged in resignation. ‘I suppose I’d better go and tell her.’

He left. So did the policeman. so did Ferenc. Bowman didn’t hesitate. He could see where Czerda was going, he could guess where the policeman was heading for – the nearest estaminet – so was momentarily interested in the movements of neither. But in Ferenc he was interested, for there was something in the alacrity and purposeful-ness with which he walked quickly through the archway into the parking lot that bespoke some fixed intent. Bowman followed more leisurely and stopped in the archway.

On the right-hand side of the lot was a row of four fortune-tellers’ booths, got up in the usual garishly-coloured canvas. The first in the row was occupied, a notice said, by a certain Madame Marie-Antoinette who offered a money back if not satisfied guarantee. Bowman went inside immediately, not because of any particular predilection for royalty or parsimony or both, but because just as Ferenc was entering the most distant booth he paused and looked round directly at Bowman and Ferenc’s face was stamped with the unmistakably unpleasant characteristics of one whose suspicions could be instantly aroused. Bowman passed inside.

Marie-Antoinette was a white-haired old crone with eyes of polished mahogany and a gin-trap for a mouth. She gazed into a cloudy crystal ball that was cloudy principally because it hadn’t been cleaned for months, spoke to Bowman encouragingly about the longevity, health, fame and happiness that could not fail to be his, took four francs from him and appeared to go into a coma, a sign Bowman took to indicate that the interview was over. He left. Cecile was standing just outside, swinging her handbag in what could have been regarded as an unnecessarily provocative fashion and looking at him with a degree of speculative amusement perhaps uncalled for in the circumstances.

‘Still studying human nature?’ she asked sweetly.

‘I should never have gone in there.’ Bowman took off his glasses and peered myopically around. The character running the shooting gallery across the parking lot, a short thick-set lad with the face of a boxer who had had a highly unspectacular career brought to an abrupt end, was regarding him with a degree of interest that verged on the impolite. Bowman put his spectacles back on and looked at Cecile.

‘Your fortune?’ she enquired solicitously. ‘Bad news?’

‘The worst. Marie-Antoinette says I will be married in two months. She must be wrong.’

‘And you not the marrying kind,’ she said sympathetically. She nodded at the next booth, which bore a legend above the entrance. ‘I think you should ask Madame What’s-her-name for a second opinion.’

Bowman studied Madame Zetterling’s comeon, then looked again across the car-park. The gallery attendant appeared to be finding him as fascinating as ever. Bowman followed Cecile’s advice and went inside.

Madame Zetterling looked like MarieAntoinette’s elder sister. Her technique was different inasmuch as the tools of her trade consisted of a pack of very greasy playing cards which she shuffled and dealt with a speed and dexterity that would have had her automatically blackballed in any casino in Europe, but the forecast for his future was exactly the same. So was the price.

Cecile was still waiting outside, still smiling. Ferenc was standing now by the archway in the hedge and had clearly taken over the eye-riveting stint from the shooting-stall attendant. Bowman polished his glasses some more.

‘God help us,’ Bowman said. ‘This is nothing but a matrimonial agency. Extraordinary. Uncanny.’ He replaced his glasses. Lot’s wife had nothing on Ferenc. ‘Quite incredible, in fact.’

‘What is?’

‘Your resemblance,’ Bowman said solemnly, ‘to the person I’m supposed to marry.’

‘My, my!’ She laughed, pleasantly and with genuine amusement. ‘You do have an original mind, Mr Bowman.’

‘Neil,’ Bowman said, and without waiting for further advice entered the next booth. In the comparative obscurity of the entrance he looked round in time to see Ferenc shrug his shoulders and move off into the forecourt.

The third fortune-teller made up the cast for the three witches of Macbeth. She used tarot cards and ended up by telling Bowman that he would shortly be journeying across the seas where he would meet and marry a raven-haired beauty and when he said he was getting married to a blonde the following month she just smiled sadly and took his money.

Cecile, who now clearly regarded him as the best source of light entertainment around, had a look of frankly malicious amusement on her face.

‘What shattering revelations this time?’

Bowman took his glasses off again and shook his head in perplexity: as far as he could see he was no longer the object of anyone’s attention. ‘I don’t understand. She said: “Her father was a great seaman, as was his, as was his.” Doesn’t make any kind of sense to me.’

It did to Cecile. She touched a switch somewhere and the smile went out. She stared at Bowman, green eyes full of perplexed uncertainty.

‘My father is an admiral,’ she said slowly. ‘So was my grandfather. And great-grandfather. You – you could have found this out.’

‘Sure, sure. I carry a complete dossier on every girl I’m about to meet for the first time. Come up to my room and I’ll show you my filing cabinets – I carry them about in a pantechnicon. And wait, there’s more. I quote again: “She has a roseshaped strawberry birthmark in a place where it can’t be seen.”’

‘Good God!’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself. Hang on. There may be worse yet to come.’ Bowman made no excuse and gave no reason for entering the fourth booth, the only one that held any interest for him, nor was it necessary: the girl was so shaken by what she’d just been told that the oddity of Bowman’s behaviour must have suddenly become of very secondary importance.

The booth was very dimly lit, the illumination coming from an Anglepoise lamp with a very low wattage bulb that cast a pool of light on a green baize table and a pair of hands that lay lightly clasped on the table. Little of the person to whom the hands belonged could be seen as she sat in shadow with her head bent but enough to realize that she would never make it as one of the three witches of Macbeth or even as Lady Macbeth herself. This one was young, with flowing titian hair reaching below her shoulders and gave the vague impression, although her features were almost indistinguishable, that she must be quite beautiful: her hands certainly were.

Bowman sat on the chair opposite her and looked at the card on the table which bore the legend: ‘Countess Marie le Hobenaut.’

‘You really a countess, ma’am?’ Bowman asked politely.

‘You wish to have your hand read?’ Her voice was low, gentle and soft. No Lady Macbeth: here was Cordelia.

‘Of course.’

She took his hand in both of hers and bent over it, her head so low that the titian hair brushed the table. Bowman kept still – it wasn’t easy but he kept still – as two warm tears fell on his hands. With his left hand he twisted the Anglepoise and she put a forearm up to protect her eyes but not before he had time to see that her face was beautiful and that the big brown eyes were sheened with tears.

‘Why is Countess Marie crying?’

‘You have a long lifeline – ’

‘Why are you crying?’

‘Please.’

‘All right. Why are you crying, please?’

‘I’m sorry. I – I’m upset.’

‘You mean I’ve only got to walk into a place – ’ ‘My young brother is missing.’

‘Your brother? I know someone’s missing. Everyone knows. Alexandre. But your brother.

They haven’t found him?’

She shook her head, the titian hair brushing across the table.

‘And that’s your mother in the big green-andwhite caravan?’

A nod this time. She didn’t look up.

‘But why all the tears? He’s only been missing for a little while. He’ll turn up, you’ll see.’

Again she said nothing. She put her forearms on the table and her head on her forearms and cried silently, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Bowman, his face bitter, touched the young gypsy’s shoulder, rose and left the booth. But when he emerged the expression on his face was one of dazed bewilderment. Cecile glanced at him in some trepidation.

‘Four kids,’ Bowman said quietly. He took her unresisting arm and led her through the archway towards the forecourt. Le Grand Duc, the blonde girl still with him, was talking to an impressively scar-faced and heavily built gypsy dressed in dark trousers and frilled off-white shirt. Bowman ignored Cecile’s disapproving frown and halted a few convenient feet away.

‘A thousand thanks, Mr Koscis, a thousand thanks,’ Le Grand Duc was saying in his most gracious lord of the manor voice. ‘Immensely interesting, immensely. Come, Lila, my dear, enough is enough. I think we have earned ourselves a drink and a little bite to eat.’ Bowman watched them make their way towards the steps leading to the patio, then turned and looked consideringly at the green-and-white caravan.

Cecile said: ‘Don’t.’

Bowman looked at her in surprise.

‘And what’s wrong with wanting to help a sorrowing mother? Maybe I can comfort her, help in some way, perhaps even go looking for her missing boy. If more people would be more forthcoming in times of trouble, be more willing to risk a snub – ’

‘You really are a fearful hypocrite,’ she said admiringly.

‘Besides, there’s a technique to this sort of thing. If Le Grand Duc can do it, I can. Still your apprehensions.’

Bowman left her there nibbling the tip of a thumb in what did appear to be a very apprehensive manner indeed and mounted the caravan steps.

At first sight the interior appeared to be deserted, then his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he realized he was standing in an unlighted vestibule leading to the main living quarters beyond, identifiable by a crack of light from an imperfectly constructed doorway and the sound of voices, women’s voices.

Bowman took a step through the outer doorway. A shadow detached itself from a wall, a shadow possessed of the most astonishing powers of acceleration and the most painful solidity. It struck Bowman on the breastbone with the top of a head that had the unforgiving consistency of a cement bollard: Bowman made it all the way to the ground without the benefit of even one of the caravan steps. Out of the corner of an eye he was dimly aware of Cecile stepping hurriedly and advisedly to one side then he landed on his back with a momentarily numbing impact that took care of any little air that bullet-head had left in his lungs in the first place. His glasses went flying off into the middle distance and as he lay there whooping and gasping for the oxygen that wouldn’t come the shadow came marching purposefully down the steps. He was short, thick-set, unfriendly, had a speech to make and was clearly determined on making it. He stooped, grabbed Bowman by the lapels and hauled him to his feet with an ease that boded ill for things to come.

‘You will remember me, my friend.’ His voice had the pleasant timbre of gravel being decanted from a metal hopper. ‘You will remember that Hoval does not like trespassers. You will remember that next time Hoval will not use his fists.’

From this Bowman gathered that on this occasion Hoval did intend to use his fists and he did. Only one, but it was more than enough. Hoval hit him in the same place and, as far as Bowman could judge from the symptoms transmitted by a now nearly paralysed midriff, with approximately the same amount of force. He took half-a-dozen involuntary backward steps and then came heavily to earth again, this time in a seated position with his hands splayed out behind him. Hoval dusted off his hands in an unpleasant fashion and marched back up into the caravan again. Cecile looked around till she located Bowman’s glasses, then came and offered him a helping hand which he wasn’t too proud to accept.

‘I think Le Grand Duc must use a dfferent technique,’ she said gravely.

‘There’s a lot of ingratitude in this world,’ Bowman wheezed.

‘Isn’t there just? Through with studying human nature for the night?’ Bowman nodded, it was easier than speaking. ‘Then for goodness’ sake let’s get out of here. After that, I need a drink.’

‘What do you think I require?’ Bowman croaked.

She looked at him consideringly. ‘Frankly, I think a nanny would be in order.’ She took his arm and led him up the steps to the patio. Le Grand Duc, with a large bowl of fruit before him and Lila by his side, stopped munching a banana and regarded Bowman with a smile so studiously impersonal as to be positively insulting.

‘That was a rousing set-to you had down there,’ he observed.

‘He hit me when I wasn’t looking,’ Bowman explained.

‘Ah!’ Le Grand Duc said non-committally, then added in a penetrating whisper when they’d moved on less than half-a-dozen feet: ‘As I said, long past his prime.’ Cecile squeezed Bowman’s arm warningly but unnecessarily: he gave her the wan smile of one whose cup is overful and led her to the table. A waiter brought drinks.

Bowman fortified himself and said: ‘Well, now.

Where shall we live? England or France?’

‘What?’

‘You heard what the fortune-teller said.’

‘Oh, my God!’

Bowman lifted his glass. ‘To David.’

‘David?’

‘Our eldest. I’ve just chosen his name.’

The green eyes regarding Bowman so steadily over the rim of a glass were neither amused nor exasperated, just very thoughtful. Bowman became very thoughtful himself. It could be that Cecile Dubois was, in that well-turned phrase, rather more than just a pretty face.

CHAPTER 2

Certainly, two hours later, no one could have referred to Bowman’s as a pretty face. It could be said in fairness that, owing to various troubles it had encountered from time to time, it didn’t have very much going for it in the first place but the black stocking mask he’d pulled up almost to the level of his eyes gave it an even more discouraging look than it normally possessed.

He’d changed his grey garberdine for a dark one and his white shirt for a navy roll-neck pullover. Now he put the spectacles he had worn for disguise away in his suitcase, switched off the overhead light and stepped out on to the terrace.

All the bedrooms on that floor opened on to the same terrace. Lights came from two of them. In the first, the curtains were drawn. Bowman moved to the door and its handle gave fractionally under his hand. Cecile’s room, he knew: a trusting soul. He moved on to the next lit window, this one uncurtained, and peered stealthily round the edge.

A commendable precaution, but superfluous: had he done an Apache war dance outside that window it was doubtful whether either of the two occupants would have noticed or, if they had, would have cared very much. Le Grand Duc and Lila, his black and her blonde head very close together, were seated side by side in front of a narrow table: Le Grand Duc, a tray of canapés beside him, appeared to be teaching the girl the rudiments of chess. One would have thought that the customary vis-à-vis position would have been more conductive to rapid learning: but then, Le Grand Duc had about him the look of a man who would always adopt his own strongly original attitude to all that he approached. Bowman moved on.

The moon still rode high but a heavy bar of black cloud was approaching from the far battlements of Les Baux. Bowman descended to the main terrace by the swimming pool but did not cross. The management, it seemed, kept the patio lights burning all night and anyone trying to cross the patio and descend the steps to the forecourt would have been bound to be seen by any gypsy still awake: and that there were gypsies who were just that Bowman did not doubt for a moment.

He took a sidepath to the left, circled the hotel to the rear and approached the forecourt uphill from the west. He moved very slowly and very quietly on rubber soles and kept to deep shadow. There was, of course, no positive reason why the gypsies should have any watcher posted: but as far as this particular lot were concerned, Bowman felt, there was no positive reason why they shouldn’t. He waited till a cloud drifted over the moon and moved into the forecourt.

All but three of the caravans were in darkness. The nearest and biggest of the lit caravans was Czerda’s: bright light came from both the halfopened door and a closed but uncurtained side window. Bowman went up to that window like a cat stalking a bird across a sunlit lawn and hitched an eye over the sill.

There were three gypsies seated round a table and Bowman recognized all three: Czerda, his son Ferenc and Koscis, the man whom Le Grand Duc had so effusively thanked for information received. They had a map spread on the table and Czerda, pencil in hand, was indicating something on it and clearly making an explanation of some kind. But the map was on so small a scale that Bowman was unable to make out what it was intended to represent, far less what Czerda was pointing but on it, nor, because of the muffling effect of the closed window, could he distinguish what Czerda was saying. The only reasonable assumption he could make from the scene before him was that whatever it was Czerda was planning it wouldn’t be for the benefit of his fellow men. Bowman moved away as soundlessly as he had arrived.

The side window of the second illuminated caravan was open and the curtains only partially drawn. Closing in on this window Bowman could at first see no one in the central portion of the caravan. He moved close, bent forward and risked a quick glance to his right and there, at a small table near to the door, two men were sitting playing cards. One of the men was unknown to Bowman but the other he immediately and feelingly recognized as Hoval, the gypsy who had so unceremoniously ejected him from the greenand-white caravan earlier in the night. Bowman wondered briefly why Hoval had transferred himself to the present one and what purpose he had been serving in the green-and-white caravan. From the ache Bowman could still feel in his midriff the answer to that one seemed fairly clear. But why?

Bowman glanced to his left. A small compartment lay beyond an open doorway in a transverse partition. From Bowman’s angle of sight nothing was visible in the compartment. He moved along to the next window. The curtains on this one were drawn, but the window itself partly open from the top, no doubt for ventilation. Bowman moved the curtains very very gently and applied his eye to the crack he had made. The level of illumination inside was very low, the only light coming from the rear of the caravan. But there was enough light to see, at the very front of the compartment, a three-tiered bunk and here lay three men, apparently asleep. Two of them were lying with their faces turned towards Bowman but it was impossible to distinguish their features: their faces were no more than pale blurs in the gloom. Bowman eased the curtains again and headed for the caravan that really intrigued him – the greenand-white one.

The rear door at the top of the caravan was open but it was dark inside. By this time Bowman had developed a thing about the unlit vestibules of caravans and gave this one a wide berth. In any event it was the illuminated window half-way down the side of the caravan that held the more interest for him. The window was half-open, the curtains half-drawn. It seemed ideal for some more peeking.

The caravan’s interior was brightly lit and comfortably furnished. There were four women there, two on a settee and two on chairs by a table. Bowman recognized the titian-haired Countess Marie with, beside her, the grey-haired woman who had been involved in the altercation with Czerda – Marie’s mother and the mother of the missing Alexandre. The two other young women at the table, one auburn-haired and about thirty, the other a slight dark girl with most ungypsy-like cropped hair and scarcely out of her teens, Bowman had not seen before. Although it must have been long past their normal bed-times, they showed no signs of making any preparations for retiring. All four looked sad and forlorn to a degree: the mother and the dark young girl were in tears. The dark girl buried her face in her hands.

‘Oh, God!’ She sobbed so bitterly it was difficult to make the words out. ‘When is it all going to end? Where is it all going to end?’

‘We must hope, Tina,’ Countess Marie said. Her voice was dull and totally devoid of hope. ‘There is nothing else we can do.’

‘There is no hope.’ The dark girl shook her head despairingly. ‘You know there’s no hope. Oh, God, why did Alexandre have to do it?’ She turned to the auburn-haired girl. ‘Oh, Sara, Sara, your husband warned him only today – ’

‘He did, he did.’ This was from the girl called Sara and she sounded no happier than the others.

She put her arm round Tina. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, my dear, so terribly sorry.’ She paused. ‘But Marie’s right, you know. Where there’s life there’s hope.’

There was silence in the caravan. Bowman hoped, and fervently, that they would break it and break it soon. He had come for information but had so far come across nothing other than the mildly astonishing fact of four gypsies talking in German and not in Romany. But he wanted to learn it quickly for the prospect of hanging around that brightly illuminated window indefinitely lacked appeal of any kind: there was something in the brooding atmosphere of tragedy inside that caravan and menace outside calculated to instil a degree of something less than confidence in the bystander.

‘There is no hope,’ the grey-haired woman said heavily. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘A mother knows.’

Marie said: ‘But, Mother – ’

‘There’s no hope because there’s no life,’ her, mother interrupted wearily. ‘You’ll never see your brother again, nor you your fiancé, Tina. I know my son is dead.’

There was silence again, which was just as well for Bowman for it was then that he heard the all but imperceptible sound of a fractionally disturbed piece of gravel, a sound which probably saved his life.

Bowman whirled round. He’d been right about one thing, anyway: there was menace abroad that night. Koscis and Hoval were frozen in a crouched position less than five feet away. Both men were smiling. Both held long curving knives in their hands and the lamplight gleamed dully off them in a very unpleasant fashion.

They’d been waiting for him, Bowman realized, or someone like him, they’d been keeping tabs on him ever since he’d entered the forecourt or maybe even long before that, they’d just wanted to give him enough rope to hang himself, to prove that he was up to what they would regard as no good – no good for themselves – and, when satisfied, eliminate the source of irritation: their actions, in turn, certainly proved to him that there was something sadly amiss with this caravan heading for Saintes-Maries.

The realization of what had happened was instantaneous and Bowman wasted no time on self-recriminations. There would be a time for those but the time was assuredly not when Koscis and Hoval were standing there taking very little trouble to conceal the immediacy of their homicidal intentions. Bowman lunged swiftly and completely unexpectedly – for a man with a knife does not usually anticipate that one without a knife will indulge in such suicidal practices – towards Koscis, who instinctively drew back, lifting his knife high in self-defence. Prudently enough, Bowman didn’t complete his movement, but threw himself to his right and ran across the few intervening yards of forecourt leading to the patio steps.

He heard Koscis and Hoval pounding across the gravel in pursuit. They were saying things, to Bowman unintelligible things, but even in Romany the burden of their remarks was clear. Bowman reached the fourth step on his first bound, checked so abruptly that he almost but didn’t quite lose his balance, wheeled round and swung his right foot all in one movement. Koscis it was who had the misfortune to be in the lead: he grunted in agony, the knife flying from his hand, as he fell backwards on to the forecourt.

Hoval came up the steps as Koscis went down them, his right arm, knife pointing upwards, hooking viciously. Bowman felt the tip of the knife burning along his left forearm and then he’d hit Hoval with a great deal more force than Hoval had earlier hit him, which was understandable enough, for when Hoval had hit him he’d been concerned only with his personal satisfaction: Bowman was concerned with his life. Hoval, too, fell backwards, but he was luckier than Koscis: he fell on top of him.

Bowman pushed up his left sleeve. The wound on the forearm was about eight inches long but, although bleeding quite heavily, was little more than a superficial cut and would close up soon. In the meantime, he hoped it wouldn’t incapacitate him too much.

He forgot about that trouble when he saw a new one approaching. Ferenc was running across the forecourt in the direction of the patio steps. Bowman turned, hurried across the patio to the steps leading to the upper terrace and stopped briefly to look back. Ferenc had both Koscis and Hoval on their feet and it was clear that it was only a matter of seconds before all three were on their way.

Three to one and the three with knives. Bowman carried no weapon of any kind and the immediate prospect was uninviting. Three determined men with knives will always hunt down an unarmed man, especially three men who appeared to regard the use of knives as second nature. A light still showed from Le Grand Duc’s room. Bowman pulled down his black face mask and burst through the doorway: he felt he didn’t have time to knock. Le Grand Duc and Lila were still playing chess but Bowman again felt that he didn’t have time to worry about mildly surprising matters of that nature.

‘For God’s sake, help me, hide me!’ The gasping, he thought, might have been slightly overdone but in the circumstances it came easily. ‘They’re after me!’

Le Grand Duc looked in no way perturbed, far less startled. He merely frowned in ducal annoyance and completed a move.

‘Can’t you see we’re busy?’ He turned to Lila who was staring at Bowman with parted lips and very large rounded eyes. ‘Careful, my dear, careful. Your bishop is in great danger.’ He spared Bowman a cursory glance, viewing him with distaste. ‘Who are after you?’

‘The gypsies, that’s who. Look!’ Bowman rolled up his left sleeve. ‘They’ve knifed me!’

The expression of distaste deepened.

‘You must have given them some cause for offence.’

‘Well, I was down there – ’

‘Enough!’ He held up a magisterial hand. ‘Peeping Toms can expect no sympathy from me. Leave at once.’

‘Leave at once? But they’ll get me – ’

‘My dear.’ Bowman didn’t think Le Grand Duc was addressing him and he wasn’t. He patted Lila’s knee in a proprietorial fashion. ‘Excuse me while I call the management. No cause for alarm, I assure you.’

Bowman ran out through the doorway, checked briefly to see if the terrace was still deserted. Le Grand Duc called: ‘You might close that door after you.’

‘But, Charles – ’ That was Lila.

‘Checkmate,’ said Le Grand Duc firmly, ‘in two moves.’

There was the sound of footsteps, running footsteps, coming across the patio to the base of the terrace steps. Bowman moved quickly to the nearest port in the storm.

Cecile wasn’t asleep either. She was sitting up in bed holding a magazine and attired in some fetching negligée that, in happier circumstances, might well have occasioned admiring comment. She opened her mouth, whether in astonishment or the beginning of a shout for help, then closed it again and listened with surprising calmness as Bowman stood there with his back to the closed door and told her his story.

‘You’re making all this up,’ she said.

Bowman hoisted his left sleeve again, an action which by now he didn’t much like doing as the coagulating blood was beginning to stick wound and material together.

‘Including this?’ Bowman asked.

She made a face. ‘It is nasty. But why should they – ’

‘Ssh!’ Bowman had caught the sound of voices outside, voices which rapidly became very loud.

An altercation was taking place and Bowman had little doubt that it concerned him. He turned the handle of the door and peered out through a crack not much more than an inch in width.

Le Grand Duc, with Lila watching from the open doorway, was standing there with arms outspread like an overweight traffic policeman, barring the way of Ferenc, Koscis and Hoval. That they weren’t immediately recognizable as those three was due to the fact that they’d obviously considered it prudent to take time out to wrap some dirty handkerchiefs or other pieces of cloth about their faces in primitive but effective forms of masks, which explained why Bowman had been given the very brief breathing space he had been.

‘This is private property for guests only,’ Le Grand Duc said sternly.

‘Stand aside!’ Ferenc ordered.

‘Stand aside? I am the Duc de Croytor – ’

‘You’ll be the dead Duc de – ’

‘How dare you, sir!’ Le Grand Duc stepped forward with a speed and coordination surprising in a man of his bulk and caught the astonished and completely unprepared Ferenc with a roundhouse right to the chin. Ferenc staggered back into the arms of his companions who had momentarily to support him to prevent his collapse. There was some moments’ hesitation, then they turned and ran from the terrace, Koscis and Hoval still having to support a very wobbly Ferenc.

‘Charles.’ Lila had her hands clasped in what is alleged to be the classic feminine gesture of admiration. ‘How brave of you!’

‘A bagatelle. Aristocracy versus ruffians – class always tells.’ He gestured towards his doorway. ‘Come, we have yet to finish both the chess and the canapés.’

‘But – but how can you be so calm? I mean, aren’t you going to phone? The management? Or the police?’

‘What point? They were masked and will be far away by this time. After you.’

They went inside and closed their door. Bowman closed his.

‘You heard?’ She nodded. ‘Good old duke. That’s taken the heat off for the moment.’ He reached for the door handle. ‘Well, thanks for the sanctuary.’

‘Where are you going?’ She seemed troubled or disappointed or both.

‘Over the hills and far away.’

‘In your car?’

‘I haven’t got one.’

‘You can take mine. Ours, I mean.’

‘You mean that?’

‘Of course, silly.’

‘You’re going to make me a very happy man one day. But for the car, some other time. Good night.’

Bowman closed her door behind him and was almost at his own room when he stopped. Three figures had emerged from the shadows.

‘First you, my friend.’ Ferenc’s voice was no more than a whisper, maybe the idea of disturbing the Duke again didn’t appeal to him. ‘Then we attend to the little lady.’

Bowman was three paces from his own door and he had taken the first even before Ferenc had stopped talking – people generally assume that you will courteously hear them out – and had taken the third before they had moved, probably because the other two were waiting for the lead from Ferenc and Ferenc’s reactions were temporarily out of kilter since his brief encounter with Le Grand Duc. In any event, Bowman had the door shut behind him before Ferenc’s shoulder hit in and had the key turned before Ferenc could twist the door handle from his grip.

He spent no time on brow-mopping and self congratulation but ran to the back of the apartment, opened the window and looked out. The branches of a sufficiently stout tree were less than six feet away. Bowman withdrew his head and listened. Someone was giving the door handle a good going over, then abruptly the sound ceased to be replaced by that of running footsteps. Bowman waited no longer: if there was one thing that had been learnt from dealing with those men it was that procrastination was uninsurable.

As a piece of arboreal trapeze work there was little enough to it. He just stood on the sill, halfleaned and half-fell outwards, caught a thick branch, swung into the bole of the tree and slid to the ground. He scrambled up the steep bank leading to the road that encircled the hotel from the rear. At the top he heard a low and excited call behind him and twisted round. The moon was out again and he could clearly see the three of them starting to climb the bank: it was equally clear that the knives they held in their hands weren’t impeding their progress at all.

Before Bowman lay the choice of running downhill or up. Downhill from the Baumanière lay open country, uphill lay Les Baux with its winding streets and back-alleys and labyrinth of shattered ruins. Bowman didn’t hesitate. As one famous heavyweight boxer said of his opponents – this was after he had lured the unfortunates into the ring – ‘they can run but they can’t hide.’ In Les Baux Bowman could both run and hide. He turned uphill.

He ran up the winding road towards the old village as quickly as the steepness, his wind and the state of his legs would permit. He hadn’t indulged in this sort of thing in years. He spared a glance over his shoulder. Neither, apparently, had the three gypsies. They hadn’t gained any that Bowman could see: but they hadn’t lost any either, maybe they were just pacing themselves for what they might consider to be a long run that lay ahead: if that were the case, Bowman thought, he might as well stop running now.

The straight stretch of road leading to the entrance to the village was lined with car parks on both sides but there were no cars there and so no place to hide. He passed on through the entrance.

After about another hundred yards of what had already become this gasping lung-heaving run Bowman came to a fork in the road. The fork on the right curved down to the battlemented walls of the village and had every appearance of leading to a cul-de-sac. The one to the left, narrow and winding and very steep, curved upwards out of sight and while he dreaded the prospect of any more of that uphill marathon it seemed to offer the better chance of safety so he took it. He looked behind again and saw that his momentary indecision had enabled his pursuers to make up quite a bit of ground on him. Still running in this same unnerving silence, the knives in their hands glinting rhythmically as their arms pumped to and fro, they were now less than thirty yards distant.

At the best speed he could, Bowman continued up this narrow winding road. He slowed down occasionally to peer briefly and rather desperately into various attractive dark openings on both sides, but mainly to the right, but he knew it was his labouring lungs and leaden legs that told him that those entrances were inviting, his reason told him that those attractions were almost certainly fatal illusions, leading to cul-de-sacs or some other form of trap from which there could be no escape.

And now, for the first time, Bowman could hear behind him the hoarse and rasping breathing of the gypsies. They were clearly in as bad shape as he was himself but when he glanced over his shoulder he realized this was hardly cause for any wild rejoicing, he was hearing them now simply because they were that much closer than they had been: their mouths were open in gasping exertion, their faces contorted by effort and sheened in sweat and they stumbled occasionally as their weakening legs betrayed them on the unsure footing of the cobblestones. But now they were only fifteen yards away, the price Bowman had paid for his frequent examinations of possible places of refuge. But at least their nearness made one decision inevitable for him: there was no point in wasting any further time in searching for hiding-places on either side for wherever he went they were bound to see him go and follow. For him now the only hope of life lay among the shattered ruins of the ancient fortress of Les Baux itself.

Still pounding uphill he came to a set of iron railings that apparently completely blocked what had now turned from a narrow road into no more than a winding metalled path. I’ll have to turn and fight, he thought, I’ll have to turn and then it will be all over in five seconds, but he didn’t have to turn for there was a narrow gap between the right-hand side of the railing and a desk in an inlet recess in the wall which was clearly the paybox where you handed over your money to inspect the ruins. Even in the moment of overwhelming relief at spotting this gap, two thoughts occurred to Bowman: the first the incongruous one that that was a bloody stupid set-up for a pay-box where the more parsimoniously minded could slip through at will, the second that this was the place to stand and fight, for they could only squeeze through that narrow entrance one at a time and would have to turn sideways to do so, a circumstance which might well place a swinging foot on a par with a constricted knifearm: or it did seem like a good idea to him until it fortunately occurred that while he was busy trying to kick the knife from the hand of one man the other two would be busy throwing their knives at him through or over the bars of the railing and at a distance of two or three feet it didn’t seem very likely that they would miss. And so he ran on, if the plodding, lumbering, stumbling progress that was now all he could raise could be called running.

A small cemetery lay to his right. Bowman thought of the macabre prospect of playing a lethal hide-and-seek among the tombstones and hastily put all thought of the cemetery out of his mind. He ran on another fifty yards, saw before him the open plateau of the Les Baux massif, where there was no place to hide and from which escape could be obtained only by jumping down the vertical precipices which completely enclosed the massif, turned sharply to his left, ran up a narrow path alongside what looked like a crumbling chapel and was soon among the craggy ruins of the Les Baux fortress itself. He looked downhill and saw that his pursuers had fallen back to a distance of about forty yards which was hardly surprising as his life was at stake and their lives weren’t. He looked up, saw the moon riding high and serene in a now cloudless sky and swore bitterly to himself in a fashion that would have given great offence to uncounted poets both alive and dead. On a moonless night he could have eluded his pursuers with ease amidst that great pile of awesome ruins.

And that they were awesome was beyond dispute. The contemplation of large masses of collapsed masonry did not rank among Bowman’s favourite pastimes but as he climbed, fell, scrambled and twisted among that particular mass of masonry and in circumstances markedly unconducive to any form of aesthetic appreciation there was inexorably borne in upon him a sense of the awful grandeur of the place. It was inconceivable that any ruins anywhere could match those in their wild, rugged yet somehow terrifyingly beautiful desolation. There were mounds of shattered building stones fifty feet high: there were great ruined pillars reaching a hundred feet into the night sky, pillars overlooking vertical cliff faces of which the pillars appeared to be a natural continuation and in some cases were: there were natural stairways in the shattered rock face, natural chimneys in the remnants of those man-made cliffs, there were hundreds of apertures in the rock, some just large enough for a man to squeeze through, others large enough to accommodate a double-decker. There were strange paths let into the natural rock, some man-made, some not, some precipitous, some almost horizontal, some wide enough to bowl along in a coach and four, others narrow and winding enough to have daunted the most mentally retarded of mountain goats. And there were broken, ruined blocks of masonry everywhere, some big as a child’s hand, others as large as a suburban house. And it was all white, eerie and dead and white: in that brilliantly cold pale moonlight it was the most chillingly awe-inspiring sight Bowman had ever encountered and not, he reflected, a place he would willingly have called home. But, here, tonight, he had to live or die.

Or they had to live or die, Ferenc and Koscis and Hoval. When it came to the consideration of this alternative there was no doubt at all in Bowman’s mind as to what the proper choice must be and the choice was not based primarily on the instinct of self-preservation although Bowman would have been the last to deny that it was an important factor: those were evil men and they had but one immediate and all-consuming ambition in life and that was to kill him but that was not what ultimately mattered. There was no question of morality or legality involved, just the simple factor of logic. If they killed him now they would, he knew, go on to commit more and more heinous crimes: if he killed them, then they wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. Some men deserve to die and the law cannot deal with them until it is too late and the law is not an ass in this respect, it’s just because of inbuilt safeguards in every legal constitution designed to protect the rights of the individual that it is unable to cope in advance with those whose ultimate evil or murderous intent is beyond rational dispute but beyond legal proof. It was the old, old story of the greatest good of the greatest number and it was merely fortuitous, Bowman reflected wryly, that he happened to be one of the greatest number. If he had been scared he was no longer scared now, his mind was quite cold and detached. He had to get high. If he got to a certain height where they couldn’t reach him it would be stalemate: if he went higher and they still tried to follow him the danger to the greatest good of the greatest number was going to be effectively reduced. He looked up at the towering shattered crags bathed in the white moonlight and started to climb.

Bowman had never had any pretensions towards being a climber but he climbed well that night. With the devil himself behind him he would normally have made good speed: with three of them he made excellent time. Looking back from time to time, he could see that he was steadily outdistancing them but not to the extent that they ever lost sight of him for more than a few seconds at a time. And now they were clearly recognizable for whom they were for now they had completely removed their home-made masks.

They had probably arrived, and rightly, at the safe conclusion that up in the wild desolation of those ruins in the middle of the night they no longer required them and even if they were seen on the way back it wouldn’t matter, for the corpus delicti would have vanished for ever and no charge could be laid against them other than that of entering the fortress without paying the required admission fee of a franc per head, which they would probably have regarded as a reasonable exchange for a night’s work well done.

Bowman stopped climbing. Through no fault of his own, because he was totally unfamiliar with the terrain, he had made a mistake. He had been aware that the walls of the narrow gully up which he was scrambling had been rapidly steepening on both sides, which hadn’t worried him unduly because it had happened twice before, but now as he rounded a comer he found himself faced with a vertical wall of solid rock. It was a perfect cul-desac from which there was no escape except by climbing, and the vertical walls were wholly unclimbable. The blank wall facing Bowman was riddled by cracks and apertures but a quick glance at the only three or four that were accessible to him showed no moonlight at the far end, only uncompromising darkness.

He ran back to the comer, convinced he was wasting his time. He was. The three men had been in no doubt as to the direction in which he had disappeared. They were forty yards away, no more. They saw Bowman, stopped and came on again. But not so hurriedly now. The very fact that Bowman had turned back to check on their whereabouts would be indication enough that he was in serious trouble.

A man does not die before he has to. He ran back into the cul-de-sac and looked desperately at the apertures in the rock. Only two were large enough to allow a man to enter. If he could get inside one and turn around the darkness behind him would at least counter-balance the advantages of a man with a knife – and, of course, only one man could come at a time. For no reason at all he chose the right-hand aperture, scrambled up and wriggled inside.

The limestone tunnel started narrowing almost immediately. But he had to go on, he was not yet in total concealment. By the time he estimated that he was hidden the tunnel was no more than two feet wide and scarcely as high. It would be impossible for him to turn, all he could do was lie there and be hacked piecemeal at someone’s leisure. And even that, he realized now, would not be necessary: all they would have to do would be to wall up the entrance and go home for a good night’s sleep. Bowman inched ahead on hands and knees.

He saw a pale glow of light ahead. He was imagining it, he thought, he knew he must be imagining it, but when he suddenly realized that what lay ahead was a corner in the tunnel, he knew he wasn’t. He reached the corner and wriggled round with difficulty. Before him he saw a patch of starstudded sky.

The tunnel had suddenly become a cave. A small cave, to be sure, a good deal less than headhigh and its lip ending in nothingness less than six feet away: but a cave. He crawled to the lip and looked down. He at once wished he hadn’t: the plain lay hundreds of sheerly vertical feet below, the rows of dusty olive trees so impossibly distant that they couldn’t even be fairly described as toy bushes.

He leaned out another few vertiginous inches and twisted his head to look upwards. The top of the cliff lay no more than twenty feet above – twenty smoothly vertical feet with neither fingernor toe-hold in sight.

He looked to the right and that was it. That was the path that even the moronic mountain goat would have balked at, narrow broken edge extending down at not too acute an angle to a point that passed, as he now saw, some four feet below the lip of the cave. The path, for want of a better word, went right to the top.

But even the moronic goat, which Bowman was not, will refuse suicidal chances acceptable to the sacrificial goat, which Bowman undoubtedly was, for death and suicide come to the same thing anyway. He didn’t hesitate, for he knew with certainty that if he did he would elect to remain and fight it out in that tiny cave soomer than face that dreadful path. He swung out gingerly over the rim, lowered himself till he had located the ledge with his feet and started to edge his way upwards.

He shuffled along with his face to the wall, arms wide outstretched, palms in constant contact with the rock-face, not because of any purchase that could be gained, for there was none, but because he was no mountaineer, had no particular head for heights and knew very well that if he looked down he’d inevitably just lean out and go tumbling head over heels to the olive groves far below. A crack Alpinist, it was possible, would have regarded the climb as just a light Sunday afternoon workout but for Bowman it was the most terrifying experience of his life. Twice his foot slipped on loose stone, twice chunks of limestone disappeared into the abyss, but after a lifetime that was all of two minutes long he made it and hauled himself over the brink and into safety, sweating like a man in a Turkish bath and trembling like a withered leaf in the last gale of autumn. He’d thought he wouldn’t be scared again and he had been wrong: but now he was back on terra firma and it was on terra firma that he operated best.

He ventured a quick glance over the edge. There was no one in sight. He wondered briefly what had delayed them, maybe they’d thought he was lurking in the shadow in the cul-de-sac, maybe they’d picked the wrong aperture to start with, maybe anything. He’d no time to waste wondering, he had to find out, and immediately, whether there was any escape from the pinnacle he was perched on. He had to find out for three very good and urgent reasons. If there was no other escape route he knew in his heart that no power on earth would ever make him face that descent to the cave and that he’d just have to stay there till the buzzards bleached his bones – he doubted whether there were any buzzards in those parts but the principle of the thing was pretty well fixed in his mind. If there was an escape route, then he’d have to guard against the possibility of being cut off by the gypsies. Thirdly, if there was such a route and they regarded it as unassailable, they might just elect to leave him there and go off to deal with Cecile Dubois whom they clearly, if erroneously, suspected of being a party to his irritatingly interfering behaviour.

He crossed the no more than ten yards of the flat limestone summit, lowered himself flat and peered over the edge. His circumspection was needless. There was an escape route, a very steep scree-laden slope that debouched gradually into an area of massive limestone boulders which in turn gave on to the Les Baux plateau massif itself. Uninviting but feasible.

He made his way back to the cliff-side and heard voices, at first indistinctly, then clearly.

‘This is madness!’ It was Hoval speaking and for the first time Bowman shared a point of view with him.

‘For you, Hoval, for a mountaineer from the High Tatra?’ Ferenc’s voice. ‘If he went this way, we can too. You know that if we do not kill this man everything will be lost.’

Bowman looked down. He could see Hoval quite clearly and the heads of Ferenc and Koscis.

Koscis, apparently trying to postpone a decision, said: ‘I do not like killing, Ferenc.’

Ferenc said: ‘Too late to be queasy now. My father’s orders are that we do not return until this man lies dead.’

Hoval nodded reluctantly, reached down his feet, found the ledge and started to edge his way along. Bowman rose, looked around, located a limestone boulder that must have weighed at least fifty pounds, lifted it chest high and returned to the brink of the precipice.

Hoval was obviously a great deal more experienced than Bowman for he was making about twice the best speed that Bowman had been able to manage. Ferenc and Koscis, heads and shoulders clearly visible now, were glancing anxiously sideways, watching Hoval’s progress and almost certainly far from relishing the prospect of having to emulate him. Bowman waited till Hoval was directly beneath him. Hoval had once already tried to murder and now was coming to try to murder again. Bowman felt no pity and opened his hands.

The boulder, with a curious absence of sound, struck head and shoulders: the whole brief sequence, indeed, was characterized by an eerie silence. Hoval made no sound at all on the long way down and may well have been dead before he started to fall: and no sound of what must have been appalling impact came from either Hoval or the boulder that had killed him as they plunged into the olive groves so far away. They just disappeared soundlessly from sight, vanished in the darkness below.

Bowman looked at Ferenc and Koscis. For several seconds they crouched there, their faces stunned, for catastrophe rarely registers instantaneously, then Ferenc’s face became savagely transformed. He reached inside his jacket, snatched out a gun, pointed it upwards and fired. He knew Bowman was up there but he could have had no idea where he was. It was no more than the uncontrollable expression of an access of blind fury but Bowman took a couple of rapid backward steps all the same.

The gun introduced a new dimension. Clearly, because of their predilection for knives, they had intended to dispose of Bowman as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, but Ferenc, Bowman felt sure, did not carry a gun unless he intended to use it in the last resort and that was plainly at hand: they were going to get him at no matter what risk to themselves. Bowman reflected that whatever he had so nearly stumbled across must literally be a matter of life and death, then he turned and ran. Ferenc and Koscis would already be heading back through the tunnel on the assumption that there might be an escape route open to Bowman: in any event it would be pointless for them to remain where they were as any action they might try to take there would result in their untimely end. Untimely, that is, from their point of view.

He ran down the steep slope of scree because he had no alternative but to run, taking increasingly huge bounding steps to maintain what was left of his balance. Three-quarters of the way down to the waiting jumble of limestone boulders his loss of balance passed the point of no return and he fell, rolling diagonally downhill, trying frantically and with a total lack of success to brake himself. The braking was done for him, violently and painfully, by the first of the boulders with which he came into contact and it was his right knee that took the major brunt of the impact.

He was sure he had smashed the knee-cap for when he tried to rise his leg just gave under him and he sat down again. A second time he tried it and this time with a little more success: the third time he made it and he knew the knee-cap had just been momentarily paralysed. Now it felt merely numb although he knew it must hurt badly later and would be severely bruised. He hobbled on his way through the thinning scattering of boulders at about half the best speed he could normally have made for the knee kept collapsing under him as if it had a will of its own.

A puff of white smoke flew off from a boulder just in front of him and the sound of the shot was almost simultaneous. Ferenc had anticipated too well. Bowman didn’t try to take cover because Ferenc could see where he was and had Bowman tried to hide Ferenc would just have walked down to the place of concealment and put the pistol to his head to make quite sure that he didn’t miss. Bowman made off down the slope, twisting and doubling among the rocks to throw Ferenc off aim, not even trying to locate where his pursuers were for the knowledge would have been useless to him anyway. Several shots came close, one kicking up a small cloud of soil at his right foot, but the combination of his swerving run and the fact that Ferenc had himself to dodge in and out among the rocks must have made him an almost impossible target. Besides, to shoot accurately downhill is notoriously difficult at the best of times. In between the shots Bowman could hear the sound of their pounding footsteps and he knew they were gaining on him: but still he didn’t look round for if he were going to be shot through the back of the head he felt he’d just as soon not know about it in advance.

He was clear of the rocks now and running straight over the hard-packed earth towards the railed entrance to the village. Ferenc, closing up and also running straight, should have had his chance then but the firing had stopped and Bowman could only assume that he had run out of ammunition. He might well, Bowman realized, carry a spare magazine but if he did he would have been hard put to it to reload on the dead run.

Bowman’s knee was hurting now but, contradictorily, it was bearing up much better. He glanced behind. His pursuers were still gaining, but more slowly. Bowman passed through the railed upper entrance to the village and ran down to the fork where he had hesitated on the way up. The two gypsies were not yet in sight but the sound of their running feet was clear. They would expect him, Bowman hoped, to continue out through the lower entrance to the village, so he turned left down the short road that led to the old battlements of the town. The road debouched into a small square, a cul-de-sac, but he was past caring about that. He registered the fact, without knowing why, that an ancient wrought-iron cross stood in the centre of the square. To the left was an equally ancient church, facing it was a low wall with apparently nothing beyond it and, between church and wall, a high fence of vertical rocks with deep man-made apertures cut into it, for reasons that couldn’t be guessed at.

He ran across to the low rock and peered over it. It was certainly no low rock on the other side: it dropped almost two hundred feet to what looked like scrub trees at the foot.

Ferenc had been cleverer than Bowman thought he would have been. He was still peering over the wall when he heard the sound of running feet approaching the square, one set of feet: they’d split up to investigate both avenues of escape. Bowman straightened and hurried soundlessly across the square and hid in the shadows of one of the deep recesses cut in the natural rock.

Koscis it was. He slowed down on entering the square, his stertorous breathing carrying clearly in the night air, walked past the iron cross, glanced at the open doorway of the church, then, as if guided by some natural instinct, came heading straight towards the particular niche where Bowman stood as deeply pressed back in the shadow as he possibly could. There was a peculiar inevitability about the unhesitating manner of his approach. He held his knife, thumb on top of the handle, in what appeared to be his favourite waist-high level.

Bowman waited until the gypsy was fractionally away from the point which would make discovery certain, then hurled himself from the dark niche, managing to grab his knife wrist more by good luck than good judgment. Both men fell heavily to the ground, fighting for possession of the knife. Bowman tried to twist Koscis’s right wrist but it seemed to be made of overlaid strands of wire hawser and Bowman could feel the wrist slowly breaking free from his grasp. He anticipated the inevitable by suddenly letting go and rolling over twice, rising to his feet at the same instant as Koscis did. For a moment they looked at each other, immobile, then Bowman backed away slowly until his hands touched the low wall behind him. He had no place to run to any more and no place to hide.

Koscis advanced. His face, at first implacable, broke into a smile that was notably lacking in warmth. Koscis, the expert with a knife, was savouring the passing moment.

Bowman threw himself forward, then to the right, but Koscis had seen this one before. He flung himself forward to intercept the second stage of the movement, his knife arcing up from knee level, but what Koscis had forgotten was that Bowman knew he had seen this one before. Bowman checked with all the strength of his right leg, dropped to his left knee and as the knife hooked by inches over his head, his right shoulder and upper arm hit the gypsy’s thighs. Bowman straightened up with a convulsive jerk and this, combined with the speed and accelerating momentum of Koscis’s onrush, lifted the gypsy high into the air and sent him, useless knife still in hand, sailing helplessly over the low wall into the darkness below. Bowman twisted round and watched him as he fell, a diminishing manikin tumbling over and over in almost incredibly slow motion, his passing marked only by a fading scream in the night. And then Bowman couldn’t see him any more and the screaming stopped.

For a few seconds Bowman stood there, a man held in thrall, but only for a few seconds. If Ferenc hadn’t been afflicted with a sudden and total deafness he was bound to have heard that eldritch fear-crazed scream and come to investigate and immediately.

Bowman ran from the square towards the main street: halfway up the narrow connecting lane he slid into a darkened alleyway for he’d heard Ferenc coming and for a brief moment saw him as he passed the end of the alleyway, pistol in one hand, knife in the other. Whether the pistol had been reloaded or not or whether Ferenc had balked at firing it so near the village was impossible to say. Even in what must have been that moment of intolerable stress Ferenc was still possessed of a sufficient instinct of self-preservation to keep exactly to the middle of the road where he couldn’t be ambushed by an unarmed man. His lips were drawn back in an unconscious snarl compounded of rage and hate and fear and his face was the face of a madman.

CHAPTER 3

It isn’t every woman who, wakened in the middle of the night, can sit bolt upright in bed, sheets hauled up to the neck, hair dishevelled and eyes blurred with sleep, and still look as attractive as if she were setting out for a ball, but Cecile Dubois must have been one of the few. She blinked, perhaps, rather more than a would-be dancer would have done, then gave Bowman what appeared to be a rather penetrating and critical look, possibly because as a result of all that climbing in the ruins and falling down screecovered slopes Bowman’s dark broadcloth had lost some of its showroom sheen: in fact, now that he could clearly see it for the first time, it was filthily dirty, stained and ripped beyond repair. He waited for her reaction, sarcastic, cynical or perhaps just plain annoyed, but she wasn’t an obvious sort of girl.

She said: ‘I thought you’d be in the next county by this time.’

‘I was almost in another land altogether.’ He took his hand from the light switch and eased the door until it was almost but not quite closed. ‘But I came back. For the car. And for you.’

‘For me?’

‘Especially for you. Hurry up and get dressed. Your life’s not worth a tinker’s cuss if you stay here.’

‘My life? But why should I – ’

‘Up, dress and pack. Now.’ He crossed to the bed and looked at her, and although his appearance wasn’t very encouraging it must have been convincing for she compressed her lips slightly, then nodded. Bowman returned to the door and looked out through the crack he had left. Very fetching though the dark-haired Miss Dubois might be, he reflected, it did not mean that she had to conform to the beautiful brunette pattern: she made decisions, quickly accepted what she regarded as being inevitable and the ‘if you think I’m going to get dressed while you’re standing there’ routine apparently hadn’t even crossed her mind. Not that he would have seriously objected but, for the moment, the imminent return of Ferenc held prior claim to his attentions. He wondered briefly what was holding Ferenc up, he should have posted hotfoot by that time to report to his old man that they had encountered some unexpected difficulties in the execution of their assignment. It could have been, of course, that even then Ferenc was prowling hopefully and stealthily through the back alleys of Les Baux with a gun in one hand, a knife in the other and murder in his heart.

‘I’m ready,’ Cecile said.

Bowman looked round in mild astonishment.

She was, too, even to the extent of having combed her hair. A strapped suitcase lay on her bed. ‘And packed?’ Bowman asked.

‘Last night.’ She hesitated. ‘Look, I can’t just walk off without – ’

‘Lila? Leave her a note. Say you’ll contact her Poste Restante, Saintes-Maries. Hurry. Back in a minute – I have to collect my stuff.’

He left her there, went quickly to his own room and paused briefly at the door. The south wind sighed through the trees and he could hear the splash of the fountain in the swimming pool but that was all he could hear. He went into his room, crammed clothes anyhow into a suitcase and was back in Cecile’s room within the promised minute. She was still scribbling away industriously.

‘Poste Restante, Saintes-Maries, that’s all you’ve got to write,’ Bowman said hastily. ‘Your life story she probably knows about.’

She glanced up at him, briefly and expressionlessly over the rims of a pair of glasses that he was only mildly surprised to see that she was wearing, reduced him to the status of an insect on the wall, then got back to her writing. After another twenty seconds she signed her name with what seemed to be a wholly unnecessary flourish considering the urgency of the moment, snapped the spectacles in the case and nodded to indicate that she was ready. He picked up her suitcase and they left, switching off the light and closing the door behind them. Bowman picked up his own suitcase, waited until the girl had slid the folded note under Lila’s door, then both walked quickly and quietly along the terrace, then up the path to the road that skirted the back of the hotel. The girl followed closely and in silence behind Bowman and he was just beginning to congratulate himself on how quickly and well she was responding to his training methods when she caught his left arm firmly and hauled him to a stop. Bowman looked at her and frowned but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

Short-sighted, he thought charitably.

‘We’re safe here?’she asked.

‘For the moment, yes.’

‘Put those cases down.’

He put the cases down. He’d have to revise his training methods.

‘So far and no farther,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve been a good little girl and I’ve done what you asked because I thought there was possibly one chance in a hundred that you weren’t mad. The other ninety-nine per cent of my way of thinking makes me want an explanation. Now.’

Her mother hadn’t done much about training her either, Bowman thought. Not, at least, in the niceties of drawing-room conversation. But someone had done a very good job in other directions, for if she were upset or scared in any way it certainly didn’t show.

‘You’re in trouble,’ Bowman said. ‘I got you into it. Now it’s my responsibility to get you out of it.’

‘I’m in trouble?’

‘Both of us. Three characters from the gypsy caravan down there told me that they were going to do me in. Then you. But first me. So they chased me up to Les Baux and then through the village and the ruins.’

She looked at him speculatively, not at all worried or concerned as she ought to have been. ‘But if they chased you – ’

‘I shook them off. The gypsy leader’s son, a lovable little lad by the name of Ferenc, is possibly still up there looking for me. He has a gun in one hand, a knife in the other. When he doesn’t find me he’ll come back and tell Dad and then a few of them will troop up to our rooms. Yours and mine.’

‘What on earth have I done?’ she demanded.

You’ve been seen with me all evening and you’ve been seen to give refuge, that’s what you’ve done.’

‘But – but this is ridiculous. I mean, taking to our heels like this.’ She shook her head. ‘I was wrong about that possible one per cent. You are mad.’

‘Probably.’ It was, Bowman thought, a justifiable point of view.

‘I mean, you’ve only got to pick up the phone.’

‘And?’

‘The police, silly.’

‘No police – because I’m not silly, Cecile. I’d be arrested for murder.’

She looked at him and slowly shook her head in disbelief or incomprehension or both.

‘It wasn’t so easy to shake them off tonight,’ Bowman went on. ‘There was an accident. Two accidents.’

‘Fantasy.’ She shook her head as she whispered the word again. ‘Fantasy.’

‘Of course.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘Come, I’ll show you the bodies.’ He knew he could never locate Hoval in the darkness but Koscis’s whereabouts would present no problem and as far as proving his case was concerned one corpse would be as good as two any time. And then he knew he didn’t have to prove anything, not any more. In her face, very pale now but quite composed, something had changed. He didn’t know what it was, he just registered the change. And then she came close to him and took his free hand in hers. She didn’t start having the shakes, she didn’t shrink away in horrified revulsion from a self-confessed killer, she just came close and took his other hand.

‘Where do you want to go?’ Her voice was low but there were no shakes in it either. ‘Riviera?

Switzerland?’

He could have hugged her but decided to wait for a more propitious moment. He said: ‘Saintes-Maries.’

‘SaintesMaries!’

‘That’s where all the gypsies are going. So that’s where I want to go.’

There was a silence, then she said without any particular inflection in her voice: ‘To die in Saintes-Maries.’

‘To live in Saintes-Maries, Cecile. To justify living, if you like. We idle layabouts have to, you know.’ She looked at him steadily, but kept silent: he would have expected this by now, she was a person who would always know when to be silent. In the pale wash of moonlight the lovely face was grave to the point of sadness. ‘I want to find out why a young gypsy is missing,’ Bowman went on. ‘I want to find out why a gypsy mother and three gypsy girls are terrified out of their lives. I want to find out why three other gypsies tried their damnedest to kill me tonight. And I want to find out why they’re even prepared to go to the extraordinary lengths of killing you. Wouldn’t you like to find those things out too, Cecile?’

She nodded and took her hands away. He picked up the suitcases and they walked down circumspectly past the main entrance to the hotel. There was no one around, no sound of any person moving around, no hue and cry, nothing but the soft quiet and peacefulness of the Elysian Fields or, perhaps, of any well-run cemetery or morgue. They carried on down the steeply winding road to where it joined the transverse road running north and south through the Valley of Hell and there they turned sharply right – a ninety-degree turn. Another thirty yards and Bowman gratefully set the cases down on the grassy verge.

‘Where’s your car parked?’ he asked.

‘At the inner end of the parking area.’

‘That is handy. Means it has to be driven out through the parking lot and the forecourt. What make?’

‘Peugeot 504. Blue.’

He held out his hand. ‘The keys.’

‘Why? Think I’m not capable of driving my own car out of – ’

‘Not out of, chérie. Over. Over anyone who tries to get in your way. Because they will.’

‘But they’ll be asleep – ’

‘Innocence, innocence. They’ll be sitting around drinking slivovitz and waiting happily for the good news of my death. The keys.’

She gave him a very old-fashioned look, one compounded of an odd mixture of irritation and speculative amusement, dug in her handbag and brought out the keys. He took them and, as he moved off, she made to follow. He shook his head.

‘Next time,’ he said.

‘I see.’ She made a face. ‘I don’t think you and I are going to get along too well.’

‘We’d better,’ he said. ‘For your sake, for my sake, we’d better. And it would be nice to get you to that altar unscarred. Stay here.’

Two minutes later, pressed deeply into shadow, he stood at the side of the entrance to the forecourt. Three caravans, the three he had examined earlier, still had their lights burning, but only one of them – Czerda’s – showed any sign of human activity. It came as no surprise to him to discover that his guess as to what Czerda and his headmen would be doing had proved to be so remarkably accurate, except that he had no means of checking whether the alcohol they were putting away in such copious quantities was slivovitz or not. It was certainly alcohol. The two men sitting with Czerda on the caravan steps were cast in the same mould as Czerda himself, swarthy, lean, powerfully built, unmistakably Central European and unprepossessing to a degree. Bowman had never seen either before nor, looking at them, did he care very much whether he ever saw either of them again. From the desultory conversation, he gathered they were called Maca and Masaine: whatever their names it was clear that fate had not cast them on the side of the angels.

Almost directly between them and Bowman’s place of concealment stood Czerda’s jeep, parked so that it faced the entrance of the forecourt – the only vehicle there so positioned: in an emergency, clearly, it would be the first vehicle that would be pressed into service and it seemed to Bowman prudent to do something about that. Crouched low, moving slowly and silently across the forecourt and at all times keeping the jeep directly between him and the caravan steps, he arrived at the front end of the jeep, edged cautiously towards the near front tyre, unscrewed the valve cap and inserted the end of a match into the valve using a balled-up handkerchief to muffle the hiss of the escaping air. By and by the rim of the wheel settled down until it was biting into the inner carcass of the tread. Bowman hoped, fervently if belatedly, that Czerda and his friends weren’t regarding the front near wing in any way closely for they could not have failed to be more than mildly astonished by the fact that it had sunk a clear three inches closer to the ground. But Czerda and his friends had, providentially, other and more immediate concerns to occupy their attention.

‘Something is wrong,’ Czerda said positively. ‘Very far wrong. You know that I can always tell about those things.’

‘Ferenc and Koscis and Hoval can look after themselves.’ It was the man whose name Bowman thought to be Maca and he spoke confidently. ‘If this Bowman ran, he could have run a very long way.’

‘No.’ Bowman risked a quick glance round the wing of the jeep and Czerda was now on his feet. ‘They’ve been gone too long, far too long. Come. We must look for them.’

The other two gypsies rose reluctantly to their feet but remained there, as Czerda did, their heads cocked and slowly turning. Bowman had heard the sound as soon as they had, the sound of pounding feet from the patio by the pool. Ferenc appeared at the top of the steps, came down three at a time and ran across the forecourt to Czerda’s caravan. It was the lurching stumbling run of a man very close to exhaustion and from his distressed breathing, sweating face and the fact that he made no attempt to conceal the gun in his hand it was clear that Ferenc was in a state of considerable agitation.

‘They’re dead, Father!’ Ferenc’s voice was a hoarse gasping wheeze. ‘Hoval and Koscis. They’re dead!’

‘God’s name, what are you saying?’ Czerda demanded.

‘Dead! Dead, I tell you! I found Koscis. His neck is broken, I think every bone in his body is broken. God knows where Hoval is.’

Czerda seized his son by the lapels and shook him violently. ‘Talk sense! Killed?’ His voice was almost a shout.

‘This man Bowman. He killed them.’

‘He killed – he killed – and Bowman?’

‘Escaped.’

‘Escaped! Escaped! You young fool, if this man escapes Gaiuse Strome will kill us all. Quickly! Bowman’s room!’

‘And the girl’s.’ Ferenc’s wheezing had eased fractionally. ‘And the girl’s.’

‘The girl?’ Czerda asked. ‘The dark one?’

Ferenc nodded violently. ‘She gave him shelter.’

‘And the girl’s,’ Czerda agreed viciously. ‘Hurry.’

The four men ran off towards the patio steps. Bowman moved to the offside front tyre and because this time he didn’t have to bother about muffling the escaping hiss of air he merely unscrewed the valve and threw it away. He rose and, still stooping, ran across the forecourt and through the sculptured arch in the hedge to the parking space beyond.

Here he ran into an unexpected difficulty. A blue Peugeot, Cecile had said. Fine. A blue Peugeot he could recognize any time – in broad daylight. But this wasn’t daytime, it was nighttime, and even although the moon was shining the thickly-woven wickerwork roofing cast an almost impenetrable shadow on the cars parked beneath it. Just as by night all cats are grey so by night all cars look infuriatingly the same. Easy enough, perhaps, to differentiate between a Rolls and a Mini, but in this age of mindless conformity the vast majority of cars are disturbingly alike in size and profile. Or so, dismayingly, Bowman found that night. He moved quickly from one car to the next, having to peer closely in each case for an infuriating length of time, only to discover that it was not the car he was seeking.

He heard the sound of low voices, but voices angry and anxious, and moved quickly to the archway. Close by Czerda’s caravan, the four gypsies, who had clearly discovered that their birds had flown, were gesticulating and arguing heatedly, holding their council of war and obviously wondering what in hell to do next, a decision Bowman didn’t envy their having to make for in their position he wouldn’t have had the faintest idea himself.

Abruptly, the centre of his attention altered. Out of the corner of an eye he had caught sight of something which, even in that pale moonlight, definitely constituted a splash of colour. This brightly-hued apparition, located on the upper terrace, consisted of a pair of garishly-striped heliotrope pyjamas and inside the pyjamas was no other than Le Grand Duc, leaning on the balustrade and gazing down towards the forecourt with an expression of what might have been mild interest or benign indifference or, indeed, quite a variety of other expressions as it is difficult to be positive about those things when a large part of what can be seen of the subject’s face consists of jaws champing regularly up and down while most of the remainder is concealed by a large red apple. But, clearly, however, he wasn’t in the grip of any violent emotion.

Bowman left Le Grand Duc to his munching and resumed his search. The inner end of the parking lot, she had said. But her damned Peugeot wasn’t at the inner end. He’d checked twice. He turned to the west side and the fourth one along was it. Or he thought it was. A Peugeot, anyway. He climbed inside and the key fitted the ignition. Women, he thought bitterly, but didn’t pursue the subject with himself, there were things to be done.

The door he closed as softly as he could: it seemed unlikely that the faint click would have been heard in the forecourt even if the gypsies hadn’t been conducting their heated council of war. He released the hand-brake, engaged first gear and kept the clutch depressed, reached for and turned on the ignition and the headlamp switches simultaneously. Both engine and lamps came on precisely together and the Peugeot, throwing gravel from its rear wheels, jumped forward, Bowman spinning the wheel to the left to head for the archway in the hedge. At once he saw the four gypsies detach themselves from the rear of Czerda’s caravan and run to cover what they accurately assumed would be the route he would take between the archway and the exit from the forecourt. Czerda appeared to be shouting and although his voice couldn’t be heard above the accelerating roar of the engine his violent gesticulations clearly indicated that he was telling his men to stop the Peugeot although how he proposed to do this Bowman couldn’t imagine. As he passed through the archway he could see in the blaze of the headlamps that Ferenc was the only one carrying a firearm and as he was pointing it directly at Bowman he didn’t leave Bowman with very much option other than to point the car directly at him. The panic registering suddenly on Ferenc’s face showed that he had lost all interest in using the gun and was now primarily concerned with saving himself. He dived frantically to his left and almost got clear but almost wasn’t enough. The nearside wing of the Peugeot caught him in the thigh and suddenly he wasn’t there any more, all Bowman could see was the metallic glint of his gun spinning in the air. On the left, Czerda and the two other gypsies had managed to fling themselves clear. Bowman twisted the wheel again, drove out of the forecourt and down towards the valley road. He wondered what Le Grand Duc had made of all that: probably, he thought, he hadn’t missed as much as a munch.

The tyres squealed as the Peugeot rounded the right-angle turn at the foot of the road. Bowman drew up beside Cecile, stopped, got out but left the engine running. She ran to him and thrust out a suitcase.

‘Hurry! Quickly!’ Angrily, almost, she thrust the case at him. ‘Can’t you hear them coming?’

I can hear them,’ Bowman said pacifically. ‘I think we have time.’

They had time. They heard the whine of an engine in low gear, a whine diminishing in intensity as the jeep braked heavily for the corner. Abruptly it came into sight and clearly it was making a very poor job indeed of negotiating the right-hand bend. Czerda was hauling madly on the steering-wheel but the front wheels – or tyres, at least – appeared to have a mind of their own. Bowman watched with interest as the jeep carried straight on, careered across the opposite bank of the road, cut down a sapling and landed with a resounding crash.

‘Tsk! Tsk!’ Bowman said to Cecile. ‘Did ever you see such careless driving?’ He crossed over the road and looked into the field. The jeep, its wheels still spinning, lay on its side while the three gypsies, who had clearly parted company with their vehicle before it had come to rest, lay in a sprawled heap about fifteen feet away. As he watched they disentangled themselves and scrambled painfully to their feet. Ferenc, understandably, was not one of the three. Bowman became aware that he had been joined by Cecile.

‘You did this,’ she said accusingly. ‘You sabotaged their jeep.’

‘It was nothing,’ he said deprecatingly. ‘I just let a little air out of the tyres.’

‘But – but you could have killed those men!

The jeep could have landed on top of them and crushed them to death.’

‘It’s not always possible to arrange everything as one would wish it,’ Bowman said regretfully. She gave him the kind of look Dr Crippen must have got used to after he’d been hauled into court, so Bowman changed his tone. ‘You don’t look like a fool, Cecile, nor do you talk like one, so don’t go and spoil the whole effect by behaving like one. If you think our three friends down there were just out to savour the delights of the night-time Provencal air, why don’t you go and ask them how they are?’

She turned and walked back to the car without a word. He followed and they drove off in a onesidedly huffy silence. Within a minute he slowed and pulled the car into a small cleared area on the right-hand side of the road. Through the windscreen they could see the vertical limestone bluffs with enormous man-made rectangular openings giving on the impenetrable darkness of the unseen caverns beyond.

‘You’re not stopping here?’ Incredulity in her voice.

He switched off the engine and set the parking brake.

‘I’ve stopped.’

‘But they’ll find us here!’ She sounded a little desperate. ‘They’re bound to any minute now.’

‘No. If they’re capable of thinking at all after that little tumble they had, they’ll be thinking that we’re half-way to Avignon by this time. Besides, I think it’s going to take them some time to recover their first fine enthusiasm for moonlight driving.’

They got out of the car and looked at the entrance to the caverns. Foreboding wasn’t the word for it, nor was sinister: something stronger, much stronger. It was, quite literally, an appalling place and Bowman had no difficulty in understanding and sympathizing with the viewpoint of the policeman back at the hotel. But he didn’t for a moment believe that you had to be born in Les Baux and grow up hand-in-hand with all the ancient superstitions in order to develop a night phobia about those caves: quite simply it was a place into which no man in his right mind would venture after the sun had gone down. He was, he hoped, in his right mind, and he didn’t want to go in. But he had to.

He took a torch from his suitcase and said to Cecile: ‘Wait here.’

‘No! You’re not going to leave me alone here.’ She sounded pretty vehement about it.

‘It’ll probably be an awful lot worse inside.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Suit yourself.’

They set off together and passed through the largest of the openings to the left: if you could have put a three-storey house on wheels you could have trundled it through that opening without any trouble. Bowman traversed the walls with his torch, walls covered with the graffiti of countless generations, then opted for an archway to the right that led to an even larger cavern. Cecile, he noticed, even although wearing flat-heeled sandals, stumbled quite a bit, more than the occasional slight undulations in the limestone floor warranted: he was pretty well sure now that her vision was a good deal less than twenty-twenty which, he reflected, was maybe why she had consented to come with him in the first place.

The next cavern held nothing of interest for Bowman. True, its vaulted heights were lost in darkness, but as only a bat could have got up there anyway that was of no moment. Another archway loomed ahead.

‘This is a dreadful place,’ Cecile whispered.

‘Well, I wouldn’t like to live here all the time.’

Another few paces and she said: ‘Mr Bowman.’

‘Neil.’

‘May I take your arm?’ In these days he didn’t think they asked.

‘Help yourself,’ he said agreeably. ‘You’re not the only person in need of reassurance round here.’

‘It’s not that. I’m not scared, really. It’s just that you keep flashing that torch everywhere and I can’t see and I keep tripping.’

‘Ah!’

So she took his arm and she didn’t trip any more, just shivered violently as if she were coming down with some form of malaria. By and by she said: ‘What are you looking for?’

‘You know damned well what I’m looking for.’

‘Perhaps – well, they could have hidden him.’

‘They could have hidden him. They couldn’t have buried him, not unless they had brought along some dynamite with them, but they could have hidden him. Under a mound of limestone rock and stones. There’s plenty around.’

‘But we’ve passed by dozens of piles of limestone rocks. You didn’t bother about them.’

‘When we come to a freshly made mound you’ll know the difference,’ he said matter-offactly. She shivered again, violently, and he went on: ‘Why did you have to come in, Cecile? You were telling the truth when you said you weren’t scared: you’re just plain terrified.’

‘I’d rather be plain terrified in here with you than plain terrified alone out there.’ Any moment now and her teeth would start chattering.

‘You may have a point there,’ he admitted. They passed, slightly uphill this time, through another archway, into another immense cavern: after a few steps Bowman stopped abruptly.

‘What is it? she whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘Yes, I do know.’ For the first time he shivered himself.

‘You, too?’Again that whisper.

‘Me, too. But it’s not that. Some clod-hopping character has just walked over my grave.’

‘Please?’

‘This is it. This is the place. When you’re old and sinful like me, you can smell it.’

‘Death?’ And now her voice was shaking. ‘People can’t smell death.’

‘I can.’

He switched off the torch.

‘Put it on, put it on!’ Her voice was highpitched, close to hysteria. ‘For God’s sake, put it on. Please.’

He detached her hand, put his arm round her and held her close. With a bit of luck, he thought, they might get some synchronization into their shivering, not as much perhaps as the ballroom champions on TV got in their dancing, but enough to be comfortable. When the vibrations had died down a little he said: ‘Notice anything different about this cavern?’

‘There’s light! There’s light coming from somewhere.’

‘There is indeed.’ They walked slowly forward till they came to a huge pile of rubble on the floor. The jumble of rocks stretched up and up until at the top they could see a large sqarish patch of star-dusted sky. Down the centre of this rockfall, all the way from top to bottom, was a narrow patch of disturbed rubble, a pathway that seemed to have been newly made. Bowman switched on his torch and there was no doubt about it: it was newly made. He traversed the base of the rockfall with the beam of the torch and then the beam, almost of its own volition, stopped and locked on a mound of limestone rocks, perhaps eight feet in length by three high.

‘With a freshly made mound of limestone,’ Bowman said, ‘you can see the difference.’

‘You can see the difference,’ she repeated mechanically.

‘Please. Walk away a little.’

‘No. It’s funny, but I’m all right now.’

He believed her and he didn’t think it was funny. Mankind is still close enough to the primeval jungles to find the greatest fear of all in the unknown: but here, now, they knew.

Bowman stooped over the mound and began to throw stones to one side. They hadn’t bothered to cover the unfortunate Alexandre to any great depth for inside a moment Bowman came to the slashed remnants of a once white shirt, now saturated in blood. Lying in the encrusted blood and attached to a chain was a silver crucifix. He unclipped the chain and lifted both it and the crucifix away.

Bowman parked the Peugeot at the spot in the valley road where he had picked up Cecile and the cases. He got out.

‘Stay here,’ he said to Cecile. ‘This time I mean it.’ She didn’t exactly nod her head obediently but she didn’t argue either: maybe his training methods were beginning to improve. The jeep, he observed without any surprise, was where he’d last seen it: it was going to require a mobile crane to get it out of there.

The entrance to the Baumanière’s forecourt seemed deserted but he’d developed the same sort of affectionate trust for Czerda and his merry band of followers as he would have for a colony of cobras or black widow spiders so he pressed deep into the shadows and advanced slowly into the forecourt. His foot struck something solid and there was a faint metallic clink. He became very still but he’d provoked no reaction that he could see or hear. He stooped and picked up the pistol that he’d inadvertently kicked against the base of a petrol pump. Young Ferenc’s pistol, without a doubt. From what last Bowman had seen of Ferenc he didn’t think he’d have missed it yet or would be wanting to use it for some time: but Bowman decided to return it to him all the same. He knew he wouldn’t be disturbing anyone for lights from inside Czerda’s caravan still shone through the windows and the halfopen door. Every other caravan in the forecourt was in darkness. He crossed to Czerda’s caravan, climbed the steps soundlessly and looked in through the doorway.

Czerda, with a bandaged left hand, bruised cheek and large strip of sticking-plaster on his forehead, wasn’t looking quite his old self but he was in mint condition compared to Ferenc to whose injuries he was attending. Ferenc lay on a bunk, moaning and barely half-conscious, exclaiming in pain from time to time as his father removed a blood-soaked bandage from his forehead. When the bandage was at last jerked free to the accompaniment of a final yelp of pain, a pain that had the effect of restoring Ferenc to something pretty close to complete consciousness, Bowman could see that he had a very nasty cut indeed across his forehead, but a cut that faded into insignificance compared to the massive bruising of forehead and face: if he had sustained other bodily bruises of comparable magnitude Ferenc had to be suffering very considerably and feeling in a very low state indeed. It was not a consideration that moved Bowman: if Ferenc had had his way he, Bowman, would be in a state in which he’d never feel anything again.

Ferenc sat shakily up on the bunk while his father secured a fresh bandage, then sat forward, put his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands and moaned.

‘In God’s name, what happened? My head – ’

‘You’ll be all right,’ Czerda said soothingly. ‘A cut and a bruise. That’s all.’

‘But what happened? Why is my head – ’

‘The car. Remember?’

‘The car. Of course. That devil Bowman!’ Coming from Ferenc, Bowman thought, that was rather good. ‘Did he – did he – ’

‘Damn his soul, yes. He got clear away – and he wrecked our jeep. See this?’ Czerda pointed to his hand and forehead. Ferenc looked without interest and looked away. He had other things on his mind.

‘My gun, Father! Where’s my gun?’

‘Here,’ Bowman said. He pointed the gun at Ferenc and walked into the caravan: the bloodstained chain and crucifix dangled from his left hand. Ferenc stared at him: he looked as a man might look with his head on the block and the executioner starting the back swing on his axe, for executioner Ferenc would have been in Bowman’s position. Czerda, whose back had been to the door, swung round and remained as immobile as his son. He didn’t seem any more pleased to see Bowman than Ferenc did. Bowman walked forward, two paces, and placed the bloody crucifix on a small table.

‘His mother might like to have that,’ he said. ‘I should wipe the blood off first, though.’ He waited for some reaction but there was none so he went on: ‘I’m going to kill you, Czerda. I’ll have to, won’t I, for no one can ever prove you killed young Alexandre. But I don’t require proof, all I need is certainty. But not yet. I can’t do it yet, can I? I mustn’t cause innocent people to die, must I? But later. Later I kill you. Then I kill Gaiuse Strome. Tell him I said so, will you?’

‘What do you know of Gaiuse Strome?’ he whispered.

‘Enough to hang him. And you.’

Czerda suddenly smiled but when he spoke it was still in the same whisper.

‘You’ve just said you can’t kill me yet.’ He took a step forward.

Bowman said nothing. He altered the pistol fractionally until it was lined up on a spot between Ferenc’s eyes. Czerda made no move to take a second step. Bowman looked at him and pointed to a stool close to the small table.

‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and face your son.’

Czerda did as he was told. Bowman took one step forward and it was apparent that Ferenc’s reactions weren’t yet back in working order for his suddenly horrified expression in what little was left of his face that was still capable of registering expressions and his mouth opening to shout a warning came far too late to be of any aid to Czerda who crashed heavily to the floor as the barrel of Bowman’s gun caught him behind the ear.

Ferenc bared his teeth and swore viciously at him. At least that was what Bowman assumed he was doing for Ferenc had reverted to his native Romany but he hadn’t even started in on his descriptions when Bowman stepped forward wordlessly, his gun swinging again. Ferenc’s reactions were even slower than Bowman had imagined: he toppled headlong across his father and lay still.

‘What on earth – ’ The voice came from behind Bowman. He threw himself to one side, dropping to the floor, whirled round and brought the gun up: then, more slowly, he rose. Cecile stood in the doorway, her green eyes wide, her face stilled in shock.

‘You fool,’ Bowman said savagely. ‘You almost died there. Don’t you know that?’ She nodded, the shock still in her face. ‘Come inside. Shut the door. You are a fool. Why the hell didn’t you do what I asked and stay where you were?’

Almost as if in a trance she stepped inside and closed the door. She stared down at the two fallen men, then back at Bowman again.

‘For God’s sake, why did you knock those two men senseless? Two injured men?’

‘Because it was inconvenient to kill them at present,’ Bowman said coldly. He turned his back on her and began to search the place methodically and exhaustively. When one searches any place, be it gypsy caravan or baronial mansion, methodically and exhaustively, one has to wreck it completely in the process. So, in an orderly and systematic fashion, Bowman set about reducing Czerda’s caravan to a total ruin. He ripped the beds to pieces, sliced open the mattresses with the aid of a knife he’d borrowed from the recumbent Czerda, scattering the flock stuffing far and wide to ensure that there was nothing hidden inside, and wrenched open cupboards, all locked, again with the aid of Czerda’s knife. He moved into the kitchen recess, smashed all the items of crockery that were capable of holding anything, emptied the contents of a dozen food tins into the sink, smashed open preserving jars and a variety of wine bottles by the simple expedient of knocking them together two at a time and ended up by spilling the contents of the cutlery drawers on the floor to ensure that there was nothing hidden beneath the lining paper. There wasn’t.

Cecile, who had been watching this performance still in the same kind of hypnotic trance, said: ‘Who’s Gaiuse Strome?’

‘How long were you listening?’

‘All the time. Who’s Gaiuse Strome?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bowman said frankly. ‘Never heard of him until tonight.’

He turned his attention to the larger clothing drawers. He emptied the contents of each in turn on the floor and kicked them apart. There was nothing there for him, just clothes.

‘Other people’s property doesn’t mean all that much to you, does it?’ By this time Cecile’s state of trance had altered to the dazed incomprehension of one trying to come to grips with reality.

‘He’ll have it insured,’ Bowman said comfortingly. He began an assault on the last piece of furniture still intact, a beautifully carved mahogany bureau worth a small fortune in anybody’s money, splintering open the locked drawers with the now invaluable aid of the point of Czerda’s knife. He dumped the contents of the first two drawers on the floor and was about to open a third when something caught his eye. He stooped and retrieved a pair of heavy rolled-up woollen socks. Inside them was an elastic-bound package of brand-new crackling banknotes with consecutive serial numbers. It took him over half a minute to count them.

‘Eighty thousand Swiss francs in one-thousand franc notes,’ Bowman observed. ‘I wonder where friend Czerda got eighty thousand Swiss francs in one-thousand-franc notes? Ah, well.’ He stuffed the notes into a hip pocket and resumed the search.

‘But – but that’s stealing!’ It would be too much, perhaps, to say that Cecile looked horrified but there wasn’t much in the way of admiration in those big green eyes: but Bowman was in no mood for moral disapprobation.

‘Oh, shut up!’ he said.

‘But you’ve got money.’

‘Maybe this is how I get it.’

He broke open another drawer, sifted through the contents with the toe of his shoe, then turned as he heard a sound to his left. Ferenc was struggling shakily to his feet, so Bowman took his arm, helped him to stand upright, hit him very hard indeed on the side of the jaw and lowered him to the floor again. The shock was back in Cecile’s face, a shock mingled with the beginnings of revulsion, she was probably a gently nurtured girl who had been brought up to believe that opera or the ballet or the theatre constituted the ideal of an evening’s entertainment. Bowman started in on the next drawer.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Just an idle layabout laying about. Not funny?’

‘No.’ She had her lips compressed in a very school-marmish way.

‘I’m pressed for time. Ah!’

‘What is it?’ In even the most puritanical of females repugnance doesn’t stand a chance against curiosity.

‘This.’ He showed her a delicately fashioned rosewood lacquered box inlaid with ebony and motherof-pearl. It was locked and so exquisitely made that it was quite impossible to insert the point of even Czerda’s razor-sharp knife into the microscopic line between lid and box. Cecile seemed to derive a certain malicious satisfaction from this momentary problem for she waved a hand to indicate the indescribable wreckage that now littered almost every square inch of the caravan floor.

‘Shall I look for the key?’ she asked sweetly.

‘No need.’ He laid the rosewood box on the floor and jumped on it with both heels, reducing it at once to splintered matchwood. He removed a sealed envelope from the ruins, opened it and extracted a sheet of paper.

On it was a typewritten – in capitals – jumble of apparently meaningless letters and figures. There were a few words in plain language but their meaning in the context was completely obscure.

Cecile peered over his shoulder. Her eyes were screwed up and he knew she was having difficulty in seeing.

‘What is it?’she asked.

‘Code, looks like. One or two words straight. There’s “Monday”, a date – May 24th – and a place-name – Grau du Roi.’

‘Grau du Roi?’

‘A fishing port and holiday resort down on the coast. Now, why should a gypsy be carrying a message in code?’ He thought about this for a bit but it didn’t do him any good: he was still awake and on his feet but his mind had turned in for the night. ‘Stupid question. Up, up and away.’

‘What? Still two lovely drawers left unsmashed?’

‘Leave those for the vandals.’ He took her arm so that she wouldn’t trip too often on the way to the door and she peered questioningly at him.

‘Meaning you can break codes?’

Bowman looked around him. ‘Furniture, yes. Crockery, yes. Codes, no. Come, to our hotel.’

They left. Before closing the door Bowman had a last look at the two still unconscious and injured men lying amidst the irretrievably ruined shambles of what had once been a beautifully appointed caravan interior. He felt almost sorry for the caravan.

CHAPTER 4

When Bowman woke up the birds were singing, the sky was a cloudless translucent blue and the rays of the morning sun were streaming through the window. Not the window of an hotel but the window of the blue Peugeot which he’d pulled off the road in the early hours of the morning into the shelter of a thick clump of trees that had seemed, in the darkness, to offer almost total concealment from the road. Now, in daylight, he could see that it offered nothing of the kind and that they were quite visible to any passer-by who cared to cast a casual sideways glance in their direction and, as there were those not all that far distant whose casual sideways glances he’d much rather not be the object of, he deemed it time to move on.

He was reluctant to wake Cecile. She appeared to have passed a relatively comfortable night – or what had been left of the night – with her dark head on his shoulder, a fact that he dimly resented because he had passed a most uncomfortable night, partly because he’d been loath to move for fear of disturbing her but chiefly because his unaccustomedly violent exercise of the previous night had left him with numerous aches in a variety of muscles that hadn’t been subjected to such inconsiderate treatment for a long time. He wound down the driver’s window, sniffed the fresh cool morning air and lit a cigarette. The rasp of the cigarette lighter was enough to make her stir, straighten and peer rather blearily about her until she realized where she was.

She looked at him and said: ‘Well, as hotels go, it was cheap enough.’

‘That’s what I like,’ Bowman said. ‘The pioneering spirit.’

‘Do I look like a pioneer?’

‘Frankly, no.’

‘I want a bath.’

‘And that you shall have and very soon. In the best hotel in Arles. Cross my heart.’

‘You are an optimist. Every hotel room will have been taken weeks ago for the gypsy festival.’ ‘Indeed. Including the one I took. I booked my room two months ago.’

‘I see.’ She moved pointedly across to her own side of the seat which Bowman privately considered pretty ungrateful of her considering that she hadn’t disdained the use of his shoulder as a pillow for the most of the night. ‘You booked your room two months ago, Mr Bowman – ’

‘Neil.’

‘I have been very patient, haven’t I, Mr Bowman? I haven’t asked any questions?’

‘That you haven’t.’ He looked at her admiringly. ‘What a wife you’re going to make. When I come home late from the office – ’

‘Please. What is it all about? Who are you?’

‘A layabout on the run.’

‘On the run? Following the gypsies that – ’

‘I’m a vengeful layabout.’

‘I’ve helped you – ’

‘Yes, you have.’

‘I’ve let you have my car. You’ve put me in danger – ’

‘I know. I’m sorry about that and I’d no right to do it. I’ll put you in a taxi for Martignane airport and the first plane for England. You’ll be safe there. Or take this car. I’ll get a lift to Arles.’

‘Blackmail!’

‘Blackmail? I don’t understand. I’m offering you a place of safety. Do you mean that you’re prepared to come with me?’

She nodded. He looked at her consideringly.

‘Such implicit trust in a man with so much and so very recently spilled blood on his hands?’

She nodded again.

‘I still don’t understand.’ He gazed forward through the windscreen. ‘Could it be that the fair Miss Dubois is in the process of falling in love?’

‘Rest easy,’ she said calmly. ‘The fair Miss Dubois has no such romantic stirrings in mind.’

‘Then why come along with me? Who knows, they may all be lying in wait – the mugger up the dark alley, the waiter with the poison phial, the smiler with the knife beneath the cloak – any of Czerda’s pals, in fact. So why?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

He started up the Peugeot. ‘I’m sure I don’t know either.’ But he did know. And she knew. But what she didn’t know was that he knew that she knew. It was, Bowman thought, all very confusing at eight o’clock in the morning.

They’d just regained the main road when she said: ‘Mr Bowman, you may be cleverer than you look.’

‘That would be difficult?’

‘I asked you a question a minute or two ago. Somehow or other you didn’t get around to answering it.’

‘Question? What question?’

‘Never mind,’ she said resignedly. ‘I’ve forgotten what it was myself.’

Le Grand Duc, his heliotrope-striped pyjamas largely and mercifully obscured by a napkin, was having breakfast in bed. His breakfast tray was about the same width as the bed and had to be to accommodate the vast meal it held. He had just speared a particularly succulent piece of fish when the door opened and Lila entered without the benefit of knocking. Her blonde hair was uncombed. With one hand she held a wrap clutched round her while with the other she waved a piece of paper. Clearly, she was upset.

‘Cecile’s gone!’ She waved the paper some more. ‘She left this.’

‘Gone?’ Le Grand Duc transferred the forkful of fish to his mouth and savoured the passing moment. ‘By heavens, this red mullet is superb. Gone where?’

‘I don’t know. She’s taken her clothes with her.’

‘Let me see.’ He stretched out his hand and took the note from Lila. ’“Contact me Poste Restante Saintes-Maries.” Rather less than informative, one might say. That ruffianly fellow who was with her last night – ’

‘Bowman? Neil Bowman?’

‘That’s the ruffianly fellow I meant. Check if he’s still here. And your car.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘One has to have the mind for it,’ Le Grand Duc said kindly. He picked up his knife and fork again, waited until Lila had made her hurried exit from the room, laid down knife and fork, opened a bedside drawer and picked up the notebook which Lila had used the previous night while she was acting as his unpaid secretary when he had been interviewing the gypsies. He compared the handwriting in the notebook with that on the sheet of paper Lila had just handed him: it was indisputably the same handwriting. Le Grand Duc sighed, replaced the notebook, let the scrap of paper fall carelessly to the floor and resumed his attack on the red mullet. He had finished it and was just appreciatively lifting the cover of a dish of kidneys and bacon when Lila returned. She had exchanged her wrap for the blue mini-dress she had been wearing the previous evening and had combed her hair: but her state of agitation remained unchanged.

‘He’s gone, too. And the car. Oh, Charles, I am worried.’

‘With Le Grand Duc by your side, worry is a wasted emotion. Saintes-Maries is the place, obviously.’

‘I suppose so.’ She was doubtful, hesitant. ‘But how do I get there? My car – our car – ’

‘You will accompany me, chérie. Le Grand Duc always has some sort of transport or other.’ He paused and listened briefly to a sudden babble of voices. ‘Tsk! Tsk! Those gypsies can be a noisy lot. Take my tray, my dear.’

Not without some difficulty, Lila removed the tray. Le Grand Duc swung from the bed, enveloped himself in a violently-coloured Chinese dressing-gown and headed for the door. As it was clear that the source of the disturbance came from the direction of the forecourt the Duke marched across to the terrace balustrade and looked down. A large number of gypsies were gathered round the rear of Czerda’s caravan, the one part of the caravan that was visible from where Le Grand Duc was standing. Some of the gypsies were gesticulating, others shouting: all were clearly very angry about something.

‘Ah!’ Le Grand Duc clapped his hands together. ‘This is fortunate indeed. It is rare that one is actually on the spot. This is the stuff that folklore is made of. Come.’

He turned and walked purposefully towards the steps leading down to the terrace. Lila caught his arm.

‘But you can’t go down there in your pyjamas!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Le Grand Duc swept on his way, descended the steps to the patio, ignored – or, more probably, was oblivious of – the stares of the early breakfasters on the patio and paused at the head of the forecourt steps to survey the scene. Already, he could see, the parking lot beyond the hedge was empty of caravans and two or three of those that had been in the forecourt had also disappeared while others were obviously making preparations for departure. But at least two dozen gypsies were still gathered round Czerda’s caravan.

Like a psychedelic Caligula, with an apprehensive and highly embarrassed Lila following, Le Grand Duc made his imperious way down the steps and through the gypsies crowding round the caravan. He halted and looked at the spectacle in front of him. Battered, bruised, cut and heavily bandaged, Czerda and his son sat on their caravan’s steps, both of them with their heads in their hands: both physically and mentally, their condition appeared to be very low. Behind them several gypsy women could be seen embarking on the gargantuan task of cleaning up the interior of the caravan, which, in the daytime, looked to be an even more appalling mess than it had been by lamplight. An anarchist with an accurate line in bomb-throwing would have been proud to acknowledge that handiwork as his own.

‘Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!’ Le Grand Duc shook his head in a mixture of disappointment and disgust. ‘A family squabble. Very quarrelsome, some of those Romany families, you know. Nothing here for the true folklorist. Come, my dear, I see that most of the gypsies are already on their way. It behoves us to do the same.’ He led her up the steps and beckoned a passing porter. ‘My car, and at once.’

‘Your car’s not here?’ Lila asked.

‘Of course it’s not here. Good God, girl, you don’t expect my employees to sleep in the same hotel as I do? Be here in ten minutes.’

‘Ten minutes! I have to bath, breakfast, pack, pay my bill – ’

‘Ten minutes.’

She was ready in ten minutes. So was Le Grand Duc. He was wearing a grey double-breasted flannel suit over a maroon shirt and a panama straw hat with a maroon band, but for once Lila’s attention was centred elsewhere. She was gazing rather dazedy down at the forecourt.

‘Le Grand Duc,’ she repeated mechanically, ‘always has some sort of transport or other.’

The transport in this case was a magnificent and enormous handmade cabriolet Rolls-Royce in lime and dark green. Beside it, holding the rear door-open, stood a chauffeuse dressed in a uniform of lime green, exactly the same shade as that of the car, piped in dark green, again exactly the same shade as the car. She was young, petite, auburn-haired and very pretty. She smiled as she ushered Le Grand Duc and Lila into the back seat, got behind the wheel and drove the car away in what, from inside the car, was a totally hushed silence.

Lila looked at Le Grand Duc who was lighting a large Havana with a lighter taken from a most impressively button-bestrewed console to his right.

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ she demanded, ‘that you wouldn’t let so deliciously pretty a creature stay in the same hotel as yourself?’

‘Certainly not. Not that I lack concern for my employees.’ He selected a button in the console and the dividing window slid silently down into the back of the driver’s seat. ‘And where did you spend the night, Carita, my dear?’

‘Well, Monsieur le Duc, the hotels were full and – ’

‘Where did you spend the night?’

‘In the car.’

‘Tsk! Tsk!’ The window slid up and he turned to Lila. ‘But it is, as you can see, a very comfortable car.’

By the time the blue Peugeot arrived in Arles a coolness had developed between Bowman and Cecile. They had been having a discussion about matters sartorial and weren’t quite seeing eye to eye. Bowman pulled up in a relatively quiet sidestreet opposite a large if somewhat dingy clothing emporium, stopped the engine and looked at the girl. She didn’t look at him.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’ She was examining some point in the far distance. ‘It’s not on. I think you’re quite mad.’

‘Like enough,’ he nodded. He kissed her on the cheek, got out, took his case from the rear seat and walked across the pavement, where he stopped to examine some exotic costumes in the drapery window. He could clearly see the reflection of the car and, almost equally clearly, that of Cecile. Her lips were compressed and she was distinctly angry. She appeared to hesitate, then left the car and crossed to where he was standing.

‘I could hit you,’ she announced.

‘I wouldn’t like that,’ he said. ‘You look a big strong girl to me.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up and put that case back in the car.’

So he shut up and put the case back in the car, took her arm and led her reluctantly into the faded emporium.

Twenty minutes later he looked at himself in a full-length mirror and shuddered. He was clad now in a black, high-buttoned and very tightly fitting suit which gave him some idea how the overweight and heroically corseted operatic diva must feel when she was reaching for a high C, a floppy white shirt, black string tie and widebrimmed black hat. It was a relief when Cecile appeared from a dressing-room, accompanied by a plump, pleasant middle-aged woman dressed in black whom Bowman assumed to be the manageress. But he observed her only by courtesy of his peripheral vision, any man who didn’t beam his entire ocular voltage directly at Cecile was either a psychiatric case or possessed of the visual acuity of a particularly myopic barnyard owl.

He had never thought of her as an eyesore but now he realized, for the first time but for keeps, that she was a stunningly lovely person. It wasn’t because of the exquisite dress she wore, a beautiful, beautifully fitting, exotic and clearly very expensive gypsy costume that hadn’t missed out on many of the colours of the rainbow, nor because of her white ruched mantilla head-dress affair, though he had heard tell that the awareness of wearing beautiful things gives women their inner glow that shows through. All he knew was that his heart did a couple of handsprings and it wasn’t until he saw her sweet and ever so slightly amused smile that he called his heart to order and resumed what he hoped was his normally inscrutable expression. The manageress put his very thoughts in words.

‘Madame,’ she breathed, ‘looks beautiful.’

‘Madame,’ he said, ‘is beautiful,’ then reverted to his old self again. ‘How much? In Swiss francs. You take Swiss francs?’

‘Of course.’ The manageress summoned an assistant who started adding figures while the manageress packed clothes.

‘She’s packing up my clothes.’ Cecile sounded dismayed. ‘I can’t go out in the street like this.’

‘Of course you can.’ Bowman had meant to be heartily reassuring but the words sounded mechanical, he still couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘This is fiesta time.’

‘Monsieur is quite correct,’ the manageress said. ‘Hundreds of young Arlésiennes dress like this at this time of year. A pleasant change and very good for them it is, too.’

‘And it’s not bad for business either.’ Bowman looked at the bill the assistant had just handed him. ‘Two thousand, four hundred Swiss francs.’ He peeled three thousand-franc notes from Czerda’s roll and handed them to the manageress. ‘Keep the change.’

‘But monsieur is too kind.’ From her flabbergasted expression he took it that the citizens of Arles were not notably open-handed when it came to the question of gratuities.

‘Easy come, easy go,’ he said philosophically and led Cecile from the shop. They got into the Peugeot and he drove for a minute or two before pulling up in an almost deserted car-park. Cecile looked at him enquiringly.

‘My cosmetic case,’ he explained. He reached into his case in the back seat and brought out a small black zipped leather bag. ‘Never travel without it.’

She looked at him rather peculiarly. ‘A man doesn’t carry a cosmetic case.’

‘This one does. You’ll see why.’

Twenty minutes later, when they stood before the reception desk of the grandest hotel in Arles, she understood why. They were clad as they had been when they had left the clothing emporium but were otherwise barely recognizable as the same people. Cecile’s complexion was several shades darker, as was the colour of her neck, hands and wrists, she wore bright scarlet lipstick and far too much rouge, mascara and eyeshadow: Bowman’s face was now the colour of well-seasoned mahogany, his newly acquired moustache dashing to a degree. The receptionist handed him back his passport.

‘Your room is ready, Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘This is Mrs Parker?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Bowman said, took Cecile’s suddenly stiff arm and followed the bell-boy to the lift. When the bedroom door closed behind them, she looked at Bowman with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

‘Did you have to say that to the receptionist?’

‘Look at your hands.’

‘What’s wrong with my hands – apart from the fact that that stuff of yours has made them filthy?’

‘No rings.’

‘Oh!’

‘Well might you “Oh!” The experienced receptionist notices those things automatically – that’s why he asked. And he may be asked questions – any suspicious couples checked in today, that sort of thing. As far as the criminal stakes are concerned a man with his lady-love in tow is automatically above suspicion – it is assumed that he has other things in mind.’

‘There’s no need to talk – ’

‘I’ll tell you about the birds and bees later. Meantime, what matters is that the man trusts me. I’m going out for a bit. Have your bath. Don’t wash that stuff off your arms, face and neck. There’s little enough left.’

She looked into a mirror, lifted up her hands and studied both them and her face. ‘But how in heaven’s name am I going to have a bath without – ’

‘I’ll give you a hand if you like,’ Bowman volunteered. She walked to the bathroom, closed and locked the door. Bowman went downstairs and paused for a moment outside a telephone kiosk in the lobby, rubbing his chin, a man deep in thought. The telephone had no dialling face which meant that outgoing calls were routed through the hotel switchboard. He walked out into the bright sunshine.

Even at that early hour the Boulevard des Lices was crowded with people. Not sightseers, not tourists, but local tradesmen setting up literally hundreds of stalls on the broad pavements of the boulevard. The street itself was as crowded as the pavements with scores of vehicles ranging from heavy trucks to handcarts unloading a variety of goods that ran the gamut from heavy agricultural machinery, through every type of food, furniture and clothes imaginable, down to the gaudiest of souvenir trinkets and endless bunches of flowers.

Bowman turned into a post office, located an empty telephone booth, raised the exchange and asked for a Whitehall number in London. While he was waiting for the call to come through he fished out the garbled message he had found in Czerda’s caravan and smoothed it out before him.

At least a hundred gypsies knelt on the ground in the grassy clearing while the black-robed priest delivered a benediction. When he lowered his arm, turned, and walked towards a small black tent pitched near by, the gypsies rose and began to disperse, some wandering aimlessly around, others drifting back to their caravans which were parked just off the road a few miles north-east of Arles: behind the caravans loomed the majestic outline of the ancient Abbey de Montmajour.

Among the parked vehicles, three were instantly identifiable: the green-and-white caravan where Alexandre’s mother and the three young gypsy girls lived, Czerda’s caravan which was now being towed by a garishly yellow-painted breakdown truck and Le Grand Duc’s imposing green Rolls. The cabriolet hood of the Rolls was down for the sky was cloudless and the morning already hot. The chauffeuse, her auburn hair uncovered to show that she was temporarily off-duty, stood with Lila by the side of the car: Le Grand Duc, reclining in the rear seat, refreshed himself with some indeterminate liquid from the open cocktail cabinet before him and surveyed the scene with interest.

Lila said: ‘I never associated this with gypsies.’

‘Understandable, understandable,’ Le Grand Duc conceded graciously. ‘But then, of course, you do not know your gypsies, my dear, while I am a European authority on them.’ He paused, considered and corrected himself. ‘The European authority. Which means, of course, the world. The religious element can be very strong, and their sincerity and devotion never more apparent than when they travel to worship the relics of Sara, their patron saint. Every day, in the last period of their travel, a priest accompanies them to bless Sara and their – but enough! I must not bore you with my erudition.’

‘Boring, Charles? It’s all quite fascinating. What on earth is that black tent for?’

‘A mobile confessional – little used, I fear. The gypsies have their own codes of right and wrong. Good God! There’s Czerda going inside.’ He glanced at his watch.

‘Nine-fifteen. He should be out by lunch-time.’

‘You don’t like him?’Lila asked curiously. ‘You think that he – ’

‘I know nothing about the fellow,’ Le Grand Duc said. ‘I would merely observe that a face such as his has not been fashioned by a lifetime of good works and pious thoughts.’

There was certainly little enough indicative of either as Czerda, his bruised face at once apprehensive and grim, closed and secured the tent flap behind him. The tent itself was small and circular, not more than ten feet in diameter. Its sole furnishing consisted of a cloth-screen cubicle which served as a confessional booth.

‘You are welcome, my son.’ The voice from the booth was deep and measured and authoritative.

‘Open up, Searl,’ Czerda said savagely. There was a fumbling motion and a dark linen curtain dropped to reveal a seated priest, with rimless eyeglasses and a thin ascetic face, the epitome of the man of God whose devotion is tinged with fanaticism. He regarded Czerda’s battered face briefly, impassively.

‘People may hear,’ the priest said coldly. ‘I’m Monsieur le Curé, or “Father”.’

‘You’re “Searl” to me and always will be,’ Czerda said contemptuously. ‘Simon Searl, the unfrocked priest. Sounds like a nursery rhyme.’

‘I’m not here on nursery business,’ Searl said sombrely. ‘I come from Gaiuse Strome.’

The belligerence slowly drained from Czerda’s face: only the apprehension remained, deepening by the moment as he looked at the expressionless face of the priest.

‘I think,’ Searl said quietly, ‘that an explanation of your unbelievably incompetent bungling is in order. I hope it’s a very good explanation.’

‘I must get out! I must get out!’ Tina, the dark crop-haired young gypsy girl stared through the caravan window at the confessional tent, then swung round to face the other three gypsy women. Her eyes were red and swollen, her face very pale. ‘I must walk! I must breathe the air! I – I can’t stand it here any more.’

Marie le Hobenaut, her mother and Sara looked at one another. None of them looked very much happier than Tina. Their faces were still as sad and bitter as they had been when Bowman had watched them during the night, defeat and despair still hung as heavily in the air.

‘You will be careful, Tina?’ Marie’s mother said axiously. ‘Your father – you must think of your father.’

‘It’s all right, Mother,’ Marie said. ‘Tina knows. She knows now.’ She nodded to the dark girl who hurried throught the doorway, and went on softly: ‘She was so very much in love with Alexandre. You know.’

‘I know,’ her mother said heavily. ‘It’s a pity that Alexandre hadn’t been more in love with her.’

Tina passed through the rear portion of the caravan. Seated on the steps there was a gypsy in his late thirties. Unlike most gypsies, Pierre Lacabro was squat to the point of deformity and extremely broad, and also unlike most gypsies who, in their aquiline fashion, are as aristocratically handsome as any people in Europe, he had a very broad, brutalized face with a thin cruel mouth, porcine eyes and a scar, which had obviously never been stitched, running from right eyebrow to right chin. He was, clearly, an extremely powerful person. He looked up as Tina approached and gave her a broken-toothed grin.

‘And where are you going, my pretty maid?’ He had a deep, rasping, gravelly and wholly unpleasant voice.

‘For a walk.’ She made no attempt to keep the revulsion from her face. ‘I need air.’

‘We have guards posted – and Maca and Masaine are on the watch. You know that?’

‘Do you think I’d run away?’

He grinned again. ‘You’re too frightened to run away.’

With a momentary flash of spirit she said: ‘I’m not frightened of Pierre Lacabro.’

‘And why on earth should you be?’ He lifted his hands, palms upwards. ‘Beautiful girls like you – why, I’m like a father to them.’

Tina shuddered and walked down the caravan steps.

Czerda’s explanation to Simon Searl had not gone down well at all. Searl was at no pains to conceal his contempt and displeasure: Czerda had gone very much on the defensive.

‘And what about me?’ he demanded. ‘I’m the person who has suffered, not you, not Gaiuse Strome. I tell you, he destroyed everything in my caravan – and stole my eighty thousand francs.’

‘Which you hadn’t even earned yet. That was Gaiuse Strome’s money, Czerda. He’ll want it back: if he doesn’t get it he’ll have your life in place of it.’

‘In God’s name, Bowman’s vanished! I don’t know – ’

‘You will find him and then you will use this on him.’ Searl reached into the folds of his robe and brought out a pistol with a screwed-on silencer. ‘If you fail, I suggest you save us trouble and just use it on yourself.’

Czerda looked at him for a long moment. ‘Who is this Gaiuse Strome?’

‘I do not know.’

‘We were friends once, Simon Searl – ’

‘Before God, I have never met him. His instructions come either by letter or telephone and even then through an intermediary.’

‘Then do you know who this man is?’ Czerda took Searl’s arm and almost dragged him to the flap of the tent, a corner of which he eased back. Plainly in view was Le Grand Duc who had obviously replenished his glass. He was gazing directly at them and the expression on his face was very thoughtful. Czerda hastily lowered the flap. ‘Well?’

‘That man I have seen before,’ Searl said. ‘A wealthy nobleman, I believe.’

‘A wealthy nobleman by the name of Gaiuse Strome?’

‘I do not know. I do not wish to know.’

‘This is the third time I have seen this man on the pilgrimage. It is also the third year I have been working for Gaiuse Strome. He asked questions last night. This morning he was down looking at the damage that had been done to our caravan. And now he’s staring at us. I think – ’

‘Keep your thinking for Bowman,’ Searl advised. ‘That apart, keep your own counsel. Our patron wishes to remain anonymous. He does not care to have his privacy invaded. You understand?’

Czerda nodded reluctantly, thrust the silenced pistol inside his shirt and left. As he did, Le Grand Duc peered thoughtfully at him over the rim of his glass.

‘Good God!’ he said mildly. ‘Shriven already.’

Lila said politely: ‘I beg your pardon, Charles.’

‘Nothing, my dear, nothing.’ He shifted his gaze and caught sight of Tina who was wandering disconsolately and apparently aimlessly across the grass. ‘My word, there’s a remarkably fine-looking filly. Downcast, perhaps, yes, definitely downcast.

But beautiful.’

Lila said: ‘Charles, I’m beginning to think that you’re a connoisseur of pretty girls.’

‘The aristocracy always have been. Carita, my dear, Arles and with all speed. I feel faint.’

‘Charles!’ Lila was instant concern. ‘Are you unwell? The sun? If we put the hood up – ’

‘I’m hungry,’ Le Grand Duc said simply.

Tina watched the whispering departure of the Rolls then looked casually around her. Lacabro had disappeared from the steps of the green-andwhite caravan. Of Maca and Masaine there was no sign. Quite fortuitously, as it seemed, she found herself outside the entrance to the black confessional tent. Not daring to look round to make a final check to see whether she was under observation, she pushed the flap to one side and went in. She took a couple of hesitating steps towards the booth.

‘Father! Father!’ Her voice was a tremulous whisper. ‘I must talk to you.’

Searl’s deep grave voice came from inside the booth: ‘That’s what I’m here for, my child.’

‘No, no!’ Still the whisper. ‘You don’t understand. I have terrible things to tell you.’

‘Nothing is too terrible for a man of God to hear. Your secrets are safe with me, my child.’

‘But I don’t want them to be safe with you! I want you to go to the police.’

The curtain dropped and Searl appeared. His lean ascetic face was filled with compassion and concern. He put his arm round her shoulders.

‘Whatever ails you, daughter, your troubles are over. What is your name, my dear?’

‘Tina. Tina Daymel.’

‘Put your trust in God, Tina, and tell me everything.’ In the green-and-white caravan Marie, her mother and Sara sat in a gloomy silence. Now and again the mother gave a half sob and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

‘Where is Tina?’ she said at length. ‘Where can she be? She takes so long.’

‘Don’t worry, Madame Zigair,’ Sara said reassuringly. ‘Tina’s a sensible girl. She’ll do nothing silly.’

‘Sara’s right, Mother,’ Marie said. ‘After last night – ’

‘I know. I know I’m being foolish. But Alexandre – ’

‘Please, Mother.’

Madame Zigair nodded and fell silent. Suddenly the caravan door was thrown open and Tina was thrown bodily into the room to fall heavily and face downwards on the caravan floor. Lacabro and Czerda stood framed in the entrance, the former grinning, the latter savage with a barely controlled anger. Tina lay where she had fallen, very still, clearly unconscious. Her clothes had been ripped from her back which was blood-stained and almost entirely covered with a mass of wicked-looking red and purplish weals: she had been viciously, mercilessly whipped.

‘Now,’ Czerda said softly. ‘Now will you all learn?’

The door closed. The three women stared in horror at the cruelly mutilated girl, then fell to their knees to help her.

CHAPTER 5

Bowman’s call to England came through quickly and he returned to his hotel within fifteen minutes of having left it. The corridor leading to his bedroom was thickly carpeted and his footfalls soundless. He was reaching for the handle of the door when he heard voices coming from inside the room. No voices, he realized, just one – Cecile’s – and it came only intermittently: the tone of her voice was readily recognizable but the muffling effect of the intervening door was too great to allow him to distinguish the words. He was about to lean his ear against the woodwork when a chambermaid carrying an armful of sheets came round a corner of the corridor. Bowman walked unconcernedly on his way and a couple of minutes later walked unconcernedly back. There was only silence in the room. He knocked and went inside.

Cecile was standing by the window and she turned and smiled at him as he closed the door. Her gleaming dark hair had been combed or brushed or whatever she’d done with it and she looked more fetching than ever.

‘Ravishing,’ he said. ‘How did you manage without me? My word, if our children only look – ’

‘Another thing,’ she interrupted. The smile, he now noticed, lacked warmth. ‘This Mr Parker business when you registered. You did show your passport, didn’t you – Mr Bowman?’

‘A friend lent it to me.’

‘Of course. What else? Is your friend very important?’

‘How’s that?’

‘What is your job, Mr Bowman?’

‘I’ve told you – ’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten. A professional idler.’

She sighed. ‘And now – breakfast?’

‘First, for me, a shave. It’ll spoil my complexion but I can fix that. Then breakfast.’

He took the shaving kit from his case, went into the bathroom, closed the door and set about shaving. He looked around him. She’d come in here, divested herself of all her cumbersome finery, had a very careful bath to ensure that she didn’t touch the stain, dressed again, reapplied to the palms of her hands some of the stain he’d left her and all this inside fifteen minutes. Not to mention the hair brushing or combing or whatever. He didn’t believe it, she had about her the fastidious look of a person who’d have used up most of that fifteen minutes just in brushing her teeth. He looked into the bath and it was indubitably still wet so she had at least turned on the tap. He picked up the crumpled bath-towel and it was as dry as the sands of the Sinai desert. She’d brushed her hair and that was all. Apart from making a phone call.

He shaved, re-applied some war-paint and took Cecile down to a table in a corner of the hotel’s rather ornate and statuary-crowded patio. Despite the comparatively early hour it was already well patronized with late breakfasters and early coffeetakers. For the most part the patrons were clearly tourists, but there was a fair sprinkling of the more well-to-do Arlésiens among them, some dressed in the traditional fiesta costume of that part, some as gypsies.

As they took their seats their attention was caught and held by an enormous lime and dark green Rolls-Royce parked by the kerb: beside it stood the chauffeuse, her uniform matching the colours of the car. Cecile looked at the gleaming car in frank admiration.

‘Gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Absolutely gorgeous.’

‘Yes indeed,’ Bowman agreed. ‘You’d hardly think she could drive a great big car like that.’ He ignored Cecile’s old-fashioned look and leisurely surveyed the patio. ‘Three guesses as to the underprivileged owner.’

Cecile followed his line of sight. The third table from where they sat was occupied by Le Grand Duc and Lila. A waiter appeared with a very heavy tray which he set before Le Grand Duc who picked up and drained a beaker of orange juice almost before the waiter had time to straighten what must have been his aching back.

‘I thought that fellow would never come.’ Le Grand Duc was loud and testy.

‘Charles.’ Lila shook her head. ‘You’ve just had an enormous breakfast.’

‘And now I’m having another one. Pass the rolls, ma chérie.’

‘Good God!’ At their table, Cecile laid a hand on Bowman’s arm. ‘The Duke – and Lila.’

‘What’s all the surprise about?’ Bowman watched Le Grand Duc industriously ladling marmalade from a large jar while Lila poured coffee. ‘Naturally he’d be here – where the gypsies are, there the famous gypsy folklorist will be. And, of course, in the best hotel. There’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship across there. Can she cook?’

‘Can she – funnily enough, she can. A very good one, too. Cordon Bleu.’

‘Good Lord! He’ll kidnap her.’

‘But what is she still doing with him?’

‘Easy. You told her about Saintes-Maries. She’ll want to go there. And she hasn’t a car, not since we borrowed it. He’ll definitely want to be going there. And he has a car – a pound to a penny that’s his Rolls. And they seem on pretty good terms, though heavens knows what she sees in our large friend. Look at his hands – they work like a conveyor belt. Heaven grant I’m never aboard a lifeboat with him when they’re sharing out the last of the rations.’

‘I think he’s good-looking. In his own way.’

‘So’s an orang-utan.’

‘You don’t like him, do you?’ She seemed amused. ‘Just because he said you were – ’

‘I don’t trust him. He’s a phoney. I’ll bet he’s not a gypsy folklorist, has never written a thing about them and never will. If he’s so famous and important a man why has neither of us heard of him? And why does he come to this part three years running to study their customs? Once would be enough for even a folklore ignoramus like me.’

‘Maybe he likes gypsies.’

‘Maybe. And maybe he likes them for all the wrong reasons.’

Cecile looked at him, paused and said in a lowered voice: ‘You think he’s this Gaiuse Strome?’

‘I didn’t say anything of the kind. And don’t mention that name in here – you still want to live, don’t you?’

‘I don’t see – ’

‘How do you know there’s not a real gypsy among all the ones wearing fancy dress on this patio?’

‘I’m sorry. That was silly of me.’

‘Yes.’ He was looking at Le Grand Duc’s table. Lila had risen and was speaking. Le Grand Duc waved a lordly hand and she walked towards the hotel entrance. His face thoughtful, Bowman’s gaze followed her as she crossed the patio, mounted the steps, crossed the foyer and disappeared.

‘She is beautiful, isn’t she?’ Cecile murmured.

‘How’s that?’ Bowman looked at her. ‘Yes, yes of course. Unfortunately I can’t marry you both – there’s a law against it.’ Still thoughtfully, he looked across at Le Grand Duc, then back at Cecile. ‘Go talk to our well-built friend. Read his palm. Tell his fortune.’

‘What?’

‘The Duke there. Go – ’

‘I don’t think that’s funny.’

‘Neither do I. Never occurred to me when your friend was there – she’d have recognized you. But the Duke won’t – he hardly knows you. And certainly wouldn’t in that disguise. Not that there’s the slightest chance of him lifting his eyes from his plate anyway.’

‘No!’

‘Please, Cecile.’

‘No!’

‘Remember the caverns. I haven’t a lead.’

‘Oh, God, don’t!’

‘Well then.’

‘But what can I do?’

‘Start off with the old mumbo-jumbo. Then say you see he has very important plans in the near future and if he is successful – then stop there. Refuse to read any more and come away. Give him the impression that he has no future. Observe his reactions.’

‘Then you really do suspect – ’

‘I suspect nothing.’

Reluctantly she pushed back her chair and rose.

‘Pray to Sara for me.’

‘Sara?’

‘She’s the patron saint of the gypsies, isn’t she?’

Bowman watched her as she moved away. She side-stepped politely to avoid bumping into another customer who had just entered, an ascetic and otherworldly looking priest: it was impossible to imagine Simon Searl as anything other than a selfless and dedicated man of God in whose hands one would willingly place one’s life. They murmured apologies and Cecile carried on and stopped at the table of Le Grand Duc, who lowered his coffee cup and glanced up in properly ducal irritation.

‘Well, what is it?’

‘Good morning, sir.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, good morning.’ He picked up his coffee cup again. ‘What is it?’

‘Tell your fortune, sir?’

‘Can’t you see I’m busy? Go away.’

‘Only ten francs, sir.’

‘I haven’t got ten francs.’ He lowered his cup again and looked at her closely for the first time.

‘But by Jove, though, if only you’d blonde hair – ’

Cecile smiled, took advantage of the temporary moment of admiration and picked up his left hand.

‘You have a long lifeline,’ she announced.

‘I’m as fit as a fiddle.’

‘And you come of noble blood.’

‘Any fool can see that.’

‘You have a very kind disposition – ’

‘Not when I’m starving.’ He snatched away his hand, used it to pick up a roll, then glanced upwards as Lila came back to the table. He pointed his roll at Cecile. ‘Remove this young pest. She’s upsetting me.’

‘You don’t look upset, Charles.’

‘How can you see what’s happening to my digestion?’

Lila turned to Cecile with a smile that was halffriendly, half-apologetic, a smile that momentarily faded as she realized who it was. Lila put her smile back in place and said: ‘Perhaps you would like to read my hand?’ The tone was perfectly done, conciliatory without being patronizing, a gently implied rebuke to Le Grand Duc’s boorishness. Le Grand Duc remained wholly unaffected.

‘At a distance, if you please,’ he said firmly. ‘At a distance.’

They moved off and Le Grand Duc watched them go with an expression as thoughtful as possible for one whose jaws are moving with metronomic regularity. He looked away from the girls and across the table where Lila had been sitting. Bowman was looking directly at him but almost immediately looked away. Le Grand Duc tried to follow Bowman’s altered line of sight and it seemed to him that Bowman was looking fixedly at a tall thin priest who sat with a cup of coffee before him, the same priest, Le Grand Duc realized, as he’d seen blessing the gypsies by the Abbey de Montmajour. And there was no dispute as to where the object of Simon Searl’s interest lay: he was taking an inordinate interest in Le Grand Duc himself. Bowman watched as Lila and Cecile spoke together some little way off: at the moment Cecile was holding Lila’s hand and appearing to speak persuasively while Lila smiled in some embarrassment. He saw Lila press something into Cecile’s hand, then abruptly lost interest in both. From the corner of his eye he had caught sight of something of much more immediate importance: or he thought he had.

Beyond the patio was the gay and bustling fiesta scene in the Boulevard des Lices. Tradesmen were still setting up last-minute stalls but by this time they were far outnumbered by sightseers and shoppers. Together they made up a colourful and exotic spectacle. The rare person dressed in a sober business suit was strikingly out of place. Camera-behung tourists were in their scores, for the most part dressed with that excruciating careless abandon that appears to afflict most tourists the moment they leave their own borders, but even they formed a relatively drab backcloth for the three widely differing types of people who caught and held the eye in the splendid finery of their clothes – the Arlésienne girls so exquisitely gowned in their traditional fiesta costumes, the hundreds of gypsies from a dozen different countries and the gardiens, the cowboys of the Camargue.

Bowman leaned forward in his seat, his eyes intent. Again he saw what had attracted his attention in the first place – a flash of titian hair, but unmistakable. It was Marie le Hobenaut and she was walking very quickly. Bowman looked away as Cecile rejoined him and sat down.

‘Sorry. Up again. A job. Left on the street – ’

‘But don’t you want to hear – and my breakfast – ’ ‘Those can wait. Gypsy girl, titian hair, green and black costume. Follow her. See where she’s going – and she’s going some place. She’s in a tearing hurry. Now!’

‘Yes, sir.’ She looked at him quizzically, rose and left. He did not watch her go. Instead, he looked casually around the patio. Simon Searl, the priest, was the first to go and he did almost immediately, leaving some coins by his coffee cup. Seconds later, Bowman was on his feet and following the priest out into the street. Le Grand Duc, with his face largely obscured by a huge coffee cup, watched the departure of both.

Among the colourful crowds, the very drabness of Searl’s black robes made him an easy figure to follow. What made him even easier to follow was the fact that, as befitted a man of God, he appeared to have no suspicions of his fellow-men for he did not once look back over his shoulder. Bowman closed up till he was within ten feet of him. Now he could clearly see Cecile not much more than the same distance ahead of Searl and, occasionally, there was a brief glimpse of Marie le Hobenaut’s titian hair. Bowman closed up even more on Searl and waited his opportunity.

It came almost at once. Hard by a group of fish-stalls half-a-dozen rather unprepossessing gypsies were trying to sell some horses that had seen better days. As Bowman, no more than five feet behind Searl now, approached the horses he bumped into a dark, swarthy young man with a handsome face and hairline moustache: he sported a black sombrero and rather flashy, tight-fitting dark clothes. Both men murmured apologies, side-stepped and passed on. The dark young man took only two steps, turned and looked after Bowman, who was now almost lost to sight, edging his way through the group of horses.

Ahead of him, Searl stopped as a restive horse whinnied, tossed its head and moved to block his progress. The horse reared, Searl stepped prudently backwards and as he did so Bowman kicked him behind the knee. Searl grunted in agony and fell to his sound knee. Bowman, concealed by horses on both sides of him, stooped solicitously over Searl and chopped the knuckles of his right hand into the base of the man’s neck. Searl collapsed.

‘Watch those damned horses!’ Bowman shouted. At once several gypsies quieted the restive horses and pulled them apart to make a clear space round the fallen priest.

‘What happened?’ one of them demanded. ‘What happened?’

‘Selling that vicious brute?’ Bowman asked. ‘He ought to be destroyed. Kicked him right in the stomach. Don’t just stand there. Get a doctor.’

One of the gypsies at once hurried away. The others stooped low over the prostrate man and while they did so Bowman made a discreet withdrawal. But it wasn’t so discreet as to go unobserved by the same dark young man who had earlier bumped into Bowman: he was busy studying his fingernails.

Bowman was finishing off his breakfast when Cecile returned.

‘I’m hot,’ she announced. She looked it. ‘And I’m hungry.’

Bowman crooked a finger at a passing waiter.

‘Well?’

‘She went into the chemist’s shop. She bought bandages – yards and yards – and a whole lot of cream and ointment and then she went back to the caravans – in a square not far from here – ’

‘The green-and-white caravan?’

‘Yes. There were two women waiting for her at the caravan door and then all three went inside.’

‘Two women?’

‘One middle-aged, the other young with auburn hair.’

‘Marie’s mother and Sara. Poor Tina.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just rambling.’ He glanced across the courtyard. ‘The love-birds across there.’

Cecile followed his gaze to where Le Grand Duc, who was now sitting back with the relieved air of a man who has narrowly escaped death from starvation, smiled indulgently at Lila as she put her hand on his and talked animatedly.

Bowman said: ‘Is your girl-friend simpleminded or anything like that?’

She gave him a long cool look. ‘Not any more than I am.’

‘Um. She knew you, of course. What did you tell her?’

‘Nothing – except that you had to run for your life.’

‘Didn’t she wonder why you came?’

‘Because I wanted to, I said.’

‘Tell her I was suspicious of the Duke?’

‘Well – ’

‘It doesn’t matter. She have anything to tell you?’

‘Not much. Just that they stopped to watch a gypsy service this morning.’

‘Service?’

‘You know – religious.’

‘Regular priest?’

‘So Lila said.’

‘Finish your breakfast.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘But I thought – I thought you would want to know what the Duke said, his reactions. After all, that’s why you sent me.’

‘Was it?’ Bowman seemed abstracted. ‘Later.’ He rose and entered the hotel: the girl watched him go with a puzzled expression on her face.

‘Tall, you say, El Brocador. Thick-set. Very fast.’ Czerda rubbed his own battered and bandaged face in painfully tender recollection, and looked at the four men seated at the table in his caravan – El Brocador, the swarthy young man Bowman had bumped into in the street, Ferenc, Pierre Lacabro and a still shaken and pale Simon Searl who was trying to rub the back of his neck and the back of his thigh simultaneously.

‘His face was darker than you say,’ El Brocador said. ‘And a moustache.’

‘Dark faces and a moustache you can buy in shops. He can’t hide his stock in trade – violence.’

‘I hope I meet this man soon,’ Pierre Lacabro said. His tone was almost wistful.

‘I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry,’ Czerda said drily. ‘You didn’t see him at all, Searl?’

‘I saw nothing. I just felt those two blows in the back – no, I didn’t even feel the second blow.’

‘Why in God’s name did you have to go to that hotel patio anyway?’

‘I wanted to get a close-up of this Duc de Croytor. It was you, Czerda, who made me curious about him. I wanted to hear his voice. Who he spoke to, see if he has any contacts, who – ’

‘He’s with this English girl. He’s harmless.’

‘Clever men do things like that,’ Searl said.

‘Clever men don’t do the things you do,’ Czerda said grimly. ‘Now Bowman knows who you are. He almost certainly knows now that someone in Madame Zigair’s caravan has been badly hurt. If the Duc de Croytor is who you think he is then he must know now that you suspect him of being Gaiuse Strome – and, if he is, he’s not going to like any of those three things at all.’ The expression on Searl’s face left no doubt but that he himself was of the same opinion. Czerda went on: ‘Bowman. He’s the only solution. This man must be silenced. Today. But carefully. Quietly. By accident. Who knows what friends this man may not have?’

‘I told you how this can be done,’ El Brocador said.

‘And a good way. We move on this afternoon. Lacabro, you’re the only one of us he does not know. Go to his hotel. Keep watch. Follow him.

We dare not lose him now.’

‘That will be a pleasure.’

‘No violence,’ Czerda warned.

‘Of course not.’ He looked suddenly crestfallen. ‘But I don’t know what he looks like. Dark and thisckset – there are hundreds of dark and thickset – ’

‘If he’s the man El Brocador described and the man I remmember seeing on the hotel patio,’

Searl said, ‘he’ll be with a girl dressed as a gypsy. Young, dark, pretty, dressed mainly green and gold, four gold bangles on her left wrist.’

Cecile looked up from the remains of her breakfast as Bowman joined her at the table.

‘You took your time,’ she observed.

‘I have not been idle. I’ve been out. Shopping.’

‘I didn’t see you go.’

‘They have a back entrance.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I have urgent business to attend to.’

‘Like this? Just sitting here?’

‘Before I attend to the urgent thing I have to attend to I’ve something else urgent to attend to first. And that involves sitting here. Do you know they have some very nosey Chinese in the city of Arles?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Couple sitting over by Romeo and Juliet there. Don’t look. Man’s big for a Chinese, forty, although it’s always hard to say with them. Woman with him is younger, Eurasian, very good looking. Both wearing lightly-tinted sun-glasses with those built-in reflectors so that you can’t see through them from the outside.’

Cecile lifted a cup of coffee and looked idly round the patio. She said: ‘I see them now.’

‘Never trust people with reflecting sun-glasses. He seems to be displaying a very keen interest in Le Grand Duc.’

‘It’s his size.’

‘Like enough.’ Bowman looked thoughtfully at the Chinese couple, then at Le Grand Duc and Lila, then back at the Chinese again. Then he said: ‘We can go now.’

She said: ‘This urgent business – this first urgent business you had to attend to – ’

‘Attended to. I’ll bring the car round to the front.’

Le Grand Duc watched his departure and announced to Lila: ‘In about an hour we mingle with our subjects.’

‘Subjects, Charles?’

‘Gypsies, dear child. But first, I must compose another chapter of my book.’

‘Shall I bring you pen and paper?’

‘No need, my dear.’

‘You mean – you mean you do it all in your head? It’s not possible, Charles.’

He patted her hand and smiled indulgently.

‘What you can get me is a litre of beer. It’s becoming uncommonly warm. Find a waiter, will you?’

Lila moved obediently away and Le Grand Duc looked after her. There was nothing indulgent about the expression on his face when he saw her talking briefly and smiling to the gypsy girl who had so recently read her fortune: there was nothing indulgent about it when he examined the Chinese couple at an adjacent table: even less so when he saw Cecile join Bowman in a white car in the street: and least of all when he observed another car move off within seconds of Bowman’s.

Cecile gazed in perplexity round the interior of the white Simca. She said: ‘What’s all this about, then?’

‘Such things as phones,’ he explained. ‘Fixed it while you were having breakfast. Fixed two of them in fact.’

‘Two what?’

‘Two hired cars. Never know when you’re going to run short.’

‘But – but in so short a time.’

‘Garage is just down the street – they sent a man to check.’ He took out Czerda’s barely depleted wad of Swiss notes, crackled it briefly and returned it. ‘Depends upon the deposit.’

‘You really are quite amoral, aren’t you?’ She sounded almost admiring.

‘How’s that again?’

‘The way you throw other people’s money around.’

‘Life is for living, money for the spending,’ Bowman said pontifically. ‘No pockets in a shroud.’

‘You’re hopeless,’ she said. ‘Quite, quite hopeless. And why this car, anyway?’

‘Why that get-up you’re wearing?’

‘Why – oh, I see. Of course the Peugeot’s known. I hadn’t thought of that.’ She looked at him curiously as he turned the Simca in the direction of a sign-post saying ‘Nîmes’. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘I’m not quite sure. I’m looking for a place where I can talk undisturbed.’

‘To me?’

‘Still your apprehensions. I’ll have all the rest of my life to talk to you. When we were on the patio a battered-looking gypsy in a batteredlooking Renault sat and watched us for ten minutes. Both of them are about a hundred yards behind us now. I want to talk to the batteredlooking gypsy.’

‘Oh!’

‘Well might you say “Oh!” How, one wonders, is it that Gaiuse Strome’s henchmen are on to us so soon.’ He gave her a sidelong glance. ‘You’re looking at me in a very peculiar manner, if I may say so.’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Well?’

‘If they’re on to you, why did you bother switching cars?’

Bowman said patiently: ‘When I hired the Simca I didn’t know they were on to me.’

‘And now you’re taking me into danger again? Or what might be danger?’

‘I hope not. If I am, I’m sorry. But if they’re on to me, they’re on to the charming gypsy girl who has been sitting by my side – don’t forget that it was you that the priest was tailing when he met up with his unfortunate accident. Would you rather I’d left you behind to cope with them alone?’

‘You don’t offer very much in the way of choices,’ she complained.

‘I’ve got very little to offer.’ Bowman looked in the mirror. The battered Renault was less than a hundred yards behind. Cecile looked over her shoulder.

‘Why don’t you stop here and talk to him? He’d never dare do anything here. There are far too many people around.’

‘Far too many,’ Bowman agreed. ‘When I talk to him I don’t want anyone within half a mile.’

She glanced at him, shivered and said nothing. Bowman took the Simca over the Rhône to Trinquetaille, turned left on to the Albaron road and then left again on to the road that ran south down the right bank of the river. Here he slowed and gently brought the car to a stop. The driver of the Renault, he observed, did the same thing at a discreet distance to the rear. Bowman drove the Simca on its way again: the Renault followed.

A mile farther on into the flat and featureless plains of the Camargue Bowman stopped again. So did the Renault. Bowman got out, went to the rear of the car, glanced briefly at the Renault parked about a hundred yards away, opened the boot, extracted an implement from the tool-kit, thrust it inside his jacket, closed the boot and returned to his seat. The implement he laid on the floor beside him.

‘What’s that?’ Cecile looked and sounded apprehensive.

‘A wheel-brace.’

‘Something wrong with the wheels?’

‘Wheel-braces can have other uses.’

He drove off. After a few minutes the road began to climb slightly, rounded an unexpectedly sharp left-hand corner and there suddenly, almost directly beneath them and less than twenty feet away, lay the murkily gleaming waters of the Grand Rhône. Bowman braked heavily, was out of the car even as it stopped and walked quickly back the way he had come. The Renault rounded the corner and its driver, caught completely unawares, slewed the car to a skidding stop less than ten yards from Bowman.

Bowman, one hand behind his back, approached the Renault and jerked the driver’s door open. Pierre Lacabro glared out at him, his broad brutalized face set and savage.

‘I’m beginning to think you’re following me around,’ Bowman said mildly.

Lacabro didn’t reply. Instead, with one hand on the wheel and the other on the door frame to afford him maximum leverage he launched himself from the car with a speed surprising for a man of his bulk. Bowman had been prepared for nothing else. He stepped quickly to one side and as the driving Lacabro hurtled past him he brought the wheel-brace swinging down on Lacabro’s left arm. The sound of the blow, the surprising loud crack of a breaking bone and Lacabro’s shriek of pain were almost instantaneous.

‘Who sent you?’ Bowman asked.

Lacabro, writhing on the ground and clutching his damaged left forearm, snarled something incomprehensible in Romany.

‘Please, please listen,’ Bowman said. ‘I’m dealing with murderers. I know I’m dealing with murderers. More important, I know how to deal with murderers. I’ve already broken one bone – I should think it’s your forearm. I’m prepared to go right on breaking as many bones as I have to – assuming you stay conscious – until I find out why those four women in that green-and-white painted caravan are terrified out of their lives. If you do become unconscious, I’ll just sit around and smoke and wait till you’re conscious again and break a few more bones.’

Cecile had left the Simca and was now only feet away. Her face was very pale. She stared at Bowman in horror.

‘Mr Bowman, do you mean – ’

‘Shut up!’ He returned his attention to Lacabro. ‘Come now, tell me about those ladies.’

Lacabro mouthed what was almost certainly another obscenity, rolled over quickly and as he propped himself up on his right elbow Cecile screamed. Lacabro had a gun in his hand but shock or pain or both had slowed his reactions. He screamed again and his gun went flying in one direction while the wheel-brace went in another. He clutched the middle of his face with both hands: blood seeped through his fingers.

‘And now your nose is gone, isn’t it?’ Bowman said. ‘That dark girl, Tina, she’s been hurt, hasn’t she? How badly has she been hurt? Why was she hurt? Who hurt her?’

Lacabro took his hands away from his bleeding face. His nose wasn’t broken, but it still wasn’t a very pretty sight and wouldn’t be for some time to come. He spat blood and a broken tooth, snarled again in Romany and stared at Bowman like a wild animal.

‘You did it,’ Bowman said with certainty. ‘Yes, you did it. One of Czerda’s hatchet-men, aren’t you? Perhaps the hatchet-man. I wonder, my friend. I wonder. Was it you who killed Alexandre in the caverns?’

Lacabro, his face the face of a madman, pushed himself drunkenly to his feet and stood there, swaying just as drunkenly. He appeared to be on the verge of total collapse, his eyes turning up in his head. Bowman approached and, as he did so Lacabro, showing an incredible immunity to pain, an animal-like cunning and an equally animallike power of recuperation, suddenly stepped forward and brought his right fist up in a tremendous blow which, probably due more to good fortune than calculation, struck Bowman on the side of the chin. Bowman staggered backwards, lost his balance and fell heavily on the short turf only a few feet away from the vertical drop into the Rhône. Lacabro had his priorities right. He turned and ran for the gun which had landed only a foot or two from where Cecile was standing, the shock in her face reflected in the immobility of her body.

Bowman pushed himself rather dizzily up on one arm. He could see it all happening in slow motion, the girl with the gun at her feet, Lacabro lurching towards it, the girl still stock-still. Maybe she couldn’t even see the damn thing, he thought despairingly, but her eyes couldn’t be all that bad, if she couldn’t see a gun two feet away she’d no right to be out without a white stick. But her eyes weren’t quite so bad as that. Suddenly she stooped, picked up the gun, threw it into the Rhône, then, with commendable foresight, dropped flat to the ground as Lacabro, his battered bleeding face masked in blood and hate, advanced to strike her down. But even in that moment of what must have been infuriating frustration and where his overriding instinct must have been savagely to maim the girl who had deprived him of his gun, Lacabro still had his priorities right. He ignored the girl, turned and headed for Bowman in a low crouching run.

But Cecile had bought Bowman all the time he needed. By the time Lacabro reached him he was on his feet again, still rather dazed and shaken but a going concern none the less. He avoided Lacabro’s first bull-rush and wickedly swinging boot and caught the gypsy as he passed: it so chanced that he caught him by the left arm. Lacabro shouted in agony, dragged his arm free at whatever unknown cost to himself and came again. This time Bowman made no attempt to avoid him but advanced himself at equal speed. His clubbing right hand had no difficulty in reaching Lacabro’s chin, for now Lacabro had no left guard left. He staggered backwards several involuntary paces, tottered briefly on the edge of the bluff, then toppled backwards into the Rhône. The splash caused by his impact on the muddied waters seemed quite extraordinarily loud.

Bowman looked gingerly over the crumbling edge of the bluff: there was no sign of Lacabro. If he’d been unconscious when he’d struck the water he’d have gone to the bottom and that was that: there could be no possibility of locating him in those dark waters. Not that Bowman relished the prospect of trying to rescue the gypsy: if he were not unconscious he would certainly express his gratitude by doing his best to drown his rescuer. Bowman did not feel sufficiently attached to Lacabro to take the risk.

He went to the Renault, searched it briefly, found what he expected to find – nothing – started up the engine, let in first gear, aimed it for the bank of the river and jumped out. The little car trundled to the edge of the bluff, cartwheeled over the edge and fell into the river with a resounding crash that sent water rising to a height of thirty feet.

Much of this water rained down on Lacabro. He was half-sitting, half-lying on a narrow ledge of pebble and sand under the overhang of the bluff. His clothes were soaked, his right hand clutched his left wrist. On his dazed and uncomprehending face was a mixture of pain and bewilderment and disbelief. It was, by any reckoning, the face of a man who has had enough for one day.

Cecile was still sitting on the ground when Bowman approached her. He said: ‘You’re ruining that lovely gypsy costume sitting there.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am.’ Her voice was matter-offact, remarkably calm. She accepted his hand, got to her feet and looked around her. ‘He’s gone?’

‘Let’s say I can’t find him.’

‘That wasn’t – that wasn’t fair fighting.’

‘That was the whole idea behind it, pet. Ideally, of course, he would have riddled me with bullets.’

‘But – but can he swim?’

‘How the hell should I know?’ He led her back to the Simca and after they’d gone a mile in silence he looked at her curiously. Her hands were trembling, her face had gone white and when she spoke her voice was a muted whisper with a shake in it: clearly some sort of delayed shock had set in.

She said: ‘Who are you?’

‘Never mind.’

‘I – I saved your life today.’

‘Well, yes, thanks. But you should have used that gun to shoot him or hold him up.’

There was a long pause, then she sniffed loudly and said almost in a wail: ‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I can’t see to fire a gun.’

‘I know. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about everything, Cecile. But I’m sorriest of all that I ever got you into this damnably ugly mess. God, I should have known better.’

‘Why blame yourself?’ Still the near-sob in her voice. ‘You had to run some place last night and my room – ’ She broke off, peered at him some more, looked away and tried to light a cigarette but her hand shook so much he did it for her. Her hand was still shaking when they got back to the hotel.

CHAPTER 6

Bowman drew up outside the hotel entrance. Not five yards away Lila sat alone by a table just inside the patio entrance. It was difficult to say whether she looked primarily angry or disconsolate: she certainly did not look happy.

‘Boy-friend’s ditched her,’ Bowman announced. ‘Meet me in fifteen minutes. Alleyway at the back entrance of the hotel. Stay out of sight till you see a blue Citroën. I’ll be inside. Stay off the patio. You’ll be safe in the foyer.’

Cecile nodded to Lila. ‘Can I talk to her?’

‘Sure. Inside.’

‘But if we’re seen – ’

‘It won’t matter. Going to tell her what a dreeadful person I am?’

‘No.’ A shaky smile.

‘Ah! Then you’re going to announce our forthcoming nuptials.’

‘Not that either.’ Again the smile.

‘You want to make up your mind.’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘I think you might even be rather a kind person.’

‘I doubt whether the lad in the Rhône would share your sentiments,’ Bowman said drily.

The smile vanished. She got out, Bowman drove off, she watched him disappear with a small frown creasing her forehead, then went on to the patio. She looked at Lila, nodded towards the hotel foyer: they went in together, talking.

‘You’re sure?’ Cecile asked. ‘Charles recognizes Neil Bowman?’

Lila nodded.

‘How? Why?’

‘I don’t know. He’s very, very shrewd, you know.’

‘Something more than a famous wine-grower or folklorist, you would say?’

‘I would say.’

‘And he doesn’t trust Bowman?’

‘That puts it very mildly indeed.’

‘Stalemate. You know what Bowman thinks of the Duke. I’m afraid my money’s on my man, Lila. He disposed of another of the bad men today – ’ ‘He did what?’

‘Threw him into the Rhône. I saw him do it. He says – ’

‘So that’s why you looked like a ghost when I saw you just now.’

‘I felt a bit like one, too. He says he’s killed two others. I believe him. And I saw him lay out two more. Local colour is local colour but that would be ridiculous, you can’t fake a dead man. He’s on the side of the angels, Lila. Not, mind you, that I can see the angels liking it very much.’

‘I’m no angel and I don’t like any part of it,’ Lila said. ‘I’m out of my depth and I don’t know how to cope. What are we to do?’

‘You’re no more lost than I am. Do? Do what we were told to do, I suppose?’

‘I suppose so.’ Lila sighed and resumed her earlier woebegone expression. Cecile peered at her.

‘Where is Charles?’

‘He’s gone.’ Her gloom deepened. ‘He’s just gone off with that little chauffeuse – that’s what he calls her – and told me to wait here.’

‘Lila!’ Cecile stared at her friend. ‘It’s not possible – ’

‘Why? Why is it not? What’s wrong with Charles?’

‘Nothing, of course. Nothing at all.’ Cecile rose. ‘Two minutes for an appointment. Our Mr Bowman does not like to be kept waiting.’

‘When I think of him with that little minx – ’

‘She looked a perfectly charming young girl to me.’

‘That’s what I thought, too,’ Lila admitted. ‘But that was an hour ago.’

Le Grand Duc was not, in fact, with the little minx, nor was he anywhere near her. In the square where the Rumanian and Hungarian caravans were pulled up, there were no signs of either Carita or the huge green Rolls and neither could have been said to be normally inconspicuous. Le Grand Duc, on the contrary, was very much in evidence: not far from the green-and-white caravan and with notebook in hand, he was talking with considerable animation to Simon Searl. Czerda, as befitted the leader of the gypsies and an already established acquaintance of Le Grand Duc, was close by but taking no part in the conversation: Searl, from what a few signs of emotion that occasionally registered in his thin ascetic face, looked as if he wished he were taking no part either.

‘Vastly obliged, Monsieur le Curé, vastly obliged.’ Le Grand Duc was at his regally gracious best. ‘I can’t tell you how impressed I was by the service you held in the fields by the Abbey, this morning. Moving, most moving. By Jove, I’m adding to my store of knowledge every minute.’ He peered more closely at Searl. ‘Have you hurt your leg, my dear fellow?’

‘A slight strain, no more.’ The only obvious strain was in his face and voice.

‘Ah, but you must look after those slight strains – can develop very serious complications, you know. Yes, indeed, very serious.’ He removed his monocle, swinging it on the end of its thick black ribbon, the better to observe Searl. ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before – I don’t mean at the Abbey. Yes, yes, of course – outside the hotel this morning. Odd, I don’t recall you limping then. But then, I’m afraid my eyesight – ’ He replaced his monocle. ‘My thanks again. And watch that strain. Do exercise the greatest care, Monsieur le Curé. For your own sake.’

Le Grand Duc tucked the notebook in an inner pocket and marched majestically away. Czerda looked at Searl, the unbandaged parts of his face registering no expression. Searl, for his part, licked dry lips, said nothing, turned and walked away.

To even a close observer who knew him, the man behind the wheel of the gleamingly blue Citroën parked in the alleyway behind the hotel must have been almost totally unrecognizable as Bowman. He was dressed in a white sombrero, dark glasses, an excruciating blue-and-white polka-dotted shirt, an unbuttoned, embroidered black waistcoat, a pair of moleskin trousers and high boots. The complexion was paler, the moustache larger. Beside him on the seat lay a small purse-stringed bag. The offside front door opened and Cecile peered in, blinking uncertainly.

‘I don’t bite,’ Bowman said encouragingly.

‘Good God!’ She slid into her seat. ‘What – what’s this?’

‘I’m a gardien, a cowboy in his Sunday best, one of many around. Told you I’d been shopping. Your turn, now.’

‘What’s in the bag?’

‘My poncho, of course.’

She eyed him with the speculative look that had now become almost habitual with her as he drove her to the clothing emporium they’d visited earlier that morning. After a suitable lapse of time the same manageress fluttered around Cecile, making gushing, admiring remarks, talking with her arms as much as with her voice. Cecile was now attired in the fiesta costume of an Arlésienne, with a long sweeping darkly embroidered dress, a ruched lace white bodice and a wimpled hat of the same material. The hat was perched on a dark red wig.

‘Madame looks – fantastic!’ the manageress said ecstatically.

‘Madame matches the price,’ Bowman said resignedly. He peeled off some more banknotes and led Cecile to the Citroën where she sat and smoothed the rich material of her dress approvingly.

‘Very nice, I must say. You like dressing girls up?’

‘Only when I’m being bankrolled by criminals. That’s hardly the point. A certain dark gypsy girl has been seen with me. There’s not an insurance company in Europe would look at that dark gypsy girl.’

‘I see.’ She smiled wanly. ‘All this solicitude for your future wife?’

‘Of course. What else?’

‘The fact that, quite frankly, you can’t afford to lose your assistant at the moment?’

‘Never occurred to me.’

He drove the Citroën close to the point where the Hungarian and Rumanian caravans were parked in the square. He stopped the Citroën, lifted his purse-stringed bag, got out, straightened and turned. As he did so, he bumped into a large pedestrian who was sauntering slowly by. The pedestrian stopped and glared at him through a black-beribboned monocle: Le Grand Duc was not accustomed to being bumped into by anyone.

‘Your pardon, m’sieur,’ Bowman said.

Le Grand Duc favoured Bowman with a look of considerable distaste. ‘Granted.’

Bowman smiled apologetically, took Cecile’s arm and moved off. She said to him, sotto voce and accusingly: ‘You did that on purpose.’

‘So? If he doesn’t recognize us, who will?’ He took another couple of steps and halted. ‘Well, now, what could this be?’

There was a sudden stir of interest as a plain black van turned into the square. The driver got out, made what was evidently an enquiry of the nearest gypsy who pointed across the square, entered the van again and drove it across to the vicinity of Czerda’s caravan. Czerda himself was by the steps, talking to Ferenc: neither appeared to have made much progress in the recovery from their injuries.

The driver and an assistant jumped down, went to the rear of the van, opened the doors and, with considerable difficulty and not without willing help, they slid out a stretcher on which, left arm in a sling and face heavily bandaged, lay the recumbent form of Pierre Lacabro. The malevolent gleam in the right eye – the left one was completely shut – showed clearly that Lacabro was very much alive. Czerda and Ferenc, consternation in their faces, moved quickly to help the stretcher-bearers. Inevitably, Le Grand Duc was one of the first on the immediate scene. He bent briefly over the battered Lacabro, then straightened.

‘Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Nobody’s safe on the roads these days.’ He turned to Czerda. ‘Isn’t this my poor friend Mr Koscis?’

‘No.’ Czerda spoke with considerable restraint.

‘Ah! I’m glad to hear it. Sorry for this poor fellow of course. By the way, I wonder if you’d tell Mr Koscis that I’d like to have another word with him when he’s here? At his convenience, of course.’

‘I’ll see if I can find him.’ Czerda helped move the stretcher towards the steps of his own caravan and Le Grand Duc turned away, narrowly avoiding coming into collision with the Chinese couple who had earlier been on the patio of the hotel. He doffed his hat in gallant apology to the Eurasian woman.

Bowman had missed none of the by-play. He looked first at Czerda, whose face was registering a marked degree of mixed anger and apprehension, then at Le Grand Duc, then at the Chinese couple: he turned to Cecile.

‘There now,’ he whispered. ‘I knew he could swim. Let’s not show too keen a degree of interest in what’s going on.’

He led her away a few paces. ‘You know what I want to do – it’ll be safe, I promise.’

He watched her as she wandered casually past Czerda’s caravan and stopped to adjust a shoe in the vicinity of the green-and-white caravan. The window at the side was curtained but the window itself slightly ajar.

Satisfied, Bowman moved off across the square to where a group of horses was tethered by some trees close by several other caravans. He looked aimlessly around to check that he was unobserved, saw Czerda’s caravan door close as the stretcher was brought inside, dug into his bag and fetched out a fistful of coiled, brown-paper sheathed objects, each one fitted with an inch of blue touch-paper: they were, quite simply, old fashioned firecrackers…

In Czerda’s caravan, Czerda himself, Ferenc, Simon Searl and El Brocador were gathered round Pierre Lacabro’s still recumbent form. The expression on what little could be seen of Lacabro’s face registered a degree of unhappiness that was not entirely attributable to his physical sufferings: he had about him the wounded appearance of one whose injuries are not being accorded their due meed of loving care and concerned sympathy.

‘You fool, Lacabro!’ Czerda’s voice was almost a shout. ‘You crazy idiot! No violence, I told you. No violence.’

‘Maybe you should have told Bowman instead,’ El Brocador suggested. ‘Bowman knew. Bowman was watching. Bowman was waiting. Who is going to tell Gaiuse Strome?’

‘Who but our unfrocked friend here,’ Czerda said savagely. ‘I do not envy you, Searl.’

From the look on Searl’s face it was clear that he didn’t envy himself either. He said unhappily: ‘That may not be necessary. If Gaiuse Strome is who we now all think he is, then he knows already.’

‘Knows?’ Czerda demanded. ‘What can he know? He doesn’t know that Lacabro is one of my men and so one of his. He doesn’t know that Lacabro didn’t have a road accident. He doesn’t know that Bowman is responsible. He doesn’t know that once again we’ve managed to lose track of Bowman – while at the same time Bowman appears to know all our movements. If you think you have nothing to explain, Searl, you’re out of your mind.’ He turned to Ferenc. ‘Round up the caravans. Now. We leave inside the half-hour. Tell them that tonight we camp by Vaccarés. What was that?’

There had come clearly and sharply the sound of a series of sharp reports. Men shouted, horses whinnied in fear, a policeman’s whistle blew and still the series of flat staccato explosions continued. Czerda, followed by the three others, rushed to the door of his caravan and threw it open.

They were not alone in their anxiety and curiosity to discover the source of the disturbance. It would hardly be exaggeration to claim that within thirty seconds every pair of eyes in the square was trained on the north-eastern part of it where a group of gypsies and gardiens, Bowman prominently active among them, was fighting to restrain a rearing, milling, whinnying and by now thoroughly fear-crazed group of horses.

One pair of eyes was otherwise engaged and those belonged to Cecile. She was pressed close in to the side of the green-and-white painted caravan, standing on tiptoe and peering through a gap she had just made in the curtain.

It was dark inside the curtained caravan but the darkness was far from total and even Cecile’s eyes quickly became accustomed to the gloom: when they did it was impossible for her to restrain her involuntary shocked gasp of horror. A girl with dark cropped hair was lying face down on a bunk – obviously the only way she could possibly lie. Her bare and savagely mutilated back had not been bandaged but had been liberally covered with salves of some kind. From her continuous restive movements and occasional moans it was clear that she was not sleeping.

Cecile lowered the curtain and moved off. Madame Zigair, Sara and Marie le Hobenaut were on the steps of the caravan, peering across the square, and Cecile walked by them as unconcernedly as she could, which was not easy when her legs felt shaky and she was sick inside. She crossed the square and rejoined Bowman who had just succeeded in calming down one of the panic-stricken horses. He released the horse, took her arm and led her towards where they’d left the Citroën parked. He looked at her, but didn’t have to look closely.

‘You didn’t like what you saw, did you?’ he said.

‘Teach me how to use a gun and I’ll use it. Even although I can’t see. I’ll get close enough.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘As bad as that. She’s hardly more than a child, a little thin creature, and they’ve practically flayed the skin from her back. It was horrible. The poor child must be in agony.’

‘So you don’t feel so sorry for the man I threw in the Rhône?’

‘I would. If I met him. With a gun in my hand.’

‘No guns. I don’t carry one myself. But I take your point.’

‘And you seem to take my news very calmly.’

‘I’m as mad as you are, Cecile, only I’ve been mad about it for a long time now and I can’t keep showing it all the time. As for the beating the girl got, it had to be something like that. Like Alexandre, the poor kid got desperate and tried to pass on a message, some information, so they taught her what they thought would be a permanent lesson to herself and the other women, and it probably will.’

‘What information?’

‘If I knew that I’d have those four women out of that caravan and in safety in ten minutes.’

‘If you don’t want to tell, don’t tell.’

‘Look, Cecile – ’

‘It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.’ She paused. ‘You know that I wanted to run away this morning? Coming back from the Rhône?’

‘I wouldn’t have been surprised.’

‘Not now. Not any more. You’re stuck with me now.’

‘I wouldn’t want to be stuck with anyone else.’ She looked at him almost in surprise. ‘You said that without smiling.’

‘I said it without smiling,’ he said.

They reached the Citroën, turned and looked back towards the square. The gypsies were milling around in a state of great activity. Ferenc, they could see, was going from one caravan to the next, speaking urgently to the owners, and as soon as he left them they began making preparations to hitch their towing units on to the caravans.

‘Pulling out?’ Cecile looked at Bowman in surprise. ‘Why? Because of a few firecrackers?’

‘Because of our friend who’s been in the Rhône. And because of me.’

‘You?’

‘They know now, since our friend returned from his bathe, that I’m on to them. They don’t know how much I know. They don’t know what I look like now but they know that I’ll be looking different. They do know that they can’t get me here in Arles because they can’t have any idea where I am or where I might be staying. They know that to get me they’ll have to isolate me and to do that they’ll have to draw me out into the open. Tonight they’ll camp in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the Camargue. And there they’ll hope to get me. For they know now that wherever their caravans are, there I’ll be too.’

‘You are good at making speeches, aren’t you?’ There was no malice in the green eyes.

‘It’s just practice.’

‘And you haven’t exactly a low opinion of yourself, have you?’

‘No.’ He regarded her speculatively. ‘Do you think they have?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She touched the back of his hand in a gesture of contrition. ‘I talk that way when I’m scared.’

‘Me too. That’s most of the time. We’ll leave after you’ve picked your things up from the hotel and, in the best Pinkerton fashion, tail them from in front. Because if we follow them, they’ll string out watchers at regular intervals to check every car that follows. And there won’t be all that many cars moving south – tonight’s the big fiesta night in Arlies and most people won’t be moving down to Saintes-Maries for another forty-eight hours.’

‘They would recognize us? In these rigouts? Surely they can’t – ’

‘They can’t recognize us. They can’t possibly be on to us yet. Not this time. I’m positive. They don’t have to be. They’ll be looking for a car with a couple in it. They’ll be looking for a car with Arles number-plates, because it’ll have to be a rented car. They’ll be looking for a couple in disguise, because they’ll have to be in disguise, and in those parts that means only gypsy or gardien fiesta costumes. They’ll be looking for a couple with by now certain well-known characteristics such as that you are slender, have high cheekbones and green eyes, while I’m far from slender and have certain scars on my face that only a dye can conceal. How many cars with how many couples going south to Vaccarès this afternoon will match up with all those qualifications?’

‘One.’ She shivered. ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

‘Neither will they. So we go ahead of them. If they don’t catch up with us we can always turn back to find out where they’ve stopped. They won’t suspect cars coming from the south. At least, I hope to God they don’t. But keep those dark glasses on all the time: those green eyes are a dead giveaway.’

Bowman drove back to the hotel and stopped about fifty yards from the patio, the nearest parking place he could get. He said to Cecile: ‘Get packed. Fifteen minutes. I’ll join you in the hotel inside ten.’

‘You, of course, have some little matter to attend to first?’

‘I have.’

‘Care to tell me what it is?’

‘No.’

‘That’s funny. I thought you trusted me now.’

‘Naturally. Any girl who is going to marry me – ’

‘I don’t deserve that.’

‘You don’t. I trust you, Cecile. Implicitly.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded as if satisfied. ‘I can see you mean that. What you don’t trust is my ability not to talk under pressure.’

Bowman looked at her for several moments, then said: ‘Did I suggest, sometime during the middle watches of the night, that you weren’t – ah – quite as bright as you might be?’

‘You called me a fool several times, if that’s what you mean.’

‘You can get around to forgiving me?’

‘I’ll work on it.’ She smiled, got out of the car and walked away. Bowman waited till she had turned into the patio, left the car, walked back to the post office, picked up a telegram that was awaiting him in the Poste Restante, took it back to the car and opened it. The message was in English and uncoded. It read: MEANING UNCLEAR STOP QUOTE IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT CONTENTS BE DELIVERED AIGUESMORTES OR GRAU DU ROI BY MONDAY MAY 24 INTACT AND REPEAT INCOGNITO STOP IF ONLY ONE POSSIBLE DO NOT DELIVER CONTENTS STOP IF POSSIBLE RELATIVE EXPENDITURE IMMATERIAL STOP NO SIGNATURE.

Bowman re-read the message twice and nodded to himself. The meaning was far from unclear to him: nothing, he thought, was unclear any more. He produced matches and burnt the telegram, piece by piece, in the front ashtray, grinding the charred paper into tiny fragments. He glanced around frequently to see if anyone was taking an unusual interest in his unusual occupation but no one was. In his rear mirror he could see Le Grand Duc’s Rolls stopped at traffic lights some three hundred yards away. Even a Rolls, he reflected, had to stop at a red light: Le Grand Duc must find such annoying trifles a constant source of ducal irritation. He looked through the windscreen and could see the Chinese and his Eurasian lady leisurely sauntering towards the patio, approaching from the west.

Bowman wound down his window, tore his telegram envelope into tiny shreds and dropped them to the gutter: he hoped the citizens of Arles would forgive him his wanton litter-bugging. He left the car and passed into the hotel patio, meeting the Chinese couple on the way. They looked at Bowman impassively from behind their reflector glasses but Bowman did not as much as glance their way.

Le Grand Duc, stalled at the traffic lights, was, surprisingly enough, displaying no signs of irritation at all. He was absorbed in making notes in a book which, curiously, was not the one he habitually used when adding to his increasing store of gypsy folklore. Satisfied, apparently, with what he had written, he put the book away, lit a large Havana and pressed the button which controlled the dividing window. Carita looked at him enquiringly in the rear-view mirror.

‘I need hardly ask you, my dear,’ Le Grand Duc said, ‘if you have carried out my instructions.’

‘To the letter, Monsieur le Duc.’

‘And the reply?’

‘Ninety minutes, with luck. Without it, two and a half hours.’

‘Where?’

‘Replies in quadruplicate, Monsieur le Duc. Poste Restante, Arles, Saintes-Maries, AiguesMortes and Grau du Roi. That is satisfactory, I hope?’

‘Eminently.’ Le Grand Duc smiled in satisfaction. ‘There are times, my dear Carita, when I hardly know what I’d do without you.’ The window slid silently up, the Rolls whispered away on the green light and Le Grand Duc, cigar in hand, leaned back and surveyed the world with his customary patriarchal air. Abruptly, after a rather puzzled glance through the windscreen of the car, he bent forward all of two inches, an action which, in Le Grand Duc, indicated an extraordinarily high degree of interest. He pressed the dividing window button.

‘There’s a parking space behind that blue Citroën. Pull in there.’

The Rolls slowed to a stop and the Duke performed the almost unheard-of feat of opening the door and getting out all by himself. He strolled leisurely forward, halted and looked at the pieces of yellow telegram paper lying in the gutter, then at the Chinese who was slowly straightening with some of the pieces in his hand.

‘You seem to have lost something,’ Le Grand Duc said courteously. ‘Can I be of help?’

‘You are too kind.’ The man’s English was immaculate, Oxbridge at its most flawless. ‘It is nothing. My wife has just lost one of her earrings. But it is not here.’

‘I am sorry to hear it.’ Le Grand Duc carried on, sauntered through the patio entrance, passed by the seated wife of the Chinese and nodded fractionally in gracious acknowledgement of her presence. She was, Le Grand Duc noted, unmistakably Eurasian and quite beautiful. Not blonde, of course, but beautiful. She was also wearing two earrings. Le Grand Duc paced with measured stride across the patio and joined Lila, who was just seating herself at a table. Le Grand Duc regarded her gravely.

‘You are unhappy, my dear.’

‘No, no.’

‘Oh, yes, you are. I have an infallible instinct for such things. For some extraordinary reason you have some reservations about me. Me! Me, if I may say so, the Duc de Croytor!’ He took her hand. ‘Phone your father, my friend the Count Delafont, and phone him now. He will reassure you, you’ve my word for that. Me! The Duc de Croytor!’

‘Please, Charles. Please.’

‘That’s better. Prepare to leave at once. A matter of urgency. The gypsies are leaving – at least the ones we’re interested in are leaving – and where they go we must follow.’ Lila made to rise but he put out a restraining hand. ‘“Urgency” is a relative term. In about, say, an hour’s time – we must have a quick snack before departing for the inhospitable wastes of the Camargue.’

CHAPTER 7

To the newcomer the Camargue does indeed appear to be an inhospitable wasteland, an empty wasteland, a desolation of enormous skies and limitless horizons, a flat and arid nothingness, a land long abandoned by life and left to linger and wither and die all summer long under a pitiless sun suspended in the washed-out steel-blue dome above. But if the newcomer remains long enough, he will find that first impressions, as they almost invariably do, give a false and misleading impression. It is, it is true, a harsh land and a bleak land, but one that is neither hostile nor dead, a land that is possessed of none of the uniformly dreadful lifelessness of a tropical desert or a Siberian tundra. There is water here, and no land is dead where water is: there are large lakes and small lakes and lakes that are no lakes at all but marshes sometimes no more than fetlock deep to a horse, others deep enough to drown a house. There are colours here, the ever-changing blues and greys of the wind-rippled waters, the faded yellows of the beds of marshes that line the étangs, the nearblackness of smooth-crowned cypresses, the dark green of windbreak pines, the startlingly bright green of occasional lush grazing pastures, strikingly vivid against the brown and harsh aridity of the tough sparse vegetation and salt-flats hardbaked under the sun that occupy so much the larger part of the land area. And, above all, there is life here: birds in great number, very occasional small groups of black cattle and, even more rarely, white horses: there are farms, too, and ranches, but these are set so far back from roads or so wellconcealed by windbreaks that the traveller rarely sees them. But one indisputable fact about the Camargue remains, one first impression that never changes, one that wholly justifies its timeand-time again description as being an endless plain: the Camargue is as featurelessly smooth and flat as a sun-warmed summer sea.

For Cecile, as the blue Citroën moved south between Arles and Saintes-Maries, the Camargue was nothing but an increasingly featureless desolation: her spirits became correspondingly increasingly depressed. Occasionally she glanced at Bowman but found no help there: he seemed relaxed, almost cheerful, and if the consideration of the recently spilled blood he had on his hands bore heavily on him he was concealing his feelings remarkably well. Probably, Cecile thought, he had forgotten all about it: the thought had made her feel more depressed than ever. She surveyed the bleak landscape again and turned to Bowman.

‘People live here?’

‘They live here, they love here, they die here. Let’s hope we won’t today. Die here, I mean.’

‘Oh, do be quiet. Where are all the cowboys I’ve heard of – the gardiens as you call them?’

‘In the pubs, I should imagine. This is fiesta day, remember – a holiday.’ He smiled at her. ‘I wish it was for us too.’

‘But your life is one long holiday. You said so.’

‘For us, I said.’

‘A pretty compliment.’ She looked at him consideringly. ‘Can you tell me, offhand, when you last had a holiday?’

‘Offhand, no.’

Cecile nodded, looked ahead again. Half a mile away, on the left-hand side of the road, was a fairly large group of buildings, some of them quite substantial.

‘Life at last,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’

‘A mas. A farm, more of a ranch. Also a bit of a dude ranch – living accommodation, restaurant, riding school. Mas de Lavignolle, they call it.’

‘You’ve been here before, then?’

‘All those holidays,’ Bowman said apologetically.

‘What else?’ She turned her attention to the scene ahead again, then suddenly leaned forward. Just beyond the farm was a windbreak of pines and just beyond that again there was coming into view a scene that showed that there could, indeed, be plenty of life in the Camargue. At least a score of caravans and perhaps a hundred cars were parked haphazardly on the hard-packed earth on the right-hand side of the road. On the left, in a field which was more dust than grass, there were lines of what appeared to be brightly coloured tents. Some of the tents were no more than striped awnings with, below them, trestle tables which, dependent on what was piled on them, acted as either bars or snack-bars. Other and smaller canvas-topped stalls were selling souvenirs or clothes or candy, while still others had been converted into shooting galleries, roulette stands and other games of chance. There were several hundred people milling around among the stalls, obviously enjoying and making the most of the amenities offered. Cecile turned to Bowman as he slowed to let people cross the road.

‘What’s all this, then?’

‘Obvious, isn’t it? A country fair. Arles isn’t the only place in the Camargue – some of the people hereabouts don’t even consider it as being part of the Camargue and act accordingly. Some communities prefer to provide their own diversions and amusements at fiesta time – the Mas de Lavignolle is one of them.’

‘My, my, we are well-informed, aren’t we?’ She looked ahead again and pointed to a large ovalshaped arena with its sides made, apparently, of mud and wattles.

‘What’s that? A corral?’

‘That,’ Bowman said, ‘is a genuine old-fashioned bull-ring where the main attraction of the afternoon will take place.’

She made a face. ‘Drive on.’

He drove on. After less than fifteen minutes, at the end of a long straight stretch of dusty road, he pulled the blue Citroën off the road and got out. Cecile looked at him enquiringly.

‘Two straight miles of road,’ he explained. ‘Gypsy caravans travel at thirty miles an hour. So, four minutes’ warning.’

‘And a panic-stricken Bowman can be on his way in less than fifteen seconds?’

‘Less. If I haven’t finished off the champagne, longer. But enough. Come. Lunch.’

Ten miles to the north, on the same road, a long convoy of gypsy caravans were heading south, raising an immense cloud of dust in their passing. The caravans, normally far from inhibited in the brightness and diversity of their colours, seemed now, in their striking contrast to the bleakness of the landscape around them, more gay and exotic than ever.

The leading, vehicle in the convoy, the yellow breakdown truck that had been pressed into the service of hauling Czerda’s caravan, was the only one that was completely dust-free. Czerda himself was driving, with Searl and El Brocador seated beside him. Czerda was looking at El Brocador with an expression on his face that came as close to admiration as his presently rather battered features were capable of expressing.

He said: ‘By heavens, El Brocador, I’d rather have you by my side than a dozen incompetent unfrocked priests.’

‘I am not a man of action,’ Searl protested. ‘I never have claimed to be.’

‘You’re supposed to have brains,’ Czerda said contemptuously. ‘What happened to them?’

‘We musn’t be too hard on Searl,’ El Brocador said soothingly. ‘We all know he’s under great pressure, he’s not, as he says, a man of action and he doesn’t know Arles. I was born there, it is the back of my hand to me. I know every shop in Arles that sells gypsy costumes, fiesta costumes and gardien clothes. There are not so many as you might think. The men I picked to help me were all natives too. But I was the lucky one. First time, first shop – just the kind of shop Bowman would choose, a seedy old draper’s in a sidestreet.’

‘I hope, El Brocador, that you didn’t have to use too much – ah – persuasion?’ Czerda was almost arch about it and it didn’t become him at all.

‘If you mean violence, no. Those aren’t my methods, you know that, and besides I’m far too well known in Arles to try anything of the sort. Anyway, I didn’t have to, nobody would have to. I know Madame Bouvier, everyone knows her, she’d throw her own mother in the Rhône for ten francs. I gave her fifty.’ El Brocador grinned. ‘She couldn’t tell me enough fast enough.’

‘A blue and white polka-dotted shirt, white sombrero and black embroidered waistcoat.’ Czerda smiled in anticipation. ‘It’ll be easier than identifying a circus clown at a funeral.’

‘True, true. But first we must catch our hare.’

‘He’ll be there,’ Czerda said confidently. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the following caravans. ‘As long as they are here, he’ll be here. We all know that by this time. You just worry about your part, El Brocador.’

‘No worry there.’ El Brocador’s confidence matched Czerda’s own. ‘Everyone knows what mad Englishmen are like. Just another crazy idiot who tried to show off before the crowd. And dozens of witnesses will have seen him tear free from us in spite of all we could do to stop him.’

‘The bull will have specially sharpened horns? As we arranged?’

‘I have seen to it myself.’ El Brocador glanced at his watch. ‘Can we not make better time? You know I have an appointment in twenty minutes.’

‘Never fear,’ Czerda said. ‘We shall be in Mas de Lavignolle in ten minutes.’

At a discreet distance behind the settling dust the lime-green Rolls swept along in its customary majestic silence. The cabriolet hood was down, with Le Grand Duc sitting regally under the shade of a parasol which Lila held over him.

‘You slept well?’ she asked solicitously.

‘Sleep? I never sleep in the afternoons. I merely had my eyes closed. I have many things, far too many things, on my mind and I think better that way.’

‘Ah! I didn’t understand.’ The first quality one required in dealing with Le Grand Duc, she had learned, was diplomacy. She changed the subject rapidly. ‘Why are we following so few caravans when we’ve left so many behind in Arles?’

‘I told you, those are the ones I am interested in.’

‘But why – ’

‘Hungarian and Rumanian gypsies are my special field.’ There was a finality about the way he spoke that effectively sealed off that particular line of discussion.

‘And Cecile. I’m worried about – ’

‘Your friend Miss Dubois has already left and unless I am much mistaken – ’ his tone left no room to doubt the impiety of any such thought – ‘she is also on this road and considerably ahead of us. She was, I must concede,’ he added reflectively, ‘attired in a very fetching Arlésienne fiesta dress.’

‘A gypsy dress, Charles.’

‘Arlésienne fiesta,’ Le Grand Duc said firmly. ‘I miss very little, my dear. Gypsy costume when you saw her, perhaps. But Arlésienne when she left.’

‘But why should she – ’

‘How should I know?’

‘You saw her go?’

‘No.’

‘Then how – ’

‘Our Carita here also misses very little. She left with, it seems, a shady-looking individual in gardien clothes. One wonders what happened to that other ruffian – Bowman, wasn’t it? Your friend appears to possess a unique talent for picking up undesirables.’

‘And me?’ Lila was suddenly tight-lipped.

‘Touché! I deserved that. Sorry, I did not intend to slight your friend.’ He gestured with a hand ahead and to the left where a long narrow line of water gleamed like burnished steel under the early afternoon sun. ‘And what is that, my dear?’

Lila glanced at it briefly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said huffily.

‘Le Grand Duc never apologizes twice.’

‘The sea?’

‘Journey’s end, my dear. Journey’s end for all the gypsies who have come hundreds, even thousands of miles from all over Europe. The Etang de Vaccarès.’

‘Etang?’

‘Lake. Lake Vaccarès. The most famous wildlife sanctuary in Western Europe.’

‘You do know a lot, Charles.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Le Grand Duc conceded.

Bowman packed up the remains of lunch in a wicker basket, disposed of what was left of a bottle of champagne and closed the boot of the car.

‘That was delightful,’ Cecile said. ‘And how very thoughtful of you.’

‘Don’t thank me, thank Czerda. He paid for it.’ Bowman looked north along the two-mile stretch of road. It was quite empty of traffic. ‘Well, back to Mas de Lavignolle. The caravans must have stopped at the fair. Heigh-Ho for the bullfight.’

‘But I hate bullfights.’

‘You won’t hate this one.’

He reversed the Citroën and drove back to Mas de Lavignolle. There seemed to be many fewer people there than there had been when they had passed through even although the number of cars and caravans had almost doubled, a discrepancy easily and immediately accounted for as soon as the Citroën had stopped by the sound of laughter and shouting and cheering coming from the nearby bullring. For the moment Bowman ignored the bullring: remaining seated in the car, he looked carefully around him. He did not have to look for long.

‘To nobody’s surprise,’ he announced, ‘Czerda and his missionary pals have turned up in force. At least, their caravans have, so one assumes that Czerda and company have also.’ He drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the steering wheel. ‘To nobody’s surprise, that is, except mine. Curious, curious. One wonders why?’

‘Why what?’ Cecile asked.

‘Why they’re here.’

‘What do you mean? You expected to find them here. That’s why you turned back, wasn’t it?’

‘I turned back because the time-factor, their delay in overtaking us, convinced me that they must have stopped somewhere and this seemed as likely a place as any. The point is that I would not have expected them to stop at all until they reached some of the lonely encampments on one of the étangs to the south where they could have the whole wide Camargue all to themselves. But instead they choose to stop here.’

He sat in silence and she said: ‘So?’

‘Remember I explained in some detail back in Arles just why I thought the gypsies were pulling out so quickly?’

‘I remember some of it. It was a bit confusing.’

‘Maybe I was confusing myself. Somewhere a flaw in the reasoning. My reasoning. But where?’ ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t think I’m exaggerating my own importance,’ Bowman said slowly. ‘Not, at least, as far as they are concerned. I’m convinced they’re under pressure, under very heavy pressure, to kill me as quickly as humanly possible. When you’re engaged on a job of great urgency you don’t stop off and spend a peaceful summer’s afternoon watching a bullfight. You press on and with all speed. You entice Bowman to a lonely camp-site at the back of beyond where, because he’s the only person who’s not a member of your group, he can be detected and isolated with ease and disposed of at leisure. You do not stop at a faircum-bullfight where he would be but one among thousands of people, thereby making isolation impossible.’ Bowman paused. ‘Not, that is, unless you knew something that he didn’t know, and knew that you could isolate him even among that thousand. Do I make myself clear?’

‘This time I’m not confused.’ Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper. ‘You make yourself very clear. You’re as certain as can be that they’ll get you here. There’s only one thing you can do.’

‘Only one thing,’ Bowman agreed. He reached for the door handle. ‘I’ve got to go and find out for sure.’

‘Neil.’ She gripped his right wrist with surprising strength.

‘Well, at last. Couldn’t keep on calling me Mr Bowman in front of the kids, could you? Victorian.’

‘Neil.’ There was pleading in the green eyes, something close to desperation, and he felt suddenly ashamed of his flippancy. ‘Don’t go. Please, please, don’t go. Something dreadful is going to happen here. I know it.’ She ran the tip of her tongue over dry lips. ‘Drive away from here. Now. This moment. Please.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He forced himself to look away, her beseeching face would have weakened the resolution of an angel and he had no reason to regard himself as such. ‘I have to stay and it may as well be here. It may as well be here for a showdown there has to be, it’s inevitable, and I still think I stand a better chance here than I would on the shores of some lonely étang in the south.’

‘You said, “I have to stay”?’

‘Yes.’ He continued to look ahead. ‘There are four good reasons and they’re all in that greenand-white caravan.’ She made no reply and he went on: ‘Or just Tina alone, Tina and her flayed back. If anyone did that to you I’d kill him. I wouldn’t think about it, I’d just naturally kill him.

Do you believe that?’

‘I think so.’ Her voice was very low. ‘No, I know you would.’

‘It could just as easily have been you.’ He altered his tone slightly and said: ‘Tell me, now, would you marry a man who ran away and left Tina?’

‘No, I would not.’ She spoke very matter-offactly.

‘Ha!’ He altered his tone some more. ‘Am I to take it from that if I don’t run away and leave Tina – ’ He broke off and looked at her. She was smiling at him but the green eyes were dim, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and when she spoke it could have been a catch in her voice or the beginning of laughter.

‘You’re quite, quite hopeless,’ she said.

‘You’re repeating yourself.’ He opened the door. ‘I won’t be long.’

She opened her own door. ‘We won’t be long,’ she corrected him.

‘You’re not – ’

‘I am. Protecting the little woman is all very nice but not when carried to extremes. What’s going to happen in the middle of a thousand people? Besides, you said yourself they can’t possibly recognize us.’

‘If they catch you with me – ’

‘If they catch you, I won’t be there, because if they can’t recognize you then their only way of getting you is when you are doing something you shouldn’t be doing, like breaking into a caravan.’

‘In broad daylight? You think I’m insane?’

‘I’m not sure.’ She took his arm firmly. ‘One thing I am sure about. Remember what I said back in Aries? You’re stuck with me, mate.’

‘For life?’

‘We’ll see about that.’

Bowman blinked in surprise and peered at her closely. ‘You make me a very happy man,’ he said. ‘When I was a little boy and I wanted something and my mother said “We’ll see about that” I knew I’d always get it. All feminine minds work the same way, don’t they?’

She smiled at him serenely, quite unperturbed. ‘At the risk of repeating myself again, Neil Bowman, you’re a lot cleverer than you look.’

‘My mother used to say that too.’

They paid their admission money, climbed steps to the top of the arena. The terraces were comfortably full, colourfully crowded with hundreds of people, very few of whom could be accused of being drably dressed: gardiens and gypsies were there in about equal proportions, there was a sprinkling of Arlésiens in their fiesta best but most of the spectators were either tourists or local people.

Between the spectators and the sanded ring itself was an area four feet wide, running the entire circumference of the ring and separated from it by a wooden barrier four feet high: it was into this area, the callajon, that the razateur leapt for safety when things were going too badly for him.

In the centre of the ring a small but uncommonly vicious-looking black Camargue bull appeared bent upon the imminent destruction of a white-costumed figure who pirouetted and swerved and twisted and turned and closely but easily avoided the rushes of the increasingly maddened bull. The crowd clapped and shouted their approval.

‘Well!’ Cecile, wide-eyed and fascinated, her fears in temporary abeyance, was almost enjoying herself. ‘This is more like a bullfight!’

‘You’d rather see the colour of the man’s blood than the bull’s?’

‘Certainly. Well, I don’t know. He hasn’t even got a sword.’

‘Swords are for the Spanish corridas where the bull gets killed. This is the Provençal cours libre where nobody gets killed although the occasional razateur – the bullfighter – does get bent a bit. See that red button tied between the horns? He’s got to pull that off first. Then the two bits of string.

Then the two white tassels tied near the tips of the horns.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

‘It’s not a way of life I’d choose myself,’ Bowman admitted. He lifted his eyes from the programme note he held in his hand and looked thoughtfully at the ring.

‘Anything wrong?’ Cecile asked.

Bowman didn’t reply immediately. He was still looking at the ring where the white-clad razateur, moving in a tight circle with remarkable speed but with all the controlled grace of a ballet dancer, swerved to avoid the charging bull, leaned over at what appeared to be an impossible angle and deftly plucked away the red button secured between the bull’s horns, one of which appeared almost to brush the razateur’s chest.

‘Well, well,’ Bowman murmured. ‘So that’s El Brocador.’

‘El who?’

‘Brocador. The lad in the ring there.’

‘You know him?’

‘We haven’t been introduced. Good, isn’t he?’

El Brocador was more than good, he was brilliant. Timing his evasive movements with ice-cold judgment and executing them with an almost contemptuous ease, he continued to avoid the bull’s furious rushes with consummate skill: in four consecutive charges he plucked away the two strings that had supported the red button and the two white tassels that had been secured to the tips of the horns. After removing the last tassel and apparently unaware of the bull’s existence, he bowed deeply and gravely to the crowd, ran lightly to the barrier and vaulted gracefully into the safety of the callajon as the bull, now only scant feet behind, charged full tilt into the barrier, splintering the top plank. The crowd clapped and roared its approval.

But not all of them. There were four men who were not only refraining from enthusiastic applause, they weren’t even looking at the bullring. Bowman, who had himself spent very little time in watching the spectacle, had picked them out within two minutes of arriving on the terraces – Czerda, Ferenc, Searl and Masaine. They weren’t watching the bullring becaused they were too busy watching the crowd. Bowman turned to Cecile.

‘Disappointed?’

‘What?’

‘Very slow bull.’

‘Don’t be horrid. What on earth is this?’

Three clowns, dressed in their traditional baggy and garishly-coloured garments, with painted faces, large false noses and ridiculous pill-boxes perched on their heads, had appeared in the callajon. One carried an accordion which he started to play. His two companions, both managing to trip and fall flat on their faces in the process, climbed over the barrier into the ring and, when they had picked themselves up, proceeded to do a sailor’s hornpipe.

As they danced, the toril gate opened and a fresh bull appeared. Like its predecessor, it was a small black Camargue bull but what it lacked in inches it more than made up for in sheer bad temper for it had no sooner caught sight of the two dancing clowns than it lowered its head and charged. It went for each clown in turn but they, without in any way breaking step or losing the rhythm of the dance, glided and pirouetted to safety as if unaware of the bull’s existence: they were, obviously, razateurs of the highest order of experience.

Temporarily, the music stopped, but the bull didn’t: it charged one of the clowns who turned and ran for his life, screaming for help. The crowd shouted with laughter. The clown, momentarily incensed, stopped abruptly, shook his fist at them, looked over his shoulder, screamed again, ran, mistimed his leap for the barrier and brought up heavily against it, the bull only feet away. It seemed inevitable that he must be either impaled or crushed. Neither happened, but he did not escape entirely unscathed for when he miraculously broke clear it could be seen that his baggy trousers were hooked on to one of the bull’s horns. The clown, clad in white ankle-length underpants, continued his flight, still screaming for help, pursued by a now thoroughly infuriated bull who trailed the trousers along behind him. The crowd was convulsed.

The four gypsies weren’t. As before, they ignored the action in the bullring. But now they were no longer still. They had begun to move slowly through the crowd, all moving in a clockwise fashion, closely scanning the faces of all whom they passed by. And as closely as they observed others, Bowman observed them.

Down in the callajon the accordionist began to play ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’. The two clowns came together and waltzed gravely in the centre of the ring. Inevitably, the bull charged the dancing couple. He was almost upon them when they waltzed apart from each other, each completing a single turn before joining up again immediately the bull’s headlong rush had carried him beyond them.

The crowd went wild. Cecile laughed to the extent that she had to use a handkerchief to dab the tears from her eyes. There was no trace of a smile on Bowman’s face: with Czerda not twenty feet away and heading straight for him, he didn’t feel like smiling.

‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ Cecile said.

‘Marvellous. Wait here.’

She was instantly serious, apprehensive. ‘Where are you – ’

‘Trust me?’

‘Trust you.’

‘A white wedding. I won’t be long.’

Bowman moved leisurely away. He had to pass within a few feet of Czerda who was still scrutinizing everyone he went by with a thoroughness that lifted eyebrows and brought frowns. A few feet further on, close to the exit, he passed behind the politely clapping Chinese couple that he’d seen before in Arles. They were, he thought, a remarkably distinguished looking couple. As it was extremely unlikely that they had come all the way from China, they obviously must be European residents. He wondered idly what manner of occupation such a man would pursue in Europe, then dismissed the thought from his mind: there were other and more urgent matters to occupy his attention.

He circled the arena at the back, walked about two hundred yards south down the road, crossed it and made his way back north coming up at the back of Czerda’s caravans which were parked in two tight rows well back from the side of the road. The caravans appeared to be completely deserted. Certainly there was no apparent guard on Czerda’s caravan or on the green-and-white caravan, but on that afternoon he was interested in neither. The caravan he was interested in, as he was now certain it would be, did have a guard. On a stool on the top of the steps the gypsy Maca was sitting, beer-bottle in hand.

Bowman sauntered leisurely towards the caravan: as he approached Maca lowered his beerbottle, looked down at him and scowled warningly. Bowman ignored the scowl, approached even more closely, stopped and inspected both Maca and the caravan, taking his time about it. Maca made a contemptuous jerking movement with his thumb, unmistakably indicating that Bowman should be on his way. Bowman remained where he was.

‘Clear off!’ Maca ordered.

‘Gypsy swine,’ Bowman said pleasantly.

Maca, obviously doubting that he had heard aright, stared for a brief moment of incredulity, then his face contorted in rage as he shifted his grip to the neck of the bottle, rose and jumped down. But Bowman had moved even more quickly and he struck Maca very hard indeed even before the gypsy’s feet had reached the ground. The combined effect of the blow and his own momentum had a devastating effect on Maca: eyes unfocused, he staggered back dazedly. Bowman struck him again with equal force, caught the now unconscious man before he could fall, dragged him round to one side of the caravan, dropped him and pushed him out of sight of any casual passer-by.

Bowman glanced quickly around him. If anyone had seen the brief fracas he was taking care not to publicize the fact. Twice Bowman circled the caravan but there was no lurking watcher in the shadows, no hint of danger to be seen. He climbed the steps and entered the caravan. The rear, smaller portion of the caravan was empty. The door leading to the forward compartment was secured by two heavy bolts. Bowman slid back the bolts and passed inside.

For a moment his eyes were unable to penetrate the gloom. The curtains were drawn and very heavy curtains they were, too. Bowman drew them back.

At the front of the caravan was the three-tiered bunk he had observed when he peered in late the previous night: as before, three men lay on those bunks. Previously, that had been a matter of no significance: bunks are for sleeping in and one would have expected to find them occupied in the nighttime: one would not have expected to find them occupied in the early afternoon. But Bowman had known that he would find them occupied.

All three men were awake. They propped themselves up on their elbows, eyes, accustomed to deep gloom, blinking in the harsh light of the Camargue. Bowman advanced wordlessly, reached over the man in the lowermost bunk and picked up his right hand. The wrist belonging to that hand was manacled to a ring-bolt let into the front wall of the caravan. Bowman let his wrist fall and examined the man in the middle bunk: he was similarly secured. Bowman didn’t trouble to look at the wrist of the man on top. He stepped back and looked at them thoughtfully.

He said: ‘Count le Hobenaut, husband of Marie le Hobenaut, Mr Tangevec, husband of Sara Tangevec and the third name I do not know. Who are you, sir?’ This to the man in the bottom bunk, a middle-aged, greying and very distinguished looking person.

‘Daymel.’

‘You are Tina’s father?’

‘I am.’ The expression on his face was that of a man receiving his executioner and not his saviour. ‘Who in the name of God are you?’

‘Bowman. Neil Bowman. I’ve come to take you three gentlemen away.’

‘I don’t know who you are.’ This from the man in the middle bunk who didn’t seem any happier to see Bowman than Daymel had been. ‘I don’t care who you are. For God’s sake go away or you’ll be the death of us all.’

‘You are the Count le Hobenaut?’ The man nodded.

‘You heard about your brother-in-law? Alexandre?’

Le Hobenaut looked at him with an odd speculative desperation on his face, then said: ‘What about my brother-in-law?’

‘He’s dead. Czerda murdered him.’

‘What crazy talk is this? Alexandre? Dead?

How can he be dead? Czerda promised us – ’

‘You believed him?’

‘Of course. Czerda has everything to lose – ’

‘You two believe him?’ Bowman asked. They nodded.

‘A man who trusts a killer is a fool. You are fools – all three of you. Alexandre is dead. I found his body. If you think he’s alive why don’t you ask Czerda if you can see him? Or you, Daymel. Why don’t you ask Czerda if you can see your daughter?’

‘She’s not – she’s – ’

‘She’s not dead. Just half dead. They flayed her back. Why did they flay her back? Why did they kill Alexandre? Because they were both trying to tell someone something. What was it that they were trying to tell, gentlemen?’

‘I beg you, Bowman.’ Le Hobenaut’s distress was but one step removed from terror. ‘Leave us!’

‘Why are you so terrified for them? Why are they so terrified for you? And don’t tell me again to go for I’m not going until I know the answers.’

‘You’ll never know the answers now,’ Czerda said.

CHAPTER 8

Bowman turned round slowly for there was nothing to be gained by haste now. Of the shock, of the inevitably profound chagrin, there was no sign in his face. But Czerda, standing in the doorway with a silenced gun in his hand and Masaine, beside him, with a knife in his, made no attempt to disguise their feelings. Both men were smiling and smiling broadly, although their smiles were noticeably lacking in warmth. At a nod from Czerda, Masaine advanced and tested the shackles securing the three men. He said: ‘They have not been touched.’

‘He was probably too busy explaining to them just how clever he was.’ Czerda did not trouble to conceal the immense amount of satisfaction he was deriving from the moment. ‘It was all too simple, Bowman. You really are a fool. Shopkeepers in Arles who receive a gratuity of six hundred Swiss francs are hardly likely to forget the person who gave it to them. I tell you, I could hardly keep a straight face when I was moving through the crowd there pretending to look for you. But we had to pretend, didn’t we, to convince you that we hadn’t recognized you or you’d never have come out into the open, would you? You fool, we had you identified before you entered the arena.’

‘You might have told Maca,’ Bowman murmured.

‘We might, but Maca is no actor, I’m afraid,’ Czerda said regretfully. ‘He wouldn’t have known how to make a fake fight look real. And if we’d left no guard at all you’d have been doubly suspicious.’ He stretched out his left hand. ‘Eighty thousand francs, Bowman.’

‘I don’t carry that sort of loose change with me.’

‘My eighty thousand francs.’

Bowman looked at him with contempt. ‘Where would a person like you get eighty thousand francs?’

Czerda smiled, stepped forward unexpectedly and drove the silenced barrel of his gun into Bowman’s solar plexus. Bowman doubled up, gasping in agony.

‘I would have liked to strike you across the face, as you struck me.’ He had removed his smile. ‘But for the moment I prefer that you remain unmarked. The money, Bowman?’

Bowman straightened slowly. When he spoke, his voice came as a harsh croak.

‘I lost it.’

‘You lost it?’

‘I had a hole in my pocket.’

Czerda’s face twisted in anger, he lifted his gun to club Bowman, then smiled. ‘You’ll find it within the minute, you’ll see.’

The green Rolls-Royce slowed as it approached the Mas de Lavignolle. Le Grand Duc, still with a parasol being held above his head, surveyed the scene thoughtfully.

‘Czerda’s caravans,’ he observed. ‘Surprising. One would not have expected the Mas de Lavignolle to be of any particular interest to our friend Czerda. But a man like that will always have a good reason for what he is doing. However, he will doubtless consider it a privilege to inform me of his reasons… What is it, my dear?’

‘Look ahead.’ Lila pointed. ‘Just there.’

Le Grand Duc followed the direction of her arm. Cecile, flanked by El Brocador and Searl, the first all in white, the second all in black. The door closed behind them.

Le Grand Duc pressed the dividing window button. ‘Stop the car, if you please.’ To Lila he said: ‘You think that’s your friend? Same dress, I admit, but all those Arlésienne fiesta dresses look the same to me, especially from the back.’

‘That’s Cecile.’ Lila was positive.

‘A razateur and a priest,’ Le Grand Duc mused.

‘You really must admit that your friend does have a marked propensity for striking up the most unusual aquaintanceships. You have your notebook?’

‘I have what?’

‘We must investigate this.’

‘You’re going to investigate – ’

‘Please. No Greek chorus. Everything is of interest to the true folklorist.’

‘But you can’t just barge in – ’

‘Nonsense. I am the Duc de Croytor. Besides, I never barge. I always make an entrance.’

The ache in his midriff, Bowman guessed, was as nothing compared to some of the aches that he was going to come by very shortly – if, that was, he would then be in a position to feel anything. There was a gleam in Czerda’s eye, a barely-contained anticipation in the face that bespoke ill, Bowman thought, for the immediate future.

He looked round the caravan. The three shackled men had in their faces the uncomprehending and lacklustre despair of those to whom defeat is already an accepted reality. Czerda and Masaine had pleasantly anticipatory smiles on their faces, El Brocador was serious and thoughtful and watchful, Simon Searl had a peculiar look in his eyes which made his unfrocking a readily comprehensible matter, while Cecile just looked slightly dazed, a little frightened, a little angry but as far removed from hysteria as could be.

‘You understand now,’ Czerda said, ‘why I said you’d find the money within the minute.’

‘I understand now. You’ll find it – ’

‘What money?’ Cecile asked. ‘What does that – that monster want?’

‘His eighty thousand francs back again – minus certain small outlays I’ve been compelled to make – and who can blame him?’

‘Don’t tell him anything!’

‘And don’t you understand the kind of men you’re dealing with? Ten seconds from now they’ll have your arm twisted up behind your back till it’s touching your ear, you’ll be screaming in agony and if they happen to break your shoulder or tear a few ligaments, well, that’s just too bad.’

‘But – but I’ll just faint – ’

‘Please.’ Bowman looked at Czerda, carefully avoided Cecile’s gaze. ‘It’s in Arles. Safe-deposit in the station.’

‘The key?’

‘On a ring. In the car. Hidden. I’ll show you.’

‘Excellent,’ Czerda said. ‘A disappointment to friend Searl, I’m afraid, but inflicting pain on young ladies gives me no pleasure though I wouldn’t hesitate if I had to. As you shall see.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You will. You are a danger, you have been a great danger and you have to go, that’s all. You will die this afternoon and within the hour so that no suspicion will ever attach to us.’

It was, Bowman thought, as laconic a death sentence as he’d ever heard of. There was something chilling in the man’s casual certainty.

Czerda went on: ‘You will understand now why I didn’t injure your face, why I wanted you to go into that bullring unmarked.’

‘Bullring?’

‘Bullring, my friend.’

‘You’re mad. You can’t make me go into a bullring.’

Czerda said nothing and there was no signal. Searl, eagerly assisted by a grinning Masaine, caught hold of Cecile, forced her face downwards on to a bunk and, while Masaine pinned her down, Searl gripped the collar of the Arlésienne costume and ripped it down to the waist. He turned and smiled at Bowman, reached into the folds of his clerical garb and brought out what appeared to be a version of a hunting stock, with a fifteen-inch interwoven leather handle attached to three long thin black thongs. Bowman looked at Czerda and Czerda wasn’t watching anything of what was going on: he was watching Bowman and the gun pointing at Bowman was motionless.

Czerda said: ‘I think perhaps you will go into that bullring?’

‘Yes.’ Bowman nodded. ‘I think perhaps I will.’

Searl put his stock away. His face was twisted in the bitter disappointment of a spoilt child who has been deprived of a new toy. Masaine took his hands away from Cecile’s shoulders. She pushed herself groggily to a sitting position and looked at Bowman. Her face was very pale but her eyes were mad. It had just occurred to Bowman that she was, as she’d said, quite capable of using a gun if shown how to use one when there came from outside the sound of a solid measured tread: the door opened and Le Grand Duc entered with a plainly apprehensive Lila trailing uncertainly behind him. Le Grand Duc pushed the monocle more firmly into his eye.

‘Ah, Czerda, my dear fellow. It’s you.’ He looked at the gun in the gypsy’s hand and said sharply: ‘Don’t point that damned thing at me!’ He indicated Bowman. ‘Point it at that fellow there. Don’t you know he’s your man, you fool?’

Czerda uncertainly trained his gun back on Bowman and just as uncertainly looked at Le Grand Duc.

‘What do you want?’ Czerda tried to imbue his voice with sharp authority but Le Grand Duc wasn’t the properly receptive type and it didn’t come off. ‘Why are you – ’

‘Be quiet!’ Le Grand Duc was at his most intimidating, which was very intimidating indeed. I am speaking. You are a bunch of incompetent and witless nincompoops. You have forced me to destroy the basic rule of my existence – to bring myself into the open. I have seen more intelligence exhibited in a cageful of retarded chimpanzees. You have lost me much time and cost me vast trouble and anxiety. I am seriously tempted to dispose of the services of you all – permanently. And that means you as well as your services. What are you doing here?’

‘What are we doing here?’ Czerda stared at him. ‘But – but – but Searl here said that you – ’

‘I will deal with Searl later.’ Le Grand Duc’s promise was imbued with such menacing overtones that Searl at once looked acutely unhappy. Czerda looked nervous to a degree that was almost unthinkable for him, El Brocador looked puzzled and Masaine had clearly given up thinking of any kind. Lila simply looked stunned. Le Grand Duc went on: ‘I did not mean, you cretin, what you are doing in Mas de Lavignolle. I meant what are you doing here, as of this present moment, in this caravan.’

‘Bowman here stole the money you gave me,’ Czerda said sullenly. ‘We were – ’

‘He what?’ Le Grand Duc’s face was thunderous.

‘He stole your money,’ Czerda said unhappily.

‘All of it.’

‘All of it!’

‘Eighty thousand francs. That’s what we’ve been doing – finding out where it is. He’s about to show me the key to where the money is.’

‘I trust for your sake that you find it.’ He paused and turned as Maca came staggering into the caravan, both hands holding what was clearly a very painful face.

‘Is this man drunk?’ Le Grand Duc demanded. ‘Are you drunk, sir? Stand straight when you talk to me.’

‘He did it!’ Maca spoke to Czerda, he didn’t appear to have noticed Le Grand Duc, for his eyes were for Bowman only. ‘He came along – ’

‘Silence!’ Le Grand Duc’s voice would have intimidated a Bengal tiger. ‘My God, Czerda, you surround yourself with the most useless and ineffectual bunch of lieutenants it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter.’ He looked round the caravan, ignoring the three manacled men, took two steps towards where Cecile was sitting and looked down at her. ‘Ha! Bowman’s accomplice, of course. Why is she here?’

Czerda shrugged. ‘Bowman wouldn’t cooperate – ’

‘A hostage? Very well. Here’s another.’ He caught Lila by the arm and shoved her roughly across the caravan. She stumbled, almost fell, then sat down heavily on the bunk beside Cecile. Her face, already horror-stricken, now looked stupefied.

‘Charles!’

‘Be quiet!’

‘But Charles! My father – you said – ’

‘You are a feather-brained young idiot,’ Le Grand Duc said with contempt. ‘The real Duc de Croytor, to whom I fortunately bear a strong resemblance, is at present in the upper Amazon, probably being devoured by the savages in the Matto Grosso. I am not the Duc de Croytor.’

‘We know that, Mr Strome.’ Simon Searl was at his most obsequious.

Again displaying his quite remarkable speed, Le Grand Duc stepped forward and struck Searl heavily across the face. Searl cried out in pain and staggered heavily, to bring up against the wall of the caravan. There was silence for several seconds.

‘I have no name,’ Le Grand Duc said softly. ‘There is no such person as you mentioned.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Searl fingered his cheek. ‘I – ’

‘Silence!’ Le Grand Duc turned to Czerda. ‘Bowman has something to show you? Give you?’

‘Yes, sir. And there’s another little matter I have to attend to.’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Be quick about it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I shall wait here. We must talk on your return, mustn’t we, Czerda.’

Czerda nodded unhappily, told Masaine to watch the girls, put his jacket over his gun and left accompanied by Searl and El Brocador. Masaine, his knife still drawn, seated himself comfortably. Maca, tenderly rubbing his bruised face, muttered something and left, probably to attend to his injuries. Lila, her face woebegone, looked up at Le Grand Duc.

‘Oh, Charles, how could you – ’

‘Ninny!’

She stared at him brokenly. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Cecile put an arm round her and glared at Le Grand Duc. Le Grand Duc looked through her and remained totally unaffected.

‘Stop here,’ Czerda said.

They stopped, Bowman ahead of Czerda with a silencer prodding his back, El Brocador and Searl on either side of him, the Citroën ten feet away.

‘Where’s the key?’ Czerda demanded.

‘I’ll get it.’

‘You will not. You are perfectly capable of switching keys or even finding a hidden gun.

Where is it?’

‘On a key ring. It’s taped under the driver’s seat, back, left.’

‘Searl?’ Searl nodded, went to the car. Czerda said sourly: ‘You don’t trust many people, do you?’

‘I should, you think?’

‘What’s the number of this deposit box?’

‘Sixty-five.’

Searl returned. ‘These are ignition keys.’

‘The brass one’s not,’ Bowman said.

Czerda took the keys. ‘The brass one’s not.’ He removed it from the ring. ‘Sixty-five. For once, the truth. How’s the money wrapped?’

‘Oilskin, brown paper, sealing-wax. My name’s on it.’

‘Good.’ He looked round. Maca was sitting on the top of some caravan steps. Czerda beckoned him and he came to where they were, rubbing his chin and looked malevolently at Bowman. Czerda said: ‘Young José has a motor scooter, hasn’t he?’

‘You want a message done. I’ll get him. He’s in the arena.’

‘No need.’ Czerda gave him the key. ‘That’s for safe deposit sixty-five in Arles station. Tell him to open it and bring back the brown paper parcel inside. Tell him to be as careful with it as he would be with his own life. It’s a very, very valuable parcel. Tell him to come back here as soon as possible and give it to me and if I’m not here someone will know where I’ve gone and he’s to come after me. Is that clear?’

Maca nodded and left. Czerda said: ‘I think it’s time we paid a visit to the bullring ourselves.’

They crossed the road but went not directly to the arena but to one of several adjacent huts which were evidently used as changing rooms, for the one they entered was behung with matadors’ and razateurs’ uniforms and several outfits of clowns’ attire. Czerda pointed to one of the last. ‘Get into that.’

‘That?’ Bowman eyed the garish rigout. ‘Why the hell should I?’

‘Because my friend here asks you to.’ Czerda waved his gun. ‘Don’t make my friend angry.’

Bowman did as he was told. When he was finished he was far from surprised to see El Brocador exchange his conspicuous white uniform for his dark suit, to see Searl pull on a long blue smock, then to see all three men put on paper masks and comic hats. They appeared to have a craving for anonymity, a not unusual predilection on the part of would-be murderers. Czerda draped a red flag over his gun and they left for the arena.

When they arrived at the entrance to the callajon Bowman was mildly astonished to discover that the comic act that had been in process when he’d left was still not finished: so much seemed to have happened since he’d left the arena that it was difficult to realize that so few minutes had elapsed. They arrived to find that one of the clowns, incredibly, was doing a handstand on the back of the bull, which just stood there in baffled fury, its head swinging from side to side. The crowd clapped ecstatically: had the circumstances been different, Bowman thought, he might even have clapped himself.

For their final brief act the clowns waltzed towards the side of the arena to the accompaniment of their companion’s accordion. They stopped, faced the crowd side by side and bowed deeply, apparently unaware that their backs were towards the charging bull. The crowd screamed a warning: the clowns, still bent, pushed each other apart at the last moment and the bull hurtled wildly over the spot where they had been standing only a second previously and crashed into the barrier with an impact that momentarily stunned it. As the clowns vaulted into the callajon the crowd continued to whistle and shout their applause. It occurred to Bowman to wonder whether they would still be in such a happily carefree mood in a few minutes’ time: it seemed unlikely.

The ring was empty now and Bowman and his three escorts had moved out into the callajon. The crowd stared with interest and in considerable amusement at Bowman’s attire and he was, unquestionably, worth a second glance. He was clad in a most outlandish fashion. His right leg was enclosed in red, his left in white and the doublet was composed of red and white squares. The flexible green canvas shoes he wore were so ludicrously long that the toes were tied back into the shins. He wore a white conical pierrot’s hat with a red pom-pom on top: for defence he was armed with a slender three-foot cane with a small tricolor at the end of it.

‘I have the gun, I have the girl,’ Czerda said softly. ‘You will remember?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘If you try to escape, the girl will not live. You believe me?’

Bowman believed him. He said: ‘And if I die, the girl will not live either.’

‘No. Without you, the girl is nothing, and Czerda does not make war on women. I know who you are now, or think I do. It is no matter. I have discovered that you never met her until last night and it is unthinkable that a man like you would tell her anything of importance: professionals never explain more than they have to, do they, Mr Bowman? And young girls can be made to talk, Mr Bowman. She can do us no harm. When we’ve done what we intend to do, and that will be in two days, she is free to go.’

‘She knows where Alexandre is buried.’

‘Ah, so. Alexandre? Who is Alexandre?’

‘Of course. Free to go?’

‘You have my word.’ Bowman didn’t doubt him. ‘In exchange, you will now put on a convincing struggle.’

Bowman nodded. The three men grabbed him or tried to grab him and all four staggered about the callajon. The colourful crowd were by now in excellent humour, gay, chattering, relaxed: all evidently felt that they were having a splendid afternoon’s entertainment and that this mock-fight that was taking place in the callajon – for mock-fight it surely was, there were no upraised arms, no blows being struck in anger – was but the prelude to another hilariously comic turn, it had to be, with the man trying to struggle free dressed in that ridiculous pierrot’s costume. Eventually, to the accompaniment of considerable whistling, laughter and shouts of encouragement, Bowman broke free, ran a little way along the callajon and vaulted into the ring. Czerda ran after him, made to clamber over the barrier but was caught and restrained by Searl and El Brocador, who pointed excitedly to the north end of the ring. Czerda followed their direction.

They were not the only ones looking in that direction. The crowd had suddenly fallen silent, their laughter had ceased and the smiles vanished: puzzlement had replaced their humour, a puzzlement that rapidly shaded into anxiety and apprehension. Bowman’s eyes followed the direction of those of the crowd: he could not only understand the apprehension of the crowd, he reflected, but shared it to the fullest extent.

The northern toril gate had been drawn and a bull stood at the entrance. But this was not the small light black bull of the Camargue that was used in the cours libre – the bloodless bullfight of Provence: this was a huge Spanish fighting bull, one of the Andalusian monsters that fight to the death in the great corridas of Spain. It had enormous shoulders, an enormous head and a terrifying spread of horn. Its head was low but not as low as it would be when it launched itself into its charge: it pawed the ground, alternately dragging each front hoof backwards, gouging deep channels in the dark sand.

Members of the crowd were by this time looking at one another in uneasy and rather fearful wonder. For the most part they were aficionados of the sport and they knew that what they were seeing was quite unprecedented and this could be no better than sending a man, no matter how brave and skilful a razateur he might be, to his certain death.

The giant bull was now advancing slowly into the ring, at the same time still contriving to make those deep backwards scores in the sand. Its great head was lower than before.

Bowman stood stock-still. His lips were compressed, his eyes narrow and still watchful. Some twelve hours previously, when inching up the ledge on the cliff-face in the ruined battlements of the ancient fortress he had known fear, and now he knew it again and admitted it to himself. It was no bad thing, he thought wryly. Fear it was that sent the adrenaline pumping, and adrenaline was the catalyst that triggered off the capacity for violent action and abnormally swift reaction: as matters stood now he was going to need all the adrenaline he could lay hands on. But he was coldly aware that if he survived at all it could only be for the briefest of periods: all the adrenaline in the world couldn’t save him now.

From the safety of the callajon Czerda licked his lips, half in unconscious empathy with the man in the ring, half in anticipation of things to come. Suddenly he tensed and the whole crowd tensed with him. An eerie silence as of death enveloped the arena. The great bull was charging.

With unbelievable acceleration for a creature of its size it came at Bowman like an express train. Bowman, unblinking, his racing mind figuring out the correlation between the speed of the bull and the rapidly narrowing distance between them, stood as a man would who is frozen with fear. Trance-like, fearful, the spectators stared in horror, convinced in their minds that this mad pierrot’s destruction was only a couple of heartbeats away. Bowman waited for one of those heart-beats to tick away and then, when the bull was less than twenty feet and a second away, he flung himself to his right. But the bull knew all about such tactics, for with remarkable speed in so massive an animal it veered instantly to its left to intercept: but Bowman had only feinted. He checked violently and threw himself to the left and the bull thundered harmlessly by, the huge right horn missing Bowman by a clear foot. The crowd, unbelieving, heaved a long collective sigh of relief, shook their heads at one another and murmured their relief. But the apprehension, the tension, still lay heavily in the air.

The Andalusian bull could brake as swiftly as it could accelerate. It pulled up in a shower of sand, whirled round and came at Bowman again without pause. Again Bowman judged his moment to a fraction of a second, again he repeated the same manoeuvre, but this time in the reverse order. Again the bull missed, but this time only by inches. There came another murmur of admiration from the crowd, this time to the accompaniment of some sporadic hand-clapping: the tension in the air was beginning to ease, not much, but enough to be perceptible.

Again the bull turned but this time it stood still, less than thirty feet away. Quite without moving, it watched Bowman, just as Bowman, quite without moving, watched him. Bowman stared at the great horns: there could be no doubt about it, their tips had been filed to sharp points. It occurred to Bowman, with a curious sense of detachment, that he had rarely encountered a more superfluous refinement: whether the horns had been sharpened or filed to the diameter of a penny it wouldn’t have made a ha’porth of difference: a swinging hook of one of those giant horns with all the power of those massive shoulder and neck muscles behind it would go straight through his body irrespective of the condition of the tip. Indeed, being gored by the sharpened horn might prove the easier and less agonizing way to die but it was a matter of academic importance anyway, the end result would be inevitable and the same.

The bull’s red eyes never wavered. Did it think, Bowman wondered, was it thinking? Was it thinking what he was thinking, that this was but a game of Russian roulette in so far as the terms of probabilities went? Would he expect Bowman to execute the same manoeuvre next time, refuse to be drawn, carry straight on and get him while Bowman had checked to fling himself the other way? Or would he think that Bowman’s next evasive action might not be a feint but the real thing, swerve accordingly and still get him? Bluff and double-bluff, Bowman thought, and it was pointless to speculate: the laws of blind chance were at work here and sooner or later, sooner rather than later, for on every occasion he had only a fiftyfifty chance, one of those horns would tear the life out of him.

The thought of that fifty-fifty chance prompted Bowman to risk a quick glance at the barrier. It was only ten feet away. He turned and sprinted for it, three steps, aware that behind him the bull had broken into its charge, aware ahead of him, in the callajon, of the figure of Czerda with the red flag over his arm, but the gun beneath clearly hanging downwards. He knew, as Bowman knew he knew, that Bowman had no intention of leaving the ring.

Bowman spun, back to the barrier, to face the bull. Pirouetting like a spinning top, he moved swiftly away along the barrier as the onrushing enraged bull hooked viciously with his right horn, the sharpened point brushing Bowman’s sleeve but not even tearing the material. The bull crashed into the barrier with tremendous force, splintered the top two planks, then reared up with his fore-feet on top of the planks as he tried furiously to climb over. Some time elapsed before the bull realized that Bowman was still in the same ring though by this time a prudent distance away.

By now the crowd was clapping and shouting its approval. Smiles were reappearing and some were even beginning to enjoy what had originally appeared to be a ludicrously one-sided and suicidal contest.

The bull stood still for a full half minute, shaking its great head slowly from side to side as if dazed by the power of its head-on collision with the barrier, which it very probably was. When it moved this time, it had changed its tactics. It didn’t charge Bowman, it stalked him. It walked forward as Bowman walked backward, slowly gaining on him, and when it abruptly lowered its head and charged it was so close that Bowman had no room left for manoeuvre. He did the only thing open to him and lept high in the air as the bull tried to toss him. He landed on the bull’s shoulders, somersaulted and came to the ground on his feet: although hurt and badly winded he miraculously succeeded in retaining his balance.

The crowd roared and whistled its admiration. Laughing in delight, they clapped one another on the back. Here, below that pierrot’s disguise, must be one of the great razateurs of the day. The great razateur of the day. Some of the spectators looked almost sheepish at having worried about the capacity for survival of so great a master at this.

The three manacled prisoners on their bunks, the two girls and Masaine watched in some trepidation as Le Grand Duc paced restlessly up and down the length of the caravan, glancing in mounting irritation at his watch.

‘What in the devil’s name is taking Czerda so long?’ he demanded. He turned to Masaine. ‘You, there. Where have they taken Bowman?’

‘Why, I thought you knew.’

‘Answer, you cretin!’

‘For the key. For the money. You heard. And then to the bullring, of course.’

‘The bullring? Why?’

‘Why?’ Masaine was genuinely puzzled. ‘You wanted it done, didn’t you?’

‘Wanted what done?’ Le Grand Duc was exercising massive restraint.

‘Bowman. To get him out of the way.’

Le Grand Duc laid his hands on Masaine’s shoulders and shook him in a no longer to be contained exasperation.

‘Why the bullring?’

‘To fight a bull, of course. A huge black Spanish killer. Bare hands.’ Masaine nodded at Cecile. ‘If he doesn’t, we’re going to kill her. This way, Czerda says, no suspicion can fall on us. Bowman should be dead by now.’ Masaine shook his head in admiration. ‘Czerda’s clever.’

‘He’s a raving maniac!’ Le Grand Duc shouted. ‘Kill Bowman? Now? Before we’ve made him talk? Before I know his contacts, how he broke our ring? Not to mention the eighty thousand francs we haven’t got yet. At once, fellow! Stop Czerda! Get Bowman out of there before it’s too late.’

Masaine shook his head stubbornly. ‘My orders are to stay here and guard those women.’

‘I shall attend to you later,’ Le Grand Duc said chillingly. ‘I cannot, must not be seen in public with Czerda again. Miss Dubois, run at once – ’

Cecile jumped to her feet. Her Arlésienne costume was not the thing of beauty that it had been but Lila had effected running repairs sufficient to preserve the decencies. She made to move forward, but Masaine barred her way.

‘She stays here,’ he declared. ‘My orders – ’

‘Great God in heaven!’ Le Grand Duc thundered. ‘Are you defying me?’

He advanced ponderously upon a plainly apprehensive Masaine. Before the gypsy could even begin to realize what was about to happen Le Grand Duc smashed down his heel, with all his massive weight behind it, on Masaine’s instep. Masaine howled in agony, hobbled on one leg and stooped to clutch his injured foot with both hands. As he did so Le Grand Duc brought down his locked hands on the base of Masaine’s neck, who collapsed heavily on the floor, unconscious before he struck it.

‘Swiftly, Miss Dubois, swiftly!’ Le Grand Duc said urgently. ‘If not already gone, your friend may well be in extremis.’

And in extremis Bowman undoubtedly was. He was still on his feet – but it was only an exceptional will-power and instinct, though fast fading, for survival that kept him there. His face was streaked with sand and blood, twisted in pain and drawn in exhaustion. From time to time he held his left ribs which appeared to be the prime source of the pain he was suffering. His earlier pierrot finery was now bedraggled and dirtied and torn, two long rips on the right-hand side of his tunic were evidences of two extremely narrow escapes from the scything left horn of the bull. He had forgotten how many times now he’d been on the sanded floor of the arena but he hadn’t forgotten the three occasions when his visits there had been entirely involuntary: twice the shoulder of the bull had hurled him to the ground, once the backsweep of the left horn had caught him high on the left arm and sent him somersaulting. And now the bull was coming at him again.

Bowman side-stepped but his reactions had slowed, and slowed badly. Providentially, the bull guessed wrongly and hooked away from Bowman but his left shoulder struck him a glancing blow, though from something weighing about a ton and travelling at thirty miles an hour the word ‘glancing’ is purely a relative term. It sent Bowman tumbling head over heels to the ground. The bull pursued him, viciously trying to gore, but Bowman had still enough awareness and physical resources left to keep rolling over and over, desperately trying to avoid those lethal horns.

The crowd had suddenly become very quiet. This, they knew, was a great razateur, a master mime and actor, but surely no one would carry the interest of his art to the suicidal lengths where, every second now as he rolled over the sand, he escaped death by inches and sometimes less, for twice in as many seconds the bull’s horns tore through the back of the doublet.

Both times Bowman felt the horn scoring across his back and it was this that galvanized him to what he knew must be his final effort. Half a dozen times he rolled away from the bull as quickly as he could, seized what was only half a chance and scrambled upright. He could do no more than just stand there, swaying drunkenly and staggering from side to side. Again, that eerie silence fell across the arena as the bull, infuriated beyond measure and too mad to be cunning any more, came charging in again, but just as it seemed inevitable that the bull must surely this time impale him, an uncontrollable drunk lurch by Bowman took him a bare inch clear of the scything horn: so incensed was the bull that he ran on for another twenty yards before realizing that Bowman was no longer in his way and coming to a halt.

The crowd appeared to go mad. In their relief, in their unbounded admiration for this demigod, they cheered, they clapped, they shouted, they wept tears of laughter. What an actor, what a performer, what a magnificent razateur! Such an exhibition, surely, had never been seen before. Bowman leaned in total exhaustion against the barrier, a smiling Czerda only feet away from where he stood. Bowman was finished and the desperation on his face showed it. He was finished not only physically, he had come to the end of his mental tether. He just wasn’t prepared to run any more. The bull lowered its head in preparation for another charge: again, silence fell over the arena. What fresh wonder was this miracle man going to demonstrate now?

But the miracle man was through with demonstrations for the day. Even as the silence fell he heard something that made him spin round and stare at the crowd, incredulity in his face. Standing high at the back of the crowd and waving frantically at him was Cecile, oblivious of the fact that scores of people had turned to stare at her.

‘Neil!’ Her voice was close to a scream. ‘Neil Bowman! Come on!’

Bowman came. The bull had started on its charge but the sight of Cecile and the realization that escape was at hand had given Bowman a fresh influx of strength, however brief it might prove to be. He scrambled into the safety of the callajon at least two seconds before the bull thundered into the barrier. Bowman removed the pierrot’s hat which had been hanging by its elastic band down the back of his neck, impaled it on one of the sharpened horns, brushed unceremoniously by the flabbergasted Czerda and ran up the terraces as quickly as his leaden legs would permit, waving to the crowd who parted to make way for him: the crowd, nonplussed though it was by this remarkable turn of events, nevertheless gave him a tumultuous reception: so unprecedented had the entire act been that they no doubt considered that this was also part of it. Bowman neither knew nor cared what their reactions were: just so long as they opened up before him and closed again after he had passed it would give him what might prove to be vital extra seconds over the inevitable pursuers. He reached the top, caught Cecile by the arm.

‘I just love your sense of timing,’ he said. His voice, like his breathing, was hoarse and gasping and distressed. He turned and looked behind him. Czerda was ploughing his way up through the crowd and not leaving any newly made friends behind him: El Brocador was moving on a converging course: of Searl he could see no sign. Together they hurried down the broad steps outside the arena, skirting the bull pens, stables and changing rooms. Bowman slid a hand through one of the many rips in his tunic, located his car keys and brought them out. He tightened his grip on Cecile’s arm as they reached the last of the changing rooms and peered cautiously round the corner. A second later he withdrew, his. face bitter with chagrin.

‘It’s just not our day, Cecile. That gypsy I clobbered – Maca – is sitting on the bonnet of the Citroën. Worse, he’s cleaning his nails with a knife. One of those knives.’ He opened a door behind them, thrust Cecile into the changing room where he himself had robed before his performance, and handed her the car keys. ‘Wait till the crowd comes out. Mingle with them. Take the car, meet me at the southern end – the seaward end – of the church at Saintes-Maries. For God’s sake, don’t leave the Citroën anywhere near by – drive it out to the caravan park east of the town and leave it there.’

‘I see.’ She was, Bowman thought, remarkably calm. ‘And meantime you have things to attend to?’

‘As always.’ He peered through a crack in the door: for the moment there was no one in sight. ‘Four bridesmaids,’ he said, slipped out and closed the door behind him.

The three manacled men were lying in their bunks, quietly and seemingly uncaring, Lila was sniffing disconsolately and Le Grand Duc scowling thunderously when Searl came running up the steps. The apprehensive look was back on his face again and he was noticeably short of breath.

‘I trust,’ Le Grand Duc said ominously, ‘that you are not the bearer of ill tidings.’

‘I saw the girl,’ Searl gasped. ‘How did she – ’

‘By God, Searl, you and your nincompoop friend Czerda will pay for this. If Bowman is dead – ’ He broke off and stared over Searl’s shoulder, then pushed him roughly to one side. ‘Who in heaven’s name is that?’

Searl turned to follow Le Grand Duc’s pointing finger. A red-and-white-clad pierrot was making his way at a lurching, stumbling run across the improvised car park: it was evident that he was near total exhaustion.

‘That’s him,’ Searl shouted. ‘That’s him.’ As they watched, three gypsies appeared from behind some huts, Czerda unmistakably one of them, running in pursuit of Bowman and covering the ground a great deal faster than he was. Bowman looked over his shoulder, located his pursuers, swerved to seek cover among several caravans, checked again as he saw his way blocked by El Brocador and two other gypsies, turned at rightangles and headed for a group of horses tethered near by, white Camargue horses fitted with the heavy-pommelled and high-backed Camargue saddles which look more like ribbed and leatherupholstered armchairs than anything else. He ran for the nearest, unhitched it, got a foot into the peculiarly fenced stirrup and managed, not without considerable effort, to haul himself up.

‘Quickly!’ Le Grand Duc ordered. ‘Get Czerda. Tell him if Bowman escapes neither he nor you shall. But I want him alive. If he dies, you die. I want him delivered to me within the hour at the Miramar Hotel in Saintes-Maries. I myself cannot afford to remain here another moment. Don’t forget to catch that damned girl and bring her along also. Hurry, man, hurry!’

Searl hurried. As he made to cross the road he had to step quickly and advisedly to one side to avoid being run down by Bowman’s horse. Bowman, Le Grand Duc could see, was swaying in the saddle to the extent that even although he had the reins in his hands he had to hold on to the pommel to remain in his seat. Beneath the artificial tan the face was pale, drawn in pain and exhaustion. Le Grand Duc became aware that Lila was standing by his side, that she too was watching Bowman.

‘I’ve heard of it,’ the girl said quietly. No tears now, just a quietness and a sadness and disbelief. ‘And now I see it. Hounding a man to death.’

Le Grand Duc put a hand on her arm. ‘I assure you, my dear girl – ’

She struck his hand from her arm and said nothing. She didn’t have to, the contempt and the loathing in her face said it all for her. Le Grand Duc nodded, turned away and watched the diminishing figure of Bowman disappearing round the bend in the road to the south.

Le Grand Duc was not the only one to take so keen an interest in Bowman’s departure. Her face pressed against a small square window in the side of the changing room, Cecile watched the galloping white horse and its rider till it vanished from sight. Sure knowledge of what would happen next kept her there nor did she have long to wait. Within thirty seconds five other horsemen came galloping by – Czerda, Ferenc, El Brocador, Searl and a fifth man whom she did not recognize. Drylipped, near tears and sick at heart, she turned away from the window and started searching among the racks of clothes.

Almost at once she found what she wanted – a clown’s outfit consisting of the usual very wide trousers, red, with wide yellow braces as support, a red-and-yellow-striped football jersey and a voluminous dark jacket. She pulled on the trousers, stuffing in the long fiesta dress as best she could – the trousers were cut on so generous a scale that the additional bagginess was scarcely noticeable – pulled the red-and-yellow jersey over her head, shrugged into the big jacket, removed her red wig and stuck a flat green cap on her head. There was no mirror in the changing room: that, she thought dolefully, was probably as well.

She went back to the window. The afternoon show was clearly over and people were streaming down the steps and across the road to their cars. She moved towards the door. Dressed as she was in a dress so shriekingly conspicuous that it conferred a degree of anonymity on the wearer, with the men she most feared in pursuit of Bowman and with plenty of people outside with whom to mingle, this, she realized, would be the best opportunity she would be likely to have to make her way undetected to the Citroën.

And, as far as she could tell, no one remarked her presence as she crossed the road towards the car or, if they did, they made no song and dance about it which, as far as Cecile was concerned, amounted to the same thing. She opened the car, glanced forwards and back to make sure she was unobserved, slid into the driver’s seat, put the key in the ignition and cried out more in fright than in pain as a large and vice-like hand closed around her neck.

The grip eased and she turned slowly round. Maca was kneeling on the floor at the back. He was smiling in a not very encouraging fashion and he had a large knife in his right hand.

CHAPTER 9

The hot afternoon sun beat down mercilessly on the baking plains beneath, on the étangs, on the marshes, on the salt-flats and the occasional contrasting patches of bright green vegetation. A shimmering haze characteristic of the Camargue rose off the plains and gave a curiously ethereal quality, a strange lack of definition, to all the features of the landscape, an illusion enhanced by the fact that none of those features was possessed of any vertical element. All plains are flat, but none as flat as the Camargue.

Half-a-dozen horsemen on steaming horses galloped furiously across the plain. From the air, their method of progress must have seemed peculiar and puzzling in the extreme as the horses seldom galloped more than twenty yards in a straight line and were continuously swerving off course. But seen at ground level the mystery disappeared: the area was so covered with numerous marshes, ranging from tiny little patches to areas larger than a football field, that it made continuous progress in a direct line impossible.

Bowman was at a disadvantage and knew it. He was at a disadvantage on three counts: he was, as his strained face showed and the blood-stains and dirt-streaks could not conceal, as exhausted as ever – this full-stretch gallop, involving continuous twisting and turning, offered no possibility of recuperating any strength – his mind was as far below its decision-making best as his body was of executing those decisions: his pursuers knew the terrain intimately whereas he was a complete stranger to it: and, fairly accomplished horseman though he considered himself to be, he knew he could not even begin to compare with the expertise his pursuers had developed and refined almost from the cradle.

Constantly he urged his now flagging horse on but made little or no attempt to guide it as the sure-footed animal, abetted by experience and generations of inborn instinct, knew far better than he did where the ground was firm and where it was not. Occasionally he lost precious seconds in trying to force his horse to go in certain directions when his horse balked and insisted on choosing his own path.

Bowman looked over his shoulder. It was hopeless, in his heart he knew it was hopeless. When he had left Mas de Lavignolle he had had a lead of several hundred yards over his pursuers: now it was down to just over fifty. The five men behind him were spread out in a shallow fan shape. In the middle was El Brocador who was clearly as superb a horseman as he was a razateur. It was equally clear that he had an intimate knowledge of the terrain as from time to time he shouted orders and gestured with an outflung arm to indicate the direction a certain rider should go. On El Brocador’s left rode Czerda and Ferenc, still heroically bandaged: on his right rode Simon Searl, an incongruous sight indeed in his clerical garb, and a gypsy whom Bowman could not identify.

Bowman looked ahead again. He could see no sign of succour, no house, no farm, no lonely horseman, nothing: and by this time he had been driven, not, he was grimly aware, without good reason, so far to the west that the cars passing on the main Arles-Saintes-Maries road were no more than little black beetles crawling along the line of the horizon.

He looked over his shoulder again. Thirty yards now, not more. They were no longer riding in a fan shape but were almost in line ahead, bearing down on his left, forcing him now to alter his own line of flight to the right. He was aware that this was being done with some good purpose in mind but, looking ahead, he could see nothing to justify this move. The land ahead appeared as normally variegated as the terrain he had just crossed: there was, directly ahead, an unusually large patch of almost dazzling green turf, perhaps a hundred yards by thirty wide, but, size apart, it was in no way different from scores of others he had passed in the last two or three miles.

His horse, Bowman realized, had run its heart out and was near the end. Sweat-stained, foamflecked and breathing heavily, it was as exhausted as Bowman himself. Two hundred yards ahead lay that invitingly green stretch of turf and the incongruous thought occurred to Bowman of how pleasant it would be to lie there, shaded, on a peaceful summer’s day. He wondered why he didn’t give up, the end of his pursuit was as certain as death itself: he would have given up, only he did not know how to set about it.

He looked back again. The five horsemen behind had now adopted a deep crescent shape, the outriders not much more than ten yards behind him. He looked ahead again, saw the greensward not more than twenty yards away, then the thought occurred that Czerda was now within accurate shooting range and Bowman was certain that when the five men returned to the caravans he would not be returning with them. Again he looked backwards and was astonished to see all five men reining in their horses and reining them in strongly at that. He knew something was wrong, terribly wrong, but before he could even start to think about it his own horse stopped abruptly and in an unbelievably short distance, forelegs splayed and sliding on its haunches, at the very edge of the patch of greensward. The horse stopped but Bowman did not. Still looking over his shoulder, he had been taken totally unprepared. He left the saddle, sailed helplessly over the horse’s head and landed on the stretch of green grass.

He should have been knocked out, at the worst broken his neck, at the best landed heavily and bruised badly, but none of those things happened because it was at once apparent that the greensward was not what it appeared to be. He did not fall heavily or bounce or roll: instead he landed with a soggy squelching splash on a soft, cushioning and impact-absorbing material. Into this he slowly started to sink.

The five horsemen walked their horses forward, stopped, leaned on their pommels and gazed impassively downwards. Bowman had assumed a vertical position now, although leaning slightly forward. Already, he was hip-deep in the deadly quicksand with the safety of firm land no more than four feet away. Desperately he flailed his arms in an endeavour to reach it but made no progress whatsoever. The watchers remained motionless on their horses: the impassiveness of their faces was frightening in its suggestion of total implacability.

Bowman sank to the waist. He tried a gentle swimming motion for he realized that frantic struggling was only having the opposite effect to what was intended. It slowed up the sinking but did not stop it: the sucking effect of the quicksand was terrifying in its remorselessness.

He looked at the five men. The total impassivity had disappeared. Czerda was smiling the pleased smile he reserved for occasions like this, Searl was slowly, obscenely licking his lips. All eyes were fixed on Bowman’s face, but if he had any thoughts of shouting for help or begging for mercy no sign of it showed in his expressionless face. Nor were there any thoughts of it in his mind. Fear he had known on the battlements of Les Baux and in the bullring at Mas de Lavignolle, but here, now, there was no fear. On the other occasions there had been a chance, however slender, of survival, dependent upon his own resourcefulness, his coordination of hand and eye: but here all his hardly won knowledge and experience and skill, his exceptional reflexes and physical attributes were useless: from a quicksand there can be no escape. It was the end, it was inevitable and he accepted it.

El Brocador looked at Bowman. The quicksand was now almost up to his armpits, only shoulders, arms and head were now in view. El Brocador studied the impassive face, nodded to himself, turned and looked at Czerda and Searl in turn, distaste and contempt in his face. He unhooked a rope from his pommel.

‘One does not do this to a man like this,’ he said. ‘I am ashamed for us all.’ With a skilful flick of his wrist he sent the rope snaking out: it landed precisely midway between Bowman’s outstretched hands.

Even the most ardent publicist of the attractions of Saintes-Maries – if any such exists – would find it difficult to rhapsodize over the beauties of the main street of the town which runs from east to west along a sea-front totally invisible behind a high rock wall. It is, like the rest of the town, singularly devoid of scenic, artistic or architectural merit, although on that particular afternoon its drabness was perhaps slightly relieved by the crowds of outlandishly dressed tourists, gypsies, gardiens and the inevitable fairground booths, shooting galleries, fortune tellers’ stands and souvenir shops that had been haphazardly set up for their benefit and edification.

It was not, one would have thought, a spectacle that would have brought a great deal of gratification to Le Grand Duc’s aristocratic soul, yet, as he sat in the sidewalk café outside the Miramar Hotel, surveying the scene before him, the expression on his face was mellow to the point of benevolence. Even more oddly in the light of his notoriously undemocratic principles, Carita, his chauffeuse, was seated beside him. Le Grand Duc picked up a litre carafe of red wine, poured a large amount in a large glass he had before him, a thimbleful into a small glass she had before her and smiled benevolently again, not at the passing scene but at a telegram form that he held in his hand. It was clear Le Grand Duc’s exceptional good humour was not because of Saintes-Maries and its inhabitants, but in spite of them. The source of his satisfaction lay in the paper he held in his hand.

‘Excellent, my dear Carita, excellent. Exactly what we wished to know. By Jove, they have moved fast.’ He contemplated the paper again and sighed. ‘It’s gratifying, most gratifying, when one’s guesses turn out to be one hundred per cent accurate.’

‘Yours always are, Monsieur le Due’

‘Eh? What was that? Yes, yes, of course. Help yourself to some more wine.’ Le Grand Duc had temporarily lost interest in both the telegram and Carita, and was gazing thoughtfully at a large black Mercedes that had just pulled up a few feet away. The Chinese couple whom Le Grand Duc had last seen on the hotel patio in Aries emerged and made for the hotel entrance. They passed by within a few feet of Le Grand Duc’s table. The man nodded, his wife smiled faintly and Le Grand Duc, not to be outdone, bowed gravely. He watched them as they went inside, then turned to Carita.

‘Czerda should be here soon with Bowman. I have decided that this is an inadvisable place for a rendezvous. Too public, too public by far. There’s a big lay-by about one mile north of the town. Have Czerda stop there and wait for me while you come back here for me.’

She smiled and rose to leave but Le Grand Duc raised a hand.

‘One last thing before you go. I have a very urgent phone call to make and I wish it made in complete privacy. Tell the manager I wish to see him. At once.’

Le Hobenaut, Tangevec and Daymel were still in their bunks, still manacled to the caravan wall. Bowman, his pierrot suit now removed and his gardien clothes saturated and still dripping, lay on the floor with his hands bound behind his back. Cecile and Lila were seated on a bench under the watchful eyes of Ferenc and Masaine. Czerda, El Brocador and Searl were seated at a table: they weren’t talking and they looked very unhappy. Their expression of unhappiness deepened as they listened to the measured tread of footsteps mounting the steps of the caravan. Le Grand Duc made his customary impressive entry. He surveyed the three seated men coldly.

‘We have to move quickly.’ His voice was brusque, authoritative and as cold as his face. ‘I have received cabled information that the police are becoming suspicious and may well by this time be certain of us – thanks to you, Czerda, and that bungling fool Searl there. Are you mad, Czerda?’

‘I do not understand, sir.’

‘That’s precisely it. You understand nothing. You were going to kill Bowman before he’d told us how he broke our ring, who his contacts are, where my eighty thousand francs are. Worst of all, you cretins, you were going to kill him publicly. Can’t you see the enormous publicity that would have received? Secrecy, stealth, those are my watch-words.’

‘We know where the eighty thousand francs are, sir.’ Czerda tried to salvage something from the wreck.

‘Do we? Do we? I suspect you have been fooled again, Czerda. But that can wait. Do you know what will happen to you if the French police get you?’ Silence. ‘Do you know the rigorous penalties French courts impose on kidnappers?’ Still silence. ‘Not one of you here can hope to escape with less than ten years in prison. And if they can trace Alexandre’s murder to you…’

Le Grand Duc looked at El Brocador and the four gypsies in turn. From the expression on their faces it was quite clear that they knew what would happen if the murder could be traced to them.

‘Very well, then. From this moment on your futures and your lives depend entirely on doing exactly what I order – it is not beyond my powers to rescue you from the consequences of your own folly. Exactly. Is that understood?’

All five men nodded. No one said anything.

‘Very well. Unchain those men. Untie Bowman. If the police find them like that – well, it’s all over. We use guns and knives to guard them from now on. Bring all their womenfolk in here – I want all our eggs in one basket. Go over our proposed plans, Searl. Go over them briefly and clearly so that even the most incompetent nincompoop, and that includes you, can understand what we have in mind. Bring me some beer, someone.’

Searl cleared his throat self-consciously and looked distinctly unhappy. The arrogance, the quietly cold competence with which he’d confronted Czerda in the confessional booth that morning had vanished as if it had never existed.

‘Rendezvous any time between last night and Monday night. Fast motor-boat waiting – ’

Le Grand Duc sighed in despair and held up a hand.

‘Briefly and clearly, Searl. Clearly. Rendezvous where, you fool? With whom?’

‘Sorry, sir.’ The Adam’s apple in the thin scraggy neck bobbed up and down as Searl swallowed nervously. ‘Off Palavas in the Gulf of Aigues-Mortes. Freighter Canton.’

‘Bound for?’

‘Canton.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Recognition signals – ’

‘Never mind that. The motor-boat?’

‘At Aigues-Mortes on the Canal du Rhone a Sete. I was going to have it moved down to Le Grau du Roi tomorrow – I didn’t think – I – ’

‘You never have done,’ Le Grand Duc said wearily. ‘Why aren’t those damned women here? And those manacles still fixed? Hurry.’ For the first time he relaxed and smiled slightly. ‘I’ll wager our friend Bowman still doesn’t know who our three other friends are. Eh, Searl?’

‘I can tell him?’ Searl asked eagerly. The propspect of climbing out of the hot seat and transferring the spotlight elsewhere was clearly an attractive one.

‘Suit yourself.’ Le Grand Duc drank deeply of his beer. ‘Can it matter now?’

‘Of course not.’ Searl smiled widely. ‘Let me introduce Count le Hobenaut, Henri Tangevec and Serge Daymel. The three leading rocket fuel experts on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Chinese wanted them badly, they have been so far unable to develop a vehicle to carry their nuclear warheads. Those men could do it. But there wasn’t a single land border between China and Russia that could be used, not a single neutral country that was friendly to both the great powers and wouldn’t have looked too closely at irregular happenings. So Czerda brought them out. To the West. No one would ever dream that such men would defect to the West – the West has its own fuel experts. And, at the frontiers, no one ever asks questions of gypsies. Of course, if the three men had clever ideas, their wives would have been killed. If the women got clever ideas, the men would have been killed.’

‘Or so the women were told,’ Le Grand Duc said contemptuously. ‘The last thing that we wanted was that any harm should come to those men. But women – they’ll believe anything.’ He permitted himself a small smile of satisfaction. ‘The simplicity – if I may say so myself, the staggering simplicity of true genius. Ah, the women. Aigues-Mortes, and with speed. Tell your other caravans, Czerda, that you will rendezvous with them in the morning in Saintes-Maries. Come, Lila, my dear.’

‘With you?’ She stared at him in revulsion. ‘You must be mad. Go with you?’

‘Appearances must be maintained, now more than ever. What suspicion is going to attach to a man with so beautiful a young lady by his side? Besides, it’s very hot and I require someone to hold my parasol.’

Just over an hour later, still fuming and tightlipped, she lowered the parasol as the green RollsRoyce drew up outside the frowning walls of Aigues-Mortes, the most perfectly preserved Crusader walled city in Europe. Le Grand Duc descended from the car and waited till Czerda had brought the breakdown truck towing the caravan to a halt.

‘Wait here,’ he ordered. ‘I shall not be long.’ He nodded to the Rolls. ‘Keep a sharp eye on Miss Delafont there. You apart, no others are on any account to show themselves.’

He glanced up the road towards Saintes-Maries. Momentarily, it was deserted. He marched quickly away and entered the bleak and forbidding town by the north gate, turned right into the car-park and took up position in the concealment of a barrel organ. The operator, a decrepit ancient who, in spite of the heat of the day, was wearing two overcoats and a felt hat, looked up from the stool where he had been drowsing and scowled. Le Grand Duc gave him ten francs. The operator stopped scowling, adjusted a switch and began to crank a handle: the screeching cacophonous result was an atonal travesty of a waltz that no composer alive or dead would ever have acknowledged as his. Le Grand Duc winced, but remained where he was.

Within two minutes a black Mercedes passed in through the archway, turned right and stopped. The Chinese couple got out, looked neither to left or right, and walked hurriedly down the main street – indeed, Aigues-Mortes’s only street, towards the tiny café-lined square near the centre of the town. More leisurely and at a discreet distance Le Grand Duc followed.

The Chinese couple reached the square and halted uncertainly on a corner by a souvenir shop, not far from the statue of St Louis. No sooner had they done so than four large men in plain dark clothes emerged from the shop, two from each door, and closed in on them. One of the men showed the Chinese man something cupped in the palm of his hand. The Chinese man gesticulated and appeared to protest violently but the four large men just shook their heads firmly and led the couple away to a pair of waiting Citroëns.

Le Grand Duc nodded his head in what could not easily have been mistaken for anything other than satisfaction, turned and retraced his steps to the waiting car and caravan.

Less than sixty seconds’ drive took them to a small jetty on the Canal du Rhône à Sète, a canal that links the Rhône to the Mediterranean at Le Grau du Roi and runs parallel to the western wall of Aigues-Mortes. At the end of the jetty was moored a thirty-five-foot power-boat with a large glassed-in cabin and an only slightly smaller cockpit aft. From the lines of the broad flaring bows it appeared to be a vessel capable of something unusual in terms of speed.

The Rolls and the caravan pulled clear off the road and halted so that the rear of the caravan was less than six feet from the head of the jetty. The transfer of the prisoners from the caravan to the boat was performed smoothly, expeditiously and in such a fashion that it could have roused no suspicion in even the most inquisitive of bystanders: in point of fact the nearest person was a rod fisherman a hundred yards away and his entire attention was obviously concentrated on what was happening at the end of his line some feet below the surface of the canal. Ferenc and Searl, each with a barely concealed pistol, stood on the jetty near the top of a short gangway while Le Grand Duc and Czerda, similarly unostentatiously armed, stood on the poop of the boat while first the three scientists, then their womenfolk, then Bowman, Cecile and Lila filed aboard. Under the threat of the guns they took up position on the settees lining the side of the cabin.

Ferenc and Searl entered the cabin, Searl advancing to the helmsman’s position. For a moment Le Grand Duc and Masaine remained in the cockpit, checking that they were quite unobserved, then Le Grand Duc entered the cabin, pocketed his gun and rubbed his hands in satisfaction.

‘Excellent, excellent, excellent.’ He sounded positively cheerful. ‘Everything, as always, under control. Start the engines, Searl!’ He turned and poked his head through the cabin doorway. ‘Cast off, Masaine!’

Searl pressed buttons and the twin engines started up with a deep powerful throb of a sound, but a sound by no means loud enough to muffle a short sharp exclamation of pain: the sound emanated from Le Grand Duc, who was still looking aft through the doorway.

‘Your own gun in your own kidney,’ Bowman said. ‘No one to move or you die.’ He looked at Ferenc and Czerda and Searl and El Brocador. At least three of them, he knew, were armed. He said: ‘Tell Searl to stop the engines.’

Searl stopped the engines without having to have the message relayed through Le Grand Duc.

‘Tell Masaine to come here,’ Bowman said. ‘Tell him I’ve got a gun in your kidney.’ He looked round the cabin: no one had moved. ‘Tell him to come at once or I’ll pull the trigger.’

‘You wouldn’t dare!’

‘You’ll be all right,’ Bowman said soothingly.

‘Most people can get by on one kidney.’

He jabbed the gun again and Le Grand Duc gasped in pain. He said hoarsely: ‘Masaine! Come here at once. Put your gun away. Bowman has his gun on me.’

There was a few seconds’ silence, then Masaine appeared in the doorway. No profound thinker at the best of times, he was obviously uncertain as to what to do: the sight of Czerda, Ferenc, Searl and El Brocador busy doing nothing convinced him that nothing was, for the moment, the wise and prudent course of action. He moved into the cabin.

‘Now we come up against the delicate balance of power,’ Bowman said conversationally. He was still pale and haggard, he felt unutterably tired and stiff and sore all over: but he felt a prince compared to the condition he’d been in two hours previously. ‘A question of checks and balances. How much influence and authority can I exert on you standing here with this gun in my hand? How much of my will can I impose? So much – but only so much.’

He pulled Le Grand Duc back by the shoulder, stepped to one side and watched Le Grand Duc collapse heavily on a settee, a well-made settee which didn’t break. Le Grand Duc glared at Bowman, the aristocratic voltage in the blue eyes turned up to maximum power: Bowman remained unshrivelled.

‘It’s difficult to believe just looking at you,’ Bowman went on to Le Grand Duc, ‘but you’re almost certainly the most intelligent of your band of ruffians. Not, of course, that that would call for any great intelligence. I have a gun here and it is in my hand. There are four others here who also have guns and although they’re not in their hands at the present moment it wouldn’t take very long for the guns to get there. If it came to a fight, I think it extremely unlikely that I could get all four before one of you – more probably two – got me. I am not a Wild Bill Hickock. Moreover, there are eight innocent people here – nine, if you count me – and a gun-fight in this enclosed space would almost certainly result in sone of them being hurt, even killed. I wouldn’t like that any more than I would like being shot myself.’

‘Get to the point,’ Le Grand Duc growled.

‘It’s obvious, surely. What demands can I make upon you that wouldn’t be too great to precipitate this gun-fight that I’m sure we all want to avoid? If I told you to hand over your guns, would you, quietly and tamely, with the knowledge that long prison sentences and probably indictments for murder awaited you all? I doubt it. If I said I’ll let you go but take the scientists and their women, would you go along with that? Again, I doubt it, for they would be living evidence of your crimes, with the result that if you set foot anywhere in Western Europe you’d finish in prison and if you set foot in Eastern Europe you’d be lucky to end up in a Siberian prison camp as the Communists aren’t too keen on people who kidnap their top scientists. In fact, there’d be no place left for you in any part of Europe. You’d just have to go on the Canton and sail all the way home with her and I don’t think you’d find life in China all it’s cracked up to be – by the Chinese, of course.

‘On the other hand, I doubt whether you’d be prepared to fight to the death to prevent the deaprture of the two young ladies and myself. They’re only ciphers, a couple of romantically minded and rather empty-headed young holidaymakers who thought it rather fun to get mixed up in these dark goings on.’ Bowman carefully avoided looking at the two girls. ‘I admit that it is possible for me to start trouble, but I don’t see I would get very far: It would be only my word against yours, there wouldn’t be a shred of evidence I could offer and there’s no way I can think of how you could be tied up with the murder in the cave. The only evidence lies in the scientists and their wives and they would be half-way to China before I could do anything. Well?’

‘I accept your reasoning,’ Le Grand Duc said heavily. ‘Try to make us give ourselves or the scientists up – or their wives – and you’d never leave this boat alive. You and those two young fools there are, as you say, another matter. You can arouse suspicion, but that’s all you can do: better that than have two or three of my men die uselessly.’

‘It might even be you,’ Bowman said.

‘The possibility had not escaped me.’

‘You’re my number one choice of hostage and safe conduct,’ Bowman said.

‘I rather thought I might be.’ Le Grand Duc rose with obvious reluctance to his feet.

‘I don’t like this,’ Czerda said. ‘What if – ’

‘You want to be the first to die?’ Le Grand Duc asked wearily. ‘Leave the thinking to me, Czerda.’

Czerda, obviously ill at ease, said no more. At a gesture from Bowman the two girls left the cabin and climbed the gangway. Bowman, walking backwards with his gun a few inches from Le Grand Duc’s midriff, followed. At the top of the gangway Bowman said to the girls: ‘Get back and out of sight.’

He waited ten seconds then said to Le Grand Duc: ‘Turn round.’ Le Grand Duc turned. Bowman gave him a hefty shove that set him stumbling, almost falling, down the gangway. Bowman threw himself flat: there was always the off-chance of someone or ones down there changing their minds. But no shots were fired, there was no sound of footsteps on the gangway. Bowman raised a cautious head. The engines had started up again.

The power-boat was already twenty yards away and accelerating. Bowman rose quickly and, followed by Cecile and Lila, ran to the Rolls. Carita gazed at him in astonishment.

‘Out!’ Bowman said.

Carita opened her mouth to protest but Bowman was in no mood for protests. He jerked open the door and practically lifted her on to the road. Immediately afterwards he was behind the wheel himself.

‘Wait!’ Cecile said. ‘Wait! We’re coming with – ’

‘Not this time.’ He leaned down and plucked Cecile’s handbag from her. She stared at him, slightly open-mouthed, but said nothing. He went on: ‘Go into the town. Phone the police in Saintes-Maries, tell them there’s a sick girl in a green-and-white caravan in a lay-by a kilometre and a half north of the town and that they’re to get her to a hospital at once. Don’t tell them who you are, don’t tell them a single thing more than that. Just hang up.’ He nodded to Lila and Carita. ‘Those two will do for a start.’

‘Do for what?’ She was, understandably, bemused.

‘Bridesmaids.’

The road between Aigues-Mortes and Le Grau du Roi is only a few kilometres long and, for the most part, it parallels the canal at a distance of a few feet: the only boundary line between them, if such it can be called, is a thin line of tall reeds. It was through those reeds, less than a minute after starting up the Rolls, that Bowman caught his first glimpse of the power-boat, fewer than a hundred yards ahead. It was already travelling at an illegally high spped, its stern dug into the water, spray flying high and wide from the deflectors on the bows: the wash set up by the wake of its passing was sending waves high up both sides of the canal banks.

Searl was at the wheel, Masain, El Brocador and Ferenc were seated but keeping a watchful eye on the passengers, while Le Grand Duc and Czerda were conversing near the after door of the cabin. Czerda looked most unhappy.

He said: ‘But how can you be sure that he can bring no harm to us?’

‘I’m sure.’ The passage of time had restored Le Grand Duc to his old confident self.

‘But he’ll go to the police. He’s bound to.’

‘So? You heard what he said himself. His solitary word against all of ours? With all his evidence half-way to China? They’ll think he’s mad. Even if they don’t, there’s nothing in the world they can prove.’

‘I still don’t like it,’ Czerda said stubbornly. ‘I think – ’

‘Leave the thinking to me,’ Le Grand Duc said curtly. ‘Good God!’

There was a splintering of glass, the sound of a shot and a harsh cry of pain from Searl, who abandoned the wheel in favour of clutching his left shoulder. The boat swerved violently and headed straight for the left bank: it would unquestionably have struck it had not Czerda, although older than any of his companions and the farthest from the wheel, reacted with astonishing speed, hurled himself forward and spun the wheel hard to starboard. He succeeded in preventing the power-boat from burying – and probably crushing – its bows in the bank, but wasn’t in time to prevent the wildly slewing boat from crashing its port side heavily against the bank with an impact that threw all who were standing, except Czerda, and quite a few who were seated, to the deck. It was at that instant that Czerda glanced through a side window and saw Bowman, at the wheel of the Rolls-Royce and less than five yards distant on the paralleling road, taking careful aim with Le Grand Duc’s pistol through an open window.

‘Down!’ shouted Czerda. He was the first down himself. ‘Flat on the floor.’

Again there came the sound of smashing glass, again the simultaneous report from the pistol, but no one was hurt. Czerda rose to a crouch, eased the throttle, handed the wheel over to Masaine, and joined Le Grand Duc and Ferenc who had already edged out, on all fours, to the poop-deck. All three men peered cautiously over the gunwale, then stood upright, thoughtfully holding their guns behind their backs.

The Rolls had dropped thirty yards back. Bowman was being blocked by a farm tractor towing a large four-wheeled trailer, and balked from overtaking by several cars approaching from the south.

‘Faster,’ Czerda said to Masaine. ‘Not too fast – keep just ahead of that tractor. That’s it. That’s it.’ He watched the last of the north-bound cars go by on the other side of the road. ‘Here he comes now.’

The long green nose of the Rolls appeared in sight beyond the tractor. The three men in the cockpit levelled their guns and the tractor-driver, seeing them, braked and swerved so violently that he came to a rest with the right front wheel of his tractor overhanging the bank of the canal. Its abrupt braking and swerve brought the entire length of the car completely and suddenly in sight.

Bowman, gun cocked in hand and ready to use, saw what was about to happen, dropped the gun and threw himself below the level of the door sills. He winced as bullet after bullet thudded into the bodywork of the Rolls. The windscreen suddenly starred and became completely opaque. Bowman thrust his fist through the bottom of the glass, kicked the accelerator down beyond the detente and accelerated swiftly away. It was obvious that, with the element of surprise gone, he stood no chance whatsoever against the three armed men in the poop. He wondered vaguely how Le Grand Duc felt about the sudden drop in the resale market value of his Rolls.

He drove at high speed past the arena on his left into the town of Grau du Roi, skidding the car to a halt at the approaches to the swing bridge that crossed the canal and connected the two sides of the town. He opened Cecile’s bag, peeled money from the roll of Swiss francs he had taken from Czerda’s caravan, put the roll back in the bag, thrust the bag into a cubby-hole, hoped to heaven the citizens of Grau du Roi were honest, left the car and ran down the quayside.

He slowed down to a walk as he approached the craft moored along the left bank, just below the bridge. It was a wide-beamed, high-prowed fishing boat, of wooden and clearly very solid construction, that had seen its best days some years ago. Bowman approached a grey-jerseyed fisherman of middle age who was sitting on a bollard and lethargically mending a net.

‘That’s a fine boat you’ve got there,’ Bowman said in his best admiring tourist fashion. ‘Is it for rent?’

The fisherman was taken aback by the directness of the approach. Matters involving finance were customarily approached with a great deal more finesse.

‘Fourteen knots and built like a tank,’ the owner said proudly. ‘The finest wooden-hulled fishing boat in the south of France. Twin Perkins diesels. Like lightning! And so strong. But only for charter, m’sieur. And even then only when the fishing is bad.’

‘Too bad, too bad.’ Bowman took out some Swiss francs and fingered them. ‘Not even for an hour? I have urgent reasons, believe me.’ He had, too. In the distance he could hear the rising note of Le Grand Duc’s power-boat.

The fisherman screwed up his eyes as if in thought: it is not easy to ascertain the denomination of foreign banknotes at a distance of four feet. But sailors’ eyes are traditionally keen. He stood and slapped his thigh.

‘I will make an exception,’ he announced, then added cunningly: ‘But I will have to come with you, of course.’

‘Of course. I would have expected nothing else.’ Bowman handed over two one-thousand Swiss franc notes. There was a legerdemain flick of the wrist and the notes disappeared from sight.

‘When does m’sieur wish to leave?’

‘Now.’ He could have had the boat anyway, Bowman knew, but he preferred Czerda’s banknotes to the waving of a gun as a means of persuasion: that he would eventually have to wave his gun around he did not doubt.

They cast off, went aboard and the fisherman started the engines while Bowman peered casually aft. The sound of the power-boat’s engines was very close now. Bowman turned and watched the fisherman push the throttles forward as he gave the wheel a turn to starboard. The fishing boat began to move slowly away from the quayside.

‘It doesn’t seem too difficult,’ Bowman observed. ‘To handle it, I mean.’

‘To you, no. But it takes a lifetime of knowledge to handle such a vessel.’

‘Could I try now?’

‘No, no. Impossible. Perhaps when we get to the sea – ’

‘I’m afraid it will have to be now. Please.’

‘In five minutes – ’

‘I’m sorry. I really am.’ Bowman produced his pistol, pointed with it to the starboard for’ard corner of the wheel-house. ‘Please sit down there.’

The fisherman stared at him, relinquished the wheel and moved across to the corner of the wheel-house. He said quietly, as Bowman took over the wheel: ‘I knew I was a fool. I like money too much, I think.’

‘Don’t we all.’ Bowman glanced over his shoulder. The power-boat was less than a hundred yards from the bridge. He opened the throttles wide and the fishing boat began to surge forward.

Bowman dug into his pocket, came up with the last three thousand francs of Czerda’s money that he had on him and threw it across to the man. ‘This will make you even more foolish.’

The fisherman stared at the notes, made no attempt to pick them up. He whispered: ‘When I am dead, you will take it away. Pierre des Jardins is not a fool.’

‘When you are dead?’

‘When you kill me. With that pistol.’ He smiled sadly. ‘It is a wonderful thing to have a pistol, no?’

‘Yes.’ Bowman reversed hold on his pistol, caught it by the barrel and threw it gently across to the fisherman. ‘Do you feel wonderful too, now?’

The man stared at the pistol, picked it up, pointed it experimentally at Bowman, laid it down, picked up and pocketed the money, picked up the pistol a second time, rose, crossed to the wheel and replaced the pistol in Bowman’s pocket. He said: ‘I’m afraid I am not very good at firing those things, m’sieur.’

‘Neither am I. Look behind you. Do you see a power-boat coming up?’

Pierre looked. The power-boat was no more than a hundred yards behind. He said: ‘I see it.

I know it. My friend Jean – ’

‘Sorry. Later about your friend.’ Bowman pointed ahead to where a freighter was riding out in the gulf. ‘That’s the freighter Canton. A Communist vessel bound for China. Behind us, in the power-boat, are evil men who wish to put aboard that vessel people who do not wish to go there. It is my wish to stop them.’

‘Why?’

‘If you have to ask why I’ll take this pistol from my pocket and make you sit down again.’ Bowman looked quickly behind him: the powerboat was barely more than fifty yards behind.

‘You are British, of course?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are an agent of your government?’

‘Yes.’

‘What we call your Secret Service?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are known to our government?’

‘I am to your Deuxième Bureau. Their boss is my boss.’

‘Boss?’

‘Chief. Chef.’

Pierre sighed. ‘It has to be true. And you wish to stop this boat coming up?’ Bowman nodded. ‘Then please move over. This is a job for an expert.’

Bowman nodded again, took the gun from his pocket, moved to the starboard side of the wheelhouse and wound down the window. The powerboat was less than ten feet astern, not more than twenty feet away on a parallel course and coming up fast. Czerda was at the wheel now, with Le Grand Duc by his side. Bowman raised his pistol, then lowered it again as the fishing boat leaned over sharply and arrowed in on the power-boat. Three seconds later the heavy oaken bows of the fishing boat smashed heavily into the port quarter of the other vessel.

‘That was, perhaps, more or less what you had in mind, m’sieur?’ Pierre asked.

‘More or less,’ Bowman admitted. ‘Now please listen. There is something you should know.’

The two boats moved apart on parallel courses. The power-boat, being the faster, pulled ahead, inside its cabin there was considerable confusion.

‘Who was that madman?’ Le Grand Duc demanded.

‘Bowman!’ Czerda spoke with certainty.

‘Guns out!’ Le Grand Duc shouted. ‘Guns out!

Get him!’

‘No.’

‘No? No? You dare countermand – ’

‘I smell petrol. In the air. One shot – poof.

Ferenc, go and check the port tank.’ Ferenc departed and returned within ten seconds.

‘Well?’

‘The tank is ruptured. At the bottom. The fuel is nearly gone.’ Even as he spoke the port engine faltered, spluttered and stopped. Czerda and Le Grand Duc looked at each other: nothing was said.

Both boats had by now cleared the harbour and were out in the open sea of the Gulf of AiguesMortes. The power-boat, on one engine now, had dropped back until it was almost parallel with the fishing boat. Bowman nodded to Pierre, who nodded in turn. He spun the wheel rapidly, their vessel angled in sharply, they made violent contact again in exactly the same place as previously, then sheered off.

‘God damn it all!’ Aboard the power-boat Le Grand Duc was almost livid with fury and making no attempt to conceal it. ‘He’s holed us! He’s holed us! Can’t you avoid him?’

‘With one engine, it is very difficult to steer.’ Under the circumstances, Czerda’s restraint was commendable. He was in no way exaggerating. The combination of a dead port engine and a holed port quarter made the maintenance of a straight course virtually impossible: Czerda was no seaman and even with his best efforts the powerboat was now pursuing a very erratic course indeed.

‘Look!’ Le Grand Duc said sharply. ‘What’s that?’

About three miles away, not more than halfway towards Palavas, a large and very old fashioned freighter, almost stopped in the water, was sending a message by signalling lamp.

‘It’s the Canton!’ Searl said excitedly. He so far forgot himself as to stop rubbing the now padded flesh wound on top of his shoulder. ‘The Canton! We must send a recognition signal. Three long, three short.’

‘No!’ Le Grand Duc was emphatic. ‘Are you mad? We musn’t get them involved in this. The international repercussions – look out!’

The fishing boat was veering again. Le Grand Duc and Ferenc rushed to the cockpit and loosed off several shots. The windows in the wheelhouse of the fishing boat starred and broke, but Bowman and Pierre had already dropped to the deck which Le Grand Duc and Ferenc had to do at almost exactly the same moment as the heavy oaken stern of the fishing boat crashed into the port quarter at precisely the spot where they were standing.

Five times inside the next two minutes the manoeuvre was repeated, five times the powerboat shuddered under the crushing assaults. By now, at Le Grand Duc’s orders, all firing had ceased: ammunition was almost exhausted.

‘We must keep the last bullets for when and where they will do the most good.’ Le Grand Duc had become very calm. ‘Next time – ’

‘The Canton is leaving!’ Searl shouted. ‘Look, she has turned away.’

They looked. The Canton was indeed turning away, beginning to move with increasing speed through the water.

‘What else did you expect?’ Le Grand Duc asked. ‘Never fear, we shall see her again.’

‘What do you mean?’ Czerda demanded.

‘Later. As I was saying – ’

‘We’re sinking!’ Searl’s voice was almost a scream. ‘We’re sinking!’ He was in no way exaggerating: the power-boat was now deep in the water, the sea pouring in through gaps torn in the hull by the bows of the fishing boat.

‘I am aware of that,’ Le Grand Duc said. He turned to Czerda. ‘They’re coming again. Hard a starboard – to your right, quickly. Ferenc, Searl, El Brocador, come with me.’

‘My shoulder,’ Searl wailed.

‘Never mind your shoulder. Come with me.’

The four men stood just inside the doorway of the cabin as the fishing boat came at them again.

But this time the power-boat, though sluggish and far from responsive because of its depth in the water, had succeeded in turning away enough to reduce the impact to the extent that the two boats merely grazed each other. As the wheel-house of the fishing boat passed by the cabin of the powerboat, Le Grand Duc and his three men rushed out into the cockpit. Le Grand Duc waited his moment then, with that speed and agility so surprising in a man of his bulk, stood on the gunwale and flung himself on to the poop of the fishing boat. Within two seconds the others had followed.

Ten seconds after that Bowman turned round sharply as the port door of the wheel-house opened abruptly and Ferenc and Searl stood framed there, both with guns in their hands.

‘No.’ Bowman spun again to locate the voice behind him. He hadn’t far to look. The guns of Le Grand Duc and El Brocador were less than a foot from his face. Le Grand Duc said: ‘Enough is enough?’

Bowman nodded. ‘Enough is enough.’

CHAPTER 10

Fifteen minutes later, with the first shades of evening beginning to fall, the fishing boat, a curiously unperturbed Pierre des Jardins at the wheel, moved placidly up the Canal du Rhône à Sète. The three scientists and their womenfolk, the last of whom had been hauled aboard only seconds before the power-boat had sunk, were seated on the foredeck under the concealed guns of the gypsies, for all the world like vacation trippers enjoying a leisurely cruise in the warm summer evening. All the glass had been knocked out from the broken windows and the few bullet holes in the woodwork of the wheel-house were discreetly camouflaged by El Brocador and Masaine, who were leaning negligently against the starboard side of the structure. Pierre apart, the only two other occupants of the wheel-house were Bowman and Le Grand Duc, the latter with a gun in his hand.

A few kilometres up the canal they passed by the tractor and trailor that had so abruptly left the road when the shooting contest between the Rolls and the powerboat had begun. The tractor was as it had been, a front wheel still over-hanging the canal: clearly and understandably, the driver had deemed it wiser to wait for assistance rather than risk a watery grave for his tractor by trying to extricate it under its own power. The driver, oddly enough, was still there, pacing up and down with a legitimately thunderous look on his face.

Czerda joined the three men in the wheelhouse. He said worriedly: ‘I do not like it, I do not like it at all. It is much too quiet. Perhaps we are going to some kind of trap. Surely some person – ’

‘Does that make you feel happier?’ Le Grand Duc pointed in the direction of Aigues-Mortes: two black police cars, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing, were approaching at high speed. ‘Something tells me that our friend the tractor driver has been complaining to someone.’

Le Grand Duc’s guess proved to be correct. The police cars swept by and almost at once started slowing as the tractor driver stood in the middle of the road and frantically waved his arms. They stopped and uniformed figures jumped out of the car and surrounded the gesticulating tractor driver who was obviously retelling his story with a great deal of verve and gusto.

‘Well, if the police are bothering somebody else, they can’t very well be bothering us at the same time,’ Le Grand Duc observed philosophically. ‘Happier now, Czerda?’

‘No,’ Czerda said and looked as if he meant it. ‘Two things. Dozens of people, hundreds for all I know, must have seen what was happening out in the gulf. Why did no one stop us on the way in? Why did no one report what was happening to the police?’

‘Quite frankly, I don’t know,’ Le Grand Duc said thoughtfully. ‘I can guess, though. Same thing happens time and again – when large numbers of people see something happening they invariably leave it to someone else to do something about it. Why, there have been cases of pedestrians watching a man being beaten to death in the street and not lifting a hand to help. Mankind is curiously apathetic about that sort of thing. Maybe it’s a natural reluctance to step into the limelight. I do not profess to know. All that matters is that we came up the harbour without causing an eyebrow to be lifted. Your other question? You had two?’

‘Yes,’ Czerda was grim. ‘What in God’s name are we going to do now?’

‘That is no problem.’ Le Grand Duc smiled. ‘Did I not tell you that we would see the good ship Canton again?’

‘Yes, but how – ’

‘How long will it take us to drive to Port le Bouc?’

‘Port le Bouc?’ Czerda furrowed his brow. ‘With the caravan and truck?’

‘How else?’

‘Two and a half hours. Not more than three.

Why?’

‘Because that’s where the Canton has instructions to await us if any difficulty arose at the Palavas rendezvous. It will remain there until tomorrow – and we will be there tonight. Don’t you know by now, Czerda, that I always have another string to my bow? Many strings, in fact. And there, tonight, the scientists and their women will be taken aboard. So will Bowman. And so, to eliminate any possibility of risk whatsoever, will the two young ladies and, I’m afraid, this unfortunate fisherman here.’ Pierre des Jardins glanced at Le Grand Duc, lifted an eyebrow, then concentrated on his task again: it was a minuscule reaction for a man listening to what was virtually a death sentence. ‘And then, Czerda, you and your men will be as free as the air for when Bowman and his three friends arrive in China they will simply disappear and never be heard of again. The only witnesses against you will be gone for ever and no breath of suspicion will ever attach itself to you or your men on either side of the Iron Curtain.’

‘If I have ever questioned you in the past, I apologize.’ Czerda spoke slowly, almost reverently. ‘This is genius.’ He looked as a man might look after the Forth Bridge had been lifted off his back.

‘Elementary, elementary.’ Le Grand Duc waved a disparaging hand. ‘Now, then. We shall be in sight of the jetty shortly and we don’t want to give the young ladies any shocks to their delicate nervous systems, the kind of shock, for instance, that might prompt them to drive away at speed with the truck and caravan before we even reach the jetty. Everybody into the fish-hold now and to keep out of sight till the word is given. You and I will remain here – seated, of course – while Bowman takes the vessel alongside. Understood?’

‘Understood.’ Czerda looked at him admiringly. ‘You think of everything!’

‘I try,’ Le Grand Duc said modestly. ‘I try.’

The three girls with a youngster seated on a scooter were at the head of the jetty as Bowman, apparently alone, brought the boat alongside. They ran down, secured the ropes he threw them and jumped aboard. Cecile and Lila were halfsmiling, half-prehensive, wondering what news he bore: Carita remained in the background, aloof and rather remote.

‘Well?’ Cecile demanded. ‘Well, tell us. What happened?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Bowman said. ‘Things have gone wrong.’

‘Not for us,’ Le Grand Duc said jovially. He stood up, gun in hand, accompanied by Czerda, similarly equipped, and beamed at the girls. ‘Not really, I must say. How nice to see you again, my dear Carita. Had a pleasant time with the two young ladies?’

‘No,’ Carita said shortly. ‘They wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘Prejudice, sheer prejudice. Right, Czerda, everyone on deck and in the caravan inside a minute.’ He looked towards the head of the jetty. ‘And who is that youth with the scooter?’

‘That’s José!’ Czerda was as near a mood of excited anticipation as it would ever be possible for him to achieve. ‘The boy I sent to get the money that Bowman stole from me – from us, I mean.’ He stepped out on deck and waved an arm. ‘José! José!’

José swung his leg over the scooter, came down the jetty and jumped aboard. He was a tall thin youth with an enormous shock of black hair, beady eyes and a prematurely knowing expression.

‘The money?’ Czerda asked. ‘You have the money?’

‘What money?’

‘Of course, of course. To you, only a brown paper parcel.’ Czerda smiled indulgently. ‘But it was the right key?’

‘I don’t know.’ José’s mental processes quite evidently knew nothing about the intelligent expression on his face.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know whether it was the right key or the wrong key,’ José explained patiently. ‘All I know is that there are no safe-deposit boxes in the railway station in Aries.’

There was a fairly lengthy silence during which a number of thoughts, none of them particularly pleasant, passed through the minds of several of those present, then Bowman cleared his throat and said apologetically: ‘I’m afraid this is all rather my fault. That was the key to my suitcase.’

There was another silence, more or less of the same length, then Le Grand Duc said with immense restraint: ‘The key to your suitcase. I would have expected nothing else. Where are the eighty thousand francs, Mr Bowman?’

‘Seventy thousand. I’m afraid I had to deduct a little of it. Current expenses, you know.’ He nodded to Cecile. ‘That dress alone cost me – ’

‘Where are they?’ Le Grand Duc shouted. He was through with restraint for the day. ‘The seventy thousand francs?’

‘Ah yes. Well, now.’ Bowman shook his head. ‘There’s so much happened since last night – ’

‘Czerda!’ Le Grand Duc was back on balance again but it was a close thing. ‘Put your pistol to Miss Dubois’s head. I shall count three.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Bowman said. ‘I left it at the Les Baux caves. By Alexandre.’

‘By Alexandre?’

‘I’m not an idiot,’ Bowman said tiredly. ‘I knew the police might be there this morning. Rather, would be there and might find Alexandre. But it’s close by.’

Le Grand Duc gave him a long, thoughtful stare then turned to Czerda. ‘This would be only a minor detour on our way to Port le Bouc?’

‘Another twenty minutes. No more.’ He nodded towards Bowman. ‘The canal here is deep. Do we need him along, sir?’

‘Only,’ Le Grand Duc said ominously, ‘until we discover whether he’s telling the truth or not.’

Night had fallen when Czerda pulled up in the lay-by at the head of the Valley of Hell. Le Grand Duc, who, along with El Brocador, had been Czerda’s passenger in the front of the towing truck, got out, stretched himself and said: ‘The ladies we will leave here. Masaine will stay behind to guard them. All the others will come with us.’

Czerda looked his puzzlement. ‘We require so many?’

‘I have my purpose.’ Le Grand Duc was at his most enigmatic. ‘Do you question my judgement?’

‘Now? Never!’

‘Very well, then.’

Moments later a large group of people was moving through the terrifying vastness of the tomb-like caves. There were eleven of them in all – Czerda, Ferenc, Searl, El Brocador, the three scientists, the two girls, Bowman and Le Grand Duc. Several carried torches, their beams reflecting weirdly, whitely, off the great limestone walls. Czerda led the way, briskly, confidently, until he came to a cavern where a broken landfall led up to the vague outline of a starlit sky above. He advanced to the jumbled base of the landfall and stopped.

‘This is the place,’ he said.

Le Grand Duc probed with his torch. ‘You are sure?’

‘I am certain.’ Czerda directed his torch towards a mound of stones and rubble. ‘Incredible, is it not? Those idiots of police haven’t even found him yet!’

Le Grand Duc directed his own torch at the mound. ‘You mean – ’

‘Alexandre. This is where we buried him.’

‘Alexandre is of no concern any more.’ Le Grand Duc turned to Bowman. ‘The money, if you please.’

‘Ah, yes. The money.’ Bowman shrugged and smiled. ‘This is the end of the road, I’m afraid. There is no money.’

‘What!’ Le Grand Duc advanced and thrust the barrel of his gun into Bowman’s ribs. ‘No money?’

‘It’s there, all right. In a bank. In Aries.’

‘You fooled us?’ Czerda said incredulously. ‘You brought us all this way – ’

‘Yes.’

‘You bought your life for two hours?’

‘For a man under sentence of death two hours can be a very long time.’ Bowman smiled, looked at Cecile, then turned back to Czerda. ‘But also a very short time.’

‘You bought your life for two hours!’ Czerda seemed more astonished at this fact than he was concerned by the loss of the money.

‘Put it that way.’

Czerda brought up his gun. Le Grand Duc stepped forward, seized Czerda’s wrist and pressed his gun-hand down. He said in a low, harsh, bitter voice: ‘My privilege.’

‘Sir.’

Le Grand Duc pointed his gun at Bowman, then jerked it to the right. For a moment Bowman seemed to hesitate, then shrugged. They moved away together, Le Grand Duc’s gun close to Bowman’s back, round a right-angled corner into another cavern. After a few moments the sound of a shot reverberated through the caverns, its echoes followed by the thud as of a falling body. The scientists looked stunned, a complete and final despair written in their faces. Czerda and his three companions looked at one another in grim satisfaction. Cecile and Lila clung to each other, both, in the reflected wash of torchlight, ashen-faced and in tears. Then all heard the measured tread of returning footsteps and stared at the right-angled corner where the two men had disappeared.

Le Grand Duc and Bowman came into view at the same instant. Both of them carried guns, rock-steady in their hands.

‘Don’t,’ Bowman said.

Le Grand Duc nodded. ‘As my friend observes, please, please, don’t.’

But after a moment of total disbelief, Ferenc and Searl did. There were two sharp reports, two screams and the sound, sharply metallic, of two guns striking the limestone floor. Ferenc and Searl stood in stupefied agony, clutching shattered shoulders. The second time, Bowman reflected, that Searl had been wounded in that shoulder but he could bring himself to feel no pity for he knew now that it had been Searl who had used the whip to flay the skin from Tina’s back.

Bowman said: ‘Some people take a long time to learn.’

‘Incorrect, Neil. Some people never learn.’ Le Grand Duc looked at Czerda, the expression on his face indicating that he would have preferred to be looking elsewhere. ‘We had nothing against you, from a judicial point of view, that is. Not a shred of proof, not a shred of evidence. Not until you, personally and alone, led us to Alexandre’s grave and admitted to the fact that you had buried him. In front of all those witnesses. Now you know why Mr Bowman bought his life for two hours.’ He turned to Bowman. ‘Incidentally, where is the money, Neil?’

‘In Cecile’s handbag. I just kind of put it there.’

The two girls advanced, slowly, uncertainly. There were no longer any signs of tears but they were totally uncomprehending. Bowman pocketed his gun, went to them and put his arms round the shoulders of both.

‘It’s all right, now,’ he said. ‘It’s all over, it really is.’ He lifted his hand from Lila’s shoulders, pressed her cheek with his fingertips till she turned to look at him in dazed enquiry. He smiled. ‘The Duc de Croytor is indeed the Duc de Croytor. My boss, these many years.’

EPILOGUE

Beneath the frowning cliffs of Les Baux, the Baumanière slept peacefully in the light of a yellow moon. Bowman, sitting on a chair and sipping a drink, lifted an eyebrow as Cecile emerged from a room, tripped and almost fell over an extension cord. She recovered herself and sat beside him.

‘Twentyfour hours,’ she said. ‘Only twenty-four hours. I just can’t believe it.’

‘You want to get yourself a pair of spectacles,’ Bowman observed.

‘I have a pair of spectacles, thank you.’

‘Then you want to wear them.’ Bowman put a kindly hand on hers. ‘After all, you’ve got your man now.’

‘Oh, do be quiet.’ She made no attempt to remove her hand. ‘How’s that young girl?’

‘Tina’s in hospital, in Arles. She’ll be around in a couple of days. Her father and Madame Zigair are there with her now. The Hobenauts and Tangevecs are having dinner inside. Not a very festive occasion, I should imagine, but I would say they must be experiencing a certain sense of relief, wouldn’t you? And Pierre des Jardins, by this time, must be home in Le Grau du Roi.’

‘I can’t believe it.’ Bowman peered at her, then realized that she had been only half listening to him and was now on another topic altogether. ‘He – he’s your boss?’

‘Charles? He is indeed. Nobody believes anything about Charles. I’m ex-Army Intelligence, ex-military attaché in Paris. I’ve got another job now.’

‘I’ll bet you have,’ she said feelingly.

‘The only other person who knows anything about this is Pierre, the fishing-boat skipper. That’s why he maintained such a marvellous sang-froid. He’s sworn to secrecy. So are you.’

‘I don’t know if I like that.’

‘You’ll do what you’re told. Charles, I can assure you, is much higher up the pecking order than I am. We’ve been together for eight years. For the last two years we’ve known that Iron Curtain gypsies have been smuggling things across the frontier. What, we didn’t know. This time, of all people, the Russians tipped us off – but even they didn’t know what was really happening.’

‘But this Gaiuse Strome – ’

‘Our Chinese pal in Arles and elsewhere? Temporarily held by the French police. He was getting too close to things and Charles had him copped on a technicality. They’ll have to let him go. Diplomatic immunity. He arranged it all – he’s the Chinese military attaché in Tirhana.’

‘Tirhana?’

‘Albania.’

She reached into her handbag, brought out her glasses, looked at him closely and said: ‘But we were told – ’

‘We?’

‘Lila and myself, we’re secretaries in the Admiralty. To keep an eye on you. We were told that one of you was under suspicion – ’

‘I’m sorry. Charles and I arranged that. There we were, a goodie and a baddie. We could never be seen together. We had to have a channel of communication. Girl-friends chatter. Girls get on the phone to their bosses back home. We had the channel.’

‘You fixed all this?’ She withdrew her hand. ‘You knew – ’

‘I’m sorry. We had to do it.’

‘You mean – ’

‘Yes.’

‘Strawberry birthmark – ’

‘Sorry again.’ Bowman shook his head admiringly. ‘But I must say it was the most complete dossier I’ve ever seen.’

‘I despise you! I detest you! You’re the most utterly contemptible – ’

‘Yes, I know, and I’m not worried. What does worry me is that so far we’ve only managed to fix up two bridesmaids and I said – ’

‘Two,’ she said firmly, ‘will be quite enough.’

Bowman smiled, rose, offered her his hand and together they walked arm in arm to the balustrade and looked down. Almost directly beneath them were the Duc de Croytor and Lila, seated at, inevitably, a loaded table. It was apparent that Le Grand Duc was under a very considerable emotional strain for despite the fact that he held a papersheathed leg of lamb in his hand he was not eating.

‘Good God!’ he was saying. ‘Good God!’ He peered at his blonde companion’s lovely face from a distance of about six inches. ‘I turn pale at the very thought. I might have lost you forever. I never knew!’

‘Charles!’

‘You are a Cordon Bleu cook?’

‘Yes, Charles.’

‘Brochettes de queues de langoustines au beurre blanc?’

‘Yes, Charles.’

‘Poulet de la ferme au champagne?’

‘Yes, Charles.’

‘Filets de sole Retival?’

‘But of course.’

‘Pintadeau aux morilles?’

‘My speciality.’

‘Lila. I love you. Marry me!’

‘Oh, Charles!’

They embraced in front of the astonished eyes of the other guests. Symbolically, perhaps, Le Grand Duc’s leg of lamb fell to the floor.

Still arm in arm, Bowman led Cecile down to the patio. Bowman said: ‘Don’t be fooled by Romeo down there. He doesn’t give a damn about the cuisine. Not where your friend is concerned.’

‘The big bold baron is a little shy boy inside?’

Bowman nodded. ‘The making of old-fashioned proposals is not exactly his forte.’

‘Whereas it is yours?’

Bowman ushered her to a table and ordered his drinks. ‘I don’t quite understand.’

‘A girl likes to be asked to marry,’ she said.

‘Ah! Cecile Dubois, will you marry me?’

‘I may as well, I suppose.’

‘Touché!’ He lifted his glass. ‘To Cecile.’

‘Thank you, kind sir.’

‘Not you. Our second-born.’

They smiled at each other, then turned to look at the couple at the next table. Le Grand Duc and Lila were still gazing rapturously into each other’s eyes, but Le Grand Duc, nevertheless, was back on balance again. Imperiously, he clapped his hands together.

‘Encore!’ said Le Grand Duc.

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Bear Island

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First Sterling edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1971

© 1971 HarperCollinsPublishers

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

To even the least sensitive and perceptive beholder the Morning Rose, at this stage of her long and highly chequered career, must have seemed illnamed, for if ever a vessel could fairly have been said to be approaching, if not actually arrived at, the sunset of her days it was this one. Officially designated an Arctic Steam Trawler, the Morning Rose, 560 gross tons, 173 feet in length, 30 in beam and with a draught, unladen but fully provisioned with fuel and water, of 14.3 feet, had, in fact, been launched from the Jarrow slipways as far back as 1926, the year of the General Strike.

The Morning Rose, then, was far gone beyond the superannuation watershed, she was slow, creaking, unstable and coming apart at the seams. So were Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes. The Morning Rose consumed a great deal of fuel in relation to the foot-pounds of energy produced. So did Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, malt whisky for Captain Imrie, Jamaican rum for Mr Stokes. And that was what they were doing now, stoking up on their respective fuels with the steadfast dedication of those who haven’t attained septuagenarian status through sheer happenstance.

As far as I could see, none of the sparse number of diners at the two long fore-and-aft tables was stoking up very much on anything. There was a reason for this, of course, the same reason that accounted for the poor attendance at dinner that night. It was not because of the food which, while it wouldn’t cause any sleepless nights in the kitchens of the Savoy, was adequate enough, nor was it because of any aesthetic objections our cargo of creative artists might have entertained towards the dining saloon’s decor, which was, by any standards, quite superb: it was a symphony in teak furniture and wine-coloured carpets and curtains, not, admittedly, what one would look to find on the average trawler, but then, the average trawler, when its fishing days are over—as the Morning Rose’s were deemed to be in 1956—doesn’t have the good fortune to be re-engined and converted to a luxury yacht by, of all people, a shipping millionaire whose enthusiasm for the sea was matched only by his massive ignorance of all things nautical.

The trouble tonight lay elsewhere, not within the ship but without. Three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, where we at the present moment had the debatable fortune to be, the weather conditions can be as beautifully peaceful as any on earth, with mirror-smooth, milky-white seas stretching from horizon to horizon under a canopy of either washed-out blue or stars that are less stars than little chips of frozen fire in a black, black sky. But those days are rare and, usually, to be found only in that brief period that passes for summer in those high latitudes. And whatever summer there had been was long gone. We were deep into late October now, the period of the classical equinoctial gales, and there was a real classical equinoctial beauty blowing up right then. Moxen and Scott, the two stewards, had prudently drawn the dining saloon curtains so that we couldn’t see quite how classical it was.

We didn’t have to see it. We could hear it and we could feel it. We could hear the wild threnody of the gale in the rigging, a high-pitched, ululating, atonic sound, as lonely, lost and eerie as a witch’s lament. We could hear, at monotonously regular intervals, the flat explosive clap of sound as the bluff bows of the trawler crashed into the troughs of the steep-sided waves marching steadily eastwards under the goad of that bitter wind born on the immensity of the Greenland icecap, all of seven hundred miles away. We could hear the constantly altering variation in the depth of the engine note as the propeller surged upwards, almost clearing water level, then plunged deep down into the sea again.

And we could feel the storm, a fact that most of those present clearly found a great deal more distressing than just listening to it. One moment, depending upon which side of the fore-and-aft tables we were sitting, we would be leaning sharply to our left or right as the bows lurched and staggered up the side of a wave: the next, we would be leaning as sharply in the other direction as the stern, in turn, rode high on the crest of the same wave. To compound the steadily increasing level of misery and discomfort the serried ranks of waves beyond the damask drapes were slowly but ominously beginning to break down into confused seas which violently accentuated the Morning Rose’s typical fishing-boat propensity for rolling continuously in anything short of mill-pond conditions. The two different motions, lateral and transverse, were now combining to produce an extremely unpleasant corkscrewing effect indeed.

Because I’d spent most of the past eight years at sea, I wasn’t experiencing any distressing symptoms myself, but I didn’t have to be a doctor—which my paper qualifications declared me to be—to diagnose the symptoms of mal de mer. The wan smile, the gaze studiously averted from anything that resembled food, the air of rapt communication with the inner self, all the signs were there in plenty. A very mirth-provoking subject, sea-sickness, until one suffers from it oneself: then it ceases to be funny any more. I’d dispensed enough sea-sickness pills to turn them all buttercup-yellow, but these are about as effective against an Arctic gale as aspirin is against cholera.

I looked round and wondered who would be the first to go. Antonio, I thought, that tall, willowy, exquisite, rather precious but oddly likeable Roman with the shock of ludicrously blond and curling hair. It is a fact that when a person reaches that nadir of nausea which is the inevitable prelude to violent sickness the complexion does assume a hue which can only be described as greenish: in Antonio’s case it was more a tinge of apple-green chartreuse, an odd coloration that I’d never seen before, but I put it down to his naturally sallow complexion. Anyway, no question but that it was the genuine symptom of the genuine illness: another particularly wild lurch and Antonio was on his feet and out of the saloon at a dead run—or as near a dead run as his land-lubber legs could achieve on that swaying deck—without either farewell or apology.

Such is the power of suggestion that within a very few seconds and on the very next lurch three other passengers, two men and a girl, hurriedly rose and left. And such is the power of suggestion compounded that within two minutes more there were, apart from Captain Imrie, Mr Stokes and myself, only two others left: Mr Gerran and Mr Heissman.

Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, seated at the heads of their respective and now virtually deserted tables, observed the hurried departure of the last of the sufferers, looked at each other in mild astonishment, shook their heads and got on with the business of replenishing their fuel reserves. Captain Imrie, a large and splendidly patriarchal figure with piercing blue eyes that weren’t much good for seeing with, had a mane of thick white hair that was brushed straight back to his shoulders, and, totally obscuring the dinner tie he affected for dinner wear, an even more impressively flowing beard that would have been the envy of many a biblical prophet: as always, he wore a gold-buttoned, double-breasted jacket with the thick white ring of a commodore of the Royal Navy, to which he wasn’t entitled, and, partly concealed by the grandeur of his beard, four rows of medal ribbons, to which he was. Now, still shaking his head, he lifted his bottle of malt scotch from its container—not until that evening had I understood the purpose of that two-foot-high wrought-iron contraption bolted to the saloon deck by the side of his chair—filled his glass almost to the top and added the negligible amount of water required to make it brimming full. It was at this precise moment that the Morning Rose reared unusually high on the crest of a wave, hovered for what appeared to be an unconscionably long time, then fell both forwards and sideways to plunge with a resounding, shuddering crash into the shoulder of the next sea. Captain Imrie didn’t spill a drop: for any indication he gave to the contrary he might have been in the tap-room of the Mainbrace in Hull, which was where I’d first met him. He quaffed half the contents of his glass in one gulp and reached for his pipe. Captain Imrie had long mastered the art of dining gracefully at sea.

Mr Gerran, clearly, hadn’t. He gazed down at his lamb chops, brussels sprouts, potatoes, and glass of hock which weren’t where they ought to have been—they were on his napkin and his napkin was on his lap—with a vexed frown on his face. This was, in its small way, a crisis, and Otto Gerran could hardly be said to be at his ineffectual best when faced with crisis of any kind. But for young Moxen, the steward, this was routine: his own napkin at the ready and bearing a small plastic bucket he’d apparently conjured from nowhere, he set about effecting running repairs while Gerran gazed downwards with an expression of perplexed distaste.

Seated, Otto Gerran, apart from his curiously narrow, pointed cranium that widened out to broad, fleshy jowls, looked as if he might have been cast in one of the standard moulds which produce the vast majority of human shapes and forms: it was not until he stood up, a feat he performed with great difficulty and as infrequently as possible, that one appreciated how preposterous this misconception was. Gerran stood five feet two inches in his elevator shoes, weighed two hundred and forty-five pounds and, were it not for his extremely ill-fitting clothes—one would assume that the tailor just gave up—was the nearest thing to a perfect human sphere I’d ever clapped eyes on. He had no neck, long slender sensitive hands and the smallest feet I’ve ever seen for a man of his size. The salvage operation over, Gerran looked up and at Imrie. His complexion was puce in colour, with the purple much more in evidence than the brown. This did not mean that he was angry, for Gerran never showed anger and was widely believed to be incapable of it: puce was as standard for him as the peaches and cream of the mythical English rose. His coronary was at least fifteen years overdue.

‘Really, Captain Imrie, this is preposterous.’ For a man of his vast bulk, Gerran had a surprisingly high-pitched voice: surprisingly, that is, if you weren’t a medical practitioner. ‘Must we keep heading into this dreadful storm?’

‘Storm?’ Captain Imrie lowered his glass and looked at Gerran in genuine disbelief. ‘Did you say “storm”? A little blow like this?’ He looked across to the table where I was sitting with Mr Stokes. ‘Force Seven, you would say, Mr Stokes? A touch of Eight, perhaps?’

Mr Stokes helped himself to some more rum, leaned back and deliberated. He was as bereft of cranial and facial hair as Captain Imrie was overendowed with it. With his gleaming pate, tightlydrawn brown face seamed and wrinkled into a thousand fissures, and a long, thin, scrawny neck, he looked as aged and as ageless as a Galapagos turtle. He also moved at about the same speed. Both he and Captain Imrie had gone to sea together—in mine-sweepers, as incredibly far back as World War I—and had remained together until they had officially retired ten years previously. Nobody, the legend went, had ever heard them refer to each other except as Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes. Some said that, in private, they used the terms Skipper and Chief (Mr Stokes was the Chief Engineer) but this was discounted as an unsubstantiated and unworthy rumour which did justice to neither man.

Moments passed, then Mr Stokes, having arrived at a measured opinion, delivered himself of it. ‘Seven,’ he said.

‘Seven.’ Captain Imrie accepted the judgement as unhesitatingly as if an oracle had spoken and poured himself another drink: I thanked whatever gods there be for the infinitely reassuring presence of Smithy, the mate, on the bridge. ‘You see, Mr Gerran? Nothing.’ As Gerran was at that moment clinging frantically to a table that was inclined at an angle of 30 degrees, he made no reply. ‘A storm? Dearie me, dearie me. Why, I remember the very first time that Mr Stokes and I took the Morning Rose up to the Bear Island fishing grounds, the very first trawler ever to fish those waters and come back with full holds, 1928, I think it was—’ ‘1929,’ Mr Stokes said.

‘1929.’ Captain Imrie fixed his bright blue eyes on Gerran and Johann Heissman, a small, lean, pale man with a permanently apprehensive expression: Heissman’s hands were never still. ‘Now, that was a storm! We were with a trawler out of Aberdeen, I forget its name—’

‘The Silver Harvest,’ Mr Stokes said.

‘The Silver Harvest. Engine failure in a Force Ten.

Two hours she was broadside to the seas, two hours before we could get a line aboard. Her skipper— her skipper—’

‘MacAndrew. John MacAndrew.’

‘Thank you, Mr Stokes. Broke his neck. Towed his boat—and him with his broken neck in splints— for thirty hours in a Force Ten, four of them in a Force Eleven. Man, you should have seen yon seas. I tell you, they were mountains, just mountains. The bows thirty feet up and down, up and down, rolling over on our beam ends, hour after hour, every man except Mr Stokes and myself coughing his insides up—’ He broke off as Heissman rose hurriedly to his feet and ran from the saloon. ‘Is your friend upset, Mr Gerran?’

‘Couldn’t we heave to or whatever it is you do?’ Gerran pleaded. ‘Or run for shelter?’

‘Shelter? Shelter from what? Why, I remember—’

‘Mr Gerran and his company haven’t spent their lives at sea, Captain,’ I said.

‘True, true. Heave to? Heaving to won’t stop the waves. And the nearest shelter is Jan Mayen— and that’s three hundred miles to the west—into the weather.’

‘We could run before the weather. Surely that would help?’

‘Aye, we could do that. She’d steady up then, no doubt about it. If that’s what you want, Mr Gerran. You know what the contract says—captain to obey all orders other than those that will endanger the vessel.’

‘Good, good. Right away, then.’

‘You appreciate, of course, Mr Gerran, that this blow might last another day or so?’

With amelioration of the present sufferings practically at hand Gerran permitted himself a slight smile. ‘We cannot control the caprices of Mother Nature, Captain.’

‘And that we’ll have to turn almost ninety east?’

‘In your safe hands, Captain.’

‘I don’t think you are quite understanding. It will cost us two, perhaps three days. And if we run east, the weather north of North Cape is usually worse than it is here. Might have to put into Hammerfest for shelter. Might lose a week, maybe more. I don’t know how many hundred pounds a day it costs you to hire the ship and crew and pay your own camera crew and all those actors and actresses—I hear tell that some of those people you call stars can earn a fortune in just no time at all—’ Captain Imrie broke off and pushed back his chair. ‘What am I talking about? Money will mean nothing to a man like you. You will excuse me while I call the bridge.’

‘Wait.’ Gerran looked stricken. His parsimony was legendary throughout the film world and Captain Imrie had touched, not inadvertently, I thought, upon his tenderest nerve. ‘A week! Lose a whole week?’

‘If we’re lucky.’ Captain Imrie pulled his chair back up to the table and reached for the malt.

‘But I’ve already lost three days. The Orkney cliffs, the sea, the Morning Rose—not a foot of background yet.’ Gerran’s hands were out of sight but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been wringing them.

‘And your director and camera crew on their backs for the past four days,’ Captain Imrie said sympathetically. It was impossible to say whether a smile lay behind the obfuscatory luxuriance of moustache and beard. ‘The caprices of nature, Mr Gerran.’

‘Three days,’ Gerran said again. ‘Maybe another week. A thirty-three day location budget, Kirkwall to Kirkwall.’ Otto Gerran looked ill, clearly both the state of his stomach and his film finances were making very heavy demands upon him. ‘How far to Bear Island, Captain Imrie?’

‘Three hundred miles, give or take the usual. Twenty-eight hours, if we can keep up our best speed.’

‘You can keep it up?’

‘I wasn’t thinking about the Morning Rose. It can stand anything. It’s your people, Mr Gerran. Nothing against them, of course, but I’m thinking they’d be more at home with those pedal boats in the paddling ponds.’

‘Yes, of course, of course.’ You could see that this aspect of the business had just occurred to him. ‘Dr Marlowe, you must have treated a great deal of sea-sickness during your years in the Navy.’ He paused, but as I didn’t deny it, he went on: ‘How long do people take to recover from sickness of this kind?’

‘Depends how sick they are.’ I’d never given the matter any thought, but it seemed a logical enough answer. ‘How long they’ve been ill and how badly. Ninety rough minutes on a cross-Channel trip and you’re as right as rain in ten minutes. Four days in an Atlantic gale and you’ll be as long again before you’re back on even keel.’

‘But people don’t actually die of sea-sickness, do they?’

‘I’ve never known of a case.’ For all his usual indecisiveness and more than occasional bumbling ineptitude which tended to make people laugh at him—discreetly and behind his back, of course—Otto, I realized for the first time and with some vague feeling of surprise, was capable of determination that might verge on the ruthless. Something to do with money, I suppose. ‘Not by itself, that is. But with a person already suffering from a heart condition, severe asthma, bronchitis, ulcerated stomach—well, yes, it could see him off.’

He was silent for a few moments, probably carrying out a rapid mental survey of the physical condition of cast and crew, then he said: ‘I must admit that I’m a bit worried about our people. I wonder if you’d mind having a look over them, just a quick check? Health’s a damn sight more important than any profit—hah! profit, in these days!—that we might make from the wretched film. As a doctor I’m sure you whole-heartedly agree.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Right away.’ Otto had to have something that had made him the household name that he had become in the past twenty years and one had to admire this massive and wholly inadmirable hypocrisy that was clearly part of it. He had me all ways. I had said that sea-sickness alone did not kill so that if I were to state categorically that some member or members of his cast or crew were in no condition to withstand any further punishment from the sea he would insist on proof of the existence of some disease which, in conjunction with sea-sickness, might be potentially lethal, a proof that, in the first place, would have been very difficult for me to adduce in light of the limited examination facilities available to me aboard ship and, in the second place, would have been impossible anyhow, for every single member of cast and crew had been subjected to a rigorous insurance medical before leaving Britain: if I gave a clean bill of health to all, then Otto would press on with all speed for Bear Island, regardless of the sufferings of ‘our people’ about whom he professed to be so worried, thereby effecting a considerable saving in time and money: and, in the remote event of any of them inconsiderately dying upon our hands, why, then, as the man who had given the green light, I was the one in the dock.

I drained my glass of inferior brandy that Otto had laid on in such meagre quantities and rose. ‘You’ll be here?’

‘Yes. Most co-operative of you, Doctor, most.’

‘We never close,’ I said.

I was beginning to like Smithy though I hardly knew him or anything about him: I was never to get to know him, not well. That I should ever get to know him in my professional capacity was unthinkable: six feet two in his carpet slippers and certainly nothing short of two hundred pounds, Smithy was as unlikely a candidate for a doctor’s surgery as had ever come my way.

‘In the first-aid cabinet there.’ Smithy nodded towards a cupboard in a corner of the dimly-lit wheel-house. ‘Captain Imrie’s own private elixir. For emergency use only.’

I extracted one of half a dozen bottles held in place by felt-lined spring clamps and examined it under the chart-table lamp. My regard for Smithy went up another notch. In latitude 70° something north and aboard a superannuated trawler, however converted, one does not look to find Otard-Dupuy VSOP.

‘What constitutes an emergency?’ I asked.

‘Thirst.’

I poured some of the Otard-Dupuy into a small glass and offered it to Smithy, who shook his head and watched me as I sampled the brandy, then lowered the glass with suitable reverence.

‘To waste this on a thirst,’ I said, ‘is a crime against nature. Captain Imrie isn’t going to be too happy when he comes up here and finds me knocking back his special reserve.’

‘Captain Imrie is a man who lives by fixed rules. The most fixed of the lot is that he never appears on the bridge between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Oakley—he’s the bo’sun—and I take turns during the night. Believe me, that way it’s safer for everyone all round. What brings you to the bridge, Doctor—apart from this sure instinct for locating VSOP?’

‘Duty. I’m checking on the weather prior to checking on the health of Mr Gerran’s paid slaves. He fears they may start dying off like flies if we continue on this course in these conditions.’ The conditions, I’d noted, appeared to be deteriorating, for the behaviour of the Morning Rose, especially its degree of roll, was now distinctly more uncomfortable than it had been: perhaps it was just a function of the height of the bridge but I didn’t think so.

‘Mr Gerran should have left you at home and brought along his palm-reader or fortune-teller.’ A very contained man, educated and clearly intelligent, Smithy always seemed to be slightly amused. ‘As for the weather, the 6 p.m. forecast was as it usually is for these parts, vague and not very encouraging. They haven’t,’ he added superfluously, ‘a great number of weather stations in those parts.’

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s not going to improve.’ He dismissed the weather and smiled. ‘I’m not a great man for the small-talk, but with the Otard-Dupuy who needs it? Take the weight off your feet for an hour, then go tell Mr Gerran that all his paid slaves, as you call them, are holding a square dance on the poop.’

‘I suspect Mr Gerran of having a suspicious checking mind. However, if I may—?’

‘My guest.’

I helped myself again and replaced the bottle in the cabinet. Smithy, as he’d warned, wasn’t very talkative, but the silence was companionable enough. Presently he said: ‘Navy, aren’t you, Doc?’

‘Past tense.’

‘And now this?’

‘A shameful come-down. Don’t you find it so?’

‘Touché.’ I could dimly see the white teeth as he smiled in the half-dark. ‘Medical malpractice, flogging penicillin to the wogs or just drunk in charge of a surgery?’

‘Nothing so glamorous. “Insubordination” is the word they used.’

‘Snap. Me too.’ A pause. ‘This Mr Gerran of yours. Is he all right?’

‘So the insurance doctors say.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘You can’t expect me to speak ill of my employer.’ Again there was that dimly-seen glimpse of white teeth.

‘Well, that’s one way of answering my question. But, well, look, the bloke must be loony—or is that an offensive term?’

‘Only to psychiatrists. I don’t speak to them. Loony’s fine by me. But I’d remind you that Mr Gerran has a very distinguished record.’

‘As a loony?’

‘That, too. But also as a film-maker, a producer.’

‘What kind of producer would take a film unit up to Bear Island with winter coming on?’

‘Mr Gerran wants realism.’

‘Mr Gerran wants his head examined. Has he any idea what it’s like up there at this time of year?’

‘He’s also a man with a dream.’

‘No place for dreamers in the Barents Sea. How the Americans ever managed to put a man on the moon—’

‘Our friend Otto isn’t an American. He’s a central European. If you want the makers of dreams or the peddlers of dreams, there’s the place to find them—among the headwaters of the Danube.’

‘And the biggest rogues and confidence men in Europe?’

‘You can’t have everything.’

‘He’s a long way from the Danube.’

‘Otto had to leave in a great hurry at a time when a large number of people had to leave in a great hurry. Year before the war, that was. Found his way to America—where else?—then to Hollywood—again, where else? Say what you like about Otto—and I’m afraid a lot of people do just that—you have to admire his recuperative powers. He’d left a thriving film business behind him in Vienna and arrived in California with what he stood up in.’

‘That’s not so little.’

‘It was then. I’ve seen pictures. No greyhound, but still about a hundred pounds short of what he is today. Anyway, inside just a few years— chiefly, I’m told, by switching at the psychologically correct moment from anti-Nazism to anti-Communism—Otto prospered mightily in the American film industry on the strength of a handful of nauseatingly super-patriotic pictures, which had the critics in despair and the audiences in raptures. In the mid-fifties, sensing that the cinematic sun was setting over Hollywood—you can’t see it but he carries his own built-in radar system with him—Otto’s devotion to his adopted country evaporated along with his bank balance and he transferred himself to London, where he made a number of avant-garde films that had the critics in rapture, the audiences in despair and Otto in the red.’

‘You seem to know your Otto,’ Smithy said.

‘Anybody who has read the first five pages of the prospectus for his last film would know his Otto. I’ll let you have a copy. Never mentions the film, just Otto. Misses out words like “nauseating” and “despair” of course and you have to read between the lines a bit. But it’s all there.’

‘I’d like a copy.’ Smithy thought some, then said: ‘If he’s in the red where’s the money coming from? To make this film, I mean.’

‘Your sheltered life. A producer is always at his most affluent when the bailiffs are camped outside the studio gates—rented studio, of course. Who, when the banks are foreclosing on him and the insurance companies drafting their ultimatums, is throwing the party of the year at the Savoy? Our friend the big-time producer. It’s kind of like the law of nature. You’d better stick to ships, Mr Smith,’ I added kindly.

‘Smithy,’ he said absently. ‘So who’s bankrolling your friend?’

‘My employer. I’ve no idea. Very secretive about money matters is Otto.’

‘But someone is. Backing him, I mean.’

‘Must be.’ I put down my glass and stood up. ‘Thanks for the hospitality.’

‘Even after he’s produced a string of losers? Seems barmy to me. Fishy, at least.’

‘The film world, Smithy, is full of barmy and fishy people.’ I didn’t, in fact, know whether it was or not but if this shipload was in any way representative of the cinema industry it seemed a pretty fair extrapolation.

‘Or perhaps he’s just got hold of the story to end all stories.’

‘The screenplay. There, now, you may have a point—but it’s one you would have to raise with Mr Gerran personally. Apart from Heissman, who wrote it, Gerran is the only one who’s seen it.’

It hadn’t been a factor of the height of the bridge. As I stepped out on to the starboard ladder on the lee side—there were no internal communications between bridge and deck level on those elderly steam trawlers—I was left in no doubt that the weather had indeed deteriorated and deteriorated sharply, a fact that should have probably been readily apparent to anyone whose concern for the prevailing meteorological conditions hadn’t been confronted with the unfair challenge of Otard-Dupuy. Even on this, what should have been the sheltered side of the ship, the power of the wind, bitter cold, was such that I had to cling with both hands to the handrails: and with the Morning Rose now rolling, erratically and violently, through almost fifty degrees of arc—which was wicked enough but I’d once been on a cruiser that had gone through a hundred degrees of arc and still survived—I could have used another pair of arms.

Even on the blackest night, and this was incontestably one of the blackest, it is never wholly dark at sea: it may never be possible precisely to delineate the horizon line where sea and sky meet, but one can usually look several vertical degrees above or below the horizon line and say with certainty that here is sky or here is sea: for the sea is always darker than the sky. Tonight, it was impossible to say any such thing and this was not because the violently rolling Morning Rose made for a very unstable observation platform nor because the big uneven seas bearing down from the east made for a tumbling amorphous horizon: because tonight, for the first time, not yet dense but enough to obscure vision beyond two miles, smoke frost lay on the surface of the sea, that peculiar phenomenon which one finds in Norway where the glacial land winds pass over the warm fjord waters or, as here, where the warm Atlantic air passed over the Arctic waters. All I could see, and it was enough to see, was that the tops were now being torn off the waves, white-veined on their leeward sides, and that the seas were breaking clear across the foredeck of the Morning Rose, the white and icy spume hissing into the sea on the starboard. A night for carpet slippers and the fireside.

I turned for’ard towards the accommodation door and bumped into someone who was standing behind the ladder and holding on to it for support. I couldn’t see the person’s face for it was totally obscured by wind-blown hair but I didn’t have to, there was only one person aboard with those long straw-coloured tresses and that was Mary dear: given my choice of people to bump into on the Morning Rose I’d have picked Mary dear any time. ‘Mary dear’, not ‘Mary Dear’: I’d given her that name to distinguish her from Gerran’s continuity girl whose given name was Mary Darling. Mary dear was really Mary Stuart but that wasn’t her true name either: Ilona Wisniowecki she’d been christened but had prudently decided that it wasn’t the biggest possible asset she had for making her way in the film world. Why she’d chosen a Scots name I didn’t know: maybe she just liked the sound of it.

‘Mary dear,’ I said. ‘Aboard at this late hour and on such a night.’ I reached up and touched her cheek, we doctors can get away with murder. The skin was icily cold. ‘You can carry this fresh air fanatic bit too far. Come on, inside.’ I took her arm—I was hardly surprised to find she was shivering quite violently—and she came along docilely enough.

The accommodation door led straight into the passenger lounge which, though fairly narrow, ran the full width of the ship. At the far end was a built-in bar with the liquor kept behind two glassed-in iron-grilled doors: the doors were kept permanently locked and the key was in Otto Gerran’s pocket.

‘No need to frog-march me, Doctor.’ She habitually spoke in a low-pitched quiet voice. ‘Enough is enough and I was coming in anyway.’

‘Why were you out there in the first place?’

‘Can’t doctors always tell?’ She touched the middle button of her black leather coat and from this I understood that her internal economy wasn’t taking too kindly to the roller-coaster antics of the Morning Rose. But I also understood that even had the sea been mirror-smooth she’d still have been out on that freezing upper deck: she didn’t talk much to the others nor the others to her.

She pushed the tangled hair back from her face and I could see she was very pale and the skin beneath the brown eyes tinged with the beginnings of exhaustion. In her high-cheekboned Slavonic way—she was a Latvian but, I supposed, no less a Slav for that—she was very lovely, a fact that was freely admitted and slightingly commented upon as being her only asset: her last two pictures—her only two pictures—were said to have been disasters of the first magnitude. She was a silent girl, cool and aloofly remote and I liked her, which made me a lonely minority of one.

‘Doctors aren’t infallible,’ I said. ‘At least, not this one.’ I peered at her in my best clinical fashion. ‘What’s a girl like you doing in these parts on this floating museum?’

She hesitated. ‘That’s a personal question.’

‘The medical profession are a very personal lot. How’s your headache? Your ulcer? Your bursitis? We don’t know where to stop.’

‘I need the money.’

‘You and me both.’ I smiled at her and she didn’t smile back so I left her and went down the companionway to the main deck.

Here was located the Morning Rose’s main passenger accommodation, two rows of cabins lining the fore-and-aft central passageway. This had been the area of the former fish-holds and although the place had been steam-washed, fumigated and disinfected at the time of conversion it still stank most powerfully and evilly of cod liver oil that has lain too long in the sun. In ordinary circumstances, the atmosphere was nauseating enough: in those extraordinary ones it was hardly calculated to assist sufferers in a rapid recovery from the effects of sea-sickness. I knocked on the first door on the starboard side and went in.

Johann Heissman, horizontally immobile on his bunk, looked like a cross between a warrior taking his rest and a medieval bishop modelling for the stone effigy which in the fullness of time would adorn the top of his sarcophagus. Indeed, with his thin waxy fingers steepled on his narrow chest, his thin waxy nose pointing to the ceiling and his curiously transparent eyelids closed, the image of the tomb seemed particularly opposite in this case: but it was a deceptive image for a man does not survive twenty years in a Soviet hard-labour camp in Eastern Siberia just to turn in his cards from mal de mer.

‘How do you feel, Mr Heissman?’

‘Oh, God!’ He opened his eyes without looking at me, moaned and closed them again. ‘How do I feel?’

‘I’m sorry. But Mr Gerran is concerned—’

‘Otto Gerran is a raving madman.’ I didn’t take it as any indication of some sudden upsurge in his physical condition but, no question, this time his voice was a great deal stronger. ‘A crackpot! A lunatic!’

While privately conceding that Heissman’s diagnosis lay somewhere along the right lines, I refrained from comment and not out of some suitably due deference to my employer. Otto Gerran and Johann Heissman had been friends much too long for me to risk treading upon the delicate ground that well might lie between them. They had known each other, as far as I had been able to discover, since they had been students together at some obscure Danubian gymnasium close on forty years ago and had, at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, been the joint owners of a relatively prosperous film studio in Vienna. It was at this point in space and time that they had parted company suddenly, drastically and, it seemed at the time, permanently, for while Gerran’s sure instinct had guided his fleeing footsteps to Hollywood, Heissman had unfortunately taken off in the wrong direction altogether and, only three years previously, to the total disbelief of all who had known him and believed him dead for a quarter of a century, had incredibly surfaced from the bitter depths of his long Siberian winter. He had sought out Gerran and now it appeared that their friendship was as close as ever it had been. It was assumed that Gerran knew about the hows and whys of Heissman’s lost years and if this were indeed the case then he was the only man who did so for Heissman, understandably enough, never discussed his past. Only two things about the men were known for certain—that it was Heissman, who had a dozen pre-war screenplays to his credit, who was the moving spirit behind this venture to the Arctic, and that Gerran had taken him into full partnership in his company, Olympus Productions. In light of this, it behooved me to step warily and keep my comments on Heissman’s comments strictly to myself.

‘If there’s anything you require, Mr Heissman—’

‘I require nothing.’ He opened his transparent eyelids again and this time looked—or glared—at me, eyes of washed-out grey streaked with blood. ‘Save your treatment for that cretin Gerran.’

‘Treatment?’

‘Brain surgery.’ He lowered his eyelids wearily and went back to being a medieval bishop again, so I left him and went next door.

There were two men in this cabin, one clearly suffering quite badly, the other equally clearly not suffering in the slightest. Neal Divine, the unit director, had adopted a death’s door resignation attitude that was strikingly similar to that favoured by Heissman and although he wasn’t even within hailing distance of death’s door he was plainly very sea-sick indeed. He looked at me, forced a pale smile that was half apology, half recognition, then looked away again. I felt sorry for him as he lay there, but then I’d felt sorry for him ever since he’d stepped aboard the Morning Rose. A man dedicated to his craft, lean, hollow-cheeked, nervous and perpetually balanced on what seemed to be the knife-edge of agonizing decisions, he walked softly and talked softly as if he were perpetually afraid that the gods might hear him. It could have been a meaningless mannerism but I didn’t think so: no question, he walked in perpetual fear of Gerran, who was at no pains to conceal the fact that he despised him as a man just as much as he admired him as an artist. Why Gerran, a man of indisputably high intelligence, should behave in this way, I didn’t know. Perhaps he was one of that far from small group of people who harbour such an inexhaustible fund of ill-will towards mankind in general that they lose no opportunity to vent some of it on the weak, the pliant or those who are in no position to retaliate. Perhaps it was a personal matter. I didn’t know either man or their respective backgrounds well enough to form a valid judgement.

‘Ah, ’tis the good healer,’ a gravelly voice said behind me. I turned round without haste and looked at the pyjama-clad figure sitting up in his bunk, holding fast with his left hand to a bulkhead strap while with the other he clung equally firmly to the neck of a scotch bottle, three parts empty. ‘Up the ship comes and down the ship goes but naught will come between the kindly shepherd and his mission of mercy to his queasy flock. You will join me in a post-prandial snifter, my good man?’

‘Later, Lonnie, later.’ Lonnie Gilbert knew and I knew and we both knew that the other knew that later would be too late, three inches of scotch in Lonnie’s hands had as much hope as the last meringue at the vicar’s tea-party, but the conventions had been observed, honour satisfied. ‘You weren’t at dinner, so I thought—’

‘Dinner!’ He paused, examined the word he’d just said for inflexion and intonation, decided his delivery had been lacking in a proper contempt and repeated himself. ‘Dinner! Not the hogswash itself, which I suppose is palatable enough for those who lack my esoteric tastes. It’s the hour at which it’s served. Barbaric. Even Attila the Hun—’

‘You mean you no sooner pour your apéritif than the bell goes?’

‘Exactly. What does a man do?’

Coming from our elderly production manager, the question was purely rhetorical. Despite the baby-clear blue eyes and faultless enunciation, Lonnie hadn’t been sober since he’d stepped aboard the Morning Rose: it was widely questioned whether he’d been sober for years. Nobody—least of all Lonnie—seemed to care about this, but this was not because nobody cared about Lonnie. Nearly all people did, in greater or lesser degrees, dependent on their own natures. Lonnie, growing old now, with all his life in films, was possessed of a rare talent that had never bloomed and never would now, for he was cursed—or blessed—with insufficient drive and ruthlessness to take him to the top, and mankind, for a not always laudable diversity of reasons, tends to cherish its failures: and Lonnie, it was said, never spoke ill of others and this, too, deepened the affection in which he was held except by the minority who habitually spoke ill of everyone.

‘It’s not a problem I’d care to be faced with myself,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Me?’ He inclined his bald pate 45 degrees backwards, tilted the bottle, lowered it and wiped a few drops of the elixir from his grey beard. ‘Never been ill in my life. Who ever heard of a pickled onion going sour?’ He cocked his head sideways. ‘Ah!’

‘Ah, what?’ He was listening, that I could see, but I couldn’t hear a damned thing except the crash of bows against seas and the metallic drumming vibration of the ancient steel hull which accompanied each downwards plunge.

‘“The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,”’ Lonnie said. ‘“Hark! The Herald Angels.”’

I harked and this time I heard. I’d heard it many times, and with steadily increasing horror, since boarding the Morning Rose, a screechingly cacophonous racket that was fit for heralding nothing short of Armageddon. The three perpetrators of this boiler-house bedlam of sound, Josh Hendriks’s young sound crew assistants, might not have been tone stone deaf but their classical musical education could hardly be regarded as complete, as not one of them could read a note of music. John, Luke and Mark were all cast in the same contemporary mould, with flowing shoulder-length hair and wearing clothes that gave rise to the suspicion that they must have broken into a gurus’ laundry. All their spare time was spent with recording equipment, guitar, drums and xylophone in the for’ard recreation room where they rehearsed, apparently night and day, against the moment of their big break-through into the pop-record world where they intended, appropriately enough, to bill themselves as ‘The Three Apostles’.

‘They might have spared the passengers on a night like this,’ I said.

‘You underestimate our immortal trio, my dear boy. The fact that you may be one of the most excruciating musicians in existence does not prevent you from having a heart of gold. They have invited the passengers along to hear them perform in the hope that this might alleviate their sufferings.’ He closed his eyes as a raucous bellow overlaid with a high-pitched scream as of some animal in pain echoed down the passageway outside. ‘The concert seems to have begun.’

‘You can’t fault their psychology,’ I said. ‘After that, an Arctic gale is going to seem like a summer afternoon on the Thames.’

‘You do them an injustice.’ Lonnie lowered the level in the bottle by another inch then slid down into his bunk to show that the audience was over. ‘Go and see for yourself.’

So I went and saw for myself and I had been doing them an injustice. The Three Apostles, surrounded by that plethora of microphones, amplifiers, speakers and arcane electronic equipment without which the latter-day troubadours will not—and, more importantly, cannot—operate, were performing on a low platform in one corner of the recreation room and maintaining their balance with remarkable ease largely, it seemed, because their bodily gyrations and contortions, as inseparable a part of their art as the electronic aids, seemed to synchronize rather well with the pitching and rolling of the Morning Rose. Rather conservatively, if oddly, clad in blue jeans and psychedelic caftans, and bent over their microphones in an attitude of almost acolytic fervour, the three young sound assistants were giving of their uninhibited best and from what little could be seen of the ecstatic expressions on faces eighty per cent concealed at any given moment by wildly swinging manes of hair, it was plain that they thought that their best approximated very closely to the sublime. I wondered, briefly, how angels would look with ear-plugs, then turned my attention to the audience.

There were fifteen in all, ten members of the production crew and five of the cast. A round dozen of them were very clearly the worse for wear, but their sufferings were being temporarily held in abeyance by the fascination, which stopped a long way short of rapture, induced by the Three Apostles who had now reached a musical crescendo accompanied by what seemed to be some advanced form of St Vitus’ Dance. A hand touched me on the shoulder and I looked sideways at Charles Conrad.

Conrad was thirty years old and was to be the male lead in the film, not yet a big-name star but building up an impressive international reputation. He was cheerful, ruggedly handsome, with a thatch of thick brown hair that kept falling over his eyes: he had eyes of the bluest blue and most gleamingly white perfect teeth—like his name, his own—that would have transported a dentist into ecstasies or the depths of despair, depending upon whether he was primarily interested in the aesthetic or economic aspects of his profession. He was invariably friendly, courteous and considerate, whether by instinct or calculated design it was impossible to say. He cupped his hand to my ear, nodded towards the performers.

‘Your contract specifies hairshirts?’

‘No. Why? Does yours?’

‘Solidarity of the working classes.’ He smiled, looking at me with an oddly speculative glint in his eyes. ‘Letting the opera buffs down, aren’t you?’

‘They’ll recover. Anyway, I always tell my patients that a change is as good as a rest.’ The music ceased abruptly and I lowered my voice about fifty decibels. ‘Mind you, this is carrying it too far. Fact is, I’m on duty. Mr Gerran is a bit concerned about you all.’

‘He wants his herd delivered to the cattle market in prime condition?’

‘Well, I suppose you all represent a pretty considerable investment to him.’

‘Investment? Ha! Do you know that that twisted old skinflint of a beer-barrel has not only got us at fire-sale prices but also won’t pay us a penny until shooting’s over?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ I paused. ‘We live in a democracy, Mr Conrad, the land of the free. You don’t have to sell yourselves in the slave market.’

‘Don’t we just! What do you know about the film industry?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Obviously. It’s in the most depressed state in its history. Eighty per cent of the technicians and actors unemployed. I’d rather work for pennies than starve.’ He scowled, then his natural good humour reasserted itself. ‘Tell him that his prop and stay, that indomitable leading man Charles Conrad, is fit and well. Not happy, mind you, just fit and well. To be happy I’d have to see him fall over the side.’

‘I’ll tell him all of that.’ I looked around the room. The Three Apostles, mercifully, were refreshing themselves, though clearly in need of something stronger than ginger ale. I said to Conrad: ‘This little lot will get to market.’

‘Instant mass diagnosis?’

‘It takes practice. It also saves time. Who’s missing?’

‘Well.’ He glanced around. ‘There’s Heissman—’

‘I’ve seen him. And Neal Divine. And Lonnie. And Mary Stuart—not that I’d expect her to be here anyway.’

‘Our beautiful but snooty young Slav, eh?’

‘I’ll go half-way with that. You don’t have to be snooty to avoid people.’

‘I like her too.’ I looked at him. I’d only spoken to him twice, briefly. I could see he meant what he said. He sighed. ‘I wish she were my leading lady instead of our resident Mata Hari.’

‘You can’t be referring to the delectable Miss Haynes?’

‘I can and I am,’ he said moodily. ‘Femmes fatales wear me out. You’ll observe she’s not among those present. I’ll bet she’s in bed with those two damned floppy-eared hounds of hers, all of them having the vapours and high on smelling salts.’

‘Who else is missing?’

‘Antonio.’ He was smiling again. ‘According to the Count—he’s his cabin-mate—Antonio is in extremis and unlikely to see the night out.’

‘He did leave the dining-room in rather a hurry.’ I left Conrad and joined the Count at his table. The Count, with a lean aquiline face, black pencil moustache, bar-straight black eyebrows and greying hair brushed straight back from his forehead, appeared to be in more than tolerable health. He held a very large measure of brandy in his hand and I did not have to ask to know that it would be the very best cognac obtainable, for the Count was a renowned connoisseur of everything from blondes to caviare, as precisely demanding a perfectionist in the pursuit of the luxuries of life as he was in the performance of his duties, which may have helped to make him what he was, the best lighting cameraman in the country and probably in Europe. Nor did I have to wonder where he had obtained the cognac from: rumour had it that he had known Otto Gerran a very long time indeed, or at least long enough to bring his own private supplies along with him whenever Otto went on safari. Count Tadeusz Leszczynski— which nobody ever called him because they couldn’t pronounce it—had learned a great deal about life since he had parted with his huge Polish estates, precipitately and for ever, in mid-September, 1939.

‘Evening, Count,’ I said. ‘At least, you look fit enough.’

‘Tadeusz to my peers. In robust health, I’m glad to say. I take the properly prophylactic precautions.’ He touched the barely perceptible bulge in his jacket. ‘You will join me in some prophylaxis? Your penicillins and aureomycins are but witches’ brews for the credulous.’

I shook my head. ‘Duty rounds, I’m afraid. Mr Gerran wants to know just how ill this weather is making people.’

‘Ah! Our Otto himself is fit?’

‘Reasonably.’

‘One can’t have everything.’

‘Conrad tells me that your room-mate Antonio may require a visit.’

‘What Antonio requires is a gag, a straightjacket and a nursemaid, in that order. Rolling around, sick all over the floor, groaning like some miscreant stretched out on the rack.’ The Count wrinkled a fastidious nose. ‘Most upsetting, most.’

‘I can well imagine it.’

‘For a man of delicate sensibilities, you understand.’

‘Of course.’

‘I simply had to leave.’

‘Yes. I’ll have a look at him.’ I’d just pushed my chair back to the limit of its securing chain when Michael Stryker sat down in a chair beside me. Stryker, a full partner in Olympus Productions, combined the two jobs, normally separate, of production designer and construction manager— Gerran never lost the opportunity to economize. He was a tall, dark and undeniably handsome man with a clipped moustache and could readily have been mistaken for a matinee idol of the mid-thirties were it not for the fashionably long and untidy hair that obscured about ninety per cent of the polo-necked silk sweater which he habitually affected. He looked tough, was unquestionably cynical and, from what little I had heard of him, totally amoral. He was also possessed of the dubious distinction of being Gerran’s son-in-law.

‘Seldom we see you abroad at this late hour, Doctor,’ he said. He screwed a long black Russian cigarette into an onyx holder with all the care of a precision engineer fitting the tappets on a Rolls-Royce engine, then held it up to the light to inspect the results. ‘Kind of you to join the masses, esprit de corps and what have you.’ He lit his cigarette, blew a cloud of noxious smoke across the table and looked at me consideringly. ‘On second thoughts, no. You’re not the esprit de corps type. We more or less have to be. You don’t. I don’t think you could. Too cool, too detached, too clinical, too observant—and a loner. Right?’

‘It’s a pretty fair description of a doctor.’

‘Here in an official capacity, eh?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I’ll wager that old goat sent you.’

‘Mr Gerran sent me.’ It was becoming increasingly apparent to me that Otto Gerran’s senior associates were unlikely ever to clamour for the privilege of voting him into the Hall of Fame.

‘That’s the old goat I mean.’ Stryker looked thoughtfully at the Count. ‘A strange and unwonted solicitude on the part of our Otto, wouldn’t they say, Tadeusz? I wonder what lies behind it?’

The Count produced a chased silver flask, poured himself another generous measure of cognac, smiled and said nothing. I said nothing either because I’d already decided that I knew the answer to that one: even later on, in retrospect, I could not and did not blame myself, for I had arrived at a conclusion on the basis of the only facts then available to me. I said to Stryker: ‘Miss Haynes is not here. Is she all right?’

‘No, I’m afraid she’s no sailor. She’s pretty much under the weather but what’s a man to do? She’s pleading for sedatives or sleeping drugs and asking that I send for you, but of course I had to say no.’

‘Why?’

‘My dear chap, she’s been living on drugs ever since we came aboard this damned hell-ship.’ It was as well for his health, I thought, that Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes weren’t sitting at the same table. ‘Her own sea-sick tablets one moment, the ones you doled out the next, pep pills in between and barbiturates for dessert. Well, you know what would happen if she took sedatives or more drugs on top of that lot.’

‘No, I don’t. Tell me.’

‘Eh?’

‘Does she drink? Heavily, I mean?’

‘Drink? No. I mean, she never touches the stuff.’

I sighed. ‘Why don’t cobblers stick to their own lasts? I’ll leave films to you, you leave medicine to me. Any first-year medical student could tell you— well, never mind. Does she know what kind of tablets she’s taken today and how many—not that it could have been all that many or she’d have been unconscious by now?’

‘I should imagine so.’

I pushed back my chair. ‘Shell be asleep in fifteen minutes.’

‘Are you sure? I mean—’

‘Which is her room?’

‘First on the right in the passageway.’

‘And yours?’ I asked the Count.

‘First left.’

I nodded, rose, left, knocked on the first door on the right and went inside in response to a barely-heard murmur. Judith Haynes was sitting propped up in her bed with, as Conrad had predicted, a dog on either side of her—two rather beautiful and beautifully groomed cocker spaniels: I could not, however, catch any trace of smelling salts. She blinked at me with her rather splendid eyes and gave me a wan smile, at once tremulous and brave. My heart stayed where it was.

‘It was kind of you to come, Doctor.’ She had one of those dark molasses voices, as effective at close personal quarters as it was in a darkened cinema. She was wearing a pink quilted bed-jacket which clashed violently with the colour of her hair and, high round her neck, a green chiffon scarf, which didn’t. Her face was alabaster white. ‘Michael said you couldn’t help.’

‘Mr Stryker was being over-cautious.’ I sat down on the edge of the mattress and took her wrist. The cocker spaniel next me growled deep in its throat and bared its teeth. ‘If that dog bites me, I’ll clobber it.’

‘Rufus wouldn’t harm a fly, would you, Rufus darling?’

It wasn’t flies I was worried about but I kept silence and she went on with a sad smile: ‘Are you allergic to dogs, Doctor Marlowe?’

‘I’m allergic to dog bites.’

The smile faded until her face was just sad. I knew nothing about Judith Haynes except what I’d heard at second hand, and as all I’d heard had been from her colleagues in the industry I heavily discounted about ninety per cent of what had been told me: the only thing I had so far learned with any certainty about the film world was that back-biting, hypocrisy, double-dealing, innuendo and character assassination formed so integral a part of its conversational fabric that it was quite impossible to know where the truth ended and falsehood began. The only safe guide, I’d discovered, was to assume that the truth ended almost immediately.

Miss Haynes, it was said, claimed to be twenty-four and had been, on the best authority, for the past fourteen years. This, it was said darkly, explained her predilection for chiffon scarves, for it was there that the missing years showed: equally, she may just have liked chiffon scarves. With equal authority it was stated that she was a complete bitch, her only redeeming quality being her total devotion to her two cocker spaniels and even this back-handed compliment was qualified by the observation that as a human being she had to have something or somebody to love, something or somebody to return her affection. She had tried cats, it was said, but that hadn’t worked: the cats, apparently, didn’t love her back. But one thing was indisputable. Tall, slender, with wonderful titian hair and classically beautiful in the sculptured Greek fashion, Miss Haynes, it was universally conceded, couldn’t act for toffee. Nonetheless, she was a very hot box office attraction indeed: the combination of the wistfully regal expression, which was her trade-mark, and the startling contrast of her lurid private life saw to that. Nor was her career in any way noticeably hindered by the facts that she was the daughter of Otto Gerran, whom she was said to despise, the wife of Michael Stryker, whom she was said to hate, and a full partner in the Olympus Productions company.

There was nothing much wrong with her physical condition that I could see. I asked her how many tablets of various kinds she had consumed in the course of the day and after dithering about helplessly for a bit and totting up the score with the shapely and tapering forefinger of her right hand on the shapely and tapering fingers of her left—she was alleged to be able to add up pounds and dollars with the speed and accuracy of an IBM computer—she gave me some approximate figures and in return I gave her some tablets with instructions as to how many and when to take them, then left. I didn’t prescribe any sedatives for the dogs—they looked OK to me.

The cabin occupied by the Count and Antonio was directly opposite across the passageway. I knocked twice, without reply, went inside and saw why there had been no reply: Antonio was there all right, but I could have knocked until doomsday and Antonio would not have heard me, for Antonio would never hear anything again. From the Via Veneto via Mayfair to die so squalidly in the Barents Sea: for the gay and laughing Antonio there could never have been a right or proper or suitable place to die, for if ever I’d met a man in love with life it had been Antonio: and for this cosseted creature of the sybaritic salons of the capitals of Europe to die in those bleak and indescribably bitter surroundings was so incongruous as to be shocking, so unreal as to momentarily suspend both belief and comprehension. But there he was, just there, lying there at my feet, very real, very dead.

The cabin was full of the sour-sweet smell of sickness and there was physical evidence of that sickness everywhere. Antonio lay not on his bunk but on the carpeted deck beside it, his head arched impossibly far back until it was at right angles to his body. There was blood, a great deal of blood, not yet congealed, on his mouth and on the floor by his mouth. The body was contorted into an almost impossible position, arms and legs outflung at grotesque angles, the knuckles showing ivory. Rolling around, the Count had said, sick, a man on the rack, and he hadn’t been so far out at that, for Antonio had died as a man on the rack dies, in agony. Surely to God he must have cried out, even although his throat would have been blocked most of the time, he must have screamed, he must have, he would have been unable to prevent himself: but with the Three Apostles in full cry, his cries would have gone unheeded. And then I remembered the scream I had heard when I’d been talking to Lonnie Gilbert in his cabin and I could feel the hairs prickling on the back of my neck: I should have known the difference between the high-pitched yowling of a rock singer and the scream of a man dying in torment.

I knelt, made a cursory examination, finding out no more in the process than any layman would have done, closed the staring eyes aad then, with the advent of rigor mortis in mind, straightened out the contorted limbs with an ease that I found vaguely surprising. Then I left the cabin, locked the door and hesitated for only a moment before dropping the key in my pocket: if the Count were possessed of the delicate sensibilities he claimed, he’d be glad I’d taken the key with me.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Dead?’ Otto Gerran’s puce complexion had deepened to a shade where I could have sworn it was overlaid with indigo. ‘Dead, did you say?’

‘That’s what I said.’ Otto and I were alone in the dining saloon: it was ten o’clock now and at nine-thirty sharp Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes invariably left for their cabins, where they would remain incommunicado for the next ten hours. I lifted from Otto’s table a bottle of raw fire-water on which someone had unblushingly stuck a label claiming that the contents were brandy, took it to the stewards’ pantry, returned with a bottle of Hine and sat down. It said much for Otto’s unquestioned state of shock that not only had he not appeared to note my brief absence, he even stared directly at me, unblinkingly and I’m sure unseeingly, as I poured out two fingers for myself: he registered no reaction whatsoever. Only something pretty close to a state of total shock could have held Otto’s parsimonious nature in check and I wondered what the source of this shock might be. True, the news of the death of anyone you knew can come as a shock, but it comes as a numbing shock only when the nearest and dearest are involved, and if Otto had even a measurable amount of affection for anyone, far less for the unfortunate Antonio, he concealed it with great skill. Perhaps he was, as many are, superstitious about death at sea, perhaps he was concerned with the adverse effect it might have on cast and crew, maybe he was bleakly wondering where, in the immensity of the Barents Sea, he could lay hands on a make-up artist, hairdresser and wardrobe man, for Otto, in the sacred name of economy, had combined all three normally separate jobs in the person of one man, the late Antonio. With a visibly conscious effort of will-power he looked away from the Hine bottle and focused his eyes on me.

‘How can he be dead?’

‘His heart’s stopped. His breathing’s stopped. That’s how he can be dead. That’s how anyone can be dead.’

Otto reached out for the bottle of Hine and splashed some brandy into a glass. He didn’t pour it, he literally splashed it, the spreading stain on the white tablecloth as big as my hand: his own hand was shaking as badly as that. He poured out three fingers as compared to my two, which may not sound so very much more but then Otto was using a balloon glass whereas mine was a tulip. Tremblingly, he lifted the glass to his mouth and half of its contents disappeared in one gulp, most of it down his throat but a fair proportion on his shirt-front. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if ever I found myself in a situation where all seemed lost, and the only faint hope of life depended on having one good man and true standing by my right shoulder, the name of Otto Gerran was not one that would leap automatically to my mind.

‘How did he die?’ The brandy had done some good. Otto’s voice was low just above a whisper, but it was steady.

‘In agony, I would say. If you mean why did he die, I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? You—you’re supposed to be a doctor.’ Otto was having the greatest difficulty in remaining in his seat: with one hand clutching the brandy glass, the other was barely sufficient to anchor his massive weight against the wild plunging of the Morning Rose. I said nothing so he went on: ‘Was it sea-sickness? Could that have done it?’

‘He was sea-sick, all right.’

‘But you said a man doesn’t die just from that.’

‘He didn’t die just from that.’

‘An ulcerated stomach, you said. Or heart. Or asthma—’

‘He was poisoned.’

Otto stared at me for a moment, his face registering no comprehension, then he set his glass on the table and pushed himself abruptly to his feet, no mean accomplishment for a man of his bulk. The trawler rolled wickedly. I leaned quickly forward, snatched up Otto’s glass just as it began to topple and at the same moment Otto lurched to one side and staggered across to the starboard— the lee—door of the saloon leading to the upper deck. He flung this open and even above the shrieking of the wind and the crash of the seas I could hear him being violently sick. Presently he re-entered, closed the door, staggered across the deck and collapsed into his chair. His face was ashen, I handed him his glass and he drained the contents, reached out for the bottle and re-filled his glass. He drank some more and stared at me.

‘Poison?’

‘Looked like strychnine. Had all—’

‘Strychnine? Strychnine! Great God! Strychnine! You—you’ll have to carry out a post-mortem, an—an autopsy.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish. I’ll carry out no such thing, and for a number of excellent reasons. For one thing, have you any idea what an autopsy is like? It’s a very messy business indeed, I can assure you. I haven’t the facilities. I’m not a specialist in pathology—and you require one for an autopsy. You require the consent of the next of kin—and how are you going to get that in the middle of the Barents Sea? You require a coroner’s order—no coroner. Besides, a coroner only issues an order where there’s a suspicion of foul play. No such suspicion exists here.’

‘No—no foul play? But you said—’

‘I said it looked like strychnine. I didn’t say it was strychnine. I’m sure it’s not. He seemed to show the classical symptoms of having had tetanic spasms and opisthotonos—that’s when the back arches so violently that the body rests on the head and the heels only—and his face showed pure terror: there’s nearly always this conviction of impending death at the onset of strychnine poisoning. But when I straightened him out there were no signs of tetanic contractions. Besides, the timing is all wrong. Strychnine usually shows its first effects within ten minutes and half an hour after taking the stuff you’re gone. Antonio was at least twenty minutes here with us at dinner and there was nothing wrong with him then—well, sea-sickness, that’s all. And he died only minutes ago—far too long. Besides, who on earth would want to do away with a harmless boy like Antonio? Do you have in your employ a raving psycho who kills just for the kicks of it? Does it make any kind of sense to you?’

‘No. No, it doesn’t. But—but poison. You said—’

‘Food poisoning.’

‘Food poisoning! But people don’t die of food poisoning. You mean ptomaine poisoning?’

‘I mean no such thing for there is no such thing. You can eat ptomaines to your heart’s content and you’ll come to no harm. But you can get all sorts of food poisoning—chemically contaminated— mercury in fish, for instance—edible mushrooms that aren’t edible mushrooms, edible mussels that aren’t edible mussels—but the nasty one is salmonella. And that can kill, believe me. Just at the end of the war one variety of it, salmonella enteritidis, laid low about thirty people in Stoke-on-Trent. Six of them died. And there’s an even nastier one called clostridium botulinum—a kind of half-cousin of botulinus, a charming substance that is guaranteed to wipe out a city in a night—the Ministry of Health makes it. This clostidium secretes an exotoxin—a poison—which is probably the most powerful occurring in nature. Between the wars a party of tourists at Loch Maree in Scotland had a picnic lunch—sandwiches filled with potted duck paste. Eight of them had this. All eight died. There was no cure then, there is no cure now. Must have been this or something like this that Antonio ate.’

‘I see, I see.’ He had some more brandy, then looked up at me, his eyes round. ‘Good God! Don’t you see what this means, man! We’re all at risk, all of us. This dostridium or whatever you call it could spread like wildfire—’

‘Rest easy. It’s neither infectious nor contagious.’

‘But the galley—’

‘You think that hadn’t occurred to me? The source of infection can’t be there. If it were, we’d all be gone—I assume that Antonio—before his appetite deserted him, that was—had the same as all of us. I didn’t pay any particular attention but I can find out probably from the people on either side of him—I’m sure they were the Count and Cecil.’

‘Cecil?’

‘Cecil Golightly—your camera focus assistant or something like that.’

‘Ah! The Duke.’ For some odd reason Cecil, a diminutive, shrewd and chirpy little Cockney sparrow was invariably known as the Duke, probably because it was so wildly unsuitable. ‘That little pig see anything! He never lifts his eyes from the table. But Tadeusz—well, now, he doesn’t miss much.’

‘I’ll ask. I’ll also check the galley, the food store and the cold room. Not a chance in ten thousand— I think we’ll find that Antonio had his own little supply of tinned delicacies—but I’ll check anyway. Do you want me to see Captain Imrie for you?’

‘Captain Imrie?’

I was patient. ‘The master must be notified. The death must be logged. A death certificate must be issued—normally, he’d do it himself but not with a doctor aboard—but I’ll have to be authorized. And he’ll have to make preparations for the funeral. Burial at sea. Tomorrow morning, I should imagine.’

He shuddered. ‘Yes, please. Please do that. Of course, of course, burial at sea. I must go and see John at once and tell him about this awful thing.’ By ‘John’ I assumed he meant John Cummings Goin, production accountant, company accountant, senior partner in Olympus Productions and widely recognized as being the financial controller— and so in many ways the virtual controller—of the company. ‘And then I’m going to bed. Yes, yes, to bed. Sounds terrible, I know, poor Antonio lying down there, but I’m dreadfully upset, really dreadfully upset.’ I couldn’t fault him on that one, I’d rarely seen a man look so unhappy.

‘I can bring a sedative to your cabin.’

‘No, no, I’ll be all right.’ Unthinkingly, almost, he picked up the bottle of Hine, thrust it into one of the capacious pockets of his tent-like jacket and staggered from the saloon. As far as insomnia was concerned, Otto clearly preferred homemade remedies to even the most modern pharmaceutical products.

I went to the starboard door, opened it and looked out. When Smithy had said that the weather wasn’t going to improve, he’d clearly been hedging his bets: conditions were deteriorating and, if I were any judge, deteriorating quite rapidly. The air temperature was now well below freezing and the first thin flakes of snow were driving by overhead, almost parallel to the surface of the sea. The waves were now no longer waves, just moving masses of water, capriciously tending, it seemed, in any and all directions, but in the main still bearing mainly easterly. The Morning Rose was no longer just cork-screwing, she was beginning to stagger, falling into a bridge-high trough with an explosive impact more than vaguely reminiscent of the flat, whip-like crack of a not so distant naval gun, then struggling and straining to right herself only to be struck by a following wall of water that smashed her over on her beam ends again. I leaned farther outwards, looking upwards and was vaguely puzzled by the dimly seen outline of the madly flapping flag on the foremast: puzzled, because it wasn’t streaming out over the starboard side, as it should have been, but towards the starboard quarter. This meant that the wind was moving round to the north-east and what this could portend I could not even guess: I vaguely suspected that it wasn’t anything good. I went inside, yanked the door closed with some effort, made a silent prayer for the infinitely reassuring and competent presence of Smithy on the bridge, made my way to the stewards’ pantry again and helped myself to a bottle of Black Label, Otto having made off with the last of the brandy—the drinkable brandy, that is. I took it across to the captain’s table, sat in the captain’s chair, poured myself a small measure and stuck the bottle in Captain Imrie’s convenient wrought-iron stand.

I wondered why I hadn’t told Otto the truth. I was a convincing liar, I thought, but not a compulsive one: probably because Otto struck me as being far from a stable character and with several more pegs of brandy inside him, in addition to what he had already consumed, he seemed less than the ideal confidant.

Antonio hadn’t died because he’d taken or been given strychnine. Of that I was quite certain. I was equally certain that he hadn’t died from clostridium botulinum either. The exotoxin from this particular anaerobe was quite as deadly as I had said but, fortunately, Otto had been unaware that the incubation period was seldom less than four hours and, in extreme cases, had been known to be as long as forty-eight—not that the period of incubation delay made the final results any less fatal. It was faintly possible that Antonio might have scoffed, say, a tin of infected truffles or suchlike from his homeland in the course of the afternoon, but in that case the symptoms would have been showing at the dinner table, and apart from the odd chartreuse hue I’d observed nothing untoward. It had to be some form of systematic poison, but there were so many of them and I was a long way from being an expert on the subject. Nor was there any necessary question of foul play: more people die from accidental poisoning than from the machinations of the ill-disposed.

The lee door opened and two people came staggering into the room, both young, both bespectacled, both with faces all but obscured by windblown hair. They saw me, hesitated, looked at each other and made to leave, but I waved them in and they came, closing the door behind them. They staggered across to my table, sat down, pushed the hair from their faces and I identified them as Mary Darling, our continuity girl, and Allen—nobody knew whether he had another name or whether that was his first or second one—the clapper/loader. He was a very earnest youth who had recently been asked to leave his university. He was an intelligent lad but easily bored. Intelligent but a bit short on wisdom—he regarded film-making as the most glamorous job on earth.

‘Sorry to break in on you like this, Dr Marlowe.’ Allen was very apologetic, very respectful. ‘We had no idea—to tell you the truth we were both looking for a place to sit down.’

‘And now you’ve found a place. I’m just leaving. Try some of Mr Gerran’s excellent scotch— you both look as if you could do with a little.’ They did, indeed, look very pale indeed.

‘No, thank you, Dr Marlowe. We don’t drink.’ Mary Darling—everyone called her Mary darling— was cast in an even more earnest mould than Allen and had a very prim voice to go with it. She had very long, straight, almost platinum hair that fell any old how down her back and that clearly hadn’t been submitted to the attentions of a hairdresser for years: she must have broken Antonio’s heart. She wore a habitually severe expression, enormous horn-rimmed glasses, no make-up—not even lipstick—and had about her a businesslike, competent, no-nonsense, I can-take-care-of-myself-thank-you attitude that was so transparently false that no one had the heart to call her bluff.

‘No room at the inn?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ Mary darling said, ‘it’s not very private down in the recreation room, is it? As for those three young—young—’

‘The Three Apostles do their best,’ I said mildly. ‘Surely the lounge was empty?’

‘It was not.’ Allen tried to look disapproving but I thought his eyes crinkled. ‘There was a man there. In his pyjamas. Mr Gilbert.’

‘He had a big bunch of keys in his hands.’ Mary darling paused, pressed her lips together, and went on: ‘He was trying to open the doors where Mr Gerran keeps all his bottles.’

‘That sounds like Lonnie,’ I agreed. It was none of my business. If Lonnie found the world so sad and so wanting there was nothing much I or anybody could do about it: I just hoped that Otto didn’t catch him at it. I said to Mary: ‘You could always try your cabin.’

‘Oh, no! We couldn’t do that.’

‘No, I suppose not.’ I tried to think why not, but I was too old. I took my leave and passed through the stewards’ pantry into the galley. It was small, compact, immaculately clean, a minor culinary symphony in stainless steel and white tile. At this late hour I had expected it to be deserted, but it wasn’t: Haggerty, the chief cook, with his regulation chef’s hat four-square on his greying clipped hair, was bent over some pots on a stove. He turned round, looked at me in mild surprise.

‘Evening, Dr Marlowe.’ He smiled. ‘Carrying out a medical inspection of my kitchen?’

‘With your permission, yes.’

He stopped smiling. ‘I’m afraid I do not understand, sir.’ He could be very stiff, could Haggerty, twenty-odd years in the Royal Navy had left their mark.

‘I’m sorry. Just a formality. We seem to have a case of food poisoning aboard. I’m just looking around.’

‘Food poisoning! Not from this galley, I can assure you. Never had a case in my life.’ Haggerty’s injured professional pride quite overcame any humanitarian concern he might have had about the identity of the victim or how severe his case was. ‘Twenty-seven years as a cook in the Andrew, Dr Marlowe, last six as Chief on a carrier, and if I’m to be told I don’t run a hygienic galley—’

‘Nobody’s telling you anything of the sort.’ I used to him the tone he used to me. ‘Anyone can see the place is spotless. If the contamination came from this galley, it won’t be your fault.’

‘It didn’t come from this galley.’ Haggerty had a square ruddy face and periwinkle blue eyes: the complexion, suffused with anger, was now two shades deeper and the eyes hostile. ‘Excuse me, I’m busy.’ He turned his back and started rattling his pots about. I do not like people turning their backs on me when I am talking to them and my instinctive reaction was to make him face me again, but I reflected that his pride had been wounded, justifiably so from his point of view, so I contented myself with the use of words.

‘Working very late, Mr Haggerty?’

‘Dinner for the bridge,’ he said stiffly. ‘Mr Smith and the bo’sun. They change watches at eleven and eat together then.’

‘Let’s hope they’re both fit and well by twelve.’

He turned very slowly. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I mean that what’s happened once can happen again. You know you haven’t expressed the slightest interest in the identity of the person who’s been poisoned or how ill that person is?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’

‘I find it very peculiar. Especially as the person became violently ill just after eating food prepared in this galley.’

‘I take orders from Captain Imrie,’ he said obliquely. ‘Not from passengers.’

‘You know where the captain is at this time of night. In bed and very, very sound. It’s no secret. Wouldn’t you like to come with me and see what you’ve done? To look at this poisoned person.’ It wasn’t very nice of me but I didn’t see what else I could do.

‘To see what I’ve done!’ He turned away again, deliberately placed his pots to one side and removed his chef’s hat. ‘This had better be good, Doctor.’

I led the way below to Antonio’s cabin and unlocked the door. The smell was revolting. Antonio lay as I had left him, except that he looked a great deal more dead now than he had done before: the blood had drained from face and hands leaving them a transparent white. I turned to Haggerty.

‘Good enough?’

Haggerty’s face didn’t turn white because ruddy faces with a mass of broken red veins don’t turn that way, but it did become a peculiar muddy brick colour. He stared down at the dead man for perhaps ten seconds, then turned away and walked quickly up the passage. I locked the door and followed, staggering from side to side of the passage as the Morning Rose rolled wickedly in the great troughs. I made my erratic way through the dining saloon, picked up the Black Label from Captain Imrie’s wrought-iron stand, smiled pleasantly at Mary darling and Allen—God knows what thoughts were in their minds as I passed through—and returned to the galley. Haggerty joined me after thirty seconds. He was looking ill and I knew he had been ill. I had no doubt that he had seen a great deal during his lifetime at sea but there is something peculiarly horrifying about the sight of a man who has died violently from poisoning. I poured him three fingers of scotch and he downed it at a gulp. He coughed, and either the coughing or the scotch brought some colour back to his face.

‘What was it?’ His voice was husky. ‘What— what kind of poison could kill a man like that? God, I’ve never seen anything so awful.’

‘I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. May I look round now?’

‘Christ, yes. Don’t rub it in, Doctor—well, I didn’t know, did I? What do you want to see first?’

‘It’s ten past eleven,’ I said.

‘Ten past—my God, I’d forgotten all about the bridge.’ He prepared the bridge dinner with remarkable speed and efficiency—two cans of orange juice, a tin opener, a flask of soup, and then the main course in snap-lidded metal canteens. Those he dumped in a wicker basket along with cutlery and two bottles of beer and the whole preparation took just over a minute.

While he was away—which wasn’t for more than two minutes—I examined what little open food supplies Haggerty carried in his galley, both on shelves and in a large refrigerator. Even had I been capable of it, which I wasn’t, I’d no facilities aboard for analysing food, so I had to rely on sight, taste and smell. There was nothing amiss that I could see. As Haggerty had said, he ran a hygienic galley, immaculate food in immaculate containers.

Haggerty returned. I said, Tonight’s menu, again.’

‘Orange juice or pineapple juice, oxtail—’

‘All tinned?’ He nodded. ‘Let’s see some.’ I opened two tins of each, six in all, and sampled them under Haggerty’s now very apprehensive eye. They tasted the way those tinned products usually taste, which is to say that they didn’t taste of anything very much at all, but all perfectly innocuous in their pallid fashion.

‘Main course?’ I said. ‘Lamb chops, brussels, horseradish, boiled potatoes?’

‘Right. But these things aren’t kept here.’ He took me to the adjacent cool room, where the fruits and vegetables were stored, thence below to the cold room, where sides of beef and pork and mutton swung eerily from steel hooks in the harsh light of naked bulbs. I found precisely what I had expected to find, nothing, told Haggerty that whatever had happened was clearly no fault of his, then made my way to the upper deck and along an interior passage till I came to Captain Imrie’s cabin. I tried the handle, but it was locked. I knocked several times, without result. I hammered it until my knuckles rebelled, then kicked it, all with the same result: Captain Imrie had still about nine hours’ sleep coming up and the relatively feeble noises I was producing had no hope of penetrating to the profound depths of unconsciousness he had now reached. I desisted. Smithy would know what to do.

I went to the galley, now deserted by Haggerty, and passed through the pantry into the dining saloon. Mary darling and Allen were sitting on a bulkhead settee, all four hands clasped together, pale—very pale—faces about three inches apart, gazing into each other’s eyes in a kind of mystically miserable enchantment. It was axiomatic, I knew, that shipboard romances flourished more swiftly than those on land, but I had thought those phenomena were confined to the Bahamas and suchlike balmy climes: aboard a trawler in a full gale in the Arctic I should have thought that some of the romantically essential prerequisites were wholly absent or at least present in only minimal quantities. I took Captain Imrie’s chair, poured myself a small drink and said ‘Cheers!’

They straightened and jumped apart as if they’d been connected to electrodes and I’d just made the switch. Mary darling said reproachfully: ‘You did give us a fright, Dr Marlowe.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Anyway, we were just leaving.’

‘Now I’m really sorry.’ I looked at Allen. ‘Quite a change from university, isn’t it?’

He smiled wanly. ‘There is a difference.’

‘What were you studying there?’

‘Chemistry.’

‘Long?’

‘Three years. Well, almost three years.’ Again the wan smile. ‘It took me all that time to find out I wasn’t much good at it.’

‘And you’re now?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘All the time in the world to find out what you are good at. I was thirty-three before I qualified as a doctor.’

‘Thirty-three.’ He didn’t say it but his face said it for him: if he was that old when he qualified what unimaginable burden of years is he carrying now? ‘What did you do before then?’

‘Nothing I’d care to talk about. Tell me, you two were at the captain’s table for dinner tonight, weren’t you?’ They nodded. ‘Seated more or less opposite Antonio, weren’t you?’

‘I think so,’ Allen said. That was a good start. He just thought so.

‘He’s not well. I’m trying to find out if he ate something that disagreed with him, something he may have been allergic to. Either of you see what he had to eat?’

They looked at each other uncertainly.

‘Chicken?’ I said encouragingly. ‘Perhaps some French fries?’

‘I’m sorry, Dr Marlowe,’ Mary darling said. ‘I’m afraid—well, we’re not very observant.’ No help from this quarter, obviously they were so lost in each other that they couldn’t even remember what they had eaten. Or perhaps they just hadn’t eaten anything. I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t been very observant myself. But then, I hadn’t been expecting a murder to happen along.

They were on their feet now, clinging to each other for support as the deck tried to vanish from beneath their feet. I said: ‘If you’re going below I wonder if you’d ask Tadeusz if he’d be kind enough to come up and see me here. He’ll be in the recreation room.’

‘He might be in bed,’ Allen said. ‘Asleep.’

‘Wherever he is,’ I said with certainty, ‘he’s not in bed.’

Tadeusz appeared within a minute, reeking powerfully of brandy, a vexed expression on his aristocratic features. He said without preamble: ‘Damned annoying. Most damned annoying. Do you know where I can find a master key? That idiot Antonio has gone and locked our cabin door from the inside and he must be hopped to the eyebrows with sedatives. Simply can’t waken him. Cretin!’

I produced his cabin key. ‘He didn’t lock the door from the inside. I did from the outside.’ The Count looked at me for an uncomprehending moment, then mechanically reached for his flask as shocked understanding showed in his face. Not too much shock, just a little, but I was sure that what little there was was genuine. He tilted the flask and two or three drops trickled into his glass. He reached for the Black Label, helped himself with a steady but generous hand and drank deeply.

‘He couldn’t hear me? He—he is beyond hearing?’

‘I’m sorry. Something he ate, I can’t think what else, some killer toxin, some powerful, quick-acting and deadly poison.’

‘Quite dead?’ I nodded. ‘Quite dead,’ he repeated. ‘And I told him to stop making such a grand opera Latin fuss and walked away and left a dying man.’ He drank some more scotch and grimaced, an expression that was no reflection on Johnnie Walker. ‘There are advantages in being a lapsed Catholic, Dr Marlowe.’

‘Rubbish. Sackcloth and ashes not only don’t help, they’re simply just not called for here. All right, so you didn’t suspect there was anything wrong with him. I saw him at table and I wasn’t any cleverer and I’m supposed to be a doctor. And when you left him in the cabin it was too late anyway: he was dying then.’ I helped him to some more scotch but left my own glass untouched: even one relatively sober mind around might prove to be of some help, although just how I couldn’t quite see at that moment. ‘You sat beside him at dinner. Can you remember what you ate?’

‘The usual.’ The Count, it was clear, was more shaken than his aristocratic nature would allow him to admit ‘Rather, he didn’t eat the usual.’

‘I’m not in the right frame of mind for riddles, Tadeusz.’

‘Grapefruit and sunflower seeds. That was about what he lived on. One of those vegetarian nuts.’

‘Walk softly, Tadeusz. Those nuts may yet be your pallbearers.’

The Count grimaced again. ‘A singularly illchosen remark. Antonio never ate meat. And he’d a thing against potatoes. So all he had were the sprouts and horseradish. I remember particularly well because Cecil and I gave him our horseradish, to which, it seems, he was particularly partial.’ The Count shuddered. ‘A barbarian food, fit only for ignorant Anglo-Saxon palates. Even young Cecil has the grace to detest meat offal.’ It was noteworthy that the Count was the only person in the film unit who did not refer to Cecil Golightly as the Duke: perhaps he thought he was being upstaged in the title stakes but, more probably, as a dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat himself, he objected to people taking frivolous liberties with titles.

‘He had fruit juice?’

‘Antonio had his own homemade barley water.’ The Count smiled faintly. ‘It was his contention that everything that came out of a can had been adulterated before it went into that can. Very strict on those matters, was Antonio.’

‘Soup? Any of that?’

‘Ox-tail?’

‘Of course. Anything else? That he ate, I mean?’

‘He didn’t even finish his main course—well, his sprouts and radish. You may recall that he left very hurriedly.’

‘I recall. Was he liable to sea-sickness?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t forget, I’ve known him no longer than yourself. He’s been a bit off-colour for the past two days. But then, who hasn’t?’

I was trying to think up another penetrating question when John Cummings Goin entered. His unusual surname he’d inherited from a French grandfather in the High Savoy, where, apparently, this was not an altogether uncommon name. The film crew, inevitably, referred to him as Comin’ and Goin’, but Goin was probably wholly unaware of this: he was not the sort of man with whom one took liberties.

Any other person entering the dining saloon from the main deck on a night like that would have presented an appearance that would have varied from the wind-blown to the dishevelled. Not one hair of Goin’s black, smooth, centre-parted, brushed-back hair was out of place: had I been told that he eschewed the standard proprietary hairdressing creams in favour of cow-hide glue, I would have seen no reason to doubt it. And the hairstyle was typical of the man—everything smooth, calm, unruffled and totally under control. In one area only did the comparison fall down. The hairstyle was slick, but Goin wasn’t: he was just plain clever. He was of medium height, plump without being fat, with a smooth, unlined face. He was the only man I’d ever seen wearing pince-nez, and that only for the finest of fine print which, in Goin’s line of business, came his way quite often: the pince-nez looked so inevitable that it was unthinkable that he should ever wear any other type of reading aid. He was, above all, a civilized man and urbane in the best sense of the word.

He picked up a glass from a rack, timed the wild staggering of the Morning Rose to walk quickly and surely to the seat on my right, picked up the Black Label and said: ‘May I?’

‘Easy come, easy go,’ I said. ‘I’ve just stolen it from Mr Gerran’s private supply.’

‘Confession noted.’ He helped himself. ‘This makes me an accessory. Cheers.’

‘I assume you’ve just come from Mr Gerran,’ I said.

‘Yes. He’s most upset. Sad, sad, about that poor young boy. An unfortunate business.’ That was something else about Goin, he always got his priorities right: the average company accountant, confronted with the news of the death of a member of a team, would immediately have wondered how the death would affect the project as a whole: Goin saw the human side of it first Or, I thought, he spoke of it first: I knew I was being unfair to him. He went on: ‘I understand you’ve so far been unable to establish the cause of death.’ Diplomacy, inevitably, was second nature to Goin: he could so easily and truthfully have said that I just hadn’t a clue.

So I said it for him. ‘I haven’t a clue.’

‘You’ll never get to Harley Street talking that way.’

‘Poison, that’s certain. But that’s all that’s certain. I carry the usual sea-going medical library around with me, but that isn’t much help. To identify a poison you must be able either to carry out a chemical analysis or observe the poison at work on the victim—most of the major poisons have symptoms peculiar to themselves and follow their own highly idiosyncratic courses. But Antonio was dead before I got to him and I lack the facilities to do any pathological work, assuming I could do it in the first place.’

‘You’re destroying all my faith in the medical profession. Cyanide?’

‘Impossible. Antonio took time to die. A couple of drops of hydrocyanic—prussic acid—or even a tiny quantity of pharmacopoeial acid, and that’s only two per cent of anhydrous prussic acid—and you’re dead before your glass hits the floor. And cyanide makes it murder, it always makes it murder. There’s no way I know of it can be administered by accident. Antonio’s death, I’m certain, was an accident.’

Goin helped himself to some more scotch. ‘What makes you so certain it was an accident?’

‘What makes me so certain?’ That was a difficult one to answer off the cuff owing to the fact that I was convinced it was no accident at all. ‘First, there was no opportunity for the administering of poison. We know that Antonio was alone in his cabin all afternoon right until dinner-time.’ I looked at the Count. ‘Did Antonio have any private food supplies with him in his cabin?’

‘How did you guess?’ the Count looked surprised.

‘I’m not guessing. I’m eliminating. He had?’

‘Two hampers. Full of glass jars—I think I mentioned that Antonio would never eat anything out of a tin—with all sorts of weird vegetable products inside, including dozens of baby food jars with all sorts of purees in them. A very finicky eater, was poor Antonio.’

‘So I’m beginning to gather. I think our answer will lie there. I’ll have Captain Imrie impound his supplies and have them analysed on our return. To get back to the opportunity factor. Antonio came up to the dining saloon here, had the same as the rest of us—’

‘No fruit juices, no soup, no lamb chops, no potatoes,’ the Count said.

‘None of those. But what he did have we all had. Then straight back to his cabin. In the second place, who would want to kill a harmless person like that—especially as Antonio was a total stranger to all of us and only joined us at Wick for the first time? And who but a madman would administer a deadly poison in a closed community like this, knowing that he couldn’t escape and that Scotland Yard would be leaning over the quay walls in Wick, just waiting for our return?’

‘Maybe that’s the way a madman would figure a sane person would figure,’ Goin said.

‘What English king was it who died of a surfeit of lampreys?’ the Count said. ‘If you ask me, our unfortunate Antonio may well have perished from a surfeit of horseradish.’

‘Like enough.’ I pushed back my chair and made to rise. But I didn’t get up immediately. Way back in the dim and lost recesses of my mind the Count had triggered off a tiny bell, an infinitesimal tinkle so distant and remote that if I hadn’t been listening with all my ears I’d have missed it completely: but I had been listening, the way people always listen when they know, without knowing why, that the old man with the scythe is standing there in the wings, winding up for the back stroke. I knew both men were watching me. I sighed. ‘Decisions, decisions. Antonio has to be attended to—’

‘With canvas?’ Goin said.

‘With canvas. Count’s cabin cleaned up. Death has to be logged. Death certificate. And Mr Smith will have to make the funeral arrangements.’

‘Mr Smith?’ The Count was vaguely surprised. ‘Not our worthy commanding officer.’

‘Captain Imrie is in the arms of Morpheus,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried.’

‘You have your deities mixed up,’ Goin said. ‘Bacchus is the one you’re after.’

‘I suppose it is. Excuse me, gentlemen.’

I went directly to my cabin but not to write out any death certificate. As I’d told Goin, I did carry a medical library of sorts around with me and it was of a fair size. I selected several books, including Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, 9th edition (Edinburgh 1950), Dewar’s Textbook of Forensic Pharmacy (London 1946) and Gonzales, Vance and Helpern’s Legal Medicine and Toxicology, which seemed to be a pre-war book. I started consulting indices and within five minutes I had it.

The entry was listed under ‘Systematic Poisons’ and was headed ‘Aconite. Bot A poisonous plant of the order Ranunculaceae. Particular reference Monkshood and Wolfsbane. Phar. Aconitum napellus. This, and aconitine, an alkaloid extract of the former, is commonly regarded as the most lethal of all poisons yet identified: a dose of not more than 0.004 gm is deadly to man. Aconite and its alkaloid produce a burning and peculiar tingling and numbing effect where applied. Later, especially with larger doses, violent vomiting results, followed by paralysis of motion, paralysis of sensation and great depression of the heart, followed by death from syncope.

‘Treatment. To be successful must be immediate as possible. Gastric lavage, 12 gm of tannic acid in two gallons of warm water, followed by 1.2 gm Unnic acid in 180 ml tepid water: this should be followed by animal charcoal suspended in water. Cardiac and respiratory stimulants, artificial respiration and oxygen will be necessary as indicated.

‘N.B. The root of aconite has frequently been eaten in mistake for that of horseradish.’

CHAPTER THREE

I was still looking at, but no longer reading the article on Aconite when it was gradually borne in upon my preoccupation that there was something very far amiss with the Morning Rose. She was still under way, her elderly oil-fired steam engines throbbing along as dependably as ever, but her motion had changed. Her rolling factor had increased till she was swinging wickedly and dismayingly through an angle of close on 70 degrees: the pitching factor had correspondingly decreased and the thudding jarring vibration of the bluff bows smashing into the quartering seas had fallen away to a fraction of what it had previously been.

I marked the article, closed the book, then lurched and stumbled—I could not be said to have run for it was physically impossible—along the passageway, up the companionway, through the lounge and out on to the upper deck. It was dark but not so dark as to prevent me from gauging direction by the feel of the gale wind, by the spume blowing off the top of the confused seas. I shrank back and tightened my grip on a convenient handrail as a great wall of water, black and veined and evil, reared up on the port side, just for’ard of the beam: it was at least ten feet higher than my head. I was certain that the wave, with the hundreds of tons of water it contained, was going to crash down square on the fore-deck of the trawler, I couldn’t see how it could fail to, but fail it did: as the wave bore down on us, the trough to starboard deepened and the Morning Rose, rolling over to almost forty degrees, simply fell into it, pressed down by the great weight of water on its exposed port side. There came the familiar flat explosive thunderclap of sound, the Morning Rose vibrated and groaned as over-stressed plates and rivets adjusted to cope with the sudden shearing strain, white, icily-cold water foamed over the starboard side and swirled around my ankles, and then it was gone, gurgling through the scuppers as the Morning Rose righted itself and rolled far over on its other side. There was no worry about any of this, no threat to safety and life, this was what Arctic trawlers had been built for and the Morning Rose could continue to absorb this punishment indefinitely. But there was cause for worry, if such a word can be used to express a desperately acute anxiety: that massive wave which had caught the trawler on her port bow, had knocked her almost 20 degrees off course. She was still 20 degrees off course, and 20 degrees off course she remained: nobody was making any attempt to bring her round. Another, and a smaller sea, and then she was lying five more degrees over to the east and here, too, she remained. I ran for the bridge ladder.

I bumped into and almost knocked down a person at the precise spot where I’d bumped into Mary dear an hour ago. Contact this time was much more solid and the person said ‘Oof!’ or something of that sort. The kind of gasp a winded lady makes is quite different from a man’s and instinct and a kind of instantaneous reasoning told me that I had bumped into the same person again: Judith Haynes would be in bed with her spaniels and Mary darling was either with Allen or in bed dreaming about him: neither, anyway, was the outdoor type.

I said something that might have been misconstrued as a brusque apology, side-stepped and had my foot on the first rung when she caught my arm with both hands.

‘Something’s wrong. I know it is. What?’ Her voice was calm, just loud enough to make itself heard over the high-pitched obbligato of the wind in the rigging. Sure she knew something was wrong, the sight of Dr Marlowe moving at anything above his customary saunter was as good as a police or air raid siren any day. I was about to say something to this effect when she added: ‘That’s why I came on deck,’ which effectively rendered stillborn any cutting remarks I’d been about to make, because she’d been aware of trouble before I’d been: but, then, she hadn’t had her thoughts taken up with Aconitum napellus.

‘The ship’s not under command. There’s nobody in charge on the bridge, nobody trying to keep a course.’

‘Can I do anything?’

She was wonderful. ‘Yes. There’s a hot-water electric geyser on the galley bulkhead by the stove. Bring up a jug of hot water, not too hot to drink, a mug and salt. Lots of salt.’

I sensed as much as saw her nod and then she was gone. Four seconds later I was inside the wheel-house. I could dimly see one figure crumpled against the chart-table, another apparently sitting straight by the wheel, but that was all I could see. The two overhead lights were dull yellow glows. It took me almost fifteen frantic seconds to locate the instrument panel just for’ard of the wheel, but only a couple of seconds thereafter to locate the rheostat and twist it to its clockwise maximum. I blinked in the hurtfully sudden wash of white light.

Smithy was by the chart-table, Oakley by the wheel, the former on his side, the latter upright, but that, I could see, didn’t mean that Oakley was in any better state of health than the first mate, it was just that neither appeared capable of moving from the positions they had adopted. Both had their heads arched towards their knees, both had their hands clasped tightly to their midriffs. Neither of them was making any sound. Possibly neither was suffering pain and the contracted positions they had assumed resulted from some wholly involuntary motor mechanism: it was equally possible that their vocal cords were paralysed.

I looked at Smithy first. One life is as important as the next, or so any one of a group of sufferers will think, but in this case I was concerned with the greatest good of all concerned and the fact that the ‘all’ here just coincidentally included me had no bearing on my choice: if the Morning Rose was running into trouble, and I had a strange fey conviction that it was, Smithy was the man I wanted around.

Smithy’s eyes were open and the look in them intelligent. Among other things the aconite article had stated that full intelligence is maintained to the very end. Could this be the end? Paralysis of motion, the article had said and paralysis of motion we undoubtedly had here. Then paralysis of sensation—maybe that’s why they weren’t crying out in agony, it could have been that they had been screaming their heads off up on the bridge here with no one around to hear them, but now they weren’t feeling anything any more. I saw and vaguely recorded the fact that there were two metal canteens lying close together on the floor, both of them very nearly emptied of food. Both of them, I would have thought, were in extremis but for one very odd factor: there was no sign of the violent vomiting of which the article had spoken. I wished to God that somewhere, sometime, I had taken the trouble to learn something about poisons, their causes, their effects, their symptoms and aberrant symptoms—which we seemed to have here—if any.

Mary Stuart came in. Her clothes were soaking and her hair was in a terrible mess, but she’d been very quick and she’d got what I’d asked her to— including a spoon, which I’d forgotten. I said: ‘A mug of hot water, six spoons of salt. Quick. Stir it well.’ Gastric lavage, the book had said, but as far as the availability of tannic acid and animal charcoal was concerned I might as well have been on the moon. The best and indeed the only hope lay in a powerful and quick-acting emetic. Alum and zinc sulphate was what the old boy in my medical school had preferred but I’d never come across anything better than sodium chloride—common salt. I hoped desperately that aconitine absorption into the bloodstream hadn’t progressed too far— and that it was aconitine I didn’t for a moment doubt. Coincidence is coincidence but to introduce some such fancy concoction as curare at this stage would be stretching things a bit. I levered Smithy into a sitting position and was just getting my hands under his armpits when a dark-haired young seaman, clad—in that bitter weather—in only jersey and jeans came hurrying into the wheel-house. It was Allison, the senior of the two quartermasters. He looked—not stared—at the two men on the deck: he was very much a seaman cast in Smithy’s mould.

‘What’s wrong, Doctor?’

‘Food poisoning.’

‘Had to be something like that. I was asleep. Something woke me. I knew something was wrong, that we weren’t under command.’ I believed him, all experienced seamen have this inbuilt capacity to sense trouble. Even in their sleep. I’d come across it before. He moved quickly to the chart-table then glanced at the compass. ‘Fifty degrees off course, to the east.’

‘We’ve got all the Barents Sea to rattle about in,’ I said. ‘Give me a hand with Mr Smith, will you?’

We took an arm each and dragged him towards the port door. Mary dear stopped stirring the contents of the metal mug she held in her hand and looked at us in some perplexity.

‘Where are you going with Mr Smith?’

‘Taking him out on the wing.’ What did she think we were going to do with him, throw him over the side? ‘All that fresh air. It’s very therapeutic.’

‘But it’s snowing out there! And bitterly cold.’

‘He’s also—I hope—going to be very, very sick. Better outside than in. How does that concoction taste?’

She sipped a little salt and water from her spoon and screwed up her face. ‘It’s awful!’

‘Can you swallow it?’

She tried and shuddered. ‘Just.’

‘Another three spoons.’ We dragged Smithy outside and propped him in a sitting position. The canvas wind-dodger gave him some protection but not much. His eyes were open and following our actions and he seemed aware of what was going on. I put the emetic to his lips and tilted the mug but the fluid just trickled down his chin. I forced his head back and poured some of the emetic into his mouth. Clearly, all sensation wasn’t lost, for his face contorted into an involuntary grimace of distaste: more importantly, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down and I knew he’d swallowed some of it. Encouraged, I poured in twice as much, and this time he swallowed it all. Not ten seconds later he was as violently ill as ever I’ve seen a man be. Over Mary’s protests and in spite of Allison’s very evident apprehension, I forced some more of the salt and water on him: when he started coughing blood I turned my attention to Oakley.

Within fifteen minutes we had two still very ill men on our hands, clearly suffering violent abdominal pains and weak to the point of exhaustion, but, more importantly, we had two men who weren’t going to go the same way as the unfortunate Antonio had gone. Allison was at the wheel, with the Morning Rose back on course: Mary dear, her straw-coloured hair now matted with snow, crouched beside a very groggy Oakley: Smithy was now sufficiently recovered to sit on the storm-sill of the wheel-house, though he still required my arm to brace him against the staggering of the Morning Rose. He was beginning to recover the use of his voice although only to a minimal extent.

‘Brandy,’ he croaked.

I shook my head. ‘Contra-indicated. That’s what the textbooks say.’

‘Otard-Dupuy,’ he insisted. At least his mind was clear enough. I rose and got him a bottle from Captain Imrie’s private reserve. After what his stomach had just been through, nothing short of carbolic acid was going to damage it any more. He put the bottle to his head, swallowed and was immediately sick again.

‘Maybe I should have given you cognac in the first place,’ I said. ‘Salt water comes cheaper, though.’

He tried to smile, a brief and painful effort, and tilted the bottle again. This time the cognac stayed down, he must have had a stomach lined with steel or asbestos. I took the bottle from him and offered it to Oakley, who winced and shook his head.

‘Who’s got the wheel?’ Smithy’s voice was a hoarse and strained whisper as if it hurt him to speak, which it almost certainly did.

‘Allison.’

He nodded, satisfied. ‘Damn boat,’ he said. ‘Damn sea. I’m sea-sick. Me. Sea-sick.’

‘You’re sick, all right. Nothing to do with the sea. This damn boat wallowing about in this damn sea was all that saved you: a flat calm and Smithy was among the immortals.’ I tried to think why anyone who was not completely unhinged should want Smithy and Oakley among the immortals but the idea was so preposterous that I abandoned it almost the moment it occurred to me. ‘Food poisoning and I was lucky. I got here in time.’

He nodded but kept quiet. It probably hurt him too much to talk. Mary dear said: ‘Mr Oakley’s hands and face are freezing and he’s shaking with the cold. So am I, for that matter.’

And so, I realized, was I. I helped Smithy to a bolted chair beyond the wheel, then went to assist Mary dear who was trying to get a jelly-kneed Oakley to his feet. We’d just got Oakley approximately upright, no easy task, for he was practically a dead weight and we required one hand for him and one for ourselves, when Goin and the Count appeared at the top of the ladder.

‘Thank God, at last!’ Goin was slightly out of breath but not one hair was out of place. ‘We’ve been looking for you every—what on earth! Is that man drunk?’

‘He’s sick. The same sickness as Antonio had, only he’s been lucky. What’s the panic?’

‘The same sickness—you must come at once, Marlowe. My God, this is turning into a regular epidemic.’

‘A moment.’ I helped Oakley inside and lowered him into as comfortable a position as possible atop some kapok life-jackets. ‘Another casualty, I take it?’

‘Yes, Otto Gerran.’ Maybe I lifted an eyebrow, I forget, I do know I felt no particular surprise, it seemed to me that anyone who had been within sniffing distance of that damned aconite was liable to keel over at any moment. ‘I called at his cabin ten minutes ago, there was no reply and I went in and there he was, rolling about the carpet—’

The irreverent thought came to me that, with his almost perfectly spherical shape, no one had ever been better equipped for rolling about a carpet than Otto was: it seemed unlikely that Otto was seeing the humorous side of it at that moment. I said to Allison: ‘Can you get anyone up here to help you?’

‘No trouble.’ The quartermaster nodded at the small exchange in the corner. ‘I’ve only to phone the mess-deck.’

‘No need.’ It was the Count. ‘I’ll stay.’

‘That’s very kind.’ I nodded at Smithy and Oakley in turn. ‘They’re not fit to go below yet. If they try to, they’ll like as not end up over the side. Could you get them some blankets?’

‘Of course.’ He hesitated. ‘My cabin—’

‘Is locked. Mine’s not. There are blankets on the bed and extra ones at the foot of the hanging locker.’ The Count left and I turned to Allison. ‘Short of dynamiting his door open, how do I attract the captain’s attention? He seems to be a sound sleeper.’

Allison smiled and again indicated the corner exchange. ‘The bridge phone hangs just above his head. There’s a resistance in the circuit. I can make the call-up sound like the QE2’s fog-horn.’

‘Tell him to come along to Mr Gerran’s room and tell him it’s urgent.’

‘Well.’ Allison was uncertain. ‘Captain Imrie doesn’t much like being woken up in the middle of the night. Not without an awfully good reason, that is, and now that the mate and bo’sun are all right again, like—’

‘Tell him Antonio is dead.’

CHAPTER FOUR

At least Otto wasn’t dead. Even above the sound of the wind and the sound of the sea, the creakings and groanings as the elderly trawler slammed her way into the Arctic gale, Otto’s voice could be distinctly heard at least a dozen feet from his cabin door. What he was saying, however, was far from distinct, the tearing gasps and agonized moans boded ill for what we would see when we opened the door.

Otto Gerran looked as he sounded, not quite in extremis but rapidly heading that way. As Goin had said, he was indeed rolling about the floor, both hands clutching his throat as if he was trying to throttle himself: his normally puce complexion had deepened to a dark and dangerous-looking purple, his eyes were bloodshot and a purplish foam at his mouth had stained his lips to almost the same colour as his face: or maybe his lips were purplish anyway, like a man with cyanosis. As far as I could see he hadn’t a single symptom in common with Smithy and Oakley: so much for the toxicological experts and their learned textbooks.

I said to Goin: ‘Let’s get him on his feet and along to the bathroom.’ As a statement of intent it was clear and simple enough, but its execution was far from simple: it was impossible. The task of hoisting 245 lbs of unco-operative jellyfish to the vertical proved to be quite beyond us. I was just about to abandon the attempt and administer what would certainly be a very messy first aid on the spot when Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes entered the cabin. My surprise at the remarkable promptness with which they had put in an appearance was as nothing compared to my initial astonishment at observing that both men were fully dressed: it was not until I noticed the horizontal creases in their trousers that I realized that they had gone to sleep with all their clothes on. I made a brief prayer for Smithy’s swift and complete recovery.

‘What in the name of God goes on?’ Whatever condition Captain Imrie had been in an hour or so ago, he was completely sober now. ‘Allison says that Italian fellow’s dead and—’ He stopped abruptly as Goin and I moved sufficiently apart to let him have his first glimpse of the prostrate, moaning Gerran. ‘Jesus wept!’ He moved forward and stared down. ‘What the devil—an epileptic fit?’

‘Poison. The same poison that killed Antonio and nearly killed the mate and Oakley. Come on, give us a hand to get him along to the bathroom.’

‘Poison!’ He looked at Mr Stokes as if to hear from him confirmation that it couldn’t possibly be poison, but Mr Stokes wasn’t in the mood for confirming anything, he just stared with a kind of numbed fascination at the writhing man on the floor. ‘Poison! On my ship. What poison? Where did they get it? Who gave it to them. Why should—’

‘I’m a doctor, not a detective. I don’t know anything about who, where, when, why, what. All I know is that a man’s dying while we’re talking.’

It took the four of us less than thirty seconds to get Otto Gerran along to the bathroom. It was a pretty rough piece of manhandling but it was a fair assumption that he would rather be Otto Gerran, bruised but alive, than Otto Gerran, unmarked but dead. The emetic worked just as swiftly and effectively as it had with Smithy and Oakley and within three minutes we had him back in his bunk under a mound of blankets. He was still moaning incoherently and shivering so violently that his teeth chattered uncontrollably, but the deep purple had begun to recede from his cheeks and the foam had dried on his lips.

‘I think he’s OK now but please keep an eye on him, will you?’ I said to Goin. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’

Captain Imrie stopped me at the door. ‘If you please, Dr Marlowe, a word with you.’

‘Later.’

‘Now. As master of this vessel—’ I put a hand on his shoulder and he became silent. I felt like saying that as master of this vessel he’d been awash in scotch and snoring in his bunk when people were all around dropping like flies but it would have been less than fair: I was irritable because unpleasant things were happening that should not have been happening and I didn’t know why, or who was responsible.

‘Otto Gerran will live,’ I said. ‘He’ll live because he was lucky enough to have Mr Goin here stop by his cabin. How many other people are lying on their cabin floors who haven’t been lucky enough to have someone stop by, people so far gone that they can’t even reach their doors? Four casualties so far: who’s to say there isn’t a dozen?’

‘A dozen? Aye. Aye, of course.’ If I was out of my depth, Captain Imrie was submerged. ‘We’ll come with you.’

‘I can manage.’

‘Like you managed with Mr Gerran here?’

We made our way directly to the recreation room. There were ten people there, all men, mostly silent, mostly unhappy: it is not easy to be talkative and cheerful when you’re hanging on to your seat with one hand and your drink with the other. The Three Apostles, whether because of exhaustion or popular demand, had laid the tools of their trade aside and were having a drink with their boss Josh Hendriks, a small, thin, stern and middle-aged Anglo-Dutchman with a perpetual worried frown. Even when off-duty, he was festooned with a mass of strap-hung electronic and recording equipment: word had it that he slept so accoutred. Stryker, who appeared far from overcome by concern for his ailing wife, sat at a table in a corner, talking to Conrad and two other actors, Gunther Jungbeck and Jon Heyter. At a third table John Halliday, the stills photographer and Sandy, the props man, made up the company. No one, as far as I could judge, was suffering from anything that couldn’t be accounted for by the big dipper antics of the Morning Rose. One or two glances of mildly speculative curiosity came our way, but I volunteered no explanation for our unaccustomed visit there: explanations take time but the effects of aconitine, as was being relentlessly borne in upon me, waited for no man.

Allen and Mary darling we found in the otherwise deserted lounge, more green-faced than ever but clasping hands and gazing at each other with the rapt intensity of those who know there will be no tomorrow: their noses were so close together that they must have been cross-eyed from their attempts to focus. For the first time since I’d met her Mary darling had removed her enormous spectacles—misted lenses due to Allen’s heavy breathing, I had no doubt—and without them she really was a very pretty young girl with none of that rather naked and defenceless look that so often characterizes the habitual wearer of glasses when those are removed. One thing was for sure, there was nothing wrong with Allen’s eyesight.

I glanced at the liquor cupboard in the corner. The glass-fronted doors were intact from which I assumed that Lonnie Gilbert’s bunch of keys were capable of opening most things: had they failed here I would have looked for signs of the use of some other instrument, not, perhaps, the berserk wielding of a fire-axe but at least the discreet employment of a wood chisel: but there were no such signs.

Heissman was asleep in his cabin, uneasily, restlessly asleep, but clearly not ill. Next door Neal Divine, his bed-board raised so high that he was barely visible, looked more like a medieval bishop than ever, but a happily unconscious one this time. Lonnie was sitting upright in his bunk, his arms folded across his ample midriff, and from the fact that his right hand was out of sight under the coverlet, almost certainly and lovingly wrapped round the neck of a bottle of purloined scotch, and the further fact that he wore a beatific smile, it was clear that his plethora of keys could be put to a very catholic variety of uses.

I passed up Judith Haynes’s cabin—she’d had no dinner—and went into what I knew to be, at that moment, the last occupied cabin. The unit’s chief electrician, a large, fat, red-faced and chubby-cheeked individual rejoicing in the name of Frederick Crispin Harbottle, was propped on an elbow and moodily eating an apple: appearances to the contrary, he was an invincibly morose and wholly pessimistic man. For reasons I had been unable to discover, he was known to all as Eddie: rumour had it that he had been heard to speak, in the same breath, of himself and that other rather better-known electrician, Thomas Edison.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘We’ve got some cases of food poisoning. You’re not one of them, obviously.’ I nodded towards the recumbent occupant of the other bed, who was lying curled up with his back to us. ‘How’s the Duke?’

‘Alive.’ Eddie spoke in a tone of philosophical resignation. ‘Moaning and groaning about his bellyache before he dropped off. Moans and groans nearly every night, come to that. You know what the Duke’s like, he just can’t help himself.’

We all knew what he was like. If it is possible for a person to become a legend within the space of four days then Cecil Golightly had become just that. His unbridled gluttony lay just within the bounds of credibility and when Otto, less than an hour previously, had referred to him as a little pig who never lifted his eyes from the table he had spoken no more than the truth. The Duke’s voracious capacity for food was as abnormal as his obviously practically defunct metabolic system, for he resembled nothing so much as a man newly emerged from a long stay in a concentration camp.

More out of habit than anything I bent over to give him a cursory glance and I was glad I did, for what I saw were wide-open, pain-dulled eyes moving wildly and purposelessly from side to side, ashen lips working soundlessly in an ashen face and the hooked fingers of both hands digging deep into his stomach as if he were trying to tear it open.

I’d told Goin that I’d be back in Otto’s cabin in five minutes: I was back in forty-five. The Duke, because he had been so very much longer without treatment than Smithy, Oakley or Gerran, had gone very, very close to the edge indeed, to the extent that I had on one occasion almost given up his case as being intractably hopeless, but the Duke was a great deal more stubborn than I was and that skeletal frame harboured an iron constitution: even so, without almost continuous artificial respiration, a heart stimulant injection and the copious use of oxygen, he would surely have died: now he would as surely live.

‘Is this the end of it, then? Is this the end?’ Otto Gerran spoke in a weakly querulous voice and, on the face of it, I had to admit that he had every right to sound both weak and querulous. He hadn’t as yet regained his normal colour, he looked as haggard as a heavily-jowled man ever can and it was clear that his recent experience had left him pretty exhausted: and with this outbreak of poisoning coming on top of the continuously hostile weather that had prevented him from shooting even a foot of background film, Otto had reason to believe that the fates were not on his side.

‘I should think so,’ I said. In view of the fact that he had aboard some ill-disposed person who was clearly a dab hand with some of the more esoteric poisons this was as unwarrantedly optimistic a statement as I could remember making, but I had to say something. ‘Any other victims would have shown the symptoms before now: and I’ve checked everyone.’

‘Have you now?’ Captain Imrie asked. ‘How about my crew? They eat the same food as you do.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ And I hadn’t. Because of some mental block or simply because of lack of thought, I’d assumed, wholly without reason, that the effects would be confined to the film unit people: Captain Imrie was probably thinking that I regarded his men as second-rate citizens who, when measured against Otto’s valuable and expensive cast and crew, hardly merited serious consideration. I went on: ‘What I mean is, I didn’t know that. That they ate the same food. Should have been obvious. If you’ll just show me—’

With Mr Stokes in lugubrious attendance, Captain Imrie led me round the crew quarters. Those consisted of five separate cabins—two for the deck staff, one for the engine-room staff, one for the two cooks and the last for the two stewards. It was the last one that we visited first.

We opened the door and just stood there for what then seemed like an unconscionably long time but was probably only a few seconds, mindless creatures bereft of will and speech and power of motion. I was the first to recover and stepped inside.

The stench was so nauseating that I came close to being sick for the first time that night and the cabin itself was in a state of indescribable confusion, chairs knocked over, clothes strewn everywhere and both bunks completely denuded of sheets and blankets which were scattered in a torn and tangled mess over the deck. The first and overwhelming impression was that there had been a fight to the death, but both Moxen and Scott, the latter almost covered in a shredded sheet, looked curiously peaceful as they lay there, and neither bore any marks of violence.

‘I say we go back. I say we return now.’ Captain Imrie wedged himself more deeply into his chair as if establishing both a physically and argumentatively commanding position. ‘You gentlemen will bear in mind that I am the master of this vessel, that I have responsibilities towards both passengers and crew.’ He lifted his bottle from the wrought-iron stand and helped himself lavishly and I observed, automatically and with little surprise, that his hand was not quite steady. ‘If I’d typhoid or cholera aboard I’d sail at once for quarantine in the nearest port where medical assistance is available. Three dead and four seriously ill, I don’t see that cholera or typhoid could be any worse than we have here on the Morning Rose. Who’s going to be the next to die?’ He looked at me almost accusingly. Imrie seemed to be adopting the understandable attitude that, as a doctor, it was my duty to preserve life and that as I wasn’t making a very good job of it what was happening was largely my fault. ‘Dr Marlowe here admits that he is at a loss to understand the reasons for this—this lethal outbreak. Surely to God that itself is reason enough to call this off?’

‘It’s a long, long way back to Wick,’ Smithy said. Like Goin, seated beside him, Smithy was swathed in a couple of blankets and, like Otto, he still looked very much under the weather. ‘A lot can happen in that time.’

‘Wick, Mr Smith? I wasn’t thinking of Wick. I can be in Hammerfest in twenty-four hours.’

‘Less,’ said Mr Stokes. He sipped his rum, deliberated and made his pronouncement. ‘With the wind and the sea on the port quarter and a little assistance from me in the engine-room? Twenty hours.’ He went over his homework and found it faultless. ‘Yes, twenty hours.’

‘You see?’ Imrie transferred his piercing blue gaze from myself to Otto. ‘Twenty hours.’

When we’d established that there had been no more casualties among the crew Captain Imrie, in what was for him a very peremptory fashion, had summoned Otto to the saloon and Otto in turn had sent for his three fellow directors, Goin, Heissman and Stryker. The other director, Miss Haynes, was, Stryker had reported, very deeply asleep, which was less than surprising in view of the sedatives I’d prescribed for her. The Count had joined the meeting without invitation but everyone appeared to accept his presence there as natural.

To say that there was an air of panic in the saloon would have been exaggeration, albeit a forgivable one, but to say that there was a marked degree of apprehension, concern and uncertainty would have erred on the side of understatement. Otto Gerran, perhaps, was more upset than any other person present, and understandably so, for Otto had a great deal more to lose than any other person present.

‘I appreciate the reasons for your anxiety,’ Otto said, ‘and your concern for us all does you the greatest credit. But I think this concern is making you over-cautious. Dr Marlowe says that this— ah—epidemic is definitely over. We are going to look very foolish indeed if we turn and run now and then nothing more happens.’

Captain Imrie said: ‘I’m too old, Mr Gerran, to care what I look like. If it’s a choice between looking a fool and having another dead man on my hands, then I’d rather look a fool any time.’

‘I agree with Mr Gerran,’ Heissman said. He still looked sick and he sounded sick. ‘To throw it all away when we’re so near—just over a day to Bear Island. Drop us off there and then go to Hammerfest—just as in the original plan. That means—well, you’d be in Hammerfest in say sixty hours instead of twenty-four. What’s going to happen in that extra thirty-six hours that’s not going to happen in the next twenty-four? Lose everything for thirty-six hours just because you’re running scared?’

‘I am not running scared, as you say.’ There was something impressive about Imrie’s quiet dignity. ‘My first—’

‘I wasn’t referring to you personally,’ Heissman said.

‘My first concern is for the people under my charge. And they are under my charge. I am the person responsible. I must make the decision.’

‘Granted, Captain, granted.’ Goin was his usual imperturbable self, a calm and reasonable man. ‘But one has to strike a balance in these matters, don’t you think. Against what Dr Marlowe now regards as being a very remote possibility of another outbreak of food poisoning occurring, there’s the near certainty—no, I would go further and say that there’s the inevitability—that if we go directly to Hammerfest we’ll be put in quarantine for God knows how long. A week, maybe two weeks, before the port medical authorities give us clearance. And then it’ll be too late, we’d just have to abandon all ideas about making the film at all and go home.’ Less than a couple of hours previously, I recalled, Heissman had been making most disparaging remarks about Otto’s mental capacities, but he’d backed him up against Captain Imrie and now here was Goin doing the same thing: both men knew which side of their bread required butter. ‘The losses to Olympus Productions will be enormous.’

‘Don’t be telling me that, Mr Goin,’ Imrie said. ‘What you mean is that the losses to the insurance company—or companies—will be enormous.’

‘Wrong,’ Stryker said and from his tone and attitude it was clear that directorial solidarity on the board of Olympus Productions was complete. ‘Severally and personally, all members of the cast and crew are insured. The film project—a guarantee as to its successful conclusion—was uninsurable, at least in terms of the premiums demanded. We, and we alone, bear the loss—and I would add that for Mr Gerran, who is by far and away the biggest shareholder, the effects would be ruinous.’

‘I am very sorry about that.’ Captain Imrie seemed genuinely sympathetic but he didn’t for a moment sound like a man who was preparing to abandon his position. ‘But that’s your concern, I’m afraid. And I would remind you, Mr Gerran, of what you yourself said earlier on this evening. “Health,” you said, “is a damned sight more important than any profit we might make from this film.” Wouldn’t you say this is a case in point?’

‘That’s nonsense to say that,’ Goin said equably. He had the rare gift of being able to make potentially offensive statements in a quietly rational voice that somehow robbed them of all offence. ‘“Profit”, you say was the word Mr Gerran used. Certainly, Mr Gerran would willingly pass up any potential profit if the need arose, and that need wouldn’t have to be very pressing or demanding. He’s done it before.’ This was at variance with the impression I’d formed of Otto, but then Goin had known him many more years than I had days. ‘Even without profit we could still make our way by breaking even, which is as much as most film companies can hope for these days. But you’re not talking—we’re not talking—about lack of profit, we’re talking about a total and non-recoverable loss, a loss that would run into six figures and break us entirely. We’ve put our collective shirt on this one, Captain Imrie, yet you’re talking airily of liquidating our company, putting dozens of technicians—and their families—on the breadline and damaging, very likely beyond repair, the careers of some very promising actors and actresses. And all of this for what? The remote chance—according to Dr Marlowe, the very remote chance—that someone may fall ill again. Haven’t you got things just a little bit out of proportion, Captain Imrie?’

If he had, Captain Imrie wasn’t saying so. He wasn’t saying anything. He didn’t exactly have the look of a man who was thinking and thinking hard.

‘Mr Goin puts it very succinctly,’ Otto said. ‘Very succinctly indeed. And there’s a major point that seems to have escaped you, Captain Imrie. You have reminded me of something I said earlier. May I remind you of something you said earlier. May I remind you—’

‘And may I interrupt, Mr Gerran,’ I said. I knew damn well what he was going to say and the last thing I wanted was to hear him say it. ‘Please. A peace formula, if you wish. You want to continue. So does Mr Goin, so does Mr Heissman. So do I— if only because my reputation as a doctor seems to depend on it. Tadeusz?’

‘No question,’ said the Count. ‘Bear Island.’

‘And, of course, it would be unfair to ask either Mr Smith or Mr Stokes. So I propose—’

‘This isn’t Parliament, Dr Marlowe,’ Imrie said. ‘Not even a local town council. Decisions aboard a vessel at sea are not arrived at by popular vote.’

‘I’ve no intention that they should be. I suggest we draw up a document. I suggest we note Captain Imrie’s proposals and considered opinions. I suggest if more illness occurs we run immediately for Hammerfest, even although we are at the time only one hour distant from Bear Island. I suggest it be recorded that Captain Imrie be protected and absolved from any accusation of hazarding the health of his crew and passengers in light of the medical officer’s affidavit—which I will write out and sign—that no such hazard exists: the only charge the captain has to worry about at any time is the physical hazarding of his vessel and that doesn’t exist here. Then we will state that the captain is absolved from all blame and responsibility for any consequences arising from our decision: the navigation and handling of the vessel remain, of course, his sole responsibility. Then all five of us sign it. Captain Imrie?’

‘Agreed.’ There is a time to be prompt and Captain Imrie clearly regarded this as such a time. At best, the proposal was a lame compromise, but one he was glad to accept. ‘Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me. I have to be up betimes—4 a.m. to be precise.’ I wondered when he had last risen at that unearthly hour—not, probably, since his fishing days had ended: but the illness of mate and bo’sun made for exceptional circumstances. He looked at me. ‘I will have that document at breakfast?’

‘At breakfast. I wonder, Captain, if on your way to bed you could ask Haggerty to come to see me. I’d ask him personally, but he’s a bit touchy about civilians like myself.’

‘A lifetime in the Royal Navy is not forgotten overnight. Now?’

‘Say ten minutes? In the galley.’

‘Still pursuing your inquiries, is that it? It’s not your fault, Dr Marlowe.’

If it wasn’t my fault, I thought, I wished they’d all stop making me feel it was. Instead I thanked him and said good night and he said good night to us and left accompanied by Smithy and Mr Stokes. Otto steepled his fingers and regarded me in his best chairman of the board fashion.

‘We owe you our thanks, Dr Marlowe. That was well done, an excellent face-saving proposal.’ He smiled. ‘I am not accustomed to suffering interruption lightly but in this case it was justified.’

‘If I hadn’t interrupted we’d all be on our way to Hammerfest now. You were about to remind him of that part of your contract with him which states that he will obey all your orders other than those that actually endanger the vessel. You were about to point out that, as no such physical danger exists, he was technically in breach of contract and so would be legally liable to the forfeiture of the entire contract fee, which would certainly have ruined him. But for a man like that money ranks a long, long way behind pride and Captain Imrie is a very proud man. He’d have told you to go to hell and turned his ship for Hammerfest.’

‘I’d say that our worthy physician’s assessment is a hundred per cent accurate.’ The Count had found some brandy and now helped himself freely. ‘You came close there, Otto, my boy.’

If the company chairman felt annoyance at being thus familiarly addressed by his cameraman, he showed no evidence of it. He said: ‘I agree. We are in your debt, Dr Marlowe.’

‘A free seat at the première,’ I said, ‘and all debts discharged.’ I left the board to its deliberations and weaved my unsteady way down to the passenger accommodation. Allen and Mary darling were still in the same place in the lounge, only now she had her head on his shoulder and seemed to be asleep. I gave him a casually acknowledging wave of my hand and he answered in kind: he seemed to be becoming accustomed to my peripatetic presence.

I entered the Duke’s cabin without knocking, lest there was someone there asleep. There was. Eddie, the electrician, was very sound indeed and snoring heavily, the sight of his cabin mate’s close brush with the reaper hadn’t unnerved him any that I could see. Cecil Golightly was awake and looking understandably very pale and drawn but not noticeably suffering, largely, it seemed very likely, because Mary Stuart, who was just as pale as he was, was sitting by his bedside and holding his far from reluctant hand. I was beginning to think that perhaps she had more friends than either she or I thought she had.

‘Good lord!’ I said. ‘You still here?’

‘Didn’t you expect me to be? You asked me to stay and keep an eye on him. Or had you forgotten?’

‘Certainly not,’ I lied. ‘Didn’t expect you to remain so long, that’s all. You’ve been very kind.’ I looked down upon the recumbent Duke. ‘Feeling a bit better?’

‘Lots, Doctor. Lots better.’ With his voice not much more than a strained whisper he didn’t sound it, but then, after what he’d been through in the past hour I didn’t expect him to.

‘I’d like to have a little talk with you,’ I said. ‘Just a couple of minutes. Feel up to it?’

He nodded. Mary dear said: ‘I’ll leave you then,’ and made to rise but I put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

‘No need. The Duke and I share no secrets.’ I gave him what I hoped would be translated as a thoughtful look. ‘It’s just possible, though, that the Duke might be concealing a secret from me.’

‘Me? A—a secret?’ Cecil was genuinely puzzled.

‘Tell me. When did the pains start?’

‘The pains? Half-past nine. Ten. Something like that, I can’t be sure.’ Temporarily bereft of his quick wit and chirpy humour, the Duke was a very woebegone Cockney sparrow indeed. ‘When this thing hit me I wasn’t feeling much like looking at watches.’

‘I’m sure you weren’t,’ I said sympathetically. ‘And dinner was the last bite you had tonight?’

‘The last bite.’ His voice even sounded firm.

‘Not even another teeny-weeny snack? You see, Cecil, I’m puzzled. Miss Stuart has told you that others have been ill, too?’ He nodded. ‘Well, the odd thing is that the others began to be ill almost at once after eating. But it took well over an hour in your case. I find it very strange. You’re absolutely sure? You’d nothing?’

‘Doctor!’ He wheezed a bit. ‘You know me.’

‘Yes. That’s why I’m asking.’ Mary dear was looking at me with coolly appraising and rather reproachful brown eyes, any moment now she was going to say didn’t I know Cecil was a sick man. ‘You see, I know that the others who were sick were suffering from some kind of food poisoning that they picked up at dinner and I know how to treat them. But your illness must have had another cause. I’ve no idea what it was or how to treat it and until I can make some sort of diagnosis I can’t afford to take chances. You’re going to be very hungry tomorrow morning and for some time after that but I have to give your system time to settle down: I don’t want you to eat anything that might provoke a reaction so violent that I mightn’t be able to cope with it this time. Time will give the all clear.’

‘I don’t understand, Doctor.’

‘Tea and toast for the next three days.’

The Duke didn’t turn any paler than he was because that was impossible: he just looked stricken.

‘Tea and toast?’ His voice was a weak croak. ‘For three days!’

‘For your own good, Cecil.’ I patted him sympathetically on the shoulder and straightened, preparing to leave. ‘We just want to see you on your feet again.’

‘I was feeling peckish, like,’ the Duke explained with some pathos.

‘When?’

‘Just before nine.’

‘Just before—half an hour after dinner?’

‘That’s when I feel the most peckish. I nipped up into the galley, see, and there was this casserole on a hot plate but I’d only time for one spoonful when I heard two people coming so I jumped into the cool room.’

‘And waited?’

‘I had to wait.’ The Duke sounded almost virtuous. ‘If I’d opened the door even a crack they’d have seen me.’

‘So they didn’t see you. Which means they left. Then?’

‘They’d scoffed the bleedin’ lot,’ the Duke said bitterly.

‘Lucky you.’

‘Lucky?’

‘Moxen and Scott, wasn’t it? The stewards?’

‘How—how did you know?’

‘They saved your life, Duke.’

‘They what?’

‘They ate what you were going to eat So you’re alive. They’re both dead.’

Allen and Mary darling had obviously given up their midnight vigil for the lounge was deserted. I’d five minutes before I met Haggerty in the galley, five minutes in which to collect my thoughts: the trouble was that I had to find them first before I could collect them. And then I realized I was not even going to have the time to find them for there were footsteps on the companionway. Trying with very little success to cope with the wild staggering of the Morning Rose, Mary Stuart made her unsteady way towards an armchair opposite me and collapsed into rather than sat in it. Insofar as it was possible for such an extraordinarily good-looking young woman to look haggard, then she looked haggard: her face was grey. I should have felt annoyed with her for interrupting my train of thought, assuming, that was, that I ever managed to get the train under way, but I could feel no such emotion: I was beginning to realize, though only vaguely, that I was incapable of entertaining towards this Latvian girl any feeling that remotely bordered on the hostile. Besides, she had clearly come to talk to me, and if she did she wanted some help, or reassuring or understanding and it would come very hardly indeed for so proud, so remote, so aloof a girl to ask for any of those. In all conscience, I couldn’t make things difficult for her.

‘Been sick?’ I asked. As a conversational gambit it lacked something but doctors aren’t supposed to have manners. She nodded. She was clasping her hands so tightly that I could see the faint ivory gleam of knuckles.

‘I thought you were a good sailor?’ The light touch.

‘It is not the sea that makes me ill.’

I abandoned the light touch. ‘Mary dear, why don’t you lie down and try to sleep?’

‘I see. You tell me that two more men have been poisoned and died and then I am supposed to drop off to sleep and have happy dreams. Is that it?’ I said nothing and she went on wryly: ‘You’re not very good at breaking bad news, are you?’

‘Professional callousness. You didn’t come here just to reproach me with my tactlessness. What is it, Mary dear?’

‘Why do you call me “Mary dear”?’

‘It offends you?’

‘Oh, no. Not when you say it.’ From any other woman the words would have carried coquettish overtones, but there were none such here. It was meant as a statement of fact, no more.

‘Very well, then.’ I don’t know what I meant by ‘Very well, then,’ it just made me feel obscurely clever. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m afraid,’ she said simply.

So she was afraid. She was tired, overwrought, she’d tended four very, very sick men who’d been poisoned, she’d learnt that three others whom she knew had died of poison and the violence of the Arctic gale raging outside was sufficient to give pause to even the most intrepid. But I said none of those things to her.

‘We’re all afraid at times, Mary.’

‘You too?’

‘Me too.’

‘Are you afraid now?’

‘No. What’s there to be afraid of?’

‘Death. Sickness and death.’

‘I have to live with death, Mary. I detest it, of course I do, but I don’t fear it. If I did, I’d be no good as a doctor. Would I now?’

‘I do not express myself well. Death I can accept. But not when it strikes out blindly and you know that it is not blind. As it is here. It strikes out carelessly, recklessly, without cause or reason, but you know there is cause and reason. Do you—do you know what I mean?’

I knew perfectly well what she meant. I said: ‘Even at my brightest and best, metaphysics are hardly my forte. Maybe the old man with the scythe does show discrimination in his indiscrimination, but I’m too tired—’

‘I’m not talking about metaphysics.’ She made an almost angry little gesture with her clasped hands. ‘There’s something terribly far wrong aboard this ship, Dr Marlowe.’

‘Terribly far wrong?’ Heaven only knew that I couldn’t have agreed with her more. ‘What should be wrong, Mary dear?’

She said gravely: ‘You would not patronize me, Dr Marlowe? You would not humour a silly female?’

I had to answer at once so I said obliquely but deliberately: ‘I would not insult you, Mary dear. I like you too much for that.’

‘Do you really?’ She smiled faintly, whether amused by me or pleased at what I’d said I couldn’t guess. ‘Do you like all the others, too?’

‘Do I—I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t you find something odd, something very strange about the people, about the atmosphere they create?’

I was on safer ground here. I said frankly: ‘I’d have to have been born deaf and blind not to notice it. One is warding off barely-expressed hostilities, elbowing aside tensions, wading through undercurrents the whole of the livelong day, and at the same time, if you’ll forgive the mixing of the metaphors, trying to shield one’s eyes from the constant shower of sparks given off by everyone trying to grind their own axes at the same time. Everyone is so frighteningly friendly to everyone else until the moment comes, of course, when everyone else is so misguided as to turn his or her back. Our esteemed employer, Otto Gerran, cannot speak too highly of his fellow directors, Heissman, Stryker, Goin and his dear daughter, all of whom he vilifies most fearfully the moment they are out of earshot, all of which would be wholly unforgivable were it not for the fact that Heissman, Stryker and his dear daughter each behave in the same fashion to Otto and their co-directors. You get the same petty jealousies, the same patently false sincerities, the same smilers with the knives beneath the cloaks on the lower film unit crew level—not that they, and probably rightly, would regard themselves as being any lower than Otto and his chums—I use the word “chums”, you understand, without regard to the strict meaning of the word. And, just to complicate matters, we have this charming interplay between the first and second divisions. The Duke, Eddie Harbottle, Halliday, the stills man, Hendriks and Sandy all cordially detest what we might call the management, a sentiment that is strongly reciprocated by the management themselves. And everybody seems to have a down on the unfortunate director, Neal Divine. Sure, I’ve noticed all of this, I’d have to be a zombie not to have, but I disregard ninety-odd per cent and just put it down to the normally healthy backbiting bitchery inseparable from the cinema world. You get fakes, cheats, liars, mountebanks, sycophants, hypocrites the world over, it’s just that the movie-making milieu appears to act as a grossly distorting magnifying-glass that selects and highlights all the more undesirable qualities while ignoring or at best diminishing the more desirable ones—one has to assume that there are some.’

‘You don’t think a great deal of us, do you?’

‘Whatever gave you that impression?’

She ignored that. ‘And we’re all bad?’

‘Not all. Not you. Not the other Mary or young Allen—but maybe that’s because they’re too young yet or too new in this business to have come to terms with the standard norms of behaviour. And I’m pretty sure that Charlie Conrad is on the side of the angels.’

Again the little smile. ‘You mean he thinks along the same lines as you?’

‘Yes. Do you know him at all?’

‘We say good morning.’

‘You should get to know him better. He’d like to know you better. He likes you—he said so. And, no, we weren’t discussing you—your name cropped up among a dozen others.’

‘Flatterer.’ Her tone was neutral, I didn’t know whether she was referring with pleasure to Conrad or with irony to myself. ‘So you agree with me? There is something very strange in the atmosphere here?’

‘By normal standards, yes.’

‘By any standards.’ There was a curious certainty about her. ‘Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, one looks to find those things in our unpleasant little world, but one does not look to find them on the scale that we have here. Do not forget that I know about those things. I was born in a Communist country, I was brought up in a Communist country. You understand?’

‘Yes. When did you get away?’

‘Two years ago. Just two years.’

‘How?’

‘Please. Others may wish to use the same way.’

‘And I’m in the pay of the Kremlin. As you wish.’

‘You are offended?’ I shook my head. ‘Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, Dr Marlowe. But there is more here, much more. There is hate and there is fear. I—I can smell it. Can’t you?’

‘You have a point to make, Mary dear, and you’re leading up to it in a very tortuous fashion. I wish you would come to it.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I do not wish to be rude to you but neither do I wish to be rude to the person who is waiting to see me.’

‘If people hate and fear each other enough, terrible things can happen.’ This didn’t seem to require even an affirmative, so I kept silent and she went on: ‘You say that those illnesses, those deaths, are the result of accidental food poisoning. Are they, Dr Marlowe? Are they?’

‘So this is what has taken you all this long time to lead up to? You think—you think it may have been deliberate, have been engineered by someone. That’s what you think?’ I hoped it was clear to her that the idea had just occurred to me for the first time.

‘I don’t know what to think. But yes—yes, that’s what I think.’

‘Who?’

‘Who?’ She looked at me in what appeared to be genuine astonishment. ‘How should I know who? Anybody, I suppose.’

‘You’d be a sensation as a prosecuting counsel. Then if not who, why?’

She hesitated, looked away, glanced briefly back at me, then looked at the deck. ‘I don’t know why, either.’

‘So you’ve no basis for this incredible suggestion other than your Communist-trained instincts.’

‘I’ve put it very badly, haven’t I?’

‘You’d nothing to put, Mary. Just examine the facts and see how ridiculous your suggestion is. Seven disparate people affected and all struck down completely at random—or can you give me a reason why so wildly diverse a group as a film producer, a hairdresser, a camera focus assistant, a mate, a bo’sun and two stewards should be the victims? Can you tell me why some lived, why some died? Can you tell me why two of the victims assimilated this poison from food served at the saloon table, two from food consumed in the galley and one, the Duke, who may have been poisoned in either the galley or the saloon? Can you, Mary?’

She shook her head, the straw-coloured hair fell over her eyes and she let it stay there. Maybe she didn’t want to look at me, maybe she didn’t want me to look at her.

‘After today,’ I said, ‘I’ve been left standing, I’ve been widely given to understand, among the ruins of my professional reputation but I’ll wager what’s left of it, together with anything else you care to name, that this wholesale poisoning is completely accidental and that no person aboard the Morning Rose wished to, hoped to or intended to poison those seven men.’ Which was a different thing entirely from claiming that there was no one aboard the Morning Rose who was responsible for the tragedy. ‘Not unless we have a madman aboard, and you can say what you like—you’ve already said it—about our highly—ah—individualistic shipboard companions, none of them is unhinged. Not, that is, criminally unhinged.’

She hadn’t looked at me once when I was speaking, and even when I’d finished, continued to present me with a view of the crown of her head. I rose, lurched across to the armchair where she was sitting, braced myself with one hand on the back of her chair and placed a finger of the other under her chin. She straightened and brushed back the hair from her eyes, brown eyes, large and still and full of fear. I smiled at her and she smiled back and the smile didn’t touch her eyes. I turned and left the lounge.

I was quite ten minutes late for my appointment in the galley and as Haggerty had already made abundantly clear to me that he was a stickler for the proprieties, I expected to find him in a mood anywhere between stiff outrage and cool disapproval. Haggerty’s attention, however, was occupied with more immediate and pressing matters, for as I approached the galley through the stewards’ pantry I could hear the sound of a loud and very angry altercation. At least, Haggerty was being loud and angry.

It wasn’t so much an altercation as a monologue and it was Haggerty, his red face crimson now with anger and his periwinkle blue eyes popping, who was conducting it: Sandy, our props man, was the unfortunate party on the other side of this very one-sided argument and his silent acceptance of the abuse that was being heaped upon him stemmed less from the want of something to say than from the want of air. I thought at first that Haggerty had his very large red hand clamped round Sandy’s scrawny neck but then realized that he had the two lapels of Sandy’s jacket crushed together in one hand: the effect, however, was about the same, and as Sandy was only about half the cook’s size there was very little he could do about it, I tapped Haggerty on the shoulder.

‘You’re choking this man,’ I said mildly. Haggerty glanced at me briefly and got back to his choking. I went on, just as mildly: ‘This isn’t a naval vessel and I’m not a Master-At-Arms so I can’t order you about. But I am what the courts would accept as an expert witness and I don’t think they’d question my testimony when you’re being sued for assault and battery. Could cost you your life’s savings, you know.’

Haggerty looked at me again and this time he didn’t look away. Reluctantly, he removed his hand from the little man’s collar and just stood there, glaring and breathing heavily, momentarily, it seemed, at a loss for words.

Sandy wasn’t. After he’d massaged his throat a bit to see if it were still intact, he addressed a considerable amount of unprintable invective to Haggerty, then continued, shouting: ‘You see? You heard, you great big ugly baboon. It’s the courts for you. Assault and battery, mate, and it’ll cost you—’

‘Shut up,’ I said wearily. ‘I didn’t see a thing and he didn’t lay a finger on you. Be happy you’re still breathing.’ I looked at Sandy consideringly. I didn’t really know him, I knew next to nothing about him, I wasn’t even sure whether I liked him or not. Like Allen and the late Antonio, if Sandy had another name no one seemed to know what it was. He claimed to be a Scot but had a powerful Liverpool accent. He was a strange, undersized, wizened leprechaun of a man, with a wrinkled walnut-brown face and head—his pate was gleamingly bald—and stringy white hair that started about earlobe level and cascaded in uncombed disarray over his thin shoulders. He had quick-moving and almost weasel-like eyes but maybe that was unfair to him, it may have been the effect of the steel-legged rimless glasses that he affected. He was given to claiming, when under the influence of gin, which was as often as not, that he not only didn’t know his birthday, he didn’t even know the year in which he had been born, but put it around 1919 or 1920. The consensus of informed shipboard opinion put the date, not cruelly, at 1900 or slightly earlier.

I noticed for the first time that there were some tins of sardines and pilchards on the deck, and a larger one of corned beef. ‘Aha!’ I said. ‘The midnight skulker strikes again.’

‘What was that?’ Haggerty said suspiciously.

‘You couldn’t have given our friend here a big enough helping for dinner,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t for myself.’ Sandy, under stress, had a high-pitched squeak of a voice. ‘I swear it wasn’t You see—’

‘I ought to throw the little runt over the side. Little sneaking robbing bastard that he is. Down here, up to his thieves’ tricks, the minute any back’s turned. And who’s blamed for the theft, eh, tell me that, who’s blamed for the theft? Who’s got to account to the captain for the missing supplies? Who’s got to make the loss good from his own pocket? And who’s going to get his pay docked for not locking the galley door?’ Haggerty’s blood pressure, as he contemplated the injustices of life, was clearly rising again. ‘To think,’ he said bitterly, ‘that I’ve always trusted my fellow men. I ought to break his bloody neck.’

‘Well, you can’t do that now,’ I said reasonably. ‘You can’t expect me, as a professional man, to perjure myself in the witness box. Besides, there’s no harm done, nothing stolen. You’ve no losses to pay for, so why get in bad with Captain Imrie?’ I looked at Sandy, then at the tins on the floor. ‘Was that all you stole?’

‘I swear to God—’

‘Oh, do be quiet.’ I said to Haggerty: ‘Where was he, what was he doing when you came in?’

‘He’d his bloody great long nose stuck in the big fridge there, that was what he was doing. Caught him red-handed, I did.’

I opened the refrigerator door. Inside it was packed with a large number of items of very restricted variety—butter, cheeses, long-life milk, bacon and tinned meats. That was all. I said to Sandy: ‘Come here. I want to look through your clothes.’

‘You want to look through my clothes?’ Sandy had taken heart from his providential deliverance from the threat of physical violence and the knowledge that he would not now be reported to those in authority. ‘And who do you think you are then? A bleedin’ cop? The CID, eh?’

‘Just a doctor. A doctor who’s trying to find out why three people died tonight.’ Sandy stared at me, his eyes widening behind his rimless glasses, and his lower jaw fell down. ‘Didn’t you know that Moxen and Scott were dead? The two stewards?’

‘Aye, I’d heard.’ He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘I’m not sure. Not yet.’

‘You can’t pin that on me. What are you talking about?’ Sandy’s brief moment of truculence was vanished as if it had never been. ‘I’ve nothing to do—’

‘Three men died and four almost did. They died or nearly died from food poisoning. Food comes from the galley. I’m interested in people who make unauthorized visits to the galley.’ I looked at Haggerty. ‘I think we’d better have Captain Imrie along here.’

‘No! Christ, no!’ Sandy was close to panic. ‘Mr Gerran would kill me—’

‘Come here.’ He came to me, the last resistance gone. I went through his pockets but there was no trace of the only instrument he could have used to infect foodstuffs in the refrigerator, a hypodermic syringe. I said: ‘What were you going to do with those tins?’

‘They weren’t for me. I told you. What would I want with them? I don’t eat enough to keep a mouse alive. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you.’

I didn’t have to ask anyone. What he said was perfectly true: Sandy, like Lonnie Gilbert, depended almost exclusively upon the Distillers Co., Ltd to maintain his calorific quota. But he could still have been using those tins of meat as an insurance, as a red herring, if he’d been caught out as he had been.

‘Who were the tins for, then?’

‘The Duke. Cecil. I’ve just been to his cabin. He said he was hungry. No, he didn’t. He said he was going to be hungry ‘cos you’d put him on tea and toast for three days.’ I thought back to my interview with the Duke. I’d only used the tea and toast threat to extract information from him and it wasn’t until now that I recalled that I had forgotten to withdraw the threat. This much of Sandy’s story had to be true.

‘The Duke asked you to get some supplies for him?’

‘No.’

‘You told him you were going to get them?’

‘No. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted to see his face when I turned up with the tins.’

Impasse. He could be telling the truth. He could equally well be using the story as a cloak for other and more sinister activities. I couldn’t tell and probably would never know. I said: ‘You better go and tell your friend the Duke that he’ll be back on a normal diet as from breakfast.’

‘You mean—I can go?’

‘If Mr Haggerty doesn’t wish to press a charge.’

‘I wouldn’t lower myself.’ Haggerty clamped his big hand round the back of Sandy’s neck with a grip tight enough to make the little man squeal in pain. ‘If I ever catch you within sniffing distance of my galley again I won’t just squeeze your neck, I’ll break the bloody thing.’ Haggerty marched him to the door, literally threw him out and returned. ‘Got off far too easy if you ask me, sir.’

‘He’s not worth your ire, Mr Haggerty. He’s probably telling the truth—not that makes him any less a sneak-thief. Moxen and Scott ate here tonight after the passengers had dinner?’

‘Every night. Waiting staff usually eat before the guests—they preferred it the other way round.’ With the departure of Sandy, Haggerty was looking a very troubled and upset man, the loss of the two stewards had clearly shaken him badly and was almost certainly responsible for the violence of his reaction towards Sandy.

‘I think I’ve traced the source of the poison. I believe the horseradish was contaminated with a very unpleasant organism called clostridium botulinum, a sporing anaerobe found most commonly in garden soil.’ I’d never heard of such a case of contamination but that didn’t make it impossible. ‘No possible reflection on you—it’s totally undetectable before, during and after cooking. Were there any leftovers tonight?’

‘Some. I made a casserole for Moxen and Scott and put the rest away.’

‘Away?’

‘For throwing. There wasn’t enough to re-use for anything.’

‘So it’s gone.’ Another door locked.

‘On a night like this? No fear. The gash is sealed in polythene bags, then they’re punctured and go over the side—in the morning.’

The door had opened again. ‘You mean it’s still here?’

‘Of course.’ He nodded towards a rectangular plastic box secured to the bulkhead by butterfly nuts. ‘There.’

I crossed to the box and lifted the lid. Haggerty said: ‘You’ll be going to analyse it, is that it?’

‘That’s what I intended. Rather, to keep it for analysis.’ I dropped the lid. ‘That won’t be possible now. The bin’s empty.’

‘Empty? Over the side—in this weather?’ Haggerty came and unnecessarily checked the bin for himself. ‘Bloody funny. And against regulations.’

‘Perhaps your assistant—’

‘Charlie? That bone-idle layabout. Not him. Besides, he’s off-duty tonight.’ Haggerty scratched the grey bristle of his hair. ‘Lord knows why they did it but it must have been Moxen or Scott.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It must have been.’

I was so tired that I could think of nothing other than my cabin and my bunk. I was so tired that it wasn’t until I had arrived at my cabin and looked on the bare bunk that I recalled that all my blankets had been taken away for Smithy and Oakley. I glanced idly at the small table where I’d left the toxicological books that I had been consulting and my tiredness very suddenly left me.

The volume on Medical Jurisprudence that had provided me with the information on aconitine was lying with its base pressed hard against the far fiddle of the table, thrown there, of course, by one of the violent lurches of the Morning Rose. The silken bookmark ribbon attached to the head of the book stretched out most of its length on the table, which was an unremarkable thing in itself were it not for my clear and distinct recollection that I’d carefully used the bookmark to mark the passage I’d been reading.

I wondered who it was who knew I’d been reading the article on aconitine.

CHAPTER FIVE

I suddenly didn’t fancy my cabin very much any more. Not, that was, as a place to sleep in. The eccentric shipping millionaire who’d had the Morning Rose completely stripped and fitted for passenger accommodation had had a powerful aversion to locks on cabin doors and, having had the means and the opportunity to do so, had translated his theories into practice. It may have been just a phobia or it may have stemmed from his assertion that many people had unnecessarily lost their lives at sea through being trapped in locked cabins as their ships went down—which, in fact, I knew to be true. However it was, it was impossible to lock a cabin door in the Morning Rose from the inside: it didn’t even have a sliding bolt.

The saloon, I decided, was the place for me. It had, as I recalled, a very comfortable corner bulkhead settee where I could wedge myself and, more importantly, protect my back. The lockers below the settee seats had a splendid assortment of fleecy steamer rugs, another legacy, like the lockless doors, from the previous owner. Best of all, it was a brightly lit and public place, a place where people were liable to come and go even at that late hour, a place where no one could sneak up on you unawares. Not that any of this would offer any bar to anyone so ill-disposed as to take a potshot at me through the saloon’s plate glass windows. It was, I supposed, some little consolation that the person or persons bent on mayhem had not so far chosen to resort to overt violence, but that hardly constituted a guarantee that they wouldn’t: why the hell couldn’t the publishers of reference books emulate the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica and do away with bookmarks altogether?

It was then that I recalled that I’d left the board of Olympus Productions in full plenary session up in the saloon. How long ago was that? Twenty minutes, not more. Another twenty minutes, perhaps, and the coast would be clear. It wasn’t that I harboured any particular suspicion towards any of the four: they might just consider it very odd if I were to elect to sleep up there for the night when I’d a perfectly comfortable cabin down below.

Partly on impulse, partly to kill some of the intervening time, I decided to have a look at the Duke, to check on his condition, to ensure him a restful night by promising he’d be back on full rations come breakfast time and to find out if Sandy had been telling the truth. His was the third door to the left: the second to the right was wide open, the door stayed back at 90 degrees. It was Mary Stuart’s cabin and she was inside but not asleep: she sat in a chair wedged between table and bunk, her eyes wide open, her hands in her lap.

‘What’s this, then?’ I said. ‘You look like someone taking part in a wake.’

‘I’m not sleepy.’

‘And the door open. Expecting company?’

‘I hope not. I can’t lock the door.’

‘You haven’t been able to lock the door since you came aboard. It doesn’t have a lock.’

‘I know. It didn’t matter. Not till tonight.’

‘You—you’re not thinking that someone might sneak up and do you in while you’re sleeping?’ I said in a tone of a person who could never conceive of such a thing happening to himself.

‘I don’t know what to think. I’m all right. Please.’

‘Afraid? Still?’ I shook my head. ‘Fie on you. Think of your namesake, young Mary Darling.

She’s not scared to sleep alone.’

‘She’s not sleeping alone.’

‘She isn’t? Ah, well, we live in a permissive age.’

‘She’s with Allen. In the recreation room.’

‘Ah! Then why don’t you join them? If it’s safety you wrongly imagine you need, why then, there’s safety in numbers.’

‘I do not like to play—what you say— gooseberry.’

‘Oh, fiddlesticks!’ I said and went to see the Duke. He had colour, not much but enough, in his cheeks and was plainly on the mend. I asked him how he was.

‘Rotten,’ said the Duke. He rubbed his stomach.

‘Still pretty sore?’

‘Hunger pains,’ he said.

‘Nothing tonight. Tomorrow, you’re back on the strength—forget the tea and toast. By the way, that wasn’t very clever of you to send Sandy up to raid the galley. Haggerty nabbed him in the act.’

‘Sandy? In the galley?’ The surprise was genuine. ‘I didn’t send him up.’

‘Surely he told you he was going there?’

‘Not a word. Look, Doc, you can’t pin—’

‘Nobody’s pinning anything on anybody. I must have taken him up wrong. Maybe he just wanted to surprise you—he said something about you feeling peckish.’

‘I said that all right. But honest to God—’

‘It’s all right. No harm done. Good night.’

I retraced my steps, passing Mary Stuart’s open door again. She looked at me but said nothing so I did the same. Back in my cabin I looked at my watch. Five minutes only had elapsed, fifteen to go. I was damned if I was going to wait so long, I was feeling tired again, tired enough to drop off to sleep at any moment, but I had to have a reason to go up there. For the first time I devoted some of my rapidly waning powers of thought to the problem and I had the answer in seconds. I opened my medical bag and extracted three of the most essential items it contained—death certificates. For some odd reason I checked the number that was left—ten. All told, thirteen. I was glad I wasn’t superstitious. I stuffed the certificates and a few sheets of rather splendidly headed ship’s notepaper—the previous owner hadn’t been a man to do things by half—into my briefcase.

I opened the cabin door wide so as to have some light to see by, checked that the passage was empty and swiftly unscrewed the deck-head lamp. This I dropped on the deck from gradually increasing heights starting with about a foot or so until a shake of the lamp close my ear let me hear the unmistakable tinkle of a broken filament. I screwed the now useless lamp back into its holder, took up my briefcase, closed the door and made for the bridge.

The weather, I observed during my very hurried passage across the upper deck and up the bridge ladder, hadn’t improved in the slightest. I had the vague impression that the seas were moderating slightly but that may have been because of the fact that I was feeling so tired that I was no longer capable of registering impressions accurately. But one aspect of the weather was beyond question: the almost horizontally driving snow had increased to the extent that the masthead light was no more than an intermittent glow in the gloom above.

Allison was at the wheel, spending more time looking at the radarscope than at the compass, and visibility being what it was, I could see his point. I said: ‘Do you know where the captain keeps his crew lists? In his cabin?’

‘No.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘In the chart-house there.’ He hesitated. ‘Why would you want those, Dr Marlowe?’

I pulled a death certificate from the briefcase and held it close to the binnacle light. Allison compressed his lips.

‘Top drawer, port locker.’

I found the lists, entered up the name, address, age, place of birth, religion and next of kin of each of the two dead men, replaced the book and made my way down to the saloon. Half an hour had elapsed since I’d left Gerran, his three co-directors and the Count sitting there, and there all five still were, seated round a table and studying cardboard-covered folders spread on the table before them. A pile of those lay on the table, some more were scattered on the floor where the rolling of the ship had obviously precipitated them. The Count looked at me over the rim of his glass: his capacity for brandy was phenomenal.

‘Still abroad, my dear fellow? You do labour on our behalf. Much more of this and I suggest that you be co-opted as one of our directors.’

‘Here’s one cobbler that sticks to his last.’ I looked at Gerran. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve some forms to fill up. If I’m interrupting some private session—’

‘Nothing private going on here, I assure you.’ It was Goin who answered. ‘Mainly studying our shooting script for the next fortnight. All the cast and crew will have one tomorrow. Like a copy?’

‘Thank you. After I’ve finished this. Afraid my cabin light has gone on the blink and I’m not much good at writing by the light of matches.’

‘We’re just leaving.’ Otto was still looking grey and very tired but he was mentally tough enough to keep going long after his body had told him to stop. ‘I think we could all do with a good night’s sleep.’

‘It’s what I would prescribe. You could postpone your departure for five minutes?’

‘If necessary, of course.’

‘We’ve promised Captain Imrie a guarantee or affidavit or what will you exonerating him from all blame if we have any further outbreaks of mysterious illness. He wants it on his breakfast table, and he wants it signed. And as Captain Imrie will be up at 4 a.m. and I suspect his breakfast will be correspondingly early, I suggest it would be more convenient if you all signed it now.’

They nodded agreement. I sat at a nearby table and in my best handwriting, which was pretty bad, and best legal jargon, which was awful, I drafted a statement of responsibility which I thought would meet the case. The others apparently thought so too or were too tired to care, for they signed with only a cursory glance at what I had written. The Count signed too and I didn’t as much as raise an eyebrow. It had never even crossed my mind that the Count belonged to those elevated directorial ranks, I had thought that the more highly regarded cameramen, of which the Count was undoubtedly one, were invariably freelance and therefore ineligible for election to any film company board. But at least it helped to explain his lack of proper respect for Otto.

‘And now, to bed.’ Goin eased back his chair. ‘You, too, Doctor?’

‘After I’ve filled out the death certificates.’

‘An unpleasant duty.’ Goin handed me a folder. ‘This might help amuse you afterwards.’

I took it from him and Gerran heaved himself upright with the usual massive effort. ‘Those funerals, Dr Marlowe. The burials at sea. What time do they take place?’

‘First light is customary.’ Otto closed his eyes in suffering. ‘After what you’ve been through, Mr Gerran, I’d advise you to give it a miss. Rest as long as possible tomorrow.’

‘You really think so?’ I nodded and Otto removed his mask of suffering. ‘You will stand in for me, John?’

‘Of course,’ Goin said. ‘Good night, Doctor. Thank you for your co-operation.’

‘Yes, yes, thank you, thank you,’ Otto said.

They trooped off unsteadily and I fished out my death certificate forms and filled them out. I put those in one sealed envelope, the signed affidavit—I just in time remembered to add my own signature—in another, addressed them to Captain Imrie and took them up to the bridge to ask Allison to hand them over to the captain when he came on watch at four in the morning. Allison wasn’t there. Instead, Smithy, heavily clad and muffled almost to the eyebrows, was sitting on a high stool before the wheel. He wasn’t touching the wheel, which periodically spun clockwise and counter-clockwise as of its own accord, and he’d turned up the rheostat. He looked pale and had dark circles under his eyes but he didn’t have a sick look about him any more. His recuperative powers were quite remarkable.

‘Automatic pilot,’ he explained, almost cheerfully, ‘and all the lights of home. Who needs night-sight in zero visibility?’

‘You ought to be in bed,’ I said shortly.

‘I’ve just come from there and I’m just going there. First Officer Smith is not yet his old self and he knows it. Just come up to check position and give Allison a break for coffee. Also, I thought I might find you here. You weren’t in your cabin.’

‘I’m here now. What did you want to see me about?’

‘Otard-Dupuy,’ he said. ‘How does that sound?’

‘It sounds fine.’ Smithy slid off his stool and headed for the cupboard where Captain Imrie kept his private store of restoratives. ‘But you weren’t hunting the ship to offer me a brandy.’

‘No. Tell you the truth, I’ve been trying to figure out some things. No dice with the figuring, if I was bright enough for that I’d be too bright to be where I am now. Thought you could help me.’ He handed me a glass.

‘We should make a great team,’ I said.

He smiled briefly. ‘Three dead and four half dead. Food poisoning. What poisoning?’

I told him the story about the sporing anaerobes, the one I’d given Haggerty. But Smithy wasn’t Haggerty.

‘Mighty selective poison, isn’t it? Clobbers A and kills him, passes up B, clobbers C and doesn’t kill him, passes up D and so on. And we all had the same food to eat.’

‘Poisons are notoriously unpredictable. Six people at a picnic can eat the same infected food: three can land in hospital while the others don’t feel a twinge.’

‘So, some people get tummy-aches and some don’t. But that’s a bit different from saying that a poison that is deadly enough to kill, and to kill violently and quickly, is going to leave others entirely unaffected. I’m no doctor but I flat out don’t believe it.’

‘I find it a bit odd myself. You have something in mind?’

‘Yes. The poisoning was deliberate.’

‘Deliberate?’ I sipped some more of the Otard-Dupuy while I wondered how far to go with Smithy. Not too far, I thought, not yet. I said: ‘Of course it was deliberate. And so easily done. Take our poisoner. He has this little bag of poison. Also, he has this little magic wand. He waves it and turns himself invisible and then flits around the dining tables. A pinch for Otto, none for me, a pinch for you, a pinch for Oakley, no pinches for, say, Heissman and Stryker, a double pinch for Antonio, none for the girls, a pinch for the Duke, two each for Moxen and Scott, and so on. A wayward and capricious lad, our invisible friend: or would you call it being selective?’

‘I don’t know what I’d call it,’ Smithy said soberly. ‘But I know what I’d call you—devious, off-putting, side-tracking and altogether protesting too much. Without offence, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘I wouldn’t rate you as anybody’s fool. You can’t tell me that you haven’t had some thoughts along those lines.’

‘I had. But because I’ve been thinking about it a lot longer than you, I’ve dismissed them. Motive, opportunity, means—impossible to find any. Don’t you know that the first thing a doctor does when he’s called in to a case of accidental poisoning is to suspect that it’s not accidental?’

‘So you’re satisfied?’

‘As can be.’

‘I see.’ He paused. ‘Do you know we have a transmitter in the radio office that can reach just about any place in the northern hemisphere? I’ve got a feeling we’re going to have to use it soon.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘Help.’

‘Help?’

‘Yes. You know. The thing you require when you’re in trouble. I think we need help now. Any more funny little accidents and I’ll be damn certain we need help.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You’re way beyond me. Besides, Britain’s a long long way away from us now.’

‘The NATO Atlantic forces aren’t. They’re carrying out fleet exercise somewhere off the North Cape.’

‘You’re well informed,’ I said.

‘It pays to be well informed when I’m talking to someone who claims to be as satisfied as can be over three very mysterious deaths when I’m certain that someone would never rest and could never be satisfied until he knew exactly how those three people had died. I’ve admitted I’m not very bright but don’t completely under-estimate what little intelligence I have.’

‘I don’t. And don’t overestimate mine. Thanks for the Otard-Dupuy.’

I went to the starboard screen door. The Morning Rose was still rolling and pitching and shaking and shuddering as she battered her way northwards through the wild seas but it was no longer possible to see the wind-torn waters below: we were in a world now that was almost completely opaque, a blind and bitter world of driving white, a world of snowy darkness that began and ended at scarcely an arm length’s distance. I looked down at the wing bridge deck and in the pale light of wash from the wheel-house I could see footprints in the snow. There was only one set of them, sharp and clearly limned as if they had been made only seconds previously. Somebody had been there, for a moment I was certain that someone had been there, listening to Smith and myself talking. Then I realized there was only one set, the set I had made myself, and they hadn’t been filled in or even blurred because the blizzard driving horizontally across the wind-dodger was clearing the deck at my feet. Sleep, I thought, and sleep now: for with that lack of sleep, the tiring events of the past few hours, the sheer physical exhaustion induced by the violent weather and Smithy’s dark forebodings, I was beginning to imagine things. I realized that Smithy was at my shoulder.

‘You levelling with me, Dr Marlowe?’

‘Of course. Or do you think I’m the invisible Borgia who’s flitting around, a little pinch here, a little pinch there?’

‘No, I don’t. I don’t think you’re levelling with me, either.’ His voice was sombre. ‘Maybe some day you are going to wish you were.’

Some day I was going to wish I had, for then I wouldn’t have had to leave Smithy behind in Bear Island.

Back in the saloon, I picked up the booklet Goin had given me, went to the corner settee, found myself a steamer blanket, decided I didn’t require it yet and wedged myself into the corner, my feet comfortably on a swivel chair belonging to the nearest table. I picked up, without much interest, the cardboard file and was debating whether to open it when the lee door opened and Mary Stuart came in. There was snow on the tangled corn-coloured hair and she was wearing a heavy tweed coat.

‘So this is where you are.’ She banged the door shut and looked at me almost accusingly.

‘This,’ I acknowledged, ‘is where I am.’

‘You weren’t in your cabin. And your light’s gone. Do you know that?’

‘I know that. I’d some writing to do. That’s why I came here. Is there something wrong?’

She lurched across the saloon and sat heavily on the settee opposite me. ‘Nothing more than has been wrong.’ She and Smithy should meet up, they’d get on famously. ‘Do you mind if I stay here?’

I could have said that it didn’t matter whether I minded or not, that the saloon was as much hers as mine, but as she seemed to be a touchy sort of creature I just smiled and said: ‘I would take it as an insult if you left.’ She smiled back at me, just an acknowledging flicker, and settled as best she could in her seat, drawing the tweed coat around her and bracing herself against the violent movements of the Morning Rose. She closed her eyes and with the long dark lashes lying along pale wet cheeks her high cheek-bones were more pronounced than ever, her Slavonic ancestry unmistakable.

It was no great hardship to look upon Mary Stuart but I still felt an increasing irritation as I watched her. It wasn’t so much her fey imaginings and need for company that made me uneasy, it was the obvious discomfort she was experiencing in trying to keep her seated balance while I was wedged so very comfortably in my own place: there is nothing more uncomfortable than being comfortable oneself and watching another in acute discomfort, not unless, of course, one has a feeling of very powerful antagonism towards the other party, in which case a very comfortable feeling can be induced: but I had no such antagonism towards the girl opposite. To compound my feeling of guilt she began to shiver involuntarily.

‘Here,’ I said. ‘You’d be more comfortable in my seat. And there’s a rug here you can have.’

She opened her eyes. ‘No, thank you.’

‘There are plenty more rugs,’ I said in something like exasperation. Nothing brings out the worst in me more quickly than sweetly-smiling suffering. I picked up the rug, did my customary two-step across the heaving deck and draped the rug over her. She looked at me gravely and said nothing.

Back in my corner I picked up the booklet again but instead of reading it got to wondering about my cabin and those who might visit it during my absence. Mary Stuart had visited it, but then she’d told me she had and the fact that she was here now confirmed the reason for her visit. At least, it seemed to confirm it. She was scared, she said, she was lonely and so she naturally wanted company. Why my company? Why not that of, say, Charles Conrad who was a whole lot younger, nicer, and better-looking than I was? Or even his other two fellow actors, Gunther Jungbeck and Jon Heyter, both very personable characters indeed? Maybe she wanted to be with me for all the wrong reasons. Maybe she was watching me, maybe she was virtually guarding me, maybe she was giving someone the opportunity to visit my cabin while— I was suddenly very acutely aware that there were things in my cabin that I’d rather not be seen by others.

I put the book down and headed for the lee door. She opened her eyes and lifted her head.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out.’

‘I’m sorry. I just—are you coming back?’

‘I’m sorry, too. I’m not rude,’ I lied, ‘just tired. Below. Back in a minute.’

She nodded, her eyes following me until I closed the door behind me. Once outside I remained still for twenty seconds or so, ignoring the vagrant flurries of snow that even here, on the lee side, seemed bent on getting down my collar and up the trouser cuffs, then walked quickly for’ard. I peered through the plate glass window and she was sitting as I’d left her, only now she had her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, shaking her head slowly from side to side. Ten years ago I’d have been back in that saloon pretty rapidly, arms round her and telling her that all her troubles were over. That was ten years ago. Now I just looked at her, wondered if she had been expecting me to take a peek at her, then made my way for’ard and down to the passenger accommodation.

It was after midnight but not yet closing hours in the lounge bar, for Lonnie Gilbert, with a heroically foolhardy disregard for what would surely be Otto’s fearful wrath when the crime was discovered, had both glass doors swung open and latched in position, while he himself was ensconced in some state behind the bar itself, a bottle of malt whisky in one hand, a soda-siphon in the other. He beamed paternally at me as I passed through and as it seemed late in the day to point out to Lonnie that the better-class malts stood in no need of the anaemic assistance of soda I just nodded and went below.

If anybody had been in my cabin and gone through my belongings, he’d done it in a very circumspect way. As far as I could recall everything was as I had left it and nothing had been disturbed, but then, a practised searcher rarely left any trace of his passing. Both my cases had elasticized linen pockets in the lids and in each pocket in each lid, holding the lids as nearly horizontal as possible, I placed a small coin just at the entrance to the pocket. Then I locked the cases. In spite of the trawler’s wildly erratic behaviour those coins would remain where they were, held in place by the pressure of the clothes inside but as soon as the lid was opened, the pressure released, and the lid then lifted even part way towards the vertical, the coins would slide down to the feet of the pockets. I then locked my medical bag—it was considerably larger and heavier than the average medical bag but then it held a considerably greater amount of equipment—and put it out in the passage. I closed the door behind me, carefully wedging a spent book match between the front of the door and the sill: that door would have to open only a crack and the match would drop clear.

Lonnie, unsurprisingly, was still at his station in the lounge when I reached there.

‘Aha!’ He regarded his empty glass with an air of surprise, then reached out with an unerring hand. ‘The kindly healer with his bag of tricks. Hotfoot to the succour of suffering mankind? A new and dreadful epidemic, is it? Your old Uncle Lonnie is proud of you, boy, proud of you. This Hippocratic spirit—’ He broke off, only to resume almost at once. ‘Now that we have touched, inadvertently chanced upon, as one might say, this topic—spirit, the blushful Hippocrene—I wonder if by any chance you would care to join me in a thimbleful of the elixir I have here—’

‘Thank you, Lonnie, no. Why don’t you get to bed? If you keep it up like this, you won’t be able to get up tomorrow.’

‘And that, my dear boy, is the whole point of the exercise. I don’t want to get up tomorrow. The day after tomorrow? Well, yes, if I must, I’ll face the day after tomorrow. I don’t want to, mind you, for tomorrows, I’ve found, are always distressingly similar to todays. The only good thing you can say about a today is that at any given moment such and such a portion of it is already irrevocably past—’ he paused to admire his speech control— ‘irrevocably past, as I say, and, with the passing of every moment, so much less of it to come. But all of tomorrow is still to come. Think of it. All of it— the livelong day.’ He lifted his recharged glass. ‘Others drink to forget the past. But some of us— very, very few and it would not be right of me to say that we’re gifted with a prescience and understanding and intelligence far beyond the normal ken, so I’ll just say we’re different—some of us, I say, drink to forget the future. How, you will ask, can one forget the future? Well, for one thing, it takes practice. And, of course, a little assistance.’ He drank half his malt in one gulp and intoned: ‘“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable—”’

‘Lonnie,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you’re the least little bit like Macbeth.’

‘And there you have it in a nutshell. I’m not. A tragic figure, a sad man, fated and laden with doom. Now, me, I’m not like that at all. We Gilberts have the indomitable spirit, the unconquerable soul. Your Shakespeares are all very well, but Walter de la Mare is my boy.’ He lifted his glass and squinted myopically at it against the light. ‘“Look your last on all things lovely every hour.”’

‘I don’t think he quite meant it in that way, Lonnie. Anyway, doctor’s orders and do me a favour—get to hell out of here. Otto will have you drawn and quartered if he finds you here.’

‘Otto? Do you know something?’ Lonnie leaned forward confidentially. ‘Otto’s really a very kindly man. I like Otto. He’s always been good to me, Otto has. Most people are good, my dear chap, don’t you know that? Most people are kind. Lots of them very kind. But none so kind as Otto. Why, I remember—’

He broke off as I went round the back of the bar, replaced the bottles, locked the doors, placed the keys in his dressing-gown pocket and took his arm.

‘I’m not trying to deprive you of the necessities of life,’ I explained. ‘Neither am I being heavy-handed and moralistic. But I have a sensitive nature and I don’t want to be around when you find out that your assessment of Otto is a hundred per cent wrong.’ Lonnie came without a single murmur of protest. Clearly, he had his emergency supplies cached in his cabin. On our stumbling descent of the companionway he said: ‘You think I’m headed for the next world with my gas pedal flat on the floor, don’t you?’

‘As long as you don’t hit anybody it’s none of my business how you drive, Lonnie.’

He stumbled into his cabin, sat heavily on his bed, then moved with remarkable swiftness to one side: I could only conclude that he’d inadvertently sat on a bottle of scotch. He looked at me, pondering, then said: ‘Tell me, my boy, do you think they have bars in heaven?’

‘I’m afraid I have no information on that one, Lonnie.’

‘Quite, quite. It makes a gratifying change to find a doctor who is not the source of all wisdom. You may leave me now, my good fellow.’

I looked at Neal Divine, now quietly asleep, and at Lonnie, impatiently and for obvious reasons awaiting my departure, and left them both.

Mary Stuart was sitting where I’d left her, arms straight out on either side and fingers splayed to counteract the now noticeably heavier pitching of the Morning Rose: the rolling effect, on the other hand, was considerably less, so I assumed that the wind was still veering in a northerly direction. She looked at me with the normally big brown eyes now preternaturally huge in a dreadfully tired face, then looked away again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I found myself apologizing. ‘I’ve been discussing classics and theology with our production manager.’ I made for my corner seat and sat down gratefully. ‘Do you know him at all?’

‘Everybody knows Lonnie.’ She tried to smile. ‘We worked together in the last picture I made.’ Again she essayed a smile. ‘Did you see it?’

‘No.’ I’d heard about it though, enough to make me walk five miles out of my way to avoid it.

‘It was awful. I was awful. I can’t imagine why they gave me another chance.’

‘You’re a very beautiful girl,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to be able to act. Performance detracts from appearance. Anyway, you may be an excellent actress. I wouldn’t know. About Lonnie?’

‘Yes. He was there. So were Mr Gerran and Mr Heissman.’ I said nothing so she went on: ‘This is the third picture we’ve all made together. The third since Mr Heissman—well, since he—’

‘I know. Mr Heissman was away for quite a bit.’

‘Lonnie’s such a nice man. He’s so helpful and kind and I think he’s a very wise man. But he’s a funny man. You know that Lonnie likes to take a drink. One day, after twelve hours on the set and all of us dead tired, when we got back to the hotel I asked for a double gin and he became very angry with me. Why should he be like that?’

‘Because he’s a funny man. So you like him?’

‘How could I not like him? He likes everybody so everybody just likes him back. Even Mr Gerran likes him—they’re very close. But then, they’ve known each other for years and years.’

‘I didn’t know that. Has Lonnie a family? Is he married?’

‘I don’t know. I think he was. Maybe he’s divorced. Why do you ask so many questions about him?’

‘Because I’m a typically knowing, prying sawbones and I like to know as much as possible about people who are or may be my patients. For instance, I know enough about Lonnie now never to give him a brandy if he were in need of a restorative for it wouldn’t have the slightest effect.’

She smiled and closed her eyes. Conversation over. I took another steamer rug from under my seat, wrapped it around me—the temperature in the saloon was noticeably dropping—and picked up the folder that Goin had given me. I turned to Page 1, which, apart from being titled ‘Bear Island’, started off without any preamble.

‘It is widely maintained,’ it read, ‘that Olympus Productions is approaching the making of this, its latest production, in conditions so restrictive as to amount to an aura of almost total secrecy. Allegations to this effect have subsequently made their appearance in popular and trade presses and in light of the absence of production office denials in the contrary those uncorroborated assertions have achieved a considerable degree of substance and credence which one might regard, in the circumstances, as being a psychological inevitability.’ I read through this rubbish again, a travesty of the Queen’s English fit only for the columns of the more learned Sunday papers, and then I got it: they were making a hush-hush picture and didn’t care who knew. And very good publicity it was for the film, too, I thought, but, no, I was doing the boys an injustice. Or so the boys said. The article continued:

‘Other cinematic productions’—I assumed he meant films—‘have been approached and, on occasion, even executed under conditions of similar secrecy but those other and, one is afraid spurious sub rosa ventures have had for their calculated aim nothing less, regrettably, than the extraction of the maximum free publicity. This, we insist, and with some pride, is not the objective of Olympus Productions.’ Good old Olympus, this I had to see, a cinema company who didn’t want free publicity: next thing we’d have the Bank of England turning its nose up at the sound of the word ‘money’. ‘Our frankly cabbalistic approach to this production, which has given rise to so much intrigued and largely ill-informed speculation, has, in fact, been imposed upon us by considerations of the highest importance: the handling of this, a story which in the wrong hands might well generate potentially and dangerously explosive international repercussions, calls for the utmost in delicacy and finesse, essential qualities for the creation of what we confidently expect will be hailed as a cinematic masterpiece, but qualities which even we feel—nay, are certain—would not be able to overcome the immense damage done by—and we are certain of this—the world-wide furore that would immediately and automatically follow the premature leaking of the story we intend to film.

‘We are confident, however, that when—there is no “if”—this production is made in our own way, in our own time, and under the very strictest security conditions—this is why we have gone to the quite extraordinary lengths of obtaining notarized oaths of secrecy from every member of the cast and crew of the film project under discussion, including the managing director and his codirectors—we will have upon our hands, when this production is presented to a public, which will have been geared by that time to the highest degree of expectancy, a tour de force of so unparalleled an order that the justification for—’

Mary Stuart sneezed and I blessed her, twice, once for her health and once for the heaven-sent interruption of the reading of this modestly phrased manifesto. I glanced at her again just as she sneezed again. She was sitting in a curiously huddled fashion, hands clasped tightly together, her face white and pinched. I laid down the Olympus manifesto, unwrapped my rug, crossed the saloon in a zigzag totter which resulted from the now very pronounced pitching of the Morning Rose, sat beside her and took her hands in mine. They were icily cold.

‘You’re freezing,’ I said somewhat unnecessarily.

‘I’m all right. I’m just a bit tired.’

‘Why don’t you go below to your cabin? It’s at least twenty degrees warmer down there and you’ll never sleep up here if you have to keep bracing yourself all the time from falling off your seat.’

‘No. I don’t sleep down there either. I’ve hardly slept since—’ She broke off. ‘And I don’t feel nearly so—so queasy up here. Please.’

I don’t give up easily. I said: ‘Then at least take my corner seat, you’ll be much more comfortable there.’

She took her hands away. ‘Please. Just leave me.’

I gave up. I left her. I took three wavering steps in the direction of my seat, halted in irritation, turned back to her and hauled her none too gently to her feet. She looked at me, not speaking, in tired surprise, and continued to say nothing, and to offer no resistance, as I led her across to my corner, brought out another two steamer rugs, cocooned her in those, lifted her feet on to the settee and sat beside her. She looked up at me for a few seconds, her gaze transferring itself from my right eye to my left and back again, then she turned her face to me, closed her eyes and slid one of her icy hands under my jacket. During all this performance she didn’t speak once or permit any expression to appear on her face and I would have been deeply moved by this touching trust in me were it not for the reflection that if it were her purpose or instructions to keep as close an eye as possible on me she could hardly, even in her most optimistic moments, have hoped to arrive at a situation where she could keep an eye within half an inch of my shirt-front. I couldn’t even take a deep breath without her knowing all about it. On the other hand, if she were as innocent as the driven snow that had now completely obscured the plate glass not six inches from my head, then it was less than likely that any ill-disposed citizen or citizens would contemplate taking action of a violent and permanent nature against me as long as I had Mary Stuart practically sitting on my lap. It was, I thought, a pretty even trade. I looked down at the half-hidden lovely face and reflected that I was possibly having a shade the better of the deal.

I reached for my own rug, draped it round my shoulders in Navaho style, picked up the Olympus manifesto again and continued to read. The next two pages were largely a hyperbolic expansion of what had gone before, with the writer—I assumed it was Heissman—harping on at nauseating length on the twin themes of the supreme artistic merit of the production and the necessity for absolute secrecy. After this self-adulatory exercise, the writer got down to facts.

‘After long consideration, and the close examination and subsequent rejection of a very considerable number of possible alternatives, we finally decided upon Bear Island as the location for this project. We are aware that all of you, and this includes the entire crew of the Morning Rose from Captain Imrie downwards, believed that we were heading for a destination in the neighbourhood of the Lofoten Islands off Northern Norway and it was not exactly, shall we say, through fortuitous circumstances, that this rumour was gaining some currency in certain quarters in London immediately prior to our departure. We make no apologies for what may superficially appear to be an unwarranted deception, for it was essential to our purposes and the maintenance of secrecy that this subterfuge be adopted.

‘For the following brief description of Bear Island we are indebted to the Royal Geographical Society of Oslo, who have also furnished us with a translation.’ That was a relief, just as long as the translator wasn’t Heissman I might be able to get it on the first reading. ‘This information, it is perhaps superfluous to add, was obtained for us through the good offices of a third party entirely unconnected with Olympus Productions, a noted ornithologist who must remain entirely incognito. It may be mentioned in the passing that the Norwegian government has given us permission to film on the island. We understand that it is their understanding that we propose to make a wild life documentary: such an understanding, far less a commitment, was not obtained from us.’

I wondered about that last bit—not the cleverer-than-thou smugness of it, that was clearly inseparable from everything Heissman wrote—but the fact that he should say it at all. Heissman, clearly, was not a man much given to hiding his own brilliance—the phrase ‘low cunning’ would not have occurred to him—under a bushel but equally he wasn’t a man who would permit this particular type of self-gratification to lead him into danger. Almost certainly if the Norwegians did find out they had been deluded there would be nothing in international law they could do about it— Olympus wouldn’t have overlooked anything so obvious—other than ban the completed film from their country, and as Norway could hardly be regarded as a major market this would cause few sleepless nights. On the other hand, it would be effective in stilling any qualms of conscience— true, this was the world of the cinema but Heissman would be unlikely to overlook even the most remote possibility—that might have arisen had the project been denied even this superficial official blessing, and the very fact that they were being made privy to the secret inner workings of Olympus would tend to bind both cast and crew closer to the company, for it is an almost universal law of nature that mankind, which is still in the painful process of growing up, dearly loves its little closed and/or secret societies, whether those be the most remote Masonic Lodge in Saskatchewan or White’s of St James’s, and tends to form an intense personal attachment and loyalty to other members of that group while presenting a united front to the world of the unfortunates beyond their doors. I did not overlook the possibility that there might be another, and conceivably sinister, interpretation of Heissman’s confidential frankness but as it was now into the early hours of the morning I didn’t particularly feel like seeking it out.

‘Bear Island,’ the résumé began. ‘One of the Svalbard group, of which Spitzbergen is much the largest. This group remained neutral and unclaimed until the beginning of the twentieth century when, because of its very considerable investments in the exploitation of mineral resources and the establishment of whaling operations, Norway requested sovereignty of the area, placing her petition before the Conference’—they didn’t specify what conference—’at Christiania (Oslo) in 1910, 1912 and again in 1914. On each occasion Russian objections prevented ratification of the proposals. However, in 1919 the Allied Supreme Council granted Norway sovereignty, formal possession being taken on August 14th, 1925.’

Having established the ownership beyond all doubt the report proceeded: ‘The (Bear) island, 74° 28’N., 19° 13’E., lies some 260 miles N.N.W. of North Cape, Norway, and some 140 miles south of Spitzbergen and may be regarded as the meeting point of the Norwegian, Greenland and Barents Seas. In terms of distance from its nearest neighbours, this is the most isolated island in the Arctic.’

There followed a long and for me highly uninteresting account of the island’s history which seemed to consist mainly of interminable squabbles between Norwegians, Germans and Russians over whaling and mining rights—although I was mildly intrigued to learn that as recently as the twenties there had been as many as a hundred and eighty Norwegians working the coal mines at Tunheim in the north-east of the island—I would have imagined that even the polar bears, after whom the island was named, would have given this desolation as wide a berth as possible. The mines, it seemed, had been closed down following a geological survey which showed that the purity and thickness of the seams were not sufficient to make it a profitable proposition. The island, however, was not entirely uninhabited even today: it appeared that the Norwegian Government maintained a meteorological and radio station at Tunheim.

Then came articles on the natural resources, vegetation and animal life, all of which I took as read. The references to the climate, however, which might be expected to concern us all, I found much more intriguing and highly discouraging. ‘The meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Polar Drift,’ it read, ‘makes for extremely poor weather conditions, with large rainfall and dense fogs. The average summer temperature rises to not more than five degrees above freezing. Not until mid-July do the lakes become ice-free and the snow melts. The midnight sun lasts for 106 days from April 30th to August 13th: the sun remains below the horizon from November 7th to February 4th.’ This last item made our presence there, this late in the year, very odd indeed as Otto couldn’t expect more than a few hours of daylight at the most: perhaps the script called for the whole story to be shot in darkness.

‘Physically and geologically,’ it went on, ‘Bear Island is triangular in shape with its apex to the south, being approximately twelve miles long on its north-south axis, in width varying from ten miles in the north to two miles in the south at the point where the southernmost peninsula begins. Generally speaking the north and west consist of a fairly flat plateau at an elevation of about a hundred feet, while the south and east are mountainous, the two main complexes being the Misery Fell group in the east and the Antarcticfjell and its associated mountains, the Alfredfjell, Harbergfjell and Fuglefjell in the extreme south-east.

‘There are no glaciers. The entire area is covered with a network of shallow lakes, none more than a few yards in depth: those account for about one-tenth of the total area of the island: the remainder of the interior of the island consists largely of icy swamps and loose scree which makes it extremely difficult to traverse.

‘The coastline of Bear Island is regarded as perhaps the most inhospitably bleak in the world. This is especially true in the south where the island ends in vertical cliffs, the streams entering the sea by waterfalls. A characteristic feature of this area is the detached pillars of rock that stand in the sea close to the foot of the cliffs, remnants from that distant period when the island was considerably larger than it is now. The melting of the snows and ice in June/July, the powerful tidal streams and the massive erosion undermine those coastal hills so that large masses of rock are constantly falling into the sea. The great polomite cliffs of Hambergfjell drop sheer for over 1400 feet: at their base, projecting from the seas are sharp needles of rock as much as 250 feet high, while the Fuglefjell (Bird Fell) cliffs are almost as high and have at their most southerly point a remarkable series of high stacks, pinnacles and arches. To the east of this point, between Kapp Bull and Kapp Kolthoff, is a bay surrounded on three sides by vertical cliffs which are nowhere less than 1000 feet high.

‘Those cliffs are the finest bird breeding grounds in the Northern Hemisphere.’

It was all very fine for the birds, I supposed. That was the end of the Geographical Society’s report— or as much of it as the writer had chosen to include—and I was bracing myself for a return to Heissman’s limpid prose when the lee door opened and John Halliday staggered in. Halliday, the unit’s highly competent stills photographer, was a dark, swarthy, taciturn and unsmiling American. Even by his normal cheerless standards Halliday looked uncommonly glum. He caught sight of us and stood there uncertainly, holding the door open.

‘I’m sorry.’ He made as if to go. ‘I didn’t know—’

‘Enter, enter,’ I said. ‘Things are not as they seem. What you see before you is a strictly doctor-patient relationship.’ He closed the door and sat down morosely on the settee that Mary Stuart had so lately occupied. ‘Insomnia?’ I asked. ‘A touch of the mal de mer?’

‘Insomnia.’ He chewed dispiritedly on the wad of black tobacco that never seemed to leave his mouth. ‘The mal de mer’s all Sandy’s.’ Sandy, I knew, was his cabin-mate. True, Sandy hadn’t been looking very bright when last I’d seen him in the galley but I’d attributed this to Haggerty’s yearning to eviscerate him: at least it explained why he hadn’t called in to see the Duke after he’d left us.

‘Bit under the weather, is he?’

‘Very much under the weather. Kind of a funny green colour and sick all over the damned carpet.’ Halliday wrinkled his nose. ‘The smell—’

‘Mary.’ I shook her gently and she opened sleep-dulled eyes. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go for a moment.’ She said nothing as I half helped her to a sitting position, just glanced incuriously at Halliday and closed her eyes again.

‘I don’t think he’s all that bad,’ Halliday said. ‘Not poisoning or anything like that, I mean. I’m sure of it.’

‘No harm to take a look,’ I said. Halliday was probably right: on the other hand Sandy had had the freedom of the galley before Haggerty had caught him and with Sandy’s prehensile and sticky fingers anything was conceivable, including the possibility that his appetite was not quite as bird-like as he claimed. I picked up my medical bag and left.

As Halliday had said, Sandy was of a rather peculiar greenish shade and he’d obviously been very sick indeed. He was sitting propped up in his bunk, with both forearms wrapped round his middle: he glared at me balefully as I entered.

‘Christ, I’m dying,’ he wheezed. He swore briefly, pungently and indiscriminately at life in general and Otto in particular. ‘Why that crazy bastard wants to drag us aboard this bloody old stinking hell-ship—’

I gave him some sleeping-sedatives and left. I was beginning to find Sandy a rather less than sympathetic character: more importantly, sufferers from aconitine poisoning couldn’t speak, far less indulge in the fluent Billingsgate in which Sandy was clearly so proficient.

Swaying from side to side and again with her arms stretched out to support herself, Mary Stuart still had her eyes shut: Halliday, dejectedly chewing his wad of tobacco, looked up at me in lackadaisical half-inquiry as if he didn’t much care whether Sandy was alive or dead.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Just the weather.’ I sat down a little way from Mary Stuart and not as much as by a flicker of a closed eyelid did she acknowledge my presence. I shivered involuntarily and drew the steamer rug around me. I said: ‘It’s getting a bit nippy in this saloon. Why don’t you take one of these and kip down here?’

‘No thanks. I’d no idea it would be so damn cold here. My blankets and pillow and it’s me for the lounge.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Just as long as Lonnie doesn’t trample all over me with his hobnailed boots in the middle watch.’ It was apparently common knowledge that the liquor in the lounge drew Lonnie like a lodestone. Halliday chewed some more, then nodded at the bottle in Captain Imrie’s wrought-iron stand. ‘You’re a whisky man, Doc. That’s the stuff to warm you up.’

‘Agreed. But I’m a very choosy whisky man. What is it?’

Halliday peered. ‘Black Label.’

‘None better. But I’m a malt man myself. You’re cold, you try some. It’s on the house. Stole it from Otto.’

‘I’m not much of a one for scotch. Now bourbon—’

‘Corrodes the digestive tract. I speak as a medical man. Now, one sip of that stuff there and you’ll swear off those lethal Kentucky brews for ever. Go on. Try it.’

Halliday looked at the bottle, as if uncertainly. I said to Mary Stuart: ‘How about you? Just a little? You’ve no idea how it warms the cockles.’

She opened her eyes and gave me that oddly expressionless look. ‘No thank you. I hardly ever drink.’ She closed her eyes again.

‘The flaw that makes for perfection,’ I said absently, because my mind was on other things. Halliday wouldn’t drink from that bottle, Mary Stuart wouldn’t drink from that bottle, but Halliday seemed to think it was a good idea that I should. Had they both remained in their seats during my absence or had they been busy little bees, one keeping guard against my premature return while the other altered the character of the Black Label with ingredients not necessarily made in Scotland? Why else had Halliday come up to the saloon if not to lure me away? Why hadn’t he gone direct to the lounge with blankets and pillow instead of wandering aimlessly up here to the saloon where he must have known from mealtimes that the temperature was considerably colder than it was down below? Because, of course, before Mary Stuart had made her presence known to me here, she’d seen me through the outer windows and had reported to Halliday that a certain problem had arisen that could only be solved by bringing about my temporary absence from the saloon. Sandy’s sickness had been a convenient coincidence—if it had been a coincidence, I suddenly thought: if Halliday was the person, or was in cahoots with the person who was so handy with poisons, then the introduction of some mildly emetic potion into Sandy’s drink would have involved no more problem than that of opportunity. It all added up.

I became aware that Halliday was on his feet and was lurching unsteadily in my direction, bottle in one hand and glass in the other: the bottle, I noticed almost mechanically, was about one-third full. He halted, swaying, in front of me and poured a generous measure into the glass, bowed lightly, offered me the glass and smiled. ‘Maybe we’re both on the hide-bound and conservative side, Doc. In the words of the song, I will if you will so will I.’

I smiled back. ‘Your willingness to experiment does you credit. But no thanks. I told you, I just don’t like the stuff. I’ve tried it. Have you?’

‘No, but I—’

‘Well, how can you tell, then?’

‘I don’t think—’

‘You were going to try it anyway. Go on. drink it.’

Mary Stuart, opened her eyes. ‘Do you always make people drink against their will? Is this what doctors do—force alcohol on those who don’t want it?’

I felt like scowling and saying, ‘why don’t you shut up?’ but instead I smiled and said: ‘Teetotal objections overruled.’

‘So what’s the harm?’ Halliday said. He had the glass to his lips. I stared at him until I remembered I shouldn’t be staring, which was all of a fraction of a second, smiled indulgently, glanced at Mary Stuart whose ever so slightly compressed lips registered no more than a trace of prudish disapproval, then looked back in time to see Halliday lowering his half empty glass.

‘Not bad,’ he pronounced. ‘Not bad at all. Kind of a funny taste, though.’

‘You could be arrested in Scotland for saying that,’ I said mechanically. The villain had nonchalantly quaffed the hemlock while his accomplice had looked on with indifference. I felt very considerably diminished, a complete and utter idiot: as a detective, my inductive and deductive powers added up to zero. I even felt like apologizing to them except that they wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

‘You may in fact be right, Doc, one could even get to like this stuff.’ Halliday topped up his glass, drunk again, took the bottle across to its wrought-iron rest and resumed his former seat. He sat there silently for perhaps half a minute, finished off the scotch with a couple of swallows and rose abruptly to his feet. ‘With that lot inside me I can even ignore Lonnie’s hob-nails. Good night.’ He hurried from the saloon.

I looked at the doorway through which he had vanished, my mind thoughtful, my face not. I still didn’t understand why he had come to the saloon in the first place: and what thought had so suddenly occurred to him to precipitate so abruptly a departure? An unprofitable line of thinking to pursue, I couldn’t even find a starting-point to begin theorizing. I looked at Mary Stuart and felt very guilty indeed: murderesses, I knew, came in all shapes, sizes and guises but if they came in this particular guise then I could never trust my judgement again. I wondered what on earth could have led me to entertain so ludicrous a suspicion: I must be even more tired than I thought.

As if conscious of my gaze she opened her eyes and looked at me. She had this extraordinary ability to assume this still and wholly expressionless face, but beneath this remoteness, this distance, this aloofness lay, I thought, a marked degree of vulnerability. Wishful thinking on my part, it was possible: but I was oddly certain it wasn’t. Still without speaking, still without altering her expression or lack of it, she half-rose, hobbled awkwardly in her cocoon of steamer rugs and sat close beside me. In my best avuncular fashion I put my arm round her shoulders, but it didn’t stay there for long for she took hold of my wrist and deliberately and without haste lifted my arm over the top of her head and pushed it clear of her. Just to show that doctors are suprahuman and incapable of being offended by patients who aren’t really responsible for their own behaviour, I smiled at her. She smiled back at me and her eyes, I saw with an astonishment that I knew was not reflected in my face, were filled with unshed tears: almost as if she were aware of those tears and wished to hide them, she suddenly swung her legs up on the settee, turned towards me and got back to the short-range examination of my shirt-front, only this time she put both her arms around me. As far as freedom of mobility was concerned I was as good as handcuffed, which was doubtless what she wanted anyway. That she harboured no lethal intent towards me I was sure: I was equally sure that she was determined not to let me out of her sight and that this was the most effective way she knew of doing just that. How much it cost that proud and lonely person to behave like this I couldn’t guess: even less could I imagine what made her do it at all.

I sat there and tried to mull things over in my now thoroughly befogged mind and, predictably, made no progress whatsoever. Besides, my tired eyes were being almost hypnotized by the behaviour of the scotch inside the Black Label bottle, with the almost metronomic regularity with which the liquid ascended and descended the opposite sides of the bottle in response to the regular pitching of the Morning Rose. One thing led to another and I said: ‘Mary dear?’

‘Yes?’ She didn’t turn her face up to look at me and I didn’t have to be told why: the area around the level of my fourth shirt-button was becoming noticeably damp.

‘I don’t want to disturb you but it’s time for my nightcap.’

‘Whisky?’

‘Ah! Two hearts that beat as one.’

‘No.’ She tightened her arms.

‘No?’

‘I hate the smell of whisky.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said sotto voce, ‘I’m not married to you.’

‘What was that?’

‘I said “Yes, Mary dear”.’

Five more minutes passed and I realized that my mind had closed down for the night. Idly I picked up the Olympus manifesto, read some rubbish about the sole completed copy of the screenplay being deposited in the vaults of a London bank, and put it down again. Mary Stuart was breathing quietly and evenly and seemed to be asleep. I bent and blew lightly on the left eyelid which was about the only part of her face that I could see. It didn’t quiver. She was asleep. I shifted my position experimentally, not much, and her arms automatically tightened round me, she’d clearly left a note to her subconscious before turning in for the night. I resigned myself to remaining where I was, it wasn’t a form of imprisonment that was likely to scar me permanently: I wondered vaguely whether the idea behind this silken incarceration was to prevent me from doing things or from chancing upon some other devilry that might well be afoot. I was too tired to care. I made up my mind just to sit there and keep a sleepless vigil until the morning came: I was asleep within not more than two minutes.

Mary Stuart was not and didn’t look as if she was built along the lines of a coal-heaver but she wasn’t stuffed with swansdown either, for when I woke my left arm was asleep, wholly numb and almost useless, a realization that was brought home to me when I had to reach across my right hand to lift up my left wrist to see what time the luminous hands of my watch said it was. They said it was 4.15.

It says much for my mental acuity that at least ten seconds elapsed before it occurred to me why it had been necessary for me to consult the luminous hands. Because it was dark, of course, but why was the saloon dark? Every light had been on when I’d gone to sleep. And what had wakened me? Something had, I knew without knowing why that I hadn’t wakened naturally but that there had been some external cause. What and where was the cause? A sound or a physical contact, it couldn’t be anything else, and whoever was responsible for whatever it had been was still with me. He had to be, insufficient time had elapsed since I’d woken for him to have left the saloon: more importantly the hairs on the back of my neck told me there was another and inimical presence in the saloon with me.

Gently I took hold of Mary Stuart’s wrists to ease her arms away. Again the resistance was automatic, hers was not a subconscious to go to sleep on the job, but I was in no mood to be balked by any subconscious. I prised her arms free, slid along the settee, lowered her carefully to the horizontal, rose and moved out towards the middle of the saloon.

I stood quite still, my hands grasping the edge of a table to brace myself, my breathing almost stopped as I listened intently. I could have spared myself the trouble. I was sure that the weather had moderated, not a great deal but enough to be just noticeable, since I’d gone to sleep, but it hadn’t moderated to the extent where any stealthy movements—and I could expect none other— could possibly be heard above the sound of the wind and the seas, the metallic creakings and groanings of the ancient plates and rivets of the Morning Rose.

The nearest set of light switches—there was a duplicate set by the stewards’ pantry—was by the lee door. I took one step in the remembered direction then stopped. Did the presence in the room know that I was awake and on my feet? Were his eyes more attuned to the darkness than my newly opened ones? Could he dimly discern my figure? Would he guess that my first move would be towards the switches and was he preparing to block my way? If he were, how would he block my way? Would he be carrying a weapon and what kind of weapon—I was acutely aware that all I had were two hands, the left one still a fairly useless lump of tingling pins and needles. I stopped, irresolute.

I heard the metallic click of a door handle and a gust of icy air struck me: the presence was leaving by the lee door. I reached the door in four steps, stepped outside on to the deck, flung up an instinctively protective right forearm as a bright light abruptly struck my eyes and immediately wished I had used my left forearm instead for then it might have offered me some measure of protection against something hard, heavy and very solid that connected forcibly and painfully with the left side of my neck. I clung to the outside edge of the door to support myself but I didn’t seem to have much strength left in my hands: and I seemed to have none at all in my legs for although I remained quite conscious I sank to the deck as if my legs had been filleted: by the time the momentary paralysis had passed and I was able to use the support of the door to drag myself shakily to my feet, I was alone on the deck. I had no idea where my assailant had gone and the matter was one of only academic interest, my legs could barely cope with supporting my weight in a static position: even the thought of running or negotiating ladders and companionways at speed was preposterous.

Still clinging to whatever support was to hand I stepped back into the saloon, fumbled the lights on and pulled the lee door closed behind me. Mary Stuart was propped on an elbow, the heel of one palm rubbing an eye while the lid of the other was half open in the fashion of a person just rousing from a very deep or drugged sleep. I looked away, stumbled towards Captain Imrie’s table and sat down heavily in his chair. I lifted the bottle of Black Label from its stand. It was half full. For what seemed quite a long time but could have been no more than seconds I stared at this bottle, not seeing it, then looked away to locate the glass that Halliday had been using. It was nowhere to be seen, it could have fallen and rolled out of sight in a dozen different directions. I selected another glass from the table rack, splashed some scotch into it, drank it and made my way back to my seat. My neck felt awful. One good shake of my head and it would fall off.

‘Don’t breathe through your nose,’ I said, ‘and you’ll hardly smell the demon drink at all.’ I propped her up to a sitting position, rearranged her rugs and forestalled her by, for a change, putting my arms around her. I said: ‘There now.’

‘What was it? What happened?’ Her voice was low and had a shake to it.

‘Just the door. Wind blew it open. Had to close it, that’s all.’

‘But the lights were off.’

‘I put them off. Just after you’d gone to sleep.’

She wriggled an arm free from the blankets and gently touched the side of my neck.

‘It’s colouring already,’ she whispered. ‘It’s going to be a huge ugly bruise. And it’s bleeding.’ I reached up with my handkerchief and she wasn’t making any mistake: I stuffed my handkerchief into my collar and left it there. She went on in the same little voice: ‘How did it happen?’

‘One of those stupid things. I slipped on the snow and struck my neck on the storm-sill of the door. Does ache a bit, I must say.’

She didn’t answer. She freed her other arm, caught me by both lapels, stared at me with a face full of misery and put her forehead on my shoulder. Now it was my collar’s turn to become damp. It was the most extraordinary behaviour for a wardress—that her function was to keep tabs on and effectively immobilize me I was increasingly sure—but then, she was the most extraordinary wardress I’d ever come across. And the nicest. Dr Marlowe, I said, the lady is in distress and you are but human. I let my suspicions take five and stroked the tangled yellow hair. I’d been led to believe, I forget by what or by whom, that nothing was as conducive to the calming of upset feminine feelings as that soothing gesture: only seconds later I was wondering where I’d picked up this piece of obviously blatant misinformation for she suddenly pushed herself upright and struck me twice on the shoulder with the base of her clenched left fist. I was more than ever convinced that she wasn’t made of swansdown.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘All right,’ I said agreeably. ‘I won’t do that. I’m sorry.’

‘No, no, please! I’m sorry. I don’t know what made me—I really—’ She stopped speaking, although her lips kept on moving, and stared at me with tear-filled eyes, the no longer beautiful face defenceless and defeated and full of despair: it made me feel acutely uncomfortable for I do not like to see proud and self-contained people thus reduced. There was a quick indrawing of breath, then, astonishingly, she had her arms wound round my neck and so tightly that it would appear that she was bent upon my instant asphyxiation. She wept in silence, her shoulders shaking.

Splendidly done, I thought approvingly, quite splendidly done. Irrespective of for whose benefit it might be—and then I despised myself for my cynicism. Quite apart from the fact that her acknowledged limitations as an actress put such a performance out of the question I was convinced, without knowing why I was convinced, that what I was seeing was genuine uninhibited emotion. And what on earth had she to gain by pretending to lower her defences in front of me?

For whom, then, the tears? Not for me, of that I was certain, why in the world for me? I scarcely knew her, she scarcely knew me, I was only a shoulder to cry on, likely enough I was only a doctor’s shoulder to cry on, people have the oddest misconceptions about doctors and maybe their shoulders are regarded as being more reliable and comforting than the average. Or more absorbent. Nor were the tears for herself, I was equally certain of that, to survive, intact, the kind of upbringing she’d hinted she’d had, one had to be possessed of an unusual degree of self-reliance and mental toughness that almost automatically excluded considerations of self-pity. So for whom, then, the tears?

I didn’t know and, at that moment, I hardly cared. In normal circumstances and with no other matter so significantly important as to engage my attention, so lovely a girl in such obvious distress would have had my complete and undivided concern, but the circumstances were abnormal and my thoughts were elsewhere engaged with an intensity that made Mary Stuart’s odd behaviour seem relatively unimportant.

I couldn’t keep my eyes from the bottle of scotch by the captain’s table. When Halliday had had, at my insistence as I now bitterly recalled, his first drink, the bottle had been about a third full: after his second drink it had been about a quarter full: and now it was half full. The quiet and violent man who had so recently switched off the lights and moved through the saloon had switched bottles and, for good measure, had removed the glass that Halliday had used.

Mary Stuart said something, her voice so muffled and indistinct that I couldn’t make it out: what with salt tears and salt blood this night’s work was going to cost me a new shirt. I said: ‘What?’

She moved her head, enough to enable her to speak more clearly, but not enough to let me see her face.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was such a fool. Will you forgive me?’

I squeezed her shoulder in what was more or less an automatic gesture, my eyes and my thoughts were still on that bottle, but she seemed to take it as sufficient answer. She said hesitantly: ‘Are you going to sleep again?’ She hadn’t stopped being as foolish as she thought: or perhaps she wasn’t being foolish at all.

‘No, Mary dear, I’m not going to sleep again.’ Whatever tone of firm resolution my tone carried, it was superfluous: the throbbing pain in my neck was sufficient guarantee of my wakefulness.

‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I didn’t ask what this cryptic remark was intended to convey. Physically, we couldn’t have been closer but mentally I was no longer with her. I was with Halliday, the man whom I had thought had come to kill me, the man I’d practically forced to have a drink, the man who’d drunk what had been intended for me.

I knew I would never see him again. Not alive.

CHAPTER SIX

Dawn, in those high latitudes and at that time of year, did not come until half-past ten in the morning, and it was then that we buried the three dead men, Antonio and Moxen and Scott, and surely their shades would have forgiven us for the almost indecent dispatch with which their funerals were carried out, for that driving blizzard was still at its height, the wind was full of razored knives and struck through both clothes and flesh and laid its icy fingers on the marrow. Captain Imrie, a large and brass-bound Bible in his mittened hands, read swiftly through the burial service, or at least I assumed he did, he could have been reading the Sermon on the Mount for all I could tell, the wind just plucked the inaudible words from his mouth and carried them out over the grey-white desolation of waters. Three times a canvas-wrapped bundle slid smoothly out from beneath the Morning Rose’s only Union Flag, three times a bundle vanished soundlessly beneath the surface of the sea: we could see the splashes but not hear them for our ears were full of the high and lonely lament of the wind’s requiem in the frozen rigging.

On land, mourners customarily find it difficult to tear themselves away from a newly-filled grave, but here there was no grave, there was nothing to look at and the bitter cold was sufficient to drive from every mind any thought other than that of immediate shelter and warmth: besides, Captain Imrie had said that it was an old fisherman’s custom to drink a toast to the dead. Whether it was or not I had no idea, it could well have been a custom that Imrie had invented himself, and certainly the deceased had been no fishermen: but whatever its origin I’m sure that it made its contributory effect towards the extremely rapid clearing of the decks.

I remained where I was. I felt inhibited from joining the others not because I found Captain Imrie’s proposal distasteful or ethically objectionable— only the most hypocritical could find in the Christian ethic a bar to wishing bon voyage to the departed—but because, in crowded surroundings, it could be very difficult to see who was filling my glass and what he was filling it with. Moreover, I’d had no more than three hours’ sleep the previous night, my mind was tired and a bit fuzzy round the edges and it was my hope that the admittedly heroic treatment of exposure to an Arctic blizzard might help to blow some of the cobwebs away. I took a firm hold on one of the numerous lifelines that were rigged on deck, edged my way out to the largest of one of the numerous deck cargoes we were carrying, took what illusory shelter was offered in its lee and waited for the cobwebs to fly away.

Halliday was dead. I hadn’t found his body, I’d searched, casually and unobtrusively, every likely and most of the unlikely places of concealment on the Morning Rose: he had vanished and left no trace. Halliday, I knew, was lying in the black depths of the Barents Sea. How he’d got there I didn’t know and it didn’t seem to be important: it could be that someone had helped him over the side but it was even more probable that he had required no assistance. He’d left the saloon as abruptly as he had because the poison in his scotch—my scotch—had been as fast acting as it had been deadly. He had felt the urgent need to be sick and the obvious place to be sick was over the side: a slip on the snow or ice, one of the hundreds of trough-seeking lurches that the trawler had experienced during the night and in what must have been by that time his ill, weakened and dazed state, and he would have been quite unable to prevent himself from pitching over the low guard-rails. The only consolation, if consolation it was, was that he had probably succumbed to poison before his lungs had filled with water. I did not subscribe to the popular belief that death from drowning was a relatively easy and painless way to go, if for no other reason than that it was a theory that in the nature of things lacked positive documentation.

I was as certain as could be that Halliday’s absence had so far gone unnoticed by everyone except myself and the person responsible for his death, and there was not even certainty about that last point, it was quite possible that he knew nothing of Halliday’s brief visit to the saloon. True, Halliday had not appeared for breakfast but as a few others had done the same and those who had come had done so intermittently over the best part of a couple of hours, his absence had gone unremarked. His cabin-mate, Sandy, was still feeling under the weather to the extent that Halliday’s presence or absence was a matter of total indifference to him: and as Halliday had been very much a solitary there was no one who would be sufficiently concerned to inquire anxiously as to his whereabouts. I hoped that his absence remained undiscovered as long as possible: although the signed guarantee given to Captain Imrie that morning had contained no specific reference as to the action to be taken in the event of someone going missing, he was quite capable of seizing upon this as a pretext to abandon the trip and make with all speed for Hammerfest.

The match I’d left jammed between the foot of my cabin door and the sill had no longer been in position when I’d returned to my cabin early in the morning. The coins I’d left in the linen pockets of the lids of my suitcases had shifted position from the front to the back of the pockets, sure evidence that my cases had been opened in my absence. It says much for my frame of mind that the discovery occasioned me no particular surprise—which was in itself surprising, for although someone aboard was aware that the good doctor had been boning up on aconitine and so had more than a fair idea that the poisoning had not been accidental, that in itself was hardly reason to start examining the doctor’s hand luggage. More than ever, it behooved me to watch my back.

I heard a sound behind my back. My instinctive reaction was to take a couple of rapid steps forward, who knew what hard or sharp implement might be coming at my occiput or shoulder-blades, then whirl round, but a simultaneous reasoning told me that it was unlikely that anyone would propose to do me in on the upper deck in daylight under the interested gaze of watchers on the bridge, so I turned round leisurely and saw Charles Conrad moving into what little shelter was offered in the lee of the bulk deck cargo.

‘What’s this, then?’ I said. ‘The morning constitutional at all costs? Or don’t you fancy Captain Imrie’s scotch?’

‘Neither.’ He smiled. ‘Curiosity is all.’ He tapped the tarpaulin-covered bulk beside us. It was close on ten feet in height, semi-cylindrical—the base was flat—and was lashed in position by at least a dozen steel cables. ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘Is this a clever question?’

‘Yes.’

‘Prefabricated Articized huts. Or so the word went in Wick. Six of them, designed to fit one inside the other for ease of transportation.’

‘That’s it. Made of bonded ply, kapok insulation, asbestos and aluminium.’ He pointed to another bulky item of deck cargo immediately for’ard of the one behind which we were sheltering. This peculiarly shaped object appeared to be roughly oval along its length, perhaps six feet high. ‘And this?’

‘Another clever question?’

‘Of course.’

‘And my answer will be wrong? Again?’

‘If you still believe what you were told in Wick, yes. Those aren’t huts because we don’t need huts. We’re heading for an area called the Sor-hamna— the South Haven—where there already are huts, and perfectly usable ones. Bloke called Lerner came there seventy years ago, prospecting for coal—which he found, by the way: a bit of an odd-ball who painted the rocks on the shore in the German colours to indicate that this was private property. He built huts—he even built a road across the headland to the nearest bay, the Kvalross Bukta or Walrus Bay. After him a German fishing company based themselves here—and they built huts. More importantly, a Norwegian scientific expedition spent nine months here during the most recent International Geophysical Year—and they built huts. Whatever else is lacking at South Haven it’s not accommodation.’

‘You’re very well informed.’

‘I don’t forget something that I finished reading only half an hour ago. Comin’ and Goin’s been making the rounds this morning handing out copies of the prospectus of what’s going to be the greatest film ever made. Didn’t you get one from him?’

‘Yes. He forgot to give me a dictionary, though.’

‘A dictionary would have helped.’ He tapped the tarpaulin beside us. ‘This is a mock-up of the central section of a submarine—just a shell, nothing inside it. When I say it’s a mock-up, I don’t mean it’s made of cardboard—it’s made of steel and weighs ten tons, including four tons of cast-iron ballast. That other item in front is a conning-tower which is to be bolted on to this once it’s in the water.’

‘Ah!’ I said because I couldn’t think of any other comment. ‘And those alleged tractors and drums of fuel on the after deck—they’ll be tanks and anti-aircraft guns?’

‘Tractors and fuel, as stated.’ He paused. ‘Do you know there’s only one copy of the screen-play for this film and that’s locked up in the Bank of England or some such?’

‘I went to sleep about that bit.’

‘They haven’t even got a shooting script for the scenes to be shot on the island. Just a series of unrelated incidents which, taken together, make no sense at all. Sure, there must be connecting links to make sense of it all: but they’re all in the vaults in Threadneedle Street or whatever this damned bank is. No part of it makes sense.’

‘Maybe it’s not meant to make sense.’ I was conscious that my feet were slowly turning into blocks of ice. ‘Not at this stage. There may be excellent reasons for the secretiveness. Besides, don’t some producers encourage directors who play it off the cuff, who improvise as they go along and as the mood takes them?’

‘Not Neal Divine. He’s never shot an off-the-cuff scene in his life.’ Not much of Conrad’s forehead was to be seen beneath the thick brown hair that the snow and wind had brought down almost to eyebrow level, but what little was visible was very heavily corrugated indeed. ‘If a Divine shooting script calls for you to be wearing a bowler hat and doing the can-can in Scene 289, then you’re doing a bowler-hatted can-can in 289. As for Otto, he never moves until everything’s calculated out to the last matchstick and the last penny. Especially the last penny.’

‘He has the reputation for being careful.’

‘Careful!’ Conrad shivered. ‘Doesn’t the whole set-up strike you as being crazy.’

‘The entire film world,’ I said candidly, ‘strikes me as being crazy, but as an ordinary human being exposed to it for the first time I wouldn’t know whether this current particular brand of craziness differs from the norm or not. What do your fellow actors think of it?’

‘What fellow actors?’ Conrad said glumly. ‘Judith Haynes is still closeted with those two pooches of hers. Mary Stuart is writing letters in her cabin, at least she says it’s letters, it’s probably her last will and testament. And if Gunther Jungbeck and Jon Heyter have any opinion on everything they’re carefully keeping it to themselves. Anyway, they are a couple of odd-balls themselves.’

‘Even for actors?’

‘Touché.’ He smiled, but he wasn’t trying too hard. ‘Sea burials bring out the misanthrope in me. No, it’s just that they know so little about the film world, at least the British film world, understandable enough I suppose, Heyter’s done all his acting in California, Jungbeck in Germany. They’re not odd, really, it’s just that we have nothing in common to talk about, no points of reference.’

‘But you must know of them?’

‘Not even that, but that’s not surprising. I like acting but the film world bores me to tears and I don’t mix socially. That makes me an odd-ball too. But Otto vouches for them—in fact, he speaks pretty highly of them, and that’s good enough for me. They’ll both probably act me off the screen when it comes to the bit.’ He shivered again. ‘Conrad’s curiosity remains unsatisfied, but Conrad has had enough. As a doctor, wouldn’t you prescribe some of this scotch which old Imrie is supposed to be dispensing so liberally?’

We found Captain Imrie dispensing the scotch with so heavy a hand that plainly it came from his own private supplies and not from Otto’s, for Otto, heavily wrapped in a coloured blanket and with his puce complexion still a pale shadow of its former self, was sitting in his accustomed dining chair and raising no objections that I could see. There must have been at least twenty people present, ship’s crew and passengers, and they were very far indeed from being a merry throng. I was surprised to see Judith Haynes there, with her husband, Michael Stryker, hovering attentively over her. I was surprised to see Mary darling there, her sense of duty or what was the done thing must have been greater than her aversion to alcohol, and was even more surprised to note that she had so abandoned all sense of the proprieties as to be holding young Allen by the arm in a positively proprietorial fashion: I was not surprised to see that Mary Stuart was absent. So were Heissman and Sandy. The two actors with whom Conrad claimed to have so little in common, Jungbeck and Heyter, were together in one corner and for the first time I looked at them with some degree of real interest. They looked like actors, no question of that, or, more accurately, they looked like what I thought actors ought to look like. Heyter was tall, fair, good-looking, young and twenty years ago would have been referred to as clean-cut: he had a mobile, expressive, animated face. Jungbeck was at least fifteen years his senior, a thick-set man with heavy shoulders, a five o’clock shadow and dark, curling hair just beginning to grey: he had a ready, engaging smile. He was cast, I knew, as the villain in the forthcoming production and despite the appropriate build and blue jowls didn’t look the least bit like one.

The almost complete silence in the saloon, I soon realized, didn’t stem entirely from the solemnity of the occasion, although that element must have been there: Captain Imrie had been holding the floor and had only broken off to acknowledge our entrance and to take the opportunity of dispensing some more liquor, which I refused. And now, it was clear, Captain Imrie was taking up where he had left off.

‘Aye,’ he said heavily, ‘’tis fitting, ’tis fitting. They have gone today, sadly, tragically gone, three of Britain’s sons—’ I was almost glad, for the moment, that Antonio was no longer around— ’but it comes to us all, sooner or later the hour strikes, and if they must rest where better to lie than in those honoured waters of Bear Island where ten thousand of their countrymen sleep?’ I wondered, uncharitably, what hour struck when Captain Imrie poured himself his first restorative of the morning but then recalled that as he had been up since 4 a.m. he was no doubt now rightly regarding the day as being pretty far advanced, a supposition which he proceeded to prove correct by replenishing his glass without, however, interrupting the smooth flow of his monologue. His audience, I noted with regret, had about them the look of men and women who wished themselves elsewhere.

‘I wonder what Bear Island means to you people,’ he went on. ‘Nothing, I suppose, why should it? It’s just a name, Bear Island, just a name. Like the Isle of Wight or what’s yon place in America, Coney Island: just a name. But for people like Mr Stokes here and myself and thousands of others it’s a wee bit more than that. It was a kind of turning-point, a dividing point in our lives, what those geography or geology fellows would call a watershed: when we came to know the name we knew that no name had ever meant so much to us before—and no name would ever mean so much again. And we knew that nothing would ever be the same again. Bear Island was the place where boys grew up, just over the night, as it were: Bear Island was the place where middle-aged men like myself grew old.’ This was a different Captain Imrie speaking now, quietly reminiscent, sad without bitterness, and the captive audience was now voluntarily so, no longer glancing longingly at the saloon exits.

‘We called it “the Gate”,’ he went on. ‘The gate to the Barents Sea and the White Sea and those places in Russia where we took those convoys through all the long years of the war, all those long years ago. If you passed the Gate and came back again, you were a lucky man: if you did it half-a-dozen times you’d used up all your luck for a lifetime. How many times did we pass the Gate, Mr Stokes?’

‘Twenty-two times.’ For once, Mr Stokes had no need for deliberation.

‘Twenty-two times. I am not saying it because I was there but people on those convoys to Murmansk suffered more terribly than people have ever suffered in war before or will ever suffer in war again, and it was here, in those waters, at the Gate, that they suffered most of all, for it was here that the enemy waited by night and by day and it was here that the enemy struck us down. The fine ships and the fine boys, our boys and the German boys, more of them lie in those waters than anywhere in the world, but the waters run clean now and the blood is washed away. But not in our minds, not in our minds: thirty years have passed now and I cannot hear the words “Bear Island”, not even when I say them myself, but my blood runs cold. The graveyard of the Arctic and we hope they are at peace now, but still my blood runs cold.’ He shivered, as if he felt a physical chill, then smiled slightly. ‘The old talk too much, a blether talks too much, so you know now how terrible it is to have an old blether stand before you. All I’d really meant to say is that our shipmates are in good company.’ He raised his glass. ‘Bon voyage.’

Bon voyage. But not the last goodbye, not the last time we would be saying goodbye, I felt it deep in my bones and I knew that Captain Imrie felt it also. I knew that it was some sort of foreknowledge or premonition that had made him talk as he had done, that had been responsible for a rambling reminiscence as uncalled for as it was irrelevant—or appeared to be. I wondered if Captain Imrie was even dimly aware of this thought transference process, of the substitution of the fearful things, the dreadful things of long ago for the unrealized awareness that such things were not confined to the actions of overt warfare, that violent death acknowledged no restrictions in time and space, that the bleak and barren waters of the Barents Sea were its habitat and its home.

I wondered how many others of those present felt this atavistic fear, this oddly nameless dread so often encountered in the loneliest and most desolate places on earth, a dread that reaches back over the aeons to primitive man who as yet knew not fire, to those unthinkably distant ancestors who crouched in terror in their lightless caves while the forces of evil and darkness walked abroad in the night: a fear that, here and now, was all too readily reinforced and compounded by the sudden, violent and inexplicable deaths of three of their company the previous night.

It was hard to tell, I thought, just who was feeling affected by such primeval stirrings of foreboding, for mankind does not readily acknowledge even to itself, far less show or discuss, the existence of such irrationally childlike superstitions. Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, without a doubt: they had gone into a corner by themselves and were staring down, unseeingly, I was sure, and certainly without speaking, at the glasses in their hands, and as the two of them rarely if ever sat together without discussing, at great length, matters of the gravest import, this was highly significant in itself. Neal Divine, more hollow-cheeked than ever but apparently slightly recovered from his very low state of the previous evening, sat by himself, continuously twirling the empty glass in his hand, his usual nervous preoccupied self, but whether he was preoccupied with mal de mer, the thought that he was about to begin his directorial duties and so consequently be exposed to the lash of Gerran’s tongue or whether he, too, was feeling fingers from the dead past reach deep into him was impossible to say.

Comin’ and Goin’ was seated by Otto at the head of the table and they, too, were silent. I wondered just what the relationship between the two men was. They seemed to be on cordial enough terms but they only sought each other out, I had observed, when questions of business were to be discussed. It could well have been that, personally, they had little in common, but the fact that Comin’ and Goin’ had recently been made Vice-President and heir-apparent to Olympus Productions seemed to speak highly enough of Otto’s regard for him. And as they were together now and not talking I assumed that they were pondering over matters similar to those that were engaging the attention of Imrie and myself.

The Three Apostles weren’t talking, but that meant nothing, when they were deprived of their instruments, their music magazines and their garishly primary-coloured comics, the presence of all of which they had probably deemed as being inappropriate in the present circumstances, they were habitually bereft of speech. Stryker, still in solicitously close attendance upon his wife, was talking quietly to the Count, while the Duke was conspicuously not talking to his cabin-mate Eddie, but as they were rarely on speaking terms anyway, this was hardly significant. I became aware that Lonnie Gilbert was at my elbow and I wondered what degree, if any, of the underlying significance of Captain Imrie’s words had penetrated his befuddled mind. Lonnie was clutching a glass of scotch, both container and contents of genuine family size, a marked contrast to the relatively small portions he’d been pouring himself in the lounge bar about midnight: I could only assume that somewhere in the remoter recesses of Lonnie’s mind there lurked some vestigial traces of conscience which permitted him only modest amounts of hooch not honestly come by.

‘“Envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight shall touch them not and torture not again,”’ Lonnie intoned. He tilted his glass, lowered the liquid level by two fingers and smacked his lips. ‘“From the contagion—”’

‘Lonnie.’ I nodded at the glass. ‘When did you start this morning?’

‘Start? My dear fellow, I never stopped. A sleepless night. “From the contagion of the world’s slow stain they are secure, and now can never mourn the heart grown cold, the head grown grey—”’

Aware that he had lost his audience, Lonnie broke off and followed my line of sight. Mary darling and Allen, proprieties observed, were leaving. Mary hesitated, stopped in front of Judith Haynes’s chair, smiled and said: ‘Good morning. Miss Haynes. I hope you’re feeling better today?’

Judith Haynes smiled, a fractionally glimpsed set of perfect teeth, then looked away: a false smile meant to be seen and understood as a false smile, followed by a complete and contemptuous dismissal. I saw colour stain Mary darling’s cheeks and she made as if to speak, but Allen, his lips tight, took her arm and urged her gently towards the lee door.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘I wonder what all that was about. A clearly offended Miss Haynes but I can’t conceive of our little Mary giving offence to anybody.’

‘But she has done, my boy, she has done. Our Judith is one of those sad and unfortunate females who can’t abide any other female who is younger, better-looking or more intelligent than she is. Our little Mary offends on at least two of those counts.’

‘You disappoint me,’ I said. ‘Here I was, manfully trying to discount—or at least ignore—what appears to be the universally held opinion that Judith Haynes is a complete and utter bitch and now—’

‘And you were right.’ Lonnie regarded his empty glass with an expression of faint astonishment. ‘She isn’t a bitch, at least she doesn’t make a career out of it, except inadvertently. To those who offer no threat or competition, little children or pets, she is capable of generous impulses, even affection. But that apart, a poor, poor creature, incapable of loving or inspiring love in others, to wit and in short, a loveless soul, perverse but pitiable, a person who having once seen herself and not liking what she has seen, turns away from reality and takes refuge in misanthropic fantasy.’ Lonnie executed a swift sideways scuttle in the direction of an unattended scotch bottle, replenished his glass with the speed and expertise born of a lifetime of practice, returned happily and warmed to his theme.

‘Sick, sick, sick, and it is the sick, not the whole, who require our help and sympathy.’ Lonnie could, on occasion, sound very pontifical indeed. ‘She’s one of the hapless band of the world’s willing walking wounded—how’s that, four w’s and never a stutter—who takes a positive delight in being hurt, in being affronted, and if the hurt is not really there, why, then, all the better, they can imagine one even closer to the heart’s desire. For those unfortunates who love only themselves the loving embrace of self-pity, close hugged like an old and dear friend, is the supreme, the most precious luxury in life. I can assure you, my dear fellow, that no hippo ever wallowed in his African mud-bath with half the relish—’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Lonnie,’ I said, ‘and a very apt analogy that is, too.’ I wasn’t listening to him any more, my attention had been caught and held by the fleeting glimpse I’d had of a figure hurrying by on the deck outside. Heissman, I was almost sure it was Heissman, and if it were I’d three immediate questions that asked for equally immediate answers. Heissman was rarely observed to move at any but the most deliberate and leisurely speed so why the uncharacteristic haste? Why, if he were moving aft, did he choose the weather instead of the lee side of the superstructure unless he hoped to avoid being observed through the large snow-obscured windows on the weather side of the saloon? And what, in view of his well-known and almost pathological aversion to cold—an inevitable legacy, one supposed, of his long years in Siberia—was he doing on the upper deck anyway? I clapped Lonnie on the shoulder. ‘Back, as the saying goes, in a trice. I have to visit the sick.’

I left, not hurriedly, through the lee door, then paused to see if anyone was interested enough in my departure to follow me out. And someone did follow me, almost immediately, but if he had any interest in my movements he wasn’t letting me see it. Gunther Jungbeck smiled at me briefly, indifferently, and hurried forward to the entrance to the passenger accommodation. I waited a few more seconds, then climbed up the vertical steel ladder to the boat deck, immediately abaft the bridge and radio office.

I circled the funnel and engine intake fans casing and found no one there. I hadn’t expected to, even a polar bear wouldn’t have hung around that bitter and totally exposed boat deck without a very compelling reason. I moved aft by one of our two motorized lifeboats, took what illusory shelter I could find beside a ventilator and peered out over the after-deck.

For the first few moments I could see nothing, nothing, that was, that was likely to be of any interest to me, not so much because of the driving snow as the fact that all objects crowding the after-deck—and there were well over a score of them, ranging from fuel drums to a sixteen-foot work-boat on a special cradle—were so deeply shrouded in their shapeless cocoons of snow that, in most cases, it was virtually impossible to decide upon not only their identity but whether they were inanimate or not. Not until any of them might move.

One of the cocoons stirred, a slender ghostly form detaching itself from the shelter of a square bulky object which I knew to be the cabin for a Sno-Cat. The figure half-turned in my direction and although the face was almost entirely hidden by a hand that held both sides of the parka hood closed against the snow, enough of straw-coloured hair showed to let me identify the only person aboard with that colour of hair. Almost at once she was joined by a person moving into my line of vision from behind the break of the boat deck and I didn’t even have to see the thin ascetic face to know that this was Heissman.

He approached the girl directly, took her arm without, as far as I could see, any kind of opposition being offered, and said something to her. I sank to my knees, partly to reduce the risk of detection if either chanced to look up, partly to try and make out what was being said. The concealment part worked but the eavesdropping failed, partly because the wind was in the wrong direction but chiefly because they had their heads very close together either because they regarded suitably low and conspiratorial conversation as being appropriate to the occasion or because they were affording each other’s faces protection from the snow. I inched forward to the very end of the boat deck and squatted back on my heels with my head bent forward but this was of no help either.

Heissman now had an arm around Mary Stuart’s shoulders and this time the gesture of intimacy did produce a reaction although scarcely the expected one for she reached up an arm around his neck and put her head on his shoulder. At least another two minutes were spent in this highly confidential tête-à-tête, then they walked slowly away towards the living accommodation, Heissman still with his arm around the girl’s shoulders. I made no move to follow them, for such a move would not only have almost certainly resulted in quick detection but it would have been pointless: whatever personal they’d had to say had already been said.

‘Yoga in the Barents Sea,’ a voice said behind me. ‘That’s dedication for you.’

‘Fanatics always carry everything to excess,’ I said. I rose awkwardly but without too much haste before turning round for I knew I had nothing to fear from Smithy. Clad in a hooded duffel-coat and looking a great deal fitter than he had been doing just before midnight, he was looking at me with what might have been an expression of quizzical amusement except that his eyes didn’t seem to find anything humorous in what they saw. ‘You have to be regular in these things,’ I explained.

‘Of course.’ He walked past me, looked over the boat deck guard-rail and examined the deep tracks left in the snow by Mary and Heissman. ‘Bird-watching?’

‘The haunts of coot and hern.’

‘Yes, indeed. But an oddly assorted pair of lovebirds, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It’s this film world, Smithy. It seems to be full of very oddly assorted birds.’

‘Odd birds, period.’ He nodded for’ard, towards the chart-house. ‘Warmth and cheer, Doc, just the place for some more ornithological research.’

There wasn’t a great deal of warmth owing to the fact that Smithy had left the side door open after he’d looked out through the window and observed me moving cautiously along the boat deck but there was a certain amount of cheer in the shape of a bottle he produced from a cupboard. He said: ‘Shall we send for the king’s taster?’

I looked at the unbroken lead seal. ‘Not unless you think someone has brought his own bottling plant aboard.’

‘I’ve checked.’ Smithy broke the seal. ‘We talked last night. At least, I did. You may or may not have listened. I was worried last night. I thought you might not be levelling with me. I’m worried stiff now. Because I know you’re not.’

‘Because I’ve taken up ornithology?’ I said mildly.

‘That among other things. This wholesome poisoning, now. I’ve had time to think, just a bit. Of course you couldn’t have had any idea who the poisoner was—it’s hardly conceivable that if you knew the person who had done in that Italian boy that you’d have let him do the same to six others, two of whom were to die. In fact you couldn’t even have been sure that the whole thing wasn’t accidental, the poisoning was on so apparently haphazard a basis.’

‘Thank you kindly,’ I said. My opinion of Smithy had fallen sharply. ‘Except that it wasn’t on an apparently haphazard basis. It was haphazard.’

‘That was last night.’ It was as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘Then you couldn’t have had any idea. Now you can. Things have happened, haven’t they?’

‘What things?’ My opinion of Smithy had risen sharply. He was sure that there was mayhem afoot, but why? Was he making a mental short list, guessing as to who might be the handy lad with the aconite—not that he could possibly know the poison used was aconite—wondering where he had got it, where he kept it now, where he had learned to prepare it so skilfully that it could indetectably be introduced into food? And not only who was the poisoner but why was the poisoner acting as he did? And why the random nature of the poisoning? Was he basing his guesses just on my stealthy behaviour?

‘Lots of things, not all of which have necessarily lately happened, just things that have come to light or seem odd in view of what we might call recent developments. For instance, why have Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes been chosen for the job instead of any two young and efficient yacht and charter skippers and engineers who usually find themselves unemployed at this time of year? Because they’re so old and so soaked in scotch and rum that they can’t tell the time of day twenty hours out of the twenty-four. They just don’t see what goes on and even if they were to they’d probably attach no significance to it anyway.’

I didn’t put down my glass, look keenly at Smithy or in any other way indicate that I was listening with undivided attention. But I was. This thought had never occurred to me.

Smithy continued. ‘I said last night that I thought the presence of Mr Gerran and his company up here at this time in the year was a bit odd. I don’t think so any more. I think it’s damned peculiar and calls for some sort of rational explanation from your friend Otto, which we’re not likely to get.’

‘He’s not my friend,’ I said.

‘And this.’ He pulled out a copy of the Olympus Productions manifesto. ‘A load of meaningless rubbish that old smoothie Goin has been inflicting on everybody in sight. Have you—’

‘Goin? A smoothie?’

‘An untrustworthy, time-serving, money-grubbing smoothie with his two hands never on speaking terms, and I’d say that even if he weren’t a professional accountant.’

‘Maybe he’d better not be my friend either,’ I said.

‘All this ridiculous secrecy they harp on in this clap-trap. To protect the importance of their damned screen-play. A hundred gets one it’s a screen to protect something an awful lot more important than their screen-play. Another hundred gets one that there’s no screen-play in the bank vaults they speak of for the reason that there is no screen-play. And their shooting schedule for Bear Island. Have you read that? It’s not even comic. Just a lot of unrelated incidents about caves, and mysterious motor-boats and shooting dummy submarines and climbing cliffs and falling into the sea and dying in Arctic snows that any five-year-old could have dreamed up.’

‘You’ve got a very suspicious mind, Smithy,’ I said.

‘Have I not? And this young Polish actress, the blonde one—’

‘Latvian. Mary Stuart. What of her?’

‘A strange one. Aloof and alone. Never mixes. But when there’s illness on the bridge, or in Otto’s cabin or in the cabin of that young lad they call the Duke, who’s there? Who but our friend Mary Stuart.’

‘She’s a kind of Samaritan. Would you be so conspicuous if you wanted to avoid attention?’

‘Might be the very best way to achieve it. But if that’s not the case, why make a point of being so damned inconspicuous just now when meeting Heissman in a blizzard on the after-deck?’

I would very much rather, I thought, have Smith for me than against me. I said: ‘A romantic assignation, perhaps?’

‘With Heissman?’

‘You’re not a girl, Smithy.’

‘No.’ He grinned briefly. ‘But I’ve met ‘em. Why are all the big nobs on the management side so pally with Otto in public and so critical in private? Why is a cameraman a director? Why—’

‘How did you know that?’

‘Uh-huh. So you knew too. Because Captain Imrie showed me this guarantee thing that you and the directors of Olympus had signed: the Count had signed as one of them. Why is the director, this Divine fellow who is supposed to be so good at his job, so scared of Otto, while Lonnie, who is not only a permanent alcoholic layabout but latches on to Otto’s private hooch supplies with impunity, doesn’t give a damn about him?’

‘Tell me, Smithy,’ I said, ‘just how much time have you been devoting lately to steering and navigating this boat?’

‘Hard to say. Just about as much time, I would say, as you have been to the practice of medicine.’

I didn’t say ‘Touché’ or anything like that, I just let Smithy pour some more of the aconite-free drink into my glass and looked out of the window at the grey swirling icy world beyond. So many whys, Smithy, so many whys. Why had Mary been foregathering clandestinely with Heissman when the Heissman I’d observed last night had been so clearly unwell as to be unable to indulge in any skullduggery—not that this ruled out the chilling possibility that Heissman might be one of two or more who held life so lightly and might easily be either a principal or a go-between. Why had Otto, though himself a poisoning victim, reacted so violently—including having been violently ill—when he’d heard that Antonio had been a poisoning victim? Had Cecil’s larder raid been as innocuous as he had claimed? Had Sandy’s? Who had checked on the aconitine article, disposed of the leftovers in the galley, been in my cabin during the night and searched my baggage? Why had he searched my baggage—this extremely active poisoner, the same man, perhaps, who had doctored the scotch bottle, clobbered me and been responsible for Halliday’s death? Again, was there more than one of them? And if Halliday had died accidentally, as I was sure he had, then why had he come to the saloon, where his visit, I was equally sure, had not been accidental?

It was all so full of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ that I was beginning to clutch at ridiculous straws rather than fight my way through the impenetrable fog. What accounted for Lonnie’s diatribe—for it had amounted to no less—against Judith Haynes to the effect that she detested all mankind, especially when they were womankind? No doubt Miss Haynes was as capable of being catty and jealous as many other otherwise likeable females are, but one would have thought that she had too much going for her in the way of wealth, success, fame, position and looks to have to bother too much about despising every woman she met. But if that were so, why had she cold-shouldered Mary darling?

But what could that have to do with murder? I didn’t know, but nothing the slightest bit odd, I thought gloomily, could be dismissed out of hand as having nothing to do with the very odd goings-on aboard the Morning Rose. Were Jungbeck and Heyter, for instance, to be considered as being possibly under suspicion because one had recently followed me from the saloon—especially as Conrad had earlier thrown a degree of suspicion on them by disclaiming all knowledge of them as actors? Or did this factor of apparently throwing suspicion bring Conrad himself under just the tiniest cloud? Dammit to hell, I thought wearily, if I keep on thinking like this I’ll be casting young Allen as the master poisoner just because he’d told me that he’d once studied chemistry, briefly, at university.

‘A penny for your thoughts, Dr Marlowe.’ Smithy wasn’t very much of a one for letting his face act as a front man for his mind.

‘Don’t throw your money away. What thoughts?’

‘Two thoughts. Two kinds of thoughts. All the thoughts you’re having about all the things you’re not telling me and all the guilty thoughts you’re having about not telling me them.’

‘It’s like a rule of nature,’ I said. ‘Some people are always more liable to have injustices done to them than others.’

‘So you’ve told me all your thoughts?’

‘No. But the ones I haven’t told aren’t worth the telling. Now, if I had some facts—’

‘So you admit something is pretty far wrong?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you’ve told me everything you know, just not everything you think?’

‘Of course.’

‘I speak in sorrow,’ Smithy said, ‘for my lost illusions about the medical profession.’ He reached up under the hood of my parka, pulled down the scarf around my neck and stared at what was by now the great multi-coloured and blood-encrusted weal on my neck. ‘Jesus! That is something. What happened to you?’

‘I fell.’

‘The Marlowes of this world don’t fall. They’re pushed. Where did you fall?’ I didn’t much care for the all but imperceptible accent on the word ‘fall’.

‘Upper deck. Port side. I struck my neck on the storm-sill of the saloon door.’

‘Did you now? I would say that this was caused by what the criminologists call a solid object. A very solid object about half-an-inch wide and sharp-edged. The saloon door sill is three inches wide and made of sorbo-rubber. All the storm doors on the Morning Rose are—it’s to make them totally windproof and waterproof. Or perhaps you hadn’t noticed? The way you perhaps haven’t noticed that John Halliday, the unit’s still photographer, is missing?’

‘How do you know?’ He’d shaken me this time, not just a little, or my face would have shown it, but so much that I knew my features stayed rigidly fixed in the same expression.

‘You don’t deny it?’

‘I don’t know. How do you?’

‘I went down to see the props man, this elderly lad they call Sandy. I’d heard he was sick and—’

‘Why did you go?’

‘If it matters, because he’s not the sort of person that people visit very much. He doesn’t seem liked. Seems a bit hard to be sick and unpopular at the same time.’ I nodded, this would be in character with Smithy. ‘I asked him where his room-mate Halliday was as I hadn’t seen him at breakfast. Sandy said he’d gone for breakfast. I didn’t say anything to Sandy but this made me a bit curious so I had a look in the recreation room. He wasn’t there either, so I got curiouser until I’d searched the Morning Rose twice from end to end. I think I covered every nook and cranny in the vessel where even a stray seagull could be hiding and you can take my word for it. Halliday’s not in the Morning Rose.’

‘Reported this to the captain?’

‘Well, well, what an awful lot of reaction. No, I haven’t reported it to the captain.’

‘Why not?’

‘Same reason as you haven’t. If I know my Captain Imrie, he’d at once declare that there was no clause in that agreement you signed that was binding on this particular case, that saying that foul play wasn’t involved in this case also would be altogether too much of a good thing, and turn the Morning Rose straight for Hammerfest.’ Smithy looked at me dead-pan over the rim of his glass. ‘I’m rather curious to see what does happen when we get to Bear Island.’

‘It might be interesting.’

‘Very non-committal. It might, says he thoughtfully, be equally interesting to provoke some kind of reaction in Dr Marlowe. Just once. Just for the record—my own private record. I wonder if I could do it. Do you remember I said on the bridge in the very early hours of this morning that we might just possibly have to call for help and that if we had to we had a transmitter here that could reach almost anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Not, perhaps, my exact words, but the gist is accurate?’

‘The gist is accurate.’ Even to myself the repetition of the words sounded mechanical and I had to make a conscious effort not to shiver as an iceshod centipede started up a fandango between my shoulder-blades.

‘Well, we can call for help till we’re blue in the face, this transmitter here can no longer reach as far as the galley.’ For once, almost unbelievably, Smithy’s face was registering an emotion other than amusement. His face tight with anger, he produced a screwdriver from his pocket and turned to the big steel-blue receiver-transmitter on the inner bulkhead.

‘Do you always carry a screwdriver about with you?’ The sheer banality of the question made it apposite in the circumstances.

‘Only when I call up the radio station at Tunheim in north-east Bear Island and get no reply. And that’s no ordinary radio station, it’s an official Norwegian Government base.’ Smithy set to work on the face-plate screws. ‘I’ve already had this damned thing off about an hour ago. You’ll see in a jiffy why I put it back on again.’

While I was waiting for this jiffy to pass I recalled our conversation on the bridge in the very early hours of the morning, the time he’d referred to the radio and the relative closeness— and, by inference, the availability—of the NATO Atlantic forces. It had been immediately afterwards that I’d looked through the starboard screen door and seen the sharp fresh footprints in the snow, footprints, I’d been immediately certain, that had been made by an eavesdropper, a preposterous idea I’d almost as quickly put out of my mind when I’d appreciated that there had been only one set of footprints there, those which I made myself. For some now inexplicable reason it had never occurred to me that any person clever enough to have been responsible for the series of undetected crimes that had taken place aboard the Morning Rose would have been far too clever to have overlooked the blinding obviousness of the advantage that lay in using footsteps already there. The footsteps had, indeed, been newly made, our ubiquitous friend had been abroad again.

Smithy removed the last of the screws and, not without some effort, removed the face-plate. I looked at the revealed interior for about ten seconds, then said: ‘I see now why you put the face-plate back on. The only thing that puzzles me is that that cabinet looks a bit small for a man to get inside it with a fourteen pound sledgehammer.’

‘Looks just like it, doesn’t it?’ The tangled mess of wreckage inside was, literally, indescribable. The vandal who had been at work had seen to it that, irrespective of how vast a range of spares were carried, the receiver-transmitter could never be made operable again. ‘You’ve seen enough?’

‘I think so.’ He started to replace the cover and I said: ‘You’ve radios in the lifeboats?’

‘Yes. Hand-cranked. They’ll reach farther than the galley but a megaphone would be about as good.’

‘You’ll have to report this to the captain, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then it’s heigh-ho for Hammerfest?’

‘Twenty-four hours from now and he can heigh-ho for Tahiti as far as I’m concerned.’ Smithy tightened the last screw. ‘That’s when I’m going to tell him. Twenty-four hours from now. Maybe twenty-six.’

‘Your outside limit for dropping anchor in Sor-hamna?’

‘Tying up. Yes.’

‘You’re a very deceitful man, Smithy.’

‘It’s the company I keep. And the life I lead.’

‘You’re not to blame yourself, Smithy,’ I said kindly. ‘We live in vexed and troubled times.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

When the Norwegian compilers of the report on Bear Island had spoken of it as possessing perhaps the most inhospitably bleak coastline in the world, they had been speaking with the measured understatement of true professional geographers. As we approached it in the first light of dawn—which in those latitudes, at that time of year, and under grey and lowering skies which were not only full of snow but getting rid of it as fast as they could, was as near mid forenoon as made no difference— it presented the most awesome, awe-inspiring and, in the true sense of the word, awful spectacle of nature it had ever been my misfortune to behold. A frightening desolation, it was a weird combination of the wickedly repellent and unwillingly fascinating, an evil and dreadful and sinister place, a place full of the terrifying intimation of mortality, the culmination of all the terrors for our long-lost Nordic ancestors, for whom hell was the land of eternal cold and for whom this would be the eternally frozen purgatory to be visited only in their dying nightmares.

Bear Island was black. That was the shocking, the almost frightful thing about it. Bear Island was black, black as a widow’s weeds. Here in the regions of year-long snow and ice, where, in winter, even the waters of the Barents Sea ran a milky white, to find this ebony mass towering 1500 vertical feet up into the grey overcast evoked the same feeling of total disbelief, the same numbing impact, although here magnified a hundredfold, as does the first glimpse of the black cliff of the north face of the Eiger rearing up its appalling grandeur among the snows of the Bernese Oberland: this benumbment of the senses stemmed from a dichotomous struggle to accept the evidence before the eyes, for while reason said that it had to be so, that primeval part of the mind that existed long before man knew what reason was just flatly refused to accept it.

We were just south-west of the most southerly tip of Bear Island, steaming due east through the calmest seas that we had encountered since leaving Wick, but even that term was only relative, it was still necessary to hang on to something if one wished to maintain the perpendicular. Overall, the weather hadn’t changed any for the better, the comparative moderating of the seas was due entirely to the fact that the wind blew now directly from the north and we were in the lee of whatever little shelter was afforded by those giant cliffs. We were making this particular approach to our destination at Otto’s request for he was understandably anxious to build up a library of background shots which, so far, was completely non-existent, and those bleak precipices would have made a cameraman’s or director’s dream: but Otto’s luck was running true to form, those driving gusts of snow, which would in any event have driven straight into the camera lens and completely obscured it, more often than not obscured the cliffs themselves.

Due north lay the highest cliffs of the island, the polomite battlements of the Hambergfjell dropping like a stone into the spume-topped waves that lashed its base, with, standing out to sea, an imposing rock needle thrusting up at least 250 feet: to the north-east, and less than a mile distant, stood the equally magnificent Bird Fell cliffs with, clustered at their foot, an incredible series of high stacks, pinnacles and arches that could only have been the handiwork of some Herculean sculptor, at once both blind and mad.

All this we—about ten others and myself—could see purely by courtesy of the fact that we were on the bridge which had its for’ard screen windows equipped with a high-speed Kent clear-view screen directly in front of the helmsman—which at this particular moment was Smithy—while on either side were two very large windscreen-wipers which coped rather less effectively with the gusting snow.

I was standing with Conrad, Lonnie and Mary Stuart in front of the port wiper. Conrad, who was by no means as dashing in real life as he was on the screen, appeared to have struck up some kind of diffident friendship with Mary, which, I reflected, was as well for her social life as she’d barely spoken to me since the morning of the previous day, which might have been interpreted as being a bit graceless of her considering I’d incurred a large variety of aches and cramps in preventing her from falling to the floor during most of the preceding night. She hadn’t exactly avoided me in the past twenty-four hours but neither had she sought me out, maybe she had certain things on her mind, such as her conscience and her unforgiveable treatment of me: nor had I exactly sought her out for I, too, had a couple of things on my mind, the first of which was herself.

I had developed towards her a markedly ambivalent feeling: while I had to be grateful to her for having, however unwittingly, saved my life because her aversion to scotch had prevented me from having the last nightcap I’d ever have had in this world, at the same time she’d prevented me from moving around and, just possibly, stumbling upon the lad who had been wandering about in the middle watches with illintent in his heart and a sledge-hammer in his hand. That she, and for whomsoever she worked, knew beyond question that I was a person who might have reason to be abroad at inconvenient hours I no longer doubted. And the second thing in my mind was the ‘whomsoever’: I no longer doubted that it was Heissman and perhaps he didn’t even stand in need of an accomplice: doctors, by the nature of their profession, are even more fallible and liable to error than the average run of mankind and I might well have been in error when I’d seen him on his bed in pain and judged him unfit to move around. Moreover, Goin apart, he was the only man with a cabin to himself and so able to sally out and return undetected by a room-mate. And, of course, there was always this mysterious Siberian background of his. None of which, not even his secret meeting with Mary Stuart, was enough to hang a cat on.

Lonnie touched my arm and I turned. He smelt like a distillery. He said: ‘Remember what we were talking about? Two nights ago.’

‘We talked about a lot of things.’

‘Bars.’

‘Don’t you ever think of anything else, Lonnie? Bars? What bars?’

‘In the great hereafter,’ Lonnie said solemnly. ‘Do you think there are any there? In heaven, I mean. I mean, you couldn’t very well call it heaven if there are no bars there, now could you? I mean, I wouldn’t call it an act of kindness to send an old man like me to a prohibition heaven, now would you? It wouldn’t be kind.’

‘I don’t know, Lonnie. On biblical evidence I should expect there would be some wine around. And lots of milk and honey.’ Lonnie looked pained. ‘What leads you to expect that you’re ever going to be faced with the problem?’

‘I was but posing a hypothetic question.’ The old man spoke with dignity. ‘It would be positively unChristian to send me there. God, I’m thirsty. Unkind is what I mean. I mean, charity is the greatest of Christian virtues.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘An act of the greatest uncharity, my dear boy, the very negation of the spirit of kindness.’ Lonnie gazed out through a side window at the fantastically shaped islets of Keilhous Oy, Hosteinen and Stappen, now directly off our port beam and less than half a mile distant. His face was set in lines of tranquil sacrifice. He was as drunk as an owl.

‘You do believe in this kindness, Lonnie?’ I said curiously. After a lifetime in the cinema business I didn’t see how he possibly could.

‘What else is there, my dear boy?’

‘Even to those who don’t deserve it?’

‘Ah! Now. There is the point. Those are the ones who deserve it most.’

‘Even Judith Haynes?’

He looked as if I had struck him and when I saw the expression on his face I felt as if I had struck him, even although I felt his to be a mysteriously exaggerated reaction. I reached out a hand even as I was about to apologize for I knew not what, but he turned away, a curious sadness on his face, and left the bridge.

‘Now I’ve seen the impossible,’ Conrad said. He wasn’t smiling but he wasn’t being censorious either. ‘Someone has at last given offence to Lonnie Gilbert.’

‘One has to work at it,’ I said. ‘I’ve transgressed against Lonnie’s creed. He thinks that I’m unkind.’

‘Unkind?’ Mary Stuart laid a hand on the arm I was using to steady myself. The skin under the brown eyes was perceptibly darker than it had been thirty-six hours ago and was even beginning to look puffy and the whites of the eyes themselves were dulled and slightly tinged with red. She hesitated, as if about to say something, then her gaze shifted to a point over my left shoulder. I turned.

Captain Imrie closed the starboard wheel-house door behind him. Insofar as it was possible to detect the shift and play of expression on that splendidly bewhiskered and bearded face, it seemed that the captain was upset, even agitated. He crossed directly to Smithy and spoke to him in a low and urgent voice. Smithy registered surprise, then shook his head. Captain Imrie spoke again, briefly. Smithy shrugged his shoulders, then said something in return. Both men looked at me and I knew there was more trouble coming, if not actually arrived, if for no reason other than that so far nothing untowards had happened with which I hadn’t been directly or indirectly concerned. Captain Imrie fixed me with his piercing blue eyes, jerked his head with most uncharacteristic peremptoriness towards the chart-room door and headed for it himself. I shrugged my own shoulders in apology to Mary and Conrad and followed. Captain Imrie closed the door behind me.

‘More trouble, mister.’ I didn’t much care for the way he called me ‘mister’. ‘One of the film crew, John Halliday, has disappeared.’

‘Disappeared where?’ It wasn’t a very intelligent question but then it wasn’t meant to be.

‘That’s what I’d like to know.’ I didn’t much care for the way he looked at me either.

‘He can’t just have disappeared. I mean, you’ve searched for him?’

‘We’ve searched for him, all right.’ The voice was harsh with strain. ‘From anchor locker to sternpost. He’s not aboard the Morning Rose.’

‘My God,’ I said. ‘This is awful.’ I looked at him in what I hoped registered as puzzlement. ‘But why tell me all this?’

‘Because I thought you might be able to help us.’

‘Help you? I’d like to, but how? I assume that you can only be approaching me in my medical capacity and I can assure you that there’s absolutely nothing in what I’ve seen of him or read in his medical history—’

‘I wasn’t approaching you in your bloody medical capacity!’ Captain Imrie had started to breathe very heavily. ‘I just thought you might help me in other ways. Bloody strange, isn’t it, mister, that you’ve been in the thick of everything that’s been happening?’ I’d nothing to say to this, I’d just been thinking the same thing myself. ‘How it was you who just “happened” to find Antonio dead. How it was you who just “happened” to go to the bridge when Smith and Oakley were ill. How was it you who went straight to the stewards’ cabin in the crew quarters. Next thing, I suppose, you’d have gone straight to Mr Gerran’s cabin and found him dead also, if Mr Goin hadn’t had the good luck to go there first. And isn’t it bloody strange, mister, that a doctor, the one person who could have helped those people and seemingly couldn’t is the one person aboard with enough medical knowledge to make them sick in the first place?’

No question—looking at it from his angle— Captain Imrie was developing quite a reasonable point of view. I was more than vaguely surprised to find that he was capable of developing a point of view in the first place. Clearly, I’d been underestimating him: just how much I was immediately to realize.

‘And just why were you spending so much time in the galley late the night before last—when I was in my bed, damn you? The place where all the poison came from. Haggerty told me. He told me you were poking around—and got him out of the galley for a spell. You didn’t find what you wanted. But you came back later, didn’t you? Wanted to find out where the food left-overs were, didn’t you? Pretended you were surprised when they were gone. That would look good in court.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you silly old—’

‘And you were very, very late abroad that night, weren’t you? Oh, yes, I’ve been making inquiries. Up in the saloon—Mr Goin told me: up on the bridge—Oakley told me: down in the lounge— Gilbert told me: and—’ he paused dramatically— ’in Halliday’s cabin—his cabin-mate told me. And, most of all, who was the man who stopped me from going to Hammerfest when I wanted to and persuaded the others to sign this worthless guarantee of yours absolving me from all blame? Tell me that, eh, mister?’

His trump card played, Captain Imrie rested his case. I had to stop the old coot, he was working himself up to having me clapped in irons. I sympathized with him, I was sorry for what I would have to say to him, but clearly this wasn’t my morning for making friends anyway. I looked at him coldly and without expression for about ten seconds then said: ‘My name’s “Doctor” not “mister”. I’m not your damned mate.’

‘What? What was that?’

I opened the door to the wheel-house and invited him to pass through.

‘You just mentioned the word “court”. Just step out there and repeat those slanderous allegations in the presence of witnesses and you’ll find yourself standing in a part of a court you never expected to be in. Can you imagine the extent of the damages?’

From his face and the perceptible shrinking of his burly frame it was apparent that Captain Imrie immediately could. I was a long, long way from being proud of myself, he was a worried old man saying honestly what he thought had to be said, but he’d left me with no option. I closed the door and wondered how best to begin.

I wasn’t given the time to begin. The knock on the door and the opening of the door came on the same instant. Oakley had an urgent and rather apprehensive look about him.

‘I think you’d better come down to the saloon right away, sir,’ he said to Imrie. He looked at me. ‘You, too, I’m afraid, Dr Marlowe. There’s been a fight down there, a bad one.’

‘Great God Almighty!’ If Captain Imrie still had any lingering hopes that he was running a happy ship, the last of them was gone. For a man of his years and bulk he made a remarkably rapid exit: I followed more leisurely.

Oakley’s description had been reasonably accurate. There had been a fight and a very unpleasant affair it must have been too during the period it had lasted—obviously, the very brief period it had lasted. There were only half a dozen people in the saloon altogether—one or two were still suffering sufficiently from the rigours of the Barents Sea to prefer the solitude of their cabins to the forbidding beauties of Bear Island, while the Three Apostles, as ever, were down in the recreation room, still cacophonously searching for the bottom rung on the ladder to musical immortality. Three of the six were standing, one sitting, one kneeling and the last stretched out on the deck of the saloon. The three on their feet were Lonnie and Eddie and Hendriks, all with the air of concerned but hesitant helplessness that afflicts uncommitted bystanders on such occasions. Michael Stryker was sitting in a chair at the captain’s table, using a very bloodstained handkerchief to dab a deep cut on the right cheekbone: it was noticeable that the knuckles of the hand that held the handkerchief were quite badly skinned. The kneeling figure was Mary Darling. All I could see was her back, the long blonde tresses falling to the deck and her big horn-rimmed spectacles lying about two feet away. She was crying, but crying silently, the thin shoulders shaking convulsively in incipient hysteria. I knelt and raised her, still kneeling, to an upright position. She stared at me, ashen-faced, no tears in her eyes, not recognizing me: without her glasses she was as good as blind.

‘It’s all right, Mary,’ I said. ‘Only me. Dr Marlowe.’ I looked at the figure on the floor and recognized him, not without some difficulty, as young Allen. ‘Come on, now, be a good girl. Let me have a look at him.’

‘He’s terribly hurt, Dr Marlowe, terribly hurt!’ She had difficulty in getting her words out during long and almost soundless gasps. ‘Oh, look at him, look at him, it’s awful!’ Then she started crying in earnest, not quietly this time. Her whole body shook. I looked up.

‘Mr Hendriks, will you please go to the galley and ask Mr Haggerty for some brandy? Tell him I want it. If he’s not there, take it anyway.’ Hendriks nodded and hurried away. I said to Captain Imrie: ‘Sorry, I should have asked permission.’

‘That’s all right, Doctor.’ We were back on professional terms again, however briefly: perhaps it was because his reply was largely automatic for the bulk of his interest, and all that clearly hostile, was for the moment centred on Michael Stryker. I turned back to Mary.

‘Go and sit on the settee, there. And take some of that brandy. You hear?’

‘No! No! I—’

‘Doctor’s orders.’ I looked at Eddie and Lonnie and without a word from me they took her across to the nearest settee. I didn’t wait to see whether she followed doctor’s orders or not: a now stirring Allen had more pressing claims on my attention. Stryker had done a hatchet job on him: he had a cut forehead, a bruised cheek, an eye that was going to be closed by night, blood coming from both nostrils, a split lip, one tooth missing and another so loose that it was going to be missing very soon also. I said to Stryker: ‘You do this to him?’

‘Obvious, isn’t it?’

‘You have to savage him like this? Christ, man, he’s only a kid. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size next time?’

‘Like you, for instance?’

‘Oh, my God!’ I said wearily. Beneath Stryker’s tissue-thin veneer of civilization lay something very crude indeed. I ignored him, asked Lonnie to get water from the galley and cleaned up Allen as best I could. As was invariable in such cases the removal of surface blood improved his appearance about eighty per cent. A plaster on his forehead, two cottonwool plugs for his nose, and two stitches in a frozen lip and I’d done all I could for him. I straightened as an indignant Captain Imrie started questioning Stryker.

‘What happened, Mr Stryker?’

‘A quarrel.’

‘A quarrel, was it now?’ Captain Imrie was being heavily ironic. ‘And what started the quarrel?’

‘An insult. From him.’

‘From that—from that child?’ The captain’s feelings clearly matched my own. ‘What kind of insult to do that to a boy?’

‘A private insult.’ Stryker dabbed the cut on his cheek and, Hippocrates in temporary abeyance, I felt sorry that it wasn’t deeper, even although it looked quite unpleasant enough as it was. ‘He just got what anyone gets who insults me, that’s all.’

‘I shall endeavour to keep a still tongue in my head,’ Captain Imrie said drily. ‘However, as captain of this ship—’

‘I’m not a member of your damned crew. If that young fool there doesn’t lodge a complaint—and he won’t—I’d be obliged if you’d mind your own business.’ Stryker rose and left the saloon. Captain Imrie made as if to follow, changed his mind, sat down wearily at the head of his own table and reached for his own private bottle. He said to the three men now clustered round Mary: ‘Any of you see what happened?’

‘No, sir.’ It was Hendriks. ‘Mr Stryker was standing alone over by the window there when Stuart went up to speak to him, I don’t know what, and next moment they were rolling about the floor. It didn’t last more than seconds.’

Captain Imrie nodded wearily and poured a considerable measure into his glass, he was obviously and rightly depending on Smithy to make the approach to anchorage. I got Allen, now quite conscious, to his feet and led him towards the saloon door. Captain Imrie said: ‘Taking him below?’

I nodded. ‘And when I come back I’ll tell you all about how I started it.’ He scowled at me and returned to his scotch. Mary, I noticed, was sipping at the brandy and shuddering at every sip. Lonnie held her glasses in his hand and I escaped with Allen before he gave them back to her.

I got Allen into his bunk and covered him up. He had a little colour in his battered cheeks now but still hadn’t spoken.

I said: ‘What was all that about?’

He hesitated. ‘I’m sorry. I’d rather not say.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘I’m sorry again. It’s a bit private.’

‘Someone could be hurt?’

‘Yes, I—’ He stopped.

‘It’s all right. You must be very fond of her.’ He looked at me for a few silent moments, then nodded. I went on: ‘Shall I bring her down?’

‘No, Doctor, no! I don’t want—I mean, with my face like this. No, no, I couldn’t!’

‘Your face was an awful sight worse just five minutes ago. She was doing a fair job of breaking her heart even then.’

‘Was she?’ He tried to smile and winced. ‘Well, all right.’

I left and went to Stryker’s cabin. He answered my knock and his face didn’t have welcome written all over it. I looked at the still bleeding cut.

‘Want me to have a look at that?’ Judith Haynes, clad in a fur parka and trousers and looking rather like a red-haired Eskimo, was sitting on the cabin’s only chair, her two cocker spaniels in her lap. Her dazzling smile was in momentary abeyance.

‘No.’

‘It might scar.’ I didn’t give a damn whether it scarred or not.

‘Oh.’ The factor of his appearance, it hadn’t been too hard to guess, was of importance to Stryker. I entered, closed the door, examined and dabbed the cut, put on astringent and applied a plaster. I said: ‘Look, I’m not Captain Imrie. Did you have to bang that boy like that? You could have flattened him with a tap.’

‘You were there when I told Captain Imrie that it was a purely personal matter.’ I’d have to revise my psychological thinking, clearly neither my freely offered medical assistance nor my reasonableness of approach nor the implied flattery had had the slightest mollifying effect. ‘Having MD hung round your neck doesn’t give you the right to ask impertinent prying questions. Remember what else I said to Imrie?’

‘You’d be obliged if I minded my own damned business?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I’ll bet young Allen feels that way too.’

‘That young Allen deserves all he got,’ Judith Haynes said. Her tone wasn’t any more friendly than Stryker’s. I found what she said interesting for two reasons. She was widely supposed to loathe her husband but there was no evidence of it here: and here might lie a more fruitful source for inquiry for, clearly, she wasn’t as good at keeping her emotions and tongue under wraps as her husband was.

‘How do you know’ Miss Haynes? You weren’t there.’

‘I didn’t have to be. I—’

‘Darling!’ Stryker’s voice was abrupt, warning.

‘Can’t trust your wife to speak for herself, is that it?’ I said. His big fists balled but I ignored him and looked again at Judith Haynes. ‘Do you know there’s a little girl up in the saloon crying her eyes out over what your big tough husband did to that kid? Does that mean nothing to you?’

‘If you’re talking about that little bitch of a continuity girl, she deserves all that comes her way too.’

‘Darling!’ Stryker’s voice was urgent I stared at Judith Haynes in disbelief but I could see she meant what she said. Her red slash of a mouth was contorted into a line as straight and as thin as the edge of a ruler, the once beautiful green eyes were venomous and the face ugly in its contorted attempts to conceal some hatred or viciousness or poison in the mind. It was an almost frightening display of what must have been a very, very rare public exhibition of what powerful rumour in the film world—to which I now partially apologized for my former mental strictures—maintained to be a fairly constant private amalgam of the peasant shrew and the screaming fishwife.

‘That—harmless—child?’ I spaced the words in slow incredulity. ‘A bitch?’

‘A tramp, a little tramp! A slut! A little gutter—’

‘Stop it!’ Stryker’s voice was a lash, but it had strained overtones. I had the feeling that only desperation would make him talk to his wife in this fashion.

‘Yes, stop it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Miss Haynes, and I’m damned sure you don’t either. All I know is you’re sick.’

I turned to go. Stryker barred my way. He’d lost a little colour from his cheeks.

‘Nobody talks to my wife that way.’ His lips hardly moved as he spoke.

I was suddenly sick of the Strykers. I said: ‘I’ve insulted your wife?’

‘Unforgivably.’

‘And so I’ve insulted you?’

‘You’re getting the point, Marlowe.’

‘And anyone who insults you gets what’s coming to them. That’s what you said to Captain Imrie.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘I see.’

‘I thought you might.’ He still barred my way.

‘And if I apologize?’

‘An apology?’ He smiled coldly. ‘Let’s try one out for size, shall we?’

I turned to Judith Haynes. I said: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Miss Haynes, and I’m damned sure you don’t either. All I know is you’re sick.’

Her face looked as if invisible claws had sunk deep into both cheeks all the way from temple to chin and dragged back the skin until it was stretched drumtight over the bones. I turned to face Stryker. His facial skin didn’t look tight at all. The strikingly handsome face wasn’t handsome any more, the contours seemed to have sagged and jellied and the cheeks were bereft of colour. I brushed by him, opened the door and stopped.

‘You poor bastard,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. Doctors never tell.’

I was glad to make my way up to the clean biting cold of the upper deck. I’d left something sick and unhealthy and more than vaguely unclean down there behind me and I didn’t have to be a doctor to know what the sickness was. The snow had eased now and as I looked out over the weather side—the port side—I could see that we were leaving one promontory about a half-mile behind on the port quarter while another was coming up about the same distance ahead on the port bow. Kapp Kolthoff and Kapp Malmgrem, I knew from the chart, so we had to be steaming north-east across the Evjebukta. The cliffs here were less high, but we were even more deeply into their lee than twenty minutes previously and the sea had moderated even more. We had less than three miles to go.

I looked up at the bridge. The weather, obviously, was improving considerably or interest and curiosity had been stimulated by the close proximity of our destination, for there was now a small knot of people on either wing of the bridge but with hoods so closely drawn as to make features indistinguishable. I became aware that there was a figure standing close by me huddled up against the fore superstructure of the bridge. It was Mary Darling with the long tangled blonde tresses blowing in every direction of the compass. I went towards her, put my arm round her with the ease born of recent intensive practice, and tilted her face. Red eyes, tear-splotched cheeks, a little woebegone face half-hidden behind the enormous spectacles: the slut, the bitch, the little tramp.

‘Mary Darling,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? It’s far too cold. You should be inside or below.’

‘I wanted to be alone.’ There was still the catch of a dying sob in her voice. ‘And Mr Gilbert kept wanting to give me brandy—and, well—’ she shuddered.

‘So you’ve left Lonnie alone with the restorative. That’ll be an eminently satisfactory all-round conclusion as far as Lonnie—’

‘Dr Marlowe!’ She became aware of the arm round her and made a half-hearted attempt to break away. ‘People will see us!’

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I want the whole world to know of our love.’

‘You want the whole—’ She looked at me in consternation, her normally big eyes huge behind her glasses, then came the first tremulous beginnings of a smile. ‘Oh, Dr Marlowe!’

‘There’s a young man below who wants to see you immediately,’ I said.

‘Oh!’ The smile vanished, heaven knows what gravity of import she found in my words. ‘Is he— I mean, he’ll have to go to hospital, won’t he?’

‘He’ll be up and around this afternoon.’

‘Really? Really and truly?’

‘If you’re calling my professional competence into question—’

‘Oh, Dr Marlowe! Then what—why does he—’ ‘I should imagine he wants you to hold his hand. I’m putting myself in his shoes, of course.’

‘Oh, Dr Marlowe! Will it—I mean in his cabin—’

‘Do I have to drag you down there?’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary.’ She hesitated. ‘Dr Marlowe?’

‘Yes?’

‘I think you’re wonderful. I really do.’

‘Hoppit.’

She smiled, almost happily now, and hopped it. I wished I even fractionally shared her opinion of me, for if I was in a position to do so there would be a good number fewer of dead and sick and injured around. But I was glad of one thing, I hadn’t had to hurt Mary Darling as I’d feared I might, there had been no need to ask her any of the questions that had half-formed in my mind even as I had left the Strykers’ cabin. If she were even remotely capable of being any of those things that Judith Haynes had, for God knew what misbegotten reasons, accused her of being, then she had no right to be in the film industry as a continuity girl, she was in more than a fair way to making her fame and fortune as one of the great actresses of our time. Besides, I didn’t have to ask any questions now, not where she and Allen and the Strykers were concerned: it was hard to say whether my contempt for Michael Stryker was greater than my pity.

I remained where I was for a few minutes watching some crew members who had just come on to the foredeck begin to remove the no longer necessary lashings from the deck cargo, strip off tarpaulins and set slings in place, while another two set about clearing away the big fore derrick and testing the winch. Clearly, Captain Imrie had no intention of wasting any time whatsoever upon our arrival: he wanted, and understandably, to be gone with all dispatch. I went aft to the saloon.

Lonnie was the sole occupant, alone but not lonely, not as long as he had that bottle of Hine happily clutched in his fist. He lowered his glass as I sat down beside him.

‘Ah! You have assuaged the sufferings of the walking wounded? There is a preoccupied air about you, my dear fellow.’ He tapped the bottle. ‘For the instant alleviation of workaday cares—’

‘That bottle belongs to the pantry, Lonnie.’

‘The fruits of nature belong to all mankind. A soupçon?’

‘If only to stop you from drinking it all. I have an apology to make to you, Lonnie. About our delectable leading lady. I don’t think there’s enough kindness around to waste any in throwing it in her direction.’

‘Barren ground, you would say? Stony soil?’

‘I would say.’

‘Redemption and salvation are not for our fair Judith?’

‘I don’t know about that. All I know is that I wouldn’t like to be the one to try and that, looking at her, I can only conclude that there’s an awful lot of unkindness around.’

‘Amen to that.’ Lonnie swallowed some more brandy. ‘But we must not forget the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son. Nothing and nobody is ever entirely lost.’

‘I dare say. Luck to leading her back to the paths of the righteous—you shouldn’t have to fight off too much competition for the job. How is it, do you think, that a person like that should be so different from the other two?’

‘Mary dear and Mary darling? Dear, dear girls. Even in my dotage I love them dearly. Such sweet children.’

‘They could do no wrong?’

‘Never!’

‘Ha! That’s easy to say. But what if, perhaps, they were deeply under the influence of alcohol?’

‘What?’ Lonnie appeared genuinely shocked. ‘What are you talking about? Inconceivable, my dear boy, inconceivable!’

‘Not even, say, if they were to have a double gin?’

‘What piffling nonsense is this? We are speaking of the influence of alcohol, not about apéritifs for swaddling babes.’

‘You would see no harm in either of them asking for, say, just one drink?’

‘Of course not.’ Lonnie looked genuinely puzzled. ‘You do harp on so, my dear fellow.’

‘Yes, I do rather. I just wondered why once, after a long day on the set, when Mary Stuart had asked you for just that one drink you flew completely off the handle.’

In curiously slow-motion fashion Lonnie put bottle and glass on the table and rose unsteadily to his feet. He looked old and tired and terribly vulnerable.

‘Ever since you came in—now I can see it.’ He spoke in a kind of sad whisper. ‘Ever since you came in you’ve been leading up to this one question.’

He shook his head and his eyes were not seeing me. ‘I thought you were my friend,’ he said quietly, and walked uncertainly from the saloon.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The north-west corner of the Sor-hamna bight, where the Morning Rose had finally come to rest, was just under three miles due north-east, as the crow flies, from the most southerly tip of Bear Island. The Sor-hamna itself, U-shaped and open to the south, was just over a thousand yards in width on its east-west axis and close on a mile in length from north to south. The eastern arm of the harbour was discontinuous, beginning with a small peninsula perhaps three hundred yards in length, followed by a two hundred-yard gap of water interspersed with small islands of various sizes then by the much larger island of Makehl, very narrow from east to west, stretching almost half a mile to its most southerly point of Kapp Roalkvam. The land to the north and east was lowlying, that to the west, or true island side, rising fairly steeply from a shallow escarpment but nowhere higher than a small hill about 400 feet high about halfway down the side of the bight. Here were none of the towering precipices of the Hambergfjell or Bird Fell ranges to the south: but, on the other hand, here the entire land was covered in snow, deep on the north-facing slopes and their valleys where the pale low summer sun and the scouring winds had passed them by.

The Sor-hamna was not only the best, it was virtually the only reasonable anchorage in Bear Island. When the wind blew from the west it offered perfect protection for vessels sheltering there, and for a northerly wind it was only slightly less good. From an easterly wind, dependent upon its strength and precise direction, it afforded a reasonable amount of cover—the gap between Kapp Heer and Makehl was the deciding factor here and, when the wind stood in this quarter and if the worst came to the worst, a vessel could always up anchor and shelter under the lee of Makehl Island: but when the wind blew from the south a vessel was wide open to everything the Barents Sea cared to throw at it.

And this was why the degree of unloading activity aboard the Morning Rose was increasing from the merely hectic to the nearly panicstricken. Even as we had approached the Sor-hamna the wind, which had been slowly veering the past thirty-six hours, now began rapidly to increase its speed of movement round the compass at disconcerting speed so that by the time we had made fast it was blowing directly from the east. It was now a few degrees south of east, and strengthening, and the Morning Rose was beginning to feel its effects: it only had to increase another few knots or veer another few degrees and the trawler’s position would become untenable.

At anchor, the Morning Rose could comfortably have ridden out the threatened blow, but the trouble was that the Morning Rose was not at anchor. She was tied up alongside a crumbling limestone jetty—neither iron nor wooden structures would have lasted for any time in those stormy and bitter waters—that had first been constructed by Lerner and the Deutsche Seefischerei-Verein about the turn of the century and then improved upon—if that were the term—by the International Geophysical Year expedition that had summered there. The jetty, which would have been condemned out of hand and forbidden for public use almost anywhere else in the northern hemisphere, had originally been T-shaped, but the left arm of the T was now all but gone while the central section leading to the shore was badly eaten away on its southward side. It was against this dangerously dilapidated structure that the Morning Rose was beginning to pound with increasing force as the south-easterly seas caught her under the starboard quarter and the cushioning effect as the trawler struck heavily and repeatedly against the jetty was sufficient to make those working on deck stagger and clutch on to the nearest support. It was difficult to say what effect this was having on the Morning Rose, for apart from the scratching and slight indentations of the plates none was visible, but trawlers are legendarily tough and it was unlikely that she was coming to any great harm: but what was coming to harm, and very visibly so, was the jetty itself, for increasingly large chunks of masonry were beginning to fall into the Sor-hamna with dismaying frequency, and as most of our fuel, provisions and equipment still stood there, the seemingly imminent collapse of the pier into the sea was not a moment to be viewed with anything like equanimity.

When we’d first come alongside shortly before noon, the unloading had gone ahead very briskly and smoothly indeed, except for the unloading of Miss Haynes’s snarling pooches. Even before we’d tied up, the after derrick had the sixteen-foot work-boat in the water and three minutes later an only slightly smaller fourteen-footer with an outboard had followed it: those boats were to remain with us. Within ten minutes the specially strengthened for’ard derrick had lifted the weirdly-shaped— laterally truncated so as to have a flat bottom— mock-up of the central section of a submarine over the side and lowered it gently into the water, where it floated with what appeared to be perfect stability, no doubt because of its four tons of cast-iron ballast. It was when the mockup conning-tower was swung into position to be bolted on to the central section of the submarine that the trouble began.

It just wouldn’t bolt on. Goin and Heissman and Stryker, the only three who had observed the original tests, said that in practice it had operated perfectly: clearly, it wasn’t operating perfectly now. The conning-tower section, elliptical in shape, was designed to settle precisely over a four-inch vertical flange in the centre of the mid-section, but settle it just wouldn’t do: it turned out that one of the shallow curves at the foot of the conning-tower was at least a quarter-inch out of true, a fact that was almost certainly due to the pounding that we’d taken on the way up from Wick: just one lashing not sufficiently bar-taut would have permitted that microscopic freedom of vertical movement that would have allowed the tiny distortion to develop.

The solution was simple—just to hammer the offending curve back into shape—and in a dockyard with skilled platelayers available this would probably have been no more than a matter of minutes. But we’d neither technical facilities nor skilled labour available and the minutes had now stretched into hours. A score of times now the for’ard derrick had offered up the offending conning-tower piece to the flange: a score of times it had had to be lifted again and painstakingly assaulted by hammers. Several times a perfect fit had been achieved where it had been previously lacking only to find the distortion had mysteriously and mischievously transferred itself a few inches farther along the metal. Nor, now, despite the fact that the submarine section was in the considerable lee afforded by both pier and vessel, were matters being made any easier by the little waves that were beginning to deep around the bows of the Morning Rose and rock it, gently at first but with increasing force, to the extent that the ultimate good fit was clearly going to depend as much on the luck of timing as the persuasion of the hammers.

Captain Imrie wasn’t frantic with worry for the sound reason that it wasn’t in his nature to become frantic about anything, but the depth of his concern was evident enough from the fact that he had not only skipped lunch but hadn’t as much as fortified himself with anything stronger than coffee since our arrival in the Sor-hamna. His main concern, apart from the well-being of the Morning Rose—he clearly didn’t give a damn about his passengers—was to get the foredeck cleared of its remaining deck cargo because, as I’d heard Otto rather unnecessarily and unpleasantly reminding him, it was part of his contractual obligations to land all passengers and cargo before departure for Hammerfest. And, of course, what was exercising Captain Imrie’s mind so powerfully was that, with darkness coming on and the weather blowing up, the for’ard deck cargo had not yet been unloaded and would not be until the fore derrick was freed from its present full-time occupation of holding the conning-tower suspended over the mid-section.

The one plus factor about Captain Imrie’s concentration was that it gave him little time to worry about Halliday’s disappearance. More precisely, it gave him little time to try to do anything constructive about it, for I knew it was still very much on his mind from the fact that he had taken time off to tell me that upon his arrival in Hammerfest his first intention would be to contact the law. There were two things I could have said at this stage, but I didn’t. The first was that I failed to see what earthly purpose this could serve—it was just, I suppose, that he felt that he had to do something, anything, however ineffectual that might be: the second was that I felt quite certain that he would never get the length of Hammerfest in the first place, although just then hardly seemed the time to tell him why I thought so. He wasn’t then in the properly receptive mood: I had hopes that he would be shortly after he had left Bear Island.

I went down the screeching metal gangway— its rusty iron wheels, apparently permanently locked in position, rubbed to and fro with every lurch of the Morning Rose—and made my way along the ancient jetty. A small tractor and a small Sno-Cat—they had been the third and fourth items to be unloaded from the trawler’s after-deck— were both equipped with towing sledges and everybody from Heissman downwards was helping to load equipment aboard those sledges for haulage up to the huts that lay on the slight escarpment not more than twenty yards from the end of the jetty. Everybody was not only helping, they were helping with a will: when the temperature is fifteen degrees below freezing the temptation to dawdle is not marked. I followed one consignment up to the huts.

Unlike the jetty, the huts were of comparatively recent construction and in good condition, relics from the latest IGY—there could have been no possible economic justification in dismantling them and taking them back to Norway. They were not built of the modern kapok, asbestos and aluminium construction so favoured by modern expeditions in Arctic regions as base headquarters: they were built—although admittedly pre-sectioned— in the low-slung chalet design fairly universally found in the higher Alpine regions of Europe. They had about them that four-square hunch-shouldered look, the appearance of lowering their heads against the storm, that made it seem quite likely that they would still be there in a hundred years’ time. Provided they are not exposed to prevailing high winds and the constant fluctuation of temperature above and below the freezing point, man-made structures can last almost indefinitely in the deep-freeze of the high Arctic.

There were five structures here altogether, all of them set a considerable distance apart—as far as the shoulder of the hill beyond the escarpment would permit. Little as I knew of the Arctic, I knew enough to understand the reason for this spacing: here, where exposure to cold is the permanent and dominating factor of life, it is fire which is the greatest enemy, for unless there are chemical fire-fighting appliances to hand, and there nearly always are not, a fire, once it has taken hold, will not stop until everything combustible has been destroyed: blocks of ice are scarcely at a premium when it comes to extinguishing flames.

Four small huts were set at the corners of a much larger central block. According to the rather splendid diagram Heissman had drawn up in his manifesto, those were to be given over, respectively, to transport, fuels, provisions and equipment: I was not quite sure what he meant by equipment. Those were all square and windowless. The central and very much larger building was of a peculiar starfish shape with a pentagonal centrepiece and five triangular annexes all forming an integral whole: the purpose of this design was difficult to guess, I would have thought it one conducive to maximum heat-loss. The centrepiece was the living, dining and cooking area: each arm held two tiny bare rooms for sleeping quarters. Heating was by electric oil-filled black heaters bolted to the walls, but until we got our own portable generator going we were dependent on simple oil stoves: lighting was by pressurized Coleman kerosene lamps. Cooking, which was apparently to consist of the endless opening and heating of contents of tins, was to be done on a simple oil stove. Otto, needless to say, hadn’t brought a cook along: cooks cost money.

With the notable exception of Judith Haynes everyone, even the still groggy Allen, worked willingly and as quickly as the unfamiliar and freezing conditions would permit: they also worked silently and joylessly, for although no one had been on anything approaching terms of close friendship with Halliday, the news of his disappearance had added fresh gloom and apprehension to a company who believed themselves to be evilly jinxed before even the first day of shooting. Stryker and Lonnie, who never spoke to each other except when essential, checked all the stores, fuel, oil, food, clothing, arctizing equipment—Otto, whatever his faults, insisted on thoroughness: Sandy, considerably recovered now that he was on dry land, checked his props, Hendriks his sound equipment, the Count his camera equipment, Eddie his electrical gear, and I myself what little medical kit I had along. By three o’clock, when it was already dusk, we had everything stowed away, cubicles allocated and camp-beds and sleeping-bags placed in those: the jetty was now quite empty of all the gear that had been unloaded there.

We lit the oil stoves, left a morose and muttering Eddie—with the doleful assistance of the Three Apostles—to get the diesel generator working and made our way back to the Morning Rose, myself because it was essential that I speak to Smithy, the others because the hut was still miserably bleak and freezing whereas even the much-maligned Morning Rose still offered a comparative haven of warmth and comfort. Very shortly after our return a variety of incidents occurred in short and eventually disconcerting succession.

At ten past three, totally unexpectedly and against all indications, the conning-tower fitted snugly over the flange of the midship section. Six bolts were immediately fitted to hold it in position— there were twenty-four altogether—and the work-boat at once set about the task of towing the unwieldy structure into the almost total shelter offered by the right angle formed by the main body of the jetty and its north-facing arm.

At three-fifteen the unloading of the foredeck cargo began and, with Smithy in charge, this was undertaken with efficiency and dispatch. Partly because I didn’t want to disturb him in his work, partly because it was at that moment impossible to speak to Smithy privately, I went below to my cabin, removed a small rectangular cloth-bound package from the base of my medical bag, put it in a small purse-string duffel bag and went back on top.

This was at three-twenty. The unloading was still less than twenty per cent completed but Smithy wasn’t there. It was almost as though he had awaited my momentary absence to betake himself elsewhere. And that he had betaken himself elsewhere there was no doubt. I asked the winchman where he had gone, but the winchman, exclusively preoccupied with a job that had to be executed with all dispatch, was understandably vague about Smithy’s whereabouts. He had either gone below or ashore, he said, which I found a very helpful remark. I looked in his cabin, on the bridge, in the chart-house, the saloon and all the other likely places. No Smithy. I questioned passengers and crew with the same result. No one had seen him, no one had any idea whether he was aboard or had gone ashore, which was very understandable because the darkness was now pretty well complete and the harsh light of the arc lamp now rigged up to aid unloading threw the gangway into very heavy shadow so that anyone could be virtually certain of boarding or leaving the Morning Rose unnoticed.

Nor was there any sign of Captain Imrie. True, I wasn’t looking for him, but I would have expected him to be making his presence very much known. The wind was almost round to the south-south-east now and still freshening, the Morning Rose was beginning to pound regularly against the jetty wall with a succession of jarring impacts and a sound of screeching metal that would normally have had Imrie very much in evidence indeed in his anxiety to get rid of all his damned passengers and their equipment in order to get his ship out to the safety of the open sea with all speed. But he wasn’t around, not any place I could see him.

At three-thirty I went ashore and hurried up the jetty to the huts. They were deserted except for the equipment hut where Eddie was blasphemously trying to start up the diesel. He looked up as he saw me.

‘Nobody could ever call me one for complaining, Dr Marlowe, but this bloody—’

‘Have you seen Mr Smith? The mate?’

‘Not ten minutes ago. Looked in to see how we were getting on. Why? Is there something—’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘About where he was going? What he was doing?’

‘No.’ Eddie looked at the shivering Three Apostles, whose blank expressions were of no help to anyone. ‘Just stood there for a couple of minutes with his hands in his pockets, looking at what we were doing and asking a few questions, then he strolls off.’

‘See where he went?’

‘No.’ He looked at the Three Apostles, who shook their heads as one. ‘Anything up, then?’

‘Nothing urgent. Ship’s about to sail and the skipper’s looking for him.’ If that wasn’t quite an accurate assessment of how matters stood at that moment, I’d no doubt it would be in a very few minutes. I didn’t waste time looking for Smithy. If he had been hanging around with apparent aimlessness at the camp instead of closely supervising the urgent clearing of the foredeck, which one would have expected of him and would normally have been completely in character, then Smithy had a very good reason for doing so: he just wanted, however temporarily, to become lost.

At three-thirty-five I returned to the Morning Rose. This time Captain Imrie was very much in evidence. I had thought him incapable of becoming frantic about anything, but as I looked at him as he stood in the wash of light at the door of the saloon I could see that I could have been wrong about that. Perhaps ‘frantic’ was the wrong term, but there was no doubt that he was in a highly excitable condition and was mad clear through. His fists were balled, what could be seen of his face was mottled red and white, and his bright blue eyes were snapping. With commendable if lurid brevity he repeated to me what he’d clearly told a number of people in the past few minutes. Worried about the deteriorating weather—that wasn’t quite the way he’d put it—he’d had Allison try to contact Tunheim for a forecast. This Allison had been unable to do. Then he and Allison had made the discovery that the transceiver was smashed beyond repair. And just over an hour or so previously the receiver had been in order—or Smith had said it was, for he had then written down the latest weather forecast. Or what he said was the latest weather forecast. And now there was no sign of Smith. Where the hell was Smith?

‘He’s gone ashore,’ I said.

‘Ashore? Ashore? How the hell do you know he’s gone ashore?’ Captain Imrie didn’t sound very friendly, but then, he was hardly in a friendly mood.

‘Because I’ve just been up in the camp talking to Mr Harbottle, the electrician. Mr Smith had just been up there.’

‘Up there? He should have been unloading cargo. What the hell was he doing up there?’

‘I didn’t see Mr Smith,’ I explained patiently. ‘So I couldn’t ask him.’

‘What the hell were you doing up there?’

‘You’re forgetting yourself, Captain Imrie. I am not responsible to you. I merely wished to have a word with him before he left. We’ve become quite friendly, you know.’

‘Yes you have, haven’t you?’ Imrie said significantly. It didn’t mean anything, he was just in a mood for talking significantly. ‘Allison!’

‘Sir?’

‘The bo’sun. Search-party ashore. Quickly now, I’ll lead you myself.’ If there had ever been any doubt as to the depth of Captain Imrie’s concern there was none now. He turned back to me but as Otto Gerran and Goin were now standing beside me I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing me or not. ‘And we’re leaving within the half-hour, with Smith or without him.’

‘Is that fair, Captain?’ Otto asked. ‘He may just have gone for a walk or got a little lost—you see how dark it is—’

‘Don’t you think it bloody funny that Mr Smith should vanish just as I discover that a radio over which he’s been claiming to receive messages is smashed beyond repair?’

Otto fell silent but Goin, ever the diplomat, stepped in smoothly.

‘I think Mr Gerran is right, Captain. You could be acting a little bit unfairly. I agree that the destruction of your radio is a serious and worrisome affair and one that is more than possibly, in light of all the mysterious things that have happened recently, a very sinister affair. But I think you are wrong immediately to assume that Mr Smith has any connection with it. For one thing, he strikes me as much too intelligent a man to incriminate himself in so extremely obvious a fashion. In the second place, as your senior officer who knows how vitally important a piece of equipment your radio is, why should he do such a wanton thing? In the third place, if he were trying to escape the consequences of his actions, where on earth could he escape to on Bear Island? I do not suggest anything as simple as an accident or amnesia: I’m merely suggesting that he may have got lost. You could at least wait until the morning.’

I could see Captain Imrie’s fists unballing, not much, just a slight relaxation, and I knew that if he weren’t wavering he was at least on the point of considering, a state of approaching uncertainty that lasted just as long as it took Otto to undo whatever Goin might have been on the point of achieving.

‘That’s it, of course,’ he said. ‘He just went to have a look around.’

‘What? In the pitch bloody dark?’ It was an exaggeration but a pardonable one. ‘Allison! Oakley! All of you. Come on!’ He lowered his voice a few decibels and said to us: ‘I’m leaving within the half-hour, Smith or no Smith. Hammerfest, gentlemen, Hammerfest and the law.’

He hurried down the gangway, half a dozen men close behind. Goin sighed. ‘I suppose we’d better lend a hand.’ He left and Otto, after hesitating for a moment, followed.

I didn’t, I’d no intention of lending a hand, if Smithy didn’t want to be found then he wouldn’t be. Instead I went down to my cabin, wrote a brief note, took the small duffel bag with me and went in search of Haggerty. I had to trust somebody, Smithy’s most damned inconvenient disappearing trick had left me with no option, and I thought Haggerty was my best bet. He was stiff-necked and suspicious and, since Imrie’s questioning of him that morning, he must have become even more suspicious of me: but he was no fool, he struck me as being incorruptible, he was, I thought, amenable to an authoritative display of discipline and, above all, he’d spent twenty-seven years of his life in taking orders.

It was fifteen minutes’ touch and go, but at last he grudgingly agreed to do what I asked him to.

‘You wouldn’t be making a fool out of me, Dr Marlowe?’ he asked.

‘You’d be a fool if you even thought that. What would I have to gain?’

‘There’s that, there’s that.’ He took the small duffel bag reluctantly. ‘As soon as we’re safely clear of the island—’

‘Yes. That, and the letter. To the captain. Not before.’

‘Those are deep waters, Dr Marlowe.’ He didn’t know how deep, I was close to drowning in them. ‘Can’t you tell me what it is all about?’

‘If I knew that, Haggerty, do you think I’d be remaining behind on this godforsaken island?’

For the first time he smiled. ‘No, sir, I don’t really think you would.’

Captain Imrie and his search-party returned only a minute or two after I’d gone back up to the upper deck. They returned without Smithy. I was surprised neither by their failure to find him nor the brevity of their search—an elapsed time of only twenty minutes. Bear Island, on the map, may be only the veriest speck in the high Arctic, but it does cover an area of 73 square miles and it must have occurred to Captain Imrie very early on indeed that to attempt to search even a fraction of one per cent of that icily mountainous terrain in darkness was to embark upon a monumental folly. His fervour for the search had diminished to vanishing point: but his failure to find Smithy had, if anything, increased his determination to depart immediately. Having ensured that the last of the foredeck cargo had been unloaded and that all of the film company’s equipment and personal effects were ashore, he and Mr Stokes courteously but swiftly shook hands with us all as we were ushered ashore. The derricks were already stayed in position and the mooring ropes singled up: Captain Imrie was not about to stand upon the order of his going.

Otto, properly enough, was the last to leave. At the head of the gangway, he said: ‘Twenty-two days it is, then, Captain Imrie? You’ll be back in twenty-two days?’

‘I won’t leave you here the winter, Mr Gerran, never fear.’ With both the mystery and his muchunloved Bear Island about to be left behind. Captain Imrie apparently felt that he could permit himself a slight relaxation of attitude. ‘Twenty-two days? At the very outset. Why, man, I can be in Hammerfest and back in seventy-two hours. I wish you all well.’

With this Captain Imrie ordered the gangway to be raised and went up to the bridge without explaining his cryptic remark about the seventy-two hours. It was more likely than not that what he had in mind at that very moment was, indeed, to be back inside seventy-two hours with, his manner seemed to convey, a small regiment of heavily-armed Norwegian police. I wasn’t concerned: I was as certain as I could be that, if that were indeed what he had in mind, he would change his mind before the night was out.

The navigation lights came on and the Morning Rose moved off slowly northward from the jetty, slewed round in a half-circle and headed down the Sor-hamna, her engine note deepening as she picked up speed. Opposite the jetty again Captain Imrie sounded his hooter—only the captain could have called it a siren—twice, a high and lonely sound almost immediately swallowed up in the muffling blanket of snow: within seconds, it seemed, both the throb of the engine and the pale glow of the navigation lights were lost in the snow and the darkness.

For what seemed quite some time we all stood there, huddled against the bitter cold and peering into the driving snow, as if by willing it we could bring the lights back into view again, the engine throb back into earshot. The atmosphere was not one of voyagers happily arrived at their hoped-for destination but of castaways marooned on an Arctic desert island.

The atmosphere inside the big living cabin was not much of an improvement. The oil heaters were functioning well enough and Eddie had the diesel generator running so that the black heaters on the walls were just beginning to warm up, but the effects of a decade of deep-freeze were not to be overcome in the space of an hour: the inside temperature was still below freezing. Nobody went to their allocated cubicles for the excellent reason that they were considerably colder than the central living space. Nobody appeared to want to talk to anybody else. Heissman embarked upon a pedantic and what promised to be lengthy lecture about Arctic survival, a subject concerning which his long and intimate acquaintance with Siberia presumably made him uniquely qualified to speak, but there were no takers, it was questionable whether he was even listening to himself. Then he, Otto and Neal Divine began a rather desultory discussion of their plans for—weather permitting— the following day’s shooting, but obviously they hadn’t their hearts even in that. It was, eventually, Conrad who put his finger on the cause of the general malaise, or, more accurately, expressed the thought that was in the mind of everybody with the possible exception of myself.

He said to Heissman: ‘In the Arctic, in winter, you require torches. Right?’

‘Right?’

‘We have them?’

‘Plenty, of course. Why?’

‘Because I want one. I want to go out. We’ve been in here now, all of us, how long, I don’t know, twenty minutes at least, and for all we know there may be a man out there sick or hurt or frostbitten or maybe fallen and broken a leg.’

‘Oh, come now, come now, that’s pitching it a bit strongly, Charles,’ Otto said. ‘Mr Smith has always struck me as a man eminently able to take care of himself.’ Otto would probably have said the same thing if he’d been watching Smithy being mangled by a polar bear: because of both nature and build Otto was not a man to become unnecessarily involved in anything even remotely physical.

‘If you don’t really care, why don’t you come out and say so?’ This was a new side of Conrad to me and he continued to develop his theme at my expense. ‘I’d have thought you’d have been the first to suggest this, Dr Marlowe.’ I might have been, too, had I not known considerably more about Smithy than he did.

‘I don’t mind being the second,’ I said agreeably.

In the event, we all went, with the exception of Otto, who complained of feeling unwell, and Judith Haynes who roundly maintained that it was all nonsense and that Mr Smith would come back when he felt like it, an opinion which I held myself but for reasons entirely different from hers. We were all provided with torches and agreed to keep as closely together as possible or, if separated, to be back inside thirty minutes at the latest.

The party set off in a wide sweep up the escarpment fronting the Sor-hamna to the north. At least, the others did. I headed straight for the equipment hut where the diesel generator was thudding away reassuringly, for it was unlikely that any one of us would be missed—no one would probably be aware of the presence of any other than his immediate neighbours—and the best place to sit out a wild goose chase was the warmest and most sheltered spot I could find. With my torch switched off so as not to betray my presence I opened the door of the hut; passed inside, closed the door, took a step forward and swore out loud as I stumbled over something comparatively yielding and almost measured my length on the planked floor. I recovered, turned and switched on my torch.

A man was lying stretched out on the floor and to my total lack of surprise it proved to be Smithy. He stirred and groaned, half-turned, raised a feeble arm to protect his eyes from the bright glare of the torch, then slumped back again, his arm falling limply by his side, his eyes closed. There was blood smeared over his left cheek. He stirred uneasily, moving from side to side and moaning in that soft fashion a man does when he is close to the borderline of consciousness.

‘Does it hurt much, Smithy?’ I asked.

He moaned some more.

‘Where you scratched your cheek with a handful of frozen snow,’ I said.

He stopped moving and he stopped moaning.

‘The comedy act we’ll keep for later in the programme,’ I said coldly. ‘In the meantime, will you kindly get up and explain to me why you’ve behaved like an irresponsible idiot?’

I placed the torch on the generator casing so that the beam shone upwards. It didn’t give much light, just enough to show Smithy’s carefully expressionless face as he got to his feet.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘PQS 182131, James R. Huntingdon, Golden Green and Beirut, currently and wrongly known as Joseph Rank Smith, is who I mean.’

‘I guess I’m the irresponsible idiot you mean,’ Smithy said. ‘It would be nice to have introductions all round.’

‘Dr Marlowe,’ I said. He kept the same carefully expressionless face. ‘Four years and four months ago when we took you from your nice cosy job as Chief Officer in that broken-down Lebanese tanker we thought you had a future with us. A bright one. Even four months ago we thought the same thing. But here, now, I’m very far from sure.’

Smithy smiled but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘You can’t very well fire me on Bear Island.’

‘I can fire you in Timbuctoo if I want to,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘Well, come on.’

‘You might have made yourself known to me.’ Smithy sounded aggrieved and I supposed I would have been also in his position. ‘I was beginning to guess. I didn’t know there was anyone else aboard apart from me.’

‘You weren’t supposed to know. You weren’t supposed to guess. You were supposed to do exactly what you were told. Just that and no more. You remember the last line in your written instructions? They were underlined. A quotation from Milton. I underlined it.’

‘“They also serve who only stand and wait”,’ Smithy said. ‘Corny, I thought it at the time.’

‘I’ve had a limited education,’ I said. ‘Point is, did you stand and wait? Did you hell! Your orders were as simple and explicit as orders could ever be. Remain constantly aboard the Morning Rose until contacted. Do not, under any circumstances, leave the vessel even to step ashore. Do not, repeat not, attempt to conduct any investigations upon your own, do not seek to discover anything, at all times behave like a stereotype merchant navy officer. This you failed to do. I wanted you aboard that ship, Smithy. I needed you aboard— now. And where are you—stuck in a godforsaken hut on Bear Island. Why in God’s name couldn’t you follow out simple instructions?’

‘OK. My fault. But I thought I was alone. Circumstances alter cases, don’t they? With four men mysteriously dead and four others pretty close to death—well, damn it all, am I supposed to stand by and do nothing? Am I supposed to have no initiative, nor to think for myself even once?’

‘Not till you’re told to. And now look where you’ve left me—one hand behind my back. The Morning Rose was my other hand and now you’ve deprived me of it. I wanted it on call and close to hand every hour of the day and night. I might need it at any time—and now I haven’t got it. Is there anybody aboard that blasted trawler who could maintain position just off-shore in the darkest night or bring her up the Sor-hamna in a full blizzard? You know damn well there’s not. Captain Imrie couldn’t bring her up the Clyde on a midsummer’s afternoon.’

‘You have a radio with you then? To communicate with the trawler?’

‘Of course. Built into my medical case—no more than a police job, but range enough.’

‘Be rather difficult to communicate with the Morning Rose’s transceiver lying in bits and pieces.’

‘How very true,’ I said. ‘And why is it in bits and pieces? Because on the bridge you started talking freely and at length about shouting for help over that self-same radio and whistling up the NATO Atlantic forces if need be, while all the time some clever-cuts was taking his ease out on the bridge wing drinking in every word you said. I know, there were fresh tracks in the snow—well, my tracks, but re-used, if you follow me. So, of course, our clever-cuts hies himself off and gets himself a heavy hammer.’

‘I could have been more circumspect at that, I suppose. You can have my apologies if you want them but I don’t see them being all that useful at this stage.’

‘I’m hardly in line myself for a citation for distinguished services, so we’ll leave the apologies be. Now that you’re here—well, I won’t have to watch my back so closely.’

‘So they’re on to you—whoever they are?’

‘Whoever they are are unquestionably on to me.’ I told him briefly all I knew, not all I thought I knew or suspected I knew, for I saw no point in making Smithy as confused as myself. I went on: ‘Just so we don’t act at cross-purposes, let me initiate any action that I—or we—may think may have to be taken. I need hardly say that that doesn’t deprive you of initiative if and when you find yourself or think you find yourself physically threatened. In that event, you have my advance permission to flatten anybody.’

‘That’s nice to know.’ Smithy smiled briefly for the first time. ‘It would be even nicer to know who it is that I’m likely to have to flatten. It would be even nicer still to know what you who are, I gather, a fairly senior Treasury official, and I, whom I know to be a junior one, are doing on this god-damned island anyway.’

‘The Treasury’s basic concern is money, always money, in one shape or other, and that’s why we’re here. Not our money, not British money, but what we call international dirty money, and all the members of the Central Banks co-operate very closely on this issue.’

‘When you’re as poor as I am,’ Smithy said, ‘there’s no such thing as dirty money.’

‘Even an underpaid civil servant like yourself wouldn’t touch this lot. This is all ill-gotten gains, illegal loot from the days of World War II. This money has all been earned in blood and what has been recovered of it—and that’s only a fraction of the total—has almost invariably been recovered in blood. Even as late as the spring of 1945 Germany was still a land of priceless treasures: by the summer of that year the cupboard was almost entirely bare. Both the victors and the vanquished laid their sticky fingers on every imaginable object of value they could clap eyes on—gold, precious stones, old masters, securities—German bank securities issued forty years ago are still perfectly valid—and took off in every conceivable direction. I need hardly say that none of those involved saw fit to declare their latest acquisitions to the proper authorities.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Your worried friends are scouring Bear Island for you—or a very small part of it, anyway. A half-hour search. I’ll have to bring in your unconscious form in about fifteen minutes.’

‘It all sounds pretty dull to me,’ Smith said. ‘All this loot, I mean. Was there much of it?’

‘It all depends what you call much. It’s estimated that the Allies—and when I say “Allies” I mean Britain and America as well as the much-maligned Russians—managed to get hold of about two-thirds of the total. That left the Nazis and their sympathizers with about a paltry one-third, and the conservative estimate of that one-third—conservative, Smithy—is that it amounts to approximately £350 million. Pounds sterling, you understand.’

‘A thousand million all told?’

‘Give or take a hundred million.’

‘That childish remark about this being a dull subject. Strike it off the record.’

‘Granted. Now this loot has found its way into some very odd places indeed. Some of it, inevitably, lies in secret numbered bank-accounts. Some of it—there is no question about this—lies in the form of specie in some of the very deepest Austrian Alpine lakes and has so far proved irrecoverable. I know of two Raphaels in the cellar gallery of a Buenos Aires millionaire, a Michelangelo in Rio, several Halses and Rubenses in the same illegal collection in New York, and a Rembrandt in London. Their owners are either people who have been in, were in, or are closely connected to the governments or armed forces of the countries concerned: there’s nothing the governments concerned can do about it and there are no signs that they’re particularly keen to do anything about it anyway, they themselves might be the ultimate beneficiaries. As lately as the end of 1970 an international cartel went on to the market with £30 millions’ worth of perfectly valid German securities issued in the ‘thirties, approaching in turn the London, New York and Zürich markets, but the Federal Bank of Germany refused to cash those until proper owner identification was established: the point is that it’s an open secret that those securities were taken from the vaults of the Reichsbank in 1945 by a special Red Army unit who were constituted as the only legalized military burglars in history.

‘But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak; the vast bulk of this immense fortune is hidden because the war is still too recent and people— the illegal owners—still too scared to convert their treasures into currency. There’s a special Italian Government Recovery Office that deals exclusively with this matter, and its boss, one Professor Siviero, estimates that there are at least seven hundred old masters, many of them virtually priceless, still untraced, while another expert, a Simon Wiesenthal of the Austrian Jewish Documentation Service, says virtually the same thing— he, incidentally, maintains that there are countless highly-wanted characters, such as top-ranking officers in the SS, who are living in great comfort from hundreds of numbered bank accounts scattered throughout Europe.

‘Siviero and Wiesenthal are the acknowledged legal experts in this form of recovery. Unfortunately, there are known to be a handful of people— they amount to certainly not more than three or four—who are possessed of an equal or even greater expertise in this matter, but who unfortunately are lacking in the high principles of their colleagues, if that is the word, who operate on the right side of the law. Their names are known but they are untouchable because they have never committed any known crimes, not even fraudulent conversion of stocks, because the stocks are always good, the claimants always proven. They are, nevertheless, criminals operating on an international level. We have the most skilful and successful of the lot with us here on Bear Island. His name is Johann Heissman.’

‘Heissman!’

‘None other. He’s a very gifted lad is our Johann.’

‘But Heissman! How can that be? Heissman? What kind of sense can that make? Why it’s only two years—’

‘I know. It’s only two years since Heissman made his spectacular escape from Siberia and arrived in London to the accompaniment of lots of noise and TV cameras and yards of newspaper space and enough red carpet to go from Tilbury to Tomsk, since which time he has occupied himself exclusively with his old love of film-making, so how can it possibly be Heissman?

‘Well, it can be Heissman and it is Heissman for our Johann is a very downy bird indeed. We have checked, in fact, that he was a movie studio partner of Otto in Vienna just before the war and that they did, in fact, attend the same gymnasium in St Polten, which is not all that far away. We do know that Heissman ran the wrong way while Otto ran the right way at the time of the Anschluss, and we do know that Heissman, because of his then Communist sympathies, was a very welcome guest of the Third Reich. What followed was one of those incredibly involved double and treble dealing spy switches that occurred so frequently in central Europe during the war. Heissman was apparently allowed to escape to Russia, where his sympathies were well known, and then sent back to Germany where he was ordered to transmit all possible misleading but still acceptable military information back to the Russians.’

‘Why? Why did he do it?’

‘Because his wife and two children were captured at the same time as he was. A good enough reason?’ Smithy nodded. ‘Then when the war was over and the Russians overran Berlin and turned up their espionage records, they found out what Heissman had really been doing and shipped him to Siberia.’

‘I would have thought they would have shot him out of hand.’

‘They would have, too, but for one small point. I told you that Heissman was a very downy bird and that this was a treble deal. Heissman was, in effect and actually, working throughout the war for the Russians. For four years he faithfully sent back his misleading reports to his masters and even though he had the help of the German Intelligence in the preparation of his coded messages, they never once latched on to the fact that Heissman was using his own overlaid code throughout. The Russians simply spirited him away at the end of the war for his own safety and allegedly sent him to Siberia. Our information is that he’s never been to Siberia: we believe that his wife and two married daughters are still living very comfortably in Moscow.’

‘And he has been working for the Russians ever since?’ Smithy was looking just faintly baffled and I had some fellow-feeling for him, Heissman’s masterful duplicity was not for ready comprehension.

‘In his present capacity. During his last eight years in his Siberian prison, Heissman, in a variety of disguises, has been traced in North and South America, South Africa, Israel and, believe it or not, in the Savoy Hotel in London. We know but we cannot prove that all those trips were in some way concerned with the recovery of Nazi treasure for his Russian masters—you have to remember that Heissman had built up the highest connections in the Party, the SS and the Intelligence: he was almost uniquely qualified for the task. Since his “escape” from Siberia he has made two pictures in Europe, one in Piedmont, where an old widow complained that some tattered old paintings had been stolen from the loft of her barn, the other in Provence, where an old country lawyer called in the police about some deed boxes that had been removed from his office. Whether either pictures or deed boxes were of any value we do not know: still less can we connect either disappearance with Heissman.’

‘This is an awful lot to take in all at once,’ Smithy complained.

‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘OK if I smoke?’

‘Five minutes. Then I’ve got to drag you back by the heels.’

‘By the shoulders, if it’s all the same to you.’ Smithy lit his cigarette and thought a bit. ‘So what you’ve got to find out is what Heissman is doing on Bear Island.’

‘That’s why we’re here.’

‘You’ve no idea?’

‘None. Money, it’s got to be money. This would be the last place on earth I’d associate with money and maybe that association would be wrong anyway. Maybe it’s only a means to the money. Johann, as I trust you’ve gathered by this time, is a very devious character indeed.’

‘Would there be a tie-up with the film company? With his old friend Gerran? Or would he just be making use of them?’

‘I’ve simply no idea.’

‘And Mary Stuart? The secret rendezvous girl? What could the possible connection be there?’

‘Same answer. We know very little of her. We know her real name—she’s never made any attempt to conceal that—age, birthplace and that she’s a Latvian—or comes from what used to be Latvia before the Russians took it over. We also know—and this information she hasn’t volunteered—that it was only her mother who was Latvian. Her father was German.’

‘Ah! In the Army perhaps? Intelligence? SS?’

‘That’s the obvious connection to seek. But we don’t know. Her immigration forms say that her parents are dead.’

‘So the department has been checking on her too?’

‘We’ve had a rundown on everyone here connected with Olympus Productions. We may as well have saved ourselves the trouble.’

‘So no facts. Any hunches, feelings?’

‘Hunches aren’t my stock in trade.’

‘I somehow didn’t feel they would be.’ Smithy ground out his cigarette. ‘Before we go, I’d like to mention two very uncomfortable thoughts that have just occurred to me. Number one. Johann Heissman is a very big-time very successful international operative? True?’

‘He’s an international criminal.’

‘A rose by any other name. The point is that those boys avoid violence wherever possible, isn’t that true?’

‘Perfectly true. Apart from anything else, it’s beneath them.’

‘And have you ever heard Heissman’s name being associated with violence?’

‘There’s no record of it.’

‘But there’s been a considerable amount of violence, one way or the other, in the past day or two. So if it isn’t Heissman, who’s behind the strong-arm behaviour?’

‘I don’t say it isn’t Heissman. The leopard can change his spots. He may be finding himself, for God knows what reason, in so highly unusual a situation that he has no option other than to have recourse to violence. He may, for all we know, have violent associates who don’t necessarily represent his attitude. Or it may be someone entirely unconnected with him.’

‘That’s what I like,’ Smithy said. ‘Simple straightforward answers. And there’s the second point that may have escaped your attention. If our friends are on to you the chances are that they’re on to me too. That eavesdropper on the bridge.’

‘The point had not escaped my attention. And not because of the bridge, although that may have given pause for thought, but because you deliberately skipped ship. It doesn’t matter what most of them think, one person or possibly more is going to be convinced that you did it on purpose. You’re a marked man, Smithy.’

‘So that when you drag me back there not everyone is going to feel genuine pangs of sorrow for poor old Smithy? Some may question the bona fides of my injuries?’

‘They won’t question. They’ll damn well know. But we have to act as if.’

‘Maybe you’ll watch my back too? Now and again?’

‘I have a lot on my mind, but I’ll try.’

I had Smithy by the armpits, head lolling, heels and hands trailing in the snow, where two flashlights picked us up less than five yards from the door of the main cabin.

‘You’ve found him then?’ It was Goin, Harbottle by his side. ‘Good man!’ Even to my by now hypersensitive ear Goin’s reaction sounded genuine.

‘Yes. About quarter of a mile away.’ I breathed very quickly and deeply to give them some idea as to what it must have been like to drag a two-hundred-pound dead-weight over uneven snow-covered terrain for such a distance. ‘Found him in the bottom of a gully. Give me a hand, will you?’

They gave me a hand. We hauled him inside, fetched a camp-cot and stretched him out on this.

‘Good God, good God, good God!’ Otto wrung his hands, the anguished expression on his face testimony to the fresh burden now added to the crippling weight of the cross he was already carrying. ‘What’s happened to the poor fellow?’ The only other occupant of the cabin, Judith Haynes, had made no move to leave the oil stove she was monopolizing, unconscious men being borne into her presence might have been so routine an affair as not even to merit the raising of an eyebrow.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said between gasps. ‘Heavy fall, I think, banged his head on a boulder. Looked like.’

‘Concussion?’

‘Maybe.’ I probed through his hair with my fingertips, found a spot on the scalp that felt no different from anywhere else, and said: ‘Ah!’

They looked at me in anxious expectancy.

‘Brandy,’ I said to Otto. I fetched my stethoscope, went through the necessary charade, and managed to revive the coughing, moaning Smithy with a mouthful or two of brandy. For one not trained to the boards, he put up a remarkable performance, highlighted, at its end, with a muted series of oaths and an expression of mingled shock and chagrin when I gently informed him that the Morning Rose had sailed without him.

During the course of the histrionics most of the other searchers wandered in in twos or threes. I watched them all carefully without seeming to, looking for an expression that was other than surprise or relief, but I might have spared myself the trouble: if there was one or more who was neither surprised nor relieved he had his emotions and facial muscles too well schooled to show anything. I would have expected nothing else.

After about ten minutes our concern shifted from a now obviously recovering Smithy to the fact that two members of the searching party, Allen and Stryker, were still missing. After the events of that morning I felt the absence of those two, of all of us, to be rather coincidental; after fifteen minutes I felt it odd, and after twenty minutes I felt it downright ominous, a feeling that was clearly shared by nearly everyone there. Judith Haynes had abandoned her squatter’s rights by her oil stove and was walking up and down in short, nervous steps, squeezing her hands together. She stopped in front of me.

‘I don’t like it, I don’t like it!’ Her voice was strained and anxious, it could have been acting but I didn’t think so. ‘What’s keeping him? Why is he so long? He’s out there with that Allen fellow. Something’s wrong. I know it is, I know it.’ When I didn’t answer she said: ‘Well, aren’t you going out to look for him?’

‘Just as you went out to look for Mr Smith here,’ I said. It wasn’t very nice, but then I didn’t always feel so very kind to other people as Lonnie did. ‘Maybe your husband will come back when he feels like it.’

She looked at me without speaking, her lips moving but not speaking, no real hostility in her face, and I realized for the second time that day that her rumoured hatred for her husband was, in fact, only a rumour and that, buried no matter how deep, there did exist some form of concern for him. She turned away and I reached for my torch.

‘Once more into the breach,’ I said. ‘Any takers?’

Conrad, Jungbeck, Heyter and Hendriks accompanied me. Volunteers there were in plenty but I reasoned that not only would increased numbers get in one another’s way, but the chances of someone else becoming lost would be all the greater. Immediately after leaving the hut the five of us fanned out at intervals of not more than fifteen feet and moved off to the north.

We found Allen inside the first thirty seconds: more accurately, he found us, for he saw our torches—he’d lost his own—and came stumbling towards us out of the snow and the darkness. ‘Stumbled’ was the operative word, he was weaving and swaying like one far gone in alcohol or exhaustion, and when he tried to speak his voice was thick and slurred. He was shivering like a man with the ague. It seemed not only pointless but cruel to question him in that condition so we hurried him inside.

I had a look at him as we sat him on a stool by an oil stove and I didn’t have to look twice or very closely to see that this hadn’t exactly been Allen’s day. Allen had been in the wars again and the damage that had been inflicted on him this time at least matched up to the injuries he’d received that morning. He had two nasty cuts above what had been up till then his undamaged eye, a bruised and scratched right cheek, and blood came from both his mouth and nose, blood already congealed in the cold but his worst injury was a very deep gash on the back of the head, the scalp laid open clear to the bone. Someone had given young Allen a very thorough going over indeed.

‘And what happened to you this time?’ I asked. He winced as I started to clean up his face. ‘Or should I say, do you know what happened to you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said thickly. He shook his head and drew his breath in sharply as some pain struck through either head or neck. ‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember.’

‘You’ve been in a fight, laddie,’ I said. ‘Again. Someone’s cut you up, and quite badly.’

‘I know. I can feel it. I don’t remember. Honest to God, I don’t remember. I—I just don’t know what happened.’

‘But you must have seen him,’ Goin said reasonably. ‘Whoever it was, you must have been face to face with him. God’s sake, boy, your shirt’s torn and there’s at least a couple of buttons missing from your coat. And he had to be standing in front of you when he did this to you. Surely you must have caught a glimpse of him at least.’

‘It was dark,’ Allen mumbled. ‘I didn’t see anything. I didn’t feel anything, all I knew was that I woke up kind of groggy like in the snow with the back of my head hurting. I knew I was bleeding and—please, I don’t know what happened.’

‘Yes you do, yes you do!’ Judith Haynes had pushed her way to the front. The transformation that had taken place in her face was as astonishing as it was ugly, and although her morning performance had partially prepared me for something of this kind, and though this expression was different from the one that had disfigured her face that time, it was still an almost frightening thing to watch. The red gash of the mouth had vanished, the lips drawn in and back over bared teeth, the green eyes were no more than slits and, as had happened that morning, the skin was stretched back over her cheekbones until it appeared far too tight for her face. She screamed at him: ‘You damned liar! Wanted your own back, didn’t you? You dirty little bastard, what have you done with my husband? Do you hear me? Do you hear me? What have you done with him, damn you? Where is he? Where did you leave him?’

Allen looked up at her in a half-scared astonishment, then shook his head wearily. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Haynes, I don’t know what—’

She hooked her long-nailed fingers into talons and lunged for him, but I’d been waiting for it. So had both Goin and Conrad. She struggled like a trapped wild-cat, screaming invective at Allen, then suddenly relaxed, her breath coming in harsh, rasping sobs.

‘Now then, now then, Judith,’ Otto said. ‘That’s no—’

‘Don’t you “now then” me, you silly old bastard!’ she screamed. Filial respect was clearly not Judith Haynes’s strong point, but Otto, though clearly nervous, accepted his daughter’s abuse as if it were a matter of course. ‘Why don’t you find out instead what this young swine’s done to my husband? Why don’t you? Why don’t you!’ She struggled to free her arms and as she was trying to move away we let her go. She picked up a torch and ran for the door.

‘Stop her,’ I said.

Heyter and Jungbeck, big men both, blocked her flight.

‘Let me go, let me out!’ she shouted. Neither Heyter nor Jungbeck moved and she whirled round on me. ‘Who the hell are you to—I want to go out and find Michael!’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Haynes,’ I said. ‘You’re in no condition to go to look for anyone. You’d just run wild, no trace of where you’d been, and in five minutes’ time you’d be lost too and perhaps lost for good. We’re leaving in just a moment.’

She took three quick steps towards Otto, her fists clenched, her teeth showing again.

‘You let him push me around like this?’ This with an incinerating glare in my direction. ‘Spineless, that’s you, absolutely spineless! Anybody can walk over you!’ Otto blinked nervously at this latest tirade but said nothing. ‘Aren’t I supposed to be your bloody daughter? Aren’t you supposed to be the bloody boss? God’s sake, who gives the orders about here? You or Marlowe?’

‘Your father does,’ Goin said. ‘Naturally. But, without any disrespect to Dr Marlowe, we don’t hire a dog just to bark ourselves. He’s a medical man and we’d be fools not to defer to him in medical matters.’

‘Are you suggesting I’m a medical case?’ All the colour had drained from her cheeks and she looked uglier than ever. ‘Are you? Are you, then? A mental case, perhaps?’

Heaven knows I wouldn’t have blamed Goin if he’d said ‘yes’ straight out and left it at that, but Goin was far too balanced and diplomatic to say any such thing, and besides, he’d clearly been through this sort of crisis before. He said, quietly but not condescendingly: ‘I’m suggesting no such thing. Of course you’re distressed, of course you’re overwrought, after all it is your husband that’s missing. But I agree with Dr Marlowe that you’re not the person to go looking for him. We’ll have him back here all the quicker if you co-operate with us, Judith.’

She hesitated, still halfway between hysteria and rage, then swung away. I taped the gash on Allen’s head and said: ‘That’ll do till I come back. Afraid I’ll have to shave off a few locks and stitch it.’ On the way to the door I stopped and said quietly to Goin: ‘Keep her away from Allen, will you?’

Goin nodded.

‘And for heaven’s sake keep her away from Mary darling.’

He looked at me in what was as close to astonishment as he was capable of achieving. ‘That kid?’

‘That kid. She’s next on the list for Miss Haynes’s attentions. When Miss Haynes gets around to thinking about it, that is.’

I left with the same four as previously. Conrad, the last out, closed the door behind him and said: ‘Jesus! My charming leading lady. What a virago she is!’

‘She’s a little upset,’ I said mildly.

‘A little upset! Heaven send I’m in the next county if she ever gets really mad. What the hell do you think can have happened to Stryker?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said, and because it was dark I didn’t have to assume an honest expression to go with the words. I moved closer to him so that the others, already fanned out in line of search, couldn’t hear me. ‘Seeing we’re such a bunch of odd-balls anyway, I hope an odd request from another odd-ball won’t come amiss.’

‘You disappoint me, Doctor. I thought you and I were two of the very few halfway normal people around here.’

‘By the prevailing standards, any moderate odd-ball is normal. You know anything of Lonnie’s past?’

He was silent for a moment, then said: ‘He has a past?’

‘We all have a past. If you think I mean a criminal past, no. Lonnie hasn’t got one. I just want to find out if he was married or had any family. That’s all.’

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

‘If I felt free to ask him myself, would I be asking you?’

Another silence. ‘Your name really Marlowe, Doc?’

‘Marlowe, as ever was. Christopher Marlowe. Passport, birth certificate, driving licence—they’re all agreed on it.’

‘Christopher Marlowe? Just like the playwright, eh?’

‘My parents had literary inclinations.’

‘Uh-huh.’ He paused again. ‘Remember what happened to your namesake—stabbed in the back by a friend before his thirtieth birthday?’

‘Rest easy. My thirtieth birthday is lost in the mists of time.’

‘And you’re really a doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re really something else too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lonnie. Marital status. Children or no. You may rely on Conrad’s discretion.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. We moved apart. We were walking to the north for two reasons—the wind, and hence the snow, were to our backs and so progress was easier in that direction, and Allen had come stumbling from that direction. In spite of Allen’s professed total lack of recall of what had happened, it seemed likely to me that we might find Stryker also somewhere in that direction. And so it proved.

‘Over here! Over here!’ In spite of the muffling effects of the snow Hendriks’s shout sounded curiously high-pitched and cracked. ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found him!’

He’d found him all right. Michael Stryker was lying face down in the snow, arms and legs outspread in an almost perfectly symmetrical fashion. Both fists were clenched tight. On the snow, beside his left shoulder, lay a smooth elliptical stone which from its size—it must have weighed between sixty and seventy pounds—better qualified for the name of boulder. I stooped low over this boulder, bringing the torch close, and at once saw the few dark hairs embedded in the dark and encrusted stain. Proof if proof were required, but I hadn’t doubted anyway that this was what had been used to smash in the back of Stryker’s skull. Death would have been instantaneous.

‘He’s dead!’ Jungbeck said incredulously.

‘He’s all that,’ I said.

‘And murdered!’

‘That too.’ I tried to turn him over on his back but Conrad and Jungbeck had to lend their not inconsiderable weights before this was done. His upper lip was viciously split all the way down from the nostril, a tooth was missing and he had a peculiar red and raw-looking mark on his right temple.

‘By God, there must have been a fight,’ Jungbeck said huskily. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that kid Allen had had it in him.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so either,’ I said.

‘Allen?’ Conrad said. ‘I’d have sworn he was telling the truth. Could he—well, do you think it could have happened when he was suffering from amnesia?’

‘All sorts of funny things can happen when you’ve had a bump on the head,’ I said. I looked at the ground around the dead man, there were footprints there, not many, already faint and blurred from the driving snow: there was no help to be gained from that quarter. I said: ‘Let’s get him back.’

So we carried the dead man back to the camp and it wasn’t, in spite of the uneven terrain and the snow in our faces, as difficult a task as it might have been for the same reason that I’d found it so difficult to turn him over—the limbs had already begun to stiffen, not from the onset of rigor mortis, for it was too soon for that yet, but from the effects of the intense cold. We laid him in the snow outside the main cabin. I said to Hendriks: ‘Go inside and ask Goin for a bottle of brandy— say that I sent you back for it, that we need it to keep us going.’ It was the last thing I would ever have recommended to keep anyone warm in bitter outdoor cold, but it was all I could think of on the spur of the moment. ‘Tell Goin—quietly—to come here.’

Goin, clearly aware that there was something far amiss, walked out casually and casually shut the door behind him, but there was nothing casual about his reaction when he saw Stryker lying there, his gashed and marble-white face a death’s head in the harsh light of several torches. Goin’s own face was clear enough in the backwash of light reflected from the snow. The shocked expression on his face he could have arranged for: the draining of blood that left it almost as white as Stryker’s he couldn’t.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he whispered. ‘Dead?’

I said nothing, just turned the dead man over with Conrad’s and Jungbeck’s help again. This time it was more difficult. Goin made a strange noise in his throat but otherwise didn’t react at all, I suppose he’d nothing left to react with, he just stood there and stared as the driving snow whitened the dead man’s anorak and, mercifully, the fearful wound in the occiput. For what seemed quite a long time we stood there in silence, gazing down at the dead man: I was aware, almost subconsciously, that the wind, now veering beyond south, was strengthening, for the thickening snow was driving along now almost parallel to the ground: I do not know what the temperature was, but it must have been close on thirty degrees below freezing. I was dimly aware that I was shaking with the cold: looking around, I could see that the others were also. Our breaths froze as they struck the icy air, but the wind whipped them away before the vapour had time to form.

‘Accident?’ Goin said hoarsely. ‘It could have been an accident?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I saw the boulder that was used to crush his skull in.’ Goin made the same curious noise in his throat again, and I went on: ‘We can’t leave him here and we can’t take him inside. I suggest we leave him in the tractor shed.’

‘Yes, yes, the tractor shed,’ Goin said. He really didn’t know what he was saying.

‘And who’s going to break the news to Miss Haynes?’ I went on. God alone knew that I didn’t fancy doing it.

‘What?’ He was still shocked. ‘What was that?’

‘His wife. She’ll have to be told.’ As a doctor, I supposed I was the one to do it, but the decision was taken from my hands. The cabin door was jerked abruptly open and Judith Haynes, her two dogs by her ankles, stood there framed against the light from the interior, with Otto and the Count just vaguely discernible behind her. She stood there for some little time, a hand on either door jamb, quite immobile and without any expression that I could see, then walked forward in a curiously dreamlike fashion and stooped over her husband. After a few moments she straightened, looked around as if puzzled, then turned questioning eyes on me, but only for a moment, for the questioning eyes turned up in her head and she crumpled and fell heavily across Stryker’s body before I or anyone could get to her.

Conrad and I, with Goin following, brought her inside and laid her on the camp-cot so lately occupied by Smithy. The cocker spaniels had to be forcibly restrained from joining her. Her face was alabaster white and her breathing very shallow. I lifted up her right eyelid and there was no resistance to my thumb: it was only an automatic reaction on my part, it hadn’t even occurred to me that the faint wasn’t genuine. I became aware that Otto was standing close by, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, his hands clenched together until the ivory knuckles showed.

‘Is she all right?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘Will she—’ ‘She’ll come to,’ I said.

‘Smelling salts,’ he said. ‘Perhaps—’

‘No.’ Smelling salts, to hasten her recovery to the bitter reality she would have to face.

‘And Michael? My son-in-law? He’s—I mean—’

‘You saw him,’ I said almost irritably. ‘He’s dead, of course he’s dead.’

‘But how—but how—’

‘He was murdered.’ There were one or two involuntary exclamations, the shocked indrawing of breath, then a silence that became intensified with the passing of seconds by the hissing of the Coleman lamps. I didn’t even bother to look up to see what the individual reactions might be for I knew by now that I’d learn nothing that way. I just looked at the unconscious woman and didn’t know what to think. Stryker, the tough, urbane, cynical Stryker had, in his own way, been terrified of this woman. Had it been because of the power she had wielded as Otto’s daughter, his knowledge that his livelihood was entirely dependent on her most wayward whim—and I could imagine few more gifted exponents of the wayward whim than Judith Haynes? Had it been because of her pathological jealousy which I knew beyond all question to exist, because of the instant bitchiness which could allegedly range from the irrational to the insane, or had she held over his head the threat of some nameless blackmail which could bring him at once to his knees? Had he, in his own way, even loved his wife and hoped against hopeless hope that she might reciprocate some of this and been prepared to suffer any humiliation, any insult, in the hope that he might achieve this or part of it? I’d never know, but the questions were academic anyway, Stryker no longer concerned me, I was only turning them over in my mind wondering in what way they could throw any light on Judith Haynes’s totally unexpected reaction to Stryker’s death. She had despised him, she must have despised him for his dependence upon her, his weakness, his meek acceptance of insult, the fear he had displayed before me, for the emptiness and nothingness that had lain concealed behind so impressively masculine a facade. But had she loved him at the same time, loved him for what he had been or might have been, or was she just desolated at the loss of her most cherished whipping-boy, the one sure person in the world upon whom she knew she could with impunity vent her wayward spleen whenever the fancy took her? Even without her awareness of it, he might have become an integral, an indispensable part of her existence, an insidiously woven warp in the weft of her being, always dependable, always there, always ready to hand when she most needed him even when that need was no more than to absorb the grey corrosive poison eating away steadily at the edges of her mind. Even the most tarnished cornerstone can support the most crumbling edifice: take that away and the house comes tumbling down. The traumatic reaction to Stryker’s death could, paradoxically, be the clinching manifestation of a complete and irredeemable selfishness: the as yet unrealized realization that she was the most pitiful of all creatures, a person totally alone.

Judith Haynes stirred and her eyes fluttered open. Memory came back and she shuddered. I eased her to a sitting position and she looked dully around her.

‘Where is he?’ I had to strain to hear the words.

‘It’s all right, Miss Haynes,’ I said, and, just to compound that fatuous statement, added: ‘We’ll look after him.’

‘Where is he?’ she moaned. ‘He’s my husband, my husband. I want to see him.’

‘Better not, Miss Haynes.’ Goin could be surprisingly gentle. ‘As Dr Marlowe says, we’ll take care of things. You’ve seen him already and no good can come—’

‘Bring him in. Bring him in.’ A voice devoid of life but the will absolute. ‘I must see him again.’

I rose and went to the door. The Count barred my way. His aquiline, aristocratic features held a mixture of revulsion and horror. ‘You can’t do that. It’s too ghastly—it’s—it’s macabre.’

‘What do you think that I think it is?’ I felt savage but I know I didn’t sound that way, I think I only sounded tired. ‘If I don’t bring him in, she’ll just go outside again. It’s not much of a night for being outside.’

So we brought him in, the same three of us, Jungbeck and Conrad and myself, and we laid him on his back so that the fearful wound in the occiput didn’t show. Judith Haynes rose from her camp-cot, moved slowly towards him like a person in a dream and sank to her knees. Without moving, she looked at him for some moments then reached out and gently touched the gashed face. No one spoke, no one moved. Not without effort, she pulled his right arm close in to his side, made to do the same with his left, noticed that the fist was still clenched and carefully prised it open.

A brown circular object lay in the palm of his hand. She took it, placed it in the palm of her own hand, straightened—still on her knees—and swung in a slow semi-circle showing us what she held. Then, her hand outstretched towards him, she looked at Allen. We all looked at Allen.

The brown leather button in her hand matched the still remaining buttons on Allen’s torn coat.

CHAPTER NINE

I’m not sure how long the silence went on, a silence that the almost intolerable hiss of the lamps and the ululating moan of the south wind served only to deepen. It must have lasted at least ten seconds, although it seemed many times as long, a seemingly interminable period of time during which nobody moved and nothing moved, not even eyes, for Allen’s eyes were fixed on the button in Judith Haynes’s hand in fascinated uncomprehension, while every other eye in the room was on Allen. That one small leather-covered button held us all in thrall.

Judith Haynes was the first to move. She rose, very slowly, as if it called for a tremendous effort of both mind and muscle, and stood there for a moment, as if irresolute. She seemed quiet now and very resigned and because this was the wrong reaction altogether I looked past her towards Conrad and Smithy and caught the eyes of both. Conrad lowered his eyes briefly as if in acknowledgment of a signal, Smithy shifted his gaze towards Judith Haynes and when she began to move away from the body of her husband both of them moved casually towards each other to block off her clearly intended approach to Allen. Judith Haynes stopped, looked at them and smiled.

‘That won’t be necessary at all,’ she said. She tossed the button to Allen who caught it in involuntary reaction. He held it in his hand, staring at it, then looked up in perplexity at Judith Haynes, who smiled again. ‘You’ll be needing that, won’t you?’ she said, and walked in the direction of her allocated room.

I relaxed and was aware that others were doing so also, for I could hear the slow exhalation of breaths of those standing closest to me. I looked away from Judith Haynes to Allen, and that was a mistake because I had relaxed too soon, I’d been instinctively aware that the seemingly quiet and sad resignation had been wholly out of character but had put it down to the effects of the shattering shock she had just received.

‘You killed him, you killed him!’ Her voice was an insane scream, but no more insane than the demented fury with which she was attacking Mary Darling who had already stumbled over backwards, the other woman falling on top of her, clawing viciously with hooked fingers. ‘You bitch, you whore, you filthy slut, you—you murderess! You’re the person who killed him! You killed my husband! You! You!’ Sobbing and shrieking maniacal invective at the terrified and momentarily paralysed Mary Darling who had already lost her big horn-rimmed spectacles, Judith Haynes wound one hand round the unfortunate Mary’s hair and was reaching for her eyes with the other when Smithy and Conrad got to her. Both were big strong men but she fought with such crazed and tigerish ferocity—and they had at the same time to cope with two equally hysterical dogs— that it took them quite some seconds to pull her clear, and even then she clung with the strength of madness to Mary’s hair, a grip that Smithy ruthlessly and without hesitation broke by squeezing her wrist until she shrieked with pain. They dragged her upright and she continued to scream hysterically with all the strength of her lungs, no longer attempting even to mouth words, just that horrible nerve-drilling shrieking like some animal in its dying agony, then the sound abruptly ceased, her legs buckled and Smithy and Conrad eased her to the floor.

Conrad looked at me. ‘Act two?’ He was breathing heavily and looked pale.

‘No. This is real. Will you please take her to her cubicle?’ I looked at the shocked and sobbing Mary but she didn’t need any immediate assistance from me, for Allen, his own injuries forgotten, had dropped to his knees beside her, raised her to a sitting position and was using a none too clean handkerchief to dab at the three deep and ugly scratches that had been torn down the length of her left cheek. I left them, went into my cubicle, prepared a hypodermic and entered the cubicle where Judith Haynes had been taken. Smithy and Conrad were standing watchfully by and had been joined by Otto, the Count and Goin. Otto looked at the syringe and caught my arm.

‘Is that—is that for my daughter? What are you going to do to her? It’s all over now, man—good God, you can see she’s unconscious.’

‘And I’m going to see that she bloody well stays that way,’ I said. ‘For hours and hours and hours. That way it’s best for her and best for all of us. All right, I’m sorry for your daughter, she’s had a tremendous shock, but medically I’m not concerned with that, I’m just concerned with how best to treat her for the condition she’s in now, which is frankly unbalanced, unstable and highly dangerous. Or do you want to have a look at Mary Darling again?’

Otto hesitated but Goin, calmly reasonable as always, came to my help. ‘Dr Marlowe is perfectly right, Otto—and it’s for Judith’s own good, after such a shock a long rest can only help. This is the best thing for her.’

I wasn’t so sure about that, I’d have preferred a strait-jacket, but I nodded my thanks to Goin, administered the injection, helped bundle her into a zipped sleeping-bag, saw that she was covered over and above that with a sufficiency of blankets and left her. I took the dogs with me and put them in my own cubicle—I don’t much like having animals, especially highly-strung ones, in the company of a person under sedation.

Allen had Mary Darling seated on a bench now but was still dabbing her cheek. She’d stopped sobbing now, was just breathing with long quivering in-drawn gasps and, scratches apart, didn’t seem much the worse for an experience that must have been as harrowing as it was brief. Lonnie was standing a few feet away, looking sorrowfully at the girl and shaking his head.

‘Poor, poor lassie,’ he said quietly. ‘Poor little girl.’

‘She’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘If I do a halfway job the scratches won’t even scar.’ I looked at Stryker’s body and decided that its removal to the tractor shed was clearly the first priority: apart from Lonnie and Allen, no one had eyes for anything else, and even although out of sight would not necessarily be out of mind, the absence of that mutilated body could hardly fail to improve morale.

‘I wasn’t talking about young Mary.’ Lonnie had my attention again. ‘I was thinking about Judith Haynes. Poor, lonely lassie.’ I looked at him closely but I should have known him well enough by then to realize that he was incapable of either dissimulation or duplicity: he looked as sad as he sounded.

‘Lonnie,’ I said, ‘you never cease to astonish me.’ I lit the oil stove, put some water on to heat, then turned to Stryker. Both Smithy and Conrad were waiting and words were unnecessary. Lonnie insisted on coming with us, to open doors and hold a flash-light: we left Stryker in the tractor shed and went back to the main cabin. Smithy and Conrad went inside but Lonnie showed no intentions of following them. He stood there as if deep in thought, seemingly oblivious of a wind now strong enough to have to lean against, of a thickening driving snow now approaching the proportions of a blizzard, of the intense and steadily deepening cold.

‘I think I’ll stay out here a bit,’ he said. ‘Nothing like a little fresh air to clear the head.’

‘No, indeed,’ I said. I took the torch from him and directed its beam at the nearest hut. ‘In there. On the left.’ Wherever else Olympus Productions may have fallen short in the commissariat department, it hadn’t been in the line of alcoholic stimulants.

‘My dear fellow.’ He retrieved his torch with a firm grasp. ‘I personally supervised its storage.’

‘And not even a lock to contend with,’ I said.

‘And what if there was? Otto would give me the key.’

‘Otto would give you a key?’ I said carefully.

‘Of course. Do you think I’m a professional safe-cracker who goes around festooned with strings of skeleton keys? Who do you think gave me the keys to the lounge locker on the Morning Rose?’

‘Otto did?’ I said brightly.

‘Of course.’

‘What kind of blackmail are you using, Lonnie?’

‘Otto is a very, very kind man,’ Lonnie said seriously. ‘I thought I’d told you that?’

‘I’d just forgotten.’ I watched him thoughtfully as he plodded purposefully through the deep snow towards the provisions hut, then went inside the main cabin. Most of the people inside, now that Stryker had gone, had transferred their attention to Allen, who was clearly self-consciously aware of this, for he no longer had his arm around Mary, although he still dabbed at her cheek with a handkerchief. Conrad, who had clearly become more than a little smitten by Mary Stuart for he’d sought out her company whenever possible in the past two days, was sitting beside her chafing one of her hands—I assumed she’d been complaining of the temperature which was still barely above freezing—and although she seemed half-reluctant and was smiling in some embarrassment, she wasn’t objecting to the extent of making a song and dance about it. Otto, Goin, the Count and Divine were talking in low voices near one of the oil stoves: Divine, not surprisingly, was there not in the capacity of a contributor to the conversation, but as a bar-tender for he was laying out glasses and bottles under Otto’s fussy direction. Otto beckoned me across.

‘After what we’ve just been through,’ he said, ‘I think we’re all badly in need of a restorative.’ That Otto should be lashing out so recklessly with his private supplies was sufficient indication of the extent to which he had been shaken. ‘It will also give us time to decide what to do with him.’

‘Who?’

‘Allen, of course.’

‘Ah. Well, I’m sorry, I’m afraid you gentlemen will have to count me out for both drink and deliberations.’ I nodded to Allen and Mary Darling, both of whom were watching us with some degree of apprehension. ‘A little patching up to do there. Excuse me.’

I took the now hot water from the oil stove, brought it into my cubicle, put a white cloth on the rickety table that was there, laid out a basin, instruments and what medicaments I thought I’d require, then returned to where Conrad and Mary Stuart were sitting in the main body of the cabin. Like all the other little groups in the cabin they were talking in voices so low as to be virtually whispering, whether from a desire for privacy or because they still felt themselves to be in the presence of death I didn’t know. Conrad, to my complete lack of surprise, was now industriously massaging her other hand, and as that was her left or faraway one I assumed that he hadn’t had to fight for it.

I said: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt the first-aid but I want to patch up young Allen a bit. I wonder if Mary dear will look after Mary darling for a bit?’

‘Mary dear?’ Conrad raised an inquiring eyebrow.

‘To distinguish her from Mary darling,’ I explained. ‘It’s what I call her when we’re alone in the long watches of the night.’ She smiled slightly but that was her only reaction.

‘Mary dear,’ Conrad said appreciatively. ‘I like it. May I call you that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said mock-seriously. ‘Perhaps it’s copyright.’

‘He can have the patent under licence,’ I said. ‘I can always rescind it. What were you two being so conspiratorial about?’

‘Ah, yes,’ Conrad said. ‘Your opinion, Doc. That stone out there, I mean the lump of rock Stryker was clobbered with. I’d guess the weight about seventy pounds. Would you?’

‘The same.’

‘I asked Mary here if she could lift a rock like that above her head and she said don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Unless she’s an Olympic weight-lifter in disguise, well, yes, you are ridiculous. She couldn’t. Why?’

‘Well, just look at her.’ He nodded across at the other Mary. ‘Skin and bone, just skin and bone. Now how—’

‘I wouldn’t let Allen hear you.’

‘You know what I mean. A rock that size. “Murderess”, Judith Haynes called her. Well, so OK, she was out there looking with the others, but how on earth—’

‘I think Miss Haynes had something else in mind,’ I said. I left them, beckoned to Allen, then turned to Smithy who was sitting close by. ‘I require a surgery assistant. Feeling up to it now?’

‘Sure.’ He rose. ‘Anything to take my mind off Captain Imrie and the report he must be writing out about me right now.’

There was nothing I could do to Allen’s face that nature couldn’t do better so I concentrated on the gash on the back of his head. I froze it, shaved the area around it, and jerked my head to Smithy to have a look. He did this and his eyes widened a little but he said nothing. I put eight stitches in the wound and covered it with plaster. During all of this we hadn’t exchanged a word and Allen was obviously very conscious of this.

He said: ‘You haven’t got much to say to me, have you, Dr Marlowe?’

‘A good tradesman doesn’t talk on the job.’

‘You’re just thinking what all the others are thinking, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what all the others are thinking. Well, that’s it. Just comb your hair straight back and no one will know you’re prematurely bald.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’ He turned and faced me, hesitated and said: ‘It does look pretty black against me, doesn’t it?’

‘Not to a doctor.’

‘You—you mean you don’t think I did it?’

‘It’s not a matter of thinking. It’s a matter of knowing. Look, all in all you’ve had a pretty rough day, you’re more shaken up than you realize, and when that anaesthetic wears off you’re going to hurt a bit. Your cubicle’s next to mine, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Go and lie down for a couple of hours.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And I’ll send Mary through when I’ve finished with her.’

He made to speak, then nodded wearily and left. Smithy said: ‘That was nasty. The back of his head, I mean. It must have been one helluva clout.’

‘He’s been lucky that his skull isn’t fractured. Doubly lucky in that he’s not even concussed.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Smithy thought for a moment. ‘Look, I’m not a doctor and I’m not very good at coining phrases, but doesn’t this put a rather different complexion upon matters?’

‘I am a doctor and it does.’

He thought some more. ‘Especially when you have a close look at Stryker?’

‘Especially that.’

I brought Mary Darling in. She was very pale, still apprehensive and had a little-girl-lost look about her, but she had herself under control. She looked at Smithy, made as if to speak, hesitated, changed her mind and let me get on with doing what I could. I cleaned and disinfected the scratches, taped them up carefully and said: ‘It’ll itch like fury for a bit, but if you can resist the temptation to haul the plasters off then you’ll have no scars.’

‘Thank you, Doctor. I’ll try.’ She looked very wan. ‘Can I speak to you, please?’

‘Of course.’ She looked at Smithy and I said: ‘You can speak freely. I promise you it will go no farther.’

‘Yes, yes, I know, but—’

‘Mr Gerran is dispensing free scotch out there,’ Smithy said, and made for the door. ‘I’d never forgive myself if I passed up an experience that can happen only once in a lifetime.’

She had me by the lapels even before Smithy had the door fully closed behind him. There was a frantic worry in her face, a sick misery in the eyes that made me realize just how much it had cost her to maintain her composure while Smithy had been there.

‘Allen didn’t do it, Dr Marlowe! He didn’t, I know he didn’t, I swear he didn’t. I know things look awful for him, the fight they had this morning, and now this other fight and that button in— in Mr Stryker’s hand and everything. But I know he didn’t, he told me he didn’t, Allen couldn’t tell a lie, he wouldn’t tell me a lie! And he couldn’t hurt anything, I mean just not kill anybody, I mean hurt anybody, he just couldn’t do it! And I didn’t do it.’ Her fists clenched until the knuckles showed, she was even, for some odd reason, trying to shake me now, and tears were rolling down her face; whatever she’d known in her short life hadn’t prepared her for times and situations like those. She shook her head in despair. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t! A murderess, that’s what she called me! In front of everybody, she called me a murderess! I couldn’t kill anybody, Dr Marlowe, I—’

‘Mary.’ I stopped the hysterical flow by the simple process of putting my fingers across her lips. ‘I seriously doubt whether you could dispose of a fly without worrying yourself sick afterwards. You and Allen together—well, if it were a particularly obnoxious fly you just might manage it. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.’

She took my hand away and stared at me: ‘Dr Marlowe, do you mean—’

‘I mean you’re a silly young goose. Together, you make a fine pair of silly young geese. It’s not that I just don’t believe that Allen or you had anything to do with Stryker’s death. I know you hadn’t.’

She sniffed a bit and then she said: ‘You’re an awfully kind person, Dr Marlowe. I know you’re trying to help us—’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ I said. ‘I can prove it.’

‘Prove it? Prove it?’ There was some hope in the sick eyes, she didn’t know whether to believe me or not, and then it seemed that she decided not to, for she shook her head again and said numbly: ‘She said I killed him.’

‘Miss Haynes was speaking figuratively,’ I said, ‘which is not the same thing at all, and even then she was wrong. What she meant was that you were the precipitating factor in her husband’s death, which of course you weren’t.’

‘Precipitating factor?’

‘Yes.’ I took her hands from my now badly crushed lapels, held them in mine and looked at her in my best avuncular fashion. ‘Tell me, Mary darling, have you ever dallied in the moonlight with Michael Stryker?’

‘Me? Have I—’

‘Mary?’

‘Yes,’ she said miserably. ‘I mean no, no, I didn’t.’

‘That’s very clear,’ I said. ‘Let’s put it this way. Did you ever give Miss Haynes reason to suspect that you had been? Dallying, I mean.’

‘Yes.’ She sniffed again. ‘No. I mean he did.’ I kept my baffled expression in cold storage and looked at her encouragingly. ‘He called me into his cabin, just the day we left Wick, that was. He was alone there. He said that he wanted to discuss some things about the film with me.’

‘A change from etchings,’ I said.

She looked at me uncomprehendingly and went on: ‘But it wasn’t about the film he wanted to talk. You must believe me, Dr Marlowe. You must!’

‘I believe you.’

‘He closed the door and grabbed me and then—’

‘Spare my unsullied mind the grisly details. When the villain was forcing his unwelcome attentions upon you there came the pit-a-pat of feminine footsteps in the corridor outside, whereupon the villain rapidly assumed a position where you appeared to be forcing your unwelcome attentions upon him and when the door opened—to reveal, of course, none other than his better half—there he was, fending off the licentious young continuity girl and crying, “No, no, Nanette, control yourself, this can never be,” or words to that effect.’

‘More or less.’ She looked more miserable than ever, then her eyes widened. ‘How did you know?’

‘The Strykers of this world are pretty thick upon the ground. The ensuing scene must have been pretty painful.’

‘There were two scenes,’ she said dully. ‘Something like it happened on the upper deck the following night. She said she was going to report me to her father—Mr Gerran. He said—not when she was there, of course—that if I tried to make trouble he’d have me fired. He was a director, you know. Later, when I got, well, friendly with Allen, he said he’d get us both fired if need be and make sure that neither of us would ever again get a job in films. Allen said that this was all wrong, why should we accept this when neither of us had done anything, so—’

‘So he tried to make him see the error of his ways this morning and got clobbered for his pains. Don’t worry, you’ve neither of you anything to worry about. You’ll find your wounded knighterrant next door, Mary.’ I smiled and gently touched the swollen cheek. ‘This should be something to see. Love’s young dream in sticking-plaster. You do love him, don’t you, Mary?’

‘Of course.’ She looked at me solemnly. ‘Dr Marlowe.’

‘I’m wonderful?’

She smiled, almost happily, and left. Smithy, who must have been watching for her departure, came in almost at once and I told him what had been said.

‘Had to be that, of course,’ he said. ‘The truth’s always obvious when it’s hung up in front of you and you’re beaten over the head with a two-by-four to make you take notice. And now?’

‘And now, I think, three things. The first, to clear the names of the two love-birds next door: that’s not important at this stage, but they’re sensitive souls and I think they’d like to be on speaking terms with the rest of the company again. Second thing is, I’ve no intention of being stranded here for the next twenty-two days—two days is a lot more like it: who knows, I might be able to pressure unknown or unknowns into precipitate action.’

‘I should have thought there had been enough of that already,’ Smithy said.

‘You may have a point. Third thing is, I could make life a great deal easier and safer for both of us if we had every person so busy watching every other person that it would make it a great deal more difficult for the disaffected to creep up upon our backs unawares.’

‘You touch upon a very sympathetic nerve,’ Smithy said. ‘Your plan into action and at once, I say. A small chat with the assembled company?’

‘A small chat with the assembled company. I suggested a couple of hours’ lie-down to Allen but I think he and Mary should be there. Would you?’

Smithy left and I went into the living area. Goin, Otto and the Count, all armed with glasses as was almost every other person there, were still in solemn and low-voiced conclave. Otto beckoned me across.

‘One moment,’ I said. I went outside, coughed and caught my breath as the bitter air cut into my lungs, then trudged against that snow-filled gale across to the provisions hut. Lonnie was seated on a packing case, lovingly examining the amber contents of a glass against the light from his torch.

‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Our peripatetic healer. You know, when one consumes a noble wine like this—’

‘Wine?’

‘A figure of speech. When one consumes a noble scotch like this, half the pleasure lies in the visual satisfaction. Ever tried it in the darkness? Flat, stale, strangely lacking in bouquet. There’s a worthwhile monograph here, I’m sure.’ He waved his glass in the direction of the crates of bottles by one wall. ‘Harking back to my earlier allusions to the hereafter, if they can have bars in Bear Island then surely—’

‘Lonnie,’ I said, ‘you’re missing out on the largesse stakes. Otto is dispensing noble wine at this very moment. He’s using very large glasses.’

‘I was on the very point of leaving.’ He tilted his head and swallowed rapidly. ‘I have a dread of being thought a misanthrope.’

I took this friend of the human race back to the main cabin and counted those there. Twenty-one, myself included, as it should have been: the twenty-second and last, Judith Haynes, was deeply unconscious and would be so for hours. Otto beckoned me a second time and I went across.

‘We’ve been having what you might call a council of war,’ Otto said importantly. ‘We’ve arrived at a conclusion and would like to have your opinion.’

‘Why mine? I’m just an employee, like everyone else here, apart, of course, from the three of you—and Miss Haynes.’

‘Consider yourself a co-opted director,’ the Count said generously. ‘Temporary and unpaid, of course.’

‘Your opinion would be valued,’ Goin said precisely.

‘Opinion about what?’

‘Our proposed measures for dealing with Allen,’ Otto said. ‘I know that in law every man is presumed innocent until proved otherwise. Nor do we have any wish to be inhumane. But simply in order to protect ourselves—’

‘I wanted to talk to you about that,’ I said. ‘About protecting ourselves. I wanted to talk to everybody about that. In fact, that’s what I propose to do this very moment.’

‘You propose to do what?’ Otto could arrange his eyebrows in a very forbidding fashion when he put his mind to it.

‘A brief address only,’ I said. ‘I’ll take up hardly any of your time.’

‘I can’t permit that,’ Otto said loftily. ‘At least, not until you give us some idea what you have in mind and then we may or may not give our consent.’

‘Your permission or lack of it is irrelevant,’ I said indifferently. ‘I don’t require permission when I’m talking about something that may affect lives—you know, the difference between living and dying.’

‘I forbid it. I would remind you of what you have just reminded me.’ Otto had forgotten about the need for conducting delicate matters in conspiratorial murmurs and we had the undivided attention of everyone in the cabin. ‘You are an employee of mine, sir!’

‘And I’ll now perform my last act as a dutiful employee.’ I poured myself a measure of Otto’s scotch which, as he and several others were drinking it, I presumed to be safe to drink. ‘Health to one and all,’ I said, ‘and I don’t mean that lightly or in the conventional sense. We’re going to need it all before we leave this island, and let each one of us hope that he or she is not the one who is going to be abandoned by fortune. As for being your employee, Gerran, you can consider my resignation as being effective as from this moment. I do not care to work for fools. More importantly, I do not care to work for those who may be both fools and knaves.’

This, at least, had the effect of reducing Otto to silence for, to judge by the indigo hue his complexion was assuming, he appeared to be having some little difficulty in his breathing. The Count, I observed, had a mildly speculative expression on his face, while Goin’s face held the impassivity of one withholding judgement. I looked round the cabin.

I said: ‘It is, I know, belabouring the obvious to say that this trip of ours, so far, has been singularly luckless and ill-starred. We have been plagued by a series of tragic and extraordinarily strange events. We had Antonio die. This might have been the merest mischance: it might equally well be that he was the victim of a premeditated murder or the hapless victim of a misplaced murder attempt that was aimed at someone else. Exactly the same can be said of the two stewards, Moxen and Scott. Similar attempts may or may not have been aimed at Mr Gerran, Mr Smith, Oakley and young Cecil here: all I can say with certainty is that if I hadn’t been so lucky as to be in the vicinity when they were struck down at least three of those might have died. You may wonder why I make such a fuss about what could have been a simple, if deadly, outbreak of food poisoning: it is because I have reason to believe, without being able to prove it, that a deadly poison called aconitine, which is indistinguishable in appearance from horseradish, was introduced at specific points into the evening meal we had on the occasion when those people were struck down.’

I checked to see if I had the attention of those present and I’ve never made a more superfluous check. They were so stunned that they hadn’t even got to the lengths of looking at each other: Otto’s liquid largesse wholly forgotten, they had eyes only for me, ears only for what I was saying, the average university lecturer would have found it a dream of paradise: but then the average university lecturer rarely had the doubtful fortune to chance upon such wholly absorbing subject-matter as I had to hand.

‘And then we have the mysterious disappearance of Halliday. I have no doubt that the cause of his death could be established beyond doubt if an autopsy could be carried out, but as I’ve equally no doubt that the unfortunate Halliday lies on the floor of the Barents Sea this can never be possible. But it is my belief—and this, again, is but conjecture—that he died not from any form of food poisoning but because he had a nightcap from a poisoned whisky bottle that was intended for me.’ I looked at Mary Stuart: huge eyes and parted lips in a white shocked face, but I was the only one who saw it.

I pulled down the collar of my duffel-coat and showed them the impressively large and impressively multi-coloured bruise on the left-hand side of my neck

‘This, of course, could have been self-inflicted. Or maybe I just slipped somewhere and banged myself. Or take this odd business of the smashed radio. Somebody with an aversion to radios, perhaps, and suchlike outward manifestations of what we choose to call progress, or someone who found the Arctic just too much for him and had to take it out on something—you know, the equivalent of going cafard in the desert.

‘So far, nothing but conjecture. An extraordinary and even more extraordinarily unconnected series of violent and tragic mishaps, one might claim, coincidence is an accepted part of life. But not, surely, coincidence multiplied up to the nth degree like this; that would have to lie at the very farthest bounds of possibility. I think you would admit that if we could prove the existence, beyond any doubt, of a carefully premeditated and carefully executed crime, then the other violent happenings must cease to be regarded as conjectural coincidences and considered as being what they then would be, deliberately executed murders in pursuit of some goal that can’t yet even be guessed at but must be of overwhelming importance.’

They weren’t admitting anything, or, at least, if they were admitting anything to themselves they weren’t saying it out loud, but I think it was really a case of their minds having stopped working, not all their minds, there had to be one exception, probably more.

‘And we have this one proven crime,’ I went on. ‘The rather clumsily executed murder of Michael Stryker which was at the same time an attempt, and not a very clever attempt, to frame young Allen here for something he never did. I don’t think the murderer had any special ill-will towards Allen, well, no more than he seems to have for the general run of mankind: he just wanted to divert any possible suspicion from himself. I think if you’d all had time enough to think about it you’d have come to the eventual conclusion that Allen couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it: with a doctor in the house, if you’ll excuse the phrase, he hadn’t a hope in hell.

‘Allen says he has no recollection at all about what happened. I believe him absolutely. He’s sustained a severe blow on the back of the head—the scalp is open to the bone. How he escaped a fractured skull, far less concussion, I can’t imagine. It certainly must have rendered him unconscious for a considerable period. Which leads one to assume that this assailant was still in excellent shape after what was clearly his coup de grâce. Are we to assume then that Allen, after having been knocked senseless, immediately leapt up and smote his assailant hip and thigh? That doesn’t make any kind of sense at all. What does make sense, what is the only answer, is that the unknown crept up behind Allen and laid him out, not with his hands but with some heavy and solid object—probably a stone, there’s more than enough lying around. Having done this, he proceeded to cut the unconscious Allen up about the face, ripped his coat and tore off a couple of buttons—all to give the very convincing impression that he’d been in a fight.

‘The same thing, but this time on a lethal scale, happened to Stryker. I’m convinced that it was no accident that Allen was merely knocked unconscious while Stryker was killed—our friend, who must be a bit of an expert in such matters, knew just how much weight to bring to bear in each case, by no means as easy a matter as you might think. Then this ghoul, in a stupid attempt to create the impression that Stryker had been the other party to the fight, proceeded to rough up Stryker’s face as he had done Allen’s: I leave it to you to form your own estimate of just how evil must be the mind of a man who will deliberately set about mutilating the face of a dead man.’

I left them for a little to form their own estimates. For the most part they looked neither sick nor revolted: their reactions were mainly of shock and minds still consciously fighting against comprehension. No glances were exchanged, no eyes moved: their eyes were only for me.

‘Stryker had a split upper lip, a tooth missing and a reddish rough mark on his temple which I think must have been caused by another stone— very probably all the injuries were inflicted in this fashion to avoid any tell-tale marking of the hands or knuckles. Had those injuries been sustained in the course of a fight there would have been extensive bleeding and fairly massive bruising: there were no signs of either because Stryker was dead and circulation had ceased before those wounds were caused. To complete what he thought would be a most convincing effect, the murderer then closed the dead man’s hand round one of the buttons torn from Allen’s coat. Incidentally, there were no signs whatever of the churned-up snow one would have expected to find at the scene of a fight: there were two sets of tracks leading to the place where Stryker lay, one set leading away. No fuss, no commotion, just a quick if not particularly clean dispatch.’ I sipped some more of Otto’s scotch—it must have come from his own private supply for it was excellent stuff—then asked in my best lecturer’s fashion: ‘Are there any questions?’

Predictably, there were none. They were all clearly far too busy asking themselves questions to have any time to put any to me.

I went on: ‘I think you’d agree, then, that it now seems extremely improbable that any of the four previous deaths were the results of innocent coincidence. I think that only the most gullible and the most naïve would now be prepared to believe that those deaths were unconnected and not the work of the same agent. So what we have is, in effect, a mass murderer. A man who is either mad, a pathological killer, or a vicious and evil monster who finds it essential to murder with what can be only an apparent indiscrimination in order to achieve God knows what murky ends. He may, it is possible, be all three of those at once. Whatever he is or whoever he is, he’s in this cabin now. I wonder which one of you it is?’

For the first time their eyes left me as they looked quickly and furtively at one another as if in the ludicrous hope that they might by this means discover the identity of the killer. None of them examined one another as closely as I observed them all over the rim of my glass; if one pair of eyes remained fixed on mine it could only be because its owner knew who the murderer was and didn’t have to bother to look around: but I knew, even as I watched them, that I had no real foundation for any such hope, the murderer may have been no great shakes at physiology, but he was far too clever to walk into what, for an intelligent man with five deaths on his conscience, must have been a very obvious trap indeed. I was certain that there wasn’t a pair of eyes before me that didn’t flicker surreptitiously around the cabin. I waited patiently until I had their combined attention again.

‘I have no idea who this murderous fiend may be,’ I said, ‘but I think I can with certainty say who it isn’t. Counting the absent Miss Haynes, there are twenty-two of us in this cabin: to nine of those I cannot see that any suspicion can possibly attach.’

‘Merciful God!’ Goin muttered. ‘Merciful God! This is monstrous, Dr Marlowe, unbelievable. One of us here, one of the people we know, one of our friends has the blood of five people on his hands? It can’t be! It just can’t be!’

‘Except that you know that it must be,’ I said. Goin made no reply. ‘To begin with, I myself am in the clear, not because I know I am—we could all claim that—but because two hostile acts have been committed against my person, one of which was intended to be lethal. Further, I was bringing in Mr Smith here when Stryker was killed and Allen injured.’ This last was the truth but not the whole truth, but only the killer himself would know that and as he was already on to me his opinion was unimportant because he couldn’t possibly voice it. ‘Mr Smith is in the clear because not only was he unconscious at the time, he was a nearly fatal victim of the poisoner’s activities and it’s hardly likely that he would go around poisoning himself.’

‘Then that lets me out, Dr Marlowe!’ The Duke’s voice was a cracked falsetto, hoarse with strain. ‘It wasn’t me, it couldn’t—’

‘Agreed, Cecil, it wasn’t you. Apart from the fact that you were another poisoning victim, I don’t think—well, I’m not being physically disparaging but I’d think it very unlikely that you could have hoisted that rock that was used to kill Stryker. Mr Gerran, too, is above suspicion: not only was he poisoned but he was in the cabin here at the time of Stryker’s death. Allen, obviously, could have had nothing to do with it and neither did Mr Goin here, although you’ll have to take my word for that.’

‘What does that mean, Dr Marlowe?’ Goin’s voice was steady.

‘Because when you first saw Stryker’s body you turned as white as the proverbial sheet. People can do lots of things with their bodies, but they can’t switch on and off the epidermal blood supply at will. Had you been prepared for the sight you saw you wouldn’t have changed colour. You did. So you weren’t prepared. Our two Marys here we’ll have to leave out of the reckoning for it would have been a physical impossibility for either of them to have attacked Stryker with that rock. And Miss Haynes, of course, doesn’t come into the reckoning at all. Which, by my count, leaves thirteen potential suspects in all.’ I looked round the cabin and counted. ‘That’s right. Thirteen. Let’s hope it’s going to be a very unlucky number for one of you.’

‘Dr Marlowe,’ Goin said. ‘I think you should consider withdrawing your resignation.’

‘Consider it withdrawn. I was beginning to wonder what I’d do for food anyway.’ I looked at my now empty glass, then at Otto. ‘Seeing that I’m now back on the strength, as it were, would it be in order—’

‘Of course, of course.’ Otto, looking stricken, sunk heavily on to a providentially sturdy stool and insofar as it was possible for over two hundredweights of lard to look like a punctured balloon, he looked like a punctured balloon. ‘Dear God, this is ghastly. One of us here is a murderer. One of us here has killed five people!’ He shivered violently although the temperature had by this time risen well above freezing point. ‘Five people. Dead. And the man who did it is here!’

I lit a cigarette, sipped a little more of Otto’s scotch and waited for some further contributions to the conversation. Outside, the wind had strengthened until it was now a high and lonesome moaning sound that set the teeth on edge, a moan that regularly climbed up the register into a weird and eldritch whistling as the wind gusted and fell away, everyone appeared to be listening to it and listening intently, a weirdly appropriate litany for the fear and the horror that was closing in on their minds, a fit requiem for the dead Stryker. A whole minute dragged by and no one spoke so I took up the conversational burden again.

‘The implications will not have escaped you,’ I said. ‘At least, when you have had as much time to think about them as I’ve had, they won’t. Stryker is dead—and so are four others. Who should want them dead? Why should they have died? Is there a reason, a purpose behind those slayings? Have we a psychopathic murderer amongst us? If there is a purpose, has it been achieved? If it hasn’t—or if the killer is a psychopath—which one of us is going to be next? Who is going to die tonight? Who is going to go to his cubicle tonight knowing that anyone, a crazed killer, it may be, is going to enter at any time—or even, possibly, one’s own room-mate may be waiting his turn with a knife or a suffocating pillow? In fact, I should think that the room-mate possibility might be by far the more likely—for who would do anything so crazily obvious as that? Except, of course, a crazy man. So, before us, we have what you might call a sleepless vigil. Perhaps we can all keep it up for one night. But for twenty-two nights—can we keep it up for twenty-two nights? Is there any of us here who can be sure of still being alive when the Morning Rose returns?’

From their expressions and the profound silence that greeted this last question it was apparent that no one was prepared to express any such certainty. When I came to consider it myself, instead of just asking them to do so, I realized that the question of continued existence applied more particularly and more strongly to myself than to any of the others, for if the killer were no wayward psycho who struck out as the fancy took him but was an ice-cold and calculating murderer with a definite objective in view, then I was convinced that I was first on his calling list. I didn’t for a moment think that any attempt to dispose of me would be because that was any part of the killer’s preconceived plans but solely because I represented a threat to those plans.

‘And how are we going to comport ourselves from now on?’ I said. ‘Do we now polarize into two groups, the nine acknowledged innocent giving a very wide berth and a leery eye to the thirteen potentially guilty even although this is going to be a mite hard on, say, twelve of the latter? Shall we be like oil and water and resolutely refuse to mix? Or about your shooting plans for tomorrow. Mr Gerran and the Count, I believe, are heading for the fells tomorrow, a goodie and a potential baddie—Mr Gerran is going to make sure that he has at least another goodie along with him to watch his back? Heissman is taking the work-boat to reconnoitre possible locations along the Sor-hamna and perhaps a bit farther south. I believe Jungbeck and Heyter here have volunteered to go along with him. Three of those, you note, whose innocence is not proved. Any white sheep going to go along with black wolf or wolves who may come back and sorrowfully explain that the poor sheep fell over the side and that in spite of their heroic efforts the poor fellow perished miserably? And those splendid precipices at the south of the island—one little well-timed nudge, a deft clicking together of the ankles—well, sixteen hundred feet is a considerable drop, especially when you bear in mind that it’s straight down all the way. A perplexing and difficult problem, isn’t it, gentlemen?’

‘This is preposterous,’ Otto said loudly. ‘Absolutely preposterous.’

‘Isn’t it?’ I said. ‘A pity we can’t ask Stryker his opinion about that. Or the opinions of Antonio and Halliday and Moxen and Scott. When your pale ghost looks down from Limbo, Mr Gerran, and watches you being lowered into a hole in the frozen snow—do you think it will still look preposterous?’

Otto shuddered and reached for the bottle. ‘What in God’s name are we going to do?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘You heard what I just said to Mr Goin. I have reverted to the position of employee. I haven’t got my shirt on this film as I heard Mr Goin say to Captain Imrie that you had, I’m afraid this is a decision to arrive at at directorial level—well, the three directors that are still capable of making decisions.’

‘Would our employee mind telling us what he means?’ Goin tried to smile but it didn’t come off, his heart wasn’t in it.

‘Do you want to go ahead with shooting all your scenes up here or don’t you? It’s up to you. If we all stay here in the cabin permanently, at least half a dozen awake at any given time, looking with all their eyes and listening with all their ears, then the chances are high that we’ll all still be in relatively mint condition by the time the twenty-two days are up. On the other hand, of course, that means that you won’t get any of your film shot and you’ll lose all your investment. It’s a problem I wouldn’t like to have to face. That’s excellent scotch you have there, Mr Gerran.’

‘I can see that you appreciate it.’ Otto would have liked a touch of asperity in his voice, but all he managed to do was to sound worried.

‘Don’t be so mean.’ I helped myself. ‘These are times that try men’s souls.’ I wasn’t really listening to Otto, I was barely listening to myself. Once before, since leaving Wick, on the occasion when the Count had said something about a surfeit of horseradish, certain words had had the effect of a touch-paper being applied to a trail of gun-powder, triggering off a succession of thoughts that came tumbling in one after the other almost faster than my mind could register them, and now the same thing had happened again, only this time the words had been triggered off by something I’d said myself. I became aware that the Count was speaking, presumably to me. I said: ‘Sorry, mind on other things, you know.’

‘I can see that.’ The Count was looking at me in a thoughtful fashion. ‘All very well to opt out of responsibility, but what would you do?’ He smiled. ‘If I were to co-opt you again as a temporary unpaid director?’

‘Easy,’ I said, and the answer did come easily— as the result of the past thirty seconds’ thinking. ‘I’d watch my back and get on with the ruddy film.’

‘So.’ Otto nodded, and he, the Count and Goin looked at one another in apparent satisfaction. ‘But now, this moment, what would you do?’

‘When do we have supper?’

‘Supper?’ Otto blinked. ‘Oh, about eight, say.’

‘And it’s now five. About to have three hours’ kip, that’s what I’m going to do. And I wouldn’t advise anyone to come near me, either for an aspirin or with a knife in their hand, for I’m feeling very nervous indeed.’

Smithy cleared his throat. ‘Would I get clobbered if I asked for an aspirin now? Or something a bit more powerful to make a man sleep? I feel as if my head has been on a butcher’s block.’

‘I can have you asleep in ten minutes. Mind you, you’ll probably feel a damn sight worse when you wake up.’

‘Impossible. Lead me to the knock-out drops.’

Inside my cubicle I gripped the handle of the small square double-plate-glazed window and opened it with some difficulty. ‘Can you do that with yours?’

‘You do have things on your mind. No mangers allocated for uninvited guests.’

‘All the better. Bring a cot in here. You can borrow one from Judith Haynes’s room.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘There’s a spare one there.’

CHAPTER TEN

Five minutes later, wrapped to the eyes against the bitter cold, the driving snow and that wind that was now howling, not moaning, across the frozen face of the island, Smithy and I stood in the lee of the cabin, by my window which I’d wedged shut against a wad of paper: there was no handle on the outside to pull it open again, but I had with me a multi-tooled Swiss army knife that could pry open just about anything. We looked at the vaguely seen bulk of the cabin, at the bright light—Coleman lamps have an intensely white flame—streaming from one of the windows in the central section and the pale glimmer of smaller lights from a few of the cubicles.

‘No night for an honest citizen to be taking a constitutional,’ Smithy said in my ear. ‘But how about bumping into one of the less honest ones?’

‘Too soon for him or them to be stirring abroad,’ I said. ‘For the moment the flame of suspicion burns too high for anyone even to clear his throat at the wrong moment. Later, perhaps. But not now.’

We went directly to the provisions store, closed the door behind us and, since the hut was windowless, switched on both our torches. We searched through all the bags, crates, cartons and packages of food and found nothing untoward.

‘What are we supposed to be looking for?’ Smithy asked.

‘I’ve no idea. Anything, shall we say, that shouldn’t be here.’

‘A gun? A big black ribbed bottle marked “Deadly Poison”?’

‘Something like that.’ I lifted a bottle of Haig from a crate and stuck it in my parka pocket. ‘Medicinal use only,’ I explained.

‘Of course.’ Smithy made a farewell sweep of his torch beam round the walls of the hut: the beam steadied on three small highly varnished boxes on an upper shelf.

‘Must be very high grade food in those,’ Smithy said. ‘Caviar for Otto, maybe?’

‘Spares medical equipment for me. Mainly instruments. No poisons. Guaranteed.’ I made for the door. ‘Come on.’

‘Not checking?’

‘No point. Be a bit difficult to hide a submachine-gun in one of those.’ The boxes were about ten inches by eight.

‘OK to have a look, all the same?’

‘All right.’ I was a bit impatient. ‘Hurry it up, though.’

Smithy opened the lids of the first two boxes, glanced cursorily at the contents and closed them again. He opened the third box and said: ‘Broken into your reserves already, I see.’

‘I have not.’

‘Then somebody has.’ He handed over the box and I saw the two vacant moulds in the blue felt.

‘Somebody has indeed,’ I said. ‘A hypodermic and a tube of needles.’

Smithy looked at me in silence, took the box, closed the lid and replaced it. He said: ‘I don’t think I like this very much.’

‘Twenty-two days could be a very long time,’ I said. ‘Now, if we could only find the stuff that’s going to go inside this syringe.’

‘If. You don’t think somebody may have borrowed it for his own private use? Somebody on the hard stuff who’s bent his own plunger? One of the Three Apostles, for instance? Right background, after all—pop world, film world, just kids?’

‘No, I don’t think that.’

‘I don’t think so either. I wish I did.’

We went from there to the fuel hut. Two minutes was sufficient to discover that the fuel hut had nothing to offer us. Neither had the equipment hut although it afforded me two items I wanted, a screwdriver from the tool-box Eddie had used when he was connecting up the generator, and a packet of screws. Smithy said: ‘What do you want those for?’

‘For the screwing up of windows,’ I said. ‘A door is not the only way you can enter the cubicle of a sleeping man.’

‘You don’t trust an awful lot of people, do you?’

‘I weep for my lost innocence.’

There was no temptation to linger in the tractor shed, not with Stryker lying there, his face ghastly in the reflected wash from the torches, his glazed eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling. We rummaged through tool-boxes, examined metal panniers, even went to the length of probing fuel tanks, oil tanks and radiators: we found nothing.

We made our way down to the jetty. From the main cabin it was a distance of just over twenty yards and it took us five minutes to find it. We did not dare use our torches, and with that heavy and driving snow reducing visibility to virtually arm’s length, we were blind people moving in a blind world. We edged our way very gingerly out to the end of the jetty—the snow had covered up the gaps in the crumbling limestone and, heavily clad as we were, the chances of surviving a tumble into the freezing waters of the Sor-hamna were not high—located the work-boat in the sheltered north-west angle of the jetty and climbed down into it by means of a vertical iron ladder that was so ancient and rusty that the outboard ends of some of the rungs were scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter.

On a dark night the glow from a torch can be seen from a considerable distance even through the most heavily falling snow but now that we were below the level of the jetty wall we switched our torches on again, though still careful to keep them hooded. A quick search of the work-boat revealed nothing. We clambered into the fourteen-footer lying alongside and had the same lack of success. From here we transferred ourselves to the mock-up submarine—an iron ladder had been welded both to its side and the conning-tower.

The conning-tower had a platform welded across its circumference at a distance of about four feet from the top. A hatch in this led to a semi-circular platform about eighteen inches below the flange to which the conning-tower was secured: from here a short ladder led to the deck of the submarine. We went down and shone our torches around.

‘Give me subs any time,’ Smithy said. ‘At least they keep the snow out. That apart, I don’t think I’d care to settle down here.’

The narrow and cramped interior was indeed a bleak and cheerless place. The deck consisted of transverse spaced wooden planks held in position at either side by large butterfly nuts. Beneath the planks we could see, firmly held in position, rows of long narrow grey-painted bars—the four tons of cast-iron that served as ballast. Four square ballast tanks were arranged along either side of the shell— those could be filled to give negative buoyancy— and at one end of the shell stood a small diesel, its exhaust passing through the deck-head as far as the top of the conning-tower, to which it was bolted: this engine was coupled to a compressor unit for emptying the ballast tanks. And that, structurally, was all that there was to it: I had been told that the entire mock-up had cost fifteen thousand pounds and could only conclude that Otto had been engaged in the producers’ favourite pastime of cooking the books.

There were several other disparate items of equipment. In a locker in what I took to be the after end of this central mock-up were four small mushroom anchors with chains, together with a small portable windlass: immediately above these was a hatch in the deck-head which gave access to the upper deck: the anchors could only be for mooring the model securely in any desired position. Opposite this locker, securely lashed against a bulkhead, was a lightweight plastic reconstruction of a periscope that appeared to be capable of operating in a sufficiently realistic fashion. Close by were three other plastic models, a dummy three-inch gun, presumably for mounting on the deck, and two model machine-guns which would be fitted, I imagined, somewhere in the conning-tower. In the for’ard end of the craft were two more lockers: one held a number of cork life-jackets, the other six cans of paint and some paint-brushes. The cans were marked ‘Instant Grey’.

‘And what does that mean?’ Smithy asked.

‘Some sort of quick-drying paint, I should imagine.’

‘Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion,’ Smithy said. ‘I wouldn’t have given Otto the credit.’ He shivered. ‘Maybe it isn’t snowing in here, but I’d have you know that I’m very cold indeed. This place reminds me of an iron tomb.’

‘It isn’t very cosy. Up and away.’

‘A fruitless search, you might say?’

‘You might. I didn’t have many hopes anyway.’

‘Is that why you changed your mind about their getting on with the making of the film? One minute indifference, the next advising them to press on? So that you could, perhaps, examine their quarters and their possessions when they’re out?’

‘Whatever put such a thought in your mind, Smithy?’

‘There are a thousand snowdrifts where a person could hide anything.’

‘That’s a thought that’s also in my mind.’

We made the trip from the jetty to the main cabin with much greater ease than we had the other way, for this time we had the faint and diffuse glow of light from the Colemans to guide us. We scrambled back inside our cubicle without too much difficulty, brushed the snow from our boots and upper clothing and hung the latter up: compared to the interior of the submarine shell the warmth inside the cubicle was positively genial. I took screwdriver and screws and started to secure the window, while Smithy, after some references to the low state of his health, retrieved the bottle I’d taken from the provisions shed and took two small beakers from my medical box. He watched me until I had finished.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s us safe for the night. How about the others?’

‘I don’t think most of the others are in any danger because they don’t offer any danger to the plans of our friend or friends.’

‘Most of the others?’

‘I think I’ll screw up Judith Haynes’s window too.’

‘Judith Haynes?’

‘I have a feeling that she is in danger. Whether it’s grave danger or imminent danger I have no idea. Maybe I’m just fey.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ Smithy said ambiguously. He drank some scotch absently. ‘I’ve just been thinking myself, but along rather different lines. When, do you think, is it going to occur to our directorial board to call some law in or some outside help or, at least, to let the world know that the employees of Olympus Productions are dying off like flies and not from natural causes either?’

‘That’s the decision you would arrive at?’

‘If I wasn’t a criminal, or, in this case, the criminal and had very powerful reasons for not wanting the law around, yes, I would.’

‘I’m not a criminal but I’ve very powerful reasons for not wanting the law around either. The moment the law officially steps into the picture every criminal thought, intent and potential action will go into deep freeze and we’ll be left with five unresolved deaths on our hands and that’ll be the end of it, for there’s nothing surer than that we haven’t got a thing to hang on anyone yet. There’s only one way and that’s by giving out enough rope for a hanging job.’

‘What if you give out too much rope and our friend, instead of hanging himself, hangs one of us instead? What if there’s murder?’

‘In that case we’d have to call in the law. I’m here to do a job in the best way I can but that doesn’t mean by any means I can: I can’t use the innocent as sacrificial pawns.’

‘Well, that’s some relief. But if the thought does occur to them?’

‘Then obviously we’ll have to try to contact Tunheim—there’s a Meteorological Office radio there that should just about reach the moon. Or we’ll have to offer to try to contact Tunheim. It’s less than ten miles away but in weather conditions like these it might as well be on the far side of Siberia. If the weather eases, it might be possible. The wind’s veering round to the west now and if it stayed in that quarter a trip by boat up the coast might be possible—pretty unpleasant, but just possible. If it goes much north of west, it wouldn’t—those are only open work-boats and would be swamped in any kind of sea. By land— if the snow stopped—well, I just don’t know. In the first place, the terrain is so broken and mountainous that you couldn’t possibly use the little Sno-Cat—you’d have to make it on foot. You’d have to go well inland, to the west, to avoid the Misery Fell complex for that ends in cliffs on the east coast. There are hundreds of little lakes lying in that region and I’ve no idea how heavily they may be frozen over, maybe some of them not very much, maybe just enough to support a covering of snow and not a man—and I believe some of those lakes are over a hundred feet deep. You might be ankle-deep, knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist-deep in snow. And apart from being bogged-down or drowned, we’re not equipped for winter travel, we haven’t even got a tent for an overnight stop— there isn’t a hope of you making it in one day— and if the snow started falling again and kept on falling I bet Olympus Productions haven’t even as much as a hand compass to prevent you from walking in circles until you drop dead from cold or hunger or just plain old exhaustion.’

‘“You, you, you”,’ Smithy said. ‘You’re always talking about me. How about you going instead?’ He grinned. ‘Of course, I could always set off for there, search around till I found some convenient cave or shelter, hole up there for the night, and return the next day announcing mission impossible.’

‘We’ll see how the cards fall.’ I finished my drink and picked up screwdriver and screws. ‘Let’s go and see how Miss Haynes is.’

Miss Haynes seemed to be in reasonable health. No fever, normal pulse, breathing deeply and evenly: how she would feel when she woke was another matter altogether. I screwed up her window until nobody could have entered her room from the outside without smashing their way in— and breaking through two sheets of plate glass would cause enough racket to wake up half the occupants of the cabin. Then we went into the living area of the cabin.

It was surprisingly empty. At least ten people I would have expected to be there were absent, but a quick mental count of the missing heads convinced me that there was no likely cause for alarm in this. Otto, the Count, Heissman and Goin, conspicuously absent, were probably in secret conclave in one of their cubicles discussing weighty matters which they didn’t wish their underlings to hear. Lonnie had almost certainly betaken himself again in his quest for fresh air and I hoped that he hadn’t managed to lose himself between the cabin and the provisions hut. Allen, almost certainly, had gone to lie down again, and I presumed that Mary darling, who appeared to have overcome a great number of her earlier inhibitions, had returned to her dutiful hand-holding. I couldn’t imagine where the Three Apostles had got to nor was I particularly worried: I was sure that there was nothing to fear from them other than permanent damage to the eardrums.

I crossed to where Conrad was presiding over a three-burner oil cooker mounted on top of a stove. He had two large pans and a large pot all bubbling away at once, stew, beans and coffee, and he seemed to be enjoying his role of chef not least, I guessed, because he had Mary Stuart as his assistant. In another man I would have looked for a less than altruistic motive in this cheerful willingness, the hail-fellow-well-met leading man playing the democrat to an admiring gallery, but I knew enough of Conrad now to realize that this formed no part of his nature at all: he was just a naturally helpful character who never thought to place himself above his fellow-actors. Conrad, I thought, must be a very rara avis indeed in the cinema world.

‘What’s all this, then?’ I said. ‘You qualified for this sort of thing? I thought Otto had appointed the Three Apostles as alternate chefs?’

‘The Three Apostles had it in mind to start improving their musical technique in this very spot,’ Conrad said. ‘I did a self-defence trade with them. They’re practising across in the equipment hut—you know, where the generator is.’

I tried to imagine the total degree of cacophony produced by their atonal voices, their amplified instruments and the diesel engine in a confined space of eight by eight, but my imagination wasn’t up to it. I said: ‘You deserve a medal. You too, Mary dear.’

‘Me?’ She smiled. ‘Why?’

‘Remember what I said about the goodies pairing off with the baddies? Delighted to see you keeping a close eye on our suspect here. Haven’t seen his hand hovering suspiciously long over one of the pots, have you?’

She stopped smiling. ‘I don’t think that’s funny, Dr Marlowe.’

‘I don’t think it is either. A clumsy attempt to lighten the atmosphere.’ I looked at Conrad. ‘Can I have a word with the chef?’

Conrad looked at me briefly, speculatively, nodded and turned away. Mary Stuart said: ‘That’s nice. For me, I mean. Why can’t you have a word with him here?’

‘I’m going to tell him some funny stories. You don’t seem to care much for my humour.’ I walked away a few paces with Conrad and said: ‘Had a chance of a word with Lonnie yet?’

‘No. I mean, I haven’t had an opportunity yet. Is it that urgent?’

‘I’m beginning to think it may be. Look, I haven’t seen him there but I’m certain as can be that Lonnie is across in the provisions hut.’

‘Where Otto keeps all those elixirs of life?’

‘You wouldn’t expect to find Lonnie in the fuel shed? Diesel and petrol aren’t his tipples. I wonder if you could go across there, seeking liquid solace from this harsh and weary world, from Bear Island, from Olympus Productions, from whatever you like, and engage him in crafty conversation. Touch upon the theme of how you’re missing your family. Anything. Just get him to tell you about his.’

He hesitated. ‘I like Lonnie. I don’t like this job.’

‘I’m past caring now about people’s feelings. I’m just concerned with people’s lives—that they should keep on living, I mean.’

‘Right.’ He nodded and looked at me soberly. ‘Taking a bit of a chance, aren’t you? Enlisting the aid of one of your suspects, I mean.’

‘You’re not on my list of suspects,’ I said. ‘You never were.’

He looked at me for some moments then said: ‘Tell that to Mary dear, will you?’ He turned and made for the outer door. I returned to the oil cooker. Mary Stuart looked at me with her usual grave and remote lack of expression.

I said: ‘Conrad tells me to tell you that I’ve just told him—you’re following me?—that he’s not on my list of suspects and never was.’

‘That’s nice.’ She gave me a little smile but there was a touch of winter in it.

‘Mary,’ I said, ‘you are displeased with me.’

‘Well.’

‘Well what?’

‘Are you a friend of mine?’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course, of course.’ She mimicked my tone very creditably. ‘Dr Marlowe is a friend of all mankind.’

‘Dr Marlowe doesn’t hold all mankind in his arms all night long.’

Another smile. This time there was a touch of spring in it. She said: ‘And Charles Conrad?’

‘I like him. I don’t know what he thinks about me.’

‘And I like him and I know he likes me and so we’re all friends together.’ I thought better of saying ‘of course’ again and just nodded. ‘So why don’t we all share secrets together?’

‘Women are the most curious creatures,’ I said. ‘In every sense of the word “curious”.’

‘Please don’t be clever with me.’

‘Do you always share secrets?’ She frowned a little, as if perplexed, and I went on: ‘Let’s play kiddies’ games, shall we? You tell me a secret and I’ll tell you one.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘This secret assignation you had yesterday morning. In the snow and on the upper deck. When you were being so very affectionate with Heissman.’

I’d expected some very positive reaction from this and was correspondingly disappointed when there was none. She looked at me, silently thoughtful, then said: ‘So you were spying on us.’

‘I just happened to chance by.’

‘I didn’t see you chancing by.’ She bit her lip, but not in any particularly discernible anguish. ‘I wish you hadn’t seen that.’

‘Why?’ It had been briefly in my mind to be heavily ironic but I could hear a little warning bell tinkling in the distance.

‘Because I don’t want people to know.’

‘That’s obvious,’ I said patiently. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m not very proud of it. I have to make a living, Dr Marlowe. I came to this country only two years ago and I haven’t got any qualifications for anything. I haven’t even got any qualifications for what I’m doing now. I’m a hopeless actress. I know I am. I’ve just got no talent at all. The last two films I was in—well, they were just awful. Are you surprised that people give me the cold shoulder, why they’re wondering out loud why I’m making my third film with Olympus Productions? Well, you can guess now: Johann Heissman is the why.’ She smiled, just a very small smile. ‘You are surprised, Dr Marlowe? Shocked, perhaps?’

‘No.’

The little smile went away. Some of the life went from her face and when she spoke her voice was dull. ‘It is so easy, then, to believe this of me?’

‘Well, no. The point is that I just don’t believe you at all.’

She looked at me, her face a little sad and quite uncomprehending. ‘You don’t believe—you don’t believe this of me?’

‘Not of Mary Stuart. Not of Mary dear.’

Some of the life came back and she said almost wonderingly: ‘That’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me.’ She looked down at her hands, as if hesitating, then said, without looking up: ‘Johann Heissman is my uncle. My mother’s brother.’

‘Your uncle?’ I’d been mentally shuffling all sorts of possibilities through my mind, but this one hadn’t even begun to occur to me.

‘Uncle Johann.’ Again the little, almost secret smile, this time with what could have been an imagined trace of mischief: I wondered what her smile would be like if she ever smiled in pure delight or happiness. ‘You don’t have to believe me. Just go and ask him yourself. But privately, if you please.’

Dinner that night wasn’t much of a social success. The atmosphere of cheerful good fellowship which is required to make such communal gettogethers go with a swing was noticeably lacking. This may have been due, partially, to the fact that most people either ate by their solitary selves or, both sitting and standing, in scattered small groups around the cabin, their attention almost exclusively devoted to the unappetizing goulash in the bowls held in their hands: but it was mainly due to the fact that everybody was clearly and painfully aware that we were experiencing the secular equivalent of our own last supper. For the interest in the food was not all-absorbing: frequently, but very very briefly, a pair of eyes would break off their rapt communion with the stew and beans, glance swiftly around the cabin, then return in an oddly guilty defensiveness to the food as if the person had hoped in that one lightning ocular sortie to discover some unmistakable tell-tale signs that would infallibly identify the traitor in our midst. There were, needless to say, no such overt indications of self-betrayal on display, and the problem of identification was deepened and confused by the fact that most of those present exhibited a measure of abnormality in their behaviour that would ordinarily have given rise to more than a modicum of suspicion anyway: for it is an odd characteristic of human nature that even the most innocent person who knows himself or herself to be under suspicion tends to over-react with an unnatural degree of casual indifference and insouciant concern that serves only to heighten the original suspicion.

Otto, clearly, was not one of those thus afflicted. Whether it was because he knew himself to be one of those who was regarded as being completely in the clear or because, as chairman of the company and producer of the film, he regarded himself as being above and apart from the problems that afflicted the common run of mankind, Otto was remarkably composed and, astonishingly, even forceful and assertive. Unlikely though it had appeared up to that moment, Otto, normally so dithering and indecisive, might well be one of those who only showed of their best in the moments of crisis. There was certainly nothing dithering or indecisive about him when he rose to speak at the end of the meal.

‘We are all aware,’ said Otto briskly, ‘of the dreadful happenings of the past day or two, and I think that we have no alternative to accepting Dr Marlowe’s interpretation of the events. Further, I fear we have to accept as very real the doctor’s warnings as to what may happen in the near future.

‘Those are inescapable facts and entirely conceivable possibilities so please don’t for a moment imagine that I’m trying to minimize the seriousness of the situation. On the contrary, it would be impossible to exaggerate it, impossible to exaggerate an impossible situation. Here we are, marooned in the high Arctic and beyond any reach of help, with the knowledge that there are those of us who have come to a violent end and that this violence may not yet be over.’ He looked unhurriedly around the company and I did the same: I could see that there were quite a number who were as impressed by Otto’s calm assessment of the situation as I was. He went on: ‘It is precisely because the state of affairs in which we find ourselves is so unbelievable and so abnormal that I suggest we comport ourselves in the most rational and normal fashion possible. A descent into hysteria will achieve no reversal of the awful things that have just occurred and can only harm all of us.

‘Accordingly, my colleagues and I have decided that, subject, of course, to taking every possible precaution, we should proceed with the business in hand—the reason why we came to this island at all—in as normal a fashion as possible. I am sure you will all agree with me that it is much better to have our time and attention taken up—I will not say gainfully employed—by working steadily at something purposive and constructive rather than sit idly by and have those awful things prey upon our minds. I do not suggest that we can pretend that those things never happened: I do suggest that it will benefit all of us if we act as if they hadn’t.

‘Weather permitting, we will have three crews in the field tomorrow.’ Otto wasn’t consulting, he was telling: I’d have done the same in his place. ‘The main group, under Mr Divine here, will go north up Lerner’s Way—a road built through to the next bay about the turn of the century, although I don’t suppose there are many traces left of it now. The Count, Allen and Cecil here will, of course, accompany him. I intend to go along myself and I’ll want you there too, Charles.’ This to Conrad.

‘You’ll require me along, Mr Gerran?’ This from Mary Darling, her hand upraised like a little girl in class.

‘Well, it’ll be nearly all background—’ He broke off, glanced at Allen’s battered face, then looked again at Mary with what I took to be a roguish smile. ‘If you wish to, certainly. Mr Hendriks, with Luke, Mark and John here, will try to capture for us all the sounds of the island—the winds on the fells, the birds on the cliffs, the waves breaking against the shore. Mr Heissman here is taking a hand-camera out in the boat to seek out some suitable seaward locations—Mr Jungbeck and Mr Heyter, who have nothing on tomorrow, have kindly volunteered to accompany him.

‘These, then, are our decisions for tomorrow’s programme. But the most important decision of all, which I have left to the last, is in no way connected with our work. We have decided that it is essential that we seek help with all possible speed. By help I mean the law, police or some such recognized authority. It is not only our duty, it may well be essential for our own self-preservation, to have a thorough and expert investigation made as quickly as is humanly possible. To call for help we need a radio and the nearest is at the Norwegian Meteorological Station in Tunheim.’ I carefully refrained from looking at Smithy and was confident that he would reciprocate. ‘Mr Smith, your presence here may prove to be a blessing—you are the only professional seaman amongst us. What would be the chances of reaching Tunheim by boat?’

Smithy was silent for a few seconds to lend weight to his observations, then said: ‘In the present conditions so poor that I wouldn’t even consider trying it, not even in these desperate circumstances. We’ve had very heavy weather recently, Mr Gerran, and the seas won’t subside for quite some time. The drawback with those work-boats is that if one does encounter rough seas ahead you can’t do what you would normally do, that is, turn and run before the sea: those boats are completely open at the back and would almost certainly be pooped—that is, they’d fill up with water and sink. So you’d have to be pretty certain of your weather before you set out.’

‘I see. Too dangerous for the moment. When the sea moderates, Mr Smith?’

‘Depends upon the wind. It’s backing to the west right now and if it were to stay in that quarter— well, it’s feasible. If it moves round to the northwest or beyond, no. Not on.’ Smithy smiled. ‘I wouldn’t say that an overland trip would be all that easier, but at least you wouldn’t be swamped in heavy seas.’

‘Ah! So you think that it is at least possible to reach Tunheim on foot?’

‘Well, I don’t know. I’m no expert on Arctic travel. I’m sure Mr Heissman here—I’m told he’s been giving a lecture about this already—is much more qualified to speak about it than I am.’

‘No, no.’ Heissman waved a deprecating hand. ‘Let’s hear what you think, Mr Smith.’

So Smithy let them hear what he thought, which was more or less a verbatim repetition of what I’d said to him in our cubicle earlier. When he’d finished, Heissman, who probably knew as much about winter travel in Arctic regions as I did about the back side of the moon, nodded sagely and said: ‘Succinctly and admirably put. I agree entirely with Mr Smith.’

There was a thoughtful silence eventually broken by Smithy who said diffidently: ‘I’m the supernumerary here. If the weather eases, I don’t mind trying.’

‘And now I have to disagree with you,’ Heissman said promptly. ‘Suicidal, just suicidal, my boy.’

‘Not to be thought of for an instant,’ Otto said firmly. ‘For safety—for mutual safety—nothing short of an expedition would do.’

‘I wouldn’t want an expedition,’ Smithy said mildly. ‘I don’t see that the blind leading the blind would help much.’

‘Mr Gerran.’ It was Jon Heyter speaking. ‘Perhaps I could be of help here.’

‘You?’ Otto looked at him in momentary perplexity, then his face cleared. ‘Of course. I’d forgotten about that.’ He said in explanation: ‘Jon here was my stuntman in The High Sierra. A climbing picture. He doubled for the actors who were terrified or too valuable for the climbing sequences. A really first-class alpinist, I assure you. How about that then, eh, Mr Smith?’

I was about to wonder how Smithy would field that one when he answered immediately. ‘That’s about the size of the expedition I’d have in mind. I’d be very glad to have Mr Heyter along— he’d probably have to carry me most of the way there.’

‘Well, that’s settled then,’ Otto said. ‘Very grateful to you both. But only, of course, if the weather improves. Well, I think that covers everything.’ He smiled at me. ‘As co-opted board member, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Except with your assumption that everyone will be here in the morning to play the parts you have assigned to them.’

‘Ah!’ Otto said.

‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘You weren’t seriously contemplating that we should all retire for the night, were you? For certain people with certain purposes in mind there is no time like the still small hours. When I say “people”, I’m not going out-with the bounds of this cabin: when I say “purposes”, I refer to homicidal ones.’

‘My colleagues and I have, in fact, discussed this,’ Otto said. ‘You propose we set watches?’

‘It might help some of us to live a little longer,’ I said. I moved two or three steps until I was in the centre of the cabin. ‘From here I can see into all five corridors. It would be impossible for any person to leave or enter any of the cubicles without being observed by a person standing here.’

‘Going to call for a rather special type of person, isn’t it?’ Conrad said. ‘Someone with his neck mounted on swivels.’

‘Not if we have two on watch at the same time,’ I said. ‘And as the time’s long gone when anybody’s hurt feelings are a matter of any importance, two people on watch who are not only watching the corridors but watching each other. A suspect, shall we say, and a non-suspect. Among the non-suspects, I think we might gallantly exclude the two Marys. And I think that Allen too could do with a full night’s sleep. That would leave Mr Gerran, Mr Goin, Mr Smith, Cecil and myself. Five of us, which would work out rather well for two-hour watches between, say, 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.’

‘An excellent suggestion,’ Otto said. ‘Well, then, five volunteers.’

There were thirteen potential volunteers and all thirteen immediately offered their services. Eventually it was agreed that Goin and Hendriks should share the ten to midnight watch, Smith and Conrad the midnight to two, myself and Luke the two to four, Otto and Jungbeck the four to six, and Cecil and Eddie the six to eight. Some of the others, notably the Count and Heissman, protested, not too strongly, that they were being discriminated against: the reminder that there would be still another twenty-one nights after this one was sufficient to ensure that the protest was no more than a token one.

The decision not to linger around in small talk and socializing was reached with a far from surprising unanimity. There was, really, only one thing to talk about and nobody wished to talk about it in case he had picked the wrong person to talk to. In ones and twos, and within a very few minutes, almost everybody had moved off to their cubicles. Apart from Smithy and myself, only Conrad remained and I knew that he wished to talk to me. Smithy glanced briefly at me, then left for our cubicle.

‘How did you know?’ Conrad said. ‘About Lonnie and his family?’

‘I didn’t. I guessed. He’s talked to you?’

‘A little. Not much. He had a family.’

‘Had?’

‘Had. Wife and two daughters. Two grown-up girls. A car crash. I don’t know if they hit another car, I don’t know who was driving. Lonnie just clammed up as if he had already said too much. He wouldn’t even say whether he had been in the car himself, whether anyone else had been present, not even when it had taken place.’

And that was all that Conrad had learnt. We talked in a desultory fashion for some little time, and when Goin and Hendriks appeared to begin the first watch I left for my cubicle. Smithy was not in his camp-bed. Fully clothed, he was just removing the last of the screws I’d used to secure the window frame: he’d the flame of the little oil lamp turned so low that the cubicle was in semi-darkness.

‘Leaving?’ I said,

‘Somebody out there.’ Smithy reached for his anorak and I did the same. ‘I thought maybe we shouldn’t use the front door.’

‘Who is it?’

‘No idea. He looked in here but his face was just a white blur. He doesn’t know I saw him, I’m sure of that, for he went from here and shone a torch through Judith Haynes’s window, and he wouldn’t have done that if he thought anyone was watching.’ Smithy was already clambering through the window. ‘He put his torch out but not before I saw where he was heading. Down to the jetty, I’m sure.’

I followed Smithy and jammed the window shut as I had done before. The weather was very much as it had been earlier, still that driving snow, the deepening cold, the darkness and that bitter wind which was still boxing the compass and had moved around to the south-west. We moved across to Judith Haynes’s window, hooded our torches to give thin pencil beams of light, picked up tracks in the snow that led off in the direction of the jetty, and were about to follow them when it occurred to me that it might be instructive to see where they came from. But we couldn’t find where they came from: whoever the unknown was he’d walked, keeping very close to the walls, at least twice round the cabin, obviously dragging his feet as he had gone, so that it was quite impossible to discover which cubicle window he’d used as an exit route from the cabin. That he should have so effectively covered his tracks was annoying: that he should have thought to do it at all was disconcerting for it plainly demonstrated at least the awareness that such late-night sorties might be expected.

We made our way quickly but cautiously down to the jetty, giving the unknown’s tracks a prudently wide berth. At the head of the jetty I risked a quick flash with the narrowed beam of my torch: a single line of tracks led outwards.

‘Well, now,’ Smithy said softly. ‘Our lad’s down at the boats or the sub. If we go to investigate we might bump into him. If we go down to the end of the jetty for a quick look-see and don’t bump into him he’s still bound to see our tracks on his return trip. We want to make our presence known?’

‘No. No law against a man taking a stroll when he feels like it, even though it is in a blizzard. And if we declare ourselves you can be damn sure he’ll never put another foot wrong as long as we remain on Bear Island.’

We withdrew to the shelter of some rocks only a few yards distant along the beach, an almost wholly superfluous precaution in that close to zero visibility.

‘What do you think he’s up to?’ Smithy said.

‘Specifically, no idea. Generally, anything between the felonious and the villainous. We’ll check down there when he’s gone.’

Whatever purpose he’d had in mind, it hadn’t taken him long to achieve it for he was gone within two minutes. The snow was so thick, the darkness so nearly absolute, that he might well have passed by both unseen and unheard had it not been for the erratic movement of the small torch he held in his hand. We waited for some seconds then straightened.

‘Was he carrying anything?’ I said.

‘Same thought here,’ Smithy said. ‘He could have been. But I couldn’t swear to it.’

We followed the double tracks in the snow down to the end of the jetty, where they ended at the head of the iron ladder leading down to the submarine mock-up. No question but this was where he’d gone, for apart from the fact that there was nowhere else where he could have been his footprints were all over the hull and, when we’d climbed into it, the platform in the conning-tower. We dropped down into the hull of the submarine.

Nothing was changed, nothing appeared to be missing from our earlier visit. Smithy said: ‘I’ve taken a sudden dislike to this place. Last time we were here I called it an iron tomb. I wouldn’t want it to be our tomb.’

‘You feel it might?’

‘Our friend seemingly didn’t take anything away. But he must have had some purpose in coming here so I assume he brought something. On the track record to date that purpose wouldn’t be anything I’d like and neither would be that something he brought. How would it be if he’d planted something to blow the damn thing up?’

‘Why would he want to do a crazy thing like that?’ I didn’t feel as disbelieving as I sounded.

‘Why has he done any of the crazy things he’s done? Right now, I don’t want a reason. I just want to know whether, as of now, and here and now, he’s just done another crazy thing. What I mean is, I’m nervous.’

He wasn’t the only one. I said: ‘Assuming you’re right, he couldn’t blow this thing up with a little itsy-bitsy piece of plastic explosive. It would have to be something big enough to make a big bang. So, a delayed-action fuse.’

‘To give him time to be asleep in his innocent bed when the explosion goes off? I’m more nervous than ever. I wonder how long he figured it would take him to get back to his bed.’

‘He could do it in a minute.’

‘God’s sake, why are we standing here talking?’ Smithy flashed his torch around. ‘Where the hell would a man put a device like that?’

‘Against a bulkhead, I’d say. Or on the bottom.’

We examined the deck first but all the bars of iron ballast and their securing wooden battens appeared to be undisturbed and firmly in place. There was just no room there for even the smallest explosive device. We turned to the rest of the hull, looked behind the mushroom anchors, among the chains, under the compressor unit and the windlass and behind the plastic models of periscope and guns. We found nothing. We even peered at the cleaning plates on the ballast tanks to see if any of those could have been unscrewed but there were no marks on them. And there was certainly no place where such a device could have been attached to the bulkheads themselves without being instantly detectable.

Smithy looked at me. It was difficult to say whether he was perplexed or, like me, increasingly and uncomfortably conscious of the fact that if such a time device did exist time might be swiftly running out. He looked towards the fore end of the hull and said: ‘Or he might just have dropped it in one of those lockers. Easiest and quickest place to hide anything, after all.’

‘Most unlikely,’ I said, but I reached there before he did. I ran the beam of the torch over the paint locker and then the light steadied on a wooden batten close by the floor of the locker. I kept the light where it was and said to Smithy: ‘You see it too?’

‘A giveaway piece of fresh and unmelted snow. From a boot.’ He reached for the lid of the locker. ‘Well, time’s a-wasting. Better open the damn thing.’

‘Better not.’ I’d caught his arm. ‘How do you know it’s not booby-trapped?’

‘There’s that.’ He’d snatched back his hand like a man seeing a tiger’s jaws closing on it. ‘It would save the cost of a time-fuse. How do we open it then?’

‘Gradually. It’s unlikely that he had the time to rig up anything so elaborate as an electrical trigger, but if he did there’ll be contacts in the lid. More likely, if anything, a simple pull cord. In either event nothing can operate in the first two inches of lift for he must have left at least that space to withdraw his hand.’

So we gingerly opened the lid those two inches, examined the rim and what we could see of the interior of the locker and found nothing. I pushed the locker lid right back. There was no sign of any explosive. Nothing had been put inside. But something had been removed—two cans of the quick-dry paint and two brushes.

Smithy looked at me and shook his head. Neither of us said anything. The reasons for removing a couple of paint cans were so wholly inconceivable that, clearly, there was nothing that could be gainfully said. We closed the locker, climbed up the conning-tower and regained the pier. I said: ‘It’s very unlikely that he would have taken them back to the cabin with him. After all, they’re large cans and not easy things to hide in a tiny cubicle, especially if any of your friends should chance to come calling.’

‘He doesn’t have to hide them there. As I said earlier, there are a thousand snowdrifts where you can hide practically anything.’

But if he’d hidden anything he hadn’t hidden them in any of the snowdrifts between the jetty and the cabin, for his tracks led straight back to the latter without any deviation to either side. We followed the footprints right back close up to the cabin walls and there they were lost in the smudged line of tracks that led right round the cabin’s perimeter. Smithy hooded his torch and examined the tracks for some seconds.

He said: ‘I think that track’s wider and deeper than it was before. I think that someone—and it doesn’t have to be the same person—has been making another grand tour of the cabin.’

‘I think you’re right,’ I said. I led the way back to the window of our own cubicle and was about to pull it open when some instinct—or perhaps it was because I was now subconsciously looking for the suspicious or untoward in every possible situation—made me shine my torch on the window-frame. I turned to Smithy. ‘Notice something?’

‘I notice something. The wad of paper we left jammed between the window and frame—well, it’s no longer jammed between window and frame.’ He shone his torch on the ground, stopped and picked something up. ‘Because it was lying down there. A caller or callers.’

‘So it would seem.’ We clambered inside, and while Smithy started screwing the window back in place I turned up the oil lamp and started to look around partly for some other evidence to show that an intruder had been there, but mainly to try to discover the reason for his being there. Inevitably, my first check was on the medical equipment, and my first check was my last, and very brief it was too.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘Two birds with one stone. We’re a brilliant pair.’

‘We are?’

‘The lad you saw with his face pressed against that window. Probably had it stuck against it for all of five minutes until he’d made sure he’d been seen. Then, to make certain you were really interested, he went and shone his torch into Judith Haynes’s window. No two actions, he must have calculated, could have been designed to lure us out into the open more quickly.’

‘He was right at that, wasn’t he?’ He looked at my opened medical kit and said carefully: ‘I’m to take it, then, that there’s something missing there?’

‘You may so take it.’ I showed him the velvet-lined gap in the tray where the something missing had been. ‘A lethal dose of morphine.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘Four bells and all’s well,’ Smithy said, shaking my shoulder. Neither the call nor the shake was necessary. I was by this time, even in my sleep, in so keyed-up a state that his turning of the door-handle had been enough to have me instantly awake. ‘Time to report to the bridge. We’ve made some fresh coffee.’

I followed him into the main cabin, said a greeting to Conrad who was bent over pots and cups at the oil stove, and went to the front door. To my surprise the wind, now fully round to the west, had dropped away to something of not more than the order of a Force 3, the snow had thinned to the extent that it promised to cease altogether pretty soon, and I even imagined I could see a few faint stars in a clear patch of sky to the south, beyond the entrance of the Sor-hamna. But the cold, if anything, was even more intense than it had been earlier in the night. I closed the door quickly, turned to Smithy and spoke softly.

‘You’re very encouraging,’ Smithy said. ‘What makes you so sure that those five—’ He broke off as Luke, yawning and stretching vastly, entered the main cabin. Luke was a thin, awkward, gangling creature, a tow-headed youth urgently in need of the restraining influences of either a barber or a ribbon.

I said: ‘Do you see him as a gun for hire?’

‘I could have him up for committing musical atrocities with a guitar, I should think. Otherwise— yes, I guess. Very little threat to life and limb. And, yes again, that would go for the other four too.’ He watched as Conrad went into one of the passages, carrying a cup of coffee. ‘I’d put my money on our leading man any day.’

‘Where on earth is he off to?’

‘Bearing sustenance for his lady-love, I should imagine. Miss Stuart spent much of our watch with us.’

I was on the point of observing that the alleged lady-love had a remarkable predilection for moving around in the darker watches of the night but thought better of it. That Mary Stuart was involved in matters dark and devious—Heissman’s being her uncle didn’t even begin to account for the earlier oddity of her behaviour—I didn’t for a moment doubt: that she was engaged in any murderous activities I couldn’t for a moment believe.

Smithy went on: ‘It’s important that I reach Tunheim?’

‘It hardly matters whether you do or not. With Heyter along, only the weather and the terrain can decide that. If you have to turn back, that’s fine with me, I’d rather have you here: if you get to Tunheim, just stay there.’

‘Stay there? How can I stay there? I’m going there for help, am I not? And Heyter will be shouting to come back.’

‘I’m sure they’ll understand if you explain that you’re tired and need a rest. If Heyter makes a noise, have him locked up—I’ll give you a letter to the Met. officer in charge.’

‘You’ll do that, will you? And what if the Met. officer point-blank refuses?’

‘I think you’ll find some people up there who’ll be only too happy to oblige you.’

He looked at me without a great deal of enthusiasm. ‘Friends of yours, of course?’

‘There’s a visiting meteorological team from Britain staying there briefly. Five of them. Only, they’re not meteorologists.’

‘Naturally not.’ The lack of enthusiasm deteriorated into a coldness that was just short of outright hostility. ‘You play your cards mighty close to the chest, don’t you, Dr Marlowe?’

‘Don’t get angry with me. I’m not asking you that, I’m telling you. Policy—I obey orders, even if you don’t. A secret shared is never a secret halved—even a peek at my cards and who knows who’s kibitzing? I’ll give you that letter early this morning.’

‘OK.’ Smithy was obviously restraining himself with no small difficulty. He went on morosely: ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised to find even the Morning Rose up there?’

‘Let me put it this way,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility.’

Smithy nodded, turned and walked to the oil stove where Conrad, now returned, was pouring coffee. We sat for ten minutes, drinking and talking about nothing much, then Smithy and Conrad left. The next hour or so passed without event except that after five minutes Luke fell sound asleep and stayed that way. I didn’t bother to wake him up, it wasn’t necessary, I was in an almost hypernatural state of alertness: unlike Luke, I had things on my mind.

A door in a passage opened and Lonnie appeared. As Lonnie, by his own account, wasn’t given to sleeping much and as he wasn’t on my list of suspects anyway, this was hardly call for alarm. He came into the cabin and sat heavily in a chair by my side. He looked old and tired and grey and the usual note of badinage was lacking in his tone.

‘Once again the kindly healer,’ he said, ‘and once again looking after his little flock. I have come, my boy, to share your midnight vigil.’

‘It’s twenty-five to four,’ I said.

‘A figure of speech.’ He sighed. ‘I have not slept well. In fact, I have not slept at all. You see before you, Doctor, a troubled old man.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Lonnie.’

‘No tears for Lonnie. For me, as for most of pitiful mankind, my troubles are of my own making. To be an old man is bad enough. To be a lonely old man, and I have been lonely for many years, makes a man sad for much of the time. But to be a lonely old man who can no longer live with his conscience—ah, that is not to be borne.’ He sighed again. ‘I am feeling uncommonly sorry for myself tonight.’

‘What’s your conscience doing now?’

‘It’s keeping me awake, that’s what it’s doing. Ah, my boy, my boy, to cease upon the midnight with no pain. What more could a man want when it’s evening and time to be gone?’

‘This wine-shop on the far shore?’

‘Not even that.’ He shook his head mournfully. ‘No welcoming arms in paradise for the lost Lonnies of this world. Haven’t the right entry qualifications, my boy.’ He smiled and his eyes were sad. ‘I’ll pin my hopes on a small four-ale bar in purgatory.’

He lapsed into silence, his eyes closed and I thought he was drifting off into sleep. But he presently stirred, cleared his throat and said apparently apropos of nothing, ‘It’s always too late. Always.’

‘What’s always too late, Lonnie?’

‘Compassion is, or understanding or forgiveness. I fear that Lonnie Gilbert has been less than he should have been. But it’s always too late. Too late to say I like you or I love you or how nice you are or I forgive you. If only, if only, if only. It is difficult to make your peace with someone if you’re looking at that person and he’s lying there dead. My, my, my.’ As if with an immense effort, he pushed himself to his feet. ‘But there’s still a little shred of something that can be saved. Lonnie Gilbert is now about to go and do something that he should have done many, many years ago. But first I must arm myself, some life in the ancient bones, some clarity in the faded mind, in short, prepare myself for what I’m ashamed to say I still regard as the ordeal that lies ahead. In brief, my dear fellow, where’s the scotch?’

‘I’m afraid Otto has taken it with him.’

‘A kind fellow, Otto, none kinder, but he has his parsimonious side to him. But no matter, the main source of supply is less than a Sunday’s march away.’ He made for the outer door but I stopped him.

‘One of those times, Lonnie, you’re going to go out there, sit down there, go to sleep and not come back again because you’ll be frozen to death. Besides, there’s no need. There’s some in my cubicle. Same source of supply, I assure you. I’ll fetch it. Just keep your eye open in my absence, will you?’

It didn’t matter very much whether he kept his eyes open or not for I was back inside twenty seconds. Smithy, clearly, was a heavier sleeper than I was for he didn’t stir during my brief visit.

Lonnie helped himself copiously, drained his glass in a few gulps, gazed at the bottle longingly then set it firmly aside. ‘Duty completed, I shall return and enjoy this at my leisure. Meantime, I am sufficiently fortified.’

‘Where are you going?’ It was difficult to imagine what pressing task he had on hand at that time of the night.

‘I am in great debt to Miss Haynes. It is my wish—’

‘To Judith Haynes?’ I know I stared at him. ‘It was my understanding that you could with but difficulty look at her.’

‘In great debt,’ he said firmly. ‘It is my wish to discharge it, to clear the books, you might say. You understand?’

‘No. What I do understand is that it’s only three-forty-five. If this business has been outstanding, as you said, for so many years, surely it can wait just another few hours. Besides, Miss Haynes has been sick and shocked and she’s under sedatives. As her doctor, and whether she likes it or not, I am her doctor, I can’t permit it.’

‘And as a doctor, my dear fellow, you should understand the necessity for immediacy. I have worked myself up to this, screwed myself, as it were, to the sticking-point. Another few hours, as you say, and it may be too late. The Lonnie Gilbert you see before you will almost certainly have reverted to the bad old, cowardly old, selfish old, clay-souled Lonnie of yore, the Lonnie we all know so well. And then it will always be too late.’ He paused and switched his argument. ‘Sedatives, you say. How long do the effects of those last?’

‘Varies from person to person. Four hours, six hours, maybe as much as eight.’

‘Well, there you are then. Poor girl’s probably been lying awake for hours, just longing for some company, although not, in all likelihood, that of Lonnie Gilbert. Or has it escaped your attention that close on twelve hours have elapsed since you administered that sedative?’

It had. But what had not escaped my attention was that Lonnie’s relationship vis-à-vis Judith Haynes had been intriguing me considerably for some time. It might, I thought, be very helpful and, with regard to a deeper penetration of the fog of mystery surrounding us, more than a little constructive if I could learn something of the burden of what Lonnie had in mind to say to Judith Haynes. I said: ‘Let me go and see her. If she’s awake and I think she’s fit to talk, then OK.’

He nodded. I went to Judith Haynes’s room and entered without knocking. The oil lamp was turned up and she was awake, stretched out under the covers with only her face showing. She looked ghastly, which was the way I had expected her to look, with the titian hair emphasizing the drawn pallor of her face. The usually striking green eyes were glazed and lack-lustre and her cheeks were smudged and streaked with tears. She looked at me indifferently as I pulled up a stool, then looked as indifferently away.

‘I hope you slept well, Miss Haynes,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Do you usually come calling on patients in the middle of the night?’ Her voice was as dull as her eyes.

‘I don’t make a practice of it. But we’re taking turns keeping watch tonight, and this happens to be my turn. Is there anything that you want?’

‘No. Have you found out who killed my husband?’ She was so preternaturally calm, under such seemingly iron control, that I suspected it to be the prelude to another uncontrollable hysterical outburst.

‘No. Am I to take it from that, Miss Haynes, that you no longer think that young Allen did?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve been lying here for hours, just thinking, and I don’t think so.’ From the lifeless voice and the lifeless face I was pretty sure she was still under the influence of the sedative. ‘You will get him, won’t you? The man who killed Michael. Michael wasn’t as bad as people thought, Dr Marlowe, no, he really wasn’t.’ For the first time a trace of expression, just the weary suggestion of a smile. ‘I don’t say he was a kind man or a good one or a gentle one, for he wasn’t: but he was the man for me.’

‘I know,’ I said, as if I understood, which I only partially did. ‘I hope we get the man responsible. I think we will. Do you have any ideas that could help?’

‘My ideas are not worth much, Doctor. My mind doesn’t seem to be very clear.’

‘Do you think you could talk for a bit, Miss Haynes? It wouldn’t be too tiring?’

‘I am talking.’

‘Not to me. To Lonnie Gilbert. He seems terribly anxious to speak to you.’

‘Speak to me?’ Tired surprise but not outright rejection of the idea. ‘Why should Lonnie Gilbert wish to speak to me?’

‘I don’t know. Lonnie doesn’t believe in confiding in doctors. All I gather is that he feels that he’s done you some great wrong and he wants to say “sorry”. I think.’

‘Lonnie say “sorry” to me!’ Astonishment had driven the flat hopelessness from her voice. ‘Apologize to me? No, not to me.’ She was silent for a bit, then she said: ‘Yes, I’d very much like to see him now.’

I concealed my own astonishment as best I could, went back to the main cabin, told an equally astonished Lonnie that Judith Haynes was more than prepared to meet him, and watched him as he went along the passage, entered her room and closed the door behind him. I glanced at Luke. He appeared, if anything, to be more soundly asleep than ever, absurdly young to be in this situation, a pleased smile on his face: he was probably dreaming of golden discs. I walked quietly along the passage to Judith Haynes’s room: there was nothing in the Hippocratic oath against doctors listening at closed doors.

It was clear that I was going to have to listen very closely indeed for although the door was only made of bonded ply, the voices in the room were being kept low and I could hear little more than a confused murmur. I dropped to my knees and applied my ear to the keyhole. The audibility factor improved quite remarkably.

‘You!’ Judith Haynes said. There was a catch in her voice. I wouldn’t have believed her capable of any of the more kindly emotions. ‘You! To apologize to me! Of all people, you!’

‘Me, my dear, me. All those years, all those years.’ His voice fell away and I couldn’t catch his next few words. Then he said: ‘Despicable, despicable. For any man to go through life, nurturing the animosity, nay, my dear, the hatred—’ He broke off and there was silence for some moments. He went on: ‘No forgiveness, no forgiveness. I know he can’t—I know he couldn’t have been so bad, or even really bad at all, you loved him and no one can love a person who is bad all through, but even if his sins had been black as the midnight shades—’

‘Lonnie!’ The interruption was sharp, even forceful. ‘I know I wasn’t married to an angel, but I wasn’t married to any devil either.’

‘I know that, my dear, I know that. I was merely saying—’

‘Will you listen! Lonnie, Michael wasn’t in that car that night. Michael was never near that car.’

I strained for the answer but none came. Judith Haynes went on: ‘Neither was I, Lonnie.’

There was a prolonged silence, then Lonnie said in a voice so low that it was a barely heard whisper: ‘That’s not what I was told.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t, Lonnie. My car, yes. But I wasn’t driving it. Michael wasn’t driving it.’

‘But—you won’t deny that my daughters were— well, incapable, that night. And that you were too. And that you made them that way?’

‘I’m not denying anything. We all had too much to drink that night—that’s why I’ve never drunk since, Lonnie. I don’t know who was responsible. All I know is that Michael and I never left the house. Good God, do you think I have to tell you this—now that Michael is dead?’

‘No. No, you don’t. Then—then who was driving your car?’

‘Two other people. Two men.’

‘Two men. And you’ve been protecting them all those years?’

‘Protecting? No, I wouldn’t use the word “protecting”. Except inadvertently. No, I didn’t put that well, I mean—well, any protection given was just incidental to something else we really wanted. Our own selfish ends, I suppose you could call it. Everybody knows well enough that Michael and I— well, we were criminals but we always had an eye on the main chance.’

‘Two men.’ It was almost as if Lonnie hadn’t been listening to a word she’d said. ‘Two men. You must know them.’

Another silence, then she said quietly: ‘Of course.’

Once more an infuriating silence, I even stopped breathing in case I were to miss the next few words. But I wasn’t given the chance either to miss them or to hear them for a harsh and hostile voice behind me said: ‘What in the devil do you think you are doing here, sir?’

I refrained from doing what I felt like doing, which was to let loose with a few choice and uninhibited phrases, turned and looked up to find Otto’s massively pear-shaped bulk looming massively above me. His fists were clenched, his puce complexion had darkened dangerously, his eyes were glaring and his lips were clamped in a thin line that threatened to disappear at any moment.

‘You look upset, Mr Gerran,’ I said. ‘In point of fact, I was eavesdropping.’ I pushed myself to my feet, dusted off the knees of my trousers, straightened and dusted off my hands. ‘I can explain everything.’

‘I’m waiting for your explanation.’ He was fractionally more livid than ever. ‘It should be interesting, Dr Marlowe.’

‘I only said I can explain everything. Can, Mr Gerran. That doesn’t mean I’ve got any intention of explaining anything. Come to that, what are you doing here?’

‘What am I—what am I—?’ He spluttered into outraged speechlessness, the year’s top candidate for an instant coronary. ‘God damn your impudence, sir! I’m about to go on watch! What are you doing at my daughter’s door? I’m surprised you’re not looking through that keyhole, Marlowe, instead of listening at it!’

‘I don’t have to look through keyholes,’ I said reasonably. ‘Miss Haynes is my patient and I’m a doctor. If I want to see her I just open the door and walk in. Well, then, now that you’re on watch, I’ll be on my way. Bed. I’m tired.’

‘Bed! Bed! By God, I swear this, Marlowe, you’ll regret—who’s in there with her?’

‘Lonnie Gilbert.’

‘Lonnie Gilbert! What in the name of hell— stand aside, sir! Let me pass!’

I barred his way—physically. It was like stopping a small tank upholstered in Dunlopillo, but I had the advantage of having my back to the wall and he brought up a foot short of the door. ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you. They’re having a rather painful moment in there. Lost, one might say, in the far from sweet remembrance of things past.’

‘What the devil do you mean? What are you trying to tell me, you—you eavesdropper?’

‘I’m not trying to tell you anything. Maybe, though, you’d tell me something? Maybe you would like to tell me something about that car crash—I assume that it must have been in California—in which Lonnie Gilbert’s wife and two children were killed a long long time ago?’

He stopped being livid. He even stopped being his normal puce. Colour drained from his face to leave it ugly and mottled and stained with grey. ‘Car crash?’ He’d a much better control over his voice than he had over his complexion. ‘What do you mean, “car crash”, sir?’

‘I don’t know what I mean. That’s why I’m asking you. I heard Lonnie, just snippets, talking about his family’s fatal car crash, and as your daughter seemed to know something about it I assumed you would too.’

‘I don’t know what he’s talking about. Nor you.’ Otto, who seemed suddenly to have lost all his inquisitorial predilections, wheeled and walked up the passage to the centre of the cabin. I followed and walked to the outer door. Smithy was in for a hike, I thought, no doubt about it now. Although the cold was as intense as ever, the snow had stopped, the west wind dropped away to no more than an icily gentle breeze—the fact that we were now in the lee of the Antarcticfjell might have accounted for that—and there were quite large patches of star-studded sky all around. There was a curious lightness, a luminescence in the atmosphere, too much to be accounted for by the presence of stars alone. I walked out a few paces until I was clear of the main cabin, and low to the south I could see a three-quarter moon riding in an empty sky.

I went back inside and as I closed the door I saw Lonnie crossing the main living area, heading, I assumed, for his cubicle. He walked uncertainly, like a man not seeing too well, and as he went by close to me I could see that his eyes were masked in tears: I would have given a lot to know just what it was that had been responsible for those tears. It was a mark of Lonnie’s emotional upset that he did not so much as glance at the still three-quarter-full bottle of scotch on the small table by which Otto was sitting. He didn’t even so much as look at Otto: more extraordinarily still, Otto didn’t even look up at Lonnie’s passing. In the mood he’d been in when he’d accosted me outside his daughter’s door I’d have expected him to question Lonnie pretty closely, probably with both hands around the old man’s neck: but Otto’s mood, clearly, had undergone a considerable sea-change.

I was walking towards Luke, bent on rousing the faithful watchdog from his slumbers, when Otto suddenly heaved his bulk upright and made his way down the passage towards his daughter’s cubicle. I didn’t even hesitate, in for a penny, in for a pound. I followed him and took up my by now accustomed station outside Judith Haynes’s door, although this time I didn’t have to have resource to the keyhole again as Otto, in what was presumably his agitation, had left the door considerately ajar. Otto was addressing his daughter in a low harsh voice that was noticeably lacking in filial affection.

‘What have you been saying, you young she-devil? What have you been saying? Car crash? Car crash? What lies have you been telling Gilbert, you blackmailing little bitch?’

‘Get out of here!’ Judith Haynes had abandoned the use of her dull and expressionless voice, although probably involuntarily. ‘Leave me, you horrible, evil, old man. Get out, get out, get out!’

I leaned more closely to the crack between door and jamb. It wasn’t every day one had the opportunity to listen to those family tête-à-têtes.

‘By God, and I’ll not have my own daughter cross me.’ Otto had forgotten the need to talk in a low voice. ‘I’ve put up with more than enough from you and that other idle worthless bastard of a blackmailer. What you did—’

‘You dare to talk of Michael like that?’ Her voice had gone very quiet and I shivered involuntarily at the sound of it. ‘You talk of him like that and he’s lying dead. Murdered. My husband. Well, Father dear, can I tell you about something you don’t know that I know he was blackmailing you with? Shall I, Father dear? And shall I tell it to Johann Heissman too?’

There was a silence, then Otto said: ‘You venomous little bitch!’ He sounded as if he was trying to choke himself.

‘Venomous! Venomous!’ She laughed, a cracked and chilling sound. ‘Coming from you, that’s rich. Come now, Daddy dear, surely you remember 1938—why, even I can remember it. Poor old Johann, he ran, and ran, and ran, and all the time he ran the wrong way. Poor Uncle Johann. That’s what you taught me to call him then, wasn’t it, Daddy dear? Uncle Johann.’

I left, not because I had heard all that I wanted to hear but because I thought that this was a conversation that was not going to last very long and I could foresee a degree of awkwardness arising if Otto caught me outside his daughter’s door a second time. Besides—I checked the time—Jungbeck, Otto’s watch-mate, was due to make his appearance just at that moment and I didn’t want him to find me where I was and, very likely, lose no time in telling his boss about it. So I returned to Luke, decided that there was no point in awakening him only to tell him to go to sleep again, poured myself a sort of morning nightcap and was about to savour it when I heard a feminine voice scream ‘Get out, get out, get out’, and saw Otto emerging hurriedly from his daughter’s cubicle and as hurriedly close the door behind him. He waddled swiftly into the middle of the cabin, seized the whisky bottle without as much as by-your-leave— true, it was his own, but he didn’t know that— poured himself a brimming measure and downed half of it at a gulp, his shaking hand spilling a fair proportion of it on the way up to his mouth.

‘That was very thoughtless of you, Mr Gerran,’ I said reproachfully. ‘Upsetting your daughter like that. She’s really a very sick girl and what she needs is tender affection, a measure of loving care.’

‘Tender affection!’ He was on the second half of his glass now and he spluttered much of it over his shirt front. ‘Loving care! Jesus!’ He splashed some more scotch into his glass and gradually subsided a little. By and by he became calm, almost thoughtful: when he spoke no one would have thought that only a few minutes previously his greatest yearning in life would have seemed to be to disembowel me. ‘Maybe I wasn’t as thoughtful as I ought to have been. But a hysterical girl, very hysterical. This actress temperament, you know. I’m afraid your sedatives aren’t very effective, Dr Marlowe.’

‘People’s reactions to sedatives vary greatly, Mr Gerran. And unpredictably.’

‘I’m not blaming you, not blaming you,’ he said irritatedly. ‘Care and attention. Yes, yes. But some rest, a damned good sleep is more important, if you ask me. How about another sedative—a more effective one this time? No danger in that, is there?’

‘No. No harm in it. She did sound a bit—what shall we say?—worked up. But she’s rather a self-willed person. If she refuses—’

‘Ha! Self-willed! Try, anyway.’ He seemed to lose interest in the subject and gazed moodily at the floor. He looked up without any enthusiasm as Jungbeck made a sleepy entrance, turned and shook Luke roughly by the shoulder. ‘Wake up, man.’ Luke stirred and opened bleary eyes. ‘Bloody fine guard you are. Your watch is over. Go to bed.’ Luke mumbled some sort of apology, rose stiffly and moved off.

‘You might have let him be,’ I said. ‘He’ll have to get up for the day inside a few hours anyway.’

‘Too late now. Besides,’ Otto added inconsequentially, ‘I’m going to have the lot of them up inside two hours. Weather’s cleared, there’s a moon to travel by, we can all be where we want to be and ready to shoot as soon as there’s enough light in the sky.’ He glanced along the corridor where his daughter’s cubicle was. ‘Well, aren’t you going to try?’

I nodded and left. Ten minutes’ time—in the right circumstances which in this case were the wrong ones—can bring about a change in a person’s features which just lies within the bounds of credibility. The face that had looked merely drawn so very recently, now looked haggard: she looked her real age and then ten hard and bitter years after that. She wept in a sore and aching silence and the tears flowed steadily down her temples and past the earlobes, the damp marks spreading on the grey rough linen of her pillow. I would not have thought it possible that I could ever feel such deep pity for this person and wish to comfort her: but that was how it was. I said: ‘I think you should sleep now.’

‘Why?’ Her hands were clenched so tightly that the ivory of the knuckles showed. ‘What does it matter? I’ll have to wake up, won’t I?’

‘Yes, I know.’ It was the sort of situation where, no matter what I said, the words would sound banal. ‘But the sleep would do you good, Miss Haynes.’

‘Well, yes,’ she said. It was hard for her to speak through the quiet tears. ‘All right. Make it a long sleep.’

So, like a fool, I made it a long sleep. Like an even greater fool I went to my cubicle and lay down. And, like the greatest fool of all, I went to sleep myself.

I slept for over four hours and awoke to an almost deserted cabin. Otto had indeed been as good as his word and had had everyone up and around at what they must have regarded as the most unreasonable crack of dawn. Understandably enough, neither he nor anyone else had seen fit to wake me: I was one of the few who had no functions to perform that day.

Otto and Conrad were the only two people in the main quarter of the cabin. Both were drinking coffee, but as both were heavily muffled they were clearly on the point of departure. Conrad said a civil good morning. Otto didn’t bother. He informed me that the Count, Neal Divine, Allen, Cecil and Mary Darling had taken off with the Sno-Cat and cameras along Lerner’s Way and that he and Conrad were following immediately. Hendriks and the Three Apostles were abroad with their sound-recording equipment. Smithy and Heyter had left over an hour previously for Tunheim. Initially, I found this vaguely disturbing, I would have thought that Smithy would have at least woken and spoken to me before leaving. On reflection, however, I found this omission less than disturbing: it was a measure of Smithy’s confidence in himself and, by implication, my unspoken confidence in himself, that he had not thought it necessary to seek either advice or reassurance before his departure. Finally, Otto told me, Heissman and his hand-held camera, along with Jungbeck, had taken off on his location reconnaissance in the sixteen-foot work-boat: they had been accompanied by Goin, who had volunteered to stand in for the now absent Heyter.

Otto stood up, drained his cup and said: ‘About my daughter, Dr Marlowe.’

‘She’ll be all right.’ She would never again be all right.

‘I’d like to talk to her before I go.’ I couldn’t begin to imagine a reason why he should wish to talk to her or she to him, but I refrained from comment. He went on: ‘You have no objections? Medical ones, I mean?’

‘No. Just straightforward commonsense ones. She’s under heavy sedation. You couldn’t even shake her awake.’

‘But surely—’

‘Two or three hours at the very least. If you don’t want my advice, Mr Gerran, why ask for it?’

‘Fair enough, fair enough. Leave her be.’ He headed towards the outer door. ‘Your plans for the day, Dr Marlowe?’

‘Who’s left here?’ I said. ‘Apart from your daughter and myself?’

He looked at me, his brows levelled in a frown, then said: ‘Mary Stuart. Then there’s Lonnie, Eddie and Sandy. Why?’

‘They’re asleep?’

‘As far as I know. Why?’

‘Someone has to bury Stryker.’

‘Ah, yes, of course. Stryker. I hadn’t forgotten, you know, but—yes, of course. Yes, yes. You—?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am in your debt. A ghastly business, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly. Thank you again, Dr Marlowe.’ He waddled purposefully towards the door. ‘Come, Charles, we are overdue.’

They left. I poured myself some coffee but had nothing to eat for it wasn’t a morning for eating, went outside into the equipment shed and found myself a spade. The frozen snow was not too deep, not much more than a foot, but the permafrost had set into the ground and it cost me over an hour and a half and, what is always dangerous in those high latitudes, the loss of much sweat before I’d done what had to be done. I returned the spade and went inside quickly to change: it was a fine clear morning of bitter cold with the sun not yet in the sky, but no morning for an overheated man to linger.

Five minutes later, a pair of binoculars slung round my neck, I closed the front door softly behind me. Despite the fact that it was now close on ten o’clock, Eddie, Sandy, Lonnie and Mary Stuart had not as yet put in an appearance. The presence of the first three would have given me no cause for concern for all were notorious for their aversion to any form of physical activity and it was extremely unlikely that any would have suggested that they accompany me on my outing: Mary Stuart might well have done so, for any number of reasons: curiosity, the wish to explore, because she’d been told to keep an eye on me, even, maybe, because she would have felt safer with me than being left behind at the cabin. But whatever her reasons might have been I most definitely didn’t want Mary Stuart keeping an eye on me when I was setting out to keep an eye on Heissman.

But to keep an eye on Heissman I had first of all to find him, and Heissman, inconveniently and most annoyingly, was nowhere to be seen. The intention, as I had understood it, was that he, with Jungbeck and Goin, should cruise the Sor-hamna in the sixteen-footer, in search of likely background material. But there was no trace of their boat anywhere in the Sor-hamna, and from where I stood in the vicinity of the cabin I could take in the whole sweep of the bay at one glance. Against the remote possibility that the boat might have temporarily moved in behind one of the tiny islands on the east side of the bay I kept the glasses on those for a few minutes. Nothing stirred. Heissman, I was sure, had left the Sor-hamna.

He could have moved out to the open sea to the east by way of the northern tip of the island of Makehl, but this seemed unlikely. The northerly seas were white-capped and confused, and apart from the fact that Heissman was as far removed from the popular concept of an intrepid seaman as it was possible to imagine it seemed unlikely that he would have forgotten Smithy’s warning the previous day about the dangers inherent in taking an open-pooped boat out in such weather. Much more likely, I thought, he’d moved south out of the Sor-hamna into the sheltered waters of the next bay to the south, the Evjebukta.

I, too, made my way south. Initially, I moved in a southwesterly direction to give the low cliffs of the bay as wide a berth as possible, not from any vertiginous fear of heights but because Hendriks and the Three Apostles were down there somewhere recording, or hoping to record, the cries of the kittiwake gulls, the fulmars, the black guillemots which were reputed to haunt those parts: I had no reason to fear anything at their hands, I just didn’t want to go around arousing too much curiosity.

The going, diagonally upwards across a deceptively easy-looking slope, proved very laborious indeed. Mountaineering ability was not called for, which in view of my lack of expertise or anything resembling specialized equipment, was just as well: what was required was some form of in-built radar to enable me to detect the presence of hidden fissures and sudden dips in the smooth expanse of white, and in this, unfortunately, I was equally lacking, with the result that I fell abruptly and at fairly regular intervals into drifts of newly-formed snow that at times reached as high as my shoulders. There was no physical danger in this, the cushioning effect of newly-driven snow is almost absolute, but the effort of almost continuously extricating myself from those miniature ravines and struggling back up to something resembling terra firma—which even then had seldom less than twelve or fifteen inches of soft snow—was very wearing indeed. If it were so difficult for me to make progress along such relatively simple ground I wondered how Smithy and Heyter must be faring in the so much more wildly rugged mountainous terrain to the north.

It took me just on an hour and a half to cover less than a mile and arrive at a vantage point of a height of about five hundred feet that enabled me to see into the next bay—the Evjebukta. This wide U-shaped bay, stretching from Kapp Malmgren in the north-east to Kap Kolthoff in the south-west, was just over a mile in length and perhaps half of that in width: the entire coastline of the bay consisted of vertical cliffs, a bleak, forbidding and repellent stretch of grey water and precipitous limestone that offered no haven to those in peril on the sea.

I stretched out gratefully on the snow and, when the thumping of my heart and the rasping of my breathing had quietened sufficiently for me to hold a pair of binoculars steady, I used them to quarter the Evjebukta. It was completely bereft of life. The sun was up now, low over the southeastern horizon, but even although it was in my eyes, visibility was good enough and the resolution of the binoculars such that I could have picked up a sea-gull floating on the waters. There were some little islands to the north of the bay and, of course, there were the cliffs immediately below me that blocked off all view of what might be happening at their feet: but if the boat was concealed either behind an island or under the cliffs, it was most unlikely that Heissman would remain in such positions long for there would be nothing to detain him.

I looked south beyond the tip of Kapp Kolthoff and there, beyond the protection of the headland, the sun glinted off the broken tops of white water. I was as certain as one could be without absolute proof that they would not have ventured beyond the protection of the point: Heissman’s unseamanlike qualities apart, Goin was far too prudent a man to step unheedingly into anything that would even smack of danger.

How long I lay there waiting for the boat to appear either from behind an island or out from under the concealment of the nearest cliffs I didn’t know: what I did know was that I suddenly became aware of the fact that I was shaking with the cold and that both hands and feet were almost completely benumbed. And I became aware of something else. For several minutes now I’d had the binoculars trained not on the north end of the bay but at the foot of the cliffs to the south on a spot where, about three hundred yards north-west of the tip of Kapp Kolthoff, there was a peculiar indentation in the cliff walls. Partly because of the fact that it appeared to bear to the right and out of sight behind one of the cliff-faces guarding the entrance, and partly because, due to the height of the cliffs and the fact that the sun was almost directly behind, the shadows cast were very deep, I was unable to make out any details beyond this narrow entrance. But that it was an entrance to some cove beyond I didn’t doubt. Of any place within the reach of my binoculars it was the only one where the boat could have lain concealed: why anyone should wish to lie there at all was another matter altogether, a reason for which I couldn’t even guess at. One thing was for certain, a landward investigation from where I lay was out of the question: even if I didn’t break my neck in the minimum of the two-hour journey it would take me to get there, nothing would be achieved by making such a trip anyway, for not only did the descent of those beetling black cliffs seem quite suicidal but, even if it were impossibly accomplished, what lay at the end of it removed any uncertainty about the permanency of the awaiting reception: for there was no foreshore whatever, just the precipitous plunge of those limestone walls into the dark and icy seas.

Stiffly, clumsily, I rose and headed back towards the cabin. The trip back was easier than the outwards one for it was downhill, and by following my own tracks I was able to avoid most of the involuntary descents into the sunken snow-drifts that had punctuated my climb. Even so, it was nearer one o’clock than noon when I approached the cabin.

I was only a few paces distant when the main door opened and Mary Stuart appeared. One look at her and my heart turned over and something cold and leaden seemed to settle in the pit of my stomach. Dishevelled hair, a white and shocked face, eyes wild and full of fear, I’d have had to be blind not to know that somewhere, close, death had walked by again.

‘Thank God!’ Her voice was husky and full of tears. ‘Thank God you’re here! Please come quickly. Something terrible has happened.’

I didn’t waste time asking her what, clearly I’d find out soon enough, just followed her running footsteps into the cabin and along the passage to Judith Haynes’s opened door. Something terrible had indeed happened, but there had been no need for haste. Judith Haynes had fallen from her cot and was lying sideways on the floor, half-covered by her blanket which she’d apparently dragged down along with her. On the bed lay an opened and three parts empty bottle of barbiturate tablets, a few scattered over the bed: on the floor, its neck still clutched in her hand, lay a bottle of gin, also three-parts empty. I stooped and touched the marble forehead: even allowing for the icy atmosphere in the cubicle, she must have been dead for hours. Make it a long sleep, she’d said to me: make it a long sleep.

‘Is she—is she—?’ The dead make people speak in whispers.

‘Can’t you tell a dead person when you see one?’ It was brutal of me but I felt flooding into me that cold anger that was to remain with me until we’d left the island.

‘I—I didn’t touch her. I—’

‘When did you find her?’

‘A minute ago. Two. I’d just made some food and coffee and I came to see—’

‘Where are the others? Lonnie, Sandy, Eddie?’

‘Where are—I don’t know. They left a little while ago—said they were going for a walk.’

A likely tale. There was only one reason that would make at least two of the three walk as far as the front door. I said: ‘Get them. You’ll find them in the provisions shed.’

‘Provisions shed? Why would they be there?’

‘Because that’s where Otto keeps his scotch.’

She left. I put the gin bottle and barbiturate bottle to one side, then I lifted Judith Haynes on to the bed for no better reason than that it seemed cruel to leave her lying on the wooden floor. I looked quickly around the cubicle, but I could see nothing that could be regarded as untoward or amiss. The window was still screwed in its closed position, the few clothes that she had unpacked neatly folded on a small chair. My eye kept returning to the gin bottle. Stryker had told me and I’d overheard her telling Lonnie that she never drank, had not drunk alcohol for many years: an abstainer does not habitually carry around a bottle of gin just on the off-chance that he or she may just suddenly feel thirsty.

Lonnie, Eddie and Sandy came in, trailing with them the redolence of a Highland distillery, but that was the only evidence of their sojourn in the provision shed; whatever they’d been like when Mary had found them, they were shocked cold sober now. They just stood there, staring at the dead woman and saying nothing: understandably, I suppose, they thought there was nothing they could usefully say.

I said: ‘Mr Gerran must be informed that his daughter is dead. He’s gone north to the next bay. He’ll be easy to find—you’ve only got to follow the Sno-Cat’s tracks. I think you should go together.’

‘God love us all.’ Lonnie spoke in a hushed and anguished reverence. ‘The poor girl. The poor, poor lassie. First her man—and now this. Where’s it all going to end, Doctor?’

‘I don’t know, Lonnie. Life’s not always so kind, is it? No need to kill yourselves looking for Mr Gerran. A heart attack on top of this we can do without.’

‘Poor little Judith,’ Lonnie said. ‘And what do we tell Otto she died of? Alcohol and sleeping tablets—it’s a pretty lethal combination, isn’t it?’

‘Frequently.’

They looked at each other uncertainly, then turned and left. Mary Stuart said: ‘What can I do?’

‘Stay there.’ The harshness in my voice surprised me almost as much as it clearly surprised her. ‘I want to talk to you.’

I found a towel and a handkerchief, wrapped the gin bottle in the former and the barbiturate bottle in the latter. I had a glimpse of Mary watching me, wide-eyed, in what could have been wonder or fear or both, then crossed to examine the dead woman, to see whether there were any visible marks on her. There wasn’t much to examine— although she’d been in bed with blankets over her, she’d been fully clothed in parka and some kind of fur trousers. I didn’t have to look long. I beckoned Mary across and pointed to a tiny puncture exposed by pushing back the hair on Judith Haynes’s neck. Mary ran the tip of her tongue across dry lips and looked at me with sick eyes.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Murdered. How do you feel about that, Mary dear?’ The term was affectionate, the tone not.

‘Murdered!’ she whispered. ‘Murdered!’ She looked at the wrapped bottles, licked her lips again, made as if to speak and seemingly couldn’t.

‘There may be some gin inside her,’ I conceded. ‘Possibly even some barbiturate. I’d doubt it though—it’s very hard to make people swallow anything when they’re unconscious. Maybe there are no other fingerprints on the bottles— they could have been wiped off. But if we find only her forefinger and thumb round the neck— well, you don’t drink three-quarters of a bottle of gin holding it by the finger and thumb.’ She stared in fascinated horror at the pin-prick in the neck and then I let the hair fall back. ‘I don’t know, but I think an injection of an overdose of morphine killed her. How do you feel about it, Mary dear?’

She looked at me pitifully but I wasn’t wasting my pity on the living. She said: ‘That’s the second time you said that. Why did you say that?’

‘Because it’s partly your fault—and it may be a very large part—that she’s dead. Oh, and very cleverly dead, I assure you. I’m very good at finding those things out—when it’s too damn late. Rigged for suicide—only, I knew she never drank. Well?’

‘I didn’t kill her! Oh, God, I didn’t kill her! I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!’

‘And I hope to God you’re not responsible for killing Smithy too,’ I said savagely. ‘If he doesn’t come back, you’re first in line as accessory. After murder.’

‘Mr Smith!’ Her bewilderment was total and totally pathetic. And I was totally unmoved. She said: ‘Before God, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Of course not. And you won’t know what I’m talking about when I ask you what’s going on between Gerran and Heissman. How could you— a sweet and innocent child like you? Or you wouldn’t know what’s going on between you and your dear loveable Uncle Johann?’

She stared at me in a dumb animal-like misery and shook her head. I struck her. Even although I was aware that the anger that was in me was directed more against myself than at her, still it could not be contained and I struck her, and when she looked at me the way a favourite pet would look at a person who has shot it but not quite killed it, I lifted my hand again but this time when she closed her eyes and flinched away, turning her head to one side, I let my hand drop helplessly to my side, then did what I should have done in the first place, I put my arms around her and held her tight. She didn’t try to fight or struggle, just stood quite still. She had nothing left to fight with any more.

‘Poor Mary dear,’ I said. ‘You’ve got no place left to run to, have you?’ She made no answer, her eyes were still closed. ‘Uncle Johann is no more your uncle than I am. Your immigration papers state that your father and mother are dead. It is my belief that they are still alive and that Heissman is no more your mother’s brother than he is your uncle. It is my belief that he is holding them as hostage for your good conduct and that he is holding you as hostage for theirs. I don’t just think that Heissman is up to no good, I know he is, for I don’t just think he’s a criminal operating on an international scale, I know that too. I know that you’re not Latvian but strictly of German ancestry. I know too that your father ranked very highly in the Berlin councils of war.’ I didn’t know that at all, but it had become an increasingly safe guess. ‘And I know too that there’s a great deal of money involved, not in hard cash but in negotiable securities. All this is true, is it not?’

There was a silence then she said dully. ‘If you know so much, what’s the good in pretending any more.’ She pushed back a little and looked at me through defeated eyes. ‘You’re not a real doctor?’

‘I’m real enough, but not in the ordinary way of things, for which any patients I might have had would probably feel very thankful as I haven’t practised these past good few years. I’m just a civil servant working for the British Government, nothing glamorous or romantic like Intelligence or counter-intelligence, just the Treasury, which is why I’m here because we’ve been interested in Heissman’s shenanigans for quite some time. I didn’t expect to run into this other bus-load of trouble though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Too long to explain, even if I could. I can’t, yet. And I’ve things to do.’

‘Mr Smith?’ She hesitated. ‘From the Treasury too?’ I nodded and she went on: ‘I’ve been thinking that.’ She hesitated again. ‘My father commanded submarine groups during the war. He was also a high Party official, very high, I think. Then he disappeared—’

‘Where was his command?’

‘For the last year, the north—Tromso, Trondheim, Narvik, places like that, I’m not sure.’ I was, all of a sudden I was, I knew it had to be true.

I said: ‘Then disappearance. A war criminal?’ She nodded. ‘And now an old man?’ Another nod. ‘And amnestied because of age?’

‘Yes, just over two years ago. Then he came back to us—Mr Heissman brought us all together, I don’t know how.’

I could have explained Heissman’s special background qualifications for this very job, but it was hardly the moment. I said: ‘Your father’s not only a war criminal, he’s also a civil criminal—probably an embezzler on a grand scale. Yet you do all this for him?’

‘For my mother.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry too. I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve given you. Do you think my mother will be all right?’

‘I think so,’ I said, which, considering my recent disastrous record in keeping people alive, was a pretty rash statement on my part.

‘But what can we do? What on earth can we do with all those terrible things happening?’

‘It’s not what we can do. I know what to do. It’s what you are going to do.’

‘I’ll do anything. Anything you say. I promise.’

‘Then do nothing. Behave exactly as you’ve been behaving. Especially towards Uncle Johann. But never a word of our talk to him, never a word to anyone.’

‘Not even to Charles?’

‘Conrad? Least of all to him.’

‘But I thought you liked—’

‘Sure I do. But not half as much as our Charles likes you. He’d just up and clobber Heissman on the spot. I haven’t,’ I said bitterly, ‘been displaying very much cleverness or finesse to date. Give me this one last chance.’ I thought a bit about being clever, then said: ‘One thing you can do. Let me know if you see anyone returning here. I’m going to look around a bit.’

Otto had almost as many locks as I had keys. As befitted the chairman of Olympus Productions, the producer of the film and the de facto leader of the expedition he carried a great number of bits and pieces of equipment with him. Most of the belongings were personal and most of these clothes, for although Otto, because of his spherical shape, was automatically excluded from the list of the top ten best-dressed men, his sartorial aspirations were of the most soaring, and he carried at least a dozen suits with him although what he intended to do with them on Bear Island was a matter for conjecture. More interestingly, he had two small squat brown suitcases that served merely as cover for two metal deed-boxes.

Those were hasp-bound with imposing brass padlocks that a blind and palsied pick-lock could have opened in under a minute, and it didn’t take me much longer. The first contained nothing of importance, that was, to anyone except Otto: they consisted of hundreds of press clippings, no doubt carefully selected for the laudatory nature of their contents, and going back for twenty-odd years, all of them unanimous in extolling Otto’s cinematic genius: precisely the sort of ego-feeding nourishment that Otto would carry around with him. The second deed-box contained papers of a purely financial nature, recorded Otto’s transactions, incomes and outgoes over a number of years, and would have proved, I felt certain, fascinating reading for any Inland Revenue Inspector or law-abiding accountant, if there were any such around, but my interest in them was minimal: what did interest me though, and powerfully, was a collection of cancelled cheque-books, and as I couldn’t see that those were going to be of any use to Otto in the Arctic I pocketed them, checked that everything was as I had found it, and left.

Goin, as befitted the firm’s accountant, was also much given to keeping things under lock and key, but because the total of his impediments didn’t come to much more than a quarter of Otto’s, the search took correspondingly less time. Again as befitted an accountant, Goin’s main concern was clearly with matters financial, and as this coincided with my own current interest I took with me three items that I judged likely to be handsomely rewarding of more leisured study. Those were the Olympus Productions salary lists, Goin’s splendidly-padded private bank-book and a morocco diary that was full of items in some sort of private code but was nonetheless clearly concerned with money, for Goin hadn’t bothered to construct a code for the columns of pounds and pence. There was nothing necessarily sinister about this: concern for privacy, especially other people’s privacy, could be an admirable trait in an accountant.

In the next half-hour I went through four cubicles. In Heissman’s I found what I had expected to find, nothing. A man with his background and experience would have discovered many years ago that the only safe place to file his records was inside his head. But he did have some innocuous items—I supposed he had used them in the production of the Olympus manifesto for the film— which were of interest to me, several large-scale charts of Bear Island. One of those I took.

Neal Divine’s private papers revealed little of interest except a large number of unpaid bills, IOUs and a number of letters, all of them menacing in varying degrees, from an assortment of different bankers—a form of correspondence that went well with Divine’s nervous, apprehensive and generally down-trodden mien. At the bottom of an old-fashioned Gladstone in the Count’s room I found a small black automatic, loaded, but as an envelope beside it contained a current London licence for a gun this discovery might or might not have significance: the number of law-abiding people in law-abiding Britain who for divers law-abiding reasons consider it prudent to own a gun are, in their total, quite remarkable. In the cubicle shared by Jungbeck and Heyter I found nothing incriminating. But I was intrigued by a small brown paper packet, sealed, that I found in Jungbeck’s case. I took this into the main cabin where Mary Stuart was moving from window to window—there were four of them—keeping watch.

‘Nothing?’ I said. She shook her head. ‘Put on a kettle, will you.’

‘There’s coffee there. And some food.’

‘I don’t want coffee. A kettle—water—half an inch will do.’ I handed her the packet. ‘Steam this open for me, will you?’

‘Steam—what’s in it?’

‘If I knew that I wouldn’t ask you to open it.’

I went into Lonnie’s cubicle but it held nothing but Lonnie’s dreams—an album full of faded photographs. With few exceptions, they were of his family—clearly Lonnie had taken them himself. The first few showed a dark attractive girl with a wavy shoulder-length thirties hair-do holding two babies who were obviously twins. Later photographs showed that the two babies were girls. As the years had passed Lonnie’s wife, changing hairstyles apart, had changed remarkably little while the girls had grown up from page to page, until eventually they had become two rather beautiful youngsters very closely resembling their mother. In the last photograph, about two-thirds of the way through the album, all three were shown in white summer dresses of an unconscionable length leaning against a dark open roadster: the two girls would then have been about eighteen. I closed the album with that guilty and uncomfortable feeling you have when you stumble, however inadvertently, across another man’s private dreams.

I was crossing the passage to Eddie’s room when Mary called me. She had the package open and was holding the contents in a white handkerchief. I said: ‘That’s clever.’

‘Two thousand pounds,’ she said wonderingly. ‘All in new five-pound notes.’

‘That’s a lot of money.’ They were not only new, they were in consecutive serial number order. I noted down the first and last numbers, tracing would be automatic and immediate: somebody was being very stupid indeed or very confident indeed. This was one item of what might be useful evidence that I did not appropriate but locked up again, re-sealed, in Jungbeck’s case. When a man has that much money around he’s apt to check on its continued presence pretty frequently.

Neither Eddie’s nor Hendriks’s cubicles revealed any item of interest, while the only thing I learned from a brief glance at Sandy’s room was that he was just that modicum less scrupulous in obtaining his illicit supplies than Lonnie: Sandy stocked up on Otto’s scotch by the bottleful. The Three Apostles’ quarters I passed up: a search in there would, I was convinced, yield nothing. It never occurred to me to check on Conrad.

It was just after three o’clock, with the light beginning to fade from the sky, when I returned to the main cabin. Lonnie and the other two should have contacted Otto and the others a long time ago, their return, I should have thought, was considerably overdue. Mary, who had eaten—or said she had—gave me steak and chips, both of the frozen and pre-cooked variety, and I could see that she was worried. Heaven knew she had enough reason to be worried about a great number of things, but I guessed that her present worry was due to one particular cause.

‘Where on earth can they all be?’ she said. ‘I’m sure something must have happened to them.’

‘He’ll be all right. They probably just went farther than they intended, that’s all.’

‘I hope so. It’s getting dark and the snow’s starting—’ She broke off and looked at me in embarrassed accusation. ‘You’re very clever, aren’t you?’

‘I wish to God I were,’ I said, and meant it. I pushed my almost uneaten meal away and rose. ‘Thank you. Sorry, and it’s nothing to do with your cooking, but I’m not hungry. I’ll be in my room.’

‘It’s getting dark,’ she repeated inconsequentially.

‘I won’t be long.’

I lay on my cot and looked at my haul from the various cabins. I didn’t have to look long and I didn’t have to be possessed of any outstanding deductive powers to realize the significance of what I had before me. The salary lists were very instructive but not half so enlightening as the correspondence between Otto’s cheque-books and Goin’s bank-book. But the map—more precisely the detailed inset of the Evjebukta—was perhaps the most interesting of all. I was gazing at the map and having long, long thoughts about Mary Stuart’s father when Mary Stuart herself came into my room.

‘There’s someone coming.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. It’s too dark and there’s snow falling.’

‘What direction?’

‘That way.’ She pointed south.

‘That’ll be Hendriks and the Three Apostles.’ I wrapped the papers up into a small towel and handed them to her. ‘Hide those in your room.’ I turned my medical bag upside down, brought a small coach-screwdriver from my pocket and began to unscrew the four metal studs that served as floor-rests.

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you mind telling me—’

‘There are shameless people around who wouldn’t think twice of searching through a man’s private possessions. Especially mine. If I’m not here, that’s to say.’ I’d removed the base and now started working free the flat black metal box that had fitted so snugly into the bottom.

‘You’re going out.’ She said it mechanically, like one who is beyond surprise. ‘Where?’

‘Well, I’m not dropping in at the local, and that’s for sure.’ I took out the black box and handed it to her. ‘Careful. Heavy. Hide that too—and hide it well.’

‘But what—’

‘Hurry up. I hear them at the door.’

She hurried up. I screwed the base of the bag back in position and went into the main cabin. Hendriks and the Three Apostles were there and from the way they clapped their arms together to restore circulation and in between sipped the hot coffee that Mary had left on the stove, they seemed to be more than happy to be back. Their happiness vanished abruptly when I told them briefly of Judith Haynes’s death, and although, like the rest of the company, none of them had any cause to cherish any tender feelings towards the dead woman, the simple fact of the death of a person they knew and that this fresh death, suicide though it had been, had come so cruelly swiftly after the preceding murders, had the immediate effect of reducing them to a state of speechless shock, a state from which they weren’t even beginning to recover when the door opened and Otto lurched in. He was gasping for air and seemed close to exhaustion, although such symptoms of physical distress, where Otto was concerned, were not in themselves necessarily indicative of recent and violent exertion: even the minor labour of tying his shoe-laces made Otto huff and puff in an alarming fashion. I looked at him with what I hoped was a proper concern.

‘Now, now, Mr Gerran, you must take it easy,’ I said solicitously. ‘I know this has been a terrible shock to you—’

‘Where is she?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Where’s my daughter? How in God’s name—’

‘In her cubicle.’ He made to brush by me but I barred his way. ‘In a moment, Mr Gerran. But I must see first that—well, you understand?’

He stared at me under lowered brows, then nodded impatiently to show that he understood, which was more than I did, and said: ‘Be quick, please.’

‘Seconds only.’ I looked at Mary Stuart. ‘Some brandy for Mr Gerran.’

What I had to do in Judith Haynes’s cubicle took only ten seconds. I didn’t want Otto asking awkward questions about why I’d so lovingly wrapped up the gin and barbiturate bottles, so, holding them gingerly by the tops of the necks, I unwrapped them, placed them in reasonably conspicuous positions and summoned Otto. He hung around for a bit, looking suitably stricken and making desolate sounds, but offered no resistance when I took his arm, suggested that he was achieving nothing by remaining there and led him outside.

In the passage he said: ‘Suicide, of course?’

‘No doubt about that.’

He sighed. ‘God, how I reproach myself for—’

‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with, Mr Gerran. You saw how completely broken she was at the news of her husband’s death. Just plain, old-fashioned grief.’

‘It’s good to have a man like you around in times like these,’ Otto murmured. I met this in modest silence, led him back to his brandy and said: ‘Where are the others?’

‘Just a few minutes behind. I ran on ahead.’

‘How come Lonnie and the other two took so long to find you?’

‘It was a marvellous day for shooting. All background. We just kept moving on, every shot better than the last one. And then, of course, we had this damned rescue job. My God, if ever a location unit has been plagued with such ill luck—’

‘Rescue job?’ I hoped I sounded puzzled, that my tone didn’t reflect my sudden chill.

‘Heyter. Hurt himself.’ Otto lowered some brandy and shook his head to show the burden of woes he was carrying. ‘He and Smith were climbing when he fell. Ankle sprained or broken, I don’t know. They could see us coming along Lerner’s Way, heading more or less the way they’d gone, though they were much higher, of course. Seems Heyter persuaded Smith to carry on, said he’d be all right, he’d attract our attention.’ Otto shook his head and drained his brandy. ‘Fool!’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. I could hear the engine of the approaching Sno-Cat.

‘Instead of just lying there till we came within shouting distance he tried to hobble down the hill towards us. Of course his blasted ankle gave way— he fell into a gully and knocked himself about pretty badly. God knows how long he was lying there unconscious, it was early afternoon before we heard his shouts for help. A most damnable job getting him down that hill, just damnable. Is that the Sno-Cat out there?’

I nodded. Otto heaved himself to his feet and we went towards the front door together. I said: ‘Smithy? Did you see him?’

‘Smith?’ Otto looked at me in faint surprise. ‘No, of course not. I told you, he’d gone on ahead.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten.’

The door opened from the outside just as we reached it. Conrad and the Count entered, half-carrying a Heyter who could only hop on one leg. His head hung exhaustedly, his chin on his chest, and his pale face was heavily bruised on both the right cheek and temple.

We got him on to a couch and I eased off his right boot. The ankle was swollen and badly discoloured and bleeding slightly where the skin had been broken in several places. While Mary Stuart was heating some water, I propped him up, gave him some brandy, smiled at him in my most encouraging physician’s fashion, commiserated with him on his ill luck and marked him down for death.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Otto’s stocks of liquid cheer were taking a severe beating. It is a medical commonplace that there are those who, under severe stress, resort to the consumption of large quantities of food. Olympus Productions Ltd harboured none of those. The demand for food was non-existent, but, in a correspondingly inverse proportion, alcoholic solace was being eagerly sought, and the atmosphere in the cabin was powerfully redolent of that of a Glasgow public house when a Scottish soccer team has resoundingly defeated its ancient enemies from across the border. The sixteen people scattered around the cabin—the injured Heyter apart—showed no desire to repair to their cubicles, there was an unacknowledged and wholly illogical tacit assumption that if Judith Haynes could die in her cubicle anyone could. Instead, they sat scattered around in twos and threes, drinking silently or conversing in murmurs, furtive eyes forever moving around the others present, all deepening a cheerless and doom-laden air which stemmed not from Judith Haynes’s death but from what might or might not be yet another impending disaster: although it was close on seven now, with the darkness total and the snow falling steadily out of the north, Heissman, Goin and Jungbeck had not yet returned.

Otto, unusually, sat by himself, chewing on a cigar but not drinking: he gave the impression of a man who is wondering what fearsome blow fate now has in store for him. I had talked to him briefly some little time previously and he had given it as his morose and unshakable opinion that all three of them had been drowned: none of them, as he had pointed out, knew the first thing about handling a boat. Even if they managed to survive more than a few minutes in those icy waters, what hope lay for them if they did swim to shore? If they reached a cliff-face, their fingers would only scrabble uselessly against the smoothly vertical rock until their strength gave out and they slid under: if they managed to scramble ashore at some more accessible point, the icy air would reach through their soaked clothes to their soaked bodies and freeze them to death almost instantly. If they didn’t turn up, he said, and now he was sure they wouldn’t, he was going to abandon the entire venture and wait for Smithy to bring help, and if that didn’t come soon he would propose that the entire company strike out for the safety of Tunheim.

The entire company had momentarily fallen silent and Otto, looking across the cabin to where I was standing, gave a painful smile and said, as if in a desperate attempt to lighten the atmosphere: ‘Come, come, Dr Marlowe, I see you haven’t got a glass.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s wise.’

Otto looked around the cabin. If he was being harrowed by the contemplation of his rapidly dwindling stocks he was concealing his grief well. ‘The others seem to think it’s wise.’

‘The others don’t have to take into account the danger of exposing opened pores to zero temperatures.’

‘What?’ He peered at me. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that if Heissman, Jungbeck and Goin aren’t back here in a very few minutes I intend to take the fourteen-footer and go to look for them.’

‘What!’ This in a very different tone of voice. Otto hauled himself painfully to his feet as he always did when he was preparing to appear impressive. ‘Go to look for them? Are you mad, sir? Look for them, indeed. On a night like this, pitch dark, can’t see a hand in front of your nose. No, by God, I’ve already lost too many people, far too many. I absolutely forbid it.’

‘Have you taken into account that their engine may have just failed? That they’re just drifting helplessly around, freezing to death by the minute while we sit here doing nothing?’

‘I have and I don’t believe it possible. The boat engines were overhauled completely before our departure and I know that Jungbeck is a very competent mechanic. The matter is not to be contemplated.’

‘I’m going anyway.’

‘I would remind you that that boat is company property.’

‘Who’s going to stop me taking it?’

Otto spluttered ineffectually, then said: ‘You realize—’

‘I realize.’ I was tired of Otto. ‘I’m fired.’

‘You’d better fire me too then,’ Conrad said. We all turned to look at him. ‘I’m going along with him.’

I’d have expected no less from Conrad, he, after all, had been the one to initiate the search for Smithy soon after our landing. I didn’t try to argue with him. I could see Mary Stuart with her hand on his arm, looking at him in dismay: if she couldn’t dissuade him, I wasn’t going to bother to try.

‘Charles!’ Otto was bringing the full weight of his authority to bear. ‘I would remind you that you have a contract—’

‘——the contract,’ Conrad said.

Otto stared at him in disbelief, clamped his lips quite shut, wheeled and headed for his cubicle. With his departure everybody, it seemed, started to speak at the same time. I crossed to where the Count was moodily drinking the inevitable brandy. He looked up and gave me a cheerless smile.

‘If you want a third suicidal volunteer, my dear boy—’

‘How long have you known Otto Gerran?’

‘What’s that?’ He seemed momentarily at a loss, then quaffed some more brandy. ‘Thirty-odd years. It’s no secret. I knew him well in pre-war Vienna. Why do you—’

‘You were in the film business then?’

‘Yes and no.’ He smiled in an oddly quizzical fashion. ‘Again it’s on the record. In the halcyon days, my dear fellow, when Count Tadeusz Leszczynski—that’s me—was, if not exactly a name to be conjured with, at least a man of considerable means. I was Otto’s angel, his first backer.’ Again a smile, this time amused. ‘Why do you think I’m a member of the board?’

‘What do you know of the circumstances of Heissman’s sudden disappearance from Vienna in 1938?’

The Count stopped being amused. I said: ‘So that’s not on the record.’ I paused to see if he would say anything and when he didn’t I went on: ‘Watch your back, Count.’

‘My—my back?’

‘That part of the anatomy that’s so subject to being pierced by sharp objects or rapidly moving blunt ones. Or has it not occurred to you that the board of Olympus are falling off their lofty perches like so many stricken birds? One lying dead outside, another lying dead inside, and two more at peril or perhaps even perished on the high seas. What makes you think you should be so lucky? Beware the slings and arrows, Tadeusz. And you might tell Neal Divine and Lonnie to beware of the same things, at least while I’m gone. Especially Lonnie—I’d be glad if you made sure he doesn’t step outside this cabin in my absence. Very vulnerable things, backs.’

The Count sat in silence for some moments, his face not giving anything away, then he said: ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I never for a moment thought you would.’ I tapped the bulky pocket of his anorak ‘That’s where it should be, not lying about uselessly in your cabin.’

‘What, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Your 9 mm Beretta automatic.’

I left the Count on this suitably enigmatic note and moved across to where Lonnie was making hay while the sun shone. The hand that held his glass shook with an almost constant tremor and his eyes were glassy but his speech was as intelligible and lucid as ever.

‘And once again our medical Lochinvar or was it Launcelot gallops forth to the rescue,’ Lonnie intoned. ‘I can’t tell you, my dear boy, how my heart fills with pride—’

‘Stay inside when I’m gone, Lonnie. Don’t go beyond that door. Not once. Please. For me.’

‘Merciful heavens!’ Lonnie hiccoughed on a grand scale. ‘One would think I am in danger.’

‘You are. Believe me, you are.’

‘Me? Me?’ He was genuinely baffled. ‘And who would wish ill to poor old harmless Lonnie?’

‘You’d be astonished at the people who would wish ill to poor old harmless Lonnie. Dispensing for the moment with your homilies about the innate kindness of human nature, will you promise me, really promise me, that you won’t go out tonight?’

‘This is so important to you, then, my boy?’

‘It is.’

‘Very well. With this gnarled hand on a vat of the choicest malt—’

I left him to get on with what promised to be a very lengthy promise indeed and approached Conrad and Mary Stuart who seemed to be engaged in an argument that was as low-pitched as it was intense. They broke off and Mary Stuart put a beseeching hand on my arm. She said: ‘Please, Dr Marlowe. Please tell Charles not to go. He’ll listen to you, I know he will.’ She shivered. ‘I just know that something awful is going to happen tonight.’

‘You may well be right at that,’ I said. ‘Mr Conrad, you are not expendable.’

I could, I immediately realized, have lighted upon a more fortunate turn of phrase. Instead of looking at Conrad she kept looking at me and the implications of what I’d said dawned on me quite some time after they had clearly dawned on her. She put both hands on my arm, looked at me with dull and hopeless eyes, then turned and walked towards her cubicle.

‘Go after her,’ I said to Conrad. ‘Tell her—’

‘No point. I’m going. She knows it.’

‘Go after her and tell her to open her window and put that black box I gave her on the snow outside. Then close her window.’

Conrad looked at me closely, made as if to speak, then left. He was nobody’s fool, he hadn’t even given a nod that could have been interpreted as acknowledgment.

He was back within a minute. We pulled on all the outer clothes we could and furnished ourselves with four of the largest torches. On the way to the door, Mary Darling rose from where she was sitting beside a still badly battered Allen. ‘Dr Marlowe.’

I put my head to where I figured her ear lay behind the tangled platinum hair and whispered: ‘I’m wonderful?’

She nodded solemnly, eyes sad behind the huge horn-rimmed glasses, and kissed me. I didn’t know what the audience thought of this little vignette and didn’t much care: probably a last tender farewell to the good doctor before he moved out forever into the outer darkness. As the door closed behind us, Conrad said complainingly: ‘She might have kissed me too.’

‘I think you’ve done pretty well already,’ I said. He had the grace to keep silent. With our torches off we moved across to what shelter was offered from the now quite heavily falling snow by the provisions hut and remained there for two or three minutes until we were quite certain that no one had it in mind to follow us. Then we moved round the side of the main cabin and picked up the black box outside Mary Stuart’s window. She was standing there and I’m quite sure she saw us but she made no gesture or any attempt to wave goodbye: it seemed as if the two Marys had but one thought in common.

We made our way through the snow and the darkness down to the jetty, stowed the black box securely under the stern-sheets, started up the outboard—5½ horsepower only, but enough for a fourteen-footer—and cast off. As we came round the northern arm of the jetty Conrad said: ‘Christ, it’s as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. How do you propose to set about it?’

‘Set about what?’

‘Finding Heissman and company, of course.’

‘I couldn’t care if I never saw that lot again,’ I said candidly. ‘I’ve no intention of trying to find them. On the contrary, all our best efforts are going to be brought to bear to avoid them.’ While Conrad was silently mulling over this volte-face, I took the boat, the motor throttle right back for prudence’s sake, just over a hundred yards out until we were close into the northern shore of the Sor-hamna and cut the engine. As the boat drifted to a stop I went for’ard and eased anchor and rope over the side.

‘According to the chart,’ I said, ‘there are three fathoms here. According to the experts, that should mean about fifty feet of rope to prevent us from drifting. So, fifty feet. And as we’re against the land and so can’t be silhouetted, that should make us practically invisible to anyone approaching from the south. No smoking, of course.’

‘Very funny,’ Conrad said. Then, after a pause, he went on carefully: ‘Who are you expecting to approach from the south?’

‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’

‘All right, all right. So you don’t think there’s anything wrong with them?’

‘I think there’s a great deal wrong with them, but not in the sense you mean.’

‘Ah!’ There was a silence which I took to be a very thoughtful one on his part. ‘Speaking of Snow White.’

‘Yes?’

‘How about whiling away the time by telling me a fairy story?’

So I told everything I knew or thought I knew and he listened in complete silence throughout. When I finished I waited for comment but none came, so I said: ‘I have your promise that you won’t clobber Heissman on sight?’

‘Reluctantly given, reluctantly given.’ He shivered. ‘Jesus, it’s cold.’

‘It will be. Listen.’

At first faintly, intermittently, through the falling snow and against the northerly wind, came the sound of an engine, closing: within two minutes the exhaust beat was sharp and distinct. Conrad said: ‘Well, would you believe it. They got their motor fixed.’

We remained quietly where we were, bobbing gently at anchor and shivering in the deepening cold, as Heissman’s boat rounded the northern arm of the jetty and cut its engine. Heissman, Goin and Jungbeck didn’t just tie up and go ashore immediately, they remained by the jetty for over ten minutes. It was impossible to see what they were doing, the darkness and the snow made it impossible to see even the most shadowy outlines of their forms, but several times we could see the flickering of torch beams behind the jetty arm, several times I heard distinctly metallic thuds and twice I imagined I heard the splash of something heavy entering the water. Finally, we saw three pin-points of light move along the main arm of the jetty and disappear in the direction of the cabin.

Conrad said: ‘I suppose, at this stage, I should have some intelligent questions to ask.’

‘And I should have some intelligent answers. I think we’ll have them soon. Get that anchor in, will you?’

I started up the outboard again and, keeping it at its lowest revolutions, moved eastwards for another two hundred yards, then turned south until, calculating that the combination of distance and the northerly wind had taken us safely out of earshot of the cabin, I judged the moment had come to open the throttle to its maximum.

Navigating, if that was the word for it, was easier than I had thought it would be. We’d been out more than long enough now to achieve the maximum in night-sight and I had little difficulty in making out the coastline to my right: even on a darker night than this it would have been difficult not to distinguish the sharp demarcation line between the blackness of the cliffs and the snow-covered hills stretching away beyond them. Neither was the sea as rough as I had feared it might be: choppy, but no more than that, the wind could hardly have lain in a more favourable quarter than it did that night.

Kapp Malmgren came up close on the starboard hand and I turned the boat more to the southwest to move into the Evjebukta, but not too much, for although the cliffs were easily enough discernible, objects low in the water and lying against their black background were virtually undetectable and I had no wish to run the boat on to the islands that I had observed that morning in the northern part of the bay.

For the first time since we’d weighed anchor Conrad spoke. He was possessed of an exemplary patience. Clearing his throat, he said: ‘Is one permitted to ask a question?’

‘You’re even permitted to receive an answer. Remember those extraordinary stacks and pinnacles close by the cliffs when we were rounding the south of the island in the Morning Rose?’

‘Oh blessed memory,’ Conrad said yearningly.

‘No need for heartbreak,’ I said encouragingly. ‘You’ll be seeing her again tonight.’

‘What!’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘The Morning Rose?’

‘None other. That is to say, I hope. But later. Those stacks were caused by erosion, which in turn was caused by tidal streams, storm waves and frost—island used to be much bigger than it is now, bits of it are falling into the sea all the time. This same erosion also caused caves to form in the cliffs. But it formed something else—I knew nothing about it until this afternoon—which I think must be unique in the world. Two or three hundred yards in from the southern tip of this bay, a promontory called Kapp Kolthoff, is a tiny horseshoe-shaped harbour—I saw it through the binoculars this morning.’

‘You did?’

‘I was out for a walk. At the inner end of this harbour there is an opening, not just any opening, but a tunnel that goes clear through to the other side of Kapp Kolthoff. It must be at least two hundred yards in length. It’s called Perleporten. You have to have a large-scale map of Bear Island to find it. I got my hands on a large-scale map this afternoon.’

‘That length? Straight through? It must be man-made.’

‘Who the hell would spend a fortune tunnelling through two hundred yards of rock from A to B, when you can sail from A to B in five minutes? I mean, in Bear Island?’

‘It’s not very likely,’ Conrad said. ‘And you think Heissman and his friends may have been here?’

‘I don’t know where else they could have been. I looked every place I could look this morning in the Sor-hamna and in this bay. Nothing.’

Conrad said nothing, which was one of the things I liked about a man whom I was beginning to like very much. He could have asked a dozen questions to which there were as yet no answers, but because he knew there were none he refrained from asking them. The Evinrude kept purring along with reassuring steadiness and in about ten minutes I could see the outline of the cliffs on the south of the Evjebukta looming up. To the left, the tip of Kapp Kolthoff was clearly to be seen. I imagined I could see white breakers beyond.

‘There can’t possibly be anyone to see us,’ I said, ‘and we don’t need our night-sight any more. I know there are no islands in the vicinity. Headlamps would be handy.’

Conrad moved up into the bows and switched on two of our powerful torches. Within two minutes I could see the sheer of dripping black cliffs less than a hundred yards ahead. I turned to starboard and paralleled the cliffs to the north-west. One minute later we had it—the eastward facing entrance to a tiny circular inlet. I throttled the motor right back and moved gingerly inside and almost at once we had it—a small semi-circular opening at the base of the south cliff. It seemed impossibly small. We drifted towards it at less than one knot. Conrad looked back over his shoulder.

‘I’m claustrophobic’

‘Me too.’

‘If we get stuck?’

‘The sixteen-footer is bigger than this one.’

‘If it was here. Ah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.’

I crossed my mental fingers that Conrad would have cause to remember those words and eased the boat into the tunnel. It was bigger than it looked but not all that bigger. The waves and waters of countless æons had worn the rock walls as smooth as alabaster. Although it held a remarkably true direction almost due south it was clear, because of the varying widths and the varying heights of the tunnel roof, that the hand of man had never been near the Perleporten; then, suddenly, when Conrad called out and pointed ahead and to the right, that wasn’t so clear any more.

The opening in the wall, no more, really, than an indentation hardly distinguishable from one or two already passed, was, at its deepest, no more than six feet, but it was bounded by an odd flat shelf that varied from two to five feet in width. It looked as if it had been man-made, but then, there were so many curiously shaped rock formations in those parts that it might just possibly have resulted from natural causes. But there was one thing about that place that absolutely was in no way due to natural causes: a pile of grey-painted metal bars, neatly stacked in criss-cross symmetry.

Neither of us spoke. Conrad switched on the other two torches, pivoted their heads until they were facing upwards, and placed them all on the shelf, flooding the tiny area with light. Not without some difficulty we scrambled on to the shelf and looped the painter round one of the bars. Still without speaking I took the boat-hook and probed the bottom: it was less than five feet below the surface, and a very odd kind of rock it felt too. I guddled around some more, let the hook strike something at once hard and yielding and hauled it up. It was a half-inch chain, corroded in places, but still sound. I hauled some more and the end of another rectangular bar, identical in size to those on the shelf and secured to the chain by an eyebolt, came into sight. It was badly discoloured. I lowered chain and bar back to the bottom.

Still in this uncanny silence I took a knife from my pocket and tested the surface of one of the bars. The metal, almost certainly lead, was soft and yielding, but it was no more than a covering skin, there was something harder beneath. I dug the knifeblade in hard and scraped away an inch of the lead. Something yellow glittered in the lamp-light.

‘Well, now,’ Conrad said. ‘Jackpot, I believe, is the technical term.’

‘Something like that.’

‘And look at this.’ Conrad reached behind the pile of bars and brought up a can of paint. It was labelled ‘Instant Grey’.

‘It seems to be very good stuff,’ I said. I touched one of the bars. ‘Quite dry. And, you must admit, quite clever. You saw off the eye-bolt, paint the whole lot over, and what do you have?’

‘A ballast bar identical in size and colour to the ballast bars in the mock-up sub.’

‘Ten out of ten,’ I said. I hefted one of the bars. ‘Just right for easy handling. A forty-pound ingot.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s my Treasury training. Current value—say thirty thousand dollars. How many bars in that pile, would you say?’

‘A hundred. More.’

‘And that’s just for starters. Bulk is almost certainly still under water. Paint-brushes there?’

‘Yes.’ Conrad reached behind the pile but I checked him.

‘Please not,’ I said. ‘Think of all those lovely fingerprints.’

Conrad said slowly: ‘My mind’s just engaged gear again.’ He looked at the pile and said incredulously: ‘Three million dollars?’

‘Give or take a few per cent.’

‘I think we’d better leave,’ Conrad said. ‘I’m coming all over avaricious.’

We left. As we emerged into the little circular bay we both looked back at the dark and menacing little tunnel. Conrad said: ‘Who discovered this?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Perleporten. What does that mean?’

‘The gates of Pearl.’

‘They came pretty close at that.’

‘It wasn’t a bad try.’ The journey back was a great deal more unpleasant than the outward one had been, the seas were against us, the icy wind and the equally icy snow were in our faces, and because of the same snow the visibility was drastically reduced. But we made it inside an hour. Almost literally frozen stiff but at the same time contradictorily shaking with the cold, we tied the boat up. Conrad clambered up on to the jetty. I passed him the black box, cut about thirty feet off the boat’s anchor rope and followed. I built a rope cradle round the box, fumbled with a pair of catches and opened a hinged cover section which comprised a third of the top plate and two-thirds of a side plate. In the near total darkness switches and dials were less than half-seen blurs, but I didn’t need light to operate this instrument, which was a basically very simple affair anyway. I pulled out a manually operated telescopic aerial to its fullest extent and turned two switches. A dim green light glowed and a faint hum, that couldn’t have been heard a yard away, came from the box.

‘I always think it’s so satisfactory when those little toys work,’ Conrad said. ‘But won’t the snow gum up the works?’

‘This little toy costs just over a thousand pounds. You can immerse it in acid, you can boil it in water, you can drop it from a four-storey building. It still works. It’s got a little sister that can be fired from a naval gun. I don’t think a little snow will harm, do you?’

‘I wouldn’t think so.’ He watched in silence as I lowered the box, pilot light facing the stonework, over the south arm of the pier, secured the rope to a bollard, made it fast round its base and concealed it with a scattering of snow. ‘What’s the range?’

‘Forty miles. It won’t require a quarter of that tonight’

‘And it’s transmitting now?’

‘It’s transmitting now.’

We moved back to the main arm of the pier, brushing footmarks away with our gloves. I said: ‘I wouldn’t think they would have heard us coming back, but no chances. A weather eye, if you please.’

I was down inside the hull of the mock-up sub and had rejoined Conrad inside two minutes. He said: ‘No trouble?’

‘None. The two paints don’t quite match. But you’d never notice it unless you were looking for it.’

We were not greeted like returning heroes. It would not be true to say that our return, or our early return, was greeted with anything like disappointment, but there was definitely an anticlimactic air to it; maybe they had already expended all their sympathies on Heissman, Jungbeck and Goin, who had claimed, predictably enough, that their engine had broken down in the late afternoon. Heissman thanked us properly enough but there was a faint trace of amused condescension to his thanks that would normally have aroused a degree of antagonism in me were it not for the fact that my antagonism towards Heissman was already so total that any deepening of it would have been quite impossible. So Conrad and I contented ourselves with making a show of expressing our relief to find the three voyagers alive while not troubling very much to conceal our chagrin. Conrad especially, was splendid at this: clearly, he had a considerable future as an actor.

The atmosphere in the cabin was almost unbearably funereal. I would have thought that the safe return of five of their company might have been cause for some subdued degree of rejoicing, but it may well have been that the very fact of our being alive only heightened the collective awareness of the dead woman lying in her cubicle. Heissman tried to tell us about the marvellous backgrounds he had found that day and I couldn’t help reflecting that he was going to have a most hellishly difficult job in setting up camera and sound crews within the extraordinarily restrictive confines of the Perleporten tunnel: Heissman desisted when it became clear that no one was listening to him. Otto made a half-hearted attempt to establish some kind of working relationship with me and even went to the length of pressing some scotch upon me, which I accepted without thanks but drank nevertheless. He tried to make some feebly jocular remark about open pores and it being obvious that I didn’t intend venturing forth again that night, and I didn’t tell him, not just yet, that I did indeed intend to venture forth again that night but that as my proposed walk would take me no farther than the jetty it was unlikely that all the open pores in the world would incapacitate me.

I looked at my watch. Another ten minutes, no more. Then we would all go for that little walk, the four directors of Olympus Productions, Lonnie and myself. Just the six of us, no more. The four directors were already there and, given the time Lonnie normally took to regain contact with reality after a prolonged session with the only company left in the world that gave him any solace, it was time that he was here also. I went down the passage and into his cabin.

It was bitterly cold in there because the window was wide open, and it was wide open because that was the way that Lonnie had elected to leave his cubicle, which was quite empty. I picked up a torch that was lying by the rumpled cot and peered out of the window. The snow was still falling and steadily but not so heavily as to obscure the tracks that led away from the window. There were two sets of tracks. Lonnie had been persuaded to leave: not that he would have required much persuasion.

I ignored the curious looks that came my way as I went quickly through the main cabin and headed for the provisions hut. Its door was open but Lonnie was not there either. The only sure sign that he had been there was a half-full bottle of scotch with its screw-top off. So much for Lonnie and his mighty oath taken with his hand on a vat of the choicest malt.

The tracks outside the hut were numerous and confused: it was clear that my chances of isolating and following any particular set of those was minimal. I returned to the cabin and there was no lack of immediate volunteers for the search: Lonnie had never made an unwitting enemy in his life.

It was the Count who found him, inside a minute, face down in a deep drift behind the generator shed. He was already shrouded in white, so he must have been lying there for some time. He was clad in only shirt, pullover, trousers and what appeared to be a pair of ancient carpet slippers. The snow beside his head was stained yellow where the contents—or part of the contents—of yet another bottle, still clutched in his right hand, had been spilt.

We turned him over. If ever a man looked like a dead man it was Lonnie. His skin was ice-cold to the touch, his face the colour of old ivory, his glazed unmoving eyes were open to the falling snow, and there was no rise and fall to his chest, but on the off-chance that there might just be some substance in the old saw that a special providence looks after little children and drunks, I put my ear to his chest and thought I detected a faint and far-off murmur.

We carried him inside and laid him out on his cot. While oil heaters, hot-water bags and heated blankets were being brought in or prepared— apart from the general esteem in which Lonnie was held, everyone seemed almost pathetically eager to contribute to something constructive—I used my stethoscope and established that he did indeed have a heart-beat if such a term could be applied to something as weak and as fluttering as the wings of a wounded captive bird. I thought briefly of a heart stimulant and brandy and dismissed both ideas, both, in his touch-and-go condition, were as likely to kill him off as to have any good effect. So we just concentrated on heating up the frozen and lifeless-seeming body as quickly as possible, while four people continuously massaged ominously white feet and hands to try to restore some measure of circulation.

Fifteen minutes after we’d first found him he was perceptibly breathing again, a shallow and gasping fight for air, but breathing nevertheless. He was now as warm as artificial aids could make him, so I thanked the others and told them they could go: I asked the two Marys to stay behind as nurses, because I couldn’t stay myself: by my watch, I was already ten minutes late.

Lonnie’s eyes moved. No other part of him did, but his eyes moved. After a few moments they focused blearily on me: he was as conscious as he was likely to be for a long time.

‘You bloody old fool!’ I said. It was no way to talk to a man with one foot still halfway through death’s door, but it was the way I felt. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Aha!’ His voice was a far-off whisper.

‘Who took you out of here? Who gave you the drink?’ I was aware that the two Marys had at first stared at me, then at each other, but the time was gone when it mattered what anyone thought.

Lonnie’s lips moved soundlessly a few times. Then his eyes flickered shiftily and he gave a drunken cackle, no more than a faint rasping sound deep in his throat. ‘A kind man,’ he whispered weakly. ‘Very kind man.’

I would have shaken him except for the fact that I would certainly have shaken the life out of him. I restrained myself with a considerable effort and said: ‘What kind man, Lonnie?’

‘Kind man,’ he muttered. ‘Kind man.’ He lifted one thin wrist and beckoned. I bent towards him. ‘Know something?’ His voice was a fading murmur.

‘Tell me, Lonnie.’

‘In the end—’ His voice trailed away.

‘Yes, Lonnie?’

He made a great effort. ‘In the end—’ there was a long pause, I had to put my ear to his mouth— ‘in the end, there’s only kindness.’ He lowered his waxen eyelids.

I swore and I kept on swearing until I realized that both girls were staring at me with shocked eyes, they must have thought that I was swearing at Lonnie. I said to Mary Stuart: ‘Go to Conrad— Charles. Tell him to tell the Count to come to my cubicle. Now. Conrad will know how to do it.’

She left without a question. Mary Darling said to me: ‘Will Lonnie live, Dr Marlowe?’

‘I don’t know, Mary.’

‘But—but he’s quite warm now—’

‘It won’t be exposure that will kill him, if that’s what you mean.’

She looked at me, the eyes behind the hornrims at once earnest and scared. ‘You mean—you mean he might go from alcoholic poisoning?’

‘He might. I don’t know.’

She said, with a flash of that almost touching asperity that could be so characteristic of her: ‘You don’t really care, do you, Dr Marlowe?’

‘No, I don’t.’ She looked at me, the pinched face shocked, and I put my arm round the thin shoulders. ‘I don’t care, Mary, because he doesn’t care. Lonnie’s been dead a long time now.’

I went back to my cubicle, found the Count there and wasted no words. I said: ‘Are you aware that that was a deliberate attempt on Lonnie’s life?’

‘No. But I wondered.’ The Count’s customary cloak of badinage had fallen away completely.

‘Do you know that Judith Haynes was murdered?’

‘Murdered!’ The Count was badly shaken and there was no pretence about it either.

‘Somebody injected her with a lethal dose of morphine. Just for good measure, it was my hypodermic, my morphine.’ He said nothing. ‘So your rather illegal bullion hunt has turned out to be something more than fun and games.’

‘Indeed it has.’

‘You know you have been consorting with murderers?’

‘I know now.’

‘You know now. You know what interpretation the law will put on that?’

‘I know that too.’

‘You have your gun?’ He nodded. ‘You can use it?’

‘I am a Polish count, sir.’ A touch of the old Tadeusz.

‘And very impressive a Polish count should look in a witness-box too,’ I said. ‘You are aware, of course, that your only hope is to turn Queen’s Evidence?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know that too.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Mr Gerran,’ I said, ‘I’d be grateful if you, Mr Heissman, Mr Goin and Tadeusz here would step outside with me for a moment.’

‘Step outside?’ Otto looked at his watch, his three fellow directors, his watch again and me in that order. ‘On a night like this and at an hour like this? Whatever for?’

‘Please.’ I looked at the others in the cabin. ‘I’d also be grateful if the rest of you remained here, in this room, till I return. I hope I won’t be too long. You don’t have to do as I ask and I’m certainly in no position to enforce my request, but I suggest it would be in your own best interests to do so. I know now, I’ve known since this morning, who the killer amongst us is. But before I put a name to this man I think it is only fair and right that I should first discuss the matter with Mr Gerran and his fellow directors.’

This brief address was received, not unsurprisingly, in total silence. Otto, predictably, was the one to break the silence: he cleared his throat and said carefully: ‘You claim to know this man’s identity?’

‘I do.’

‘You can substantiate this claim?’

‘Prove it, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘Ah!’ Otto said significantly. He looked around the company and said: ‘You’re taking rather much upon yourself, are you not?’

‘In what way?’

‘This rather dictatorial attitude you’ve been increasingly adopting. Good God, man, if you’ve found, or think you’ve found our man, for God’s sake tell us and don’t make this big production out of it. It ill becomes any man to play God, Dr Marlowe, I would remind you that you’re but one of a group, an employee, if you like, of Olympus Productions, just like—’

‘I am not an employee of Olympus Productions. I am an employee of the British Treasury who has been sent to investigate certain aspects of Olympus Productions Ltd. Those investigations are now completed.’

Otto over-reacted to the extent that he let his jaw drop. Goin didn’t react much but his smooth and habitually bland face took on a wary expression that was quite foreign to it. Heissman said incredulously: ‘A Government agent! A secret service—’

‘You’ve got your countries mixed up. Government agents work for the US Treasury, not the British one. I’m just a civil servant and I’ve never fired a pistol in my life, far less carried one. I have as much official power as a postman or a Whitehall clerk. No more. That’s why I’m asking for cooperation.’ I looked at Otto. ‘That’s why I’m offering you what I regard as the courtesy of a prior consultation.’

‘Investigations?’ Clearly, I’d lost Otto at least half a minute previously. ‘What kind of investigations? And how does it come that a man hired as doctor—’ Otto broke off, shaking his head in the classic manner of one baffled beyond all hope of illumination.

‘How do you think it came that none of the seven other applicants for the post of medical officer turned up for an interview? They don’t teach us much about manners in medical school but we’re not as rude as that. Shall we go?’

Goin said calmly: ‘I think, Otto, that we should hear what he has to say.’

‘I think I’d like to hear what you have to say too,’ Conrad said. He was one of the very few in the cabin who wasn’t looking at me as if I were some creature from outer space.

‘I’m sure you would. However, I’m afraid you’ll have to remain. But I would like a private word with you, if I may.’ I turned without waiting for an answer and made for my cubicle. Otto barred my way.

‘There’s nothing you can have to say to Charles that you can’t say to all of us.’

‘How do you know?’ I brushed roughly by him and closed the door when Conrad entered the cubicle. I said: ‘I don’t want you to come for two reasons. If our friends arrive, they may miss me down at the jetty and come straight here—I’d like you in that case to tell them where I am. More importantly, I’d like you to keep an eye on Jungbeck. If he tries to leave, try to reason with him. If he won’t listen to reason, let him go—about three feet. If you can just kind of naturally happen to have a full bottle of scotch or suchlike in your hand at the time, then clobber him with all you have. Not on the head—that would kill him. On the shoulder, close in to the neck. You’ll probably break the odd bone: in any event it will surely incapacitate him.’

Conrad didn’t as much as raise an eyebrow. He said: ‘I can see why you don’t bother with guns.’

‘Socially and otherwise,’ I said, ‘a bottle of scotch is a great leveller.’

I’d taken a Coleman storm lantern along with me and now hung it on a rung of the vertical iron ladder leading down from the conning-tower to the interior of the submarine mock-up: its harsh glare threw that icily dank metallic tomb into a weirdly heterogeneous mélange of dazzling white and inkily black geometrical patterns. While the others watched me in a far from friendly silence, I unscrewed one of the wooden floor battens, lifted and placed a ballast bar on top of the compressor and scraped at the surface with the blade of my knife.

‘You will observe,’ I said to Otto, ‘that I am not making a production of this. Prologues dispensed with, we arrive at the point without waste of time.’ I closed my knife and inspected the handiwork it had wrought. ‘All that glitters is not gold. But does this look like toffee to you?’

I looked at them each in turn. Clearly, it didn’t look like toffee to any of them.

‘A total lack of reaction, a total lack of surprise.’ I put my knife back in my pocket and smiled at the stiffening attitudes of three out of the four of them. ‘Scout’s honour, we civil servants never carry guns. And why should there be surprise even at the fact of my knowledge—all four of you have been perfectly well aware for some time that I am not what I was engaged to be. And why should any of you express surprise at the sight of this gold—after all, that was the only reason for your coming to Bear Island in the first place.’

They said nothing. Curiously enough, they weren’t even looking at me, they were all looking at the gold ingot as if it were vastly more important than I was, which, from their point of view, was probably a perfectly understandable priority preference.

‘Dear me, dear me,’ I said. ‘Where are all the instant denials, the holier-than-thou clutching of the hearts, the outraged cries of “What in God’s name are you talking about?”. I would think, wouldn’t you, that the unbiased observer would find this negative reaction every bit as incriminating as a written confession?’ I looked at them with what might have been interpreted as an encouraging expression, but again—apart from Heissman’s apparently finding it necessary to lubricate his lower lip with the tip of his tongue—I elicited no response, so I went on: ‘It was, as even your defending counsel will have to admit in court, a clever and well thought-out scheme. Would any of you care to tell me what the scheme was?’

‘It is my opinion, Dr Marlowe,’ Otto said magisterially, ‘that the strain of the past few days has made you mentally unbalanced.’

‘Not a bad reaction at all,’ I said approvingly. ‘Unfortunately, you’re about two minutes too late in coming up with it. No volunteers to set the scene, then? Do we suffer from an excess of modesty or just a lack of co-operation? Wouldn’t you, for instance, Mr Goin, care to say a few words? After all, you are in my debt. Without me, without our dramatic little confrontation, you’d have been dead before the week was out.’

‘I think Mr Gerran is right,’ Goin said in that measured voice he knew so well how to use. ‘Me? About to die?’ He shook his head. ‘The strain for you must have been intolerable. Under such circumstances, as a medical man, you should know that a person’s imagination can easily—’

‘Imagination? Am I imagining this forty-pound gold ingot?’ I pointed to the ballast bars below the battens. ‘Am I imagining those other fifteen ingots there? Am I imagining the hundred-odd ingots piled on a rock shelf inside the Perleporten? Am I imagining the fact that your total lack of reaction to the word Perleporten demonstrates beyond question that you all know what Perleporten is, where it is and what its significance is? Am I imagining the scores of other lead-sheathed ingots still under water in the Perleporten? Let’s stop playing silly little games for your own game is up. As I say, quite a clever little game while it lasted. What better cover for a bullion-recovery trip to the Arctic than a film unit—after all, film people are widely regarded as being eccentric to the extent of being lunatic so that even their most ludicrous behaviour is accepted as being normal within its own abnormal context? What better time to set out to achieve the recovery of this bullion than when there are only a few hours’ daylight so that the recovery operation can be carried out through the long hours of darkness? What better way of bringing the bullion back to Britain than by switching it with this vessel’s ballast so that it can be slipped into the country under the eyes of the Customs authorities?’ I surveyed the ballast. ‘Four tons, according to this splendid brochure that Mr Heissman wrote. I’d put it nearer five. Say ten million dollars. Justifies a trip to even an out-of-the-way resort like Bear Island, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’

They wouldn’t say anything.

‘By and by,’ I went on, ‘you’d probably have manufactured some excuse for towing this vessel down to Perleporten so as to make the transshipment of the gold all that easier. And then heigh-ho for Merry England and the just enjoyment of the fruits of your labours. Could I be wrong?’

‘No.’ Otto was very calm. ‘You’re right. But I think you’d find it very hard to make a criminal case out of this. What could we possibly be charged with? Theft? Ridiculous. Finders, keepers.’

‘Finders, keepers? A few miserable tons of gold? Your ambitions are only paltry, you’re only skimming the surface of the available loot. Isn’t that so, Heissman?’

They all looked at Heissman. Heissman, in turn, didn’t appear particularly anxious to look at anyone.

‘Why do you silly people think I’m here?’ I said. ‘Why do you think that, in spite of the elaborate smoke-screen you set up, the British Government not only knew that you were going to Bear Island but also knew that your purpose in going there was not as advertised? Don’t you know that, in certain matters, European governments co-operate very closely? Don’t you know that most of them share a keen interest in the activities of Johann Heissman? For what you don’t know is that most of them know a great deal more about Johann Heissman than you do. Perhaps, Heissman, you’d like to tell them yourself—starting, shall we say, with the thirty-odd years you’ve been working for the Soviet government?’

Otto stared at Heissman, his huge jowls seeming to fall apart. Goin’s facial muscles tightened until the habitual smooth blandness had vanished from his face. The Count’s expression didn’t change, he just nodded slowly as if understanding at last the solution of a long-standing problem. Heissman looked acutely unhappy.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘as Heissman doesn’t appear to have any intention of telling anyone anything, I suppose that leaves it up to me. Heissman, here, is a remarkably gifted specialist in an extremely specialized field. He is, purely and simply, a treasure-hunter, and there’s no one in the business who can hold a candle to him. But he doesn’t just hunt for the type of treasure that you people think he does: I fear he may have been deceiving you on this point, as, indeed, he has been deceiving you on another. I refer to the fact that a pre-condition of his cutting you into a share of the loot was that his niece, Mary Stuart, be employed by Olympus Productions. Having the nasty and suspicious minds that you do, you probably and rapidly arrived at the conclusion that she wasn’t his niece at all—which she isn’t— and was along for some other purposes—which she is. But not for the purposes which your nasty and suspicious minds attributed to her. For Heissman, Miss Stuart was essential for the achievement of an entirely different purpose which he kind of forgot to tell you about.

‘Miss Stuart’s father, you have to understand, was just as unscrupulous and unprincipled a rogue as any of you. He held very senior positions in both the German Navy and the Nazi Party and, like others similarly placed, used his power to feather his own nest—just as Hermann Goering did—when the war was seen to be lost, although he was smarter than Goering and managed to get out from under before the war-criminal roundup. The gold, although this will probably never be proved, almost certainly came from the vaults of Norwegian banks, and a man with all the resources of the German Navy behind him would have had no trouble in choosing such a splendidly isolated spot as Perleporten in Bear Island and having the stuff transferred there. Probably by submarine. Not that it matters.

‘But it wasn’t just the gold that was transported to Perleporten, which is why Mary Stuart is here. Feathers weren’t enough for Dad’s nest, nothing less than swansdown would do. The swansdown almost certainly took the form of either bank bonds or securities, probably obtained—I wouldn’t say purchased—in the late thirties. Such securities are perfectly redeemable even today. An attempt was recently made to sell £30 millions’ worth of such securities through foreign exchange, but the West German Federal Bank wouldn’t play ball because proper owner-identification was lacking. But there wouldn’t be any problem about owner-identification this time, would there, Heissman?’

Heissman didn’t say whether there would or there wouldn’t.

‘And where are they?’ I said. ‘Nicely welded up in a dummy steel ingot?’ As he still wasn’t being very forthcoming, I went on: ‘No matter, we’ll have them. And then you’re never going to have the pleasure of seeing Mary Stuart’s father put his signature and fingerprints on those documents and of checking that they match up.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ Heissman said. He had recovered his normal degree of composure, which meant that he was very composed indeed.

‘In a changing world like ours who can be sure of anything? But with that proviso, yes.’

‘I think you’ve overlooked something.’

‘I have?’

‘Yes. We have Admiral Hanneman.’

‘That’s Miss Stuart’s father’s true name?’

‘You didn’t even know that?’

‘No. It’s of no relevance. And no, I haven’t overlooked that fact. I shall attend to that matter shortly. After I have attended to your friends. Maybe that’s the wrong word, maybe they’re not your friends any more. I mean, they don’t look particularly friendly, do they?’

‘Monstrous!’ Otto shouted. ‘Absolutely monstrous. Unforgivable! Diabolical! Our own partner!’ He spluttered into an outraged silence.

‘Despicable,’ Goin said coldly. ‘Absolutely contemptible.’

‘Isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Tell me, does this moral indignation stem from this revelation of the depths of Heissman’s perfidy or merely because he omitted to cut you in on the proceeds of the cashing of the securities? Don’t bother answering that question, it’s purely rhetorical, as villains you’re dyed in the same inky black as Heissman. What I mean is, most of you spend a great deal of time and careful thought in concealing from the other members of the board of Olympus Productions just what the true natures of your activities are. Heissman is hardly alone in this respect.

‘Take the Count here. Compared to the rest of you he was a vestal angel, but even he dabbled in some murky waters. For over thirty years now he’s been a member of the board and has had a free meal ticket for life because he happened to be in Vienna when the Anschluss came, when Otto headed for the States and Heissman was spirited away. Heissman was spirited away because Otto had arranged for him to be so that he could take all the film company’s capital out of the country: Otto was never a man to hesitate when it came to selling a friend down the river.

‘What Otto didn’t know but what the Count did but carefully refrained from telling him was that Heissman’s disappearance had been entirely voluntary. Heissman had been a German secret agent for some time and his adopted country needed him. What his adopted country didn’t know was that Russia had adopted him even before they had, but this isn’t germane to the main point: that Otto believed he had betrayed a friend for gold and that the Count knew it. Unfortunately, it’s going to be very hard to prove anything against the Count, and not being a grasping man by nature, never having asked for anything more than his salary, there’s nothing to demonstrate blackmail which is why I’ve chosen him—and he’s accepted—as the person to turn Queen’s Evidence against his fellow directors on the board.’

Heissman now joined Otto and Goin in giving the Count the kind of look they had so lately given him.

‘Or take Otto,’ I went on. ‘For years he’d been embezzling very large sums of money from the company, virtually bleeding it white.’ It was now the turn of Heissman and the Count to stare at Otto. ‘Or take Goin. He discovered about the embezzling and for two or three years he’s been blackmailing Otto and bleeding him white. In sum, you constitute the most unpleasant, unprincipled and depraved bunch it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter. But I haven’t even scratched the surface of your infamy, have I? Or the infamy of one of you. We haven’t even discussed the person responsible for the violent deaths that have taken place. He is, of course, one of you. He is, of course, quite, quite mad and will end his days in Broadmoor: although I have to admit that there’s been a certain far from crazy logic in his thinking and actions. But a prison for the insane—one regrets the abolition of the death penalty—is a certainty: it may well be, Otto, as well as being the best you can hope for, that you won’t live long after you get there.’ Otto said nothing, the expression on his face remained unchanged. I went on: ‘For your hired killers, of course, Jungbeck and Heyter, there will be life sentences in maximum security jails.’

The temperature in that icily cold metallic tomb had fallen to many degrees below freezing point, but everyone appeared to be completely unaware of the fact: the classic example of mind over matter, and heaven knew that minds could rarely have been more exclusively and almost obsessively possessed than those of the men in those weird and alien surroundings.

‘Otto Gerran is an evil man,’ I said, ‘and the enormity of his crimes scarcely comes within the bounds of comprehension. However, one has to admit that he has had the most singularly wretched luck in his choice of business associates, and those associates must be held partly to blame for the terrible events that happened, for their extraordinary cupidity and selfishness drove Otto into a corner from which he could escape only by resorting to the most desperate measures.

‘We have already established that three of you here have been blackmailing Otto steadily over the years. His other two fellow directors, his daughter and Stryker, joined whole-heartedly in what had become by this time a very popular pastime. They, however, used a very different basis for their blackmail. This basis I cannot as yet prove but the facts, I believe, will be established in time. The facts are concerned with a car crash that took place in California over twenty years ago. There were two cars involved. One of those belonged to Lonnie Gilbert and had three women inside—his wife and two daughters, all of whom appeared to be considerably the worse for drink at the time. The other car belonged to the Strykers—but the Strykers were not in their car. The two people who were had, like Lonnie’s family, been at the same party in the Strykers’ house and, like Lonnie’s family, were in an advanced state of intoxication. They were Otto and Neal Divine. Isn’t that so, Otto?’

‘There’s nothing of this rubbish that can be proved.’

‘Not yet. Now, Otto was driving the car, but when Divine recovered from the effects of the crash he was convinced—no doubt by Otto—that he had been at the wheel. So for years now Divine has been under the impression that he owes his immunity from manslaughter charges purely to Otto’s silence. The salary lists show—’

‘Where did you get the salary lists from?’ Goin asked.

‘From your cubicle—where I also found this splendid bank-book of yours. The lists show that Divine has been receiving only a pittance in salary for years. How admirable is our Otto. He not only makes a man take the responsibility for deaths which he himself has caused but in the process reduces that man to the level of a serf and a pauper. The blackmailed doing some blackmailing on his own account. Makes for a pretty picture all round, does it not?

‘But the Strykers knew who had really caused the crash for Otto had been driving when they left the house. So they sold their silence in return for jobs on the board of Olympus Productions and vastly inflated salaries. You are a lovable, lovable lot, aren’t you? Do you know that this fat monster here actually tried to have Lonnie murdered tonight? Why? Because Judith Haynes, very shortly before she died, had told Lonnie the truth of what had happened in the car crash: so, of course, Lonnie would have been a danger to Otto as long as he had lived.

‘I don’t know who suggested this film expedition as a cover for getting the bullion. Heissman, I suppose. Not that it matters. What matters is that Otto saw in this proposed trip a unique and probably never to be repeated opportunity to solve all his troubles at one stroke. The solution was simple— eliminate all his five partners, including his daughter whom he hated as much as she hated him. So he gets himself two guns for hire, Heyter and Jungbeck—no question about the hire aspect, I found two thousand pounds in five-pound notes in Jungbeck’s case this afternoon: two alleged actors of whom no one but Otto had ever heard.

‘In effect, Otto would clear his board in one fell sweep. He’d get rid of the people he hated and who hated him. He’d buy enough time by their deaths to conceal his embezzlement. He’d collect very considerable insurance money and get back in the black with the help of accommodating accountants who can be as venal as the next lot. He would get all that lovely gold for himself. And, above all, he’d be for ever free of the continuous blackmail that had dominated his life and warped his mind until it drove him over the edge of insanity.’ I looked at Goin. ‘Do you understand now what I mean by saying that without me you’d have been dead by the end of the week?’

‘Yes. Yes, I think so. I have no option other than to believe you are right.’ He looked at Otto in a kind of wonder. ‘But if he was only after the board of directors—’

‘Why should others die? Ill luck, ill management, or someone just got in his way. The first intended victim was the Count, and this was where the ill luck came in. Not the Count’s— Antonio’s. Otto, as I think digging into his past will show, is a man of many parts. Among some of the more esoteric skills acquired were some relating to either chemistry or medicine: Otto is at home with poisons. He is also, as so many very fat men are, extremely gifted at palming articles. At the table on the night when Antonio died the food, as usual, was served from the side table at the top of the main table where Otto sat. Otto introduced some aconite—only a pinch was necessary—into the horseradish on the plate intended for the Count. Unfortunately for poor Antonio, the Count has a profound dislike of horseradish and passed his on to the vegetarian Antonio. And so Antonio died.’

‘He tried to poison Heissman at the same time. But Heissman wasn’t feeling in the best of form that evening, were you, Heissman—you will recall that you left the table in a great hurry, your plate untouched. The economical Haggerty, instead of consigning this clearly untouched plate to the gash bucket, put it back in the casserole from which the two stewards, Scott and Moxen, were served later that night—and from which the Duke stole a few surreptitious mouthfuls. Three became very ill, two died—all through ill luck.’

‘Aren’t you overlooking the fact that Otto himself was poisoned?’ the Count said.

‘Sure he was. By his own hand. To obviate any suspicion that might fall on him. He didn’t use aconite though—all that was required was some relatively harmless emetic and some acting. This, incidentally, was why Otto sent me off on a tour of the Morning Rose—not to check on sea-sickness but to see who else he might have poisoned by accident. His reaction when he heard of Antonio’s death was unnaturally violent—though I didn’t get the significance at the time.

‘Matters took another tragic turn later that evening. Two people came to check my cabin in my absence—one was either Jungbeck or Heyter and the other was Halliday.’ I looked at Heissman. ‘He was your man, wasn’t he?’

Heissman nodded silently.

‘Heissman was suspicious of me. He wanted to check on my bona fides and examined my cases— had them examined, rather, by Halliday. Otto was suspicious and one of his hired men discovered that I’d been reading an article about aconite. One death more or less wasn’t going to mean much to Otto now, so he planned to eliminate me, using his favourite eliminator—poison. In a bottle of scotch. Unfortunately for Halliday, who had come to see if he could lay hands on the medical case that I’d taken up to the saloon, he drank the night-cap intended for me.

‘The other deaths are easy to explain. When the party was searching for Smithy, Jungbeck and Heyter clobbered Allen and killed Stryker in this clumsy attempt to frame Allen. And, during the night, Otto arranged for the execution of his own daughter. He was on watch with Jungbeck and the murder could only have occurred during that time.’ I looked at Otto. ‘You should have checked on your daughter’s window—I’d screwed it shut so that it was impossible for anyone to have entered from the outside. I’d also found that a hypodermic and a phial of morphine had been stolen. You don’t have to admit any of this—both Jungbeck and Heyter will sing like canaries.’

‘I admit everything.’ Otto spoke with a massive calm. ‘You are correct in every detail. Not that I see that any of it is going to do you any good.’ I’d said that he was an artist in palming things and he proceeded to prove it. The very unpleasant-looking little black automatic that he held in his hand just seemed to have materialized there.

‘I don’t see that that’s going to do you any good either,’ I said. ‘After all, you’ve just admitted that you’re guilty of everything I claimed you were.’ I was standing directly under the conning-tower hatchway, where I’d deliberately and advisedly positioned myself as soon as we’d arrived, and I could see things that Otto couldn’t. ‘Where do you think the Morning Rose is now?’

‘What was that?’ I didn’t much like the way his pudgy little hand tightened round the butt of his gun.

‘She never went farther than Tunheim where there have been people up there waiting to hear from me. True, they couldn’t hear by direct radio contact, because you’d had one of your hard men smash the trawler’s receiver, hadn’t you? But before the Morning Rose left here I’d left aboard a radio device that tunes into a radio homer. They had clear instructions as to what to do the moment that device was actuated by the homer transmitter. It’s been transmitting for almost ninety minutes now. There are armed soldiers and police officers of both Norway and Britain aboard that trawler. Rather, they were. They’re aboard this vessel now. Please take my word for it Otherwise we have useless bloodshed.’

Otto didn’t take my word for it. He stepped forward quickly, raising his gun as he peered up towards the conning-tower. Unfortunately for Otto, he was standing in a brightly-lit spot while peering up into the darkness. The sound of a shot, hurtful to the ears in that enclosed space, came at the same instant as his scream of pain, followed by a metallic clunk as the gun falling from his bloodied hand struck a bar of bullion.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You didn’t give me time to tell you that they were specially picked soldiers.’

Four men descended into the body of the vessel. Two were in civilian clothes, two in Norwegian Army uniforms. One of the civilians said to me: ‘Dr Marlowe?’ I nodded, and he went on: ‘Inspector Matthewson. This is Inspector Nielson. It looks as if we were on time?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ They weren’t in time to save Antonio and Halliday, the two stewards, Judith Haynes and her husband. But that was entirely my fault. ‘You were very prompt indeed.’

‘We’ve been here for some time. We actually saw you go below. We came ashore by rubber dinghy from the outside, north of Makehl. Captain Imrie didn’t much fancy coming up the Sor-hamna at night. I don’t think he sees too well.’

‘But I do.’ The harsh voice came from above. ‘Drop that gun! Drop it or I’ll kill you.’ Heyter’s voice carried utter conviction. There was only one person carrying a gun, the soldier who had shot Otto, and he dropped it without hesitation at a sharp word from the Norwegian inspector. Heyter climbed down into the hull, his eyes watchful, his gun moving in a slight arc.

‘Well done, Heyter, well done.’ Otto moaned from the pain of his shattered hand.

‘Well done?’ I said. ‘You want to be responsible for another death? You want this to be the last thing Heyter ever does, well or not?’

‘Too late for words.’ Otto’s puce face had turned grey, the blood was dripping steadily on to the gold. ‘Too late.’

‘Too late? You fool, I knew that Heyter was mobile. You’d forgotten I was a doctor, even if not much of a one. He’d a badly cut ankle inside a thick leather boot. That could only have been caused by a compound fracture. There was no such fracture. A sprained ankle doesn’t cut the skin open. A self-inflicted injury. As in killing Stryker, so in killing Smith—a crude and total lack of imagination. You did kill him, didn’t you, Heyter?’

‘Yes.’ He turned his gun on me. ‘I like killing people.’

‘Put that gun down or you’re a dead man.’

He swore at me, viciously and in contempt, and was still swearing when the red rose bloomed in the centre of his forehead. The Count lowered his Beretta, dark smoke still wisping from its muzzle, and said apologetically, ‘Well, I was a Polish count. But we do get out of practice, you know.’

‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘A rotten shot but I guess it’s worth a royal pardon at that.’

On the jetty, the police inspectors insisted on handcuffing Goin, Heissman and even the wounded Otto. I persuaded them that the Count was not a danger and further persuaded them to let me have a word with Heissman while they made their way up to the cabin. When we were alone I said: ‘The water in the harbour there is below the normally accepted freezing point. With those heavy clothes and your wrists handcuffed behind your back you’ll be dead in thirty seconds. That’s the advantage of being a doctor, one can be fairly definite about those things.’ I took him by the arm and pushed him towards the edge of the jetty.

He said in a high-strained voice: ‘You had Heyter deliberately killed, didn’t you?’

‘Of course. Didn’t you know—there’s no death penalty in England now. Up here, there’s no problem. Goodbye, Heissman.’

‘I swear it! I swear it!’ His voice was now close to a scream. ‘I’ll have Mary Stuart’s parents released and safely reunited. I swear it! I swear it!’

‘It’s your life, Heissman.’

‘Yes.’ He shivered violently and it wasn’t because of the bitter wind. ‘Yes, I know that.’

The atmosphere in the cabin was extraordinarily quiet and subdued. It stemmed, I suppose, from that reaction which is the inevitable concomitant of profound and still as yet unbelieving relief. Matthewson, clearly, had been explaining things.

Jungbeck was lying on the floor, his right hand clutching his left shoulder and moaning as if in great pain. I looked at Conrad, who looked at the fallen man and then pointed to the broken shards of glass on the floor.

‘I did as you asked,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid the bottle broke.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘The scotch, I mean.’ I looked at Mary Darling, who was sobbing bitterly, and at Mary Stuart who was trying to comfort her and looked only fractionally less unhappy. I said reprovingly: ‘Tears, idle tears, my two Marys. It’s all over now.’

‘Lonnie’s dead.’ Big blurred eyes staring miserably from behind huge glasses. ‘Five minutes ago. He just died.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But no tears for Lonnie. His words, not mine. “He hates him who would on the rack of this rough world stretch him out longer.”’

She looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Did he say that?’

‘No. Chap called Kent.’

‘He said something else,’ Mary Stuart said. ‘He said we were to tell the kindly healer—I suppose he meant you—to bring his penny to toss for the first round of drinks in some bar. I didn’t understand. A four-ale bar.’

‘It wouldn’t have been in purgatory?’

‘Purgatory? Oh, I don’t know. It didn’t make any sense to me.’

‘It makes sense to me,’ I said. ‘I won’t forget my penny.’

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a schoolmaster. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Way to

Dusty Death

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1973

© 1973 HarperCollinsPublishers

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9256-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4027-9257-1 (ebook)

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

To Mary Marcelle

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER ONE

Harlow sat by the side of the race-track on that hot and cloudless afternoon, his long hair blowing about in the fresh breeze and partially obscuring his face, his golden helmet clutched so tightly in his gauntleted hands that he appeared to be trying to crush it: the hands were shaking uncontrollably and occasional violent tremors racked his entire body.

His own car, from which he had been miraculously thrown clear, uninjured, just before it had overturned lay, of all places, in its own Coronado pits, upside down and with its wheels spinning idly. Wisps of smoke were coming from an engine already engulfed under a mound of foam from the fire extinguishers and it was clear that there was now little danger of an explosion from the unruptured fuel tanks.

Alexis Dunnet, the first to reach Harlow, noticed that he wasn’t looking at his own car but was staring trance-like at a spot about two hundred yards farther along the track where an already dead man called Isaac Jethou was being cremated in the white-flamed funeral pyre of what had once been his Grand Prix Formula One racing car. There was curiously little smoke coming from the blazing wreck, presumably because of the intense heat given off by the incandescent magnesium alloy wheels, and when the gusting wind occasionally parted the towering curtains of flame Jethou could be seen sitting bolt upright in his cockpit, the one apparently undamaged structure left in an otherwise shattered and unrecognizable mass of twisted steel: at least Dunnet knew it was Jethou but what he was seeing was a blackened and horribly charred remnant of a human being.

The many thousands of people in the stands and lining the track were motionless and soundless, staring in transfixed and incredulous awe and horror at the burning car. The last of the engines of the Grand Prix cars – there were nine of them stopped in sight of the pits, some drivers standing by their sides – died away as the race marshals frantically flagged the abandonment of the race.

The public address system had fallen silent now, as did a siren’s ululating wail as an ambulance screeching to a halt at a prudent distance from Jethou’s car, its flashing light fading into nothingness against the white blaze in the background. Rescue workers in aluminium asbestos suits, some operating giant wheeled fire-extinguishers, some armed with crowbars and axes, were trying desperately, for some reason wholly beyond the bounds of logic, to get sufficiently close to the car to drag the cindered corpse free, but the undiminished intensity of the flames made a mockery of their desperation. Their efforts were as futile as the presence of the ambulance was unnecessary. Jethou was beyond any mortal help or hope.

Dunnet looked away and down at the overalled figure beside him. The hands that held the golden helmet still trembled unceasingly and the eyes still fixed immovably on the sheeted flames that now quite enveloped Isaac Jethou’s car were the eyes of an eagle gone blind. Dunnet reached for his shoulder and shook it gently but he paid no heed. Dunnet asked him if he were hurt for his face and trembling hands were masked in blood: he had cart-wheeled at least half a dozen times after being thrown from his car in the final moments before it had upended and come to rest in its own pits. Harlow stirred and looked at Dunnet, blinking, like a man slowly arousing himself from a nightmare, then shook his head.

Two ambulance men with a stretcher came towards them at a dead run, but Harlow, unaided except for Dunnet’s supporting hand under his upper arm, pushed himself shakily to his feet and waved them off. He didn’t, however, seem to object to what little help Dunnet’s hand lent him and they walked slowly back to the Coronado pits, the still dazed and virtually uncomprehending Harlow, Dunnet tall, thin, with dark hair parted in the middle, a dark pencil-line moustache and rimless glasses, everyone’s idealized conception of a city accountant even though his passport declared him to be a journalist.

MacAlpine, a fire-extinguisher still held in one hand, turned to meet them at the entrance to the pits. James MacAlpine, owner and manager of the Coronado racing team, dressed in a now stained tan gaberdine suit, was in his mid-fifties, as heavily jowled as he was heavily built and had a deeply lined face under an impressive mane of black and silver hair. Behind him, Jacobson, the chief mechanic and his two red-haired assistants, the Rafferty twins who for some reason unknown were invariably referred to as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, still ministered to the smouldering Coronado, while behind the car two other men, white-coated first-aid men, were carrying out more serious ministrations of their own: on the ground, unconscious but still clutching the pad and pencil with which she had been taking lap times, lay Mary MacAlpine, the owner’s black-haired, twenty-year-old daughter. The first-aid men were bent over her left leg and scissoring open to the knee wine-red slacks that had been white moments ago. MacAlpine took Harlow’s arm, deliberately shielding him from the sight of his daughter, and led him to the little shelter behind the pits. MacAlpine was an extremely able, competent and tough man, as millionaires tend to be: beneath the toughness, as of now, lay a kindness and depth of consideration of which no one would have dared to accuse him.

In the back of the shelter stood a small wooden crate which was, in effect, a portable bar. Most of it was given over to an ice-box stocked with a little beer and lots of soft drinks, chiefly for the mechanics, for working under that torrid sun was thirsty business. There were also two bottles of champagne for it had not been unreasonable to expect of a man who had just reeled off a near-impossible five consecutive Grand Prix victories that he might just possibly achieve his sixth. Harlow opened the lid of the crate, ignored the ice-box, lifted out a bottle of brandy and half-filled the tumbler, the neck of the bottle chattering violently against the rim of the glass: more brandy spilled to the ground than went into the glass. He required both hands to lift the glass to his mouth and now the rim of the tumbler, castanet-like fashion, struck up an even more erratic tattoo against his teeth than the bottle had on the glass. He managed to get some of it down but most of the glass’s contents overflowed by the two sides of his mouth, coursed down the blood-streaked chin to stain the white racing overalls to exactly the same colour as the slacks of the injured girl outside. Harlow stared bemusedly at the empty glass, sank on to a bench and reached for the bottle again.

MacAlpine looked at Dunnet, his face without expression. Harlow had suffered three major crashes in his racing career, in the last of which, two years previously, he had sustained near-fatal injuries: on that last occasion, he had been smiling, albeit in agony, as his stretcher had been loaded aboard the ambulance plane for the flight back to London and the left hand he had used to give the thumbs-up signal – his right forearm had been broken in two places – had been as steady as if graven from marble. But more dismaying was the fact that apart from a token sip of celebration champagne he had never touched hard alcohol in his life.

It happens to them all, MacAlpine had always maintained, sooner or later it happens to them all. No matter how cool or brave or brilliant they were, it happened to them all, and the more steely their icy calm and control the more fragile it was. MacAlpine was never a man to be averse to the odd hyperbolic turn of phrase and there was a handful – but only a handful – of outstanding ex-Grand Prix drivers around who had retired at the top of their physical and mental form, sufficient, at any rate, to disprove MacAlpine’s statement in its entirety. But it was well enough known that there existed top-flight drivers who had crashed or who had suffered so much nervous and mental fatigue that they had become empty shells of their former selves, that there were among the current twenty-four Grand Prix drivers four or five who would never win a race again because they had no intention of ever trying to do so, who kept going only in order to shore up the façade of a now empty pride. But there are some things that are not done in the racing world and one of those is that you don’t remove a man from the Grand Prix roster just because his nerve is gone.

But that MacAlpine was more often right than wrong was sadly clear from the sight of that trembling figure hunched on the bench. If ever a man had gone over the top, had reached and passed the limit of endurance before tumbling over the precipice of self-abnegation and hapless acceptance of ultimate defeat, it was Johnny Harlow, the golden boy of the Grand Prix circuits, unquestionably, until that afternoon, the outstanding driver of his time and, it was being increasingly suggested, of all time: with last year’s world championship safely his and the current year’s, by any reasonable standards, almost inevitably his with half the Grand Prix races still to run, Harlow’s will and nerve would have appeared to have crumbled beyond recovery: it was plain to MacAlpine and Dunnet that the charred being who had been Isaac Jethou would haunt him for however long his days were to be.

Not that the signs hadn’t been there before for those with eyes to see them and most of the drivers and mechanics on the circuits had the kind of eyes that were required. Ever since the second Grand Prix race of the season, which he had easily and convincingly won unaware of the fact that his brilliant younger brother had been forced off the track and had telescoped his car into a third of its length against the base of a pine tree at something over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, the signs had been there. Never a sociable or gregarious person, he had become increasingly withdrawn, increasingly taciturn and when he smiled, and it was rarely, it was the empty smile of a man who could find nothing in life to smile about. Normally the most icily calculating and safety-conscious of drivers, his impeccable standards had become eroded and his previous near obsession with safety dismayingly decreased while, contradictorily, he had consistently kept on breaking lap records on circuits throughout Europe. But he had continued on his record-breaking way, capturing one Grand Prix trophy after the other at the increasingly mounting expense of himself and his fellow competitors: his driving had become reckless and increasingly dangerous and the other drivers, tough and hardened professionals though they all were, began to go in fear of him for instead of disputing a corner with him as they would normally have done they had nearly all of them fallen into the habit of pulling well in when they saw his lime-green Coronado closing up on their driving mirrors. This, in all conscience, was seldom enough, for Harlow had an extremely simple race-winning formula – to get in front and stay there.

By now more and more people were saying out loud that his suicidally competitive driving on the racetracks signified not a battle against his peers but a battle against himself. It had become increasingly obvious, latterly painfully obvious, that this was one battle that he would never win, that this last ditch stand against his failing nerve could have only one end, that one day his luck would run out. And so it had, and so had Isaac Jethou’s, and Johnny Harlow, for all the world to see, had lost his last battle on the Grand Prix tracks of Europe and America. Maybe he would move out on the tracks again, maybe he would start fighting again: but it seemed certain then that no one knew with more dreadful clarity than Harlow that his fighting days were over.

For a third time Harlow reached out for the neck of the brandy bottle, his hands as unsteady as ever. The once-full bottle was now one-third empty but only a fraction of that had found its way down his throat, so uncontrollable were his movements. MacAlpine looked gravely at Dunnet, shrugged his heavy shoulders in a gesture of either resignation or acceptance and then glanced out into the pits. An ambulance had just arrived for his daughter and as MacAlpine hurried out Dunnet set about cleaning up Harlow’s face with the aid of a sponge and a bucket of water. Harlow didn’t seem to care one way or another whether his face was washed: whatever his thoughts were, and in the circumstances it would have taken an idiot not to read them aright, his entire attention appeared to be concentrated on the contents of that bottle of Martell, the picture of a man, if ever there was one, who desperately needed and urgently sought immediate oblivion.

It was as well, perhaps, that both Harlow and MacAlpine failed to notice a person standing just outside the door whose expression clearly indicated that he would take quite some pleasure in assisting Harlow into a state of permanent oblivion. Rory, MacAlpine’s son, a dark curly-haired youth of a normally amiable, even sunny, disposition had now a dark thundercloud on his face, an unthinkable expression for one who for years, and until only a few minutes previously, regarded Harlow as the idol of his life. Rory looked away towards the ambulance where his unconscious and blood-soaked sister lay and then the unthinkable was no longer so. He turned again to look at Harlow and now the emotion reflected in his eyes was as close to outright hatred as a sixteen year-old was ever likely to achieve.

The official inquiry into the cause of the accident, held almost immediately afterwards, predictably failed to indict any one man as the sole cause of the disaster. Official race inquiries almost never did, including the notorious inquiry into that unparalleled Le Mans holocaust when seventy-three spectators were killed and no one was found to blame whereas it was common knowledge at the time that one man and one man only – dead now these many years – had been the person responsible for it.

This particular inquiry failed to indict, in spite of the fact that two or three thousand people in the main stands would unhesitatingly have laid the sole charge at the door of Johnny Harlow. But even more damning was the incontrovertible evidence supplied in the small hall where the inquiry was held by a TV playback of the entire incident. The projection screen had been small and stained but the picture clear enough and the sound effects all too vivid and true to life. In the re-run of the film – it lasted barely twenty seconds but was screened five times – three Grand Prix cars, viewed from the rear but being closely followed by the telescopic zoom lens, could be seen approaching the pits. Harlow, in his Coronado, was closing up on the leading car, a vintage privately-entered Ferrari that was leading only by virtue of the fact that it had already lost a lap. Moving even more quickly than Harlow and well clear on the other side of the track was a works-entered fire-engine-red Ferrari driven by a brilliant Californian, Isaac Jethou. In the straight Jethou’s twelve cylinders had a considerable edge over Harlow’s eight and it was clear that he intended to pass. It seemed that Harlow, too, was quite aware of this for his brake lights came on in keeping with his apparent intention of easing slightly and tucking in behind the slower car while Jethou swept by.

Suddenly, incredibly, Harlow’s brake lights went out and the Coronado swerved violently outwards as if Harlow had decided he could overtake the car in front before Jethou could overtake him. If that had been his inexplicable intention then it had been the most foolhardy of his life, for he had taken his car directly into the path of Isaac Jethou who, on that straight, could not have been travelling at less than 180 miles an hour and who, in the fraction of the second available to him, had never even the most remote shadow of a chance to take the only braking or avoiding action that could have saved him.

At the moment of impact, Jethou’s front wheel struck squarely into the side of Harlow’s front wheel. For Harlow, the consequences of the collision were, in all conscience, serious enough for it sent his car into an uncontrollable spin, but for Jethou they were disastrous. Even above the cacophonous clamour of engines under maximum revolutions and the screeching of locked tyres on the tarmac, the bursting of Jethou’s front tyre was heard as a rifle shot and from that instant Jethou was a dead man. His Ferrari, wholly out of control and now no more than a mindless mechanical monster bent on its own destruction, smashed into and caromed off the nearside safety barrier and, already belching gouts of red flame and black oily smoke, careered wildly across the track to strike the far side barrier, rear end first, at a speed of still over a hundred miles an hour. The Ferrari, spinning wildly, slid down the track for about two hundred yards, turned over twice and came to rest on all four wrecked wheels, Jethou still trapped in the cockpit but even then almost certainly dead. It was then that the red flames turned to white.

That Harlow had been directly responsible for Jethou’s death was beyond dispute but Harlow, with eleven Grand Prix wins behind him in seventeen months was, by definition and on his record, the best driver in the world and one simply does not indict the best driver in the world. It is not the done thing. The whole tragic affair was attributed to the race-track equivalent of an act of God and the curtain was discreetly lowered to indicate the end of the act.

CHAPTER TWO

The French, even at their most relaxed and unemotional, are little given to hiding their feelings and the packed crowd at Clermont-Ferrand that day, which was notably unrelaxed and highly emotional, was in no mood to depart from their Latin norm. As Harlow, head bowed, trudged rather than walked along the side of the Coronado pits, they became very vocal indeed. Their booing, hissing, cat-calling and just plain shouts of anger, accompanied by much Gallic waving of clenched fists, was as threatening as it was frightening. Not only was it an ugly scene, it was one that looked as if it would only require one single flash-point to trigger off a near riot, to convert their vengeful emotions towards Johnny Harlow into physical action against him and this, it was clear, was the apprehension that was uppermost in the minds of the police, for they moved in close to afford Harlow such protection as he might require. It was equally clear from the expressions on their faces that the police did not relish their task, and from the way they averted their faces from Harlow that they sympathized with their countrymen’s feelings.

A few paces behind Harlow, flanked by Dunnet and MacAlpine, walked another man who clearly shared the opinions of police and spectators. Angrily twirling his racing helmet by its strap, he was clad in racing overalls identical to those that Harlow was wearing: Nicolo Tracchia was, in fact, the No. 2 driver in the Coronado racing team. Tracchia was almost outrageously handsome, with dark curling hair, a gleaming perfection of teeth that no dentifrice manufacturer would ever dare use as an advertisement and a suntan that would have turned a life-guard pale green. That he wasn’t looking particularly happy at that moment was directly attributable to the fact that he was scowling heavily: the legendary Tracchia scowl was a memorable thing of wonder, in constant use and held in differing degrees of respect, awe and downright fear but never ignored. Tracchia had a low opinion of his fellow-man and regarded the majority of people, and this with particular reference to his fellow Grand Prix drivers, as retarded adolescents.

Understandably, he operated in a limited social circle. What made matters worse for Tracchia was his realization that, brilliant driver though he was, he was fractionally less good than Harlow, and even this was exacerbated by the knowledge that, no matter how long or desperately he tried, he would never quite close that fractional gap. When he spoke now to MacAlpine he made no effort to lower his voice which in the circumstances mattered not at all for Harlow could not possibly have heard him above the baying of the crowd: but it was quite clear that Tracchia would not have lowered his voice no matter what the circumstances.

‘An act of God!’ The bitter incredulity in the voice was wholly genuine. ‘Jesus Christ! Did you hear what those cretins called it? An act of God! An act of murder, I call it.’

‘No, lad, no.’ MacAlpine put his hand on Tracchia’s shoulder, only to have it angrily shrugged off. MacAlpine sighed. ‘At the very outside, manslaughter. And not even that. You know yourself how many Grand Prix drivers have died in the past four years because their cars went wild.’

‘Wild! Wild!’ Tracchia, at a momentary and most uncharacteristic loss for words, gazed heavenwards in silent appeal. ‘Good God, Mac, we all saw it on the screen. We saw it five times. He took his foot off the brake and pulled out straight in front of Jethou. An act of God! Sure, sure, sure. It’s an act of God because he’s won eleven Grand Prix in seventeen months, because he won last year’s championship and looks as if he’s going to do the same this year.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know damn well what I mean. Take him off the tracks and you might as well take us all off the tracks. He’s the champion, isn’t he? If he’s that bad, then what the hell must the rest of us be like? We know that’s not the case, but will the public? Will they hell. God knows that there are already too many people, and damned influential people as well, agitating that Grand Prix racing should be banned throughout the world, and too many countries just begging for a good excuse to get out. This would be the excuse of a lifetime. We need our Johnny Harlows, don’t we, Mac? Even though they do go around killing people.’

‘I thought he was your friend, Nikki?’

‘Sure, Mac. Sure he’s my friend. So was Jethou.’

There was no reply for MacAlpine to make to this so he made none. Tracchia appeared to have said his say, for he fell silent and got back to his scowling. In silence and in safety – the police escort had been steadily increasing – the four men reached the Coronado pits. Without a glance at or word to anyone Harlow made for the little shelter at the rear of the pits. In their turn nobody – Jacobson and his two mechanics were there also – made any attempt either to speak to or stop him, nor did any among them do even as much as trouble to exchange significant glances: the starkly obvious requires no emphasis. Jacobson ignored him entirely and came up to MacAlpine. The chief mechanic – and he was one of acknowledged genius – was a lean, tall and strongly built man. He had a dark and deeply lined face that looked as if it hadn’t smiled for a long time and wasn’t about to make an exception in this case either.

He said: ‘Harlow’s clear, of course.’

‘Of course? I don’t understand.’

‘I have to tell you? Indict Harlow and you set the sport back ten years. Too many millions tied up in it to allow that to happen. Isn’t there now, Mr MacAlpine?’

MacAlpine looked at him reflectively, not answering, glanced briefly at the still scowling Tracchia, turned away and walked across to Harlow’s battered and fire-blistered Coronado which was by that time back on all four wheels. He examined it leisurely, almost contemplatively, stooped over the cockpit, turned the steering wheel which offered no resistance to his hand, then straightened.

He said: ‘Well, now. I wonder.’

Jacobson looked at him coldly. His eyes, expressing displeasure, could be as formidable and intimidating as Tracchia’s scowl. He said: ‘I prepared that car, Mr MacAlpine.’

MacAlpine’s shoulders rose and fell in a long moment of silence.

‘I know, Jacobson, I know. I also know you’re the best in the business. I also know that you’ve been too long in it to talk nonsense. Any car can go. How long?’

‘You want me to start now?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Four hours.’ Jacobson was curt, offence given and taken. ‘Six at the most.’

MacAlpine nodded, took Dunnet by the arm, prepared to walk away, then halted. Tracchia and Rory were together talking in low indistinct voices but their words didn’t have to be understood, the rigid hostility in their expressions as they looked at Harlow and his bottle of brandy inside the hut were eloquent enough. MacAlpine, his hand still on Dunnet’s arm, moved away and sighed again.

‘Johnny’s not making too many friends today, is he?’

‘He hasn’t been for far too many days. And I think that here’s another friend that he’s about not to make.’

‘Oh Jesus.’ Sighs seemed to be becoming second nature to MacAlpine. ‘Neubauer does seem to have something on his mind.’

The figure in sky-blue racing overalls striding towards the pits did indeed seem to have something on his mind. Neubauer was tall, very blond and completely Nordic in appearance although he was in fact Austrian. The No. 1 driver for team Cagliari – he had the word Cagliari emblazoned across the chest of his overalls – his consistent brilliance on the Grand Prix tracks had made him the acknowledged crown prince of racing and Harlow’s eventual and inevitable successor. Like Tracchia, he was a cool, distant man wholly incapable of standing fools at any price, far less gladly. Like Tracchia, his friends and intimates were restricted to a very small group indeed: it was a matter for neither wonder nor speculation that those two men, the most unforgiving of rivals on the race-tracks were, off-duty, close friends.

Neubauer, with compressed lips and cold pale-blue eyes glittering, was clearly a very angry man and his humour wasn’t improved when MacAlpine moved his massive bulk to block his way. Neubauer had no option other than to stop: big man though he was MacAlpine was very much bigger. When he spoke it was with his teeth clamped together.

‘Out of my way.’

MacAlpine looked at him in mild surprise.

‘You said what?’

‘Sorry, Mr MacAlpine. Where’s that bastard Harlow?’

‘Leave him be. He’s not well.’

‘And Jethou is, I suppose? I don’t know who the hell or what the hell Harlow is or is supposed to be and I don’t care. Why should that maniac get off scot-free? He is a maniac. You know it. We all know it. He forced me off the road twice today, that could just as well have been me burnt to death as Jethou. I’m giving you warning, Mr MacAlpine. I’m going to call a meeting of the GPDA and have him banned from the circuits.’

‘You’re the last person who can afford to do that, Willi.’ MacAlpine put his hands on Neubauer’s shoulders. ‘The last person who can afford to put the finger on Johnny. If Harlow goes, who’s the next champion?’

Neubauer stared at him. Some of the fury left his face and he stared at MacAlpine in almost bewildered disbelief. When his voice came it was low, almost an uncertain whisper. ‘You think I would do it for that, Mr MacAlpine?’

‘No, Willi, I don’t. I’m just pointing out that most others would.’

There was a long pause during which what was left of Neubauer’s anger died away. He said quietly: ‘He’s a killer. He’ll kill again.’ Gently, he removed MacAlpine’s hands, turned and left the pits. Thoughtfully, worriedly Dunnet watched him leave.

‘He could be right, James. Sure, sure, he’s won five Grand Prix in a row but ever since his brother was killed in the Spanish Grand Prix – well, you know.’

‘Five Grand Prix under his belt and you’re trying to tell me that his nerve is gone?’

‘I don’t know what’s gone. I just don’t know. All I know is that the safest driver on the circuits has become so reckless and dangerous, so suicidally competitive if you like, that the other drivers are just plain scared of him. As far as they are concerned, the freedom of the road is his, they’d rather live than dispute a yard of track with him. That’s why he keeps on winning.’

MacAlpine regarded Dunnet closely and shook his head in unease. He, MacAlpine, and not Dunnet, was the acknowledged expert, but MacAlpine held Dunnet and his opinions in the highest regard. Dunnet was an extraordinarily shrewd, intelligent and able person. He was a journalist by profession, and a highly competent one, who had switched from being a political analyst to a sports commentator for the admittedly unarguable reason that there is no topic on earth so irretrievably dull as politics. The acute penetration and remarkable powers of observation and analysis that had made him so formidable a figure on the Westminster scene he had transferred easily and successfully to the race-tracks of the world. A regular correspondent for a British national daily and two motoring magazines, one British, one American – although he did a remarkable amount of freelance work on the side – he had rapidly established himself as one of the very few really outstanding motor racing journalists in the world. To do this in the space of just over two years had been a quite outstanding achievement by any standard. So successful had he been, indeed, that he had incurred the envy and displeasure, not to say the outright wrath, of a considerable number of his less gifted peers.

Nor was their minimal regard for him in any way heightened by what they sourly regarded as the limpet-like persistency with which he had attached himself to the Coronado team on an almost permanent basis. Not that there were any laws, written or unwritten, about this sort of behaviour, for no independent journalist had ever done this sort of thing before. Now that it had been done it was, his fellow-writers said, a thing that simply was not done. It was his job, they maintained and complained, to write in a fair and unbiased fashion on all the cars and all the drivers in the Grand Prix field and their resentment remained undiminished when he pointed out to them, reasonably and with unchallengeable accuracy, that this was precisely what he did. What really grieved them, of course, was that he had the inside track on the Coronado team, then the fastest burgeoning and most glamorous race company in the business: and it would have been difficult to deny that the number of off-track articles he had written partly about the team but primarily about Harlow would have made up a pretty fair-size volume. Nor had matters been helped by the existence of a book on which he had collaborated with Harlow.

MacAlpine said: ‘I’m afraid you’re right, Alexis. Which means that I know you’re right but I don’t even want to admit it to myself. He’s just terrifying the living daylights out of everyone. And out of me. And now this.’

They looked across the pits to where Harlow was sitting on a bench just outside the shelter. Uncaring whether he was observed or not, he half-filled a glass from a rapidly diminishing brandy bottle. One did not have to have eyesight to know that the hands were still shaking: diminishing though the protesting roar of the crowd still was, it was still sufficient to make normal conversation difficult: nevertheless, the castanet rattle of glass against glass could be clearly heard. Harlow took a quick gulp from his glass then sat there with both elbows on his knees and stared, unblinkingly and without expression, at the wrecked remains of his car.

Dunnet said: ‘And only two months ago he’d never touched the hard stuff in his life. What are you going to do, James?’

‘Now?’ MacAlpine smiled faintly. ‘I’m going to see Mary. I think by this time they might let me in to see her.’ He glanced briefly, his face seemingly impassive, around the pits, at Harlow lifting his glass again, at the red-haired Rafferty twins looking almost as unhappy as Dunnet, and at Jacobson, Tracchia and Rory wearing uniform scowls and directing them in uniform directions, sighed for the last time, turned and walked heavily away.

Mary MacAlpine was twenty-two years old, pale complexioned despite the many hours she spent in the sun, with big brown eyes, gleamingly brushed black hair as dark as night and the most bewitching smile that ever graced a Grand Prix racing track: she did not intend that the smile should be bewitching, she just couldn’t help it. Everyone in the team, even the taciturn and terrible-tempered Jacobson, was in love with her in one way or another, not to mention a quite remarkable number of other people who were not in the team: this Mary recognized and accepted with commendable aplomb, although without either amusement or condescension: condescension was quite alien to her nature. In any event, she viewed the regard that others had for her as only the natural reciprocal of the regard she had for them: despite her quick no-nonsense mind, Mary MacAlpine was in many ways still very young.

Lying in bed in that spotless, soullessly antiseptic hospital room that night, Mary MacAlpine looked younger than ever. She also looked, as she unquestionably was, very ill. The natural paleness had turned to pallor and the big brown eyes which she opened only briefly and reluctantly, were dulled with pain. This same pain was reflected in MacAlpine’s eyes as he looked down at his daughter, at the heavily splinted and bandaged left leg lying on top of the sheet. MacAlpine stooped and kissed his daughter on the forehead.

He said: ‘Sleep well, darling. Good night.’

She tried to smile. ‘With all the pills they’ve given me? Yes, I think I will. And Daddy.’

‘Darling?’

‘It wasn’t Johnny’s fault. I know it wasn’t. It was his car. I know it was.’

‘We’re finding that out. Jacobson is taking the car down.’

‘You’ll see. Will you ask Johnny to come and see me?’

‘Not tonight, darling. I’m afraid he’s not too well.’

‘He – he hasn’t been – ’

‘No, no. Shock.’ MacAlpine smiled, ‘He’s been fed the same pills as yourself.’

‘Johnny Harlow? In shock? I don’t believe it. Three near-fatal crashes and he never once – ’

‘He saw you, my darling.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll be around later tonight.’

MacAlpine left the room and walked down to the reception area. A doctor was speaking to the nurse at the desk. He had grey hair, tired eyes and the face of an aristocrat. MacAlpine said: ‘Are you the person who is looking after my daughter?’

‘Mr MacAlpine? Yes, I am. Dr Chollet.’

‘She seems very ill.’

‘No, Mr MacAlpine. No problem. She is just under heavy sedation. For the pain, you understand.’

‘I see. How long will she be – ’

‘Two weeks. Perhaps three. No more.’

‘One question, Dr Chollet. Why is her leg not in traction?’

‘It would seem, Mr MacAlpine, that you are not a man who is afraid of the truth.’

‘Why is her leg not in traction?’

‘Traction is for broken bones, Mr MacAlpine. Your daughter’s left ankle bone, I’m afraid, is not just broken, it is – how would you say it in English? – pulverized, yes I think that is the word, pulverized beyond any hope of remedial surgery. What’s left of the bone will have to be fused together.’

‘Meaning that she can never bend her ankle again?’ Chollet inclined his head. ‘A permanent limp? For life?’

‘You can have a second opinion, Mr MacAlpine. The best orthopaedic specialist in Paris. You are entitled –’ ‘No. That will not be necessary. The truth is obvious, Dr Chollet. One accepts the obvious.’

‘I am deeply sorry, Mr MacAlpine. She is a lovely child. But I am only a surgeon. Miracles? No. No miracles.’

‘Thank you, Doctor. You are most kind. I’ll be back in about say – two hours?’

‘Please not. She will be asleep for at least twelve hours. Perhaps sixteen.’

MacAlpine nodded his head in acceptance and left.

Dunnet pushed away his plate with his untouched meal, looked at MacAlpine’s plate, similarly untouched, then at the brooding MacAlpine.

He said: ‘I don’t think either of us, James, is as tough as we thought we were.’

‘Age, Alexis. It overtakes us all.’

‘Yes. And at very high speed, it would seem.’ Dunnet pulled his plate towards him, regarded it sorrowfully then pushed it away again.

‘Well, I suppose it’s a damn sight better than amputation.’

‘There’s that. There’s that.’ MacAlpine pushed back his chair. ‘A walk, I think, Alexis.’

‘For the appetite? It won’t work. Not with me.’

‘Nor with me. I just thought it might be interesting to see if Jacobson has turned up anything.’

The garage was very long, low, heavily skylighted, brilliantly lit with hanging spotlights and, for a garage, was remarkably clean and tidy. Jacobson was at the inner end, stooped over Harlow’s wrecked Coronado, when the metal door screeched open. He straightened, acknowledged the presence of MacAlpine and Dunnet with a wave of his hand, then returned to his examination of the car.

Dunnet closed the door and said quietly: ‘Where are the other mechanics?’

MacAlpine said: You should know by this time. Jacobson always works alone on a crash job. A very low opinion of other mechanics, has Jacobson. Says they either overlook evidence or destroy it by clumsiness.’

The two men advanced and watched in silence as Jacobson tightened a connection in the hydraulic brake line. They were not alone in watching him. Directly above them, through an open skylight, the powerful lamps in the garage reflected on something metallic. The metallic object was a hand-held eight millimetre camera and the hands that held them were very steady indeed. They were the hands of Johnny Harlow. His face was as impassive as his hands were motionless, intent and still and totally watchful. He was also totally sober.

MacAlpine said: ‘Well?’

Jacobson straightened and tenderly massaged an obviously aching back.

‘Nothing. Just nothing. Suspension, brakes, engine, transmission, tyres, steering – all OK.’

‘But the steering – ’

‘Sheared. Impact fracture. Couldn’t be anything else. It was still working when he pulled out in front of Jethou. You can’t tell me that the steering suddenly went in that one second of time, Mr MacAlpine. Coincidence is coincidence, but that would be just a bit too much.’

Dunnet said: ‘So we’re still in the dark?’

‘It’s broad daylight where I stand. The oldest reason in the business. Driver error.’

‘Driver error.’ Dunnet shook his head. ‘Johnny Harlow never made a driver error in his life.’

Jacobson smiled, his eyes cold. ‘I’d like to have the opinion of Jethou’s ghost on that one.’

MacAlpine said: ‘This hardly helps. Come on. Hotel. You haven’t even eaten yet, Jacobson.’ He looked at Dunnet. ‘A night-cap in the bar, I think, then a look-in on Johnny.’

Jacobson said: ‘You’ll be wasting your time, sir. He’ll be paralytic.’

MacAlpine looked at Jacobson consideringly, then said very slowly and after a long pause: ‘He’s still world champion. He’s still Coronado’s number one.’

‘So that’s the way of it, is it?’

‘You want it some other way?’

Jacobson crossed to a sink, began to wash his hands. Without turning he said: ‘You’re the boss, Mr MacAlpine.’

MacAlpine made no reply. When Jacobson had dried his hands the three men left the garage in silence, closing the heavy metal door behind them.

Only the top half of Harlow’s head and supporting hands were visible as he clung to the ridgepole of the garage’s V-roof and watched the three men walk up the brightly lit main street. As soon as they had turned a corner and disappeared from sight, he slid gingerly down towards the opened skylight, lowered himself through the opening and felt with his feet until he found a metal cross-beam. He released his grip on the skylight sill, balanced precariously on the beam, brought out a small flashlight from an inner pocket – Jacobson had switched off all the lights before leaving – and directed it downwards. The concrete floor was about nine feet below him.

Harlow stooped, reached for the beam with his hands, slid down over it, hung at the full stretch of his hand, then released his grip. He landed lightly and easily, headed for the door, switched on all the lights then went directly to the Coronado. He was carrying not one but two strap-hung cameras, his eight millimetre cine and a very compact still camera with flashlight attachment.

He found an oily cloth and used it to rub clean part of the right suspension, a fuel line, the steering linkage and one of the carburettors in the engine compartment. Each of these areas he flash-photographed several times with the still camera. He retrieved the cloth, coated it with a mixture of oil and dirt from the floor, swiftly smeared the parts he had photographed and threw the cloth into a metal bin provided for that purpose.

He crossed to the door and tugged on the handle, but to no avail. The door had been locked from the outside and its heavy construction precluded any thought or attempt to force it: and Harlow’s last thought was to leave any trace of his passing. He looked quickly around the garage.

On his left hand side was a light wooden ladder suspended from two right-angle wall brackets – a ladder almost certainly reserved for the cleaning of the very considerable skylight area. Below it, and to one side, lay, in a corner, the untidy coil of a towrope.

Harlow moved to the corner, picked up the rope, lifted the ladder off its brackets, looped the rope round the top rung and placed the ladder against the metal cross-beam. He returned to the door and switched off the lights. Using his flashlight, he climbed up the ladder and straddled the beam. Grasping the ladder while still maintaining his grip on the rope, he maneuvered the former until the lower end hooked on to one of the right angle wall brackets. Using the looped rope, he lowered the other end of the ladder until, not without some difficulty, he managed to drop it into the other bracket. He released one end of the rope, pulled it clear of the ladder, coiled it up and threw it into the corner where it had been previously lying. Then, swaying dangerously, he managed to bring himself upright on the beam, thrust himself head and shoulders through the opened skylight, hauled himself up and disappeared into the night above.

MacAlpine and Dunnet were seated alone at a table in an otherwise deserted lounge bar. They were seated in silence as a waiter brought them two scotches. MacAlpine raised his glass and smiled without humour.

‘When you come to the end of a perfect day. God, I’m tired.’

‘So you’re committed, James. So Harlow goes on.’

‘Thanks to Jacobson. Didn’t leave me much option, did he?’

Harlow, running along the brightly lit main street, stopped abruptly. The street was almost entirely deserted except for two tall men approaching his way. Harlow hesitated, looked around swiftly, then pressed into a deeply recessed shop entrance. He stood there immobile as the two men passed by: they were Nicolo Tracchia, Harlow’s team-mate, and Willi Neubauer, engrossed in low-voiced and clearly very earnest conversation. Neither of them saw Harlow. They passed by. Harlow emerged from the recessed doorway, looked cautiously both ways, waited until the retreating backs of Tracchia and Neubauer had turned a corner, then broke into a run again.

MacAlpine and Dunnet drained their glasses. MacAlpine looked questioningly at Dunnet. Dunnet said: ‘Well, I suppose we’ve got to face it some time.’

MacAlpine said: ‘I suppose.’ Both men rose, nodded to the barman, and left.

Harlow, now moving at no more than a fast walk, crossed the street in the direction of a neon-signed hotel. Instead of using the main entrance, he went down a side alleyway, turned to his right and started to climb a fire-escape two steps at a time. His steps were as sure-footed as a mountain goat, his balance immaculate, his face registering no emotion. Only his eyes registered any expression. They were clear and still but possessed an element of clear-eyed and concentrated calculation. It was the face of a dedicated man who knew completely what he was about.

MacAlpine and Dunnet were outside a door, numbered 412. MacAlpine’s face registered a peculiar mixture of anger and concern. Dunnet’s face, oddly, showed only unconcern. It could have been tight-lipped unconcern, but then Dunnet was habitually a tight-lipped man. MacAlpine hammered loudly on the door. The hammering brought no reaction. MacAlpine glanced furiously at his bruising knuckles, glanced at Dunnet and started a renewed assault on the door. Dunnet had no comment to make, either vocally or facially.

Harlow reached a platform on the fourth-floor fire-escape. He swung over the guard-railing, took a long step towards a nearby open window, negotiated the crossing safely and passed inside. The room was small. A suitcase lay on the floor, its contents spilled out in considerable disarray. On the bedside table stood a low-wattage lamp, which gave the only weak illumination in the room, and a half empty bottle of whisky. Harlow closed and locked the window to the accompaniment of a violent tattoo of knocks on the door. MacAlpine’s outraged voice was very loud and clear.

‘Open up! Johnny! Open up or I’ll break the bloody door in.’

Harlow pushed both cameras under the bed. He tore off his black leather jacket and black roll-neck pull-over and thrust them both after the cameras. He then took a quick swill of whisky, split a little in the palm of his hand and rubbed it over his face.

The door burst open to show MacAlpine’s outstretched right leg, the heel of which he’d obviously used against the lock. Both MacAlpine and Dunnet entered, then stood still. Harlow, clad only in shirt and trousers and still wearing his shoes, was stretched out in bed, apparently in an almost coma-like condition. His arm dangled over the side of the bed, his right hand clutching the neck of the whisky bottle. MacAlpine, grim-faced and almost incredulous, approached the bed, bent over Harlow, sniffed in disgust and removed the bottle from Harlow’s nerveless hand. He looked at Dunnet, who returned his expressionless glance.

MacAlpine said: ‘The greatest driver in the world.’

‘Please James. You said it yourself. It happens to all of them. Remember? Sooner or later, it happens to them all.’

‘But Johnny Harlow?’

‘Even to Johnny Harlow.’

MacAlpine nodded. Both men turned and left the room, closing the broken door behind them. Harlow opened his eyes, rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His hand stopped moving and he sniffed his palm. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

CHAPTER THREE

As the crowded weeks after the Clermont-Ferrand race rushed by there appeared to be little change in Johnny Harlow. Always a remote, withdrawn and lonely figure, remote and withdrawn he still remained, except that he was now more lonely than ever. In his great days, at the peak of his powers and the height of his fame, he had been a man relaxed to the point of abnormality, his inner self under iron control: and so, in his quietness, he seemed to be now, as aloofly remote and detached as ever, those remarkable eyes – remarkable in the quality of their phenomenal eyesight, not in appearance – as clear and calm and unblinking as ever and the aquiline face quite devoid of expression.

The hands were still now, hands that bespoke a man at peace with himself, but it would seem likely that the hands belied and did not bespeak for it seemed equally that he was not at peace with himself and never would be again for to say that Johnny Harlow’s fortunes steadily declined from that day he had killed Jethou and crippled Mary one would be guilty of a sad misuse of the English language. They hadn’t declined, they had collapsed with what must have been for him – and most certainly for his great circle of friends, acquaintances and admirers – a complete and shattering finality.

Two weeks after the death of Jethou – and this before his own home British crowd who had come, almost to a man, to forgive him for the dreadful insults and accusations heaped upon him by the French press and to cheer their idol home to victory – he had suffered the indignity, not to say the humiliation, of running off the track in the very first lap. He had caused no damage either to himself or any spectator but his Coronado was a total write-off. As both front tyres had burst it was assumed that at least one of them had gone before the car had left the track: there could not, it was agreed, have been any other explanation for Harlow’s abrupt departure into the wilderness. This agreement was not quite universal. Jacobson, predictably, had privately expressed his opinion that the accepted explanation was a very charitable assumption indeed. Jacobson was becoming very attached to the phrase ‘driver error’.

Two weeks after that, at the German Grand Prix – probably the most difficult circuit in Europe but one of which Harlow was an acknowledged master – the air of gloom and despondency that hung like a thundercloud over the Coronado pits was almost palpable enough, almost visible enough to take hold of and push to one side – were it not for the fact that this particular cloud was immovable. The race was over and the last of the Grand Prix cars had vanished to complete the final circuit of the track before coming into their pits.

MacAlpine, looking both despondent and bitter, glanced at Dunnet, who lowered his eyes, bit his lower lip and shook his head. MacAlpine looked away and lost himself in his own private thoughts. Mary sat on a canvas chair close beside them. Her left leg was still in heavy plaster and crutches were propped up against her chair. She held a lap-time note-pad in one hand, a stop watch and pencil in the other. She was gnawing a pencil and her pale face held the expression of one who was pretty close to tears. Behind her stood Jacobson, his two mechanics, and Rory. Jacobson’s face, if his habitual saturnine expression were excepted, was quite without expression. His mechanics, the red-haired Rafferty twins, wore, as usual, identical expressions, in this case a mixture of resignation and despair. Rory’s face registered nothing but a cold contempt.

Rory said: ‘Eleventh out of twelve finishers! Boy, what a driver. Our world champion – doing his lap of honour, I suppose.’

Jacobson looked at him speculatively.

‘A month ago he was your idol, Rory.’

Rory looked across at his sister. She was still gnawing her pencil, the shoulders were drooped and the tears in her eyes were now unmistakable. Rory looked back at Jacobson and said: ‘That was a month ago.’

A lime-green Coronado swept into the pits, braked and stopped, its crackling exhaust fading away into silence. Nicolo Tracchia removed his helmet, produced a large silk handkerchief, wiped his matinée-idol face and started to remove his gloves. He looked, and with reason, particularly pleased with himself, for he had just finished second and that by only a car’s length. MacAlpine crossed to him and patted the still-seated Tracchia on the back.

‘A magnificent race, Nikki. Your best ever – and on this brute of a course. Your third second place in five times out.’ He smiled. ‘You know, I’m beginning to think that we may make a driver of you yet.’

Tracchia grinned hugely and climbed from the car.

‘Watch me next time out. So far, Nicolo Tracchia hasn’t really been trying, just trying to improve the performance of those machines our chief mechanic ruins for us between races.’ He smiled at Jacobson, who grinned back: despite the marked differences in the natures and interests, there was a close affinity between the two men. ‘Now, when it comes to the Austrian Grand Prix in a couple of weeks – well, I’m sure you can afford a couple of bottles of champagne.’

MacAlpine smiled again and it was clear that though the smile did not come easily its reluctance was not directed against Tracchia. In the space of one brief month MacAlpine, even though he still couldn’t conceivably be called a thin person, had noticeably lost weight in both body and face, the already trenched lines in the latter seemed to have deepened and it was possible even to imagine an increase in the silver on that magnificent head of hair. It was difficult to imagine that even the precipitous fall from grace of his superstar could have been responsible for so dramatic a change but it was equally difficult to imagine that there could have been any other reason. MacAlpine said:

‘Overlooking the fact, aren’t we, that there’ll be a real live Austrian at the Austrian Grand Prix. Chap called Willi Neubauer. You have heard of him?’

Tracchia was unperturbed. ‘Austrian our Willi may be, but the Austrian Grand Prix is not his circuit. He’s never come in better than fourth. I’ve been second in the last two years.’ He glanced away as another Coronado entered the pits then looked back at MacAlpine. ‘And you know who came in first both times.’

‘Yes, I know.’ MacAlpine turned away heavily and approached the other car as Harlow got out, removed his helmet, looked at his car and shook his head. When MacAlpine spoke there was no bitterness or anger or accusation in either voice or face, just a faint resignation and despair.

‘Well, Johnny, you can’t win them all.’

Harlow said: ‘Not with this car I can’t.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Loss of power in the higher revs.’

Jacobson had approached and his face was still without expression as he heard Harlow’s explanation. He said: ‘From the start?’

‘No. Nothing to do with you, Jake, I know that. It was bloody funny. Kept coming and going. At least a dozen times I got full power back. But never for long.’ He turned away and moodily examined his car again. Jacobson glanced at MacAlpine, who gave him an all but imperceptible nod.

By dusk that evening the race-track was deserted, the last of the crowds and officials gone. MacAlpine, a lonely and brooding figure, his hands thrust deeply in the pockets of his tan gaberdine suit, stood at the entrance of the Coronado pits. He wasn’t, however, quite as alone as he might justifiably have imagined. In the neighbouring Cagliari pits a figure clad in a dark roll-neck pullover and dark leather jacket stood hidden in a shadowed corner. Johnny Harlow had a remarkable capacity for maintaining an absolute stillness and that capacity he was employing to the full at that moment. But apart from those two figures the entire track seemed quite empty of life.

But not of sound. There came the deepening clamour of the sound of a Grand Prix engine and a Coronado, lights on, appeared from the distance, changed down through the gears, slowed right down as it passed the Cagliari pits and came to a halt outside the entrance to the Coronado pits. Jacobson climbed out and removed his helmet.

MacAlpine said: ‘Well?’

‘Damn all the matter with the car.’ His tone was neutral but his eyes were hard. ‘Went like a bird. Our Johnny certainly knows how to use his imagination. We’ve got something more than just driver error here, Mr MacAlpine.’

MacAlpine hesitated. The fact that Jacobson had made a perfect lap circuit was no proof of anything one way or another. In the nature of things he would have been unable to drive the Coronado at anything like the speed Harlow had done. Again, the fault may have occurred only when the engine had heated to its maximum and it was unlikely that Jacobson could have reached that in a single lap: finally, those highly-bred racing engines, which could cost up to eight thousand pounds, were extraordinarily fickle creatures and quite capable of developing and clearing up their own faults without the hand of man going anywhere near them. Jacobson, inevitably, regarded MacAlpine’s silence as either doubt or outright agreement. He said: ‘Maybe you’re coming round to my way of thinking, Mr MacAlpine?’

MacAlpine didn’t say whether he was or he wasn’t. He said instead: ‘Just leave the car where she is. We’ll send Henry and the two boys down with the transporter to pick it up. Come along. Dinner. I think we’ve earned it. And a drink. I think we’ve earned that, too. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever earned so many drinks as I have in the past four weeks.’

‘I wouldn’t disagree with you on that, Mr MacAlpine.’

MacAlpine’s blue Aston Martin lay parked in the rear of the pits. Both men climbed in and drove off down the track.

Harlow watched the car depart. If he had been disturbed by the conclusions Jacobson had arrived at or MacAlpine’s apparent acceptance of them no signs of any such anxiety were reflected in his untroubled face. He waited until the car had disappeared into the gathering darkness, looked round carefully to make sure that he was entirely alone and unobserved, then moved into the back of the Cagliari pits. There he opened a canvas bag he was carrying, produced a flat-based lamp-light with a large swivelling head, a hammer, cold chisel and screwdriver and set them on top of the nearest crate. He pressed the switch on the handle of the lamp-light and a powerful white beam illuminated the back of the Cagliari pits. A flick on the lever on the base of the swivelling head and the white dazzle was at once replaced by a red muted glow. Harlow took hammer and chisel in hand and set resolutely to work.

Most of the crates and boxes did not, in fact, have to be forced for the esoteric collection of engine and chassis spares inside them could not conceivably have been of any interest to any passing thief: he almost certainly wouldn’t have known what to look for and, in the remote event of his so knowing, he would quite certainly have been unable to dispose of them. The few crates that Harlow did have to open he did so carefully, gently and with the minimum of noise.

Harlow spent the minimum of time on his examination, presumably because delay always increased the danger of discovery. He also appeared to know exactly what he was looking for. The contents of some boxes were disposed of with only the most cursory of glances: even the largest of the crates merited no more than a minute’s inspection. Within half an hour after beginning the operation he had begun to close all the crates and boxes up again. Those he had been compelled to force open he closed with a cloth-headed hammer to reduce noise to a minimum and leave the least perceptible traces of his passing. When he was finished, he returned his torch and tools to the canvas bag, emerged from the Cagliari pits and walked away into the near darkness. If he was disappointed with the results of his investigation he did not show it: but, then, Harlow rarely showed any emotion.

Fourteen days later Nicolo Tracchia achieved what he promised MacAlpine he would achieve – the ambition of his life. He won the Austrian Grand Prix. Harlow, by now predictably, won nothing. Worse, not only did he not finish the race, he hardly even began it, achieving only four more laps than he had in England – and there he had crashed on the first lap.

He had begun well enough by any standards, even his own, he had made a brilliantly successful start and was leading the field by a clear margin after the end of the fifth lap. Next time round he pulled his Coronado into the pits. As he stepped out of his car he seemed normal enough with no trace of undue anxiety and nothing even closely resembling a cold sweat. But he had his hands thrust deeply into his overall pockets and his fists were tightly balled: this way you can’t tell whether a man’s hands are shaking or not. He removed one hand long enough to make a dismissive gesture towards all the pit crew – with the exception of the still chair-borne Mary – who came hurrying towards him.

‘No panic.’ He shook his head. ‘And no hurry. Fourth gear’s gone.’ He stood looking out moodily over the track. MacAlpine stared at him closely then looked at Dunnet who nodded without even appearing to have seen the glance that MacAlpine had directed at him. Dunnet was staring at the clenched hands inside Harlow’s pockets.

MacAlpine said: ‘We’ll pull Nikki in. You can have his car.’

Harlow didn’t answer immediately. There came the sound of an approaching racing engine and Harlow nodded towards the track. The others followed his line of sight. A lime-green Coronado flashed by but still Harlow stared out over the track. At least another fifteen seconds elapsed before the next car, Neubauer’s royal blue Cagliari came by. Harlow turned and looked at MacAlpine. Harlow’s normally impassive face had come as near as it was possible for it to register a degree of incredulity.

‘Pull him in? Good God, Mac, are you mad? Nikki’s got fifteen clear seconds now that I’m out. There’s no way he can lose. Our Signor Tracchia would never forgive me – or you – if you were to pull him in now. It’ll be his first Grand Prix – and the one he most wanted to win.’

Harlow turned and walked away as if the matter was settled. Both Mary and Rory watched him go, the former with dull misery in her eyes, the latter with a mixture of triumph and contempt at which he was at no pains at all to conceal. MacAlpine hesitated, made as if to speak, then he too turned and walked away, although in a different direction. Dunnet accompanied him. The two men halted in a corner of the pits.

MacAlpine said: ‘Well?’

Dunnet said: ‘Well what, James?’

‘Please. I don’t deserve that from you.’

‘You mean, did I see what you saw? His hands?’

‘He’s got the shakes again.’ MacAlpine made a long pause then sighed and shook his head. ‘I keep on saying it. It happens to them all. No matter how cool or brave or brilliant – hell, I’ve said it all before. And when a man has icy calm and iron control like Johnny – well, when the break comes it’s liable to be a pretty drastic one.’

‘And when does the break come?’

‘Pretty soon, I think. I’ll give him one more Grand Prix. Do you know what he’s going to do now? Later tonight, rather – he’s become very crafty about it.’

‘I don’t think I want to know.’

‘He’s going to hit the bottle.’

A voice with a very powerful Glasgow accent said: ‘The word is that he already has.’

Both MacAlpine and Dunnet turned slowly round. Coming out of the shadows of the hut behind was a small man with an incredibly wizened face, whose straggling white moustache contrasted oddly with his monk’s tonsure. Even odder was the long, thin and remarkably bent black cigar protruding from one corner of his virtually toothless mouth. His name was Henry, he was the transporter’s old driver – long long past retiring age – and the cigar was his trademark. It was said that he occasionally ate with the cigar in his mouth.

MacAlpine said without inflection: ‘Eavesdropping, eh?’

‘Eavesdropping! ’It was difficult to say whether Henry’s tone and expression reflected indignation or incredulity but in either event they were on an Olympian scale. ‘You know very well that I would never eavesdrop, Mr MacAlpine. I was just listening. There’s a difference.’

‘What did you say just now?’

‘I know you heard what I said.’ Henry was still splendidly unperturbed. ‘You know that he’s driving like a madman and that all the other drivers are getting terrified of him. In fact, they are terrified of him. He shouldn’t be allowed on a racetrack again. The man’s shot, you can see that. And in Glasgow, when we say that a man’s shot, we mean – ’

Dunnet said: ‘We know what you mean. I thought you were a friend of his, Henry?’

‘Aye, I’m all that. Finest gentleman I’ve ever known, begging the pardon of you two gentlemen. It’s because I’m his friend that I don’t want him killed – or had up for manslaughter.’

MacAlpine said without animosity: ‘You stick to your job of running the transporter, Henry: I’ll stick to mine of running the Coronado team.’

Henry nodded and turned away, gravity in his face and a certain carefully controlled degree of outrage in his walk as if to say he’d done his duty, delivered his witch’s warning and if that warning were not acted upon the consequences weren’t going to be his, Henry’s, fault. MacAlpine, his face equally grave, rubbed his cheek thoughtfully and said: ‘He could be right at that. In fact, I have every reason for thinking he is.’

‘Is what, James?’

‘On the skids. On the rocks. Shot, as Henry would say.’

‘Shot by whom? By what?’

‘Chap called Bacchus, Alexis. The chap that prefers using booze to bullets.’

‘You have evidence of this?’

‘Not so much evidence of his drinking as lack of evidence of his not drinking. Which can be just as damning.’

‘Sorry, don’t follow. Can it be that you have been holding out on me, James?’

MacAlpine nodded and told briefly of his duplicity in the line of duty. It was just after the day that Jethou had died and Harlow had shown his lack of expertise both in pouring and drinking brandy that MacAlpine had first suspected that Harlow had forgone his lifelong abstention from alcohol. There had been, of course, no spectacular drinking bouts, for those would have been automatically responsible for having him banned from the race-tracks of the world: a genius for avoiding company, he just went about it quietly, steadily, persistently and above all secretly, for Harlow always drank alone, almost invariably in out of the way places, usually quite remote, where he stood little or no chance of being discovered. This MacAlpine knew for he had hired what was practically a full-time investigator to follow him but Harlow was either extremely lucky or, aware of what was going on – he was a man of quite remarkable intelligence and must have suspected the possibility of his being followed – extremely astute and skilled in his avoidance of surveillance, for he had been tracked down only three times to sources of supply, small Weinstuben lost in the forests near the Hockenheim and Nurburgring circuits. Even on those occasions he had been observed to be sipping, delicately and with what appeared to be commendable restraint, a small glass of hock which was hardly sufficient to blunt even the highly-tuned faculties and reactions of a Formula One driver: what made this elusiveness all the more remarkable was that Harlow drove everywhere in his flame-red Ferrari, the most conspicuous car on the roads of Europe. But that he went to such extraordinary – and extraordinarily successful – lengths to escape surveillance was, for MacAlpine, all the circumstantial evidence he required that Harlow’s frequent, mysterious and unexplained absences coincided with Harlow’s frequent and solitary drinking bouts. MacAlpine finished by saying that a later and more sinister note had crept in: there was now daily and incontrovertible evidence that Harlow had developed a powerful affinity for scotch.

Dunnet was silent until he saw that MacAlpine apparently had no intention of adding to what he had said. ‘Evidence?’ he said, ‘What kind of evidence?’

‘Olfactory evidence.’

Dunnet paused briefly then said: ‘I’ve never smelt anything.’

MacAlpine said kindly: ‘That, Alexis, is because you are not capable of smelling anything. You can’t smell oil, you can’t smell fuel, you can’t smell burning tyres. How do you expect to be able to smell scotch?’

Dunnet inclined his head in acknowledgment. He said: ‘Have you smelt anything?’

MacAlpine shook his head.

‘Well, then.’

MacAlpine said: ‘He avoids me like the plague nowadays – and you know how close Johnny and myself used to be. Whenever he does get close to me he smells powerfully of menthol throat tablets. Doesn’t that say something to you?’

‘Come off it, James. That’s no evidence.’

‘Perhaps not. But Tracchia, Jacobson and Rory swear to it.’

‘Oh, brother, are they unbiased witnesses. If Johnny is forced to step down who’s going to be Coronado’s number one driver with a good chance of being the next champion? Who but our Nikki. Jacobson and Johnny have never been on good terms and now the relationship is going from bad to worse: Jacobson doesn’t like having his cars smashed up and what he likes even less is Harlow’s contention that the smashes have nothing to do with him which brings into question Jacobson’s ability to prepare a car thoroughly. As for Rory, well, frankly, he hates Johnny Harlow’s guts: partly because of what Johnny did to Mary, partly because she’s never allowed the accident to make the slightest difference in her attitude towards him. I’m afraid, James, that your daughter is the only person left on the team who is still totally devoted to Johnny Harlow.’

‘Yes, I know.’ MacAlpine was momentarily silent then said dully: ‘Mary was the first person to tell me.’

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Dunnet looked miserably out on the track and without looking at MacAlpine said: ‘You’ve no option now. You have to fire him. For preference, today.’

‘You’re forgetting, Alexis, that you’ve just learnt this while I’ve known it for some time. My mind has been made up. One more Grand Prix.’

The parking lot, in the fading light, looked like the last resting place of the behemoths of a bygone age. The huge transporters that carried the racing cars, spare parts and portable workshops around Europe, parked, as they were, in a totally haphazard fashion, loomed menacingly out of the gloom. They were completely devoid of life as evinced by the fact that no light showed from any of them. The car park itself was equally deserted except for a figure that had just appeared from out of the gathering dusk and passed through the entrance to the transporter parking lot.

Johnny Harlow made no apparent attempt to conceal his presence from any chance observer, if any such there had been. Swinging his little canvas bag he made his way diagonally across the parking lot until he brought up at one of the huge behemoths: written large on the side and back was the word FERRARI. He didn’t even bother to try the door of the transporter but produced a bunch of curiously shaped keys and had the door open in a matter of a few seconds. He passed inside and closed and locked the door behind him. For five minutes he did nothing other than move from window to window on either side of the transporter checking patiently, continuously, to see if his unauthorized entrance had been observed. It was apparent that it had not been. Satisfied, Harlow withdrew the flash-lamp from the canvas bag, switched on the red beam, stooped over the nearest Ferrari racing car and began to examine it minutely.

There were about thirty people in the hotel lobby that evening. Among them were Mary MacAlpine and her brother, Henry and the two red-haired Rafferty twins. The sound level of the conversation was notably high: the hotel had been taken over for the weekend by several of the Grand Prix teams and the racing fraternity is not particularly renowned for its inhibitions. All of them, mainly drivers but with several mechanics, had discarded their workaday clothes and were suitably attired for their evening meal which was as yet an hour distant. Henry, especially, was exceptionally resplendent in a grey pin-striped suit with a red rose in his buttonhole. Even his moustache appeared to have been combed. Mary sat beside him with Rory a few feet away, reading a magazine, or at least appearing to do so. Mary sat silently, unsmiling, constantly gripping and twisting one of the walking sticks to which she had now graduated. Suddenly, she turned to Henry.

‘Where does Johnny go each evening. We hardly ever see him after dinner nowadays.’

‘Johnny?’ Henry adjusted the flower in his button, hole. ‘No idea, miss. Maybe he prefers his own company. Maybe he finds the food better elsewhere. Maybe anything.’

Rory still held the magazine before his face. Clearly however he was not reading for his eyes were very still. But, at the moment, his whole being was not in his eyes but in his ears.

Mary said: ‘Maybe it’s not just the food that he finds better elsewhere.’

‘Girls, miss? Johnny Harlow’s not interested in girls.’ He leered at her in what he probably imagined to be a roguish fashion in keeping with the gentlemanly splendour of his evening wear. ‘Except for a certain you-know-who.’

‘Don’t be such a fool.’ Mary MacAlpine was not always milk and roses. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘What do you mean, miss?’

‘Don’t be clever with me, Henry.’

Henry assumed the sad expression of the continuously misjudged.

‘I’m not clever enough to be clever with anybody.’

Mary looked at him in cold speculation then abruptly turned away. Rory just as quickly averted his own head. He was looking very thoughtful indeed and the expression superimposed upon the thoughtfulness could hardly be described as pleasant.

Harlow, the hooded red light giving all the illumination he required, probed the depths of a box of spares. Suddenly, he half straightened, cocked his head as if to listen, switched off the torch, went to a side window and peered out. The evening darkness had deepened until it was now almost night, but a yellowish half-moon drifting behind scattered cloud gave just enough light to see by. Two men were heading across the transporter park, heading straight towards the Coronado unit, which was less than twenty feet from where Harlow stood watching. There was no difficulty at all in identifying them as MacAlpine and Jacobson. Harlow made his way to the Ferrari transporter’s door, unlocked it and cautiously opened it just sufficiently to give him a view of the Coronado transporter’s door. MacAlpine was just inserting his key in the lock. MacAlpine said:

‘So there’s no doubt then. Harlow wasn’t imagining things. Fourth gear is stripped.’

‘Completely.’

‘So he may be in the clear after all?’ There was a note almost of supplication in MacAlpine’s voice.

‘There’s more than one way of stripping a gear.’ Jacobson’s tone offered very little in the way of encouragement.

‘There’s that, I suppose, there’s that. Come on, let’s have a look at this damned gear-box.’

Both men passed inside and lights came on. Harlow, unusually half-smiling, nodded slowly, closed and gently locked the door and resumed his search. He acted with the same circumspection as he had in the Cagliari pits, forcing open crates and boxes, when this was necessary, with the greatest of care so that they could be closed again to show the absolute minimum of offered violence. He operated with speed and intense concentration, pausing only once at the sound of a noise outside. He checked the source of the noise, saw MacAlpine and Jacobson descending the steps of the Coronado transporter and walk away across the deserted compound. Harlow returned to his work.

CHAPTER FOUR

When Harlow finally returned to the hotel, the lobby, which also served as the bar, was crowded with hardly a seat left vacant and a group of at least a dozen men pressing in close against the bar. MacAlpine and Jacobson were sitting at a table with Dunnet. Mary, Henry and Rory were still sitting in the same seats. As Harlow closed the street door behind him, the dinner gong sounded – it was that kind of small country hotel, deliberately so styled, where everyone ate at the same time or not at all. It was a great convenience to management and staff though somewhat less so to the guests.

The guests were rising as Harlow made his way across the lobby towards the stairs. Nobody greeted him, few even bothered to look at him. MacAlpine, Jacobson and Dunnet ignored him entirely. Rory scowled at him in open contempt. Mary glanced briefly at him, bit her lip and quickly looked away again. Two months previously it would have taken Johnny Harlow five minutes to reach the foot of those stairs. That evening he made it in under ten seconds. If he was in any way dismayed by his reception he hid his concern well. His face was as impassive as that of a wooden Indian’s.

Arrived in his bedroom, he washed cursorily, combed his hair, crossed to a cupboard, reached for a high shelf, brought down a bottle of scotch, went into the bathroom, sipped some of the scotch, swirled it round his mouth then grimaced and spat it out. He left the glass, with its still almost untouched contents, on the basin ledge, returned the bottle to the cupboard and made his way down to the dining-room.

He was the last arrival. A complete stranger entering would have been paid more attention than was accorded to him. Harlow was no longer the person to be seen with. The dining-room was pretty well filled but not to capacity. Most of the tables held four people, a handful held only two. Of the tables that held four people, only three had as few as three people at them. Of the tables for two, only Henry sat alone. Harlow’s mouth quirked, so briefly, perhaps even involuntarily, that it could have been more imagined than seen, then, without hesitation, he crossed the dining-room and sat down at Henry’s table.

Harlow said: ‘May I, Henry?’

‘Be my guest, Mr Harlow.’ Henry was cordiality itself, and cordial he remained throughout the meal, talking at length on a wide variety of utterly inconsequential subjects which, try as he might, Harlow found of only minimal interest. Henry’s intellectual reach was normally limited in its nature and Harlow found that it was only with considerable difficulty that he could keep up his conversational end against Henry’s pedestrian platitudes. To make matters worse he had to listen to Henry’s observations from a distance of about six inches, an aesthetic ordeal in itself, as at even a distance of several yards Henry could not, with all charity, have been called photogenic. But Henry appeared to have considered this close-range exchange of intimacies as essential and, in the circumstances, Harlow would have found it hard to disagree with him. The silence in the dining-room that evening was more in the nature of a cathedral hush, one that could not have been attributed to a beatific enjoyment of the food which was of a standard to earn for the Austrians the most astronomical odds against in the culinary stakes. It was plain to Harlow, as it was plain to all present, that the very fact of his being there had an almost totally inhibitory effect on normal conversation. Henry, consequently, considered it prudent to lower his voice to a graveyard whisper that could not be heard beyond the confines of their table which in turn necessitated this very personal face-to-face approach. Harlow felt but did not express his profound relief when the meal was over: Henry also suffered from a severe case of halitosis.

Harlow was among the last to rise. He drifted aimlessly into the now again crowded lobby. He stood there in apparent irresolution, quite ignored and glancing idly around. Mary he saw there, and Rory, while at the far end of the lobby MacAlpine was engaged with what appeared to be some form of desultory conversation with Henry.

MacAlpine said: ‘Well?’

Henry was wearing his self-righteous expression. ‘Smelled like a distillery, sir.’

MacAlpine smiled faintly. ‘Coming from Glasgow, you should know something about those things. A good job. I owe you an apology, Henry.’

Henry inclined his head. ‘Granted, Mr MacAlpine.’

Harlow averted his head from this tableau. He hadn’t heard a word of the exchange but then he didn’t have to hear it. Suddenly, like a man making up his mind, he headed for the street door. Mary saw him go, looked around to see if she was being observed, came to the apparent conclusion that she wasn’t, gathered up her two sticks and limped after him. Rory, in his turn, waited for about ten seconds after his sister’s departure then drifted aimlessly towards the door.

Five minutes later Harlow entered a café and took a seat at an empty table where he could keep an eye on the entrance. A pretty young waitress approached, opened her eyes and then smiled charmingly. There were few young people of either sex in Europe who did not recognize Harlow on sight.

Harlow smiled back. ‘Tonic and water, please.’

The eyes opened even wider. ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘Tonic and water.’

The waitress, whose opinion of world champion drivers had clearly suffered a sudden revision, brought the drink. He sipped it occasionally, keeping an eye on the entrance door, then frowned as the door opened and Mary, clearly in a very apprehensive mood, entered the café. She saw Harlow at once, limped across the room and sat down at the table.

She said: ‘Hallo, Johnny,’ in the voice of one who was far from sure of her reception.

‘I must say I’d expected someone else.’

‘You what?’

‘Someone else,’

‘I don’t understand. Who – ’

‘No matter.’ Harlow’s tone was as brusque as his words. ‘Who sent you here to spy on me?’

‘Spy on you? Spy on you?’ She stared at him, the expression on her face one of lack of understanding rather than incredulity. ‘What on earth can you mean?’

Harlow remained implacable. ‘Surely you know what the word “spy” means?’

‘Oh, Johnny!’ The hurt in the big brown eyes was as unmistakable as that in the voice. ‘You know I’d never spy on you.’

Harlow relented, but only marginally. ‘Then why are you here?’

‘Aren’t you pleased just to see me?’

‘That’s neither here nor there. What are you doing in this café?’

‘I was – I was just passing by and – ’

‘And you saw me and came in.’ Abruptly he pushed back his chain and rose. ‘Wait here.’

Harlow went to the front door, glanced at it briefly and opened it, stepping just outside. He turned and looked for several seconds back up the way he had come, then turned round and looked down the street. But his interest lay in neither direction, but in a doorway directly across the street. A figure stood there, pushed back deeply into the recess. Without appearing to have noticed him, Harlow reentered the café, closed the door behind him and returned to his seat.

He said: ‘Aren’t you lucky to have those X-ray eyes. Frosted glass all the way and yet you see me sitting here.’

‘All right, Johnny.’ She sounded very weary. ‘I followed you. I’m worried. I’m dreadfully worried.’

‘Aren’t we all now and again. You should see me out on those race-tracks at times.’ He paused, then added with apparent inconsequence: ‘Was Rory still in the hotel when you left?’

She blinked her puzzlement. ‘Yes. Yes he was. I saw him. Just as I was leaving.’

‘Could he have seen you?’

‘That’s a funny question.’

‘I’m a funny fellow. Ask anyone around the racetracks. Could he have seen you?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose he could. Why – why all this concern about Rory?’

‘I wouldn’t like the poor little lad to be abroad in the streets at night and maybe catch a chill. Or maybe even get mugged.’ Harlow paused consideringly. ‘There’s a thought, now.’

‘Oh, stop it, Johnny! Stop it! I know, well I know he can’t stand the sight of you, won’t even speak to you ever since – ever since – ’

‘Ever since I crippled you.’

‘Oh, dear God!’ The distress in the face was very real. ‘He’s my brother, Johnny, but he’s not me. Can I help it if – look, whatever his grudge, can’t you forget it? You’re the kindest man in the world, Johnny Harlow – ’

‘Kindness doesn’t pay, Mary.’

‘You still are. I know you are. Can’t you forget it? Can’t you forgive him? You’re big enough, much more than big enough. Besides, he’s only a boy. You’re a man. What danger is he to you? What harm can he do you?’

‘You should see what harm a dangerous nine year-old can do in Vietnam when he has a rifle in his hands.’

She pushed her chair back. The tonelessness in her voice belied the tears in her eyes. She said: ‘Please forgive me. I shouldn’t have bothered you. Good night, Johnny.’

He laid a gentle hand on her wrist and she made no move to withdraw it, merely sat waiting there with a numbed despair on her face. He said: ‘Don’t go. I just wanted to make sure of something.’

‘What?’

‘Oddly, it doesn’t matter any more. Let’s forget about Rory. Let’s talk of you.’ He called to the waitress. ‘Same again, please.’

Mary looked at the freshly filled glass. She said: ‘What’s that? Gin? Vodka?’

‘Tonic and water.’

‘Oh, Johnny!’

‘Will you kindly stop “Oh, Johnnying” me.’ It was impossible to tell whether the irritation in his voice was genuine or not. ‘Now then. You say you are worried – as if you have to tell anyone that, far less me. Let me guess at your worries, Mary. I would say that there are five of them, Rory, yourself, your father, your mother and me.’ She made as if to speak but he waved her to silence. ‘You can forget about Rory and his antagonism to me. A month from now and he’ll think it was all a bad dream. Then yourself – and don’t deny you are worried about our, shall we say, relationship: those things tend to mend but they take time. Then there’s your father and mother and, well, me again. I’m about right?’

‘You haven’t talked to me like this for a long long time.’

‘Does that mean I’m about right?’

She nodded without speaking.

‘Your father. I know he’s not looking well, that he’s lost weight. I suggest that he’s worried about your mother and me, very much in that order.’

‘My mother,’ she whispered. ‘How did you know about that? Nobody knows about that except Daddy and me.’

‘I suspect Alexis Dunnet may know about it, they’re very close friends, but I can’t be sure. But your father told me, over two months ago. He trusted me, I know, in the days when we were still on speaking terms.’

‘Please, Johnny.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s better than “Oh, Johnny”. In spite of all that’s passed, I believe he still does. Please don’t tell him that I told you because I said I’d tell no one. Promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘Your father hasn’t been very communicative in the past two months. Understandably. And I hardly felt I was in a position to ask him questions. No progress, no trace of her, no message since she left your Marseilles home three months ago?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’ If she’d been the type to wring her hands she’d have done just that. ‘And she used to phone every day she wasn’t with us, write every week and now we – ’

‘And your father has tried everything?’

‘Daddy’s a millionaire. Don’t you think he would have tried everything?’

‘I should have thought so. So. You’re worried. What can I do?’

Mary briefly drummed her fingers on the table and looked up at him. Her eyes were masked in tears. She said: ‘You could remove his other main worry.’

‘Me?’

Mary nodded.

At that precise moment MacAlpine was very actively concerned in investigating his other main worry. He and Dunnet were standing outside a hotel bedroom door, with MacAlpine inserting a key in the lock. Dunnet looked around him apprehensively and said: ‘I don’t think the receptionist believed a word you said.’

‘Who cares?’ MacAlpine turned the key in the lock. ‘I got Johnny’s key, didn’t I?’

‘And if you hadn’t?’

‘I’d have kicked his damned door in. I’ve done it before, haven’t I?’

The two men entered, closed and locked the door behind them. Wordlessly and methodically, they began to search Harlow’s room, looking equally in the most likely as unlikely places – and in a hotel room the number of places available for concealment to even the most imaginative is very limited. Three minutes and their search was over, a search that had been as rewarding as it was deeply dismaying. The two men gazed down in a brief and almost stunned silence at the haul on Harlow’s bed – four full bottles of scotch and a fifth half full. They looked at each other and Dunnet summed up their feelings in a most succinct fashion indeed.

He said ‘Jesus!’

MacAlpine nodded. Unusually for him, he seemed at a total loss for words. He didn’t have to say anything for Dunnet to understand and sympathize with his feelings for the vastly unpleasant dilemma in which MacAlpine now found himself. He had committed himself to giving Harlow his last chance ever and now before him he had all the evidence he would ever require to justify Harlow’s instant dismissal.

Dunnet said: ‘So what do we do?’

‘We take that damn poison with us, that’s what we do.’ MacAlpine’s eyes were sick, his low voice harsh with strain.

‘But he’s bound to notice. And at once. From what we know of him now the first thing he’ll do on return is head straight for the nearest bottle.’

‘Who the hell cares what he does or notices? What can he do about it? More importantly, what can he say about it? He’s not going to rush down to the desk and shout: ‘I’m Johnny Harlow. Someone’s just stolen five bottles of scotch from my room.’ He won’t be able to do or say a thing.’

‘Of course he can’t. But he’ll still know the bottles are gone. What’s he going to think about that?’

‘Again, who cares what that young dipsomaniac thinks? Besides, why should it have been us. If we had been responsible, he’d expect the heavens to fall in on him the moment he returns. But they won’t. We won’t say a word – yet. Could have been any thief posing as a member of the staff. Come to that, it wouldn’t have been the first genuine staff member with a leaning towards petty larceny.’

‘So our little bird won’t sing?’

‘Our little bird can’t. Damn him. Damn him. Damn him.’

‘Too late, my Mary,’ Harlow said. ‘Can’t drive no more. Johnny Harlow’s on the skids. Ask anyone.’

‘I don’t mean that and you know it. I mean your drinking.’

‘Me? Drink?’ Harlow’s face was its usual impassive self. ‘Who says that?’

‘Everybody.’

‘Everybody’s a liar.’

As a remark, it was a guaranteed conversation-stopper. A tear fell from Mary’s face on to her wrist watch but if Harlow saw it he made no comment. By and by Mary sighed and said quietly: ‘I give up. I was a fool to try. Johnny, are you coming to the Mayor’s reception tonight?’

‘No.’

‘I thought you’d like to take me. Please.’

‘And make you a martyr? No.’

‘Why don’t you come? Every other race driver does.’

‘I’m not every other driver. I’m Johnny Harlow. I’m a pariah, an outcast. I have a delicate and sensitive nature and I don’t like it when nobody speaks to me.’

Mary put both her hands on his. ‘I’ll speak to you, Johnny, you know I always will.’

‘I know.’ Harlow spoke without either bitterness or irony. ‘I cripple you for life and you’ll always speak to me. Stay away from me, young Mary. I’m poison.’

‘There are some poisons I could get to like very much indeed.’

Harlow squeezed her hand and rose. ‘Come on. You have to get dressed for this do tonight. I’ll see you back to the hotel.’

They emerged from the café, Mary using her walking stick with one hand while with the other she clung to Harlow’s arm. Harlow, carrying the other stick, had slowed his normal pace to accommodate Mary’s limp. As they moved slowly up the street, Rory MacAlpine emerged from the shadows of the recessed doorway opposite the café. He was shivering violently in the cold night air but seemed to be entirely unaware of this. Judging from the look of very considerable satisfaction on his face, Rory had other and more agreeable matters on his mind than the temperature. He crossed the street, followed Harlow and Mary at a discreet distance until he came to the first road junction. He turned right into this and began to run.

By the time he had arrived back at the hotel, he was no longer shivering but sweating profusely for he had not stopped running all the way. He slowed down to cross the lobby and mount the stairs, went to his room, washed, combed his hair, straightened his tie, spent a few moments in front of his mirror practising his sad but dutiful expression until he thought he had it about right, then walked across towards his father’s room. He knocked, received some sort of mumbled reply and went inside.

James MacAlpine’s suite was, by any odds, the most comfortable in the hotel. As a millionaire, MacAlpine could afford to indulge himself: as both a man and a millionaire he saw no reason why he shouldn’t. But MacAlpine wasn’t indulging in any indulgence at that moment, nor, as he sat far back in an over-stuffed armchair did he appear to be savouring any of the creature comforts surrounding him. He appeared, instead, to be sunk in some deep and private gloom from which he roused himself enough to look up almost apathetically as his son closed the door behind him.

‘Well, my boy, what is it? Couldn’t it wait until the morning?’

‘No, Dad, it couldn’t.’

‘Out with it, then. You can see I’m busy.’

‘Yes, Dad, I know.’ Rory’s sad but dutiful expression remained in position. ‘But there’s something I felt I had to tell you.’ He hesitated as if embarrassed at what he was about to say. ‘It’s about Johnny Harlow, Dad.’

‘Anything you have to say about Harlow will be treated with the greatest reserve.’ Despite the words, a degree of interest had crept into MacAlpine’s thinning features. ‘We all know what you think of Harlow.’

‘Yes, Dad. I thought of that before I came to see you.’ Rory hesitated again. ‘You know this thing about Johnny Harlow, Dad? The stories people are telling about his drinking too much.’

‘Well?’ MacAlpine’s tone was wholly noncommittal. It was with some difficulty that Rory managed to keep his pious expression from slipping: this was going to be much more difficult than he expected.

‘It’s true. The drinking, I mean. I saw him in a pub tonight.’

‘Thank you, Rory, you may go.’ He paused. ‘Were you in that pub too?’

‘Me? Come on, Dad. I was outside. I could see in, though.’

‘Spying, lad?’

‘I was passing by.’ A curt but injured tone.

MacAlpine waved a hand in dismissal. Rory turned to go, then turned again to face his father.

‘Maybe I don’t like Johnny Harlow. But I do like Mary. I like her more than any person in the world.’ MacAlpine nodded, he knew this to be true. ‘I don’t ever want to see her hurt. That’s why I came to see you. She was in that pub with Harlow.’

‘What!’ MacAlpine’s face had darkened in immediate anger.

‘Cut my throat and hope I die.’

‘You are sure?’

‘I am sure, Dad. Of course I’m sure. Nothing wrong with my eyes.’

‘I’m sure there’s not.’ MacAlpine said mechanically. A little, but not much, of the anger had left his eyes. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to accept it. Mind you, I don’t like spying.’

‘This wasn’t spying, Dad.’ Rory’s indignation could be of a particularly nauseating righteousness at times. ‘This was detective work. When the good name of the Coronado team is at stake – ’

MacAlpine lifted his hand to stop the spate of words and sighed heavily.

‘All right, all right, you virtuous little monster. Tell Mary I want her. Now. But don’t tell her why.’

Five minutes later Rory had been replaced by a Mary who looked simultaneously apprehensive and defiant. She said: ‘Who told you this?’

‘Never mind who told me. Is it true or not?’

‘I’m twenty-two, Daddy.’ She was very quiet. ‘I don’t have to answer you. I can look after myself.’

‘Can you? Can you? If I were to throw you off the Coronado team? You’ve no money and you won’t have till I’m dead. You’ve got no place to go. You’ve no mother now, at least no mother you can reach. You’ve no qualifications for anything. Who’s going to employ a cripple without qualifications?’

‘I would like to hear you say those horrible things to me in front of Johnny Harlow.’

‘Surprisingly, perhaps, I won’t react to that one. I was just as independent at your age, more so, I guess, and taking a poor view of parental authority.’ He paused, then went on curiously: ‘You in love with this fellow?’

‘He’s not a fellow. He’s Johnny Harlow.’ MacAlpine raised an eyebrow at the intensity in her voice. ‘As for your question, am I never to be allowed any areas of privacy in my life?’

‘All right, all right.’ MacAlpine sighed. ‘A deal. If you answer my questions then I’ll tell you why I’m asking them. OK?’

She nodded.

‘Fine. True or false?’

‘If your spies are certain of their facts, Daddy, then why bother asking me?’

‘Mind your tongue.’ The reference to spies had touched MacAlpine to the raw.

‘Apologize for saying “mind your tongue” to me.’

‘Jesus!’ MacAlpine looked at his daughter in an astonishment that was compounded half of irritation, half of admiration. ‘You must be my daughter. I apologize. Did he drink?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Something clear. He said it was tonic and water.’

‘And that’s the kind of liar you keep company with. Tonic and bloody water! Stay away from him, Mary. If you don’t, it’s back home to Marseille for you.’

‘Why, Daddy? Why? Why? Why?’

‘Because God knows I’ve got enough trouble of my own without having my only daughter tying herself up to an alcoholic with the skids under him.’

‘Johnny! Alcoholic! Look, Daddy, I know he drinks a little – ’

MacAlpine silenced her by the gesture of picking up the phone.

‘MacAlpine here. Will you ask Mr Dunnet to come to see me? Yes. Now.’ He replaced the phone. ‘I said I’d tell you why I was asking those questions. I didn’t want to. But I’m going to have to.’

Dunnet entered and closed the door behind him. He had about him the look of a man who was not looking forward too keenly to the next few minutes. After asking Dunnet to sit down he said: ‘Tell her, Alexis, would you, please?’

Dunnet looked even more acutely unhappy. ‘Must I, James?’

‘I’m afraid so. She’d never believe me if I told her what we found in Johnny’s room.’

Mary looked at each in turn, sheer incredulity in her face. She said: ‘You were searching Johnny’s room.’

Dunnet took a deep breath. ‘With good reason, Mary, and thank God we did. I can still hardly believe it myself. We found five bottles of scotch hidden in his room. One of them was half empty.’

Mary looked at them, stricken. Clearly, she believed them all too well. When MacAlpine spoke, it was very gently.

‘I am sorry. We all know how fond you are of him. We took the bottles away, incidentally.’

‘You took the bottles away.’ Her voice was slow and dull and uncomprehending. ‘But he’ll know. He’ll report the theft. There’ll be police. There’ll be fingerprints – your fingerprints. Then – ’

MacAlpine said: ‘Can you imagine Johnny Harlow ever admitting to anyone in the world that he’d five bottles of scotch in his room? Run along, girl, and get dressed. We’ve got to leave for this bloody reception in twenty minutes – without, it seems, your precious Johnny.’

She remained seated, her face quite without expression, her unblinking eyes irremovably fixed on MacAlpine’s. After a few moments his expression softened and he smiled. He said: ‘I’m sorry. That was quite uncalled for.’

Dunnet held the door while she hobbled from the room. Both men watched her go with pity in their eyes.

CHAPTER FIVE

To the Grand Prix racing fraternity of the world, as to seasoned travellers everywhere, a hotel is a hotel is a hotel, a place to sleep, a place to eat, a stopover to the next faceless anonymity. The newly-built Villa-Hotel Cessni on the outskirts of Monza, however, could fairly claim to be an exception to the truism. Superbly designed, superbly built and superbly landscaped, its huge airy rooms with their immaculately designed furniture, their luxurious bathrooms, splendidly sweeping balconies, sumptuous food and warmth of service, here one would have thought was the caravanserai nonpareil for the better-heeled millionaire.

And so it would be, one day, but not yet. The Villa-Hotel Cessni had as yet to establish its clientele, its image, its reputation and, hopefully and eventually, its traditions and for the achievement of those infinitely desirable ends, the fair uses of publicity, for luxury hotels as for hotdog stands, could be very sweet indeed. No sport on earth has a more international following and it was with this in mind that the management had deemed it prudent to invite the major Grand Prix teams to accommodate themselves in this palace, for a ludicrously low nominal fee, for the duration of the Italian Grand Prix. Few teams had failed to accept the invitation and fewer still cared to exercise their minds with the philosophical and psychological motivations of the management: all they knew and cared about was that the Hotel-Villa Cessni was infinitely more luxurious and fractionally cheaper than the several Austrian hotels they had so gratefully abandoned only twelve days ago. Next year, it seemed likely, they wouldn’t even be allowed to sleep stacked six-deep in the basement: but that was next year.

That Friday evening late in August was warm but by no means warm enough to justify air-conditioning. Nevertheless, the air-conditioning in the lobby of the Hotel-Villa Cessni was operating at the top of its bent making the temperature in that luxuriously appointed haven from the lower classes almost uncomfortably cool. Common sense said that this interior climatic condition was wholly unnecessary: the prestige of an up and coming status symbol said that it was wholly necessary. The management was concerned with prestige to the point of obsession: the air-conditioning remained on. The Cessni was going to be the place to go when the sun rode high.

MacAlpine and Dunnet, sitting side by side but almost concealed from each other’s sight by virtue of the imposing construction of the vast velvet-lined arm-chairs in which they reclined rather than sat, had more important things on their minds than a few degrees of temperature hither and yonder. They spoke but seldom and then with a marked lack of animation: they gave the air of those who had precious little to get animated about. Dunnet stirred.

‘Our wandering boy is late on the road tonight.’

‘He has an excuse,’ MacAlpine said. ‘At least, I hope to hell he has. One thing, he was always a conscientious workman. He wanted a few more extra laps to adjust the suspension and gear ratios of this new car of his.’

Dunnet was gloomy. ‘It wouldn’t have been possible, I suppose, to give it to Tracchia instead?’

‘Quite impossible, Alexis, and you know it. The mighty law of protocol. Johnny’s not only Coronado’s number one, he’s still the world’s. Our dear sponsors, without which we couldn’t very well operate – I could, but I’ll be damned if I’ll lay out a fortune like that – are highly sensitive people. Sensitive to public opinion, that is. The only reason they paint the names of their damned products on the outside of our cars is that the public will go out and buy those same damned products. They’re not benefactors of racing except purely incidentally: they are simply advertisers. An advertiser wants to reach the biggest market. Ninety-nine point repeater nine per cent of that market lies outside the racing world and it doesn’t matter a damn if they know nothing about what goes on inside the racing world. It’s what they believe that matters. And they believe that Harlow still stands alone. So, Harlow gets the best and newest car. If he doesn’t, the public lose their faith in Harlow, in Coronado and in the advertisers, and not necessarily in that order.’

‘Ah, well. The days of miracles may not yet lie behind us. After all, he hasn’t been observed or known to take a drink in the past twelve days. Maybe he’s going to surprise us all. And there’s only two days to go to the Italian Grand Prix.’

‘So why did he have those two bottles of scotch which you removed from his room only an hour ago?’

‘I could say he was trying to test his moral fibre but I don’t think you would believe it.’

‘Would you?’

‘Frankly, James, no.’ Dunnet relapsed into another period of gloom from which he emerged to say: ‘Any word from your agents in the south, James?’

‘Nothing. I’m afraid, Alexis, I’ve just about given up hope. Fourteen weeks now since Marie disappeared. It’s too long, it’s just too long. Had there been an accident, I would have heard. Had there been foul play, then I’m sure I would have heard. Had it been kidnap and ransom – well, that’s ridiculous, of course I would have heard. She’s just vanished. Accident, boating – I don’t know.’

‘And we’ve talked so often about amnesia.’

‘And I’ve told you so often, without immodesty, that no one as well known as Marie MacAlpine, no matter what her mental trouble, could go missing so long without being picked up.’

‘I know. Mary’s taking that pretty badly now, isn’t she?’

‘Especially in the past twelve days. Harlow. Alexis, we broke her heart – sorry, that’s quite unfair – I broke her heart in Austria. If I’d known how far she was gone – ah, but I’d no option.’

‘Taking her to the reception tonight?’

‘Yes. I insisted. To take her out of herself, that’s what I tell myself – or is it just to ease my conscience? Again, I don’t know. Maybe I’m making another mistake.’

‘It seems to me that that young fellow Harlow has a great deal to answer for. And this is his last chance, James? Any more crazy driving, any more fiascos, any more drinking – then it’s the chopper? That’s it?’

‘That’s entirely it.’ MacAlpine nodded in the direction of the revolving entrance doors. ‘Think we should tell him now?’

Dunnet looked in the direction indicated. Harlow was walking across the Carrara-marbled flags. He was still clad in his customarily immaculate white racing overalls. A young and rather beautiful young girl at the desk smiled at him as he passed by. Harlow flicked her an expressionless glance and the smile froze. He continued on his way across the vast lobby and such is the respect that men accord the gods when they walk the earth that a hundred conversations died as he passed by. Harlow seemed unaware of the presence of any of them, for he looked neither to left nor to right, but it was a safe assumption that those remarkable eyes missed nothing, an assumption borne out by the fact that, apparently without noticing them, he veered direction towards where MacAlpine and Dunnet sat. MacAlpine said: ‘No scotch or menthol, that’s for sure. Otherwise, he’d avoid me like the plague.’

Harlow stood before them. He said, without any inflection of irony or sarcasm: ‘Enjoying the quiet evenfall, gentlemen?’

MacAlpine answered. ‘You could say that. We might enjoy it even more if you could tell us how the new Coronado is coming along.’

‘Shaping up. Jacobson – for once – agrees with me that a slight alteration in the ratios and the rear suspension is all that’s necessary. It’ll be all right for Sunday.’

‘No complaints, then?’

‘No. It’s a fine car. Best Coronado yet. And fast’

‘How fast?’

‘I haven’t found out yet. But we equalled the lap record the last two times out.’

‘Well, well.’ MacAlpine looked at his watch. ‘Better hurry. We have to leave for the reception in half an hour.’

‘I’m tired. I’m going to have a shower, two hours’ sleep, then some dinner. I’ve come here for the Grand Prix, not for mingling with high society.’

‘You definitely refuse to come?’

‘I refused to come last time out too. Setting a precedent, if you like.’

‘It’s obligatory, you know.’

‘In my vocabulary, obligation and compulsion are not the same things.’

‘There are three or four very important people present tonight especially just to see you.’

‘I know.’

MacAlpine paused before speaking. ‘How do you know. Only Alexis and I know.’

‘Mary told me.’ Harlow turned and walked away.

‘Well.’ Dunnet pressed his lips tightly together. ‘The arrogant young bastard. Walking in here to tell us he’s just equalled the lap record without even trying. Thing is, I believe him. That’s why he stopped by, isn’t it?’

‘To tell me that he’s still the best in the business? Partly. Also to tell me to stuff my bloody reception. Also to tell me that he’ll speak to Mary whether I like it or not. And the final twist, to let me know that Mary has no secrets from him. Where’s that damned daughter of mine?’

‘This should be interesting to see.’

‘What should be?’

‘To see if you can break a heart twice.’

MacAlpine sighed and slumped even farther back in his armchair. ‘I suppose you’re right, Alexis, I suppose you’re right. Mind you, I’d still like to knock their two damned young heads together.’

Harlow, clad in a white bath-robe and obviously recently showered, emerged from the bathroom and opened up his wardrobe. He brought out a fresh suit then reached up to a shelf above it. Clearly, he didn’t find what he expected to and his eyebrows lifted. He looked in a cupboard with similarly negative results. He stood in the middle of the room, pondering, then smiled widely.

He said softly: ‘Well, well, well. Here we go again. Clever devils.’

From the still-smiling expression on his face, it was clear that Harlow didn’t believe his own words. He lifted the mattress, reached under, removed a flat half-bottle of scotch, examined and replaced it. From there he went into the bathroom, removed the cistern lid, lifted out a bottle of Glenfiddich malt, checked the level – it was about three-parts full, replaced it in a certain position and then put the cistern lid back in place. This he left slightly askew. He returned to his bedroom, put on a light grey suit and was just adjusting his tie when he heard the sound of a heavy engine below. He switched out the light, pulled back the curtains, opened his window and peered out cautiously.

A large coach was drawn up outside the hotel entrance and the various drivers, managers, senior mechanics and journalists who were headed for the official reception were filing aboard. Harlow checked to see that all those whose absence that evening he considered highly desirable were among those present, and they were – Dunnet, Tracchia, Neubauer, Jacobson and MacAlpine, the last with a very pale and downcast Mary clinging to his arm. The door closed and the bus moved off into the night.

Five minutes later, Harlow sauntered up to the reception desk. Behind it was the very pretty young girl he’d ignored on the way in. He smiled widely at her – his colleagues wouldn’t have believed it – and she, recovering quickly from the shock of seeing the other side of Harlow’s nature, smiled in return, almost blushing in embarrassed pleasure. For those outside immediate racing circles, Harlow was still the world’s number one.

Harlow said: ‘Good evening.’

‘Good evening, Mr Harlow, sir.’ The smile faded. ‘I’m afraid you’ve just missed your bus.’

‘I have my own private transport.’

The smile came back on again. ‘Of course, Mr Harlow. How silly of me. Your red Ferrari. Is there something – ’

‘Yes, please. I have four names here – MacAlpine, Neubauer, Tracchia and Jacobson. I wonder if you could give me their room numbers?’

‘Certainly, Mr Harlow. But I’m afraid those gentlemen have all just left.’

‘I know. I waited until they had left.’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘I just want to slip something under their doors. An old pre-race custom.’

‘You race drivers and your practical jokes.’ She’d almost certainly never seen a race driver until that evening but that didn’t prevent her from giving him a look of roguish understanding. ‘The numbers you want are 202, 208, 204 and 206.’

‘That’s in the order of the names I gave you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ Harlow touched a finger to his lips. ‘Now, not a word.’

‘Of course not, Mr Harlow.’ She smiled conspiratorially at him as he turned away. Harlow had a sufficiently realistic assessment of his own fame to appreciate that she would talk for months about this brief encounter: just as long as she didn’t talk until that weekend was over.

He returned to his own room, took a movie camera from a suitcase, unscrewed its back, carefully scratching the dull metallic black as he did so, removed the plate and pulled out a small miniaturized camera not much larger than a packet of cigarettes. He pocketed this, rescrewed in place the back plate of the movie camera, replaced it in his suitcase and looked thoughtfully at the small canvas bag of tools that lay there. Tonight, he would not require those: where he was going he knew where to find all the tools and flashlights he wanted. He took the bag with him and left the room.

He moved along the corridor to room 202 – MacAlpine’s room. Unlike MacAlpine, Harlow did not have to resort to devious means to obtain hotel room keys – he had some excellent sets of keys himself. He selected one of these and with the fourth key the door opened. He entered and locked the door behind him.

Having disposed of the canvas bag in the highest and virtually unreachable shelf in a wall wardrobe, Harlow proceeded to search the room thoroughly. Nothing escaped his scrutiny – MacAlpine’s clothing, wardrobes, cupboards, suitcases. Finally he came across a locked suitcase, so small as to be almost a brief-case, fastened with locks that were very strong and peculiar indeed. But Harlow also had a set of very small and peculiar keys. Opening the small suitcase presented no difficulty whatsoever.

The interior held a kind of small travelling office, containing as it did a mass of papers, including invoices, receipts, cheque-books and contracts: the owner of the Coronado team obviously served as his own accountant. Harlow ignored everything except an elastic-bound bunch of expired cheque-books. He flipped through those quickly then stopped and stared at the front few pages of one of the cheque-books where all the payments were recorded together. He examined all four recording pages closely, shook his head in evident disbelief, pursed his lips in a soundless whistle, brought out his miniature camera and took eight pictures, two of each page. This done, he returned everything as he had found it and left.

The corridor was deserted. Harlow moved down to 204 – Tracchia’s room – and used the same key to enter as he had on MacAlpine’s door: hotel room keys have only marginal differences as they have to accommodate a master key: what Harlow had was, in fact, a master key.

As Tracchia had considerably fewer possessions than MacAlpine, the search was correspondingly easier. Again Harlow encountered another, but smaller, brief-case, the opening of which again provided him with the minimum of difficulty. There were but few papers inside and Harlow found little of interest among them except a thin book, bound in black and red, of what appeared to be a list of extremely cryptic addresses. Each address, if address it were, was headed by a single letter, followed by two or three wholly indecipherable lines of letters. It could have meant something: it could have meant nothing. Harlow hesitated, obviously in a state of indecision, shrugged, brought out his camera and photographed the pages. He left Tracchia’s room in as immaculate a condition as he had left MacAlpine’s.

Two minutes later in 208, Harlow, sitting on Neubauer’s bed with a brief-case on his lap, was no longer hesitating. The miniature camera clicked busily away: the thin black and red notebook he held in his hand was identical to the one he had found in Tracchia’s possession.

From there, Harlow moved on to the last of his four objectives – Jacobson’s room. Jacobson, it appeared, was either less discreet or less sophisticated than either Tracchia or Neubauer. He had two bankbooks and when Harlow opened them he sat quite still. Jacobson’s income, it appeared from them, amounted to at least twenty times as much as he could reasonably expect to earn as a chief mechanic. Inside one of the books was a list of addresses, in plain English, scattered all over Europe. All those details Harlow faithfully recorded on his little camera. He replaced the papers in the case and the case in its original position and was on the point of leaving when he heard footsteps in the corridor. He stood, irresolute, until the footsteps came to a halt outside his door. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and was about to use it as a mask when a key turned in the lock. Harlow had time only to move swiftly and silently into a wardrobe, pulling the door quietly to behind him, when the corridor door opened and someone entered the room.

From where Harlow was, all was total darkness. He could hear someone moving around the room but had no idea from the sound as to what the source of the activity might be: for all he could tell someone might have been engaged in exactly the same pursuit as he himself had been a minute ago. Working purely by feel, he folded his handkerchief cornerwise, adjusted the straight edge to a point just below his eyes and knotted the handkerchief behind the back of his head.

The wardrobe door opened and Harlow was confronted with the spectacle of a portly, middle-aged chambermaid carrying a bolster in her hands – she’d obviously just been changing it for the nighttime pillows. She, in turn, was confronted with the shadowy menacing figure of a man in a white mask. The chambermaid’s eyes turned up in her head. Soundlessly, without even as much as a sigh, she swayed and crumpled slowly towards the floor. Harlow stepped out, caught her before she hit the marble tiles and lowered her gently, using the bolster as a pillow. He moved quickly towards the opened corridor door, closed it, removed his handkerchief and proceeded to wipe all the surfaces he had touched, including the top and handle of the brief-case. Finally, he took the telephone off the hook and left it lying on the table. He left, pulling the door to behind him but not quite closing it.

He passed swiftly along the corridor, descended the stairs at a leisurely pace, went to the bar and ordered himself a drink. The barman looked at him in what came to being open astonishment.

‘You said what, sir?’

‘Double gin and tonic is what I said.’

‘Yes, Mr Harlow. Very good, Mr Harlow.’

As impassively as he could, the barman prepared the drink which Harlow took to a wall seat situated between two potted plants. He looked across the lobby with interest. There were some signs of unusual activity at the telephone switchboard, where the girl operator was showing increasing signs of irritation. A light on her board kept flashing on and off but she was obviously having no success in contacting the room number in question. Finally, clearly exasperated, she beckoned a page boy and said something in a low voice. The page boy nodded and crossed the lobby at the properly sedate pace in keeping with the advertised ambience of the Hotel-Villa Cessni.

When he returned, it was at anything but a sedate pace. He ran across the lobby and whispered something urgently to the operator. She left her seat and only seconds later no less a personage than the manager himself appeared and hurried across the lobby. Harlow waited patiently, pretending to sip his drink from time to time. He knew that most people in the lobby were covertly studying him but was unconcerned. From where they sat he was drinking a harmless lemonade or tonic water. The barman, of course, knew better and it was as certain as that night’s sundown that one of the first things that MacAlpine would do on his return would be to ask for Johnny Harlow’s drink bill, on the convincing enough pretext that it was inconceivable for the champion to put his hand in his pocket for anything.

The manager reappeared, moving with most unmanagerial haste, in a sort of disciplined trot, reached the desk and busied himself with the telephone. The entire lobby was now agog with interest and expectation. Their undivided attention had now been transferred from Harlow to the front desk and Harlow took advantage of this to tip the contents of his glass into a potted plant. He rose and sauntered across the lobby as if heading for the front revolving doors. His route brought him past the side of the manager. Harlow broke step.

He said sympathetically: ‘Trouble?’

‘Grave trouble, Mr Harlow. Very grave.’ The manager had the phone to his ear, obviously waiting for a call to come through, but it was still apparent that he was flattered that Johnny Harlow should take time off to speak to him. ‘Burglars! Assassins! One of our chambermaids has been most brutally and savagely assaulted.’

‘Good God! Where?’

‘Mr Jacobson’s room.’

‘Jacobson’s – but he’s only our chief mechanic. He’s got nothing worth stealing.’

‘Ah! Like enough, Mr Harlow. But the burglar wasn’t to know that, was he?’

Harlow said anxiously: ‘I hope she was able to identify her attacker.’

‘Impossible. All she remembers is a masked giant jumping out of a wardrobe and attacking her. He was carrying a club, she said.’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Excuse me. The police.’

Harlow turned, exhaled a long slow sigh of relief, walked away, passed out through the revolving doors, turned right and then right again, re-entered the hotel through one of the side doors and made his way unobserved back up to his own room. Here he withdrew the sealed film cassette from his miniature camera, replaced it with a fresh one – or one that appeared to be fresh – unscrewed the back of his cine-camera, inserted the miniature and screwed home the back plate of the cine-camera. For good measure, he added a few more scratches to the dulled black metal finish. The original cassette he put in an envelope, wrote on it his name and room number, took it down to the desk, where the more immediate signs of panic appeared to be over, asked that it be put in the safe and returned to his room.

An hour later, Harlow, his more conventional wear now replaced by a navy roll-neck pullover and leather jacket, sat waiting patiently on the edge of his bed. For the second time that night, he heard the sound of a heavy diesel motor outside, for the second time that night he switched off the light, pulled the curtains, opened the window and looked out. The reception party bus had returned. He pulled the curtains to again, switched on the light, removed the flat bottle of scotch from under the mattress, rinsed his mouth with some of it and left.

He was descending the foot of the stairs as the reception party entered the lobby. Mary, reduced to only one stick now, was on her father’s arm but when MacAlpine saw Harlow he handed her to Dunnet. Mary looked at Harlow quietly and steadily but her face didn’t say anything.

Harlow made to brush by but MacAlpine barred his way.

MacAlpine said: ‘The mayor was very vexed and displeased by your absence.’

Harlow seemed totally unconcerned by the mayor’s reactions. He said: ‘I’ll bet he was the only one.’

‘You remember you have some practice laps first thing in the morning?’

‘I’m the person who has to do them. Is it likely that I would forget?’

Harlow made to move by MacAlpine but the latter blocked his way again.

MacAlpine said: ‘Where are you going?’

‘Out.’

‘I forbid you – ’

‘You’ll forbid me nothing that isn’t in my contract.’

Harlow left. Dunnet looked at MacAlpine and sniffed.

‘Air is a bit thick, isn’t it?’

‘We missed something,’ MacAlpine said. ‘We’d better go and see what it was we missed.’

Mary looked at them in turn.

‘So you’ve already searched his room when he was out on the track. And now that his back is turned again you’re going to search it again. Despicable. Utterly despicable. You’re nothing better than a couple of – a couple of sneak-thieves.’ She pulled her arm away from Dunnet. ‘Leave me alone. I can find my own room.’

Both men watched her limp across the foyer. Dunnet said complainingly: ‘Considering the issues involved, life or death issues, if you like, I do consider that a rather unreasonable attitude.’

‘So is love,’ MacAlpine sighed. ‘So is love.’

Harlow, descending the hotel steps, brushed by Neubauer and Tracchia. Not only did he not speak to them, for they still remained on courtesy terms, he didn’t even appear to see them. Both men turned and looked after Harlow. He was walking with that over-erect, over-stiff posture of the slightly inebriated who are making too good a job of trying to pretend that all is well. Even as they watched, Harlow made one barely perceptible and clearly unpremeditated stagger to one side, but quickly recovered and was back on an over-straight course again. Neubauer and Tracchia exchanged glances, nodded to each other briefly, just once. Neubauer went into the hotel while Tracchia moved off after Harlow.

The earlier warm night air had suddenly begun to chill, the coolness being accompanied by a slight drizzle. This was to Tracchia’s advantage. City-dwellers are notoriously averse to anything more than a slight humidity in the atmosphere, and although the Hotel-Villa Cessni was situated in what was really nothing more than a small village, the same urban principle applied: with the first signs of rain the streets began to clear rapidly: the danger of losing Harlow among crowds of people decreased almost to nothingness. The rain increased steadily until finally Tracchia was following Harlow through almost deserted streets. This, of course, increased the chances of detection should Harlow choose to cast a backward glance but it became quickly evident that Harlow had no intention of casting any backward glances: he had about him the fixed and determined air of a man who was heading for a certain objective and backward glances were no part of his forward-looking plans. Tracchia, sensing this, began to move up closer until he was no more than ten yards behind Harlow.

Harlow’s behaviour was becoming steadily more erratic. He had lost his ability to pursue a straight line and was beginning to weave noticeably. On one occasion he staggered in against a recessed doorway shop window and Tracchia caught a glimpse of Harlow’s reflected face, head shaking and eyes apparently closed. But he pushed himself off and went resolutely if unsteadily on his way. Tracchia closed up even more, his face registering an expression of mingled amusement, contempt and disgust. The expression deepened as Harlow, his condition still deteriorating, lurched round a street corner to his left.

Temporarily out of Tracchia’s line of vision, Harlow, all signs of insobriety vanished, moved rapidly into the first darkened doorway round the corner. From a back pocket he withdrew an article not normally carried by racing drivers – a woven leather black-jack with a wrist thong. Harlow slipped the thong over his hand and waited.

He had little enough time to wait. As Tracchia rounded the corner the contempt on his face gave way to consternation when he saw that the ill-lit street ahead was empty. Anxiously, he increased his pace and within half a dozen paces was passing by the shadowed and recessed doorway where Harlow waited.

A Grand Prix driver needs timing, accuracy and eyesight. All of those Harlow had in superabundance. Also he was extremely fit. Tracchia lost consciousness instantly. Without as much as a glance at it, Harlow stepped over the prostrate body and strode briskly on his way. Only, it wasn’t the way he had been going. He retraced his tracks for about a quarter of a mile, turned left and almost at once found himself in the transporter parking lot. It seemed extremely unlikely that Tracchia, when he came to, would have even the slightest idea as to where Harlow had been headed.

Harlow made directly for the nearest transporter. Even through the rain and near darkness the name, in two feet high golden letters, was easily distinguishable: CORONADO. He unlocked the door, passed inside and switched on the lights and very powerful lights they were too, as they had to be for mechanics working on such delicate engineering. Here there was no need for glowing red lights, stealth and secrecy: there was no one who was going to question Johnny Harlow’s right to be inside his own transporter. Nevertheless, he took the precaution of locking the door from the inside and leaving the key half-turned in the lock so that it couldn’t be opened from the outside. Then he used ply to mask the windows so that he couldn’t be seen from outside: only then did he make for the tool-rack on the side and select the implements he wanted.

MacAlpine and Dunnet, not for the first time, were illegally in Harlow’s room and not feeling too happy about it: not about the illegality but what they had found there. More precisely, they were in Harlow’s bathroom. Dunnet had the cistern cover in his hand while MacAlpine held up a dripping bottle of malt whisky. Both men regarded each other, at a momentary loss for words, then Dunnet said: ‘Resourceful lad is our Johnny. He’s probably got a crate hidden under the driving seat of his Coronado. But I think you’d better leave that bottle where you found it.’

‘Why ever should I? What’s the point in that?’

‘That way we may know his daily consumption. If he can’t get it from that bottle he’ll sure as hell get it elsewhere – you know his uncanny way of vanishing in that red Ferrari of his. And then we’ll never know how much he drinks.’

‘I suppose so, I suppose so.’ He looked at the bottle and there was pain in his eyes. ‘The most gifted driver of our time, perhaps the most gifted driver of all time, and now it’s come to this. Why do the gods strike a man like Johnny Harlow down, Alexis? Because he’s beginning to walk too close to them.’

‘Put the bottle back, James.’

Only two doors away was another pair of unhappy men, one of them markedly so. Tracchia, from the incessant way in which he massaged the back of his neck, appeared to be in very considerable pain. Neubauer watched him with a mixture of sympathy and anger.

Neubauer said: ‘Sure it was that bastard Harlow?’

‘I’m sure. I’ve still got my wallet.’

‘That was careless of him. I think I’ll lose my room key and borrow the master.’

Tracchia momentarily ceased to massage his aching neck. ‘What the hell for?’

‘You’ll see. Stay here.’

Neubauer returned within two minutes, a key ring whirling round his finger. He said: ‘I’m taking the blonde at reception out on Sunday night. I think I’ll ask for the keys of the safe next time.’

Tracchia said in agonized patience: ‘Willi, there is a time and a place for comedy.’

‘Sorry.’ He opened the door and they passed out into the corridor. It was deserted. Less than ten seconds later they were both inside Harlow’s room, the door locked behind them.

Tracchia said: ‘What happens if Harlow comes along?’

‘Who would you rather be? Harlow or us?’

They had spent no more than a minute in searching when Neubauer suddenly said: ‘You were quite right, Nikki. Our dear friend Johnny is just that little bit careless.’

He showed Tracchia the cine-camera with the crisscross of scratches round each of the four screws securing the plate at the back, produced a pocket-knife, selected a small screw-driver, removed the plate and extracted the micro camera. Neubauer then extracted the cassette from the micro camera and examined it thoughtfully. He said: ‘We take this?’

Tracchia shook his head and instantly screwed up his face in the agony caused by the thoughtless movement. When he had recovered, he said: ‘No. He would have known we were here.’

Neubauer said: ‘So there’s only one thing for it then?’

Tracchia nodded and again winced in pain. Neubauer lifted off the cover of the cassette, unreeled the film and passed it under a strong desk lamp, then, not without some difficulty, rewound the film, replaced the cover, put the cassette back in the micro camera and the micro camera in the cine.

Tracchia said: ‘This proves nothing. We contact Marseilles?’

Neubauer nodded. Both men left the room.

Harlow had a Coronado pushed back by about a foot. He peered at the section of floor-board revealed, reached for a powerful torch, knelt and examined the floor intently. One of the longitudinal planks appeared to have two transverse lines on it, about fifteen inches apart. Harlow used an oily cloth to rub the front line, whereupon it became evident that the front line was no line at all but a very fine sharp cut. The revealed heads of the two holding nails were bright and clear of any marks. Harlow brought a chisel to bear and the front of the inlet wooden section lifted with surprising ease. He reached down an arm to explore the depth and length of the space beneath. A fractional lifting of the eyebrows expressed some degree of surprise, almost certainly as to the unseen extent of area available. Harlow brought out his arm and touched fingertips to mouth and nose: there was no perceptible change in his expression. He replaced the board section and gently tapped it into place, using the butt of a chisel on the gleaming nail-heads. With a suitably oiled and dirty cloth he smeared the cuts and nails.

Forty-five minutes had elapsed between the time of Harlow’s departure from the Villa-Hotel Cessni and his return there. The vast foyer looked semi-deserted but there must, in fact, have been over a hundred people there, many of them from the official reception party, all of them, probably, waiting to go in for late dinner. The first two people Harlow saw were MacAlpine and Dunnet, sitting alone at a small table with short drinks. Two tables away Mary sat by herself, a soft drink and a magazine in front of her. She didn’t give the impression of reading and there was a certain stiff aloofness in her bearing. Harlow wondered towards whom the hostility was directed. Towards himself, likely enough, but on the other hand there had grown up an increasing estrangement between Mary on the one hand and MacAlpine on the other. Of Rory there was no sign. Probably out spying somewhere, Harlow thought.

The three of them caught sight of Harlow at almost the same instant as he saw them. MacAlpine immediately rose to his feet.

‘I’d be grateful, Alexis, if you could take Mary in to dinner. I’m going into the dining-room. I’m afraid if I were to stay – ’

‘It’s all right, James. I understand.’

Harlow watched the calculated snub of the departing back without expression, an absence of outward feeling that quickly changed to a certain apprehension as he saw Mary bearing down on him. No question now as to whom the unspoken hostility had been directed. She gave the very distinct impression of having been waiting for him. That bewitching smile that had made her the sweetheart of the race-tracks was, Harlow observed, in marked abeyance. He braced himself for what he knew was going to be a low but correspondingly fierce voice.

‘Must you let everybody see you like this? And in a place like this.’ Harlow frowned in puzzlement. ‘You’ve been at it again.’

He said: ‘That’s right. Go ahead. Wound an innocent man’s feelings. You have my worded bond – I mean my bonded word – ’

‘It’s disgusting! Sober men don’t fall flat on their faces in the street. Look at the state of your clothes, your filthy hands. Go on! Just look at yourself.’

Harlow looked at himself.

‘Oh! Aha! Well, sweet dreams, sweet Mary.’

He turned towards the stairs, took five steps and halted abruptly when confronted by Dunnet. For a moment the two men looked at each other, faces immobile, then there was an almost imperceptible lift of Dunnet’s eyebrow. When Harlow spoke, his voice was very quiet.

He said: ‘We go now.’

‘The Coronado?’

‘Yes.’

‘We go now.’

CHAPTER SIX

Harlow drained his coffee – it was by now his invariable custom to breakfast alone in his bedroom – and crossed to the window. The famed Italian September sun was nowhere to be seen that morning. The overcast was very heavy, but the ground was dry and the visibility excellent, a combination making for ideal race-track conditions. He went into the bathroom, opened the window to its fullest extent, removed the cistern cover, took out the scotch, turned on the hot water tap and systematically poured half the contents of the bottle into the basin. He returned the bottle to its hiding-place, sprayed the room very heavily with an airfresh aerosol and left.

He drove alone to the race-track – the passenger seat in his red Ferrari was rarely occupied now – to find Jacobson, his two mechanics and Dunnet already there. He greeted them briefly and in very short order, overalled and helmeted, was sitting in the cockpit of his new Coronado. Jacobson favoured him with his usual grimly despondent look.

He said: ‘I hope you can give us good practice lap-time today, Johnny.’

Harlow said mildly: ‘I thought I didn’t do too badly yesterday. However, one can but try.’ With his finger on the starter button he glanced at Dunnet. ‘And where is our worthy employer today? Never known him to miss a practice lap before.’

‘In the hotel. He has things to attend to.’

MacAlpine did, indeed, have things to attend to. What he was attending to at that moment had by this time become almost a routine chore – investigating the current level of Harlow’s alcohol supply. As soon as he entered Harlow’s bathroom he realized that checking the level of scotch in the bottle in the cistern was going to be a mere formality: the wide open window and the air heavy with the scent of the aerosol spray made further investigation almost superfluous. However, investigate he did: even though he had been almost certain what to expect, his face still darkened with anger as he held the half empty bottle up for inspection. He replaced the bottle, left Harlow’s room almost at a run, actually ran across the hotel foyer, climbed into his Aston and drove off in a fashion that might well have left the astonished onlookers with the impression that he had mistaken the forecourt of the Villa-Hotel Cessni for the Monza circuit.

MacAlpine was still running when he arrived at the Coronado pits: there he encountered Dunnet who was just leaving them. MacAlpine was panting heavily. He said: ‘Where’s that young bastard Harlow?’

Dunnet did not reply at once. He seemed more concerned with shaking his head slowly from side to side.

‘God’s sake, man, where’s that drunken layabout?’ MacAlpine’s voice was almost a shout. ‘He mustn’t be allowed anywhere near that damned track.’

‘There’s a lot of other drivers in Monza who would agree with you.’

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘It means that that drunken layabout has just broken the lap record by two point one seconds.’ Dunnet continued to shake his head in continued disbelief. ‘Bloody well incredible.’

‘Two point one! Two point one! Two point one!’ It was MacAlpine’s turn to take up the head-shaking. ‘Impossible. A margin like that? Impossible.’

‘Ask the time-keepers. He did it twice.’

‘Jesus!’

‘You don’t seem as pleased as you might, James.’

‘Pleased. I’m bloody well terrified. Sure, sure, he’s still the best driver in the world – except in actual competition when his nerve goes. But it wasn’t driving skill that took him around in that time. It was Dutch courage. Sheer bloody suicidal Dutch courage.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘He’d a half-bottle of scotch inside him, Alexis.’

Dunnet stared at him. He said at length, ‘I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. He may have driven like a bat out of hell but he also drove like an angel. Half a bottle of scotch? He’d have killed himself.’

‘Perhaps it’s as well there was no one else on the track at the time. He’d have killed them, maybe.’

‘But – but a whole half-bottle!’

‘Want to come and have a look in the cistern in his bathroom?’

‘No, no. You think I’d ever question your word? It’s just that I can’t understand it.’

‘Nor can I, nor can I. And where is our world champion at the moment?’

‘Left the track. Says he’s through for the day. Says he’s got the pole position for tomorrow and if anyone takes it from him he’ll just come back and take it away from them again. He’s in an uppish sort of mood today, is our Johnny.’

‘And he never used to talk that way. That’s not uppishness, Alexis, it’s sheer bloody euphoria dancing on clouds of seventy proof. God Almighty, do I have a problem or do I have a problem.’

‘You have a problem, James.’

On the afternoon of that same Saturday MacAlpine, had he been in a certain rather shabby little side street in Monza, might well have had justification for thinking that his problems were being doubly or trebly compounded. Two highly undistinguished little cafés faced each other across the narrow street. They had in common the same peeling paint façade, hanging reed curtains, chequered cloth-covered sidewalk tables and bare, functional and splendidly uninspired interiors. And both of them, as was so common in cafés of this type, featured high-backed booths facing end-on to the street.

Sitting well back from the window in such a booth on the southern and shaded side of the street were Neubauer and Tracchia with untouched drinks in front of them. The drinks were untouched because neither man was interested in them. Their entire interest was concentrated upon the café opposite where, close up to the window and clearly in view, Harlow and Dunnet, glasses in their hands, could be seen engaged in what appeared to be earnest discussion across their booth table.

Neubauer said: ‘Well, now that we’ve followed them here, Nikki, what do we do now? I mean, you can’t lip-read, can you?’

‘We wait and see? We play it by ear? I wish to God I could lip-read, Willi. And I’d also like to know why those two have suddenly become so friendly – though they hardly ever speak nowadays in public. And why did they have to come to a little back street like this to talk? We know that Harlow is up to something very funny indeed – the back of my neck still feels half-broken, I could hardly get my damned helmet on today. And if he and Dunnet are so thick then they’re both up to the same funny thing. But Dunnet’s only a journalist. What can a journalist and a has-been driver be up to?’

‘Has-been? Did you see his times this morning?’

‘Has-been I said and has-been I meant. You’ll see – he’ll crack tomorrow just as he’s cracked in the last four GPs.’

‘Yes. Another strange thing. Why is he so good in practice and such a failure in the races themselves?’

‘No question. It’s common knowledge that Harlow’s pretty close to being an alcoholic – I’d say he already is one. All right, so he can drive one fast lap, maybe three. But in an eighty-lap Grand Prix – how can you expect an alco to have the stamina, the reactions, the nerve to last the pace? He’ll crack.’ He looked away from the other café and took a morose sip of his drink. ‘God, what wouldn’t I give to be sitting in the next booth to those two.’

Tracchia laid a hand on Neubauer’s forearm. ‘Maybe that won’t be necessary, Willi. Maybe we’ve just found a pair of ears to do our listening for us. Look!’

Neubauer looked. With what appeared to be a considerable degree of stealth and secrecy Rory MacAlpine was edging his way into the booth next to the one occupied by Harlow and Dunnet. He was carrying a coloured drink in his hand. When he sat it was with his back to Harlow: physically, they couldn’t have been more than a foot apart. Rory adopted a very upright posture, both his back and the back of his head pressed hard against the partition: he was, clearly, listening very intently indeed. He had about him the look of one who was planning a career either as a master spy or a double agent. Without question he had a rare talent for observing – and listening – without being observed.

Neubauer said: ‘What do you think young MacAlpine is up to?’

‘Here and now?’ Tracchia spread his hands. ‘Anything. The one thing that you can be sure of is that he intends no good to Harlow. I should think he is just trying to get anything he can on Harlow. Just anything. He’s a determined young devil – and he hates Harlow. I must say I wouldn’t care very much myself to be in his black books.’

‘So we have an ally, Nikki, yes?’

‘I see no reason why not. Let’s think up a nice little story to tell him.’ He peered across the street. ‘Young Rory doesn’t seem too pleased about something.’

Rory wasn’t. His expression held mixed feelings of vexation, exasperation and perplexity: because of the high back of the booth and the background noise level created by the other patrons of the café, he could catch only snatches of the conversation from the next booth.

Matters weren’t helped for Rory by the fact that Harlow and Dunnet were carrying on this conversation in very low tones indeed. Both of them had tall clear drinks in front of them, both drinks with ice and lemon in them: only one held gin. Dunnet looked consideringly at the tiny film cassette he was cradling in the palm of his hand then slipped it into a safe inside pocket.

‘Photographs of code? You’re sure?’

‘Code for sure. Perhaps even along with some abstruse foreign language. I’m afraid I’m no expert on those matters.’

‘No more than I am. But we have people who are experts. And the Coronado transporter. You’re sure about that too?’

‘No question.’

‘So we’ve been nursing a viper to our own bosom – if that’s the phrase I’m looking for.’

‘It is a bit embarrassing, isn’t it?’

‘And no question about Henry having any finger in the pie?’

‘Henry?’ Harlow shook his head positively. ‘My life on it.’

‘Even though, as driver, he’s the only person who’s with the transporter on every trip it makes?’

‘Even though.’

‘And Henry will have to go?’

‘What option do we have?’

‘So. Exit Henry – temporarily, though he won’t know it: he’ll get his old job back. He’ll be hurt, of course – but what’s one brief hurt to thousands of life-long ones?’

‘And if he refuses?’

‘I’ll have him kidnapped,’ Dunnet said matter-of-factly. ‘Or other wise removed – painlessly, of course. But he’ll go along. I’ve got the doctor’s certificate already signed.’

‘How about medical ethics?’

‘The combination of £500 and a genuine certificate of an already existing heart murmur makes medical scruples vanish like a snowflake in the river.’

The two men finished their drinks, rose and left. So, after what he presumably regarded as being a suitably safe interval, did Rory. In the café opposite, Neubauer and Tracchia rose hurriedly, walked quickly after Rory and overtook him in half a minute. Rory looked his surprise.

Tracchia said confidentially: ‘We want to talk to you, Rory. Can you keep a secret?’

Rory looked intrigued but he had a native caution which seldom abandoned him. ‘What’s the secret about?’

‘You are a suspicious young person.’

‘What’s the secret about?’

‘Johnny Harlow.’

‘That’s different.’ Tracchia had Rory’s instantaneous and cooperative attention. ‘Of course I can keep a secret.’

Neubauer said: ‘Well, then, never a whisper. Never one word or you’ll ruin everything. You understand?’

‘Of course.’ He hadn’t the faintest idea what Neubauer was talking about.

‘You’ve heard of the GPDA?’

‘Course. The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association.’

‘Right. Well, the GPDA has decided that for the safety of us all, drivers and spectators alike, Harlow must be removed from the Grand Prix roster. We want him taken off all the race-tracks in Europe. You know that he drinks?’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘He drinks so much that he’s become the most dangerous driver in Europe.’ Neubauer’s voice was low-pitched, conspiratorial and totally convincing. ‘Every other driver is scared to be on the same track as he is. None of us knows when he’s going to be the next Jethou.’

‘You – you mean – ’ ‘He was drunk at the time. That’s why a good man dies, Rory – because another man drinks half a bottle of scotch too many. Would you call that much different from being a murderer?’

‘No, by God I wouldn’t!’

‘So the GPDA has asked Willi and myself to gather the evidence. About drinking, I mean. Especially before a big race. Will you help us?’

‘You have to ask me?’

‘We know, boy, we know.’ Neubauer put his hand on Rory’s shoulder, a gesture at once indicative of consolation and understanding. ‘Mary is our girl, too. You saw Harlow and Mr Dunnet in that café just now. Did Harlow drink?’

‘I didn’t really see them. I was in the next booth. But I heard Mr Dunnet say something about gin and I saw the waiter bring two tall glasses with what looked like water in them.’

‘Water!’ Tracchia shook his head sadly. ‘Anyway, that’s more like it. Though I can’t believe that Dunnet – well, who knows. Did you hear them talk about drink?’

‘Mr Dunnet? Is there something wrong with him too?’

Tracchia said evasively, well aware that that was the surest way of arousing Rory’s interest: ‘I don’t know anything about Mr Dunnet. About drink, now.’

‘They spoke in very low voices. I caught something, not much. Not about drink. The only thing I heard was something about changed cassettes – film cassettes – or such-like, something Harlow had given to Mr Dunnet. Didn’t make any kind of sense to me.’

Tracchia said: ‘That hardly concerns us. But the rest, yes. Keep your eyes and ears open, will you?’

Rory, carefully concealing his new-found sense of self-importance, nodded man to man and walked away. Neubauer and Tracchia looked at each other with fury in their faces, a fury, clearly, that was not directed at each other.

Through tightly clenched teeth Tracchia said: ‘The crafty bastard! He’s switched cassettes on us. That was a dud we destroyed.’

On the evening of that same day Dunnet and Henry sat in a remote corner of the lobby in the Villa-Hotel Cessni. Dunnet wore his usual near-inscrutable expression. Henry looked somewhat stunned although it was clear that his native shrewdness was hard at work making a reassessment of an existing situation and a readjustment to a developing one. He tried hard not to look cunning. He said: ‘You certainly do know how to lay it on the line, don’t you, Mr Dunnet?’ The tone of respectful admiration for a higher intellect was perfectly done. Dunnet remained totally unmoved.

‘If by laying it on the line, Henry, you mean putting it as briefly and clearly as possible, then, yes, I have laid it on the line. Yes or no?’

‘Jesus, Mr Dunnet, you don’t give a man much time to think, do you?’

Dunnet said patiently: ‘This hardly calls for thought, Henry. A simple yes or no. Take it or leave it.’

Henry kept his cunning look under wraps. ‘And if I leave it?’ ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’ Henry looked distinctly uneasy. ‘I don’t know if I like the sound of that, Mr Dunnet.’

‘How does it sound to you, Henry?’

‘I mean, well, you aren’t blackmailing me or threatening me or something like that?’

Dunnet had the air of a man counting up to ten. ‘You make me say it, Henry. You’re talking rubbish. How can one blackmail a man who leads the spotless life you do? You do lead a spotless life, don’t you, Henry? And why should I threaten you? How could I threaten you?’ He made a long pause. ‘Yes or no?’

Henry sighed in defeat. ‘Damn it all, yes. I’ve got nothing to lose. For £5,000 and a job in our Marseilles garage I’d sell my own grandmother down the river – God rest her soul.’

‘That wouldn’t be necessary even if it were possible. Just total silence that’s all. Here’s a health certificate from a local doctor. It’s to say you have an advanced cardiac condition and are no longer fit for heavy work such as, say, driving a transporter.’

‘I haven’t been feeling at all well lately and that’s a fact.’

Dunnet permitted himself the faintest of smiles. ‘I thought you might have been feeling that way.’

‘Does Mr MacAlpine know about this?’

‘He will when you tell him. Just wave that paper.’

‘You think he’ll wear it?’

‘If you mean accept it, yes. He’ll have no option.’

‘May I ask the reason for all this?’

‘No. You’re getting paid £5,000 not to ask questions. Or talk. Ever.’

‘You’re a very funny journalist, Mr Dunnet.’

‘Very.’

‘I’m told you were an accountant in what they call the City. Why did you give it up?’

‘Emphysema. My lungs, Henry, my lungs.’

‘Something like my cardiac condition?’

‘In these days of stress and strain, Henry, perfect health is a blessing that is granted to very few of us. And now you’d better go and see Mr MacAlpine.’

Henry left. Dunnet wrote a brief note, addressed a stout buff envelope, marked it EXPRESS and URGENT in the top left corner, inserted the note and microfilm and left. As he passed out into the corridor he failed to notice that the door of the room next to his was slightly ajar: consequently, he also failed to observe a single eye peering out through this narrow gap in the doorway.

The eye belonged to Tracchia. He closed the door, moved out on to his balcony and waved an arm in signal. In the distance, far beyond the fore-court of the hotel, an indistinct figure raised an arm in acknowledgment. Tracchia hurried downstairs and located Neubauer. Together they moved towards the bar and sat there, ordering soft drinks. At least a score of people saw and recognized them for Neubauer and Tracchia were scarcely less well known that Harlow himself. But Tracchia was not a man to establish an alibi by halves.

He said to the barman: ‘I’m expecting a call from Milan at five o’clock. What time do you have?’

‘Exactly five, Mr Tracchia.’

‘Let the desk know I’m here.’

The direct route to the Post Office lay through a narrow alleyway lined with mews-type houses and alternate garages on both sides. The road was almost deserted, a fact that Dunnet attributed to its being a Saturday afternoon. In all its brief length of less than two hundred yards there was only an overalled figure working over the engine of his car outside the opened door of a garage. In a fashion more French than Italian he wore a navy beret down to his eyes and the rest of his face was so streaked with oil and grease as to be virtually unrecognizable. He wouldn’t, Dunnet thought inconsequentially, have been tolerated for five seconds on the Coronado racing team. But, then, working on a Coronado and on a battered old Fiat 600 called for different standards of approach.

As Dunnet passed the Fiat the mechanic abruptly straightened. Dunnet politely sidestepped to avoid him but as he did so the mechanic, one leg braced against the side of the car to lend additional leverage for a take-off thrust, flung his entire bodily weight against him. Completely off-balance and already falling, Dunnet staggered through the opened garage doorway. His already headlong process towards the ground was rapidly and violently accelerated by two very large and very powerful stocking-masked figures who clearly held no brief for the more gentle arts of persuasion. The garage door closed behind him.

Rory was absorbed in a lurid comic magazine and Tracchia and Neubauer, alibis safely established, were still at the bar when Dunnet entered the hotel. It was an entry that attracted the immediate attention of everyone in the foyer for it was an entry that would have attracted such attention anywhere. Dunnet didn’t walk in, he staggered in like a drunken man and even then would have fallen were it not for the fact that he was supported by a policeman on either side of him. He was bleeding badly from nose and mouth, had a rapidly closing right eye, an unpleasant gash above it and, generally, a badly bruised face. Tracchia, Neubauer, Rory and the receptionist reached him at almost the same moment.

The shock in Tracchia’s voice marched perfectly with the expression on his face. He said: ‘God in heaven, Mr Dunnet, what happened to you?’

Dunnet tried to smile, winced and thought better of it. He said in a slurred voice: ‘I rather think I was set upon.’

Neubauer said: ‘But who did – I mean where – why, Mr Dunnet, why?’

One of the policemen held up his hand and turned to the receptionist. ‘Please. At once. A doctor.’

‘In one minute. Less. We have seven staying here. She turned to Tracchia. ‘You know Mr Dunnet’s room, Mr Tracchia. If you and Mr Neubauer would be so kind as to show the officers – ’

‘No need. Mr Neubauer and I will take him up.’

The policeman said: ‘I’m sorry. We will require a statement from – ’

He halted as most people did when they were on the receiving end of Tracchia’s most intimidating scowl. He said: ‘Leave your station number with this young lady. You will be called when the doctor gives Mr Dunnet permission to talk. Not before. Meantime, he must get to bed immediately. Do you understand?’

They understood, nodded and left without another word. Tracchia and Neubauer, followed by a Rory whose puzzlement was matched only by his apprehension, took Dunnet to his room and were in the process of putting him to bed when a doctor arrived. He was young, Italian, clearly highly efficient and extremely polite when he asked them to leave the room.

In the corridor Rory said: ‘Why would anyone do that to Mr Dunnet?’

‘Who knows?’ Tracchia said. ‘Robbers, thieves, people who would sooner rob and half-kill than do an honest day’s work.’ He flicked a glance at Neubauer, one that Rory was not intended to miss. ‘There are lots of unpleasant people in the world, Rory. Let’s leave it to the police, shall we?’

‘You mean that you’re not going to bother – ’

‘We’re drivers, my boy,’ Neubauer said. ‘We’re not detectives.’

‘I’m not a boy! I’ll soon be seventeen. And I’m not a fool.’ Rory brought his anger under control and looked at them speculatively. ‘There’s something very fishy, very funny going on. I’ll bet Harlow is mixed up in this somewhere.’

‘Harlow?’ Tracchia raised an amused eyebrow in a fashion that was little to Rory’s liking. ‘Come off it, Rory. You were the person who overheard Harlow and Dunnet having their confidential little tête-à-tête.’

‘Aha! That’s just the point. I didn’t overhear what they said. I just heard their voices, not what they said. They could have been saying anything. Maybe Harlow was threatening him.’ Rory paused to consider this fresh and intriguing prospect and conviction burgeoned on the instant. ‘Of course that was what it was. Harlow was threatening him because Dunnet was either double-crossing or blackmailing him.’ Tracchia said kindly: ‘Rory, you really must give up reading those horror comics of yours. Even if Dunnet were double-crossing or blackmailing Harlow, how would beating up Dunnet help in any way? He’s still around, isn’t he? He can still carry on this double-crossing or blackmailing of yours. I’m afraid you’ll have to come up with a better one than that, Rory.’

Rory said slowly: ‘Maybe I can. Dunnet did say he was beaten up in that narrow alleyway leading towards the main street. Do you know what lies at the far end of the alleyway? The Post Office. Maybe Dunnet was going down there to dispose of some evidence he had on Harlow. Maybe he thought it was too dangerous to carry that evidence around with him any more. So Harlow made good and sure that Dunnet never got the chance to post it.’

Neubauer looked at Tracchia then back at Rory. He wasn’t smiling any more. He said: ‘What kind of evidence, Rory?’

‘How should I know?’ Rory’s irritation was marked. ‘I’ve been doing all the thinking up till now. How about you two trying to do a little thinking for once?’

‘We might just at that.’ Tracchia, like Neubauer, was now suddenly serious and thoughtful. ‘Now don’t go talking around about this, lad. Apart from the fact that we haven’t a single shred of proof, there’s such a thing as the law of libel.’

‘I’ve told you once,’ Rory said with some acerbity, ‘I’m not a fool. Besides, it wouldn’t look too good for you two if it was known that you were trying to put the finger on Johnny Harlow.’

‘That you can say again,’ Tracchia said. ‘Bad news travels fast. Here comes Mr MacAlpine.’

MacAlpine arrived at the head of the stairs, his face, much thinner now and far more deeply lined than it had been two months previously, was grim and tight with anger. He said: ‘This is true? I mean about Dunnet?’

Tracchia said: ‘I’m afraid so. Some person or persons have given him a pretty thorough going over.’

‘In God’s name, why?’

‘Robbery, it looks like.’

‘Robbery! In broad daylight. Jesus, the sweet joys of civilization. When did this happen?’

‘Couldn’t have been much more than ten minutes ago. Willi and I were at the bar when he went out. It was exactly five o’clock because I happened to be checking a phone call with the barman at the time. We were at the bar when he came back and when he came back I checked my watch – thought it might be useful for the police to know. It was exactly twelve minutes past five. He couldn’t have got very far in that time.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘There. In his room.’

‘Then why are you three – ’

‘Doctor’s in there with him. He threw us out.’

‘He will not,’ MacAlpine predicted with certainty, ‘throw me out.’

Nor did he. Five minutes later it was the doctor who was the first to emerge followed in another five by MacAlpine, his face at once thunderous and deeply worried. He went straight to his own room.

Tracchia, Neubauer and Rory were sitting by a wall table in the foyer when Harlow entered. If he saw them he paid no heed but walked straight across the length of the foyer to the stairs. He smiled faintly once or twice in response to tentative approaches and deferential smiles of greeting, but otherwise his face remained its normal impassive self.

Neubauer said: ‘Well, you must admit that our Johnny doesn’t look all that concerned about life.’

‘You bet he doesn’t.’ Rory could not have been accused of snarling, because he hadn’t yet mastered the art, but he was obviously getting close. ‘I’ll bet he’s not very concerned about death either. I’ll bet if it was his own grandmother he’d – ’

‘Rory.’ Tracchia held up a restraining hand. ‘You’re letting your imagination run wild. The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association is a very respectable body of men. We have what people call a good public image and we don’t want to spoil it. Sure, we like to have you on our side: but wild talk like this can only damage everyone concerned.’

Rory scowled at each man in turn, rose and walked stiffly away. Neubauer said, almost sadly: ‘I’m afraid, Nikki, that our young firebrand there is shortly about to experience some of the most painful moments of his life.’

‘It’ll do him no harm,’ Tracchia said. ‘And it certainly won’t do us any either.’ Neubauer’s prophecy was confirmed in remarkably short order.

Harlow closed the door behind him and looked down at the prostrate figure of Dunnet who, although he had been duly and efficiently doctored, had a face that looked as if it had emerged from a major road accident within the past few minutes. Allowing for the areas covered by bruises and a variety of plasters, there was, in all conscience, little enough of his face to be seen, just a nose double its usual size, a completely-closed rainbow-coloured right eye and stitches on the forehead and upper lip, but sufficient to lend credence to his recent life and hard times. Harlow clucked his tongue in the usual sympathetic if rather perfunctory fashion, took two silent steps towards the door and jerked it open. Rory literally fell into the room and measured his length on the splendid marble tiles of the Villa-Hotel Cessni.

Wordlessly, Harlow bent over him, wound his fingers in Rory’s thick black curling hair and hauled him to his feet. Rory had no words either, just a piercing heartfelt scream of agony. Still without speaking, Harlow transferred his grip to Rory’s ear, marched him along the corridor to MacAlpine’s room, knocked and went inside, dragging Rory with him: tears of pain rolled down the unhappy Rory’s face. MacAlpine, lying on top of his bed, propped himself up on one elbow: his outrage that his only son should be so cruelly mishandled was clearly outweighed by the fact that it was Harlow who was doing the mishandling.

Harlow said: ‘I know I’m not very much in the grace and favour line with Coronado at the moment. I also know he is your son. But the next time I find this spying young tramp eavesdropping outside the door of a room I’m in I’ll well and truly clobber him.’

MacAlpine looked at Harlow, then at Rory, then back to Harlow. ‘I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.’ The voice was flat and singularly lacking in conviction.

‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’ Harlow’s anger had gone, he’d slipped on his old mask of indifference. ‘But I know you would believe Alexis Dunnet. Go and ask him. I was with him in his room when I opened the door a bit unexpectedly for our young friend here. He had been leaning so heavily against it that he fell flat to the floor. I helped him up. By his hair. That’s why there’s tears in his eyes.’

MacAlpine looked at Rory in a less than paternal fashion. ‘Is this true?’

Rory wiped his sleeve across his eyes, concentrated sullenly on the examination of the toes of his shoes and prudently said nothing.

‘Leave him to me, Johnny.’ MacAlpine didn’t look particularly angry or upset, just very very tired. ‘My apologies if I seemed to doubt you – I didn’t.’

Harlow nodded, left, returned to Dunnet’s room, closed and locked the door then, as Dunnet watched in silence, proceeded to search the room thoroughly. A few minutes later, apparently still not satisfied, he moved into the adjacent bathroom, turned a tap and the shower on to maximum then went out, leaving the door wide open behind him. It is difficult for even the most sensitive microphone to pick up with any degree of clarity the sound of human voices against a background of running water.

Without any by-your-leave, he searched through the outer clothing that Dunnet had been wearing. He replaced the clothing and looked at Dunnet’s torn shirt and the white band that a wrist watch had left on a sun-tanned wrist.

‘Has it occurred to you, Alexis,’ Harlow said, ‘that some of your activities are causing displeasure in certain quarters and that they are trying to discourage you?’

‘Funny. Bloody funny.’ Dunnet’s voice was, understandably, so thick and slurred that in his case the use of any anti-microphone devices was almost wholly superfluous. ‘Why didn’t they discourage me permanently?’

‘Only a fool kills unnecessarily. We are not up against fools. However, who knows, one day? Well, now. Wallet, loose change, watch, cuff-links, even your half-dozen fountain pens and car keys – all gone. Looks like a pretty professional roll job, doesn’t it?’

‘The hell with that.’ Dunnet spat blood into a handful of tissue. ‘What matters is that the cassette is gone.’

Harlow hesitated then cleared his throat in a diffident fashion.

‘Well, let’s say that a cassette is missing.’

The only really viable feature in Dunnet’s face was his unblemished right eye: this, after a momentary puzzlement, he used most effectively to glower at Harlow with the maximum of suspicion.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

Harlow gazed into the middle distance.

‘Well, Alexis, I do feel a little bit apologetic about this, but the cassette that matters is in the hotel safe. The one our friends now have – the one I gave to you – was a plant.’

Dunnet, with what little could be seen of his sadly battered face slowly darkening in anger, tried to sit up: gently but firmly Harlow pushed him down again.

Harlow said: ‘Now, now, Alexis, don’t do yourself an injury. Another one, I mean. They were on to me and I had to put myself in the clear or I was finished – although God knows I never expected them to do this to you.’ He paused. ‘I’m in the clear now.’

‘You’d better be sure of that, my boy.’ Dunnet had subsided but his anger hadn’t.

‘I’m sure. When they develop that film spool they’ll find it contains micro photos – about a hundred – of line drawings of a prototype gas turbine engine. They’ll conclude I’m as much a criminal as they are, but as my business is industrial espionage, there can be no possible conflict of interests. They’ll lose interest in me.’

Dunnet looked at him balefully. ‘Clever bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am, rather.’ He went to the door, opened it and turned round. ‘Especially, it seems, when it is at other people’s expense.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the Coronado pits on the following afternoon a heavily panting MacAlpine and a still sadly battered Dunnet argued in low and urgent tones. The faces of both men were marked with worry.

MacAlpine made no attempt to conceal the savagery he felt inside him. He said: ‘But the bottle’s empty, man. Drained to the last drop. I’ve just checked. Jesus, I can’t just let him go out there and kill another man.’

‘If you stop him you’ll have to explain why to the press. It’ll be a sensation, the international sporting scandal of the last decade. It’ll kill Johnny. Professionally, I mean.’

‘Better have him killed professionally than have him kill another driver for real.’

Dunnet said: ‘Give him two laps. If he’s in the lead, then let him go. He can’t kill anyone in that position. If not, flag him in. We’ll cook up something for the press. Anyway, remember what he did yesterday with the same skinful inside him?’

‘Yesterday he was lucky. Today – ’

‘Today it’s too late.’

Even at a distance of several hundred feet the sound of twenty-four Grand Prix racing engines accelerating away from the starting grid was startling, almost shattering, both in its unexpectedness and ear-cringing fury of sound. MacAlpine and Dunnet looked at each other and shrugged simultaneously. There seemed to be no other comment or reaction to meet the case.

The first driver past the pits, already pulling fractionally clear of Nicolo Tracchia, was Harlow in his lime-green Coronado. MacAlpine turned to Dunnet and said heavily: ‘One swallow does not make a summer.’

Eight laps later MacAlpine was beginning to question his ornithological expertise. He was looking slightly dazed while Dunnet was indulging in considerable eyebrow-lifting, Jacobson’s expression was not one indicative of any marked internal pleasure while Rory was positively scowling although manfully trying not to. Only Mary expressed her true emotion and that without inhibition. She looked positively radiant.

‘Three lap records gone,’ she said incredulously. ‘Three lap records in eight laps.’

By the end of the ninth lap the emotions of those in the Coronado pits, as registered by their facial expressions, had radically altered. Jacobson and Rory were, with difficulty, refraining from looking cheerful. Mary was chewing anxiously on her pencil. MacAlpine looked thunderous but the thunder was overlaid by deep anxiety.

‘Forty seconds overdue!’ he said. ‘Forty seconds! All the field’s gone past and he’s not even in sight. What in God’s name could have happened to him?’

Dunnet said: ‘Shall I phone the track-marshals’ checkpoints?’

MacAlpine nodded and Dunnet began to make calls. The first two yielded no information and he was about to make a third when Harlow’s Coronado appeared and drew into the pits. The engine note of the Coronado sounded perfectly healthy in every way, which was more than could be said for Harlow when he had climbed out of his car and removed his helmet and goggles. His eyes were glazed, and bloodshot. He looked at them for a moment then spread his hands: the tremor in them was unmistakable.

‘Sorry. Had to pull up about a mile out. Double vision. Could hardly see where I was going. Come to that, I still can’t.’

‘Get changed.’ The bleak harshness in MacAlpine’s voice startled the listeners. ‘I’m taking you to hospital.’

Harlow hesitated, made as if to speak, shrugged, turned and walked away. Dunnet said in a low voice: ‘You’re not taking him to the course doctor?’

‘I’m taking him to see a friend of mine. An optometrist of note but many other things besides. All I want him to do is a little job for me, a job I couldn’t get done in privacy and secrecy on the track.’

Dunnet said quietly, almost sadly: ‘A blood sample?’

‘Just one positive blood sample.’

‘And that will be the end of the road for Grand Prix’s superstar?’

‘The end of the road.’

For a person who might well have good reason for believing he had reached the end of his professional career Harlow, as he sat relaxed in his chair in a hospital corridor, seemed singularly unperturbed. Most unusually for him he was smoking a cigarette, the hand holding the cigarette as steady as if it had been carved from marble. Harlow gazed thoughtfully at the door at the far end of the corridor. Behind that door MacAlpine, his face registering a combination of disbelief and consternation, looked at the man seated across the desk from him, a benign and elderly bearded doctor in shirt sleeves.

MacAlpine said: ‘Impossible. Quite impossible. You mean to tell me there is no alcohol in his blood?’

‘Impossible or not, I mean what I say. An experienced colleague has just carried out a double-check. He has no more alcohol in his blood than you would find in that of a life-long abstainer.’

MacAlpine shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he repeated. ‘Look, Professor, I have proof – ’

‘To us long-suffering doctors nothing is impossible. The speed with which different individuals metabolize alcohol varies beyond belief. With an obviously extremely fit young man like your friend outside – ’

‘But his eyes! You saw his eyes. Bleary, bloodshot – ’

‘There could be half a dozen reasons for that.’

‘And the double vision?’

‘His eyes seem normal enough. How well he is seeing it’s hard to say yet. There exists always the possibility that the eyes themselves are sound enough but that some damage may have been done to an optical nerve.’ The doctor stood up. ‘A spot check is not enough. I’d need a series of tests, a battery of tests. Unfortunately, not now – I’m already overdue at the theatre. Could he come along about seven this evening?’

MacAlpine said he could, expressed his thanks and left. As he approached Harlow, he looked at the cigarette in his hand, then at Harlow, then back at the cigarette but said nothing. Still in silence, the two men left the hospital, got into MacAlpine’s Aston and drove back in the direction of Monza.

Harlow broke the silence. He said mildly: ‘As the principal concerned, don’t you think you should tell me what the doctor said?’

MacAlpine said shortly: ‘He’s not sure. He wants to carry out a series of tests. The first is at seven o’clock tonight.’

Still mildly, Harlow said: ‘I hardly think that will be necessary.’

MacAlpine glanced at him in brief speculation. ‘And what’s that meant to mean?’

‘There’s a lay-by half a kilometre ahead. Pull in, please. There’s something I want to say.’

At seven o’clock that evening, the hour when Harlow was supposed to be in hospital, Dunnet sat in MacAlpine’s hotel room. The atmosphere was funereal. Both men had large glasses of scotch in their hands.

Dunnet said: ‘Jesus! Just like that? He said his nerve was gone, he knew he was finished and could he break his contract?’

‘Just like that. No more beating about the bush, he said. No more kidding – especially kidding himself. God knows what it cost the poor devil to say so.’

‘And the scotch?’

MacAlpine sampled his own and sighed heavily, more in sadness than weariness. ‘Quite humorous about it, really. Says he detests the damned stuff and is thankful for a reason never to touch it again.’

It was Dunnet’s turn to have recourse to his scotch. ‘And what’s going to happen to your poor devil now? Mind you, James, I’m not overlooking what this has cost you – you’ve lost the best driver in the world. But right now I’m more concerned about Johnny.’

‘Me, too. But what to do? What to do?’

The man who was the subject of all this concern was displaying a remarkable amount of unconcern. For a man who was the central figure in the greatest fall from grace in the history of motor racing, Johnny Harlow seemed most extraordinarily cheerful. As he adjusted his tie before the mirror in his room he whistled, albeit slightly tunelessly, to himself, breaking off occasionally to smile at some private thought. He shrugged into his jacket, left his room, went down to the lobby, took an orangeade from the bar and sat down at a nearby table. Before he was even able to sip his drink Mary came and sat beside him. She took one of his hands in both of hers.

‘Johnny!’ she said. ‘Oh, Johnny!’

‘Harlow gazed at her with sorrowful eyes.

She went on: ‘Daddy just told me. Oh, Johnny, what are we going to do?’

‘We?’

She gazed at him for long seconds without speaking, looked away and said: ‘To lose my two best friends in one day.’ There were no tears in her eyes but there were tears in her voice.

‘Your two – what do you mean?’

‘I thought you knew.’ Now the tears were trickling down her cheeks. ‘Henry’s got bad heart trouble. He has to go.’

‘Henry? Dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ Harlow squeezed her hands and gazed off into the middle distance. ‘Poor old Henry. I wonder what will happen to him?’

‘Oh, that’s all right.’ She sniffed. ‘Daddy’s keeping him on in Marseilles.’

‘Ah. Then it’s probably all for the best – Henry was getting past it anyway.’

Harlow remained thoughtful for some seconds, apparently lost in deep thought, then clasped Mary’s hands with his free one. He said: ‘Mary, I love you. Hang on, will you? Back in a couple of minutes.’

One minute later Harlow was in MacAlpine’s room. Dunnet was there and he had the appearance of a man who was with difficulty keeping his anger under control. MacAlpine was clearly highly distressed. He shook his head many times.

He said: ‘Not at any price. Not under any circumstances. No, no, no. It’s just not on. One day the world champion, the next trundling a lumbering transporter all over the place. Why, man, you’d be the laughing stock of Europe.’

‘Maybe.’ Harlow’s voice was quiet, without bitterness. ‘But not half as much a laughing stock as I’d be if people knew the real reason for my retiral, Mr MacAlpine.’

‘Mr MacAlpine? Mr MacAlpine? I’m always James to you, my boy. Always have been.’

‘Not any more, sir. You could explain about my so-called double vision, say that I’ve been retained as a specialist adviser. What more natural? Besides, you do need a transporter driver.’

MacAlpine shook his head in slow and complete finality. ‘Johnny Harlow will never drive any transporter of mine and that’s the end of it.’

MacAlpine covered his face with his hands. Harlow looked at Dunnet who jerked his head towards the door. Harlow nodded and left the room.

Dunnet let some seconds pass in silence, then he said, picking his words carefully and without emotion: ‘And that’s the end of me. I’ll say goodbye to you, then, James MacAlpine. I’ve enjoyed every minute of my assignment. Except for the last minute.’

MacAlpine removed his hands, slowly lifted his head and stared at Dunnet in wonderment. He said: ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I mean this. Isn’t it obvious? I value my health too much to stay around and feel sick every time I think of what you’ve done. That boy lives for motor racing, it’s the only thing he knows and now he has no place left in the world to go. And I would remind you, James MacAlpine, that in the space of four short years the Coronado has been hauled up from the depths of near obscurity and made into the most successful and respected Grand Prix racing car in the world through one thing and one thing only – the incomparable driving genius of that boy to whom you have just shown the door. Not you, James, not you. Johnny Harlow made Coronado. But you can’t afford to be associated with failure, he’s no use to you any more so you drop him into the discard. I hope you sleep well tonight, Mr MacAlpine. You should do. You have every reason to be proud of yourself.’

Dunnet turned to leave. MacAlpine, with tears in his eyes, spoke softly. ‘Alexis.’

Dunnet turned.

MacAlpine said: ‘If you ever speak to me like that again I’ll break your blasted neck. I’m tired, I’m dead tired, and I want to sleep before dinner. Go tell him he can have any bloody job he likes on the Coronado – mine, if he so cares.’

Dunnet said: ‘I’ve been bloody rude. Please accept my apologies. And thank you very much, James.’

MacAlpine smiled faintly. ‘Not Mr MacAlpine?’

‘I said “Thank you, James”.’

Both men smiled at each other. Dunnet left, closing the door with a quiet hand, went down in to the lobby where Harlow and Mary were seated side by side, untouched drinks before them. The aura of profound despondency that overhung their table was almost palpable. Dunnet picked up a drink from the bar, joined Harlow and Mary, smiled broadly, lifted his glass and said: ‘Cheers. Here’s to the fastest transporter driver in Europe.’

Harlow left his drink untouched. He said: ‘Alexis, I’m in one of my less humorous moods this evening.’

Dunnet said cheerfully: ‘Mr James MacAlpine has had a sudden and complete change of mind and heart. His final words were “Go and tell him he can have any blasted job he likes on the Coronado – mine, if he so cares.”’ Harlow shook his head. Dunnet went on: ‘God’s sake, Johnny, I’m not having you on.’

Harlow shook his head again. ‘I’m not doubting you, Alexis. I’m just flabbergasted. How on earth did you manage – well, perhaps it’s just as well you don’t tell me.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I don’t think I really want Mr MacAlpine’s job.’

‘Oh, Johnny!’ There were tears in her eyes but not tears of sorrow, not in that radiant face. She rose, flung her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Harlow, though slightly startled, was not noticeably embarrassed.

‘That’s my girl,’ Dunnet said approvingly. ‘A last long farewell to the fastest lorry driver in Europe.’

She stared at him. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘The transporter leaves for Marseilles tonight. Someone has to drive it there. This is a job usually reserved for the transporter driver.’

Harlow said: ‘My God! I’d rather overlooked that part of it. Now?’

‘As ever was. There appears to be a considerable degree of urgency. I think you’d better see James now.’

Harlow nodded, rose and left for his room where he changed into dark trousers, navy roll-neck sweater and leather jacket. He went to see MacAlpine and found him stretched out on his bed looking ill and pale and little short of positively haggard.

MacAlpine said: ‘I have to admit, Johnny, that the reason for my decision is based largely on self-interest. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, good mechanics though they are, couldn’t drive a wheelbarrow. Jacobson has already left for Marseilles to make loading arrangements for the morning. It’s asking a lot, I know, but I must have number four, the new X car and the spare engine at the Vignolles test track by noon tomorrow – we have the track for two days only. A lot of driving, I know, and you’ll have only a few hours’ sleep, if that. You’ll have to start loading in Marseilles by 6 a.m.’

‘Fine. Now what shall I do with my own car?’

‘Ah! The only transporter driver in Europe with his own Ferrari. Alexis will take my Aston while I, personally, will drive your rusty old bucket of bolts to Vignolles tomorrow. Then you’ll have to take it to our Marseilles garage and leave it there. For keeps, I’m afraid.’

‘I understand, Mr MacAlpine.’

‘Mr MacAlpine, Mr MacAlpine. Are you sure this is what you want to do, Johnny?’

‘Never surer, sir.’

Harlow went down to the lounge to find that Mary and Dunnet were no longer there. He went upstairs again, found Dunnet in his room and asked: ‘Where’s Mary?’

‘Gone for a walk.’

‘Bloody chilly evening to go for a walk.’

‘I don’t think she’s in any condition to feel the cold,’ Dunnet said drily. ‘Euphoria, I believe they call it. Seen the old boy?’

‘Yes. The old boy, as you call him, really is becoming an old boy. He’s put on five years in the last six months.’

‘More like ten years. Understandable with his wife vanishing just like that. Maybe if you’d lost someone to whom you’ve been married for twenty-five years – ’

‘He’s lost more than that.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I don’t even know myself. His nerve, his self-confidence, his drive, his will to fight and win.’ Harlow smiled. ‘Some time this week we’ll give him those lost ten years back again.’

‘You’re the most incredibly arrogant, self-confident bastard I’ve ever known,’ Dunnet said admiringly. When Harlow made no reply, he shrugged and sighed. ‘Well, to be a world champion I suppose you have to have some little belief in yourself. And now what?’

‘Off. On my way out I’ll pick up from the hotel safe this little bauble that I’m going to deliver to our friend in the rue St Pierre – seems a damned sight safer than trying to walk to the Post Office. How about having a drink in the bar and seeing if anyone’s interested in me?’

‘Why should they be? They have the right cassette – or think they have, which amounts to the same thing.’

‘That’s as maybe. But it’s just possible that the ungodly might change their minds when they see me taking this envelope from the hotel safe, rip it open, throw the envelope away, examine the cassette and stick it in my pocket. They know they’ve been fooled once. You can bet your life that they’ll be more than prepared to believe that they’ve been fooled twice.’

For long seconds Dunnet stared at Harlow in total disbelief. When he spoke, his voice was a whisper. He said: ‘This isn’t just asking for trouble. This is ordering your own pine box.’

‘Only the best of oak for world champions. With gold-plated handles. Come on.’

They went down the stairs together. Dunnet turned off towards the bar while Harlow went to the desk. As Dunnet’s eyes roved round the lobby, Harlow asked for and received his envelope, opened it, extracted the cassette and examined it carefully before putting it in an inside pocket of his leather jacket. As he turned away from the desk, Dunnet wandered up almost casually and said in a quiet voice. ‘Tracchia. His eyes almost popped out of his head. He almost ran to the nearest phone booth.’

Harlow nodded, said nothing, passed through the swing doors, then halted as his way was barred by a leather-coated figure. He said: ‘What are you doing here, Mary? It’s bitterly cold.’

‘I just wanted to say goodbye, that’s all.’

‘You could have said goodbye inside.’

‘I’m a very private person.’

‘Besides, you’ll be seeing me again tomorrow. In Vignolles.’

‘Will I, Johnny? Will I?’

‘Tsk! Tsk! Someone else who doesn’t believe I can drive.’

‘Don’t try to be funny, Johnny, because I’m not feeling that way. I’m feeling sick. I’ve this awful feeling that something dreadful is going to happen. To you.’

Harlow said lightly: ‘It’s this half-Highland blood of yours. Fey is what they call it. Having the second sight. If it’s any consolation to you the second-sighters have an almost perfect 100 per cent record of failure.’

‘Don’t laugh at me, Johnny.’ There were tears in her voice.

He put an arm round her shoulders.

‘Laugh at you? With you, yes. At you, never.’

‘Come back to me, Johnny.’

‘I’ll always come back to you, Mary.’

‘What? What did you say, Johnny?’

‘A slip of the tongue.’ He squeezed her shoulders, pecked her briskly on the cheek and strode off into the gathering darkness.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The giant Coronado transporter, its vast silhouette outlined by at least a score of lights on the sides and back, not to mention its four powerful head-lamps, rumbled through the darkness and along the almost wholly deserted roads at a speed which would not have found very much favour with the Italian police speed patrols, had there been any such around that night which, fortunately, there weren’t.

Harlow had elected to take the autostrada across to Turin then turned south to Cuneo and was now approaching the Col de Tende, that fearsome mountain pass with the tunnel at the top which marks the boundary between Italy and France. Even in an ordinary car, in daylight and in good dry driving conditions, it calls for the closest of care and attention: the steepness of the ascent and descent and the seemingly endless series of murderous hairpin bends on both sides of the tunnel make it as dangerous and difficult a pass as any in Europe. But to drive a huge transporter, at the limit of its adhesion and road-holding in rain that was now beginning to fall quite heavily, was an experience that was hazardous to a degree.

For some, it was plainly not only hazardous but harrowing to a degree. The red-haired twin mechanics, one curled up in the bucket seat beside Harlow, the other stretched out on the narrow bunk behind the front seats, though quite exhausted were clearly never more wide awake in their lives. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were frankly terrified, either staring in horror at each other or closing their eyes as they slid and swayed wildly on each successive hairpin bend. And if they did leave the road it wouldn’t be just to bump across the surrounding terrain: it would be to fall a very long way indeed and their chances of survival were non-existent. The twins were beginning to realize why old Henry had never made it as a Grand Prix driver.

If Harlow was aware of the very considerable inner turmoil he was causing, he gave no signs of it. His entire being was concentrated on his driving and on scanning the road two, even three hairpin bends ahead. Tracchia and, by now, Tracchia’s associates knew that he was carrying the cassette and that they intended to separate him from that cassette Harlow did not for a moment doubt. When and where they would make their attempt was a matter for complete conjecture. Crawling round the hairpins leading to the top of the Col de Tende made them the perfect target for an ambush. Whoever his adversaries were, Harlow was convinced they were based in Marseilles. It was unlikely that they would care to take the risk of running foul of the Italian law. He was certain that he hadn’t been trailed from Monza. The chances were that they didn’t even know what route he was taking. They might wait until he was much nearer their home base or even arrived at it. On the other hand they might be considering the possibility that he was getting rid of the cassette en route. Speculation seemed not only unrewarding but useless. He put the wide variety of possibilities out of his mind and concentrated on his driving while still keeping every sense alert for danger. As it was they made the top of the Col without incident, passed through the Italian and French Customs and started on the wickedly winding descent on the other side.

When he came to La Giandola, he hesitated briefly. He could take the road to Ventimiglia thus taking advantage of the new autoroutes westwards along the Riviera or take the shorter but more winding direct route to Nice. He took into account that the Ventimiglia route would entail encountering the Italian and French Customs not once but twice again and decided on the direct route.

He made Nice without incident, followed the autoroute past Cannes, reached Toulon and took the N8 to Marseilles. It was about twenty miles out of Cannes, near the village of Beausset, that it happened.

As they rounded a bend they could see, about a quarter of a mile ahead, four lights, two stationary, two moving. The two moving lights were red and obviously hand-held, for they swung steadily through arcs of about ninety degrees.

There was an abrupt change in the engine note as Harlow dropped a gear. The sound brought the dozing twins to something like near wakefulness just in time to identify, a bare second after Harlow, the legends on the two stationary lights, red and blue and flashing alternately: one said STOP, the other POLICE. There were at least five men behind the lights, two of them standing in the middle of the road.

Harlow was hunched far forward over the wheel, his eyes narrowed until even the pupils seemed in danger of disappearing. He made an abrupt decision, arm and leg moved in swift and perfect unison, and again the engine note changed as the big diesel dropped another gear. Ahead, the two moving red lamps stopped swinging. It must have been evident to those wielding them that the transporter was slowing to a halt.

Fifty yards distant from the road-block Harlow stamped the accelerator pedal flat to the floor. The transporter, designedly, had been in the correct gear to pick up maximum acceleration and it was in that gear that Harlow held it, the engine revolutions climbing as the distance between the transporter and the flashing lights ahead steadily and rapidly decreased. The two men with the red lights moved rapidly apart: it had dawned on them, and a very rude awakening it must have been, that the transporter had no intention of stopping.

Inside the cab the faces of Tweedledum and Tweedledee registered identical expressions of horrified and incredulous apprehension. Harlow’s face registered no expression at all as he watched the shadowy figures who had been standing so confidently in the middle of the road fling themselves to safety towards either verge. Above the still mounting roar of the diesel could be heard the sound of the splintering of glass and the screeching of buckling metal as the transporter over-ran the pedestal-mounted flashing lights in the middle of the road. Twenty yards farther on there came a series of heavy thuds from the rear of the transporter, a drumming sound that continued for another thirty or forty yards until Harlow swung the swaying transporter round a forty-five turn in the road. Harlow changed up once and then again into top gear. He appeared to be quite unconcerned which was considerably more than could be said for the twins.

Tweedledum said in a stricken voice: ‘Jesus, Johnny, are you mad? You’ll have us all in prison before the night is out. That was a police block, man!’

‘A police block without police cars, police motorcycles or police uniforms: I wonder why the good Lord gave you pair two eyes apiece?’

Tweedledee said: ‘But those police signs – ’

‘I will refrain from giving you pitying looks,’ Harlow said kindly. ‘Please do not overtax your minds. I would also point out that the French police do not wear masks, which this lot did, nor do they fix silencers to their guns.’

‘Silencers?’ The twins spoke as one.

‘You heard those thumps and bumps on the back of the transporter? What do you think they were doing – throwing stones after us?’

Tweedledum said: ‘Then what – ’

‘Hi-jackers. Members of an honoured and respected profession in these parts.’ Harlow trusted he would be forgiven for this wicked slur on the honest citizens of Provence. But it was the best he could think of on the spur of the moment and, besides, the twins, though excellent mechanics, were of a rather simple cast of mind who would readily believe anything that a person of the stature of Johnny Harlow were to tell them.

‘But how could they have known we were coming?’

‘They didn’t.’ Harlow was improvising rapidly. ‘They’re usually in radio contact with lookouts posted a kilometre or so on either side of them. We’ve probably just passed the second one. When a likely-looking prospect – such as us – comes along it takes only a few seconds to have the lights in position and working.’

‘A backward lot, those Froggies,’ Tweedledum observed.

‘Aren’t they just? They haven’t even got round to great train robberies yet.’

The twins composed themselves for slumber. Harlow, apparently tireless, was as alert and watchful as ever. After a few minutes, in his outside rear mirror, he caught sight of a pair of powerful headlights approaching at high speed. As they closed, Harlow briefly considered moving out to the middle of the road to block its passage just in case the occupant or occupants belonged to whatever opposition there might be but he dismissed the idea immediately. If they were ill-disposed, all they would have to do would be to shoot holes in his rear tyres at their leisure, as effective a way as any of bringing the transporter to a halt.

As it happened, the person or persons showed no signs of hostility, but one curious event occurred. As it overtook the transporter all the car’s lights, both front and rear, went out and remained out until it was at least a hundred yards ahead, the driver of the car seeing by courtesy of the transporter’s headlights: when its lights did come on again it was too far away for its rear numberplate to be identified.

Only seconds later, Harlow saw another pair of powerful headlights closing at even higher speed. This car did not cut its lights as it overtook the transporter and it would have been most improbable had it done so for it was a police car with both siren and flashing blue light in splendid working order. Harlow permitted himself an almost beatific smile, and, just over a mile later, still had an expression of pleased anticipation on his face as he gently braked the transporter.

Ahead, the police car, blue lamp still flashing, was parked by the side of the road. Immediately ahead of it was another car, with a policeman, pad in hand, interrogating the driver through an opened window. There could be little question what the interrogation was about. Except on the autoroutes, the legal speed limit in France is 110 kph: the man being interrogated must have been doing at least 150 when he had passed the transporter. The transporter, still moving slowly, pulled out to the left to overtake both cars and Harlow had no difficulty in making out the number-plate of the front car. It read PNIIIK.

Like most major cities, Marseilles has places well worth looking at and others that do not qualify in that category. Certain sections of north-west Marseilles unmistakably belong in the latter category, seedy and rundown ex-suburban areas, now more industrial than they are residential. The rue Gerard was typical of such an area. While it might barely escape being described as an eye-sore, it was a singularly unprepossessing street almost entirely given over to small factories and large garages. The largest building in the street was a brick and corrugated iron monstrosity about half-way along on the left. Above the huge ribbed metal door was, in foot-high letters, the single word CORONADO.

As Harlow trundled the transporter down the rue Gerard he seemed unmoved by the unlovely spectacle before him. The twins were sound asleep. As Harlow approached the garage the metal door began to roll upwards and as Harlow swung out to make his approach, lights came on inside.

The garage was a cavernous place, eighty feet long and about fifty in width. It seemed ancient in construction and appearance but was about as well-kept, well-swept and clean as anyone could reasonably expect such a garage to be. Lined up against the right-hand wall were no fewer than three Coronado Formula I cars, and, pedestal-mounted beyond those, three unmistakable Ford-Cosworth V-8 engines. Nearest the door, on the same side, was a black Citroën DS21. The left-hand side of the garage was given over to rows of lavishly equipped work-benches while at the rear of the garage, stacked head-high, were dozens of crates of spares and tyres. Running both longitudinally and laterally were overhead beams for moving the engines about and for loading up the transporter.

Harlow eased the transporter in and stopped it precisely under the main longitudinal loading beam. He stopped the engine, shook the sleeping twins and climbed down to the garage floor. Jacobson was there to meet him. He didn’t seem particularly glad to meet him but then Jacobson never seemed particularly glad to meet anyone. He looked at his watch and said grudgingly: ‘Two o’clock. Fast trip.’

‘Empty road. What now?’

‘Bed. We’ve an old villa just round the corner. It’s not much but it serves. We’ll be here in the morning to start loading – after we unload, that is. The two resident mechanics will be here to help us.’

‘Jacques and Harry?’

‘They’ve left.’ Jacobson looked even more sour than usual. ‘Homesick, they said. They’re always getting homesick. Homesick means too much hard work. New boys are Italian. Not half bad, though.’

Jacobson did not appear to have noticed the back of the transporter until then. He said: ‘What the hell are those marks?’

‘Bullets. Somebody tried to hi-jack us this side of Toulon. At least I think it was an attempted hi-jack but if it was they weren’t very good at their job.’

‘And why the hell should anyone want to hi-jack you? What good could a couple of Coronados be to anyone?’

‘None. Maybe their information was wrong. This is the kind of wagon they use for transporting those very large cargoes of scotch or cigarettes. A million, two million francs a load – something really worth hi-jacking. Anyway, no harm done. Fifteen minutes with a panel-beater and a spray gun and she’ll be as good as new.’

‘I’ll report this to the police in the morning,’ Jacobson said. ‘Under French law it’s an offence not to report such an incident. Not,’ he added bitterly, ‘that it will do any bloody good.’

The four men left the garage. As they did, Harlow glanced casually at the black Citroën. The number-plate read PNIIIK.

As Jacobson had said the old villa round the corner was not much but it served. Barely. Harlow sat in a chair by the side of a sparsely furnished room which, apart from a narrow bed and some worn linoleum, had as its only other item of furniture another chair which served as a bedside table. The window of the bedroom, which was on street level, had no curtains, just thin gauze netting. Although the room light was out, some faint degree of illumination was afforded by the weak street lights outside. Harlow twitched the netting fractionally aside and peered out. The mean, narrow little street outside, compared to which the rue Gerard was an arterial highway, was completely deserted.

Harlow glanced at his watch. The luminous hands said that it was two fifteen. Suddenly Harlow cocked his head, listening intently. It could have been his imagination, he thought; or perhaps what he heard was the sound of faint footfalls in the passageway outside. Noiselessly, he crossed to his bed and lay down on it. It did not creak because it was a flock mattress that had a long if probably dishonourable history behind it. His hand reached under the pillow, which was of the same vintage as the mattress, and brought out his blackjack. He slipped the thong over his right wrist then returned his right hand under the pillow.

The door opened stealthily. Breathing deeply and evenly, Harlow partly opened his eyes. A faint shadow stood in the doorway, but it was impossible to recognize who it was. Harlow remained as he was, perfectly relaxed and apparently soundly asleep. After a few seconds, the intruder closed the door as stealthily as he had opened it and Harlow’s now highly attuned hearing could distinguish the soft sound of footsteps fading away. Harlow sat up, rubbing his chin in puzzled indecision, then left his bed and took up his vantage point by the window.

A man, this time clearly identifiable as Jacobson, had just left the house. He crossed the street and as he did so a dark car, a small Renault, rounded the corner and stopped almost directly opposite. Jacobson stooped and talked to the driver, who opened the door and stepped out. He removed his dark overcoat, folded it neatly – there was an unpleasant and rather menacing certainty about all his movements – placed it in the back seat, patted his pockets as if to reassure himself that nothing was missing, nodded to Jacobson and began to cross the street. Jacobson walked away.

Harlow retreated to his bed, where he lay with his black-jacked right hand under his pillow, facing the window, his eyes fractionally open. Almost at once he saw a shadowy figure, his features indistinguishable because he was illuminated from behind, appear at the window and peer in. He brought up his right hand and examined what it held: there was nothing indistinguishable about this, it was a large and very unpleasant looking pistol, and as Harlow watched he slid back a catch on the side. It was then that Harlow saw that the gun had a lengthy cylindrical object screwed on to the end of the muzzle. A silencer, a piece of equipment designed to silence a shot for a fraction of a second and Harlow for ever. The figure disappeared.

Harlow left his bed with considerable alacrity. A blackjack, as compared to a silenced gun, had its distinct limitations. He crossed the room and took up position against the wall about two feet from the hinged side of the door.

For ten long seconds, which even Harlow found rather wearing on the nerves, there was total silence. Then there came the barely audible creak from a floor-board – the villa didn’t go in much for deep-piled carpeting – in the passageway outside. The door handle depressed with almost millimetric stealth then slowly returned to position as the door, very very smoothly and gently, began to open. The gap between the door and jamb widened until it was about ten inches. Momentarily, the door ceased to move. A head began to poke its way cautiously through the gap. The intruder had a thin swarthy face, black hair plastered close to his narrow head and a pencil-line moustache.

Harlow leaned back on his left leg, raised his right leg and smashed the heel of his right foot against the door, just below the key-hole, from which the key had been thoughtfully and earlier removed. There was a muffled half-cough, half-scream of agony. Harlow jerked the door wide open and a short, thin dark-suited man stumbled into the room. Both hands, the right still clutching the gun, were clasped to the blood-masked shattered middle of his face. The nose was certainly broken: what had happened to cheekbones and teeth were, at the moment, a matter for the most idle conjecture.

It certainly didn’t concern Harlow. His face was entirely without pity. He swung his black-jack, none too lightly, and brought it down over the intruder’s right ear. Moaning, the man sank to his knees. Harlow took the gun from an unresisting hand and ran his free hand over the man’s body. At his belt he discovered a sheath knife, which he withdrew. It was six inches long, double-edged, needlepointed and razor-sharp. Gingerly, Harlow slipped the knife into his outside leather jacket pocket, changed his mind, switched over gun and knife, entwined his hand in the man’s black greasy hair and pulled him ruthlessly to his feet. Equally ruthlessly, he pressed the blade of the knife into his back until he was sure the tip had penetrated the skin,

Harlow said: ‘Outside.’

With the knife pressing ever deeper into his spine, Harlow’s would-be killer had little option. The two men emerged from the villa and crossed the deserted street towards the little black Renault. Harlow pushed the man into the front seat while he himself got into the back.

Harlow said: ‘Drive. Police.’

When the man spoke it was, understandably, with some muffled difficulty. He said: ‘No can drive.’

Harlow reached for his black-jack and struck the man with approximately the same force as before but this time over the left ear. The man sagged wearily against the wheel.

Harlow said: ‘Drive. Police.’

He drove, if his performance could be called driving. It was, understandably, the most erratic and harrowing journey Harlow had ever experienced. Apart from the fact that the man was barely conscious, he had to drive with one hand only, having to take his hand off the wheel to change gear, using the other hand to hold a blood-saturated handkerchief against his shattered face. Fortunately, the streets were deserted and the police station only ten minutes away.

Harlow half-pushed, half-carried the unhappy Italian into the station, deposited him not too gently on a bench, then went to the desk. Behind it were two large, burly and apparently genial policemen, both in uniform, one an inspector, the other a sergeant. They were studying with surprise and considerable interest the man on the bench who was now in a state of almost complete collapse, holding both hands to his blood-smeared face.

Harlow said: ‘I want to lodge a complaint about this man.’

The inspector said mildly: ‘It looks more to me that he should be lodging a complaint against you.’

Harlow said: ‘You will be requiring some identification.’ He pulled out his passport and driving licence but the inspector waved them away without even looking at them.

‘Even to the police your face is better known than that of any criminal in Europe. But I had thought, Mr Harlow, that your sport was motor racing, not boxing.’

The sergeant, who had been studying the Italian with some interest, touched the inspector on the arm.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said, ‘If it isn’t our old friend and true, Luigi the Light-fingered. Difficult to recognize him, though.’ He looked at Harlow. ‘How did you make his acquaintance, sir?’

‘He came visiting me. I’m sorry there was some violence.’

‘Apologies are out of order,’ the inspector said. ‘Luigi should be beaten up regularly, preferably once a week. But this one should last him a couple of months. Was it – ah – necessary – ?’

Wordlessly, Harlow produced the knife and gun from his pockets and laid them on the counter.

The inspector nodded. ‘With his record, a minimum of five years. You will press charges of course?’

‘Please do it for me. I have urgent business. I’ll look in later, if I may. Incidentally, I don’t think Luigi came to rob me. I think he came to kill me. I’d like to find out who sent him.’

‘I think that could be arranged, Mr Harlow.’ There was a grim-faced thoughtfulness about the inspector that boded ill for Luigi.

Harlow thanked them, left, climbed into the Renault and drove off. Apart from the fact that he had no compunction in the world about borrowing Luigi’s car, it was highly unlikely that its owner would be in any fit state to use it for quite some time to come. It had taken Luigi ten minutes to drive from the villa to the police station. It took Harlow just under four, and then less than another thirty seconds to be parked fifty yards away from the big roller door of the Coronado garage. The door was closed but bars of light could be seen on either side of it.

Fifteen minutes later Harlow stiffened and leaned forward. A small side door let into the main door had opened and four men emerged. Even in the negligible street lighting provided for the rue Gerard, Harlow had no difficulty in recognizing Jacobson, Neubauer and Tracchia. The fourth man he had never seen before: presumably he was one of Jacobson’s mechanics. Jacobson left the closing and locking of the door to the others and walked quickly up the street in the direction of the villa. As he came abreast on the other side of the street, he didn’t as much as glance in Harlow’s direction. There are thousands of small black Renaults on the streets of Marseilles.

The other three men locked the door, climbed into a Citroën and drove off. Harlow’s car, light-less, pulled away from the curb and followed. It was to be in no sense a chase or pursuit, just two cars moving at a leisurely pace through the suburbs of the city, the one following the other at varying but always discreet distances. Only on one occasion did Harlow fall well back and switch on his side-lights at the sight of an approaching police car, but he had no difficulty in making up the lost ground.

Eventually, they came to a fairly broad tree-lined boulevard in an obviously well-to-do area. Large villas, hiding behind exceptionally high brick walls, lined both sides of the road. The Citroën rounded a right-angled corner. Fifteen seconds later Harlow did the same and immediately switched on his side-lights. About 150 yards ahead the Citroën had pulled up outside a villa and a man – it was Tracchia – had already left the car and was advancing towards the gates with a key in his hand. Harlow pulled out to overtake the parked car and as he did so he saw the gates swing open. The other two occupants of the Citroën ignored the passing Renault.

Harlow turned into the first side street and parked. He got out, pulled on Luigi’s dark coat and lifted the collar high. He walked back to the boulevard which bore the corner name plate of rue Georges Sand and made his way along it till he came to the villa where the Citroën had turned in. It was called The Hermitage, a name that Harlow considered singularly inappropriate in the circumstances. The walls on either side of the gate were at least ten feet high, topped with broken bottle glass embedded in concrete. The gates were of the same height and had what appeared to be very sharp spikes on top. Twenty yards beyond the gates was the villa itself, a rambling old-fashioned Edwardian building much behung with balconies. Lights showed through chinks in the curtains on both floors.

Cautiously, Harlow tested the gates. They were locked. He glanced both ways to ensure that the boulevard was deserted, then produced a ring of fairly large keys. He studied the lock, studied the keys, selected one and tried it. It worked first time. He pocketed the keys and walked away.

Fifteen minutes later, Harlow parked his car in an undistinguished little street, almost an alleyway. He mounted a flight of street steps and at the top did not even have to knock or ring a bell. The door opened and an elderly man, plump, grey-haired and wrapped in a Chinese dressing-gown, beckoned him inside. The room into which he led Harlow seemed to be a cross between an electronic laboratory and a photographer’s dark room. It was filled with, festooned with, impressively scientific-looking equipment which appeared to be of the most advanced kind. It did, however, possess two comfortable arm-chairs. The elderly man waved Harlow towards one of them.

He said: ‘Alexis Dunnet warned me, but you do come at a most inconvenient hour, John Harlow. Pray, a seat.’

‘I have come upon most inconvenient business, Giancarlo, and I haven’t time to sit down.’ He produced the film cassette and handed it over. ‘How long to develop this and give me separate enlargements of each?’

‘How many?’

‘Frames, you mean?’ Giancarlo nodded. ‘Sixty. Give or take.’

‘You do not ask for much.’ Giancarlo was heavily sarcastic. ‘This afternoon.’

Harlow said: ‘Jean-Claude is in town?’

‘Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! Code?’ Harlow nodded. ‘He is. I will see what he can do.’

Harlow left. On the way back to the villa he pondered the problem of Jacobson. Almost certainly the first thing that Jacobson would have done on his return to the villa would have been to check his, Harlow’s, room. The absence of Harlow would have caused him no surprise at all: no worthwhile assassin was going to incriminate his employer by leaving a corpse in the room next to his: there were acres of water in and around Marseilles and heavy lead weights would not be difficult to come by if one knew where to look and Luigi the Light-fingered had given the distinct impression of one who wouldn’t have had to look too far.

Jacobson was going to have a mild heart attack whether he met Harlow now or at the arranged meeting time of 6 a.m. But if he did not meet Harlow until 6 he was going to assume that Harlow had been absent until that time, and Jacobson, who was nothing if not suspicious, was going to wonder like fury what Harlow had been up to in the long watches of the night. It would be better to confront Jacobson now.

In the event, he had no option. He entered the villa just as Jacobson was about to leave it. Harlow regarded two things with interest: the bunch of keys dangling from Jacobson’s hand – no doubt he was en route for the garage to perform some double-crossing operation on his friends and colleagues – and the look of utter consternation on the face of Jacobson, who must have been briefly and understandably under the impression that Harlow’s ghost had come back to haunt him. But Jacobson was tough and his recovery, if not immediate, was made in a commendably short time.

‘Four o’clock in the bloody morning!’ Jacobson’s shock showed through in his strained and over-loud voice. ‘Where the hell have you been, Harlow?’

‘You’re not my keeper, Jacobson.’

‘I bloody well am, too. I’m the boss now, Harlow. I’ve been looking and waiting for you for an hour. I was just about to contact the police.’

‘Well, now, that would have been ironic. I’ve just come from them.’

‘You’ve – what do you mean, Harlow?’

‘What I say. I’m just back from handing over a thug to the police, a lad who came calling on me in the still watches of the night, gun and knife in hand. I don’t think he came to tell me bed-time stories. He wasn’t very good at his job. He’ll be in bed now, a hospital bed, under heavy police guard.’

Jacobson said: ‘Come inside. I want to hear more about this.’

They went inside and Harlow told Jacobson as much as he thought it was prudent for Jacobson to know of his night’s activities, then said: ‘God, I’m tired. I’ll be asleep in one minute flat.’

Harlow returned to his spartan accommodation and took up watch by the window. In less than three minutes Jacobson appeared in the street, the bunch of keys still in his hand and headed in the direction of the rue Gerard, headed, presumably, for the Coronado garage. What his intentions were Harlow for the moment neither knew nor cared.

Harlow left the house and drove off in Luigi’s Renault in a direction opposite to that which Jacobson had taken. After about four blocks, he turned into a narrow lane, stopped the engine, ensured that the doors were locked from the inside, set his wrist alarm for 5.45 a.m., and composed himself for a very brief sleep. As a place to lay his weary head Johnny Harlow had developed a powerful and permanent aversion to the Coronado villa.

CHAPTER NINE

It was just coming up for dawn when Harlow and the twins entered the Coronado garage. Jacobson and an unknown mechanic were already there. They looked, Harlow reflected, just as exhausted as he himself felt.

Harlow said: ‘Thought you told me you had two new boys?’

‘One of them didn’t turn up. When he does,’ Jacobson said grimly, ‘he’s out. Come on, let’s empty the transporter and load up.’

The brilliant early morning sun, which presaged rain later in the day, was over the roof-tops when Harlow backed the transporter out into the rue Gerard. Jacobson said: ‘On your way then, the three of you. I’ll be in Vignolles about a couple of hours after you. Some business to attend to first.’

Harlow didn’t even bother to make the natural inquiry as to what that business might be. In the first place he knew that whatever answer he got would be a lie. In the second place he knew what the answer was anyway: Jacobson would have an urgent appointment with his associates in The Hermitage in the rue Georges Sand to acquaint them with the misfortunes of Luigi the Light-fingered. So he merely contented himself with a nod and drove off.

To the twins’ vast relief, the journey to Vignolles was not a replica of the hair-raising trip between Monza and Marseilles. Harlow drove almost sedately. In the first place, he had time in hand. Then again he knew he was so tired that he had lost the fine edge of his concentration. Finally, within an hour of leaving Marseilles, it had begun to rain, lightly at first then with increasing intensity, which drastically reduced visibility. Nevertheless, the transporter reached its destination by 11.30.

Harlow pulled the transporter to a stop midway between the stands and a large chalet-like building and climbed down, followed by the twins. It was still raining, and the skies were heavily overcast. Harlow gazed round the grey and empty desolation of the Vignolles track, stretched his arms and yawned.

‘Home, sweet home. God, I’m tired. And hungry. Let’s see what the canteen has to offer.’

The canteen had not, in fact, a great deal to offer but all three men were too hungry to complain. As they ate, the canteen slowly began to fill up, mainly with officials and employees of the track. Everyone knew Harlow, but almost no one acknowledged his presence. Harlow remained quite indifferent. At noon he pushed back his chair and made for the door and as he reached for the handle the door opened and Mary entered. She more than over-compensated for the general lack of welcome shown by the others. She smiled at him in delight, wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly. Harlow cleared his throat and looked round the canteen where the diners were now showing a vast degree more interest in him.

He said: ‘I thought you said you were a very private person.’

‘I am. But I hug everyone. You know that.’

‘Well, thank you very much.’

She rubbed her cheek. ‘You’re scruffy, filthy and unshaven.’

‘What do you expect of a face that hasn’t seen water or felt a blade for twenty-four hours?’

She smiled. ‘Mr Dunnet would like to see you in the chalet, Johnny. Though why he couldn’t come to see you in the canteen – ’

‘I’m sure Mr Dunnet has his reasons. Such as not wanting to be seen in my company.’

She wrinkled her nose to show her disbelief and led the way out to the rain. She clung to his arm and said: ‘I was so scared, Johnny. So scared.’

‘And so you’d every right to be,’ Harlow said solemnly. ‘It’s a perilous mission lugging a transporter to Marseilles and back.’

‘Johnny.’

‘Sorry.’

They hurried through the rain to the chalet, up the wooden steps, across the porch and into the hall. As the door closed, Mary reached for Harlow and kissed him. As a kiss, it was neither sisterly nor platonic. Harlow blinked his unresisting astonishment.

She said: ‘But I don’t do that to everyone. Or anyone.’

‘You, Mary, are a little minx.’

‘Ah, yes. But a lovable little minx.’

‘I suppose so. I suppose so.’

Rory watched this scene from the head of the chalet stairs. He was scowling most dreadfully but had the wit to disappear swiftly as Mary and Harlow turned to mount the stairs: Rory’s last meeting with Harlow was still a very painful memory.

Twenty minutes later, showered, shaved, but still looking very tired, Harlow was in Dunnet’s room. The account of the night’s activities he’d given to Dunnet had been brief, succinct, but had missed out nothing of importance.

Dunnet said: ‘And now?’

‘Straight back into Marseilles in the Ferrari. I’ll check on Giancarlo and the films, then go and extend my sympathies to Luigi the Light-fingered’

‘Will he sing?’

‘Like a linnet. If he talks, the police will forget that they ever saw his gun and knife which will save our friend from five years’ mailbag sewing or breaking boulders in a quarry or whatever. Luigi does not strike me as the noblest Roman of them all.’

‘How do you get back here?’

‘By Ferrari.’

‘But I thought that James said that – ’

‘That I was to leave it in Marseilles? I’m going to leave it in that disused farmyard down the road. I want the Ferrari tonight. I want to get into the Villa Hermitage tonight. I want a gun.’

For almost fifteen interminable seconds Dunnet sat quite still, not looking at Harlow, then he brought up his typewriter from beneath the bed, upended it and unclipped the base plate. This was lined with felt and was equipped with six pairs of spring clips. In the clips were held two automatic pistols, two silencers and two spare ammunition magazines. Harlow removed the smaller pistol, a silencer and a spare magazine. He pressed the magazine release switch, examined the magazine already in the gun and pressed it home again. He put all three items in the inner pocket of his leather jacket and zipped it up. He left the room without another word.

Seconds later he was with MacAlpine. MacAlpine’s complexion was quite grey and he was unquestionably a very sick man with an illness insusceptible to physical diagnosis. He said: ‘Leaving now? You must be exhausted.’

Harlow said: ‘It’ll probably hit me tomorrow morning.’

MacAlpine glanced through the window. The rain was sheeting down. He turned back to Harlow and said: ‘Don’t envy you your trip to Marseilles. But the forecast says it’ll clear this evening. We’ll unload the transporter then.’

‘I think you’re trying to say something, sir.’

‘Well, yes.’ MacAlpine hesitated. ‘I believe you have been kissing my daughter.’

‘That’s a bare-faced lie. She was kissing me. Incidentally, one of these days I’m going to clobber that boy of yours.’

‘You have my best wishes,’ MacAlpine said wearily. ‘Do you have designs upon my daughter, Johnny?’

‘I don’t know about that. But she sure as hell has designs on me.’

Harlow left and literally bumped into Rory in the corridor outside. They eyed each other, speculation in Harlow’s eyes, trepidation in Rory’s.

Harlow said: ‘Aha! Eavesdropping again. Almost as good as spying, isn’t it, Rory?’

‘What? Me? Eavesdrop? Never!’

Harlow put a kindly arm around his shoulder.

‘Rory, my lad, I have news. I not only have your father’s permission for but approval of my intention to clobber you one of these days. At my convenience, of course.’

Harlow gave Rory a friendly pat on the shoulder: there was considerable menace in the friendliness. Harlow, smiling, descended the stairs to find Mary waiting.

She said: ‘Speak to you, Johnny?’

‘Sure. But on the porch. That black-haired young monster has probably got the whole place wired for sound.’

They went out on the porch, closing the door behind them. The chill rain was falling so heavily that it was impossible to see more than half-way across the abandoned airfield.

Mary said: ‘Put your arm around me, Johnny.’

‘I obediently put my arm round you. In fact, as a bonus, I’ll put them both around you.’

‘Please don’t talk like that, Johnny. I’m scared. I’m scared all the time now, scared for you. There’s something terribly wrong, isn’t there, Johnny?’

‘What should be wrong?’

‘Oh, you are exasperating!’ She changed the subject – or appeared to. ‘Going to Marseilles?’

‘Yes.’

‘Take me with you.’

‘No.’

‘That’s not very gallant.’

‘No.’

‘What are you, Johnny? What are you doing?’

She had been pressing closely against him but now she drew back, slowly, wonderingly. She put her hand inside his leather jacket, pulled the pocket zip and took out the automatic: she gazed down, hypnotized, at the blue metallic sheen of the gun.

‘Nothing that’s wrong, sweet Mary.’

She put her hand in his pocket again, took out the silencer and stared at it with eyes sick with worry and fear. She whispered: ‘This is a silencer, isn’t it? This way you can kill people without making a noise.’

‘I said “Nothing that’s wrong, sweet Mary.”’

‘I know. I know you never would. But – I must tell Daddy.’

‘If you wish to destroy your father, then do so.’ It was brutal, Harlow realized, but he knew of no other way. ‘Go ahead. Tell him.’

‘Destroy my – what do you mean?’

‘There’s something I want to do. If your father knew, he’d stop me. He’s lost his nerve. Everybody’s opinion to the contrary, I haven’t lost mine.’

‘What do you mean – destroy him?’

‘I don’t think he’d long survive the death of your mother.’

‘My mother?’ She stared at him for long seconds. ‘But my mother – ’

‘Your mother’s alive. I know she is. I think I can find out where she is. If I do, I’ll go and get her tonight.’

‘You’re sure?’ The girl was weeping silently. ‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure, my sweet Mary.’ Harlow wished he felt as confident as he sounded.

‘There are police, Johnny.’

‘No. I could tell them where to get the information but they wouldn’t get it. They have to operate within the law.’

Instinctively, she dropped her brown tear-filled eyes from his and gazed at the gun and silencer in her hand. After a few moments she lifted her eyes again. Harlow nodded slightly, just once, took them gently from her, returned them to his pocket and closed the zip. She looked at him for a long moment, then took his leather lapels in her hands.

‘Come back to me, Johnny.’

‘I’ll always come back to you, Mary.’

She tried to smile through her tears. It was not a very successful effort. She said: ‘Another slip of the tongue?’

‘That was not a slip of the tongue.’ Harlow turned his leather collar high, descended the steps and walked quickly through the driving rain. He did not look back.

Less than one hour later Harlow and Giancarlo were occupying the two arm-chairs in Giancarlo’s scientific laboratory. Harlow was leafing through a thick pile of glossy photographs. Harlow said: ‘I’m a very competent cameraman, although I do say so myself.’

Giancarlo nodded. ‘Indeed. And very full of human interest, those subjects of yours. We are, alas, temporarily baffled by the Tracchia and Neubauer documents, but then that makes them even more interesting, don’t you think? Not that MacAlpine and Jacobson are lacking in interest. Far from it. Do you know that MacAlpine has paid out just over £140,000 in the past six months?’

‘I guessed it was a lot – but that much! Even for a millionaire that must bite. What are the chances of identifying the lucky recipient?’

‘At present, zero. It’s a Zurich numbered account. But if they are presented with proved criminal acts, especially murder, the Swiss banks will open up.’

Harlow said: ‘They’ll get their evidence.’

Giancarlo looked at Harlow in lengthy speculation, then nodded. ‘I should not be surprised. Now, as for our friend Jacobson, he must be the wealthiest mechanic in Europe. His addresses, incidentally, are those of the leading book-makers of Europe.’

‘Gambling on the gee-gees?’

Giancarlo gave him a pitying look. ‘No great feat to find what it was, the dates made it easy. Each lodgement was made two or three days after a Grand Prix race.’

‘Well, well. An enterprising lad is our Jacobson. Opens up a whole new vista of fascinating possibilities, doesn’t it?’

‘Doesn’t it, now? You can take those photographs. I have duplicates.’

‘Thank you very much indeed.’ Harlow handed back the photographs. ‘Think I want to be caught with that bloody lot on me?’

Harlow said his thanks and goodbye and drove straight to the police station. On duty was the inspector who had been there in the early hours of the morning. His former geniality had quite deserted him: he now had about him a definitely lugubrious air.

Harlow said: ‘Has Luigi the Light-fingered been singing sweet songs?’

The inspector shook his head sadly. ‘Alas, our little canary has lost his voice.’

‘Meaning?’

‘His medicine did not agree with him. I fear, Mr Harlow, that you dealt with him in so heroic a fashion that he required pain-killing tablets every hour. I had four men guarding him – two outside the room, two inside. Ten minutes before noon this ravishingly beautiful young blonde nurse – that’s how those cretins describe her – ’

‘Cretins?’

‘My sergeant and his three men. She left two tablets and a glass of water and asked the sergeant to see that he took his medicine exactly at noon. Sergeant Fleury is nothing if not gallant so precisely at noon he gave Luigi his medicine.’

‘What was the medicine?’

‘Cyanide.’

It was late afternoon when Harlow drove the red Ferrari into the courtyard of the deserted farm just south of the Vignolles airfield. The door of the empty barn was open. Harlow took the car inside, stopped the engine and got out, trying to adjust his eyes to the gloom of the windowless barn. He was still trying to do this when a stocking-masked figure seemed to materialize out of this self-same gloom. Despite the almost legendary speed of his reactions Harlow had no time to get at his gun, for the figure was less than six feet away and already swinging what looked like a pick-axe handle. Harlow catapulted himself forward, getting in below the vicious swing of the club, his shoulder crashing into his assailant just below the breastbone. The man, completely winded, gasped in agony, staggered backwards and fell heavily with Harlow on top of him, one hand on the prostrate man’s throat while with the other he reached for his gun.

He did not even manage to get the gun clear of his pocket. He heard the faintest of sounds behind him and twisted round just in time to see another masked figure and a swinging club and catch the full impact of a vicious blow on the right forehead and temple. He collapsed without a sound. The man whom Harlow had winded climbed unsteadily to his feet and although still bent almost double in pain swung his leg and kicked Harlow full in his unconscious and unprotected face. It was perhaps fortunate for Harlow that his attacker was still in so weakened a state otherwise the kick might well have been lethal. Clearly, his attacker was dissatisfied with his initial effort for he drew his foot back again but his companion dragged him away before he could put his potentially lethal intentions into effect. The winded man, still bent over, staggered to and sat on a convenient bench while the other man proceeded to search the unconscious Harlow in a very thorough fashion indeed.

It was noticeably darker inside the barn when Harlow slowly began to come to. He stirred, moaned, then shakily raised shoulders and body off the ground until he was at arm’s length from it. He remained in this position for some time then, with what was clearly a Herculean effort, managed to stagger to his feet where he remained uncontrollably swaying like a drunken man. His face felt as if it had been struck by a passing Coronado. After a minute or two, more by instinct than anything else, he lurched out of the garage, crossed the courtyard, falling down twice in the process, and made his erratic way towards the airfield tarmac.

The rain had now stopped falling and the sky was beginning to clear. Dunnet had just emerged from the canteen and was heading towards the chalet when he caught sight of this staggering figure, less than fifty yards away, weaving its seemingly alcoholic way across the airfield tarmac. For a moment Dunnet stood like a man turned to stone, then broke into a dead run. He reached Harlow in seconds, put a supporting arm around his shoulders as he stared into his face, a face now barely recognizable. The forehead was wickedly gashed and hideously bruised and the blood that had seeped – and was still seeping – had completely masked the right side of his face and blinded his right eye. The left-hand side of the face was in little better condition. The left cheek was one huge bruise with a transverse cut. He bled from nose and mouth, his lip was split and at least two teeth were missing.

‘Christ Almighty!’ Dunnet said. ‘Dear Christ Almighty!’

Dunnet half-guided, half-carried the staggering, semiconscious Harlow across the tarmac, up the steps, across the porch and into the hall of the chalet. Dunnet cursed under his breath as Mary chose just that moment to emerge from the living-room. She stood stock-still for a moment, brown eyes huge in a white appalled face, and when she spoke her voice was a barely audible whisper.

‘Johnny!’ she said. ‘Oh, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. What have they done to you?’

She reached forward and gently touched the blood-masked face, beginning to tremble uncontrollably as the tears rolled down her face.

‘No time for tears, Mary, my dear.’ Dunnet’s voice was deliberately brisk. ‘Warm water, sponge, towel. After that, bring the first-aid box. On no account are you to tell your father. We’ll be in the lounge.’

Five minutes later, in the lounge, a basin of bloodstained water and a bloodstained towel lay at Harlow’s feet. His face was clear of blood now and the end result was, if anything, worse looking than ever inasmuch as the gashes and bruises stood out in clear relief. Dunnet, ruthlessly applying iodine and antiseptics, was taping up the gashes and from the frequent wincing expressions on the face of his patient, it was clear that Harlow was suffering considerably. He put finger and thumb inside his mouth, wrenched, winced again and came out with a tooth which he regarded with disfavour before dropping into the basin. When he spoke, despite the thickness of his speech, it was clear that however damaged he might have been physically, mentally he was back on balance.

‘You and me, Alexis. I think we should have our photographs taken. For the family albums. How do we compare for looks?’

Dunnet examined him judicially. ‘About evenstephen, I should say.’

‘True, true. Mind you, I think nature gave me an unfair start over you.’

‘Stop it, stop it, will you.’ Mary was openly crying. ‘He’s hurt, he’s terribly hurt. I’m going to get a doctor.’

‘No question.’ The bantering note had left Harlow’s voice and there was iron in it now. ‘No doctors. No stitches. Later. Not tonight.’

Mary, her eyes brimming with tears, gazed fixedly at the glass of brandy Harlow held in his hand. The hand was steady as that of a stone statue. She said, not with bitterness, only a dawning of understanding: ‘You fooled us all. The nerve-shattered world champion with the shaking hands. You fooled us all the time. Didn’t you, Johnny?’

‘Yes. Please leave the room, Mary.’

‘I swear I’ll never talk. Not even to Daddy.’

‘Leave the room.’

‘Leave her be,’ Dunnet said. ‘If you talk, Mary, you know he’d never look at you again. My God, it never rains but it pours. You’re our second alarm this afternoon. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are missing.’

Dunnet looked at Harlow for his reaction but there was none.

Harlow said: ‘They were working on the transporter at the time.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘How the hell do you know?’

‘In the south hangar. With Jacobson.’

Dunnet nodded slowly.

‘They saw too much,’ Harlow said. ‘Too much. It must have been by accident because God knows they weren’t overburdened by intelligence. But they saw too much. What’s Jacobson’s story?’

‘The twins went for a tea-break. When they didn’t come back after forty minutes, he went looking for them. They’d just vanished.’

‘Did they, in fact, go to the canteen?’ Dunnet shook his head. ‘Then if they’re ever found it will be in the bottom of a ravine or a canal. Remember Jacques and Henry in the Coronado garage?’ Dunnet nodded. ‘Jacobson said they’d become homesick and gone home. They’ve gone home all right – in the same way that Tweedledum and Tweedledee have gone home. He’s got two new mechanics down there but only one turned up for work this morning. The other didn’t. I’ve no proof, but I’ll get it. The missing lad didn’t turn up because I put him in hospital in the middle hours of the night.’

Dunnet showed no reaction. Mary stared at Harlow with unbelieving horror in her eyes.

Harlow went on: ‘Sorry, Mary. Jacobson is a killer, murderer if you like. He’ll stop at nothing to protect his own interests. I know he was responsible for the death of my young brother in the first Grand Prix of this season. That was what first made Alexis persuade me to work for him.’

Mary said in total disbelief: ‘You work for Alexis? A journalist?’

Harlow went on as if he had not heard her. ‘He tried to kill me in the French Grand Prix. I have photographic proof. He was responsible for Jethou’s death. He tried to get me last night by using a fake police trap to stop the transporter. He was responsible for the murder of a man in Marseilles today.’

Dunnet said calmly: ‘Who?’

‘Luigi the Light-fingered. He was fed a pain-reliever in hospital today. It certainly removed him from all pain – permanently. Cyanide. Jacobson was the only person who knew about Luigi so he had him eliminated before he could sing to the police. My fault – I’d told Jacobson. My fault. But I’d no option at the time.’

‘I can’t believe it.’ Mary was totally bewildered. ‘I can’t believe it. This is a nightmare.’

‘Believe what you like. Just stay a mile away from Jacobson. He’ll read your face like a book and will begin to become very interested in you. I should hate for Jacobson to become very interested in you, I’d rather you didn’t end up in a gravel pit. And always remember – you’re crippled for life and Jacobson did it.’

While he had been talking, Harlow had been carrying out a thorough examination of his pockets.

‘Cleaned out,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Completely. Wallet, passport, driving licence, money, car keys – but I have spares. All my skeleton keys.’ He pondered briefly. ‘That means I’ll require a rope, hook and tarpaulin from the transporter. And then – ’

Mary interrupted, fear in her eyes. ‘You’re not – you can’t go out again tonight! You should be in hospital.’

Harlow glanced at her briefly, expressionlessly, then went on: ‘And then, of course, they took my gun. I shall require another, Alexis. And some money.’

Harlow pushed himself to his feet, walked quickly and quietly to the door and jerked it open. Rory, who had clearly been listening with his ear pressed hard against the door, more or less fell into the room. Harlow seized him by the hair and Rory yelped in agony as Harlow straightened him up.

Harlow said: ‘Look at my face, Rory.’

Rory looked, winced and the colour drained from his own.

Harlow said: ‘You’re responsible for that, Rory.’

Suddenly, without warning, he struck Rory flat-handed across the left cheek. It was a heavy blow and would normally have sent Rory reeling but he couldn’t in this case because Harlow’s left hand was firmly entwined in his hair. Harlow struck him again, backhanded and with equal force, across the right cheek, then proceeded to repeat the process with metronomic regularity.

Mary screamed: ‘Johnny! Johnny! Have you gone mad?’ She made to throw herself at Harlow but Dunnet moved swiftly to pin her arms from behind. Dunnet appeared remarkably unperturbed by the turn events had taken.

‘I’m going to keep this up, Rory,’ Harlow said, ‘until you feel the way I look.’

Harlow kept it up. Rory made no attempt to resist or retaliate. His head was beginning to roll from side to side, quite helplessly, as Harlow continued to strike him repeatedly. Then, considering that the softening-up process had probably gone far enough, Harlow stopped.

Harlow said: ‘I want information. I want the truth. I want it now. You eavesdropped on Mr Dunnet and myself this afternoon, did you not?’

Rory’s voice was a trembling pain-wracked whisper. ‘No ! No! I swear I didn’t. I swear – ’

He broke off with a screech of pain as Harlow resumed the treatment. After a few seconds Harlow stopped again. A sobbing Mary, still securely held by Dunnet, was looking at him in stupefied horror.

Harlow said: ‘I was beaten up by some people who knew I was going to Marseilles to see about some very important pictures. They wanted those pictures very very badly. They also knew that I would be parking the Ferrari in a barn in a disused farmhouse a little way down the road. Mr Dunnet was the only other person who knew about the pictures and the farmyard. You think perhaps he told?’

‘Maybe.’ Like his sister’s, Rory’s cheeks were now liberally streaked with tears. ‘I don’t know. Yes, yes, he must have done.’

Harlow spoke slowly and deliberately, interspersing every other few words with a resounding slap.

‘Mr Dunnet is not a journalist. Mr Dunnet has never been an accountant. Mr Dunnet is a senior officer of the Special Branch of New Scotland Yard and a member of Interpol and he has accumulated enough evidence against you, for aiding and abetting criminals, to ensure that you’ll spend the next few years in a remand home and Borstal.’ He removed his left hand from Rory’s hair.

‘Whom did you tell, Rory?’

‘Tracchia.’

Harlow pushed Rory into an arm-chair where he sat hunched, his hands covering his aching scarlet face.

Harlow looked at Dunnet. ‘Where’s Tracchia?’

‘Gone to Marseilles. He said. With Neubauer.’

‘He was out here, too ? He would be. And Jacobson?’

Out in his car. Looking for the twins. He said.’

‘He’s probably taken a spade with him. I’ll get the spare keys and fetch the Ferrari. Meet you at the transporter in fifteen minutes. With the gun. And money.’

Harlow turned and walked away. Rory, rising rather unsteadily to his feet, followed. Dunnet put an arm round Mary’s shoulders, pulled out a breast handkerchief and proceeded to clean her tear-ravaged face. Mary looked at him in wonderment.

‘Are you what Johnny said you were? Special Branch? Interpol?’

‘Well, yes, I’m a police Officer of sorts.’

‘Then stop him, Mr Dunnet. I beg of you. Stop him.’

‘Don’t you know your Johnny yet?’

Mary nodded miserably, waited until Dunnet had effected his running repairs, then said: ‘He’s after Tracchia, isn’t he?’

‘He’s after Tracchia. He’s after a lot of people. But the person he’s really after is Jacobson. If Johnny says that Jacobson is directly responsible for the deaths of seven people, then he’s directly responsible for the deaths of seven people. Apart from that he has two personal scores to settle with Jacobson.’

‘His young brother?’ Dunnet nodded. ‘And the other?’

‘Look at your left foot, Mary.’

CHAPTER TEN

At the roundabout south of Vignolles, a black Citroën braked to give precedence to Harlow’s red Ferrari. As the Ferrari swept by, Jacobson, at the wheel of the Citroën, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, turned his car towards Vignolles and stopped by the first roadside telephone booth.

In the Vignolles canteen MacAlpine and Dunnet were finishing a meal in the now almost deserted room. They were both looking towards the door, watching Mary leave.

MacAlpine sighed. ‘My daughter is in low spirits tonight.’

‘Your daughter is in love.’

‘I fear so. And where the hell has that young devil Rory got to?’

‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it, Harlow caught that young devil eavesdropping.’

‘Oh, no. Not again?’

‘Again. The ensuing scene was quite painful really. I was there. I rather think that Rory was afraid that he might find Johnny here. Johnny, in fact, is in bed – I don’t think he’d any sleep last night.’

‘And that sounds a very attractive proposition to me. Bed, I mean. I feel unaccountably tired tonight. If you will excuse me, Alexis.’

He half rose to his feet, then sat down again as Jacobson entered and approached their table. He looked very tired indeed.

MacAlpine said: ‘What luck?’

‘Zero. I’ve searched everywhere within five miles of here. Nothing. But I’ve just had a report from the police that two people answering closely to their descriptions have been seen in Le Beausset – and there can’t be many people around like the terrible twins. I’ll just have a bite and go there. Have to find a car first, though. Mine’s on the blink – hydraulics gone.’

MacAlpine handed Jacobson a set of car keys. ‘Take my Aston.’

‘Well, thank you, Mr MacAlpine. Insurance papers?’

‘Everything in the glove box. Very kind of you to go to such trouble, I must say.’

‘They’re my boys too, Mr MacAlpine.’

Dunnet gazed expressionlessly into the middle distance.

The Ferrari’s speedometer registered 180 kph. Harlow was clearly paying scant attention to the French 110 kph restriction, but from time to time, purely from instinct, for it seemed unlikely that there was any police car in France capable of overtaking him, he consulted his rear mirror. But there was at no time anything to be seen except the coils of rope, hook and first-aid box on the back seat and the hump of a dirty white tarpaulin which had been clearly flung carelessly on the floor.

An incredible forty minutes after leaving Vignolles the Ferrari passed the Marseilles sign. A kilometre farther on the Ferrari pulled up as traffic lights changed to red. Harlow’s face was so battered and bruised and covered in plaster that it was impossible to tell what expression it wore. But the eyes were as calm and steady and watchful as ever, his posture as immobile as ever: no impatience, no drumming of fingers on the wheel. But even Harlow’s total relaxation could be momentarily upset.

‘Mr Harlow.’ The voice came from the rear of the car.

Harlow swung round and stared at Rory, whose head had just emerged from its cocoon of canvas tarpaulin. When Harlow spoke it was with slow, deliberate, spaced words.

‘What the hell are you doing there?’

Rory said defensively: ‘I thought you might be needing a bit of a hand, like.’

Harlow restrained himself with what was obviously an immense effort.

‘I could say “This is all I need” but I don’t think that would help much.’ From an inner pocket he fished out some of the money that Dunnet had given him. ‘Three hundred francs. Get a hotel and phone Vignolles for a car in the morning.’

‘No, thank you, Mr Harlow. I made a terrible mistake about you. I’m just plain stupid, I guess. I won’t say sorry, for all the sorries in the world are not enough. The best way to say “sorry” is to help. Please, Mr Harlow.’

‘Look, laddie, I’ll be meeting people tonight, people who would kill you soon as look at you. And now I’m responsible for you to your father.’

The lights changed and the Ferrari moved on. What little could be seen of Harlow’s face looked slightly bemused.

‘And that’s another thing,’ Rory said. ‘What’s wrong with him? My father, I mean.’

‘He’s being blackmailed.’

‘Dad? Blackmailed?’ Rory was totally incredulous.

‘Nothing he’s ever done. I’ll tell you some time.’

‘Are you going to stop those people from blackmailing him?’

‘I hope so.’

‘And Jacobson. The man who crippled Mary. I must have been mad to think it was your fault. Are you going to get him, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t say “I hope so” this time. You said “Yes”.’

‘That’s right.’

Rory cleared his throat and said diffidently: ‘You going to marry Mary, Mr Harlow?’

‘The prison walls appear to be closing round me.’

‘Well, I love her too. Different like, but just as much. If you’re going after the bastard who crippled Mary I’m coming too.’

‘Watch your language,’ Harlow said absently. He drove some way in silence then sighed in resignation. ‘OK. But only if you promise to stay out of sight and keep safe.’

‘I’ll stay out of sight and keep safe.’

Harlow made to bite his upper lip and winced as he bit the gash in that lip. He looked in the rear mirror. Rory, now sitting on the back seat, was smiling with considerable satisfaction. Harlow shook his head in what might have been disbelief or despair or both.

Ten minutes later Harlow parked the car in an alleyway about three hundred yards away from the rue Georges Sand, packed all the equipment into a canvas bag, slung it over his shoulder and set off, accompanied by a Rory whose expression of complacency had now changed to one of considerable apprehension. Other factors apart, there was a sound enough reason for Rory’s nervousness. It was a bad night for the purposes Harlow had in mind. A full moon hung high in a cloudless starlit Riviera sky. The visibility was at least as good as it would have been on an overcast winter’s afternoon. The only difference was that moon-shadows are much darker.

Harlow and Rory were now pressed close into the shadow of one of the ten-foot high walls that surrounded the Villa Hermitage. Harlow examined the contents of the bag.

‘Now then. Rope, hook, tarpaulin, twine, insulated wire-cutters, chisels, first-aid box. Yes, the lot.’

‘What is that lot for, Mr Harlow?’

‘First three for getting over that wall. Twine for tying things up or together, like thumbs. Wire-cutters for electric alarms – if I can find the wires. Chisels for opening things. First-aid box – well, you never know. Rory, will you kindly stop your teeth from chattering? Our friends inside could hear you forty feet away.’

‘I can’t help it, Mr Harlow.’

‘Now, remember, you’re to stay here. The last people we want here are the police but if I’m not back in thirty minutes go to the phone box on the corner and tell them to come here at the double.’ Harlow secured the hook to the end of the rope. For once, the bright moonlight was of help. With his first upward cast the hook sailed over the branch of a tree within the grounds. He pulled cautiously until the hook engaged firmly round the branch, slung the white tarpaulin over his shoulder, climbed the few feet that were necessary, draped the tarpaulin over the broken glass embedded in the concrete, pulled himself farther up, sat gingerly astride and looked at the tree that had provided this convenient branch: the lower branches extended to within four feet of the ground.

Harlow glanced down at Rory. ‘The bag.’

The bag came sailing upwards. Harlow caught it and dropped it on the ground inside. He took the branch in his hands, swung inwards and was on the ground in five seconds.

He passed through a small thicket of trees. Lights shone from the curtained windows of a ground floor room. The massive oaken door was shut and almost certainly bolted. In any event Harlow considered that a frontal entry was as neat a way as any of committing suicide. He approached the side of the house, keeping to shadows wherever possible. The windows on the ground floor offered no help – all were heavily barred. The back door, predictably, was locked: the ironic thought occurred to Harlow that the only skeleton keys which could have probably opened that door were inside that house.

He moved round to the other side of the house. He didn’t even bother looking at the barred lower windows. He looked upwards and his attention was at once caught and held by a window that was slightly ajar. Not much, perhaps three inches, but still ajar. Harlow looked around the grounds. About twenty yards away were a cluster of garden and potting sheds and a greenhouse. He headed resolutely in their direction.

Rory, meanwhile, was pacing up and down in the lane outside, continually glancing at the rope in what appeared to be an agony of indecision. Suddenly, he seized the rope and began to climb.

By the time he had dropped to the ground on the other side, Harlow had a ladder against the lower sill of the window and had reached the level of the window itself. He pulled out his torch and carefully examined both sides of the window. Both sides had what were clearly electrical wires stapled to the framework of the window. Harlow reached inside his bag, produced the wire-cutters, snipped both wires, lifted the sash high and passed inside.

Within two minutes he had established that there was no one on the upper floor. Canvas bag and unlit torch in his left hand, the silenced pistol in the other, he stealthily descended the stairs towards the hallway. Light streamed from a door that was slightly ajar and the sound of voices from inside, one of them a woman’s, carried very clearly. This room he temporarily ignored. He prowled round the ground floor ensuring that all the rooms were empty. In the kitchen, his torch located a set of steps leading down to the basement. Harlow descended those and played his torch round a concrete-floored, concrete-walled cellar. Four doors led off this cellar. Three of those looked perfectly normal: the fourth had two massive bolts and a heavy key such as one might expect to find in a medieval dungeon. Harlow slid the bolts, turned the key, passed inside, located and pressed a light switch.

Whatever it was, it was certainly no dungeon. It was a very modern and immaculately equipped laboratory although what precisely it was equipped to do was not immediately apparent. Harlow crossed to a row of aluminium containers, lifted the lid of one, sniffed the white powdery contents, wrinkled his nose in disgust and replaced the lid. As he left he passed by a wall telephone, obviously, from the dial, an external exchange one. He hesitated, shrugged and walked out, leaving the door open and the light on.

Rory, just at the precise moment when Harlow was mounting the steps from the cellar, was hidden in the deep shadow on the edge of the thicket of trees. From where he stood he could see both the front and the side of the house. His face held a considerable degree of apprehension, an apprehension that suddenly changed to something very close to fear.

A squat, powerfully built man, clad in dark trousers and a dark roll-neck pullover, had suddenly appeared from behind the back of the house. For a moment the man, the patrolling guard that Harlow hadn’t bargained for, stood stock-still, staring at the ladder propped against the wall. Then he started running towards the front door of the house. As if by magic two items had appeared in his hands – a large key and a very much larger knife.

Harlow stood in the hallway outside the occupied room, thoughtfully regarding the bar of light streaming from the partially opened door and listening to the sound of voices. He tightened the silencer on his gun, took two quick steps forward then violently smashed the door open with the sole of his right foot: the door all but parted company with its hinges.

There were five people inside the room. Three of them were curiously alike and might well have been brothers – heavy, well-suited, obviously prosperous men, black-haired and very swarthy. The fourth was a beautiful blonde girl. The fifth was Willi Neubauer. They stared as if mesmerized at Harlow who, with his bruised and battered face and silenced pistol, must have presented a less than friendly appearance.

Harlow said: ‘The hands high, please.’

All five lifted their hands.

‘Higher. Higher.’

The five occupants of the room stretched their arms very high indeed.

‘What the devil does this mean, Harlow?’ Neubauer’s tone was intended to be harsh and demanding but it burred with the sharp edge of strain. ‘I come calling on friends – ’

Harlow interrupted in an iron voice. ‘The judge will have more patience with you than I have. Shut up!’

‘Look out!’ The almost panic-stricken scream was barely recognizable as Rory’s voice.

Harlow had the cat-like reflexes that befitted the outstanding Grand Prix driver of his time. He turned and fired in one movement. The dark man, who had been just about to start a vicious downstroke, screamed in agony and stared in disbelief at his shattered hand. Harlow ignored him and had whirled back to face the others even before the dark man’s knife had struck the floor. One of the swarthy men had dropped his right hand and was reaching inside his jacket.

Harlow said encouragingly: ‘Go on.’

The swarthy man lifted his right hand very quickly indeed. Harlow stepped prudently to one side and gestured briefly with his gun towards the wounded man.

‘Join your friends.’ Moaning in pain, his left hand clutching his bleeding right, the dark man did so. Just then Rory entered the room.

Harlow said: ‘Thank you, Rory. All sins forgiven. Get the first-aid box from that bag. I told you we might need it.’ He surveyed the company coldly. ‘And I do hope this is the last time we need it.’ He pointed his gun at the blonde girl. ‘Come here, you.’

She rose from her chair and came slowly forward. Harlow smiled at her, chillingly, but she was either too shocked or stupid to realize what lay behind that smile.

‘I believe you have some pretensions towards being a nurse,’ Harlow said, ‘even though the late and un-lamented Luigi might not agree with that. There’s the first-aid box. Fix your friend’s hand.’

She spat at him. ‘Fix it yourself.’

Harlow gave no warning. There was a blur of movement and the silencer of the pistol smashed against the blonde’s face. She screamed, staggered and fell to a sitting position, blood welling from gashes on both cheek and mouth.

‘Jesus!’ Rory was appalled. ‘Mr Harlow!’

‘If it’s any consolation, Rory, this charmer is wanted for premeditated murder.’ He looked at the blonde and what little could be seen of his face was totally devoid of pity. ‘Get to your feet and fix your friend’s hand. Then, if you wish, your own face. Not that I care. The rest of you, face down on the floor, hands behind your back. Rory, see if they have guns. The first man that as much as twitches will be shot through the back of the head.’

Rory searched them. When he had finished, he looked down almost in awe at the four guns he had placed on the table.

‘They all had guns,’ he said.

‘What did you expect them to be carrying? Powder puffs? Now, Rory, the twine. You know what to do. As many knots as you like, the twine as tight as possible and the hell with their circulation.’ Rory set about his task with enthusiasm and in very short order had the hands of all six securely bound behind their backs: the dark man now had his hand roughly bandaged.

Harlow said to Neubauer: ‘Where’s the gate key?’

Neubauer glared venomously and kept silent. Harlow pocketed his gun, picked up the knife his would-be assailant had dropped and pressed the tip against Neubauer’s throat, just breaking the skin.

‘I’m going to count three then I’m going to push this knife clear through to the back of your neck. One. Two.’

‘Hall table.’ Neubauer’s face was ashen.

‘On your feet, all of you. Down to the cellar.’

They trooped down to the cellar, all with highly apprehensive expressions on their faces. So apprehensive was the last of the six, one of the three swarthy men, that he made a sudden vicious lunge at Harlow, probably with the intention of knocking him down the steps and then stamping on him, which was a very foolish thing to do, for he had already had eye-witness proof of the quite remarkable speed of Harlow’s reactions. Harlow stepped nimbly to one side, struck him above the ear with the barrel of his pistol and watched him topple then fall halfway down the steps. Harlow caught one of his ankles and dragged him down the lower half of the stairs, the unconscious man’s head bumping from concrete step to concrete step.

One of the other swarthy men shouted: ‘God’s sake, Harlow, are you mad ? You’ll kill him!’

Harlow dragged the unconscious man down the last step until his head hit the concrete floor and looked indifferently at the man who had made the protest. ‘So? I’m probably going to have to kill you all anyway.’

He ushered them into the cellar laboratory and, with Rory’s assistance, dragged the unconscious man in after them.

Harlow said: ‘Lie down on the floor. Rory, tie their ankles together. Very tightly, please.’ Rory did so, displaying not only enthusiasm for but now positive enjoyment in his work. When he had finished, Harlow said: ‘Go through their pockets. See what identification papers they are carrying. Not Neubauer. We all know who our dear Willi is.’

Rory returned to Harlow with quite a bundle of identification documents in his hand. He looked uncertainly at the woman on the floor. ‘What about the lady, Mr Harlow?’

‘Never confuse that murderous bitch with a lady.’ Harlow looked at her. ‘Where’s your handbag?’

‘I haven’t got a handbag.’

Harlow sighed, crossed to where she lay and knelt beside her. ‘When I’m finished with the other side of your face no man will ever look at you again. Not that you’ll be seeing any men for a long time to come – no court is going to overlook the testimony of four policemen who can identify you and the fingerprints on that glass.’ He looked at her consideringly then lifted his gun. ‘And I don’t suppose the wardresses will care what you look like. Where’s that handbag?’

‘In my bedroom.’ The tremble in her voice accurately reflected the fear in her face.

‘Where in your bedroom?’

‘The wardrobe.’

Harlow looked at Rory. ‘Rory, if you would be so kind.’

Rory said uncertainly: ‘How will I know which bedroom?’

Harlow said patiently: ‘When you come to a bedroom where the dressing-table looks like the toilet counter in a pharmacy, then you’ll have found the right bedroom. And bring down the four guns from the living-room.’

Rory left. Harlow got to his feet, crossed to the desk where he’d placed the identification documents and began to study those with interest. After about a minute he looked up.

‘Well, well, well. Marzio, Marzio and Marzio. Sounds like a firm of well-established solicitors. And all from Corsica. I seem to have heard of the Marzio brothers before. I’m quite certain the police have and will be delighted to have those documents.’ He laid down the papers, pulled six inches of a roll of stand-mounted Scotch tape and affixed it lightly to the edge of the desk. He said: ‘You’ll never guess what that’s for.’

Rory returned, bearing with him a handbag so large as to be more a valise than a handbag, along with four guns. Harlow opened the bag, examined the contents, which included a passport, then unzipped only a side compartment and pulled out a gun.

‘My, my. So Anne-Marie Puccelli carries a fire-arm around with her. No doubt to fend off those would-be nasty attackers bent on robbing her of those cyanide tablets such as she fed to the late Luigi.’ Harlow replaced the gun, then dropped into the bag the other documents and the four guns Rory had brought. He extracted the first-aid box from the bag, took out a very small bottle and poured white tablets into his hand.

‘How convenient. Exactly six tablets. One for each. I want to know where Mrs MacAlpine is being held and I’m going to know in less than two minutes. Florence Nightingale there will know what those are.’

Florence Nightingale had no comment to make. Her face was paper-white and drawn, she appeared to have put on ten years in ten minutes.

Rory said: ‘What are those things?’

‘Sugar-coated cyanide. Quite pleasant to take really. Take about three minutes to melt.’

‘Oh, no ! You can’t do that.’ Shock had drained Rory’s face of all its colour. ‘You just can’t. That – that’s murder.’

‘You want to see your mother again, don’t you? Besides, it’s not murder, it’s extermination. We’re dealing with animals, not human beings. Look around you. What do you think the end product of this charming old cottage industry is?’ Rory shook his head. He seemed to be completely numbed. ‘Heroin. Think of the hundreds, more likely thousands, of people they’ve killed. I insulted animals by calling them animals. They’re the lowest form of vermin on earth. It would be a pleasure to wipe out all six of them.’

Among the six bound, prostrate prisoners there was a considerable amount of sweating and lip-licking in evidence. All six were plainly terrified. There was a ruthless implacibility in Harlow that made it all too horrifyingly plain that he was in deadly earnest.

Harlow knelt on Neubauer’s chest, tablet in one hand, gun, in the other. He struck Neubauer, stiff-fingered, in the solar plexus. Neubauer gasped and Harlow stuck the silencer of his pistol into his opened mouth so preventing him from clenching his teeth. With finger and thumb he held the tablet alongside the silencer.

Harlow said: ‘Where is Mrs MacAlpine?’ He withdrew the gun. Neubauer was babbling, almost mad with fear.

‘Bandol! Bandol! Bandol! In a boat.’

‘What type? Where?’

‘In the bay. Motor yacht. Forty feet or so. Blue with white top. The Chevalier it’s called.’

Harlow said to Rory: ‘Bring me that strip of Scotch tape from the side of the table.’ He repeated his two-fingered assault on Neubauer’s solar plexus. Once again the gun was in the mouth. Harlow dropped the tablet in. ‘I don’t believe you.’ He strapped the tape across Neubauer’s mouth. ‘Just to prevent you from spitting that cyanide tablet out.’

Harlow moved across to the man who had made the vain attempt to pull his gun. Tablet in hand, he sank to his knees. Totally panic-stricken, the man started screaming at Harlow before the latter could speak.

‘Are you mad? Are you mad? For God’s sake, it’s true! The Chevalier. Bandol. Blue and white. She’s anchored two hundred metres off-shore.’

Harlow stared at the man for a long moment, nodded, rose, crossed to the wall phone, lifted the receiver and dialled 17 – Police secours, which can be variously interpreted as police-help or police-emergency. He made contact almost instantly.

Harlow said: ‘I’m speaking from the Villa Hermitage in the rue Georges Sand. Yes, that’s it. In a basement room you will find a fortune in heroin. In the same room you will find the equipment for the bulk manufacture of heroin. Also in the same room you will find six people responsible for the manufacture and distribution of this heroin. They will offer no resistance – they are securely bound. Three of them are the Marzio brothers. I have taken their identification papers along with those of a wanted murderess called Anne-Marie Puccelli. These will be given to you later tonight.’ There came from the earpiece the sound of a voice talking rapidly, urgently, but Harlow ignored it. He said: ‘I will not repeat myself. I know that every emergency call is tape-recorded, so there’s no point in trying to detain me until you get here.’ He hung up, to find Rory gripping his arm.

Rory said desperately: ‘You’ve got your information. The three minutes aren’t up. You could still get that tablet from Neubauer’s mouth.’

‘Ah, that.’ Harlow put four of the tablets back in the small bottle, held up the fifth, ‘five grains acetylsalicylic acid. Aspirin. That’s why I taped his mouth – I didn’t want him shouting to his pals that all he had been fed was an aspirin – there can’t be an adult human being in the western world who doesn’t know the taste of aspirin. Look at his face – he’s not terrified any more, he’s just hopping mad. Come to that, they all look hopping mad. Ah, well.’ He picked up the girl’s handbag and looked at her. ‘We’ll borrow this temporarily – fifteen, twenty years, whatever the judge cares to give you.’

They left, bolting and locking the door behind them, took the gate key from the hall table, ran through the open front door, down the driveway then unlocked and opened the gates. Harlow pulled Rory into the shadow of a cluster of pine trees.

Rory said: ‘How long do we stay here?’

‘Just till we make sure that the right people get here first.’

Only seconds later they heard the ululating wails of approaching sirens. Very shortly afterwards, sirens still on and lights flashing, two police cars and a police van came at speed through the gateway and pulled up in a shower of spraying gravel and at least seven policemen ran up the steps and through the open doorway. Despite Harlow’s reassurance that the prisoners had been immobilized, they all considered it necessary to have their guns in their hands.

Harlow said: ‘The right people got here first.’

Fifteen minutes later, Harlow was seated in an armchair in Giancarlo’s laboratory. Giancarlo, leafing through a bundle of documents in his hands, heaved a long sigh.

‘You do lead an interesting life, John. Here, there, everywhere. You’ve done us a great service tonight. The three men you speak of are indeed the notorious Marzio brothers. Widely supposed to be Sicilians and in the Mafia, but they’re not. As you’ve discovered, they’re Corsicans. Corsicans regard the Sicilian Mafiosa as bungling amateurs. Those three have been at the top of our list for years. Never any evidence – but they won’t get out of this one. Not when they’re found alongside several million francs’ worth of heroin. Well, one good turn deserves another.’ He handed some papers over to Harlow. ‘Jean-Claude has preserved his honour. He broke the code this evening. Interesting reading, no?’

After about a minute Harlow said: ‘Yes. A list of Tracchia’s and Neubauer’s drop-offs throughout Europe.’

‘No less.’

‘How long to get through to Dunnet?’

Giancarlo looked at him almost pityingly. ‘I can reach any place in France inside thirty seconds.’

There were almost a dozen policemen in the outer office of the police station together with Neubauer and his five felonious companions. Neubauer approached the sergeant at the desk.

‘I have been charged. I wish to phone my lawyer. I have the right.’

‘You have the right.’ The sergeant nodded to the phone on the desk.

‘Communications between lawyer and client are privileged.’ He indicated an adjacent phone booth. ‘I know what that’s for. So that the accused can talk to their lawyers. May I?’

The sergeant nodded again.

A phone rang in a rather luxurious flat not half a mile from the police station. Tracchia was reclining at his ease on a couch in the lounge. Beside him was a luscious brunette who evinced a powerful aversion to wearing too many clothes. Tracchia scowled, picked the phone up and said: ‘My dear Willi! I am desolate. I was unavoidably detained – ’

Neubauer’s voice carried clearly.

‘Are you alone?’

‘No.’

‘Then be alone.’

Tracchia said to the girl: ‘Georgette, my dear, go powder your nose.’ She rose, sulkily, and left the room. Into the phone he said: ‘Clear now.’

‘You can thank your lucky stars that you were unavoidably detained otherwise you’d be where I am now – on the way to prison. Now listen.’ Tracchia listened very intently indeed, his normally handsome face ugly in anger as Neubauer gave a brief account of what had happened. He finished by saying: ‘So. Take the Lee Enfield and binoculars. If he gets there first pick him off when he comes ashore – if he survives Pauli’s attentions. If you get there first, go aboard and wait for him. Then lose the gun in the water. Who’s aboard The Chevalier now?’

‘Just Pauli. I’ll take Yonnie with me. I may need a lookout or signal-man. And look, Willi, not to worry. You’ll be sprung tomorrow. Associating with criminals is not a crime in itself and there’s not a single shred of evidence against you.’

‘How can we be sure? How can you be sure that you yourself are in the clear? I wouldn’t put anything beyond that bastard Harlow. Just get him for me.’

‘That, Willi, will be a pleasure.’

Harlow was on the phone in Giancarlo’s laboratory. He said: ‘So. Simultaneous arrests 5 a.m. tomorrow. There’s going to be an awful lot of unhappy people in Europe by 5.10 a.m. I’m in a bit of a hurry so I’ll leave Giancarlo to give you all the details. Hope to see you later tonight. Meantime, I have an appointment.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Rory said: ‘Mr Harlow, are you secret service or special agent or something?’

Harlow glanced at him, then returned his eyes to the road. He was driving quickly but nowhere near his limit: there seemed to be no compelling urgency about the task on hand. He said: ‘I’m an out of work race driver.’

‘Come on. Who are you kidding?’

‘No one. In your own phraseology, Rory, just giving Mr Dunnet a bit of a hand, like.’

‘Doing what, Mr Harlow? I mean, Mr Dunnet doesn’t seem to be doing very much, does he?’

‘Mr Dunnet is a coordinator. I suppose I’m what might be called his field man.’

‘Yes. But doing what?’

‘Investigating other Grand Prix drivers. Keeping an eye on them, rather. And mechanics – anyone connected with racing.’

‘I see.’ Rory, clearly, did not see at all. ‘I’m not being rude, Mr Harlow, but why pick you? Why not investigate you?’

‘A fair question. Probably because I’ve been so very lucky in the last two years or so that they figured that I was making more money honestly than I possibly could dishonestly.’

‘That figures.’ Rory was in a very judicial mood. ‘But why were you investigating?’

‘Because something has been smelling and smelling badly on the Grand Prix circuits for over a year now. Cars were losing that seemed a certainty to win. Cars were winning that shouldn’t have had a chance. Cars had mysterious accidents. Cars went off the track where there was no earthly reason why they should have gone off the track. They ran out of petrol when they shouldn’t have run out of petrol. Engines over-heated through a mysterious loss of oil or coolant or both. Drivers fell ill at the most mysterious times – and the most inconvenient times. And as there is so much prestige, pride, power and above all profit in running a highly successful racing car, it was at first thought that a manufacturer or, more likely, a race team owner was trying to corner the market for himself.’

‘But he wasn’t?’

‘As you so brightly remark, he wasn’t. This became clear when manufacturers and team owners discovered that they were all being victimized. They approached Scotland Yard only to be told that they were powerless to intervene. The Yard called in Interpol. In effect, Mr Dunnet.’

‘But how did you get on to people like Tracchia and Neubauer?’

‘In the main, illegally. Round the clock telephone switchboard watch, maximum surveillance of all suspects at every Grand Prix meeting and interception of all incoming and out-going mail. We found five drivers and seven or eight mechanics who were stashing away more money than they could have possibly earned. But it was an irregular sort of thing for most of them. It’s impossible to fix every race. But Tracchia and Neubauer were stashing it away after every race. So we figured they were selling something – and there’s only one thing you can sell for the kind of money they were getting.’

‘Drugs. Heroin.’

‘Indeed.’ He pointed ahead and Rory caught the sign ‘BANDOL’ picked up by the headlights. Harlow slowed, lowered his window, poked his head out and looked up. Bands of cloud were beginning to spread across the sky but there was still much more starlit sky than cloud. Harlow withdrew his head and said: ‘We could have picked a better night for the job. Far too damn bright. They’re bound to have a guard, maybe two, for your mother. Point is, will they be keeping a watch – not only seeing that your mother doesn’t escape but that no one comes aboard? No reason why they should assume that anyone should try to board The Chevalier – I can’t think of any way they can have heard of the misfortune that has happened to Neubauer and his pals. But that’s the way an organization like the Marzio brothers has survived so long – by never taking chances.’

‘So we assume there is a guard, Mr Harlow?’

‘That is what we assume.’

Harlow drove into the little town, parked the car in an empty high-walled builder’s yard where it could not possibly be seen from the narrow alleyway outside. They left the car and soon, keeping in deep shadow, were cautiously picking their way along the small waterfront and harbour. They halted and scanned the bay to the east.

‘Isn’t that her?’ Although there was no one within earshot, Rory’s voice was a tense whisper. ‘Isn’t that her?’

‘The Chevalier for sure.’

There were at least a dozen yachts and cruisers anchored in the brilliantly moonlit and almost mirror-smooth little bay. The one nearest the shore was a rather splendid motor yacht, nearer fifty feet than forty, and had very definitely a blue hull and white topsides.

‘And now?’ Rory said. ‘What do we do now?’ He was shivering, not because of cold or, as had been the case in the Villa Hermitage, of apprehension, but because of sheer excitement. Harlow glanced thoughtfully upwards. The sky was still heavily overcast although there was a bar of cloud moving in the direction of the moon.

‘Eat. I’m hungry.’

‘Eat? Eat? But-but, I mean – ’ Rory gestured towards the yacht.

‘All things in their time. Your mother’s hardly likely to vanish in the next hour. Besides, if we were to – ah – borrow a boat and go out to The Chevalier … I don’t much fancy being picked out in this brilliant moonlight. There are clouds moving across. Let’s bide a wee.’

‘Let’s what?’

‘An old Scottish phrase. Let’s wait a little while Festina lente.’

Rory looked at him in bafflement. ‘Festina what?’

‘You really are an ignorant young layabout.’ Harlow smiled to rob his words of offence. ‘An even older Latin phrase. Make haste slowly.’

They moved away and brought up at a waterside café which Harlow inspected from the outside. He shook his head and they walked on to a second café, where the same thing happened. The third café they entered. It was three-parts empty. They took seats by a curtained window.

Rory said: ‘What’s this place got that the others haven’t?’

Harlow twitched back the curtain. ‘A view.’ Their vantage point commanded an excellent view of The Chevalier.

‘I see.’ Rory consulted his menu without enthusiasm. ‘I can’t eat a thing.’

Harlow said encouragingly: ‘Let’s try a little something.’

Five minutes later two enormous dishes of bouillabaisse were set before them. Five minutes after that Rory’s dish was completely empty. Harlow smiled at both the empty plate and Rory, then his smile abruptly vanished.

‘Rory. Look at me. Don’t look elsewhere. Especially don’t look at the bar. Act and speak naturally. Bloke’s just come in whom I used to know very slightly. A mechanic who left the Coronado team a few weeks after I joined. Your father fired him for theft. He was very friendly with Tracchia and from the fact that he’s in Bandol it’s a million to one that he still is.’

A small dark man in brown overalls, so lean and scrawny as to be almost wizened, sat at the bar with a full glass of beer before him. He took his first sip of it and as he did so his eyes strayed to the mirror at the back of the bar. He could clearly see Harlow talking earnestly to Rory. He spluttered and half-choked over his beer. He lowered his glass, put coins on the counter and left as unobtrusively as possible.

Harlow said: ‘ “Yonnie” they used to call him. I don’t know his real name. I think he’s certain we neither saw nor recognized him. If he’s with Tracchia, and he must be, this makes it for sure that Tracchia is already aboard. Either Tracchia’s temporarily relieved him of guard duties so that he could come ashore for a much-needed drink or Tracchia’s sent him away because he doesn’t want any witnesses around when he picks me off when I go out to the boat.’

Harlow pulled back the curtains and they both looked out. They could see a small outboard-powered dinghy heading directly towards The Chevalier. Rory looked questioningly at Harlow.

Harlow said: ‘Our Nicolo Tracchia is an impulsive, not to say impetuous lad, which is why he’s not quite the driver he could be. Five minutes from now he’ll be in the shadows somewhere outside waiting to gun me down the moment I step out of here. Run up to the car, Rory. Bring me some of that twine – and adhesive tape. I think we may need it. Meet me about fifty yards along the quay there, at the head of the landing steps.’

As Harlow signalled the waiter for his bill, Rory left, walking with some degree of restraint. As soon as he had passed through the bead-curtained doorway he broke into a dead run. Arrived at the Ferrari, he opened the boot, stuffed twine and tape into his pockets, closed the boot, hesitated, then opened the driver’s door and pulled out the four automatics from under the seat. He selected the smallest, pushed the other three back into concealment, studied the one he held in his hand, eased the safety catch off, looked guiltily around and stuffed the automatic into an inside pocket. He made his way quickly down to the waterfront.

Near the top of the landing steps was a double row of barrels, stacked two high. Harlow and Rory stood silently in the shadow, the former with a gun in his hand. They could both see and hear the outboard dinghy approaching. The engine slowed, then cut out: there came the sound of feet mounting the wooden landing steps, then two figures; appeared on the quay, Tracchia and Yonnie: Tracchia was carrying a rifle. Harlow moved out from the shadows.

‘Keep quite still,’ he said. ‘Tracchia, that gun on the ground. Hands high and turn your backs to me. I get tired of repeating myself but the first of you to make the slightest suspicious movement will be shot through the back of the head. At four feet I am not likely to miss. Rory, see what your former friend and his friend are carrying.’

Rory’s search produced two guns.

‘Throw them in the water. Come on, you two. Behind those barrels. Face down, hands behind your backs. Rory, attend to our friend Yonnie.’

With the expertise born of recent and intensive practice Rory had Yonnie trussed like a turkey in less than two minutes.

Harlow said: ‘You know what the tape is for?’

Rory knew what the tape was for. He used about a couple of feet of black insulated adhesive tape that effectively ensured Yonnie’s total silence.

Harlow said: ‘Can he breathe?’

‘Just.’

‘“Just” is enough. Not that it matters. We’ll leave him here. Maybe someone will find him in the morning. Not that that matters either. Up, Tracchia.’

‘But aren’t you – ’

‘Mr Tracchia we need. Who’s to say there isn’t another guard aboard? Tracchia here is a specialist in hostages so he’ll know what we want him for.’

Rory looked up at the sky. ‘That cloud that’s moving towards the moon is taking its time about it.’

‘It doesn’t appear to be in any great hurry about it. But we’ll take a chance on it. We have our life assurance with us.’

The outboard motor dinghy moved across the moonlit water. Traccia was at the controls while Harlow, gun in hand, sat amidships facing him. Rory was in the bows, facing forward. At this point, the blue and white yacht was only a hundred yards away.

In the wheelhouse of the yacht a tall and powerfully built man had a pair of binoculars to his eyes. His face tightened. He laid down the binoculars, took a gun from a drawer, left the wheelhouse, climbed the ladder there and spreadeagled himself on the cabin roof.

The dinghy came alongside the water-skiing steps at the stern and Rory made fast. At a gesture from Harlow, Tracchia climbed the ladder first and moved back slowly as Harlow, the gun trained on him, climbed the steps in turn. Rory followed. Harlow made a gesture that Rory should remain where he was, thrust his gun in Tracchia’s back and moved off to search the boat.

One minute later Harlow, Rory and a blackly scowling Tracchia were in The Chevalier’s brightly lit saloon.

Harlow said: ‘No one aboard, it seems. I take it that Mrs MacAlpine is behind that locked door below. I want the key, Tracchia.’

A deep voice said: ‘Stand still. Don’t turn round. Drop that gun.’

Harlow stood still, didn’t turn round and dropped his gun. The seaman walked into the saloon from the after door.

Tracchia smiled, almost beatifically. ‘That was well done, Pauli.’

‘My pleasure, Signor Tracchia.’ He passed by Rory, gave him a contemptuous shove that sent him reeling into a corner of the settee and moved forward to pick up Harlow’s gun.

‘You drop your gun. Now!’ Rory’s voice had a most distinct quaver to it.

Pauli swung around, an expression of total astonishment on his face. Rory had a gun clutched in two very unsteady hands.

Pauli smiled broadly. ‘Well, well, well. What a brave little gamecock.’ He brought up his gun.

Rory’s hands and arms were trembling like an aspen leaf in an autumn gale. He compressed his lips, screwed his eyes shut and pulled the trigger. In that confined space the report of the gun was deafening but even so not loud enough to drown out Pauli’s shout of agony. Pauli stared down in stupefaction as the blood from his shattered right shoulder seeped down between the clutching fingers of his left hand. Tracchia, too, wore a similarly bemused expression, one that changed to one of considerable pain as Harlow’s vicious swinging left hook sank deeply into his stomach. He bent double, Harlow struck him on the back of the neck but Tracchia was tough and durable. Still bent almost double, he staggered through the after door out on to the deck. As he did so, he passed Rory, very pale and looking very faint and clearly through with shooting exploits for the night. It was as well. Harlow was in such close pursuit that he might well have been the victim of Rory’s extremely wobbly marksmanship.

Rory looked at the wounded Pauli then at the two guns lying at his feet. Rory rose and pointed his gun at Pauli. He said: ‘Sit down.’

Pain-wracked though he was, Pauli moved with alacrity to obey. There was no saying where Rory’s next unpredictable shot might lodge itself. As he moved to a corner of the saloon the sound of blows and grunts of pain could be clearly heard from outside. Rory scooped up the two guns and ran through the after door.

On deck, the fight had clearly reached its climax. Tracchia, his wildly flailing feet clear of the deck and his body arched like a bow, had his back on the guardrail and the upper half of his body over the water. Harlow’s hands were on his throat. Tracchia, in turn, was belabouring Harlow’s already sadly battered and bruised face, but the belabouring was of no avail. Harlow, his face implacable, pushed him farther and farther out. Suddenly changing his tactics, he removed his right hand from Tracchia’s throat, hooked it under his thighs and proceeded to tip him over the guard-rail. When Tracchia spoke, his voice came as a wholly understandable croak.

‘I can’t swim! I can’t swim!’

If Harlow had heard him there was not even the most minuscule change of expression on his face to register that fact. He gave a final convulsive heave, the flailing legs disappeared and Tracchia entered the water with a resounding splash that threw water as high as Harlow’s face. A barred cloud had at last crossed the moon. Harlow gazed down intently into the water for about fifteen seconds, produced his torch and made a complete circuit of the water around the yacht until he arrived back at his starting place. Again, still breathing deeply and quickly, he peered over the side, then turned to Rory. He said: ‘Maybe he was right at that. Maybe he can’t swim.’

Rory tore off his jacket. ‘I can swim. I’m a very good swimmer, Mr Harlow.’

Harlow’s iron hand grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. ‘You, Rory, are out of your mind.’

Rory looked at him for a long moment, nodded, picked up his jacket and put it on again. He said: ‘Vermin?’

‘Yes.’ They went back into the saloon. Pauli was still huddled in a settee, moaning. Harlow said: ‘The key to Mrs MacAlpine’s cabin.’

Pauli nodded in the direction of a cabinet drawer. Harlow found the key, removed the first-aid box from its clip on the bulkhead, ushered Pauli below at the point of his gun, opened the first cabin door, gestured Pauli inside and threw in the first-aid box. He said: ‘I’ll have a doctor here within half an hour. Meantime, I don’t care a damn whether you live or die.’ He left and locked the cabin door from the outside.

In the next cabin, a woman of about forty sat on a stool by her bunk. Pale and thin from her long confinement, she was still quite beautiful. The resemblance to her daughter was startling. She was listless, totally apathetic, the epitome of resignation and despair. The sound of the gun and the commotion on the upper deck could not have gone unregistered, but no signs of registration showed in her face.

A key turned in the lock, the door opened and Harlow came in. She made no move. He walked to within three feet of her and still she gazed uncaringly downwards.’

Harlow touched her shoulder and said, very gently: ‘I’ve come to take you home, Marie.’

She turned her head in slow and unbelieving wonderment, initially and understandably not recognizing the battered face before her. Then, slowly, almost incredulously, recognition dawned upon her. She rose unsteadily to her feet, half smiled at him, then tremblingly took a step forward, put her thin arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder.

‘Johnny Harlow,’ she whispered. ‘My dear, dear Johnny. Johnny Harlow. What have they done to your face?’

‘Nothing that time won’t cure,’ Harlow said briskly. ‘After all, it wasn’t all that hot to begin with.’ He patted her back as if to reassure her of his actual presence, then gently disengaged himself. ‘I think there’s someone else who would like to see you, Marie.’

For someone who claimed that he could not swim, Tracchia was cleaving through the water like a torpedo. He reached the landing steps, scrambled up to the quay, and headed for the nearest phone booth. He put through a reverse charge call to Vignolles and had to stand there for almost five minutes before his call came through: the French telephone service is not world renowned. He asked for Jacobson and finally reached him in his bedroom. Tracchia’s account of the evening’s happenings were succinct and to the point but could have been shorter as it was heavily burdened with a wide range of expletives. ‘So that’s it, Jake,’ Tracchia finished up. ‘That bastard has outsmarted us all’

Jacobson’s face, as he sat on his bed, was tight with anger but he was clearly in control of himself. He said: ‘Not quite yet. So we’ve lost our ace in the hole. We’ll just have to get ourselves another one, won’t we? You understand? Meet you at Bandol inside the hour. Usual place.’

‘Passport?’

‘Yes.’

‘In my bedside table drawer. And for Christ’s sake bring me a set of dry clothing or I’ll have pneumonia before the night is out.’

Tracchia emerged from the phone booth. He was actually smiling. He went to take up position among some crates and barrels, seeking a safe position where he could keep The Chevalier under observation and, in the process of doing so, literally tripped over the prostrate Yonnie.

‘Good God, Yonnie, I’d forgotten just where you were.’ The bound and gagged man looked up with pleading eyes. Tracchia shook his head. ‘Sorry, can’t untie you yet. That bastard Harlow, young MacAlpine rather, has shot Pauli, I had to swim for it. The two of them will be coming ashore any minute. Harlow may check whether you’re still here. If he does, and you’re gone, he’ll raise a hue and cry immediately: if you’re still here he’ll reckon that you can be left in cold storage for a while. Gives us more time to play with. When they’ve landed and gone take the dinghy out to The Chevalier. Find a bag and stuff it with all the papers in the two top drawers of the chart-table. God, if the police were ever to lay hands on that lot! Among other things, your days would be numbered. You’ll take them to your place in Marseilles in my car and wait there. If you get those papers you’re in the clear. Harlow didn’t recognize you, it was too dark in the shadows here, nobody even knows your name. Understand?’

Yonnie nodded glumly then turned his head in the direction of the harbour. Tracchia nodded. The sound of the outboard was unmistakable and soon the dinghy appeared in sight round the bows of The Chevalier. Tracchia prudently withdrew twenty or thirty yards along the waterfront. The dinghy came alongside the landing steps and Rory was the first out, painter in hand. As he secured the dinghy, Harlow helped Marie ashore, then followed himself, her suitcase in his hand. His gun was in his other hand. Tracchia toyed briefly with the idea of way-laying Harlow in the shadows but almost immediately and very prudently changed his mind. He knew that Harlow would be in no mood to be taking any chances and, if necessary, would shoot and shoot to kill without the slightest compunction.

Harlow came straight to where Yonnie lay, bent over him, straightened, and said: ‘He’ll keep.’ The three crossed the road to the nearest phone booth – the one that Tracchia had lately occupied – and Harlow went inside. Tracchia moved stealthily along behind the cover of barrels and crates until he reached Yonnie. He produced a knife and cut him free. Yonnie sat up and he had the expression of a man who would have given a great deal to be able to shout in pain. He rubbed hands and wrists in agony: Rory was no respecter of circulations. By and by, gingerly and clearly not enjoying the process, he removed the insulated tape from his face. He opened his mouth but Tracchia clapped his hand across it to prevent what would be doubtless a torrential outpouring of imprecations.

‘Quiet,’ Tracchia whispered. ‘They’re just on the other side of the road. Harlow’s in the phone booth.’ He removed his hand. ‘When they leave, I’m going to follow them to see that they do really leave Bandol. As soon as they’re out of sight, get down to the dinghy. Use the oars. We don’t want Harlow hearing the outboard start up and coming back to investigate.’

‘Me? Row?’ Yonnie said huskily. He flexed his fingers and winced. ‘My hands are dead.’

‘You’d better get them back to life fast,’ Tracchia said unfeelingly. ‘Or you’re going to be dead. Ah, now.’ He lowered his voice still further. ‘He’s just left the phone box. Be dead quiet. That bastard Harlow can hear a leaf drop twenty feet away.’

Harlow, Rory and Mrs MacAlpine walked up a street away from the waterfront. They turned a corner and disappeared. Tracchia said: ‘Get going.’

He watched Yonnie head for the landing steps then followed quickly after the trio in front. For about three minutes he trailed them at a very discreet distance indeed, then lost sight of them as they turned another left corner. He peered cautiously round the corner, saw that it was a cul-de-sac, hesitated and then stiffened as he heard the unmistakable sound of a Ferrari engine starting up. Shivering violently in his still soaking clothes, he pressed himself into the darkness of a recessed and unlit alleyway. The Ferrari emerged from the cul-de-sac, turned left and headed north out of Bandol. Tracchia watched it go then hurried back to the phone booth.

There was the usual frustrating delay in getting through to Vignolles. Eventually, he succeeded in reaching Jacobson. He said: ‘Harlow’s just left with Rory and Mrs MacAlpine. He made a phone call before he left – almost certainly to Vignolles to tell MacAlpine that he’s got his wife back. I’d leave by the back door if I were you.’

‘No worry,’ Jacobson sounded confident. ‘I am leaving by the back door. The fire-escape. I’ve already got our cases in the Aston and our passports in my pocket. I’m now on my way to collect our third passport. See you.’

Tracchia replaced the receiver. He was about to open the booth door when he stopped and stood as if a man turned to stone. A large black Citroën had slid silently down to the waterfront, showing only side-lights. Even those were switched off before the car came to a halt. No flashing lights, no howling sirens – but it was indisputably a police car and one paying a very private visit. Four uniformed policemen came out of the car. Tracchia pried open the door of the booth so that the automatic light went out, then leaned as far back as possible, praying that he wouldn’t be seen. He wasn’t. The four policemen at once disappeared behind the barrels where Yonnie had been, two of them with lit torches in hand, and reappeared within ten seconds, one of them carrying some unidentifiable objects in his hand. Tracchia did not need to see it to know what the man was carrying – the twine and black tape that had immobilized and silenced Yonnie. The four policemen held a brief conference then headed for the landing steps. Twenty seconds later a rowing boat was heading purposefully but silently towards The Chevalier.

Tracchia emerged from the booth, fists clenched, his face black with anger and softly but audibly swearing to himself. The only printable word, and one that was repeated many times, was ‘Harlow’. The bitter realization had come to Tracchia that Harlow had not phoned Vignolles: he had phoned the local police.

In her room in Vignolles Mary was getting ready for dinner when a knock came at her door. She opened it to find Jacobson standing there. He said: ‘Can I have a private word with you, Mary? It’s very important.’

She regarded him with mild astonishment then opened the door for him to enter. Jacobson closed the door behind him.

She said curiously: ‘What’s so important? What do you want?’

Jacobson pulled a gun from his waist-band. ‘You. I’m in trouble and I need some form of security to make sure that I don’t get into more trouble. You’re the security. Pack an overnight bag and give me your passport.’

She gave him her passport and packed the bag. Jacobson crossed to the bed and snapped shut the catches of her case. ‘You’d better come now.’

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Now, I said.’ He lifted his gun menacingly.

‘Then you’d better shoot me now. Number eight.’

‘Cuneo. Then parts beyond.’ His voice was harsh but had the ring of sincerity. ‘I never make war on women. You’ll be released within twenty-four hours.’

‘I’ll be dead in twenty-four hours.’ She picked up her handbag. ‘May I go to the bathroom? I feel sick.’

Jacobson opened the bathroom door and looked inside. ‘No window. No telephone. OK.’

Mary entered the bathroom and closed the door behind her. She took a pen from her handbag, scribbled a few shaky words on a piece of paper, placed the paper face down on the floor behind the door and left. Jacobson was waiting for her. He had her case in his left hand, a gun in the other. Both gun and right hand were buried deep in his jacket pocket.

On board The Chevalier, Yonnie thrust the last of the documents from the chart-table into a large briefcase. He returned to the saloon, placed the briefcase on a settee and went down the companionway to the accommodation quarters. He went to his own cabin and there spent a hurried five minutes in cramming his own most personal possessions into a canvas bag. He then made a tour of the other cabins, rifling the drawers for whatever money or articles of value that he might find. He found a considerable amount, returned to his own cabin and stuffed them inside his bag. He zipped the bag shut and climbed up the companionway. Four steps from the top he stopped. His face should have been masked in disbelief and terror but it wasn’t. Yonnie had run out of emotions and the capacity to display them.

Four very large armed policemen were resting comfortably on the settees in the saloon. A sergeant, with the briefcase on his knees, his elbow on the case and a gun in his hand pointing approximately in the direction of Yonnie’s heart, said genially: ‘Going some place Yonnie?’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Once again, the Ferrari was moving through the darkness. Harlow was not idling but neither was he pushing the car hard. As on the trip from Marseilles to Bandol, it seemed that the need for urgency was not there. Mrs MacAlpine was in the front passenger seat wearing, at Harlow’s insistence, a double safety belt. A rather drowsy Rory was stretched out on the back seats,

Harlow said: ‘So, you see, it was all quite simple, really. Jacobson was the master-mind behind this particular operation. It will turn out that the Marzio brothers were the ones that really mattered. Anyway, it was Jacobson’s idea to gamble on the Grand Prix drivers and he altered the odds in his favour by suborning no fewer that five drivers. Plus even more mechanics. He paid them plenty – but he made a fortune himself. I was the thorn in his flesh – he knew better than to try to get at me, and as I was winning the majority of the races it was making his business very difficult indeed. So he tried to kill me at Clermont-Ferrand. I have proof – both stills and cine film.’

In the rear Rory stirred sleepily. ‘But how could he do that to you while you were on the track?’

‘Me? And a lot of others? Two ways. A radio-controlled explosive device on a suspension strut or a chemically operated explosive device on the hydraulic brake lines. Both devices, I imagine, would blow clear on detonation and leave no trace of their presence. Anyway, it’s on film record that Jacobson replaced both a strut and a brake line.’

Rory said: ‘Which is why he always insisted on being alone when inspecting smashed cars?’

Harlow nodded, temporarily lost in thought. Mrs MacAlpine said: ‘But how – how could you degrade yourself in this awful fashion?’

‘Well, it wasn’t all that pleasant. But you know the blaze of publicity I live in. I couldn’t move privately, more or less to brush my teeth, than to do the job I was asked to. I had to take the heat off myself, step out of the limelight and become a loner. It wasn’t all that difficult. As for working my way down to the transporter job – well, I had to find out whether the stuff was coming from the Coronado garage or not. It was.’

‘The stuff?’

‘The dust. European jargon for heroin. My dear Marie, there are more ways to dusty death than losing control on a Grand Prix race-track.’

‘The way to dusty death.’ She shivered and repeated the words. ‘The way to dusty death. Did James know about this, Johnny?’

‘He knew six months ago that the transporter was being used – oddly enough, he never suspected Jacobson. They’d been together too long, I suppose. Some way, any way, they had to have the price of his silence. You were that price. And for good measure he was also being blackmailed for approximately twenty-five thousand pounds a month.’

She was silent for almost a minute then she said: ‘Did James know I was still alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he knew about the heroin – all those months he knew. Think of all those people ruined, perhaps dead. Think of all – ’

Harlow reached out his right hand and caught her left in his. ‘I think, Marie, that perhaps he loves you.’

A car approached then, headlights dipped. Harlow dipped his. briefly, as if by mistake, the approaching car’s headlights came on full beam, then dipped again. As they passed each other, the driver of the other car turned to his passenger, a girl with her hands bound in front of her.

‘Tut! Tut! Tut!’ Jacobson sounded in almost high humour. ‘Young Lochinvar headed in the wrong direction.’

In the Ferrari Mrs MacAlpine said: ‘And James will have to stand trial for his – complicity in this heroin traffic?’

‘James will never stand trial for anything.’

‘But heroin – ’

Harlow said: ‘Heroin? Heroin? Rory, did you hear anyone mentioning the word “heroin”?’

‘Mother’s been through a pretty rough time, Mr Harlow. I think she is beginning to imagine things.’

The Aston Martin pulled up outside a darkened café on the outskirts of Bandol. A violently shivering Tracchia emerged from the shadows and climbed into the back of the Aston Martin.

He said: ‘Complete with insurance policy, I see. Now, for God’s sake, Jake, stop at the first clump of trees outside Bandol. Unless I change out of these clothes damn quick I’m going to freeze to death.’

‘Right. Where’s Yonnie?’

‘In gaol.’

‘Jesus!’ Even the abnormally phlegmatic Jacobson was shaken. ‘What in the hell happened?’

‘I’d sent Yonnie out in the dinghy while I was phoning you. I’d told him to bring ashore all the papers and documents in the two top drawers in the chart-table. You know how important those are, Jake?’

‘I know.’ There was no disguising die harsh edge of strain in Jacobson’s voice.

‘Remember I’d told you that I thought Harlow had phoned Vignolles? He hadn’t. The bastard had phoned the Bandol police. They arrived while I was still in the phone booth. There was nothing I could do. They rowed out to The Chevalier and nabbed him there.’

‘And the papers?’

‘One of the police was carrying a large attaché case.’

‘I don’t think that Bandol is a very healthy place for us to be.’ Jacobson was back on balance again. He drove off but not in a fashion ostentatious enough to attract attention. As they reached the outskirts of the town, he said: ‘That’s it, then. What with those papers and that cassette the whole operation’s blown. Termine. Fine. The end of the road.’ He seemed remarkably calm.

‘And now?’

‘Operation fly-away. I’ve had it planned for months. First stop is our flat in Cuneo.’

‘Nobody knows about it?’

‘Nobody. Except Willi. And he won’t talk. Besides, it’s not under our names anyway.’ He pulled up alongside a thicket of trees. ‘The boot’s unlocked and the grey case is yours. Those clothes you’re wearing – leave them among the trees.’

‘Why? It’s a perfectly good suit and – ’

‘What’s’ going to happen if the Customs search us and find a suit of soaking wet clothes?’

‘You have a point,’ Tracchia said and got out of the car. When he returned in two or three minutes, Jacobson was in the back seat. Tracchia said: ‘You want me to drive?’

‘We’re in a hurry and my name is not Nicolo Tracchia.’ As Tracchia engaged gear he went on: ‘We should have no trouble with the Customs and police at the Col de Tende. The word won’t be out for hours yet. It’s quite possible that they haven’t discovered that Mary is missing yet. Besides, they’ve no idea where we’re heading. No reason why they should notify border police. But by the time we reach the Swiss frontier we may be in trouble.’

‘So?’

‘Two hours in Cuneo. We’ll switch cars, leave the Aston in the garage and take the Peugeot. Pack some more clothes for ourselves, pick up our other passports and identification papers, then call in Erita and our photographer friend. Within the hour Erita will have turned our Mary into a blonde and very shortly afterwards our friend will have a nice shiny British passport for her. Then we drive up to Switzerland. If the word is out, then the border boys will be on the alert. Well, as alert as those cretins can be in the middle of the night. But they’ll be looking for an Aston Martin with one man and a brunette inside – that’s assuming our friends back in Vignolles have managed to put two and two together, which I very much doubt. But they won’t be looking for two men and blonde in a Peugeot, with passports carrying completely different names.’

Tracchia was now driving the car close to its limits and he had almost to shout to make himself heard. The Aston Martin is a magnificent machine but not particularly renowned for the quietness of its engine: there were carping critics who occasionally maintained that the engines for the David Brown tractor division found their way into the wrong machines. Ferrari and Lamborghini owners had been known to describe it as the fastest lorry in Europe. Tracchia said: ‘You sound very sure of yourself, Jake.’

‘I am.’

Tracchia glanced at the girl by his side. ‘And Mary here? God knows we’re no angels but I don’t want any harm to come to her.’

‘No harm. I told her I don’t make war on women and I’ll keep my word on that. She’s our safe conduct if the police come after us.’

‘Or Johnny Harlow?’

‘Or Harlow. When we get to Zurich, each of us will go to the bank in turns, cash and transfer money while the others keeps her as hostage. Then we fly out into the wild blue yonder,’

‘You expect trouble in Zurich?’

‘None. We haven’t even been arrested far less convicted so our Zurich friends won’t open up. Besides, we’re under different names and with numbered accounts.’

‘The wild blue yonder? With teleprinted copies of our photographs at every airport in the world?’

‘Only the major ones on scheduled flights. Lots of minor airfields around. There’s a private flight division in Kloten airport and I have a pilot friend there. He’ll file a flight plan for Geneva which will mean that we don’t have to pass customs. We’ll land somewhere quite a way from Switzerland. He can always claim that he was hi-jacked. Ten thousand Swiss francs should fit it.’

‘You think of everything, don’t you, Jake?’ There was genuine admiration in Tracchia’s voice.

‘I try.’ Jacobson, uncharacteristically, sounded almost complacent. ‘I try.’

The red Ferrari was drawn up outside the chalet in Vignolles. MacAlpine held his sobbing wife in his arms but he was not looking as happy as he might have done in the circumstances. Dunnet approached Harlow.

‘How do you feel, boy?’

‘Bloody well exhausted.’

‘I’ve bad news, Johnny. Jacobson’s gone.’

‘He can wait. I’ll get him.’

‘There’s more to it than that, Johnny.’

‘What?’

‘He’s taken Mary with him.’

Harlow stood immobile, his drawn and weary face without expression. He said: ‘Does James know?’

‘I’ve just told him. And I think he’s just telling his wife.’ He handed a note to Harlow. ‘I found this in Mary’s bathroom.’

Harlow looked at it. ‘“Jacobson is taking me to Cuneo.”’ Without even a pause he said: ‘I’ll go now.’

‘You can’t, man! You’re totally exhausted. You said so yourself.’

‘Not any more. Come with me?’

Dunnet accepted the inevitable. ‘You stop me. But I’ve no gun.’

‘Guns we have,’ Rory said. He produced four as proof of his assertion.

‘We?’ Harlow said. ‘You’re not coming.’

‘I would remind you, Mr Harlow,’ Rory said with some asperity, ‘that I saved your life twice tonight. All good things come in threes. I have the right.’

Harlow nodded. ‘You have the right.’

MacAlpine and his wife were staring numbly at them. The expressions on their faces were an extraordinary combination of happiness and a broken bewilderment.

MacAlpine said, tears in his eyes: ‘Alexis has told me everything. I’ll never be able to thank you, I’ll never be able to forgive myself and the rest of my life will be too short for the apologies I have to make to you. You destroyed your career, ruined yourself, to bring my Marie back.’

‘Ruined me?’ Harlow said calmly. ‘Nonsense. There’s another season coming up.’ He smiled without mirth. ‘And there’ll be a fair bit of the top-flight opposition missing.’ He smiled again, this time encouragingly. ‘I’ll bring Mary back. With your help, James. Everybody knows you. You know everybody and you’re a millionaire. There’s only one way from here to Cuneo. Phone someone, preferably some big trucking firm in Nice. Offer them £10,000 to block the French end of the Col de Tende. My passport’s gone. You understand?’

‘I’ve a friend in Nice who would do it for nothing. But what’s the use, Johnny? It’s a job for the police.’

‘No. And I’m not thinking about the continental habit of first of all riddling wanted cars and then asking the dead bodies questions. What I –’

‘Johnny, whether you or the police get to them first makes no difference. I know now that you know everything, have known for a long time. Those are the two men who will bring me down.’

Harlow said mildly: ‘There’s a third man, James. Willi Neubauer. But he’ll never talk. Admission to kidnapping would bring him another ten years in prison. You weren’t listening to me, James. Phone Nice. Phone Nice now. All I said was that I would bring Mary back.’

MacAlpine and his wife stood together, listening to the howl of the Ferrari engine die away in the distance. In what was almost a whisper, Marie MacAlpine said: ‘What did that mean, James? “All I said is that I would bring Mary back.”’

‘I’ve got to phone Nice and at once. Then the biggest drink the château can offer, a small dinner then bed. There’s nothing more we can do now.’ He paused, then went on almost sadly: ‘I have my limitations. I do not operate in Johnny Harlow’s class.’

‘What did he mean, James?’

‘What he said.’ MacAlpine tightened his arm around his wife’s shoulder. ‘He brought you back, didn’t he? He’ll bring our Mary back. Don’t you know they’re in love?’

‘What did he mean, James?’

MacAlpine said in a dead voice: ‘He meant that neither of us would ever see Jacobson and Tracchia again.’

The nightmare journey to the Col de Tende, a journey that would live in the minds of Dunnet and Rory for ever, was conducted, with only one exception, in absolute conversational silence, partially because Harlow was completely concentrated on the job on hand, partially because both Dunnet and Rory had been reduced to a state pretty close to abject terror. Harlow was not only driving the Ferrari to its limits – in the opinions of his two passengers he was driving it far beyond its limits. As they drove along the autoroute between Cannes and Nice, Dunnet looked at the speedometer. It read 260 kph – something over 160 miles per hour.

He said: ‘May I say something?’

For a flicker of a second Harlow glanced at him. ‘But of course.’

‘Jesus Christ Almighty. Superstar, if you want. The best driver in the world, like enough the best driver who’s ever lived. But in all bloody hell – ’

‘Language,’ Harlow said mildly. ‘My young future brother-in-law is sitting behind us.’

‘This is the way you earn a living?’

‘Well, yes.’ While the seat-belted Dunnet clung in desperate apprehension to any available hand-hold, Harlow braked, changed down, and with all four wheels in a screaming slide and at just under a hundred miles an hour, rounded a corner that few other drivers, however competent, would have attempted at seventy. ‘But you must admit it’s better than working.’

‘Jesus!’ Dunnet lapsed into a semi-stunned silence and closed his eyes like a man in prayer. Very probably he was.

The N204, the road between Nice and La Giandola, where it links up with the road from Ventimiglia, is a very winding one, with some spectacular hairpins and rising in places to over three thousand feet, but Harlow treated it all as if he were driving along the autoroute. Presently, both Dunnet and Rory had their eyes closed: it could have been exhaustion but, more likely, they didn’t want to see what was going on.

The road was entirely empty. They crossed over the Col de Braus, went through Sospel at a ludicrously illegal speed, passed through the Col de Brouis and reached La Giandola without having met a single car, which was perhaps just as well for the nerves of any driver who might have been coming the other way. Then they went north through Saorge, Fontan and finally the township of Tende itself. It was just beyond Tende that Dunnet stirred and opened his eyes.

He said: ‘Am I still alive?’

‘I think so.’

Dunnet rubbed his eyes. ‘What was that you just said about your brother-in-law?’

‘“Just” was a long time ago.’ Harlow pondered. ‘Looks as if someone has to look after the MacAlpine family. I might as well make it official.’

‘You secretive so-and-so. Engaged?’

‘Well, no. I haven’t asked her yet. And I have news for you, Alexis. You’re going to drive this car back to Vignolles while I sleep the sleep of the just. In the back seat. With Mary.’

‘You haven’t even asked her yet and you’re certain you’re going to get her back.’ Dunnet looked at Harlow in disbelief and shook his head. ‘You, Johnny Harlow, are the most arrogant human being I’ve ever known.’

‘Don’t you knock my future brother-in-law, Mr Dunnet,’ Rory said sleepily from the back. ‘By the way, Mr Harlow, if I am going to be your brother-in-law, can I call you Johnny?’

Harlow smiled. ‘You can call me anything you like. Just as long as it’s said in a tone of proper respect.’

‘Yes, Mr Harlow. Johnny, I mean.’ Suddenly his voice was no longer sleepy. ‘Do you see what I see?’

Ahead of them were the headlights of a car negotiating the vicious hairpins of the lower end of the Col de Tende.

‘I’ve been seeing it for quite some time. Tracchia.’

Dunnet looked at him. ‘How can you tell?’

‘Two things.’ Harlow dropped two gears as he approached the first hairpin. ‘There aren’t half a dozen people in Europe who can drive a car the way that car is being driven.’ He dropped another gear and slid round the hairpin with all the calm relaxation of a man sitting in a pew in a church. ‘Show an art expert fifty different paintings, and he’ll immediately tell you who the artist is. I’m not talking about anything so wildly different as Rembrandt and Renoir. The same school of painters. I can recognize the driving technique of any Grand Prix driver in the world. After all, there are fewer Grand Prix drivers than there are painters. Traccia has the habit of braking slightly early for a corner then accelerating quickly through it.’ He threw the Ferrari, tyres shrieking in protest, round the next corner. ‘That’s Tracchia.’

It was indeed Tracchia. Seated beside him, Jacobson was peering anxiously through the rear window. He said: ‘There’s someone coming up behind.’

‘It’s a public road. Anyone can use it.’

‘Believe me, Nikki, this is not just anyone.’

In the Ferrari, Harlow said: ‘I think we better get ready.’ He pressed a button and the windows slid down. Then he reached for his gun and placed it beside him. ‘And I’ll be greatly obliged if neither of you shoot Mary.’

Dunnet said: ‘I just hope to hell that tunnel’s blocked.’ He brought out his own gun.

The tunnel was indeed blocked, completely and solidly blocked. A very large furniture van was jammed diagonally and apparently immovably into its mouth.

The Aston Martin rounded the last hairpin. Tracchia swore bitterly and braked the car to a halt. Both men gazed apprehensively through the rear window. Mary looked too, though with hope, not fear.

Jacobson said: ‘Don’t tell me that damned truck jammed there is sheer coincidence. Turn the car, Nikki. God, there they are!’

The Ferrari came sliding round the last corner and accelerated towards them. Tracchia tried desperately to turn his car, a maneuver made more difficult when Harlow, braking heavily, rammed his Ferrari into the side of the Aston. Jacobson had his gun out and was firing at apparent random.

‘Jacobson,’ Harlow said urgently. ‘Not Tracchia. You’ll kill Mary.’

Both men leaned out of their windows and fired just as their windscreen smashed and starred. Jacobson ducked low for safety but he ducked too late. He screamed in agony as two bullets lodged in his left shoulder. In the confusion and noise Mary opened the door and jumped out as quickly as her crippled leg would permit her. Neither man, for the moment, even noticed that she was gone.

Tracchia, only the top of his head visible above the windscreen, eventually managed to wrench his car round and clear then accelerated desperately away. Four seconds later, with Dunnet having practically dragged Mary inside, the Ferrari was in pursuit. Harlow, apparently oblivious to the inflicted cuts, had already smashed his fist through the shattered windscreen. Dunnet completed the work with the butt of his pistol.

Not once, but several times, Mary cried out in fear as Harlow took the Ferrari down through the hairpins of the Col de Tende. Rory had his arm round his sister and although he did not voice his fear he was plainly just as terrified as Mary was. Dunnet, firing his gun through the empty space where the windscreen had been, didn’t look particularly happy either. Harlow’s face was still, implacable. To an observer, it must have appeared that the car was being driven by a maniac, but Harlow was in complete control. To the accompaniment of the sound of tortured tyres and engine bellowing in the lower gears, he descended the Col as no one had ever done before and, assuredly, no one would ever do again. By the sixth hairpin he was only a matter of feet behind the Aston.

‘Stop shooting,’ Harlow shouted. He had to shout to make himself heard above the sound of an engine at maximum revolutions in bottom gear.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s not final enough.’

The Aston, now only a car’s length ahead, slid desperately round a right-hand hairpin bend. Harlow, instead of braking, accelerated, spun the wheel viciously to the right and the car slid half-way round the corner on all four screaming, skidding tyres, at right-angles to its line of travel only a second previously, apparently completely out of control. But Harlow had judged matters to a hair-raising degree of nicety: the side of the Ferrari smashed fairly and squarely into that of the Aston. The Ferrari, already practically stopped, rebounded into the middle of the curve. The Aston, moving diagonally now and hopelessly unmanageable, slid out towards the edge. Beyond the edge there was a drop of six hundred feet into the darkened and unseen depths of a ravine below.

Harlow was out of the stopped Ferrari just before the teetering Aston vanished over the side. He was followed almost immediately by the others. They peered over the edge of the road.

The Aston, descending with apparently incredible slowness, turned slowly over and over as it fell. It disappeared into the depths and the darkness of the ravine. There was a brief thunderclap of sound and a great gout of brilliant orange flame that seemed to reach half-way up to where they stood. Then there was only the silence and the darkness.

On the road above, all four stood quiet and still, like people in a trance, then Mary, shuddering, buried her face in Harlow’s shoulder. He put his arm around her and continued to gaze down, unseeingly as it seemed, into the hidden depths of the ravine.

Alistair MacLean

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a school-master. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Breakheart Pass

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1976

First published in Great Britain by

Collins 1974 Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1974

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9350-9

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

To Mary Marcelle

THE CHARACTERS

JOHN DEAKIN

A Gunman

COLONEL CLAREMONT

US Cavalry

COLONEL FAIRCHILD

Commandant of Fort Humboldt

GOVERNOR FAIRCHILD

The Governor of Nevada

MARICA FAIRCHILD

The Governor’s niece and the daughter of Colonel Fairchild

MAJOR O’BRIEN

The Governor’s Aide

NATHAN PEARCE

US Marshal

SEPP CALHOUN

A villain of some note

WHITE HAND

Chief of the Paiutes

GARRITTY

A gambler

REV. THEODORE PEABODY

Chaplain elect for Virginia City

DOCTOR MOLYNEUX

US Army Doctor

CHRIS BANLON

Engineer

CARLOS

Cook

HENRY

Steward

BELLEW

US Army Sergeant

DEVLIN

Brakeman on train

RAFFERTY

A trooper

FERGUSON

CARTER

US Army Telegraphists

SIMPSON

BENSON

CARMODY

Three minor villains

HARRIS

CAPTAIN OAKLAND

Passive but relevant

LIEUTENANT NEWELL

The following bears very closely on the choice of 1873 as the date for this story.

CALIFORNIAN GOLD RUSH

1855-75

COMSTOCK LODE DISCOVERED

1859

DISAFFECTED NEVADA INDIANS ACTIVE

1860-80

NEVADA BECAME STATE

1864

UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY BUILT

1869

BONANZA DISCOVERED

1873

CHOLERA IN ROCKIES

1873

DEVELOPMENT OF FIRST WINCHESTER

REPEATERS

1873

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA (ELKO)

ESTABLISHED

1873

DISASTROUS FIRE IN LAKE’S CROSSING

(WHICH BECAME RENO IN 1879)

1873

NB. It might appear odd that a US Army relief mission should be sent to attend a cholera outbreak, but this is not so: the State of Nevada Health Service was not established until 1893.

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ONE

The saloon bar of Reese City’s grandiosely named Imperial Hotel had about it an air of defeat, of uncaring dilapidation, of the hauntingly sad nostalgia for the half-forgotten glories of days long gone by, of days that would never come again. The occasionally plastered walls were cracked and dirty and liberally behung with faded pictures of what appeared to be an assortment of droopmoustached desperadoes: the lack of ‘Wanted’ notices below the pictures struck an almost jarring note. The splintered planks that passed for a floor were incredibly warped and of a hue that made the walls appear relatively freshly painted: much missed-at spittoons were much in evidence, while there were few square inches without their cigar butts: those lay about in their hundreds, the vast majority bearing beneath them charred evidence to the fact that their owners hadn’t bothered to stub them out either before or after dropping them to the floor. The shades of the oil-lamps. like the murky roof above, were blackened by soot, the full-length mirror behind the bar was fly-blown and filthy. For the weary traveller seeking a haven of rest, the saloon bar offered nothing but a total lack of hygiene, an advanced degree of decadence and an almost stultifying sense of depression and despair.

Neither did the majority of the customers. They were remarkably in keeping with the general ambience of the saloon. Most of them were disproportionately elderly, markedly dispirited, unshaven and shabby, all but a lonely few contemplating the future, clearly a bleak and hopeless one, through the bottoms of their whisky glasses. The solitary barman, a myopic individual with a chest-high apron which, presumably to cope with laundry problems, he’d prudently had dyed black in the distant past, appeared to share in the general malaise: wielding a venerable handtowel in which some faint traces of near-white could with difficulty be distinguished, he was gloomily attempting the impossible task of polishing a sadly cracked and chipped glass, his ultra-slow movements those of an arthritic zombie. Between the Imperial Hotel and, also of that precise day and age, the Dickensian concept of a roistering, hospitable and heart-warming coaching inn of Victorian England lay a gulf of unbridgeable immensity.

In all the saloon there was only one isolated oasis of conversational life. Six people were seated round a table close by the door, three of them in a high-backed bench against the wall: the central figure of those three was unquestionably the dominant one at the table. Tall and lean, deeply tanned and with the heavily crow-footed eyes of a man who has spent too long in the sun, he was dressed in the uniform of a colonel of the United States Cavalry, was aged about fifty, was – unusually for that time – clean-shaven and had an aquiline and intelligent face crowned by a mass of brushed-back silver hair. He wore, at that moment, an expression that could hardly be described as encouraging.

The expression was directed at a man standing opposite him on the other side of the table, a tall and powerfully built individual with a darkly saturnine expression and a black hairline moustache. He was dressed entirely in black. His badge of office, that of a US Marshal, glittered on his chest. He said: ‘But surely. Colonel Claremont, in circumstances such as those–’

‘Regulations are regulations.’ Claremont’s voice, though civil enough, was sharp and incisive, an accurate reflection of the man’s appearance. ‘Army business is army business. Civilian business is civilian business. I’m sorry. Marshal – ah–’

‘Pearce. Nathan Pearce.’

‘Of course. Of course. My apologies. I should have known.’ Claremont shook his head regretfully, but there was no trace of regret in his voice. ‘Ours is an army troop train. No civilians aboard – except by special permission from Washington.’

Pearce said mildly: ‘But couldn’t we all be regarded as working for the Federal government?’

‘By army definitions, no.’

‘I see.’ Pearce clearly didn’t see at all. He looked slowly, thoughtfully, around the other five – one of them a young woman: none wore uniform. Pearce centred his gaze on a small, thin, frockcoated individual with a preacher’s collar, a high domed forehead chasing a rapidly receding hair-line and an expression of permanently apprehensive anxiety. He shifted uneasily under the Marshal’s penetrating stare and his prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as if he were swallowing with considerable speed and frequency.

Claremont said drily: ‘The Reverend Theodore Peabody has got both special permission and qualifications.’ It was clear that Claremont’s regard for the preacher was somewhat less than unlimited. ‘His cousin is private secretary to the President. The Reverend Peabody is going to be a chaplain in Virginia City.’

‘He’s going to be what?’ Pearce looked at a now positively cringing preacher, then unbelievingly at Claremont. ‘He’s mad! He’d last a damn sight longer among the Paiute Indians.’

Peabody’s tongue licked his lips as he resumed his swallowing performance. ‘But – but they say the Paiutes kill every white man on sight.’

‘Not on sight. They tend to take their time about it.’ Pearce moved his eyes again. Seated beyond the by now plainly scared pastor was a massively rotund figure in a loudly checked suit. He had the jowls to match his build, an expansive smile and a booming voice.

‘Dr Edward Molyneux, at your service. Marshal.’

‘I suppose you’re going to Virginia City, too. Plenty work for you there, Doctor – filling out death certificates. Precious few from natural causes, I’m afraid.’ Molyneux said comfortably: ‘Not for me, those dens of iniquity. You see before you the newly appointed resident surgeon for Fort Humboldt. They haven’t been able to find a uniform to fit me yet.’

Pearce nodded, passed up several obvious comments and shifted his eyes again. A degree of irritation creeping into his voice, Claremont said: ‘I may as well save you the labour of individual interrogation. Not that you have the right to know. A matter of courtesy, only.’ Whether rebuke was either intended or accepted was impossible to say. Claremont gestured to the man seated on his right, a splendidly patriarchal figure with flowing white hair, moustache and beard who could have moved in and taken his place in the US Senate without having an eyelid batted in his general direction. Beard apart, the overall resemblance to Mark Twain was quite startling. Claremont said : ‘Governor Fairchild of Nevada you will know.’ Pearce inclined his head, then looked with a slight trace of interest at the young woman seated to Claremont’s left. Perhaps in her mid-twenties, she had a pale face, strangely dark smoky eyes and her tightly drawn hair – or what little could be seen of it under a grey and widebrimmed felt hat – was as dark as night. She sat huddled under a matching grey coat: the proprietor of the Imperial Hotel did not regard his profit margin as being of such an order as to justify any extravagant drain on the fuel supply for his corded wood stove. Claremont said: ‘Miss Marica Fairchild, the Governor’s niece.’

‘Ah!’ Pearce looked from her to the Colonel. ‘The new quarter-master sergeant?’

Claremont said shortly: ‘She’s joining her father, the Commanding Officer at Fort Humboldt. Senior officers do have that privilege.’ He gestured to his left. ‘The Governor’s aide and liaison officer to the Army, Major Bernard O’Brien. Major O’Brien–’

He broke off and looked curiously at Pearce. Pearce, in turn, was staring at O’Brien, a burly, sun-tanned, cheerfully plump-faced man. O’Brien returned the look with growing interest, then, with the almost immediate coming of recognition, jumped to his feet. Suddenly, both men, smiling widely, moved quickly towards each other and shook hands – four-handed – like long-lost brothers, before pounding each other on the back. The ancient regulars of the Imperial Hotel gazed upon the scene with wonderment: none of those present could ever recall Marshal Nathan Pearce displaying even a slight degree of emotion before.

Delight was in O’Brien’s face. ‘Sergeant Pearce! Why did it never ring a bell? The Nathan Pearce! I’d never have recognized you. Why, man, at Chattanooga your beard was–’

‘Was nearly as long as your own. Lieutenant.’

‘Major.’ O’Brien spoke in mock severity, then added sadly: ‘Promotion comes slowly, but it comes. Nathan Pearce, eh? The greatest army scout, the finest Indian fighter, the best gun–’

Pearce’s voice was dry. ‘Except for yourself. Major, except for yourself. Remember that day …’ Arms around each other’s shoulders and apparently quite oblivious of the rest of the company, the two men moved purposefully towards the bar, so profoundly an architectural monstrosity in design as to be deserving of a certain grudging admiration for its shoddy magnificence. It consisted of three enormous, and presumably enormously heavy, railway sleepers resting unsecured on a pair of trestles that seemed incapable of bearing a fraction of the weight they were being called upon to do. Originally, the classic simplicity of this design had been obscured by green linoleum on top and a floor-length drapery of velvet that had surrounded three sides. But time had had its inevitable way with both linoleum and velvet and the secrets of the designer were there for all to see. But despite the fragility of its construction, Pearce did not hesitate to lean his elbows on the bar and make appropriate signals to the glass-polisher. The two men fell into a low-voiced conversation.

The five who still remained at the table by the door remained silent for some lime, then Marica Fairchild said in some puzzlement: ‘What did the Marshal mean by “except for yourself”? I mean, they were talking about scouting and fighting Indians and shooting and, well, all the Major can do is fill in forms, sing Irish songs, tell those awful stories of his and – and–’

‘And kill people more efficiently than any man I ever knew. Agreed, Governor?’

‘Agreed.’ The Governor laid his hand on his niece’s forearm. ‘O’Brien, my dear, was one of the most highly decorated Union Army officers in the War between the States. His – ah – expertise with either a rifle or hand gun has to be seen to be believed. Major O’Brien is my aide, agreed, but an aide of a very special kind. Up in those mountain states politics – and, after all, I am a politician – tend to assume a rather – what shall we say? – physical aspect. But as long as Major O’Brien is around the prospects of violence leave me unconcerned.’

‘People would harm you? You mean that you have enemies?’

‘Enemies!’ The Governor didn’t exactly snort but he came pretty close to it. ‘Show me a Governor west of the Mississippi who says he hasn’t and I’ll show you an out-and-out liar.’

Marica looked at him uncertainly, then at the broad back of O’Brien at the bar, the disbelief in her face deepening. She made to speak, then changed her mind as O’Brien and Pearce, glasses in their hands, turned away from the bar and made their way back to their table. They were talking earnestly now, Pearce obviously in some exasperation: O’Brien was trying to be conciliatory.

Pearce said: ‘But damn it, O’Brien, you know what this man Sepp Calhoun is like. He’s killed, robbed both stage companies and the railroad, fomented range wars, sold guns and whisky to the Indians–’

‘We all know what he’s like.’ O’Brien was being very pacific. ‘If ever a man deserved to hang, it’s Calhoun. And hang he will.’

‘Not until a lawman gets his hands on him. And I’m the lawman, not you and your lot. And he’s up there now! In custody. In Fort Humboldt. All I want to do is to fetch him back. Up with your train, back with the next.’

‘You heard what the Colonel said, Nathan.’ Awkward and ill at ease, O’Brien turned to Claremont. ‘Do you think we could have this criminal sent back to Reese City under armed escort, sir?’

Claremont didn’t hesitate. ‘That can be arranged.’

Pearce looked at him and said coldly: ‘I thought you said this wasn’t army business.’

‘It isn’t. I’m doing you a favour. That way or no way, Marshal.’ He pulled out his pocket watch and glanced irritably at it. ‘Haven’t those damned horses been watered and provisioned yet? God, if you want anything done in today’s army you’ve got to see to it yourself.’ He pushed back his chair and rose. ‘Excuse me, Governor, but we’re due to leave in half an hour. Back in a moment.’

Colonel Claremont left. Pearce said: ‘Well, he doesn’t pay the piper, the US tax-payer does that, but I suppose he calls the tune all the same. And half an hour?’ He took O’Brien’s arm and began to lead him towards the bar. ‘Little enough time to make up for ten years.’

Governor Fairchild said: ‘One moment, please, gentlemen.’ He delved into a briefcase and held up a sealed package. ‘Forgotten something, haven’t we. Major?’

‘Those old comrades’ reunions.’ He took the package and handed it across to Pearce. ‘The Marshal at Ogden asked us to pass this on to you.’

Pearce nodded his thanks and the two men headed towards the bar. As they went, O’Brien looked casually around him: the smiling Irish eyes missed nothing. Nothing had changed in the past five minutes, no movement appeared to have been made: the ancients at the bar and tables might have been figures frozen for eternity into a waxen tableau. It was just at that moment that the outer door opened and five men entered and made for a distant table. They sat down and one of them produced a pack of cards. None of them spoke.

O’Brien said: ‘A lively bunch of citizens you have in Reese City.’

‘All the lively citizens – and by “lively” I include quite a few who had to be helped on to the saddles of their horses – left some months ago when they made the big Bonanza strike in the Comstock Lode. All that’s left now are the old men – and God knows there are few enough of those around, growing old is not much of a habit in these parts – the drifters and the drunks, the shiftless and the ne’er-do-wells. Not that I’m complaining. Reese City needs a peace-keeping Marshal as much as the local cemetery does.’ He sighed, held up two fingers to the barman, produced a knife, sliced open the package that O’Brien had given him, extracted a bunch of very badly illustrated ‘Wanted’ notices and smoothed them out on the cracked linoleum of the bar-top.

O’Brien said: ‘You don’t seem very enthusiastic’

‘I’m not. Most of them arrive in Mexico six months before their pictures are circulated. Usually the wrong pictures of the wrong men, anyway.’

The Reese City railroad station building was in approximately the same state of decrepitude as the saloon bar of the Imperial Hotel. The scorching summers and sub-zero winters of the mountains had had their way with the untreated clapboard walls and, although not yet four years old, the building looked to be in imminent danger of falling to pieces. The gilt-painted sign REESE CITY was so blistered and weather-beaten as to be practically indecipherable.

Colonel Claremont pushed aside a sheet of canvas that had taken the place of a door long parted with its rusted-through hinges and called out for attention. There was no reply. Had the Colonel been better acquainted with the ways of life in Reese City he would have found little occasion for surprise in this, for apart from the time devoted to sleeping and eating and supervising the arrival and departure of trains – rare occasions, those, of which he was amply forewarned by friendly telegraph operators up and down the line – the station-master, the Union Pacific Railway’s sole employee in Reese City, was invariably to be found in the back room of the Imperial Hotel steadily consuming whisky as if it cost him nothing, which in fact it didn’t. There was an amicable but unspoken agreement between hotel proprietor and station-master: although all the hotel’s liquor supplies came by rail from Ogden, the hotel hadn’t received a freight bill for almost three years.

Claremont, anger in his face now, pushed aside the curtain and went out, his eyes running over the length of his troop train. Behind the highstacked locomotive and tender loaded with cordwood, were what appeared to be seven passenger coaches with a brake van at the end. That the fourth and fifth coaches were not, in fact, passenger coaches was obvious from the fact that two heavily sparred gangways reached up from the track-side to the centre of both. Standing at the foot of the first of the gangways was a burly, dark and splendidly moustached individual in shirt-sleeves, busy ticking items off a check-list he held in his hand. Claremont walked briskly towards him. He regarded Bellew as the best sergeant in the United States Cavalry while Bellew, in his turn, regarded Claremont as the finest CO he’d served under. Both men went to considerable lengths to conceal the opinions they held of each other.

Claremont nodded to Bellew, climbed up the first ramp and peered inside the coach. About four-fifths of its length had been fitted out with horse-stalls, the remaining space being given over to food and water. All the stalls were empty. Claremont descended the gangway.

‘Well, Bellew, where are the horses? Not to mention your troops. All to hell and gone, I suppose?’

Bellew, buttoning up his uniform jacket, was unruffled. ‘Fed and watered. Colonel. The men are taking them for a bit of a canter. After two days in the wagons they need the exercise, sir.’

‘So do I, but I haven’t the time for it. All right, all right, our four-legged friends are your responsibility, but get them aboard. We’re leaving in half an hour. Food and water enough for the horses till we reach the fort?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And for your men?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Fuel for all the stoves, including the horsetrucks? It’s going to be most damnably cold up in those mountains.’

‘Plenty, sir.’

‘For your sake, for all our sakes, there had better be. Where’s Captain Oakland? And Lieutenant Newell?’

‘They were here just before I took the men and the horses down to the livery stables. I saw them walking up to the front of the train as if they were heading for town. Aren’t they in town, sir?’

‘How the devil should I know? Would I be asking you if I did?’ Claremont’s irritation threshold was rapidly sinking towards a new low. ‘Have a detail find them. Tell them to report to me at the Imperial. My God! The Imperial!’

Bellew heaved a very perceptible but discreetly inaudible long-suffering sigh of relief as Claremont turned away and strode forward towards the locomotive. He swung himself up the iron steps into the driving cab. Chris Banlon, the engineer, was short and lean almost to the point of scrawniness; he had an almost incredibly wrinkled, nut-brown face which made a highly incongruous setting for a pair of periwinkle blue eyes. He was making some adjustments with the aid of a heavy monkey wrench. Becoming aware of Claremont’s presence, he made a last fractional adjustment to the bolt he was working on, returned the wrench to the tool-box and smiled at Claremont.

‘Afternoon, Colonel. This is a privilege.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Just making sure there is none, sir.’

‘Steam up?’

Banlon swung open the door of the fire-box. The blast of heat from the glowingly red-hot bed of cordwood made Claremont take a couple of involuntary steps backward. Banlon closed the door. ‘Ready to roll. Colonel.’

Claremont glanced to the rear where the tender was piled high with neatly stacked cordwood. ‘Fuel?’

‘Enough to last to the first depot. More than enough.’ Banlon glanced at the tender with pride. ‘Henry and I filled every last corner. A grand worker is Henry.’

‘Henry? The steward?’ The frown was in Claremont’s voice, not on his face. ‘And your mate – Jackson, isn’t it? The stoker?’

‘Me and my big mouth,’ Banlon said sadly. ‘I’ll never learn. Henry asked to help. Jackson – ah – helped us after.’

‘After what?’

‘After he’d come back from town with the beer.’ The extraordinarily bright blue eyes peered anxiously at Claremont. ‘I hope the Colonel doesn’t mind?’

Claremont was curt. ‘You’re railway employees, not soldiers. No concern of mine what you do – just so long as you don’t drink too much and drive us off one of the trestle bridges up in those damned mountains.’ He turned to go down the steps, then swung around again. ‘Seen Captain Oakland or Lieutenant Newell?’

‘Both of them, as a matter of fact. Stopped by here to chat to Henry and me, then went into town.’

‘Say where they were going?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

Thanks, anyway.’ He descended, looked down the train to where Bellew was saddling up his horse and called: ‘Tell the search detail that they are in town.’

Bellew gave a sketchy salute.

O’Brien and Pearce turned away from the bar in the hotel saloon, Pearce stuffing the ‘Wanted’ notices back into their envelope. Both men halted abruptly and turned as a shout of anger came from a distant corner of the room.

At the card table, a very large man, dressed in moleskin trousers and jacket that looked as if they had been inherited from his grandfather, and sporting a magnificent dark red beard, had risen to his feet and was leaning across the table. His right hand held what appeared to be a small cannon, which is not an unfair description of a Peacemaker Colt, while his left pinioned to the surface of the table the left wrist of a man sitting across the table from him. The face of the seated man was shadowed and indistinct, being largely obscured by a high-turned sheepskin collar and a black stetson pulled low on his forehead.

The man with the red beard said: That was once too often, friend.’

Pearce brought up by the table and said mildly: ‘What was once too often, Garritty?’

Garritty advanced the Peacemaker till the muzzle was less than six inches from the seated man’s face. ‘Slippery fingers here. Marshal. Cheating bastard’s taken a hundred and twenty dollars from me in fifteen minutes.’

Pearce glanced briefly over his shoulder, more out of instinct than any curiosity, as the saloon bar door opened and Colonel Claremont entered. Claremont halted briefly, located the current centre of action within two seconds and made his unhesitating way towards it: to play the part of bit player or spectator was not in Claremont’s nature. Pearce returned his attention to Garritty.

‘Maybe he’s just a good player.’

‘Good?’ Garritty appeared to smile but, behind all that russet foliage, his intended expression was almost wholly a matter for conjecture. ‘He’s brilliant – too brilliant by half. I can tell. You won’t forget. Marshal, that I have been playing cards for fifty years now.’

Pearce nodded. ‘You’ve left me the poorer for meeting you across the poker table.’

Garritty twisted the left wrist of the seated man, who struggled hopelessly to resist, but Garritty had more than all the leverage he required. With the back of the left wrist pressed to the table, the cards in the hand were exposed: face-cards all of them, the top being the ace of hearts.

Pearce said: ‘Looks a pretty fair hand to me.’

‘Fair is not the word I’d use.’ Garritty nodded to the deck on the table. ‘About the middle. Marshal …’

Pearce picked up what was left of the pack of cards and ruffled his way through them. Suddenly he stopped and turned up his right hand: another ace of hearts lay there. Pearce laid it face down on the table, took the ace of hearts from the stranger’s hand and laid it, also face down, beside the other. Their backs were identical. Pearce said: ‘Two matching decks. Who provided those?’

‘I’ll give you one guess.’ The overtones in Garritty’s voice were, in all conscience, grim enough: the undertones were considerably worse.

‘An old trick,’ the seated man said. His voice was low but, considering the highly compromising situation in which he found himself, remarkably steady. ‘Somebody put it there. Somebody who knew I had the ace.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Deakin. John Deakin.’

‘Stand up, Deakin.’ The man did so. Pearce moved leisurely round the table until he was face to face with Deakin. Their eyes were on a level. Pearce said: ‘Gun?’

‘No gun.’

‘You surprise me. I should have thought a gun would have been essential for a man like you – for self-defence, if nothing else.’

‘I’m not a man of violence.’

‘I’ve got the feeling you’re going to experience some whether you like it or not.’ With his right hand Pearce lifted the left-hand side of Deakin’s sheepskin coat while with his free hand he delved into the depth of Deakin’s inside lining pocket. After a few seconds’ preliminary exploration he withdrew his left hand and fanned out an interesting variety of aces and face-cards.

‘My, my,’ O’Brien murmured. ‘What’s known as playing it close to the chest.’

Pearce pushed the money lying in front of Deakin across to Garritty, who made no attempt to pick it up. Garritty said harshly: ‘My money is not enough.’

‘I know it isn’t.’ Pearce was being patient. ‘You should have gathered as much from what I said. You know my position, Garritty. Cheating at cards is hardly a Federal offence, so I can’t interfere. But if I see violence taking place before my eyes – well, as the local peace-keeper, I’m bound to interfere. Give me your gun.’

‘My pleasure.’ The ring of ominous satisfaction in Garritty’s voice was there for all to hear. He handed his mammoth pistol across to Pearce, glared at Deakin and jerked his thumb in the direction of the front door. Deakin remained motionless. Garritty rounded the table and repeated the gesture. Deakin made an almost imperceptible motion of the head, but one unmistakably negative. Garritty struck him, backhanded, across the face. There was no reaction. Garritty said: ‘Outside!’

‘I told you,’ Deakin said. ‘I’m not a man of violence.’

Garritty swung viciously and without warning at him. Deakin staggered backwards, caught a chair behind his knees and fell heavily to the floor. Hatless now, he remained as he had fallen, quite conscious and propped on one elbow, but making no attempt to move. Blood trickled from a corner of his mouth. In what must have been an unprecedented effort, every single member of the regular clientele had risen to his feet: together, they pressed forward to get a closer view of the proceedings. The expressions on their faces registered a slow disbelief ultimately giving way to something close to utter contempt. The bright red thread of violence was an integral and unquestionable element of the warp and woof of the frontier way of life: unrequited violence, the meek acceptance of insult or injury without any attempt at physical retaliation, was the ultimate degradation, that of manhood destroyed.

Garritty stared down at the unmoving Deakin in frustrated incredulity, in a steadily increasing anger which was rapidly stripping him of the last vestiges of self-control. Pearce, who had moved forward to forestall Garritty’s next expression of a clearly intended mayhem, was looking oddly puzzled: then the puzzlement was replaced by what seemed an instant realization. Mechanically, almost, as Garritty took a step forward and swung back his right foot with a clearly near-homicidal intent, Pearce also took a step forward and buried a none too gentle right elbow in Garritty’s diaphragm. Garritty, almost retching, gasped in pain and doubled over, both hands clutching his midriff: he was having temporary difficulty in breathing.

Pearce said: ‘I warned you, Garritty. No violence in front of a US Marshal. Any more of this and you’ll be my guest for the night. Not that that’s important now. I’m afraid the matter is out of your hands now.’

Garritty tried to straighten himself, an exercise that clearly provided him with no pleasure at all. His voice, when he finally spoke, was like that of a bull-frog with laryngitis.

‘What the hell do you mean – it’s out of my hands?’

‘It’s Federal business now.’

Pearce slipped the ‘Wanted’ notices from their envelope, leafed rapidly through them, selected a certain notice, returned the remainder to the envelope, glanced briefly at the notice in his hand. glanced just as briefly at Deakin, then turned and beckoned to Colonel Claremont who, without so much as a minuscule twitch of the eyebrows, walked forward to join Pearce and O’Brien. Wordlessly, Pearce showed Claremont the paper in his hand. The picture of the wanted man, little better than a daguerreotype print, was a greyish sepia in colour, blurred and cloudy and indistinct in outline: but it was unmistakably a true likeness of the man who called himself John Deakin.

Pearce said: ‘Well, Colonel, I guess this buys me my train ticket after all.’

Claremont looked at him and said nothing. His expression didn’t say very much either, just that of a man politely waiting.

Pearce read from the notice: “Wanted: for gambling debts, theft, arson and murder.”’

‘A nice sense of priorities,’ O’Brien murmured.

‘“John Houston alias John Murray alias John Deakin alias” – well, never mind, alias a lot of things. “Formerly lecturer in medicine at the University of Nevada.”’

‘University?’ Claremont’s tone reflected the slight astonishment in his face. ‘In those Godforsaken mountains?’

‘Can’t stop progress, Colonel. Opened in Elko. This year.’ He read on: ‘“Dismissed for gambling debts and illegal gambling. Embezzlement of university funds subsequently discovered, attributed to wanted man. Traced to Lake’s Crossing and trapped in hardware store. To cover escape, used kerosene to set fire to store. Ensuing blaze ran out of control and central part of Lake’s Crossing destroyed with the loss of seven lives.”’

Pearce’s statement gave rise to a splendid series of expressions among onlookers and listeners, ranging from incredulity to horror, from anger to revulsion. Only Pearce and O’Brien and, curiously enough, Deakin himself, registered no emotion whatsoever.

Pearce continued: ‘“Traced to railroad repair shops at Sharps. Blew up wagonload of explosives destroying three sheds and all rolling stock. Present whereabouts unknown.”

Garritty’s voice was still a croak. ‘He – this is the man who burnt down Lake’s Crossing and blew up Sharps?’

‘If we are to believe this notice, and I do believe it, this is indeed the man. We all know about the long arm of coincidence but this would be stretching things a bit too far. Kind of puts your paltry hundred and twenty dollars into its right perspective, doesn’t it, Garritty? By the way, I’d pocket that money right now if I were you – nobody’s going to be seeing Deakin for a long, long time to come.’ He folded the notice and looked at Claremont. ‘Well?’

‘They won’t need a jury. But it’s still not Army business.’

Pearce unfolded the notice, handed it to Claremont. ‘I didn’t read it all out, the notice was too long.’ He pointed to a paragraph. ‘I missed this bit, for instance.’

Claremont read aloud : ‘“The explosives wagon in the Sharps episode was en route to the United States Army Ordnance Depot at Sacramento, California.” He folded the paper, handed it back and nodded. ‘This makes it Army business.’

TWO

Colonel Claremont, whose explosive temper normally lay very close to the surface indeed, was clearly making a Herculean effort to keep it under control. It was just as clearly a losing battle. A meticulous and exceptionally thorough individual, one who cleaved to prescribed detail and routine, one who had a powerful aversion to the even tenor of his ways being interrupted, far less disrupted, and one who was totally incapable of suffering either fools or incompetence gladly, Claremont had not yet devised, and probably never would devise, a safety-valve for his only failing as an officer and a man. Not for him the gradual release of or sublimation for the rapid and rapidly increasing frustration-based anger that simmered just below boiling point and did all sorts of bad things to his blood pressure. In geological terms, he neither vented volcanic gases nor released surplus superheated energy in the form of spouts and geysers: like Krakatoa, he just blew his top, and the results, at least for those in his immediate vicinity, were, more often than not, only a slight degree less devastating.

The Colonel had an audience of eight. A rather apprehensive Governor, Marica, chaplain and doctor stood just outside the main entrance to the Imperial: some little way along the boardwalk O’Brien, Pearce and Deakin were also watching the Colonel in full cry, although it was noticeable that Pearce had an even closer eye for Deakin than he did for the Colonel. The eighth member was the unfortunate Sergeant Bellew. He was rigidly at attention, or as rigid as one can be when seated on a highly restive horse, with his gaze studiously fixed on a point about a couple of light years beyond the Colonel’s left shoulder. The afternoon had turned cold but Bellew was sweating profusely.

‘Everywhere?’ Claremont’s disbelief was total and he made no attempt to hide it. ‘You’ve searched everywhere?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Officers of the United States Cavalry can hardly be a common sight hereabouts. Someone’s bound to have seen them.’

‘No one we talked to, sir. And we talked to everyone we saw.’

‘Impossible, man, impossible!’

‘Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.’ Bellew abandoned his rapt contemplation of infinity, focused his eyes on the Colonel’s face and said, almost in quiet desperation: ‘We can’t find them, sir.’

The colour of the Colonel’s complexion deepened to a dangerous hue. It required no great feat of the imagination to see that the lava of his fury was about to erupt. Pearce took a couple of hasty steps forward and said: ‘Maybe I can. Colonel. I can pick twenty, thirty men who know every hole and corner in this town – and heaven knows there are not a great number of those. Twenty minutes and we’ll find them. If they’re here to be found.’

‘What the devil do you mean – if?’

‘What I say.’ It was obvious that Pearce was in no placatory mood. ‘I’m offering to be of assistance – and I don’t have to offer. I don’t expect a “thank you”, I don’t even expect an acceptance. A little courtesy would help, though. Yes or no.’

Claremont hesitated, his blood pressure fractionally easing. He’d been brought up short by Pearce’s curt tone and had to remind himself, painfully and almost forcibly, that he was dealing with a civilian, one of that unfortunate majority over whom he had neither control nor authority. Claremont kept his contact with civilians to a basic minimum, with the result that he had almost forgotten how to talk to them. But the root cause of his temporary indecision was the galling and humiliating prospect that those unwashed and undisciplined derelicts of Reese City might succeed where his own beloved troops had failed. When he did reply it cost him a very considerable effort to speak as he did.

‘Very well. Marshal. Please do that. And thank you. Departure time, then, twenty minutes. We’ll wait down at the depot.’

‘I’ll be there. A favour in return. Colonel. Could you detail two or three of your men to escort the prisoner to the train?’

‘An escort?’ Claremont was openly contemptuous. ‘Hardly, I would have thought, a man of violence, Marshal.’

Pearce said mildly: ‘It depends upon what you mean by violence, Colonel. Where the violence involves himself – well, we’ve seen he’s no lover of bar-room brawls. But on his past record he’s quite capable of burning down the Imperial or blowing up your precious troop train the moment my back is turned.’

Leaving Claremont with this cheerful thought, Pearce hurried into the Imperial. Claremont said to Bellew: ‘Call off your men. Take the prisoner down to the train. Have his hands tied behind his back and put him on an eighteen-inch hobble. Our friend here seems to have the habit of disappearing into thin air.’

‘Who do you think you are? God almighty?’ There was a trace, slight though the combination was, of self-righteous anger and quavering defiance in Deakin’s voice. ‘You can’t do this to me. You’re not a lawman. You’re only a soldier.’

‘Only a soldier. Why, you–’ Claremont held himself in check then said with some satisfaction: ‘A twelve-inch hobble. Sergeant Bellew.’

‘That will be a pleasure, sir.’ It was obviously an even greater pleasure for Sergeant Bellew to have his and his Colonel’s displeasure directed against a common antagonist, however innocuous that antagonist might seem, rather than have the Colonel’s wrath directed against him personally. Bellew withdrew a whistle from his tunic, took a deep breath and blew three ear-piercing blasts in rapid succession. Claremont winced, made a gesture that the others should follow him and led the way down towards the depot. After about a hundred yards, Claremont, O’Brien by his side, stopped and looked back. There was issuing forth from the doors of the Imperial what must have been an unprecedented exodus in the annals of Reese City. The motley crew could hardly have been classified under the heading of the halt and the lame and the blind, but they came pretty close to qualifying for it.

Due to the fact that the dilution of their whisky with water would have brought immediate and permanent ostracism to any of the Imperial’s devoted clientele, at least half of those who emerged had the rolling, weaving gait of a windjammer sailor who had spent too long at sea. Two of them limped badly and one, no soberer than the rest, was making remarkably good time on a pair of crutches; he at least had the support that the others lacked. Pearce joined them and issued what appeared to be a series of rapid instructions. O’Brien watched the grey-bearded band disperse in a variety of directions and slowly shook his head from side to side.

He said: ‘If they were on a treasure hunt for a buried bottle of bourbon, I’d have my money on them any day. As it is–’

‘I know, I know,’ Claremont turned dispiritedly and resumed the trek to the depot. Smoke and steam were issuing profusely and Banlon, clearly, had a full head of steam up. The engineer looked out.

‘Any signs, sir?’

‘I’m afraid not, Banlon.’

Banlon hesitated. ‘Still want me to keep a full head of steam up, Colonel?’

‘And why not?’

‘You mean – we’re going to pull out with or without the Captain and the Lieutenant?’

‘That’s precisely what I mean. Fifteen minutes, Banlon. Just fifteen minutes.’

‘But Captain Oakland and Lieutenant Newell–’

‘They’ll just have to catch the next train, won’t they?’

‘But, sir, that might be days–’

‘At the moment, I’m hardly in the mood to worry over the welfare of the Captain and the Lieutenant.’ He turned to the others and gestured towards the steps leading up to the front of the first coach. ‘It’s cold and it’s going to be a damned sight colder. Governor, with your permission, I’d like Major O’Brien stay with me a little. Just until this fellow Deakin is brought along. Nothing against my own men, mind you, none better, but I don’t trust them to cope with a slippery customer like Deakin. But I think the Major can cope admirably – and without exerting himself unduly. Just till Pearce gets back.’

O’Brien smiled and said nothing. Governor Fairchild nodded his agreement, then hastily mounted the steps. Even in the past fifteen minutes the late afternoon had become noticeably colder.

Claremont nodded briefly to O’Brien, then slowly began to walk the length of the train, from time to time slapping his very English swaggerstick – his sole concession to individuality or eccentricity, it all depended upon how one viewed it – against his leather riding boots. Colonel Claremont knew next to nothing about trains but he had been born with an inspectorial eye and rarely passed up the opportunity of exercising it. Further, he was the commandant of the train and Claremont believed in keeping a close and jealous eye upon his own, however temporarily that property might remain in his keeping.

The first coach consisted of the officers’ day compartment – that into which the Governor had so recently and thankfully disappeared – the night compartments for the Governor and his niece and, at the rear, the officers’ dining saloon. The second coach consisted of the galley, sleeping quarters for Henry and Carlos who were steward and cook respectively, and the officers’ night compartment. The third coach was the supply wagon, the fourth and fifth the horse wagons. The first quarter of the sixth wagon was given over to the troops’ galley, while the remainder of it and all of the seventh coach was given over to the troops’ accommodation. None the wiser for his tour of inspection, Claremont reached the brake van, then, hearing the sound of hooves, looked towards the front of the train. Bellew had rounded up his lost sheep: as far as Claremont could ascertain he had the entire cavalry detachment with him.

Sergeant Bellew himself was in the lead. He held loosely in his left hand a rope, the other end of which was looped round Deakin’s neck. Deakin himself, because of the twelve-inch hobble, was forced to walk in a ludicrously fast, stiff-legged gait, more like a marionette than a human being. It was a shameful and humiliating position for any grown man to find himself in but it left Claremont totally unmoved. He paused just long enough to see O’Brien move out to intercept Bellew, then swung himself up the brake van’s steps, pushed open the door and passed inside.

Compared to the chill outside, the atmosphere inside the brake van was close on stifling, almost oppressively hot. The reason for this was not far to seek: the cordwood-burning stove in one corner of the van had been stoked with such skill and devotion that its circular, removable cast-iron top glowed a far from dull red. To one side of the stove was a bin well stacked with cordwood: beyond that again was a food cupboard – if the cordwood bin was anything to go by, Claremont thought, the cupboard would be far from empty – and beyond that again was the massive brake wheel. To the other side of the stove was a massive and massively over-stuffed armchair then, finally, a mattress piled high with faded army issue blankets and what looked like a couple of bearskins.

Almost buried in the depths of the armchair and reading a book through a pair of steel-rimmed and steel-legged glasses was a man who could only, in all fairness to the ancient cliche, be described as a grizzled veteran. He had a four-day growth of white beard on his face; his hair, if hair he had, was invisible beneath what looked like a Dutch bargee’s peaked hat, pulled low over the ears, no doubt to keep out the cold. He was cocooned in considerable but indeterminate layers of clothing, the whole topped off with an Eskimotype anorak made from equally indeterminate furs. To defeat the ill intent of even the most cunning of draughts, a heavy Navajo blanket stretched from his waist to his ankles.

As Claremont entered, the brakeman stirred, courteously removed his glasses and peered at Claremont with pale blue watery eyes. He blinked in surprise, then said: ‘This is indeed an honour, Colonel Claremont.’ Although over sixty years had passed since the brakeman had made his one and only crossing of the Atlantic, his Irish brogue was still so pronounced that he could have left his native Connemara only the previous day. He struggled to rise – no easy task from the position into which he had wedged himself – but Claremont waved him to sit down. The brakeman complied willingly and cast a meaningful glance towards the opened door.

Claremont made haste to close it and said: ‘Devlin, isn’t it?’

‘Seamus Devlin at your service, sir.’

‘Bit of a lonely life you lead here, isn’t it?’

‘It all depends upon what you mean by lonely, sir. Sure, I’m alone but I’m never lonely.’ He closed the book he had been reading and clasped it tight in both hands. ‘If you want a lonely job. Colonel, it’s up there in the driver’s cab. Sure, you’ve got your fireman, but you can’t talk to him, not with all that racket up front there. And when it’s raining or snowing or sleeting you’ve got to keep looking out to see where you’re going, so that you’re either frying or freezing. I should know, I spent forty-five years on the footplate but I got a bit past it a few years ago.’ He looked around him with some pride. ‘Reckon I’ve got the best job in the Union Pacific here. My own stove, my own food, my own bed, my own armchair–’

‘I was going to ask you about that,’ Claremont said curiously. ‘Hardly Union Pacific standard issue, I should have thought.’

‘I must have picked it up somewhere,’ Devlin said vaguely.

‘Many more years to retirement?’

Devlin smiled, almost conspiratorially. ‘The Colonel is very – what do you say? – diplomatic. Yes, that’s right, diplomatic. Well, sir, you’re right, I’m afraid I’m a mite old for the job but I kind of lost my birth certificate years ago and that made things a bit difficult for the Union Pacific. This is my last trip, Colonel. When I get back east, it’s my grand-daughter’s home and the old fireside for me.’

‘May heaven rain cordwood upon you,’ Claremont murmured.

‘Eh? I mean, I beg the Colonel’s pardon.’

‘Nothing. Tell me, Devlin, how do you pass the time here?’

‘Well, I cook and eat and sleep and–’

‘Yes, now. How about sleep? If you’re asleep and a bad corner or a steep descent comes up what–’

‘No trouble, sir. Chris – that’s Banlon the engineer – and I have what they call these days communication. Just a wire inside a tube, but it works. Chris gives half a dozen pulls, the bell rings in here and I give one pull back to show that I’m in the land of the living, like. Then he gives one, two, three or four pulls, all depends how much pressure he wants me to put on the wheel. Never failed yet, sir.’

‘But you can’t spend all your time just eating and sleeping?’

‘I read, sir. I read a lot. Hours every day.’

Claremont looked around. ‘You’ve got your library pretty well hidden.’

‘I haven’t got a library. Colonel. Just this one book. It’s all I ever read.’ He turned the book he held in his hand and showed it to Claremont: it was an ancient and sadly battered family Bible.

‘I see.’ Colonel Claremont, a strictly nonchurchgoer whose closest brushes with religion came in his not infrequent conducting of burial services, felt and looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘Well, Devlin, let’s hope for a safe trip to Fort Humboldt and a safe last passage back east for you.’

‘Thank you, sir. Much obliged, I’m sure.’ Devlin had resumed his steel spectacles and had the Bible opened even before the Colonel had the brake van door closed behind him.

Claremont walked briskly towards the front of the train. Bellew and half a dozen of his men were busy dismantling the horse wagon ramps. Claremont said: ‘Livestock and men. All accounted for?’

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘Five minutes?’

‘Easily, Colonel.’

Claremont nodded and continued on his way. Pearce appeared round the corner of the depot building and hurried towards him. Pearce said: ‘I know you’ll never do it. Colonel, but you really do owe Bellew and his men an apology.’

‘No signs of them? None at all?’

‘Wherever they are, they’re not in Reese City. My life on it.’

Claremont’s first reaction, oddly enough, had been one almost of relief – relief that Pearce and his derelict posse had not succeeded where his own men had failed. But now the full implication of their apparent desertion or unforgivably delayed absence returned with renewed force and he said without unclenching his teeth: ‘I’ll have them court-martialled and dismissed the service for this.’

Pearce looked at him speculatively and said: i never met them, of course. Like that, were they?’

‘No, dammit, they weren’t.’ Claremont slashed viciously at the side of his riding boot and barely repressed his wince of pain. ‘Oakland and Newell were two of the finest officers I’ve ever had serve under me. But no exceptions, no exceptions. Fine officers, all the same, fine officers – Come on, Marshal. Time we were gone.’

Pearce boarded the train. Claremont looked back to check that the horse wagon doors were closed, then turned and raised his hand. Banlon gave an acknowledging wave from his cab, moved inside and opened the steam regulator. The driving wheels slipped once, twice, three times; then they began to bite.

THREE

By dusk, the troop train had left Reese City and the level plateau on which it stood So far behind that both were completely lost to sight. The high plain had now given way to the foothills of the true mountain country and the train was climbing gently up a long, wide, pine-wooded valley, the undulations of the track following closely those of the rock-strewn river alongside which it ran. The heavens were dark, there was no trace of the afterglow of sunset that must have been hidden behind those lowering clouds; there would be no stars, that night, and no moon; the leaden sky promised only one thing – snow.

The occupants of the officers’ day compartment, understandably enough, displayed a minimum of concern for the chill bleakness and plainly deteriorating weather in the world beyond their windows. Cocooned as they were in warmth and ease and comfort, it seemed not only pointless but downright wrong to dwell upon the rigours without. Luxury is a pervasive anodyne and, for what was supposed to be an army troop train, the officers’ compartment was unquestionably very luxurious indeed. There were two deep couches with split arm-rests at the front and back, and several scattered armchairs, all splendidly upholstered in buttoned-down brushed green velvet. The embroidered looped-back window curtains, held in place by tasselled silken cords, were made of what appeared to be the same material. The carpet was rust-coloured and deep of pile. There were several highly polished mahogany tables in the vicinity of the couches and chairs. In the right-hand front corner was a liquor cabinet, which was clearly not there for the purposes of display. The entire compartment was bathed in a warm amber glow from the gimballed and gleaming copper oil-lamps.

There were eight occupants of the compartment, seven of them with glasses in their hands. Nathan Pearce, seated beside Marica on the rear couch, had a glass of whisky, while she held a glass of port wine. On the front couch, the Governor and Colonel Claremont, and in two of the three armchairs, Dr Molyneux and Major O’Brien all held whisky glasses. In the third armchair the Rev. Theodore Peabody had a glass of mineral water and an expression of righteous superiority. The only person without a refreshment of any kind was John Deakin. Apart from the fact that it would have been unthinkable to offer hospitality to a criminal of such note, he would in any case have found it physically impossible to raise a glass to his lips as both hands were bound behind his back. His ankles, too, were tied. He was sitting on the floor, most uncomfortably hunched, close by the passageway leading to the night compartments. Apart from Marica, who cast him an occasionally troubled glance, none of the others present appeared to feel that Deakin’s presence there constituted a jarring note. On the frontier, life was cheap and suffering so commonplace as hardly to merit notice, far less sympathy.

Nathan Pearce lifted his glass. ‘Your very good health, gentlemen. My word. Colonel, I never knew the army travelled in such style. No wonder our taxes–’

Claremont was curt. ‘The army, Marshal, does not travel in such style. This is Governor Fairchild’s private coach. Behind your back are the two sleeping compartments normally reserved for the Governor and his wife – in this case the Governor and his niece – and beyond that again their private dining compartment. The Governor has very kindly offered to let us travel and eat with him.’

Pearce raised his glass again. ‘Well, bully for you. Governor.’ He paused and looked quizzically at Fairchild. ‘What’s the matter. Governor? You look a mite worried to me.’

The Governor did, indeed, look a trifle worried. He seemed paler than usual, his face drawn, his lips compressed. He forced a smile, emptied and refilled his glass and attempted to speak lightly.

‘Matters of state, my dear Marshal, matters of state. Life in the legislature is not all receptions and balls, you know.’

‘I’m sure it’s not. Governor.’ Pearce’s pacific tone turned to one of curiosity. ‘Why are you along on this trip, sir? I mean, as a civilian–’

O’Brien interrupted. ‘A governor has full military powers in his own state, Nathan. Surely you know that.’

Fairchild said pontifically: ‘There are certain matters calling for my personal presence and attention in Fort Humboldt.’ He glanced at Claremont, who gave a tiny shake of his head. ‘More I can’t say – not, that is, at the moment.’

Pearce nodded, as if satisfied, and did not pursue the topic. A silence, not wholly comfortable, fell over the compartment, and was interrupted only twice by the entrance of Henry, the tall, immensely thin and almost cadaverous steward, once to top up glasses, once to replenish the cordwood-burning stove. Deakin’s head had fallen forward on to his chest and his eyes were closed: he was either shutting out the world around him or had genuinely fallen asleep, which would have been no mean feat for a man trussed as uncomfortably as he was and having to brace himself, however unconsciously, against the increasingly erratic movements of the coach. The train, having reached a comparatively level stretch, had picked up speed and was beginning to sway from side to side. Even in those plushly upholstered seats, the motion was becoming distinctly uncomfortable.

Marica said uneasily to the Governor: ‘Must we go so fast. Uncle Charles? Why all the fearful hurry?’

Claremont answered for the Governor. ‘Because the engineer. Miss Fairchild, is under orders to make the best speed possible. And because this is an army relief train, and we’re late. The United States Cavalry does not like to be late – and we’re already two days behind schedule.’ He lifted his eyes as Henry entered a third time and loomed there, the very image of the melancholy dyspeptic to whom, apparently, life was an intolerable burden.

‘Governor, Colonel. Dinner is served.’

The dining-room was small, holding only two four-seater tables, but was furnished to the same luxurious standards as the day saloon. The Governor, his niece, Claremont and O’Brien were seated at one table, Pearce, Dr Molyneux and the Rev. Peabody at the other. There were some bottles of both red and white wines on the table and, by some legerdemain known only to Henry, the white wine was actually chilled. Henry himself moved around with a quiet if lugubrious efficiency.

Peabody lifted an austere hand against Henry’s offer of wine, turned his glass, in what was clearly intended to be a significant gesture, upside down on the tablecloth, then resumed gazing at Pearce with an expression of mingled awe and horrified fascination.

Peabody said: ‘By coincidence. Marshal, both the doctor and I come from Ohio, but even in those distant parts everyone has heard of you. My word, it is an odd sensation. Peculiar, most peculiar. I mean, to be sitting here, in person, so to speak, with the most famous – ah – lawman in the West.’

Pearce smiled. ‘Notorious, you mean. Reverend.’

‘No, no, no! Famous, I assure you.’ Peabody’s assurances were made in a very hasty fashion. ‘A man of peace, of God, if you want, but I do clearly appreciate that it was in the line of duty that you had to kill all those scores of Indians–’

Pearce said protestingly : ‘Easy on. Reverend, easy on. Not scores, just a handful and even then only when I had to. And there was hardly an Indian among them, mostly white renegades and outlaws – and that was years ago. Today, I’m like you – I’m a man of peace. Ask the Governor – he’ll bear me out.’

Peabody steeled himself. ‘Then why do you carry two guns. Marshal?’

‘Because if I don’t, I’m dead. There are at least a dozen men, most of them recently released from the prisons to which I sent them, who would dearly love to have my head on a platter. None of them will pull a gun on me, because I have acquired a certain reputation in the use of a hand gun. But my reputation would offer me as much protection as a sheet of paper if any of them ever found me without a gun.’ Pearce tapped his guns. ‘Those aren’t offensive weapons. Reverend. Those are my insurance policies.’

Peabody carefully hid his disbelief. ‘A man of peace?’

‘Now? Yes. I was an army scout once, an Indian fighter, if you like. There are still plenty around. But a man gets sick of killing.’

‘A man?’ Despite what he probably imagined as his poker face, the preacher was manifestly still unconvinced. ‘You?’

‘There are more ways of pacifying Indians than shooting holes in them. I asked the Governor here to appoint me Indian agent for the territory. I settle differences between Indians and whites, allocate reservations, try and stop the traffic in guns and whisky and see to it that the undesirable whites are removed from the territory.’ He smiled. ‘Which is part of my job as Marshal anyway. It’s slow work, but I’m making a little progress. I think the Paiutes almost trust me now. Which reminds me.’ He looked at the other table. Colonel.’

Claremont lifted an enquiring eyebrow.

‘Might be a good idea to have the curtains pulled about now, sir. We’re running into hostile territory, and there’s no point in drawing unnecessary attention to ourselves.’

‘So soon? Well, you should know. Henry! You heard? Then go tell Sergeant Bellew to do the same.’

Peabody tugged Pearce’s sleeve. His face was a mask of apprehension. ‘Hostile territory, did you say? Hostile Indians?’

‘Mainly we just call them hostiles.’

Pearce’s indifference served only to deepen Peabody’s fears. ‘But – but you said they trusted you!’

‘That’s right. They trust me.’

‘Ah!’ What this meant was not clear, nor did Peabody care to elaborate. He just swallowed several times in rapid succession and lapsed into silence.

Henry served them coffee in the day compartment while O’Brien displayed considerable efficiency in dispensing brandy and liqueurs from the liquor cabinet. With all windows tightly closed and the top of the stove beginning to glow a dull red, the temperature in the compartment had risen into the eighties, but no one seemed unduly perturbed about this. On the frontier, extremes of heat and cold were an inevitable part of the way of life and phlegmatically accepted as such. The green velvet curtains were closely drawn. Deakin had his eyes open and, propped on one elbow, seemed more uncomfortable than ever, but because discomfort, like heat and cold, was also an integral part of the frontier, he received, apart from the occasional vexed glance from Marica, scant attention and even less sympathy. After some desultory small-talk, Dr Molyneux put his glass on the table, rose, stretched his arms and patted a yawn to discreet extinction.

He said: ‘If you will excuse me. I have a hard day ahead tomorrow and an oldster like me needs his sleep.’

Marica said politely: ‘A hard day, Dr Molyneux?’

‘I’m afraid so. Most of our medical stores in the supply wagon were loaded at Ogden only yesterday. Must have them all checked before we get to Fort Humboldt.’

Marica looked at him in amused curiosity. ‘Why all the great hurry, Dr Molyneux? Couldn’t it wait till you get there?’ When he made no immediate answer she said smilingly: ‘Or is this epidemic at Fort Humboldt, influenza or gastric influenza or whatever you said it was, already out of control?’

Molyneux did not return her smile. ‘The epidemic at Fort Humboldt–’ He broke off, eyed Marica speculatively, then swung round to look at Colonel Claremont. ‘I suggest that any further concealment is not only pointless and childish but downright insulting to a group of supposedly intelligent adults. There was, I admit, a need for secrecy to allay unnecessary fear – well, if you like, understandable fear – but all those aboard the train are now cut off from the rest of the world, and will remain that way, until we arrive at the Fort where they’re bound to find out–’

Claremont raised a weary hand to dam the flow of words. ‘I take your point. Doctor, I take your point. I suppose we may as well tell. Dr Molyneux here is not an Army doctor and never will be. And, by the same coin, he’s not any ordinary run-of-the-mill general practitioner – he is a leading specialist in tropical diseases. The troops aboard this train are not relief troops – they are replacement troops for the many soldiers who have died in Fort Humboldt.’

The puzzlement on Marica’s face shaded quickly into fear. Her voice, now, was little more than a whisper. ‘The soldiers – the many soldiers who have died–’

‘I wish to God, Miss Fairchild, that we didn’t have to answer your questions as to why the train is in such a hurry or why Dr Molyneux is in such a hurry or the Marshal’s question as to why the Governor is so anxious.’ He squeezed his eyes with his hand, then shook his head. ‘Fort Humboldt is in the grip of a deadly cholera epidemic’

Of the Colonel’s seven listeners, only two registered anything more than a minimal reaction. The Governor, Molyneux and O’Brien were already aware of the existence of the epidemic. Pearce lifted only one eyebrow, and fractionally at that; the semi-recumbent Deakin merely looked thoughtful; apparently he was even less given than Pearce to untoward displays of emotional reaction. To an outside observer the lack of response on the part of those five might have appeared disappointing: but this lack was overcompensated for by Marica and the Rev. Peabody: fear and horror showed in the former’s face, a stunned and disbelieving shock in the latter’s. Marica was the first to speak.

‘Cholera! Cholera! My father–’

‘I know, my child, I know.’ The Governor rose, crossed to her seat and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘I would have spared you this, Marica, but I thought that if – well, if your father were ill, you might like–’

The Rev. Peabody’s recovery from his state of shock was spectacularly swift. From the depths of his armchair he propelled himself to his feet like a jack-in-the-box, his face a mask of incredulous outrage. His voice had moved into the falsetto register.

‘How dare you! Governor Fairchild, how dare you! To expose this poor child to the risks, the awful risks, of this – this dreadful pestilence. Words fail me. I insist that we return immediately to Reese City and – and–’

‘Return how?’ O’Brien maintained a carefully neutral tone and expression. ‘It’s no easy feat, Reverend, to turn a train on a single track railway.’

‘For heaven’s sake, padre, what do you take us for?’ Claremont’s surging irritability couldn’t have been more clearly demonstrated by the waving of a red flag. ‘Assassins? Would-be suicides? Or just plain fools? We have provisions aboard this train to last a month. And aboard this train we will remain, all of us, until Dr Molyneux pronounces the camp free from the epidemic’

‘But you can’t, you can’t!’ Marica rose, clutched Dr Molyneux by the arm and said almost desperately: ‘I know you’re a doctor, but doctors have as much chance – more chance – of catching cholera than anyone else.’

Molyneux gently patted the anxious hand. ‘Not this doctor. I’ve had cholera – and survived. I’m immune. Good night.’

From his semi-recumbent position on the floor Deakin said: ‘Where did you catch it. Doctor?’

Everyone stared at him in surprise. Felons, like little children, were supposed to be seen and not heard. Pearce pushed himself halfway to his feet, but Molyneux waved him down.

‘In India,’ Molyneux said. ‘Where I studied the disease.’ He smiled without much humour. ‘At very, very close quarters. Why?’

‘Curiosity. When?’

‘Eight, ten years ago. Again why?’

‘You heard the Marshal read out my wanted notice. I know a little about medicine. Just interested, that’s all.’

For a few moments Molyneux, his face oddly intent, studied Deakin. Then he nodded briefly to the company and left.

This,’ Pearce said thoughtfully, ‘isn’t nice. The news, I mean. How many at the last count. Colonel? Of the garrison, I mean. The dead.’

Claremont glanced interrogatively at O’Brien, who was his usual prompt and authoritative self. ‘At the last count – that was about six hours ago – there were fifteen. That is out of a garrison of seventy-six. We don’t have figures as to the numbers stricken but still alive but Molyneux, who is very experienced in such matters, estimates, on the basis of the number of the dead, that anything between two-thirds and threequarters of the remainder must be affected.’

Pearce said: ‘So possibly there are no more than fifteen fit soldiers left to defend the Fort?’

‘Possibly.’

‘What a chance for White Hand. If he knew about this.’

‘White Hand? Your bloodthirsty chief of the Paiutes?’ Pearce nodded his head and O’Brien shook his. ‘We’ve thought of this possibility and discounted it. We all know about White Hand’s obsessive hatred of the white man in general and the United States Cavalry in particular, but we also know that he’s very, very far from being a fool. If he weren’t, the Army or –’ O’Brien permitted himself a slight smile – ‘our intrepid lawmen of the West would have nabbed him quite some time ago. If White Hand knows that Fort Humboldt is so desperately under-manned, then he’ll know why and will avoid the Fort like the plague.’ Another smile, but wintry this time. ‘Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be clever.’

Marica said shakily: ‘My father?’

‘No. Clear so far.’

‘You mean–’

‘I’m sorry.’ O’Brien touched her arm lightly. ‘All I mean is that I know no more about it than you do.’

‘Fifteen of God’s children taken to their rest.’ Peabody’s voice emerged from the depths of the sepulchre. ‘I wonder how many more of those poor souls will have been taken from us come the dawn.’

‘Come the dawn,’ Claremont said shortly, ‘we’ll find out.’ Claremont, clearly, was increasingly of the opinion that the padre was a less than desirable person to have around in circumstances such as these.

‘You’ll find out?’ Again the millimetric raising of Pearce’s right eyebrow. ‘How?’

‘There’s no magic. We have a portable telegraph transmitter aboard. We clamp a long lead on to the railroad telegraph wires: that way we contact the fort to the west of Reese City – even Ogden – to the east.’ He looked at Marica, who had turned away. ‘You are leaving us, Miss Fairchild.’

‘I’m – I’m just tired.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Not your fault. Colonel, but you’re not the bearer of very good news.’ She walked away stopped by the passageway entrance and looked for a long, considering moment at Deakin, then swung round to face Pearce.

‘Is this poor man to get nothing at all to eat or drink?’

‘Poor man!’ There was open contempt in Pearce’s voice but it was clearly directed at Deakin, not Marica. ‘Would you like to repeat that, ma’am, to the relatives of the folks who died in the fire at Lake’s Crossing? Plenty of meat on that ruffian’s bones yet. He’ll survive.’

‘But surely you’re not going to leave him tied up all night?’

‘That’s just what I intend to do.’ Finality in the voice. ‘I’ll cut him free in the morning.’

‘In the morning?’

‘That’s it. And not for any tender feelings I have for our friend here. By that time we’ll be deep in hostile territory. He won’t try to escape then. A white man, alone, unarmed and without a horse wouldn’t last two hours among the Paiutes. A two-year-old could track him in the snow – and apart from anything else he’d just starve or freeze to death. And whatever else we don’t know about Master John Deakin, we have learnt that he has a mighty high regard for his own skin.’

‘So he lies there – and suffers – all night.’

Pearce said patiently: ‘He’s a murderer, arsonist, thief, cheat and coward. You make a mighty poor choice for your pity, ma’am.’

‘And you make a mighty poor example of a lawman, Mr Pearce.’ Judging by the rather more than mildly astonished looks on the faces of the listeners, her stormy outburst was clearly out of character. ‘Or don’t you know the law? No, Uncle, I will not “shush, my dear”. The law of the United States is very explicit on this. A man is innocent until proved guilty, but Mr Pearce has already tried, convicted and condemned this man and will probably hang him from the first convenient tree. The law! Show me the law that says that you’re entitled to treat a man like a wild dog!’

With a swirl of her long skirts Marica made an angry departure. O’Brien said, poker-faced: ‘I thought you knew about the law, Nathan?’

Pearce scowled at him, then grinned ruefully and reached for his glass.

On the western horizon the dark clouds had now turned to a threatening indigo-black. The dimlyseen and still distant peaks loomed palely white against the ominous backdrop: the upper pines in the valley, along the foot of which the railway track snaked in conformation with the winding and partially frozen river, were already covered with snow. The relief train, scarcely more than crawling up the steep gradient, was moving into the bitter cold, the icy darkness of the uplands.

The contrast aboard the train itself could hardly have been more marked, but Deakin, alone now in the officers’ day compartment, was hardly in a mood to appreciate this. The warmth from the cordwood stove, the warm glow from the single gimballed oil-lamp were clearly not the matters uppermost in his mind. He was still in his recumbent position but had now fallen over completely on his side. He grimaced in pain as he made another wrenching but futile attempt to ease the ropes that bound his wrists together behind his back; the brief attempt ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

Deakin was not the only one in that coach who was not asleep. Marica sat upright on the narrow bunk which occupied more than half of her tiny cubicle, thoughtfully biting her lower lip and glancing occasionally and irresolutely at her door. Her thoughts were centred on precisely the same matter as was engaging the attention of Deakin himself – the uncomfortable predicament in which the latter found himself. Suddenly, decisively, she rose, pulled a wrap around her and moved silently out into the passageway, closing the door as silently behind her.

She put her ear against the door next her own. It was clear that, within, silence was not at a premium: judging from the stentorian snores, the Governor of the State of Nevada had decided to let tomorrow’s troubles look after themselves. Satisfied, Marica moved on, opened the door to the day compartment, closed it behind her and looked down at Deakin. He returned her gaze, his face giving away nothing. Marica forced herself to speak in a calm and detached manner.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Well, well.’ Deakin looked at her with an expression of faint interest in his face. ‘Perhaps the Governor’s niece isn’t quite the cocooned little marshmallow she seems to be. You know what the Governor or the Colonel or, for that matter, Pearce would do to you if you were found here?’

‘And what would they do to me?’ A degree of acerbity was not lacking in her voice. ‘I hardly think, Mr Deakin, that you are in a position to warn or lecture anybody. And I would remind you that today is today and not a hundred years ago and I can get by quite well, thank you, without any cotton-wool or rose-petals. I asked you if you were all right.’

Deakin sighed. ‘That’s it – kick a man when he’s down. Sure I’m all right. Can’t you see? I always sleep this way.’

‘As a form of wit, sarcasm is wasted on me.’ Her voice was cold. ‘And it looks as if I’m wasting my time on you. I came to ask if I can get you something.’

‘Sorry. No offence. John Deakin is not at his best. As regards your offer – well, you heard what the Marshal said. Don’t waste your sympathy on me.’

‘What the Marshal says goes in my left ear and out the right.’ She ignored the slight surprise, the increasing interest in his face. ‘There’s some food left in the galley.’

‘I’ve lost my appetite. Thanks, all the same.’

‘A drink?’

‘Ah, now! Did I hear the sound of sweet music?’ He straightened, with difficulty, until he had reached a vertical sitting position. ‘I’ve been watching them drinking all evening and it hasn’t been pleasant. I don’t like being spoon-fed. Could you untie the ropes on my wrists?’

‘Could I – do I look mad? If once you got your hands free, you – you–’

‘Would wrap them round your lovely neck?’ He peered more closely at her neck while she regarded him in stony silence. ‘It is rather lovely. However, that’s hardly the point. At this moment, I doubt whether I could wrap my two hands round a whisky glass. Have you seen my hands?’

He twisted round and let her see them. They were blue and almost grotesquely swollen, with the thongs cutting deeply into the badly puffed flesh of the wrists. Deakin said: ‘Whatever else our Marshal lacks, you must admit he brings a certain enthusiasm to the task on hand.’

Marica’s face was tight-lipped, both anger and compassion in her eyes. She said: ‘Do you promise–’

‘My turn now. Do I look mad. Escape? With all those nasty Paiutes out there. I’d rather take my chance on the Governor’s rot-gut whisky.’

Five minutes elapsed before Deakin could take that chance. It took Marica only a minute to untie him, but it took Deakin another four, after hopping to the nearest armchair, to restore a measure of circulation to his numbed hands. The pain must have been excruciating but his face remained immobile. Marica, watching him intently, said: T think John Deakin is a great deal tougher than everybody seems to give him credit for.’

‘It ill becomes a grown man to bellow in front of a woman.’ He flexed his fingers. ‘I think you mentioned something about a drink, Miss Fairchild.’

She brought him a glass of whisky. Deakin drained half of it in one gulp, sighed in satisfaction, replaced the glass on the table by his side, stooped and started to free the ropes binding his ankles. Marica jumped to her feet, her fists clenched, her eyes mad; she remained like that for the briefest of moments, then ran from the compartment. She was back in seconds while Deakin was still untying his ankles. He looked in disfavour at the small but purposeful-looking pearl-handled pistol in her hand. He said: ‘What are you carrying that around for?’

‘Uncle said that if the Indians ever got me ‘ She broke off, her face furious. ‘Damn you! Damn you! You promised me–’

‘When a person’s a murderer, arsonist, thief, cheat and coward, you can hardly be surprised when he turns out to be a liar as well. In fact, you’d be a damned idiot to expect anything else.’ He removed the thongs from his ankles, pushed himself rather shakily to his feet, advanced two steps and casually removed the gun from her hand as if she had no intention of firing it, which she clearly hadn’t. He pushed her gently down into an armchair, placed the little pistol on her lap, hobbled back to his chair and sat down, wincing briefly. ‘Rest easy, lady. As it so happens, I’m not going anywhere. A little circulation trouble, that’s all. Would you like to see my ankles?’

‘No!’ She was obviously seething with anger at her own lack of resolution.

‘To tell you the truth, neither would I. Is your mother still alive?’

‘Is my–’ The unexpected question had caught her completely off-balance. ‘What on earth has that to do with you?’

‘Making conversation. You know how difficult it is when two strangers meet for the first time.’ He rose again and paced gingerly up and down, glass in hand. ‘Well, is she?’

Marica was curt. ‘Yes.’

‘But not well?’

‘How would you know that? Besides, what business is it of yours?’

‘None. Just that I’m possessed of an incorrigible degree of curiosity.’

‘Faney words.’ It was questionable whether Marica was capable of sneering but she came very close to it. ‘Very fancy, Mr Deakin.’

‘I used to be a university lecturer. Very important to impress upon your students that you’re smarter than they are. I used big words. So. Your mother is not well. If she were it would be much more natural for a fort commandant to be joined by his wife rather than his daughter. And I would have thought that your place would have been by your sick mother. And it strikes me as very odd indeed that you should be permitted to come out here when there’s cholera in the Fort and the Indians are so restive. Don’t those things strike you as odd, Miss Fairchild? Must have been a very pressing and urgent invitation from your father, though for God knows what reasons. The invitation came by letter?’

‘I don’t have to answer your questions.’ But it was apparent that, nonetheless, the questions intrigued her.

‘In addition to all my other faults the Marshal listed, I’ve more than my fair share of persistent impertinence. By letter? Of course it wasn’t. It was by telegraph. All urgent messages are sent by telegraph.’ Abruptly, he switched his questioning. ‘Your uncle. Colonel Claremont, Major O’Brien – you know them all very well, don’t you?’

‘Well, really!’ Marica had renewed her lipcompressing expression. ‘I think it’s quite intolerable–’

‘Thank you, thank you.’ Deakin drained his glass, sat and began to retie his ankles. ‘That was all I wanted to know.’ He stood up, handed her another piece of rope, then turned with his hands clasped behind his back. ‘If you would be so kind – but not quite so tight this time.’

Marica said slowly: ‘Why all this concern, this interest in me? I should have thought that you yourself had enough worries and troubles–’

‘I have, my dear girl, I have. I’m just trying to take my mind off them.’ He screwed his eyes as the rope tightened on his inflamed wrists. He said protestingly:

‘Easy, now, easy.’

She made no reply, tightened the last knot, helped ease Deakin to first a sitting, then a lying position, then left, still without a word. Back in her own cubicle, she closed the door softly behind her, then sat on her bed for a long time indeed, her eyes unfocused but her face very thoughtful and still.

In the redly and brightly illuminated driving cab the face of Banlon, the engineer, was equally thoughtful as he divided his time and attention between the controls and peering out the side window to examine the track ahead and the skies above. The black mass of cloud, moving rapidly to the east, now obscured more than half the sky; in a very short time indeed the darkness would be as close to total as it could ever be in uplands where mountains and pines – and increasingly the ground itself – were overlaid with a blanket of white.

Jackson, the fireman, was as close a carbon copy to Banlon as it was possible to be – abnormally lean, dark-complexioned and with two enormous crows’ feet that traversed his parchment face from the ears almost to the tip of his nose. Despite the cold, Jackson was sweating profusely: on steep gradients such as this, the continuous demand for a full head of steam gobbled up fuel almost as quickly as it could be fed into the cavernous maw of the fire-box, casting Jackson in the role of little less than a slave to a very demanding master. He heaved a last section of cordwood on to the glowing bed of coals, mopped his forehead with a filthy towel and swung the door of the fire-box shut. The immediate effect was to reduce the footplate to a state of semi-darkness.

Banlon abandoned the cab window and moved towards the controls. Suddenly there came a loud, metallic and very ominous rattle. Banlon addressed a series of unprintable epithets towards the source of the sound.

Jackson’s voice was sharp. ‘What’s wrong?’

Banlon didn’t answer at once. He reached swiftly towards the brake. There was a moment’s silence, followed by a screeching, banging clamour as the train, with a concertina collisioning of bumpers, began to slow towards a stop. Throughout the train all the minority who were awake – with the exception of the bound Deakin – and most of the majority who had just been violently woken grabbed for the nearest support as the train ground to its jolting, shuddering, emergency stop. Not a few of the heavier sleepers were dumped unceremoniously on the floor.

‘That damned steam regulator again!’ Banlon said. ‘I think the retaining nut has come off. Give Devlin the bell – brakes hard on.’ He unhooked a feeble oil-lamp and peered at the offending regulator. ‘And open the fire-box door – I’ve seen better glow-worms than this goddamned lamp.’

Jackson did what he was asked, then leaned out and peered back down the track. ‘Quite a few folk coming this way,’ he announced. ‘They don’t seem all that happy to me.’

‘What do you expect?’ Banlon said sourly. ‘A deputation coming to thank us for saving their lives?’ He peered out on his own side. ‘There’s another lot of satisfied customers coming up this way, too.’

But there was one traveller who was not running forward. A vague and palish blur in the darkness, he jumped down from the train, looked swiftly around him, stooped, scuttled swiftly to the track-side and dropped down the embankment to the riverside below. He pulled a peculiar peaked coonskin cap low over his forehead and started running towards the rear of the train.

Colonel Claremont, despite his pronounced and very recently acquired limp – he had been one of the heavier sleepers and the contact his right hip had made with the floor had been nothing if not violent – was the first to reach the driving cab. With some difficulty he pulled himself up to the footplate.

‘What the devil do you mean, Banlon, by scaring us all out of our wits like that?’

‘Sorry, sir.’ Banlon was very stiff, very proper, very correct. ‘Company’s emergency regulations. Control failure. The retaining nut–’

‘Never mind that.’ Claremont tenderly rubbed his aching hip. ‘How long will it take to fix? All damned night, I suppose.’

Banlon permitted himself the faint smile of the expert. ‘Five minutes, no more.’

While Banlon was bringing his expertise to bear, the running figure with the coonskin cap stopped abruptly at the base of a telegraph pole. He looked back the way he had come : the rear of the train was at least sixty yards away. Apparently satisfied, the man produced a long belt, passed it around himself and the pole and swiftly began to climb. Arrived at the top, he produced from his pocket a pair of wire-cutters with which he rapidly snipped through the telegraph wires on the side of the insulators remote from the train. The wires dropped away into the gloom and, almost as quickly, the man slid down to the ground.

On the footplate Banlon straightened, spanner still in hand. Claremont said: ‘Fixed?’

Banlon raised a grimy hand to cover a prodigious yawn. ‘Fixed.’

Claremont spared some of the concern for his aching hip. He said : ‘You sure you’re fit to drive for the rest of the night?’

‘Hot coffee. That’s all we need – and we have all the means and the makings right here in the cab. But if you could have Jackson and me spelled tomorrow–’

‘I’ll see to that.’ Claremont spoke curtly, not from any animosity he held towards Banlon, it was merely that the pain in his hip was clamouring for his attention again. He climbed stiffly down to the track-side, made his way down the left side of the train and climbed as stiffly up the iron steps towards the entrance to the leading coach. The train slowly got under way again. As it did so, the coonskin-hatted figure appeared over the embankment to the right of the now moving train, glanced fore and aft, moved quickly forward and swung aboard the rear end of the third coach.

FOUR

Dawn came and it came late, as dawn does in mountain valleys so late in the year and in those altitudes. The distant peaks of the previous evening were now invisible, even although measurably closer; the grey and total opacity of the sky ahead – to the west, that was – was indication enough that, not many miles away, snow was falling. And, as could be seen from the gentle swaying of the snow-clad pine-tops, the morning wind was steadily freshening. Some of the pools in the river, where the water was almost still, had ice reaching out from both banks to meet almost in the middle. The mountain winter was at hand.

Henry, the steward, was stoking the already glowing stove in the officers’ day coach when Colonel Claremont entered from the passageway, passing the recumbent and apparently sleeping form of Deakin without so much as a glance. Claremont, his limp of the previous night apparently now no more than a memory, rubbed his hands briskly together.

‘A bitter morning, Henry.’

‘It’s all that, sir. Breakfast? Carlos has it all ready.’

Claremont crossed to the window, drew the curtain, rubbed the misted glass and peered out unenthusiastically. He shook his head.

‘Later. Looks as if the weather is breaking up. Before it does, I’d like to speak to Reese City and Fort Humboldt first. Go fetch Telegraphist Ferguson, will you? Tell him to bring his equipment here.’

Henry made to leave, then stood to one side as the Governor, O’Brien and Pearce entered. Pearce moved towards Deakin, shook him roughly and began to untie his knots.

‘Good morning, good morning.’ Claremont was radiating his customary efficiency. ‘Just about to raise Fort Humboldt and Reese City. The telegraphist will be here shortly.’

O’Brien said : ‘Stop the train, sir?’

‘If you please.’

O’Brien opened the door, moved out on to the front platform, closed the door behind him and pulled an overhead cord. A second or two later Banlon looked out from his cab and peered backwards to see O’Brien moving his right arm up and down. Banlon gestured in return and disappeared. The train began to slow. O’Brien re-entered and clapped his hands against his shoulders.

‘Jesus! It’s cold outside.’

‘Merely an invigorating nip, my dear O’Brien,’ Claremont said with the hearty disapproval of one who has yet to poke his nose outside. He looked at Deakin, now engaged in massaging his freed hands, then at Pearce. ‘Where do you want to keep this fellow, Marshal? I can have Sergeant Bellew mount an armed guard on him.’

‘No disrespect to Bellew, sir. But with a man so handy with matches and kerosene and explosives – and I should imagine that it would be an odd troop train that didn’t carry a goodish supply of all three of those – well, I’d rather keep a personal eye on him.’

Claremont nodded briefly, then turned his attention towards two soldiers who had just knocked and entered. Telegraphist Ferguson was carrying a collapsible table, a coil of cable, and a small case containing his writing material. Behind him his assistant, a young trooper called Brown, was lugging the bulky transmitter. Claremont said: ‘As soon as you’re ready.’

Two minutes later Telegraphist Ferguson was ready. He was perched on the arm of a sofa, and from the telegraph set before him a lead passed through a minimally opened crack in the window. With his handkerchief, Claremont rubbed the misted window and peered out. The lead looped up to the top of a telegraph pole from which Brown was supported by a belt. Brown finished whatever adjustment he was making, then turned and waved a hand. Claremont turned to Ferguson. ‘Right. The Fort first.’

Ferguson tapped out a call-up signal three times in succession. Almost at once, through his earphones, could be heard the faint chatter of Morse. Ferguson eased back his earphones and said: ‘A minute, sir. They’re fetching Colonel Fairchild.’

While they were waiting Marica entered, closely followed by the Rev. Peabody. Peabody was wearing his graveside expression and looked as if he had passed a very bad night. Marica glanced first, without expression, at Deakin, then, interrogatively, at her uncle.

‘We’re in touch with Fort Humboldt, my dear,’ the Governor said. ‘We should have the latest report in a minute.’

Faintly, the renewed sound of Morse could be heard from the earphones. Ferguson wrote, rapidly but neatly, tore a sheet from his pad and handed it to Claremont.

More than a day’s journey away over the mountains, eight men sat or stood in the telegraphy room in Fort Humboldt. The central and unquestionably the dominating figure in the room lounged in a swivel chair behind a rather splendid leather-topped mahogany table, with both his filthy riding boots resting squarely on top of the desk. The spurs which he needlessly affected had left the leather top in several degrees less than mint condition, a consideration that apparently left the wearer unmoved. His general appearance attested to the first impression that there was little of the aesthetic about him. Even seated, it could be seen that he was a tall figure, bulky and broadshouldered, with a ragged deerskin jacket pulled back to reveal a sagging belt weighted down by a pair of Peacemaker Colts. Above the jacket and below a stetson that had been old while the jacket was still in its first youth, a high-boned face, hooked nose, cold eyes of a washed-out grey and a week’s growth of beard overlaying a naturally swarthy complexion gave one the impression of being in the presence of a ruthless desperado, which was, in fact, a pretty apt description for Sepp Calhoun.

A man dressed in United States Cavalry uniform was seated by the side of Calhoun’s table, while several feet away another soldier sat by the telegraph. Calhoun looked at the man by his side.

‘Well, Carter, let’s see if Simpson really transmitted the message I gave him to translate.’ Scowling, Carter passed the message across. Calhoun took it and read aloud: ‘“Three more cases. No more deaths. Hope epidemic has passed peak. Expected time of arrival, please.”’ He looked towards the operator. ‘Takes a clever man not to be too clever, eh, Simpson? Ain’t either of us can afford to make a mistake, is there?’

In the day coach Colonel Claremont had just read out the same message. He laid the note down and said: ‘Well, that does make good news. Our time of arrival?’ He glanced at O’Brien. ‘Approximately.’

‘To haul this heavy load with a single loco?’ O’Brien pondered briefly. ‘Thirty hours, I’d say, sir. I can check with Banlon.’

‘No need. Near enough.’ He turned to Ferguson. ‘You heard? Tell them–’

Marica said: ‘My father–’

Ferguson nodded, transmitted. He listened to the reply, eased his headphones and looked up. He said: “Expect you tomorrow afternoon. Colonel Fairchild well.”

While Marica smiled her relief, Pearce said: ‘Could you tell the Colonel I’m aboard, coming to take Sepp Calhoun into custody?’

In the Fort Humboldt telegraph room, Sepp Calhoun was also smiling, but not with relief. He made no attempt to conceal the wicked amusement in his eyes as he handed a slip of telegraph paper to a tall, grey-haired, grey-moustached Colonel of the United States Cavalry. ‘Honestly, now. Colonel Fairchild, doesn’t that beat everything! They’re going to come to take poor old Sepp Calhoun into custody. Whatever in the world shall I do?’

Colonel Fairchild read the message and said nothing. His face expressed nothing. Contemptuously, he opened his fingers and let the message drop to the floor. For a moment Calhoun’s eyes became still, then he relaxed and smiled again. He could afford to smile. He looked at the four men close to the doorway, two raggedly dressed white men and two equally unprepossessing Indians, all four with rifles pointed variously at Fairchild and the two soldiers, and said: The Colonel must be feeling hungry. Let him get back to his breakfast.’

Claremont said: ‘Now try for the telegraph operator at the Reese City depot. Find out if he has any information for us about Captain Oakland or Lieutenant Newell.’

Ferguson said: The depot, sir? that’ll be the station-master. I mean, they don’t have a telegraph office in Reese City any more. They tell me the telegraphist left for the Big Bonanza some time ago.’

‘Well, the station-master.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Ferguson hesitated. ‘The word is, sir, that he’s not seen at the depot very often. He appears to spend most of his life in the back room of the Imperial Hotel.’

‘Try, anyway.’

Ferguson tried. He transmitted the call-sign at least a dozen times, then looked up. ‘I don’t seem to be able to raise them, sir.’

O’Brien said, sotto voce, to Pearce: ‘Maybe they should switch the telegraph to the Imperial.’ The tightening of Claremont’s lips showed that the remark hadn’t been quite so sotto voce as intended, but he ignored it and said to Ferguson: ‘Keep trying.’

Ferguson tried and kept on trying. His earphones remained obstinately silent. He shook his head and looked towards Claremont, who forestalled him. ‘No one manning the other end, eh?’

‘No, sir, nothing like that.’ Ferguson was genuinely puzzled. ‘The line’s out of action. Dead. One of the relay repeaters gone, most like.’

‘I don’t see how it can have gone. No snow, no high winds – and nothing the matter with any of them when we called the Fort from Reese City yesterday. Keep trying while we have some breakfast.’ He paused, looked first of all unenthusiastically at Deakin, then in grieved enquiry at Pearce. ‘This criminal here, this Houston. Does he have to eat with us?’

‘Deakin,’ Deakin said. ‘Not Houston.’

‘Shut up,’ Pearce said. To the Colonel: ‘He could starve for all I care – but, well, he can sit at my table. If the Reverend and the Doctor don’t mind, that is.’ He glanced around. ‘I see the good Doctor isn’t up and about yet.’ He took Deakin none too gently by the arm. ‘Come on.’

The seven people taking breakfast were seated as they had been the previous evening, except that Deakin had taken the place of Dr Molyneux, who had yet to put in an appearance. Peabody, seated next to him, spent what was clearly a most uncomfortable meal: he kept glancing furtively at Deakin and had about him the look of a divine on the qui vive for the emergence of a pair of horns and forked tail. Deakin, for his part, paid no attention: as befitted a man who had just undergone an enforced absence from the pleasures of the table, his undivided attention was devoted to the contents of the plate before him.

Claremont finished his meal, sat back, nodded to Henry to pour him some more coffee, lit a cheroot and glanced across at Pearce’s table. He permitted himself one of his rare and wintry smiles.

‘I’m afraid Dr Molyneux is going to find some difficulty in adjusting to army breakfast times. Henry, go and waken him.’ He twisted in his seat and called down the passageway. ‘Ferguson?’

‘No luck, sir. Nothing. Quite dead.’

For a moment, head still averted, Claremont tapped his fingers irresolutely on the table, then made up his mind. ‘Dismantle your equipment,’ he called, then turned to face the company again. ‘We’ll leave as soon as he’s ready. Major O’Brien, if you would be so kind–’ He broke off in astonishment as Henry, his measured steward’s gait in startling abeyance, almost rushed into the diningroom, wide eyes reflecting the shock mirrored in the long lugubrious face.

‘What on earth’s the matter, Henry?’

‘He’s dead, Colonel! He’s lying there dead! Dr Molyneux.’

‘Dead? Dead? The doctor? Are you – are you sure, Henry? Did you shake him?’

Henry nodded and shivered at the same moment, then gestured towards the window. ‘He’s like the ice in that river.’ He moved to one side as O’Brien pushed by. ‘Heart, I’d say, sir. Looked as if he slipped away peaceful, like.’

Claremont rose and paced up and down in the narrow confined space available to him. ‘Good God! This is dreadful, dreadful.’ It was clear that Claremont, apart from the natural shock at the news of Molyneux’s death, was aghast at the implications it held: but it was left to the Reverend Peabody to put it into words.

‘In the midst of life …’ For a person built along the lines of an undernourished scarecrow Peabody was possessed of an enormously deep and sepulchral voice that seemed to resonate from the depths of the tomb. ‘Dreadful for him. Colonel, dreadful to be struck down in his prime, dreadful for those sick and dying souls in the Fort who were depending upon him, and him alone, to come to their succour. Ah, the irony of it, the bitter irony of it all. Life is but a walking shadow.’ What was meant by the last remark was not clear and Peabody, it was equally clear, was in no mind to elucidate: hands clasped and eyes screwed tightly shut, Peabody was deep in silent prayer.

O’Brien entered, his face grave and set. He nodded in reply to Claremont’s interrogative glance.

‘Died in his sleep, I’d say, sir. As Henry says, it looks like a heart attack, and a sudden and massive one at that. From his face, it seems that he never knew anything about it.’

Deakin said: ‘Could I have a look?’

Seven pairs of eyes, including those of the Reverend Peabody, who had momentarily interrupted his intercession with the hereafter, immediately turned on Deakin, but none with quite the cold hostility of Colonel Claremont’s.

‘You? What the devil for?’

‘Establish the exact cause of death, maybe.’ Deakin shrugged, relaxed to the point of indifference. ‘You know that I trained to be a doctor.’

‘Qualified?’

‘And disbarred.’

‘Inevitably.’

‘Not for incompetence. Not for professional misconduct.’ Deakin paused then went on delicately: ‘For other things, shall we say? But once a doctor, always a doctor.’

‘I suppose so.’ Claremont was sufficiently a realist to allow his pragmatism to override his personal feelings. ‘Well, why not? Show him, Henry.’

A profound silence enveloped the dining compartment after the departure of the two men. There were so many things to be said, but all those things were so obvious that it appeared pointless to say them: by common consent they avoided the gaze of each other and seemed to concentrate on objects in the middle distance. Even the advent of Henry with another pot of fresh coffee failed to dispel the funereal atmosphere, if for no reason other than the fart that Henry was a natural for the chief mourner at any wake. All seven pairs of eyes withdrew their gazes from the far distances as Deakin returned.

Claremont said: ‘Heart attack?’

Deakin considered. ‘I guess you could call it that. Kind of.’ He glanced at Pearce. ‘Lucky for us we have the law aboard.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’ Governor Fairchild looked even more distraught than he had the previous evening: with what was possibly very good reason, he now looked positively distressed.

‘Somebody knocked Molyneux out, took a probe from his surgical case, inserted it under the rib cage and pushed up, piercing his heart. Death would have supervened pretty well immediately.’ Deakin surveyed the company in an almost leisurely fashion. ‘I would say that it was done by someone with some medical knowledge, at least of anatomy. Any of you lot know anything about anatomy?’

Claremont’s voice was forgiveably harsh. ‘What in God’s name are you saying?’

‘He was struck on the head by something heavy and solid – like a gun butt, say. The skin above the left ear is broken. But death occurred before there was time for a bruise to form. Just below the ribs is a tiny blue-red puncture. Go see for yourselves.’

‘This is preposterous.’ Claremont’s expression didn’t quite match the expressed conviction, there was a disturbing certainty about the way in which Deakin spoke. ‘Preposterous!’

‘Of course it is. What really happened is that he stabbed himself to death, then cleaned up the probe and returned it to his case. Tidy to the end.’

‘This is hardly the time–’

‘You’ve got a murderer aboard. Why don’t you go and check?’

Claremont hesitated, then led an almost concerted movement back towards the second coach, even the Reverend Peabody pressing along anxiously if apprehensively in the rear. Deakin was left alone with Marica, who sat tensely in her chair, hands clenched in her lap and looking at him with a most peculiar expression. When she spoke it was almost in a whisper.

‘A murderer! You’re a murderer. The Marshal says so. Your Wanted notice says so. That’s why you had me untie and tie those ropes, so that later you could wriggle out–’

‘Heaven send me help.’ Wearily, Deakin poured himself some more coffee. ‘Clear-cut motive, of course – I wanted his job so I upped and did him in in the middle of the night. I killed him, faking to make it look like a natural death, then proved to everyone it wasn’t. Then, of course, I re-tied my hands behind my back, using my toes to tie the knots.’ He rose, moved past her, touched her lightly on the shoulder, then moved on to a steam-clouded window, which he began to clear. ‘I’m tired, too. It’s snowing now. The sky’s getting dark, the wind’s getting up and there’s a blizzard lurking behind those peaks. No day for a burial service.’

‘There won’t be any. They’ll take him all the way back to Salt Lake.’

‘They’ll do what?’

‘Doctor Molyneux. And all the men who have died in the epidemic at Fort Humboldt. It’s normal peacetime practice. The relatives and friends – well, they like to be there.’

‘But it – it’ll take days to–’

Not looking at him, she said: ‘There are about thirty empty coffins in the supply wagon.’

‘There are? Well, I’ll be damned. A railroad hearse!’

‘More or less. We were told that those coffins were going to Elko. Now we know they’re going no further than Fort Humboldt.’ She shivered despite the warmth of the compartment. ‘I’m glad I’m not returning on this train … Tell me, who do you think did it?’

‘Did what? Ah, the Doc. Set a murderer to catch a murderer, is that it?’

‘No.’ The dark eyes looked at him levelly. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Well, it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you. That only leaves the Marshal with about seventy other suspects – I don’t know how many troops they have aboard. Ah! Here are some of them coming now.’

Claremont entered, followed by Pearce and O’Brien. Deakin caught his eye. Claremont nodded heavily and, just as heavily, sat down in silence and reached for the coffee-pot.

As the morning progressed, so did the snow steadily thicken, as Deakin had predicted. The increase of the wind had not kept pace with that of the snow so blizzard conditions were still some way off: but all the signs were there.

The train was now fairly into the spectacular mountain country. The track no longer ran along valleys with rivers meandering through them, but through steep, almost precipitously-sided gorges, through tunnels or along permanent ways that had been blasted out of the solid rock leaving a cliff-edge drop to the foot of the ravine below.

Marica peered through a lee-side window that was relatively free from snow and thought, not for the first time, that those mountains were no place for the faint-hearted and advanced sufferers from vertigo. At the moment, the train was rattling and swaying its way across a trellis bridge spanning an apparently bottomless gorge, the lowermost supports of the bridge being lost in the gloomy and snow-filled ravine below.

As the locomotive came off the bridge, it curved away to the right and began to climb up the lefthand side of a steep-sided valley, towering snowclad pines to the left, the ravine to the right. The brake van had just cleared the bridge when Marica staggered and almost fell as the train brakes screeched and jolted the train to a violent halt. None of the men in the dining compartment was similarly affected for the sufficient reason that they were all sitting down: but the explosive language of Claremont could be taken as being fairly representative of their general feelings. Within seconds, Claremont, O’Brien, Pearce and, more leisurely, Deakin had risen, moved out on to the rear platform of the leading coach and swung down to the ankle-deep snow of the track-side.

Banlon, his wizened face twisted with anxiety, came running down the track. O’Brien caught and checked him, Banlon struggled to free himself. He shouted: ‘God’s sake, let go! He’s fallen off.’

‘Who has, man?’

‘Jackson, my fireman!’ Banlon broke free and ran on to the bridge, stopped and peered down into the murky depths. He hurried on another few paces and looked again. This time he remained where he was, first kneeling and then lowering himself until he was prone on the snow. He was joined almost immediately by the others, including by now Sergeant Bellew and some soldiers. All of them peered gingerly over the edge of the bridge.

Sixty, perhaps seventy feet below, a crumpled figure lay huddled on a spur of rock. Over a hundred feet below that again the foaming white waters of the river at the foot of the gorge could dimly be discerned.

Pearce said: ‘Well, Doctor Deakin?’ The emphasis on the ‘doctor’ was minimal: but it was there.

Deakin was curt. ‘He’s dead. Any fool can see that.’

‘I don’t regard myself as a fool and I can’t see it,’ Pearce said mildly. ‘He might be in need of medical assistance. Agreed, Colonel Claremont?’

‘I have no power to ask this man–’

Deakin said: ‘And neither has Pearce. And if I go down, what guarantee have I that Pearce won’t arrange for a life-line to slip? We all know the high opinion the Marshal has of me and we all know that after my trial I’m for the drop. It would save the Marshal an awful lot of time and trouble if he were kind of accidentally to arrange for me to have this drop now – right down to the bottom of the gorge.’

‘There’ll be six of my soldiers belaying that rope, Deakin.’ Claremont’s face was stony. ‘You insult me, sir.’

‘I do?’ Deakin looked at him consideringly. ‘Yes, I do believe I do. My apologies.’ He took the end of the rope, made a double bowline, thrust his legs through the loops and took a bight around his waist. ‘I’d like another rope, too.’

‘Another rope?’ Claremont frowned. ‘That one would support a horse.’

‘I wasn’t thinking so much about horses. Would you think it fitting for an army colonel to lie down there until the vultures picked you clean to the bone? Or is it only cavalrymen who rate a decent burial?’

Claremont bestowed a momentary blue glare on Deakin, whirled and nodded to Bellew. Within a minute a soldier had returned with a rope and within two more, after a dizzying, swaying descent, Deakin had secured a foothold on the spur of rock which held the broken body of Jackson.

For almost a minute, buffeted by the gusting winds down the ravine, Deakin remained stooped over the prone figure, then secured the second rope round Jackson. He straightened, lifted a hand in signal and was hauled back up to the bridge again.

‘Well?’ Predictably, the impatient Claremont.

Deakin undid his rope and rubbed two painfully grazed knees. ‘Fractured skull, nearly every major rib in his body broken.’ He looked enquiringly at Banlon. ‘He had a rag tied to his right wrist.’

‘That’s right.’ Banlon appeared to have shrunk another impossible inch or two. ‘He was outside, clearing the snow from my driving window, when he fell off. Tying the rag like that is an old fireman’s trick. He can hang on with both hands.’

‘Didn’t hang on this time, did he? I think I know why. Marshal, you’d better come – as law officer you’ll be asked to certify the death certificate. Disbarred doctors are denied that privilege.’

Pearce hesitated, nodded and moved off after Deakin, O’Brien following close behind. Deakin reached the locomotive, walked a couple of paces past the cab and looked up. The snow in the vicinity of the engineer’s window and on the after part of the boiler casing had been rubbed off. Deakin swung up to the cab and, watched by Pearce, O’Brien and Banlon, who had now joined them, looked first around him and then behind him. The tender was now two-thirds empty, with the bulk of the cordwood stacked to the rear. On the right-hand side the cords lay in disarray on the floor, as if a heap of them had fallen forward.

Deakin’s eyes had become very still and watchful. His nose wrinkled and after a few moments his eyes shifted sideways and downwards. Deakin stooped, reached behind some tangled pieces of cordwood, straightened and held out a bottle.

‘Tequila. He was reeking of the stuff, had some of it spilled on his clothes.’ He looked incredulously at Banlon. ‘And you knew nothing – nothing of this?’

‘Just what I was going to ask.’ Pearce looked and sounded grim.

‘God’s my witness, Marshal.’ If Banlon kept shrinking at his present rate his eventual disappearance was only a matter of time. ‘I’ve no sense of smell – ask anybody. I didn’t know Jackson until he joined us at Ogden – and I never even knew that he drank that stuff.’

‘You know now.’ Claremont had made his appearance in the cab. ‘We all know now. Poor devil. As for you, Banlon, I’m putting you under military law. Any more drinking and you’ll end up in a cell in Fort Humboldt and I’ll have you dismissed the Union Pacific’

Banlon tried to look aggrieved but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘I never drink on duty, sir.’

‘You were drinking yesterday afternoon at the Reese City depot.’

‘I mean when I’m driving the train–’

‘That’ll do. No more questions. Marshal?’

‘Nothing more to ask. Colonel. It’s open and shut to me.’

‘Right.’ Claremont turned back to Banlon. ‘I’ll have Bellew detail a trooper as fireman.’ He made a gesture of dismissal and made to turn away.

Banlon said hurriedly: ‘Two things, Colonel.’ Claremont turned. ‘You can see we’re running low on fuel and there’s a depot about a mile and a half up the valley–’

‘Yes, yes. I’ll detail a loading party. And –?’

‘I’m pretty well bushed, sir. And this business of Jackson … If Devlin – that’s the brakeman – could relieve me in a couple of hours–’

‘That shall be arranged.’

A soldier in a peaked cavalryman’s cap peered out from the side of the locomotive through the now heavily falling snow. He said to Banlon: ‘I think this must be the fuel dump coming up.’

Banlon joined them, nodded, returned to the controls and brought the train to a gentle stop, so positioning it that it brought up with locomotive and tender precisely opposite the fuel dump, an open-faced, three-sided shack piled high with cordwood. Banlon said: ‘Fetch the loading detail, would you?’

The loading detail, about a dozen men in all, were on the scene in only a matter of seconds and a remarkably unhappy band of troopers they appeared to be. One had the impression that, given the option, they’d have taken on twice their number of hostile Indians rather than the chore on hand and their reluctance for the appointed task was wholly understandable: although it was now approaching noon, the sky was so dark and the now wind-whipped snow so heavy that the light was no better than that of late dusk and visibility no more than a few feet; and the cold was deepening with the passing of every moment. The soldiers, shivering with cold and stamping their feet, lined up with their backs to the developing blizzard and passed the cordwood arm to arm between the fuel store and the tender. And they moved very quickly indeed: no one had to tell them that the sooner they had finished, the sooner they were back in the comparative warmth of their coaches.

Some way back on the other side of the train. an indistinct figure moved quickly and silently along the track-side and climbed silently on to the platform at the front of the supply wagon. The door was locked. The man, wearing an army overcoat and a peaked cavalryman’s cap, stooped, examined the lock, produced a heavy bunch of keys, selected one and inserted it. The door opened at once, and closed almost immediately as the man entered.

A match scratched, flared and a small oil-lamp came to life. Deakin brushed snow from his greatcoat – O’Brien had provided him with some protection against the elements – moved towards the centre of the wagon and looked around him.

To the rear of the coach, packed four deep and two wide in obviously makeshift racks on either side of the central aisle, were exactly thirty-two coffins, all of them identical in shape and size: whoever made coffins for the army apparently visualized all cavalrymen as being exactly the same shape, size and weight. Most of the rest of the wagon was given up to supplies of one kind and another. The right-hand side was given up to neatly stored piles of bagged and crated food supplies. All the left-hand side was stacked with brass-bound oiled wooden boxes, which took up a relatively small space, and unidentified objects lashed down under tarpaulins. The wooden boxes bore the legend: MEDICAL CORPS SUPPLIES: UNITED STATES ARMY. Deakin lifted a corner of the first tarpaulin. The boxes there, also oiled wood, bore the marking, in large red letters: DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! The next few tarpaulins covered boxes similarly marked. The last and smallest tarpaulin to be lifted revealed a tall narrow grey box with a leather carrying handle. It was marked: US ARMY POSTS & TELEGRAPHS.

Deakin lifted off the tarpaulin covering this box, rolled it, thrust it under his coat, picked up the grey box, doused the lamp and left, locking the door behind him. Even during the brief time he had been inside the supply wagon the visibility had become appreciably worse. It was as well, Deakin reflected, that they had the security of the railway lines to guide them on their way: in such weather, a horse and rider, or horses and coaches, would, like as not, have ended up in the depths of the ravine.

Lugging the heavy transmitter and now making little attempt at concealment, Deakin hurried along the length of the supply wagon and climbed up the front platform of the leading horse wagon. The door was unlocked. He passed inside, closed the door, lowered the transmitter, located and lit an oil-lamp.

Nearly all the horses were standing, the majority of them chewing mournfully on the hay from the managers bolted to the side of the wagon. They had little enough room to move in their individual stalls but seemed unconcerned about it. Nor did they show much concern for Deakin’s presence. Such few as bothered to acknowledge his presence looked at him incuriously, then as idly turned their heads away.

Deakin paid no attention to the horses. He was much more interested in the source of their food supply, a wood-slatted haybox by his right shoulder that reached almost to the roof. He removed the two top slats, climbed on to the top of the hay and burrowed a deep hole at the back, hard against the side of the wagon. He swung down to the floor, wrapped the transmitter in the tarpaulin, carried it to the top of the haybox, buried it deep in the hole and covered it with hay to a depth of almost three feet. Even allowing for the most evil mischance, Deakin reckoned, the transmitter should remain undetected for at least twenty-four hours: and twenty-four hours would be all he would ever want.

He doused the lamp, left and made his way to the rear end of the second coach. He shook out his coat on the platform, went inside, hung the coat on a hook in the passageway outside the officers’ sleeping cubicles and made his way forward, sniffing appreciatively as he went. He stopped and looked through an open doorway to his right.

The galley was small but spotless with an array of pots simmering gently on the wood-burning stove. The occupant, when he turned, proved to be a short and very plump Negro most incongruously dressed in a regulation galley uniform, complete even to the chef’s tall white hat. He smiled widely at Deakin, teeth white and shining and perfect.

‘Morning, sir.’

‘Good morning. You must be Carlos, the chef?’

‘That’s right.’ Carlos beamed happily. ‘And you must be Mr Deakin, the murderer. Just in time for some coffee, sir.’

Claremont by his side, Banlon stood on the footplate of the locomotive, examining the tender. He turned and leaned out.

‘That’s the lot. Full. Many thanks.’

Sergeant Bellew raised a hand in acknowledgment, turned and said something to his men, who at once trudged thankfully away in the direction of their coaches, being lost to sight almost at once in the whitely swirling gloom.

Claremont said: ‘Ready to roll then, Banlon?’

‘Just as soon as this snow-squall clears. Colonel.’

‘Of course. You said you wanted the brakeman to relieve you. This would be a good time.’

Banlon said very firmly: ‘I did say that, but this would not be a good time, sir. For the next three miles, I want Devlin right where he is.’

‘The next three miles?’

‘To the top of Hangman’s Pass. The steepest climb in all the mountains.’

Claremont nodded. ‘A brakeman could have his uses.’

FIVE

Fort Humboldt lay at the head of a narrow and rock-strewn valley which debouched on to a plain to the west. The strategic position of the Fort had been excellently chosen. Behind it, to the north, was a sheer cliff-face: to the east and south it was bounded by a ravine, narrow but very deep, the eastern arm of which was traversed by a trestle railway bridge: the railway line itself passed eastwest in front of the Fort descending slowly down the winding valley into the plain beyond. From the point of view of defence Fort Humboldt could not have been more advantageously located. It could be approached only across the bridge or up the valley; facing in either direction, a small group of determined and well-entrenched men could have easily held off ten times their number.

Architecturally, the Fort itself had no claims to originality. Built years before the completion of the Union Pacific Railway in 1869, it had to depend entirely on local building materials, and the plentiful stands of conifers provided unlimited supplies of that. The wooden stockade was built in the customary form of a hollow square with a boardwalk, about four feet from the top of the stakes, running the entire length of the inside perimeter. The heavy gate, facing both railroad and the river which wound down the valley, lay to the south; immediately inside the gate there was, to the right, the guard-house and to the left the store for weapons, ammunition and explosives. The entire eastern side of the compound was given over to stables. To the western side were the troops’ quarters and cookhouse; the northern side was given over to officers’ quarters, administrative and telegraph offices, sick bay and some spare accommodation for the invariably weary travellers who made Fort Humboldt a port of call with a not surprising frequency; it was a long long way from any other place.

Approaching the Fort from the west – up valley – were a group of weary travellers who were clearly looking forward very keenly to whatever the Fort might offer them in the way of shelter and hospitality. They were Indians, wrapped to the ears in an unavailing attempt to protect themselves from the biting cold and the thinly falling snow. Tired, very tired, they looked, but not as exhausted as their horses, who were literally trudging through the fetlock-deep snow. Of them all, only their leader, an unusually pale-faced and strikingly handsome Indian, seemed unweary. He sat very erect in the saddle. But then, the chief of the Paiutes always did.

He led his men through the open and unguarded doorway, raised his hand in a gesture of dismissal and headed across the compound, bringing up at a wooden hut with, above the door, the legend COMMANDANT. The Indian dismounted, climbed the few steps and entered, closing the door quickly behind him to keep out the swirling snow.

Sepp Calhoun was seated in Colonel Fairchild’s desk armchair, his feet on the Colonel’s desk, one of the Colonel’s cheroots in one hand and a glass of the Colonel’s whisky in the other. He looked up, swung his feet to the floor and rose, a most unusual gesture of respect on the part of Sepp Calhoun, who customarily showed no respect towards anyone. But then, people did not show disrespect to this particular Indian. Not twice.

Calhoun said: ‘Welcome home, White Hand. You made fast time.’

‘In weather such as this the wise man does not linger.’

‘All went well? The line to San Francisco–’

‘Is cut.’ Imperiously, almost contemptuously. White Hand waved away the proffered bottle of whisky. ‘We destroyed the bridge over the Anitoba gorge.’

‘You have done well, White Hand. You and your men. How much time do we have?’

‘Before the soldiers from the west could reach here?’

‘Yes. Not that there’s any reason to assume that they think that there is anything wrong in Fort Humboldt and will be coming here anyway. But chances we cannot take.’

‘The stakes are high, Sepp Calhoun.’ He thought briefly. ‘Three days. Not less.’

‘More than enough. The train arrives tomorrow between noon and sundown.’

‘The soldiers on the train ?’

‘No word yet.’ Calhoun hesitated, then cleared his throat apologetically. ‘It would be as well, White Hand, if you and your braves have some hours of rest. You may need to ride again before dark.’

There was silence during which White Hand regarded a highly uncomfortable Calhoun with total impassivity, then he said: ‘There are times, Calhoun, when White Hand questions your judgment. We had an agreement, you remember, about capturing this fort. You and your friends were to come here in the hours of darkness and seek lodging for the night. You would be invited to spend the night, for you are white men and the night was full of snow. So much came true. Then you were to kill the night guards, open the gates, let us in and fall upon the soldiers in their bunks.’

Calhoun reached for his bottle of bourbon.

‘It was a wild night. White Hand. We could not see well. The night, as you say, was full of snow and there was a great storm blowing. We thought–’

‘The storm was in your minds and the snow came from that bottle of fire-water. I could smell it. So two of the guards they did not kill and there was time for a warning. Not enough time, Calhoun, but enough that fifteen of my best men lie dead. Fire-water! Bourbon! And the white men are better than the red!’

‘Now look. White Hand. You must understand–’

‘I understand everything. I understand that you care only for yourself, your friends who are all bad men, but not for the Paiutes. Then we ride a night and a day to destroy the Anitoba bridge. This, too, we did. And now you ask us to ride again.’

Calhoun was at his most nervously soothing. ‘Only perhaps. White Hand. Those troops must be prevented from arriving here. You know that.’

‘I may lose more men, it is sure that I will lose more men. I may lose many more men. But not for you, Calhoun, not for your evil bourbon, but for what they have done to my people the army of the white men are my enemies and will be while White Hand lives. But they, too, are brave and skilful fighters. And if they find out that it is White Hand and the Paiutes who have attacked them they will never rest until they have hunted down and destroyed each last one of us. I say the price is too high, Sepp Calhoun.’

‘And if there is no white man left to tell what happened?’ Calhoun let this thought take hold, then went on softly, persuasively: ‘The rewards are even higher.’

After a long pause. White Hand nodded several times. ‘The rewards are even higher.’

Fifteen minutes after the troop train had embarked on its laborious crawl up Hangman’s Pass, Marica stood gazing through the day compartment window, oblivious both of the six men seated behind her and the icy chill of glass against which her forehead rested. She said to no one in particular: ‘What a fantastic view!’

She could hardly be faulted for her comment. The blizzard-like squall had passed away and from where she stood she could see the track curving round and downwards for the space of almost two miles as it followed the breathtaking contours of the conifer-lined white valley until it reached the spidery bridge spanning the gorge at the foot of the valley. As was so often the case after snow had ceased to fall, everything could be seen with preternatural clarity.

Claremont was uninterested in the view; he had more pressing and disturbing matters on his mind. He said: ‘Made any progress with your enquiries. Marshal?’

‘No, sir.’ Pearce wasn’t demonstrably unhappy, because it wasn’t in his nature either to feel or express such an emotion, but he certainly couldn’t have been described as ebullient. ‘Nobody knows anything, nobody’s seen anything, nobody did anything, nobody heard anything and nobody as much as suspects anybody else. No, sir, you can take it that I haven’t made any progress.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Deakin spoke encouragingly. ‘Every little elimination helps, doesn’t it, Marshal? For instance, I was tied up, so it couldn’t have been me. Means you’ve got only eighty-odd suspects left. Marshal. For a man of–’

Deakin broke off as a sharp report was heard. Claremont, already half out of his seat, said in the voice of a man who knew that impending doom was no longer at hand but had arrived: ‘In God’s name, what was that?’

Marica must have left him in no doubt as to the accuracy of his diagnosis. Her voice rose to a scream. ‘No! No! No!’

Apart from Claremont, Pearce and Deakin there were three other men in the compartment – O’Brien, the Governor and the Rev. Peabody. Within two seconds the last of them had propelled himself to his feet and flung himself towards the nearest window on Marica’s side. The faces of the six reflected, or appeared to reflect, all the consternation, shock and horror that Marica’s voice had held.

The last three wagons of the train – the two troop-carrying coaches and the brakevan – had broken away from the main body of the train and were already rolling quite quickly back down the long steep descent of Hangman’s Pass. The rapidly widening gap between the leading troop coach and the second of the horsewagons showed just how rapidly the three runaway wagons were accelerating.

Deakin shouted: ‘For God’s sake, jump! Jump now! Before it’s too late.’

But nobody jumped.

The middle wagon of the three runaways – the second troop coach in which Sergeant Bellew was quartered – was already beginning to sway and rattle in the most alarming fashion. The clicketyclick of the wheels crossing the expansion joints in the lines increased in tempo with the passing of every moment; and as the fish-plates which held the lines were secured to the sleepers by spikes and not by bolts there was a mounting danger that the track itself might begin to work loose from the bed.

The confusion among the soldiers in the coach was total, their expressions ranging from the dumbfounded to the panic-stricken. Most of the men – all of them struggling to maintain their balance – were milling about wildly without any set purpose or intent, but two pairs of soldiers, lashed by the urgency of Bellew’s voice, struggled desperately to open two side doors. After only a few fruitless moments they gave up. One of the soldiers raised his voice above the bedlam of sound.

‘Godalmighty!’ His voice was only one degree short of a shriek. ‘The doors are locked! From the outside!’

In fascinated horror, the six men and the girl in the day compartment, completely without any power to help, continued to watch the runaways, now quarter way round the quarter circle curve of Hangman’s Pass and at least a mile distant, remorselessly accelerating and terrifyingly swaying to the extent that wheels were now beginning to lift clear of the track.

Claremont shouted : ‘Devlin! The brakeman! Why in God’s name doesn’t he do something?’

The same thought, though understandably with even more urgency, was in the mind of Sergeant Bellew.

‘The brakeman! The brakeman! Why doesn’t he do – what in God’s name is he doing?’

Bellew ran or more correctly staggered along the wildly shaking and vibrating aisle towards the rear door, a matter made easier by the fact that the central space was clear, nearly all the soldiers having their terrified faces pressed close against the windows, their minds mesmerized by the blurring landscape and hypnotized by shock into the blind acceptance of the inevitable.

Bellew reached the rear door. He tugged desperately and completely without avail at the handle; this door, too, was locked. Bellew drew his Colt and shot above and to the side of the handle. He fired four times, oblivious of two ricochets which whistled with lethal potential through the coach; by this time there were more deadly dangers abroad than ricochets. After the fourth shot the door yielded to the desperate pressure of Bellew’s hand.

He emerged on to the rear platform and was almost immediately thrown off by the combination of a wind which had now reached near-hurricane force and an exceptionally violent lurch of the coach. To save himself he had to grab desperately at the rail with both hands. His Colt had been in his right hand: now it went spinning over the side.

Bellew took a suicidal chance, but between sudden death by suicide and sudden death through external causes there lies no difference. He flung himself towards the front platform on the brake van, caught the rail, dragged himself to temporary safety and seized the door of the brake van. This he twisted, pulled and pushed with a close to fear-crazed violence, but this door, by now predictably, was also locked. Bellew flattened his face against the glass panel to the side of the door and peered inside; his eyes widened and his face became masked in the total and final despair of a knowledge that comes too late.

The big brake wheel was at the end of the van but there was no hand on this wheel. Instead, the hand clutched a Bible, which was opened, face down, on the floor of the van. Devlin himself, also face down, lay beside his makeshift bed; between the thin shoulders protruded the hilt of a knife.

Bellew turned his stricken face sideways and stared, almost uncomprehendingly, at the snowladen pines lining the track-side stream whizzing by in a hundred-mile-an-hour blur. Bellew crossed himself, something he hadn’t done since boyhood, and now the fear was gone from his face. In its place there was only resignation, the acceptance of the inevitability of death.

In the day compartment the seven horrified watchers were without speech for there was no longer anything to say. Like Bellew, although with a vastly different outlook, they too had dumbly accepted the inevitability of death.

The runaway coaches, two miles away now and still somehow miraculously remaining on the track, were hurtling towards the final curve leading to the bridge. Marica jerked convulsively away from the window and buried her face in her hands as the runaways failed to negotiate the last bend. They shot off the track – whether they ripped the track off with them or not it was impossible to tell at that distance – toppled sideways as they then sailed out across the void of the gorge, turning over almost lazily in mid-air until the three coaches, still locked together, had assumed a vertical position, a position they still occupied when all three smashed simultaneously into the precipitous far cliff-side of the gorge with the explosive thunderclap of sound of a detonating ammunition dump. Unquestionably, for every man aboard those coaches death must have super- vened instantaneously. For a long second of time the flattened, mangled coaches remained in that position, seemingly pinned against the canyon wall as if unwilling to move, then, with a deliberation and slowness in grotesque contrast to their speed at the moment of impact, dropped reluctantly off and tumbled lazily into the unseen depths below.

The eleven survivors of the original trainload from Reese City, most of them shivering violently, were gathered round the rear end of the second horse wagon – now, in effect, the end of the train – examining the coupling, the free end of which had formerly been bolted to the front of the leading troop wagon. Three of the four massive securing bolts were still loosely in place in the plate. Claremont stared unbelievingly at the plate and the bolts.

‘But how, how, how could it have happened? Look at the size of those bolts!’

O’Brien said: ‘Not that I have any intention of going down into that ravine to investigate – even although all the evidence is smashed to pieces anyway – but what I’d have liked to see was the condition of the timber to which those bolts were attached.’

‘But I thought I heard a report–’

‘Or,’ Deakin suggested, ‘a baulk of heavy timber snapping in half.’

‘Of course.’ Claremont dropped the chain and plate. ‘Of course. That’s what it must have been. But why should it – Banlon, you’re the engineer. In fact, you’re the only trainman we have left.’

‘Before God, I’ve no idea. The wood may have rotted – it can happen without showing any signs – and this is the steepest climb in the mountains. But I’m only guessing. What I can’t understand is why Devlin did nothing about it.’

Claremont was sombre in both face and voice. ‘Some answers we’ll never know. What’s past is past. First thing is to have another try to contact Reese City or Ogden – we must have replacements for those poor devils at once, God rest their souls. What a way to die! The only way for a cavalryman to die is in the face of the enemy’ Claremont wasn’t quite as pragmatic as he would have liked to sound and he had to make a conscious effort to return himself to the realities of the present. ‘At least, thank God, we didn’t lose those medical supplies.’

Deakin was clearly in no mood to commiserate with Claremont. ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference if you had.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Medical supplies aren’t much good without a doctor to administer them.’

Claremont paused for a few seconds. ‘You’re a doctor.’

‘Not any more I’m not.’

They had a close circle of listeners. Even a trace of interest was beginning to show in Marica’s still rather shocked face.

Claremont was becoming heated. ‘But, damn it all, Deakin, that’s cholera they have up there. Your fellow man–’

‘My fellow man’s going to hang me. Probably, in spite of Pearce’s protestations, from the nearest cottonwood tree. The hell with my fellow man. Besides, as you say, that’s cholera they’ve got up there.’

Claremont showed as much contempt as it is possible for a man to do without actually sneering. ‘And that’s your real reason?’

‘I think it’s a very good reason.’

Claremont turned away in disgust and looked around the shivering company. ‘Morse I’ve never learnt. Can anyone–’

‘I’m no Ferguson,’ O’Brien said. ‘But if you give me time–’

‘Thank you, Major. Henry, you’ll find the set in the front of the supply wagon, under a tarpaulin. Bring it through to the day compartment, will you?’ He turned to Banlon, his mouth bitter. ‘I suppose the only good point about this ghastly business is that we’ll be able to make better time to the Fort. With those wagons gone–’

Banlon said heavily: ‘We won’t make better time. Devlin was the only other person aboard who could drive this train – and I’ve got to have sleep some time.’

‘My God, I’d quite forgotten. Now?’

‘I can make twice the speed in the day that I can by night. I’ll try to hang on to nightfall. By that time–’ he nodded to his fireman soldier standing by–‘Rafferty and I are going to be pretty bushed. Colonel.’

‘I understand.’ He looked at the dangling chain and the plate on the ground. ‘And how about the safety factor, Banlon?’

Banlon spent quite some time rubbing the white bristles on his wizened face, then said: ‘I can’t see it, Colonel. Any problem, that is. Four things. This has been a million to one chance – I’ve never heard of it before – and it’s one to a million that it will happen again. I’ve got a lot less weight to pull so the strain on the couplings is going to be that much less. This is the steepest gradient on the line and once we’re over the top it’s going to be that much easier.’

‘You said four things. That’s three.’

‘Sorry, sir.’ Banlon rubbed his eyes. ‘Tired, that’s all. What I’m going to do now is to get a spike and hammer and test the woodwork around each coupling plate. Only sure way to test for rot, Colonel.’

‘Thank you, Banlon.’ He transferred his attention to the returning Henry who wore upon his face the expression of a man whom fate can touch no more. ‘Ready?’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean – no?’

‘I mean the set’s gone.’

‘What!’

‘It’s not in the supply wagon, that’s for sure.’

‘Impossible.’

Henry stared silently into the middle distance.

‘Are you sure?’ It wasn’t so much disbelief in Claremont’s tone as a groping lack of understanding, the wearied bafflement of a man to whom too many incomprehensible things have happened too quickly.

Henry assumed an air of injured patience which sat well upon his lugubrious countenance. ‘I do not wish to seem impertinent to the Colonel but I suggest the Colonel goes see for himself.’

Claremont manfully quelled what was clearly an incipient attack of apoplexy. ‘All of you! Search the train!’

‘Two things. Colonel,’ Deakin said. He looked around and ticked numbers off his fingers. ‘First is, of the ten people you’re talking to, Rafferty is the only one you can order about. None of the rest of us is under your command, directly or indirectly, which makes it a bit awkward for martinet colonels accustomed to instant obedience. Second thing is, I don’t think you need bother searching.’

Claremont did some even more manful quelling, then finally and silently gave Deakin a coldly interrogative look.

Deakin said: ‘When we were refuelling this morning I saw someone take a case about the size of a transmitter from the supply wagon and walk back along the track with it. The snow was pretty thick and the visibility – well, we all remember what that was like. I just couldn’t see who it was.’

‘Yes? Assuming it was Ferguson, why should he do a thing like that?’

‘How should I know? Ferguson or no Ferguson, I didn’t speak to this person. Why should I do your thinking for you?’

‘You become increasingly impertinent, Deakin.’

‘I don’t see there’s a great deal you can do about that.’ Deakin shrugged. ‘Maybe he wanted to repair it.’

‘And why take it away to do that?’

Deakin showed an uncharacteristic flash of irritation. ‘How the hell should–’ He broke off. ‘Is the supply wagon heated?’

‘No.’

‘And it’s way below freezing. If he wanted to carry out some repairs or maintenance he’d take it to a heated place – one of the troop wagons. And they’re both at the bottom of that ravine now – including the transmitter. There’s your answer.’

Claremont had himself well under control. He said thoughtfully: ‘And you’re pretty glib with your answers, Deakin.’

‘Oh my God! Go and search your damned train, then.’

‘No. You’re probably right, if only because there would appear to be no other explanations.’ He took a step closer to Deakin. ‘Something’s familiar about your face.’ Deakin looked at him briefly then looked away in silence. ‘Were you ever in the army, Deakin?’

‘No.’

‘Union or Confederate, I mean?’

‘Neither.’

‘Neither?’

‘I’ve told you, I’m not a man of violence.’

‘Then where were you in the War between the States?’

Deakin paused as if trying to recall, then finally said: ‘California. The goings-on in the east didn’t seem all that important out there.’

Claremont shook his head. ‘How you cherish the safety of your own skin, Deakin.’

‘A man could cherish worse things in life,’ Deakin said indifferently. He turned and walked slowly up the track. Henry, his lugubrious eyes very thoughtful, watched him go. He turned to O’Brien and spoke softly:

‘I’m like the Colonel. I’ve seen him before, too.’

‘Who is he?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t put a name to him and I can’t remember where I saw him. But it’ll come back.’

Shortly after noon it had started to snow again but not heavily enough to impair forward visibility from the cab. The train, now with only five coaches behind the tender, was making fair speed up the winding bed of a valley, a long plume of smoke trailing out behind. In the dining saloon all but one of the surviving passengers were sitting down to a sombre meal. Claremont turned to Henry.

‘Tell Mr Peabody that we’re eating.’ Henry left and Claremont said to the Governor: ‘Though God knows I’ve got no appetite.’

‘Nor I, Colonel, nor I.’ The Governor’s appearance did not belie his words. The anxiety of the previous night was still there but now overlaid with a new-found haggard pallor. The portmanteau bags under his eyes were dark and veined and what little could be seen of the jowls behind the splendid white beard was more pendulous than ever. He was looking less like Buffalo Bill by the minute. He continued: ‘What a dreadful journey, what a dreadful journey! All the troops, all those splendid boys gone. Captain Oakland and Lieutenant Newell missing – and they may be dead for all we know. Then Dr Molyneux – he is dead. Not only dead, but murdered. And the Marshal has no idea who – who – My God! He might even be sitting here. The murderer, I mean.’

Pearce said mildly: ‘The odds are about ten to one that he isn’t. Governor. The odds are ten to one that he’s lying back in the ravine there.’

‘How do you know?’ The Governor shook his head in slow despair. ‘How can anyone know? One wonders what in the name of God is going to happen next.’

‘I don’t know,’ Pearce said. ‘But judging from the expression on Henry’s face, it’s happened already.’

Henry, who had that moment returned, had a hunted air about him. His hands were convulsively opening and closing. He said in a husky voice: ‘I can’t find him, sir. The preacher, I mean. He’s not in his sleeping quarters.’

Governor Fairchild gave an audible moan. Both he and Claremont looked at each other with the same dark foreboding mirrored in their eyes. Deakin’s face, for a moment, might have been carved from stone, his eyes bleak and cold. Then he relaxed and said easily: ‘He can’t be far. I was talking to him only fifteen minutes ago.’

Pearce said sourly: ‘So I noticed. What about?’

‘Trying to save my soul,’ Deakin explained. ‘Even when I pointed out that murderers have no soul he–’

‘Be quiet!’ Claremont’s voice was almost a shout. ‘Search the train!’

‘And stop it, sir?’

‘Stop it, O’Brien?’

‘Things happen aboard this train, Colonel.’

O’Brien didn’t try to give any special significance to his words, he didn’t have to. ‘He may be on it. He may not. If he’s not, he must be by the track; he can’t very well have fallen down a ravine for there have been none for over an hour. If he were to be found outside, then we’d have to reverse down the line and every yard further we go on–’

‘Of course. Henry, tell Banlon.’

Henry ran forward while the Governor, Claremont, O’Brien and Pearce moved towards the rear. Deakin remained where he was, evidently with no intention of going anywhere. Marica looked at him with an expression that was far from friendly. The dark eyes were as stony as it was possible for warm dark eyes to be, the lips compressed. When she spoke it was with a quite hostile incredulity.

She said in a tone that befitted her expression: ‘He may be sick, injured, dying perhaps. And you just sit there. Aren’t you going to help them look for him?’

Deakin leaned back leisurely in his chair, his legs crossed, produced and lit a cheroot. He said in what appeared to be genuine surprise: ‘Me? Certainly not. What’s he to me? Or I to him? The hell with the Reverend.’

‘But he’s such a nice man.’ It was difficult to say whether Marica was more aghast at the impiety or the callous indifference. ‘Why, he sat there and talked to you–’

‘He invited himself. Now let him look after himself.’

Marica said in disbelief, slowly spacing the words: ‘You just don’t care.’

‘That’s it.’

‘The Marshal was right and I was wrong. I should have listened to a man of the world. Hanging is too good for you. You must be the most self-centred, the most utterly selfish man in the world.’

Deakin said reasonably: ‘Well, it’s better to be best at something than best at nothing. Which reminds me of something else that is very good indeed.’ He rose. ‘The Governor’s bourbon. Now seems like an excellent chance to help myself when they’re all busy.’

He left along the passageway past the Governor’s and Marica’s sleeping quarters. Marica remained where she was for a few moments, the anger in her face now with an element of puzzlement in it, hesitated, rose and walked quietly after Deakin. By the time she had reached the door of the officers’ day compartment, Deakin had crossed to the cabinet above the sofa at the front end of the coach, poured some bourbon into a tumbler and drained the contents in one savage gulp. Marica watched, her face n ow showing only wonderment and an increasing lack of comprehension, as Deakin poured himself some more bourbon, drank half of it and turned to the right, gazing with seemingly unseeing eyes through the window. The lean, dark, bitter face was set in lines of an almost frighteningly implacable cruelty.

Eyes widening under a furrowed brow, Marica advanced slowly and silently into the compartment and was less than four feet away from him when Deakin turned, the same almost viciously hard expression on his face. Marica recoiled before it, taking a step back almost as if expecting to be struck. Several seconds elapsed before Deakin appeared to become aware of her presence. His face gradually assumed its normal expression – or lack of it. He said, affably: ‘Quite a start you gave me, ma’am.’

She did not answer at once. She advanced like a sleep-walker, her face still full of wonder, lifted a hand and tentatively, almost apprehensively, touched his lapel. She whispered: ‘Who are you?’

He shrugged. ‘John Deakin.’

‘What are you?’

‘You heard what the Marshal said–’

He broke off as the sound of voices came from the passageway, loud voices that carried with them the connotation of gesticulating hands. Claremont entered, followed by the Governor, Pearce and O’Brien. Claremont was saying: ‘If he’s not here, he must have fallen off and be lying by the track-side. And he’s not here. If we back up, say, five miles–’

Fairchild interrupted, one more vexation added to his sea of troubles. ‘Damn you, Deakin. That’s my whisky!’

Deakin gave an acknowledging nod. ‘And excellent stuff it is, too. You don’t have to be afraid of offering this to anyone.’

Without a word and without warning Pearce stepped forward and savagely struck Deakin’s right wrist, sending the glass flying.

Marica’s reaction was involuntary, as surprising to her as it was to the others. She said in sudden anger: ‘What a brave man you are. Marshal – with that big gun hanging by your side.’

With the exception of Deakin, everyone stared at her in astonishment. Pearce looked back towards Deakin, the surprise on his face giving way to contempt, a contempt reflected in his gesture as he pulled the Colt from its holster, threw it on the couch and smiled invitingly at Deakin. Deakin made no response. Pearce swung his left hand and hit Deakin, hard, across the lower face with the back of his clenched fist, a humiliating blow with which to strike any man. Deakin staggered and sat down heavily on the sofa, then, after a few seconds during which the other men averted their faces in shame for lost manhood, rose, dabbed some blood from a split lip and walked across to the other corner of the compartment, near the entrance to the passageway where, to the accompaniment of the screeching of brakes, the others brushed by him as they hurried to take up observation positions on the platforms. Marica came slowly after them and stopped in front of Deakin. From her reticule she brought out a flimsy wisp of cambric and patted the cut lip. When she spoke, it was in a very quiet tone.

‘Poor man,’ she said. ‘So little time to live.’

‘I’m not dead yet.’

‘I didn’t mean you. I meant the Marshal.’

She walked down the passageway and entered her sleeping compartment without looking back. Deakin looked after her thoughtfully, then crossed to the liquor cabinet and helped himself to some more bourbon.

While Deakin was lowering the level in the Governor’s bottle, Banlon backed the train slowly down the valley. Four men stood at the very end of the train, the rear platform of the second horse wagon, heavily wrapped against the biting cold and the thinly falling snow: Claremont and Pearce studied the track-side to the right, the Governor and O’Brien the side to the left. But as mile succeeded crawling mile there was nothing to be seen. The snow on both sides was virginal, untouched except for the faint dusting of soot from the locomotive’s earlier passage; nor was the snow heavy enough to have concealed any recent disturbances in the ankle-deep snow on the ground, far less have covered the body of a man. In short, there was no sign of the Reverend Peabody or any mark made by him had he fallen – or been pushed – from the train.

Claremont straightened and turned at the same instant as O’Brien, on the other side of the platform, did the same. Claremont shook his head slowly and O’Brien nodded in reluctant agreement; the latter turned again, leaned far out over the platform safety rail and waved his arm. Banlon, who had for the past fifteen or twenty minutes been looking towards the rear of the train, gave an acknowledging wave of his arm. The train jolted to a halt, then began to move forward again. Reluctantly, the four men on the rear platform moved away from the safety rails and returned to the comparative warmth of the horse wagon.

As soon as they returned to the day compartment Claremont had assembled there, with the exception of Banlon and his soldier-fireman Rafferty, the only eight remaining survivors of the original trainload. The atmosphere was heavy with suspicion and menace, not unmixed with fear. Every person present appeared to be carefully avoiding the eyes of every other person, with the exception of Deakin, who didn’t appear to care where he looked.

Claremont passed a weary hand across his forehead.

‘It’s impossible. It’s just absolutely impossible. We know that Peabody is not on the train. We know he can’t have left the train. And nobody saw him after he left this compartment. A man can’t just vanish like that.’ Claremont looked round the listeners, but there was no help from there, no reaction except the embarrassed shuffling of the feet of Carlos, the Negro cook, who was clearly embarrassed by the unaccustomed presence of the gentry. Claremont repeated: ‘Well, he can’t, can he?’

‘Can’t he?’ Fairchild said heavily. ‘He’s done it, hasn’t he?’

Deakin said: ‘Well, yes and no.’

Pearce’s antagonism flared instantly. ‘What do you mean – yes and no? What do you know about this disappearance, mister?’

‘Nothing. How could I? I was here from the time Peabody left till the time Henry reported his disappearance. Miss Fairchild will vouch for that.’

Pearce made to speak but Claremont lifted a restraining hand and turned to Deakin. ‘You have something in mind?’

‘I have something in mind. True, we haven’t crossed any ravines during the time that Peabody could have disappeared. But we did cross over two small trellis bridges in that stretch. The outside of the train is practically level with the sides of the bridges – and neither of those have guard rails. He could have gone from the train over the edge without leaving a trace.’

O’Brien made no attempt to conceal the disbelief in his voice. ‘An interesting theory, Deakin. All you have to explain now is why he jumped from–’

‘He didn’t jump. He was pushed. More likely, someone just picked him up and threw him over the edge. He was, after all, a very little man. A big strong person could have thrown him well clear. I wonder who that person could have been. Not me. I’ve an alibi. Not Miss Fairchild. She’s not a big strong man and, anyway, I’m her alibi, although I suppose my testimony is worthless in your eyes. But you’re big strong men. All of you. Six big strong men.’ He paused and surveyed them severally and leisurely. ‘I wonder which one of you it was.’

The Governor didn’t splutter but he came close. ‘Preposterous! Absolutely preposterous!’

Claremont said icily: The man’s crazy.’

‘I’m only trying to find a theory to fit the known facts/ Deakin said mildly. ‘Anyone got a better one?’

From the uneasy silence it was apparent that no one had a better one. Marica said: ‘But who on earth would want to – to kill a harmless little man like Mr Peabody?’

‘I don’t know. Who on earth would do away with a harmless old doctor like Molyneux? Who on earth would want to do away with two – I presume – harmless cavalry officers like Oakland and Newell?’

Pearce’s suspicions were immediate and inevitable. ‘Who said anything’s happened to them?’

Deakin regarded him for a long and, it seemed, pitying moment; he appeared bent on making it clear that the strength of his determination not to become involved physically with Pearce was matched only by his total disregard for the man, an attitude that Pearce was manifestly finding more intolerable by the moment. Deakin said: ‘If you believe, after all that’s happened, that their disappearance is just the long arm of coincidence, then it’s time you turned over your badge to someone who isn’t solid bone between the ears. Why, Marshal, you might be the man we want.’

Pearce, his face ugly, stepped forward, his fist swinging, but Claremont quickly interposed himself between him and Deakin and whatever Claremont lacked it was certainly not authority.

‘That will be quite enough, Marshal. There’s been too much violence already.’

‘I agree entirely with Colonel Claremont.’ Fairchild puffed out his cheeks and spoke weightily in his impressively gubernatorial manner. ‘I think we’re being panicked. We don’t know that anything of what this – this felon is suggesting is true. We don’t know that Molyneux was murdered–’ Fairchild had a splendid gift for emphasis with a telling pause after each word so emphasized – ‘and we’ve only Deakin’s word for that, we’ve only Deakin’s word that he, Deakin, was a doctor – and we all know what Deakin’s word is worth.’

‘You’re maligning my character in public, Governor,’ Deakin said. ‘There’s a law in the constitution that says you – that’s me – can seek redress for such unsubstantiated imputations. I have six witnesses to the fact that you have slandered me.’ Deakin looked around him. ‘Mind you I wouldn’t say that they are all unbiased.’

‘The law! The law!’ Fairchild had turned an unbecoming turkey red and the popping bloodshot blue eyes appeared to be in some danger of coming adrift from their moorings. ‘A scofflaw like you, a murderer, an arsonist, daring to invoke the sacred constitution of our United States!’ He paused, probably because of the awareness that he was operating some little way below his thes-pian best. ‘We don’t know that Oakland and Newell were murdered. We don’t actually know that Peabody was the victim of–’

‘You’re whistling in the dark/ Deakin said contemptuously. He looked at the Governor consideringly. ‘Or maybe you don’t intend to lock the door of your sleeping compartment tonight.’ The Governor failed to take advantage of the longensuing pause and Deakin went on: ‘Unless, of course, you’re in a position to know that you personally have nothing to worry about.’

Fairchild stared at him. ‘By God, Deakin, you’ll pay for that insinuation.’

Deakin said wearily: ‘Hark at who’s talking about insinuations. Pay for it? With what? My neck? That’s already spoken for. My God, it’s wonderful. Here you all are, bent on delivering me up to justice, while one of you a killer with the blood of four men on his hands. Maybe not four men. Maybe eighty-four men.’

‘Eighty-four men?’ Fairchild exercised the last of his rapidly waning hauteur.

‘As you put it yourself. Governor, we don’t know that the loss of the troop wagons was an accident.’ Deakin gazed off into the middle distance, then focused again on the Governor. ‘Just as we don’t know that there is only one of you eight – even though they are not here, we cannot exclude Banlon and Rafferty although we must of course exclude Miss Fairchild – solely responsible for the killings. There may be two or more of you felons acting in concert, in which case all of you would be equally guilty in the eyes of the law. My training in medical jurisprudence. Not that any of you would believe it.’

With an unhurried ostentation Deakin turned his back on the company, leaned his elbows on the brass grab-rail and peered out into the thickening, snow-laden twilight.

SIX

Banlon eased the locomotive to a halt, secured the brake, locked it, removed the heavy key, tiredly wiped his brow with a sweat-rag and turned to Rafferty who was propped up against his side of the cab, his eyes half-closed and swaying with utter weariness.

Banlon said: ‘Enough.’

‘Enough. I’m dead.’

‘Two corpses.’ Banlon peered out into the snow-filled darkness of the night and shivered. ‘Come on. Let’s go see your Colonel.’

The Colonel, at that moment, was sitting as close to the wood-burning stove as it was possible for a man to be. Huddled with him were Governor Fairchild, O’Brien, Pearce and Marica. All of them had glasses of various liquids in their hands. Deakin sat on the floor in a remote corner, his shoulders hunched against the cold; predictably, he had no glass in his hand.

The door leading to the front platform opened and Banlon and Rafferty hurried in, accompanied by a blast of freezing air and a thick swirl of snow, and quickly closed the door. They looked whitefaced and exhausted. Banlon yawned mightily, politely covering his mouth with his hand; one does not yawn in the presence of governors and colonels. He yawned again, uncontrollably, and said: ‘Well, that’s it, then. Colonel. We lie down or we fall down.’

‘You’ve done a fine job, Banlon, a splendid job. I won’t forget to report this to your Union Pacific employers. As for you, Rafferty, I’m proud of you.’ Claremont considered briefly. ‘You can have my bunk, Banlon; Rafferty, you have the Major’s.’

‘Thank you.’ Banlon yawned a third time. ‘One thing. Colonel. Somebody’s going to have to keep the steam up.’

‘Seems a waste of fuel. Can’t you just let the fire out and light it again?’

‘No way.’ The emphatic shake of Banlon’s head precluded any argument. ‘Relighting would waste another couple of hours and use just as much fuel as it would cost to keep steam up. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that if the fires go out and the water in the condenser tubes freezes – well. Colonel, it’s still a mighty long walk to Fort Humboldt.’

Deakin rose stiffly to his feet. ‘I’m not much of a walker. I’ll go.’

‘You?’ Pearce had also risen, his face at once suspicious. ‘What suddenly makes you so cooperative?’

‘I don’t feel the slightest bit co-operative; the last thing I want to do is to co-operate with any of you lot. But it’s my skin as well as yours – and you all know by now how much I cherish my own skin. Also, Marshal, I have very delicate feelings – I can sense I’m not very popular here. And I’m cold – this is a very draughty spot – while it will be nice and warm in the cab. And I’d rather not spend the rest of the night watching the lot of you drinking whisky. And I’d feel safer the further I am from you – meaning you, Pearce. And I’m the only person who can be trusted to go – or had you forgotten, Marshal, that I’m the only person aboard above suspicion?’

Deakin turned and looked enquiringly at Banlon, who in turn looked at Colonel Claremont. Claremont hesitated, then nodded.

Banlon said: ‘Rake the fire-box bed every halfhour. Feed in enough fuel to keep the pressure gauge needle between the blue and the red. If it goes over the red, you’ll find the steam release valve beside the gauge.’

Deakin nodded and left. Pearce looked uneasily after him, then turned to Claremont.

‘I don’t like it. What’s to stop him from uncoupling the locomotive and driving off himself? We all know that scofflaw will stop at nothing.’

‘This is to stop him, Marshal.’ Banlon held out the heavy key. ‘I’ve locked the brake wheel. Like to take charge of it?’

‘I would indeed.’ Pearce took the key, sat down, relaxed and reached for his glass. O’Brien rose at the same moment, nodded to Banlon and Rafferty.

‘I’ll show you men where to sleep. Come on.’

The three men left the day compartment and O’Brien led the way towards the after end of the second coach. He showed Banlon into Claremont’s compartment, then led Rafferty into his own. He waved a hand and said: ‘This suit you?’

While Rafferty looked around in dutiful respect O’Brien swiftly extracted a bottle of whisky from a cupboard and held it out in the passageway where it couldn’t be seen. Rafferty said: ‘Of course. Thank you very much, sir.’

‘Fine. I’ll say good night, then.’ O’Brien closed the door and retraced his steps until he reached the galley. Without even the courtesy of a knock he entered and closed the door behind him. The galley was a tiny place, not more than six by five, and when the space taken up by the cord-fuelled cooking stove, the cupboards for pots, pans, crockery and food were taken into account, there was barely room for the cook to turn around in, far less swing a cat: but Carlos and Henry, each perched on a tiny stool, did not appear to find the accommodation unduly cramped. As O’Brien entered they looked up, each man wearing his habitual expression, Henry his look of lugubrious near-despair, Carlos his dazzling beam.

O’Brien placed the bottle on the tiny worktable. ‘You’re going to need this. And the warmest clothes you can find. It’s a bitter night out. I’ll be back shortly.’ He looked round curiously. ‘Wouldn’t you have a lot more room in your own quarters?’

‘Yes, indeed, Mr O’Brien.’ Carlos smiled hugely and indicated the stove – it was too hot to touch. ‘But we wouldn’t have this. Warmest place on the train.’

The second warmest place was unquestionably the locomotive cab. At that moment it was quite a few degrees colder than it would have been normally because of the heavy gusts of driving snow that swirled almost continuously into it; but the fierce red glow from the opened fire-box, which rendered the two oil-lamps momentarily superfluous, at least gave the illusion of warmth. But Deakin, unquestionably, was feeling no cold at all; sweat glistened on his face as he stoked the fire-box.

He fed in a final baulk of cordwood, straightened and glanced at the steam-gauge. The needle was close to the red mark. He nodded to himself in satisfaction and closed the fire-box door. The illumination in the cab was suddenly much reduced and still further so when Deakin unhooked one of the lamps and took it with him into the tender, which was still about two-thirds full of cordwood. He set the lamp on the floor and began to work almost feverishly, transferring the wood from the right to the left side of the tender.

Fifteen minutes later his face no longer glistened with sweat; it was copiously covered with it and this despite the fact that the temperature in the fully exposed tender must have been close on freezing point. But then, shifting heavy baulks of timber at high speed is no light work and Deakin had already transferred at least half of the remaining contents of the tender from the right to the left. He straightened wearily, rubbed an obviously aching back, turned away, moved into the cab and examined the steam-gauge. The needle, during his exertions, had fallen below the blue line. Hurriedly, Deakin opened the fire-box door, raked through the bed, threw some more cordwood into the hungry heart of the fire-box, closed the door and, without even glancing at the steam-gauge, returned to his back-breaking task in the tender.

He had removed no more than twenty baulks when he stopped work abruptly and brought the oil-lamp to examine the remaining pile of cordwood more closely. He set the oil-lamp to one side and threw the next dozen baulks to the left before reaching for the lamp again. He sank slowly to his knees, the normal lack of expression on his face replaced by a hard and bitter anger.

The two men lying huddled together were unmistakably dead, literally frozen stiff. Deakin had removed sufficient cordwood to reveal their upper bodies and faces. Both men had ghastly head wounds, both men wore the uniforms of officers of the United States Cavalry, one a Captain, the other a Lieutenant. Beyond a doubt Claremont’s two missing officers, Oakland and Newell.

The anger had left Deakin’s face: for a man who lived the life he did, anger, he had long discovered, was an emotion he couldn’t afford. He stood and swiftly began to replace the cordwood, stacking it in the neat precise form in which he had found it until it had all been returned to its original position. Understandably, because of this necessity for precision and because of his rapidly increasing tiredness which was now but one stage removed from exhaustion, it took him twice as long to restack the pile as it had taken him to dismantle it.

Finished, he again checked the steam-gauge to find that the needle had now fallen well below the blue line, then again opened the fire-box door to reveal a red glow inside which was now very dull indeed. Wearily, Deakin resumed the stoking and thrust into the box every last baulk of timber it would accommodate. Again he closed the door, again he did not examine the gauge. He pulled his collar high, his hat low and swung down on the track-side into the icy breath-catching driving whiteness of what was now a near-blizzard.

Not bothering too much to conceal his presence – the visibility was now as close to zero as made no difference – Deakin walked back along the track-side, passing first the day-cum-dining coach, then the coach containing the galley and officers’ night quarters. As he reached the end of this he stopped abruptly and cocked his head. He could distinctly hear a peculiar glug-glugging sound – peculiar in those circumstances but readily identifiable in more normal circumstances. Deakin eased forward in ghostlike silence and hitched a wary eye round the rear corner of the second coach.

On the leading platform of the third coach – the supply wagon – a man was sitting on the rail, his head tilted back as he drank deeply from the neck of a bottle. Because of the now almost horizontally driving snow and the fart that it was blowing directly from the front to the back of the train, the man was sitting in an almost completely snow-sheltered oasis; Deakin had no difficulty at all in recognizing the man as Henry.

Deakin pressed back against the coach, drew a deep breath of relief, pulled his sleeve across his forehead in another gesture of relief, silently retraced his steps for several paces, then moved directly out from the train and came curving back in a semicircle which took him to a point just to the rear of the supply wagon. This time his approach was a great deal more cautious. He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled cautiously forward and glanced upward. A second man was on guard at the rear of the supply wagon; there was no mistaking the black moonface of Carlos even although the gleaming smile was in noticeable and understandable abeyance.

Deakin repeated the circling tactic and brought up at the rear end of the first horse wagon. He mounted the platform, effected a prudently stealthy entrance and closed the door behind him. As he moved towards the front of the wagon a horse whinnied nervously. Deakin immediately moved towards the horse, stroked its neck and murmured reassuring words; the horse nuzzled his face and fell quiet. If Carlos had heard the sound he paid no attention; apart from the fact that it was a sound that one would naturally expect to hear from a horse wagon, it wasn’t much of a night for paying attention.

Arrived at the front end of the wagon, Deakin peered through a crack in the door. Carlos, only a few feet away, appeared to be gloomily contemplating what must have been his very chilly feet indeed. Deakin turned away to the slatted haybox to his left. With great care and in complete silence he removed a few of the top bars and an armful of hay, recovered the telegraph transmitter, replaced the hay and the bars as he had found them, and moved off with the transmitter to the rear of the wagon where he descended the steps, looked quickly to the front and the rear – visibility was still almost nil – stepped down silently into the snow and made his way quickly towards the rear of the train.

A convenient fifty yards from the rear of the train Deakin located a telegraph pole. He unwound the trailing lead from the transmitter and secured one end to his belt. Then he began to climb the telegraph pole.

‘Began’ was the operative word. He managed to get about three feet off the ground, then helplessly remained there, unable to make another inch. The effects of snow, high winds and freezing temperatures had combined to encase the pole in an impenetrable sheath of ice which offered a zero friction coefficient, an entire lack of grip which rendered further progress quite impossible. Deakin returned to earth, stood there for a moment in thought, then tore a quantity of material from his shirt and ripped it into two pieces.

He made for the nearest angled guy wire, wrapped his legs around it, and, using them and the two improvised gloves from his shirt to afford a friction grip, started to climb again. It was a fairly difficult climb and, in the light of what he had recently been through, a most exhausting one, but by no means impossible; by the time he’d reached the top and straddled the crossbar the matter that concerned him most was that his frozen hands felt as if they no longer belonged to him. At that moment frostbite was the very last thing he wanted.

Two minutes of rubbing and kneading his hands and the pain that steadily accompanied this as the circulation returned convinced him that this misfortune had not indeed befallen him. He detached the end of the trailing lead from his belt, secured it firmly to a telegraph wire and returned to earth the way he had come and so swiftly that by the time he arrived there the hands that had so lately felt frozen now felt as if they had been badly burned. He uncovered the transmitter set and bent over it, shielding it as best he could from the snow, and began to transmit.

At Fort Humboldt, where the weather was no better and no worse than it was where Deakin was crouched, Sepp Calhoun, White Hand and two other white men were sitting in the Commandant’s office. Calhoun, as usual, was using his boots to make free of Colonel Fairchild’s desk, while both hands were occupied in similarly making free of the Colonel’s whisky and cigars. White Hand was sitting erect in a hard-backed chair, carefully not touching the glass before him. The door opened and a man entered, his face conveying as high a degree of urgency as is possible for one whose bewhiskered and bearded face is liberally covered in snow.

Calhoun and White Hand looked at each other, then moved swiftly towards the door. Even as they reached the telegraph office Carter was transcribing a message. Calhoun glanced briefly at him and Simpson, the other captive telegraph operator. nodded briefly at the two guards and took up his customary position behind the desk. White Hand remained standing. Carter ceased writing and handed a slip of paper to Calhoun, whose face immediately assumed a thunderous expression of frustrated anger.

‘Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!’

White Hand said in a quiet voice: ‘Trouble, Sepp Calhoun? Trouble for White Hand?’

‘Trouble for White Hand. Listen. “Attempt on troop wagons failed. Heavy armed guard on all coaches. Advise.” How in God’s name did the damned idiots not–’

‘Such talk will not help, Calhoun.’ Calhoun looked at him without expression. ‘My men and I will help.’

‘It’s a bad night.’ Calhoun went to the door, opened it and passed outside. White Hand followed, closing the door behind him. Within moments the figures of the two men whitened in the heavy driving snow.

Calhoun said: ‘A very bad night, White Hand.’

‘The rewards are great. Your words, Sepp Calhoun.’

‘You can do it? Even on a night like this?’ White Hand nodded. ‘Very well. The entrance to Breakheart Pass. A cliff on one side, steep slope with plenty of rock cover for you and your men on the other. You can leave your horses half a mile–’

‘White Hand knows what to do.’

‘Sorry. Come on. Let’s tell them to instruct Banlon to stop the train there. You’ll never have an easier job. White Hand.’

‘I know, I do not like it. I am a warrior and I live to fight. But massacre I do not like.’

‘The rewards are great.’

White Hand nodded in silence. Both men reentered the telegraph room where Carter was tapping out a message. Calhoun waved him into stillness, sat at his purloined desk, wrote a brief message, handed it to one of the guards to give to Carter and said to Simpson: ‘Listen good, friend.’

Carter sent out the communication while Simpson wrote. At the end of the transmission Calhoun said: ‘Well, Simpson?’

‘“Instruct Banlon halt train two hundred yards inside east entrance to Breakheart Pass.”

Calhoun nodded approvingly towards Carter. ‘You may yet live to be an old man.’ As he finished speaking another message in Morse came in over the headphones. It was very brief and Carter read it out without waiting for the usual confirmation from Simpson.

“Affirmative. Signing off.”

Calhoun smiled in as benign a fashion as he was capable of and said: ‘We have them. White Hand.’

Judging from the barely perceptible expression on his face, Deakin was not quite of the same opinion. He removed his headphones, with a strong tug pulled the telegraph lead clear from overhead, then gave the telegraph set a shove which sent it tumbling down a steep slope to vanish in the darkness below. He walked away quickly, gave the train a wide berth, arrived at the cab’s footplate, brushed the snow from his face, then peered at the steam-gauge.

The needle had fallen dangerously below the blue line. Deakin opened the fire-box, looked at the very dully glowing embers and began to feed cordwood into the fire-box. This time, either through tiredness or concern, he seemed to be in no hurry to go. Instead, he watched the gauge in an almost proprietorial fashion and waited patiently until the needle had climbed up from below the blue line to fractionally above the red one. Banlon had intimated that this was the danger area, but Deakin didn’t seem to care. He closed the door on the now fiercely-burning firebox, took an oil-can and two railroad spikes from Banlon’s tool-box, turned up his sheepskin collar and dropped down to the track-side.

He made his by now advisedly circuitous route towards the rear of the train and fetched up stealthily in the close proximity of the rear platform of the supply wagon. Carlos was there, a huddled and shivering Carlos, vainly endeavouring to combat the rigours of the night with the assistance of a bottle of bourbon. Deakin nodded to himself, as if in satisfaction, dropped silently to his hands and knees, crawled under the side of the coach and on to the middle of the track, lowered himself on to his elbows and made his stealthy and extremely slow way along the ties between the rear bogies of the coach. He finally stopped and twisted round with infinite care until he was looking upwards.

Immediately above him was the screwed coupling attaching the rear of the supply wagon to the front of the first horse wagon. Above that again could be seen the rear platform of the supply wagon and the front platform of the horse wagon. On the former and no more than five feet away from Deakin was the clearly observable figure of Carlos.

Very cautiously, so as to avoid any metallic clanking, Deakin gripped the two coupled central links and tried to unscrew them. He desisted almost at once, partly because the task was clearly impossible, partly because of the realization that if he persisted in his effort he was going to leave much of the skin of his palms attached to the frozen metal when the time came for removing his hands. He lifted his oil-can and squirted a generous amount of lubricant on to the screw threads. He heard a sound, lowered the can gently to the snow and turned round very very slowly indeed until he was once more looking upwards.

The sound he had heard was clearly that of Carlos placing his bottle down, for he had just straightened and then started to clump to and fro on the metal platform, stamping his feet and beating his arms, in an attempt to restore circulation. After a few moments he opted for the certainty of internal warmth as opposed to the manifest uncertainty of external warmth and returned to his bottle of bourbon.

Deakin returned to the task on hand. Again he seized the links, again he twisted and again the result was the same. Nothing. With delicate care he released his grip, fished inside his coat and brought out the two railroad spikes; compared to the coupling links, the metal he now held in his hands felt almost warm. Slowly and carefully he inserted the spikes into the links and twisted again. This time the extra leverage did what was required and the screw turned a fraction, making a slight squeaking noise. Deakin remained absolutely still, then looked slowly upwards. Carlos stirred, straightened from the rail, looked around unenthusiastically, then went back into a huddle with his bottle of bourbon.

Once again Deakin resumed his assault on the bottle screw. Using alternately the oil-can and spikes, he reached, in very short order indeed, the stage where there were not more than two or three threads left. He withdrew the spikes and made the last couple of turns by hand. The two halves of the bottle screw came apart and he lowered them, slowly and in complete silence, until they were dangling vertically at the foot of their respective chains.

Deakin looked up. Carlos hadn’t moved. On elbows and knees again Deakin inched back the way he had come, crawled out on to the trackside and made his circumspect way back to the locomotive cab. The needle of the steam-gauge was, predictably, on the blue mark. Some little time later, after another stint of feeding the insatiable maw of the fire-box, an operation that Deakin clearly found to be increasingly distasteful, the needle stood on the red once more. Deakin sank wearily on to a bucket seat in the corner and closed his eyes.

Whether he was asleep or not wds impossible to say, but if he were he must have set some sort of timing mechanism in his brain for at fairly regular intervals he started awake, fed some more fuel into the box, then returned to his seat. When Banlon and Rafferty, accompanied by O’Brien, returned to the footplate, they found him hunched on the bucket seat, his head bent, his chin sunk on his chest. He appeared to be asleep. Suddenly he started and looked upwards.

‘No more than I expected.’ O’Brien’s voice was coldly contemptuous. ‘Sleeping on the job, eh, Deakin?’

Deakin said nothing, merely pointed a thumb in the direction of the steam-gauge. Banlon crossed and examined it.

‘Pretty short sleep, I’d say, Major. Pressure’s right up.’ He turned round unconcernedly and glanced at the tender; the cordwood was neatly stacked with no signs of having been disarranged. ‘And just the right amount of fuel gone, I’d say. A fair enough job. Of course, with all the experience he’s had of fires, such as burning down Lake’s Crossing–’

‘That’ll do, Banlon.’ O’Brien jerked his head. ‘Come on, you.’

Deakin rose stiffly and glanced at his watch. ‘Midnight ! Seven hours I’ve been here. You said four.’

‘Banlon needed it. What do you want, Deakin? Sympathy?’

‘Food.’

‘Carlos has made supper.’ Deakin privately wondered how Carlos had found time to make supper. ‘In the galley. We’ve eaten.’

‘I’ll bet you have.’

O’Brien and Deakin descended to the trackside and made their way to the front platform of the leading coach. O’Brien leant far out and waved a hand. Banlon waved an acknowledging hand and disappeared inside the cab. O’Brien turned away and opened the door to the officers’ day compartment.

‘Coming, then?’

Deakin rubbed his brow. ‘In a moment. Don’t forget that when the train is stopped no fresh air gets into that cab. After seven hours there I’ve got a head like a pumpkin.’

O’Brien regarded Deakin for a speculative moment, then obviously and rightly concluding that Deakin could do no mischief standing where he was, nodded and passed inside, closing the door behind him.

Banlon opened up the throttle. The wheels spun on the icy rails, the laboured puffing of the locomotive increased as clouds of smoke belched from the high stack, the puffing slowed abruptly as the wheels bit and the train slowly got under way. With his hand on the grab-rail Deakin leaned far outwards and looked backwards. It was difficult to be certain in the snow-filled darkness, it could have been as much imagination as anything else, but it seemed to him that there was a slight gap opening up between the supply wagon and the first of the horse wagons. A half-minute later, with the train now rounding a gentle curve and so making rearward observation that much easier, Deakin knew for sure that his imagination was not at work. Rapidly fading ghostly blurs in the darkness, the two horse wagons, now at two or three hundred yards’ distance, were stationary on the track.

Deakin straightened. Although his face might have appeared at first glance to be its normal, still, inscrutable self, it was perhaps just possible to detect a slight expression of satisfaction. He turned the handle of the door and passed inside. The Governor, Claremont, Pearce and O’Brien were sitting close to the stove, glasses in hand, while Marica, somewhat apart and glassless, sat with her hands demurely folded in her lap. They all looked up at the same moment. O’Brien jerked a thumb in the direction of the rear of the train.

‘Food’s in the galley.’

‘Where do I sleep tonight?’

‘You could learn to say “thanks”.’

‘I can’t recall anyone saying “thanks” to me for the seven hours I spent out in that damned cab. Where do I sleep tonight?’

Claremont said: ‘Here. Bunk down on one of the couches.’

‘What? Next the liquor cabinet?’ He made to move away but Claremont’s voice stopped him.

‘Deakin.’ Deakin turned. ‘You’d a long haul out there. I didn’t mean it that way. Cold?’

‘I survived.’

Claremont looked at Governor Fairchild, who hesitated, then nodded. Claremorit reached into the cabinet behind him, lifted out a bottle of bourbon and handed it to Deakin, who almost reluctantly accepted it. The Colonel said: ‘As Miss Fairchild said, you’re innocent until you are proved guilty. If you follow me. Might warm you up a little, Deakin.’

‘Thank you, Colonel. I appreciate that.’

Deakin left. As he moved towards the passageway leading to the rear of the coach Marica looked up, the tentative beginnings of a smile on her lips. Deakin walked impassively by and Marica’s face became as expressionless as his own.

Almost impossibly, the three of them managed to squeeze into that tiny galley. Carlos and Henry accepted generous measures from Deakin’s bottle while Deakin himself set about attacking a meal imposing in quantity but indeterminate in quality: Carlos, understandably, had not been at his culinary best. Deakin scraped the plate with his fork, picked up his own glass and drained it.

Carlos said apologetically: ‘Sorry, Mr Deakin, sir. Afraid it got a bit tough in the oven.’

Deakin didn’t ask what ‘it’ was. ‘It was fine, just fine and just what I needed.’ He yawned. ‘And I know what I need now.’ He picked up the bourbon bottle, then set it down again. ‘Never was much of a drinking man. Think you boys can attend to this for me?’

Carlos beamed ‘We’ll try, Mr Deakin. We’ll certainly try.’

Deakin left for the day compartment. As he entered, the Governor, Claremont, O’Brien and Pearce – Marica was already gone – were leaving for their sleeping quarters, none of them so much as looking at Deakin, far less vouchsafing a word. Deakin, in turn, ignored them. He put some more wood in the stove, stretched out on the settee at the front of the coach, pulled out his watch and looked at it. It was one o’clock.

SEVEN

‘One o’clock,’ Sepp Calhoun said. ‘You will be back by dawn?’

‘I shall be back by dawn.’ White Hand descended the steps of the commandant’s, office and joined his men, at least fifty Indians already assembled in the Fort compound. All were mounted and horses and men were whitely covered in the thickly driving snow. White Hand swung into his own saddle and lifted his hand in grave salute; Calhoun lifted his own in acknowledgment. White Hand wheeled his horse and urged it at a fast canter towards the compound gate; his fifty horsemen followed.

Deakin stirred, woke, swung his legs over the edge of the couch and again consulted his watch. It was four o’clock. He rose and moved quietly down the passageway past the Governor’s and Marica’s sleeping quarters, through the dining compartment and through the end door, out on to the rear platform of the first coach. From that he transferred to the front platform of the second coach. Moving very stealthily now, he peered through the window of the door leading into the second coach.

Not five feet away a pair of lanky legs protruded from the galley out into the passageway. The legs were unmistakably those of Henry. Even as Deakin watched, the legs uncrossed and recrossed themselves. Henry was unmistakably awake.

Deakin drew back from the window, his face thoughtful. He moved to one side of the platform, climbed up on the platform rail, reached up and, after a struggle, succeeded in hauling himself on to the roof. On his hands and knees, moving from the safety of one central ventilator to the next, he made his way across the precarious route offered by the snow- and ice-encrusted roof, a journey made no easier by the jolting, swaying coach.

The train was moving along the side of a narrow and deep ravine, the track-side closely bordered by heavily snow-weighted conifers. The sagging branches of the pines appeared almost to brush the roof of the train. On two occasions, as if warned by instinct, he glanced over his shoulder just in time to see such heavy branches sweeping towards him and both times he had to drop flat to escape being swept from the roof of the train.

He reached the rear of the second coach, edged his way forward with millimetric stealth and peered down. To his total lack of surprise, Carlos, muffled to the ears against the bitter cold, paced to and fro on the platform. Deakin inched his way back from the rear edge, turned, got to his hands and knees and crawled back for a few feet. Then he stood and continued walking forward, maintaining his balance only with the greatest difficulty.

The large bough of a pine tree came sweeping towards him. Deakin didn’t hesitate. He knew that if he didn’t do it now it was questionable if he would ever summon the suicidal resolution to try again. He took a few swift running backward steps to break the impact of the branch as it caught him, arms outstretched further to break the impact, chest-high.

He seized the branch with both hands and realized to his immediate dismay that it was nowhere near as stout as he had thought – he had been deceived by its thick covering of snow. The bough bent. Desperately he swung his feet up but even at that his back was barely two feet clear of the roof. He glanced down. An oblivious Carlos, pacing to and fro, was momentarily only feet below him, then lost to sight.

Deakin swung his legs down and, facing rearward, his heels gouging twin tracks in the frozen snow, abruptly released his grip in the knowledge that he had an even chance of being disembowelled by one of the row of central ventilators.

He was not so disembowelled, but for that fleeting second he was probably unaware of his good fortune, for though he had made sure to keep his head high the impact of his back striking against the coach roof was almost literally stunning. Paradoxically enough, it was that treacherous snow-frosted roof that saved his life. Had he landed on a dry roof the deceleration factor would have been so great that he would certainly have lost consciousness, if not been gravely injured: in either event the result would have been the same – his senseless or broken body would have gone over the edge. As it was, the deceleration factor was minimized by the fact that his body at once started sliding along the roof – and sliding at such speed that it seemed not only probable but certain that he would go shooting out over the rear edge and on to the track below, when damage of a very permanent nature would likely occur to him.

Again, paradoxically, it was the potentially lethal ventilators that were his saving. More by instinct than by calculated thought he reached out for the first ventilator that came sweeping by. He had the distinct impression of his right shoulder being wrenched off and his grip was ruthlessly broken; but it perceptibly slowed his rate of travel. He reached for the next ventilator coming up and the same agonizing process was repeated; but he was sliding now at hardly more than walking pace. The third and, he could see, the last ventilator came up. Again he hooked his right elbow round it but this time brought over his left arm and clasped it round his right wrist. He must have grown a new right shoulder for it felt as if this one, too, was coming off. But he held on. His body pivoted through three-quarters of a circle until his legs as far as the knees were protruding over the left-hand side of the roof. But he held on. He knew he had to move then, knew he couldn’t hang on much longer. Slowly and in great pain he hauled himself back to the centre line of the coach roof, moved to the rear end and fell rather than lowered himself to the rear platform below.

Gasping for breath, doubled up and totally winded, he sat there for what must have been all of five minutes, feeling like the first man who had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He assessed his injuries: a collection of broken ribs in front where the branch had caught his chest, a similar amount at the back where he’d crashed on to the roof and a shoulder broken in an indeterminate number of places. It took a considerable amount of gingerly investigation to establish that in fact his skeletal system was still intact. Bruising, probably massive bruising there would be and a considerable amount of pain for some time to come, but those he could try both to ignore and forget. They would not incapacitate him. He pulled himself to his feet, opened the rear door of the supply wagon and passed inside.

He moved forward through the banked tiers of coffins and medical supply crates until he came to the front of the supply wagon, where he peered through one of the two small circular observation ports. Carlos was as he had been, pacing to and fro and clearly unaware that anything was amiss. Deakin shook off his sheepskin jacket, fixed it over one of the observation windows and put a piece of heavy sacking over the other. He then lit one of the oil-lamps which hung at intervals along the central length of the coach. Deakin noted with some concern that there was a very narrow chink between two of the planks on the right-hand side and it was barely possible that a thin line of light might show through. But then, to observe such a light, if light there was, one would have to be standing to the right of the coach and Carlos was at the front. Besides, there was nothing he could do about it anyway. Deakin dismissed the matter from his mind and turned to the task on hand.

With the aid of a screwdriver and cold chisel with which he had thoughtfully provided himself from Banlon’s tool-box, Deakin prised open the lid of a yellow brass-bound oiled wooden box marked MEDICAL CORPS SUPPLIES: UNITED STATES ARMY. The lid came clear with a wrenching, splintering sound but Deakin paid no attention. Nefarious pursuits came much easier on a moving train than on a halted one. The combination of an elderly train, rusted wheels and ancient bogies made sufficient noise as it rattled along the track to preclude normal conversation at a distance of even a few feet. Any noise from within the supply wagon, short of something like a pistol shot, would have been quite inaudible to Carlos, who was in any event concentrating upon other matters. As on an earlier occasion, Carlos had stopped pacing and was relying heavily on liquid internal warmth.

The medical supplies were packed in unusual grey metal containers, unmarked. Deakin picked up one of the tins and opened the lid. The box was packed with gleaming metal shells. Deakin showed no reaction. The discovery, clearly, came as no shock. He opened another two tins. The contents were as before.

Deakin left the wooden crate with its lid wrenched off – he had apparently passed the point of no return and seemed indifferent as to whether his handiwork was discovered or not – and moved on to another box, the lid of which he levered open with the same disregard for what purported to be US Government property. The contents were as they had been in the previous box. Deakin left and moved towards the rear of the supply wagon, lamp in hand, ignoring all the other wooden boxes marked as containing medical supplies. He reached the stacked tiers of coffins and began to haul one out from the bottom rack. For a supposedly empty coffin, even allowing for the state of his back and shoulder, this manoeuvre seemed to cost him a quite disproportionate deal of effort.

Carlos wasn’t indulging in anything like so considerable an amount of energy. It was apparent that he had not yet lost faith in the efficacy of bourbon as a means of warding off the intense cold; he had the neck of a bottle to his mouth, its base pointing vertically skywards. He lowered the bottle reluctantly, shook and inverted it, all to no purpose. The bottle was empty. Sorrowfully and perhaps a thought unsteadily, Carlos made for the side rail of the platform, leaned out and hurled the bottle into the night. His eyes wistfully followed the flight of the bottle until it disappeared almost immediately into the darkness and the swirling snow. Suddenly the wistful expression vanished, to be replaced not by his normal cheerful beaming expression but by a hard and chilling expression, the suddenly narrowed eyes incongruous in the moonlike face. He momentarily screwed shut those eyes and looked again but what he had seen was still there – a distinct line of light running along the side of the supply wagon. Moving with a speed and delicacy that one would not normally associate with so heavily built a character, he swung across from the rear platform of the second coach to the front platform of the supply wagon. He paused, reached inside his coat and brought out a very unpleasantlooking throwing knife.

At the far end of the wagon Deakin removed a rather sadly splintered lid from the coffin. He lifted the lantern and looked down. His face hardened into bitterness but registered neither surprise nor shock. Deakin had found no more than he had expected to find. The Reverend Peabody’s resting-place was not incongruous. He had been dead for many hours.

Deakin loosely replaced the splintered coffin lid and dragged another coffin from its rack on to the wagon floor. From the time taken and the great degree of energy expended, this coffin was obviously very much heavier than the previous one. Deakin used the cold chisel ruthlessly and had the lid off in seconds. He looked down into the interior of the coffin, then nodded almost imperceptibly in far from slow comprehension. The coffin was full to the top with heavily-oiled Winchester repeater rifles, lever action, with tubular magazines on the forestocks.

Deakin threw the lid loosely on top of the coffin, placed the oil-lamp on it, hauled a third coffin to the floor and, with the expertise born of practice, had the lid off in seconds. He had just time to notice that this, too, was full of brand new Winchesters when something caught his sleepless attention and his eyes shifted fractionally to the left. The oil-lamp had flickered, just once, as if in some sudden draught in a place where there shouldn’t have been a draught.

Deakin whirled round as Carlos, knife hand already swinging, flung himself upon him. Deakin caught the knife wrist and there was a brief but fierce struggle which ended, temporarily, when both men tripped over a coffin and broke apart in their fall, Deakin falling in an aisle between two rows of coffins, Carlos in the middle of the wagon. Both men were quickly on their feet, although Deakin, despite his aches and pains, or perhaps because of the cold appreciation of the fact that he was the one without a knife, was fractionally the faster. Carlos had changed his grip on his knife and now held it in a throwing position. Deakin, with no room to manoeuvre or take evasive action in those narrow confines, kicked savagely at the loose lid of the nearest coffin, the one on which the oil-lamp stood. The lid shot up in the air, momentarily obscuring Deakin from Carlos’s view as the lamp shattered on the floor, plunging the supply wagon into comparative darkness. Deakin was in no mood to wait around. To fight in the darkness a man carrying a knife you cannot see is a certain form of suicide.

He ran for the rear door of the supply wagon, went through and closed the door behind him. He didn’t even bother looking around him, there was no place to go except up. He scrambled to the roof via the safety rail, stretched himself out and looked down, waiting for Carlos to appear so that he could either jump him or, better, slide back when he did appear, wait for the appearance of his head over the top and kick it off. But the seconds passed and Carlos did not appear. Realization came to Deakin almost too late. He twisted his head around and peered forward into an opaque world filled with greyly driving snow. He rubbed the snow from his eyes, cupped his hand over them and peered again.

Carlos, less than ten feet away, was crawling cautiously along the centre of the roof, knife in one hand and teeth gleaming in a smile in the dark face. Carlos gave the marked impression of one who who was not only enjoying himself but expected to be enjoying himself considerably more in a matter of a second or two. Deakin did not share his feelings, this was one thing he could well have done without; the way he felt at that moment, a robust five-year-old could have coped with him without too much difficulty. There was, in fact, one consideration that slightly lessened the odds against Deakin. Though Carlos’s physical faculties seemed quite unimpaired, it was very questionable if the same could be said for his mental ones: Carlos was awash in a very considerable amount of bourbon.

Deakin, on hands and knees now, swung round to face the oncoming Carlos. As he did so, he caught a fleeting glimpse ahead of what seemed, through the snow, to be the beginnings of a long trellis bridge spanning a ravine, but it could have been as much imagined as seen. He had no time for any more. Carlos, now less than six feet away and still with the same gleaming smile of wolfish satisfaction, lifted his throwing hand over his shoulder. He did not look like a man who was in the habit of missing. Deakin jerked his own right hand convulsively forward and the handful of frozen snow it held struck Carlos in the eyes. Blindly, instinctively, Carlos completed his knife throw but Deakin had already flung himself forward in a headlong dive which took him below the trajectory of the knife, his right shoulder socketing solidly into Carlos’s chest.

It became immediately apparent that Carlos was not just the big fat man he appeared to be but a big and very powerful man. He took the full impact of Deakin’s dive without a grunt – admittedly the icy surface had robbed Deakin of all but a fraction of his potential take-off thrust – closed both hands around Deakin’s neck and began to squeeze.

Deakin tried to break the Negro’s grip but this proved to be impossible. Savagely, Deakin struck him with all his power – or what was left of it – on both face and body. Carlos merely smiled widely. Slowly, his legs quivering under the strain, Deakin got both feet beneath him and forced himself to a standing position, Carlos rising with him. Carlos, in fact, made no great effort to prevent Deakin from rising, his sole interest was concerned in maintaining and intensifying his grip

As the two men struggled, fighting in grotesquely slow motion as they tried to maintain their footholds on the treacherous surface, Carlos glanced briefly to his left. Directly below was the beginning of a curving trellis bridge and, below that again, the seemingly bottomless depths of a ravine. His teeth bared, half in savage intensity of effort, half in knowledge of impending triumph as he hooked his fingers ever more deeply into Deakin’s neck. It was a measure of his over-confidence, or more likely of the quantity of alcohol inside him, that he apparently quite failed to realize Deakin’s intention in bringing them both to their feet. When he did the time for realization had long gone by.

His hands grasping Carlos’s coat, Deakin flung himself violently backwards. Carlos, taken by surprise and completely off-balance on that icy surface, had no option but to topple after him. As they fell, Deakin doubled his legs until his knees almost touched his chin, got both feet into Carlos’s midriff and kicked upward with all his strength. The forward velocity of Carlos’s fall and the vicious upthrust from Deakin’s legs combined with the strong downpull of his arms, broke Carlos’s stranglehold and sent him, arms and legs flailing ineffectually and helplessly, catapulting over the side of the wagon, over the side of the bridge and into the depths of the ravine below.

Deakin reached quickly for the security of a ventilator and stared down into the gorge. Carlos, tumbling through the air in an almost grotesquely lazy slow motion, vanished into the snow-filled depths. As he disappeared, a long thin fading scream of terror reached up from the blackness below.

Deakin’s were not the only ears to hear Carlos’s last sound on earth. Henry, busy tending a pot of coffee on the stove, looked up sharply. He stood for a few moments in a tensely waiting position, then, when no other sound came, shrugged and returned to the coffee-pot.

Winded, breathing heavily and massaging his bruised neck – an action which gave his aching right shoulder as much pain as it gave his neck solace – Deakin clung for some time to the ventilator, then edged cautiously to the rear of the supply wagon and lowered himself on to the rear platform. He moved inside, lit another oil-lamp and continued his research. He opened two more of the Army Medical Corps boxes. As before, those contained Winchester ammunition. He came to a fifth, was about to pass it by when he noticed that it was slightly more elongated than the others. That was enough for Deakin to get his cold chisel working immediately. The box was jammed with stone-coloured gutta-percha bags, the type frequently employed for the transport of gunpowder.

Deakin decided to open one more box even though it seemed in every way identical to its predecessor. This one was packed with small cylindrical objects, each about eight inches in length, each wrapped in grey greased paper, presumably waterproof. Deakin pocketed two of these, extinguished the oil-lamp, moved forward and took his sheepskin jacket down from the circular observation window it had been blanketing off and was in the process of shrugging into it when, through the window, he saw the rear door of the second coach open and Henry appear. He was carrying a coffee-pot, two mugs and a lantern. He closed the door behind him and looked around in mild astonishment. Apparently it had not been in Carlos’s nature to abandon his post.

Deakin didn’t wait. He moved quickly down the aisle to the rear of the supply wagon, passed out on to the rear platform and took up position at one of the observation windows.

Henry, lantern held high, opened the door and advanced slowly into the supply wagon. He looked to his left and stood quite still, his face registering total disbelief, perfectly understandable in the circumstances; Henry had not looked to find six oiled wooden boxes with their lids cavalierly wrenched off to expose their contents of ammunition, gunpowder and blasting powder. Slowly, in a fashion not far removed from that of a somnambulist, Henry laid down the coffee-pot and mugs and moved slowly towards the rear of the supply wagon, where he stopped, eyes wide and mouth open, looking down at the three opened coffins, two with the Winchester rifles, the third with the mortal remains of the Reverend Peabody. Recovering from his temporary trancelike state, Henry looked around almost wildly, as if to reassure himself that he was not in the company of the deranged vandal responsible for what lay around him, hesitated, made to retrace his steps, changed his mind and made for the rear of the coach. Deakin, who was now becoming proficient in such matters, made for the roof of the coach.

Henry emerged on to the rear platform. Long seconds passed before his now clearly rather dazed mind could accept the evidence of his senses, or what remained of them. The expression of shocked and staring incredulity as he realized that the rest of the train was no longer there was so extreme as to be almost a parody of the real thing. He stood there like a man turned to stone. Suddenly volition returned. He whirled round and disappeared through the still open doorway. Deakin swung down and followed him, although at a rather more sedate pace.

Henry ran through the supply wagon, the passageway in the sleeping coach and finally the passageway in the first coach until he reached the officers’ day compartment at the front where Deakin was supposedly safely bedded down for the night. Henry’s instinct had been unerring. Deakin had flown. Henry wasted no time in expressing stupefaction or any other emotion – by that time he’d probably have been stupefied to find Deakin still there – but turned at once and ran back the way he had come. As he crossed from the first to the second coaches he had a great deal too many things on his mind even to consider looking upwards, but even had he done so it was highly unlikely that he would have seen Deakin crouched on the roof above. As Henry rushed into the passageway of the sleeping coach, leaving the door wide open behind him, Deakin swung down to the platform and waited with interest by the open doorway.

He hadn’t long to wait. There came the sound of a frantic hammering on a door, then Henry’s voice. Henry’s voice sounded as Henry had looked, overwrought.

‘God’s sake, Major, come quickly. They’re gone, they’re all gone!’

‘What the devil are you talking about?’ O’Brien’s voice was distinctly testy, the voice of one rudely awakened from sound slumber. ‘Talk sense, man.’

‘Gone, Major, gone. The two horse wagons – they’re no longer there.’

‘What? You’re drunk.’

‘Wish to God I was. Gone, I tell you. And the ammunition and explosives boxes have been forced open. And the coffins. And Carlos is gone. And so is Deakin. No sign of either of them. I heard a scream. Major–’

Deakin didn’t wait to hear more. He crossed to the second coach, passed through the dining compartment, stopped outside Marica’s door, tested it, found it locked, used his keys, and went inside, closing the door securely behind him. A night-light, turned low, burned on a little table beside Marica’s bunk. Deakin crossed to this, turned it up, placed a hand on the blanket-clad shoulder of the sleeping girl and shook gently. She stirred, turned, opened her eyes, opened them much wider still, then opened her mouth. A large hand closed over it–’

Don’t. You’ll die if you do.’ Her eyes opened even wider and Deakin shook his head, trying to look encouraging, which was a pretty difficult thing to do in the circumstances. ‘Not by my hand, ma’am.’ He jerked his free thumb towards the door. ‘Your friends out there. They’re after me.

When they get me, they’ll kill me. Can you hide me?’ He removed his hand. Despite the racing pulse in her neck she was no longer terrified, but her eyes were still wary. Her lips moved without her speaking, then she said : ‘Why should I?’

‘You save my life. I’ll save yours.’

She looked at him with little reaction, not so much dispassionately as without understanding, then slowly shook her head. Deakin twisted his belt until the under side showed, opened a buttoned compartment, extracted a card and showed it to her. She read it, at first uncomprehending; her eyes widened again, then she nodded and looked at him in slow understanding. There came the sound of voices from the passageway. Marica slipped from her bunk and gestured urgently to Deakin, who climbed in and pressed closely against the compartment partition. pulling the clothes over his head. Marica quickly turned down the night-light and was just climbing into the bunk when a knock came at the door. Marica did not answer but instead busied herself with arranging the clothing on the bed to conceal Deakin as effectively as possible. The knock came again, more peremptorily this time.

Marica propped herself on an elbow and said in a sleepy voice: ‘Who is it?’

‘Major O’Brien, ma’am.’

‘Come in, come in. The door’s not locked.’ The door opened and O’Brien stood in the doorway, making no move to come further. Marica said in an indignant voice: ‘What on earth do you mean by disturbing me at this hour, Major?’

O’Brien was most apologetic. ‘The prisoner Deakin, Miss Fairchild. He’s escaped.’

‘Escaped? Don’t be ridiculous. Where could a man escape to in this wilderness?’

‘That’s just the point, ma’am. There is no place to escape to. That’s why we think he’s still aboard the train.’

Marica looked at him in cold disbelief. ‘And you thought that perhaps I–’

Hastily and at his most pacific O’Brien said: ‘No, no. Miss Fairchild. It’s just that he could have sneaked in here silently when you were asleep–’

‘Well, he’s not hiding under my bed.’ There was considerable asperity in Marica’s tone.

‘I can see that, ma’am. Please excuse me.’ O’Brien beat what was clearly an uncharacteristically rapid retreat, and the sound of his footsteps was lost as he moved along the passageway. Deakin’s head appeared from under the clothes–’

Well now, ma’am.’ Deakin’s voice was frankly admiring. ‘That was something. And you never even had to tell a lie. I’d never have believed–’

‘Out! You’re covered with snow from head to foot and I’m freezing.’

‘No. You get out. Get out, get dressed and bring Colonel Claremont here.’

‘Get dressed! With – with you lying–’

Deakin laid a weary forearm across his eyes ‘My dear girl – that is to say, I mean, ma’am – I have other and less pleasant things to think of. You saw that card. Don’t let anyone hear you talk to him. Don’t let anyone see you bring him here. And don’t tell him I’m here.’

Marica gave him a very old-fashioned speculative look but she didn’t argue any more. There was something in Deakin’s face that precluded further argument. She dressed quickly, left and returned within two minutes, followed by an understandably bewildered-looking Colonel Claremont.

As Marica closed the door behind them Deakin drew back the covers from his face and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.

‘Deakin! Deakin!’ Claremont stared his disbelief. ‘What in God’s name–’ He broke off and reached for the Colt at his waist.

‘Leave that damned gun alone.’ Deakin said tiredly. ‘You’re going to have every chance to use it later. Not on me, though.’

He handed Claremont his card. Claremont took it hesitantly, read it, then read it a second time and third time. He said: ‘“John Stanton Deakin… United States Government … Federal Secret Service … Allan Pinkerton.”’ Claremont recovered his aplomb with remarkable speed and calmly handed the card back to Deakin. ‘Mr Pinkerton I know personally. That’s his signature. I know you too. Now. Or I know of you. In 1866 you were John Stanton. You were the man who broke open the $700,000 Adams Express robbery in that year.’ Deakin nodded. ‘What do you want me to do, Mr Deakin?’

‘What does he want you - but you’ve only just met him. Colonel.’ Marica was openly incredulous. ‘How do you know that he – I mean, don’t you question him or–’

‘No one questions John Stanton Deakin, my dear.’ Claremont’s voice was almost gentle.

‘But I’ve never even heard of–’

‘We’re not allowed to advertise,’ Deakin said patiently. ‘Secret Service the card says. There’s no time for questions. They’re on to me now and neither of your lives is worth a burnt-out match.’ He paused reflectively. ‘That would still hold true even if they weren’t on to me. But it’s come earlier now. Every other person left alive on this train at this moment has only one ambition in life – to see we don’t stay alive.’ He opened the door a crack, listened, then closed it. ‘They’re up front, talking. Now’s our one and only chance. Come on.’ He ripped the sheets from Marica’s bed and stuffed them under his jacket.

Claremont said: ‘What do you want those for?’

‘Later. Come on.’

‘Come on?’ Marica spoke almost wildly. ‘My uncle! I can’t leave–’

Deakin said very softly. ‘ I intend to see that the honourable and upright Governor, your beloved uncle, stands trial for murder, high treason and grand larceny.’

Marica looked at him in totally uncomprehending silence, her face registering almost a state of shock. Deakin eased open the door. A babble of excited raised voices could be heard from the officers’ day compartment. Henry, at the moment, was holding the floor.

‘Richmond! That’s where I saw him. Richmond!’ Henry sounded acutely unhappy. ‘Sixty-three, it was. A Union espionage agent. I saw him just the once. He escaped. But that’s him.’

‘God! A Federal agent.’ O’Brien’s tone was vicious but the accompanying apprehension was more than just underlying. ‘You know what this means, Governor?’

Apparently the Governor knew all too well what it meant. His voice was shaking and pitched abnormally high.

‘Find him! For God’s sake find him. Find him and kill him. Do you hear me? Kill him! Kill him!’

‘I think he wants to kill me,’ Deakin said in Marica’s ear. ‘Charming old boy, isn’t he?’

Deakin hurried soft-footed down the passageway, a white-faced, badly shaken Marica behind with a singularly unflustered Claremont bringing up the rear. They walked quickly through the dining-room and moved out on to the rear platform. Wordlessly, Deakin gestured towards the roof. Claremont glanced at him in momentary puzzlement, then nodded his understanding. With an assist from Deakin he was swiftly on the roof, clinging to a ventilator with one hand while reaching for Marica with the other. Soon all three were on the roof, huddled together, their backs to the driving snow.

‘This is dreadful!’ Marica’s voice was shaking, but it was with cold and not from fear. ‘We’ll freeze to death up here.’

‘Don’t speak ill of train roofs.’ Deakin said reprovingly. ‘They’ve become a kind of second home to me. Besides, at this moment, it’s the safest place on this train. Bend down!’

At the urging of both his voice and arms they bent down as a thick broom of feathery conifer needles brushed their backs. Deakin said : ‘The safest place if, that is, you watch out for those damned low-lying branches.’

‘And now?’ Claremont was very calm, with the faint air of a man who expected to be enjoying himself any moment.

‘We wait. We wait and we listen.’ Deakin stretched himself out on the roof and put his ear to the ventilator. Claremont at once did the same. Deakin reached out an arm and pulled Marica down beside them.

She said coldly: ‘You don’t have to keep your arm round me.’

‘It’s the romantic surroundings,’ Deakin explained, i’m very susceptible to that sort of thing.’

‘Are you indeed?’ Her voice was icy as the night.

‘I don’t want you to fall off the damned train.’ She lapsed into hurt silence.

‘They’re there,’ Claremont said softly. Deakin nodded.

O’Brien, Pearce and Henry, all with guns in their hands, stood in momentary indecision in the dining compartment.

Pearce said: ‘If Henry heard a scream and Deakin did have a fight with Carlos, maybe they both fell off the train and–’

In so far as it was possible for the Governor to run, he came running into the compartment. Two yards and he was out of breath.

‘My niece! She’s gone!’

There was a brief, baffled silence from which O’Brien was the first to recover. He said to Henry: ‘Go see if Colonel Claremont – no, I’ll go myself.’

Deakin and Claremont exchanged glances, then Deakin twisted and peered over the rear edge just in time to see O’Brien crossing swiftly between the first and second coaches. O’Brien, Deakin noted, had forgotten the elementary courtesy of holstering his pistol before going calling on his commanding officer. Deakin moved back to the ventilator, absent-mindedly putting his arm round the girl’s shoulders. If she had objections, she failed to voice them.

Claremont said: ‘You and Carlos had differences?’

‘Some. On the roof of the supply wagon. He fell off.’

‘Carlos? Fell off? That nice big cheerful man?’ Marica’s capacity for absorbing fresh and increasingly unwelcome information was about exhausted. ‘But – but he may be badly hurt. I mean, lying back there on the track-side, perhaps freezing to death in this awful cold.’

‘He’s badly hurt all right. But he’s not on the track-side and he isn’t feeling a thing. We were passing over a bridge at the time. He fell a long, long way down to the bottom of a ravine.’

‘You killed him.’ Deakin could barely catch the husky words. ‘But that’s murder!’

‘Every man needs a hobby.’ Deakin tightened his grip on her shoulders. ‘Or perhaps you’d rather I was lying at the bottom of that ravine? I damn nearly was.’

She was silent for a few moments, then said: ‘I’m sorry. I am a fool.’

‘Yes,’ Claremont said ungallantly. ‘Well, Mr Deakin, what’s next?’

‘We take over the locomotive.’

‘We’d be safe there?’

‘Once we’ve disposed of our friend Banlon we will.’ Claremont looked at him without understanding. ‘I’m afraid so, Colonel. Banlon.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘The shades of the three men he’s already killed would believe it all right.’

‘Three men?’

‘To my certain knowledge.’

It took Claremont a very brief time only to come to terms with the fresh reality. He said in a calm voice: ‘So he’s armed?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. Anyway, Rafferty has his rifle with him. Banlon would use that – after shoving Rafferty over the side.’

‘He could hear us coming? He could hold us off?’ ‘It’s an uncertain world, Colonel.’

‘We could take our stand in the train. In a passageway. In a doorway. I’ve got my revolver–’

‘Hopeless. They’re desperate men. With all respect, Colonel, I doubt whether you could match either Pearce or O’Brien with a hand gun. And even if you could hold them off there would still be an awful lot of gunfire. And the first shot Banlon hears he’s on his guard. Nobody could get near his cab – and he’d drive straight through to Fort Humboldt without stopping.’

‘So? We’d be among friends.’

‘I’m afraid not.’ He held up a warning finger, looked cautiously over the rear edge of the roof in time to see O’Brien crossing from the second to the first coach. He put his ear to the ventilator again. From the tone of his voice O’Brien’s relaxed urbanity appeared to have abandoned him.

The Colonel’s gone too! Henry, stay here, see no one passes you – either way. Shoot on sight. Kill on sight. Nathan, Governor – we’ll start from the back and search every inch of this damned train.’

Deakin gestured urgently forward but Claremont, on his knees now, was staring towards the rear of the train.

The horse wagons! They’re gone!’

‘Later! Later! Come on.’

Soundlessly, the three edged their way along the centre line of the leading coach’s roof. Arrived at the other end, Deakin lowered himself to the platform and peered through the coach’s front observation window. Henry was clearly visible at the far end of the passageway, strategically placed with his back to the side of the dining compartment, where his constantly moving eyes could cover both the front and rear approaches. Cradled in his right hand in an unpleasantly purposeful fashion was a Peacemaker Colt.

Deakin glanced upwards, put a finger, perhaps unnecessarily, to his lips, pointed to the interior of the coach, reached up and helped both Marica and Claremont on to the platform. Still silently, he reached out a hand to Claremont, who hesitated, then handed him his gun. Deakin made a downward patting motion with his hand to indicate that they should stay where they were, climbed over the safety rail, reached for the rear of the tender and transferred his weight to one of the buffers. Slowly he hoisted himself upwards until his eyes cleared the stacked cordwood at the rear of the tender.

Banlon was peering ahead through the driving window. Rafferty had the glowing fire-box open and was busily engaged in stoking it. Leaving the door open, he turned and made for the tender: Deakin’s head swiftly disappeared from sight. Rafferty lifted two more baulks of cordwood and had hardly begun to move forward again when Deakin pulled himself upward until he was in full view of either of the two men who cared to turn round. He made his way quickly but with great care over the stacked cordwood, then lowered himself noiselessly to the floor of the tender.

Banlon had suddenly become very still. Something, almost certainly a fleeting reflection or movement in his driving window, had caught his attention. He looked slowly away from the window and glanced at Rafferty, who caught his eye at the same moment. Both men turned round and looked to the rear. Deakin was four feet away and the Colt in his hand was pointed at the middle of Banlon’s body.

Deakin said to Rafferty: ‘I see your rifle there. Don’t try to get it. Read this.’

Reluctantly almost, Rafferty took the card from Deakin’s hand, stopped and read it by the light from the fire-box. He handed it back to Deakin, his face puzzled and uncertain.

Deakin said: ‘Colonel Claremont and Miss Fairchild are on the first platform. Help them over here. Very, very quietly, Rafferty – if you don’t want your head blown off.’

Rafferty hesitated, nodded and left. He was back within twenty seconds accompanied by Claremont and Marica. As they moved from the tender to the cab, Deakin moved towards Banlon, caught him by the lapels, thrust him back violently against the side of the cab and pushed the muzzle of the Colt, far from gently, into Banlon’s throat.

‘Your gun, Banlon. Vermin like you always have a gun.’

Banlon, who looked as if he were about to be sick at any moment, fought for breath against the pressure of the pistol. Under the circumstances, his attempt at outrage did considerable credit to his histrionic ability.

‘What in God’s name is the meaning of this? Colonel Claremont–’

Deakin jerked him forward, twisted him around, pushed Banlon’s right hand up somewhere between the shoulder-blades and thrust him towards the steps and the open doorway on the right-hand side of the cab.

‘Jump!’

Banlon’s staring eyes reflected his horror. Through the driving snow he could just see a steep-sided rock-strewn gully rushing by. Deakin jabbed the Colt’s muzzle hard against Banlon’s back. ‘Jump, I said.’ Marica, shocked disbelief registering in her face, made to move towards Deakin; Claremont put out a restraining arm.

‘The tool-box!’ Banlon shouted. ‘It’s under the tool-box.’

Deakin stepped back, allowing Banlon to move into the safety of the cab. With his gun Deakin motioned him into a corner and said to Rafferty: ‘Get it, will you?’

Rafferty glanced at Claremont, who nodded. The soldier felt beneath the tool-box and produced a revolver which he handed to Deakin, who took it and handed Claremont back his own gun. Claremont jerked his head in the direction of the rear of the tender and Deakin nodded.

‘They’re no fools. It won’t take them long to figure that if we’re not in the train we must be on top of it and if we’re not there there’s only one other place we can be. Anyway, the marks we left on the roof will give us away.’ Deakin turned to Rafferty. ‘Point your gun at Banlon and keep pointing it. If he moves, kill him.’

‘Kill him?’

‘You wouldn’t try to just wound a rattlesnake, would you? Banlon’s more deadly than any rattlesnake. Kill him, I say. He’s going to die anyway. By the rope.’

‘Me? The rope!’ Banlon’s face twisted. ‘I don’t know who you think you are, Deakin, but the law says–’

There was no warning. Deakin took one long stride forward and struck him viciously, backhanded, to send him stumbling against the controls, blood welling immediately from his nose and mouth.

‘I am the law.’

EIGHT

Banlon dabbed ineffectually at nose and mouth with a wad of very unhygienic waste. His selfministrations had no noticeable effect, the blood continued to flow copiously. Banlon’s normally wizened face now looked even more scraped and drawn, the brown parchment of the skin was several degrees paler and his eyes darted continuously from side to side, a trapped wild animal looking for a means of escape that did not exist. Mainly his eyes flitted from Deakin to Claremont and back again but he found no comfort there: the faces of both men were devoid of pity.

‘The end of the road,’ Claremont said. ‘Live by the sword and you’ll die by the same. John Stanton Deakin is the law, Banlon, a secret agent of the Federal Government. You will know what that means.’

Clearly Banlon knew all too well. His weasel face looked, if possible, even more hunted than before. Deakin said to Rafferty: ‘Through the body, not the head. We don’t want all those nasty ricochets flying about inside the cab.’

He turned his back on the company, moved into the tender and started throwing aside the cordwood from the right-hand rear corner. The eyes of Marica and Banlon did not once leave him. Claremont, Colt cocked, divided his attention between Deakin and Banlon: Rafferty, sticking to his brief, had eyes only for Banlon.

Deakin, his task evidently finished, straightened and stood to one side. Marica performed the classic gesture of putting her hand to her mouth, the dark smoky eyes huge in an ashen face. Claremont stared at the two crumpled uniformclad forms, the upper parts of whose bodies had been exposed.

‘Oakland! Newell!’

Deakin said bleakly to Banlon: ‘Like I said, the rope.’ He turned to Claremont. ‘You know now why you couldn’t find Oakland and Newell in Reese City. They never left the train.’

‘They found out something they shouldn’t have found out?’

‘Whatever it was they found, it was in this cab. They must have been killed in this cab – you can’t carry two dead officers along a platform busy with soldiers. I don’t think they could have seen anything suspicious or mcriminating. Not in a cab. Probably heard someone, Banlon and someone else, discussing some very odd things and mounted the cab to investigate, the last mistake they ever made.’ ‘Henry. That was the someone else. Banlon himself told me that they’d sent the stoker – Jackson – into town while they–’

‘While they covered up the bodies of the dead men with cordwood. That’s why poor Jackson had to die. He discovered the bodies.’ Deakin stooped and carefully replaced some of the cordwood to cover the men. ‘I think Banlon was scared that they were using wood too fast and that Jackson would find them, so he plied Jackson with tequila in the hope of making him paralytic and then disposing of the bodies while Jackson snored his head off. But all that happened was that the drink made Jackson careless in the unloading. He pulled all the wood from one corner and discovered the bodies. Then Banlon had to kill him. A heavy spanner, probably; but that didn’t kill him.’

‘Before God, Colonel. I don’t know what this madman’s talking about.’ Banlon’s voice was a high-pitched whine, he was projecting the image of a cornered animal more successfully than ever. Claremont ignored him, his entire attention was on Deakin. ‘Go on.’

‘When Jackson hit the side of the gorge, death was instantaneous. But there was a deep cut on the back of the neck that had bled badly.’

‘And dead men don’t bleed.’

‘Dead men don’t bleed. Banlon tied a cleaning rag to Jackson’s wrist, threw him out over the bridge, stopped the train, made marks in front of the cab window to show Jackson had been there and then told the tale.’

Banlon’s voice was hoarse, naked fear in it. ‘You can’t prove any of this!’

‘That’s so. I can’t prove either that you faked control-lever trouble to give enough time for the telegraph lines back to Reese City to be cut.’

Claremont said slowly: ‘I saw Banlon adjusting the steam throttle in Reese City–’

‘Slackening it, more like. Nor can I prove that he made a premature stop for fuel to allow an explosive charge to be fitted behind the front coupling of the leading troop coach – timed to go off near the top of the steepest climb in the mountains. It’s easy now to guess why nobody jumped off or tried to stop the runaway. When we recover the wreckage you can be sure that we’ll find that all the doors were locked from outside and that the brakeman had been murdered.’

‘On purpose?’ Marica whispered. ‘Those men were all – murdered?’

Four shots rang out in swift succession followed, at once by the screaming ricochet of bullets as they struck the ironwork of the cab and went screaming off into the darkness and the snow; none, almost unbelievably, ricocheted about the interior of the cab.

‘Down!’ Deakin shouted. In unison they threw themselves to the floor of the cab and tender – all except Banlon. Banlon’s life was already forfeit. A heavy eighteen-inch wrench miraculously appeared in his hand, sliced down in a murderous arc and struck the prone Rafferty a crushing blow on the side of the head. Banlon wrenched the rifle from the already powerless hands and swung round. He said to Claremont, who had his revolver pointing towards the rear of the tender: ‘Don’t move,’ and to Deakin, whose gun was still in his belt: ‘I wish you would.’

Neither man moved.

‘Lay down your guns.’

They laid down their guns.

‘On your feet. Hands high.’

The three rose, Deakin and Claremont with raised arms. Banlon said to Marica: ‘You heard.’

She didn’t appear to have done so. She was staring unbelievingly down at Rafferty. Quite clearly, he was dead. Banlon shifted the rifle slightly. ‘Last chance, lady.’

Like a person in a dream world she slowly lifted her hands. Banlon transferred his attention to Deakin and as he did so Marica’s right hand moved slowly until it was behind one of the suspended oil-lamps. If Deakin had seen the stealthy movement no slightest hint of it showed in his face or eyes. Her hand gradually closed on the lamp.

Banlon said: ‘I don’t know why you brought those white sheets but they’re going to be mighty useful. Climb up on the cordwood there and wave one. Now!’

Marica’s hand lifted the lamp clear and her arm jerked convulsively forward. Out of the corner of his eye Banlon saw the blur of light come towards him. He whirled, moving sideways, but was too late to prevent the lamp from striking him in the face. He retained hold of the rifle but was offbalance for all of two seconds, more time than a man like Deakin would ever need. His headlong dive caught Banlon in the midriff, sending the rifle clattering to the floor and Banlon staggering back to crash with stunning force against the boiler. Deakin followed like a big cat, caught Banlon by the throat and smashed his head twice against the metalwork.

Deakin’s face was no longer without expression. As his eyes shifted to the left and down and rested momentarily on Rafferty’s body his face was savage and bitter and almost inhuman and for the first time Marica looked on him with fear. Deakin returned his attention to Banlon. Banlon could already have been dead but Deakin neither knew nor cared. Once again Banlon’s head thudded against the boiler, almost certainly crushing the occiput. Deakin lifted the man high, took two steps and threw him out over the side of the cab.

Pearce and O’Brien, guns in hands, were on the leading coach’s front platform. Suddenly, both their gazes jerked sideways and they had just time to identify Banlon’s tumbling body before it disappeared into the darkness. They stared at each other, then moved hastily off the platform inside the coach.

In the cab, Deakin’s temporary expression of implacability had been replaced by the habitual mask of impassivity. He said to Marica: ‘Go on. I know. I shouldn’t have done it.’

‘Why not?’ she said reasonably. ‘You said you couldn’t prove a thing.’

For the second time that night Deakin’s expression slipped. He stared at her in total astonishment. He said carefully : ‘We may have more in common than you think.’

She smiled at him sweetly. ‘How do you know what I think?’

In the officers’ day compartment O’Brien, Pearce, Henry and the Governor were holding what appeared to be a council of war. At least, the first three were. The Governor, a brimming whisky glass in his hand, was staring at the wood stove; the expression of misery on his face was profound.

‘This is terrible!’ His voice was a low moan. ‘Terrible. I’m ruined. Oh my God.’

O’Brien said savagely: ‘You didn’t think it terrible when I found out what kind of man you were, that you’d rigged elections and spent a fortune in bribes to become Governor and suggested you come in with Nathan and myself. You didn’t think it terrible when you suggested Nathan here would be the ideal agent and appointed him personally to deal with the Indian reservations. You didn’t think it terrible when you insisted on your share of half of all we made. You make me feel violently ill. Governor Fairchild.’

‘I didn’t think we’d get involved in anything like this,’ the Governor muttered drearily. ‘All this killing. All this murder. What peace of mind is there in this for an honest man?’ He ignored or did not hear O’Brien’s incredulous exclamation. ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted my niece as a hostage in case there was trouble with her father. You didn’t tell me–’

Pearce said with feeling : ‘God knows what I’d like to tell you. But I have more to think of.’

‘You’re supposed to be men of action.’ Fairchild tried to be scathing but only succeeded in sounding depressed. ‘Why don’t you do something?’

O’Brien looked at him in contempt.

‘Do what, you old fool? Have you seen that barricade of cordwood they’ve erected at the back of the tender? It would take a cannon shell to go through it, while they’re probably peering through a chink, gun in hand, ready to pick off the first of us to go through that door. At six feet,’ he added with gloomy finality, ‘they can hardly miss.’

‘You don’t have to make a frontal attack. Go to the back of this coach, climb up and make your approach over the roof. That way you’ll be able to look down on anyone in the tender.’

O’Brien pondered, then said: ‘Maybe you’re not such an old fool after all.’

While Deakin acquainted himself with the controls, Claremont stoked the fire and Marica, sitting on some cordwood with a tarpaulin over her shoulders to protect her from the snow, kept a close watch on the front of the leading coach through a strategically placed chink in the cordwood barricade. Claremont closed the fire-box and straightened.

‘So Pearce it was?’

‘Yes,’ Deakin said. ‘Pearce it was. He’s been on our suspect list for a long time. It’s true he was once an Indian fighter but he moved over to the other side six years ago. But to the Vvorld at large he’s still Uncle Sam’s man keeping a fatherly eye on the reservations. Whisky and guns. Fatherly!’

‘O’Brien?’

‘Nothing against him. Every detail of his military record known. A fine soldier but a rotten apple – remember that big reunion scene in Reese City with Pearce, recalling the good old days at Chattanooga in ‘63? O’Brien was there all right. Pearce was never within a thousand miles of it – he was an Indian scout for one of the six cavalry companies raised by what became the new State of Nevada the following year. So that made O’Brien a bad one, too.’

‘Which must go for the Governor as well?’

‘What else? He’s weak and avaricious and a manipulator of some note.’

‘But he’ll hang from the same tree?’

‘He’ll hang from the same tree.’

‘You suspected everyone.’

‘My nature. My job.’

‘Why not me?’

‘You didn’t want Pearce aboard. That put you in the clear. But I wanted him aboard – and me. It wasn’t hard – not with those splendid “Wanted” notices the Service provided.’

‘You fooled me.’ Claremont sounded bitter but not rancorous. ‘Everyone fooled me. The Government or the Army might have taken me into their confidence.’

‘Nobody fooled you. We suspected there might be something wrong at Humboldt so it was thought better to have two strings to the bow. When I joined this train I knew no more about what was going on at Humboldt than you did.’

‘But now you know?’

‘Now I know.’

‘Deakin!’ Deakin whirled round as the shout came from behind him, his hand reaching for the gun in his belt. ‘There’s a gun lined up on the little lady. Don’t try anything, Deakin.’

Deakin didn’t try anything. Pearce was sitting on the roof of the leading coach, his feet dangling over the front edge, a very steady Colt in his hand and his saturnine hawk-like face creased in a very unfriendly smile.

Deakin kept his hands well away from his body which seemed a doubly advisable thing to do for, a few feet behind Pearce on the roof, he could now make out O’Brien also, inevitably with pistol in hand. Deakin called: ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘That’s more like it, Mr Secret Service man.’ Pearce sounded almost jovial. ‘Stop the train.’

Deakin turned towards the controls and said sotto voce: ‘Stop the train, the man said.’

He eased the brake very gently as he closed the throttle. Suddenly, in a convulsive movement, he closed the brakes all the way. The locomotive wheels locked solid and there came a series of violently metallic crashes as the buffers of the tender and the following coaches came into jarring successive contact.

The effect for the two gunmen on the roof was disastrous. The combination of the sudden deceleration and the violent jolting sent the seated Pearce sliding helplessly forward on the ice-coated roof to pitch wildly downward on to the platform beneath, his gun spinning away on to the trackside as he clutched at the safety rail to save himself. Further back on the roof O’Brien was sprawled out broadside on the length of the coach as he clung tightly to a ventilator to prevent himself from going the same way as Pearce.

Deakin shouted: ‘Down!’ He released the brake, opened the throttle wide and dived towards the tender. Claremont was already sprawled on the cab floor while Marica was sitting on the floor of the tender with a pained expression on her face. Deakin risked a quick glance over the cordwood barricade at the rear of the tender.

Pearce, already on his feet, was moving very quickly indeed into the shelter of the leading coach. O’Brien, face bitter and masked in rage, was lining up his pistol. Flame stabbed from the muzzle. For Deakin, the shot, the metallic clang as the bullet struck metal and the whine of the ricochet came as one. Almost as a reflex action he grabbed the nearest baulk of cordwood and, without exposing himself to O’Brien’s fire, hurled it upwards and backwards.

O’Brien had no target to fire at, but then he did not think he required one. A haphazardly ricocheting spent shell inside that confined metallic space could be just as deadly as a direct hit. As he eased the pressure on the trigger, the expression on his face changed from anger to alarm; the cordwood baulk rapidly approaching him seemed as large as a tree trunk. Still retaining his grip on the ventilator, he flung himself to one side but too late to prevent the baulk of timber striking him on the shoulder with numbing force: his gun flew wide. Unaware that O’Brien was disarmed, Deakin continued to throw baulks of wood as fast as he could stoop and straighten. O’Brien managed to avoid some of the missiles and fend off others, but was unable to prevent himself from being struck by quite a number. He made an awkward, scuttling, crablike retreat towards the rear of the roof of the first coach and thankfully lowered himself to the shelter of the rear platform.

In the tender Deakin stood up, risked a quick first glance, then a longer one to the rear. The coast was clear. Both the front platform and the roof of the leading coach were deserted. He turned to Marica.

‘Hurt?’

She rubbed herself tenderly. ‘Only where I sat down suddenly.’

Deakin smiled and looked at Claremont. ‘You?’

‘Only my dignity.’

Deakin nodded, eased the throttle, picked up Rafferty’s rifle, moved towards the rear of the tender and began to arrange a fresh gap in the cordwood barricade.

In the day compartment the Governor and his three companions were holding their second council of war. There was for the moment a certain aura of frustration, if not precisely defeatism. Governor Fairchild had the same brimming glass – or another brimming glass – of whisky in his hand. His expression as he gazed into the glowing wood stove was nervously unhappy in the extreme. O’Brien and Pearce, the latter just replacing a decanter on the centre of the table between them, wore the expressions of two very tough, very competent men who were not accustomed to being routed so completely and so easily. Henry, also with a glass in his hand, stood at a respectful distance; his expression was, if that were possible, more lugubrious than ever.

Pearce said savagely: ‘Any more clever ideas, Governor?’

‘The conception was mine. The execution was yours. Is it my fault he out-smarted you? By God, if I were twenty years younger–’

‘You’re not,’ said O’Brien. ‘So shut up.’

Henry said diffidently: ‘We’ve a crate of blasting powder. We could throw a stick–’

‘If you’ve nothing better to suggest, you’d better shut up, too. We need this train to take us back east.’

They relapsed into a brooding silence, a silence which came to an abrupt end as the whisky decanter shattered and sent the alcohol and razoredged slivers of glass flying across the compartment. The sharp crack of a rifle was clearly heard. The Governor took his hand away from his cheek and stared uncomprehendingly at the blood. There came a second crack and Pearce’s black hat flew across the compartment. Suddenly, there was no more incomprehension. All four men flung themselves to the floor and crawled hurriedly towards the passageway leading to the dining compartment. Three more bullets thudded into the day compartment, but by the time the last of those had arrived the compartment had been vacated.

Deakin withdrew his rifle from the cordwood barricade, stood up, took Marica by the arm and led her into the locomotive cab. He eased the throttle some more, picked up the dead Rafferty, carried him to the tender and covered him with a piece of tarpaulin before returning to the cab.

Claremont said: ‘I’d better get back on watch, then.’

‘No need. They won’t bother us again tonight.’ He peered closely at Claremont. ‘Only your dignity hurt, eh?’ He lifted Claremont’s left arm and looked at the hand which was bleeding profusely. ‘Clean it with snow, ma’am, please, then bandage it with a strip of that sheet.’ He returned his attention to the track ahead. The train was doing no more than fifteen miles an hour, a safe maximum in the very restricted visibility conditions. Unenthusiastically, he set about stoking the fire-box.

Claremont winced as Marica cleaned the wound. He said: ‘Back there on the roof you said there would be no friends at the Fort.’

‘There will be some – under lock and key. The Fort’s been taken over. Sepp Calhoun, for a certainty. With the help, probably, of the Paiutes.’

‘Indians! What’s in it for Indians – except reprisals?’

‘There’s a lot in it for the Indians – and no reprisals either. Not once they’ve received the payment we’re carrying aboard this train.’

‘Payment?’

‘In the supply wagon. Why Doctor Molyneux died. Why Peabody died. Molyneux said he was going to examine the medical supplies – so Molyneux had to die.’

‘Had to?’

‘There’s no medicine on this train. The medical crates are stuffed with rifle ammunition.’

Claremont watched Marica complete the bandaging of his hand. After a long pause he said: ‘I see. And the Reverend?’

‘The Reverend? I doubt whether Peabody has ever seen the inside of a church. He’s been a Union and Federal agent for the last twenty years, my partner for the last eight of those.’

Claremont said carefully: ‘He’s been what?’

They caught him opening up a coffin. You know, for the cholera victims.’

‘I know. I know what the coffins are for.’ Claremont sounded testy but the impatience in his voice probably stemmed from his confusion.

There’s as much cholera in Fort Humboldt as there are brains in my head.’ Deakin, with little or no justification, sounded thoroughly disgusted with himself. ‘Those coffins are full of Winchester rifles, repeaters, lever action tubular magazines.’

‘No such thing.’

‘There is now.’

‘How come I’ve never heard of them?’

‘Few people have – outside the factory. Production began only four months ago, none has been on sale yet – but the first four hundred were stolen from the factory. Now we know where all those stolen arms are, don’t we?’

‘I don’t know where I am. Coming or going. I’m lost. What happened to the horse wagons, Mr Deakin?’

‘I detached them.’

‘Inevitably. Why?’

Deakin glanced at the gauge. ‘A moment. We’re losing pressure.’

There was no easing of pressure in the comparative safety of the dining compartment where Fairchild and the others were holding their third council of war. It was a council singularly lacking in animation, or, for that matter, conversation. For the most part the Governor, O’Brien and Pearce sat in silent gloom, which another bottle of whisky they had obtained from somewhere seemed powerless to dispel, while Henry dispiritedly stoked the wood stove.

The Governor stirred. ‘Nothing? Can you think of nothing?’

O’Brien was curt. ‘No.’

‘There must be an answer.’

Henry straightened from the stove. ‘Begging the Governor’s pardon, we don’t need an answer.’

‘Oh, do be quiet,’ O’Brien said wearily.

Henry had his say to say and refused to be quiet. ‘We don’t need an answer because there isn’t any question. The only question could be, what happens if we don’t stop him. Well, it’s simple. He just drives on till he’s safe and sound with his friends in Fort Humboldt.’

There was a quickening of interest, a long and thoughtful silence, then O’Brien said slowly: ‘By God, I do believe you’re right, Henry. Just because he knows we’re running guns to the Indians we’ve assumed that he knows all about us, what we really have in mind. Of course he doesn’t. How could he? Nobody does. Impossible – nobody but us have been in touch with the Fort.

‘What else?’ O’Brien said expansively. ‘Well, gentlemen, it’s a bitter night. I suggest we just let Deakin get right on with his driving. He seems quite competent.’

Beaming broadly, the Governor reached for the bottle. He said with happy anticipation: ‘White Hand will certainly give him a warm welcome when we arrive at the Fort.’

White Hand was, at that moment, quite a long distance from the Fort and increasing the distance between them by the minute. The snow was still falling but not so heavily; the wind was still blowing but not so strongly. Behind White Hand, two or three score heavily muffled horsemen cantered rapidly along the base of a broad and winding valley. White Hand turned his head and looked slightly to his left and upwards. Already, above the mountains, there were the beginnings of a lightening of the sky to the east.

White Hand swung in the saddle, gestured to the east and beckoned his men on, urgently. impatiently. The Paiutes began to string out as they increased speed along the valley floor.

Deakin, too, could see the first signs of the predawn as he straightened from the open fire-box. He glanced at the steam-gauge, nodded in satisfaction and closed the door of the fire-box. Claremont and Marica, both pale-faced and showing unmistakable signs of exhaustion, occupied the two bucket seats in the cab. Deakin himself could easily have felt the same way but he could not yet allow himself the luxury of being tired. As much to keep himself alert and occupied as for any other reason, Deakin resumed where he had left off.

‘Yes. The horse wagons. I had to cut those loose. Indians – almost certainly the Paiutes under White Hand – are going to try to intercept and ambush this train at the entrance to Breakheart Pass. I know Breakheart Pass. They’ll be forced to leave their horses at least a mile away – and I don’t want them to have any more horses ready to hand.’

‘Ambush? Ambush?’ Claremont was a man groping in the dark. ‘But I thought the Indians were working hand in hand with those – those renegades back there.’

‘And so indeed they are. But they’re under the impression that the attempt to detach the troop wagons failed – and, for them, those troops must be destroyed. I had to get the Indians out of the Fort – otherwise w e could never get in.’

Claremont said carefully: They’re under the impression that–’

‘The missing telegraph. It was missing because I hid it. In the haybox in the first horse wagon. When we were stopped last night and I was fuelling this damned fire-box I took time off to use it. They thought I was O’Brien.’

Claremont looked at him for a long moment. ‘You’ve been very busy, Mr Deakin.’

‘I haven’t been all that idle.’

‘But why, why, why?’ Marica spread her hands helplessly. ‘Why for the sake of a few crates of rifles should Fort Humboldt be taken over? Why should the Paiutes be attacking the train? Why the killings, the massacre of those soldiers? Why should my uncle, O’Brien and Pearce be risking their lives, wrecking their careers–’

‘Those coffins aren’t arriving empty at Fort Humboldt and by the same token and for the same reason they won’t be leaving empty either.’

Claremont said: ‘But you said there was no cholera–’

‘No cholera. But there’s something else at Fort Humboldt, something quite different from cholera, something for which men will sell their lives, their honour, their souls. Have you ever heard of four men called Mackay, Fair, O’Brien – no relation of our friend back there – and Flood?’

Claremont looked down at the blood seeping slowly through the makeshift bandage. ‘The names sound familiar.’

‘Those are the four men who struck the Big Bonanza earlier this year on the Comstock. To our certain knowledge there’s already been ten million dollars’ worth taken out of the ground. There’s only one way this metal can be shipped east – on this railroad. And, of course, there’s also the regular gold bullion transport from the Californian fields. Both sets of bullion have to funnel through Fort Humboldt. It’s my guess that, at this moment, there’s more gold and silver bullion in Fort Humboldt than in any place outside the Federal vaults.’

Claremont said: ‘It’s just as well that I’m already sitting down.’

‘Make yourself at home. As you know, the state governor is notified whenever there’s going to be a large-scale bullion transport through his territory and it’s up to him to notify either the military or civilian authorities to provide the guard. In this case Fairchild notified neither. Instead he notified O’Brien, who notified Pearce, who notified Calhoun, who hired the services of the Paiutes for a stated reward. It’s all very simple, isn’t it?’

‘And the bullion was going back in those coffins?’

‘How else? Can you imagine a safer, a more foolproof form of transport? Nobody’s going to open up coffins – especially the coffins of men who have died of cholera. If need be, those bullion coffins could even be buried with full military honours – to be dug up the following night, of course.’

Claremont shook his head. His spirit seemed to have left him, he was a man close to despair. ‘All those murdering Paiutes, heaven knows how many of them, those desperadoes in the coaches behind us, Calhoun and his renegades waiting for us in Fort Humboldt–’

‘Don’t worry,’ Deakin said comfortingly. ‘We’ll think of something.’

Marica looked at him with a coldly appraising eye. ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something, Mr Deakin.’

‘As a matter of fact, I already have.’

NINE

The aptly named Breakheart Pass, a barren and waterless gully, carried the railway line up to a small divide. The left or southern hand of the gully was bordered by an almost vertical cliff; the right-hand side by a fairly shallow slope leading down to the long dead watercourse, a course liberally strewn with large boulders which offered splendid cover – splendid, that was, for men but quite useless for horses. The nearest shelter of any other kind was offered by a thick clump of pines a mile distant across the valley. It was within the confines of this copse that White Hand waved his weary troop of horsemen to a grateful halt.

White Hand dismounted. He pointed to the boulder-strewn gully. ‘There the train will stop. There we will hide. We must go there on foot.’ He turned to two of his men. ‘The horses. Keep them here. Take them even deeper into the woods. They must not be seen.’

In the dining compartment of the train Henry sat by the wood stove, drowsing. Fairchild, O’Brien and Pearce, seated and with their heads resting on their forearms, were asleep or appeared to be asleep over the dining tables. On the footplate, Deakin, very far from being asleep, was peering ahead through the cab window; snow was still falling and the visibility was poor. Marica, equally wide awake, was making the final adjustments to the white sheet which was so wrapped round Colonel Claremont that, his unencumbered arms apart, he appeared to be cocooned from head to foot. Deakin beckoned to him and pointed ahead.

‘Breakheart Pass coming up. Maybe two miles to go. For you, one mile. See that big clump of pines to the right of the track?’ Claremont nodded. ‘They’ll have hidden their horses there. There’ll be guards.’ He nodded to Rafferty’s rifle which Claremont held in his hands. ‘Don’t give them a sporting chance. Don’t give them an even break.’

Claremont shook his head slowly and said nothing. His face was no less implacable than that of Deakin.

White Hand and another Indian were crouched behind a craggy rock on the boulder-strewn righthand slope of the gully. They were staring down towards the lower, easternmost entrance to the pass. The thinly falling snow let them see as far as the furthest bend of the track; so far there was nothing to be seen. Suddenly the other Indian reached out and touched White Hand on the shoulder. Both men turned their heads slightly and adopted an intensely listening attitude. Far off, faintly but unmistakably, the puffing of a straining locomotive engine could be heard. White Hand glanced at his companion and nodded, just once.

Deakin reached under his coat and brought out the two sticks of blasting powder he had earlier filched from the supply wagon. One of these he carefully placed inside the tool-box, the other he held in his hand. With his free hand he gently eased the steam throttle all the way off. At once, the train began to slow down.

O’Brien woke with a start, moved swiftly to the nearest window, hastily cleared away the condensation and peered out. Almost at once he turned to Pearce.

‘Wake up! Wake up! We’re stopping! Nathan, know where we are?’

‘Breakheart Pass.’ The two men looked questioningly at one another. Fairchild stirred, sat upright and came to the window. He said uneasily: ‘What’s that devil up to now?’

Deakin was indeed up to something. With the train now almost brought to a complete standstill, he ignited the tube of blasting powder in his hand, judged his moment to what he regarded as a nicety, then tossed it out of the right-hand cab opening. At the same moment Claremont moved on to the steps of the left-hand side of the cab. Pearce, O’Brien, Fairchild and Henry, all with their faces pressed to the window, recoiled involuntarily and threw up defensive hands as there came a blinding flash of light and the flat sharp crack of an explosion immediately outside. The window did not shatter and after a moment or two they pressed close to it again. But by this time Claremont had dropped off the left-hand side of the cab, rolled down the embankment and come to rest at its foot. Wrapped in the white sheeting, he was almost entirely invisible and remained quite motionless. Deakin jerked the throttle open again.

The bafflement of the four men in the dining compartment was of a lesser nature altogether than that of White Hand and his Indian companion. White Hand said uncertainly: ‘It may be that our friends wanted to warn us of their approach. See, they are moving again.’

‘Yes. And I see something else.’ The other Indian jumped to his feet. ‘The troop wagons! The soldier wagons! They’re not there!’

‘Get down, fool!’ White Hand’s habitual impassivity had, for the moment, completely deserted him. His face was baffled, uncomprehending, as he saw that the train, now well into Breakheart Pass, clearly consisted of no more than three coaches.

O’Brien’s face was now equally uncomprehending. He said: ‘How the hell should I know what he’s up to? The man’s a lunatic’

Fairchild said: ‘You could try to find out, couldn’t you?’

Pearce handed Fairchild one of his guns. ‘Tell you what, Governor. You find out.’

The Governor grabbed the gun. For that brief passing moment he was clearly out of his mind. ‘Very well, then. I shall.’

He took the gun, moved forward, opened the front door of the leading coach no more than a crack and slid an apprehensive eye round the edge. A second later there was the boom of a Colt and a bullet struck the coach less than a foot from his head: Fairchild withdrew with speed, banging the door behind him, his momentary period of insanity clearly behind him. Severely shaken, he re-entered the dining compartment.

Pearce said: ‘Well, what did you find out?’

The Governor said nothing. He threw the gun on the table and made for the whisky bottle.

Up front, Deakin said: ‘Company?’

‘My uncle.’ Marica examined the still smoking Colt with aversion.

‘Get him?’

‘No.’

‘Pity.’

Claremont, still swathed in his white camouflage, inched slowly towards the edge of the embankment and hitched a wary eye over the top. The train, almost a mile away by that time, was well into the pass. He scanned the boulders in the dry watercourse ahead but could detect no sign of movement. He had not expected to see any, not yet; White Hand was far too experienced to make his presence known until the last moment possible. Claremont then looked across the valley to the distant clump of pine trees. If Deakin were right and horses there were, that was where the horses would be held in concealment; and Claremont no longer questioned Deakin’s judgment. The approach to the pines would be difficult but not impossible: a smaller branching watercourse led up to the very edge of the copse and if he could reach the foot of this dry gully unobserved he should be under concealment for the rest of the way. The only danger lay in crossing the railway line, and while he was far too experienced a soldier to discount the possibility of any danger, he thought that the odds on a safe traverse of the track lay in his favour. The guard or guards in charge of the horses would, in the normal course of events, be taking a lively interest in what was happening, or what was about to happen across the valley. But their attention would almost certainly be fixed on the train and the hidden Paiutes and those were now a mile away to his left. Besides, it was still only dawn and the snow had not yet ceased to fall. Claremont did not hesitate, if for no other reason than that he knew that there were no options left open to him. Wraith-like, and using only his elbows and knees, he began to slither across the track.

Deakin eased back the throttle. Marica, from her observation post at the back of the tender, spared him a brief glance. ‘Stopping?’

‘Slowing.’ He indicated the right-hand side of the cab. ‘Leave the tender and get down there. On the floor.’

Hesitantly, she moved forward. ‘You think there’ll be shooting?’

‘Well, there won’t be too many rose petals thrown, and that’s a fact.’

The train was now crawling along at between ten and fifteen miles an hour but clearly was not about to come to a complete halt, a fact that was becoming increasingly obvious to White Hand. His face registered at first faint puzzlement, then exasperation, then finally outright anger.

‘The fools!’ he said. ‘The fools! Why don’t they stop?’ He jumped to his feet, waving his arm. The train continued on its way. White Hand shouted to his warriors to follow him. They all broke concealment and came running and stumbling up the slope as quickly as the shingly and snowcovered terrain would permit them. Deakin judiciously opened the throttle a notch or two.

Once again O’Brien, Pearce, the Governor and Henry were peering with what was by now a degree of justifiable anxiety through the window. Pearce said: ‘White Hand! White Hand and his braves! What in God’s name is the meaning of this?’ He ran towards the rear platform, the others closely behind him. As they arrived there the train perceptibly began to slow.

Fairchild said: ‘We could jump for it now. White Hand could give us cover and–’

‘Fool!’ Whatever respect Pearce might ever have had for the governor of his state had clearly diminished to vanishing point. ‘That’s just exactly what he’s inviting us to do. It’s still a long, long walk to Fort Humboldt.’ He waved to the rear and pointed towards the driving cab. White Hand waved a return acknowledgment, turned and shouted some unheard order. Immediately a score of rifles were levelled.

Deakin dropped to the floor of the cab as a fusillade of bullets struck the locomotive, then, in a momentary lull in the firing, risked a quick glance through the footplate doorway. The Indians, running as they reloaded, were clearly gaining. Once again, Deakin opened the throttle slightly.

O’Brien said with increasing unease: ‘What in hell’s name is Deakin playing at? He could leave them behind if he–’

He and Pearce stared at each other.

Claremont, safely arrived in the shelter of the wood, was moving swiftly and stealthily through the trees, circling so as to approach from the rear. The guards, he was certain, would be at the lower edge of the wood, watching the scene across the valley, which meant that their backs would be towards him. From the implacable expression on his face it was clear that Claremont had no compunction in the world about gunning down unsuspecting men from the rear; far too many lives, not to mention a fortune in bullion and all his men he had so recently lost, made any consideration of fair play seem totally irrelevant.

There were about sixty horses all told, none of them hobbled or tied – Indian ponies were as well trained as those of the United Stares Cavalry. Claremont picked out what he thought would be the three most likely horses – the rest he would stampede – and slowly worked his way through them. They neither whinnied nor neighed, some glanced incuriously at him, some not at all – despite the thickness of their coats, they were all clearly preoccupied with their own frozen miseries.

The guards – there were two of them – stood at the very edge of the wood, just beyond the last of the horses, looking speculatively at each other as they listened to the now desultory gunfire from across the valley. Because of the cushioning effect of the snow, the occasional restless stamping of the horses, and the Indians’ complete absorption with the running battle now almost two miles away, Claremont was able to approach within twenty feet before taking up position behind the sturdy bole of a pine. At that short distance the use of the rifle seemed superfluous. He laid his rifle silently against the trunk of the tree and brought out his Colt.

Aboard the train, both Pearce and O’Brien gestured frantically to the rear, pointing repeatedly towards the distant pine wood and motioning that White Hand and his men should return there. The Indian chief, comprehending, stopped in his tracks and indicated that his men should do the same. He wheeled and pointed to the pine wood.

‘The horses!’ White Hand shouted. ‘Back to the horses!’ He took just one running step, then stopped abruptly. The two distant revolver shots carried very clearly in the freezing air. White Hand, his face impassive, tapped two of his men on the shoulders. They set off at a jog-trot towards the pine wood, not really hurrying. From White Hand’s demeanour it was apparent that the time for haste was already past.

Pearce said savagely: ‘Now we know why Deakin slowed the train and set off that damned blasting charge – to distract our attention while Claremont dropped off the other side.’

‘What worries me is the two things we don’t know - why is White Hand here and how in the name of all that’s holy did Deakin know he would be here?’

The Indians, guns lowered, now stood in a disconsolate group almost three hundred yards behind the train. Deakin, looking back, eased the throttle slightly.

‘We’ve got to stop him.’ The hysteria in Fairchild’s voice was now unmistakable. ‘We’ve got to, we’ve got to, we’ve got to! Look, we’re hardly doing more than a walking pace. We can jump down, two on either side, out-flank him and–’

O’Brien said: ‘And watch him wave goodbye as he opens the throttle wide?’

‘You sure that’s why he’s going so slow?’

‘What else?’

Claremont, his two riderless horses trailing, urged his horse up to the top of a narrow divide in a valley. Ahead of him, the rest of the troop of stampeding horses were now spread out, now gradually coming to a halt. Claremont reined in his horse at the top of the divide and looked into the middle distance. Less than three miles away, even through the still gently falling snow, the mouth of another valley could be seen branching off to the right. The telegraph poles issuing from the valley could be seen. It was the western exit of Breakheart Pass.

Claremont grimaced with pain and looked down at his bandaged left hand. Both it and a section of the rein it held were saturated with blood. He looked away and kicked his horse into motion.

The train was moving more quickly now, leaving the stationary Indians steadily further behind. White Hand, immobile and expressionless, watched the two scouts return from the pine wood. The leading scout said nothing, merely lifted his forearms, palms upwards. White Hand nodded and turned away. His men followed and they walked quickly, in double file, along the sleepers in the direction of the vanishing train.

Aboard the rear observation platform of the train Fairchild, O’Brien, Pearce and Henry looked acutely unhappy as they watched White Hand and his men becoming lost to sight round a bend in the track. Their unhappiness deepened further as they heard two pistol shots in rapid succession. Fairchild said, almost in despair: ‘And what was that about?’

‘Claremont, for a certainty.’ Pearce spoke with conviction. ‘Probably a signal to Deakin that he’s driven White Hand’s horses to hell and gone. Which means that White Hand’s braves are going to have a long walk back to Fort Humboldt and by the time he gets there Deakin will be ready for him.’

‘Sepp Calhoun will be there,’ the Governor said hopefully.

‘Calhoun has as much chance of coping with Deakin as my grandmother has,’ Pearce said. ‘Besides, he’s usually half-drunk anyway.’ His face tightened in a thin ugly line. ‘What did I tell you? He’s speeded up the train.’

No question, the train was accelerating. The four men looked at each other with even greater unease. O’Brien said: ‘He’s probably given up all hope of tricking us into jumping off.’ He leaned out over the safety rail and looked ahead. There was a sharp crack and O’Brien jerked back into safety. He removed his hat with none too steady a hand and examined a jagged hole torn in the brim.

Pearce said drily: ‘It would appear that he doesn’t given up hope in other directions.’

Up front in the locomotive Deakin peered ahead through the cab window. The v snow had stopped now. The junction of the western exit of Breakheart Pass and the valley to his right – the agreed rendezvous with Claremont – was now less than two hundred yards away. Deakin said: ‘Hold tight.’ He closed the throttle and jammed on the brakes. The traction wheels locked to the accompaniment of the violent clanking of buffers crashing together. The four men on the rear platform regarded one another with a steadily increasing mixture of perplexity and apprehension. Deakin handed Banlon’s gun to Marica, took the second tube of blasting powder from the toolbox.

The train ground to a standstill, Deakin said ‘Now.’ She stepped off the footplate and jumped, falling heavily, with an exclamation of pain, and rolling over several times. Deakin released the brake, put the lever in reverse and opened the throttle wide. Moments later he had joined Marica on the track-side.

It took the four men on the rear observation platform several minutes to realize that the train was moving backwards, not forwards. O’Brien, the first to recover, leaned out. His eyes widened as understanding came: Deakin, by the track-side, had his gun lined up on him: O’Brien had barely time to fling himself back even as the gun was fired.

‘Jesus!’ O’Brien used some choice language. ‘They’ve jumped the train!’

‘No one at the controls?’ Fairchild was close to hysteria. ‘For God’s sake, jump off!’

O’Brien reached out a restraining hand. ‘No!’

‘God’s sake, man, remember what happened to the troops in the runaways!’

‘We need this train.’ He pushed his way to the rear door of the leading coach. ‘Drive a train, Nathan?’

Pearce shook his head.

‘Me neither. I’ll try.’ He jerked a thumb forwards. ‘Deakin.’

Pearce nodded and swung down from the platform. The train was already gathering speed and Pearce rolled over and over as he hit the trackside. But the steeply snow-covered slope of the embankment helped cushion his fall and he arrived at the bottom of the slope rather winded but unhurt. He rose at once to his feet and looked around.

The train, still accelerating, was already fifty yards away. Pearce glanced in the other direction where he could just see Deakin’s head and shoulders; he was supporting a rather shaky Marica.

‘This,’ Deakin said, ‘is just what I needed. Where are you hurt?’

‘My ankle. And my wrist.’

‘Can you stand?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Well, sit then.’ He dumped her rather unceremoniously into a sitting position by the trackside. She favoured him with a very old-fashioned look, but Deakin’s attention was already engaged elsewhere. Glancing back along the track, he could see that the train was already more than a quarter of a mile distant. What he could not see was O’Brien slithering down the cordwood in the tender and halting, his face an odd mixture of urgency and indecision as he found himself confronted with the baffling array of engine controls.

Deakin stooped and inserted the blastingpowder tube under a rail close to a sleeper. He tamped it all round with earth and stones, leaving only the fuse free.

Marica said in a noticeably cool tone: ‘You’re going to blow up the track?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Not today, it’s not.’ Pearce advanced, Colt in hand. He glanced at Marica who was cradling her left wrist in her right hand. ‘Maybe that’ll teach you to jump off trains.’ He closed on Deakin, ignoring Marica. ‘Your gun. Under your coat. By the barrel, friend.’

Deakin reached under his coat. His gun came slowly into view.

Marica said: ‘I’ve got a gun, too. Turn round. Marshal. Hands high.’

Pearce turned slowly, his eyes widening as he saw that Marica’s right hand now cradled a revolver.

Deakin switched his grip on the barrel of his Colt. Pearce, who sensed what was coming, flung himself to one side, so that the blow lost some of its impact. But it was sufficient to make him stumble and fall, the gun coming free from his temporarily nerveless hand. He dived after it but Deakin was even quicker, jumping forward with his right foot swinging.

Marica winced in horror and revulsion at the sound of the heavy blow. She said in a whisper: ‘You hit him when his back was turned, when his hands were up and then – and then–’

‘And then I kicked him on the head. Next time you point a gun at a man like Pearce make sure the safety-catch is off.’

She stared at him, stared down at the gun in her hand, then shook her head slowly. After a moment she looked up.

‘You might at least say thanks.’

‘What? Oh, sure. Thanks.’ He glanced down the track. The train, rapidly dwindling into the distance, was now going very quickly indeed and beginning to sway wildly. He switched his gaze. Claremont, two other horses held on loose reins, came cantering round the spur of a hill. At a gesture from Deakin he reined the horses in and held them where they were. Deakin dragged Pearce along the line, dropped him in unceremonious fashion, hurried back up the line, stooped, lit a fuse, picked up Marica and came quickly down the embankment. He helped her on to one of the spare horses, swung aboard the third himself and gestured that they should move away. After a short distance, as if by mutual consent, they stopped and looked back.

The explosion was curiously quiet. Rubble and dirt flew through the air. When those and the smoke settled, it could be seen that one sleeper was twisted and the left-hand line badly distorted.

Claremont said uncertainly: They can fix that, you know. They can unbolt the damaged section of the track, take it out and replace it with a section from behind the train.’

‘I know. If I’d wrecked it permanently with a large charge, they’d have no option but to walk to the Fort.’

‘Well?’

‘That way they would arrive at the Fort alive, wouldn’t they?’

Marica looked at him in horror.

‘That means that we would all die.’

Marica’s expression did not change.

‘Don’t you see?’ Deakin’s voice was gentle. ‘I’ve no option.’

Marica shuddered and turned away. Deakin looked at her without expression, urged his horse into a canter. After a moment, the others followed.

TEN

O’Brien sagged against the side of the cab, mopping a sweat-stained brow in relief. The train was still reversing but, just as clearly, it was markedly slowing. O’Brien looked from the footplate towards the rear. White Hand and his men were now less than a quarter of a mile distant. For once, White Hand’s iron impassivity had deserted him. His face reflected at first astonished disbelief, then gladness. He waved towards the train, beckoned to his men and broke into a run. Within two minutes the Paiutes were swarming aboard the stopped train while White Hand swung up on to the footplate to be greeted by O’Brien. Immediately, O’Brien opened the throttle and the train began to move forwards.

O’Brien said: ‘And the horses were all gone?’

‘All gone. And two of my men shot in the back. You have saved us a long walk, Major O’Brien. My friend, Marshal Pearce – I do not see him.’

‘You will in a moment. He dropped off to attend to some urgent business.’

O’Brien peered ahead through the cab window where the western exit of Breakheart Pass could be seen coming up. Suddenly, to obtain a better view, he leaned out through the footplate entrance. Beyond question, there was a body lying on the track ahead: equally beyond question, the body was that of Pearce. O’Brien swore and jumped for the steam throttle and brake.

The train juddered to a halt. O’Brien and White Hand jumped down, ran forward, then stopped, grim-faced, at the spectacle of the crumpled, bleeding and still very unconscious Pearce. As one, both men lifted their eyes and looked about thirty yards ahead. Above a hole blown in the rail-bed, a sleeper was twisted and a rail badly buckled.

White Hand said softly: ‘Deakin will die for this.’

O’Brien looked at him for a long moment, then said sombrely: ‘Not if he sees you first, White Hand.’

‘White Hand fears no man.’

‘Then you’d better learn to fear this one. He is a United States Federal agent. In your own language, he has the cunning of a serpent and the luck of the devil. Marshal Pearce can count himself lucky that Deakin did not choose to kill him. Come, let us repair this track.’

Under O’Brien’s direction it took the Paiutes all of twenty minutes to effect the repair. They worked in two gangs – one removing the damaged section of the track, another freeing a sound section to the rear of the train. The damaged section was thrown down the embankment while the undamaged section was brought forward from the rear and fitted in its place. Bedding down the sleepers and aligning the track was no job for unskilled amateurs but eventually O’Brien was satisfied that, jerry-built though the improvisation was, it might just bear the weight of the train. During the operation a groaning Pearce, his back propped against the cow-catcher, slowly regained consciousness, supported by a solicitous Henry who constantly dabbed a cheek and temple already badly cut and spectacularly bruised.

‘We go now,’ O’Brien said. The Paiutes, Pearce and Henry went back into the main body of the train while White Hand rejoined O’Brien in the cab. O’Brien released the brake and opened the throttle very gently indeed, at the same time peering out gingerly over the side. As the locomotive wheels reached the new section of the track the line dipped slightly but not dangerously. When the last of the coaches had passed over the damaged area O’Brien returned to the controls and opened the throttles wide.

Deakin, Claremont and Marica had stopped, all three still on horseback. Deakin was swiftly rebandaging Claremont’s gory hand.

Claremont said urgently: ‘Minutes count, man! We’re losing time.’

‘We’ll lose you if we don’t stop this bleeding.’ He glanced at Marica, who with set face and lips compressed against the pain, held her left wrist tightly in her right hand. ‘How’s it going?’

‘I’ll be all right.’

Deakin looked at her briefly, without expression, then resumed the rebandaging. They had scarcely moved on when he looked at her again. She was slumped in the saddle, her head bowed. He said: ‘Is your wrist that bad?’

‘It’s my ankle. I can’t put my foot in the stirrup.’ Deakin moved round to the other side of her horse. Her left leg was dangling clear of the stirrup. He looked away, turned around and glanced upward over his right shoulder. The snow was gone and the clouds drifting away to leave the washed-out blue of the sky; the sun was appearing over the shoulder of a mountain. Again, he looked at Marica: with ankle and wrist out of commission she was now scarcely able to maintain her seat in the saddle. He pulled in close to her horse, lifted her across to his own, took the reins of the now riderless horse in his free hand and urged both animals into a rapid canter. Claremont, who looked in no better case than Marica, followed close behind. They were now paralleling the line of the railway track. The ground there was flat and relatively free from snow and they made comparatively good time.

Sepp Calhoun was in his usual place, the Commandant’s chair, with his feet in their usual position, the Commandant’s table, pursuing his usual custom which was drinking the Commandant’s whisky and smoking one of his cheroots. The only other occupant of the room was Colonel Fairchild, who sat on a straight deal chair and had his wrists bound behind him. The door opened and a scruffy and very swarthy white man entered.

Calhoun said genially: ‘All right, Carmody?’

‘Fixed. The telegraphists are locked up with the rest. Benson is at the gate. Harris is fixing some grub.’

‘Fine. Just time for a snack before our friends arrive. Less than an hour, I should say.’ He grinned mockingly at Fairchild. ‘The battle of Breakheart Pass belongs to history now, Colonel.’ He smiled even more broadly. ‘I guess “massacre” is the word I’m looking for.’

In the supply wagon a still badly battered but much recovered Pearce was busy handing out repeaters and ammunition to the Paiutes who crowded round him. There was no sign of the traditional Indian reserve. They chattered and smiled and their eyes shone, children transported by their new toys. Pearce made his way forward and clambered into the tender, three Winchester repeaters under his arm. He passed into the cab and handed one to White Hand.

‘A present for you. White Hand.’

The Indian smiled. ‘You are a man of your word, Marshal Pearce.’

Pearce made to smile but his face at once felt so painful that he rapidly thought better of it. Instead he said: ‘Twenty minutes. Not more than twenty minutes.’

Deakin had fifteen minutes on them. Momentarily he halted the horses and gazed ahead. The bridge over the ravine was no more than half a mile away; immediately beyond that lay the Fort Humboldt compound. He helped Marica on to her own horse and motioned for both her and Claremont to precede him. He drew his pistol and held it in his hand. In now brilliant sunshine the three horses picked their delicate way across the trestle bridge that spanned the ravine and cantered up to the compound gate. Benson, the guard, a man with a dull, stupid, brutalized face, moved out to intercept them, cocked rifle ready in his hands.

‘Who are you?’ His voice was slurred with a mixture of truculence and alcohol. ‘What’s your business at Fort Humboldt?’

‘Not with you.’ Deakin’s voice was bleak, authoritative. ‘Sepp Calhoun. Quickly!’

‘Who you got there?’

‘Are you blind? Prisoners. From the train.’

‘From the train?’ Benson nodded uncertainly, whatever mental processes he had clearly in temporary abeyance. ‘You’d better come.’

Benson led them across the compound. As they approached the Commandant’s office the door opened and Calhoun appeared, a gun in either hand. He said savagely: ‘Who the hell you got there, Benson?’

‘Says they’re from the train, boss.’

Deakin ignored both Calhoun and Benson and moved his pistol in the direction of Claremont and Marica. ‘Get down, you two.’ He turned to Calhoun. ‘You Calhoun? Let’s talk inside.’

Calhoun levelled both pistols at Deakin. ‘Uhuh. Too fast, mister. Who are you?’

Deakin said in weary exasperation. ‘John Deakin. Nathan Pearce sent me.’

‘So you say.’

‘So they say.’ He nodded to the now dismounted and clearly sick Claremont and Marica. ‘My passport. Hostages. Safe-conduct. Call them what you like. Nathan said I was to take them for proof.’

A shade less aggressively Calhoun said: ‘I’ve seen passports in better shape.’

‘They tried to be clever. Meet Colonel Claremont, the relief Commandant. And Miss Marica Fairchild – the present Commandant’s daughter.’

Calhoun’s eyes widened, his mouth opened perceptibly and his guns momentarily wavered, but his recovery was almost immediate. ‘We’ll soon see about that. Inside.’ He and Benson ushered the other three, at gun-point, into the Commandant’s office.

Colonel Fairchild stared as the door opened. Despite the bound hands, he stumbled shakily to his feet.

‘Marica! Marica! And Colonel Claremont.’ Marica hobbled across the room and threw her arms around him. ‘My dear, my dear. What have they done to you? And what – what in God’s name – why are you here?’

Deakin said to Calhoun: ‘Satisfied?’

‘Well, I guess – but I never heard of no John Deakin.’

Deakin thrust his gun inside his coat, a pacific gesture which helped further reassure the wavering Calhoun.

‘Who do you think took those four hundred rifles from the Winchester armoury?’ He had the ascendancy now and used it with savage authority. ‘God’s sake, man, stop wasting time. Things are bad, terribly bad. Your precious White Hand botched the job. He’s dead. So’s O’Brien. Pearce is hurt, badly. The soldiers have the train and when they get it going again–’

‘White Hand, O’Brien, Pearce–’

Deakin nodded curtly to Benson. ‘Tell him to wait outside.’

‘Outside?’ Calhoun seemed dazed.

‘Out. There’s worse to come – but for your ears only.’

Calhoun nodded mechanically at a bewildered Benson, who left, closing the door behind him.

Calhoun said despairingly: ‘There couldn’t be anything worse–’

‘Yes, there is. This.’ The pistol was back in Deakin’s hand, the muzzle pressing with brutal force against Calhoun’s teeth. Deakin swiftly relieved the stupefied Calhoun of both guns and handed one to Claremont, who lined it up on Calhoun. Deakin produced a knife and sliced the bonds of Colonel Fairchild, who was no less flabbergasted than Calhoun, and laid Calhoun’s other gun on the table beside him. ‘Yours. When you’re fit to use it. How many other men does Calhoun have? Apart from Benson?’

‘Who in God’s name are you? How–’

Deakin grabbed Fairchild’s lapels. ‘How – many – men?’

‘Two. Carmody and Harris, they’re called.’

Deakin wheeled round and dug the muzzle of his Colt violently into Calhoun’s kidneys. Calhoun gasped with pain. Deakin repeated the process. He said, smiling: ‘You have the blood of scores of men on your hands, Calhoun. Please, please believe me that I’m just begging for the excuse to kill you.’ From the expression on Calhoun’s face it was apparent that he believed him totally. ‘Tell Benson that you want him, Carmody and Harris here at once.’

Deakin opened the door slightly and prodded Calhoun towards the opening. Benson was pacing up and down only a few feet away.

Calhoun said hoarsely: ‘Get Carmody and Harris here. And yourself. Now!’

‘What’s up, boss? You look – you look like death.’

‘God’s sake, man, hurry!’

Benson hesitated, then ran across the compound. Deakin closed the door and said to Calhoun: ‘Turn round.’

Calhoun obeyed. Deakin’s reversed gun swung and he caught Calhoun before he toppled to the ground. Marica stared at him in horror.

‘Spare me your goddamned lectures.’ Deakin’s tone was coldly conversational. ‘A minute from now and he would have been as desperate as a cornered rat.’ He turned to Fairchild. ‘How many survivors?’

‘We lost only ten men – and they gave a good account of themselves.’ Fairchild was still trying to massage life back into his hands. ‘The rest were caught in their bunks. Calhoun and his friends – we’d given the damned renegades lodging for the night – overpowered my night guards and let the Indians in. But they’re two miles from here, in an abandoned mine, with Indian guards.’

‘No matter. I don’t need them. I don’t want them. Last thing I want is a pitched battle. How you feeling now?’

‘A great deal better, Mr Deakin. What do you want me to do?’

‘When I give the word, go to the armoury and get me a sackful of blasting powder and fuses. Please be very quick then. Where are your cells?’

Fairchild pointed. ‘The corner of the compound there.’

‘The key?’

Fairchild took a key from the board behind his desk and handed it to Deakin, who nodded his thanks, pocketed it and took up a watching post by the window.

He had to watch only for seconds. Benson, Carmody and Harris were crossing the compound at a dead run. At a nod from Deakin, Claremont helped him to drag the prostrate Calhoun into a more or less standing position. As the three running men approached the Commandant’s office the door opened wide and the unconscious form of Calhoun was pushed violently down the steps. The confusion was immediate and complete and the tangled heap of Benson, Carmody and Harris had nothing to offer in the way of resistance when Deakin, gun in hand, appeared in the doorway. Fairchild appeared immediately behind him and ran across to the opposite side of the compound. Deakin followed, leading his horse by one hand while with the other, Colt in hand, he shepherded the other three, now bearing the inert Calhoun, towards the cells. As he turned the key on them, Fairchild appeared from a nearby doorway, carrying what appeared to be a fairly heavy sack. Deakin, on horseback now, snatched up the sack, slung it across the pommel of his saddle and, urging his horse to a gallop, swung left through the main gateway of the compound. Marica, supported by a still shaky Claremont, the blind leading the blind, appeared from the Commandant’s office. Together with Fairchild, they made their best speed towards the gateway.

Deakin pulled up his horse in the concealment of an outcrop of rock that had been blasted to make the approach to the trellis bridge, dismounted, flung the bag over his shoulder and headed for the bridge.

Pearce swung out from the left-hand cab window of the locomotive cab and looked ahead. A wide smile crossed his sadly battered face.

‘We’re there!’ Exultation in his voice. ‘We’re almost there!’

White Hand joined him by the window. The trellis bridge was less than a mile ahead. White Hand smiled and lovingly rubbed the stock of his Winchester repeater.

Deakin, meantime, had just finished wedging two large charges of blasting powder between the wooden piers and buttresses of the trellis bridge, one on either side. He had used scarcely half of the powder Fairchild had given him, but estimated the quantity to be sufficient. He shinned up a wooden buttress, threw the halfempty sack on to the track, then cautiously raised his head; the train was now no more than a quarter of a mile distant. He descended swiftly, ignited the fuses of both charges, then climbed as swiftly back on to the bridge. The train was no more than two hundred yards distant. Deakin shouldered his bag and ran back to the western exit of the bridge.

Pearce and White Hand, leaning out from opposite sides of the footplate, saw the fleeing figure of Deakin just clearing the bridge. Momentarily, the two men in the cab stared at each other, then simultaneously raised their Winchesters. Bullets struck the ground and ricocheted off the rocks near the flying figure of Deakin, but because of the latter’s dodging, twisting run and the most unstable firing platform provided by the swaying locomotive, none came too close. Within seconds Deakin had thrown himself behind the shelter of the outcrop of rock.

‘The bridge!’ Pearce’s voice was almost a scream. ‘The devil’s mined the bridge!’ O’Brien, his face masked in rage and fear, slammed shut the throttle and jammed on the brakes. But the train, though abruptly slowing, was already on the bridge.

Fairchild, Claremont and Marica, now no more than two hundred yards distant, stopped and stared. The train appeared to be almost across the bridge; the locomotive and tender were, in fact, already across the bridge and on solid rock. O’Brien, at the controls, mouthing incomprehensible words, realized that he had made a mistake, possibly even a fatal one, released the brake and opened the throttle to its widest extent. But O’Brien was too late. There came two almost simultaneous white flashes, a double roar that combined into one and the bridge disintegrated and collapsed into the ravine. The three coaches disappeared at once into the depths of the gorge, dragging the still coupled tender and locomotive after them. The tender had already disappeared and the locomotive was fast following them when three figures, all bearing Winchesters, jumped clear from the cab and landed heavily on the solid rock. The locomotive was dragged inexorably over the edge and amid the rending screech of tearing metal and the splintering of heavy baulks of timber, the entire train dropped into the depths.

Shaken, but still going concerns, Pearce, O’Brien and White Hand scrambled to their feet. With the three men lining their guns on him Deakin seemed momentarily paralysed, then dived for safety without a shot being fired. Shock had slowed the reactions of the men with the Winchesters.

Fairchild, Claremont and Marica flung themselves flat as the three men advanced, their Winchesters cocked. Deakin thrust his hand under his coat. It came out slowly, empty. His gun was in the Commandant’s room. The three men were now less than fifteen yards distant from him, rounding the outcrop: it was obvious that Deakin had no gun. But in his right hand he held an already ignited tube of blasting powder. He waited for what seemed a dangerously long period, then threw it over the outcrop.

The charge exploded over the three men, momentarily blinding them and throwing them off-balance. Deakin ran round the corner of the outcrop. There was much smoke and dust but he could see that White Hand, his hands clutched to his streaming eyes, had lost his rifle. Two seconds later it was in Deakin’s hands, lined up on the still slightly dazed Pearce and O’Brien.

Deakin said: ‘Don’t do it. Don’t make me make history. Don’t make me the first man in history to kill another with a Winchester repeater.’

Pearce, who had recovered the most quickly of the three, hurled himself to one side, bringing up his repeater. Deakin’s gun boomed.

Deakin said: i think that’s enough history for one day.’

O’Brien nodded and threw down his gun. His tear-filled eyes could barely see.

The three of them were joined by Fairchild, Marica and Claremont, the last with a very steady gun in his wounded hand. Deakin, Fairchild and Marica stood a little apart close to the edge of the shattered bridge, gazing downwards. Far below in the depths of the ravine lay the crumpled, broken remains of the train with the locomotive lying on top of the crushed coaches. There was no movement to be seen, no sign of life.

Deakin said heavily: ‘An eye for an eye. Well, I suppose we have the ones who matter – O’Brien, Calhoun and White Hand.’

Fairchild was sombre. ‘All except one.’

Deakin looked at him. ‘You – you know about your brother?’

‘I always suspected. I never knew. He – he was the ringleader?’

‘O’Brien was. O’Brien used him, used his greed and his weakness.’

‘And all his ambition, all his greed, ends in the bottom of a ravine.’

‘For him, for you, for your daughter – the best way.’

‘And now?’

‘One detachment of your men to bring back the horses I abandoned down the line. Another to repair the telegraph line. Then we call up a train-load of army and civil engineers to rebuild this bridge.’

Marica said: ‘And you’ll be returning to Reese City now?’

‘I’ll be going back to Reese City when that bridge is repaired and a train has crossed it to load all the bullion in Fort Humboldt. I’ll let that gold and silver out of my sight when it’s reached Washington. But not before.’

Fairchild said: ‘But it’ll take weeks to repair that bridge.’

‘Like enough.’

Marica smiled. ‘It looks like being a long hard winter.’

Deakin smiled in return. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I dare say we’ll find something to talk about.’

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the remarkable documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a schoolmaster. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt. from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Circus

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1975

then in paperback by Fontana 1977

Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1975

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9352-3

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

To Juan Ignacio

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

‘If you were a genuine army colonel,’ Pilgrim said, ‘instead of one of the most bogus and unconvincing frauds I’ve ever seen, you’d rate three stars for this. Excellently done, my dear Fawcett, excellently done.’

Pilgrim was the great-grandson of an English peer of the realm and it showed. Both in dress and in speech he was slightly foppish and distinctly Edwardian: subconsciously, almost, one looked for the missing monocle, the Old Etonian tie. His exquisitely cut suits came from Savile Row, his shirts from Turnbull and Asser and his pair of matched shotguns, which at 4000 dollars he regarded as being cheap at the price, came, inevitably, from Purdeys of the West End. The shoes, regrettably, were hand-made in Rome. To have him auditioned for the screen part of Sherlock Holmes would have been superfluous.

Fawcett did not react to the criticism, the praise or the understated sartorial splendour. His facial muscles seldom reacted to anything – which may have been due to the fact that his unlined face was so plump it was almost moon-shaped. His bucolic expression verged upon the bemused: large numbers of people languishing behind federal bars had been heard to testify, frequently and with understandable bitterness, that the impression Fawcett conveyed was deceptive to the point of downright immorality.

Half-hooded eyes deep-sunk in the puffy flesh, Fawcett’s gaze traversed the leather-lined library and came to rest on the sparking pine fire. His voice wistful, he said, ‘One would wish that promotion were so spectacular and rapid in the CIA.’

‘Dead men’s shoes, my boy.’ Pilgrim was at least five years younger than Fawcett. ‘Dead men’s shoes.’ He regarded his own Roman foot briefly and with some satisfaction, then transferred his attention to the splendid collection of ribbons on Fawcett’s chest. ‘I see you have awarded yourself the Congressional Medal of Honour.’

‘I felt it was in keeping with my character.’

‘Quite. This paragon you have unearthed. Bruno. How did you come across him?’

‘I didn’t. Smithers did, when I was in Europe. Smithers is a great circus fan.’

‘Quite.’ Pilgrim seemed fond of the word. ‘Bruno. One would assume that he has another name.’

‘Wildermann. But he never uses it – professionally or privately.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. Presumably Smithers never asked him either. Would you ask Pele or Callas or Liberace what their other names are?’

‘You class his name with those?’

‘It’s my understanding that the circus world would hesitate to class those names with his.’

Pilgrim picked up some sheets of paper. ‘Speaks the language like a native.’

‘He is a native.’

‘Billed as the world’s greatest aerialist.’ Pilgrim was a hard man to knock off his stride. ‘Daring young man on the flying trapeze? That sort of thing?’

‘That, too. But he’s primarily a high-wire specialist.’

‘The best in the world?’

‘His fellow professionals are in no doubt about it.’

‘If our information about Crau is correct, he’d better be. I see he claims to be an expert in karate and judo.’

‘He has never claimed anything of the kind. I claim it for him – rather, Smithers does, and as you know Smithers is very much an expert in those matters. He watched Bruno having a work-out down-town this morning in the Samurai club. The instructor there is a black belt – they don’t come any higher in judo. By the time Bruno had finished with him – well, I understand the instructor disappeared with the general air of a man about to write out his resignation on the spot. Smithers said he hadn’t seen Bruno chopping people around in karate: he has the feeling he wouldn’t like to, either.’

‘And this dossier claims that he is a mentalist.’ Pilgrim steepled his fingers in the best Holmes fashion. ‘Well, good for Bruno. What the devil is a mentalist?’

‘Chap that does mental things.’

Pilgrim exercised a massive restraint. ‘You have to be an intellectual to be an aerialist?’

‘I don’t even know whether you have to be an intellectual – or even intelligent – in order to be an aerialist. It’s beside the point. Practically every circus performer doubles up and does one, sometimes even two jobs in addition to his speciality in the actual arena. Some act as labourers – they have mountains of equipment to move around. Some are entertainers. Bruno doubles as an entertainer. Just outside the circus proper they have a showground, fairground, call it what you will, which is used to separate the arriving customers from their spare cash. Bruno performs in a small theatre, just a collapsible plywood job. He reads minds, tells you the first name of your great-grandfather, the numbers of the dollar bills in your pockets, what’s written or drawn inside any sealed envelope. Things like that.’

‘It’s been done. Audience plants and the hocus-pocus of any skilled stage magician.’

‘Possibly, although the word is that he can do things for which there is no rational accounting and which professional conjurers have failed to reproduce. But what interests us most is that he has a totally photographic memory. Give him an opened double-spread of, say, Time magazine. He’ll look at it for a couple of seconds, hand it back, then offer to identify the word in any location you select. You say to him that you’d like to know what the third word in the third line in the third column on the right-hand page is and if he says it’s, say, “Congress” then you can lay your life it is “Congress”. And he can do this in any language – he doesn’t have to understand it.’

‘This I have to see. A propos, if he’s such a genius, why doesn’t he concentrate exclusively on stage work? Surely he could make a fortune out of that, much more than by risking his life turning somersaults up there in the low cloud?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. According to Smithers, he’s not exactly paid in pennies. He’s the outstanding star in the outstanding circus on earth. But that wouldn’t be his real reason. He’s the lead member of a trio of aerialists called “The Blind Eagles”, and without him they’d be lost. I gather they are not mentalists.’

‘I wonder. We can’t afford excessive sentiment and loyalty in our business.’

‘Sentiment, no. Loyalty – to us – yes. To others, yes also. If they are your two younger brothers.’

‘A family trio?’

‘I thought you knew.’

Pilgrim shook his head. ‘You called them The Blind Eagles?’

‘No undue hyperbole, Smithers tells me. Not when you’ve seen their act. They may not quite be up in the wild blue yonder or hanging about, as you suggest, in the low cloud, but they’re not exactly earthbound either. On the upswing of the trapeze they’re eighty feet above terra firma. Whether you fall from eighty feet or eight hundred, the chances of breaking your neck – not to mention most of the two hundred-odd bones in your body – are roughly the same. Especially if you’re blindfolded and can’t tell up from down, while your body can’t tell you exactly where up is and most certainly can’t locate down.’

‘You’re trying to tell me – ’

‘They wear those black silk cotton gloves when they take off from one trapeze to another. People think there may be some advanced electronic quirk in those gloves, like negative poles attracting positive poles, but there isn’t. Just for better adhesion, that’s all. They have no guidance system at all. Their hoods are entirely opaque but they never miss – well, obviously they never miss or they would be one Blind Eagle short by this time. Some form of extra-sensory perception, I suppose – whatever that may mean. Only Bruno has it, which is why he is the catcher.’

‘This I have to see. And the great mentalist at work.’

‘No problem. On the way in.’ Fawcett consulted his watch. ‘We could leave now. Mr Wrinfield is expecting us?’ Pilgrim nodded in silence. A corner of Fawcett’s mouth twitched: he could have been smiling. He said: ‘Come now, John, all circusgoers are happy children at heart. You don’t look very happy to me.’

‘I’m not. There are twenty-five different nationalities working for this circus, at least eight of them mid- or eastern European. How am I to know that someone out there might not love me, might be carrying a picture of me in his back pocket? Or half a dozen of them carrying pictures of me?’

‘The price of fame. You want to try disguising yourself.’ Fawcett surveyed his own colonel’s uniform complacently. ‘As a lieutenant-colonel, perhaps?’

They travelled to down-town Washington in an official but unidentifiable car, Pilgrim and Fawcett in the back, the driver and a fourth man in the front. The fourth man was a grey, balding anonymity of a person, raincoated, with a totally forgettable face. Pilgrim spoke to him.

‘Now, don’t forget, Masters, you better be sure that you’re the first man on that stage.’

‘I’ll be the first man, sir.’

‘Picked your word?’

‘Yes, sir. “Canada.”’

Dusk had already fallen and ahead, through a slight drizzle of rain, loomed an oval, high-domed building festooned with hundreds of coloured lights that had been programmed to flicker on and off in a pre-set pattern. Fawcett spoke to the driver, the car stopped and, wordlessly and carrying a magazine rolled up in one hand, Masters got out and seemed to melt into the gathering crowd. He had been born to melt into crowds. The car moved on and stopped again only when it had reached as close to the building entrance as possible. Pilgrim and Fawcett got out and passed inside.

The broad passageway led directly to the main audience entrance of the big top itself – a misnomer, as the days of the great canvas structures, at least as far as the big circuses were concerned, had gone. Instead they relied exclusively on exhibition halls and auditoriums, few of which seated less than ten thousand people, and many considerably more: a circus such as this had to have at least seven thousand spectators just to break even.

To the right of the passageway glimpses could be caught of the true back-stage of the circus itself, the snarling big cats in their cages, the restlessly hobbled elephants, the horses and ponies and chimpanzees, a scattering of jugglers engaged in honing up their performances – a top-flight juggler requires as much and as constant practice as a concert pianist – and, above all, the unmistakable and unforgettable smell. To the rear of the area were prefabricated offices and, beyond those, the rows of changing booths for the performers. Opposite those, in the far corner and discreetly curved so as to minimize the audience’s view of what was taking place back-stage, was the wide entrance to the arena itself.

From the left of the passageway came the sound of music, and it wasn’t the New York Philharmonic that was giving forth. The music – if it could be called that – was raucous, tinny, blaring, atonal, and in any other circumstances could have been fairly described as an assault on the eardrums: but in that fairground milieu any other kind of music, whether because of habituation or because it went so inevitably with its background, would have been unthinkable. Pilgrim and Fawcett passed through one of the several doors leading to the concourse that housed the side-show itself. It covered only a modest area but what it lacked in size it clearly compensated for in volume of trade. It differed little from a hundred other fairgrounds apart from the presence of a sixty-by-twenty, garishly-painted and obviously plywood-constructed structure in one corner. It was towards this, ignoring all the other dubious attractions, that Pilgrim and Fawcett headed.

Above the doorway was the intriguing legend: ‘The Great Mentalist’. The two men paid their dollar apiece, went inside and took up discreet standing positions at the back. Discretion apart, there were no seats left – The Great Mentalist’s fame had clearly travelled before him.

Bruno Wildermann was on the tiny stage. Of little more than average height, and of little more than average width across the shoulders, he did not look a particularly impressive figure, which could have been due to the fact that he was swathed from neck to ankle in a voluminous and highly-coloured Chinese mandarin’s gown, with huge, billowing sleeves. His aquiline, slightly swarthy face, crowned by long black hair, looked intelligent enough, but it was a face that was more pleasant than remarkable: if he passed you in the street you would not have turned to look after him.

Pilgrim said, sotto voce: ‘Look at those sleeves. You could hide a hutchful of rabbits up them.’

But Bruno was not bent on performing any conjuring tricks. He was confining himself strictly to his advertised role as a mentalist. He had a deep carrying voice, not loud, with a trace of a foreign accent so slight as to make its source of origin unidentifiable.

He asked a woman in the audience to think of some object then whisper it to her neighbour: without hesitation Bruno announced what the object was and this was confirmed.

‘Plant,’ said Pilgrim.

Bruno called for three volunteers to come to the stage. After some hesitation three women did so. Bruno sat all three at a table, provided them with foot-square pieces of paper and envelopes to match and asked them to write or draw some simple symbol and enclose them in the envelopes. This they did while Bruno stood facing the audience, his back to them. When they had finished he turned and examined the three envelopes lying on the table, his hands clasped behind his back. After only a few seconds he said: ‘The first shows a swastika, the second a question mark, the third a square with two diagonals. Will you show them to the audience please?’

The three women extracted the cards and held them up. They were undeniably a swastika, a question mark and a square with two diagonals.

Fawcett leaned towards Pilgrim: ‘Three plants?’ Pilgrim looked thoughtful and said nothing.

Bruno said: ‘It may have occurred to some of you that I have accomplices among the audience. Well, you can’t all be accomplices because then you wouldn’t bother to come and see me, even if I could afford to pay you all, which I can’t. But this should remove all doubt.’ He picked up a paper plane and said: ‘I’m going to throw this among you and although I can do lots of things I can’t control the flight of a paper plane. Nobody ever could. Perhaps the person it touches would be good enough to come to the stage.’

He threw the paper plane over the audience. It swooped and darted in the unpredictable fashion of all paper planes, then, again in the fashion of all paper planes, ended its brief flight in an ignominious nose-dive, striking the shoulder of a youth in his late teens. Somewhat diffidently he left his seat and mounted the stage. Bruno gave him an encouraging smile and a sheet of paper and envelope similar to those he’d given the women.

‘What I want you to do is simple. Just write down three figures and put the sheet inside the envelope.’ This the youth did, while Bruno stood with his back to him. When the paper was inside the envelope Bruno turned, but did not even look at the paper far less touch it. He said: ‘Add the three numbers and tell me what the total is.’

‘Twenty.’

‘The numbers you wrote down were seven, seven and six.’

The youth extracted the paper and held it up for the audience to see. Seven, seven and six it was.

Fawcett looked at Pilgrim, who had now adopted a very thoughtful expression indeed. Clearly, if Bruno were not genuine then he was either a consummate magician or an extraordinarily devious character.

Then Bruno announced his most difficult feat of all – that of displaying that he was possessed of a photographic memory, that of identifying, given the location, of any word in a double-spread of any magazine, irrespective of language. Masters left nothing to chance or the impetuousness of any eager beaver who might care to forestall him for he was on stage even before Bruno had finished his explanation. Bruno, slightly lifting amused eyebrows, took the opened magazine from him, glanced at it briefly, handed it back and looked interrogatively at Masters.

Masters said: ‘Left page, second column, let me see now, seven lines down, middle word.’ He looked at Bruno with a half-smile of triumphant expectation.

Bruno said: ‘Canada.’

The half-smile vanished. Masters’s nondescript features seemed to fall apart then he shrugged his shoulders in genuine disbelief and turned away.

Outside, Fawcett said: ‘I hardly think that Bruno is likely to have the inside track on the CIA. Convinced?’

‘Convinced. When does the performance start?’

‘Half an hour.’

‘Let’s go and watch him on the high wire or whatever. If he’s half as good out there – well, he’s our man.’

The exhibition hall that housed the three-ring circus was completely full. The air was alive with music, this time more than tolerable music from a very competent orchestra, an air that was charged with tension and excitement and anticipation, with thousands of young children transported into an enchanted fairyland – almost, indeed, to the extent their grandparents were. Everything glittered, but it was no cheap tinsel glitter, but a background that seemed the integral and inevitable part of everything a circus should be. Apart from the dun-coloured sand in the three rings, a dazzling rainbow of colours caught the eye even more than the music the ear. Circling the ring were beautiful and beautifully dressed girls on the most outrageously caparisoned elephants and if there was any colour in the spectrum that the designer had omitted it wasn’t apparent to the eye. In the rings themselves clowns and pierrots vied with each other in the ludicrousness of their antics and the ridiculousness of their costumes, while both of them vied with the tumblers and the stately procession of stilt-walkers. The audience watched it all in fascination – albeit with an element of impatience, for this spectacle, magnificent as it was, was only the warm-up, the prelude to the action to come. There is no atmosphere in the world quite like that of the charged atmosphere in the big top just before the performance begins.

Fawcett and Pilgrim sat together in excellent viewing seats, almost opposite the entrance of the main ring. Fawcett said: ‘Which is Wrinfield?’

Without appearing to do so, Pilgrim indicated a man sitting only two seats away in the same row. Immaculately clad in a dark blue suit, matching tie and white shirt, he had a lean, thoughtful, almost scholarly face, with neatly parted grey hair and pebble glasses.

‘That’s Wrinfield?’ Pilgrim nodded. ‘Looks more like a college professor to me.’

‘I believe he was once. Economics. But bossing a modern circus is no longer a seat of the pants job. It’s big business and running it requires corresponding intelligence. Tesco Wrinfield is a highly intelligent man.’

‘Maybe too intelligent. With a name like that and on a job like this it’s going to be – ’

‘He’s a fifth-generation American.’

The last of the elephants left the arena and then, to the accompaniment of a blare of trumpets and the suddenly amplified effects of the orchestra, a golden chariot, drawn by two magnificently adorned black stallions, erupted into the arena at full gallop, followed by a dozen horsemen. From time to time these horsemen retained some form of contact with their horses, but for the most part performed a series of acrobatic feats as spectacular as clearly suicidal. The crowd yelled and cheered and applauded. The circus had begun.

The performance that followed more than bore out the circus’s claim that it had no peer in the world. It was superbly arranged and superbly presented and, as was to be expected, it numbered among its acts some of the best in the world: Heinrich Neubauer, an all but incomparable trainer with an uncanny power over a dozen very unpleasant Nubian lions; his only equal, Malthius, who treated the same number of even more unpleasant Bengal tigers as if they were kittens; Carraciola, who had no trouble at all in making his chimpanzees look a great deal more intelligent than he was; Kan Dahn, billed as the strongest man in the world, which, on the basis of his extraordinary one-handed feats on the high wire and trapeze while seemingly unencumbered by the presence of several attractive young ladies who clung to him with a touching degree of devotion, he might well have been; Lennie Loran, a high-wire-walking comedian, who would have made any insurance agent in the country jump on his pen; Ron Roebuck, who could perform feats with a lasso that a rodeo cowboy wouldn’t even dare dream about; Manuelo, a knife-thrower who could extinguish a lit cigarette at twenty feet – with his eyes bandaged; the Duryans, a Bulgarian teeterboard team who made people shake their heads in wonder; and a dozen other acts, ranging from aerial balletists to a group who climbed up tall ladders and balanced there entirely unsupported while they threw Indian clubs at each other.

After an hour or so of this Pilgrim said graciously: ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. And here, I take it, is our star turn.’

The lights dimmed, the orchestra played suitably dramatic if somewhat funereal music, then the lights came on again. High up on the trapeze platform, with half a dozen coloured spotlights trained on them, stood three men clad in sparkling sequinned leotards. In the middle was Bruno. Without his mandarin’s gown he now looked singularly impressive, broad-shouldered and hard and heavy muscled, every inch the phenomenal athlete he was reputed to be. The other two men were fractionally slighter than he. All three were blindfolded. The music died away, and the crowd watched in eerie silence as the three men pulled hoods over their blindfolds.

Pilgrim said: ‘On balance, I think I would prefer to be down here.’

‘That’s two of us. I don’t think I want to look.’

But look they did as The Blind Eagles went through their clearly impossible aerial routine – impossible because, apart from the occasional roll of a solitary drum in the orchestra, they had no means of knowing where each other was, of synchronizing their sightless movements. But not once did a pair of hands fail to smack safely and securely into another and waiting pair, not once did an outstretched pair of hands appear even remotely liable to miss a silently swinging trapeze. The performance lasted for all of an interminable four minutes and at the end there was another hushed silence, the lights dimmed a second time and almost the entire audience was on its feet, clapping and shouting and whistling.

Pilgrim said: ‘Know anything about his two brothers?’

‘Vladimir and Yoffe, I believe they’re called. Nothing. I thought this was going to be a one-man job.’

‘It is. And Bruno has the motivation? The incentive?’

‘If any man ever had. I was making enquiries when I was in eastern Europe time before last. I couldn’t find out much from our man there, but enough, I think. There were seven of the family in the circus act – dad or mum more or less retired – but only those three made it over the border when the secret police closed in. I don’t even know why they closed in. That was six, maybe seven years ago. Bruno’s wife is dead, that’s for sure, there are witnesses who will testify to that – well, they would, if they didn’t live in the part of the world they do. He’d been married two weeks. What happened to his youngest brother, his father and his mother, nobody knows. They just disappeared.’

‘Along with a million others. He’s our man, all right. Mr Wrinfield is willing to play. Will Bruno?’

‘He’ll play.’ Fawcett was confident, then looked thoughtful. ‘He’d better. After all those weeks of trouble you’ve been to.’

The lights brightened. The Blind Eagles were now on a wire platform some twenty feet above ground, the wire itself stretching to another platform on the far side of the centre ring. Both other rings were empty and there was no other performer in sight except one – and he was on the ground. There was no music and among the crowd the silence was absolute.

Bruno straddled a bicycle. Across his shoulders was strapped a wooden yoke while one of his brothers held a twelve-foot steel pole. Bruno edged the bicycle forward until the front wheel was well clear of the platform and waited until his brother had placed the pole in slots across the yoke. It was totally insecure. As Bruno moved off, bringing both feet on to the pedals, the brothers caught hold of the pole, leaned forward in perfect unison and swung themselves clear of the platform until, again in perfect unison, they hung suspended at the full length of their arms. The wire sagged noticeably, but Bruno didn’t: slowly and steadily he pedalled away.

For the next few minutes, balanced partly by himself but mainly by the perfect timing of Vladimir and Yoffe, Bruno cycled backwards and forwards across the wire while the brothers went through a series of controlled but intricate acrobatics. On one occasion, while Bruno remained perfectly steady for seconds at a time, the brothers, necessarily moving with the same immaculate synchronization, gradually increased their pendulum swing until they were doing hand-stands on the pole. The same extraordinary hush remained with the audience, a tribute that wasn’t entirely due to the performance they were witnessing: directly below them as they performed were Neubauer and his twelve Nubian lions, the head of every one of which was turned yearningly upwards.

At the end of the performance the silence in the audience was replaced by a long and far from silent collective sigh of relief, then once again came the same standing ovation, as heartfelt and prolonged as the one that had gone before.

Pilgrim said: ‘I’ve had enough – besides, my nerves can’t take any more. Wrinfield will follow me. If he brushes by you on the way back to his seat that means that Bruno is willing to talk and that you’re to follow him at a discreet distance at the end of the show. Wrinfield, I mean.’

Without making any sign or looking in any particular direction, Pilgrim rose leisurely and left. Almost at once Wrinfield did the same.

A few minutes later the two men were closeted in one of Wrinfield’s offices, a superbly equipped secretary’s dream, albeit somewhat compact. Wrinfield had a much larger if ramshackle office where most of his work was normally carried out just outside the arena itself; but that did not possess a cocktail bar as this one did. On the principle that he forbade anyone to have liquor on the circus site proper, Wrinfield accordingly denied himself the privilege also.

The office was but a tiny part of a complex and beautifully organized whole that constituted the mobile home of the circus. Every person in the circus, from Wrinfield downwards, slept aboard this train except for some independent diehards who insisted on dragging their caravans across the vast spaces of the United States and Canada. On tour the train also accommodated every single performing animal in the circus: at the end, just before the brake-van, were four massive flat-cars that accommodated all the bulky equipment, ranging from tractors to cranes, that were essential for the smooth operation of the circus. In all, it was a minor miracle in ingenuity, meticulous planning and the maximum utilization of available space. The train itself was a monster, over half a mile in length.

Pilgrim accepted a drink and said: ‘Bruno’s the man I want. You think he will accept? If not, we may well cancel your European tour.’

‘He’ll come, and for three reasons.’ Wrinfield’s speech was like the man himself, neat, precise, the words chosen with care. ‘As you’ve seen, the man doesn’t know what fear is. Like all newly naturalized Americans – all right, all right, he’s been naturalized for over five years but that rates as yesterday – his patriotism towards his adopted country makes yours and mine look just that little shabby. Thirdly, he’s got a very big score to settle with his former homeland.’

‘Now?’

‘Now. And then we speak to you?’

‘I’m the last person you speak to. For both our sakes you want to be seen with me as little as possible. And don’t come within a mile of my office – we have a whole battalion of foreign agents who do nothing but sit in the sun and watch our front door all the time. Colonel Fawcett – he’s the uniformed person who was sitting beside me and the chief of our East European Field Operations – knows a great deal more about it than I do.’

‘I didn’t know that you carried uniformed personnel in your organization, Mr Pilgrim.’

‘We don’t. That’s his disguise. He wears it so often that he’s more readily recognizable in it than in civilian clothes, which is why nearly everyone calls him “the Colonel”. But never underestimate him.’

Fawcett waited until the end of the show, dutifully applauded, turned and left without glancing at Wrinfield: Wrinfield had already given him the signal. Fawcett left the circus and made his way through the darkness and the steadily increasing rain, moving slowly so that Wrinfield might not lose him. Eventually he came to the large, dark limousine in which he and Pilgrim had arrived and climbed into the back seat. A dark figure was pushed up against the far corner, his face as deeply in shadow as possible.

Fawcett said: ‘Hello. My name’s Fawcett. I hope that no one saw you arrive?’

The driver answered: ‘No one, sir. I was keeping a pretty close look-out.’ He looked out through the rain-spattered windows. ‘It’s not much of a night for other people to be minding other people’s business.’

‘It isn’t.’ He turned to the shadowy figure. ‘A pleasure to meet you.’ He sighed. ‘I have to apologize for all this comic-opera cloak-and-dagger business, but I’m afraid it’s too late now. Gets in your blood, you know. We’re just waiting for a friend of yours – ah, here he comes now.’ He opened the door and Wrinfield got in beside them. What little could be seen of his face didn’t display a great deal in the way of carefree rapture.

‘Poynton Street, Barker,’ Fawcett said.

Barker nodded in silence, and drove off. Nobody spoke. Wrinfield, more than a little unhappy, kept turning restlessly in his seat and finally said: ‘I think we’re being followed.’

Fawcett said: ‘We’d better be. If not the driver of that car would be out of a job tomorrow. That car’s following us to make sure that no other car follows us. If you follow me, that is.’

‘I see.’ From the tone of his voice it was questionable whether Wrinfield did. He became increasingly unhappy as the car moved into what was very close to a slum area and unhappier still when it drew up in an ill-lit street outside a sleazy walk-up apartment block. He said, complainingly: ‘This isn’t a very nice part of town. And this – this looks like a house of ill-fame.’

‘And a house of ill-fame it is. We own it. Very handy places, these bordellos. Who, for instance, could ever imagine that Tesco Wrinfield would enter one of those places? Come inside.’

CHAPTER TWO

For such an unsalubrious place in such an unsalubrious area the sitting-room was surprisingly comfortable, although the person who had furnished it would appear to have had a fixation about the colour russet, for the sofa, armchairs, carpet and heavily discreet curtains were all of the same colour or very close to it. A smokeless coal fire – for this was a smokeless area – did its best to burn cheerfully in the hearth. Wrinfield and Bruno occupied an armchair apiece: Fawcett was presiding over a cocktail cabinet, one of the portable kind.

Bruno said carefully: ‘Tell me again, please. About this anti-matter or whatever you call it.’

Fawcett sighed. ‘I was afraid you might ask me that. I know I got it right first time, because I’d memorized what I had to say and just repeated it parrot fashion. I had to because I don’t really know what it’s all about myself.’ Fawcett handed round drinks – a soda for Bruno – and rubbed his chin. ‘I’ll try and simplify it this time round. Then maybe I’ll be able to get some inklings of understanding myself.

‘Matter, we know, is made up of atoms. There are lots of things that go to make up those atoms – scientists, it seems, are becoming increasingly baffled about the ever-increasing complexity of the atom – but all that concerns our simple minds are the two basic constituents of the atom, electrons and protons. On our earth – in the universe, for that matter – electrons are invariably negatively charged and protons positively charged. Unfortunately, life is becoming increasingly difficult for our scientists and astronomers – for instance, it has been discovered only this year that there are particles, made of God knows what, that travel at many times the speed of light, which is a very upsetting and distressing concept for all those of the scientist community – and that was one hundred per cent – who believe that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. However, that’s by the way.

‘Some time ago a couple of astronomers – Dicke and Anderson were their names – made the inconvenient discovery, based on theoretical calculations, that there must exist positively charged electrons. Their existence is now universally accepted, and they are referred to today as positrons. Then, to complicate things still further, the existence of anti-protons was discovered – this was in Berkeley – again electrically opposite to our protons. A combination of positrons and anti-protons would give rise to what is now termed “anti-matter”. That anti-matter does exist no serious scientists seriously dispute.

‘Nor do they dispute that if an electron or positron or proton and anti-proton collided or both sets collided the results would be disastrous. They would annihilate each other, giving off lethal gamma rays and creating, in the process, a considerable local uproar and a blast of such intense heat that all life within tens or perhaps hundreds of square miles would be instantaneously wiped out. On this scientists are agreed. It is estimated that if only two grams of anti-matter struck our planet on the side out-facing the sun the result would be to send the earth, with all life immediately extinct, spinning into the gravitational orbit of the sun. Provided, of course, it didn’t disintegrate immediately on contact.’

‘A delightful prospect,’ Wrinfield said. He did not have the look of a convert about him. ‘No offence, but it sounds like the most idle sciencefiction speculation to me.’

‘Me, too. But I have to accept what I’m told. Anyway, I’m beginning to believe it.’

‘Look. We don’t have any of this anti-matter stuff on earth?’

‘Because of anti-matter’s unpleasant propensity for annihilating all matter with which it comes into contact, that should be fairly obvious.’

‘Then where does the stuff come from?’

‘How the hell should I know?’ Fawcett hadn’t intended to be irritable, he just disliked treading the murky waters of the unknown. ‘We think ours is the only universe. How do we know? Maybe there lies another universe beyond ours, maybe many. It seems, according to latest scientific thinking, that if there are such universes, there is no reason why one or more should not be made of anti-matter.’ Fawcett paused gloomily. ‘I suppose if any intelligent beings existed there they would consider our universe as being composed of anti-matter. Of course, it could have been some rogue material thrown off at the moment of creation of our own universe. Who’s to say?’

Bruno said: ‘So the whole matter is speculation. It’s just a hypothesis. Theoretical calculations, that’s all. There is no proof, Colonel Fawcett.’

‘We think there is.’ He smiled. ‘Forgive the use of the “we”. What could have been, in the terms of human lives, a disaster of the first magnitude occurred in a happily unpopulated area of northern Siberia in 1908. When Russian scientists got around to investigating this – almost twenty years later – they discovered an area of over a hundred square miles where trees had been destroyed by heat: not fire but by instantaneous incineration which, in many cases, led to the petrification of trees in the upright position. Had this extraordinary phenomenon occurred over, say, New York or London, they would have become blackened cities of the dead.’

‘Proof,’ Bruno said. ‘We were speaking of proof, Colonel.’

‘Proof. Every other known damage caused to the earth by the impact of bodies from outer space has, without explanation, been caused by meteors. There was no trace of the meteor that might have caused this Siberian holocaust and no signs of any mark upon the ground where the meteor might have crashed into it; when meteors crashed into Arizona and South Africa they left enormous craters in the ground. The now accepted and indeed inevitable conclusion is that Siberia was struck by a particle of anti-matter with a mass of something of the order of one hundredth of a millionth of a gram.’

There was a considerable silence, then Wrinfield said: ‘Well, we have already covered this. Second time round it’s a bit clearer, but not much. So?’

‘Some dozen years ago there was scientific speculation as to whether the Russians had discovered the secret of anti-matter but this was dismissed out of hand because – well, because of anti-matter’s unpleasant propensity of annihilating all matter with which it comes into contact, the creation, harnessing and storage of it was impossible.

‘Was impossible. What if it were possible or about to become possible? The nation that held this secret could hold the world to ransom. Comparatively, nuclear weapons are inoffensive toys for the amusement of little toddlers.’

For a long minute no one spoke, then Wrinfield said: ‘You would not be talking in this fashion unless you had reason to believe that such a weapon exists or could exist.’

‘I have reason so to believe. This possibility has obsessed the intelligence agencies of all the modern world for some years now.’

‘Obviously this secret is not in our hands, or you wouldn’t be telling us all this.’

‘Obviously.’

‘And it wouldn’t be in the hands of a country such as Britain?’

‘That would give us no cause for anxiety.’

‘Because when the chips are down they would be allies with responsible hands?’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

‘Then this secret resides – if it does reside anywhere – in the hands of a country which, when the chips were down, would be neither friendly nor responsible?’

‘Precisely.’ Pilgrim, Fawcett reflected, had warned him not to underrate Wrinfield’s intelligence.

Wrinfield said slowly: ‘Pilgrim and I have already made some tentative arrangements, come to preliminary agreements. You will know that. But he never told me any of this.’

‘The time wasn’t right.’

‘So now it is?’

‘Now or not at all.’

‘Of course, you want this secret or formula or whatever?’

Fawcett began to revise his opinion of Wrinfield’s intelligence. ‘What do you think?’

‘What makes you think our hands are more responsible than those of a score of other nations?’

‘I’m a paid employee of the United States government. Mine is not to reason why.’

‘It will not have escaped you that that was precisely the reasoning adopted by the Gestapo and the SS in Germany during the Second World War or by Russia’s KGB since?’

‘It has not escaped me. But I don’t think the analogy is very exact. The United States doesn’t really want more power – we have already overkill capacity. Can you imagine what would happen if this secret fell into the hands of, say, the certifiable leaders of a couple of the new Central African republics? We simply think we have more responsible hands than most.’

‘We have to hope we have.’

Fawcett tried to conceal his long slow exhalation of relief. ‘That means you’ll go along.’

‘I’ll go. A moment ago you said the time was now right to tell me. Why?’

‘I hope I was right in saying I was right.’

Bruno stirred. ‘What do you want of me, Colonel?’

There were times, Fawcett was aware, when there was little point in beating about the bush. He said: ‘Get it for us.’

Bruno rose and poured himself another soda. He drank it all down then said: ‘You mean, steal it?’

‘Get it. Would you call taking a gun away from a maniac stealing?’

‘But why me?’

‘Because you have unique gifts. I can’t discuss what type of use we would propose making of those gifts until I have some sort of answer. All I know is that we are pretty certain that there is only one formula in existence, only one man who has the formula and is capable of reproducing it. We know where both man and formula are.’

‘Where?’

Fawcett didn’t hesitate. ‘Crau.’

Bruno didn’t react in at all the way Fawcett had expected. His voice, when he spoke, was as bereft of expression as his face. Tonelessly, he repeated the word: ‘Crau.’

‘Crau. Your old home country and your old home town.’

Bruno didn’t reply immediately. He returned to his chair, sat in it for a full minute, then said: ‘If I do agree, how do I get there? Illegal frontier crossing? Parachutes?’

Fawcett made a heroic – and successful – effort to conceal his sense of exultation. Wrinfield and Bruno – he’d got them both in a matter of minutes. He said matter-of-factly: ‘Nothing so dramatic. You just go along with the circus.’

This time Bruno seemed to be beyond words, so Wrinfield said: ‘It’s quite true, Bruno. We – that is, I – have agreed to co-operate with the government on this issue. Not that I had any more idea, until this moment, what the precise issue involved was. We are going to make a short tour of Europe, mainly eastern Europe. Negotiations are already well advanced. It’s quite natural. They send circus acts, dancers, singers to us: we’re just reciprocating.’

‘The whole circus?’

‘No, naturally not. That would be impossible. Just the cream of the cream, shall we say.’ Wrinfield smiled faintly. ‘One would have imagined that to include you.’

‘And if I refuse?’

‘We simply cancel the tour.’

Bruno looked at Fawcett. ‘Mr Wrinfield’s lost profits. This could cost your government a million dollars.’

‘Our government. We’d pay a billion to get hold of this.’

Bruno looked from Fawcett to Wrinfield then back to Fawcett again. He said abruptly: ‘I’ll go.’

‘Splendid. My thanks. Your country’s thanks. The details – ’

‘I do not need my country’s thanks.’ The words were cryptical but without offence.

Fawcett was slightly taken aback, sought for the meaning behind the words then decided he’d better not. He said: ‘As you will. The details, as I was about to say, can wait until later. Mr Wrinfield, did Mr Pilgrim tell you that we’d be grateful if you would take along two additional people when you go abroad?’

‘He did not.’ Wrinfield seemed somewhat miffed. ‘It would appear that there are quite a number of things that Mr Pilgrim did not tell me.’

‘Mr Pilgrim knows what he is doing.’ Now that he had them both Fawcett took off the velvet gloves but still remained urbane and polite. ‘There was no point in burdening you with unnecessary details until we had secured the co-operation of both you gentlemen. The two people in question are a Dr Harper and an equestrienne, Maria. Our people. Very important to our purpose. That, too, I’ll explain later. There are some things I must first discuss urgently with Mr Pilgrim. Tell me, Bruno, why have you agreed to do this? I must warn you that it might be extremely dangerous for you and if you’re caught we’ll have no option but to disown you. Why?’

Bruno shrugged. ‘Who’s to say why? There can be many reasons that a man can’t explain even to himself. Could be gratitude – America took me in when my own country threw me out. There are people there to whom I would like to perform as great a disservice as they did to me. I know there are dangerous and irresponsible men in my old country who would not hesitate to employ this weapon, if it exists. And then you say I am uniquely equipped for this task. In what ways I don’t yet know, but if it is the case how could I let another go in my place? Not only might he fail in getting what you want but he could well be killed in the process. I wouldn’t like to have either of those things on my conscience.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Just say it’s a bit of a challenge.’

‘And your real reason?’

Bruno said simply: ‘Because I hate war.’

‘Mmm. Not the answer I expected, but fair enough.’ He stood up. ‘Thank you, gentlemen, for your time, your patience and above all your cooperation. I’ll have the cars take you back.’

Wrinfield said: ‘And yourself? How do you get to Mr Pilgrim’s office?’

‘The madame here and I have an understanding of sorts. I’m sure she’ll provide me with some form of transport.’

Fawcett had keys in his hand when he approached Pilgrim’s apartment – Pilgrim both worked and slept in the same premises – but he put them away. Pilgrim, most uncharacteristically, had not even locked his door, he hadn’t even closed it properly. Fawcett pushed the door and went inside. The first partly irrational thought that occurred to him was that he could have been just that little bit optimistic when he had assured Wrinfield that Pilgrim knew what he was doing.

Pilgrim was lying on the carpet. Whoever had left him lying there had clearly a sufficiency of ice-picks at home, for he hadn’t even bothered to remove the one he’d left buried to the hilt in the back of Pilgrim’s neck. Death must have been instantaneous, for there wasn’t even a drop of blood to stain his Turnbull and Asser shirt. Fawcett knelt and looked at the face. It was as calmly expressionless as it had habitually been in life. Pilgrim had not only not known what hit him, he hadn’t even known he’d been hit.

Fawcett straightened, crossed to the phone and lifted it.

‘Dr Harper please. Ask him to come here immediately.’

Dr Harper wasn’t exactly a caricature or a conceptualized prototype of the kindly healer, but it would have been difficult to visualize him in any other role. There was a certain medical inevitability about him. He was tall, lean, distinguished in appearance, becomingly grey at the temples and wore a pair of horn-rimmed pebble glasses which lent his gaze a certain piercing quality which might have been illusory, intentional or just habitual. Horn-rimmed pebble glasses are a great help to doctors; the patient can never tell whether he is in robust health or has only weeks to live. His dress was as immaculate as that of the dead man he was thoughtfully examining. He had his black medical bag with him but wasn’t bothering to use it. He said: ‘So that’s all you know about tonight?’

‘That’s all.’

‘Wrinfield? After all, he was the only one who knew. Before tonight, I mean.’

‘He knew no details before tonight. No way. And he’d no opportunity. He was with me.’

‘There’s such a thing as an accomplice?’

‘No chance. Wait until you see him. His record’s immaculate – don’t you think Pilgrim spent days checking? His patriotism is beyond question, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s got a “God Bless America” label sewn on to his undershirt. Besides, do you think he would have gone to the time and trouble of arranging to take his whole damn circus – well, most of it – to Europe if he had intended to do this? I know there’s such a thing as erecting a façade, laying down a smokescreen, dragging red herrings – you name it – but, well, I ask you.’

‘It’s not likely.’

‘But I think we should have him and Bruno up here. Just to let them see what they’re up against. And we’ll have to notify the admiral immediately. Will you do that while I get hold of Barker and Masters?’

‘That’s the scrambler there?’

‘That’s the scrambler.’

Dr Harper was still on the phone when Barker and Masters arrived, Barker the driver and Masters the grey man who had confronted Bruno on the stage. Fawcett said: ‘Get Wrinfield and Bruno up here. Tell them it’s desperately urgent but don’t tell them anything about this. Bring them in by the rear tunnel. Be quick!’

Fawcett closed but did not lock the door behind them as Dr Harper hung up. Harper said: ‘We’re to keep it under wraps. According to the admiral, who is the one man who would know, he had no close relatives so he died of a heart attack. Me and my Hippocratic oath. He’ll be right round.’

Fawcett was gloomy. ‘I thought he might be. He’s going to be very happy about this. Pilgrim was the apple of his eye, and it’s no secret that he was next in line for the admiral’s chair. Well, let’s have a couple of the boys with their little cans of dusting powder and let them have a look around. Not, of course, that they’ll find anything.’

‘You’re so sure?’

‘I’m sure. Anyone cool enough to walk away leaving the murder weapon in situ, as it were, is pretty confident in himself. And you notice the way he’s lying, feet to the door, head pointing away?’

‘So?’

‘The fact that he’s so close to the door is almost sure proof that Pilgrim opened it himself. Would he have turned his back on a murderer? Whoever the killer was, he was a man Pilgrim not only knew but trusted.’

Fawcett had been right. The two experts who had come up with their little box of tricks had turned up nothing. The only places where fingerprints might conceivably have been, on the ice-pick handle and door-knobs, were predictably clean. They were just leaving when a man entered without benefit of either permission or knocking.

The admiral looked like everybody’s favourite uncle or a successful farmer or, indeed, what he was, a fleet admiral, albeit retired. Burly, red-faced, with pepper-and-salt hair and radiating an oddly kind authority, he looked about ten years younger than his acknowledged if frequently questioned fifty-five. He gazed down at the dead man on the floor, and the more kindly aspect of his character vanished. He turned to Dr Harper.

‘Made out the death certificate yet? Coronary, of course.’ Dr Harper shook his head. ‘Then do so at once and have Pilgrim removed to our private mortuary.’

Fawcett said: ‘If we could leave that for a moment, sir. The mortuary bit, I mean. I have two people coming up here very shortly, the owner of the circus and our latest – ah – recruit. I’m convinced neither of them has anything to do with this – but it would be interesting to see their reactions. Also, to find out if they still want to go through with this.’

‘What guarantee can you offer that they won’t leave here and head for the nearest telephone? There isn’t a newspaper in the country that wouldn’t give their assistant editor for this story.’

‘You think that had not occurred to me, sir?’ A slightly less than cordial note had crept into Fawcett’s tone. ‘There is no guarantee. There’s only my judgement.’

‘There’s that,’ the admiral said pacifically. It was the nearest he could ever bring himself to an apology. ‘Very well.’ He paused and to recover his position said: ‘They are not, I trust, knocking and entering by the front door?’

‘Barker and Masters are bringing them. By the rear tunnel.’

As if on cue, Barker and Masters appeared in the doorway, then stepped aside to let Wrinfield and Bruno in. The admiral and Dr Harper, Fawcett knew, were watching their faces as intently as he was. Understandably, neither Wrinfield nor Bruno was watching them: when you find a murdered man lying at your feet your ocular attention does not tend to stray. Predictably, Bruno’s reactions were minimal, the narrowing of the eyes, the tightening of the mouth could have been as much imagined as real, but Wrinfield’s reactions were all that anyone could have wished for: the colour drained from his face, leaving it a dirty grey, he put out a trembling hand against the lintel to steady himself and for a moment he looked as if he might even sway and fall.

Three minutes later, three minutes during which Fawcett had told him what little he knew, a seated Wrinfield, brandy glass in hand, was still shaking. Bruno had declined the offer of a restorative. The admiral had taken the floor.

He said to Wrinfield: ‘Do you have any enemies in the circus?’

‘Enemies? In the circus?’ Wrinfield was clearly taken aback. ‘Good God, no. I know it must sound corny to you but we really are one big happy family.’

‘Any enemies anywhere?’

‘Every successful man has. Of a kind, that is. Well, there’s rivalry, competition, envy. But enemies?’ He looked almost fearfully at Pilgrim and shuddered. ‘But not in this way.’ He was silent for a moment, then looked at the admiral with an expression that approximated pretty closely to resentment and when he spoke again the tremor had gone from his voice. ‘And why do you ask me these questions? They didn’t kill me. They killed Mr Pilgrim.’

‘There’s a connection. Fawcett?’

‘There’s a connection. I may speak freely, sir?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Well, there are telephone boxes and sacrificial assistant editors – ’

‘Don’t be a fool. I’ve already apologized for that.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Fawcett briefly searched his memory and found no apology there. It seemed pointless to mention this. ‘As you say, sir, there’s a connection. There’s also been a leak and it can only have come from within our own organization. As I said, sir, and as I have explained to these gentlemen, it’s clear that Pilgrim was killed by someone well known to him. There can’t have been any specific leak – only you, Pilgrim, Dr Harper and myself really knew what the intentions were. But any of up to a dozen people or more – researchers, telephone operators, drivers – within the organization knew that we had been in regular touch with Mr Wrinfield. It would be unusual, if not unique, to find any intelligence or counter-intelligence agency in the world whose ranks have not been infiltrated by an enemy agent, one who eventually becomes so securely entrenched as to become above suspicion. It would be naïve of us to assume that we are the sole exception.

‘It was hardly top secret that Mr Wrinfield had been in the formative stages of planning a European tour – a primarily eastern European tour – and it would have been comparatively simple to discover that Crau was on the list of towns to be visited. As far as the gentlemen in Crau are concerned – more precisely, the gentlemen responsible for the research taking place in Crau – coincidence could be coincidence but the obvious tie-up with the CIA would be that little bit too much.’

‘So why kill Pilgrim? As a warning?’

‘In a way, sir, yes.’

‘Would you care to be more specific, Mr Fawcett?’

‘Yes, sir. No question but that it was a warning. But to make Pilgrim’s death both understandable and justifiable from their point of view – for we have to remember that though we are dealing with unreasonable men we are also dealing with reasoning men – it had to be something more than just a warning. His murder was also an amalgam of invitation and provocation. It is a warning they wished to be ignored. If they believe Mr Wrinfield’s forthcoming tour is sponsored by us, and if, in spite of Pilgrim’s death – which they won’t for a moment doubt that we’ll be convinced has been engineered by them – we still go ahead and proceed with the tour, then we must have extraordinarily pressing needs to make it. Conclusive proof they would expect to find in Crau.

‘And then we would be discredited internationally. Imagine, if you can, the sensational impact of the news of the internment of an entire circus. Imagine the tremendously powerful bargaining weapon it would give the East in any future negotiations. We’d become an international laughing stock, all credibility throughout the world gone, an object of ridicule in both East and West. The Gary Powers U-plane episode would be a bagatelle compared to this.’

‘Indeed. Tell me, what’s your opinion of locating this cuckoo in the CIA nest?’

‘As of this moment?’

‘Zero.’

‘Dr Harper?’

‘I agree totally. No chance. It would mean putting a watcher on every one of your several hundred employees in this building, sir.’

‘And who’s going to watch the watchers? Is that what you mean?’

‘With respect, sir, you know very well what I mean.’

‘Alas.’ The admiral reached into an inside pocket, brought out two cards, handed one to Wrinfield, the other to Bruno. ‘If you need me, call that number and ask for Charles. Any guesses you may have as to my identity – and you must be almost as stupid as we are if you haven’t made some – you will please keep to yourselves.’ He sighed. ‘Alas again, I fear, Fawcett, that your reading of the matter is entirely correct. There is no alternative explanation, not, at least, a remotely viable one. Nevertheless, getting our hands on this document overrides all other considerations. We may have to think up some other means.’

Fawcett said: ‘There are no other means.’

Harper said: ‘There are no other means.’

The admiral nodded. ‘There are no other means. It’s Bruno or nothing.’

Fawcett shook his head. ‘It’s Bruno and the circus or nothing.’

‘Looks like.’ The admiral gazed consideringly at Wrinfield. ‘Tell me, do you fancy the idea of being expendable?’

Wrinfield drained his glass. His hand was steady again and he was back on balance. ‘Frankly, I don’t.’

‘Not even being interned?’

‘No.’

‘I see your point. It could be a bad business. Am I to take it from that that you have changed your mind?’

‘I don’t know, I just don’t know.’ Wrinfield shifted his gaze, at once both thoughtful and troubled. ‘Bruno?’

‘I’ll go.’ Bruno’s voice was flat and without colour, certainly with no traces of drama or histrionics in it. ‘If I have to go, I’ll go alone. I don’t know – yet – how I’ll get there and I don’t know – yet – what I have to do when I arrive. But I’ll go.’

Wrinfield sighed. ‘That’s it, then.’ He smiled faintly. ‘A man can only stand so much. No immigrant American is going to put a fifth-generation American to shame.’

‘Thank you, Mr Wrinfield.’ The admiral looked at Bruno with what might have been an expression of either curiosity or assessment on his face. ‘And thank you, too. Tell me, what makes you so determined to go?’

‘I told Mr Fawcett. I hate war.’

The admiral had gone. Dr Harper had gone. Wrinfield and Bruno had gone and Pilgrim had been carried away: in three days’ time he would be buried with all due solemnity and the cause of his death would never be known, a not unusual circumstance amongst those who plied the trades of espionage and counter-espionage and whose careers had come to an abrupt and unexpected end. Fawcett, looking as bleak and hard as the plumpness of his face would permit, was pacing up and down the dead man’s apartment when the telephone rang. Fawcett picked it up immediately.

The voice in the receiver was hoarse and shaking. It said: ‘Fawcett? Fawcett? Is that you, Fawcett?’

‘Yes. Who’s that?’

‘I can’t tell you over the phone. You know damn well who it is. You got me into this.’ The voice was trembling so much as to be virtually unrecognizable. ‘For God’s sake get down here, something terrible has happened.’

‘What?’

‘Get down here.’ The voice was imploring. ‘And for God’s sake come alone. I’ll be in my office. The circus office.’

The line went dead. Fawcett jiggled the receiver bar but dead the line remained. Fawcett hung up, left the room, locked the door behind him, took the lift to the underground garage and drove down to the circus through the darkness and the rain.

The external circus lights were out except for some scattered weak illumination – it was already late enough for all the circus members to have sought their night accommodation aboard the train. Fawcett left the car and hurried into the animal quarters, where Wrinfield had his shabby little portable office. The lighting here was fairly good. Signs of human life there were none, which Fawcett, on first reaction, found rather surprising, for Wrinfield had a four-footed fortune in there: the second and almost immediate reaction was that it wasn’t surprising at all for nobody in his right mind was going to make off with an Indian elephant or Nubian lion. Not only were they difficult animals to control, but disposal might have presented a problem. Most of the animals were lying down, asleep, but the elephants, asleep or not and chained by one foreleg, were upright and constantly swaying from side to side and in one large cage twelve Bengal tigers were prowling restlessly around, snarling occasionally for no apparent reason.

Fawcett made for Wrinfield’s office then halted in puzzlement when he saw no light coming from its solitary window. He advanced and tested the door. It wasn’t locked. He opened it and peered inside and then all the world went black for him.

CHAPTER THREE

Wrinfield hardly slept that night, which, considering the recent events and the worries they had brought in their wake, was hardly a matter for surprise. He finally rose about five o’clock, showered, shaved and dressed, left his luxurious quarters aboard the train and headed for the animal quarters, an instinctive practice of his whenever he was deeply troubled, for Wrinfield was in love with his circus and felt more at home there than anywhere in the world: the degree of rapport that existed between him and his animals certainly exceeded that which had existed between him and the reluctant economics students whom – as he now regarded it – he had wasted the best years of his life teaching. Besides, he could always pass the time with Johnny the night watchman who, despite the vast gulf in status that lay between them, was an old crony and confidant of his. Not that Wrinfield had any intention of confiding in anyone that night.

But Johnny wasn’t there and Johnny wasn’t the man ever to fall asleep on the job, undemanding though it was – his job was to report to the trainer concerned or the veterinary surgeon any animal that might appear off-colour. No more than slightly puzzled at first, then with increasing anxiety, Wrinfield carried out a systematic search and finally located him in a dark corner. Johnny, elderly, wizened and crippled – he’d taken one fall too many from the low wire – was securely bound and gagged but otherwise alive, apparently unharmed and furiously angry. Wrinfield loosened the gag, undid the bonds and helped the old man to his shaking legs. A lifetime in the circus had left Johnny with an extraordinary command of the unprintable and he didn’t miss out a single epithet as he freely unburdened his feelings to Wrinfield.

Wrinfield said: ‘Who did this to you?’

‘I don’t know, boss. Mystery to me. I didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear nothing.’ Tenderly, Johnny rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Sandbagged, it feels like.’

Wrinfield examined the back of his scrawny neck. It was badly bruised and discoloured but the skin unbroken. Wrinfield put an arm round the frail shoulders. ‘Sandbagged you were. Come on. A seat in the office. I’ve got a little something there that’ll set you up. Then we get the police.’

They were halfway towards the office when Johnny’s shoulders stiffened under the supporting arm and he said in an oddly harsh and strained voice: ‘I reckon we’ve got something a bit more important than a sandbagging to report to the cops, boss.’

Wrinfield looked at him questioningly, then followed the direction of his staring eyes. In the cage of the Bengal tigers lay the savagely mauled remains of what had once been a man. Only by the few shreds of clothing left him and the pathetically heroic row of medal ribbons did Wrinfield recognize that he was looking at all that remained of Colonel Fawcett.

Wrinfield gazed in horrified fascination at the still pre-dawn scene – circus workers, artistes, policemen in uniform and plainclothes detectives all milling around the animal quarters, all of them busily engaged in eradicating forever any putative clues there may have been. Ambulance men were wrapping up the unidentifiable remains of Fawcett and placing it on a stretcher. In a small group remote from the others were Malthius, the tiger trainer, Neubauer the lion tamer and Bruno, the three men who had gone into the cage and taken Fawcett out. Wrinfield turned to the admiral, whom he had first called and who, since his arrival, hadn’t bothered to explain his presence or identity to anyone and it was markedly noticeable that no policeman had approached him to ask him to justify his presence there; clearly, some senior police officer had said: ‘Do not approach that man!’

Wrinfield said: ‘Who in God’s name could have done this terrible thing, sir?’

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Wrinfield.’ It was completely out of character for the admiral to say that he was sorry about anything. ‘Sorry all round. Sorry for Fawcett, one of my ablest and most trusted deputies and a damned fine human being at that. And sorry for you, that I should have been responsible for involving you in this ghastly mess. This is the kind of publicity that any circus could do without.’

‘The hell with publicity. Who, sir, who?’

‘And I suppose I feel a bit sorry for myself, too.’ The admiral shrugged his shoulders heavily. ‘Who? Obviously the same person or persons who killed Pilgrim. Your guess as to who they are is as good as mine. The one thing for sure is that they – whoever they are – knew he was coming down here or they wouldn’t have silenced the guard in advance – he can count himself lucky that he wasn’t found inside that cage with Fawcett. There was almost certainly a false phone call. We’ll soon know. I have them checking on it.’

‘Checking on what?’

‘Every call to our office, incoming or outgoing, except, of course, on the scrambler phones, is recorded. With luck, we’ll have that recording within minutes. Meantime, I’d like to talk to those three men who took Fawcett out of the cage. Individually. I understand that one of those men is your tiger trainer. What’s his name?’

‘Malthius. But – but he’s above suspicion.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ The admiral was trying to be patient. ‘Do you think any murder mystery would ever be solved if we questioned only the suspects? Please have him brought.’

Malthius, a dark-eyed Bulgarian with an open face, was plainly deeply upset. The admiral said, kindly for him: ‘You’ve no need to be so distressed.’

‘My tigers did this, sir.’

‘They would probably do it to anyone in the country except you. Or would they?’

‘I don’t know, sir. If a person were lying quietly, I really don’t think so.’ He hesitated. ‘But, well, under certain circumstances they might.’ The admiral waited patiently and Malthius went on: ‘If they were provoked. Or – ’

‘Yes?’

‘If they smelled blood.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Of course he’s sure.’ The admiral, who was quite unaware of Wrinfield’s intense loyalty to his men, was surprised at the asperity in his voice. ‘What do you think, sir? We feed them on horse meat or beef and those are raw and smell of blood. The tigers can’t wait to get at the meat and tear it to pieces with teeth and claws. Have you ever seen tigers at feeding-time?’

The admiral had a mental vision of how Fawcett must have died and shuddered involuntarily. ‘No, and I don’t think I’ll ever want to either.’ He turned back to Malthius. ‘So he could have been alive, conscious or not – blood doesn’t flow when you’re dead – stabbed and thrown into the cage?’

‘That is possible, sir. But you won’t find a trace of a stab wound now.’

‘I realize that. You found the door locked on the outside. Is it possible to do that from the inside?’

‘No. You can bolt it from the inside. It wasn’t bolted.’

‘Isn’t that a rather curious arrangement?’

Malthius smiled for the first time, albeit faintly. ‘Not for a tiger trainer, sir. When I go into the cage I turn the key on the outside and leave it in position. Once I get inside I bolt the door – can’t risk having the door swing open or being pulled open by one of the tigers and letting them loose among the crowd.’ He smiled a second time, again without mirth. ‘It could come in useful for me, too. If things get unpleasant for me, I just slide the bolt, get away from there and turn the key on the outside.’

‘Thank you. Would you ask that friend of yours – ’

‘Heinrich Neubauer, sir. The lion trainer.’

‘I’d like to see him.’ Malthius walked dejectedly away and the admiral said: ‘He seems very unhappy to me.’

‘Wouldn’t you be?’ Again the unexpected asperity in Wrinfield’s voice. ‘He not only feels personally responsible but his tigers have for the first time acquired a taste for human flesh. Malthius is human flesh, too, you know.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

The admiral asked Neubauer a few desultory and inconsequential questions then asked for Bruno. When he arrived the admiral said: ‘You’re the only one I really wanted to talk to. The other two were only a cover – we’re being watched both by circus people and the police. Some of the police, by the way, think I’m a very senior police officer, others that I’m from the FBI, although why they should imagine that I can’t imagine. A dreadful thing, Bruno, a quite dreadful thing. Well, it looks as if poor Fawcett was correct, we’re being pushed to the limit to find out how really desperate we are to go to Crau. Well, I’ve been pushed far enough. Who knows who’s going to be next? I have no right, no one has any right, to ask you to be involved in this ghastly business any more. There’s a limit to patriotism – being patriotic did Pilgrim and Fawcett a great deal of good, didn’t it? You are now released from any obligations, real or imagined, that you may have had.’

‘Speak for yourself.’ Wrinfield’s tone had remained unchanged. Whatever touched Wrinfield’s beloved circus touched his rawest nerve: this had become a personal matter. ‘Two good men have died. You want them to have died in vain? I’m going to Europe.’

The admiral blinked and turned to Bruno. ‘And you?’

Bruno looked at him in a silence that verged on the contemptuous.

‘Well.’ The admiral was momentarily nonplussed. ‘Off again, on again. If you’re prepared to accept the risks, I’m prepared to accept your sacrifices. Utterly selfish, I know, but we desperately want those papers. I won’t try to thank you, I honestly wouldn’t know how to, but the least I can do is to arrange protection. I’ll assign five of my best men to you – as a Press corps, shall we say? – then once you are aboard the boat – ’

Bruno spoke in a very quiet voice. ‘If you assign any of your men to us, then nobody’s going anywhere, and that includes me. And from what I’m told, although I don’t understand it yet, if I don’t go then there’s no point in anyone else going anyway. The exception, of course, is Dr Harper, a dead man vouched for him and you can’t get any better recommendation than that. As for the rest of your men – who do you think killed Pilgrim and Fawcett? Without their protection, we might have a chance.’ Bruno turned abruptly and walked away. The admiral looked after him, with a slightly pained expression on his face, at a momentarily but highly unusual loss for words, but was saved the necessity of making comment by the arrival of a police sergeant carrying a small black box. That the uniform was not the property of the man inside it Wrinfield was quite certain. When it came to local colour Charles – it was the only way Wrinfield could think of him – was not a man who missed much.

The admiral said: ‘The recording – ’ and when the sergeant nodded: ‘May we use your office, please, Mr Wrinfield?’

‘Of course.’ Wrinfield looked around him. ‘Not here. In the train. Too many people.’

The office door closed behind them, the sergeant took the recorder from its casing and Wrinfield said: ‘What do you expect to hear?’

‘You.’ Wrinfield looked his astonishment. ‘Or a very close approximation of your voice. Or Bruno’s. Yours were the only two voices in the circus that Fawcett knew: he wouldn’t have come for anyone else.’

They heard the recording through. At the end Wrinfield said calmly: ‘That’s meant to be me. Shall we hear it again?’

They heard it through a second time then Wrinfield said positively: ‘That’s not my voice. You know it isn’t.’

‘My dear Wrinfield, I never dreamed it would be. I know it isn’t. Now I know it isn’t. But I had to hear it a second time to make sure. When a man speaks in that hurried and distressed fashion, his voice takes on abnormal overtones. A piece of silk stretched across the mouthpiece is a great help. I don’t blame poor Fawcett for being fooled, especially when he had only the one thing on his mind at the time. But it’s a damned good imitation all the same.’ The admiral paused, ruminated, then looked at Wrinfield consideringly. ‘To the best of my knowledge and belief, and to yours, you don’t know and never have talked to any of my men. Right?’ Wrinfield nodded. ‘So I put it to you that this call was made by someone who knew your voice intimately and had studied it.’

‘That’s preposterous. If you’re suggesting – ’

‘Precisely what I am suggesting, I’m afraid. Look, man, if our organization can be infiltrated don’t you think your damned circus can be too? After all, you’ve got twenty-five nationalities working for you: I’ve got only one.’

‘You’re the CIA. Everyone would want to infiltrate the CIA. Who’d want to infiltrate a harmless circus?’

‘Nobody. But in the eyes of the ungodly you’re not a harmless circus, you’re an affiliate of the CIA and therefore ripe for infiltration. Don’t let blind loyalty blind your intelligence. Let’s hear that recording again. Only this time don’t listen for your own voice, listen for someone else’s. I should imagine you know the voice of every man in your employment. And to narrow the field, remember that most of your men speak with fairly heavy foreign accents. This is an Anglo-Saxon voice, probably American, although I can’t be sure.’

They played the recording through four more times and at the end Wrinfield shook his head. ‘It’s no good. The distortion is far too heavy.’

‘Thank you, officer, you may leave.’ The sergeant snapped the case shut and left. Briefly the admiral paced up and down the full length of the office – three steps in either direction – then shook his head in the reluctant acceptance of the inevitable. ‘What a charming thought. A link up between my lot and yours.’

‘You’re terribly certain.’

‘I’m terribly certain of one thing and that’s this. There isn’t one man in my lot who wouldn’t give up his pension rather than open the door of a tiger’s cage.’

Wrinfield nodded with an equally reluctant acceptance. ‘I suppose it’s my turn to say that I should have thought of that.’

‘That’s unimportant. Point is, what are we going to do? You’re under hostile surveillance, my career’s on that.’ He paused in momentary gloom. ‘Whatever my career’s going to be worth when all this is over.’

‘I thought we’d settled all that.’ The now accustomed touch of asperity was back in Wrinfield’s voice. ‘You heard what I said back in the circus. You heard what Bruno said. We go.’ The admiral regarded him thoughtfully. ‘A marked change of attitude since last night. Or, more properly, a marked hardening in attitude.’

‘I don’t think you quite understand, sir.’ Wrinfield was being patient. ‘This is my life, my whole life. Touch me, touch my circus. Or vice versa. We have one major card in the hole.’

‘I’ve missed it.’

‘Bruno’s still in the clear.’

‘I hadn’t missed it and it’s because I want him to stay that way that I’d like you to take this girl of ours into your employ. Her name is Maria Hopkins and although I don’t know her all that well Dr Harper assures me she is a very bright operative and that her loyalty is beyond question. She’s to fall in love with Bruno and he with her. Nothing more natural.’ The admiral put on his sad smile. ‘If I were twenty years younger I’d say there was nothing easier. She’s really rather beautiful. That way she can liaise with Bruno, yourself, Dr Harper – and, up to the time of your departure, with myself – without raising any eyebrows. As an equestrienne, perhaps? That was Fawcett’s idea.’

‘No perhaps. She may think she’s good, she may actually be good, but there’s no place for amateurs in the circus. Besides, there’s not a man or woman on my performing staff who wouldn’t spot immediately that she’s not a trained circus equestrienne: you couldn’t devise a surer way of calling attention to her.’

‘Suggestions?’

‘Yes. Fawcett mentioned this possibility in this dreadful bordello place he took us to and I’ve given the matter some thought. Didn’t require much, really. My secretary is getting married in a few weeks to a very strange fellow who doesn’t like circuses: so she’s leaving. This is common knowledge. Let Maria be my new secretary. Every reason for her to be in constant contact with me, and through me your doctor and Bruno without any questions being asked.’

‘Couldn’t be better. Now, I’d like you to put a large box advert in the papers tomorrow for a doctor to accompany the circus to Europe. I know this isn’t the way one normally recruits a medical man but we’ve no time to wait to use the more professional channels. This must be made clear in the advert. Besides it will make it perfectly clear that you are seeking a doctor with no one in mind and that your choice will essentially be a random one. You may have quite a few replies – it would make a nice holiday for someone who has just, say, finished his internship – but you will, of course, choose Dr Harper.

‘He hasn’t practised medicine for years, although I dare say he’d find an aspirin if you twisted his arm. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that he is an outstanding intelligence agent.’

‘So, I was led to believe, was Pilgrim. And Fawcett.’

The admiral made a quick gesture of irritation. ‘Things don’t always happen in threes. Fortunes turn. Those two men knew the risks. So does Harper. Anyway, no suspicion attaches to him. There’s no connection between him and the circus.’

‘Has it occurred to you that “they” may check on his background?’

‘Has it occurred to you that I might make a better owner and managing director of a circus than you are?’

‘Touché. I asked for that.’

‘Yes, you did. Two things. There’s no more reason why they should check on him than any of your hundreds of employees. His background is impeccable: he’s a consultant at the Belvedere and this is his way of spending part of his sabbatical at someone else’s expense. Much higher qualifications and much more experienced than any of the other applicants you’ll have. A natural choice. You’re lucky to have him.’

‘But he hasn’t practised – ’

‘He has consulting rooms in the hospital. One of our branch offices.’

‘Is nothing sacred to you people?’

‘Not much. How soon are you prepared to leave?’

‘Leave?’

‘For Europe.’

‘I have a number of alternative dates and places pencilled in for there. That’s not the problem. Three more days here then we have three more engagements on the east coast.’

‘Cancel them.’

‘Cancel them? We never cancel – I mean, we have all arrangements made, theatres booked, saturation advertising, thousands of tickets sold in advance – ’

‘Compensation, Mr Wrinfield, will be on a princely scale. Think of a suitable figure and it will be lodged in your bank tomorrow.’

Wrinfield was not much given to wringing his hands but he looked as if he would have liked to indulge in just a little right then. ‘We are an annual institution in those places. We have a tremendous amount of goodwill – ’

‘Double the figure you first thought of. Cancel. Your sea transport will be ready in New York in one week. When you sign up Dr Harper, he’ll organize vaccinations and inoculations. If you have any visa problems, we’ll do a little leaning. Not that I expect any trouble from the east European embassies or consulates – their countries are just dying to have you. I will be around tonight for the evening performance. So will the ravishing Miss Hopkins – but not with me. Have someone show her around, but not you.’

‘I have a very bright nephew – ’

‘Fine. Tell him nothing. Have him give her a thorough guided tour, the new secretary getting acquainted with the physical background of her new job. Have her introduced to some of your top performers. Especially, of course, to Bruno. Let Bruno know the score in advance.’

Henry Wrinfield looked a great deal more like Tesco Wrinfield’s son than a nephew had any right to look, although he undoubtedly was his nephew. He had the same dark eyes, the same lean studious face, the same quick intelligence; and if he wasn’t quite in the same cerebral league as his uncle, he was, as his uncle had said, a very bright young fellow indeed, or at least bright enough to find no hardship in the chore of escorting Maria Hopkins round the back-stage of the circus. For an hour or so he completely forgot the blue-stockinged Ivy Leaguer to whom he was engaged and was slightly surprised that, when he remembered her about an hour later – he rarely spent ten minutes without thinking about her – he experienced no twinges of conscience.

Few men would have found cause for complaint in the performance of such a task as had been entrusted to Henry, and those only misogynists in an irretrievably advanced state. She was a petite figure, although clearly not suffering from malnutrition, with long dark hair, rather splendid liquid dark eyes and an extraordinarily infectious smile and laugh. Her resemblance to the popular concept of an intelligence agent was non-existent, which may have been one of the reasons why Dr Harper reportedly held her in such high regard.

Henry, quite unnecessarily guiding her by the upper arm, showed her round the tethered and caged animals and introduced her to Malthius and Neubauer, who were putting the big cats through their last-minute paces. Malthius was charming and graceful and wished her a very pleasant stay: Neubauer, though civil enough, didn’t know how to be charming and wished her nothing.

Henry then led her through to the raucous blare of the fairground. Kan Dahn was there, toying with an enormous bar-bell and looking more impressively powerful than ever: he took her small hand carefully in his own gigantic one, smiled widely, announced that she was the best recruit to arrive at the circus since he himself had joined it years ago and altogether gave her a welcome so courteous it bordered on the effusive. Kan Dahn was always in high humour, although nobody was quite sure whether it stemmed from an innate good nature or because he had discovered quite some time ago that it was unnecessary for him to be unpleasant to anyone. Manuelo, the Mexican genius with the knife, was standing behind the counter of a booth, benevolently watching considerable numbers of the young and not so young throwing rubber-tipped knives at moving targets. Occasionally he would come round to the front of his booth and, throwing double-handed, would knock down six targets in half that number of seconds, just to show his customers that there was really nothing to it. He welcomed Maria with a great deal of Latin enthusiasm, putting himself entirely at her service during her stay in the circus. A little farther on, Ron Roebuck, the lasso specialist, gave her a grave but friendly welcome: as she walked away from him she was astonished and then delighted to see a shimmering whirling circle of rope drop down over her, barely touch the ground, then effortlessly rise and disappear without once touching her clothes. She turned and gave Roebuck a wide smile and he no longer looked grave.

Bruno emerged from his little performing hall as Henry and Maria approached it. He was clad in the same Mandarin robe as previously and, also as before, looked anything but impressive. Henry made the introductions and Bruno looked at her with a kind of inoffensive appraisal. As usual, it was almost impossible to tell what he was thinking, and then he smiled, a rare gesture for Bruno but one that transformed his face.

He said: ‘Welcome to the circus. I hope your stay is a long and happy one.’

‘Thank you.’ She smiled in turn. ‘This is an honour. You – you are the star of the circus?’

Bruno pointed skywards. ‘All the stars are up there, Miss Hopkins. Down here there are only performers. We all do what we can. Some of us are lucky in that we have acts more spectacular than others, that’s all. Excuse me. I must hurry.’

Maria, thoughtful, watched him go. Henry said in amusement: ‘Not quite what you expected?’

‘Well, no.’

‘Disappointed?’

‘A little, I suppose.’

‘You won’t be tonight. Nobody ever is, not when they watch the impossible.’

‘Is it true that he and his brothers are completely blindfolded up there? They can’t see at all?’

‘No faking. They are in total darkness. But you’ll notice that it’s Bruno that conducts the orchestra. He’s the co-ordinator and catcher. Maybe the three brothers share some telepathic gift. I don’t know. Nobody else seems to know either. And if Bruno and his brothers know they’re not saying.’

‘Maybe it’s something else.’ She indicated the legend ‘The Great Mentalist’. ‘A photographic memory, they say, and can read people’s minds.’

‘I hope he didn’t read yours tonight.’

‘Please. And he can read the contents of sealed envelopes. If he can see through paper why can’t he see through a blindfold?’

He looked at her in genuine surprise. He said: ‘Miss Hopkins, you’re not just a pretty face. Do you know, I’d never thought of that.’ He pondered for a moment, then gave up. ‘Let’s go take our seats for the show. Like it, so far?’

‘Very much.’

‘Anything special?’

‘Yes. Everybody’s so terribly nice and polite.’

Henry smiled. ‘We’re not all just down from the trees.’ He took her arm and guided her towards the arena. His blue-stocking fiancée wasn’t even a cloud on his rose-coloured horizon.

There was someone in the circus at that moment who was not being terribly nice and polite, but then the admiral was not a member of the circus and he certainly was not accustomed to having his will thwarted. Further, he’d had a long, tiring and very frustrating day and his normal amiability had deserted him.

‘I don’t think you heard me properly,’ the admiral said with ominous restraint.

‘You heard me, all right.’ Because the back-stage entrance to the circus was ill-lit, because it was very dark and still raining outside and because his faded eyes no longer saw too well, Johnny, the night watchman, had failed to identify the admiral. ‘The entrance for the public is farther along there. Get going!’

‘You’re under arrest,’ the admiral said without preamble. He turned to a shadowy figure behind him. ‘Take this fellow to the nearest station. Have him charged with obstructing the course of justice.’

‘Easy, now, easy.’ Johnny’s tone had undergone a marked change. ‘There’s no need – ’ He leaned forward and peered up at the admiral. ‘Aren’t you the gentleman who was here when we had this bit of bother this morning?’

‘If by a bit of bother you mean murder, yes. Take me to Mr Wrinfield!’

‘Sorry, sir. I’m on duty here.’

‘Johnny, isn’t it? You still want to be on duty tomorrow, Johnny?’

Johnny took the admiral to Mr Wrinfield.

The admiral’s interview with Wrinfield was brief. He said: ‘You’re clear for Europe. There’ll be no trouble with visas.’

‘Twenty-five different nationalities? In one day?’

‘I have a staff of four hundred, amongst some of whom the eagle-eyed may detect some glimmering of intelligence. Dr Harper will be here at ten in the morning. Be here please. He will begin immediately. Our personal investigations and police enquiries into the murders of Pilgrim and Fawcett have turned up nothing. I don’t expect they will. Future events may.’

‘What kind of events?’

‘I don’t know. Fairly drastic in nature, I should imagine. Next, I’ve just put a scare into Johnny, your night watchman. That was to ensure his co-operation. He’s truculent and a bit dim but I suppose reliable.’

‘I’d trust him with my life.’

‘We put different values on our lives. I’m putting six men on to patrol the sleeping quarters of the train at night. They’re not from our organization, so you need have no worries on that score. They will be here nightly until you leave – which, incidentally, will be in five days’ time.’

‘Why the patrol? I’m not sure I like that.’

‘Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not.’ The admiral smiled, albeit tiredly, to rob the words of offence. ‘From the moment you accepted this assignment, you’re under government orders. It’s for security. I want Johnny to act as a guide-dog.’

‘Whose security?’

‘Bruno’s, Maria’s, Harper’s – and yours.’

‘Mine? I’m in danger?’

‘Quite candidly, I’m sure you’re not, if for no other reason than if anything happened to you the trip would be cancelled – which wouldn’t suit our friends at all. But I’m not taking the ghost of a chance.’

‘And you think this patrol will help?’

‘Yes. In a closed community like this their presence will be common knowledge within the hour. Put it about that the police have received threats against unspecified members of your staff. If you have any bogey-men among your crew members, this news will make them lie very low indeed.’

‘As you say, you don’t take many chances, do you?’

The admiral said drily: ‘I think the shadows of Pilgrim and Fawcett would entirely approve. Have Bruno and Maria met yet?’ Wrinfield nodded. ‘Reactions?’

‘Bruno hasn’t got any. If he has, he never shows them. As for Maria, well, Henry said she didn’t exactly fall about.’

‘Unimpressed, one might say?’

‘One might.’

‘She’s watching the show?’

‘Yes. With Henry.’

‘I wonder if she’s still unimpressed.’

‘Still unimpressed?’ Henry asked. He clearly wasn’t, but then he couldn’t keep his eyes off her.

Maria didn’t answer immediately. She was staring, as if hypnotized – as ten thousand other people were doing – as The Blind Eagles went through their unbelievable and seemingly suicidal aerial routine. At the end of the performance she released her breath in a long soundless sigh.

‘I don’t believe it.’ Her voice was almost a whisper. ‘I just don’t believe what I’ve seen.’

‘I can hardly believe it myself – and I’ve seen it a hundred times. First impressions can be wrong, no?’

‘Just how wrong.’

Half an hour later she was with Henry just outside the dressing-room area when Bruno emerged, dressed in street clothes. He was back to his old, relatively unimpressive self. He stopped, smiled at her, and said: ‘I saw you at the show.’

‘Blindfolded?’

‘On the low wire. On the bicycle.’

She looked at him in astonishment. ‘Doing that impossible act? You have time to look round the audience?’

‘I have to have something to occupy my attention,’ he said with mock bravado. ‘Enjoy it all?’ She nodded and he smiled again. ‘Even The Blind Eagles? I’m only searching for compliments, of course.’

Maria looked at him without smiling, pointed upwards and said: ‘A star has fallen from the sky.’ She turned and walked away. From the slight corrugation of Bruno’s brow it was impossible to tell whether he was puzzled or amused.

Dr Harper, looking every inch the high-powered consultant that he wasn’t, arrived precisely at ten o’clock the following morning, but had to wait over half an hour while Wrinfield went through the motions of interviewing several other would-be circus doctors who had turned up quite some time before ten o’clock.

Wrinfield was alone in his office when Harper knocked and entered. Harper said: ‘Good morning. I’m Dr Harper.’

Wrinfield looked at him in considerable astonishment and had just opened his mouth to speak, doubtless to inform Harper that he was not likely to have forgotten him due to the fact that they had made their first acquaintance over the dead body of Pilgrim, when Harper handed him a handwritten note. It read: ‘This office may be bugged. Interview me as you would any other candidate.’

‘Good morning.’ Wrinfield hadn’t even blinked. ‘I’m Wrinfield, the owner.’ He launched smoothly into the interview: Harper, both while listening and answering, sat down and scribbled another note. He handed it across. It read: ‘End the interview and give me the job. Ask me my immediate plans then invite me outside for a look around.’

Wrinfield said: ‘Well, that’s it. I’m too busy a man to spend a lifetime on making decisions. The job’s yours. Frankly, when I have the choice between an experienced consultant and the young interns I’ve been seeing – well, I don’t have much of a choice. I’m not so naïve as to imagine that you’re making this a full-time career. A sabbatical – or part of it?’

‘Twelve years in the Belvedere is a long time.’

‘How soon could you be free, Doctor?’

‘Now.’

‘Splendid. And what would your immediate plans be?’

‘Depends on how soon you want to leave on this foreign tour.’

‘Let’s work towards four or five days from now.’

‘Little enough time. First, Mr Wrinfield, I’d like your authorization for medical supplies, then a collection of all the passports until I see what’s required in the way of vaccinations and inoculations – I understand your circus has never toured abroad before. I’m afraid that some of your high-wire and trapeze artistes will have to curtail their acts quite a bit in the next few days.’

‘All that I can arrange immediately. First of all, though, I suggest you have a look around. When you see what you’ve taken on you might want to change your mind.’

The two men left the office and Wrinfield led the way to the centre ring of the circus itself, a spot which, in so far as potential eavesdroppers were concerned, was probably more secluded than any place for a mile around. Nonetheless, Wrinfield scuffed the sand with the toe of his shoe and looked casually around before speaking.

He said: ‘And what was all that for?’

‘Sorry about all that cloak-and-dagger stuff. We don’t usually go in for it – spoils our image. Incidentally, congratulations – you’d make a splendid recruit to our organization. Anyway, I was speaking to Charles just before I came here and we both came up with the same very nasty suspicion at the same time.’

‘That my office was bugged?’

‘If it were, it could explain a great deal.’

‘But why all the paper notes you handed me? Why didn’t you just phone and warn me?’ Harper half-smiled at him and Wrinfield tapped his own head. ‘That wasn’t very bright. The phone could have been bugged, too.’

‘Indeed. In a few minutes’ time you can expect another applicant for my job. His name is Dr Morley and he will be carrying the regulation black medical bag. But he’s no doctor, he’s an electronics expert and his bag is packed with extremely advanced equipment for locating bugging devices. Ten minutes alone in your office and he’ll find out whether it’s clean or not.’

Fifteen minutes later, as Wrinfield and Harper approached the office, a tall dark man with a black bag descended the steps from it. For the benefit of watchers or listeners Wrinfield introduced them and suggested a cup of coffee in the canteen. They sat at a remote corner table.

Morley said: ‘Two bugs. Miniaturized radio transmitters. One in the ceiling light, the other in the phone.’

‘So I can breathe again,’ Wrinfield said. Neither of the other two made any immediate reply so he went on rather uncertainly: ‘I mean, those devices have been removed or deactivated?’

‘Most certainly not,’ Harper said. ‘The bugs are still there and there they will remain, probably until we return from Europe. Do you think we want the ungodly to know that we know? Think of all the amount of false and confusing and misleading information we can feed them.’ One could see that, mentally, Harper was positively rubbing his hands. ‘From now on you will conduct only routine circus business in that office.’ He smiled almost dreamily. ‘Unless, of course, I give instructions to the contrary.’

In the days that followed, four subjects increasingly and exclusively dominated conversation in the circus.

The first of those, inevitably, emanated from the mounting excitement over the forthcoming trip to Europe, a euphoric state that was not, understandably, shared by the unfortunates who were not making the foreign tour but would be returning to the winter headquarters in Florida: for purely logistical reasons, only two-thirds of the personnel would be able to make it. But for the two-thirds who were going the European visit, especially as it included a two-way ocean voyage, was regarded as nothing less than a holiday. An extremely arduous holiday it promised to be from the moment of disembarkation, but nonetheless a holiday. About half the crew were American, few of whom had ever been abroad before, partly from financial considerations, partly because the circus season was so long that they had only three weeks free in the year and this at the wrong time of the year – in the dead of winter: for them, this could be a once in a lifetime experience. The remainder were predominantly European, mainly from the other side of the Iron Curtain, and this was, possibly, also a once in a lifetime experience – that of seeing their native countries and families again.

The second subject concerned the much-maligned activities of Dr Harper and his two temporarily employed trained nurses. Their degree of unpopularity was high. Harper was rigorous to the point of ruthlessness, and when it came to vaccinations and inoculations no one passed through the meshes of the wide net he cast and when any to-be-or-not-to-be questions arose he never gave anyone the benefit of the doubt. Circus people are undoubtedly tougher and fitter than the average run of mankind, but when it came to a profound aversion to injections, scratches and consequent sore arms they were no different from anyone else. But nobody could possibly doubt that they had a genuine and dedicated doctor in their midst.

The third concerned two sets of mysterious activities. The first was the patrol that so closely guarded the sleeping quarters on the train during the night. No one seriously believed that threats to lives had been made by parties unknown but, then, they didn’t know what else to believe. Then there was the baffling incident of two alleged electrical engineers who had come to examine the wiring of the train. They had almost finished their task before their authenticity had been questioned and the police called. Unknown to anyone in the circus except Harper, they had been detained in custody for precisely five minutes, which was all the time it took for one of them to phone the admiral and reassure him that none of the sleeping quarters on the train had been bugged.

The last, but unquestionably the most engrossing topic of the lot, concerned Bruno and Maria. To the vexation of Henry, who was not engaged in a battle with his conscience, they were not only seen increasingly in each other’s company, but were also seen actively and with no attempt at concealment to seek out each other’s company. The reactions to this particular development were predictably mixed. Some were amused to see Bruno’s hitherto inviolate defences being breached. Others were envious – the men because Bruno had undoubtedly and apparently without effort attached the affections of a girl who politely and pointedly ignored any other approaches made to her, the women because Bruno, by far the most eligible bachelor in the circus, politely but pointedly ignored any approaches made to him. Many more were happy for Bruno, and this despite the fact that apart from Kan Dahn, Manuelo and Roebuck he had no real friends in the circus, because it was common knowledge that since the death of his wife he had been a sad, lonely and withdrawn man who never looked at women. But the majority regarded it as only natural and inevitable that the undisputed star of the circus should come together with a girl who was arguably the most lovely young lady among a plethora of lovely young ladies.

It was not until the last performance of their last night in town that Bruno rather diffidently asked her along to see his quarters aboard the train. Maria showed no diffidence in accepting the offer. He guided her stumbling footsteps along the rutted siding track then helped her up the steep steps at the end of a coach.

Bruno had rather splendid and completely enclosed quarters, consisting of a sitting-room, kitchen-cum-dinette, bathroom – with, of all things, a sunken bath – and bedroom. Maria looked almost dazed as he led her back to the sitting-room.

He said: ‘I’m told I mix what the Americans call a rather mean Martini. Only time I ever drink is after I’ve finished a series in a town. Alcohol and the trapeze don’t mix. Will you join me?’

‘Please. I must say you do live in style. You should have a wife to share all this.’

Bruno fetched ice. ‘Is that a proposal?’

‘No, it’s not. But all this – just for one man.’

‘Mr Wrinfield is very kind to me.’

She said drily: ‘I don’t think Mr Wrinfield is losing out on the deal. Does anyone else have accommodation like this?’

‘I haven’t gone around examining – ’

‘Bruno!’

‘No.’

‘Certainly not me. I have a place like a horizontal telephone box. Ah, well, I suppose there’s a vast gap in status between a trainee secretary and you.’

‘That’s so.’

‘Men! Modesty! I just don’t know!’

‘Come with me on the high trapeze. Blindfolded. Then you’ll know.’

She shuddered, not altogether affectedly. ‘I can’t even stand on a chair without getting vertigo. Truly. You’re welcome to your palace. Well, I suppose I can always come along and visit the palace.’

He handed her a drink. ‘I’ll have a special welcome mat made out for you.’

‘Thank you.’ She lifted her glass. ‘To our first time alone. We’re supposed to be falling in love. Any idea how the others think we are doing?’

‘I can’t speak for the others. I think I’m doing very well.’ He glanced at the compressing lips and said hastily: ‘I think we’re doing very well. I suppose, as of this moment, that must be the general idea. By this time at least a hundred people must know that you’re here with me. Aren’t you supposed to blush or something?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a lost art. Well, I don’t suppose you came along just for my dark eyes. You have something to tell me?’

‘Not really. You asked me, remember?’ She smiled. ‘Why?’

‘Just polishing up our act.’ She stopped smiling and put down her glass. He reached forward quickly and touched the back of her hand. ‘Don’t be a silly goose, Maria.’ She looked at him uncertainly, smiled a token smile, and picked up her glass again. ‘Tell me. What am I supposed to do when we get to Crau – and how am I supposed to do it?’

‘Only Dr Harper knows, and he’s not ready to talk yet. I should imagine that he’ll tell you – us – either on the way across or when we get to Europe. But two things he did tell me this morning – ’

‘I knew you had something to tell me.’

‘Yes. I was just trying to be a tease. It didn’t work, did it? Remember those two so-called electrical engineers that the police escorted to the train? They were our people, electronic experts searching for listening devices – bugs. They concentrated on your apartment.’

‘Bugs? In my apartment? Come on, Maria, that is a bit melodramatic.’

‘Is it? The second item of news is that a few days ago they found two bugs in Mr Wrinfield’s office – one for the room, one for the telephone. I suppose that’s melodramatic, too?’ When Bruno made no reply she went on: ‘They haven’t removed the bugs. Mr Wrinfield, on Dr Harper’s suggestion, is on the phone to Charles several times a day, dropping vague hints and making veiled suggestions about certain members of the circus who might be of interest to him. Nothing about us, of course. In fact he’s made so many suggestions that if they – whoever “they” may be – are keeping tabs on the suggested suspects they won’t have time to look at far less think about anyone else. Which, of course, includes us.’

‘I think they’re nuts,’ Bruno said candidly. ‘And by “they”, this time, I don’t mean “they”, I mean Wrinfield and Harper. Playing little kiddies’ games.’

‘The murders of Pilgrim and Fawcett. That was a game?’

‘Preserve me from feminine logic. I wasn’t talking about them.’

‘Dr Harper has twenty years’ experience behind him.’

‘Or one year’s twenty times over. OK, so I leave myself in the safe arms of the experts. Meantime, I suppose there’s nothing for the sacrificial calf to do?’

‘No. Well, yes. You can tell me how to get in touch with you.’

‘Knock twice and ask for Bruno.’

‘You have a sealed-off suite here. I won’t be able to see you when the train is in motion.’

‘Well, well.’ Bruno smiled widely, a rare thing for him: it was the first time she had seen his smile touch his eyes. ‘I make progress. You think you’ll be wanting to see me?’

‘Don’t be silly. I may have to see you.’

Bruno nodded forwards. ‘It’s illegal to seal off any part of a coach in motion. There’s a door in the corner of my bedroom that leads to the passage beyond. But it’s only got one handle and that’s on my side.’

‘If I knock tat-tat, tat-tat, you’ll know it’s me.’

‘Tat-tat, tat-tat,’ he said solemnly. ‘I love those kiddies’ games.’

He escorted her back to her compartment. At the foot of the steps he said: ‘Well, goodnight. Thanks for the visit.’ He bent forward and kissed her lightly.

She didn’t object, just said mildly: ‘Isn’t that carrying realism a bit too far?’

‘Not at all. Orders are orders. We are supposed to be creating a certain impression, and the chance was too good to pass up. There are at least a dozen people watching us.’

She made a face, turned and went up the steps.

CHAPTER FOUR

Most of the following day was given up to dismantling the bewildering variety and daunting amount of equipment inside the arena, the backstage and the fairground and loading up the half-mile-long train. To transfer this, the animal cages, the prefabricated offices, the fairground booths and Bruno’s ramshackle mentalist theatre, not to mention the animals and circus members to the coaches and flat-cars, was a massive undertaking that to the layman would have appeared well-nigh impossible: the circus, with its generations of experience behind it, performed the task with an almost ludicrous ease, a smooth efficiency that reduced a seemingly hopeless confusion to a near-miracle of precision and order. Even the loading up of provisions for the hundreds of animals and humans would have seemed a most formidable task: in the event the last of the provision trucks departed less than an hour after the first had arrived. The whole operation could have been likened to an exercise in military logistics with the sole proviso that any unbiased and expert observer would have conceded that the circus had unquestionably the edge in efficiency.

The circus train was due to pull out at ten o’clock that night. At nine o’clock, Dr Harper was still closeted with the admiral, studying two very complicated diagrams.

The admiral had a pipe in one hand, a brandy in the other. He looked relaxed, calm and unconcerned. It was possible that he might just have been relaxed and calm but, as the sole instigator of the forthcoming operation, the man who had conceived and planned it all down to the last and most intimate details possible, it was impossible that he should not be concerned. He said: ‘You have it all? Guards, entry, interior layout, exit and escape route to the Baltic?’

‘I have it all. I just hope that damned ship is there for rendezvous.’ Harper folded the diagrams and pushed them deeply into the inside pocket of his coat.

‘You break in on a Tuesday night. They’ll be cruising off-shore from the Friday to the following Friday. A whole week’s grace.’

‘Won’t the East Germans or the Poles or the Russians be suspicious, sir?’

‘Inevitably. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Won’t they object?’

‘How can they? Since when has the Baltic been anyone’s private pond? Of course they’re going to tie up the presence of the ship – or ships – with the presence of the circus in Crau. Inevitable, and nothing we can do about it. The circus, the circus.’ The admiral sighed. ‘You’d better deliver the goods, Harper, or I’m going to be on welfare before the year is out.’

Harper smiled. ‘I wouldn’t like that, sir. And you know better than anyone that the ultimate responsibility for the delivery of the goods doesn’t lie in my hands.’

‘I know. Have you formed any personal impression of our latest recruit yet?’

‘Nothing more than is obvious to anyone else, sir. He’s intelligent, tough, strong and appears to have been born without a nervous system. He’s a very close person. Maria Hopkins says that it’s impossible to get next to him.’

‘What?’ The admiral quirked a bushy eyebrow. ‘That delightful young child? I’m sure if she really tried – ’

‘I didn’t quite mean it that way, sir.’

‘Peace, Harper, peace. I do not endeavour to be facetious. There are times that are sent to try men’s souls. Although I know we have no option it is not easy to have to rely in the final analysis on an unknown. Apart from the fact that if he fails – well, there’s only one way he can fail and then he’ll be on my conscience for the remainder of my days. And don’t you add to that burden.’

‘Sir?’

‘Mind your back is what I mean. Those papers you’ve just stuck – securely, I trust – in your inside pocket. You are aware, of course, what will happen if you are caught with those in your possession?’

Harper sighed. ‘I am aware. ‘I’ll have my throat cut and end up, suitably weighted, in some canal or river. Doubtless you can always find a replacement.’

‘Doubtless. But the way things are going I’m going to be running out of replacements quite soon, so I’d rather not be put to the trouble. You are quite sure you have the times of transmission and the code totally memorized?’

Harper said gloomily: ‘You don’t have much faith in your subordinates, sir.’

‘The way things have been going recently, I don’t have much faith in myself, either.’

Harper touched the bottom of his medical bag. ‘This postage stamp receiver. You sure you can pick me up?’

‘We’re using NASA equipment. We could pick you up on the moon.’

‘I somehow wish I was going there.’

Some six hours after departure the circus train drew into a shunting yard. Arc lamps apart, the darkness was total and the rain very heavy. There, after an interminable period of advancing, reversing, bumping, clanking and screeching of wheels on points – the combination of all of which effectively succeeded in waking up everybody aboard – a considerable number of pre-selected coaches were detached, subsequently to be hauled south to their winter quarters in Florida. The main body of the train continued on its way to New York.

Nothing untoward happened en route. Bruno, who invariably cooked for himself, had not left his quarters once. He had been visited twice by his brothers, once by Wrinfield and once by Harper but by no one else: known to everybody as a loner, he was invariably treated as such.

Not until the train had arrived on the quay alongside the container-passenger ship that was to take them to Genoa – selected not so much for its strategic geographical position as the fact that it was one of the few Mediterranean ports with the facilities to off-load the crane-breaking coaches and flat-cars – did Bruno leave his quarters. It was still raining. One of the first persons he encountered was Maria. She was dressed in navy slacks, a voluminous yellow oilskin, and looked thoroughly miserable. She gave him the nearest she would ever be able to come to a scowl and came to the point with what he had now come to regard as her customary straightforwardness.

‘Not very sociable, are you?’

‘I’m sorry. But you did know where I was.’

‘I had nothing to tell you.’ Then, inconsequentially: ‘You knew where I was.’

‘I find telephone boxes cramping.’

‘You could have invited me. While I know we’re supposed to be striking up some special relationship I don’t go openly chasing after men.’

‘You don’t have to.’ He smiled to rob the next words of offence. ‘Or do you prefer to do it discreetly?’

‘Very amusing. Very clever. You have no shame?’

‘For what?’

‘Your shameful neglect.’

‘Lots.’

‘Then take me to dinner tonight.’

‘Telepathy, Maria. Sheer telepathy.’

She gave him a look of disbelief and left to change.

They switched taxis three times on the way to the pleasant Italian restaurant Maria had chosen. When they were seated Bruno said: ‘Was all that necessary? The taxis, I mean?’

‘I don’t know. I follow orders.’

‘Why are we here? You miss me so much?’

‘I have instructions for you.’

‘Not my dark eyes?’ She smiled and shook her head and he sighed. ‘You can’t win them all. What instructions?’

‘I suppose you’re going to say that I could easily have whispered them to you in some dark corner on the quayside?’

‘A prospect not without its attractions. But not tonight.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s raining.’

‘What is it like to be a romantic at heart?’

‘And I like it here. Very pleasant restaurant.’ He looked at her consideringly, at the blue velvet dress, the fur cape that was far too expensive for a secretary, the sheen of rain on her shining dark hair. ‘Besides, in the dark I wouldn’t be able to see you. Here I can. You’re really very beautiful. What instructions?’

‘What?’ She was momentarily flustered, unbalanced by the sudden switch, then compressed her lips in mock ferociousness. ‘We sail at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. Please be in your cabin at eleven o’clock in the evening. At that hour the purser will arrive to discuss seating arrangements, or some such, with you. He’s a genuine purser but he’s also something else. He will make absolutely certain that there are no listening devices in your cabin.’ Bruno remained silent. ‘I notice you’re not talking about melodrama this time.’

Bruno said with some weariness: ‘Because it hardly seems worth talking about. Why on earth should anyone plant bugs in my cabin? I’m not under suspicion. But I will be if you and Harper keep on behaving in this idiotic cloak-and-dagger fashion. Why the bugging of Wrinfield’s office? Why were two men sent to look for bugs in my place aboard the train? Why this character now? Too many people seeing that I’m debugged, too many people knowing that I can’t possibly be all that I claim to be or that the circus claims that I am. Too many people having their attention called to me. I don’t like it one little bit.’

‘Please. There’s no need to be like that – ’

‘Isn’t there? Your opinion. And don’t be soothing to me.’

‘Look, Bruno, I’m just a messenger. Directly, there’s no reason on earth why you should be under suspicion. But we are – or we’re going to be – up against an extremely efficient and suspicious secret police, who certainly won’t overlook the slightest possibility. After all, the information we want is in Crau. We’re going to Crau. You were born in Crau. And they will know that you have the strongest possible motivation – revenge. They killed your wife – ’

‘Be quiet!’ Maria recoiled, appalled by the quiet ferocity in his voice. ‘Nobody has spoken of her to me in six and a half years. Mention my dead wife again and I’ll pull out, wreck the whole operation and leave you to explain to your precious chief why it was your gaucherie, your ill manners, your total lack of feeling, your incredible insensitivity that ruined everything. You understand?’

‘I understand.’ She was very pale, shocked almost, tried to understand the enormity of her blunder and failed. She ran a slow tongue across her lips. ‘I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry. That was a bad mistake.’ She still wasn’t sure what the mistake was about. ‘But never again, I promise.’

He said nothing.

‘Dr Harper says please be outside your cabin at 6.30 p.m., sitting on the floor – sorry, deck – at the foot of the companionway. You have fallen down and damaged your ankle. You will be found and helped to your cabin. Dr Harper will, of course, be there almost immediately. He wishes to give you a full briefing on the nature of the operation.’

‘Has he told you?’ There was still a singular lack of warmth in Bruno’s voice.

‘He told me nothing. If I know Dr Harper he’ll probably tell you to tell me nothing either.’

‘I will do what you ask. Now that you’ve completed your business, we may as well get back. Three taxis for you, of course, rules are rules. I’ll take one straight back to the ship. It’s quicker and cheaper and the hell with the CIA.’

She reached out a tentative hand and touched his arm.

‘I have apologized. Sincerely. How long must I keep on doing it?’ When he made no answer she smiled at him and the smile was as her hand had been, tentative and uncertain. ‘You’d think a person who earns as much money as you do could afford to buy a meal for a working girl like myself. Or do we go Dutch? Please don’t leave. I don’t want to go back. Not yet.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s – it’s just one of those obscure – I don’t know. I just want to make things right.’

‘I was right. First time out. You are a goose.’ He sighed, reached out for a menu and handed it to her. He gave her an odd look. ‘Funny. I thought your eyes were dark. They’ve gone all brown. Dark, flecked brown, mind you, but still brown. How do you do it? Have you a switch or something?’

She looked at him solemnly. ‘No switch.’

‘Must be my eyes then. Tell me, why couldn’t Dr Harper have come and told me all this himself?’

‘It would have created a very odd impression if you two were seen leaving together. You never speak to each other. What’s he to you or you to him?’

‘Ah!’

‘With us it’s different. Or had you forgotten? The most natural thing in the world. I’m in love with you and you’re in love with me.’

‘He’s still in love with his dead wife.’ Maria’s voice was flat, neutral. Elbows on the guard-rail, she was standing on the passenger deck of the MC Carpentaria, apparently oblivious to the chill night wind, watching in apparent fascination but without really registering what she was seeing as the giant dockside cranes, with their blazing attached arc-lamps, swung the coaches inboard.

She started as a hand laid itself on her arm and a teasing voice said: ‘Who’s in love with whose wife, then?’

She turned and looked at Henry Wrinfield. The thin intelligent face, chalk-white in the glare of the arc-lamps, was smiling.

‘You might have coughed or something,’ she said reproachfully. ‘You did give me a fright, you know.’

‘Sorry. But I could have been wearing hobnailed boots and you wouldn’t have heard me above the racket of those damned cranes. Well, come out with it, who’s in love with who?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Love,’ Henry said patiently. ‘You were declaiming something about it when I came up.’

‘Was I?’ Her voice was vague. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. My sister says I talk non-stop in my sleep. Maybe I was asleep on my feet. Did you hear any other Freudian slips or whatever?’

‘Alas, no. My loss, I’m sure. What on earth are you doing out here? It’s cold and starting to rain.’ He had lost interest in the remark he’d overheard.

She shivered. ‘Day-dreaming. I must have been. It’s cold.’

‘Come inside. They have a beautiful old-fashioned bar aboard. And warm. A brandy will make you warmer.’

‘Bed would make me warmer still. Time I was there.’

‘You spurn a nightcap with the last of the Wrinfields?’

‘Never!’ She laughed and took his arm. ‘Show me the way.’

The lounge – it could hardly have been called a bar – had deep green leather armchairs, brass tables, a very attentive steward and excellent brandy. Maria had one of those, Henry had three and at the end of the third Henry, who clearly had no head for alcohol, had developed a distinct, if gentlemanly, yearning look about the eyes. He took one of her hands in his and yearned some more. Maria looked at his hand.

‘It’s unfair,’ she said. ‘Custom dictates that a lady wears an engagement ring when she is engaged, a wedding ring when she is married. No such duty devolves upon a man. I think it’s wrong.’

‘So do I.’ If she’d said he ought to wear a cowbell around his neck he’d have agreed to that, too.

‘Then where’s yours?’

‘My what?’

‘Your engagement ring. Cecily wears one. Your fiancée. Remember? The green-eyed one at Bryn Mawr. Surely you can’t have forgotten?’

The fumes evaporated from Henry’s head. ‘You’ve been asking questions about me?’

‘Never a one and no need to ask either. You forget I spend a couple of hours a day with your uncle. No children of his own so his nieces and nephews have become his pride and joy.’ She gathered her handbag and rose. ‘Thank you for the nightcap. Good night and sweet dreams. Be sure to dream about the right person.’

Henry watched her go with a moody eye.

Maria had been in bed no more than five minutes when a knock came at her cabin door. She called: ‘Come in. It’s not locked.’

Bruno entered and closed the door behind him.

‘It should be locked. What with characters like myself and Henry prowling around – ’

‘Henry?’

‘Last seen calling for a double brandy. Looks like a Romeo who’s just found out that he’s been serenading the wrong balcony. Nice chair.’

‘You’ve come to discuss décor at this time of night?’

‘You allocated this room?’

‘Funny question. As a matter of fact, no. There were seven or eight cabins to choose from, the steward, a very nice old boy, offered me my pick. I took this one.’

‘Like the décor, eh?’

‘Why did you come, Bruno?’

‘To say good night, I guess.’ He sat beside her, put an arm around her shoulders and held her close. ‘And to apologize for snapping at you in the restaurant. I’ll explain to you later – when we’re on our way home.’ He rose as abruptly as he had sat down, opened the door, said: ‘Lock it!’ and closed the door behind him. Maria stared at the door in total astonishment.

The Carpentaria was big – close on thirty thousand tons – and had been built primarily as a bulk ore ship capable of immediate conversion into a container vessel. She was also capable of carrying nearly two hundred passengers, though hardly in transatlantic passenger line style. Her two front holds were at the moment taken up by twenty circus train coaches, animal and crew member coaches mainly, while the contents of a dozen others had been unloaded on the quay and carefully stowed away in the holds. The flat-cars were securely clamped on the reinforced foredeck. In Italy they were to be met by a sufficiency of empty coaches and a locomotive powerful enough to haul them across the mountains of central Europe.

At six o’clock on the following evening the Carpentaria, in driving rain and a heavy swell – she was stabilized to reduce roll to a minimum – was seven hours out from New York. Bruno was stretched out on a settee in his cabin – one of the very few rather sumptuous staterooms available on the vessel – when a knock came to the door and a uniformed purser entered. To Bruno’s total lack of surprise he was carrying a thick black brief-case.

He said: ‘Good evening, sir. Were you expecting me?’

‘I was expecting someone. I suppose that’s you.’

‘Thank you, sir. May I?’ He locked the door behind him, turned to Bruno and tapped his case. ‘The paperwork for a modern purser,’ he said sadly, ‘is endless.’

He opened the brief-case, extracted a flat, rectangular metal box, liberally covered with dials and controls, extended an antenna from it, clamped on a pair of earphones and began, slowly, to traverse first the stateroom and then the bathroom, assiduously twirling his controls as he went. He looked like a cross between a mine detector and a water diviner. After about ten minutes he divested himself of his equipment and stowed it away in his brief-case.

‘Clear,’ he said. ‘No guarantee, mind you – but as sure as I can be.’

Bruno indicated the brief-case. ‘I know nothing about those things but I thought they were fool-proof.’

‘So they are. On dry land. But on a ship you have so much iron, the hull being used as a conductor, magnetic fields from all the heavy power cables – well, anyone can be fooled. I can. So can my electronic friend here.’ He put out a hand to a bulkhead to steady himself as the Carpentaria, apparently forgetting all about its stabilizers, gave an unexpected lurch. ‘Looks like a nasty night coming up. Shouldn’t be surprised if we have a few sprains and bruises this evening. First night out, you know – people haven’t had time to find their sea-legs.’ Bruno wondered if he had seen a wink or not, it could have been imagination and he had no means of knowing how much the purser was in Harper’s confidence. He made a noncommittal remark to the purser, who thanked him politely, unlocked the door and left.

Precisely at six-thirty Bruno stepped out into the passageway. It was, fortunately, quite deserted. The foot of the companionway was only six feet away. Half-seated, half-lying, he arranged himself as comfortably as possible in the most suitably uncomfortable-looking position on the deck and awaited developments. Five minutes passed, and he was beginning to develop an acute cramp in his right knee, when a couple of stewards appeared and rescued him from his misery. To the accompaniment of much tongue-clucking they assisted him sympathetically to his stateroom and lowered him tenderly to his settee.

‘Just you hang on a minute, guv’nor,’ one of them said. He had a powerful Cockney accent. ‘I’ll have Dr Berenson here in a jiffy.’

It hadn’t occurred to Bruno – as it apparently hadn’t occurred to Harper – that the Carpentaria would be carrying its own doctor, which was an elementary oversight on both their parts: over and above a certain passenger capacity international law made the carrying of a ship’s doctor mandatory. He said quickly: ‘Could I have our own doctor, please – the circus doctor? His name is Dr Harper.’

‘I know his cabin, next deck down. At once, sir.’

Harper must have been waiting in his cabin, medical bag in hand, for he arrived in Bruno’s cabin, tongue-clucking and looking suitably concerned, inside thirty seconds. He locked the stateroom door after the stewards’ departure, then set to work on Bruno’s ankle with some extremely pungent salve and about a yard of elasticized bandage.

He said: ‘Mr Carter was on schedule?’

‘If Mr Carter is the purser – he didn’t introduce himself – yes.’

Harper paused in his ministrations and looked around. ‘Clean?’

‘Did you expect anything else?’

‘Not really.’ Harper inspected his completed handiwork: both the visual and olfactory aspects were suitably impressive.

Harper brought over a low table, reached into an inside pocket, brought out and smoothed two detailed plans and set some photographs down beside them. He tapped one of the plans.

‘This one first. The plan outline of the Lubylan Advanced Research Centre. Know it?’

Bruno eyed Harper without enthusiasm. ‘I hope that’s the last stupidly unnecessary question you ask this evening.’ Harper assumed the look of a man trying not to look hurt. ‘Before the CIA recruited me for this job – ’

‘How do you know it’s the CIA?’

Bruno rolled his eyes upwards then clearly opted for restraint. ‘Before the Boy Scouts recruited me for this job they’d have checked every step I’ve taken from the cradle. To your certain knowledge you know I spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Crau. How should I not know Lubylan?’

‘Yes. Well. Oddly enough, they do carry out advanced research in Lubylan, most of it, regrettably, associated with chemical warfare, nerve gas and the like.’

‘Regrettably? The United States doesn’t engage in similar research?’

Harper looked pained. ‘That’s not my province.’

Bruno said patiently: ‘Look, Doctor, if you can’t trust me how can you expect me to repose implicit trust in you? It is your province and you damned well know it. Remember the Armed Forces courier service at Orly Airport? All the top-secret classified communications between the Pentagon and the American Army in Europe were channelled through there. Remember?’

‘I remember.’

‘Remember a certain Sergeant Johnson? Fellow with the splendidly patriotic Christian names of Robert Lee? Russia’s most successfully planted spy in a generation, passed every US-Europe top military secret to the KGB for God knows how long. Remember?’

Harper nodded unhappily. ‘I remember.’ Bruno’s briefing was not going exactly as he’d planned it.

‘Then you won’t have forgotten that the Russians published photocopies of one of the top-secret directives that Johnson had stolen. It was the ultimate US contingency plan if the Soviet Union should ever overrun Western Europe. It suggested that in that event the United States intended to devastate the Continent by waging bacteriological, chemical and nuclear warfare: the fact that the entire civilian population would be virtually wiped out was taken for granted. This caused a tremendous furore in Europe at the time and cost the Americans the odd European friend, about two hundred million of them: I doubt whether it even made the back page of the Washington Post.’

‘You’re very well informed.’

‘Not being a member of the CIA doesn’t mean you have to be illiterate. I can read. German is my second language – my mother was a Berliner. Two German magazines carried the story at the same time.’

Harper was resigned. ‘Der Spiegel and Stern, September 1969. Does it give you any particular pleasure in putting me on a hook and watching me wriggle?’

‘That wasn’t my intention. I just want to point up two things. If you don’t level with me all the time and on every subject you can expect no cooperation from me. Then I want you to know why I’ve really gone along with this. I have no idea whether the Americans really would go ahead with this holocaust. I can’t believe it but what I believe doesn’t matter: it’s what the East believes and if they believe that America would not hesitate to implement this threat then they might be sorely tempted to carry out a pre-emptive strike. From what I understood from Colonel Fawcett a millionth of a gram of this anti-matter would settle America’s hash once and for all. I don’t think anyone should have this weapon, but, for me, it’s the lesser of two evils: I’m European by birth but American by adoption. I’ll stick by my adopted parents. And now, could we get on with it. Lay it all on the line. Let’s say I’ve never heard of or seen Crau and go on from there.’

Harper looked at him without enthusiasm. He said sourly: ‘If it was your intention to introduce a subtle change in our relationships you have succeeded beyond any expectation you might have had. Only, I wouldn’t call it very subtle. Well. Lubylan. Conveniently enough, it’s situated only a quarter of a mile from the auditorium where the circus will be held: both buildings, though in the town, are, as one would expect, on the outskirts. Lubylan, as you can see, faces on to a main street.’

‘There are two buildings shown on that diagram.’

‘I’m coming to that. Those two buildings, incidentally, are connected by two high walls which are not shown in the plan.’ Harper quickly sketched them in. ‘At the back of Lubylan is only wasteland. The nearest building in that direction is an oil-fired electric power station.

‘This building that abuts on the main street – let’s call it the west building – is where the actual research is carried out. In the east building, the one abutting the wasteland at the back, research is also carried out, but research of a different kind and almost certainly much nastier than that carried out in the west building. In the east building they carry out a series of highly unpleasant experiments – on human beings. It’s run entirely by the secret police and is the maximum security detention centre for the enemies of the State, who may range from a would-be assassin of the Premier to a weak-minded dissident poet. The mortality rate, I understand, is rather higher than normal.’

‘I suppose it’s my turn to say that you are very well informed.’

‘We don’t send a man in blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. This, crossing the courtyard here, is an elevated fifth-floor corridor connecting the two buildings. It is glass-sided and glass-topped and kept brightly illuminated from dusk to dawn. It is impossible for anyone to use it without being seen.

‘Every window in both buildings is heavily barred. All are nevertheless fitted with burglar alarms. There are only two entrances, one for each building, both time-locked and heavily guarded. The buildings are both nine storeys high and the connecting walls are the same height. The whole upper perimeter of the walls is lined with closely spaced, outward curving metal spikes, the whole with two thousand volts running through them. There’s a watch-tower at every corner. The guards there have machine-guns, searchlights and klaxons. The courtyard between the two buildings, like the elevated glass corridor, is brightly lit at night – not that that matters so much: killer Dobermann pinschers roam the place all the time.’

Bruno said: ‘You have a great gift for encouraging people.’

‘You’d rather not know these things? There are only two ways of escaping from this place – death by torture or death by suicide. No one has ever escaped.’ Dr Harper indicated the other diagram. ‘This is the plan layout of the ninth floor of the west building. This is why the government is mounting a multi-million-dollar operation – to get you in here. This is where Van Diemen works, eats, sleeps and has his being.’

‘Should I know the name?’

‘Most unlikely. He’s almost totally unknown to the public. In the Western world fellow-scientists speak of him with awe. An acknowledged genius – the only indisputable genius – in particle research. The discoverer of anti-matter – the only man in the world who has the secret of making, storing and harnessing this fearful weapon.’

‘He’s Dutch?’

‘Despite his name, no. He’s a renegade West German, a defector. God only knows why he defected. Here you can see his laboratories and office. Here is the guards’ room – the place, understandably, is guarded like Fort Knox twenty-four hours a day. And this is his living quarters – just a small bedroom, an even smaller bathroom and a tiny kitchenette.’

‘You mean he hasn’t got a home? It would make things a damn sight easier if he had.’

‘He’s got a home, all right, a splendid lake-forest mansion given him by the government. He’s never even been there. He lives for nothing but his work and he never leaves here. One suspects the government is just as happy that he continues to do so: it makes their security problem comparatively simple.’

‘Yes. To come back to another simple problem. You say that no one has ever escaped from Lubylan. Then how the hell do you expect me to get in there?’

‘Well, now.’ Harper cleared his throat; he was putting his first foot on very delicate ground. ‘We’d given the matter some thought, of course, before we approached you. Which is why we approached you and only you. The place, as I’ve said, is ringed with a two-thousand-volt fence of steel. The power has to come from someplace: it comes from the electric power station at the back of the east building. Like most high-power transmissions it comes by an overhead cable. It comes in a single loop, three hundred yards long, from a pylon in the power station to the top of the east building.’

‘You’re way out of your mind. You must be. If you’re so crazy as to suggest – ’

Harper prepared to be diplomatic, persuasive and reasonable all at once. ‘Let’s look at it this way. Let’s think of it as just another high wire. As long as you are in contact with this cable with either hands or feet, and don’t earth yourself to anything such as the anchor wire for a pylon insulator, then – ’

‘Let’s think of it as just another high wire,’ Bruno mimicked. ‘Two thousand volts – that’s what they use, or used to use, in the electric chair, isn’t it?’

Harper nodded unhappily.

‘In the circus you step from a platform on to the wire, and step off on to another platform at the other end. If I step off from the pylon on to the wire or from the wire on to the prison wall, I’ll have one foot on the cable and the other to earth. I’ll be frizzled in a second flat. And three hundred yards long – have you any kind of idea what kind of sag that entails? Can you imagine what the effects of that sag combined with whatever wind may be blowing would be like? Has it occurred to you that, at this time of year, there might be both ice and snow on that wire? God’s sake, Dr Harper, don’t you know that our lives depend on the friction coefficient between the soles of our feet and the wire – the cable, in this case. Believe me, Doctor, you may know a lot about counter-espionage but you know damn all about the high wire.’

Harper looked even more unhappy.

‘And should I ever live to cross that cable how do I ever live to cross that courtyard – that illuminated courtyard patrolled by Dobermanns – or cross over that transparent aerial corridor, assuming I could ever get to it in the first place? And if I do get to the west building, how am I going to get past the guards?’

Harper was now looking acutely unhappy.

‘And if I do manage that – I’m not a gambler but I’ll lay a thousand to one I never make it – how am I going to locate the place where those papers are kept? I mean, I don’t suppose they’d just be lying around on a table. They’ll be locked away – Van Diemen may just even sleep with them under his pillow.’

Harper studiously avoided Bruno’s eye. He was distinctly and understandably uncomfortable. He said: ‘Locked filing cabinets or safes are no problems – I can give you keys that should open any commercial office lock.’

‘And if it’s a combination?’

‘Looks as if you’re going to need a little luck all the way.’

Bruno gazed at the deckhead, considered the enormity of this understatement, pushed the papers away and relapsed into speechlessness. After quite some time he stirred, looked at Harper, sighed and said: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need a gun. A silenced gun. With plenty of ammunition.’

Harper went through his own speechless act then said: ‘You mean you’re going to try?’ If he were experiencing any feelings of hope or relief he didn’t show them: there was only a dull disbelief in his voice.

‘Once a nut, always a nut. Not a gun that fires bullets. A gas gun or one that fires anaesthetic darts. Possible?’

‘That’s what diplomatic bags are for,’ Harper said, almost absently. ‘Look, I don’t think I’d properly appreciated the difficulties myself. If you think it’s outright impossible – ’

‘You’re mad. I’m mad. We’re all mad. But you’ve got the whole damned circus at sea now – as far as I’m concerned we’re at sea in more ways than one – and if nothing else we owe it to your murdered colleagues. The gun.’

Harper, clearly, was searching for suitable words and failed. He said: ‘You will keep those diagrams and pictures in a place of absolute safety?’

‘Yes.’ Bruno rose, picked up papers and photographs, tore them into little pieces, took them to the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. He returned and said: ‘They’re safe now.’

‘It would be difficult for anyone to get their hands on them now. A remarkable gift. I’d be grateful if you didn’t fall down the stairs – genuinely, this time – land on your head and give yourself amnesia. Any idea how you’re going to set about this?’

‘Look, I’m a mentalist, not Merlin the wizard. How long have you known about this?’

‘Not long. A few weeks.’

‘Not long. A few weeks.’ Bruno made it sound like a few years. ‘And have you worked out any solution yet?’

‘No.’

‘And you expect me to do it in a few minutes?’

Harper shook his head and rose. ‘I suppose Wrinfield will be along to see you in a short time – he’s bound to hear of your accident any moment and he doesn’t know it was rigged, although you can tell him that. How much do you propose telling him?’

‘Nothing. If I told him this suicidal scheme you have in mind for me he’d have this ship turned round in less time than it could take him to wash his hands of you.’

CHAPTER FIVE

The days passed uneventfully enough, if somewhat unsteadily: the Carpentaria’s stabilizers didn’t seem quite to understand what was expected of them. For the circus crew there was little enough to do other than feed the animals and keep their quarters clean. Those performers who could practise their esoteric arts practised them: those who couldn’t possessed their souls in patience.

Bruno spent sufficient time with Maria to lend credence to the now almost universal belief among the circus people that here indeed was a romance that was steadily blossoming: what was even more intriguing was that there seemed to be a distinct possibility that there might be two romances getting under way, for whenever Bruno was not with her Henry Wrinfield was solicitously unsparing in the attentions he paid her. And, as Bruno spent most of his time with Kan Dahn, Roebuck and Manuelo, Henry lacked neither the time nor the opportunity; he made the most of both.

The lounge bar, a large room that seated well over a hundred people, was invariably well patronized before dinner. On the third night out Henry sat at a remote corner table, talking earnestly to Maria. On the far side of the lounge Bruno sat playing cards with his three friends. Before the game, Roebuck and Manuelo spent their ritual ten minutes bemoaning the fact that they had no opportunity to practise their arts with lasso and knife respectively. Kan Dahn was in no way concerned about himself: clearly he was of the belief that his massive strength wasn’t going to drain away from him in a matter of days: it was a belief that was widely shared.

Poker was their game. They played for low stakes and Bruno almost invariably won. The others claimed that this was because he could see through their cards, a claim that Bruno stoutly denied, although the fact that on the previous night, wearing a blindfold, he had won four consecutive hands put a query mark to his assertion. Not that he was ever in pocket at the end of a game: the winner paid for the drinks and although he, Roebuck and Manuelo consumed very little, the capacity of Kan Dahn’s three-hundred-pound frame for beer was awesome.

Kan Dahn drained another uncounted pint, glanced across the room and tapped Bruno on the arm. ‘You’d best look to your defences, my lad. Your lady-love is under siege.’

Bruno glanced across and said mildly: ‘She’s not my lady-love. Even if she were I don’t think Henry is the type to snatch her and run. Not that he could run very far in the middle of the Atlantic.’

‘Far enough,’ Roebuck said darkly.

‘His fair-haired dear one is back in the States,’ Manuelo said severely. ‘Our little Maria is here. It makes a difference.’

‘Somebody,’ Roebuck said, ‘should tell her about Cecily.’

‘Our little Maria knows all about Cecily. She told me so herself. Even knows the kind of engagement ring she wears.’ Bruno glanced at the couple again, then returned to his cards. ‘I do not think that they are discussing affairs of the heart.’

Maria and Henry were not, indeed, discussing affairs of the heart. Henry was being very very earnest, very intense and very genuinely concerned. He suddenly broke off, looked across to the bar, then back to Maria again.

‘That proves it!’ Henry’s voice held a mixture of triumph and apprehension.

Maria said patiently: ‘What proves what, Henry?’

‘The fellow I told you about. The fellow who’s been following you. That steward that just entered and went behind the bar. The chap with the weasel face. He’s no right to be here. He doesn’t work here.’

‘Oh, come on now, Henry. He hasn’t got a weasel face, just thin, that’s all.’

‘He’s English,’ Henry said inconsequentially.

‘I’ve met some Englishmen who weren’t criminals. And you haven’t overlooked the fact that this is a British ship?’

Henry was persistent. ‘I’ve seen him follow you half a dozen times. I know, because I’ve followed the two of you.’ She looked at him in surprise, but this time without smiling. ‘He also follows my uncle.’

‘Ah!’ She looked thoughtful. ‘His name’s Wherry. He’s a cabin steward.’

‘I told you he shouldn’t be here. Keeping tabs on you, that’s what.’ He checked himself. ‘A cabin steward. How do you know? Your cabin steward?’

‘Your uncle’s. That’s where I saw him first. In your uncle’s cabin.’ Her thoughtful expression deepened. ‘Now that you mention it, I have seen him around rather a lot. And, two or three times when I’ve been walking about, I turned around and found him close behind.’

‘You bet you did.’

‘And what’s that meant to mean, Henry?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m making no mistake.’

‘Why should anyone follow me? Do you think he’s a detective in disguise and I’m a wanted criminal? Or do I look like a counter-spy or a secret agent or Mata Hari fifty years on?’

Henry considered. ‘No, you don’t look the part. Besides, Mata Hari was ugly. You’re beautiful.’ He adjusted his glasses the better to confirm his judgement. ‘Really beautiful.’

‘Henry! Remember this morning? We had agreed to confine our discussions to intellectual matters.’

‘The hell with intellectual matters.’ Henry thought and weighed his words with care. ‘I really believe I’m falling in love with you.’ He thought some more. ‘Fallen.’

‘I don’t think Cecily would – ’

‘The hell with her, too – no, I didn’t mean that. Sorry. Although I did mean what I said about you.’ He half-turned in his seat. ‘Look, Wherry’s leaving.’

They watched him go, a small thin dark man with a small thin dark moustache. At his nearest approach to their table, which was about ten feet away, he flickered a glance at them then as quickly looked away again. Henry leaned back in his seat and gave her his ‘I-told-you-so’ look.

‘A criminal. Written all over him. You saw that?’

‘Yes.’ She was troubled. ‘But why, Henry, why?’

He shrugged. ‘Do you have any valuables? Any jewellery?’

‘I don’t wear jewellery.’

Henry nodded his approval. ‘Jewellery is for women who need it. But when a person is as lovely as you are – ’

‘Henry, it’s getting so I just can’t talk to you. This morning I said it was a lovely day and you put on your soulful expression and made disparaging remarks about the day. When I commend my peach melba you say it’s not half as sweet as I am. And when we looked at the beautiful colourings of the sunset tonight – ’

‘I have a poetic soul. Ask Cecily. No, on second thoughts, don’t ask Cecily. I can see that I’m going to have to keep a very, very close eye on you.’

‘I should say that you are making a pretty good start already.’

‘Ah.’ An unrepentant Henry, eyes slightly glazed but not from alcohol, made no attempt to switch his adoring gaze to pastures less green. He said wistfully: ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to be someone’s Sir Galahad.’

‘I wouldn’t, if I were you, Henry. There’s no place in the world today for Sir Galahads. Chivalry is dead, Henry. The lances and the bright swords and the days of knightly combat are gone: this is the era of the knife in the back.’

Alas for Henry, all his senses, except that of sight, were temporarily in abeyance. Her words fell on deaf ears.

On the fourth night out Dr Harper joined Bruno in his stateroom. He was accompanied by Carter, the purser, who had been so busy with the debugging equipment on the first night out. Carter extended his customary courteous good evening, wordlessly repeated the search performance, shook his head and left.

Harper nodded to the cocktail cabinet, poured himself a drink, savoured it and said with some satisfaction: ‘We will pick up your guns in Vienna.’

‘Guns?’

‘Indeed.’

‘You have been in touch with the States? Doesn’t the radio operator raise an eyebrow?’

It was Harper’s night to indulge himself to a moderate degree. He smiled. He said: ‘I am my own radio operator. I have a very high frequency radio transceiver, no bigger than the average book, which can’t possibly interfere with normal ship’s frequencies. As Charles says, it could reach the moon. Anyway, I transmit in code. Show you the thing some time – in fact, I’ll have to show it to you and explain its operation in case you have to use it. In case something should go wrong with me.’

‘What should go wrong with you?’

‘What should have gone wrong with Pilgrim and Fawcett? Now, we’ll be picking up two guns for you, not one, and that for a reason. The anaesthetic dart gun – the missiles are more like needles, actually – is the more effective, but the word is that Van Diemen has a long-standing heart condition. So, if you should have to quieten him, the use of a dart gun is, as they say, contra-indicated. For him, the gas gun. Have you figured out a way to get inside yet?’

‘A battery-powered helicopter would be splendid only there are no such things. No, I haven’t figured out a way into the damned place yet.’

‘Early days and fingers crossed. You know you’re slated to dine with me at the captain’s table tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Passengers are rotated for the privilege. A normal courtesy. See you then.’

They had just seated themselves at the table when a steward approached, bent and whispered something discreetly into the captain’s ear. The captain rose, excused himself and followed the steward from the dining saloon. He was back inside two or three minutes, looking more than vaguely perturbed.

‘Odd,’ he said. ‘Very odd. Carter – you’ve met him, he’s chief purser – claims that he has just been assaulted by some thug. “Mugged”, I believe, is the American term for it. You know, caught round the neck from behind and choked. No marks on him, but he does seem a trifle upset.’

Harper said: ‘Couldn’t he just have taken a turn?’

‘If he did, then his wallet left his inside pocket of its own volition.’

‘In which case he’s been attacked and his wallet – minus the contents, of course – is now probably at the bottom of the Atlantic. Shall I have a look at him?’

‘It might be wise. Berenson is holding hands with some silly old trout who thinks she’s having a heart attack. Thank you, Doctor. I’ll get a steward to take you.’

Harper left, Bruno said: ‘That pleasant, courteous man. Who would rob a person like that?’

‘I don’t think Carter’s character would come into it. Just someone who was short of money and reasoned that if any person would be liable to be carrying money it would be the ship’s purser. An unpleasant thing to have happen on one’s ship – in fact I’ve never known or heard of an instance before. I’ll have my chief officer and some men investigate.’

Bruno smiled. ‘I hope we circus people don’t automatically come under suspicion. Among some otherwise reasonable citizens our reputation is not what it could be. But I don’t know more honest people.’

‘I don’t know who is responsible, and the question, I’m afraid, is of academic importance anyway. I don’t think my chief has a hope in hell of finding him.’

Bruno leaned over the taffrail of the Carpentaria, gazing contemplatively at the slight phosphorescence of the ship’s wake. He stirred and turned as someone came up beside him. He said: ‘Anyone in the vicinity?’

‘No one,’ Manuelo said.

‘No bother?’

‘No bother.’ The startlingly white teeth gleamed in the darkness. ‘You were quite right. The unfortunate Mr Carter does indeed take a regular – what do you call it – ?’

‘Constitutional.’

‘Right. Takes his constitutional at that time of evening on the boat deck. Lots of shadows on the boat deck. Kan Dahn kind of leaned on him a little bit, Roebuck took the purser’s cabin keys, brought them down to me and kept watch in the passageway while I went inside. I didn’t take long. There was a funny electrical gadget inside a brief-case – ’

‘I think I know about that. Looked like a small radio except there were no wavebands on it?’

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘A device for locating listening devices. They’re a very suspicious lot aboard this boat.’

‘With us around you’re surprised?’

‘What else?’

‘There was fifteen hundred dollars, in tens, at the bottom of a trunk – ’

‘I didn’t know about that. Used?’

‘No. New. And in sequence.’

‘How careless.’

‘Looks like.’ He handed a piece of paper to Bruno. ‘I wrote down the serial numbers of the first and last numbers.’

‘Good, good. You’re quite sure they were genuine notes?’

‘My life on it. I wasn’t in all that hurry and I passed one out to Roebuck. He agrees.’

‘That was all?’

‘There were some letters addressed to him. Not to any particular address but to Poste Restante in a few cities, mostly London and New York.’

‘What language? English?’

‘No. I didn’t recognize it. The postmark said Gdynia. That would make it Polish, wouldn’t it?’

‘It would indeed. Then everything was left as found, door locked and the keys returned to the sleeping Mr Carter.’

Manuelo nodded. Bruno thanked him, left, returned to his stateroom, glanced briefly at the serial numbers on the piece of paper that Manuelo had given him then flushed it down the toilet.

To no one’s surprise, Carter’s assailant was never found.

On the evening before their arrival in Genoa Dr Harper came to Bruno’s stateroom. He helped himself to a Scotch from Bruno’s virtually untouched liquor cabinet.

He said: ‘How goes the thinking on this entry business? Mine, I’m afraid, has bogged down to a halt.’

Bruno said gloomily: ‘Maybe it would have been better, especially for the sake of my health, if mine had bogged down, too.’

Harper sat up in his armchair and pursed his lips. ‘You have an idea?’

‘I don’t know. A glimmering, perhaps. I was wondering – have you any further information for me? Anything at all? About the interior layout of the west building and how to gain access to the ninth floor. Take the roof. Is there any access by way of ventilator shafts, trapdoors or suchlike?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘I think we can forget the ventilator shafts. In a maximum security place like this the air circulation probably vents through the side walls and would have impossibly narrow exit apertures. Trapdoors, I would have thought, they must have. How else could the guards get up to their towers or the electricians service the electric fence when the need arises? I can hardly see them climbing up ninety feet high vertical steel ladders bolted to an inside wall. Do you know whether the Lubylan runs to lifts?’

‘That I do know. There’s a stairs shaft runs from top to bottom in each building with two lifts on either side of the shafts.’

‘Presumably it services the ninth floor as well as the rest. That means that the lift-head – you know, where they have the pulley mechanism for the cables – must protrude above the roof. That could provide a way in.’

‘It would also provide an excellent way of having yourself crushed to death if you were descending the shaft as the lift came up. It’s happened before, you know, and not seldom either, with service men working on top of a lift.’

‘That’s a risk. Walking a frozen two-thousand-volt cable in a high wind – we have to assume the worst – isn’t a risk? What’s on the eighth floor? More laboratories?’

‘Oddly, no. That belongs to the east building – the detention centre. The senior prison officers and prison staff sleep there – maybe they can’t stand the sound of the screams, maybe they don’t want to be around in the detention centre if the enemies of the State manage to break loose – I don’t know. All the prison offices and records offices are kept there. Apart from the guards’ sleeping quarters and dining quarters, all of the detention centre is given over to cells. Apart, that is, from a few charming places in the basement which are euphemistically referred to as interrogation centres.’

Bruno looked at him consideringly. ‘Would it be out of order for me to enquire where you get all this detailed information from? I thought that no stranger would ever be allowed inside and that no guard would ever dare talk.’

‘Not at all. We have, as they say, our man in Crau. Not an American, a native. He was imprisoned some fifteen years ago for some trifling political offence, became what we would call a trusty after a few years and had the complete run of the building. His privileged position did not affect in the slightest the complete and total hatred he nourishes for the regime in general and Lubylan and all those who work inside it in particular. He still drinks with the guards and warders from the Lubylan and one way or another manages to keep us reasonably up to date with what’s going on. It’s over four years since he’s been discharged but the guards still regard him as a trusty and talk freely, especially when he plies them with vodka. We provide the money for the vodka.’

‘It’s a messy business.’

‘All espionage and counter-espionage is. The glamour quotient is zero.’

‘The problem still remains. There may just be a solution. I don’t know. Have you mentioned any of this to Maria yet?’

‘No. Plenty of time. The fewer people who know – ’

‘I’d like to talk to her tonight. May I?’

Harper smiled. ‘Three minds are better than two? That’s hardly a compliment to me.’

‘If only you knew it, it is. I can’t afford to have you too closely involved with anything I’m doing. You’re the co-ordinator and the only person who really knows what is going on – I still don’t believe that you have told me everything I might know, but it doesn’t seem all that important any more. Besides, I have courted the young lady assiduously – although it was under instructions I haven’t found the task too disagreeable – and people are accustomed to seeing us together now.’

Harper smiled without malice. ‘They’re also accustomed to seeing young Henry squiring her around, too.’

‘I shall challenge him to a duel when we get some suitably central European background – the atmosphere has to be right. I don’t need Maria’s ideas. All I want from her is her co-operation. No point in discussing it with you until I have it.’

‘No harm. When?’

‘After dinner.’

‘Where? Here?’

‘Not here. It’s perfectly proper for my doctor to come and see me – anxiously caring for one of the circus’s prime properties. But, as you say – or as you infer from Carter’s antics with his bug-detector – it’s just possible that someone might be keeping a wary eye on me. I don’t want them keeping a wary eye on her, too.’

‘Then I suggest her cabin.’

Bruno thought. ‘I’ll do that.’

Before dinner, Bruno went into the lounge bar, located Maria sitting by herself at a small corner table, sat beside her and ordered a soft drink. He said: ‘This is intolerable. Incredible. Maria Hopkins sitting alone.’

She said with some asperity: ‘And whose fault is that?’

‘Never mine, surely?’

‘I’m treated like a pariah, an outcast. There are lots of very nice men here who would love to buy me a drink and talk to me. But no, I’m the plague. The great Bruno might come in at any moment.’ She brooded a bit. ‘Or Henry. He’s as bad. Not only is he the light and the joy of his uncle’s heart – and it would be well to remember that his uncle is the big white chief – he’s also developing a very intimidating line in scowls. The only person who doesn’t give a damn is that enormous friend of yours. Do you know that he calls me your lady-love?’

‘And are you? That’s what’s usually referred to as a keen, probing question.’

She treated his remark with silent disdain.

‘Ah, well. And where is the rival for my ladylove’s hand tonight? I’ve just been talking about it with Dr Harper. Henry and I are going to fight a duel when we get to the Carpathians. You should come and watch. After all, it’s over you.’

‘Oh, do be quiet.’ She looked at him for a long moment, smiled widely in spite of herself and put her hand on his. ‘What’s the masculine equivalent of “lady-love”?’

‘There isn’t one or if there is I don’t think I’d like to hear it. Where is Henry?’

‘He’s gone sleuthing.’ Subconsciously, she lowered her voice. ‘I think he’s watching someone or shadowing someone. Henry has spent a great deal of time these past two days following someone he swears is following me.’

Surprisingly, Bruno was not amused. He said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I didn’t think it important. I didn’t take it seriously.’

‘Didn’t? And now?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Why should anyone be following you?’

‘If I knew I’d tell you, wouldn’t I?’

‘Would you?’

‘Please.’

‘Have you told Dr Harper?’

‘No. That’s the point. There’s nothing to tell. I don’t like being laughed at. I think Dr Harper’s got his reservations about me, anyway. I don’t want him to think that I’m a bigger ninny than he already probably thinks I am.’

‘This mystery shadower. He has a name?’

‘Yes. Wherry. A cabin steward. Small man, narrow face, very pale, narrow eyes, small black moustache.’

‘I’ve seen him. Your steward?’

‘Mr Wrinfield’s.’

Bruno was momentarily thoughtful, then appeared to lose interest. He raised his glass. ‘I’d like to see you after dinner. Your cabin, if you please.’

She raised her glass and smiled. ‘And your good health, too.’

Dinner over, Bruno and Maria made no secret of the fact that they were leaving together. This was commonplace, now, and no longer called for the raised eyebrow. Some twenty seconds after the departure Henry rose and sauntered from the dining saloon, leaving by the opposite door. Once outside he quickened his pace, crossed over to the other side, moved aft, descended a companionway and reached the passenger accommodation. Bruno and Maria were about fifty feet ahead of him. Henry moved in behind the companionway and stood in shadow.

Almost at once a figure emerged, or partially emerged from a side passage about twenty feet away on the left. He peered along the main passageway, saw Bruno and Maria and quickly withdrew into cover again but not so quickly that Henry couldn’t recognize him. It was, unmistakably, Wherry. Henry experienced a very considerable degree of self-satisfaction.

Wherry ventured another look. Bruno and Maria were just disappearing round a corner to their left. Wherry moved out and followed them. Henry waited until he, too, had disappeared from sight, then moved out in stealthy pursuit. He reached the left-hand corner on soundless tip-toes, glanced round with one eye then immediately moved back into cover again. Wherry was less than six paces away, looking down a right-hand corridor. Henry didn’t have to be told what Wherry was looking at – Maria’s cabin was the fourth door down. When he looked again Wherry had vanished. Henry moved, took up the position Wherry had so recently occupied and did some more head-poking. Wherry was engaged in the undignified occupation of pressing his right ear hard against a cabin door. Maria’s cabin. Henry drew back and waited. He was in no hurry.

Henry let thirty seconds pass then risked another look. The passageway was empty. Without haste Henry walked along the corridor, passed Maria’s cabin – he could hear the soft murmur of voices – reached the end and dropped down another companionway. He hadn’t spent two days so zealously – and, as he imagined, so unobtrusively – trailing Wherry without discovering where Wherry’s quarters were. That that was where he had gone Henry did not for a moment doubt.

Henry was right. Wherry had indeed gone to his cabin and was apparently so confident of himself that he had even left the door ajar. That there may have been some other reason for this apparent carelessness did not occur to Henry. Wherry was sitting with his back three-quarters turned to him, a pair of earphones, the lead of which led to a radio, clamped over his head. There was nothing unusual in this; Wherry, as did all stewards, doubled up with one of his mates, and as they were frequently on different shifts and slept at different times, the earphones insured that one could listen to the radio without disturbing the other’s sleep: it was standard practice on this and most passenger ships.

Maria sat on her cabin bed and stared at Bruno in shocked disbelief. Her face was drained of colour, leaving the eyes preternaturally huge. She said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper: ‘This is mad! It’s crazy! It’s suicidal!’

‘It’s all of that and a good deal else besides. But you have to appreciate that Dr Harper is in an impossible spot. As ideas go, it was an ingenious one, a desperate ingenuity, mind you, but there were no other options open to him, at least none that he could see.’

‘Bruno!’ She’d slipped off the bed and was on her knees beside his armchair, his left hand in both of hers; there was fear in her face and Bruno was uncomfortably aware that it wasn’t fear for herself. ‘You’ll be killed, you know you’ll be killed. Don’t. Please, don’t! No, Bruno. Nothing’s worth your life, nothing! Oh, God, there isn’t even a chance.’

He looked at her in mild surprise. ‘And all the time I thought you were a tough young CIA agent.’

‘Well, I’m not. Tough I mean.’ There was a sheen of tears in her eyes.

Almost absently, he stroked her hair. Her face was averted. ‘There might be another way, Maria.’

‘There can’t be another way.’

‘Look.’ With his free hand he swiftly sketched a diagram. ‘Let’s forget entrance via the power cable. The fact that those windows are barred may yet be the saving of us – well, me, anyway. I propose to get to this lane to the south of the research building. I’ll take with me a length of rope with a padded hook at one end. A couple of casts and I should catch a bar on a first-floor window. I haul myself up to the first floor, unhook the rope, repeat the process and reach the second floor. And so on until I get to the top.’

‘Yes?’ The scepticism now in her face hadn’t replaced the fear, merely redoubled it. ‘And then?’

‘I’ll find some way of silencing the guard or guards in the corner tower.’

‘What is it, Bruno? What drives you? You are a driven man, don’t you know that? You don’t work for the CIA and this damnable anti-matter can’t mean all the world to you. Yet I know – I don’t think – I know you’re willing to die to get inside that damnable prison. Why, Bruno, why?’

‘I don’t know.’ She couldn’t see his face but for a moment it was disturbed, almost wary. ‘Perhaps you’d best go and ask the shades of Pilgrim and Fawcett.’

‘What are they to you? You hardly knew them.’ He made no reply. She went on wearily: ‘So you’re going to silence the guards. How are you going to find a way of silencing two thousand volts of steel fencing?’

‘I’ll find a way, not by putting it out of action – that’s impossible – but by by-passing it. But I’m going to need your co-operation and you might end up in prison.’

‘What kind of co-operation?’ Her voice was toneless. ‘And what’s prison if you’re dead?’

Henry heard those words. Wherry had taken off his earphones to find some cigarettes and the conversation from Maria’s cabin, faint and tinny and distorted though it was, was understandable and unmistakable. Henry craned his head a bit more and saw that the radio was not the only piece of electrical equipment in the cabin. There was a small tape recorder on the deck with both spools slowly turning.

Wherry found his cigarettes, lit one, resumed his seat, picked up the phones and was about to replace them on his head when Henry pushed the door wide and stepped inside. Wherry swung round, his eyes wide.

Henry said: ‘I’d like to have that recorder if you don’t mind, Wherry.’

‘Mr Wrinfield!’

‘Yes, Mr Wrinfield. Surprised? The recorder, Wherry.’ Involuntarily, as it seemed, Wherry switched his glance to a spot above Henry’s left shoulder and Henry laughed. ‘Sorry, Wherry, but that’s been done before.’

Henry heard the last sound he was ever to hear, an almost soundless swish in the air behind him. His ears registered it for the fleeting fraction of a second but his body had no time to react. His legs crumpled and Wherry caught him just as he struck the deck.

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Maria’s voice was still colourless, without expression. ‘What’s prison, what’s anything, if you’re dead? Can’t you think of me? All right, all right, so I’m being selfish, but can’t you think of me?’

‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ He’d intended his voice to be harsh or at least cold but it sounded neither harsh nor cold to him. ‘We arrive in Crau on a Thursday and leave on the following Wednesday – it’s the longest stop-over on the tour. We have shows Friday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday. Sunday is free. So on Sunday we hire a car and have ourselves a little excursion into the country. I don’t know how far we’ll be allowed to go, I believe restrictions have been relaxed, but it doesn’t matter. We can always travel around in ever narrowing circles. What does matter – and this will have to be after dusk – is that on the way back we reconnoitre Lubylan and see if they have guards patrolling outside. If there are, I’ll need your help.’

‘Please give up this crazy idea, Bruno. Please.’

‘When I’m climbing up the south side of the research building you’ll be standing at the corner of the south lane and the main west street. This, I didn’t mention, will be after the last show on Tuesday night. The hired car, which I trust will be comprehensively insured, will be parked a few feet away in the main street. The windows will be open and you’ll have a small can of gasoline ready on the front seat. If you see a guard approaching, reach for the can, pour some fuel, not too much, on the front and rear upholstery, throw in a lighted match and stand smartly back. This will not only distract all attention but also the blaze will cast such a heavy shadow round the corner that I should be able to climb in almost complete darkness. I’m afraid you could be caught and questioned but the combination of Mr Wrinfield and Dr Harper should secure your release.’ He considered this for a moment. ‘On the other hand it may not.’

‘You’re quite mad. Quite.’

‘Too late to change my spots.’ He stood up and she with him. ‘Must get in touch with Dr Harper now.’

She reached up and locked her fingers round the back of his neck. Her voice reflected the misery in her face.

‘Please. Please, Bruno. Just for me. Please.’

He put his hands on her forearms but not to pull the fingers apart. He said: ‘Look, my ladylove, we’re only supposed to be falling in love.’ His voice was gentle. ‘This way there’s a chance.’

She said dully: ‘Either way you’re a dead man.’

Halfway to his stateroom Bruno found a phone and called Dr Harper. Harper was eventually located in the dining saloon. Bruno said: ‘My ankle’s acting up again.’

‘Ten minutes and I’ll be across.’

And in ten minutes’ time Harper was in the stateroom as promised. He made free of Bruno’s liquor cabinet, made himself at armchair ease and heard out Bruno’s account of his conversation with Maria. At the end, and after due thought, he said: ‘I’d say it gives you at least a fighting chance. Better than mine, I must admit. When do you propose to carry this into effect?’

‘The final decision is, of course, yours. I’d thought of making the reconnaissance on Sunday and making the entry on Tuesday night. Late Tuesday night. That seems like the best plan, the best time, for we will be leaving the following day and that will give the police less time for questioning if questioning there will be.’

‘Agreed.’

‘If we have to make a break for it – you have escape plans?’

‘We have. But they’re not finalized yet. I’ll let you know when they are.’

‘Coming via your little transceiver? Remember you promised to show me that some time.’

‘I shall. I’ve got to – I told you. I’ll do three things at one time, show you the transceiver, give you the guns and give you the escape plans. I’ll let you know when. What does Maria think of your idea?’

‘A marked lack of enthusiasm. But then she was hardly over the moon about yours either. But, however unwillingly, she’ll co-operate.’ Bruno stopped and looked around him in some puzzlement.

Harper said: ‘Something’s wrong?’

‘Not necessarily wrong. But the ship’s slowing down. Can’t you hear it? Can’t you feel it? The engine revolutions have dropped right away. Why should a ship stop – well, anyway, slow down – in the middle of the Mediterranean? Well, I suppose we’ll find out in good enough time.’

They found out immediately. The door was unceremoniously thrown open, with a force sufficient to send it juddering on its hinges. Tesco Wrinfield almost ran into the room.

His face was grey, his breathing heavy and short at the same time. He said: ‘Henry’s missing. He’s missing! We can’t find him anywhere.’

Bruno said: ‘Is that why the Carpentaria is slowing down?’

‘We’ve been searching everywhere.’ He gulped down the glass of brandy which Harper had handed to him. ‘The crew has searched, is still searching everywhere. There’s just no trace of him. Vanished, just vanished.’

Harper was soothing. He glanced at his watch. ‘Come on, now, Mr Wrinfield, that couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes ago. And this is a very big ship.’

‘With a very big crew,’ Bruno said. ‘They have a standardized routine for this sort of thing – searching for a missing passenger, that is. From the lifeboats to the hold they can cover every conceivable area in less time than you would believe possible.’ He turned to the distraught Wrinfield. ‘Sorry I can’t offer you any comfort, sir – but is the captain slowing down so as not to get too far away from the place where your nephew may have fallen overboard?’

‘I think so.’ Wrinfield listened. ‘We’re picking up speed, aren’t we?’

‘And turning,’ Bruno said. ‘I’m afraid that means, sir, that the captain is pretty sure that Henry is not aboard. He’ll be taking the Carpentaria through a hundred and eighty degrees and tracking back the way we came. If Henry is overboard he may well be swimming or afloat. This sort of thing has happened before: there’s always a chance, Mr Wrinfield.’

Wrinfield looked at him with distraught disbelief on his face and Bruno did not blame him: he didn’t believe it himself either.

They went on deck. The Carpentaria, retracing the course it had come, was making perhaps ten knots, no more. A motorized lifeboat, already manned, was swung out on its davits. Two powerful searchlights, one on either wing of the bridge, shone straight ahead. In the bows two seamen directed the beams of their portable searchlights almost vertically downwards. A little farther aft two seamen on either side waited with rope-attached and illuminated lifebelts. Beyond them still, rope-ladders, picked out in the beams of torches, hung over the side.

Twenty minutes of steadily mounting tension and dwindling hope passed. Wrinfield abruptly left his two companions and made his way to the bridge. He found the master on the starboard wing, binoculars to his eyes. He lowered them as Wrinfield came by his side and shook his head slowly.

He said: ‘Your nephew is not on the ship, Mr Wrinfield. That is for certain.’ The captain looked at his watch. ‘It is now thirty-eight minutes since your nephew was last seen. We are now at the precise spot where we were thirty-eight minutes ago. If he is alive – I’m sorry to be so blunt, sir – he cannot be beyond this point.’

‘We could have missed him?’

‘Most unlikely. Calm sea, windless night, no currents hereabouts worth speaking of and the Mediterranean, as you know, is virtually tideless. He would have been on the line we have taken.’ He spoke to an officer by his side: the man disappeared inside the bridge.

Wrinfield said: ‘And what now?’

‘We’ll take her round in a tight circle. Then in widening concentric circles, three, maybe four. Then, if we turn up nothing, we go back at the same speed to the spot where we turned.’

‘And that will be it?’

‘That, I’m afraid, will be it.’

‘You are not very hopeful, Captain.’

‘I am not very hopeful.’

It took the Carpentaria forty minutes to complete the search pattern and return to the position where she had turned round. Maria, standing with Bruno in the shadow of a lifeboat, shivered as the throb of the engines deepened and the Carpentaria began to pick up speed.

She said: ‘That’s it, then, isn’t it?’

‘The searchlights have gone out.’

‘And it’s my fault. It’s my fault.’ Her voice was husky.

‘Don’t be silly.’ He put his arm round her. ‘There’s no way this could have been prevented.’

‘It could! It could! I didn’t take him seriously enough. I – well, I didn’t quite laugh at him – but, well, I didn’t listen to him either. I should have told you two days ago.’ She was openly weeping now. ‘Or Dr Harper. He was such a nice person.’

Bruno heard the word ‘was’ and knew she had finally accepted what he himself had accepted an hour ago. He said gently: ‘It would be nice if you spoke to Mr Wrinfield.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. But – well, I don’t want to see people. Couldn’t we – I don’t like asking, but if he could come here – if you could bring him and – ’

‘Not on your sweet life, Maria. You’re not staying here alone.’

He sensed her staring at him in the darkness. She whispered: ‘Do you think that someone – ’

‘I don’t know what to think because I don’t know how or why Henry died. All I’m certain of is it was no accident: he died because he found out that someone was too interested in you and because he must have made the mistake of finding out too much. I’ve been asking one or two questions. Apparently he left the dining saloon just after we did. He left by another door but I suppose he wanted to avoid any obvious connection. I’m sure he wasn’t directly following us – he may have taken a dim view of my association with you, but he was straight, honest and the last peeping Tom one could imagine. I think he was acting in his self-appointed guardian role. I think he was checking to see if anyone was following or watching us – Henry had a romantic streak and this sort of thing would have appealed to him. I can only assume that he did indeed find some such person, and that that person – or another person, God only knows how many unpleasant characters there may be aboard – found Henry in a highly compromising situation. Compromising to the villains, I mean. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the primary object of attention was you. Just bear in mind that you can’t swim very far if the back of your head has been knocked in in advance.’ He produced a handkerchief and carried out running repairs to the tear-stained face. ‘You come along with me.’

As they walked along the boat-deck they passed and greeted Roebuck. Bruno made an unobtrusive follow-me gesture with his hand. Roebuck stopped, turned and sauntered along about ten paces behind them.

Wrinfield was finally located in the radio office, arranging for the dispatch of cablegrams to Henry’s parents and relatives. Now that the initial shock was over Wrinfield was calm and self-composed and in the event had to spend considerably more time in comforting Maria than she him. They left him there and found Roebuck waiting outside.

Bruno said: ‘Where’s Kan Dahn?’

‘In the lounge. You’d think there’s a seven-year famine of beer just round the corner.’

‘Would you take this young lady down to her cabin, please?’

‘Why?’ Maria wasn’t annoyed, just puzzled. ‘Am I not capable – ’

Roebuck took a firm grip on her arm. ‘Mutineers walk the plank, young lady.’

Bruno said: ‘And you lock your door. How long will it take you to get to bed?’

‘Ten minutes.’

‘I’ll be along in fifteen.’

Maria unlocked the door at the sound of Bruno’s voice. He entered, followed by Kan Dahn, who was carrying a couple of blankets under his arm. Kan Dahn smiled genially at her, then wedged his massive bulk into the armchair and carefully arranged the blankets over his knees.

Bruno said: ‘Kan Dahn finds his own quarters a bit cramped. He thought he’d take a rest down here.’

Maria looked at them, first in protest, then in perplexity, then shook her head helplessly, smiled and said nothing. Bruno said his good night and left.

Kan Dahn reached out, turned down the rheostat on the flexible bedside light and angled the remaining dim glow so that it was away from the girl’s face and leaving him in deep shadow. He took her hand in his massive paw.

‘Sleep well, my little one. I don’t want to make a thing out of this but Kan Dahn is here.’

‘You can’t sleep in that awful chair?’

‘Not can’t. Won’t. I’ll sleep tomorrow.’

‘You haven’t locked the door.’

‘No,’ he said happily. ‘I haven’t, have I?’

She was asleep in minutes and no one, most fortunately for the state of his continued good health, came calling on her that night.

CHAPTER SIX

The arrival, unloading and disembarkation at Genoa was smooth and uneventful and took place in a remarkably short space of time. Wrinfield was his usual calm, efficient and all-overseeing self and to look at him as he went about his business it would have been impossible to guess that his favourite nephew, who had been much more like a son to him, had died the previous night. Wrinfield was a showman first, last and all the way between: in the hackneyed parlance the show had to go on, and as long as Wrinfield was there that it would most certainly do.

The train, with the help of a small shunting engine, was assembled and hauled to a shunting yard about a mile away where some empty coaches and provisions for animals and humans were already waiting. By late afternoon the last of the preparations were complete, the small diesel shunter disengaged itself and was replaced by the giant Italian freight locomotive that was to haul them over the many mountains that lay in their way. In the gathering dusk they pulled out for Milan.

The swing through Europe, which was to cover ten countries – three in western Europe, seven in eastern Europe – turned out to be something more than a resounding success. It resembled a triumphant progress and as the circus’s fame travelled before it the welcome, the enthusiasm, the adulation became positively embarrassing until the stage was reached that there were half a dozen applications for each seat available for any performance – and some of the auditoriums were huge, some bigger than any in the United States. At dingy sidings in big cities they were greeted and seen off by crowds bigger than those paying homage to the latest fabulous group of singers – or cup-winning football teams – at international airports.

Tesco Wrinfield, determinedly and with a conscious effort of will, had put the past behind him. Here he was in his element. He revelled in solution of the complexities of the vast logistical problems involved. He knew Europe, especially eastern Europe, where he had recruited most of his outstanding acts, as well as any European on the train and certainly far better than any of his executives or American-born artistes and workers. He knew that those audiences were more sophisticated about and more appreciative of the finer arts of the circus than American and Canadian audiences, and when those people’s papers increasingly referred to his pride and joy as the greatest circus of all time it was undiluted balm to his showman’s heart: even more heady, were that possible, were the increasing references to himself as the greatest showman on earth. Nor was he displeased with the pragmatic side of it all: the packed houses and the very high profits made ledger books a positive pleasure to peruse: one cannot be a great showman without being a great businessman as well. It came to the stage that he began calculating that, even without the United States government backing, he could still, America to America, have made a handsome profit on the tour. Not, of course, that the United States government would be apprised of this.

At least as happy were those of his artistes – over half of them – who came from eastern Europe. For them, especially for the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians, whose circus training schools were the best in Europe and probably in the world, this was the long-promised homecoming. In front of their own people they excelled themselves, reaching heights of professional brilliance never attained before. The morale in a top circus is always high: even so, Wrinfield had never seen those people so happy and contented.

They swung through northern Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary then across the Curtain back into Austria. It was after the final show of their first day in Vienna, the finale of which had been greeted with the now standard rapturous ovation, that Harper – who had kept their contacts on the Continent to the barest minimum – approached Bruno. He said: ‘Come to my compartment when you are ready.’

When Bruno arrived, Harper said without preamble: ‘I promised you I’d show you three things in one night. Here they are.’ He unclipped the bottom of his medical bag and drew out a metal container smaller even than a box of Kleenex tissues. ‘A little transistorized beauty. Earphones and mike. This switch is for power. This button is for a combination of pre-selected wavelengths and call-up – the receiver in Washington is manned twenty-four hours a day. This spring-loaded lever is for speak-transmit. Simple.’

‘You said something about a code.’

‘I won’t burden you with that. I know if I wrote it out you could commit it to memory in nothing flat but the CIA has a thing about committing codes to paper, however temporarily. Anyway, if you do have to use this machine – which would mean, unfortunately for me, that I would no longer be around – you wouldn’t want to bother with code anyway. You just shout “Help!” in plain English.

‘It’s on this machine that I received confirmation of our escape route instructions today – this evening, in fact. There’s a NATO exercise taking place in the Baltic in about ten days’ time. An unspecified naval vessel – they’re a very cagey lot in Washington; I assume it’s American but I don’t even know what type of craft it is – will be standing by or cruising off the coast from the Friday night until the following Friday. It carries an Air-Sea Rescue helicopter. It will land at a place I’ll show you when we get there – I don’t consider it wise to carry maps on me and, besides, I can’t properly locate it until we get there. The ship is tuned to the same wavelength as Washington. We press this top button on the transceiver here – just as simple as that – and the helicopter comes a-running.’

‘All seems perfectly straightforward. You do seem to have this organized. You know, I’m beginning to think that the Government regard Van Diemen’s pieces of paper as very valuable indeed.’

‘One gathers that impression. By the way, I’m curious. How long does your memory span last?’

‘As long as I want.’

‘So you’ll be able to memorize the contents of those papers and reproduce them, say, a year later?’

‘I should think so.’

‘Let’s hope that’s the way it’s going to be – that you’re going to be given the chance to reproduce them, I mean. Let’s hope nobody ever finds out that you got in there, did your mentalist bit and left unseen. Let’s hope, in other words, that you don’t have to use these.’ From the breast pocket of his jacket Harper unclipped a couple of pens, one black, one red. They were of the heavy felt-Biro type with the release button at the top. ‘I picked these up in town today. I don’t have to tell you where I picked them up.’

Bruno looked at the pens, then at Harper. ‘What on earth would I want to use those things for?’

‘Whatever the faults of our science and research department, it’s not lack of imagination. They positively dote on dreaming up these little toys. You don’t think I’m going to let you cross two eastern frontiers with a couple of Peacemaker Colts strapped to your waist? These are guns. Yes, guns. The red one is the nasty one, the one with the anaesthetic-tipped needles which are not so healthy for those with heart conditions: the other one is the gas gun.’

‘So small?’

‘With the micro-miniaturization techniques available today, those are positively bulky. The needle gun has an effective range of forty feet, the gas gun of not more than four. Operation is simplicity itself. Depress the button at the top and the gun is armed: press the pocket clip and the gun is fired. Stick them in your outside pocket. Let people get used to the sight of them. Now listen carefully while I outline the plans for Crau.’

‘But I thought you had already agreed to the plan – my plan.’

‘I did and I do. This is merely a refinement of the original part of that plan. You may have wondered why the CIA elected to send you with a medical person. When I have finished you will understand.’

Some four hundred and fifty miles to the north, three men sat in a brightly lit, windowless and very austere room, the furniture of which consisted mainly of metal filing cabinets, a metal table and some metal-framed chairs. All three were dressed in uniform. From the insignia they wore, one was a colonel, the second a captain, the third a sergeant. The first was Colonel Serge Sergius, a thin, hawk-faced man with seemingly lidless eyes and a gash where his mouth should have been: his looks perfectly befitted his occupation, which was that of a very important functionary in the secret police. The second, Captain Kodes, was his assistant, a well-built athletic man in his early thirties, with a smiling face and cold blue eyes. The third, Sergeant Angelo, was remarkable for one thing only, but that one thing was remarkable enough. At six feet three, Angelo was considerably too broad for his height, a massively muscular man who could not have weighed less than two hundred and fifty pounds. Angelo had one function and one only in life – he was Sergius’s personal bodyguard. No one could have accused Sergius of choosing without due care and attention.

On the table a tape recorder was running. A voice said: ‘and that is all we have for the moment’. Kodes leaned forward and switched off the recorder.

Sergius said: ‘And quite enough. All the information we want. Four different voices. I assume, my dear Kodes, that if you were to meet the owners of those four voices you could identify them immediately?’

‘Without the shadow of a doubt, sir.’

‘And you, Angelo?’

‘No question, sir.’ Angelo’s gravelly booming voice appeared to originate from the soles of his enormous boots.

‘Then please go ahead, Captain, with the reservation of our usual rooms in the capital – the three of us and the cameraman. Have you chosen him yet, Kodes?’

‘I thought young Nicolas, sir. Extraordinarily able.’

‘Your choice.’ Colonel Sergius’s lipless mouth parted about a quarter of an inch, which meant that he was smiling. ‘Haven’t been to the circus for thirty years – circuses had ceased to exist during the war – but I must say I’m looking forward with almost childish enthusiasm to this one. Especially one which is as highly spoken of as this one is. Incidentally, Angelo, there is a performer in this circus whom I’m sure you will be most interested to see, if not meet.’

‘I do not care to see or meet anyone from an American circus, sir.’

‘Come, come, Angelo, one must not be so chauvinistic.’

‘Chauvinistic, Colonel?’

Sergius made to explain then decided against the effort. Angelo was possessed of many attributes but a razor-sharp intelligence was not among them.

‘There are no nationalities in a circus, Angelo, only artistes, performers: the audience does not care whether the man on the trapeze comes from Russia or the Sudan. The man I refer to is called Kan Dahn and they say that he is even bigger than you. He is billed as the strongest man in the world.’

Angelo made no reply, merely inflated his enormous chest to its maximum fifty-two inches and contented himself with a smile of wolfish disbelief.

The three-day stay in Austria was by now the inevitable enormous success. From there the circus moved north and, after only one stop-over, arrived in the city where Sergius and his subordinates had moved to meet them.

At the evening performance, those four had taken the best seats about six rows back facing the centre of the centre ring. All four were in civilian clothes and all four were unmistakably soldiers in civilian clothes. One of them, immediately after the beginning of the performance, produced a very expensive-looking camera with a telephoto lens, and the sight of this produced a senior uniformed police officer in very short order indeed. The taking of photographs was officially discouraged, while with Westerners the illegal possession of an undeclared camera, if discovered, was a guarantee of arrest and trial: every camera aboard the circus train had been impounded on entering the country and would not be returned until the exit frontier had been crossed.

The policeman said: ‘The camera please: and your papers.’

‘Officer.’ The policeman turned towards Sergius and gave him the benefit of his cold insolent policeman’s stare, a stare that lasted for almost a full second before he swallowed what was obviously a painful lump in his throat. He moved in front of Sergius and spoke softly: ‘Your pardon, Colonel. I was not notified.’

‘Your headquarters were informed. Find the incompetent and punish him.’

‘Sir. My apologies for – ’

‘You’re blocking my view.’

And, indeed, the view was something not to be blocked. No doubt inspired by the fact that they were being watched by connoisseurs, and wildly enthusiastic connoisseurs at that, the company had in recent weeks gone from strength to strength, honing and refining and polishing their acts, continually inventing more difficult and daring feats until they had arrived at a now almost impossible level of perfection. Even Sergius, who was normally possessed of a mind like a refrigerated computer, gave himself up entirely to the fairyland that was the circus. Only Nicolas, the young – and very presentable – photographer, had his mind on other things, taking an almost non-stop series of photographs of all the main artistes in the circus. But even he forgot his camera and his assignment as he stared – as did his companions – in total disbelief as The Blind Eagles went through their suicidal aerial routine.

It was shortly after their performance that a nondescript individual approached Sergius and murmured: ‘Two rows back, sir, ten seats to your left.’ A brief nod was Sergius’s only acknowledgement.

Towards the very end of the performance Kan Dahn, who appeared to grow fitter with the passing of every day, went through his paces. Kan Dahn spurned the use of props such as iron bars and bar-bells: a five-year-old could tie an iron bar in knots and lift a massive 400-pound bar-bell, provided they were made of the right material, which could be anything except iron. He invariably worked with human beings: creatures who ran, jumped and turned cartwheels could not very well be made of featherweight plastic.

As a finale, Kan Dahn paraded around the centre ring, with a heavy wooden pole resting in a yoke on his shoulders. On either side of the yoke sat five circus girls. If Kan Dahn was aware of the presence of their weight he showed no signs of it. Occasionally, he stopped to scratch the back of his left calf with his right instep. Sergius leaned across Kodes and spoke to Angelo, who was watching the spectacle with an air of determined indifference.

‘Big, isn’t he, Angelo?’

‘All show muscle. Puffy. I once saw an old man in Athens, seventy-five if he was a day, and not a kilo, I swear, over fifty, carrying a grand piano the length of a street. Friends must have put it on his back – he could never have straightened his legs under the load – and if he didn’t keep them straight he would have collapsed.’

Even as he spoke, Kan Dahn started climbing a massive step-ladder in the centre of the ring. The platform on top was about three feet square. Kan Dahn reached this without any apparent difficulty, stepped on to an inset turntable, and by a progressive twisting of his tree-trunk legs set the turntable in circular motion, slowly speeding up until the girls on the outer ends of the pole were no more than coloured kaleidoscopic blurs. Gradually he slowed, came to a stop, descended the ladder, knelt, then bowed his shoulders until the feet of the circus girls touched the sawdust. Sergius leaned across again.

‘Could your old friend in Athens have done that with his piano?’ Angelo made no reply. ‘Do you know that they say that he can do that with fourteen girls but the management won’t allow him because they say nobody will believe it?’ Angelo remained silent.

The performance ended and the rapturous applause, a standing ovation, lasted several minutes. When the audience started filing out, Sergius looked for and located Wrinfield, and by judging his pace contrived to meet him at the exit gangway. He said: ‘Mr Wrinfield?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry, should I know you?’

‘We haven’t met.’ Sergius pointed to the picture on the front of the souvenir programme he carried. ‘The likeness, you will agree, is unmistakable. My name is Colonel Sergius.’ They shook hands formally. ‘Stupendous, Mr Wrinfield. Impossible. Had anyone told me that such a show existed, I would have called him a liar to his face.’ Wrinfield beamed. Beethoven’s Ninth left him cold – this was the music that reached his heart. ‘I’ve been a devotee of the circus ever since I was a young boy,’ – Sergius was as fluent a liar as the next man and a great deal more so than most – ‘but never in my life have I seen anything like this.’

Wrinfield beamed some more. ‘You are too kind, Colonel.’

Sergius shook his head sadly. ‘I wish I had the gift with words the way you have with those marvellous performers of yours. But that is not the sole reason for introducing myself. Your next stop, I know, is Crau.’ He produced a card. ‘I am the Chief of Police there.’ Sergius carried a considerable variety of cards with him. ‘Whatever I can do, I am at your service. Ask and it’s done and I shall consider it a privilege. Not that I shall ever be very far from your side. It is my intention to attend every single performance, for I know I shall never see the like again. For the duration of your stay, crime in Crau can reign unchecked.’

‘Again, you are too kind. Colonel Sergius, you shall be my personal – and, I hope – permanent guest at the circus. I would be honoured – ’ He broke off and looked at the three men, who showed no intention of moving on. ‘They are with you, Colonel?’

‘How thoughtless of me. I’m afraid I quite got carried away.’ Sergius performed the introductions while Wrinfield introduced Harper, who had been seated next to him.

Wrinfield went on: ‘As I was about to say, Colonel, I would be honoured if you and your men would join us in my office for a glass of your national drink.’ Sergius said that the honour would be entirely theirs. It was all very cordial.

In the office, one glass became two and then three. Nicolas, permission given, clicked his camera constantly, not forgetting to take at least a dozen of a smilingly protesting Maria, who had been seated behind her desk when they had entered.

Wrinfield said: ‘I wonder, Colonel, if you would like to meet some of our performers?’

‘You’re a mind-reader, Mr Wrinfield! I must confess that I did have that very thought in mind but I didn’t dare presume – I mean, I have sufficiently trespassed on your hospitality – ’

‘Maria.’ Wrinfield rattled off a list of names. ‘Go to the dressing-rooms and ask them if they would be kind enough to come and visit our distinguished guest.’ Wrinfield, in recent weeks, had fallen victim to a certain mid-European floweriness of speech.

And so they came to see the distinguished guest, Bruno and his brothers, Neubauer, Kan Dahn, Ron Roebuck, Manuelo, Malthius and half a dozen others. Apart from a certain reserve in Angelo’s attitude when he greeted Kan Dahn, everything was very pleasant indeed, fulsome congratulations offered and as modestly received. Sergius did not overstay his welcome and left almost immediately after the last handshake, he and Wrinfield exchanging mutual expressions of goodwill and cordial anticipation of their next meeting.

Sergius had a large black limousine waiting outside, with a uniformed police chauffeur and a dark man in dark clothes beside him. After about quarter of a mile, Sergius stopped the car and issued certain instructions to the plain-clothes man, whom he addressed as Alex. Alex nodded and left the car.

Back in his hotel suite, Sergius said to Kodes and Angelo: ‘You had no trouble in matching the voices with the tapes?’ Both men shook their heads. ‘Good. Nicolas, how long will it take you to develop those photographs?’

‘To develop? Within the hour, sir. Printing will take considerably longer.’

‘Just print those of Mr Wrinfield, Dr Harper, the girl – Maria, isn’t it? – and the leading circus performers.’ Nicolas left and Sergius said: ‘You may leave, too, Angelo. I’ll call you.’

Kodes said: ‘Is one permitted to ask the object of this exercise?’

‘One is permitted. I was about to tell you, which is why I asked Angelo to leave. A loyal soul, but one does not wish to overburden his mind with complexities.’

Bruno and Maria, for the first time walking arm in arm, made their way along the ill-lit street, talking with apparent animation. Some thirty yards behind them Alex followed with the unobtrusive casualness of one who has had long practice in following people without calling attention to himself. He slowed his pace as the couple ahead turned through a doorway with an incomprehensible neon sign above.

The café was ill-lit and smoke-filled from an evil-smelling brown-coal fire – the outside temperature hovered near the freezing point – but cosy and comfortable enough if one had a gas-mask ready to hand. It was half full. Seated in a wall booth were Manuelo and Kan Dahn, the former with a coffee, Kan Dahn with two litres of beer. Kan Dahn’s legendary consumption of beer was excused – by Kan Dahn – on the grounds that he required it to keep his strength up: it certainly never affected his performance. Bruno spoke briefly to them and asked to be excused for not joining them. Kan Dahn smirked and said that that was perfectly all right by them: Bruno led Maria to a corner table. Only a few seconds later Roebuck sauntered in, acknowledged their presence with a wave of his hand and sat down with his two companions. The three of them talked desultorily, then started, casually at first, then with increasing urgency, to search through their pockets: from where Bruno sat it would appear that a certain degree of acrimony, not to say downright recrimination, had crept into their conversation. Finally Roebuck scowled, made a dismissive gesture, rose and crossed to Bruno’s table.

He said sadly: ‘Roebuck, begging for alms. Not one of us bothered to check if the others were carrying money. As it turns out, we don’t have a cent. Rather, we do have thousands of cents, but we doubt whether they’ll accept dollars here and Kan Dahn appears to be against washing up in the kitchen. Now, if I had comrades in distress – ’

Bruno smiled, brought out a wallet, handed some notes to Roebuck, who thanked him and left. Bruno and Maria ordered an omelette apiece.

Alex, shivering in the cold on the pavement, waited until the food had been served, crossed the street and went into a phone booth. He fed in money, dialled a number and said: ‘Alex.’

‘Yes?’

‘I followed the man and the girl to the Black Swan. They’re beginning to eat so it looks as if they’ll be there for some time yet. They spoke to two other people, at another table, after their arrival, before going to their own place.’

‘You sure you have the right ones?’

‘I have their photographs, Colonel. A third man came in shortly after the man and girl had sat down at their own table. He sat with the other two men for some time then went across to this man Bruno. He seemed to be borrowing money, at least I saw notes changing hands.’

Sergius said: ‘Do you know any of those three men?’

‘No, sir. But one of them I’d recognize if I didn’t see him again for twenty years. A giant, the biggest man I’ve ever seen, bigger even than Angelo.’

‘I won’t award myself any prizes for guessing who that is. Come back here. No, wait. Stay out of sight so that no one inside the café can see you. I’ll send Vladimir and Josef down to relieve you. I’ll give them their instructions. You just have to point those people out to them. A car will be there in a few minutes.’

Inside the café, Maria said: ‘What’s wrong, Bruno?’

‘What should be wrong?’

‘You look troubled.’

‘I am troubled. D-day approaches with uncommon haste. Just about a week now. Wouldn’t you be troubled if you had to get inside that damned Lubylan?’

‘It’s not just that. You’ve become remote from me. Cool. Distant. I’ve done something you don’t like? Said something wrong?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘Please.’

‘Is this affection? Or something more? Or something else?’

‘Why do you hurt me so?’

‘I don’t want to.’ His voice lacked the ring of conviction. ‘Have you ever been an actress?’

She took her hand away. There was bafflement in her face, and pain. She said: ‘I can’t think what I’ve done wrong, I can’t think what I’ve said wrong – and you do want to hurt me. Suddenly you want to hurt me. Why don’t you slap me, then? Right here in public? That way you can hurt both me and my pride. I don’t understand you, I just don’t understand you.’ She pushed back her chair. ‘I can find the way.’

It was Bruno’s turn to take her hand. Whether this was affection, appeal or just an attempt to restrain her it was difficult to say. He said: ‘I wish I could.’

‘Could what?’

‘Find the way.’ He looked at her, his brow slightly corrugated. ‘You’ve been how long with the CIA?’

‘Nearly four years.’ The bafflement was back in her face.

‘Who appointed you to this particular job?’

‘Dr Harper. Why?’

‘I thought it was a man called Charles.’

‘He appointed me. Dr Harper made the suggestion. He was very insistent that I should be the one who should come along on this trip.’

‘I’ll bet he was.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Merely congratulations. To Dr Harper. On his impeccable good taste. Who’s Charles?’

‘Just Charles.’

‘He’s not Charles. He has another name.’

‘Why didn’t you ask him?’

‘He wouldn’t have told me. I’d hoped you might.’

‘You know that we can’t divulge things such as that.’

‘Well, I like that. I’m going to risk my damned life for the CIA and they can’t even trust me with a straightforward piece of information like that. I thought that at least by this time I could trust you or you could trust me. It seems I was wrong – on the second count, anyway. You’re willing that I should die but you’re not even willing to tell me that. Trust and faith and loyalty – those are great things, aren’t they? Or used to be. There doesn’t seem to be too much of it around nowadays.’

‘His name is Admiral George C. Jamieson.’

Bruno looked at her for a long moment, then his face slowly broke into a wide smile that transformed his whole expression. She snatched her hand away and looked at him furiously. At their table Kan Dahn nudged Roebuck and Manuelo in turn: all three watched the scene with interest.

‘You horrid man! You deceitful, devious, conniving human being – if I can call you that! And you had the audacity to ask me if I had ever been an actress. I never have been but even if I had I could never hold a candle to you as an actor. Why did you do it? I don’t deserve that.’

Roebuck said: ‘She’s getting madder by the minute.’

‘How little you know of human nature,’ Kan Dahn said. ‘She’ll be proposing to him inside thirty seconds.’

Bruno said: ‘I apologize. But I had to.’

‘Had to find out if I would trust you?’

‘It’s terribly important to me. Please forgive me.’ He took her unresisting hand again and examined its ringless state with care. He said: ‘It looks pretty bare to me.’

‘What does?’

‘You know that we’re only supposed to be in love?’

‘Yes.’ It was Maria’s turn to be silent. ‘Or do you think we should stop supposing?’ Her voice was hesitant, unsure.

‘I don’t think. I know. Do you love me, Maria?’

The voice was a whisper but the answer immediate. ‘Yes.’ She looked at her left hand and smiled. ‘It does look a little bare, doesn’t it?’

Kan Dahn leant back against the booth in an expansive fashion. ‘What did your Uncle Kan Dahn tell you? Somebody buy me a drink.’

Bruno said: ‘Sure?’

‘Even the most intelligent man can ask the most stupid questions. Can’t you see it?’

‘I think I can. At least, I hope I can.’

‘I’ve been in love with you for weeks.’ She had stopped smiling now. ‘In the early days I used to watch you blindfolded on that trapeze. Then after a while I had to leave the auditorium and go outside and be sick. Now I don’t dare go inside at all and I’m still sick. A fraction of a second too early or too late …’ She broke off and her eyes were wet. ‘But I can still hear the music, your music, and when it begins I die inside.’

‘Will you marry me?’

‘Of course I will, you lunkhead.’ She was crying openly now.

‘There’s no need for such language. And I’d like to point out that Kan Dahn, Manuelo and Ron are taking the greatest interest in the proceedings. I have a feeling they’re taking bets on us. I’ve also got the feeling that I’m going to suffer when they get me alone.’

‘I can’t see them.’ Bruno passed his handkerchief and she mopped her eyes. ‘Yes, they are looking a bit this way, aren’t they?’ Unconsciously crumpling the handkerchief in her hand, she turned her gaze back to Bruno. ‘I love you, I want to marry you – isn’t that old-fashioned – I’d marry you tomorrow – but I can’t love and marry the greatest aerialist in the world. I know I can’t. I think you know that I can’t. Do you want me to be sick all my life?’

‘That wouldn’t be nice for either of us. Well, it’s all living and learning – I thought blackmail normally started after one married.’

‘You live in a strange world, Bruno, if you think honesty and blackmail are the same thing.’

Bruno appeared to ponder. ‘You could always marry the greatest ex-aerialist.’

‘Ex?’

‘No problem.’ Bruno made a throwaway gesture with his right hand. ‘I’ll burn my trapeze or whatever the phrase is.’

She stared at him. ‘Just like – just like that? But it’s your life, Bruno.’

‘I have other interests.’

‘What?’

‘When your name is Mrs Wildermann, I’ll let you know.’

‘This year, next year, some time, never.’ Matrimony was obviously closer to her heart than alternative occupations for a future husband.

‘Could be the day after tomorrow.’

She got back to staring at him. ‘Do you mean here? In this country?’

‘Heaven forbid. No. In the States. Special licence. We could get the first plane out tomorrow. Nobody’s going to stop us. I’ve plenty of money.’

She took some time to assimilate this, then said with conviction: ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

Bruno said agreeably: ‘Lots of times that’s true. This time, no. I know what I’m saying because – and it’s no exaggeration – I know we’re in deadly danger. I know they’re on to me. I’m pretty sure they’re on to you. We were followed here tonight. I don’t want – ’

‘Followed? How do you know?’

‘I know. Later. Meantime, I don’t want you to die.’ For a moment Bruno rubbed his chin with a pensive hand. ‘Come to that, I don’t particularly want to die myself.’

‘You’d let your brothers down? You’d let Mr Wrinfield and the circus down? You’d abandon this entire mission?’

‘I’d abandon anything in the world for you.’

‘You’re running scared, Bruno?’

‘Possibly. Let’s go to the American embassy now and get things fixed up. It’s hardly office hours, but they wouldn’t turn away a couple of nationals in distress.’

She looked at him in total disbelief. Then the disbelief faded to be replaced with something very close to contempt. Then that look faded in turn to be replaced by a very thoughtful expression indeed. A faint smile touched her face, widened, and then suddenly she began to laugh. Bruno looked at her speculatively, the three men at the adjacent table in perplexity. She said: ‘You’re impossible. It’s not enough for you to test me once, you have to do it all over again.’

It was as if she hadn’t spoken. He said: ‘You heard me? I’d give up the world for you. Can’t you do the same for me?’

‘Willingly. The whole world. But not the whole world and Bruno. If we went to the embassy, do you know what would happen? I’d be on that plane tomorrow. But you wouldn’t. Oh, no, you’d stay here. Don’t deny it. It’s in your face. You think you’re the inscrutable Bruno Wildermann. Everyone thinks so. Well, almost everyone. Three months and you won’t have a secret left from me.’

Bruno said: ‘I’m afraid of that. Okay, okay, so I tried and failed. Nothing new for me. Please don’t tell Dr Harper any of this. He’ll not only think me a fool but he’ll take a dim view of my mingling, shall we say, business and pleasure.’ He put money on the table. ‘Let’s leave. When we get to the door I’m going to turn back on some pretext and have a word with Roebuck. While I do that, have a look around, see if there is any person who might be taking – or about to take – an interest in us.’

At the doorway, Bruno, as if recalling something, turned back. He approached Roebuck and said: ‘What was he like?’

‘Medium height. Black hair. Black moustache. Black coat. He followed you all the way from the circus.’

‘Your compartments may be bugged. I doubt it, but no chances. See you.’

Arm in arm he walked along the street with Maria. She said curiously: ‘What are those three to you?’

‘Very old friends. No more. You don’t put friends’ heads on the chopping block. Fellow all in black, black hair, black coat. See him?’

‘Saw two, but none like that. One had that horrible marcelled blond hair, the other was as bald as a coot.’

‘Which means that Junior has returned to hand in his report to his boss.’

‘His boss?’

‘Colonel Sergius.’

‘The Crau police chief?’

‘He is not the Crau police chief. He’s the head of the national secret police.’

She stopped and looked at him. ‘How do you know? How can you know?’

‘I know. I know him although he doesn’t know me. You forget this is my country. But I know Sergius and I’ll never forget him. Would you forget the man who killed your wife?’

‘The man who – oh, Bruno!’ She paused. ‘But he must know now.’

‘He knows.’

‘But then he must know why you’re here!’

‘I imagine so.’

‘I’ll go with you tomorrow. I swear it.’ There was a note of hysteria in her voice. ‘That plane, Bruno, that plane. Don’t you know you’ll never leave this country alive?’

‘I have things to do. And kindly modulate your voice. There’s a character with horrible marcelled blond hair close behind.’

‘I’m scared. I’m scared.’

‘It’s catching. Come along and I’ll give you some real coffee.’

‘Where?’

‘In this accommodation of mine you envy so much.’

They walked some way in silence then she said: ‘Have you thought that if they’re on to you they may have bugged your place?’

‘Who says we’ve got to discuss affairs of state?’

Sergius was deeply engaged in discussing affairs of state. He said to Alex: ‘That’s all that happened? Bruno and the girl went into this café, he spoke briefly to the two men already seated, took the girl to a separate table and ordered a meal. Then a third man appeared, joined the other two men, went to Bruno’s table, borrowed some money from him and returned to his seat.’ Alex nodded. ‘And you said you didn’t know the names of any of those men, had never seen them before, but that one of them was a giant, as big as Angelo here?’

Alex looked at Angelo. ‘Bigger,’ he said with some satisfaction. Angelo was sadly lacking in Kan Dahn’s genial good nature and did not make the most lovable of characters.

Angelo scowled blackly but no one paid him any attention, possibly because it was difficult to differentiate between his black scowl and his normal expression.

Sergius said: ‘Well, we know who that is. Would you recognize the three men from their photographs?’

‘Of course.’ Alex looked hurt.

‘Angelo. Go tell Nicolas to bring whatever prints he has ready.’

Angelo returned with Nicolas and about twenty prints. Silently, Sergius handed them to Alex, who leafed rapidly through them. He put one on the table. ‘That’s the girl,’ he announced.

Sergius said with restraint, ‘We know that’s the girl.’

‘Your pardon, Colonel.’ Alex selected three more. ‘Those.’

Sergius took them and handed them to Kodes, who glanced at them briefly and said: ‘Kan Dahn, Manuelo the knife-thrower and Roebuck, the expert with the cowboy rope.’

‘Precisely.’ Sergius smiled his mordant smile. ‘Have them shadowed at all times.’

Kodes showed his surprise. ‘The presence of those three men could have been just coincidence. After all, they are among the outstanding artistes in the circus and it is natural that they should be friends. Besides, the Black Swan is, after all, the nearest café to the circus.’

Sergius sighed. ‘Alas, it was ever thus. I am left to fight on virtually alone. All the decisions have to be made, all the thinking has to be done by a senior officer, which is no doubt why I am a senior officer.’ A false modesty was not one of Sergius’s besetting sins. ‘Our Bruno Wildermann is clever, he may also be dangerous. He suspected, only he knows how, that he was under surveillance and put his suspicions to the test. He had this man Roebuck standing by to follow whoever might follow him. This would make Roebuck – and, by implication, the other two – something just a little bit more than friends. Roebuck followed Alex. He didn’t go to borrow money, he went to inform Bruno that he, Bruno, had been followed by a man with a black coat, black moustache, very stupid.’ He bestowed a pitying glance on the crestfallen shadower. ‘I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you, Alex, to look over your shoulder? Just once?’

‘I’m sorry, Colonel.’

Sergius gave him a look more commonly associated with a starving crocodile which has just spotted lunch.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The circus left for Crau on the Wednesday night. Before its departure Bruno had gone to Dr Harper’s rail compartment. For a man with so much on his mind, facing up to what was unquestionably the crucial moment of his professional career, Harper was remarkably calm and relaxed. It was more than could be said of Wrinfield, who sat there with a drink in his hand and a most dispirited expression on his face. Wrinfield had screwed his courage to the sticking point but now that the moment was at hand he had about him the air of a man who suspects that something is about to become unstuck. Crau was a huge black cloud on his horizon.

‘Evening, Bruno. A seat. What will you drink?’

‘Thank you. Nothing. I’ve only one a week and I’m reserving that for later.’

‘With the fair Miss Hopkins, one would suppose?’

‘One would suppose correctly.’

‘Why don’t you marry the girl?’ Wrinfield said sourly. ‘She’s getting so she’s almost useless to me now, either moping or dreaming the whole day long.’

‘I’m going to. Maybe she’s worried and nervous. Like yourself, Mr Wrinfield.’

‘Going to what?’ Harper said.

‘Marry her.’

‘Good God!’

Bruno took no offence. ‘Marriage is a common enough institution.’

Wrinfield said suspiciously: ‘Does she know about this?’ Wrinfield had become genuinely fond of her and had come to treat her as the daughter he’d never had, more especially since Henry’s death.

‘Yes.’ Bruno smiled. ‘So would you, if you kept your eyes open, sir. She sat next to you at table tonight.’

Wrinfield clapped his palm against his forehead. ‘She was wearing a ring tonight. She’s never worn a ring before. Fourth finger, left hand.’ He paused and came up with a triumphant solution. ‘An engagement ring.’

‘You’ve had a lot on your mind, sir. Like Maria. I bought it this afternoon.’

‘Well, congratulations. When we move off, we must come and toast the happy couple.’ Bruno winced but said nothing. ‘Eh, Dr Harper?’

‘Indeed. I couldn’t be more pleased.’

‘Thank you. I didn’t come to talk about the ring, though, just the company I had when I bought it. I’m afraid someone is on to me. A couple of nights ago I went with Maria to a café. It so happened Roebuck came along very soon after. He said he’d been intrigued by the behaviour of a character who emerged from the shadows of an alley near the circus when we’d passed by. Apparently he followed us all the way to the café, stopped when we stopped then took up a position across the road where he could watch us. It could have been coincidence or Roebuck’s lively imagination. Last night I was pretty certain that Maria and I were being followed again but I wasn’t sure. Today I was because it was in daylight. Not one shadow but two, taking the job in turns, one with artificially waved blond hair, the other completely bald. We wandered aimlessly, like a couple of tourists, wherever the fancy took us: they followed everywhere.’

‘I don’t like this,’ Harper said.

‘Thank you for not questioning my word. I don’t much like it either. And I don’t understand it. I’ve done nothing, absolutely nothing to attract any attention to myself. Maybe it’s just because my name is Wildermann and Crau’s my home town. It’s anybody’s guess. Maybe a dozen other circus people are under surveillance, too. Who’s to say?’

‘Most disturbing,’ Wrinfield said. ‘Most disturbing. What are you going to do, Bruno?’

‘What can I do? Just keep going, that’s all. Play it as it comes. One thing’s for sure, they won’t be shadowing me on the night.’

‘The night?’

‘Hasn’t Dr Harper told you?’

‘Ah. Tuesday. I wonder where we’ll all be then.’ With much clanking and shuddering the train began slowly to get under way.

‘I know where I’ll be. See you shortly.’ Bruno turned to go, then stopped short at the sight of the miniature transceiver on Harper’s desk. ‘Tell me. I’ve often wondered. How is it that the customs in various countries remove just about the fillings from our teeth while you manage to sail through with that transceiver?’

‘Transceiver? What transceiver?’ Harper clamped the earphones to his head, touched the microphone to Bruno’s chest, switched on the power and pulled the transmit switch backwards instead of forwards. The machine hummed and a narrow strip of paper emerged from an all but invisible slit at the side. After about ten seconds Harper switched off, tore the protruding few inches of paper away and showed it to Bruno. It had a long wavy line along the middle. ‘A cardiograph machine, my dear Bruno. Every travelling doctor needs one. You can’t imagine the fun I’ve had taking the cardiographs of customs official after customs official.’

‘Whatever will they think of next.’ Bruno left, walked along the corridors of the now-swaying train, picked up Maria from her compartment, took her along to his own, unlocked the handleless door and ushered her inside.

Bruno said: ‘Shall we have some music? Romantic, to fit the occasion? Then one of my incomparable dry martinis to celebrate – if that is the word – my descent into human bondage. And – it is just a thought – a few sweet nothings in your ear.’

She smiled. ‘That all sounds very pleasant. Especially the sweet nothings.’

He turned on the record player, keeping the volume low, mixed the Martinis, set them on the table, sat on the settee beside her and pressed his face against the dark hair in the approximate area of where her ear could be presumed to be. From the expressions on Maria’s face, first of startle-ment then of sheer incredulity, it was clear that Bruno had a line in sweet nothings that she had not previously encountered.

Crau lay just under two hundred miles distant, so that even for a necessarily slow freight train it was no more than a brief overnight haul there, with two intermediate stops. They left in darkness, they arrived in darkness, and it was still dark when they disembarked. It was also extremely cold. The first overwhelming impression of Crau was one of bleak inhospitability, but then railway sidings, especially in cold and darkness, are not the most welcoming of places anywhere. The siding in which they had just drawn up was an inconvenient three-quarters of a mile from the circus auditorium, but the organizational genius of Wrinfield and his executive staff had been functioning with its usual smooth efficiency and a fleet of trucks, buses and private cars was already waiting alongside.

Bruno walked beside the track towards a group of circus performers and hands who stood huddled under the harsh glare of an overhead arc-lamp. After exchanging the routine good mornings he looked around for his two brothers, but failed to see them. He spoke to the man nearest him, Malthius, the tiger trainer.

‘Seen my wandering brothers around? They’re a very hungry couple who never fail to join me for breakfast but I haven’t had the pleasure this morning.’

‘No.’ Malthius called out: ‘Anyone seen Vladimir and Yoffe this morning?’ When it soon became apparent that no one had, Malthius turned to one of his assistant trainers. ‘Go and give them a shake, will you?’

The man left. Dr Harper and Wrinfield, both with fur hats and collars upturned against the gently falling snow, came up and said their good mornings. Wrinfield said to Bruno: ‘Like to come with me and see what kind of exhibition hall they have for us here? For some odd reason it’s called the Winter Palace, although I can’t see it having any possible resemblance to that palace in Leningrad.’ He shivered violently. ‘Even more important, however, is the fact that I’m told that the central heating is superb.’

‘I’d like to. If you could just wait a moment. Two thirds of The Blind Eagles seem to have slept in this morning. Ah! Here’s Johann.’

Urgency in his voice, Malthius’s assistant said: ‘I think you’d better come, Bruno. Quickly!’ Bruno said nothing, just jumped quickly aboard the train. Dr Harper and Wrinfield, after an uncomprehending glance at each other, followed closely behind him.

Vladimir and Yoffe had shared a double-bedded compartment, nothing like the princely quarters of their elder brother but comfortable enough for all that. They had become renowned and teased for their almost compulsive tidiness: unquestionably, they would have been distressed to see its present state.

It was a shambles and looked as if a small but determined tornado had recently passed through it. Bedding lay scattered over the floor, two chairs were broken, glasses were smashed, a small handbasin had been splintered and even a window – of heavy plate – had been cracked and starred without however, shattering. Most ominously of all, there were bloodstains on the torn sheets and on the cream-panelled walls.

Bruno went to move inside but Harper put a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t. The police wouldn’t like it.’

The police, when they arrived, didn’t like it at all. They were shocked that such a monstrous thing, the kidnapping of two famous American artistes – if they knew that Vladimir and Yoffe had been born less than half a mile from where they stood they were keeping the information to themselves – should happen upon their soil. The most immediate, the most rigorously thorough investigation would be held immediately. To begin with, said the inspector who had arrived to take charge, the area had to be completely cleared and cordoned off by his men, which was a lot less impressive than it sounded, for the cordoning off consisted merely of stationing two of them in the corridor. The occupants of the coach in which the brothers had slept were to remain available for questioning. Wrinfield suggested the dining-room – the temperature outside was below freezing point – and the inspector agreed. As they moved off, plain-clothes detectives and fingerprint experts arrived at the scene. Wrinfield elected to join them in the dining-car, after directing his immediate deputies to proceed with the unloading of the train and the setting up of the circus and the cages in the arena immediately outside.

The air in the dining-wagon was almost unbearably warm – the giant locomotive was still hooked up and would remain so throughout the day to provide the necessary heat for the animals, who would remain there until they were moved up to the circus in the evening.

Bruno stood apart with Wrinfield and Harper. Briefly, they discussed what could possibly have happened to the brothers and why; but as there was clearly no answer to either question they soon fell silent and remained that way until no less a person than Colonel Sergius himself made his entrance. His face was set in hard, bitter lines and he gave the impression that his anger was barely under control.

‘Dastardly!’ he said. ‘Unbelievable! Humiliating! That this should happen to guests in my country. I promise you, you shall have the full criminal investigating weight of our country behind this. What a welcome and what a black day for Crau!’

Harper said mildly: ‘This can hardly be laid at the door of any citizen of Crau. They were missing when we arrived here. We had two intermediate stops on the way up. It must have happened at one of those.’

‘True, true, Crau is exonerated. Does that make it any easier for us to bear, do you think? What hurts our country hurts us all.’ He paused and then his voice took on a deeper timbre. ‘It needn’t have happened at either of those two stops.’ He looked at Bruno. ‘I’m sorry to have to suggest this but they might have been thrown off the train while in motion.’

Bruno didn’t stare at him, his feelings and emotions were always too tightly under control for that, but he came close to it. ‘Why should anyone do that? Why should anyone even lay hands on them? I know my brothers better than anyone in the world – they never did anyone any harm.’

Sergius looked at him pityingly. ‘Don’t you know that it is always the innocent who suffer? If you want to commit a burglary you don’t go to the home of a notorious gangster to do it.’ He turned to an aide. ‘Get the radio telephone in here and get the Minister of Transport on the line for me. No, do it yourself. If he complains about still being in bed tell him I’ll come and talk to him personally. Tell him I want every inch of track between the capital and here searched for two missing people. Tell him it’s urgent. Tell him they may be badly hurt and that the temperature is below freezing. Tell him I want a report within two hours. Then call the Air Force. Tell them the same thing but only to use helicopters. I want their report within the hour.’ The aide left.

Wrinfield said: ‘You think there’s a serious possibility – ’

‘I think nothing. A policeman’s job is to overlook nothing. We’ll know inside the hour. I have no faith in that old fuddy-duddy transport minister, but the Air Force is a different matter altogether. Pilots flying at ten metres, a trained observer for either side.’ He looked at Bruno with what he probably intended to be a sympathetic expression. ‘I commiserate with you, Mr Wildermann. I also commiserate with you, Mr Wrinfield.’

Wrinfield said: ‘With me? Admittedly, two of my very best artistes are gone. True, I held them in the highest regard. But so did a score of others. So, for that matter, did everyone else in the circus.’

‘The others won’t have to pay the ransom. I merely advance a possibility. If such a possibility existed you would pay a great deal of money to get them back, would you not?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Alas, even in our glorious country, we have our villains. We even have kidnappers – and their favourite method of seizing a victim is from a train. And they are very desperate men – kidnapping is a capital offence in our country. This is but supposition, but a fairly strong one.’ He looked again at Bruno and the gash that substituted for his mouth parted fractionally. Sergius was smiling. ‘And we commiserate with ourselves. It looks as if we shall not be seeing The Blind Eagles in Crau.’

‘You’ll be seeing one of them.’

Sergius looked at him. A score of people looked at him. Maria slowly passed a tongue across her lips. Sergius said: ‘Am I to understand – ’

‘I used to be a solo act before my brothers were old enough to join me. A few hours’ practice and I can do it again.’

Sergius looked at him for a considering moment. ‘We all know you are a man totally without nerves. Are you also a man totally without feelings?’

Bruno turned away without reply.

Sergius looked after him thoughtfully, then turned away also. He said: ‘All the occupants of that coach here?’

‘All present, Colonel,’ Wrinfield said. ‘But you voiced the opinion that kidnappers were – ’

‘Might. And you heard what I said – a policeman’s job is to overlook nothing. Anybody here heard any noise, any unusual sound during the night?’ From the loud silence it was apparent that no one had heard anything. ‘Very well. The brothers slept in the end compartment in the coach. Who slept next to them?’

Kan Dahn moved his massive bulk forward. ‘I did.’

‘Surely you heard something?’

‘I already haven’t answered your question. That means no. I’m a very heavy sleeper.’

Sergius looked thoughtful. ‘You’re big enough to do it single-handed.’

Kan Dahn’s tone was mild. ‘Are you accusing me?’

‘I’m making an observation.’

‘Vladimir and Yoffe were good friends of mine, very good friends. Everyone knows this for years. Why should I wait until now and then do something crazy like this? Besides, if I did it there would have been no signs of a struggle. An arm round each and I would have just carried them away.’

Sergius was sceptical. ‘Indeed?’

‘Perhaps the colonel would like a demonstration?’

‘It should be interesting.’

Kan Dahn indicated the two burly uniformed policemen standing together. He said: ‘They are bigger, much bigger, and stronger than the two brothers?’

‘I should have thought so.’

For the giant he was Kan Dahn moved with the speed of a cat. Before the two policemen had time to assume defensive postures Kan Dahn was upon them, a gorilla arm round each of them, pinning their own arms to their sides. A moment later both men were off their feet, struggling furiously to free themselves from what, judging by the expressions on their faces, was a far from affectionate embrace.

Kan Dahn, his voice still mild, said: ‘Stop struggling or I shall have to squeeze.’

Doubtless under the impression that Kan Dahn could squeeze no more, the men intensified their efforts to escape. Kan Dahn squeezed some more. One man cried out, the other grunted, both expressions of agony. Kan Dahn tightened the inexorable pressure. Both men stopped struggling. Carefully, gently, Kan Dahn set them on their feet and stood back and watched sorrowfully as the two men collapsed to the floor.

Sergius regarded the tableau thoughtfully. ‘Angelo should be here this morning. You, Kan Dahn, are exonerated.’ The tone was totally humourless. He turned as Captain Kodes hurried in. ‘Well?’

‘All we have is fingerprints, Colonel. There are many sets of two different fingerprints. Those must belong to the brothers. But we also found two other sets in rather unusual positions – against the walls, on the window, on the inside of the door – places where men might have braced themselves in the course of a violent fight.’

‘So.’ Sergius thought briefly, absently watching the painful efforts of the two policemen to struggle to their feet. Their sufferings obviously left him completely unmoved. He turned to Wrinfield. ‘Every man in this circus will have to be fingerprinted this morning. In the Exhibition Hall, where your circus is being held.’

‘Is it really necessary – ’

Sergius affected weariness. ‘I have a job to do. And, for the third time, a policeman’s job is to overlook nothing.’

Although Crau lay roughly to the north of the capital, the main railway station did not, as one might have expected, lie to the south of the town: because of unfavourable terrain the railway line curved round the city and entered from the north. Consequently, when the black limousine of uncertain vintage set out for the Winter Palace, it drove due south along what, downtown, developed into the main thoroughfare of the city. This north-south street was, confusingly enough, called West Street.

Bruno sat in the back seat and beside him was Dr Harper. Wrinfield, whose gloomy expression was indication enough that his dark forebodings about Crau were in the process of being confirmed, sat silently beside the driver. The weather was hardly calculated to lend a certain buoyancy to the spirits: it was just after dawn, a bleak and bitter dawn with snow swirling down from the darkly lowering clouds.

Some hundred yards from the siding Harper, who was sitting in the right-hand corner, rubbed the steamy window, peered out and up, then touched Bruno on the arm.

‘Never seen anything like it. What on earth is that?’

‘I can’t see from here.’

‘On top of those buildings. Bushes, shrubs – good heavens, they’ve even got trees growing up there.’

‘Roof gardens. Very common in central Europe. Living in a flat doesn’t have to mean that you can’t have your own little plot of land. Lots of them even have lawns.’ Bruno rubbed his own window. The building to his left was as grim, bleak and forbidding as any he had ever seen. He counted the storeys: there were nine of them. He saw the windows, each one heavily barred. He observed the curving menace of the steel spikes that surrounded the roof, the watch-towers at the north and south corners: from that angle it was impossible to see what might be on the roofs of those towers but Bruno knew there would be searchlights and klaxons mounted there. He looked at Harper and lifted an eyebrow: the driver had smilingly shrugged when addressed in English, but the chances were high that he was one of Sergius’s men and Sergius would not have picked a non-English speaker for the job. Harper caught his glance and nodded, although the confirmation was really superfluous: the reality of Lubylan all too dismayingly matched Harper’s description of it. The prospect of trying to effect an entry into the fortress was as chilling as the dawn.

Some quarter of a mile farther on they passed by a row of stationary black cars lining the right-hand pavement. At the front was a wreath-covered hearse: the hour was not early but it was daybreak: the cortège, Bruno reflected, must have quite some way to go. Across the pavement from the hearse was an establishment with draped black velvet curtains in the windows, those being the framing for what the proprietor obviously regarded as being his choicest selection of wreaths, artificial bouquets under glass domes and unengraved marble tombstones, all in black. The adjacent door was also of the same cheerful colour, relieved only by a white cross. Bruno caught a glimpse of the door opening and the foot of a coffin on the shoulders of the two leading bearers.

‘How very convenient,’ Bruno murmured.

Dr Harper appeared not to have heard him.

The Winter Palace was the pride of Crau, and deservedly so. Deliberately baroque in construction, both inside and out, it was in fact only three years old. It was a reinforced steel and concrete structure, clad both inside and out with white marble veneer from which, presumably, the name of the building arose. The building itself consisted of a very large, elliptical covered forecourt, which gave on to the much greater elliptical stadium beyond it. The interior could not have been in greater contrast to the spires, minarets and gargoyles which so liberally be-festooned the exterior: here all the latest ideas in spectacle presentation had been incorporated, so that everything was modern, almost excruciatingly so, functional and above all adaptable. The permutations of staging and seating, always to the best advantage of performers and audience, were practically limitless. It could be and was used for opera, theatre, cinema and music-hall: it was also used for the presentation of sporting spectacles ranging from ice-hockey to covered court tennis: for the setting for a circus amphitheatre it was nothing short of superb. In the last capacity, the sharply tiered seats, each one upholstered and with its own armrests, could accommodate no fewer than eighteen thousand spectators. It was, Wrinfield declared, the finest auditorium he had ever seen, no mean compliment coming from a man who had seen the best in North America and Europe, especially when it was borne in mind that the population of Crau totalled just under a quarter million.

The mass fingerprinting of the entire circus staff took place during the course of the forenoon in one of the many restaurants and bars – empty at that time of day – that lined the inner side of the forecourt. Resentment and indignation at what was pretty well regarded as cavalier and unnecessary treatment ran high, and it required much of Wrinfield’s considerable tact and powers of persuasion to ensure co-operation. Sergius, supervising by remote control from the comparative comfort of Wrinfield’s prefabricated office and armoured in his seemingly pachydermatous hide, remained totally unmoved by the sullenness of the circus employees, the numerous far-from-affectionate glances that were cast in his direction. Towards the end of the fingerprinting he received a telephone message, but as he spoke in his own language neither Wrinfield nor Maria, who were present with him, could understand the burden of the conversation.

Sergius drained his glass of vodka – he had the same osmotic affinity for his national drink as parched sand has for water – and said: ‘Where is Bruno Wildermann?’

‘He’s in the stadium. But – but you’re not seriously thinking of fingerprinting him? His own brothers – ’

‘Please. I look so foolish? Come. It concerns you, too.’

As the two men approached, Bruno turned away from the supervision of the rigging of a low wire across the centre ring. He looked without expression at Sergius and said: ‘You have word, Colonel?’

‘Yes. Both from the railways and the Air Force. But I’m afraid both reports are negative. No trace of any person lying alongside the railway tracks.’

‘So that has to make it kidnapping?’

‘There would appear to be no other obvious solution.’

Late that afternoon, when Bruno was rehearsing his solo act on the newly slung high trapeze, he was summoned to Wrinfield’s office. He slid to the ground, put on his mentalist’s mandarin cloak and went to the office, which, as seemed inevitable, was only feet from the as yet empty tigers’ cage. Wrinfield was at his desk, Maria at hers. Sergius and Kodes were standing. The atmosphere was halfway between the tense and the funereal.

Sergius took a piece of paper that Wrinfield was studying and handed it to Bruno. It held a printed message, in English, which said: ‘The Wildermann brothers will be returned alive on the receipt of 50,000 dollars. Used bills. Any denomination. Instructions for transfer on Sunday, delivery Monday. Failure to deliver will result in delivery of two left little fingers Monday. Same fingers delivered if notes received but found to be treated for identification by infra-red, ultra-violet or X-ray. Two fingers on Tuesday. On Thursday, two one-handed trapeze artistes.’

Bruno handed the note back to Sergius.

‘Your suspicions were correct.’

‘I was right. No nerves. No feelings. Yes, it would appear so.’

‘They seem ruthless.’

‘They are.’

‘And professionals?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do they keep their promises?’

Sergius sighed. ‘Are you so naive as to try to trap me into something? You are about to say that I seem to know a lot about them. If they are who I think they are – and this has all the hallmarks of previous ransom demands – then they are an extremely able and efficient gang of kidnappers who have carried out a number of such kidnappings in the past few years.’

‘You know the members of this gang?’

‘We think we know one or two.’

‘Then why are they still at large?’

‘Suspicion, my dear Wildermann, is not proof. One cannot ask for the death penalty on suspicion.’

‘I did ask an earlier question. About their promises. Will they carry out their mutilation threats? If the ransom is paid, will they return my brothers alive?’

‘I can offer no guarantee. But, judging by past experiences, the chances are high. It’s only logical and good business for them, as specialists in kidnapping operations, to do so. Sounds ridiculous in this context, but it builds up good faith and good will. If a kidnapee is returned promptly and unharmed after the payment of the ransom, then the parents and relatives of the next victim will meet the demands at once, knowing the chances are good that the victim will be returned. But if the kidnappers were to accept the ransom and then kill the victim, then the relatives of the next victim might conclude that the paying of a ransom was a waste of time.’

‘What are the chances of tracing them before Monday?’

‘Four days? Very little, I’m afraid.’

‘Then we’d better have the money ready, hadn’t we?’ Sergius nodded and Bruno turned to Wrinfield. ‘It would take me a year to pay you back, sir.’

Wrinfield smiled, a not very happy smile. ‘I’d do it for the boys themselves without any hope of return. And – I’m being purely selfish, of course – there is not and never will be another group like The Blind Eagles.’

Walking casually, aimlessly, they turned right down a street opposite the undertaker’s on West Street. Dr Harper said: ‘Are we being followed, do you think?’

Bruno said: ‘Watched, I don’t know. Shadowed, no.’

Inside two or three hundred yards the street deteriorated into a winding country lane. Soon afterwards it came to a stout wooden bridge which spanned a slow-flowing and obviously very deep river, some thirty feet in width with ice already forming at both edges. Bruno examined the bridge with some deliberation, then hurried to catch up with an impatient Harper, whose circulation was clearly not geared to cope with the sub-freezing temperature.

Immediately beyond the bridge the road was swallowed up by what appeared to be virgin pine forest. Less than a quarter of a mile farther on the two men came to a large semicircular glade lying to the right of the road.

‘The helicopter,’ Dr Harper said, ‘will land here.’

Dusk was falling when Bruno, clad in his best street clothes, returned to Wrinfield’s office. Only the owner and Maria were there.

Bruno said: ‘Okay if I take my fiancée for a coffee, sir?’

Wrinfield smiled, nodded, then got back to looking worried and preoccupied again. Bruno helped the girl on with her heavy Astrakhan coat and they walked out into the thinly falling snow.

Maria said crossly: ‘We could have had coffee in the canteen or in your living-room. It’s very cold and damp out here.’

‘Nagging and not even married yet. Two hundred yards is all. You will find that Bruno Wildermann always has his reasons.’

‘Such as?’

‘Remember our friends of the other night, who followed us so faithfully?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at him, startled. ‘You mean – ’

‘No. They’ve been given a rest – snow has an adverse effect upon both marcelled hair and bald heads. The lad behind us is about three inches shorter than you, with a cloth cap, torn coat, baggy trousers and scuffed shoes. Looks like a skid row graduate but he’s not.’

They turned into a café that had obviously abandoned hope a generation ago. In a country where the cafés seemed to specialize in smoke and minimal lighting, this one had really touched rock bottom. One’s eyes immediately started to smart: a couple of guttering candles would have provided an equal level of illumination. Bruno guided Maria to a corner seat. She looked around her in distaste.

‘Is this what married life is going to be like?’

‘You may look back on this as one of your happiest days.’ He turned round. The Chaplinesque figure had slumped wearily into a chair close to the door, produced a ragged paper from somewhere, and sat there dispiritedly with his elbow on the table and a grimy hand to his head. Bruno turned back to Maria.

‘Besides, you must admit there is a certain wild Bohemian charm to the place.’ He put his finger to his lips, leaned forward and pulled up the collar of her Astrakhan coat. Nestling deep in the fold of her collar was a small shining metal device no bigger than a hazelnut. He showed it to her and she stared at him wide-eyed: ‘Order up for us, will you?’

He rose, crossed to where their shadow was sitting, seized him unceremoniously by the right wrist, pulled it away from his head and twisted sharply, an action that gave rise to a sudden yelp of pain from the man but no reaction from the few other customers, who were presumably accustomed to such diversions to the point of boredom. Nestled in the man’s hand was a tiny metal earphone attached to a wire. Bruno followed the wire to a small metal box, hardly larger than the average cigarette lighter, which was tucked away in a breast pocket. Bruno put those items in his own pocket and said: ‘Tell your boss that the next person who follows me will be in no condition to report back again. Leave!’

The man left. Bruno went back to his table and showed the trophies. He said: ‘Let’s try it.’ He lifted the tiny meshed metal oval to his ear. Maria turned her mouth towards the collar of her coat.

She murmured: ‘I love you. Truly. Always.’

Bruno removed the earphone. ‘It works just fine, although it doesn’t seem to know what it’s saying.’ He put the equipment away. ‘A persistent lot, aren’t they. But so very, very obvious.’

‘Not to me. I think you should be doing my job. But did you have to let him know we were on to him?’

‘They know anyway. Maybe now they’ll stop shadowing me and let me move around in peace. Anyway, how could I talk to you with that character invading my privacy?’

‘What is there to talk about?’

‘My brothers.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean – why were they taken, Bruno?’

‘Well, for one thing, it’s given that hypocritical, twisting, sadistic liar – ’

‘Sergius?’

‘Are there any other hypocritical, twisted, sadistic liars around? He had the perfect excuse to fingerprint every man in the circus.’

‘How will that help him?’

‘Apart from giving him a feeling of power and making him feel very clever, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They’re my hostages to fate. If I step too far out of line things will happen to them.’

‘Have you talked to Dr Harper about this? You can’t risk their lives, Bruno. You just can’t. Oh, Bruno, if I lose you and they’re lost and all the others in your family gone – ’

‘Well, really, you are the biggest crybaby I’ve ever met. Who on earth picked you for the CIA?’

‘So you don’t believe this story about the kidnapping?’

‘Love me?’ She nodded. ‘Trust me?’ She nodded again. ‘Then don’t discuss anything I discuss with you with any other person at all.’

She nodded a third time. Then she said: ‘Including Dr Harper?’

‘Including Dr Harper. He has a brilliant mind, but he’s orthodox and doesn’t have the central European mentality. I’m not brilliant, but I’m unorthodox and I was born right here. He might not care for some improvisations I might care to make.’

‘What kind of improvisations?’

‘There you are. The perfect wife. How come that red stain on your handkerchief? How should I know what improvisations? I don’t even know myself yet.’

‘The kidnapping?’

‘Rubbish. He had to have a story to explain their disappearance. You heard him say he knew who a couple of the gang were but could prove nothing? If Sergius knew them he’d have them in Lubylan in nothing flat and he’d have the entire truth out of them in five minutes before they died in screaming agony. Where do you think you are – back home in New England?’

She shivered. ‘But why the threats? Why say they’d cut off your brothers’ fingers? Why ask for that money?’

‘Background colour. Besides, liberally rewarded though Sergius may be for his nefarious activities, fifty thousand bucks in the hip pocket gives a man a very comfortable feeling of support.’ He looked at his untouched coffee in distaste, put some money on the table and rose. ‘Like some real coffee?’

They returned to the exhibition hall looking for transport to the train, which was almost immediately arranged. As they moved out again into the darkness and the cold they met Roebuck coming in. He was pinched-looking, bluish and shivering. He stopped and said: ‘Hi. Going back to the train?’ Bruno nodded. ‘A lift for your tired and suffering friend.’

‘What are you suffering from? Been swimming in the Baltic?’

‘Come winter, all the cab-drivers in this town go into hibernation.’ Bruno sat silently in front on the way to the station. When they alighted at the siding opposite the passenger coaches Bruno sensed as much as felt something being slipped into his jacket pocket.

After the coffee, sweet music and sweet nothings in Bruno’s living-room, Maria left. Bruno fished out a tiny scrap of paper from his pocket. On it Roebuck had written: ‘4.30. West entrance. No question. My life on it.’ Bruno burnt the note and washed the ashes down the hand-basin.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was during the last performance on the following night – it was officially billed as the opening night, although, in fact, there had already been two performances, a free matinée for school children and a somewhat shortened version of the full show in the afternoon – that the accident happened. Such was the rapturous enthusiasm among the huge audience that the effect was all the more shocking when it came.

The Winter Palace had not one empty seat left, and over ten thousand applications for tickets, made in advance over the previous two weeks, had had to be regretfully refused. The atmosphere at the beginning was gay, festive, electric in anticipation. The women, who gave the lie to the western concept of Iron Curtain women being habitually dressed in belted potato sacks, were dressed as exquisitely as if the Bolshoi were visiting town – which indeed it had done, thought not to so tumultuous a welcome – and the men were resplendent in either their best suits or in bemedalled uniforms. Sergius, seated next to Wrinfield, looked positively resplendent. Behind the two of them sat Kodes and Angelo, the latter tending slightly to lower the whole tone of the atmosphere. Dr Harper, as ever, sat in the front row, the ever-present black bag unobtrusively under his seat.

The audience, suitably primed by all the wildly enthusiastic reports that had preceded the circus, were prepared for magnificence and that night they got it. As if to make up for the absence of The Blind Eagles – a broadcast announcement before the start of the performance had regretted that two members were indisposed, what Sergius didn’t want to get into the papers didn’t get into the papers – the performers reached new heights that even astonished Wrinfield. The crowd – there were eighteen thousand there – were entranced, enthralled. Act merged into act with the smooth and flawless precision for which the circus was justly famed and each act seemed better than the one that had preceded it. But Bruno that evening surpassed them all. That night he was not only blindfolded but hooded as well and his repertoire on the high trapeze, helped only by two girls on the platforms, who handled the two free trapezes in timing with the strict metronomic music from the orchestra, had an almost unearthly magic about it, a sheer impossibility that even had the most experienced circus artistes riveted in a stage halfway between awe and outright disbelief. He climaxed his act with a double somersault between two trapezes – and his outstretched hands missed the approaching trapeze. The heart-stopping shock throughout the audience was a palpable thing – unlike the crowds at many sports ranging from auto-racing to boxing, circus audiences are always willing the performers to safety – and equally palpable was the sigh of incredulous relief when Bruno caught the trapeze with his arched heels. Just to show that there was no fluke about it, he did it all over again – twice.

The crowd went hysterical. Children and teenagers screamed, men shouted, women cried in relief, a cacophony of noise that even Wrinfield had never heard before. It took the ringmaster three full minutes and repeated broadcast appeals to restore a semblance of order to the crowd.

Sergius delicately mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. ‘No matter what you pay our young friend up there, it must always be only a fraction of what he is worth.’

‘I pay him a fortune and I agree with you. Have you ever seen anything like that?’

‘Never. And I know I never will again.’

‘Why?’

Sergius cast about for an answer. He said: ‘We have an old saying in our country: “Only once in a lifetime is a man permitted to leave himself and walk with the gods.” Tonight was such a night.’

‘You may be right, you may be right.’ Wrinfield was hardly listening to him, he turned to talk to an equally excited neighbour as the lights dimmed. A millimetric parting appeared between the upper and lower parts of Sergius’s mouth – one could not call them lips. Sergius was permitting himself another of his rare smiles.

The lights came on again. As usual, in the second part of his act, Bruno used the low wire – if twenty feet could be called low – strung across the cage, open at the top, where Neubauer was, as he liked to put it, conducting his choir – putting his dozen Nubian lions, an unquestionably savage lot who would permit nobody except Neubauer near them, through their paces.

For his first trip across the back of the cage on his bicycle and with his balancing pole, Bruno – without the normal burden of having to carry his two brothers – obviously found it almost ridiculously easy to perform the acrobatic balancing feats which in fact few other artistes in the circus world could emulate. The crowd seemed to sense this ease, and while appreciating the skill, daring and expertise, waited expectantly for something more. They got it.

On his next sally across the ring he had a different machine, this one with a seat four feet high, pedals clamped below the seat and a vertical driving chain four feet in length. Again he crossed and recrossed the ring, again he performed his acrobatic feats, although this time with considerably more caution. When he crossed for the third time he had the audience distinctly worried, for this time his seat was no less than eight feet in height, with a vertical drive chain of corresponding length. The concern of the audience turned to a lip-biting apprehension when, reaching the sag in the middle, both bicycle – if the strange contraption could any longer be called that – and man began to sway in a most alarming fashion and Bruno had virtually to abandon any but the most elementary acrobatics in order to maintain his balance. He made it safely there and back, but not before he had wrought considerable changes in the adrenaline, breathing and pulse rates of the majority of the audience.

For his fourth and final excursion both seat and chain were raised to a height of twelve feet. This left him with his head some sixteen feet above the low wire, thirty-six above the ground.

Sergius glanced at Wrinfield, who, eyes intent, was rubbing his hand nervously across his mouth. Sergius said: ‘This Bruno of yours. Is he in league with the chemists who sell sedatives or the doctors who specialize in heart attacks?’

‘This has never been done before, Colonel. No performer has ever attempted this.’

Bruno started to sway and wobble almost immediately after leaving the top platform but his uncanny sense of balance and incredible reactions corrected the swaying and brought it within tolerable limits. This time there was no attempt to perform anything even remotely resembling acrobatics. His eyes, sinews, muscles, nerves were concentrating on one thing alone – maintaining his balance.

Exactly halfway across Bruno stopped pedalling. Even the least informed among the audience knew that this was an impossible, a suicidal thing to do: when the factor of balance has reached critical dimensions – and here it already appeared to have passed that critical limit – only movement backwards or forwards could help to regain equilibrium.

‘Never again,’ Wrinfield said. His voice was low, strained. ‘Look at them! Just look at them!’

Sergius glanced at the audience but not for longer than a fraction of a second. It was not difficult to take Wrinfield’s point. Where audience participation is concerned a certain degree of vicarious danger can be tolerable, even pleasurable: but when the degree of danger becomes intolerable – and prolonged, as in this case – the pleasure turns to fear, a corroding anxiety. The clenched hands, the clenched teeth, in many cases the averted gazes, the waves of empathy washing across the exhibition hall – none of this was calculated to bring the crowds flocking back to the circus.

For ten interminable seconds the unbearable tension lasted, the wheels of the bicycle neither advancing nor going backwards as much as an inch, while its angle of sway perceptibly increased. Then Bruno pushed strongly on the pedals.

The chain snapped.

No two people afterwards gave precisely the same account of what followed. The bicycle immediately tipped over to the right, the side on which Bruno had been pressing. Bruno threw himself forward – there were no handlebars to impede his progress. Hands outstretched to cushion his fall, he landed awkwardly, sideways, on the wire, which appeared to catch him on the inner thigh and the throat, for his head bent backwards at an unnatural angle. Then his body slid off the wire, he seemed to be suspended by his right hand and chin alone, then his head slid off the wire, the grip of his right hand loosened and he fell into the ring below, landed feet first on the sawdust and immediately crumpled like a broken doll.

Neubauer, who at that moment had ten Nubian lions squatting on a semi-circle of tubs, reacted very quickly. Both Bruno and the bicycle had landed in the centre of the ring, well clear of the lions, but lions are nervous and sensitive creatures and react badly to unexpected disturbances and interruptions – and this was a very unexpected disturbance indeed. The three lions in the centre of the half-circle had already risen to all four feet when Neubauer stooped and threw handfuls of sand in their faces. They didn’t sit, but they were temporarily blinded and remained where they were, two of them rubbing their eyes with massive forepaws. The cage door opened and an assistant trainer and clown entered, not running, lifted Bruno, carried him outside the cage and closed the door.

Dr Harper was with him immediately. He stooped and examined him briefly, straightened, made a signal with his hand, but it was unnecessary. Kan Dahn was already there with a stretcher.

Three minutes later the announcement was made from the centre ring that the famous Blind Eagle was only concussed and with any luck would be performing again the next day. The crowd, unpredictable as all crowds, rose to its collective feet and applauded for a whole minute: better a concussed Blind Eagle than a dead one. The show went on.

The atmosphere inside the first aid room was distinctly less cheerful: it was funereal. Present were Harper, Wrinfield, two of his associate directors, Sergius and a splendidly white-maned, white-moustached gentleman of about seventy. He and Harper were at one end of the room where Bruno, still on the stretcher, lay on a trestle table.

Harper said: ‘Dr Hachid, if you would care to carry out your own personal examination – ’

Dr Hachid smiled sadly. ‘I hardly think that will be necessary.’ He looked at one of the associate directors, a man by the name of Armstrong. ‘You have seen death before?’ Armstrong nodded. ‘Touch his forehead.’ Armstrong hesitated, advanced, laid his hand on Bruno’s forehead. He almost snatched it away.

‘It’s cold.’ He shivered. ‘Already it’s gone all cold.’

Dr Hachid pulled the white sheet over Bruno’s head, stepped back and pulled a curtain which obscured the stretcher. Hachid said: ‘As you say in America, a doctor is a doctor is a doctor, and I would not insult a colleague. But the law of our land – ’

‘The law of every land,’ Harper said. ‘A foreign doctor cannot sign a death certificate.’

Pen in hand, Hachid bent over a printed form. ‘Fracture of spine. Second and third vertebrae, you said? Severance of spinal cord.’ He straightened. ‘If you wish me to make arrangements – ’

‘I have already arranged for an ambulance. The hospital morgue – ’

Sergius said: ‘That will not be necessary. There is a funeral parlour not a hundred metres from here.’

‘There is? That would save much trouble. But at this time of night – ’

‘Dr Harper.’

‘My apologies, Colonel. Mr Wrinfield, can I borrow one of your men, a trusted man who will not talk?’

‘Johnny, the night watchman.’

‘Have him go down to the train. There’s a black case under my bunk. Please have him bring it here.’

The back parlour of the undertaker’s emporium was harshly lit with neon strip lighting which pointed up the coldly antiseptic hygiene of the surroundings, tiled walls, marble floor, stainless steel sinks. Upended coffins lined one wall. In the centre of the room were three more coffins on steel-legged marble tables. Two of those were empty. Dr Harper was pulling a sheet over the third. Beside him, the plump undertaker, a man with gleaming shoes and gleaming bald pate, virtually hopped from foot to foot, his professional feelings visibly outraged.

He said, ‘But you cannot do this. Straight into the coffin, I mean. There are things to be done – ’

‘I will do those things. I have sent for my own equipment.’

‘But he has to be laid out.’

‘He was my friend. I shall do it.’

‘But the shroud – ’

‘You will be excused for not knowing that a circus performer is always buried in his circus clothes.’

‘It is all wrong. We have ethics. In our profession – ’

‘Colonel Sergius.’ Harper’s voice was weary. Sergius nodded, took the undertaker by the arm, led him some way apart and spoke quietly. He was back in twenty seconds with an undertaker three shades paler and with a key, which he handed to Harper.

‘The parlour is all yours, Dr Harper.’ He turned to the undertaker. ‘You may leave.’ He left.

‘I think we should leave, too,’ Wrinfield said. ‘I have some excellent vodka in my office.’

Maria was in the office, forehead resting on crossed arms on the desk, when the men came in. She lifted her head slowly, peering through half-closed eyes as if not seeing too well. A concerned and troubled Dr Harper was standing before her, an equally concerned Wrinfield and an impassive Sergius beside him: Sergius’s facial muscles for conveying sympathy had atrophied over the years. Maria’s eyes were red and puffy and glazed and her cheeks glistened. Wrinfield looked at the grief-stricken face and touched her arm awkwardly.

‘Do forgive me, Maria. I had forgotten – I didn’t know – we shall go at once.’

‘Please, it’s all right.’ She dabbed at her face with some tissues. ‘Please come in.’

As the other three men rather reluctantly entered and Wrinfield brought out his bottle of vodka, Harper said to her: ‘How did you know? I’m so terribly sorry, Maria.’ He looked at her engagement ring and looked away again. ‘But how did you know?’

‘I don’t know. I just knew.’ She dabbed at her eyes again. ‘Yes, I do know. I heard the announcement about his fall. I didn’t come to see – well, because I was scared to come. I was sure that if he was badly hurt he’d ask for me or you would have sent for me. But nobody came.’

In an understandably strained silence and with considerable haste the men disposed of their vodkas and filed out. Harper, the last to leave, said to Maria: ‘I have to see to some equipment. I’ll be back in two minutes.’

He closed the door behind him. Maria waited for some moments, rose, glanced through the window, opened the door and peered cautiously out. There was no one in the immediate vicinity. She closed the door, locked it, returned to her desk, took a tube from a drawer, removed the cap, squeezed and rubbed some more glycerine into her eyes and face. She then unlocked the door.

Dr Harper returned shortly with a suitcase. He poured himself another vodka, looked everywhere except at the girl as if uncertain how to begin. Then he cleared his throat and said apologetically: ‘I know you’re never going to forgive me for this but I had to do it. You see, I didn’t know how good an actress you might be. Not so good, I’m afraid. Your feelings do tend to show through.’

‘My feelings tend – you know that Bruno and I – ’ She broke off, then said slowly: ‘What on earth do you mean?’

He smiled at her, broadly although albeit somewhat apprehensively. ‘Dry your tears and come and see.’

The first beginnings of understanding touched her face. ‘Do you mean – ’

‘I mean come and see.’

Bruno pushed back the two covering sheets and sat up in his coffin. He looked at Harper without much enthusiasm and said reproachfully: ‘Weren’t in too much of a hurry, were you? How would you like to lie in a coffin wondering when some enthusiastic apprentice is going to come along and start battening down the lid?’

Maria saved Harper the necessity of a reply. When Bruno had finally disentangled himself, he climbed stiffly down to the floor, reached inside the coffin, held up a limp, dripping linen bag and said: ‘And I’m soaking wet, too.’

Maria said: ‘What is that?’

‘A slight subterfuge, my dear.’ Harper gave a deprecatory smile. ‘An ice bag. It was necessary to give Bruno the cold clammy forehead of the deceased. Ice, unfortunately, melts.’ Harper placed the case on the coffin and opened the lid. ‘And, alas, we now have to cause Bruno some more suffering: we have to transform him into a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’

The transformation took all of twenty minutes. Harper had not necessarily mistaken his profession but clearly he would have been perfectly at home in the make-up department of any film studio. He worked swiftly and skilfully and obviously derived some satisfaction from his creative handiwork. When he was finished, Bruno looked at himself in a full-length mirror and winced. The light brown wig was just that too much long and straggly, the light brown moustache a soupçon too luxuriant: the vivid semicircular scar that ran from his forehead round the corner of his right eye almost to his nose was the result, clearly, of an encounter with a broken bottle: for clothes he wore a blue and white striped shirt, red tie, light brown suit with red vertical stripes, mustard socks and shoes of the same appalling colour. The rings on his fingers would appear to have had their source of origin either in a fairground stall or Christmas crackers.

Bruno said: ‘A thing of beauty, the man says. I could always hire myself out as a scarecrow.’ He bent a discouraging look on Maria, whose hand, discreetly covering her mouth, could not disguise the crinkling in her eyes. He looked back to Harper. ‘This makes me inconspicuous?’

‘The point precisely. It makes you so conspicuous that no one will bother to take a second look at you – except for those who will do a double-take to convince themselves that their eyes weren’t deceiving them in the first place. It’s the anonymous, furtive, grey man slinking down alleyways that attracts suspicion. You are Jon Neuhaus, a machine-tool salesman from East Germany. The passport and papers are in your inside pocket.’

Bruno dug out his passport, a venerable-looking document that attested to the fact that his salesman’s duties had taken him to virtually every Iron Curtain country, some of them many times. He looked at his picture and then again at himself in the mirror. The resemblance was quite remarkable.

He said: ‘This must have taken quite a time to prepare. Where was it made?’

‘In the States.’

‘You’ve had it all that time?’ Harper nodded. ‘You might have shown it to me earlier on. Given me time to get accustomed to the awfulness of it all.’

‘You would probably have refused to come.’ Harper checked his watch. ‘The last train in tonight arrives in fifteen minutes. A car is waiting for you about a hundred yards down the street from here which will take you discreetly to the station, where you will make sure you are seen – you have just come off the train. The suitcase contains all the clothes and toilet gear you will require. The same car will then drive you up to a hotel where you made a reservation two weeks ago.’

‘You fixed all this?’

‘Yes. Rather, one of our agents did. Our man, as you might say, in Crau. Invaluable. He can fix anything in this city – he ought to, he’s a big wheel in the city council. One of his men will be driving your car tonight.’

Bruno looked at him consideringly. ‘You certainly believe in playing a tight game, Dr Harper.’

‘And I survive.’ Harper permitted himself a patient sigh. ‘When you’ve spent most of your adult life in a racket like this you will discover that, at any given time, the fewer people who know anything about anything, the greater the safety factor. Maria will hire a car in the morning. Two blocks west of here is an inn called the Hunter’s Horn. Be there at dusk. Maria will be there shortly afterwards. She’ll look in the doorway then walk away. You will follow her. You have a singular gift for sensing when you will be shadowed so I have no worries on that score. Any change of plan or further instructions will be given you by Maria.’

‘You said your man in Crau could fix anything?’

‘I did say that.’

‘Have him fix a few sticks of dynamite. Any explosive will do as long as it has an approximately ten-second fuse. He can fix that?’

Harper hesitated. ‘I suppose. Why do you want it?’

‘I’ll tell you in a couple of days and that’s not because I’m doing a Dr Harper and being all mysterious. I’m not quite sure myself but I’m developing an idea that it might help me to leave the Lubylan.’

‘Bruno.’ The dark anxiety was back in the girl’s face again, but Bruno didn’t look at her.

‘I think there’s a chance I might get in undetected. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that I’ll be able to get out undetected. I may have to leave in a very great hurry indeed and once the alarm is raised I’m sure the exits will be automatically sealed. So my best line of exit may well be to blast my way out.’

‘I seem to recall you saying that you had no wish to kill anyone. A dynamite blast could kill quite a few.’

‘I’ll be as careful as I can. It may have to come to the inevitable choice – them or me. One hopes not. Do I get the bangers or not?’

‘You’ll have to give me time to think about that one.’

‘Look, Dr Harper. I know you’re in charge, but here and now you’re not the person who matters. I am. I’m the person who’s got to put his life on the line to get inside Lubylan – and out again. Not you. You’re safe and sound in base camp and will disclaim all knowledge of anything if I get chopped. I’m not asking, not now, I’m demanding. I want that explosive.’ He glanced down in distaste at his clothes. ‘If I don’t get it you can try on this suit for size.’

‘I repeat, I need time.’

‘I can wait.’ Bruno hitched his elbows on the coffin. ‘I can wait all of five seconds. I’ll count them. Then I’m taking this damned suit off and going back to the circus. I wish you luck in your break-in to Lubylan. I also wish you luck when you come to explaining to the police just how you made the trifling error of certifying me as being dead. One. Two. Three.’

‘This is blackmail.’

‘What else? Four.’

‘All right, all right, you can have your damned fireworks.’ Harper pondered, then went on complainingly: ‘I must say this is a side of your nature I’ve never seen before.’

‘I’d never examined that damned Lubylan before. I’ve seen it now. I know my chances. Please have Maria take the explosives in her car tomorrow night. Does Wrinfield know that this was a charade tonight?’

‘Of course.’

‘You took a chance bringing Sergius with you here.’

‘Apart from the fact that he insisted, I’d have taken a damned bigger chance if I hadn’t. That would have been the one thing calculated to rouse his suspicions.’

‘And he’s not? Suspicious, I mean?’

‘The last thing that would occur to Colonel Sergius is that anyone would ever be misguided enough to pick his parish as a place to commit suicide.’

‘Money?’

‘In your other inside pocket.’

‘It’s freezing outside.’

‘There’s a nice warm coat in the car.’ Harper smiled. ‘You’re going to love it.’

Bruno nodded to the open coffin. ‘That?’

‘Will be weighted and the lid screwed down during the night. We will bury you on Monday morning.’

‘Can I send me a wreath?’

‘That would not be advisable.’ Harper smiled thinly. ‘You can always, of course, mingle discreetly with your mourners.’

Forty minutes later Bruno was in his hotel room, unpacking, his eyes straying occasionally towards the nice warm coat that Harper had so thoughtfully provided. It was made of thick brushed nylon, in black and white wavy vertical stripes, and looked for all the world like a four-thousand-guinea chinchilla. Indisputably, it was the only one of its kind in Crau and, likely enough, for some hundreds of miles around, and the stir he had caused strolling through the lobby to the reception desk had been more than considerable: when the effect of his coat was added to the fact that he had it carelessly flung open to reveal the sartorial rainbow of his suiting beneath it was understandable that hardly anyone had bothered to give his face a first glance, far less a second one.

Bruno put out the light, eased the curtains, opened the window and leaned out. His room was at the back of the hotel, overlooking a narrow warehouse-lined lane. It wasn’t quite in total darkness but it wasn’t far from it either. Less than four feet away were the steps of a fire-escape, the easy and, in combination with the darkened lane, the perfect way to leave the hotel. Too easy, too perfect.

In line with Harper’s advocated policy of non-concealment, Bruno went down to the hotel dining-room for dinner, carrying under his arm an East Berlin newspaper, dated that day, which he had found in his case. Harper was a man to whom the most insignificant detail could be of importance. Where he had obtained it Bruno had no means of knowing. His entrance did not cause any notable sensation – the citizens of Crau or visiting firemen were too well-mannered for that. But the raised eyebrows, the smiles, the whispers were evidence that his presence had not gone unnoted. Bruno looked casually around. There was nobody in sight who looked remotely like a secret police agent, although there was little comfort in that: the best agents never did. Bruno ordered his meal, then buried himself in his newspaper.

At eight o’clock the following morning Bruno was once more in the dining-room, again reading a paper but this time a local news-sheet. The first thing that caught his attention was a large black-bordered box – the borders were half an inch thick – in the centre of the front page. From this he learnt that he had died during the night. The grief was profound for circus lovers the world over but nowhere, of course, as keenly felt as in Crau. There was much sentimentalizing and philosophical sorrowing over the machinations of a strange fate that had brought Bruno Wildermann home to die. He was to be buried at 11 a.m. on Monday. It was hoped that large numbers of the citizens of Crau would turn out to pay their last respects to their city’s most illustrious son, the greatest aerialist of all time. Bruno took the parcel back up to his room after breakfast, found scissors and cut out the black-bordered article, which he carefully folded and placed in an inside pocket.

Late that afternoon Bruno went shopping. It was a cold and sunny day and he had left his fur coat in his room. This he had done neither because of the weather nor because of any innate bashfulness. It was just too bulky to be carried inconspicuously, however well it might have been wrapped up.

This was the town that Bruno knew better than any in the world and he could have shaken off any shadower without even half thinking about it: it took him less than five minutes to know that he was not being followed. He turned down a side street, then into an even meaner street, little more than a lane, and entered the shop of a haberdasher for whom Savile Row must have lain on the far side of Paradise: even the best clothes it had for sale could not have qualified for the description of second-hand. The proprietor, an elderly stooped man, whose watery eyes swam behind thickly pebbled glasses – although it seemed an extremely remote possibility that the oldster would ever be called upon to identify him Bruno doubted whether he could have identified members of his own family, if any – had a unique but eminently practical way of displaying the wares he had for sale. The articles of clothing were piled in untidy heaps on the floor, jackets in one pile, trousers in another, coats in another, shirts in another, and so on. Ties were conspicuous by their absence.

When Bruno emerged it was with a bulky and exceedingly grimy brown paper parcel roughly tied with some frayed twine. He made his way to the nearest public conveniences and when he emerged his transformation was complete. He was clad in ill-fitting, patched and ancient clothes, wholly disreputable, not the sort of person the average citizen would approach within yards of, far less associate with: the grimy crumpled beret was two sizes too large and fell over his ears: the dark raincoat was irreparably stained, the trousers baggy beyond belief, the creased, once-navy shirt tieless and the heels of the scuffed shoes so worn down at the back that they lent him a peculiar rolling gait. To complete matters he was surrounded by a powerful aura that afflicted people at a distance of several yards: to keep lice, fleas and other forms of wild life at bay the haberdasher was a great believer in drenching every article of apparel with a disinfectant that was as vile-smelling as it was powerful.

Clutching his brown parcel under his arm, Bruno made his leisurely way across town. Dusk was beginning to fall. He took a short cut through a large park, a section of which was given over for use as one of the city’s cemeteries. Passing by an opened iron gate in the high wall that surrounded the cemetery, he was intrigued to see two men busily digging by the light of a pair of storm lanterns. Intrigued, he approached the spot and as he did two men, standing in an as yet shallow grave, straightened up and rubbed clearly aching backs.

‘You work late, comrades,’ Bruno said sympathetically.

‘The dead wait for no man,’ the elder gravedigger said in a sepulchral voice, then peering more closely, added: ‘Some of us have to work for a living. Do you mind standing to the other side of the grave?’

The light wind, Bruno realized, was wafting his presence across the grave. He moved round and said: ‘And whose last resting place is this?’

‘A famous American, though he was born and brought up in this town. I knew his grandfather well. A Wildermann, he is. He was with a circus – the circus – in the Winter Palace. Killed in an accident. It’ll be a big day here on Monday, with Johann and myself in our best suits.’

‘An accident?’ Bruno shook his head. ‘One of those damnable buses, I’ll be bound. Many’s the time – ’

The younger man said: ‘No, you old fool. He fell off a wire in the circus and broke his neck.’ He jammed his shovel into the sandy soil. ‘Do you mind? We have work to do.’

Bruno mumbled his apologies and shambled away. Five minutes later he was in the Hunter’s Horn, where he had to show his money to a nose-wrinkling waiter before being served coffee. After about fifteen minutes Maria appeared in the doorway, looked around, clearly failed to recognize anybody, hesitated and moved off again. Bruno rose leisurely and rolled his way towards the door. Once in the street he lengthened his stride without increasing his pace and within a minute he was only a few feet behind her.

He said: ‘Where’s the car?’

She wheeled round. ‘Where on earth – you weren’t – yes, you were!’

‘You’ll feel better shortly. Where’s the car?’

‘Round the next corner.’

‘Any car follow you?’

‘No.’

The car was a nondescript battered old Volkswagen, one of hundreds similar in the town: it was parked under a street lamp. Bruno got in behind the wheel, Maria in the passenger seat. She sniffed in disgust.

‘What on earth is that dreadful smell?’

‘Me.’

‘I appreciate that. But – ’

‘Just disinfectant. A very powerful one, but still a disinfectant. You’ll get used to it. Quite bracing really.’

‘It’s awful! Why on earth – ’

‘Disguise,’ Bruno said patiently. ‘You don’t actually think this is my preferred mode of dress? I think that Dr Harper underestimates Colonel Sergius. I may be Jon Neuhaus, a citizen in good standing from a friendly satellite country, but I’m still an East German. I’m an outsider – and you can bet Sergius has every outsider tabbed from the moment he’s within twenty miles of Crau. He will know – if he wishes – within ten minutes of any stranger checking in to any hotel in Crau. He’ll have a complete description of me. I have the documentation so he won’t give me a second thought. But he’ll give a second thought if a respectable sales representative for a major firm is found in a sleazy dump like the Hunter’s Horn or parked indefinitely in the shadow of the Lubylan. Don’t you think?’

‘Agreed. In that case there is only one thing to do.’ She opened her handbag, extracted a small eau-de-cologne aerosol, sprayed herself liberally, then squirted the contents over Bruno. When she had finished Bruno sniffed.

‘The disinfectant wins,’ he announced and, indeed, instead of the cologne having a neutralizing effect it had a compounding effect. Bruno lowered the windows and hastily moved off, his eye as much on the rear-view mirror as on the road. He twisted and turned through the darkened streets and alleyways until any tail car there might have been must have been irretrievably lost. As they drove, they briefly rehearsed the plans for the Lubylan break-in on the Tuesday night. Then Bruno said: ‘Got the stuff I asked for?’

‘In the boot. Not what you asked for – Dr Harper’s contact couldn’t get that. He says you’re to be very careful with this stuff – it seems you’ve only to look at it and it will explode.’

‘Good God! Don’t tell me he’s got me nitroglycerine?’

‘No. It’s called amatol.’

‘That’s all right, then. It’s the detonator he’ll be worried about. Fulminate of mercury, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, he said that.’

‘Seventy-seven grains. Very temperamental stuff. It will have a length of RDX fuse and a chemical igniter.’

‘Yes. He did say that.’ She looked at him curiously. ‘How come you’re an expert on explosives?’

‘I’m not. I read about it some years ago and just sort of filed the information away.’

‘Must be quite a filing cabinet you’ve got in there. This instant and total recall bit – how’s it done?’

‘If I knew that I’d be making a fortune out of it instead of fooling my life away on a trapeze. Now, there’s something else I want. First a large, eight by eight – preferably – sheet of rubber matting or hide leather.’

She took his hand and said: ‘What do you want that for?’ Her eyes told him that she knew.

‘What do you think? To throw over that damned electrified fence, of course. A tumbler’s mat would do fine. Also I require a rope with a padded hook. I want to see them both as soon as possible. Ask Dr Harper to arrange for those things and have them put in the boot of the car. Would you like to have lunch with me tomorrow?’

‘What?’

‘I want to see that stuff.’

‘Oh. I’d love to.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘No, I wouldn’t. Not if you’re wearing those clothes. Anyway, no half-decent restaurant would let you through the front door.’

‘I’ll change.’

‘But if we’re seen together – in daylight, I mean – ’

‘There’s a charming little inn in a charming little village about ten miles from here. Nobody will know us there and nobody will be looking anyway: I’m dead. Which reminds me. It’s less than an hour since I was talking to a couple of grave-diggers.’

‘We are being humorous again, are we?’

‘Fact. Very interesting.’

‘In the Hunter’s Horn?’

‘In the cemetery. I asked them who it was for and they said it was for me. Well, the American who fell off the wire. It’s not everyone who’s privileged enough to watch his own grave being dug. They were making a very neat job of it, I must say.’

‘Please.’ She shivered. ‘Must you?’

‘Sorry. That wasn’t funny. I just thought it was. Now, you’ll go to this village – it’s called Kolszuki – by car and I’ll go by train. We’ll meet at the station there. We might as well go now and check the train time-tables at the Crau station. You’ll have to get clearance from Dr Harper, of course.’

On a very spartan metal table in a very spartan and largely metal office, the spools of a tape-recorder revolved. On either side of the table sat Colonel Sergius and Captain Kodes. Both had headphones to their ears. In addition to the phones Sergius had a cigar, vodka and as close to a beatific smile as he was ever likely to achieve. Captain Kodes, too, was permitting himself the luxury of smiling broadly. Angelo, discreetly seated in a far corner, although he had neither phones nor vodka, was also smiling. If the colonel was happy, that made him happy, too.

Bruno returned from consulting the time-tables inside the Crau station. He said: ‘There’s a very convenient train for lunch. Meet me at the Kolszuki station at noon. You won’t have any trouble in finding it – there aren’t more than fifty houses in the village. Know where this place is?’

‘There’s a map in the glove-box. I’ve checked. I’ll be there then.’

Bruno drove up the main street and parked the Volkswagen just opposite the lane abutting on the southern side of Lubylan. The street was not deserted – there were two trucks and a car on the south side of the lane, obviously parked for the night. It was a measure of the confidence in their security arrangements of those within Lubylan that they raised no objections to vehicles parking in such close proximity. Bruno made a mental note of this: there is no objection to the night-time parking of trucks in the south lane.

Bruno said: ‘Now don’t forget to tell Dr Harper everything we discussed tonight. And don’t forget that, for the benefit of any innocent passers-by, we’re just a couple of lovers lost in each other’s eyes. Darling, darling Maria. That’s for practice.’

‘Yes, Bruno,’ she said primly. ‘We’ll be married soon, Bruno.’

‘Very soon, my love.’ They relapsed into silence, their eyes fixed on the lane, Maria’s all the time, Bruno’s most of the time.

In the headquarters of the secret police Colonel Sergius was making harsh croaking noises in his throat. He was not choking on his vodka. Colonel Sergius was laughing. He indicated that Angelo should pour him another vodka, then indicated that Angelo should help himself also. Angelo refrained from crushing the bottle in his surprise, smiled his wolfish smile and swiftly complied before Sergius could change his mind. This was without precedent, an epoch-making night.

Bruno turned suddenly, put his arms around Maria and kissed her passionately. For a moment she stared at him, dark eyes open in astonishment and surmise, let herself relax against him, then stiffened as an authoritative rat-tat-tat came on her window. She broke from Bruno’s arms and swiftly wound down the window. Two large policemen, complete with the customary guns and batons, were bent down peering into the car. Uniforms and weapons apart, however, they bore no resemblance to the popular conception of the Iron Curtain policeman. Their expressions were genial, positively paternal. The larger of the two sniffed suspiciously.

‘Very strange smell in this car, I must say.’

Maria said: ‘I’m afraid I’ve just broken a phial of perfume. A drop is nice – but a whole bottle – well, it is a bit strong, I must say.’

Bruno, stammering slightly and with his voice sounding acutely embarrassed, said: ‘What is it, officer? This is my fiancée.’ He held up Maria’s beringed left hand so that there should be no doubt about it. ‘Surely there’s no law – ’

‘Indeed not.’ The policeman leaned a confidential elbow on the window-sill. ‘But there is a law against parking in a main street.’

‘Oh! Sorry. I didn’t realize – ’

‘It’s the fumes,’ the policeman said kindly. ‘Your mind must be all befuddled.’

‘Yes, officer.’ Bruno smiled weakly. ‘Is it all right if we park behind those trucks?’ Hopefully, he indicated the vehicles in the south lane.

‘Certainly. Don’t catch cold now. And, comrade?’

‘Officer?’

‘If you love her so much, why don’t you buy your fiancée a bottle of decent perfume? Needn’t be expensive, you know.’ The policeman beamed and walked away with his colleague.

Maria, remembering her momentary yielding to Bruno, said in a cross voice: ‘Well, thank you. For a moment there I thought you had found me irresistible.’

‘Always use your rear-view mirror. It’s just as important when you’re stationary as when you’re driving.’

She made a face at him as he pulled the car into the south lane.

The two policemen watched them park. They moved out of eyeshot of the car. The larger man pulled a walkie-talkie microphone from his breast pocket, pressed a button and said: ‘They’re parked in the south lane by the Lubylan, Colonel.’

‘Excellent.’ Even with the metallic distortion and the fact that his speech was interrupted by a series of whooping gasps – laughter was an unaccustomed exercise for him – Sergius’s voice was unmistakable. ‘Just leave the love-birds be.’

It took Bruno and Maria minutes only to establish that there were indeed ground-level guards. There were three of them and they kept up a continuous peripheral patrol, each making a full circuit of the Lubylan in turn. At no time was any guard in sight of the other two. As sentries, they were a degree less than enthusiastic. Not for them the continually roving, probing eyes, the piercing scrutiny of all that lay in their path of vision: with downcast gaze and trudging steps, they gave the impression of thoroughly miserable men, huddled against the cold and living only for the moment of their relief. There had been night-time sentries patrolling the Lubylan for ten, perhaps twenty years, and probably no untoward incident had ever occurred: there was no conceivable reason why it ever should.

From the two watchtowers they could see, the south-west and south-east ones, searchlights flashed occasionally and erratically along the tops of the perimeter walls. There was no discernible predetermined sequence to the switching on and off of the searchlights: it appeared to be a quite random process, its arbitrary nature dependent on the whim of the guard.

After twenty minutes Bruno drove off to the public convenience he had patronized earlier that evening. He left the car, kissed Maria goodbye as she moved into the driver’s seat and disappeared into the depths. When he emerged, the grimy parcel with the old clothes and the amatol tucked under his arm, he was clad in his original sartorial glory.

CHAPTER NINE

Precisely at noon on the following day Bruno was met by Maria at Kolszuki station. It was a beautiful, cloudless winter’s day, crisp and clear and sunny, but the wind off the plains to the east was bitingly cold. On the twenty-minute journey out Bruno had passed the time of day studying his own highly-coloured obituary in the Crau Sunday paper. He was astonished at the richness and variety of his career, the international acclaim that followed him wherever he went, the impossible feats he had performed before heads of state the world over: he was particularly touched to discover how kind he had been to little children. It contained just enough fact to make it obvious that the reporter had actually been interviewing someone in the circus, a person clearly possessed of a deadpan sense of humour. That it wasn’t the work of Wrinfield he was sure: Kan Dahn appeared much the most likely culprit if for no reason other than the fact that he was the only person mentioned in the article apart from Bruno. The article, Bruno reflected, augured well for the morrow: the turn-out at the cemetery at 11 a.m. promised to be a remarkable one. Bruno carefully cut the piece out and put it together with the previous day’s black-bordered obituary.

The inn Bruno had in mind was only two miles away. One mile out, he pulled into a lay-by, got out, opened the boot, gave a cursory examination to the tumbler’s mat and the padded hook attached to a rope, closed the boot and returned to his seat.

‘Both mat and rope are just what I wanted. Just let them stay there until Tuesday night. You have this car rented until then?’

‘Until we leave here on Wednesday.’

They pulled off the main road, went some way up a narrow lane, then pulled up in the cobblestoned courtyard of what looked to be a very ancient inn indeed. The head waiter courteously escorted them to a table and took their order. As he was finishing, Bruno said: ‘Do you mind if we sit by that corner table?’ Maria looked her surprise. ‘It’s such a lovely day.’

‘But of course, sir.’

When they were seated, Maria said: ‘I can’t see any lovely day from here. All I can see is the back of a broken-down barn. Why the new table?’

‘I just wanted my back to the room so that no one could see our faces.’

‘You know somebody here?’

‘No. We were followed from the station by a grey Volkswagen. When we stopped at that lay-by he passed us but then pulled into a side turning and waited until we had passed him, then he tucked in behind us again. Where he’s sitting now he’s directly facing our previous table. He may well be a lip-reader.’

She was vexed. ‘It’s supposed to be my job to see those things.’

‘Maybe we should swop jobs.’

‘That’s not very funny,’ she said, then smiled in spite of herself. ‘I somehow don’t see myself as the daring young girl on the flying trapeze. I can’t even stand on a first-floor balcony, even stand on a chair, without getting vertigo. Fact. See what you’re letting yourself in for?’ The smile faded. ‘I may have smiled, Bruno, but I’m not smiling inside. I’m scared. See what else you’re letting yourself in for?’ He said nothing. ‘Well, thanks anyway for not laughing at me. Why are we being followed, Bruno? Who could possibly know we were out here? And who is the person they’re following – you or me?’

‘Me.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Did anyone tail you out here?’

‘No. I’ve listened to your lectures on driving mirrors. I spend more time looking backwards than forwards now when I’m driving. I stopped twice. No one passed me.’

‘So it’s me. And nothing to worry about. I detect Dr Harper’s hand in this. It’s what I take to be the old CIA mentality. Never, never trust anyone. I suspect half the members of espionage and counter-espionage services spend a good deal of their time watching the other half. And how is he to know that I’m not going to go native and revert to my old Crau sympathies? I don’t blame him. This is a very, very difficult situation indeed for the good doctor. A hundred against one that that lad behind us is what it pleases Harper to call his man in Crau. Just do me one favour – when you get back to the circus train, go see Dr Harper and ask him straight out.’

She said doubtfully: ‘You really think so?’

‘I’m certain.’

After lunch they drove back to Kolszuki station with the grey Volkswagen in faithful if distant attendance. Bruno stopped the car outside the main entrance and said: ‘See you tonight?’

‘Oh, yes, please.’ She hesitated. ‘Will it be safe?’

‘Sure. Walk two hundred yards south of the Hunter’s Horn. There’s a café there with the illuminated sign of the Cross of Lorraine. God knows why. I’ll be there. Nine o’clock.’ He put his arm round her. ‘Don’t look so sad, Maria.’

‘I’m not sad.’

‘Don’t you want to come?’

‘Oh, yes, yes, yes, I want to spend every minute of the day with you.’

‘Dr Harper wouldn’t approve.’

‘I suppose not.’ She took his face in her hands and looked deep into his eyes. ‘But have you ever thought that now is all the time there may be?’ She shivered. ‘I can feel someone walking over my grave.’

‘Nobody’s got any manners any more,’ Bruno said. ‘Tell him to get off.’ Without looking at or speaking to him again she let in the clutch of the car and moved off: he watched her until she disappeared from sight.

Bruno was lying on the bed in his hotel room when the phone rang. The operator asked if he was Mr Neuhaus and when Bruno said he was put the caller through. It was Maria.

‘Tanya,’ he said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

There was a pause while she apparently adjusted to her new name, then she said: ‘You were quite right. Our friend admits responsibility for what happened at lunch-time.’

‘Jon Neuhaus right as ever. See you at the appointed time.’

By 6 p.m. that evening the full darkness of night had already fallen. The temperature was well below freezing, a faint wind was stirring and patches of slowly drifting cloud occasionally obscured the three-quarter moon. Most of the sky was bright with twinkling frosty stars.

The lorry parked outside the truck-drivers’ pull-up, three miles south of the town, was filled almost to capacity. From the low single-storey café came bright yellow light and the sound of jukebox music: the café was being heavily patronized, drivers entering or leaving at fairly regular intervals. One driver, a middle-aged man enveloped in the numerous swathes of his breed, emerged and climbed into his vehicle, a large and empty furniture van with two hinged rear doors and securing battens running along both sides. There was no partition between the driver and the body of the van: just that single seat up front. The driver turned the ignition, the big diesel thudded into life but before the driver could touch brake, clutch or gear he was slumped forward over his wheel, unconscious. A pair of giant hands reached under his armpits, plucked him from his seat as if he were a puppet and deposited him on the floor of the van.

Manuelo applied adhesive to the unfortunate driver’s mouth and then set about fixing a blindfold. He said: ‘I am grieved that we should have to treat an innocent citizen in this manner.’

‘Agreed, agreed.’ Kan Dahn shook his head sadly and tightened the last knot on their victim’s wrists. ‘But the greatest good of the greatest number. Besides,’ he said hopefully, ‘he may not be an innocent citizen.’

Ron Roebuck, who was securing the man’s ankles to one of the parallel securing battens, did not appear to think that the situation called for any comment. There were lassos, clothes-lines, heavy twine and a large coil of nylon rope – the most conspicuous of all and by far the heaviest and thickest: it was knotted at eighteen-inch intervals.

At 6.15 p.m. Bruno, magnificently attired in what he privately thought of as his Pierrot’s suit and the magnificent pseudo chinchilla, left the hotel. He walked with the unhurried measured gait of one for whom time is not a matter of pressing concern: in fact he did not wish to disturb the fulminate of mercury in the six explosive devices that were suspended from his belt. The voluminous nylon coat concealed those perfectly.

As befitted a man with time on his hands, he wandered at apparent random, following what would otherwise have been thought to be a devious twisting route. He spent a considerable amount of time in stopping and apparently examining goods in shop windows, not omitting the side windows at shop entrances. He finally sauntered round a corner, quickened his pace for a few steps, then sank into the dark shadow of a recessing doorway. A dark raincoated man rounded the same corner, hesitated, hastened forward, passed where Bruno stood concealed, then sagged at the knees, momentarily stunned, as the edge of Bruno’s right hand caught him below his right ear. Bruno held him upright with one hand, went swiftly through his pockets with the other and came up with a snub-nosed automatic. The safety catch clicked off.

‘Walk,’ Bruno said.

The hijacked furniture van was about halfway down the south lane abutting on the Lubylan, the last of five parked trucks. Bruno saw it at once when he halted, arm apparently cordially in arm with his erstwhile shadow, at the corner of the main street and the south lane. Bruno had deemed it prudent to halt because a guard was coming up the other side of the lane, machine gun shoulder-slung. From his general appearance the weapon was the last thing on his mind. Like the guards of the previous night he wasn’t walking with a brisk military step, he was trudging along, wallowing in the unplumbed depths of his own frozen miseries. Bruno dug his automatic deeper into his companion’s side, just above the hip-bone.

‘Call out and you’re a dead man.’

Clearly, the idea did not appeal to the prisoner. The combination of fear and the cold gave him the impression of one who was frozen stiff. As soon as the guard had turned the corner into the main street – he did not have the appearance of one who was about to glance back suspiciously over his shoulder – Bruno marched his captive down to the line of parked trucks: once safely abreast of these they were hidden from the sight of anyone on the other side of the lane.

Pushing the man in front of him, Bruno moved out cautiously between the third and fourth parked trucks and glanced to his right. A second guard had just appeared round the south-east corner and was on his way up the south lane. Bruno retreated to the pavement. There was no guaranteeing that his captive would not suddenly screw his courage to the sticking point and, moreover, it was now safe, because free from observation, to have an unconscious man on his hands, so Bruno repeated the earlier blow, although this time with considerably more force, and eased the man to the ground. The guard passed unwittingly by on the other side. Bruno hoisted his captive to his shoulder and carried him to the rear of the van just as one of the doors opened: someone had been keeping a good watch through the windscreen. Kan Dahn had the unconscious man inside in a second and Bruno followed.

‘Is Roebuck on his way? To get that little toy for me from the train, and the cassettes?’

‘On his way.’ Kan Dahn jumped down followed by Manuelo, who hid behind the end of the van. Kan Dahn lay down in the middle of the lane, produced a bottle of Scotch from his pocket, poured a liberal amount over his face and shoulders and lay still, the bottle still clasped in his hand. His arm covered his face.

A guard came round the south-east corner and saw Kan Dahn almost immediately. He stood stock still for a moment, looked around warily, saw no danger and broke into a run towards the prostrate man. As he approached he unslung his machinepistol and advanced slowly and cautiously, the barrel trained on the massive bulk. At fifteen feet it was unthinkable that he should miss. At twenty-five feet it was equally unthinkable that Manuelo should miss. The hilt of the knife caught the guard squarely between the eyes and Kan Dahn, courteously breaking his fall, had him inside the van in five seconds.

In another ten seconds Manuelo had retrieved his knife and retreated into his former hiding position while Kan Dahn resumed his recumbent position. Such was Bruno’s faith in the two that he did not even bother to watch the painful proceedings but concentrated instead on the process of immobilizing, gagging and blindfolding the prisoners. Within six minutes there were five men lashed to the side of the furniture van, completely helpless and silenced, three of them already conscious but none of them able to do anything about their circumstances. The people of the circus are pastmasters in the art of tying knots: their lives too often depend on this very expertise.

The three men left the van. Kan Dahn had a pair of canvas shoes in a pocket and carried a finely chiselled but massive crowbar, Bruno carried a pocket flash, three bound poles slung from his shoulder, and a polythene-wrapped and very peculiar packet in his pocket; Manuelo, in addition to a variety of throwing knives, carried a pair of rather fearsome-looking and heavily insulated wire cutters. The amatol explosives Bruno had left behind in the van.

They walked eastwards along the lane. Occasionally the moon shone through and their presence there was readily to be seen by anyone with eyes to see. Even so, they had no option other than to carry on as unobtrusively as they could – although it was questionable whether any close observer would have found anything unobtrusive about the crowbar, wire-cutter and poles. By the time they had reached the power station, some three hundred yards distant from the prison side of the Lubylan, the moon had slid behind some barred cloud again. There were no guards to be seen or heard, and the only form of protection appeared to be a heavy steel mesh mounted on ten-feet hollow steel tubes, with one crossrailing at the top and one six feet up. The top railing was liberally festooned with very unpleasant barbed wire.

Bruno took the crowbar from Kan Dahn, pressed one end firmly into the earth and let the other fall against the mesh, at the same time taking two prudent backward steps. There was no pyrotechnical display, no blinding coruscation of arcs, sparks and flashes. The fence was not electrified nor had Bruno for a moment thought it would have been. Only a madman would put two thousand volts through a fence at ground level; but Bruno had had no guarantee that he wasn’t dealing with madmen.

Manuelo began to snip his way through the mesh. Bruno took out his red pen and thoughtfully pushed down the end button. Kan Dahn looked at him curiously.

‘Left it a bit late to write your last will and testament?’

‘A toy Dr Harper gave me. Fires anaesthetic darts.’

One by one they stooped and passed through the hole Manuelo had made. Five paces they took and then they discovered that the lack of human guards was compensated for by the presence of canine ones in the form of three Dobermann pinschers that came at them out of the gloom. Manuelo’s knife flickered forward in an underhand throw and the leaping dog died in mid-air, the blade buried to the hilt in its throat. The dog jumping for Kan Dahn’s throat found itself with one iron forearm under its lower jaw and the other behind its ears: one effortless twist and the vertebra snapped. The third dog did succeed in knocking Bruno down but not before the steel dart had lodged in its chest. The dog landed heavily, rolled over twice and lay still.

They advanced to the powerhouse itself. The door was made of metal and was locked. Bruno put his ear to the door and moved away quickly: even on the outside the high-speed whining of turbines and generators was an assault on the eardrums. To the left of the door and about ten feet up was a barred window. Bruno glanced at Kan Dahn, who stooped, caught him by the ankles and hoisted him effortlessly: it was like going up in a lift.

The powerhouse was deserted but for one man seated in a glass-enclosed control room. He was wearing what Bruno at first took to be a pair of headphones: they were, in fact, earmuffs for excluding sound. Bruno returned to earth.

‘The door, please, Kan Dahn. No, not there. The handle side.’

‘Designers always make the same mistake. The hinges are never as massive as the securing bolts.’ He inserted the chisel edge of the crowbar between the door and the wall and had the door off its hinges in ten seconds. Kan Dahn looked at the bent crowbar in some vexation, grasped it in his hands and straightened it out as if it were made of putty.

It took them no more than twenty seconds, making no attempt at concealment, to reach the door of the control box. The duty engineer, facing rows of breakers and gauges, was no more than eight feet away, completely oblivious to their presence. Bruno tried the door. This, too, was locked. Bruno looked at the two men. Both nodded. With one scything sweep of his crowbar Kan Dahn removed most of the glass from the door. Even the ear-muffed engineer could not have failed to hear the resulting racket, for when Kan Dahn shattered a sheet of plate glass he did it con brio. He swung round on his swivel chair and had only the fleeting fraction of a second to register the impression of three vague silhouettes outside the control room when the haft of Manuelo’s knife caught him on the forehead.

Bruno reached through the hole and turned the key. They went inside and while Kan Dahn and Manuelo immobilized the hapless engineer Bruno scanned the metal labels on the breakers. He selected a particular one and yanked the handle down through ninety degrees.

Kan Dahn said: ‘Sure?’

‘Sure. It’s marked.’

‘If you’re wrong?’

‘I’ll be electrocuted.’

Bruno sat in the engineer’s vacant chair, removed his shoes and replaced them with the pair of canvas shoes he used on the high wire. His own shoes he handed to Kan Dahn, who said: ‘You have a mask, a hood?’

Bruno looked at his red and brown suit and mustard socks. ‘If I wear a mask they won’t recognize me?’

‘You have a point.’

‘For me, it doesn’t matter whether I’m recognized or not. I don’t intend to hang around when this lot is over. What matters is that you and Manuelo and Roebuck are not recognized.’

‘The show must go on?’

Bruno nodded and led the way outside. Curious to see the duration of the effect of the anaesthetic darts, he stooped and examined the Dobermann, then straightened slowly. It appeared that Dobermanns had nervous systems that differed from those of humans: this Dobermann was stone dead.

There were several pylons, each about eighty feet high, inside the compound. He made for the most westerly of those and started to climb. Kan Dahn and Manuelo left through the hole in the compound mesh.

The pylon presented no problem. Dark though the night was – the moon was still behind cloud – Bruno climbed it with no more effort than the average person would have encountered with a flight of stairs in daylight. Reaching the top crossbar, Bruno unslung the bound poles, undid the bindings, which he thrust into his pocket, and screwed the three pieces solidly together: he had his balancing pole. He stooped and reached out to touch, just beyond the retaining insulator, the heavy steel cable that angled off towards the south-east corner of the Lubylan. For a moment he hesitated, then fatalistically concluded that hesitation would serve no purpose. If he had switched off the wrong breaker then at least he would never know anything about it. He reached down and caught the cable.

He’d switched off the right breaker. The cable was ice-cold to the touch but, all-importantly, it was not ice-sheathed. There was some wind, but it was slight and fitful. The cold was close to numbing but this was not a consideration to be taken into account: by the time he’d traversed that interminable three hundred yards he’d be, he knew, covered in perspiration. He waited no longer. Balancing his pole, he made his gingerly way along the insulator anchoring wire and stepped out on to the power cable.

Roebuck took a couple of steps down towards the track, craned forward and peered cautiously fore and aft, saw no one in sight, descended the remaining steps, then left the train at a measured pace. Not that he had not the right to leave the train whenever he wished, nor even to be seen with what he had then, two canvas sacks clipped together at their tops and slung over his shoulders, for those were the containers he habitually used to transport his ropes and the metal pins he used as targets in his act: what might have aroused a degree of passing curiosity was that he had left the circus train at a point four coaches distant from where he had his own quarters.

He climbed into the small Skoda he’d arrived in and parked it a hundred yards short of the Lubylan. He walked briskly on until he came to a small lane. He turned in here, crossed through a gate in a fence, jumped for and pulled down the spring extension of a fire-escape and climbed quickly until he’d hauled himself on to the roof. Crossing to the other side of the roof was akin to hacking one’s way through the Amazonian jungle. Some arborealist whom Roebuck, in his total ignorance of central European horticultural matters, presumed to have been of some distant English extraction, had seen fit to plant, in earth-filled tubs or troughs, shrubs, bushes, conifers extending to the height of twenty feet and, incredibly, two transverse and immaculately trimmed privet hedges and one lateral one that lined the edge of the roof overlooking the main street. Even in this egalitarian society the passion for privacy was not to be denied. This was, in fact, the same roof garden that Dr Harper had remarked on their first trip from the station to the Winter Palace.

Roebuck, a latter-day Last of the Mohicans, parted the lateral hedge and peered across and up. Across the street and about fifteen feet above the elevation where he stood was the watch-tower at the south-west corner of the Lubylan. In size and shape it was very much like a telephone box, metal or wood for the first five feet then glass above. That it was manned by only one guard was clear, because a light was on inside the tower and Roebuck could clearly see the solitary occupant. Suddenly, a remote controlled searchlight, mounted about two feet above the top of the tower, came to life, stabbing along the western perimeter of the roof, but depressed so that it would not blind the guard in the north-west tower. The light died then came on again, this time playing along the southern perimeter, then again faded. The guard appeared to be in no hurry to put out his light. He lit a cigarette, then lifted what appeared to be a hip flask to his mouth. Roebuck hoped that the light would remain on: as long as it did the guard’s night vision was virtually useless.

The curving spikes of the electrified fence were on a level with the base of the watch-tower. The distance, allowing for the angled increase of height, was about forty-five feet. Roebuck stepped back from the hedge, blessing the person whose sense of privacy had driven him to such horticultural lengths, removed the coil of rope from his shoulders and took about eight loops in his right hand. The free end of the rope had already been made into a running noose. The rope itself, hardly as thick as the average clothes-line, looked as if it might be fit for tying up a parcel but no more than that. It was, in fact, made of steel-cored nylon with a breaking strain of 1400 pounds.

He parted the hedge again and peered down. Kan Dahn and Manuelo were standing, apparently chatting aimlessly, at the corner of the main street and the south lane. The main street was empty of all life, except for passing cars, which were of no concern: not one driver in a thousand ever looks upward at night.

Roebuck stood on the parapet, swung the rope once round his head and on the second circle let it go. With what seemed a childishly simple inevitability, the rope snaked outwards and upwards and the loop settled over precisely the two spikes he had chosen. Roebuck did not attempt to draw the noose tight; he could easily have pulled it off the outward curving spikes. He gathered up all the remainder of the rope and threw it across the street to land precisely at the feet of Kan Dahn and Manuelo. They picked up the rope and disappeared along the south lane: the rope tightened and settled down on the base of the spikes.

The first half of the journey along the power cable towards Lubylan Bruno accomplished without too much difficulty. The second part taxed all his powers, his innate ability, his reaction, his superb sense of balance. He had not appreciated that there was such a sag in the cable nor that he would be faced with so steep an upward climb: nor had he bargained for the increasingly frequent gusts of wind. They were slight enough, to be sure, but to a man poised in his precarious position even the sharp increase of five miles an hour in wind speed could have been lethal. As it was it was strong enough to make the cable sway in a highly disconcerting fashion. Had there been the most infinitesimal coating of ice on the wire he could never have made it. But make it he did.

The cable was clamped into a giant insulator held in place by two anchoring wires attached to the wall. Beyond the insulator, the cable looped upwards through another insulator in the base of a heavy switched breaker covered by a plastic hood. To switch off that breaker would nullify the danger that might be caused by someone discovering the power-station break-in and switching on the circuit that Bruno had already broken: but that twin-pronged switch, sunk though it almost certainly was in a bath of oil, might make enough noise on release to alert the guard in the southeast watch-tower, no more than ten feet distant. Bruno decided to leave it for the moment.

He unscrewed the balancing pole, bound it together and suspended it from an anchoring wire, unlikely though it was that he would be using it again. Getting over the fence of those outward curving spikes would be no problem. It was only about three feet above his head, and all he had to do was to hoist himself up to the top of the breaker and almost literally step over. But here was also the moment of greatest danger – the first time he would be completely exposed to observation.

He threw a loop of rope over a spike, hoisted himself up until he was standing on the breaker, his head at least four feet above the top of the spiked fence. The massive flat-topped wall was at least thirty inches thick. A five-year-old who didn’t suffer from vertigo could have toddled around the top perimeter with ease; but the same five-year-old would have been suicidally open to the repeated and irregular probings of the watchtower searchlights along the perimeter walls.

And, just at that moment when he was about to step over the curved spikes of the steel fence, a searchlight bloomed into life. It came from the north-east tower and the beam traversed the length of the east perimeter wall he had been about to mount. Bruno’s reflex action was instantaneous. He crouched below the top level of the wall, holding on to the loop of the rope to keep himself from toppling outwards. It seemed very unlikely that the guard would pick up any object as small as the tiny bight of the rope round its anchoring spike and so in the event it proved. The searchlight beam moved away through ninety degrees, briefly traversed the north wall then died. Five seconds later Bruno stood on top of the wall.

Five feet below on the opposite side was the roof of the detention block. The entrance to the watch-tower had to be from there. Bruno lowered himself to the roof and made his crouching way along to the base of the tower.

A flight of eight angled wooden steps led up to the tower platform. As Bruno glanced upwards a match inside the tower flared and he had a glimpse of a figure with a fur hat and turned-up collar of a greatcoat lighting a cigarette. Bruno unscrewed the cover of the gas-pen and soundlessly mounted the stairs, putting his left hand on the door. He waited until the guard drew heavily on his cigarette, opened the door without undue haste, aimed the pen at the red glow and pressed the clip.

Five minutes later he arrived, via the detention block roof, at the north-east watch-tower. His stay there occupied him no longer than had his brief sojourn at the first tower. Leaving the second guard there as immobilized and silenced as the first, he made his way back along the east wall, lowered himself down to the breaker and gently pressed down the lever. The muffled thud could not have been heard more than a few feet away, for as he’d guessed the switch had been immersed in a bath of oil. He returned to the south-east tower, peered over the south wall and flashed his torch three times in rapid succession, then pressed it on and left it on. A recognition flash came from the south lane below.

Bruno doused his light, produced a considerable length of weighted cord from a capacious pocket and lowered it. He felt pressure come on the end followed by a gentle tug and immediately started reeling in the cord. In very short order indeed he had in his hands the other end of the rope that Roebuck had succeeded in attaching to the spikes at the south-west corner of Lubylan. He pulled it taut but not too taut – the steel core of the nylon ensured that the sagging factor would be negligible – and fastened it securely. He now had a rope that ran the full length of the outside of the southern wall, three to four feet below the base of the spikes. For an aerialist and high-wire specialist it was as good as a public highway.

It was a fifty-yard trip to the south-west tower and he made it in under three minutes. With the rope to walk on and the base of the curved spikes for support it was, for Bruno, a ridiculously easy passage. Once, but then only very briefly, he had to duck low when the searchlight of the watchtower he was approaching traversed the south wall, but there was never any danger of discovery. And within a minute of his arrival at his destination a third guard had lost all his conscious interest in the immediate future.

Bruno pointed his torch down and signalled four times, this to let those waiting below know that he had arrived but to wait. There was still the final guard to be disposed of, the one in the northwest tower. It could well have been that the guards merely traversed their searchlights when and if the whim took them or there could have been some concerted arrangement, however irregular that may have been. In any event, he could not afford to arouse any degree of suspicion. He waited until the remaining guard had made a couple of perfunctory traverses with his searchlight, dropped down to the roof of the research building – like its eastern counterpart it was five feet below the level of the wall – and made his silent way across. Clearly the guard had had no suspicion at all. Bruno made his way back to the south-west watch-tower, flashed his torch twice and lowered his weighted cord again. A minute later he was securing a heavy knotted rope to the base of the spikes. He flashed again, waited a few seconds and gave the rope an experimental tug. It was bar-taut. The first of his companions was on his way up. Bruno peered downwards to try to identify the climber, but the gloom was too deep to make positive identification: from the bulk of the shadowy figure it looked like Kan Dahn.

Bruno embarked on a more careful examination of the roof. There had to be an access hatch for the watch-tower guards, for there was no such vertical access in or near the towers themselves. He located it almost at once by a glow of light emanating from a partially covered hatchway close to the inner edge of the roof, about halfway between the north and south walls. The hatchway cover, vertically sided, curved through an arc of ninety degrees, whether to obscure the light from above, which seemed unlikely, or to give protection against the weather to the hatch below, which seemed more probable. Bruno hitched a cautious eye round the corner of the cover. The light came from a heavily meshed square of plate glass set in a hinged trapdoor. Looking down, Bruno could see only a part of the bleak room below but what he could see was enough. There were four guards there, fully clothed, three of them lying, apparently asleep, on hinged canvas bunks, the fourth, his back to Bruno and facing an open door, playing some sort of solitary card game. A vertical steel ladder ran from the floor of the room to the side of the trap-door.

Gingerly, Bruno tried the hatch, but it was locked, probably bolted from below. The place might not, as Harper had said it was, be guarded like Fort Knox, but they certainly took every precaution against the most unlikely occurrences. Bruno moved away and looked down over a low parapet into the courtyard. There were no immediate signs of the guard dogs Harper had mentioned, but that did not preclude the possibility of their lurking in one of the several archways he could see, but that didn’t seem likely: Dobermanns are inveterate prowlers. And there was no movement or sign of life in the glass-enclosed elevated passageway that joined the two buildings on the fifth-floor level.

When Bruno returned to the south-west tower Kan Dahn was already there. The ninety-foot climb hadn’t even altered his rate of breathing. He said: ‘How was the trip across?’

‘A good performer always quits at the top. I can’t ever top that, so I’ve just quit.’

‘And not a soul to see you. Alas, life’s little ironies. I mean, with an audience there, we could have cleaned up twenty thousand bucks tonight.’ He appeared in no way surprised by Bruno’s decision. ‘The watch-tower guards?’

‘Asleep.’

‘All?’ Bruno nodded. ‘So there’s no rush?’

‘There’s no time to hang around either. I don’t know when the reliefs come on duty.’

‘7 p.m. seems an unlikely hour.’

‘Yes. But we haven’t come all this way to take what looks even like a ghost of a chance.’ He turned as first Roebuck and then Manuelo appeared in rapid succession. In contrast with Kan Dahn they appeared to be experiencing some difficulty with their breathing. Roebuck, the double canvas bag still slung over a shoulder, said: ‘Thank God we go down that rope instead of up when we leave.’

‘We don’t leave that way.’

‘We don’t?’ Roebuck paled beneath the tan. ‘You mean there’s another way? I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to that.’

Bruno said soothingly, ‘A Sunday walk, that’s all. Now, access. There’s only one way in from the roof and that’s locked.’

Kan Dahn said: ‘A door?’

‘A trap-door.’

Kan Dahn brandished his crowbar. ‘Poof! No trap-door.’

‘There are guards in the room below. One, at least, is wide awake.’ He led the way halfway along the west perimeter wall, knelt, caught hold of a curved spike and leaned out over the main street. The others did the same.

‘I know the geography of this place. That first window down – I want to get in through there.’

‘That first window down,’ Roebuck said, ‘has got big thick iron bars protecting it.’

‘It won’t have in a little while.’ Bruno knelt upright and produced the plastic packet from his pocket. He unrolled this to reveal two small polythene-wrapped packages. ‘For iron bars, the ultimate persuader. Turns them into a form of putty near enough.’

Roebuck said: ‘What kind of hocus-pocus is this?’

‘No hocus, no pocus. You can apologize at your leisure. Every professional magician worth his salt knows about it. You can soften and bend practically any metal by smearing it with this stuff – oddly enough, with reasonable care, it doesn’t affect the human skin. The plastic inside this polythene contains an acid that eats into the interstices between the molecules of metal and softens it up. There’s an Israeli magician who says that given time and enough of the stuff he could bend a Sherman tank. Here we have only two iron bars.’

‘How long does it take to work?’

‘Five minutes should be enough. I’m not certain.’

Manuelo said: ‘Burglar alarms?’

‘Those I can fix.’

Bruno tied a double bowline, slipped his legs through them until they reached the top of his thighs, secured a bight round his waist and eased himself out and over the curving spikes. He lowered himself to the full extent of his arms while Kan Dahn took a turn of the rope round a spike; then he exchanged his grip on the spikes for one on the rope, and Kan Dahn eased him down.

With the rope round his thighs and waist, his feet on the window sill and one hand grasping an iron bar, Bruno was as safe as a man in church. There were four bars on the window, each pair about eight inches apart. He removed the two cylinders of plastic compound from his pocket, opened them halfway and, careful not to remove the polythene covering, wrapped the plastic round the middle of the two centre bars, closing and smoothing the polythene round each in turn so that the compound was again completely sealed off. He climbed the few feet up the rope to the metal fence: Kan Dahn reached down, caught him under the armpits and lifted him easily over the wickedly out-curving spikes.

He said: ‘Five minutes. Manuelo, you’ll come down with Kan Dahn and myself. Roebuck will stay here. And watch that canvas bag of yours – that’s the last thing we can afford to lose at this stage of the game. Could I have the wire-cutters, please, Manuelo?’

Kan Dahn slipped into a double bowline, secured a bight round his waist, belayed the rope round three spikes – probably a sensible precaution for a man of his massive weight – and lowered himself down to the window ledge. He clenched a massive fist round each of the central bars and began to pull them apart. The contest was brief and unequal. The bars bent as if made from some inferior putty, but Kan Dahn wasn’t content with just making a gap: he leaned some more on the bars and both came free from their anchorages. He handed them up to the roof.

Bruno joined Kan Dahn by means of a separate rope. Arrived opposite the window, he used his flash and peered through the glass. It appeared to be a perfectly innocuous office, bleakly furnished with metal cabinets, metal tables and padded metal seats. It certainly offered no hint of danger.

While Kan Dahn held the torch Bruno produced a roll of brown paper, unrolled it and pressed one side against a pane of glass. That side was clearly adhesive. He waited a few seconds then struck the centre of the glass quite firmly with the heel of his fist. The glass came away and fell into the room, making practically no noise at all. Bruno took the torch from Kan Dahn and, holding both torch and wire-cutters in the same hand, thrust his head and one of his arms through the hole he had made. He located the unconcealed alarm wires at once, severed them, reached up and opened the window catch and pushed the lower window upwards. Ten seconds and both he and Kan Dahn were inside the room: another ten and Manuelo had joined them. He was carrying Kan Dahn’s crowbar with him.

The office door was unlocked, the corridor beyond deserted. The three men made their way along until they came to an open door on the left. Bruno signalled to Manuelo to move forward. He did so and, holding a knife by the blade, cautiously showed an inch of the hilt round the edge of the jamb. Almost at once came the sound of discreet tapping on the glass of the hatch-cover above, enough to alert the card-playing soldier but not enough to disturb the three sleeping men. The guard at the table looked up questioningly, and then it was over. The hilt of Manuelo’s knife caught him over the ear and Kan Dahn caught him before he even had time to strike the ground. Bruno picked up one of several guns stacked in a ramp and covered the three others with it. The last thing he wanted or intended to do was to use it, but the three men were not to know that and a man waking from his sleep is not going to argue with a Schmeisser machine-pistol. But they kept on sleeping soundly even when Kan Dahn unbolted the trap-door to allow Roebuck – and his canvas bag – down into the guard-room. Bruno took out his gas pen and advanced upon the three sleeping guards: Roebuck, armed with a suitable amount of rope, followed him.

They left the four guards there, securely bound and taped, three of them even more deeply asleep than they had been a few minutes previously. They bolted the trap-door, a probably unnecessary precaution, locked the guard-room door behind them and removed the key. Bruno said: ‘So far, so good.’ He hefted the Schmeisser he had borrowed from the guard-room. ‘Let’s call on Van Diemen.’

Kan Dahn paused in the passageway and looked puzzled. ‘Van Diemen? Why do we have to attend to him first – or at all? You know where his offices and laboratories are. Why don’t we go straight in there now, find out the papers you want – you’re quite sure you’ll recognize those – ’

‘I’ll recognize them.’

‘Then fold our tents and steal away into the night. Like the Arabs, you know. A classy job, smooth, slick and noiseless. That’s what I like.’

Bruno looked his disbelief. ‘What you would like is to crack every skull in the Lubylan. I can give you four reasons for not doing it your way and then no arguing – the change of the guard may be due at any moment. Time is not on our side.’

‘The change of guard is all nicely asleep in the guard-room.’

‘That may not be the change of guard. They may have to report to some kind of HQ at change-over. There may be an officer who carries out a routine inspection. I don’t know. Reason one: what we want may be in his private quarters. Reason two: we may be able to persuade him to tell us where the papers are. Reason three: if his filing cabinets are locked – and it would be astonishing if they aren’t – we may make quite a noise in opening them up and his quarters are right next door. But reason four is most important. You should have guessed.’ From their expressions it was apparent that no one had guessed. ‘I’m taking him back to the States with me.’

‘Taking him back – ’ Roebuck looked his incredulity. ‘You’ve been through too much. It’s your mind.’

‘Is it? What the hell’s the point in taking the papers back home and leaving him here? He’s the only man who knows those damned formulas or whatever they are – and all he’d do is just sit down and write them out again.’

Roebuck said in slow comprehension: ‘You know, that had never occurred to me.’

‘Hadn’t occurred to a lot of other people either, it would seem. Very odd, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m sure that Uncle Sam can always find him a nice congenial job.’

‘Such as supervising the development of this damnable anti-matter?’

‘From what I’ve heard of Van Diemen, he’d die first. He’s a renegade, you know that. It must have taken some awfully compelling political and ideological reasons for him to defect from West Germany to here. He’d never co-operate.’

‘But you can’t do this to a man,’ Kan Dahn said. ‘Kidnapping is a crime in any country.’

‘True. But better than death, I would have thought. What do you want me to do? Have him swear on the Bible – or any handy Marxist treatise that we can lay hands on – that he’ll never again reproduce any of those formulas? You know damned well that he’d never consent to that. Or just leave him in peace to write his memoirs – all about how to construct this hellish weapon?’

The silence was very loud.

‘You haven’t left me much choice, have you? So what would you have me do? Execute him in the sacred name of patriotism?’

There was no immediate answer to this because he’d left them without the option of an answer. Then Kan Dahn said: ‘You have to take him back home.’

CHAPTER TEN

Van Diemen’s door was locked. Ran Dahn leaned on it and it was no longer locked. It crashed back against its hinges and Bruno was the first in, Schmeisser levelled – it had occurred to him, not, fortunately, too belatedly, that, without some recognizably offensive weapon, they were at a distinct disadvantage – a wandering guard, seeing them apparently unarmed, would be sorely tempted to cut loose with whatever weapon he might possess.

The startled man, propped on one elbow and rubbing sleep from his eyes, had a lean aristocratic face, grey hair, grey moustache and grey beard: he looked the exact antithesis of the mad scientist of popular conception. His unbelieving eyes switched from the intruders to a bell-push on his bedside table.

‘Touch that and you’re dead.’ Bruno’s voice carried utter conviction. Van Diemen was convinced. Roebuck advanced to the bell-push and sliced the flexible lead with the wire-cutters.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Van Diemen’s voice was steady, seemingly without fear: he had about him the look of a man who has suffered too much to be afraid of anything any more.

‘We want you. We want the plans of your antigravity invention.’

‘I see. You can have me any time. Alive or dead. To get the plans you’ll have to kill me first. They’re not here anyway.’

‘You said the last two sentences the wrong way round. Tape his mouth and tie his hands behind his back. Then we look. For papers, keys, perhaps even one key.’

The search, which lasted perhaps ten minutes and left Van Diemen’s quarters in an indescribable shambles, yielded precisely nothing. Bruno stood in momentary indecision. For all he knew, time might be running out very fast indeed.

‘Let’s try his clothes.’

They tried his clothes. Again they found nothing. Bruno advanced on the bound and gagged figure sitting up in bed, regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then reached down and gently lifted the gold chain he wore round his neck. No crucifix for Van Diemen, no Star of David, but something that was probably even more precious to him than those could have been to a Catholic or Jew: dangling from the end of the chain was a bright and intricately-cut bronze key.

Two whole walls of Van Diemen’s main office were lined with metal filing cabinets. Fourteen in all, each with four sliding drawers. Fifty-six holes. Roebuck was unsuccessfully trying his thirtieth. Every pair of eyes in the office looked at him intently. All except Bruno’s. His did not leave Van Diemen’s face, which had remained expressionless throughout. Suddenly there was a tic at the corner of his mouth.

‘That one,’ Bruno said.

That one it was. The key turned easily and Roebuck pulled the drawer out. Van Diemen tried to throw himself forward, which, if an understandable reaction, was a futile one, for Kan Dahn had one massive arm around him. Bruno advanced to the drawer, started leafing quickly through the files. He picked out one sheaf of papers, checked the other files, double-checked them and closed the drawer.

Roebuck said: ‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’ Bruno thrust the files deep inside the inner pocket of his garish suit.

Roebuck said complainingly: ‘Seems like a bit of an anticlimax.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Bruno said encouragingly. ‘The climax may still be to come.’

They descended to the eighth floor. Van Diemen had his mouth taped and hands bound behind his back, for the prison staff lived there and it seemed highly likely that Van Diemen might have wished to call attention to their presence. There were no guards here, either asleep or awake, and no reason why there should have been: guards were expendable but Van Diemen’s papers were not.

Bruno headed directly for the door at the foot of the stairs. It was not locked and neither were the filing cabinets inside, and again there was no reason why any of them should have been. Bruno began opening filing drawers in swift succession, extracting files, leafing through them rapidly and discarding them in turn by the elementary process of dropping them on the floor.

Roebuck looked at him in some puzzlement and said: ‘A moment ago you were in one Godalmighty damned hurry to get out. What place is this anyway?’

Bruno looked at him briefly. ‘You forget the note you passed me?’

‘Ah!’

‘Yes, ah. “4.30. West entrance. No question. My life on it.” They keep the prison records here.’

Bruno offered no further explanation to anyone. Suddenly he appeared to find what he wanted, a highly detailed schematic diagram with rows of names printed on one side. He glanced briefly at it, nodded in what appeared to be some satisfaction, dropped it to the floor and turned away.

Roebuck said: ‘We are doing our mentalist bit again?’

‘Something like that.’

They eschewed the elevator, walked down to the fifth floor, and crossed to the detention block by way of the glass-enclosed passageway. There was an admitted element of risk in this, but slight: the only people who might reasonably have been expected to have a watchful eye on that goldfish bowl corridor were the watch-tower guards and they were in no condition to have their eyes on anything.

Bruno halted the others as they reached the closed door at the far end of the passageway. ‘Wait. I know where the guardroom is – just round the corner to the left. What I don’t know is whether the guards will be patrolling.’

Roebuck said: ‘So?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No. Nobody’s recognized you yet. I don’t intend that anyone shall. Don’t forget that true trouper Roebuck is performing tonight. And Kan Dahn. And Manuelo. And not forgetting, of course, Vladimir and Yoffe.’

Manuelo looked at him in something approaching stupefaction.

‘Your brothers?’

‘Of course. They’re here. Where else do you think they would have been taken?’

‘But – but the ransom demands?’

‘Courtesy of the secret police. So my brothers can perform with impunity. Nobody’s got anything against them. How can they? They were just pawns, hostages for my good conduct. And do you think the police are going to admit they abducted them and sent ransom demands? Now that would cause an international uproar.’

Manuelo said complainingly: ‘You do play cards pretty close to the chest.’

‘It’s one of the better ways of surviving.’

‘And how are you going to survive any longer?’

‘I’m getting out of here.’

‘Sure. No problem. You just flap your arms and fly away.’

‘More or less. Roebuck has a little gadget in that bag of his. I just operate it and a whirlygig should be here in about twenty minutes.’

‘Whirlygig? Helicopter? From where, for God’s sake?’

‘American naval vessel lying offshore.’

There was no ready answer to this. Then Roebuck said: ‘Very, very close to the chest. That means that you’re the only one of us who’s leaving?’

‘I’m taking Maria. The police have recorded evidence that she’s up to her ears in this.’

They stared at him in complete incomprehension.

‘I think I forgot to mention. She’s a CIA agent.’

Roebuck said heavily: ‘Very, very, very close. And how do you propose to get her?’

‘Go up to the circus for her.’

Kan Dahn shook his head sadly. ‘Quite, quite mad.’

‘Would I be here if I weren’t?’ He depressed the top knob of the black pen, slipped off the safety catch on his machine-pistol and cautiously eased open the door.

It was a prison just like any other prison, rows of cells on four sides of the block, passageways with four-feet-high railings bordering the deep well that ran the full vertical height of the building. As far as Bruno could see there was no one on patrol, certainly not on that fifth floor. He moved out to the railing, glanced up and then down the fifty-foot drop to the concrete below. It was impossible to be certain, but there appeared to be no one on patrol, nor could he hear anything. And prison guards, especially military guards, are not noted for the lightness of their steps.

Light came from a glass-fronted door about twenty feet to his left. Bruno pussy-footed his way towards it and peered in. There were two guards and two only, seated one on either side of a small table. Quite clearly they weren’t expecting any senior officers or NCOs around on a tour of inspection, for they had a bottle on the table and a glass apiece. They were playing the inevitable cards.

Bruno pushed the door open. Both men turned their heads and looked down the uninviting muzzle of the Schmeisser.

‘On your feet.’

They complied with alacrity.

‘Hands behind your necks. Close your eyes. Tight.’

They wasted no time over this either. Bruno pulled out the gas pen, squirted it twice, then whistled softly for the others to join him. While they were immobilizing the two guards, Bruno inspected the rows of numbered keys hanging on the guard-room wall.

On the seventh floor, Bruno selected the key numbered 713 and opened the cell door. The two brothers, Vladimir and Yoffe, stared at him in open disbelief, then rushed out and hugged him wordlessly. Bruno pushed them smilingly aside, selected more keys, opened up 714 then 715 and 716 in succession. Bruno, standing outside 715, smiled without mirth at his two brothers, companions and Van Diemen, who had moved up to join him.

He said: ‘A rather nice touch, don’t you think, to lock all the Wildermanns up together?’

The three doors opened almost simultaneously and three people made their way, two with very faltering footsteps, out into the passageway. The two who could not walk too well were old and stooped and grey, one who had been a man, the other who had been a woman, their prison pallor faces lined with suffering and pain and privation. The third figure had been a young man but was no longer young, except in years.

The old woman stared at Bruno with dull lacklustre eyes. She said: ‘Bruno.’

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘I knew you would come some day.’

He put his arm round the frail shoulders. ‘I’m sorry I took so long.’

‘Touching,’ Dr Harper said. ‘How very, very touching.’

Bruno removed his arm and turned round unhurriedly. Dr Harper, using Maria Hopkins as a shield, had a silenced pistol in one hand. Beside him, smiling wolfishly, Colonel Sergius was similarly armed. Behind them stood the giant Angelo, whose preferred form of weapon was a giant lethal club the size of a baseball bat.

Harper went on: ‘We’re not interrupting, are we? I mean, you weren’t thinking of going some place?’

‘We had that in mind.’

‘Drop that machine-pistol,’ Sergius ordered.

Bruno stooped, placed it on the ground, then, as he came upright, moved with lightning speed, grabbed Van Diemen and held him before him as a shield. With his other hand he got the red dart pen from his breast pocket, depressed the knob, and pointed it over Van Diemen’s shoulder at Harper’s face. At the sight of the pen Harper’s face widened in fear and the finger tightened on the trigger of the silenced gun.

Sergius, no longer smiling, said viciously: ‘Drop that. I can get you from the side.’ Which was an accurate observation, but, unfortunately for Sergius, he had transferred his attention to Bruno while he was speaking, a period of about two seconds, and for a man possessed of the cobra speed and accuracy of Manuelo two seconds was a laughably long time. Sergius died unawares, the knife buried to the haft in his throat.

Two seconds after that both Van Diemen and Harper were on the floor, Van Diemen with the bullet intended for Bruno buried in his chest, Harper with the dart buried in his cheek. Angelo, his face contorted in fury, made an animal noise deep in the throat and leapt forward, his huge club swinging. Kan Dahn, moving forward even more quickly, and with astonishing agility for a man of his immense bulk, avoided the downward blow, wrenched the club from Angelo and tossed it contemptuously to one side. The struggle that followed was as titanic as it was brief, and the sound of Angelo’s neck breaking was that of a rotten bough shearing under the woodman’s axe.

Bruno put one arm round the violently trembling girl, the other round the stunned, terrified and uncomprehending old woman.

He said: ‘Fine. Terminé. It’s all over and you’re all safe now. I think we should leave this place now. You won’t really mind will you, Father?’ The old man gazed at the prostrate figures and said nothing. Bruno went on, to no one in particular: ‘About Van Diemen I’m sorry. But perhaps it’s best. He’d really no place left to go.’

Kan Dahn said: ‘No place?’

‘In his world, yes. In mine, not. He was completely amoral – not immoral – in devising so fiendish a weapon. A totally unheeding, irresponsible man. I know it’s a very cruel thing to say, but the world can well do without him.’

Maria said: ‘Why did Dr Harper come for me? He kept saying something about his transmitter and tapes being missing from his railway compartment.’

‘Yes. It had to be something like that. Roebuck here stole them. Can’t trust those Americans.’

‘You don’t trust me very much. You don’t tell me very much.’ There was no reproach in her voice, just a lack of understanding. ‘But perhaps you can tell me what happens when Dr Harper comes to.’

‘Dead men don’t come to. Not on this planet, anyway.’

‘Dead?’ She had no emotions left to register.

‘Those darts were tipped with lethal poison. Some form of refined curare, I should imagine. I was supposed to kill some of their own men. Fortunately, I had to use it on a guard dog. Now a very dead guard dog.’

‘Kill their own men?’

‘It would have looked very black for me – and America – if I’d killed some of the guards here, then been caught red-handed. Their own men. People like Harper and Sergius are men without hearts, without souls. They’d shoot their own parents if it served their personal political ends. It was also slated, incidentally, that you should die. I had, of course, been instructed not to use the dart gun on Van Diemen on the pretext that he had a weak heart. Well, God knows he’s got a weak enough heart now – Harper put a bullet through it.’ He looked at Maria. ‘You know how to operate the call-up on the transmitter – Roebuck has it in his bag there?’ She nodded. ‘Right, send the signal now.’ He turned to Kan Dahn, Roebuck and Manuelo. ‘Bring my folks down slowly, will you? They can’t hurry. I’ll wait below.’

Kan Dahn said with suspicion: ‘Where are you going?’

‘The entrance is time-locked so someone must have let them in. Whoever that was will still be there or thereabouts. You’re all still in the clear. I want you to stay that way.’ He picked up the Schmeisser. ‘I hope I don’t have to use this.’

When the others joined him on the ground floor some five minutes later, Bruno had already done what he had to do. Kan Dahn surveyed the two bound, gagged and for the moment unconscious guards with considerable satisfaction.

‘By my count that’s making thirteen people we’ve tied up tonight. It’s certainly been an unlucky number for some. So it’s up, up and away.’

‘Indeed.’ He asked Maria: ‘You made contact?’

She looked at her watch. ‘It’s airborne. Rendezvous in sixteen minutes.’

‘Good.’ He looked and smiled at Kan Dahn, Manuelo, Roebuck, Vladimir and Yoffe. ‘Well, it’s the van for us while you five make your own discreet way back to the Winter Palace. Au revoir and many thanks. See you all in Florida. Have a nice night at the circus.’

Bruno helped his elderly parents and youngest brother into the back of the van, climbed into the front with Maria and drove off towards the rendezvous with the helicopter. He stopped the van about thirty yards beyond the wooden bridge spanning the narrow deep river. Maria looked at the trees closely crowding on both sides.

‘This is the rendezvous?’

‘Round the next corner. In a clearing. But I have a little chore to attend to first.’

‘Inevitably.’ She looked and sounded resigned. ‘And is one allowed to ask what it is?’

‘I’m going to blow the bridge up.’

‘I see. You’re going to blow the bridge up.’ She registered no surprise and was by now at the stage where she wouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow if he’d announced his intention of razing the Winter Palace to the ground. ‘Why?’

Carrying his clutch of amatol explosives, Bruno descended from the van. Maria followed. As they walked on to the bridge Bruno said: ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that when they hear the chopper’s engine – and you can hear a chopper’s engine an awfully long way away – the police and army are going to come swarming out of town like enraged bees? I don’t want to get stung.’

Maria was crestfallen. ‘There seem to be an awful lot of things that don’t occur to me.’

Bruno took her arm and said nothing. Together, they walked out to the middle of the bridge, where Bruno stooped and laid the charges together between two struts on the side of the bridge. He straightened and surveyed them thoughtfully.

Maria said: ‘Are you an expert on everything?’

‘You don’t have to be an expert to blow up a wooden bridge.’ He produced a pair of pliers from his pocket. ‘All you require is one of those to crimp the chemical fuse – and, of course, the sense to walk away immediately afterwards.’

He stood there thoughtfully and she said: ‘Well, aren’t you going to crimp the fuses, then?’

‘Two things. I only crimp one fuse: the other charges will go up through sympathetic detonation. And if I blow up the bridge now then angry bees will be out here immediately, perhaps with enough time to figure out a way to cross the river or find a nearby bridge. We wait till we hear the chopper, blow the bridge, drive round to this glade in the woods and use the van’s headlights to light up the landing area.’

She said: ‘I can hear the helicopter now.’

He nodded, stooped again, crimped a fuse, took her hand and ran off the bridge. Twenty yards beyond the bridge they turned round just on the moment that the explosion came. The noise was a very satisfactory one indeed, and so was the result: the centre of the bridge, a flimsy structure at best, simply disintegrated and fell into the river below.

The transfer to the helicopter and the flight back to the ship went without a hitch, the pilot hedgehopping all the way to keep below the radar screen. In the wardroom Bruno was being apologetic to a rather stormy Maria.

‘I know I fooled you and I’m sorry. But I didn’t want you to die, you see. I knew from the beginning that most of our conversations were being recorded. I had to make Harper think that the break-in was going to be on Tuesday. He was all set to get us that night and that meant he would have got you, too.’

‘But Kan Dahn and Roebuck and Manuelo – ’

‘No risk. They were in it from the beginning.’

‘Why, you close, devious – but something must have put you on to Harper in the first place?’

‘My Slav blood. Nasty suspicious natures we Slavs have. About the only place that wasn’t bugged was the circus office back in the States. The electronic snooper that Harper brought in was an accomplice of his: this was designed to throw suspicion on the circus. If there was no internal circus contact then it had to be Harper. Only four people were really privy to what was going on – your boss, Pilgrim, Fawcett and Harper. Your boss was above suspicion, Fawcett and Pilgrim were dead. So, Harper. Aboard ship, Carter, the purser, wasn’t there to make sure that my cabin wasn’t bugged – he was there to make sure that it was. So was yours.’

‘You have no proof of this.’

‘No? He was in correspondence with Gdynia and he had fifteen hundred dollars in his cabin. New dollars. I have the serial numbers.’

‘That night he met with the accident on deck – ’

‘Kan Dahn was the accident. Then Harper told me he had keys for Van Diemen’s offices. He must have thought me a simpleton. You’d have needed a hundred skeleton keys to cover every lock. He’d keys for one reason only – he’d access to Van Diemen’s keys. And he kept asking me about my plans for entry. I kept saying I’d play it by ear. So eventually I gave him all my plans – a tissue of lies – by giving them to you in your cabin. You may remember Harper suggested your cabin as a rendezvous. And, of course, I didn’t trust you either.’

‘What!’

‘I didn’t distrust you. I just didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t know you were clean until you insisted that Harper had personally appointed you to this job. If you had been in cahoots, you’d have said your boss did.’

‘I’ll never trust you again.’

‘And why were we followed by the secret police everywhere. Someone gave them the tip-off. When I knew it wasn’t you, there wasn’t anyone else very much to suspect.’

‘And you still expect me to marry you?’

‘I’ll have to. For your own sake. After you’ve resigned, that is. This may be the day of women’s lib, but I think all this is a bit too lib for you. Do you know why Harper picked you – because he reckoned you were the person least likely to give him any trouble. He was right. My God, it’s never even occurred to you how Harper managed to drag Fawcett inside the tiger’s cage without being savaged.’

‘Well, since you’re so clever – ’

‘He anaesthetized the tigers with a dart gun.’

‘Of course. Maybe I should retire at that. You don’t make many mistakes, do you?’

‘Yes. A major one. One that could have been fatal for many people. I assumed that the red dartgun was the same as he’d used on the tigers. It wasn’t. It was lethal. If it hadn’t been for that Dobermann pinscher – ah well, it was fitting that he died by his own hand, so to speak. Hoisted by his own petard, or those who live by the sword die by the sword or something like that.’

‘One thing – among, seemingly, many others – I don’t understand. This business of you having to take Van Diemen prisoner. Surely Van Diemen’s almost certain ability to reproduce the formulas would have been foreseen by the CIA back in Washington?’

‘It was foreseen. It was intended that I kill him with the lethal red pen. If not, Harper – who probably carried a vest pocketful of red pens – was slated to attend to him on Tuesday night, the supposed time of the break-in. He would have got off with it – he was as cunning as he was brilliant – and there would have been no one to testify against him. I would have been dead.’

She looked at him and shuddered.

He smiled. ‘It’s all over now. Harper told me a fairy story about Van Diemen’s heart condition and insisted that I used the black gas pen against him. The need to use either did not arise. It was Harper’s – and, of course, his masters’ – intention that Van Diemen should survive. As I said, Harper died by his own hand – and Van Diemen by Harper’s. Harper is totally responsible for the deaths of both Van Diemen and himself.’

‘But why – why did he do it?’

‘Who knows? Who will ever know? A dedicated anti-American? A million dollars on the nail? The motivation – or motivations – of a double agent lie beyond comprehension. Not that it matters now. Sorry, incidentally, that I jumped on you that night in New York – I had no means of knowing whether my family was alive or dead. You know, of course, why Harper sent us to the restaurant that night – so that he could have my stateroom bugged. Which reminds me – I must send a telegram to have Carter arrested. And Morley – Harper’s bogus electronics friend who bugged my stateroom on the train. And now, I have a delicate question for you.’

‘And that is?’

‘May I go to the men’s room?’

So he went to the men’s room. There he extracted from his inside pocket the papers he had taken from Van Diemen’s filing cabinet. He did not even look at them. He tore them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

Captain Kodes knocked on the circus’s office door and entered without invitation. Wrinfield looked up in mild surprise.

‘I’m looking for Colonel Sergius, Mr Wrinfield. Have you seen him?’

‘I’ve just arrived from the train. If he’s inside he’ll be in his usual seat.’

Kodes nodded and hurried into the large exhibition hall. The late-night performance was in full swing and, as usual, it was a capacity house. Kodes made his way along to the section of the seats opposite the centre ring, but there was no sign of Sergius. For a few moments he stood there irresolute, then instinctively, almost inevitably, his eyes followed the gaze of ten thousand other pairs of eyes.

For long moments Kodes stood stock still, as if petrified, his mind at first blankly refusing to accept the evidence of his eyes. But his eyes were making no mistake. What he was witnessing was the impossible but the impossible was indubitably there: two of The Blind Eagles were going through their customary hair-raising trapeze act.

Kodes turned and ran. As he went through the exit he was met by Kan Dahn, who greeted him in genial fashion. It was questionable whether Kodes saw him. He burst into Wrinfield’s office, this time without the benefit of knocking.

‘The Blind Eagles! The Blind Eagles! Where in God’s name have they come from?’

Wrinfield looked at him mildly. ‘Their kidnappers released them. We notified the police. Didn’t you know?’

‘No, I damn well didn’t know!’ Kodes ran from the office and into his car.

Ashen-faced and stunned, Kodes stood on the seventh floor of the Lubylan detention block. The shock of finding gagged and bound men both at the open entrance below and in the guard-room had been shattering enough: but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of the three dead men lying there, Sergius and Van Diemen and Angelo.

A sure instinct led Kodes to the undertaker’s emporium. He was hardly conscious of the fact that the lights were on in the front office. They were also on in the back parlour. He made his way to the coffin that had been so briefly occupied by Bruno, and slowly removed the lid.

Dr Harper, hands crossed on his chest, looked curiously peaceful. The hands held the large blackbordered box that had been cut from the paper that had announced Bruno’s death.

The admiral leaned back in his chair in his Washington office and stared in disbelief as Bruno and Maria entered.

‘God! That suit!’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ Bruno surveyed his suit without enthusiasm. ‘Chap in Crau gave it to me.’

‘He did? Anyway, welcome home, Bruno. And Miss Hopkins.’

‘Mrs Wildermann,’ Bruno said.

‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘Holy matrimony. They give you a special licence for people in a hurry. We are in a hurry.’

The admiral contained his near-apoplexy. ‘I have the outline of the past few days. The details, please.’

Bruno gave him the details and when he had finished the admiral said: ‘Magnificent. Well, well, it took a long time before we could put it all together. Van Diemen and your family.’

‘A long time.’

Maria stared from one to the other in puzzlement.

The admiral said briskly: ‘And now. The plans.’

‘Destroyed.’

‘Naturally. But your mentalist mind isn’t.’

‘My mentalist mind, sir, has gone into a state of total shock. Amnesia.’

The admiral leaned forward, his eyes narrowing, his hands tightening on the desk. ‘Repeat that.’

‘I destroyed them without looking at them.’

‘You destroyed them without looking at them.’ It was a statement not a question. His voice was very quiet. ‘Why?’

‘What did you want, sir? Another mutual balance of terror throughout the world?’

‘Why?’

‘I told you why. Remember? I hate war.’

For long moments the admiral looked at him without enthusiasm, then he slowly relaxed, leaned back and astonished them both by laughing.

‘I’ve a damned good mind to fire you.’ He sighed, still smiling. ‘But you’re probably right on the whole.’

Maria said blankly: ‘Fire him?’

‘Didn’t you know? Bruno has been one of my top, and certainly most trusted, agents for the past five years.’

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Golden Gate

To Mary Marcelle

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

About the author

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

Where Eagles Dare

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

The operation had to be executed with a surgically military precision marked with a meticulousness that matched, in degree if not in scope, the Allied landings in wartime Europe. It was. The preparations had to be made in total stealth and secrecy. They were. A split-second co-ordination had to be achieved. It was. All the men had to be rehearsed and trained, over and over again until they played their parts perfectly and automatically. They were so trained. Every eventuality, every possible departure from the planned campaign had to be catered for. It was. And their confidence in their ability to carry out their plan, irrespective of reversals and departures from the norm, had to be total. It was.

Confidence was a quality exuded by their leader, Peter Branson. Branson was thirty-eight years old, just under six feet tall, strongly built, with black hair, pleasant features, lips that were curved in an almost perpetual smile and light blue eyes that had forgotten how to smile many years ago. He was dressed in a policeman’s uniform but he was not a policeman. Neither was any of the eleven men with them in that disused trucker’s garage not far from the banks of Lake Merced, halfway between Daly City to the south and San Francisco to the north, although three were attired in the same uniform as Branson.

The single vehicle there looked sadly out of place in what was, in effect, nothing more than an open-ended shed. It was a bus, but barely, by normal standards, qualified for the term. It was an opulently gleaming monster which above shoulder level was composed, except for the stainless-steel crossover struts, entirely of slightly tinted glass. There was no regular seating as such. There were about thirty swivel chairs, anchored to the floor but scattered seemingly at random, with deep armrests and aircraft-type swing-out dining-tables housed in each armrest. Towards the rear there was a cloakroom and a remarkably well-stocked bar. Beyond that there was a rear observation deck, the floor of which had for the moment been removed to reveal the cavernous baggage department. This was filled to near capacity but not with baggage. This enormous storage space, seven and a half feet wide by the same in length, held, among other things, two petrol-driven electric generators, two twenty-inch searchlights, a variety of smaller ones, two very peculiar-looking missile-like weapons with mounting tripods, machine-pistols, a large crated unmarked wooden box, four smaller wooden boxes, and a variety of other items of material, conspicuous among which were large coils of rope. Branson’s men were still loading.

The coach, one of only six ever made, had cost Branson ninety thousand dollars: for the purposes for which he intended to use it, he considered this figure a trifling investment. He was buying the coach, he had told the Detroit firm, as an agent for a publicity-shy millionaire, who was also an eccentric who wanted it painted yellow. And yellow it had been when it was delivered: it was now a gleaming, translucent white.

Two of the remaining five coaches had been bought by genuine and extrovert millionaires, both of whom intended them for luxurious, personal vacation travel. Both buses had rear ramps to accommodate their mini-cars. Both, presumably, would rest for about fifty weeks a year in their specially built garages.

The other three buses had been bought by the Government.

The dawn was not yet in the sky.

The other three white buses were in a garage in downtown San Francisco. The big sliding doors were closed and bolted. In a canvas chair in a corner a man in plain clothes, a sawn-off riot gun held on his lap by flaccid hands, slept peacefully. He had been dozing when the two intruders arrived and was now blissfully unaware that he had sunk into an even deeper sleep because he’d inhaled the single-second squirt from the gas gun without being aware of the fact. He would wake up within the hour almost equally unaware of what had happened and would be extremely unlikely to admit to his superiors that his vigilance had been a degree less than eternal.

The three buses looked indistinguishable from Branson’s, at least externally, although the centre one was markedly different in two respects, one visible, the other not. It weighed two tons more than its companions, for bullet-proof glass is a great deal heavier than ordinary plate glass, and those panoramic buses had an enormous glass area. And the interior of the coach was nothing less than a sybarite’s dream, which was no less than what one would expect for the private transportation of the country’s Chief Executive.

The Presidential coach had two huge facing sofas, so deep, so soft and so comfortable that the overweight man possessed of prudent foresight would have thought twice about ensconcing himself in either of them for regaining the vertical would have called for an apoplectic amount of will power or the use of a crane. There were four armchairs constructed along the same treacherously voluptuous lines. And that, in the way of seating accommodation, was that. There were cunningly concealed spigots for ice-water, scattered copper coffee tables and gleaming goldplated vases awaiting their daily consignment of fresh flowers. Behind this section were the washroom and the bar, a bar whose capacious refrigerators, in this particular and unusual instance, were stocked largely with fruit juices and soft drinks in deference to the customs of the President’s guests of honour, who were Arabs and Muslims.

Beyond this again, in a glassed-in compartment that extended the full width of the bus, was the communications centre, a maze of miniaturized electronic systems which was constantly manned whenever the President was aboard. It was said that this installation had cost considerably more than the coach itself. Besides incorporating a radio telephone system that could reach any place in the world, it had a small row of differently coloured buttons in a glass case which could be removed only with the aid of a special key. There were five such buttons. To press the first brought instant contact with the White House in Washington: the second was for the Pentagon: the third was for the airborne Strategic Air Command: the fourth was for Moscow and the fifth for London. Apart from the necessity of being in touch with his armed forces all the time, the President was an acute sufferer from telephonitis, even to the extent of an internal phone connecting him with his habitual seat on the bus and the communications compartment at the rear.

But it was not in this coach that the intruders were interested but in the one standing to its left. They entered by the front door and immediately removed a metal plate by the driver’s seat. One of the men shone a torch downwards, appeared to locate what he wanted almost immediately, reached up and took from his companion something that looked like a polythene bag of putty to which there was attached a metal cylinder not more than three inches long and one in diameter. This he securely bound to a metal strut with adhesive tape. He seemed to know what he was doing – which he did, for the lean and cadaverous Reston was an explosives expert of some note.

They moved to the rear and went behind the bar. Reston climbed on to a stool, slid back an overhead cupboard door and looked at the liquor contents. Whatever the camp-followers in the Presidential motorcade were going to suffer from, it clearly wasn’t going to be thirst. There were two rows of vertically stacked bottles, the first ten to the left, five in each row, being bourbon and scotch. Reston stooped and examined the upside-down optics beneath the cupboard and saw that the bottles that interested him in the cupboard were duplicated in the ones below and that those were all full. It seemed unlikely that anyone was going to be interested in the contents of the cupboard for some little time to come.

Reston removed the ten bottles from their circular retaining holes in the cupboard and handed them down to his companion who stacked five of them on the counter and placed the other five in a canvas bag which had evidently been brought along for this purpose, then handed Reston a rather awkward piece of equipment which consisted of three parts: a small cylinder similar to the one that had been fitted forwards, a beehive-shaped device, no more than two inches high and the same in diameter, and a device which looked very like a car fire extinguisher, with the notable exception that it had a plastic head. Both this and the beehive were attached to the cylinder by wires.

The beehive had a rubber sucker at its base but Reston did not seem to have any great faith in suckers for he produced a tube of quick-acting glue with which he liberally besmeared the base of the beehive. This done he pressed it firmly against the forward-facing side of the cupboard, taped it securely to the large and small cylinders and then taped the three to the inner row of circular holes which retained the bottles. He replaced the five bottles in front. The device was completely hidden. He slid shut the door, replaced the stool and left the bus with his companion. The guard still slept peacefully. The two men left by the side door by which they had entered and locked it behind them. Reston produced a walkie-talkie. He said: ‘PI?’

The amplified voice came through clearly on the fascia-mounted speaker in the bus in the garage north of Daly City. Branson made a switch.

‘Yes?’

‘Okay’

‘Good.’ There was no elation in Branson’s voice and no reason why there should have been: with six weeks of solid preparation behind him he would have been astonished if anything should have gone wrong. ‘You and Mack get back to the apartment. Wait.’

Johnson and Bradley were curiously alike, good-looking, in their early thirties, almost identical in build and both with blond hair. They also bore a striking resemblance, both in build and coloration, to the two men, newly wakened from sleep, who were propped up in the two beds in the hotel room, gazing at them with an understandable mixture of astonishment and outrage. One of them said: ‘Who the hell are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing here?’

‘Kindly modulate your voice and mind your language,’ Johnson said. ‘It ill becomes a naval air officer. Who we are doesn’t matter. We’re here because we require a change of clothes.’ He looked at the Beretta he was holding and touched the silencer with his left forefinger. ‘I don’t have to tell you what those things are.’

He didn’t have to tell them what those things were. There was a cold calm professionalism, a chilling surety about Johnson and Bradley that discouraged freedom of speech and inhibited even the very thought of action. While Johnson stood there, gun dangling in apparent negligence by his side, Bradley opened the valise they had brought with them, produced a length of thin rope and trussed up the two men with a speed and efficiency that indicated a long or intensive experience of such matters. When he had finished Johnson opened a cupboard, produced two suits, handed one to Bradley and said: ‘Try them for size.’

Not only were the suits an almost perfect fit but so also were the hats. Johnson would have been surprised if they had been otherwise: Branson, that most meticulous of planners, almost never missed a trick.

Bradley surveyed himself in a full-length mirror. He said sadly: ‘I should have stayed on the other side of the law. The uniform of a Lieutenant in the US Naval Air Arm suits me very well indeed. Not that you look too bad yourself.’

One of the bound men said: ‘Why do you want those uniforms?’

‘I thought naval helicopter pilots were intelligent.’

The man stared at him. ‘Jesus! You don’t mean to stand there and tell us -’

‘Yes. And we’ve both probably flown Sikorskys a damned sight more than either of you.’

‘But uniforms? Why steal our uniforms? There’s no trick in getting those made. Why do you -’

‘We’re parsimonious. Sure, we could get them made. But what we can’t get made are the documentation you carry about with you – identifications, licences, the lot.’ He patted the pockets of his uniform. ‘They’re not here. Where?’

The other bound man said: ‘Go to hell.’ He looked as if he meant it, too.

Johnson was mild. ‘This is off-season for heroes. Where?’

The other man said: ‘Not here. The Navy regard those as classified documents. They have to be deposited in the manager’s safe.’

Johnson sighed. Oh, dear. Why make it difficult? We had a young lady stake-out in an armchair by the receptionist’s last evening. Redhead. Beautiful. You may recall.’ The two bound men exchanged the briefest of glances: it was quite clear that they did recall. ‘She’d go on oath in a witness stand that neither of you deposited anything.’ He smiled in a wintry fashion. ‘A witness stand in court may be the last place on earth she’d want to go near, but if she says it’s no deposit, it’s no deposit. Let’s not be silly. Three things you can do. Tell us. Have your mouths taped and after a little persuasion tell us. Or, if those don’t work, we just search. You watch. If you’re conscious, that is.’

‘You going to kill us?’

‘What on earth for?’ Bradley’s surprise was genuine.

‘We can identify you.’

‘You’ll never see us again.’

‘We can identify the girl.’

‘Not when she removes her red wig, you can’t.’ He dug into the valise and came up with a pair of pliers. He had about him an air of gentle resignation. ‘Time’s a-wasting. Tape them up.’

Both bound men looked at each other. One shook his head, the other sighed. One smiled, almost ruefully: ‘It does seem a gesture of useless defiance – and I don’t want my good looks spoilt. Under the mattresses. At the foot.’

Under the mattresses they were. Johnson and Bradley flicked over the leaves of the two wallets, looked at each other, nodded, extracted the not inconsiderable dollar billfolds in each wallet and placed those by the bedside tables. One man said: ‘Couple of crazy crooks you are.’

Johnson said: ‘Maybe you’ll be needing that more than us pretty soon.’ He extracted money from his newly discarded suit and placed it in his uniform while Bradley did the same. Our suits you can have. Unthinkable for US officers to be running around the city in their striped underpants. And now, I’m afraid, we have to tape you.’ He reached into the valise.

One man, a quick mixture of suspicion and apprehension in his eyes, tried, vainly, to sit up in bed. ‘I thought you said -’

‘Look, if we wanted to kill you, the noise from those silenced guns wouldn’t even be heard in the corridor outside. Think we want you to start hollering the place down the moment we step outside that door? Besides, it would upset the neighbours.’

After they were taped Johnson said: ‘And, of course, we don’t want to have you jumping and wriggling around and making banging noises on the floor or walls. I’m afraid we can’t have any bangs in the next couple of hours or so. Sorry.’ He stooped, retrieved what looked like an aerosol can from the valise, and squirted it briefly in the faces of both bound men. They left, hanging up the no disturb notice outside. Johnson double-locked the door, produced his pliers, leaned on the key and snapped it leaving the head jammed in the lock.

Downstairs, they approached the clerk at reception, a cheerful youngster who gave a cheerful good morning.

Johnson said: ‘You weren’t on last night?’

‘No, sir. The management wouldn’t believe it but even a desk clerk requires a little sleep now and again.’ He looked at them with interest. ‘No offence, but aren’t you the two gentlemen who’re going to ride herd on the President this morning?’

Johnson smiled. ‘I’m not sure if the President would care to have you put it quite that way, but yes. It’s no secret. We phoned for an alarm call last night. Ashbridge and Martinez. Was it recorded?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The clerk put his pen through the names.

‘Now, we’ve left one or two – ah – naval things in our room that we really shouldn’t have done. Will you make certain that no one goes near our room until we return? Three hours, about.’

‘You can depend on me, sir.’ The clerk made a note. ‘The no disturb sign -’

‘We’ve already done that.’

They left and stopped at the first pay telephone on the street. Johnson went inside with the valise, fished inside and brought out a walkie-talkie. He was immediately through to Branson, waiting patiently in the dilapidated garage north of Daly City. He said: ‘PI?’

‘Yes?’

‘Okay’

‘Good. Get down there.’

The sun was coming up as the six men filed out of their cabin in the hills above Sausalito in Marin County, north across the bay from San Francisco. They made up a nondescript and not particularly attractive group, four of them in overalls and two in faded raincoats that might have been lifted from some unsuspecting scarecrow. They all piled into a rather battered Chevrolet station-wagon and headed down to the town. Before them stretched a stunning vista. To the south the Golden Gate and the staggering – if rather Manhattanized – skyline of San Francisco. To the south-east, lent a slightly spurious glamour by the early rays of the sun, Alcatraz Island, of unhappy history, lay to the north of the Fisherman’s Wharf, in line of sight of Treasure Island, the Bay Bridge and Oakland on the far side of the bay. To the east lay Angel Island, the largest in the bay, while to the north-east lay Belvedere Island, Tiburon and, beyond that again, the wide reaches of San Pablo Bay vanishing into nothingness. There can be few more beautiful and spectacular vistas in the world – if such there so be – than that from Sausalito. On the basis that not to be moved by it would require a heart of stone, the six men in the station-wagon had between them, it was clear, the makings of a fair-sized quarry.

They reached the main street, travelled along past the immaculate rows of sailing craft and the far from immaculate hodge-podge of boathouses, until eventually the driver pulled off into a side-street, parked and stopped the engine. He and the man beside him got out and divested themselves of their coats, revealing themselves as clad in the uniforms of California State Patrolmen. The driver, a sergeant by the name of Giscard, was at least six feet three in height, burly, red-faced, tight-mouthed and, even to the cold, insolent eyes, was the conceptualized epitome of the dyed-in-the-wool tough cop. Policemen, admittedly, were part and parcel of Giscard’s life but his frequent acquaintanceships with them he had kept to as limited a nature as possible on the numerous occasions when, hitherto without success, they had attempted to put him behind bars. The other, Parker, was tall, lean and of a nasty appearance and the best that could be said for him was that he might have passed for a cop if one were myopic or he were viewed at a considerable distance: his habitually wary bitter expression was probably attributable to the fact that he had experienced considerably less success than the sergeant in evading the long arm of the law.

They turned a corner and entered a local police precinct station. Two policemen were behind the counter, one very young, the other old enough to be his father. They looked rather tired and unenthusiastic as was natural for two men who were looking forward to some sleep, but they were polite, courteous.

‘Good morning, good morning.’ Giscard could be very brisk indeed as only befitted a man who had shown a clean pair of heels to half the police forces on the Coast. ‘Sergeant Giscard. Patrolman Parker.’ He pulled from his pocket a paper with a long list of names. ‘You must be Mahoney and Nimitz?’

‘Indeed we are.’ Mahoney, a guileless youth, would have found some difficulty in concealing his Hibernian ancestry. ‘And how do you know?’

‘Because I can read.’ The niceties of salon conversation were not for Giscard. ‘From this I take it that your station boss didn’t advise you we were coming. Well, it’s this damned motorcade this morning – and from what I’ve found out this morning maybe I’m not wasting all that much of my time in making this final check-up. You’d be surprised at the number of policemen in this state who are either illiterate or stone deaf.’

Nimitz was polite. ‘If we were to know what we have done wrong, Sergeant -’

‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’ He consulted his sheet. ‘Just four things. When do the day shift come on? How many? Where are the patrol cars? And the cells.’

‘That’s all?’

‘All. Two minutes. And hurry. I’ve got to check every place from here across the bridge to Richmond.’

‘Eight o’clock. Eight men – twice the usual. The cars -’

‘Let me see them.’

Nimitz lifted a key from a board and led the two men round the corner of the block. He opened double doors. The two police cars, as was only proper on this auspicious occasion when a President, a King and a Prince were travelling through their precinct, had the impossible glitter of showroom models.

‘Ignition keys?’

‘In the ignition.’

Back in the station, Giscard nodded to the entrance door. ‘Keys?’ ‘I beg your pardon.’

Giscard was heavily patient. ‘I know it’s normally never locked. But you might all have to leave in a tearing hurry this morning. You want to leave the shop unattended?’

‘I see.’ Nimitz indicated the keys on the board.

‘The cells.’

Nimitz led the way, taking keys with him. They were only a few feet away but round a corner out of sight of the more sensitive citizens who had reluctant occasion to enter the front office. Nimitz entered and Giscard unholstered his pistol and stuck it against his back. ‘A dead policeman,’ Giscard observed, ‘is no good to anyone.’ Parker joined them in ten seconds pushing a furious and flabbergasted Mahoney in front of him.

Both captives were gagged and left sitting on the floor, backs to the bars, arms thrust uncomfortably through them and wrists handcuffed. From the baleful expressions on their faces it was as well that they were so securely gagged. Giscard put the keys in his pocket, picked up two other sets from the board, ushered Parker out before him, locked the entrance door, pocketed that key too then went round and opened up the garage. He and Parker backed the cars out and while Giscard locked the doors – and, inevitably, pocketed the keys – Parker went to fetch the other four men from the station-wagon. When they appeared they were not, surprisingly, any longer overalled working men but gleaming advertisements for the California State Patrol.

They drove north on the US 101, took the cutoff west to State I, passed by Muir Woods and its pre-Christian stands of two-hundred-and-fifty-feet-high redwoods and finally stopped in the Mount Tamalpais State Park. Giscard brought out the walkie-talkie that went so well with his uniform and said: ‘PI?’

Branson was still patiently waiting in the bus in the abandoned garage. ‘Yes?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Good. Stay.’

The forecourt and street outside the luxurious caravanserai atop Nob Hill were, understandably at that hour of the morning, practically deserted. There were, in fact, only seven people in sight. Six of those stood on the steps of the hotel which was that night housing more dollars on the hoof than it ever had remotely had in its long and illustrious career. The seventh of those, a tall, handsome man, aquiline-faced, youthful-looking despite his grey hair and clad in immaculate hound’s-tooth, was pacing slowly up and down on the roadway. From the looks exchanged among the six men – two doorkeepers, two policemen and two men in plain clothes whose coats fitted awkwardly under their left armpits – his presence appeared to be giving rise to an increasing degree of vexation. Finally, after a low-murmured conversation among them, one of the uniformed men came down the steps and approached him.

He said: ‘Morning, sir. No offence, sir, but do you mind moving on. We have a job to do.’

‘How do you know I have not?’

‘Sir. Please. You must understand we have some very important people in there.’

‘Don’t I know it. Don’t I just know it.’ The man sighed, reached inside his coat, produced and opened a wallet. The policeman looked at it, stiffened, unmistakably swallowed and deepened his complexion by two shades.

‘I’m very sorry, sir. Mr Jensen, sir.’

‘I’m sorry, too. Sorry for all of us. They can keep their damned oil as far as I’m concerned. Dear lord, what a circus.’ He talked until the officer relaxed, then carried on his to-and-fro strolling. The policeman returned to the steps.

One of the plain-clothes men looked at him without a great deal of enthusiasm. He said: ‘A great crowd mover-on you are.’

‘Like to try?’

‘If I must give you a demonstration,’ he said wearily. He walked down three steps, paused, looked back up. ‘He flashed a card at you, didn’t he?’

‘Sort of.’ The policeman was enjoying himself.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t you recognize your own deputy director when you see him?’

‘Jesus!’ The FBI man’s miraculous return to the top step could have been attributed to nothing other than sheer levitation.

‘Are you not,’ the policeman asked innocently, ‘going to move him on?’

The plain-clothes man scowled then smiled. ‘From now on, I think I’ll leave those menial tasks to the uniformed branch.’

A bell-boy of great age appeared on the top step, hesitated, then went down to the street as Jensen gave him an encouraging wave. As he approached his wizened face was further creased in worry. He said: ‘Aren’t you taking a helluva chance, sir? FBI man up there.’

‘No chance.’ Jensen was unperturbed. ‘He’s California FBI. I’m Washington. Chalk and cheese. I doubt if he’d know the Director-General if he came and sat on his lap. What’s the word, Willie?’

‘They’re all having breakfast in their rooms. No sleepers-in, all on schedule.’

‘Let me know every ten minutes.’

‘Yes, sir. Gee, Mr Jensen, aren’t you taking one godawful chance? The place is swarming with fuzz and not only just inside. Those windows across there – there’s a rifle behind a dozen of them and a man behind each rifle.’

‘I know, Willie. I’m the man in the eye of the storm. Dead safe.’

‘If you’re caught -’

‘I won’t be. Even if I were, you’re clear.’

‘Clear! Everybody sees me talking to you -’

‘Why? Because I’m FBI. I told you that. You’ve no reason to doubt it. There are six men on the top of the steps who believe the same thing. Anyway, Willie, you can always plead the Fifth Amendment.’

Willie departed. In full view of the six watchers Jensen pulled out his walkie-talkie. ‘PI?’

‘Yes?’ Branson was as calm as ever.

‘On schedule.’

‘Fine. Pl’s moving now. Every ten minutes. Right?’

‘Of course. How’s my twin?’

Branson looked towards the rear of the coach. The bound and gagged man between the aisles bore an uncanny resemblance to Jensen.

‘He’ll live.’

TWO

Van Effen eased the big coach on to the 280 and headed her north-east up the Southern Freeway. Van Effen was a short, stocky man, with close-cropped blond hair and a head that was almost a perfect cube. His ears were so close to his head that they appeared to have been pasted there, his nose had clearly been at odds with some heavy object in the past, he tended to wear a vacuous smile as if he’d decided it was the safest expression to cope with the numerous uncertain things that were going on in the uncertain world around him and the dreamy light blue eyes, which would never be accused of being possessed of any powers of penetration, served only to reinforce the overall impression of one overwhelmed by the insoluble complexities of life. Van Effen was a very very intelligent person whose knife-like intelligence could cope with an extremely wide variety of the world’s problems and, although they had known each other for only two years, he had indisputably become Peter Branson’s indispensable lieutenant.

Both men sat together in the front of the coach, both, for the nonce, dressed in long white coats which lent them, as drivers, a very professional appearance indeed: the State Department frowned on Presidential motorcade drivers who opted for lumber-jackets or rolled up sleeves. Branson himself generally drove and was good at it but, apart from the fact that he was not a San Franciscan and Van Effen had been born there, he wished that morning to concentrate his exclusive attention on his side of the coach’s fascia which looked like a cross between the miniaturized flight instrumentation of a Boeing and those of a Hammond organ. As a communications system it could not compare to those aboard the Presidential coach, but everything was there that Branson wanted. Moreover, it had one or two refinements that the Presidential coach lacked. The President would not have considered them refinements.

Branson turned to the man in the seat behind him. Yonnie, a dark, swarthy and incredibly hirsute person who, on the rare occasions he could be persuaded to remove his shirt and approach a shower, looked more like a bear than a human being, had about him the general appearance – it was impossible to particularize – of an ex-pugilist who had taken not one but several hundred punches too many. Unlike many of Branson’s associates Yonnie, who had been with Branson since he’d embarked upon his particular mode of life all of thirteen years ago, could not be classed among the intellectually gifted, but his patience, invariable good humour and total loyalty to Branson were beyond dispute.

Branson said: ‘Got the plates, Yonnie?’

‘The plates?’ Yonnie wrinkled the negligible clearance between hairline and eyebrows, his customary indication of immense concentration, then smiled happily. ‘Yeah, yeah, I got them.’ He reached under his seat and brought up a pair of spring-clipped number plates. Branson’s coach was, externally, exactly the same as the three in the Presidential motorcade except for the fact that those were Washington DC plates while his were Californian. The plates that Yonnie held in his hands were Washington DC and, even better, exactly duplicated the numbers of one of the three waiting coaches in the garage.

Branson said: ‘Don’t forget. When I jump out the front door you jump out the back. And fix the back one first.’

‘Leave it to me, Chief.’ Yonnie exuded confidence.

A buzzer on the fascia rang briefly. Branson made a switch. It was Jensen, the Nob Hill stakeout.

‘PI?’

‘Yes?’

‘On schedule. Forty minutes.’

‘Thanks.’

Branson closed the switch and flipped another.

‘P4?’

‘?4.’

‘Move in.’

Giscard started up the stolen police car and moved up the Panoramic Highway followed by the second car. They didn’t drive sufficiently quickly to attract attention but they didn’t linger either and had reached the Mount Tamalpais radar stations in a matter of minutes. Those stations dominated the mountainous countryside for miles around and looked like nothing in the world as much as a couple of gigantic white golf balls. Giscard and his men had the entire layout committed to heart and memory and no trouble was envisaged.

Giscard said: ‘There’ll be no need to lean. We’re cops, aren’t we? The guardians of the people. You don’t attack your guardians. No shooting, the boss says.’

One of them said: ‘What if I have to shoot?’

‘You’ll lose half your cut.’ ‘No shooting.’

Branson flipped another switch.

‘?3?’ P3 was the code of the two men who had recently booby-trapped one of the motorcade buses.

‘P3.’

‘Anything?’

‘Two drivers, is all.’

‘Guards?’

‘Okay. No suspicions.’ ‘Wait.’

Branson flipped a switch as another buzzer rang.

‘P5,’ the speaker said. ‘On schedule. Thirty minutes.’

‘Thank you.’

Branson made another switch.

‘P2?’ The code for Johnson and Bradley.

‘Yes?’

‘You can go now.’

‘We go now.’ The voice was Johnson’s. He and Bradley, immaculate in their naval air uniforms, were sauntering casually along in the direction of the US Naval Air Station Alameda. Both men were carrying smooth shiny flight bags into which they had transferred the contents of the valise. As they approached the entrance they increased their pace. By the time they reached the two guards at the entrance they were giving the impression of two men who were in a considerable hurry. They showed their cards to one of the guards.

‘Lieutenant Ashbridge, Lieutenant Martinez. Of course. You’re very late, sir.’

‘I know. We’ll go straight to the choppers.’

‘I’m afraid you can’t do that, sir. Commander Eysenck wants you to report to his office at once.’ The sailor lowered his voice confidentially. ‘The Commander doesn’t sound very happy to me, sir.’

‘Damn!’ Johnson said, and meant it. ‘Where’s his office?’

‘Second door on the left, sir.’

Johnson and Bradley hurried there, knocked and entered. A young petty officer seated behind his desk pursed his lips and nodded silently towards the door to his right. His demeanour indicated that he had no desire whatsoever to participate in the painful scene that was about to follow. Johnson knocked and entered, head down and apparently searching for something in his flight bag. The precaution was needless. In the well-known demoralization ploy of senior officers deepening their intimidation of apprehensive junior officers, Eysenck kept on making notes on a pad before him. Bradley closed the door. Johnson placed the flight bag on the edge of the desk. His right hand was concealed behind it. So was the aerosol gas can.

‘So kind of you to turn up.’ Eysenck spoke in a flat drawling accent: Annapolis had clearly failed to have any effect on his Boston upbringing. ‘You had your strict orders.’ He raised his head in what would normally have been a slow and effective gesture. ‘Your explanations -’ He broke off, eyes widening, but still not suspecting anything untoward. ‘You’re not Ashbridge and Martinez.’

‘No, we’re not, are we?’

It was clear that Eysenck had become suddenly aware that there was something very very far untoward. His hand stretched out for a desk button but Johnson already had his thumb on his. Eysenck slumped forward against his desk. Johnson nodded to Bradley who opened the door to the outer office and as he closed it behind him it could be seen that his hand was fumbling in the depths of his bag. Johnson moved behind the desk, studied the buttons below the phone, pressed one as he lifted the phone.

‘Tower?’

‘Sir?’

‘Immediate clearance Lieutenants Ashbridge and Martinez.’ It was a very creditable imitation of Eysenck’s Boston accent. Branson again called P3, the two watchers by the garage.

‘And now?’

‘Filling up.’

The three buses inside the garage were indeed filling up. Two of them, indeed, had their complements of passengers and were ready to go. The coach that had been booby-trapped was given over mainly to newspapermen, wire service men and cameramen, among them four women, three of indeterminate age, the other young. On a platform at the rear of the bus were three mounted ciné-cameras, for this was the coach that led the motorcade and the cameras would at all times have an excellent view of the Presidential coach which was to follow immediately behind. Among the passengers in this coach were three men who wouldn’t have recognized a typewriter or a camera if it had dropped on their toes but who would have had no difficulty whatsoever in differentiating between a Walther, Colt, Biretti, Smith & Wesson and other such paraphernalia generally regarded as superfluous to the needs of the communications media. This was known as the lead coach.

But there was one passenger in this coach who would have recognized a camera if he had seen it – he was, in fact, carrying a highly complicated apparatus – but who would also have had no difficulty at all in differentiating between a Walther, Colt, Biretti and Smith & Wesson, any of which he was legally entitled to carry and not infrequently did. On this occasion, however, he was unarmed – he considered it unnecessary; between them his colleagues constituted a veritable travelling arsenal – but he did carry a most unusual item of equipment, a beautifully miniaturized and transistorized transceiver radio concealed in the false bottom of his camera. His name was Revson and as he had repeatedly proved in the past, in the service of his country although his country knew nothing of this – a man of quite remarkable accomplishments.

The rear coach was also well occupied, again by newspapermen and men with no interest in newspapers, although in this case the ratio was inversed. The greatly outnumbered journalists, although they realized that the Presidential coach would soon, in terms of the realizable assets of its passengers, be nothing less than a rolling Fort Knox, wondered if it were necessary to have quite so many FBI agents around.

There were only three people aboard the Presidential coach, all crew members. The white-coated driver, his ‘receive’ switch depressed, was waiting for instructions to come through the fascia speaker. Behind the bar, an extraordinarily pretty brunette, who looked like an amalgam of all those ‘Fly me’ airline advertisements, was trying to look demure and inconspicuous and failing miserably. At the rear, the radio operator was already seated in front of his communications console.

A buzzer rang in Branson’s coach.

‘P5,’ the speaker said. ‘On schedule. Twenty minutes.’

A second buzzer rang.

‘P4,’ the speaker said. ‘All okay.’

‘Excellent.’ For once Branson permitted himself a slight feeling of relief. The take-over of the Tamalpais radar stations had been essential to his plans. ‘Scanners manned?’

‘Affirmative.’

A third buzzer rang.

‘PI?’ Johnson’s voice was hurried. ‘P2. Can we go now?’

‘No. Trouble?’

‘Some.’ Johnson, seated at the helicopter controls, engines still not started, watched a man emerge from Eysenck’s office and break into a run, rounding the corner of the building. That could only mean, Johnson realized, that he was going to look through Eysenck’s office window and that could only mean that he had failed to open the door which he and Bradley had locked behind them: the key was at that moment in Johnson’s pocket. Not that looking through Eysenck’s window was going to help him much because he and Bradley had dragged the unconscious Eysenck and petty officer into the windowless washroom leading off the Commander’s office. The key of the washroom door was also in his pocket.

The man came into sight round the corner of the building. He wasn’t running now. In fact, he stopped and looked around. It wasn’t too hard to read what was going on in his mind. Eysenck and the petty officer might well be going about their lawful occasions and he was going to look pretty sick if he started to cry wolf. On the other hand if something had happened and he didn’t report his suspicions he was going to make himself highly unpopular with his superiors. He turned and headed in the direction of the Station Commander’s office, obviously with the intent of asking a few discreet questions. Halfway towards the office it became clear that his questions weren’t going to be all that discreet: he had broken into a run.

Johnson spoke into the walkie-talkie.

‘Bad trouble.’

‘Hold on as long as possible. Leave in emergency. Rendezvous remains.’

In coach PI Van Effen looked at Branson. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Yes. Johnson and Bradley are in trouble, want to take off. Imagine what’s going to happen if they do, if they have to cruise around ten minutes waiting for us? A couple of hijacked helicopters with the President and half the oil in the Middle East in the city? Everybody’s going to be as jittery as hell. They’ll take no chances. Panic-stricken. They’ll stop at nothing. The choppers will be shot out of the sky. They have Phantoms in a state of instant readiness on that base.’

‘Well, now.’ Van Effen eased the coach to a stop at the back of the garage which held the motorcade. ‘Bad, but maybe not as bad as all that. If they have to take off before schedule, you could always instruct them to fly over the motorcade. It would take a pretty crazy air commander to instruct his pilots to fire machine-guns or rockets at a chopper hovering above the Presidential coach. Bingo – no President, no Arabian oil kings and sheikhs, no Chief of Staff, no Mayor Morrison. Chopper might even crash down on to the top of the Presidential coach. Not nice to be a sacked Rear Admiral without a pension. If, that is to say, he survives the court-martial.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’ Branson sounded half convinced, no more. ‘You’re assuming our air commander is as sane as you are, that he would react along your line of thinking. How are we to know that he is not certifiable? Extremely unlikely, I admit, but I have no option other than to accept your suggestion. And we’ve no option other than to go ahead.’

The buzzer rang. Branson made the appropriate switch.

‘PI?’

‘Yes?’

‘P3.’ It was Reston from the garage. ‘Lead coach has just moved out.’

‘Let me know when the Presidential coach moves.’

Branson gestured to Van Effen, who started up the engine and moved slowly round the side of the garage.

The buzzer rang again.

‘P5. On schedule. Ten minutes.’

‘Fine. Get down to the garage.’

Again the buzzer rang. It was Reston. He said: ‘Presidential coach is just moving out.’

‘Fine.’ Branson made another switch. ‘Rear coach?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Hold it for a couple of minutes. We’ve a traffic jam here. Some nut has just slewed his articulated truck across the street. Pure accident, I’d say. But no chances. No panic, no need for anyone to leave their seats. We’re coming back to the garage for a couple of minutes till they decide on a new route. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

Van Effen drove slowly round to the front of the garage, nosed it past the front door until the first third of the coach was visible to the occupants of the rear coach inside, still parked where it had been. Branson and Van Effen descended unhurriedly from the opposite front seats, walked into the garage: Yonnie, unobserved by those inside, exited via the back door and began to clamp the new number plate on top of the old.

The occupants of the rear coach watched the approach of the two white-coated figures curiously, but without suspicion, for endless frustrating delays were part and parcel of their lives. Branson walked round to the front door opposite the driver’s side, while Van Effen wandered, aimlessly as it seemed, towards the rear. Had there been any cause for concern on the part of the occupants, it would have been allayed by the sight of two blue-overalled figures busily doing nothing by the main doors. They were not to know they were Reston and his friend.

Branson opened the front left-hand door and climbed up two steps. He said to the driver: ‘Sorry about this. It happens. They’re picking out a new route, a safe route, for us to go up to Nob Hill.’

The driver looked puzzled, no more. He said: ‘Where’s Ernie?’

‘Ernie?’

‘Lead coach driver.’

‘Ah! That’s his name. Taken sick, I’m afraid.’

‘Taken sick?’ Suspicion flared. ‘Only two minutes ago -’

The driver twisted round in his seat as two minor explosions occurred in the rear of the coach, less explosions than soft plops of sound, to the accompanying sounds of breaking glass and a hiss as of air escaping under pressure. The rear of the coach was already enveloped in a dense, billowing and rapidly mushrooming cloud of grey smoke, so dense that it was impossible to see the now closed rear door and the figure of Van Effen leaning against it and making sure it stayed that way. Every man in the bus – or those who were still visible – had swung round in his seat, reaching for a gun in an automatic but useless reaction for there was nothing to be seen to fire at.

Branson held his breath, threw two of the grenade-shaped gas bombs in rapid succession-one in the front aisle, one at the driver’s feet-jumped to the garage floor, slammed the door and held the handle, a somewhat pointless precaution as he knew, for the first inhalation of that gas produced immediate unconsciousness. After ten seconds he left, walked round the front of the bus where he was joined by Van Effen. Reston and his companion had already closed and bolted the main entrance. Now they were stripping off their overalls to reveal the conservative and well-cut suits beneath.

Reston said: ‘Over? So soon? Just like that?’ Branson nodded. ‘But if one whiff of that can knock a man out, surely it’s going to kill them-if they keep on sitting there, I mean, inhaling the stuff all the time?’

They left via the side door, not too hurriedly, locking it behind them. Branson said: ‘Contact with oxygen neutralizes the gas inside fifteen seconds. You could walk inside that bus now and be entirely unaffected. But it will be at least an hour before anyone in that bus comes to.’

Harriman stepped out of a taxi as they came round to the garage front. They boarded the coach – now the new rear coach of the motorcade – and Van Effen headed for Nob Hill. Branson made a switch in the fascia.

‘P2?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are things?’

‘Quiet. Too damned quiet. I don’t like it.’

‘What do you think is happening?’

‘I don’t know. I can just see someone on the phone asking for permission to launch a couple of guided missiles at us.’

‘Permission from whom?’

‘The highest military authority in the country’

‘Could take time to contact Washington.’

‘Take damn-all time to contact Nob Hill.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Momentarily, even Branson’s habitual massive calm was disturbed. The highest military authority in the country was, indeed, in the next suite to the President in the Mark Hopkins hotel. General Cartland, Chief of Staff and adviser extraordinary to the President, was indeed participating in that day’s motorcade. ‘You know what happens if they do contact him?’

‘Yes. They’ll cancel the motorcade.’ Chief of the Armed Forces though the President might be, he could be overruled in matters of security by his Chief of Staff. ‘Hold it a minute.’ There was a pause then Johnson said: ‘One of the guards at the gate is on the telephone. This could mean anything or nothing.’

Branson was conscious of a slight dampness in the region of his neck collar. Although he had given up the habit of prayer even before he’d left his mother’s knee, he prayed it was nothing. Perhaps the call to the guard was perfectly innocuous: perhaps the outcome of the call might be innocuous: if it were not, the many months and the quarter million dollars he’d spent in preparation for this coup was so much irrecoverable water under the bridge.

‘PI?’

‘Yes?’ Branson was dimly aware that his teeth were clamped tightly together.

‘You’re not going to believe this but tower has just given us permission to lift off.’

Branson remained silent for a few moments while someone lifted the Golden Gate Bridge off his back. He was not one much given to brow-mopping but this, if ever, seemed a warranted occasion. He refrained. He said: ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth. How do you account for this?’

‘The guards must have said that they’d checked our identity papers and that they were in order.’

‘Start up, will you? I’d like to find out if I can hear you over the racket of the rotors.’

Twin lines of security men, back to back at a distance of about six feet and facing outwards, formed a protective lane for the short distance between the hotel and the waiting Presidential coach, which seemed rather superfluous as the streets had been barricaded off from the public for a hundred yards all around. The visiting dignitaries from the Persian Gulf seemed to be in no way put out by this nor to be suffering from any claustrophobic sense of imprisonment: in their own homelands, where the fine art of assassination had reached peaks as yet undreamed of in the United States, this was part and parcel of their everyday lives: not only would they have felt naked without this overt show of protection, they would have been offended if not humiliated by the very concept that they were sufficiently unimportant not to merit the massive security precaution.

The President led the way, looking almost wistfully from side to side as if disappointed that there was no one there for him to wave at. He was a tall, rather portly figure, immaculately attired in a tan gaberdine suit, with a patrician face vaguely reminiscent of one of the better-fed Roman emperors and a splendid head of the purest silver hair which was widely supposed to be his especial pride and joy. One had but to look at him to appreciate that he had been doomed from the cradle to end up in the Oval Office: that anyone else should aspire to be – or be – the Chief Executive was quite unthinkable. Better brains there might be on Capitol Hill, but that magnificent presence was unique. As far as politicians went he was a man of the utmost probity – the fact that he was a multi-millionaire may have helped him in this-intelligent, humorous and was loved, liked, admired or held in genuine affection to an extent that had been achieved by no other President in the previous half century, a remarkable but far from impossible achievement. As always, he carried a stout cane, a relic from that occasion when he had required it for almost two days after tripping over the leash of his Labrador. That he had no need of the cane was quite indisputable. Perhaps he thought it rounded off his image, or lent him a slightly Rooseveltian aura. Whatever the reason, he was never seen in public or private without it.

He reached the coach, half turned, smiled and bowed slightly as he ushered the first of his guests aboard.

Precedence and pride of place went inevitably to the King: his vast kingdom held as much oil as the rest of the world put together. He was a tall, imposing figure, a king from the floor-sweeping skirts of his dazzling white robes to the top of the equally dazzling burnous. He had an aquiline dark face, with a splendidly trimmed white beard and the hooded eyes of a brooding eagle. Supposedly the wealthiest man in all history, he could easily have been a tyrant and despot but was neither: against that his autocratic rule was absolute and the only laws he obeyed were those he made himself.

The Prince came next – his small sheikhdom had never rated and never had had a king. While his territorial holdings came to less than five per cent of the King’s, his influence was almost as great: his sheikhdom, an arid and barren expanse of some of the world’s most inhospitable sands, was literally afloat on a sea of oil. An extrovert and flamboyant personality, who owned a Cadillac for every four miles of his principality’s hundred miles of road – it was said with some authority that if one of his cars had the slightest mechanical trouble it was regarded as obsolete and never used again, a fact which must have given some small satisfaction to General Motors – he was an excellent pilot, a remarkably gifted race-car driver and an assiduous patron of many of the most exclusive nightclubs in the world. He went to considerable lengths to cultivate his reputation as an international playboy, an exercise which deceived nobody: behind the façade lay the computerized mind of an outstanding businessman. He was of medium height, well built and wouldn’t have been seen dead in the traditional Arab clothes. He was Savile Row’s best customer. ‘Dapper’ was the only word to describe him, from the pointed crocodile shoes to the almost invisible hairline moustache.

They were followed by Sheikh Iman and Sheikh Kharan, the oil ministers respectively of the King and the Prince. They looked remarkably alike and were rumoured to have the same grandfather, which was not at all impossible. Both wore Western clothes, both were plump, smiling almost to the point of beaming and extremely shrewd indeed. The only way to tell them apart was while Iman sported a tiny black goatee beard Kharan was clean-shaven.

The next to board was General Cartland. Although wearing civilian clothes – an inconspicuous blue pin-stripe – he was unmistakably what he was. If he had been wearing only a bath towel he would still have been immediately recognizable as a general. The erect bearing, the precise movements, the clipped speech, the cool blue eyes that never asked a question twice – everything marked him out for the man he was. Even his grey hair was shorn. Although Cartland had more than a peripheral interest in oil – he did, after all, require some form of fuel for his ships, tanks and planes – he was not along because of any special expertise in the oil business. He was along primarily because the President refused to cross the street without him. The President – and he made no bones about it – was heavily dependent on Cartland for his advice, far-ranging width of experience and solid common sense, a fact which had given and still gave rise to considerable if wholly misplaced jealousy in Washington. Cooler judgements in that city regarded him as being virtually irreplaceable as Presidential adviser, and although his duty left him with less and less time to run his army, navy and air force Cartland seemed to cope with both tasks effortlessly. He would have made an excellent politician or statesman but had unfortunately been cursed from birth with an unshakable incorruptibility and moral integrity.

The next man to board was Hansen, the President’s energy czar. He was the latest appointee to the post and as yet a largely unknown quantity. His qualifications for the post were impeccable but his experience so far slight. Energy was one thing he appeared to possess in abundance. He was a darting, nervous, volatile individual, painfully thin, whose hands and dark eyes were never still. He was reputed to have a first-class brain. This was his biggest – indeed almost his only – confrontation with great oil barons and his awareness of being on trial was painful.

Muir went next. He was a very rubicund man, almost bald, and the number of his chins varied from two to four according to the angle of his neck. Unlike most fat men he had a permanently doleful expression. He had a positively bucolic appearance about him, an unsuccessful farmer who concentrated less on the production than the consumption of what he grew on his farm. This proposed deal with the Arab nations could raise as many political as physical problems, which was why Under-Secretary of State Muir was along. Although it was almost impossible to believe he was unquestionably the country’s leading expert on the Middle East.

The President waved the last man aboard but John Morrison, waving his hand in turn, declined. The President acknowledged the gesture, smiled and preceded him up the steps. Morrison, a burly, genial man of unquestionably Italian ancestry, was not along for his energy expertise. Energy concerned him but not to the extent of causing him sleepless nights. He was along partly as a guide, partly because he conceived it to be his duty to accept the Presidential invitation. Although the President was the official host to his guests, this was Morrison’s parish and here he was both host and king. He was the Mayor of San Francisco.

In the rear coach, some fifty yards away, Branson saw the Presidential coach door close. He made a switch.

‘P2?’

‘Yes?’ Johnson.

‘We go now.’

‘Now it is.’

The motorcade moved off, led by a police car and motor-cycle outriders. They were followed by the lead coach, the Presidential coach, the rear coach, a second police car and two more outriders. There was no attempt to make any scenic tour of the town, that had been attended to the previous afternoon soon after Air Force 1 had landed at the International Airport. This was strictly a business trip. The motorcade went along California, right down Van Ness, left along Lombard, angled right up Richardson Avenue and so into the Presidio. From this point onwards the roads had been closed that morning to all normal traffic. They took the Viaduct Approach, curving right and to the north until at last, dead ahead, loomed the immensity of the Golden Gate Bridge.

THREE

The Golden Gate Bridge is unquestionably one of the engineering wonders of the world. To San Franciscans, inevitably, it is the engineering wonder of the world and as bridges go it must be at once the most spectacular and graceful in existence. To see the two great brick-red – or orange or ochre, according to the quality of the light-towers emerging from the dense banks of fog that so frequently billow in from the Pacific is to experience a profound sense of unreality and when the fog disperses completely the feeling changes to one of disbelief and a benumbment of the senses that men had not only the audacity to conceive of this epic poem in mechanical grandeur but also the technical expertise to bring it into being. Even while the evidence of the eyes is irrefutable it still remains difficult for the mind to accept that it actually is there.

That it is there at all is not, in fact, due to man but to one man, a certain Joseph B. Strauss, who, in the pig-headed fashion of considerable Americans, despite seemingly unsurmountable and political difficulties and the assurances of his architectural colleagues that his dream was a technical impossibility, just went ahead and built it anyway. The bridge was opened in May 1937.

Until the construction of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in 1964, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world. Even now, it is only about twenty yards shorter. The two massive towers that support the bridge soar seven hundred and fifty feet above the waters of the Golden Gate: the bridge’s total length is just under one and three-quarter miles. The cost of construction was $35,000,000: to replace it today something in the region of $200,000,000 would be needed.

The one sombre aspect about the bridge is that for Americans who find the burdens of life intolerable to bear this is unquestionably the most favoured point of departure. There have been at least five hundred known suicides: probably as many again have gone undetected. There have been eight known survivors. Among the rest, the possibility of survival seems extremely remote. If any did indeed survive the shattering impact of the two-hundred-foot drop to the water, the surging tides and vicious currents of the Golden Gate would swiftly have completed what the jump itself failed to do. Those dangerous tides and currents make their effect felt for some distance on either side of the bridge. Three miles to the east lies what used to be the forbidding prison-fortress of Alcatraz Island. No precise figures of those who attempted escape by swimming are available: but it is believed that only three of those who tried it ever survived.

It is idle to speculate upon the choice of the bridge as a springboard to eternity. Psychiatrists would have it that it is a spectacular and attention-riveting finale to a drab and unspectacular life dragged out in a grey anonymity. But it would seem that there is nothing either eye-catching or spectacular in jumping into the darkness in the middle of the night.

The procession made its stately way under the first of the giant towers. In the upholstered luxury of the Presidential coach, the King, Prince and their two oil ministers gazed around them with a carefully controlled degree of regal and viceregal appreciation, for although there was a marked absence of Golden Gate Bridges in their dusty homelands – and, indeed, no need for them – it would not have done to admit that there were some things better done in the West than in the Middle East. Nor did they enthuse overmuch about the scenery, for although a million square miles of drifting sands might not be without its attractions for a homesick Bedouin, it could hardly be said to compare with the lush and fertile greenery of the farm land and forest land that stretched ahead of them across the Golden Gate. Indeed, the whole of the Bay Area could not have looked better than it did on that splendid June morning, with the sun already climbing high to their right in a cloudless sky and sparkling iridescently off the blue-green waters below. It was the perfect story-book setting for a day which, the President and Hansen, his energy czar, devoutly hoped would have a story-book ending.

The Prince looked around the coach, this time in open admiration, for he was very much a man of his own generation and possessed of a passion for all things mechanical and said in his clipped Oxford accent: ‘My word, Mr President, you do know how to travel in style. I wish I had one of those.’

‘And so you shall,’ the President said indulgently. ‘My country would be honoured to present you with one, as soon as you return to your homeland. Equipped to your own specifications, of course.’

The King said drily: ‘The Prince is accustomed to ordering his vehicles by the round dozen. No doubt, Achmed, you would like a couple of those to go with it.’ He pointed upwards to where two naval helicopters were hovering overhead. ‘You do take good care of us, Mr President.’

The President smiled non-committally. How could one comment upon the obvious? General Cartland said: ‘For decorative purposes only, your Highness. Apart from your own security men waiting on the other side and an occasional police car, you will see nothing between here and San Rafael. But the security is there all the same. Between here and San Rafael the motorcade will be under heavily armed surveillance literally every yard of the way. There are crackpots everywhere, even in the United States.’

‘Especially in the United States,’ the President said darkly.

In mock seriousness the King said: ‘So we are safe?’

The President regained his smiling composure. ‘As in the vaults of Fort Knox.’

It was at this point, just after the lead coach had passed the halfway mark across the bridge, that five things happened in almost bewilderingly rapid succession. In the rear coach Branson pressed a button on the console in front of him. Two seconds later a small explosion occurred in the front of the lead coach, almost beneath the driver’s feet. Although unhurt, the driver was momentarily shocked, then swore, recovered quickly and jammed his foot on the brake pedal. Nothing happened.

‘Sweet Jesus!’ It took him all of another second to realize that his hydraulic lines were gone. He jammed his handbrake into the locked position and changed down into first gear. The coach began to slow.

Branson abruptly lifted his right arm, as abruptly lowered it again to reinforce the left in bracing himself against the fascia. Behind him his men did the same, outstretched arms, slightly bent at the elbows as they had learnt in frequent practices, braced against the backs of the seats in front: nobody sat in the front seats. Van Effen slipped the gear into neutral and kicked down on the brake pedal as if he were trying to thrust it through the floor.

The fact that Van Effen had recently and with malice aforethought seen fit to deactivate his rear brake lights did little to help the plight of the hapless driver of the police car behind. The motorcade was travelling slowly, about twenty-five miles an hour, and the rear police car was trailing the coach by about the same number of feet. The driver had no reason to suspect that anything might be amiss, for the bridge was closed to all traffic except the motorcade: there was no earthly reason to expect anything should interfere with the smooth and even tempo of their progress. He may even have spared a momentary side glance to admire the view. However it was, when he first realized that all was not what it should have been the distance between them had halved. An incredulous double-take cost him another few feet and, skilled police driver though he was, his reactions were no faster than those of the next man and by the time his foot had hit the brake the gap between himself and the now stationary coach had lessened to not more than five feet. The effect of a car’s striking a solid and immovable object at twenty miles an hour has a less than humorous effect on the occupants of that car: the four officers in the car were no exception.

At the moment of impact Branson touched a second button on the fascia. The lead coach, slowing only by its handbrake, was now doing no more than ten miles an hour when another small explosion occurred in the drinks cabinet at the rear, an explosion followed immediately by a pronounced hissing as if caused by compressed air escaping under very high pressure. Within seconds the entire compartment was filled with a dense, grey, obnoxious and noxious gas. The coach, almost immediately out of control as the driver slumped forward over the wheel, slewed slowly to the right and came to a rest less than two feet from the side of the road. Not that it would have mattered particularly if it had struck the safety barriers on the side of the bridge which were of a nature to withstand the assaults of anything less than a Chieftain tank.

The Presidential coach came to no harm. The driver had seen the lead coach’s brake warning lights come on, braked, pulled left to avoid the slewing coach ahead and came to a rest beside it. The expressions of the twelve occupants of the coach expressed varying degrees of unhappiness but not, as yet, of alarm.

The police car and two motor-cycle outriders leading the motorcade had been curiously slow to observe the confusion behind them. Only now had they spotted the slewed coach and were beginning to turn.

In the rear coach everything was taking place with the clockwork precision that stemmed from a score of practice runs that had covered all conceivable potentialities. Van Effen jumped down from the left-hand door, Yonnie from the right, just as the two motor-cycle outriders pulled up almost alongside. Van Effen said: ‘You better get in there fast. Looks like we got a stiff on our hands.’

The two patrolmen propped their machines and jumped aboard the coach. They could now no longer be seen by the returning lead police car and outriders so it was safe to take swift and efficient action against them, which was done with considerable ease not least because their attention had immediately been caught up by the sight of the bound figure lying sprawled on the floor in the rear aisle.

Seven men emerged swiftly from the doors of the coach. Five of those joined Van Effen and Yonnie and ran towards the other coaches. Two more ran back towards the crashed police car. Two others inside the coach swung wide the rear door and mounted what appeared to be a relatively harmless length of steel tubing on a tripod stand. Branson and Jensen remained where they were: the bound man on the floor, whose identity Jensen had taken over, regarded them all severally with a baleful expression but, beyond that, the options open to him were rather limited.

The two men who had run back towards the crashed police car were called Kowalski and Peters. They didn’t look like criminals, unless a couple of prosperous young commuters from the stockbroker belt could be called criminals. Yonnie apart, none of Branson’s associates bore any resemblance whatever to the popular concept of those who habitually stepped outside the law. Both men, in fact, had killed a number of times, but then only legally – as far as the term ‘legal’ could be interpreted – as members of a highly specialized Marine commando unit in Vietnam. Disillusioned with civilian life they’d found their next best panacea with Branson, who had a splendid eye for the recruitment of such men. They had not killed since. Branson approved of violence if and when necessary: killing was not permitted except as a last resort. In his thirteen years of upsetting law officers in the United States, Canada and Mexico, Branson had not yet had to have recourse to the last resort. Whether this was due to moral scruples or not was unclear: what was clear was that Branson regarded it as bad business. The degree of intensity of police efforts to catch robbers as opposed to murderers differed quite appreciably.

The windows of both front doors of the car were wound down – obviously they had been so at the moment of the crash. The four uniformed men seated inside had not been seriously injured but clearly had been badly shaken and had suffered minor damage, the worst of which appeared to be a broken nose sustained by the man in the front seat next to the driver. For the most part they were just dazed, too dazed, in any event, to offer any resistance to the removal of their weapons. Working in smooth unison Kowalski and Peters wound up the front windows. Peters closed his door while Kowalski threw in a gas bomb and closed his in turn.

None of any of this action had been witnessed by the returning police car’s crew or the motorcycle outriders. The policemen left their car and machines and were cautiously approaching the lead coach when Yonnie and Van Effen with the five others came running up. All had guns of one kind or another in their hands.

‘Quickly!’ Van Effen shouted. ‘Take cover! There are a couple of crazy bastards back in that coach there, one with a bazooka, the other with a Schmeisser. Get behind the bus!’

Given time to consider the matter the policemen might have queried Van Effen’s statements but they weren’t given the time and the instinct for immediate if irrational self-preservation remains always paramount. Van Effen checked quickly to see if they were hidden from the view of the Presidential coach. They were. Not that he feared anything from that source, he just wanted to be spared the chore of blasting open the lock of the door that would be surely locked against them if their actions were observed.

He nodded to Yonnie and walked away with another man towards the rear of the bus. Whatever might be said, and had unkindly been said, about Yonnie’s cerebral limitations, this was the situation he had been born for, a basically elemental one in which action took precedence over thoughts. Long training had even given the vocabulary appropriate to the occasion. He said: ‘Let’s kinda put our hands up, huh?’

The six men turned round. Their expressions ran through the gamut of astonishment, anger and then resignation. Resignation was all that was left them. They had, with reason enough, not yet thought it time to produce their own weapons, and when the wise man is confronted at point-blank range with a pair of submachine-pistols he does what he is told and just kinda puts his hands up. Yonnie kept them covered while another man relieved them of their pistols. The remaining two men began to run back towards the rear coach as soon as they saw Van Effen and another climb aboard the Presidential coach.

The reaction of those aboard this coach had, so far, amounted to no more than an amalgam of perplexity and annoyance, and even that was slight enough. One or two were making the customary laborious effort to rise when Van Effen mounted the steps.

‘Please relax, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Just a slight delay’ Such is the authority of even a white coat — in a street accident a crowd will make way for a man in a butcher’s apron – that everybody subsided. Van Effen produced an unpleasant-looking weapon, a double-barrelled 12-bore shotgun with most of the barrel and stock removed to make for easier transport, if not accuracy. ‘I am afraid this is what you might call a hold-up or hijack or kidnap. I don’t suppose it matters very much what you call it. Just please remain where you are.’

‘Good God in heaven!’ The President stared at Van Effen’s moonface as if he were a creature from outer space. His eyes, as if drawn magnetically, went to the King and the Prince, then he returned his incredulous, outraged gaze to Van Effen. ‘Are you insane? Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know you’re pointing a gun at the President of the United States?’

‘I know. You can’t help being what you are any more than I can help being what I am. As for pointing guns at Presidents, it’s a long if not very honourable tradition in our country. Please do not give any trouble.’ Van Effen looked directly at General Cartland – he’d had him under indirect observation from the moment he had entered the coach. ‘General, it is known that you always carry a gun. Please let me have it. Please do not be clever. Your .22 can be nasty enough if it is accurate enough: this whippet will blast a hole the size of your hand through your chest. You are not the man, I know, to confuse courage with suicide.’

Cartland smiled faintly, nodded, produced a small, black, narrow automatic and handed it across.

Van Effen said: Thank you. I’m afraid you will have to remain seated for the moment at least. You have only my word for it, but if you offer no violence you will receive none.’

A profound silence descended. The King, eyes closed and hands folded across his chest, appeared to be communing either with himself or with the All-powerful. Suddenly he opened his eyes, looked at the President and said: ‘Just how safe are the vaults in Fort Knox?’

‘You’d better believe me, Hendrix,’ Branson said. He was talking into a hand-held microphone. ‘We have the President, the King and the Prince. If you will wait a minute or two I’ll have the President himself confirm that to you. Meantime, please don’t attempt anything so stupid or rash as to try to approach us. Let me give you a demonstration. I assume you have some patrol cars near the south entrance and you are in radio contact with them?’

Hendrix didn’t look like anyone’s conception of a Chief of Police. He looked like a professorial refugee from the campus of the nearby university. He was tall, slender, dark, slightly stooped and invariably immaculately groomed and conservatively dressed. A great number of people temporarily or permanently deprived of their freedom would have freely if blasphemously attested to the fact that he was very very intelligent indeed. There was no more brilliant or brilliantly effective policeman in the country. At that moment, however, that fine intelligence was in temporary abeyance. He felt stunned and had about him the look of a man who has just seen all his nightmares come true.

He said: ‘I am.’

‘Very well. Wait.’

Branson turned and made a signal to the two men at the rear of the coach. There was a sudden explosive whoosh from the recoilless missile weapon mounted at the rear. Three seconds later a cloud of dense grey smoke erupted between the pylons of the south tower. Branson spoke into the microphone. ‘Well?’

‘Some kind of explosion,’ Hendrix said. His voice was remarkably steady. ‘Lots of smoke, if it is smoke.’

‘A nerve gas. Not permanently damaging, but incapacitating. Takes about ten minutes’ time before it oxidizes. If we have to use it and a breeze comes up from the north-west, north or northeast – well, it will be your responsibility, you understand.’

‘I understand.’

‘Conventional gas-masks are useless against it. Do you understand that also?’

‘I understand.’

‘We have a similar weapon covering the northern end of the bridge. You will inform police squads and units of the armed forces of the inadvisability of attempting to move out on to the bridge. You understand that too?’ ‘Yes.’

‘You will have been informed of the presence of two naval helicopters hovering over the bridge?’

‘Yes.’ The rather hunted look had left Hendrix’s face and his mind was clearly back into top gear. ‘I find it rather puzzling, I must say.’

‘It needn’t be. They are in our hands. Have an immediate alarm put through to all local army and naval air commanders. Tell them if any attempt is made to dispatch fighters to shoot down those helicopters they will have very unpleasant effects on the President and his friends. Tell them that we shall know immediately whenever any such plane does lift off. The Mount Tamalpais radar stations are in our hands.’

‘Good God!’ Hendrix was back to square one.

‘He won’t help. They are manned by competent radar operators. No attempt will be made to retake those stations whether by land or airborne assault. If such an assault is made we are aware that we have no means of preventing it. However, I do not think that the President, King or Prince would look kindly upon any individual who was responsible for depriving them of, say, their right ears. Please do not think that I am not serious. We shall deliver them, by hand, in a sealed plastic bag.’

‘No such attempt will be made.’ Captain Campbell, a burly, sandy-haired, red-faced and normally jovial character whom Hendrix regarded as his right-hand man, regarded Hendrix with some surprise, not because of what he had just said but because it was the first time he had ever seen Hendrix with beads of sweat on his brow. In an unconscious gesture Campbell reached up and touched his own forehead, then looked with a feeling of grave disquiet at the dampened back of his hand.

Branson said: ‘I hope you mean what you say. I will contact you shortly.’

‘It will be in order if I come down to the bridge? It would appear that I have to set up some kind of communications headquarters and that seems the most logical place for it to be.’

‘That will be in order. But do not move out on to the bridge. And please prevent any private cars from entering the Presidio. Violence is the very last thing we want but if some arises I do not wish innocent people to suffer.’

‘You are very considerate.’ Hendrix sounded, perhaps justifiably, more than a little bitter.

Branson smiled and replaced the microphone.

The gas inside the lead coach had vanished but the effect it had had on the occupants had not. All were still profoundly unconscious. Some two or three had fallen into the aisle without, apparently, having sustained any injuries in the process. For the most part, however, they just remained slumped in their seats or had fallen forward against the backs of the seats in front of them.

Yonnie and Bartlett moved among them but not in the capacity of ministering angels. Bartlett, at twenty-six, was the youngest of Branson’s men, and looked every inch a fresh-faced college boy which he every inch was not. They were searching every person in the coach, and searching them very thoroughly indeed, those who were being subjected to this indignity being in no position to object. The lady journalists were spared this but their handbags were meticulously examined. It said much for the standards that Branson imposed that none of the several thousand dollars that passed through the hands of Yonnie and Bartlett found its way into either of their pockets. Robbery on a grand scale was big business: robbery on a small scale was petty larceny and not to be tolerated. In any event, they weren’t looking for money, they were looking for guns. Branson had reasoned, and correctly as it turned out, that there would be several special agents in the journalists’ coach, whose assignment would be not the direct protection of the President and his guests but the surveillance of the journalists themselves. Because of the worldwide interest aroused by the visit of the Arabian oil princes to the United States, at least ten of those journalists aboard were from abroad – four from Europe, the same from the Gulf States and one each from Nigeria and Venezuela, countries which might well be regarded as having a pressing interest in any transactions between the major oil states and the United States.

They found three such guns and pocketed them. The three owners of the guns were handcuffed and left where they were. Yonnie and Bartlett descended and joined the man who was guarding the six still largely uncomprehending policemen who were handcuffed together in single file. Another man was seated behind one of the bazooka-like missile firers that was guarding the north tower. Here, as at the southern end, everything was completely under control, everything had gone precisely as Branson had meticulously and with much labour planned over the preceding months. Branson had every reason to be feeling agreeably pleased with himself.

Branson, as he stepped down from the rear coach, looked neither pleased nor displeased. Things had gone as he had expected them to and that was that. His followers had often remarked, although never in his hearing, on Branson’s almost staggering self-confidence: on the other hand they had to admit that he had never, as yet, failed to justify his utter trust in himself. Of Branson’s permanent nucleus of eighteen men, nine of them had spent various times in various penitentiaries up and down the country reflecting upon the vagaries of fortune. But that was before they had been recruited by Branson. Since then not one of the eighteen had even got as far as a courtroom far less the prison walls: when it was taken into account that those included such semi-permanent guests of the United States Government as Parker this record could be regarded as an achievement of no little note.

Branson walked forward to the Presidential coach. Van Effen was standing in the doorway. Branson said: ‘I’m moving the lead coach ahead a bit. Tell your driver to follow me.’

He moved into the lead coach and with Yonnie’s help dragged clear the slumped driver behind the wheel. He slid into the vacant seat, started the engine, engaged gear, straightened out the coach and eased it forward for a distance of about fifty yards, bringing it to a halt with the use of the handbrake. The Presidential coach followed, pulling up only feet behind them.

Branson descended and walked back in the direction of the south tower. When he came to the precise middle of the bridge – the point at which the enormous suspension cables were at their lowest – he looked behind him and again in front of him. The fifty yards of the most central section of the bridge, the section where the helicopter rotors would be most unlikely to be fouled by the cables, even if subjected to the unseen and unforeseen vagaries of wind, was clear. Branson walked clear of the area and waved to the two machines chattering overhead. Johnson and Bradley brought their naval helicopters down easily and with the minimum of fuss. For the first time in its long and august history the Golden Gate Bridge was in use as a helipad.

Branson boarded the Presidential coach. Everyone there was instinctively aware that he was the leader of the kidnappers, the man behind their present troubles, and their reception of him did not even begin to border on the cordial. The four oil men and Cartland looked at him impassively: Hansen, understandably, was more jittery and nervous than ever, his hands and eyes forever on the rapid and almost furtive move: Muir was his usual somnolent self, his eyes half-closed as if he were on the verge of dropping off to sleep: Mayor Morrison, who had won so many medals in the Second World War that he could scarcely have found room for them even on his massive chest, was just plain furious: and so, indisputably, was the President: that expression of kindly tolerance and compassionate wisdom which had endeared him to the hearts of millions had for the moment been tucked away in the deep freeze.

Branson said without preamble but pleasantly enough: ‘My name is Branson. Morning, Mr President. Your Highnesses, I would like -’

‘You would like!’ The President was icily angry but he had the expression on his face and the tone in his voice under control: you don’t have two hundred million people call you President and behave like an unhinged rock star. ‘I suggest we dispense with the charade, with the hypocrisy of empty politeness. Who are you, sir?’

‘I told you. Branson. And I see no reason why the normal courtesies of life should not be observed. It would be pleasant if we were to begin our relationship – an enforced introduction on your side, I agree – on a calmer and more reasonable basis. It would make things so much more pleasant if we behaved in a more civilized fashion.’

‘Civilized?’ The President stared at him in a genuine astonishment that swiftly regressed to his former fury. ‘You! A person like you. A thug! A crook! A hoodlum! A common criminal. And you dare suggest we behave in a more civilized fashion.’

‘A thug? No. A crook? Yes. A hoodlum? No. A common criminal? No. I’m a most uncommon criminal. However, I’m not sorry you adopt this attitude. Having you express yourself with such hostility to me doesn’t mean that it eases my conscience in what I may have to do to you. I don’t have any conscience. But it makes life that much simpler for me. Not having to hold your hand – I don’t speak literally, you understand-makes it all that much easier for me to achieve my ends.’

‘I don’t think you’ll be called upon to hold any hands, Branson.’ Cartland’s voice was very dry. ‘How are we to regard ourselves? As kidnapees? As ransom for some lost cause you hold dear?’

‘The only lost cause I hold dear is standing before you.’

‘Then hostages to fortune?’

‘That’s nearer it. Hostages to a very large fortune, I trust.’ He looked again at the President. ‘I genuinely do apologize for any affront or inconvenience caused by me to your foreign guests.’

‘Inconvenience!’ The President’s shoulders sagged as he invoked his tragic Muse. ‘You don’t know what irreparable damage you have done this day, Branson.’

‘I wasn’t aware that I had done any yet. Or are you referring to their Highnesses here? I don’t see what damage I can have caused there. Or are you referring to your little trip to San Rafael today-I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone that for a bit-to inspect the site of what will be the biggest oil refinery in the world?’ He smiled and nodded towards the oil princes. ‘They really have you and Hansen over a barrel there, don’t they, Mr President – an oil barrel? First they rob you blind over oil sales, accumulate so much loot that they can’t find homes for all of it, conceive the bright idea of investing it in the land of the robbed, come up with the concept of building this refinery and petro-chemical complex on the West Coast and running it themselves – with your technical help, of course – on their own oil which would cost them nothing. The foreseeable profits are staggering, a large portion of which would be passed on to you in the form of vastly reduced oil prices. Bonanzas all round. I’m afraid international finance is beyond my scope – I prefer to make my money in a more direct fashion. If you think your deal is going to slip through because of the offence now being given to those Arabian gentlemen you must be an awful lot more naïve than a President of the United States has any right to be. Those are not gentlemen to be swayed by personal considerations. They have tungsten steel where their hearts should be and IBM computers for brains.’ He paused. ‘I’m not being very polite to your guests, am I?’

Neither the King nor Prince Achmed were quite so impassive now: their eyes, as they looked at Branson, were expressive of a distinct yearning.

Cartland said: ‘You seem to be in no great hurry to get on with whatever you intend to get on with.’

‘How right you are. The need for speed has now gone. Time is no longer of the essence except that the longer I spend here the more profitable it is going to be for me. That I shall explain later. In the meantime, the longer you remain here the more time it will give both you and your peoples both here and in the Gulf States to appreciate just what a pretty pickle you find yourselves in. And, believe me, you are in a pickle. Think about it.’

Branson walked to the rear of the coach and spoke to the blond young soldier who was manning the massive communication complex.

‘What’s your name?’

The soldier, who had heard all that had gone on and obviously didn’t like any of it, hesitated, then said grudgingly: ‘Boyann.’

Branson handed him a piece of paper. ‘Get this number, please. It’s just local.’

‘Get it yourself.’

‘I did say “please”.’

‘Go to hell.’

Branson shrugged and turned. ‘Van Effen?’

‘Yes?’

‘Bring Chrysler here.’ He turned to Boyann. ‘Chrysler has forgotten a great deal more about telecommunications than you’ve learnt so far. You think I hadn’t anticipated meeting up with young heroes?’ He spoke to Van Effen. ‘And when you bring him take Boyann here out and have him thrown over the side of the bridge into the Golden Gate.’

‘Right away’

‘Stop!’ The President was shocked and showed it. ‘You would never dare.’

‘Give me sufficient provocation and I’ll have you thrown over the side too. I know it seems hard but you’ve got to find out some way, some time, that I mean what I say’

Muir stirred and spoke for the first time. He sounded tired. ‘I think I detect a note of sincerity in this fellow’s voice. He may, mark you, be a convincing bluffer. I, for one, wouldn’t care to be the person responsible for taking the chance.’

The President bent an inimical eye on the Under-Secretary but Muir seemed to have gone to sleep. Cartland said in a quiet voice: ‘Boyann, do what you are told.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Boyann seemed more than happy to have had the decision taken out of his hands. He took the paper from Branson who said: ‘You can put it through to the phone by that chair opposite the President’s?’ Boyann nodded. ‘And patch it in to the President’s?’ Boyann nodded again. Branson left and took his seat in the vacant armchair.

Boyann got through immediately: clearly, the call had been awaited.

‘Hendrix,’ the voice said.

‘Branson here.’

‘Yes. Branson. Peter Branson. God, I might have guessed!’ There was a silence then Hendrix said quietly: ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you, Branson.’

‘And so you shall, my dear fellow, and much sooner than you think. I’d like to speak to you later. Meantime, I wouldn’t be surprised if the President didn’t want to have a word with you.’ Branson stood up, not without difficulty, and offered both the telephone and seat to Morrison who in turn struggled to his feet and accepted the offer with alacrity.

The President ran true to the form of any President who might have been so unfortunate as to find himself in his position. He ran through the whole gamut of incredulity, outrage, disbelief and horror that not only the Chief Executive but, even more important, foreign potentates should find themselves in a situation so preposterous as to be, in his opinion, without parallel in history. He laid the blame, predictably, entirely at Hendrix’s door – security cover, as the President knew all too well, was arranged by Washington and the local police forces did precisely what they were told to do, but the President’s memory, logic and sense of justice had gone into a state of shock-and ended up by demanding that Hendrix’s duty was to clear up the whole damnable mess and that he should do something about it immediately.

Hendrix, who had a great deal longer time to consider the situation, remained admirably calm. He said: ‘What do you suggest I do about it, sir?’

The incoherent splutterings that followed were indication enough that constructive suggestions were at that moment some light years away from the President’s mind. Morrison took advantage of the momentary hiatus.

‘Bernard? John here.’ Morrison smiled without meaning to. ‘The voters aren’t going to like this, Bernard.’

‘All one hundred and fifty million of them?’

Again the same smile. ‘If we think nationally, yes.’

‘I’m afraid this is going to turn into a national problem, John. In fact, you know damn well it already is. And on the political side it’s too big for either of us.’

‘You cheer me up greatly, Bernard.’

‘I wish someone would cheer me. Do you think our friend would let me speak to the General?’

‘I’ll ask.’ He asked and Branson nodded amiably enough. The other occupants of the coach eyed one another with a mounting degree of suspicion and apprehension, both directed against Branson. The man was too utterly sure of himself. And, as matters stood at that moment, there seemed to be little reason why he shouldn’t be. He just didn’t hold all the aces in the pack – he held a pack full of aces.

Hendrix said: ‘General Cartland? Hendrix. The way I see it, sir, this is going to be as much a military operation as a police one. Much more so, if I’m any judge. I should call in the senior military officers on the coast?’

‘Higher than that.’

‘The Pentagon?’

‘At once.’

‘Local action?’

‘Damn all. Wait until the situation stabilizes itself – and we find out what this madman wants.’ Branson smiled politely but as usual the smile never touched his eyes. ‘According to what he says himself – if you can believe a word he says – time is not of the essence. I think he wants to talk to you.’

Branson took the phone from Cartland and eased himself comfortably into the armchair. ‘One or two questions and requests, Hendrix. I think I am in a position to expect answers and compliance with whatever I want. Wouldn’t you agree?’ ‘I’m listening.’

‘Has the news been broken yet?’

‘What the hell do you mean broken? Half of San Francisco can see you stuck out on that damned bridge.’

‘That’s no way to speak of my favourite bridge. Nationwide is what I mean.’

‘It’ll get around fast enough.’

‘See that it gets around now. The communications media, as those people term themselves nowadays, are going to be interested. I am prepared to allow, no, that’s wrong, I insist that you put a helicopter, no, two helicopters at the disposal of some of the hundreds of news cameramen who will wish to record this historic event. The Bay Area is thick with suitable machines, both military and civilian.’

There was a silence then Hendrix said: ‘What the devil do you want those for?’

‘Obvious, surely. Publicity. The maximum exposure. I want every person in America and indeed every person in the world who is within reach of a television set to see just what a predicament the President and his Arabian friends are in. And they are in a predicament, wouldn’t you say?’

Another silence. ‘This publicity, of course, you will use as a lever to get public opinion on your side, to help you obtain what you want, whatever that might be?’

‘What else?’

Hendrix said heavily: ‘You wouldn’t like me to send a coach-load of reporters on to the bridge, would you?’

Branson smiled into the telephone. ‘A coachload of reporters I wouldn’t mind but I don’t much fancy a coach-load of FBI men armed to the teeth and disguised as reporters. No, I think we’ll pass that one up. Besides, reporters we have, our own coach-load.’

‘What’s to prevent me from loading those helicopters up with troops, maybe paratroopers?’

Branson sighed. ‘Only your own common sense. We’ve got hostages, or had you forgotten? A bullet can reach the President far more quickly than a paratrooper ever could.’ Branson glanced at the President, whose expression indicated that he clearly didn’t care to be used as a bargaining counter.

‘You wouldn’t dare. You’d defeat your own ends. You’d have nothing left to blackmail us with.’

‘I’d still have a king and a prince. Try me and see. You’re whistling in the dark and you know it. Or do you want to go down in history as the man responsible for the deaths of a president, a king and a prince?’ Hendrix made no reply. It was clearly not a role he envisaged for himself. ‘However, it hasn’t escaped me that there might be some death-or-glory hotheads who would stop at nothing in taking blind gambles, so I’ve got my second request to make now. This area is crammed with military stations – the Presidio itself, Fort Baker, Treasure Island, Forts Funston, Miley and Mason, Fort Barry, Cronkite – you name them, they’re around and all within easy reach of here by road. I’d be very surprised if between them they can’t rustle up the two mobile self-propelled rapid-fire anti-aircraft guns which I want on the bridge within the hour. Plenty of ammunition, of course – and the army will test them out first. You know how some of that hardware gets afflicted with all kinds of jinxes.’

‘You’re quite mad.’

‘A divine sort of madness. Instructions now.’

‘I refuse.’

‘You refuse? General Cartland?’

Cartland heaved himself upright and walked heavily down the coach. He took the phone and said quietly: ‘Do what the madman asks. Don’t you recognize megalomania when you hear it?’

‘That was very unkind, General.’ Branson smiled and retrieved the phone. ‘You have the message, Hendrix?’

‘I have the message.’ Hendrix sounded as if he were being strangled.

‘My third request. Call up a couple of squads of army engineers. I want two sets of steel barriers built on the bridge, one under either tower. They are to be strong enough to stop a tank and high enough – barbed at the top, of course – to prevent anyone from climbing over. The north barrier is to be unbroken, the south with a hinged central section, wide enough to permit the passage of a jeep, and capable of being opened from the inside – our side – only. The barriers will be anchored to the sides of the bridge by bolting or welding and secured to the roadway by pneumatically driven spikes. But the army will know a great deal more about such things than I do. I shall supervise the operations personally.’

Hendrix seemed to be having some difficulty with his breathing. Finally he said: ‘Why?’

‘It’s those nasty fogs that come rolling in from the Pacific all the time. More often than not they cover the bridge – in fact I can see one coming in right now.’ Branson sounded almost apologetic. ‘It would be too easy to rush us under fog cover.’

‘And why the hinged section in the south barrier?’

‘I thought I told you. To permit the passage of a jeep. For such things as negotiating committees, a doctor if need be and the transport of the best food and drink in town.’

‘Jesus! You have your nerve, Branson.’

‘Nerve?’ Branson was hurt. ‘This humanitarian consideration of the well-being of my fellow man? You call that nerve? Kings and presidents are not accustomed to going hungry. Among other things you don’t want to go down in history as, Hendrix, includes I’m sure being the man responsible for starving kings and presidents to death. Think of the verdict of history.’

Hendrix was silent. He may or may not have been thinking about the verdict of history.

Branson went on: ‘And we must not forget the delicate sensibilities of royalty. Before the barriers are in place we’d like to have a couple of mobile latrine vans in position. Equipped, of course, to the very highest standards – and that does not include being loaded to the gunwales with FBI agents. You have all that, Hendrix?’

‘It’s been recorded.’

‘Then set the wheels in motion. Or must I call in General Cartland again?’

‘It will be done.’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

Branson cradled the phone on his knee and looked at it wonderingly. ‘And he didn’t even tell me I couldn’t get off with it.’ He lifted the phone again. ‘Last request, Hendrix, but the most important one. The President is temporarily incapacitated. How can one talk to the leader of a leaderless nation?’

‘The Vice-President is already in Chicago. He’s on his way to O’Hare airfield now.’

‘Splendid. Splendid. Co-operation without even asking for it. But I’m afraid I’ll also have to ask for the co-operation of one or two other senior members of the government. I know it’s asking for a lot but I feel -’

‘Spare me your schoolboy humour, Branson.’ There was an edge to Hendrix’s voice now but it was a tired edge. ‘I suppose you have some people in mind?’

‘Just a couple, that’s all.’ Branson had a gift for sounding eminently reasonable when making the most unreasonable demands.

‘And if you get them and the Vice-President together here I suppose you’ll make all three of them hostages too.’

‘No. You’ve only got my word for it, of course, but no. You’re losing whatever grip you had, Hendrix. You don’t kidnap negotiators. If you did you’d have to negotiate with someone else and so on down the line until we came to someone like you.’ Branson waited for comment but Hendrix appeared to be beyond comment. ‘I want the Secretary of State.’

‘He’s on his way.’

‘A mind-reader, no less! From where?’

‘Los Angeles.’

‘How very convenient. How come he was there?’

‘An IMF meeting.’

‘IMF? Then that means -’

Branson replaced the receiver. ‘Well, well, well. Little Peter Branson vis-à-vis, the Secretary of the Treasury. What a tête-à-tête this should be. I thought the day would never come.’

‘Yes,’ Hendrix said wearily. ‘The Secretary of the Treasury was there. He’s flying up with him.’

FOUR

Paul Revson surfaced slowly, almost reluctantly, to a state of consciousness. His eyelids felt leaden, his head fuzzy and he thought that he had gone slightly deaf. Otherwise he felt no after-effects from having been gassed – he knew he must have been gassed but everything had happened so quickly after the explosion under the driver’s feet that he had no clear recollection of what had happened. As his eyesight cleared he looked around him. By his side a girl with a mop of blonde hair was huddled forward against the back of the seat before her, her neck twisted at an uncomfortable angle. Some people, he saw, were lying in the aisle, apparently asleep. A score of others were still in their seats, all resting at the most uncomfortable angles: some of them, like himself, were just beginning to stir. He peered through the coach window, blinked unbelievingly, then stared again. As a born and bred San Franciscan it took him nothing flat to realize that their coach was halted almost squarely in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a circumstance, he felt, which called for some explanation.

He turned his immediate attention to the girl at his side. She was worth anyone’s attention. She was possessed of a slight figure, hardly strong enough, one would have thought, to lug around the heavy ciné-camera which, shoulder-slung, accompanied her everywhere. The blonde hair was so bleached – naturally, Revson thought-that it almost qualified for the description of platinum, and she was quite beautiful with a very pale skin that the sun never appeared to touch. She was, she had given him to understand, a fashion photographer for one of the major TV companies and as the official party of this Presidential trip was exclusively male it was rather difficult to understand just why she was there. It didn’t make sense, but then, again, neither did most Presidential trips. Her name was equally preposterous. April Wednesday, she called herself, and her press card bore this out. Revson could only assume that she had been born of singularly unimaginative parents who, as christening day approached, had seized upon the birth date as the easy way out.

He put his hands on her shoulders and gently pulled her upright. The blonde head lolled against his shoulder. He had no idea how to revive people who had suffered from some form of gas poisoning. Should he shake her, slap her cheek gently or just let her sleep it off? He was spared the resolution of this problem when she stirred, shivered for some reason or other – although she was clad in only a thin and markedly abbreviated green silk dress, the temperature in the bus must have been in the eighties – then opened her eyes and gazed unblinkingly at Revson’s.

In a face not noticeably lacking other commendable features, those eyes were by far the most remarkable feature. They were huge, clear, of a startling deep sea-green and were possessed of an odd quality of purity and innocence. Revson wondered idly just how devious she was: any young woman who toted a camera for a TV company must have lost her innocence quite some time ago, assuming she was possessed of any in the first place.

She said, not taking her eyes from his: ‘What happened?’

‘At a guess, some joker must have let off a gas bomb. The instant effect variety. How do you feel?’

‘Punch-drunk. Hung over. You know what I mean?’ He nodded. ‘Why would anyone want to do a thing like that?’

‘Why a lot of things.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Why, after an hour and ten minutes, are we still stranded in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge?’

‘What!’

‘Look around you.’

She looked around her, slowly acknowledging the reality of the surroundings. Suddenly she stiffened and caught hold of the hand that was still around her shoulders.

‘Those two men across the aisle.’ Her voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘They’re wearing handcuffs.’

Revson bent forward and looked. The two large and still sleeping men were undoubtedly wearing handcuffs.

‘Why?’ Again the whisper.

‘How should I know why? I’ve just come to myself.’

‘Well, then, why aren’t we wearing them?’

‘How should – we are among the blessed.’ He looked over his shoulder and saw the Presidential coach parked just behind them. ‘Excuse me. As a good journalist I think the odd probing question is in order.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘Sure.’ She stepped into the aisle and he followed. Instead of moving directly after her he lifted the coat lapel of the nearest of the sleeping men. An empty shoulder holster was much in evidence. He followed the girl. At the front door he noticed that the driver, still sound asleep, was propped against the right-hand front door, quite some distance from his seat: obviously, he hadn’t made it there under his own steam.

He joined the girl on the bridge. A very large and extremely ugly policeman – Yonnie had the kind of face that would have given any force a bad name – was pointing a machine-pistol at them. That a policeman should be pointing a gun at them was peculiar enough. That a policeman should be armed with a machine-gun was even more peculiar. Most peculiar of all, however, was the spectacle of six scowling and clearly unhappy policemen standing in a line, each attached to the other by a pair of handcuffs.

April Wednesday stared at them in astonishment, then looked at Revson. He said: ‘I agree. This would seem to call for some kind of explanation.’

‘You’ll have it.’ Branson, walking easily, talking easily, had just appeared round the front of the Presidential bus. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Revson.’

‘Sorry about this. You too, young lady.’

‘Helicopters!’ she said.

‘Yes, they are, aren’t they? Explanations will be forthcoming but not severally. When your friends have all come to, then we’ll have a little talk.’ Branson walked away towards the rear coach. His step was almost jaunty and he did not seem too displeased with life. He looked at the bank of cloud moving in slowly, very slowly, from the west. If it troubled him he did not show it. He reached the crashed police car and spoke to the man standing guard. ‘Have our four friends recovered, Chrysler?’

‘Yes, sir. I wouldn’t say they’re in very high spirits, though.’ Chrysler was a lean, dark, intelligent-looking young man and it only required the addition of a brief-case to see him as an up-and-coming attorney. He was indeed, as Branson had told Boyann, a telecommunications expert. He was also very good with combination locks and frightening people with guns.

‘I dare say. Let them stay in the car. Easier than getting them out and handcuffing them. When the four FBI men – at least from the fact that they were armed I assume they were FBI men – in the lead coach have come to, take a couple of the boys and escort them, along with the six cops up front, the four here and the two inside our coach halfway towards the south tower. Sixteen in all and any one a potential menace if we keep them here. Halfway there take off whatever handcuffs there are – very useful things, handcuffs, you never know when we may need them again-then let them walk off the bridge under their own steam. Okay?’

‘It’s done.’ He pointed to the west, to the slowly advancing bank of cloud. ‘Do you like that, Mr Branson?’

‘Could have done without it. We’ll cope when it comes. Looks as if it may well pass under the bridge anyway.’

‘Mr Branson.’ It was Jensen, beckoning urgently from the front door of the rear coach. ‘Mount Tamalpais. Urgent.’

Branson ran into the coach, seated himself in front of the console and lifted the microphone. ‘Branson.’

‘Giscard. We’ve picked up a blip. Coming from the south – well, a bit east of south. Light plane, looks like. Maybe eight miles out.’

‘Thank you.’ Branson made another switch. South and a little east. That could only be San Francisco International Airport. ‘Chief of Police Hendrix. At once.’

Hendrix was on the phone in seconds. ‘What now?’

‘I told you to keep a clear airspace. Our radar’s picked up a blip, airport direction -’

Hendrix interrupted. His voice was sour. ‘You wanted to see Messrs Milton and Quarry, didn’t you?’ Milton was the Secretary of State, Quarry the Secretary of the Treasury. They came in from Los Angeles fifteen minutes ago and are flying up direct by helicopter?’

‘Where are they landing?’

‘In the Military Reservation in the Presidio. Two, three minutes by car.’

‘Thanks.’ Branson made the switch to Mount Tamalpais. Giscard acknowledged. Branson said: ‘No sweat. Friends. But watch that scanner – the next one may not be a friend.’

‘Will do, Mr Branson.’

Branson rose, made to leave the coach then stopped and looked at the bound man in the rear of the aisle. He said to Jensen, who had taken the place of the bound man: ‘You can get back to calling yourself Harriman again. Untie Jensen here.’

‘Sending him off the bridge?’

For once Branson hesitated and didn’t like the feeling at all. Hesitation was not in his nature. Whether he arrived at decisions intellectually or instinctively he almost invariably did so immediately: the few mistakes he’d made in his life had invariably been associated with hesitation. He made up his mind.

‘We’ll keep him. He might come in useful, I don’t know how yet, but he just might. And he is deputy director of the FBI. He’s no minnow to have in our net. Tell him the score but keep him here until I give the word.’

He left and walked towards the lead coach. At least a score of people were lined up outside the coach under the watchful eyes and guns of Yonnie and his two colleagues. They had, understandably, a general air of bafflement about them. Branson saw that included among them were four handcuffed men. He looked inside the coach, saw that it was empty, and turned to Peters.

‘Take those four gentlemen with the handcuffs and the six policemen down to Chrysler. He’ll know what to do with them.’

He turned to look at the oncoming fog. Close-up, it was coming in a deal faster than it had seemed at a distance. But it was a low bank: with luck it would pass under the bridge. Even if it didn’t, he imagined that they could cope by using suitable threats against the President and his friends, but he wouldn’t feel really happy about those intermittent fogs until the steel barriers were in position at either end of the bridge.

He turned and looked at the correspondents. There were four women among them but only one of them, the green-eyed blonde with Revson, could truthfully have claimed to have been a postwar baby – World War Two, that was.

‘You can all relax,’ Branson said. ‘No harm is going to come to any of you. In fact, when I have finished you’ll be given a free choice – to walk off the bridge in safety or stay aboard the bridge, equally in safety’ He smiled his generous empty smile. ‘I somehow fancy that most of you will elect to stay. When I have finished you will realize, I hope, that a story like this does not fall into your laps every week.’

When he had finished, not one of those frantically scribbling and furiously camera-clicking journalists and photographers was under any doubt whatsoever: a story like this fell into their laps once in a lifetime, if they had the luck to have a very long life, that was. Physical violence would have been required to remove any of them from the Golden Gate Bridge. They were slap bang in the middle of an unprecedented episode in criminal history and one that bade fair to become part of the more general history of their times.

The fog had reached the bridge now, but not enveloped it. Thin wisps of it drifted over the top but the main body of the fog rolled by twenty feet below the bridge: the effect was to produce an odd feeling of weightlessness, of suspension in space, as if the bridge was afloat on the insubstantial bedrock of water vapour.

Branson said: ‘You have elected to remain so you must accept some guide rules. In the rear coach there are three telephone lines to town. Those are for my own personal and emergency use but you will be allowed to use them once-to contact your photographic services, newspapers, wire services or whatever to arrange for a representative to be stationed at the southern end of the bridge to pick up your dispatches and photographs. This can be done three times a day at times yet to be arranged. Markers will be arranged in an oblong around the Presidential coach and no one will cross those without permission. No one will interview any person inside the Presidential coach without my permission or the consent of the party concerned: it would be more satisfactory all round and fairer to all concerned if, say, the President were to hold a press conference out here, but that I cannot and will not force anyone to do. The helicopters will be similarly cordoned off and that will also be forbidden territory. Twenty yards south of my coach and twenty yards north of yours white lines will be painted across the bridge. Those will be your demarcation limits. Five yards beyond those lines will be a guard with a machine-pistol and his orders will be not to warn but to shoot anyone who steps over those lines. Finally, you will be confined to your coach during the hours of darkness: this rule will only be relaxed if some particularly newsworthy happening occurs. I will be the judge of what is newsworthy. Anyone unwilling to abide by those ground rules may leave now.’

Nobody left.

‘Any questions?’ Branson watched the fog roll eastwards, obscuring Alcatraz Island, as the newsmen conferred among themselves.

Two men took a step forward. Both were middle-aged, dressed in well-cut, conservative suits, one almost completely bald, the other with grizzled hair and beard, both inordinately bushy. The bald man said: ‘We have.’

‘Your names?’

‘I’m Grafton – AP. This is Dougan – Reuters.’

Branson regarded them with an interest that was pointless to conceal. Those two could reach more newspapers worldwide than all the rest put together. ‘And the question?’

‘We would be right in saying, Mr Branson, that you didn’t exactly get up this morning and say “This would be a fine day for kidnapping the President of the United States”?’

‘You would.’

Dougan said: ‘This operation bears all the hallmarks of long and meticulous planning. Without condoning your actions one has to admit that you appear to have left nothing to chance and have foreseen every eventuality. How long did the planning take?’

‘Three months.’

‘That’s not possible. The details of this itinerary were released only four days ago.’

‘The details were known in Washington three months ago.’

Grafton said: ‘On the evidence before us we have to believe you. Why do you think this was kept under wraps so long?’

‘In order to obviate the possibility of people like me doing exactly what I have done.’

‘How did you get the advance information?’

‘I bought it.’

‘How? Where?’

‘In Washington, as in many other places, thirty thousand dollars buys a lot of information.’

Dougan said: ‘Would you care to name names?’

‘That’s a stupid question. Any others?’

A dark-suited lady of indeterminate years said: ‘Yes. Here we have all the signs of a highly experienced professionalism. We can assume that this is not your first foray outside the law?’

Branson smiled. ‘You may assume what you like. What’s past is prologue.’

She persisted. ‘Do you have a criminal record, Mr Branson?’

‘I have never been in court in my life. Anything else?’

‘Of course.’ It was Dougan. ‘The thing that we all want to know. Why?’

‘That you will find out in the course of a press conference I shall be holding within two hours. At the conference will be a TV camera and crew representing the three main companies. Also present will be the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury. Vice-President Richards we expect later but not in time for the conference.’

Experienced newsmen and newswomen though they were they appeared to be at a temporary loss for words. Finally Dougan said carefully: ‘Would it be true to say of you that you subscribe to the belief that if a thing is worth doing it’s worth doing well?’

‘A pragmatic philosophy but it works. You may now use the telephones in my coach. Three at a time.’

Branson turned away and took a step towards the Presidential coach when Yonnie’s voice stopped him.

‘Jesus!’ Yonnie, mouth inelegantly agape, was staring out to the west. ‘You see what I see, Mr Branson?’

Branson saw what he saw. Not much more than half a mile away the fog-bank came to an abrupt end as if it had been sliced off by a cleaver. Less than a mile beyond that again could be seen the superstructure of a very large vessel indeed. Although the hull of the vessel was still hidden by the fog-bank there was, from what could be seen of it, very little doubt as to its identity. Branson stood still for a second or two, ran for the Presidential coach, entered, hurried down the aisle oblivious to curious stares of the seated men and said quickly to Boyann: ‘Hendrix. Hurry!’ He indicated a phone in a recess beside the console. That one.’

Hendrix was on the line immediately. When Branson spoke his voice was cold, almost savage, a marked departure from the norm: even Branson had defences that could be breached.

‘Hendrix. Want I should send the President’s ears now?’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘What do you mean? Or is that little paddle-boat just out there by happenstance? Call it off.’

‘God’s sake, call what off?’

Branson spoke his words clearly and spaced them distinctly. ‘There is a very large battleship approaching the Golden Gate Bridge. I don’t want it to approach. I don’t know what you have in mind but I don’t think I would like it. Call it off!’

‘I just don’t know what you’re talking about. Hold on.’ While the line was silent Branson beckoned to Van Effen, who approached down the aisle.

Branson said quickly: ‘There’s a battleship approaching the bridge. Trouble? I don’t know. What I do know is I want everybody under cover at once, the press in their own coach, our men in ours. Doors to be closed. Then come back at once.’

Van Effen nodded to where a red-haired young man was standing by the driver’s seat, his hand resting on a pistol that was stuck in his belt. ‘Think Bradford can manage?’

Branson pulled out his own pistol and laid it on the telephone recess. ‘I’m here too. Hurry.’ He was vaguely disappointed in Van Effen. Bradford could have carried out his warder duties just as effectively by going outside and standing near the door but for the creation of the properly threatening climate of menace and intimidation it was better that he remain in the full view of the captives. Then Hendrix was on the phone again.

‘That is the battleship USS New Jersey. San Francisco is her home base for several months of the year. This is one of her regular fuel and food reprovisioning returns to base. She’s coming at this particular time because she can only get under the bridge at low tide.’

That much, Branson knew, was true. The tide, he had observed, was out and it seemed highly unlikely that the authorities could whistle up a battleship at such short notice – less than two hours. And it was difficult to see what use could be made of it – certainly they were unlikely to blow up the bridge with the President on it. But Branson had a profound distrust of his fellow man, which was one of the reasons he had survived so long. He said: ‘Stop it. It’s not to come under the bridge. Want I should throw one of your oil boys on to its bridge as it passes beneath?’

‘For God’s sake, are you a nut, a complete madman?’ Branson smiled to himself, the sharp edge of anxiety in Hendrix’s voice was unmistakable. ‘We’re trying to raise him.’

Correspondents and guards alike were crowding the western side of the bridge fascinated by the approach of the giant battleship. Although reason said that there was no danger in the battleship’s passing under the bridge there was a growing degree of tension among the spectators. The superstructure towered so high that it seemed certain that some sections of it must inevitably strike the bridge and this feeling existed in spite of the elementary reasoning which would have reassured them that the ship must have made the same passage many times in the past and the Navy was not in the habit of putting at risk some hundred-million-dollar battleship in a let’s-try-it-and-see effort.

One person showed no apparent interest in the approach of the New Jersey. Revson, alone in the front coach, was intent on securing a considerable length of green cord, so slender as to be hardly more than the thickness of a stout thread, to a black cylinder about eight inches in length and one in diameter. He thrust both cylinder and cord into the capacious pocket of his bush jacket, left the bus, took a bearing on the approaching superstructure of the battleship and wandered casually round to the right-hand side of the coach. As he did so he could see Van Effen hurrying across to the far side of the bridge where the spectators were grouped. What Van Effen’s purpose was he couldn’t be sure but there was an urgency behind his half-trot that told Revson that the time at his own disposal might be very short.

He forced himself not to hurry but sauntered towards the east side of the bridge. No one took any notice of him because there was no one there to do so. He leant casually against the side and as casually withdrew cylinder and cord from his pocket. He glanced, seemingly aimlessly, around him, but if he were arousing cause for suspicion no one was giving any indication of this. Swiftly, without moving either hands or elbows, he let some hundred feet slide through his fingers then secured the cord to a strut. He trusted his estimate of length was reasonably accurate then dismissed the thought: what was done was done. He returned leisurely to the coach, took his seat and transferred what was left of the green cord to the bottom of April Wednesday’s carry-all. If his dangling cord were discovered and a search of their personal belongings carried out he would rather that the cord be discovered elsewhere than in his possession. Even if it were found in her bag he doubted whether she would come to any harm. She’d been on the other side of the bridge since the New Jersey had first appeared behind the bank of cloud and there would be sufficient witnesses to attest to that: April Wednesday was the sort of person whose absence would not go lightly unremarked. Even if she were to find herself in trouble that he could bear with fortitude: he didn’t care who came under suspicion as long as it was not himself.

‘You have to believe me, Branson.’ Hendrix’s voice could hardly have been said to carry a note of pleading, an alien exercise to a man of his nature, but there was no questioning the earnestness, the total sincerity in the tone. ‘The New Jersey’s captain has heard no news of what happened and he thinks it all an elaborate joke at his expense. You can’t blame him. He sees the damned bridge standing safe and sound as it’s stood for forty years. Why should anything be wrong?’

‘Keep trying.’

Van Effen entered and closed the door of the Presidential coach securely behind him. He approached Branson.

‘All safely corralled. Why?’

‘I wish I knew. Almost certainly Hendrix is right and this is just sheer coincidence. But on the one chance in a hundred that it isn’t? What would they use? Not shells, no kind of high explosive. Gas shells.’

‘No such things.’

‘Wrong. There are. They wouldn’t mind temporarily knocking out the President and a few oil sheikhs if they could saturate the centre of the bridge with some knock-out gas and lay us all low. Then the troops and police, like enough with gas-masks, could come and take us at their leisure. But the insulation is tight in those air-conditioned coaches.’

‘It’s pretty far-fetched.’

‘And what we are doing is not? Wait.’ Hendrix was on the phone again.

‘We’ve tried, Branson, and at last he agrees with us. But he refuses to do anything. Says he has too much way on and to try to take turning or reversing action at this stage would endanger both the battleship and the bridge. And he says his money would be on the New Jersey if it hit a tower. A forty-five-thousand-ton battering ram takes a lot of stopping.’

‘You’d better pray, Hendrix.’ Branson hung up and moved towards the centre of the coach, Van Effen behind him, and peered through the right-hand windows, waiting for the battleship’s superstructure to reappear from under the bridge.

The President’s voice was nothing if not testy. ‘Just what is happening, Branson?’

‘You know. The USS New Jersey is passing beneath us.’

‘So? Doubtless going about its lawful occasions.’

‘You’d better hope so. You’d better hope the captain doesn’t start throwing things at us.’

‘At us?’ The President paused and pondered the possibility of an awful lese-majesty. ‘At me?’

‘We all know you’re the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. At the moment, however, you’re a bit isolated from the lower echelons. What happens if the captain consider it his duty to act upon his own initiative? Anyway, we’ll soon find out. Here he comes now.’

The superstructure of the New Jersey had moved into view. All nine of the seated captives struggled to their feet and crowded close to the right-hand windows. One of them crowded very closely indeed on Branson who suddenly became aware of something, obviously metallic, jabbing painfully into his left kidney.

‘Initiative, you said, Mr Branson.’ It was Sheikh Iman, the one with the beard, and he was still beaming. ‘Your own gun. Tell your men to drop theirs.’

‘Good man!’ There was triumph in the President’s voice and an element of vindictiveness that the voters wouldn’t have liked at all.

Branson said patiently: ‘Put that gun away. Don’t you know when you’re dealing with professionals?’

He turned around slowly and Iman proved Branson’s implied point that he was not a professional by letting Branson hold his gaze for all of a second. A gun boomed, Iman shrieked in pain, dropped his gun and clutched a shattered shoulder. Sheikh Kharan stooped swiftly to retrieve the gun from the floor and cried out in agony as Branson’s heel crushed his hand against the metal: a peculiar crackling splintering sound left no doubt that several of Kharan’s fingers had been broken. Branson picked up his gun.

Van Effen was apologetic but not unduly so. ‘Had to, I’m afraid, Mr Branson. If I’d warned him – well, I didn’t want any gunfight in the OK corral with all those nasty ricochets from the bullet-proof glass. He might have done himself an injury.’

‘Quite right.’ Branson looked through the window again. The New Jersey was now almost a half mile away and its captain was obviously not in a belligerent mood. Branson turned away and spoke to Bradford.

‘Go to our coach and fetch the first-aid box. Bring Peters.’

‘Peters, Mr Branson?’

‘Used to be field corpsman. Take your seats, gentlemen.’ Unhappily, they took their seats: the President, in particular, looked especially deflated. Branson wondered briefly just how hollow a man he might be then dismissed the line of thought as unprofitable. ‘I don’t think I have to warn you not to try anything so silly again.’ He went to the communications console and picked up the phone. ‘Hendrix?’

‘Here. Satisfied now?’

‘Yes. Warn the harbour-master or whoever the responsible official is that there is to be no more traffic under the bridge. Either way’

‘No more traffic? You’ll bring the entire port to a standstill. And the fishing fleet -’

‘The fishing fleet can go fish in the bay. Send an ambulance and a doctor and do it quickly. A couple of men here have gotten themselves hurt, one badly’

‘Who? How?’

‘The oil ministers – Iman and Kharan. Self-inflicted injuries, you might say.’ As he spoke Branson watched Peters hurry into the coach, approach Iman and start scissoring away the sleeve of his coat. ‘There will be a TV van coming to the bridge soon. Let it through. I also want some chairs brought on to the bridge – forty should do.’

‘Chairs?’

‘You don’t have to buy them,’ Branson said patiently. ‘Confiscate them from the nearest restaurant. Forty.’

‘Chairs?’

‘Things you sit on. I’m going to hold a news conference in an hour or so. You don’t stand around at news conferences. You sit around.’

Hendrix said carefully: ‘You’re going to hold a news conference and you’re going to televise it live?’

‘That’s it. Nationwide.’

‘You’re out of your mind.’

‘My mental health is my concern. Milton and Quarry there yet?’

‘You mean the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury?’

‘I mean Milton and Quarry.’

‘They’ve just arrived and are with me now.’

Hendrix looked at the two men who were with him then inside the big mobile communications van. Milton, the Secretary of State, was a tall, thin, dyspeptic character with no hair, rimless steel-legged glasses and an enviable reputation in Foreign Offices around the world: Quarry, white-haired, plump and cheerful, had a kindly avuncular air about him which many men, even some very highly intelligent ones, had taken to be a reflection of the true personality of the man: his reputation as a banker and economist stood as high as that of Milton in his field.

Milton said: ‘It would be easy to say “he’s quite crazy, of course”. Is he?’

Hendrix spread his hands. ‘You know what they say. Crazy like a fox.’

‘And violent, it would seem?’

‘No. Violence he uses only as a last resort and even then only when pushed into a corner. Iman and Kharan must have made the mistake of pushing him into a corner.’

Quarry said: ‘You would seem to know a fair bit about him?’

Hendrix sighed. ‘Every senior police officer in the States knows about him. And in Canada, Mexico and God knows how many South American countries.’ Hendrix sounded bitter. ‘So far he has spared Europe his attentions. It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure.’

‘What’s his speciality?’

‘Robbery. He robs trains, planes, armoured cars, banks and jewellers. Robbery, wherever possible, as I say, without violence.’

Quarry was dry. ‘I gather he is quite successful?’

‘Quite successful! To the best of our knowledge he has been operating for at least a dozen years and the lowest estimate of his takings in that time is twenty million dollars.’

‘Twenty million!’ For the first time there was a note of respect in Quarry’s voice, the banker and economist in him surfacing. ‘If he’s got all that money, why does he want more?’

‘Why do Niarchos and Getty and Hughes want more – after all, they too are comfortably off? Maybe he’s just a businessman in the way that they are businessmen and he’s hooked on his job. Maybe he finds it a stimulating intellectual exercise. Maybe it’s sheer greed. Maybe anything.’

Milton said: ‘Has he ever been convicted?’

Hendrix looked pained. ‘He’s never even been arrested.’

‘And that has something to do with the fact that neither of us has ever heard of him?’

Hendrix gazed through the van window at the magnificent sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a far-off look of yearning in his eyes. He said: ‘Let us say, sir, that we do not care to advertise our failures.’

Milton smiled at him. ‘John and I’ – he nodded at the Secretary of the Treasury – ‘frequently suffer from the same bashfulness and for the same reasons. Infallibility is not the lot of mankind. Anything known about this man – apart from what is known about his criminal activities?’

Hendrix said sourly: ‘It wouldn’t be hard to know more about him than we do about his life of crime. Pretty well documented background, really. A WASP from out east. Comes from what they call a good family. Father a banker and when I say banker I mean he owned – still does, I believe – his own bank.’

‘Branson,’ the Treasury Secretary said. ‘Of course. Know him. Not personally, though.’

‘And something else that will interest you, sir-professionally. Branson took a degree in economics and went to work in his father’s bank. While he was there he took a PhD – and no coffee-grinder diploma school either – genuine Ivy League. Then for his post-graduate course he took up the subject of crime – something to do with having worked in his old man’s bank, maybe.’ Hendrix looked gloomy. ‘I suppose we could say that he has graduated in that subject now too – summa mm laude.’

Milton said: ‘You seem to have almost a degree of admiration for this person, Hendrix?’

‘I’d give my pension to see him behind bars. Both as a man and a policeman he outrages whatever passes for my sensibilities. But one can’t help respecting sheer professionalism, no matter how misused.’

‘My sentiments too, I’m afraid,’ Milton said. ‘He’s not a particularly retiring person, this Branson of yours?’

‘I wish he were mine. If you mean does he suffer from our bouts of bashfulness, no, sir, he does not.’

‘Arrogant?’

‘To the point, perhaps, of megalomania. At least, that’s what General Cartland says, and I wouldn’t care to dispute what the General says.’

‘Few would.’ Milton spoke with some feeling. ‘Speaking of self-opinionated characters, where art thou at this hour, my James?’

‘Sir?’

“What other self-opinionated character is there? I refer to Mr Hagenbach, the self-opinionated head of our FBI. I would have thought he would have been the first man hot-foot to the scene.’

‘Washington says they don’t know where he is. They’re trying every place they can think of. I’m afraid he’s a very elusive man, sir.’

‘Man’s got a mania for secrecy’ Milton brightened. ‘Well, if he’s watching his TV in an hour or so he should be considerably enlightened. What a perfectly splendid thought – the head of our FBI the last man in America to know about this.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Branson’s insistence on maximum publicity – TV, radio I’ll be bound, newsmen, photographers – has he ever declared himself publicly like this before? I mean, before or during any of his criminal activities?’

‘Never.’

‘The man must be terribly sure of himself.’

‘In his place, so would I.’ Quarry appeared distracted. ‘What can we do to the man? As I see it, he’s in an impregnable, quite unassailable position.’

‘I wouldn’t give up hope, sir. We have one or two experts looking for an answer. Admiral Newson and General Carter are in our HQ now working on this.’

‘Newson. Carter. Our twin geniuses of finesse.’ Quarry seemed more discouraged than ever. ‘Never use one hydrogen bomb where two will suffice. Someone should send our Arabian oil friends word that they’re about to become involved in a nuclear holocaust.’ He gestured through his window towards the bridge. ‘Just look at it. Just think of it. A totally impossible situation – if it weren’t for the fact that we can see now that it’s all too possible. Total, absolute isolation, completely cut off from the world – and in the full view of everybody in San Francisco-everybody in the world, for that matter, as soon as those TV cameras start turning. A figurative stone’s throw away – and they might as well be on the moon.’ He sighed heavily. ‘One must confess to a feeling of utter helplessness.’

‘Come, come, John.’ Milton was severe. ‘Is this the spirit that won the West?’

‘The hell with the West. I’m thinking about me. I don’t have to be very clever to know beyond any doubt that I am going to be the man in the middle.’

Hendrix said: ‘Sir?’

‘Why else do you think this ruffian had summoned the Secretary of the Treasury to his royal presence?’

Hands in pockets, as if deep in thought, Revson wandered along the east side of the bridge, stopping frequently to gaze at, and presumably admire the panorama stretched out before him – to his left the tip of Belvedere beyond Fort Baker, Tiburon and Angel Island, the largest in the Bay; to his right the city itself and straight ahead Alcatraz Island and beyond it Treasure Island: between the two the rapidly diminishing shape of the New Jersey was heading for its berth at Alameda. He made frequent stops, as if peering over the side. On one of those occasions he reached casually for the green cord he’d attached to the strut and hefted it. It was weightless.

‘What are you doing?’

He turned unhurriedly. April Wednesday’s big green eyes, if not exactly alive with curiosity, held a certain puzzlement.

‘You do have flannel feet. I thought I was the only person within miles – well, yards.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘When I look at this marvellous view here and then at you I really don’t know which I prefer. I think you. Have any people ever told you that you’re really rather beautiful?’

‘Lots.’ She caught the green cord between finger and thumb and started to lift it then made a muffled sound of pain as his hand closed none too gently over hers.

‘Leave that alone.’

She rubbed her hand, looked around and said: ‘Well?’

‘I’m fishing.’

‘Not for compliments, that’s for sure.’ She massaged her knuckles tenderly, then looked at him with some uncertainty. ‘Fishermen tell tall tales, don’t they?’

‘I’ve done it myself.’

‘Tell me one.’

‘Are you as trustworthy as you’re beautiful?’ ‘Am I beautiful? And I’m not fishing. Honest.’

‘You are.’

‘Then I’m trustworthy too.’ They smiled at each other and he took her arm. ‘A really tall one?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Why ever not?’ They walked slowly away together.

Hendrix replaced the receiver in its cradle. He looked at Milton and Quarry. ‘You are ready, gentlemen?’

‘Act One, Scene One, and all the world’s a stage. That’s wrong somehow.’ Milton rose and looked critically at Quarry. ‘The shirt’s wrong too, John. White shows up badly on TV. Should be blue-like me – or the President. Blue shirts are all he has: you never know when a TV camera is lurking round the next corner.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ Quarry turned morosely towards the rear door of the van then stopped as a motorcycle policeman drew up with a suitably dramatic screeching of tyre and smell of burning rubber, dismounted, propped his machine and hurried to the rear steps of the van. He held up his hand to Hendrix. ‘For you, sir.’

Hendrix took the eight-inch-long narrow cylinder. ‘It’s got my name on it, all right. Where did you get it from?’

The pilot boat brought it in from the New Jersey. The captain – of the New Jersey, that is-thought it might be very urgent.’

FIVE

The centre section of the Golden Gate Bridge was fast assuming the appearance of an embryonic town, sprawling, inchoate and wholly disorganized as those burgeoning settlements tend to be, but none the less possessed of a vitality, a feverish restlessness that augured well for its expansive future. The fact that all the buildings were on wheels and that all the village elders, seated in solemn conclave, were immaculately dressed and had clearly never done a single day’s physical toil in their collective lives, did little to detract from the curious impression that here were the pioneers pushing forward the limits of the wild frontier.

There were three coaches and three police cars – the third had just brought Hendrix, Milton and Quarry. There were two large, glaze-windowed vehicles which bore the euphemistic legend ‘Rest Room’: painted in becoming red and yellow stripes they had been borrowed from an itinerant circus currently stopped-over in the city. There was an ambulance, which Branson had commandeered for purposes best known to himself, a large side-counter wagonette which had provided hot meals, a very large TV camera truck with its generator placed at a discreet hundred yards distance and, finally, a van that was unloading blankets, rugs and pillows to help ease the new settlers through the rigours of their first night.

There were, of course, the discordant, even jarring items. The helicopters, the tracked antiaircraft guns, the patrolling armed men, the army engineers at a distance on either side busily erecting steel barricades – those did tend to project a disturbing hint of violence to come. And yet they were not entirely alien there: so bizarre were the circumstances that the normal would have tended to look sadly out of place. The unreality of it all, when matched up against the outside world, had its own strange reality in this particular point in time and place. And for those participating in the scene, the reality of their situation was all too self-evident. No one smiled.

The cameras were in position, so were the hostages, the three newly arrived men and, behind them in the second row, sat the journalists. The photographers had taken up positions best suited to themselves, none of them more than a few feet distant from an armed guard. Facing them, in solitary splendour, sat Branson. Close by him on the ground lay a peculiar object, a length of heavy canvas with cone-shaped objects embedded in it: beside it lay a heavy metal box, its lid closed.

‘I will not detain you unnecessarily, gentlemen,’ Branson said. Whether or not he was enjoying his moment of glory, the knowledge that he held some of the most powerful men in the world at his complete mercy, the consciousness that a hundred million people were looking at and listening to him, was quite impossible to say. He was calm, relaxed, unnervingly confident of and in himself, but displaying no other visible emotion. ‘You will have guessed why we all find ourselves here and why I am here.’

‘The reason why I’m here, I take it,’ Quarry said.

‘Exactly.’

‘You will bear in mind that, unlike you, I am not a law unto myself. The final decision is not mine.’

‘Appreciated.’ Branson could have been conducting some urbane seminar in an Ivy college. ‘That comes later. First things first, don’t you think, Mr Quarry?’

‘Money.’

‘Money.’

‘How much?’ Quarry’s reputation for disconcerting bluntness had been easily earned.

‘One moment, Mr Secretary’ The President had his weaknesses no less than the two hundred million people for whom he was the elected head of state and high on the list was an almost pathological dislike of being upstaged. ‘What do you want this money for, Branson?’

‘What’s that got to do with it – supposing it’s any of your business?’

‘It is my business. I must state categorically if you want it for any subversive activities, for any evil practices whatsoever, and especially for any anti-American activities – well, I tell you here and now that you can have my body first. Who am I compared to America?’

Branson nodded approval. ‘Stoutly spoken, Mr President, especially considering the fact that you have left your speech-writers behind. I hear the voice of our founding fathers, the clarion call of the conscience that lies at the grass-roots of America. The Grand Old Party are going to love you for that. It should be worth another two million votes come November. However, quite apart from the fact that you don’t mean a word you say, I have to reassure you that this money is required for purely apolitical purposes. It’s for a private trust, in fact. Branson Enterprises, Inc. Me.’

The President wasn’t a man to be easily knocked off stride – if he were he wouldn’t have been President. ‘You have just mentioned the word “conscience”. You have none?’

‘I don’t honestly know,’ Branson said frankly. ‘Where money is concerned, none. Most of the really wealthy men in the world are moral cripples, basically criminally-minded types who maintain a facade of spurious legality by hiring lawyers as morally crippled as they are themselves.’ Branson appeared to muse. ‘Multi-millionaires, politicians, lawyers – which of them lies furthest beyond the moral pale? But don’t answer that – I may unintentionally be putting you in an invidious position. We’re all rogues, whether under the hypocritical cover of legalism or out in the noonday sun, like me. I just want some fast money fast and I reckon this is as good a way as any of getting it.’

Quarry said: ‘We accept that you are an honest thief. Let us come to cases.’

‘My reasonable demands?’

‘The point, Mr Branson.’

Branson surveyed the Arabian oil barons – now without Iman who was in hospital – and the President. ‘For this lot, on the hoof, in prime condition and no haggling about pennies – three hundred million dollars. That’s a three followed by eight nothings.’

To the many million viewers throughout America it was immediately obvious that there had been a sound transmission breakdown. The silence, however, was more than compensated for by the wide and interesting variety of expressions registered on the faces of those on the screen, which ranged from total outrage through total incomprehension through total incredulity to total shock: indeed, in those few imperishable moments, sound would have been an unforgivable intrusion. Predictably, in view of the fact that he was accustomed to dealing with figures which contained large numbers of zeros, Secretary of the Treasury Quarry was the first to recover.

‘You did say what I thought I heard you say?’

‘Three zero zero, comma, zero zero zero, comma, zero zero zero period. If you give me a blackboard and some chalk I’ll write it out for you.’

‘Preposterous! Lunatic! The man’s mad, mad, mad.’ The President, whose now puce colour showed up rather well on colour television, clenched his fist and looked round in vain for a table to bang it on. ‘You know the penalty for this, Branson – kidnapping, blackmail, extortion under threats on a scale -’

‘A scale quite unprecedented in the annals of crime?’

‘Yes. On a scale quite – shut up! The death penalty can be invoked for treason – and this is high treason – and if it’s the last thing I do -’

‘That might be any moment. Rest assured, Mr President, that you won’t be around to pull the switch. You better believe me.’ He produced his pistol. ‘As a token of my intent, how would you like a hundred million viewers to see you being shot through the knee-cap – then you really would need that cane of yours. It’s a matter of indifference to me.’ And in his voice there was a chilling indifference that carried far more conviction than the words themselves. The President unclenched his fist and seemed not so much to sink into his chair as to deflate into it. The puce was assuming a greyish hue.

‘You people have to learn to think big,’ Branson went on. ‘This is the United States of America, the richest country in the world, not a banana republic. What’s three hundred million dollars? A couple of Polaris submarines? A tiny fraction of what it cost to send a man to the moon? A fraction of one per cent of the gross national product? If I take one drop from the American bucket who’s going to miss it – but if I’m not allowed to take it then a lot of people are going to miss you, Mr President, and your Arabian friends.

‘And to think what you are going to lose, you and America. Ten times that, a hundred times that? To start with the San Rafael refinery deal will fall through. Your hopes of becoming a most favoured nation receiving oil at rock-bottom prices are gone for ever. In fact, if their Highnesses fail to return to their homeland it is certain that a total oil embargo would be placed on the States which would send the country into a bottomless recession which would make 1929 look like a Sunday afternoon picnic’ He looked at Hansen, the energy czar. ‘You would agree, Mr Hansen?’

Clearly, the last thing that Hansen wanted to do was to agree with anyone. His nervous tics were rapidly assuming the proportions of a St Vitus’s dance. Head darting, he looked around for succour in his hour of need. He swallowed, he coughed into his hands, he looked imploringly at the President and seemed almost on the point of breaking down when the Secretary of the Treasury came to his rescue.

Quarry said: ‘I would read the future the same way.’

‘Thank you.’

The King raised his hand. ‘A word, if you will.’ The King was a man of a very different calibre to the President. As one who had to remove, permanently more often than not, quite a number of his closest relatives in order to get his crown, the rough and tumble of life was hardly a new experience for him: he had lived with violence all his life and would very probably die with it or because of it.

‘Of course.’

‘Only the blind have their eyes closed to reality. I am not blind. The President will pay.’ The President had no comment to make on this generous offer: he was staring down at the roadway like a fortune teller peering into his crystal ball and not wanting to tell his client what he sees there.

‘Thank you, your Highness.’

‘You will of course be hunted down and killed afterwards no matter where you may seek to hide in the world. Even if you were to kill me now your death is already as certain as tomorrow’s sun.’

Branson was unconcerned. ‘As long as I have you, your Highness, I have no worries on that score. I should imagine that any of your subjects who as much as endangered your life far less being responsible for your losing it would find himself rather precipitately in paradise – if regicides go to paradise, which I don’t think should be allowed. And I hardly think you’re the type of man to run to the side of the bridge now and jump over in order to incite the faithful to come after me with their long knives.’

‘Indeed.’ The hooded eyes were unblinking. ‘And what if I were not the sort of person you think I am?’

‘If you were to jump – or try to?’ Again the chilling indifference. ‘Why do you think I have a doctor and ambulance here? Van Effen, if anyone is as misguided as to make a break for it – what are your instructions?’

Van Effen matched the indifference. ‘Chop his foot off with my machine-pistol. The doctor will fix him up.’

‘We might even – eventually – provide you with an artificial foot. You’re worth nothing to me dead, your Highness.’ The hooded eyes had closed. ‘Well, the ransom figure? Agreed? No objectors? Splendid. Well, that’s for starters.’

‘Starters?’ It was General Cartland speaking and one could almost see the firing squad mirrored in his eyes.

‘To begin with, that means. There’s more. Two hundred million dollars more. That’s what I want for the Golden Gate Bridge.’

This time the state of traumatic shock did not last quite so long – there is a limit to how much the human mind can take. The President raised his eyes from the depths of the bottomless pit he was scanning and said dully: ‘Two hundred million dollars for the Golden Gate Bridge?’

‘It’s a bargain. At the price, practically a giveaway. True, it cost only forty million to build and the asking price of two hundred million just exactly represents the five-fold inflation over the past forty years. But, money apart, think of the fearful cost of replacing it. Think of the noise, the dust, the pollution, the disruption to all the city traffic as all those thousands of tons of steel have to be brought in, of the tourists who will cripple the city’s economy by staying away in their tens of thousands. Beautiful though San Francisco is, without the Golden Gate it would be like Mona Lisa without her smile. Think – and this is for a period of at least one year, perhaps two – of all those Marin County motorists who couldn’t get to the city – it’s a long long way round by the San Rafael bridge – or, come to that, the city motorists who couldn’t get to Marin County. The hardship would be intolerable for everyone – except for the owners of the ferry-boat companies who would become millionaires. And who am I to grudge the entrepreneur the making of an honest dollar? Two hundred million dollars? Philanthropy, that’s what it is.’

Quarry, the man accustomed to thinking in rows of noughts, said: ‘If we do not accede to this monstrous request, what do you intend to do with the bridge? Take it away and pawn it somewhere?’

‘I’m going to blow it up. A two-hundred-foot drop – it should be the most almighty splash the West Coast has ever seen.’

‘Blow it up! Blow up the Golden Gate Bridge!’ Mayor Morrison, whose normal boiling point was just above freezing, was on his feet, his face suffused with ungovernable anger and had launched himself at Branson before anyone realized what was happening, certainly before Branson had realized. In tens of millions of American homes they saw Branson being knocked backwards off his seat, his head striking heavily against the roadway as Morrison, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, followed him down and struck at his face with berserker fury. Van Effen stepped forward and brought the butt of his machine-pistol down on Morrison’s neck. He immediately swung round to cover the seated men with his gun but the precaution was superfluous, no one was showing any inclination to follow Morrison’s example.

It was a full twenty seconds before Branson could sit up, and then only groggily. He accepted a pad of medical gauze and dabbed at a smashed lip and a very bloody nose. He looked at Morrison, then at the doctor.

‘How is he?’

The doctor carried out a brief examination. ‘He’ll be all right, he’s not even concussed.’ The doctor glanced at Van Effen without enthusiasm. ‘Your friend seems to be able to judge those things to a nicety.’

‘Practice,’ Branson explained thickly. He accepted another gauze pad in place of the already blood-saturated one and rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘Mayor Morrison doesn’t know his own strength.’

Van Effen said: ‘What shall I do with him?’

‘Leave him be. It’s his city, it’s his bridge. My fault – I just trod on a man’s dreams.’ He looked at Morrison consideringly. ‘On second thoughts you’d better handcuff him – behind the back. Next time he might knock my head off my shoulders.’

General Cartland came to his feet and walked towards Branson. Van Effen levelled his gun menacingly but Cartland ignored him. He said to Branson: ‘You fit to talk?’

‘I’m fit to listen, anyway. He didn’t get round to my ears.’

‘I may be Chief of Staff but to trade I’m an army engineer. That means I know explosives. You can’t blow up the bridge and you should know it. You’d require a wagon-load of explosives to bring down those towers. I don’t see any wagon-load of explosives.’

‘We don’t need them.’ He pointed to the thick canvas strap with the conical mounds embedded in it. ‘You’re the expert.’

Cartland looked at the strap, then at Branson, then at the seated watchers, then back at the strap again. Branson said: ‘Suppose you tell them. My mouth hurts, I can’t imagine why.’

Cartland took a long look at the massive towers and the cables suspended from them. He said to Branson: ‘You have experimented?’ Branson nodded. ‘Successfully – or you wouldn’t be here?’ Branson nodded again.

Reluctantly, almost, Cartland turned to the seated hostages and journalists. ‘I was wrong. I’m afraid Branson can indeed bring the bridge down. Those cones you see embedded in the canvas strap contain some conventional explosives – TNT amatol, anyway something of the requisite power. Those cones are called “beehives”, and because of their concave bases are designed to direct at least eighty per cent of their explosive value inwards. The idea, I should imagine, is to wrap one of those canvas straps with its hundredweight or whatever of high explosive round one of the suspension cables, probably high up near the top of a tower.’ He looked at Branson again. ‘I should imagine you have four of those.’ Branson nodded. ‘And designed to fire simultaneously.’ He turned back to the others. ‘I’m afraid that would be it. Down it all comes.’

There was a brief silence, which must have been very nail-biting for TV watchers, a silence caused by the fact that Branson understandably didn’t feel very much like speaking and the others couldn’t think of very much to say. Cartland said eventually: ‘How can you be sure they all go off together?’

‘Simple. Radio wave that activates an electric cell that burns the wire in a mercury fulminate detonator. Up goes the primer and up goes the beehive. One’s enough. The others go up by sympathetic detonation.’

Quarry said heavily: ‘I suppose that ends your demands for the day?’

‘Not quite.’ Branson turned a palm up in an apologetic gesture. ‘But it’s only a trifle.’

One wonders what you might consider a trifle.’

‘A quarter of a million dollars.’

‘Astonishing. By your standards, a grain of sand. And what might that be for?’

‘My expenses.’

‘Your expenses.’ Quarry breathed deeply, twice. ‘My God, Branson, you are the piker to end all pikers.’

‘I’m used to people calling me names.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t hurt so easily any more and one learns to take the rough with the smooth. Now, as to payment – you are going to pay me, aren’t you?’

No one said whether they were going to pay him or not.

‘I have to make arrangements with a friend in New York who has friends in certain European banks.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s noon now so it’s either eight or nine o’clock in Central Europe and all good Central European bankers knock off at six precisely. So I’d be greatly obliged if you’d let me have your decision by seven o’clock in the morning.’

Quarry said cautiously: ‘What decision?’

‘As to the availability of the funds and the form that they will take. Not that I care very much what they are, anything from Euro-dollars to stock in suitably selected offshore funds. You, of all people, should find little problem in handling such things with a certain amount of discretion – witness, for instance, the hundreds of millions of dollars you’ve funded such organizations as the CIA for subversive activities overseas without the poor taxpayer being any the wiser. A childishly simple routine for your Treasury. Not that I care whether those funds are traceable or not: just as long as they are convertible.

‘When my New York friend has informed us that those funds have all arrived at their several destinations – and that shouldn’t take more than another twenty-four hours, say until noon the same day – we shall take our farewells of you. Our hostages will, of course, accompany us.’

‘And where are you taking us?’ Cartland demanded.

‘You I’m not taking anywhere. The armed services may regard you as invaluable but your value to me as a bargaining counter is zero. Besides, you’re the only man here who could conceivably cause me trouble. Not only are you a man of action but you’re far too lean – let me have men about me that are fat and all that bit. The President and his three remaining oil friends. There’s no harm in telling you that I have a friend in the Caribbean who is the President of an island that doesn’t and never will have an extradition treaty with the United States. He’s willing to put us up, bed and breakfast, for a million dollars a night.’

No one had anything to say to this. In terms of the sums of money that Branson had so recently been bandying about, it seemed a reasonable enough charge.

One point,’ Branson said. ‘I did not mention that as from noon the following day – day after tomorrow that is – there will be a penalty clause, an escalation charge you might call it, for every hour’s delay in the reported lodgement of the funds. Two million dollars an hour.’

‘You do place a certain value on your time, don’t you, Mr Branson,’ Quarry said.

‘If I don’t, who will? Would there be any more questions?’

‘Yes,’ Cartland said. ‘How do you propose to get to this island paradise of yours?’

‘Fly there. How else? A ten-minute flight in our helicopters to the International Airport and we board our plane there.’

‘You have all this arranged? You have a plane standing by?’

‘Well, it doesn’t know it’s standing by but it will soon enough.’

‘What plane?’

‘Air Force 1, I believe you call it.’

Even Cartland was shaken out of his habitual reserve. ‘You mean you’re going to hijack the Presidential Boeing?’

‘Be reasonable, General. You surely can’t expect your President to judder his way down to the Caribbean in a clapped-out DC3? It’s the logical, the only way of transporting world leaders who are accustomed to the ultimate in luxury travel. We’ll show them the latest films. Brief though their incarceration may be we’ll make it as comfortable as possible for them. We might even get some more new films when we fly them back to the States again.’

‘We?’ Cartland said carefully.

‘My friends and 1.1 feel it only right – no, more than that, our bounden duty – that we should see them safely back again. How any man of any sensitivity can bear to live in that monstrosity they call the White House I don’t know but, after all, there’s no place like home.’

Milton was equally careful. ‘You mean you’re going to set foot on American soil again?’

‘My own, my native land. Why ever not? You disappoint me, Mr Milton.’

‘I do?’

‘You do. Apart from the Supreme Court and the Attorney General I would have thought that the Secretary of State would know as much about our law and constitution as any other man in the land.’ There was silence. Branson looked around but there was still silence so he addressed himself to the Secretary again. ‘Or don’t you know that bit where it says that no man who has been granted a full and free pardon by the State for any crime, actual or alleged, can ever again be arraigned on that same charge?’

It took at least ten seconds for the full implications to dawn and it was then that the Potomac, in the person of the Chief Executive, burst its banks. It was also then that the President lost twice the number of the putative votes he might have gained from his earlier statement that he would sacrifice himself for America. He could hardly be blamed. Devious some politicians may be and others are armoured in pachydermal hides: but never had the President encountered such Machiavellian effrontery. Even Presidents may be forgiven the odd earthy turn of phrase within the privacy of their own four walls but they customarily abjure such phraseology when addressing the electorate. But, momentarily, the President had totally forgotten the fact that he was, in effect, addressing the electorate: he was appealing to a mindless heaven for justice. And it was in that direction that his anguished face was lifted as he stood there, arms rigidly outstretched and fists clenched, his face assuming a peculiarly purplish hue.

‘Half a deleted billion dollars! And a deleted full and free pardon! God Al-deleted-mighty!’ He lowered his gaze from the cloudless sky and turned the full fury of his wrath on Branson who, disappointingly, had not been struck down by a bolt from heaven.

Branson murmured to the doctor: ‘You have your cardiac arrest unit handy?’

‘This is not funny’

The President warmed to his theme. ‘You evil twisted deleted bastard! If you imagine -’

Cartland, belatedly, reached his side, touched his arm and whispered urgently: ‘You’re on television, sir.’

The President, cut off in mid-expletive, looked at him, screwed his eyes shut in sudden comprehension, opened them again, looked the camera squarely in the eye and addressed it in measured tones.

‘I, as the elected representative and Chief Executive of the American people, will not stand for this vile blackmail, the machinations of this evil and amoral man. The American people will not stand for it. Democracy will not stand for it. Come what may we shall fight this cancer in our midst -’

‘How?’ Branson asked.

‘How?’ The President tried manfully to control his blood pressure at the thought of this but full rationality had not yet returned to him. ‘The entire resources of every investigative agency in those United States of ours, the entire weight of the armed forces, the full majesty of law and order will be brought to bear -’

‘You’re not up for re-election for six months yet. How?’

‘When I have consulted with the senior members of my cabinet -’

‘You’re through with consulting anyone, except on my say-so. A full and free pardon. If not, your stay on this tropical island may be indefinitely extended. Most of the island, as I say, is pretty close to paradise: but there’s a small stockaded section in one corner of the island that’s been modelled rather closely on the Devil’s Island that used to be. The Generalissimo has to have some place for his political dissidents, and as he doesn’t care for them overly much the majority of them never emerge again. It’s a combination of hard labour, fever and starvation. I somehow don’t see the King here with a pickaxe in his hand. Nor yourself for that matter.

‘And instead of waffling on about the nation’s moral rectitude, you might give thought to another possible predicament of your guests here. It is no secret that both the King and Prince have trusted Government ministers and relatives who are just yearning to try their thrones for size. If your friends’ stay in the Caribbean were to be unduly prolonged, one rather suspects that they would have neither kingdom nor sheikhdom to return to. You appreciate, of course, that American opinion would never let you deal with their usurpers – especially as you would be the one held to blame for it. Bang goes November. Bang goes San Rafael. Here comes either redoubled oil prices or a total embargo and, in either case, a disastrous recession. You won’t even rate a footnote in history. At best, if they ever get round to compiling a list of history’s most stupid and disastrous national leaders, then you have a fair chance of making the Guinness Book of Records. But history itself? No.’

‘You have quite finished?’ The President’s anger had seemingly evaporated and he had attained a curious sort of resigned dignity.

‘For the moment.’ Branson motioned to the TV cameramen that the performance was over.

‘May I have a word with the King, Prince, my governmental colleagues and the Chief of Police?’

‘Why not? Especially if it helps you to arrive at your decision more quickly.’

‘In privacy?’

‘Certainly. Your coach.’

‘In the strictest privacy?’

‘The guard will remain outside. As you know, the coach is soundproof. The strictest privacy, I promise you.’

They moved away, leaving Branson alone. He beckoned Chrysler, his telecommunications expert.

‘Is the bug in the Presidential coach activated?’

‘Permanently.’

‘Our friends are having a top-level secret discussion in there. Wouldn’t you care to have a rest in our coach? You must be tired.’

‘Very tired, Mr Branson.’

Chrysler made his way to the rear coach and sat by the driver’s seat in front of the console. He made a switch and lifted a single earphone. Apparently satisfied with what he heard he replaced the earphone and made another switch. A tape recorder started humming.

April Wednesday said to Revson: ‘Well, what did you make of that?’

‘I’d love to see the Nielsen ratings when they rerun that later in the day’ They were walking to and fro along the western or deserted side of the bridge. ‘What a cast. Rehearsals would have ruined it.’

‘You know I don’t mean that.’

‘I know. He’s quite a boy, our Peter Branson. Highly intelligent – but we know that already-all the angles figured, every eventuality taken care of far in advance, he’d have made an excellent general. You could – at least I could – almost like and admire the guy, except for the fact that, the odd half billion apart, he plainly does this for kicks, he’s a moral vacuum and the ordinary standards of right and wrong just do not hold good for him, they simply don’t exist. There’s something strangely empty about him.’

‘His bank-book isn’t going to be. But I didn’t mean that either.’

‘I know that too. In answer to your unspoken question, yes he has us helpless.’

‘Do you intend to do anything about it?’ ‘Intentions are one thing, achievements another.’

‘Well, you just can’t walk up and down there doing nothing. After what you told me this morning -’

‘I know what I told you this morning. A little respectful silence, if you please. Can’t you see I’m thinking?’

After some little time he said: ‘I’ve thought.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘Have you ever been sick?’

She lifted her brows which had the effect of making the huge green eyes larger than ever. With those eyes, Revson reflected, she could wreck a cardinals’ council in nothing flat. To keep his mind on the work in hand, he looked away. She said: ‘Of course I’ve been sick. Everybody’s been sick some time.’

‘I mean really sick. Hospital. Like that.’

‘No. Not ever.’

‘You’re going to be very soon. In hospital. Sick. If you’re still prepared to help, that is.’

‘I’ve told you that already.’

‘Asperity ill becomes a lovely lady. There’s quite an element of risk. If you’re caught, Branson would make you talk. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money to have at stake. You’d talk very quickly.’

‘Even more quickly than that. I’m not one of your wartime resistance heroines and I don’t like pain. Caught at what?’

‘Delivering a letter for me. Leave me alone for a few minutes, will you.’

Revson unshipped his camera and took some still shots, of the coaches, helicopters, anti-aircraft guns and guards, trying as much as possible to keep the southern tower and the San Franciscan skyline in the background, clearly a dedicated craftsman at work. He then turned his attention and lens towards the ambulance and the white-jacketed doctor leaning against it.

The doctor said: ‘Instant fame for me, is it?’

‘What else? Everyone wants to be immortalized.’

‘Not this doctor. And an ambulance you can film anywhere.’

‘You need psychiatric help.’ Revson lowered his camera. ‘Don’t you know that it’s positively anti-social in this country not to want to hog the camera lens? My name’s Revson.’

‘O’Hare.’ O’Hare was youthful, cheerful, red-haired and his Irish ancestry lay no more than a generation behind him.

‘And what do you think of this lovely little setup?’

‘For quotation?’

‘I’m a cameraman.’

‘Aw, hell, quote me if you want. I’d just love to belt smarty-pants’s ears off.’

‘It figures.’

‘What?’

‘The red hair.’

‘I’d feel the same if I were black, blond or bald as a coot. Arrogant smoothies do something to me. And I don’t like the way he needles the President and publicly humiliates him.’

‘You’re a President man, then?’

‘Hell, he’s a Californian, I’m a Californian, I voted for him last time and I’ll do so next time. Okay, so he’s stuffy and overdoes the kindly uncle bit but he’s the best we have. Not that that says a great deal – but, well, he’s really a decent old stick.’

‘Decent old stick?’

‘Don’t blame me, I was educated in England.’

‘Would you like to help him?’

O’Hare looked at Revson thoughtfully. ‘Funny question. Sure I would.’

‘Would you help me to help him?’

‘How can you help him?’

‘I’ll try and I’ll tell you how – if you say “yes”, that is.’

‘And what makes you think you can help more than anyone else?’

‘Special qualifications. I’m a Government employee.’

‘So what’s with the camera, then?’

‘And I always thought it took a fair amount of intelligence to qualify as a doctor. What do you expect me to be carrying – a foot-wide plaque on my chest saying “I am an FBI agent”?’

O’Hare smiled, but only faintly. ‘Well, no. But the story is that all the FBI men were left asleep in a downtown garage. Except for a few on the press coach who were rousted out and marched off the bridge.’

‘We don’t put all our eggs in one basket.’

‘And agents don’t usually disclose their identity either.’

‘Not this agent. I’d disclose my identity to anyone if I were in trouble. And I’m in trouble now.’

‘As long as it’s not unethical -’

‘I wouldn’t bring a blush to the Hippocratic cheek. That guaranteed, would you consider it unethical to help put Branson behind bars?’

‘Is that guaranteed too?’

‘No.’

‘Count on me. What do you want done?’

‘We have a lady photographer with us who is young, rather beautiful, by the unlikely name of April Wednesday’

‘Ha!’ O’Hare brightened considerably. ‘The green-eyed blonde.’

‘Indeed. I want her to take a message ashore, if that’s the word, for me and bring me back an answer within a couple of hours. I propose to code this message, film it and give you the spool. It’s about half the size of a cigarette and I’m sure you can easily conceal it in one of the many tubes and cartons you must carry about with you. Anyway, no one questions a doctor’s integrity’

‘Don’t they, now?’ O’Hare spoke with some feeling.

There’s no hurry. I’ll have to wait till Messrs Milton, Quarry and Hendrix have been escorted off the bridge. By which time, too, I expect that the trusty Mr Hagenbach will have arrived from wherever he has been lurking.’

‘Hagenbach? You mean this old twister -’

‘You are referring to my respected employer. Now, this is just an ambulance. Apart from your usual medical kit, heart unit, oxygen kit to stitch together the misguided who step out of line, I don’t suppose you carry anything much more sophisticated.’ O’Hare shook his head.

‘So you don’t have any radiological gear or clinical investigative equipment and most certainly not operational facilities, even if you did have an anaesthetist, which you haven’t. I suggest then that, when Miss Wednesday takes most painfully ill in about an hour or so, you diagnose something that may demand, or may not demand-doctors can’t take chances – immediate hospital diagnosis and possible surgery. Something like a grumbling appendix or suspected peritonitis or such-like. Don’t ask me.’

‘I wouldn’t.’ O’Hare looked at Revson with some disfavour. ‘You seem to be unaware that even the rawest intern, no matter how damp behind the ears, can diagnose appendicitis with his hands, figuratively, in his pockets.’

‘I am aware. But I’m damned if I could do it. And I’m pretty certain that no one else on this bridge could do it either.’

‘You have a point. Right. But you’ll have to give me fifteen to twenty minutes’ notice – before I call in Branson or whoever. The odd job or two to induce the proper symptoms. No danger.’

‘Miss Wednesday has just informed me that she is allergic to pain.’

‘She won’t feel a thing,’ O’Hare said in his best dentist’s voice. ‘Besides, it’s for the homeland.’ He looked at Revson consideringly. ‘I believe you gentlemen of the press are handing your stuff over at the south barrier in two hours’ time. Couldn’t it wait till then?’

‘And get my answer back by carrier pigeon next week. I want it this afternoon.’

‘You are in a hurry’

‘During the war – World War Two, that is-Winston Churchill used to annotate all instructions to his military and governmental staff with just three scribbled words: “Action this day”. I am a great admirer of Sir Winston.’

He left the slightly bemused O’Hare and returned to April Wednesday. He told her that O’Hare had okayed his request and her first question was: ‘Want I should bring back a miniaturized transceiver radio?’

He gave her a kind look. ‘Thoughtful, but no. Electronic surveillance of all kinds can hardly be your province. Such a transceiver I have, screwed into the base of my camera. But that little revolving disc above the villains’ coach means only one thing – they have an automatic radio-wave scanner. They’d pick me up in five seconds. Now listen carefully and I’ll tell you exactly what I want you to do and how I want you to behave.’

When he had finished she said: ‘Understand. But I don’t much care for the thought of the kindly healer there running amok with his hypodermic’

‘You won’t feel a thing,’ Revson said soothingly. ‘Besides, it’s for the fatherland.’

He left her and walked casually across to the press coach. The imperial conference in the Presidential coach was still in full plenary session, and though the speech inside was wholly inaudible from where Revson stood it was clear from the gestures and expressions of those inside that all they had succeeded in reaching so far was a marked degree of difference in opinion. Their problem, Revson reflected, was hardly one susceptible to the ready formation of a consensus of opinion. Branson and Chrysler were up front in the rear coach, apparently dozing, which they probably weren’t – though it wouldn’t have mattered very much if they were, for alert guards were very much in evidence patrolling between the freshly painted boundary lines on the bridge. Members of the various news media stood around in groups, wearing an air of almost hushed anticipation as if expecting the next momentous occasion to happen along any second now, which seemed as likely as not.

Revson entered the press coach. It was deserted. He made his way to his own seat, unshipped his camera, produced a pad and felt pen and began, quickly and without hesitation, to write what was apparently pure gibberish. There were those who were lost without their code-books but Revson was not one of them.

SIX

Hagenbach, the chief of the FBI, was a burly and formidable character in his middle sixties, with short-cropped grey hair, short-cropped grey moustache, slightly hooded light blue eyes which never appeared to blink and a face possessed of a total non-expression which it had taken him years of hard work to acquire. It was said that among the upper echelons of his FBI there was a sweepstake as to the day and date when Hagenbach would first be seen to smile. The sweepstake had been running for five years.

Hagenbach was a very able man and looked it. He had no friends and he looked that too. Men with a consuming passion seldom do and Hagenbach was a man with a consuming passion. As was said of one of his illustrious predecessors, he was alleged to have a file on every senator and congressman in Washington, not to mention the entire staff of the White House. He could have made a fortune in blackmail but Hagenbach was not interested in money. Nor was he interested in power, as such. Hagenbach’s total dedication lay in the extirpation of corruption, whenever and wherever he might encounter it.

He looked at Admiral Newson and General Carter, the former plump and rubicund, the latter tall and lean and looking disconcertingly like his superior, General Cartland. Both men he had known, and well, for almost twenty years and had not once called either by his first name. That anyone should address Hagenbach by his Christian name was unthinkable. It would also have been extremely difficult as no one seemed to know it. He was the type of man who didn’t need a first name.

Hagenbach said: ‘So those are the only tentative proposals for action you have come up with so far?’

‘The situation is unprecedented,’ Newson said. ‘Carter and I are fundamentally men of direct action. To date, direct action seems out of the question. Let’s hear your ideas.’

‘I’ve only just arrived. Have you any immediate proposals for the moment?’

‘Yes. Await the arrival of the Vice-President.’

‘The Vice-President is a nincompoop. You know that. I know that. We all know that.’

‘Be that as it may, he’s the only man in the United States who can approve and authorize any course of action we may eventually decide to make. Also, I think we had first better wait and consult Mr Milton, Mr Quarry and Chief Hendrix when they’re released.’

‘If they’re released.’

‘Hendrix is certain they will be and Hendrix knows far more about Branson than we do. Besides, he has to negotiate with somebody.’ He picked up the message that had arrived from Revson via the New Jersey. ‘How much reliance do you place on this?’

Hagenbach took the note and read it aloud.

‘“Please wait. No precipitate action. No violence – especially no violence. Let me evaluate the situation. Cannot use transceiver – the bandits have an automatic radio-wave scanner in constant use. Will communicate with you this afternoon.’”

Hagenbach laid down the paper. ‘Quite a bit, actually.’

Carter said: ‘What’s he like, this Revson of yours?’

‘Ruthless, arrogant, independent, dislikes authority, a loner who consults superior officers only under duress and even then goes his own way.’

Newson said: ‘That doesn’t sound very encouraging. What’s a hothead like that doing along on a trip like this?’

‘He’s no hothead. His mind is as near ice-cold as any man’s can be. I also forgot to say that he’s highly intelligent, very ingenious and extremely resourceful.’

‘Then he’s a hand-picked man?’ Newson said. Hagenbach nodded. ‘You hand-picked him?’ Again the nod. ‘So he’s the best in the business?’

‘I can’t say. You know the size of our organization. I can’t possibly know all the field agents. He’s just the best I happen to know.’

‘Is he good enough to cope with Branson?’

‘I don’t know because I don’t know Branson. What’s for sure, for once Revson is going to depend heavily on outside help.’ There was a degree of satisfaction in Hagenbach’s voice.

Carter said: ‘And how in hell is he going to communicate with us this afternoon?’

‘I have no idea.’ Hagenbach nodded to Revson’s note. ‘He got that through, didn’t he?’ There was a brief pause as the Admiral and General respectfully contemplated the note. ‘Would either of you gentlemen have thought of that?’ They shook their heads. ‘Me neither. Resourceful is what I said.’

Branson walked up and down the bridge between the rear and Presidential coaches. No nervous pacing, no signs of strain or tension, he could have been taking a pleasant saunter in the afternoon sun, and, indeed, the afternoon was extremely pleasant. The skies were cloudless, the view all around came straight from the pages of a fairy-tale book and the waters of the Golden Gate and the Bay sparkled in the warm sun. Having had his fill of the view, Branson consulted his watch, strolled unhurriedly towards the Presidential coach, knocked on the door, opened it and stepped inside. He surveyed the occupants and the sound of voices stilled.

Branson said pleasantly: ‘You have arrived at a decision, gentlemen?’ There was no reply. ‘Am I to take it, then, that you have arrived at an impasse?’

The President lowered the very large gin and Martini with which he had been sustaining himself.

‘We require more time for our deliberations.’

‘You’ve had all the time you’re going to have. You could sit here all day and get no further. If all your minds weren’t so devious and at the same time so closed to the facts of life, you’d recognize this for the painfully simple issue it is. Pay up or else. And don’t forget the escalation penalty clause.’

The President said: ‘I have a proposal to make.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Permit the King, Prince and Sheikh Kharan to go. I shall remain as hostage. The situation would remain the same. You would still have the President of the United States. For that matter I can’t see why you don’t let all the hostages in this coach go.’

Branson was admiring. ‘My heavens, what a perfectly splendid gesture. Noble, I should say. Why, do that, and the electorate would demand that they re-alter the constitution and let their hero run for another three terms instead of one.’ He smiled and went on without a change in tone. ‘No way, Mr President. Apart from the fact that I shudder at the very thought of you being in the White House for the next thirteen years I’ve always dreamt of holding a hand of cards with four aces in it. Here I’ve got four. One is not enough. And has it ever occurred to you that if you were to be the only hostage left on the Golden Gate Bridge the Government, in the person of your Vice-President who would just love to sit behind that table in the Oval Office, might be sorely tempted to achieve some sort of immortality by wiping out this monstrous band of criminals who have kidnapped you and your Arabian friends? Nothing drastic of course – nobody who destroyed this bridge could ever hope to be President. A single supersonic fighter-bomber from Alameda would do the job nicely. And if one of his rockets went off course slightly – well, that’s just bad luck, an Act of God and pilot’s error.’

The President spilt a considerable amount of his gin and Martini on the carpet.

Branson looked at Quarry, Milton and Hendrix in turn, said: ‘Gentlemen,’ and left the coach. The three men followed. The President carefully didn’t watch them go. He appeared to have found something of profound interest in the depths of what remained of his drink.

Outside, Branson spoke to Van Effen. ‘Get that TV van and crew back here again. Make sure the TV companies are notified.’

Van Effen nodded. ‘It would be wrong of you to let the nation suffer this agonizing suspense. Where are you going?’

‘To the south end with those three gentlemen.’

‘As guaranteed escort for their safety? Can’t they take the word of a gentleman?’

‘Not that. I just want to inspect the progress being made on the barrier. Saves the walk, that’s all.’

The four men climbed into the police car and drove off.

Still alone in the press coach, Revson watched them go then returned his attention to the three small sheets of notepaper on his knees. Each was smaller than the average postcard and all three were covered with small, neat and incomprehensible writing. He focused his camera and photographed each three times – Revson always covered his bets. He then took each paper in turn, set fire to it and crushed the blackened remains in his ash-tray. It was a very curious paper for it gave off no smoke. He then wound off the camera spool, sealed it and wrapped it in a very thin lead foil; as he had promised O’Hare, the completed result was no larger than half a cigarette.

He reloaded his camera and went outside. The atmosphere of suspense and excitement had markedly heightened. He spoke to a nearby newspaperman – understandably, he knew none of them by name.

‘Something new afoot?’

‘Branson’s just sent for the television van again.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘No idea.’

‘Nothing very important, probably. Maybe he’s always had a yen to appear on TV. Maybe he’s just wanting to keep the pressure on the nation and the Government – and the Arabian Governments too, for this time the big three companies will be geared for action, the satellites will be ready and waiting and so will be all the Persian Gulf. The executives of the big companies will be hard put to it to shed crocodile tears for the plight of their beloved President and at the same time refrain from jumping for joy. The biggest show on earth and all for free. What’s the odds Branson won’t be putting on a late show about two in the morning?’

Revson shot about a dozen other pictures. The chances of its being discovered that he had taken no pictures at all were remote in the extreme, but then again Revson always covered his bets. He drifted casually across to where O’Hare was leaning against his ambulance and shook a cigarette from its pack.

‘Light, Doctor?’

‘Sure.’ O’Hare produced a lighter and lit it. Revson cupped the flame in his hands to shield it from the very slight breeze and as he did so he slid the spool into O’Hare’s palm.

‘Thanks, Doc’ He looked idly around. There was no one within earshot. ‘How long to hide?’

‘One minute. I have the place for it.’

‘Two minutes and you’ll have your patient.’

O’Hare went into the ambulance while Revson sauntered halfway across the bridge where April Wednesday was prudently standing alone, a circumstance normally very difficult for her to achieve. She looked at him, wet her lips and tried to smile at him. It wasn’t a very successful effort.

Revson said: ‘Who’s that solid dependable-looking character standing by the engine of the ambulance?’

‘Grafton. Associated Press. A nice man.’

‘Go and collapse gracefully against him. Discretion is of the essence. We don’t want any undue fuss. But first let me get to the other side of the bridge. I want to be at a safe distance when you’re taken ill.’

When Revson reached the far side of the bridge he turned and looked back. April had already begun to head in the direction of the ambulance. Her gait seemed a little unsteady but not markedly so. She may be scared, he thought – and she unquestionably was – but she can act.

She was about fifteen feet distant from Grafton when he first saw her or, more precisely, when she first attracted his attention. He regarded her slightly wavering approach with curiosity, a curiosity which quickly turned to concern. He took two quick steps forward and caught her by the shoulders. She leaned gratefully against him, lips and eyes compressed as in pain.

‘April Wednesday,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter, girl?’

‘I’ve a terrible pain. It just hit me now.’ Her voice was husky and she was holding herself with both hands. ‘It – it feels like a heart attack.’

‘How would you know?’ Grafton said reasonably, his tone reassuring. ‘And wherever your heart is, it’s not on the right-hand side of your tummy. Don’t misinterpret me, but some people have all the luck.’ He took her firmly by the arm. ‘There’s a doctor only five yards from here.’

From the far side of the bridge Revson watched them vanish round to the rear of the ambulance. As far as he could reasonably tell, he had been the only person to observe the brief by-play.

Branson walked unhurriedly away from the half-completed southern barrier, apparently well satisfied with the progress of the work in hand. He reached the rear coach and swung up to sit beside Chrysler.

‘Any more sensational revelations?’

‘No, Mr Branson. It’s all become a bit repetitive and boring. You can have a playback or transcript if you like but it’s not worth it.’

‘I’m sure it’s not. Tell me.’

‘Can I switch off, Mr Branson? They’re really not worth listening to.’

‘They never were. Well?’

‘Same old story. About the payment. Still arguing.’

‘But they’re going to pay.’

‘No question. It’s whether to pay now or stall. Latest opinion poll has four for, two undecided, two against. The King, the Prince and Kharan are all for the money being handed over now-Treasury money, of course. Mayor Morrison is of the same mind.’

‘That’s understandable. He’d pay a billion dollars within the hour to ensure the safety of his beloved bridge.’

‘Cartland and Muir have no preference either way, the only difference being that General Cartland is willing to fight us to the death. The President and Hansen are very much against immediate payment.’

‘Again understandable. Hansen’s never made a decision in his life and the President would stall for ever, hoping for a miracle to happen, hoping to save the nation the loss of a half billion for which, rightly or wrongly, he would probably be blamed, hoping to save face and his Presidential image. Let them stew in their own juice.’ He turned as Peters appeared in the doorway. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Nothing that affects us, sir. Seems Dr O’Hare has some medical problem on his hands. He’d like to see you as soon as possible.’

When Branson entered the ambulance he found April lying on the hinged side bed, a discreet six inches of her midriff showing, her face chalk-white. Branson did not much care for finding himself in the presence of sick people and this was obviously a sick person. He looked enquiringly at O’Hare.

O’Hare said: ‘I’ve a very sick young lady on my hands, here, Mr Branson. I want her removed to hospital immediately’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Look at her face.’

It was indeed ashen, an effect easily achieved by the application of an odourless talcum.

‘And at her eyes.’

They were opaque with enormously dilated pupils, the effect of the first of the two jabs that O’Hare had given her. Not that the eyes hadn’t been big enough to begin with.

‘Feel her pulse.’

Reluctantly, Branson lifted the slender wrist and dropped it almost immediately.

‘It’s racing,’ he said. And indeed it was. O’Hare had probably been a little too thorough there. The rate of the pulse when she had entered the ambulance had already been so high as to render the second injection unnecessary.

‘Would you care to feel the distension on the right-hand side of the abdomen?’

‘No, I would not.’ Branson was emphatic.

‘It could be a grumbling appendix. It could be a threatened peritonitis. The signs are there. But I have no proper diagnostic equipment, no X-ray facilities, no way of carrying out abdominal surgery and, of course, no anaesthetist. Hospital, and pretty damn quick.’

‘No!’ April had sat up in bed, fear in her face. ‘No! Not hospital! They’ll cut me up! Surgery! I’ve never even been in a hospital in my life.’

O’Hare put his hands on her shoulders, firmly; and not bothering to be gentle, and pressed her back down again.

‘And if I’m not that sick? If it’s only a tummy-ache or something? Mr Branson wouldn’t let me back. The only scoop of my life. And I’m scared!’

O’Hare said: ‘It’s more than a tummy-ache, lassie.’

‘You can come back,’ Branson said. ‘But only if you do what the doctor and I say.’ He nodded towards the door and stepped down. ‘What do you think really is the matter with her?’

‘A doctor doesn’t have to discuss a patient with a layman.’ O’Hare was showing every symptom of losing his patience. ‘And I can tell you this, Branson. Make off with half a billion dollars and you’ll probably end up as some kind of folk hero. It’s happened often before, although not, admittedly, on this scale. But let this girl die because you denied her access to medical care and you’ll become the most hated man in America. They’ll never stop till they get you. To start with, the CIA will find you wherever you are in the world-and they won’t bother to bring you to trial.’

Branson showed no signs of losing his patience. He said mildly: ‘You don’t have to threaten me, Doctor. She’ll get her medical care. I’m just asking as a favour.’

‘In confidence?’ Branson nodded. ‘You don’t have to be a doctor to see that she’s a pretty sick kid. But there is more than one way of being sick. Is she threatened with appendicitis or peritonitis? I don’t think so. She’s an excitable, intense, highly strung kid who lives on her nerves. Under pressure, as of now, those could produce an emotional trauma or psychosomatic disorders which are capable of causing the symptoms we’ve just seen. It’s rare, but it exists. In medicine, there’s a condition called the Malthusian syndrome where a person can actually will himself into producing-faking, if you want to call it that – symptoms of a non-existent disease. Not in this case – if it is what I think it is, it’s involuntary. But you see my position -1 can’t take chances. She may require intensive medical diagnosis or psychiatric evaluation. The first I can do myself, but I need hospital equipment. The second I can’t – I’m not a psychiatrist. Either way I must get to hospital. We’re wasting time.’

‘I won’t keep you long. Do you mind if we search your ambulance?’

O’Hare stared at him. ‘What the hell for? What do you think I’m carrying? Bodies? Narcotics-well, quite a lot really. What do you think I would be taking off this bridge that I didn’t bring on to it? I’m a doctor, not an FBI agent.’

‘We’ll forget it. Another question. Do you mind if we send a guard along – for observation purposes?’

‘Send half a dozen. They’ll get damned little observation done.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that Harben – he’s chief of surgery-cherishes his unit like a newborn baby. He wouldn’t give a damn about you and your bridge. If any of your men tried to force their way into emergency reception of the emergency theatre he’d have a dozen sharpshooters there in ten minutes. I’m not joking – I’ve seen him do it.’

‘We’ll forget that, too. It’s unimportant.’

One thing that is important. Will you phone, ask them to have the emergency operating theatre ready and Dr Huron standing by.’

‘Dr Huron?’

‘Senior psychiatrist.’

‘Right.’ Branson smiled faintly. ‘Do you know that a Presidential route is always laid out so that it’s never more than a few minutes from the nearest hospital? Just in case. Convenient, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’ O’Hare turned to the driver. ‘Start the siren.’

As the ambulance moved towards the south tower they were passed by a TV van and generator truck coming the other way. Immediately, cameramen, photographers and reporters began moving into what they assumed would be the same TV arena as before. Some cameramen were so overcome by the occasion that they began wasting film on the forthcoming truck as if this were an unprecedented spectacle in itself.

Revson was not one of those who joined in the surge forward. He moved in the opposite direction and regained his seat in the deserted press coach. He undipped the base of his camera, removed the miniaturized transceiver, slipped it into a side pocket, reached into his carrier bag and fed spare film into the base of his camera. He was just reclipping the base of the camera when he became aware of being watched. He looked up. Blue eyes under blond hair, a head the approximate shape of a sugar cube and a vacuous smile. Revson believed in that vacuous smile the way he believed in Santa Claus. Branson would have settled for nothing less than an exceptional man when picking his lieutenant.

‘Revson, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Van Effen, I believe.’

‘Yes. Why aren’t you out there with the others, recording this historical moment for posterity?’

‘First, what is there to record yet? Second, the big eye of TV can do a damned sight better job of posterity-recording than I can do. Third, if you’ll excuse the hackneyed phrase, what I’m after is the human interest angle. Fourthly, I prefer to load in the shadow.’

‘That looks a most exceptional camera.’

‘It is.’ Revson permitted himself a small proprietary smile that almost bordered on a smirk. ‘Handmade and assembled. Swedish. A rare species. The only camera in the world that can take colour stills, black and white stills and is a ciné-camera at the same time.’

‘May I have a look? I’m a bit of a camera buff myself.’

‘Certainly’ The battery-powered air-conditioning in the coach, Revson thought, was falling down on the job.

Van Effen examined the camera with the eye of a connoisseur. Inadvertently, as it seemed, his hand touched the spring clip at the base. A dozen cassettes and spools tumbled on to the seat beside Revson.

‘I am sorry. It would seem that I’m not all that much of a camera buff.’ He inverted the camera and looked with admiration at the recessed base. ‘Very very ingenious.’ While Revson sat, acutely conscious of the slight bulge caused by the transceiver in his side pocket, Van Effen meticulously replaced cassettes and spools in the base, closed the flap and handed the camera back to Revson. ‘Excuse my curiosity.’

‘Well, you went to the right finishing school, anyway.’

‘It always shows.’ Van Effen gave him his vacuous smile and left.

Revson did not mop his brow for it was a gesture alien to his nature. Had he been a browmopper, he would have done so. He wondered if Van Effen had noticed the two tiny spring clips in the base. He probably had. Had he realized their significance? Equally probably not. They could have been retaining clips for any number of esoteric attachments.

Revson turned in his seat. The hostages were descending from their coach, the President manfully substituting for his black scowl a calm, resolute and statesmanlike expression. Even Van Effen, Revson saw, had his eyes on them. Revson left the coach by the door opposite the driver’s so that he was on the blind side of all the spectators and participants. He leaned his elbows in brief contemplation on the outer rail, then opened his right hand, the one that held the transceiver. He had read somewhere that it took a solid object, accelerating at thirty-two feet per second, only three seconds to fall from the bridge to the Golden Gate and he gravely doubted whether the man responsible for those figures could count. Nobody had noticed anything amiss. Revson had covered his bets again.

He made his unhurried and silent entry into the coach again, closed the door quietly behind him and emerged, much less quietly, from the opposite door. Van Effen turned, smiled vaguely, then turned back his attention to the circus on hand.

As before, Branson had everything stage-managed to perfection, hostages and newsmen seated in their proper places, ciné and still cameramen strategically positioned although, this time, there was one minor but significant difference from the previous occasion. This time Branson had two TV cameras instead of one. Without further ado Branson, calm, relaxed and as assured as ever, re-embarked upon his psychological warfare. Apart from being a born general and a born stage manager, he could also have been a born anchor-man on TV. He divided his attention fairly evenly between the TV lens and those seated beside him. After a wholly unnecessary introduction of himself, the President, the King and the Prince, his first reference, not unsurprisingly, was to cameras.

‘We have, this afternoon, two television cameras with us. One for the illustrious company you are now viewing, the other facing the other way towards the south or San Franciscan shore. The second one is a tracking camera with a telephoto zoom lens, that, up to half a mile, can give the clarity of resolution that one would expect at the distance of ten feet. As there is no trace of fog this afternoon it should be able to perform its function admirably. Its function is as follows.’

Branson lifted the canvas cover from a large, rectangular box then, microphone in hand, went and sat in a specially reserved vacant chair by the President. He gestured towards the object he had just unveiled.

‘A courtesy gesture towards our assembled guests. A rather splendid colour TV set. No better obtainable anywhere. American, of course.’

The President had to make himself heard. After all, most of the so-called civilized eyes in the world were upon him. He said, with heavy sarcasm and a cold distaste: ‘I’ll wager you haven’t paid for your TV set, Branson.’

‘That’s hardly relevant. The point is that I don’t want to make you and your guests feel like second-class and deprived citizens. All the world will be able to see in close detail how we are going to attach the first of our explosive charges to one of the cables by the south tower and I feel it would be unjust to deprive you of the same privilege. After all, at a distance of over two thousand feet and an elevation of over five hundred feet, it would be difficult for even the keenest-eyed to appreciate the finer points of this operation. But the box here will show you everything you want.’ Branson smiled. ‘Or don’t want. Now, please direct your attention to the vehicle descending the ramp from the rear coach.’

They so directed their attention. What they saw could also be seen on the TV set before them. The vehicle looked like a stripped-down, miniaturized golf-cart. It was self-propelled but silent, clearly electrically powered. The driver, Peters, stood on a tiny platform at the rear immediately over the batteries. On the flat steel platform before him was a large coil of very thin rope and, at the very front, a small, double-drummed winch.

At the foot of the ramp, Peters stopped the vehicle. Four men appeared from the rear of the coach. The first two were carrying an obviously very heavy canvas strap of explosives – similar to the one that Branson had earlier demonstrated on TV. This they deposited, very carefully indeed, on the vehicle’s platform beside the rope. The other two men carried objects about eight feet in length: one was a boat-hook, the other an H-sectioned steel beam with butterfly screw clamps at one end and a built-in pulley at the other.

‘The tools of our trade,’ Branson said. ‘You should be able to guess what they’re all for but in any event this will be explained to you when they are put to use. Two things are of particular interest: the explosives and the rope. That strap of explosives is ten feet long and contains thirty beehives of high explosive, each five pounds in weight: the rope, which is a quarter of a mile long, looks, and is, thinner than the average clothes-line, but, as it is made of steel-cored nylon, has a breaking strain of eight hundred pounds which is exactly five times as much as will be required of it.’ He gestured to Peters, who nodded, eased open the circular control wheel and trundled off in the direction of the south tower. Branson looked directly at the TV lens.

He said: ‘For those of you who don’t know, and apart from the citizens of San Francisco there will be many who will not know, those towers are something less than solid structures.’ On the TV set before him and on countless millions of sets throughout the world, the south tower came into sharp, close focus. ‘These towers consist of steel framework boxes called cells. Each is about the size of a phone booth, but twice as high, riveted together and connected by manholes. Each tower consists of over five thousand such cells. They contain elevators and ladders – a rather staggering twenty-three miles of them.’

He reached under his seat and brought up a manual.

‘As you will appreciate, it would be very easy for the inexperienced to get lost inside this labyrinth. Once, when they were building this bridge, two men spent the entire night inside the north tower trying to find their way out and, indeed, Joseph Strauss, the designer and builder of this bridge, was capable of getting completely lost inside the tower. It was with this in mind that Strauss produced this twenty-six-page manual-well, not this one, this is a facsimile I was fortunate enough to come by – instructing inspectors how to find their way about inside the towers.

‘At this moment, two of my men, each with a copy of this manual – although they hardly need them, they’re using the elevator – are at, or nearing, the top of the east tower there, the one facing towards the bay. They are carrying with them nothing except a fifteen-pound weight, the purpose of which you will shortly discover. May we observe the progress of our electric truck, please?’

The telephoto TV camera obligingly descended and closed on Peters, travelling along the wrong side of the bridge. Even as they watched, it slowed and came to a halt almost directly under the lowest of the four massive cross-struts of the south tower.

Branson said: ‘Elevation, please.’

Again the telephoto camera focused on the saddle – the curved steel housing over which the cable passed – on the bayside tower. Almost immediately two men came into sight by the saddle, tiny figures for those directly observing from the middle of the bridge, close-up for those looking at the TV screens.

‘On cue, on time,’ Branson said with some satisfaction. ‘In those matters, co-ordination is of the essence. I dare say that not one in ten thousand of you would care to be where those two men are now. Quite frankly, neither would I. One misstep and it’s over seven hundred and fifty feet down to the Golden Gate: only a seven-second fall but at a hundred and seventy miles an hour hitting water is no different from hitting solid concrete. But those two are as safe as you would be in a church pew. Spidermen, they’re called-the workers you can see standing on girders a thousand feet above the streets of New York or Chicago when they’re building a new skyscraper.’

The camera closed on Peters again. He produced a pistol, unusual as to both length of barrel and width of muzzle, took brief aim upwards and fired. Neither camera could track nor eye see the nature of the missile ejected: what the camera did show, four seconds after firing, was that Bartlett, one of the men by the saddle, had a green cord safely in his hands. He reeled this in swiftly. At the end of the cord was a leather-hung pulley, which in turn was attached to one end of the rope. Two and a half minutes elapsed before the rope was in Bartlett’s hands.

He held this securely while his partner, Boyard, undid both cord and pulley. Bartlett reeled in about another dozen feet, cut this section off with a knife and handed it to Boyard, who secured one end to a strut and another to the strap of the pulley. The rope was then passed through the pulley, through a hole at its top, to a pear-shaped lead weight which the men had brought up with them. Both weight and rope were then released and sank swiftly down to bridge level again.

Peters caught the weight, undid the knot that secured the rope but did not withdraw the rope. Instead he passed it through the pulley in the steel beam and a ring at the end of the boat-hook and secured all three together. He took a few turns of the other end of the rope round one of the drums of the winch and started up the electric motor.

The winch, though small, was powerful and fast. From bridge to saddle took less than a minute and a half. There was a gentle breeze blowing from the north, apparently freshening as the altitude increased, and the rope and its burden swayed quite noticeably, striking each of the cross-struts, at times quite forcibly, on the way up. Peters seemed unconcerned, his gaze fixed on Bartlett. As the rope and its cargo neared the top Bartlett made a horizontal waving motion of his arm. Peters eased the winch drum to a crawl. Bartlett made a slow upwards beckoning motion with his arm then stretched it out horizontally. Peters unwound the rope after stopping the winch, leaving only one turn on the drum.

Bartlett and Boyard pulled in the beam and boat-hook, detached them along with the lead weight, passed the rope through the pulley and resecured the lead weight. They then eased out the ?-beam for a distance of about six feet then clamped the inner end to a strut, tightening the butterfly nuts to their maximum. Bartlett signalled Peters who took the last turn off the drum. Weight and rope sank rapidly downwards.

Two minutes later the rope was on its way up again, this time with the canvas strap of explosives which dangled at its full length, fastened to the rope by two heavy metal buckles at one end of the strap. Unlike the previous occasion Peters now moved with great caution, the drum moving very slowly and occasionally stopping altogether. General Cartland commented on this to Branson.

‘Your winchman is trying to eliminate all sway?’

‘Yes. We don’t want that strap of explosives to bang against one of the cross-struts.’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten how sensitive fulminate of mercury detonators are.’

‘The detonators are in Bartlett’s pocket. But the primers can be temperamental too. That’s why we have that extended beam up top – to give clearance. Also, it’s asking a bit much for even two strong men to haul a hundred and sixty pounds – not a hundredweight as you estimated, General – over five hundred feet vertically upwards.’

They watched the explosive safely negotiate the second top cross-strut. Cartland said: ‘So it’s one strap there, one on the opposite cable and the other two at the north tower?’

‘No. We’ve changed our minds on that. We suspect that the suspension cables – and don’t forget that there are over twenty-seven thousand spun wires inside that steel sheath – may be considerably stronger than the mock-up we used for the test. So we’re going to use all four explosive straps at the south tower, a pair on each cable. That will leave no margin for doubt. And if the south end of the bridge falls into the Golden Gate it seems reasonable to expect that the north end will follow suit. Whether the north tower – don’t forget it will then be bearing most of the weight of the four-thousand-two-hundred-feet span – will be pulled down too we haven’t been able to determine but it seems pretty close to a certainty.’

Van Effen took two quick steps forwards and clicked off the safety-catch on his machine-pistol. Mayor Morrison, half out of his seat, slowly subsided back into it but his fists were still tightly clenched, his eyes still mad.

By now, Bartlett and Boyard had the boat-hook round the rope and were steadily, cautiously and without too much trouble, overhanding the explosives in towards themselves. Soon it disappeared out of the range of the telephoto TV camera. So, immediately afterwards, did all of Bartlett except for head and shoulders.

‘Inserting the detonators?’ Cartland asked. Branson nodded and Cartland gestured to the section of the cable nearest them. At that point, in the centre of the bridge, the cable dipped until it was almost within arm’s length. ‘Why go to all that immense labour? Wouldn’t it have been easier just to fix the charges here?’

‘Easier, yes, but there’s no guarantee that severing the cables in mid-bridge would bring the bridge down. There’s no way of knowing: what’s for sure is that no one has ever carried out a control test or experiment on this sort of thing. Suspension bridges come expensive. If the cables were severed here the towers, as far as weight is concerned, would still be in a fair state of equilibrium. Bridge might sag a little or a lot, it might break but it wouldn’t drop the whole span clear into the water. My way, success is guaranteed. You wouldn’t expect me to charge two hundred million for a botched-up job, would you?’

General Cartland didn’t say whether he would or he wouldn’t.

‘Besides, if things go wrong, that is, if you turn out to be stingy with the money, I intend to trigger off the explosives immediately we take off. I don’t want to be within half a mile of six hundred pounds of high explosives when it goes up.’

The President said carefully: ‘You mean the triggering device is aboard one of those helicopters?’

Branson gave a patient sigh. ‘I’ve always maintained that all Presidential candidates should undergo an IQ test. Of course it is. In the nearest one. What did you expect me to do? Press a button inside a coach and then go down with the coach and bridge to the bottom of the Golden Gate?’

Branson removed his disbelieving gaze from the President and returned it to the TV screen before him. Bartlett, with Boyard steadying him, had the canvas strip wrapped round the cable, hard up against the saddle and was buckling tight the second of the two straps that held the strap securely in position. That done, he moved back along with Boyard to admire their handiwork. The camera then left them and zeroed in on the section of cable wrapped in the lethal embrace of the high explosive.

Branson smiled broadly: ‘Well, now, isn’t that a perfectly splendid sight?’

Cartland remained poker-faced. ‘It all depends upon your point of view.’

SEVEN

Vice-President Richards switched off the TV set. He looked thoughtful, shocked and concerned all at one and the same time. When he spoke, those emotions were reflected in his voice.

‘That was a remarkably effective performance. One has to confess that our villainous friend appears to know exactly what he is about and has the total ability to carry out his numerous threats. At least, that is how I see it, but I’m just a newcomer to the scene. Do you gentlemen see it any differently?’

The Vice-President was a tall, genial, loquacious southerner, much given to slapping – one could not call it clapping – the unwary rather painfully on the back and was an internationally known gourmet, a fact amply testified to by his ample figure. He was far from being the nincompoop Hagenbach had alleged – Hagenbach’s opinion stemmed from the fact that theirs were two totally differing personalities: he was forceful, shrewd, intelligent and was remarkably well informed on a very wide range of topics: if he had one fault it was that he had, unlike Hagenbach, a consuming desire for power. Branson had hardly been exaggerating when he had suggested that a yearning look came into Richards’s eyes whenever he entered the Oval Office in the White House.

Richards looked, without much hope, around the company assembled in the office of the hospital supervisor. Hagenbach, Hendrix and the two Secretaries sat around a small table. Newson and Carter, as if to demonstrate the exclusivity of the highest echelons of the military, sat at a second and smaller table. O’Hare, arms folded and leaning against a radiator, wore the wry, slightly amused, slightly condescending expression that most doctors reserve for all those who are not also doctors. April Wednesday sat, quietly and alone, in a corner chair.

From the silence that followed it was clear that none of the gentlemen present saw it any differently.

Richards’s geniality yielded to a certain amount of testiness. ‘You, Hagenbach, what do you propose to do?’

Hagenbach restrained himself. Even though he was the head of the FBI he had to pay his due respect, albeit lip-service respect, to the Vice-President.

‘I suggest we await the transcription of Revson’s message, sir.’

‘Transcription! Transcription! Was it necessary for this man of yours to complicate things by sending in code?’

‘On the face of it, no. Revson has a near-mania for secrecy, that must be admitted, and is extraordinarily security-conscious. The same might be said about myself. Agreed, the message came through with safety and ease. On the other hand, as Miss Wednesday here has testified, Branson did contemplate searching the ambulance. With the proverbial toothcomb, he might have come up with something. But not with this microfilm.’ He looked up as a young man, dressed in the immaculate conservative grey of a Wall Street broker, came through the doorway and handed him two typed sheets of paper.

‘Sorry it took so long, sir. It was a bit difficult.’

‘So is Revson.’ Hagenbach read quickly through the papers, totally oblivious of the impatience of the others. He looked up at the young man. ‘You like and you value your position in our organization, Jacobs?’

‘You don’t have to say that, sir.’

Hagenbach tried to smile but, as ever, failed to crack the ice barrier. ‘I apologize.’ It was a measure of Hagenbach’s concern over the matter in hand that he had never previously been heard to say sorry to anyone.

‘You don’t have to say that either, sir.’ Jacobs left the room.

Hagenbach said: ‘This is what Revson says. “To give you the maximum time to obtain what I require for my immediate needs, I will state those first of all.”’

Admiral Newson coughed. ‘Do your subordinates usually address you in such a peremptory tone?’

‘Not usually. He goes on: “I want four hundred yards of blue or green thin cord, cylindrical waterfront containers for written messages and a variably hooded Morse-flashlight. Then I would like an aerosol, two pens – one white, one red – and a CAP air pistol. Please order those immediately. Without them, I cannot hope to operate.”’

General Carter said: ‘Gobbledegook. What are those terms supposed to mean?’

Hagenbach said: ‘I am not sure if I should tell you. That does not refer to you personally, General. Senior officers, cabinet ministers and, of course, senior police officers, are entitled to be privy to such information. But there are – ah-civilians present.’

O’Hare said mildly: ‘Doctors don’t talk. What’s more, they don’t leak secret information to the press either.’

Hagenbach favoured him with a very old-fashioned look then said to April: ‘And you, Miss Wednesday?’

She said: ‘I’d talk my head off if you as much as showed me a pair of thumb-screws. You wouldn’t have to put them on, showing would be quite enough. Otherwise, no.’

Hagenbach said to Hendrix: ‘How’s Branson with thumb-screws and young ladies?’

‘No way. Master criminal though he is he has a remarkable reputation for gallantry towards women. He has never carried out a robbery where a woman might be involved, far less hurt.’

‘But Mr Revson told me –’

‘I rather fancy,’ Hagenbach said, ‘that Revson wanted you to act scared. So he threw a scare into you.’

April Wednesday was indignant: ‘Has he no scruples?’

‘In private life, a model of integrity. On business – well, if he has scruples he has so far hidden the fact very well. As to those objects he asked for, the aerosol contains exactly the same knockout nerve gas that Branson used with such effect on the bridge. No permanent damage whatsoever – the presence of Miss Wednesday testifies to that. The pens – they look like ordinary felt pens – fire tiny tipped needles that also knock out people.’

Admiral Newson said: ‘Why two colours?’

‘The red knocks you out a bit more permanently’

‘One assumes that “a bit more permanently” means permanently’

‘Could happen. The air pistol – well, it has the advantage of almost complete silence.’

‘And the CAP bit?’

Hagenbach’s hesitation betrayed a degree of reluctance.

‘It means the bullets are tipped.’

‘Tipped with what?’

Hagenbach’s reluctance turned into something close to embarrassment.

‘Cyanide.’

After a brief and understandable silence Richards said heavily: ‘This Revson of yours. Is he a direct descendant of Attila the Hun?’

‘He is an extremely effective operative, sir.’

‘Loaded down with a lethal armoury like that, I don’t for a moment doubt it. He has killed?’

‘So have thousands of police officers.’

‘And what’s his score to date?’

‘I really couldn’t say, sir. In his reports, Revson lists only the essentials.’

‘Only the essentials.’ Richards’s echo had a hollow ring to it. He shook his head and said no more.

‘If you will excuse me for a moment.’ Hagenbach wrote quickly on a notepad, opened the door and handed the note to a man outside. ‘Have those items here within the hour.’ He returned and picked up the transcript again.

‘To continue. “In what little time I’ve had I’ve tried to make an assessment of Branson’s character. In original concept, planning, organization and execution, the man is quite brilliant. He would have made an excellent general, for his appreciation of both strategy and tactics is masterly. But nobody can be that good. He has his failings, which I hope can be used to bring him down. He has a divine belief in his own infallibility. This belief carries with it the seeds of his own destruction. No one is infallible. Second, he is possessed of a colossal vanity. He could just as easily have held those TV interviews – I’ve only seen one of Branson’s love affairs with the public but there are bound to be more – at, say, the south tower – but, no, he had to have it smack in the middle, surrounded by his own private press corps. In his place I would have had the whole press corps off the bridge in five minutes. It seems it just has not occurred to him that the ranks of the press corps may have been infiltrated. Third, he should have searched the doctor and Miss Wednesday and then the ambulance, if necessary throwing every single item of medical equipment into the Golden Gate, before allowing it to leave the bridge: in other words, he is not security-conscious enough.

‘“How to deal with them? I have no idea yet. I would like some guidance. I have suggestions but I don’t think any of them is practical.

‘“No one can cope with seventeen heavily armed men. But of those seventeen only two matter. Some of the other fifteen are bright but only Branson and Van Effen are natural killers. Those two I could kill.”’

‘Kill!’ April Wednesday’s shocked green eyes stared out of her pale face. ‘The man’s a monster.’

Hagenbach was dry. ‘At least, he’s a realistic monster.’ He read on. ‘“It’s feasible, but unwise. The others would then almost certainly overreact and I wouldn’t care to be responsible for the health of the President and his friends. This is a second last resort.

‘“Would it be possible to have a submarine standing by under the bridge during the hours of darkness, with only the top of the conning tower showing? I could certainly pass messages and pick up anything I wanted that way. What else, I don’t know. I can’t for instance, visualize the President descending two hundred feet of rope ladder. He’d fall off after ten feet.

‘“When Branson’s men are fixing the charges would it be possible to send a two-thousand-volt jolt through the cables? I know this would electrify the entire bridge but those standing on the roadway or inside the coaches should be safe enough.”’

Richards said: ‘Why two thousand volts?’

Hagenbach sounded almost apologetic. ‘Electric chair voltage.’

‘I owe an apology to the shade of Attila.’

‘Yes. “One drawback to this is that someone, say the President, might be leaning his elbows on the side of the bridge or sitting on a crash barrier. That would mean a new Presidential election. I need expert advice. Or could we aim a laser beam at the charges when in position? The beam would certainly cut through the canvas. If the charge were to fall on to the bridge it would certainly detonate on impact but as most of the explosive force would be dissipated in thin air, damage to the roadway would not be severe. It is sure that it wouldn’t bring the bridge down. Trouble is, the laser beam might detonate the charge instead. Please advise.

‘“Under suitable cover would it be possible to introduce men into the tower? Natural fog would be fine. Phoney oil fire depending on the direction of the wind? I don’t know. But the thing is to get men to the top, return the lift and then cut off the power to the elevators. Any person who gets to the top after five hundred odd feet of ladders isn’t going to be in much shape to do anything.

‘“Is it possible to introduce some form of knockout drugs in the food? Something that would lay them out for half an hour, maybe an hour and not too fast-acting? If anyone were to keel over with the first bite you can imagine Branson’s reaction. The individual food trays would have to be marked so that seventeen of them would go to the seventeen for whom they were intended.”’

Hagenbach looked at O’Hare. ‘There are such drugs?’

‘I’m sure of it. The concoction of Mickey Finns is not my speciality, but Dr Isaacs – he’s the chief of the Drugs and Narcotics Section – knows as much about those brews as anyone in the country. Catherine de Medici could never have coped with him.’

‘That’s useful.’ Hagenbach returned his attention to the final brief section of the transcript.

‘“Please let me have your suggestions. All I myself can really do at the moment is to try to deactivate the radio trigger that sets off the charges without leaving any signs that it has been tampered with. That in itself should be simple. It’s getting at the damned thing that’s difficult. It has, of course, to be in one of the helicopters and those are bathed in light both night and day and are heavily guarded. I’ll try.” That’s all.’

Newson said: ‘You mentioned a second last resort. What’s the last resort?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. If he has a last resort, he’s keeping it to himself. Now, sooner than pass those notes around I’ll have them Xeroxed. Minutes only and you’ll each have a copy.’ He left the room, approached Jacobs, the man who had handed him the typescript, and said quietly: ‘Have this Xeroxed. Ten copies.’ He pointed to the last paragraph. ‘Blank this off. And for God’s sake make sure that this original gets back to me and not anyone else.’

Jacobs was back in the promised few moments. He distributed six and handed the remaining copies and the original to Hagenbach, who folded the original and stuck it in an inside pocket. Then all seven carefully studied the report. And again. And again.

General Carter said, almost complainingly: ‘Revson certainly doesn’t leave me very much for my imagination to work on. Candidly, he doesn’t leave anything. Maybe it’s just not one of my days.’

‘Then it’s not one of mine either,’ Newson said. ‘Your man seems to have covered the ground pretty comprehensively, Hagenbach. Sounds like a very useful man to have on our side.’

‘He is. But even Revson requires room to manoeuvre. He has none.’

Quarry said, tentatively: ‘I know this is not my field but it occurs to me that the key lies in the helicopters. We have the means to destroy those?’

Carter said: ‘That’s no problem. Planes, guns, rockets, wire-guided anti-tank missiles. Why?’

‘That’s the only way Branson and his men can leave. And as long as he remains on the bridge he can’t detonate his charges. So what happens then?’

Carter looked at the Secretary of the Treasury without admiration.

‘I can think of three things. First, Branson would call for a mobile crane, have it dump the choppers into the Golden Gate and demand two replacements within the hour or he’d send us a neat little parcel containing the President’s ears. Second, whether it’s a shell, rocket or missile, it’s impossible to localize or contain the blast effect and some innocent bystanders might end up in the same condition as the choppers. Third, has it occurred to you that though the blast might well destroy the radio-activating device for the explosive charge, it might equally well trigger it off? Even with only one end of one cable gone that bridge is going to sag and assume a crazy angle in nothing flat, and nothing that is not nailed down would have a hope of remaining on that bridge. If that were to happen, Mr Secretary, and the President and his guests knew you were the man responsible, I don’t think that their last thoughts of you, as they sat there in their coach at the bottom of the Golden Gate, would be very charitable ones.’

Quarry sighed. ‘I’d better stick to counting my pennies. I told you this wasn’t my field.’

Richards said: ‘I suggest we all have twenty minutes’ silent meditation and see what we come up with.’

They did just that and when the twenty minutes were up Hagenbach said: ‘Well?’

All, apparently, was not well. The silence was profound.

‘In that case, I suggest we start considering which are the less awful of Revson’s options.’

The return of the ambulance to the centre of the bridge at about six o’clock was greeted with warmth and interest. Even being in the spotlight of the eyes of the world loses its dramatic effect if one has nothing to do. Branson’s TV broadcasts apart, the middle of the bridge offered little in the way of entertainment.

When April, pale-faced and still apparently shaken, stepped from the ambulance, Branson was the first to greet her.

‘How do you feel?’

‘I feel such a fool.’ She rolled up a sleeve to exhibit the punctures O’Hare had inflicted upon her earlier in the day. ‘Two little pricks and I’m as right as rain.’

She walked away and sat down rather heavily on one of the many chairs scattered around her. Her colleagues gathered round.

Branson said to O’Hare: ‘She doesn’t look as right as rain to me.’

‘If you mean she’s still not back to normal, I agree. Same appearance, different causes. Last time you saw her she was on a high: now it’s a low. My guess was right, it seems – just an emotional trauma. She’s been sound asleep for the past two hours under heavy sedation. Dopey, that’s all. Dr Huron, the psychiatrist, didn’t want her to return, but she made such a damned noise about not getting back and this being her last chance or whatever that he decided that it might be better for her to return. No worry. I’ve brought back enough of the same sedative to last us for a week out here.’

‘For the sake of all of us, let’s hope you won’t need a quarter of it.’

Revson waited until the last of April’s welcomers had left her for the TV, a show of peculiar interest to all as the programme was devoted exclusively to a rerun of Branson’s early afternoon broadcast. Nobody, Revson was unsurprised to observe, was more interested than Branson himself. But then Branson had no more to occupy his time than anyone else. The only person who seemed remotely active was Chrysler, who visited the rear coach at regular intervals. He wondered why.

Revson sat beside the girl. She looked at him coldly.

He said: ‘What’s the matter with you?’ She remained silent. ‘Don’t tell me. Somebody’s been turning you against me.’

‘Yes. You. I don’t like killers. Especially I don’t like killers who plan their next murders coldbloodedly in advance.’

‘Come, come. That’s putting it a bit strongly.’

‘Is it? Cyanide guns? Lethal pens? Shot through the back, I should imagine.’

‘My, my, we are bitter. Three things. First, those weapons are used only in acute emergency and then only to save lives, to stop bad people killing good people, although perhaps you would rather have it the other way round. Second, it doesn’t matter to a dead man where he has been shot. Third, you have been eavesdropping.’

‘I was invited to listen.’

‘People make mistakes. Clearly, they invited the wrong person. I could be flippant and say I owe a duty to the taxpayer, but I’m not in the mood.’ April looked at the hard face, listened to the voice from which all trace of the normal bantering warmth had vanished and realized with apprehension that indeed he was not in the mood. ‘I have a job to do, you don’t know what you’re talking about, so we’ll dispense with your moral strictures. I assume you brought the equipment I asked for. Where is it?’

‘I don’t know. Dr O’Hare does. For some reason he didn’t want me to know in case we were questioned and the ambulance searched.’

‘For some reason! For an obvious and excellent reason. O’Hare is no fool.’ A flush touched the pale cheeks but he ignored it. ‘All of it?’

‘So I believe.’ She tried to speak stiffly.

‘Never mind your wounded pride. And don’t forget you’re in this up to your lovely neck. Hagenbach have any instructions for me?’

‘Yes. But he didn’t tell me. He told Dr O’Hare.’ Her voice was acid or bitter or both. ‘I suppose that makes Mr Hagenbach no fool either.’

‘Don’t take those things so much to heart.’ He patted her hand and smiled warmly. ‘You’ve done an excellent job. Thank you.’

She tried a tentative smile. ‘Maybe you are a little bit human after all, Mr Revson.’

‘Paul. One never knows.’ He smiled again, rose and left. At least, he thought, he was semi-human enough not to inflict further damage upon her amour propre by telling her that the last little bit of by-play had been purely for the benefit of Branson who had momentarily lost interest in the screen – he was not then on camera – and was casting a speculative look at them. Not that that necessarily meant anything suspicious or sinister. Branson was much given to casting speculative looks at everybody. April was beautiful and he may well have thought that she was wasting this beauty on the wrong company.

Revson sat on a seat not far from Branson and watched the last twenty minutes of the broadcast. The intercutting between the Presidential group and the top of the south tower had been most skilfully done and the overall impact was all that Branson could ever have wished. Branson watched it intently. His face betrayed no particular sign of satisfaction, but then Branson’s face registered precisely what he wanted it to and was no mirror of his inner thoughts and feelings. When the broadcast finished Branson rose and stopped briefly by Revson’s chair.

‘Revson, isn’t it?’ Revson nodded. ‘And how does all this strike you?’

‘Just the same as it strikes a million other people, I guess.’ This was it, Revson thought, this is one part of his Achilles heel. Branson knew he was a genius but he had no objection to people saying so. ‘A feeling of total unreality. This just can’t be happening.’

‘But it is, isn’t it? A very satisfactory beginning, don’t you think?’

‘I can quote?’

‘Certainly. Call it an exclusive if you want. How do you see the scenario developing?’

‘Just as you have programmed it. I can’t see anything to stop you. You have them, most unfortunately, at your total mercy.’

‘Most unfortunately?’

‘What else? I don’t want to overdo the American citizen bit and although you may be a master criminal, a genius in your own immoral fashion, to me you’re still a crook, a crook so bent as to make a spiral staircase look like a fireman’s ladder.’

‘I rather like that. I may quote you in turn?’ Branson seemed genuinely gratified. One could hardly have called him thin-skinned.

‘There’s no verbal copyright.’

‘Alas, universal disapproval, not to say disapprobation, would seem to be my lot.’ Branson didn’t sound too unhappy about it. ‘That’s a most unusual camera you have there.’

‘Almost, but not quite unique.’

‘May I have a look at it?’

‘If you wish. But if you want to examine it for the reasons I imagine you want to examine it then you’re about four hours too late.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that your very able lieutenant, Van Effen, has the same nasty suspicious mind as you have. He has already taken my camera apart.’

‘No radios? No offensive weapons?’

‘Look for yourself.’

‘That won’t be necessary now.’

‘A question. I don’t want to inflate your already super-expanded ego –’

‘Don’t you think you might be taking chances, Revson?’

‘No. You have the reputation of being a nonviolent criminal.’ Revson waved his arm. ‘Why all this? You could have made a fortune in any business you cared to enter.’

Branson sighed. ‘I tried it. Business is so dull, don’t you think? This at least gives me the opportunity to exercise most of my capacities.’ He paused. ‘You’re a bit odd, yourself. A cameraman. You don’t look, act or speak like one.’

‘How’s a cameraman supposed to look, act and speak? You look in the mirror when you shave. Do you see a criminal? I see a Wall Street Vice-President.’

‘Touché. What’s your paper or magazine?’

‘Freelance, but I’m accredited to the London Times.’

‘But you’re American?’

‘News has no boundaries. Not any longer. I prefer to work the foreign beat, where the action is.’ Revson smiled faintly. ‘At least, until today. That used to mean South-East Asia. Not any more. Europe and the Middle East.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘Pure happenstance. Just passing through, you might say, from New York to a special assignment in China.’

‘When are you due to leave for there?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? You’ll want to get off the bridge tonight. As I’ve said, members of the media are free to leave whenever they choose.’

‘You, Branson, must be out of your mind.’

‘China can wait?’

‘China can wait. Unless, of course, you’re planning to kidnap Chairman Mao.’

Branson smiled the smile that never touched his eyes and walked away.

Revson, camera poised, stood outside the open front right door of the rear coach. He said: ‘Do you mind?’

Chrysler turned round. He looked at Revson in some surprise, then smiled. ‘Why me for this honour?’

‘Because my camera is tired of taking photographs of Branson and the assorted big-wigs. Mind? I’m now compiling a rogues’ gallery of Branson’s henchmen.’ Revson smiled to remove offence. ‘You’re Chrysler, aren’t you? The telecommunications expert?’

‘If that’s what they call me, yes.’

Revson took two or three shots, thanked Chrysler, and moved away. For good measure and local colour, he took some more pictures of Branson’s men. They all seemed to have been infected by Branson’s massive self-confidence and cheerfully, in some cases almost eagerly, acceded to Revson’s requests. After the last of those shots he crossed to the west side of the bridge, sat on the crash barrier and lit a ruminative cigarette.

After a few minutes O’Hare, hands thrust deep in his white coat, came strolling by. Hundreds of pictures and thousands of words of reports had already been dispatched by the south tower and there were at least twenty of the media men – and women – who now had nothing better to do who were strolling aimlessly up and down the centre of the bridge. Revson took a couple of routine shots of O’Hare, who came and sat beside him.

He said: ‘I saw you talking to Miss Wednesday. Suffering from a degree of pique, is she?’

Our April could be happier. You have it all?’

‘Both weapons and instructions.’

‘Everything I asked for is camouflaged?’

‘I would say so. The two pens are clipped to my medical clipboard, there for anyone to see. We doctors are models of efficiency. The gun with the tipped bullets is in the cardiac arrest unit. This is wax-sealed and the seal has to be broken before the unit can be opened. The unit is sealed. Not that it would matter very much if it were opened. The gun lies in a false bottom and you have to know how to open it. I mean, it can’t be done by accident. You have to know. I know.’

‘You seem to be positively enjoying yourself, Doctor.’

‘Well, yes. It makes a change from treating ingrowing toenails.’

‘I hope you’ll enjoy coming under the heading of “Classified” for the rest of your life. How come you carry those peculiar units in your hospital?’

‘We don’t. But your director appears to be on very close terms with his counterpart in the CIA. I tell you, we were completely taken over by experts.’

‘That means you’re double classified for life. My cord and containers?’ O’Hare seemed a mile away.

‘My cord and containers?’ O’Hare returned to the world.

‘Modesty compels me to admit that I came up with this one. Four containers. Empty. Lab. samples printed on the outside. Who’s going to question that? The cord is wrapped round a square wooden framework with two hooks and two lures attached to one end.’

‘You’re going fishing over the side of the bridge?’

‘I’m going fishing. It can get quite boring out here, you know.’

‘Something tells me it’s not going to be that way long. I suppose it’s unnecessary to ask you about the nerve gas?’

O’Hare smiled broadly. ‘I’d rather you did, actually.’

‘Must you speak English English?’

‘I told you. London educated. It’s an aerosol can, clamped just above my note-desk. Anyone can see it. Product, ostensibly, of a nationally known aerosol company. People called Prestige Fragrance of New York. Rather charming, really. The colour, I mean. Forest brown, I believe. A scaled-down version of their seven-ounce can. Freon pressure three times normal. Effective range ten feet.’

‘Do the Prestige people know about this?’

‘Heavens, no. The CIA are not overly concerned with patent rights.’ O’Hare smiled, almost dreamily. On the back of the can it says “fragrant and piquant” and “keep away from children”. On the front it says “Sandalwood”. Can’t you just see Branson or any of his minions who don’t know what sandalwood smells like giving themselves an exploratory whiff?’

‘No, I can’t. I’ll pick up the pens later tonight. Now, what were Hagenbach’s instructions?’

‘Hagenbach and company. A committee meeting and an agreed decision. The Vice-President was there, along with Admiral Newson, General Carter, Hendrix, Quarry and Milton.’

‘And yourself and April Wednesday.’

‘We plebs know our place. Total silence on our part. First off, there’s no possibility of electrifying the bridge. Nothing to do with the possibility of a President or king sitting where we are now and having their pants roasted. The voltage could be produced, but not the wattage. Not for umpteen thousand tons of steel. Besides, the potential victims would have to be earthed. A bird can perch in perfect safety on a high-tension wire.

‘Second piece of expert advice was about laser beams. You wondered if they would slice through the canvas wrapping of the explosive belts. Certainly, say the boys in Berkeley. But the tremendous heat generated when a laser beam strikes a solid object would turn the bridge wire – I think that’s what they called it – in the detonator white-hot immediately.’

‘Poof?’

‘As you so rightly observe, “poof”. Four things they did agree on, however.’

‘A submarine they can provide. Apparently, it will call for some critical underwater navigation to get there and a fair bit of fancy juggling to keep the boat in position once it gets there. Apart from the tides there are lots of very nasty currents in the Golden Gate. But the Admiral reckons he has just the man for the job. And in the absence of any instructions to the contrary they propose to park this boat under the front coach, your press coach, that is.’

‘My omission. They’re right, of course.’ Revson glanced idly round but no one was paying any undue attention to them except General Cartland, a physical fitness fanatic who was countermarching briskly to and fro along the central section of the bridge. He gave them a keen glance in passing but that signified nothing. General Cartland invariably gave everyone a keen glance in passing. Hansen, the energy czar, with the excess nervous energy to burn, was also engaged in the same exercise, but his attention was devoted exclusively to the toes of his shoes. He did not walk with Cartland. There was no antipathy between the two men: they simply had nothing in common.

O’Hare continued. ‘They agreed with your suggestion that the south tower be occupied. As you didn’t specify whether it was the east or west section which should be occupied, they’re a bit in the dark. The meteorological forecast is rather good. Heavy fog is expected before dawn and to remain until about ten in the morning. They’d better be right. The wind tomorrow will be westerly so that any cover from the smoke of burning oil will be out of the question. But they still don’t know which section of the tower to occupy.’

‘One item I forgot to ask you about. It was about this hooded flashlight with the variable shutter that –’

‘I have it.’

‘If Branson and company come across it?’

‘Medical requisite, my dear fellow. Eye examination, dilation of pupils and so forth. You know Morse?’

Revson was patient. ‘I just want to read books at night in the coach.’

‘Sorry. One of my off-moments. From the east side of the bridge aim approximately forty-five degrees right. They’ll have two men on watch in relays, all night. They can’t signal you back, of course, so for “message acknowledged and understood” they’ll send up a firework rocket from Chinatown. Followed by lots of others so as not to arouse any suspicions. The setting off of fireworks, bangers, crackers or whatever you call them is illegal in this city, but in Chinatown the police bend a tolerant and indulgent eye towards it. Chinese national pastime, you know. You should see the Chinese New Year. Shortly after I arrived – just a few months ago –’

Revson was even more patient. ‘I am a San Franciscan.’

‘Ah, well. But you still don’t know which section of the south tower –’

‘I’ll find out.’

‘You seem very sure of yourself?’

‘Not at all. But I’m sure of our April Wednesday. Branson has given her more than a passing glance. I shall have her employ her feminine wiles to discover which cable is next for the explosive treatment. And when.’

‘You’re still very sure of yourself. Now. Your suggestion about drugged food. Unanimous approval. This evening meal. Dr Isaacs – he’s our narcotics wizard in the hospital – has been busy stirring up his witch’s cauldron. Seventeen unpleasant surprises.’

“Very quick work.’ Revson was uneasy. ‘How are the surprises to be identified?’

‘No problem. The usual airline plastic food in the usual airline plastic trays. Those trays have carrying lugs. The bad trays, if I may put it that way, will have indentations on the underside of the lugs. Tiny, but enough to be detected by normally sensitive fingertips.’

‘Well, Doctor, you haven’t been wasting your time, that I have to say. Obviously we’ll have to be very careful. If anything can go wrong it will go wrong – one of Parkinson’s laws or something like that. I shall appoint myself head waiter – with Branson’s prior approval. Second, you will have April Wednesday in for a routine check as the meal wagon arrives and will remain there until the meals have been distributed. In the ambulance, I mean.’

‘Why?’

‘Parkinson’s Law. If something goes wrong, you two would be the first under suspicion – you’ve left the bridge and returned. Third, I can get word to the Presidential coach.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll figure a way.’

‘And the press coach?’

‘No guarantee. I’m no mastermind. If one or two of them get the wrong trays – well, I can take care of the one or two villains who get the right trays.’

O’Hare looked at Revson with a certain lack of admiration. ‘You don’t care how you use people, do you?’

‘I have things to do and I do what I can. I weigh the odds but I don’t know what the odds are.’ Revson paused. ‘I’m fighting in the dark. I’m a blind man, if you like, and my hands are tied behind me. Perhaps you’d care to think again about your last remark.’

O’Hare thought. ‘I apologize. Your pens and the flashlight will be waiting whenever you care to step by. And one last thing. They approve your intention to neutralize the triggering device.’

‘I appreciate that. You don’t have any magic potion that will make me invisible?’

‘Alas, no.’ O’Hare stood and walked away.

Revson lit and smoked another cigarette, tossed the butt over the side, rose and sauntered across to the rows of chairs. April was still sitting where he had left her. He took the seat beside her.

He said: ‘When the evening meal wagon comes I want you to go to the ambulance. For a check-up.’

She didn’t look at him. ‘Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir.’

Revson breathed deeply. ‘I shall try to conceal my slow burn, what the Victorians would call my mounting exasperation. I thought we had parted friends.’

‘I don’t much care for being a mindless puppet.’

‘We’re all puppets. I, too, do what I’m told. I don’t always like it, but I have a job to do. Please don’t make my job more difficult than it already is. The doctor will tell you why you’re there. He’ll also tell you when to leave.’

‘Yes, Mr Revson. As a forcibly co-opted member of your secret service, I do what I’m told.’

Revson decided against any more deep breathing. ‘Before that, I’d like you to have a word with our Mr Branson. I fancy he has one, if not two, of his cold codfish eyes upon you.’

She turned her head slowly and gave him the full treatment of her luminous green eyes. ‘And you, of course, don’t?’

Revson held her gaze for some seconds, then considered the tarmac of the Golden Gate Bridge. ‘I try to look the other way. Besides, my eyes are not those of a cod. Find out from him on which cable he intends to affix his next explosive charge – and when. Wait a few moments after I’ve left and then make a casual encounter.’

He looked at her again. The eyes were bigger and greener than ever and held an almost mischievous glint. She was smiling. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was there. She said: ‘You’ll end up making me as devious and cunning as yourself.’

‘Heaven forfend.’ Revson rose and made his way back to his previous seat on the crash barrier, which was less than twenty yards from the demarcation painted line where a man in the middle of the bridge, with a Schmeisser machine-pistol, kept constant vigil. General Cartland, military stride in excelsis, was approaching. Revson stood, lifted his camera and snapped off three quick shots.

He said: ‘May I have a word with you, sir?’

Cartland stopped. ‘You may not. No interview, exclusive or otherwise. I may be a spectator in this damned circus, but I’m no performer.’ He walked on.

Revson was deliberately brusque. ‘You’d better speak to me, General.’

Cartland stopped again. His glacial stare drilled through Revson’s eyes into the wide blue yonder.

‘What did you say?’ Each word was spaced out slowly and carefully. Revson was on the parade ground, a court-martialled officer about to be stripped of insignia and buttons and have his sword broken over a knee.

‘Don’t ignore me, sir.’ Deference now replaced brusqueness. ‘Hagenbach wouldn’t like it.’

‘Hagenbach?’ Cartland and Hagenbach, men possessed of almost identical casts of mind, were as intimate as two loners could ever be. ‘What’s Hagenbach to you?’

‘I suggest you come and sit beside me, General. Please relax and act casual.’

It was entirely alien to Cartland’s nature to relax and ‘act casual’, but he did his best. He sat and said: ‘I repeat, what’s Hagenbach to you?’

‘Mr Hagenbach is very important to me. He pays my salary when he remembers.’

Cartland looked at him for a long moment then, as if to demonstrate that he was not totally like Hagenbach, he smiled. His smile was nowhere near as frosty as his face. ‘Well, well. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Your name?’

‘Paul Revson.’

‘Revson? Revson! James has talked to me about you. And not only once.’

‘Sir, you must be the only person in the United States who knows his first name.’

Cartland nodded his agreement. There aren’t many around. You know he has you slated for the hot seat in five years’ time?’

‘I should live that long.’

‘Well, well.’ Cartland seemed to be very fond of ‘well, well’. ‘A very neat job of infiltration, if I may say so.’

‘The Chief’s idea, not mine.’ Revson stood up and snapped off some more photographs. He said, apologetically: ‘Local colour. You will please not tell any of your colleagues on the Presidential coach –’

‘Colleagues? Clowns!’

‘You will please not tell any of the clowns that you have met me.’

‘I retract my remark. The President is a personal friend.’

‘That is known, sir. The President and the clowns. I would not include the Mayor among the latter. If you want to talk to them privately, take a walk. Your coach is bugged.’

‘If you say so, Revson.’

‘I know so, sir. There’s a tape recorder whirling away busily in the rear coach. You heard it. I didn’t.’

‘I heard it. I’ve never heard of you.’

‘General Cartland, you should join our organization.’

‘You think?’

‘I retract in turn. A Chief of Staff can go nowhere except down.’

Cartland smiled again. ‘To mint a new phrase, tell me all.’

Revson stood, walked away some paces, took more pictures, returned, sat down and told all. When he had finished, General Cartland said: ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I don’t want. One does not give instructions to the Chief of Staff.’

The Chief of Staff became the Chief of Staff. ‘The point, Revson.’

‘Take your sedentary friends for a walk. Tell them about the coach being bugged. Tell them how to identify their own safe food trays.’

‘No problem. That all?’

‘One last thing, General Cartland. I’m a bit hesitant about this, but as you would say, to the point. It is known – at least I know – that you habitually carry a gun.’

‘Past tense. I have been relieved of it.’

‘You still have your holster?’

‘I have.’

‘I’ll give you a replacement that will fit very snugly into your holster.’

‘You do your homework, Revson. It will be a pleasure.’

‘The bullets are cyanide-tipped, sir.’

Cartland didn’t hesitate. ‘Still a pleasure.’

EIGHT

The evening meal wagon arrived at seven thirty. The occupants of the Presidential coach were close to the north painted barrier, huddled in what appeared to be deep conversation. April Wednesday, under the watchful eye of a guard, made her quiet way towards the ambulance. Revson sat, apparently half-dozing, in a chair. He started as a hand touched his shoulder.

‘Food, my China-bound friend.’ Branson, with his smile.

Revson sat upright. ‘Wine, one trusts?’

‘The best vintages that money can buy’

‘Whose money?’

‘Irrelevances bore me.’ Branson was regarding him with an appraising eye.

Revson stood and looked around him. ‘Your honoured guests along there –’

‘They are being informed.’

‘You might have at least given them time to have their pre-dinner cocktail. Well, not the President’s Arab friends –’

‘Time for that. The food is in hot cupboards.’ Branson did some more appraisal. ‘You know, Revson, you interest me. You might even say you intrigue me. There’s a certain – what shall I call it – intransigence about you. I still don’t see you as a man behind a camera.’

‘And I don’t see you as the man behind the most massive hold-up of all time. Too late for you to go back to Wall Street?’

Branson clapped Revson on the shoulder. ‘On behalf of the President, let’s go and sample some of the superior vintages.’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘Who knows what our Medici friends in the Presidio might be up to?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. You trust nobody?’

‘No.’

‘Me? A guinea-pig?’

‘Yes. You and Cartland make me uneasy.’

‘A weakness. You should never confess to them. Lead on, Macduff.’

Arrived at the meal wagon Branson said to the white and blue striped attendant: ‘Your name?’

The attendant gave an odd sort of sketchy salute. ‘Tony, Mr Branson.’

‘What wines do you have?’

‘Three reds, three white, Mr Branson.’

‘Array them before us, Tony. Mr Revson hereis an internationally known sommelier. A judge of wine, in other words.’

‘Sir.’

Six bottles and six glasses appeared on the counter. Revson said: ‘Just a quarter in each glass. I don’t want to fall off the bridge during the night. Have you bread and salt?’

‘Yes, Mr Revson.’ Tony clearly regarded himself as being in the presence of lunatics.

Interspersed with the bread and salt Revson sampled all six vintages. At the end he said: ‘All uniformly excellent. I must tell the French vintners about this. The best Californian matches up with the best French.’

Branson said: ‘It would appear that I owe you an apology, Revson.’

‘No way. Let’s do it again. Or will you join me in one of the – ah – approved wines?’

‘It would seem safe to do so.’ Tony clearly considered himself in the presence of a couple of head cases.

‘I suggest one of your own. A Gamay Beaujolais from your Almadén vineyards.’

‘Ah.’ Branson pondered. ‘Tony?’

‘Mr Revson has excellent taste, sir.’

They consumed their wines in a leisurely fashion. Branson said: ‘I agree with both of your assessments. You are ready to serve dinner, Tony?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He smiled. ‘I have already served one. About twenty minutes ago, I’d say. Mr Hansen. He snatched a plate and said that as the energy czar he needed energy.’

‘It figures.’ Branson turned a lazy head. ‘In the coach, I presume?’

‘No, sir. He took his tray across to the east crash barrier. There.’ He followed his pointing finger then softly said: ‘Jesus!’

‘Jesus what?’

‘Look.’

They looked. Hansen, slowly toppling off the barrier, fell to the roadway and lay there, his body jerking. Branson and Revson crossed the six road lanes and reached him in as many seconds.

Hansen was vomiting violently. They spoke to him, but he seemed incapable of answering. His body went into strange and frightening convulsions.

Revson said: ‘Stay here. I’ll get O’Hare.’

O’Hare and April were together in the ambulance when he arrived. Understandably enough, he was welcomed with lifted eyebrows.

Revson said: ‘Quickly. I think that Mr Hansen – hungry, it seems – picked up the wrong dinner tray. He looks in pretty bad shape to me.’

O’Hare was on his feet. Revson barred the way.

‘I think your Dr Isaacs has stirred up a more powerful brew than he imagined. If this is the effect it has – well, I want you to go across there and diagnose some form of food poisoning. Call in some chemical analyst or whatever you call them. Nobody, but nobody, must touch that food again. I don’t want wholesale murder on my hands.’

‘I understand.’ O’Hare picked up his emergency bag and left at speed.

April said: ‘What’s gone wrong, Paul?’

‘I don’t know. Some foul-up. Maybe I’m to blame. Stay here.’

When he arrived across the bridge Branson was standing upright and O’Hare slowly straightening. Revson looked at them both then addressed himself to O’Hare. ‘Well?’

O’Hare let go the limp wrist he was holding. ‘I’m afraid that Mr Hansen is dead.’

‘Dead?’ For once, Branson was clearly shocked. ‘How can he be dead?’

‘Please. For the moment, I’m in charge. This plastic centre plate is almost empty. I assume that Hansen ate it all.’

O’Hare bent over the dead man and breathed deeply. His nose wrinkled. Very slowly, he straightened again.

‘Can’t be salmonella. That takes time. Not even botulinus. It’s quick, but not this quick.’ O’Hare looked at Branson. ‘I want to talk to the hospital.’

‘I don’t understand. Perhaps you’d like to talk to me first?’

O’Hare sounded weary. ‘I suppose. The smell – it comes from the pancreas – is unmistakable. Some form of food poisoning. I don’t know. Doctors have their specialities and this is not one of mine. The hospital, please.’

‘You don’t mind if I listen in?’

‘Listen in all you want.’

O’Hare was on the phone in the rear end of the Presidential coach. Branson held the President’s side-phone. Revson sat in the next deeply upholstered chair.

O’Hare said: ‘How long will it take you to contact Hansen’s private physician?’

‘We’re in contact now.’

‘I’ll wait.’

They all waited. They all looked at one another, while carefully not looking at one another. The phone became activated again.

‘O’Hare?’

‘Sir?’

‘Hansen is – was – just recovering from his second – and almost fatal – heart attack.’

‘Thank you, sir. That explains everything.’

‘Not quite.’ Branson was his old balanced self again. ‘I want two analytical chemists out here to determine the source of this infection, if that’s what you would call it. The food tray, I mean. Separate examinations. If they disagree, one of them is going to go over the side.’

O’Hare sounded even more weary. ‘Such specialists we have in San Francisco. I know two of the top people. The only thing they have in common is their total disagreement with each other.’

‘In which case they will both be thrown over the side. You will accompany them. Make contact now.’

O’Hare made contact. Revson said to Branson: ‘Only an American would have this gift for making friends and influencing people.’

‘I’ll talk to you later. O’Hare?’

‘They’ll come. Only if you promise immunity. Damn it all and to hell, Branson, why should their lives be put at risk?’

Branson considered. ‘Their lives will not be put at risk. Leave that phone. I want it.’ He made a signal through the window. After a few seconds, Van Effen entered. He was carrying his Schmeisser in a rather unsympathetic manner. Branson moved to the rear.

He said: ‘Let me talk to Hendrix.’

Not more than two seconds elapsed before Hendrix was on the phone.

‘Hendrix?’ Branson was his usual unemotional self. ‘I have promised immunity to the doctors coming out here. I want you and the Vice-President to accompany them.’ There was a brief delay, then Hendrix came through again on the intercom.

‘Mr Richards agrees. But you are not to hold the Vice-President as a hostage.’

‘I agree in turn.’

‘Your word?’

‘For what it’s worth. You have to believe me, don’t you? You’re in no position to bargain.’

‘No position. I have a dream, Branson.’

‘I know. But I think handcuffs are so inelegant. I will see you in a very few minutes. Send out the TV truck. Alert the networks.’

‘Again?’

‘I think it very important that the nation should be made aware of the establishment’s modus operandi.’ Branson rested the phone.

In the communications wagon just off the Presidio, Hendrix, in turn rested his phone and looked at the six men clustered around him. He addressed himself to Hagenbach.

‘Well, you have it. Hansen dead. Nobody’s fault, really. How was anybody to know that he had a critical heart condition? And how – and why – did nobody know about it?’

Hagenbach said heavily: ‘I knew. Like nearly all senior Government officials Hansen was intensely secretive about his physical health. He was in Bethesda twice in the last nine months and the second time was touch and go. It was reported that he was receiving treatment for overwork, exhaustion. So I think if anyone is to blame it’s me.’

Quarry said: ‘You’re talking nonsense and you know it. Who could possibly have foreseen this? It’s not your fault and it’s certainly not Dr Isaacs’s fault. He told us the drug was perfectly safe for any normal healthy adult. You cannot question the judgement of a man of his reputation. He wasn’t to know that Hansen wasn’t a normal healthy adult far less anticipating that Hansen would misguidedly pick up the wrong plate. And what’s going to happen now?’

Hendrix said: ‘It’s obvious what’s going to happen now. We seven are going to be publicly indicted as murderers.’

The TV crew had arrived on the centre of the bridge but were, momentarily, inactive. The two specialist doctors were analysing the food and, despite O’Hare’s predictions, for once seemed to be agreeing with each other. The President was talking quietly to the Vice-President. From the expressions on their faces it seemed they didn’t have very much to talk about.

Branson was alone with Hendrix in the Presidential coach. Branson said: ‘Do you honestly expect me to believe that you and Hagenbach know nothing about this?’

Hendrix said wearily: ‘Nothing. There’s been a botulinus outbreak downtown in the past few days.’ He pointed towards the TV set in the middle of the roadway. ‘If you watch that at all, you must have heard of it.’ He pointed again towards the evening meal wagon where the two doctors were busily at work. ‘They were convinced before arrival what the trouble was.’ He refrained from adding that he’d told the doctors to find not more than a dozen cases of poisoning. ‘You have lives on your hands, Branson.’

‘Don’t we all. Get on that phone there. Some more hot meals. The first three, taken by random sample, will be by the President, the King and the Prince. You do understand, don’t you?’

Revson was in the ambulance with O’Hare and April Wednesday. She was lying blanket-covered on the hinged-down bed.

She said, drowsily: ‘Did you have to do this to me?’

‘Yes. You don’t like thumb-screws.’

‘No. Maybe you’re not the monster I thought you were. But Dr O’Hare –’

‘Dr O’Hare, as he would say in his own native tongue, is a different kettle of fish. What did Branson say?’

She said sleepily: ‘Same cable. Bay side.’

Her eyelids closed. O’Hare took Revson by the arm. His voice was quiet. ‘Enough.’

‘How long?’

‘Two hours. Not less.’

‘The pens.’

O’Hare withdrew the pens from his clipboard. ‘You do know what you’re doing?’

‘I hope.’ He thought briefly, then said: ‘You’re going to be questioned.’

‘I know. You want your torch?’

‘Later.’

Kylenski was the senior of the two doctors examining the food trays. He said to Branson: ‘My colleague and I have found twelve infected food trays.’

Branson looked at Van Effen then back at Kylenski. That all? Twelve? Not seventeen?’

Kylenski had a grey beard, grey moustache and aquiline aristocratic stare. ‘Twelve. Spoiled meat. Some form of botulinus. You don’t even have to taste it. You can smell it. Well, I can. Apparently Hansen didn’t.’

‘Lethal?’

‘In this concentration, normally, no. This infected food didn’t kill Hansen. Well, not directly. But it was almost certainly responsible for reactivating this long-standing and severe heart ailment which did kill him.’

‘What would the effect of this be on the average healthy adult?’

‘Incapacitating. Violent vomiting, possibility of stomach haemorrhaging, unconsciousness or something pretty close to it.’

‘So a man would be pretty helpless?’

‘He’d be incapable of action. Most likely of thought, too.’

‘What a perfectly splendid prospect. For some.’ Branson looked again at Van Effen. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think I want to know what you want to know.’ Van Effen turned to Kylenski. ‘This poison or whatever it is – could it have been deliberately introduced?’

‘Who on earth would want to do a thing like that?’

Branson said: ‘Answer the question.’

‘Any doctor specializing in this field, any research fellow, even a reasonably competent laboratory assistant could produce the necessary toxin culture.’

‘But he would have to be a doctor or in some way associated with the medical profession? I mean, this would call for trained knowledge and laboratory facilities?’

‘Normally, yes.’

Branson said to the meal wagon attendant: ‘Come out from behind that counter, Tony.’

Tony came. His apprehension was unmistakable.

Branson said: ‘It’s not all that hot, Tony. It’s turning quite cool, in fact. Why are you sweating?’

‘I don’t like all this violence and guns.’

‘No one has offered you any violence or even pointed a gun at you, although I’m not saying that both of them aren’t going to happen to you in the very near future. I suggest, Tony, that you are suffering from a guilty conscience.’

‘Me? Conscience?’ Tony actually mopped his brow: if his conscience wasn’t troubling him something else clearly was. ‘God’s sake, Mr Branson –’

‘Fairy stories are fairy stories but they don’t run to a dozen coincidences at a time. Only a fool would accept that. But there had to be some way of identifying the poisoned plates. What way, Tony?’

‘Why don’t you leave him alone, Branson?’ Vice-President Richards’s voice was at once harsh and contemptuous. ‘He’s only a van driver.’

Branson ignored him. ‘How were the plates to be identified?’

‘I don’t know! I don’t! I don’t even know what you are talking about!’

Branson turned to Kowalski and Peters. ‘Throw him into the Golden Gate.’ His voice was as level and conversational as ever.

Tony made an animal-like noise but offered no resistance as Kowalski and Peters took an arm apiece and began to march him away. His face was ashen and rivulets of sweat were now pouring down his face. When he did speak his voice was a harsh unbelieving croak.

‘Throw me off the bridge! That’s murder! Murder! In the name of God I don’t know –’

Branson said: ‘You’ll be telling me next that you have a wife and three kids.’

‘I’ve got nobody.’ His eyes turned up in his head and his legs sagged under him until he had to be dragged across the roadway. Both the Vice-President and Hendrix moved in to intercept the trio. They stopped as Van Effen lifted his Schmeisser.

Van Effen said to Branson: ‘If there was a way of identifying those plates, that would be important and dangerous information. Would you entrust Tony with anything like that?’

‘Not for a second. Enough?’

‘He’ll tell anything he knows. I suspect it won’t be much.’ He raised his voice. ‘Bring him back.’

Tony was brought back and released. He sagged wearily to the roadway, struggled with difficulty to his feet and clung tremblingly to the luncheon wagonette. His voice shook as much as his frame.

‘I know nothing about the plates. I swear it!’

‘Tell us what you do know.’

‘I thought something was far wrong when they loaded the food into my van.’

‘At the hospital?’

‘The hospital? I don’t work at the hospital. I work for Selznick’s.’

‘I know them. The caterers for open-air functions. Well?’

‘I was told the food was ready when I got there. I’m usually loaded and away in five minutes. This time it took three-quarters of an hour.’

‘Did you see anybody from the hospital when you were waiting at Selznick’s?’

‘Nobody.’

‘You’ll live a little longer, Tony. Provided you don’t eat that damned food of yours.’ He turned to O’Hare. ‘Well, that leaves only you and the fragile Miss Wednesday.’

‘You insinuating that either of us might have been carrying secret instructions from your alleged poisoners?’ There was more contempt than incredulity in O’Hare’s tone.

‘Yes. Let’s have Miss Wednesday here.’

O’Hare said: ‘Leave her alone.’

‘You said – who do you think is in charge here?’

‘Where a patient of mine is concerned, I am. If you want her here, you’ll have to carry her. She’s asleep in the ambulance, under heavy sedation. Can’t you take my word?’

‘No. Kowalski, go check. You know, a couple of stiff fingers in the abdomen.’

Kowalski returned within ten seconds. ‘Out like a light.’

Branson looked at O’Hare. ‘How very convenient. Maybe you didn’t want her subjected to interrogation?’

‘You’re a lousy psychologist, Branson. Miss Wednesday is not, as you know, cast in the heroic mould. Can you imagine anyone entrusting her with any vital information?’ Branson made no reply. ‘Apart from that, the only good thing that’s ever been said about you is that you never molest women.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Chief of Police Hendrix told me. He seems to know a lot about you.’

‘You confirm that, Hendrix?’

Hendrix was curt. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

Branson said: ‘So that leaves only you, Doctor.’

‘As a prime suspect? You’re losing your grip.’ He nodded at Hansen’s sheet-covered form on a stretcher. ‘I don’t want to sound sanctimonious but as a doctor my job is to save lives, not take them away. I have no wish to be struck off the Medical Register. Besides, I haven’t left the ambulance since before the food wagon arrived. I couldn’t very well be there identifying your damned food trays and be in the ambulance at the same time.’

Branson said: ‘Kowalski?’

‘I can vouch for that, Mr Branson.’

‘But you were talking to people after you returned and before the food wagon arrived.’

Kowalski said: ‘He did. To quite a few people. So did Miss Wednesday.’

‘We can forget her. The good doctor here.’

‘A fair number of people.’

‘Anyone in particular? I mean long earnest chats, that sort of thing?’

‘Yes.’ Kowalski appeared to be extremely observant or have an uncomfortably good memory or both. ‘Three. Two with Miss Wednesday –’

‘Forget the lady. She’d plenty of time to talk to him in the ambulance to and from hospital. Who else?’

‘Revson. A long talk.’

‘Overhear anything?’

‘No. Thirty yards away and downwind.’

‘Anything pass between them?’

‘No.’ Kowalski was definite.

Branson said to O’Hare: ‘What did you talk about?’

‘Medical privilege.’

‘You mean mind my own damned business?’

O’Hare said nothing. Branson looked at Revson.

‘No medical privileges,’ Revson said. ‘Cabbages and kings. I’ve talked to at least thirty people, including your own men, since we arrived. Why single this out as a special case?’

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘You’re pretty cool, aren’t you?’

‘A clear conscience. You should try it some time.’

‘And, Mr Branson.’ Kowalski again. ‘Revson also had a long talk with General Cartland.’

‘Oh. More cabbages and kings, General?’

‘No. We were discussing the possibilities of ridding this bridge of some of its more undesirable elements.’

‘Coming from you, I can well believe it. A fruitful talk?’

Cartland looked at him in icy silence.

Branson looked thoughtfully at Van Effen. ‘I have a feeling, just a feeling, mind you, that we have an infiltrator in our midst.’

Van Effen gazed at him with his impassive moonface and said nothing.

Branson went on: ‘I think that would rule out the doctor. Apart from the fact that we’ve checked out on his credentials, I have the odd instinct that there is a trained agent loose on this bridge. That again would rule out O’Hare, who’s just here by happenstance anyway. You share my instinct?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

Van Effen didn’t hesitate. ‘Revson.’

Branson beckoned Chrysler. ‘Revson here claims to be an accredited correspondent of The Times of London. How long would it take you to check that out?’

‘Using the Presidential telecommunications?’

‘Yes.’

‘Minutes.’

Revson said: ‘I suppose I’m supposed to show a degree of high indignation, but I won’t bother. Why me? Why assume it’s any of the news media members? Why not one of your own men?’

‘Because I hand-picked them personally.’

‘Just the same way that Napoleon did his marshals. And look how many of them turned against him in the end. How you can expect loyalty from a bunch of cut-throats like this, however hand-picked, is beyond me.’

‘You’ll do for the moment,’ Van Effen said comfortably. He touched Branson’s arm and pointed to the west. ‘We may not have all that much time.’

‘You’re right.’ Dark, heavy, ominous clouds were rolling in from the Pacific, although still some miles distant. ‘The audiences wouldn’t like it at all if they were to see their President and Vice-President, not to mention their oil friends, sitting here getting soaked in a thunderstorm. Ask Johnson to organize the cameras and the seating.’ He waited thoughtfully until Van Effen had done this then took him across to where Revson was standing alone. He said to Van Effen: ‘Revson tells me that you have already searched his camera.’

‘Yes. But I didn’t take it to pieces.’

‘Maybe you should.’

‘And maybe you shouldn’t.’ For once, Revson let anger show. ‘Do you know that it takes a man five years’ training to learn just how to assemble one of those cameras? I’d rather you kept the damned thing for the duration of our stay here than have it ruined.’

‘Call his bluff and have it stripped,’ Branson said.

‘I agree.’ Van Effen said to Revson, almost soothingly, ‘We’ll have Chrysler do it. He’s as close to a mechanical genius as anyone I know. It will be intact.’ To Branson he said: ‘I’ve also searched his carry-all, the upholstery of his seat, below the seat and the rack above. Clean.’

‘Search him.’

‘Search me?’ More than a trace of truculence remained in Revson’s face. ‘I’ve already been searched.’

‘For weapons only’

If there had been a grain of rice on Revson’s person, including inside the coat lining, Van Effen wouldn’t have missed it. Apart from keys, coins and an inoffensive little knife, all he came up with were papers.

‘The usual,’ Van Effen said. ‘Driving licence, social security, credit cards, press cards –’

‘Press cards,’ Branson said. ‘Any of them identify him with the London Times!’ ‘There’s this.’ Van Effen handed the card across to Branson. ‘Looks pretty kosher to me.’

‘If he is who or what we think he might be, he wouldn’t be likely to hire the worst forger in town.’ He handed the card back, a slight frown on his face. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yes.’ Van Effen opened a long envelope. ‘Airline ticket. For Hong Kong.’

‘It wouldn’t be dated for tomorrow?’

‘It is. How did you know?’

‘He told me so himself. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’ For a moment, as Van Effen idly fingered Revson’s felt pens both he and Branson were only a heart’s beat from death. But Van Effen, his mind on something else, reclipped them and opened Revson’s passport. He flipped rapidly through the pages. ‘Certainly gets around. Lots of South-East Asia passports, last about two years ago. Near East immigration stamps galore. Not many European or London stamps, but that signifies nothing. They are an idle bunch across there and British and most European – Western European – passport officers only stamp your passports if they feel in need of the exercise. How does it all sound to you?’

‘Ties in with his own claims, what he told me himself. You?’

‘If he’s a bad one, I would call this an excessive cover-up. Why not Milwaukee? Or even San Francisco?’

Branson said: ‘You a San Franciscan?’

‘By adoption.’

Van Effen said: ‘Who’d spend a dozen years travelling the world just to establish a background, an alibi like this?’

Chrysler came up. Branson looked at him in slight surprise. ‘Through already?’

‘The President has a hot line to London. I hope you don’t mind. Revson’s clean. He’s a fully accredited correspondent of the London Times.’

Revson said to Chrysler: ‘Branson wants you to take my camera to pieces. There’s a time-bomb or a radio inside it. Watch you don’t blow yourself up. After that, you’d better make damn sure you put it all together again.’

Chrysler received Branson’s nod, smiled, took the camera and left. Revson said: ‘Will that be all? Or do you want to unscrew my false heels?’

Branson wasn’t amused. ‘I’m still not satisfied. How am I to know that Kylenski here is not in cahoots with the poisoners? How am I to know that he was not instructed to find only a dozen poisoned plates so as to kill our suspicions? There should have been seventeen tampered trays. There should – there must be someone on the bridge capable of identifying them. I want you, Revson, to sample one of the trays that Kylenski has declared safe.’

‘You want me – you want to kill me off with botulinus on the off-chance that Kylenski has made a mistake? I’m damned if I will. I’m no human guinea-pig.’

Then we’ll try some of them out on the President and his oil friends here. Royal guinea-pigs, if you will. This should make medical history. If they resist, we’ll force-feed them.’

Revson was about to make the obvious point that they could force-feed him equally well but immediately changed his mind. Cartland had not yet had the opportunity to inform those in the Presidential coach as to how the infected trays could be identified: O’Hare apart, he was the only one who could. Revson turned his palms upwards. ‘God knows what you’re after but I trust the two doctors here. If they say there are so many uncontaminated trays, then I believe them. So you can have your plebeian guinea-pig.’

Branson looked at him closely. ‘Why have you changed your mind?’

Revson said conversationally: ‘You know, Branson, you’re endlessly over-suspicious. From the expression of your lieutenant, Van Effen there, I would say that he agrees with me.’ No harm could come, Revson thought, from sowing the odd seed of dissension. ‘Some people might even interpret it as a sign of weakness, of uncertainty. I’m agreeing because I don’t care so much for you. A chink in everybody’s armour. I’m beginning to believe that your belief in your own infallibility may rest on rather shaky ground. Besides, plebs are expendable: Presidents and kings are not.’

Branson smiled his confident smile and turned to Tony. ‘Lay out ten of the uncontaminated plates on the counter.’ Tony did so. ‘Now, Revson, which one would you care to sample?’

‘You’re slipping, Branson. You’ve still the lingering suspicion that I might be able to identify the poisoned trays. Suppose you choose for me?’ Branson nodded and pointed at one of the trays. Revson moved forward, lifted the indicated tray and sniffed it slowly and cautiously. The surreptitious movements of his fingertips found no traces of tiny indentations on the underside of the plastic lugs. This tray was clean. He took a spoon, dug into the centre of what looked like a browned-over cottage pie, and sampled the meat. He grimaced, chewed, swallowed, then repeated the process. He laid down the tray in disgust.

Branson said: ‘Not to your liking?’

‘If I were in a restaurant I’d send this back to the kitchen. Better, I’d take it there and empty it over the chef’s head – not that the person who made this could ever be called a chef.’

‘Contaminated, you’d think?’

‘No. Just plain bloody lousy’

‘Perhaps you’d care to sample another one?’

‘No, I would not. Besides, you said, just one sample.’

Branson said persuasively: ‘Come on. Be cooperative.’

Revson scowled but co-operated. This tray, too, was clean. He went through the same performance and had no sooner done so when Branson handed him a third tray.

This one had indentations on the underside of the lugs.

Revson broke the skin, sniffed suspidously, tasted a little and at once spat it out. ‘I don’t know whether this is contaminated or not, but it tastes and smells even lousier than the other two. If that’s possible.’ He pushed the tray under Kylenski’s nose, who sniffed it and passed it across to his colleague.

Branson said: ‘Well?’

Kylenski was hesitant. ‘Could be. A marginal, a borderline case. It would require lab. testing.’ He looked thoughtfully at Revson. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘No.’

‘Drink?’

‘Birthdays and funerals only.’

Kylenski said: ‘That could account for it. Some non-smokers and non-drinkers can have an extraordinarily acute sense of taste and smell. Revson is obviously one of those.’

Without consulting anyone, Revson examined another six trays. He pushed them all away and turned to Branson. ‘My opinion, for what it’s worth?’ Branson nodded. ‘Most – not all, but most – of those trays are off. With some, you’ve almost got to imagine it. Others stink. I think the whole damn lot is contaminated. In varying degrees.’

Branson looked at Kylenski. ‘Possible?’

Kylenski looked uncomfortable. ‘It happens. Botulinus can vary widely in its degree of concentration. Only last year there was a double family outing in New England. Ten in all. Among other things, they had sandwiches. Again the botulinus bug. Five died, two were slightly ill, three unaffected. But the sandwiches were all spread with the same meat paste.’

Branson and Van Effen walked apart. Van Effen said: ‘Enough?’

‘You mean you see no point in going ahead with this?’

‘You stand to lose credibility, Mr Branson.’

‘I agree. I’m not happy about it, but I agree. Trouble is, we’ve really, basically, only got Revson’s word for it.’

‘But he’s identified twenty – in all – contaminated trays: three more than was necessary.’

‘Who says so? Revson?’

‘After all the proofs, you still don’t trust him?’

‘He’s too cool, too relaxed. He’s obviously highly trained, highly competent – and I’m damned sure that it’s not in photography’

‘He could be in that, too.’

‘I wouldn’t doubt it.’

‘So you’re still going to treat this as a case of deliberate poisoning?’

‘Where our vast viewing public is concerned? Who’s to gainsay me? There’s only one mike and it’s in my hand.’

Van Effen looked towards the south tower. ‘Food wagon number two on its way’

Branson had the TV cameras, the honoured guests, the newspapermen and still cameramen in position in very short order indeed. The black thunderous clouds from the west were steadily marching in on them. Among those seated, the only difference in composition was that Hansen’s seat had been taken over by the Vice-President. The cameras were turning and Branson, seated next to the President, was talking into the microphone.

He said: ‘I am calling upon all viewers in America and throughout the world to be witnesses to a particularly heinous crime that has been committed upon this bridge just over an hour ago, a crime that I trust will persuade you that not all criminals are those who stand without the law. I would ask you to look at this food wagon which, as you can see, has its counter covered with food trays. Harmless, if not particularly appetizing food trays, you would think, such as any major airline would serve up to its passengers. But are they really harmless?’ He turned to the man on his other side and the camera was now back on them. ‘This is Dr Kylenski, a leading forensic expert on the West Coast. A specialist in poisons. Are those trays really harmless, Dr Kylenski?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll have to speak up, Doctor.’

‘No. They are not harmless. Some are contaminated.’

‘How many?’

‘Half. Maybe more. I have no laboratory resources to hand.’

‘Contaminated. That means infected. What are they infected with, Doctor?’

‘A virus. Botulinus. A major source of severe food poisoning.’

‘How severe? Can it be deadly?’

‘Yes.’

‘Frequently?’

‘Yes.’

‘Normally it occurs naturally – spoiled food, things like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘But a culture of it can be manufactured synthetically or artificially in a laboratory’

‘That’s putting it very loosely’

‘We’re talking primarily to laymen.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it could be injected synthetically into already prepared but otherwise harmless food?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you, Dr Kylenski. That will be all.’

Revson, still without his camera, was standing by the ambulance with O’Hare. ‘For a person who’s never been inside a courtroom, Branson seems to have mastered the prosecuting counsel bit pretty well.’

‘It’s all this TV.’

Branson said: ‘I put it to all of you who are watching that the authorities – military, police, FBI, Government or whoever – have made a deliberate attempt to murder or at least incapacitate those of us who have taken over the Presidential entourage and this bridge. There must be someone on this bridge who knew how to identify poisoned trays and see that they fell into the right hands – that is, the hands of my colleagues and myself. The attempt, fortunately, failed, but there has been one casualty whom I shall mention later.

‘Meantime, I would draw your attention to the fact that a second food wagon has arrived.’ A camera obligingly drew the viewers’ attention to this fact. ‘It seems incredible that the authorities would be so obtuse as to try the same gambit again but, on the other hand, they have already shown that they are incredibly obtuse. So we are going to select three trays at random and offer them to the President, King and Prince. If they survive, we may reasonably assume that the food is uncontaminated. If, on the other hand, they become seriously ill – or worse – the world will know that the guilt cannot be laid at our door. We are in permanent radio-telephone contact with the police and military authorities ashore. They have one minute to tell us whether this food is contaminated or not.’

Mayor Morrison was on his feet. Van Effen lifted his Schmeisser fractionally but Morrison ignored him. He said to Branson: ‘Apart from the personal indignity and affront you are heaping on the President and his royal guests couldn’t you pick someone a bit lower down the scale for your experiment?’

‘Such as yourself?’

‘Such as myself.’

‘My dear Mayor, your personal courage is beyond dispute. That is well known. Your intelligence, however, isn’t. If anyone is to be put to the test it will be the three men who are probably the most important in the United States today. Their untimely disappearance from the scene would have the maximum inhibiting effect on would-be poisoners. In the olden days, the serfs tasted the food of their rulers: I find it rather amusing that the roles should be reversed. Please sit.’

‘Megalomaniac bastard,’ Revson said.

O’Hare nodded. ‘He’s all of that but a lot more. He knows damn well there isn’t a chance in the world of the food being spiked but he’s going through the charade all the same. He’s not only enjoying his own showmanship, he’s getting a positively sadistic kick out of it all, particularly in humiliating the President.’

‘You think he’s sick? In the head? Certifiably, I mean?’

‘I’m no psychiatrist. He could get all he wants without those histrionics and TV spectaculars. What’s for sure, he’s got a grudge against society in general and the President in particular. Certainly, he’s in it for the money, but he’s in it for something else: as if he wanted to become a nationally – or internationally – recognized figure.’

‘In that case, he’s made a fair start. In fact, he’s gone as far as he can go. Now it seems as if he’s overcompensating for something. Lord knows what.’

They watched three trays of food being brought towards the rows of chairs. O’Hare said: ‘Reckon they’ll sample that stuff?’

‘They’ll eat it. In the first place, they couldn’t bear the indignity of being force-fed in front of hundreds of millions of viewers. The President’s courage is known well enough – you will remember his record during World War Two in the Pacific. Again, as President, he has to give a lead to the nation – if he refused to eat while his oil friends did, he’d be a dead duck at the next election. Conversely, his oil friends would lose face if the President ate and they didn’t.’

They ate. After Chrysler had given a negative signal from the Presidential coach, Branson nodded towards the trays. The President–inevitably, he was not a man to be upstaged by anyone – was the first to get busy with knife and fork. It could hardly be said that he ate with unrestrained gusto but he plodded along stolidly enough and had finished more than half his meal before he laid down his eating tools.

Branson said: ‘Well?’

‘I wouldn’t offer it to my guests in the White House but it’s palatable enough.’ In spite of the deep humiliation he must have been experiencing, the President was maintaining a remarkable degree of sang-froid. ‘A little wine would have helped, though.’

‘You shall have as much as you want in a few moments. I imagine a great number of people are also going to feel like a restorative pretty soon, too. Incidentally, if you people are still interested, we shall be fixing our second strap of explosives at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Our time, of course. And now, could we have the cameras on that stretcher there.’

Two men stood at the head of the canvas-shrouded stretcher. At a word from Branson they pulled back the top section of the canvas. The cameras zoomed in on the pallid, haggard face of the dead man, held it for all of ten interminable and hushed seconds, then returned to Branson.

He said: ‘John Hansen, your energy czar. Death certified as due to botulinus poisoning. For what may be the first time in history a wanted criminal accuses the legal authorities of murder. Second degree murder it may be, but I nevertheless indict them on a charge of murder.’

Hagenbach was in full vitriolic flow. Some phrases like ‘evil, twisted, macabre, vicious bastard’ were just identifiable, but the rest was wholly unprintable. Newson, Carter, Milton and Quarry were momentarily silent but their faces showed clearly enough that they totally identified themselves with Hagenbach’s expressed convictions. Hagenbach, being only human, finally ran out of breath.

‘He’s made us look very very bad indeed.’ In the circumstances, Milton’s restraint was remarkable.

‘Bad?’ Quarry looked around for another word then gave up. ‘If he pulls another one like this-if we pull another one like this – Branson will have half the nation on his side. What’s to do next?’

Hagenbach said: ‘Wait till we hear from Revson.’

‘Revson?’ Admiral Newson seemed unenthusiastic. ‘He’s hardly distinguished himself so far.’

‘A hundred to one it wasn’t Revson’s fault,’ Hagenbach said. ‘And don’t forget the final decision was ours. We bear a collective responsibility, gentlemen.’

They sat around the table bearing this intolerable responsibility, each one an Atlas bearing his own private world on his shoulders.

NINE

On the Golden Gate Bridge that evening events happened in fairly quick but ordered fashion. A special ambulance appeared and took away the stretcher bearing the remains of Hansen. An autopsy was to be performed, which seemed to be a singular waste of time but was apparently mandatory under State law when a person had died under unusual circumstances. Dr Kylenski and his colleague, with a marked absence of reluctance, accompanied the ambulance. Newsmen, captives and captors had their evening meal, the first two with a notable but understandable lack of appetite but with a thirst, equally notable and understandable, so marked that further liquid supplies had to be commandeered. The two TV trucks left and, shortly afterwards, the two food wagons. Last to go were Vice-President Richards and Hendrix. The Vice-President had spent a long time in a long and earnest private discussion with the President, just as had General Cartland with Hendrix. Both Branson had watched with a certain amused tolerance but had paid little attention. From their grim and depressed expressions it was clear that their discussions had been totally fruitless. No other result could have been expected. It may well have been that Branson was suffering from a certain degree of euphoria after the dramatic effect of his last broadcast: from his expression it was impossible to tell.

Branson approached Kowalski, just as Richards and Hendrix turned towards their waiting police car. ‘Well?’

‘My life on it, Mr Branson. I had my eye on Hendrix and the Vice-President every second. At no time did Revson approach within twenty yards of either man.’

Branson was aware that Kowalski, a very bright youngster indeed, was looking at him with an expression of barely restrained curiosity. Branson gave his usual faint and empty smile.

‘You wondering what’s bugging me about Revson?’

‘Not wondering, sir. Interested. I’ve known you for three years now, sir. I shouldn’t imagine you see many fairies at the bottom of your garden.’

‘Don’t you, now?’ Branson turned and called to Richards. ‘Wait.’ To Kowalski: ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well. Revson. He’s been searched to pieces. He’s passed every test. Maybe if the boys and I knew what you are –’

‘Every test. With flying colours. Perhaps his flag flies too high. Would you have sampled those charming botulinus dinners?’

‘My oath and I wouldn’t.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, if it was a direct order from you –’

‘And with a gun in your back?’

Kowalski said nothing.

Branson said: ‘Revson doesn’t take orders from me. And he had no gun in his back.’

‘Maybe he takes orders from someone else.’

‘Maybe he does at that. Just a very close eye, Kowalski.’

‘If I have to stay awake all night.’

‘You know, I think I’d rather appreciate that.’ Branson walked away towards the police car. Kowalski looked after him very thoughtfully indeed.

The Vice-President and Hendrix were standing impatiently by the opened doors of the police car. Branson came up and said: ‘You will not have forgotten the deadline, gentlemen?’

‘Deadline?’

Branson smiled. ‘Do not be so deliberately obtuse, Mr Vice-President. The transfer of certain monies to Europe. Half a billion dollars – plus, of course, my quarter million expenses. Noon. Tomorrow.’

Richards’s chilling glare should have petrified Branson on the spot. Branson remained unaffected.

‘And don’t forget the escalation clause. Two million dollars for every hour’s delay. And, of course, the free pardon. I expect that will take some time, I suppose your Congress will be a little stuffy about that. But we – your friends and I–can rest comfortably in the Caribbean till that comes through. I bid you good evening, gentlemen.’

He walked away and stopped at the opened door of the rear coach. Revson was there, slinging over his shoulder the strap of the camera which Chrysler had just handed back to him. Chrysler smiled at Branson.

‘Clean as a whistle, Mr Branson. My word, I wish I had one of those.’

‘You can have a dozen very soon. You had another camera, Revson.’

‘Yes.’ Revson sighed. ‘Do you want me to fetch it for you?’

‘I’d rather not. Will you get it, Chrysler?’

‘Five back, inside seat,’ Revson said helpfully. ‘It’s on the seat.’

Chrysler returned with the camera, showed it to Branson. ‘An Asahi-Pentax. I have one myself. Those things are so jammed with miniaturized electronic equipment that you couldn’t hide a pea inside it.’

‘Assuming, of course, that it is not just an empty shell.’

‘Ah.’ Chrysler looked at Revson. ‘Loaded?’ Revson shook his head. Chrysler opened the back just as Van Effen joined them and displayed the rear of the camera. ‘The genuine article.’ He snapped the back closed.

Revson took his camera back. He spoke to Branson, his tone as cold as his face. ‘Maybe you’d like to look at my watch. Could be a transistorized two-way radio. All the best investigators in the comic strips wear one.’

Branson said nothing. Chrysler took Revson’s wrist, pressed a knob on either side of the watch. Illuminated red figures appeared, one set giving the date, the other the time. Chrysler dropped the wrist.

‘Pulsar digital. You couldn’t hide a grain of sand inside one of those things.’

Revson turned with deliberate contempt on his heel and walked away. Chrysler went inside the coach. Van Effen said: ‘Still bugged, Mr Branson? So he’s annoyed. Wouldn’t you be if you’d been put through the hoop the way you’ve put him through the hoop? Besides, if he’d anything to hide he wouldn’t let his animosity show so plain, he’d keep a very low profile indeed.’

‘Maybe that’s the way he expects us to react. Or maybe he’s clear.’ Branson looked thoughtful almost to the extent of being worried. ‘But I can’t shake off the feeling that there’s something wrong, and it’s a feeling that’s never let me down before. I’m convinced, don’t ask me how, that someone on the bridge has some means of communicating with someone on land. I want every inch of every person – and that includes our illustrious guests – searched, and to hell with the ladies’ feelings. Every inch of their personal belongings, every inch of every coach.’

‘Immediately, Mr Branson.’ There was acquiescence in the tone but no great enthusiasm. ‘And the rest-rooms?’

‘Those too.’

‘And the ambulance?’

‘Yes. I think I’ll attend to that myself.’

O’Hare looked up in mild surprise as Branson entered the ambulance. ‘Don’t tell me that the botulinus has struck again?’

‘No. I’m here to search this ambulance.’

O’Hare rose from his stool, his face tight. ‘I don’t allow civilians to touch my medical supplies.’

‘You’re going to allow this one. If necessary, I’ll call one of my men and have you held either at pistol-point or tied up while I conduct my search.’

‘And just what in the hell do you think you’re looking for?’

‘That’s my concern.’

‘So I can’t stop you. I just warn you that we carry quite a lot of dangerous drugs and surgical equipment here. If you poison yourself or slice an artery, here’s one doctor who’s not going to help you.’

Branson nodded to April Wednesday who was sleeping peacefully on the side bunk. ‘Lift her off.’

‘Lift her – what do you think –’

‘Do it immediately or I call a guard.’

O’Hare lifted the slight form in his arms. Branson pummelled every inch of the thin mattress, lifted it, looked under it and said: Tut her back.’

Branson carried out a thorough search of all the medical equipment in the ambulance. He knew exactly what he was looking for and nothing he examined looked even remotely like what he hoped to find. He looked around, picked up a torch suspended from one side of the ambulance, switched it on and twisted the top, opening and then narrowing the hooded shutter. ‘A peculiar flashlight, O’Hare.’

O’Hare said wearily: ‘It’s an ophthalmic torch. Every physician carries one. You can diagnose a dozen different diseases by the dilation of the pupils of the eyes.’

‘This can be useful. Come with me.’ He went down the rear steps of the ambulance, went round to the front and jerked open the driver’s door. The driver, peering at a lurid magazine in the now fading light, looked round in surprise.

Branson said: Out!’ The man descended and Branson, offering no explanation, searched him comprehensively from head to foot. He then climbed inside the driving compartment, examined the upholstery, opened various lockers and shone the torch inside. He descended and said to the driver: ‘Open the engine hood.’

This was done. Again with the aid of the torch he carried out a thorough inspection of the compartment and found nothing worthy of his attention. He went round to the rear of the ambulance and re-entered. O’Hare followed, politely removed the torch from Branson’s hand and replaced it. Branson indicated a metal canister held in place by a spring clip. He said: ‘What’s that?’

O’Hare gave a creditable impression of a man whose patience was wearing very very thin. ‘An aerosol air-freshener.’ It was the fake Prestige can that contained the knock-out gas.

Branson freed the can. ‘Sandalwood,’ he said. ‘You have an exotic taste in perfumes.’ He shook the can, listened to the gurgling inside, then replaced the canister in its clip. O’Hare hoped that the dampness on his brow didn’t show.

Branson finally directed his attention to the big oiled-wood box on the floor. ‘And what’s this?’

O’Hare didn’t answer. Branson looked at him. O’Hare was leaning with a negligent elbow on top of a locker, his expression a mixture of barely concealed impatience and bored indifference.

Branson said sharply: ‘You heard me.’

‘I heard you. I’ve had just about enough of you, Branson. If you expect me to show any obedience or respect for you, then you’re way out of your mind. I’m beginning to think you are illiterate. Can’t you see those big red letters? They spell out “Cardiac Arrest Unit”. Emergency equipment for patients who have, or may shortly be expected to have, a heart attack.’

‘Why the big red seal in front?’

‘There’s more to it than just that red seal. The whole unit is hermetically sealed. The entire interior of that box and all the equipment it contains is completely sterilized before the box is sealed. One does not inject an unsterilized needle in or near the heart of a cardiac patient.’

‘What would happen if I broke the seal?’

‘To you, nothing. You’d just be committing the most cardinal sin in any hospital. You’d render the contents useless. And the way you’re carrying on the President is a prime candidate for a heart attack at any moment.’ O’Hare was acutely conscious that the aerosol can was only inches from his hand. If Branson broke the seal and started delving deeper he intended to use the aerosol without a second thought: Branson could hardly be expected to be the person who would fail to recognize a cyanide air pistol when he saw it.

Branson’s face was without expression. The President –’

‘I’d sooner turn in my licence than insure the President for anything. I am a doctor. Twice your needling and public humiliation have driven him into a state of near-apoplexy. You never know, third time you may be lucky. Go on and break the bloody seal. What’s another death on your conscience?’

‘I’ve never been responsible for anybody’s death in my life.’ Without as much as looking at O’Hare, Branson abruptly left the ambulance. O’Hare went to the rear door and looked after him thoughtfully. Revson was ambling across the roadway and Branson spared him neither a word nor a glance, behaviour uncharacteristic of Branson who was much given to directing penetrating glances at everyone, usually for no reason whatsoever. Revson looked after him in some puzzlement, then strolled off towards the ambulance.

Revson said: ‘You just been put through the grinder, too?’

‘That you can say again.’ O’Hare spoke with some feeling. ‘You, too?’

‘Not me. I’ve been searched so often that nobody would bother. Everybody else was, though. It must have been pretty thorough. I heard more than one ladylike scream of protest.’ He looked after the departing Branson. ‘Our mastermind seems unusually preoccupied.’

‘He was acting a bit oddly when he left.’

‘He drew a blank, obviously.’

‘Yes.’

‘Didn’t even investigate your one sealed container – the cardiac unit?’

‘That’s when he started behaving oddly. I’m pretty sure that he was about to break the seal when I pointed out that that would de-sterilize the equipment and render it useless. I also pointed out that I considered the President a prime candidate for a heart attack and that I regarded him as being the prime cause for this. That was when he backed off.’

‘Understandable, I would have thought. He doesn’t want to lose his principal hostage.’

‘That wasn’t the impression he gave me. He also said another funny thing when he left, that he’d never been responsible for anyone’s death in his life.’

‘To the best of my knowledge that’s true. Maybe he just didn’t want to spoil his good record.’

‘Could have been, could have been.’ But the puzzled expression was still on O’Hare’s face.

Van Effen regarded Branson with a curiosity that his face didn’t register. Branson, he thought, was a shade less than his old ebullient self. Van Effen said: ‘Well, how did you find the ambulance and the good doctor? Clean?’

‘The ambulance is. God damn it all, I quite forgot to go over O’Hare.’

Van Effen smiled. ‘One tends to. Pillars of moral rectitude. I’ll go look at him.’

‘How did it go with you?’

‘There were ten of us and we were pretty thorough – and pretty thoroughly unpopular. If there was a silver dollar on the Golden Gate Bridge we’d have found it. We didn’t find any silver dollars.’

But then Branson and his men had been searching the wrong places and the wrong people. They should have searched Chief of Police Hendrix before he’d been allowed to leave the bridge.

Hagenbach, Milton, Quarry, Newson and Carter were seated round the long oblong table in the communications wagon. There were bottles of liquor on a wall-mounted sideboard and, judging from the levels of the liquids in the bottles and the glasses in front of the five men, they weren’t there for purely decorative purposes. The five appeared to be concentrating on two things only: not speaking to one another and not looking at one another. The bottoms of their glasses appeared to hold a singular fascination for them: comparatively, the average funeral parlour could have qualified as an amusement arcade.

A bell rang softly at the inner end of the wagon. A shirt-sleeved policeman, seated before a battery of telephones, lifted one and spoke softly into it. He turned and said: ‘Mr Quarry, sir. Washington.’

Quarry rose to his feet with the alacrity of a French aristocrat going to the guillotine and made his way to the communications desk. His end of the conversation appeared to consist of a series of dispirited grunts. Finally he said, ‘Yes, as planned,’ returned to the table and slumped into his chair. ‘The money has been arranged just in case it’s needed.’

Milton said heavily: ‘Can you see it not being needed?’

‘The Treasury also agrees that we should stall them for up to twenty-four hours from noon tomorrow.’

Milton’s lugubriousness didn’t alter. ‘By Branson’s escalation demands that means close on another fifty million dollars.’

‘Peanuts to what he’s asking.’ Milton made a stillborn attempt to smile. ‘Might give one of our brilliant minds time to come up with a brilliant idea.’ He relapsed into a silence which no one seemed inclined to break. Hagenbach reached for a bottle of scotch, helped himself and passed the bottle around. They resumed their mournful inspection of the depths of their glasses.

The bottle was not long left undisturbed. Richards and Hendrix entered and, without speaking, sat down heavily in two vacant chairs. The Vice-President’s hand reached the bottle just fractionally before that of Hendrix.

Richards said: ‘How did we look on TV tonight?’

‘Goddamned awful. But no more awful than the seven of us sitting around here without a single idea in our heads.’ Milton sighed. ‘Seven of the allegedly best governmental and law enforcement minds in the business. The best we can do is drink scotch. Not a single idea among us.’

Hendrix said: ‘I think perhaps Revson has.’ He fished a piece of paper from the inside of a sock and handed it to Hagenbach. ‘For you.’

Hagenbach unfolded the note, cursed and shouted to the operator.

‘My decoder. Quick.’ Hagenbach was back in business and, predictably, he turned to Hendrix: he wouldn’t have asked Richards for the time of day. ‘How are things out there? Anything we don’t know? How come Hansen died?’

‘To put it brutally, hunger, greed. Seemingly he snitched one of the food trays before he could be warned which were the dangerous ones and how they could be identified.’

Milton sighed. ‘He always was a voracious eater. Compulsive, you might say. Something wrong with his metabolic system, I suppose. Speak no ill of the dead but I often told him that he was digging his grave with his own teeth. Looks like that’s what happened.’

‘No fault of Revson’s?’

‘None in the world. But there’s worse. Your man Revson is under heavy suspicion. Branson, as we all have cause to know, is a very very clever man and he’s convinced there’s an infiltrator in their midst. He’s also almost equally convinced that it’s Revson. I think the man is working on sheer instinct. He can’t pin a thing on Revson.’

‘Who’s also a very very clever man.’ Hagenbach paused then looked sharply at Hendrix. ‘If Branson is so suspicious of Revson would he let him get within a mile of you, knowing that you were going ashore?’

‘Revson didn’t come anywhere near me. General Cartland gave me the message. Revson gave the message to Cartland.’

‘So Cartland is in on this?’

‘He knows as much about it as we do. Revson is going to give him the cyanide pistol. Never thought our Chief of Staff was so positively bloodthirsty. He seems actually to be looking forward to using it.’

Carter said: ‘You know Cartland’s reputation as a tank commander in the Second World War. After all the comparatively decent Italians and Germans he disposed of then, do you think he’s going to worry about doing away with a few really bad hats?’

‘You should know. Anyway, I went into one of their awful rest-rooms and shoved the note down my sock. I suspected that the Vice-President here and I might be searched before we left the bridge. We weren’t. Your Revson is right. Branson is both over-confident and under-conscious of security precautions.’

Revson and O’Hare watched Van Effen walk away. Revson himself walked away a few steps, indicating that O’Hare should follow him. Revson said: ‘Well, that was a pretty thorough going-over our friend gave you. I don’t think he much appreciated your remark about your hoping that he would be a patient of yours some day’

O’Hare looked up at the darkly threatening sky, now almost directly overhead. The wind was freshening and, two hundred feet below, the white horses were showing in the Golden Gate.

O’Hare said: ‘Looks like a rough night coming up. We’d be more comfortable inside the ambulance, I think, and I’ve some excellent whisky and brandy in there. Used, you understand, solely for the resuscitation of the sick and ailing.’

‘You’re going to go far in your profession. Sick and ailing describes my symptoms precisely. But I’d rather be succoured out here.’

‘Whatever for?’

Revson gave him a pitying look. ‘If it weren’t for your good fortune in having me here, you’d very probably be the main object of Branson’s suspicions. Has it not occurred to you that, during his intensive search of your ambulance, he might have planted a tiny electronic bug which you wouldn’t discover in a week of searching?’

‘It occurs to me now. There’s a dearth of devious minds in the medical profession.’

‘Do you have any gin?’

‘It’s odd you should ask that. I do.’

‘That’s for me. I told Branson that I didn’t drink and that’s why I have a nose like a bloodhound. I shouldn’t care for him to see me with a glass of something amber in my hand.’

‘Devious, devious minds.’ O’Hare disappeared inside the ambulance and reappeared shortly with two glasses, the clear one for Revson. ‘Health.’

‘Indeed. I shouldn’t wonder if that’s going to be in short supply inside the next twenty-four hours.’

‘Cryptic, aren’t we?’

‘Psychic’ Revson looked speculatively at the nearest helicopter. ‘I wonder if the pilot – Johnson, I think – intends to sleep in his machine tonight.’

O’Hare gave a mock shiver. ‘You ever been in a helicopter?’

‘Oddly, perhaps, no.’

‘I have several times. Strictly, I assure you, in the line of medical duty. These army jobs are fitted with steel-framed canvas chairs, if that’s the word for them. For me, it would be a toss-up between that and a bed of nails.’

‘So much I suspected. So he’ll probably bed down with his fellow-villains in the rear coach.’

‘The chopper appears to interest you strangely’

Revson glanced casually around. There was no one within possible earshot.

‘The detonating mechanism for the explosives is inside there. I intend – note that I say intend – to deactivate it tonight.’

O’Hare was silent for a long moment, then said kindly: ‘I think I should give you a medical. For that space between the ears. There’ll be at least one armed guard on all night patrol. You know the bridge is a blaze of light all night long. So you just dematerialize yourself –’

‘The sentry I can take care of. The lights will be switched off when I want them.’

‘Abracadabra!’

‘I’ve already sent a message ashore.’

‘I didn’t know that secret agents doubled as magicians. You produce a carrier pigeon from your hat –’

‘Hendrix took it ashore for me.’

O’Hare stared at him then said: ‘Another drink?’

‘No befuddled wits tonight, thank you.’

‘Then I’ll have one.’ He took both glasses and reappeared with his own. ‘Look, that guy Kowalski has the general appearance and the eyes of a hawk. I’m not exactly short-sighted myself. He never took his eyes off you all the time the Vice-President and Hendrix were out here. Branson’s orders, I’m certain.’

‘Me, too. Who else? I never went near Hendrix. I gave the message to Cartland who passed it on to Hendrix. Kowalski was too busy watching me to bother about Cartland and Hendrix.’

‘What time will the lights go off?’

‘I don’t know yet. Til send a signal.’

‘This means Cartland is in on this?’

‘What else? By the way, I promised the General the cyanide gun. Can you get it to him?’

‘One way or another.’

‘No way, I suppose, of replacing that seal on the cardiac unit once it has been broken?’

‘You mean in case our suspicious Mr Branson visits the ambulance again. No.’ He smiled. ‘It just so happens that I am carrying two spare seals inside the box.’

Revson smiled in turn. ‘Just goes to show. A man can’t think of everything. Still on the side of law and order? Still like to see Branson wearing a nice shiny pair of bracelets?’

‘It’s becoming a distinct yearning.’

‘It might involve bending your code of ethics a little.’

‘The hell with the medical ethics.’

Hagenbach positively snatched the sheet of typewritten paper from his decoder. He glanced rapidly through it, his brow corrugating by the second. He said to Hendrix: ‘Revson appeared to be perfectly normal when you left him?’

‘Who can tell what Revson appears to be?’

‘True. I don’t seem to be able to make head or tail of this.’

Richards said acidly: ‘You might share your little secrets with us, Hagenbach.’

‘He says: “It looks as if it’s going to be a lousy night, which should help. I want two fake oil fires set now. Or a mixture of oil and rubber tyres. One to my south-west, say Lincoln Park, the other to the east, say Fort Mason – a much bigger fire there. Ignite the Lincoln Park one at twenty-two hundred hours. At two-two-oh-three, infra-red sights if necessary, use a laser beam to destroy the radio scanner on top of the rear coach. Wait my flashlight signal – SOS – then ignite the other. After fifteen minutes blacken out bridge and northern part of San Francisco. It would help if you could at same time arrange a massive fireworks display in Chinatown – as if a firework factory had gone up.

‘“Submarine at midnight. Please provide transistorized transceiver small enough to fit base camera. Preset your frequency and mine and have submarine patch in on same frequency.”’

There was a lengthy silence during which Hagenbach, perhaps very understandably, again reached for the scotch. The bottle was rapidly emptied. Richards finally passed his judgement.

‘The man’s mad, of course. Quite, quite mad.’

Nobody, for some time, appeared inclined to disagree with him. Richards, pro tem, the Chief Executive of the nation, was the man to make the decision, but, apart from his observations on mental instability, he was clearly in no mood to make any kind of decision. Hagenbach took the decision out of his hands.

‘Revson is probably a good deal saner than any of us here. He’s brilliant, we’ve had proof of that. Almost certainly, he lacked the time to go into detail. Finally, anyone here got any better idea-let me amend that, anybody here got any idea?’

If anyone had, he was keeping it to himself.

‘Hendrix, get hold of the deputy Mayor and the Fire Chief. Have those fires set. How about the fireworks?’

Hendrix smiled. ‘Fireworks are illegal in San Francisco. Nineteen hundred and six and all that. It so happens we know an illegal underground factory in Chinatown. The owner will be anxious to co-operate.’

Richards shook his head. ‘Mad,’ he said. ‘Quite, quite mad.’

TEN

From far out at sea came the first faint flickers of lightning and the distant rumble of approaching thunder. A now-recovered if somewhat wan April Wednesday, standing with Revson by the centre of the bridge, looked up at the indigo sky and said: ‘It looks like being quite a night.’

‘I’ve a feeling that way myself.’ He took her arm. ‘Are you afraid of thunderstorms as you appear to be of everything else?’

‘I don’t much fancy being stuck out on this bridge in the middle of one.’

‘It’s been here for almost thirty years. It’s not likely to fall down tonight.’ He looked upwards as the first drops of rain began to fall. ‘But getting wet I object to. Come on.’

They took their seats inside the lead coach, she by the window, he by the aisle. Within minutes the coach was full and within half an hour most of the occupants were dozing if not asleep. Each seat had its own individual reading light, but without exception those were either dimmed or completely out. There was nothing to see, nothing to do. It had been a long, tiring, exciting and in many ways a nerve-racking day. Sleep was not only the sensible but inevitable recourse. And the sound of drumming rain, whether on canvas or on a metal roof, has a peculiarly soporific effect.

And that the rain was now drumming was beyond dispute. It had been increasing steadily ever since the passengers had entered the coach and could now fairly be described as torrential. The approaching thunderstorm, though still some miles distant, was steadily increasing in violence. But neither rain, thunder nor lightning were any deterrent to the prowling Kowalski: he had promised Branson that he would keep his eye on Revson all night long if he had to, and that he clearly intended to do. Regularly, every fifteen minutes, he entered the coach, peered pointedly at Revson, spoke a few brief words to Bartlett, who sat sideways on guard, in the seat next to the driver’s, then left. Bartlett, Revson apart, was the only alert person in the coach and this, Revson suspected, was due more to Kowalski’s recurrent visits than to anything else. On one occasion Revson had overheard Bartlett ask when he was to be relieved and been curtly told that he would have to remain where he was until one o’clock, which suited Revson well enough.

At nine o’clock, when the rain was at its heaviest, Kowalski made another of his routine checks. Revson took out and armed his white pen. Kowalski turned to go. His heel was just descending the riser of the first step when he appeared to stumble. Then he fell, heavily, face-first out of the coach on to the roadway.

Bartlett was the first to reach him, Revson the second. Revson said: ‘What the hell happened to him?’

‘Lost his footing, far as I could see. Coach door has been open all evening and the steps are slippery as all hell.’ Both men stooped to examine the unconscious Kowalski. He was bleeding quite heavily from the forehead which had obviously taken the main brunt of his fall. Revson felt his head gently with his fingers. The needle protruded almost a quarter of an inch behind Kowalski’s left ear. Revson removed and palmed it.

Revson said: ‘Shall I fetch the doctor?’

‘Yes. Sure looks as if he needs one.’

Revson ran to the ambulance. As he approached, the light came on inside the ambulance. Revson took the aerosol can from O’Hare and thrust it into his pocket. The two men, O’Hare carrying his medical bag, ran back to the lead coach. By this time quite a number of curious journalists from the coach – activated, almost certainly, by the inbuilt curiosity that motivates all good journalists, were crowded round the unconscious Kowalski.

‘Stand back,’ O’Hare ordered. The journalists made way respectfully but didn’t stand all that far back. O’Hare opened his bag and began to wipe Kowalski’s forehead with a piece of gauze. His opened bag was quite some distance from him, and in the dim light, the driving rain and aided by the total concentration of all on the injured man, it was no great feat for Revson to extract an oil-skinned packet from the bag and send it spinning under the coach. He, but only he, heard the gentle thump as it struck the kerb on the far side. He then pressed in among the curious onlookers.

O’Hare straightened. ‘A couple of volunteers to help me get him across to the ambulance.’ There was no lack of volunteers. They were about to lift him when Branson came running up.

‘Your man’s had a pretty nasty fall. I want him in the ambulance for a proper examination.’

‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’

‘How the hell should I know? You’re wasting what could be valuable time, Branson.’

Bartlett said: ‘He fell all right, Mr Branson. He slipped on the top step and hadn’t a chance to save himself.’

‘Certain?’

‘Of course I’m bloody certain.’ Bartlett was justifiably indignant. He spoke again, but a crashing peal of thunder drowned out his next words. He repeated himself. ‘I was within two feet of him at the time – and I hadn’t a chance to save him.’

O’Hare paid no more attention to him. With the help of two others he carried Kowalski across to the ambulance. Branson looked at the group of journalists still there, caught sight of Revson.

‘Where was Revson at the time?’

‘Revson was nowhere near him. He was in his seat, five back there. Everyone was in their seats. Christ, Mr Branson, I’m telling you. It was a pure bloody accident.’

‘Must have been.’ Clad only in already totally sodden shirt-sleeves and trousers, Branson shivered. ‘Jesus, what a night!’ He hurried across to the ambulance and as he arrived the two men who had helped O’Hare to carry Kowalski came down the ambulance steps. Branson went inside. O’Hare had already had Kowalski’s leather jacket removed and his right sleeve rolled beyond the elbow, and was preparing a hypodermic injection.

Branson said: ‘What’s that for?’

O’Hare turned in irritation. ‘What the hell are you doing here? This is doctor’s work. Get out!’

The invitation passed unheeded. Branson picked up the tube from which O’Hare had filled his hypodermic. ‘Anti-tetanus? The man’s got a head wound.’

O’Hare withdrew the needle, covered the pinprick with antiseptic gauze. ‘I thought even the most ignorant layman knew that when a man has been injured in the open the first thing he gets is an anti-tetanus injection. You’ve obviously never seen tetanus.’ He sounded Kowalski with his stethoscope, took his pulse and then his temperature.

‘Get an ambulance from the hospital.’ O’Hare pushed Kowalski’s sleeve further up and started to wind the blood-pressure band round it.

Branson said: ‘No.’

O’Hare didn’t answer until after he’d taken the pressure. He then repeated: ‘Get the ambulance.’

‘I don’t trust you and your damned ambulances.’

O’Hare didn’t answer. He jumped down the steps and strode off through rain that was now rebounding six inches high off the roadway. He was back shortly with the two men who had helped him carry Kowalski across. O’Hare said: ‘Mr Grafton. Mr Ferrers. Two highly respected, even eminent journalists. Their words carry a great deal of weight. So will their word.’

‘What’s that meant to mean?’ For the first time since his arrival on the bridge Branson wore just the slightest trace of apprehension.

O’Hare ignored him, addressed himself to the two journalists. ‘Kowalski here has severe concussion, possibly even a skull fracture. The latter is impossible to tell without an X-ray. He also has shallow, rapid breathing, a weak and feathery pulse, a temperature and abnormally low blood pressure. This could indicate a few things. One of them cerebral haemorrhaging. I want you gentlemen to bear witness to the fact that Branson refuses to allow an ambulance to come for him. I want you to bear witness to the fact that if Kowalski dies Branson and Branson alone will be wholly responsible for his death. I want you to bear witness to the fact that Branson is fully aware that if Kowalski dies he will be guilty of the same charge as he recently levelled against persons unknown – murder. Only, in this case, I think it would have to be an indictment of the first degree.’

Grafton said: ‘I shall so solemnly bear witness.’

Ferrers said: ‘And I.’

O’Hare looked at Branson with contempt. ‘And you were the person who said to me that you’d never in your life been responsible for the death of a single person.’

Branson said: ‘How am I to know that once they get him ashore they won’t keep him there?’

‘You’re losing your grip, Branson.’ The contempt was still in O’Hare’s voice: he and Revson had deliberated long enough on how best to wear down Branson psychologically. ‘As long as you have a President, a king and a prince, who the hell is going to hold a common criminal like this as a counter-ransom?’

Branson made up his mind. It was difficult to tell whether he was motivated by threats or a genuine concern for Kowalski’s life. ‘One of those two will have to go tell Chrysler to call the ambulance. I’m not keeping my eyes off you until I see Kowalski safely transferred to the other ambulance.’

‘Suit yourself,’ O’Hare said indifferently. ‘Gentlemen?’

‘It will be a pleasure.’ The two journalists left. O’Hare began to cover Kowalski in blankets.

Branson said with suspicion: ‘What are you doing that for?’

‘Heaven preserve me from ignorant laymen. Your friend here is in a state of shock. Rule number one for shock victims – keep them warm.’

Just as he finished speaking there was a massive thunderclap directly above, so close, so loud, that it was positively hurtful to the eardrums. The reverberations took many long seconds to die away. O’Hare looked speculatively at Branson then said: ‘Know something, Branson? That sounded to me just like the crack of doom.’ He poured some whisky into a glass and added a little distilled water.

Branson said: ‘I’ll have some of that.’

‘Help yourself,’ O’Hare said agreeably.

From the comparative comfort of the lead coach – comparative, for his clothes were as soaked as if he had fallen into the Golden Gate – Revson watched another ambulance bear away Kowalski’s stretchered form. For the moment Revson felt as reasonably content as was possible for a man in his slowly chilling condition. The main object of the exercise had been to get his hands on the cord, canister, torch and aerosol. All of those he had achieved. The first three were still under the bus by the kerbside: the fourth nestled snugly in his pocket. That all this should have been done at the expense of Kowalski, the most relentlessly vigilant of all Branson’s guards and by a long way the most suspicious, was just an added bonus. He bethought himself of the aerosol. He gave April Wednesday a gentle nudge and, because people were still talking in varying degrees of animation about the latest incident, he did not find it necessary to keep his voice especially low.

‘Listen carefully, and don’t repeat my words, no matter how stupid my question may appear. Tell me, would a young lady of – ah – delicate sensibilities – carry a miniature aerosol air-freshener around with her?’

Beyond a blink of the green eyes she showed no reaction. ‘In certain circumstances I suppose so, yes.’

He placed the can between them. ‘Then please put this in your carry-all. Sandalwood, but I wouldn’t try sniffing it.’

‘I know very well what’s in it.’ The can disappeared. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter very much if I’m caught with it? If they bring out those old thumb-screws –’

‘They won’t. They already searched your carryall, and the person who made the search almost certainly wouldn’t remember the contents of one of a dozen bags he’s searched. No one’s keeping an eye on you: I’m way out on my own as Suspect Number One.’

By ten o’clock silence and sleep had returned to the coach. The rain had eased, until it could be called no more than heavy, but still the lightning crackled and the thunder boomed with unabated enthusiasm. Revson glanced over his shoulder to the south-west. There were no signs of any unusual activities in the direction of Lincoln Park. He wondered if those ashore had misinterpreted his message or deliberately ignored it. Both possibilities he thought unlikely: more likely, because of the heavy rain, they were having difficulty in igniting a fire.

At seven minutes past ten a red glow appeared to the south-west. Revson was almost certainly the first person on the bridge to notice it but he thought it impolitic to draw attention to the fact. Within half a minute the dark oily flames were at least fifty feet high.

It was Bartlett who first called attention to this phenomenon and he did so in a very emphatic fashion. He stood in the open doorway behind the driver’s seat and shouted: ‘Jesus, would you look at that!’

Almost everyone immediately started awake and looked. They couldn’t see much. Rain still lashed the outside of the windows and the insides were pretty well steamed up. Like a bunch of lemmings hell-bent on a watery suicide they poured out through the door. The view was certainly very much better from there and well worth the seeing. The flames, already a hundred feet high and topped by billowing clouds of oily smoke, were increasing by the second. Still of the same lemming-like mind and totally oblivious of the rain, they began to run across the bridge to obtain a better view. The occupants of the Presidential and rear coaches were doing exactly the same. Nothing attracts people more than the prospect of a good-going disaster.

Revson, though among the first out of the lead coach, made no attempt to join them. He walked unhurriedly round the front of the coach, walked back a few feet, stooped and recovered the oilskin package. No one paid any attention to him, even had he been visible beyond the bulk of the coach, because they were all running in and looking towards the opposite direction. He removed the torch from the package, angled it forty-five degrees to his right and made his SOS signal, just once: he then pocketed the torch and made his more leisurely way across to the other side of the bridge, glancing occasionally over his left shoulder. Halfway across he saw a rocket, a not very spectacular one, curving up to the south-east.

He reached the far crash barrier and joined O’Hare who was standing some little way apart from the others. O’Hare said: ‘You’d make quite an arsonist.’

‘That’s just by the way of introduction. Wait till you see the next one. Not to mention the fireworks. Sheer pyromania, that’s what it is. Let’s look at the front end of the rear coach.’

They looked. A full minute passed and nothing happened. O’Hare said: ‘Hm. Worrisome?’

‘No. Just running a little bit behind schedule, I should think. Don’t even blink.’

O’Hare didn’t and so he saw it – a tiny intense spark of bluish-white that could have lasted only milliseconds. O’Hare said: ‘You saw it too?’

‘Yes. Far less than I thought it would be.’

‘End of radio-wave scanner?’

‘No question.’

‘Would anyone inside the coach have heard it?’

‘That’s academic. There’s no one inside the rear coach. They’re all across here. But there is some sign of activity at the rear of the Presidential coach. A dollar gets a cent that Branson’s asking some questions.’

Branson was indeed asking some questions. Chrysler by his side, he was talking forcefully into a telephone.

‘Then find out and find out now.’

‘I’m trying to.’ It was Hendrix and he sounded weary. ‘I can be held responsible for a lot of things but I can’t be held responsible for the forces of nature. Don’t you realize this is the worst lightning storm the city has had in years? There are dozens of outbreaks of small fires and the Firemaster tells me his force is fully extended.’

‘I’m waiting, Hendrix.’

‘So am I. And God only knows how you imagine this fire in Lincoln Park can affect you. Sure, it’s giving off clouds of oil smoke, but the wind’s from the west and the smoke won’t come anywhere near you. You’re jumping at shadows, Branson. Wait. A report.’ There was a brief silence then Hendrix went on: ‘Three parked road oil tankers. One had its loading hose partly on the ground so it was earthed. Witnesses saw this tanker being struck by lightning. Two fire engines are there and the fire is under control. Satisfied?’

Branson hung up without replying.

The fire was indeed under control. Firemen, taking their convincing time, were now smothering the barrels of blazing oil with foam extinguishers. Fifteen minutes after the fire had first begun – or been noticed – it was extinguished. Reluctantly, almost – they were now so wet that they couldn’t possibly get any wetter – the watchers by the west barrier turned and made their way back to the coaches. But their evening’s entertainment had only just begun.

Another fire bloomed to the north. It spread and grew with even greater rapidity than the previous one, becoming so bright and intense that even the lights in the concrete towers of downtown San Francisco seemed pale by comparison. Branson, who had made his way back to his own coach, now ran back to the Presidential coach. A bell was ringing in the communications section in the rear. Branson snatched the phone. It was Hendrix.

Hendrix said: ‘Nice to forestall you for once. No, we are not responsible for this one either. Why in the hell should we set off a fire where all the smoke is being carried away from you east over the bay? The meteorological officer says that there’s a lightning strike once every three or four seconds. And it’s not cloud to cloud stuff, it’s mainly cloud to earth. On the law of averages, he says, something combustible has to go in one in twenty. I’ll keep you posted.’

For the first time, Hendrix hung the phone up on him. Branson slowly replaced his own. For the first time, lines of strain were beginning to etch themselves round the corners of his mouth.

The blue-veined flames were towering now to a height of six or seven hundred feet, as high as the highest building in the city. The smoke given off was dense and bitingly acrid, which is generally the case when several hundred used tyres are added to an oil-based fire. But half a dozen giant fire engines and as many again mobile foam wagons were in very close attendance indeed. On the bridge the more nervous of the newspapermen and cameramen were speculating as to whether the fire would spread to the city itself, a rather profitless speculation as the wind was entirely in the wrong direction. Mayor Morrison stood by the eastern crash barrier, fists clenched, tears streaming down his face, cursing with a non-stop fluid monotony.

O’Hare said to Revson: ‘I wonder if the King and the Prince see the irony in all this. After all, it’s probably their own oil that they’re seeing going up.’ Revson made no reply and O’Hare touched his arm. ‘Sure you haven’t overdone things a bit this time, old boy?’ In moments of stress, his English education background tended to show through.

‘I wasn’t the one with the matches.’ Revson smiled. ‘No worry, they know what they’re about. What I am looking forward to seeing now is the firework display.’

In the Presidential communications centre the phone rang again. Branson had it in a second.

‘Hendrix. It’s an oil storage tank in Fort Mason.’ There was no oil storage tank in Fort Mason, but Branson was not a Californian far less a San Franciscan and it was highly unlikely that he was aware of that. ‘I’ve just been on the radio to the Fire Commissioner. He says its bark is worse than its bite and that there’s no danger.’

‘And what the hell is that, then?’ Branson’s voice was a shout, his normal monolithic calm in at least temporary abeyance.

‘What’s what?’

Hendrix’s calm served only to deepen Branson’s apprehension. ‘Fireworks! Dozens of them! Fireworks! Can’t you see them?’

‘Not from where I sit I can’t. Wait.’ Hendrix went to the rear door of the communications wagon. Branson hadn’t been exaggerating. The sky was indeed full of fireworks, of every conceivable colour and design, at least half of them exploding in glittering falling stars. If Branson had been his usual calm and observant self, Hendrix reflected, he might have noticed that the fireworks, nearly all of a medium trajectory, were firing to the north-east which was the shortest distance between where they were coming from and the nearest stretch of water. All of them, without exception, would fizzle out in the waters of San Francisco Bay. Hendrix returned to the phone.

‘They appear to be coming from the Chinatown area and sure as hell they aren’t celebrating the Chinese New Year. I’ll call back.’

Revson said to O’Hare: ‘Take your white coat off. It’s too conspicuous or will be when it gets dark.’ He gave O’Hare his white felt pen. ‘You know how to use this?’

‘Depress the clip and press the button on top.’

‘Yes. If anyone comes too near – well, aim for the face. You’ll have to extract the needle.’

‘Me and my medical ethics.’

Branson picked up the phone. ‘Yes?’

‘It was Chinatown. A fireworks factory there was struck. That damned thunder and lightning doesn’t just seem to want to go away. God knows how many more outbreaks of fire we’ll have tonight.’

Branson left the coach and joined Van Effen by the east barrier. Van Effen turned.

‘Not often you see a sight like this, Mr Branson.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not in the mood to enjoy it.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve a feeling that this is being staged for our benefit.’

‘How could this possibly affect us? Nothing’s changed as far as we’re concerned. Don’t let’s forget our Presidential and royal hostages.’

‘Even so –’

‘Even so your antennae are tingling?’

‘Tingling! They’re jumping. I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I’ve the feeling that I’m not going to enjoy it.’

It was at that moment that the bridge and the whole of northern San Francisco blacked out.

For some few seconds the silence on the bridge was total. The darkness wasn’t total but it came fairly close to being that way. The only illumination came from the faint lighting from the coaches – to conserve the batteries most of the individual reading lights were out, the others dimmed – and the orange-red glow from the distant oil fire. Van Effen said softly: ‘Your antennae, Mr Branson. You know you could make a fortune hiring them out.’

‘Start up the generator. We’ll have the searchlights on the north and south towers. See that the self-propelled guns are ready, loaded, crews standing by. Three men with submachine-guns to be by each gun. I’ll go south, you north and alert them. After that, you’re in charge of both. I’ll try to find out from that bastard Hendrix what this is all about.’

‘You don’t seriously expect a frontal assault, Mr Branson.’

‘I frankly don’t know what the hell to expect. What I do know is that we take no chances. Hurry!’

Branson ran south. As he passed the rear coach he shouted: ‘Chrysler! The generator. Quick, for God’s sake.’

The generator was running before either Branson or Van Effen reached the respective defensive positions. The powerful searchlights came on illuminating both towers: the reverse effect was to plunge the central portion of the bridge into even deeper gloom than before. The guns were readied, machine-gunners in close attendance. Van Effen stayed where he was. Branson ran back towards the central coach. But both Branson and Van Effen were concentrating their efforts on the wrong things and in the wrong direction. They should have been where Revson was.

Revson was crouched in the nose section of the leading helicopter, the variably shuttered flashlight in his hand reduced to scarcely more than a pinhole of light. He had had no trouble in locating the triggering device: it was between the pilot’s seat and the one opposite to it.

With the screwdriver blade of his knife Revson had already removed the four screws that secured the top-plate and the top-plate itself. It was a simple enough device. On the outside of the device was a vertical lever padlocked in position in its top position. When this was depressed it brought a copper arm down between two spring-loaded interior copper arms, so completing the circuit. Twin pieces of flex led from those last two to two crocodile spring-loaded clamps, each secured to the terminals of two nickel-cadmium Nife cells connected up in series. That would produce a total of only three volts, little enough, one would have thought, to activate the radio trigger: but that Branson would have it all expertly calculated out in advance Revson did not for a moment doubt.

He didn’t bother to sever or disconnect anything. He merely removed the crocodile clips from the terminals, lifted the Nife cells free, broke the connection between them and stuffed one in each jacket pocket. Had he disconnected or severed anything Branson could have carried out some sort of jury rig: but Revson would have wagered heavily that Branson carried no spare Nife cells. There was no earthly reason why he should have done. He began to replace the cover-plate.

Hendrix sounded angry, a man near the breaking point of exasperation. ‘What do you think I am, Branson? A bloody magician? I just sit here and snap my fingers and presto! all the lights in the north half of the city go out? I’ve told you and I tell you again that two of the main transformers have gone out. How I don’t know yet, but you don’t have to be a genius to know that our old friend from the skies above has been at work again. What did you expect us to do – throw in a tank regiment against you? We knew you had those heavy guns and searchlights – and your priceless hostages. Think we’re morons? I’m beginning to think that you’re the moron. I’m beginning to think that you’re losing your grip. I’ll call back.’ Hendrix hung up. Branson did the same, almost smashing the rest in the process. It was the second occasion in a very brief space of time that it had been suggested to him that he was losing his grip. His lips were compressed. It was a suggestion he didn’t much care for, far less care to contemplate. He remained seated where he was.

Revson closed the helicopter door softly and dropped lightly to the ground. A few paces away he could see O’Hare silhouetted against the still towering but slowly diminishing flames. He called his name softly and O’Hare approached.

‘Let’s walk to the west side,’ Revson said. ‘No shooting practice?’

‘Nobody as much as looked at the place, far less came near it. Even if they had looked, I doubt whether they would have seen anything. After staring so long at that fire and the fireworks, looking back to the centre of the bridge would have been like looking into total darkness. You know, no night sight.’ He handed Revson the white pen. ‘Have your little toy back. I remain ethically unbent.’

‘And you can have your flashlight back.’ Revson handed it over. ‘I suggest you return it to your ambulance. At the same time I suggest we might retrieve that pistol and give it to General Cartland. I also suggest you give it to him. I don’t want to be seen being too chummy with the General. Tell him not to use it till he gets the word. Ever seen one of those before?’ He took a Nife cell from his pocket and handed it to O’Hare who peered at it in the near darkness.

‘Some sort of battery?’

‘Yes. There were two of them and I have the other. They were to be used to power the explosives’ triggering device.’

‘And you left no trace of your coming and going?’

‘None.’

‘So we walk towards the side of the bridge.’

They lobbed the cells into the Golden Gate and walked to the ambulance. O’Hare ushered Revson in first, then followed, closing the door. He said: ‘I think we should use the torch. The sudden appearance of bright lights in the windows might attract suspicious attention. After all, we’re supposed to be out there enjoying the sights.’

It took O’Hare less than two minutes to break the Cardiac Arrest Unit seal, lift out some equipment, open up, after a series of intricate operations, a secret compartment in the bottom of the box, retrieve the cyanide gun, replace the equipment, close and reseal the lid. O’Hare placed the gun in an inside coat pocket and said complainingly: ‘I’m beginning to become ethical all over again.’

Hendrix said over the phone: ‘It wasn’t the transformers after all. There have been so many breaks and shorts in the city’s electrical equipment tonight that the generators’ overload coils just packed up.’

‘How long?’ Branson asked.

‘A few minutes. No more.’

As was his habit, General Cartland was standing alone by the east barrier. He turned and saw O’Hare who said quietly: ‘A word, sir, if you please.’

The lights of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge came on five minutes later. Branson left the Presidential coach and went to meet Van Effen. He said: ‘Still think I could make a fortune hiring out my antennae?’ He was smiling.

Van Effen wasn’t. He said: ‘Do me a favour. Just hang on to them a little while yet.’

‘Don’t tell me your antennae are at work too?’

‘If they’re not, they sure have good stand-ins.’

The last of the fireworks fizzled to extinction, the oil fire in Fort Mason sank down into a sullen deep-red glow, the lightning and thunder eased, although not markedly so, but the rain showed no sign of abating: had fire broken out in San Francisco that night, it would surely have been rained to extinction. Now that the night’s entertainment was patently over, everyone became very conscious that the rain had become very chilly indeed. There was an almost concerted movement back to the coaches.

Revson was in the window seat by the time April Wednesday came in. She hesitated, then sat down beside him. She said: ‘And why do you want my seat? I thought it was customary for the lady to be offered the inside seat.’

‘To keep her from falling into the aisle during the night? Don’t you know this is the golden age of women’s lib? However, that’s not my real reason. Is it possible for me to reach the aisle without disturbing you in the process?’

‘That’s a silly question.’

‘Is it? I mean, possible?’

‘You can see it isn’t.’

‘Would you be prepared to swear – short of thumb-screws, that is – that I never once disturbed you in the course of the night?’

‘You propose to disturb me, then?’

‘Yes. Will you?’

She smiled. ‘I think I’ve shown that I can lie with the best of them.’

‘You’re not only beautiful, but you’re good.’

‘Thank you. Where were you thinking of going?’

‘Do you really want to know? I think you’d better not. Think of the thumb-screws, the rack, being broken on the wheel –’

‘But Chief of Police Hendrix said that Branson never offered violence to women.’

‘That was the Branson of yore. But he’s become jittery now, more than a little rattled. He might find himself driven to a point where he’s compelled to abandon his scruples.’

It wasn’t the completely sodden thin silk dress she was wearing that made her shiver. ‘I think I’d rather not know. When are you –’

‘Just before midnight.’

‘Then I shan’t sleep a wink before then.’

‘Excellent. Give me a shake at five minutes to.’ Revson closed his eyes and appeared to relax comfortably in his seat.

By five minutes to midnight everyone in the coach appeared to be asleep: despite their cold and discomfort nearly all had been asleep for over an hour. Even April Wednesday was asleep, her head on Revson’s shoulder, huddling close to him for warmth. She was quite unaware of this. Even the guard, Bartlett, almost certainly because Kowalski’s prowling figure was no longer there to keep him on the qui vive, was much nearer sleep than wakefulness, his head nodding on his chest, only occasionally, and with longer intervals in between, jerking his head upright. Only Revson, his eyes closed, was as awake and alert as a cat on a midnight prowl. He nudged April and whispered in her ear. She started awake and looked at him, her eyes uncomprehending.

‘Time to go,’ he said softly. It was almost dark inside the coach, the only illumination coming from the dimmed light over the driver’s seat and from the lights of the bridge itself. ‘Give me the aerosol.’

‘The what?’ Suddenly she was wide awake, the white of the smudged eyes – the pupils could have been any colour – huge in the gloom. ‘Of course.’ She reached under her seat and brought up the aerosol can. Revson tucked it in his inside left coat pocket. She said: ‘How long will you be?’

‘With luck, twenty minutes. Perhaps half an hour. I’ll be back.’

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Please take care.’

Revson had no comment on this highly unnecessary advice. ‘Move into the aisle. Quietly as you can.’

He passed by her and moved silently forwards, his white pen in his hand. Bartlett’s head was on his chest. Revson pressed the button at a distance of less than a foot and the needle lodged behind Bartlett’s left ear. Revson eased him back until his head dangled over the back of his seat. The drug, apart from inducing unconsciousness, had a temporarily paralysing effect so there seemed little enough likelihood that Bartlett would slip off his seat. April watched all this without any expression: the only indication of her feelings was the tip of a tongue that sought to moisten dry lips.

There had to be a patrolling guard, Revson knew – he had, in fact, seen him several times – and he had to be taken care of. He peered cautiously through the open driver’s doorway. A guard was indeed approaching, coming up from the south, walking a few feet wide of the coaches and carrying a shoulder-slung machine-carbine. Revson thought he recognized him as Johnson, one of the helicopter pilots, but couldn’t be sure. Revson switched off Bartlett’s dimmed light and remained where he was. He had the aerosol can in his hand but at the last moment changed his mind and brought out the pen instead. A person recovering from the effects of the knock-out needles invariably awoke none the worse for his experience and usually assumed that he had just dropped off to sleep: but as Revson could tell from his own experience of that morning, a person awakening from a gas knock-out felt nauseated and thoroughly hung over and under no illusion at all that he had been anaesthetized in one way or another. It didn’t seem a good idea to have Johnson report this to Branson.

Revson pressed the button and jumped down at the same instant to catch Johnson before he keeled over on to the roadway, less for humanitarian reasons than to prevent the metallic sound of the carbine striking the roadway. He removed the needle from Johnson’s forehead, hauled him as silently as possible inside the coach and jammed him in a very uncomfortable position in front of the driver’s seat. Johnson was in no position to feel any discomfort and Revson didn’t want to risk the possibility of any passenger awakening – highly unlikely though it seemed – and finding an unconscious stranger lying in the aisle.

April Wednesday had gone back to her lip-licking.

Revson emerged by the nearside front door. In the bright lights of the bridge he might almost as well have stepped out into daylight. He had no doubt that his activities were being carefully watched from both north and south shores through powerful night glasses, but that was of no concern. What mattered was that he was effectively shielded from the other two coaches, though he seriously doubted whether there was anyone keeping watch in either or, indeed, whether anybody at all was awake. In point of fact both Van Effen and Chrysler were talking quietly to each other in the rear coach, but it was impossible for them to see Revson.

Revson crossed the crash barrier, pulled himself to the rail and peered down. Below, all was total blackness. The submarine could or could not have been there: he just had to hope it was.

He descended and pulled the oil-skin container from under the coach. Inside was the fishing line and a weighted lab. sample canister – weighted, because the wind was still gusting and he had to be sure that the line descended reasonably vertically.

He cut off hooks and lures at the end of the fishing line and attached the canister to the line. He eased the canister over the side and started unwinding the line from its square wooden framework. After about thirty seconds of this he stopped, held the line delicately between forefinger and thumb and waited for some sort of acknowledging tug. There was none. He lowered it another ten feet. Still no answering tug. Perhaps the submarine wasn’t there, perhaps the captain was finding it impossible to maintain position because of the tides and strong currents. But then Admiral Newson had said that he knew just the very man who could do just that and it was unlikely that a man of Newson’s reputation would make any mistake. Revson lowered the line another ten feet then sighed aloud with relief when he felt two sharp tugs on the line.

Twenty seconds later there came another two sharp tugs. Revson overhanded the line in with all possible speed. When he estimated there were only a few feet of line left he leaned far out and pulled in at a much slower speed. He had no wish to bang the radio, however gently, against the steelwork of the bridge. Finally, he had it in his hand, a waterproof bag with the line securely fixed round its neck. He descended to the side of the bus to examine his catch. He cut the securing line with his knife and peered inside. There it was – a tiny gleaming transistorized transceiver.

‘Strange hour to go fishing, Revson,’ Van Effen said behind him. For a second, no more, Revson remained immobilized. He was holding the bag at chest level and his hand slid stealthily into his left inner pocket. ‘I’d like to see just what kind of fish one catches at night in the Golden Gate. Turn round, Revson, slow and easy. I’m a nervous character and you know what that can do to trigger fingers.’

Revson turned round, slow and easy, in the manner of a man who knows all about nervous trigger fingers. He already had the aerosol inside the bag. He said resignedly: ‘Well, I suppose it was too good to last.’

‘So Branson was right all along.’ Van Effen, moon-shaped face as expressionless as ever, was between five and six feet away. He had his machine-pistol in both hands, held loosely, but with his forefinger indubitably on the trigger. Revson would have been a dead man before he’d covered half the distance between them. But Van Effen was clearly expecting no resistance. ‘Let’s see what you have there. Slow and easy, now. Slow and easy’

Slowly, easily, Revson withdrew the aerosol. It was so small that it was almost hidden in his hand. He knew that the can was pressurized to three times the normal and that its effective range was ten feet. Or so O’Hare had told him and Revson had a great deal of faith in O’Hare.

Van Effen shifted the gun under his right arm and pointed the barrel straight at Revson. ‘Let me see that.’

‘Slow and easy?’

‘Slow and easy.’

Revson stretched his arm out unhurriedly. Van Effen’s face was no more than three feet away when he pressed the button. He dropped the aerosol and snatched Van Effen’s machine-pistol: again he wished to obviate any metallic sounds. He looked down at the crumpled figure at his feet. He had come to form a certain regard for Van Effen, both as a man and a professional: but regrets were not in Revson’s line of business. He retrieved the aerosol, took the transceiver and pressed a switch.

‘Revson here.’

‘Hagenbach.’ Revson lowered the volume.

‘This is a closed VHF line? No possibility of interception?’

‘None.’

‘Thank you for the radio. I have a problem here. One of disposal. Van Effen caught me but I caught him. Gas. He recognized me, of course, and can’t remain on the bridge. I could throw him into the Golden Gate but I don’t want to. He’s done nothing to deserve anything like that. He might even turn State evidence. May I speak to the submarine captain, please.’

A new voice came through. ‘Captain here. Commander Pearson.’

‘My congratulations, Captain, and thank you for the radio. You heard what I said to Mr Hagenbach.’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you be prepared to accept another passenger even though he is unconscious?’

‘We aim to please.’

‘Would you have a line or rope aboard easy enough for me to haul up but strong enough to take a man’s weight? I’d need about five hundred feet.’

‘Goodness, no. Wait till I check.’ There was a brief silence, then Pearson’s voice came through again. ‘We have three thirty-fathom coils. Joined together that should be more than enough.’

‘Splendid. I’ll send my cord down again. Moment, please. I’ll have to get a weight for it first.’ He strap-hung the radio round his neck to leave his hands free and his eye lighted almost immediately on Van Effen’s machine-pistol. He secured the cord to the trigger-guard and immediately began to lower away. He spoke into the radio.

‘The line’s on the way down. It’s weighted with Van Effen’s machine-pistol and the cord is tied to the trigger-guard. I mean, I wouldn’t like anyone to shoot themselves by accident.’

‘The Navy is accustomed to the handling of offensive weapons, Mr Revson.’

‘No offence, Captain. When I get the rope up I’ll pass it over a rail and secure it to Van Effen. Double bowline round the thighs, a turn round his waist and his hands tied behind his back so that the rope can’t slip over his shoulders.’

‘We have openings in the Service for resourceful young men like you.’

‘I’m afraid the age qualification cut-off lies far behind me. When I have him ready can you have two or three of your men lower him down over the rail? Damned if I’m going to try myself. As I said, it’s my age.’

‘You wouldn’t believe how modernized today’s Navy is. We’ll use a winch.’

Revson said apologetically: ‘I’m just a landlubber.’

‘We have your cord and gun and nobody’s shot down anybody’ There was a brief pause. ‘Haul away.’

Revson brought in the rope. It looked hardly thicker than a clothes-line, but Revson didn’t doubt that Pearson knew what he was about. He trussed Van Effen in the manner he’d described then dragged him to the edge. He said into the radio: ‘Ready to take the strain?’

‘Ready.’

Revson eased him over the edge. For a moment Van Effen dangled there, then disappeared downwards into the darkness. The rope over the rail went slack and Pearson’s voice came over the radio.

‘We have him.’

‘Intact?’

‘Intact. All for tonight?’

‘Yes. Thank you for your co-operation.’ Revson wondered briefly what Van Effen’s reaction would be when he found himself in a submarine, then spoke again into the radio. ‘Mr Hagenbach?’

‘Here.’

‘You heard it all?’

‘Yes. Not a bad job.’ Hagenbach was not much given to showering fulsome congratulations on his subordinates.

‘I’ve been lucky. The triggering mechanism for the explosives has been deactivated. Permanently’

‘Good. Very good.’ This, from Hagenbach, was the equivalent to the Roman tribute offered a highly successful general after he’d conquered his second or third country in succession. ‘Mayor Morrison will be pleased to know this.’

‘When he knows it. I suggest that in a couple of hours’ time you douse the bridge lights again and effect entry into the east side south tower. You have the men, sir?’

‘Hand-picked.’

‘Don’t forget to tell them to remove the detonators on the explosives. Just precautionary, you know.’

‘Ha!’ Hagenbach’s deflation was like a snowflake in the river. ‘Of course.’

‘And another thought. Before you cut the lights you might use the laser on their south-facing searchlight.’

‘We will, my boy, we will.’

‘Please don’t contact me at any time. I might be carrying the radio on me and might be in a very awkward position, such as talking to Branson, when the call-up buzzer goes off.’

‘We’ll keep a permanent listening watch for you.’

Hagenbach looked round his colleagues. His face almost broke into a smile but he just managed to keep his record intact. He looked at each one in turn, trying to conceal his complacency, but not trying too hard, then finally directed his attention towards the Vice-President.

‘“Mad” was the word you used, sir. “Quite mad.”’

Richards took it very well. ‘Well, perhaps a divine sort of madness. Deactivating that triggering device is a major step forward in itself. If only, as you say, Morrison knew.’

‘There do appear to be no limits to his resourcefulness,’ Quarry said. ‘The right man, in the right place, at the right time, if ever there was. But it still doesn’t solve the central problem of the plight of our hostages.’

‘I wouldn’t worry.’ Hagenbach leaned back comfortably in his chair. ‘Revson will think of something.’

ELEVEN

The only thing Revson was thinking about was how very pleasant it would be to have a few hours’ blissful sleep. He’d dragged an already stirring Johnson from his cramped position in front of the driver’s seat and propped him on the second step of the coach entrance, head and shoulders resting more or less comfortably against the handrail. A minute or two, Revson thought, and he would come to. Even Bartlett was beginning to stir restlessly in his drugged sleep. Different people reacted widely in the length of time it took them to recover from the effect of the knock-out needles. Johnson and Bartlett appeared to have very similar reaction times.

Revson moved silently down the aisle. April Wednesday was wide awake. She swung out to let him pass to the inside seat then sat again. Before removing his soaking coat and dumping it on the floor, he passed her the aerosol. She stooped and thrust it in the bottom of her carry-all. She whispered: ‘I didn’t think I’d see you again. How did it go?’

‘Well enough.’

‘What happened?’

‘You want to know? Really?’

She thought and shook her head. There were still visions of thumb-screws in her head. Instead, she said softly: ‘What’s that round your neck?’

‘Good God!’ From sleepiness Revson was jerked into immediate wide-awakeness. The little transceiver still dangled from his neck. What a sight for a roving Branson. He lifted the transceiver from his neck, undipped the straps, picked up his camera and inserted the radio in its base.

She said: ‘What’s that?’

‘Just a teeny-weeny hand camera.’

‘It’s not. It’s a radio.’

‘Call it what you like.’

‘Where did you get it from? I mean, this coach – everything – has been searched from top to bottom.’

‘From a passing friend. I have friends everywhere. You may well have saved my life there. I could kiss you for it.’

‘Well?’

When it came to kissing she was nowhere near as fragile as she looked. Revson said: ‘That was the nicest part of the whole evening. Of the whole day. Of a whole lot of days. Some day, some time, when we get off this damned bridge, we must try that again.’

‘Why not now?’

‘You’re a brazen -’ He caught her arm and nodded. Somewhere up front someone was stirring. It was Johnson. He rose to his feet with surprising quickness and looked up and down the bridge. Revson could just picture what was going on in his mind. His last recollection would have been of seeing the steps of the lead coach and his natural assumption would be that he had just sat down for a moment to rest. One thing was for sure, he would never admit to Branson that he’d slept for even a second. He stepped into the bus and prodded Bartlett with the muzzle of his machine-gun. Bartlett started awake and stared at him.

‘You asleep?’ Johnson demanded.

‘Me? Asleep?’ Bartlett was amazed, indignant. ‘Can’t a man rest his eyes for a moment without having accusations like that thrown at him?’

‘Just see that you don’t rest them for too long.’ Johnson’s voice was coldly self-righteous. He descended the steps and walked away.

Revson murmured to April: ‘I was sleepy but I’m not now. But I not only want to appear to be asleep, I want to be asleep if any turmoil breaks out in the very near future, which I strongly suspect might happen. Don’t happen to have any sleeping tablets on you, do you?’

‘Why on earth should I? This was supposed to be a day trip, remember.’

‘I remember.’ He sighed. ‘Well, there’s nothing else for it. Give me the aerosol can.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to take just the tiniest whiff of it. Then take the can from my hand and tuck it away again.’

She hesitated.

‘Remember this dinner – those lots of dinners – I’m going to take you to just as soon as we get ashore.’

‘I don’t remember anything of the kind.’

‘Well, remember it now. But I can’t very well take you if I’m at the bottom of the Golden Gate, can I?’

She shuddered and reached reluctantly into her carry-all.

In the rear coach Chrysler put his hand on Branson’s shoulder and shook him gently. Branson, despite what must have been his exhaustion, was immediately awake, immediately alert. ‘Trouble?’

‘I don’t know. I’m worried, Mr Branson. Van Effen left here just, he said, to make a normal check on things. He hasn’t come back.’

‘How long ago was that?’

‘Half an hour, sir.’

‘God. Chrysler, why didn’t you wake me before now?’

‘Two things. I knew you needed sleep and we all depend on you. And if ever I knew a man who could take care of himself it’s Van Effen.’

‘He was carrying his machine-pistol?’

‘Have you ever seen him without it since we came on this bridge?’

Branson rose from his seat, picked up his own gun and said: ‘Come with me. Did you see which way he went?’

‘North.’

They walked to the Presidential coach. Peters, the guard, was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, smoking. He turned quickly as a gentle tap came on the door, removed a key from an inner pocket and turned it in the lock. Branson opened the door from the outside and said quietly: ‘Have you seen any signs of Van Effen?’ He could, in fact, have raised his voice a couple of dozen decibels and it would have made no difference: when it comes to the terms of stertorous snoring, presidents, royalty, generals, mayors and assorted government ministers are no different from the common run of mankind.

‘Yes, Mr Branson. Must have been about half an hour ago. I saw him walk towards the nearest rest-room there.’

‘Did you see him come out again?’

‘No. Quite frankly I wasn’t looking outside. I don’t bother much. My job is to see that none of those gentlemen makes for the communications desk or rushes me and takes away my gun and key. I don’t much fancy having my own gun pointed at my own head. I keep my eyes for what goes on inside this coach not what goes on outside it.’

‘And right you are. No reflections on you, Peters.’ Branson closed the door and heard the key turn in the lock. They made for the nearest rest-room. A very brief search indicated that it was empty. So was the other rest-room. They made their way to the ambulance. Branson opened the rear door, used a small torch to locate a switch and flooded the ambulance with light. A shirt-sleeved O’Hare covered with a single blanket, was sound asleep on the side-hinged cot. Branson shook him awake. It took some shaking.

O’Hare opened the rather bleary eyes, winced at the bright overhead light, looked at the two men then at his watch.

‘Quarter to one! What the hell do you want at this time of the morning?’

‘Van Effen’s missing. Have you seen him?’

‘No, I haven’t seen him.’ O’Hare showed a faint stirring of what could have been professional interest. ‘Was he sick or something?’

‘No.’

‘Then why bother me? Perhaps,’ O’Hare said hopefully, ‘he’s fallen over the side.’

Branson studied the doctor briefly. O’Hare’s eyes were slightly puffy, but Branson was experienced enough to realize that it was the puffiness of sleepiness not of sleeplessness. He gestured Chrysler to leave, followed, switched out the light and closed the door behind him.

Johnson, machine-gun slung, was walking towards them. He came up to them, stopped and said: “Evening, Mr Branson. ‘Morning rather.’

‘Have you seen Van Effen?’

‘Van Effen? When?’

‘Inside the past half hour.’

Johnson shook his head positively. ‘Definitely not.’

‘But he was out on the bridge. You were on the bridge. If he was here, then you must have.’

‘Sorry. No. It’s possible he was and possible that I didn’t see him. I walk to and fro all the time-it’s the best way of keeping awake. I don’t keep glancing over my shoulder all the time.’ Johnson thought or appeared to think. ‘He may have been on the bridge but he may have left it. By that I mean he may for reasons best known to himself have chosen to walk on the other side of the buses.’

‘Why should he do that?’

‘How should I know? Maybe he wanted to keep in concealment. Maybe anything. How should I know what goes on in Van Effen’s mind?’

‘True.’ Branson had no particular wish to antagonize Johnson, who, apart from being an ex-naval officer, was a highly experienced helicopter pilot and an essential part of his escape plans. He said mildly: ‘I just suggest that you stand in the middle here and look around from time to time. You’re hardly likely to go to sleep on your feet-you’re due for relief in fifteen minutes.’

He and Chrysler made their way towards the lead coach. There was a half-dimmed light up front and they could see the glow of Bartlett’s cigar. Branson said: ‘Well, at least all the guards seem to be on the alert – which makes it all the more difficult to understand Van Effen’s disappearance.’

Bartlett said briskly: “Morning, Mr Branson. Making your rounds? All’s well here.’

‘Have you seen Van Effen? In the past half hour?’

‘No. You can’t find him?’

‘Let’s say he’s missing.’

Bartlett thought. ‘I won’t ask stupid questions like “How can he be missing?” Who saw him last?’

‘Peters. Not that that helps. Anybody left this coach in the past half hour?’

‘Nobody’s left this coach since we came in after the fire.’

Branson walked back to Revson’s seat. April Wednesday was wide awake. Revson, eyes closed, was breathing deeply, heavily. Branson shone the torch in his eyes. There was no reaction. Branson lifted an eyelid. There was no involuntary twitching or muscular resistance in the eyelid which is invariable when the eyelid of a conscious person is raised. Branson concentrated his beam on one eye. A rather glazed eye looked out unseeingly, unblinkingly. Branson dropped the eyelid.

Branson said: ‘Out like a light. That’s for sure.’ If there was disappointment in his voice he concealed it well. ‘How long have you been awake, Miss Wednesday?’

‘I haven’t been to sleep. Maybe I shouldn’t have come back to the bridge.’ She smiled tremulously. ‘I’m just a cowardy-custard, Mr Branson. I hate thunderstorms.’

‘I’m not going to hurt you, Miss Wednesday’ He reached out a hand and ran a finger gently across her lips while she looked at him in perplexity. Her lips were as dry as dust. Branson remembered O’Hare’s summing up of her emotional and nervous stability or lack of it.

‘You are scared.’ He smiled and patted her shoulder. ‘Not to worry. The storm’s almost passed away’ He left.

She was scared, but not for the reasons given. She’d been terrified that Branson would try to shake or even slap Revson awake and find it impossible to arouse him.

Twenty minutes later Branson and Chrysler stood by the doorway of the rear coach. Chrysler said: ‘There’s no way he can be on the bridge, Mr Branson.’

‘I agree. Let me hear you think aloud, Chrysler.’

Chrysler made a deprecating gesture. ‘I’m a follower, not a leader.’

‘Nevertheless.’

‘I’ll try. I can speak freely?’ Branson nodded. ‘First, Van Effen didn’t jump. Not only is he the last person I’d ever associate with suicide, but he was also only days away from a seven-figure fortune. He didn’t defect. You said I could speak freely. Again he stood to lose a fortune, he was totally loyal and to defect he’d have had to walk two thousand feet towards either tower and Johnson couldn’t have missed that. So he’s met with an accident. You’re sure it couldn’t have been the doctor?’

‘Positive.’

‘And it wasn’t Revson. The only other person I could think of is General Cartland. He could be dangerous. But Peters -’ Chrysler broke off and thought. ‘You know, Mr Branson, I don’t think this would have happened if Kowalski had been on the prowl tonight.’ He paused. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if Kowalski’s accident really was an accident.’

‘I have wondered. Your conclusions, Chrysler?’

‘Somewhere in this barrel there’s another rotten apple. It could be one of us.’

‘A disquieting thought but one that has to be considered. Although why anyone should throw away a fortune -’

‘Maybe the Government, some way, somehow, has promised someone to double their cut if -’

‘This is just idle speculation.’ Branson’s creased brow gave the lie to his words. ‘Suspecting everyone in sight only leads to hysteria and hysterics is one thing we can’t afford. And your final conclusion on Van Effen?’

‘The same as yours. He’s at the bottom of the Golden Gate.’

Van Effen was, in fact, seated in the communications wagon ashore. Hagenbach and Hendrix were seated across the table from him. Two policemen with drawn guns stood by the doorway. Van Effen wasn’t quite his usual expressionless self. He looked slightly dazed, whether from the shock of finding himself in the predicament he was in or because he was still suffering from the after-effects of the gassing was difficult to say.

Van Effen said: ‘So I underestimated Revson?’

‘When you get up to San Quentin you’ll find quite a few others who will endorse your views.’ Hagenbach looked at Van Effen. ‘Speaking of San Quentin, you appreciate you can’t hope for less than ten years with no hope of remission.’

‘There’s an occupational hazard in every job.’

‘There doesn’t have to be.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘We can do a deal.’

‘No deal.’

‘You’ve nothing to lose and a great deal to gain. Ten years of your life, to be precise.’

‘No deal.’

Hagenbach sighed. ‘I rather thought that might be your attitude. Admirable but misguided.’ He looked at Hendrix. ‘You would agree?’

Hendrix said to the policemen: ‘Handcuff him and take him to the maximum security wing of the military hospital. Tell the doctors that Mr Hagenbach will be along in a few minutes. Make sure the recorders are working.’

Van Effen said: ‘Hospital? Recorders? You mean drugs.’

‘If you won’t co-operate with us we’ll just have to settle for your unwilling co-operation. Unconscious co-operation, if you wish.’

Van Effen cracked his moonface in an almost contemptuous smile. ‘You know that no court will accept a confession made under duress.’

‘We don’t need any confession from you. We already have enough on you to put you away for as long as we wish. We just want a little helpful information from you. A judicious mixture of sodium pentothal and a few other choice herbs will make you sing like a lark.’

‘That’s as maybe.’ The contempt was still in Van Effen’s face. ‘Even you have to obey the law of the land. Lawmen who extract information by illegal means are subject to automatic prosecution and automatic imprisonment.’

Hagenbach was almost genial. ‘Dear me, dear me. I thought even you, Van Effen, would have heard of a Presidential pardon. Or have you forgotten that you kidnapped a President?’

At ten minutes to three that morning an Air Force lieutenant on the south shore twirled two knobs on a highly sophisticated piece of equipment until the cross-hairs on his ultraviolet telescopic sights were lined up dead centre on the centre of Branson’s southern-facing searchlight. He jabbed a button, just once.

At five minutes to three, three men climbed into a strangely shaped low-slung vehicle which was concealed from the bridge by the communications truck. A rather nondescript individual in a grey coat climbed behind the wheel while the other two sat in the back seat. They were clad in grey overalls and looked curiously alike. Their names were Carmody and Rogers. They were both in their mid-thirties and looked tough and competent in a rather gentlemanly way. Whether they were gentlemen or not was not known: whether they were tough and competent was beyond dispute. They didn’t look like explosives experts but they were that too. Both carried pistols and both carried silencers for those pistols. Carmody carried a canvas bag containing a toolkit, two aerosol gas cans, a ball of heavy cord, adhesive tape and a torch. Rogers had a similar bag with a walkie-talkie, Thermos and sandwiches. They were obviously well-equipped for whatever task they had in mind and prepared for a stay of some duration.

At three o’clock all the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge and the adjacent parts of the city blacked out. The man in the grey coat started up his flat truck and the electric vehicle whirred almost silently towards the south tower.

The duty policeman picked up the phone in the communications wagon. It was Branson and he wasn’t in a jovial mood. ‘Hendrix?’

‘The Chief is not here.’

Then get him.’

‘If you could tell me what the matter -’

The bridge lights have gone again. Get him.’

The policeman laid down his phone and walked to the rear of the wagon. Hendrix sat on a stool by the open door, a walkie-talkie in his hand, a cup of coffee in the other. The walkie-talkie crackled.

‘Carmody here, Chief. We’re inside the tower and Hopkins is halfway back with the electric cart already’

Thank you.’ Hendrix put down the walkie-talkie. ‘Branson? A mite anxious?’

Hendrix finishing off his coffee in a leisurely fashion, crossed the wagon, picked up the phone and yawned.

‘I was asleep. Don’t tell me. The lights are out again. We’ve been having blackouts all over the city tonight. Hold on.’

In the Presidential coach, Branson held on. Chrysler came running down the aisle. The President looked at him blearily. The oil barons snored steadily on. Branson, phone still in hand, looked round. Chrysler said quickly: ‘South searchlight is out of action.’

‘It’s not possible.’ Branson’s face was beginning to show deeper lines of strain. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘God knows. It’s black out there. Generator seems fine.’

‘Then run for the north one and turn it round. No. Wait.’ Hendrix was on the phone. ‘One minute you say?’ He turned to Chrysler. ‘Forget it. The lights are coming on again.’ Branson spoke into the phone again. ‘Don’t forget. I want Quarry on this phone at seven sharp.’

Branson replaced the phone and walked up the aisle. The President stopped him.

‘When is this nightmare going to stop?’

‘That’s up to your Government.’

‘I’ve no doubt the Government will accede to your requests. You interest me, Branson, you interest all of us here. Why this bitter grudge against society?’

Branson smiled his empty smile. ‘Society I can take or leave.’

‘Then why the grudge against me? Why the public humiliation? You’ve been invariably polite to everyone else. Isn’t it enough to hold the nation to ransom without making a fool of me at the same time?’

Branson made no answer.

‘You don’t like my politics, perhaps?’

‘Politics bore me.’

‘I was speaking to Hendrix today. He tells me your father is an extremely wealthy banker back east. A multi-millionaire. You envy a man who’s made it to the very top. You couldn’t wait to inherit his bank and his millions so you took the only other course open to you. Crime. And you haven’t made it. And you haven’t had recognition – except that of a few top policemen. So you’re a failure. So you bear a grudge. So you take it out, symbolically, on America’s leading citizen.’

Branson said wearily: ‘You, Mr President, are a lousy diagnostician and an even lousier psychiatrist. Okay, okay, insults again, but this is private. You may fear no more the lash of my tongue. But to think that your decisions can affect over two hundred million Americans.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s how wrong you can get. Branson, senior, that model of integrity and propriety, is a double-dyed bastard. He was also – and still is – a double-dyed crook. A renowned investment banker, you understand, but it didn’t do his investors much good. They were mainly people of modest means. I at least rob wealthy institutions. I found this out when I worked in his bank. I wouldn’t have taken a lousy dollar from him. I didn’t even give him the pleasure of disinheriting me. I just told him what I thought of him and his lousy bank and walked out. As for recognition – who wants it?’

‘You certainly achieved more in the past eighteen hours than your father did in a lifetime.’ The President was understandably sour.

‘That’s notoriety. Who wants that either? And for money – I already am a multi-millionaire.’

‘And still you want more?’

‘My motives are my business. Sorry to have interrupted your sleep, sir.’ Branson left.

Muir, in the next armchair, said: ‘Now, that was rather peculiar.’

‘So you weren’t asleep?’

‘One hates to interrupt. The Branson in the still watches of the night is not the Branson of the daylight hours. Forthcoming, one might almost say. Polite. Almost as if he was seeking for some kind of self-justification. But obviously bitter as hell about something.’

‘If he doesn’t want recognition and doesn’t need the money then what the hell are we doing stuck out on this damned bridge?’

‘Ssh. Mayor Morrison might hear you. I don’t know. With your permission, Mr President, I’m going back to sleep.’

When Carmody and Rogers reached the top of the south tower and stepped outside the lift, Carmody reached an arm in, pressed a button and withdrew his arm as the door began to close. Both men stepped outside and gazed down silently at the darkened and barely visible bridge some five hundred feet below them. After a minute Rogers withdrew the walkie-talkie from his canvas bag, extended the aerial and said: ‘You can cut the power now. The lift’s been down for thirty seconds.’

He replaced the walkie-talkie and removed his overalls. Over his purposely chosen dark shirt he wore a leather harness with a heavy steel buckle at the back. A nylon rope spliced to the buckle was wound several times round his waist. He was in the process of unwinding this when the bridge lights and the aircraft warning lights on top of the towers came on again. Carmody said: ‘A chance of our being spotted, you think?’

‘Thinking of the aircraft lights?’ Carmody nodded. ‘No chance. Not from their angle. And I understand their south searchlight isn’t working too well.’

Carmody unwound the rest of the rope and passed the end to Rogers. ‘A couple of turns, if you would, Charles, then hang on real good.’

‘Depend on it. If you take a dive that means I’ll have to disarm the damned thing myself-with no one to hold me.’

‘We should get danger money for this.’

‘You’re a disgrace to the Army bomb disposal squad.’

Carmody sighed, moved out on to the giant cable and began to remove the detonators from the explosives.

It was six thirty in the morning when Revson stirred and woke. He looked at April and saw that her green eyes were on his. There were heavy shadows under her eyes and her normally pale skin was now even more unnaturally so.

He said: ‘You don’t look to me as if you’ve rested any too well.’

‘I didn’t sleep all night.’

‘What? With me here to look after you?’

‘It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s you.’

He said nothing.

‘Do you feel hung over? After your – your sleeping pill?’

‘No. Guess I must have slipped into a natural sleep. That all you worried about?’

‘No. Branson was here just before one o’clock. He examined your eyes with a torch to see if you were still asleep.’

‘No sense of privacy, that man. You’d think -’

‘I think he’s again cast you in the role of prime suspect.’

‘Suspected of what?’

‘Van Effen’s missing.’

‘Is he now?’

‘You don’t seem much concerned.’

‘What’s Van Effen to me or me to Van Effen? No more alarms during the night?’

‘At three o’clock the bridge lights went off again.’

‘Ah!’

‘Nothing surprises you much, does it?’

‘Why should the lights going out surprise me? Could have been a dozen reasons for it.’

‘I think the reason is sitting right by me.’

‘I was asleep.’

‘You weren’t asleep when you were out on the bridge at midnight. I’ll bet your new little – ah-camera wasn’t all that inactive either.’ She leaned towards him, her eyes moving from one of his to the other. ‘You didn’t by any chance just happen to kill Van Effen last night?’

‘What do you think I am? A murderer for hire?’

‘I don’t know what to think. You will not have forgotten that I heard the contents of the message you sent when I was taken to the hospital. I remember the exact words. “Only Branson and Van Effen are natural leaders. Those two I could kill.’”

‘I did say that. I didn’t kill Van Effen last night. My life on it. Van Effen, in my opinion, is alive and well, if not exactly flourishing.’

‘That’s not what Branson thinks.’

‘How should you know that?’

‘After Bartlett left – was relieved -’

‘Bartlett didn’t mention to Branson that he might just possibly have dozed off for a moment?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Okay, so he was alert and watchful as all hell. And then?’

‘And then this – this gorilla came on.’ Revson looked at the new guard. Hirsute, incredibly beetle-browed, with a negligible clearance between brows and hairline: April’s description didn’t flatter gorillas any.

‘Yonnie,’ Revson said. ‘Branson’s mobile think-tank.’

‘Chrysler came by, more than once. I heard him saying to that man that he and Branson knew that Van Effen was at the bottom of the Golden Gate.’

‘I’m looking forward to seeing his face when he finds out, just possibly for the first time in his life, how wrong he can be.’

‘You don’t want to tell me?’ ‘No. Neither do you.’ ‘You seem very sure of yourself.’ ‘About that, yes.’

‘Can you make an end to all this?’

‘That, I’m afraid, is another matter.’ He thought and smiled. ‘If I try very hard, can I take you out for dinner tonight?’

‘Tonight!’

‘You heard.’

‘You can take me to Timbuktu if you want.’

‘Hussies. You can always tell them.’

The phone call-up in the communications centre in the Presidential coach buzzed at exactly seven o’clock. Branson picked it up. ‘Yes.’

‘Quarry here. We have acceded to your preposterous demands and made the necessary arrangements. We’re waiting to hear from your contact in New York.’

‘Waiting to hear – you should have heard two hours ago.’

Quarry said wearily: ‘We’re waiting to hear from him again.’

‘When did he call?’

‘As you said, two hours ago. He’s making some arrangements with what he calls “European friends”.’

‘He was to have given you a password.’

‘He did. Hardly original, I thought. “Peter Branson”.’

Branson smiled broadly and replaced the receiver. He was still smiling when he stepped out into the early morning sunshine. Chrysler was there and he wasn’t smiling at all. Chrysler was exhausted, he’d temporarily taken over the roles of both Van Effen and Kowalski. But the reason for his worry lay elsewhere. Branson said: ‘Money side is all fixed up.’

‘That’s splendid, Mr Branson.’

Branson’s smile disappeared. ‘You seem less than overjoyed.’

‘There are a couple of things I’d like to show you.’

Chrysler led them to the south-facing searchlight. ‘You probably know that a searchlight is not like an ordinary torch or flashlight. I mean it doesn’t use lamps. It comes from an electric arm that jumps between two electrodes. Something like the sparking plug in a car except that there the spark is intermittent. Here the arc is continuous. Look at the electrode on the left.’

Branson looked. ‘It looks as if it’s been melted or bent or something like that. And one must assume that those electrodes are designed to withstand the tremendous heat generated by the arc’

‘Precisely. And something you haven’t seen. This tiny hole here in the glass.’

‘What are you trying to tell me, Chrysler?’

‘There’s something else.’ Chrysler, walking slowly back with Branson, pointed to the roof of the rear coach. ‘The radio-wave scanner. It’s kaput, knocked out. Since we checked and double-checked that there are no transceivers – apart from ours – on the bridge, we haven’t bothered using it. I just happened to check by accident this morning. I went up and had a look. There’s a scorch mark on the base of the revolving spindle.’

‘Could have been caused by lightning? Both cases? After all, God knows there was plenty of it around last night.’

‘I would point out, Mr Branson, that neither the radio-wave scanner or the searchlight are earthed: both are mounted on rubber wheels.’

‘The scanner -’

Chrysler said patiently: ‘The coach’s rubber wheels.’

‘Then what?’

‘I think they’re using a laser beam on us.’

Even at that early hour all seven of the decisionmakers ashore were gathered round the table in the communications centre when the phone rang. The duty policeman picked it up.

‘Branson here. Get me General Carter.’

‘He can’t be far away. Hang on, please.’ The policeman covered the mouthpiece. ‘It’s Branson for you, General.’

‘Switch on the speaker so that we can all hear what he has to say. Tell him I’ve just come in.’

‘The General has just arrived.’

Carter took the phone. ‘Branson?’

‘Carter, use that laser beam on us just once again and we’ll throw, say, Mr Muir over the side. For starters.’

The other six at the table looked at one another with quick apprehension and, possibly, the relieved thought in their minds that it was Carter who had to field this one.

‘Explain yourself.’

One of our searchlights and radio-wave scanner have been knocked out. All signs point to a laser beam.’

‘You’re a fool.’

There was a brief silence. Branson, clearly, had been taken momentarily aback. Then he said: ‘Muir won’t think so when he’s on his way down to the Golden Gate.’

‘I repeat you’re a fool and if you can listen I’ll tell you why. In the first place you’re not an expert and wouldn’t recognize the signs of laser damage if it was on your breakfast plate. In the second place, there are no such units in the Bay area – if there were I’d be the first person to know. In the third place, if we had laser beams we could have picked off every one of your villains as they walked about the bridge – or don’t you know how accurate and deadly a laser beam is? With the proper telescopic sights you can puncture a football at ten thousand yards.’

‘You seem to know a suspiciously great deal about lasers, General.’ It was a negative remark and Branson could have been either thinking or stalling for time.

‘I don’t deny it. I’ve been trained in them, I even helped in the development of them. Every general has his own trade or speciality. General Cartland is an explosives expert. I’m an electronics engineer. Where was I? Yes. In the fourth place we could have immobilized your helicopters without your knowing anything about it until you tried to take off. You’re putting ideas into my head, Branson. Lastly, the probable cause was an electrical discharge – lightning.’

‘Neither the searchlight nor scanner was earthed. They’re mounted on rubber wheels.’

Carter let irritation creep into his voice. ‘I’d stick to robbing banks if I were you. You don’t have to be earthed to be struck by lightning. It happens to planes hundreds of times a year at altitudes up to twenty-five thousand feet. Would you call those earthed? Lightning has also quite an affinity for metal.’ He paused. ‘Of course, you have a generator for your searchlight, almost certainly a petrol generator and as you wouldn’t want to be asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes you wouldn’t have it inside a coach. Tell me, do you also use the generator to recharge your coach batteries – through a transformer, I mean?’

There was the barest pause then Branson said: ‘Yes.’

Carter sighed. ‘Must I do all the thinking for you, Branson? There you have a massive great lump of metal solidly earthed to the roadway and directly connected to both searchlight and scanner. What a target for any wandering lightning flash. Would there be anything more?’

‘Yes. Pass the word that I want the TV cameras in position and ready at nine a.m.’

Carter hung up. Richards said approvingly: ‘Quite a performance for the crack of dawn. Takes more than a few stars to make a general, I suppose. I have a feeling that our Branson must be feeling more than a little harried by this time. And when shall we be giving our own TV performance?’

Hagenbach said: ‘Directly after Branson’s, I should think. Nine thirtyish. Moment of maximum psychological impact and all that sort of thing.’

‘As our – ah – anchor-man, you have your lines ready?’

Hagenbach didn’t deign to reply.

Branson said: ‘Well, you go along with that?’

‘Carter’s no fool, that’s sure.’ Chrysler was uncertain. ‘But if it were lightning transmitted through the generator why didn’t it just jump from one electrode to the next instead of making a hole in the searchlight glass? I mean, where was it going?’

‘I’m afraid it’s not my field.’

‘I’m beginning to think it’s not mine either. But I’m damned sure there’s something fishy afoot.’ He hesitated. ‘Maybe I wasn’t so bright with that one but I’ve another idea, Mr Branson.’

‘Ideas are what I need. Myself, I’m fresh out of them.’ Coming from Branson, Chrysler thought, that was quite a remarkable statement.

‘I do my best, but I’m no Van Effen. Besides, I feel just about all in. Even you can’t keep going twenty-four hours a day. You need a new lieutenant – not to say a fresh one – and with respects to my colleagues, well -’

‘Out with it.’

‘Now that our men are in possession of the Mount Tamalpais radar stations, I think Parker is quite capable of looking after things himself. I suggest you send a chopper to bring in Giscard. You know him even better than I do. He’s tough, he’s a leader, he’s resourceful, he doesn’t panic and in some ways he’s very astute: by that I mean, all respects to you, Mr Branson, he’s never seen the inside of a courtroom. It would take a helluva load off your back.’

‘You’re quite right, of course. If I didn’t need a break I should have thought of that myself. Get hold of either Johnson or Bradley – no, Bradley: Johnson had guard duty. Tell him to move right away. I’ll get on the phone and tell Giscard. I’ll also warn our friends ashore what’s going to happen to them if they try to interfere. Not that they should need telling by now.’

Branson made his calls, winced at the clattering roar as the Sikorsky lifted cleanly off the bridge and headed north. At least Carter had been telling the truth about one thing: the helicopter hadn’t been subjected to the attentions of a laser beam.

Revson said to April: ‘I don’t want to sound indelicate but wouldn’t you like to pay a visit to the ladies’ – ah – powder-room?’

She stared at him. ‘What on earth for? Oh, well, you’ll have a reason.’

‘Yes. Just repeat this after me.’

She repeated it four times then said: ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes.’

‘Once would have been enough.’

‘Well, you never know what the help’s like these days.’

‘Why can’t you do it yourself?’

‘It’s urgent and I want it done now. There are four ladies aboard this bridge and at least fifty men. Your chances of privacy and seclusion are all that higher.’

‘And what are you going to do? You look pretty scruffy to me.’

‘To rephrase the old song, I’ve left my razor in San Francisco. Then breakfast. The wagon’s due at seven thirty’

‘I wish I had an appetite.’ She rose and spoke briefly to Yonnie who bared his teeth in a fearful grimace that he probably regarded as being a charmingly graceful assent.

The transistor in front of Hagenbach buzzed. He pulled it towards him and raised the volume. The other six men bent forward in eager expectancy. This call could be from only one source. They were wrong.

‘Mr Hagenbach?’ A feminine voice.

‘Speaking.’

‘April Wednesday’

Hagenbach took it with remarkable aplomb. ‘Carry on, my dear.’

‘Mr Revson wants to know as soon as possible if it’s possible to reduce the last resort to a non-lethal level. He wants you to have as much time as possible to try. That’s why I’m calling now.’

‘I’ll try. I can’t guarantee.’

‘He says to lay down a pattern of smoke bombs one minute before. He says he’ll radio you one minute before that.’

‘And I want to talk to Revson just as urgently. Why isn’t he doing this himself?’

‘Because I’m in the ladies’ toilets. Somebody’s coming.’ The voice trailed away in a whisper and the transceiver went dead.

Hagenbach called to the communications centre: ‘The armour. Emergency. General Carter. I’m going to need your help on this one.’

‘The ladies’ toilet,’ Quarry said unbelievingly. ‘Are there no depths to which this man of yours won’t descend?’

‘Be reasonable. You didn’t expect him to be there himself. Knowing Revson, I rate that an “A” for gentlemanly conduct.’

Vice-President Richards spoke slowly and distinctly. ‘Up in the hospital you told us that you didn’t know what “the last resort” was.’

Hagenbach looked at him coldly. ‘Vice-Presidents should know better. No one has ever become the head of the FBI without being a master of prevarication.’

Breakfast arrived on mid-bridge at seven thirty. Branson passed it up which, in view of the shock awaiting his nervous system, was perhaps as well. At seven forty-five Bradley made a perfect touchdown in his Sikorsky. Giscard, grim-faced and purposeful, stepped down on to the bridge not, oddly enough, looking at all incongruous in his police sergeant’s uniform. He probably had more photographs taken of him in the next five minutes than he’d had in the whole of his previous existence – which would not have been difficult: Giscard, as a purely professional safeguard, made it his business never to have his photograph taken. But even the redoubtable Giscard had come too late. At eight o’clock an already troubled Branson – no hint of concern showed in his composed and confident face – received his first and far from faint intimations of mortality.

Branson was deep in conversation with a fresh and confident Giscard when Reston, duty guard on the Presidential coach, came hurrying up. ‘Phone, Mr Branson.’

Giscard said: ‘I’ll take care of things, Mr Branson. You try to get some rest.’ He touched him lightly on the shoulder. There’s nothing to worry about.’ Giscard had no means of knowing it but it was the most way-out prophecy he’d ever made or would ever be likely to make again.

It was Hagenbach on the phone. He said: ‘I’ve bad news for you, Branson. Kyronis doesn’t want to see you. Not now. Not ever.’

‘Who?’ Branson saw the marbled knuckles on the hand holding the phone and made a conscious effort to relax.

‘K-Y-R-O-N-I-S. The President of that Caribbean island paradise of yours. I’m afraid you’re not welcome.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m afraid you do. And I’m afraid your worldwide publicity campaign has scared the poor man out of his wits. We didn’t find him, he called us. He’s on the international line right now. Shall I patch him in?’

Branson didn’t say whether he should patch him in or not. A high-pitched voice with a pronounced Caribbean accent came to his ear.

‘You fool, Branson. You madman. You wide-mouthed boaster. You had to tell the world that you were going to the Caribbean. You had to tell the world that it had a prison stockade in one corner. You had to tell the world that it had no extradition treaty with the United States. You damn fool, how long do you think it would take American Intelligence to piece that together? I called them before they came calling on me. Their fleet has already moved out from their Guantánamo base in Cuba. Their C54s are lined up on the runways in Fort Lauderdale with God knows how many paratroopers and Marines standing by. They could take our little principality over in ten minutes and your Vice-President has assured me that they would consider it a pleasure.’ Kyronis stopped to take what appeared to be his first breath since he started his tirade. Branson said nothing.

‘Megalomania, Branson. Megalomania. I always warned you it was the one thing that could bring you down. Sheer, bloody megalomania.’

Branson hung up the phone.

TWELVE

Giscard took the news with remarkable aplomb. ‘So Kyronis has ratted on us. It’s not the end of the world and I don’t see that it changes a single thing. I think this is just part of a war of nerves, attrition, you know, psychological warfare. Okay; so you’ve been here – what is it? – twenty-three hours and I don’t know what the strains have been like. But I’m sure of this – with no other way of getting at you they’re trying to pressurize you into making a mistake. It’s kind of like a poker game but with no cards in their hands all they can do is bluff.’ Giscard nodded to the Presidential coach. ‘What’s bluff when you hold all the cards in your hands?’

‘There speaks the voice of reason, is that it?’ Branson smiled. ‘You forget that I know Kyronis’s voice.’

‘Sure you do. I don’t doubt it was Kyronis. I also don’t doubt that the Government, through some fast checking by the CIA or the FBI, got to him first.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because Kyronis has your VHF number. He could have radioed you direct instead of causing all this hullabaloo. But that wouldn’t have suited our friends’ department of psychological warfare.’

‘And I’ve had an idea, Mr Branson.’ Chrysler had shed much of his weariness since Giscard’s arrival. ‘Who needs Kyronis? The Presidential Boeing can reach half a dozen countries anywhere in the world that have no extradition treaty with the USA. A dozen, for all I know. But there’s no need to go further than the Caribbean. You’ve been thinking big all along, Mr Branson. Now’s the time to keep on thinking big.’

Branson rubbed his forehead. ‘Think big aloud. Someone has to this morning.’

‘Havana. There’s no extradition treaty with them. Sure, there’s an agreement to repatriate hijackers, but no one’s going to return the hijacker of the Presidential Boeing – especially if the President has a pistol to his head. Okay, so the US is prepared to take over Kyronis’s tiny islet. Cuba is a vastly different proposition. Castro has a first-class army, air force and navy. Any attempt to get the President out would lead to nothing short of full-scale war. And don’t forget that Castro is Moscow’s blue-eyed boy. An armed invasion of Cuba would bring a violent reaction and I don’t think the US would be prepared to risk an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation over a miserable half billion dollars.’

Branson nodded slowly. ‘Curiously enough, that was where Van Effen wanted to go. And for much the same reasons.’

‘And can’t you see how Castro would just love it? He’d go on TV and weep and wail and wring his hands and say how much he’d love to be of help but his hands are hopelessly tied. Then when the cameras are switched off he falls about the place laughing.’

Branson said: ‘Gentlemen, you have restored my faith in human nature. At least my own nature. Havana it is. Now. Our next show is at nine. All the tackle and explosives as before. Peters can drive the electric truck as before. Bartlett and Boyard fixed the last lot – let’s give Reston and Harrison a go.’ Branson smiled. ‘They think they’re better than Bartlett and Boyard and should have had the privilege of the first attempt. See they carry walkie-talkies. Which reminds me. Chrysler, I want to be in a position where I can lay hands on a telephone wherever I happen to be. I don’t want to have to keep running to the President’s coach. I just want a direct line to Hagenbach and company. You can fix one up in our coach?’

‘I’d have to go through the local exchange.’

‘So what? By all means. Tell them to keep the line permanently open. I want a lead to where I’ll be sitting when the TV is on. And can you get a radio-telephone link from the lead helicopter?’

“Turn a knob, is all. What’s that for, Mr Branson?’

‘We’re going to need it some time. Better sooner than never.’

It was another glorious morning of blue and gold, a cloudless sky, a fairy tale setting which achieved the impossible of making even the grim fortress of Alcatraz into an islet of shimmering beauty. As on the previous day a low deep bank of fog was approaching from the west. Out of all three coaches there was only one person who was not savouring the delights of the morning or, in the case of Branson’s men, on duty.

Revson sat in his seat, elbow on the window ledge, hand cupped to his cheeks so that no one could see his lips moving.

Hagenbach said: “Turn the volume down, put the transceiver to your ear.’

‘Impossible. My head and shoulders are above window level. I can bend down for a few seconds. But be quick.’

Revson’s camera was upside down on his knees, the transceiver nestling in the opened recess. He turned down the volume and put his head low. After about fifteen seconds he straightened and looked carelessly around. Nobody was paying any attention to him. He turned up the volume.

‘Well?’ Hagenbach’s voice was querulous. ‘Aren’t you surprised?’

‘Not all that much. Are you going to tell him?’

‘Remember, you don’t give any signal to go until I’m all through at this end.’

‘I’ll remember. How about the CUBs?’

‘The experts aren’t all that happy about the prospects.’

‘Then use a few of them only and make up for the rest in gas bombs. Are you in touch with the two men at the top of the tower?’

‘Carmody and Rogers. Yes.’

‘Tell them if they nab anyone to take them down to the pier of the tower.’

‘Why?’

‘Look. I’m exposed. Is the Admiral there?’

Hagenbach refrained from questions though it must have cost him a considerable effort. Newson came through.

Revson said: ‘Do you have any small, quiet boats, sir?’

‘Electrically powered?’

‘Ideally.’

‘In abundance.’

‘When the fog comes in, do you think you could get one alongside the pier of the south tower?’

‘Consider it done.’

‘With a breeches-buoy pistol and suitable ropes?’

‘No problem.’

‘Thank you, sir. Mr Hagenbach?’

‘Yes. Secretive bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, sir. The laser unit is ready for action? Ah, good. Would you have it lined up on the drive shaft of the rotor of the lead helicopter – that’s to say, the one furthest from you. Have it locked in position so that it can hit its target even through dense smoke.’

‘Why on earth -’

‘Somebody coming.’

Revson looked around. There was nobody coming, but he’d no desire to bandy words with Hagenbach. He clipped the base of the camera, slung it over his shoulder and left the coach.

‘A bit of trouble, sir.’ Chrysler handed a walkie-talkie to Branson.

‘Reston here, Mr Branson.’ Reston and Harrison had set off less than ten minutes earlier for the south pier. ‘The lift is out of order.’

‘Damn. Wait.’ Branson looked at his watch. Eight twenty-five. His performance was due to start at nine. He crossed to the rear coach where Chrysler had already obtained a direct line to the communications centre ashore.

‘Branson here.’

‘Hendrix. Don’t tell me what you’re after, I know. I was speaking to the bridge commissioners a few moments ago. They tell me that the breaker for the tower lifts was burnt out during the night.’

‘Why isn’t it repaired?’

‘They’ve been working on it for three hours.’

‘And how much longer -’

‘Half an hour. Perhaps an hour. They can’t be certain.’

‘Call me the moment it’s fixed.’

He returned to his walkie-talkie. ‘Sorry, you’ll have to climb. The lift’s being repaired.’

There was a silence then Reston said: ‘Jesus. All that way?’

‘All that way. It’s not Everest. Should be straightforward. And you have your manual.’ He laid down the walkie-talkie and said to Giscard: ‘I don’t envy them, myself. Another psychological pin-prick?’

‘Could be. But after a night like last night, well -’

Revson joined O’Hare by the west barrier. He said without preamble: ‘How hermetic is the rear door of your ambulance?’

O’Hare had ceased to be surprised at anything Revson said. ‘Why?’

‘Say oxygen were to be abstracted from the inside. How would you get on?’

‘We’ve oxygen bottles, of course. Not to mention the oxygen in the cardiac unit.’

‘You may need it. Ever heard of CUB-55s? Short for Cluster Bomb Units.’ O’Hare shook his head. ‘Well, there’s liable to be a few around in the next hours – this morning, I shouldn’t be surprised. They are lethal asphyxiation bombs, one of the more delightful of the recent advances in weaponry. They suck the oxygen from the air and leave not a mark on the victims.’

‘You should know. But – well, it’s far fetched.’

‘A pity you couldn’t ask the hundreds who died at Xuan Loc because of them. The Cambodian Government made frequent use of them in South-East Asia. The bombs, I regret to say, were supplied then by the United States Navy’

‘This classified information?’

‘No. Hanoi made plenty of noise about it at the time.’

‘And you’re going to use those bombs?’

‘Yes. I’m trying to have them denatured, you know, their lethal potential lessened. At least, the experts are.’

‘Can they do it?’

‘There’s a certain lack of optimism.’

‘Who thought this one up? You?’ Revson nodded, just once. ‘You, Revson, are a coldblooded bastard. Hasn’t it occurred to you that the innocent will suffer, maybe die, as well as the guilty?’

‘Not for the first time, I repeat that all doctors should be given an intelligence test before they’re allowed to practise. The innocent will not suffer. The innocent will be in their coaches and, because it’s going to be hot, they’ll have the air-conditioning on. That means closed doors and the recirculation of cleaned used air. When you see the first smoke bomb drop, make for cover.’

Revson walked away and touched Grafton on the arm. ‘May I have a word with you?’ Graftonhesitated, shook his head in puzzlement, then followed. When he judged they were out of earshot of the nearest person, Revson stopped.

Grafton said: ‘Do we have to take a walk to talk?’

‘In this case, yes. We haven’t been introduced. You’re Mr Grafton of AP, doyen of the newsmen on this bridge?’

‘If you want to flatter me, yes. And you’re Mr Revson, food-taster to Royalty.’

‘Just a sideline with me.’

‘You have another business. Don’t tell me.’ Grafton regarded him with cool grey, judicial eyes. ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

‘Thank you for sparing me the trouble of convincing you. I’m glad your name’s not Branson.’

General Cartland said: ‘If you can’t have those CUB-55s denatured, as you call it, some local funeral parlour is in for a brisk bit of business.’

‘You prepared to use that cyanide pistol?’

‘Touché. ‘

Several minutes before nine Branson had his usual stage set. He seemed as calm and relaxed as ever, the only change in his normal behaviour being that he had been polite, almost deferential, in his seating of the President. At nine o’clock the cameras began to turn.

At nine o’clock, too, Reston and Harrison, sweating profusely and complaining bitterly of the pain in their legs, reached the top of their last ladder. Rogers, eyeing them over his silenced pistol, said sympathetically: ‘You must be exhausted after your long climb, gentlemen.’

Giscard whispered in Branson’s ear: ‘You better get on with it, Mr Branson. Looks as if that fog is coming in just about bridge level.’

Branson nodded, then carried on speaking into the microphone. ‘So I’m sure you will be all as delighted as I am to know that the Government has acceded to our very reasonable requests. However, until we receive final confirmation, we feel we might as well pass our time profitably and instruct and entertain you at the same time. In show-business jargon, there will be repeat performances at eleven and one o’clock. I really do urge you to watch those. You will certainly never see other performances like them in your lives.

‘As before, you can see the electric truck with its explosives and equipment leaving for the south tower. Now if we can have the zoom camera we shall be seeing two of my colleagues appearing on top of the south tower.’ The zoom camera obliged but the top of the tower was bereft of any sign of life. A minute later it was still bereft.

Branson said easily: ‘There seems to be a slight hold-up. A temporary delay. Please don’t go away’ He was smiling the confident smile of one who knew that not one of his millions of watchers would have dreamed of going away when the phone on the road beside his chair rang. Branson smiled at the unseen millions, said: ‘Excuse me,’ covered the microphone with his hand and picked up the phone.

‘Hendrix here. Lift’s fixed.’

‘Now you tell me. Do you know how long it should take a man to climb up to the top?’

‘Don’t tell me your men have – rather are trying to climb to the top. They must be mad. You must be mad to have sent them.’

‘They have a manual.’

‘What manual?’

‘A copy of the original.’

‘Then they can be lost for days. Because of internal changes that manual was scrapped twenty years ago. They can be lost all day in there.’

Branson replaced the phone. Still covering the microphone he said to Giscard: ‘Lift’s working. Get Bartlett and Boyard here at the double. Tell them not to forget the weight.’ He spoke into the microphone again. ‘Sorry, viewers. A slight hitch.’

The viewers spent the next ten minutes being rewarded with a variety of panoramic shots of the Golden Gate and the marvellous surrounding scenery, with Branson giving an occasional commentary. After ten minutes he said: ‘Right. South tower again.’

Bartlett and Boyard were there, hands held high in salute. Then, along with Peters, they repeated their previous day’s performance and had the second strap of explosives alongside the first in a remarkably short space of time. Bartlett and Boyard waved again and disappeared inside the tower. Rogers eyed them over his silenced pistol. ‘You really are experts. What a pity. Now you’ve put us to the trouble of having to remove a second set of detonators.’

The phone by Branson rang as he was delivering a farewell speech to the camera. He picked it up.

‘Hagenbach here. Sorry to have to cut in and cut you off but we have our own little show to watch. You’re off the air now and your viewers are now seeing and watching us. Same channel. We’ve just watched your splendid production. Now, perhaps, you’d like to watch our little show.’

The screen’s picture changed to a close-up of Hagenbach. To San Franciscans, at least, his background was unquestionably that of the Presidio.

Hagenbach said: ‘There seems little we can do to prevent this criminal Branson from achieving his criminal ends. But from all this, some good might yet come. I give you Mr Richards, the Vice-President of the United States.’

Richards made an imposing figure at the microphone. A convivial and highly articulate man at the best of times, years of dominating conferences and campaigning across the nation had honed his natural abilities as a speaker until he had reached a stage where he could have recited the alphabet backwards and still held his audience spellbound. But he put his gifts into cold storage that morning: this was a moment that was neither for conviviality nor rhetoric. As became a man at the very heart of a national crisis, he was stern, quiet and, exceptionally for him, brief and to the point.

‘Unfortunately, what you have just heard is correct. No matter how distasteful and humiliating this present situation may be, there is no possibility in the world of endangering the President, his royal guests and the good name of America. We submit to blackmail. This criminal Branson would appear to have got away with the blackmailing equivalent of murder but I wish him to listen to me very carefully. On information I have received this morning, information, as I shall shortly prove, of the most reliable kind, I believe that Branson is very near the end of his road. I believe he will very soon be alone and friendless. I believe he will have no one left in the world to turn to. I believe every man’s hand will be against him. And I believe that those hands that will be reaching out most eagerly to strike him down, as they most surely will, are the hands of his devoted criminal followers who misguidedly imagine their leader to be a man of honour and integrity’ Richards lapsed into momentary rhetoric. ‘Those are hands that will literally cut him down just as he, figuratively, intends to stab them all in the back.’

Some of Branson’s men were looking at him in a vague and baffled incomprehension. Revson and O’Hare exchanged enquiring glances. Only Branson seemed entirely at his ease, lounging back in his chair, a faintly contemptuous smile on his lips.

‘I said that I had information of the most reliable kind. As your Vice-President, I have been accused more than once of not exactly being given to understatement. In this case I was. What I have is impeccable proof. Ladies and gentlemen and, indeed, viewers, throughout the world, may I present to you the man who, until the early hours of this morning, was Branson’s most devoted lieutenant. Mr Johann Van Effen.’

The camera changed to a picture of five men in medium shot sitting in adjoining chairs. The man in the centre was unquestionably Van Effen, who appeared to be his normal relaxed self and to be chatting with seeming amiability to his companions. The picture wasn’t close enough to show the glazed eyes, the fact that he was still under the influence of drugs, the drugs which had made him talk his head off during three long hours of probing by a skilled police psychiatrist who, in turn, had received continual prompting from Hagenbach.

Richards went on: ‘From left to right: Admiral Newson, naval commander, west coast: San Francisco Chief of Police Hendrix: Mr Van Effen: Mr Hagenbach, head of the FBI: and General Carter, officer commanding, west coast. If I may be permitted a feeble joke, I doubt whether Van Effen has ever found himself in such law-abiding company in his life.’

Branson had very definitely stopped both lounging and relaxing. He was sitting far forward in his chair and for once his feelings were showing: the expression on his face could be described as nothing else other than stunned disbelief.

‘Van Effen,’ Richards said, ‘defected in the very early hours of this morning. He defected for what he, and indeed I, believe to have been very compelling reasons. He departed for the excellent reason that he is still a comparatively young man and would like to live a little longer. Incidentally, as the acting Head of State, I have already guaranteed Van Effen immunity from the due processes of the law. His information has been invaluable, as has been his information on eight major robberies in the past three years in each of which – as we now know – Branson was the leader.

‘But I digress. He defected because he feared for his life. He defected because Branson had suggested to him that he and Van Effen share the ransom money equally. The rest could go to hell and, presumably, prison. Apart from the fact that Van Effen does appear to be possessed of a belief in honesty between thieves, he was only too well aware that if he went along with this the next back to feel the blade of a knife – literally – would be his own. Van Effen feels strongly that his ex-comrades should be made aware of what lies in store for them. He has, he tells me, already persuaded four of Branson’s men to defect along with him and we expect them shortly. When they arrive we shall show them on the screen. If you can at all, I suggest you don’t stray too far from your television sets.’

O’Hare said: ‘Jesus! Talk about sowing seeds of dissension. How’s Branson going to cope with this, recover from this? Brilliant. As the Veep says, who’s going to trust him now among his own men. This your idea, Revson?’

‘I wish it were. But even I am not as crafty, evil and devious as that. The unmistakable hand of Hagenbach.’

‘I never thought that Van Effen -’

‘Whatever you’re about to say, he didn’t. Hagenbach made sure that there were no close-ups of Van Effen. Had there been, even a layman would have seen that Van Effen was doped to the eyes.’

‘Doped? If he defected -’

‘An involuntary defection. I gassed him and lowered him down to an – ah – passing submarine.’

‘Of course. What else? An – ah – passing submarine.’ O’Hare favoured him with the look of a psychiatrist who finds himself with an intractable case on his hands.

‘Dear, dear. You don’t believe me.’

‘But of course, old boy.’

‘You’re under stress again,’ Revson said kindly. ‘Talking English English.’ He patted the base of his camera. ‘How do you think I got hold of a brand-new radio transceiver in the middle of the night?’

O’Hare stared at him. He said with an effort: ‘And the four other promised defectors. Submariners all?’

‘Hell, no. Forcible abduction, all within the past half hour.’

O’Hare got back to his staring.

In the Mount Tamalpais radar station, Parker, until lately Giscard’s number two, looked away from the TV set and at the four men gathered around him. He said: ‘Sold down the river.’

From the silence that met this observation, it was clear that the others agreed with him. But it could hardly have been called an agreeable silence.

Richards was trying hard to show that he was not actively enjoying himself. He said into his microphone: ‘I can see that the fog is going to pass over the bridge so you won’t be able to see me in a couple of minutes. Don’t suppose it will last long, though. When it clears, we’ll show you your four other faithful henchmen who have defected from you. I will leave you with one last observation. Your money’s guaranteed, but watch how you go: I understand it takes exactly six minutes to block the major runways at Havana Airport.’

Branson, his face quite without expression, rose and walked to the rear coach, Giscard following. It was noticeable that his own men either looked at him with puzzlement or thoughtfulness or just averted their eyes. After entering the coach, Giscard went to the back and returned with scotch and two glasses. He poured two large drinks and said: I’m against drinking in the morning, too.’

Branson, most uncharacteristically, drained half his glass in one gulp. He said: ‘How does your back feel, Giscard?’

‘With eleven years working for you and a seven-figure bank balance, my back feels okay. I suggest we cut the comedy, Mr Branson. This could be damned serious. With the exception of Van Effen, Yonnie and myself, none of your men has known you for even as long as a year. I forgot Chrysler. But the rest – did you watch their faces as we came here?’

Branson shook his head slowly. ‘They just didn’t know what to think. Blame them?’

‘No. Blame Van Effen?’

‘If I believed the sun wasn’t going to set tonight, I’d believe he defected. He didn’t. Notice that the camera showed no close-up, and that he wasn’t invited to speak?’ He broke off as Chrysler appeared at the doorway.

Branson said: ‘It’s all right. Come in. You look unhappy.’

‘I am unhappy. I heard what Giscard just said. They let Van Effen stay in the background because he was drugged. I’ll bet he told them his life story without realizing one word of what he was saying. Van Effen defect? Never. And there’s another thing I’m unhappy about. Bartlett and Boyard should have been back by this time. They haven’t even appeared at the south tower. What’s more, they’re not going to. I know who the next four so-called defectors are going to be.’

Branson said: ‘Drugs. No defection. Coercion. We’re all agreed on that. But – how did Van Effen leave the bridge!’

Giscard said: ‘God knows. I wasn’t here. Could it have been during one of the two blackouts you had that night?’

Branson said: ‘He was with me on both occasions. Any ideas, Chrysler?’

‘None. It’s as I said, Mr Branson. There’s a rotten apple in the barrel somewhere.’ He looked out moodily at the fog drifting over the bridge. ‘It’s getting so that I don’t like this bridge much any more.’

Carmody removed the last of the detonators from the second strap of explosives and gingerly rejoined Rogers on the top of the south tower. He picked up the walkie-talkie. ‘General Carter, please.’ There was a few seconds’ delay then Carter came through. Carmody said: ‘We’ve got them, sir. Shall Rogers and I take a stroll across to the other side? Branson, I believe, has promised another show at eleven. It’ll be the west cable, this time, and we quite like our job of being a reception committee.’

‘It’s a sensible precaution although I somehow don’t think that Branson is going to risk any more of his men in the south tower.’

‘Ah! Our four friends made it to terra-firma, sir?’

‘With me now. Pity you haven’t a TV up there, you and Rogers. Some splendid shows on today.’

‘There’ll be repeats. We must leave, sir. Fog’s thinning quickly down below.’

The fog, in fact, moved into the bay in less than five minutes leaving the bridge brilliant in the bright sunshine. Branson, pacing up and down a short section of the bridge, stopped as Chrysler approached.

‘Hagenbach on the phone, Mr Branson. He says to switch on the television in two minutes’ time.’

Branson nodded. ‘We all know what this is going to be.’

This time Hagenbach was the master of ceremonies. He hadn’t prepared his lines as well as the Vice-President but he made his point with considerable impact.

‘It does look as if Branson’s criminal empire, if not at least crumbling, is showing signs of coming apart at the seams. The Vice-President promised you that more defectors would appear. That Van Effen had talked four more into deserting the sinking ship. Well, they have just so done as you can see for yourselves.’

Another camera picked up a table with four men sitting around it, each with a glass in his hand. A bottle stood in the middle of the table. They could hardly be described as a gay and happy group but then they had no reason to be.

Hagenbach moved into camera range. ‘There they are then, ladies and gentlemen. Left to right, Messrs Reston, Harrison, Bartlett and Boyard. Incidentally, one of Branson’s top men is in hospital with a fractured skull. One does wonder what will happen next. Thank you for your kind attention.’

The cameras had just stopped turning when a policeman came running up to Hagenbach. ‘Telephone for you, sir. It’s Mount Tamalpais.’

Ten seconds later Hagenbach was inside the communications wagon, listening intently. He replaced the receiver and looked at Hendrix, Newson and Carter. ‘How long would it take to provide two helicopters, one with a TV camera and crew, the other with armed police?’

Carter said: ‘Ten minutes. Twelve at the most.’

Giscard said bitterly, ‘Attrition, attrition, attrition. Pin-pricks and more pin-pricks. A steady undermining of confidence in those of us who are left. And not a thing in the world you can do about it, nothing to justify any violent retaliatory action against the hostages. They’re just using the TV to play you at your own game, Mr Branson.’

‘Yes, they are.’ Branson didn’t seem unduly disturbed: what he’d seen had come neither as shock nor surprise to him. ‘One has to admit that they’re quite good at it.’ He looked at Giscard and Chrysler. ‘Well, gentlemen, I’ve made up my mind. Your thoughts?’

Giscard and Chrysler looked briefly at each other. It was not in character with Branson that he should ask anyone’s opinion.

‘We’ve got our hostages trapped here,’ Chrysler said. ‘Now I’m the one who’s beginning to feel trapped on this damned bridge. We’ve no freedom of movement.’

Giscard said: ‘But we would have in the Presidential Boeing. And it has the finest communications system in the world.’

‘So we make orderly preparations for, if need be, an emergency take-off. I am in agreement. They shall pay for this. Just to show them I mean what I say, I’m still going to bring down their damned bridge. Now, I hardly think it would be wise to wrap the remaining two explosive devices round the west cable at the top of the north tower.’

‘Not,’ Giscard said, ‘unless you want to have another couple of involuntary defectors.’

‘So we wrap them round the cable just where we are here. At the lowest point, between the two helicopters. That should do satisfactorily enough, I think.’

Some half hour later, shortly after the last two of the explosive straps had been secured to the west cable, Chrysler came up to Branson. ‘Hagenbach. He says there’ll be an interesting programme coming on in just two minutes. Five minutes after the programme he’s going to call you. He says two very important messages are coming through from the east.’

‘I wonder what that conniving old devil is up to now?’ Branson went and took his accustomed viewing place. Automatically, the seats beside and behind him filled up. The screen came to life.

It portrayed something that looked like an enormous white golf ball – one of the Mount Tamalpais radar scanners. Then the camera zoomed in on a group of about ten men, policemen in their shirtsleeves, all armed with submachine-guns. Slightly in front of them stood Hendrix, a microphone in his hand. The camera followed as Hendrix moved forwards towards an opening door. Five men emerged, all with their hands high. The leading man of the five stopped when he was within three feet of Hendrix.

Hendrix said: ‘You’re Parker?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Hendrix. Chief of Police, San Francisco. Do you men surrender voluntarily?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Better than being hunted and gunned down by you – or stabbed in the back by that bastard Branson.’

‘You’re under arrest. Get into the van.’ Hendrix watched them go then spoke again into the microphone. ‘When it comes to making speeches, I’m afraid I’m not in the same league as the Vice-President or Mr Hagenbach, so I won’t even try. All I can say, with due modesty on the part of all of us, is that ten defectors is not a bad morning’s bag. And the morning is not yet over. Incidentally, there will be no more broadcasts from us for at least an hour.’

Revson stood up and glanced round casually. In the space of only two seconds he caught the eye of both General Cartland and Grafton. Slowly, casually, the newsmen and the hostages began to drift off to their separate coaches, the former presumably to write up their dispatches or refill cameras, the latter, almost certainly, in the pursuit of refreshments – the President looked particularly thirsty. Besides, the comfort of an air-conditioned coach was vastly to be preferred to the already uncomfortable heat out on the bridge.

Giscard said in anger: ‘The fool, the fool, the bloody fool! Why did he have to let himself be duped so easily?’

There was just a trace of weary acceptance in Branson’s voice. ‘Because he had no Giscard there beside him, that’s why.’

‘He could have phoned you. He could have phoned me.’

‘What might have been. No older phrase in any language. I don’t really blame him.’

Chrysler said: ‘Has it occurred to you, Mr Branson, that when you’ve received your ransom money and returned the hostages, they might want most if not all of it back if you want their prisoners freed? They’re no fools and they know damned well that you wouldn’t let your men down.’

‘There’ll be no deal. I admit it’s going to make things a bit more tricky, but there’ll be no deal. Well, I suppose I’d better go and see what friend Hagenbach wants.’ Branson rose and walked towards the rear coach, his head bent in thought.

Mack, the guard, waited until the last of his illustrious hostages had entered the Presidential coach, locked the door and pocketed the key. His machine-pistol was dangling from one hand. He turned round to see Cartland’s little pistol not three feet from him.

Cartland said: ‘Don’t try anything, I beg you. Try to lift and fire that gun and it is the last thing you ever do.’ Cartland’s calm impersonal voice carried immense conviction. ‘Gentlemen, I ask you to bear witness to -’

‘That funny little pop-gun?’ Mack was openly contemptuous. ‘You couldn’t even hurt me with that thing, but I’d still cut you to pieces.’

‘Bear witness to the fact that I warned this man that this “pop-gun” is loaded with cyanide-tipped bullets. Just has to break the skin and you won’t even feel it. You’ll be a dead man before you hit the floor.’

‘In my country,’ the King observed, ‘he’d already be dead.’

With the possible exception of Yonnie, none of Branson’s men was a fool. Mack was no fool. He handed over his gun. Cartland marched him to the rear of the coach, pushed him into the washroom, extracted the inside key and locked the door from the outside.

The President said: ‘Well?’

Cartland said: ‘There’s going to be some rather violent unpleasantness outside in a minute or two. I don’t want to risk any of you at this late date. I want this door kept sealed and locked because our friends ashore are going to use a special and very lethal bomb which sucks oxygen from the atmosphere and leaves you very dead. Thirdly, Branson is going to come around very quickly with the intention of shooting up one or two of you if the nastiness doesn’t stop. But if the door’s locked and he can’t get in he can fire all day at this bullet-proof glass and make no impression. Fourthly, although we now have two guns, we’re not going to use them when we do leave here as we must eventually. I don’t want a gunfight at the OK corral. We’ll be loaded into a helicopter but the helicopter isn’t going any place.’

The President said: ‘Where did you get all this information from?’

‘A well-informed source. Fellow who gave me this gun. Revson.’

‘Revson. How does he tie in? Don’t know the chap.’

‘You will. He’s stated as Hagenbach’s successor in the FBI.’

The President was plaintive. ‘It’s like I always say: no one ever tells me anything.’

Revson was much less verbose and not at all forthcoming with explanations. Ensuring that he was the last man in, he turned and chopped the unsuspecting Peters below the right ear just as Peters turned the key in the lock. Revson relieved him of both key and machine-pistol, dragged him in and propped him in the driver’s seat, then brought out his radio.

‘Revson here.’

‘Hendrix.’

‘Ready yet?’

‘Hagenbach’s still on the phone to Branson.’

‘Let me know immediately he’s through.’

‘So the money’s in Europe,’ Branson said into the phone. ‘Excellent. But there had to be a codeword.’

There was. Very appropriate this time.’ Hagenbach’s voice was dry. ‘“Offshore”.’

Branson permitted himself a slight smile.

Hendrix’s voice came through on Revson’s receiver. He said: ‘They’re through.’

‘Clear with Hagenbach.’

‘Clear.’

‘Now.’

Revson didn’t replace the transistor in his camera case. He put it in his pocket, unslung his camera and laid it on the floor. He unlocked the door, leaving the key in the lock, opened the door a judicious crack and peered back. The first smoke bomb burst about two hundred yards away just as Branson descended from the rear coach. A second, twenty yards nearer, burst about two seconds later. Branson still remained as he was, as if momentarily paralysed. Not so O’Hare, Revson observed, who moved very swiftly into the back of his ambulance, closing the door hard behind him: the driver, Revson assumed, was already inside.

Branson broke from his thrall. He leapt inside the rear coach, lifted a phone and shouted: ‘Hagenbach! Hendrix!’ He had apparently overlooked the fact that if Hendrix had been at Mount Tamalpais some five minutes previously, he could hardly have returned by that time.

‘Hagenbach speaking.’

‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’

‘I’m not up to anything.’ Hagenbach’s voice was infuriatingly unconcerned.

The dense clouds of smoke were now no more than a hundred yards away.

‘I’m going inside the Presidential coach.’ He was still shouting. ‘You know what that means.’ He thrust the phone back and pulled out his pistol. ‘Giscard, tell the men to prepare for an attack on the south. They must be mad.’ Johnson and Bradley had advanced from the rear of the coach but he thrust them back. ‘You two I can’t afford to lose. Not now. Stay here. That goes for you, too, Giscard. Tell the men, get back here, and tell Hagenbach what I’m doing.’ Giscard eyed him with understandable concern. An erratic, repetitive and slightly incoherent Branson he had not encountered before: but then Giscard had not spent the previous twenty-four hours on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Two more smoke bombs had fallen by the time Branson jumped down to the roadway. The pall of smoke, thick and dense now totally obscuring the south tower was no more than fifty yards away. He rushed to the door of the Presidential coach, grabbed the handle and tried to wrench the door open: but the door remained immovable.

Another smoke bomb exploded. This one was just short of the rear coach. Branson battered at the window of the door with the butt of his pistol and peered inside. The driver’s seat, the seat which Mack, the guard, should have been occupying, was empty. General Cartland appeared at the doorway as the next smoke bomb burst not ten yards away.

Branson shouted at him, quite forgetting that he was only mouthing words – for the coach was totally soundproof – and pointed at the driver’s seat. Cartland shrugged his shoulders. Branson loosed off four quick shots at the lock and wrenched the handle again but the Presidential coach had been specifically designed to withstand assaults of this nature, which was as well for Branson: Cartland’s right hand, held behind his back, had the forefinger on the trigger of the cyanide gun.

The next bomb burst directly opposite Branson and the dense, acrid evil-smelling fumes were on him in seconds. Branson fired two more shots at the lock and tried again.

Revson withdrew the key from the door of the lead coach, dropped down to the roadway, shut the door, locked it and left the key in position. A smoke bomb burst immediately opposite him.

Vile though the fumes were to both nostrils and throat, they were not incapacitating. Running his fingers along the side of the Presidential coach, Branson made his way back to the rear coach, opened the now closed door and went inside, closing the door behind him. The air in the coach was clear, the lights were on, the air-conditioning unit was functioning and Giscard was on the phone.

Branson managed to control his coughing. ‘I couldn’t get in. Door’s locked and no sign of Mack. Get anything?’

‘I got Hagenbach. He says he knows nothing about this. I don’t know whether to believe him or not. He’s sent for the Vice-President.’

Branson snatched the phone from him and as he did Richards’s voice came through. ‘You this fellow Giscard?’

‘Branson.’

‘There is no attack. There will be no attack. Do you think we’re mad – you there with guns at the heads of seven hostages? It’s the Army in the shape of Carter, who’s gone mad. Heaven alone knows what he intended to achieve. He refuses to answer the phone. I’ve sent Admiral Newson to stop him. It’s that or his career.’

In the communications wagon, Richards turned to look at Hagenbach. ‘How did I sound?’

For the first time in his years of contact with Richards, Hagenbach permitted an expression of approval to appear on his face. ‘You’re keeping the wrong kind of company, Mr Vice-President. You’re as devious as I am.’

Giscard said: ‘Do you believe him?’

‘God only knows. It’s sense. It’s logical. Stay here. And keep that door closed.’

Branson dropped down to the roadway. The smoke was thinning now but there was still enough of it to make his eyes water and start him coughing again. On his third step he bumped into a vaguely seen shape in the opacity. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Chrysler.’ Chrysler was almost convulsed in his paroxysms of coughing. ‘What the hell’s going on, Mr Branson?’

‘God knows. Nothing, according to Richards. Any signs of an attack?’

‘Any signs of an – I can’t see a bloody yard. No sounds, anyway.’

Just as he spoke, there came half a dozen cracks in rapid succession. Chrysler said: ‘Those weren’t smoke bombs.’

In a few seconds it was clear that they were indeed not smoke bombs. Both men started to gasp, searching for oxygen and unable to find it. Branson was the first to guess at what might be happening. He held his breath, grabbed Chrysler by the arm and dragged him towards the rear coach. Seconds later they were inside, the door closed behind them. Chrysler lay unconscious on the floor, Branson barely conscious on his feet.

Giscard said: ‘What in God’s name -’

‘Air-conditioning maximum.’ Branson’s voice came in short painful gasps. ‘They’re using CUBs.’

Unlike O’Hare, Giscard knew what CUBs were. ‘Asphyxiation bombs?’

‘They’re not playing any more.’

Neither was General Cartland. Mack’s machine-pistol in hand, he unlocked the washroom door. Mack gave him a baleful glare but with the machine-pistol’s muzzle six inches from his stomach was unable to give any more direct expression of his feelings.

Cartland said: ‘I’m the Army Chief of Staff. In an emergency such as this I am responsible to no one, including the President, for my actions. Give me the door key or I’ll shoot you dead.’

Two seconds later the door key was in Cartland’s hand. Cartland said: “Turn round.’

Mack turned and almost immediately collapsed to the floor. The impact from the butt of Cartland’s machine-pistol may have been too heavy, but from the indifferent expression on Cartland’s face it was clear that he didn’t particularly care one way or another. He locked the washroom door behind him, pocketed the key, walked forward, thrust the machine-pistol out of sight beneath the chair of a rather dazed President, and made his way to the control panel in front of the driver’s seat. He touched a few buttons without effect, pulled and pushed some switches then turned sharply as the entrance window slid down. He took two paces, sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose and quickly moved back to push the last switch he’d touched in the other direction. The window closed. Again, very briefly, Cartland touched the switch. The window slid down an inch. Cartland moved across and dropped the door key outside, returned and closed the window.

Two minutes later the gentle western breeze from the Pacific had blown the now dispersing fumes into the bay. The bridge was clear. Branson opened the door of the rear coach: the air was sweet and fresh and clean. He stepped down, looked at the figures lying on the ground and started running. Giscard, Johnson and Bradley followed him. A slowly recovering Chrysler sat up but remained where he was, shaking his head from side to side.

They checked the men lying on the bridge. Giscard said: ‘They’re all alive. Unconscious, totally knocked out, but they’re still breathing.’

Branson said: ‘After CUBs? I don’t understand. Load them aboard your chopper, Bradley, and take off when you’re ready.’

Branson ran towards the Presidential coach and immediately saw the key on the ground. He picked it up and opened the bullet-scarred door. Cartland was standing by the driver’s seat. Branson said: ‘What happened here?’

‘You tell me. All I know is that your guard locked the door from the outside and ran. He ran when the smoke reached here. I assume that the smoke wasn’t really smoke, just a smoke-screen, to allow another defector to escape.’

Branson stared at him, first shook his head, then nodded. ‘Stay here.’

He ran towards the lead coach. He at once saw the key in the lock, twisted it and opened the door. He looked at the slumped and clearly unconscious Peters, mounted the steps and looked down the coach. He said: ‘Where’s Revson?’

‘Gone.’ A well-rehearsed and apparently uncomprehending Grafton spoke in a weary voice. ‘I can tell you only three things. He chopped your guard. He spoke on what looked like a miniature radio. Then, when the smoke came, he left, locked the door from the outside and ran. Look, Branson, we’re only bystanders, civilians from your point of view. You promised us safety. What’s happening out there?’

‘Which way did he run?’

‘Towards the north tower. He’ll have reached there long ago.’

Branson remained silent for quite some time. When he spoke, it was in his accustomed measured tones. ‘I am going to destroy this bridge. I do not kill innocent people. Can anybody here drive a coach?’

A young journalist stood up. ‘I can.’

‘Get this coach off the bridge. Immediately. Through the south barrier.’

He closed the door and ran towards the ambulance. The rear door opened as he approached. O’Hare appeared and said: ‘Well, you certainly know how to lay on entertainment for your guests.’

‘Get off this bridge. This moment.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Stay if you like. I’m going to blow up this damned bridge.’

Branson left, not running now, just walking quickly. He saw a dazed Chrysler emerging from the rear coach. He said: ‘Go stay by the President’s coach.’

Giscard and Johnson were standing by the rear helicopter. Bradley was leaning through an opened window. Branson said: ‘Go now. Meet you at the airport.’

Bradley lifted his helicopter cleanly off the bridge even before Branson had reached the President’s coach.

Revson lifted himself from his cramped position on the floor of the rear seat of the lead helicopter and glanced briefly through a window. The seven hostages, escorted by Branson, Giscard and Chrysler, were approaching the helicopter. Revson sank back into hiding and pulled the transceiver from his pocket. He said: ‘Mr Hagenbach?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Can you see the rotor on this helicopter?’

‘I can. We all can. We all have glasses on you.’

‘First turn the rotor takes, the laser beam.’

The seven hostages were ushered in first. The President and the King sat in the two front seats on the left, the Prince and Cartland on the right. Behind them, the Mayor, Muir and the oil sheikh took up position. Giscard and Chrysler took up separate positions in the third row. Each had a gun in his hand.

The ambulance was approaching the south tower when O’Hare tapped on the driver’s window. The window slid back.

O’Hare said: “Turn back to the middle of the bridge.’

‘Turn back! Jesus, Doc, he’s about to blow up the damn bridge.’

‘There’s going to be some sort of an accident but not the kind you think. Turn back.’

Johnson was the last to enter the helicopter. When he was seated Branson said: ‘Right. Lift off.’

There came the usual ear-numbing clattering roar, a roar which rapidly developed into a screaming sound, the sound of an engine running far above its rated revolutions, but even so not loud enough to drown a fearsomely clattering sound outside. Johnson leaned forward and all the noise suddenly ceased.

Branson said: ‘What’s wrong? What happened?’

Johnson stared ahead, then said quietly: ‘I’m afraid you were right about the laser beam, Mr Branson. The rotor’s just fallen into the Golden Gate.’

Branson reacted very quickly. He lifted a phone and pressed a button. ‘Bradley?’

‘Mr Branson?’

‘We’ve had some trouble. Come back to the bridge and pick us up.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’ve had some trouble myself – a couple of Phantom jets riding herd on me. I’m to land at the International Airport. I’m told there will be a welcoming committee.’

Revson was silently on his feet, white pen in hand. He pressed the button twice and, almost in unison, both men slumped forward then, quite unexpectedly and to Revson’s shocked dismay, toppled far from silently into the aisle, their guns clattering on the metallic floor.

Branson twisted round and there was a pistol in his hand: Revson was too far away for his tipped needles to carry. Branson took careful aim, squeezed slowly and steadily, then cried out in pain as the President’s cane slashed across his cheek. Revson threw himself to the floor of the aisle, his right hand clamping on the butt of Giscard’s gun. By the time Branson had wrenched away the President’s cane and swung round again, Revson was ready. All he could see of Branson was his head: but he was ready.

They stood in a group, isolated but not twenty yards from the ambulance, the President, the Vice-President, the seven decision-makers and Revson. Revson had a firm grip on April Wednesday’s arm. They stood and watched in silence as the shrouded stretcher was lowered from the helicopter and carried through the dozens of armed police and soldiers to the waiting ambulance. Nobody had anything to say: there was nothing to say.

The President said: ‘Our royal friends?’

Richards said: ‘Can’t wait to get to San Rafael tomorrow. They’re more than philosophic about the entire episode. They’re downright pleased. Not only has it all given America a great big black eye but it will make them national heroes at home.’

The President said: ‘We’d better go talk to them.’

He and Richards made to turn away when Revson said: ‘Thank you, sir.’

The President looked at him in incredulity. ‘Me? You thank me? I’ve already thanked you a hundred times.’

‘Yes, sir. As a rule I don’t like owing favours but I rather care for having my life saved.’

The President smiled and, along with Richards, turned and walked away.

Hagenbach said to Revson: ‘Well, let’s go to the office and have your full report.’

‘Ah, that. What’s the penalty for disobeying an order by the head of the FBI?’

‘You get fired.’

‘Pity. I quite liked my job. My proposal is that I shower, shave, change, take Miss Wednesday for lunch and then file my report in the afternoon. I guess you owe me at least that.’

Hagenbach pondered, then nodded.

‘I guess I do.’

Two thousand miles away, among the higher echelons in the FBI headquarters, someone just came into a minor sweepstake fortune.

Hagenbach smiled.

About the author

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Golden Rendezvous

The Satan Bug

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 From Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccares

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

HMS Ulysses

Alistair MacLean

‘A brilliant, overwhelming piece of descriptive writing’

Observer

This is one of the great war novels of our century and one of the finest achievements of Alistair MacLean’s bestselling career. It is the story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk – a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance, crippled by enemy atack and the bitter cold of the Arctic.

‘A story of exceptional courage which grips the imagination’

Daily Telegraph

‘It deserves an honourable place among twentieth-century war books’

Daily Mail

‘HMS Ulysses is in the same class as The Cruel Sea’

Evening Standard

ISBN 0 00 613512 9

Where Eagles Dare

Alistair MacLean

‘A real humdinger. The best MacLean yet.   Daily Mirror

‘There is a splendid audacity about Where Eagles Dare in which a handful of British agents invade an “impenetrable” Gestapo command post… MacLean offers a real dazzler of a thriller, with vivid action, fine set pieces of suspense, and a virtuoso display of startling plot twists.’

New York Times

‘Alistair MacLean has done it again: produced another king-sized thriller of tremendous pace and excitement. The tension is almost unbearable at times, but you can’t stop turning the pages in a feverish desire to know what happens next.’

Liverpool Echo

ISBN 0 00 615804 8

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www. harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2005 2

Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1963

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1963

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1963

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

ISBN 978-0-00-614494-6

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Goodbye California

Gisela

Table of Contents

Author’s Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

It was at twenty seconds to six o’clock on the morning of 9 February 1972 that the earth shook. As such tremors go it could hardly even be called noteworthy; it was certainly no more remarkable than those that afflict the citizens of Tokyo and its surrounding countryside scores of times a year. Pendant lamps oscillated briefly, some precariously balanced objects fell from their shelves, but those were the only discernible effects of the passing of the earth ripple. The aftershock, considerably weaker, came twenty seconds later. It was learnt afterwards that there had been four more aftershocks, but those were of so low a magnitude that they registered only on the seismographs. Altogether a rather inconsequential affair, but memorable for me, at least, inasmuch as it was the first-ever tremor I had experienced: having the ground move beneath your feet provides a distinctly disquieting sensation.

The area where the maximum damage had occurred lay only a few miles to the north and I drove out to see it, but not until the following day – partly because of reports of fissured roads, damaged viaducts and burst water mains but chiefly because the authorities bend an unkindly eye on rubber-neckers whose unwanted presence interferes with the efforts of rescue and medical teams.

The township of Sylmar, which had borne the brunt of the earthquake, lies in the San Fernando Valley in California, some miles north of Los Angeles – in fact, so unconscionably sprawling is that city that it encompasses Sylmar within its boundaries. To the untutored eye the scene in that town appeared to be one of considerable confusion, with wreckers, bulldozers and trucks milling around at apparent random, but this was entirely illusory: all activities were highly organized and under central control. Unlike their more unfortunate brethren in, say, Nicaragua or Guatemala or the Philippines, places sadly accustomed to being side-swiped by much more than their fair share of earthquakes, the Californians are not only prepared for but are highly geared to deal efficiently with the aftermaths of natural disasters: the San Franciscans, for instance, have fifteen hospitals in kit form distributed at various key points around their city in preparation for the next earthquake which is widely and more than a little fearfully regarded as inevitable.

Damage to buildings was widespread but not severe – except in one very localized area. This was, or to a considerable extent had been, the Veterans’ Administration Hospital. Before the earthquake it had consisted of three parallel blocks of buildings. The two outer blocks had remained virtually intact: the central one had collapsed like a house of cards. Destruction was total; no part of it was left standing. Over sixty patients died.

The contrast between this ruin and the virtual immunity of the two sister blocks would have seemed incomprehensible to anyone without some knowledge of the Californian building codes. With some such knowledge it was all too readily understandable. The city of Los Angeles has the misfortune to have its very own private and personal structure fault running under its streets. This is known as the Newport-Inglewood Fault, and when one side of the fault suddenly jerked forward in respect to the other in 1933 it produced the Long Beach earthquake in which a disconcertingly large number of buildings fell down, solely because they had been shoddily built on unreinforced, made-up ground.

This prompted the authorities to introduce a new building code, designed to result in structures as nearly earthquake-proof as possible, a code that is as rigorously enforced as it is rigorous in nature, and it was under the enforcements of this code that the two outer blocks of the Veterans’ Hospital had been built, one in the late 1930s, the other in the late 1940s: the destroyed block had been constructed in the mid-twenties.

Nevertheless, it had been destroyed by an earthquake the epicentre of which had been some eight miles distant to the north-east. But what was important – and significant – about the earthquake that had caused this considerable damage was the factor of its power – or lack of it. The power, or magnitude, of an earthquake is registered on an arbitrarily chosen Richter scale which ranges from zero to twelve. And what is important to bear in mind is that the Richter scale progresses not arithmetically but logarithmically. Thus, a six on the Richter scale is ten times as powerful as a five or a hundred times as powerful as a four. The San Fernando earthquake which levelled this hospital block in Sylmar registered six-point-three on the Richter scale: the one that wreaked havoc on San Francisco in 1906 registered seven-point-nine (according to the recent modifications of the Richter scale). Thus, the earthquake that caused this damage in Sylmar was possessed of only one per cent of the effective power of the San Francisco one. It is a sobering and, to those burdened with an over-active imagination, a fearful reflection.

What is even more sobering and frightening is the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no great earthquake – ‘great’ is arbitrarily taken to be anything eight and above on the Richter scale – has ever occurred beneath or in the immediate vicinity of any major city. (Such a disaster may have occurred in that awesome North Chinese earthquake of 1976 when a third of a million people are reported to have died: but the Chinese have dropped a total news blanket over this tragedy.) But the law of averages would indicate strongly that somewhere, some time, a major earthquake will occur in a place which is not conveniently uninhabited or, at least, sparsely populated. There is no reason not to imagine, unless one chooses to take refuge behind I-don’t-want-to-know mental blinkers, that this possibility may even today be a probability.

The word ‘probability’ is used because the law of averages is strengthened by the fact that with the exception of China, Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Italy, earthquakes largely tend to take place in coastal areas, whether those coastal areas be of land masses or islands; and it is in those coastal areas, for the purposes of trade and because they are the points in ingress to the hinterland, that many of the world’s great cities have been built. Tokyo, Los Angeles and San Francisco are three such examples.

That earthquakes should be largely confined to those areas is in no way fortuitous: their cause, as well as that of volcanoes, is now a matter of almost universal agreement among geologists. The theory is simply that in the unimaginably distant past when land first appeared it was in the form of one gigantic super-continent surrounded by – inevitably – one massive ocean. With the passage of time and for reasons not yet definitely ascertained this super-continent broke up into several different continental masses, which, borne on what are called their ‘tectonic plates’ – which float on the still molten magma layer of the earth – drifted apart. Those tectonic plates occasionally bang or rub against one another; the effects of the collisions are transmitted either to the land above or the ocean floor and appear in the form of earthquakes or volcanoes.

Most of California lies on the North American plate which, while tending to move westward, is not the real villain of the piece. That unhappy distinction belongs to that same North Pacific plate which deals so hardly with China, Japan and the Philippines and on which that section of California lying to the west of the San Andreas Fault so unhappily lies. Although the North Pacific plate appears to be rotating slightly, its movement in California is still roughly to the north-west and, now and then, when the pressure between the two plates becomes too much, the North Pacific plate eases this pressure by jerking north-west along the San Andreas Fault and so producing one of those earthquakes that Californians don’t care so much about.

The extent of the dislocation along this right-slip fault – so called because if you stand on either side of the fault after an earthquake the other side appears to have moved to the right – is crucial in relation to the magnitude of the shock. Occasionally there may be no lateral slip at all. Sometimes it may be only a foot or two. But, even though its consequences are not to be contemplated lightly, a lateral slip of forty feet is eminently possible.

In fact, and in this context, all things are possible. The active earthquake and volcanic belt that circumgirdles the Pacific is commonly – and appropriately – known as the ‘ring of fire’. The San Andreas Fault is an integral part of this, and it is on this ring of fire that the two greatest monster earthquakes (in Japan and South America) ever recorded have occurred. They were on the order of eight-point-nine on the Richter scale. California can lay no more claim to divine protection than any other part of the ring of fire and there is no compelling reason why the next monster, about six times as powerful as the great San Francisco one, shouldn’t occur, say, in San Bernardino, thus effectively dumping Los Angeles into the Pacific. And the Richter scale goes up to twelve!

Earthquakes on the ring of fire can show another disadvantageous aspect – they can occur offshore as well as under land. When this occurs huge tidal waves result. In 1976 the town of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines was inundated and all but destroyed and thousands of lives were lost when an undersea earthquake at the mouth of the crescent-shaped Morro Bay caused a fifteen-foot tidal wave that engulfed the shores of the bay. Such an ocean earthquake off San Francisco would devastate the Bay area and, in all probability, wouldn’t do any good to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.

As it is said, it is the wandering nature of those tectonic plates that is the prime cause of earthquakes. But there are three other imponderable possibilities that could well act as triggering factors which could conceivably cause earthquakes.

The first of those is emissions from the sun. It is known that the strength and content of solar winds alter considerably and wholly unpredictably. It is also known that they can produce considerable alterations in the chemical structure of our atmosphere which in turn can have the effect of either accelerating or acting as a brake on the rotation of the earth; an effect which, because it would be measurable in terms of only hundredths of a second, would be wholly undetected by many but could have (and may have had in the past) an influence ranging from the considerable to the profound on the unanchored tectonic plates.

Secondly, there is a respectable body of scientific opinion that holds that the gravitational influences of the planets act on the sun to modulate the strength of these solar winds. This is of immediate concern since a rare alignment of all the planets of the Solar System is due in 1982. If this theory, known as The Jupiter Effect from the title of a book by Drs John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, is correct that alignment will be the trigger for unprecedented solar activity, with repercussions on the stability of planet Earth. So scientists are waiting for 1982 with considerable interest, and not a little trepidation.

And, apart from war, this concept can be employed for a variety of other interesting purposes, which is what this book is about.

CHAPTER ONE

Ryder opened his tired eyelids and reached for the telephone without enthusiasm. ‘Yes?’

‘Lieutenant Mahler. Get down here right away. And bring your son.’

‘What’s wrong?’ The lieutenant customarily made a point of having his subordinates call him ‘sir’, but in Sergeant Ryder’s case he’d given up years ago. Ryder reserved that term for those he held in respect: no friends or acquaintances, to the best of their knowledge, had ever heard him use it.

‘Not over the phone.’ The receiver clicked and Ryder rose reluctantly to his feet, pulled on his sports coat and fastened the central button, so effectively concealing the .38 Smith & Wesson strapped to the left-hand side of what had once been his waist. Still reluctantly, as became a man who had just finished a twelve-hour non-stop duty stint, he glanced around the room, all chintzy curtains and chair covers, ornaments and vasefuls of flowers: Sergeant Ryder, clearly, was no bachelor. He went into the kitchen, sniffed sorrowfully at the aroma coming from the contents of a simmering casserole, turned off the oven and wrote ‘Gone down-town’ at the foot of a note instructing him when and to what temperature he should turn a certain switch: which was as near to cooking Ryder had ever come in his twenty-seven years of marriage.

His car was parked in the driveway. It was a car that no self-respecting police officer would care to have been found shot in. That Ryder was just such a policeman was beyond doubt, but he was attached to Intelligence and had little use for gleaming sedans equipped with illuminated ‘police’ signs, flashing lights and sirens. The car–for want of a better word–was an elderly and battered Peugeot of the type much favoured by Parisians of a sadistic bent of mind whose great pleasure it was to observe the drivers of shining limousines slow down and pull into the kerb whenever they caught sight of those vintage chariots in their rear-view mirrors.

Four blocks from his own home Ryder parked his car, walked up a flagged pathway and rang the front-door bell. A young man opened the door.

Ryder said: ‘Dress uniform, Jeff. We’re wanted downtown.’

‘Both of us? Why?’

‘Your guess. Mahler wouldn’t say.’

‘It’s all those TV cop series he keeps watching. You’ve got to be mysterious or you’re nothing.’ Jeff Ryder left and returned in twenty seconds, tie in position and buttoning up his uniform. Together they walked down the flagged path.

They made an odd contrast, father and son. Sergeant Ryder was built along the general lines of a Mack truck that had seen better days. His crumpled coat and creaseless trousers looked as if they had been slept in for a week: Ryder could buy a new suit in the morning and by evenfall a second-hand clothes dealer would have crossed the street to avoid meeting him. He had thick dark hair, a dark moustache and a worn, lined, lived-in face that held a pair of eyes, dark as the rest of him, that had looked at too many things in the course of a lifetime and had liked little of what they had seen. It was also a face that didn’t go in for much in the way of expressions.

Jeff Ryder was two inches taller and thirty-five pounds lighter than his father. His immaculately pressed California Highway Patrolman’s uniform looked like a custom-built job by Saks. He had fair hair, blue eyes–both inherited from his mother–and a lively, mobile, intelligent face. Only a clairvoyant could have deduced that he was Sergeant Ryder’s son.

On the way, they spoke only once. Jeff said: ‘Mother’s late on the road tonight–something to do with our summons to the presence?’

‘Your guess again.’

Central Office was a forbidding brownstone edifice overdue for demolition. It looked as if it had been specifically designed to depress further the spirits of the many miscreants who passed or were hauled through its doorway. The desk officer, Sergeant Dickson, looked at them gravely, but that was of no significance: the very nature of his calling inhibits any desk sergeant’s latent tendency towards levity. He waved a discouraged arm and said: ‘His eminence awaits.’

Lieutenant Mahler looked no less forbidding than the building he inhabited. He was a tall thin man with grizzled hair at the temples, thin unsmiling lips, a thin beaky nose and unsentimental eyes. No one liked him, for his reputation as a martinet had not been easily come by: on the other hand, no one actively disliked him, for he was a fair cop and a fairly competent one. ‘Fairly’ was the operative and accurate word. Although no fool he was not over-burdened with intelligence and had reached his present position partly because he was the very model of the strict upholder of justice, partly because his transparent honesty offered no threat to his superiors.

For once, and rarely for him, he looked ill at ease. Ryder produced a crumpled packet of his favoured Gauloises, lit a forbidden cigarette–Mahler’s aversion to wine, women, song and tobacco was almost pathological–and helped him out.

‘Something wrong at San Ruffino, then?’

Mahler looked at him in sharp suspicion. ‘How do you know? Who told you?’

‘So it’s true. Nobody told me. We haven’t committed any violations of the law recently. At least, my son hasn’t. Me, I don’t remember.’

Mahler allowed acidity to overcome his unease. ‘You surprise me.’

‘First time the two of us have ever been called in here together. We have a couple of things in common. First, we’re father and son, which is no concern of the police department. Second, my wife–Jeff’s mother–is employed at the nuclear reactor plant in San Ruffino. There hasn’t been an accident there or the whole town would have known in minutes. An armed break-in, perhaps?’

‘Yes.’ Mahler’s tone was almost grudging. He hadn’t relished the role of being the bearer of bad news, but a man doesn’t like having his lines taken from him.

‘Who’s surprised?’ Ryder was very matter of fact. For any sign of reaction he showed Mahler could well have remarked that it looked as if it might rain soon. ‘Security up there is lousy. I filed a report on it. Remember?’

‘Which was duly turned over to the proper authorities. Power plant security is not police business. That’s IAEA’s responsibility.’ He was referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, one of the responsibilities of which was to supervise the safeguard system for the protection of power plants, specifically against the theft of nuclear fuels.

‘God’s sake!’ Not only had Jeff failed to inherit his father’s physical characteristics, he was also noticeably lacking in his parent’s massive calm. ‘Let’s get our priorities right. Lieutenant Mahler. My mother. Is she all right?’

‘I think so. Let’s say I have no reason to think otherwise.’

‘What the hell is that meant to mean?’

Mahler’s features tightened into the preliminary for a reprimand but Sergeant Ryder got in first. ‘Abduction?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Kidnap?’ Jeff stared his disbelief. ‘Kidnap? Mother is the director’s secretary. She doesn’t know a damn thing about what goes on there. She’s not even security classified.’

‘True. But remember she was picked for the job; she didn’t apply. Cops’ wives are supposed to be like Caesar’s wife–beyond suspicion.’

‘But why pick on her?’

‘They didn’t just pick on her. They took about six others, or so I gather: the deputy director, deputy security chief, a secretary and a control room operator. More importantly–although not, of course, from your point of view–they took two visiting university professors. Both are highly qualified specialists in nuclear physics.’

Ryder said: ‘That makes five nuclear scientists to have disappeared in the past two months.’

‘Five it is.’ Mahler looked acutely unhappy.

Ryder said: ‘Where did those two scientists come from?’

‘San Diego and UCLA, I believe. Does it matter?’

‘I don’t know. It may be too late already.’

‘What’s that meant to mean, Sergeant?’

‘It means that if those two men have families they should be under immediate police guard.’ Mahler, Ryder could see, wasn’t quite with him so he went on: ‘If those two men have been kidnapped then it’s with a special purpose in mind. Their co-operation will be required. Wouldn’t you co-operate a damn sight faster if you saw someone with a pair of pliers removing your wife’s fingernails one by one?’

Possibly because he didn’t have a wife the thought had clearly not occurred to Lieutenant Mahler, but, then, thinking was not his forte. To his credit, once the thought had been implanted he wasted no time. He spent the next two minutes on the telephone.

Jeff was grim-faced, edgy, his voice soft but urgent. ‘Let’s get out there fast.’

‘Easy. Don’t go off half-cocked. The time for hurry is past. It may come again but right now it’s not going to help any.’

They waited in silence until Mahler replaced his phone. Ryder said: ‘Who reported the break-in?’

‘Ferguson. Security chief. Day off, but his house is wired into the San Ruffino alarm system. He came straight down.’

‘He did what? Ferguson lives thirty miles out in the hills in the back of nowhere. Why didn’t he use his phone?’

‘His phone had been cut, that’s why.’

‘But he has a police band car radio–’

‘That had been attended to also. So had the only three public phone boxes on the way in. One was at a garage–owner and his mechanic had been locked up.’

‘But there’s an alarm link to this office.’

‘There was.’

‘An inside job?’

‘Look, Ferguson called only two minutes after he had arrived there.’

‘Anybody hurt?’

‘No violence. All tlhe staff locked up in the same room.’

‘The sixty-four-million-dollar question.’

‘Theft of nuclear fuel? That’ll take time to establish, according to Ferguson.’

‘You going out there?’

‘I’m expecting company.’ Mahler looked unhappy.

‘I’ll bet you are. Who’s out there now?’

‘Parker and Davidson.’

‘We’d like to go out and join them.’

Mahler hesitated, still unhappy. He said, defensively: ‘What do you expect to find that they won’t? They’re good detectives. You’ve said so yourself.’

‘Four pairs of eyes are better than two. And because she’s my wife and Jeff’s mother and we know how she might have behaved and reacted we might be able to pick up something that Parker and Davidson might miss.’

Mahler, his chin in the heels of his hands, gazed morosely at his desk. Whatever decision he took the chances were high that his superiors would say it was the wrong one. He compromised by saying nothing. At a nod from Ryder both men left the room.

The evening was fine and clear and windless, and a setting sun was laying a path of burnished gold across the Pacific as Ryder and his son drove through the main gates of San Ruffino. The nuclear station was built on the very edge of the San Ruffino cove–like all such stations it required an immense amount of water, some 1,800,000 gallons of sea-water a minute, to cool the reactor cores down to their optimum operating temperatures: no domestic utility supply could hope to cope with the tiniest fraction of this amount.

The two massive, gleamingly-white and domed containment structures that housed the reactor cores were at once beautiful–in the pure simplicity of their external design–but sinister and threatening; if one chose to view them that way: they were certainly awe-inspiring. Each was about the height of a twenty-five-storey building with a diameter of about 150 feet. The three-and-a-half-feet-thick concrete walls were hugely reinforced by the largest steel bars in the United States. Between those containment structures–which also held the four steam generators that produced the actual electricity–was a squat and undeniably ugly building of absolutely no architectural merit. This was the Turbine Generator Building, which, apart from its two turbo-generators, also housed two condensers and two sea-water evaporators.

On the seaward side of those buildings was the inaptly named ‘auxiliary building’, a six-storey structure, some 240 feet in length, which held the control centres for both reactor units, the monitoring and instrumentation centres and the vastly complicated control system which ensured the plant’s safe operation and public protection.

Extending from each end of the auxiliary building were the two wings, each about half the size of the main building. These in their own ways were areas as delicate and sensitive as the reactor units themselves, for it was here that all the nuclear fuels were handled and stored. In all, the building of the complex had called for something like a third of a million cubic yards of concrete and some fifty thousand tons of steel. What was equally remarkable was that it required only eighty people, including a good proportion of security staff, to run this massive complex twenty-four hours a day.

Twenty yards beyond the gate Ryder was stopped by a security guard wearing an indeterminate uniform and a machine-carbine that was far from menacing inasmuch as the guard had made no move to unsling it from his shoulder. Ryder leaned out.

‘What’s this, then? Open house day? Public free to come and go?’

‘Sergeant Ryder.’ The little man with the strong Irish accent tried to smile and succeeded only in looking morose. ‘Fine time now to lock the stable door. Besides, we’re expecting lawmen. Droves of them.’

‘And all of them asking the same stupid questions over and over again just as I’m going to do. Cheer up, John. I’ll see they don’t get you for high treason. On duty at the time, were you?’

‘For my sins. Sorry about your wife, Sergeant. This’ll be your son?’ Ryder nodded. ‘My sympathies. For what they’re worth. But don’t waste any sympathy on me. I broke regulations. If it’s the old cottonwood tree for me, I’ve got it coming. I shouldn’t have left my box.’

Jeff said: ‘Why?’

‘See that glass there. Not even the Bank of America has armoured plate like that. Maybe a Magnum ‘forty-four could get through–I doubt it. There’s a two-way speaker system. There’s an alarm buzzer by my hand and a foot switch to trigger off a ten-pound charge of gelignite that would discourage anything short of a tank. It’s buried under the asphalt just where the vehicles pull up. But no, old smarty-pants McCafferty had to unlock the door and go outside.’

‘Why?’

‘No fool like an old fool. The van was expected at just that time–I had the note on my desk. Standard fuel pick-up from San Diego. Same colour, same letters, driver and guard with the same uniforms, even the same licence plates.’

‘Same van, in other words. Hi-jack. If they could hi-jack it when it was empty why not on the return journey when it was full?’

‘They came for more than the fuel.’

‘That’s so. Recognize the driver?’

‘No. But the pass was in order, so was the photograph.’

‘Well, would you recognize that driver again?’

McCafferty scowled in bitter recollection. ‘I’d recognize that damned great black beard and moustache again. Probably lying in some ditch by this time.

‘Didn’t have time even to see the old shotgun, just the one glance and then the van gate–they’re side loaders–fell down. The only uniform the lot inside were wearing were stocking masks. God knows how many of them there were; I was too busy looking at what they were carrying–pistols, sawn-off twelve-bores, even one guy with a bazooka.’

‘For blasting open any electronically-locked steel doors, I suppose.’

‘I suppose. Fact of the matter is, there wasn’t one shot fired from beginning to end. Professionals, if ever I saw any. Knew exactly what they were doing, where to go, where to look. Anyway, I was plucked into that van and had hand and leg cuffs on before I had time to close my mouth.’

Ryder was sympathetic. ‘I can see it must have been a bit of a shock. Then?’

‘One of them jumped down and went into the box. Bastard had an Irish accent: I could have been listening to myself talking. He picked up the phone, got through to Carlton–he’s the number–two man in security, if you recollect: Ferguson was off today–told him the transport van was here and asked for permission to open the gate. He pressed the button, the gates opened, he waited until the van had passed through, closed the door, came out through the other door and climbed into the van that had stopped for him.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘All I know. I stayed in there–I didn’t have much option, did I?–until the raid was over, then they locked me up with the others.’

‘Where’s Fergusont?’

‘In the north wing.’

‘Checking on missing articles, shall we say? Tell him I’m here.’

McCafferty went to his guard box, spoke briefly on the phone and returned. ‘It’s okay.’

‘No comments?’

‘Funny you should ask that. He said: “Dear God, as if we haven’t got enough trouble here”.’

Ryder half-smiled a very rare half-smile and drove off.

Ferguson, the security chief, greeted them in his office with civility but a marked lack of enthusiasm. Although it was some months since he had read Ryder’s acerbic report on the state of security at San Ruffino Ferguson had a long memory.

The fact that Ryder had been all too accurate in his report and that he, Ferguson, had neither the authority nor the available funds to carry out all the report’s recommendations hadn’t helped matters any. He was a short stocky man with wary eyes and a habitually worried expression. He replaced a telephone and made no attempt to rise from behind his desk.

‘Come to write another report, Sergeant?’ He tried to sound acid but all he did was sound defensive. ‘Create a little more trouble for me?’

Ryder was mild. ‘Neither. If you don’t get support from your blinkered superiors with their rose-coloured glasses then the fault is theirs, not yours.’

‘Ah.’ The tone was surprised but the face still wary.

Jeff said: ‘We have a personal interest in this, Mr Ferguson.’

‘You the sergeant’s son?’ Jeff nodded. ‘Sorry about your mother. I guess saying that doesn’t help very much.’

‘You were thirty miles away at the time,’ Ryder said reasonably. Jeff looked at his father in some apprehension: he knew that a mild-mannered Ryder was potentially the most dangerous Ryder of all, but in this case there seemed no undue cause for alarm. Ryder went on: I’d looked to find you down in the vaults assessing the amount of loot our friends have made off with.’

‘Not my job at all. Never go near their damned storage facilities except to check the alarm systems. I wouldn’t even begin to know what to look for. The Director himself is down there with a couple of assistants finding what the score is.’

‘Could we see him?’

‘Why? Two of your men, I forget their names–’

‘Parker and Davidson.’

‘Whatever. They’ve already talked to him.’

‘My point. He was still making his count then.’

Ferguson reached a grudging hand for the telephone, spoke to someone in tones of quiet respect, then said to Ryder: ‘He’s just finishing. Here in a moment, he says.’

‘Thanks. Any way this could have been an inside job?’

‘An inside job? You mean, one of my men involved?’ Ferguson looked at him suspiciously. He himself had been thirty miles away at the time, which should have put himself, personally, beyond suspicion: but equally well, if he had been involved he’d have made good and certain that he was thirty miles away on the day that the break-in had occurred. ‘I don’t follow. Ten heavily armed men don’t need assistance from inside.’

‘How come they could have walked through your electronically-controlled doors and crisscross of electric eyes undetected?’

Ferguson sighed. He was on safer ground here. ‘The pickup was expected and on schedule. When Carlton heard from the gate guard about its arrival he would automatically have turned them off.’

‘Accepting that, how did they find their way to wherever they wanted to go? This place is a rabbit warren.’

Ferguson was on even surer ground now. ‘Nothing simpler. I thought you would know about that.’

‘A man never stops learning. Tell me.’

‘You don’t have to suborn an employee to find out the precise lay-out of any atomic plant. No need to infiltrate or wear false uniforms, get hold of copies of badges or use any violence what soever. You don’t have to come within a thousand miles of any damned atomic plant to know all about it, what the lay-out is, the precise location of where uranium and plutonium are stored, even when nuclear fuel shipments might be expected to arrive or depart. as the case may be. All you have to do is to go to a public reading-room run by the Atomic Energy Commission at Seventeen-seventeen H Street in Washington, DC. You’d find it most instructive, Sergeant Ryder–specially if you were a villain bent on breaking into a nuclear plant.’

‘This some kind of a sick joke?’

‘Very sick. Especially if, like me, you happen to be the head of security in a nuclear plant. There are card indexes there containing dockets on all nuclear facilities in the country in private hands. There’s always a very friendly clerk to hand–I’ve been there–who on request will give you a stack of more papers than you can handle giving you what I and many others would regard as being top-secret and classified information on any nuclear facility you want–except governmental ones, of course. Sure it’s a joke, but it doesn’t make me and lots of others laugh out loud.’

‘They must be out of their tiny minds.’ It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Sergeant Ryder was stunned–facial and verbal over-reactions were wholly alien to him–but he was unquestionably taken aback.

Ferguson assumed the expression of one who was buttoning his hair-shirt really tight. ‘They even provide a Xerox machine for copying any documents you choose.’

‘Jesus! And the Government permits all this?’

‘Permits? It authorized it. Atomic Energy Act, amended nineteen-fifty-four, states that citizen John Doe–undiscovered nut-case or not–has the right to know about the private use of nuclear materials. I think you’ll have to revise your insider theory, Sergeant.’

‘It wasn’t a theory, just a question. In either case consider it revised.’

Dr Jablonsky, the director of the reactor plant, came into the room. He was a burly, sun-tanned and white-haired man in his mid-sixties but looking about ten years younger, a man who normally radiated bonhomie and good cheer. At the moment he was radiating nothing of the kind.

‘Damnable, damnable, damnable,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Evening, Sergeant. It would have been nice to meet again in happier circumstances for both of us.’ He looked at Jeff interrogatively. ‘Since when did they call in CHPs on an–’

‘Jeff Ryder, Dr Jablonsky. My son.’ Ryder smiled slightly. ‘I hope you don’t subscribe to the general belief that highway patrolmen only arrest on highways. They can arrest anyone, anywhere, in the State of California.’

‘My goodness, I hope he’s not going to arrest me.’ He peered at Jeff over the top of rimless glasses. ‘You must be worried about your mother, young man, but I can’t see any reason why she should come to any harm.’

‘And I can’t see any reason why she shouldn’t,’ Ryder interrupted. ‘Ever heard of any kidnappee who was not threatened with actual bodily harm? I haven’t.’

‘Threats? Already?’

‘Give them time. Wherever they’re going they probably haven’t got there yet. How is it with the inventory of stolen goods?’

‘Bad. We have three types of nuclear fuel in storage here: Uranium-238, Uranium-235 and Plutonium. U-238 is the prime source of all nuclear fuel and they didn’t bother taking any of that. Understandably.’

‘Why understandably?’

‘Harmless stuff’.’ Absently, almost, Dr Jablonsky fished in the pocket of his white coat and produced several small pellets, each no more than the size of a .38-calibre shell. ‘That’s U-238. Well, almost. Contains about three per cent U-235. Slightly enriched, as we call it. You have to get an awful lot of this stuff together before it starts to fission, giving off the heat that converts water to steam that spins the turbine blades that make our electricity. Here in San Ruffino we crowd six-and-three-quarter millions of these, two-hundred-and-forty into each of twenty-eight-thousand twelve-foot rods, into the nuclear reactor core. This we figure to be the optimum critical mass for fissioning, a process controlled by huge supplies of cooling water and one that can be stopped altogether by dropping boron rods between the uranium tubes.’

Jeff said: ‘What would happen if the water supply stopped and you couldn’t activate the boron rods or whatever? Bang?’

‘No. The results would be bad enough–clouds of radio-active gas that might cause some thousands of deaths and poison tens, perhaps thousands of square miles of soil–but it’s never happened yet, and the chances of it happening have been calculated at five billion to one. So we don’t worry too much about it. But a bang? A nuclear explosion? Impossible. For that you require U-235 over ninety per cent pure, the stuff we dropped on Hiroshima. Now that is nasty stuff. There was a hundred-and-thirty-two pounds of it in that bomb, but it was so crudely designed–it really belonged to the nuclear horse-and-buggy age–that only about twenty-five ounces of it fissioned: but was still enough to wipe out the city. Since then we have progressed–if that’s the word I want. Now the Atomic Energy Commission reckons that a total of five kilograms–eleven pounds–is the so-called “trigger” quantity, enough for the detonation of a nuclear bomb. It’s common knowledge among scientists that the AEC is most conservative in its estimate–it could be done with less.’

Ryder said: ‘No U-238 was stolen. You used the word “understandably”. Couldn’t they have stolen it and converted it into U-235?’

‘No. Natural uranium contains a hundred-and-forty atoms of U-238 to each atom of U-235. The task of leaching out the U-235 from the U-238 is probably the most difficult scientific task that man has ever overcome. We use a process called “gaseous diffusion”–which is prohibitively expensive, enormously complicated and impossible to avoid detection. The going cost for a gaseous diffusion plant, at today’s inflated rates, is in the region of three billion dollars. Even today only a very limited number of men know how the process works–I don’t. All I know is that it involves thousands of incredibly fine membranes, thousands of miles of tubes, pipes and conduits and enough electrical power to run a fair-sized city. Then those plants are so enormous that they couldn’t possibly be built in secret. They cover so many hundreds of acres that you require a car or electric cart to get round one. No private group, however wealthy or criminally-minded, could ever hope to build one.

‘We have three in this country, none located in this State. The British and French have one apiece. The Russians aren’t saying. China is reported to have one in Langchow in Kansu Province.’

‘It can be done by high-speed centrifuges, spinning at such a speed that the marginally heavier U-238 is flung to the outside. But this process would use hundreds of thousands of centrifuges and the cost would be mind-boggling. I don’t know whether it’s ever been done. The South Africans claim to have discovered an entirely new process, but they aren’t saying what and US scientists are sceptical. The Australians say they’ve discovered a method by using laser beams. Again, we don’t know, but if it were possible a small group–and they’d all have to be top-flight nuclear physicists–could make U-235 undetected. But why bother going to such impossible lengths when you can just go to the right place and steal the damned stuff ready-made just as they did here this afternoon?’

Ryder said: ‘How is it all stored?’

‘In ten-litre steel bottles each containing seven kilograms of U-235, in the form of either an oxide or metal, the oxide in the form of a very fine brown powder, the metal in little lumps known as “broken buttons”. The bottles are placed in a cylinder five inches wide that’s braced with welded struts in the centre of a perfectly ordinary fifty-five-gallon steel drum. I needn’t tell you why the bottles are held in suspension in the airspace of the drum–stack them all together in a drum or box and you’d soon reach the critical mass where fissioning starts.’

Jeff said: ‘This time it goes bang?’

‘Not yet. Just a violent irradiation which would have a very nasty effect for miles around, especially on human beings. Drum plus bottle weighs about a hundred pounds, so is easily moveable. Those drums are called “bird-cages”, though Lord knows why: they don’t look like any bird-cage I’ve ever seen.’

Ryder said: ‘How is this transported?’

‘Long distance by plane. Shorter hauls by common carrier.’

‘Common carrier?’

‘Any old truck you can lay your hands on.’ Ferguson sounded bitter.

‘How many of those cages go in the average truck shipment?’

‘That hi-jacked San Diego truck carries twenty.’

‘One hundred and forty pounds of the stuff. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘A man could make himself a fair collection of nuclear bombs from that lot. How many drums were actually taken?’

‘Twenty.’

‘A full load for the van?’

‘Yes.’

‘So they didn’t touch your plutonium?’

‘More bad news, I’m afraid. When they were being held at gunpoint but before they were locked up some of the staff heard the sound of another engine. A diesel. Heavy. Could have been big–no one saw it.’ The telephone on his desk rang. He reached for it and listened in silence except for the occasional ‘who?’, ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ He hung up.

‘Still more bad news?’ Jablonsky asked.

‘Don’t see it makes any difference one way or another. The hi-jacked van’s been found. Empty, of course, except for the driver and guard trussed up like turkeys in the back. They say they were following a furniture van round a blind corner when it braked so sharply that they almost ran into it. Back doors of the van opened and the driver and the guard decided to stay just where they were. They say they didn’t feel like doing much else with two machine-guns and a bazooka levelled six feet from their windscreen.’

‘An understandable point of view,’ Jablonsky said. ‘Where were they found?’

‘In a quarry, up a disused side road. Couple of young kids.’

‘And the furniture van is still there?’

‘As you say, Sergeant. How did you know?’

‘Do you think they’d have transferred their cargo into an identifiable van and driven off with it? They’d have a second plain van.’ Ryder turned to Dr Jablonsky. ‘As you were about to say about this plutonium–’

‘Interesting stuff and if you’re a nuclear bomb-making enthusiast it’s far more suitable for making an atom bomb than uranium although it would call for a greater deal of expertise. Probably call for the services of a nuclear physicist.’

‘A captive physicist would do as well?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They–the villains–took a couple of visiting physicists with them this afternoon. From San Diego and Los Angels, I believe they were.’

‘Professor Burnett and Dr Schmidt? That’s a ludicrous suggestion. I know both men well, intimately, you might say. They are men of probity, men of honour. They’d never co-operate with the blackguards who stole this stuff.’

Ryder sighed. ‘My regard for you is high, Doctor, so I’ll only say that you lead a very sheltered life. Men of principle? Decent men?’

‘Our regard is mutual so I’ll just content myself with saying that I don’t have to repeat myself.’

‘Men of compassion, no doubt?’

‘Of course they are.’

‘They took my wife, and a stenographer–’

‘Julie Johnson.’

‘Julie Johnson. When our hi-jacking thieves start feeding those ladies through a meat grinder what do you think is going to win out–your friends’ high principles or their compassion?’

Jablonsky said nothing. He just lost a little colour.

Ferguson coughed in a sceptical fashion, which is a difficult thing to do, but in his line of business he’d had a lot of practice. ‘And I’d always thought you were devoid of imagination, Sergeant. That’s stretching things a bit, surely.’

‘Is it? As security chief it’s your job to vet everybody applying for a job here. This stenographer, Julie. What’s her background?’

‘Typist making a living. Shares a small flat, nothing fancy, with two other girls. Drives a beat-up Volkswagen. Parents dead.’

‘Not a millionairess doing the job for kicks?’

‘Kicks. No chance. A nice girl, but nothing special there.’

Ryder looked at Jablonsky. ‘So. A stenographer’s pay-cheque. A sergeant’s pay-cheque. A patrol-man’s pay-cheque. Maybe you think they’re going to hold those ladies to ransom for a million dollars each? Maybe just to rest their eyes on after a long day at the nuclear bench?’ Jablonsky said nothing. ‘The meat grinder. You were talking about this plutonium.’

‘God, man, have you no feelings?’

‘Time and a place for everything. Right now a little thinking, a little knowledge might help more.’

‘I suppose.’ Jablonsky spoke with the restrained effort of a man whose head is trying to make his heart see sense. ‘Plutonium–Plutonium 239, to be precise. Stuff that destroyed Nagasaki. Synthetic–doesn’t exist in nature. Man-made–we Californians had the privilege of creating it. Unbelievably toxic–a cobra’s bite is a thing of joy compared to it. If you had it in an aerosol in liquid form with freon under pressure–no one has as yet got around to figuring out how to do this but they will, they will–you’d have an indescribably lethal weapon on your hands. A couple of squirts of this into a crowded auditorium, say, with a couple of thousand people, and all you’d require would be a couple of thousand coffins.

‘It’s the inevitable by-product of the fissioning of uranium in a nuclear reactor. The plutonium, you understand, is still inside the uranium fuel rods. The rods are removed from the reactor and chopped up–.’

‘Who does the chopping? Not a job I’d fancy myself.’

‘I don’t know whether you would or not. First chop and you’d be dead. Done by remote-controlled guillotines in a place we call the “canyon”. Nice little place with five-foot walls and five-foot-thick windows. You wouldn’t want to go inside. The cuttings are dissolved in nitric acid then washed with various reactive chemicals to separate the plutonium from the uranium and other unwanted radioactive fission products.’

‘How’s this plutonium stored?’

‘Plutonium nitrate, actually. About ten litres of it goes into a stainless steel flask, about fifty inches high by five in diameter. That works out about two and a half kilograms of pure plutonium. Those flasks are even more easily handled than the uranium drums and quite safe if you’re careful.’

‘How much of this stuff do you require to make a bomb?’

‘No one knows for sure. It is believed that it is theoretically possible although at the moment practically impossible to make a nuclear device no bigger than a cigarette. The AEC puts the trigger quantity at two kilograms. It’s probably an over-estimate. But you could for sure carry enough plutonium to make a nuclear bomb in a lady’s purse.’

‘I’ll never look at a lady’s purse with the same eyes again. So that’s a bomb flask?’

‘Easily.’

‘Is there much of this plutonium around?’

‘Too much. Private companies have stock-piled more plutonium than there is in all the nuclear bombs in the world.’

Ryder lit a Gauloise while he assimilated this. ‘You did say what I thought you did say?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are they going to do with this stuff?’

‘That’s what the private companies would like to know. The half-life of this plutonium is about twenty-six thousand years. Radioactively, it’ll still be lethal in a hundred thousand years. Quite a legacy we’re leaving to the unborn. If mankind is still around in a hundred thousand years, which no scientist, economist, environmentalist or philosopher seriously believes, can’t you just see them cursing their ancestors some three thousand generations removed?’

‘They’ll have to handle that problem without me. It’s this generation I’m concerned with. Is this the first time nuclear fuel has been stolen from a plant?’

‘God, no. The first forced entry I know of, but others may have been hushed up. We’re touchy about those things, much more touchy than the Europeans who admit to several terrorist attacks on their reactor stations.’

‘Tell the man straight out.’ Ferguson sounded weary. ‘Theft of plutonium goes on all the time. I know it, Dr Jablonsky knows it. The Office of Nuclear Safeguards–that’s the watchdog of the AEC–knows about it best of all, but comes over all coy when questioned, even although their director did admit to a Congressional House energy sub-committee that perhaps one half of one per cent of fuel was unaccounted for. He didn’t seem very worried about it. After all, what’s one half of one per cent, especially when you say it quickly? Just enough to make enough bombs to wipe out the United States, that’s all. The great trusting American public know nothing about it–what they don’t know can’t frighten them. Do I sound rather bitter to you, Sergeant?’

‘You do a bit. You have reason to?’

‘I have. One of the reasons I resented your security report. There’s not a security chief in the country that doesn’t feel bitter about it. We spend billions every year preventing nuclear war, hundreds of millions from preventing accidents at the reactor plants but only about eight millions on security. The probability of those occurrences are in the reverse order. The AEC say they have up to ten thousand people keeping track of material. I would laugh if I didn’t feel like crying. The fact of the matter is they only know where it is about once a year. They come around, balance books, count cans, take samples and feed the figures into some luckless computer that usually comes up with the wrong answers. Not the computer’s fault–not the inspector’s. There’s far too few of them and the system is ungovernable anyway.

‘The AEC, for instance, say that theft by employees, because of the elaborate built-in protection and detection systems, is impossible. They say this in a loud voice for public consumption. It’s rubbish. Sample pipes lead off from the plutonium run-off spigot from the canyon–for testing strength, purity and so forth. Nothing easier than to run off a little plutonium into a small flask. If you’re not greedy and take only a small amount occasionally the chances are that you can get off with it almost indefinitely. If you can suborn two of the security guards–the one who monitors the TV screens of the cameras in the sensitive areas and the person who controls the metal detector beam you pass through on leaving–you can get off with it for ever.’

‘This has been done?’

‘The government doesn’t believe in paying high salaries for what is basically an unskilled job. Why do you think there are so many corrupt and crooked cops? If you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I don’t mind. This is the only way? Stealing the stuff in dribs and drabs. Hasn’t been done on a large scale?’

‘Sure it has. Again, nobody’s talking. As far back as nineteen-sixty-four, when the Chinese exploded their first nuclear bomb, it was taken for granted in this country that the Chinese just didn’t have the scientific know-how to separate-out U-235 from natural uranium. Ergo, they must have pinched it from somewhere. They wouldn’t have stolen it from Russia because Chinese, to say the least, are not welcome there. But they’re welcome here, especially in California. In San Francisco you have the biggest Chinese community outside China. Their students are received with open arms in Californian universities. It’s no secret that that’s how the Chinese came to have the secrets of making an atom bomb. Their students came across here, took a post-graduate course in physics, including nuclear physics, then high-tailed it back to the mother country with the necessary information.’

‘You’re digressing.’

‘That’s what bitterness does for you. Shortly after they exploded their bomb it came to light. perhaps accidentally, that sixty kilos of U-235 had disappeared from a nuclear fuel fabricating plant in Appolo, Pennsylvania. Coincidence? Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything. The stuff’s going missing right and left. A security chief in the east once told me that a hundred-and-ten kilos of U-235 somehow got lost from his plant.’ He broke off and shook his head dejectedly. ‘The whole thing is so damned stupid anyway.’

‘What’s stupid?’

‘Pilfering a few grams at a time from a plant or breaking into one to steal it on a grand scale. That’s being stupid. It’s stupid because it’s unnecessary. If you’d wanted a king-size haul of U-235 or plutonium today what would you have done?’

‘That’s obvious. I’d have let the regular crew of that truck load up and hi-jack it on the way back.’

‘Exactly. One or two plants send out their enriched nuclear fuel in such massive steel and concrete drums–transported in big fifteen-to-twenty-ton trucks–that the necessity for a crane effectively rules out hi-jacking. Most don’t. We don’t. A strong man on his own would have no difficulty in handling our drums. More than one nuclear scientist has publicly suggested that we approach the Kremlin and contract the Red Army for the job. That’s the way the Russians do it–a heavily armored truck with an escort armored vehicle in front and behind.’

‘Why don’t we do that?’

‘Not to be thought of. Same reason again–mustn’t scare the pants off the public. Bad for the nuclear image. Atoms for peace, not war. In the whole fuel cycle transportation is by so far the weakest link in security that it doesn’t deserve to be called a link at all. The major road shippers–like Pacific Intermountain Express or Tri-State or MacCormack–are painfully aware of this, and are worried sick about it. But there’s nothing their drivers can do. In the trucking business–many would prefer the word “racket”–theft and shortages are the name of the game. It’s the most corrupt and criminal-ridden business in the State but no one, especially the drivers, is going to say so out loud for all the world to hear. The Teamsters are the most powerful and widely feared union in the States. In Britain or Germany or France they would just be outlawed, and that would be that; in Russia they’d end up in Siberia. But not here. You don’t buck or bad-mouth the Teamsters–not if you place any value on your wife or kids or pension, or, most of all, your own personal health.

‘Every day an estimated two per cent of goods being transported by road in this country just go missing: the real figure is probably higher. The wise don’t complain: in the minority of cases where people do complain the insurers pay up quietly, since their premiums are loaded against what they regard as an occupational hazard. “Occupational” is the keyword. Eighty-five per cent of thefts are by people inside the trucking industry. Eighty-five per cent of hi-jackings involve collusion–which has to involve the truck-drivers, all, of course, paid-up members of the Teamsters.’

‘Has there ever been a case of a nuclear hi-jack on the open road?’

‘Hi-jacks don’t happen on the open road. Well, hardly ever. They occur at transfer points and driver’s stop-overs. Driver Jones visits the local locksmith and has a fresh set of keys for ignition and cab doors cut and hands it over to Smith. Next day he stops at a drivers’ pull-up, carefully locks the door and goes–either himself or with his mate–for his hamburger and french fries or whatever. When he comes out, he goes through the well-rehearsed routine of double-take, calling to heaven for vengeance and hot-footing it to the nearest phone box to call the cops, who know perfectly well what is going on but are completely incapable of proving anything. Those hi-jackings are rarely reported and pass virtually unnoticed because there are very rarely any crimes of violence involved.’

Ryder was patient. ‘I’ve been a cop all my life. I know that. Nuclear hi-jacks, I said.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know or you aren’t telling?’

‘That’s up to you to decide, Sergeant.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’ It was impossible for anyone to say whether Ryder had decided anything or not. He turned to Jablonsky.

Okay. Doc, if we go and have a look at Susan’s office?’

Jablonsky’s voice was dry. ‘Unusual of you, Sergeant, to ask anybody’s permission for anything.’

‘That’s downright unkind. Fact is, we haven’t been officially assigned to this investigation.’

‘I know that.’ He looked at Jeff. ‘This is hardly the stamping ground for a highway patrolman. Have you been expressly forbidden to come here?’

‘No.’

‘Makes no difference. Heavens, man, in your place I’d be worried to death. Search the whole damned building if you want.’ He paused briefly. ‘I suggest I come with you.’

‘“The whole damned building”, as you call it, can be left to Parker and Davidson, who are already here, and the lawmen in their droves who will be here in any moment. Why do you want to come with us to my wife’s office? I’ve never tampered with evidence in my life.’

‘Who says you did?’ He looked at Jeff. ‘You know your father has a long-standing and well-justified reputation for taking the law into his own hands?’

‘One does hear rumours, I have to admit. So you’d be a witness-stand guarantor for the good behaviour of one who is in need of care and protection?’ It was the first time that Jeff had smiled since he’d heard of his mother’s kidnapping.

Jablonsky said: ‘First time I ever heard anyone mention care and protection and Sergeant Ryder in the same breath.’

‘Jeff could be right.’ Ryder was unruffled. ‘I am getting on.’

Jablonsky smiled his total disbelief.

CHAPTER TWO

The office door, slightly ajar, had four splintered holes tightly grouped round the lock and handle. Ryder looked at them with no reaction, pushed open the door and walked inside. Sergeant Parker stopped from what he was doing, which was pushing scraps of paper around a desk-top with the rubber tip of a pencil, and turned round. He was a burly, pleasant-faced man in his late thirties who didn’t look a bit like a cop – which was one reason why his arrest record ranked second only to Ryder’s.

‘Been expecting you,’ he said. One hell of a business, just incredible.’ He smiled as if to alleviate the tension which Ryder didn’t seem to be feeling at all. ‘Come to take over, have you, to show the incompetents how a professional goes about it?’

‘Just looking. I’m not on this and I’m sure old Fatso will take great pleasure in keeping me off it.’ ‘Fatso’ referred to their far-from-revered police chief.

‘The sadistic blubber of lard would love to do just that.’ He ignored the slight frown of Dr Jablonsky who had never had the privilege of making the police chief’s acquaintance. ‘Why don’t you and I break his neck some day?’

‘Assuming he’s got a neck inside that twenty-inch collar.’ Ryder looked at the bullet-ridden door. ‘McCafferty – the gate guard – told me there was no shooting. Termites?’

‘Silencer.’

‘Why the gun at all?’

‘Susan is why.’ Parker was a family friend of long standing. ‘The villains had rounded up the staff and put them in the room across the hallway there. Susan just happened to look out of the door and saw them coming so she closed the door and locked it.’

‘So they blasted it open. Maybe they thought she was making a dive for the nearest telephone.’

‘You made the security report.’

‘That’s so. I remember. Only Dr Jablonsky here and Mr Ferguson were permitted direct lines to the outside. All other calls have to be cleared through the switchboard. They’d have taken care of the girl there first. Maybe they thought she was leaving through a window.’

‘Not a chance. From all I’ve heard – I haven’t had time to take statements yet – those villains would have been perfectly at home here with blindfolds on. They’d have known there was no fire-escape outside. They’d have known that every room is air-conditioned and that you can’t very well jump through plate-glass windows sealed like those are.’

‘Then why?’

‘Maybe in a hurry. Maybe just the impatient type. At least he gave warning. His words were: “Stand well to one side, Mrs Ryder, I’m going to blast open that door”.’

‘Well, that seems to prove two things. The first is that they’re not wanton killers. But I said “seem”. A dead hostage isn’t much good as a bargaining counter or as a lever to make reluctant physicists bend to their task. Second, they knew enough to be able to identify individual members of the staff.’

‘That they did.’

‘They seem to have been very well informed.’ Jeff tried to speak calmly, to emulate the monolithic calm of his father, but a rapidly beating pulse in his neck gave him away.

Ryder indicated the table-top strewn with scraps of torn paper. ‘Man of your age should be beyond jigsaws.’

‘You know me: thorough, painstaking, the conscientious detective who leaves no stone unturned.’

‘You’ve got all the pieces the right way up, I’ll say that for you. Make anything of it?’

‘No. You?’

‘No. Contents of Susan’s waste-paper basket, I take it?’

‘Yes.’ Parker looked at the tiny scraps in irritation. ‘I know secretaries and typists automatically tear up bits of papers destined for the waste-paper basket. But did she have to be so damned thorough about it?’

‘You know Susan. Never does things by halves. Or quarters. Or eighths.’ He pushed some of the scraps around – remnants of letters, carbons, some pieces of shorthand. ‘Sixteenths, yes. Not halves.’ He turned away. ‘Any other clues you haven’t come up with?’

‘Nothing on her desk, nothing in her desk. She took her handbag and umbrella with her.’

‘How do you know she had an umbrella?’

‘I asked,’ Parker said patiently. ‘Nothing but this left.’ He picked up a framed and unflattering picture of Ryder, replaced it on the desk and said à propos of nothing: ‘Some people can function efficiently under any circumstances. And that’s it, I’m afraid.’

Dr Jablonsky escorted them to the battered Peugeot. ‘If there’s anything I can do, Sergeant –’

‘Two things, as a matter of fact. Without letting Ferguson know, can you get hold of the dossier on Carlton? You know, the details of his past career, references, that sort of thing.’

‘Jesus, man, he’s number two in security.’

‘I know.’

‘Any reason to suspect him?’

‘None. I’m just curious why they took him as hostage. A senior security man is supposed to be tough and resourceful. Not the kind of man I’d have around. His record may show some reason why. Second thing, I’m still a pilgrim lost in this nuclear desert. If I need any more information can I contact you?’

‘You know where my office is.’

‘I may have to ask you to come to my place. Head office can put a stop order against my coming here.’

‘A cop?’

‘A cop, no. An ex-cop, yes.’

Jablonsky looked at him consideringly. ‘Expecting to be fired? God knows, it’s been threatened often enough.’

‘It’s an unjust world.’

On the way back to the station Jeff said: ‘Three questions. Why Carlton?’

‘Bad choice of hostage, like I said. Secondly, if the villains could identify your mother they could probably identify anyone in the plant. No reason why they should be especially interested in our family. The best sources of names and working locations of the staff is in the security files. Only Ferguson and Carlton – and, of course, Dr Jablonsky – have access to them.’

‘Why kidnap him?’

‘To make it look good? I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t kidnapped. You heard what Ferguson said about the government not paying highly for unskilled jobs. Maybe greener fields were beckoning.’

‘Sergeant Ryder, you have an unpleasantly suspicious imagination. What’s more, you’re no better than a common thief.’ Ryder drew placidly on his cigarette and remained unmoved. ‘You told Jablonsky you never tampered with evidence. I saw you palm pieces of paper from the table where Sergeant Parker was trying to sort them out.’

‘Suspicious minds would seem to run in this family,’ Ryder said mildly. ‘I didn’t tamper with evidence. I took it. If it is evidence, that is.’

‘Why did you take it if you don’t know?’

‘You saw what I took?’

‘Didn’t look much to me. Squiggles, doodles.’

‘Shorthand, you clown. Notice anything about the cut of Jablonsky’s coat?’

‘First thing any cop would notice. He should have his coat cut looser to conceal the bulge of his gun.’

‘It’s not a gun. It’s a cassette recorder. Jablonsky dictates all his letters and memos into that, wherever he is in the plant, as usually as not when he’s walking around.’

‘So?’ Jeff thought for a bit then looked properly chagrined. ‘Guess I’ll just stick to my trusty two-wheeler and handing out tickets to traffic violators. That way my lack of a towering intelligence doesn’t show up so much. No shorthand required, is that it?’

‘I would have thought so.’

‘But why tear it up into little bits –’

‘Just goes to show that you can’t believe half the experts who say that intelligence is hereditary.’ Ryder puffed on his cigarette with just a hint of complacency. ‘Think I would have married someone who panicked and lacked resource?’

‘Like she runs from a room when she sees a spider? A message?’

‘I would think. Know anyone who knows shorthand?’

‘Sure. Marge?’

‘Who’s Marge?’

‘God damnit, Dad, your god-daughter. Ted’s wife.’

‘Ah. Your fellow easy rider on the lonely trails of the freeways? Marjory, you mean? Ask them around for a drink when we get home.’

‘What did you mean back there by saying to Jablonsky that you expected to be fired?’

‘He said it, not me. Let’s say I sense premature retirement coming up. I have a feeling that Chief Donahure and I aren’t going to be seeing very much eye to eye in a few minutes’ time.’ Even the newest rookie in the police force knew of the Chief of Police’s enmity towards Ryder, a feeling exceeded only by the massive contempt in which Ryder held his superior.

Jeff said: ‘He doesn’t much like me either.’

‘That’s a fact.’ Ryder smiled reminiscently. Some time before her divorce from the Chief of Police, Jeff had handed out a speeding ticket to Mrs Donahure, although he had known perfectly well who she was. Donahure had first of all asked Jeff, then demanded of him that he tear up the booking. Jeff had refused, as Donahure must have known he would in advance. The Californian Highway Patrol had the reputation, of which it was justifiably proud, of being perhaps the only police force in the Union that was wholly above corruption. Not too long ago a patrolman had handed out a speeding ticket to the Governor. The Governor had written a letter of commendation to police headquarters – but he still had to pay up.

Sergeant Dickson was still behind his desk. He said:

‘Where have you two been?’

‘Detecting,’ Ryder said. ‘Why?’

‘The brass have been trying to reach you at San Ruffino.’ He lifted a phone. ‘Sergeant Ryder and Patrolman Ryder, Lieutenant. They’ve just come in.’ He listened briefly and hung up. ‘The pleasure of your company, gentlemen.’

‘Who’s with him?’

‘Major Dunne.’ Dunne was the area head of the FBI. ‘Plus a Dr Durrer from Erda or something.’

‘Capitals,’ Ryder said. ‘E-R-D-A. Energy Research and Development Administration. I know him.’

‘And, of course, your soul-mate.’

Four men were seated in Mahler’s office. Mahler, behind the desk, was wearing his official face to conceal his unhappiness. Two men sat in chairs – Dr Durrer, an owlish-looking individual with bottle-glass pince-nez that gave his eyes the appearance of those of a startled fawn, and Major Dunne, lean, greying, intelligent, with the smiling eyes of one who didn’t find too much in life to smile about. The standing figure was Donahure, Chief of Police. Although he wasn’t very tall his massive pear-shaped body took up a disproportionate amount of space. The layers of fat above and below his eyes left little space for the eyes themselves: he had in addition a fleshy nose, fleshy lips and a formidable array of chins. He was eyeing Ryder with distaste.

‘Case all sewn up, I suppose, Sergeant?’

Ryder ignored him. He said to Mahler: ‘You sent for us?’

Donahure’s face had turned an instant purple. ‘I was speaking to you, Ryder. I sent for you. Where the hell have you been?’

‘You just used the word “case”. And you’ve been phoning San Ruffino. If we must have questions do they have to be stupid ones?’

‘My God, Ryder, there’s no man talks to me –’

‘Please.’ Dunne’s voice was calm, quiet but incisive. ‘I’d be glad if you gentlemen would leave your bickering for another time. Sergeant Ryder, Patrolman, I’ve heard about Mrs Ryder and I’m damned sorry. Find anything interesting up there?’

‘No,’ Ryder said. Jeff kept his eyes carefully averted. ‘And I don’t think anyone will. Too clean a job, too professional. No violence offered. The only established fact is that the bandits made off with enough weapons-grade material to blow up half the State.’

‘How much?’ Dr Durrer said.

‘Twenty drums of U-Two-Three-Five and plutonium; I don’t know how much. A truck-load, I should think. A second truck arrived after they had taken over the building.’

‘Dear, dear.’ Durrer looked and sounded depressed.

‘Inevitably, the threats come next?’

Ryder said: ‘You get many threats?’

‘I wouldn’t bother answering that,’ Donahure said. ‘Ryder has no official standing in this case.’

‘Dear, dear,’ Durrer said again. He removed his pince-nez and regarded Donahure with eyes that weren’t owlish at all. ‘Are you curtailing my freedom of speech?’ Donahure was clearly taken aback and looked at Dunne but found no support in the coldly smiling eyes. Durrer returned his attention to Ryder. ‘We get threats. It is the policy of the State of California not to disclose how many, which is really a rather stupid policy as it is known – the figures have been published and are in the public domain – that some two hundred and twenty threats have been made against Federal and commercial facilities since nineteen-sixty-nine.’ He paused, as if expectantly, and Ryder accommodated him.

‘That’s a lot of threats.’ He appeared oblivious of the fact that the most immediate threat was an apopletic one: Donahure was clenching and unclenching his fists and his complexion was shading into an odd tinge of puce.

‘It is indeed. All of them, so far, have proved to be hoaxes. But some day the threat may prove to be real – that is, either the Government or private industry may have to pay up or suffer the effects of a nuclear detonation or nuclear radiation. We list six types of threat – two as highly improbable, four reasonably credible. The highly improbable are the detonation of a home-made bomb made from stolen weapons-grade materials or the detonation of a ready-made nuclear bomb stolen from a military ordnance depot: the credible are the dispersion of radio-active material other than plutonium, the release of hi-jacked radio-active materials from a spent fuel shipment, the detonation of a conventional high explosive salted with strontium-ninety, krypton-eighty-five, cesium-one-three-seven or even plutonium itself, or simply by the release of plutonium for contamination purposes.’

‘From the business-like way those criminals behaved in San Ruffino it might be that they mean business.’

‘The time has to come – we know that. This may be the time we receive a threat that really is a threat. We have made preparations, formulated in nineteen-seventy-five. “Nuclear Blackmail Emergency Response Plan for the State of California”, it’s called. The FBI have the overall control of the investigation. They can call on as many Federal, State and local agencies as they wish – including, of course, the police. They can call on nuclear experts from such places as Donner in Berkeley and Lawrence at Livermore. Search and decontamination teams and medical teams, headed by doctors who specialize in radiology, are immediately available as is the Air Force to carry those teams anywhere in the State. We at ERDA have the responsibility of assessing the validity of the threat.’

‘How’s that done?’

‘Primarily on checking with the government’s computerized system that determines very quickly if unexpected amounts of fissionable material is missing.’

‘Well, Dr Durrer, in this case we know already how much is missing so we don’t have to ask the computers. Just as well; I believe the computers are useless anyway.’

For the second time Durrer removed his pince-nez. ‘Who told you this?’

Ryder looked vague. ‘I don’t remember. It was some time ago.’ Jeff kept his smile under covers. Sure, it was some time ago. It must have been almost half an hour since Ferguson had told him. Durrer looked at him thoughtfully then clearly decided there was no point in pursuing the subject. Ryder went on, addressing himself to Mahler. ‘I’d like to be assigned to this investigation. I’d look forward to working under Major Dunne.’

Donahure smiled, not exactly an evil smile, just that of a man savouring the passing moment. His complexion had reverted to its customary mottled red. He said: ‘No way.’

Ryder looked at him. His expression wasn’t encouraging. ‘I have a very personal interest in this. Forgotten?’

‘There’ll be no discussion, Sergeant. As a policeman, you take orders from only one person in this county and that’s me.’

‘As a policeman.’ Donahure looked at him in sudden uncertainty.

Dunne said: ‘I’d appreciate having Sergeant Ryder working with me. Your most experienced man and your best in Intelligence – and with the best arrest record in the county – any county; come to that.’

‘That’s his trouble. Arrest-happy. Trigger-happy. Violent. Unstable if he was emotionally involved, as he would be in a case like this.’ Donahure tried to assume the expression of pious respectability but he was attempting the impossible. ‘Can’t have the good name of my force brought into disrepute.’

‘Jesus!’ It was Ryder’s only comment.

Dunne was mildly persistent. ‘I’d still like to have him.’

‘No. And with respects, I needn’t remind you that the authority of the FBI stops on the other side of that door. It’s for your own sake, Major Dunne. He’s a dangerous man to have around in a delicate situation like this.’

‘Kidnapping innocent women is delicate?’ Durrer’s dry voice made it apparent that he regarded Donahure as something less than a towering intelligence. ‘You might tell us how you arrive at that conclusion?’

‘Yes, how about that, Chief?’ Jeff could restrain himself no longer; he was visibly trembling with anger. Ryder observed him in mild surprise but said nothing. ‘My mother, Chief. And my father. Dangerous? Arrest-happy? Both of those things – but only to you, Chief, only to you. My father’s trouble is that he goes around arresting all the wrong people – pimps, drug-pushers, crooked politicians, honest, public-spirited members of the Mafia, respected business-men who are no better than scofflaws, even – isn’t it sad? – corrupt cops. Consult his record, Chief. The only time his arrests have failed to secure either a conviction or a probation order was when he came up against Judge Kendrick. You remember Judge Kendrick, don’t you, Chief? Your frequent house-guest who pocketed twenty-five thousand dollars from your buddies in City Hall and finished up with penitentiary. Five years. There were quite a lot of people who were lucky not to join him behind bars, weren’t there, Chief?’

Donahure made an indeterminate sound as if he were suffering from some constriction of the vocal cords. His fists were clenching and unclenching again and his complexion was still changing colour – only now with the speed and unpredictability of a chameleon crawling over tartan.

Dunne said: ‘You put him there, Sergeant?’

‘Somebody had to. Old Fatso here had all the evidence but wouldn’t use it. Can’t blame a man for not incriminating himself.’ Donahure made the same strangled noise. Ryder took something from his coat pocket and held it hidden, glancing quizzically at his son.

Jeff was calm now. He said to Donahure: ‘You’ve also slandered my father in front of witnesses.’ He looked at Ryder. ‘Going to raise an action? Or just leave him alone with his conscience?’

‘His what?’

‘You’ll never make a cop.’ Jeff sounded almost sad. ‘There are all those finer points that you’ve never mastered, like bribery, corruption, kickbacks and having a couple of bank accounts under false names.’ He looked at Donahure. ‘It’s true, isn’t it, Chief? Some people have lots of accounts under false names?’

‘You insolent young bastard.’ Donahure had his vocal cords working again, but only just. He tried to smile. ‘Kinda forgotten who you’re talking to, haven’t you?’

‘Sorry to deprive you of the pleasure, Chief.’ Jeff laid gun and badge on Mahler’s table and looked at his father in no surprise as Ryder placed a second badge on the table.

Donahure said hoarsely: ‘Your gun.’

‘It’s mine, not police property. Anyway, I’ve others at home. All the licences you want,’ Ryder said.

‘I can have those revoked tomorrow, copper.’ The viciousness of his tone matched the expression on his face.

‘I’m not a copper.’ Ryder lit a Gauloise and drew on it with obvious satisfaction.

‘Put that damned cigarette out!’

‘You heard. I’m not a copper. Not any more. I’m just a member of the public. The police are servants of the public. I don’t care to have my servants talk to me that way. Revoke my licences? You do just that and you’ll have a photostat of a private dossier I have, complete with photostat of signed affidavits. Then you’ll revoke the order revoking my licences.’

‘What the devil’s that meant to mean?’

‘Just that the original of the dossier should make very interesting reading up in Sacramento.’

‘You’re bluffing.’ The contempt in Donahure’s voice would have carried more conviction if he hadn’t licked his lips immediately afterwards.

‘Could be.’ Ryder contemplated a smoke-ring with a mildly surprised interest.

‘I’m warning you, Ryder.’ Donahure’s voice was shaking and it could have been something else other than anger. ‘Get in the way of this investigation and I’ll have you locked up for interfering with the course of justice.’

‘It’s just as well you know me, Donahure. I don’t have to threaten you. Besides, it gives me no pleasure to see fat blobs of lard shaking with fear.’

Donahure dropped his hand to his gun. Ryder slowly unbuttoned his jacket and pushed it back to put a hand on each hip. His .38 was in full view but his hands were clear of it.

Donahure said to Lieutenant Mahler: ‘Arrest this man.’

Dunne spoke in cold contempt. ‘Don’t be more of a fool than you can help, Donahure, and don’t put your lieutenant in an impossible position. Arrest him on what grounds, for heaven’s sake?’

Ryder buttoned his jacket, turned and left the office, Jeff close behind him. They were about to climb into the Peugeot when Dunne caught up with them.

‘Was that wise?’

Ryder shrugged. ‘Inevitable.’

‘He’s a dangerous man, Ryder. Not face to face, we all know that. Different when your back’s turned. He has powerful friends.’

‘I know his friends. A contemptible bunch, like himself. Half of them should be behind bars.’

‘Still doesn’t make them any less dangerous on a moonless night. You’re going ahead with this, of course?’

‘My wife, in case you have forgotten. Think we’re going to leave her to that fat slob’s tender care?’

‘What happens if he comes up against you?’

Jeff said: ‘Don’t tempt my father with such pleasant thoughts.’

‘Suppose I shouldn’t. I said I’d like you to work with me, Ryder. You, too, if you wish, young man. Offer stands. Always room for enterprising and ambitious young men in the FBI.’

‘Thanks. We’ll think it over. If we need help or advice can we contact you?’

Dunne looked at them consideringly then nodded. ‘Sure. You have my number. Well, you have the option. I don’t. Like it or not I’ve got to work with that fat slob as you so accurately call him. Carries a lot of political clout in the valley.’ He shook hands with the two men. ‘Mind your backs.’

In the car, Jeff said: ‘Going to consider his offer?’

‘Hell, no. That would be leaving the frying-pan for the fire. Not that Sassoon – he’s the Californian head of the FBI – isn’t honest. He is. But he’s too strict, goes by the book all the time and frowns on free enterprise. Wouldn’t want that – would we?’

Marjory Hohner, a brown-haired girl who looked too young to be married, sat beside her uniformed CHP husband and studied the scraps of paper she had arranged on the table in front of her. Ryder said: ‘Come on, god-daughter. A bright young girl like you –’

She lifted her head and smiled. ‘Easy. I suppose it will make sense to you. It says: “Look at back of your photograph”.’

‘Thank you, Marjory.’ Ryder reached for the phone and made two calls.

Ryder and his son had just finished the re-heated contents of the casserole Susan had left in the oven when Dr Jablonsky arrived an hour after the departure of the Hohners, briefcase in hand. Without expression or inflection of voice he said: ‘You must be psychic. The word’s out that you’ve been fired. You and Jeff here.’

‘Not at all.’ Ryder assumed an aloof dignity. ‘We retired. Voluntarily. But only temporarily, of course.’

‘You did say “temporarily”?’

‘That’s what I said. For the moment it doesn’t suit me to be a cop. Restricts my spheres of activities.’

Jeff said: ‘You did say temporarily?’

‘Sure. Back to work when this blows over. I’ve a wife to support.’

‘But Donahure –’

‘Don’t worry about Donahure. Let Donahure worry about himself. Drink, Doctor?’

‘Scotch, if you have it.’ Ryder went behind the small wet bar and pulled back a sliding door to reveal an impressive array of different bottles. Jablonsky said: ‘You have it.’

‘Beer for me. That’s for my friends. Lasts a long time,’ he added inconsequentially.

Jablonsky took a folder from his briefcase. ‘This is the file you wanted. Wasn’t easy. Ferguson’s like a cat on a hot tin roof. Jumpy.’

‘Ferguson’s straight.’

‘I know he is. This is a photostat. I didn’t want Ferguson or the FBI to find out that the original dossier is missing.’

‘Why’s Ferguson so jumpy?’

‘Hard to say. But he’s being evasive, uncommunicative. Maybe he feels his job is in danger since his security defences were so easily breached, Running scared, a little. I think we all are in the past few hours. Even goes for me.’ He looked gloomily. ‘I’m even worried that my presence here’ – he smiled to rob his words of offence – ‘consorting with an ex-cop might be noted.’

‘You’re too late. It has been noted.’

Jablonsky stopped smiling. ‘What?’

‘There’s a closed van about fifty yards down the road on the other side. No driver in the cab – he’s inside the van looking through a one-way window.’

Jeff rose quickly and moved to a window. He said: ‘How long has he been there?’

‘A few minutes. He arrived just as Dr Jablonsky did. Too late for me to do anything about it then.’ Ryder thought briefly then said: ‘I don’t much care to have those snoopers round my house. Go to my gun cupboard and take what you want. You’ll find a few old police badges there, too.’

‘He’ll know I’m no longer a cop.’

‘Sure he will. Think he’d dare to say so and put the finger on Donahure?’

‘Hardly. What do you want me to do? Shoot him?’

‘It’s a tempting thought, but no. Smash his window open with the butt of your gun and tell him to open up. His name is Raminoff and he looks a bit like a weasel, which he is. He carries a gun. Donahure reckons he’s his top undercover man. I’ve had tabs on him for years. He’s not a cop – he’s a criminal with several sentences behind him. You’ll find a policeband radio transmitter. Ask him for his licence. He won’t have one. Ask him for his police identification. He won’t have that either. Make the usual threatening noises and tell him to push off.’

Jeff smiled widely. ‘Retirement has its compensations.’

Jablonsky looked after him doubtfully. ‘You sure got a lot of faith in that boy, Sergeant.’

‘Jeff can look after himself,’ Ryder said comfortably. ‘Now, Doctor, I hope you’re not going to be evasive about telling me why Ferguson was being evasive.’

‘Why should I?’ He looked glum. ‘Seeing that I’m a marked man anyway.’

‘He was evasive with me?’

‘Yes. I feel more upset about your wife than you realize. I think you have the right to know anything that can help you.’

‘And I think that deserves another drink.’ It was a measure of Jablonsky’s preoccupation that he’d emptied his glass without being aware of it. Ryder went to the bar and returned. ‘What didn’t he tell me?’

‘You asked him if any nuclear material had been hi-jacked. He said he didn’t know. Fact is, he knows far too much about it to be willing to talk about it. Take the recent Hematite Hangover business, so-called, I imagine, because it’s given a headache to everybody in nuclear security. Hematite is in Missouri and is run by Gulf United Nuclear. They may have anything up to a thousand kilograms of U-235 on the premises at any given time. This comes to them, bottled, in the form of UF-Six, from Portsmouth, Ohio. This is converted into U-235 oxide. Much of this stuff, fully enriched and top weapons-grade material, goes from Hematite to Kansas City by truck, thence to Los Angeles as air cargo then is again trucked a hundred and twenty miles down the freeways to General Atomic in San Diego. Three wide-open transits. Do you want the horrifying details?’

‘I can imagine them. Why Ferguson’s secretiveness?’

‘No reason really. All security men are professional clams. There’s literally tons of the damned stuff missing. That’s no secret. The knowledge is in public domain.’

‘According to Dr Durrer of EKDA – I spoke to him this evening – the government’s computer system can tell you in nothing flat if any significant amount of weapons-grade material is missing.’

Jablonsky scowled, a scowl which he removed by fortifying himself with some more Scotch. ‘I wonder what he calls significant. Ten tons? Just enough to make a few hundred atom bombs, that’s all. Dr Durrer is either talking through a hole in his hat, which, knowing him as I do, is extremely unlikely, or he was just being coy. ERDA have been suffering from very sensitive feelings since the GAO gave them a black eye in, let me see, I think it was in July of ‘76.’

‘GAO?’

‘General Accounting Office.’ Jablonsky broke off as Jeff entered and deposited some material on a table. He looked very pleased with himself.

‘He’s gone. Heading for the nearest swamp I should imagine.’ He indicated his haul. ‘One police radio: he’d no licence for it so I couldn’t let him keep that, could I? One gun: clearly a criminal type so I couldn’t let him keep that either, could I? One driving licence: identification in lieu of police authorization which he didn’t seem to have. And one pair of Zeiss binoculars stamped “LAPD”: he couldn’t recall where he got that from and swore blind that he didn’t know that the initials stood for Los Angeles Police Department.’

‘I’ve always wanted one of those,’ Ryder said. Jablonsky frowned in heavy disapproval but removed that in the same way as he had removed his scowl.

‘I also wrote down his licence plate number, opened the hood and took down the engine and chassis numbers. I told him that all the numbers and confiscated articles would be delivered to the station tonight.’

Ryder said: ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve gone and upset Chief Donahure. Or he’s going to be upset any minute now.’ He looked wistful. ‘I wish we had a tap on his private line. He’s going to have to replace the equipment, which will hurt him enough but not half as much as replacing that van is going to hurt him.’

Jablonsky said: ‘Why should he have to replace the van?’

‘It’s hot. If Raminoff were caught with that van he’d get laryngitis singing at the top of his voice to implicate Donahure. He’s the kind of trusty henchman that Donahure surrounds himself with.’

‘Donahure could block the enquiry.’

‘No chance. John Aaron, the Editor of the Examiner, has been campaigning for years against police corruption in general and Chief Donahure in particular. A letter to the editor asking why Donahure failed to act on information received would be transferred from the readers’ page to page one. The swamp, you say, Jeff? Me, I’d go for Cypress Bluff. Two hundred feet sheer into the Pacific, then sixty feet of water. Ocean bed’s littered with cars past their best. Anyway, I want you to take your own car and go up there and drop all this confiscated stuff and the rest of those old police badges to join the rest of the ironmongery down there.’

Jeff pursed his lips. ‘You don’t think that old goat would have the nerve to come around here with a search warrant?’

‘Sure I do. Trump up any old reason – he’s done it often enough before.’

Jeff said, wooden-faced: ‘He might even invent some charge about tampering with evidence at the reactor plant?’

‘Man’s capable of anything.’

‘There’s some people you just can’t faze.’ Jeff left to fetch his car.

Jablonsky said: ‘What was that meant to mean?’

‘Today’s generation? Who can tell? You mentioned the GAO. What about the GAO?’

‘Ah, yes. They produced a report on the loss of nuclear material for a government department with the memorable name of the “House Small Business Subcommittee on Energy and Environment”. The report was and is classified. The Subcommittee made a summary of the report and declassified it. The GAO would appear to have a low opinion of ERDA. Says it doesn’t know its job. Claims that there are literally tons of nuclear material – number of tons unspecified – missing from the thirty-four uranium and plutonium processing plants in the country. GAO say they seriously question ERDA’s accountability procedures, and that they haven’t really a clue as to whether stuff is missing or not.’

‘Dr Durrer wouldn’t have liked that.’

‘ERDA were hopping. They said there was – and I know it to be true – up to sixty miles of piping in the processing system of any given plants, and if you multiply that by thirty-four you have a couple of thousand miles of piping, and there could be a great deal of nuclear material stuck in those pipes. GAO completely agreed but rather spoiled things by pointing out that there was no way in which the contents of those two thousand miles could be checked.’

Jablonsky peered gloomily at the base of his empty glass. Ryder rose obligingly and when he returned Jablonsky said accusingly but without heat: ‘Trying to loosen my tongue, is that it?’

‘What else? What did ERDA say?’

‘Practically nothing. They’d even less to say shortly afterwards when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission compounded that attack on them. They said in effect two things: that practically any plant in the country could be taken by a handful of armed and determined men and that the theft-detection systems were defective.’

‘You believe this?’

‘No silly questions, please – especially not after what happened today.’

‘So there could be tens of tons of the stuff cached around the country?’

‘I could be quoted on my answer?’

‘Now it’s your turn for silly questions.’

Jablonsky sighed. ‘What the hell. It’s eminently possible and more than probable. Why are you asking those questions, Sergeant?’

‘One more and I’ll tell you. Could you make an atom bomb?’

‘Sure. Any competent scientist – he doesn’t have to be a nuclear physicist – could. Thousands of them. School of thought that says that no one could make an atomic bomb without retracing the Manhattan project – that extremely long, enormously complicated and billion-dollar programme that led to the invention of the atom bomb in World War Two. Rubbish. The information is freely available. Write to the Atomic Energy Commission, enclose three dollars and they’ll be glad to let you have a copy of the Los Alamos Primer, which details the mathematical fundaments of fission bombs. A bit more expensive is the book called Manhattan District History, Project Y, the Los Alamos Project. For this you have to approach the Office of Technical Services of the US Department of Commerce, who will be delighted to let you have a copy by return post. Tells you all about it. Most importantly, it tells you of all the problems that arose in the building of the first atomic bomb and how they were overcome. Stirring stuff. Any amount of works in public print – just consult your local library – that consist of what used to be the supersecret information. All else failing, the Encyclopedia Americana will probably tell any intelligent person as much as he needs to know.’

‘We have a very helpful government.’

‘Very. Once the Russians had started exploding atom bombs they reckoned the need for secrecy was past. What they didn’t reckon on was that some patriotic citizen or citizens would up and use this knowledge against them.’ He sighed. ‘It would be easy to call the government of the day a bunch of clowns but they lacked the gift of Nostradamus: “hindsight makes us all wise”.’

‘Hydrogen bombs?’

‘A nuclear physicist for that.’ He paused then went on with some bitterness: ‘Provided, that is, he’s fourteen years of age or over.’

‘Explain.’

‘Back in nineteen-seventy there was an attempted nuclear blackmail of a city in Florida. Police tried to hush it up but it came out all the same. Give me a million dollars and a safe conduct out of America or I’ll blast your city out of existence, the blackmailer said. Next day came the same threat, this time accompanied by a diagram of a hydrogen bomb – a cylinder filled with lithium hydride wrapped in cobalt, with an implosion system at one end.’

‘That how they make a hydrogen bomb?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Isn’t that sad? And you a nuclear physicist. They nailed the blackmailer?’

‘Yes. A fourteen-year-old boy.’

‘It’s an advance on fireworks.’ For almost a minute Ryder gazed into the far distance, which appeared to be located in the region of his toe-caps, through a drifting cloud of blue-grey smoke, then said:

‘It’s a come-on. A con-job. A gambit. A phoney. Don’t you agree?’

Jablonsky was guarded. ‘I might. If, that is to say, I had the faintest idea what you were talking about.’

‘Will this theft of the uranium and plutonium be made public?’

Jablonsky gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘No, sir. Not if we can help it. Mustn’t give the shivers to the great American public’

‘Not if you can help it. I’ll take long odds that the bandits won’t be so bashful and that the story will have banner head-lines in every paper in the State tomorrow. Not to mention the rest of the country. It smells, Doc. The people responsible are obviously experts and must have known that the easiest way to get weapons-grade materia: is to hi-jack a shipment. With all that stuff already missing it’s long odds that they’ve got more than enough than they need already. And you know as well as I do that three nuclear physicists in the State have just vanished in the past couple of months. Would you care to guess who their captors were?’

‘I don’t think so – I mean, I don’t think I have to.’

‘I didn’t think so. You could have saved me all this thinking – I prefer to avoid it where possible. Let’s assume they already had the fuel. Let’s assume they already had the physicists to make the nuclear devices, quite possibly even hydrogen explosives. Let’s even assume that they have already got one of those devices – and why stop at one? – manufactured and tucked away at some safe place.’

Jablonsky looked unhappy. ‘It’s not an assumption I care to assume.’

‘I can understand that. But if something’s there wishing it wasn’t won’t make it go away. Some time back you described something as being eminently possible and more than probable. Would you describe this assumption in the same words?’

Jablonsky thought for some moments then said: ‘Yes.’

‘So. A smoke-screen. They didn’t really need the fuel or the physicists or the hostages. Why did they take something they didn’t need? Because they needed them.’

‘That makes a lot of sense.’

Ryder was patient. ‘They didn’t need them to make bombs. I would think they needed them for three other reasons. The first would be to obtain maximum publicity, to convince people that they had means to make bombs and meant business. The second is to lull us into the belief that we have time to deal with the threat. I mean, you can’t make a nuclear bomb in a day or a week, can you?’

‘No.’

‘So. We have breathing space. Only we haven’t.’

‘Getting the hang of your double-talk takes time. If our assumption is correct we haven’t.’

‘And the third thing is to create the proper climate of terror. People don’t behave rationally when they’re scared out of their wits, do they? Behaviour becomes no longer predictable. You don’t think, you just react.’

‘And where does all this lead us?’

‘That’s as far as my thinking goes. How the hell should I know?’

Jablonsky peered into his Scotch and found no inspiration there. He sighed again and said: ‘The only thing that makes sense out of all of this is that it accounts for your behaviour.’

‘Something odd about my behaviour?’

‘That’s the point. There should be. Or there should have been. Worried stiff about Susan. But if you’re right in your thinking – well, I understand.’

‘I’m afraid you don’t. If I’m right in what you so kindly call “my thinking” she’s in greater danger than she would have been if we’d accepted the facts at their face value. If the bandits are the kind of people that I think they are then they’re not to be judged on ordinary standards. They’re mavericks. They’re power-mad, megalomaniacs if you like, people who will stop at nothing, people who will go all the way in ruthlessness, especially when thwarted or shoved into a corner.’

Jablonsky digested this for some time then said: ‘Then you ought to look worried.’

‘That would help a lot.’ The door bell rang. Ryder rose and went to the lobby. Sergeant Parker, a bachelor who looked on Ryder’s house as a second home, had already let himself in. He, like Jablonsky, was carrying a briefcase: unlike Jablonsky, he looked cheerful.

‘Evening. Shouldn’t be associating with a fired cop, but in the sacred name of friendship –’

‘I resigned.’

‘Comes to the same thing. Leaves the way clear for me to assume the mantle of the most detested and feared cop in town. Look on the bright side. After thirty years of terrifying the local populace you deserve a break.’ He followed Ryder into the living-room. ‘Ah! Dr Jablonsky. I didn’t expect to find you here.’

‘I didn’t expect to be here.’

‘Lift up your spirits, Doc. Consorting with disgraced cops is not a statutory crime.’ He looked accusingly at Ryder. ‘Speaking of lifting – or lifting up spirits – this man’s glass is almost empty. London gin for me.’ A year on an exchange visit to Scotland Yard had left Parker with the profound conviction that American gin hadn’t advanced since prohibition days and was still made in bath-tubs.

‘Thanks to remind me.’ Ryder looked at Jablonsky. ‘He’s only consumed about a couple of hundred crates of the stuff here in the past fourteen years. Give or take a crate.’

Parker smiled, delved into his briefcase and came up with Ryder’s photograph. ‘Sorry to be so late with this. Had to go back and report to our fat friend. Seemed to be recovering from some sort of heart attack. Less interested in my report than in discussing you freely and at some length. Poor man was very upset so I congratulated him on his character analysis. This picture has some importance?’

‘I hope so. What makes you think so?’

‘You asked for it. And it seems Susan was going to take it with her then changed her mind. Seems she took it with her into the room where they were all locked up. Told the guard she felt sick. Guard checked the wash-room – for windows and telephone, I should imagine – then let her in. She came out in a few minutes looking, so I’m told, deathly pale.’

‘Morning Dawn,’ Ryder said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Face-powder she uses.’

‘Ah! Then – peace to the libbers – she exercised a woman’s privilege of changing her mind and changed her mind about taking the picture with her.’

‘Have you opened it up?’

‘I’m a virtuous honest cop and I wouldn’t dream –’

‘Stop dreaming.’

Parker eased off the six spring-loaded clips at the back, removed the rectangle of white cardboard and peered with interest at the back of Ryder’s photograph. ‘A clue, by heavens, a clue! I see the word “Morro”. The rest, I’m afraid, is in shorthand.’

‘Figures. She’d be in a hurry.’ Ryder crossed to the phone, dialled then hung up in about thirty seconds. ‘Damn! She’s not there.’

‘Who?’

‘My shorthand translator, Marjory. She and Ted have gone to eat, drink, dance, to a show or whatever. I’ve no idea what they do in the evenings or where the young hang out these days. Jeff will know. We’ll just have to wait till he returns.’

‘Where is your fellow ex-cop?’

‘Up on Cypress Bluff throwing some of Chief Donahure’s most treasured possessions into the Pacific’

‘Not Chief Donahure himself? Pity. I’m listening.’

CHAPTER THREE

America, like England, has much more than its fair share of those people in the world who choose not to conform to the status quo. They are the individualists who pursue their own paths, their own beliefs, their own foibles and what are commonly regarded as their own irrational peculiarities with a splendid disregard, leavened only with a modicum of kindly pity and sorrow and benign resignation, for those unfortunates who are not as they, the hordes of faceless conformists amongst whom they are forced to move and have their being. Some few of those individualists, confined principally to those who pursue the more esoteric forms of religions of their own inventions, try sporadically to lead the more gullible of the unenlightened along the road that leads to ultimate revelation: but basically, however, they regard the unfortunate conformists as being sadly beyond redemption and are resigned to leaving them to wallow in the troughs of their ignorance while they follow the meandering highways and byways of their own chosen life-style, oblivious of the paralleling motorways that carry the vast majority of blinkered mankind. They are commonly known as eccentrics.

America, as said, has its fair share of such eccentrics – and more. But California, as both the inhabitants of that State and the rest of the Union would agree, has vastly more than its fair share of American eccentrics: they are extremely thick upon the ground. They differ from your true English eccentric, who is almost invariably a loner. Californian eccentrics tend to polarize, and could equally well be categorized as cultists, whose beliefs range from the beatific to the cataclysmic, from the unassailable – because incapable of disproof – pontifications of the self-appointed gurus to the courageous resignation of those who have the day, hour and minute of the world’s end or those who crouch on the summit of a high peak in the Sierras awaiting the next flood which will surely lap their ankles – but no higher – before sunset. In a less free, less open, less inhibited and less tolerant society than California’s they would be tidied away in those institutions reserved for imbalanced mavericks of the human race: the Golden State does not exactly cherish them but does regard them with an affectionate if occasionally exasperated amusement.

But they cannot be regarded as the true eccentrics. In England, or on the eastern seaboard of the States, one can be poor and avoid all contact with like-minded deviants and still be recognized as an outstanding example of what the rest of mankind is glad it isn’t. In the group-minded togetherness of California such solitary peaks of eccentric achievement are almost impossible to reach, although there have been one or two notable examples, outstandingly the self-proclaimed Emperor of San Francisco and Defender of Mexico. Emperor Norton the First became so famous and cherished a figure that even the burial ceremony of his dog attracted such a vast concourse of tough and hard-headed nineteenth-century Franciscans that the entire business life of the city, saloons and bordellos apart, ground to a complete halt. But it was rare indeed for a penniless eccentric to scale the topmost heights.

To hope to be a successful eccentric in California one has to be a millionaire: being a billionaire brings with it a cast-iron guarantee. Von Streicher had been one of the latter, one of the favoured few. Unlike the bloodless and desiccated calculating machines of the oil, manufacturing and marketing billionaires of today, Von Streicher had been one of the giants of the era of steamships, railways and steel. Both his vast fortune and his reputation as an eccentric had been made and consolidated by the early twentieth century, and his status in both fields was unassailable. But every status requires its symbol: a symbol for your billionaire cannot be intangible: it has to be seen, and the bigger the better: and all self-respecting eccentrics with the proper monetary qualifications invariably settled on the same symbol: a home that would properly reflect the uniqueness of the owner. Kubla Khan had built his own Xanadu and, as he had been incomparably wealthier than any run-of-the-mill billionaire, what was good enough for him was good enough for them.

Von Streicher’s choice of location had been governed by two powerful phobias: one of tidal waves, the other of heights. The fear of tidal waves stemmed from his youth, when he had read of the volcanic eruption and destruction of the island of Thera, north of Crete, when a tidal wave, estimated at some 165 feet in height, destroyed much of the early Minoan, Grecian and Turkish civilizations. Since then he had lived with the conviction that he would be similarly engulfed some day. There was no known basis for his fear of heights but an eccentric of good standing does not require any reason for his whimsical beliefs. He had taken this fearful dilemma with him on his one and only return to his German birthplace, where he had spent two months examining the architectural monuments, almost exclusively castles, left behind by the mad Ludwig of Bavaria, and on his return had settled for what he regarded as the lesser of two evils – height.

He didn’t, however, go too high. He selected a plateau some fifteen hundred feet high on a mountain range some fifty miles from the ocean, and there proceeded to build his own Xanadu which he later christened ‘Adlerheim’ – the home of the eagle. The poet speaks of Kubla Khan’s pied-à-terre as being a stately pleasure dome. Adlerheim wasn’t like that at all. It was a castellated neo-Gothic horror, a baroque monstrosity that came close to being awe-inspiring in its total, unredeemed vulgarity. Massive, built of north Italian marble, it was an incredible hodge-podge of turrets, onion towers, crenellated battlements – and slit windows for the use of archers. All it lacked was a moat and drawbridge, but Von Streicher had been more than satisfied with it as it was. For others, living in more modern and hopefully more enlightened times, the sole redeeming feature was to be seen from the battlements, looking west: the view across the broad valley to the distant coastal range, Streicher’s first break-water against the inevitable tidal wave, was quite splendid.

Fortunately for the seven captives in the rear of the second of two vans grinding round the hairpins up to the castle, they were doubly unable to see what lay in store for them. Doubly, because in addition to the van body being wholly enclosed, they wore blindfolds as well as handcuffs. But they were to know the inside of Adlerheim more intimately than even the most besotted and aesthetically retarded admirer of all that was worst in nineteenth-century design would have cared to.

The prisoners’ van jolted to a stop. Rear doors were opened, bandages removed and the seven still-handcuffed passengers were helped to jump down on to the authentically cobbled surface of what proved to be a wholly enclosed courtyard. Two guards were closing two massive, iron-bound oaken doors to seal off the archway through which they had just entered. There were two peculiarities about the guards. They were carrying Ingram submachine guns fitted with silencers, a favourite weapon of Britain’s elite Special Air Service – despite its name, an Army regiment – which had two rare privileges: the first was that they had access to their own private armoury, almost certainly the most comprehensively stocked in the world, the second being that any member of the unit had complete freedom to pick the weapon of his own particular choice. The popularity of the Ingram was testimony to its effectiveness.

The second idiosyncrasy about the two guards was that, from top of burnous to sandal-brushing skirts of robe, they were dressed as Arabs – not the gleamingly white garb that one would normally look to find in the State of California but, nonetheless, eminently suitable for both the very warm weather and the instantaneous concealment of Ingrams in voluminous folds. Four other men, two bent over colourful flower borders that paralleled all four walls of the courtyard, two carrying slung rifles, were similarly dressed. All six had the sun-tanned swarthiness of an Eastern desert dweller: but some of their facial bone structures were wrong.

The man who was obviously the leader of the abductors, and had been in the leading van, approached the captives and let them see his face for the first time – he had removed his stocking mask on leaving San Ruffino. He was a tall man, but broad-shouldered and, unlike the pudgy Von Streicher, who had habitually worn lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with pheasant’s feather when in residence, he looked as if he belonged in an eagle’s home. His face was also lean and suntanned, but with a hooked nose and a piercing light blue eye. One eye. His right eye was covered by a black patch.

He said: ‘My name is Morro. I am the leader of this community here.’ He waved at the white-robed figures. ‘Those are my followers, acolytes, you might almost call them, all faithful servants of Allah.’

‘That’s what you would call them. I’d call them refugees from a chain gang.’ The tall thin man in the black alpaca suit had a pronounced stoop and bi-focal glasses and looked the prototype of the absent-minded academic, which was half-true. Professor Burnett of San Diego was anything but absent-minded: in his professional circle he was justly famous for his extraordinarily acute intelligence and justly notorious for his extraordinarily short temper.

Morro smiled. ‘Chains can be literal or figurative, Professor. One way or another we are all slaves to something.’ He gestured to the two men with rifles. ‘Remove their handcuffs. Ladies and gentlemen, I have to apologize for a rather upsetting interruption of the even tenor of your ways. I trust none of you suffered discomfort on our journey here.’ His speech had the fluency and precision of an educated man for whom English is not his native language. ‘I do not wish to sound alarming or threatening’ – there is no way of sounding more alarming and threatening than to say you don’t intend to – ‘but, before I take you inside, I would like you to have a look at the walls of this courtyard.’

They had a look. The walls were about twenty feet high and topped with a three-stranded barbed wire fence. The wires were supported by but not attached to the L-shaped steel posts embedded in the marble, but passed instead through insulated apertures.

Morro said: ‘Those walls and the gates are the only way to leave here. I do not advise that you try to use either. Especially the wall. The fence above is electrified.’

‘Has been for sixty years.’ Burnett sounded sour.

‘You know this place, then?’ Morro didn’t seem surprised. ‘You’ve been here?’

‘Thousands have. Von Streicher’s Folly. Open to the public for about twenty years when the State ran it.’

‘Still open to the public, believe it or not. Tuesdays and Fridays. Who am I to deprive Californians of part of their cultural heritage? Von Streicher put fifty volts through it as a deterrent. It would only kill a person with a bad heart – and a person with a bad heart wouldn’t try to scale that wall in the first place. I have increased the current to two thousand volts. Follow me, please.’

He led the way through an archway directly opposite the entrance. Beyond lay a huge hall, some sixty feet by sixty. Three open fireplaces, of stone, not granite, were let into each of three walls, each fireplace large enough for a man to stand upright: the three crackling log fires were not for decorative purposes because even in the month of June the thick granite walls effectively insulated the interior from the heat outside. There were no windows, illumination being provided by four massive chandeliers which had come all the way from Prague. The gleaming floor was of inlaid redwood. Of the floor space only half of the area was occupied, this by a row of refectory tables and benches: the other was empty except for a hand-carved oaken rostrum and, close by, a pile of undistinguished mats.

‘Von Streicher’s banqueting hall,’ Morro said. He looked at the’ battered tables and benches. ‘I doubt whether he would have approved of the change.’

Burnett said: ‘The Louis Fourteenth chairs, the Empire-period tables. All gone? They would have made excellent firewood.’

‘You must not equate non-Christian with being barbaric, Professor. The original furniture is intact. The Adlerheim has massive cellars. The castle, I’m afraid, its splendid isolation apart, is not as we would have wished for our religious purposes. The refectory half of this hall is profane. The other half – he indicated the bare expanse – ‘is consecrated. We have to make do with what we have. Some day we hope to build a mosque adjoining here: for the present this has to serve. The rostrum is for the readings of the Koran: the mats, of course, are for prayers. For calling the faithful to prayer we have again been forced to make a most reluctant compromise. For Mohammedans those onion towers, the grotesque architectural symbol of the Greek Orthodox Church, are anathema, but we have again consecrated one of them and it now serves as our minaret from which the muezzin summons the acolytes to prayer.’

Dr Schmidt, like Burnett an outstanding nuclear physicist and, like Burnett, renowned for his inability to stand fools gladly, looked at Morro from under bushy white eyebrows that splendidly complemented his impossible mane of white hair. His ruddy face held an expression of almost comical disbelief.

‘This is what you tell your Tuesday and Friday visitors?’

‘But of course.’

‘My God!’

‘Allah, if you please.’

‘And I suppose you conduct those personal tours yourself? I mean, you must derive enormous pleasure from feeding this pack of lies to my gullible fellow citizens.’

‘Allah send that you some day see the light.’ Morro was not patronizing, just kindly. ‘And this is a chore – what am I saying? – a sacred duty that is performed for me by my deputy Abraham.’

‘Abraham?’ Burnett permitted himself a professional sneer. ‘A fitting name for a follower of Allah.’

‘You have not been in Palestine lately, have you, Professor?’

‘Israel.’

‘Palestine. There are many Arabs there who profess the Jewish faith. Why take exception to a Jew practising the Muslim faith? Come. I shall introduce you to him. I dare say you will find the surroundings more congenial there.’

The very large study into which he led them was not only more congenial: it was unashamedly sybaritic. Von Streicher had left the internal design and furnishings of the Adlerheim to his architects and interior designers and, for once, they had got something right. The study was clearly modelled on an English ducal library: book-lined walls on three sides of the room, each book expensively covered in the finest leather, deep-piled russet carpet, silken damask drapes, also russet, comfortable and enveloping leather armchairs, oaken side-tables and leather-topped desk with a padded leather swivel chair behind it. A slightly incongruous note was struck by the three men already present in the room. All were dressed in Arab clothes. Two were diminutive, with unremarkable features not worth a second glance; but the third was worth all the attention that the other two were spared. He looked as if he had started out to grow into a basketball player then changed his mind to become an American football player. He was immensely tall and had shoulders like a draught horse: he could have weighed anything up to three hundred pounds.

Morro said: ‘Abraham, our guests from San Ruffino. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Abraham Dubois, my deputy.’

The giant bowed. ‘My pleasure, I assure you. Welcome to the Adlertheim. We hope your stay here will be a pleasant one.’ Both the voice and the tone of the voice came as a surprise. Like Morro, he spoke with the easy fluency of an educated man and, looking at that bleak impassive face, one would have expected any words to have either sinister or threatening overtones. But he sounded courteous and genuinely friendly. His speech did not betray his nationality but his features did. Here was no Arab, no Jew, no Levantine and, despite his surname, no Frenchman. He was unmistakably American – not your clean-cut all-American campus hero, but a native American aristocrat whose unbroken lineage was shrouded in the mists of time: Dubois was a full-blooded Red Indian.

Morro said: ‘A pleasant stay and, we hope, a short one.’ He nodded to Dubois, who in turn nodded to his two diminutive companions, who left. Morro moved behind the desk. ‘If you would be seated, please. This will not take long. Then you’ll be shown to your quarters – after I have introduced you to some other guests.’ He pulled up his swivel chair, sat, and took some papers from a desk drawer. He uncapped a pen and looked up as the two small white-robed men, each bearing a silver tray filled with glasses, entered. ‘As you see, we are civilized. Refreshments?’

Professor Burnett was the first to be offered a tray. He glowered at it, looked at Morro and made no move. Morro smiled, rose from his seat and came towards him.

‘If we had intended to dispose of you – and can you think of any earthly reason why we should? – would I have brought you all the way here to do so? Hemlock we leave to Socrates, cyanide to professional assassins. We prefer our refreshments undiluted. Which one, my dear Professor, would you care to have me select at random?’

Burnett, whose thirst was legendary, hesitated only briefly before pointing. Morro lifted the glass, lowered the amber level by almost a quarter and smiled appreciatively. ‘Glenfiddich. An excellent Scottish malt. I recommend it.’

The Professor did not hesitate. Malt was malt no matter what the moral standards of one’s host. He drank, smacked his lips and sneered ungratefully. ‘Muslims don’t drink.’

‘Breakaway Muslims do.’ Morro registered no offence. ‘We are a breakaway group. As for those who call themselves true Muslims, it’s a rule honoured in the breach. Ask the manager of any five-star hotel in London which, as the pilgrimage centre of the upper echelons of Arabian society, is now taking over from Mecca. There was a time when the oil sheikhs used to send out their servants daily to bring back large crates of suitably disguised refreshments until the management discreetly pointed out that this was wholly unnecessary and all that was required that they charge such expenses up to laundry, phones or stamps. I understand that various governments in the Gulf remained unmoved at stamp bills for a thousand pounds sterling.’

‘Breakaway Muslims,’ Burnett wasn’t through with sneering yet. ‘Why the front?’

‘Front?’ Morro smilingly refused to take umbrage. ‘This is no front, Professor. You would be surprised how many Muslims there are in your State. You’d be surprised how highly placed a large number of them are. You’d be surprised how many of them come here to worship and to meditate – Adlerheim, and not slowly, is becoming a place of pilgrimage in the West. Above all, you’d be surprised how many influential citizens, citizens who cannot afford to have their good name impugned, would vouch for our unassailable good name, dedication and honesty of purpose.’

Dr Schmidt said: ‘If they knew what your real purpose was I wouldn’t be surprised: I’d be utterly incredulous.’

Morro turned his hands palm upwards and looked at his deputy. Dubois shrugged then said: ‘We are respected, trusted and – I have to say this – even admired by the local authorities. And why not? Because Californians not only tolerate and even cherish their eccentrics, regarding them as a protected species? Certainly not. We are registered as a charitable organization and, unlike the vast majority of charities, we do not solicit money, we give it away. In the eight months we have been established we have given over two million dollars to the poor, the crippled, the retarded and to deserving pension funds, regardless of race or creed.’

‘Including police pension funds?’ Burnett wasn’t through with being nasty for the evening.

‘Including just that. There is no question of bribery or corruption.’ Dubois was so open and convincing that disbelief came hard. ‘A quid pro quo you may say for the security and protection that they offer us. Mr Curragh, county Chief of Police, a man widely respected for his integrity, has the whole-hearted support of the Governor of the State in ensuring that we can carry out our good works, peaceful projects and selfless aims without let or hindrance. We even have a permanent police guard at the entrance to our private road down in the valley to ensure that we are not molested.’ Dubois shook his massive head and his face was grave. ‘You would not believe, gentlemen, the number of evilly-intentioned people in this world who derive pleasure from harassing those who would do good.’

‘Sweet Jesus!’ Burnett was clearly trying to fight against speechlessness. ‘Of all the hypocrisy I’ve encountered in my life…You know, Morro, I believe you. I can quite believe that you have – not suborned, not subverted – you have conned or persuaded honest citizens, an honest Chief of Police and an honest police force into believing that you are what you claim to be. I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t believe you – after all, they have two million good reasons, all green, to substantiate your claims. People don’t throw around a fortune like that for amusement, do they?’

Morro smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re coming round to our point of view.’

‘They don’t throw it around like that unless they are playing for extremely high stakes. Speculate to accumulate – isn’t that it, Morro?’ He shook his head in slow disbelief, remembered the glass in his hand and took further steps to fortify himself against unreality. ‘Out of context, one would be hard put not to believe you. In context, it is impossible.’

‘In context?’

‘The theft of weapons-grade materials and mass kidnapping. Rather difficult to equate that with your alleged humanitarian purposes. Although I have no doubt you can equate anything. All you need is a sick enough mind.’

Morro returned to his seat and propped his chin on his fists. For some reason he had not seen fit to remove the black leather gloves which he had worn throughout. ‘We are not sick. We are not zealots. We are not fanatics. We have but one purpose in mind – the betterment of the human lot.’

‘Which human lot? Yours?’

Morro sighed. ‘I waste my time. Perhaps you think you are here for ransom? You are not. Perhaps you think it is our purpose to compel you and Dr Schmidt to make some kind of crude atomic weapon for us? Ludicrous – no one can compel men of your stature and integrity to do what they do not wish to do. You might think – the world might think – that we might compel you to work by the threat of torturing the other hostages, particularly the ladies? Preposterous. I would remind you again that we are no barbarians. Professor Burnett, if I pointed a six-gun between your eyes and told you not to move, would you move?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Would you or wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘So, you see, the gun doesn’t have to be loaded. You take my point?’

Burnett remained silent.

‘I will not give you my word that no harm will come to any of you for clearly my word will carry no weight with any of you. We shall just have to wait and see, will we not?’ He smoothed the sheet in front of him. ‘Professor Burnett and Dr Schmidt I know. Mrs Ryder I recognize.’ He looked at a bespectacled young girl with auburn hair and a rather scared expression. ‘You must, of course, be Miss Julie Johnson, stenographer.’

He looked at the three remaining men. ‘Which of you is Mr Haverford, Deputy Director?’

‘I am.’ Haverford was a portly young man with sandy hair and a choleric expression who added as an afterthought: ‘Damn your eyes.’

‘Dear me. And Mr Carlton? Security deputy?’

‘Me.’ Carlton was in his mid-thirties, with black hair, permanently compressed lips and, at that moment, a disgusted expression.

‘You mustn’t reproach yourself.’ Morro was almost kindly. ‘There never has been a security system that couldn’t be breached.’ He looked at the seventh hostage, a pallid young man with thin pale hair whose bobbing Adam’s apple and twitching left eye were competing in sending distress signals. ‘And you are Mr Rollins, from the control room?’ Rollins didn’t say whether he was or not.

Morro folded the sheet. ‘I should like to suggest that when you get to your rooms you should each write a letter. Writing materials you will find in your quarters. To your nearest and dearest, just to let them know that you are alive and well, that – apart from the temporary curtailment of your liberty – you have no complaints of ill treatment and have not been and will not be threatened in any way. You will not, of course, mention anything about Adlerheim or Muslims or anything that could give an indication as to your whereabouts. Leave your envelopes unsealed: we shall do that.’

‘Censorship, eh?’ Burnett’s second Scotch had had no mellowing effect.

‘Don’t be naïve.’

‘And if we – or I – refuse to write?’

‘If you’d rather not reassure your families that’s your decision entirely.’ He looked at Dubois. ‘I think we could have Drs Healey and Bramwell in now.’

Dr Schmidt said: ‘Two of the missing nuclear physicists.’

‘I promised to introduce you to some guests.’

‘Where is Professor Aachen?’

‘Professor Aachen?’ Morro looked at Dubois, who pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘We know no one of that name.’

‘Professor Aachen was the most prestigious of the three nuclear physicists who disappeared some weeks ago.’ Schmidt could be very precise, even pedantic, in his speech.

‘Well, he didn’t disappear in our direction. I have never heard of him. I’m afraid that we cannot accept responsibility for every scientist who chooses to vanish. Or defect.’

‘Defect? Never. Impossible.’

‘I’m afraid that’s been exactly the reaction of American and British colleagues of scientists who have found the attractions of State-subsidized flats in Moscow irresistible. Ah! Your non-defecting colleagues, gentlemen.’

Apart from a six-inch difference in height Healey and Bramwell were curiously alike. Dark, with thin, intelligent faces and identical horn-rimmed glasses and wearing neat, conservatively-cut clothes, they would not have looked out of place in a Wall Street boardroom. Morro didn’t have to make any introductions: top-ranking nuclear physicists form a very close community. Characteristically, it occurred to neither Burnett nor Schmidt to introduce their companions in distress.

After the customary hand-shaking, gripping of upper arms and not-so-customary regrets that their acquaintance should be renewed in such deplorable circumstances, Healey said: ‘We were expecting you. Well, colleagues?’ Healey favoured Morro with a look that lacked cordiality.

Burnett said: ‘Which was more than we did of you.’ By ‘we’ he clearly referred only to Schmidt and himself. ‘But if you’re here we expected Willi Aachen to be with you.’

‘I’d expected the same myself. But no Willi. Morro here is under the crackpot delusion that he may have defected. Man had never even heard of him, far less met him.’

‘“Crackpot” is right,’ Schmidt said, then added grudgingly: ‘You two look pretty fit, I must say.’

‘No reason why not.’ It was Bramwell. ‘An enforced and unwanted holiday, but the seven most peaceful weeks I’ve had in years. Ever, I suppose. Walking, eating, sleeping, drinking and, best, no telephone. Splendid library, as you can see, and in every suite colour TV for the weak-minded.’

‘Suite?’

‘You’ll see. Those old-time billionaires didn’t begrudge themselves anything. Any idea why you are here?’

‘None,’ Schmidt said. ‘We were looking to you to tell us.’

‘Seven weeks and we haven’t a clue.’

‘He hasn’t tried to make you work for him?’

‘Like building a nuclear device? Frankly, that’s what we thought would be demanded of us. But nothing.’ Healey permitted himself a humourless smile. ‘Almost disappointing, isn’t it?’

Burnett looked at Morro. ‘The gun with the empty magazine; is that it?’ Morro smiled politely.

‘How’s that?’ Bramwell said.

‘Psychological warfare. Against whomsoever the inevitable threat will ultimately be directed. Why kidnap a nuclear physicist if not to have him manufacture atom bombs under duress? That’s what the world will think.’

‘That’s what the world will think. The world does not know that you don’t require a nuclear physicist for that. But the people who really matter are those who know that for a hydrogen bomb you do require a nuclear physicist. We figured that out our first evening here.’

Morro was courteous as ever. ‘If I could interrupt your conversation, gentlemen. Plenty of time to discuss the past – and the present and future – later. A late supper will be available here in an hour. Meantime, I’m sure our new guests would like to see their quarters and attend to some – ah – optional correspondence.’

Susan Ryder was forty-five and looked ten years younger. She had dark-blonde hair, cornflower-blue eyes and a smile that could be bewitching or coolly disconcerting according to the company. Intelligent and blessed with a sense of humour, she was not, however, feeling particularly humorous at that moment. She had no reason to. She was sitting on her bed in the quarters that had been allocated to her. Julie Johnson, the stenographer, was standing in the middle of the room.

‘They certainly know how to put up their guests,’ said Julie. ‘Or old Von Streicher did. Living-room and bedroom from the Beverly Wilshire. Bathroom with gold-plated taps – it’s got everything!’

‘I might even try out some of these luxuries,’ said Susan in a loud voice. She rose, putting a warning finger to her lips. ‘In fact I’m going to try a quick shower. Won’t be long.’

She passed through the bedroom into the bathroom, waited some prudent seconds, turned the shower on, returned to the living-room and beckoned Julie who followed her back to the bathroom. Susan smiled at the young girl’s raised eyebrows and said in a soft voice: ‘I don’t know whether these rooms are bugged or not.’

‘Of course they are.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘I wouldn’t put anything past that creep.’

‘Mr Morro. I thought him quite charming, myself. But I agree. Running a shower gets a hidden mike all confused. Or so John told me once.’ Apart from herself and Parker, no one called Sergeant Ryder by his given name, probably because very few people knew it: Jeff invariably called her Susan but never got beyond ‘Dad’ where his father was concerned. ‘I wish to heaven he was here now – though mind you, I’ve already written a note to him.’

Julie looked at her blankly.

‘Remember when I was overcome back in San Ruffino and had to retire to the powder room? I took John’s picture with me, removed the backing, scribbled a few odds and ends on the back of the picture, replaced the back and left the picture behind.’

‘Isn’t it a pretty remote chance that it would ever occur to him to open up the picture?’

‘Yes. So I scribbled a tiny note in shorthand, tore it up and dropped it in my waste-paper basket.’

‘Again, isn’t it unlikely that that would occur to him? To check your basket? And even if he did, to guess that a scrap of shorthand would mean anything?’

‘It’s a slender chance. Well, a little better than slender. You can’t know him as I do. Women have the traditional right of being unpredictable, and that’s one of the things about him that does annoy me: ninety-nine point something per cent of the time he can predict precisely what I will do.’

‘Even if he does find what you left – well, you couldn’t have been able to tell him much.’

‘Very little. A description – what little I could give of anybody with a stocking mask – his stupid remark about taking us to some place where we wouldn’t get our feet wet, and his name.’

‘Funny he shouldn’t have warned his thugs against calling him by name. Unless, of course, it wasn’t his name.’

‘Sure it’s not his name. Probably a twisted sense of humour. He broke into a power station, so it probably tickled him to call himself after another station, the one in Morro Bay. Though I don’t know if that will help us much.’

Julie smiled doubtfully and left. When the door closed behind her Susan turned around to locate the draught that had suddenly made her shoulders feel cold, but there was no place from which a draught could have come.

Showers were in demand that evening. A little way along the hallway Professor Burnett had his running for precisely the same reason as Susan had. In this case the person he wanted to talk to was, inevitably, Dr Schmidt. Bramwell, when listing the amenities of Adlerheim, had omitted to include what both Burnett and Schmidt regarded as by far the most important amenity of all: every suite was provided with its own wet bar. The two men silently toasted each other, Burnett with his malt, Schmidt with his gin and tonic: unlike Sergeant Parker, Schmidt had no esoteric preferences as to the source of his gin. A gin was a gin was a gin.

Burnett said: ‘Do you make of all this what I make of all this?’

‘Yes.’ Like Burnett, Schmidt had no idea whatsoever what to make of it.

‘Is the man mad, a crackpot or just a cunning devil?’

‘A cunning devil, that’s quite obvious.’ Schmidt pondered. ‘Of course, there’s nothing to prevent him from being all three at the same time.’

‘What do you reckon our chances are of getting out of here?’

‘Zero.’

‘What do you reckon our chances are of getting out of here alive?’

‘The same. He can’t afford to let us live. We could identify them afterwards.’

‘You honestly think he’d be prepared to kill all of us in cold blood?’

‘He’d have to.’ Schmidt hesitated. ‘Can’t be sure. Seems civilized enough in his own odd-ball way. Could be a veneer, of course – but just possibly he might be a man with a mission.’ Schmidt helped his meditation along by emptying his glass, left and returned with a refill. ‘Could even be prepared to bargain our lives against freedom from persecution. Speaking no ill of the others, of course’ – he clearly was – ‘but with four top-ranking nuclear physicists in his hands he holds pretty strong cards to deal with either State or government, as the case may be.’

‘Government. No question. Dr Durrer of ERDA would have called in the FBI hours ago. And while we may be important enough we mustn’t overlook the tremendous emotional factor of having two innocent women as hostages. The nation will clamour for the release of all of us, irrespective of whether it means stopping the wheels of justice.’

‘It’s a hope.’ Schmidt was glum. ‘We could be whistling in the dark. If only we knew what Morro was up to. All right, we suspect it’s some form of nuclear blackmail because we can’t see what else it could be: but what form we can’t even begin to guess.’

‘Healey and Bramwell could tell us. After all, we haven’t had a chance to talk to them. They’re mad, sure, but they seemed fairly relaxed and not running scared. Before we start jumping to conclusions perhaps we should talk to them. Odds are that they know something we don’t.’

‘Too relaxed.’ Schmidt pondered some time. ‘I hesitate to suggest this – I’m no expert in the field – but could they have been brain-washed, subverted in some way?’

‘No.’ Burnett was positive. ‘The thought occurred to me while we were talking to them. Very long odds against. Know them too well.’

Burnett and Schmidt found the other two physicists in Healey’s room. Soft music was playing. Burnett put a finger to his lips. Healey smiled and turned up the volume.

‘That’s just to put your minds at rest. We haven’t been here for seven weeks without knowing the rooms aren’t bugged. But something’s bugging you?’

‘Yes. Bluntly, you’re too casual by half. How do you know Morro isn’t going to feed us to the lions when he gets whatever he wants?’

‘We don’t. Maybe we’re stir-happy. He’s repeatedly told us that we will come to no harm and that he’s no doubt about the outcome of his negotiations with the authorities when he’s carried out whatever mad scheme he has in mind.’

‘That’s roughly what we had in mind. It doesn’t seem like much of a guarantee to us.’

‘It’s all we have. Besides, we’ve had time to figure it out. He doesn’t want us for any practical purpose. Therefore we’re here for psychological purposes, like the theft of uranium and plutonium: as you said, the pointed gun without bullets. If we were wanted for only psychological purposes then the very fact of our disappearance would have achieved all he wanted and he could have disposed of us on the spot. Why keep us around for seven weeks before disposing of us? For the pleasure of our company?’

‘Well, there’s no harm in looking on the bright side. Maybe Dr Schmidt and I will come around to your way of thinking. I only hope it doesn’t take another seven weeks.’ Healey pointed towards the bar and lifted an interrogative eyebrow, but Burnett shook his head, clear indication of how perturbed he was. ‘Something else still bugs me. Willi Aachen. Where has he disappeared to? Reason tells me that if four physicists have fallen into Morro’s hands so should have the fifth. Why should he be favoured? Or, depending on your point of view, so blessed?’

‘Lord only knows. One thing for sure, he’s no defector.’

Schmidt said: ‘He could be an involuntary defector?’

Burnett said: ‘It’s been known to happen. But it’s one thing to take a horse to water.’

‘I’ve never met him,’ Schmidt said. ‘He’s the best, isn’t he? From all I hear and all I read, that is.’

Burnett smiled at Healey and Bramwell then said to Schmidt: ‘We physicists are a jealous and self-opinionated lot who yield second place to no one. But well, yes, he’s the best.’

‘I assume that it’s because I’ve been naturalized only six months and that he works in a super-sensitive area that I’ve been kept away from him. What’s he like? I don’t mean his work. His fame is international.’

‘Last seen at that symposium in Washington ten weeks ago. The three of us were there. Cheerful, happy-go-lucky type. Frizzled head of hair like the blackest gollywog you ever saw. Tall as I am, and heavily built – about two-hundred-and-ten pounds, I’d say. And stubborn as they come – the idea of the Russians or anybody making him work for them just isn’t conceivable.’

Unknown to Professor Burnett, unknown to any other person who had ever known Willi Aachen in his prime, Burnett was wrong on every count. Professor Aachen’s face was drawn, haggard and etched with a hundred lines, none of which had existed three months previously. The mane of frizzled hair he still had but it had turned the colour of snow. He was no longer tall because he had developed a severe stoop akin to that of an advanced sufferer from kypho-scoliosis. His clothes hung on a shrunken frame of 150 pounds. And Aachen would work for anybody, especially Lopez. If Lopez had asked him to step off the Golden Gate Bridge Aachen would have done it unhesitatingly.

Lopez was the man who had worked this change on the seemingly indestructible, seemingly impregnable Aachen. Lopez – nobody knew his surname and his given name was probably fictitious anyway – had been a lieutenant in the Argentinian army, where he had worked as an interrogator in the security forces. Iranians and Chileans are widely championed as being the most efficient torturers in the world, but the army of the Argentine, who are reluctant to talk about such matters, make all others specializing in the field of extracting information appear to be fumbling adolescents. It said a great deal for Lopez’s unholy expertise that he had sickened his ruthless commanders to the extent that they had felt compelled to get rid of him.

Lopez was vastly amused at stories of World War heroes gallantly defying torture for weeks, even months, on end. It was Lopez’s claim – no boast, for his claim had been substantiated a hundred times over – that he could have the toughest and most fanatical of terrorists screaming in unspeakable agony within five minutes and, within twenty minutes, have the name of every member of his cell.

It had taken him forty minutes to break Aachen and he had to repeat the process several times in the following three weeks. For the past month Aachen had given no trouble. It was a tribute and testimony to Lopez’s evil skill that, although Aachen was a physically shattered man with the last vestiges of pride, will and independence gone for ever, his mind and memory remained unimpaired.

Aachen gripped the bars of his cell and gazed through them, with lack-lustre eyes veined with blood, at the immaculate laboratory-cum-workshop that had been his home and his hell for the previous seven weeks. He stared unblinkingly, interminably, as if in a hypnotic trance, at the rack against the opposite wall. It held twelve cylinders. Each had a lifting ring welded to the top. Eleven of those were about twelve feet high, and in diameter no more than the barrel of a 4.5-inch naval gun, to which they bore a strong resemblance. The twelfth was of the same diameter but less than half the height.

The workshop, hewn out of solid rock, lay forty feet beneath the banqueting hall of the Adlerheim.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ryder, Dr Jablonsky, Sergeant Parker and Jeff waited with varying degrees of patience as Marjory transcribed Susan’s shorthand, a task that took her less than two minutes. She handed her notepad to Ryder.

‘Thank you. This is what she says. “The leader is called Morro. Odd”.’

Jablonsky said: ‘What’s odd about that? Lot of unusual names around.’

‘Not the name. The fact that he should permit one – or more – of his men to identify him by his name.’

‘Bogus,’ Jeff said.

‘Sure. “Six foot, lean, broad-shouldered, educated voice. American? Wears black gloves. Only one with gloves. Think I see black patch over his right eye. Stocking mask makes it difficult to be certain. Other men nondescript. Says no harm will come to us. Just regard the next few days as a holiday. Bracing vacation resort. Not the sea. Can’t have anyone getting their feet wet. Meaningless chatter? Don’t know. Turn the oven off”. That’s all.’

‘It’s not much.’ Jeff’s disappointment showed.

‘What did you expect? Addresses and telephone numbers? Susan wouldn’t have missed anything, so that was all she had to go on. Two things. This Morro may have something wrong with both hands – disfigurement, scarring, amputation of fingers – and with one eye: could be a result of an accident, car crash, explosion, even a shoot-out. Then, like all criminals, he may occasionally be so sure of himself that he talks too much. “Not the sea, but bracing”. Could have been telling lies to mislead, but why mention it at all? Bracing. Hills. Mountains.’

‘Lots of hills and mountains in California.’ Parker sounded less than encouraging. ‘Maybe two-thirds. Just leaves an area about the size of Britain to search. And for what?’

There was a brief silence then Ryder said: ‘Maybe it’s not what. Maybe it’s not where. Maybe we should be asking ourselves why.’

The front-door bell rang for an unnecessary length of time. Jeff left and returned with the Chief of Police, who appeared to be in his customary foul mood, and an unhappy young detective called Kramer. Donahure looked around him with the thunderously proprietorial air of a house-owner whose premises have been invaded by a hippy commune. His glare settled on Jablonsky.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Funny you should ask that.’ Jablonsky spoke in a cold voice and removed his glasses so that Donahure could see that his eyes were cold too. ‘I was about to ask you the same.’

Donahure let him have some more of the glare then switched it to Parker. ‘And what the hell are you doing here?’

Parker took a slow sip of his gin, an action that had a predictable effect on Donahure’s complexion. ‘An old friend visiting an old friend. Maybe for the thousandth time. Talking over old times.’ Parker took another leisurely sip. ‘Not that it’s any of your goddamned business.’

‘Report to me first thing in the morning.’ Donahure’s larynx was giving him trouble again. ‘I know what you’re talking about – the break-in. Ryder is not only not on the case, he’s not a cop any more. You don’t discuss police business with the public. Now, get out. I want to talk to Ryder privately.’

Ryder was on his feet with surprising ease for a man of his bulk. ‘You’ll be getting me a reputation for down-right lack of hospitality. I can’t have that.’

‘Out!’ A difficult word to snarl but Donahure made a creditable attempt. Parker ignored him. Donahure swung round, crossed the room, lifted a telephone and yelped in agony as Ryder’s left hand closed over his arm. The ulnar nerve in the elbow is the most exposed and sensitive of all peripheral nerves and Ryder had powerful fingers. Donahure dropped the telephone on the table to free his right hand for the purpose of massaging his left elbow: Ryder replaced the phone on its rest.

‘What the hell was that for?’ Donahure rubbed his elbow industriously. ‘Right. Kramer. Book Ryder for assault and obstruction of justice.’

‘What?’ Ryder looked around. ‘Anyone here see me assault Fatso?’ Nobody, apparently, had seen anything. ‘Californian’s home is his castle. Nobody touches anything without my say-so.’

‘Is that so?’ Triumph overcame the throbbing nerve. He dug into a pocket and produced a piece of paper which he flourished at Ryder. ‘I’ll touch anything I like in this house. Know what that is?’

‘Sure. A search warrant with LeWinter’s name on it.’

‘It’s a warrant, Mister.’

Ryder took the warrant. ‘Law says I’ve the right to read it. Or didn’t you know?’ Ryder glanced at it for all of a second. ‘Judge LeWinter it is. Your poker-playing pal at City Hall. Next only to yourself the most corrupt official in town, the only judge in town who would issue you with a warrant on a trumped-up charge.’ He looked at the four seated people. ‘Now please watch the reactions of this upholder of public morality, especially his complexion. Jeff, would you have any idea what this trumped-up charge might be?’

‘Well, now.’ Jeff thought. ‘A trumped-up charge of theft, I’d think. A stolen driving licence? A missing police radio? Or something really ridiculous, like harbouring a set of binoculars with an LAPD stamp.’

Observe the complexion,’ Ryder said. ‘An interesting clinical study. Violet with overtones of purple. I’ll bet a good psychologist could make something of that. A guilt complex, perhaps?’

‘I’ve got it,’ Jeff said happily. ‘He’s come to search the place for evidence stolen from the scene of the crime.’

Ryder studied the warrant. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

Donahure snatched the warrant back. ‘Too damn right. And when I do find it –’

‘Find what? That’s why it’s a put-up job – you’ve no idea what you’re looking for. You haven’t even been out to San Ruffino.’

I know what I’m looking for.’ He marched off to an adjacent bedroom then halted as he became aware that Ryder was following him. He turned. ‘I don’t need you, Ryder.’

‘I know. But my wife does.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s got some pretty nice jewellery in there.’

Donahure balled his fists, looked at Ryder’s eyes, changed his mind and stalked – if a hippopotamus could ever be said to stalk – into the bedroom, Ryder at his heels.

He started with a dressing-table drawer, rifled through a pile of blouses, left them in an untidy heap, slammed the drawer shut, moved to the next drawer and repeated his cry of pain as Ryder found the ulnar nerve again. In the living-room Parker rolled up his eyes, rose, picked up his own glass and that of Jablonsky and headed purposefully for the bar.

Ryder said: ‘I don’t like untidy people. Especially, I don’t want filthy fingers touching my wife’s clothing. I’ll go through her clothing and you can watch. As I’ve no idea what the hell you’re looking for I can’t very well hide it, can I?’ Ryder made a meticulous search of his wife’s clothing, then allowed Donahure to take over.

Jeff brought a drink into the kitchen. Kramer, leaning against the sink with his arms folded, looked glum and unhappy. Jeff said: ‘You look like a man who could do with a morale booster. Gin. Donahure is loaded up with bourbon. Never smell it.’ Kramer took the drink gratefully. ‘What are you supposed to be doing?’

‘Thanks. You can see what I’m doing. I’m searching the kitchen.’

‘Found anything yet?’

‘I will when I start looking. Pots and pans, plates and saucers, knives and forks – all sorts of things.’ He gulped some of his drink. ‘Don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be looking for. Damned sorry about this, Jeff. What can I do?’

‘Just what you’re doing. Nothing. Inactivity becomes you. Any idea what our fat friend is looking for?’

‘No. You?’

‘No.’

‘Your father?’

‘It’s possible. If he knows he hasn’t told me. Not that he’s had a chance to.’

‘Must be something important. Something that makes Donahure pretty close to desperate.’

‘How come?’

‘Sergeant Ryder is how come. Or maybe you don’t know the reputation of the bogeyman?’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes. Takes a desperate man to provoke your old man.’

‘Like a man playing for high stakes. Well, now. You interest me.’

‘I interest myself.’

‘Looking for incriminating evidence, perhaps.’

‘Incriminating whom, I wonder?’

‘I wonder.’

Footsteps and voices approached. Jeff plucked the glass from Kramer, who had a drawer open before Donahure entered. Ryder was close behind him. Donahure gave Jeff the benefit of his customary glare.

‘What are you doing here?’

Jeff lowered the glass from his lips. ‘Keeping an eye on the cutlery.’

Donahure jerked a thumb. ‘Out.’ Jeff glanced at his father.

‘Stay,’ Ryder said. ‘Fatso’s the one who leaves.’

Donahure breathed heavily. ‘By God, Ryder, push me any more and I’ll –’

‘You’ll do what? Give yourself a heart attack by picking up your teeth?’

Donahure took it out on Kramer. ‘What did you find? Nothing?’

‘Nothing that shouldn’t be here.’

‘Sure you searched properly?’

‘Pay no attention,’ Ryder said. ‘If there was an elephant in this house Donahure would miss it. Never tapped a wall, lifted a rug, tried to find a loose tile, didn’t even look under a mattress. Couldn’t have had police schools in his days.’ He ignored Donahure’s apoplectic splutterings and led the way back to the living-room. He said to no one in particular: ‘Whoever made this oaf a chief of police was either mentally deficient or a victim of blackmail. Donahure, I’m now looking at you with what is known as undisguised contempt. You better go make a fast report to your boss. Tell him you’ve made a classic blunder. Two blunders. One psychological, one tactical. I’ll bet for once you acted on your own – no one with an IQ above fifty would have tipped his hand in that crass fashion.’

‘Boss? Boss? What the hell do you mean, boss?’

‘You’d make as good an actor as you are a police chief. You know, I do believe I’m right. Bluster – your only stock in trade, of course – but beneath bluster you’re running scared. “Boss”, I said. “Boss”, I meant. Every puppet needs his puppet-master. Next time you’re thinking of making any independent move I suggest you first consult someone with intelligence. One assumes your boss must have a little intelligence.’

Donahure tried out his basilisk stare, realized it was the wrong fit, turned on his heel and left. Ryder followed him to the front door. ‘Not your day, Donahure. But then it wasn’t quite Raminoff’s day either, was it? But I hope his had a better ending. I mean, I hope he managed to jump clear before he dumped your van in the Pacific’ He clapped Kramer on the shoulder. ‘Don’t look so perplexed, young man. I’m sure the Chief will tell you all about it on the way back to the station.’

He went back into the living-room. Parker said: ‘What was all that about, then?’

‘I’m not quite sure. I talked about his blunders and I’m sure I was right. He’d never make the lead in “The Great Stone Face”. I blundered myself, but in a different way. I blundered into what seemed to be a sensitive area. I wonder what that area could be…’

‘You said it yourself. He’s taking orders from someone.’

‘That crook’s been taking orders all his life. Don’t look so shocked, Dr Jablonsky. He’s a crook, and has been for as long as I’ve known him, which is far too long. Sure, the Californian police forces are no better than the other States in the Union as far as the three P’s are concerned – power, politics and promotion. But it is remarkably free from genuine corruption – Donahure is the exception that proves the rule.’

‘You have proof?’ Jablonsky said.

‘Just look at him. He’s living proof. But you would mean documented proof. That I have. What I’m going to say you can’t quote me on, because I didn’t say it.’

Jablonsky smiled. ‘You can’t faze me any more. As I said, I’ve got the hang of your double-talk now.’

‘Not for repetition. Ah! Something else.’ He picked up the picture with the shorthand. ‘Not for repetition either.’

‘I can tell Ted?’ Marjory said.

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Wait till I tell Susan you keep secrets from her.’

‘Okay. But a secret shared is no longer a secret.’ He caught her interrogative glance at Jablonsky and Parker. ‘My dear child, the first thing nuclear physicists and intelligence cops learn is how to guard their tongues.’

‘I won’t talk. Ted won’t talk. We just want to help.’

‘I don’t want your help.’

She made a moue.

‘Sorry.’ He took her hand in apology. ‘That wasn’t nice. If I need you, I’ll ask. I just don’t want to involve you in what may be a messy business.’

She smiled. ‘Thank you.’ Both of them knew that he would never ask.

‘Chief of Police Donahure. He has a rather special house, Spanish-Moroccan, swimming pool, wet bars everywhere, expensive furniture in awful taste, no mortgage. Mexican couple. Late model Lincoln, full payment on delivery. Twenty thousand dollars on bank deposit. Living high off the hog, you might say, but then Donahure doesn’t have a wife to spend all his money for him – understandably, he’s a bachelor. An acceptable life-style – he doesn’t get paid in pennies. What’s not so acceptable is that in seven different banks under seven different names he has just over half a million dollars salted away. He might have some difficulty in accounting for that.’

‘Nothing that goes on or is said in this house is going to surprise me any more.’ Jablonsky nevertheless managed to look surprised. ‘Proof?’

‘Sure he’s got proof,’ Jeff said. As Ryder didn’t seem disposed to deny this, he carried on: ‘I didn’t know until this evening. My father has a dossier on him, complete with signed affidavits, which would make very interesting reading in Sacramento.’

Jablonsky said: ‘This true?’

‘You don’t have to believe it,’ Ryder said.

‘I’m sorry. But why don’t you lower the boom on him? Repercussions wouldn’t matter a damn to you.’

‘They wouldn’t. But they’d matter to others. Nearly half of our friend’s ill-gotten gains come from blackmail. Three prominent citizens of this town, basically as clean and innocent as most of us are, which doesn’t say a great deal, have been badly compromised. They could also be badly hurt. I’ll use this document if my hand is forced, of course.’

‘And what would it take to force your hand?’

‘State secrets, Doc’ Parker smiled as he said it and rose to his feet.

‘So State secrets.’ Jablonsky rose also, then nodded towards the file he’d brought. ‘Hope that’s of some use to you.’

‘Thank you. Thank you both very much.’

Jablonsky and Parker walked together to their cars. Jablonsky said: ‘You know him better than I do, Sergeant. Ryder really cares about his family? He doesn’t seem terribly upset to me.’

‘He cares. Not much of a man for the emotional scene. He’ll probably be just as relaxed when he kills the man who took Susan.’

‘He would do that?’ Jablonsky seemed unhappy.

‘Sure. Wouldn’t be the first time. Not in cold blood, of course – he’d have to have a reason. No reason, he’ll just leave a nice challenging case for the plastic surgeon. And either of those two things could happen to anyone who gets in his way when he’s trying to get next to Morro, or whatever his name is. I’m afraid the kidnappers made a big mistake – they kidnapped the wrong person.’

‘What do you think he’s going to do?’

‘Don’t know. I’m just guessing when I say I know what I’m going to do, something I never thought I would. I’m going right home and say a prayer for the health of our Chief of Police.’

Jeff nodded towards the file Jablonsky had brought. ‘How about your homework? I always had to do it first thing when I came home.’

‘Uninterrupted thought for that one.’

‘I suppose he thinks that’s a gentle hint. Come on, Marge, I’ll take you home. See you when I see you.’

‘Half an hour.’

‘Ha!’ Jeff looked pleased. ‘So you’re not going to sit there all night and do nothing?’

‘No. I’m not going to sit here all night and do nothing.’

For some time after they had left it seemed as if he intended to do just that. After some minutes he put his photograph back in the frame, rose and placed it between two others on the upright piano. The one to the left was that of his wife: the other, that of Peggy, his daughter, a sophomore in arts at San Diego. She was a laughing girl with dancing eyes who had inherited her father’s colouring in eyes and hair but, fortunately, neither his features nor build, both of which belonged strictly to her mother. It was common knowledge that she was the only person who could wrap the formidable Sergeant Ryder round her little finger, a state of affairs of which Ryder was well aware and by which he appeared completely untroubled. He looked at the three photographs for some seconds, shook his head, sighed, removed his own and placed it in a drawer.

He made a call to San Diego, listened for a full half-minute and hung up. The next call he made was to Major Dunne of the FBI. After the first ring Ryder suddenly replaced the receiver. Some thought had evidently occurred to make him change his mind. Instead, he poured himself an unaccustomed Scotch, picked up the file on Carlton, sat and began to leaf through it, making neat, precise notes as he reached the foot of each page. He had just gone through it a second time when Jeff returned. Ryder rose.

‘Let’s go take a little ride in your car.’

‘Sure. Where?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘Anywhere? I can manage that.’ Jeff thought. ‘Donahure might be more persistent than one would give him credit for?’

‘Yes.’

They drove off in Jeff’s Ford. After half a mile Jeff said: ‘I don’t know how you do it. There was a stake-out. We’re being followed.’

‘Make sure.’

Jeff made sure. Another half-mile and he said: ‘I’m sure.’

‘You know what to do.’

Jeff nodded. He turned left at the first intersection, turned right up a poorly-lit lane, passed the entrance of a builder’s yard and came to a stop opposite a second entrance, turning his lights off. Both men got out and walked unhurriedly into the yard.

The car following drew up about fifty yards behind. A lean man of medium height, his face shadowed by a fedora that had become passé in the 1930s, emerged and walked quickly towards the Ford. He had just passed the first entrance when something told him that all was not well. He swung round, reached inside his coat, then lost all interest in what he was doing as a heavy toe-cap caught him just below the knee: in any event it is difficult to reach for a gun when hopping around on one leg and clutching the other with both hands.

‘Stop that noise,’ Ryder said. He reached inside the man’s coat, pulled out an automatic, transferred his grip to the barrel and struck the man squarely in the face with the butt. This time the man screamed. Jeff flashed a torch in his face and said in a voice that could have been steadier: ‘His nose is gone. Some of his top teeth too. They’re gone as well.’

‘So’s my wife.’ The tone of the voice made Jeff flinch and he looked at a man that he’d never seen before. ‘Ridden your luck too far, Raminoff. If I catch you within a mile of my house again you’ll be a month in Belvedere.’ Belvedere was the city hospital. ‘Then after that I’ll go and attend to your boss. Tell him that. Who is your boss, Raminoff?’ He lifted the gun. ‘You have two seconds.’

‘Donahure.’ It was a peculiar gurgling sound and one for which Raminoff could hardly be blamed: blood was pumping steadily from mouth and nose. Ryder watched him for a couple of dispassionate seconds, then turned on his heel.

Back in the Ford Ryder said: ‘Stop at the first phone booth.’ Jeff glanced at him questioningly but Ryder wasn’t looking at him.

Ryder spent three minutes in the booth and made two calls. He returned to the car, lit a Gauloise and said: ‘Drive home.’

‘We’ve got a phone there. Tapped?’

‘Would you put anything beyond Donahure? Two things. I’ve just made a call to John Aaron. Editor of the Examiner. No word yet from the kidnappers. He’ll let me know as soon as anything comes through. I’ve also made a call to Major Dunne of the FBI. I’ll be seeing him shortly. After you’ve dropped me off home I want you to come inside, pick up a gun and something that will serve as a mask and go out to Donahure’s place and find out whether he’s at home or not. Discreetly, of course.’

‘He’s having visitors tonight?’

‘Two. You and me. If he’s there call me at this number.’ He switched on a map light and wrote on a notepad, tearing the page off. ‘The Redox in Bay Street. Know it?’

‘By reputation.’ Jeff sounded severe. ‘A singles bar, full of gays and drug-pushers, not to mention addicts. Hardly your scene, I would have thought.’

‘Why I’m going there. Must say Dunne didn’t sound too happy about it either.’

Jeff hesitated. ‘Going to give Donahure the Raminoff treatment?’

‘It’s a tempting thought, but no. He’d have nothing to tell us. Anyone smart enough to pull off this raid would be smart enough not to establish any direct contact with a clown like Donahure. He would certainly use an intermediary, maybe even two. I would.’

‘Then what would you be looking for?’

‘I wouldn’t know until I have looked.’

Ryder was in disguise – he was wearing a freshly pressed business suit which only his family knew he possessed. Dunne, too, was in disguise: he wore a beret, dark glasses and a pencil moustache, none of which suited him and made him, as he was uncomfortably aware, look slightly ridiculous. But the grey eyes were as intelligent and watchful as ever. He looked in distaste at the oddly attired clientele, mainly teenagers and those in the early twenties, and sniffed the air in nose-wrinkling disgust.

‘Place smells like a damn bordello.’

‘You frequent those places?’

‘Only in the line of duty.’ Dunne smiled. ‘Okay, so no one would look for us here. Certainly I wouldn’t.’ He broke off as a creature in pink pantaloons deposited two drinks on their table and left. Ryder poured both into a convenient potted plant.

‘Can’t do it any harm. Teaspoonful of whisky topped up with water.’ He produced a flask from an inside pocket and poured generous measures. ‘Malt. Always prepared. Your health.’

‘Excellent. And now?’

‘Four things. One, our Chief of Police. For your information only. Donahure and I are not seeing eye to eye.’

‘You surprise me.’

‘Probably not half as surprised as Donahure is right now. I’ve been upsetting him. I’ve been the cause of his losing a van of his this evening – it fell off a cliff into the Pacific. I’ve confiscated some of his personal goods and interviewed a stake-out he set on me.’

‘He’s in hospital?’

‘He’ll need medical care. Right now I’d guess he’s reporting to Donahure on the failure of his mission.’

‘How did you pin him to Donahure?’

‘He told me.’

‘Naturally. Well, can’t say I’m sorry. But I did warn you – Donahure’s dangerous. Rather, his friends are. And you know how cornered rats behave. You have a tie-in between him and San Ruffino?’

‘Things point that way. I’ll look through his house later on tonight, see what I can find.’

‘He might be at home.’

‘What difference does that make? Then I think I’ll go have a word with Judge LeWinter.’

‘You will? He’s a different kettle of fish from Donahure. Spoken of as the next State Supreme Court Chairman.’

‘Still tarred with the same brush. What do you know of him?’

‘We have a file on him.’ Dunne peered at his glass.

‘That means he’s poison?’

‘I’m being non-committal.’

‘Yes. Well, something else for your file. Donahure called tonight with a search warrant on such an obviously trumped-up charge that only a crooked judge would have signed it.’

‘Any prizes for guessing?’

‘No. Number two. I’d appreciate your help in this and the next couple of matters.’ He drew Carlton’s file and the notes he had made on it from a large envelope. ‘Security deputy. One of the seven snatched this afternoon. His curriculum vitae or whatever you call it. Seems above-board.’

‘All the best villains are.’

‘Yes. Army, intelligence, two security jobs before coming to San Ruffino. As he’s always worked for the Army or the AEC his past should be an open book. However, I’d like an answer to those few questions I’ve noted, especially his past contacts. The contacts, no matter how unimportant, are the important things.’

‘You have reason to suspect this man Carlton?’

I’ve no reason not to, which is the same thing to me.’

‘Routine. Number three?’

Ryder produced another paper – Marjory’s transcription of Susan’s shorthand – and explained how he had come by it. Dunne read through it several times. Ryder said: ‘You seem to find this interesting?’

‘Odd. This bit about not getting wet feet. About once a year since the turn of the century some people in this State have been confidently expecting the second flood. Cranks, of course.’

‘Cranks and highly organized criminals like this Morro or whoever don’t go together?’

‘They’re not mutually exclusive either.’

‘Does the FBI have their names?’

‘Of course. Thousands of them.’

‘Forget it. If you were to lock up all the nonconformists in this State you’d have half the population behind bars.’

‘And maybe the wrong half at that.’ Dunne was pensive. ‘You mentioned the word “organized”. We do have groups of what you might call organized and successful cranks.’

‘Subversives?’

‘Weirdos. But weirdos who have managed to put it together in an acceptable and comprehensible fashion. Acceptable and comprehensible to them, that is.’

‘Many of those so-called organized groups?’

‘Haven’t seen the list lately. Couple of hundred perhaps.’

‘Just a handful. No stone unturned, is that it?’

‘And no avenue unexplored. I’ll get a list. But that’s not what you’re interested in. This Morro character. Fictitious name, of course. May have disfigurement or damage to hands and right eye. That’s easy. Number four?’

‘Bit more personal, Major.’ Ryder slid a photograph and piece of paper across the table. ‘I want this person taken care of.’

Dunne looked at the photograph with appreciation. ‘Lovely young lady. Obviously no relation of yours, so what’s the connection?’

‘Peggy. My daughter.’

‘Ah!’ Dunne was not an easy man to knock off stride. ‘Mrs Ryder must be a beautiful person.’

‘Well, thank you very much.’ Ryder smiled. ‘She’s a sophomore at San Diego. The address is the flat she shares with three other girls. Tried to phone her – that’s her number there – but no reply. I’m sure one of your men could find out where she is in no time. I’d like her to know what’s happened before she finds out on the radio or TV in some crowded discotheque.’

‘No problem. But that’s not all, is it? You said “taken care of”.’

‘They already have my wife. If Donahure is tied into this – and I’ll know within an hour – Morro and his friends might not like me.’

‘The request is unusual.’

‘So are the circumstances.’ Dunne was hesitating. ‘You have children, Major?’

‘Damnit, yes. I mean, damn you, yes. How old is Peggy?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘So’s my Jane. Blackmail, Sergeant, downright blackmail. All right, all right. But you know I’m supposed to be co-operating closely with Donahure. You’re putting me in a difficult position.’

‘What kind of position do you think I’m in?’ He looked up as pink pantaloons approached their table and looked at Ryder.

‘You Mr Green?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘Caller said a wide man in a dark suit. You’re the only wide man in a dark suit here. Phone’s this way.’

Ryder followed and picked up the phone. ‘Well-built, my lad, not wide. What news?’

‘Raminoff’s been and left. Houseboy drove him. Still bleeding. Gone to some struck-off quack, probably.’

‘Donahure there?’

‘I don’t imagine Raminoff spent five minutes talking to the houseboy.’

‘Meet you at the corner of Fourth and Hawthorne. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.’

Ryder had arrived back at his table but had not yet sat down when pink pantaloons appeared again. ‘Another call, Mr Green.’

Ryder was back inside a minute. He sat and brought out his flask again.

‘Two calls. The stake-out did in fact report back to Donahure. Going out there in a minute.’ Under Dunne’s puzzled gaze Ryder gulped the contents of his refilled glass. ‘Second call was from John Aaron. You know him?’

‘The Examiner? I know him.’

‘AP and Reuters are burning up the wires. Gentleman called them. You’d never guess the name he gave.’

‘Morro.’

‘Morro it was. Said he’d engineered the San Ruffino break-in of which he was sure they knew nothing about. Gave in specific detail the amount of Uranium Two-Three-Five and plutonium that had been taken, and asked any interested party to check with the power station. Also gave names and addresses of hostages and asked all interested parties to contact their relatives to check.’

Dunne was calm. ‘No more than what you expected. Your phone must be ringing constantly at the moment. Any threats?’

‘None. Just thought he’d let us know and give us time to consider the implications.’

‘Aaron say when the news is being released?’

‘Be an hour at least. TV and radio stations are jittery as hell. They don’t know whether it’s a hoax, or not, and they don’t want to appear the biggest fools in the West. Also, even if it were true, they’re not sure whether they’d be contravening national security regulations. Personally I’ve never heard of any such regulations. They’re apparently waiting confirmation and clearance from the AEC. If they get it there’ll be a simultaneous State-wide release at eleven.’

‘I see. Well, it gives me plenty of time to get a man around to your Peggy.’

I’d much appreciate that. In the circumstances, most people would have forgotten all about a mere teenager.’

‘I told you. I have one. She doesn’t think she’s there at all. You have your car?’ Ryder nodded. ‘If you drop me off at my place I’ll get hold of San Diego and have a couple of men assigned to the job in ten minutes. No sweat.’ Dunne became thoughtful. ‘You won’t be able to say that about the citizens of this State tomorrow. They’ll be sweating buckets. Clever lad, this Morro. Mustn’t underestimate him. He’s craftily reversed the old maxim of better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Now it’s a case of worse the devil you don’t know than the devil you do. He’ll have everyone in fits.’

‘Yes. The citizens of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento all wondering who’s going to be the first for vaporization, and each hoping to hell it’s going to be one of the other three.’

‘You seriously think that, Sergeant?’

‘I haven’t really had time to think about anything. I’m just trying to imagine how other people would think. No, I don’t seriously think so. Clever men like our friend Morro have an objective in mind, and indiscriminate annihilation wouldn’t be any way to achieve that. Threats would be enough.’

‘That’s what I would think. But, then, it will take the public some time to realize – if they ever do – that we’re up against a person of that kind of cunning.’

‘And for such a person the mental climate is just right. For him, it couldn’t be better.’ Ryder ticked off his fingers. ‘We’ve had the bubonic plague bugaboo. Didn’t come to much, granted, but it scared half the people out of their wits. Then the swine fever – you could say exactly the same about that. Now practically everybody in the State, especially those on the coast, has this obsessive and – what’s the word? –’

‘Paranoid?’

‘I didn’t make college. This paranoid fear about when the next, the biggest and perhaps the last earthquake is going to come. And now this. The nuclear holocaust – we know, at least we think we know there isn’t going to be any such thing. But try convincing people of that.’ Ryder laid money on the table. ‘At least it should take their minds off earthquakes for the time being.’

Ryder met Jeff as arranged. They left their cars at the intersection and made their way on foot up Hawthorne Drive, a steep, narrow and winding lane lined with palms.

‘The houseboy’s back,’ Jeff said. ‘He came back alone, so I should imagine Raminoff’s either having his nose set or is being detained for the night in the casualty ward. The house-boy and his wife don’t sleep in the house – there’s a little bungalow at the foot of the garden. They’re both inside there, for the night, I take it. Up this bank here.’

They scrambled up a grassy bank, pulled themselves over a wall and parted some rose bushes. Donahure’s house was built round three sides of an oblong swimming pool, with the centre section, a long, low living-room, brightly illuminated. The night had turned cool and steam over the pool hung motionless in the still night air, but not so opaque as to prevent the watchers seeing Donahure, glass in hand, pacing heavily up and down. The sliding glass doors were opened wide.

‘Go down to the corner there,’ Ryder said. ‘Hide in the bushes. I’ll get as close as I can to that lounge. When I wave my arm attract his attention.’

They took up position, Jeff among the rose bushes, Ryder, on the other side of the pool, in the dark shadow between two yew trees. (The Californians, unlike Europeans, do not relegate their yews and cypresses to graveyards.) Jeff made a loud moaning sound. Donahure stopped his pacing, listened, went to the opening between the sliding glass doors and listened again. Jeff repeated the sound. Donahure slipped off his shoes and padded silently across the tiles, a gun in his hand. He had taken only five steps when the butt of the Smith & Wesson caught him behind the right ear.

They used a pair of Donahure’s own handcuffs to secure him to the standpipe of a radiator, Scotch Tape from his desk to gag him and a table runner to blindfold him.

Ryder said: ‘The main entrance will be at the back. Go down to the bungalow and check that the houseboy and his wife are still there. When you return lock it, and if anyone rings don’t answer. Lock every door and window in the house. Pull the curtains here then start on that desk. I’ll be in his bedroom. If there’s anything to be found it will be in one of those two rooms.’

‘Still don’t know what we’re looking for?’

‘No. Something that would make you lift an eyebrow if you saw it in your house or mine.’ He looked around the room. ‘No sign of a safe – and you can’t have secret wall-safes in a wooden house.’

‘If I had as much on my conscience as you say he has I wouldn’t have anything in the house. I’d have it in a bank safe-deposit. Well, at least you’ve got the satisfaction of knowing that he’ll have a headache when he wakes.’ Jeff thought. ‘He could have a study or office or den – lots of these houses do.’

Ryder nodded and left. There was no such study. The first bedroom he came to was plainly unoccupied. The second bedroom was Donahure’s. Ryder used a pencil flash, established that the curtains of both windows were open, closed them and switched on overhead and bedside lights.

The immaculate room clearly reflected the efficient tidiness of the houseboy’s wife, a tidiness that made Ryder’s task that much easier. Ryder was painstaking, methodical, took all of fifteen minutes for his search and found nothing, for there was nothing to find. For all that, he made an interesting discovery. One wall cupboard was given over to a positive armoury of weapons – revolvers, automatics, shotguns and rifles with a copious supply of ammunition to match. There was nothing sinister in this: many American gun buffs had their own private armouries, frequently setting aside an entire gun-room to display them. But two particular weapons caught his attention – peculiarly-shaped light-weight rifles of a type not to be found in any gun store in America. Ryder took them both and a box of matching ammunition then, for good measure, pocketed three of the splendid collection of handcuffs that Donahure had hanging from hooks on the side. All those items he laid on the bed while he went to examine the bathroom. There was nothing there that there shouldn’t have been. He picked up his newly acquired possessions from the bed and rejoined Jeff.

Donahure, chin slumped on his chest, appeared to be asleep. With the rifle barrel Ryder prodded him far from gently in the region of his expansive solar plexus. He was asleep. Jeff was sitting by the desk looking down into an opened drawer. Ryder said: ‘Anything?’

‘Yes.’ Jeff looked pleased with himself. ‘I’m a slow starter but when I get going –’

‘What do you mean, a slow starter?’

‘Desk was locked. Took me some time to find the key – it was at the bottom of Fatso’s holster.’ Jeff deposited a bundle of currency notes on the table. They were in eight separate lots, each secured with an elastic band.

‘Hundreds of bills, all small denominations, looks like. What’s Donahure doing with hundreds of bills?’

‘What indeed? Got any gloves?’

‘Now he asks me. Do I have any gloves? Masks – hoods, rather – because you told me. Now that I – and I suppose you – have smeared fingerprints all over the shop you ask for gloves.’

‘Our fingerprints don’t matter. You think Donahure is going to report this matter and complain about the disappearance of all this money which we are about to take with us? I just want you to count the stuff and not smear up fingerprints. Old notes are no good, they could carry a hundred smears. Maybe some new notes. Count from the bottom left – most people and most tellers count from the top right.’

‘Where did you get those toys from?’

‘From Donahure’s toy shop.’ Ryder looked at the two rifles. ‘Always wanted one of those. Thought you might want one too.’

‘Rifles you have.’

‘Not those. I’ve never seen one. I’ve seen a diagram.’

‘What are they?’

‘You’ll be surprised. Unobtainable in this country. We think we make the best rifles in the world. The British think they do and the Belgians think the same of their own Nato rifles. Well, we don’t think, we say. But they all know that this is the best Light, deadly accurate, can be stripped down in seconds and hidden in the pockets of your top-coat. Splendid weapon for terrorists – as the British soldiers in Northern Ireland have found out to their cost.’

‘The IRA have those?’

‘Yes. It’s called the kalashnikov. If a person’s hunting you at night with one of those fitted with infra-red telescopic sights you might as well shoot yourself. Or so they say.’

‘Russian?’

‘Yes.’

‘Catholics and Communists make strange bedfellows.’

‘The people who use those in Northern Ireland are Protestants. An extremist splinter-group officially disowned by the IRA. Not that the Communists care very much with whom they associate as long as they can stir up trouble.’

Jeff took one of the rifles, examined it, looked at the unconscious Donahure and then at Ryder.

Ryder said: ‘Don’t ask me. All I know about our friend’s early background is that he’s a first-generation American.’

‘From Northern Ireland?’

‘From Northern Ireland. Fits in neatly. Probably fits in too neatly.’

‘Donahure – a Communist?’

‘We mustn’t look for a Red under every bush. No law against it – well, not since McCarthy departed the scene. I don’t think so, anyway. He’s too stupid and too selfish to be interested in any ideology. That’s not to say, of course, that he wouldn’t accept their money. Count those notes and then check the rest of the desk. I’ll go over the rest of the room.’

Ryder looked while Jeff counted. After some minutes Jeff looked up, his face alight. ‘Boy, this is interesting. Eight packets of notes, each containing one-thousand, two-hundred-and-fifty dollars. Ten thousand.’

‘So I was wrong. He’s now got an eighth unofficial bank account. Very interesting, I agree. But nothing to get excited about.’

‘No? There are several new notes in each packet. I’ve only made a quick check but as far as I can see they’re in series. And they’re the bicentennial two dollar notes.’

‘Ah, this is interesting. The one the ungrateful American public turned their thumbs down on. The Treasury had carloads of the stuff printed but there’s only a small percentage of it in circulation. If they really are in series, the FBI should be able to trace it without trouble.’

Nothing more came to light and they left five minutes later after freeing a now-stirring Donahure of his handcuffs, Scotch Tape and blindfold.

Major Dunne was still in his office, handling two phones at the same time. When he’d hung up Ryder said: ‘Not yet abed?’

‘No. And I don’t expect to be – not this night, anyway. I’ll have plenty of company in my misery. Statewide alert, twenty-four-hour basis, for every agent who could walk. Description of Morro has been telexed, or is being telexed, throughout the country. I’ve arranged for this list of the organized weirdos, but I won’t have that until tomorrow. Your Peggy has been taken care of.’

Jeff said to Ryder: Our Peggy?’

‘Forgot to tell you. The kidnappers have made a statement to AP and Reuters. No threats, just detailing what materials they’ve stolen and the names of the people they kidnapped. It will be released at eleven tonight.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Half an hour. I didn’t want your sister to have the shock of hearing of the kidnapping of her mother over the TV or radio. Major Dunne has kindly taken care of that.’

Jeff looked from one man to another then said: ‘It’s just a thought. But has it occurred to you that Peggy might be in danger?’

‘It is a thought and it has occurred.’ Dunne could be very precise and clipped in his speech. ‘It has also been taken care of.’ He peered at the rifles in Ryder’s hand. ‘Late hour to go shopping.’

‘We borrowed them from your friend Donahure.’

‘Ah! How is he?’

‘Unconscious. Not that there’s much difference between that and his walking state. He knocked his head against the butt of an automatic’

Dunne brightened. ‘Disgraceful. You had reason for taking those? Something special?’

‘I’m pretty sure. These are Kalashnikovs. Russian. Can you check with Washington, import controls, to see if any licences have been issued to bring those in? I very much doubt it. The Russians just love to unload their arms on anyone with the cash to pay, but it’s a fair guess they wouldn’t part with the most advanced rifle in the business, which this is.’

‘Illegal possession? That would make him an ex-chief of police.’

‘Unimportant. He’ll be that soon anyway.’

‘Communist?’

‘Unlikely. Of course, he’s capable of being an empty convert to anything if the money’s good enough.’

‘I’d like to have those, if I may.’

‘Sorry. Finders keepers. Want to admit in court that you abetted burglarious entry? Don’t be upset. Jeff’s got a little present for you.’ Jeff placed the wad of banknotes on the table. ‘Ten thousand dollars exactly. All yours. How many consecutively listed brand new two-dollar notes are there, Jeff?’

‘Forty.’

‘Manna,’ Dunne said reverently. ‘I’ll have the names of the bank, teller and drawer by noon tomorrow. Pity you weren’t able to find out the name of the drawer.’

‘Told you. Donahure was asleep. I’ll go back and ask him later on.’

‘Like that? May be pushing your luck, Sergeant.’

‘No. I’ve had the great misfortune to know Chief Donahure longer than you have. Man’s a bully. I know it’s commonplace to say that all bullies are cowards, which is not at all true: but in his case it is. Take his face. A disaster, but the only one he has and he probably cherishes it. He saw what happened to his stake-out’s face tonight.’

‘Mm.’ Dunne’s momentarily beatific expression had been replaced by a frown, and it wasn’t because of anything that Ryder had said. He tapped the bundle of notes. ‘This. How am I to account for this, to explain it away? I mean, where did it come from?’

‘Yes.’ It was Jeff’s turn to frown. ‘I didn’t think of it either.’

‘Easy. Donahure gave it to you.’

‘He what?’

‘Despite the fact that he has about half a million in ill-gotten gains salted away under seven or eight forged names, we all know that he’s basically a decent, upright, honourable man, deeply committed to the welfare of his fellow man, to upholding the rule of justice and ruthlessly crushing bribery and corruption wherever it raises its ugly head. He was approached by the syndicate responsible for the San Ruffino break-in and given this money in return for a blow-by-blow account of the steps being taken by the State and Federal authorities in investigating this case. You and he worked out a plan to feed false and misleading information to the crooks. Naturally, he handed you this tainted money for safe keeping. You have to admire the man’s unshakeable integrity.’

‘Ingenious, but you’ve overlooked the obvious. All Donahure has to do is to deny it.’

‘With his fingerprints all over those notes – especially those new ones? He’s either got to go with the story or admit that he had the notes cached away in the house which would leave him the awkward task of explaining where he got them from. Which option do you think he’ll elect?’

Dunne said admiringly: ‘You have a very devious mind.’

‘Set a thief to catch a thief?’ Ryder smiled. ‘Maybe. Two things, Major. When you or whoever handle those notes don’t touch the top right. Fingerprints, especially on the two-dollar bills.’

Dunne looked at the notes. He said: ‘I’d estimate there’s about two thousand bills there. You expect me to try them all for fingerprints?’

‘I said you or whoever.’

‘Well, thanks. And the second thing?’

‘Have you got a fingerprinting set here?’

‘Lots. Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Ryder was vague. ‘You never know when those things might not come in handy.’

Judge LeWinter lived in a splendidly impressive house as befitted one widely tipped to become the next chairman of the State Supreme Court. Within a few miles of the Californian coast is to be found a greater variety of home architecture than anywhere, but, even by such standards, LeWinter’s home was unusual, a faithful replica of an Alabaman ante-bellum house, gleaming white, with its two-storey colonnaded porch, balconies, a profusion of surrounding magnolias and a plethora of white oak and long-bearded Spanish moss, neither of which seemed to find the climate very congenial. Within so imposing a residence – one couldn’t call it a home – could only dwell, one would have thought, a pillar of legal rectitude. One could be wrong.

How wrong Ryder and his son found out when they opened the bedroom door without the courtesy of a prior knock and found the legal luminary in bed, but not alone: and he wasn’t being not alone with his wife, either. The judge, bronzed, white-haired and white-moustached, the absence of a white winged collar and black string neck-tie an almost jarring note, looked perfectly at home in the gilded Victorian iron bedstead. Which was more than could be said for his companion, a sadly over-painted and youthful demi-mondaine who looked as if she would have been much more at home in what could delicately be termed as the outermost fringes of society. Both wore startled and wide-eyed expressions as people tend to wear when confronted with two hooded men bearing guns, the girl’s expression shading gradually into a guilty fear, the judge’s, predictably, into outrage. His speech was equally predictable.

‘What the devil! Who the hell are you?’

‘We’re no friends, you can be sure of that,’ Ryder said. ‘We know who you are. Who’s the young lady?’ He didn’t bother to wait for the inevitable silence but turned to Jeff. ‘Bring your camera, Perkins?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Pity.’ He looked at LeWinter. ‘I’m sure you would have loved us to send a snapshot to your wife to show that you’re not pining too much in her absence.’ The judge’s outrage subsided. ‘Right, Perkins, the prints.’

Jeff was no expert, but he was not long enough out of police school to have forgotten how to make clean prints. A deflated LeWinter, who clearly found the situation beyond him, offered neither objection nor resistance. When Jeff had finished he glanced at the girl and then at Ryder, who hesitated and nodded. Ryder said to her: ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you, Miss. What’s your name?’

She compressed her lips and looked away. Ryder sighed, picked up a purse which could only be hers, opened it and emptied the contents on to a dressing table. He rifled through those, selected an envelope and said: ‘Bettina Ivanhoe, eight-eight-eight South Maple.’ He looked at the girl, frightened, flaxen-haired, with high and rather wide Slavonic cheekbones: but for her efforts to improve on nature she would have been strikingly good-looking. ‘Ivanhoe? Ivanov would be nearer it. Russian?’

‘No. I was born here.’

‘I’ll bet your parents weren’t.’ She made no reply. He looked through the scattered contents of the purse and picked up two photographs, one each of the girl and LeWinter. That made her more than a one-time visitor. There had to be a forty-year gap in their ages. ‘Darby and Joan,’ Ryder said. The contempt in his voice was matched by his gesture of flicking the cards to the floor.

‘Blackmail?’ LeWinter tried to inject some contempt of his own, but he wasn’t up to it. ‘Extortion, eh?’

Ryder said indifferently: ‘I’d blackmail you to death if you were what I think you might be. In fact, I’d put you to death without any blackmail.’ The words hung chillingly in the air. ‘I’m after something else. Where’s your safe and where’s the key to it?’

LeWinter sneered, but there was – it could have been imagined – a hint of relief behind the sneer. ‘A cheap-jack heist-man.’

‘Unbecoming language from the bench.’ Ryder produced and opened a pen-knife, then approached the girl. ‘Well, LeWinter?’

LeWinter folded his arms and looked resolute.

‘The flower of southern chivalry.’ Ryder tossed the knife to Jeff, who placed the tip against LeWinter’s second chin and pressed.

‘It’s red,’ Jeff said. ‘Just the same as the rest of us. Should I have sterilized this?’

‘Down and to the right,’ Ryder said. ‘That’s where the external jugular is.’

Jeff removed the knife and examined it. The blade was narrow and only the top half-inch had blood on it. To LeWinter, who had stopped looking resolute, it must have seemed that the arterial flood-gates had burst. His voice was husky. ‘The safe’s in my study downstairs. The key’s in the bathroom.’

Ryder said: ‘Where?’

‘In a jar of shaving soap.’

‘Odd place for an honest man to keep a key. The contents of this safe should be interesting.’ He went into the bathroom and returned in a few seconds, key in hand. ‘Do you have staff on the premises?’

‘No.’

‘Probably not. Think of the stirring tales they could tell your wife. Believe him, Perkins?’

‘On principle, no.’

‘Me neither.’ Ryder produced three sets of handcuffs – all, until very recently, the property of the police chief. One set secured the girl’s right wrist to a bedpost, the second LeWinter’s left to the other bedpost, the third, passing behind a central head-rail, secured their other two wrists together. For gags a couple of pillow-slips sufficed. Before securing LeWinter’s gag Ryder said: ‘A hypocrite like you, who makes all those stirring speeches against the Washington gun lobby, is bound to have some lying around. Where are they?’

‘Study.’

Jeff began a meticulous search of the room. Ryder went below, located the study, located the gun cupboard and opened it. No Kalashnikovs. But one particular hand-gun, of a make unknown to him, took his attention. He wrapped it in a handkerchief and dropped it into one of his capacious coat pockets.

The safe was massive, six feet by three, weighing well over a quarter of a ton and built at some time in the remote past before safe-breakers had developed the highly sophisticated techniques of today. The locking mechanism and key were woefully inadequate. Had the safe been freestanding Ryder would have opened it without hesitation. But it was set into a brick wall to a depth of several inches, a most unusual feature for that type of safe. Ryder returned upstairs, removed LeWinter’s gag and produced his knife.

‘Where’s the cut-off switch for the safe?’

‘What damned switch?’

‘You were too quick in telling me where the key was. You wanted me to open that safe.’ For the second time that night LeWinter winced, more in apprehension than pain, as the knife tip punctured the skin of his neck. ‘The switch that cuts the alarm relay to the local sheriff’s office.’

LeWinter was more obdurate this time, but not markedly so. Ryder returned downstairs and slid back a panel above the study door to expose a simple switch. He clicked this off and opened the safe. Half of it was designed as a filing cabinet, the files, in the customary fashion, being suspended by metal lugs from parallel rails. Nearly all of those were given over to personal notes on court cases that had come before him. Two files were marked ‘Private Correspondence’, but apparently weren’t all that private, as some of them had been signed on his behalf by his secretary, (Miss) B. Ivanhoe: the young lady upstairs seemed to have carried secretarial devotion to her boss to lengths above and beyond the call of duty. In the shelves above only three objects caught his attention and were removed. One was a list of names and telephone numbers. The second was a leather-bound copy of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The third was a green and also leather-bound notebook.

As notebooks go it was large – about eight inches by five – and secured by a locked, brass clasp, a sufficient deterrent against the young or merely curious but of no avail against the ill-intentioned armed with a knife. Ryder sliced open the spine and rifled through the exposed pages – which told him nothing, inasmuch as they were covered with neatly-typed figures, not letters. He wasted no time on the notebook. He knew nothing of cryptography, which didn’t worry him: the FBI had its own highly specialized department of code-breakers who could decipher anything except the most highly sophisticated military codes, and even those they could do if given enough time. Time. Ryder looked at his watch. It was one minute to eleven.

He found Jeff methodically going through the pockets of LeWinter’s considerable number of custom-made suits. LeWinter and the girl were still resting comfortably. Ryder ignored them and switched on a TV set. He didn’t bother to select any particular station: the same programme would be on every one. Ryder didn’t bother to look at the screen. He didn’t appear to be watching anything at all but, in fact, he didn’t allow the couple on the bed to move out of peripheral vision.

The announcer, who might just coincidentally have been dressed anyway in a dark suit and tie, used his State funeral voice. He confined himself to the facts. The San Ruffino nuclear power reaction station had been broken into that late afternoon and the criminals had made good their escape, taking with them weapons-grade material and hostages. The precise amount of material taken was specified, as were the names, addresses and occupations of the hostages. Neither the person giving this information nor the source from which it had come had been identified, but the genuineness of the information was beyond dispute as it had been confirmed in detail by the authorities. The same authorities were carrying out an intensive investigation. The usual meaningless poppycock, Ryder thought; they had no leads to investigate. He switched off the set and looked at Jeff.

‘Notice anything, Perkins?’

‘The same thing as you were noticing. What you can see of Casanova’s face here didn’t show much change in expression. Didn’t show anything, in fact. Guilty as hell, I’d say.’

‘Good as a signed confession. That news was no news to him.’ He looked at LeWinter and appeared momentarily lost in thought before saying: ‘I’ve got it. Your rescuers, I mean. I’ll send along a reporter and a photographer from the Globe.’

‘Isn’t that interesting?’ Jeff said. ‘I do believe Don Juan has registered a slight change of expression.’

LeWinter had, in fact, registered a marked change in expression. The bronzed skin had assumed a greyish hue and the suddenly protuberant eyes seemed bent on parting company with their sockets. One could enjoy the Globe without being able to read too well. It specialized in artistic portraits of unclad feminine illiterates who spent their evenings reading Sophocles in the original, in candid shots of the newsworthy caught in apparently compromising or undignified situations, and, for the intelligentsia among their readers, extensive muck-raking couched in terms of holy crusades against shocked morality. All of this was, perforce, in the very simplest of prose. And such was the intolerable pressure brought to bear through the demands imposed by the clamorous urgency, the evangelistic immediacy and the socially important content of those journalistic imperatives that the overworked editorial staff were frequently and reluctantly compelled to encapsulate, hold over or, most commonly, altogether forget, such trivia as the international news or, indeed, any but the most salaciously elevating items of the local news. One did not require telepathic aid to guess that the judge’s mind was touching on such matters in general and, in particular, on page one, where the unretouched and considerably enlarged picture of himself and his handcuffed amorita would leave room only for the appalled caption.

Downstairs in the study Ryder said: ‘Glance through those court cases in the files. You may find something of interest, although I doubt it. I have a call to make.’ He dialled a number, and while waiting for his call to come through glanced at the list of names and telephone numbers he had taken from the safe. His number answered and he asked for Mr Jamieson. Jamieson was the night manager at the telephone exchange. He was on the line almost at once.

‘Sergeant Ryder here. Important and confidential, Mr Jamieson.’ Jamieson had delusions about his self-importance and liked to have those kept well stoked. ‘I have a number here and would be glad if you made a note of it.’ He gave the number, had it read back to him and said: ‘I think it’s Sheriff Hartman’s home number. Would you check and give me the address – it’s not in the book.’

‘Important, huh?’ Jamieson sounded eager. ‘Hush-hush?’

‘You don’t know how important. Heard the news?’

‘San Ruffino? My God, yes. Just now. Bad, eh?’

‘You just can’t guess.’ He waited patiently until Jamieson came back to him. ‘Well?’

‘You got the right name, right number. Classified, God knows why. One hundred-and-eighteen Rowena.’

Ryder thanked him and hung up. Jeff said: ‘Who’s Hartman?’

‘Local sheriff. That safe is wired to his office. Missed something up there, didn’t you?’

‘I know.’

‘How?’

‘If I hadn’t missed it you wouldn’t mention it.’

‘You noticed how readily LeWinter parted with the key to that safe. What does that tell you about Sheriff Hartman?’

‘Nothing much. Correction, nothing good.’

‘Yes. The number of people by whom LeWinter would willingly be found in such a scandalous and compromising situation must be very few. But he knows that Sheriff Hartman wouldn’t talk. So there’s a bond between them.’

‘LeWinter could have a friend in this world.’

‘We’re talking about probabilities, not the near-impossible. Blackmail? Unlikely. If the judge were blackmailing Hartman this would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the sheriff to make sure that the blackmail ended here and now. LeWinter could be the victim but I can’t see it that way. What I do see is that they are in some very profitable business together. Criminal business. An honest judge would never compromise himself by going into business with a lawman. Anyway, I know LeWinter is bent. I know nothing about this Hartman but he’s probably the same.’

‘As honest – if unemployed – cops it’s our duty to find out what Hartman’s bent about. In what now appears to be the usual fashion?’ Ryder nodded. ‘Donahure can wait?’

‘He’ll keep. Turned up anything?’

‘Hell, no. All these “whereases” and “whereofs” and “here-intofores” are too much for me.’

‘You can forget it. Even LeWinter wouldn’t express his deepest thoughts – or criminal intentions – in legalese.’ Ryder again dialled a number, waited then said: ‘Mr Aaron? Sergeant Ryder here. Now don’t get me wrong, but how would you like one of your photographers to take a picture of a prominent citizen caught in a compromising situation?’

Aaron’s tone was uncomprehending. Not cold: just not understanding. ‘I am surprised, Sergeant. You know that the Examiner is not a yellow tabloid.’

‘Pity. I thought you were and would be interested in Judge LeWinter’s peccadilloes.’

‘Ah!’ LeWinter ranked with Chief Donahure at the top of the list of Aaron’s target for special editorials. ‘What’s that crooked old goat up to now?’

‘He’s not up to anything. He’s lying down. He’s with his secretary who is young enough to be his grand-daughter. When I say “with” I mean “with”. He’s handcuffed to her, and they’re both handcuffed to the bed.’

‘Good God!’ Aaron made a coughing sound, probably trying to stifle laughter. ‘Intrigues me vastly. Sergeant. But I’m still afraid we couldn’t publish –’

‘No one asked you to publish anything. Just take a photograph.’

‘I see.’ There was a brief silence. ‘All you want is for him to know that such a picture has been taken?’

‘That’s it. I’d be glad if your boys would maintain the fiction I’ve told him – that I was sending people from the Globe.’

This time Aaron positively cackled. ‘That would make him happy!’

‘He’s having fits. Many thanks. I’m leaving the handcuff keys on the study table.’

Dunne, as he’d promised, was still in his office when they returned. Ryder said: ‘Progress?’

‘Damn all. Almost impossible to make an outgoing call. Switchboard’s been jammed since the news announcement. At least a hundred people have seen the criminals – in, as usual, a hundred different places. You?’

‘Don’t know. You’ll have to help us if you will. First off, here are Judge LeWinter’s fingerprints.’

Dunne looked at him in disbelief. ‘He gave you his fingerprints?’

‘Sort of.’

‘I warned you, Ryder. Tangle with that old bird and you step out of your class. Donahure has powerful friends only locally but LeWinter has them’where it counts – in Sacramento. Don’t tell me you used violence again.’

‘Certainly not. We left him peacefully in bed and unharmed.’

‘Did he recognize you?’

‘No. We wore hoods.’

‘Well, thank you very much. As if I haven’t got enough on my hands. Do you know what kind of hornet’s nest you’ll have stirred up? And where will it all end up? In my lap?’ He closed his eyes. ‘I know who’ll be the next caller on those damned phones.’

‘Not LeWinter. He’s a bit restricted right now. Matter of fact we left him handcuffed to a bedpost and his secretary. They were there when we arrived. She’s Russian.’

Dunne closed his eyes again. When he’d assimilated this and steeled himself for whatever was to come, he said carefully: ‘And?’

‘This is interesting.’ Ryder unwrapped the hand-gun he had taken. ‘One wonders what an upright judge is doing with a silenced automatic. Can you have it tested for fingerprints? Incidentally, the girl’s fingerprints are already there. This is a notebook, coded. I imagine the key is in this copy of Ivanhoe. Perhaps the FBI can find out. Finally, this is his private list of telephone numbers. They may or may not be significant but I’ve neither the time nor the facilities to find out.’

Dunne was heavily sarcastic. ‘Anything else you’d like me to do for you?’

‘Yes. A copy of the file you have on LeWinter.’

Dunne shook his head. ‘FBI personnel only.’

‘Would you listen to him,’ Jeff said. ‘After all the legwork we do for him, after all the valuable clues we put in his hands –’

‘Okay, okay. But I’m promising nothing. Where to now?’

‘To see another lawman.’

‘He has my advance sympathies. Do I know him?’

‘No. And I don’t. Hartman. Must be new. Anyway, he’s in Redbank. County division.’

‘What has this unfortunate done to incur your displeasure?’

‘He’s a pal of LeWinter’s.’

‘That, of course, explains everything.’

Hartman lived in a small and unpretentious bungalow on the outskirts of town. For a detached Californian house it was virtually a slum: it had no swimming pool. Ryder said: ‘His association with LeWinter must be pretty recent.’

‘Yes. Lets the side down, doesn’t he? Door’s open. Do we knock?’

‘Good heavens, no.’

They found Hartman seated at his desk in a small study. He was a large, heavily-built man and must have stood several inches over six feet when he stood up: but Sheriff Hartman would never stand up again. Somebody had carefully cross-filed a soft-nosed bullet which had entered by the left cheek-bone. The dum-dum effect had taken off the back of his head.

It was pointless to search the house; whoever had been there before them would have made certain that nothing incriminating a third party – or parties – had been left behind.

They took the dead man’s fingerprints and left.

CHAPTER FIVE

That was the night the earth shook. Not all of the earth, of course, but for a goodly portion of the residents of South California it might have been just that. The shock came at twenty-five minutes past midnight and the tremors were felt as far north as Merced in the San Joaquin Valley, as far south as Oceanside, between Los Angeles and San Diego, as far west as San Luis Obispo, close by the Pacific, to the southeast clear across the Mojave desert and to the east as far as Death Valley. In Los Angeles, though no structural damage was done, the shake was felt by all who were awake and it was pronounced enough to wake many of those who were sleeping. In the other main centres of population – Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego – no tremors were felt; but the earthquake, a very minor one of 4.2 on the Richter scale, was duly recorded on the delicate seismographs.

Ryder and Jeff, seated in the former’s living-room, both felt it and saw it – a ceiling lamp, travelling through an arc of not more than two inches at maximum, oscillated for about twenty seconds before coming to rest. Dunne, still in his office, felt it and paid no attention to it – he had been through many such tremors before and he had more important things on his mind. LeWinter, dressed now as was his secretary, felt it through the open door of his safe, the remaining contents of which he was examining with some anxiety. Even Donahure, despite an aching occiput and a mind somewhat beclouded by his fourth consecutive large Scotch, was dimly aware of it. And, although its foundations were firmly embedded on the very solid rock of the Sierra Nevada, the Adlerheim felt it most acutely of all, for the excellent reason that the epicentre of the earthquake was no more than a dozen miles distant; even more importantly, the ‘quake registered strongly in the seismographical office installed in one of the caves – wine cellars – which Von Streicher had excavated out of the rock and on two other seismographs which Morro had foresightedly had installed in two private residences he owned, each about fifteen miles distant and in diametrically different directions.

And the shocks were registered, too, in institutes which, one would have thought, had considerably more legitimate interest in such matters than Morro. Those were the offices of Seismological Field Survey, those of the Californian Department of Water Resources, in the Californian Institute of Technology and the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research. The last two, probably the most important of the four, were conveniently located where they would be the first to be demolished should a massive earthquake affect either Los Angeles or San Francisco, for the Institute of Technology was located in Pasadena and the Earthquake Research Center in Menlo Park. The nerve-centres of all four institutes were in direct and permanent contact with each other and it had taken them only minutes to pin-point, with complete precision, the exact epicentre of the earthquake.

Alec Benson was a large, calm man in his early sixties. Except on ceremonial occasions, which he avoided wherever and whenever possible, he invariably wore a grey flannel suit and a grey polo jersey, which went well enough with the grey hair that topped the tubby, placid and usually smiling face. Director of the seismology department, he held two professorships and so many doctorates and scientific degrees that, for simplicity’s sake, his numerous scientific colleagues referred to him just as ‘Alec’. In Pasadena, at least, he was regarded as the world’s leading seismologist: while the Russians and Chinese may have disputed this it was noteworthy that those two countries were always among the first to nominate him as chairman of the not infrequent international seismo-logical conferences. This esteem stemmed primarily from the fact that Benson never made any distinction between himself and his world-wide colleagues and sought advice as frequently as he gave it.

His chief assistant was Professor Hardwick, a quiet, retiring, almost self-effacing scientist with a track record that almost matched that of Benson’s. Hardwick said: ‘Well, about a third of the people in the State must have felt the shock. It’s already been on TV and radio and will be in all the late editions of the morning’s papers. At the least guess, there must be a couple of million amateur seismologists in California. What do we tell them? The truth?’

For once, Alec Benson wasn’t smiling. He looked thoughtfully round the half-dozen scientists in the room, the vastly experienced nucleus of his research team, and studied their expressions, which were neither helpful nor unhelpful: clearly, they were all waiting for him to give a lead. Benson sighed. He said: ‘No one admires George Washington more than I do – but, no, we don’t tell them the truth. A little white lie and it won’t even rest uneasily on my conscience. What’s to be gained if we tell the truth other than scaring our fellow Californians even further out of their wits than they are now? If anything major is going to happen then it’s just going to happen and there’s damn all we can do about it. In any event, we have no evidence that this is a prelude to a major shake.’

Hardwick looked doubtful. ‘No intimation, no warning, nothing?’

‘What point would it serve?’

‘Well, there’s never been a ‘quake there in recorded history.’

‘No matter. Even a major ‘quake there wouldn’t be of great importance. Devastation of property and loss of life would be insignificant, because the area is so sparsely populated. Owens Valley, eighteen-seventy-two, the largest recorded earthquake in Califomian history – how many people died there? Maybe sixty. The Arvin-Techapi ‘quake of nineteen-fifty-two, at seven-point-seven the largest in Southern California – how many died there? Perhaps a dozen.’ Benson permitted himself his customary smile. ‘Now, if this latest jolt had happened along the Inglewood-Newport Fault I’d take a different view entirely.’ The Inglewood-Newport Fault, which had been responsible for the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, actually ran under the city of Los Angeles itself. ‘As it is, I’m in favour of letting sleeping dogs lie.’

Hardwick nodded. Reluctantly, but he nodded. ‘So we blame it on the poor old blameless White Wolf Fault?’

‘Yes. A calmly reassuring release to the media. Tell them again, briefly, about our ESPP, that we are cautiously pleased that it seems to be going according to plan and that the intensity of this shake corresponds pretty closely to our expected estimate of fault slippage.’

‘Release to the TV and radio stations?’

‘No. General. Wire service. We don’t want to lend anything that smacks of undue urgency or importance to our – ah – findings.’

Preston, another senior assistant, said: ‘We don’t let ethics creep into this, huh?’

Benson was quite cheerful. ‘Scientifically indefensible. But from the humanitarian point of view – well, call it justifiable.’

It said much for the immense weight of Benson’s prestige that the consensus of opinion was heavily on his side.

In the refectory hall in the Adlerheim Morro was being equally cheerful and reassuring to the anxious hostages who had gathered there. ‘I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that there is no cause for alarm. I grant you, it was quite a nasty shake, the worst we have experienced here, but a shake of a thousand times that magnitude would leave us completely unharmed. Apart from the fact that you will probably have already learned from your TVs that there has been no damage throughout the State, you must all be intelligent enough and widely-read enough to know that earthquakes spell danger only for those who live in dwellings on made-up filled land, marshy land whether drained or not and on alluvial soil. Damage rarely occurs to dwellings that have their foundations on rock – and we have our foundations on thousands of feet of rock. The Sierra Nevada has been here for millions of years: it is not likely to disappear overnight. It is unlikely that you could find any safer or more desirable – from the earthquake point of view – residence in the State of California.’ Morro glanced smilingly around his audience, nodding his approval when he saw that his words seemed to have had the desired calming effect. ‘I don’t know about you people, but I have no intention of allowing this passing trifle to interfere with my night’s sleep. I bid you all goodnight.’

When Morro entered his private office the smile was markedly absent. Abraham Dubois was seated behind Morro’s desk, a phone in one hand, a pencil in the other, his huge shoulders hunched over a large-scale map of California. Morro said: ‘Well?’

‘It is not well.’ Dubois replaced the phone and delicately pricked a pencil dot on the map. ‘Here. Exactly here.’ He used a rule then set it against a mileage scale. ‘The epicentre, to be precise, is exactly eleven and a half miles from the Adlerheim. This is not so good, Mr Morro.’

‘It’s not so good.’ Morro lowered himself into an armchair. ‘Does it not strike you as ironic, Abraham, that we should pick the one spot in the State where an earthquake takes place outside our back door, so to speak?’

‘Indeed. It could be an ill omen. I wish I could fault the triangulation, but I can’t. It’s been checked and re-checked.’ Dubois smiled. ‘At least we didn’t pick an extinct volcano which has suddenly turned out not to be so extinct after all. What option do we have? There is no time, there is no alternative. This is our operating base. This is our perfectly secure cover. This is our weaponry. This is the only multi-band radio transmitting station we have. All our eggs are in one basket. But if we pick up that basket and try to walk away with it the chances are that we will fall and be left with only the ruined ingredients for an omelette.’

I’ll go sleep on it although I don’t think I’ll wake up feeling any differently from the way you do now.’ Morro pushed himself heavily to his feet. ‘We mustn’t let what could be only a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence affect our thinking and planning too much. Who knows, there may not be another tremor in this area for a hundred years. After all, there hasn’t been one for hundreds, not at least that we know of or has been recorded. Sleep well.’

But Dubois did not sleep well for the excellent reason that he did not go to bed. Morro did sleep, but it was for only an hour or so. He awoke to find his light on and Dubois shaking his shoulder.

‘My apologies.’ Dubois looked rather more cheerful than when last he had been seen. ‘But I’ve just made a video-tape of a TV newscast and I think you ought to see it as soon as possible.’

‘The earthquake, I take it?’ Dubois nodded. ‘Good or bad?’

‘One could not call it bad. I think you might well turn it to your advantage.’

The replay of the video-tape lasted no more than five minutes. The newscaster, a bright and knowledgeable youngster who clearly knew enough about what he was talking about not to have recourse to a teleprompter, was remarkably brisk and fresh for one who was up and around at the unchristian hour of 3 a.m. He had a large relief map of California hanging on the wall behind him and wielded a slender cane with all the fluent dexterity of a budding Toscanini.

He began by giving concise details of what was known of the earthquake, the area over which it had been felt, the degree of apprehension felt in various areas and the amount of damage which it had caused, which was zero. He then went on to say: ‘From the latest authoritative statement it would appear that this earthquake is to be regarded as a plus and not a minus, as a matter for some self-congratulation and not as a pointer towards some future calamity. In short, according to the State’s top seismological sources, this may well be the first earthquake ever knowingly and deliberately brought about by man.

‘If this is correct, then it must be regarded as a landmark in earthquake control, the first successful implementation of the ESPP. For Californians, this can only be good news. To remind you: ESPP stands for “Earthquake Slip Preventative Programme”, which must be one of the clumsiest and most misleading titles thought up by the scientific fraternity in recent years. By “slip” is meant simply the rubbing, sliding, jarring, earthquake-producing process which occurs when one of the eight, maybe ten – no one seems very sure – of the earth’s tectonic plates, on which the continents float, push into, above, under or alongside each other. The title is misleading because it gives the impression that earthquakes may be brought under control by preventing this slip from taking place. In fact it means precisely the opposite – the prevention of earthquakes, or at least major earthquakes, by permitting, indeed encouraging, this slipping factor to take place – but to take place in a gradual and controlled process in which there is a continuing and progressive easing of the strain between the plates by allowing them to slide comparatively smoothly past one another producing a series of minor and harmless quakes at frequent intervals instead of massive ones at long intervals. The secret, not surprisingly, is lubrication.

‘It was purely a chance discovery that led to this possibility – which would now appear a strong possibility – of modifying earthquakes by increasing their frequency. Somebody, for reasons best known to themselves, injected waste water into a particularly deep well near Denver and discovered, to their surprise, that this triggered off a series of earthquakes – tiny, but unquestionably earthquakes. Since then there have been many experiments, both in the laboratory and under actual field conditions, that have clearly demonstrated that frictional resistance in a fault zone is lessened by decreasing the stress along the fault.

‘In other words, increasing the amount of fluid in the fault lessens the resistance in the fault while withdrawing the fluid increases the resistance: if an existing stress is present between the faces of two tectonic plates it can be eased by injecting fluid and causing a small earthquake, the size of which can be fairly accurately controlled by the amount of fluid injected. This was proved some years ago when Geological Survey scientists, experimenting in the Rangeley oil fields in Colorado, found that by alternately forcing in and then withdrawing fluids they could turn earthquakes off and on at will.

‘To what may be to their eternal credit, seismologists in our State were the first to put those theories to practical use.’ The newscaster, who seemed to relish his role as lecturer, was now tapping the map on the wall. ‘From here to here’ – he indicated a line that stretched from the Mexican border to the San Francisco Bay area – ‘massive drills, specifically designed for this task, have bored holes to an incredible depth of up to forty thousand feet in ten selected areas along this roughly south-east-north-west line. All of those bore-holes are in known earthquake faults and all in areas where some of the most severe of recorded earthquakes have taken place.’

Starting from the south he tapped out a number of spots on the map. ‘Ten bore-holes in all. The scientists are experimenting with various mixtures of water and oil for lubricating purposes. Well, not quite mixtures, for oil and water don’t readily mix. First oil, then stuff they call mud, the whole pushed further down and through cracks in the rocks by water under high pressure.’

He stopped, looked at the camera for a dramatic five seconds, turned, placed the tip of the cane against a spot at the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley, then, holding the cane in position, turned to face the camera again.

‘And here – if I may coin a phrase – we seem to have struck oil at one-twenty-five a.m. today. Twenty, thirty miles southeast of Bakerfield. Exactly where a massive earthquake struck a quarter of a century ago. And exactly where the sixth borehole from the south is located. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the villain of the piece – the White Wolf Fault.’ The newscaster relaxed and smiled boyishly. ‘And now, folks, you know as much about it as I do, which I’m afraid isn’t very much. But have no fear: I’m sure the real seismo-logical experts will be busy lecturing you on this for days to come.’

Wordlessly, Dubois and Morro rose from their seats, looked at each other then went to the map still spread on Morro’s table. Morro said: ‘You are quite certain that the triangulation is correct?’

‘Our three seismologists will swear to it.’

‘And our three bright boys place the epicentre in the Garlock Fault, not the White Wolf Fault?’

‘They should know. Not only are they highly experienced but we’re practically sitting on top of the Garlock Fault.’

‘The Seismology Field Survey, Caltech, the Geological Survey and God knows how many other scientific bodies – how could they all possibly – especially when they were all certainly working in collaboration – come up with the same mistake?’

‘They didn’t.’ Dubois was positive. ‘For earthquakes, this is the best monitored area in the world and those are among the world’s top experts.’

‘They lied?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why should they lie?’

Dubois was almost apologetic. ‘I’ve had a little time to think about this. I think there are two reasons. California is today obsessed with the fear, the certainty almost, that some day, maybe quite soon according to a few eminent earthquake researchers, the big one is going to strike, one that will make the San Francisco nineteen-o-six look like a firecracker: it’s more than possible that State officials are trying to allay this fear by stating that this ‘quake was man-made. Secondly, all those clever seismologists may be living with a brand-new fear which particularly affects themselves – that they may have been dabbling in murky waters, that they may not really know what they were doing, that by messing around with those various faults they may have inadvertently triggered off something they didn’t expect – a movement in the Garlock Fault where they don’t have a bore-hole. But they do have a drilling rig sitting fair and square in the middle of the Tejon Pass on the San Andreas Fault – and at Frazier Park, near Fort Tejon, the San Andreas and the Garlock Faults intersect.’

‘I suppose it is a possibility. And if that were correct it might happen again, perhaps even on a major scale, and I don’t think we’d like that at all.’ Morro compressed his lips then slowly smiled. ‘You have had more time to think about this than I have. I seem to recall your saying that we might just possibly turn this to our advantage.’ Dubois smiled in return and nodded. ‘Ten past three in the morning and what better time for a glass of that splendid Glenfiddich. Don’t you agree?’

‘For inspirational purposes.’

‘Indeed. You think perhaps we should relieve those prestigious seismological institutes of the fear that the public may come to associate unexpected earthquakes – ‘quakes in the wrong place, that is – with their indiscriminate tampering with seismic faults? If the public were to know the truth, that is?’

‘Something like that.’

Morro smiled again. ‘I look forward to writing this communiqué’

Ryder wasn’t smiling when he woke up. He cursed, quietly but with considerable feeling, as he reached out for his bedside phone. It was Dunne.

‘Sorry to wake you, Ryder.’

‘No worry. I’ve had almost three hours’ sleep.’

‘I’ve had none. Did you see that newscast shortly before three this morning?’

‘The one about the White Wolf Fault? Yes.’

‘There’ll be another and even more interesting newscast in less than five minutes. Any channel should do.’

‘What’s it this time?’

‘I think the impact will be greater if you watch for yourself. Call me afterwards.’

Ryder replaced the receiver, lifted it again, told a querulous Jeff that there was something worth watching on TV, cursed again and went through to his living-room. The newscaster – the same cheerful youngster whom he’d seen just over three hours previously – came to the point without preamble.

He said: ‘We have received a further communication from the same Mr Morro who claimed last night to have been responsible for the break-in at the San Ruffino nuclear power station and theft of nuclear fuel. We had no reason to doubt that claim as the amounts claimed as stolen corresponded precisely to the amounts that were stolen. This station cannot guarantee the authenticity of this communication, that is to say, that it is from the same man. It may be a hoax. But as the various communications media received this message in exactly the same way as the previous one we regard this as prima facie evidence that the message is genuine. Whether the information it contains is also genuine is not, of course, for us to say. The message reads:

‘“The people of California have been subjected to a hoax in that they have been deliberately lied to by the State’s leading seismological authorities. The earthquake which took place at one-twenty-five this morning did not, as so falsely alleged, take place in the White Wolf Fault, and I am sure this can easily be verified by consulting the owners of scores of privately owned seismographs throughout the State. None of them would alone dare challenge the authority of the State’s official institutes but their combined testimony would make it clear that those State institutes are lying. I expect this statement to bring in massive confirmation of what I am saying.

‘“The reason why the institutes put out this untrue statement lies in their hope of allaying the people’s increasing fear of imminent earthquake activity on an unprecedented scale and their own fear that the citizens of this State might come to associate fresh earthquakes, in areas other than those in which they are operating their ESPP plan, with their controversial attempts to tamper with the earth’s crust.

‘“I can allay their latter fear. They were not responsible for this seismic shock. I was. The epicentre lay not in the White Wolf Fault but in the Garlock Fault, which, next to the San Andreas, is the largest in the State and is parallel and so close to the White Wolf Fault that seismologists may easily have been deceived into believing that they had misread their instruments or that their instruments were in error.

‘“To be honest, I did not expect to trigger off this minor shock as there has been no earthquake in recorded history that would help explain the existence of this huge fracture. The small atomic device I exploded at one-twenty-five this morning was for purely experimental purposes – to see, in effect, whether it worked or not. The results were gratifying.

‘“It is possible that there will be many in the State who will disbelieve my claim. There will be none in the State, or in the nation, who will have any doubts remaining when I explode a second nuclear device tomorrow at a place and time to be announced later. This device is already in position and is in the kiloton range of that which destroyed Hiroshima.’

‘That’s it, then.’ This time there was no trace of the boyish grin he’d permitted himself in the earlier newscast. ‘It could be a hoax. If not, the prospect is at best sobering, at worst chilling. It would be interesting to speculate on the effects and intentions of –’

Ryder switched off. He was quite capable of doing his own speculating. He made and drank several cups of coffee while he showered, shaved and dressed for what promised to be a very long day ahead. He was into his fourth cup of coffee when Dunne rang and apologized for the delay in calling him back.

Ryder said: ‘The impact was guaranteed. There’s only one question I can see: has the State, in the persons of our seismologists, been lying to us?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘I have.’

‘That’s as maybe. Fact is, we have no closed line to Pasadena. But we have to our Los Angeles office. Sassoon is very unhappy, not least about you, and wants to see us. Nine o’clock. Bring your son. As soon as may be.’

‘Now? It’s only six-forty.’

‘I have things to tell you. Not over an open line.’

‘Tapping phones here, tapping phones there,’ Ryder complained. ‘Man’s got no privacy left in this State.’

Ryder and his son arrived at Dunne’s office a few minutes after seven. Dunne, his alert, precise and efficient self, showed no trace of his sleepless night. He was alone.

Ryder said: ‘This room isn’t bugged?’

‘When I leave two suspects alone in it, yes. Otherwise, no.’

‘Where’s the big white chief?’

‘Sassoon’s still in LA. He’s staying there. He is, as I said, unhappy. First, because this is happening in his own back yard. Second, the director of the FBI is winging his merry way from Washington. Third, the CIA have got wind of this and want into the act. As everybody must be very well aware, the FBI and the CIA are barely speaking to each other these days, and even when they do speak you can hear the ice crackling.’

‘How did they get into the act?’

‘I’ll come to that in a moment. We’re going on a short trip by helicopter soon. Pasadena. Nine a.m. the boss says, and we meet him exactly at that time.’

Ryder was mild. ‘The FBI has no jurisdiction over a retired cop.’

‘I wouldn’t even bother saying “please”. Wild horses wouldn’t stop you.’ Dunne shuffled some papers into a neat pile. ‘While you and Jeff have been resting lightly we, as usual, have been toiling all through the night. Want to make some notes?’

‘No need. Jeff’s my memory bank. He can identify over a thousand licence plates within thirty miles of here.’

‘I wish it were only licence plates we were dealing with. Well, now, our friend Carlton, the security deputy taken along with the nuclear fuel. A dossier of sorts. Captain, Army Intelligence, Nato, Germany. Nothing fancy. No cloak-and-dagger espionage or counter-espionage stuff. Seems he infiltrated a Communist cell among Germans working in the base camp. Unsubstantiated suspicion of having become too intimate with them. Offered transfer to regular tank battalion and refused. Resigned. He wasn’t cashiered, he wasn’t pressured to resign; let’s say the Army didn’t stand in his way. At least that’s what they say. Probably correct. No matter how unjustified the suspicions that hang over a man the Army understandably doesn’t take chances. End of that line. When the Pentagon decides to clam up, that’s it.’

‘Just a hint of a Communist tie-up?’

‘That would be enough for the CIA. You can’t move around the Pentagon without treading one of their agents underfoot. A whiff of a Red under the bed and they’re reaching for their cyanide guns or whatever before you know it.

‘His security references. Worked for an AEC plant in Illinois. Good record. Security chief checking on contacts. Then a reference from TVA’s twin Brown’s Ferry nuclear plants in Decator, Alabama. Man’s never been there. Certainly not under that name, certainly not in security. Some other capacity, some other name, but unlikely. Disastrous fire when he was there, incidentally, but not caused by him. Technician looking for an air leak with a lighted candle: he found it.’

‘How come the reference?’

‘Forged.’

Jeff said: ‘Wouldn’t Ferguson, the security chief, have checked out the reference?’

Briefly, Dunne sounded weary. ‘He admits he didn’t. Ferguson himself had been there and said that Carlton knew so many details about the place, including the details of the fire, that he thought a check-out pointless.’

‘How would he have known about the fire?’

‘Unclassified. It’s in the public domain.’

Ryder said: ‘How long was he supposed to have been there?’

‘Fifteen months.’

‘So he may just have dropped out of the scene for that time?’

‘Sergeant Ryder, a man with the know-how can go underground for fifteen years in this nation and never surface once.’

‘He may not have been in the country. He could have a passport at home.’

Dunne looked at him, nodded and made a note. ‘Washington checked out with the AEC at seventeen-seventeen H Street. They keep records there of those seeking information, those consulting card indices and dockets on nuclear facilities. No one had ever checked information on San Ruffino – there was none to check. I got Jablonsky out of bed over this one. He was reluctant to talk. Usual threatening noises from the FBI. Then he admitted they have advanced plans for building a fast breeder reactor there. This comes under AEC control. Top secret. No records.’

‘So Carlton’s our man?’

‘Yes. Not that that’s going to help much now that he’s holed up with Morro.’ Dunne consulted another paper. ‘You wanted a list of all the organized and – “successful”, I think you said – cranks, weirdos, eccentrics or whatever in the State. This is it. I think I said two hundred. Actually, it’s a hundred and thirty-five. Even so, I’m told it would take for ever to investigate them all. Besides, if this lot are as clever and organized as they seem to be, they’ll have an unbreakable cover.’

‘We can narrow it down. To start with, it’ll have to be a large group. Also, a comparatively new group, formed just for this purpose. Say within the past year.’

‘Numbers and dates.’ Resignedly, Dunne made another note. ‘Don’t mind how hard we have to work, do you? Next comes our friend Morro. Not surprisingly, nothing is known about him, as a man, a criminal with an eye-patch and damaged hands, to us or to the police authorities.’

Jeff looked at his father. ‘Susan’s note. Remember she wrote “American?” American, question mark?’

‘And so she did. Well, Major, another little note if you please. Contact Interpol in Paris.’

‘So Interpol it is. Now the notes you took from Donahure. Easy – just meant waking up half the bank managers and tellers in the county. Local Bank of America. Drawn four days ago by a young woman with pebble-tinted glasses and long blonde hair.’

‘You mean twenty-twenty vision and a long blonde wig.’

‘Like enough. A Mrs Jean Hart, eight hundred Cromwell Ridge. There is a Mrs Jean Hart at that address. In her seventies, no account with that bank. Bank teller didn’t count notes – just handed over ten banded thousands.’

‘Which Donahure split up eight ways for eight banks. We’ll have to get his prints.’

‘We got them. One of my boys with the help of a friend of yours, a Sergeant Parker – who, like you, doesn’t seem to care overmuch for Donahure – got them from his office about three this morning.’

‘You have been busy.’

‘Not me. I just sit here running up phone bills. But I’ve had fourteen stout men and true working for me during the night – had to scrape the southern Californian barrel to get them. Anyway, we’ve got some lovely clear specimens of Donahure’s prints on those notes. More interestingly, we have some lovely clear specimens of LeWinter’s too.’

‘The paymaster. And how about the paymaster’s automatic?’

‘Nothing there. Not registered. Nothing suspicious in that – judges get threats all the time. Not used recently – film of dust in the barrel. Silencer probably a pointer to the type of man he is, but you can’t hang a man for that.’

‘The FBI file on him. Still reluctant to tell me about it?’

‘Not now I’m not. Nothing positive. Nothing very good either. Not known to associate with criminals. His open list of telephone numbers would appear to confirm that. From that list he would appear to know every politician and city hall boss in the State.’

‘And you said that he was not known to associate with criminals? What else?’

‘Both we and the police are dissatisfied with some – more than some – of the sentences he has been handing out over the past years.’ Dunne consulted a sheet before him. ‘Enemies of known cronies getting unduly stiff sentences: criminal associates of cronies – repeat, he himself has no direct criminal associates – getting light, sometimes ludicrously light, sentences.’

‘Pay-off?’

‘No proof, but what would you think? Anyway, he’s not as naïve as his minion Donahure. No local accounts under false names – none that we know of, anyway. But we monitor – without opening – his correspondence from time to time.’

‘You’re as bad as the KGB.’

Dunne ignored this. ‘He gets occasional letters from Zurich. Never sends any, though. Keeps his tracks pretty well covered, does our judicial friend.’

‘Intermediaries feeding pay-offs into a numbered account?’

‘What else? No hope there. Swiss banks will only open up in the case of a convicted criminal.’

‘This copy of Ivanhoe that LeWinter had in his safe? And the coded notebook?’

‘Seems to be a mish-mash of telephone numbers, mainly in this State and Texas and what are beginning to look like meteorological reports. Making progress. At least Washington is. There are no specialized Russian cryptographers in California.’

‘Russian?’

‘Apparently. A simple variation – well, simple to them, I suppose – of a well-known Russian code. Reds lurking in the undergrowth again? Could mean anything, could mean nothing. Another reason, I suppose, for the keen interest being shown by the CIA. I should imagine, without actually knowing, that the bulk of Washington cryptographers are on the CIA’s payroll, one way or another.’

‘And LeWinter’s secretary is Russian. Russian descent, anyway. A cypher clerk?’

‘If this were any of a dozen countries in the world I’d have the fair Bettina in here and have the truth out of her in ten minutes. Unfortunately, this is not one of those dozen different countries.’ He paused. ‘And Donahure has – had – Russian rifles.’

‘Ah! The Kalashnikovs. Import permit –’

‘None. So officially there are none of those rifles in the country. The Pentagon do have some, but they’re not saying where they got them from. The British, I imagine – some captured IRA arms cache in Northern Ireland.’

‘And Donahure is, of course, a second generation Irishman.’

‘God, as if I haven’t got enough headaches!’ To illustrate just how many he had Dunne laid his forehead briefly on the palms of his hands then looked up. ‘Incidentally, what was Donahure looking for in your house?’

‘I’ve figured that out.’ Ryder didn’t seem to derive much satisfaction from the thought. ‘Just give me a lifetime and by the end of it I’ll add up two and two and come pretty close to the right answer. He didn’t come because Jeff and I hadn’t been too nice to his stake-out and deprived him of a lot of his personal property, including his spy-van; he’d never have dared connect himself with that. He didn’t come for the evidence I’d taken from San Ruffino because he didn’t know I’d taken any and, in the first place, he hadn’t even had time to go to San Ruffino. By the same token he didn’t have time to go to LeWinter’s for a search warrant either. He wouldn’t have dared to, anyway, for if he’d told LeWinter the real reason why he wanted the search warrant LeWinter might have considered him such a menace that he’d not only refuse such a warrant but might have had him eliminated altogether.’

Dunne wasn’t looking quite so brisk and alert as when they had arrived. He said in complaint: ‘I told you I’ve got a headache.’

‘My guess is that a proper search of Donahure’s home or office would turn up a stack of warrants already signed and officially stamped by LeWinter. All Donahure had to do was to fill them in himself. I’d told him about the dossier I had on him. He’d come for that. So obvious that I missed it at the time. And I’d told him he was so bone-headed that he just had to be acting on his own. So he was, because it was something that concerned only him personally.’

‘Of course it has to be that. The two of them might run for cover.’

‘Don’t think so. They don’t know the evidence is in our hands. Donahure, being a crook at heart, will automatically assume that only crooks would have stolen the money and the guns, and they wouldn’t be likely to advertise the fact. And I don’t think that LeWinter will run either. He’ll have been worried sick at first, especially at the thought of the stolen code-book and the fact that his fingerprints have been taken. But when he’s found out – if he hasn’t already found out – that the dreaded picture of himself and his accommodating secretary has not appeared in the Globe, he’ll have discreet enquiries made and find out that the two men who had come to photograph him were not employed on the Globe and he will come to the inevitable conclusion that they were blackmailers, perhaps out to block his appointment as Chief Justice to the State Supreme Court. You’ve said yourself he has powerful friends: by the same token such a man must also have powerful enemies. Whatever their reason, he won’t be scared of blackmailers. Blackmailers wouldn’t know a Russian code. True, fingerprints have been taken, but cops don’t wear hoods and take your prints in bed: they arrest you first. And he can take care of blackmailers. Californian law is ruthless towards that breed – and LeWinter is the law.’

Jeff said in injured reproach: ‘You might have told me all this.’

‘I thought you understood.’

‘You’d all this figured in advance? Before you moved in on them?’ Dunne said. Ryder nodded. ‘Smarter than the average cop. Might even make the FBI. Any suggestions?’

‘A tap on LeWinter’s phone.’

‘Illegal. Congress is very uptight about tapping these days – chiefly, one supposes, because they’re terrified of having their own phones tapped. It’ll take an hour or two.’

‘You appreciate, of course, that this will be the second tap on his line.’

‘Second?’

‘Why do you think Sheriff Hartman’s dead?’

‘Because he’d talk? A new recruit, still not deeply involved, wanting to get out from under before it was too late?’

‘That, too. But how come he’s dead? Because Morro had LeWinter’s line tapped. I called the night telephone manager from LeWinter’s house to get Hartman’s address – he was unlisted, but that’s probably because he was fairly new to the area. Someone intercepted the call and got to Hartman before Jeff and I did. By the way, there’s no point in recovering the bullet that killed him. It was a dum-dum and would have been distorted out of recognition and further mangled on embedding itself in the brick wall. Ballistic experts are not wizards: you couldn’t hope to match up what’s left of that bullet with any gun barrel.’

‘“Someone”, you said?’

‘Perhaps Donahure – he was showing signs of coming to when we left him – or, just possibly, one of Donahure’s underworld connections. Raminoff wasn’t the only one.’

‘You gave your name over the phone?’

‘Had to – to get the information I wanted.’

‘So now Donahure knows you were in LeWinter’s house. So now LeWinter knows.’

‘No chance. To tell LeWinter that he’d have to tell him that he either had LeWinter’s phone tapped or knew that it was tapped. By the same token if my call to Aaron of the Examiner was tapped Donahure or whoever would still be unable to tell LeWinter. But unlikely that that second call was tapped – our eavesdropping friend would have taken off like a bat after he’d heard mention of Hartman’s name and address.’

Dunne looked at him curiously – it might almost have been with respect. ‘To coin a phrase, you got all the angles figured.’

‘I wish I had. But I haven’t.’

One of the desk-phones rang. Dunne listened in silence and his lips compressed as all trace of expression left his face. He nodded several times, said, ‘Yes, I’ll do that,’ and replaced the receiver. He looked at Ryder in silence.

Without any particular inflection in tone, Ryder said: ‘I told you. I didn’t have all the angles figured. They’ve got Peggy?’

‘Yes.’

Jeff’s chair crashed over backwards. He was on his feet, face almost instantly drained of colour. ‘Peggy! What’s happened to Peggy?’

‘They’ve taken her. As hostage.’

‘Hostage! But you promised us last night – so much for your damned FBI!’

Dunne’s voice was quiet. ‘Two of the damned FBI, as you call them, were gunned down and are in hospital. One is on the critical list. Peggy, at least, is unharmed.’

‘Sit down, Jeff.’ Still no inflection in the voice. He looked at Dunne. ‘I’ve been told to lay off.’

‘Yes. Would you recognize the amethyst she wears on the little finger of her left hand?’ Dunne’s eyes were bitter. ‘Especially, they say, if it’s still attached to her little finger?’

Jeff had just straightened his chair. He was still standing, both hands holding the back bar as if he intended to crush it. His voice was husky. ‘Good God, Dad! Don’t just sit there. It’s not – it’s not human. It’s Peggy! Peggy! We can’t stay here. Let’s leave now. We can be there in no time.’

‘Easy, Jeff, easy. Where in no time?’

‘San Diego.’

Ryder allowed an edge of coolness to creep into his voice. Deliberately, he allowed it. ‘You’ll never make a cop until you learn to think like one. Peggy, San Diego – they’re just tangled up on the outside strand of the spider’s web. We’ve got to find the spider at the heart of the web. Find it and kill it. And it’s not in San Diego.’

‘I’ll go myself, then! You can’t stop me. If you want to sit around –’

‘Shut up!’ Dunne’s voice was as deliberately harsh as Ryder’s had been cool, but at once he spoke more gently. ‘Look, Jeff, we know she’s your sister. Your only sister, your kid sister. But San Diego’s no village lying out in the sticks – it’s the second biggest city in the State. Hundreds of cops, scores of trained detectives, FBI – all experts in this sort of man-hunt. You’re not an expert, you don’t even know the town. There’s probably upwards of a hundred men trying to find her right now. What could you hope to do that they can’t?’ Dunne’s tone became even more reasonable, more persuasive. ‘Your father’s right. Wouldn’t you rather go kill the spider at the heart of the web?’

‘I suppose so.’ Jeff sat in his chair but the slight shaking of the hand showed that blind rage and fear for his sister still had him in their grip. ‘I suppose so. But why you, Dad? Why get at you through Peggy?’

Dunne answered. ‘Because they’re afraid of him. Because they know his reputation, his resolution, the fact that he never gives up. Most of all they’re afraid of the fact that he’s operating outside the law. LeWinter, Donahure, Hartman – three cogs in their machine, four if you count Raminoff – and he gets to them all in a matter of hours. A man operating inside the law would never have got to any of them.’

‘Yes, but how did they –’

‘Simple with hindsight,’ Ryder said. ‘I said that Donahure would never dare tell I – we – were in LeWinter’s place. But he told whoever ordered him to fix the tap. Now that it’s too late I can see that Donahure is far too dumb to think of fixing a tap himself.’

‘Who’s the whoever?’

‘Just a voice on the phone, most likely. A link man. A link man to Morro. And I call Donahure dumb. What does that make me?’ He lit a Gauloise and gazed at the drifting smoke. ‘Good old Sergeant Ryder. All the angles figured.’

CHAPTER SIX

Golden mornings are far from rare in the Golden State and this was one of them, still and clear and beautiful, the sun already hot in a deep-blue sky bereft of cloud. The view from the Sierras across the mist-streaked San Joaquin Valley to the sunlit peaks and valleys of the Coastal Range was quite breath-takingly lovely, a vista to warm the hearts of all but the very sick, the very near-sighted, the irredeemably misanthropical and, in this particular instance, those who were held prisoner behind the grim walls of the Adlerheim. In the last case, additionally, it had to be admitted that the view from the western battlement, high above the courtyard, was marred, psychologically if not actually, by the triple-stranded barbed wire fence with its further unseen deterrent of 2000 volts.

Susan Ryder felt no uplift of the heart whatsoever. Nothing could ever make her anything less than beautiful, but she was pale and tired and the dusky blueness under her lower lids had not come from any bottle of eye-shadow. She had not slept except for a brief fifteen-minute period during the night from which she had woken with the profound conviction that something was far wrong, something more terrible than even their incarceration in that dreadful place. Susan, whose mother had been a Scot, had often, and only half-jokingly, claimed that she had the first sight, as distinct from the legendary second sight, inasmuch as she knew that something, somewhere, was terribly wrong at the moment it was happening and not that it was about to happen at some future time. She had awoken, in fact, at the moment when her daughter’s two FBI guards had been gunned down in San Diego. A heaviness of heart is as much a physical as a mental sensation, and she was at a loss to account for it. So much, she thought morosely, for her reputation as the cheerful, smiling extrovert, the sun who lit up any company in which she happened to find herself. She would have given the world to have a hand touch her arm and find herself looking into the infinitely reassuring face of her husband, to feel his rocklike presence by her side.

A hand did touch her arm then took it. It was Julie Johnson. Her eyes were dulled and tinged with red as if she had spent a goodly part of the night ensconced behind the wet bar so thoughtfully provided by Morro. Susan put an arm round the girl’s slender shoulders and held her. Neither said anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

They were the only two on the battlements. Six of the other hostages were wandering, apparently aimlessly, around the courtyard, none speaking to any of the others. It could have been that each wished to be alone with his or her personal thoughts or that they were only now beginning to appreciate the predicament in which they found themselves: on the other hand the inhibitory and intimidatory effects of those bleak walls were sufficient to stifle the normal morning courtesies of even the most gregarious.

The ringing of the bell from the door of the great hall came almost as a relief. Susan and Julie made their way down the stone steps with care – there was no guard-rail – and joined the others at one of the long tables where breakfast was being served. It was a first-class meal that would have done justice to any hotel of good standing, but apart from Dr Healey and Dr Bramwell, who ate with a gusto becoming guests of long standing, the others did no more than sip some coffee and push pieces of toast around. In atmosphere, it was the early morning equivalent of the Last Supper.

They had just finished what most of them hadn’t even started when Morro and Dubois entered, smiling, affable, courteous, freely bestowing good-mornings and hopes that they had all spent the night in peaceful and relaxing slumber. This over, Morro lifted a quizzical eyebrow. ‘I observe that two of our new guests, Professor Burnett and Dr Schmidt, are absent. Achmed’ – this to one of the white-robed acolytes – ‘ask them if they would be good enough to join us.’

Which, after five minutes, the two nuclear scientists did. Their clothes were crumpled as if they had slept in them, which, in fact, was what they had done. They had unshaven faces and what was known to the trade as ‘tartan eyes’ – for which Morro had only himself to blame in having left refreshments so freely available in their suites. In fairness, he was probably not to know that the awesome scientific reputations of the two physicists from San Diego and UCLA were matched only by their awesome reputations in the field of bacchanalian conviviality.

Morro allowed a decent interval to elapse then said: ‘Just one small matter. I would like you all to sign your names. If you would be so good, Abraham?’

Dubois nodded amiably, picked up a sheaf of papers and went round the table, laying a typed letter, typed envelope and pen before each of the ten hostages.

‘What the devil is the meaning of this, you witless bastard?’ The speaker was, inevitably, Professor Burnett, his legendary ill-temper understandably exacerbated by a monumental hangover. ‘This is a copy of the letter I wrote my wife last night.’

‘Word for word, I assure you. Just sign it.’

‘I’ll be damned if I will.’

‘It’s a matter of utter indifference to me,’ Morrow said. ‘Asking you to write those letters was purely a courtesy gesture to enable you to assure your loved ones that you are safe and well. Starting from the top of the table you will all sign your letters in rotation, handing your pens to Abraham. Thank you. You look distraught, Mrs Ryder.’

‘Distraught, Mr Morro?’ She gave him a smile but it wasn’t one of her best. ‘Why should I?’

‘Because of this.’ He laid an envelope on the table before her, address upwards. ‘You wrote this?’

‘Of course. That’s my writing.’

‘Thank you.’ He turned the envelope face down and she saw, with a sudden dryness in her mouth, that both edges had been slit. Morro opened the edges, smoothed the envelope flat and indicated a small greyish squidge in the middle of the back of the envelope. ‘Paper was completely blank, of course, but there are chemical substances that bring out even the most invisible writing. Now, even the most dedicated policeman’s wife wouldn’t carry invisible ink around with her. This little squiggle here has an acetic acid basis, most commonly used in the making of aspirin but also, in some cases, nail varnish. You, I observe, use colourless nail varnish. Your husband is a highly experienced, perhaps even brilliant detective and he would expect similar signs of intelligence from his wife. Within a few minutes of receiving this letter he would have had it in a police laboratory. Shorthand, of course. What does it say, Mrs Ryder?’

Her voice was dull. ‘“Adlerheim”.’

‘Very, very naughty, Mrs Ryder. Enterprising, of course, clever, spirited, call it what you like, but naughty.’

She stared down at the table. ‘What are you going to do with me?’

‘Do with you? Fourteen days bread and water? I think not. We do not wage war on women. Your chagrin will be punishment enough.’ He looked round. ‘Professor Burnett, Dr Schmidt, Dr Healey, Dr Bramwell, I would be glad if you would accompany me.’

Morro led the way to a large room next to his own study. It was notable for the fact that it lacked any window and was covered on three sides by metal filing cabinets. The remaining wall – a side wall – was, incongruously enough, given over to repulsively baroque paintings framed in heavy gilt – one presumed they had formed the prized nucleus of Von Streicher’s art collection – and a similarly gilt-edged mirror. There was a large table in the centre, with half a dozen chairs round it and, on it, a pile of large sheets of paper, about four feet by two, the top one of which was clearly some sort of diagram. At one end of the table there was a splendidly-equipped drinks trolley.

Morro said: ‘Well, now, gentlemen, I’ll be glad if you do me a favour. Nothing, I assure you, that will involve you in any effort. Be so kind as to have a look at them and tell me what you think of them.’

‘I’ll be damned if we do,’ Burnett said. He spoke in his normal tone, that of defiant truculence. ‘I speak for myself, of course.’

Morro smiled. ‘Oh, yes, you will.’

‘Yes? Force? Torture?’

‘Now we are being childish. You will examine them and for two reasons. You will be overcome by your natural scientific curiosity – and, surely, gentlemen, you want to know why you are here?’

He left and closed the door behind them. There was no sound of a key being turned in a lock, which was reassuring in itself. But then a pushbutton, hydraulically-operated bolt is completely silent in any event.

He moved into his study, now lit by only two red lamps. Dubois was seated before a large glass screen which, in fact, was completely transparent. Half an inch from that was the back of the one-way mirror of the room where the four scientists were. From this gap the maximum of air had been extracted, not with any insulation purposes in mind but to eliminate the possibility of the scientists hearing anything that was said in the study. Those in the study, however, had no difficulty whatsoever in hearing what the scientists had to say, owing to the positioning of four suitably spaced and cunningly concealed microphones in the scientists’ room. Those were wired into a speaker above Dubois’s head and a tape-recorder by his side.

‘Not all of it,’ Morro said. ‘Most of it will probably be unprintable – unrepeatable, rather – anyway. Just the meat on the bones.’

‘I understand. Just to be sure, I’ll err on the cautious side. We can edit it afterwards.’

They watched the four men in the room look around uncertainly. Then Burnett and Schmidt looked at each other and this time there was no uncertainty in their expressions. They strode purposefully towards the drinks trolley, Burnett selecting the inevitable Glenfiddich, Schmidt homing in on the Gordon’s gin. A brief silence ensued while the two men helped themselves in generous fashion and set about restoring a measure of tranquillity to the disturbances plaguing their nervous systems.

Healey watched them sourly then made a few far from oblique references to Morro, which was one of the passages that Morro and Dubois would have to edit out of the final transcript. Having said that, Healey went on: ‘He’s right, damn him. I’ve just had a quick glance at that top blueprint and I must say it interests me strangely – and not in a way that I like at all: and I do want to know what the hell we are doing here.’

Burnett silently scrutinized the top diagram for all of thirty seconds and even the aching head of a top physicist can absorb a great deal of information in that time. He looked round the other three, noted in vague surprise that his glass was empty, returned to the drinks trolley and rejoined the others armed with a further glass of the malt whisky, which he raised to the level of his speculative eyes. ‘This, gentlemen, is not for my hangover, which is still unfortunately with me: it’s to brace myself for whatever we find out or, more precisely, for what I fear we may find out. Shall we have a look at it then, gentlemen?’

In the study next door Morro clapped Dubois on the shoulder and left.

Barrow, with his plump, genial, rubicund face, ingenuous expression and baby-blue eyes, looked like a pastor – to be fair, a bishop – in mufti: he was the head of the FBI, a man feared by his own agents almost as much as he was by the criminals who were the object of his life-long passion to put behind bars for as long a period as the law allowed and, if possible, longer. Sassoon, head of the Californian FBI, was a tall, ascetic, absent-minded-looking man who looked as if he would have been far more at home on a university campus, a convincing impression that a large number of convicted Californian felons deeply regretted having taken at its face value. Crichton was the only man who looked his part: big, bulky, tight-lipped, with an aquiline nose and cold grey eyes, he was the deputy head of the CIA. Neither he nor Barrow liked each other very much, which pretty well symbolized the relationship between the two organizations they represented.

Alec Benson, Professor Hardwick by his side, bent his untroubled and, indeed, his unimpressed gaze on the three men, then let it rest on Dunne and the two Ryders in turn. He said to Hardwick: ‘Well, well, Arthur, we are honoured today – three senior gentlemen from the FBI and one senior gentleman from the CIA. A red-letter day for the Faculty. Well, their presence here I can understand – not too well, but I understand.’ He looked at Ryder and Jeff. ‘No offence, but you would appear to be out of place in this distinguished company. You are, if the expression be pardoned, just ordinary policemen. If, of course, there are any such.’

‘No offence, Professor,’ Ryder said. ‘There are ordinary policemen, a great many of them far too ordinary. And we aren’t even ordinary policemen – we’re ex-ordinary policemen.’

Benson lifted his brows. Dunne looked at Barrow, who nodded. ‘Sergeant Ryder and his son Patrolman Ryder resigned from the force yesterday. They had urgent and private reasons for doing so. They know more about the peculiar circumstances surrounding this affair than any of us. They have achieved considerably more than any of us who have, in fact, achieved nothing so far, hardly surprising in view of the fact that the affair began only last evening. For good measure. Sergeant Ryder’s wife and his daughter have both been kidnapped and are being held hostage by this man Morro.’

‘Jesus!’ Benson no longer looked untroubled. ‘My apologies, certainly – and my sympathies, certainly. It may be us who have not the right to be here.’ He singled out Barrow, the most senior of the investigative officers present. ‘You are here to ascertain whether or not CalTech, as spokesmen for the various other State institutes, and especially whether I, as spokesman for the spokesmen, so to speak, have been guilty of misleading the public. Or, more bluntly, have I been caught lying in my teeth?’

Even Barrow hesitated. Formidable man though he was, he recognized another formidable man when he met one and he was aware of Benson’s reputation. He said: ‘Could this tremor have been triggered off by an atomic device?’

‘It’s possible, of course, but it’s equally impossible to tell. A seismograph is incapable of deciding the nature of the source of shock waves. Generally, almost invariably, we are in no doubt as to the source. We ourselves, the British and the French announce our nuclear tests: the other two members of the so-called nuclear club are not so forthcoming. But there are still ways of telling. When the Chinese detonated a nuclear device in the megaton range – a megaton, as you are probably aware, is the equivalent of a million tons of TNT – clouds of radiation gas drifted eventually across the US. The cloud was thin, high and caused no damage, but was easily detected – this was in November nineteen-seventy-six. Again, earthquakes, almost invariably, give off after-shocks.

‘There was one classical exception – again, oddly enough, in November of nineteen-seventy-six. Seismology stations in both Sweden and Finland detected an earthquake – not major, on the four-something Richter scale – off the coast of Estonia. Other scientists disputed this, figuring that the Soviets have been responsible, accidentally or otherwise, for a nuclear detonation on the floor of the Baltic. They have been disputing the matter ever since. The Soviets, naturally, have not seen fit to give any enlightenment on the matter.’

Barrow said: ‘But earthquakes do not occur in that region of the world.’

‘I would not seek, Mr Barrow, to advise you in the matter of law enforcement. It’s a minor area, but it’s there.’

Barrow’s smile was at its most genial. ‘The FBI stands corrected.’

‘So whether this man Morro detonated a small nuclear device there or not I can’t tell you.’ He looked at Hardwick. ‘You think any reputable seismologist in the State would venture a definite opinion one way or another on this, Arthur?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that’s the answer to one question, unsatisfactory though it may be. But that, of course, is not the question you really want to ask. You wanted to know whether we – I, if you like – was entirely accurate in locating the epicentre of the shock in the White Wolf Fault instead of, as Morro claims, in the Garlock Fault. Gentlemen, I was lying in my teeth.’

There was a predictable silence.

‘Why?’ Crichton was not a man noted for his loquacity.

‘Because in the circumstances it seemed the best thing to do. In retrospect, it still seems the best thing.’ Benson shook his head in regret. ‘Pity this fellow Morro had to come along and spoil things.’

‘Why?’ Crichton was also noted for his persistency.

‘I’ll try to explain so that Mr Sassoon, Major Dunne and the two policemen here – sorry, ex-policemen – will understand. For you and Mr Barrow it may not be so easy.’

‘Why?’

It seemed to Alec Benson that Crichton was a man of remarkably limited vocabulary, but he refrained from comment. ‘Because those four are Californians. You two are not.’

Barrow smiled. ‘A State apart. I always knew it. Secession next, is that it?’

‘It is a State apart, but not in that sense. It’s apart because it’s the only State in the Union where, in the back – and maybe not so far back – of the mind of any reasonably intelligent person lies the thought of tomorrow. Not when tomorrow comes, gentlemen. If tomorrow comes.

‘Californians live in a state of fear or fearful resignation or just pure resignation. There has always been the vague thought, the entertainment of the vague possibility, that one day the big one is going to hit us.’

Barrow said: ‘The big one. Earthquake?’

‘Of devastating proportions. This fear never really crystallized until as late as nineteen-seventy-six – third time I’ve mentioned that year this morning, isn’t it? Nineteen-seventy-six was the bad year, the year that made the minds of people in this State turn to thoughts they’d rather not think about.’ Benson lifted a sheet of paper. ‘February four, Guatemala. Seven-point-five on the Richter scale. Tens of thousands died. May six, North Italy. Six-point-five. Hundreds dead, widespread devastation, and later on in the same year another ‘quake came back to wipe out the few buildings that were still left standing after the first earthquake. May sixteen, Soviet Central Asia. Seven-point-two. Death-rate and damage unknown – the Soviets are reluctant to discuss those things. July twenty-seven, Tangshan. Eight-point-two, in which two-thirds of a million died and three-quarters of a million were injured: as this occurred in a densely-populated area, large cities like Peking and Tientsin were involved. Then in the following month the far south of the Philippines. Eight-point-zero. Widespread devastation, exact deaths unknown but running into tens of thousands – this partly due to the earthquake, partly due to the giant tsunamai – tidal wave – that followed because the earthquake had occurred under the sea. They had a lesser earthquake in the Philippines some way further north on November nine. Six-point-eight. No precise figures released. In fact, November of that year was quite a month, with yet another earthquake in the Philippines, one in Iran, one in Northern Greece, five in China and two in Japan. Worst of all Turkey. Five thousand dead.

‘And all those earthquakes, with the exception of the ones in Greece and Italy, were related to the movement of what they call the Pacific plate, which causes the so-called ring of fire around the Pacific. The section that mainly concerns us, as everyone knows, is the San Andreas Fault where the north-east-moving Pacific plate rubs against the westward-pressing American plate. In fact, gentlemen, where we are now is, geologically speaking, not really part of America at all but part of the Pacific plate, and it hardly requires an educated guess to know that in the not-too-distant future we won’t physically be part of America either. Some day the Pacific plate is going to carry the western seaboard of California into the oceanic equivalent of the wild blue yonder, for where we’re sitting at the moment lies to the west of the San Andreas Fault – only a few miles, mind you, it passes under San Bernadino, just a hop, skip and jump to the east. For good measure, we’re only about the same distance from the Newport-Inglewood Fault to the west – that’s what caused the Long Beach ‘quake of nineteen-thirty-three – and not all that much further from the San Fernando Fault to the north, which caused, as you may recall, that very nasty business back in February ‘seventy-two. Seismologically speaking, only a lunatic would choose to live in the county of Los Angeles. A comforting thought, isn’t it, gentlemen?’

Benson looked around him. No one seemed to find it a comforting thought at all.

‘Little wonder, then, that people’s thoughts started turning inwards. Little wonder that they increasingly wondered, “When’s our time going to come?” We’re sitting fair and square astride the ring of fire and our turn might be any time now. It is not a happy thought to live with. And they’re not thinking in terms of earthquakes in the past. We’ve only had four major earthquakes in our known past, two of them really big ones on the order of eight-point-three on the Richter scale, Owens Valley in eighteen-seventy-two and San Francisco in nineteen-o-six. But, I say, it’s not those they’re thinking of. Not in the terms of major earthquakes but of monster earthquakes, of which there have been only two recorded in history, both of the Richter order of eight-point-nine, or about six times the destructive force of the San Francisco one.’ Benson shook his head. ‘An earthquake up to ten on the Richter scale – or even twelve – is theoretically possible but not even the scientific mind cares to contemplate the awfulness of it.

‘Those two monster ‘quakes occurred also, perhaps not coincidentally, in the first place in nineteen-o-six and nineteen-thirty-three, the first in Ecuador, the second in Japan. I won’t describe the effects to you two gentlemen from Washington or you’d be taking the plane back east – if, that is to say, you managed to get to LA airport before the ground opened up beneath you. Both Ecuador and Japan sit astride the Pacific ring of fire. So does California. Why shouldn’t it be our turn next?’

Barrow said: ‘That idea about a plane is beginning to sound good to me. What would happen if one of those struck?’

‘Assuming a properly sombre tone of voice, I must admit I’ve given a great deal of thought to this. Say it struck where we’re sitting now. You’d wake up in the morning – only of course the dead don’t wake – and find the Pacific where Los Angeles is and Los Angeles buried in what used to be Santa Monica Bay and the San Pedro Channel. The San Gabriel Mountains might well have fallen down smack on top of where we are now. If it happened at sea –’

‘How could it happen at sea?’ Barrow was a degree less jovial than he had been. ‘The fault runs through California.’

‘Easterner. It runs out into the Pacific south of San Francisco, by-passes the Golden Gate, then rejoins the mainland to the north. A monster ‘quake of the Golden Gate would be of interest. For starters, San Francisco would be a goner. Probably the whole of the San Francisco peninsula, Marin County would go the same way. But the real damage –’

‘The real damage?’ Crichton said.

‘Yes. The real damage would come from the immense ocean of water that would sweep into the San Francisco Bay. When I say “immense” I mean just that. Up in Alaska – we have proof – earthquakes have generated water levels three and four hundred feet above normal. Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, all the way down through Palo Alto to San Jose would be drowned. The Santa Cruz Mountains would become an island. And even worse – to anticipate, Mr Crichton, there is worse – the agricultural heart of California, the two great valleys of San Joaquin and Sacramento, would be flooded, and the vast part of those valleys lie under an altitude of three hundred feet.’ Benson became thoughtful. ‘I hadn’t really thought of it before but, come to that, I don’t think I’d much care to be living in the capital either at that time for it would be dead in line of the first great wall of water rushing up the Sacramento river valley. Perhaps you are beginning to understand why I and my colleagues prefer to keep people’s minds off such things?’

‘I think I’m beginning to.’ Barrow looking at Dunne. ‘How do you – as a Californian, of course – feel about this?’

‘Unhappy.’

‘You go along with this way of thinking?’

‘Go along with it? If anything, I’m even ahead of it. I have the unpleasant feeling that Professor Benson is not only catching me up in my thinking but passing me by.’

Benson said: ‘That’s as maybe. There are, I must admit, another couple of factors. In the past year or so people have begun delving into records and then wishing they hadn’t delved. Take the northern part of the San Andreas Fault. It is known that a great earthquake struck there in eighteen-thirty-three although, at the time, there was no way of calibrating its strength. The great San Francisco ‘quake of nineteen-o-six struck there sixty-eight years later. There was one in Daly City in nineteen-fifty-seven but at a magnitude of five-point-three it was geologically insignificant. There hasn’t been, if I may use the term, a “proper” earthquake up north for seventy-one years. It may well be overdue.

‘In the southern San Andreas there has been no major ‘quake since eighteen-fifty-seven. One hundred and twenty years ago. Now, triangulation surveys have shown that the Pacific plate, in relation to the American plate, is moving northeast at two inches a year. When an earthquake occurs one plate jerks forward in relation to the other – this is called a lateral slip. In nineteen-o-six slips of between fifteen and eighteen feet have been measured. On the two inches a year basis, one hundred and twenty years could mean an accumulated pressure potential amounting to twenty feet. If we accept this basis – not everyone does – a major earthquake in the Los Angeles area is considerably overdue.

‘As for the central area of the San Andreas, no major ‘quake has ever been recorded. Lord only knows how long that one may be overdue. And, of course, the big one may occur in any of the other faults, such as the Garlock, the next biggest in the State, which has been quiet for centuries.’ Benson smiled. ‘Now, that would be something, gentlemen. A monster lurking in the Garlock Fault.

‘The third thing that rather tends to preoccupy people’s minds is that reputable scientists have begun to talk out loud – in print, radio and television – about the prospects that lie ahead of us. Whether they should talk out loud or not is a matter for their own principles and consciences: I prefer not to, but I’m not necessarily correct.

‘A physicist, and a highly regarded one, Peter Franken, expects the next earthquake to be of a giant size, and he has openly predicted death toll figures between twenty thousand and a million. He has also predicted that if it happens in the long-quiescent central section of the San Andreas the severity of the shock waves would rock both Los Angeles and San Francisco – in his own words, “quite possibly wiping them out”: it is perhaps not surprising that, per head of population, California consumes more tranquillizers and sleeping tablets than any place on earth.

‘Or take the San Francisco emergency plan. It is known that no fewer than sixteen hospitals in “kit” form are stored in various places around the city ready to be set up when disaster strikes. A leading scientist commented somewhat gloomily that most of those, should a major earthquake occur, would probably be destroyed anyway, and if the city was inundated or the peninsula cut off the whole lot would be useless. San Franciscans must find this kind of statement vastly heartening.

‘Other scientists settle on a maximum of five years’ existence for both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Some say two. One seismologist gives Los Angeles less than a year to live. A crackpot? A Cassandra? No. The one person they should listen to. A James H. Whitcomb of CalTech, the best earthquake forecaster in the business. He has predicted before with an almost uncanny degree of accuracy. Won’t necessarily be located in the San Andreas Fault, but it’s coming very soon.’

Barrow said: ‘Believe him?’

‘Let me put it this way. If the roof fell in on us while we’re sitting here I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow – provided, that is, I had time to raise an eyebrow. I personally do not doubt that, sooner rather than later, Los Angeles will be razed to the ground.’

‘What were the reactions to this forecast?’

‘Well, he terrified a lot of people. Some scientists just shrugged their shoulders and walked away – earthquake prediction is still in its infancy or, at best, an inexact science. Most significantly, he was immediately threatened with a law suit by a Los Angeles city official on the grounds that such reports undermined property values. This is on record.’ Benson sighed. ‘All part of the “Jaws Syndrome” as it has come to be called. Greed, I’d call it. Recall the film – no one who had commercial interests at stake wanted to believe in this killer shark. Or take a dozen years ago in Japan, a place called Matsushiro. Local scientists predicted an earthquake there, of such and such a magnitude at such and such a time. Local hoteliers were furious, threatened them with God knows what. But, at the predicted place, magnitude and time, along came the earthquake.’

‘What happened?’

‘The hotels fell down. Commercial interests, commercial interests. Say Dr Whitcomb predicted a ‘quake on the Newport-Inglewood Fault. One certain result would be the temporary closing of the Hollywood Park Race Track – it’s almost smack on the fault, and you can’t have tens of thousands of people jammed into a potential death-trap. A week goes by, two weeks, and nothing happens. Loss of profits might run into millions. Can you imagine how much Dr Whitcomb would be sued for?

‘And the Jaws Syndrome is just first cousin to the Ostrich Syndrome. Put your head in the sand, pretend it’s not there and it’ll go away. But fewer and fewer people are indulging in that, with the result that fear, in many areas, is reaching a state dangerously close to hysteria. Let me tell you a story, not my story, but a very prophetic short story written some five years ago by a writer called R. L. Stevens.

‘If I recall correctly it was called The Forbidden Word. There was a California Enabling Act which prohibited all reference to earthquakes in print or public. Penalty of five years. The State, apparently, has lost, by death or flight, fifty per cent of its population because of earthquakes. Roadblocks at State lines and people forbidden to leave. A man and girl are arrested for mentioning the word “earthquake” in a public place. I wonder when we’re going to have a real life Enabling Act, when a mounting hysteria will drive us into a nineteen-eighty-four Orwellian situation?’

‘What happened?’ Barrow said. ‘In the story?’

‘It’s not relevant, but they got to New York which was crowded by the millions of Californians who’d fled east and were arrested by the Population Control Board for mentioning the word “love” in public. You can’t win. The same as we can’t win in this situation. To warn, to cry doom, the end of the world is nigh? Or not to warn, not to frighten them into a state of near-panic? For me, there is one crucial factor. How can you evacuate three million people, as in Los Angeles, on a mere prediction? This is a free society. How in God’s name can you close down coastal California, ten millions, maybe more, and hang around for an indeterminate time while you wait for your predictions to come true? Where are you going to go, where are you going to put them? How can you make them leave when they know there is no place to go? This is where their homes are, their jobs are, their friends are. There are no homes anywhere else, no jobs anywhere else, no friends anywhere else. This is where they live, this is where they’ll have to live, and, even though it’s sooner rather than later, this is where they’ve going to have to die.

‘And while they’re waiting to die, I think they should be allowed to live with as much peace of mind, relative though that may be, as is possible. You’re a Christian in the dungeons in Rome and you know it’s only a matter of time before you’re driven into the arena where the lions are waiting. It doesn’t help a great deal if you are reminded of the prospect every minute. Hope, however irrational, springs eternal.

‘Well, that’s my attitude and that’s my answer. I have lied in my teeth and I intend to go on doing so. Any suggestions that we were wrong will be vehemently denied. I am not, gentlemen, committed to a lie: I am committed to a belief. I have, I think, made my position very clear. Do you accept it?’

Barrow and Crichton looked briefly at each other, then turned to Benson and nodded in unison.

‘Thank you, gentlemen. As for this maniac Morro, I can be of no help there. He’s all yours, I’m afraid.’ He paused. ‘Threatening to explode an atomic bomb, or suchlike. I must say that, as a concerned citizen, I’d dearly love to know what he’s up to. Do you believe him?’

Crichton said: ‘We have no idea.’

‘No inkling what he’s up to?’

‘None.’

‘Suspense, war of nerves, tension. Creating fear, hoping to panic you into precipitate and misguided action?’

‘Very likely,’ Barrow said. ‘Only, we haven’t got anything to act against yet.’

‘Well, just as long as he doesn’t let it off under my seat or in any other inhabited area. If you learn the time and place of this proposed – ah – demonstration, may I request a grandstand seat?’

‘Your request has already been granted,’ Barrow said. ‘We were going to ask you anyway. Would there be anything else, gentlemen?’

‘Yes,’ Ryder said. ‘Would it be possible to borrow some reading material on earthquakes, especially recent ones?’

Everyone looked at him in perplexity. Everyone, that is, except Benson. ‘My pleasure, Sergeant. Just give this card to the librarian.’

Dunne said: ‘A question, Professor. This Earthquake Preventitive Slip Programme of yours. Shouldn’t that delay or minimize the great ‘quake that everyone seems to think is coming?’

‘Had it been started five years ago, perhaps. But we’re only just beginning. Three, maybe four years before we get results. I know in my bones that the monster will strike first. It’s out there, crouched on the doorstep, waiting.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

At half past ten that morning Morro re-entered his study. Dubois was no longer at the observation window but was sitting at Morro’s desk, two revolving tape-recorders in front of him. He switched them off and looked up.

Morro said: ‘Deliberations over?’

‘Twenty minutes ago. They’re deliberating something else now.’

‘How to stop us, no doubt.’

‘What else? I gave up listening some time ago: they couldn’t stop a retarded five-year-old. Besides, they can’t even speak coherently, far less think rationally.’

Morro crossed to the observation window and switched on the speaker above his head. All four scientists were sitting – more accurately sprawling – round the table, bottles in front of them to save them the labour of having to rise and walk to the drinks trolley. Burnett was speaking, his face suffused with alcohol or anger or both and every other word was slurred.

‘Damn it to hell. All the way to hell. Back again, too. There’s the four of us. Look at us. Best brains in the country, that’s what we are supposed to be. Best nuclear brains. Is it beyond our capacity, gentlemen, beyond our intelligence, to devise a means whereby to circument – I mean circumvent – the devilish machinations of this monster Morro? What I maintain is –’

Bramwell said: ‘Oh, shut up. That makes the fourth time we’ve heard this speech.’ He poured himself some vodka, leaned back and closed his eyes. Healey had his elbows on the table and his hands covering his eyes. Schmidt was gazing into infinity, riding high on a cloud of gin. Morro switched off the speaker and turned away.

‘I don’t know either Burnett and Schmidt but I should imagine they are about par for their own particular courses. I’m surprised at Healey and Bramwell, though. They’re relatively sober but you can tell they’re not their usual selves. In the seven weeks they’ve been here – well, they’ve been very moderate.’

‘In their seven weeks here they haven’t had such a shock to their nervous system. They’ve probably never had a shock like this.’

‘They know? A superfluous question, perhaps.’

‘They suspected right away. They knew for certain in fifteen minutes. The rest of the time they’ve been trying to find a fault, any fault, in the designs. They can’t. And all four of them know how to make a hydrogen bomb.’

‘You’re editing, I take it. How much longer?’

‘Say twenty minutes.’

‘If I give a hand?’

‘Ten.’

‘Then in fifteen minutes we’ll give them another shock, and one that should have the effect of sobering them up considerably if not completely.’

And in fifteen minutes the four men were escorted into the study. Morro showed them personally to their deep armchairs, a glass on a table beside each armchair. There were two other berobed acolytes in the room. Morro wasn’t sure precisely what kind of reaction the physicists might display. The acolytes could have their Ingram sub-machine guns out from under their robes before any of the scientists could get half-way out of their chairs.

Morro said: ‘Well, now. Glenfiddich for Professor Burnett, gin for Dr Schmidt, vodka for Dr Bramwell, bourbon for Dr Healey.’ Morro was a great believer in the undermining of confidence. When they had entered Burnett and Schmidt had had expressions of scowling anger, Bramwell of thoughtfulness, Healey of something approaching apprehension. Now they all wore looks of suspicion compounded by surprise.

Burnett was predictably truculent. ‘How the hell did you know what we were drinking?’

‘We’re observant. We try to please. We’re also thoughtful. We thought your favourite restorative might help you over what may come as a shock to you. To business. What did you make of those blueprints?’

‘How would you like to go to hell?’ Burnett said.

‘We may all meet there some day. I repeat the question.’

‘And I repeat the answer.’

‘You will tell me, you know.’

‘And how do you propose to set about making us talk? Torture?’ Burnett’s truculence had given way to contempt. ‘We can’t tell you anything we don’t know about.’

‘Torture. Oh, dear me, no. I might – in fact, I shall be needing you later on. But torture? Hmm. Hadn’t occurred to me. You, Abraham?’

‘No, Mr Morro.’ Dubois considered. ‘It is a thought.’ He came to Morro and whispered something in his ear.

Morro looked shocked. ‘Abraham, you know me, you know I don’t wage war on innocents.’

‘You damned hypocrite!’ Burnett’s voice was a hoarse shout. ‘Of course that’s why you brought the women here.’

‘My dear fellow –’

Bramwell said in a weary voice: ‘It’s a bomb of some sorts. That’s obvious. It might well be a blueprint for a nuclear bomb, a thought that immediately occurred to us because of your propensity for stealing nuclear fuel. Whether it’s viable, whether it will work, we have just no idea. There are hundreds of nuclear scientists in this country. But the number of those who can make, actually make, a nuclear bomb is severely restricted. We are not among the chosen few. As for those who can actually design a hydrogen bomb – well I, personally, have never met one. Our science is devoted to exclusively peaceful nuclear pursuits. Healey and I were kidnapped while working in a laboratory where they produced nothing but electricity. Burnett and Schmidt, as we are well aware, were taken in the San Ruffino nuclear reactor station. God’s sake, man, you don’t build hydrogen bombs in reactor stations.’

‘Very clever.’ Morro was almost approving. ‘You do think fast on your feet. In your armchair, rather. Enough. Abraham, that particular excerpt we selected. How long will it take?’

‘Thirty seconds.’

Dubois put a tape-recorder on a fast rewind, his eye on the counter, slowed and finally stopped it. He pressed a switch, saying: ‘Healey first.’

Healey’s voice: ‘So we are in no doubt then?’

Schmidt’s voice: ‘None. I haven’t been since the first time I clapped eyes on those hellish blueprints.’

Bramwell’s voice: ‘Circuitry, materials, sheathing, triggering, design. All there. Your final confirmation, Burnett?’

There was a pause here then came Burnett’s voice, strangely flat and dead. ‘Sorry, gentlemen, I need that drink. It’s the Aunt Sally, all right. Estimated three-and-a-half megatons – about four hundred times the power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. God, to think that Willi Aachen and I had a champagne party the night we completed the design!’

Dubois switched off. Morro said: I’m sure you could even reproduce those plans from your head, Professor Burnett, if the need arose. A useful man to have around.’

The four physicists sat like men in a dream. They didn’t look stunned: they just weren’t registering anything. Morro said: ‘Come here, gentlemen.’

He led the way to the window, pressed an overhead switch and illuminated the room in which the scientists had examined the blueprints. He looked at the scientists but without satisfaction, gratification or triumph. Morro did not seem to specialize very much in the way of feelings.

‘The expressions on your faces were more than enough to tell us all we wanted to know.’ If the four men had not been overcome by the enormity of the situation in which they found themselves, the ludicrous ease with which they had been tricked, they would have appreciated that Morro, who clearly had further use for them, was doing no more than establishing a moral ascendancy, inducing in them a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. ‘But the recordings helped. That’s the first thing I would have expected. Alas, outside your own arcane specialities, men with abnormally gifted minds are no better than little children. Abraham, how long does the entire edited version take?’

‘Seven and a half minutes, Mr Morro.’

‘Let them savour it to the full. I’ll see about the helicopter. Back shortly.’

He was back in ten minutes. Three of the scientists were sitting in their chairs, bitter, dejected and defeated. Burnett, not unexpectedly, was helping himself to some more of the endless supply of Glenfiddich.

‘One further small task, gentlemen. I want each of you to make a brief recording stating that I have in my possession the complete blueprints for the making of a hydrogen bomb in the megaton range. You will make no mention whatsoever of the dimensions, no mention of its code name “Aunt Sally” – what puerile names you scientists give those toys, just another sign of how limited your imagination is outside your own field – and, above all, you will make no reference to the fact that Professor Burnett was the co-designer, along with Professor Aachen, of this bomb.’

Schmidt said: ‘Why should those damn things be kept so secret when you’ll let the world know everything else?’

‘You will understand well enough inside the next two days or so.’

‘You’ve trapped us, fooled us, humiliated us and above all used us as pawns.’ Burnett said all this with his teeth clenched, no mean feat in itself. ‘But you can push a man too far, Morro. We’re still men.’

Morro sighed, made a small gesture of weariness, opened the door and beckoned. Susan and Julie came in and looked curiously around them. There was no apprehension or fear on their faces, just puzzlement.

‘Give me that damned microphone.’ Without permission Burnett snatched it from the table and glared at Dubois. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

Burnett’s voice, though charged with emotion – pure, black rage – was remarkably clear and steady, without a trace of the fact that he had, since his non-existent breakfast, consumed the better part of a bottle of Glenfiddich, which said a great deal either for Professor Burnett or Glenfiddich.

‘This is Professor Andrew Burnett of San Diego. It’s not someone trying to imitate me – my voice-prints are in security in the University. The blackhearted bastard Morro has in his possession a complete set of plans for the construction of a hydrogen bomb in the megaton range. You had better believe me. Also you had better believe Dr Schmidt and Drs Healey and Bramwell – Drs Healey and Bramwell have been held captive in this damned place for seven weeks. I repeat, for God’s sake believe me. This is a step-by-step, fully composited, fully integrated plan ready to build now.’ There was a pause. ‘For all I know, the bastard may already have built one.’

Morro nodded to Dubois who switched off. Dubois said: ‘The first and last sentences, Mr Morro –’

‘Leave them in.’ Morro smiled. ‘Leave them. Eliminates the need for checking on voice-prints. They carry with them the normal characteristic flavour of the Professor’s colourful speech. You can cope, Abraham? Ridiculous question. Come, ladies.’

He ushered them out and closed the door. Susan said: ‘Do you mind enlightening us? I mean, what is going on?’

‘Certainly not, my dears. Our learned nuclear physicists have been doing a chore for me this morning. Not that they were aware of that fact: unknown to them I had their conversation recorded.

‘I showed them a set of plans. I proved to them that I am indeed in possession of the secrets of the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. Now they are proving that to the world. Simple.’

‘Is that why you brought the scientists here?’

‘I still have a further important use for them but, primarily, yes.’

‘Why did you bring us into that room, your study?’

‘See? You are an inquisitive person. I was just satisfying your curiosity.’

‘Julie here is not an inquisitive person.’

Julie nodded vigorously. For some reason she seemed close to tears. ‘I just want out of here.’

Susan shook her arm. ‘What is it?’

‘You know very well what it is. You know why he brought us in there. The men were turning balky. That’s why we were brought up here.’

‘The thought hadn’t escaped me,’ Susan said. ‘Would you – or that dreadful giant – have twisted our arms until we screamed? Or do you have dungeons – castles always have dungeons, don’t they? You know, thumb-screws and racks and iron maidens? Do you break people on the wheel, Mr Morro?’

‘A dreadful giant! Abraham would be hurt. A kind and gentle giant. As for the rest? Dear me. Direct intimidation, Mrs Ryder, is less effective than indirect. If people can bring themselves to believe something it’s always more effective than having to prove it to them.’

‘Would you have proved it?’ Morro was silent. ‘Would you have had us tortured?’

‘I wouldn’t even contemplate it.’

‘Don’t believe him, don’t believe him!’ Julie’s voice shook. ‘He’s a monster and a liar.’

‘He’s a monster all right.’ Susan was very calm, even thoughtful. ‘He may even be a liar. But in this case I believe him. Odd.’

In a kind of despair, Julie said: ‘You don’t know what you’re saying!’

‘I think I do. I think Mr Morro will have no further use for us.’

‘How can you say that?’

Morro looked at Julie. ‘Some day you may be as wise and understanding as Mrs Ryder. But first you will have to meet a great number of people and read a great number of characters. You see, Mrs Ryder knows that the person who laid a finger on either of you would have to answer to me. She knows that I never would. She will, of course, convince those disbelieving gentlemen we’ve just left and they will know I couldn’t use this threat again. I do not have to. You are of no more use to me.’ Morro smiled. ‘Oh, dear, that does sound vaguely threatening. Let us rather say that no harm will come to you.’

Julie looked at him briefly, the fear and suspicion in her eyes undimmed, then looked abruptly away.

‘Well, I tried, young lady. I cannot blame you. You cannot have heard what I said at the breakfast table this morning. “We do not wage war on women.” Even monsters have to live with their monstrous selves.’ He turned and walked away.

Susan watched him go and murmured: ‘And therein lies the seeds of his own destruction.’

Julie looked at her. ‘I – I didn’t catch that. What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I’m just rambling. I think this place is getting to me also.’ But she knew it wasn’t.

‘A complete waste of time.’ Jeff was in a black mood and didn’t care who knew it. He had almost to raise his voice to a shout to make himself heard above the clamorous racket of the helicopter engine. ‘Nothing, just nothing. A lot of academic waffle about earthquakes and a useless hour in Sassoon’s office. Nothing, just nothing. We didn’t learn a thing.’

Ryder looked up from the sheaf of notes he was studying. He said, as mildly as one could in a necessarily loud voice: ‘Oh, I don’t know. We discovered that even learned academics can tamper with the truth when they see fit. We learned – leastways I did – about earthquakes and this earthquake syndrome. As for Sassoon, nobody expected to learn anything from him. How could we? He knew nothing – how could he? He was learning things from us.’ He returned his attention to his notes.

‘Well, my God! They’ve got Susan, they’ve got Peggy and all you can do is to sit there and read that load of old rubbish just as if –’

Dunne leaned across. No longer as alert and brisk as he had been some hours ago, he was beginning to show the effects of a sleepless night. He said: ‘Jeff. Do me a favour.’

‘Yes?’

‘Shut up.’

There was a pile of papers lying on Major Dunne’s desk. He looked at them without enthusiasm, placed his briefcase beside them, opened a cupboard, brought out a bottle of Jack Daniels and looked interrogatively at Ryder and his son. Ryder smiled but Jeff shook his head: he was still smarting from the effects of Dunne’s particular brand of curtness.

Glass in hand, Dunne opened a side door. In the tiny cubicle beyond was a ready-made-up camp bed. Dunne said, I’m not one of your superhuman FBI agents who can go five nights and days without sleep. I’ll have Delage’ – Delage was one of his juniors – ‘man the phones here. I can be reached any time, but the excuse had better be a good one.’

‘Would an earthquake do?’

Dunne smiled, sat and went through the papers on his desk. He pushed them all to one side and lifted a thick envelope which he slit open. He peered at the contents inside and said: ‘Guess what?’

‘Carlton’s passport.’

‘Damn your eyes. Anyway, nice to see someone’s been busy around here.’ He extracted the passport, flipped through the pages and passed it to Ryder. ‘And damn your eyes again.’

‘Intuition. The hallmark of the better-class detective.’ Ryder went through the pages, more slowly than Dunne. ‘Intriguing. Covers fourteen out of the fifteen months when he seemed to have vanished. A bad case of wander-bug infection. Did get around in that time, didn’t he? Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong, Manila again, Singapore, Manila yet again, Tokyo, Los Angeles.’ He passed the passport to Jeff. ‘Fallen in love with the mysterious East, it would seem. Especially the Philippines.’

Dunne said: ‘Make anything of it?’

‘Not a thing. Maybe I did have some sleep but it wasn’t much. Mind seems to have gone to sleep. That’s what we need, my mind and myself – sleep. Maybe when I wake I’ll have a flash of inspiration. Wouldn’t bet on it, though.’

He dropped Jeff outside the latter’s house. ‘Sleep?’

‘Straight to bed.’

‘First one awake calls the other. Okay?’

Jeff nodded and went inside – but he didn’t go straight to bed. He went to the bay-fronted window of his living-room and looked up the street. From there he had an excellent view of the short driveway leading to his father’s house.

Ryder didn’t head for bed either. He dialled the station house and asked for Sergeant Parker. He got through at once.

‘Dave? No ifs, no buts. Meet me at Delmino’s in ten minutes.’ He went to the gas fire, tilted it forwards, lifted out a polythene-covered green folder, went to the garage, pushed the folder under the Peugeot back seat, climbed in behind the wheel and backed the car down the driveway and into the road. Jeff moved as soon as he saw the rear of the car appearing, ran to his garage, started the engine and waited until Ryder’s car had passed by. He followed.

Ryder appeared to be in a tearing hurry. Halfway towards the first intersection he was doing close on seventy, a speed normally unacceptable in a 3 5 mph limit, but there wasn’t a policeman in town who didn’t know that battered machine and its occupant and would ever have been so incredibly foolish as to detain Sergeant Ryder when he was going about his lawful occasions. Ryder got through the lights on the green but Jeff caught the red. He was still there when he saw the Peugeot go through the next set of lights. By the time Jeff got to the next set they too had turned to red. When he did cross the intersection the Peugeot had vanished. Jeff cursed, pulled over, parked and pondered.

Parker was in his usual booth in Delmino’s when Ryder arrived. He was drinking a Scotch and had one ready for Ryder who remembered that he’d had nothing to eat so far that day. It didn’t, however, affect the taste of the Scotch.

Ryder said without preamble: ‘Where’s Fatso?’

‘Suffering from the vapours, I’m glad to say. At home with a bad headache.’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised. Very hard thing, the butt of a ‘thirty-eight. Maybe I hit him harder than I thought. Enjoyed it at the time, though. Twenty minutes from now he’s going to feel a hell of a sight more fragile. Thanks. I’m off.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. You clobbered Donahure. Tell me.’

Briefly and impatiently, Ryder told him. Parker was suitably impressed.

‘Ten thousand bucks. Two Russian rifles. And this dossier you have on him. You have the goods on him all right – our ex-Chief of Police. But look, John, there’s a limit to how far you can go on taking the law into your own hands.’

‘There’s no limit.’ Ryder put his hand on Parker’s. ‘Dave, they’ve got Peggy.’

There was a momentary incomprehension then Parker’s eyes went very cold. Peggy had first sat on his knees at the age of four and had sat there at regular intervals ever since, always with the mischievously disconcerting habit of putting her elbow on his shoulder, her chin on her palm and peering at him from a distance of six inches. Fourteen years later, dark, lovely and mischievous as ever, it was a habit she had still not abandoned, especially on those occasions when she wanted to wheedle something from Ryder, labouring under the misapprehension that this made her father jealous. Parker said nothing. His eyes said it for him.

Ryder said: ‘San Diego. During the night. They gunned down the two FBI men who were looking after her.’

Parker stood up: ‘I’m coming with you.’

‘No. You’re still an officer of the law. You’ll see what I’m going to do with Fatso and you’ll have to arrest me.’

‘I’ve just come all over blind.’

‘Please, Dave. I may be breaking the law but I’m still on the side of the law and I need at least one person inside the law I can trust. There’s only you.’

‘Okay. But if any harm comes to her or Susan I’m out of a job.’

‘You’ll be welcome in the ranks of the unemployed.’

They left. As the door swung to behind them a lean Mexican youth with a straggling moustache that reached his chin rose from the next booth, inserted his nickel and dialled. For a full minute the phone rang at the other end without reply. The youth tried again with the same result. He fumbled in his pockets, went to the counter, changed a bill for loose change, returned and tried another number. Twice he tried, twice he failed, and his mounting frustration, as he kept glancing at his watch, was obvious; on the third time he was lucky. He started to speak in low, hurried, urgent Spanish.

There was a certain lack of aesthetic appeal about the way in which Chief of Police Donahure had arranged his sleeping form. Fully clothed, he lay face down on a couch, his left hand on the floor clutching a half-full glass of bourbon, his hair in disarray and his cheeks glistening with what could have been perspiration but was, in fact, water steadily dripping down from the now melting ice-bag that Donahure had strategically placed on the back of his head. It was to be assumed that the loud snoring was caused not by the large lump that undoubtedly lay concealed beneath the ice-bag but from the bourbon, for a man does not recover consciousness from a blow, inform the office that he’s sorry but he won’t be in today and then relapse into unconsciousness. Ryder laid down the polythene folder he was carrying, removed Donahure’s Colt and prodded him far from gently with its muzzle.

Donahure groaned, stirred, displaced the ice-bag in turning his head and managed to open one eye. His original reaction must have been that he was going down a long, dark tunnel. Wher the realization gradually dawned upon his befuddled brain that it was not a tunnel but the barrel of his own .45 his Cyclopean gaze travelled above and beyond the barrel until Ryder’s face swam into focus. Two things happened: both eyes opened wide and his complexion changed from its normal puce to an even more unpleasant shade of dirty grey.

Ryder said: ‘Sit up.’

Donahure remained where he was. His jowls were actually quivering. Then he screamed in agony as Ryder grabbed his hair and jerked him into the vertical. Clearly, no small amount of that hair had been attached to the bruised bump on his head. A sudden scalp pain predictably produces an effect on the corneal ducts and Donahure was no exception: his eyes were swimming like bloodshot gold-fish in peculiarly murky water.

Ryder said: ‘You know how to conduct a cross-examination. Fatso?’

‘Yes.’ He sounded as if he was being garrotted.

‘No you don’t. I’m going to show you. Not in any textbook, and I’m afraid you’ll never have an opportunity to use it. But, by the comparison, the cross-examination you’ll get in the accused’s box in court will seem almost pleasant. Who’s your paymaster, Donahure?’

‘What in God’s name –’ He broke off with a shout of pain and clapped his hands to his face. He reached finger and thumb inside his mouth, removed a displaced tooth and dropped it on the floor. His left cheek was cut both inside and out and blood was trickling down his chin: Ryder had laid the barrel of Donahure’s Colt against his face with a heavy hand. Ryder transferred the Colt to his left hand.

‘Who’s your paymaster, Donahure?’

‘What in the hell –’ Another shout and another hiatus in the conversation while Donahure attended to the right hand side of his face. The blood was now flowing freely from his mouth and dripping on to his shirt-front. Ryder transferred the revolver back to his right hand.

‘Who’s your paymaster, Donahure?’

‘LeWinter.’ A strangely gurgling sound: he must have been swallowing blood. Ryder regarded him without compassion.

Donahure gurgled again. The ensuing croak was unintelligible.

‘For looking the other way?’

A nod. There was no hate in Donahure’s face, just plain fear.

‘For destroying evidence against guilty parties, faking evidence against innocent parties?’ Another nod. ‘How much did you make, Donahure? Over the years, I mean. Blackmail on the side of course?

‘I don’t know.’

Ryder lifted his gun again.

‘Twenty thousand, maybe thirty.’ Once more he screamed. His nose had gone the same way as Raminoff’s.

Ryder said: ‘I won’t say I’m not enjoying this any more than you are, because I am. I’m more than prepared to keep this up for hours yet. Not that you’ll last more than twenty minutes and we don’t want your face smashed into such a bloody pulp that you can’t talk. Before it comes to that I’ll start breaking your fingers one by one.’ Ryder meant it and the abject terror on what was left of Donahure’s face showed that he knew Ryder meant it. ‘How much?’

‘I don’t know.’ He cowered behind raised hands. ‘I don’t know how much. Hundreds.’

‘Of thousands?’ A nod. Ryder picked up the polythene folder and extracted the folder, which he showed to Donahure. ‘Total of just over five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in seven banks under seven different names. That would be about right.’ Another nod. Ryder returned the papers to the polythene folder. If this represented only Donahure’s rake-off, how much did LeWinter have safe and sound in Zurich?

‘The last pay-off. Ten thousand dollars. What was that for?’ Donahure was now so befuddled with pain and fright that it never occurred to him to ask how Ryder knew about it.

‘Cops.’

‘Bribes to do what?’

‘Cut all the public phones between here and Ferguson’s house. Cut Ferguson’s phone. Wreck, his police band radio. Clear the roads.’

‘Clear the roads? No patrols on the hi-jack van’s escape route?’

Donahure nodded. He obviously felt this easier than talking.

‘Jesus. You are a sweet bunch. I’ll have their names later. Who gave you those Russian rifles?’

‘Rifles?’ A frown appeared in the negligible clearance between Donahure’s hairline and eyebrows, sure indication that at least part of his mind was working again. ‘You took them. And the money. You –’ He touched the back of his head.

‘I asked a question. Who gave you the rifles?’

‘I don’t know.’ Donahure raised defensive hands just as Ryder lifted his gun. ‘Smash my face to pieces and I still don’t know. Found them in the house when I came back one night. Voice over the phone said I was to keep them.’ Ryder believed him.

‘This voice have a name?’

‘No.’ Ryder believed that also. No intelligent man would be crazy enough to give his name to a man like Donahure.

‘This the voice that told you to tap LeWinter’s phone?’

‘How in God’s name –’ Donahure broke off not because of another blow or impending blow but because, swallowing blood from both mouth and nose, he was beginning to have some difficulty with his breathing. Finally he coughed and spoke in a gasp. ‘Yes.’

‘Name Morro mean anything to you?’

‘Morro? Morro who?’

‘Never mind.’ If Donahure didn’t know the name of Morro’s intermediary he most certainly didn’t know Morro.

Jeff had first tried the Redox in Bay Street, the unsavoury bar-restaurant where his father had had his rendezvous with Dunne. No one answering to either of their descriptions had been there, or, if they had, no one was saying.

From there he went to the FBI office. He’d expected to find Delage there, and did. He also found Dunne, who clearly hadn’t been to bed. He looked at Jeff in surprise. ‘So soon. What’s up?’

‘My father been here?’

‘No. Why?’

‘When we got home he said he was going to bed. He didn’t. He left after two or three minutes. I followed him, don’t know why, I had the feeling he was going to meet someone, that he was stepping into danger. Lost him at the lights.’

‘Worry about the other guy.’ Dunne hesitated. ‘Some news for you and your father, not all that good. Both shot FBI men were under heavy sedation during the night, but one’s clear now. He says that the first person shot last night was neither him nor his partner but Peggy. She got it through the left shoulder.’

‘No!’

‘I’m afraid so, boy. I know this agent well. He doesn’t make mistakes.’

‘But – but – if she’s wounded, I mean medical attention, hospital, she must have –’

‘Sorry, Jeff. That’s all we know. The kidnappers took her away, remember.’

Jeff made to speak, turned and ran from the office. He went to Delmino’s, the station officers’ favourite hang-out. Yes, Sergeants Ryder and Parker had been there. No, the barman didn’t know where they had gone.

Jeff drove the short distance to the station house. Parker was there along with Sergeant Dickson. Jeff said: ‘Seen my father?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘You know where he is?’

‘Yes. Again why?’

‘Just tell me!’

‘I’m not rightly sure I should.’ He looked at Jeff, saw the urgency and intensity and was not to know it was because of the news Jeff had just heard. He said reluctantly: ‘He’s at Chief Donahure’s. But I’m not sure –’ He stopped. Jeff had already gone. Parker looked at Dickson and shrugged.

Ryder said, almost conversationally: ‘Heard that my daughter has been kidnapped?’

‘No. I swear to God –’

‘All right. Any idea how anyone might have got hold of her address in San Diego?’

Donahure shook his head – but his eyes had flickered, just once. Ryder broke open the revolver: the hammer was lined up against an empty cylinder, one of two. He closed the gun, shoved the stubby finger of Donahure’s right hand through the trigger guard, held the Colt by barrel and butt and said: ‘On the count of three I twist both hands. One –’

‘I did, I did.’

‘How did you get it?’

‘Week or two ago. You were out for lunch and –’

‘And I’d left my address book in my drawer so you kind of naturally wrote down a few names and addresses. I really should break your finger for this. But you can’t sign a statement if I break your writing forefinger, can you?’

‘A statement?’

‘A statement?’

‘I’m not a law officer any more. It’s a citizen’s arrest. Just as legal. I arrest you, Donahure, for larceny, corruption, bribery, the acceptance of bribes – and for murder in the first degree.’

Donahure said nothing. His face, greyer than ever, had slumped between his sagging shoulders. Ryder sniffed the muzzle. ‘Fired recently.’ He broke open the gun. ‘Two bullets gone. We only carry five in a cylinder, so one’s been fired recently.’ He eased out one cartridge and scraped the tip with a nail. ‘And soft-nosed, just like the one that took off Sheriff Hartman’s head. A perfect match for this barrel, I’ll be bound.’ He knew that a match-up was impossible, but Donahure either didn’t know or was too far gone to think. ‘And you left your fingerprints on the door handle, which was a very careless thing to do.’

Donahure said dully: ‘It was the man on the phone –’

‘Save it for the judge.’

‘Freeze,’ a high-pitched voice behind Ryder said. Ryder had survived to his present age by knowing exactly the right thing to do at the right time and at the moment the right thing appeared to be to do what he was told. He froze.

‘Drop that gun.’

Ryder obediently dropped the gun, a decision which was made all the easier for him by the fact that he was holding the gun by the barrel anyway and the cylinder was hinged out.

‘Now turn round nice and slow.’ Brought up on a strict diet of B movies, Ryder reflected, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous. He turned round – nice and slow. The visitor had a black handkerchief tied below his eyes, wore a dark suit, dark shirt, white tie and, of all things, a black fedora. B movies, late 1930s.

‘Donahure ain’t going to meet no judge.’ He’d the dialogue right, too. ‘But you’re going to meet your maker. No time for prayers, mister.’

‘You drop that gun,’ said a voice from the doorway.

Obviously the masked man was considerably younger than Ryder, for he didn’t know the right thing to do. He whipped round and loosed off a snap shot at the figure in the doorway. In the circumstances it was a pretty good effort, ripping the cloth on the upper right sleeve of Jeff’s coat. Jeff’s reply was considerably more effective. The man in the mask folded in the middle like a collapsing hinge and crumpled to the floor. Ryder dropped to one knee beside him.

‘I tried for his gun-hand,’ Jeff said uncertainly. ‘Reckon I missed.’

‘You did. Didn’t miss his heart, though.’ Ryder plucked off the handkerchief mask. ‘Well. The shame of it all. Lennie the Linnet has gone riding off across the great divide.’

‘Lennie the Linnet?’ Jeff was visibly shaken.

‘Yes. Linnet. A song-bird. Well, wherever Lennie’s singing now you can take long odds that it won’t be to the accompaniment of a harp.’ Ryder glanced sideways, straightened, took the gun from Jeff’s lax hand and fired, all in seemingly slow motion. For the fifth time that night Donahure cried out in pain. The Colt he’d picked up from the floor spun across the room. Ryder said: ‘Do be quiet. You can still sign the statement. And to the charge of murder we’ll now add one of attempted murder.’

Jeff said: ‘One easy lesson, is that it?’

Ryder touched his shoulder. ‘Well, thanks, anyway.’

‘I didn’t mean to kill him.’

‘Shed no sad tears for Lennie. A heroin pusher. You followed me?’

‘Tried to. Sergeant Parker told me where you were. How did he get here?’

‘Ah, now. If you want Detective Sergeant Ryder at his brilliant best, ask him after the event. I thought our line was tapped so I phoned Parker to meet me at Delmino’s. Never occurred to me they’d put a stake-out there.’

Jeff looked at Donahure. ‘So that’s why you didn’t want me along. He ran into a truck?’

‘Self-inflicted injuries. Now on, you’re welcome along anytime. Get a couple of towels from the bathroom. Don’t want him to bleed to death before his trial.’

Jeff hesitated: he had to tell his father and actively feared for Donahure’s life. ‘Some bad news, Dad. Peggy was shot last night.’

‘Shot?’ The lips compressed whitely. Ryder’s eyes switched to Donahure, the grip on Jeff’s gun tightened, but he was still under his iron control. He looked back at Jeff. ‘Bad?’

‘Don’t know. Bad enough, I should think. Left shoulder.’

Get the towels.’ Ryder lifted the phone, got through to Sergeant Parker. ‘Come out here, will you, Dave? Bring an ambulance, Doc Hinkley’ – Hinkley was the police surgeon – ‘and young Kramer to take a statement. Ask Major Dunne to come. And, Dave – Peggy was shot last night. Through the shoulder.’ He hung up.

Parker passed on the requests to Kramer then went up to see Mahler. Mahler viewed him as he was viewing life at the moment, with a harassed and jaundiced eye.

Parker said: I’m going out to Chief Donahure’s place. Some trouble out there.’

‘What trouble?’

‘Something that calls for an ambulance.’

‘Who said so?’

‘Ryder.’

‘Ryder!’ Mahler pushed back his chair and rose. ‘What the hell is Ryder doing out there?’

‘Didn’t say. I think he wanted a talk with him.’

‘I’ll have him behind bars for this. I’ll take charge of this personally.’

‘I’d like to come, Lieutenant.’

‘You stay here. That’s an order, Sergeant Parker.’

‘Nothing personal, Lieutenant.’ Parker put his badge on the desk. ‘I’m not taking orders any more.’

All five of them arrived together – the two ambulance men, Kramer, Major Dunne and Dr Hinkley. As befitted the occasion Dr Hinkley was in the lead. A small wiry man with darting eyes, he was, if not exactly soured by life, at least possessed of a profoundly cynical resignation. He looked at the recumbent figure on the floor.

‘Good lord! Lennie the Linnet. A black day for America.’ He peered more closely at the white tie with the red-rimmed hole through it. ‘Heart damage of some kind. Gets them younger every day. And Chief of Police Donahure!’ He crossed to where a moaning Donahure was sitting on his couch, his left hand tenderly cradling the blood-soaked towel round his right hand. None too gently, Hinkley unwrapped the towel. ‘Dear me. Where’s the rest of those two fingers?’

Ryder said: ‘He tried to shoot me. Through the back, of course.’

‘Ryder.’ Lieutenant Mahler had a pair of handcuffs ready. ‘I’m placing you under arrest.’

‘Put those things away and don’t make more a fool of yourself than you can help if you don’t want to be charged with obstructing the course of justice. I am making, I have made, a perfectly legal citizen’s arrest. The charges are larceny, corruption, bribery, the acceptance of bribes, attempted murder and murder in the first degree. Donahure will admit to all of them and I can prove all of them. Also, he’s an accessory to the wounding of my daughter.’

‘Your daughter shot?’ Oddly, this seemed to affect Mahler more than the murder accusation. He had put his handcuffs away. A disciplinary martinet, he was nonetheless a fair man.

Ryder looked at Kramer. ‘He has a statement to make, but as he’s suffering from a minor speech impairment right now I’ll make it for him and he’ll sign it. Give the usual warnings, of course, about legal rights, that his statement can be used in evidence, you know the form.’ It took Ryder only four minutes to make the statement on Donahure’s behalf, and by the time he had finished the damning indictment there wasn’t a man in that room, Mahler included, who wouldn’t have testified that the statement had been voluntary.

Major Dunne took Ryder aside. ‘So fine, so you’ve cooked Donahure’s goose. It won’t have escaped your attention that you’ve also cooked your own goose. You can’t imprison a man without preferring charges and the law of the land says those charges must be made public’

‘There are times when I admire the Russian legal system.’

‘Quite. So Morro will know in a couple of hours. And he’s got Susan and Peggy.’

‘I don’t seem to have many options open. Somebody has to do something. I haven’t noticed that the police or the FBI or the CIA have been particularly active.’

‘Miracles take a little time.’ Dunne was impatient. ‘Meantime, they still have your family.’

‘Yes. I’m beginning to wonder about that. If they are in danger, I mean.’

‘Jesus! Danger? Course they are. God’s sake man, look at what happened to Peggy.’

‘An accident. They could have killed her if they came that close. A dead hostage is no good to anyone.’

‘I suppose I could call you a cold-blooded bastard but I don’t believe you are. You know something I don’t?’

‘No. You have all the facts that I have. Only I have this feeling that we’re being conned, that we’re following a line that they want us to follow. I told Jablonsky last night that I didn’t think the scientists had been taken in order to force them to make a bomb of some kind. They’ve been taken for some other purpose. And if I don’t think that then I no longer think that the women were taken to force them to build a bomb. And not for a lever on me either – why should they worry about me in advance?’

‘What’s bugging you, Ryder?’

I’d like to know why Donahure has – had – those Kalashnikovs in his possession. He doesn’t seem to know either.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Unfortunately, I don’t follow myself.’

Dunne remained in silent thought for some time. Then he looked at Donahure, winced at the sight of the battered face and said: ‘Who’s next in line for your kindly ministrations? LeWinter?’

‘Not yet. We’ve got enough to pull him in for questioning but not enough to hold him on the uncorroborated word of an unconvicted man. And unlike Donahure he’s a wily bird who’ll give away nothing. I think I’ll call on his secretary after an hour or two’s sleep.’

The phone rang. Jeff answered and held it out to Dunne, who listened briefly, hung up and said to Ryder: ‘I think you’ll have to postpone your sleep for a little. Another message from our friends.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Delage was with a man the Ryders hadn’t seen before, a young man, fair-haired, broad, wearing a grey flannel suit cut loose to conceal whatever weaponry he was carrying and a pair of dark glasses of the type much favoured by Secret Service men who guard Presidents and heads of State.

‘Leroy,’ Dunne said. ‘San Diego. He’s liaising with Washington on LeWinter’s codes. He’s also in touch with the AEC plant in Illinois, checking on Carlton’s past contacts and has a team working on the lists of the weirdoes. Anything yet, Leroy?’

Leroy shook his head. ‘Late afternoon, hopefully.’

Dunne turned to Delage. ‘So what didn’t you want to tell me over the phone? What’s so hush-hush?’

‘Won’t be hush-hush much longer. The wire services have it but Barrow told them to sit on it. When the director tells people to sit on something, it’s sat on.’ He nodded to a taperecorder. ‘We recorded this over the direct line from Los Angeles. Seems that Durrer of ERDA was sent a separate recording.’

He pressed a switch and a smooth educated voice began to speak, in English but not American English. ‘My name is Morro and I am, as many of you will know by this time, the person responsible for the San Ruffino reactor break-in. I have messages to you from some eminent scientists and I suggest you all listen very carefully. For your own sakes, please listen carefully.’ The tape stopped as Dunne raised a hand.

He said: ‘Anyone recognize that voice?’ Clearly no one did. ‘Anyone identify that accent? Would it give you any idea where Morro comes from?’

Delage said: ‘Europe? Asia? Could be any place. Could be an American with a phoney accent.’

‘Why don’t you ask the experts?’ Ryder said. ‘University of California. On one campus or another, anywhere between San Diego and Stanford, you’ll find some professor or lecturer who’ll recognize it. Don’t they claim to teach every major and most of the important minor languages in the world somewhere in this State?’

‘A point. Barrow and Sassoon may already have thought of it. We’ll mention it.’ He nodded to Delage who flipped the switch again.

A rasping and indignant voice said: ‘This is Professor Andrew Burnett of San Diego. It’s not someone trying to imitate me – my voice-prints are in security in the University. This blackhearted bastard Morro –’ And so Burnett continued until he had finished his wrathful tirade. Dr Schmidt, who followed him on the tape, sounded just as furious as Burnett. Healey and Bramwell were considerably more moderate, but all four men had one thing in common – they were utterly convincing.

Dunne said to no one in particular: ‘We believe them?’

‘I believe them.’ Delage’s certainty was absolute. ‘That’s the fourth time I’ve heard that played and I believe it more every time. You could tell they weren’t being coerced, under the influence of drugs, physical intimidation, anything like that. Especially not with Professor Burnett. You can’t fake that kind of anger. Provided, of course, that those four men are who they claim to be – and they have to be: they’ll be on TV and radio any time and there must be hundreds of colleagues, friends, students who can confirm their genuineness. A megaton? That’s the equivalent of a million tons of TNT, isn’t it? Downright nasty.’

Ryder said to Dunne: ‘Well, that’s part of the answer to what we were talking about back in Donahure’s house. To confirm the existence of those plans and scare the living daylights out of us. Us and everybody in California. They’re going to succeed, wouldn’t you say?’

Leroy said: ‘What gets me is that they haven’t given the faintest indication as to what they’re up to.’

‘That’s what’s going to get everyone,’ Ryder said. ‘That’s part of his psychological gambit. Scare the living daylights out of everyone.’

‘And speaking of scaring the living daylights, I’m afraid there is more to come.’ Dunne flicked the ‘On’ switch again and Morro’s voice came through once more.

‘A postscript, if you please. The authorities claim that the earthquake felt in the southern part of the State this morning came from White Wolf Fault and, as I have already said, this is a lie. As already said, I was responsible. To prove that the State authorities are lying, I will detonate another nuclear device at exactly ten a.m. tomorrow morning. The device is already in place in a site specially chosen so that I can have it under permanent surveillance: any attempt to locate or approach this device will leave me no alternative other than to detonate it by radio control.

‘People are advised not to approach within five miles of the site. If they do, I shall not be responsible for their lives. If they don’t, but are still foolish enough not to wear specially darkened lenses I shall not be responsible for their sight.

‘The chosen site is in Nevada, about twelve miles northwest of Skull Peak, where Yucca Flat adjoins Frenchman’s Flat.

‘This device is in the kiloton range, of the approximate destructive power of those which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’

Delage switched off. After about thirty seconds’ silence, Dunne said thoughtfully: ‘Well, that’s a nice touch, I must say. Going to use the United States’ official testing ground for his purposes. As you ask, what the devil is the man up to? Does anyone here believe what we’ve just heard?’

‘I do,’ Ryder said. ‘I believe it absolutely. I believe it’s in position, I believe it will be detonated at the time he says it will, and I believe there is nothing we can do to stop him. I believe all you can do is to prevent as many rubber-neckers as possible from going there and having themselves incinerated or radiated or whatever. A traffic problem of sorts.’

Jeff said: ‘For a traffic problem you require roads. No major roads there. Dirt-tracks, that’s all.’

‘Not a job for us,’ Dunne said. ‘Army, National Guard, tanks, armoured cars, jeeps, a couple of Phantoms to discourage air-borne snoopers – there should be no problems in cordoning the area off. For all I know everybody might be more interested in running in the other direction. All that concerns me is why, why, why? Blackmail and threats, of course, but again, what, what, what? A man feels so damned helpless. Nothing you can do, nothing you can go on.’

‘I know what I’m going to do,’ Ryder said. I’m going to bed.’

The Sikorsky cargo helicopter landed in the courtyard of the Adlerheim but none of those seated in the refectory paid it any attention: the helicopter, which ferried in nearly all the supplies for the Adlerheim, was constantly coming and going, and one just learned to live with its deafening clatter. That apart, the few guards, the hostages, Morro and Dubois were considerably more interested in what was taking place on the big TV screen before them. The announcer, arms folded in a form of noble resignation and his features arranged with a gravity appropriate to the occasion, had just finished the playing of the tape-recordings of the four physicists and had embarked upon Morro’s postscript. The pilot of the helicopter, clad in a red plaid mackinaw, entered and approached Morro but was waved to a seat: Morro was not concerned with listening to his own voice but appeared to derive interest and amusement from listening to the comments and watching the expressions of the others.

When Morro had finished his postscript, Burnett turned to Schmidt and said loudly: ‘Well, what did I tell you, Schmidt? Man’s a raving lunatic’

The remark seemed to cause Morro no offence: nothing ever seemed to. ‘If you are referring to me, Professor Burnett, and I assume you are, that’s a most uncharitable conclusion. How do you arrive at it?’

‘In the first place you don’t have an atom bomb –’

‘And even worse, that’s a stupid conclusion. I never claimed it was an atom bomb. It’s an atomic device. Same effect, though. And eighteen kilo-tons is not to be regarded lightly.’

Bramwell said: ‘There is just your word –’

‘At one minute past ten tomorrow morning you and Burnett will doubtless have the courtesy to apologize to me.’

Bramwell was no longer so certain. ‘Even if such a thing did exist what would be the point in detonating it out in the desert?’

‘Simple, surely. Just to prove to people that I have nuclear explosive power available. And if I can prove that, what is to prevent them from believing that I have unlimited nuclear armament power available? One creates a climate first of uncertainty, then of apprehension, then of pure fear, finally of outright terror.’

‘You have more of those devices available?’

‘I shall satisfy the scientific curiosity of you and your three physicist colleagues this evening.’

Schmidt said: ‘What in God’s name are you trying to play at, Morro?’

‘I am not trying, and I am not playing, as the citizens of this State and indeed of the whole world will soon know.’

‘Aha! And therein lies the psychological nub of the matter, is that it? Let them imagine what they like. Let them brood on the possibilities. Let them imagine the worst. And then tell them that the worst is worse than they ever dreamed of. Is that it?’

‘Excellent, Schmidt, quite splendid. I shall include that in my next broadcast. “Imagine what you like. Brood on the possibilities. Imagine the worst. But can you imagine that the worst is worse than you ever dreamed of?” Yes. Thank you, Schmidt. I shall take all the credit for myself, of course.’ Morro rose, went to the helicopter pilot, bent to listen to a few whispered words, nodded, straightened and approached Susan. ‘Come with me, please, Mrs Ryder.’

He led her along a passage. She said, curiously: ‘What is it, Mr Morro? Or do you want to keep it as a surprise for me? A shock, perhaps? You seem to delight in shocking people. First you shock us all by bringing us here, then you shock the four physicists with your hydrogen weapon plan, now you shock millions of people in the State. Does it give you pleasure to shock people?’

Morro considered. ‘No, not really. The shocks I have administered so far have been either inevitable or calculated to further my own designs. But a warped and sadistic pleasure, no. I’ve just been wondering how to tell you. You are in for a shock, but not a serious one, for there’s nothing serious to be worried about. I have your daughter here, Mrs Ryder, and she’s been hurt. Not badly. She’ll be all right.’

‘My daughter! Peggy? Here? What in God’s name is she doing here? And how hurt?’

For answer, Morro opened a door in one side of the passageway. Inside was a small private hospital ward. There were three beds but only one in use. The occupant was a pale-faced girl with long dark hair, in which point lay the only difference from her remarkable resemblance to her mother. Her lips parted and brown eyes opened wide in astonishment as she stretched out her right arm: the bandages round her left shoulder were clearly visible. Mother and daughter exchanged the exclamations, endearments, murmurs and sympathies which mothers and daughters might be expected to exchange in such circumstances while Morro considerately maintained a discreet distance, using his right hand mutely to bar the further progress of a man who had just entered: the newcomer wore a white coat, wore a stethoscope round his neck and carried a black bag. Even without the trappings he had indefinably the word ‘doctor’ written large upon him.

Susan said: ‘Your shoulder, Peggy. Does it hurt?’

‘Not now. Well, a little.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I was shot. When I was kidnapped.’

‘I see. You were shot when you were kidnapped.’ Susan squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head and looked at Morro. ‘You, of course.’

‘Mummy.’ The girl’s face showed a complete lack of understanding. ‘What is all this? Where am I? What hospital –’

‘You’re not in hospital. This is the private residence of Mr Morro here. The man who broke into the San Ruffino refinery. The man who kidnapped you. The man who kidnapped me.’

‘You!’

Susan said bitterly: ‘Mr Morro is not a piker. He doesn’t do things on a small scale. He’s holding seven others hostage too.’

Peggy slumped back on her pillows. ‘I just don’t understand.’

The doctor touched Morro’s arm. ‘The young lady is overtired, sir.’

‘I agree. Come, Mrs Ryder. Your daughter’s shoulder requires attention. Dr Hitushi here is a highly qualified physician.’ He paused and looked at Peggy. ‘I am genuinely sorry about this. Tell me, did you notice anything peculiar about either of your attackers?’

‘Yes.’ Peggy gave a little shiver. ‘One of them – a little man – didn’t have a left hand.’

‘Did he have anything at all?’

‘Yes. Like two curved fingers, only they were made of metal, with rubber tips.’

‘I’ll be back, soon,’ Susan said and permitted Morro to guide her by the elbow out in the passageway where she angrily shook her arm free. ‘Did you have to do that to the poor child?’

‘I regret it extremely. A beautiful child.’

‘You don’t wage war on women.’ Morro should have shrivelled on the spot, but didn’t. ‘Why bring her here?’

‘I don’t hurt women or permit them to be hurt. This was an accident. I brought her here because I thought she’d be better with her mother with her.’

‘So you shock people, you tell lies and now you’re a hypocrite.’ Again Morro remained unshrivelled.

‘Your contempt is understandable, your spirit commendable, but you’re wrong on all three counts. I also brought her here for proper medical treatment.’

‘What was wrong with San Diego?’

‘I have friends there, but no medical friends.’

‘I would point out, Mr Morro, that they have fine hospitals there.’

‘And I would point out that hospitals would have meant the law. How many small Mexicans do you think there are in San Diego with a prosthetic appliance in place of a left hand? He’d have been picked up in hours and have led them to me. I’m afraid I couldn’t have that, Mrs Ryder. But I couldn’t leave her with my friends either because there she would be lonely, with no one capable of looking after her wound, and that would have been psychologically and physically very bad for her. Here she has you and skilled medical attention. As soon as the doctor has finished treating her I’m sure he’ll permit her to be wheeled to your suite to stay there with you.’

Susan said: ‘You’re a strange man, Mr Morro.’ He looked at her without expression, turned and left.

Ryder awoke at 5.30 p.m., feeling less refreshed than he should have done, because he had slept only fitfully. This was less because of worry about his family – he was becoming increasingly if irrationally of the opinion that they weren’t in as grave danger as he had at once thought – than because there were several wandering wisps of thought tugging at the corners of his mind: only he couldn’t identify them for what they were. He rose, made sandwiches and coffee, and consumed them while he ploughed through the earthquake literature he had borrowed from Pasadena. Neither the coffee nor the literature helped him any. He went out and called up the FBI office. Delage answered.

Ryder said: ‘Is Major Dunne around?’

‘Sound asleep. Is it urgent?’

‘No. Let him be. Got anything that might interest me?’

‘Leroy has, I think.’

‘Anything from eight-eight-eight South Maple?’

‘Nothing of interest. Local nosey neighbour, a rheumy-eyed old goat – I’m quoting, you understand – who would clearly like to know your Bettina Ivanhoe, if that’s her name, better than he does, says that she hasn’t been to work today, that she hasn’t been out all morning.’

‘He’s sure?’

‘Foster – that’s our stake-out man, spends most of his time round the back – says he believes him.’

‘Eternal vigilance, you’d say?’

‘Probably with a pair of high-powered binoculars. She went out this afternoon, but walking: there’s a supermarket on the corner and she came back with a couple of carry-bags. Foster got a good look at her. Says he hardly blames the old goat. While she was out Foster let himself in and put a bug on her phone.’

‘Anything?’

‘She hasn’t used the phone since. More interesting, our legal friend was on the phone twice today. Well, only the second conversation was interesting. The first was made by the judge himself to his chambers. Said he’s been stricken by a case of severe lumbago and could they get a deputy to stand in for him in court. The second was made to him. Very enigmatic. Told him to let his lumbago attack last for another couple of days and everything should be all right. That was all.’

‘Where did the call come from?’

‘Bakersfield.’

‘Odd.’

‘What?’

‘Hard by the White Wolf Fault where the earthquake was supposed to originate.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Education.’ Courtesy of the CalTech library, he’d learnt the fact only ten minutes previously. ‘Coincidence. Coin box, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks. Be down soon.’

He returned to the house, rang Jeff – he’d nothing to say to his son that a phone-tapper would find of any interest – and told him to call round but to wear different clothes from those he had been wearing the previous night. While he was waiting he himself went and changed.

Jeff arrived, looked at his father’s usual crumpled clothes, looked at his own well-creased blue suit and said: ‘Well, no one could accuse you of entering the sartorial stakes. We meant to be in disguise?’

‘Sort of. For the same reason I’m going to call up Sergeant Parker on the way in and have him meet us at the FBI office. Delage says they may have something for us, by the way. No, we’re going to have the pleasure of interviewing a lady tonight, although I doubt whether she’ll regard it as such. Bettina Ivanhoe or Ivanov or whatever. She’ll recognize the clothes we were wearing last night, which is more than we can say about her. She won’t recognize our faces, but she would our voices, which is why I’m having Sergeant Parker briefed and having him do the talking for us.’

‘What happens if something occurs to you – even me – and we want Sergeant Parker to ask a particular question?’

‘That’s why we are going along – just in case that possibility arises. We’ll arrange a signal then she’ll be told that we have to go out and check something with the station by the car radiophone. Never fails to panic the conscience-stricken. Might even panic her into making a distress call to someone. Her phone’s bugged.’

‘Coppers are a lousy lot.’

Ryder glanced at him briefly and said nothing. He didn’t have to.

‘Let’s start with Carlton,’ Leroy said. ‘The security chief at the reactor plant in Illinois never got to know him well. Neither did any of the staff there – the ones that are left, that is. That was two years or so ago and a good number have moved on elsewhere. Secretive kind of lad, it would appear.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ Ryder said. ‘Nothing I like better than minding my own business – in off-duty hours, that is. But in his case? Who knows? Any leads?’

‘One, but it sounds more than fair. The security chief – name of Daimler – had traced his old landlady. She says Carlton and her son used to be very close, used to go away weekends quite a bit. Says she doesn’t know where they went. Daimler says it’s more likely that she didn’t care where they went. She’s well off – or was: her husband left her a good annuity but she takes in boarders because most of her money goes in gin and cards. Most of her time and interest, too, it would appear.’

‘Sensible husband.’

‘Probably died in self-defence. Daimler offered – he wasn’t too enthusiastic about the offer – to go and see her. I said thanks, we’d send one of our boys – an NFI card carries more weight. He’s going there this evening – boy still lives at home.

‘That’s all. Except for his mother’s comment about him – says he’s a religious nut and should be put away somewhere.’

‘It’s the maternal instinct. What else?’

‘LeWinter’s fancy codes. We’ve traced nearly all the telephone numbers – I think you’ve been told they were mainly Californian or Texan. Seem a respectable enough bunch – at least, preliminary enquiries haven’t turned up anything about the ones investigated so far – but on the face of it they would seem an odd lot for a senior judge like LeWinter to be associated with.’

‘I’ve got a lot of friends – well, friends and acquaintances – who aren’t cops,’ Jeff said. ‘But none of them, as far as I know, has ever seen the inside of a courtroom, far less a prison.’

‘Yes. But here’s an eminent lawyer – or what a cock-eyed world regards as an eminent lawyer – with a list of people who are primarily engineers, and not only that but specialists in the engineering field. Specializing in petro-chemicals and not only chemists, metallurgists, geologists, what you would expect to find, but also oil-rig owners, drillers and explosives experts.’

Ryder said: ‘Maybe LeWinter is figuring on moving into the oil exploration field – the old rogue has probably accumulated enough in the way of ill-gotten pay-offs to finance a stake in something of that nature. But I think that’s altogether too far-fetched. Much more likely that those names have something to do with cases that have come up before him. They could be people that have been called as expert witnesses.’

Leroy smiled. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but we thought of that all by ourselves. We turned up a list of his civil, as distinct from criminal, court cases over the years and he has been involved in quite a number of law-suits primarily involved with oil – exploration, leases, environmental pollution, marine trusts, Lord knows what. Before he became a judge he was a defending counsel, and a highly successful one – as you would expect from such a devious villain –’

‘Assumption, assumption,’ Ryder said.

‘So? You just called him an old rogue. As I was saying, he made quite a reputation for himself for protecting the legal interest of various oil companies who had quite clearly transgressed the law until LeWinter proved otherwise. In fact, the amount of oil litigation that goes on in this fair State of ours is quite staggering. But it would seem that that’s all irrelevant. To me, anyway. You, I don’t know. But one way or another he’s been swimming around in this oil business for close on twenty years: so I can’t see how it bears on this present business.’

‘Nor do I,’ Ryder said. ‘On the other hand, he could have been preparing for this day for all those years and is only now putting his knowledge to use. But again I think this is farfetched. If there’s any connection between oil-prospecting or oil-recovery I have never heard of it. How about this code-book-Ivanhoe thing? I was given to understand that the Washington Russian code-breakers were making progress on that.’

‘They may well be. Unfortunately they’ve come all over coy. The centre of their enquiries appears to have shifted to Geneva.’

Ryder was patient. ‘Could you enlighten me, or did they choose to enlighten you on just what the hell Geneva has to do with a nuclear theft in this State?’

‘No, I can’t enlighten you because they clammed up. It’ll be this damned inter-service jealousy, if you ask me. “Internecine” would be a better word.’

Ryder was sympathetic. ‘You’ll be telling me next that the accursed CIA are shoving their oar in again.’

‘Have shoved, it would appear. Bad enough to have them operating in friendly countries – allies, if you like – such as Britain and France, which they freely do without the permission of their hosts, but to start poking around in a strictly neutral Switzerland –’

‘They don’t operate there?’

‘Of course not. Those agents you see lurking around the UNO, WHO and Lord knows how many international agencies in Geneva are only figments of your imagination. Heady Alpine air, or something like that. The Swiss are so sorry for them they offer them chairs in the shade or under cover, depending on the weather.’

‘You sound bitter. Let’s hope you all resolve your differences in this particular case, and quickly. How have Interpol been doing with Morro?’

‘They haven’t. You have to remember that a good bit more than half the world has never even heard of the word “Interpol”. It might help if we had the faintest clue as to where this pest comes from.’

‘The copies of the tapes of his voice? The ones that were to be sent out to our learned scholars?’

‘There hasn’t been time yet for any significant amount of comments to come in. We have had only four replies yet. One is positive that he is the voice of a Middle Easterner. In fact, he’s positive enough to state categorically that the guy comes from Beirut. As Beirut is a hodge-podge of most of the nationalities in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and a fair sprinkling of Africans, by which I mean people in African nations, it’s hard to see what he’s basing his conviction on. Another says, although not prepared to swear, that he’s Indian. A third says he’s definitely from the south-east of Asia. The last says that, as he’s spent twenty years in Japan, he’d recognize Japanese-learnt English anywhere.’

Ryder said: ‘My wife described Morro as being a broad-shouldered six-footer.’

‘And Japanese answering to that description are not thick on the ground. I’m beginning to lose faith in the University of California.’ Leroy sighed. ‘Well, with the possible – and I’m now beginning to regard it as only faintly possible – exception of Carlton, we don’t appear to have been making much headway. However, we may have something more encouraging for you in the way of those odd-ball organizations you wanted us to enquire about. You specified a year in existence and a large group. We’re not saying you’re wrong, but it did occur to us that it could conceivably be a smaller group, or one that has been in existence for a considerably longer period than a year and that may have been infiltrated or taken over by Morro and his friends. Here’s the list. I’m not saying that it’s a complete one: there’s no State law that says you have to register yourself, or yourself and your like-minded friends as a nut or nuts. But I should imagine it’s as complete as we can get, certainly within the limited time available.’

Ryder glanced at the list, handed it to Jeff, turned to say a few words to Sergeant Parker, who had just entered, then returned his attention to Leroy.

‘List’s fine as far as it goes, dates and existence, approximate numbers, but it doesn’t tell me what they’re nutty about.’

‘Could that be important?’

‘How should I know?’ Ryder was understandably a mite irritable. ‘Might give me an idea, even an inkling, just the shadow of a clue just by looking at such a list. God knows, I can’t come up with one by myself.’

With the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat, Leroy produced another sheet of paper. ‘And here we have what you want.’ He looked at the paper with some disfavour. ‘They’re so damned long-winded about their reasons, their motivations for existence as groups, that it was impossible to get it all on one sheet. They tend to be a forthcoming, not to say garrulous, lot about their ideals.’

‘Any religious nuts among them?’

‘Why?’

‘Carlton is said to be associated, or have associated, with one. Okay, so it’s a far-out connection, but any straw for a drowning man.’

‘I think you’re mixing your metaphors,’ Leroy said kindly. ‘But I see what you mean.’ He eyed the sheet. ‘Well, most of them are religious organizations. I think one would expect that. But quite a number have been established too long – long enough to achieve a measure of respectability – to be classified as nuts. The followers of Zen Buddhism, the Hindu Guru groups, the Zoroastrians and some home-grown Californian groups – at least eight of those – you can’t go around calling them nuts without having a lawsuit slapped on you.’

‘Call them what you want.’ Ryder took the sheet, and examined it more in hope than expectation. He said in complaint: ‘Can’t pronounce half of them, far less understand them.’

‘This is a very cosmopolitan State, Sergeant Ryder.’ Ryder looked at him in suspicion but Leroy’s face was perfectly straight.

‘Borundians,’ Ryder went on. ‘Corinthians. The Judges. The Knights of Calvary. The Blue Cross. The Blue Cross?’

‘Not the hospital insurance people, Sergeant.’

‘The Seekers?’

‘Not the singing group.’

‘Nineteen-ninety-nine?’

‘That’s the day the world ends.’

‘Ararat?’

‘Splinter group of nineteen-ninety-nine. Where Noah’s ark fetched up. Working with a group called the Revelations, high up in the Sierras. Building a boat for the next flood.’

‘They could be right. According to Professor Benson of CalTech a large chunk of California is going to disappear into the Pacific. They may have to wait a bit though – million years, give or take. Ah, now. This is more like it. Group over a hundred strong. Established only eight months. The Temple of Allah.’

‘Muslims. Also operating out of Sierra Nevada, but not quite so high up. Forget them. They’ve been checked out too.’

‘Still. Carlton’s a religious nut –’

‘You call a Muslim a nut, you have to call a Christian one too.’

‘Carltom’s landlady’s phrase. She probably thinks anyone who crosses a church door a nut. Morro could come from Beirut. Muslims there.’

‘And Christians. Spent nineteen-seventy-six wiping each other out. I’ve been up that blind alley, Sergeant. Morro could be Indian. Carlton’s been in New Delhi. Hindu, not Muslim. Or Morro could be south-east Asia. So Carlton’s been to Singapore, Hong Kong and Manila. First two – if anything – are Buddhist, third is Catholic. Or Japan – Carlton’s been there, Morro may have been. Shintoism. You can’t just pick the religion that fits your theory – and there’s no record of Carlton ever having been in Beirut. I told you, this place has been checked out. Chief of Police swears by them –’

‘That’s enough for an immediate arrest warrant.’

‘Not every police chief is a Donahure. This man – Curragh – is widely respected. The Governor of California is their patron. They’ve given two million – I repeat, two million – to charity. Open to the public –’

Ryder held up a hand. ‘All right, all right. Point taken. Where does this bunch of paragons hang out?’

‘Some kind of castle. Adlerheim, it’s called.’

‘I know it. Been there, in fact. Brainchild of some wealthy crank called Von Streicher.’ He paused. ‘Muslim or not anybody who lives there has to be a nut.’ He paused again, longer this time, made as if to speak then clearly changed his mind.

Leroy said: ‘Sorry I can’t help you more.’

‘Thanks. I’ll take those lists if I may. Along with my earthquake studies – they’re bound to lead me to point zero.’

Parker led the way to the car. In a quiet voice Jeff said to Ryder: ‘Come on, out with it. What were you about to say in there that you didn’t?’

‘When you consider the size of this State the Adlerheim is only a stone’s throw from Bakersfield. That’s where LeWinter’s mysterious phone call came from.’

‘Could mean something?’

‘Could mean that I’m still in a far-fetched mood tonight. Be interesting to find out whether there’s a direct line from the castle to Bakersfield.’

On the way out to the suburbs Ryder briefed Parker as exhaustively as he could.

South Maple was short, straight, tree-lined, pleasant and quiet, all the houses of the pseudo-Spanish-Moroccan architectural design so popular in the south. Two hundred yards short of his destination Ryder pulled up behind a black unmarked car, got out and walked forward. The man sitting behind the wheel glanced interrogatively at Ryder.

Ryder said: ‘You must be George Green.’

‘And you must be Sergeant Ryder. Office called me.’

‘Listen in to her phone all the time?’

‘Don’t have to. Very educated little bug.’ He tapped the square base of his telephone. ‘When she lifts her phone this little box goes tinkle-tinkle. Automatic recorder, too.’

‘We’re going to have a word with her and going to find an excuse to leave her for a minute. She may put a panic call through in our absence.’

‘I’ll have it for you.’

Bettina Ivanhoe lived in a surprisingly nice house, small, not on the scale of Donahure’s or LeWinter’s homes, but large enough to provoke the thought that for a twenty-one-year-old secretary she was doing surprisingly well for herself – or someone was doing surprisingly well for her. She answered the door bell and looked apprehensively at the three men.

‘Police officers,’ Parker said. ‘Could we have a word with you?’

‘Police officers? Yes, I suppose so. I mean, of course.’

She led the way to a small sitting-room and tucked her legs under her while the three men took an armchair apiece. She looked sweet and demure and proper, but that wasn’t anything much to go by; she’d looked sweet and demure if hardly proper when she’d been lying chained to LeWinter in his bed.

‘Am I – am I in any kind of trouble?’

‘We hope not.’ Parker had a deep booming voice, one of those rare voices that could sound hearty, reassuring and ominous all at the same time. ‘We’re just looking for any information that will help us. We’re investigating allegations – they’re more than that, I’m afraid – of widespread and illegal bribery involving foreigners and several high-placed individuals in public services in this State. A year or two back the South Koreans were giving away millions, seemingly out of the goodness of their hearts.’ He sighed. ‘And now the Russians are at it. You will understand that I can’t be more specific’

‘Yes. Yes, I understand.’ Clearly she didn’t understand at all.

‘How long have you lived here?’ The hearty reassurance in his voice had gone all diminuendo.

‘Five months.’ The apprehension was still there but it had been joined by a certain wariness. ‘Why?’

‘Asking questions is my job.’ Parker looked around leisurely. ‘Very nice place you have here. What’s your job, Miss Ivanhoe?’

‘I’m a secretary.’

‘How long?’

‘Two years.’

‘Before that?’

‘School. San Diego.’

‘University of California?’ A nod. ‘You left?’ Another nod.

‘Why did you leave?’ She hesitated. ‘Don’t forget, we can check all this out. Failed grades?’

‘No. I couldn’t afford to –’

‘You couldn’t afford to?’ Parker looked around again. ‘Yet in two years, a secretary, a beginner, really, you can afford to live here? Your average secretary has to make do with a single room in the beginning. Or live with her parents.’ He tapped his forehead lightly. ‘Of course. Your parents. Must be very understanding folk. Not to say generous.’

‘My parents are dead.’

‘I am sorry.’ He didn’t sound sorry. ‘Then somebody must have been very generous.’

‘I haven’t been charged with anything.’ She compressed her lips and swung her feet to the floor. ‘I’ll not answer another question until I’ve talked to my lawyer.’

‘Judge LeWinter is not answering the phone today. He’s got lumbago.’ This got to her. She sunk back against the cushions, looking oddly vulnerable and defenceless. She could have been acting but probably was not. If Parker felt a twinge of pity he didn’t show it. ‘You’re Russian, aren’t you?’

‘No. No. No.’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Where were you born?’

‘Vladivostok.’ She’d given up.

‘Where are your parents buried?’

‘They’re alive. They went back to Moscow.’

‘When?’

‘Four years ago.’

‘Why?’

‘I think they were called back.’

‘They were naturalized?’

‘Yes. A long time.’

‘Where did your father work?’

‘Burbank.’

‘Lockheed, I suppose?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you get your job?’

‘Box number ad. For an American secretary who could speak Russian and Chinese.’

‘There wouldn’t be many of those around?’

‘Only me.’

‘Judge LeWinter has private clients, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Including Russian and Chinese?’

‘Yes. Sometimes they need a translator in court.’

‘Does he require any translation done for him out of court?’

She hesitated. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Military stuff. Russian, of course. In code.’

Her voice was low now, barely above a whisper. ‘Yes.’

‘Anything about weather at any time?’

Her eyes were wide. ‘How do you know –’

‘Don’t you know it’s wrong? Don’t you know it’s treason? Don’t you know the penalty for treason?’

She put her forearm on the side of the couch and laid her blonde head on it. She made no reply.

Ryder said: ‘You like LeWinter?’ His voice didn’t seem to register with her as the one she’d heard the previous night.

‘I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!’ The voice was shaking but the vehemence left no room for disbelief.

Ryder stood and jerked his head to the door. Parker said: ‘We’re going to the car to call the station. Back in a minute or two.’ The three men went outside.

Ryder said: ‘She hates LeWinter and I, Dave, hate you.’

‘That makes two of us.’

‘Jeff, go see if the FBI man is intercepting a phone call. I know I’m just wasting your time.’ Jeff left.

‘Poor bloody kid.’ Parker shook his head. ‘Imagine if that were Peggy.’

‘Just what I am meaning. Old man a spy, probably an industrial one. Called back to Russia to report and now being held over her head – along with her mother, probably. Being blackmailed to hell and back. One thing: we can probably tell our super-spies in Geneva what they can do with themselves. She’s intelligent. I’ll bet she has total recall about this Russian weather report or whatever.’

‘Hasn’t she had enough, John? And what will happen to her parents?’

‘Nothing, I should imagine. Not if the report leaks out that she has been arrested or disappeared or held incommunicado. That’s the way they’d act themselves.’

‘Not the way we act in our great American democracy.’

‘They don’t believe in our great American democracy.’

They waited until Jeff returned. He looked at them and shook his head.

‘It figures,’ Ryder said. ‘Our poor little Bettina has no place left to go.’

They went back inside. She was sitting straight again, looking at them without expectation. Her brown eyes were dulled and there were tear stains on her cheeks. The men didn’t bother to sit down. She looked at Ryder.

‘I know who you are.’

‘You have the advantage over me. I’ve never seen you before in my life. We are going to take you into protective custody, that’s all.’

‘I know what that means. Protective custody. Spying, treason, a morals charge. Protective custody.’

Ryder caught her wrist, pulled her to her feet, and held her by the shoulders. ‘You’re in California, not Siberia. Protective custody means that we’re going to take you in and keep you safe and unharmed until this blows over. There will be no charges preferred against you because there are none to prefer. We promise that no harm will come to you, not now, nor later.’ He led her towards the door and opened it. ‘If you want to, you can go. Pack some things, take them to your car and drive off. But it’s cold out there and dark and you’ll be alone. You’re too young to be alone.’

She looked through the doorway, turned back, made a movement of the shoulders that could have been a shrug or a shiver and looked at Ryder uncertainly. He said: ‘We know of a safe place. We’ll send a policewoman with you, not a battle-axe to guard you but a young and pretty girl like yourself to keep you company.’ He nodded to Jeff. ‘I know my son here will take the greatest care, not to say pleasure, in picking out just the girl for you.’ Jeff grinned and it was probably his smile more than anything else that convinced her. ‘You will, of course, have an armed guard outside. Two or three days, no more. Just pack enough for that. Don’t be a dope; we just want to look after you.’

She smiled for the first time, nodded and left the room. Jeff grinned again. ‘I’ve often wondered how you managed to trap Susan, but now I’m beginning to –’

Ryder gave him a cold look. ‘Green’s all through here. Go and explain to him why.’

Jeff left, still smiling.

Healey, Bramwell and Schmidt had foregathered in Burnett’s sitting-room after dinner, excellent as was all the food in the Adlerheim. It had been a sombre meal, as most meals were, and the atmosphere had not been lightened by the absence of Susan who had been eating with her injured daughter. Carlton had not been there either, but this had hardly been remarked upon, because the deputy chief of security had become a highly unsociable creature – gloomy, withdrawn, almost secretive: it was widely assumed that he was brooding over his own defects and failures in the field of security. After a meal eaten quickly and in funereal silence all had left as soon as they decently could. And now Burnett was dispensing his post-prandial hospitality – in this case an excellent Martell – with his customary heavy hand.

‘Woman’s not normal,’ Burnett was speaking and, as usual, he wasn’t saying something, he was announcing it.

Bramwell said cautiously: ‘Which one?’

‘Which woman is?’ Burnett would have gone over big with the women’s lib. ‘But I was referring to Mrs Ryder, of course.’

Healey steepled judicious fingers. ‘Charming, I thought.’

‘Charming? To be sure, to be sure. Charming. Quite beautiful. But deranged.’ He waved a vague arm around. ‘All this, I suppose. Women can’t take it. Went along to see her after dinner, pay respects, commiserate with injured daughter, you know. Damn pretty young girl that. Lying there, all shot up.’ To listen to Burnett, one would have assumed that the patient had been riddled with machine-gun fire. ‘Well, I’m a pretty even-tempered fellow’ – he seemed to be genuinely unaware of his own reputation – ‘but I must say I rather lost my temper. Said that Morro was at worst a cold-blooded monster that should be destroyed, at best a raving lunatic that should be locked up. Would you believe it, she didn’t agree at all.’ He briefly contemplated the enormity of her error in character assessment, then shook his head at its being beyond normal comprehension. ‘Admitted that he should be brought to justice, but said he was kind, considerate and even thoughtful of others at times. An intelligent, I had thought highly intelligent, woman.’ Burnett shook his head again, whether in self-reproach at his own character assessment or because he was sadly figuring out what the rest of womankind might be like it was hard to say. He drank his brandy, clearly not savouring it at all. ‘I ask you, gentlemen. I simply ask you.’

‘He’s a maniac, all right. That I grant you.’ Bramwell was being cautious again. ‘But not amoral as a madman should be. If he really wanted an impressive debut for this atom bomb of his – assuming he has one, and none of us here doubts it – he’d detonate it without warning in the Wilshire Boulevard instead of with warning out in the desert.’

‘Balderdash. The extreme cunning of extreme madness. Wants to convince people that they’re dealing with a rational human being.’ Burnett examined his empty glass, rose and made for the bar. ‘Well, he’ll never convince me of that. I detest clichés but, gentlemen – mark my words.’

They marked his words in silence and were still sitting in silence when Morro and Dubois entered. He was either oblivious of or ignored the thunder on Burnett’s face, the gloom on that of the others.

‘I am sorry to disturb you, gentlemen, but the evenings are a bit dull here and I thought you might care to see something to titillate your scientific curiosity. I do not want to sound like a showman in a circus, but I’m sure you will be astonished – dumb-founded, I might almost say – by what Abraham and I are about to show you. Would you care to accompany me, gentlemen?’

Burnett wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to exercise his truculence. ‘And if we refuse?’

‘Your privilege. And I mean yours, Professor. I somehow think your colleagues might be quite interested, and would take great pleasure in telling you afterwards. Of course, you may all choose to refuse. I will bring no pressure to bear.’

Healey rose. ‘I was born nosey. Your food is excellent but the entertainment factor is zero. Nothing on the TV – not that there ever is much – except the precautions being taken to keep people away from the Yucca Flat tomorrow and the fearful speculation as to what the next threat is going to be and what is the motivation behind it all. What is the motivation, Morro?’

‘Later. Meantime, those of you who care –’

They all cared, even Burnett. Two white-robed acolytes were waiting in the passage. This didn’t worry the four physicists: there was nothing new in this, nor in the certain knowledge that they would be carrying their Ingrams in the folds of their robes. What was unusual was that one of them was carrying a tape-recorder. Burnett, as ever, was the first and principal objector.

‘What’s your devious mind planning on now, Morro? What’s the damned recorder for?’

Morro was patient. ‘To make a recording. I thought you might like to be the first to inform your fellow citizens of what I have here and, by implication, what’s in store for them. We will bring to an end what you, Dr Healey, call their “fearful speculations” and let them know the dreadful reality. Their fears, almost certainly, will be replaced by a mindless panic such as a people have never known before. But it is justifiable. It is justifiable because it will enable me to achieve what I wish – and, more importantly from your point of view, to achieve it without the loss of the lives of perhaps millions of people. That loss is just conceivable – if you refuse to co-operate.’

The quiet voice carried total conviction, but when a mind is confronted by the inconceivable it takes refuge in disbelief and non-acceptance.

‘You are quite, quite mad.’ For once Burnett was neither furious nor truculent but he carried as much conviction as Morro had done. ‘If we refuse to, as you say, co-operate? Torture? The threat to the women?’

‘Mrs Ryder will have told you that they are safe from me. You really can be tedious at times, Professor. No torture, except that of your own consciences, the thought that will haunt you as long as you may live – you could have saved countless lives but have chosen not to.’

Healey said: ‘What you are saying in effect is that while people might not believe you and take a chance that you are bluffing they would believe us and take no such chance.’

Morro smiled. ‘It wounds what passes for my amour propre but, yes, precisely.’

‘Let’s go and see just how mad he is.’

The lift was an extraordinary construction. Its floor measured about four feet by six but, in height, it must have been at least fourteen feet. The faces of the four physicists reflected their puzzlement. As the lift whined down Morro smiled again. ‘It is peculiar, I admit. You will understand the reason for its unique design in a very few moments.’

The lift stopped, the door opened and the eight men moved out into a large chamber about twenty feet square. The walls and roofs were as they had been when cut from the solid rock, the floor of smooth concrete. On one side were vertically stacked sheets of steel, whether hardened or stainless it was impossible to judge: on the other were unmistakable sheets of aluminium. For the rest, it was no more or less than a comprehensively-equipped machine shop, with lathes, machine presses, drills, guillotines, oxy-acetylene equipment and racks of gleaming tools. Morro waved a hand.

‘In an automobile plant, what you would call the “body shop”. Here we make the casings. I need say no more.’

Running along the length of the roof of the chamber was a heavy metal rail from which were suspended travelling chain blocks. This extended into the next compartment. Morro led the way in. There was a long table, again running the length of the chamber: a table fitted with circular metal clamps. On either side were racked storage compartments, wire-net fronted, both containing metal drums well separated at calculated intervals.

Morro didn’t even break stride. ‘Plutonium to the left, Uranium-235 to the right.’ He carried straight on to a smaller room. ‘The electrical shop, gentlemen. But that wouldn’t interest you.’ He kept on walking. ‘But this next room should fascinate you. Again in auto-manufacturing parlance, this is what you would call the “assembly shop”.’

Morro had made no mistake. The four physicists were, beyond question, fascinated as they had never been in their lives. But not in the details of the assembly shop. What caught and held fast their disbelieving and horrified attention was the rack bolted to the right-hand wall. More precisely, what the rack held. Clamped vertically, side by side, were ten twelve-feet-high cylinders, each four-and-a-half inches in diameter. They were painted in matt black with the exception of two red bands, each an inch thick, that circled the cylinders one third and two thirds the way up their height. At the further end of the row were two more sets of clamps which held nothing. Morro looked at each of the four physicists in turn. Each face held the same expression, a profound dismay coupled with a sick and shocked certainty. Morro’s face registered nothing – no humour, no triumph, no satisfaction, nothing. The silence dragged on for a seemingly interminable time, but then in circumstances sufficiently appalling a few seconds cannot be measured in the normally accepted units of time. In the accepted units of seconds, twenty had passed before Healey broke the silence. His face was grey, his voice husky as he broke from his thrall and turned to look at Morro.

‘This is a nightmare.’

‘This is no nightmare. From a nightmare you wake up. Not from this, for this is the dreadful reality. A waking nightmare, if you will.’

Burnett was as hoarse as Healey had been. ‘The Aunt Sally!’

Morro corrected him. ‘The Aunt Sallies. Ten of them. You, Professor, are an excellent designer of hydrogen weapons. Your brainchild in its final physical form. One could wish that you could have viewed it under happier circumstances.’

There was something very close to hate in Burnett’s eyes.

‘You, Morro, are an evil and vindictive bastard.’

‘You can save your breath. Professor, and for two reasons. Your statement is untrue for I derive no gloating pleasure from this; and, as you should know by now, I am impervious to insults.’

With a Herculean effort Burnett brought his temper and outrage under control, and regarded Morro with an expression of suspicious thought-fulness. He said slowly: ‘I have to admit they look like Aunt Sallies.’

‘You are suggesting something. Professor Burnett?’

‘Yes. I’m suggesting this is a hoax, a gigantic bluff. I’m suggesting that all this fancy machinery you have down here, the steel and aluminium sheets, the nuclear fuel, the electrical shop, this so-called assembly shop, is just window-dressing on an unprecedented scale. I suggest you are trying to trick my colleagues and myself into convincing the world at large that you really are in possession of those nuclear weapons, whereas in fact, they are only dummies. You could have those cylinders made in a hundred places in this State alone without arousing any suspicion But you couldn’t have the components, the very intricate and sophisticated components made without providing very complex and highly sophisticated plans, and that would have aroused suspicion. I’m afraid, Morro, that you are no engineer. To make those components here you would have required highly-skilled pattern-cutters, template-makers, turners and machinists. Such men are very hard to come by and are highly-paid professionals who most certainly would not jeopardize their careers by working for a criminal.’

Morro said: ‘Well spoken. Interesting but, if I may say so, merely amusing observations. You have quite finished?’

When Burnett made no reply Morro crossed to a large steel plate let into one wall and pressed a button by its side. The steel plate slid sideways with a muted whine to reveal a square wire-meshed door. Behind the mesh were seated six men, two watching TV, two reading and two playing cards. All six men looked towards the mesh door. Their faces were pale and gaunt and held expressions of what could be called neither hatred nor fear but were compounded of both.

‘Those may be the men you are looking for, Professor?’ Again there was neither satisfaction nor triumph in Morro’s voice. ‘One template-maker, one pattern-cutter, two lathe specialists, one machinist and one electrician, or perhaps I should say, a specialist in electronics.’ He looked at the six men and said: ‘Perhaps you would confirm that you are indeed the skilled practitioners of the arts that I have claimed you to be?’

The six men looked at him and said nothing, but their tightened lips and the loathing in their faces said it for them.

Morro shrugged. ‘Well, well. They do get like this occasionally – an irritating, if momentary, lack of co-operation. Or, to put it another way, they simply never learn.’ He crossed the chamber, entered a booth-like office and lifted a phone. His voice was inaudible to the watchers. He remained inside till a newcomer, a stranger to the physicists, entered the chamber. Morro met him and together they approached the waiting group.

‘This is Lopez,’ Morro said. Lopez was a short tubby man with an appropriately chubby face, a low hair-line, dark moustache and what appeared to be a permanently good-humoured smile. He nodded and kept on smiling as Morro made introductions but said nothing.

‘Lopez, I am just a little disappointed in you.’ Morro spoke severely but his smile matched Lopez’s own. ‘And to think I pay you such a handsome salary.’

‘I am desolate, Señor.’ If he was he didn’t look it; the smile remained firmly in place. ‘If you would let me know in what way I have fallen short –’

Morro nodded at the six men behind the mesh. Fear, not hatred, was now the dominant expression on their faces. Morro said: ‘They refuse to talk to me.’

Lopez sighed. ‘I do try to teach them manners, Señor Morro – but even Lopez is no magician.’ He pressed another button and the mesh gate slid open. He smiled with even greater good humour and beckoned. ‘Come, Peters. We’ll go to my room and have a little talk, will we?’

The man addressed as Peters said: ‘My name is John Peters and I am a lathe operator.’ There was no mistaking the abject terror in his face and his voice shook. The four physicists looked at one another with a dimly comprehending shock on their faces.

A second man said: ‘I am Conrad Bronowski. I am an electrician.’ And in a precisely similar fashion each of the other four in turn gave his name and occupation.

‘Thank you, gentlemen.’ Morro touched both buttons in succession and looked enquiringly at the four scientists as both gate and door closed. But they weren’t looking at him, they were staring at Lopez.

Schmidt said: ‘Who is this man?’

‘Lopez? Their guide and mentor. You could see how well they responded to his friendliness, his kindly good humour. Thank you, Lopez.’

‘My pleasure, Señor Morro.’

With considerable difficulty Burnett removed his eyes from Lopez and looked at Morro. ‘Those men in there. They – they look like men I have seen in a concentration camp. Forced labour. And this man – he is their guard, their torturer. I have never seen such fear in men’s faces.’

‘You are both unkind and unjust. Lopez has a deep concern for his fellow man. Those six men, I have to confess, are here under restraint but they will be –’

‘Kidnapped, you mean?’

‘As you will. But, as I was about to say, they will very shortly be returned unharmed to their families.’

‘You see?’ Burnett turned to his three colleagues. ‘Just as Mrs Ryder said. Kind, considerate and thoughtful of others. You’re a goddamned hypocrite.’

‘Sticks and stones, Professor Burnett, sticks and stones. Now, perhaps, we can get on with this recording?’

‘One minute.’ An expression of puzzlement had replaced the revulsion in Healey’s face. ‘Accepting that those men in there are what they claim they are or what this monster made them claim to be’ – Lopez continued to smile his genial smile: he was clearly as impervious to insults as Morro himself – ‘it’s still impossible that they could have assembled this mechanism without the guidance of a first-class nuclear physicist. Which leads me to believe that those men in there have simply been brain-washed into saying what they have just said.’

‘Astute,’ Morro said, ‘but only superficially so. If I just wanted six men to say what those six just have then I would surely have rehearsed six of my own men who would have required neither persuasion nor incarceration to play the parts. Not so, Dr Healey?’ Healey’s crestfallen expression showed that it was indeed so. Morro sighed resignedly. ‘Lopez, if you would be so kind as to remain in the office?’ Lopez smiled, this time as if in anticipation, and walked across to the booth from which Morrow had telephoned. Morro led the others to a second steel door, pressed a button to open it then another to open the cage gate behind.

The cell was dimly lit but bright enough to show an old man slumped in a tattered armchair, the only item of furniture there with the slightest semblance of comfort. He had frizzy white hair, a haggard and unbelievably lined face and wore shabby clothes that hung loosely on a frame as emaciated as the face. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be asleep. Were it not for the occasional twitching of thin blue-veined hands he could equally well have been dead.

Morro gestured towards the sleeping man. ‘Recognize him?’

The four men studied him without recognition, then Burnett said contemptuously: ‘This is your trump card? This your mastermind behind the alleged nuclear weapons? You forget, Morro, that I know every top-ranking nuclear physicist in the country. I’ve never seen this man before.’

‘People can change,’ Morro said mildly. He shook the old man by the shoulder until he started and opened his eyelids to reveal clouded and bloodshot eyes. With a hand under a thin arm, Morro persuaded him to his feet and urged him out into the brighter light of the assembly room. ‘Perhaps you recognize him now?’

‘What kind of try-on is this?’ Burnett peered closely and shook his head. ‘I repeat, I have never seen this man.’

Morro said: ‘It’s sad how one can forget old friends. You know him very well, Professor. Imagine if he were, say, seventy pounds heavier. Imagine if the lines had gone from his face and his hair was as black as it now is white. Think, Professor, think.’

Burnett thought. Suddenly his searching gaze changed to a stare, his face drained of expression just as his complexion drained of blood. He seized the old man by the shoulders.

‘Jesus Christ Almighty! Willi Aachen! Willi Aachen! What in God’s name have they done to you?’

‘My old friend Andy!’ The voice matched the appearance, a voice old and faint and quavering. ‘How good to see you again.’

‘What have they done to you?’

‘Well. You can see. Kidnapped.’ He shivered and tried to smile at the same time. ‘They persuaded me to work for them.’

Burnett flung himself on Morro but didn’t get within halfway. Dubois’s great hands closed on his upper arms from behind. Burnett was a powerful man and his fury gave him a momentarily berserker strength, but he had no more chance of freeing himself from that monstrous grip than the wasted and shrunken Aachen would have had.

‘It’s no use, Andy.’ Aachen sounded sad. ‘No use. We are powerless.’

Burnett stopped his futile struggling. Breathing heavily, he said for the third time: ‘What have they done to you? How? Who did it?’

Lopez, certainly in answer to some unseen signal from Morro, appeared at Aachen’s elbow. Aachen saw him and took an involuntary step backwards, flinging up an arm as if to protect a face suddenly contorted with fear. Morro, still holding him by the arm, smiled at Burnett.

‘How naïve, how childlike and unthinking even the highest intelligences can be. There are in existence, Professor Burnett, only two copies of plans for the Aunt Sally, drawn up by yourself and Professor Aachen, and those are in the vaults of the Atomic Energy Commission. You must know that they are still there, so I could have obtained those plans from only two men in America. They are both with me now. Do you understand?’

Burnett was still having difficulty with his breathing. ‘I know Professor Aachen. I know him better than anyone. No one could have made him work for you. No one! No one!’

Lopez broadened his ever-genial smile. ‘Perhaps, Señor Morro, if I had a friendly little chat in my room with Professor Burnett here. Ten minutes would suffice, I think.’

‘I agree. That should be sufficient to convince him that anyone on earth would work for me.’

‘Don’t, don’t, don’t!’ Aachen was close to hysteria. ‘For God’s sake, Andy, you’ve got to believe Morro.’ He looked in loathing at Lopez. ‘This monster knows more awful, more fiendish tortures than any sane man can conceive of. In the name of heaven, Andy, don’t be mad: this creature will break you as he broke me.’

‘I’m convinced.’ Healey had stepped forward and taken Burnett by the arm just as Dubois released his grip. He looked at Schmidt and Bramwell, then turned back to Burnett. ‘The three of us are convinced. Absolutely. What’s the point of being broken on the modern equivalent of the rack if it’s going to prove nothing? We have the proof. God’s sake, you couldn’t recognize an old friend you last saw ten weeks ago. Isn’t that proof? And those six zombie technicians. Isn’t that proof?’ He looked at Morro. ‘There could, of course, be a final proof. If those Aunt Sallies are for real you must have some way of triggering them off, and the only ways can be either by a time device or radio. It wouldn’t be the former, because then you would have committed yourself to an irrevocable decision, and I can’t see a man like you committing yourself to the irrevocable: so I assume you have elected for a controllable radio impulse.’

‘Well, well.’ Morro smiled. ‘This time you have not been just superficially obtuse. You are correct, of course. Follow me, gentlemen.’

He led the way to the small booth from which he had telephoned. Its inner wall held yet another steel door. There was no press button to open this: instead, alongside the door was a small brass panel, highly polished, measuring about ten inches by six. Morro placed his flat palm and fingers against it. The door slid smoothly open.

Inside was a tiny room, not more than six feet by six. On the wall opposite the door was a metal table which supported a simple radio transmitter, smaller than an attaché case, with calibrated dials and tuning knobs. On top of the case was a perspex-covered red button. Clamped to one side of the table was an eight-inch cylinder with a diameter about half that. At one end of the cylinder was a cranking handle: at the other end an insulated lead to a socket in one side of the transmitter. There were two other sockets close by that one. From one, a lead reached down to a lead-acid battery on the floor: the third socket was connected to a wall socket.

‘An almost childishly simple device, gentlemen,’ Morro said. ‘A perfectly ordinary radio transmitter, but one serving a most extraordinary purpose. It is programmed with a specific code on a pre-set wave-length. The chances of anyone duplicating both the wave-length and the code are so astronomically remote they can be said to be non-existent. We have, as you see, guarded against any chance of a power failure: we have mains, battery and the hand-cranked generator.’ He touched the perspex-covered red button on top. ‘To operate, one simply unscrews the plastic dome, turns the button through ninety degrees and presses.’ He ushered them out, laid his hand against the brass panel and watched the door slide close. ‘One cannot very well have buttons for this purpose. Some careless person might accidentally lean against them.’

Healey said: ‘Only your handprint can open that door?’

‘You didn’t imagine that plate was simply an elaborate press-button? Well, gentlemen, the recording.’

‘One last thing,’ Burnett said. He nodded towards the row of Aunt Sallies. ‘There are two empty sets of clamps there. Why?’

‘Well, now.’ Morro smiled his empty smile. ‘I thought you might ask me that.’

The four physicists sat round the table in Burnett’s room, contemplating both their brandies and the future with an understandably profound gloom.

‘Well, I said it, didn’t I?’ Burnett said heavily. ‘“Mark my words”, I said. Didn’t I say that?’

No one said whether he’d said it or not. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

‘Even that control room could have been part of a massive hoax.’ Schmidt was grasping at nonexistent straws.

No one said anything to that either, and for the same reason.

‘And to think that we said he wasn’t amoral as a madman should be,’ Burnett said. ‘That if he were really mad he’d set off his atomic bomb in the Wilshire Boulevard.’

No one had anything to say to that either. Burnett rose and said: ‘Back shortly, gentlemen.’

Peggy was still in bed but looked considerably better than she had done on her arrival at the Adlerheim. Her mother sat in an armchair to one side. Burnett had a brandy glass in his hand. He hadn’t brought his own with him; he’d gone straight behind Susan’s wet bar the moment he had arrived. He was still behind it, his elbows on the counter, bending an apocalyptic gaze upon his audience and addressing them in apocalyptic tones. Armageddon, it was clear, was at hand, and the dark angel was there to announce the fact.

‘You will not, ladies, doubt our unanimous conclusion that we are sitting atop enough nuclear explosive power to blast the biggest man-made crater of all time, enough to send us all into orbit – in a vaporized state, that is? The equivalent of thirty-five million tons of conventional explosive. It should cause quite a bang, don’t you think?’

It was a night for silences, for unanswered questions. Burnett’s doom-laden gaze homed in on Susan.

‘“Kindly, gentle, humane, considerate” – that’s what you said Morro was. He may very well go down in history as the most cold-blooded, calculating monster ever. Seven broken men down in the vaults there whom he has tortured – or has had tortured – beyond the breaking point of screaming agony. “Humane, considerate.”

‘And this kindly gentleman – where has he put the missing hydrogen bomb? It’s a rather scaled-down version of the Aunt Sally – a trifling one-and-a-half megatons, about seventy-five times as powerful as the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Released at a height of between ten and twenty thousand feet it could destroy half the population of Southern California. Those whom the blast didn’t get radiation and fire-storms would. But as this bomb is already in position it must be on or below ground level. The results will still be unimaginably dreadful. So, tell me, where do you think this gentle Christ-like figure placed this hydrogen device so that no harm will come to any of God’s children?’

He was still looking fixedly at Susan but she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t avoiding his gaze; her mind, like those of the others, was numbed with shock and incomprehension: she just wasn’t seeing anything.

‘So must I tell you?’

It was still a night for silences.

‘Los Angeles.’

CHAPTER NINE

On the following morning the absenteeism rate at work was the highest in the history of the State. The same almost certainly applied to the other States in the Union, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, through many of the civilized countries throughout the world, for the TV coverage of the projected – or threatened – atomic explosion in the Yucca Flat was being transmitted by satellite. Europe was hardly affected – though nonetheless concerned – for there the day’s work was all over and most Europeans were home for the evening.

But in California the absenteeism was almost total. Even the corporations running the public and utilities services, the transport system and police forces, had to operate with skeleton staffs. It could have been a great day for the criminals, particularly the robbers and burglars of California, were it not for the fact that they, too, had also stayed at home.

For reasons whether of prudence, sloth, the knowledge of the inaccessibility of the Yucca Flat or the at-hand convenience of their TV sets, not one Californian in ten thousand made his way to the explosion site that morning. Those who did make their way there – and there couldn’t have been over two thousand of them – were outnumbered by members of the military, the National Guard and police who found their task to keeping civilians at the mandatory five miles distance almost ridiculously easy.

Among the spectators present were most of the ranking scientists in the State, especially and understandably those who specialized in the nuclear and earthquake fields. Why, precisely, they were there was difficult to see, for the blast, shock and radiation effects of an eighteen-kiloton atomic device had been known with sufficient precision for over thirty years. Most of them, admittedly, had never seen an atomic explosion before, but the reason lay elsewhere. Blessed or cursed by that insatiable curiosity that had been the driving force or bane of scientists since recorded history, they just wanted to see where the bomb would go off. They too could, of course, have stayed at home: but your true scientist is in the field or he is nothing.

Among those who stayed at home were Major Dunne in his office and Sergeant Ryder at his house. Even by helicopter the round trip was over five hundred miles, and that, for Dunne, represented a waste of valuable investigative time: for Ryder it represented a waste of thinking time which he no longer regarded as being necessarily valuable but was better than not thinking at all. Jeff Ryder had originally wanted to go, but when coldly asked by his father how he hoped to help his family by spending what could be irreplaceable hours rubber-necking, he had readily agreed not to go, especially when Ryder had said that he wanted Jeff to help him. His father, Jeff thought, had a peculiar idea of what ‘helping’ meant for, as far as he could see, his parent was doing absolutely nothing. Jeff had been asked to type out every detail, however apparently insignificant, of the investigations that had been carried out till then, including, as far as possible, verbatim recollections of all conversations, and to this end he was employing his memory as best he could. From time to time he glanced resentfully at Ryder who appeared to be doing nothing other than leafing idly through the pile of earthquake literature he’d picked up from Professor Benson.

About ten minutes before ten Jeff switched on the TV. The screen showed a bluish-tinged stretch of extremely unprepossessing desert, so unattractive a spectacle that the commentator was trying – and making extremely heavy weather of it – to compensate by an intense and breathless account of what was taking place, a gallant and foredoomed effort as nothing whatsoever was taking place. He informed the watchers that the camera was stationed in Frenchman’s Flat at a distance of five miles south-west from the estimated point of explosion, as if anyone cared from what direction his camera was pointing. He said that as the device was almost certainly buried to a considerable depth there wasn’t expected to be much in the way of a fireball, which everyone had been reminded of for hours past. They were, he said, using a colour filter, which everyone who wasn’t colour-blind could readily see. Finally, he told them that the time was nine minutes to ten, as if he were the only person in California who owned a watch. He had, of course, to say something, but it was an extremely mundane run-up to something that might prove to be of lunatic significance. Jeff looked at his father in some exasperation: Ryder was certainly not looking and very probably not listening to anything that was going on. He was no longer leafing through the pages but was gazing, apparently unseeing, at one particular page. He laid down the literature and headed for the telephone.

Jeff said: ‘Dad, do you mind? There’s just thirty seconds to go.’

‘Ah!’ Ryder returned to his seat and gazed placidly at the screen.

The commentator was now speaking in that tense, breathless, near-hysterical voice which commonly afflicts race-track commentators when they endeavour to generate some spurious excitement towards the end of a race. In this particular instance the tone was quite misplaced: a calm relaxed voice would have been much more appropriate – the imminent event carried in itself all the excitement that could be generated. The commentator had now started a count-down, starting at thirty, the numbers decreasing as the dramatic impact of his voice decreased. The effect was rather spoilt because either his watch was wrong or Morro’s was. The device exploded fourteen seconds ahead of time.

To a people who had long become accustomed to seeing atomic explosions on the screen, whether at home or in the cinema, to a people who had become blasé about and bored with the spectacle of moon-rockets blasting off from Cape Canaveral, the visual effect of this latest demonstration of science’s resolute retrograde march was curiously – or perhaps not so curiously – anti-climactic. True, the fireball was considerably greater than predicted – the searing blue-white flash was of an intensity that caused many viewers to wince or even momentarily shut their eyes – but the column of smoke, fire and desert dust that streaked up into the blue Nevada sky, a blueness dramatically intensified by the camera filters, culminating in the mushrooming of the deadly radio-active cloud, faithfully followed the accustomed scenario. To the inhabitants of the central Amazon basin such a titanic convulsion would presumably have heralded the end of the world: to the more sophisticated peoples of the world it was passé, old hat, and had it occurred on some remote Pacific atoll the great majority of people wouldn’t even have bothered to watch it.

But it hadn’t happened on any remote Pacific atoll, nor had it been Morro’s purpose to provide the Californians with a diversionary spectacle to relieve the ennui of their daily lives. It had been intended, instead, to provide them with a chilling warning, an ominous threat, all the more frightening because unspecified, of impending evil, of some unimagined disaster that would strike at the whim of whoever had planted and triggered the atomic device: on a more mundane level it was intended to show that here was a man who meant what he said, who was not just there to play around and who had both the desire and ability to carry out whatever he had threatened. Had that been Morro’s intention – and there obviously had been none other – then he had succeeded to a degree which perhaps even he had not realized was possible. He had struck fear into the heart of the great majority of rational Californians, and from that time on there was practically only one topic of conversation in the State: when and where this unpredictable madman would strike again and what in the name of all that was holy – it wasn’t expressed in quite that way – were his motivations. This topic, to be precise, was to last for only ninety minutes: then they were to be given something definite and concrete about which to worry or, more accurately, to reduce that part of California most directly concerned to a state of not unreasoning terror that was swiftly to shade off into panic.

Ryder rose. ‘Well, we never doubted that he was a man of his word. Aren’t you glad you didn’t waste your time going up to see that side-show? For that’s all it was. Ah, well, it should at least keep people’s minds off taxes and the latest shenanigans in Washington for a little.’

Jeff didn’t answer. It was doubtful if he’d even heard. He was still looking at the ever-expanding mushroom over the Nevada desert, still listening to the suitably awe-stricken voice of the commentator describing in great and wholly unnecessary detail what anyone with half an eye could see perfectly well for himself. Ryder shook his head and picked up the telephone. Dunne answered.

Ryder said: ‘Anything? You know this line is bugged.’

‘Something’s coming in.’

‘Interpol?’

‘Something’s coming in.’

‘How long?’

‘Half an hour.’

He hung up, called Parker, arranged to have them meet in Dunne’s office in half an hour, hung up, sat, briefly ruminated on the fact that both Dunne and Parker had taken the reality of Morro’s threat so much for granted that neither of them had thought fit to comment on it, then resumed his reading. Fully five minutes passed before Jeff switched off the TV, glanced with some irritation at his father, sat down at his table, typed a few words and said acidly: ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

‘Not at all. How many pages have you got down?’

‘Six.’

Ryder stretched out his hand and took them. ‘We’re leaving in fifteen minutes to see Dunne. Something’s come up – or is coming up.’

‘What?’

‘You have forgotten, perhaps, that one of Morro’s henchmen is wearing a headset tied in to our phone?’

A chagrined Jeff resumed his typing while Ryder began a placid reading of Jeff’s notes.

A much refreshed Dunne, who had obviously a good night’s rest behind him, was waiting with Delage and Leroy when Ryder, Jeff and Parker arrived. Delage and Leroy were looking a good deal less rested: the assumption was that they did not have a good night’s rest behind them. Dunne confirmed this, nodding at Delage and Leroy.

‘A couple of devoted agents who think their boss is past it. Quite right too.’ He tapped a sheaf of papers in front of him. ‘Up all night – the devoted agents, I mean – collecting snippets of this and that. Some possibly useful information, some dead ends. What did you think of friend Morro’s demonstration?’

‘Impressive. What do you have?’

Dunne sighed. ‘The niceties of salon conversation, Sergeant Ryder, are not for all. Report from Daimler, remember him?’

‘Security chief in the AEC reactor plant in Illinois?’

‘Yes. Nothing wrong with your memory.’

‘Even less with Jeff’s. I’ve just been reading some notes he typed out. Well?’

‘He says that Carlton did associate with some far-out group. As I said, we preferred to have one of our boys do the direct legwork. Interviewed Carlton’s landlady’s son. He wasn’t very forthcoming – he’d only attended two or three meetings then gave it up. Couldn’t stand the mumbo-jumbo, he said.’

‘What were they called?’

‘The Damascene Disciples. Nothing known of them. Never registered as a church or religious organization. Disbanded after six months.’

‘They had a religion? I mean, they preached, they had a message?’

‘They didn’t preach. They had a message, all right. They advocated the eternal damnation of all Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists – in fact, as far as I can make out, everybody who wasn’t a Damascene.’

‘Nothing original about that. Were the Muslims on their list, do you know?’

Dunne looked at a list. ‘Oddly enough, no. Why?’

‘Curiosity. Could this landlady’s son recognize any of them?’

‘That would have been difficult. The Damascenes wore cloaks, masks, and those pixie witches’ hats affected by the Ku-Klux Klan. Only this lot were dressed in black.’

‘Something in common, all the same – as I recall it the Ku-Klux Klan weren’t all that devoted to Jews, Catholics and negroes. Anyway, no possible means of identification?’

‘None. Except that this lad told our agent that one of them was the biggest man he had ever seen, a giant, maybe six-eight, and shoulders like a cart-horse.’

‘This person didn’t note anything peculiar about any of their voices?’

‘This person, according to our agent, just escaped being classified as a moron.’

‘But Carlton was no moron. Interesting, isn’t it? What word about Morro?’

‘Well, his accent. We’ve now had reports from – what shall we call them? – linguistic experts throughout the State. Thirty-eight so far, and more coming in every minute. All of them willing to stake their reputations etc., etc. Point is, no less than twenty-eight plump for a south-east Asian origin.’

‘Do they, indeed? Any attempt to pin-point the exact source?’

‘That’s as far as they will go.’

‘Again, still interesting. Interpol?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You have a list of all the places they’ve contacted?’ Dunne looked at Leroy, who nodded. ‘The Philippines, for instance?’

Leroy consulted a list. ‘No.’

‘Try Manila. Ask them to try around the Cotabato area in Mindanao.’

‘The what in what?’

‘Mindanao is the large southern island in the Philippines. Cotabato is a seaside town. Manila may not be too interested in what goes on in Cotabato – it’s at least five hundred and fifty miles away as the crow flies, maybe a thousand by road and ferry. Try, anyway.’

‘I see.’ Dunne paused. ‘You know something that we don’t know?’

‘No. Chances are I’m making a complete fool of myself, just a wild guess based upon ludicrous improbability and I’d rather not make an utter clown of myself. LeWinter?’

‘Two things. The first one is extraordinarily odd. You will recall that in his telephone notebook he’d listed the numbers of all kinds of people with whom – outside his court cases, of course – LeWinter would not be expected to be on either social or professional terms. Engineers, drillers, oil-rig men. There were forty-four of those in all. Barrow, for reasons best known to himself – he’s almost as close-mouthed as you – assigned a federal agent to interview each and every one of them.’

‘Forty-four. That’s a lot of FBI agents.’

Dunne was patient. ‘There are approximately eight thousand FBI men in the States. If Barrow cares to allocate one half of one per cent of his men to a particular case, that’s his privilege. He could allocate four hundred and forty if he wanted. Point is, twenty-six of those agents came up with the same puzzling – I’d call it astonishing – discovery: twenty-six of the men being investigated are missing. Wives, children, relatives, friends – none of them has any idea where they might be, none was given the slightest indication of their intention to depart. What do you make of that?’

‘Well, that’s interesting too.’

‘Interesting, interesting, interesting. Is that all you can say?’

‘Well, as you say, it’s extremely odd.’

‘Look, Ryder, if you have any idea, if you’re holding anything back –’

‘Obstructing the course of justice, you mean?’

‘Just that.’

‘I thought I might be a complete fool, Dunne. Now I know you are.’ There was a silence, not long but extremely uncomfortable. ‘Sure, I’m obstructing the course of justice. How many of your family is Morro holding hostage?’ Another silence. ‘I’m going to talk to our friend LeWinter. Rather, he’s going to talk to me. It’s as obvious as the hand before your face that he’s supplied Morro with that list and that Morro has either had them suborned or taken by force. Your twenty-six agents might be profitably engaged on checking on the criminal backgrounds, if any, of those twenty-six men. LeWinter will talk. Sure as God he’ll talk.’

The quietly-spoken, cold ferocity in Ryder’s voice had a chilling effect on everyone in the room. Jeff licked his lips and looked at a man he’d never seen before. Parker regarded the ceiling. Delage and Leroy looked at Dunne. Dunne looked at the hand before his face and used the back of it to smooth his brow.

Dunne said: ‘Maybe I’m not myself. Maybe we’re not any of us ourselves. The apologies go without saying. Next you’ll be accusing us of being a bunch of lily-livered incompetents. But, hell, Sergeant, there’s a limit to how far you can step outside the law. Sure he has a list which included the twenty-six men who have disappeared. A dozen others may have similar lists and all for innocuous purposes. You’re proceeding on the basis of assumptions. There isn’t a shred of evidence, direct or otherwise, to link LeWinter and Morro.’

‘I don’t need evidence.’

Once again Dunne used the back of his hand. ‘You have just said, in the presence of three Government officers, that you’re prepared to use torture to obtain your information.’

‘Who said anything about torture? It’ll look like a heart attack. You said you had two things to tell me about LeWinter. Well, that’s one.’

‘Jesus!’ Dunne wasn’t smoothing his brow now; he was mopping it. ‘Delage, you have the information. Me, I need time to think.’

‘Yes. Well.’ Delage didn’t look any happier than his superior. ‘Miss Ivanhoe, if that’s her name, well, LeWinter’s secretary, has talked. There’s a Geneva connection all right. It all sounds very much like something out of science fiction, but if it’s even half-way true then it’s frightening enough. It must be if most of the nations of the world – major ones, that is, thirty to be precise – sit down at a disarmament conference in Geneva and talk about it.’

‘I have all morning,’ Ryder said.

‘Sorry. Well, the lady talked and it didn’t seem to make much sense so we contacted ERDA with the result that one of Dr Durrer’s senior assistants was called in, shown what Miss Ivanhoe said, and had no trouble at all in making sense of it. He’s an expert on the subject.’

‘I haven’t got the afternoon as well.’

‘Give me a break, will you? He wrote a condensed report. This is what he has to say.’

‘Classified?’

‘Declassified. It’s a bit formal, but here it is. He says: “It has long been accepted that any nuclear war, even on a limited scale, would cause megadeaths.” He puts in brackets, millions of deaths. “The US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that megadeaths could arise from another agency which did not directly involve nuclear war. A large number of nuclear explosions, almost certainly in the megaton range, could damage the layer of ozone that shields the earth from the sun’s lethal ultra-violet radiation.

‘“Most people are under the impression that ozone is what they sniff at the seaside. Ozone is an allotropic condition of oxygen, having three atoms instead of the normal two, and can be smelled at the seaside by the electrolysis of water and also after the discharge of electricity through the air, as occurs in a thunderstorm. But ozone in its natural state occurs almost solely in the lower stratosphere at an altitude between ten and thirty miles.

‘“The intense heat given off by a nuclear explosion causes the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere to combine. Those form oxides of nitrogen which would be borne upwards in the atomic cloud. Those would react with the ozone layer and by a well-understood chemical reaction convert the three atoms of ozone into two, that is, normal oxygen which offers zero protection against ultra-violet radiation. This would effectively blow a hole in the ozone layer and would expose the earth underneath the hole to the direct effects of the sun.

‘“Two effects remain unclear. The first of those –”’

Delage broke off as a telephone rang. Leroy picked it up, listened in silence, thanked the caller and hung up. He said: ‘I don’t know why I thanked him for that call. From the local TV station. It seems that Morro wants to strike while the iron is hot. He has another statement to make. At eleven o’clock. That’s in eight minutes’ time. It will be carried on every TV and radio station in the State. For the rest of the States, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ Dunne said. ‘A morning to remember. I wonder why it wasn’t cleared with the FBI first – we would have heard, wouldn’t we?’

Ryder said: ‘You blame them? After what the FBI did to stop the atomic blast in Nevada this morning? This is a matter for national concern now, not just for the FBI. Since when have you had the power to impose martial law? Their attitude, and probably the attitude of every citizen in the country, is that the FBI can go take a jump.’ He looked at Delage. ‘The first “unclear effect”?’

‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard, Ryder.’ Dunne undoubtedly meant what he said.

Delage looked unhappily at Dunne, but Dunne had his head in his hands. Delage returned to his notes.

‘“We just don’t know what will happen. The consequences might be small, they might be catastrophic. We might just all end up becoming very heavily suntanned: or the ultraviolet could conceivably destroy all human, animal and plant life. Subterranean and aquatic life might survive any conditions. We have no means of knowing.”’ Delage looked up. ‘He is a cheery lad, isn’t he?’

‘Let’s fall about afterwards,’ Ryder said. ‘Let’s have the second unclear effect.’

‘Well. He says: “It is not known whether this hole in the stratosphere would remain localized and keep pace with the rotation of the earth; worse, it is not known whether or not this hole can spread through the rest of the ozone layer. Chemical reactions at that level in the stratosphere are unknown and wholly unpredictable: there might well exist a form of breeder reaction, in which case large areas of the earth could be devastated.

‘“The possibility must be taken into account that some nation may already have experimented in some remote and uninhabitated region –”’

Parker said: ‘Siberia?’

‘He doesn’t say. He goes on: “It may have been established that such a hole can be blown through the ozone layer and has been found to be stable as to both location and extent. This, however, is pure conjecture.

‘“This introduces the Geneva connection. As long ago as September third of nineteen-seventy-six the thirty-nation disarmament conference there sent a draft treaty banning modification of the environment for military purposes to the United Nations General Assembly. The matter, not unexpectedly, is still under UNO’s consideration.

‘“The treaty is designed, in the words of the communiqué, to prevent artificial induction by the military of such phenomena as earthquakes –”’

‘Earthquakes!’ Ryder seemed jolted.

‘Yes, earthquakes. He goes on: ‘Tidal waves –’

‘Tidal waves?’ It was almost as if Ryder was beginning to comprehend something.

‘That’s what it says here. There’s some more: “ecological imbalance, alteration of weather and climate and changes in ocean currents, in the state of the ozone layer and the ionosphere, that is, the Appleton and Kennelly-Heaviside layers.” Then he goes on to say that the United States delegate at Geneva, one Mr Joseph Martin, believed that it would be a treaty amounting to a very strong practical inhibition against the hostile use of environmental modification techniques. He further comments that Mr Martin appears to have forgotten or ignored the fact that the only effect of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks was to encourage the Russians, in the sacred name of détente, to embark on a new and massive programme of building a bigger and better generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles.’ Delage appeared to run his eye down the page. ‘He does run on a bit more, but I’m afraid his scientific detachment gives way to a certain irony and bitterness. I would say that’s about all: Miss Ivanhoe’s rather vague ramblings in a coherent form.’

‘Switch on that TV,’ Dunne said. ‘A minute or so. Your sixty-seconds’-worth of observations, Sergeant Ryder?’

‘Poppycock. Or if you want it in plain language –’

‘That’s plain enough. No Reds under the bed?’ Dunne had a very disbelieving right eyebrow.

‘I didn’t say that. Neither do I say I disbelieve this story – theory, if you like – about blowing a hole through the ozone layer. I’m no scientist. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe in its relevance in those circumstances. Russian secret codes.’ On the rare occasions that Ryder expressed contempt he came across very strongly. ‘You think the Russians anyone – would use a young innocent, a marsh-mallow guaranteed to crack under the pressure of a fingertip, to decode a message or supposed secret that’s been in the public domain for two years? The idea’s preposterous.’

‘Laying a false scent, you would think?’

‘Yes. No.’

‘You’ve forgotten “perhaps”.’

‘“Perhaps” is what I mean. Morro’s intention may lie elsewhere. On the other hand, it may not. Maybe he thinks the idea’s so ridiculous that we’ll dismiss it out of hand and go ahead and use that idea. Or not. Maybe the Russians are involved. Again, or not. It’s the old story. Three ranchers are chasing a rustler who’s disappeared up a canyon. Half-way up this canyon there’s a branch canyon. Rancher A figures the rustler has gone hell for leather for the end of the canyon. Rancher B thinks he’s smarter than A and that the rustler, figuring that’s the way his pursuers will think, has taken the branch. C reckons that he’s smarter than both A and B, that the rustler will figure what B has figured and go to the end. No end to how long we could keep on outsmarting ourselves.’

He paused. ‘There could, of course, be a second branch canyon that we know nothing about. Just as we know nothing about the first.’

‘It’s a rare privilege,’ Dunne said, ‘to see a detective’s mind at work.’

Ryder might not have heard him. ‘Another interesting thing. This expert from ERDA. A nuclear physicist, I assume. About blasting a hole through the ozone layer. If the Russians – or whoever – had carried out any such experiments with God knows how many hydrogen bombs we or one of our allies would have been bound to know of it. It would have made headlines – big, big headlines – throughout the world. But there haven’t been any. Have there?’

No one said whether there had or hadn’t.

‘Well, so no experiments. Maybe the Russians – or again, whoever – are as scared of the outcome as we are. Maybe there never will be a nuclear war fought on land. Some people say it will be in space. Our friend in ERDA suggests – what did he say? – subterranean or aquatic use of nuclear devices. How do we fancy getting our feet wet?’

‘A rush on the stores for fishermen’s waders?’ Dunne turned towards the TV. I’m sure our friend Morro is about to enlighten us on that one.’

The newscaster, this time, was a much older man, which boded ill in itself. What boded worse was that he was dressed for a funeral in a suit of sombre hue, a colour in which the normal Califomian newscaster would not normally have been found dead. What boded worse still was the Doomsday expression customarily reserved for those occasions when the local gridiron heroes had been crushingly defeated by some out-of-State upstarts. The tone of voice accorded well with both clothes and expression.

‘We have received another communication from this criminal Morro.’ The newscaster clearly held in contempt the fundamental tenet of Anglo-Saxon law that a man is presumed innocent until found guilty.

‘It contains a dire warning, an unprecedently grave threat to the citizens of California and one that cannot be taken lightly in view of what occurred this morning in Yucca Flat. I have with me in the studio a panel of experts who will later explain the implications of this threat. But first, Morro.’

‘Good evening. This is a pre-recorded message.’ As before, the voice was calm and relaxed: he could have been discussing some minor change in the Dow Jones index. ‘It is pre-recorded because I am completely confident of the outcome of my little experiment in Yucca Flat. By the time you hear those words you will know that my confidence has not been misplaced.

‘This little demonstration of my nuclear resources inconvenienced nobody and hurt nobody. The next demonstration will be on a vastly larger scale, may well inconvenience millions and may well prove disastrous for an untold number of people if they are so stupid as to fail to appreciate the gravity of this warning. However, I am sure you would first like scientific confirmation, on the highest level, that I do have the means to hand. Professor Burnett?’

‘He’s got the means, all right, the blackhearted bastard.’ For a man of unquestionably brilliant intellect Burnett was singularly lacking in resource when it came to the selection of suitable epithets. ‘I hate to use the word “beg” in the presence of a monstrous lunatic but I do beg you to believe me that he has the resources he claims. Of that my fellow physicists and I are in no doubt. He has no fewer than eleven hydrogen nuclear devices here, any one of which could, say, turn Southern California into a desert as lifeless as Death Valley. They are in the three-and-a-half megaton range – that is, each has the explosive potential of three-and-a-half million tons of TNT. You will appreciate the significance of what I mean when I say this bomb is about two hundred times as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima. And he has eleven of those monsters.

‘Correction. He has only ten here. The other is already in position. Where this crazy bastard intends to put it –’

Morro interrupted. ‘Revealing the location of the weapon is a privilege I reserve for myself. Dr Schmidt, Dr Healey, Dr Bramwell, perhaps you would be so kind as to confirm your colleague’s statement.’ With varying degrees of forcefulness, gravity and outrage all three left listeners in no doubt as to the chilling genuineness of the threat. When Bramwell had finished Morro said: ‘And now, the most telling confirmation of all, that of Professor Aachen, probably the country’s leading nuclear weaponry physicist, who personally supervised every step in the building of the bombs. Professor Aachen, you may recall, vanished some seven weeks ago. He has been working with me ever since.’

‘Working with you? Working with you?’ Aachen’s voice held the high quavering note of senility. ‘You monster! You – you – I would never work with you –’ He broke into a weak sobbing and there was a brief silence.

‘He’s been tortured!’ Burnett’s voice was a shout. ‘Tortured, I tell you. He and six kidnapped technicians have been subjected to the most unspeakable –’ His voice broke off in a peculiar gasp which sounded as if he was being strangled, which he probably was.

‘How you do run on, Professor Burnett.’ Morro’s tone was resigned. ‘Well, Professor Aachen. About the viability of those bombs?’

‘They will work.’ The voice was low and still shaking.

‘How do you know?’

‘I built them.’ Aachen sounded desperately weary. ‘There are half a dozen nuclear physicists – if I were to give the design characteristics –’

‘That will not be necessary.’ There was a brief silence then Morro went on: ‘Well, that’s it. All the confirmation that any but the most mentally retarded should ever require. One small correction. Although the ten bombs remaining here are all of the three-and-a-half megaton range the one already placed in position is only of the one-and-a-half megaton range because, frankly, I am uncertain of the effect of a three-and-a-half megaton bomb which may unleash forces I do not wish unleashed – not, that is, as yet.’ Here he paused.

Dunne said with conviction: ‘He’s quite crazy.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Ryder said. ‘One thing, he’d have made one hell of an actor. Pause for effect. Timing.’

Morro said: ‘This bomb, a mere twenty inches by forty inches – it would fit into a car trunk – lies on the floor of the Pacific, off Los Angeles, roughly on the outskirts of Santa Monica Bay. When it is detonated, the resultant tsunamai – tidal wave – will, it is calculated, be between fifteen and twenty feet high, although it may well reach twice this height when being funnelled through the east-west streets of Los Angeles. The effects will be felt at least as far north as Point Arguello and as far south as San Diego. Residents in the Channel Islands – particularly, I should mention, Santa Catalina – should seek high ground. One unknown, I am afraid, is that it might trigger off the Newport-Inglewood Fault, but then I would expect that area of the city to be evacuated anyway.

‘I need hardly warn against any foolish attempts to locate this device. The device can be detonated at any time and will be if any attempt is made to interfere with it and if this should occur before any attempt is made to evacuate the area the results could not fail to be catastrophic. What I am saying is that any person or persons responsible for sending any aircraft or ships to investigate the area roughly between Santa Cruz Island and Santa Catalina will be directly responsible for the deaths of countless thousands.

‘I have certain demands to make which will be announced at one p.m. If they are not met by midnight I will trigger the hydrogen bomb at ten a.m. tomorrow morning. If, after that, the demands are still not met, the next bombs – not bomb but all the remaining bombs – will go off at some time between dusk and dawn on Saturday night.’

On this cheerful note Morro ended his message. The newscaster made to introduce his panel of experts but Dunne switched off the set with the observation that if Morro was uncertain as to the effects of the explosion then it was unlikely that the so-called experts had a clue. ‘Well, Ryder, consider yourself a prophet with honour. Inspired. We get our feet wet. Believe him?’

‘Sure. Don’t you?’

‘Yes. What to do?’

‘That’s a matter for the authorities whoever they might be. Me, I take to the hills.’

Delage said: ‘I simply don’t believe it.’

‘Bully for you,’ Dunne said. ‘The spirit that won the West. Tell you what. Leave me the details of your next of kin and stroll along the sea-front at Long Beach tomorrow. Better still, take a deck-chair on the Santa Catalina ferry.’ He bent a cold glance on the unfortunate Delage, then turned to Ryder. ‘You would say the Los Angelinos are going to be rather pre-occupied for the rest of the day?’

‘Look on the bright side. The greatest break ever for the most neurotic city ever. The perfect excuse for giving full and public rein to all those hidden phobias and neuroses. The pharmaceutical shops should be doing a roaring trade for the rest of the day.’

Parker said: ‘He clearly doesn’t expect this second warning to be sufficient, or he wouldn’t have all those back-up bombs. Jesus, his demands must be sky-high.’

‘And we don’t know what those demands are yet.’ Dunne sighed. ‘Two hours yet. Evil bastard. He certainly knows how to turn down the screw on psychological tension.’ He thought briefly. ‘I wonder why he didn’t erase those references to torture. Rather spoils his image, no?’

‘Did you believe it?’ Ryder said. Dunne nodded. ‘That’s it then. That was no act; that was for real. Conviction. Authenticity. What interests me more is that Morro may be growing careless, or that he may be so sure of himself that he’s talking too much. Why did he forbid Aachen to give any specifications about the bombs and then gratuitously inform us that it was about twenty by forty inches or something of the kind? It was not in character. He’s an economical speaker, and that was unnecessary. If Aachen had given us details they would have been accurate. Granted, Morro didn’t give us any specifications but I have a faint suspicion that the measurements given were inaccurate. If they were, why should he want to mislead us?’

‘I don’t follow,’ Dunne said. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘I wish I knew. It would be instructive to find out what kind of bombs Aachen was in the habit of designing. I mean, if he didn’t know about the design how could he supervise the construction? I wonder if you could find out.’

I’ll phone the director and try. I wouldn’t have much hope. That would be top secret and there are some people with whom the FBI have very limited power of investigation. The Atomic Energy Commission is one of those.’

‘Even in a national emergency?’

‘I said I’ll try.’

‘And can you find out anything about Sheriff Hartman’s background? Not police records. We can be sure that either LeWinter or Donahure or both had a hand in his installation in which case his records are bound to be faked. His true background.’

‘We’re ahead of you, Sergeant. It’s in hand.’

‘Well, thanks. In view of what we’ve just heard what do you feel now about my intentions of going to trample all over LeWinter’s civic rights?’

‘LeWinter? Who’s LeWinter?’

‘Just so,’ Ryder said and left followed by Parker and Jeff.

They stopped off at the Examiner building. Ryder went inside, spoke briefly to Aaron, the editor, and emerged within two minutes, a buff envelope in his hand. Inside the car he extracted a photograph and showed it to Parker and Jeff. Parker studied it with interest.

‘Beauty and the Beast? April and December? How much do you think the Globe would give us for this masterpiece?’

LeWinter was at home and had the look of a man who didn’t intend to leave it. If he was informed by the spirit of joie de vivre and goodwill towards his fellow man he was concealing it well. In fact he made no attempt to conceal his displeasure as the three policemen bustled him into his own luxurious lounge. Parker did the talking.

‘We’re from Central. We’d like to ask you a few questions.’

‘I’m a judge.’ The cold dignity came off in neither tone nor expression. ‘Where’s your warrant?’

‘You were a judge. “Were” or “are”, you’re stupid. For questions, no warrant. Which leads me rather neatly into the first question. Why did you provide Donahure with signed blank search warrants? Don’t you know that’s illegal? You, a judge? Or do you deny it?’

‘Most certainly I deny it.’

‘That was a foolish thing for a supposedly learned judge to say. Do you think we would make such an accusation unless we could substantiate it? We have them. You can see them down at the station. Well, that’s for starters. We’ve established you’re a liar. Henceforth, every statement you make will automatically be disbelieved unless we have independent corroboration. Still deny it?’

LeWinter said nothing. Parker had an excellent line in intimidation and demoralization.

Parker went on: ‘We found them in his safe. We searched his house.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘You’re no longer a judge. He’s under arrest.’

LeWinter forgot he was no longer a judge. ‘On what grounds?’

‘Bribery and corruption. You know, blackmail, taking dirty money and dishing it out to dishonest cops. Kept most of it for himself, though.’ He looked reproachfully at LeWinter. ‘You should have taught him the basic tricks of the trade.’

‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘How to stash away illegal money. Did you know he had half a million in eight accounts? He should have been sophisticated, shouldn’t he? The clown stashed it away in local accounts. Switzerland’s the place. Your numbered account in Zurich. We have it. Bank’s been co-operative.’

LeWinter’s attempted look of outrage fell just short of the pathetic. ‘If you’re insinuating that I, a senior judge of the State of California, have been involved in any illegal financial transactions –’

‘Shut up and save it for a real judge. We’re not insinuating. We know. And perhaps you would care to explain how come that ten thousand dollars found in Donahure’s possession had your prints all over them?’

LeWinter didn’t care to explain. His eyes were moving restlessly from side to side but it couldn’t have been because of any thought of escape in his mind: he could not bear himself to meet the three pairs of coldly accusing eyes.

Parker had LeWinter on the hook and had no intention of letting him get off it. ‘Not that that’s the only thing that Donahure’s been charged with. Oh, no. Unfortunately for you. He also faces a rap and certain conviction for attempted murder and murder, witnesses and confession respectively. On the murder rap you will be charged as an accessory.’

‘Murder? Murder!’ In the course of his legal practice LeWinter must have heard the word a thousand times, but it was long odds that it had ever affected him as it did now.

‘You’re a friend of Sheriff Hartman, aren’t you?’

‘Hartman?’ LeWinter was caring less and less for the line the conversation was taking.

‘So he says. After all, you do have an alarm connected from your safe to his office.’

‘Ah! Hartman.’

‘Ah, as you say, Hartman. Seen him recently?’

LeWinter had actually started wetting his lips, that indication of corrosive anxiety to which he had succeeded in reducing hundreds of suspects over the years. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘But you can remember what he looked like, I hope. You’d never recognize him now. Honestly. Back of his head blown off. Downright uncivil of you to have your friend’s head blown off.’

‘You’re mad. You’re crazy.’ Even the most newly qualified intern would have disapproved of LeWinter’s peculiar complexion which had acquired all the healthy vitality of a corpse. ‘You’ve no proof.’

‘Don’t be so original. No proof. That’s what they all say when they’re guilty. Where’s your secretary?’

‘What secretary?’ The latest switch in attack seemed to have a momentarily paralysing effect on his thought processes.

‘God help us.’ Parker lifted his eyes upwards in temporary supplication. ‘Rather, God help you. Bettina Ivanhoe. Where is she?’

‘Excuse me.’ LeWinter went to a cupboard, poured himself some bourbon and drank it in one gulp. It didn’t seem to do him any good.

Parker said: ‘You may have needed that but that wasn’t why you took it. Time to think, isn’t that it? Where is she?’

‘Gave her the day off.’

‘Whisky didn’t help. Wrong answer. When did you speak to her?’

‘This morning.’

‘Another lie. She’s been in custody since last night, assisting police with their enquiries. So you didn’t give her a day off,’ Parker was quite without pity. ‘But it seems you gave yourself a day off. Why aren’t you down in the courts dispensing justice in your usual even-handed fashion?’

‘I’m not well.’ His appearance bore him out. Jeff looked at his father to see if he would stop the ruthless interrogation but Ryder was regarding LeWinter with what appeared to be an expression of profound indifference.

‘Not well? Compared to the way you’re going to feel very soon – when you’re in your court being tried for murder – you’re in blooming health. You’re at home because one of your criminal accomplices, masters more like, called you from Bakersfield and told you to lie low. Tell me, how well do you know Miss Ivanhoe? You know, of course, that her proper name is Ivanov?’

LeWinter had further recourse to his liquor cupboard. He said wearily, almost despairingly: ‘How long is this – this inquisition to go on?’

‘Not long. If you tell the truth, that is. I asked a question.’

‘How well – she’s my secretary. That’s enough.’

‘No more than that?’

‘Of course not.’

Ryder stepped forward and showed LeWinter the photograph he’d collected from the Examiner office. LeWinter stared at it as if hypnotized, then got back to his lip-licking.

‘A nice kid.’ Ryder was being conversational. ‘Blackmail, of course. She’s told us. Not with this end in view – this is just a spin-off. Principally, as we know, she came in handy for the translation of phony Russian documents.’

‘Phony?’

‘Ah! So the documents do exist. I wonder why Morro wanted you to provide him with the names of engineers, drillers, oil-rig men. Even more, I wonder why twenty-six of them are missing.’

‘God knows what you’re talking about.’

‘And you. Watch TV this morning?’ LeWinter shook his head in a dazed and uncomprehending manner. ‘So perhaps you don’t know he’s detonating a hydrogen bomb in Santa Monica Bay or thereabouts at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’ LeWinter made no reply and registered no expression, no doubt because he’d no expressions left to register. ‘For an eminent judge you do keep odd company, LeWinter.’

It was a measure of LeWinter’s mental distress that comprehension came so slowly. He said in a dull voice: ‘You were the man who was here last night?’

‘Yes.’ Ryder nodded to Jeff. ‘And this is Perkins. Remember Perkins? Patrolman Ryder. My son. Unless you’re blind and deaf you must know that your friend Morro holds two of our family captive. One of them, my daughter – my son’s sister – has been wounded. We feel kindly disposed to you. Well, LeWinter, apart from being as corrupt as all hell, a lecherous old goat, a traitor and accessory to murder, you’re also a patsy, a sucker, a fall-guy, a scape-goat – call it what you will. You were conned, LeWinter, just as you thought you were conning Donahure and Miss Ivanov and Hartman. Used as a red herring to set up a non-existent Russian connection.

‘Only two things I want to know: who gave you something and to whom did you give something? Who gave you the money, the code-book, the instructions to hire Miss Ivanov and to obtain the names and addresses of the now-missing twenty-six men – and to whom did you give the names and addresses?’

LeWinter eventually registered an expression: he clamped his lips shut. Jeff winced as his father stepped forward, his expression, or lack of it, not changing, a gun swinging in his hand. LeWinter shut his eyes, flung up a protective forearm, stepped quickly back, caught his heel in a throw rug and fell heavily, striking the back of his head against a chair. He lay on the floor for ten seconds, perhaps longer, then slowly sat up. He looked dazed, as if having difficulty in relating himself to the circumstances in which he found himself – and he was clearly not acting.

He said in a croaking voice: I’ve got a bad heart.’ Looking at and listening to him it was impossible to doubt it.

I’ll cry tomorrow. Meantime, you think your heart will last out long enough to let you get to your feet?’ Slowly, shaking, using both a chair and a table, LeWinter got to his unsteady feet. He still had to hang on to the table for support. Ryder remained unmoved. He said: ‘The man who gave you all those things. The man to whom you gave the names. Was it the same man?’

‘Call my doctor.’ LeWinter was clutching his chest. ‘God’s sake, I’ve already had two heart attacks.’ His face was registering an expression now. It was contorted in fear and pain. He clearly felt – and was probably right – that his life was in mortal danger, and was begging to have it saved. Ryder regarded him with the dispassionate eye of a medieval headsman.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Jeff looked at him in something close to horror but Ryder had eyes only for LeWinter. ‘Then I’ll have nothing on my conscience if you die and there won’t be a mark on you when the mortuary wagon comes to collect you. Was it the same man?’

‘Yes.’ A barely audible whisper.

‘The same man as called from Bakersfield?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ryder half-lifted his gun. LeWinter looked at him in defeat and despair and repeated: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

Jeff spoke for the first time and his voice was urgent. ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘I believe him.’ Ryder hadn’t looked away from LeWinter. ‘Describe this man.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Or won’t?’

‘He wore a hood. Before God, he wore a hood.’

‘If Donahure got ten thousand dollars, then you got a lot more. Probably a great deal more. Give him a receipt?’

‘No.’ LeWinter shuddered. ‘Just said if I would break my word he would break my back. He could have done it too. Biggest man I ever saw.’

‘Ah!’ Ryder paused, seemed to relax, smiled briefly and went on, far from encouragingly: ‘He could still come and do it. Look at all the trouble it would save the law and the prison hospital.’ He produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them round LeWinter’s wrists.

The judge’s voice was weak and lacked conviction. ‘You have no arrest warrant.’

‘Don’t be simple-minded and don’t make me laugh. I don’t want any vertebrae snapping. I don’t want you getting on the wrong phone. I don’t want any escape attempt. And I don’t want any suicide.’ He looked at the photograph he still held. I’ll be a long time forgetting. I want to see you rot in San Quentin.’ He led him towards the door, stopped and looked at Parker and Jeff. ‘Observe, if you will. I never laid a finger on him.’

Jeff said: ‘Major Dunne will never believe it. Neither do I.’

CHAPTER TEN

‘You used us!’ Burnett’s face was white and bitter and he was shaking with such uncontrollable anger that his Glenfiddich was slopping over on to the floor of Morro’s study, a shocking waste of which he was uncharacteristically oblivious. ‘You double-crossed us. You evil, wicked bastard! A beautiful job, wasn’t it, the way you spliced together our recordings and your own recording?’

Morro raised an admonitory finger. ‘Come now, Professor. This helps no one. You really must learn to control yourself.’

‘Why the hell should he?’ Schmidt’s fury was as great as Burnett’s, but he had it under better control. All five physicists were there, together with Morro, Dubois and two guards. ‘We’re not thinking just about our good names, our reputations. We’re thinking about lives, maybe thousands of them, and if those lives are lost we’re going to be held responsible. Morally at least. Every viewer, every listener, every reader in the State is going to be convinced that the hydrogen device you left off the coast is in the one-and-a-half range. We know damn well it’s in the three-and-a-half. But because people will believe – they can’t help believing – that it was all part of the same recording they’re going to imagine that what you said was said with our tacit approval. You – you monster! Why did you do it?’

‘Effect.’ Morro was unruffled. ‘Very elementary psychology. The detonation of this three-and-a-half megaton device is going to have rather spectacular consequences, and I want people to say to themselves: if this is the effect of a mere one-and-a-half megaton what in the name of heaven will the cataclysmic effects of thirty-five megatons be like? It will lend persuasive weights to my demands, don’t you think? In the climate of terror all things are possible.’

‘I can believe anything of you,’ Burnett said. He looked at the shattered wreck of what had once been Willi Aachen. ‘Anything. Even that you are prepared to put thousands of lives at risk in order to achieve a psychological effect. You can have no idea what this tsunamai will be like, what height it will reach, whether or not the Newport-Inglewood Fault will trigger an earthquake. And you don’t care. The effect is all.’

‘I think you exaggerate, Professor. I think that, where height is concerned, people will leave a very considerable margin of safety between the water levels I suggested and the worst they can fear. As for the Newport-Inglewood Fault, only a madman would remain in the area at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. I do not visualize throngs of people heading for the Hollywood Park Race Track – if they head there, at that time of the morning, which I don’t know. I think your fears are mainly groundless.’

‘Mainly! Mainly! You mean only a few thousand may drown?’

‘I have no cause to love American people.’ Morro still maintained his monolithic calm. ‘They have not exactly been kind to mine.’

There was a brief silence then Healey said in a low voice: ‘This is even worse than I feared. Race, religion, politics, I don’t know. The man’s a zealot, a fanatic’

‘He’s nuts.’ Burnett reached for the bottle.

‘Judge LeWinter wishes to make a voluntary statement,’ Ryder said.

‘Does he now?’ Dunne peered at the trembling, fearful figure, a pale and almost unimaginable shadow of the imposing figure who had so long dominated the Centre Court. ‘Is that the case, Judge?’

Ryder was impatient. ‘Sure it is.’

‘Look, Sergeant, I was asking the judge.’

‘We were there,’ Parker said. ‘Jeff and I. There was no coercion, no force, the only time Sergeant Ryder touched him was to put on handcuffs. We wouldn’t perjure ourselves, Major Dunne.’

‘You wouldn’t.’ He turned to Delage. ‘Next door. I’ll take his statement in a minute.’

‘One moment before he goes,’ Ryder said. ‘Any word about Hartman?’

Dunne permitted himself his first smile. ‘For once, some luck. Just come in. Hartman, it seems, has been living out there for some years. With his widowed sister, which accounts for the fact that his name was not in the phone book. Didn’t spend much time there until a year or so ago. Travelled a lot. You’d never guess what his business is – well, was, till last year.’

‘Oil rigs.’

Dunne said without heat: ‘Damn you, Ryder, you spoil a man’s simplest pleasures. Yes. Boss roustabout. First-class record. How did you know?’

‘I didn’t. Who were his sponsors – you know, character referees?’

‘Two prominent local business men and – well?’

‘Donahure and LeWinter.’

‘Indeed.’

Ryder looked at LeWinter. ‘You and Hartman made up that list of drillers and engineers together, you from your court cases and extensive briefs from the oil companies, Hartman from his field experience?’

LeWinter said nothing.

‘Well, at least he doesn’t deny it. Tell me, LeWinter, was it his job to recruit those men?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘To kidnap them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, then, to contact them, one way or another?’

‘Yes.’

‘And deliver them?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Yes or no.’

LeWinter gathered together the shreds of his dignity and turned to Dunne. ‘I am being subjected to harassment.’

‘If that’s what you choose to call it,’ Dunne said unsympathetically. ‘Proceed, Sergeant.’

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes, damn you, yes.’

‘So, to be obvious, he must have known where to deliver those men after recruitment, voluntary or not So, assuming it was Morro who was responsible for their disappearance, Hartman had a direct line to Morro or knew how to contact him. You must agree with that.’

LeWinter sat down in a chair. He looked more like a cadaver than ever. ‘If you say so.’

‘And, of course, you and Donahure had the same line.’

‘No!’ The denial was immediate and almost vehement.

‘Well.’ Ryder was approving. ‘That’s more like it.’

Dunne said: ‘You believe him? That he’s no line on Morro?’

‘Sure. If he had, he’d be dead by now. A sweet lad, this Morro. Even playing the cards close to the chest he never lets his left hand know what the right is doing. Only Hartman knew. Morro thought that Hartman was totally in the clear. How was he to know, how was anyone to guess that I’d trace him because of the alarm linking LeWinter’s safe and Hartman’s office? Morro certainly knew nothing about that. If he did, he’d never have exposed LeWinter and Donahure by planting misleading evidence on them. But Morro had taken no chances He’d given strict orders to both LeWinter and Donahure that if anyone got a line on Hartman, the only man who had a line to him, then Hartman was to be eliminated. It’s really all so simple, isn’t it?’ He looked consideringly at LeWinter, then back at Dunne. ‘Remove that pillar of justice, will you? He makes me sick.’

When he’d gone, Dunne said: ‘A fair morning’s work. I under-estimated you, Sergeant Ryder. Not breaking his neck, I mean. I’m beginning to wonder if I could have done the same.’

‘You’re either born with a heart of gold or you aren’t. Any word from the boss-man – Barrow, isn’t it? – about what kind of bombs this Professor Aachen was designing when Morro snatched him?’

‘I phoned him. He said he’d contact the AEC and call back. He’s not a man to waste time. No reply from him yet. He was curious why we wanted to find out.’

‘Don’t rightly know myself. I said I thought Morro was trying to mislead us, that’s all. What you call an outside chance of nothing. And speaking of Morro – there wouldn’t be any word from Manila?’

Dunne looked at his watch, then in a quietly exasperated patience at Ryder. ‘You’ve been gone exactly one hour and five minutes. Manila, I would remind you, is not just a couple of blocks down the road. Would there be anything else?’

‘Well, as you’re offering.’ Dunne momentarily closed his eyes. ‘Carlton’s friend back in Illinois mentioned a very big man in the group of weirdos Carlton was flirting with. LeWinter has just mentioned, in a very scared voice, a similar person who’s threatened to break his back. Could be one and the same man. There can’t be many eighty-inchers around.’

‘Eighty-inchers?’

‘Six foot eight. That’s what Carlton’s pal said. Shouldn’t be difficult to check whether anyone of that size has been charged or convicted at some time in this State. Nor should it be very difficult to find if such a character is a member of any of the oddball organisations in California. You can’t hide a man that size, and apparently this person doesn’t go to much trouble to keep hidden. And then there’s the question of helicopters.’

‘Ah.’

‘Not just any helicopter. A special helicopter. It would be nice if you could trace it.’

‘A trifle.’ Dunne was being heavily sarcastic. ‘First, there are more helicopters in this State than there are in any comparable region on earth. Second, the FBI is stretched to its limits –’

‘Stretched to its limits! Look, Major, I’m in no mood for light humour this morning. Eight thousand agents stretched to their limits and what have they achieved? Zero. I could even ask what they are doing and the answer could be the same. When I said a special helicopter I meant a very, very special helicopter. The one that delivered this atom bomb to Yucca Flat. Or have your eight thousand agents already got that little matter in hand?’

‘Explain.’

Ryder turned to his son. ‘Jeff, you’ve said you know that area. Yucca and Frenchman Flats.’

‘I’ve been there.’

‘Would a vehicle leave tracks up there?’

‘Sure. Not everywhere. There’s a lot of rock. But there’s also shingle and rubble and sand. Chances are good, yes.’

‘Now then, Major. Would any of the eight thousand have been checking on tracks – trucks, cars, dune buggies – in the area of the crater: those, that is, that they didn’t obliterate in their mad dash to the scene of the crime?’

‘I wasn’t there myself. Delage?’ Delage picked up a phone. ‘Helicopters? An interesting speculation?’

‘I think so. And I also think that that, if I were Morro, is the way I’d have dumped that hydrogen bomb in the Pacific. Cuts out all this tricky – and maybe attention-catching – business of trucking the bomb to the coast and then transferring it to a boat.’

Dunne was doubtful. ‘There’s still an awful lot of helicopters in the State.’

‘Let’s limit it to the communes, the oddballs, the disenchanted.’

‘With a road transport system like we’ve got, who would want –’

‘Let’s limit it to the mountains. Remember, we’d more or less decided that Morro and his friends have sought out high ground.’

‘Well, the more extreme the group the higher they tend to go. I suppose some would require a chopper to get any place. But helicopters come expensive. They’d be hired on an hourly basis, and you could hardly persuade a hired pilot to carry a hydrogen bomb –’

‘Maybe the pilot isn’t hired. Nor the helicopter. Then there’s the matter of a truck. Trucks. For the transport of weapons-grade material – the stuff taken from San Ruffino.’

Dunne said: ‘You have that, Leroy?’ Leroy nodded and, like Delage, reached for a telephone.

‘Thanks.’ Ryder pondered briefly. ‘That’s all. See you around – some time this afternoon.’

Jeff looked at his watch. ‘Don’t forget. Forty-five minutes. Morro will be on the air with his terms or demands or blackmail or whatever.’

‘Probably not worth listening to. Anyway, you can tell me all about it.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Public library. The study of contemporary history. I’ve fallen way behind in my reading.’

‘I see.’ Jeff watched the door swing to behind Ryder, then looked at Dunne. ‘I don’t see. He’s all right?’

Dunne was thoughtful. ‘If he isn’t, what do you make of us?’

Ryder arrived home some ninety minutes later to find Jeff and Parker drinking beer in front of the television. Ryder seemed in remarkably good spirits. He wasn’t smiling broadly, far less laughing, nor was he cracking any jokes, for that was not his way. But for a man with two of his family held hostage and the threat of being drowned and vaporized far from being an impossibility, he was composed and relaxed. He looked at the TV screen where literally hundreds of small craft, some with sails raised, were milling about in hopeless confusion, apparently travelling at random and ramming each other with a frequency that was matched only by a blind determination. It was an enclosed harbour with half a dozen quays thrusting out towards a central channel: the room to manoeuvre was minimal, the chaos absolute.

‘My word,’ Ryder said. ‘This is something. Just, I imagine, like Trafalgar or Jutland. Those were very confused sea battles too.’

‘Dad.’ Jeff was heroically patient. ‘That’s Marina del Rey in Los Angeles. The yachtsmen are trying to leave.’

‘I know the place. The lads of the California Yacht Club and the Del Rey Yacht Club displaying their usual nautical composure, not to say stoicism. At this rate they’ll take a week to sort themselves out. What’s the great rush? Incidentally this will pose a problem for Morro. This must be happening at every harbour in Los Angeles. He said any vessel moving into the area between Santa Cruz Island and Santa Catalina would result in the detonation of the bomb. A couple of hours and there will be a couple of thousand craft in those waters. Careless of Morro. Anybody could have foreseen this.’

Parker said: ‘According to the announcer, nobody intends to go anywhere near there. They’re going to use the Santa Barbara and San Pedro Channels and go as far north and south up the coast as possible.’

‘Lemmings. Even a small boat can ride out a tidal wave at sea. Not much more than a fast-travelling ripple, really. It’s only when it reaches shallow water or estuaries that it starts to pile up into what people regard as a tidal wave. Why all this confusion, anyway?’

‘Panic,’ Parker said. ‘The owners of smaller craft are trying to lift them out of the water and trail them away but there are facilities available for only a few per cent at a time, and those are so overloaded that they keep breaking down. Diesel and petrol supplies are almost exhausted, and those that have been fuelled are so hemmed in by craft looking for fuel that they can’t get out. And then, of course, there are craft taking off under full power with their mooring ropes still attached.’ Parker shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t think urban Californians are really a sea-going race.’

‘Doesn’t signify,’ Jeff said. ‘We’re supposed to be the automobile race. You’d never know it. They’ve just been showing us street scenes in Santa Monica and Venice. Just a landbased version of what we’re seeing here. Biggest traffic jams ever. Cars being used like tanks to batter a way through. Drivers jumping from their cars and knocking one another silly. Incredible.’

‘It would be the same the world over,’ Ryder said. I’ll bet Morro’s glued to his screen in ecstasy. And everybody heading east, of course. City fathers issued any instructions yet?’

‘Not that we’ve heard of.’

‘They will. Give them time. They’re like all politicians. They’ll wait to see what the majority of the people are doing then go ahead and tell them to do what they’re already doing. Any food in this house?’

‘What?’ Jeff, understandably, was momentarily off-balance. ‘Yes. Sandwiches in the kitchen.’

‘Thanks.’ Ryder turned to go then stopped abruptly as something on the screen caught his eye. ‘What an extraordinary coincidence. We can only hope that if it is a good omen then it’s for us and not for Morro.’

Jeff said: ‘We can wait for ever.’

‘See that quay at the lower right of your screen? South-east, it is. The broad one. Unless I’m totally wrong, that’s the source of all our troubles.’

‘That quay?’ Jeff stared incredulously.

‘The name of it. Mindanao.’

A minute later Ryder was taking his ease in an armchair, sandwich in one hand, beer in the other, half an eye on the screen. He focused both eyes and said: ‘That’s interesting.’

The picture was not without its interest. Three private planes, all twin-engined, had clearly been engaged in a multiple collision. The broken wing-tip of one rested on the ground. The undercarriage of a second had crumpled while a lazy plume of smoke arose from the third.

‘Land, sea and air.’ Ryder shook his head. ‘Know that place. Clover Field in Santa Monica. One can only assume the air traffic controller has high-tailed it for the Sierras.’

‘Honest to God, Dad!’ Jeff was trying to contain himself. ‘You’re the most infuriating, exasperating character that’s ever walked. Have you got nothing to say about Morro’s ultimatum?’

‘Well, no.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Be reasonable. I’ve seen, heard and read nothing about it.’

‘Jesus!’ Jeff repeated and fell into silence. Ryder looked enquiringly at Parker who clearly steeled himself for the task.

‘Morro was on time. As always. This time he really was economical with his words. I’ll make it even more economical. His ultimatum was simply this. Give me the locations and all the operating wavebands of all your radar stations on both the east and west coasts, your cruising radar bombers both here and in Nato and in all your spy satellites or I’ll pull the plug.’

‘He said that, did he?’

‘Well, quite a bit more, but that was the gist of it.’

‘Rubbish. I told you he wouldn’t be worth listening to. I’d thought better of Morro than that. Babies along the Potomac and the Pentagon spinning around like a high-speed centrifuge.’

‘You don’t believe it?’

‘If that’s what you gather from my reactions, you’re right.’

‘But look, Dad –’

‘Look nothing. Balderdash. Maybe I’d better revise that snap judgement on Morro. Maybe he was well aware that he was making an impossible demand. Maybe he was well aware that it wouldn’t be met. Maybe he didn’t want it to be met. But just try convincing the American public – especially that section of it represented by this State – of that. It will take a long, long time and a long, long time is the one thing we don’t have.’

‘Impossible demand?’ Jeff said carefully.

‘Let me think.’ Ryder chewed some more and drank some more while he thought. ‘Three things occur and none of them makes sense and wouldn’t to the Pentagon who can’t possibly be as retarded as the New York and Washington columnists say they are. First off, what’s to prevent the Pentagon feeding him a long and highly convincing rigmarole of completely misleading information? What would lead him to suspect that it was misleading? And even if he did, how on earth could he possibly set about checking on the accuracy of the information? It’s impossible. Second, the Pentagon would probably and quite cheerfully see California being wiped out rather than give away our first defence against nuclear attack. Third, if he’s in a position to wipe out Los Angeles and San Francisco – and we must assume that he is – what’s to prevent him repeating the dose to New York, Chicago, Washington itself and so on until he achieved by direct means what he would achieve by indirect means by blinding our radar? It makes no kind of sense at all. But it all fits in.’

Jeff digested this in silence. Parker said slowly: ‘It’s all very well for you to sit there in – what kind of judgement do you call it?’

‘Olympian?’ Ryder said helpfully.

‘That’s it. It’s all very well for you to sit there in Olympian judgement, but you’d made up that crafty mind in advance that you weren’t going to believe a word Morro said and you were also certain that he wouldn’t say what you were convinced he couldn’t say.’

‘Very shrewd, Sergeant Parker. Confusing, mind you, but shrewd.’

‘And you’ve just said it all fits in.’

‘I did say that.’

‘You know something we don’t know?’

‘I don’t know any facts that you don’t know, except for those I get from reading about earthquakes and contemporary history, a practice for which Jeff here thinks I need the services of a head-shrinker.’

‘I never said –’

‘You don’t have to speak to say something.’

‘I have it,’ Parker said. ‘All good detectives come up with a theory. You have a theory?’

‘Well, in all due modesty –’

‘Modesty? So now the sun sets in the east. I don’t even have to take time out for a reflective pause. Mindanao?’

‘Mindanao.’

When Ryder had finished, Parker said to Jeff: ‘Well, what do you make of that?’

‘I’m still trying to assimilate it all.’ Jeff spoke in a kind of dazed protest. ‘I mean, I’ve just come to it. You’ve got to give me time to think.’

‘Come, come, boy. First impressions.’

‘Well, I don’t see any holes in it. And the more I think – and if you would give me more time I could think more – the fewer holes I can see. I think it could be right.’

‘Look at your old man,’ Parker said. ‘Can you see any sign of “could” in his face?’

‘That’s just smirking. Well, I can’t see any way in which it must be wrong.’ Jeff thought some more then took the plunge. ‘It makes sense to me.’

‘There you are now, John.’ Parker sounded positively jovial. ‘As near a compliment as you’ll ever be likely to extract from your son. It makes a lot of sense to me. Come, gentlemen, let’s try it out for size on Major Dunne.’

Dunne didn’t even bother saying it made sense. He turned to Leroy and said: ‘Get me Mr Barrow. And have the helicopter stand by.’ He rubbed his hands briskly. ‘Well, well. Looks as if you’re going to ruffle a few feathers in Los Angeles, Sergeant.’

‘You go and ruffle them. Top brass rub me the wrong way. Your boss seems almost human, but that’s more than I can say for Mitchell. You know as much about it now as I do, and I’m only guessing anyway. The person I would like to see is Professor Benson. If you could fix that I’d be grateful.’

‘Delighted. If you fly north.’

‘Blackmail.’ Ryder didn’t sound too heated.

‘Of course.’ Dunne regarded him over steepled fingers. ‘Seriously. Several things. First off, we could kill two birds with one stone – Pasadena is only ten minutes’ helicopter hop from our offices up there. Again, if you don’t turn up both Barrow and Mitchell will automatically assume that you lack the courage of your own convictions. You can talk to them in a way that would get me fired on the spot. They can probe more deeply than I’ve done and ask questions that I couldn’t answer – I know you’ve told me all what you regard as the essentials, but there must be details that you consider irrelevant at the moment. What’s the point in staying here? There’s nothing more you can accomplish here, and you know it: to convince the mandarins of your belief would be a major accomplishment.’ Dunne smiled. ‘Would you be so heartless as to deprive me of the pleasure of this – ah – encounter?’

‘He’s just scared of the big bad wolves,’ Jeff said.

Like all such rooms designed to give its occupants a proper sense of their own importance, the conference room was suitably impressive. It had the only mahogany-panelled walls in the building, behung with pictures of individuals who looked like the Ten Most Wanted Men but were, in fact, past and present directors and senior administrators of the FBI. It held the only mahogany oval table in the building, one that gleamed with that refulgent splendour rarely found among tables that had seen an honest day’s work. Round it were grouped the only twelve leather- and brass-studded chairs in the building. Before each chair was a leather-cornered blotter, indispensable for doodling but otherwise wholly superfluous, a brass tray for pens and pencils, a water-jug and glass: the comprehensively stocked bar lay behind a sliding wooden panel. The overall effect was slightly dimmed by the two stenographers’ chairs that faced a battery of red, white and black telephones: the chairs were covered in plastic leather. There were no stenographers there that afternoon; this was a top-secret meeting of the gravest national importance, and the faces of most of the twelve seated men accurately reflected their awareness of this.

Nobody occupied the rounded head of the table: Barrow and Mitchell each sat an equidistant foot from the centre line so that there could be no claimant for the chairman’s position. The heavens might be falling in but that would have to wait until protocol had been served. Each had three senior aides at the table – none of the six had been introduced – and all of them had briefcases and important-looking papers on the blotters before them. The fact that it had been deemed necessary to call the meeting clearly indicated that the contents of those papers were worthless: but, at the conference table, one has to have papers to shuffle or one is nothing. Mitchell opened the meeting: a toss of a coin had decided that.

He said: ‘To begin with, I must request, in the politest possible way, that Sergeant Parker and Patrolman Ryder withdraw.’

Ryder said: ‘Why?’

Nobody queried Mitchell’s orders. He bent a cold eye on Ryder. ‘Given the opportunity, Sergeant, I was about to explain. This meeting is on the highest level of national security, and those are not sworn men. Moreover, they are junior police officers both of whom have resigned their positions and therefore have no official capacity: they have not even been assigned to this investigation. That, I think, is a reasonable attitude.’

Ryder considered Mitchell for a few moments, then looked across at Dunne, who sat opposite him. He said, in a tone of exaggerated disbelief: ‘You brought me all the way up here just to listen to this pompous and arrogant rubbish?’

Dunne looked at his fingernails. Jeff looked at the roof. Barrow looked at the roof. Mitchell looked mad. His tone would have frozen mercury.

‘I don’t think I can be hearing properly, Sergeant.’

‘Then why don’t you vacate your position to someone who can? I spoke clearly enough. I didn’t want to come here. I know your reputation. I don’t give a damn about it. If you throw Mr Parker and my son out then, by the same token, you have to throw me out. You say they have no official capacity: neither have you. You just muscled your way in. They have as much right to order you out as you have to order them out: you have no official jurisdiction inside the United States. If you can’t understand that and stop antagonizing people who are doing an honest job of work then it’s time you yielded your chair to someone who can.’

Ryder looked leisurely round the table. No one appeared disposed to make any comment. Mitchell’s face was frozen. Barrow’s was set in an expression of calmly judicial impartiality, a remarkable tribute to the man’s self-control: had he been eavesdropping and alone he would unquestionably have been falling about and holding his sides.

‘So, having established the fact that there are no fewer than seven of us here in an unofficial capacity, let’s look at the investigation. Mr Parker and my son have already achieved a very considerable amount, as Major Dunne will confirm. They have helped solve the murder of a county sheriff, put a corrupt police chief behind bars on a charge of murder and also put behind bars, on a charge of accessory to murder, a judge widely regarded as Chairman-elect of the State Supreme Court. All three, including the murdered man, were deeply involved in the business on hand: this has provided us with extremely valuable information.’

Mitchell had the grace to part his lips about half an inch. Barrow remained without expression. Clearly he’d been briefed by Dunne: equally clear was the fact that he hadn’t bothered to pass on his information.

‘And what has the CIA achieved? I’ll tell you. It has succeeded in making a laughing-stock of itself in general and its director in particular, not to mention uselessly wasting the taxpayers’ money by sending its agents to pussyfoot around Geneva in search of so-called secret information that has been in the public domain for two years. Apart from that, what? An educated guess would say zero.’

Barrow coughed. ‘You wouldn’t say you are being needlessly intransigent?’ He could have put more reproof into his voice if he’d tried, even a little.

‘Needless intransigence is the only language some people seem to understand.’

Mitchell’s voice surfaced through layers of cracked ice. ‘Your point is taken, Sergeant. You have come to teach us how to do our jobs.’

Ryder wasn’t quite through with being intransigent or letting Mitchell off the hook. ‘I am not a Sergeant. I’m a private citizen and as such beholden to no one. I can’t teach the CIA anything – I wouldn’t know how to go about subverting foreign governments or assassinating their presidents. I can’t teach the FBI anything. All I want is a fair hearing, but it’s really a matter of indifference whether I get it or not.’ His eyes were looking at Mitchell’s. ‘You can shut up and let me say what I’ve been brought here to say, against my better judgement, or not. I’d as soon leave. I find the atmosphere here uncomfortable, not to say hostile, and Major Dunne has all the essentials.’

Mitchell said in a toneless voice: ‘We will hear you out.’

‘I don’t like that expression either.’ Barrow winced. Despite his antipathy towards Mitchell it was not hard to guess that, even although momentarily, he was putting himself in the other’s position. ‘It’s the term used by the chairman of the board when he’s giving a carpeted executive the chance to justify himself before being fired.’

‘Please.’ Barrow turned the palms of his hands upwards. ‘We take the point that you’re a plain speaker. Please take our point that you haven’t been brought here for nothing. We will listen carefully.’

‘Thank you.’ Ryder wasted no time on preamble. ‘You’ve all seen the streets round this block. As we came into your pad on the roof we saw a hundred streets like it. Blocked. Choked. Nothing like it since the retreat from Mons. The people are running scared. I don’t blame them. If I lived here I’d be running scared too. They believe that Morro is going to trigger off this bomb at ten tomorrow morning. So do I. I also believe that he will set off or is quite prepared to set off the other ten nuclear devices he claims to have. What I don’t for a moment believe in is his demand. It’s utter foolishness, he must know it is and we should recognize it for what it is: an empty threat, a meaningless demand that can’t be met.’

‘Perhaps you should know,’ Barrow said. ‘Just before you arrived word came through that protests have been lodged by the Kremlin and Peking, and by their embassies in Washington, crying to high heaven that they are as innocent as the driven snow of this monstrous accusation against them – no one has accused them of anything but one takes their point – and that it’s all part of a warmongering capitalist plot. First time in living memory that they’ve totally agreed with each other on anything.’

‘Not just the usual standard denial?’

‘No. They’re hopping mad.’

‘Don’t blame them. The suggestion is ludicrous.’

‘You’re sure the fact that you already seem to have discounted evidence pointing to some Communist connection has not influenced your thinking in this?’

‘I’m sure. So are you.’

Mitchell said: ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘You wouldn’t be. Last thing you do every night is look under your bed.’

Mitchell just stopped short of grinding his teeth. ‘If not that, what?’ The words were innocuous enough but their tone left no doubt that he was prepared to fight to the death for his disbelief of every word Ryder was about to say.

‘Bear with me. It all seems to start with the Philippines. I’m sure you all know how it is out there, and I’m sure the last thing I am is a specialist in foreign affairs, but I’ve been reading all about it in the library just a couple of hours ago. I’ll briefly recap what I read, as much for my own sake as anybody else’s.

‘The Philippines are in a financial mess. Hugely ambitious development plans, mounting internal and external debts, heavy military expenditures – they’re strapped. But like a good many other countries they know what to do when the kitty’s empty – put the arm on Uncle Sam. And they’re in an excellent position to apply pressure.

‘The Philippines are the keystone of America’s Pacific military strategy and the huge Seventh Fleet anchorage at Subic Bay and the strategically crucial Air Force Base are regarded by the Pentagon as being indispensable and well worth the rent – many people regard it as a cross between ransom and extortion money – that is demanded.

‘The south of the Philippines – the island of Mindanao – is inhabited by Muslims. You all know that. Unlike Christianity, the Muslim religion has no moral laws against the killing of mankind in general – just against the killing of Muslims, period. The concept of a holy war is an integral part of their lives and this is what they’re doing right now – carrying out a holy crusade against President Marcos and his predominantly Catholic government. They regard it as a religious war being waged by an oppressed people. Whether it’s a justifiable war or not is – well, it’s none of my business. In any event, it is an intensely bitter war. I think all this is well known.

‘What is, perhaps, not quite so well known is that they feel almost equally bitter towards the United States. It’s not hard to understand. Although Congress raises its hand in holier-than-thou horror at Marcos’s long-term track record on civil liberties, they still cheerfully, as I said, ante up the rent for our bases to the tune of several hundred million dollars a year in military aid, no small amount of which is put to what the Philippine government regards as being perfectly good use in crushing the Muslims.

‘Even less known is the fact that the Muslims aren’t all that much fonder of Russia, China and Vietnam. Not, as far as is known, that those countries have caused them any harm: it’s just that the Philippine government has established cordial – and diplomatic – relations with those three countries and countries that reciprocate the Philippine government’s overtures are automatically classified by the Mindanaon Muslims as belonging to the enemy camp.

‘What the Muslims desperately lack is arms. Provided that they were armed to the same standards as the government’s well-equipped eighty field battalions – well-equipped, mainly, by the courtesy of Uncle Sam – they could give a good account of themselves. Until last year what little supplies they received came from Libya – until Imelda Marcos went there and sweet-talked Colonel Gadhafi and his foreign minister Ali Tureiki into cutting off the Mindanaon Muslims’ last lifeline.

‘So what were they to do? They couldn’t obtain or manufacture their own arms in the Philippines. Even if they didn’t hate America there was no way the Americans would supply arms to insurgents against the Philippine government. They weren’t even speaking to the Communists, and their own fellow Muslims had turned against them. So the Muslim rebels came up with the only answer. Any big armament firm in the world will supply arms to anyone – if the money is right and on the barrel-head – irrespective of race, creed and politics. Why shouldn’t they? Governments do it all the time – America, Britain and France are the worst offenders. So, all they had to do was to find the cash to put on the barrel-head.

‘The solution was simple. Let the enemy provide. In this case the unfortunate provider was to be Uncle Sam. All the better if you can wound him in the process. Rob him blind, hurt him and – to kill two birds with one stone – discredit the USSR and China by using them as a smokescreen. That’s what I believe is happening in California here and now. And the frightening thing about it is that we have to remember that the Koran gives a Muslim a conscience-free hand to knock off anyone who isn’t a Muslim. And if your conscience is free, what’s the difference between one and one million? If all’s free in love and war what’s it like in a holy war?’

‘It’s an interesting hypothesis,’ Mitchell said. His tone implied that he was a courteous man tolerantly listening to another theorizing about how the moon is made of green cheese. ‘You have evidence to back this up, of course?’

‘Nothing that you would regard as positive evidence. Elimination, circumstantial evidence, all perhaps better than nothing. In the first place it’s the only theory that explains the situation in which we find ourselves now.’

‘But you said they’re after cash. If that’s so, why didn’t they blackmail the government for cash?’

‘I don’t know. I have the glimmerings of an idea but I know what you would do with a glimmering. Second, speech experts place his area of origin as south-east Asia – which includes the Philippines. Third, it is certain – there is no question about this – that he is in criminal association with Carlton, the supposedly kidnapped San Ruffino deputy of security, and there is also no question that Carlton has been in Manila several times. Fourth, if Morro has a weakness it seems to be that it tickles his ironic fancy to give himself an alias associated with the operation he is conducting. The first stage of his operation here was concerned with nuclear fuel so he may well have purposely chosen to call himself after the nuclear station at Morro Bay. Fifth, that’s not the only name pronounced that way – there’s another in the Philippines, called Moro Bay. Sixth, this is in Mindanao and is the focus of the Muslim insurgent movement. Seventh, last year Moro Bay was the scene of the greatest natural disaster in Philippine history. An earthquake at the mouth of the bay – it’s crescent-shaped – caused a gigantic tidal wave that took over five thousand lives and left seventy thousand homeless, all along the shores of the bay. A tidal wave we’re promised for tomorrow. I’ll take long odds that we’ll be promised an earthquake on Saturday. I think that this may be Morro’s Achilles’ heel. I think it would mightily tickle his fancy to have his name associated with nuclear weapons, tidal waves and earthquakes.’

‘You call this evidence?’ Mitchell’s tone was nasty, but it could have been nastier.

‘No proof, I agree. Indicators, that’s all. But they’re all-important. In police work you can’t look anywhere until you have some indication of where to look. You start hunting where the hound-dog points. Put it another way. I’m looking for a lodestone and I set down a compass. The needle swings and steadies. That might indicate the direction of the lodestone. I put down a second compass and it points in the same direction. That could be coincidence although a remarkable one. I put down five more and they all point the same way. I stop thinking about coincidences. I have seven needles here and they all point towards Mindanao.’ Ryder paused. ‘I’m convinced. I understand, of course, that you gentlemen would require some sort of proof.’

Barrow said: ‘I think I’m convinced if only for the reason that I can’t see any needle pointing any other damned way. But some proof would be nice. What would you call proof, Mr Ryder?’

‘For me, any one answer to any one of, oddly, seven questions.’ He took a sheet of paper from his pocket. ‘What is Morro’s place of origin? Where can we locate a six-foot-eight giant who must be a senior lieutenant of Morro’s? What kind of bomb did this Professor Aachen design? I think Morro lied about its dimensions for the simple reason that he didn’t have to mention it at all.’ He looked reproachfully at Barrow and Mitchell. ‘I understand the AEC have put up the shutters on this one. If you two gentlemen can’t make them open up who can? Then I want to know if there are any private organizations up in the mountains using their own helicopters. Any using their own private vans. Major Dunne is working on those two. After that I’d like to know if Morro is going to threaten us with an earthquake on Saturday. I’ve said I’m sure he is. Lastly, I’d like to know if the Post Office can discover whether there’s a radio-phone link between Bakersfield and a place called the Adlerheim.’

‘Adlerheim?’ Mitchell had lost some of his intransigence. It was reasonable to assume that he hadn’t become director because his aunt’s cousin knew some stenographer in a CIA typing pool. ‘What’s that?’

‘I know it,’ Barrow said. ‘Up in the Sierra Nevada. Von Streicher’s Folly, they call it, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I think that’s where we’ll find Morro. Anyone mind if I smoke?’

Not only did nobody object; nobody even seemed to have heard his request. They were busy. They were busy studying the insides of their closed eyelids, or the papers before them or infinity. Ryder was almost an inch down on his Gauloise before Barrow spoke.

‘That’s quite a thought, Mr Ryder. Having heard what you’ve had to say so far I don’t think anyone is going to dismiss it out of hand.’ He made a point of not looking at Mitchell. ‘Wouldn’t you agree, Sassoon?’

Sassoon spoke for the first time. ‘I’ve heard enough not to make a clown of myself. You will, of course, have your pointers, Mr Ryder.’ He smiled as he said it.

‘None that you don’t all have. In that rather cryptic note my wife left when she was kidnapped she said that Morro referred to their destination as having bracing air and a place where they wouldn’t get their feet wet. Mountains. It’s been taken over by a group of Muslims, quite openly: this would be typical of Morro’s effrontery – and his over-confidence. It’s called the “Temple of Allah” or some such name. It’s got official police protection to ensure its privacy – a fact which would again appeal to Morro’s ironic – if warped – sense of humour. It’s virtually impregnable to outside assault. It’s close to Bakersfield, where LeWinter had a telephone contact. I should think the chances are high that they have a helicopter – we’ll soon know. A guess you might say, and too damned obvious. The clever investigator overlooks the obvious. Me, I’m stupid – I’d go for the obvious which is the last thing that Morro would expect us to do.’

Barrow said: ‘You don’t actually know this Morro?’

‘Unfortunately, no.’

‘You seem to have got inside his mind pretty well. I only hope you haven’t taken any wrong turnings.’

Parker said in a mild tone: ‘He’s quite good at getting inside minds, actually. No pun intended, but ask anyone inside. Ryder’s put away more felons than any intelligence officer in this State.’

‘Let’s hope his luck doesn’t run out. That’s all, Mr Ryder?’

‘Yes. Two thoughts. When this is all over you might make out a citation to my wife. If she hadn’t thought she’d seen a black eye-patch and suspected there was something wrong with his hands we’d still be back in square one. We still don’t know for certain if she was right. The second thought is just amusing and irrelevant except that it probably again has a bearing on Morro’s twisted sense of humour. Anyone know why Von Streicher built the Adlerheim where he did?’

Nobody knew.

‘I’ll bet Morro did. Von Streicher had a phobia about tidal waves.’

Nobody said anything because, for the moment, they had nothing to say. After some time, Barrow stirred and pressed a bell twice. The door opened, two girls entered and Barrow said: ‘We’re thirsty.’ The girls moved to one wall and slid back a wooden panel.

A few minutes later Barrow laid down his glass. ‘I wasn’t really thirsty. I just wanted time to think. Neither the time nor the Scotch has helped any.’

‘We go for the Adlerheim?’ Mitchell’s aggression was in abeyance: this was just a doubtful suggestion put up for discussion.

‘No.’ Ryder gave a negative shake of the head in a very positive way. ‘I think I’m right; I could be wrong. Either way I wouldn’t give a damn about proof and legality, and I don’t think anyone else here would either. It’s the physical factor. You can’t storm the place. I told you it’s impregnable. If Morro’s there he’ll have it guarded like Fort Knox. If we did attack the place and there was armed resistance then we’d know for sure he’s there. What then? You can’t use tanks and artillery up a mountain-side. Planes with rockets, missiles, bombs? What a lovely idea with thirty-five megatons of hydrogen bombs in there.’

‘It would be a bang,’ Mitchell said. He seemed almost human. ‘And what a bang. How many dead? Tens of thousands? Hundreds? Millions? With the radio-active fall-out all over the western States? Yes, millions.’

Ryder said: ‘Not to mention blasting a hole through the ozone layer.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It’s out of the question, anyway,’ Barrow said. ‘Only the Commander-in-Chief could authorize such an attack, and whether he’s motivated by political cynicism or humanity no President is going to let himself go down in history as the man directly responsible for the deaths of millions of his fellow citizens.’

‘That apart,’ Ryder said, ‘I’m afraid we’re all missing the point, which is that those bombs will be triggered by radiowave and Morro will be sitting up there all the time with his thumb on the button. If he had the bombs sited – which he could well have by now – he has only to press that button. They could be in transit – and he has still only to press that button. Even if he’s sitting on top of the damn things he’d still do the same. It would be a splendid way to pay the Americans back for the billion or more dollars and military aid they’ve given Marcos’s government to use to crush the Muslims. American lives are nothing to them and, in a holy war, neither are theirs. They can’t lose: the gates of Paradise are standing wide.’

There was a long pause then Sassoon said: ‘It’s a bit chilly in here. Anyone join me in a Scotch or bourbon or something?’

Everyone, it seemed, was conscious of a drop in the temperature. There was another and equally long pause, then Mitchell said, almost plaintively: ‘How do we get at those damned bombs?’

‘You can’t.’ Ryder said. ‘I’ve had more time than you to think this out. Those bombs will be under constant surveillance all the time. Go anywhere near any of them and it’ll blow up in your face. I wouldn’t fancy having a three-and-a-half megaton bomb blow up in my face.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘Well, I don’t know. No worry, really. In my vaporized state I wouldn’t be likely to know much about it. Forget the bombs. We want to get to that button before Morro presses it.’

Barrow said: ‘Infiltration?’

‘How else?’

‘How?’

‘Using his over-confidence and colossal arrogance against him.’

‘How?’

‘How?’ Ryder showed his first irritation. ‘You forget that I’m just an unofficial interferer.’

‘As far as I’m concerned – and, in those United States of ours, I’m the only one who is concerned – you’re now a fully accredited, paid-up and charter member of the FBI.’

‘Well, thanks very much.’

‘How?’

‘I wish to God I knew.’

The silence was profound. By and by Barrow turned to Mitchell. ‘Well, what are we going to do?’

‘That’s the FBI all over.’ Mitchell was scowling heavily, but not at anyone in particular. ‘Always trying to beat us to it. I was about to ask you the same question.’

‘I know what I’m going to do.’ Ryder pushed back his chair. ‘Major Dunne, you will recall that you promised me a lift out to Pasadena.’

A knock came at the door and a girl entered, an envelope in her hand. She said: ‘Major Dunne?’ Dunne stretched out an arm, took the envelope, withdrew a sheet of paper and read it. He looked across at Ryder.

‘Cotabato,’ he said.

Ryder pulled his chair back in. Dunne rose, walked to the head of the table and handed the letter to Barrow, who read it, handed it across to Mitchell, waited until he had finished, took it back and began to read aloud.

‘Manila. Chief of Police, also countersigned by a General Huelva, whom I know. It says: “Description referring to person called Morro tallies exactly with that of a wanted criminal well known to us. Confirm he has two badly damaged hands and the sight of only one eye. Injuries sustained when one of group of three participating in aborted attempt to blow up Presidential holiday retreat. One accomplice – a man of enormous stature and known as Dubois – unscathed. The third, small man, lost left hand. Shot way out”.’ He paused and looked at Ryder.

‘A small world. Our large friend again. The other is probably the lad with the prosthetic appliance who put the arm on my daughter in San Diego.’

‘Very likely. “Morro’s real name is Amarak. Enquiry confirms our belief that he is in your country. Enforced exile. There is one million US dollars on his head. Native of Cotabato, focal point for Muslim insurgents in Mindanao.

‘“Amarak is the head of the MNLF – Moro National Liberation Front”.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘One sometimes despairs of mankind,’ Professor Alec Benson said sadly. ‘Here we are, twenty miles from the ocean, and still they go marching steadily east – if cars moving at an average of a mile per hour can be said to be marching. They’re as safe from a tidal wave here as they would be if they lived in Colorado, but I don’t suppose any of them intend stopping until they pitch camp atop the San Gabriel Mountains.’ He turned away from the window, picked up a cane and pressed a switch to illuminate a nine-by-eight wall chart of the State of California.

‘Well, gentlemen, to our Earthquake Slip Prevention Programme – hereon, ESPP. Where we have selected certain locations for drilling and why. The “where” and the “why” are really one and the same. As I explained last time, the theory, in essence, is that by injecting lubricating fluid along certain fault lines we will ease the frictional resistance between the tectonic plates and so – hopefully – cause them to slide past each other with a minimum of fuss and bother – a series of tiny earthquakes at frequent intervals instead of major earthquakes at long intervals. If the frictional co-efficient is allowed to build up until the lateral stress becomes intolerable then something has to go and one plate jerks forward, perhaps anything up to twenty feet, in relation to the other. That’s when we have a big one. Our sole purpose – perhaps I should say our hope – is to release this frictional coefficient gradually.’ He tapped the chart with the cane. ‘I’ll start from the bottom – the south.

‘This is actually the first bore-hole we started digging, the first of what we call our trigger spots. It’s in the Imperial Valley, between Imperial and El Centra. We had an earthquake here in nineteen-fifteen, six-point-three on the Richter scale, another in nineteen-forty, a fairly big one of seven-point-six and a small one in nineteen-sixty-six. This is the only known section of the San Andreas Fault near the US-Mexican border.’ He moved his cane.

‘We’ve drilled this one here near Hemet. There was a heavy earthquake here in eighteen-ninety-nine – no seismological recordings of it – in the area of the Cajon Pass, another of six-point-eight in nineteen-eighteen in the same fracture area – this is the San Jacinto Fault.

‘This third drill-hole is the nearest to where we are now – in the San Bernadino area. Latest earthquake there was seventy years ago, and that was only six on the scale. We have a strong feeling here that this may be a sleeper with a slip overdue: but that may be because we are living so close to the damn thing.’

Barrow said: ‘What effects would such earthquakes have if they did occur? Big ones, I mean.’

‘Any one of the three would certainly make the citizens of San Diego unhappy, and the second and third would offer a direct threat to Los Angeles.’ He moved the pointer again. ‘The next bore-hole lies in a fault which was a sleeper – until nineteen-seventy-one. Six-point-six in the San Fernando Valley. We hope that easing the pressure here might take some of the strain of the Newport-Inglewood Fault which, as you know, lies directly under the city of Los Angeles and had its own earthquake, of six-point-three in nineteen-thirty-three. I say “hope”. We don’t know. We don’t know how the two faults are connected. We don’t even know if they’re connected. There’s an awful lot we don’t know and that’s guesswork, hopefully inspired, probably not. But it’s no guess that a big one there could hurt Los Angeles badly: after all, the community of Sylmar, the worst-hit area in the shock, actually lies inside the Los Angeles city boundaries.’ The point of the cane moved again.

‘Tejon Pass. This one has us worried. Long overdue activity here and the last one – a hundred-and-twenty years ago – was a beauty, the strongest in Southern Californian history. Well, it wasn’t as great as the massive earthquake that hit Owens Valley in eighteen-seventy-three – that was the biggest in recorded Californian history – but we’re a parochial lot hereabouts and don’t regard Owens Valley as being in Southern California. A big slip here would very definitely give the Los Angelinos something to think about: if I knew about it in advance I, personally, would get out of town. Tejon Pass is on the San Andreas Fault, and it’s close by here, at Frazier Park by Fort Tejon, that the San Andreas and Garlock Faults intersect. There’s been no major earthquake in the Garlock that is known of – whether that recent small shake was caused by our friend Morro or not we have no means of telling – and none is expected: but, then, no one expected the nineteen-seventy-one business in San Fernando.’ The cane moved on.

‘Here we have our – let me see – sixth drilling-hole. It’s on the White Wolf Fault. It was the scene –’

He broke off as the phone rang. One of his assistants answered, looked round the seated men. ‘Which one of you is Major Dunne, please?’

Dunne took the phone, listened briefly, thanked the caller and hung up. He said: ‘The Adlerheim has quite a transport fleet. Not one but two helicopters, two unmarked plain vans and a jeep.’ He smiled at Ryder. ‘Two more pointers you can tick off, Sergeant.’ Ryder nodded. If he experienced any satisfaction he didn’t show it – more probably, he had been so convinced in advance of what Dunne had just said that the confirmation hardly called for comment.

Benson said: ‘What’s all this about pointers?’

‘Routine investigative checks, Professor.’

‘Ah. Ah, well, I suppose it’s none of my business. I was saying – yes, the White Wolf. Seven-point-seven, nineteen-fifty-two, the biggest in Southern California since eighteen-fifty-seven. The epicentre was somewhere between Arvin and Tehachapi here.’ He paused and looked at Ryder. ‘You frown, Sergeant? Quite heavily, if I may say so.’

‘Nothing, really, Professor. Passing thoughts. Please carry on.’

‘Well. This is a very tricky area. It’s all conjecture, really. Anything happening in the White Wolf could affect both the Garlock Fault and the San Andreas at Tejon. We don’t know. There could be a link with the Santa Ynez, Mesa and Channel Islands Faults. Very attractive earthquake area, reports going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, last big one at Lompoc in nineteen-twenty-seven. It’s all so uncertain. Any major disturbance in the Santa Ynez area would certainly cause a major disturbance in Los Angeles.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor old Los Angeles.’ Benson wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s ringed by earthquake centres – apart from having its own private and personal one at Long Beach. Last time I saw you I talked about the monster earthquake. If it were to hit San Jacinto, San Bemadino, San Fernando, the White Wolf, Tejon Pass, Santa Ynez – or, of course, Long Beach itself – the western hemisphere would be one major city less. If our civilization vanishes and another arises then that new one will be talking about Los Angeles as we today talk about the lost city of Atlantis.’

Barrow said: ‘You are in a jovial mood today, Professor.’

‘Alas, events happening around me and people asking me the questions do tend to make me less than my optimistic sunny self. Forgive me. Next, up here in the central San Andreas, we are digging an interesting hole between Cholame and Parkfield. We know we’re smack on the San Andreas there. Very active area, lots of shaking and banging going on most of the time but, again ominously, no great earthquake has ever been recorded in this area. There was a pretty big one some way to the west, back in the ‘eighties, at San Luis Obispo which could have been caused by the San Andreas or the Nacimiento Fault which parallels the coast west of the San Andreas.’ He smiled without any particular mirth. ‘A monster striking in either fault would almost certainly dump the Morro Bay nuclear reactor station into the sea.

‘Further north, we’ve drilled deep down between Hollister and San Juan Bautista, a few miles to the west, partly because this is another dormant area – again there have only been comparatively minor shakes in this area – and because it’s just south of Hollister that the Hayward Fault branches off to the right to go to the east of San Francisco Bay, cutting up through or close by Hayward, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond then out under the San Pablo Bay. In Berkeley the fault actually runs under the university football stadium, which can’t be a very nice thought for the crowds of people who attend there regularly. There have been two very big earthquakes along this fault, in eighteen-thirty-six and eighteen-sixty-eight – until nineteen-o-six San Franciscans always referred to the latter as “the great earthquake” – and it’s there that we’ve drilled our ninth hole by Lake Temescal.

‘The tenth one we put down at Walnut Creek in the Calaveras Fault, which parallels the Hayward. Our suspicions about this fault are in the inverse proportion to what we know about it, which is almost zero.’

Barrow said: ‘That makes ten and that, I take it, is all. You spoke a few minutes ago about poor old Los Angeles. How about poor old San Francisco?’

‘To be thrown to the wolves, it would seem, the orphan left out in the snow. San Francisco is, geologically and seismologically, a city that waits to die. Frankly, we are terrified to tamper with anything up there. The Los Angeles area has had seven what you might call historic ‘quakes that we know of: the Bay area has had sixteen, and we have no idea in the world where the next, the monster, may hit. There was a suggestion – frankly, it was mine – that we sink a bore-hole near Searsville Lake. This is close by Stanford University which had a bad time of it during the nineteen-o-six earthquake, and, more importantly, just where the Pilarcitos Fault branches off from the San Andreas. The Pilarcitos, which runs into the Pacific some six miles south of the San Andreas may, for all we know, be the true line of the San Andreas and certainly was some millions of years ago. Anyway, the nineteen-o-six shake ran through many miles of unpopulated hill regions. Since then, unscrupulous property developers have built cities along both fault lines and the consequences of another eight-plus earthquake are too awful to contemplate. I suggested a possible easement there, but certain vested interests in nearby Menlo Park were appalled at the very idea.’

Barrow said: ‘Vested interests?’

‘Indeed.’ Benson sighed. ‘It was in nineteen-sixty-six that the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research was established there. Very touchy about earthquakes, I’m afraid.’

‘Those bore-holes,’ Ryder said. ‘What diameter drills do you use?’

Benson looked at him for a long moment then sighed again. ‘That had to be the next question. That’s why you’re all here, isn’t it?’

‘Well?’

‘You can use any size within reason. Down in Antarctica they use a twelve-inch drill to bore through the Ross Ice Shelf, but here we get by with a good deal less – five, perhaps six inches. I don’t know. Find out easy enough. So you think the ESPP drillings are a double-edged weapon that’s going to turn in our hands? Limit to what you can achieve by tidal waves, isn’t there? But this is earthquake country, so why not harness the latent powers of nature and trigger off immense earthquakes and where better to pull the triggers than in the very ESPP sites we’ve chosen?’

Barrow said: ‘It’s feasible?’

‘Eminently.’

‘And if –’ He broke off. ‘Ten bombs, ten sites. Matches up a damn sight too well. If this were to happen?’

‘Let’s think about something else, shall we?’

‘If it were?’

‘There are so many unknown factors –’

‘An educated guess, Professor.’

‘Goodbye California. That’s what I would guess. Or a sizeable part of it – bound to affect more than half of the population. Maybe it will fall into the Pacific. Maybe just shattered by a series of monster earthquakes – and if you set off hydrogen bombs in the faults monster earthquakes are what you are going to have. And radiation, of course, would get those the sea and earthquakes didn’t. An immediate trip back east – and I mean immediate – suddenly seems a very attractive prospect.’

‘You’d have to walk,’ Sassoon said. ‘The roads are jammed and the airport is besieged. The airlines are sending in every plane they can lay hands on but it’s hardly helping: they’re stacked heaven knows how many deep just waiting for a chance to land. And, of course, when a plane does land there’s a hundred passengers for every seat available.’

‘Things will be better tomorrow. It’s not in human nature to stay permanently panic-stricken.’

‘And it’s not in an aircraft’s nature to take off in twenty feet of water, which is what the airport might be under tomorrow.’ He broke off as the phone rang again. This time Sassoon took it. He listened briefly, thanked the caller and hung up.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘The Adlerheim does have a radio telephone. All quite legal. The Post Office doesn’t know the name or the address of the person who answers it. They assume that we wouldn’t want to make enquiries. Secondly, there is a very big man up in the Adlerheim.’ He looked at Ryder. ‘It seems you were not only right but right about their arrogant self-confidence. He hasn’t even bothered to change his name. Dubois.’

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ Ryder said. If he was surprised or gratified no trace of those feelings showed. ‘Morro has kidnapped twenty-six drillers, engineers – anyway, oil men. Six are being used as forced labour in the Adlerheim. Then he’ll have a couple of men at each of the drilling rigs – they’ll have guns on them, but he has to have experienced men to lower those damn things. I don’t think we need bother the AEC any more to find out about Professor Aachen’s design: whatever nuclear device he’s constructed it’s not going to be more than five inches in diameter.’ He turned to Benson. ‘Do the crews on those rigs work at weekends?’

‘I don’t know.’

I’ll bet Morro does.’

Benson turned to one of his assistants. ‘You heard. Find out, please.’

Barrow said: ‘Well, we know for sure now that Morro lied about the dimensions of the bomb. You can’t stick something twenty inches in diameter down a five- or six-inch bore-hole. I think I have to agree that this man is dangerously overconfident.’

Mitchell was glum. ‘He’s got plenty to be confident about. All right, we know he’s up in his fancy castle, and we know, or are as certain as can be, that he has those nuclear devices up there. And a lot of good that knowledge does us. How do we get to him or them?’

An assistant spoke to Benson. ‘The drilling crew, sir. They don’t work weekends. A guard at nights. Just one. Gentleman says no one’s likely to wheel away a derrick on a wheelbarrow.’

The profound silence that followed was sufficient comment. Mitchell, whose splendid self-confidence had vanished off the bottom of the chart, said in a plaintive voice: ‘Well, what in hell are we going to do?’

Barrow broke the next silence. ‘I don’t think that there’s anything else that we can do. By that, I mean the people in this room. Apart from the fact that our function is primarily investigative, we don’t have the authority to make any decisions on a national level.’

‘International, you mean,’ Mitchell said. ‘If they can do it to us they can also do it to London or Paris or Rome.’ He almost brightened. ‘They might even do it to Moscow. But I agree. It’s a matter for the White House, Congress, the Pentagon. Personally, I prefer the Pentagon. I’m convinced that the threat of force – and if this isn’t a threat of force I’ve never known of one – can be met only by force. I’m further convinced that we should choose the lesser of two evils, that we should consider the greatest good of the greatest number. I think an attack should be launched on the Adlerheim. At least the damage, though catastrophic, would be localized. I mean, we wouldn’t have half of the damn State being devastated.’ He paused, thought, then struck his fist on a convenient table.

‘By God, I believe I have it! We’re not thinking. What we require is a nuclear physicist here, an expert on hydrogen bombs and missiles. We’re laymen. What do we know about the triggering mechanisms of those devices? For all we know they may be immune to – what’s it called? – sympathetic detonation. If that were the case, a fighter-bomber or two with tactical nuclear missiles – and poof! – all life would be immediately extinct. Instant annihilation for everyone in the Adlerheim.’ Archimedes in his bath or Newton with his apple couldn’t have shown more revelationary enthusiasm.

Ryder said: ‘Well, thank you very much.’

‘What do you mean?’

Dunne answered him. ‘Mr Ryder’s lack of enthusiasm is understandable, sir. Or have you forgotten that his wife and daughter are being held hostage there, not to mention eight others, including five of the country’s outstanding nuclear physicists?’

‘Ah! Oh!’ Much of the missionary zeal vanished. ‘I’m sorry, no, I’m afraid I’d forgotten that. Nevertheless –’

‘Nevertheless, you were going to say, the greatest good of the greatest number. Your proposal would almost certainly achieve the opposite – the greatest destruction of the greatest number.’

‘Justify that, Mr Ryder.’ Mitchell cherished his brain-children and no one was going to take his baby away if he could help it.

‘Easily. You are going to use atomic missiles. The southern end of the San Joaquin Valley is quite heavily populated. It is your intention to wipe those people out?’

‘Of course not. We evacuate them.’

‘Heaven send me strength,’ Ryder said wearily. ‘Has it not occurred to you that from the Adlerheim Morro has an excellent view of the valley, and you may be sure that he has more than a scattering of spies and informants actually down there? What do you think he is going to think when he sees the citizens of the plain disappearing en masse over the northern and southern horizons? He’s going to say to himself: “Ha! I’ve been rumbled” – and apart from anything else that’s the last thing we want him to know – “I must teach those people a lesson for they’re clearly preparing to make an atomic attack on me.” So he sends one of his helicopters down south to the Los Angeles area and another up north to the Bay area. Six million dead. I should think that’s a conservative estimate. Is that your idea of military tactics, of reducing casualties to a minimum?’

From the crestfallen expression on his face it didn’t seem to be. Clearly, it wasn’t anybody else’s either.

Ryder went on: ‘A personal opinion, gentlemen, and offered for what it’s worth, but this is what I think. I don’t think there are going to be any nuclear casualties – not unless we’re stupid enough to provoke them ourselves.’ He looked at Barrow. ‘Back in your office some little time ago I said that I believed Morro is going to trigger off this bomb in the bay tomorrow. I still do. I also said I believed he would set off or would be prepared to set off the other ten devices on Saturday night. I’ve modified that thinking a bit. I still think that if he’s given sufficient provocation he’d be prepared to trigger his devices: but I now don’t believe that he’ll do it on Saturday night. In fact, I would take odds that he won’t.’

‘It’s odd.’ Barrow was thoughtful. ‘I could almost believe that myself. Because of his kidnapping of nuclear physicists, his theft of weapons-grade material, our knowledge that he does have those damned nuclear devices, his constant nuclear threats, his display in Yucca Flat and our conviction that he is going to explode this device in the bay tomorrow morning, we have been hypnotized, mesmerized, conditioned into the inevitability of further nuclear blasts. God knows, we have every reason to believe what this monster says. And yet –’

‘It’s a brain-wash job. A top-flight propagandist can make you believe anything. Our friend should have met Goebbels in his hey-day: they would have been blood-brothers.’

‘Any idea what he doesn’t want us to believe?’

‘I think so. I told Mr Mitchell an hour ago that I had a glimmering, but that I knew what he would do with a glimmering. It’s a pretty bright beacon now. Here’s what I think Morro will be doing – or what I would do if I were in Morro’s shoes.

‘First, I’d bring my submarine through the –’

‘Submarine!’ Mitchell had obviously – and instantly – reverted to his earlier opinion of Ryder.

‘Please. I’d bring it through the Golden Gate and park it alongside one of the piers in San Francisco.’

‘San Francisco?’ Mitchell again.

‘It has better and more piers, better loading facilities and calmer waters than, say, Los Angeles.’

‘Why a submarine?’

‘To take me back home.’ Ryder was being extremely patient. ‘Me and my faithful followers and my cargo.’

‘Cargo?’

‘God’s sake, shut up and listen. We’ll be able to move with complete safety and impunity in the deserted streets of San Francisco. No single soul will be there because no hour was specified as to when the hydrogen bombs will be detonated during the night, and there’ll be nobody within fifty miles. A gallant pilot six miles up will be able to see nothing because it’s night and even if it’s a completely suicidal low-flying pilot he’ll still be able to see nothing because we know where every breaker for every transformer and power station in the city is.

‘Then our pantechnicons will roll. I shall have three and shall lead them down California Street and stop outside the Bank of America which, as you know, is the largest single bank in the world containing loot as great as that of the Federal vaults. Other pantechnicons will go to the Trans-America Pyramid, Wells Fargo, and Federal Reserve Bank, Crockers and other interesting places. There will be ten hours of darkness that night. We estimate we will require six at the outset. Some big robberies, such as the famous break-in to a Nice bank a year or two ago, took a whole leisurely weekend, but gangs like those are severely handicapped because they have to operate in silence. We shall use as much high explosive as need be and for difficult cases will use a self-propelled one-twenty-millimetre-tank guns firing armour-piercing shells. We may even blow some buildings up, but this won’t worry us. We can make all the noise in the world and not care: there’ll be nobody there to hear us. Then we load up the pantechnicons, drive down to the piers, load the submarine and take off.’ Ryder paused. ‘As I said earlier, they’ve come for cash to buy their arms and there’s more cash lying in the vaults of San Francisco than all the kings of Saudi Arabia and maharajas of India have ever seen. As I said before, it takes a simple and unimaginative mind to see the obvious and in this case, for me at least, it’s so obvious that I can’t see any flaws in it. What do you think of my scenario?’

‘I think it’s bloody awful,’ Barrow said. ‘That’s to say, it’s awful because it’s so inevitable. That has to be it, first, because it’s so right and second, because it just can’t be anything else.’ He looked around at the company. ‘You agree?’

Everyone, with one exception, nodded. The exception, inevitably, was Mitchell. ‘And what if you’re wrong?’

‘Must you be so damnably pig-headed and cantankerous?’ Barrow was irritated to the point of exasperation.

Ryder didn’t react, just lifted his shoulders and said: ‘So I’m wrong.’

‘You must be mad! You would take the burden of the deaths of countless fellow Californians on your hands?’

‘You’re beginning to bore me, Mitchell. In fact, not to put it too politely, you do bore me and have done so for some time. I do think you should call your own sanity in question. Do you think I would breathe a word of our conclusions – with you being excepted from our conclusions – outside this room? Do you think I would try to persuade anybody to remain in their homes on Saturday night? When Morro knew that people had ignored the threat and had heard, as he inevitably would, the reason why – namely, that his scheme was known – the chances are very high that in his rage and frustration he’d just go ahead and press the button anyway.’

The singularly ill-named Café Cleopatra was a wateringhole of unmatched dinginess, but on that hectic, frenetic and stifling evening it possessed the singular charm of being the only such establishment open in the blocks around Sassoon’s office. There were dozens of others but their doors were rigorously barred by proprietors who, when the opportunity was open to them, were lugging their dearest possessions to higher levels or who, when such opportunity was denied them, had already joined the panic-stricken rush to the hills.

Fear was abroad that evening but the rush was purely in the mind and heart: it was not physical, for the cars and people who jammed the street were almost entirely static. It was an evening for selfishness, ill-temper, envy, argument, and antisocial behaviour ranging from the curmudgeonly to the downright bellicose: phlegmatic the citizens of the Queen of the Coast were not.

It was an evening for those who ranged the nether scale from the ill-intentioned to the criminally inclined as they displayed in various measure that sweet concern, Christian charity and brotherly love for their fellow man in the hour of crisis, by indulging in red-faced altercation, splendidly uninhibited swearing, bouts of fisticuffs, purse-snatching, wallet-removal, mugging and kicking in the plate-glass windows of the more prosperous-looking emporiums. They were free to indulge their peccadilloes unhindered: the police were powerless as they, too, were immobilized. It was a night for pyromaniacs as many small fires had broken out throughout the city – although, in fairness, many of those were caused by unseemly speed of the departure of householders who left on cookers, ovens and heating appliances: again, the fire brigades were powerless, their only consolation being the faint hope that significant numbers of the smaller conflagrations would be abruptly extinguished at ten o’clock the following morning. It was not a night for the sick and the infirm: elderly ladies, widows and orphans were crushed against walls or, more commonly, deposited in unbecoming positions in the gutter as their fitter brethren pressed on eagerly for the high land: unfortunates in wheelchairs knew what it was to share the emotions of the charioteer who observes his inner wheel coming adrift as he rounds the first bend of the Circus Maximus: especially distressing was the case of thoughtless pedestrians knocked down by cars, driven by owners concerned only by the welfare of their family, and which mounted the pavement in order to overtake the less enterprising who elected to remain on the highway: where they fell there they remained, for doctors and ambulances were as helpless as any. It was hardly an edifying spectacle

Ryder surveyed the scene with a jaundiced and justifiably misanthropic eye although, in truth, he had been in a particularly ill humour even before arriving to sample the sybaritic pleasures of the Café Cleopatra. In the group’s return from CalTech he had listened to, without participating in, the endless wrangling as to how best they should counter and hopefully terminate the evil machinations of Morro and his Muslims: finally, in frustration and disgust, he had announced that he would return within the hour and had left with Jeff and Parker There had been no attempt to dissuade him: there was something about Ryder, as Barrow, Mitchell and their associates had come to appreciate in a very brief period of time, that precluded the idea of dissuasion; besides, he owed neither allegiance nor obedience to any man.

‘Cattle,’ Luigi said with a splendid contempt. He had just brought fresh beers to the three men and was now surveying the pandemoniac scenes being enacted beyond his unwashed windows. Luigi, the proprietor, regarded himself as a cosmopolitan par excellence in a city of cosmopolitans. Neopolitan by birth, he claimed to be a Greek and did his undistinguished best to run what he regarded as an Egyptian establishment. From his slurred speech and unsteady gait it was clear that he had been his own best customer for the day. ‘Canaille!’ His few words of French served, as he fondly imagined, to enhance his cosmopolitan aura. ‘All for one and one for all. The spirit that won the west! How true. The California gold rush, the Klondyke. Every man for himself and the devil take the rest. Alas, I fear they lack the Athenian spirit.’ He swung a dramatic arm around him and almost fell over in the process. ‘Today, this beautiful establishment: tomorrow, the deluge And Luigi? Luigi laughs at the gods, for they are but manikins that masquerade as gods else they would not permit this catastrophe to overtake those mindless infants.’ He paused and reflected. ‘My ancestors fought at Thermopylae.’ Overcome by his own eloquence and the alcohol-accentuated effects of gravity, Luigi collapsed into the nearest chair.

Ryder looked around at the incredible dilapidation which was the outstanding characteristic of Luigi’s beautiful establishment, at the vanished patterns on the cracked linoleum, the stained Formica table-tops, the aged infirmity of the bent-wood chairs, the unwashed stuccoed walls behung with sepia daguerrotypes of pharaonic profiled bas-reliefs, each with two eyes on the same side of the face, portraits of so unbelievable an awfulness that the only charitable thing that could be said about them was that they tended to restore to a state of almost pristine purity the unlovely walls which they desecrated. He said: ‘Your sentiments do you great credit, Luigi. This country could do with more men like you. Now, please, may we be left alone? We have important matters to discuss.’

They had, indeed, important matters to discuss, and their discussion led to a large and uncompromising zero. The problems of what to do with the apparently unassailable inhabitants of the Adlerheim seemed insuperable. In point of fact, the discussion was a dialogue between Ryder and Parker, for Jeff took no part in it. He just leaned back, his beer untouched, his eyes closed as if he were fast asleep or he had lost all interest in solving the unsolvable. He appeared to subscribe to the dictum laid down by the astronomer J. Allen Hynek: ‘In science it’s against the rules to ask questions when we have no way of approaching the answers.’ The problem on hand was not a scientific one: but the principle appeared to be the same.

Unexpectedly, Jeff stirred and said: ‘Good old Luigi.’

‘What?’ Parker stared at him. ‘What’s that?’

‘And Hollywood only a five-minute hop from here.’

Ryder said carefully: ‘Look, Jeff, I know you’ve been through a hard time. We’ve all been through –’

‘Dad?’

‘What?’

‘I have it. Manikins masquerading as gods.’

Five minutes later Ryder was on his third beer, but this time back in Sassoon’s office. The other nine men were still there and had indeed not stirred since Ryder, Jeff and Parker had left. The air was full of tobacco smoke, the powerful aroma of Scotch and, most disquietingly, an almost palpable aura of defeat.

Ryder said: ‘The scheme we have to propose is a highly dangerous one. It verges on the desperate, but there are degrees of desperation and it’s by no means as desperate as the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Success or failure depends entirely on the degree of co-operation we receive from every person in this nation whose duty is in any way concerned with the enforcement of the law, those not concerned directly with the law, even those, if need be, outside the law.’ He looked in turn at Barrow and Mitchell. ‘It’s of no consequence, gentlemen, but your jobs are on the line.’

Barrow said: ‘Let’s have it.’

‘My son will explain it to you. It is entirely his brainchild.’ Ryder smiled faintly. ‘To save you gentlemen any cerebral stress, he even has all the details worked out.’

Jeff explained. It took him no more than three minutes. When he had finished the expressions round the table ranged from the stunned, through incredulity, then intense consideration and finally, in Barrow’s case, the tentative dawning of hope where all hope had been abandoned.

Barrow whispered: ‘My God! I believe it could be done.’

‘It has to be done,’ Ryder said. ‘It means the instant and total co-operation of every police officer, every FBI officer, every CIA officer in the country. It means the scouring of every prison in the country and even if the man we require is a multiple murderer awaiting execution in Death Row he gets a free pardon. How long would it take?’

Barrow looked at Mitchell. ‘The hell with the hatchets. Bury them. Agreed?’ There was a fierce urgency in his voice. Mitchell didn’t answer: but he did nod. Barrow went on: ‘Organization is the name of the game. This is what we were born for.’

‘How long?’ Ryder repeated.

‘A day?’

‘Six hours Meantime, we can get the preliminaries under way.’

‘Six hours?’ Barrow smiled faintly. ‘It used to be the wartime motto of the Seabees that the impossible takes a little longer. Here, it would appear, it has to take a little shorter. You know, of course, that Muldoon has just had his third heart attack and is in Bethsheba hospital?’

‘I don’t care if you have to raise him from the dead. Without Muldoon we are nothing.’

At eight o’clock that evening it was announced over every TV and radio station in the country that at ten o’clock Western standard time – the times for the other zones were given – the President would be addressing the nation on a matter of the utmost national gravity which concerned an emergency unprecedented in the history of the Republic. As instructed, the announcement gave no further details. The brief and cryptic message was guaranteed to ensure the obsessive interest and compulsory viewing of every citizen in the Republic who was neither blind nor deaf nor both.

In the Adlerheim Morro and Dubois looked at each other and smiled. Morro reached out a hand for his bottle of Glenlivet.

In Los Angeles Ryder showed no reaction whatsoever, which was hardly surprising in view of the fact that he had helped draft the message himself. He asked Major Dunne for permission to borrow his helicopter and dispatched Jeff to pick up some specified articles from his, Ryder’s, home. Then he gave Sassoon a short list of other specified articles he required. Sassoon looked at him and said nothing. He just lifted a phone.

Exactly on ten the President appeared on TV screens throughout the country. Not even the first landing on the moon had attracted so vast a viewing – and listening – audience.

He had four men with him in the studio, and those he introduced as his Chief of Staff and the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, which seemed largely superfluous as all of them were nationally- and indeed internationally-known figures. Muldoon, the Secretary of the Treasury, was the one who caught the attention of everyone. Colour TV showed him for what he was, a very sick man indeed. His face was ashen and, surprisingly, almost haggard – surprisingly because, although not particularly tall, he was a man of enormous girth and, as he sat, his great stomach seemed almost to touch his knees. He was said to weigh 330 lbs, but his precise weight was irrelevant. What was truly remarkable about him was not that he had had three heart attacks but the fact that he had managed to survive any of them.

‘Citizens of America.’ The President’s deep, resonant voice was trembling, not with fear but with an outraged fury that he made no attempt to suppress. ‘You all know the great misfortune that has befallen, or is about to befall, our beloved State of California. Although the Government of these United States will never yield to coercion, threats or blackmail it is clear that we must employ every means in our power – and in this, the greatest country in the world, our resources are almost infinite – to avert the impending doom, the threatened holocaust that looms over the West.’ Even in the moments of the greatest stress he was incapable of talking in other than presidential language.

‘I hope the villainous architect of this monstrous scheme is listening to me, for, despite the best efforts – and those have been immense and indefatigable – of hundreds of our best law enforcement officers, his whereabouts remain a complete secret and I know of no other means whereby I can contact him. I trust, Morro, you are either watching or listening. I know I am in no position to bargain with you or threaten you’ – here the President’s voice broke off on an oddly strangled note and he was forced to have recourse to several gulps of water – ‘because you would appear to be an utterly ruthless criminal wholly devoid of even the slightest trace of humanitarian scruples.

‘But I suggest that it might be to our mutual advantage and that we might arrive at some mutually satisfactory arrangement if I, and my four senior government colleagues with me here, were to parlay with you and try to arrive at some solution to this unparalleled problem. Although it goes violently against the grain, against every principle dear to me and every citizen of this great nation, I suggest we meet at a time and a place, under whatever conditions you care to impose, at the earliest possible moment.’ The President had quite a bit more to say, most of it couched in ringingly patriotic terms which could have only deceived those mentally retarded beyond any hopes of recovery: but he had, in fact, said all that he had needed to.

In the Adlerheim the normally impassive and unemotional Dubois wiped tears from his eyes.

‘Never yield to coercion, threats or blackmail! No position to bargain or treat with us. Mutually satisfactory arrangement! Five billion dollars to begin with, perhaps? And then, of course, we proceed with our original plan?’ He poured out two more glasses of Glenlivet, handed one to Morro.

Morro sipped some of the whisky. He, too, was smiling but his voice, when he spoke, held an almost reverent tone.

‘We must have the helicopter camouflaged. Think of it, Abraham, my dear friend. The dream of a life-time come true. America on its knees.’ He sipped some more of his drink then, with his free hand, reached out for a microphone and began to dictate a message.

Barrow said to no one in particular: ‘I’ve always maintained that to be a successful politician you have to be a good actor. But to be a President you must be a superlative one. We must find some way to bend the rules of the world of the cinema. The man must have an Oscar.’

Sassoon said: ‘With a bar and crossed leaves.’

At eleven o’clock it was announced over TV and radio that a further message from Morro would be broadcast in an hour’s time.

At midnight Morro was on the air again. He tried to speak in his customary calm and authoritative voice, but beneath it were the overtones of a man aware that the world lay at his feet. The message was singularly brief.

‘I address this to the President of the United States. We’ – that ‘we’ had more of the royal than the editorial about it – ‘accede to your request. The conditions of the meeting, which will be imposed entirely by us, will be announced tomorrow morning. We shall see what can be accomplished when two reasonable men meet and talk together.’ He sounded genuinely aware of his incredibly mendacious effrontery.

He went on in a portentous voice: ‘This proposed meeting in no way affects my intention to detonate the hydrogen device in the ocean tomorrow morning. Everybody – and that includes you, Mr President – must be convinced beyond all doubt that I have the indisputable power to carry out my promises.

‘With reference to my promises, I have to tell you that the devices I still intend to detonate on Saturday night will produce a series of enormous earthquakes that will have a cataclysmic effect beyond any natural disaster ever recorded in history. That is all.’

Barrow said. ‘Well, damn your eyes, Ryder, you were right again. About the earthquakes, I mean.’

Ryder said mildly: ‘That hardly seems to matter now.’ At 12.15 a.m. word came through from the AEC that the hydrogen bomb, code-named ‘Aunt Sally’, designed by Professors Burnett and Aachen, had a diameter of 4.73 inches.

That didn’t seem to matter at all.

CHAPTER TWELVE

At eight o’clock the next morning Morro made his next contact with the anxious and – such is mankind’s morbidly avid love of vicarious doom and disaster – vastly intrigued world.

His message he delivered with his now accustomed terseness.

He said: ‘My meeting with the President and his senior advisers will take place at eleven o’clock tonight. However, I insist that the presidential party arrives in Los Angeles – if the airport is functioning, if not, San Francisco – by six o’clock this evening. The meeting place I cannot and will not specify. The travel arrangements will be announced late this afternoon.

‘I trust the low-lying regions of Los Angeles, the coastal regions north to Point Arguello and south to the Mexican border, in addition to the Channel Islands, have been evacuated. If not I will accept no responsibility. As promised, I shall detonate this nuclear device in two hours’ time.’

Sassoon was closeted in his office with Brigadier-General Culver of the Army Air Force. Far below a deathly hush lay over the totally deserted streets. The low-lying regions of the city had indeed been evacuated, thanks in large part to Culver and over two thousand soldiers and national guardsmen under his command, who had been called in to help the hopelessly overworked police restore order. Culver was a ruthlessly efficient man and had not hesitated to call in tanks in number close to battalion strength, which had a marvellously chastening effect on citizens who, prior to their arrival, had seemed hell-bent not on self-preservation but on self-destruction. The deployment of the tanks had been co-ordinated by a fleet of police, coastguard and army helicopters, which had pinpointed the major traffic bottlenecks. The empty streets were littered with abandoned cars, many of which bore the appearance of having been involved in major crashes, a state of affairs for which the tanks had been in no way responsible: the citizens had done it all by themselves.

The evacuation had been completed by midnight, but long before that the fire brigades, ambulances and police cars had moved in. The fires, none of them major, had been extinguished, the injured had been removed to hospital and the police had made a record number of arrests of hoodlums whose greed in taking advantage of this unprecedented opportunity had quite overcome their sense of self-preservation and were still looting away with gay abandon when policemen with drawn guns had taken a rather less than paternal interest in their activities.

Sassoon switched off the TV set and said to Culver: ‘What do you make of that?’

‘One has to admire the man’s colossal arrogance.’

‘Over-confidence.’

‘If you like. Understandably, he wants to conduct his meeting with the President under cover of darkness. Obviously, the “travel arrangements”, as he calls them, are linked with the deadline for the arrival of the plane. He wants to make good and sure that the President has arrived before he gives instructions.’

‘Which means that he’ll have an observer stationed at both San Francisco and Los Angeles airports. Well, he has three separate phones with three separate numbers in the Adlerheim, and we have them all tapped.’

‘They could use short-wave radio communication.’

‘We’ve thought of that and discounted the possibility. Morro is convinced that we have no idea where he is. In which case, why bother with unnecessary refinements? Ryder has been right all along: Morro’s divine belief in himself is going to bring him down.’ Sassoon paused. ‘We hope.’

‘This fellow Ryder. What’s he like?’

‘You’ll see for yourself. I expect him within the hour. At the moment he’s out at the police shooting range practising with some fancy Russian toys he took away from the opposition. Quite a character. Don’t expect him to call you “sir”.’

At 8.30 that morning a special news broadcast announced that James Muldoon, Secretary of the Treasury, had had a relapse in the early hours of the morning and had had to have emergency treatment for cardiac arrest. Had he not been in hospital and with the cardiac arrest unit standing by his bedside it was unlikely that he would have survived. As it was he was off the critical list and swearing that he could make the journey out to the west coast even although he had to be carried aboard Air Force One on a stretcher.

Culver said: ‘Sounds bad.’

‘Doesn’t it just? Fact is, he slept soundly the whole night through. We just want to convince Morro that he’s dealing with a man in a near-critical condition, a man who clearly must be treated with every consideration. It also, of course, gives a perfect excuse for two additional people to accompany the presidential delegation: a doctor and a Treasury Under-Secretary to deputize for Muldoon in the event of his expiring as soon as he sets foot in the Adlerheim.’

At 9 o’clock an Air Force jet lifted off from Los Angeles airport. It carried only nine passengers, all from Hollywood and all specialists in their own arcane crafts. Each carried a suitcase. In addition, a small wooden box had been loaded aboard. Exactly half an hour later the jet touched down in Las Vegas.

A few minutes before ten Morro invited his hostages along to his special screening room. All the hostages had TV sets of their own, but Morro’s was something special. By a comparatively simple magnification and back-projection method he was able to have a screened picture some six feet by four-and-a-half, about four times the width and height of a normal twenty-one-inch set. Why he had invited them was unclear. When not torturing people – or, more precisely, having them tortured – Morro was capable of many small courtesies. Perhaps he just wanted to watch their faces. Perhaps he wanted to revel in the magnitude of his achievement and the sense of his invincible power, and the presence of an audience always heightened the enjoyment of such an experience; but that last was unlikely as gloating did not appear to be a built-in factor in Morro’s mental make-up. Whatever the reasons, none of the hostages refused the invitation. In the presence of catastrophe, even although such catastrophe be at second hand, company makes for comfort.

It was probably true to say that every citizen in America, except those engaged in running absolutely essential services, was watching the same event on their screens: the number watching throughout the rest of the world must have run into hundreds of millions.

The various TV companies filming the incident were, understandably, taking no chances. Normally, all outdoor events on a significantly large scale, ranging from Grand Prix racing to erupting volcanoes, are filmed from helicopters, but here they were dealing with the unknown. No one had even an approximate idea of what the extent of the blast and radiation would be, and the companies had elected the same type of site for their cameras – on the tops of high buildings at a prudent distance from the ocean front: the viewers in the Adlerheim could see the blurred outline of the city abutting on the Pacific in the lower segment of their screens. If the nuclear device was anywhere near where Morro had said it was – between the islands of Santa Cruz and Santa Catalina – then the scene of action had to be at least thirty miles distant; but the telescopic zoom lenses of the cameras would take care of that with ease. And, at that moment, the zoom lenses were fully extended, which accounted for the out-of-focus blurring of the city front.

The day was fine and bright and clear with cloudless skies which, in the circumstances, formed an impossibly macabre setting for the convulsion the watchers were about to witness, a circumstance that must have pleased Morro greatly, for it could not but increase the emotional impact of the spectacle: a storm-wracked sky, lowering clouds, driving rain, fog, any face of nature that showed itself in a sombre and minor key would have been far more in keeping with the occasion – and would have lessened the impact of the spectacle of the explosion. There was only one favourable aspect about the weather. Normally at that time of the day and at that time of year the wind would have been westerly and on-shore: today, because of a heavy front pressing down from the north-west, the wind was slightly west of southerly and in that direction the nearest land-mass of any size lay as far distant as the Antarctic.

‘Pay attention to the sweep-second hand on the wall-clock,’ Morro said. ‘It is perfectly synchronized with the detonating mechanism. There are, as you can see, twenty seconds to go.’

A pure measure of time is only relative. To a person in ecstasy it can be less than the flicker of an eyelid: for a person on the rack it can be an eternity. The watchers were on no physical rack but they were on an emotional one, and those twenty seconds seemed interminable. All of them behaved in precisely the same way, their eyes constantly flickering between the clock and the screen and back again at least once in every second.

The sweep second reached sixty and nothing happened. One second passed, two, three and still nothing. Almost as if by command the watchers glanced at Morro, who sat relaxed and apparently unworried. He smiled at them.

‘Be of good faith. The bomb lies deep and you forget the factor of the earth’s curvature.’

Their eyes swivelled back to the screen and then they saw it. At first it was no more than a tiny protuberance on the curve of the distant horizon, but a protuberance that rose and swelled with frightening rapidity with the passage of every second. There was no blinding white glare of light, there was no light whatsoever of any colour, just that monstrous eruption of water and vaporized water that rose and spread, rose and spread until it filled the screen. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb but was perfectly fan-shaped in appearance, much thicker in the centre than at the edges, the lowermost sides of which were streaking outwards just above and almost parallel with the sea. The cloud, had it been possible to see it from above, must have looked exactly like an inverted umbrella, but from the side it looked like a gigantic fan opened to its full 180 degrees, much more dense in the centre, presumably because there the blast had had the shortest distance to cover before reaching the surface of the sea. Suddenly the giant fan, which had run completely off the screen, shrunk until it occupied no more than half of it.

A woman’s voice, awed and shaky, said: ‘What happened to it? What’s happened to it?’

‘Nothing’s happened to it.’ Morro looked and sounded very comfortable. ‘It’s the camera. The operator has pulled in his zoom to get the picture inside the frame.’

The commentator, who had been babbling on almost incoherently, telling the world what they could see perfectly well for themselves, was still babbling on.

‘It must be eight thousand feet high now. No, more. Ten thousand would be nearer it. Think of it, just think of it! Two miles high and four miles across the base. Good God, is the thing never going to stop growing?’

‘I think congratulations are in order, Professor Aachen,’ Morro said. ‘Your little contraption seems to have worked quite well.’

Aachen gave him a look which was meant to be a glare, but wasn’t. A broken spirit can take a long time to heal.

For about the next thirty seconds the commentator stopped commentating. It was no instance of a gross dereliction of duty: he was probably so awe-struck that he could find no words to describe his emotions. It was not often that a commentator had the opportunity to witness the terrifying spectacle unfolding before his eyes: more precisely, no commentator had ever had the opportunity before. By and by he bestirred himself. ‘Could we have full zoom, please?’

All but the base of the centre of the fan disappeared. A tiny ripple could be seen advancing lazily across the ocean. The commentator said: ‘That, I suppose, must be the tidal wave.’ He sounded disappointed; clearly he regarded it as an altogether insignificant product of the titanic explosion he’d just seen. ‘Doesn’t look much like a tidal wave to me.’

‘Ignorant youth,’ Morro said sadly. ‘That wave is probably travelling something about four hundred miles an hour at the moment. It will slow down very quickly as it reaches shallower water, but its height will increase in inverse proportion to its deceleration. I think the poor boy is in for a shock.’

About two-and-a-half minutes after the detonation a thunderous roar, which seemed as if it might shake the TV to pieces, filled the room. It lasted about two seconds before it was suddenly reduced to a tolerable level. A new voice cut in.

‘Sorry about that, folks. We couldn’t reach the volume control in time. Whew! We never expected a deafening racket like that. In fact, to be quite honest with you, we didn’t expect any sound at all from an explosion so deep under water.’

‘Fool.’ Liberal as ever, Morro had supplied refreshment for the entertainment, and he now took a delicate sip of his Glenfiddich. Burnett took a large gulp of his.

‘My word, that was a bang.’ The original commentator was back on the air. He was silent for some time while the camera, still on full zoom, remained fixed on the incoming tidal wave. ‘I don’t think I like this too much. That wave might not be so big but I’ve never seen anything moving so fast. I wonder –’

The viewers were not to find out what he was wondering about. He gave an articulate cry, there was an accompanying crashing sound and suddenly the tidal wave on the screen was replaced by an empty expanse of blue sky.

‘He’s been hit by the blast shock wave. I should have warned them about that, I suppose.’ If Morro was covered with remorse he was hiding it well. ‘Couldn’t have been all that bad, or the camera wouldn’t still be functioning.’

As usual Morro was right. Within seconds the commentator was on the air again but was clearly so dazed that he had forgotten the fact.

‘Jesus Christ! My bloody head!’ There was a pause, punctuated by a fair amount of wheezing and groaning. ‘Sorry about that, viewers. Mitigating circumstances. Now I know what it’s like to be hit by an express train. If I may be spared a feeble joke, I know the occupation I’d like to have tomorrow. A glazier. That blast must have broken a million windows in the city. Let’s see if this camera is still functioning.’

It was functioning. As the camera was lifted back to the upright the blue sky was gradually replaced by the ocean. The operator had obviously advanced the zoom, for the fan was once again in the picture. It had grown no larger and appeared to be in the first beginnings of disintegration because it had become ragged and was gradually losing its shape. A faint greyish cloud, perhaps two miles high, could be seen faintly drifting away.

‘I think it’s falling back into the ocean. Can you see that cloud drifting away to the left – to the south? That can’t be water, surely. I wonder if it’s a radio-active cloud.’

‘It’s radio-active, all right,’ Morro said. ‘But that greyness is not radio-activity; it’s water vapour held in suspension.’

Burnett said: ‘I suppose you’re aware, you bloodless bastard, that that cloud is lethal?’

‘An unfortunate by-product. It will disperse. Besides, no land mass lies in its way. One assumes that the competent authorities, if there are any in this country, will warn shipping.’

The centre of interest had now clearly changed from the now-dispersing giant fan to the incoming tidal wave, because the camera had now locked on that.

‘Well, there she comes.’ There was just a hint of a tremor in the commentator’s voice. ‘It’s slowed down, but it’s still going faster than any express train I’ve ever seen. And it’s getting bigger. And bigger.’ He paused for a few seconds. ‘Apart from hoping that the police and army are a hundred per cent right in saying that the entire lower area of the city has been evacuated, I think I’ll shut up for a minute. I don’t have the words for this. Nobody could. Let the camera do the talking.’

He fell silent, and it was a reasonable assumption that hundreds of millions of people throughout the world did the same. Words could never convey to the mind the frightening immensity of that massive on-rushing wall of water: but the eyes could.

When the tidal wave was a mile away it had slowed down to not much more than fifty miles an hour, but was at least twenty feet in height. It was not a wave in the true sense, just an enormously smooth and unbroken swell, completely silent in its approach, a silence that served only to intensify the impression that here was an alien monster, evil, malevolent, bent upon a mindless destruction. Half a mile away it seemed to rear its head and white showed along the tip like a giant surf about to break, and it was at this point that the level of the still untroubled waters between the tidal wave and the shore perceptibly began to fall as if being sucked into the ravenous jaw of the monster, as indeed they were.

And now they could hear the sound of it, a deep and rumbling roar which intensified with the passing of every moment, rising to such a pitch that the volume controller had to turn down the sound. When it was fifty yards away, just as it was breaking, the waters by the foreshore drained away completely, leaving the ocean bed showing. And then, with the explosive sound of a giant thunder-clap directly overhead, the monster struck.

Momentarily that was all there was to it as all visual definition was lost in a sheet of water that rose a hundred vertical feet and spray that rose five times that height as the wave smashed with irresistible power into the buildings that lined the waterfront. The sheet of water was just beginning to fall, although the spray was still high enough to obliterate the view of the dispersing fan of the hydrogen explosion, when the tidal wave burst through the concealing curtain and laid its ravenous claws on the waiting city.

Great torrents of water, perhaps thirty to forty feet high, seething, bubbling, white like giant maelstroms, bearing along on their tortured surfaces an infinity of indescribable, unidentifiable debris, rushed along the east-west canyons of Los Angeles, sweeping along in their paths the hundreds of abandoned cars that lay in their paths. It seemed as if the city was to be inundated, drowned and remain no more than a memory, but, surprisingly, this was not to be so, largely, perhaps, because of the rigid building controls that had been imposed after the Long Beach earthquake of 1933. Every building lining the front had been destroyed: the city itself remained intact.

Gradually, with the rising lift of the land and the spending of its strength, the torrent slowed, its levels fell away, and finally, exhausted, began, with an almost obscene sucking sound, its appetite slaked, to return to the ocean whence it had come. As always with a tidal wave there was to be a secondary one, but although this too reached into the city it was on such a comparatively minor scale that it was hardly worth the remarking.

Morro, for once, bordered almost on the complacent. ‘Well, I think that possibly might give them something to think about.’

Burnett began to swear, with a fervour and singular lack of repetition that showed clearly that a considerable part of his education must have been spent in fields other than the purely academic, remembered belatedly that he was in the presence of ladies, reached for the Glenfiddich and fell silent.

Ryder stood in stoical silence as a doctor removed splinters of glass from his head: like many others he had been looking out through the windows when the blast had struck. Barrow, who had just suffered the attentions of the same doctors, was mopping blood from his face. He accepted a glass of some stimulant from an aide and said to Ryder: ‘Well, what did you think of that little lot?’

‘Something will have to be done about it, and that’s a fact. There’s only one thing to do with a mad dog and that is to put it down.’

‘The chances?’

‘Better than even.’

Barrow looked at him curiously. ‘It’s hard to tell. Do you look forward to gunning him down?’

‘Certainly not. You know what they call us – peace officers. However, if he even looks like batting an eyelid –’

I’m still unhappy about this.’ Brigadier-General Culver’s expression bore out his words. ‘I think this is most inadvisable. Most. Not that I doubt your capabilities, Sergeant. God knows, you’re a proven man. But you have to be emotionally involved. That is not a good thing. And your fiftieth birthday lies behind you. I’m being honest, you see. I have young, fit, highly trained – well, killers if you want. I think –’

‘General.’ Culver turned as Major Dunne touched his arm. Dunne said gently: I’ll give you my personal affidavit that Sergeant Ryder is probably the most emotionally stable character in the State of California. As for those super-fit young assassins in your employ – why don’t you bring one of them in here and watch Ryder take him apart?’

‘Well. No. I still –’

‘General.’ It was Ryder, and still showing no emotion. ‘Speaking with my accustomed modesty / tracked Morro down. Jeff, here, devised the plan for tonight. My wife is up there, as is my daughter. Jeff and I have the motivation. None of your boys has. But, much more importantly, we have the right. Would you deny a man his rights?’

Culver looked at him for a long moment, then smiled and nodded acceptance. ‘It is perhaps a pity. I think, that you’re about a quarter century beyond the age for enlistment.’

As they were leaving the viewing room Susan Ryder said to Morro: ‘I understand that you are having visitors tonight?’

Morro smiled. As far as it was possible for him to form an attachment for anyone he had formed one for Susan. ‘We are being honoured.’

‘Would it – would it be possible to just see the President?’

Morro raised an eyebrow. ‘I would not have thought, Mrs Ryder –’

‘Me? If I were a man instead of the lady I pretend to be I would tell you what to do with the President. Any President. It’s for my daughter – she’ll talk about it for ever.’

‘Sorry. It’s out of the question.’

‘What harm would it do?’

‘None. One does not mix business with pleasure.’ He looked curiously at her. ‘After you’ve seen what I’ve just done – you still talk to me?’

She said calmly: ‘I don’t believe you intend to kill anyone.’

He looked at her in near-astonishment. ‘Then I’m a failure. The rest of the world does.’

‘The rest of the world hasn’t met you. Anyway, the President might ask to see us.’

‘Why should he?’ He smiled again. ‘I cannot believe that you and the President are in league.’

‘I wouldn’t like to be either. Remember what he said about you last night – an utterly ruthless criminal wholly devoid of even the slightest trace of humanitarian scruples. I don’t for a moment believe that you intend any harm to any of us, but the President might well ask to view the bodies as a preliminary to negotiations.’

‘You are a clever woman, Mrs Ryder.’ He touched her once on the shoulder, very gently. ‘We shall see.’

At 11 a.m. a Lear jet touched down at Las Vegas. Two men emerged and were escorted to one of five waiting police cars. Within fifteen minutes four other planes arrived and eight men were transferred to the four other police cars. The police convoy moved off. The route to their destination was sealed off to all traffic.

At 4 p.m. in the afternoon three gentlemen arrived at Sassoon’s office from Culver City. They were warned upon arrival that they would not be allowed to leave until midnight. They accepted the news with equanimity.

At 4.15 p.m. Air Force One, the Presidential jet, touched down at Las Vegas.

At 5.30 p.m. Culver, Barrow, Mitchell and Sassoon entered the small ante-room off Sassoon’s office. The three gentlemen from Culver City were smoking, drinking and had about them an air of justifiable pride. Culver said: ‘I’ve just learned about this. Nobody ever tells me anything.’

Ryder said: ‘If my young daughter saw me do you think there’s any power on earth that would stop her from crying out “Daddy”?’

Ryder now had brown hair, brown moustache, brown eyebrows and even brown eyelashes. The well-filled cheeks now had pouches in them, and there were slight traces of a long-healed double scar on the right cheek. His nose was not the one he’d had that morning. Susan Ryder would have brushed by him in the street without a second glance. Nor would her son or Parker have merited a second glance either.

At 5.50 p.m. Air Force One touched down at Los Angeles International airport. Even a tidal wave has no effect on the massively reinforced concrete of a runway.

At 6 p.m. Morro and Dubois were seated before a voice-box. Morro said: ‘There can be no mistake?’ It was a question, but there was no question in his voice.

‘Presidential seal, sir. They were met by two unmarked police cars and an ambulance. Seven men disembarked. Five of them were the men we saw on TV last night. My life on that. Mr Muldoon seems to be in very poor shape. He was helped down the steps by two men who took him to the ambulance. One was carrying what I took to be a medicine bag.’

‘Describe them.’

The observer, obviously highly trained, described them. Down to the last detail his description tallied exactly with the way both Jeff and Parker looked at that moment.

Morro said: ‘Thank you. Return.’ He switched off, smiled and looked at Dubois. ‘Mumain is the best in the business.’

‘He has no equal.’

Morro picked up a microphone and began to dictate.

Sassoon switched off the wall-box and looked around the room. ‘He does seem quite gratified at the prompt arrival of his guests, doesn’t he?’

At 7.30 p.m. the next and last message came through from Morro. He said: ‘It is to be hoped that there was no loss of life this morning. As I have said, if there were the fault was not mine. One regrets the considerable physical damage inevitable in the circumstances. I trust that the display was sufficiently impressive to convince everyone that I have in my power the means to implement my promises.

‘It will come as a surprise to no one to know that I am aware that the presidential party landed at ten minutes to six this evening. They will be picked up by helicopter at exactly nine o’clock. The helicopter will land in the precise centre of Los Angeles airport which will be fully illuminated by searchlights or whatever means you care to employ. No attempt will be made to trace or follow the helicopter after take-off. We will have the President of the United States aboard. That is all.’

At 9 p.m. the presidential party duly boarded the helicopter. Considerable difficulty was experienced in hoisting Muldoon aboard, but it was finally achieved without precipitating another heart seizure. For air hostesses they had two guards, each equipped with an Ingram machine-gun. One of them went around and fitted each of the seven men with a black hood, which was secured at the neck by draw-strings. The President protested furiously and was ignored.

The President was Vincent Hillary, widely regarded as the best character actor Hollywood had ever produced. Even without make-up he had borne a remarkable resemblance to the President. By the time the make-up artist had finished with him in Las Vegas the President himself would have stood in front of a plate of transparent glass and gone on oath that he was looking into a mirror. He had a remarkable capacity for modulating his voice so as to imitate a remarkably wide range of people. Hillary was expendable and was cheerfully prepared to acknowledge the fact.

The Chief of Staff was a certain Colonel Greenshaw, lately retired from the Green Berets. Nobody knew the number of deaths that lay at his door, and he had never cared to enumerate. It was widely said that the only thing he really cared about was killing people: and he was unquestionably very good at this.

The Defense Secretary was one Harlinson, a man tipped to be one of the choices to succeed Barrow as head of the FBI. He looked almost more like the Defense Secretary than the Defense Secretary did. He was said to be very good at looking after himself.

The Secretary of State was, of all things, a remarkably successful attorney-at-law who had once been an Ivy League professor. Johannsen had nothing in particular to recommend him – he wouldn’t even have known how to load a gun – except the intense patriotism of a first-generation American and his uncanny resemblance to the real Secretary. But his own private make-up men had improved even on that.

The Assistant Treasury Secretary, one Myron Bonn, had also some pretensions towards being a scholar, and uncannily bore out a statement earlier made by Ryder. He was at present in the throes about writing a thesis for his external Ph.D., and remarkably erudite it was, but then the thesis was about prison conditions and the suggested ameliorations thereof upon which he was an undoubted expert: the thesis was being written in a cell in Death Row, where he was awaiting execution. He had three things going for him. Being a criminal does not necessarily make a man less a patriot. His original resemblance, now perfected, to the Assistant Secretary, had been astonishing. And he was widely regarded by the police as being the most lethal man in the United States, behind bars or outside them. He was a multiple murderer. Oddly, he was an honest man.

Muldoon, the Treasury Secretary, was unquestionably the pièce de résistance. Like Hillary – both of whom were to put up performances that night worth platinum Oscars – he was an actor. It had taken the unremitting efforts of no less than three of the best special-effects make-up men in Hollywood – it had taken them six hours – to transfer him into what he was. Ludwig Johnson had suffered in the process and was still suffering, for even a man weighing two hundred pounds to begin with does not care to carry another unnecessary sixty pounds around with him. On the other hand, the make-up men had made that sixty pounds look like one hundred and thirty, and for that he was reasonably grateful.

So, purely by chance and not from necessity, three of them were men of unquestionable action while three would not have said boo to the proverbial goose. Ryder would not have cared if all six were in the latter category. But so the cards had fallen.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The helicopter hedge-hopped its way due east, no doubt to fly under the radar which the pilot may have mistakenly imagined was following him. After a certain distance he turned sharply to the north-west and set his craft down near the town of Gorman. At this point they were transferred to a minibus which stopped just south of Greenfield. Here they were transferred to another helicopter. Throughout Muldoon’s sufferings were heart-wrenching to behold. At eleven o’clock precisely the helicopter set them down in the courtyard of the Adlerheim. Not that any of the visitors was to know that. Their blindfolds were not removed until they were inside the refectory-cum-prayer-hall of the castle.

Morro and Dubois greeted them. There were others in the unofficial welcoming committee, but they hardly counted as all they did was to stand around watchfully with Ingram machine-guns in their hands. They were in civilian clothes. To have worn their customary robes would have been to wear too much.

Morro was unexpectedly deferential. ‘You are welcome, Mr President.’

‘Renegade!’

‘Come, come.’ Morro smiled. ‘We have met together to negotiate, not recriminate. And as a non-American how can I be a renegade?’

‘Worse! A man who is capable of doing today what you did to Los Angeles is capable of anything. Capable, perhaps, of kidnapping the President of the United States and holding him to ransom?’ Hillary laughed contemptuously and it was more than possible that he was even enjoying himself. ‘I have put my life at risk, sir.’

‘If you care to, you may leave now. Call me what you wish – renegade, rogue, criminal, murderer, a man, as you say, totally without any humanitarian scruples. But my personal integrity, even though it may be that of what you would term an international bandit, my word of honour, is not for question. You could not be safer, sir, in the Oval Room.’

‘Ha!’ Hillary went slowly red in the face with anger, an achievement which the world would have regarded as a remarkable thespian feat and for which he was widely renowned: in fact, many people can do just that by holding their breath and expanding the stomach muscles to the maximum extent. Slowly, imperceptibly, Hillary relaxed his muscles and began, again unobtrusively, to breathe again. His colour returned to normal. ‘Damned if I couldn’t even begin to believe you.’

Morro bowed. It wasn’t much of a bow, an inch at the most, but it was nevertheless a token of appreciation. ‘You do me an honour. The photographs, Abraham.’

Dubois handed across several blown-up pictures of the presidential party. Morro went from man to man, carefully scrutinizing both man and picture in turn. When he was finished he returned to Hillary. ‘A word apart, if you please?’

Whatever emotion Hillary felt his thirty-five years’ acting experience concealed it perfectly. He had not been briefed for this. Morro said: ‘Your Assistant Treasury Secretary. Why is he here? I recognize him, of course, but why?’

Hillary’s face slowly congealed until both it and his eyes were positively glacial. ‘Look at Muldoon.’

‘I take your point. You have come, perhaps, to discuss, shall we say, financial matters?’

‘Among other things.’

‘That man with the brown hair and moustache. He looks like a policeman.’

‘Damn it to hell, he is a policeman. A Secret Service guard. Don’t you know that the President always has a Secret Service guard?’

‘He didn’t accompany you on the plane today.’

‘Of course he didn’t. He’s the head of my west coast Secret Service. I thought you’d be better informed than that. Don’t you know that in flight I never –’ He broke off. ‘How did you know –’

Morro smiled. ‘Perhaps my intelligence is almost as good as yours. Come, let us rejoin the others.’ They walked back and Morro said to one of the guards: ‘Bring the doctor.’

It was a bad moment. Morro could have sent for the doctor, Ryder thought, to check on Muldoon. No one had thought of this possibility.

Morro said: ‘I am afraid, gentlemen, that it will be necessary to search you.’

‘Search me? Search the President?’ Hillary did his turkey-cock act again, then unbuttoned his overcoat and coat and flung them wide. ‘I have never been subjected to such damnable humiliation in my life. Do it yourself.’

‘My apologies. On second thoughts it will not be necessary. Not for the other gentlemen. Except one. Ah, Doctor.’ Peggy’s physician had appeared on the scene. He pointed to Jeff. ‘This young man is alleged to be a physician. Would you examine his case?’

Ryder breathed freely again and was quite unmoved when Morro pointed a finger at him. ‘This, Abraham, is the President’s Secret Service agent. He might, perhaps, be a walking armoury.’

The giant approached. Unbidden Ryder removed both overcoat and coat and dropped them to the floor. Dubois searched him with an embarrassing thoroughness, smiling at the sight of Ryder’s tightly clenched fists, even going to the lengths of poking inside his socks and examining his shoes for false heels. He looked at Morro and said: ‘So far, so good.’

He then picked up Ryder’s overcoat and coat and examined them with excruciating thoroughness, paying particular attention to the linings and the hemmed stitching. Finally he returned them both to Ryder, keeping only the two ballpoints he had taken from the coat’s breast pocket.

During the time of this examination Morro’s physician was examining Jeff’s case with a thoroughness that matched Dubois’s examination of Ryder.

Dubois crossed to Morro, took a photograph, pulled a particularly unpleasant gun from his waist, reversed the photograph, handed one of the pens to Ryder and said: ‘The point is retracted. I do not care to press the button. People can do all sorts of things with ballpoints these days. I mean no offence, of course. Perhaps you would care to write something. My gun is on your heart.’

‘Jesus!’ Ryder took photograph and pen, pressed the button, wrote, retracted the point and handed both back to Dubois. Dubois glanced at it and said to Morro: ‘This is not a very friendly message. It says: “The Hell with you all”.’ He handed the other pen to Ryder. ‘My gun is still on your heart.’

Ryder wrote and handed the photograph back to Dubois, who turned to Morro and smiled. ‘“In triplicate”, he says.’ He handed both pens back.

Morro’s physician returned and handed the case back to Jeff. He looked at Morro and smiled gently. ‘Some day, sir, you will supply me with a medical case as superb as this one.’

‘We can’t all be the President of the United States.’ The doctor smiled, bowed and left.

Hillary said: ‘Now that all this needless tomfoolery is over may I ask you if you know something about the late evening habits of the President? I know we haven’t all night, but surely there is time –’

‘I am aware that I have been most remiss in my hospitality. But I had to observe certain precautions. You must know that. Gentlemen.’

Settled in Morro’s private office suite the company might have been sampling the sybaritic comforts of some exclusive country club. Two of Morro’s staff, incongruously – for them – in black-tied evening suits, moved around with drinks. Morro kept his usually impassive but occasionally smiling calm. It could have been the greatest moment of his life, but he wasn’t letting it show. He was sitting beside Hillary.

Hillary said: ‘I am the President of the United States.’

‘I am aware of that.’

‘I am also a politician and, above all, I hope, a statesman. I have learned to accept the inevitable. You will appreciate that I am in a dreadfully embarrassing position.’

‘I am aware of that also.’

‘I have come to bargain.’ There was a long pause. ‘A famous British Foreign Secretary once demanded: “Would you send me naked to the conference table?”’

Morro said nothing.

‘One request. Before I commit myself publicly, even to my cabinet, may I talk to you privately?’

Morro hesitated.

‘I bear no arms. Bring that giant with you if you will. Or do I ask too much?’

‘No.’

‘You agree?’

‘In the circumstances, I can do no less.’

‘Thank you.’ An irritable note crept into Hillary’s voice. ‘Is it necessary that we have three armed guards to watch eight defenceless men?’

‘Habit, Mr President.’

Muldoon was slumped forward in his chair – his massive back was almost to them – and Jeff, a stethoscope hanging from his neck, was holding a glass of water and some tablets in his hand. Hillary raised his voice and said: ‘The usual, Doctor?’

Jeff nodded.

‘Digitalis,’ Hillary said.

‘Ah! A heart stimulant, is it not?’

‘Yes.’ Hillary sipped his drink, then said abruptly: ‘You have hostages here, of course.’

‘We have. They have come to no harm, I assure you.’

‘I can’t understand you, Morro. Highly civilized, highly intelligent, reasonable – yet you behave as you do. What drives you?’

‘There are some matters I prefer not to discuss.’

‘Bring me those hostages.’

‘Why?’

‘Bring them or, as sure as God’s in heaven, I will not deal with you. I may be making the mistake of taking you at your face value. You may – I only say may – be the inhuman monster you’re said to be. If they are dead, which God forbid, you may take the life of the President before he will deal with you.’

Some time passed, then Morro said: ‘Do you know Mrs Ryder?’

‘Who is she?’

‘One of our hostages. It sounds as if you were in telepathic communication with her.’

Hillary said: ‘I have China to worry about. I have Russia to worry about. I have the European Common Market. The economy. The recession. A man’s mind can accommodate only so many things. Who is this – her name?’

‘Mrs Ryder.’

‘If she is alive, bring her. If she’s all that telepathic I could replace my Vice-President. And the others.’

‘I knew beforehand – and the lady knew – that you would make such a request. Very well. Ten minutes.’ Morro snapped his fingers at a guard.

The ten minutes passed swiftly enough, much too swiftly for the hostages, but it was time and to spare for Ryder. Morro, with his customary hospitality, had offered each hostage a drink and warned them that their stay would be brief. The centre of attraction was inevitably Hillary who, wearily but charmingly, out-presidented any President who had ever lived. Morro did not leave his side. Even an inhuman monster – and it was not proven that he was – had his human side: it is not given to every man to present a President to his people.

Ryder, glass in hand, wandered around, spending an inconsequential word with those whom he met. He approached a person, who was perhaps the fifth or sixth person he’d chatted to, and said: ‘You’re Dr Healey.’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

Ryder didn’t tell him how he knew. He’d studied too many photographs too long. ‘Can you maintain a deadpan face?’

Healey looked at him and maintained a deadpan face.

‘Yes.’

‘My name is Ryder.’

‘Oh yes?’ Healey smiled at the waiter who refilled his glass.

‘Where’s the button? The switch?’

‘To the right. Elevator. Four rooms, fourth along.’

Ryder wandered away, spoke to one or two others, then accidentally ran into Healey again.

‘Tell no one. Not even Susan.’ The reference, he knew, would establish his credibility beyond any doubt. ‘In the fourth room?’

‘Small booth. Steel door inside. He has the key. The button’s inside.’

‘Guards?’

‘Four. Six. Courtyard.’

Ryder wandered away and sat down. Healey happened by. ‘There are steps beyond the elevator.’ Ryder didn’t even look up.

Ryder observed, without observing, that his son was doing magnificently. The dedicated physician, he did not once leave Muldoon’s side, didn’t once glance at his mother or his sister. He was due, Ryder reflected, for promotion to sergeant, at least. It never occurred to Ryder to think about his own future.

Two minutes later Morro courteously called a halt to the proceedings. Obediently, the hostages filed out. Neither Susan nor Peggy had as much as given a second glance to either Ryder or his son.

Morro rose. ‘You will excuse me, gentlemen. I am going to have a brief and private talk with the President. A few minutes only, I assure you.’ He looked around the room. Three armed guards, each with an Ingram, two waiters, each with a concealed pistol. Carrying security to ridiculous lengths: but that was how he survived, had survived all those long and hazardous years. ‘Come, Abraham.’

The three men left and moved along the corridor to the second door on the right. It was a small room, bare to the point of bleakness, with only a table and few chairs. Morro said: ‘We have come to discuss high finance, Mr President.’

Hillary sighed. ‘You are refreshingly – if disconcertingly – blunt. Do you mean to tell me you have no more of that splendid Scotch left?’

‘Heaven send – or should I say Allah send – that we should show any discourtesy to the leader of – well, never mind. You mentioned the inevitable. It takes a great mind to accept the inevitable.’ He sat in silence while Dubois brought a glass and a bottle of what appeared to be the inevitable Glenfiddich to the small desk before Morro. He watched in silence while Dubois poured then raised his glass. It was not to be in a toast. He said: ‘The negotiating point?’

‘You will understand why I wished to talk in private. I, the President of the United States, feel that I am selling out the United States. Ten billion dollars.’

‘We shall drink to that.’

Ryder, glass in hand, wandered slowly, aimlessly, round the room. In his overcoat pocket he had, as instructed, pressed the button of his ball-point six times and, as promised, the writing tip had fallen off at the sixth time. Harlinson was standing close to one of the waiters. Greenshaw had just ordered another drink.

Muldoon – Ludwig Johnson – had his back to the company. He shuddered and made a peculiar moaning noise. Instantly Jeff bent over him, hand on his pulse and stethoscope to his heart. Jeff’s face could be seen to tighten. Jeff pulled back his coat, undid the massive waistcoat and proceeded to do something that none of the guards could see.

One of them said: ‘What is wrong?’

‘Shut up!’ Jeff was very curt indeed. ‘He is extremely ill. Heart massage.’ He looked at Bonn. ‘Lift his back up.’

Bonn bent to do so, and as he did there came a faint zipping noise. Ryder cursed inwardly. Plastic zips were meant to be noiseless. The guard who had spoken took a step forward. His face was a blend of suspicion and uncertainty. ‘What was that?’

The nearest guard was only three feet from Ryder. Even with a pen it was impossible to miss at that range. The guard made a weird sighing noise, crumpled and fell sideways to the floor. The two other guards turned and stared in disbelief. They stared for almost three seconds, a ludicrously long time for Myron Bonn, the legal luminary from Donnemara, to shoot them both through the heart with a silenced Smith & Wesson. At the same instant Greenshaw chopped the man bending over him and Harlinson did the same for the other waiter standing in front of him.

Johnson had worn a double-thickness zipped bodice under his shirt. Below that he had worn a cover of sorbo rubber, almost a foot thick, where the lower part of his stomach ought to have been. Next to his skin he had worn another sheet of sorbo rubber, almost but not quite as thick, which was why it had taken three special make-up men six man-hours to fit him out to Muldoon’s physical specifications. Between the two layers of sorbo rubber had lain three rubber-wrapped pistols and the disassembled parts of two Kalashnikov machine-guns. It took Ryder and his son less than a minute to reassemble the Kalashnikovs.

Ryder said: ‘Bonn, you’re the marksman. Stay outside the door. Anybody comes along the corridor, either side, you know what to do.’

‘I get to finish my thesis? A doctorate, no less?’

‘I’ll come to your graduation ceremony. Jeff, Colonel Greenshaw, Mr Harlinson: there are armed guards out in the courtyard. I don’t care how much noise you make. Kill them.’

‘Dad!’ Jeff’s face was white and shocked and beseeching.

‘Give that Kalashnikov to Bonn. Those people would have killed a million, millions, of your fellow Californians.’

‘But God! Dad!’

‘Your mother…’

Jeff left. Greenshaw and Harlinson followed. Bonn and Ryder moved out after them into the corridor, and it was then that Ryder made his first mistake since his grouchy lieutenant had called him at home to inform him of the San Ruffino break-in. It wasn’t a mistake, really; he had no idea where Morro and Dubois had taken Hillary. It was just that he was extremely tired. He normally would have taken into account the possibility that Morro had gone to a room between where he stood and the elevator to the caverns below. But he was very, very tired. To all the world he looked like a man of indestructible iron. But no man is indestructible. No man is made of iron.

He listened to the stuttering bark of the Kalashnikovs and wondered whether Jeff would ever forgive him. Probably not, he thought, probably not, and it was little consolation to know that millions of Californians would. If. Not yet. The time was not yet.

Fifteen feet down the corridor to his right Dubois, gun in hand, came out, followed by Morro dragging Hillary with him. Ryder lifted his Kalashnikov and Dubois died. It was impossible to see where the bullet had struck and Ryder had not pressed the trigger. The future doctor of philosophy was still earning his degree.

Morro was moving away, dragging his human shield with him. The elevator gate was less than fifteen feet away.

‘Stay here,’ Ryder said. His voice was strangely quiet. ‘Watch out to the left.’ He switched the Kalashnikov to single-shot and squeezed the trigger. He didn’t want to do it, he hated to do it. Hillary had cheerfully admitted that he was expendable, but he still remained, as he had proved that night, a strangely likeable human being. Brave, cheerful, courageous and human: but so were millions of Californians.

The bullet hit Morro’s left shoulder. He didn’t shriek or cry, he just grunted and kept on dragging Hillary to the elevator. The gate was open. He thrust Hillary in and was disappearing himself when the second bullet struck him in the thigh, and this time he did cry out. Any ordinary man with a smashed femur either passes into unconsciousness or waits for an ambulance to come; after the initial impact of a serious wound there is no great pain, just a numbed shock: the pain comes later. But Morro, as the world now knew, was no ordinary man; the elevator gate closed and the sound of its whining descent was proof enough that Morro still had the awareness to find the descent button.

Ryder reached the blanked face of the shaft and stopped. For a second, two, three, all he could think of was Morro making his way towards the apocalyptic button. Then he remembered what Healey had said. Stairs.

They were only ten feet away and unlit. There had to be a light, but he did not know where the switch was. He stumbled down the first flight in total darkness and fell heavily as he struck a wall. There were flights of stairs. He turned right, found the next flight and this time was careful enough to anticipate the end of them. Automatically, as many people do, he had counted the number of steps to a flight. Thirteen. Good old Ryder, he thought savagely, even a boy scout would have thought to bring a flash-light. The third flight he negotiated with all the careful speed at his command. The fourth was easy, for it was awash with light.

The lift was there, its door open, a dazed Hillary sitting against one side and massaging the back of his head. He didn’t see Ryder and Ryder didn’t see him. Ahead were a series of what appeared to be caverns. The fourth, Healey had said, the fourth. Ryder reached the fourth, and then he saw Morro inside the little plywood booth hauling himself to his feet, a key in his hand. He must have been dragging himself along the floor like a wounded animal, for all life in his leg had gone and the agonizing progress he had made was clearly limned by the track of blood.

Morro fumbled with the key and had the door open. He lurched inside, an insane dreamer in an insane dreamer’s world. Ryder lifted his Kalashnikov. There was no dramatic urgency. There was time.

Ryder said: ‘Stop, Morro, stop! Please stop.’

Morro was dreadfully injured. By that time his mind must have been in the same way. But, even if he had been well both in body and mind he would probably have acted in the same way: sick or in health, for the mercifully few Morros in the world, fanaticism is their sole sustaining power, the well-spring of their being.

Morro had, incredibly, reached a calibrated, dialled metallic box and was beginning to unscrew a transparent plastic cover that housed a red knob. Ryder was still ten feet away, too far away to stop him.

He switched the Kalashnikov’s slide from single-shot to automatic…

Susan said: ‘How can you bear to drink that dreadful man’s whisky?’

‘Any port in a storm.’ Susan was both crying and shaking, a combination Ryder had never seen before. He tightened his arm around his daughter who was sitting on the other arm of his chair and nodded across Morro’s office where Burnett was conducting a seminar. ‘What’s good enough for a professor –’

‘Do be quiet. You know, I rather like the way you look. Maybe you should stay that way.’

Ryder sipped some more Glenfiddich in silence.

She said: ‘I’m sorry in a way. Okay, he was a fiend. But he was a kindly fiend.’

Ryder knew how to keep the one person in the world. He kept silent.

‘End of a nightmare,’ Susan said. ‘Happy ever after.’

‘Yes. The first chopper should be here in ten minutes. And bed for you, young lady. Happy ever after? That’s as maybe. Perhaps we’ll be as lucky as Myron Bonn there, and have a stay of execution. Perhaps not. I don’t know. Somewhere out there in the darkness the monster is still crouched on the doorstep, waiting.’

‘What on earth do you mean, John? You never talk like that.’

‘True. Something a professor in CalTech said. I think maybe we should go and live in New Orleans.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘They’ve never had an earthquake there.’

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

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1

First published in Great Britain by

William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1977

then in paperback by Fontana 1980

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1977

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © 1977 ISBN: 9780007289301

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Seawitch

To Lachlan

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Normally there are only two types of marine machines concerned with the discovery and recovery of oil from under the ocean floor. The first one, which is mainly engaged in the discovery of oil, is a self-propelled vessel, sometimes of very considerable size. Apart from its towering drilling derrick, it is indistinguishable from any ocean-going cargo vessel; its purpose is to drill bore-holes in areas where seismological and geological studies suggest oil may exist. The technical operation of this activity is highly complex, yet these vessels have achieved a remarkable level of success. However, they suffer from two major drawbacks. Although they are equipped with the most advanced and sophisticated navigational equipment, including bow-thrust propellers, for them to maintain position in running seas, strong tides and winds when boring can be extremely difficult; and in really heavy weather operations have to be suspended.

For the actual drilling of oil and its recovery – principally its recovery – the so-called ‘jack-up system’ is in almost universal use. A rig of this type has to be towed into position, and consists of a platform which carries the drilling rig, cranes, helipads and all essential services, including living accommodation, and is attached to the seabed by firmly anchored legs. In normal conditions it is extremely effective, but like the discovery ships it has drawbacks. It is not mobile. It has to suspend operations in even moderately heavy weather. And it can be used only in comparatively shallow water: the deepest is in the North Sea, where most of those rigs are to be found. This North Sea rig stands in about four hundred and fifty feet of water and the cost of increasing the length of those legs would be so prohibitive as to make oil recovery quite uneconomical, even although there are plans for the Americans to construct a rig with eight-hundred-feet legs off the Californian coast. There is also the unknown safety factor. Two such rigs have already been lost in the North Sea. The cause of those disasters has not been clearly evaluated, although it is suspected, obviously not without cause, that there may have been design, structural or metallic faults in one or more of the legs.

And then there is the third type of oil rig – the TLP – technically, the tension leg drilling/production platform. At the time of this story there was only one of its type in the world. The platform – the working area – was about the size of a football field – if, that is, one can imagine a triangular football field, for the platform was, in fact, an equilateral triangle. The deck was not made of steel but of a uniquely designed ferro-concrete, specially developed by a Dutch oil ship-building company. The supports for this massive platform had been designed and built in England and consisted of three enormous steel legs, each at one corner of the structure, all three being joined together by a variety of horizontal and diagonal hollow cylinders, the total combination offering so tremendous a degree of buoyancy that the working platform they supported was out of the reach of even the highest waves.

From each of the bases of the three legs, three massive steel cables extended to the base of the ocean floor, where each triple set was attached to large sea-floor anchors. Powerful motors could raise or lower it to a depth two or three times that of most modern fixed oil derricks, which meant that it could operate at depths far out on the continental shelf.

The TLP had other very considerable advantages.

Its great buoyancy put the anchor cables under constant tension, and this tension practically eliminated the heaving, pitching and rolling of the platform. Thus the rig could continue operating in very severe storms, storms that would automatically stop production on any other type of derrick.

It was also virtually immune to the effects of an under-sea earthquake.

It was also mobile. It had only to up anchors to move to potentially more productive areas.

And compared to standard oil rigs its cost of establishing position in any given spot was so negligible as to be worth no more than a passing mention.

The name of the TLP was the Seawitch.

CHAPTER ONE

In certain places and among certain people, the Seawitch was a very bad name indeed. But, overwhelmingly, their venom was reserved for a certain Lord Worth, a multi–some said bulti–millionaire, chairman and sole owner of Worth Hudson Oil Company and, incidentally, owner of the Seawitch. When his name was mentioned by any of the ten men present at that shoreside house on Lake Tahoe, it was in tones of less than hushed reverence.

Their meeting was announced in neither the national nor local press. This was due to two factors. The delegates arrived and departed either singly or in couples and among the heterogeneous summer population of Lake Tahoe such comings and goings went unremarked or were ignored. More importantly, the delegates to the meeting were understandably reluctant that their assembly become common knowledge. The day was Friday 13th, a date that boded no good for someone.

There were nine delegates present, plus their host. Four of them were American, but only two of these mattered–Corral, who represented the oil and mineral leases in the Florida area, and Benson, who represented the rigs off Southern California.

Of the other six, again only two mattered. One was Patinos of Venezuela; the other was Borosoff of Russia: his interest in American oil supplies could only be regarded as minimal. It was widely assumed amongst the others that his main interest in attending the meeting was to stir up as much trouble as possible, an assumption that was probably correct.

All ten were, in various degrees, suppliers of oil to the United States and had the one common interest: to see that the price of those supplies did not drop. The last thing they all wanted to see was an oil value depreciation.

Benson, whose holiday home this was and who was nominally hosting the meeting, opened the discussion.

‘Gentlemen, does anyone have any strong objections if I bring a third party–that is, a man who represents neither ourselves nor Lord Worth–into this meeting?’

Practically everyone had, and there were some moments of bedlamic confusion: they had not only objections but very strong ones at that.

Borosoff, the Russian, said: ‘No. It is too dangerous.’ He glanced around the group with calculated suspiciousness. ‘There are already too many of us privy to these discussions.’

Benson, who had not become head of one of Europe’s biggest oil companies, a British-based one, just because someone had handed him the job as a birthday present, could be disconcertingly blunt.

‘You, Borosoff, are the one with the slenderest claims to be present at this meeting. You might well bear that in mind. Name your suspect.’ Borosoff remained silent. ‘Bear in mind, gentlemen, the objective of this meeting–to maintain, at least, the present oil price levels. The OPEC is now actively considering hiking all oil prices. That doesn’t hurt us much here in the US–we’ll just hike our own prices and pass them on to the public.’

Patinos said: ‘You’re every bit as unscrupulous and ruthless as you claim us to be.’

’Realism is not the same as ruthlessness. Nobody’s going to hike anything while Worth Hudson is around. They are already undercutting us, the majors. A slight pinch, but we feel it. If we raise our prices more and theirs remain steady, the slight pinch is going to increase. And if they get some more TLPs into operation then the pinch will be beginning to hurt. It will also hurt the OPEC, for the demand for your products will undoubtedly fall off.

’We all subscribe to the gentlemen’s agreement among major oil companies that they will not prospect for oil in international waters, that is to say outside their own legally and internationally recognized territorial limits. Without observance of this agreement, the possibilities of legal, diplomatic, political and international strife, ranging from scenes of political violence to outright armed confrontation, are only too real. Let us suppose that Nation A–as some countries have already done–claims all rights for all waters a hundred miles offshore from its coasts. Let us further suppose that Nation B comes along and starts drilling thirty miles outside those limits. Then, horror of horrors, let us suppose that Nation A makes a unilateral decision to extend its offshore limits to a hundred and fifty miles–and don’t forget that Peru has claimed two hundred miles as its limits: the subsequent possibilities are too awesome to contemplate.

’Alas, not all are gentlemen. The chairman of the Worth Hudson Oil Company, Lord Worth, and his entire pestiferous board of directors, would have been the first vehemently to deny any suggestion that they were gentlemen, a fact held in almost universal acceptance by their competitors in oil. They would also equally vehemently have denied that they were criminals, a fact that may or may not have been true, but most certainly is not true now.

’He has, in short, committed what should be two indictable offences. “Should,” I say. The first is unprovable, the second, although an offence in moral terms, is not, as yet, strictly illegal.

‘The facts of the first–and what I consider much the minor offence–concerns the building of Lord Worth’s TLP in Hudson. It is no secret in the industry that the plans for those were stolen–those for the platform from the Mobil Oil Company, those for the legs and anchoring systems from the Chevron Oilfield Research Company. But, as I say, unprovable. It is commonplace for new inventions and developments to occur at two or more places simultaneously, and he can always claim that his design team, working in secret, beat the others to the gun.’

In saying which Benson was perfectly correct. In the design of the Seawitch Lord Worth had adopted short-cuts which the narrow-minded could have regarded as unscrupulous if not illegal. Like all oil companies, Worth Hudson had its own design team. As they were all cronies of Lord Worth and were employed for purely tax-deductible purposes, their combined talents would have been incapable of designing a rowing boat.

This didn’t worry Lord Worth. He didn’t need a design team. He was a vastly wealthy man, had powerful friends–none of them, needless to say, among the oil companies–and was a master of industrial espionage. With the resources at his disposal he found little trouble in obtaining those two secret advance plans, which he passed on to a firm of highly competent marine designers, whose exorbitant fees were matched only by their extreme discretion. The designers found little difficulty in marrying the two sets of plans, adding just sufficient modifications and improvements to discourage those with a penchant for patent rights litigation.

Benson went on: ‘But what really worries me, and what should worry all you gentlemen here, is Lord Worth’s violation of the tacit agreement never to indulge in drilling in international waters.’ He paused, deliberately for effect, and looked slowly at each of the other nine in turn. ‘I say in all seriousness, gentlemen, that Lord Worth’s foolhardiness and greed may well prove to be the spark that triggers off the ignition of a third world war. Apart from protecting our own interests I maintain that for the good of mankind–and I speak from no motive of spurious self-justification–if the governments of the world do not intervene then the imperative is that we should. As the governments show no signs of intervention, then I suggest that the burden lies upon us. This madman must be stopped. I think you gentlemen would agree that only we realize the full implications of all of this and that only we have the technical expertise to stop him.’

There were murmurs of approval from around the room. A sincere and disinterested concern for the good of mankind was a much more morally justifiable reason for action than the protection of one’s own selfish interests. Patinos, the man from Venezuela, looked at Benson with a smile of mild cynicism on his face. The smile signified nothing. Patinos, a sincere and devout Catholic, wore the same expression when he passed through the doors of his church.

‘You seem very sure of this, Mr Benson?’

‘I’ve given quite some thought to it.’

Borosoff said: ‘And quite how do you propose to stop this madman, Mr Benson?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’ One of the others at the table lifted his eyebrows about a millimeter–which, for him, was a sign of complete disapproval. ‘Then why did you summon us all this distance?’

‘I didn’t summon you. I asked you. I asked you to approve whatever course of action we might take.’

‘This course of action being?–’

‘Again, I don’t know.’

The eyebrows returned to normal. A twitch of the man’s lip showed that he was contemplating smiling.

‘This–ah–third party?’

‘Yes.’

‘He has a name?’

‘Cronkite. John Cronkite.’

A hush descended upon the company. The open objections had turned into pensive hesitation which in turn gave way to nodding acceptance. Benson apart, no one there had ever met Cronkite, but his name was a household word to all of them. In the oil business his name had in his own lifetime long become a legend, although at times a far from savoury one. They all knew that any of them might require his incomparable services at any time, while at the same time hoping that that day would never come.

When it came to the capping of blazing gushers, Cronkite was without peer. Wherever in the world a gusher blew fire no one even considered putting it out themselves, they just sent for Cronkite. To wincing observers his modus operandi seemed nothing short of Draconian, but Cronkite would blasphemously brook no interference. Despite the extortionate fees he charged it was more common than not for a four-engined jet to be put at his disposal to get him to the scene of the disaster as quickly as possible. Cronkite always delivered. He also knew all there was to know about the oil business. And he was, hardly surprisingly, extremely tough and ruthless.

Henderson, who represented oil interests in Honduras, said: ‘Why should a man with his extraordinary qualifications, the world’s number one, as we all know, choose to engage himself in–ah–an enterprise of this nature? From his reputation I would hardly have thought that he was one to be concerned about the woes of suffering mankind.’

‘He isn’t. Money. Cronkite comes very high. A fresh challenge–the man’s a born adventurer. But, basically, it’s because he hates Lord Worth’s guts.’

Henderson said: ‘Not an uncommon sentiment, it seems. Why?’

‘Lord Worth sent his own private Boeing for him to come cap a blazing gusher in the Middle East. By the time Cronkite arrived Lord Worth’s own men had capped it. This, alone, Cronkite regarded as a mortal insult. He then made the mistake of demanding the full fee for his services. Lord Worth has a reputation for notorious Scottish meanness, which, while an insult to the Scots, is more than justified in his case. He refused, and said that he would pay him for his time, no more. Cronkite then compounded his error by taking him to court. With the kind of lawyers Lord Worth can afford, Cronkite never had a chance. Not only did he lose but he had to pay the costs.’

‘Which wouldn’t be low?’ Henderson said.

‘Medium-high to massive. I don’t know. All I know is that Cronkite has done quite a bit of brooding about it ever since.’

‘Such a man would not have to be sworn to secrecy?’

‘A man can swear a hundred different oaths and break them all. Besides, because of the exorbitant fees Cronkite charges, his feeling towards Lord Worth and the fact that he might just have to step outside the law, his silence is ensured.’

It was the turn of another of those grouped round the table to raise his eyebrows. ‘Outside the law? We cannot risk being involved–’

‘“Might,” I said. For us, the element of risk does not exist.’

‘May we see this man?’

Benson nodded, rose, went to a door and admitted Cronkite.

Cronkite was a Texan. In height, build and cragginess of features he bore a remarkable resemblance to John Wayne. Unlike Wayne he never smiled. His face was of a peculiarly yellow complexion, typical of those who have had an overdose of anti-malarial tablets, which was just what had happened to Cronkite. Mepacrine does not make for a peaches and cream complexion–not that Cronkite had ever had anything even remotely resembling that. He was newly returned from Indonesia, where he had inevitably maintained his hundred percent record.

‘Mr Cronkite,’ Benson said. ‘Mr Cronkite, this is–’

Cronkite was brusque. In a gravelly voice he said: ‘I do not wish to know their names.’

In spite of the abruptness of his tone, several of the oilmen round the table almost beamed. Here was a man of discretion, a man after their own hearts.

Cronkite went on: ‘All I understand from Mr Benson is that I am required to attend to a matter involving Lord Worth and the Seawitch. Mr Benson has given me a pretty full briefing. I know the background. I would like, first of all, to hear any suggestions you gentlemen may have to offer.’ Cronkite sat down, lit what proved to be a very foul-smelling cigar, and waited expectantly.

He kept silent during the following half-hour discussion. For ten of the world’s top businessmen they proved to be an extraordinary inept, not to say inane lot. They talked in an ever-narrowing series of concentric circles.

Henderson said: ‘First of all it must be agreed that there is no violence to be used. Is it so agreed?’

Everybody nodded their agreement. Each and every one of them was a pillar of business respectability who could not afford to have his reputation besmirched in any way. No one appeared to notice that Cronkite sat motionless as a graven image. Except for lifting a hand to puff out increasingly vile clouds of smoke, Cronkite did not move throughout the discussion. He also remained totally silent.

After agreeing that there should be no violence the meeting of ten agreed on nothing.

Finally Patinos spoke up. ‘Why don’t you–one of you four Americans, I mean–approach your Congress to pass an emergency law banning offshore drilling in extra-territorial waters?’

Benson looked at him with something akin to pity. ‘I am afraid, sir, that you do not quite understand the relations between the American majors and Congress On the few occasions we have met with them–something to do with too much profits and too little tax–I’m afraid we have treated them in so–ah–cavalier a fashion that nothing would give than greater pleasure than to refuse any request we might make.’

One of the others, known simply as ‘Mr A’, said: ‘How about an approach to that international legal ombudsman, the Hague? After all, this is an international matter.’

‘Not on.’ Henderson shook his head ‘Forget it. The dilatoriness of that august body is so legendary that all present would be long retired–or worse–before a decision is made. The decision would just as likely be negative anyway.’

‘UNO?’ Mr A said.

‘That talk-shop!’ Benson had obviously a low and not uncommon view of the UNO. ‘They haven’t even the power to order New York to install a new parking meter outside their front door.’

The next revolutionary idea came from one of the Americans.

‘Why shouldn’t we all agree, for an unspecified time–let’s see how it goes–to lower our price below that of Worth Hudson. In that case no one would want to buy their oil.’

This proposal was met with a stunned disbelief.

Corral spoke in a kind voice. ‘Not only would that lead to vast losses to the major oil companies, but would almost certainly and immediately lead Lord Worth to lower his prices fractionally below their new ones. The man has sufficient working capital to keep him going for a hundred years at a loss–in the unlikely event, that is, of his running at a loss at all.’

A lengthy silence followed. Cronkite was not quite as immobile as he had been. The granitic expression on his face remained unchanged but the fingers of his non-smoking hand had begun to drum gently on the arm-rest of his chair. For Cronkite, this was equivalent to throwing a fit of hysterics.

It was during this period that all thoughts of the ten of maintaining their high, gentlemanly and ethical standards against drilling in international waters were forgotten.

‘Why not,’ Mr A said, ‘buy him out?’ In fairness to Mr A it has to be said that he did not appreciate just how wealthy Lord Worth was and that, immensely wealthy though he, Mr A, was, Lord Worth could have bought him out lock, stock and barrel. ‘The Seawitch rights, I mean. A hundred million dollars. Let’s be generous, two hundred million dollars. Why not?’

Corral looked depressed. ‘The answer “why not” is easy. By the latest reckoning Lord Worth is one of the world’s five richest men and even two hundred million dollars would only come into the category of pennies as far as he was concerned.’

Mr A looked depressed.

Benson said: ‘Sure, he’d sell.’

Mr A visibly brightened.

‘For two reasons only. In the first place he’d make a quick and splendid profit. In the second place, for less than half the selling price, he could build another Seawitch, anchor it a couple of miles away from the present Seawitch—there are no leasehold rights in extra-territorial waters–and start sending oil ashore at his same old price.’

A temporarily deflated Mr A slumped back in his armchair.

‘A partnership, then,’ Mr A said. His tone was that of a man in a state of quiet despair.

‘Out of the question.’ Henderson was very positive. ‘Like all very rich men, Lord Worth is a born loner. He wouldn’t have a combined partnership with the King of Saudi Arabia and the Shah of Persia even if it had been offered him.’

In a pall-like gloom a baffled and exhausted silence fell upon the embattled ten. A thoroughly bored and hitherto wordless John Cronkite rose.

He said without preamble: ‘My personal fee will be one million dollars. I will require ten million dollars for operating expenses. Every cent of this will be accounted for and the unspent balance returned. I demand a completely free hand and no interference from any of you. If I do encounter any such interference I shall retain the balance of the expenses and at the same time abandon the mission. I refuse to disclose what my plans are–or will be when I have formulated them. Finally, I would prefer to have no further contact with any of you, now or at any time.’

The certainty and confidence of the man were astonishing. Agreement among the mightily-relieved ten was immediate and total. The ten million dollars–a trifling sum to those accustomed to spending as much in bribes every month or so–would be delivered within twenty-four, at the most forty-eight hours to a Cuban numbered account in Miami–the only place in the United States where Swiss-type numbered accounts were permitted. For tax evasion purposes the money, of course, would not come from any of their respective countries; instead, ironically enough, from their bulging offshore funds.

CHAPTER TWO

Lord Worth was tall, lean and erect. His complexion was of the mahogany hue of the playboy millionaire who spends his life in the sun: Lord Worth seldom worked less than sixteen hours a day. His abundant hair and moustache were snow-white. According to his mood and expression and to the eye of the beholder he could have been a Biblical patriarch, a better-class Roman senator or a gentlemanly seventeenth-century pirate–except for the fact, of course, that none of those ever, far less habitually, wore lightweight alpaca suits of the same colour as Lord Worth’s hair.

He looked and was every inch an aristocrat. Unlike the many Americanas who bore the Christian names of Duke or Earl, Lord Worth really was a lord, the fifteenth in succession of a highly distinguished family of Scottish peers of the realm. The fact that their distinction had lain mainly in the fields of assassination, endless clan warfare, the stealing of women and cattle and the selling of their fellow peers down the river was beside the point: the earlier Scottish peers didn’t go in too much for the more cultural activities. The blue blood that had run in their veins ran in Lord Worth’s. As ruthless, predatory, acquisitive and courageous as any of his ancestors, Lord Worth simply went about his business with a degree of refinement and sophistication that would have lain several light years beyond their understanding.

He had reversed the trend of Canadians coming to Britain, making their fortunes and eventually being elevated to the peerage: he had already been a peer, and an extremely wealthy one, before emigrating to Canada. His emigration, which had been discreet and precipitous, had not been entirely voluntary. He had made a fortune in real estate in London before the Internal Revenue had become embarrassingly interested in his activities. Fortunately for him, whatever charges which might have been laid against his door were not extraditable.

He had spent several years in Canada, investing his millions in the Worth Hudson Oil Company and proving himself to be even more able in the oil business than he had been in real estate. His tankers and refineries spanned the globe before he had decided that the climate was too cold for him and moved south to Florida. His splendid mansion was the envy of the many millionaires–of a lesser financial breed, admittedly–who almost literally jostled for elbow-room in the Fort Lauderdale area.

The dining-room in that mansion was something to behold. Monks, by the very nature of their calling, are supposed to be devoid of all earthly lusts, but no monk, past or present, could ever have gazed on the gleaming magnificence of that splendid oaken refectory table without turning pale chartreuse in envy. The chairs, inevitably, were Louis XIV. The splendidly embroidered silken carpet, with a pile deep enough for a fair-sized mouse to take cover in, would have been judged by an expert to come from Damascus and to have cost a fortune: the expert would have been right on both counts. The heavy drapes and embroidered silken walls were of the same pale grey, the latter being enhanced by a series of original Impressionist paintings, no less than three by Matisse and the same number by Renoir. Lord Worth was no dilettante and was clearly trying to make amends for his ancestors’ shortcomings in the cultural fields.

It was in those suitably princely surroundings that Lord Worth was at the moment taking his ease, revelling in his second brandy and the company of the two beings whom after money–he loved most in the world: his two daughters Marina and Melinda, who had been so named by their now divorced Spanish mother. Both were young, both were beautiful, and could have been mistaken for twins, which they weren’t: they were easily distinguishable by the fact that while Marina’s hair was black as a raven’s wing Melinda’s was pure titian.

There were two other guests at the table. Many a local millionaire would have given a fair slice of his ill-gotten gains for the privilege and honour of sitting at Lord Worth’s table. Few were invited, and then but seldom. These two young men, comparatively as poor as church mice, had the unique privilege, without invitation, of coming and going as they pleased, which was pretty often.

Mitchell and Roomer were two pleasant men in their early thirties for whom Lord Worth had a strong if concealed admiration and whom he held in something close to awe–inasmuch as they were the only two completely honest men he had ever met. Not that Lord Worth had ever stepped on the wrong side of the law, although he frequently had a clear view of what happened on the other side: it was simply that he was not in the habit of dealing with honest men. They had both been highly efficient police sergeants, only they had been too efficient, much given to arresting the wrong people such as crooked politicians and equally crooked wealthy businessmen who had previously laboured under the misapprehension that they were above the law. They were fired, not to put too fine a point on it, for their total incorruptibility.

Of the two Michael Mitchell was the taller, the broader and the less good-looking. With slightly craggy face, ruffled dark hair and blue chin, he could never have made it as a matinée idol. John Roomer, with his brown hair and trimmed brown moustache, was altogether better-looking. Both were shrewd, intelligent and highly experienced. Roomer was the intuitive one, Mitchell the one long on action. Apart from being charming both men were astute and highly resourceful. And they were possessed of one other not inconsiderable quality: both were deadly marksmen.

Two years previously they had set up their own private investigative practice, and in that brief space of time had established such a reputation that people in real trouble now made a practice of going to them instead of to the police, a fact that hardly endeared them to the local law. Their homes and combined office were within two miles of Lord Worth’s estate where, as said, they were frequent and welcome visitors. That they did not come for the exclusive pleasure of his company Lord Worth was well aware. Nor, he knew, were they even in the slightest way interested in his money, a fact that Lord Worth found astonishing, as he had never previously encountered anyone who wasn’t thus interested. What they were interested in, and deeply so, were Marina and Melinda.

The door opened and Lord Worth’s butler, Jenkins–English, of course, as were the two footmen–made his usual soundless entrance, approached the head of the table and murmured discreetly in Lord Worth’s ear. Lord Worth nodded and rose.

‘Excuse me, girls, gentlemen. Visitors. I’m sure you can get along together quite well without me.’ He made his way to his study, entered and closed the door behind him, a very special padded door that, when shut, rendered the room completely soundproof.

The study, in its own way–Lord Worth was no sybarite but he liked his creature comforts as well as the next man–was as sumptuous as the dining-room: oak, leather, a wholly unnecessary log fire burning in one corner, all straight from the best English baronial mansions. The walls were lined with thousands of books, many of which Lord Worth had actually read, a fact that must have caused great distress to his illiterate ancestors, who had despised degeneracy above all else.

A tall bronzed man with aquiline features and grey hair rose to his feet. Both men smiled and shook hands warmly.

Lord Worth said: ‘Corral, my dear chap! How very nice to see you again. It’s been quite some time.’

‘My pleasure, Lord Worth. Nothing recently that would have interested you.’

‘But now?’

‘Now is something else again.’

The Corral who stood before Lord Worth was indeed the Corral who, in his capacity as representative of the Florida off-shore leases, had been present at the meeting of ten at Lake Tahoe. Some years had passed since he and Lord Worth had arrived at an amicable and mutually satisfactory agreement. Corral, widely regarded as Lord Worth’s most avowedly determined enemy and certainly the most vociferous of his critics, reported regularly to Lord Worth on the current activities and, more importantly, the projected plans of the major companies, which didn’t hurt Lord Worth at all. Corral, in return, received an annual tax-free retainer of $200,000, which didn’t hurt him very much either.

Lord Worth pressed a bell and within seconds Jenkins entered bearing a silver tray with two large brandies. There was no telepathy involved, just years of experience and a long-established foreknowledge of Lord Worth’s desires. When he left both men sat.

Lord Worth said: ‘Well, what news from the west?’

‘The Cherokee, I regret to say, are after you.’

Lord Worth sighed and said: ‘It had to come some time. Tell me all.’

Corral told him all. He had a near-photographic memory and a gift for concise and accurate reportage. Within five minutes Lord Worth knew all that was worth knowing about the Lake Tahoe meeting.

Lord Worth who, because of the unfortunate misunderstanding that had arisen between himself and Cronkite, knew the latter as well as any and better than most, said at the end of Corral’s report: ‘Did Cronkite subscribe to the ten’s agreement to abjure any form of violence?’

‘No.’

‘Not that it would have mattered if he had. Man’s a total stranger to the truth. And ten million dollars expenses, you tell me?’

‘It did seem a bit excessive.’

‘Can you see a massive outlay like that being concommitant with anything except violence?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think the others believed that there was no connection between them?’

‘Let me put it this way, sir. Any group of people who can convince themselves, or appear to convince themselves, that any action proposed to be taken against you is for the betterment of mankind is also prepared to convince themselves, or appear to convince themselves, that the word “Cronkite” is synonymous with peace on earth.’

‘So their consciences are clear. If Cronkite goes to any excessive lengths in death and destruction to achieve their ends they can always throw up their hands in horror and say, “Good God, we never thought the man would go that far.” Not that any connection between them and Cronkite would ever be established. What a bunch of devious, mealy-mouthed hypocrites!’

He paused for a moment.

‘I suppose Cronkite refused to divulge his plans?’

‘Absolutely. But there is one little and odd circumstance that I’ve kept for the end. Just as we were leaving Cronkite drew two of the ten to one side and spoke to them privately. It would be interesting to know why.’

‘Any chance of finding out?’

‘A fair chance. Nothing guaranteed. But I’m sure Benson could find out–after all, it was Benson who invited us all to Lake Tahoe.’

‘And you think you could persuade Benson to tell you?’

‘A fair chance. Nothing more.’

Lord Worth put on his resigned expression. ‘All right, how much?’

‘Nothing. Money won’t buy Benson.’ Corral shook his head in disbelief. ‘Extraordinary, in this day and age, but Benson is not a mercenary man. But he does owe me the odd favour, one of them being that, without me, he wouldn’t be the president of the oil company that he is now.’ Corral paused. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t asked me the identities of the two men Cronkite took aside.’

‘So am I.’

‘Borosoff of the Soviet Union and Pantos of Venezuela.’ Lord Worth appeared to lapse into a trance. ‘That mean anything to you?’

Lord Worth bestirred himself. ‘Yes. Units of the Russian navy are making a so-called “goodwill tour” of the Caribbean. They are, inevitably, based on Cuba. Of the ten, those are the only two that could bring swift–ah–naval intervention to bear against the Seawitch.’ He shook his head. ‘Diabolical. Utterly diabolical.’

‘My way of thinking too, sir. There’s no knowing. But I’ll check as soon as possible and hope to get results.’

‘And I shall take immediate precautions.’ Both men rose. ‘Corral, we shall have to give serious consideration to the question of increasing this paltry retainer of yours.’

‘We try to be of service, Lord Worth.’

Lord Worth’s private radio room bore more than a passing resemblance to the flight deck of his private 707. The variety of knobs, switches, buttons and dials was bewildering. Lord Worth seemed perfectly at home with them all, and proceeded to make a number of calls.

The first of these were to his four helicopter pilots, instructing them to have his two largest helicopters–never a man to do things by halves, Lord Worth owned no fewer than six of these machines–ready at his own private airfield shortly before dawn. The next four were to people of whose existence his fellow directors were totally unaware. The first was to Cuba, the second to Venezuela. Lord Worth’s world-wide range of contacts–employees, rather–was vast. The instructions to both were simple and explicit. A constant monitoring watch was to be kept on the naval bases in both countries, and any sudden and expected departures of any naval vessels, and their type, was to be reported to him immediately.

The third, to a person who lived not too many miles away, was addressed to a certain Giuseppe Palermo, whose name sounded as if he might be a member of the Mafia, but who definitely wasn’t: the Mafia Palermo despised as a mollycoddling organization which had become so ludicrously gentle in its methods of persuasion as to be in imminent danger of becoming respectable. The next call was to Baton Rouge in Louisiana, where there lived a person who only called himself ‘Conde’ and whose main claim to fame lay in the fact that he was the highest-ranking naval officer to have been court-martialled and dishonourably discharged since World War Two. He, like the others, received very explicit instructions. Not only was Lord Worth a master organizer, but the efficiency he displayed was matched only by his speed in operation.

The noble lord, who would have stoutly maintained–if anyone had the temerity to accuse him, which no one ever had–that he was no criminal, was about to become just that. Even this he would have strongly denied and that on three grounds. The Constitution upheld the rights of every citizen to bear arms; every man had the right to defend himself and his property against criminal attack by whatever means lay to hand; and the only way to fight fire was with fire.

The final call Lord Worth put through, and this time with total confidence, was to his tried and trusted lieutenant, Commander Larsen.

Commander Larsen was the captain of the Seawitch.

Larsen–no one knew why he called himself ‘Commander’, and he wasn’t the kind of person you asked–was a rather different breed of man from his employer. Except in a public court or in the presence of a law officer he would cheerfully admit to anyone that he was both a non-gentleman and a criminal. And he certainly bore no resemblance to any aristocrat, alive or dead. But for all that there did exist a genuine rapport and mutual respect between Lord Worth and himself. In all likelihood they were simply brothers under the skin.

As a criminal and non-aristocrat–and casting no aspersions on honest unfortunates who may resemble him–he certainly looked the part. He had the general build and appearance of the more viciously daunting heavy-weight wrestler, deep-set black eyes that peered out under the overhanging foliage of hugely bushy eyebrows, an equally bushy black beard, a hooked nose and a face that looked as if it had been in regular contact with a series of heavy objects. No one, with the possible exception of Lord Worth, knew who he was, what he had been or from where he had come. His voice, when he spoke, came as a positive shock: beneath that Neanderthaloid façade was the voice and the mind of an educated man. It really ought not to have come as such a shock: beneath the façade of many an exquisite fop lies the mind of a retarded fourth-grader.

Larsen was in the radio room at that moment, listening attentively, nodding from time to time, then flicked a switch that put the incoming call on to the loudspeaker.

He said: ‘All clear, sir. Everything understood. We’ll make the preparations. But haven’t you overlooked something, sir?’

‘Overlooked what?’ Lord Worth’s voice over the telephone carried the overtones of a man who couldn’t possibly have overlooked anything.

‘You’ve suggested that armed surface vessels may be used against us. If they’re prepared to go to such lengths isn’t it feasible that they’ll go to any lengths?’

‘Get to the point, man.’

‘The point is that it’s easy enough to keep an eye on a couple of naval bases. But I suggest it’s a bit more difficult to keep an eye on a dozen, maybe two dozen airfields.’

‘Good God!’ There was a long pause during which the rattle of cogs and the meshing of gearwheels in Lord Worth’s brain couldn’t be heard. ‘Do you really think–’

‘If I were on the Seawitch, Lord Worth, it would be six and half a dozen to me whether I was clobbered by shells or bombs. And planes could get away from the scene of the crime a damn sight faster than ships. They could get clean away. The US navy or land-based bombers would have a good chance of intercepting surface vessels. And another thing, Lord Worth.’

There was a moment’s pause.

‘A ship could stop at a distance of a hundred miles. No distance at all for the guided missile, I believe they have a range of four thousand miles these days. When the missile was, say, twenty miles from us, they could switch on its heat-source tracking device. God knows, we’re the only heat-source for a hundred miles around.’

Another lengthy pause, then: ‘Any more encouraging thoughts occur to you, Commander Larsen?’

‘Yes, sir. Just one. If I were the enemy–I may call them the enemy–’

‘Call the devils what you want.’

‘If I were the enemy I’d use a submarine. They don’t even have to break water to loose off a missile. Poof! No Seawitch. No signs of any attacker. Could well be put down to a massive explosion aboard the Seawitch. Far from impossible, sir.’

‘You’ll be telling me next that there’ll be atomic-headed missiles.’

‘To be picked up by a dozen seismological stations? I should think it hardly likely, sir. But that may just be wishful thinking. I have no wish to be vaporized.’

‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ The line went dead.

Larsen hung up his phone and smiled widely. One would have subconsciously imagined this action to reveal a set of yellowed fangs: instead, it revealed a perfect set of gleamingly white teeth. He turned to look at Scoffield, his head driller and right-hand man.

Scoffield was a large, rubicund, smiling man, the easy-going essence of good nature. To the fact that this was not precisely the case any member of his drilling crews would have eagerly and blasphemously testified. Scoffield was a very tough citizen indeed and one could assume that it was not innate modesty that made him conceal this: much more probably it was a permanent stricture of the facial muscles caused by the four long vertical scars on his cheeks, two on either side. Clearly he, like Larsen, was no great advocate of plastic surgery. He looked at Larsen with understandable curiosity.

‘What was all that about?’

‘The day of reckoning is at hand. Prepare to meet thy doom. More specifically, his lordship is beset by enemies.’ Larsen outlined Lord Worth’s plight. ‘He’s sending what sounds like a battalion of hard men out here in the early morning, accompanied by suitable weaponry. Then in the afternoon we are to expect a boat of some sort, loaded with even heavier weaponry.’

‘One wonders where he’s getting all those hard men and weaponry from.’

‘One wonders. One does not ask.’

‘All this talk–your talk–about bombers and submarines and missiles. Do you believe that?’

‘No. It’s just that it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to ruffle the aristocratic plumage.’ He paused then said thoughtfully: ‘At least I hope I don’t believe it. Come, let us examine our defences.’

‘You’ve got a pistol. I’ve got a pistol. That’s defences?’

‘Well, where we’ll mount the defences when they arrive. Fixed large-bore guns, I should imagine.’

‘If they arrive.’

‘Give the devil his due. Lord Worth delivers.’

‘From his own private armoury, I suppose.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘What do you really think, Commander?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that if Lord Worth is even half-way right life aboard may become slightly less monotonous in the next few days.’

The two men moved out into the gathering dusk on to the platform. The Seawitch was moored in 150 fathoms of water–900 feet–which was well within the tensioning cables’ capacities–safely south of the US’s mineral leasing blocks and the great east-west fairway, straight on top of the biggest oil reservoir yet discovered round the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The two men paused at the drilling derrick where a drill, at its maximum angled capacity, was trying to determine the extent of the oilfield. The crew looked at them without any particular affection but not with hostility. There was reason for the lack of warmth.

Before any laws were passed making such drilling illegal, Lord Worth wanted to scrape the bottom of this gigantic barrel of oil. Not that he was particularly worried, for government agencies are notoriously slow to act: but there was always the possibility that they might bestir themselves this time and that, horror of horrors, the bonanza might turn out to be vastly larger than estimated.

Hence the present attempt to discover the limits of the strike and hence the lack of warmth. Hence the reason why Larsen and Scoffield, both highly gifted slave-drivers, born centuries out of their time, drove their men day and night. The men disliked it, but not to the point of rebellion. They were highly paid, well housed and well fed. True, there was little enough in the way of wine, women and song but then, after an exhausting twelve-hour shift, those frivolities couldn’t hope to compete with the attractions of a massive meal then a long, deep sleep. More importantly and most unusually, the men were paid a bonus on every thousand barrels of oil.

Larsen and Scoffield made their way to the western apex of the platform and gazed out at the massive bulk of the storage tank, its topsides festooned with warning lights. They gazed at this for some time, than turned and walked back towards the accommodation quarters.

Scoffield said: ‘Decided upon your gun emplacements yet, Commander–if there are any guns?’

‘There’ll be guns.’ Larsen was confident. ‘But we won’t need any in this quarter.’

‘Why?’

‘Work it out for yourself. As for the rest, I’m not too sure. It’ll come to me in my sleep. My turn for an early night. See you at four.’

The oil was not stored aboard the rig–it is forbidden by a law based strictly on common sense to store hydrocarbons at or near the working platform of an oil rig. Instead, Lord Worth, on Larsen’s instructions–which had prudently come in the form of suggestions–had had built a huge floating tank which was anchored, on a basis exactly similar to that of the Seawitch herself, at a distance of about three hundred yards. Cleansed oil was pumped into this after it came up from the ocean floor, or, more precisely, from a massive limestone reef deep down below the ocean floor, a reef caused by tiny marine creatures of a now long-covered shallow sea of anything up to half a billion years ago.

Once, sometimes twice a day, a 50,000 dw tanker would stop by and empty the huge tank. There were three of those tankers employed on the criss-cross run to the southern US. The Worth Hudson Oil Company did, in fact, have supertankers, but the use of them in this case did not serve Lord Worth’s purpose. Even the entire contents of the Seawitch tank would not have filled a quarter of the super-tanker’s carrying capacity, and the possibility of a super-tanker running at a loss, however small, would have been the source of waking nightmares for the Worth Hudson: equally important, the more isolated ports which Lord Worth favoured for the delivery of his oil were unable to offer deep-water berth-side facilities for anything in excess of 50,000 dw.

It might in passing be explained that Lord Worth’s choice of those obscure ports was not entirely fortuitous. Among those who were a party to the gentlemen’s agreement against offshore drilling–some of the most vociferous of those who roundly condemned Worth Hudson’s nefarious practices–were regrettably Worth Hudson’s best customers. They were the smaller companies who operated on marginal profits and lacked the resources to engage in research and exploration, which the larger companies did, investing allegedly vast sums in those projects and then, to the continuous fury of the Internal Revenue Service and the anger of numerous Congressional investigation committees, claiming even vaster tax exemptions.

But to the smaller companies the lure of cheaper oil was irresistible. The Seawitch, which probably produced as much oil as all the government official leasing areas combined, seemed a sure and perpetual source of cheap oil until, that was, the government stepped in, which might or might not happen in the next decade: the big companies had already demonstrated their capacity to deal with inept Congressional enquiries and, as long as the energy crisis continued, nobody was going to worry very much about where oil came from, as long as it was there. In addition, the smaller companies felt, if the OPEC–the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries–could play ducks and drakes with oil prices whenever they felt like it, why couldn’t they?

Less than two miles from Lord Worth’s estate were the adjacent homes and common office of Michael Mitchell and John Roomer. It was Mitchell who answered the door bell.

The visitor was of medium height, slightly tubby, wore wire-rimmed glasses and alopecia had hit him hard. He said: ‘May I come in?’ in a clipped but courteous enough voice.

‘Sure.’ Mitchell let him in. ‘We don’t usually see people this late.’

‘Thank you. I come on unusual business. James Bentley.’ A little sleight of hand and a card appeared. ‘FBI.’

Mitchell didn’t even look at it. ‘You can have those things made at any joke shop. Where you from?’

‘Miami.’

‘Phone number?’

Bentley reversed the card which Mitchell handed to Roomer. ‘My memory man. Saves me from having to have a memory of my own.’

Roomer didn’t glance at the card either. ‘It’s okay, Mike. I have him. You’re the boss man up there, aren’t you?’ A nod. ‘Please sit down, Mr Bentley.’

‘One thing clear, first,’ Mitchell said. ‘Are we under investigation?’

‘On the contrary. The State Department has asked me to ask you to help them.’

‘Status at last,’ Mitchell said. ‘We’ve got it made, John, but for one thing–the State Department don’t know who the hell we are.’

‘I do.’ Discussion closed. ‘I understand you gentlemen are friendly with Lord Worth.’

Roomer was careful. ‘We know him slightly, socially–just as you seem to know a little about us.’

‘I know a lot about you, including the fact that you are a couple of ex-cops who never learned to look the right way at the right time and the wrong way at the wrong time. Bars the ladder to promotion. I want you to carry out a little investigation into Lord Worth.’

‘No deal,’ Mitchell said. ‘We know him slightly better than slightly.’

‘Hear me out, Mike.’ But Roomer’s face, too, had lost whatever little friendliness it may have held.

‘Lord Worth has been making loud noises–over the phone–to the State Department. He seems to be suffering from a persecution complex. This interests the State Department, for they see him more in the role of the persecutor than the persecuted.’

‘You mean the FBI does,’ Roomer said. ‘You’ll have had him on your files for years. Lord Worth always gives the impression of being eminently capable of looking after himself.’

‘That’s precisely what intrigues the State Department.’

Mitchell said: ‘What kind of noises?’

‘Nonsense noises. You know he has an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico?’

‘The Seawitch? Yes.’

‘He appears to be under the impression that the Seawitch is in mortal danger. He wants protection. Very modest in his demands, as becomes a bulti-millionaire–the odd missile frigate, some missile fighters standing by, just in case.’

‘In case of what?’

‘That’s the rub. He refused to say. Just said he had secret information–which, in fact, wouldn’t surprise me. The Lord Worths of this world have their secret agents everywhere.’

‘You’d better level with us,’ Mitchell said.

‘I’ve told you all I know. The rest is surmise. Calling the State Department means that there are foreign countries involved. There are Soviet naval vessels in the Caribbean at present. The State Department smell an international incident or worse.’

‘What do you want us to do?’

‘Not much. Just to find out Lord Worth’s intended movements for the next day or two.’

Mitchell said: ‘And if we refuse? We have our licences rescinded?’

‘I am not a corrupt police chief. Just forget that you ever saw me. But I thought you might care enough about Lord Worth to help protect him against himself or the consequences of any rash action he might take. I thought you might care even more about the reactions of his two daughters if anything were to happen to their father.’

Mitchell stood up, jerked a thumb. ‘The front door. You know too damn much.’

‘Sit down.’ A sudden chill asperity. ‘Don’t be foolish. Of course it’s my job to know too damn much. But apart from Lord Worth and his family I thought you might have some little concern for your country’s welfare.’

Roomer said: ‘Isn’t that pitching it a little high?’

‘Very possibly. But it is the policy of both the State Department and the FBI not to take any chances.’

Roomer said: ‘You’re putting us in a damned awkward situation.’

‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate that. Horns of a dilemma, torn loyalties, biting the hand that feeds you, all that sort of thing. I know I’ve put you in a spot and apologize for it, but I’m afraid you’ll have to resolve that particular dilemma yourselves.’

Mitchell said: ‘Thank you for dropping this little problem in our laps. What do you expect us to do? Go to Lord Worth, ask him why he’s been hollering to the State Department, ask him what he’s up to and what his immediate plans are?’

Bentley smiled. ‘Nothing so crude. You have a remarkable reputation–except, of course, in the police department–of being, in that vulgar phrase, a couple of classy operators. The approach is up to you.’ He stood. ‘Keep that card and let me know when you find out anything. How long would that take, do you think?’

Roomer said: ‘A couple of hours.’

‘A couple of hours?’ Even Bentley seemed momentarily taken aback. ‘You don’t, then, require an invitation to visit the baronial mansion?’

‘No.’

‘Millionaires do.’

‘We aren’t even thousandaires.’

‘It makes a difference. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. Good night.’

After Bentley’s departure the two men sat for a couple of minutes in silence, then Mitchell said: ‘We play it both ways?’

‘We play it every way.’ Roomer reached for a phone, dialled a number and asked for Lord Worth. He had to identify himself before he was put through–Lord Worth was a man who respected his privacy.

Roomer said: ‘Lord Worth? Mitchell and Roomer here. Something to discuss with you, sir, which may or may not be of urgency and importance. We would prefer not to discuss it over the phone.’ He paused, listened for a few moments, murmured a thank you and hung up.

‘He’ll see us right away. Park the car in the lane. Side door. Study. Says the girls have gone upstairs.’

‘Think our friend Bentley will already have our phone tapped?’

‘Not worth his FBI salt if he hasn’t.’

Five minutes later, car parked in the lane, they were making their way through the trees to the side door. Their progress was observed with interest by Marina, standing by the window in her upstairs bedroom. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then turned and unhurriedly left the room.

Lord Worth welcomed the two men in his study and securely closed the padded door behind them. He swung open the doors of a concealed bar and poured three brandies. There were times when one rang for Jenkins and there were times when one didn’t. He lifted his glass.

‘Health. An unexpected pleasure.’

‘It’s no pleasure for us,’ Roomer said gloomily.

‘Then you haven’t come to ask me for my daughters’ hands in marriage?’

‘No, sir.’ Mitchell said. ‘No such luck. John here is better at explaining these things.’

‘What things?’

‘We’ve just had a visit from a senior FBI agent.’ Roomer handed over Bentley’s card. ‘There’s a number on the back that we’re to ring when we’ve extracted some information from you.’

‘How very interesting.’ There was a long pause then Lord Worth looked at each man in turn. ‘What kind of information?’

‘In Bentley’s words, you have been making “loud noises” to the State Department. According to them, you seem to think that the Seawitch is under threat. They want to know where you got this secret information, and what your proposed movements are.’

‘Why didn’t the FBI come directly to me?’

‘Because you wouldn’t have told them any more than you told the State Department. If, that is to say, you’d even let them over the threshold of your house. But they know–Bentley told us this–that we come across here now and again, so I suppose they figured you’d be less off your guard with us.’

‘So Bentley figures that you’d craftily wring some careless talk from me without my being aware that I was talking carelessly.’

‘Something like that.’

‘But doesn’t this put you in a somewhat invidious position?’

‘Not really.’

‘But you’re supposed to uphold the law, no?’

‘Yes.’ Mitchell spoke with some feeling. ‘But not organized law. Or have you forgotten, Lord Worth, that we’re a couple of ex-cops because we wouldn’t go along with your so-called organized law? Our only responsibility is to our clients.’

‘I’m not your client.’

‘No.’

‘Would you like me to be your client?’

Roomer said: ‘What on earth for?’

‘It’s never something for nothing in this world, John. Services have to be rewarded.’

‘Failure of a mission.’ Mitchell was on his feet. ‘It was kind of you to see us, Lord Worth.’

‘I apologize.’ Lord Worth sounded genuinely contrite. ‘I’m afraid I rather stepped out of line there.’ He paused ruminatively, then smiled. ‘Just trying to recall when last I apologized to anybody. I seem to have a short memory. Bless my lovely daughters. Information for our friends of the FBI? First, I received my information in context of several anonymous threats–telephone calls–on the lives of my daughters. A double-barrelled threat, if you will–against the girls if I didn’t stop the flow of oil–as they pointed out I can’t hide them for ever and there’s nothing one can do against a sniper’s bullet–and if I were too difficult they’d have the Seawitch blown out of the water. As for my future movements. I’m going out to the Seawitch tomorrow afternoon and will remain there for twenty-four hours, perhaps forty-eight.’

Roomer said: ‘Any truth in either of those two statements?’

‘Don’t be preposterous. Of course not. I am going out to the rig–but before dawn. I don’t want those beady-eyed bandits watching me from the undergrowth at my heliport as I take off.’

‘You are referring to the FBI, sir?’

‘Who else? Will that do for the moment?’

‘Splendidly.’

They walked back to the lane in silence. Roomer got in behind the wheel of the car, Mitchell beside him.

Roomer said: ‘Well, well, well.’

‘Well, as you say, well, well, well. Crafty old devil.’

Marina’s voice came from the back. ‘Crafty he may be, but–’

She broke off in a gasp as Mitchell whirled in his seat and Roomer switched on the interior lights. The barrel of Mitchell’s .38 was lined up between her eyes, eyes at the moment wide with shock and fear.

Mitchell said in a soft voice: ‘Don’t ever do that to me again. Next time it may be too late.’

She licked her lips. She was normally as high-spirited and independent as she was beautiful, but it is a rather disconcerting thing to look down the muzzle of a pistol for the first time in your life. ‘I was just going to say that he may be crafty but he’s neither old nor a devil. Will you please put that gun away? You don’t point guns at people you love.’

Mitchell’s gun disappeared. He said: ‘I’m not much given to falling in love with crazy young fools.’

‘Or spies.’ Roomer was looking at Melinda. ‘What are you two doing here?’

Melinda was more composed than her sister. After all, she hadn’t had to look down the barrel of a pistol. She said: ‘And you, John Roomer, are a crafty young devil. You’re just stalling for time.’ Which was quite true.

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘It means you’re thinking furiously of the answer to the same question we’re about to ask you. What are you two doing here?’

‘That’s none of your concern.’ Roomer’s normally soft-spoken voice was unaccustomedly and deliberately harsh.

There was a silence from the back seat, both girls realizing that there was more to the men than they had thought, and the gap between their social and professional lives wider than they had thought.

Mitchell sighed. ‘Let’s cool it, John. Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child.’

‘Jesus!’ Roomer shook his head. ‘That you can say again.’ He hadn’t the faintest idea What Mitchell was talking about.

Mitchell said: ‘Why don’t you go to your father and ask him? I’m sure he’ll tell you–at the cost of the biggest shellacking you’ve ever had in your lives for interfering in his private business.’ He got out, opened the rear door, waited until the sisters got out, closed the rear door, said ‘Good night’ and returned to his seat, leaving the sisters standing uncertainly at the side of the road.

Roomer drove off. He said: ‘Very masterful, though I didn’t like doing it. God knows, they meant no harm. Never mind, it may stand us in good stead in the future.’

‘It’ll stand us in even better stead if we get to the phone box just round the corner as soon as we can.’

They reached the booth in fifteen seconds and one minute later Mitchell emerged from it. As he took his seat Roomer said: ‘What was all that about?’

‘Sorry, private matter.’ Mitchell handed Roomer a piece of paper. Roomer switched on the overhead light. On the paper Mitchell had scrawled. ‘This car bugged?’

Roomer said: ‘Okay by me.’ They drove home in silence. Standing in his carport Roomer said: ‘What makes you think my car’s bugged?’

‘Nothing. How far do you trust Bentley?’

‘You know how far. But he–or one of his men–wouldn’t have had time.’

‘Five seconds isn’t a long time. That’s all the time it takes to attach a magnetic clamp.’

They searched the car, then Mitchell’s. Both were clean. In Mitchell’s kitchen Roomer said: ‘Your phone call?’

‘The old boy, of course. Got to him before the girls did. Told him what had happened and that he was to tell them he’d received threats against their lives, that he knew the source, that he didn’t trust the local law and so had sent for us to deal with the matter. Caught on at once. Also to give them hell for interfering.’

Roomer said: ‘He’ll convince them.’ ‘More importantly, did he convince you?’ ‘No. He thinks fast on his feet and lies even faster. He wanted to find out how seriously he would be taken in the case of a real emergency. He now has the preliminary evidence that he is being taken seriously. You have to hand it to him–as craftily devious as they come. Not that we haven’t always known that. I suppose we tell Bentley exactly what he told us to tell him?’

‘What else?’

‘Do you believe what he told us to be truth?’ ‘That he has his own private intelligence corps? I wouldn’t question it for a moment. That he’s going out to the Seawitch? I believe that, too. I’m not so sure about his timing, though. We’re to tell Bentley that he’s leaving in the afternoon. He told us he’s leaving about dawn. If he can lie to Bentley he can lie to us. I don’t know why he should think it necessary to lie to us, probably just his lordship’s second nature. I think he’s going to leave much sooner than that.’

Roomer said: ‘Me, too, I’m afraid. If I intended to be up by dawn’s early light I’d be in bed by now or heading that way. He shows no signs of going to bed, from which I can only conclude that he has no intentions of going to bed, because it wouldn’t be worth his while.’ He paused. ‘So. A double stake-out?’

‘I thought so. Up by Lord Worth’s house and down by his heliport. You for the heliport, me for the tail job?’

‘What else?’ Mitchell was possessed of phenomenal night-sight. Except on the very blackest of nights he could drive without any lights at all, an extraordinarily rare quality which, in wartime, made generals scour an army for such men as chauffeurs. ’I’ll ‘hole up behind the west spinney. You know it?’

‘I know it. How about you feeding the story to Bentley while I make a couple of flasks of coffee and some sandwiches?’

‘Fine.’ Roomer reached for the phone, then paused. ‘Tell me, why are we doing all this? We owe nothing to the FBI. We have no authority from anyone to do anything. As you said yourself, we and organized law walk in different directions. I feel under no obligation to save my country from a non-existent threat. We have no client, no commission, no prospect of fees. Why should we care if Lord Worth sticks his head into a noose?’

Mitchell paused in slicing bread. ‘As to your last question, why don’t you ring up Melinda and ask her?’

Roomer gave him a long, old-fashioned look, sighed and reached for the telephone.

CHAPTER THREE

Scoffield had been wrong in his guess. Lord Worth was possessed of no private armoury. But the United States armed services were, and in their dozens, at that.

The two break-ins were accomplished with the professional expertise born of a long and arduous practice that precluded any possibility of mistakes. The targets in both cases were government armouries, one army and one naval. Both, naturally, were manned by round-the-clock guards, none of whom was killed or even injured if one were to disregard the cranial contusions–and those were few–caused by sandbagging and sapping: Lord Worth had been very explicit on the use of minimal violence.

Giuseppe Palermo, who looked and dressed like a successful Wall Street broker, had the more difficult task of the two, although, as a man who held the Mafia in tolerant contempt, he regarded the exercise as almost childishly easy.

Accompanied by nine almost equally respectable men–sartorially respectable, that was–three of whom were dressed as army majors, he arrived at the Florida armoury at fifteen minutes to midnight. The six young guards, none of whom had even seen or heard a shot fired in anger, were at their drowsiest and expecting nothing but their midnight reliefs. Only two were really fully awake–the other four had dozed away–and those two, responding to a heavy and peremptory hammering on the main entrance door, were disturbed, not to say highly alarmed, by the appearance of three army officers who announced that they were making a snap inspection to test security and alertness. Five minutes later all six were bound and gagged–two of them unconscious and due to wake up with very sore heads because of their misguided attempts to put up a show of resistance–and safely locked up in one of the many so-called secure rooms in the armoury.

During this period and the next twenty minutes one of Palermo’s men, an electronics expert called Jamieson, made a thorough and totally comprehensive search for all the external alarm signals to both the police and nearest military HQ. He either defused or disconnected them all.

It was when he was engaged in this that the relief guard, almost as drowsy as those whom they had been expecting to find, made their appearance and were highly disconcerted to find themselves looking at the muzzles of three machine-carbines. Within minutes, securely bound but not gagged, they had joined the previous guards, whose gags were now removed. They could safely shout until doomsday as the nearest place of habitation was over a mile away: the temporary gagging of the first six guards had been merely for the purpose of preventing their making loud noises and warning off their reliefs.

Palermo now had almost eight hours before the break-in could be discovered.

He next sent one of his men, Watkins, to bring round to the front the concealed mini-bus in which they had arrived. All of them, Watkins excepted, changed from their conservative clothing and military uniforms into rough work clothes, which resulted in the effecting of rather remarkable changes in their appearance and character. While they were doing this Watkins went to the armoury garage, picked a surprisingly ineffectual lock, selected a two-ton truck, wired up the ignition–the keys were, understandably, missing–and drove out to the already open main loading doors of the armoury.

Palermo had brought along with him one by the name of Jacobson who, between sojourns in various penitentiaries, had developed to a remarkable degree the fine art of opening any type of lock, combination or otherwise. Fortunately, his services were not needed, for nobody, curiously enough, had taken the trouble to conceal some score of keys hanging on the wall in the main office.

In less than half an hour Palermo and his men had loaded aboard the truck–chosen because it was a covered-van type–a staggering variety of weaponry, ranging from bazookas to machine-pistols, together with sufficient ammunition for a battalion and a considerable amount of high explosives. This done, they locked all the doors they had unlocked and took the keys with them–when the next relief arrived at eight in the morning it would take them all that much longer to discover what had actually happened. After that, they locked the loading and main entrance doors.

Watkins drove the mini-bus, with its load of discarded clothes, back to its place of concealment, returned to the truck and drove off. The other nine sat or lay in varying degrees of discomfort among the weaponry in the back. It was as well for them that it was only twenty minutes’ drive to Lord Worth’s private, isolated and deserted heliport–deserted, that was, except for two helicopters, their pilots and co-pilots.

The truck, using only its sidelights, came through the gates of the heliport and drew up alongside one of the helicopters. Discreet portable loading lights were switched on, casting hardly more than a dull glow, but sufficient for a man only 80 yards away and equipped with a pair of night-glasses to distinguish clearly what was going on. And Roomer, prone in the spinney and with the binoculars to his eyes, was only 80 yards away. No attempt had been made to wrap or in any way disguise the nature of the cargo. It took only twenty minutes to unload the truck and stow its contents away in the helicopter under the watchful eye of a pilot with a keen regard for weight distribution.

Palermo and his men, with the exception of Watkins, boarded the other helicopter and sat back to await promised reinforcements. The pilot of this helicopter had already, as was customary, radio-filed his flight plan to the nearest airport, accurately giving their destination as the Seawitch. To have done otherwise would have been foolish indeed. The radar tracking systems along the Gulf states are as efficient as any in the world, and any deviation of course from a falsely declared destination would have meant that, in very short order, two highly suspicious pilots in supersonic jets would be flying alongside and asking some very unpleasant questions.

Watkins drove the truck back to the armoury garage, de-wired the ignition, locked the door, retrieved the mini-bus and left. Before dawn all his friends’ clothes would have been returned to their apartments and the mini-bus, which had, inevitably, been stolen, to its parking lot.

Roomer was getting bored and his elbows were becoming sore. Since the mini-bus had driven away some half hour ago he had remained in the same prone position, his night-glasses seldom far from his eyes. His sandwiches were gone as was all his coffee, and he would have given much for a cigarette but decided it would be unwise. Clearly those aboard the helicopters were waiting for something and that something could only be the arrival of Lord Worth.

He heard the sound of an approaching engine and saw another vehicle with only sidelights on turn through the gateway. It was another minibus. Whoever was inside was not the man he was waiting for, he knew: Lord Worth was not much given to travelling in mini-buses. The vehicle drew up alongside the passenger helicopter and its passengers disembarked and climbed aboard the helicopter. Roomer counted twelve in all.

The last was just disappearing inside the helicopter when another vehicle arrived. This one didn’t pass through the gateway, it swept through it, headlights on but dipped. A Rolls-Royce. Lord Worth for a certainty. As if to redouble his certainty, there came to his ears the soft swish of tyres on the grass. He twisted round to see a car, both lights and engine off, coasting to a soundless stop beside his own.

‘Over here,’ Roomer called softly. Mitchell joined him, and together they watched the white-clad figure of Lord Worth leave the Rolls and mount the steps of the helicopter. ‘I should think that that completes the payload for the night.’

‘The payload being?’

‘There are twenty-one other passengers aboard that machine. I can’t swear to it, but instinct tells me they are not honest, upright citizens. The story goes that every multi-millionaire–’

‘Bulti.’

‘Bulti. The story goes that every bulti-millionaire has his own private army. I think I’ve just seen one of Lord Worth’s platoons filing by.’

‘The second chopper plays no part in this?’

‘Far from it. It’s the star of the show. It’s loaded to the gunwales with weaponry.’

‘Not a crime in itself. Could be part of Lord Worth’s private collection. He’s got one of the biggest in the country.’

‘Private citizens aren’t allowed to have bazookas, machine-guns and high explosives in their collection.’

‘He borrowed them, you think?’

‘Yes. Without payment or receipt.’

‘The nearest government armoury?’

‘I should imagine.’

‘They’re still sitting there. Maybe they’re waiting a pre-set time before take-off. Might be some time. Let’s go to one of the cars and radio-phone the law.’

‘The nearest army command post is seven miles from here.’

‘Right.’

The two men were on their feet and had taken only two steps towards the cars when, almost simultaneously, the engines of both helicopters started up with their usual clattering roar. Seconds later, both machines lifted off.

Mitchell said: ‘Well, it was a thought.’

‘“Was” is right. And just look at them go. Honest God-fearing citizens with all their navigational lights on.’

‘That’s just in case someone bumps into them.’ Mitchell thought. ‘We could call up the nearest air force base and have them forced down.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘Stolen government property.’

‘No evidence. Just our say-so. They’ll have to know Lord Worth is aboard. Who’s going to take the word of a couple of busted cops against his?’

‘No one. A sobering thought. Ever felt like a pariah?’

‘Like now. I just feel goddamned helpless. Well, let’s go and find some evidence. Where’s the nearest armoury from here?’

‘About a mile from the command post. I know where.’

‘Why can’t they keep their damned armouries inside their command posts?’

‘Armouries can and do blow up. How would you like to be sitting in a crowded barracks when an armoury blew up?’

Roomer straightened from the key-hole of the main door of the armoury and reluctantly pocketed the very large set of keys for the carrying of which any ill-disposed law officer could have had him behind bars without any need for a warrant.

‘I thought I could open any door with this little lot. But not this door. You don’t have to guess where the keys are now.’

‘Probably sailing down from a chopper in the Gulf.’

‘Like as not. Those loading doors have the same lock. Apart from that, nothing but barred windows. You don’t have a hacksaw on you, Mike?’

‘I will next time.’ He shone his torch through one of the barred windows. All he could see was his own reflection. He took out his pistol, and holding it by the barrel, struck the heavy butt several times against the glass, without any noticeable effect–hardly surprising considering that the window lay several inches beyond the bars and the force of the blows was minimal.

Roomer said: ‘And just what are you trying to do?’

Mitchell was patient. ‘Break the glass.’

‘Breaking the glass won’t help you get inside.’

‘It’ll help me see and maybe hear. I wonder if that’s just plate glass or armoured stuff?’

‘How should I know?’

‘True. Watch me finding out. If it’s armoured, the bullet will ricochet. Get down.’ Both men crouched and Mitchell fired one shot at an upward angle. The bullet did not ricochet. It passed through, leaving a jagged hole with radiating cracks. Mitchell began chipping away round the hole but desisted when Roomer appeared with a heavy car jack: a few powerful blows and Roomer had a hole almost a foot in diameter. Mitchell shone his torch through this: an office lined with filing cabinets and an open door beyond. He put his ear as close to the hole as possible and he heard it at once, the faint but unmistakable sound of metal clanging against metal and the shouting of unmistakably hoarse voices. Mitchell withdrew his head and nodded to Roomer, who stooped and listened in turn.

Five seconds was enough. Roomer straightened and said: ‘There are a lot of frustrated people in there.’

About a mile beyond the entrance to the army command post they stopped by a roadside telephone booth. Mitchell telephoned the army post, told them the state of defences at their armoury would bear investigation and that it would be advisable for them to bring along a duplicate set of keys for the main door. When asked who was speaking he hung up and returned to Roomer’s car.

‘Too late to call in the air force now, I suppose?’

‘Too late. They’ll be well out over extra-territorial waters by now. There’s no state of war. Not yet.’ He sighed. ‘Why, oh why, didn’t I have an infrared ciné camera tonight?’

Over in Mississippi Conde’s task of breaking into the naval armoury there turned out to be ridiculously easy. He had with him only six men, although he had sixteen more waiting in reserve aboard the 120-foot vessel Roamer which was tied up dockside less than thirty feet from the armoury. Those men had already effectively neutralized the three armed guards who patrolled the dock area at night.

The armoury was guarded by only two retired naval petty officers, who regarded their job not only as a sinecure but downright nonsense, for who in his right mind would want to steal depth-charges and naval guns? It was their invariable custom to prepare themselves for sleep immediately upon arrival, and asleep they soundly were when Conde and his men entered through the door they hadn’t even bothered to lock.

They used two fork-lift trucks to trundle depth-charges, light, dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns and a sufficiency of shells down to the dockside, then used one of the scores of cranes that lined the dockside to lower the stolen equipment into the hold of the Roamer, which was then battened down. Clearing the customs was the merest formality. The customs officials had seen the Roamer come and go so many times that they had long ago lost count, Besides, no one was going to have the temerity to inspect the ocean-going property of one of the richest men in the world: the Roamer was Lord Worth’s seismological survey vessel.

At its base not far from Havana, a small, conventionally powered and Russian-built submarine slipped its moorings and quietly put out to sea. The hastily assembled but nonetheless hand-picked crew were informed that they were on a training cruise designed to test the sea-going readiness of Castro’s tiny fleet. Not a man aboard believed a word of this.

Meanwhile Cronkite had not been idle. Unlike the others, he had no need to break into any place to obtain explosives. He just had to use his own key. As the world’s top expert in capping blazing gushers he had access to an unlimited number and great variety of explosives. He made a selection of those and had them trucked down from Houston, where he lived–apart from the fact that Houston was the oil rig centre of the south the nature of his business made it essential for him to live within easy reach of an airport with international connections. They were then sent off to Galveston.

As the truck was on its way another seismological vessel, a converted coastguard cutter, was also closing in on Galveston. This vessel, without explaining his reasons why, Cronkite had obtained through the good offices of Durant, who had represented the Galveston area companies at the meeting of the ten at Lake Tahoe. The cutter, which went by the name of Questar, was normally based at Freeport, and Cronkite could quite easily have taken the shipment there, but this would not have suited his purpose. The tanker Crusader was unloading at Galveston and the Crusader was one of the three tankers that plied regularly between the Seawitch and the Gulf ports.

The Questar and Cronkite arrived almost simultaneously. Mulhooney, the Questar’s skipper, eased his ship into a berth conveniently close to the Crusader. Mulhooney was not the regular captain of the Questar. That gentleman had been so overcome by the sight of two thousand dollars in cash that he had fallen ill, and would remain so for a few days. Cronkite had recommended his friend, Mulhooney. Cronkite didn’t immediately go aboard the Questar. Instead he chatted with the chief customs inspector, who watched with an idle eye as what were obviously explosives were transferred to the Questar. The two men had known each other for years. Apart from observing that someone out in the Gulf had been careless with matches again, the customs official had no further pertinent comment to make.

In response to idle questioning Cronkite learned that the Crusader had just finished offloading its cargo, and would be sailing in approximately one hour.

He boarded the Questar, greeted Mulhooney and went straight to the crew’s mess. Seated among the others there were three divers already fully clad in scuba suits. He gave brief instructions and the three men went on deck. Under cover of the superstructure and on the blind side of the ship–the side remote from the dock–the three men went down a rope ladder and slid quietly into the water. Six objects–radio-detonated magnetic mines equipped with metallic clamps–were lowered down towards them. They were so constructed as to have a very slight negative buoyancy, which made them easy to tow along under water.

In the pre-dawn darkness the hulls of the vessels cast so heavy a shadow from the powerful shorelights that it was virtually certain that the men could have swum unobserved on the surface. But Cronkite was not much given to taking any chances at all. The mines were attached along the stern half of the Crusader’s hull, thirty feet apart and set at a depth of about ten feet. Five minutes after their departure the scuba divers were back. After a further five minutes the Questar put out to sea.

Cronkite, despite his near-legendary reputation for ruthlessness, had not quite lost touch with humanity: to say that he was possessed of an innate kindliness would have been a distortion of the truth, for he was above all an uncompromising and single-minded realist, but one with no innate killer instinct. Nonetheless, there were two things that would at that moment have given him considerable satisfaction.

The first of these was that he would have preferred to have the Crusader at sea before pressing the sheathed button before him on the bridge. He had no wish that innocent lives should be lost in Galveston, but it was a chance that he had to take. Limpet mines, as the Italian divers had proved in Alexandria in World War Two–and this to the great distress of the Royal Navy–could be devastatingly effective against moored vessels. But what might happen to high buoyancy limpets when a ship got under way and worked its way up to a maximum speed was impossible to forecast, as there was no known case of a vessel under way ever having been destroyed by limpet mines. It was at least possible that water pressure of a ship under way might well overcome the tenuous magnetic hold of the limpets and tear them free.

The second temptation was to board the helicopter on the Questar’s after helipad–many such vessels carried helicopters for the purpose of having them drop patterned explosives on the seabed to register on the seismological computer–and go to have a close look at what would be the ensuing havoc, a temptation which he immediately regarded as pure self-indulgence.

He put both thoughts from his mind. Eight miles out from Galveston he unscrewed the button-covered switch and leaned firmly on the button beneath. The immediate results were wholly unspectacular, and Cronkite feared that they might have been out of radio range. But for those in the port area in Galveston the results were highly spectacular. Six shattering explosions occurred almost simultaneously, and within twenty seconds the Crusader, her stern section torn in half, developed a marked list to starboard as thousands of tons of water poured through the ruptured side Another twenty seconds later–making forty seconds in all–the distant rumble of the explosions reached the ears of the listeners on the Questar. Cronkite and Mulhooney, alone on the bridge–the ship was on automatic pilot–looked at each other with grim satisfaction. Mulhooney, an Irishman with a true Irishman’s sense of occasion, produced an opened bottle of champagne and poured two brimming glassfuls. Cronkite, who normally detested the stuff, consumed his drink with considerable relish and set his glass down. It was then that the Crusader caught fire.

Its petrol tanks, true, were empty, but its engine diesel fuel tanks were almost completely topped up. In normal circumstances ignited diesel does not explode but burns with a ferocious intensity. Within seconds the smoke-veined flames had risen to a height of 200 feet, the height increasing with each passing moment until the whole city was bathed in a crimson glow, a phenomenon which the citizens of Galveston had never seen before and would almost certainly never see again. Even aboard the Questar, now some miles distant, the spectacle had an awe-inspiring and unearthly quality about it. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped as the Crusader turned completely over on its side, the harbour waters quenching the flames into hissing extinction. Some patches of floating oil still flickered feebly across the harbour, but that was all that there was to it.

Clearly, Lord Worth was going to require a new tanker, a requirement that presented quite a problem. In this area of a gross over-supply of tankers, any one of scores of laid-up super-tankers could be had just through exercising enough strength to lift a telephone. But 50,000 dw tankers, though not a dying breed, were a dwindling breed, principally because the main shipyards throughout the world had stopped producing them. ‘Had’ is the operative word. Keels of that size and even smaller were now being hastily laid down, but would not be in full operation for a year or two to come. The reason was perfectly simple. Super-tankers on the Arabian Gulf-Europe run had to make the long and prohibitively expensive circuit of the Cape of Good Hope because the newly reopened Suez Canal could not accommodate their immense draught, a problem that presented no difficulties to smaller tankers. It was said, and probably with more than a grain of truth, that the notoriously wily Greek ship-owners had established a corner of this particular market.

The dawn was in the sky.

At that precise moment there were scenes of considerable activity around and aboard the Seawitch. The Panamanian registered tanker, the Torbello, was just finishing the off-loading of the contents of the Seawitch’s massive floating conical oil tank. As they were doing so, two helicopters appeared over the north-eastern horizon. Both were very large Sikorsky machines which had been bought by the thrifty Lord Worth for the traditional song, not because they were obsolete but because they were two of the scores that had become redundant since the end of the Vietnam war, and the armed forces had been only too anxious to get rid of them: civilian demand for ex-gunships is not high.

The first of those to land on the helipad debarked twenty-two men, led by Lord Worth and Giuseppe Palermo. The other twenty, who from their appearance were not much given to caring for widows and orphans, all carried with them the impeccable credentials of oil experts of one type or another. That they were experts was beyond question: what was equally beyond question was that none of them would have recognized a barrel of oil even if he had fallen into it. They were experts in diving, underwater demolition, the handling of high explosives and the accurate firing of a variety of unpleasant weapons.

The second helicopter arrived immediately after the first had taken off. Pilot and co-pilot apart, it carried no other human cargo. What it did carry was the immense and varied quantity of highly offensive weaponry from the Florida armoury, the loss of which had not yet been reported in the newspapers.

The oil rig crew watched the arrival of gunmen and weapons with an oddly dispassionate curiosity. They were men to whom the unusual was familiar; the odd, the incongruous, the inexplicable, part and parcel of their daily lives. Oil rig crews were a race apart and Lord Worth’s men formed a very special subdivision of that race.

Lord Worth called them all together, told of the threat to the Seawitch and the defensive measures he was undertaking, measures which were thoroughly approved of by the crew, who had as much regard for their own skins as the rest of mankind. Lord Worth finished by saying that he knew he had no need to swear them to secrecy.

In this the noble lord was perfectly correct. Though all experienced oilmen, there was hardly a man aboard who had not at one time or another had a close and painful acquaintanceship with the law. There were ex-convicts among them. There were escaped convicts among them. There were those whom the law was very anxious to interview. And there were parolees who had broken their parole. There could be no safer hideouts for those men than the Seawitch and Lord Worth’s privately-owned motel where they put up during their off-duty spells. No law-officer in his sane mind was going to question the towering respectability and integrity of one of the most powerful oil barons in the world, and by inevitable implication this attitude of mind extended to those in his employ.

In other words Lord Worth, through the invaluable intermediacy of Commander Larsen, picked his men with extreme care.

Accommodation for the newly-arrived men and storage for the weaponry presented no problem. Like many jack-ups, drill-ships and submersibles, the Seawitch had two complete sets of accommodation and messes, one for Westerners, the other for Orientals: there were at that time no Orientals aboard.

Lord Worth, Commander Larsen and Palermo held their own private council of war in the luxuriously equipped sitting-room which Lord Worth kept permanently reserved for himself. They agreed on everything. They agreed that Cronkite’s campaign against them would be distinguished by a noticeable lack of subtlety: outright violence was the only course open to him. Once the oil was offloaded ashore there was nothing Cronkite could do about it. He would not attempt to attack and sink a loaded tanker, just as he would not attempt to destroy their huge floating storage tank. Either method would cause such a massive oil slick, comparable to or probably exceeding the great oil slick caused by the Torrey Canyon disaster off the south-west coast of England some years previously. The ensuing international uproar would be bound to uncover something, and if Cronkite were implicated he would undoubtedly implicate the major oil companies–who wouldn’t like that at all. And that there would be a massive investigation was inevitable: ecology and pollution were still the watchwords of the day.

Cronkite could attack the flexible oil pipe that connected the rig with the tank, but the three men agreed that this could be taken care of. After Conde and the Roamer arrived and its cargo had been hoisted aboard, the Roamer would maintain a constant day-and-night patrol between the rig and the tank. The Seawitch was well equipped with sensory devices, apart from those which controlled the tensioning anchor cables. A radar scanner was in constant operation atop the derrick, and sonar devices were attached to each of the three giant legs some twenty feet under water. The radar could detect any hostile approach from air or sea, and the dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns, once aboard and installed, could take care of those. In the highly unlikely event of an underwater attack sonar would locate the source and a suitably placed depth-charge from the Roamer would attend to that.

Lord Worth, of course, was unaware that at that very moment another craft was moving out at high speed to join Cronkite on the Questar. It was a standard and well-established design irreverently known as the ‘pull-push’, where water was ducted in through a tube forward under the hull and forced out under pressure at the rear. It had no propeller and had been designed primarily for work close inshore or in swamps where there was always the danger of the propeller being fouled. The only difference between this vessel–the Starlight– and others was that it was equipped with a bank of lead acid batteries and could be electrically powered. Sonar could detect and accurately pinpoint a ship’s engines and propeller vibrations: it was virtually helpless against an electric pull-push.

Lord Worth and the others considered the possibility of a direct attack on the Seawitch. Because of her high degree of compartmentalization and her great positive buoyancy nothing short of an atom bomb was capable of disposing of something as large as a football field. Certainly no conventional weapon could. The attack, when it came, would be localized. The drilling derrick was an obvious target, but how Cronkite could approach it unseen could not be imagined. But of one thing Lord Worth was certain: when the attack came it would be levelled against the Seawitch.

The next half hour was to prove, twice, just how wrong Lord Worth could be.

The first intimations of disaster came when Lord Worth was watching the fully-laden Torbello just disappearing over the northern horizon; the Crusader, he knew, was due alongside the tank late that afternoon. Larsen, his face one huge scowl of fury, silently handed Lord Worth a signal just received in the radio office. Lord Worth read it, and his subsequent language would have disbarred him for ever from a seat in the House of Lords. The message told, in cruelly unsparing fashion, of the spectacular end of the Crusader in Galveston.

Both men hurried to the radio room. Larsen contacted the Jupiter, their third tanker then offloading at an obscure Louisiana port, told its captain the unhappy fate of the Crusader and warned him to have every man on board on constant look-out until they had cleared harbour.

Lord Worth personally called the chief of police in Galveston, announced who he was and demanded more details of the sinking of the Crusader. These he duly received and none of them made him any happier. On inspiration he asked if there had been a man called John Cronkite or a vessel belonging to a man of that name in the vicinity at the time. He was told to hang on while a check was made with the Customs. Two minutes later he was told yes, there had been a John Cronkite aboard a vessel called the Questar, which had been moored directly aft of the Crusader. It was not known whether Cronkite was the owner or not. The Questar had sailed half an hour before the Crusader blew up.

Lord Worth peremptorily demanded that the Questar be apprehended and returned to port and that Cronkite be arrested. The police chief pointed out that international law prohibited the arrest of vessels on the high sea except in time of war and, as for Cronkite, there wasn’t a shred of evidence to connect him with the sinking of the Crusader. Lord Worth then asked if he would trace the owner of the Questar. This the police chief promised to do, but warned that there might be a considerable delay. There were many registers to be consulted.

At that moment the Cuban submarine steaming on the surface at full speed was in the vicinity of Key West and heading directly for the Seawitch. At almost the same time a missile-armed Russian destroyer slipped its moorings in Havana and set off in apparent pursuit of the Cuban submarine. And, very shortly after that, a destroyer slipped its moorings at its home base in Venezuela.

The Roamer, Lord Worth’s survey vessel under the command of Conde, was now half-way towards its destination. The Starlight, under the command of Easton, was just moving away from the Questar, which was lying stopped in the water. Men on stages had already painted out the ship’s name, and with the aid of cardboard stencils were painting in a new name–Georgia. Cronkite had no wish that any vessel with whom they might make contact could radio for confirmation of the existence of a cutter called Questar. From aft there came the unmistakable racket of a helicopter engine starting up, then the machine took off, circled and headed south-east, not on its usual pattern-bombing circuit but to locate and radio back to the Questar the location and course of the Torbello, if and when it found it. Within minutes the Questar was on its way again, heading in approximately the same direction as the helicopter.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lord Worth, enjoying a very early morning cup of tea, was in his living-room with Larsen and Palermo when the radio operator knocked and entered, a message sheet in his hand. He handed it to Lord Worth and said: ‘For you, sir. But it’s in some sort of code. Do you have a code-book?’

‘No need.’ Lord Worth smiled with some little self-satisfaction, his first smile of any kind for quite some time. ‘I invented this code myself.’ He tapped his head. ‘Here’s my code-book.’

The operator left. The other two watched in mild anticipation as Lord Worth began to decode. The anticipation turned into mild apprehension as the smile disappeared from Lord Worth’s face, and the apprehension gave way in turn to deep concern as reddish-purplish spots the size of pennies touched either cheek-bone. He laid down the message sheet, took a deep breath, then proceeded to give a repeat performance, though this time more deeply felt, more impassioned, of the unparliamentary language he had used when he had greeted the news of the loss of the Crusader. After some time he desisted, less because he had nothing fresh to say as from sheer loss of breath.

Larsen had more wit than to ask Lord Worth if something were the matter. Instead he said in a quiet voice: ‘Suppose you tell us, Lord Worth?’

Lord Worth, with no little effort, composed himself and said: ‘It seems that Cor–’ He broke off and corrected himself: it was one of his many axioms that the right hand shouldn’t know what the left hand doeth. ‘I was informed–all too reliably, as it now appears–that a couple of countries hostile to us might well be prepared to use naval force against us. One, it appears, is already prepared to do so. A destroyer has just cleared its Venezuelan home port and is heading in what is approximately our direction.’

‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Palermo said.

‘When people are power-and money-mad they’ll stop at nothing.’ It apparently never occurred to Lord Worth that his description of people applied, in excelsis, to himself.

‘Who’s the other power?’ said Larsen.

‘The Soviet Union.’

‘Is it now?’ Larsen seemed quite unmoved. ‘I don’t know if I like the sound of that.’

‘We could do without them.’ Lord Worth was back on balance again. He flipped out a telephone notebook and consulted it. ‘I think I’ll have a talk to Washington.’ His hand was just reaching out for the receiver when the phone rang. He lifted the receiver, at the same time making the switch that cut the incoming call into the bulkhead speaker.

‘Worth.’

A vaguely disembodied voice came through the speaker. ‘You know who I am?’ Disembodied or not, Worth knew to whom the voice belonged. Corral.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve checked my contact, sir. I’m afraid our guesses were only too accurate. Both X and Y are willing to commit themselves to naval support.’

‘I know. One of them has just moved out and appears to be heading in our general direction.’

‘Which one?’

‘The one to the south. Any talk of air commitment?’

‘None that I’ve heard, sir. But I don’t have to tell you that that doesn’t rule out its use.’

‘Let me know if there is any more good news.’

‘Naturally. Goodbye, sir.’

Lord Worth replaced the receiver, then lifted it again.

‘I want a number in Washington.’

‘Can you hold a moment, sir?’

‘Why?’

‘There’s another code message coming through. Looks like the same code as the last one, sir.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’ Lord Worth’s tone was sombre. ‘Bring it across as soon as possible.’

He replaced the receiver, pressed a button on the small console before him, lifting the receiver as he did so.

‘Chambers?’ Chambers was his senior pilot.

‘Sir?’

‘Your chopper refuelled?’

‘Ready to go when you are, sir.’

‘May be any second now. Stand by your phone.’ He replaced the receiver.

Larsen said: ‘Washington beckons, sir?’

‘I have the odd feeling that it’s about to. There are things that one can achieve in person that one can’t over the phone. Depends upon this next message.’

‘If you go, anything to be done in your absence?’

‘There’ll be dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns arriving aboard the Roamer this afternoon. Secure them to the platform.’

‘To the north, south, east but not west?’

‘As you wish.’

‘We don’t want to start blowing holes in our own oil tank.’

‘There’s that. There’ll also be mines. Three piles, each half-way between a pair of legs.’

‘An underwater explosion from a mine wouldn’t damage the legs?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. We’ll just have to find out, won’t we? Keep in constant half-hourly touch with both the Torbello and the Jupiter. Keep the radar and sonar stations constantly manned. Eternal vigilance, if you will. Hell, Commander, I don’t have to tell you what to do.’ He wrote some figures on a piece of paper. ‘If I do have to go, contact this number in Washington. Tell them that I’m coming Five hours or so.’

‘This is the State Department?’

‘Yes. Tell them that at least the Under-Secretary must be there. Remind him, tactfully, of future campaign contributions. Then contact my aircraft pilot, Dawson. Tell him to be standing by with a filed flight plan for Washington.’

The radio operator knocked, entered, handed Lord Worth a message sheet and left. Lord Worth, hands steady and face now untroubled, decoded the message, reached for the phone and told Chambers to get to the helicopter at once.

He said to the two men: ‘A Russian-built Cuban submarine is on its way from Havana. It’s being followed by a Russian guided missile destroyer. Both are heading this way.’

‘A visit to the State Department or the Pentagon would appear to be indicated,’ Larsen said. ‘There isn’t too much we can do about guided missiles. Looks like there might be quite some activity hereabouts: that makes five vessels arrowing in on us–three naval vessels, the Jupiter and the Roamer.’ Larsen might have been even more concerned had he known that the number of vessels was seven, and not five: but then Larsen was not to know that the Questar and the Starlight were heading that way also.

Lord Worth rose. ‘Well, keep an eye on the shop. Back this evening some time. I’ll be in frequent radio contact.’

Lord Worth was to fly four legs that day: by helicopter to the mainland, by his private Boeing to Washington, the return flight to Florida and the final leg by helicopter out to the Seawitch. On each of those four legs something very unpleasant was going to happen–unpleasant for Lord Worth, that was. Fortunately for Lord Worth he was not blessed with the alleged Scottish second sight–the ability to look into the future.

The first of those unpleasantnesses happened when Lord Worth was en route to the mainland. A large estate wagon swept up to the front door of Lord Worth’s mansion, carrying five rather large men who would have been difficult later to identify, for all five wore stocking masks. One of them carried what appeared to be a large coil of clothes rope, another a roll of adhesive tape. All carried guns.

MacPherson, the elderly head gardener, was taking his customary pre-work dawn patrol to see what damage the fauna had wreaked on his flora during the night when the men emerged from the estate wagon. Even allowing for the fact that shock had temporarily paralysed his vocal chords he never had a chance. In just over a minute, bound hand and foot and with his lips literally sealed with adhesive tape he had been dumped unceremoniously into a clump of bushes.

The leader of the group, a man by the name of Durand, pressed the front-door bell. Durand, a man who had a powerful affinity with banks and who was a three-time ex-convict, was by definition a man of dubious reputation, a reputation confirmed by the fact that he was a close and long-term associate of Cronkite. Half a minute passed then he rang again. By and by the door opened to reveal a robe-wrapped Jenkins, tousle-haired and blinking the sleep from his eyes–it was still very early in the morning. His eyes stopped blinking and opened wide when he saw the pistol in Durand’s hand.

Durand touched the cylinder screwed on to the muzzle of his gun. As hooked a TV addict as the next man, Jenkins recognized a silencer when he saw one.

‘You know what this is?’

A fully awake Jenkins nodded silently.

‘We have no wish to harm anyone in this household. Especially, no harm will come to you if you do what you are told. Doing what you are told includes not telling lies. Understood?’

Jenkins understood.

‘How many staff do you have here?’

There was a noticeable quaver in Jenkins’s voice. ‘Well, there’s me–I’m the butler–’

Durand was patient. ‘You we can see.’

‘Two footmen, a chauffeur, a radio operator, a secretary, a cook and two housemaids. There’s a cleaning lady but she doesn’t come until eight.’

‘Tape him,’ Durand said. Jenkins’s lips were taped. ‘Sorry about that, but people can be silly at times. Take us to those eight bedrooms.’

Jenkins reluctantly led the way. Ten minutes later all eight of the staff were securely bound and silenced. Durand said: ‘And now, the two young ladies.’

Jenkins led them to a door Durand picked out three of his men and said softly: ‘The butler will take you to the other girl. Check what she packs and especially her purse.’

Durand, followed by his man, entered the room, his gun in its concealed holster so as not to arouse too much alarm. That the bed was occupied was beyond doubt, although all that could be seen was a mop of black hair on the pillow. Durand said in a conversational voice: ‘I think you better get up, ma’am.’ Durand was not normally given to gentleness, but he did not want a case of screaming hysterics on his hands.

A case of hysterics he did not have. Marina turned round in bed and looked at him with drowsy eyes. The drowsiness did not last long. The eyes opened wide, either in fear or shock, then returned to normal. She reached for a robe, arranged it strategically on the bed cover, then sat bolt upright, wrapping the robe round her.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’ Her voice was not quite as steady as she might have wished.

‘Well, would you look at that, now?’ Durand said admiringly. ‘You’d think she was used to being kidnapped every morning of her life.’

‘This is a kidnap?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Durand sounded genuinely apologetic.

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Vacation. Little island in the sun.’ Durand smiled. ‘You won’t be needing any swim-suit though. Please get up and get dressed.’

‘And if I refuse?’

‘We’ll dress you.’

‘I’m not going to get dressed with you two watching me.’

Durand was soothing. ‘My friend will stand out in the corridor. I’ll go into the bathroom there and leave the door open just a crack–not to watch you, but to watch the window, to make sure that you don’t leave by it. Call me when you’re ready and be quick about it.’

She was quick about it. She called him inside three minutes. Blue blouse, blue slacks and her hair combed. Durand nodded his approval.

‘Pack a travelling bag. Enough for a few days.’

He watched her while she packed. She zipped the bag shut and picked up her purse. ‘I’m ready.’

He took the purse from her, unclipped it and up-ended the contents on the bed. From the jumble on the bed he selected a small pearl-handled pistol, which he slipped into his pocket.

‘Let’s pack the purse again, shall we?’

Marina did so, her face flushed with mortification.

A somewhat similar scene had just taken place in Melinda’s bedroom.

Twenty-five minutes had elapsed since the arrival of Durand and his men and their departure with the two girls. No one had been hurt, except in their pride, and they had even been considerate to the extent of seating Jenkins in a deep armchair in the front hall. Jenkins, as he was now securely bound hand and foot, did not appreciate this courtesy as much as he might have done.

About ten minutes after their departure Lord Worth’s helicopter touched down beside his Boeing in the city airport. There were no customs, no clearance formalities Lord Worth had made it plain some years previously that he did not much care for that sort of thing, and when Lord Worth made things plain they tended to remain that way.

It was during the second leg of his flight that the second unfortunate occurrence happened. Again, Lord Worth was happily unaware of anything that was taking place.

The Questar’s (now the Georgia’s) helicopter had located the Torbello. The pilot reported that he had sighted the vessel two minutes previously and gave her latitude and longitude as accurately as he could judge. More importantly, he gave her course as 315°, which was virtually on a collison course with the Georgia. They were approximately forty-five miles apart. Cronkite gave his congratulations to the pilot and asked him to return to the Georgia.

On the bridge of the Georgia, Cronkite and Mulhooney looked at each other with satisfaction. Between planning and execution there often exists an unbridgeable gap. In this case, however, things appeared to be going exactly according to plan.

Cronkite said to Mulhooney: ‘Time, I think, to change into more respectable clothes. And don’t forget to powder your nose.’

Mulhooney smiled and left the bridge. Cronkite paused only to give a few instructions to the helmsman, then left the bridge also.

Less than an hour later the Torbello stood clear over the horizon. The Georgia headed straight for it, then at about three miles’ distance made a thirty degree alteration to starboard, judged the timing to a nicety and came round in a wide sweeping turn to port. Two minutes later the Georgia was on a parallel course to the Torbello, alongside its port quarter–the bridge of a tanker lies very far aft–paralleling its course at the same speed and not more than thirty yards away. Cronkite moved out on to the wing of the Georgia’s bridge and lifted his loud-hailer.

‘Coastguard here. Please stop. This is a request, not an order. I believe your vessel to be in great danger. Your permission, please, to bring a trained search party aboard. If you value the safety of your men and the ship, on no account break radio silence.’

Captain Thompson, an honest sailor with no criminal propensities whatsoever, used his own loud-hailer.

‘What’s wrong? Why is this boarding necessary?’

‘It’s not a boarding. I am making a polite request for your own good. Believe me, I’d rather not be within five miles of you. It is necessary. I’d rather come aboard with my lieutenant and explain privately. Don’t forget what happened to your sister ship, the Crusader, in Galveston harbour last night.’

Captain Thompson, clearly, had not forgotten and was, of course, completely unaware that Cronkite was the man responsible for what had happened to his sister ship: a ringing of bells from the bridge was indication enough of that. Three minutes later the Torbello lay stopped in the calm waters. The Georgia edged up alongside the Torbello until its midships were just ahead of the bulk of the tanker’s superstructure. At this point it was possible to step from the Georgia’s deck straight on to the deck of the deeply-laden tanker, which was what Cronkite and Mulhooney proceeded to do. They paused there until they had made sure that the Georgia was securely moored fore and aft to the tanker, then climbed a series of companion-ways and ladders up to the bridge.

Both men were quite unrecognizable as themselves. Cronkite had acquired a splendidly bushy black beard, a neatly trimmed moustache and dark glasses and, with his neatly tailored uniform and slightly rakish peaked cap, looked the epitome of the competent and dashing coastguard cutter captain which he was not. Mulhooney was similarly disguised.

There was only Captain Thompson and an unemployed helmsman on the bridge. Cronkite shook the captain’s hand.

‘Good morning. Sorry to disturb you when you are proceeding about your lawful business and all that, but you may be glad we stopped you. First, where is your radio room?’ Captain Thompson nodded to a door set in back of the bridge. ‘I’d like my lieutenant to check on the radio silence. This is imperative.’ Again Captain Thompson, now feeling distinctly uneasy, nodded. Cronkite looked at Mulhooney. ‘Go check, Dixon, will you?’

Mulhooney passed through into the radio room, closing the door behind him. The radio operator looked up from his transceiver with an air of mild surprise.

‘Sorry to disturb.’ Mulhooney sounded almost genial, a remarkable feat for a man totally devoid of geniality. ‘I’m from the coastguard cutter alongside. The captain has told you to keep radio silence?’

‘That’s just What I’m doing.’

‘Made any radio calls since leaving the Seawitch?’

‘Only the routine half-hourly on course, on time calls.’

‘Do they acknowledge those? I have my reasons for asking.’ Mulhooney carefully refrained from saying what his reasons were.

‘No. Well, just the usual “Roger-and-out” business.’

‘What’s the call-up frequency?’

The operator pointed to the console. ‘Pre-set.’

Mulhooney nodded and walked casually behind the operator. Just to make sure that the operator kept on maintaining radio silence, Mulhooney clipped him over the right ear with the butt of his pistol. He then returned to the bridge where he found Captain Thompson in a state of considerable and understandable perturbation.

Captain Thompson, a deep anxiety compounded by a self-defensive disbelief, said: ‘What you’re telling me in effect is that the Torbello is a floating time-bomb.’

‘A bomb, certainly. Maybe lots of bombs. Not only possible but almost certain. Our sources of information–sorry, I’m not at liberty to divulge those–are as nearly impeccable as can be.’

‘God’s sake, man, no one would be so mad as to cause a vast oilslick in the Gulf.’

Cronkite said: ‘It’s your assumption, not mine, that we’re dealing with sane minds. Who but a madman would have endangered the city of Galveston by blowing up your sister tanker there?’

The captain fell silent and pondered the question gloomily.

Cronkite went on: ‘Anyway, it’s my intention–with your consent, of course–to search the engine room, living accommodation and every storage space on the ship. With the kind of search crew I have it shouldn’t take more than half an hour.’

‘What kind of pre-set time-bomb do you think it might be?’

‘I don’t think it’s a time-bomb–or bombs–at all. I think that the detonator–or detonators–will be a certain radio-activated device that can be triggered off by any nearby craft, plane or helicopter. But I don’t think it’s slated to happen till you’re close to the US coast.’

‘Why?’

‘Then you will have the maximum pollution along the shores. There will be a national outcry against Lord Worth and the safety standards aboard his–if you will excuse me–rather superannuated tankers, perhaps resulting in the closing down of the Seawitch or the arrest of any of Lord Worth’s tankers that might enter American territorial waters.’ In addition to his many other specialized qualifications, Cronkite was a consummate liar. ‘Okay if I call my men?’ Captain Thompson nodded without any noticeable enthusiasm.

Cronkite lifted the loud-hailer and ordered the search party aboard. They came immediately, fourteen of them, all of them wearing stocking masks, all of them carrying machine-pistols. Captain Thompson stared at them in stupefaction then turned and stared some more at Cronkite and Mulhooney, both of whom had pistols levelled against him. Cronkite may have been looking satisfied or even triumphant, but such was the abundance of his ersatz facial foliage that it was impossible to tell.

Captain Thompson, in a stupefaction that was slowly turning into a slow burn, said: ‘What the hell goes?’

‘You can see what goes. Hijack. A very popular pastime nowadays. I agree that nobody’s ever hijacked a tanker before, but there always has to be someone to start a new trend. Besides, it’s not really something new. Piracy on the high seas. They’ve been at it for thousands of years. Don’t try anything rash, Captain, and please don’t try to be a hero. If you all behave no harm will come to you. Anyway, what could you possibly do with fourteen submachine-guns lined up against you?’

Within five minutes all the crew, officers and men, with one exception, were herded in the crew’s mess under armed guard. Nobody had even as much as contemplated offering resistance. The exception was an unhappy-looking duty engineer in the engine room. There are few people who don’t look slightly unhappy, when staring at the muzzle of a Schmeisser from a distance of five feet.

Cronkite was on the bridge giving Mulhooney his final instructions.

‘Continue sending the Seawitch its half-hourly on time, on course reports. Then report a minor breakdown in two or three hours–a fractured fuel line or something of the sort–enough that would keep the Torbello immobilized for a few hours. You’re due in Galveston tonight and I need time and room to manoeuvre. Rather, you need time and room to manoeuvre. When darkness comes keep every navigational light extinguished–indeed, every light extinguished. Don’t let’s underestimate Lord Worth.’ Cronkite was speaking with an unaccustomed degree of bitterness, doubtless recalling the day Lord Worth had taken him to the cleaner’s in court. ‘He’s an exceptionally powerful man, and it’s quite on the cards that he can have an air and sea search mounted for his missing tanker.’

Cronkite rejoined the Georgia, cast off and pulled away. Mulhooney, too, got under way, but altered course ninety degrees to port so that he was heading south-west instead of north-west. On the first half-hour he sent the reassuring report to the Seawitch–‘on course, on time.’

Cronkite waited for the Starlight to join him, then both vessels proceeded together in a generally south-eastern direction until they were about thirty-five nautical miles from the Seawitch, safely over the horizon and out of reach of the Seawitch’s radar and sonar. They stopped their engines and settled down to wait.

The big Boeing had almost halved the distance between Florida and Washington. Lord Worth, in his luxurious state-room immediately abaft the flight deck, was making up for time lost during the previous night and, blissfully unaware of the slings and arrows that were coming at him from all sides, was soundly asleep.

Mitchell had been unusually but perhaps not unexpectedly late in waking that morning. He showered, shaved and dressed while the coffee percolated, all the time conscious of a peculiar and unaccustomed sense of unease. He paced up and down the kitchen, drinking coffee, then abruptly decided to put his unease at rest. He lifted the phone and dialled Lord Worth’s mansion. The other end rang, rang again and kept on ringing. Mitchell replaced the receiver, then tried again with the same result. He finished his coffee, went across to Roomer’s house and let himself in with his pass-key. He went into the bedroom to find Roomer still asleep. He woke him up. Roomer regarded him with disfavour.

‘What do you mean by waking up a man in the middle of the night?’

‘It’s not the middle of the night.’ He pulled open the drapes and the bright summer sunlight flooded the room. ‘It’s broad daylight, as you will be able to see when you open your eyes.’

‘Is your house on fire or something, then?’

‘I wish it were something as trivial as that. I’m worried, John. I woke up feeling bugged by something, and the feeling got worse and worse. Five minutes ago I called up Lord Worth’s house. I tried twice. There was no reply. Must have been at least eight or ten people in that house, but there was no reply.’

‘What on earth do you suppose–’

‘You’re supposed to be the man with the intuition. Get yourself ready. I’ll go make some coffee.’

Long before the coffee was ready, in fact less than ninety seconds later, Roomer was in the kitchen. He had neither showered nor shaved but had had the time and the grace to run a comb through his hair. He was looking the same way as the expressionless Mitchell was feeling.

‘Never mind the coffee.’ Roomer was looking at him with an almost savage expression on his face, but Mitchell knew that it wasn’t directed at him. ‘Let’s get up to the house.’

Roomer drove his own car, which was the nearer.

Mitchell said: ‘God, we’re a bright lot. Hit us over the head often enough and then maybe–I only say maybe–we’ll begin to see the obvious. But we’re far too smart to see the obvious, aren’t we?’ He held on to his seat as Roomer, tyres screeching, rounded a blind corner. ‘Easy, boy, easy. Too late to bolt the stable door now.’

With what was clearly a conscious effort of will Roomer slowed down. He said: ‘Yes, we’re the clever ones, Lord Worth offered as an excuse for his actions a threat of the girls’ abduction. You told him to offer the threat of the girls’ abduction as an excuse for our presence there last night. And it never occurred to either of our staggering intellects that their abduction was both logical and inevitable. Lord Worth was not exaggerating–he has enemies, and vicious enemies, who are out to get him, come what may. Two trump cards–and what trumps. All the aces in the pack. He’s powerless now. He pretends to be loftily indulgent towards the two girls. He’ll give away half his money to get them back. Just half. He’ll use the other half to hunt them down. Money can buy any co-operation in the world, and the old boy has all the money in the world.’

Mitchell now seemed relaxed, comfortable, even calm. He said: ‘But we’ll get to them first, won’t we, John?’

Roomer stirred uncomfortably in his seat as they swung into the mansion’s driveway. He said: ‘I’m just as sick and mad as you are. But I don’t like it when you start to talk that way. You know that.’

‘I should say I’m expressing an intention or at least a hope.’ He smiled. ‘Let’s see.’

Roomer stopped his car in a fashion that did little good to Lord Worth’s immaculately raked gravel. The first thing that caught Mitchell’s eye as he left the car was an odd movement by the side of the driveway in a clump of bushes. He took out his gun and went to investigate, then put his gun away, opened his clasp-knife and sliced through MacPherson’s bonds. The head gardener, after forty years in Florida, had never lost a trace of a very pronounced Scottish accent, an accent that tended to thicken according to the degree of mental stress he was undergoing. On this occasion, with the adhesive removed, his language was wholly indecipherable–which, in view of what he was almost certainly trying to say, was probably just as well in the circumstances.

They went through the front doorway. Jenkins, apparently taking his ease in a comfortable armchair, greeted them with a baleful glare, a glare that was in no way directed at them. He was just in a baleful mood, a mood that was scarcely bettered when Mitchell swiftly, painfully, and with scant regard for Jenkins’s physical and mental feelings, yanked away the adhesive from his lips. Jenkins took a deep breath, doubtless preparatory to lodging some form of protest, but Mitchell cut in before he could speak.

‘Where does Jim sleep?’ Jim was the radio operator.

Jenkins stared at him in astonishment. Was this the way to greet a man who had been through a living hell, snatched, one might almost say, from the jaws of death? Where was the sympathy, the condolences, the anxious questioning? Mitchell put his hands on his shoulders and shook him violently.

‘Are you deaf? Jim’s room?’

Jenkins looked at the bleak face less than a foot from his own and decided against remonstrating. ‘In back, first floor, first right.’

Mitchell left. So, after a second or two, did Roomer. Jenkins called after him in a plaintive voice: ‘You aren’t leaving me too, Mr Roomer?’

Roomer turned and said patiently: ‘I’m going to the kitchen to get a nice sharp carver. Mr Mitchell has taken the only knife we have between us.’

Jim Robertson was young, fresh-faced and just out of college, a graduate in electrical engineering in no hurry to proceed with his profession. He sat on the bed massaging his now unbound wrists, wincing slightly as the circulation began to return. As tiers of knots, Durand’s henchmen had been nothing if not enthusiastic.

Mitchell said: ‘How do you feel?’

‘Mad.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder. Fit to operate your set?’

‘I’m fit for anything if it means getting hold of those bastards.’

‘That’s the general idea. Did you get a good look at the kidnappers?’

‘I can give you a general description–’ He broke off and stared at Mitchell. ‘Kidnappers?’

‘It appears that Lord Worth’s daughters have been abducted.’

‘Holy Christ!’ The assimilation of this news took some little time. ‘There’ll be all hell to pay for this.’

‘It should cause a considerable furore. Do you know where Marina’s room is?’

‘I’ll show you.’

Her room showed all the signs of a hasty and unpremeditated departure. Cupboard doors were open, drawers the same and some spilled clothing lay on the floor. Mitchell was interested in none of this. He quickly rifled through the drawers in her bedside table and within seconds found what he had hoped to find–a United States passport. He opened it and it was valid. He made a mental note that she had lied about her age–she was two years older than she claimed to be–returned the passport and hurried down to the radio room with Robertson, who unlocked the door to let them in. Robertson looked questioningly at Mitchell.

‘The County Police Chief. His name is McGarrity. I don’t want anyone else. Say you’re speaking on behalf of Lord Worth. That should work wonders. Then let me take over.’

Roomer entered while Robertson was trying to make contact. ‘Seven more of the staff, all suitably immobilized. Makes ten in all. I’ve left Jenkins to free them. His hands are shaking so badly that he’s bound to slice an artery or two, but for me the freeing of elderly cooks and young housemaids lies above and beyond the call of duty.’

‘They must have been carrying a mile of rope,’ Mitchell said absently. He was figuring out how much not to tell the chief of police.

Roomer nodded to the operator. ‘Who’s he trying to contact?’

‘McGarrity.’

‘That hypocritical old time-server.’

‘Most people would regard that as a charitable description. But he has his uses.’

Robertson looked up. ‘On the line, Mr Mitchell. That phone.’ He made discreetly to replace his own but Roomer took it from him and listened in.

‘Chief of Police McGarrity?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Please listen very carefully. This is extremely important and urgent, and the biggest thing that’s ever come your way. Are you alone?’

‘Yes. I’m quite alone.’ McGarrity’s tone held an odd mixture of suspicion and aroused interest.

‘Nobody listening in, no recorder?’

‘Goddam it, no. Get to the point.’

‘We’re speaking from Lord Worth’s house. You know of him?’

‘Don’t be a damned fool. Who’s “we”?’

‘My name is Michael Mitchell. My partner is John Roomer. We’re licensed private investigators.’

‘I’ve heard of you. You’re the pair who give the local law so much trouble.’

‘I’d put it the other way round, but that’s hardly relevant. What is relevant is that Lord Worth’s two daughters have been kidnapped.’

‘Merciful God in heaven!’ There ensued what could fairly have been described as a stunned silence at the other end of the line.

Roomer smiled sardonically and covered his mouthpiece. ‘Can’t you see the old twister grabbing his seat, eyes popping, big signs saying “Promotion” flashing in front of him?’

‘Kidnapped, you said?’ McGarrity’s voice had suddenly developed a certain hoarseness.

‘Kidnapped. Abducted. Snatched.’

‘Sure of this?’

‘Sure as can be. The girls’ rooms have every sign of a hurried unpremeditated departure. Ten of the staff bound and gagged. What would you conclude from that?’

‘Kidnap.’ McGarrity made it sound as if he’d made the discovery all by himself.

‘Can you put a block on all escape routes? They haven’t taken their passports, so that rules out international flights. I hardly think the kidnappers would have taken any commercial internal flight. Can you see Lord Worth’s daughters passing through the crowded concourse of any terminal without being recognized? I suggest a stop order and permanent guard on every private airfield and heliport in the southern part of the state. And that goes for every port, big and small, in the same area.’

McGarrity sounded bemused, befuddled. ‘That would call for hundreds of policemen.’

The tone of anguished protest was unmistakable. Mitchell sighed, cupped the mouthpiece, looked at Roomer and said: ‘Man’s out of his depth. Can I call him lunk-head?’ He removed his hand. ‘Look, Chief McGarrity, I don’t think you quite realize what you’re sitting on. It’s the daughters of Lord Worth that we’re talking about. You could lift your phone and have a thousand cops for the asking. You could call out the National Guard if you wanted–I’m sure Lord Worth would recoup every cent of expenses. Good God, man, there’s been nothing like this since the Lindbergh kidnapping.’

‘That’s so, that’s so.’ It wasn’t difficult to visualize McGarrity licking his lips. ‘Descriptions?’

‘Not much help there, I’m afraid. They all wore stocking masks. The leader wore gloves, which may or may not indicate a criminal record. All were big, well-built men and all wore dark business suits. I don’t require to give you a description of the girls, I suppose?’

‘Lady Marina? Lady Melinda?’ McGarrity was a classic snob of awesome proportions, who followed with avid interest the comings and goings of alleged society, of the internationally famous and infamous. ‘Good heavens, no. Of course not. They must be the most photographed couple in the State.’

‘You’ll keep this under wraps, tight as possible, for the moment?’

‘I will, I will.’ McGarrity had his baby clutched close to his heart, and nobody, but nobody, was going to take it away from him.

‘Lord Worth will have to be informed first of all. I’ll refer him to you.’

‘You mean you haven’t told him yet?’ McGarrity could hardly believe his good fortune.

‘No.’

‘Tell him to rest easy, well, as easy as he can, that is. Tell him I’m taking complete and personal charge of the investigation.’

‘I’ll do that, Chief.’

Roomer winced and screwed his eyes shut.

McGarrity sounded positively brisk. ‘Now, about the local law.’

‘I suppose I’ve got to call them in. I’m not too happy about it. They’re biased against us. Suppose they refuse to keep the wraps on this–’

‘In which case,’ McGarrity said ominously, ‘just put the person concerned directly on the line to me. Anyone else know about this yet?’

‘Of course not. You’re the only man with the power to authorize the closing of the escape routes. Naturally we contacted you first.’

‘And you were perfectly right, Mr Mitchell.’ McGarrity was warm and appreciative, as well he might have been, for he had a very shaky reelection coining up and the massive publicity the kidnapping was bound to generate would guarantee him a virtual shoe-in. ‘I’ll get the wheels turning this end. Keep me posted.’

‘Of course, Chief.’ Mitchell hung up.

Roomer looked at him admiringly. ‘You are an even bigger and smarmier hypocrite than McGarrity.’

‘Practice. Anyway, we got what we wanted.’ Mitchell’s face was sombre. ‘Has it occurred to you that the birds may have flown?’

Roomer looked equally unhappy. ‘It has. But first things first. Lord Worth next?’ Mitchell nodded. ‘I’ll pass this one up. They say that, under provocation, he has a rich command of the English language, not at all aristocratic. I’d be better employed interviewing the staff. I’ll ply them with strong drink to help them overcome the rigours of their ordeal and to loosen their tongues–Lord Worth’s reserve Dom Perignon for choice–and see what I can extract from them. I have little hope. All I can ask them is about descriptions and voices and Whether or not they touched anything that might yield up fingerprints. Not that that will help if their prints aren’t on file.’

‘The brandy sounds the best part of your programme. Would you ask Jenkins to bring a large one–’ he looked at Robertson–‘two large ones?’

Roomer was at the door when he turned. ‘Do you know what happened in ancient times to the bearers of bad news?’

‘I know. They got their heads cut off.’

‘He’ll probably blame us for carelessness and lack of foresight–and he’ll be right, too, even although he’s just as guilty as we are.’ Roomer left.

‘Get me Lord Worth, Jim.’

‘I would if I knew where he was. He was here last night when I left.’

‘He’s on the Seawitch.’

Robertson raised an eyebrow, lowered it, said nothing and turned his attention to the switchboard. He raised the Seawitch in fifteen seconds. Mitchell took the phone.

‘Lord Worth, please.’

‘Hold on.’

Another voice came on, a rasping gravelly voice, not as friendly.

‘What is it that you want?’

‘Lord Worth, please.’

‘How do you know he’s here?’

‘How do I–what does that matter? May I speak to him?’

‘Look, mister, I’m here to protect Lord Worth’s privacy. We get far too many oddball calls from oddball characters. How did you know he was here?’

‘Because he told me.’

‘When?’

‘Last night. About midnight.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Mitchell. Michael Mitchell.’

‘Mitchell.’ Larsen’s tone had quite changed. ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’

‘Because I didn’t expect a Gestapo investigation, that’s why. You must be Commander Larsen?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Not very bloody civil, are you?’

‘I’ve a job to do.’

‘Lord Worth.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘He wouldn’t lie to me.’ Mitchell thought it impolitic to add that he’d actually seen Lord Worth take off.

‘He didn’t lie to you. He was here. He left hours ago to go to Washington.’

Mitchell was silent for a few moments while he re-adjusted himself. ‘Has he got a number where he can be reached?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I didn’t ask you why he’d gone to Washington. It’s an urgent, private and personal matter. From what I’ve heard of you from Lord Worth, and that’s quite a bit, you’d react in exactly the same way. Give me the number and I’ll call you just as soon as Lord Worth gives me clearance.’

‘Your promise?’

So Mitchell gave him his promise and Larsen gave him the number.

Mitchell replaced the receiver. He said to Robertson: ‘Lord Worth has left the Seawitch and gone to Washington.’

‘He does get around. In his Boeing, I presume?’

‘I didn’t ask. I took that for granted. Do you think you can reach him?’

Robertson didn’t look encouraging. ‘When did he leave the Seawitch?’

‘I don’t know. Should have asked, I suppose. Hours ago, Larsen said.’

Robertson looked even more discouraged. ‘I wouldn’t hold out any hope, Mr Mitchell. With this set I can reach out a couple of thousand miles. Lord Worth’s Boeing can reach any airport not quite as far away, just as the airport can reach him. But the receiving equipment aboard the Boeing hasn’t been modified to receive long-range transmissions from this set, which is a very specialized set indeed. Short-range only. Five hundred miles, if that. The Boeing is bound to be well out of range by now.’

‘Freak weather conditions?’

‘Mighty rare, Mr Mitchell.’

‘Try anyway, Jim.’

He tried and kept on trying for five minutes, during which it became steadily more apparent that Lord Worth was going to have another brief spell of peace before being set up for his coronary. At the end of five minutes Robertson shrugged his shoulders and looked up at Mitchell.

‘Thanks for the try, Jim.’ He gave Robertson a piece of paper with a number on it. ‘Washington. Think you can reach that?’

‘That I can guarantee.’

‘Try for it in half an hour. Ask for Lord Worth. Emphasize the urgency. If you don’t contact him try again every twenty minutes. You have a direct line to the study?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be there. I have to welcome the law.’

Lord Worth, still happily unaware of his disintegrating world, slept soundly. The Boeing, at 33,000 feet, was just beginning its descent to Dulles airport.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lord Worth, a glass of scotch in one hand and an illegal Cuban cigar in the other, was comfortably ensconced in a deep armchair in the Assistant Secretary of State’s very plush office. He should have been contented and relaxed: he was, in fact, highly discontented and completely unrelaxed. He was becoming mad, steadily and far from slowly, at the world in general and the four other people in that room in particular.

The four consisted of Howell, the Assistant, a tall, thin, keen-faced man with steel-rimmed glasses who looked like, and in fact was, a Yale professor. The second was his personal assistant, whose name, fittingly enough, Lord Worth had failed to catch, for he had about him the grey anonymity of a top-flight civil servant. The third was Lieutenant-General Zweicker, and all that could be said about him was that he looked every inch a general. The fourth was a middle-aged stenographer who appeared to take notes of the discussion whenever the mood struck her, Which didn’t appear to be very often: most likely, long experience had taught her that most of what was said at any conference wasn’t worth noting anyway.

Lord Worth said: ‘I’m a very tired man who has just flown up from the Gulf of Mexico. I have spent twenty-five minutes here and appear to have wasted my time. Well, gentlemen, I have no intention of wasting my time. My time is as important as yours. Correction. It’s a damn sight more important. “The big brush-off”, I believe it’s called.’

‘How can you call it a brush-off? You’re sitting in my office and General Zweicker is here. How many other citizens rate that kind of treatment?’

‘The bigger the façade, the bigger the brush-off. I am not accustomed to dealing with underlings. I am accustomed to dealing with the very top, which I haven’t quite reached yet, but will. The cool, diplomatic, deep-freeze treatment will not work. I am no trouble-maker, but I’ll go to any lengths to secure justice. You can’t sweep me under your diplomatic carpet, Mr Howell. I told you recently that there were international threats to the Seawitch, and you chose either to disbelieve me or ignore me. I come to you now with additional proof that I am under threat–three naval vessels heading for the Seawitch—and still you propose to take no action. And I would point out, incidentally, if you still don’t know independently of the movements of those vessels, then it’s time you got yourselves a new intelligence service.’

General Zweicker said. ‘We are aware of those movements. But as yet we see no justification for taking any kind of action. You have no proof that what you claim is true. Suspicions, no more. Do you seriously expect us to alert naval units and a squadron of fighter-bombers on the unproven and what may well be the unfounded suspicions of a private citizen?’

‘That’s it in a nutshell,’ Howell said. ‘And I would remind you, Lord Worth, that you’re not even an American citizen.’

Lord Worth, his voice gone very soft, pounced. ‘“Not even an American citizen.”’ He turned to the stenographer. ‘I trust you made a note of that.’ He lifted his hand as Howell made to speak. ‘Too late, Howell. Too late to retrieve your blunder, a blunder, I may say, of classical proportions. Not an American citizen? I would point out that I paid more taxes last year than all your precious oil companies in the States combined–this apart from supplying the cheapest oil to the United States. If the level of competence of the State Department is typical of the way this country is run, then I can only rejoice in the fact that I still retain a British passport. One law for Americans, another for the heathen beyond the pale. Even-handed justice. “Not an American citizen.” This should make a particularly juicy titbit for the news conference I intend to hold immediately after I leave.’

‘A news conference?’ Howell betrayed unmistakable signs of agitation.

‘Certainly.’ Lord Worth’s tone was as grim as his face. ‘If you people won’t protect me then, by God, I’ll protect myself.’

Howell looked at the General then back at Lord Worth. He strove to inject an official and intimidating note into his voice. ‘I would remind you that any discussions that take place here are strictly confidential.’

Lord Worth eyed him coldly. ‘It’s always sad to see a man who has missed his true vocation. You should have been a comedian, Howell, not a senior member of government. Confidential. That’s good. How can you remind me of something that you never even mentioned before? Confidential. If there wasn’t a lady present I’d tell you what I really think of your asinine remark. God, it’s rich, a statement like that coming from the number two in a Government department with so splendid a record of leaking State secrets to muckraking journalists, doubtless in return for a suitable quid pro quo. I cannot abide hypocrisy. And this makes another juicy titbit for the press conference–the State Department tried to gag me. Classical blunder number two, Howell.’

Howell said nothing. He looked as if he were considering the advisability of wringing his hands.

‘I shall inform the press conference of the indecision, reluctance, inaction, incompetence and plain running-scared vacillation of a State Department which will be responsible for the loss of a hundred million dollar oil rig, the stopping of cheap supplies of fuel to the American people, the biggest oil slick in history and the possible–no, I would say probable–beginnings of a third major war. In addition to holding this news conference, I shall buy TV and radio time, explain the whole situation and further explain that I am forced to go to those extraordinary lengths because of the refusal and inability of the State Department to protect me.’ He paused. ‘That was rather silly of me. I have my own TV and radio stations. It’s going to be such a burning hot topic that the big three companies will jump at it and it won’t cost me a cent. By tonight I’ll have the name of the State Department, particularly the names of you and your boss, if not exactly blackened at least tarnished across the country. I’m a desperate man, gentlemen, and I’m prepared to adopt desperate methods.’

He paused for their reactions. Facially they were all he could have wished. Howell, his assistant and the General all too clearly realized that Lord Worth meant every word he said. The implications were too horrendous to contemplate. But no one said anything, so Lord Worth took up the conversational burden again.

‘Finally, gentlemen, you base your pusillanimous refusal to act on the fact that I have no proof of evil intent. I do, in fact, possess such proof, and it’s cast-iron. I will not lay this proof before you because it is apparent that I will achieve nothing here. I require a decision-maker and the Secretary has the reputation for being just that. I suggest you get him here.’

‘Get the Secretary?’ Howell was clearly appalled by this suggested lese-majesty. ‘One doesn’t “get” the Secretary. People make appointments days, even weeks in advance. Besides, he is in a very important conference.’

Lord Worth remained unmoved. ‘Get him. This conference he’d better have with me will be the most important of his life. If he elects not to come then he’s probably holding the last conference of his political career. I know he’s not twenty yards from here. Get him.’

‘I–I don’t really think–’

Lord Worth rose. ‘I hope your immediate successors–and the operative word is “immediate”–will, for the country’s sake, display more common sense and intestinal fortitude than you have. Tell the man who, through your gross negligence and cowardly refusal to face facts, will be held primarily responsible for the outbreak of the next war, to watch TV tonight. You have had your chance–as your stenographer’s notebook will show–and you’ve thrown it away.’ Lord Worth shook his head, almost in sadness. ‘There are none so blind as those who will not see–especially a spluttering fuse leading to a keg of dynamite. I bid you good day, gentlemen.’

‘No! No!’ Howell was in a state of very considerable agitation. ‘Sit down! Sit down! I’ll see what I can do.’

He practically ran from the room.

During his rather protracted absence–he was gone for exactly thirteen minutes–conversation in the room was minimal.

Zweicker said: ‘You really mean what you say, don’t you?’

‘Do you doubt me, General?’

‘Not any more. You really intend to carry out those threats?’

‘I think the word you’re searching for is “promises”.’

After this effective conversation-stopper an uncomfortable silence fell on the room. Only Lord Worth appeared in no way discomforted. He was, or appeared to be, calm and relaxed, which was quite a feat, because he knew that the appearance or non-appearance of the Secretary meant whether he had won or lost.

He’d won, The Secretary, John Belton, when Howell nervously ushered him in, didn’t look at all like his reputation–which was that of a tough, shrewd-minded, hard-nosed negotiator, ruthless when the situation demanded and not much given to consulting his cabinet colleagues when it came to decision-making. He looked like a prosperous farmer, and exuded warmth and geniality–which deceived Lord Worth, a man who specialized in warmth and geniality, not a whit. Here, indeed, was a very different kettle of fish from Howell, a man worthy of Lord Worth’s mettle. Lord Worth rose.

Belton shook his hand warmly. ‘Lord Worth! This is a rare privilege–to have, if I may be forgiven the unoriginal turn of speech, to have America’s top oil tycoon calling on us.’

Lord Worth was courteous but not deferential. ‘I wish it were under happier circumstances. My pleasure, Mr Secretary. It’s most kind of you to spare a few moments. Well, five minutes, no more. My promise.’

‘Take as long as you like.’ Belton smiled. ‘You have the reputation for not bandying words. I happen to share that sentiment.’

‘Thank you.’ He looked at Howell. ‘Thirteen minutes to cover forty yards.’ He looked back at the Secretary. ‘Mr Howell will have–ah–apprised you of the situation?’

‘I have been fairly well briefed. What do you require of us?’ Lord Worth refrained from beaming: here was a man after his own heart. John Belton continued. ’We can, of course, approach the Soviet and Venezuelan ambassadors, but that’s like approaching a pair of powder-puffs. All they can do is to report our suspicions and veiled threats to their respective governments. They’re powerless, really. Even ten years ago ambassadors carried weight. They could negotiate and make decisions. Not any more. They have become, through no fault of their own, faceless and empty people who are consistently bypassed in State-to-State negotiations. Even their second chauffeurs, who are customarily trained espionage agents, wield more power than the ambassadors themselves.

‘Alternatively, we can make a direct approach to the governments concerned. But for that we would have to have proof. Your word doesn’t come into question, but it’s not enough. We must be able to adduce positive proof of, shall we say, nefarious intent.’

Lord Worth replied immediately. ‘Such proof I can adduce and can give you the outline now. I am extremely reluctant to name names because it will mean the end of the professional career of a friend of mine. But if I have to, that I will do. Whether I release those names to you or to the public will depend entirely upon the Department’s reaction. If I can’t receive a promise of action after I have given you this outline, then I have no recourse other than to approach the public. This is not blackmail. I’m in a corner and the only solution is to fight my way out of it. If you will, as I hope you will, give me a favourable reaction, I shall, of course, give you a list of names, which, I would hope, will not be published by your department. Secrecy, in other words. Not, of course, that this will prevent you from letting loose the FBI the moment I board my helicopter out there.’

‘The great warm heart of the American public versus the incompetent bumbling of the State Department.’ Belton smiled. ‘One begins to understand why you are a millionaire–I do apologize, billionaire.’

‘Earlier this week a highly secret meeting was held in a lakeside resort out west. Ten people, all of them very senior oilmen, attended this meeting. Four were Americans, representing many of the major oil companies in the States. A fifth was from Honduras. A sixth was from Venezuela, a seventh from Nigeria. Numbers eight and nine were oil sheikhs from the Gulf. The last was from the Soviet Union. As he was the only one there who had no interest whatsoever in the flow of oil into the United States, one can only presume that he was there to stir up as much trouble as possible.’

Lord Worth looked around the five people in the room. That he had their collective ear was beyond dispute. Satisfied, he continued.

’The meeting had one purpose and one only in mind. To stop me and to stop me at all costs. More precisely, they wanted to stop the flow of oil from the Seawitch– that is the name of my oil rig–because I was considerably undercutting them in price and thereby raising all sorts of fiscal problems. If there are any rules or ethics in the oil business I have as yet to detect any. I believe your congressional investigative committees would agree one hundred per cent with me on that. Incidentally, Worth Hudson–that’s the official name of my company–has never been investigated.

’The only permanent way to stop the flow of oil is to destroy the Seawitch. Halfway through the meeting they called in a professional trouble-shooter, a man whom I know well, and a highly dangerous man at that. For reasons I won’t explain until I get some sort of guarantee of help, he has a deep and bitter grudge against me. He also happens–just coincidentally, of course–to be one of the world’s top experts–if not the very top–on the use of high explosives.

‘After the meeting this trouble-shooter called aside the Venezuelan and Soviet delegates and asked for naval cooperation. This he was guaranteed.’ Lord Worth looked at the company with a singular lack of enthusiasm. ’Now perhaps you people will believe me.

‘I would add that this man so hates me that he would probably do the job for nothing. However, he has asked for–and got–a fee of a million dollars. He also asked for–and got–ten million dollars “operating expenses”. What does ten million dollars mean to you–except the unlimited use of violence?’

‘Preposterous. Incredible.’ The Secretary shook his head. ‘It has, of course, to be true. You are singularly well-informed, Lord Worth. You would appear to have an intelligence service to rival our own.’

‘Better. I pay them more. This oil business is a jungle and it’s a case of the survival of the most devious.’

‘Industrial espionage?’

‘Most certainly not.’ It was just possible that Lord Worth actually believed this.

‘This friend who may be coming to the end of his–’

‘Yes.’

‘Give me all the details, including a list of the names. Put a cross against the name of your friend. I shall see to it that he is not implicated and that only I will see that list.’

‘You are very considerate, Mr Secretary.’

‘In return I shall consult with Defence and the Pentagon.’ He paused. ‘Even that will not be necessary. In return I can personally guarantee you a sufficiency of air and sea cover against any normal or even considerable hazard.’

Lord Worth didn’t doubt him. Belton had the reputation of being a man of unshakeable integrity. More important, he had the justly-deserved reputation of being the President’s indispensable right-hand man. Belton delivered. Lord Worth decided against showing too much relief.

‘I cannot tell you how deeply grateful I am.’ He looked at the stenographer, and then at Howell. ‘If I could borrow this lady’s services–’

‘Of course.’ The stenographer turned to a fresh page in her notebook and waited expectantly.

Lord Worth said: ‘The place–Lake Tahoe, California, The address–’

The telephone jangled. The stenographer gave Lord Worth an ‘excuse-me’ smile and picked up the receiver. Howell said to the Secretary: ‘Dammit, I gave the strictest instructions–’

‘It’s for Lord Worth.’ She was looking at Belton. ‘A Mr Mitchell from Florida. Extremely urgent.’ The Secretary nodded and the stenographer rose and handed rest and receiver to Lord Worth.

‘Michael? How did you know I was here? … Yes, I’m listening.’

He listened without interruption. As he did so, to the considerable consternation of those watching him, the colour drained from his tanned cheeks and left them an unhealthy sallow colour. It was Belton himself who rose, poured out a brandy and brought it across to Lord Worth, who took it blindly and drained the not inconsiderable contents at a gulp. Belton took the glass from him and went for a refill. When he came back Lord Worth took the drink but left it untouched. Instead he handed the receiver to Belton and held his left hand over his now screwed-shut eyes.

Belton spoke into the phone. ‘State Department. Who’s speaking?’

Mitchell’s voice was faint but clear. ‘Michael Mitchell, from Lord Worth’s home. Is that–is that Dr Belton?’

‘Yes. Lord Worth seems to have received a severe snock.’

‘Yes, sir. His two daughters have been kidnapped.’

‘Good God above.’ Belton’s habitual imperturbability had received a severe dent. No one had ever seen him register shock before. Perhaps it was the bluntness of the announcement. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I wish to hell I wasn’t, sir.’

‘What are you?’

‘We–my partner John Roomer and I–are private investigators. We are not here in an investigative capacity. We are here because we are neighbours and friends of Lord Worth and his daughters.’

‘Called the police?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s been done?’

‘We have arranged for the blocking of all air and sea escape routes.’

‘You have descriptions?’

‘Poor. Five men, heavily armed, wearing stocking masks.’

‘What’s your opinion of the local law?’

‘Low.’

‘I’ll call in the FBI.’

‘Yes, sir. But as the criminals haven’t been traced there’s no evidence that they’ve crossed the state line.’

‘Hell with state lines and regulations. If I say they’re called in, that’s it. Hold on. I think Lord Worth would like another word.’ Lord Worth took the receiver. Some colour had returned to his cheeks.

‘I’m leaving now. Less than four hours, I should say. I’ll radio from the Boeing half an hour out. Meet me at the airport.’

‘Yes, sir. Commander Larsen would like to know–’

‘Tell him.’ Lord Worth replaced the receiver, took another sip of his brandy. ‘There’s no fool like an old fool and only a blind fool would have overlooked so obvious a move. This is war, even if undeclared war, and in war no holds are barred. To think that it should come to this before you had incontrovertible proof that I am indeed under siege. Unforgivable. To have left my daughters unguarded was wholly unforgivable. Why didn’t I have the sense to leave Mitchell and Roomer on guard?’ He looked at his now-empty glass and the stenographer took it away.

Belton was faintly sceptical. ‘Five armed men?’

Lord Worth looked at him morosely. ‘I had forgotten that you don’t know these men. Mitchell, for example, could have taken care of them all by himself. He’s lethal.’

‘So they’re your friends, and you respect them. Don’t take offence, Lord Worth, but is there any way that they could be implicated in this?’

‘You must be out of your mind.’ Lord Worth, still morose, sipped his third brandy. ‘Sorry. I’m not myself. Sure they’d like to kidnap my daughters, almost as much as my daughters would like to be kidnapped by them.’

‘That the way?’ Belton seemed mildly astonished. In his experience, billionaires’ daughters did not normally associate with the lower orders.

‘That’s the way. And in answer to your next two questions: yes, I approve and no, they don’t give a damn about my money.’ He shook his head wonderingly. ‘It is extremely odd. And I shall forecast this, Mr Secretary. When Marina and Melinda are brought back to me it won’t be through the good offices of either the local police or your precious FBI. Mitchell and Roomer will bring them back. One does not wish to sound overly dramatic, but they would, quite literally, give their lives for my daughters.’

‘And, as a corollary, they would cut down anyone who got in their way?’

For the first time since the phone call Lord Worth smiled, albeit faintly. ‘I’ll take the fifth amendment on that one.’

‘I must meet these paragons some time.’

‘Just as long as it’s not over the wrong end of Mitchell’s gun.’ He rose, leaving his drink unfinished, looked round the room. ‘I must go. Thank you all for your kindness and consideration, not to say forbearance.’ He left, with the Secretary by his side.

When the door closed behind them General Zweicker rose and poured himself a brandy. ‘Well. What may be the kidnapping of the century pales into insignificance compared to the likelihood of the Russkies starting to throw things at us.’ He took some brandy. ‘Don’t tell me I’m the only person who can see the hellish witches’ brew Lord Worth is stirring up for us.’

It was clear that all three listening to him had a very clear view of the cauldron. Howell said: ‘Let’s give Lord Worth his due. He could even be right when he says he’s glad he’s got a British passport. The stirrers-up are our own compatriots; the holier-than-thou major American oil companies, who are willing to crucify Lord Worth and put their country at jeopardy because of their blind stupidity.’

‘I don’t care who’s responsible.’ The stenographer’s voice was plaintive. ‘Does anyone know where I can get a nuclear shelter, cheap?’

Belton led Worth down one flight of stairs and out on to the sunlit lawn, where the helicopter was waiting.

Belton said: ‘Ever tried to find words to tell someone how damnably sorry one feels?’

‘I know from experience. Don’t try. But thanks.’

‘I could have our personal physician accompany you down to Florida.’

‘Thanks again. But I’m fine now.’

‘And you haven’t had lunch?’ Belton, clearly, was finding conversational gambits heavy going.

‘As I don’t much care for plastic lunches from plastic trays, I have an excellent French chef aboard my plane.’ Again a faint smile. ‘And two stewardesses, chosen solely for their good looks. I shall not want.’

They reached the steps of the helicopter. Belton said: ‘You’ve had neither the time, inclination nor opportunity to give me that list of names. For the moment that is of no consequence. I just want you to know that my guarantee of protection remains in force.’

Lord Worth shook his hand silently and climbed the steps.

By this time Conde, aboard the Roamer, had arrived at the Seawitch, and the big derrick crane aboard the platform was unloading the heavy weaponry and mines from the Louisiana armoury. It was a slow and difficult task, for the tip of the derrick boom was 200 feet above sea level and in all the transfer was to take about three hours. As each dual-purpose anti-aircraft gun came aboard Larsen selected its site and supervised Palermo and some of his men in securing it in position: this was done by drilling holes in the concrete platform, then anchoring the gun-carriage base with sledgehammer-driven steel spikes. The guns were supposed to be recoil-less, but then neither Larsen nor Palermo were much given to taking chances.

The depth-charges, when they came, were stacked together in three groups, each half-way between the three apexes of the triangle. That there was an inherent risk in this Larsen was well aware: a stray bullet or shell–or perhaps not so stray–could well trigger off the detonating mechanism of one of the depth-charges, which would inevitably send up the other charges in sympathetic detonation. But it was a risk that had to be taken if for no other reason than the fact that there was no other place where they could be stored ready for immediate use. And when and if the time came for their use the need would be immediate.

The drilling crew watched Palermo and his crew at work, their expressions ranging from dispassion to approval. Neither group of men spoke to the other. Larsen was no great believer in fraternization.

Things were going well. The defensive system was being steadily installed. The Christmas Tree, the peculiar name given to the valve which controlled the flow of oil from the already tapped reservoir, was wide open and oil was being steadily pumped to the huge storage tank while the derrick drill, set at its widest angle, was driving ever deeper into the sub-stratum of the ocean floor, seeking to discover as yet untapped new oil deposits. All was going well, there were no overt signs of attack or preparation for attack from air or sea, but Larsen was not as happy as he might have been, even despite the fact that they were still receiving the half-hour regular ‘on course, on time’ reports from the Torbello.

He was unhappy partly because of the nonexistence of the Questar. He had recently learned from Galveston that there was no vessel listed in naval or coastguard registries under the name of Questar. He had then asked that they check civilian registrations and had been told that this was a forlorn hope. It would take many hours, perhaps days, to carry out this type of investigation and private vessels, unless fully insured, would show up neither in official registries nor in those of the major marine insurance companies. There was no law which said they had to be insured, and the owners of the older and more decrepit craft didn’t even bother to insure: there are such things as tax write-offs.

Larsen was not to know that his quest was a hopeless one. When Mulhooney had first taken over the Questar it had been called the Hammond, which he had thoughtfully had painted out and replaced by the name of Questar on the way to Galveston. Since Cronkite had since replaced that by the name Georgia, both the Hammond and the Questar had ceased to exist.

But what concerned Larsen even more was his conviction that something was far wrong. He was quite unable to put a finger on what this might be. He was essentially a pragmatist of the first order, but he was also a man who relied heavily on instinct and intuition. He was a man occasionally given to powerful premonitions, and more often than not those premonitions had turned into reality. And so when the loudspeaker boomed ‘Commander Larsen to the radio cabin. Commander Larsen to the radio cabin,’ he was possessed of an immediate certainty that the hour of his premonition had come.

He walked leisurely enough towards the radio cabin, partly because it would never do for Commander Larsen to be seen hurrying anxiously anywhere, partly because he was in no great hurry to hear the bad news he was convinced he was about to hear. He told the radio operator that he would like to take this call privately, waited until the man had left and closed the door behind him, then picked up the telephone.

‘Commander Larsen.’

‘Mitchell. I promised I’d call.’

‘Thanks. Heard from Lord Worth? He promised to keep in touch, but no word.’

‘And no wonder. His daughters have been kidnapped.’

Larsen said nothing immediately. Judging from the ivoried knuckles, the telephone handpiece seemed in danger of being crushed. Although caring basically only for himself, he had formed an avuncular attachment towards Lord Worth’s daughters, but even that was unimportant compared to the implications the kidnapping held about the welfare of the Seawitch. When he did speak it was in a steady, controlled voice.

‘When did this happen?’

‘This morning. And no trace of them. We’ve blocked every escape route in the southern part of the State. And there is no report from any port, airport, or heliport of any unusual departure from any of those since the time of the kidnapping.’

‘Vanished into thin air?’

‘Vanished, anyway. But not into thin air, we think. Terra firma, more likely. We think they’ve gone to earth, and are holed up not all that far away. But it’s only a guess.’

‘No communication, no demands, from the kidnappers?’

‘None. That’s what makes it all so odd.’

‘You think this is a ransom kidnap?’

‘No.’

‘The Seawitch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know why Lord Worth went to Washington?’

‘No. I’d like to.’

‘To demand naval protection. Early this morning a Russian destroyer and a Cuban submarine left Havana, while another destroyer left Venezuela. They are on converging courses. The point of convergence would appear to be the Seawitch.’

There was a silence, then Mitchell said: ‘This is for sure?’

‘Yes. Well, Lord Worth’s cup of woes would seem to be fairly full. The only consolation is that nothing much else can happen to him after this. Please keep me informed.’

In Lord Worth’s radio room both Mitchell and Roomer hung up their phones.

Mitchell briefly indulged in some improper language. ‘God, I never thought his enemies would go to this length.’

Roomer said: ‘Neither did I. I’m not sure that I even think so now.’

‘Uncle Sam’s not going to let any foreign naval powers play ducks and drakes in his own backyard?’

‘Something like that. I don’t think the Soviets would go so far as to risk a confrontation. Could be a bluff, a diversionary move. Maybe the real attack is coming from elsewhere.’

‘Maybe anything. Could be a double bluff. One thing’s sure: Larsen’s right in saying that Lord Worth’s cup of woes is fairly full. In fact I’d say it was over-spilling.’

‘Looks that way,’ Roomer said absently. His thoughts were clearly elsewhere.

Mitchell said: ‘Don’t tell me you’re in the throes of intuition again?’

‘I’m not sure. When you were talking to Larsen just now you mentioned “terra firma”. Firm land, dry land. What if it weren’t dry land? What if it were unfirm land?’

Mitchell waited politely.

Roomer said: ‘If you wanted to hole up, really get lost in Florida, where would you go?’

Mitchell hardly had to think. ‘We are bright. Unfirm land, infirm land, whatever you want to call it. The swamps, of course. Where else?’

‘Man could hide out for a month there, and a battalion of troops couldn’t find him. Which explains why the cops have been unable to find the station wagon.’ Between them MacPherson and Jenkins had been able to give a fairly accurate description of the kidnappers’ estate wagon. ‘They’ve been checking the highways and byways. I’ll bet they never thought of checking the roads into the swamps.’

‘Did we?’

‘As you said, we’re bright. There are dozens of those roads into the swamps, but most of them are very short and in no time you reach a point where no wheeled vehicle can go any further. A few dozen police cars could comb the nearest swamps in an hour.’

Mitchell said to Robertson: ‘Get Chief McGarrity.’

A knock came on the half-open door and Louise, one of the young housemaids, entered. She held a card in her hand. She said: ‘I was just making up Miss Marina’s bed when I found this between the sheets.’

Mitchell took the card. It was a plain calling card giving Marina’s name and address.

Louise said: ‘Other side.’

Mitchell reversed the card, holding it so that Roomer could see. Handwritten with a ball-point were the words: ‘Vacation. Little island in the sun. No swim-suit.’

‘You know Miss Marina’s handwriting, Louise?’ Mitchell had suddenly realized that he didn’t.

The girl looked at the card. ‘Yes, sir. I’m sure.’

‘Thank you, Louise. This could be very useful.’ Louise smiled and left. Mitchell said to Roomer: ‘What kind of lousy detective are you, then? Why didn’t you think of searching the bedrooms?’

‘Hmm. I can only guess that she asked them to leave while she dressed.’

‘You’d have thought she’d have been too scared to think of this.’

‘The handwriting’s steady enough. Besides, she doesn’t scare easily. Except, that is, when you point a pistol between her eyes.’

‘I wish, right here and now, that I was pointing a pistol between someone else’s eyes. Little island in the sun where you can’t go bathing. An overconfident kidnapper can talk too much. You thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘Roomer nodded. The Seawitch.’

At 33,000 feet Lord Worth had just completed a light but delicious lunch accompanied by a splendid Bordeaux wine, specially bottled for him in a Rothschild vinery. He had regained his habitual calm. He was almost philosophical. He had, he reckoned, touched his nadir. All that could happen had happened. In common with Larsen, Mitchell and Roomer he was convinced that the Fates could touch him no more. All four were completely and terribly wrong. The worst was yet to come. It was, in fact, happening right then.

Colonel Farquharson, Lieutenant-Colonel Dewings and Major Breckley were not in fact the people their ID cards claimed they were, for the sufficient reason that there were no officers of that rank with corresponding names in the US army. But then it was a very big army, and nobody, not even the officers, could possibly be expected to know the names of more than a tiny fraction of their fellow officers. Nor were their faces their normal faces, although they could hardly be described as being heavily disguised. The man responsible had been a Hollywood make-up artist who preferred subtlety to false beards. All three men were dressed in sober and well-cut business suits.

Farquharson presented his card to the corporal at the outer reception desk. ‘Colonel Farquharson to see Colonel Pryce.’

‘I’m afraid he’s not here.’

‘Then the officer in charge, man.’

‘Yes, sir.’

A minute later they were seated before a young and apprehensive Captain Martin, who had just finished a rather reluctant and very perfunctory scrutiny of their ID cards.

Farquharson said: ‘So Colonel Pryce has been called to Washington. I can guess why.’

He didn’t have to guess. He himself had put through the fake call that had led to Pryce’s abrupt departure. ‘And his second in command?’

‘Flu.’ Martin sounded apologetic.

‘At this time of year? How inconvenient. Especially today. You can guess why we’re here.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Martin looked slightly unhappy. ‘Security check. I had a phone call telling me of the break-ins into the Florida and Louisiana armouries.’ Dewings had put through that one. ‘I’m sure you’ll find everything in order.’

‘Doubtless. I have already discovered something that is not in order.’

‘Sir?’ There was a definite apprehension now in Martin’s voice and appearance.

‘Security-consciousness. Do you know that there are literally dozens of shops where I could buy, perfectly legally, a general’s uniform? Those are the speciality shops that cater primarily for the film and stage industries. If I walked in dressed in such a uniform, would you accept me for what my uniform proclaimed me to be?’

‘I suppose I would, sir.’

‘Well, don’t. Not ever again.’ He glanced at his identity card lying on the desk. ‘Forging one of those presents no problems. When a stranger makes an appearance in a top-security place like this, always, always, check his identity with Area Command. And always talk only to the commanding officer.’

‘Yes, sir. Do you happen to know his name? I’m new here.’

‘Major-General Harsworth.’

Martin had the corporal at the front desk put him through. On the first ring a voice answered. ‘Area Command.’

The voice did not in fact come from Area Command. It came from a man less than half a mile away, seated at the base of a telegraph pole. He had with him a battery-powered transceiver. A sheathed copper line from that led up to a crocodile clip attached to one of the telegraph lines.

Martin said: ‘Netley Rowan Armoury. Captain Martin. I’d like to speak to General Harsworth.’

‘Hold.’ There was a series of clicks, a pause of some seconds, then the same voice said: ‘On the line, Captain.’

Martin said: ‘General Harsworth?’

‘Speaking.’ The man by the telegraph pole had deepened his voice by an octave. ‘Problems, Captain Martin?’

‘I have Colonel Farquharson with me. He insists that I check out his identity with you.’

The voice at the other end was sympathetic. ‘Been at the receiving end of a security lecture?’

‘I’m afraid I have rather, sir.’

‘Very hot on security, the Colonel. He’ll be with Lieutenant-Colonel Dewings and Major Breckley?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, it’s hardly the end of your professional career. But he’s right, you know.’

Farquharson himself took the wheel of the car on the three-mile journey, a chastened, compliant Martin sitting up front beside him. A fifteen-foot-high electrical warning barbed-wire fence surrounded the armoury, a squat, grey, windowless building covering almost half an acre of land. A sentry with a machine-carbine barred the entrance to the compound. He recognized Captain Martin, stepped back and saluted. Farquharson drove up to the one and only door of the armoury and halted. The four men got out. Farquharson said to Martin: ‘Major Breckley has never been inside a TNW armoury before. A few illuminating comments, perhaps?’ It would be illuminating for Farquharson also. He had never been inside an armoury of any description in his life.

‘Yes, sir. TNW–Tactical Nuclear Warfare. Walls thirty-three inches thick, alternating steel and ferro-concrete. Door–ten inches tungsten steel. Both walls and door capable of resisting the equivalent of a fourteen-inch armour-piercing naval shell. This glass panel is recording us on TV videotape. This meshed grille is a two-way speaker which also records our voices.’ He pressed a button sunk in the concrete.

A voice came through the grille. ‘Identification, please?’

‘Captain Martin with Colonel Farquharson and security inspection.’

‘Code?’

‘Geronimo.’ The massive door began to slide open, and they could hear the hum of a powerful electrical motor. It took all of ten seconds for the door to open to its fullest extent. Martin led them inside.

A corporal saluted their entrance. Martin said: ‘Security inspection tour.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The corporal didn’t seem too happy.

Farquharson said: ‘You seem to have a troubled conscience, soldier?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then you should have.’

Martin said: ‘Something wrong, sir?’ He was patently nervous.

‘Four things.’ Martin dipped his head so that Farquharson couldn’t see that he had been swallowing. One thing would have been bad enough.

‘In the first place, that sentry gate should be kept permanently locked. It should only be opened after a phone call to your HQ and an electronic link for opening the gate installed in your office. What’s to prevent a person or persons with a silenced automatic disposing of your sentry and driving straight up here? Secondly, what would prevent such people walking through the open doorway and riddling us all with sub-machine-guns? That door should have been shut the moment we passed through.’ The corporal started to move but Farquharson stopped him with upraised hand.

‘Thirdly, all people who are not base personnel–such as us–should be finger-printed on arrival–I will arrange to have your guards trained in those techniques. Fourthly, and most importantly, show me the controls for those doors.’

‘This way, sir.’ The corporal led the way to a small console. ‘The red button opens, the green one closes.’

Farquharson pressed the green button. The massive door hissed slowly closed. ‘Unsatisfactory. Totally. Those are the only controls to operate the door?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Martin looked very unhappy indeed.

‘We shall have another electronic link established with your HQ, which will render those buttons inoperable until the correct signal is sent.’ Farquharson was showing signs of irritation. ‘I would have thought all those things were self-evident.’

Martin smiled weakly. ‘They are now, sir.’

‘What percentage of explosives, bombs and shells stored here are conventional?’

‘Close on ninety-five per cent, sir.’

‘I’d like to see the nuclear weapons first.’

‘Of course, sir.’ A now thoroughly demoralized Martin led the way.

The TNW section was compartmented off but not sealed. One side was lined with what appeared to be shells, stowed on racks, the other with pear-shaped metal canisters about thirty inches high, with buttons, a clock-face and a large knurled screw on top. Beyond them were stacked what looked like very odd-shaped fibre-glass suitcases, each with two leather handles.

Breckley indicated the pear-shaped canisters. ‘What are those? Bombs?’

‘Both bombs and landmines.’ Martin seemed glad to talk and take his mind off his troubles. ’Those controls on top are relatively simple. Before you get at those two red switches you have to unscrew those two transparent plastic covers. The switches have then to be turned ninety degrees to the right. They are then still in the safe position. They then have to be flipped ninety degrees to the left. This is the ready-to-activate position.

‘Before that is done, you have to put the time setting on the clock. That is done by means of this knurled knob here. One complete turn means a one-minute time delay which will show up on this clock face here. It registers in seconds, as you can see. Total time delay is thirty minutes–thirty turns.’

‘And this black button?’

‘The most important of them all. No cover and no turning. You might want to get at it in a hurry. Depressing that stops the clock and, in fact, deactivates the bomb.’

‘What’s the area of damage?’

‘Compared to the conventional atom bomb, tiny. The vaporization area would be a quarter-mile radius. Perhaps less. The blast, shock and radiation areas would, of course, be considerably greater.’

‘You said they could be used as both bombs and mines.’

’For mines I should perhaps have said an explosive device for use on land. As bombs the setting would probably be only six seconds–in tactical warfare they would be carried by low-flying supersonic planes. They’d be about two miles clear by the time the bomb went off and moving too fast for the shock waves to catch up with them. For land use–well, say you wanted to infiltrate an ammunition dump. You’d check how long it would take you to infiltrate there, calculate how long it would take you to get out and clear of the blast zone and set the timer accordingly.

‘The missiles here–’

‘We’ve seen and heard enough,’ Farquharson said. ‘Kindly put your hands up.’

Five minutes later, with furiously reluctant assistance from Martin, they had loaded two bombs, safely concealed in their carrying-cases, into the trunk of their car. In so doing the need of the two carrying handles became clear: each bomb must have weighed at least ninety pounds. Farquharson went back inside, looked indifferently at the two bound men, pressed the button and slipped through the doorway as the door began to close. He waited until the door was completely shut, then climbed into the front seat beside Martin, who was at the wheel this time.

Farquharson said: ‘Remember, one false move and you’re a dead man. We will, of course, have to kill the sentry too.’

There were no false moves. About a mile from the armoury the car stopped by a thicket of stunted trees. Martin was marched deep into the thicket, bound, gagged and attached to a tree just in case he might have any ideas about jack-knifing his way down to the roadside. Farquharson looked down at him.

‘Your security was lousy. We’ll phone your HQ in an hour or so, let them know where they can find you. I trust there are not too many rattlesnakes around.’

CHAPTER SIX

Robertson looked up from the radio console. ‘Chief McGarrity.’

Mitchell took the phone. ‘Mitchell? We’ve found the kidnappers’ estate wagon. Down by the Wyanee swamp.’ McGarrity sounded positively elated. ‘I’m going there personally. Tracker dogs. I’ll wait for you at the Walnut Tree crossing.’ Mitchell replaced the receiver and said to Roomer: ‘McGarrity’s got it all wrapped up. He’s found the estate wagon. Well, someone else did, but it will be made clear eventually that McGarrity did.’

‘Empty, of course. Doesn’t that old fool know that this makes it more difficult, not easier? At least we knew what transport they were using. Not any more. He didn’t mention anything about bringing along a newspaper photographer that he just sort of accidentally bumped into?’

‘Tracker dogs were all he mentioned.’

‘Did he suggest source material for the dogs to sniff at?’ Mitchell shook his head, Roomer shook his and after a few minutes Jenkins appeared. ‘Will you get Louise, please?’

Louise appeared very quickly. Roomer said: ‘We’d like an article, a piece of clothing, that the ladies used to wear a lot.’

She looked uncertain. ‘I don’t understand–’

‘Some things we can give bloodhounds to sniff so that they pick up scent.’

‘Oh.’ It required only a second’s thought. ‘Their dressing-gowns, of course.’ This with but the slightest hint of disapproval, as if the girls spent most of the day lounging about in those garments.

‘Handle as little as possible, please. Put each in a separate plastic bag.’

A police car and a small closed police van awaited them at the Walnut Tree crossing. McGarrity was standing by the police car. He was a small bouncy man who radiated bonhomie and who only stopped smiling when he vehemently denounced corruption in politics. He was a police chief of incomparable incompetence, but was a consummate and wholly corrupt politician, which was why he was police chief. He shook the hands of Mitchell and Roomer with all the warmth and sincerity of an incumbent coming up for re-election, which was precisely what he was.

‘Glad to meet you two gentlemen at last. Heard very good reports about you.’ He appeared to have conveniently forgotten his allegation that they gave a lot of trouble to the local law. ‘Appreciate all the co-operation you’ve given me–and for turning up here now. This is Ron Stewart of the Herald.’ He gestured through an open car window where a man, apparently festooned in cameras, sat in the back seat. ‘Kind of accidentally bumped into him.’

Mitchell choked, turning it into a cough. ‘Too many cigarettes.’

‘Same failing myself. Driver’s the dog-handler. Driver of the van is the other one. Just follow us, please.’

Five miles further on they reached the turn-off–one of many–into the Wyanee swamp. The foliage of the trees, almost touching overhead, quickly reduced the light to that of a late winter afternoon. The increase in the humidity was almost immediately noticeable, as was the sour nose-wrinkling miasma as they neared the swamps. A distinctly unhealthy atmosphere, or such was the first impression: but many people with a marked aversion to what passed for civilization lived there all their lives and seemed none the worse for it.

The increasingly rutted, bumpy road had become almost intolerable until they rounded a blind corner and came across the abandoned station wagon.

The first essential was, apparently, that pictures be taken, and the second that McGarrity be well-placed in each one, his hand, for preference, resting in a proprietorial fashion on the hood. That done, the cameraman fitted a flashlight and was reaching for the rear door when Roomer clamped his wrist not too gently. ‘Don’t do that!’

‘Why not?’

‘Never been on a criminal case before? Fingerprints is why not.’ He looked at McGarrity. ‘Expecting them soon?’

‘Shouldn’t be long. Out on a case. Check on them, Don.’ This to the driver who immediately got busy on his radio. It was clear that the idea of bringing fingerprint experts along had never occurred to McGarrity.

The dogs were released from the van. Roomer and Mitchell opened up their plastic bags and allowed the dogs to sniff the dressing-gowns. McGarrity said: ‘What you got there?’

‘The girls’ dressing-gowns. To give your hounds a trace. We knew you’d want something.’

‘Of course. But dressing-gowns!’ McGarrity was a past master in covering up. Something else, clearly, that had not occurred to him.

The dogs caught the scents at once and strained at their leashes as they nosed their way down a rutted path, for the road had come to an abrupt end. Inside a hundred yards, their path was blocked by water. It wasn’t a true part of the swamp but a slow, meandering, mud-brown creek, perhaps twenty feet across, if that. There was a hitching-post nearby, with a similar one at the far bank. Also by the far bank was a warped and aged craft which not even the charitable could have called a boat. It was built along the lines of an over-sized coffin, with a squared-off end where the bows should have been. The ferry–probably the most kindly name for it–was attached to the two hitching-posts by an endless pulley.

The two dog-handlers hauled the boat across, got into it with understandable caution, and were joined by their dogs, who kept on displaying considerable signs of animation, an animation which rapidly diminished then vanished shortly after they had landed on the far bank. After making a few fruitless circles, they lay down dejectedly on the ground.

‘Well, ain’t that a shame,’ a voice said. ‘Trail gone cold, I guess.’

The four men on the near bank turned to look at the source of the voice. He was a bizarre character, wearing a new panama hat with a tartan band, gleaming thigh-length leather boots (presumably as a protection against snakebites) and clothes discarded by a scarecrow. ‘You folks chasin’ someone?’

‘We’re looking for someone,’ McGarrity said cautiosly.

‘Lawmen, yes?’

‘Chief of Police McGarrity.’

‘Honoured, I’m sure. Well, Chief, you’re wasting your time. Hot trail here, cold on the other side. So, the party you’re looking for got off halfway across.’

‘You saw them?’ McGarrity asked suspiciously.

‘Hah! More than one, eh? No, sir. Just happened by right now. But if I was on the run from the law that’s what I’d do because it’s been done hundreds of times. You can get out midway, walk half a mile, even a mile, up-stream or downstream. Dozens of little rivulets come into this creek. You could turn up any of those, go a mile into the swamp without setting foot on dry land. Wouldn’t find them this side of Christmas, Chief.’

‘How deep is the creek?’

‘Fifteen inches. If that.’

‘Then why the boat? I mean, with those boots you could walk across without getting your feet wet?’

The stranger looked almost shocked. ‘No siree. Takes me an hour every morning to polish up them critters.’ It was assumed that he was referring to his boots. ‘Besides, there’re the water-moccasins.’ He seemed to have a rooted aversion to snakes. ‘The boat? Come the rains, the creek’s up to here.’ He touched his chest.

McGarrity called the dog-handlers to return. Mitchell said to the stranger: ‘Any place in the swamps where a helicopter could land?’

‘Sure. More firm land out there than there is swampland. Never seen any helicopters, though. Yes, lots of clearings.’

The dog-handlers and dogs disembarked. Leaving the stranger to flick some invisible dust off his boots, they made their way back to the estate wagon. Mitchell said: ‘A moment. I’ve just had a thought.’ He opened up the two plastic bags containing the dressing-gowns and presented them to the dogs again. He then walked back up the rutted lane, past the two cars and van, beckoning the dog-handlers to follow him, which they did, almost having to drag the reluctant dogs behind them.

After about twenty yards the reluctance vanished. The dogs yelped and strained at their leashes. For another twenty yards they towed their handlers along behind them, then abruptly stopped and circled a few times before sitting down dispiritedly. Mitchell crouched and examined the surface of the lane. The others caught up with him.

McGarrity said: ‘What gives, then?’

‘This.’ Mitchell pointed to the ground. ‘There was another vehicle here. You can see where its back wheels spun when it started to reverse. The kidnappers guessed we’d be using tracker dogs–it wasn’t all that hard a guess. So they carried the girls twenty yards or so, to break the scent, before setting them down again.’

‘Right smart of you, Mr Mitchell, right smart.’ McGarrity didn’t look as pleased as his words made out. ‘So the birds have flown, eh? And now we haven’t the faintest idea what the getaway vehicle looks like.’

Roomer said: ‘Somebody’s flown, that’s for sure. But maybe only one or two. Maybe they’ve gone to borrow a helicopter.’

‘A helicopter?’ The waters didn’t have to be very deep for Chief McGarrity to start floundering.

With a trace of weary impatience Mitchell said: ‘It could be a double bluff. Maybe they reversed the procedure and took the girls back to the station wagon again. Maybe they are still in the swamp, waiting for a helicopter to come and pick them up. You heard the old boy back there–he said there were plenty of places in the swamp where a helicopter could touch down.’

McGarrity nodded sagely and appeared to ponder the matter deeply. The time had come, he felt, for him to make a positive contribution. ‘The swamp’s out. Hopeless. So I’ll have to concentrate on the helicopter angle.’

Mitchell said: ‘How do you propose to do that?’

‘Just you leave that to me.’

Roomer said: ‘That’s hardly fair, Mr McGarrity. We’ve given you our complete confidence. Don’t you think we’re entitled to some in return?’

‘Well, now.’ McGarrity appeared to ruminate, although he was secretly pleased to be asked the question, as Roomer had known he would be. ‘If the chopper doesn’t get in there, it can’t very well lift them out, can it?’

‘That’s a fact,’ Roomer said solemnly.

‘So I station marksmen round this side of the swamp. It’s no great deal to bring down a low-flying chopper.’

Mitchell said: ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

‘No indeed.’ Roomer shook his head. ‘The law frowns on murder.’

‘Murder?’ McGarrity stared at them. ‘Who’s talking of murder?’

‘We are,’ Mitchell said. ‘Rifle or machine-gun fire might well kill someone inside the helicopter. If it brings down the helicopter they’d all probably die. Maybe there are criminals aboard, but they’re entitled to a fair trial before execution. And has it occurred to you that the pilot will almost certainly be an innocent party with a pistol pointed at his head?’ McGarrity, clearly, had not thought of that. ‘Not going to make us very popular, is it?’

McGarrity winced. Even the very thought of unpopularity and the forthcoming election made him feel pale inside.

‘So what the devil do we do?’

Roomer was frank. ‘I’ll be damned if I know. You can post observers. You can even have a grounded helicopter standing by to chase the other one when it takes off. If, that’s to say, it ever comes in the first place. We’re only guessing.’

‘No more we can do here,’ Mitchell said. ‘We’ve already missed too many appointments today. We’ll be in touch.’

Back on the highway Roomer said: ‘How do you think he’d do as a dog-catcher?’

‘Place would be overrun by stray dogs in a few months. How much faith do you have in this idea that they might use a helicopter?’

‘Quite a lot. If they just wanted to change cars they wouldn’t have gone through this elaborate rigmarole. They could have parked their station wagon out of sight almost any place. By apparently going into hiding in the swamp they hoped to give the impression that they were preparing to hole up in there for quite some time to come. They hadn’t figured on our backing–your backtracking–up the lane.’

‘We’re pretty sure that their destination is the Seawitch. We’re pretty sure they’ll use a helicopter. Which helicopter and pilot would you use?’

‘Lord Worth’s. Not only are his pilots almost certainly the only ones who know the exact coordinates of the Seawitch, but the very distinctly marked Worth Hudson helicopters are the only ones that could approach the Seawitch without raising suspicion.’ Roomer reached for the phone, fiddled with the waveband and raised Lord Worth’s house. ‘Jim?’

‘At my post, Mr Roomer.’

‘We’re coming back there. Look for Lord Worth’s address book. Probably right by you in your radio room. Make us a list of the names and addresses of his helicopter pilots. Is the gatekeeper at the heliport on the radiophone, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get that for us too, please.’

‘Will do.’

He said to Mitchell: ‘Still think we shouldn’t warn Larsen about our suspicions?’

‘That’s for sure.’ Mitchell was very definite. ‘The Seawitch is Larsen’s baby, and the kind of reception he’d prepare might all too easily be over-enthusiastic. Or would you care for the job of explaining to Lord Worth how come his daughters got caught in cross-fire?’

‘I would not.’ Roomer spoke with some feeling.

‘Or even explaining to yourself how Melinda got shot through the lung?’

Roomer ignored him. ‘What if we’re wrong in our guesses about his lordship’s pilots?’

‘Then turn the whole thing over to that ace detective, McGarrity.’

‘So we’d better be right.’

They were right. They were also too late.

John Campbell was both an avid fisherman and an avid reader. He had long since mastered the techniques of indulging his two pleasures simultaneously. A creek, fairly popular with fish, ran within twenty feet of his back porch. Campbell was sitting on a canvas chair, parasol over his head, alternating every page with a fresh cast of his line, when Durand and one of his men, stocking-masked and holding guns in their hands, came into his line of vision. Campbell rose to his feet, book still in hand.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’

‘You. You’re Campbell, aren’t you?’

‘What if I am?’

‘Like you to do a little job for us.’

‘What job?’

‘Fly a helicopter for us.’

‘I’ll be damned if I do.’

‘So you are Campbell. Come along.’

Following the gesturing of their guns Campbell moved between the two men. He was within one foot of Durand’s gun hand when he chopped the side of his hand on the wrist that held the gun. Durand grunted in pain, the gun fell to the ground and a second later the two men were locked together, wrestling, kicking and punching with a fine disregard for the rules of sport, altering position so frequently that Durand’s henchman, gun barrel now in his hand–the last thing he wanted to do was to shoot Campbell–at first found no opportunity to intervene. But the opportunity came very soon. The unsportsmanlike but effective use of Campbell’s right knee doubled Durand over in gasping agony, but enough instinct was left him to seize Campbell’s shirt as he fell over backwards. This was Campbell’s downfall in more ways than one, for the back of his head simply cried out for the attentions of a gun-butt.

The man who had felled Campbell pulled Campbell clear, allowing Durand to climb painfully to his feet, although still bent over at an angle of 45 degrees. He pulled off his stocking mask as if to try to gain access to more air. Durand, surprisingly, was Latin American. He had a pale, coffee-coloured face, thick black curling hair and a pencil-line moustache and might even have proved to be handsome when the twisted lines of agony ceased to contort his face. He straightened inch by inch and finally obtained a modicum of breath, enough, at least, to allow him to announce what he would like to do with Campbell.

‘Have to be some other time, Mr Durand. He can’t very well fly a chopper from a hospital bed.’

Durand painfully acknowledged the truth of this. ‘I hope you didn’t hit him too hard.’

‘Just a tap.’

‘Tie him, tape him and blindfold him.’ Durand was now about twenty degrees off the vertical. His helpmate left for the car and returned in moments with cord, tape and blindfold. Three minutes later they were on their way, with a rug-covered and still unconscious Campbell on the floor at the back. Resting comfortably on the rug were Durand’s feet–he still didn’t feel quite up to driving. Both men had their masks off now–even in the free-wheeling state of Florida men with stocking masks in cars were apt to draw just a little more than passing attention.

Mitchell glanced briefly at the list of names and addresses Robertson had given them. ‘Fine. But what are those ticks opposite five of the names?’

Robertson sounded apologetic. ‘I hope you don’t mind–I don’t want to seem interfering–but I took the liberty of phoning those gentlemen to see if they would be at home when you called. I assumed you’d be calling because you asked for the addresses.’

Mitchell looked at Roomer. ‘Why the hell didn’t you think of that?’

Roomer bestowed a cold glance on him and said to Robertson, ‘Maybe I should have you as a partner. What did you find out?’

‘One pilot is standing by at the airport. Four of the others are at home. The one whose name I haven’t ticked–Mr John Campbell–isn’t home. I asked one of the other pilots about this, and he seemed a bit surprised. Said that Mr Campbell usually spends his afternoons fishing outside the back of his house. He’s a bachelor and lives in a pretty isolated place.’

‘It figures,’ Roomer said. ‘A bachelor in isolation. The kidnappers seem to have an excellent intelligence system. The fact that he doesn’t answer the phone may mean nothing–he could have gone for a walk, shopping, visiting friends. On the other hand–’

‘Yes. Especially on the other hand.’ Mitchell turned to leave, then said to Robertson: ‘Does the gate-keeper have a listed phone number as well as the radio-phone?’

‘I’ve typed it on that list.’

‘Maybe we should both have you as a partner.’

Mitchell and Roomer stood on Campbell’s back lawn and surveyed the scene unemotionally. The canvas chair, on its side, had a broken leg. The parasol was at full length on the grass, straddling an upturned book. The fishing rod was in the water up to its handle, and would have floated away had not the reel snagged on a shrub root. Roomer retrieved the rod while Mitchell hurried through the back doorway–the back door was wide open, as was the front. He dialled a phone number, which answered on the first ring. ‘Lord Worth’s heliport. Gorrie here.’ ‘My name’s Mitchell. You have a police guard?’ ‘Mr Mitchell? You Lord Worth’s friend?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Sergeant Roper is here.’

‘That all? Let me speak to him.’ There was hardly a pause before Roper came on the phone. ‘Mike? Nice to hear from you again.’ ‘Listen, Sergeant, this is urgent. I’m speaking from the house of John Campbell, one of Lord Worth’s pilots. He has been forcibly abducted, almost certainly by some of the kidnappers of Lord Worth’s daughters. I have every reason to believe–no time for explanations now–that they are heading in your direction with the intention of hijacking one of Lord Worth’s helicopters and forcing Campbell to fly it. There’ll be two of them at least, maybe three, armed and dangerous. I suggest you call up reinforcements immediately. If we get them we’ll break them–at least Roomer and I will, you can’t, you’re a law officer and your hands are tied–and we’ll find out where the girls are and get them back.’

‘Reinforcements coming up. Then I’ll look the other way.’

Mitchell hung up. Roomer was by his side. Roomer said: ‘You prepared to resort to torture to get the information you want?’

Mitchell looked at him bleakly. ‘I look forward to it. Don’t you?’

‘No. But I’ll go along with you.’

Once again Mitchell and Roomer had guessed correctly. And once again they were too late.

Mitchell had driven to Lord Worth’s heliport with a minimum regard for traffic and speed regulations, and now, having arrived there, realized bitterly that his haste had been wholly unnecessary.

Five men greeted their arrival, although it was hardly a cheerful meeting: Gorrie, the gateman, and four policemen. Gorrie and Sergeant Roper were tenderly massaging their wrists. Mitchell looked at Roper.

‘Don’t tell me.’ Mitchell sounded weary. ‘They jumped you before the reinforcements were to hand.’

‘Yes.’ Roper’s face was dark with anger. ‘I know it sounds like the old lame excuse, but we never had a chance. This car comes along and stops outside the gate-house, just here. The driver–he was alone in the car–seemed to be having a fit of sneezes and was holding a big wad of Kleenex to his face.’

Roomer said: ‘So you wouldn’t recognize him again?’

‘Exactly. Well, we were watching this character when a voice behind us–the back window was open–told us to freeze. I didn’t even have my hand on my gun. We froze. Then he told me to drop my gun. Well, this guy was no more than five feet away and I had my back to him. I dropped my gun. Dead heroes are no good to anyone. Then he told us to turn round. He was wearing a stocking mask. Then the driver came in and tied our wrists behind our backs. When we turned round he was wearing a stocking mask too.’

‘Then they tied your feet and tied you together so that you wouldn’t have any funny ideas about using a telephone?’

‘That’s how it was. But they weren’t worried about the phones. They smashed them both before they took off.’

‘They took off immediately?’

Gorrie said: ‘No. Five minutes later. The pilots always radio-file a flight plan before take-off. I suppose the kidnappers forced Campbell to do the same. To make it look kosher.’

Mitchell shrugged his indifference. ‘Means nothing. You can file a flight plan to any place. Doesn’t mean you have to keep it. How about fuel–for the helicopters, I mean?’

‘Fuel’s always kept topped up. My job. Lord Worth’s orders.’

‘What direction did the kidnappers go?’

‘That-away.’ Gorrie indicated with an outstretched arm.

‘Well, the birds have flown. Might as well be on our way.’

‘Just like that?’ Roper registered surprise.

‘What do you expect me to do that the police can’t?’

‘Well, for starters, we could call in the air force.’

‘Why?’

‘They could force it down.’

Mitchell sighed. ‘There’s a great deal of rubbish talked about forcing planes down. What if they refuse to be forced down?’

‘Then shoot it down.’

‘With Lord Worth’s daughters aboard? Lord Worth wouldn’t be very pleased. Neither would you. Think of all the cops that would be out of a job.’

‘Lord Worth’s daughters!’

‘It’s all this routine police work,’ Roomer said. ‘Atrophies the brain. Who the hell do you think that helicopter has gone to pick up?’

Once clear of the heliport Roomer extended an arm. ‘“That-away” the man said. “That-away” is north-west. The Wyanee swamp.’

‘Even if they’d taken off to the southeast they’d still have finished up in Wyanee.’ Mitchell pulled up by a public booth. ‘How are you with McGarrity’s voice?’ Roomer was an accomplished mimic.

‘It’s not the voice that worries me. It’s the thought processes. I’ll give it a try.’ He didn’t say what he was going to try because he didn’t have to. He left for the booth and was back inside two minutes.

‘Campbell filed a flight plan for the Seawitch.’

‘Any questions asked?’

‘Not really. Told them that some fool had made a mistake. Anyone who knows McGarrity would know the identity of the fool that made the mistake.’

Mitchell switched on the engine then switched off as the phone rang. Mitchell lifted the receiver.

‘Jim here. Tried to ring you a couple of times, fifteen minutes ago, five minutes ago.’

‘Figures. Out of the car both times. More bad news?’

‘Not unless you consider Lord Worth bad news. Touch-down in fifteen minutes.’

‘We’ve time.’

‘Says he’s coming up to the house.’

‘Sent for the Rolls?’

‘No. Probably wants to talk private. And it looks as if he’s planning to stay away some time. Ordered a bag packed for a week.’

‘Seven white suits.’ Mitchell hung up.

Roomer said: ‘Looks as if we’re going to have to do some bag-packing ourselves.’ Mitchell nodded and switched on again.

Lord Worth was looking his old self when he settled in the back seat of their car. Not quite radiating his old bonhomie, to be sure, but calm and lucid and, to all appearances, relaxed. He told of his success in Washington, for which he was duly and politely congratulated. Roomer then told him in detail what had happened in his absence: this time the absence of congratulations was marked.

‘You’ve notified Commander Larsen of your suspicions, of course?’

‘Not suspicions,’ Mitchell said. ‘Certainties. And there’s no “of course” and no, we didn’t notify him. I’m primarily responsible for that.’

‘Taking the law into your own hands, eh? Mind telling me why?’

‘You’re the person who knows Larsen best. You know how possessive he is about the Seawitch. You yourself have told us about his anger and violence. Do you think a man like that, duly forewarned, wouldn’t have a very warm reception waiting for the kidnappers? Stray bullets, ricocheting bullets, are no respecters of persons, Lord Worth. You want a daughter crippled for life? We prefer that the kidnappers establish a bloodless beach-head.’

‘Well, all right.’ The words came grudgingly. ‘But from now on keep me fully informed of your intentions and decisions.’ Lord Worth, Roomer noted with sardonic amusement, had no intention of dispensing with their unpaid services. ‘But no more taking the law into your own hands, do you hear?’

Mitchell stopped car and engine. Roomer’s amusement changed to apprehension. Mitchell twisted in his seat and looked at Lord Worth in cool speculation.

‘You’re a fine one to talk.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’ There were fifteen generations of Highland aristocracy in the glacial voice.

Mitchell remained unmoved. ‘For taking the law into your own hands by breaking into and robbing that armoury last night. If Roomer and I were decent citizens and law-abiding detectives, we’d have had you behind bars last night. Not even a billionaire can get off with that sort of thing, especially when it involves the assault and locking up of the armoury guards. John and I were there.’ Mitchell was not above a little prevarication when the need arose.

‘You were there?’ Most rarely for him, Lord Worth was at a loss for words. He recovered quickly. ‘But I wasn’t there.’

‘We know that. We also know you sanctioned the break-in. Ordered it, rather.’

‘Balderdash. And if you actually witnessed this, why did you not stop it?’

‘John and I take our chances. But not against nine men armed with nine machine-guns.’

This gave Lord Worth to pause. They had their figures and facts right. Clearly they had been there. He said: ‘Supposing any of this rigmarole were true, how in God’s name do you tie me up with this?’

‘Now you’re being a fool. We were also at your heliport. We saw the truck arrive. We saw nine men unload a fairly massive quantity of more than fairly lethal weaponry into one helicopter. Then a man drove the truck away–an army truck, of course–back to the armoury from where it had been stolen. The other eight men boarded another helicopter. Then a mini-bus arrived, carrying twelve heavily-armed thugs, who joined the other eight. John and I recognized no fewer than five of them–two of them we’ve personally put behind bars.’ Roomer looked at him admiringly, but Mitchell wasn’t looking at him, he was looking at Lord Worth, and both voice and tone were bereft of any form of encouragement. ‘It came as a shock to both of us to find that Lord Worth was consorting with common criminals. Your brow is very damp, Lord Worth. Why is it very damp?’

Lord Worth didn’t enlighten them as to the reason why his brow was damp.

‘And then, of course, you came along in the Rolls. One of the very best sequences we got on our infra-red ciné camera last night.’ Roomer choked, but the peculiar coughing sound had no effect on Lord Worth, who was now perspiring freely. That Lord Worth believed Mitchell, Roomer did not for a moment doubt: everything that Mitchell had said, even the slight embellishments, Lord Worth knew or believed to be true, so he had no reason to doubt the truth of the ciné camera fiction.

‘We actually debated phoning the nearest army HQ and have them send along some armoured cars and a trailered tank. Even your murderous thugs would have stood no chance. We thought of going down the road, blocking the Rolls and holding you until the army arrived–it was perfectly obvious that the helicopters had no intention of leaving until you turned up. Once captured, God knows how many of them–especially those who had already served prison terms–would have jumped at the chance of turning State’s evidence and incriminating you. It’s quite true, you know–there is no honour among thieves.’ If Lord Worth had any objection to being categorized as a thief it didn’t register in his face. ‘But after the standard bit of soul-searching we decided against it.’

‘Why, in God’s name?’

‘So you admit it.’ Mitchell sighed. ‘Why couldn’t you do that at the beginning and save me all this trouble?’

‘Why?’ Lord Worth repeated his question.

It was Roomer who answered. ‘Partly because even though you’re a confessed law-breaker, we still have a regard for you. But it’s chiefly because we didn’t want to see your daughters confronted with the unedifying spectacle of seeing their father behind bars. In hindsight, of course, we’re extremely glad we didn’t. In comparison with the kidnapping of your daughters, your own ventures outside the law fade into something that is comparatively a peccadillo.’

Mitchell started the motor again and said: ‘It is understood that there will be no more such peccadilloes again. It is also understood that there will be no more silly talk as to whether we take the law into our own hands or not.’

Lord Worth lay back in his study armchair. His second brandy tasted just as good as his first–it seemed to be his day for brandies. He hadn’t spoken a word for the rest of the trip which, fortunately, had been mercifully short, for Lord Worth had felt urgently in need of restoratives. Not for the first time he found himself silently blessing his kidnapped daughters.

He cleared his throat and said: ‘I assume you are still willing to come out to the rig with me?’

Mitchell contemplated his glass. ‘We never expressed our intentions one way or another about that. But I suppose someone has to look after you and your daughters.’

Lord Worth frowned. There had, he felt, been more than a subtle change in their relationships. Perhaps the establishment of an employer-employee status would help redress the balance. He said: ‘I feel it’s time we put your co-operation on a business-like footing. I propose to retain you in your professional capacities as investigators, in other words to become your client. I shall not quibble at your demanded fees.’ He had no sooner finished than he realized that he had made a mistake.

Roomer’s voice was coldly unenthusiastic. ‘Money doesn’t buy everything, Lord Worth. Particularly, it doesn’t buy us. What you are proposing is that you establish a moral ascendancy on the basis of the man who pays the piper calls the tune. We have no intention of being shackled, of having our freedom of action curtailed. And as to the question of fees and your “sky’s-the-limit” inference, the hell with your fees. How often do you have to be told that we don’t barter money for your daughters’ lives?’

‘Hear, hear,’ Mitchell said. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

Lord Worth didn’t even bother frowning. The change in relationship, he reflected sadly, had been even greater than he had realized. ‘As you will. One assumes that you will be suitably disguised?’

Mitchell said: ‘Why?’

Lord Worth was impatient. ‘You said you saw some ex-convicts boarding the helicopter. People you recognized. They’ll surely recognize you?’

‘We never saw any of them before in our lives.’

Lord Worth was properly shocked. ‘But you told me–’

‘You told us big black lies. What’s a little white lie? Let’s go aboard as–say–your technological advisers. Geologists, seismologists–it’s all the same to us, we know nothing about geology or seismology. All we need are a couple of well-cut business suits, panamas, horn-rimmed glasses with plain lenses–for the studious look–and briefcases.’ He paused. ‘And we’ll also need a doctor, with full medical kit and a large supply of bandages.’

‘A doctor?’

‘For extracting bullets, sewing up gunshot wounds. Or are you so naïve as to believe that there will be no shot fired in anger aboard the Seawitch?’

‘I abhor violence.’

‘Sure. That’s why you sent twenty heavily-armed thugs out to the Seawitch during the night? Fine, so you abhor violence. Others welcome it. Can you lay hands on such a doctor?’

‘Dozens of them. The average doctor hereabouts rates his scanning of X-rays a very poor second to the scanning of his bank balances. I know the man. Greenshaw. After seven years in Vietnam, he should fit your bill.’

Roomer said: ‘And ask him to bring along two spare white lab-coats.’

‘Why?’ Mitchell said.

‘Want to look scientific, don’t you?’

Lord Worth picked up the phone, made the arrangements, replaced the receiver and said: ‘You must excuse me. I have some private calls to make from the radio room.’ Lord Worth’s sole reason for returning to his house was to contact his inside man, Corral, and have him, without incriminating himself, inform Benson, who had hosted the Lake Tahoe meeting, that the Government intended to blast out of the water any foreign naval ships that approached the Seawitch. An exaggeration but, Lord Worth thought, a pardonable one. Despite the Secretary’s promise, Lord Worth placed more faith in his direct approach.

Mitchell said: ‘Which one of us do you want to go with you?’

‘What do you mean? “Private”, I said.’ His face darkened in anger. ‘Am I to be ordered around in my own house, supervised as if I’m an irresponsible child?’

‘You behaved responsibly last night? Look, Lord Worth, if you don’t want either of us around, then it’s obvious you want to say something that you don’t want us to hear.’ Mitchell gave him a speculative look. ‘I don’t like that. You’re either up to something shady if you like, or it’s a vote of no confidence in us.’

‘It’s a personal and highly important business call. I don’t see why you should be privy to my business affairs.’

Roomer said: ‘I agree. But it so happens that we don’t think that it is a business call, that business would be the last thing in your mind at such a time.’ Both Mitchell and Roomer stood up. ‘Give our regards to the girls–if you ever find them.’

‘Blackmail! Damned blackmail!’ Lord Worth rapidly weighed the importance of his call to Corral compared to the importance of having Mitchell and Roomer around. It took all of two seconds to make up his mind, and Corral was clear out of sight at the winning post. He was sure that the two men were bluffing, but there was no way he could call their bluff, for that was the one sure way of provoking a genuine walk-out.

Lord Worth put on his stony face. ‘I suppose I have no option other than to accede to your threats. I suggest you go and pack your bags and I’ll pick you up in the Rolls.’

Mitchell said: ‘Packing will take minutes. I feel it would be much more polite if we were to wait here until you’re ready.’

Lord Worth glared at him. ‘You think I’d head for a telephone the moment your backs are turned?’

Mitchell smiled. ‘Isn’t it odd that the same thought should occur to the three of us at the same instant?’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Commander Larsen and Scoffield observed the approach of the Worth Hudson helicopter with surprise but without undue concern. Lord Worth customarily gave advance warning of his arrival but could occasionally be forgetful on his point. In any event it was his helicopter, and this should be about his expected time of arrival. They sauntered across the platform and arrived at the north-east helipad just as the helicopter touched down.

Surprisingly, no one emerged immediately from the machine. Larsen and Scoffield looked at each other in some perplexity, a perplexity that was considerably deepened when the disembarkation door slid back and Durand appeared in the doorway with a machine-pistol cradled in his hands. Just behind him stood a similarly equipped henchman. From their shadowed position it was impossible for them to be observed by any of the rig duty crew.

Durand said: ‘Larsen and Scoffield? If you are carrying weapons please don’t be so foolish as to try to use them.’ The boarding steps swung down. ‘Come and join us.’

The two men had no option. Once aboard, without taking his eyes off them, Durand said: ‘Kowenski, Rindler–see if they are armed.’

Both Larsen and Scoffield carried automatics but seemed quite indifferent to being deprived of them: their attention was directed exclusively to the presence of Lord Worth’s daughters.

Marina smiled, albeit a trifle wanly. ‘We could have met under happier circumstances, Commander.’

Larsen nodded. ‘Your kidnappers. This can carry a death sentence.’ He looked at Campbell. ‘Why did you fly those criminals out here?’

‘Because I come over all cowardly when I have a pistol barrel screwed into the back of my neck all the way from take-off to touchdown.’ Campbell spoke with a certain justifiable bitterness.

Larsen looked at Melinda. ‘Have you been maltreated in any fashion?’

‘No.’

‘And they won’t be,’ Durand said. ‘Unless, of course, you refuse to do as we tell you.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You close down the Christmas tree.’ This meant closing off all the oil supplies from the ocean floor.

‘I’ll be damned if I do.’ Larsen’s dark piratical face was suffused with fury. Here, Durand realized, was a man who, even without arms, could be highly dangerous. He glanced briefly at Rindler, who struck Larsen on the back of the neck with the butt of his machine-pistol, a shrewdly calculated blow designed to daze but not knock out. When Larsen’s head had cleared he found that he had bracelets around both wrists and ankles. His attention then focused on a pair of gleaming stainless steel medical cutters of the type much favoured by the surgical fraternity for snipping through ribs. The handles were in Durand’s firm grip: the unpleasant operating end was closed lightly round the little finger of Melinda’s right hand.

Durand said: ‘Lord Worth isn’t going to like you too much for this, Larsen.’

Larsen, apparently, was of the same opinion. ‘Take those damned pliers away and my bracelets off. I’ll close down your damned Christmas tree.’

‘And I’ll come with you just to see that you really do turn off this Christmas tree. Not that I would recognize one of those things if I saw it, but I do know that there are such things as flow gauges. I shall carry a walkie-talkie with me. Aaron here has another. I shall keep in constant contact with him. If anything should happen to me–’ Durand looked consideringly at the medical cutters, then handed them to Heffer, the fifth man in his team. He told Campbell to put his arms behind his seat-back and handcuffed his wrists.

‘Don’t miss much, do you?’ Larsen’s voice was sour.

‘You know how it is. So many villains around these days. Come on.’

The two men walked across the platform in the direction of the drilling rig. After only a few paces Durand stopped and looked around him admiringly.

‘Well, well, now. Dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns. Piles of depth-charges. One would almost think that you were prepared to withstand a siege. Dear me, dear me. Federal offence, you know. Lord Worth, even with the millions he can pay for lawyers, can’t fail to spend at least ten years in penitentiary for this.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Hardly standard equipment aboard an oil rig. I’ll wager it wasn’t here twenty-four hours ago. I’ll wager it was inside the Mississippi naval armoury that was broken into last night. The Government takes a very dim view of people who steal its military equipment. And, of course, you must have specialists aboard who are skilled in handling such equipment, and that’s hardly part of the basic training of oil rig crews. I wonder if those crews are also carrying special equipment–such, for instance, as was stolen from a Florida armoury last night. I mean, two unrelated armoury break-ins in the same night is just too much of a coincidence. Twenty years in prison with no possibility of remission for you too, as the person chiefly responsible for aiding and abetting. And people call us criminals!’

Larsen had a few choice observations to make in return, none of which would have received the approval of even the most tolerant board of censors.

The Christmas tree was duly neutralized. The pressure gauges registered zero. Durand turned his attention to the Roamer, carrying out its short and wearisome patrol between the rig and the huge floating oil tank. ‘What’s our friend up to?’

‘Even a land-lubber like you should be able to guess. He’s patrolling the pipe-line.’

‘What on earth for? You could replace a cut line in a day. What would that achieve? It’s crazy.’

‘You have to use crazy methods to deal with crazy people. From all accounts Lord Worth’s enemies should be locked up for their own good. For everybody’s good.’

‘Worth’s band of cut-throats aboard this rig? Who’s their leader?’

‘Giuseppe Palermo.’

‘That mobster! So the noble lord, apart from indulging in grand larceny, is a known associate of criminals and convicted felons.’

‘You know him, then?’

‘Yes.’ Durand saw no point in elaborating upon the fact that he and Palermo had spent two prison terms together. ‘I want to talk to him.’

The talk was brief and one-sided. Durand said: ‘We’ve got Lord Worth’s daughters prisoner. You’re Lord Worth’s men, so we know that no harm will come to them from you. We’re bringing them towards the living quarters here but they will not mingle with you–we don’t want you to take our aces away from us. You will remain inside your quarters. If you don’t you’re likely to hear quite a lot of screaming and see bits and pieces of fingers or ears being dropped through your windows. I hope you believe me.’

Palermo believed him. Palermo had a reputation for ruthlessness that matched Durand’s, but it couldn’t begin to match Durand’s unholy joy in sadism. Durand was perfectly capable of not only doing what he threatened but of deriving immense satisfaction in so doing.

Palermo returned to his Oriental quarters. Durand called up Rindler on the walkie-talkie and told them a to come across, including Campbell, the pilot: Campbell was tough and resourceful and it was just possible that, by standing up, he could slip his manacled arms over the back of his seat, step through them and take them off. Whether he would have enough fuel for the return fight would be a problem for him, even though he would almost certainly head, not for Florida, but for the nearest spot on the mainland, which would be due south of New Orleans.

As the prisoners and guards disembarked from the helicopter Durand said: ‘Accommodation?’

‘Plenty. There are spare rooms in the Oriental quarters. There’s Lord Worth’s private suite.’ ‘Lock-ups?’

‘What do you mean? This isn’t a prison.’

‘Store-rooms? Ones that can be locked from the outside.’

‘Yes.’

Durand looked at Larsen consideringly. ‘You’re being extremely co-operative, Larsen. Your reputation says otherwise.’

‘Two minutes’ walk around and you could confirm all I’m saying for yourself.’

‘You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you, Larsen?’

‘When the time is ripe, yes. But it’s not yet.’

‘Even so.’ Durand produced a pistol. ‘Stay about ten feet away. You might be tempted to attack me and tell our men that you’ll tear me limb from limb unless they release the girls. A tempting thought, no?’

Larsen looked at him yearningly and said nothing.

The girls, the pilot and their four escorts arrived. Durand said: ‘Well, now, we must find some suitable overnight accommodation for you.’ He led the way to the first of several store-houses and opened the door to reveal a room packed roof-high with tinned foods. He bundled Campbell inside, locked the door and pocketed the key. The next store-house contained coils of rope, a powerful smell of crude oil and an active, scuttling population of those indestructible creatures, cockroaches. Durand said to the two girls: ‘Inside.’

The girls took one shuddering look then turned away. Marina said: ‘We will not go inside that disgusting place.’

Kowenski said in a gently-chiding voice which accorded ill with the Colt he held in his hand: ‘Don’t you know what this is?’ Rindler had a similar weapon trained on Melinda.

Both girls glanced briefly at each other and then, in what was obviously a prepared and rehearsed movement, walked towards the men with the guns, seized the barrels with their right hands and hooked their right thumbs behind the trigger forefingers, pulling the guns hard against themselves.

Marina said: ‘I can squeeze my thumb far faster than you can jerk that gun away. Want to try?’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Durand was badly shaken. He had run up against most situations in his life, but this one lay far beyond his most remote conception. ‘You trying to commit suicide?’

Melinda said: ‘Precisely.’ Her eyes never left Rindler’s. ‘You’re lower than those horrible cockroaches in there. You are vermin who are trying to destroy our father. With us dead you won’t have a singe card left to pay.’

‘You’re crazy! Simple pain crazy!’

‘That’s as may be,’ Marina said. ‘But for crazy people our logic is pretty good. With nothing to shackle his hands you can imagine how our father will react–especially as he will believe, as everybody will believe, that you murdered us. He won’t have recourse to the law, of course–you simply have no idea what power a few billion dollars can bring to bear. He’ll destroy you and a your criminal associates to the last man.’ She looked at Kowenski with contempt. ‘Why don’t you press the trigger? No? Then drop your gun.’ Kowenski dropped his gun and Rindler did the same.

Melinda said: ‘My sister and I are taking a walk. We will return when you have quarters prepared fitting for Lord Worth’s daughters.’

Durand’s face had definitely lost colour and his voice was hoarse and not quite steady as he tried to regain a measure of authority. ‘Have your walk if you must. Heffer, go with them. Any trouble, shoot them in the legs.’

Marina stooped, picked up Kowenski’s Colt, walked up to Heffer and rammed the muzzle into his left eye. Heffer howled in agony. Marina said: ‘Fair deals. You shoot me through the leg–now, I mean–and I’ll blow your brains out.’

‘God’s sake!’ Durand’s voice was almost imploring. He was just one step removed from wringing his hands. ‘Somebody’s got to go with you. If you’re out there on your own and in no danger, Palermo’s men will cut us to pieces.’

‘What a perfectly splendid idea.’ Marina withdrew the pistol from an already bruising eye, and looked in distaste at Heffer, a rodent-faced creature of indeterminate age and nationality. ‘We see your point. But this–this animal is not to approach within ten yards of us at any time. That is understood?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ If they asked him for the moon Durand would have levitated himself and got it for them. Having overwhelmingly displayed what it was to have sixteen generations of Highland aristocratic ancestry, the two girls walked away towards one of the triangular perimeters. It was fully twenty yards before they both began, at the same instant, to tremble violently. Once started, they could not control the trembling and they prayed that the following Heffer could not notice it.

Marina whispered shakily: ‘Would you do that again?’

‘Never, never, never. I’d rather die.’

‘I think we came pretty close to it. Do you think that Michael and John would be shaking like us after an experience like that?’

‘No. If there’s any truth in half the hints Daddy lets drop, they’d already be planning what to do next. And Durand and his obnoxious friends wouldn’t be shaking either. Dead men don’t shake very much.’

Marina’s trembling turned into a genuine shiver. ‘I only wish to God they were here right now.’

They stopped ten feet short of the platform perimeter. Neither girl had a head for heights. They turned and looked north-eastwards as the distant and muted roar of an aero-engine came to their ears.

Durand and Larsen heard it at the same time. They could see nothing because dusk had already fallen, but neither man had any doubts as to the identity of the approaching helicopter and its occupants. With some satisfaction Durand said: ‘Company. This has to be Lord Worth. Where will they land?’

‘The south-east helipad.’

Durand glanced across the platform to where the two girls were standing with Heffer, gun carried loosely in his right hand, less than the regulation ten yards away. Satisfied, Durand picked up his machine-pistol and said: ‘Let’s go and welcome his lordship aboard. Aaron, come with us.’

Larsen said: ‘You’d better hope that Lord Worth proves a bit more tractable than his daughters.’

‘What do you mean?’

Larsen smiled in sardonic satisfaction. ‘You really did catch a couple of tigresses by their tails, didn’t you?’

Durand scowled and walked away, followed by Larsen and Aaron, the latter armed similarly to Durand. They reached the south-east helipad just as the Worth Hudson helicopter touched down. Lord Worth himself was the first out. He stood at the foot of the steps and stared in disbelief at the armed men. He said to Larsen: ‘What in God’s name goes on here?’

Durand said: ‘Welcome aboard the Seawitch, Lord Worth. You may regard me as your host and yourself as a guest–an honoured guest, of course. There has been a slight change of ownership.’

‘I’m afraid that this man here–his name is Durand and one must assume that he is one of Cronkite’s lieutenants–’

‘Cronkite!’ Durand was jarred. ‘What do you know about Cronkite?’

‘I can hardly congratulate him on his choice of lieutenants.’ When Lord Worth poured on his icy contempt he used a king-sized can. ‘Do you think we are such fools as not to know who your paymaster is? Not that Mr Cronkite has long to live. Nor you, either, for that matter.’ Durand stirred uneasily; Lord Worth sounded far too much like his daughters for his peace of mind. Lord Worth directed his attention to Larsen. ‘One assumes that this ruffian arrived with accomplices. How many?’

‘Four.’

‘Four! But with Palermo and his men you have over twenty! How is it possible–’

Durand was back on balance. When he spoke it was with a slight if pardonable smugness. ‘We have something that Larsen hasn’t. We have your daughters.’

What was apparently pure shock rendered Lord Worth temporarily speechless, then in a hoarse voice he said: ‘Great God Almighty! My daughters!’ Lord Worth could have had his Oscar just for the asking. ‘You–you are the kidnapper?’

‘Fortunes of war, sir.’ It said much for Lord Worth’s aristocratic magnetism that even the most villainous eventually addressed him in respectful tones. ‘Now, if we could see the rest of the passengers.’

Mitchell and Roomer descended. In perfectly-cut tan alpaca suits, horn-rimmed glasses and discreet panamas, they were innocuousness personified. Lord Worth said: ‘Mitchell and Roomer. Scientists–geologists and seismologists.’ He turned to Mitchell and Roomer and said dully: ‘They’re holding my daughters captive aboard the Seawitch.’

‘Good God!’ Mitchell was properly shocked. ‘But surely this is the last place–’

‘Of course. The unexpected, keeping the necessary one or two steps ahead of the opposition. What is your purpose in coming here?’

‘To find new sources of oil. We have a perfectly equipped laboratory here–’

‘Your journey has not been necessary. May we search your bag and that of your friend?’

‘Have I any option?’

‘No.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Aaron.’

Aaron carried out a quick examination of Mitchell’s bag. ‘Clothes. Some scientific books and scientific instruments. Is all.’

Dr Greenshaw clambered down the ladder, reached up and relieved the pilot of various bags and boxes. Durand looked at the doctor and said: ‘Who the hell is he?’

‘Dr Greenshaw,’ Lord Worth said. ‘A highly respected doctor and surgeon. We did expect a certain amount of violence and bloodshed aboard the Seawitch. We came prepared. We do have a dispensary and small sick-bay here.’

‘Another wasted trip. We hold all the cards, and violence is the last thing we expect. May we examine your equipment, Doctor?’

‘If you so wish. As a doctor I deal in life and not in death. I have no concealed lethal weapons. The medical code forbids it.’ Greenshaw sighed. ‘Please search but do not destroy.’

Durand pulled out his walkie-talkie. ‘Send one of Palermo’s men across here with an electric truck. There’s quite a bit of equipment to pick up.’ He replaced his walkie-talkie and looked at Mitchell. ‘Your hands are shaking Why?’

‘I’m a man of peace,’ Mitchell said. He crossed his hands behind his back to conceal the tremor.

Roomer, the only man to recognize the signals, licked his lips and looked at Mitchell in exaggerated, nervous apprehension. Durand said: ‘Another hero. I despise cowards.’

Mitchell brought his hands in front of him. The tremor was still there. Durand stepped forward, his right hand swinging back as if to strike Mitchell open-handed, then let his hand fall in disgust, which was, unwittingly, the wisest thing he had ever done. Durand’s mind was brutalized to the extent where it was incapable of picking up any psychic signals: had it been so attuned he could not have failed to hear the black wings of the bird of death flapping above his head.

The only person who derived any satisfaction, carefully concealed, from this vignette, was Larsen. Although he had talked to Mitchell on the telephone he had never met him: but he had heard a great deal about him from Lord Worth, more than enough to make him realize that Mitchell would cheerfully have reduced Durand to mincemeat sooner than back down before him. Mitchell had taken only seconds to establish the role he wished to establish–that of the cowardly nonentity who could be safely and contemptuously ignored. Larsen, who was no mean hand at taking care of people himself, felt strangely comforted.

Lord Worth said: ‘May I see my daughters?’

Durand considered, then nodded. ‘Search him, Aaron.’

Aaron, carefully avoiding Lord Worth’s basilisk glare of icy outrage, duly searched. ‘He’s clean, Mr Durand.’

‘Across there.’ Durand pointed through the gathering gloom. ‘By the side of the platform.’

Lord Worth walked off without a word. The others made their way towards the accommodation quarters. As Lord Worth approached his daughters Heffer barred his way.

‘Where do you think you’re going, mister?’

‘Lord Worth to you.’

Heffer pulled out his walkie-talkie. ‘Mr Durand? There’s a guy here–’

Durand’s voice crackled over the receiver. ‘That’s Lord Worth. He has been searched and has my permission to speak to his daughters.’

Lord Worth plucked the walkie-talkie from Heffer. ‘And would you please instruct this individual to remain outside listening range?’

‘You heard, Heffer.’ The walkie-talkie went dead.

The reunion between father and daughters was a tearful and impassioned one, at least on the daughters’ side. Lord Worth was all that a doting parent reunited with his kidnapped children should have been, but his effusiveness was kept well under control. Marina was the first to notice this.

‘Aren’t you glad to see us again, Daddy?’

Lord Worth hugged them both and said simply: ‘You two are my whole life. If you don’t know that by this time, you will never know it.’

‘You’ve never said that before.’ Even in the deepening dusk it was possible to see the sheen of tears in Melinda’s eyes.

‘I did not think it necessary. I thought you always knew. Perhaps I’m a remiss parent, perhaps still too much the reserved Highlander. But all my billions aren’t worth a lock of your black hair, Marina, or a lock of your red hair, Melinda.’

‘Titian Daddy, titian. How often must I tell you?’ Melinda was openly crying now.

It was Marina, alwavs the more shrewd and perceptive of the two, who put her finger on it. ‘You aren’t surprised to see us, Daddy, are you? You knew we were here.’

‘Of course I knew.’

‘How?’

‘My agents,’ Lord Worth said loftily, ‘lie thick upon the ground.’

‘And what is going to happen now?’

Lord Worth was frank. ‘I’m damned if I know.’

‘We saw three other men come off the helicopter. Didn’t recognize them–getting too dark.’

‘One was a Dr Greenshaw. Excellent surgeon.’

Melinda said: ‘What do you want a surgeon for?’

‘Don’t he silly. What does anyone want a surgeon for? You think we’re going to hand over the Seawitch on a plate?’

‘And the other two?’

‘You don’t know them. You’ve never heard of them. And if you do meet them you will give no indication that you recognize them or have ever seen them before.’

Marina said: ‘Michael and John.’

‘Yes. Remember–you’ve never seen them before.’

‘We’ll remember,’ the girls said almost in chorus. Their faces were transformed. Marina said: ‘But they’ll be in great danger. Why are they here?’

‘Something to do, I understand, with their stated intent of taking you back home.’

‘How are they going to do that?’

Again Lord Worth was frank. ‘I don’t know. If they know, they wouldn’t tell me. They’ve become bossy, very bossy. Watch me like a hawk. Won’t even let me near my own blasted phone.’ The girls refrained from smiling, principally because Lord Worth didn’t seem particularly perturbed. ‘Mitchell, especially, seems in a very tetchy mood.’ Lord Worth spoke with some relish. ‘Near as a whisker killed Durand inside the first minute. Would have, too, if you weren’t held hostage. Well, let’s go to my suite. I’ve been to Washington and back. Long, tiring day. I need refreshment.’

Durand went into the radio room, told the regular operator that his services would not be required until further notice and that he was to return to his quarters and remain there. The operator left. Durand, himself an expert radio operator, raised the Georgia within a minute and was speaking to Cronkite thirty seconds later.

‘Everything under control on the Seawitch. We have the two girls here and Lord Worth himself.’

‘Excellent.’ Cronkite was pleased, and sounded it. Everything was going his way, but then, he had expected nothing else. ‘Lord Worth bring anyone with him?’

‘Apart from the pilot, three people. A doctor–surgeon, rather–and he seems genuine enough. Lord Worth appears to have expected some blood to be spilt. I’ll check his credentials in Florida in a few minutes. Also, two technicians–seismologists, or something of that kind. Genuine and harmless–even the sight of a slung machine-pistol gives them a severe attack of St Vitus’s dance. All are unarmed.’

‘So no worries?’

‘Yes.’ Three. Lord Worth has a squad of about twenty men aboard. They have the look of trained killers about them, and I’m pretty certain they’re all ex-military personnel. They have to be because of my second worry–Lord Worth has eight dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns bolted on to the platform.’

‘The hell he has!’

‘I’m afraid so. He also has piles of mines lining the sides of the platform. Now we know who broke into the Mississippi naval armoury last night. And the third problem is that we’re far too thin on the ground. There’s only myself and four others to watch everybody. Some of us have to sleep sometime. I need reinforcements and I need them quickly.’

‘You’ll have over twenty arriving at dawn tomorrow morning. The relief rig crew are due in then. A man called Gregson–you’ll recognize him by the biggest red beard you ever saw–will be in charge.’

‘I can’t wait that long. I need reinforcements now. You have your chopper on the Georgia.’

‘And what do you think I carry aboard the Georgia? An army of reinforcements?’ Cronkite paused, then went on reluctantly: ‘I can spare eight men, no more.’

‘They have radar aboard.’

‘No’ unheard of. What does it matter? You’re in charge.’

‘Yes, Mr Cronkite. But your own golden rule: never take a chance.’

‘When you get the word that our helicopter has taken off, neutralize it.’

‘Destroy the radar cabin?’

‘No. We’ll almost certainly want to use it when we’ve completely taken over. The scanner will be on top of the drilling derrick. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘It’s a simple mechanical job to stop it from turning. All it needs is someone with a spanner and a head for heights. Now tell me exactly where Lord Worth’s hard men are quartered. Gregson will require this information.’

Durand told him what he wanted to know and hung up.

The dispensary/sick-bay and the laboratory were next to each other. Mitchell and Roomer were helping Dr Greenshaw to unpack his very considerable amount of medical equipment. They were, understandably, not unguarded, but Aaron and his Schmeisser were on watch on the two outside doors. Aaron could not have been accused of being in a very alert or trigger-ready state of mind, In fact, he regarded his vigil as being close to pointless. He had been present along with Durand when the three men had disembarked from the helicopter, and had formed the same opinion of them as his boss had done.

In the sick-bay Dr Greenshaw up-ended and removed the false bottom of one of his medical supply boxes. With a gingerly and patently nervous apprehension he removed two waistband holsters, two Smith & Wesson 38s, two silencers and two spare magazines. Wordlessly, Mitchell and Roomer buckled on the weaponry. Dr Greenshaw, a man, as they were discovering, of a genuinely devout turn of mind, said: ‘I only hope no one discovers you wearing those pistols.’

Roomer said: ‘We appreciate your concern, Doctor. But don’t worry about us.’

‘I wasn’t worrying about you.’ Dr Greenshaw assumed his most sombre expression. ‘A good Christian can also pray for the souls of the ungodly.’

A long distance away the meeting of ten were again assembled at Lake Tahoe. At the former meeting the atmosphere had been hopeful, forceful, determined and confident that things would go their way, spuriously motivated by their expressed intent to avert a third world war. On this evening the spirit–if that was the word–of the meeting had changed 180 degrees. They were depressed, vacillating, uncertain and wholly lacking in confidence especially as their allegedly humanitarian attempts to prevent the outbreak of war looked like having precisely the opposite effect.

Again, as it was his holiday home, Benson was hosting the meeting. But this time Benson was also undoubtedly the man in charge. Opening the discussion, he said: ’We, gentlemen, are in trouble. Not just simple plain trouble but enormous trouble that could bring us all down. It stems from two facts–we underestimated Lord Worth’s extraordinary power and we overestimated Cronkite’s ability to handle the situation with a suitable degree of discretion and tact. I admit that I was responsible for introducing Cronkite to you, but on the other hand you were unanimous in your belief that Cronkite was the only man to handle the job. And we were not aware that Cronkite’s detestation of Lord Worth ran to the extent of a virulent and irresponsible hatred.

‘I have friends in the Pentagon, not important ones but ones that matter. The Pentagon normally, like any other department of the State, leaks secrets as though through a broken sieve. This time I had to pay twenty thousand dollar to a stenographer and the same to a cypher clerk which, for a pair of comparatively lowly-paid government employees, represents a pretty fair return for a few hours’ work.

‘First, everything is known about our previous meeting here every word and sentiment that was expressed and the identities of all of us.’ Benson paused and looked round the room partly to allow time for the damning enormity of this information to sink in, partly to make it clear that he expected to be recognized for his very considerable outlay.

Mr A, one of the vastly powerful Arabian Gulf potentates, said: ‘I thought our security here was one hundred per cent. How could anyone have known of our presence?’

‘No external agency was involved. I have good friends in California Intelligence. Their interest in us is zero. Nor was the FBI involved. For that to have happened we’d have had to commit some crime and then cross State lines. Neither of those have we done. And before we met last time I had an electronics expert in to check not only this room but the entire house for bugs. There were none.’

Mr A said: ‘Perhaps he planted a bug?’

‘Impossible. Apart from the fact that he’s an old friend of immaculate reputation, I was with him all the time, a fact that did not prevent me from calling in a second expert.’

Patinos, the Venezuelan, said: ‘We give you full marks for security. That leaves only one possibility. One of us here is a traitor.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘I have no idea. We shall probably never know.’

Mr A stroked his beard. ‘Mr Corral here lives very close to Lord Worth, no?’

Corral said: ‘Thank you very much.’

Benson said: ‘Intelligent men don’t make so obvious a link.’

‘As you said on our previous meeting, I’m the only person who has no declared interest in being here.’ Borosoff seemed quietly relaxed. ‘I could be your man.’

‘It’s a point but one which I don’t accept. Whether you are here to stir up trouble for the United States may or may not be the case. Again it comes down to the factor of intelligence.’ Benson was being disarmingly frank. ‘You could be, and probably are, a Soviet agent. But top agents are never caught in the role of agent provocateur. I am not complimenting you on your unquestioned intelligence. I prefer to rely on simple common sense.’ Benson, who appeared to have developed a new maturity and authority, looked around the company. ’Every word spoken here will doubtless be relayed to either Lord Worth or the State Department. It no longer matters. We are here to set right whatever wrongs for which we may have been–however unwittingly, I may say–responsible.

’We know that a Russian missile craft and a Russian-built Cuban submarine are closing in on the Seawitch. We also know that a Venezuelan destroyer is doing the same. What you don’t know is that counter-measures are being taken. My information–and the source is impeccable–is that Lord Worth was today closeted with Belton, the Secretary of State, in Washington. My further information is that Belton was only partially convinced of Lord Worth’s statement of suspicion. He was, unfortunately, wholly convinced when the news came through of Cronkite’s irresponsible folly in kidnapping Lord Worth’s two daughters. As a result a United States cruiser and a destroyer, both armed with the most sophisticated weaponry, have moved out into the Gulf of Mexico. An American nuclear submarine is already patrolling those waters. Another American vessel is already shadowing your destroyer, Mr Patinos: your destroyer, with its vastly inferior detecting equipment, is wholly unaware of this. Additionally, at a Louisiana air-base, a squadron of supersonic fighter-bombers is on instant alert.

‘The Americans are no longer in any mood to play around. My information is that they are prepared for a showdown and are prepared for the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation which John Kennedy had with Khrushchev over Cuba. The Russians, clearly, would never risk a local nuclear confrontation where the home territory advantages are so overwhelmingly American. Neither side would dream of mounting a pre-emptive strike over the issue of a few pennies on a barrel of oil. But if the hot line between Washington and Moscow begins to burn, national prestige will make it difficult for either side to back down until they arrive at a face-saving formula which could take quite some time and would, much worse, generate overwhelming world-wide publicity. This would inevitably involve us. So I would advise you, Mr Borosoff and Mr Patinos, to call off your dogs of war before that hot line starts burning. That way, and only by that way, can we survive with our good names left unbesmirched. I blame neither of you gentlemen. You may have given the nod to Cronkite but you did not reckon on the possibility that Cronkite would carry matters to such ridiculous lengths. Please, please believe me that the Americans will not hesitate to blast your ships out of the water.’

Oil ministers do not become oil ministers because they are mentally retarded. Patinos smiled a smile of wry resignation. ‘I do not relish the thought of personal ruin. Nor do I relish the thought of becoming a scapegoat for my government.’ He looked across at Borosoff. ‘We call off the dogs of war?’

Borosoff nodded ‘Back to their kennels, and no alas. I wish to return to my Russia and this will give me great standing for they will not have to lose face in the world.’

Mr A leaned back in his chair. His relief was manifest. ‘Well that would seem to cover that.’

‘It covers most of it,’ Benson said. ‘But not all. Another very unpleasant and potentially terrifying crime occurred this afternoon. I heard of it only an hour ago, and it will be the hottest topic in the nation tonight. I only hope to God that although we were in no way responsible for it, we won’t be implicated in it. A place called the “Netley Rowan Armoury” was broken into this afternoon. It’s supposed to be just another armoury insofar as the public is concerned and so, mainly, it is. But it’s also a TNW armoury: “TNW” mean “tactical nuclear weapons”. Two of them were stolen in the break-in, and appear to have vanished without trace.’

‘God above!’ The expression and tone of the man from Honduras accurately reflected the shocked feelings of all around the table. ‘Cronkite?’

‘My life on it. No proof, naturally, but who the hell else?’

Corral said: ‘No disrespect to Mr Borosoff here, but couldn’t the Russians, say, have been seeking a prototype?’

Benson looked as weary as his voice sounded. ‘The Russian already have God knows how many of those things. It’s public knowledge that they have thousands of them deployed along the border between the Warsaw Pact countries and Nato, many of them, it is suspected, more sophisticated than ours. The Russians need our TNWs the way they need bows and arrows.’ Borosoff, despite the anxiety he shared with the others, permitted himself the ghost of a smile of complacency. ‘Cronkite. The man’s running wild.’

Mr A said: ‘You think he’s so totally crazed as to use a nuclear device against the Seawitch?’

‘I do not profess to understand the workings of an obviously diseased mind,’ Benson said. ‘He’s capable of anything.’

Patinos said: ‘What’s this weapon like?’

‘I don’t know. I phoned the Pentagon, a very senior official there, but even although he’s an old friend of mine he refused to release highly classified information. All I know is that it can be used as a land-based time-bomb–I suppose that includes the sea as well–or as an aircraft bomb. We can forget the second use. It can only be used in a limited number of supersonic fighter-bombers, which will already, I suppose, be under the heaviest security guard ever, which would strike me as a superfluous precaution as there is no chance that Cronkite, even with his obviously wide range of contacts, could know anyone who could fly one of those planes.’

‘So what happens?’

‘I think we’d better consult an astrologer on that one. All I know is that Cronkite has gone stark raving mad.’

Cronkite, aboard the Georgia, would have thought the same of them. He had a job to do and he was doing it to the best of his ability. Had he known of the possible withdrawal of the warships that had sailed from Cuba and Venezuela he would not have been overduly concerned. He had had some vague idea that they might have been useful to him as a cover and a smokescreen. Cronkite’s vendetta against Lord Worth was a highly personal and extremely vindictive one, and he wanted no one other than himself to administer the coup de grâce. Retribution exacted through the medium of other hands would not do at all.

Meantime, he was well content. He was convinced that the Seawitch was in his hands. Come the dawn it would be doubly in his hands. He knew of their defences and radar. The Starlight, under Easton, was waiting until full darkness before it moved in for the initial attack, and as rain had been falling steadily for some time now and the lowering sky blotted out the quarter-moon, it promised to be as nearly dark as it ever becomes at sea–it never becomes wholly so as it does on land.

A message was brought to him from the radio office. Cronkite glanced at it briefly, picked up the phone to the helipad and reached the pilot in his shelter. ‘Ready to go, Wilson?’

‘Whenever you say, Mr Cronkite.’

‘Then now,’ Cronkite made a rheostat switch, and a dull glow of light outlined the helipad, little enough to be sure but enough to let Wilson make a clean take-off. The helicopter made a half-circle, switched on its landing lights and made a smooth landing on the calm waters less than a hundred yards from the stationary Georgia.

Cronkite called the radar room. ‘You have him on the screen?’

‘Yes, sir. He’s making an instrument approach on our radar.’

‘Let me know when he’s about three miles out.’

Less than a minute later the operator gave him the word. Cronkite turned the rheostat to full, and the helipad became brilliantly illuminated.

A minute later a helicopter, landing lights on, appeared from the north through the driving rain. Just over another minute later it touched down as delicately as a moth, an understandable precaution by the pilot in view of the cargo he was carrying. The fuelling hoses were connected immediately. The door opened and three men descended–the alleged Colonel Farquharson, Lieutenant-Colonel Dewings and Major Breckley who had been responsible for the Netley Rowan Armoury break-in. They helped unload two large, double-handed and obviously very heavy suitcases. Cronkite, with suitable admonitions as to delicacy in handling, showed crew members where to stow the cases in shelter.

Within ten minutes the helicopter was on its way back to the mainland. Five minutes after that the Georgia’s own helicopter had returned and all the helipad lights were switched off.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was due only to the most cruel ill-luck and the extremely jittery state of Durand’s nerves that John Roomer and Melinda Worth found themselves the first patients in Dr Greenshaw’s sick-bay.

Durand was in a highly apprehensive state of mind, a mood that transferred itself all too easily to his four subordinates. Although he held control of the Seawitch he was acutely aware that his hold was a tenuous one: he had not bargained on finding Palermo and his cut-throats on board, and even though he held the master keys to both the Occidental and Oriental quarters in his pocket–the drilling crew was in the former quarters, Palermo and his men in the latter–he was well aware that there were far too many windows in both quarters and he didn’t have the men to cover every possible exit. He had broadcast a message over the external loud-hailer that anyone found on the platform would be shot on sight, and had two men on constant patrol round the Oriental quarters–he had no fear of the unarmed drilling rig crew–and another two constantly patrolling the platform. He had no fear of Lord Worth, his seismologists and the girls–as sources of danger he held them in contempt. Besides, they were unarmed. Even so, the two men patrolling the platform had been instructed to do so in such a fashion as to make sure that at least one had an eye on the doors to the suite of Lord Worth, the laboratory and the sickbay, all three of which had inter-communicating doors.

Tragically, no one inside those three places had heard the warning broadcast–and this, ironically, because Lord Worth was not above indulging in what he regarded as the bare minimum of basic creature comforts. Oil rigs can be uncommonly noisy places and those quarters he had heavily insulated.

Mitchell had been in his tiny cubicle off the laboratory at the time, reading the plan of the layout of the Seawitch over and over again until he was certain that he could have found his way around the Seawitch blindfold. This had taken him about twenty minutes. It was in the fifth minute of his studying that the shots had been fired but again, because of the soundproofing, the firing had not reached him. He had just put the plans away in a drawer when his door opened and Marina entered. She was white-faced and shaking and her face was streaked with tears. As soon as she reached him he put his arms round her and she grabbed him as if he were the last straw in the middle of the Pacific.

‘Why weren’t you there?’ she sobbed. ‘Why weren’t you there? You could have stopped them. You could have saved them!’

Mitchell took no time out to dwell upon the injustices of life. He said gently: ‘Stopped what? Saved whom?’

‘Melinda and John. They’ve been terribly hurt.’

‘How?’

‘Shot.’

‘Shot? I heard nothing.’

‘Of course you heard nothing. This area is all soundproofed. That’s why Melinda and John didn’t hear the broadcast warning.’

‘Broadcast warning? Tell it to me slowly.’

So she told him as slowly and coherently as she could. There had been such a warning but it had gone unheard in Lord Worth’s suite. The rain had stopped, at least temporarily, and when Mitchell had retired to study the plans Melinda and Roomer had elected to go for a stroll. They had been wandering around the foot of the drilling rig, where most of the lights had been turned off since Durand had ordered the abandonment of drilling, and it was there that they had been gunned down without warning.

‘“Terribly hurt”, you said. How badly hurt?’

‘I’m not sure. Dr Greenshaw is operating in the sickbay. I’m not a coward, you know that, but there was so much blood that I didn’t want to look.’

Arrived in the sickbay, Mitchell could hardly blame her. Melinda and Roomer lay in adjacent cots and both were saturated with blood. Melinda already had her left shoulder heavily bandaged. Roomer had bandages swathed round his neck and Dr Greenshaw was working on his chest.

Lord Worth, his face a mask of bitter fury, was sitting in a chair. Durand, his face a mask of nothingness, was standing by the doorway. Mitchell looked speculatively at both, then spoke to Dr Greenshaw. ‘What have you been able to determine so far, Doctor?’

‘Would you listen to him?’ Roomer’s voice was a hoarse whisper and his face creased with near-agony. ‘Never think of asking us how we feel.’

‘In a moment. Well, Doctor?’

‘Lady Melinda’s left shoulder-blade is in a pretty bad way. I’ve extracted the bullet, but she needs immediate surgery. I’m a surgeon, but I’m not an orthopaedic surgeon, and that’s what she must have. Roomer hasn’t been quite so lucky. He got hit twice. The one through the neck missed his carotid artery by a whisker, but the bullet passed straight through and there’s no worry there. The chest wound is serious. Not fatal but very serious. The bullet struck the left lung, no doubt about that, but the internal bleeding isn’t that much, so I think it’s a nick, no more. The trouble is, I think the bullet is lodged against the spine.’

‘He can wiggle his toes?’

Roomer moaned. ‘My God, what sympathy.’

‘He can. But the bullet should be removed as soon as possible. I could do it but I have no X-ray equipment here. I’ll give them blood transfusions in a moment.’

‘Shouldn’t they be flown to hospital as soon as possible?’

‘Of course.’

Mitchell looked at Durand. ‘Well?’

‘No.’

‘But it wasn’t their fault. They didn’t hear the warning.’

‘Their bad luck. There’s no way I’ll fly them ashore. Think I want a battalion of US Marines out here in a few hours?’

‘If they die it’ll be your fault.’

‘Everybody’s got to die sometime.’ Durand left, slamming the door behind him.

‘Dear, dear.’ Roomer tried to shake his head then winced at the pain in his neck. ‘He shouldn’t have said that.’

Mitchell turned to Lord Worth. ‘You can be of great help, sir. Your suite is in direct contact with the radio room, of course. Can you actually hear what is being said in the radio room?’

‘No bother. Two switches and I can hear both sides of any conversation, either on the telephone, earphones or wall-receivers.’

‘Please go and do so and don’t stop listening for a second.’ He looked at the two patients on the cots. ‘We’ll have them airborne for hospital within the half-hour.’

‘How can that be possible?’

‘I don’t know.’ Mitchell sounded vague. ‘I dare say we’ll think of something.’

Lord Worth left. Mitchell pulled out a slender pencil flashlight and started to flick it on and off in apparent aimlessness. His complexion had gone pale and the hands that held the pencil light trembled slightly. Marina looked at him first uncomprehendingly, then in dismay, finally in something approaching contempt. Incredulously, she said: ‘You’re frightened.’

‘Your gun?’ Mitchell said to Roomer.

‘When they went off for help I managed to drag myself a bit nearer the edge. I unclipped the belt and threw the lot over the side.’

‘Good lad. So we’re still in the clear.’ He seemed to become aware of the tremor in his hands, put away his flashlight and thrust his hands into his pockets. He said to Melinda: ‘Who shot you?’

‘A pair of very unpleasant characters called Kowenski and Rindler. We’ve had trouble with them before.’

‘Kowenski and Rindler,’ Mitchell repeated. He left the sickbay.

Marina said, half in sadness, half in bitterness: ‘My idol with the feet of clay.’

Roomer said huskily: ‘Put out the light and then put out the light.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say it. Chap called Othello. That’s the trouble with you millionaire’s daughters. Illiterate. First Mitchell puts out the lights. He’s got cat’s eyes. He can see in almost total darkness where an ordinary man is blind. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Puts him at a tremendous advantage. And then he extinguishes another kind of light.’

‘I know what you mean and I don’t believe you. I saw him shaking.’

‘You poor, silly, stupid, foolish ninny. You don’t deserve him.’

She stared at him in disbelief. ‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me.’ Roomer sounded tired and the doctor was looking at him in disapproval. He went on in a sombre voice: ‘Kowenski and Rindler are dead men. They have minutes to live. He loves your sister almost as much as he does you, and I’ve been his closest friend and partner since we were kids. Mitchell looks after his own.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I’m afraid he takes care of things in a rather final way.’

‘But he was shaking–only cowards shake.’ Her voice was now lacking in conviction.

‘He’s afraid of nothing that lives. As for the shaking–he’s a throw-back to the old Scandinavian berserker. He’s just trying to contain his fury. He usually smiles. As for being a coward, quite a number of people have thought that of him–probably their last thought on earth.’ He smiled. ‘You’re shaking now.’

She said nothing.

Roomer said: ‘There’s a cupboard in the vestibule. Bring what you find there.’

She looked at him uncertainly, left, and returned in a few minutes carrying a pair of shoes. She held them at arm’s length and from the look of horror on her face might have been holding a cobra.

Roomer said: ‘Mitchell’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Better return them. He’ll be requiring them quite soon.’

When she came back Melinda said: ‘Do you really think you could marry a man who kills people?’

Marina shivered and said nothing. Roomer said sardonically: ‘Better than marrying a coward, I should think.’

In the generator room Mitchell found what he wanted right away–a breaker marked ‘Deck Lights’. He pulled down the lever and stepped out on to the now darkened platform. He waited a half-minute until his eyes adjusted themselves to the darkness, then moved in the direction of the derrick crane where he could hear two men cursing in far from muted voices. He approached on soundless stockinged feet until he was less than two yards away. Still soundlessly, he laid his pencil flash on top of the barrel of the Smith & Wesson and slid forward the flash switch.

The two men swung round in remarkably swift unison, hands reaching for their guns.

Mitchell said: ‘You know what this is, don’t you?’

They knew. The deep-bluish sheen of a silenced .38 is not readily mistakable for a pop-gun. Their hands stopped reaching for their guns. It was, to say the least, rather unnerving to see an illuminated silenced gun and nothing but blackness beyond it.

‘Clasp your hands behind your necks, turn round and start walking.’

They walked until they could walk no more for the good reason that they had reached the end of the platform. Beyond that lay nothing but the 200-foot drop to the Gulf of Mexico.

Mitchell said: ‘Keep your hands even more tightly clasped and turn round.’

They did so. ‘You are Kowenski and Rindler?’

There was no reply.

‘You are the two who gunned down Lady Melinda and Mr Roomer?’

Again there was no reply. Vocal chords can become paralysed when the mind is possessed of the irrevocable certainty that one is but one step, one second removed from eternity. Mitchell squeezed the trigger twice and was walking away before the dead men had hit the waters of the Gulf. He had taken only four steps when a flashlight struck him in the face.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t clever-clever Mitchell, the scaredy scientist.’ Mitchell couldn’t see the man–and undoubtedly the gun behind the flash–but he had no difficulty in recognizing the voice of Heffer, the one with the sharp nose and rodentlike teeth. ‘And carrying a silenced gun. Whatever have we been up to, Mr Mitchell?’

Heffer had made the classic blunder of all incompetent would-be assassins. He should have shot Mitchell on sight and then asked the question: Mitchell flicked on his pencil torch and spun it upwards, where it spun around like a demented firefly. Heffer would have been less than human not to have had the automatic and instinctive reaction of glancing upward while either his conscious or subconscious mind speculated as to what the hell Mitchell was up to: Whichever it was, the speculation was of very brief duration indeed because Heffer was dead before the flash fell back on to the platform.

Mitchell picked up the flash, still surprisingly working, dragged Heffer by the heels to join his friends at the bottom of the Gulf, returned to the sickbay vestibule, donned his shoes and entered the sickbay itself. Dr Greenshaw had both his patients on blood transfusion.

Roomer looked at his watch. ‘Six minutes. What took you so long?’

A plainly unnerved Marina looked at Roomer, half in disbelief, half in stupefaction.

‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Mitchell actually managed to sound apologetic. ‘I had the misfortune to run into Heffer on the way back.’

‘You mean he had the misfortune to run into you. And where are our friends?’

‘I’m not rightly sure.’

‘I understand.’ Roomer sounded sympathetic. ‘It’s difficult to estimate the depth of the water hereabouts.’

‘I could find out. It hardly seems to matter. Dr Greenshaw, you have stretchers? Complete with straps and so forth?’ Greenshaw nodded. ‘Please prepare them. Let them stay where they are meantime. Blood transfusions can be carried on in flight?’

‘That’s no problem. I assume you want me to accompany them?’

‘If you would be so kind. I know it’s asking an awful lot but, after you’ve handed them over to the competent medical authorities, I’d like you to return.’

‘It will be a pleasure. I am now in my seventieth year and thought there was nothing fresh left in life for me to experience. I was wrong.’

Marina stared at them in disbelief. All three men seemed calm and relaxed. Melinda appeared to have dropped off into a coma but she was merely, in fact, under heavy sedation. Marina said with conviction: ‘You’re all mad.’

Mitchell said: ‘That’s what the inmate of a lunatic asylum says of the outside world, and he may well be right. However, that’s hardly the point at issue. You, Marina, will be accompanying the others on the trip back to Florida. There you will be perfectly safe–your father will ensure that the most massive security guard ever mounted will be there. No president in history will ever have been so well protected.’

‘How splendid. I love being made a fuss of, being the centre of attraction. However, mastermind, there’s just one small flaw in your reasoning. I’m not going. I’m staying with my father.’

‘That’s exactly the point I’m going to discuss with him now.’

‘You mean you’re going out to kill someone else?’

Mitchell held out his hands, fingers splayed. They could have been carved from marble.

‘Later,’ Roomer said. ‘He appears to have some other things on his mind at the moment.’

Mitchell left. Marina turned furiously on Roomer. ‘You’re just as bad as he is.’

‘I’m a sick man. You mustn’t upset me.’

‘You and his berserker moods. He’s just a killer.’

Roomer’s face went very still. ‘I don’t look forward to the prospect of having a mentally retarded person as a sister-in-law.’

She was shocked and the shock showed. Her voice was a whisper. ‘I don’t really know you, do I?’

‘No. We’re the men who walk down the dark side of the streets. Somebody has to look after the people on the dark side. We do it. Do you know how much your father offered us to take you home?’ Roomer smiled. ‘I’m afraid I’m not much good in that department at the moment, but Mike will take care of it.’

‘How much did he offer you?’

‘Whatever we wanted in the world. A million dollars to take you home? A hundred million if we’d asked for it? Sure.’

‘How much did you ask for?’ Her face wasn’t registering much in the way of expression.

Roomer sighed, which, in the low physical state he felt, wasn’t too difficult. ‘Poor Mike. To think that he regards you as the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. Maybe he’d better get off that rainbow–insubstantial things at the best of times. Poor me, too. I’m going to have to live with you too, even at second hand. Let’s be corny. Your father loves you. We love you. To pile cliché upon cliché, there are some things that can’t be bought. Pearls beyond price. Don’t make yourself an artificial pearl, Marina. And don’t ever again insult us in that fashion. But we have to live on something, so we’ll send him a bill.’

‘For what?’

‘Ammunition expended.’

She crossed to his cot-side, knelt and kissed him. Roomer seemed too weak to resist. Dr Greenshaw was severe. ‘Lady Marina, he’s not only having a blood transfusion, there’s also the factor of blood pressure.’

Roomer said: ‘My blood pressure is registering no complaints.’

She kissed him again. ‘Is that apology enough?’ Roomer smiled and said nothing. ‘“Berserker”, you said. Can anyone stop him when he’s like that? Can I?’

‘No. Some day, yes.’

‘The one person is you. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘They carried guns.’

‘You carry guns.’

‘Yes. But we’re not evil people who carry guns to do evil things.’

‘That’s all?’

‘No.’ He looked across at Melinda. ‘You see?’

‘Please.’

‘If Kowenski and Rindler hadn’t been such damned lousy shots, she’d be dead.’

‘So you let Michael loose?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re going to marry her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you asked her?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have to. Sisters talk.’

‘Mike?’

‘I don’t know, John. I’m a running coward, running scared.’

‘Well?’

‘He kills.’

‘I’ve killed.’

‘He’ll kill again?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘John.’

He reached out, took a lock of her gleaming black hair, picked out a single thread. ‘That.’

‘You mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have to see.’ She kicked off her high-heeled shoes.

‘So much to learn. Sit.’

She sat on his bed. Dr Greenshaw rolled his eyes heavenwards. She was wearing navy-blue jeans and a white blouse. Roomer reached up and undid the top button of her blouse. She looked at him and said nothing. Roomer said: ‘You do the rest. Navy or black jumper.’

She was back in thirty seconds, wearing a navy polo. She looked enquiringly at Roomer, who nodded. She left the sickbay.

In Lord Worth’s living-room he and Mitchell were seated in adjacent armchairs. The wall-speakers were on. When Marina came in Mitchell waved her to urgent silence.

Over the speakers Durand’s unmistakable voice sounded testy. ‘All I know is that the deck lights went out some minutes ago and came back on a minute ago.’ Marina glanced at Mitchell, who nodded. ‘But you’ve all the light you need to hand.’

‘Have you neutralized the radar scanner yet?’

Marina had never heard the voice before, but the tightening of Lord Worth’s lip showed that Cronkite’s voice was no stranger to him.

‘It hardly seems necessary now.’

‘It was your idea. Do it. We’ll leave in ten minutes, then there’ll be about fifteen minutes’ flying time.’

‘“We’ll leave”? That mean you’re coming too?’

‘No. I’ve more important things to do.’ There was a click: Cronkite had ceased to transmit.

Lord Worth said uneasily: ‘I wonder what that devious devil means by that?’

‘We’ll just have to find out the hard way.’ Mitchell looked at Marina. ‘Where are your shoes?’

She smiled sweetly. ‘I’m a quick study. Shoes make too much noise out on the platform.’

‘You’re not going out on any platform.’

‘I am. There are gaps in my education. I want to see how killers operate.’

Mitchell said in irritation: ‘I’m not going to kill anyone. Go get your bag packed. You’ll be leaving soon.’

‘I’m not leaving.’

‘Why?’

‘Beacuse I want to stay with Daddy–and with you. Don’t you think that natural?’

‘You’re leaving if I have to tie you up.’

‘You can’t tie my tongue up. Wouldn’t the law just love to know where the guns stolen from the Mississippi armoury are?’

Lord Worth looked slightly stunned. ‘You’d do that to me? Your own father?’

‘You’d tie me up and force me aboard that helicopter–Your own daughter?’

‘Talk about logic.’ Mitchell shook his head. ‘With respect to Lord Worth, he appears to have fathered a nutcase. If you think–’

The wall-speakers crackled again. It was Cronkite’s voice. ‘Well don’t just hang around. Stop that radar.’

‘How?’ It was Aaron and he sounded aggrieved. ‘Do you expect me to climb that damned drilling rig–’

‘Don’t be stupid. Go to the radar room. There’s a red lever switch just above the console. Pull it down.’

‘That I can do.’ Aaron sounded relieved. They heard the sound of a door closing. Mitchell kicked off his shoes, turned off the light in the living-room and eased the door open a crack. Aaron, his back already to them, was heading for the radar room. He reached it, opened the door and passed inside. Mitchell moved after him, pulling out his silenced gun and held it in his left hand. A soft voice behind him said: ‘I thought you were right-handed?’

Mitchell didn’t even bother to curse. He said in a resigned whisper: ‘I am.’

Aaron was just pulling the red lever when Mitchell made his soundless entrance. He said: ‘Don’t turn round.’

Aaron didn’t turn round.

‘Clasp your hands behind your neck, then turn and come here.’

Aaron turned. ‘Mitchell!’

‘Please don’t try anything clever. I’ve already had to kill three of your friends tonight. A fourth isn’t going to give me a sleepless night. Stop right there and turn again.’

Aaron did as he was told. Mitchell withdrew his right hand from his coat pocket. The braided leather strap attached to his wrist by a thong was no more than five inches long, but when it struck Aaron with considerable force and accuracy above and behind the right ear it was apparent that five inches was quite long enough. Mitchell caught him as he fell and eased him to the deck.

‘Did you have to do that?–’ Marina choked and stopped speaking as Mitchell’s hand clamped itself none too gently over her mouth. She flinched as he shook the strap before her eyes.

‘Keep your voice down.’ The whisper was intentionally savage. He knelt over Aaron, removed and pocketed his gun.

‘Did you have to do that?’ she said in a low voice. ‘You could have tied him up and gagged him.’

‘When I require advice from ignorant amateurs I’ll turn to you immediately. I haven’t time for folde-rols. He’ll just have a half-hour’s peaceful rest, and then all he’ll need is an aspirin.’

‘And now?’

‘Durand.’

‘Why?’

‘Ninny.’

‘I’m getting tired of people calling me “ninny”. John just called me that. He also said I was mentally retarded and an artificial pearl.’

‘No shrewder judge of character than our John,’ Mitchell said approvingly. ‘If Aaron doesn’t return Durand will come looking for him. Then he’ll get on the radiophone and stop the helicopter flight.’

‘Well, that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

He switched off the light and walked away, Marina following. Mitchell stopped outside the entrance to Lord Worth’s sitting-room.

‘Get inside. You’re both an irritation and a liability. I can’t function properly with you around. Heroines I can do without.’

‘I promise you I won’t say a word. I promise–’

He caught her by the arm and thrust her forcibly inside. Lord Worth looked up in mild surprise. Mitchell said: ‘I will hold you personally responsible, Lord Worth, if you allow this pesky daughter of yours outside that door again. More, I’m dimming the deck lights. Any unauthorized person seen moving around the platform will be shot on sight. That is my promise, and you’d better believe it. This is no place for children who want to play games.’ The door closed behind him.

‘Well!’ Marina sat down and gripped her hands together. ‘What kind of husband do you think he would make?’

‘A perfectly splendid one, I should imagine. Look, my dear, one of Mitchell’s outstanding assets is a hair-trigger reaction. You blunt it. And you know damn well how he feels about you–your presence just constitutes an additional worry at a time when he can least afford either. A wife doesn’t accompany her husband down a coal mine or on a wartime bombing mission. And Mitchell is much more of a loner than such people are.’

She attempted something between a glower and a scowl, but her beautiful face really wasn’t made for it, so she settled for a rueful smile, rose and replenished his glass of malt whisky.

Mitchell removed the gun and two large keys from the pockets of an unconscious Durand, made his way to the main entrance to the Oriental quarters, opened the door and switched on the corridor lights.

‘Commander Larsen,’ he called out. ‘Palermo.’

Doors opened and the two men were with him in a few seconds. Larsen said: ‘Mitchell! What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Just a harmless seismologist taking his constitutional.’

‘But didn’t you hear the broadcast warning–anyone seen on the platform to be shot on sight?’

‘That’s past. One piece of bad news, two of good. Bad first. Roomer and Miss Melinda didn’t hear the warning–those quarters are sound-insulated. So they took a walk. Both were hurt quite badly. Melinda has a shattered left shoulder, Roomer was shot through the neck and chest. The doctor thinks the bullet is lodged against his spine. We must get them to hospital and quick. Who’s Lord Worth’s personal pilot?’

‘Chambers,’ Larsen said.

‘Get one of your men to have him refuel his machine. The good news: Durand is in the radio room, his number two, fellow called Aaron, is in the radar room. Both are unconscious.’ He looked at Palermo. ‘When they come to–it’ll be some time yet–could you have them looked after with loving care and attention?’

‘Our pleasure.’

Larsen said: ‘Durand had three other men.’

‘They’re dead.’

‘You?’

‘Yes.’

‘We didn’t hear any shooting.’

Mitchell gave them a brief sight of his silenced .38. Larsen looked thoughtful. ‘Lord Worth talked quite a bit about you. I used to think he was exaggerating.’

‘The other bit of good news. Cronkite is sending some reinforcements by helicopter–not many, I believe, eight or nine–and they should be taking off about now. A fifteen minutes’ flight, I gather, so I reckon that Cronkite’s boat is just somewhere below the horizon, below our radar sweep.’

Palermo brightened. ‘We blast this chopper out of the sky?’

‘My original thought, I must admit. But let’s try to play it clever and lull him into some sort of sense of false security. I suggest we let them land, then take them. We’ll have their leader report to Cronkite that all is well.’

‘What if he refuses? Or tries to shout a warning?’

‘We’ll write out his script. If he deviates one word I’ll shoot him. Silencer. Cronkite will hear nothing.’

‘He could hear the man scream.’

‘When a .38 enters the base of your skull and travels upwards at forty-five degrees you don’t tend to scream much.’

‘You mean you’d kill him?’ While not exactly incredulous, Larsen was obviously taken aback.

‘Yes. Then we’d line up number two. We shouldn’t have too much trouble with him.’

Larsen said with some feeling: ‘When Lord Worth talked of you he didn’t tell me the half of it.’

‘Another thing. I want that helicopter. We’ll fake up a tale that the engine failed above the helipad, crash-landed and will take some hours to repair. Always useful to have another helicopter around but, more importantly, I want to deprive Cronkite of the use of his.’ He looked at Palermo ‘I take it that the reception committee can be safely left in your hands.’

‘You sure can. Any suggestions?’

‘Well, I’m a bit diffident about lecturing an expert like yourself.’

‘You know me?’

’I used to be a cop. The rig is loaded with portable search-lights. They’ll head for the administration buildings. I’d keep in hiding, switch off the deck lights and turn on the search-lights when they are, say, thirty yards away. ‘They’ll be blind and won’t be able to see you.’

‘You can’t cater for nutcases.’

‘I’ll bet you can.’ Mitchell smiled briefly at him, cop to crook. He said to Larsen: ‘I have a feeling that Lord Worth would like to confer with his rig boss.’

‘Yes.’ They walked away as Palermo was already giving rapid instructions to his men. ‘Lord Worth know what you’re up to?’

‘I haven’t had time. Anyway, I wouldn’t tell Lord Worth how to make a billion out of oil.’

‘A point.’ They stopped briefly by the radio room. Larsen gazed at the crumpled form of Durand, half in appreciation, half in regret. ‘What a beautiful sight. Wish it had been me, though.’

‘I’ll bet Durand–when he awakes–doesn’t. Plastic surgeons come high.’

They made their next brief stop at the sickbay. He looked at a still comatose Melinda and a wideawake Roomer, and his massive fists clenched. Roomer smiled. ‘I know. But you’re too late. How deep’s the water here?’

‘Nine hundred feet.’

‘Then you’d require a diving-bell to get your hands round the throats of those responsible. And how are things with you, Commander Larsen? You can see how things are with us.’

‘I’ve been resting. Mitchell here has been rather more active. Apart from the three men at the bottom of the Gulf, he’s also deprived me of the pleasure of beating the living daylights out of Durand. Aaron isn’t feeling too well either.’

Roomer said apologetically: ‘He doesn’t go in much for diplomacy. So the Seawitch is in our hands?’

‘For the moment.’

‘For the moment?’

‘Do you see a man like Cronkite giving up? So he’s lost five men and is probably about to lose another eight or nine. What’s that for a man with ten millions to play about with? And don’t forget his vicious personal vendetta with Lord Worth. If achieving his intent involves the crippling or even the destruction of the Seawitch, including all aboard it–well, Cronkite isn’t going to be conscience-ridden for all his days–or even for a minute if it comes to that.’ He turned to Dr Greenshaw. ‘I think it’s time you got busy with the stretchers. Could you spare four of your drilling crew, Commander, to help have them transferred to the stretchers and then carried across to the helicopter? I’m afraid, John, that you’re going to have some very unpleasant company on the trip. Durand and Aaron. Trussed like chickens, of course.’

‘Well, thank you very much.’

‘I can–occasionally–be as leery as you. I wouldn’t put it past Cronkite to gain access to the Seawitch. How he would do it I haven’t the faintest idea, but with a devious mind a highly-motivated man can accomplish almost anything he wants. Should he succeed. I don’t want Durand and Aaron pointing accusing fingers at me. I should like to remain an inconspicuous and harmless seismologist.’

Larsen gave a few orders on the phone, then he and Mitchell went through to Lord Worth’s room. Lord Worth was on the phone, listening and scowling. Marina looked at Mitchell with an expression as forbidding as her father’s.

‘I suppose you’ve been littering the platform with a few more dead men?’

‘You do me a grave injustice. There’s no one left to kill.’ She gave what might have been a tiny shudder and looked away.

Larsen said: ‘The ship is in our hands, Lady Marina. We’re expecting a little more trouble in about ten minutes, but we can take care of that.’

Lord Worth replaced his receiver. ‘What’s that?’

‘Cronkite is sending some reinforcements by helicopter. Not many–eight or nine. They’ll have no chance. He’s under the impression that Durand is still in charge here.’

‘I take it he’s not.’

‘He’s unconscious and very securely bound. So is Aaron.’

A yearning look came over Lord Worth’s face. ‘Is Cronkite coming with them?’

‘No.’

‘How very unfortunate. And I’ve just had some more bad news. The Torbello has broken down.’

‘Sabotage?’

‘No. The main fuel supply line to its engine has fractured. Just a temporary stop, though it may take some hours to repair. But there is no cause for worry and half-hourly reports on the state of repairs should be forthcoming.’

Another disturbing point had arisen. No major marine insurance companies or Lloyd’s of London had ever heard of the existence of the Questar. Even more disturbing, however, was that the Marine Gulf Corporation had reported the disappearance of its seismological survey vessel from Freeport. It was called the Hammond.

The US navy had two points of cold comfort to offer. What the United States did with its obsolete submarines was to scrap them or sell them to foreign governments: none had ever fallen into the hands of commercial companies or private individuals. Nor were there any Cousteau-type submersibles along the Gulf Coast.

The telephone call-up bell jangled. Lord Worth switched on the wall-receivers. The radio officer was succinct.

‘Helicopter, flying low, due north-west, five miles out.’

‘Well, now,’ Larsen said, ‘this should provide a diversion. Coming, Mitchell?’

‘In a moment. I have a little note to write. Remember?’

‘The note, of course.’ Larsen left. Mitchell penned a brief note in neat printed script that left no room for misinterpretation, folded it in his pocket and went to the door. Lord Worth said: ‘Mind if I come along?’

‘Well, there’ll be no danger, but I think you’d be better occupied in listening for messages from radar, radio, sonar and those monitoring the sensory devices attached to the massive anchoring cables.’

‘Agreed. And I’ll call up the Secretary to see what luck he’s had in hauling those damned warships off my back.’

Marina said sweetly: ‘If there’s no danger I’m coming with you.’

‘No.’

‘You have a very limited vocabulary, Mr Mitchell.’

‘Instead of trying to be a heroine you might try the Florence Nightingale bit–there are two very sick people through there who require their hands held.’

‘You’re too bossy by half, Michael.’

‘In today’s idiom, a male chauvinist pig.’

‘Could you imagine me marrying a person like you?’

‘Your imagination is your business. Besides, I’ve never asked you to.’ He left.

‘Well!’ She looked suspiciously at her father, but Lord. Worth had his risibility under complete control. He picked up a phone and asked for the Christmas tree to be opened and the exploratory drilling restarted.

The helicopter was making its landing approach as Mitchell joined Larsen and Palermo and his men in the deep shadows of the accommodation area. The platform lights had been dimmed but the helipad was brightly illuminated. Palermo had six portable search-lights in position. He nodded to Mitchell, then made his unhurried way to the helipad. He was carrying an envelope in his hand.

The helicopter touched down, the door opened and men with a discouraging assortment of automatic weapons started to disembark. Palermo said: ‘I’m Marino. Who’s in charge here?’

‘Me. Mortensen.’ He was a bulky young man in battle fatigues, and looked more like a bright young lieutenant than the thug he undoubtedly was. ‘I thought Durand was in charge here?’

‘He is. At the moment he’s having a brief and painful conversation with Lord Worth. He’s waiting for you in Lord Worth’s quarters.’

‘Why are the deck lights so dim?’

‘Voltage drop. Being fixed. The helipads have their own generators.’ He pointed. ‘Over there.’

Mortensen nodded and led his eight men away. Palermo said: ‘Join you in a minute. I have a private message for the pilot from Cronkite.’

Palermo climbed up into the helicopter. He greeted the pilot and said: ‘I have a message here for you from Cronkite.’

The pilot registered a degree of surprise. ‘I was under orders to fly straight back.’

‘Won’t be long. It appears that Cronkite is anxious to see Lord Worth and his daughters.’

The pilot grinned and took the envelope from Palermo. He opened it, examined both sides of a blank sheet of paper and said: ‘What gives?’

‘This.’ Palermo showed him a gun about the size of a small cannon. ‘I can’t stand dead heroes.’

The platform lights went out and six searchlights came on. Larsen’s stentorian voice carried clearly. ‘Throw down your guns. You have no chance.’

One of Mortensen’s men suicidally thought different. He flung himself to the platform deck, loosed off a burst of sub-machine-gun fire and successfully killed one of the search-lights. If he felt any sense of gratification it must have been the shortest on record, for he was dead while the shattered glass was still tinkling down on the platform. The other eight men threw down their guns.

Palermo sighed, He said to the pilot: ‘See? Dead heroes are no good to anyone, Come along.’

Eight of the nine men, together with the pilot, were shepherded into a windowless store-room and locked inside. The ninth, Mortensen, was taken to the radio room where he was shortly joined by Mitchell. For the occasion Mitchell had changed into a boiler-suit and makeshift hood, which not only effectively masked his face but also muffled his voice He had no wish to be identified.

He produced the paper on which he had made notes, screwed the muzzle of his .38 into the base of Mortensen’s neck, told him to contact Cronkite and read out the message and that the slightest deviation from the script would mean a shattered brain. Mortensen was no fool and in his peculiar line of trade he had looked into the face of death more than once. He made the contact, said all was well, that he and Durand were in complete control of the Seawitch but that it might be several hours before the helicopter could return as last-minute engine-failure had damaged the undercarriage. Cronkite seemed reasonably satisfied and hung up.

When Larsen and Mitchell returned to Lord Worth’s cabin Lord Worth seemed in a more cheerful frame of mind. The Pentagon had reported that the two naval vessels from Cuba and the one from Venezuela were stopped in the water and appeared to be awaiting instructions. The Torbello was on its way again and was expected to arrive in Galveston in ninety minutes. Lord Worth might have felt less satisfied if he’d known that the Torbello, shaking in every rivet, seam and plate, was several hundred miles from Galveston, travelling south-west in calm seas. Mulhooney was in no mood to hang around.

Marina said accusingly: ‘I heard shots being fired out there.’

‘Just warning shots in the air,’ Mitchell said. ‘Frightens the hell out of people.’

‘You made them all prisoner.’

Lord Worth said irritably: ‘Don’t talk nonsense. Now do be quiet. The Commander and I have important matters to discuss.’

‘We’ll leave,’ Mitchell said. He looked at Marina. ‘Come and let’s see the patients off.’

They followed the two stretchers out to the helicopter. They were accompanied by Durand and Aaron–both with their hands lashed behind their backs and on a nine-inch hobble–Dr Greenshaw and one of Palermo’s men, a menacing individual with a sawn-off shot-gun who was to ride guard on the captives until they reached the mainland.

Mitchell said to Marina: ‘Last chance.’

‘No.’

‘We’re going to make a great couple,’ Mitchell said gloomily. ‘Monosyllabic is what I mean.’

They said their goodbyes, watched the helicopter lift off and made their way back to Lord Worth’s quarters. Both he and Larsen were on separate lines, and from the expressions on their faces it was clear that they were less happy with life than they might have been. Both men were trying, with zero effect, to obtain some additional tankerage. There were, in fact, some half-dozen idle tankers on the south and east coast in the 50,000 dw range, but all belonged to the major oil companies who would have gone to the stake sooner than charter any of their vessels to the Worth Hudson Oil Company. The nearest tankers of the required tonnage were either in Britain, Norway or the Mediterranean, and to have brought them across would have involved an intolerable loss of time, not to say money, which last matter lay very close to Lord Worth’s heart. He and Larsen had even considered bringing one of their super-tankers into service, but had decided against it. Because of the tankers’ huge carrying capacity, the loss in revenue would have been unbearably high. And what had happened to the Crusader might even happen to a super-tanker. True, they were insured at Lloyd’s, but that august firm’s marine accident investigators were notoriously, if justifiably, cagey, prudent and thoroughly cautious men, and although they invariably settled any genuine claim they tended to deliberate at length before making any final decision.

Another call came through from the Torbello. On course, its estimated time of arrival in Galveston was one hour. Lord Worth said gloomily that they had at least two tankers in operation: they would just have to step up their already crowded schedules.

One half-hour later another message came through from the tanker. One half-hour to Galveston. Lord Worth might have felt less assured had he known that now that dark had fallen the Starlight, leaving the Georgia where it was, had already moved away in the direction of the Seawitch, its engines running on its electrical batteries. Its chances of sonar detection by the Seawitch were regarded as extremely small. It carried with it highly skilled divers and an unpleasant assortment of mines, limpet mines and amatol beehives, all of which could be controlled by long-distance radio.

Yet another half-hour passed before the welcome news came through that the tanker Torbello was safely berthed in Galveston. Lord Worth said to Larsen that he intended to make an immediate voice-link call to the port authorities in Galveston to ensure the fastest turn-round ever, money no object.

He got his voice-link in just one minute–the Lord Worths of this world are never kept waiting. When he made his customary peremptory demands the harbour-master expressed a considerable degree of surprise.

‘I really can’t imagine what you are talking about, sir.’

‘God damn it, I always know what I’m talking about.’

‘Not in this case, Lord Worth. I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed or hoaxed. The Torbello has not arrived.’

‘But damn it, I’ve just heard–’

‘One moment, please.’

The moment passed into about thirty, during which Mitchell thoughtfully brought Lord Worth a glass of scotch, which he half-consumed at one gulp. Then the voice came through again.

‘Disturbing news. Not only is there no sign of your tanker, but our radar scanners show no signs of any vessel of that size being within a radius of forty miles.’

‘Then what the devil can have happened to her? I was speaking to her only two or three minutes ago.’

‘On her own call-sign?’

‘Yes. damn it.’

‘Then obviously she’s come to no harm.’

Lord Worth hung up without as much as a courtesy thank-you. He glowered at Larsen and Mitchell as if what had happened had been their fault. He said at length: ‘I can only conclude that the captain of the Torbello has gone off his rocker.’

Mitchell said: ‘And I conclude that he’s safely under lock and key aboard his own ship.’

Lord Worth was heavily ironic. ‘In addition to your many other accomplishments you’ve now become psychic.’

‘Your Torbello has been hijacked.’

‘Hijacked! Hijacked! Now you’ve gone off your rocker. Whoever heard of a tanker being hijacked?’

‘Whoever heard of a jumbo-jet being hijacked until the first one was? After what happened to the Crusader in Galveston the captain of the Torbello would have been extremely wary of being approached, far less boarded, by any other vessel unless it were a craft with respectability beyond question. The only two such types of craft are naval or coastguard. We’ve heard that the Marine Gulf Corporation’s survey vessel has been stolen. Many of those survey vessels are ex-coastguard with a helipad for a helicopter to carry out seismological pattern bombing. The ship was called the Hammond. With your connections you could find out in minutes.’

Lord Worth did find out in minutes. He said: ‘So you’re right.’ He was too dumbfounded even to apologize. ‘And this of course was the Questar that Cronkite sailed from Galveston. God only knows what name it goes under now. What next, I wonder?’

Mitchell said: ‘A call from Cronkite, I should think.’

‘What would he call me for?’

‘Some outrageous demands, I should imagine. I don’t know.’

Lord Worth was nothing if not resilient. He had powerful and influential friends. He called an admiral friend in the naval headquarters in Washington and demanded that an air-sea search unit be despatched immediately to the scene. The navy apologetically said that they would have to obtain the permission of their Commander-in-Chief–in effect, the President. The President, apparently, professed a profound if polite degree of disinterest. Neither he nor Congress had any reason to love the oil companies who had so frequently flouted them, which was less than fair to Lord Worth who had never flouted anyone in Washington in his life More, the search almost certainly lay outside their jurisdictional waters. Besides, it was raining in the Gulf and black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat, and though their radar might well pick up a hundred ships in the area visual identification would be impossible.

He tried the CIA. Their disinterest was even more profound. In the several years past they had had their fingers badly burnt in public and all their spare time was devoted to licking their wounds.

The FBI curtly reminded him that their activities were purely internal and that anyway they got sea-sick whenever they ventured on water.

Lord Worth considered making an appeal to the UNO, but was dissuaded by Larsen and Mitchell. Not only would the Gulf states, Venezuela, Nigeria, every Communist country and what now went by the name of the Third World–and they held the vast majority of votes in the UNO–veto any such suggestion: the UNO had no legal power to initiate any such action. Apart from that, by that time the entire UNO were probably in bed anyway.

For once in his life Lord Worth appeared to be at a loss. Life, it appeared, could hold no more for him. But Lord Worth was discovering that, upon occasion, he could be as fallible as the next man: for seconds later he was at an utter and total loss.

A voice-over call came through. It was, as Mitchell had predicted it would be, Cronkite. He was glad to inform Lord Worth that there was no cause for concern over the Torbello as she was in safe hands.

‘Where?’ Had his daughter not been present Lord Worth would undoubtedly have qualified his question with a few choice adjectives.

‘I prefer not to specify exactly. Enough to say that she is securely anchored in the territorial waters of a Central American country. It is my intention to dispose of the oil to this very poor and oil-deficient country–’ he did not mention that it was his intention to sell it at half-price, which would bring in a few acceptable hundred thousand dollars–’then take the tanker out to sea and sink it in a hundred fathoms. Unless, of course–’

‘Unless what?’ Lord Worth asked. His voice had assumed a peculiar hoarseness.

‘Unless you close down the Christmas tree on the Seawitch and immediately stop all pumping and drilling.’

‘Fool.’

‘You said what?’

‘Your thugs have already attended to that. Haven’t they told you?’

‘I want proof. I want Mortensen.’

Lord Worth said wearily: ‘Hold on. We’ll get him.’

Mitchell went to fetch him. By the time he returned, again overalled and masked, Mortensen had been thoroughly briefed. He confirmed to Cronkite that all pumping and drilling had stopped. Cronkite expressed his satisfaction and the radio link went dead. Mitchell removed the .38 from the base of Mortensen’s skull and two of Palermo’s men took him from the room. Mitchell took off his hood and Marina looked at him with a mixture of horror and incredulity.

She whispered: ‘You were ready to kill him.’

‘Not at all. I was going to pat him on the head and tell him what a good boy he was. I asked you to get off this rig.’

CHAPTER NINE

Lord Worth had barely begun to wipe his brow when two men hurried into the room. One was Palermo and the other was one of the rig crew, Simpson, whose duty it was to monitor the sensory instruments attached to the platform’s legs and the tensioning anchor cables. He was obviously in a state of considerable agitation.

Lord Worth said: ‘What fresh horror does fate hold in store for us now?’

‘Somebody below the rig, sir. My instruments have gone a bit haywire. Some object, something almost certainly metallic, sir, is in intermittent contact with the western leg.’

‘There can be no doubt about this?’ Simpson shook his head. ‘Seems damnably odd that Cronkite would try to bring down the Seawitch with his own men on board.’

Mitchell said ‘Maybe he doesn’t want to bring it down, just damage the leg enough to destroy the buoyancy in the leg and the adjacent members and to tilt the Seawitch so that the drill and the pumping mechanism are rendered useless Maybe anything. Or maybe he would be prepared to sacrifice his own men to get you.’ He turned to Palermo ‘I know you have scuba equipment aboard. Show me.’ They left.

Marina said: ‘I suppose he’s off to murder someone else. He’s not really human, is he?’

Lord Worth looked at her without enthusiasm. ‘If you call being inhuman wanting to see that you don’t die, then he’s inhuman. There’s only one person aboard this rig he really cares for and you damned well know it. I never thought. I’d be ashamed of a daughter of mine.’

Palermo had in fact, two trained scuba divers with him, but Mitchell chose only one to accompany him. Palermo was not a man to be easily impressed but he had seen enough of Mitchell not to question his judgment. In remarkably quick time Mitchell and the other man, who went by the name of Sawyers, were dressed in scuba outfits, and were equipped with reloadable compressed air harpoon guns and sheath knives. They were lowered to the water by the only available means in such a giant TLP–in a wire mesh cage attached to the boom of the derrick crane. Once at water level they opened the hinged door, dived and swam to the giant western leg.

Simpson had made no mistake. They were indeed at work down there, two of them, attached by airlines and cables to the shadowy outline of a vessel some twenty feet above them. Both wore powerful headlamps. They were energetically engaged in attaching limpet mines, conventional magnetic mines and wrap round rolls of beehive amatol to the enormous leg. They had enough explosives there, Mitchell figured, to bring down the Eiffel Tower. Maybe Cronkite did intend to destroy the leg. That Cronkite was unhinged seemed more probable than not.

The two saboteurs were not only energetically engaged in their task, they were so exclusively preoccupied with it that they quite failed to notice the stealthy approach of Mitchell and Sawyers. The two scuba divers pressed their masks together, looked into each other’s eyes–there was sufficient reflected light from the other divers to allow them to do this–and nodded simultaneously. Not being much given to squeamishness where potential killers were concerned, they harpooned the two saboteurs through their backs. In both cases death must have been instantaneous. Mitchell and Sawyers reloaded their compressed air harpoons then, for good measure, they sliced their two victims’ breathing tubes which, as was standard, also contained the communication wires.

On the Starlight Easton and his crew were instantly aware that something had gone drastically wrong. The dead men were pulled up, the harpoons still embedded in their backs, and as they were being hauled over the gunwales two of the crew cried out in agony: Mitchell and Sawyers had surfaced and picked off two more targets. Whether either had been mortally or grievously injured was impossible to say, but far more than enough had happened for Easton to take off at speed, this time on his much faster diesels: the engines were admittedly noisy but the darkness was so intense that only a near-miracle would have enabled the alerted gunners on the platform to obtain an accurate fix on them.

The two scuba divers, their own headlights now switched on, swam down to the spot where the mines and explosives had been attached to the legs. There were time fuses attached to both mines and explosives. Those they detached and let fall to the bottom of the ocean. For good measure they also removed the detonators. The explosives, now harmless, they unwound and let them follow the time fuses. The mines they prudently left where they were. Both men were explosives experts but not deep water explosives experts. Mines, as many ghosts can attest to, can be very tricky and unpredictable. They consist of, as the main charge, TNT, amatol or some such conventional explosive. In their central tube they have a primer, which may consist of one of a variety of slow-burning explosives, and fitted to the top of the primer is a travelling detonator, activated by sea pressure, which usually consists of seventy-seven grains of fulminate of mercury. Even with this detonator removed the primer can still detonate under immense pressure. Neither diver had any wish to blow up the pile-driven anchors or the tensioning cables attached to the anchors. Via the derrick crane they made their way back to the platform and reported to the radio room. They had to wait for some time before making their report, for Lord Worth was in a far from amicable telephone conversation with Cronikite. Marina sat apart, her hands clenched and her normally tanned face a greyish colour. She looked at Mitchell then averted her eyes as if she never wished to set eyes on him again which, at the moment, she probably didn’t.

Cronkite was furious. ‘You murderous bastard, Worth.’ He was clearly unaware that he was talking in the presence of ladies. ‘Three of my best men dead, all of them harpooned through the back.’ Involuntarily, Marina looked at Mitchell again. Mitchell had the impression that he was either a monster from outer space or from the nethermost depths: at any rate, a monster.

Lord Worth was no less furious. ‘It would be a pleasure to repeat the process–with you as the central figure this time.’

Cronkite choked, then said with what might have been truth: ‘My intention was just temporarily to incapacitate the Seawitch without harming anyone aboard. But if you want to play it rough you’ll have to find a new Seawitch in twenty-four hours. If, that is, you’re fortunate enough to survive the loss of the present Seawitch. I’m going to blast you out of the water.’

Lord Worth was calmer now. ‘It would be interesting to know how you’re going to achieve that My information is that your precious warships have been ordered back to base.’

‘There’s more than one way of blasting you out of the water.’ Cronkite sounded very sure of himself. ‘In the meantime, I’m going to off-load the Torbello’s oil, then sink it.’ In point of fact Cronkite had no intention of sinking the tanker: the Torbello was a Panamanian-registered tanker and Cronkite was not lacking in Panamanian friends: a tanker could be easily disposed of for a very considerable sum indeed. The conversation, if such an acrimonious exchange could be so called, ended abruptly.

Mitchell said: ‘One thing’s for sure. Cronkite is a fluent liar. He’s nowhere near Central America. Not with that kind of reception. And we heard him talking to his friend Durand. He had elected not to come on this helicopter flight–which lasted only fifteen minutes. He’s lurking somewhere just over the horizon.’

Lord Worth said: ‘How did things go down there?’

‘You heard from Cronkite. There was no trouble.’

‘Do you expect more?’

‘Yes. Cronkite sounds too damn confident for my liking.’

‘How do you think it’ll come?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. He might even try the game thing again.’

Lord Worth was incredulous. ‘After what happened to him?’

‘He may be relying on the unexpected. One thing I’m sure of. If he does try the same again he’ll use different tactics. I’m sure he won’t try an air or submarine approach, if for no other reason that he doesn’t–he can’t–have skilled men. So I don’t think you’ll require your radar or sonar watch-keepers tonight. Come to that, your radio operator may need a rest–after all, he’s got an alarm call-up in his cabin. I’d keep Simpson on duty, though. Just in case our friends try for one of the legs again.’

Palermo said: ‘But they’d be waiting this time. They’d be operating close to the surface. They’d have armed guards ready and waiting to protect the divers, maybe even infra-red search-lights that we couldn’t detect from the platform. You and Sawyers had luck the first time, and luck depends very much on the element of surprise: but there would be no luck this time, because there would be no surprise.’

‘We don’t need luck. Lord Worth wouldn’t have had all those depth-charges stolen and brought aboard unless one of your men is an expert in depth-charges. You have such a man?’

‘Yes.’ Palermo eyed him speculatively. ‘Cronin. Ex-petty officer. Why?’

‘He could arrange the detonator setting so that the depth-charge would explode immediately or soon after hitting the water?’

‘I should imagine so. Again, why?’

‘We trundle three depth-charges along the platform to within, say, twenty-five yards of each of the legs. Your friend Cronin could advise us on this. My distance could be wrong. If Simpson detects anything on his sensors we just push one of the depth-charges over the side. The blast effect could or should have no effect on the leg concerned. I doubt if the boat with the divers would receive anything more than a severe shaking. But for divers in the water the concussive shock effects could hardly fail to be fatal.’

Palermo looked at him with cold, appraising eyes. ‘For a man supposed to be on the side of the law, you, Mitchell, are the most cold-blooded bastard I’ve ever met.’

‘If you want to die just say so. I should imagine you’d find conditions a bit uncomfortable nine hundred feet down in the Gulf. I suggest you get Cronin and a couple of your men and arrange the charges accordingly.’

Mitchell went to watch Palermo, Cronin and two of their men at work. Cronin had agreed with Mitchell’s estimate of placing the depth-charges twenty-five yards from the legs. As he stood there Marina came up to him.

She said: ‘More men are going to die, aren’t they, Michael?’

‘I hope not.’

‘But you are getting ready to kill, aren’t you?’

‘I’m getting ready to survive. I’m getting ready for all of us to survive.’

She took his arm. ‘Do you like killing?’

‘No.’

‘Then how come you’re so good at it?’

‘Somebody has to be.’

‘For the good of mankind, I suppose?’

‘You don’t have to talk to me.’ He paused and went on slowly. ‘Cops kill. Soldiers kill. Airmen kill. They don’t have to like it. In the First World War a fellow called Marshal Foch became the most decorated soldier of the war for being responsible for the deaths of a million men. The fact that most of them were his own men would appear to be beside the point. I don’t hunt, I don’t shoot game, I don’t even fish. I mean, I like lamb as much as the next man but I wouldn’t put a hook in its throat and drag it around a field for half an hour before it dies from agony and exhaustion. All I do is exterminate vermin. To me, all crooks, armed or not, are vermin.’

‘That’s why you and John got fired from the police?’

‘I have to tell you that?’

‘Ever killed what you, what I, would call a good person?’

‘No. But unless you shut up–’

‘In spite of everything, I think I might still marry you.’

‘I’ve never asked you.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

Mitchell sighed, then smiled. ‘Lady Marina Worth, would you do me the honour–’

Behind them, Lord Worth coughed. Marina swung round, the expression on her face indicating that only her aristocratic upbringing was preventing her from stamping her foot. ‘Daddy, you have a genius for turning up at the wrong moment.’

Lord Worth was mild. ‘The right moment I would have said. My unreserved congratulations.’ He looked at Mitchell. ‘Well, you certainly took your time about it. Everything ship-shape and secured for the night?’

‘As far as I can guess at what goes on in Cronkite’s devious mind.’

‘My confidence in you, my boy, is total. Well, it’s bed for me–I feel, perhaps not unaccountably, extremely tired.’

Marina said: ‘Me, too. Well, good night, fiancé.’ She kissed him lightly and left with her father.

For once Lord Worth’s confidence in Mitchell was slightly misplaced. He had made a mistake, though a completely unwitting one, in sending the radio officer off duty. For had that officer remained on duty he would undoubtedly have picked up the news flash about the theft of the nuclear weapons from the Netley Rowan Armory: Mitchell could not have failed to put two and two together.

During the third hour of Lord Worth’s conscience-untroubled sleep Mulhooney had been extremely active. He had discharged his 50,000 tons of oil and taken the Torbello well out to sea, far over the horizon. He returned an hour later with two companions and the ship’s only motorized lifeboat with the sad news that, in the sinking of the tanker, a shattering explosion had occurred which had decimated his crew. They three were the only survivors. The ‘decimated crew’ were, at that moment, taking the Torbello south to Panama. The official condolences were widespread, apparently sincere and wholly hypocritical: when a tanker blows up its motorized lifeboat does not survive intact. The republic had no diplomatic relation with the United State and the only things they would cheerfully have extradited to that country were cholera and the bubonic plague. A private jet awaited the three at the tiny airport. Passports duly stamped Mulhooney and his friends took out a flight plan for Guatemala.

Some hour later they arrived at the Houston International Airport. With much of the remaining ten million dollars still remaining at his disposal, Cronkite was not the man to worry about incidental expenses. Mulhooney and his friends immediately hired a long-range helicopter and set out for the Gulf.

In the fourth hour of his sleep, which had remained undisturbed by the sound of a considerable underwater explosion, Lord Worth was unpleasantly awakened by a call from a seethingly mad Cronkite who accused him of killing two more of his men and that he, Cronkite, was going to exact a fearful vengeance. Lord Worth hung up without bothering to reply, sent for Mitchell and learned that Cronkite had indeed made another attempt to sabotage the western leg. The depth-charge had apparently done everything that had been expected of it, for their search-lights had picked up the bodies of two divers floating on the surface. The craft that had been carrying them could not have been seriously damaged, for they had heard the sound of its diesels starting up. Instead of making a straight escape, it had disappeared under the rig and by the time they had reached the other tide it had so vanished into the darkness and rain that they had been unable to pick it up. Lord Worth smiled happily and went back to sleep.

In the fifth hour of his sleep he would not have been smiling quite so happily if he had been aware of certain strange activities that were taking place in a remote Louisiana motel, one exclusively owned and managed by Lord Worth himself. Here it was that the Seawitch’s relief crew spent their weekly vacation in the strictest seclusion. In addition to abundant food, drink, films, TV and a high-class bordello that might have been run by Sally Stanford herself in her hey-day, it offered every amenity for which off-duty oil rig men could ever have wished. ’Not that any of them wished to step outside the compound gates: when nine out of ten men are wanted by the law, total privacy is a paramount requirement.

The intruders, some twenty in all, arrived in the middle of the night. They were led by a man–a humanoid would have been a better term for him–called Gregson: of all Cronkite’s associates he was by far the most dangerous and lethal and was possessed of the morality and instincts of a fer-de-lance with toothache. The staff were all asleep and were chloroformed before they had any opportunity of regaining consciousness.

The rig relief crew, also, were all asleep but in a somewhat different fashion and for quite different reasons. Liquor is forbidden on oil rigs and the relief crews on their last night before returning to duty generally made the best of their last chance. Their dormant states ranged from the merely befuddled to the paralytic. The rounding up of them, most of whom, once afoot, remained still asleep on their feet, took no more than five minutes. The only two relatively sober members of the relief crew made to offer some show of resistance. Gregson, with a silenced Biretta, gunned them down as if they had been wild dogs.

The captives were pushed inside a completely standard, albeit temporarily purloined, removal van and transported to an abandoned and very isolated warehouse on the outskirts of town. To say the least it was somewhat less than salubrious, but perfectly fitted for Gregson’s purpose. The prisoners were neither bound nor gagged, which would have been pointless in the presence of two armed guards who carried the customary intimidating machine-carbines. In fact the carbines were also superfluous: the besotted captives had already drifted off into a dreamless slumber.

It was in the sixth hour of Lord Worth’s equally dreamless slumber that Gregson and his men lifted off in one of Lord Worth’s helicopters. The two pilots had been reluctant to accept them as passengers but Schmeissers are powerful persuasive agents.

It was in the seventh hour of Lord Worth’s slumber that Mulhooney and his two colleagues touched down on the empty helipad of the Georgia. As Cronkite’s own helicopter was temporarily marooned on the Seawitch he had no compunction in impounding both the helicopter and its hapless pilot.

At almost exactly the same moment another helicopter touched down on the Seawitch and a solitary passenger and pilot emerged. The passenger was Dr Greenshaw, and he looked, and was, a very tired, elderly man. He went straight to the sickbay and, without as much as trying to remove his clothes, lay down on one of the cots and composed himself for sleep. He should, he supposed, have reported to Lord Worth that his daughter Melinda and John Roomer were in good hands and in good shape: but good news could wait.

On the eighth hour, with the dawn in the sky, Lord Worth, a man who enjoyed his sleep, awoke, stretched himself luxuriously, pulled on his splendidly embroidered dressing-gown and strolled out on to the platform. The rain had stopped, the sun was tipping the horizon and there was every promise of a beautiful day to come. Privately congratulating himself on his prescience that no trouble would occur during the night, he retired to his quarters to perform his customary and leisurely morning ablutions.

Lord Worth’s self-congratulation on his prescience was entirely premature. Fifteen minutes earlier the radio operator, newly returned to duty, had picked up a news broadcast that he didn’t like at all and gone straight to Mitchell’s room. Like every man on board, even including Larsen and Palermo, he knew that the man to contact in an emergency was Mitchell: the thought of alerting Lord Worth never entered his head.

He found Mitchell shaving. Mitchell looked tired, less than surprising as he had spent most of the night awake. Mitchell said: ‘No more trouble, I hope?’

‘I don’t know.’ He handed Mitchell a strip of teletype. It read: ‘Two tactical nuclear weapons stolen from the Netley Rowan Armoury yesterday afternoon. Intelligence suspects they are being flown or helicoptered south over Gulf of Mexico to an unknown destination. A world-wide alert has been issued. Anyone able to provide information should–’

‘Jesus! Get hold of this armoury any way you can. Use Lord Worth’s name. With you in a minute.’

Mitchell was with him in half a minute. The operator said: ‘I’m through already. Not much cooperation, though.’

‘Give me that phone. Hello? My name’s Mitchell. Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Colonel Pryce.’ The tone wasn’t exactly distant, just a senior officer talking to a civilian.

‘I work for Lord Worth. You can check that with the Lauderdale Police, the Pentagon or the Secretary of State.’ He said to the operator, but loudly enough that Pryce could hear: ‘Get Lord Worth here. I don’t care if he is in his bloody bath, just get him here now. Colonel Pryce, an officer of your standing should know that Lord Worth’s daughters have been kidnapped. I have been engaged to recover them and this I have done. More importantly, this oil rig, the Seawitch, is under threat of destruction. Two attempts have already been made. They were unsuccessful. Further questioning of the Pentagon will confirm that they have stopped three foreign warships headed here for the purpose of destroying the Seawitch. I want information about those tactical weapons and I must warn you that Lord Worth will interpret any failure to provide this information as a gross dereliction of duty. And you know the immense power Lord Worth has.’

There was a far from subtle change in Colonel Pryce’s tone. ‘It’s quite unnecessary to threaten me.’

‘One moment. Lord Worth’s just arrived.’ Mitchell gave a brief résumé of what he had said, making sure that Pryce could hear every word that was spoken.

‘Nuclear bloody bombs! That’s why Cronkite said he could blast us out of the water!’ Lord Worth snatched the phone from Mitchell. ‘Lord Worth here. I have a hot line to the Secretary of State, Dr Belton. I could catch him in fifteen seconds. Want I should do that?’

‘That will not be necessary, Lord Worth.’

‘Then give us a detailed description of those damned evil things and tell us how they work.’

Pryce, almost eagerly, gave the description. It was almost precisely similar to the one that Captain Martin had given to the bogus Colonel Farquharson. ‘But Martin was a new officer and shaky on his details. The nuclear devices you–can hardly call them bombs–are probably twice as effective as he said. They took the wrong type–those devices have no black button to shut off in an emergency. And they have a ninety-minute setting, not sixty. And they can be radio activated.’

‘Something complicated? I mean, a VHF number or something of the kind?’

‘Something very uncomplicated. You can’t expect a soldier in the heat of battle to remember abstruse numbers. It’s simply a pear-shaped device with a plastic seal. Strip that off and turn a black switch through three hundred and sixty degrees. It is important to remember that turning this switch off will de-activate the detonating mechanism in the nuclear device. It can be turned on again at any time.’

‘If it should be used against us? We have a huge oil storage tank nearby. Wouldn’t this cause a massive oil slick?’

‘My dear fellow, oil is by nature combustible and much more easily vaporized than steel.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Seems to be you want a squadron of supersonic fighter-bombers out there. But I’ll have to get Pentagon permission first.’

‘Thank you again.’

Lord Worth and Mitchell left for the former’s quarters. Lord Worth said: ‘Two things. We’re only assuming, although it would be dangerous not to assume, that those damned things are meant for us. Besides, if we keep our radar, sonar and sensory posts manned I don’t see how Cronkite could approach and deliver those damned things.’

‘It’s difficult to see how. But then it’s difficult to figure out that devious devil’s cast of mind.’

From Lord Worth’s helicopter Gregson made contact with the Georgia. ‘We’re fifteen miles out.’

Cronkite himself replied. ‘We’ll be airborne in ten.’

A wall radio crackled in Lord Worth’s room. ‘Helicopters approaching from the north-east.’

‘No worry. Relief crew.’

Lord Worth had gone back to his shower when the relief helicopter touched down. Mitchell was in his laboratory, looking very professional in his white coat and glasses. Dr Greenshaw was still asleep.

Apart from gagging and manacling the pilots, the helicopter passengers offered them no violence. They disembarked in quiet and orderly fashion. The drill duty crew observed their arrival without any particular interest. They had been well trained to mind their own business and had highly personal reasons for not fraternizing with unknowns. And the new arrivals were unknowns. Off the coast Lord Worth owned no fewer than nine oil rigs–all legally leased and paid for–and, for reasons best known to his devious self, was in the habit of regularly rotating his drill crews. The new arrivals carried the standard shoulder-slung clothes-bags. Those bags did indeed contain a minimal amount of clothes, but not clothing designed to be worn: the clothes were there merely to conceal and muffle the shape of the machine-pistols and other more deadly weapons inside the bags.

Thanks to the instructions he had received from Cronkite via Durand, Gregson knew exactly where to go. He noted the presence of two idly patrolling guards and marked them down for death.

He led his men to the Oriental quarters where they placed their bags on the platform and unzipped them. Windows were smashed and what followed was sheer savage massacre. Within half a dozen seconds of machine-gun fire, bazooka fire and incinerating flame-throwers, all of which had been preceded by a flurry of tear-gas bombs, all screaming inside had ceased. The two advancing guards were mown down even as they drew their guns. The only survivor was Larsen, who had been in his own private room in the back: Palermo and all his men were dead.

Four people appeared almost at the same instant from the quarters at the end of the block. Soundproofed though those quarters were, the noise outside had been too penetrating not to be heard. There were four of them, two men in white coats, a man in a Japanese kimono and a black-haired guard in a wrap. One of Gregson’s men fired twice at the nearest white-coated figure and Mitchell staggered and fell backwards to the deck. Gregson brutally smashed the wrist of the man who had fired, who screamed in agony as the gun fell from his shattered hand.

‘You bastard idiot!’ Gregson’s voice was as vicious as his appearance. The hard men only, Mr Cronkite said.’

Gregson was nothing if not organized. He detailed five groups of two men. One group herded the drilling rig crew into the Oriental quarters. The second, third and fourth went respectively to the sensory room, the sonar room and the radar room. There they tied up but did not otherwise harm the operators, before they riddled all the equipment with a burst of machine-gun bullets. For all practical purposes the Seawitch was now blind, deaf and benumbed. The fifth group went to the radio room, where the operator was tied up but his equipment left intact.

Dr Greenshaw approached Gregson. ‘You are the leader?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m a doctor.’ He nodded to Mitchell, whose white coat accentuated his blood and who was rolling about in a convincing manner, Marina bending over him with bitter tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘He’s hurt bad. Can I take him into the sickbay and patch him up?’

‘We have no quarrel with you,’ Gregson said, which was, unwittingly, the most foolish remark he’d ever made in his life.

Dr Greenshaw helped the weak and staggering Mitchell into the sickbay where, the door closed behind him, he made an immediate and remarkable recovery. Marina stared at him in astonishment, then in something approaching anger.

‘Why you deceiving, double-crossing–’

‘That’s no way to talk to a sick man.’ He was pulling off his white coat, jacket and shirt. ‘Never seen you cry before. Makes you look even more beautiful. And that’s real blood.’ He turned to Dr Greenshaw. ‘Superficial wound on the left shoulder, a scratch on the right forearm. Dead-eyed Dick himself. Now make a real good job on me, Doc. Right forearm bandaged from elbow to wrist. Left arm bandaged from shoulder to above the elbow with a lovely big sling. Marina, even ravishing beauties like you carry talcum powder. I hope you’re no exception.’

Not yet mollified, she said stiffly: ‘I have some. Baby powder,’ she added nastily.

‘Get it, please.’

Five minutes later Mitchell had been rendered into the epitome of the walking wounded. His right arm was heavily bandaged and his left arm was swathed in white from shoulder to wrist. The sling was nothing short of voluminous. His face was very pale indeed. He left for his room and returned a few seconds later.

‘Where have you been?’ Marina asked suspiciously.

He reached inside the depths of the sling and pulled out his silenced .38. ‘Fully loaded.’ He returned it to its hiding place where it was quite invisible.

‘Never give up, do you?’ Her voice held a curious mixture of awe and bitterness.

‘Not when I’m about to be vaporized.’

Dr Greenshaw stared at him. ‘What in God’s name do you mean?’

‘Our good friend Cronkite has pinched a couple of tactical nuclear weapons. He intends to finish off the Seawitch in a style of befitting splendour. He should be here about now. Now, Doc, I would like you to do something for me. Take the biggest medical bag you have and tell Gregson that it is your humanitarian duty to go inside that shambles that used to be the Oriental quarters to succour any that may be dying or, if necessary, to put them out of their agony. They have, I know, a respectable supply of hand-grenades in there. I’d like some.’

‘No sooner said than done. God, you look awful. Destroys my faith in myself as a doctor.’

They went outside. Cronkite’s helicopter was indeed just touching down. Cronkite himself was the first out, followed by Mulhooney, the three bogus officers who had stolen the nuclear weapons, the commandeered pilot and lastly Easton. Easton was the unknown quantity. Mitchell did not appreciate it at the time but Easton’s Starlight had been so badly damaged by the depth-charge that it was no longer serviceable. Less than four miles away what appeared to be a coastguard cutter was heading straight for the Seawitch. It required no guessing to realize that this was the missing Hammond, the infamous Questar, the present Georgia.

Dr Greenshaw approached Gregson. ‘Mind if I have a look at the little you’ve left of those quarters? Maybe there’s someone still alive in there: more likely there’s someone who requires a little kindly euthanasia.’

Gregson pointed to an iron door. ‘I’m more interested in who’s in there. Spicer–’ this to one of his men–‘a bazooka shot at that lock.’

‘That’s hardly necessary,’ Greenshaw said mildly. ‘A knock from me is all that is required. That’s Commander Larsen, the boss of the oil rig. He’s no enemy of yours. He just sleeps here because he likes his privacy.’ Dr Greenshaw knocked. ‘Commander Larsen. It’s okay. It’s me, Greenshaw. Come on out. If you don’t their are some people who are going to blast your door down and you with it. Come on, man. I’m not saying this under duress.’

There was the turning of a heavy key and Larsen emerged He looked dazed, almost shell-shocked, as well he might. He said: ‘What the hell goes on?’

‘You’ve been taken over, friend,’ Gregson said. Larsen was dressed, Greenshaw was pleased to note, in a voluminous lumber-jacket, zipped around the waist. ‘Search him.’ They searched and round nothing.

‘Where’s Scoffield?’ Larsen said.

Greenshaw said: ‘In the other quarters. He should be okay.’

‘Palermo?’

‘Dead And all his men. At least I think so. I’m just going to have a look-see.’ Stooping his shoulders to look more nearly eighty than his seventy years, Dr Greenshaw shambled along the shattered corridor, but he could have saved himself the trouble of acting. Gregson had just met Cronkite outside the doorway and the two men were talking in animated and clearly self-congratulatory terms.

After the first few steps Greenshaw realized that there could be nobody left alive in that charnel-house. Those who were dead were very dead indeed, most of them destroyed beyond recognition, either by machine-gun fire, shattered by bazookas or shrivelled by the flame throwers. But he did find the primary reason for his visit there–a box of hand-grenades in prime condition and a couple of Schmeisser sub-automatics, fully loaded. A few of the grenades he stuffed into the bottom of his medical bag. He peered out of one of the shattered windows at the back and found the area below in deep shadow. He carefully lowered some grenades to the platform and laid the two Schmeissers beside them. Then he made his way outside again.

It was apparent that Cronkite and Lord Worth had already met, although the meeting could not have been a normal one. Lord Worth was lying apparently senseless on his back, blood flowing from smashed lips and apparently broken nose, while both cheek were badly bruised. Marina was bending over him dabbing at his wounds with a flimsy handkerchief. Cronkite, his face unmarked but his knuckles bleeding, had apparently for the moment at least, lost interest in Lord Worth, no doubt waiting until Lord Worth had regained full consciousness before starting in on him again.

Lord Worth whispered between smashed lips: ‘Sorry, my darling, sorry, my beloved. My fault and all my fault. The end of the road.’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was as low as his own, but strangely there were no tears in her eyes. ‘But not for us. Not while Michael is alive.’

Lord Worth looked at Michael through rapidly closing eyes. ‘What can a cripple like that do?’

She said with low but utter conviction: ‘He’ll kill Cronkite and all his evil friends.’

He tried to smile but his smashed lips wouldn’t let him. ‘I thought you hated killing.’

‘Not vermin. Not people who do things like this to my dad.’

Mitchell spoke quietly to Dr Greenshaw, then both men approached Cronkite and Gregson, who broke off what appeared to be either a discussion or an argument. Dr Greenshaw said: ‘I’m afraid you’ve done your damn murderous work all too well, Gregson. There’s not a soul in there even recognizable as a human being.’

Cronkite said: ‘Who’s he?’

‘A doctor.’

Cronkite looked at Mitchell, who was looking worse by the minute. ‘And this?’

‘A scientist. Shot by mistake.’

‘He’s in great pain,’ Greenshaw said. ‘I’ve no X-ray equipment but I suspect the arm’s broken just below the shoulder.’

Cronkite was almost jovial, the joviality of a man now almost detached from reality. ‘An hour from now he won’t be feeling a thing.’

Greenshaw said wearily: ‘I don’t know what you mean. I just want to take him to the sickbay and give him a pain-killing injection.’

‘Certainly. I’d like everyone to be fully prepared for what’s about to happen to him.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Later, later.’

Greenshaw and the unsteady Mitchell moved off. They reached the sickbay, passed inside, went through the opposite side and made their unobserved way to the radio room. Greenshaw stood guard just inside the door while Mitchell, ignoring the bound operator, went straight to the transceiver. He raised the Roamer inside twenty seconds,

‘Captain Conde, please.’

‘Speaking.’

‘Next circuit out to the oil tank get round behind it then head south at full speed. The Seawitch has been taken over but I’m certain there’s nobody here who can operate the anti-aircraft guns. Stop at twenty miles and issue a general warning to all ships and aircraft not to approach within twenty miles of the Seawitch. You have its co-ordinates?’

‘Yes. But why–’

‘Because there’s going to be a mighty big bang. Christ’s sake, don’t argue.’

‘Don’t argue about what?’ a voice behind Mitchell said.

Mitchell turned round slowly. The man behind the pistol was smiling a smile that somehow lacked a genuine warmth. Greenshaw had been pushed to one side and the gun moved in a slow arc covering them both. ‘I’ve a feeling that Gregson would like to see you both.’

Mitchell rose, turned, half-staggered and clutched his left forearm inside the sling Greenshaw said sharply: ‘God’s sake, man, can’t you see he’s ill?’

The man glanced at Greenshaw for a second but a second was all that Mitchell would ever require. The bullet from the silenced .38 took him through the heart. Mitchell peered through the doorway. There was a fair degree of shadow there, no one in sight and the edge of the platform not more than twenty feet away. A few seconds later the dead man vanished over the edge. Mitchell and Greenshaw returned to the main body of the company via the sickbay. Cronkite and Gregson were still deep in discussion. Larsen stood some distance apart, apparently in a state of profound dejection. Greenshaw approached him and said quietly: ‘How do you feel?’

‘How would you feel if you knew they intended to kill us all?’

‘You’ll feel better by and by. Round the back of the building, when you get the chance, you’ll find some hand-grenades which should rest comfortably inside that lumber-jacket of yours. You’ll also find two loaded Schmeissers. I have a few grenades in my medical bag here. And Mitchell has his silenced .38 inside his sling.’

Larsen took care not to show his feelings. He looked as morose as ever. All he said was: ‘Boy, oh boy, oh boy.’

Lord Worth was on his feet now, supported by his daughter. Mitchell joined them. ‘How do you feel, sir?’

Lord Worth spoke or rather mouthed his words with understandable bitterness. ‘I’m in great shape.’

‘You’ll feel better soon.’ He lowered his voice and spoke to Marina. ‘When I give the word, say you want to go to the ladies’ room. But don’t go there. Go to the generator room. You’ll see a red lever there marked ‘Deck Light”. Pull it down. After you count twenty put it on again.’

Cronkite and Gregson appeared to have finished their discussion. From Cronkite’s smile it appeared that his view had prevailed. Lord Worth, Marina, Larsen, Greenshaw and Mitchell stood together, a forlorn and huddled group. Facing them were the serried ranks of Cronkite, Mulhooney, Easton, the bogus Golonel Farquharson, Lieutenant-Colonel Dewings, Major Breckley, Gregson and all his killers, a most formidable group and armed to the teeth.

Cronkite spoke to a man by his side. ‘Check.’

The man lifted a walkie-talkie, spoke into it and nodded. He said to Cronkite: ‘Charges secured in position.’

‘Excellent. Tell them to steam due north for twenty miles and remain there.’ This was done. Unfortunately for Cronkite, his view to the west was blocked by the shattered building behind him and he could not see that the Roamer was already steaming steadily to the south. Even had he had a clear view it would hardly have mattered: Conde had prudently extinguished every light aboard the Roamer.

Cronkite smiled. ‘Well, Lord Worth, it’s the end of the road for both you and the Seawitch. Even a billionaire can step out of his class. I have two nuclear devices attached to the western leg of the Seawitch.’ He dug into a pocket and produced a black pear-shaped metal container. ‘The radioactive detonating device. You will not fail to observe this small switch here. It’s supposed to be good for ninety minutes, but I have already run off forty minutes of it. Fifty more minutes and poof! the Seawitch, you, Lord Worth, and everyone aboard will be vaporized. Nobody will feel a thing, I assure you.’

‘You mean you intend to kill all my innocent employees aboard the rig? Your mind, Cronkite, has totally gone. You are stark raving mad.’

‘Never saner. Can’t have any witnesses left who can identify us. Then we destroy two of the helicopters, immobilize your derrick crane, smash your radio room and take off in the other two helicopters. You may, of course, contemplate jumping into the Gulf, but your chances of survival would be about the same as a suicide jumping off the Golden Gate bridge.’

Mitchell nudged Marina. She said in a faint voice: ‘May I go to the ladies’ room?’

Cronkite was joviality itself. ‘Certainly. But be quick about it.’

Fifteen seconds later the deck lights went out.

It was Mitchell, with his unique capacity to see in the dark, who ran round the corner of the battered building, retrieved the two Schmeissers–he didn’t bother about the grenades–returned and thrust one into Larsen’s hands. Twelve seconds had elapsed but in eight seconds two men with sub-machine-guns can achieve an extraordinary amount of carnage. Larsen was firing blind but Mitchell could see and pick out his targets They were helped, in a most haphazard fashion, by Dr Greenshaw who flung grenades at random inflicting even more damage on the already shattered building but not actually injuring anyone.

The lights came on again.

There were still seven people left alive–Cronkite. Mulhooney, Easton, Gregson and three of his men. To those seven Mitchell said: ‘Lay down your arms.’ Shattered and stunned though the survivors were, they still had enough of their wits to comply at once.

Marina arrived back and was promptly sick in a very unladylike fashion.

Mitchell put down his Schmeisser and advanced on Cronkite. ‘Give me that detonating device.’

Cronkite removed it slowly from his pocket, suddenly turned the switch and lifted his arm preparatory to throwing it over the side. Whatever else, it would have meant the destruction of the Seawitch. Cronkite screamed in agony as the bullet from the silenced .38 shattered his right elbow. Mitchell caught the detonating device even before it could reach the deck.

He said to Larsen: ‘Are there two absolutely secure places with no windows and iron doors which can be securely locked without any possibility of opening them from the inside?’

‘Just two. Safe as the Fort Knox vaults. Along here.’

‘Search them and search them thoroughly. Make sure they haven’t even a penknife.’

Larsen searched. ‘Not even a penknife.’ He led them to a steel-reinforced cell-like structure, and he and Mitchell ushered them inside.

In spite of his agony Cronkite said: ‘You’re not going to leave us in here, for God’s sake!’

‘Just as you were going to leave us.’ Mitchell paused then added soothingly: ‘As you said, you won’t feel a thing.’ He closed the door, double-locked it and put the key in his pocket. He said to Larsen: ‘The other cell?’

‘Along here.’

‘This is madness!’ Lord Worth’s voice was almost a shout. ‘The Seawitch is safe now. Why in God’s name destroy it?’

Mitchell ignored him. He glanced at the timing device on the detonator. ‘Twenty-nine minutes to go. We’d better move.’ He placed the device on the floor of the cell, locked the door and sent the key spinning far out over the Gulf. ‘Get the men out of the Oriental buildings, free the men in the sensory, radar, sonar and radio rooms and make sure that all the helicopter pilots are safe.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Twenty-five minutes.’

Everyone moved with astounding alacrity except for Lord Worth, who just stood around with a stunned look on his face. Larsen said: ‘Is there a need for all this mad rush?’

Mitchell said mildly: ‘How do we know that the settings on that detonator are accurate?’

The mad rush redoubled itself. Thirteen minutes before the deadline the last of the helicopters took off and headed south. The first to land on the Roamer’s helipad held Mitchell, Larsen, Lord Worth and his daughter, in addition to the doctor and several rig men, while the other helicopter still hovered overhead. They were still only about fourteen miles south of the Seawitch, which was as far as the Roamer had succeeded in getting in that time, but Mitchell reckoned the margin of safety more than sufficient. He spoke to Conde who assured him that every vessel and aircraft had been warned to keep as far away as possible from the danger area.

When the Seawitch blew up, dead on schedule, it did so with a spectacular effect that would have satisfied even the most ghoulish. There was even a miniature mushroom cloud such as the public had become accustomed to in the photographs of detonating regular megaton atom bombs. Seventeen seconds later those in the Roamer heard the thunderclap of sound and shortly afterwards a series of miniature but harmless tidal waves rocked, but did not unduly disturb the Roamer. After Mitchell had told Conde to broadcast the news to all aircraft and shipping he turned to find a stony-faced Marina confronting him.

‘Well, you’ve lost Daddy his Seawitch. I do hope you’re satisfied with yourself.’

‘My, my, how bitter we are. Yes, quite a satisfactory job, even if I have to say it myself, for obviously no one else is going to.’

‘Why? Why? Why?’

‘Every man who died there was a murderer, some mass murderers. They might have escaped to countries with no extradition treaties with the States. Even if caught their cases might have dragged on for years. Proof would have been very difficult to obtain. And, of course, parole after a few years. This way, we know they’ll never kill again.’

‘And it was worth it to lose Daddy’s pride and joy?’

‘Listen, stupid. My father-in-law-to-be is–’

‘That he’ll never be.’

‘So okay. That old geezer is almost as big a crook as any of them. He associated with and hired for lethal purposes known and convicted criminals. He broke into two federal armouries and mounted the equipment on the Seawitch. Had the Seawitch survived, federal investigators would have been aboard within the hour. He’d have got at least fifteen to twenty years in prison, and he’d probably have died in prison.’ Her eyes were wide, partly with fear, partly with understanding. ‘But now every last tiny shred of evidence lies vaporized at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. A little in radiation clouds, maybe, but that’s not the point. Nothing can ever be traced against him.’

‘That’s really why you vaporized the Seawitch?’

‘Why should I admit anything to an ex-fiancée?’

‘Mrs Michael Mitchell,’ she mused. ‘I suppose I could go through life with a worse name.’

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a schoolmaster. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

1

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1977 under the pseudonym ‘Ian Stuart’ then in paperback by Fontana 1979

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1977

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © 1977 ISBN: 9780007289424

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Athabasca

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Map

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

This book is not primarily about oil, but is based on oil and the means whereby oil is recovered from the earth, so it may be of some interest and help to look briefly at these phenomena.

What oil is, and how it is formed in the first place, no one quite seems to know. The technical books and treatises on this subject are legion—I am aware that, personally, I haven’t seen a fraction of them—and they are largely, so I am assured, in close agreement—except when they come to what one would have thought was a point of considerable interest: how, precisely, does oil become oil? There appear to be as many divergent theories about this as there are about the origins of life. Confronted with complexities, the well-advised layman takes refuge in over-simplification—which is what I now do, as I can do no other.

Only two elements were needed for the formation of oil—rock, and the incredibly abundant plants and primitive living organisms that teemed in rivers, lakes and seas as far back as perhaps a billion years ago. Hence the term fossil fuels.

The Biblical references to the rock of ages give rise to misconceptions about the nature and permanency of rock. Rock—the material of which the earth’s crust is made—is neither eternal nor indestructible. Nor is it even unchanging. On the contrary, it is in a state of constant change, movement and flux, and it is salutary to remind ourselves that there was a time when no rock existed. Even today there is a singular lack of agreement among geologists, geo-physicists and astronomers as to how the earth came into being; but there is a measure of agreement that there was a primary incandescent and gaseous state, followed by a molten state, neither of which was conducive to the formation of anything, rock included. It is erroneous to suppose that rock has been, is and ever shall be.

Yet we are not concerned here with the ultimate origins of rock, but rock as we have it today. It is, admittedly, difficult to observe this process of flux, because a minor change may take ten million years, a major change a hundred million.

Rock is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt. In the destructive process weather is the main factor; in the rebuilding, the force of gravity.

Five main weather elements act upon rock. Frost and ice fracture rock. It can be gradually eroded by airborne dust. The action of the seas, whether through the constant movement of waves and tides or the pounding of heavy storm waves, remorselessly wears away the coastlines. Rivers are immensely powerful destructive agencies—one has but to look at the Grand Canyon to appreciate their enormous power; and such rocks as escape all these influences are worn away over the aeons by the effect of rain.

Whatever the cause of erosion, the end result is the same: the rock is reduced to its tiniest possible constituents—rock particles or, simply, dust. Rain and melting snow carry this dust down to the tiniest rivulets and the mightiest rivers, which in turn transport it to lakes, inland seas and the coastal regions of the oceans. Dust, however fine and powdery, is still heavier than water, and whenever the water becomes sufficiently still, it will gradually sink to the bottom, not only in lakes and seas but also in the sluggish lower reaches of rivers and, where flood conditions exist, inland in the form of silt.

And so, over unimaginably long reaches of time, whole mountain ranges are carried down to the seas and in the process, through the effects of gravity, new rock is born as layer after layer of dust accumulates on the bottom, building up to a depth of ten, a hundred, perhaps even a thousand feet, the lowermost layers being gradually compacted by the immense and steadily-increasing pressures from above, until the particles fuse together and re-form as new rock.

It is in the intermediate and final processes of this new rock formation that oil comes into being. Those lakes and seas of hundreds of millions of years ago were almost choked by water plants and the most primitive forms of aquatic life. On dying, they sank to the bottom of the lakes and seas along with the settling dust particles and were gradually buried deep under the endless layers of more dust and more aquatic and plant life that slowly accumulated above them. The passing of millions of years and the steadily increasing pressures from above gradually changed the decayed vegetation and dead aquatic life into oil.

Described thus simply and quickly, the process sounds reasonable enough. But this is where the grey and disputatious area arises. The conditions necessary for the formation of oil are known: the cause of the metamorphosis is not. It seems probable that some form of chemical catalyst is involved, but this catalyst has not been isolated. The first purely synthetic oil, as distinct from secondary synthetic oils such as those derived from coal, has yet to be produced. We just have to accept that oil is oil, that it is there, bound up in rock strata in fairly well-defined areas throughout the world but always on the sites of ancient seas and lakes, some of which are now continental land, some buried deep under the encroachment of new oceans.

Had the oil remained intermingled with those deeply-buried rock strata, and were the earth a stable place, that oil would have been irrecoverable. But our planet is a highly unstable place. There is no such thing as a stable continent securely anchored to the core of the earth. The continents rest on the so-called tectonic plates which, in turn, float on the molten magma below, with neither anchor nor rudder, free to wander in whichever haphazard fashion they will. This they unquestionably do: they are much given to banging into each other, grinding alongside each other, overriding or dipping under each other in a wholly unpredictable fashion and, in general, resembling rocks in the demonstration of their fundamental instability. As this banging and clashing takes place over periods of tens or hundreds of millions of years, it is not readily apparent to us except in the form of earthquakes, which generally occur where two tectonic plates are in contention.

The collision of two such plates engenders incredible pressures, and two of the effects of such pressures are of particular concern here. In the first place the huge compressive forces involved tend to squeeze the oil from the rock strata in which it is embedded and to disperse it in whichever direction the pressure permits—up, down or sideways. Secondly, a collision buckles or folds the rock strata themselves, the upper strata being forced upwards to form mountain ranges—the northern movement of the Indian tectonic plate created the Himalayas—and the lower strata buckling to create what are virtually subterranean mountains, folding the layered strata into massive domes and arches.

It is at this point, insofar as oil recovery is concerned, that the nature of the rocks themselves becomes of importance. The rock can be porous or non-porous, the porous rock—such as gypsum—permitting liquids, such as oil, to pass through them, while the non-porous—such as granite—does not. In the case of porous rock the oil, influenced by those compressive forces, will seep upwards through the rock until the distributive pressure eases, when it will come to rest at or very close to the surface of the earth. In the case of non-porous rock, the oil will become trapped in a dome or arch, and in spite of the great pressures from below can escape neither sideways nor upwards but must remain where it is.

In this latter case what are regarded as conventional methods are used in the recovery of oil. Geologists locate a dome, and a hole is drilled. With reasonable luck they hit an oil dome and not a solid one, and their problems are over—the powerful subterranean pressures normally drive the oil to the surface.

The recovery of seepage oil which has passed upwards through porous rock presents a quite different and far more formidable problem, the answer to which was not found until as late as 1967. Even then it was only a partial answer. The trouble, of course, is that this surface seepage oil does not collect in pools, but is inextricably intermixed with foreign matter such as sand and clay from which it has to be abstracted and refined.

It is, in fact, a solid and has to be mined as such; and although this solidified oil may go as deep as six thousand feet, only the first two hundred feet, in the limits of present-day knowledge and techniques, are accessible, and that only by surface mining. Conventional mining methods—the sinking of vertical shafts and the driving of horizontal galleries—would be hopelessly inadequate, as they would provide only the tiniest fraction of the raw material required to make the extraction process commercially viable. The latest oil extraction plant, which went into operation only in the summer of 1978, requires 10,000 tons of raw material every hour.

Two excellent examples of the two different methods of oil recovery are to be found in the far north-west of North America. The conventional method of deep drilling is well exemplified by the Prudhoe Bay oilfield on the Arctic shore of northern Alaska; its latter-day counterpart, the surface mining of oil, is to be found—and, indeed, it is the only place in the world where it can be found—in the tar sands of Athabasca.

1

“This,” said George Dermott, “is no place for us.” He eased his considerable bulk back from the dining-table and regarded the remains of several enormous lamb chops with disfavour. “Jim Brady expects his field operatives to be lean, fit and athletic. Are we lean, fit and athletic?”

“There are desserts,” Donald Mackenzie said. Like Dermott he was a large and comfortable man with a rugged, weatherbeaten face, a little larger and a little less comfortable. Observers often took him and his partner for a pair of retired heavyweight boxers. “I can see cakes, cookies and a wide variety of pastries,” he went on. “You read their food brochure? Says that the average man requires at least five thousand calories a day to cope with Arctic conditions. But we, George, are not average men. Six thousand would do better in a pinch. Nearer seven would be safer, I’d say. Chocolate mousse and double cream?”

“He had a notice about it on the staff bulletin board,” Dermott said wryly. “Heavy black border, for some reason. Signed, too.”

“Senior operatives don’t look at staff boards,” Mackenzie sniffed. He heaved his 220 pounds erect and headed purposefully for the food counter. There was no doubt that B.P./Sohio did extremely well by their staff. Here at Prudhoe Bay, on the bitter rim of the Arctic Ocean in midwinter, the spacious, light and airy dining-room, with multi-coloured pastel walls back-dropping the recurrent five-pointed star motif, was maintained at a pleasantly fresh 72 degrees by the air-conditioned central heating. The temperature difference between the dining-room and the outside world was 105°F. The range of excellently-cooked food was astonishing.

“Don’t exactly starve themselves up here,” he said as he returned with a mousse for each of them and a pitcher of heavy cream. “I wonder what any of the old Alaskan sourdoughs would have made of it.”

The first reaction of a prospector or trapper of yesteryear would have been that he was suffering from hallucinations. All in all, it was hard to say what feature he would have found the most astonishing. Eighty per cent of the items on the menu would have been unknown to him. But he would have been still more amazed by the forty-foot swimming-pool and the glassed-in garden, with its pine-trees, birches, plants and profusion of flowers, that abutted on the dining-room.

“God knows what the old boy would have thought,” said Dermott. “You might ask him, though.” He indicated a man heading in their direction. “Jack London would have recognised this one right away.”

Mackenzie said: “More the Robert Service type, I’d say.”

The newcomer certainly wasn’t of current vintage. He wore heavy felt boots, moleskin trousers and an incredibly faded mackinaw, which went well enough with the equally faded patches on the sleeves. A pair of sealskin gloves was suspended from his neck, and he carried a coonskin cap in his right hand. His hair was long and white and parted in the middle. He had a slightly hooked nose and clear blue eyes with deeply entrenched crow’s feet, which could have been caused by too much sun, too much snow or a too highly developed sense of humour. The rest of his face was obscured by a magnificent grizzled beard and moustache, both of which were at that moment rimed by droplets of ice. The yellow hard hat swinging from his left hand struck a jarring note. He stopped at their table, and from the momentary flash of white teeth it could be assumed that he was smiling.

“Mr Dermott? Mr Mackenzie?” He offered his hand. “Finlayson. John Finlayson.”

Dermott said: “Mr Finlayson. Field operations manager’s office?”

“I am the field operations manager.” He pulled out a chair, sat, sighed and removed some ice particles from his beard. “Yes, yes, I know. Hard to believe.” He smiled again, gestured at his clothing. “Most people think I’ve been riding the rods. You know, hobo on the box-cars. God knows why. Nearest railroad track’s a long, long way from Prudhoe Bay. Like Tahiti and grass skirts. You know, gone native. Too many years on the North Slope.” His oddly staccato manner of speech was indeed suggestive of a person whose contact with civilisation was, at best, intermittent. “Sorry I couldn’t make it. Meet you, I mean. Deadhorse.”

Mackenzie said: “Deadhorse?”

“Airstrip. A little trouble at one of the gathering centres. Happens all the time. Sub-zero temperatures play hell with the molecular structure of steel. Being well taken care of, I hope?”

“No complaints.” Dermott smiled. “Not that we require much care. There the food counter, here Mackenzie. The watering hole and the camel.” Dermott checked himself: he was beginning to talk like Finlayson. “Well, one little complaint, perhaps. Too many items on the lunch menu, too large a helping of any item. My colleague’s waist-line—”

“Your colleague’s waist-line can take care of itself,” Mackenzie said comfortably. “But I do have a complaint, Mr Finlayson.”

“I can imagine.” Another momentary flash of teeth, and Finlayson was on his feet. “Let’s hear it in my office. Just a few steps.” He walked across the dining-hall, stopped outside a door and indicated another door to the left. “Master operations control centre. The heart of Prudhoe Bay—or the western half of it, at least. All the computerized process control facilities for the supervision of the field’s operations.”

Dermott said: “An enterprising lad with a satchelful of grenades could have himself quite a time in there.”

“Five seconds, and he could close down the entire oilfield. Come all the way from Houston just to cheer me up? This way.”

He led them through the outer door, then through an inner one to a small office. Desks, chairs and filing cabinets, all in metal, all in battleship grey. He gestured them to sit and smiled at Mackenzie. “As the French say, a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.”

“It’s this Texas dust,” Mackenzie said. “Sticks in the gullet like no other dust. Laughs at water.”

Finlayson made a sweeping motion with his hand. “Some big rigs out there. Damned expensive and damned difficult to handle. It’s pitch dark, say, forty below and you’re tired—you’re always tired up here. Don’t forget we work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. A couple of Scotches on top of all that, and you’ve written off a million dollars’ worth of equipment. Or you damage the pipeline. Or you kill yourself. Or, worst of all, you kill some of your mates. Comparatively, they had it easy in the old prohibition days—bulk smuggling from Canada, bathtub gin, illicit stills by the thousand. Rather different on the North Slope here—get caught smuggling in a teaspoonful of liquor, and that’s it. No argument, no court of appeal. Out. But there’s no problem—no one is going to risk eight hundred dollars a week for ten cents’ worth of bourbon.”

Mackenzie said: “When’s the next flight out to Anchorage?”

Finlayson smiled. “All is not lost, Mr Mackenzie.” He unlocked a filing cabinet, produced a bottle of Scotch and two glasses and poured with a generous hand. “Welcome to the North Slope, gentlemen.”

“I was having visions,” said Mackenzie, “of travellers stranded in an Alpine blizzard and a St Bernard lolloping towards them with the usual restorative. You’re not a drinking man?”

“Certainly. One week in five when I rejoin my family in Anchorage. This is strictly for visiting V.I.P.s. One would assume you qualify under that heading?” Thoughtfully, he mopped melting ice from his beard. “Though frankly, I never heard of your organisation until a couple of days ago.”

“Think of us as desert roses,” Mackenzie said. “Born to blush and bloom unseen. I think I’ve got that wrong, but the desert bit is appropriate enough. That’s where we seem to spend most of our time.” He nodded towards the window. “A desert doesn’t have to be made of sand. I suppose this qualifies as an Arctic desert.”

“I think of it that way myself. But what do you do in those deserts? Your function, I mean.”

“Our function?” Dermott considered. “Oddly enough, I’d say our function is to reduce our worthy employer, Jim Brady, to a state of bankruptcy.”

“Jim Brady? I thought his initial was A.”

“His mother was English. She christened him Algernon. Wouldn’t you object? He’s always known as Jim. Anyway, there are only three people in the world any good at extinguishing oil-field fires, particularly gusher fires, and all three are Texas-based. Jim Brady’s one of the three.

“It used to be commonly accepted that there are just three causes of such oil fires: spontaneous combustion, which should never happen but does; the human factor, i.e. sheer carelessness; and mechanical failure. After twenty-five years in the business Brady recognised that there was a fourth and more sinister element involved, that would come broadly speaking under the heading of industrial sabotage.”

“Who would engage in sabotage? What would the motivation be?”

“Well we can rule out the most obvious—rivalry among the big oil companies. It doesn’t exist. This notion of cut-throat competition exists only in the sensational press and among the more feebleminded of the public. To be a fly on the wall at a closed meeting of the oil lobby in Washington is to understand once and for all the meaning of the expression ‘two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one’. Multiplied by twenty, of course. Let Exxon put up the price of gas by a penny today, and Gulf, Shell, B.P., Elf, Agip and all the others will do the same tomorrow. Or even take Prudhoe Bay here. The classic example, surely, of co-operation—umpteen companies working hand-in-glove for the mutual benefit of all concerned: benefit of all the oil companies, that is. The State of Alaska and the general public might adopt a rather different and more jaundiced viewpoint.

“So we rule out business rivalries. This leaves another kind of energy. Power. International power politics; Say Country X could seriously weaken enemy Country Y by slowing down its oil revenues. That’s one obvious scenario. Then there’s internal power politics. Suppose disaffected elements in an oil-rich dictatorship see a means of demonstrating their dissatisfaction against a regime that clasps the ill-gotten gains to its mercenary bosom or, at best, distributes some measure of the largesse to its nearest and dearest, while ensuring that the peasantry remains in the properly medieval state of poverty. Starvation does nicely as motivation; this kind of set-up leaves room for personal revenge, the settling of old scores, the working off of old grudges.

“And don’t forget the pyromaniac who sees in oil a ludicrously easy target and the source of lovely flames. In short, there’s room for practically everything, and the more bizarre and unimaginable, the more likely to happen. A case in point.”

He nodded at Mackenzie. “Donald and I have just returned from the Gulf. The local security men and the police were baffled by an outbreak of small fires—small, so-called, but with damage totalling two million dollars. Clearly the work of an arsonist. We tracked him down, apprehended him, and punished him. We gave him a bow and arrow.”

Finlayson looked at them as if their Scotch had taken hold too quickly.

“Eleven-year-old son of the British consul. He had a powerful Webley air pistol. Webley make the traditional ammunition for this—hollow, concave lead pellets. They do not make pellets of hardened steel, which give off a splendid spark when they strike ferrous metal. This lad had a plentiful supply obtained from a local Arab boy who had a similar pistol and used those illegal pellets for hunting desert vermin. Incidentally, the Arab boy’s old man, a prince of the blood royal, owned the oilfield in question. The English boy’s arrows have rubber tips.”

“I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere.”

“Sure, there’s a lesson: the unpredictable is always with you. Our industrial sabotage division—that’s Jim Brady’s term for it—was formed six years ago. There are fourteen of us in it. At first it was as a purely investigative agency. We went to a place after the deed had been done and the fire put out—as often as not it was Jim who put it out—and tried to find out who had done it, why, and what his modus operandi had been. Frankly, we had very limited success: usually the horse had gone, and all we were doing was locking the empty stable door.

“Now the emphasis has changed—we try to lock the damned door in such a fashion that no-one can open it. In other words, prevention: the maximum tightening of both mechanical and human security. The response to this service has been remarkable—we’re now the most profitable side of Jim’s operations. By far. Capping off runaway wells, putting fires out, can’t hold a candle, if you’ll pardon the expression, to our security work. Such is the demand for our services that we could triple our division and still not cope with all the calls being made upon us.”

“Well, why don’t you? Triple the business, I mean.”

“Trained personnel,” Mackenzie said. “Just not there. More accurately, there are next to no experienced operatives and there’s an almost total dearth of people qualified to be trained for the job. The combination of qualifications is difficult to come by. You have to have an investigative mind, and that in turn is based on an inborn instinct for detection—the Sherlock Holmes genes, shall we say. You’ve either got it or not: it can’t be inculcated. You have to have an eye and a nose for security, an obsession, almost—and this can only come from field experience; you have to have a pretty detailed knowledge of the oil industry world-wide: and, above all, you have to be an oilman.”

“And you gentlemen are oilmen.” It was a statement, not a question.

“All our working lives,” Dermott said. “We’ve both been field operations managers.”

“If your services are in such demand, how come we should be so lucky as to jump to the head of the queue?”

Dermott said: “As far as we know this is the first time that any oil company has received notification of intent to sabotage. First real chance we’ve had to try out our preventive medicine. We’re just slightly puzzled on one point, Mr Finlayson. You say you never heard of us until a couple of days ago. How come that we’re here, then? I mean, we knew of this three days ago when we arrived back from the Mid East. We spent a day resting up, another day studying the layout and security measures of the Alaskan pipeline and—”

“You did that, eh? Isn’t it classified information?”

Dermott was patient. “We could have sent for it immediately on receiving the request for assistance. We didn’t have to. The information, Mr Finlayson, is not classified. It’s in the public domain. Big companies tend to be incredibly careless about such matters. Whether to reassure the public or burnish their own image by taking thoroughgoing precautions, they not only release large chunks of information about their activities but positively bombard the public with them. The information, of course, comes in disparate and apparently unrelated lumps: it requires only a moderately intelligent fella to piece them all together.

“Not that those big companies, such as Alyeska, who built your pipeline, have much to reproach themselves about. They don’t even begin to operate in the same league of indiscretion as the all-time champs, the U.S. Government. Take the classic example of the de-classification of the secret of the atom bomb. When the Russians got the bomb, the Government thought there was no point in being secretive any more and proceeded to tell all. You want to know how to make an atom bomb? Just send a pittance to the A.E.C. in Washington and you’ll have the necessary information by return mail. That this information could be used by Americans against Americans apparently never occurred to the towering intellects of Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, who seem to have been under the impression that the American criminal classes voluntarily retired en masse on the day of declassification.”

Finlayson raised a defensive hand. “Hold. Enough. I accept that you haven’t infiltrated Prudhoe Bay with a battalion of spies. Answer’s simple. When I received this unpleasant letter—it was sent to me, not to our H.Q. in Anchorage—I talked to the general manager, Alaska. We both agreed that it was almost certainly a hoax. Still, I regret to say that many Alaskans aren’t all that kindly disposed towards us. We also agreed that if it was not a hoax, it could be something very serious indeed. People like us, although we’re well enough up the ladder in our own fields, don’t take final decisions on the safety and future of a ten-billion-dollar investment. So we notified the grand panjandrums. Your directive came from London. Informing me of their decision must have come as an afterthought.”

“Head offices being what they are,” Dermott said. “Got this threatening note here?”

Finlayson retrieved a single sheet of notepaper from a drawer and passed it across.

“‘My dear Mr Finlayson’,” Dermott read. “Well, that’s civil enough. ‘I have to inform you that you will be incurring a slight spillage of oil in the near future. Not much, I assure you, just sufficient to convince you that we can interrupt oil flow whenever and wherever we please. Please notify ARCO.’”

Dermott shoved the letter across to Mackenzie. “Understandably unsigned. No demands. If this is genuine, it’s intended as a softening-up demonstration in preparation for the big threat and big demand that will follow. A morale-sapper, if you will, designed to scare the pants off you.”

Finlayson’s gaze was on the middle distance. “I’m not so sure he hasn’t done that already.”

“You notified ARCO?”

“Yup. Oilfield’s split more or less half-and-half. We run the western sector. ARCO—Atlantic Richfield, Exxon, some smaller groups—they run the eastern sector.”

“What’s their reaction?”

“Like mine. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”

“Your security chief. What’s his reaction?”

“Downright pessimistic. It’s his baby, after all. If I were in his shoes I’d feel the same way. He’s convinced of the genuineness of this threat.”

“Me too,” Dermott said. “This came in an envelope? Ah, thank you.” He read the address. “‘Mr John Finlayson, B.Sc, A.M.I.M.E.’. Not only punctilious, but they’ve done their homework on you. ‘B.P./Sohio, Prudhoe Bay, Alaska’. Postmarked Edmonton, Alberta. That mean anything to you?”

“Nary a thing. I have neither friends nor acquaintances there, and certainly no business contacts.”

“Your security chief’s reaction?”

“Same as mine. Zero.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bronowski. Sam Bronowski.”

“Let’s have him in, shall we?”

“You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid. He’s down in Fairbanks. Back tonight, if the weather holds up. Depends on visibility.”

“Blizzard season?”

“We don’t have one. Precipitation on the North Slope is very low, maybe six inches in a winter. High winds are the bugaboo. They blow up the surface snow so that the air can be completely opaque for thirty or forty feet above the ground. Just before Christmas a few years ago a Hercules, normally the safest of aircraft, tried to land in those conditions. Didn’t make it. Two of the crew of four killed. Pilots have become a bit leery since—if a Hercules can buy it, any aircraft can. These high winds and the surface snowstorms they generate—that snow can be driving along at 70 miles an hour—are the bane of our existence up here. That’s why this operations centre is built on pilings seven feet above ground—let the snow blow right underneath. Otherwise we’d end the winter season buried under a massive drift. The pilings, of course, also virtually eliminate heat transfer to the permafrost, but that’s secondary.”

“What’s Bronowski doing in Fairbanks?”

“Stiffening the thin red line. Hiring extra security guards for Fairbanks.”

“How does he set about that?”

“Approach varies, I suppose. Really Bronowski’s department, Mr Dermott. He has carte blanche in those matters. I suggest you ask him on his return.”

“Oh, come on. You’re his boss. He’s a subordinate. Bosses keep tabs on their subordinates. Roughly, how does he recruit?”

“Well. He’s probably built up a list of people whom he’s personally contacted and who might be available in a state of emergency. I’m honestly not sure about this. I may be his boss, but when I delegate responsibility I do just that. I do know that he approaches the chief of police and asks for suitable recommendations. He may or may not have put an ad. in the All-Alaska Weekly—that’s published in Fairbanks.” Finlayson thought briefly. “I wouldn’t say he’s deliberately close-mouthed about this. I suppose when you’ve been a security man all your life you naturally don’t let your left hand know what the right hand’s doing.”

“What kind of men does he recruit?”

“Almost all ex-cops—you know, ex-State troopers.”

“But not trained security men?”

“As such, no, although I’d have thought security would have come as second nature to a State trooper.” Finlayson smiled. “I imagine Sam’s principal criterion is whether the man can shoot straight.”

“Security’s a mental thing, not physical. You said ‘almost all’.”

“He’s brought in two first-class security agents from outside. One’s stationed at Fairbanks, the other at Valdez.”

“Who says they’re first class?”

“Sam. He hand-picked them.” Finlayson rubbed his drying beard in what could have been a gesture of irritation. “You know, Mr Dermott, friendly, even genial you may be, but I have the odd impression that I’m being third-degreed.”

“Rubbish. If that were happening, you’d know all about it, because I’d be asking you questions about yourself. I’ve no intention of doing so, now or in the future.”

“You wouldn’t be having a dossier on me, would you?”

“Tuesday, September 5, 1939, was the day and date you entered your secondary school in Dundee, Scotland.”

“Jesus!”

“What’s so sensitive about the Fairbanks area? Why strengthen your defences there particularly?”

Finlayson shifted in his seat. “No hard and fast reason, really.”

“Never mind whether it’s hard and fast. The reason?”

Finlayson drew in his breath as if he were about to sigh, then seemed to change his mind. “Bit silly, really. You know how whisperings can generate a hoodoo. People on the line are a bit scared of that sector. You’ll know that the pipeline has three mountain ranges to traverse on its 800-mile run south to the terminal at Valdez. So, pump stations, twelve in all. Pump Station No. 8 is close to Fairbanks. It blew up in the summer of ’77. Completely destroyed.”

“Fatalities?”

“Yes.”

“Explanations given for this blow-up?”

“Of course.”

“Satisfactory?”

“The pipeline construction company—Alyeska—were satisfied.”

“But not everyone?”

“The public was sceptical. State and Federal agencies withheld comment.”

“What reason did Alyeska give?”

“Mechanical and electrical malfunction.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“The explanation was generally accepted?”

“The explanation was widely disbelieved.”

“Sabotage, perhaps?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I was here at the time. I’ve never even seen Pump Station No. 8. Been rebuilt, of course.”

Dermott sighed. “This is where I should be showing some slight traces of exasperation. Don’t believe in committing yourself, do you, Mr Finlayson? Still, you’d probably make a good security agent. I don’t suppose you’d like to venture an opinion as to whether there was a cover-up or not?”

“My opinion hardly matters. What matters, I suppose, is that the Alaskan press was damned certain there was, and said so loud and clear. The fact that the papers appeared unconcerned about the possibility of libel action could be regarded as significant. They would have welcomed a public enquiry: one assumes that Alyeska would not have.”

“Why were the newspapers stirred up—or is that an unnecessary question?”

“What incensed the press was that they were prevented for many hours from reaching the scene of the accident. What doubly incensed them was that they were prevented not by peace officers of the State but by Alyeska’s private guards, who, incredibly, took it upon themselves to close State roads. Even their local PR man agreed that this amounted to illegal restraint.”

“Anybody sue?”

“No court action resulted.”

“Why?”

When Finlayson shrugged, Dermott went on: “Could it have been because Alyeska is the biggest employer in the State, because the lifeblood of so many companies depends on their contracts with Alyeska? In other words, big money talking big?”

“Possibly.”

“Any minute now I’ll be signing you up for Jim Brady. What did the press say?”

“Because they’d been prevented for a whole day from getting to the scene of the accident, they believed Alyeska employees had been working feverishly during that time to clean up and minimise the effects of the accident, to remove the evidence of a major spillage and to conceal the fact that their fail-safe system had failed dangerously. Alyeska had also—the press said—covered up the worst effects of the fire damage.”

“Might they also have removed or covered up incriminating evidence pointing to sabotage?”

“No guessing games for me.”

“All right. Do you or Bronowski know of any disaffected elements in Fairbanks?”

“Depends what you mean by disaffected. If you mean environmentalists opposed to the construction of the pipeline, yes. Hundreds, and very strongly opposed.”

“But they’re open about it, I assume—always give their full names and addresses when writing to the papers.”

“Yes.”

“Besides, environmentalists tend to be sensitive and nonviolent people who work within the confines of the law.”

“About any other disaffected types, I wouldn’t know. There are fifteen thousand people in Fairbanks, and it would be optimistic to expect they’re all as pure as the driven snow.”

“What did Bronowski think of the incident?”

“He wasn’t there.”

“That wasn’t what I asked…”

“He was in New York at the time. He hadn’t even joined the company then.”

“A relative newcomer, then?”

“Yes. In your book, I suppose that automatically makes him a villain. If you wish to go ahead and waste your time investigating his antecedents, by all means do so, but I could save you time and effort by telling you that we had him checked, double-checked and triple-checked by three separate topflight agencies. The New York Police Department gave him a clean bill of health. His record and that of his company are—were—impeccable.”

“I don’t doubt it. What were his qualifications, and what was his company?”

“One and the same thing, really. He headed up one of the biggest and arguably the best security agencies in New York. Before that he was a cop.”

“What did his company specialise in?”

“Nothing but the best. Guards, mainly. Additional guards for a handful of the biggest banks when their own security forces were under-staffed by holidays or illness. Guarding the homes of the richest people in Manhattan and Long Island to prevent the ungodly making off with the guests’ jewellery when large-scale social functions were being held. His third speciality was providing security for exhibitions of precious gems and paintings. If you could ever persuade the Dutch to lend you Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ for a couple of months, Bronowski would be the man you’d send for.”

“What would induce a man to leave all that and come to this end of the world?”

“He doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. Homesickness. More specifically, his wife’s homesickness. She lives in Anchorage. He flies down there every weekend.”

“I thought you were supposed to do a full four weeks up here before you got time off.”

“Doesn’t apply to Bronowski—only to those whose permanent job is here. This is his nominal base, but the whole line is his responsibility. For instance, if there’s trouble in Valdez, he’s a damn sight nearer it in his wife’s flat in Anchorage than he would be if he were up here. And he’s very mobile, is our Sam. Owns and flies his own Comanche. We pay his fuel, that’s all.”

“He’s not without the odd penny to his name?”

“I should say not. He doesn’t really need this job, but he can’t bear to be inactive. Money? He retains the controlling interest in his New York firm.”

“No conflict of interests?”

“How the hell could there be a conflict of interests? He’s never even been out of the State since he arrived here over a year ago.”

“A trustworthy lad, it would seem. Damn few of them around these days.” Dermott looked at Mackenzie. “Donald?”

“Yes?” Mackenzie picked up the unsigned letter from Edmonton. “F.B.I. seen this?”

“Of course not. What’s it got to do with the F.B.I.?”

“It might have an awful lot to do with them, and soon. I know Alaskans think that this is a nation apart, that this is your own special and private fiefdom up here, and that you refer to us unfortunates as the lower 48, but you’re still part of the United States. When the oil from here arrives at Valdez, it’s shipped to one of the west-coast states. Any interruption in oil transfer between Prudhoe Bay and, say, California, would be regarded as an unlawful interference with inter-state commerce and would automatically bring in the F.B.I.”

“Well, it hasn’t happened yet. Besides, what can the F.B.I. do? They know nothing of oil or pipeline security. Look after the pipeline? They couldn’t even look after themselves. We’d just spend most of our time trying to thaw out the few of them that didn’t freeze to death during their first ten minutes here. They could only survive under cover, so what could they do there? Take over our computer terminals and master communications and alarm detection stations at Prudhoe Bay, Fairbanks and Valdez? We have highly trained specialists to monitor over three thousand sources of alarm information. Asking the F.B.I. to do that would be like asking a blind man to read Sanskrit. Inside or out, they’d only be in the way and a useless burden to all concerned.”

“Alaska State Troopers could survive. I guess they’d survive where even some of your own men couldn’t. Have you been in touch with them? Have you notified the State authorities in Juneau?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t love us. Oh, sure, if there was physical trouble, violence, they’d move in immediately. Until then, they’d rather not know. I can’t say I blame them. And before you ask me why I’ll tell you. For good or bad we’ve inherited the Alyeska mantle. Alyeska built the pipeline and they run it; but we use it. I’m afraid there’s a wide grey area of non-discrimination here. In most people’s eyes they were pipeline, we are pipeline.”

Finlayson reflected on his next words. “It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Alyeska. They were pretty cruelly pilloried. Sure, they bore the responsibility for a remarkable amount of waste, and incurred vast cost over-runs, but they did complete an impossible job in impossible conditions and, what’s more, brought it in on schedule. Best construction company in North America at the time. Brilliant engineering and brilliant engineers—but the brilliance stopped short of their PR people, who might as well have been operating in downtown Manhattan for all they knew about Alaskans. Their job should have been to sell the pipeline to the people: all they succeeded in doing was turning a large section of the population solidly against the line and the construction company.”

He shook his head. “You had to be truly gifted to get it as wrong as they did. They sought to protect the good name of Alyeska, but all they did, by blatant cover-ups—it was alleged—and by deliberate lying, was to bring whatever good name there was into total disrepute.”

Finlayson reached into a drawer, took out two sheets of paper and gave them to Dermott and Mackenzie. “Photostats of a classic example of the way they handle those under contract to them. One would assume they learnt their trade in one of the more repressive police states. Read it. You’ll find it instructive. You’ll also understand how by simple thought-transference we’re not in line for much public sympathy.”

The two men read the Photostats.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Company

Supplement No. 20

Pipeline and Roads

Revision No. 1

Job Specification

April 1,1974

Page 2004

- C. IN NO EVENT SHALL CONTRACTOR OR ITS PERSONNEL REPORT A LEAK OR AN OIL SPILL TO ANY GOVERNMENTAL AGENCY. Such reporting shall be the sole responsibility of ALYESKA. CONTRACTOR shall emphasise this to all its supervisory personnel and employees.

- D. Further IN NO EVENT SHALL CONTRACTOR OR ITS PERSONNEL DISCUSS, REPORT, OR COMMUNICATE IN ANY WAY WITH NEWS MEDIA whether the news media be radio, television, newspapers or periodicals. Any such communication by CONTRACTOR shall be deemed to be a material breach of CONTRACT by CONTRACTOR. All contacts with news media regarding leaks or oil spills shall be made by Alyeska. If news media people contact CONTRACTOR or CONTRACTOR’S personnel they shall refer news media to Alyeska without further discussing, reporting or communicating. CONTRACTOR shall emphasise the aforementioned ALYESKA news media requirements to all its supervisory personnel and employees.

Dermott rested the Photostat on his knee. “An American wrote this?”

“An American of foreign extraction,” Mackenzie said “who obviously trained under Goebbels.”

“A charming directive,” Dermott said. “Hush-up, cover-up or lose your contract. Toe the line or you’re fired. A shining example of American democracy at its finest. Well, well.” He glanced briefly at the paper, then at Finlayson. “How did you get hold of this? Classified information, surely?”

“Oddly enough, no. What you would call the public domain. Editorial page, All-Alaska Weekly, July 22, 1977. I don’t question it was classified. How the paper got hold of it, I don’t know.”

“Nice to see a little paper going against the might of a giant company and getting off with it. Restores one’s faith in something or other.”

Finlayson picked up another Photostat. “The same editorial also made a despairing reference to the ‘horrendous negative impact of the pipeline on us’. That’s as true now as it was then. We’ve inherited this horrendous negative impact, and we’re still suffering from it. So there it is. I’m not saying we’re entirely friendless, or that the authorities wouldn’t move in quickly if there were any overt violations of the law. But, because votes are important, those in charge of our destinies rule from behind: they sense the wind of public opinion, then enact acceptable legislation and adopt correspondingly safe attitudes. Whatever happens, they’re not going to antagonise those who keep them in power. They are not, with the public’s eye on both them and us, going to come and hold our hands because of any anonymous threat by some anonymous crackpot.”

Mackenzie said: “So it amounts to this: until actual sabotage occurs, you can expect no outside help. So far as preventative measures are concerned, you’re dependent solely upon Bronowski and his security teams. In effect, you’re on your own.”

“It’s an unhappy thought, but there it is.”

Dermott stood up and walked back and forth. “Accepting this threat as real, who’s behind it and what does he want? Not a crackpot, that’s sure. If it were, say, some environmentalist running amok, he’d go ahead and do his damnedest without any prior warning. No, could be with a view to extortion or blackmail, which do not have to be the same thing: extortion would be for money, blackmail could have many different purposes in mind. Stopping the flow of oil is unlikely to be the primary purpose: more likely, it’ll be a stoppage for another and more important purpose. Money, politics—local or international—power, misguided idealism, genuine idealism or just crackpot irresponsibility. Well, I’m afraid speculation will have to wait on developments. Meantime, Mr Finlayson, I’d like to see Bronowski as soon as possible.”

“I told you, he has business to finish. He’ll be flying up in a few hours.”

“Ask him to fly up now, please.”

“Sorry. Bronowski’s his own man. Overall, he’s answerable to me, but not in field operations. He’d walk out if I tried to usurp his authority. Unless he had the power to act independently, he’d be effectively hamstrung. You don’t hire a dog and bark yourself.”

“I don’t think you quite understand. Mr Mackenzie and I have not only been promised total co-operation: we’ve been empowered to direct security measures if, in our judgment, such extreme measures are dictated by circumstances.”

Finlayson’s Yukon beard still masked his expression, but there was no mistaking the disbelief in his voice. “You mean, take over from Bronowski?”

“If, again in our judgment, he’s good enough, we just sit by the sidelines and advise. If not, we will exercise the authority invested in us.”

“Invested in whom? This is preposterous. I will not, I cannot permit it. You walk in here and imagine—no, no way. I have received no such directive.”

“Then I suggest you seek such a directive, or confirmation of it, immediately.”

“From whom?”

“The grand panjandrums, as you call them.”

“London?” Dermott said nothing. “That’s for Mr Black.”

Dermott remained silent.

“General manager, Alaska.”

Dermott nodded at the three telephones on Finlayson’s desk. “He’s as far away as one of those.”

“He’s out of State. He’s visiting our offices in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. At what times and in what order I don’t know. I do know he’ll be back in Anchorage at noon tomorrow.”

“Are you telling me that is the soonest you can—or will—contact him?”

“Yes.”

“You could phone those offices.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t know where he’d be. He could be at some other place altogether. Like as not he’s in the air.”

“You could try, couldn’t you?” Finlayson remained silent and Dermott spoke again. “You could call London direct.”

“You don’t know much about the hierarchy in oil companies, do you?”

“No. But I know this.” Now Dermott’s customary geniality was gone. “You’re a considerable disappointment, Finlayson. You are, or very well may be, in serious trouble. In the circumstances, one does not expect an executive in top management to resort to stiff outrage and wounded pride. You’ve got your priorities wrong, my friend—the good of the company comes first, not your feelings or protecting your ass.”

Finlayson’s eyes showed no expression. Mackenzie was staring at the ceiling as if he had found something of absorbing interest there: Dermott, he had learned over the years, was a past-master of penning an adversary into a corner. The victim either surrendered or placed himself in an impossible situation of which Dermott would take ruthless advantage. If he couldn’t get co-operation, he would settle for nothing less than domination.

Dermott went on: “I have made three requests, all of which I regard as perfectly reasonable, and you have refused all three. You persist in your refusals?”

“Yes, I do.”

Dermott said: “Well, Donald, what are my options?”

“There are none.” Mackenzie sounded sad. “Only the inevitable.”

“Yes.” Dermott looked at Finlayson coldly. “You have a radio microwave band to Valdez that links up with the continental exchanges.” He pushed a card towards Finlayson. “Or would you refuse me permission to talk to my head office in Houston?”

Finlayson said nothing. He took the card, lifted the phone and talked to the switchboard. After three minutes’ silence, which only Finlayson seemed to find uncomfortable, the phone rang. Finlayson listened briefly then handed over the phone.

Dermott said: “Brady Enterprises? Mr Brady please, Dermott.” There was a pause, then: “Good afternoon, Jim.”

“Well, well, George.” Brady’s strong carrying voice was clearly audible in the office. “Prudhoe Bay, is it? Coincidence, coincidence. I was just on the point of phoning you.”

“Well. My report, Jim. News, rather. There’s nothing to report.”

“And I have news for you. Mine first, it’s more important. Open line?”

“One moment.” Dermott looked at Finlayson. “What security classification does your switchboard operator have?”

“None. Jesus, she’s only a telephone girl.”

“As you rightly observe, Jesus! Heaven help the trans-Alaskan pipeline.” He pulled out a notebook and pencil and addressed the phone. “Sorry, Jim. Open. Go ahead.”

In a clear, precise voice Brady began to recite a seemingly meaningless jumble of letters and figures which Dermott noted down in neatly printed script. After about two minutes Brady paused and said: “Repeat?”

“No thanks.”

“You have something to say?”

“Just this. Field manager here unco-operative, unreasonable and obstructive. I don’t think we can profitably operate here. Permission to pull out.”

There was only a brief pause before Brady said clearly: “Permission granted.” There came the click of a replaced receiver and Dermott rose to his feet.

Finlayson was already on his. “Mr Dermott—”

Dermott looked down at him icily and spoke in a voice as cold as winter: “Give my love to London, Mr Finlayson. If you’re ever there.”

2

Thirteen hundred miles south-east of Prudhoe Bay, at ten p.m., Brady’s men met Jay Shore in the bar of the Peter Pond Hotel in Fort McMurray. Among those qualified to pass judgment on such matters, it was readily agreed that as an engineering construction manager Shore had no peer in Canada. His face was dark, saturnine, almost piratical—which was rather an unfair trick for nature to play on him, since that same nature had made him easy-going, companionable, humorous and cheerful.

Not that he felt in the least humorous and cheerful at that moment. Nor did the man who sat beside him, Bill Reynolds, Sanmobil’s operations manager, a rubicund and normally smiling man to whom nature had given precisely the kind of diabolical mind that Shore appeared to have but didn’t.

Bill Reynolds looked across the table to Dermott and Mackenzie, whom he and Shore had met thirty seconds previously, and said: “You make fast time, gentlemen. Remarkable service, if one may say so.”

“We try,” Dermott said comfortably. “We do our best.”

“Scotch?” asked Mackenzie.

“Thanks.” Reynolds nodded. “Twin jet—is that it?”

“Right.”

“A shade expensive, a man would think.”

“Gets you around.” Dermott smiled.

“Head Office—that’s Edmonton—told us you might take up to four days. We didn’t expect you in four hours.” Reynolds eyed Dermott speculatively over his newly-poured glass. “I’m afraid we don’t know much about you.”

“Fair enough. We probably know even less about you.”

“Not oilmen, then?”

“Of course. But drilling oilmen. We’re not familiar with mining the stuff.”

“And your full-time job’s security?”

“That’s right.”

“So there’s no need to ask what you were doing up on the North Slope?”

“Right again.”

“How long were you up there?”

“Two hours.”

“Two hours! You mean you can lick a security—”

“We licked nothing. We left.”

“May one ask why?”

“Operations manager was…unhelpful, let’s say.”

“Me and my big mouth.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m the operations manager here. But I get the message.”

Dermott said pleasantly: “No message. You asked a question, I answered.”

“And you decided to walk out—”

“We have a backlog of cases all over the world, and no time to waste trying to help those who won’t help themselves. Let’s not get off on the wrong foot, gentlemen: your company expects Mackenzie and myself to do the questioning while you do the answering. When was this threat received?”

Shore said: “Ten o’clock this morning.”

“You have it with you?”

“Not exactly. It came by phone.”

“Where from?”

“Anchorage. International call.”

“Who took the message?”

“I did Bill here was with me, listening in. Caller gave us his message twice. Word for word he said: ‘I have to inform you that Sanmobil will be incurring a slight interruption in oil production in the near future. Not much, I assure you, just sufficient to convince you that we can interrupt oil flow whenever and wherever we please.’ That was all.”

“No demands?”

“No—surprisingly.”

“Don’t worry. The demands will come when the big threat does. Would you recognise this voice again?”

“Would I recognise the voices of a million other Canadians who talk exactly as he does? You take this threat seriously?”

“I do. We take most things seriously. How good is security at the plant?”

“Well—fair enough for normal circumstances. I suppose.”

“These promise to be highly abnormal circumstances. How many guards?”

“Twenty-four, under Terry Brinckman. He knows what he’s doing.”

“I don’t doubt it. Guard dogs?”

“None. The usual police dogs—Alsatians, Dobermans, boxers—can’t survive in these extreme conditions. Huskies can, of course, but they make lousy watch-dogs—they’re more interested in fighting each other than looking for intruders.”

“Electric fences?”

Shore rolled his eyes upwards and looked sorrowful. “You want to equip the environmentalists with a gallows right on the site? Why, if even the meanest old wolf were to singe its mangy hide…”

“Okay, okay. I suppose it’s pointless to ask about electronic beams, sensor devices and the like?”

“Pointless is right.”

Mackenzie said: “How big is this plant site?

Reynolds looked unhappy. “About eight thousand acres.”

“Eight thousand acres.” Mackenzie’s voice was all doom. “What kind of perimeter would that make for?”

“Fourteen miles.”

“Yes. We have a problem here,” Mackenzie said. “I take it your security duties are twofold: the guarding of vital installations in the plant itself and patrolling the perimeter to keep intruders out?”

Reynolds nodded. “The guards are in three shifts, eight men per shift.”

“Eight men, without any protective aids at all, to guard the plant itself and at the same time patrol fourteen miles of perimeter in the blackness of a winter night.”

Shore was defensive. “Ours is a 24-hour operation. The plant is brilliantly lit day and night.”

“But the perimeter isn’t. A blind man could drive a coach and four—hell, why go on? A couple of army regiments might help, although I doubt even that. As I say, a problem.”

“Not only that,” Dermott said. “All the brilliant illumination in the world isn’t of the slightest help. Not when you’ve got hundreds of workers on each of the three shifts a day.”

“Meaning?”

“Subversives.”

“Subversives! Less than two per cent of the work-force are non-Canadians.”

“There’s been a royal decree abolishing Canadian criminals? When you hire, you investigate backgrounds?”

“Well, not intensive questioning, third degree, lie-detector tests or any of that rubbish. Try that and you’d never hire anyone. We check on previous experience, qualifications, recommendations, and, most important, criminal records.”

“That’s the least important. Really clever criminals never have criminal records.” Dermott looked like a man who had been about to sigh, explode, curse, or quit, but had changed his mind. “Well—it’s late. Tomorrow, Mr Mackenzie and I would like to talk to your Terry Brinckman and look over the plant.”

“If we have a car here at ten o’clock—”

“How about seven o’clock? Yes, seven will be fine.” Dermott and Mackenzie watched the two men go, looked at each other, emptied their glasses, signalled the barman, then looked out through the windows of the Peter Pond Hotel, named after the first white man ever to see the Tar Sands.

Pond went down the Athabasca River by canoe almost exactly two hundred years before. He did not take too much interest in the sands, it appears, but ten years later the much more famous explorer Alexander MacKenzie was intrigued by the sticky substance oozing from outcrops high above the river, and wrote: “The bitumen is in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum, or the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, serves to gum the Indians’ canoes. In its heated state it emits a smell like that of sea-coal.”

Oddly, the significance of the words “sea-coal” wasn’t appreciated for more than a hundred years; nobody realised that the two 18th-century explorers had stumbled across one of the world’s largest reservoirs of fossil fuels. But had they not so stumbled, there would have been no Peter Pond Hotel where it is today nor, indeed, the township beyond its windows.

Even in the mid-nineteen-sixties Fort McMurray was little more than a rough, primitive frontier outpost, with a population of only thirteen hundred and streets covered with dust, mud or slush according to season. By now, though still a frontier town, it had become a frontier town with a difference. Treasuring its past, but with an eye to the future, it was the epitome of a boom-town and, in terms of burgeoning population, the fastest-expanding township in Canada. Where there were thirteen hundred citizens fourteen years earlier, there were thirteen thousand. Schools, hotels, banks, hospitals, churches, super-markets and, above all, hundreds of new houses were or were being built. And, wonder of wonders, the streets were paved. This seeming miracle stems from one factor and one factor only: Fort McMurray sits squarely in the heart of the Athabasca Tar Sands, the biggest such known deposits in the world.

It had been snowing heavily earlier in the evening and had still not completely stopped. Everything—houses, streets, car-tops, trees—was under a smoothly unbroken cover of white. Hundreds of lights shone hospitably through the gently falling flakes. The scene would have gladdened the eye and heart of a Christmas postcard artist. Some such thought had occurred to Mackenzie.

“Santa Claus should be here tonight.”

“Indeed.” Dermott sounded morose. “Especially if he brought along some of that peace on earth and goodwill to all men. What did you make of that telephone message to Sanmobil?”

“Same thing you did. Practically identical to the letter Finlayson received up in Prudhoe Bay. Obviously the work of the same man or group of men.”

“And what do you make of the fact that Alaskan oil people got a threatening message from Alberta, while the Albertan oil interests received the same threat from Alaska?”

“Nothing—except that both threats had the same origin. That call from Anchorage. For a certainty, from a public call-box. Untraceable.”

“Probably. Not certainly. I don’t know if you can dial direct from Anchorage to here. I don’t think so, but we can find out. If not, the telephone operator will have a record. There’s a chance that we might locate the phone.”

Mackenzie briefly surveyed Fort McMurray through the base of his glass and said: “That’ll be a big help.”

“It might be a small help. Two ways. That call came in at ten this morning. That’s 6 a.m. Anchorage time. Who except a nut—or some night-shift worker—is going to be out in the black and freezing streets of Anchorage at that hour? That sort of odd behaviour, I suggest, isn’t likely to go unnoticed.”

“If there’s anyone there to notice.”

“State Troopers in a patrol car. Taxi driver. Snow-plough driver. Mailman on the way to work. You’d be surprised the number of people who go about their lawful occasions in the dark watches of the night.”

“I would not be surprised.” Mackenzie spoke with some feeling. “We’ve done it often enough in this damned job of ours. Two ways, you said. What’s the second way?”

“If we locate this pay-phone, we have the police who have the post office remove the coin box and give it to their fingerprint boys. The chances are good that the person who made the call to Fort McMurray used more high-denomination coins than anyone else who went into the pay-box that day—or night. Get two or three large coins with the same prints, and that’s our man.”

“Objection. Coins are handled by many people. You’ll get prints, all right, a plethora, shall we say, of fingerprints.”

“Objection overruled. It’s established that on a metal surface the overlay, the last person to touch such a surface, leaves the dominant print. By the same token, we’d print the area round the dial. People don’t dial in fur mittens. Then we’d check with criminal records. The prints may be on file. If they are, we’ll get the man and ask him all sorts of interesting questions.”

“You do have a devious mind, George. Low cunning, but albeit a mind. First catch your man, though.”

“If we get a description or prints with history, it shouldn’t be too difficult. If he’s gone to ground, it would be different. But there’s no reason why he should think he has to take cover. Might be awkward for him anyway: may well be a pillar of the Anchorage business and social communities.”

“I’ll bet the other Anchorage pillars would love to hear you say that. They’d have the same opinion of you as our friend, John Finlayson, has now. What are we going to do about Finlayson, anyway? Rapprochement doesn’t seem advisable: it’s essential. With the tie-up so obvious—”

“Let him stew in his own juice for a while. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. But just let him worry a while in Prudhoe Bay until we’re ready. He’s a good man, intelligent, honest. He reacted precisely the way you or I would have if a couple of interlopers had tried to take over. The longer we stay away, the more certainly we’re guaranteed his co-operation when we get back. Jim Brady may have been the bearer of bad news, but that call of his couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Gave us the perfect excuse to make off. Speaking of Jim—”

“I’ve been thinking that I don’t much like any of this. Presentiments. My Scottish forebears, one presumes. You know that Prudhoe Bay and this place here contain well over half the oil reserves of North America. It’s an awful lot of oil. A man wouldn’t want anything to happen to them.”

“You haven’t worried about such things before. An investigator is supposed to be cold, clinical, detached.”

“That’s about other people’s oil. This is our oil. Massive responsibilities. Awesome decisions at the highest levels.”

“We were talking of Jim Brady.”

“I still am.”

“You think we should have him up here?”

“I do.”

“So do I. Must be why I raised the subject. Let’s go call him.”

3

Jim Brady, that passionate believer in leanness, keenness, fitness and athleticism for his field operatives, stood five feet eight in his elevator shoes and turned the scales at around 240 lbs. Never a believer in travelling light, he brought with him on the flight from Houston not only his attractive, blonde wife Jean, but also his positively stunning daughter Stella, another natural blonde, who acted as his secretary on these field trips. He left Jean behind at the hotel in Fort McMurray, but kept Stella with him in the minibus that Sanmobil had sent to ferry him out to the plant.

The first impression he made on the hard men of Athabasca was less than favourable. He wore a superbly-cut dark-grey business suit—it had to be well cut, even to approximate to a frame as spherical as his—a white shirt and a conservative tie. On top of these indoor clothes, however, he wore two woollen overcoats and a vast beaver fur coat, the combined effect being to render his vertical and horizontal dimensions approximately equal. He sported a soft felt hat the same colour as his suit, but this too was almost invisible, anchored by a grey woollen scarf that passed twice over the crown and under his chins.

“Well I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed. His voice was muffled by the ends of the scarf, tied across his face just below the eyes, which were the only part of him that could be seen. Even so, it was clear to his companions that he was impressed.

“This sure is something. You boys must have a lot of fun digging away here and building these nice little ol’ sand-castles.”

“That’s one way of putting it, Mr Brady.” Jay Shore spoke with restraint. “Not much, perhaps, by Texas standards, but it’s still the biggest mining operation in the history of mankind.”

“No offence, no offence. You don’t expect a Texan to admit there’s something bigger and better outside his own State?” One could almost feel him bracing himself for a handsome admission. “That beats anything I’ve ever come across.”

“That” was a dragline, but a dragline such as Brady had never seen before. A dragline is essentially an engine-housing with a control cabin which operates a crane-like boom. The boom is hinged and swivelled at the base of the engine-housing, and so can be both raised and lowered and swung from side to side: control is achieved by cables from the engine-housing which pass over a massive steel superstructure and reach out to the tip of the boom. Another cable, passing over the tip of the boom, supports a bucket which can be lowered to scoop up material, raised again, then swung to one side to dump its load.

“Biggest thing that ever moved on earth,” said Shore.

“Move?” Stella said.

“Yes, it can move. Walks, shuffles would be a better word, on those two huge shoes at the base, step by step. You wouldn’t want to enter it for the Kentucky Derby—it takes seven hours to travel a mile. Not that it’s ever required to travel more than a few yards at a time. Point is, it gets there.”

“And that long nose…” she said.

“The boom. The comparison most generally used is that it’s as long as a football field. Wrong—it’s longer. From here the bucket doesn’t look all that big, but that’s only because everything is dwarfed out of perspective: it scoops up eighty cubic yards at a time or enough to fill a two-car garage. A large two-car garage. The dragline weighs 6,500 tons—about the same as a light-medium cruiser. Cost? About thirty million dollars. Takes fifteen to eighteen months to build—on the site, of course. There are four of them, and between them they can shift up to a quarter of a million tons a day.”

“You win. This is a boom town,” Brady said. “Let’s get inside. I’m cold.” The other four—Dermott, Mackenzie, Shore and Brinckman, the security chief—looked at him in mild astonishment. It seemed impossible that a man so extravagantly upholstered and insulated, both naturally and otherwise, could possibly feel even cool; but if Brady said he was cold, he was cold.

They clambered into the minibus which, if a bit short on other creature comforts, did at least have heaters in excellent condition. Also in excellent condition was the girl who sat down in the back seat, lowered her parka hood, and beamed at them. Brinckman, who was much the youngest of the men, in his thirties, had not paid much attention to Stella. Now he touched the rim of his fur cap and lit up like a lamp. His enthusiasm was hardly surprising, for the white fur parka made her as cuddly-looking as a polar bear cub.

“Wanna dictate anything, Dad?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Brady grunted. Once safely sheltered from the vicious cold, he undid the ends of the scarf that concealed his face. Somewhere in the distant past there must have been signs of the character that had driven him from the back streets of poverty to his present millions, but years of gracious living had eradicated all trace of them: bone structure had vanished under a fatty accumulation which had left him without a crease, line or even the hint of crow’s feet. It was a fat, spoiled face like a cherub’s. With one exception: there was nothing cherubic about the eyes. They were blue, cool, appraising and shrewd.

He looked through the window at the dragline. “So that’s the end of the line.”

“The beginning of it,” Shore said. “The tar sands may lie as deep as fifty feet down. The stuff above, the overburden, is useless to us—gravel, clay, muskeg, shale, oil-poor sand—and has to be removed first of all.” He pointed to an approaching vehicle. “Here’s some of that rubbish being carried away now—it’s been excavated by another dragline on a new site.

“To impress you further, Mr Brady, those trucks are also the biggest in the world. A hundred and twenty-five tons empty, payload of a hundred and fifty, and all this on just four tyres. But, you will admit, they are some tyres.”

The truck was passing now and they were indeed some tyres; to Brady they looked at least ten feet high and proportionately bulky. The truck itself was monstrous—twenty feet high at the cab and about the same in width, with the driver mounted so high as to be barely visible from the ground.

“You could buy a very acceptable car for the price of one of those tyres,” Shore said. “As for the truck itself, if you went shopping for one at today’s prices, you wouldn’t get much change from three quarters of a million.” He spoke to his driver, who started up and moved slowly off.

“When the overburden is gone, the same dragline scoops up the tar sand—as the one we’ve just looked at is doing now—and dumps it in this huge pile we call a windrow.” A weird machine of phenomenal length was nosing into the pile. Shore pointed and said: “A bucketwheel reclaimer—there’s one paired with every dragline. Four hundred and twenty-eight feet long. You can see the revolving bucketwheel biting into the windrow. With fourteen buckets on a forty-foot diameter wheel, it can remove a fair tonnage every minute. The tar sands are then transported along the spine of the reclaimer—the bridge, we call it—to the separators. From there—”

Brady interrupted: “Separators?”

“Sometimes the sands come in big, solid lumps as hard as rock which could damage the conveyor belts. The separators are just vibrating screens which sort out the lumps.”

“And without the separators the conveyor belts could be damaged?”

“Certainly.”

“Put out of commission?”

“Probably. We don’t know. It’s never been allowed to happen yet.”

“And then?”

“The tar sands go into the travelling hoppers you see there. They drop the stuff on to the conveyor belt, and off it goes to the processing plant. After that—”

“One minute.” It was Dermott. “You have a fair amount of this conveyor belting?”

“A fair bit.”

“How much exactly?”

Shore looked uncomfortable. “Sixteen miles.” Dermott stared at him and Shore hurried on. “At the end of the conveyor system radial stackers direct it to what are called surge piles—just really storage dumps.”

“Radial stackers?” said Brady. “What are they?”

“Elevated extensions of the conveyor belts. They can rotate through a certain arc to direct the tar sands to a suitable surge pile. They can also feed bins that take the sands underground to start the processes of chemical and physical separation of the bitumen. The first of those processes—”

“Jesus!” said Mackenzie incredulously.

“That about sums it up,” Dermott said. “I have no wish to be rude, Mr Shore, but I don’t want to hear about the extraction processes. I’ve already heard and seen all I want to.”

“Good God Almighty!” exclaimed Mackenzie by way of variation.

Brady said: “What’s the matter, gentlemen?”

Dermott picked his words carefully. “When Don ana I were talking to Mr Shore and Mr Reynolds, the operations manager, last night, we thought we had reason to be concerned. I now realise we were wasting our time on trifles. But, by God, now I’m worried.

“Last night we had to face the fact—the ridiculous ease with which the perimeter can be penetrated and the almost equal ease with which subversives could be introduced on to the plant floor. In retrospect, those are but bagatelles. How many points did you pick up, Don?”

“Six.”

“My count also. First off, the draglines. They look as impregnable as the Rock of Gibraltar: they are, in fact, pathetically vulnerable. A hundred tons of high explosive would hardly dent the Rock of Gibraltar; I could take out a dragline with two five-pound charges of wrap-round explosive placed where the boom is hinged to the machine house.”

Brinckman, an intelligent and clearly competent person in his early thirties, spoke for the first time in fifteen minutes, then immediately wished he hadn’t. He said: “Fine, if you could approach the dragline—but you can’t. The area is lit by brilliant floodlamps.”

“Jesus!” Mackenzie’s limited repertoire was in use again.

“What do you mean, Mr Mackenzie?”

“What I mean is I would locate the breaker or switch or whatever that supplies the power to the floodlights and immobilise it by smashing it or by the brilliantly innovative device of turning it off. Or, I’d cut the power lines. Simpler still, with a five-second burst from a sub-machine gun I’d shoot them out. Assuming, of course, that they’re not made of bullet-proof glass.”

Dermott saved Brinckman the embarrassment of a long silence. “Five pounds of commercial Amatol would take out the bucketwheel for an indefinite period. A similar amount would take care of the reclaimer’s bridge. Two pounds to buckle the separator plate. That’s four ways. Getting at the radial stackers would be another excellent device—that would mean Sanmobil couldn’t even get the tar sands stock-piled in the surge piles down below for processing. And then, best of all, is this little matter of sixteen unpatrolled miles of conveyor belting.”

There was quiet in the bus until Dermott rumbled on. “Why bother sabotaging the separation plant when it’s so much simpler and more effective to interrupt the flow of raw material? You can’t very well carry out a processing operation if you’ve got nothing to process. It’d be childishly simple. Four draglines. Four bucketwheels. Four reclaimers’ bridges. Four separators. Four radial stackers. Sixteen miles of conveyor, fourteen miles of unpatrolled perimeter, and eight men to cover. Situation’s ludicrous. I’m afraid, Mr Brady, there’s no way in the world we can stop our Anchorage friend from carrying out his threat.”

Brady turned what appeared to be one cold, blue eye on the unfortunate Brinckman. “And what do you have to say?”

“What can I say except to agree? Even if I had ten times the number of men at my disposal, we still wouldn’t be geared to meet a threat like this.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even dream of anything like this.”

“Nor did anyone else. Nothing to reproach yourself about. You security people thought you were in the oil business, not a war. What are your normal duties, anyway?”

“We’re here to prevent three things—physical trouble among members of the work-force, petty pilfering, and drinking on the plant site. But so far we’ve had few instances of any of them.”

Visibly, Brinckman’s words struck a chord in Brady. “Ah. yes. Trouble in moments of stress and all that.” He turned in his seat. “Stella!”

“Yes, Dad.” She opened a wicker basket, produced a flask and glass, poured a drink and handed it to her father.

“Daiquiri,” he said. “We also have Scotch, gin, rum—”

“Sorry, Mr Brady,” Shore said. “No. The company has very strict regulations—”

Brady gave him some terse suggestions as to what he could do with company regulations and turned to Brinckman again.

“So, in effect, you’ve been pretty superfluous up till now and, if anything, are going to be even more so in the future?”

“I’d agree with half of that. The fact that we’ve had little to do up to now doesn’t mean we’ve been superfluous. Presence is important. You don’t heave a half-brick through a jeweller’s window if there’s an interested cop standing by five feet away. As to the future, yes, I agree. I feel pretty helpless.”

“If you were carrying out an attack somewhere, what would you go for?”

Brinckman was in no two minds. “The conveyor belting every time.”

Brady looked at Dermott and Mackenzie. Both men nodded.

“Mr Shore?”

“Agreed.” Shore was absentmindedly sipping some Scotch that had found its way into his hand. “Apart from the fact that there’s so damn much of it, it’s fragile. Six feet wide, but the steel cord belting is only an inch and a half thick. With a sledgehammer and chisel I could wreck it myself.” Shore looked and sounded tense. “Not many people are aware of the vast quantities of material that are processed here. To keep the plant operating at capacity and to make the project commercially viable, we need close on a quarter of a million tons of tar sands a day. As I said, the biggest mining operation ever. Cut off the supplies, and the plant closes down in a few hours. That’s a hundred and thirty thousand barrels of oil a day lost. Even Sanmobil couldn’t stand this kind of loss indefinitely.”

“How much did it cost to set up this plant?” Brady asked.

“Two billion, near enough.”

“Two billion dollars. And a potential operating loss of a hundred and thirty thousand barrels of oil a day.” Brady shook his head. “No-one’s arguing about the brilliance of the men who dreamed up this idea. Same goes for the engineers who made it work. But there’s another thing no-one would question—at least I would never question—and that is that those towering intellects had a huge blind spot. Why didn’t the bosses foresee this? I know it’s easy to be wise after the event, but, goddamn, you don’t need much foresight to think of that. Oil is not just another business. Couldn’t they have seen the giant potential for hate or crackpots—or blackmail? Couldn’t they have foreseen that they’d built the biggest industrial hostage to fortune of all time?”

Shore gazed gloomily at his glass, gloomily drank its contents, and maintained a gloomy silence.

Dermott said: “Well, not quite.”

“What do you mean ‘not quite’?”

“Sure, it’s an industrial hostage to fortune. But not the biggest of all time. That dubious distinction belongs without any question to the trans-Alaskan pipeline. Their capital outlay wasn’t two billion: it was eight billion. They don’t transport a hundred and thirty thousand barrels a day: they transport one million two hundred thousand. And they don’t just have sixteen miles of conveyor belting to guard: they have eight hundred miles of pipeline.”

Brady handed his glass back for a refill, digested this unpleasant thought, fortified himself and said: “Don’t they have any means of protecting the damned thing?”

“To the extent that they can limit damage, certainly. They have magnificent communication and electronic control systems, with every imaginable fail-safe and back-up device, even to the extent of a satellite emergency control station.” Dermott produced a paper from his pocket. “They have twelve pump stations, locally or remotely controlled. They have sixty-two remote gate valves, all radio-controlled from the pump station immediately to the north. Those gate valves can stop the flow of oil in either direction.

“There are eighty check valves to prevent the oil from flowing backwards and, well, all sorts of other weird valves that would only make sense to an engineer. Altogether they have a remote-control capability at well over a thousand points. In other words, they can isolate any section of the line at any time they want. Because it takes six minutes to shut down a big pump, some oil is bound to escape—up to fifty thousand barrels, it’s estimated. That may seem a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s in the pipeline. But there’s no way the oil can keep on pumping out indefinitely.”

“All very interesting.” Brady sounded cool. “You can bet they try harder to protect the environment. You can also bet that crooks and extortioners don’t give a damn about the environment one way or another. All they want is to interrupt the flow of oil. Can the line be protected?”

“Well, about this huge blind spot you mentioned—”

“What you’re trying not to tell me is that the pipeline can be breached any place, any time.”

“That’s right.”

Brady looked at Dermott. “You’ve thought about this problem?”

“Of course.”

“And you, Donald?”

“Me, too.”

“Well then, what have you come up with?”

“Nothing. That’s why we sent for you. We thought you might come up with something.”

Brady looked at him maliciously and resumed his pondering. By and by he said: “What happens if there’s a break and the oil is stopped in the pipe? Does it gum up?”

“Eventually. But it takes time. The oil is hot when it comes out of the ground and it’s still warm when it reaches Valdez. The pipeline is very heavily insulated, and the oil passing through the pipe generates friction heat. They reckon they might get it flowing again after a 21-day standstill. After that—” He spread his hands.

“No more oil-flow?”

“No.”

“Not ever again?”

“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t really know. Nobody’s talked to me about it. I don’t think anyone really wants to talk about it.”

No one did. Until Brady said: “Do you know what I wish?”

“I know,” Dermott said. “You wish you were back in Houston.”

The radio-phone rang. The driver listened briefly then turned to Shore.

“Operations manager’s office. Will we return immediately. Mr Reynolds says it’s urgent.” The bus driver picked up speed.

Reynolds was waiting for them. He indicated a phone lying on his table and spoke to Brady. “Houston. For you.”

Brady said “Hello”. Then he made a gesture of irritation and turned to Dermott.

“Horseshit. Damn code. Take it, huh?” This was hardly reasonable of Brady, since it was he who had invented the code and insisted on using it for almost everything except “Hello” and “Goodbye”. Dermott reached for a pad and pencil, took the phone and started writing. It took him about a minute to record the message and two more to decode it.

He said into the phone: “Is that all you have?” A pause. “When did you get this message, and when did this happen?” Another pause, “Fifteen minutes and two hours. Thank you.” He turned to Brady, his face bleak. “The pipeline’s been breached. Pump Station No. 4. Near Atigun Pass in the Brook Range. No hard details yet. Damage not severe, it seems, but enough to close down the line.”

“No chance of an accident?”

“Explosives. They took out two gate valves.”

There was a brief silence while Brady surveyed Dermott curiously.

“No need to look so goddamned grim, George. We were expecting something like this. It’s not the end of the world.”

“It is for two of the men on Pump Station Four. They’ve been murdered.”

4

It was half-past two in the afternoon, Alaskan time, almost dark, but with good visibility, a ten-knot wind and a temperature of — 4°F −36° below—when the twin-jet touched down again on one of the Prudhoe Bay air-strips. Brady, Dermott and Mackenzie had moved quickly after receipt of the message from Houston. They had driven back to Fort McMurray, packed essentials, which in Brady’s case consisted primarily of three flasks, said goodbye to Jean and Stella and driven straight to the airport. Brady was asleep when they entered Yukon airspace, and Mackenzie dozed off shortly afterwards. Only Dermott remained awake, trying to puzzle out why the enemy, in carrying out what they said would be—and, in fact proved to be—no more than a token demonstration, should have found it necessary to kill in the process.

As the jet came to a halt, a brightly-lit minibus pulled up alongside and slid open a front door. Brady, third out of the aircraft, was first into the bus. The others followed him in and the door was quickly closed. As the bus moved off the man who had ushered them aboard came and sat down beside them. Aged anywhere between forty and fifty, he was a broad, chunky man with a broad, chunky face. He looked tough but he also looked as if he could be humorous—although he had nothing worth smiling about at that moment.

“Mr Brady, Mr Dermott, Mr Mackenzie,” he said, in the unmistakably, flat accent of one who had been born within commuting distance of Boston. “Welcome. Mr Finlayson sent me to meet you—as you can imagine he’s right now practically a prisoner in the master operations control centre My name’s Sam Bronowski.”

Dermott said: “Security chief.”

“For my sins.” He smiled. “You’ll be Mr Dermott, the man who’s going to take over from me?”

Dermott looked at him. “Who the hell said that?”

“Mr Finlayson. Or words to that effect.”

“I’m afraid Mr Finlayson must be slightly overwrought.”

Bronowski smiled again. “Well, now, that wouldn’t surprise me either. He’s been talking to London and I think he suffered some damage to his left ear.”

Brady said: “We’re not out to take over from anyone. That’s not how we work. But unless we get co-operation—I mean total co-operation—we might as well have stayed home. For instance, Mr Dermott here wanted to talk to you right away. The chairman of your company himself had guaranteed me complete co-operation. Yet Finlayson refused point-blank to co-operate with Dermott and Mackenzie.”

“I’d have come at once if I’d known,” said Bronowski quickly. “Unlike Mr Finlayson, I’ve been a security man all my life, and I know who you are and the reputation you have. In a set-up like this I can do with all the expert help I can get. Go easy with him, will you? This isn’t his line of country. He treats the pipeline as his favourite daughter. This is a new experience for him and he didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t stalling—just playing it safe until he’d consulted on the highest level.”

“You don’t need lessons in sticking up for your boss, do you?”

“I’m being fair to him. I hope you will be, too. You can imagine how he feels. Says that if he hadn’t been so ornery those two men up at Pump Station Four might be alive now.”

“That’s plain daft,” Mackenzie said. “I appreciate his feelings, but this would have happened if there had been fifty Dermotts and fifty Mackenzies here.”

“When,” Brady asked, “are we going out there?”

“Mr Finlayson asked if you and your colleagues would come first to see him and Mr Black. The helicopter is ready to go any moment after that.”

“Black?”

“General manager, Alaska.”

“You been out at the station?”

“I was the man who found them. Rather, I was the first man on the scene after the attack. Along with my section chief, Tim Houston.”

“You fly your own plane?”

“Yes. Not this time, though. That section of the Brooks Range is like the mountains on the moon. Helicopter. We’ve been making a continuous check on the pump stations and the remote gate valves since this damned threat came through, and we’d stayed at Station Five last night. We were just approaching Gate Four, a mile away, I’d reckon, when we saw this damned great explosion.”

“Saw it?”

“You know, oil smoke and flames. You mean, did we hear anything? You never do in a helicopter. You don’t have to—not when you see the roof take off into the air. So we put down and got out, me with a rifle, Tim with two pistols. Wasting our time. The bastards had gone. Being oilmen yourselves, you’ll know it requires quite a group of men and a complex of buildings to provide the care and maintenance for a couple of 13,500 horsepower aircraft-type turbines, not to mention all the monitoring and communications they have to handle.

“It was the pump room itself that was on fire, not too badly, but badly enough for Tim and me not to go inside without fire extinguishers. We’d just started looking when we heard shouting come from a store room. It was locked, naturally, but the key had been left in the lock. Poulson—he’s the boss—came running out with his men. They had the extinguishers located and the fire out in three minutes. But it was too late for the two engineers inside—they’d come down the previous day from Prudhoe Bay to do a routine maintenance job on one of the turbines.”

“They were dead?”

“Very.” Bronowski’s face registered no emotion. “They were brothers. Fine boys. Friends of mine; and Tim’s.”

“No possibility of accidental death? From the effects of the explosion?”

“Explosions don’t shoot you. They were pretty badly charred, but charring doesn’t hide a bullet-wound between the eyes.”

“You searched the area?”

“Certainly. Conditions weren’t ideal—it was dark, with a little snow falling. I thought I saw helicopter ski marks on a wind-blown stretch of rock. The others weren’t so sure. On the remote off-chance I contacted Anchorage and asked them to alert every public and private airport and strip in the State. Also to have radio and TV stations ask the public to report hearing or sighting a helicopter in an unusual place. I haven’t but one hope in ten thousand that the request will bring any results.”

He grimaced. “Most people never realise how huge this State is. It’s bigger than half Western Europe, but it’s got a population of just over three hundred thousand, which is to say it’s virtually uninhabited. Again, helicopters are an accepted fact of life in Alaska, and people pay no more attention to them than you would to a car in Texas. Third, we’ve still only got about three good hours of light, and the idea of carrying out an air search is laughable—anyway, we’d require fifty times the number of planes we have, and even then it would be sheer luck to find them.

“But, for the record, we did find out something unpleasant. In case anything should happen to the pump station, there’s an emergency pipeline that can be switched in to bypass it. Our friends took care of that also. They blew up the control valve.”

“So there’s going to be a massive oil spillage?”

“No chance. The line is loaded with thousands of sensors all the way from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, and any section of it can be closed down and isolated immediately. Even the repairs would normally present no problem. But neither metal nor men work too well in these abnormally low temperatures.”

“Apparently that doesn’t apply to saboteurs,” Dermott said. “How many were there?”

“Poulson said two. Two others said three. The remainder weren’t sure.”

“Not a very observant lot, are they?”

“I wonder if that’s fair, Mr Dermott. Poulson’s a good man and he doesn’t miss much.”

“Did he see their faces?”

“No. That much is for certain.”

“Masked?”

“No. Their fur collars were pulled high up and their hats low down so that only their eyes were visible. You can’t tell the colour of a man’s eyes in the darkness. Besides, our people had just been dragged from bed.”

“But not the two engineers. They were working on the engines. How come at that very early hour?”

Bronowski spoke with restraint. “Because they had been up all night. Because they were going home to their families in Fairbanks for their week’s leave. And because I had arranged to pick them up there shortly after that time.”

“Did Poulson or any of his friends recognise the voices?”

“If they had, I’d have the owners behind bars by this time. Their collars were up to their eyes. Of course their voices would have been muffled. You ask a lot of questions, Mr Dermott.”

“Mr Dermott is a trained interrogator,” Brady said cheerfully. “Trained him myself, as a matter of fact. What happened after that?”

“They were marched across to the food store and locked in there. We keep it locked because of bears. Unless bears are near starving, they aren’t very partial to human beings, but they’re partial indeed to all human goodies.”

“Thank you, Mr Bronowski. One last question. Did Poulson or his men hear the fatal shots?”

“No. Both the men Poulson saw were carrying silenced guns. That’s the great advantage of those modern educational pictures, Mr Dermott.”

There was a pause in the questioning. Brady said: “Because I am an acute observer of character, George, I can tell something’s eating you. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s only a thought. I’m wondering if the murderers are employees of the trans-Alaskan pipeline.”

The silence was brief but marked. Then Bronowski said: “This beats everything. I speak as Dr Watson, you understand. I know that Sherlock Holmes could solve a crime without leaving his armchair, but I never knew of any cop or security man who could come up with the answer without at least visiting the scene of the crime.”

Dermott said mildly: “I’m not claiming to have solved anything. I’m just putting forward a possibility.”

Brady said: “What makes you think that?”

“In the first place, you pipeline people aren’t just the biggest employer of labour around here: you’re the only one. Where the hell else could the killers have come from? What else could they have been? Lonely trappers or prospectors on the North Slope of the Brooks Range in the depth of winter? They’d freeze to death the first day out. They wouldn’t be prospectors, because the tundra is frozen solid, and beneath that there’s two thousand feet of solid permafrost. As for trappers, they’d be not only cold and lonely but very hungry indeed, because they wouldn’t find any form of food north of Brooks Range until the late spring comes.”

Brady grunted. “What you’re saying in effect is that the pipeline is the sole means of life-support in those parts.”

“It’s a fact. Had this happened at Pump Station Seven or Eight, circumstances would have been quite different—those stations are only a hop, skip and jump from Fairbanks by car. But you don’t take a car over the Brooks Range in the depth of winter. And you don’t back-pack over the Range at this time of year, unless you’re bent on quick suicide. So the question remains, how did they get there and away again?”

“Helicopter,” Bronowski said. “Remember I said I thought I saw ski marks? Tim—Tim Houston—saw the marks too, although he was less sure. The others were frankly sceptical, but admitted the possibility. But I’ve been flying helicopters for as long as I can remember.” Bronowski shook his head in exasperation. “God’s sake, how else could they have got in and out?”

“I thought,” Mackenzie said, “that those pump stations had limited range radar-scopes.”

“They do.” Bronowski shrugged. “But snow plays funny tricks on radar. Also, they may not have been looking, or maybe they had the set switched off, not expecting company in such bad weather.”

Dermott said: “They were expecting you, surely.”

“Not for another hour or so. We’d had deteriorating weather at No. 5, so we left ahead of schedule. Another thing—even if they had picked up an incoming helicopter, they’d automatically have assumed it was one of ours and would have had no reason to be suspicious.”

“Be that as it may,” said Dermott, “I’m convinced. It was an inside job. The killers are pipeline employees. The note announcing their intention of causing a slight spillage of oil seemed civil and civilised enough, with no hint of violence, but violence there has been. The saboteurs blundered, and so they had to kill.”

“Blundered?” Mackenzie was a lap behind.

“Yes. Bronowski said the key had been left in the store room door. Don’t forget, all the engineers locked inside were engineers. With the minimum of equipment they could have either turned the key in the lock or slipped a piece of paper, cardboard, linoleum, anything, under the bottom of the door, pushed the key out to fall on it and hauled the key inside. Me, I’d have thrown that key a mile away. But the killers didn’t. Their intention was to bring the two pump-house engineers to the store room and usher them in to join their friends, and lock them in, too. But they didn’t do that either. Why? Because one of the saboteurs said or did something that betrayed their identity to the two engineers. They were recognised by the engineers, who evidently knew them well enough to penetrate their disguises. The saboteurs had no option, so they killed them.”

Brady said: “How’s that for a hypothesis, Sam?”

Bronowski was pondering his reply when the minibus pulled up outside the main entrance to the administrative building. Brady, predictably, was the first out and scuttled—as far as a nearly spherical human being could be said to scuttle—to the welcoming shelter that lay behind the main door. The others followed more sedately.

John Finlayson rose as they entered his room. He extended his hand to Brady and said: “Delighted to meet you, sir.” He nodded curtly towards Dermott, Mackenzie and Bronowski, then turned to a man seated to his right behind a table. “Mr Hamish Black, general manager, Alaska.”

Mr Black didn’t look like the general manager of anything, far less the manager of a tough and ruthless oil operation. The rolled umbrella and bowler hat were missing, but even without them his lean, bony face, immaculately trimmed pencil moustache, thinning black hair parted with millimetric precision over the centre of his scalp and the eyes behind pince-nez made him the epitome of a top City of London accountant, which he was.

That such a man, who could hardly tell a nut from a bolt, should head up a huge industrial complex was not a new phenomenon. The tea-boy who had painstakingly fought his way up through the ranks to board-room level had become a man of no mean importance: it was Hamish Black, so adept at punching the keyboard of his pocket calculator, who called the industrial tune. It was rumoured that his income ran into six figures—sterling, not dollars. His employers, evidently, thought he was worth every penny of it.

He waited patiently while Finlayson made the introductions.

“I would not go as far as Mr Finlayson and say I’m delighted to meet you.” Black’s smile was as thin as his face. His flat, precise, controlled voice belonged to the City, to London’s Wall Street, just as surely as did his appearance. “Under other circumstances, yes: under these, I can only say that I’m glad you, Mr Brady, and your colleagues are here. I assume Mr Bronowski has supplied you with details. How did you propose we proceed?”

“I don’t know. Do we have a glass?”

The expression on Finlayson’s face could have been interpreted as reluctant disapproval: Black, it seemed, didn’t believe in using expressions. Brady poured his daiquiri, waved the flask at the others, who waved it on, and said: “The F.B.I. have been notified?”

Black nodded. “Reluctantly.”

“Reluctantly?”

“There’s a legal obligation to notify of any interruption of interstate commerce. Quite frankly, I don’t see what they can achieve.”

“They’re out at the pump station now?”

“They haven’t arrived here yet. They’re waiting for some specialist Army Ordnance officers to accompany them—experts on bombs, explosives and the like.”

“Waste of time. Among the people who built and run this line are as good—if not better—explosives experts than in any Army Ordnance Corps. The killers wouldn’t have left a trace of explosives at Pump Station No. 4.”

If a silence can be said to be cold, the ensuing silence was downright chilly. Finlayson said stonily: “Does that statement mean what I think it means?”

“I should imagine it does,” said Brady. “Explain, George.”

Dermott explained. When he had finished, Finlayson said: “Preposterous. Why should any of our pipeline employees want to do a thing like that? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s never a pleasant thing to nurture a viper in your bosom,” Brady said agreeably. “Mr Black?”

“Makes sense to me, if only because no other immediate explanation occurs. What do you think, Mr Brady?”

“Exactly what I was asking Mr Bronowski as we touched down.”

“Yes. Well.” Bronowski didn’t seem any too comfortable. “I don’t like it. An inside job is all too damn plausible. Point is, carry this line of thinking a little further, and the finger points at Tim Houston and myself as the two prime suspects.” Bronowski paused. “Tim and I had a helicopter. We were in the right place at approximately the right time. We know of a dozen ways to sabotage the pipeline. It’s no secret that we’re both pretty experienced in the use of explosives, so taking out Station Four would have presented no problem for us.” He paused. “But who’s going to suspect the security chief and his number two?”

“Me, for one,” said Brady. He sipped his drink and sighed. “I’d have you clapped behind bars right now were it not for your impeccable record, lack of apparent motive, and the fact that it’s incredible that you should have acted in such a clumsy fashion.”

“Not clumsy, Mr Brady. The killers were stupid to the point of insanity, or badly frightened. The job certainly wasn’t the work of professional hit men. Why shoot the two engineers? Why leave any evidence that murder had been done? Just knock them unconscious—a dozen ways that can be done without leaving a mark—then blow them to pieces along with the pump station. Act of God, and no hint of foul play.”

“Amateurism is a grievesome thing, is it not?” Brady turned to Finlayson. “Could we have a line to Anchorage, please? Thank you. Give him the number, then take the call, George.” Dermott did so and within four minutes had hung up, his part of the conversation having been limited mainly to monosyllables.

“Wouldn’t you know it,” Dermott said.

“No luck?” said Mackenzie.

“Too much. The Anchorage police have located not one but four hot phone boxes. Suspicious characters either inside them or lurking in the vicinity, and this at a most ungodly hour. All four of them, dammit, with a disproportionate number of high-denomination coins inside them. All four have been dismantled and taken along to the cop shop. But they haven’t been fingerprinted yet, and it may be hours before the cops can check the prints against their files.”

Black said with sardonic restraint: “The relevance of this call escapes me. It has something to do with Pump Station Four?”

“Maybe,” said Brady. “Maybe not. All we know for certain is that Sanmobil—the people who have the tar sands concession north of Fort McMurray, in Alberta—have also received a threat against their oil production lines. Couched in almost identical forms with the threat you received, the only difference being that while yours arrived by mail, theirs came from a public phone booth in Anchorage. We’re trying to trace which booth and, with any fingerprint luck, who the caller may have been.”

Black thought briefly, then said: “Curious. A threat against Alaskan oil from Alberta, and one against Albertan oil from Alaska. Must tie up with Pump Station Four: the arm of coincidence isn’t all that long…and while you’re sitting here, Mr Brady, some ill-intentioned person or persons may be planting an explosive device at some strategic point in Sanmobil’s tar sands.”

“The thought had not escaped me. However, surmise and speculation will serve no point until we turn up one or two hard facts. We hope that one may even result from a close inspection of Pump Station Four. Coming out there, Mr Black?”

“Good heavens, no, I’m very much a deskbound citizen. But I shall await your return with interest.”

“Return? I’m going no place. Those frozen wastes—not for me. My excellent representatives know what to look for. Besides, someone has to stay and run the command post. How far to the pump station, Mr Bronowski?”

“Helicopter miles? Hundred and forty, give or take.”

“Splendid. That will leave us ample time for a belated lunch. Your commissary is still open, Mr Finlayson, I trust, and your wine cellar tolerable?”

“Sorry about that, Mr Brady.” Finlayson made no effort to conceal the satisfaction in his voice. “Company regulations forbid alcohol.”

“No need to distress yourself,” Brady said urbanely. “Aboard my jet is the finest cellar north of the Arctic Circle.”

5

Three generator-fed arc-lamps threw the half-demolished pump-house and its shattered contents into harsh relief, glaring white and Stygian blackness, with no intermediate shading between. Snow drifted silently down through the all-but-vanished roof, and a high wind blew a fine white cloud through a gaping hole in the northern wall. Already the combined effects of the two snows had softened and blurred the outlines of the machinery, but not sufficiently to conceal the fact that engines, motors, pumps and switchgear had been either destroyed or severely damaged. Mercifully, the snow had already covered the two mounds that lay side by side before the mangled remains of a switchboard. Dermott looked slowly around with a face again as bleak as the scene that lay before him.

“Damage evenly spread,” he said, “so it couldn’t have come from one central blast. Half-a-dozen charges, more likely.” He turned to Poulson, the charge-hand, a black-bearded man with bitter eyes. “How many explosions did you hear?”

“Just the one, I think. We really can’t be sure. If there were more after the first one, our eardrums were sure in no condition to register them. But we’re agreed that one was all we heard.”

“Triggered electrically, by radio or, if they used fulminate of mercury, by sympathetic detonation. Experts, obviously.” He looked at the two shapeless, snow-covered mounds. “But not so expert in other ways. Why have those two men been left here?”

“Orders.”

“Whose orders?”

“Head Office. Not to be moved until the postmortems have been carried out.”

“Rubbish! You can’t do a post-mortem on a frozen body.” Dermott stooped, began to clear away the snow from the nearest of the mounds, then looked up in surprise as a heavy hand clamped on his left shoulder.

“You deaf or something, mister?” Poulson didn’t sound truculent, just annoyed. “I’m in charge here.”

“You were. Donald?”

“Sure.” Mackenzie eased Poulson’s hand away and said: “Let’s go talk to the head office-man, Black, and hear what he has to say about obstructing murder investigations.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr Mackenzie,” Bronowski said. He nodded to Poulson. “John’s upset. Wouldn’t you be?”

Poulson hesitated briefly, turned and left the pump room. Dermott had most of the snow cleared away when he felt a light touch on his shoulder: it was Poulson again, proffering him, of all things, a long-handled clothes brush. Dermott took it, smiled his thanks and delicately brushed away the remaining snow.

The dreadfully charred skull of the dead man was barely recognisable as that of a human being, but the cause of the round hole above the eyeless left socket was unmistakable. With Mackenzie’s help—the corpse was frozen solid—he lifted the body and peered at the back of the skull. The skin was unbroken.

“Bullet’s lodged in the head,” Dermott said. “Rifling marks on it should be of interest to the police ballistics department.”

“There’s that,” Bronowski said. “After all, Alaska only covers just over half a million square miles. Optimism is not my long suit.”

“Agreed.” They lowered the body to the ground and Dermott tried to unzip the shredded green parka, but it, too, was frozen. There was a slight crackling of ice as he eased the jacket away from the shirt beneath and peered into the gap between the two layers of clothing. He could see some documents, including a buff-coloured envelope, tucked away in the inside right pocket. By sliding his hand in flat he tried to extract them with his fore and middle fingers, but because he could achieve so little purchase, and because they seemed frozen—not only together but also to the side of the pocket—they proved impossible to move. Dermott straightened to an upright kneeling position, looked at the dead man thoughtfully, then up at Bronowski.

“Could we have the two bodies moved to some place where they can be thawed out a bit? I can’t examine them in this state, nor by the same token, can the doctors carry out their postmortems.”

“John?” Bronowski looked at Poulson, who nodded, albeit with some reluctance.

“Another thing,” Dermott said. “What’s the quickest way of clearing away the snow here from the floor and machinery?”

“Canvas covers and a couple of hot air blowers. No time at all. Want me to fix it now? And the two men?”

“Please. Then there’s a question or two I’d like to ask. In your living quarters, perhaps?”

“Straight across. Be with you in a few minutes.”

Outside, on their way, Mackenzie said: “Your hound-dog instincts have been aroused. What gives?”

“Dead man back there. Index finger on his right hand is broken.”

“That all? Wouldn’t be surprised if half the bones in his body are broken.”

“Could be. But this bone appears to have been broken in a rather peculiar fashion. Be able to tell better, later.”

Bronowski and Poulson joined them round the table of the comfortable kitchen living quarters. Poulson said: “Okay, fixed. Snow in the pump-room should be gone in fifteen minutes. About the two engineers—well, I wouldn’t know.”

“Considerably longer,” Dermott said. “Thanks. Now, then. Bronowski, Mackenzie and myself think it likely that the murderers were employees of the trans-Alaskan pipeline. What would you think of that?”

Poulson glanced enquiringly at Bronowski, found no inspiration there, looked away and pondered. “It figures,” he said at last. “The only living souls for ten thousand square miles around here—a hundred thousand as far as I know—are employed by the pipeline. More than that, while any mad bomber could have blown up the pump station, it took an oilman to know where to locate and destroy the bypass control valve.”

“We also theorise that the engineers—what were their names, by the way?”

“Johnson and Johnson. Brothers.”

“We think that the bombers gave themselves away in one fashion or another, that the Johnsons recognised them and had to be silenced for keeps. But you and your men didn’t recognise them. That’s for sure?”

“For sure.” Poulson smiled without much humour. “If what you suppose is correct, it’s just as well for us that we didn’t. But then it’s not surprising that we didn’t. Don’t forget that up here in Number Four we’re no better than hermits living on a desert island. The only time we see anybody is when we go on leave every few weeks. Travelling maintenance engineers like the Johnsons—or, come to that, Mr Bronowski here—see ten times as many people as we do, and so are likely to recognise ten times as many people. Which makes your idea that it was an inside job all the more likely.”

“You and your men are certain there wasn’t the remotest peculiarity about them, either in speech or dress, that struck a chord?”

“You’re flogging a dead horse, Dermott.”

“I suppose. There’s a possibility that those saboteurs came by helicopter.”

“Damned if I can see how else they could have come. Mr Bronowski here thought he saw skid marks. I wasn’t sure one way or another. It was a bad night for being sure of anything: dark, with a strong wind and drifting snow. Circumstances like that, you can imagine almost anything.”

“You didn’t hear this helicopter approaching—or imagine you heard it?”

“We heard nothing. Don’t forget we were all asleep and—”

“I thought you mounted a radar watch?”

“In a fashion. Any errant bleep triggers off an alarm. But we don’t sit with our eyes glued to the screen night and day. Then, because of the extremely heavy insulation, it’s difficult for any sound to penetrate from outside. The generator running next door doesn’t help much either. Finally, of course, the wind was blowing—as it still is—almost directly from the north and would have carried away the sound of any craft approaching from the opposite direction. I know that a helicopter is one of the most rackety bits of machinery in existence but—even though we were wide awake then, we didn’t hear Mr Bronowski’s chopper coming in from the south. Sorry, that’s all I can tell you.”

“How long will it take to repair the pump-room?”

“A few days, a week. I’m not sure. We’ll need new engines, switchgear, pipelines, a mobile crane and a bulldozer. All those we already have at Prudhoe except the engines, and I expect a Herc will fly those in this evening. Then a chopper or two can fly the stuff out here. The repair crews will be on the job in the morning.”

“So a week before the oil starts flowing again?”

“No, no: tomorrow, with luck. The bypass control valve is not a major repair job; parts replacement mainly.”

Dermott said: “You might look at all this as just a minor disruption?”

“Technically, yes. The ghosts of the Johnson brothers might see it differently. Want to look at the pump-room now? Most of the stuff should have melted by this time.”

The snow in the pump-room had gone, and the atmosphere was warm and humid. Without the protective white covering, the scene was more repellent than before, the extent of the devastation more clearly and dishearteningly evident, and the stench of oil and charring more pungent and penetrating. Each with a powerful hand-torch to lighten the shadows cast by the arc-lamps, Dermott, Mackenzie and Bronowski embarked on a search of every square inch of the floors and walls.

After ten minutes Poulson said curiously: “What are you looking for?”

“I’ll let you know when I find it,” Dermott said. “Meantime I haven’t a clue.”

“In that case, can I join in the search?”

“Sure. Don’t touch or turn anything over. The F.B.I. wouldn’t like it.”

Ten minutes later, Dermott straightened and switched off his torch. “That’s it, then, gentlemen. If you’ve found no more than I have, among the four of us we’ve found nothing. Looks as if fire or blasts have wiped the platter clean. Let’s have a look at the Johnson brothers. They should be in a fairly examinable state by now.”

They were. Dermott moved first to the man he’d looked at in the pump-room. This time the zip on the green parka unfastened easily. The blast effect that had shredded the parka had not penetrated it, for the plaid shirt beneath bore no signs of damage. Dermott removed some paper, cards and envelopes from the inside right pocket of the jacket, leafed through and replaced them. He then lifted both charred wrists, examined them and the hands in an apparently cursory fashion and lowered them again. He repeated the process with the other victim, then rose to his feet. Poulson bent a quizzical eye on him.

“That’s the way a detective examines a murdered man?”

“I don’t suppose it is. But then, I’m not a detective.” He turned to Bronowski. “You all through?”

“If you are.” Sam Bronowski led the way to the helicopter, Dermott and Mackenzie following through the thinly-driving snow that reduced visibility to a few yards. It was intensely cold.

“Clues,” Mackenzie said into Dermott’s ear, not from any wish for privacy but simply to make himself heard. “Man can’t move around without tripping over them.”

“None in the pump-room, that’s sure. Place had been pretty comprehensively quartered before we ever got there. Almost certainly before the snow had started to cover anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“The old fine tooth-comb is what I mean.”

“Poulson and his men?”

“And/or. Who else?”

“Perhaps there was nothing to find?”

Dermott said—or rather shouted: “That dead man’s forefinger had been deliberately broken.

Bent in at forty-five degrees towards the thumb. Never seen anything like it before.”

“Freak accident.”

“‘Odd’ is better. Something else odd, too. When I searched him first there was a buff envelope in his inner pocket. I was unable to get it out.”

“But you were when you unzipped it later?”

“No. It was gone.”

“‘And/or’ at work, you think?”

“So it seems.”

“All very curious,” Mackenzie said.

Jim Brady was of the same opinion. After reporting the results of their investigation, Dermott and Mackenzie had retired with him to the room he’d been allocated for the night.

Brady said: “Why didn’t you mention those things to Black and Finlayson? Those are hard facts—an oddly broken finger, a missing envelope?”

“Hard facts? There’s only my word for it. I’ve no idea what was in the envelope anyway, and although I’d say the forefinger had been deliberately broken, I’m no osteologist.”

“But no harm in mentioning those things, surely?”

“Bronowski and Houston were there too.”

“You really don’t trust anyone, do you, George?” Brady’s tone was admiring, not reproachful.

“As you never fail to remind people, sir, you taught me yourself.”

“True, true,” Brady said complacently. “Very well, then, have them up. I’ll do my Olympian act while you ply them with questions and strong drink.”

Dermott spoke on the phone and within a minute Bronowski and Houston had knocked, entered and taken seats.

“Kind, gentlemen, kind.” Brady was at his most avuncular. “Long day, I know, and you must be damnably tired. But we’re babes in the wood up here. We’re not only short of necessary information, we’re totally devoid of it, and we believe you two gentlemen are those best equipped to supply us with that information. But I forget myself, gentlemen. I suggest a pre-inquisitional restorative.”

Mackenzie said: “What Mr Brady means is a drink.”

“That’s what I said: “You gentlemen like Scotch?”

“Off-duty, yes. But you know the company regulations, sir, and how strictly Mr Finlayson interprets those.”

“Strict? I am iron-clad in the interpretation of my own regulations.” The wave of Brady’s arm was, indeed, Olympian. “You are off-duty. Off regular duty, anyhow. George, refreshments. Mr Dermott will ask the questions, alternating, I do not doubt, with Mr Mackenzie. You gentlemen, if you will be so kind, will fill in the gaps in our knowledge.”

He took his daiquiri from Dermott, savoured it, laid down his glass, relaxed in his chair and steepled his hands under his chin. “I shall but listen and evaluate.” Nobody was left with any doubt as to which was the most demanding task of the three. “Health, gentlemen.”

Bronowski lifted his own glass, which he had accepted with no great show of reluctance. “And confusion to our enemies.”

Dermott said: “That’s precisely the point. The enemy aren’t confused, we are. The taking out of Pump Station Four is only the opening skirmish in what promises to be bloody battle. They—the enemy—know where they’re going to hit again. We have not the vaguest idea. But you must have—by the very nature of your job you must be more aware of the points most vulnerable to attack than anyone else between Prudhoe Bay and Valdez. Take off your security hats and put on those of the enemy. Where would you strike next?”

“Jesus!” Bronowski fortified himself with some of Brady’s malt. “That’s more than a sixty-four-dollar question. It’s an 800-mile question—and every damned mile is virtually a sitting target.”

“The boss is right,” Tim Houston said. “If we sit here and drink your whisky while pretending to help, we’re only abusing your hospitality. There’s nothing we or anyone else can do to help. A combat-ready division of the U.S. Army would be about as useful as a gaggle of girl guides. The task is impossible and the line indefensible.”

Mackenzie said: “Well, George, at least we’re operating on a bigger scale than with the tar-sands boys in Athabasca. There they said a battalion wouldn’t be big enough to guard their installation. Now it’s a division.” Mackenzie turned to Bronowski. “Let’s switch hats with the enemy. Where wouldn’t you strike next?”

Bronowski said: “Well, I wouldn’t strike at any of the pump stations again on the assumption that, until this matter is cleared up, they will be heavily guarded. I’d have been sorely tempted to go for Pump Station Ten at the Isabel Pass in the Alaska Range, or No. 12 at the Thompson Pass in the Chugach Mountains. All pump stations are vital of course, but some are more vital than others, and those are No. 10 and No. 12 — along with No. 4 here.” He considered briefly. “Or maybe I would go for them…I mean, maybe you’d be so damned certain that I wouldn’t hit again in the same place that you wouldn’t much bother—”

Dermott held up his hand. “Start in on the double-guessing, and we’re up all night. On with the hazards—the low priority ones, I mean.”

“I wouldn’t go for the two master operations control centres at Prudhoe Bay. They could be taken out easily enough and, sure, they’d stop all production from the wells immediately, but not for long. It’s no secret that contingency plans for bypassing the centres are already in hand. Repairs wouldn’t take all that long. In any event, security will be now tightened to the extent that the game wouldn’t be worth the candle. So we can be pretty certain that there will be no attempt made to sabotage the oil supply before it enters the pipeline. Same goes for when it leaves the pipe at Valdez. Maximum damage there could be inflicted at the oil movements control centre, where the pipeline controller can monitor and control the flow of oil all the way from Prudhoe to Valdez, and the terminal controller—he’s in the same room, actually—controls practically everything that moves in the terminal itself. Both of those, in turn, are dependent on what’s called the backbone supervisory system computer. Knock out any of those three and you’re in dead trouble. But they’re pretty secure as they are: from now on, they’ll be virtually impregnable. Again, not worth it.”

Dermott said: “How about the storage tanks?”

“Well, now. If one or two of them were attacked or ruptured—it would be impossible to get them all at once—the containment dykes would take care of the spillage. Fire would be another thing, but even then the snow would have a blanketing effect—we may only have an annual dusting of snow up here, but down there they have over three hundred inches. Anyway, the tank farms are the most open and easily guarded complex on the entire pipeline. There’s no way you can really get at them without bombing the area: not very likely, one would think.”

“What about the tanker terminals?”

“Again easily guarded. I hardly think they’re likely to run to underwater demolition squads. Even if they did they couldn’t do much damage, and that would be easily repaired.”

“The tankers themselves?”

“Sink a dozen and there’s always a thirteenth. No way you can interrupt the oil flow by hitting the tankers.”

“The Valdez Narrows?”

“Block them?” Dermott nodded and Bronowski shook his head. “The Narrows aren’t as narrow as they look on a small-scale chart. Three thousand feet—that’s the minimum channel width—between the Middle Rock and the east shore. You’d have to sink an awful lot of vessels to block the channel.”

“So we cross off the unlikely targets. Where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us with eight hundred miles.” Bronowski shifted.

“The air temperature is the over-riding factor,” Houston said. “No saboteur worth his salt would consider wrecking anything except the pipeline itself. This time of the year any attack has to be in the open air.”

“Why?”

“This is only early February, remember, and to all intents we’re still in the depth of winter. As often as not the temperature is well on the wrong side of thirty below, and in these parts thirty below is the crucial figure. Rupture the pipeline at, say, thirty-five below, and it stays ruptured. Repair is virtually impossible. Men can work, although well below their norm, but unfortunately the metal they may try to repair or the machine tools they use to make the repairs won’t co-operate with them. At extreme temperatures, profound molecular changes occur in metal and it becomes unworkable. Given the right—or wrong—conditions, a tap on an iron rod will shatter it like glass.”

Brady said: “You mean, all I need is a hammer and a few taps on the pipeline—”

Houston was patient. “Not quite. What with the heat of the oil inside and the insulation lagging outside, the steel of the pipeline is always warm and malleable. It’s the repair tools that would fracture.”

Dermott said: “But surely it would be possible to erect canvas or tarpaulin covers over the fracture and bring the temperature up to workable levels by using hot-air blowers? You know, the way Poulson did at Station Four?”

“Of course. Which is why I wouldn’t attack the pipeline directly. I’d attack the structures that support the pipeline, those that are already frozen solid at air temperature and would require days, perhaps weeks, to bring up to a working temperature.”

“Structures?”

“Indeed. The terrain between Prudhoe and Valdez is desperately uneven and traversed with innumerable watercourses which have to be forded or spanned in one way or another. There are over six hundred streams and rivers along the run. The 650-foot free-span suspension bridge over the Tazlina River would make a dolly of a target. Even better would be the 1,200-foot span—a similar type of construction—over the Tanana River. But one doesn’t even have to operate on such a grandiose scale, and I, personally, would prefer not to.” He looked at Bronowski. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Completely. Operate on a much more moderate and undramatic scale but one equally effective. I’d go for the V.S.M.s every time.”

Dermott said: “V.S.M.s?”

“Vertical support members. Roughly half the length of the pipeline is above ground and lies on a horizontal cradle or saddle supported by vertical metal posts. That makes for a fair number of targets −78,000 of them, to be precise. They would be a snip to take out—wrap-round beehive plastic explosives which would need all of a minute to fix in position. Take out twenty of those, and the line would collapse under its own weight and the weight of the oil inside it. Take weeks to repair it.”

“They could still use those hot-air canvas shelters.”

“A hell of a lot of help that would be,” Bronowski said, “if they couldn’t bring up the cranes and crawler equipment to effect the repairs. Anyway, there are places where, at this time of year, it just couldn’t be done. There is, for instance, one particularly vulnerable stretch which gave the designers headaches, the builders sleepless nights and security nightmares. This steep and dangerous stretch is between Pump Station Five and the summit of Atigun Pass, which is between four and five thousand feet high.”

Houston said: “4,775 feet.”

“4,775 feet. In a run of a hundred miles from the pass the pipe comes down to 1,200 feet, which is quite a drop.”

“With a corresponding amount of built-up pressure?”

“That’s not the problem. In the event of a break in the line a special computer linkage between Four and Five will automatically shut down the pumps in Four and close every remote valve between the stations. The fail-safe procedures are highly sophisticated, and they work. At the very worst the spillage could be restricted to 50,000 barrels. But the point is, in winter the line couldn’t be repaired.”

Brady coughed apologetically and descended from his Olympian heights.

“So a break in this particular section, about now, could immobilise the line for weeks on end?”

“No question.”

“Then forget it.”

“Mr Brady?”

“The burdens I have to bear alone,” Brady sighed. “Let me have men about me who can think. I begin to understand why I am what I am. I find it extraordinary that the construction company never carried out any tests to discover what happens to the viscosity of oil in low temperatures. Why didn’t they seal off a couple of hundred feet of experimental pipe with oil inside it and see how long it would take before it gummed up to the extent that it would cease to flow?”

“Never occurred to them, I suppose,” Bronowski said. “An eventuality that would never arise.”

“It has arisen. An estimate of three weeks has been bandied about. Based on scientific calculations, one assumes?”

Bronowski said: “I wouldn’t know. Not my field. Maybe Mr Black or Mr Finlayson would know.”

“Mr Black knows nothing about oil, and I doubt whether Mr Finlayson or any other professional oilman on the line has anything but the vaguest idea. Could be ten days. Could be thirty. You take my point, George?”

“Yes. Blackmail, threats, extortion, some positive and very material advantages to be gained. Interruption is one thing, cessation another. They require a lever, a bargaining counter. Close down the line completely, and the oil companies would laugh at their threats, for then they would have nothing to lose. The bargaining arm would have gone. The kidnapper can’t very well hold a kidnapee for ransom if it’s known that the kidnapee is dead.”

“I question if I could have put it better myself,” Brady said. He had about him an air of magnanimous self-satisfaction. “We are, clearly, not dealing with clowns. Our friends would have taken such imponderables into account and would err on the side of caution. You are with me, Mr Bronowski?”

“I am now. But when I was talking about hazards, I wasn’t taking that side of it into account.”

“I know you weren’t. Nobody was. Well, I think that will do, gentlemen. We appear to have established two things. It is unlikely that any attack will be carried out on any major installation—that is Prudhoe, Valdez or the intervening twelve major pump stations. It is further unlikely that any attack will be carried out in regions so inaccessible that repairs may be impossible for weeks on end.

“So we’re left with the likelihood that any further sabotage will take the form of attacks on accessible stretches of VSMs or the taking out of minor bridges—the possibility of destroying the Tazlina or Tanana bridges is remote, as those could well take weeks to repair. We may not have come up with too much, but at least we have clarified matters and established some sort of system of priorities.”

Not without difficulty Brady heaved himself to his feet to indicate that the interview was over. “Thank you, gentlemen, both for your time and information. I’ll see you in the morning—at, of course, a reasonably Christian hour.”

The door closed behind Bronowski and Houston. Brady asked: “Well, what did you make of that?”

Dermott said: “As you said, just a limitation of possibilities, which, unfortunately, still remain practically limitless. Three things I’d like to do. First, I’d like the F.B.I. or whoever to carry out a rigorous investigation into the pasts of Poulson and his pals at Pump Station Four.”

“You have reason to suspect them?”

“Not really. But I’ve an odd feeling: something is wrong at Number Four. Don shares my feeling, but there’s nothing we can put a finger on except that buff envelope that went missing from the dead engineer’s pocket. Even with that I’m beginning to question whether my eyes or imagination were playing tricks on me: the lighting was damned harsh, and I could have got my colours wrong. No matter—as you’d be the first to agree, every pipeline employee is a suspect until his innocence is established.”

“You bet. You said Poulson and Bronowski seemed on pretty cordial terms?”

“Bronowski is the sort of character who seems on pretty well cordial terms with everyone. If you’re suggesting what I think you are I might mention that according to Finlayson there have been three security checks carried out on Bronowski.”

“And passed with flying colours, no doubt. What does Finlayson know about security checks and how to evaluate them? Has he any guarantee that none of those three professedly unbiased investigators was not, in fact, a bosom friend of Bronowski? Now, I have a very good and very discreet friend in New York. As you say yourself, every pipeline operator is as guilty as hell until proved otherwise.”

“I didn’t quite say that.”

“Hair-splitting. The second thing?”

“I’d like a medical opinion, preferably that of a doctor with some osteopathic knowledge, on how the dead engineer’s finger came to be broken.”

“How can that help?”

“How should I know?” Dermott sounded almost irritable. “God knows, Jim, you’ve emphasised often enough never to overlook anything that seems odd.”

“True, true,” Brady said pacifically. “There was a third matter?”

“Let’s find out how the fingerprint boys in Anchorage are getting on with that telephone booth affair. Three tiny things, I know, but it’s all we have to go on.”

“Four. There’s also Bronowski. And now?”

The telephone rang. Brady picked it up, listened briefly, scowled and handed the phone over to Dermott. “For you.” Dermott lifted an eyebrow. “It’s that damnable code again.”

Dermott gave him an old-fashioned look, put the phone to his ear, reached for a pad and started to make notes. After barely a minute he hung up and said: “And now? That was your last question, wasn’t it?”

“What? Yes. So?”

“And now it’s back to the old jet and heigh-ho for Canada.”

Dermott gave Brady an encouraging smile. “Should be all right, sir. Still plenty of daiquiri in your airborne bar.”

“What the devil is that meant to mean?”

“Just this, sir.” Dermott’s smile had gone. “You will recall our three brilliant minds sitting around in Sanmobil’s office and coming to the unanimous conclusion that there were six points vulnerable to attack—the draglines, the bucketwheels, the reclaimers’ bridges, the separator plates, the radial stackers and, above all, the conveyor belting? Some joker up there obviously didn’t see it our way at all. He’s taken out the main processing plant.”

6

Four hours later the Brady Enterprises team stood shivering in Sanmobil’s sabotaged processing plant at Athabasca. Brady himself was enveloped in his usual cocoon of coats and scarves, his temper not improved by the fact that the flight from Alaska had deprived him of dinner.

“How did it happen?” he repeated. “Here we have an easily-patrolled area, brilliantly lit, as you pointed out yourself, and staffed with 100 per cent—I beg your pardon, 98 per cent—loyal and patriotic Canadians.” He peered through a large hole that had been blown in a cylindrical container. “How can such things be?”

“I don’t think that’s quite fair, Mr Brady.” Bill Reynolds, the fair-haired and ruddy-faced operations manager, spoke up for his colleague Terry Brinckman, the security chief at whom Brady’s remarks had been directed. “Terry had only eight men on duty last night—and that was his second shift of the day. In other words, he himself had been continuously on duty for fifteen hours when this incident occurred. You can see how hard he was trying.”

Brady did not nod in assent. Reynolds went on:

“You remember we had all agreed on the priorities, the areas most liable to attack. Those were the places that Terry and his men were doing their best to protect—which didn’t leave any men over for patrolling the plant itself. You will recall, Mr Brady, that you were in complete agreement. You also said Terry had nothing to reproach himself with. If we’re going to apportion blame, let’s not forget ourselves.”

“Nobody’s blaming anybody, Mr Reynolds. How extensive is the damage?”

“Enough. Terry and I figure that these guys let off three charges here—that’s the gas oil hydrotreater—and the same number next door at the naphtha hydrotreater. In fact we’ve been extremely lucky—we could have had gas explosions and fuel fires. We had none. As it is, damage is comparatively slight. We should be on stream again in forty-eight hours.”

“Meantime, everything is shut down?”

“Not the draglines. But the rest is. The radial stackers are full.”

“One of the plant operatives, you think?”

Brinckman said: “I’m afraid we’re sure. It’s a big plant but it takes surprisingly few people to operate it, and everybody on a shift knows everybody else. A stranger would have been spotted at once. Besides, we know it was an inside job—six thirty-ounce explosive charges were taken from the blasting shed last night.”

“Blasting shed?”

Reynolds said: “We use explosives to break up large chunks of tar sand that have become too tightly bound together. But we’ve only got small charges.”

“Big enough, it would seem. The blasting shed is normally kept locked?”

“Double-locked.”

“Somebody forced the door?”

“Nobody forced anything. That’s why Brinckman told you we’re sure it was an inside job. Somebody used keys.”

“Who normally holds the keys?” Dermott asked.

Reynolds said: “There are three sets. I hold one, Brinckman has two.”

“Why two?”

“One I keep permanently,” Brinckman explained. “The other goes to the security charge-hand for the night-shift, who passes it on to the person in charge of the morning and afternoon shifts.”

“Who are those other security shift charge-hands?”

Brinckman said: “My No. 2, Jorgensen—this is his shift, really—and Napier. I don’t think that any of the three of us is much given to stealing explosives, Mr Dermott.”

“Not unless you’re certifiable. Now, it seems unlikely anyone would risk abstracting keys and having copies made. Not only would they be too likely to be missed, but there’s also more than a fair chance that we could trace the key-cutter and so the thief.”

“There could be illegal key-cutters.”

“I still doubt the keys would have been taken. Much more likely someone took an impression: that would need seconds only. And that’s where the illegal side would come in—no straight key-cutter would touch an impression. How easy would it be for anyone to get hold of the keys, even briefly?”

Brinckman said: “About Jorgensen’s and Napier’s I wouldn’t know. I clip mine to my belt.”

Mackenzie said: “Everybody’s got to sleep.”

“So?”

“You take your belt off then, don’t you?”

“Sure.” Brinckman shrugged. “And if you’re going to ask me next if I’m a heavy sleeper, well, yes, I am. And if you’re going to ask me if it would have been possible for anyone to sneak into my room while I was asleep, borrow my key for a couple of minutes and return it unseen, well, yes that would have been perfectly possible too.”

“This,” Brady said, “is not going to take us very far. Sticky-fingered characters with an affinity for keys are legion. Would there have been any security man in this area tonight?”

“Jorgensen would know,” Brinckman said. “Shall I get him?”

“Won’t he be out patrolling sixteen miles of conveyor belting or something?”

“He’s in the canteen.”

“But surely he’s in charge, on duty?”

“In charge of what, Mr Brady? There are four men keeping an eye on the four draglines. The rest of the plant is closed down. We think it unlikely that this bomber will strike again tonight.”

“Not much is unlikely.”

“Bring him along to my office,” Reynolds said. Brinckman left. “I think you’ll find it warmer and more comfortable there, Mr Brady.”

They followed Reynolds to the office block, through an external room where a bright-eyed and pretty young woman at the desk gave them a charming smile, and on into Reynolds’s office where Brady began divesting himself of several outer layers of clothing even before Reynolds had the door closed. Reynolds took his chair behind the desk while Brady sunk wearily into the only armchair in the room.

Reynolds said: “Sorry to drag you all over the north-west like this. No sleep, no food, jet lags, all very upsetting. In the circumstances I feel entitled to bend company regulations. Come to think of it, I’m the only person in Sanmobil who can. A refreshment would be in order?”

“Ha!” Brady pondered. “Early in the morning. Not only no dinner but no breakfast either.” A hopeful look crept into his eye. “Daiquiri?”

“But I thought you always—”

“We had an unfortunate experience over the Yukon,” Dermott said. “We ran out.”

Brady scowled. Reynolds smiled. “No daiquiris here. But a really excellent twelve-year-old malt.” A few seconds later Brady lowered his half-tumbler and nodded appreciatively.

“A close second. Now you two”—this to Dermott and Mackenzie—“I’ve done all the work so far.”

“Yes, sir.” Not even the shadow of a smile touched Mackenzie’s face. “Three questions, if I may. Who suggested checking up on the amount of explosives in the blasting shed?”

“Nobody. Terry Brinckman did it off his own bat. We have a meticulous checking system and an easy one. The tally sheet’s kept up to date twice a day. We just count the numbers of each particular type of explosive, subtract that number from the latest entry on the tally sheet, and that’s the number that’s been issued that day. Or stolen, as the case may be.”

“Well, that’s certainly a mark in favour of your security chief.”

“You have reservations about him?”

“Good heavens no. Why on earth should I? Number two—where do you hang up your keys at night?”

“I don’t.” He nodded towards a massive safe in a corner. “Kept there day and night.”

“Ah! In that case I’ll have to rephrase what was going to be my third question. You are the only person with a key to that safe?”

“There’s one more key. Corinne has it.”

“Ah. That lovely lassie in the outer office?”

“That, as you say, lovely lassie in the outer office is my secretary.”

“And why does she have a key?”

“Various reasons. All big companies, as you must know, have their codes. We’re no exception. Code books are kept there. Corinne’s my coding expert. Also, I can’t be here all the time. Under-managers, accountants, our legal people and the security chief all have access to the safe. I can assure you the safe contains items of vastly more importance than the keys to the blasting shed. Nothing has ever gone missing yet.”

“People just walk in, help themselves and walk out?”

Reynolds lifted his eyebrows and looked hard at Mackenzie. “Not quite. We are security conscious to a degree. They have to sign in, show Corinne what they’ve taken and sign out again.”

“A couple of keys in a trouser pocket?”

“Of course she doesn’t search them. There has to be a certain amount of trust at executive levels.”

“Yes. Could we have her in, do you think?”

Reynolds spoke into the box on his desk. Corinne entered looking good standing up, in her khaki cord Levi’s and nicely disordered plaid shirt, a person with a smile for everyone. Reynolds said: “You know who those gentlemen are, Corinne?”

“Yes, sir. I think everybody does.”

“I think Mr Mackenzie here would like to ask you some questions.”

“Sir?”

“How long have you been with Mr Reynolds?”

“Just over two years.”

“Before that?”

“I came straight from secretarial school.”

“You have a pretty sensitive and responsible position here?”

She smiled again, but this time a little uncertainly, as if unsure where the questions were leading. “Mr Reynolds lists me as his confidential secretary.”

“May I ask how old you are?”

“Twenty-two.”

“You must be the youngest confidential secretary of any big corporation I’ve ever come across.”

This time she caught her lip and glanced at Reynolds, who was leaning back in his chair, hands clasped lazily behind his neck, with the air of a man who was almost enjoying himself. He smiled and said: “Mr Mackenzie is an industrial sabotage investigator. He has a job to do and asking questions is part of that job. I know he’s just made a statement, not asked a question, but it’s one of those statements that expects comment.”

She turned back to Mackenzie, with a swing of her long chestnut hair. “I suppose I’ve been pretty lucky at that.”

She spoke with marked coolness and Mackenzie felt it. “None of my questions are directed against you, Corinne, okay? Now, you must know the executive level people pretty well?”

“I can hardly help it. They all come through me to get to Mr Reynolds.”

“Including those who have business with that safe there?”

“Of course. I know them all well.”

“All good friends, I take it?”

“Well.” She smiled, but the smile had an edge to it. “Lots of them are much too senior to be my friends.”

“But on good terms, shall we say?”

“Oh, yes.” She smiled again. “I don’t think I’ve made any enemies.”

“Perish the thought!” This came from George Dermott, who took over the questioning on a brisker note. “Any of the people using the safe ever give you trouble? Like trying to take away what they shouldn’t?”

“Not often, and then its only absentmindedness or because they haven’t studied the classified list. And surely, Mr Dermott, if anyone wanted to get something past me they’d hide it in their clothing.”

Dermott nodded. “That’s true, Miss Delorme.” The girl was inspecting his rough-and-ready good looks with a spark of humour in her eyes, as if amused by his blunt approach. He caught the expression and, in his turn, watched her for a reflective moment. “What do you think now?” he asked her. “Do you think anyone might have smuggled something past you out of the safe?”

She looked him in the eye. “They might,” she said, “but I doubt it.”

“Could I have a list of the people who used the safe in the past four or five days?”

“Certainly.” She left and returned with a sheet which Dermott studied briefly.

“Good Lord! The safe appears to be the Mecca for half of Sanmobil. Twenty entries at least in the last four days.” He looked up at the girl. “This is a carbon. May I keep it?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.”

Corinne Delorme smiled at the room in general, but the blue eyes came back to Dermott before she went out.

“Charming indeed,” said Brady.

“Plenty of spunk,” Mackenzie said ruefully. “She built a whole generation gap between you and me, George.” He frowned. “What gave you the idea her name was Delorme?”

“There was a plaque on her desk: ‘Corinne Delorme’, it said.” Mackenzie shook his head. “Hawkeye Dermott,” he said.

The other men laughed. Some of the tension that had grown in the room during the questioning of the girl fell away again.

“Well. Anything more I can do for you?” Reynolds asked.

Dermott said: “Yes, please. Could we have a list of the names of your security staff?”

Reynolds bent over the voice-box and spoke to Corinne. He had just finished when Brinckman arrived accompanied by a tall, red-haired man whom he introduced as Carl Jorgensen.

Dermott said: “You were in charge of the night security shift, I understand. Were you around the sabotage area at all tonight?”

“Several times.”

“So often? I thought you would have been concentrating on what we regarded—mistakenly—as the more vulnerable areas.”

“I went round them a couple of times but by jeep only. But I had this funny feeling that we might have been guarding the wrong places. Don’t ask me why.”

“Your funny feeling didn’t turn out to be so funny after all Anything off-beat, anything to arouse suspicion?”

“Nothing. I know everybody on the night shift and I know where they work. Nobody there that shouldn’t have been there, nobody in any place that he hadn’t any right to be.”

“You’ve got a key to the blasting shed. Where do you keep it?”

“Terry Brinckman mentioned this. I have it only during my tour of duty and then I hand it over. I always carry it in the same button-down pocket on my shirt.”

“Could anybody get at it?”

“Nobody except a professional pick-pocket, and even then I’d know.”

The two security men left and Corinne came in with a sheet of paper. Reynolds said: “That was quick.”

“Not really. They were typed out ages ago.”

Brady said to the girl: “You must come and meet my daughter, Stella. I’m sure you’d get on. Both the same age. Stella is very like you, actually.”

“Thank you, Mr Brady. I think I’d like that.”

“I’ll have her call you.”

When she had gone, Dermott said: “What do you mean, like your daughter? I’ve never seen anyone less like Stella.”

“Dancing eyes, my boy, dancing eyes. One must learn to probe beneath the surface.” Brady heaved himself to his feet. “The years creep on. Breakfast and bed. I’m through detecting for the day. It’s tougher than capping fires.”

Dermott drove the rented car back to the hotel, Mackenzie sitting beside him. Brady took his ease across the entire width of the back seat. He said: “I’m afraid I wasn’t quite levelling with Reynolds there. Breakfast, yes. But it’ll be some hours before I—we—retire. I have come up with a plan.” He paused.

Dermott said courteously: “We’re listening.”

“I think I’ll do some listening first. Why do you think I employ you?”

“That’s a fair question,” Mackenzie said. “Why?”

“To investigate, to detect, to think, to plot, to scheme, to plan.”

“All at once?” Mackenzie said.

Brady ignored him. “I don’t want to come up with a proposal and then, if it goes wrong, have to spend the rest of my days listening to your carping reproaches. I’d like you two to come up with an idea and then if it’s a lemon we can all share the blame. Incidentally, Donald, I take it you have your bug-box with you?”

“The electronic eavesdropping locator-detector?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Yes.”

“Splendid. Now, George, let’s have your reading of the situation.”

“My reading of the situation is that for all the good we’re doing we haven’t a hope in hell of stopping the bad guys from doing exactly what they want and when they want. There is no way to forestall attacks on Sanmobil or the Alaska pipeline. They’re calling the shots and we’re the sitting ducks, if you’ll pardon the mixing of the metaphors. They call the tune and we dance to it. They’re active, we’re passive. They’re offensive, we’re defensive. If we have any tactics, I’d say it’s time we changed them.”

“Go on,” his leader urged him from behind.

“If that’s meant to sound encouraging,” Dermott said, “I don’t know why. But how’s this for a positive thought? Instead of letting them keep us off-balance, why don’t we keep them off-balance? Instead of their harassing us, let us harass them.”

“Go on, go on,” the back seat exhorted.

“Let’s attack them and put them on the defensive. Let them start worrying, instead of us.” He paused. “I see things as through a glass darkly, but I say plant a light at the end of the tunnel. What we’ll do is, we’ll provoke them. Provoke a reaction. Provoke the hell out of them. We’ll hang it on this one factor: our own pasts, our backgrounds, can be probed until the cows come home, and nothing will be turned up: but you can say that about how many people in a hundred?”

Dermott twisted his head briefly to locate a peculiar noise from the back of the car. Brady was actually rubbing his hands together. “Well, Donald, what’s your reading of it?”

“Simple enough when you see it,” Mackenzie said. “All you have to do is to antagonise anywhere between sixty and eighty people to hell and back again. Investigate them as openly as possible. Deploy maximum indiscretion.”

Brady beamed. “What sixty to eighty people do we investigate?”

“In Alaska all the security agents. Here, the security agents again, plus everybody who’s had access to Reynolds’s safe in the past few days. Going to include Reynolds himself?”

“Good heavens, no.”

Mackenzie said inconsequentially: “She is a lovely girl.”

Brady looked aloof. Mackenzie asked him: “Do you really expect to find your panjandrum among that lot?”

“Panjandrum?”

“The prime mover. Mr Big. Messrs Big.”

“Not for a moment. But if there’s a rotten apple in the barrel, he may well find him for us.”

Mackenzie said: “Right. So we get all their names and past histories. Later on—sooner rather than later—we’ll have the lot fingerprinted. Sure, they’re going to stand on their civic rights and yell blue murder, and that will please you no end—refusal to co-operate will point the finger of suspicion at the refusee, if that’s the word I want. Then you feed the information to your investigators in Houston, Washington and New York: cost no object, urgency desperate. Not that you’ll care a damn whether the investigators come up with anything or not. All that matters is that the suspects get to hear such enquiries are under way. That’s all the provocation they’ll need.”

“What kind of reactions do we expect to provoke?” Dermott asked.

“Unpleasant ones, I should hope. For the villains, I mean.”

“The first thing I’d do,” Dermott told Brady, “is send your family back to Houston. Jean and Stella could really become a liability. The scheme might rebound on you. Can’t you see the word coming through: lay off, Brady, or something unpleasant’s going to happen to your family? These people are playing for high stakes. They’ve killed once, they won’t hesitate to kill again. They can’t be hung twice.”

“Same thought occurred to me.” Mackenzie turned to face the back seat. “Either get the girls right back home, or have the RCMP protect them.”

“Hell—I need them!” Brady sat forward with indignation. “Number one, I have to be looked after. Number two, Stella’s handling the Ekofisk business for me.”

“Ekofisk?” Dermott almost turned backwards. “What’s that?”

“Big fire in the North Sea, Norwegian half. Started after you’d come north. We have a team going in there today.”

“Well, okay,” Dermott gave way a little. “So you have to keep in touch. But why not work through the locals? That red-head of Reynolds’s—Corinne. She could field calls for you.”

“What happens when we go back to Alaska?”

“Use somebody up there. Finlayson’s got a secretary—must have.”

“No substitute for the personal touch,” said Brady magisterially. He sank back in the seat as though the argument were over.

His two heavyweights turned forward again with an exchange of looks. Having been through all this a hundred times before, they knew that further pressure would be useless for the moment. Wherever he went, Brady maintained the fiction that his wife and daughter were part of his essential life-support system, and he kept them with him regardless of the expense. Or danger.

7

Not that Dermott and Mackenzie in the least minded having Jean and Stella around. Like mother, like daughter: whereas Jean was a strikingly handsome woman in her middle-forties, with that lovely, naturally blonde hair and intelligent grey eyes, Stella looked the spitting image of her mother, only younger, and even livelier, with, as her father was so fond of claiming, dancing eyes.

The men found Jean awaiting their return in the lounge bar of the Peter Pond Hotel. Tall and elegant, she advanced to meet them with her usual expression of tolerant, kindly amusement. This look, Dermott knew from experience, reflected her genuine feelings: an equable temperament was no small advantage for someone who had to spend her life humouring Jim Brady.

“Hi, honey!” He reached up slightly to kiss her on the forehead. “Where’s Stella?”

“In your room. She’s got some messages for you—been pretty busy on the phone.”

“Excuse me, then, gentlemen. Maybe one of you would be so kind as to buy my wife a drink.”

He waddled off along the corridor, while Dermott and Mackenzie settled comfortably into the warmth of the bar. In marked contrast to her husband, Jean scarcely drank alcohol at all, and she sipped carefully at a pineapple juice while the two men addressed themselves to the Scotch. Nor did she try to talk shop in Brady’s absence: instead, she chatted pleasantly about Fort McMurray and its modest midwinter pleasures until her husband returned.

When he came back, Stella was with him, swinging along with her easy, loose-hipped walk. Dermott—not normally given to flights of fancy—was suddenly struck by the absurd disparity between the two figures. Jesus, he thought to himself: a hippo and a gazelle. What a pair!

Scarcely had Brady subsided into an armchair, with an outsize glass of daiquiri in his podgy hand, than he made a slight sign to Dermott and Mackenzie, who muttered something and slipped off.

Brady seemed in buoyant form, and began to regale his family with an edited account of his movements around the far north. After a while Jean said doubtfully: “It doesn’t seem to me you’ve accomplished very much.”

Brady was unruffled. “Ninety per cent of our business is cerebral, my dear. When we move into action, what happens is merely the almost mechanical and inevitable culmination of all the invisible hard work that’s gone on before.” He tapped his head. “The wise general doesn’t fling his troops into battle without reconnoitring beforehand. We’ve been reconnoitring.”

Jean smiled. “Let us know when you’ve identified the enemy.” Suddenly she became serious. “It’s a nasty business, isn’t it?”

“Murder always is, my dear.”

“I don’t like it, Jim. I don’t like you being in it. Surely this is for the law. You’ve never come across murder before in your business.”

“So I run away?”

She looked at his ample frame and laughed: “That’s one thing you’re not built for.”

“Run?” Stella said, mock-scornfully. “Dad couldn’t jog from here to the John!”

“Please!” Brady beamed. “I trust no such haste will be necessary.”

“Where did Donald go?” Jean asked.

“Upstairs, doing a little job for me.”

Mackenzie was at that moment moving slowly round Brady’s apartment with a calibrated metal box in one hand, a portable antenna in the other, and a pair of earphones on his head. He moved purposefully, a man who knew what he was about. He soon found what he was looking for.

When he came back to the bar he headed straight for Brady’s family encampment.

“Two,” he reported.

“Two what, Uncle Donald?” Stella asked sweetly.

Mackenzie appealed to his boss. “When are you going to start training this incorrigibly nosey daughter of yours?”

“I’ve stopped. Failed. Mother’s job, anyway.” He jerked his head upwards. “Got them all, did you?”

“Guess so.”

Dermott also reappeared to report.

“Ah, George,” Brady greeted him. “How did it go?”

“Reynolds seems very co-operative. Unfortunately all records are stored at the head office in Edmonton. He says by the time they’ve been dug out and flown up here, it may be late this evening or even tomorrow morning.”

“What records?” Stella asked.

“Affairs of state,” Brady told her. “Well, can’t be helped. Anything else?”

“Naturally enough he’s got no fingerprinting equipment.”

“Fix it after lunch.”

“He says he’ll fix it himself—the police chiefs a pal of his, apparently. Thinks the chief might be a bit shirty about the delay in reporting the crime.” He grinned across at Stella. “And don’t ask ‘what crime?’”

“No, sir, Mr Dermott, sir!” She wrinkled her upper lip in a fetching manner. “I never ask questions! I’m just permitted to fetch and carry, mend and clean.”

Brady went on: “Reynolds can always claim that at first he thought it was an industrial accident.”

“I understand the chief of police has 20-20 vision and intelligence to match.”

“Well—Reynolds’ll have to handle it as best he can. What about Prudhoe Bay?”

“An hour’s hold. They’ll page me.”

“Fair enough.” Brady shifted his attention to Stella. “We met an enchanting girl this morning—didn’t we, George? Knock spots off you, any day. Wouldn’t she, gentlemen?”

“Unquestionably,” said Mackenzie.

Stella looked at Dermott. “Foul, aren’t they?”

“Dead heat,” said Dermott. “But she’s very nice.”

“The manager’s secretary,” Brady said. “Corinne Delorme. I thought maybe you’d like to meet her. She said she’d like to meet you. She must know all the night-clubs, discos and other iniquitous dens in Fort McMurray.”

Stella said: “News for you, Dad. You’ve got to be talking about another town. I don’t know what this place is like in summer, but whatever it is, it’s a dead city in mid-winter. You might have warned us that this is an Arctic town.”

“Lovely choice of phrase. Wonderful sense of geography. That’s education for you,” Brady said to no-one in particular. “Maybe you should have stayed in Houston.”

Stella looked at her mother. “Did you hear what I just heard, Mummy?” she asked with a scornful shake of the head at her father which brought the pale blonde hair swinging round her face.

Jean smiled. “I heard. Sooner or later, my dear, you have to face up to the fact that your father is no more and no less than a fearful old hypocrite.”

“But he dragged us up here, kicking and screaming against our will, and now…” Remarkably, words failed her.

As much as it was possible for so rubicund a face to register an expression, Brady’s was registering unhappiness. “Well, now you’ve found out you don’t like it, maybe you’d rather get back down to Houston.” A note of wistfulness crept into his voice. “It’ll be nearly seventy degrees back there now.”

Silence descended. Brady looked at Dermott and Dermott looked at him. Jean Brady looked at both of them. “Something goes on that I don’t understand,” she said. Brady dropped his eyes, so she switched her attention to Dermott. “George?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“George!” He looked at her. “And don’t call me ‘ma’am’.”

“No, Jean.” He sighed and spoke with some feeling. “The boss of Brady Enterprises is not only a fearful old hypocrite: he’s a fearful old coward as well. What he wants, in the good old fashioned Western phrase, is that you should get out of town.”

“Why? What on earth have we done?”

Dermott looked hopefully at Mackenzie, who said: “You’ve done nothing. He has—or is about to.” Mackenzie shook his head at Dermott. “This is difficult,” he said.

Dermott explained: “We’ve decided on a course of action to flush the ungodly into the open, make them show their hand. Don and I have this unpleasant feeling that their reaction may be directed against Brady Enterprises in general and its boss in particular. The reaction may be violent—these people don’t play by any rules but their own. We don’t think they’d go for Jim himself. It’s well known that he can’t be intimidated. But what’s equally well known is what he thinks of his own family. If they got you or Stella, or both of you, they might figure they could force him to pull out.”

Jean reached out to take Stella’s hand. “But this must be nonsense,” she said. “Drama. Things like that don’t happen any more. Don, I appeal to you…” She looked anxiously at her daughter, gave her hand a little shake and released it.

Mackenzie was dogged. “Don’t appeal to me, Jean. When they snip off your finger with the wedding ring on it, will you still be saying things like that don’t happen any more?” She looked hurt. “Sorry if I sound brutal, but things like that have never stopped happening. It may not come to anything so bad: I’m looking on the blackest possible side. But that’s the only sensible way to look. We’ve got to find a safe place for you and the girl. How can Jim operate at his best if you’re on his mind?”

“He’s right,” muttered Brady. “Go pack your bags, please.”

During Mackenzie’s speech Stella had sat with her hands clasped together on her lap, like a schoolgirl, listening gravely. Now she said: “I can’t do that, Dad.”

“Why not?”

“Who’s going to make your daiquiris for you?”

Her mother cut in sharply. “There’s a little more to this than the damned daiquiris. If we left, who’s going to be number one target?”

“Dad,” said Stella flatly. She glowered at Dermott. “You know that, George.”

“I do,” he answered mildly. “But Donald and I are pretty good at looking after people.”

“That would be just fine, wouldn’t it?” She threw herself back in her chair, hazel eyes blazing. “All three of you shot or blown up or something.”

“Getting upset isn’t going to help,” said Jean soothingly. “Logic will, though.” She transferred her attention to Brady. “If we went, you’d still be worried stiff about us, and we’d be worried stiff about you. So where would that get us?”

Brady said nothing, and she went on: “But there’s only one point that really matters. Not only will I not run away from my husband. I’ll be damned if Jean Brady will run, period.”

Stella said: “And I’ll be damned if Stella Brady runs either. Who’s gonna maintain communications, for one thing? You know how long I spent on the phone today—to England and all that? Four hours.” She stood up decisively. “Another drink, Dad?” She cocked an ear at him ostentatiously. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that.”

“Monstrous regiment of women, was what I said.”

“Ah!” she smiled, collected the empty glasses and headed for the bar. Brady glared at Dermott and Mackenzie. “Hell of a lot of good you two are. Why didn’t you back me up?” He sighed heavily and changed his tack. “Why don’t we all get something to eat? Lunch, and after it I’ll catch up on some sleep. What are you girls proposing to do this afternoon?”

Stella came back with full glasses. “We’re going for a sleigh ride. Won’t that be nice!”

“Good God! You mean outside?” Brady gloomily surveyed the few flakes drifting past the window. “Very nice for some, I’m sure, but not for the sane.” He struggled to his feet. “The dining-room in two minutes, then. George, if you will.” He took Dermott aside.

With a giant Caribou T-bone steak, a quarter of blueberry pie and some excellent California burgundy inside him, Brady watched his befurred wife and daughter go out through the main entrance and sighed with satisfaction at the feeling of physical well-being that enveloped him.

“Well, gentlemen, I really believe I might manage a brief snooze after all. Yourselves too?”

Dermott said: “Off and on. Donald and I thought we’d chivvy up Prudhoe Bay and Sanmobil and get those names and records through as soon as possible.”

“Well, thank you, gentlemen. Very considerate. Do not wake me up unless Armageddon is nigh. Aha! Here, not unexpectedly, return the ladies.” He waited until his wife had reached the table. “Something up, then?”

“Something is up.” Jean did not sound pleased. “There are two men on the driving bench of that sleigh. Why two?”

“My dear, I’m not the arbiter of local customs. Are you afraid they’re homosexual?”

She lowered her voice. “They’re both carrying guns. You can’t see them, but you can, if you know what I mean.”

Brady said: “Members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are entitled to bear arms at all times. Says so in their constitution.”

Jean stared at him, snorted with resignation, turned and left. Jim Brady beamed in satisfaction. Mackenzie said airily: “They tell me there are some very handsome young constables in the R.C.M.P”

Apart from chatting with Ferguson, Brady’s pilot, Dermott spent the afternoon alone in the lounge, consuming one cup of coffee after the other. About mid-afternoon Jean and Stella returned, rosy-cheeked and in high spirits. Stella, it appeared, had learned from their escorts of a place where the younger people congregated of an evening, and had called Corinne Delorme at work to invite her out. Whether they intended to invite their erstwhile escorts along, Stella did not say nor did Dermott enquire. Brady would have the place comprehensively checked out before he would let them near it. Shortly afterwards Dermott received a call from Alaska. It was Bronowski in Prudhoe Bay: John Finlayson he said, was out at Pump Station Four but was expected back soon; he, Bronowski, would immediately set about obtaining what Dermott wanted and would arrange for the services of a fingerprint expert from Anchorage.

At five o’clock Reynolds came through to say that the fingerprinting was well in hand. The records Dermott required were even then being delivered to Edmonton Airport and would be delivered straight from McMurray Airport to the hotel. At six-thirty Mackenzie appeared, looking refreshed but at the same time reproachful.

“You should have called me. I’d meant to come down a couple of hours ago.”

“I’ll sleep tonight,” Dermott said. “That’s four hours you owe me.”

“Three and a half. I put a call through to Houston, explained what we had in mind, told them to alert Washington and New York, and emphasised the urgency.”

“I trust your unofficial listener got it all down.”

“He could hardly fail to,” Mackenzie said. “There was a bug installed inside the base plate of the telephone.”

“Well, that should be the final stirring-up of the hornets’ nest. Let’s hope the wrong people don’t get stung. How’s Jim?”

“Peered round his door on the way down. Looked like he’d died in his sleep.”

At seven o’clock a call came through from Sanmobil. Dermott indicated to Mackenzie that he should listen in to the extension earphone slotted onto the back of the receiver.

“Mr Reynolds? Not more bad news, I hope.”

“For me it is. I’ve been told to shut down the plant for a week.”

“When?”

“Now. Well, a few minutes ago. And I’m to be contacted in forty-eight hours to see if I’ve complied.”

“Was the message from Anchorage?”

“Where else?”

“Phone?”

“No. Telex.”

“They sent an open message?”

“No. Code. Our own company code.”

Dermott looked at Mackenzie. “Pretty sure of themselves, aren’t they?”

Reynolds said: “What was that?”

“Talking to Donald Mackenzie. He’s listening in. So they know that we know it’s an inside job. They must be pretty sure of themselves. Who’s got access to the code books?”

“Anybody who’s got access to my safe.”

“How many people does that make?”

“Twenty. Give or take.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“Consult Edmonton. With their approval I intend to be on stream again inside forty-eight hours.”

“I wish you luck.” Dermott replaced the receiver and looked at Mackenzie. “Now what?”

“Do you think Armageddon is nigh enough to justify waking up the Boss?”

“Not yet. Nothing he, we or anybody can do. Infuriating. Let’s try Anchorage. What’s the betting they’ve had a similar threat to close down the pipeline?” He lifted the phone, asked for the number, listened briefly then hung up. “Hold, they say. One hour, two hours. They’re not sure.”

The telephone rang. Dermott picked it up. “Anchorage? No it can’t be. I’ve just been told—ah, I see.” He looked at Mackenzie. “Police.” Mackenzie picked up the extension receiver. They both listened in silence, Dermott said: “Thank you. Thank you very much,” and both hung up.

Mackenzie said: “Well, they seem pretty confident.”

“They’re certain. Perfect copies of the prints from the Anchorage phone boxes. But they can’t match them up with any on their lists.”

“It all helps,” Mackenzie said gloomily.

“It’s not all that bad. The Photostat is promised for tomorrow. Might just match up with some of the prints we hope to collect. The Alaskan ones, I mean.”

“Of course?”

“Yes. It would be too easy to check up on anyone here who made a brief stopover in Anchorage.”

Stella came into the lounge, all set for dancing in black sequined silk and coloured tights, and carrying her coat. Dermott said: “And where do you think you’re going?”

Stella said: “I’m going out with Corinne. First a snack and then the bright lights and the light fantastic.”

“You’ll confine your dancing activities strictly to this hotel. You’re not going any place.”

When she had got through a diatribe, calling him a stuffed shirt and a spoil-sport, she added: “Mr Reynolds said it’s all right.”

“When did he say this?”

“We phoned about an hour ago.”

“It’s not up to Mr Reynolds to give you permission.”

“But he knows Corinne is coming with me. She lives near here. You don’t think he’d let his secretary walk into danger, do you?”

“She wouldn’t be walking into danger. Nobody would be interested in her. But in you, yes.”

Stella said: “You sound as if you’re convinced something is going to happen to me.”

“That’s the way to make sure that nothing will happen to you—by taking precautions. See what your father says anyway.”

“But how would he know what’s safe and what isn’t? How would he check up?”

“He’d go to the top: the chief of police, I’m certain.”

Stella smiled brilliantly and said: “But we’ve talked already to him. Over the phone. He was with Mr Reynolds. He says it’s perfectly okay.” She smiled again, impishly. “Besides, we won’t lack protection.”

“Your friends of this afternoon?”

“John Carmody and Bill Jones.”

“Well, I suppose that does make a difference. Ah, here comes Corinne.” He beckoned her across, made the introductions and watched as they moved off. “Well, I suppose we worry too much.” He glanced at the doorway. “When I look at that lot coming in, I hardly think we need worry at all.”

“That lot” were a pretty formidable looking pair—big men in their late twenties or early thirties who looked eminently capable of taking care not only of themselves but of anyone who might be along with them. Dermott and Mackenzie rose and crossed to meet them.

Dermott said: “I could be wrong, but you wouldn’t be two policemen disguised as civilians?”

“There we go,” said the fair-haired man. “Can’t be very good at undercover work if it’s as obvious as that. I’m John Carmody. This is Bill Jones. You must be Mr Dermott and Mr Mackenzie. Miss Brady described you to us.”

Mackenzie asked: “You gentlemen on overtime tonight?”

Carmody grinned. “Tonight? Two gallant volunteers. Labour of love. Doesn’t look like being any great hardship.”

“Watch them. Beautiful she may be, but Stella’s a conniving young minx. One other thing: you know we have a feeling some bad actors might try to hurt her. Or take her out of circulation. Just a suspicion, but you never know.”

“I think we might be able to take care of that.”

“I’m sure you can. Most kind of you gentlemen. Very much appreciated, I can tell you. I know Mr Brady would like to thank you himself, but as he’s in the land of dreams I’ll do it on his behalf. The girls are through there. I hope you have a pleasant evening.”

Dermott and Mackenzie returned to their table, where they talked in desultory fashion. Then the phone rang again. This time it was Alaska: Prudhoe Bay.

“Tim Houston here. Bad news, I’m afraid. Sam Bronowski is in the hospital. I found him lying unconscious on the floor of Finlayson’s office. Appears to have been struck over the head with a heavy object. He was hit over the temple where the skull is thinnest. Doctor says there may be a fracture—he’s just finishing some X-rays. He’s certainly concussed.”

“When did this happen?”

“Half hour ago. No more. But that’s not all. John Finlayson is missing: he vanished soon after coming back from Pump Station Four. Searched everywhere. No trace of him. Not in any of the buildings. If he’s outside on a night like this—well…” There was a grim pause. “…he won’t be around for long. We’ve got a high wind and heavy drifting, and the temperature’s between thirty and forty below. Every man in the place is out looking for him. Maybe he was attacked by the same person who attacked Bronowski. Maybe he wandered out dazed. Maybe he was forcibly removed—although I don’t see how that could be possible with so many people around. Are you coming up?”

“Are the F.B.I. and the State police there?”

“Yes. But there’s been another development.”

“A message from Edmonton?”

“Yes.”

“Telling you to close down the line?”

“How did you know?”

“They make similar demands, we’ve got one here. I’ll talk to Mr Brady. If you don’t hear, you’ll know we’re on our way.” He replaced the receiver and said to Mackenzie: “Armageddon? Enough to wake Jim?”

“More than enough.”

8

Ferguson, the pilot, was unhappy and with good reason. Throughout the flight he was in more or less continuous touch with the operations centre in Prudhoe Bay, and knew that the weather ahead was dangerous. The wind was gusting at 40 miles per hour: flying snow had cut ground visibility to a few feet, and the thickness of the drifting snow-blanket was estimated at sixty feet or even more—less than ideal circumstances for landing a fast jet in darkness.

Ferguson had every modern navigational and landing aid, but although he could make a hands-off touch-down if he had to, he preferred to see terra firma before he put his wheels down on it. One factor in Ferguson’s favour was that he was a profound pessimist: his three passengers well knew that he was not given to endangering his own life, let alone those of other people on board, and would have turned back had the risks been too great.

Brady, who had been wakened from a deep sleep and was in a sour mood, spoke scarcely a word on the way north. Mackenzie and Dermott, aware that the flight might be their last opportunity for some time, spent most of the trip asleep.

The landing, with much advancing and retarding of the throttles, was a heavy, bouncing one, but nonetheless safely accomplished. Visibility was down to twenty feet, and Ferguson crept cautiously forward until he picked up the lights of a vehicle. When the cabin door was opened, freezing snow whirled in, and Brady lost no time in making his customary elephantine dash for the shelter of the waiting minibus. At the wheel was Tim Houston, lieutenant to the invalided Bronowski.

“Evening, Mr Brady.” Houston wore no welcoming smile. “Filthy night. I won’t ask if you had a good flight because I’m sure you didn’t. Afraid you haven’t had too much sleep since you came to the north-west.”

“I’m exhausted.” Brady didn’t mention that he’d had six hours’ sleep before leaving Fort McMurray. “What’s the word about John Finlayson?”

“None. We’ve examined every building, every pump-house, every last shack within a mile of the operations centre. We thought there was a remote chance that he’d gone across to the ARCO centre, but they searched and found nothing.”

“What’s your feeling?”

“He’s dead. He must be.” Houston shook his head. “If he isn’t—or wasn’t—under cover, he couldn’t have lasted a quarter of the time he’s been missing. What makes that even more certain is that he didn’t take his outdoor furs with him. Without furs? Ten minutes, if that.”

“The F.B.I. or police come up with anything?”

“Zero. Conditions are bad, Mr Brady.”

“I can see that.” Brady spoke with feeling and shivered. “I suppose you’ll have to wait for daylight before you can carry out a proper search?”

“Tomorrow will be too late. Even now it’s too late. Anyway, even if he is around, the chances are we won’t find him. We might not find him until warmer weather comes and the snow goes.”

“Drifting, you mean?” This was Mackenzie.

“Yes. He could be in a gully or by the roadside—our roads are built five feet high on gravel—and he could be lying at the bottom of a ditch with not even a mound to show where he is.” Houston gave a shrug.

“What a way to die,” Mackenzie said.

“I’m accepting the fact that he is gone,” Houston said, “and though it sounds callous, maybe, it’s not such a bad way to go. Perhaps the easiest way to go. No suffering: you just go to sleep and never wake up again.”

Dermott said: “You make it sound almost pleasant. How’s Bronowski?”

“No fracture. Heavy contusions. Dr Blake reckons the concussion is only slight. He was stirring and seeming to make an effort to surface when I left the camp.”

“No further progress in that direction?”

“Nothing. Very much doubt whether there will be either. Sam was the only person who could have told us anything or identified his assailant. It’s a thousand to one that he was attacked from behind and never caught a glimpse of his attacker. If he had, the attacker would probably have silenced him for keeps. After you’ve killed two people, what’s a third?”

“The same people, you reckon?”

Houston stared. “It’s too much of a coincidence to be different people, Mr Brady!”

“I suppose. This telex from Edmonton?”

Houston scratched his head. “Told us to close down the line for a week. Says they’re going to check in forty-eight hours.”

“And in your own company code, you said?” Dermott asked him.

“They didn’t give a damn about letting us see it was an inside job. Damned arrogance. And the telex was addressed to Mr Black. Only someone working on the pipeline would know that he was up here. He spends nearly all his time in Anchorage.”

Dermott said: “How’s Black taking this?”

“Difficult to say. Bit of a cold fish; not much given to showing his feelings. I know how I’d feel in his shoes. He’s the general manager, Alaska, and the buck stops with him.”

Houston was doing Black a degree less than justice. When they arrived at his office in the operations centre, he had a distinctly unhappy and distrait air about him. He said: “Good of you to come, Mr Brady. Must have been a highly unpleasant trip—and in the depths of a winter’s night.” He turned to a tall tanned man with iron-grey hair. This is Mr Morrison. FBI.”

Morrison shook hands with all three. “Know of you, of course, Mr Brady. I’ll bet you don’t get too much of this sort of thing out in the Gulf States.”

“Never. Don’t get any of this damnable snow and cold either. Mr Houston here tells me that you’re all up against a blank wall. Finlayson’s just vanished.”

Morrison said: “We were hoping that a fresh mind might be of use.”

“I’m afraid your hopes are misplaced. I leave detection to the professionals. I’m merely, as are my colleagues here, a sabotage investigator, although in this case it’s clear that sabotage and crimes of violence have a common ground. You’ve had Mr Finlayson’s office fingerprinted, of course.”

“From top to bottom. Hundreds of prints, and not one seems to be any use. No prints there that shouldn’t have been there.”

“You mean that the owners of those prints all had regular and legitimate access to the office?”

Morrison nodded. “Just that.”

Brady scowled. “And since we’re convinced that this character is someone working on the pipeline, any one of those fingerprints might be his.”

Mackenzie asked the FBI man: “Any sign of the weapon used on Bronowski?”

“Nothing. Dr Blake believes the blow was administered by the butt of a gun.”

Dermott asked: “Where’s the doctor?”

“In the sick bay, with Bronowski, who’s just recovered consciousness. He’s still dazed and incoherent, but it seems he’ll be okay.”

“Can we see the two of them?”

“I don’t know,” Black said. “The doctor, certainly. I don’t know whether he’ll allow you to talk to Bronowski.”

“He can’t be all that bad if he’s conscious,” said Dermott. “It’s a matter of urgency. He’s the only person who might be able to give us a clue about what happened to Finlayson.”

When they arrived in the sick bay, Bronowski was speaking coherently enough to Dr Blake. He was very pale; the right-hand side of his head had been shaved, and a huge plaster, stretching from the top of his skull to the lobe of the ear, covered the right temple. Dermott looked at the doctor, a tall, swarthy man with an almost cadaverous face and a hooked nose.

“How’s the patient?”

“Coming on. The wound’s not too bad. He’s just been soundly stunned, which is apt to addle anyone’s brains a bit. Headache for a couple of days.”

“A couple of brief questions for Bronowski.”

“Well, brief.” Dr Blake nodded at Dermott’s companions.

Dermott asked: “Did you see the guy who knocked you down?”

“See him?” Bronowski exclaimed. “Didn’t even hear him. First thing I knew of anything was when I woke up in this bed here.”

“Did you know Finlayson was missing?”

“No. How long’s he been gone?”

“Some hours. Must have gone missing before you were clobbered. Did you see him at all? Speak to him?”

“I did. I was working on those reports you asked me to get for you. He asked about the conversation I had with you, then left.” Bronowski thought about it. “That was the last I saw of him.” He looked at Black. “Those papers I was working on. Are they still on the table?”

“I saw them.”

“Can you have them put back in the safe, please? They’re confidential.”

“I’ll do that,” Black said.

Dermott asked: “May I see you a minute, doctor?”

“You’re seeing me now.” The doctor looked quizzically at Dermott down his long nose.

Dermott smiled heavily: “Do you want me to discuss my chilblains and gout in public?”

In the consulting room Dr Blake said: “You look in pretty good shape to me.”

“Advancing years, is all. Have you been up to Pump Station Four?”

“Ah, so it’s that business! What stopped you discussing it out there?”

“Because I’m naturally cagey, distrustful and suspicious.”

“I went up with Finlayson.” Blake made a grimace at the memory. “Place was a ghastly mess. So were the two murdered men.”

“They were all that,” Dermott agreed. “Did you carry out an autopsy on them?”

There was a pause. “Have you the right to be asking me these questions?”

Dermott nodded. “I think so, Doctor. We’re all interested in justice. I’m trying to find out who killed those two men. May be three, by now, if Finlayson stays missing.”

“Very well,” Blake said. “I carried out an autopsy. It was fairly perfunctory, I admit. When men have been shot through the forehead, it’s pointless to try to establish the possibility that they died of heart failure instead. Although, mind you, from the mangled state of their bodies, it’s clear that the blast effect of the explosion would in itself have been enough to kill them.”

“The bullets were still lodged in the bead?”

“They were and are. A low-velocity pistol. I know they’ll have to be recovered, but that’s a job for the police surgeon, not for me.”

“Did you search them?”

Blake lifted a saturnine eyebrow. “My dear fellow, I’m a doctor, not a detective. Why should I search them? I did see that one had some papers in an inside coat pocket, but I didn’t examine them. That was all.”

“No gun? No holster?”

“I can testify to that. I had to remove coat and shirt. Nothing of that nature.”

“One last question,” Dermott said. “Did you notice the index ringer on the same man’s right hand?”

“Fractured just below the knuckle bone? Odd sort of break in a way, but it could have resulted from a variety of causes. Don’t forget the blast flung both of them heavily against some machinery.”

“Thank you for your patience.” Dermott made for the door, then turned. “The dead men are still at Pump Station Four?”

“No. We brought them back here. I understand their families want them buried in Anchorage, and that they’ll be flown down there tomorrow.”

Dermott looked round Finlayson’s office and said to Black: “Anything been altered since Bronowski was discovered here?”

“You’d have to ask Mr Finlayson. At the time, I was across seeing my opposite number in ARCO and didn’t get here for twenty minutes.”

The F.B.I. man asked: “Some things have been touched, naturally. My men had to when they were carrying out their fingerprinting.”

Mackenzie nodded to the buff folders on Finlayson’s desk. “Are those the reports on the security men? The ones that Bronowski said he was studying when he was clobbered?”

Black looked at Houston, and the security man said: “Yes.”

“There were fingerprints, too.” Mackenzie raised an eyebrow.

“Those will be in the safe,” Houston said.

“We’d like to see those and the records,” Dermott said. “In fact, we’d like to see everything in that safe.”

Black intervened. “But that’s where all our company confidential information is kept.”

“That’s precisely why we’d like to examine it.”

Black compressed his lips. “That’s a very large order, Mr Dermott.”

“If our hands are to be tied, we might as well go back to Houston. Or have you something to hide?”

“I consider that remark offensive.”

“I don’t.” Brady had spoken from the depths of the only armchair in the room. “If you have something to hide, we’d like to know what it is. If you haven’t, open up your safe. You may be the senior man in Alaska, but the people in London are the ones that matter, and they’ve promised me we would be afforded every co-operation. You are showing distinct signs of lack of co-operation. I must say that gives me food for thought.”

Black’s lips were very pale now. “That could be construed as a veiled threat, Mr Brady.”

“Construe it any damned way you like. We’ve been through this up here once before, earlier. And John Finlayson has gone walk-about or somewhere even less attractive. Co-operate or we leave—and leave you with the task of explaining to London the reason for your secretiveness.”

“I am not being secretive. In the best interests of the company—”

“The best interest of your company is to keep that oil flowing and head off these killers. If you don’t let us examine that safe, we can only conclude that for some reason you choose to obstruct the best interest of your company.” Brady poured himself a daiquiri as if to indicate that his part of the discussion was over.

Black surrendered: “Very well.” The lips had now thinned almost to nothing. “Under protest and under, I may say, duress, I agree to what I regard as an outrageous request. The keys are in Mr Finlayson’s desk. I will bid you goodnight.”

“One moment.” Dermott didn’t sound any more friendly than Black. “Do you have records of all your employees on the pipeline?”

It was clear that Black was considering some further opposition, and then decided against it. “We do. But very concise. Couldn’t call them reports, just brief notes of, mainly, previous jobs held.”

“Where are they? Here?”

“No. Only reports on security personnel are kept here, and that’s because Bronowski regards this as his base. The rest are kept in Anchorage.”

“We’d like to see them. Perhaps you can arrange for them to be made available?”

“I can arrange it.”

“I understand from Dr Blake that you have a flight to Anchorage tomorrow. Is it a big plane?”

“Too big,” said Black the accountant. “A 737. Only one available tomorrow. Why?”

“One or more of us might want to hitch a lift,” Dermott answered. “We could, among other things, pick up those reports. Seats would be available?”

Black said: “Yes. No more questions, I trust?”

“One. You received this threatening telex message from Edmonton today, telling you to close down the line or else. What do you propose to do?”

“Carry on production, of course.” Black tried to smile sardonically, but the moment was wrong. “Assuming, of course, that the criminals have been apprehended?”

“Where’s the telex?”

“Bronowski had it. It may be on his person. Or in his desk.”

“I’ll find it,” Dermott said.

“I don’t think Bronowski would like you rummaging about his desk.”

“He’s not here, is he? Besides, he’s a security man. He would understand.” Dermott shook his head. “I don’t think you ever will.”

“No,” Black said. “Goodnight.” He turned on his heel and left. No-one said “goodnight” to him.

“Well, well.” Brady exclaimed. “A friend for life in three minutes flat. Don’t know how you do it, George. Pity he acts so suspiciously—otherwise he’d have made a splendid suspect.”

“Badly ruffled feathers,” Morrison said. “To put it in a restrained fashion, ruffling other people’s feathers is his speciality. A martinet of the first order, they say, but an extraordinarily able man.”

Dermott said: “Not, I gather, universally popular. Does he have friends?”

“Professional business contacts, that’s all. Socially, nothing. If he has any friends, he hides them well.” He tried to conceal a yawn. “My normal bedtime lies well behind me. In the F.B.I., we try to get to bed by ten p.m. Can I be of any assistance before I go?”

“Two things,” Dermott said. “The maintenance crew at Pump Station Four. Fellow called Poulson in charge. Could you have their backgrounds investigated as rigorously as possible?”

“You have a reason for asking?” The F.B.I. man sounded hopeful.

“Nothing really. Just that they happened to be there when the sabotage occurred. I’m clutching at straws. We have damn little else to clutch at.” Dermott smiled wryly.

“I think we can do that,” Morrison said. “And the other?”

“Dr Blake tells me that the two dead engineers were brought back here today. Do you know where they were put?”

Morrison knew and told them, said his good-nights and left.

Brady said: “I think I shall go and rest lightly in my room. Notify me if the heavens fall in. But not after the first half hour or so. I take it you two are about to indulge your morbid curiosity in viewing the departed.”

Dermott and Mackenzie looked down at the two murdered engineers. They had been covered in white sheets. No attempt had been made to clean them up since they last saw them at Pump Station Four. Perhaps it had been impossible. Perhaps no-one had had a strong enough stomach for the task. Mackenzie said: “I hope they’re going to be sewn up in canvas or something before being taken to Anchorage tomorrow, or their relatives are going to have the screaming heebie-jeebies. Whatever you’re looking for, George, look for it quick. I’m not enjoying myself.”

Nor was Dermott. Not only was the sight revolting, but the smell was nauseating. He lifted the hand of the man he’d briefly examined before and said: “How would you say that fore-finger got that way?”

Mackenzie bent, wrinkled his nose and said: “It sounds crazy, but it could have been broken by a pair of pliers. The trouble is that charring’s obliterated any marks that might have been made on the skin.”

Dermott went to a wash-basin, soaked his handkerchief and cleaned up the charred area as best he could. The black carbon came off surprisingly easily. It didn’t leave the skin clean—the pitting was too deep for that—but clean enough to permit a closer examination.

“No pliers,” Mackenzie said. “To break the bone, pliers would have had to close right into the flesh and would have been bound to leave saw-tooth marks. No saw-tooth marks, so no pliers. But I agree with you. I’m sure that bone was deliberately broken.”

Dermott rubbed some carbon off the charred clothing and smeared it on the cleaned area so that it did not look as if it had been wiped. He opened the jacket and slid his hand into the inside pocket: it came out empty. Mackenzie said: “The papers and cards have taken wing and flown. With assistance, of course.”

“Indeed. Could have been Poulson or one of his pals. Could have been Bronowski when he was out there yesterday. Could have been the kindly healer himself.”

“Blake? He does look like a first cousin of Dracula,” Mackenzie said.

Dermott raised the damp handkerchief again and started to clear the area round the bullet hole in the forehead. He peered closely at the wound and said to Mackenzie: “Can you see what I imagine I see?”

Mackenzie stooped low and peered closely. Still stooped, he said softly: “With the hawk eyes of my youth gone forever, I could do with a powerful magnifying glass.” He straightened. “What I imagine I see is the brown scorch marks of burnt powder.”

As before, Dermott smeared some carbon back on the cleaned area. “Funny—my imagination runs the same way. This guy was shot at point-blank range. The scenario reads that it was a very close thing indeed. The killer had a gun on this engineer and was probably searching him. What he didn’t know was that the engineer not only had a gun of his own, but had it out. However it was, he must have seen it just in time and shot to kill—there could have been no time to indulge in any fancier gun-work. The engineer’s gun-hand must have gone into muscular spasm—irreversible contraction; not unknown at the time of violent death. To free the gun, the killer had to wrench it so violently that he snapped the trigger finger. Don’t you think that fits in with the peculiar angle at which the finger was broken?”

“I think you have it. It fits, anyway.” Mackenzie frowned. “There’s only one thing I see wrong with your scenario. Why should the killer take the gun in the first place? He had a gun of his own.”

“Sure he had, but he couldn’t use it any more,” Dermott said. “More accurately, he couldn’t afford to keep it any more. Having seen no exit holes at the back of the head he knew he had left two bullets in the region of two occiputs, and that the police could match up the bullets with the gun he was carrying. Which meant he would have to get rid of it. Which meant that he would be gunless, at least temporarily. So he took the engineer’s gun. My guess is that he will have got rid of both guns by this time, and he’s almost certainly got another weapon by now. In these United States—and don’t forget Alaska is the United States—getting hold of a hand-gun is extremely simple.”

Mackenzie said slowly: “It all fits. We may well be up against a professional killer.”

“We may well be up against a psychopath.”

Mackenzie shivered. “My Scottish Highland ancestry. Some ill-mannered lout has just walked all over my grave. Let’s take counsel with the boss. Counsel and something else. If I know our worthy employer, he’ll already have had half the contents of the jet’s bar brought to his room.”

“And you want his ideas?”

“I want some of those contents.”

Mackenzie had exaggerated somewhat. Ferguson hadn’t brought across more than a tenth of the plane’s stock, but even that represented a goodly amount; Mackenzie had already had his first Scotch and was on his second. He looked at Brady, propped up in bed in a pair of shocking heliotrope pyjamas, which served only to accentuate his massive girth, and said: “Well, what do you make of George’s theory?”

“I believe in the facts and I also believe in the theory, for the adequate reason that I see no alternative to it.” Brady contemplated his finger-nails. “I also believe we’re up against a trained, ruthless and intelligent killer. I don’t doubt that he might be a psychotic on the loose. In fact there may be two psychopaths—an even more unpleasant prospect. The trouble is, George, I don’t see how this advances us much. We don’t know when this nut will hit again. What can we do to prevent it?”

“We can scare him,” Dermott answered, “that’s what we can do. I’ll bet he’s already worried by the fact that we’re raking in fingerprints and records all over the shop. Let’s try to worry him a little more. I’ll go down to Anchorage tomorrow while you and Mackenzie stay here and do some work.” Dermott sipped his Scotch. “It should be a change for at least one of you.”

“I could be deeply wounded,” Brady said, “but slings and arrows from an ungrateful staff are nothing new to me. What, precisely, do you have in mind?”

“Drastically narrowing the range of suspects is what I have in mind. All very simple, really. This is a close-knit community here in Prudhoe Bay. They more or less live out of each other’s pockets. Everyone’s movements must be known to at least a handful of other people, probably a great deal more. Check on everybody and find out who has a definite alibi for being here on the morning the engineers were being killed out in the mountains. If two or more people, say, can honestly tell you that X was here at the time of the crime, you can strike X off the suspects’ list. At the end of the day we’ll know how many suspects we have. Not even a handful, I bet. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were none at all. Remember that Pump Station Four is a hundred and forty miles away, and the only feasible way of getting there is by helicopter. One would have to have the time and opportunity and the ability to fly a helicopter to get there, and there would be no hope of taking a chopper without someone noticing. I think you’ll find it all very straightforward.

“Less straightforward is the next enquiry—who was in Anchorage on the day that the original phone message was sent from there to Sanmobil? There must have been quite a few. Don’t forget they go on holiday every three or four weeks and, almost without exception, they go to Fairbanks or Anchorage. It will be more difficult to establish alibis: you won’t find many people who have witnesses as to their whereabouts at six a.m. of a black winter morning in Alaska.

“In this case, though, we’re more concerned about those who are not in the clear than those who are. I’ll bring back a Photostat of the prints they’ve taken. We should be able to get the doubtfuls’ fingerprints without too much trouble, and, with luck, match one set up with the phone booth’s set. I don’t know how this sounds to you, but it seems quite straightforward to me.”

“And to me,” said Brady. “I think Don and I can manage that little chore without too much difficulty. Don’t forget, though, that there’s a fairly large community of people down at Valdez.”

“As you’re my boss,” Dermott said, “I’ll refrain from giving you a withering stare. Who in Valdez is going to fly a round trip of 1,300 miles during a winter night, stopping occasionally for fuel and to giving his identity away? And who’s going to fly or helicopter the 1,600 miles round trip to clobber Bronowski and very possibly do away with Finlayson, especially as he would be immediately recognised as a stranger the moment he set foot in this area?”

Mackenzie said: “He has a point, you must admit. In fact, two points.”

Dermott went on: “And don’t tell me they could have come from one of the pumping stations. They don’t have helicopters.”

“I didn’t say anything of the sort.” Brady sounded aggrieved. “All right, we’ll go along with the assumption that it’s Prudhoe Bay or nothing. But what if we turn up zero?”

“Then it will be your turn to come up with the next bright idea.”

“Hard day,” Brady said. “You for bed?”

“Yes. I had intended to look at those records and prints tonight but the prints aren’t going to be of any use to me until I return from Anchorage. Reports can wait, too. I’ll just hunt up that Edmonton telex and take it down to the Anchorage police and see if they can help me.” He stood up. “By the way: has it occurred to you that you yourself may be in danger tonight?”

“Me!” It was as if Dermott had suggested some unthinkable form of lèse-majesté. Then a look of vague apprehension crept into Brady’s face.

“It may not be just your family who are at risk,” Dermott persisted. “Why should these people bother about kidnapping when they could achieve their ends by putting a bullet in your back—which is not, if I may say so without offence, a very easy target to miss? How are you to know there isn’t a homicidal maniac in the room next door to you?”

“Good God!” Brady drank deeply from his daiquiri. Then he sat back and smiled. “At last, action! Donald, get the Smith and Wesson from my case.” He took the gun, thrust it deep under his pillow and said, almost hopefully: “Don’t you think you two are at risk also?”

“Sure,” Mackenzie said. “But not nearly, as much as you. No Jim Brady, no Brady Enterprises. You’re the legend. Without either of us, you could still function quite efficiently. This homicidal maniac doesn’t strike me as the type who would go for a couple of lieutenants while the captain is around.”

“Goodnight, then,” Dermott said. “Don’t forget to lock your door as soon as we’re gone.”

“Don’t worry. You’re armed, right?”

“Of course. But we don’t think we’ll be needing any weapons.”

9

When Dermott woke up it was with such a heavy-headed feeling of exhaustion that he could have sworn he hadn’t been to sleep at all. In fact, less than an hour had elapsed since he’d switched out the light, closed his eyes and dropped off. He did not wake up of his own volition. The overhead light was on and Morrison, looking as distraught as a senior F.B.I. agent is ever likely to look, was shaking him by the shoulder. Dermott eyed him blearily.

“Sorry about this,” Morrison began. “But I thought you’d like to come along. In fact, I want you to.”

Dermott peered at his watch and winced. “For God’s sake, where?”

“We’ve found him.”

Sleep, and all desire for it, dropped from Dermott like a cloak. “Finlayson?”

“Yes.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

“Murdered?”

“We don’t know. You’ll need warm clothing.”

“Wake Mackenzie, will you?”

“Sure.”

Morrison left. Dermott rose and dressed for the cruel temperatures outside. As he pulled on a quilted anorak his mind went back to his first meeting with Finlayson. He thought of the neatly-parted white hair, the grizzled Yukon beard, the hobo clothes. Had he been too hard on the man? No good worrying now. He pocketed a flashlight and moved into the passageway. Tim Houston was standing there. Dermott said: “So you know too?”

“I found him.”

“How come?”

“Instinct, I guess.” The bitterness in Houston’s voice was unmistakable. “One of those finely-honed instincts that comes into operation about ten hours too late.”

“Meaning that Finlayson could have been saved if this instinct of yours had been operational ten hours ago?”

“Maybe—but almost certainly not. John was murdered.”

“Shot? Knifed? What?”

“Nothing like that. I didn’t examine him. I knew that Mr Morrison and you wouldn’t want me to touch him. I didn’t have to examine him. He’s outside, it’s thirty below, and all he’s wearing is a linen shirt and jeans. He’s not even got shoes on. That makes it murder.”

Dermott said nothing, so Houston continued. “Apart from the fact that he’d never have crossed the outside doorstep voluntarily without his Arctic clothing, he’d never have been permitted to do so anyway. There are always people in the reception area, besides a person who mans the central telephone fulltime. By the same token, it would have been impossible for anyone to carry him out.”

“Lugging corpses is conspicuous. So?”

“He wouldn’t even have had to be a corpse. I think he was silenced in his own bedroom and bundled straight out the window. The cold would have finished him off. Here come your friends. I’ll go get some more flashlights.”

Outside, the cold was breathtaking. The temperature, as Houston had said, stood at thirty below. The forty-mile-per-hour gale brought the combination of temperature and chill-factor down to minus seventy. Even double-wrapped as a polar bear, without an exposed inch of flesh, the fact remains that one still has to breathe—and breathing in those conditions, until numbness intervenes, is a form of exquisite and refined agony. In the initial stages it is impossible to tell whether one is inhaling glacial air or super-heated steam: a searing sensation dominates all else. The only way to survive for any length of time is to breathe pure oxygen from a suitably insulated tank—but those are not readily available in the Arctic.

Houston led them round the right-hand corner of the main building. After about ten yards he stopped, bent down and shone his flashlight between the supporting pilings. Other beams joined his.

A body lay face down, an insignificant heap already half-covered by the drifting snow. Dermott shouted: “You have sharp eyes, Houston. A lot of people would have missed this. Let’s get him inside.”

“Don’t you want to examine him here, have a look around?”

“I do not. When this wind drops we’ll come back and look for clues. In the meantime, I don’t want to join Finlayson here.”

“I agree,” Morrison said. His teeth chattered audibly, and he was shaking with the cold.

Recovering the body from under the building provided the four men with no problem. Even if Finlayson had weighed twice as much, they would have had him out in seconds flat, such was their determination to regain shelter and warmth as soon as possible. As it was, Finlayson was slightly-built, and handling him was like handling a 150-pound log, so solidly frozen had he become. When they were clear of the pilings Dermott looked up at a brightly lit window above and yelled through the wind: “Whose room is that?”

Houston shouted: “His.”

“Your theory fits, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

When they brought Finlayson into the reception area, there were perhaps half-a-dozen men sitting or standing around. For a moment nobody said anything. Then one man stepped forward and, with some diffidence, asked: “Shall I bring Dr Blake?”

Mackenzie shook his head, sadly. “I’m sure he’s an excellent doctor, but no medical school has yet got round to offering a course on raising a man from the dead. Thanks all the same.”

Dermott said: “Have we got an empty room where we can put him?” Houston looked at him and Dermott shook his head in self-reproach. “Okay. So my mind’s gummed up with cold or lack of sleep or both. His own room, of course. Where can we find a rubber sheet?”

So they took Finlayson to his room and laid him on the rubber sheet on top of his bed. Dermott said: “Is there an individual thermostat control in here?”

“Sure,” said Houston. “It’s set on seventy-two.”

“Turn it up.”

“What for?”

“Dr Blake will want to do a post-mortem. You can’t examine a person who’s frozen solid. We’re getting experienced at this sort of thing. Too experienced.” Dermott turned to Mackenzie. “Houston thinks Finlayson was silenced in this room. Killed, knocked out, we don’t know. He also thinks that our friends got rid of him by the simple expedient of opening the window and dumping him on to the snow-bank beneath.”

Mackenzie crossed to the window, opened it, shivered at the icy blast of air that swept into the room, leaned out and peered down. Seconds later he had the window firmly closed again.

“Has to be that. We’re directly above the spot where we found him. And it’s in deep shadow down there.” He looked at Houston. “Is there much traffic along there at night?”

“None. Nor during the day. No call for it. Track leads nowhere.”

“So the killers left either by the front door or by this same window. They did the obvious thing—just stuffed him under the building, hoping the snow would have drifted over him before daylight came.” Mackenzie sighed. “He couldn’t by any chance have felt sick, opened the window for some fresh air, fell and crawled under the building?”

Dermott said: “You believe that’s possible?”

“No. John Finlayson wouldn’t get a breath of fresh air that way. He caught his death of it. Murder.”

“Well, I think the boss should be told.”

“He’s sure going to be pleased, isn’t he?”

Brady was furious. His black scowl accorded ill with his heliotrope pyjamas. He said: “Progress on all fronts. What do you two intend to do?”

Mackenzie said pacifically: “That’s why we’re here. We thought you might be able to give us a lead.”

“A lead? How the hell can I give you a lead? I’ve been asleep.” He corrected himself. “Well, for a few minutes, anyway. Sad about Finlayson. Fine man, by all accounts. What do you reckon, George?”

“One thing’s for sure. The similarities between what happened here tonight and what occurred at Pump Station Four are too great to be a coincidence. As with the two engineers, so with Finlayson. They all saw or heard too much for their own health. They recognised a person or persons they knew well and who knew them, and those people were engaged in some things that couldn’t be explained away. So they had to be silenced in the most final way.”

Brady thought for a moment, and asked: “Is there a direct connection between Bronowski being clobbered and Finlayson being killed?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Dermott said. “Tie-up looks too obvious. You could argue that Bronowski escaped because he didn’t catch his assailants red-handed in whatever they were doing, and that Finlayson died because he did. But that’s too easy, too glib.”

“What does Houston think?”

“He doesn’t appear to have any more idea about it than we do.”

“‘Appear’.” Brady seized on the word. “You mean he may know more than he’s telling?”

“At the moment he’s not saying or telling anything.”

“But you don’t trust him?”

“No. And while we’re at it, I don’t trust Bronowski.”

“Hell, man, he’s been savagely assaulted.”

“Assaulted. Not savagely. I don’t trust Dr Blake, either.”

“Because he’s unhelpful and unco-operative?”

“A good enough reason.”

Brady became tactful. “Well, you do tend to ride a bit roughshod over people’s feelings.”

“To hell with their delicate sensibilities! We’re dealing here with three cases of murder. Come to that, I don’t trust Black either.”

“You don’t trust Black? General manager, Alaska?”

“He can be the King of Siam for all I care,” Dermott said forcefully. “Some of the most successful businessmen in history number in their ranks the biggest swindlers ever. I’m not suggesting he is a swindler. All I say is that he’s crafty, cagey, cold, and unco-operative. In short, I don’t trust anyone.”

“Look, friends. We’re looking at this from the wrong angle,” Brady suggested. “We’re on the inside trying to look out. Maybe we should be on the outside trying to look in. Think of it this way. Who wants to hit the pipeline here and the tar sands of Athabasca? Do you see any significance in the fact that here they receive their instructions from Edmonton while in Alberta they come from Anchorage?”

“None.” Dermott was positive. “May be just coincidence, at best a crude attempt to confuse us. Surely they can’t be so naïve as to try to convey the impression that Canada is trying to interfere with America’s oil supplies and vice versa. Idea’s ludicrous. In these times of an acute oil shortage, what have two friendly neighbours to gain by cutting each other’s throats?”

“Then who has to gain?”

Mackenzie spoke quietly.

“O.P.E.C,” he said.

Mackenzie was just as positive as Dermott had been. “If they could put a stranglehold on the two countries’ supplies from the north, they stand to gain immensely in both profits and power. Both our governments have made it clear that they’re prepared to go to any lengths to shake free once and for all from this crucifying dependence on O.P.E.C. oil. This wouldn’t suit our foreign friends at all. They have us over a barrel—an oil barrel, if you will—and they want to keep it that way.”

“Why now?” Jim Brady said. “Although I know as well as you do.”

“They have tremendous leverage at the moment, and the last thing they’d ever want to do is to abdicate this position of almost dictatorial power. Decisions are being made now in both countries. Should North America become anywhere near self-sufficient in oil, our blackmailing friends would lose their power-base. They’d be forced to abandon their pretensions to playing an authoritative role in world affairs, and, perhaps worst of all for them, their profits would be reduced to such a trickle that they’d have to forgo their grandiose schemes for industrial and technological expansion, for hauling their countries into the middle of the late twentieth century, without any of the intermediate struggle or leasing and developmental process. When it comes to national survival, desperate men are prepared to go to desperate lengths.”

Brady paced for some time, then said: “Do you really think the O.P.E.C. countries would take concerted action against us?”

“Hell, no. Half of them are barely on speaking terms with the other half, and you can’t imagine relatively moderate countries like Saudi Arabia participating in any such combined operation. But you know as well as I do that among the O.P.E.C. rulers there are some certifiable loonies who would stop at nothing to achieve their own ends. And you won’t have forgotten that some of those countries play host to the most ruthless terrorist trainers in the business.”

Brady said: “What would you say to that, George?”

“It’s a theory, and a perfectly tenable one. On the other hand, since coming here I haven’t seen a single person who looks remotely like an Arabian or Middle Eastern terrorist.”

“So what would your guess be?”

“As a wild guess, I would suspect our troubles are caused by good old-fashioned capitalistic free enterprise. And if that’s the case, the potential sources of our troubles are legion. I’m afraid we won’t solve this by looking at it from the outside: we’ll have to look out from the inside.”

“And the motive?”

“Blackmail, obviously.”

“Cash?”

“Well, the only other bargaining counter is hostages. Nobody’s holding any hostages. So what’s left? They’re now in the process of softening us up by proving they can carry out their threats when and as they wish.”

“They won’t be asking for pennies.”

“I shouldn’t think so. To start with, the pipeline and Sanmobil have a combined investment of ten billion. For every day that delivery is held up they’ll be losing millions more. Most important of all, our two countries are desperate for oil. Whoever those people are, they have us not over but in a barrel. Naked. The ransom will be high. I should imagine it would be paid.”

“Who’d pay it?” Mackenzie said.

“The oil companies. The governments. They’ve all got a stake in this.”

Brady said: “And once the blackmailers have been paid, what’s to prevent them repeating the process all over again?”

“Nothing that I can see.”

“God, you’re a Job’s comforter.”

“Let me comfort you some more, shall I? There could be a link-up between Don’s theory and mine. If this is blackmail, and if the killers do collect, what’s to prevent some of the O.P.E.C. countries approaching them and offering to double or triple their money if they destroy the supply lines for keeps—and get out? You’ve a big responsibility on your shoulders, Mr Brady.”

“You, George are a rock of strength and compassion in times of trouble and stress.” Brady sounded plaintive. “Well, if there are no constructive suggestions forthcoming, I suggest we all retire. There is thinking to be done and I must take counsel with myself. On such nights, the best company.”

Dermott still felt unaccountably tired when the alarm clock dragged him up from the depths of a troubled sleep. It was just on eight in the morning. He rose reluctantly, showered, shaved, made his way to Finlayson’s room, and was about to knock when the door was opened by Dr Blake. At that time of the morning the doctor’s beaked nose, hollow cheeks and sunken eyes lent him a more cadaverous look than ever—not the kind of physician’s face, Dermott thought, to inspire hope and confidence.

“Ah, come in, Mr Dermott. I’ve finished with Finlayson. Was just about to send for his casket. He and the two engineers from Pump Station Four are being flown out at nine-thirty. I understand you’re going with them.”

“Yes. You have caskets?”

“Macabre, you think? Well, we do keep a few tucked away. Apart from natural illnesses, this is an accident-prone profession, and we have to be prepared. You can’t very well whistle up an undertaker from Fairbanks or Anchorage at a moment’s notice.”

“I suppose not.” Dermott nodded at the dead man. “Any luck in establishing the cause of death?”

“Well, normally it requires a full autopsy to discover whether a victim has been suffering from cerebrovascular disease or cardiac arrest. Fortunately—or unfortunately—it wasn’t necessary in this case.” Blake sounded grim. “What was before only a suspicion is now a certainty. What would be natural causes elsewhere are unnatural here. John Finlayson was murdered.”

“How? Other than by exposure?”

“None of your usual methods. He was rendered unconscious and left to die in the cold. Clad as he was in those abnormally low temperatures, I’d say his heart must have stopped in under a minute.”

“How was he knocked out?”

“Sand-bagged. In the classic spot, at the base of the neck. An expert. You can see the slight contusion and roughness there. A contusion can only be caused by blood still circulating, so he was clearly alive after the blow. The cold killed him.”

“Where could the attacker have got sand in this God-forsaken frozen hole?”

Dr Blake smiled. Dermott wished he hadn’t: the long narrow teeth only accentuated the death’s-head effect. “If you aren’t too squeamish, you can smell what they used.”

Dermott bent and rose almost immediately. “Salt.”

Blake nodded. “Probably slightly dampened. Makes an even more effective cosh than sand.”

“They teach you this in medical school?”

“I was on the forensic side once. If I make out and sign the death certificate, will you be kind enough to hand it in at Anchorage?”

“Of course.”

Big, burly, high-coloured and irrepressibly cheerful, John Ffoulkes looked more like a prosperous farmer than a tough, competent senior police officer. He produced a bottle of whisky and two glasses and smiled at Dermott.

“In view of those ridiculous prohibition laws they have up at Prudhoe Bay, maybe we can make up here in Anchorage…”

“My chief would like your style. We don’t do so badly there. Mr Brady claims to have the biggest portable bar north of the Arctic Circle. He has, too.”

“Well, then, to help erase the memory of your flight. I gather you didn’t enjoy it much?”

“Extreme turbulence, an absence of pretty stewardesses, and the knowledge that you’re carrying three murdered men in the cargo hold doesn’t make for a very relaxed flight.”

Ffoulkes stopped smiling. “Ah, yes, the dead men. Not only a tragic affair but an extremely unpleasant one. I’ve had reports from my own State troopers and the F.B.I. I wonder if you could have anything to add to what they said?”

“I doubt it. Mr Morrison of the F.B.I. struck me as a highly competent officer.”

“He’s all that, and a close friend of mine. But tell me anyway, please.”

Dermott’s account was as succinct as it was comprehensive. At the end Ffoulkes said: “Tallies almost exactly with the other reports. But no hard facts?”

“Suspicions, yes. Hard facts, no.”

“So the only lead you really have are the prints we got from that telephone booth?” Dermott nodded, and Ffoulkes brought out a buff folder from a desk drawer. “Here they are. Some are pretty smudged but a few are not too bad. Are you an expert?”

“I can read them with a powerful glass and a lot of luck. But an expert—no.”

“I’ve got a first-class young lad here. Like to borrow him for a day or two?”

Dermott hesitated. “That’s kind. But I don’t want to tread on Mr Morrison’s toes. He’s got his own man up there.”

“Not in the same class as our David Hendry. Mr Morrison won’t object.” He pressed an intercom button and gave an order.

David Hendry was fair-haired, smiling and seemed ridiculously young to be a police officer. After introductions, Ffoulkes said: “Lucky lad. How do you fancy a vacation in a winter wonderland?”

Hendry looked cautious. “Which wonderland, sir?”

“Prudhoe Bay.”

“Oh, my God!”

“Good, glad you’re happy. That’s settled then. Pack your equipment and, of course, your clothes. Three parkas should be enough—worn on top of each other. When’s your plane out, Mr Dermott?”

“Two hours.”

“Report back in an hour, David.” Hendry opened the door to leave, then stood to one side as a lean man, white-bearded like an Old Testament prophet, bustled into the room.

“Apologies, John, apologies. Couldn’t have caught me at a worse time or on a worse day. Two court cases, two suicides—people get more thoughtless every day.”

“You have my sympathies, Charles—as I, one hopes, have yours. Dr Parker—Mr Dermott.”

“Hah!” Parker looked at Dermott with an ill-concealed lack of enthusiasm. “You the fellow who’s come to add to my burden of woes?”

“Through no wish of mine, doctor. Three burdens, to be precise.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do anything about them today, Mr Dermott. Snowed under, just snowed. Very likely I can’t do anything about them tomorrow either. Most unprofessional.”

“What is?”

“My two assistants. Going down with the flu at the busiest time of the year. This modern generation—”

“I daresay they couldn’t help it.”

“Namby-pambies. What happened to those three anyway?”

“Two we know for sure. They were in the close vicinity of an explosion. After that an oil fire broke out. Savagely scarred. The fumes alone would have finished them off.”

“But they were already finished off. So. Blasted to death, burnt, asphyxiated. Doesn’t leave very much for an old sawbones like me to do, does it?”

“Each of them has also a low-velocity bullet lodged somewhere near the back of his skull,” Dermott said.

“Hah! So you want them out, is that it?”

“Not me, Dr Parker. The State police and the F.B.I. I’m no cop, just an oilfield sabotage investigator.”

Parker looked sour. “I hope my efforts aren’t as thoroughly wasted as usual.”

Ffoulkes smiled. “What odds would you offer, Mr Dermott?”

“About a million to one that they’ll be wasted. That gun has almost certainly been tossed out of a helicopter somewhere over the Brooks Range.”

“I’ll still have to ask you, Charles,” said Ffoulkes.

Dr Parker was unimpressed. “What about this third man?”

“B.P/Sohio’s field production manager in Prudhoe Bay, John Finlayson.”

“Good lord! Know the man well. Suppose I should say ‘knew’, now.”

“Yes.” Dennott nodded to Ffoulkes’s desk. “That’s his death certificate.”

Parker picked it up, screwed on a pince-nez and read through the report.

“Unusual,” he said testily. “But it seems a straightforward medical report to me. There’s no autopsy required here.” He peered at Dermott. “From your expression, you appear to disagree.”

“I’m neither agreeing nor disagreeing. I’m just vaguely unhappy.”

“Have you ever practised medicine, Mr Dermott?”

“No.”

“And yet you presume to take issue with a colleague of mine?”

“You know him, then?”

“Never heard of him.” Parker breathed deeply. “But, dammit, he’s a physician.”

“So was Dr Crippen.”

“What the devil are you insinuating?”

“You read into my words what you choose,” Dermott said flatly. “I’m insinuating nothing. I merely say that his examination was perfunctory and hurried, and that he may have missed something. You wouldn’t claim a divine right of infallibility for doctors?”

“I would not.” His voice was still testy, but only a testy mutter now. “What is it you want?”

“A second opinion.”

“That’s a damned unusual request.”

“It’s a damned unusual murder.”

Ffoulkes looked quizzically at Dermott and said: “I’ll look in at Prudhoe Bay tomorrow. There’s nothing like adding a touch of chaos to an existing state of confusion.”

10

Dermott and David Hendry flew in from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay in the leaden twilight of late afternoon to find the weather distinctly improved, with the wind down to ten knots, the top of the drifting snow-cloud not more than five feet above ground level, visibility in the plane’s headlights almost back to normal, and the temperature at least twenty degrees higher than in the morning. In the administration building lounge the first recognisable face Dermott saw was that of Morrison of the F.B.I., who was sitting with a young, ginger-haired man incongruously dressed in grey flannels and blazer. Morrison looked up and smiled.

“Trust John Ffoulkes,” he said. “No faith in the F.B.I.” He gestured towards the ginger-haired young man. “Nick Turner. Ignore the way he dresses. He’s been to Oxford. My fingerprint man. On your right, David Hendry, your fingerprint man.”

Dermott said mildly: “John Ffoulkes just observed that two pairs of eyes were better than one. No developments?”

“Not one. You?”

“Largely a waste of time. Had a thought on the way up. Why don’t we print John Finlayson’s room?”

“No dice. We’ve done it.”

“Clean as a whistle?”

“Close enough. Lots of unsatisfactory smudges which can only be Finlayson’s, a couple belonging to a plumber who was there on his rounds, and one—would you believe it, just one—belonging to the bull cook, who must be a real whiz-kid with duster and polishing cloth.”

“Bull cook?”

“Kind of house-keeper. Bed-maker and cleaner.”

“Could some other industrious soul have been busy in there with a duster?”

Morrison produced two keys. “His room key and the master key. Had them in my pocket since Finlayson was taken out this morning.”

“Here endeth the lesson.” Dermott laid the buff folder on the low table before Morrison. “Prints from the Anchorage phone booth. Now, I must go and report to the boss.”

Morrison said: “It should amuse the two young gentlemen here to compare your Anchorage prints with the ones in the office safe.”

“You don’t sound very optimistic,” Dermott said.

The F.B.I. agent smiled. “By nature I’ve always been an optimist. But that was before I crossed the forty-ninth parallel.”

Dermott found Brady and Mackenzie taking their ease in the only two chairs in Brady’s room. He looked on them without favour.

“It’s very pleasant and reassuring to see you two so comfortable and relaxed.”

Brady said: “Rough afternoon, huh?” He waved a hand towards the serried row of bottles on the sideboard. “This’il restore your moral fibre.”

Dermott helped himself and asked: “Any news from Athabasca? How are the family?”

“Fine, fine.” Brady chuckled. “Stella passed on a lot more stuff from Norway. Apparently they’ve got that fire licked. No need to keep in touch any longer.”

“That’s good.” Dermott sipped his Scotch. “What are the girls doing?”

“Right now, I guess, they’re touring the Sanmobil plant, courtesy of Bill Reynolds. Very hospitable lot, those Canadians.”

“Who’ve they got to protect them?”

“Reynolds’s own security man, Brinckman—the boss, you remember—and Jorgensen, his number two.”

Dermott was unimpressed. “I’d rather they had those two young cops.”

Brady snapped: “Your reason?”

“Three. First, they’re a damned sight tougher, more competent than Brinckman’s lot. Second, Brinckman, Jorgensen and Napier are prime suspects.”

“Why prime?”

“For having the keys that opened the Sanmobil armoury door, for having given the keys to those who did. Third, they’re security men.”

Brady smiled blandly. “You’re bushed, George. You’re becoming paranoid about the security men of the great north-west.”

“I hope you don’t have reason to regret that remark.”

Brady scowled but said nothing, so Dermott changed the subject. “How did the day go?”

“No progress. Along with Morrison we interviewed every man on the base. Every one had a cast-iron alibi for the night of the explosion in Pump Station Four. So it’s all clear there.”

“Except—” Dermott persisted.

“Who do you mean?”

“Bronowski and Houston.”

Brady glowered at his chief operative and shook his head. “You’re paranoid, George, I say it again. Shit, we know they were both out there. Bronowski’s been hurt, and Houston didn’t have to find Finlayson. If he had been crooked, it would have suited him far better to let the drifting snow obliterate every last trace of Finlayson. What do you say to that?”

“Three things. The fact that we know they were out at the pump station makes them more suspect, not less.”

“Second guessing,” growled Brady. “Hate second guessing.”

“No doubt. But we’ve agreed that the bombers must be people working on the pipeline. We’ve eliminated everyone else, so it has to be them—does it not?”

Brady did not answer. Dermott went on: “The third thing is this: there must be some reason, albeit devious, why Bronowski was clobbered and Houston made the discovery. Look at it this way. What evidence do we have that Bronowski was assaulted? The only certain thing we know about him is that he’s lying in the sick bay with an impressive bandage round his head. I don’t think there’s a damn thing wrong with Bronowski. I don’t think anybody hit him. I suggest that if the bandage were removed, his temple would be unblemished, except, perhaps, for an artistic touch of gentian blue.”

Brady assumed the expression of a man praying for inner strength. “So, besides not trusting security men, you don’t trust doctors, either?”

“Some I do. Some I don’t. I’ve already told you that I’m leery of Blake.”

“Got one single hard fact to back up your suspicions?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.” Brady didn’t enlarge on this brief statement.

“We also rounded up the Prudhoe Bay members who were in Anchorage on the night of that telephone call,” Mackenzie said. “Fourteen in all. They seemed a pretty harmless bunch to me. However, Morrison of the F.B.I. did call up the law in Anchorage, gave names and addresses and asked them to see if they could turn up anything.”

“You printed those fourteen, right?”

“Yes. One of Morrison’s assistants did. Some Ivy League kid.”

“No objections offered?”

“None. They seemed eager to co-operate.”

“Proves nothing. Anyway, I brought along the prints found on the phone booth. They’re being checked now against the prints of the fourteen.”

“That won’t take long,” Mackenzie said. “Give them a call, shall I?” He called, listened briefly, hung up and said to Dermott: “Cassandra.”

“So.” Brady looked positively lugubrious, no easy feat for a man without a line in his face. “Houston’s finest have run into a brick wall.”

“Let’s not reproach ourselves too much,” Dermott said. He looked less downcast than the other two. “Our business is investigating oil sabotage, not murder, which is the province of the F.B.I. and the Alaskan State police. They appear to have run into the same brick wall. Besides, we may have the lead into another line of investigation—John Finlayson’s autopsy.”

“Huh!” Brady gave a contemptuous lift of his hands. “That’s over. It turned up nothing.”

“The first one didn’t. But the second one might.”

Mackenzie said: “What! Another autopsy?”

“The first one was pretty superficial and perfunctory.”

“Unprecedented.” Brady shook his head. “Who the hell authorised this?”

“Nobody really. I did ask for it, but politely.”

Brady cursed, whether because of Dermott’s words or because he had spilled a goodly portion of a daiquiri over his immaculately trousered knee. He refilled his glass, breathed deeply and said: “Took your own goddamned good time in getting round to telling us, didn’t you?”

“Everything in its own good time, Jim: just a matter of getting priorities right. It’ll be a couple of days before we get the results of this autopsy. I really can’t see why you are getting so steamed up.”

“I can damn well tell you. Who the hell gave you the authorisation to make such a request without first getting permission from me?”

“Nobody did.”

“You had time before you left here this morning to discuss the matter with me.”

“Sure I had time, but I hadn’t had the idea by then. I was half-way down to Anchorage before it occurred to me that there could be something far wrong. Do you imagine I’d talk to you in Prudhoe Bay over an open line?”

“You talk as if this place is an international hotbed of espionage,” Brady came back to him sarcastically.

“It only requires one disaffected ear, and we might as well pack our bags and return to Houston. We already know how good those people are at covering their tracks.”

“George.” It was Mackenzie. “You’ve made your point. What triggered your suspicions?”

“Dr Blake. You know that as far as the murdered engineers at Pump Station Four and Bronowski’s alleged accident were concerned, I already had reservations about Blake. I began to wonder if there was anything that could tie Blake in with Finlayson’s death. I was the only person who saw the body between the completion of Blake’s autopsy and the time the lid was screwed down on the coffin.” Dermott stopped to sip.

“During that period Blake showed me marks on the back of the neck where, he said, Finlayson had been sand-bagged into unconsciousness. On the plane it occurred to me that I had never seen a bruise or contusion of that nature. There was no sign of discoloration, or of swelling. It seemed to me more than likely that the skin had been roughed up after death. Blake said Finlayson had been struck by a bag of damp salt. His neck smelled of salt all right, but it could have been rubbed on during the night, after the body had been brought back up to the room. If he had been coshed, the vertebrae would have been depressed or broken.”

Mackenzie said: “Obvious question—were they?”

“I don’t know. They looked okay to me. But Dr Parker will know.”

“Dr Parker?”

“Works with the Anchorage police in a forensic capacity. Struck me as a very bright old boy. My request wasn’t too well received at first. Like yourselves, he regarded the concept of a second autopsy as unprecedented or unconstitutional or whatever. He read Blake’s death certificate and seemed to think it perfectly in order.”

“But you persuaded him to the contrary?”

“Not exactly. He promised nothing. But he seemed interested enough to do something.”

Brady said: “You are a persuasive cuss, George.”

Dermott paused reflectively. “It may be nothing, or it may be another straw in the wind—but Dr Parker has never heard of Dr Blake.”

Brady resumed his favourite steeple-fingered pontificating attitude. “You’re aware that Alaska is more than half the size of Western Europe?”

“I’m also aware that in Western Europe there must be the odd hundred million people. In Alaska, a few hundred thousand. I’d be surprised, if, outside the few hospitals, there are more than sixty or seventy doctors, and a veteran like Parker would be bound to know or know of them all.”

Brady unsteepled his fingertips and said: “There is hope for you. An immediate investigation into Doctor Blake’s antecedents would appear to be in order.”

“Immediate,” Mackenzie agreed. “Morrison’s the man for that. Wouldn’t it be interesting, too, to have a run-down on the man who appointed or recommended Blake to this post?”

“It would,” Dermott said. “And it would certainly narrow the field a bit. I wonder. You remember just after we arrived here asking whether there were any ideas about the type of weapon used on Bronowski, and Morrison said—I think I quote him accurately—‘Dr Blake says he’s no specialist in criminal acts of violence’?”

Brady nodded.

“So. This morning, when I was with him in Finlayson’s room discussing the reasons for the man’s death, he mentioned in an off-hand way that he used to be an expert in the forensic field. Obviously he said it to lend credence to his diagnosis. But it was a slip, all the same. One time or the other, he was lying.”

Dermott looked at Brady and asked: “Your agents in New York who are investigating Bronowski’s security firm there—they aren’t, shall we say, exactly burning up the track. Give them a nudge?”

“Negative. You said yourself that an open line…”

“Who’s talking about an open line? We do it through Houston, in your code.”

“Huh! That damn code. You encode any message you like and authorise it in my name.”

Mackenzie winked unobtrusively, but Dermott ignored him and began to spell out a message to the telephone operator. It said much for his mastery of a code which its inventor found insupportably burdensome that he encoded the words straight out of his head, without having to make a prior transcript.

He had barely finished when a knock on the door announced the arrival of Hamish Black. The pencil moustache on the Alaskan general manager was as immaculately trimmed as ever, the central parting of the hair still apparently drawn by ruler, the eyeglass so securely anchored that it looked as if it could have ridden out a hurricane. He still dressed in pure City accountant, first class. At that moment, however, there was a difference in his general demeanour: he looked like a first-class accountant who had just stumbled across proof of unmistakable and gross embezzlement in the books of his favourite client. Yet he maintained his cool—or cold.

“Good evening, gentlemen.” He was a specialist in wintry smiles. “I hope I do not intrude, Mr Brady?”

“Come in, come in.” Brady was affability itself, a sure sign that he didn’t care too much for his visitor. “Make yourself at home.” He glanced around the cramped confines of his room and at the only three already occupied chairs. “Well—”

“Thank you, I’ll stand. I shall not detain you for long.”

“A drink? One of my incomparable rum drinks? How about a cigar?”

“Thank you. I neither smoke nor drink.” The minuscule twitch of the left-hand corner of his upper lip clearly indicated his opinion of those who did. “I have come here because in my capacity of general manager of Sohio/B.P. I felt it my duty to ask how much progress you have made in your investigations to date.”

Dermott said: “What have we found out so far? Well—”

“Will you please be quiet, sir. I was addressing—”

“George!” Brady made a downward placatory movement of the hand towards a Dermott who was already half-way out of his seat. He looked coldly at Black. “We are not employees of yours, Mr Black. We are not even retained by you, but directly by your head office in London. I suggest that if you want to leave this room the way you entered it, you watch your language.”

Black’s lips had disappeared somewhere. “Sir! I am not accustomed—”

“Okay, okay. We all know that. You’re obviously in a hostile mood. Our progress so far? Not much. Would there be anything else?”

Black was clearly taken aback. It is difficult for an old-time man-of-war to attack when the wind has been taken out of its sails.

“So you admit—”

“No admission. We’re just making a statement. Can we be of further help?”

“Indeed you can. You can explain to me the justification for your staying on here. The firm can scarcely afford the fees you seem likely to charge, if it gets no advantage. You have achieved nothing, and seem unlikely to achieve anything. You investigate industrial sabotage, specifically oil-flow interruption. There is, I suggest, a considerable difference between the spilling of oil and the spilling of blood. One cannot but suspect but that you are out of your depth and that events are beyond your control. One further suspects that the investigation should be left to those qualified to investigate criminal matters—the F.B.I. and the Alaskan State police.”

“We’d be interested to know what they’ve found out. Or don’t you feel free to tell us?”

Black compressed his lips still tighter. Mackenzie said: “May I have a word, Mr Brady?”

“Certainly, Donald.”

“Mr Black: Your attitude here is singularly reminiscent of the one you adopted when first we met you. Have you the power to make us leave?”

“Yes.”

“Permanently?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know very well why not. London head office would reinstate you.”

“Possibly with the qualification that if any such situation arose again it would be the general manager, Alaska, who would be required to leave.”

“I couldn’t really say.”

“I can. Or didn’t you know that Mr Brady is a close personal friend of the chairman of your company?”

From the way that Black touched his collar, it was clear that this was news to him. From the way Jim Brady experienced a sudden difficulty in swallowing a mouthful of daiquiri, it was clear that it was news to him also.

“To return to your earlier attitude, Mr Black,” Mackenzie persisted. “On that occasion Mr Dermott said he thought you might have something to hide. Mr Brady suggested you were being unduly secretive and had—what was it again?—some undisclosed and possibly discreditable reason for choosing to obstruct the best interests of your company. Reasonable requests you regarded as being preposterous. Finally, as I recall, Mr Dermott said that you were either standing on your high horse as general manager, Alaska, and were above such petty annoyances, or that you were concealing something you didn’t want us to know about.”

Black was possibly a shade or two paler, but his pallor could well have been caused by anger. He reached for the door handle.

“This is intolerable! I refuse to be the subject of character assassination.”

As he pulled open the door, Mackenzie said, reproachingly, “I think it’s impolite to interrupt a man’s speech.”

Black’s eyes matched well the icy conditions outside. “What does that mean?”

“Just that I would like to finish what I’ve been saying.”

Black looked at his watch. “Make it short.”

“I know you have a great deal to do, Mr Black.” Two tiny spots of pink appeared on the pale cheekbones, for Mackenzie’s tone had made it abundantly clear he didn’t believe Black had anything to do. “So I’ll keep it short. Your intransigence interests us. You have made it abundantly clear that you would be happy to be rid of us. By your own admission you’ve acknowledged that we would be back very soon afterwards, perhaps even in a matter of days. The conclusion is that you want us out of the way even if for only a brief period. One wonders what you intend to do or have done during that short time?”

“I see. You leave me with no alternative other than to report your gross incompetence and insolence to my board of directors in London.”

When the door had closed Dermott said: “Not a bad exit line. He’ll do nothing of the kind, of course—not when he’s had time to reflect on Mr Brady’s close personal relationship with his board chairman.” Dermott looked at Brady. “I didn’t know—”

“Neither did I.” Brady was positively jovial. He smacked one fat fist into the other podgy palm. “Tell me, Donald, how much of what you said did you mean?”

“Who’s to know? Not me. I just don’t like the bastard.”

“Hardly the basis for a dispassionate judgment,” Dermott said. “But a splendid demolition job, Donald. There are times when a man rises above himself.” He paused for a moment, then looked at Brady. “Remember the last time we had a run-in with our friend, you said that it was a pity that he acted so suspiciously, otherwise he would have made a splendid suspect? Maybe we’re outsmarting ourselves. It’s barely possible that he should be a suspect. Maybe, in addition, he’s outsmarting us. This won’t have escaped you?”

Brady stopped being jovial. “Double-guessing again. How often do I have to tell you, George, I hate this goddamn double-guessing. General manager, Alaska. Jesus, George, somebody, by definition, has to be beyond suspicion.”

In Dermott’s cabin Mackenzie said: “Took you a long time to transmit that coded message to Houston. Your brief was merely to ask them to expedite the boss’s earlier instructions. What the hell else did you say?”

“I asked them to find out if anybody had left Bronowski’s security firm within six months before or after Bronowski’s leaving.”

“Maybe Brady’s right. Maybe this security bit is getting to you. And even if Bronowski has hauled some of his old associates along with him, they may have changed their names.”

“Hardly matters. Descriptions will be enough. And as for my being bitten by the bug, it’s high time you and Jim were too. How would you try to account for the fact that the bastards in Alberta know the Alaskan company’s code, while the villains in Alaska know the Albertan code, the private Sanmobil code?”

“Ever since the first identical messages were received at Prudhoe Bay and Sanmobil, we’ve known our Alaskan and Athabascan friends were in cahoots, nicely co-ordinating their efforts to keep us wrong-footed and ensuring that we were in A while we should have been in B, and vice versa. There’s no doubt in my mind that both security corps have been infiltrated. Our only suspects on both sides are security people.”

“So you think the overall co-ordinator must be a security man?”

“Not necessarily. But what I’m sure of is that pretty soon we’re going to hear of some fresh calamity that has struck in Athabasca. The master puppeteer must be thinking it’s time the puppets were dancing again.”

“Co-ordination,” Mackenzie said darkly.

“In this instance?”

“You heard what I said to Black. That he wants us out for a few days for some purpose. If he can’t get rid of us in one way—by asking us to leave—then he’ll do it in another by arranging a fresh Athabascan calamity.”

Dermott sighed, drew a line under a list of names he had printed, and handed it over. “Names for investigation—let’s hope—by our friend Morrison of the F.B.I. What d’you think of it?”

Mackenzie took the list and studied it. His eyebrows went up. “Make Morrison jump, for sure,” he said.

“I don’t care if he jumps over the moon, as long as he gets on with it when he comes down,” said Dermott heavily. “We’ve got to get action somewhere.” He was about to say something else when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver to listen, and gradually his face went chalk white. He seemed not to notice when the glass in his left hand shattered, crushed by the pressure he had put on it, and a little rivulet of blood ran down his palm.

11

“What a place!” exclaimed Stella as she came back into Corinne’s office. “Heavens—I had no idea it was so big. We seem to have driven about fifty miles.”

“Well, it’s quite a size, that’s for sure.” Corinne grinned, pleased that her guests had enjoyed themselves. “I hope you found it interesting too, Mrs Brady?”

“Incredible!” Jean eased off the hood of her parka and shook her hair loose. “Those draglines—I never saw anything like them. They’re—they’re sort of prehistoric monsters, burrowing into the bowels of the earth.”

“That’s right!” Stella’s imagination had been fired no less. “Brontosauruses. Absolutely. Sure was kind of Mr Reynolds to fix our tour. And to ask us to supper.”

“Don’t mention it.” Corinne tried out the deprecating smile she had been cultivating. “We all like having visitors—makes a change. You’ll enjoy meeting Mary Reynolds, too. Now, let’s see if the boss is ready to leave.”

She buzzed the intercom and announced that the ladies were back. Over the loudspeaker they heard him say: “Fine—I’ll be through in a minute.”

“Be right with you,” she said. “All set?” She tidied her desk, locked the drawers, put the keys in her handbag and pulled on a fetching, roly-poly combination suit of powder-blue quilted nylon, as well as a pair of blue fur-topped boots. A moment later Reynolds himself came through the connecting door, similarly muffled in navy blue and white.

“Evening, ladies,” he said pleasantly. “Had a good tour, I hope. Not too dull?”

“Not at all!” Jean had no trouble sounding enthusiastic. “It was wonderful. Fascinating.”

“Good.” He turned to Corinne. “Where are our strong-arm boys, then?”

“Waiting for us in the lobby.”

“Great. We’d better not leave them behind, or your father’ll give us hell.” He winked at Stella and ushered her through the door.

Terry Brinckman, Sanmobil’s security chief, and his deputy Jorgensen were hovering in the entrance hall. As the party approached the two men opened the outside door and let in a blast of the Arctic evening. Out on the tarmac one of the firm’s yellow-and-black chequered minibuses stood ready, with its engine running. Reynolds opened the passenger door, helped Jean and Stella into the front seat, nipped round the the driver’s side and slammed the door, cursing the knifelike wind. Corinne hopped into the back seat between the two security men.

As they cruised down towards the main gates Reynolds called up the guard on his two-way radio and identified the vehicle, to save the man coming out into the cold. At the bus’s approach the high weldmesh gates began to roll open, driven by electric motors. A few snowflakes drifted fast through the blaze of the arc-lamps that illuminated the perimeter fence. Reynolds gave a couple of toots on the horn to signal his thanks, and a moment later they were out in the open, with the headlight beams boring into the frozen darkness ahead.

The bus was warm and comfortable. The journey would take only twenty minutes. Yet Corinne somehow felt uneasy. Her boss had been on edge all day, and although she had maintained a sunny enough exterior, she wasn’t looking forward to the evening: it could be sticky. Maybe they could get a bit of a concert or sing-song going—that would help. She leaned forward and asked Stella if she could play the guitar.

“Why, sure—if no-one else is listening.”

“Ah, come on! I thought we could maybe have a sing-song.”

“Course she can play,” Jean said firmly. “Pick up any tune you care to sing.”

“That’s great.” Corinne settled back between her two solid escorts. The bus had left the inhabited outskirts of the site and was winding through the low hills that separated the tar sands from Fort McMurray. Reynolds drove smoothly, without violent acceleration or braking, for the surface of the road was dusted with the ever-travelling snow, which flashed and glittered in the headlamp beams.

They had just passed a sharp corner which Brinckman said was known as Hangman’s Turn when Reynolds did jam on his brakes. He cursed as the bus slewed to the left, then corrected the skid. Ahead, the road was blocked by a black truck which had also skidded sideways-on.

“Look out!” Corinne shouted. “There’s someone on the road!”

The bus juddered to a halt a few yards short of the huddled figure lying face-down. The flying snow cleared for a few seconds to reveal another body, also on its front, but moving.

“Oh my God!” Jean cried from up front. “There’s been an accident!”

“You ladies, sit tight,” Reynolds ordered sharply. “Terry, go see what’s happened.”

Brinckman opened his door and got out. Corinne felt the blast of air hit her from the right. Then she saw another figure running, or rather staggering, towards them from the stranded vehicle. The man had his hands up, as if to shield his eyes from the minibus’s lights. He was limping and lurching; she thought: he’s been badly hurt.

Corinne felt Brinckman yank the first-aid box out from under the back seat. Next thing she knew, he was flat on his side, his feet having gone from under him on the ice. He got up at once and advanced more cautiously, with his feet apart, apparently to the aid of the injured man.

What happened next was so fast that Corinne afterwards wondered a hundred times whether or not she had remembered it right. Everything seemed to go into a blur. One moment Brinckman was advancing to meet the crippled figure. Next second the cripple seemed suddenly to shake off his injuries: he stood upright and let fly an expertly-timed blow that felled Brinckman like a tree. The instant the man lowered his shielding hand, Corinne saw he was wearing a stocking mask.

Stella screamed: “Back up—quick!” Corinne also shouted something. But before any of them could move the attacker was at Reynolds’s window. In a second he had wrenched it open and thrown in something that hissed.

Instinctively Corinne threw herself down flat on the floor in the back. From the front she heard stifled screams and ghastly tearing noises as people struggled for breath. Then the gas got her too, and she found herself fighting and choking as if for her life.

In spite of her distress she became aware that the people in front were being dragged out into the snow. She crouched flat on the floor, struggling to control her stinging throat and eyes. Then she heard a man shout: “Where’s the other chick? We’ve only got two.” In the next second she felt someone seize the hood of her combination suit and drag her bodily out onto the road.

Without knowing why, she pretended to be unconscious. Somehow it seemed safer. She felt herself sliding easily along the icy surface, being dragged like a sack of potatoes. Her backside skidded smoothly over the snow. As she was pulled round the front of the minibus, into the headlights, she noticed that the supposedly injured men had vanished. The bus’s engine was still running, but the vehicle blocking the road had started up as well. Suddenly she was hoisted and dumped in the open back of the truck.

For the first time she felt afraid—not of being kidnapped, but of freezing to death. In spite of her thick suit she was shivering already, and if they were going to be driven miles in an open truck, the cold would soon kill them all…

Her fears on that score proved groundless. After a rough, bumpy drive of only a few seconds the truck crunched to a halt. The noise of its motor was suddenly swamped by a far louder, heavier roar that burst out all round and over them. Corinne opened her eyes in terror and saw that they had pulled up beside a grey-white helicopter. Even as she looked up one of the rotor blades moved past her line of sight.

She felt she should scream or run—but would it do any good? Even a second’s hesitation was too long. She felt herself grabbed by shoulders and ankles and swung aboard, again like an inert sack.

The noise was terrific. The engine-roar increased to a furious pitch, but through it she could hear a woman screaming and men yelling. She saw a bundle she recognised as Stella struggling frantically with one of the men in stocking masks, rolling across the bare steel. Another of the men slid the door in the side of the fuselage nearly shut, but he kept his head stuck out through the gap, bellowing at someone still on the ground.

The engine-note rose and fell, rose and fell, as though the pilot was having mechanical difficulty. Then it went up and stayed up—but only for a few seconds. Again it dropped. Corinne had never been in a helicopter before and did not know what to expect. She didn’t know whether the pilot was going through his normal take-off routine, or whether he had some problem. What she did notice, however, was that the man who’d been shouting to his colleague on the ground had failed to close the door properly: it still stood a few inches ajar. A desperate idea flashed into her head: at the moment of take-off, whenever it came, she would dart to the door, drag it open, and fling herself out.

Before she’d had time to evaluate the risks, she felt the floor tilt—they were off already. Then came a heavy bump. Down again, she thought. Next time they did lift. It was then or never.

She rolled over, flung herself at the door and hauled it back. She was hit by a stunningly cold wash of wind. Too late she realised that they were already off the ground. She was caught by the slipstream, whirled round and sucked out. She clutched wildly at the door-frame but her gloves slipped uselessly over the bare metal. At the edge of her consciousness she heard a man screaming: “You’re crazy! You’ll be killed!” Then she was falling through the snow-laden wind. She tumbled over in mid air and glimpsed a pair of headlights snaking through the night way below. That was the last thing she saw. The next couple of seconds would bring her nightmares for the rest of her life. Time stopped. She fell endlessly through the freezing sky, convinced that her body would be smashed to pieces any instant. She tried to scream, but could not. She tried to breathe, but could not. She tried to turn over, but could not alter her attitude in the slightest. She dropped helplessly, rigid with terror.

The impact was unbelievably gentle. Instead of smashing into iron-hard tundra, she landed in something soft and yielding. She hit it back-first, and went right on down through several feet of blessed cushioning. She was winded by the impact, but that was all. She lay on her back gasping and groaning for breath, but once she had got it back, she began to shake with relief. To her own amazement, she found she was laughing as well as crying. She had landed on her backside in a great big drift of snow.

*  *  *

Jay Shore was just about to leave his office at the Sanmobil plant when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and said “Yes?”

“Switchboard operator here,” said a voice high with stress. “Got an emergency. Driver Pete Johnson is on the radio. Wants to talk to you immediately.”

“I’ll take it. Patch him through.” Shore waited.

“Hullo? Hullo?” Johnson’s voice crackled through, even more excited than the operator’s. “Mr Shore, sir?”

“Speaking. Take it easy. What’s the problem?”

“I’m on my way down to Fort McMurray, sir. Driving bus MB 3. Just come round a corner and found Bus MB 5 abandoned in the middle of the road.”

“Abandoned?”

“That’s right. Doors open, motor running, lights on. Point is, it’s the bus Mr Reynolds took to go home in.”

“Jesus! Where are you?”

“About a mile past Hangman’s Turn. Mile towards Fort McMurray.”

“Okay. I’ll get someone right out there.”

“Mr Shore?”

“What is it?”

“I just saw a chopper take off from near the road, and somebody fell out of it. And two of our security guys—Mr Brinckman and Mr Jorgensen—are lying in the road, like they’ve been hurt real bad.”

“Damn!”

“Yeah, and there’s a truck stuck in the snow by where the plane took off. It’s trying to get back on the road, facing towards Fort McMurray.”

“Keep away from it,” Shore ordered. “Stay in your own vehicle. Back off a bit. But don’t go near the truck. I’ll get someone right down.”

“Okay, Mr Shore, sir.”

Shore banged down the receiver and snatched up another, an outside line. He dialled and waited. He knew that Carmody and Jones, the two R.C.M.P. men assigned to protect the Brady family, were also due at the Reynolds’s for supper, so he called directly there. Someone answered—Mrs Reynolds.

“Mary? Jay Shore speaking. Look—I’m afraid there’s been some sort of a…mix-up. Bill and the ladies have got delayed. What’s that? No—I hope not. Nothing to worry about. Have you the two constables there already? Great. Yes please. Either will do.”

John Carmody came on the line.

“Emergency,” said Shore quietly. “I think your party’s been hijacked. Yes—I do.” He explained all he knew in a couple of sentences. “What I want you to do is come right up the road to Hangman’s Turn. You see anybody coming to meet you, stop him: it could be the grey truck we’re after. O.K?”

“O.K. We’re on our way.”

“That’s fine. Get moving.”

*  *  *

Carmody drove. Jones rode shotgun, his .38 revolver ready in his hand. The Cherokee Jeep station wagon, in four-wheel drive, held the road better than a regular sedan, but even so they had to go carefully.

Carmody swore steadily as he nursed the wheel. “Goddam it to hell!” he kept muttering. “The first time we leave them, this happens. What in hell were the Sanmobil security guys doing, for Christ’s sake?”

They drove on, snow whirling through the headlight-beams. Suddenly they saw lights coming the other way.

“Block the road!” Jones ordered. “Get sideways on.”

“Better to keep head on—dazzle him. He can’t get past, anyway.”

Carmody stopped in the middle of the road and switched on the station wagon’s flashers. The oncoming driver rounded a bend, saw them, braked and slewed violently from side to side before sliding to a halt.

Jones got out and moved towards the vehicle. He’d only gone three or four yards when a spurt of fire flashed from the driver’s window, followed instantly by the crack of a gun. Jones spun sideways, clutching his left shoulder. The other driver slammed into gear and let out the clutch. For a second his tyres raced griplessly on the snow. Then he shot forward, cannoned into the Jeep, shunted it sideways enough for him to scrape past, and accelerated away in the direction of Fort McMurray.

Carmody tried to open his door but found it jammed: the bodywork was buckled all down that side. He bunked across to the other side and ran to the aid of his wounded colleague. Jones was conscious but bleeding badly from a wound in the top corner of his chest: a large, dark stain had spread out across the snow beneath his body.

Carmody thought fast. It was too cold to administer first aid to the wound. If he took off any of Jones’s clothes, the man would die of exposure and shock. First priority was to get him somewhere warm, then to hospital. He ought to call up an ambulance.

“Come on, Bill,” he said gently. “You gotta get up.”

“O.K.,” Jones muttered. “I’m O.K.”

“On your feet, then.” Carmody got him round the waist, avoiding his chest and shoulders, in case he made anything worse there, and hoisted him upright. Then he propelled him gently towards the Jeep and opened one of the back doors.

“In there,” he said. “Front door’s jammed.”

He got the wounded man safely in, closed the door, climbed aboard himself and turned up the heater to maximum. Then he addressed himself to the radio. To his chagrin, he could get nothing out of it. The set was live, but no signal came through. Something had been broken by the impact of the truck.

For a moment Carmody considered turning and giving chase. Then he realised the other driver had too much start on him: even with his four-wheel drive, he would never overtake him in the short distance between there and Fort McMurray. He was closer to the Sanmobil plant, in any case. Better get on and make contact with the bus driver who had first raised the alarm.

He set off as fast as he dared. Jones was ominously silent, not answering questions about how he felt. Carmody set his jaw and drove through the snow.

Five minutes later he came on the stranded minibus. Immediately he recognised the black-and-yellow chequered MB 5, which he had seen and ridden in many times before. Beyond it a line of vehicles had piled up, the drivers being kept at bay by Johnson, who had told them that the police were about to arrive, and that no-one must touch the bus until the cops had checked it out. The beaten-up security men were hunched in the seats of Johnson’s bus, apparently comatose.

Carmody sized up the position in a moment. “Get it out the way,” he ordered. “Let everybody else through.”

They pushed the Reynolds bus to one side and waved the other vehicles past. Three back in the line was a Sanmobil truck with two storehands aboard—the only men Shore had been able to conscript immediately at that late hour. Over Johnson’s bus radio Carmody called for police reinforcements and alerted the Sanmobil sick bay, warning them that three injured men were being brought in. Then he detailed one of the Sanmobil men to drive his own Jeep right on to the plant, with Jones still in it. Brinckman and Jorgensen, unsteady on their feet, also climbed aboard.

“Get back in the warm,” Carmody told them. “I’ll talk to you guys later.” As they drove off he turned to Johnson: “O.K., so what happened?”

“I just came on the bus in the middle of the road, like you saw it. The two security guys were lying in front of it, trying to get up. I got out to see what the matter was, and heard the racket of a helicopter engine, right close.”

“Where was it?”

“Just over there. I’ll show you.”

He switched on a big flashlight and led the way over the frozen tundra. “Sounded like he had a problem with the motor—kept running it up and letting it die again. Then he did go: lifted off and headed thataway—north. Here—you can see the ski-marks.”

In the torch-beam the imprint of long, heavy skis was still visible, though dusted over with the snow blown about by the rotor’s down-draught.

“Any markings on the chopper, identification?” Carmody asked.

“Nothing—it was just like a big black shadow against the sky. Couldn’t even tell the colour exactly but it looked off-white. Pair of small fins near the tail too.”

“And then what happened? Where did the person fall?”

“A woman, it was: she screamed. Someplace over there.” Johnson pointed. “Not too far.”

“How high did she fall from?”

“Maybe a hundred feet. Maybe more.”

“Must be dead. We’d better look, all the same. Oh my God! One of the Bradys killed.”

They went up an incline into the teeth of the wind. On top of the slope the ground was rounded into smooth, gentle humps. The torch-beam, sweeping the snow, revealed nothing.

“Must have been around here,” said Johnson doubtfully. “Can’t have been much further, or I’d never have seen the body at all. Try over there a bit.”

They cast a little to their left. Suddenly Cannody, who had been walking on hard-frozen tundra, sunk to his waist in snow. As he exclaimed and struggled to extricate himself from the drift, Johnson called: “Listen, I thought I heard something.”

They waited, catching only the whine of the wind. Then Johnson heard the sound again—a cry that sounded faint yet close at hand.

“There it is!” he shouted. “Sure as hell, someone calling. This way!”

They tried to move eastwards, but both lunged into the deep snow again and realised that a rift in the ground ran in that direction.

They regained the hard edge of the invisible miniature valley and followed it another twenty steps. Then they heard the cry again, almost beneath them. This time they shouted back and got an answer. A few more steps brought them to the lip of a hole about a yard across that had been punched vertically downwards into the drift. Shining the light down it, they saw a bundle of powder-blue snow-suit.

“Hey! You! Mrs Brady? Stella?” Carmody called. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” came the muffled answer. “I’m not Mrs Brady or Stella, and I’m not hurt. Just stuck.”

“Who are you, then?”

“Corinne Delorme.”

“Corinne! Heaven’s sakes! John Carmody here. Hold on, and we’ll get you right out of there.” He sent Johnson running to the truck for a shovel and a rope, and in five minutes they had dug and hoisted the girl out. Considering she had been outdoors for more than half an hour, she was in remarkably good shape, mainly because the snow had insulated her and given her complete protection from the wind. But as soon as they got her into the warmth of the truck-cab, reaction set in and she began to shudder uncontrollably.

Carmody’s first impulse was to drive her to hospital, but then he changed his mind. Something—he could not quite tell what—made him favour a more devious approach. The guys in the helicopter must reckon she was dead: they must think they had another murder on their hands. It was a million-to-one that she had fallen into the drifted-up ravine rather than onto the ground: five yards to either side, and every bone in her body would have been broken. Something might be gained, Carmody thought, if the kidnappers did not realise anyone had survived; therefore he decided to move her away into safe-keeping, at any rate until Brady and his team returned.

“Know what I want you to do?” Carmody said to Johnson. “Drive Miss Delorme to the isolation unit on the plant. The isolation unit. When you reach the main gates, have her keep down out of sight, on the floor. I don’t want anyone to know where she is. Any bother, say you’re on a special run for Mr Shore, O.K.?”

Johnson nodded.

“You hear that, Corinne?” Carmody lifted up her chin. “He’ll take you to a good place at Athabasca. Nice and warm and comfortable. Out of the way, too. I’ll see you back there as soon as I can make it.”

Shock and reaction had knocked the girl to pieces for the moment, and she could not answer.

“Go on, then,” Carmody told Johnson. “Drive.”

12

It was past midnight and still snowing heavily when Brady arrived back in Fort McMurray, but the lobby of the Peter Pond Hotel was as crowded and bustling with activity as if it had been just after noon. Brady sank wearily into a chair. The flight from Prudhoe Bay had been a grim one: between them Brady, Dermott and Mackenzie had uttered hardly a word.

A tall, lean man, dark-moustached and heavily tanned, approached. “Mr Brady? My name’s Willoughby. Glad to make your acquaintance, sir, though not in these damnable circumstances.”

“Ah—the police chief.” Brady smiled without humour. “And rough for you, Mr Willoughby, to have this happen in your territory. I was sorry to hear that one of your men had been killed.”

“I’m glad to say that report was premature. There was a great deal of confusion around here when we made that phone call to you. The man was shot through the left lung and certainly looked bad, but now the doctor says he has a more than even chance.”

“That’s something.” Brady smiled wanly again.

Willoughby turned to two other men. “D’you know…?”

“Those two gentlemen I’ve met,” said Brady. “Mr Brinckman, Sanmobil security chief, and his deputy, Mr Jorgensen. Odd—for a couple of reportedly injured men, you look remarkably fit to me.”

Brinckman said: “We don’t exactly feel it. Like Mr Willoughby said, things got exaggerated in the heat of the moment. No broken bones, no knife or gun injuries, but they did knock us about a bit.”

“Pete Johnson—the guy who raised the alarm—will vouch for that,” said Willoughby. “When he got there, Jorgensen was lying on the road, out cold, and Brinckman was wandering round in a daze. He didn’t know if it was last night or last month.”

Brady turned to another man who had appeared at his side. “Evening, Mr Shore. Morning, rather. The Brady family seem to have disturbed a lot of people’s sleep, I’m afraid.”

“To hell with that.” Shore was visibly upset. “I helped show Mrs Brady and your daughter round the plant yesterday. That this should happen to her. Just as bad, that this should happen to you when you and your family were virtually our guests and you were trying to help us. A black day and a black eye for Sanmobil.”

“Maybe not all that black,” said Dermott. “God knows, it must be a traumatic experience to be kidnapped, but I don’t believe any of the four is in immediate danger. We’re not dealing with political fanatics such as you get in Europe or the Mid East. We’re up against hard-headed business men with no personal animosity against their victims: they almost certainly regard them as bargaining counters.” He clasped and unclasped his big hands. “They’re going to make demands, probably outrageous, for the return of the women, and if those demands are met, they’ll honour the bargain. Professional kidnappers usually do. In their own twisted terms, it’s sound business practice and plain commonsense.”

Brady turned to Willoughby. “We haven’t really heard what happened. I assume you haven’t had time to make wide-ranging enquiries?”

“Afraid not.”

“They’ve just vanished into thin air?”

“Thin air is right. Helicopter, as you heard. They could be a few hundred miles away in any direction by this time.”

“Any chance of airfield radars having picked up their flight-path?”

“No, sir. It’s a million to one that they were flying below radar level. Besides, there are more palm trees in Northern Alberta than there are radar stations. Down south, it’s different. We’ve alerted the stations there to keep a watch, but nothing’s been reported so far.”

“Well—” Brady steepled his fingers, sinking back in his chair. “It might help if we could have a brief chronological account of what happened.”

“That won’t take long. Jay?”

Shore said: “Yes. I was the last person to see them, apart from these two”—he pointed at Brinckman and Jorgensen. “They left in one of Sanmobil’s minibuses, with Bill Reynolds driving.”

Mackenzie cut in: “Were there any phone calls before they left?”

“I wouldn’t know. Why?”

“Let me ask another question.” Mackenzie looked at Brinckman. “How did the kidnappers stop your bus?”

“They had a truck slewed across the road. Blocked it completely.”

“It couldn’t have been there long. There’s a fair bit of traffic on that road, and drivers wouldn’t take kindly to being held up. Was there, in fact, any other traffic at the time?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

Willoughby said: “Your point, Mr Mackenzie?”

“Plain as a pikestaff. The kidnappers were tipped off. They knew the precise time when Reynolds’s bus left and when it could be expected at the interception point. Phone or short-wave radio—even a CB would have been enough. Two things are for sure: there was a tip-off, and it came from Sanmobil.”

“Impossible!” Shore sounded shocked.

“Nothing else makes sense,” said Brady. “Mackenzie’s right.”

“Good God!” Shore sounded outraged. “You make Sanmobil sound like a den of thieves.”

“It’s not a Sunday School,” said Brady heavily.

Dermott turned back to Brinckman. “So Reynolds pulled up when he saw this truck across the road? Then?”

“It was all so quick. There were two men lying in the road. One was face-down and very still, as if he were hurt real bad. The other was moving—he’d both hands clutching at the small of his back and was rolling from side to side. He seemed to be in agony. Two other men came running towards us—well, hardly running, more staggering. One was limping badly, and he had an arm stuck inside his mackinaw jacket as if he was trying to support it. Both of them had a hand up in front of their faces, covering their eyes.”

Dermott said: “Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Not at all. It was dark, and we had our headlights on. It seemed natural they should shield their eyes from the glare.”

There was a pause. Then Brinckman went on: “Well—this guy with the damaged arm—as I thought—came weaving up to my side of the bus. I grabbed the first-aid box and jumped out. I slipped on the ice, and by the time I had my balance I saw the man had dropped his hand and was wearing a stocking mask. Then I saw his left arm coming up. It was almost a blur, but I could see he had some kind of a sap in his hand. I had no time to react.” He fingered his forehead gingerly. “That’s all, I guess.”

Dermott crossed to him and examined the contusion on the side of his forehead. “Nasty. Could have been worse, though. An inch or so further back and you’d likely have had a fractured temple. Looks as if your friend was using lead shot. A leather cosh wouldn’t have done that.”

Brinckman stared at him in an odd fashion. “Lead, you reckon?”

“I should think so.” Dermott turned to Jorgensen. “I take it you hadn’t much better luck?”

“At least I wasn’t blackjacked. I just thought my jaw had been broken. The other guy was either a heavyweight champion, or he was clutching something heavy in his fist. I couldn’t see. He jerked open Mr Reynolds’s door, flung in some kind of smoke-bomb, then banged the door shut again.”

“Tear gas,” said Willoughby. “You can see his eyes are still inflamed.”

“I got out,” Jorgensen went on. “I waved my gun around, but it might have been a water pistol, the use it was. I was blind. Next thing I remember, Pete Johnson was trying to shake some sense into us.”

“So, of course, you don’t know how Reynolds and his passengers made out.” Brady looked round. He was taking over. “Where’s Carmody?”

“Down at the station,” said Shore. “Still making his report. Pete Johnson’s with him. They’ll be here presently.”

“Good.” Brady turned back to Brinckman. “The man who attacked you—was he wearing gloves?”

“I’m not sure.” Brinckman thought and then said: “Once he’d passed out of the beam of the headlights, he was in pretty deep shadow, and, as I said, it all happened so damn quickly. But I don’t think so.”

“Your man, Mr Jorgensen?”

“I could see his hand pretty clearly as he threw the tear-gas canister. No—no glove.”

“Thank you, gentlemen. Mr Willoughby, a few questions if I may.”

“Go ahead.” Willoughby cleared his throat.

“This truck the kidnappers used—you say it was stolen?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s been identified?”

“Belongs to a local garage proprietor. It was known he was off on a couple of days’ hunting trip.”

“At this time of year?”

“Your true enthusiast goes hunting any time. At all events, it was seen passing through the streets yesterday afternoon, and we assumed the owner was taking it along for his trip.”

“Which argues a fairly intimate local knowledge?”

“Sure, but no help to us.” Willoughby smoothed his dark moustache. “Fort McMurray’s no longer a village.”

“Have you fingerprinted the truck, inside and out?”

“Being done now. It’s a long job—there are hundreds of prints.”

“May we see them?”

“Of course. I’ll have them Photostatted. But, with respect, Mr Brady, what do you hope to achieve that we, the police, can’t?”

“You never know.” Brady smiled enigmatically. “Mr Dermott here is an international expert in fingerprinting.”

“I didn’t know!” Willoughby smiled at Dennott, who smiled back. He hadn’t known either.

Brady changed his tack. “Any chance of identifying the helicopter from the measurements of the ski-marks that Carmody took?”

Willoughby shook his head. “It was a good idea to record them, but no—the chances of identifying any one machine from its ski-prints are extremely remote, because there will almost certainly be dozens of its particular type around. This is helicopter country, Mr Brady, like Alaska. Here in Northern Alberta our communications are still very primitive. We have no divided highways—freeways—in this part of the world. In fact, north of Edmonton there only two paved roads that reach up north. Between them—nothing. Apart from ourselves, and Peace River and Fort Chipewyan, there are no commercial airports in an area of 200,000 square miles.”

“So,” Brady nodded. “You use choppers.”

“The preferred form of transport at all times. In winter, the only form.”

“It’s a good bet that an intensive air search wouldn’t have a hope in hell of locating the getaway machine?”

“None. I’ve made a bit of a study of kidnapping, and I can answer you best by a comparison. The world’s most kidnap-happy place is Sardinia. It’s a kind of national pastime there. Whenever a millionaire is snatched, all the resources of the law and the Italian armed forces are brought into play. The Navy blockades harbours and virtually every fishing village on the coast. The Army sets up road-blocks, and specially-trained troops sweep the hills. The Air Force carries out exhaustive reconnaissance by plane and helicopter. In all the years these searches have been carried out, they’ve never yet located a single kidnapper’s hideout. Alberta is twenty-seven times larger than Sardinia. Our resources are a fraction of theirs. Answer your question?”

“One begins to feel the first faint twinges of despair. But tell me, Mr Willoughby: if you had four kidnapped people on your hands, where would you hide them?”

“Edmonton or Calgary.”

“But those are towns. Surely…”

“Cities, yes—and the population of each must be crowding half a million. The captives wouldn’t be hidden—they’d be lost.”

“Well.” Brady pulled himself up in his chair. He looked weary. “Okay. I suppose we have to wait word from the kidnappers before we make a move. You two gentlemen—” he turned to Brinckman and Jorgensen—“I don’t think we need keep you any longer. Thank you for your co-operation.”

The two security men said their goodnights and left. Brady hoisted himself to his feet. “No sign of Carmody yet? Let’s go and make ourselves more comfortable while we wait for him. The desk will no doubt inform us when he arrives. This way, gentlemen.”

Once in the privacy of his own room, armed with a fresh drink, Brady seemed suddenly to shake off his exhaustion.

“O.K., George,” he said briskly. “You’ve been holding out on us. Why?”

“In what way?”

“Don’t pussy-foot. You said you were more concerned about the demands the crooks are going to make than about my family. You love my family. Now what did you mean?”

“The first demand will be that you, Don and I take off for Houston. They must be convinced we’re on the verge of a breakthrough.

“The second demand will be a ransom message. To keep things within reasonable bounds they can hardly ask for more than a couple of million dollars. But that would be peanuts compared with the stakes our friends are playing for.

“Third, the greater stakes. Obviously, they’ll demand a fortune to cease their harassment of both Prudhoe Bay’s and Sanmobil’s oil supplies, and the increasing destruction of their equipment. That’s where they hold all the aces: as we’ve seen, both systems are embarrassingly vulnerable to attack. For as long as the criminals’ identity remains undiscovered, they can keep on destroying both systems piecemeal.

“Their price will be high. I imagine they’ll base it on the development cost of the two systems—that’s ten billion for starters—plus the daily revenue, which is the cost of over two million-barrels a day. Five per cent of the total? Ten? Depends what the market will bear. One thing’s for sure: if they demand too much and price themselves out of the market, the oil companies are going to cut their losses and run, leaving the insurance companies to hold the baby—and it will surely be the most expensive baby in insurance history.”

Brady said querulously: “Why didn’t you bring this up downstairs?”

“I have an aversion to talking too much in crowded hotel foyers.” Dermott leant towards Jay Shore. “Did your Edmonton office send the fingerprints we asked for?”

“I have them in the safe at home.”

“Good.” Dermott nodded approval; but Willoughby was curious: “What prints?”

Shore hesitated until he received an all-but-imperceptible nod from Dermott, and said: “Mr Brady and his men seem pretty well convinced that we have at Sanmobil one or more subversives actively aiding and abetting the men trying to destroy us. Mr Dermott particularly suspects our security staff and all those who have access to our safe.”

Willoughby shot Dermott a cool, quizzical look. It was clear that he considered the matter one for the Canadian police and not for foreign amateurs. “Would you mind explaining why?” he asked coldly.

“They’re the only suspects we have—especially the men in charge of the security shifts. Not only do they have access to the key of the armoury from which the explosives were stolen, they actually carry the damn thing around with them on duty. More, I have good reason to suspect the security staff on the Alaskan pipeline. Further, it appears more than likely that both security staffs are working hand-in-glove under the same boss or bosses. How else can you explain how some villains here know the Sohio/B.P. code, while the villains there know Sanmobil’s?”

Willoughby said: “This is just conjecture…”

“Sure. But it’s conjecture shading into probability. Isn’t it a basic police philosophy to set up a theory and examine it from all sides before discarding it? Well, we’ve set up our theory, examined it from all sides, and don’t feel like discarding it.”

Willoughby frowned, then said: “You don’t trust the security men?”

“Let me amplify that. The majority are straight, no doubt, but until I know for sure, they’re all under suspicion.”

“Including Brinckman and Jorgensen?”

“‘Including’ is not the word. ‘Especially’.”

“Jesus! You’re talking crazy, Dermott. After what they went through?”

“Tell me what they went through.”

“They told you already.” Willoughby had become incredulous.

Dermott was unmoved. “I’ve only got their word for that—and I’m pretty sure in both cases that word’s worthless.”

“Carmody corroborated their story—or rather, Johnson did. Maybe you don’t trust him either?”

“I’ll decide that when I meet him. But the point is, Johnson didn’t corroborate the story. All he said—correct me if I’m wrong—was that when he arrived on the scene he found Brinckman unconscious and Jorgensen staggering around. That’s all he said. He had no more idea what went on before that than you or I do.”

“Then how d’you account for their injuries?”

“Injuries?” Dermott smiled sarcastically. “Jorgensen didn’t have a mark on him. Brinckman did, but if you’d been watching him, you’d have seen him jump when I told him he’d been struck by a lead-filled cosh. That didn’t fit. There was something wrong with the scenario.

“I suggest—both men were in perfectly good health until they saw the lights of Johnson’s minibus approaching, whereupon Jorgensen, acting on instructions, tapped Brinckman on the head just hard enough to lay him out briefly.”

“What do you mean, ‘under instructions’?” Willoughby demanded doggedly. “Whose?”

“That remains to be discovered. But you might like to know that these aren’t the first peculiar injuries we’ve come across. A doctor in Prudhoe Bay, for one, has discovered that we have highly suspicious minds on this subject. Donald and I had to examine a murdered engineer whose finger had sustained a curious fracture. The good doctor explained it away to his own apparent satisfaction, but not to ours. He probably gave orders that if any other such—ah marginal incidents happened, any security agents in the vicinity were to display proof of injuries sustained in the loyal execution of their duties—such as, in this case, their attempts to protect those whom they were supposed to be protecting.”

Willoughby stared at him and muttered: “You have to be fantasising.”

Dermott answered: “We’ll see.” But his reply was cut short by the sudden arrival of Carmody and Johnson. Both men looked pale and exhausted—a condition Brady sought to remedy by providing them with very large Scotches.

After a suitable pause for congratulation on his night’s work, Carmody was taken through his account, step by step. The exercise proved disappointing until, when he came to describe the scene of the helicopter ski-marks, he suddenly became tongue-tied. He broke off in mid-sentence and stammered: “Say, Mr Brady, could I—er—could I talk with you privately?”

“Well!” Brady was somewhat taken aback. “By all means—but what purpose would it serve? These gentlemen enjoy my fullest confidence. Say what you want in their hearing.”

“O.K., then. It’s about the girl—Corinne…” Whereupon he told them the story of the rescue. Amazement swiftly and thoroughly woke up his audience. They crowded forward, listening intently.

“Maybe I was wrong,” Carmody ended up, “but I just figured that if news of her survival didn’t get out, it might be a card up our sleeve.”

“You figured correctly,” Brady said.

“Where is she, then?” asked Dermott sharply.

“Right now she’s in the isolation unit at the plant. She went a bit hysterical, with the reaction, but she’s all right.”

Dermott let out a whoosh of air and said “My, oh my!”

“A very original observation, George,” Brady remarked wryly. “Do I detect a certain…pleasure on your part that the young lady is alive and well and in safe hands?”

“You do,” said Dermott. Then he added quickly, as if feeling he had been over-enthusiastic: “And why not?”

“Point is, I took a statement from her,” Carmody went on. “Want to hear it?”

“Certainly,” Brady said. “Fire away.”

The statement still existed only in Carmody’s notebook, and so took some time to read. The beginning of it merely confirmed what had been established already—but then came a revelation. After the hold-up, the girl reported, “one man came staggering towards us along the road”.

“One man?” snapped Dermott, half-rising out of his chair. “Did she say one man?”

“That’s what she said.” Carmody resumed his recitation, back-tracking a sentence to emphasise her account. ‘“I saw two men lying in the road, like they were hurt. One was dead still. The other could move a bit. Then one other man came limping back towards us. He had a hand up in front of his eyes. Mr Brinckman was sitting on my right. He jumped out and grabbed the first-aid box from under the seat. I think he slipped and fell over. Then he got up again. Then I saw the other man straighten up and hit him. He went down—Mr Brinckman, that is. The other man had a stocking mask on—I could see that by now. He opened the door where Mr Reynolds was sitting and threw something into the bus…’”

“That’s it!” cried Dermott, smiting his fist on the coffee-table. “We got them!”

Brady glowered at him. “Would you favour us slower brethren with an explanation?”

“The whole thing was a frame-up. They told us a load of garbage. They said two men came at them, to make it seem more realistic that they hadn’t put up any resistance. Now it’s obvious they didn’t try to resist. They were part of the act. Jorgensen just sat there watching his partner get slugged.”

“How come he wasn’t much affected by the tear gas?” Brady asked.

“He was prepared for it, of course,” Dermott replied instantly. “If you screw your eyes shut and hold your breath, tear gas has very little effect on you. Jorgensen only had to hold out for a couple of seconds before opening his own door and getting into the fresh air. Listen to what the girl said: there were no bodies left on the road when she was dragged away. Every damn one of them had got up, right as rain, to help get the captives aboard the chopper. It was only when they saw Johnson’s headlights coming that Brinckman and Jorgensen resumed their artistic poses on the road.”

Willoughby muttered a curse. “I believe you’re right,” he said slowly. “I really do. And we haven’t a shred of hard evidence against them.”

“No way you could dream up a charge and haul them in for preventive detention?” asked Dermott hopefully.

“None.”

“I wish you could,” said Dermott. “I’d sleep happier for the rest of the night. As it is, I don’t intend to sleep at all. I’ve got a slight aversion to being murdered in bed.”

Brady nearly choked on his drink. “And what the hell does that mean, mister?”

“Just that I think an attempt will soon be made to murder me. And Donald. And you.”

Brady looked as though he might explode, but remained speechless. Dermott addressed him with some acerbity.

“Whenever you spoke down there in the foyer just now, you were tightening another screw in your own coffin-lid.” He turned to Willoughby. “Could you spare a guard for Mr Shore’s house tonight?”

“Of course; but why?”

“Simple. Mr Brady unfortunately made it clear that he wanted copies of fingerprints found on the stolen truck. Brinckman and Jorgensen know that we’ve asked your people for what could be damning prints from your Edmonton H.Q. They’ll discover, if they haven’t already, that the copies of their own prints which we took earlier are in the safe in Mr Shore’s house.”

“What good would it do them to get the copies?” Brady asked edgily. “The originals are at police H.Q. in Edmonton.”

“How far d’you think this rot has spread?” said Dermott. “The originals may still be there, but they won’t be much help once they’ve been through a shredding machine.”

“Where’s the problem?” asked Willoughby. “We just print ’em out again.”

“On what grounds? Suspicion? Just one moderately competent lawyer, and the town would be looking for a new police chief. They’d refuse point-blank. What could you do then?”

“Point out to them—which is the case—that it’s a condition of employment at Sanmobil.”

“So you’d have mass resignations on your hands. Then what?”

Willoughby didn’t answer. Mackenzie broke in: “You said I was the other grave-digger?”

“Yes. You said the kidnappers must have been tipped off from Sanmobil as to when to expect Reynolds’s bus. You were right, cf course. But Brinckman and Jorgensen must have thought you meant it was they who gave the tip. They may even think we can trace the call to them, even though outgoing calls from the plant aren’t normally tapped.”

“Well, I’m sorry.” Mackenzie shifted uneasily.

“Too bad. The damage has been done. And it wouldn’t have helped to reproach you and Mr Brady in public.”

The phone rang. Dermott, the nearest, picked it up, listened briefly and said: “One moment. I think the person you should talk to is Mr Shore. He’s right here with us.”

He handed the phone over and listened impassively to Shore’s half of the conversation, which consisted almost entirely of muttered expletives. The phone rest settled as he replaced the receiver, so badly was his hand shaking. His face had gone white.

“They’ve shot Grigson,” he gasped.

“Who’s Grigson?” snapped Brady.

“Sanmobil’s president. That’s all.”

13

The police doctor, a young man named Saunders, straightened and looked down at the unconscious man on the pile of blankets. “He’ll be all right, eventually, but that’s all I can do for him now. He needs the services of an orthopaedic surgeon.”

“How long will it be before I can question him?” Brady asked.

“With the sedative I’ve given him, it’ll be several hours before he comes round.”

“Couldn’t that damned sedative have waited a little?”

Dr Saunders looked at Brady with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “I hope, for your sake, you never have your shoulder and upper arm shattered, the bone structure completely fragmented. Mr Grigson was in agony. And even had he been conscious, I wouldn’t have let you question him.”

Brady muttered something about medical dictators, then looked at Shore and said testily: “What the hell was Grigson doing here anyway?”

“Dammit, Brady, he’s more right to be here than you and I and the rest of us put together.” Shore sounded shocked and angry. “Sanmobil is the dream-come-true of one man and one only, and he’s lying there before you. Took him nine years to turn his dream into reality, and he had to fight all the way. He’s the president. Do you understand that—the president?”

Mackenzie said pacifically: “When did he arrive?”

“Yesterday afternoon. Flew in from Europe.”

Mackenzie nodded and looked round Reynolds’s office. It wasn’t a small room, but it was fairly crowded. Apart from himself, Brady, Shore, Dr Saunders and the unconscious Grigson, there were Willoughby and two young men who had clearly been in the wars during the recent past. One had a bandaged forehead, the other an arm strapped from wrist to elbow. It was to this last person, Steve Dawson, that Mackenzie addressed himself.

“You were in charge of the night-shift?”

“Nominally. Tonight there was no night-shift. The plant’s closed down.”

“I know. So how many of you were here tonight—yourself apart?”

“Just six people.” He glanced down at the wounded man. “Mr Grigson was asleep in his private room along the corridor there. Then there was Hazlitt—charge-hand of the night security shift—and four security guards deployed around the plant.”

“Tell us what happened.”

“Well—I was patrolling, reinforcing the security team, as I had nothing else to do. I saw a light come on here in Mr Reynolds’s room. First I thought it must be Mr Grigson—he’s a very active, restless person, and an erratic sleeper. Then I got to wondering what he could be doing, because he’d already spent a couple of hours with Mr Reynolds yesterday. So, quiet as I could, I came along the passage to Grigson’s room.

“The door was closed, but not locked. I went in, and there he was asleep. I woke him, told him there were intruders in the plant, and asked to borrow a gun. I knew he had one, because he used to practise on a little private target range he’d set up here.

“He’d have none of it. He produced his automatic, but kept it himself. He said he’d had it for years and knew how to use it. I couldn’t argue with him—after all, I’m only twenty-eight, and he’s crowding seventy.

“Anyway, in here we found a man with the door of that safe open. He’d smashed Corinne’s desk open with a fire-axe to get at the keys. He was wearing a stocking mask and examining a bunch of keys he had in his hand.

“Mr Grigson told him to turn around, real slow, and not to try anything, or he’d kill him. Then suddenly came two pistol shots, right close together, from behind, and Mr Grigson pitched headlong to the floor. He was wearing a white shirt, and blood from his right shoulder and arm was pumping through it. I could see he was hurt real bad.

“I dropped to my knees to help him. The man who’d fired the shots probably figured I was going for Mr Grigson’s gun. Anyway, he fired at me too.”

Dawson was breathing quickly, his distress evident. Brady poured him a Scotch and handed the glass over. “Take this.”

Dawson’s smile was wan. “I’ve never had a drink in my life, sir.”

“Maybe you’ll never have another,” said Brady agreeably. “But you need this one, and we need your story.”

Dawson drank, spluttered and coughed. He screwed up his eyes and drank some more. He clearly detested the stuff, but his system didn’t, for almost immediately some colour began to return to his cheeks. He touched his bandaged forearm.

“Looks worse than it is. The bullet just grazed me, wrist all the way to elbow, but very superficial. Stung, more than anything. One of the masked men forced me to help lug Mr Grigson to the armoury. On the way out I picked up two first-aid kits—they didn’t object. They pushed us into the armoury, locked the door and left.

“Then I took off Mr Grigson’s shirt and staunched the wound as best I could. It took a lot of bandages—there was so much blood coming. I thought he was going to bleed to death.”

“He could have,” Saunders said with certainty. “No question, your quick action saved his life.”

“Glad I was some use.” Dawson shuddered, looked at the doctor and went on; “Then I bandaged my own arm and had a go at the door, but there was no way I could get it open. I looked around and found a box full of detonators, each with a fuse attached. I struck one and dropped it out through one of the ventilation grilles. It went off with quite a bang. I must have let seven or eight of them off before Hazlitt came hammering on the door and asked what the hell was going on. I told him, and he ran off to fetch a duplicate key.”

Dawson drank some more, spluttered, but less than before, and put his glass down. “I guess that’s about all.”

“And more than enough,” said Brady with unaccustomed warmth. “A splendid job, son.” He looked round the assembled group, then asked sharply; “Where’s George?”

Until then no-one had noticed that Dermott was missing. Then Mackenzie said: “He slipped out with Carmody some time back. You want me to go find him?”

“Leave him be,” said Brady. “I have little doubt our faithful bloodhound is pursuing some spoor of his own.”

In fact the bloodhound was pursuing a fancy, not a line. He had taken Carmody aside and whispered in his ear that he urgently wanted to question the girl, Corinne. Where was she?

“In the isolation ward, like I said,” Carmody replied. “But I doubt you’ll find it on your own. It’s way out by itself, near Dragline One. Want me to come with you?”

“Sure. That’d be real kind.” Dermott swallowed his disappointment. He wanted to go alone. The instincts at work inside him made him feel uncomfortable: nothing like this had happened to him in years. But he had better be realistic and accept the offer of guidance.

By then the wind had increased, as it often did late in the night, and was whistling across the flat, open site with a deadly chill. The noise made it almost impossible to talk in the open—not that anyone in his senses would remain in the open for more than the minimum time.

Carmody had been reunited with his damaged Cherokee. Shouting an excuse into the wind, he got in first at the passenger door and slid across behind the wheel. Dermott heaved his massive frame in close behind him and slammed the door.

Carmody drove steadily across an apparently unmarked plain. The film of drifting snow had obscured the road, and the flat ground all looked the same.

“How the hell do you know which way to go?” Dermott asked.

“Markers—there.” Carmody pointed as a small stumpy, black-and-white post went past, with the number 323 stencilled on it in bold figures. “We’re on Highway Three. In a minute we’ll turn onto Highway Nine.”

Altogether they drove for nearly ten minutes before lights showed up out of the darkness ahead. Dermott was amazed once again at the sheer size of the site: by then they were four or five miles from the administration buildings.

The lights grew to a blaze of several windows, and they pulled up outside a single long hut. As they went through the door the heat hit them like a hammer as did a smell of disinfectant. Dermott at once began to wrestle his way out of his outdoor clothes: he felt he would stifle if he kept them on for one more second.

They found Corinne propped up on a pile of pillows, looking pale but (to Dermott’s eye) very sweet in a pair of pea-green pyjamas. Contrary to Carmody’s predictions, she was wide awake. She’d been asleep, she said, and had woken up thinking it was already morning.

“What time is it, anyway?” she asked.

“Four o’clock, near enough,” Dermott answered. “How d’you feel?”

“Fantastic. Not even a bruise, as far as I can tell.”

“That’s wonderful. But my, were you lucky!” Dermott began asking routine questions, to which he didn’t really want the answers. He wished to hell Carmody would go away someplace and leave him alone with the girl. What he would say to her if that happened, he didn’t quite know: all the same it was what he wanted.

“You’ve given us a real good lead, you know,” he said enthusiastically. “Can’t say just what it was, but it may be the breakthrough we needed. Mr Brady’s delighted…”

His voice tailed off as a heavy rumble suddenly shook the building. “Jesus!” he looked up sharply. “What was that?”

Carmody was gone already, out of the room and down the short passage. Dermott caught up with him at the outside door.

“Helicopter!” Carmody snapped. “Made a low pass right over the building. There he is, burning now.” Way out in the blackness a red and a green light converged and then separated again as the aircraft swung round. As the two men stood watching a pair of car headlamps snapped on from a point about a hundred yards in front of them. The vehicle moved forward, turned and stopped, with its headlights steady on a patch of snow.

“It’s a marker!” Carmody cried. “He’s gonna land. Quick, get the girl out of here. They must have come for her.”

“How in hell do they know she’s here?” said Dermott.

“Don’t worry about that. Let’s get her away.” Moving like a sprinter, Carmody slipped back into the building, bundled Corinne up in a cocoon of blankets and carried her out to the Jeep, where he dumped her in the back seat. Dermott lumbered behind him, envying his speed, and hauled himself into the front.

Without putting on any lights Carmody started the engine and moved off into the inky night, heading out into the open behind the parked marker-vehicle. A couple of hundred yards beyond it he swung round and faced in the same direction as the lights, so that he and Dermott could watch what happened through the windshield.

They sat there with the heater going full blast.

“Warm enough?” asked Carmody over his shoulder.

“Plenty, thanks.” Corinne sounded as though she was enjoying herself. “I’ve got enough blankets to keep an elephant warm.”

Dermott wondered uneasily whether that was any sort of a joke at his expense, but his speculation was cut short by the arrival of the helicopter. Suddenly it was there, large and grey-white, riding down on a storm of snow into the headlight pool. The rotor flashed brilliantly in the silvery beams, and the snow flew outwards from the downdraught.

“That’s the one!” said Carmody in a voice charged with excitement. “The getaway chopper. Description tallies perfectly with Johnson’s: grey-white, no markings, small fins by the tail. That’s our baby. Damn!”

As soon as the machine had landed, the car’s headlights cut. The watchers sat blinded by the sudden darkness. They saw a flashlight bobbing about in the blackness, but nothing else.

“Boy, will they be mad when they find you’ve gone!” Carmody said happily.

“D’you think they’re still in it?” Corinne asked. “The others, I mean?”

“Could be—easily. Depends where the chopper’s been these past few hours. Must have been waiting on the ground someplace.”

“Come on!” snapped Dermott. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait a minute,” Carmody said easily. “I wanna see what they do. Any moment now they’ll be at the building. There—I can see them now.”

Two figures moved swiftly past the lighted windows. More light showed as the door opened and shut.

“Can’t we ram the helicopter or something?” Corinne suggested. “Stop it taking off?”

“Too big,” said Carmody immediately. “You notice the legs and skis?” Higher than our roof. All we’d do would be to damage the landing gear, which wouldn’t stop them getting off. Besides, if I know them, there’s a couple of guys with guns guarding the thing, at least. Hey—what was that?”

“What?” Dermott looked at him.

“I heard something. Machinery. Sure I did.” Carmody looked out past Dermott into the darkness. “Open your window a minute.”

Dermott obeyed, and instantly the noise was far louder: a huge squealing and clanking, as of some giant engine.

“Jesus Christ!” Carmody shouted. “The dragline. It’s right here beside us.”

Dermott opened his door and got out. His eyes, accustomed to the dark, could just make out the gigantic outline towering above them. Suddenly the noise seemed terrific. “Good God!” Dermott yelled into the wind. “It’s alive. It’s moving!”

Instinctively he began to run towards the machine, or rather, round it, for already he was alongside. Beside him he could hear the whine of electric motors, the squeal of metal and the crunch of frosted dirt as the mighty shoe ground forward. The coldness of the wind seared his lungs and made his eyes stream briefly before they froze. In spite of the discomfort, he felt fired by excitement and by rage, for here was a final and outrageous act of sabotage taking place right on top of him. In a flash of intuition he saw what they intended: to drive the monster machine over the edge of the pit which it had been excavating.

The facts and figures that had been flung at him came crowding into his head. Six and a half thousand tons. It could move at some 250 yards an hour. The pit was 150 feet deep. Although he was no engineer, he knew instinctively that if the monster went over the edge, it would never come out again.

He came round the front of it and got another shock. The edge of the pit, showing as a limitless black hole, was less than thirty yards away. Perhaps only twenty-five. That meant he had a tenth of an hour—six minutes—to get the damn thing stopped. He looked up desperately. The boom disappeared into the night, like an Eiffel Tower tilted over. Somehow he had to get into the cab and throw the right switches.

He ran back right under the thing, between the shoes. Somewhere there must be a ladder. At last he found it. But as he looked up towards the cab, far above him, he saw someone moving there in a faint glow of light. He hesitated, one foot on the steel ladder, wishing he had a gun and wondering whether he should go back for Carmody. That was the last thought that entered his head for a couple of minutes, for the blow caught him squarely on the back of the neck, and brilliant points of light seemed to shoot outwards through his head as he slumped to the ground.

He came round shaking from the cold and stuck in an awkward position. His hands were jammed, somehow—jammed behind him. He needed to straighten his arms and get them back into action. He strained to sort himself out and realised with a shock that his wrists were manacled together, and manacled to something.

He gave a grunt and heaved, whereupon a man spoke out of the dark behind him.

“Ah, Mr Dermott,” said a voice he half-recognised but could not place. “Struggling will not help. You are anchored to a steel ring let into concrete. The ring is directly in the path of Dragline One, which, as you can see and hear, is now only a few feet from you. The controls have been preset and locked in position so that the middle of the right shoe will pass over you. Goodbye, Mr Dermott. You have less than two minutes to live.”

Fear cleared Dermott’s head. “Bastards!” he cried. ‘“Sadistic bastards! Come back!” But even as he shouted, he knew it was useless. In the whistle of the wind and the monstrous grinding of the dragline, his voice was nothing and carried nowhere. He twisted round and discovered that he was tethered almost on the lip of the pit: the edge of the black abyss was no more than a yard away. In the opposite direction, the front of the dragline’s shoe had ground remorselessly to within fifteen feet of him. The front of it was coming on like a tank. Above him, the steel tracery of the boom seemed to fill the sky with an angry black pattern.

Dermott stopped shouting and began to fight the manacles. At least there was some movement: he could feel that a length of chain had been passed through the shackle on the ground. He jerked it furiously back and forth in the faint hope that the chain would break, but all he achieved was to chafe his wrists viciously and expose them to the cold. He could feel the icy steel biting into his bare skin. Frostbite, he thought dully. But what did frostbite matter if he was going to be crushed like a beetle?

“Carmody!” he yelled desperately. “Help!” Where the hell had Carmody gone? Why didn’t he come looking?

Dermott fought the chain again and flopped flat, gasping. The shoe was only twelve feet off, scrunching on inch by inch. The whine of the electric motors seemed to fill the night, as if hell had claimed him.

He threw his body feverishly to left and right, experimenting to see if he could get clear of the shoe’s line of advance. Nothing he tried was the slightest good: the shoe was ten feet wide, and he was tethered right in the middle of its track. The monster had been set marching with hideous precision.

He lay still again, panting, beaten. Suddenly images began flashing through his mind, conjured up uninvoked by the extremity of his desperation. Once again he witnessed the final terrifying seconds of the car-crash that had killed his wife, the time when an explosion had blown him clean off a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, into the shark-infested sea…

All at once he became aware of a light flashing over him. Then someone was crouching, pulling at his arms. Then he heard a high, feminine cry.

“Corinne!”

“My God!” she cried. “What’s happened? Oh, Jesus!” She leapt to her feet and began to run. “Wait!” she screamed ovej her shoulder.

Dermott saw her fall, get up again, and go like a greyhound, round the corner of the shoe, the flashlight swinging wildly in the blackness. He shouted something after her, but she was gone. Wait, she’d said. Wait! What a hell of a thing to say! How could he wait? The shoe was scarcely ten feet from him: one minute, give or take a few seconds.

He found his eyes were full of tears, though whether they were of fear or relief or gratitude or what, he couldn’t tell. He was crying like a baby.

Seconds were passing. He began to count. He got to ten and couldn’t go on. He had been overtaken by a horrific vision of the exact physical process of destruction that was about to annihilate him. He would feed his feet and legs to the monster first. Or could he? Could he listen and watch while his ankles, shins and knees were crunched and flattened on the tundra? No—he would have to get the end over quickly and give it his head. But what would that be like, for God’s sake? To hear his skull crack and feel that unthinkable weight! Impossible! Never!

He roared again: “CARMODY!” As if by a miracle, his shout was answered. Headlights came boring up out of the night and swept across him as the vehicle turned. Dermott stared incredulously as the lights came on at speed, heading right for him and the front of the shoe. At the last moment the vehicle slowed, but not enough to stop. The driver deliberately slid it into the front of the shoe, using it as a last-ditch barrier to stop the monster’s progress. There was a sharp crash and the tinkle of falling glass. Then the door of the Jeep opened and Corinne leapt out.

There was so little space left that Dermott had all but been run over. The Jeep’s left-hand wheels were almost on him. The next thing he saw was the tyres being forced bodily sideways towards him by the irresistible pressure of the dragline’s advance.

Corinne had the tail-gate of the Jeep open. She dragged out a steel box—the emergency equipment—and dumped it behind Dermott with a crash.

“Keep still!” she shouted above the noise. “No—come back a bit. There. Keep there! I’ve got the bolt shears.”

Dermott leant backwards in the attitude she ordered, speechless with tension. He saw the wheels of the Jeep come sideways at him again. The back wheel was touching his feet already. The Jeep was being pushed like a toy. At that rate it was going to do more harm than good: it was merely acting as an extension of the shoe, and would crush him before the dragline itself reached him.

He felt Corinne struggling behind him. Suddenly she gave a desperate cry. “Oh my God! I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough.”

Dermott’s voice returned. “What’s happening?” he shouted.

“The cutters!” she sobbed. “The bolt shears are biting into the chain, but I can’t get enough pressure on them. It’s too bloody hard!”

“Put one end on the ground,” he ordered calmly. “One handle on the ground. Then get your weight on the other.”

He felt her try, but she slipped and went down with a crash. “Try again!” he yelled.

By then the noise of the dragline was overwhelming: its roaring and grinding filled the night. But suddenly a new sound: a sharp crack told him that the great steel treads of the shoe had hooked into some part of the Jeep’s bodywork. Instead of being pushed back, the vehicle had been gripped and held down. Dermott stared incredulously as the Cherokee began collapsing like an eggshell. The remaining headlight was snuffed out. Cracking, snapping noises accompanied the collapse of the hood and front wheels.

Behind him Corinne gave a despairing scream. “I just can’t do it. I’ve got half-way through, but that’s all.”

“Look for a hacksaw!” Dermott shouted. “In the emergency pack.”

“Got one!” She began working again frantically.

For Dermott time seemed to have stopped. He saw that the Cherokee’s engine block had at last offered the dragline a spot of serious resistance: only a spot, it was true, but a definite token. Ponderous as a dinosaur, the machine lifted one foot slowly into the air as it ground the little human vehicle beneath its steel sole. As if in a trance, Dermott saw the windshield shatter, the front of the roof crumple down, the passenger compartment flatten. Right in front of him a back wheel snapped off and was squashed flat onto the ground. If his arms had been free, he could have reached out and touched the front of the shoe—it was that close.

But his arms were not free.

“I can’t!” Corinne screamed in desperation.

Dermott’s head cleared, and he shouted: “Is there an axe?”

“A what?”

“An axe.”

“Yes—here.”

“Smash the chain with that. Aim for the link you’ve been working on.”

“I might hit you.”

“To hell with that. Belt it.”

He felt the thump as she let drive. The chain snatched sharply at his wrists and nearly jerked his arms from their sockets. Suddenly he smelt the stink of gasoline: the tank had been crushed.

Clank! She brought the axe down, then again. When Dermott twisted to see how she was doing, the clawing thread of the shoe scraped down past his shoulder. The thing was touching him. He shrank away from the monstrous beast, and brought out his last, terrible idea.

“Chop my hands off!” he ordered, quite calmly.

“I can’t!”

“Go on. It’s them or me.”

“NO!” She gave a piercing shriek and swung the axe down with every ounce of her behind it. Next second she was on her knees sobbing: “Oh my God, it’s gone! It’s gone!”

Dermott fought his instinct to leap up. He held himself down as she struggled with the severed link. The tread was bumping and bruising him now. In a few moments it would hook him under, as it had the car.

“For Christ’s sake!” he shouted. “Hurry!”

Miraculously, his hands came free. He got his arms back to their normal position and twisted sideways. “Look out for the pit!” he yelled. He himself was on the very lip. Hardly had he rolled clear of the dragline when there was a huge whumph and a roar of dark-red flame shot sideways at ground level. A chance spark had ignited the car’s gasoline. By a fluke he had rolled into the wind, so that the fiery blast went the other way and left him unscathed. Corinne was there behind him, also intact.

The blaze made no difference to the monster’s advance. The flames roared for a few seconds, then went out, and the dragline continued without faltering towards the brink.

Dermott felt weak with reaction—but not as weak as the girl. One moment she was standing behind him; the next, as Dermott struggled to find the words to express his gratitude to her, she had collapsed in a heap on the ground. He picked her up as tenderly as he knew how, laid her gingerly over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and began carrying her towards the still-lighted windows of the isolation quarters. His eyes seemed to have gone blurred with the strain. Or was it just ice? He scrubbed them with his free hand and saw better. Out in the patch of white light ahead of him, the helicopter was preparing to take off, lights flashing, rotor spinning. Even as he watched, it lifted off and slanted away into the sky.

At once the car whose lights had provided the marker moved off and accelerated. Once again, Dermott realised, the villains had melted into the night. He knew he ought to feel disappointed: as it was, he could concentrate on nothing except getting back into the warmth of the hut and lying down.

He was very close to the building, going slow, when he saw someone pass across the lighted windows in front of him. Fear seized him. Maybe it was one of them. Was he going to be shot after making such an effort? Before he had time to put down his burden or alter course, a flashlight came on, searched briefly and found his face.

“Good God! Dermott!”

“Carmody! Where in hell have you been?”

“Trying to ditch the chopper. What about you?”

“Had a…had a bit of bother.” Suddenly Dermott found he could hardly talk. He was about to break down. “Take her, will you?” he croaked. “I’ve had it.”

With an exclamation Carmody relieved him of his inert burden. “Quick,” said the policeman. “Inside.”

They laid Corinne on one bed and Dermott collapsed on to another with the manacles still dangling from his wrists. “Ring Shore!” he gasped. “Tell him for Christ’s sake to switch off the power to Dragline One. Tell him and Brady to get up here like they never drove before.”

They had turned on the floodlamps to illuminate the 150-foot depths of the pit below. They had also hammered in spikes ten yards back from the lip, and to these they had attached ropes so that the vertiginously-inclined or the less-than-sure-footed could cling to them as they peered over the edge.

Dragline One had ended up on its nose, tilted backwards towards the near-vertical face at an angle of thirty degrees. The massive casing appeared undamaged, as did the triangular arm over which the control cables passed. Even the boom, its enormous length stretched out horizontally across the uneven valley floor, seemed undamaged, at least from above.

Brady had prudently wrapped his belaying rope three times round his mighty girth. “Surprisingly little damage,” he said. “Or so it looks. I suppose some of the electric motors were wrenched free from their beds.”

“That’ll be the least of our troubles.” Jay Shore looked stricken, ashen-faced in the floodlights. The sight of the crippled monster had far more effect on him than on any of the others. “It’s getting the damn thing out of there.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to get a replacement?” asked Brady.

“Jesus! Do you know what a replacement would cost at today’s prices? Forty million dollars. Probably more. And you don’t order one up, just like that. If we could have one on our doorstep tomorrow, I’m sure Sanmobil would order it. But it can’t be done that way. You can’t transport a thing that size overland. Electric motors apart, the whole caboodle comes crated in tens of thousands of pieces, and it takes a team of skilled engineers months to assemble it.”

“Cranes?” Brady suggested. He seemed fascinated by the sheer size of the problem. Or he was trying to be diverted, trying not to think of his missing wife and daughter.

Shore made a dismissive gesture with his gloved hands. “The biggest cranes in the world—a whole battery of them—couldn’t lift the dragline an inch off the floor. We’ll either have to dismantle it piece by piece and raise the bits up here for reassembly, or build a road from down there back up to the surface level and have it towed up on bogies—or, perhaps, under its own steam. The road would have to be a very gentle gradient, which would mean a length of over a mile, heavily metalled on massive foundations. Whatever we do, it’ll cost millions.” He swore at some considerable length. “And all this in just seven minutes’ work!”

“Why in hell couldn’t you stop it, when we phoned you?” asked Carmody.

“The bastards knew what they were doing,” said Shore savagely. “They’d gone into the generator room, thrown the breaker that fed power to Dragline One, locked the door from the outside, left the key in the lock and smashed it so thoroughly that it’ll need an oxy-acetylene torch to open it again. We just couldn’t get in to shut down the power.”

“They sure knew how to cause the maximum damage and disruption with the minimum of effort,” said Brady. “I suggest, Mr Shore, there’s no point in our remaining here a moment longer: all you’re doing is twisting the knife deeper into your wound. Let’s all get back inside and ask George what happened.”

“O.K. Let’s go.” Shore, who had supervised the construction of the dragline, working along with the contractors, Bucyrus-Erie, seemed strangely reluctant to leave the fallen giant. It was as if he were abandoning an old friend. Brady could appreciate how he felt. But he could also appreciate how he felt himself: he had become acutely conscious of the cold.

Shore took one last look at the dragline and turned back towards the heated haven of the minibus. “O.K.,” he repeated automatically. “Let’s go hear Dermott’s story.”

They drove the short distance back to the isolation block, where they found Dermott lying on a bed, already being questioned by Willoughby. Corinne was sitting on a chair in the corner of the small room, looking in better shape than the man she’d rescued

“How is he?” Brady whispered to the nurse out in the corridor.

“His wrists look pretty bad: they got chewed up by the manacles, and frost-bitten as well. They’re going to be real painful for the next few days. They’ll mend, though.”

“What about his general condition—exposure?”

“What are you talking about? He’s got the constitution of an ox.”

By the time Brady, Mackenzie and Carmody had filed into the room, the place was crammed full. Brady seemed much moved by the sight of his senior operative brought low, with hands and forearms heavily bandaged.

“Well, George,” he began, clearing his throat heavily. “I am informed that you plan to survive.”

“Sure do.” Dermott grinned up at them. “But boy—I wouldn’t want to go through that again.”

“I got the story,” Willoughby cut in, brisk and businesslike. He gave a quick précis of what had happened, including the arrival and departure of the helicopter. “I’m sorry to say it, Mr Shore, but it seems the plant is riddled with corruption. Number one, somebody sabotaged the generator room, so that you couldn’t turn the power off. Number two, somebody else set the controls of the dragline to take it over the edge. Number three, somebody else hit Dermott and manacled him to the steel ring. Number four, somebody else again informed the kidnappers that the girl had survived her fall out of the helicopter and was back in the isolation unit. That makes quite a lot of villains for one plant.”

“Too right, it does,” Shore said bitterly. “You don’t think the chopper came back to do the dragline job—that somebody on board got out and set the controls?”

“Impossible. The dragline was moving before the chopper landed. Isn’t that right, Mr Dermott?”

“Right. At least—no—not quite. But we saw men from the chopper go straight to the building here—and then we heard the dragline moving, right near us. The guys from the helicopter didn’t have time to reach the dragline and set up the controls.”

“What I’d like to know is whether your family, Mr Brady, were still on board the helicopter,” Willoughby said.

“Yes, they were.” Carmody startled them all with his sudden pronouncement. “And Mr Reynolds. He was with them.”

“How d’you know?” Jim Brady asked. Dermott sat up abruptly.

“I saw them. That’s what I was doing all the time you were involved with the dragline. I made a wide circle on foot and approached the helicopter from the back. There was a man armed with a machine pistol guarding the ladder, but I climbed up onto the skid-struts from the opposite side and got a look in through the cabin windows. They were all there—Mrs Brady, Stella, Mr Reynolds.”

“How…” Brady faltered. “How did they look?”

“Fine—just fine. Quite calm, all of them. But they weren’t quite as passive as they looked.”

“What d’you mean?” Dermott asked quickly.

“One of them managed to drop this out of the door, or out of a window.” From his breast pocket Carmody drew a brown leather bill-fold, which he handed to Brady. “Looks like one of yours—J.A.B., nicely embossed in gold.”

“My God!” Brady took it. “That’s Jean’s. Her middle name’s Anneliese. This was a birthday present. Anything in it?”

“Sure is. Take a look.”

With his fingers trembling a little, Brady opened the billfold, unbuttoned a flap and drew out a small scrap of paper. “Crowfoot Lake Met. Station,” he read out loud. “Well I’m damned.”

Dermott was elated. “I knew it! I knew it!” he kept saying. “I knew the bastards would overreach themselves. Didn’t I say they’d make a major mistake through over-confidence or desperation? Well, they’ve made it. Somebody couldn’t resist the temptation to talk. Jean heard the name and wrote it down. Great, Jean!”

“Sheer luck I found it,” said Carmody. “When the chopper took off it blew hell out of the snow and all-but buried the bill-fold. I was just having a quick look-round when I saw the corner sticking up out of a drift.”

“We got it, anyway,” said Dermott. “What are we waiting for?”

“Not so fast,” Brady countered. “For one thing we don’t know where Crowfoot Lake is.”

“Oh yes we do,” said Willoughby. “It’s up beyond the Birch Mountains, seventy, eighty miles north. I know it well.”

“How do we get there?” Dermott asked.

Willoughby looked at him reproachfully. “Helicopter. No other way.”

“It’s four o’clock in the morning, gentlemen,” Brady said heavily. “An error to pursue further tonight. For one thing, we are all exhausted.”

“And for another we don’t have a helicopter,” said Dermott.

“Precisely, George. I must say, your ordeal doesn’t seem to have blunted your wits any.”

“Thank you.” Dermott lay back happily. “Maybe Mr Willoughby can help us in the morning—I mean, later this morning.”

“Sure, sure.” Willoughby stood up. “But everyone please be careful. We’re up against professionals. Their performance has been pretty impressive to date. Nothing would please them better than to catch one of your gentlemen on their own, Mr Brady. Or you, for that matter.” He turned to Corinne, only to find she had fallen asleep, sitting upright, in the corner. “O.K.,” he said gently to Mackenzie. “Look after her. But whatever you do, all keep together.”

“Like now,” said Brady. “We’ll all get in that bus together and drive back to town. Mr Carmody—it doesn’t sound as though your vehicle’s too serviceable. May I offer you a ride?”

“Flat as a pancake,” said Carmody wryly. “Never saw anything to match it. Thank you.”

They all piled in, with Shore driving. But before they even reached the administration block a radio message caught them.

“Mr Shore—urgent.” It was Steve Dawson, charge-hand of the night-shift. “We got another emergency.”

“Oh no!”Shore groaned. “I’m coming. Be right there.”

Dawson met them and led them straight into a room off the main corridor which held six beds and was obviously a dormitory. On one of the beds lay the body of a fair-haired young man whose sightless eyes gazed at the ceiling.

“Oh my God!” said Shore.

“Who is it?” Dermott snapped.

“David Crawford. The security man we were talking about.”

“The one we suspected?”

“That’s him. What happened?”

“Stabbed through the heart, from behind,” said Saunders, the doctor, who was standing by the bed. “He’s been dead some hours. We only just found him.”

“How come?” Dermott demanded. “Isn’t this the security men’s dormitory?”

“One of two,” said Saunders. “The other’s larger. Normally both are occupied by off-duty shifts. But since the shut-down, the men have been living at home. Nobody had any cause to come in here tonight.”

“Ruthless bastards,” said Brady, very low. “Four dead and two critically injured so far. Well, Mr Willoughby You’ve got a murder investigation on your hands.”

14

At 11.30 that same morning Brady and his team were the sole occupants of the hotel’s dining-room. Outside, the wind had gone, the snow had been reduced to the occasional flurry, and the sun was making a valiant effort to shine through the drifting grey cloud. Inside, the mood was one of expectancy and suppressed excitement.

“One thing’s for sure,” said Brady firmly. “You’re not coming on this little jaunt.”

“Oh yes I am,” Dermott countered. “I most certainly am. You try leaving me behind.”

“What can you do?” Brady was half-scornful, half-sympathetic. “You can’t use a gun, knock anybody down, tie anybody up.”

“All the same, I’ve got to be there.” Dermott was grey from lack of sleep and the pain in his savaged wrists. He could use his hands for gentle tasks, but his fingers were stiff, and to ease the discomfort he kept both elbows propped on the table with his forearms sticking straight up. “I really need two slings,” he muttered. “One for each arm.”

“Why not stay here and look after your gallant saviour?” Mackenzie suggested slyly.

Dermott coloured perceptibly and grunted: “She’s O.K., I guess.”

“She’s being guarded, sure,” Mackenzie agreed. “But she might be even safer if she came with us. With the rot spreading as far as it has…” He broke off and went back to eating as he saw Willoughby, the police chief, approaching across the room.

“Good morning, Chief,” Brady beamed at him. “Get any sleep?”

“One hour.” Willoughby tried to smile, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Call of duty. Can’t complain.”

“News,” Brady announced abruptly. “Take a seat.” He handed a letter across the table. “Communication from our friends. Mailed yesterday in the local post office.”

Willoughby read the first paragraph without alteration of expression. Then he looked slowly round the watching faces and said matter-of-factly: “One billion dollars.” Suddenly his calm gave way. “One billion dollars!” he cried. “Jesus!” He qualified the word “dollars” several times. “The sonsabitches are crazy. Who’s going to pay attention to this kind of drivel?”

“You think it’s drivel?” Dermott asked. “I don’t. Probably a rather optimistic estimate of what the market will stand, but not very, I would think.”

“I can’t believe it.” Willoughby threw the letter down on the table. “A billion dollars! Even if they mean it, how could the money be transferred without being traced to the recipient?”

“Nothing simpler,” said Mackenzie, forking a pancake. “You could lose Fort Knox in the labyrinth of Eurodollars and offshore funds.”

Willoughby glared at him over the breakfast table. “You’d actually pay this blackmailing monster?”

“Not me,” Mackenzie answered. “I couldn’t. But somebody sure enough will.”

“Who’d be so crazy?”

“There’s no craziness involved,” said Dermott patiently. “Just calculating, common business sense. The people who stand to lose most—our two governments, and the major oil companies who’ve invested in Alaska and Alberta. I don’t know what the position is in Canada, but this is going to pose an intriguing problem in the States, because any governmental operation in tandem with the oil companies requires Congressional approval—and as every schoolkid knows, Congress would cheerfully immolate the oil companies. Looks like it’ll make a highly diverting spectacle.”

Willoughby looked baffled.

“Read some more,” Brady prompted. “The next paragraph is only a minor shock to the nervous system.”

The policeman picked up the letter and started again. “So they want you out of Alaska and Alberta—specifically, south of the forty-ninth parallel.”

“As predicted,” said Brady.

“But no mention of any ransom?”

“Again, as we predicted.” Brady sounded smug.

“You’re not getting out, I take it.”

“Oh no? I’m going to contact my pilot in a moment and have him file a flight plan for Los Angeles.”

Willoughby stared at him. “I thought you wanted to go to Crowfoot Lake?”

“We do. But we don’t want to advertise our destination to any ill-natured persons who may be listening-in. Therefore, we file a flight plan for L.A.”

“O.K., I get it.” Willoughby grinned. “What do you want me to do?”

“Well…” Brady became evasive. “First, we need a guarantee from you.”

“You can’t make deals with the police.” Willoughby’s tone suddenly hardened.

“Rubbish!” said Brady comfortably. “It’s done all the time. Felons even make deals with judges in court.”

“O.K. So what do you want?”

“What we don’t want is a company of paratroopers. Sure, they could mop this lot up with their hands tied behind their backs, but they might mop up a few wrong people too. Softly, softly on this one. Finesse. Stealth. Secrecy. Our way or not at all.”

“You making a point or something?”

“Tell me about Crowfoot Lake,” said Brady.

“It’s an ideal place for this sort of thing. Tucked right away in the hills. Big, covered helicopter shelter right by the station. A chopper would never be spotted from the air. I was up there a year back, investigating a reported murder which turned out to be death by misadventure. Couple of young city boys newly arrived at the weather station. Happens at the beginning of the hunting season every year, without fail: all the Dan’l Boones and Buffalo Bills dropping like flies all over the place.”

“How big’s the lake?” Dermott asked. “Can a plane land on it?”

“Well, you can land on it.” Willoughby paused. “But I don’t think it would do you much good. See here: the lake’s only two miles long, so wherever you came down on it, the people in the Met. Station would be bound to hear you. I’ve got a better idea.”

“We need one.”

“Now, Mr Brady. I’ve got a request. I’m in a delicate position. I am the law around these parts, and I’m supposed to know what’s going on. I’m also a blackmailer. In return for guaranteeing that I can get you to the Met. Station undetected, I’d like some degree of participation in your expedition. You can’t operate without police authority, and I’m the authority. All cards very close to the chest, O.K. But I’d like an official watching brief—a presence.”

“I know whose presence I’d like,” Mackenzie said. Up till then he had been chewing steadily throughout the conversation, but a delicate patting of his big face with the napkin indicated that his meal was over. “I’d like Carmody.” Willoughby said: “That’s not a bad idea. I’ll get him right away.”

He went off to telephone, came back and said: “A couple of minutes.”

“Fine.” Brady turned to Mackenzie. “Don, tell Ferguson to go out to the airport and file a flight plan for Los Angeles. Tell him to expect people with provisions out there in just over an hour. Ask the kitchen to give us provisions for two or three days.”

“Just food, Mr Brady?”

Brady loftily ignored the insinuation. “Ferguson is in charge of the commissariat. He’ll know of any shortfalls. George, we’ll need some hand compasses and, I guess, ammunition. Be generous with the ammunition.”

Willoughby said: “Hand compasses we have in abundance. What guns?”

“Colt .38s”

“No problem.”

Dermott said: “Well, thank you. Tell me, Mr Willoughby, you have a deputy chief?”

“Indeed. And a good one.”

“Good enough to be left in sole charge here?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Why don’t you come with us? Giving us the directions is all very well, but it’s not the same as having you on the spot.”

“Don’t, Mr Dermott. You tempt me. You tempt me sorely.” From the momentary gleam of anticipation in his eyes, it was clear that he spoke the truth. “Duty, alas, before pleasure. I have a murder investigation on my hands.”

“You’ve just reported zero progress. There are short-cuts, Mr Willoughby. You wouldn’t want us foreign amateurs to do the job for you, would you now?”

“I’m afraid I’m not quite at my best.”

“You would be when we introduced you to Crawford’s murderer. Where else would he be but at Crowfoot Lake?”

“Mr Dermott, forget my last remark. I’m back at my very best. Ah, here he is.”

Carmody looked as large and formidable as ever.

Dermott said: “With Mr Willoughby’s consent, a request to make on behalf of Mr Brady, Mr Mackenzie and myself. As alien civilians we can only request. Those kidnappers—you’re aware they are multiple killers, desperate men. They’ll shoot on sight and shoot to kill.”

Carmody looked round in slight puzzlement but politely said nothing.

Dermott went on: “Mrs Brady, her daughter and Mr Reynolds: we know where they’re being held.”

Carmody, almost like a man in prayer, clasped his two hands lightly together and said, in a suitably churchlike whisper: “Boy, oh boy. Let’s go get them.”

Brady said: “Thank you. We appreciate it. One hour from now, O.K.?

Willoughby said: “I’ll just nip back to the office and put in a call to Edmonton.”

“Aha! I thought secrecy was the watchword?”

“It still is.”

“Then may I ask?”

“You may not. A surprise. To be revealed at Crowfoot Lake. Or in the very close vicinity. You wouldn’t rob me of my surprises?”

As the jet lifted off Brady looked across the aisle to where Carmody had just withdrawn a peculiar metallic device from its chamois-lined leather casing. It appeared to consist of a small telescope attached to a curving, semi-circular arm which in turn was bolted to a rectangular metal box. Brady said: “What do you have there, Mr Carmody?”

“John, please Mr Brady. Makes me feel less self-conscious. We cops are used to being called many things, but not ‘Mister’. This? This is an infra-red telescopic night sight. These are the securing clamps. Fits on a rifle.”

“You can see in the dark with that?”

“A little light helps. But total darkness is rare.”

“You can see the enemy but he can’t see you?”

“That’s the idea behind it. Unsporting and unfair. Never give the bastards a break—especially, Mr Brady, if they’re pointing guns at wives and daughters.”

Brady turned to Willoughby who was in the window seat. “And what lethal armaments are you carrying?”

“Apart from the regulation revolver? Just this little number here.” He reached down and picked up a zipped leather bag some eighteen inches by ten.

“Funny shape for a gun,” Brady said, intrigued.

“Two pieces that screw together.”

“It wouldn’t be a sub-machine gun?”

“It would.”

There was a short silence and then Brady said: “No chance you’ll be carrying a few hand grenades on you?”

Carmody gave a deprecating shrug. “Only a few.”

“Infra-red sights, sub-machine guns, grenades—aren’t those illegal?”

“Could be.” Carmody sounded vague. “I’m not sure they are at Crowfoot Lake. You’d have to ask Mr Willoughby about that.”

The angle of climb had levelled off, and Brady nodded his thanks as Mackenzie brought him a daiquiri.

“Cruising altitude, Donald? No way could we possibly have reached that yet.”

“Maybe this is high enough. You’d have to ask our police chief there.” He nodded forward. Willoughby had gone up to the co-pilot’s seat and was bent over a map with Ferguson. “Doing his navigator’s bit, I see.”

Some five minutes more passed before Willoughby rose and headed back to sit by Brady.

“How long, Mr Willoughby?”

“Seventy minutes.”

“Seventy minutes! But I thought Crowfoot was only seventy miles away?”

“We filed a flight plan for Los Angeles, remember. Our first leg takes us through the radar control at Calgary. So, we’re flying south. We’re also flying low to lose the radar control at Fort McMurray. When we do, we’ll circle to the west and then north. After ten minutes, north-east. We’ll keep low. No danger of bumping into anything; it’s pretty flat all the way.” He spread out a chart. “Even the Birch Mountains here are really nothing of the sort. The highest peak is less than twenty-seven hundred feet. Really, it’s just a low divide, a watershed: the streams on the west side flow west and northwest into the Peace and Birch rivers: the streams to the east flow east and southeast into the Athabasca river.”

“Where’s Crowfoot Lake?”

“Here, just on the west side of the divide.”

“It doesn’t have a name printed.”

“Too small. Neither does Deerhorn—here—on the east side of the divide. That’s where we’re going. It’s a lake, too, but it’s always called just Deerhorn.”

“How far from Deerhorn to Crowfoot?”

“Six miles. Maybe seven. Far enough, I hope. We go into Deerhorn low and we go into Deerhorn slow—as near stalling speed as possible. The chances of our being heard at that distance are remote. The only time we’ll make any real noise is when we land. The only way a fast-landing jet like this can stop on a relatively short stretch of ice is to use reverse thrust on the engines. That makes quite a racket. But I’m pretty sure that the divide between the two lakes will act as a suitable baffle. I’m a little more concerned about the helicopter.”

“Helicopter?” Brady said carefully.

“Yes. Left Edmonton about half an hour ago. Due in about an hour after us.”

“You promised me—”

“And I keep my promise. No troops, no police, not even a peashooter. Just some Arctic gear I want. It’s due to arrive just after dark.”

“And without radar transmission or airfield landing lights, how’s he going to find his way here?”

“A signal from us by radio beacon. He’s only to follow his nose. What worries me slightly is the noise the helicopter will make in landing. It’s the biggest you’ve ever seen, and the racket is corresponding.”

“Of course.” Brady showed his disquiet. “Our friends at Crowfoot Lake have their own helicopter. Won’t they hop in and come over to investigate?”

“I hope not. I want them,” Willoughby said grimly, “to stand trial, and they won’t be able to if they’re dead. If they come across, I’ll have no option but to shoot them down.”

“Fair enough.” Brady seemed unperturbed at the thought. Then he added: “You can do that?”

“We came here equipped with weapons for the express purpose of doing just that.”

“Ah! I was asking Carmody about some of his equipment and he mentioned this infra-red night sight. But I thought that was for shooting people.”

“It can do that, too. Did he mention the fact that he’s also got a rifle that can switch from single-shot to automatic at the touch of a switch? The combination of that, the night-spot and a squirrel-hunter’s eye makes for a fairly lethal outcome. You know I have a sub-machine gun? He did? Did I also mention that it has a special large capacity magazine—the old circular drum type—and that every sixth shell is a tracer so that I can see how I’m doing?”

“No.”

Willoughby smiled. “And of course we didn’t mention my own modest contribution—the jumping jacks. For use when we’re not seeing too well what’s going on up above. Just like fireworks, really—except that you get no fancy explosion of colour, just a blinding magnesium flare that drifts down slowly on a parachute. Lasts only ninety seconds, but if you can’t accomplish what you want to in ninety seconds, you should have stayed at home in the first place.”

“If I were a devout Christian I could almost weep for my adversaries.”

“Don’t.”

“Who said I was a devout Christian?” Brady nodded to Carmody. “He really goes about killing people?”

“He leans on people.”

“What, with sub-machine and high-powered rifles?”

“We’ll use them if we have to”

Brady said dryly: “You surprise me. Those weapons are illegal, of course—for police use. Right?”

“That’s the trouble with being in a remote northern town—you don’t keep up as much as you might with all the notes, minutes and regulations that Edmonton issues every other day.”

“Of course not.”

Some time later, Brady winced as the jet engines went into reverse thrust. Even though reason told him that the decibel level was no higher than normal, his apprehensive frame of mind made him feel he was listening to a continuous thunderclap of sound. When they had landed, he said to Willoughby: “You could have heard that racket clear back in Fort McMurray.”

“Wasn’t all that bad.” Willoughby seemed unconcerned. “Well, stretch the legs, a little fresh air. Coming?”

“What? Out in that mess?”

“What mess? It’s not even snowing. And it’s seven miles to Crowfoot Lake. A little exercise, a little acclimatisation. Remember what you told me back in Sanmobil? Inside the human frame there’s no room for both cold and daiquiris. Let’s put it to the test, shall we?”

“Hoist on your own petard,” Dermott said behind him. Brady scowled, hauled himself upright and followed Willoughby to the fore end of the cabin. He looked at Ferguson and stopped.

“You look worried, boy. That was a perfect touchdown.”

“Thank you. But I am, as you say, a little concerned. Aileron controls got a bit stiff as I came in to land. Nothing much, I daresay. Soon locate the trouble. First landing on ice, and maybe I was being a little oversensitive.”

Brady followed Willoughby out and looked around. Deerhorn was a singularly bleak and unprepossessing place. Snow-dusted ice beneath their feet, flat, barren land, devoid of any form of vegetation, stretching away in featureless anonymity on three sides. To the north-east lay a range of low hills, sparsely covered with a scattering of stunted, snow-laden trees.

“Those are the Birch Mountains?”

“I told you. I don’t think the person who named them knew much about mountains.”

“And those are birch trees?”

Willoughby said: “He wasn’t much of a botanist either. These are alders.”

“And seven miles beyond—”

“Look out! Stand back!” Both men whirled round to see Ferguson racing down the boarding steps clutching in one hand a cylindrically-shaped object about ten inches long and three in diameter.

“Keep clear, keep clear!” He sprinted by them, covered another fifteen yards, arched his back while still running and, like a cricket bowler, over-armed the cylinder with a convulsive jerk of his body. The cylinder had travelled not more than three yards when it exploded.

The blast was powerful enough to knock both Brady and Willoughby, even at a distance of almost twenty yards, off their feet. For several seconds they lay where they had fallen, then made their way unsteadily towards the prone figure of Ferguson. Even as they reached him they were joined by Dermott, Mackenzie and Carmody, who had been inside the plane.

Ferguson had fallen face-down on the ice. Gently, they turned him over. His face and body appeared unmarked. It was difficult to tell whether or not he was breathing.

“Into the plane with him,” Brady said. “Warm blankets and heating pads from the Red Cross chest. His heart may have stopped. Anyone here know anything about heart massage?”

“We do,” Carmody said. He picked up Ferguson and headed for the plane. “First-aid certificates.”

Three minutes later Carmody, still kneeling in the aisle, sank back on his heels and smiled.

“Ticker’s going like a watch,” he said. “Bloody fast watch, mind you, but it’s going.”

“Good work,” Brady said. “We leave him there?”

“Yes,” Dermott said. “Even when he regains consciousness—no reason why he shouldn’t, there’s no sign of any head injury—he’s still going to be in shock. Heat pads we have in plenty. That’s all we can give him, and probably all he requires. Can someone tell us what the hell happened? He came running up the aisle shouting ‘Stay where you are!’ and clutching this damned thing in his hand. He was out through the door like a greyhound clearing his trap.”

“I know what happened,” Brady said. “He complained that the controls were a bit stiff when he came in to land. That was because whoever placed this charge made a sloppy job of it. The thing stayed in place while we were climbing or cruising at a steady altitude but slid forward and wedged itself against the ailerons when we started to descend. As we left the plane he told me he was going to look for the cause of the stiffness.” Brady pursed his lips. “He found it all right.”

“He was lucky,” said Dermott. “Had it been a metal-cased bomb, the casing would have turned into shrapnel when it exploded and the back-lash would have caught him. Not a mark on him. So, a plastic bomb. For plastic bombs, plastic fuses—chemicals, really. You have two acids separated by some synthetic plastic barrier. One of them eats through the barrier, and when the two different acids meet they detonate. When an acid eats its way through the plastic barrier it generates considerable heat. I’m sure Ferguson not only felt this heat but knew right away what it meant.”

Brady looked sombre. “If we weren’t such a devious bunch, we’d have been flying at 30,000 feet on the way up. Our last trip, gentlemen.”

“Right,” said Dermott. “Even flying low, like we did, we had the luck of the devil. The drawback of a chemical detonator is that it’s almost impossible to get timing accuracy within ten or fifteen per cent. The timing could have gone off ten minutes earlier—and that would have been curtains for us. Our friends didn’t want us out of this country: they wanted us out of this world. What better way to do it, neatly, cleanly and efficiently, than have your plane’s tail fall off six miles up?”

The Sikorsky Sky-Crane landed in darkness just after three-thirty in the afternoon. It was, as Willoughby had promised, the biggest helicopter they had ever seen. The engines cut, the huge rotors idled to a standstill, and there was left only the sound of a generator whining somewhere inside the massive hull. Telescopic steps snaked down from an opened door and two men climbed nimbly down to the ice and approached the waiting group.

“Brown,” the leading figure said. “Lieutenant Brown, Air Force, alleged skipper of this craft. This is Lieutenant Vos, co-pilot, also alleged. Which of you gentlemen are Mr Willoughby and Mr Brady?”

They shook hands and Brown turned to introduce a third person who had joined them. “Doctor Kenmore.”

“How long can you stay?” Willoughby asked.

“As long as you wish.”

“Very kind. You have some cargo for me?”

“We have. O.K. to unload now?”

“Please.”

Brown shouted instructions. Brady said: “Two requests, Lieutenant?”

“You have but to ask.”

“I wish we had some more of this civility in the United States Air Force,” Brady said. He addressed Dr Kenmore. “My pilot’s been hurt. Would you look at him?”

“Of course.”

“Donald?” The two men left for the aircraft. “We have an excellent transmitter on our plane, Lieutenant, but unfortunately the pilot, who operates it, is out of action…”

“We’ve got an excellent transmitter and a first-class radio operator who’s ready for action. James!”

A young man appeared at the head of the steps. “Take this gentleman to Bernie, will you?”

Bernie was a bespectacled young man seated by a huge RCA transceiver. Dermott introduced himself and said: “Could you get me some numbers do you think?”

“Local, sir? Albertan, I mean.”

“Afraid not, Anchorage and New York.”

“No problem. We can patch in through a radio link via our Edmonton H.Q.” Bernie’s professional confidence was reassuring in the extreme. “Numbers and names, sir?”

“I have them here.” Dermott handed over a notebook. “I can actually speak to those people?”

“If they’re home, sure.”

“I may be gone for a few hours. If I am, and you get through, will you ask them to hold themselves available or let me know where I can reach them?”

“Of course.”

Dermott rejoined the group outside. Two low-profiled vehicles were already on the ice. A third was being lowered. “What are those?” Dermott asked.

Willoughby said: “My surprise for Mr Brady. Snowmobiles.”

“They’re not snowmobiles,” a black-haired slender youth said.

“Sorry.” Willoughby turned to Dermott. “John Lowry, an expert on those machines. The Edmonton people sent him up to show us how to operate them.”

“They’re everything-mobiles,” Lowry said. “Snow, roads, rough terrain, marshes, sand—you name it. Comparatively, the American and Canadian snowmobiles belong to the age of steam radio. Made by the firm of V.P.L.O.—initials only, the full name is unpronounceable—in Oulu, Finland. Called, naturally, the Finncat. Made of fibre-glass. Unlike the ordinary snowmobile, it has no skis up front. That motor-driven traction belt you see extends under the full length of the body.”

“Where did they come from?”

“We got three to put through extended tests—you know, the old test-to-destruction bit. Those are the three.”

Dermott said to Willoughby: “Nice to have friends.”

“Not quite standard models,” Lowry went on. “The front compartments are usually for stowage of gear. We’ve converted them into jump seats.”

Brady said: “You mean I can ride in one of those right now?”

Dermott said, sotto voce to Willoughby: “Test to destruction is right.”

Lowry said: “I should think so, sir.”

“That’s great, just great.” Brady’s tone was hushed and reverent. The prospect of trudging a fourteen-mile return journey through Albertan snows had held singularly little appeal for him.

“Driving is simple,” Lowry said. “Changing the inclination of the traction belt changes the direction of travel: done by the handlebars. You have forward and reverse gears and, a very sophisticated touch, hydraulic disc brakes. It can also do forty miles an hour.”

“Forty?” Dermott said. “It looks as if it would be hard pushed to touch five.”

Lowry smiled. “Forty. Not on rough terrain, of course. Incidentally, these don’t come cheap—four thousand dollars—but then the unique never does. I understand that you gentlemen are in a hurry. First three drivers up, please.”

Dr Kenmore returned from the plane with Mackenzie while Willoughby and his two men were learning the controls of the Finncats. Kenmore said: “Concussion. Nothing very serious, not the blast, he must have hit his head on the ice—there’s a beauty of a bruise just above his right ear. I’ll have him brought across here—we have a heating and lighting generator running all the time when the motors are switched off.”

Brady said: “Thank you, doctor. We appreciate it.”

“Nothing. May one ask where you’re off to in those toys?”

“Don’t let young Lowry hear you. He’d have a fit,” Dermott said.

Brady said: “Please understand we don’t mean to be churlish. We’ll tell you when we come back. How’s your expertise on shotgun wounds and bones shattered by high-velocity bullets?”

“Not very extensive, I’m afraid.” Kenmore’s expression hadn’t altered. “You plan to remedy that before the night is out?”

“I hope not.” Brady’s face was suddenly serious. “But it may come to that.”

The six men left at four-thirty, exactly one hour after the Sikorsky had touched down. The helicopter’s crew were there to see them go. Lieutenant Brown said: “Air Force personnel are not as stupid as they look. We know where you’re going, naturally. Good fortune.” He looked at the arsenal of weapons they carried, ready for action, shoulder-slung or in holsters. “Dr Kenmore may be in for a sleepless night.”

The Finncats were everything that Lowry had promised, nimble, manoeuvrable, and possessed of remarkable traction. Two carried small but efficient headlamps which picked out a path through the straggling alders. It said much for the dogged willingness of the little two-cylinder engines that a heroically suffering Brady had only to get out twice—the Finncat on those occasions had refused to budge another inch—and walk a total of two hundred yards on the way to the gently-rounded convexity which marked the watershed of the Birch Mountains. Shortly before the little army reached this point they had switched off their headlights.

The descent was simple but just as slow as the ascent because, in the absence of lights, the half-seen alders had to be negotiated with care. The engines, no more than idling, were gratifyingly quiet. Willoughby called softly and the three Finncats came to a halt.

“Far enough,” he said. “We can’t be more than three hundred yards from the shore.”

“O.K.,” Dermott agreed. “How many crew at the Met. Station, Willoughby?”

“Just two. I shouldn’t imagine that any harm has come to them. They have to keep sending their regular radio reports: any breakdown in those would have brought an official helicopter out here very quickly. So the reports must have continued to go out—under duress.”

They made their way down to the lake’s edge, keeping their voices low—sound travels as well over ice as it does over water. Tall reeds grew by the frozen shore. Carmody parted these, unshipped his infra-red night-sight, pressed his face against the rubber eye-piece and switched on.

The Crowfoot Lake meteorological station consisted of only two huts, one about three times the size of the other. The smaller one had a variety of poles, boxes and what appeared from that distance to be uncovered recording instruments on its roof. This smaller hut was dark; the larger, presumably the living quarters, showed two brightly-lit windows. Beyond this hut was parked a large, white-painted helicopter.

Jones passed the night-sight to Brady, who studied the station briefly, then handed the instrument on. The last man to use it, Dermott, took the sight from his eye and said: “As a target for tonight, I’ve seen worse. We go now?”

“We go now,” Brady said. “And we don’t treat them like human beings. No warnings. No fair play. No sportsmanship. Shoot first, questions afterwards. People who plant time bombs in aircraft—or steal my Jean and Stella—know nothing of finer feelings—or the rules of civilised warfare.”

Willoughby said: “Fair enough. But shoot to cripple, not to kill. I want those men to stand trial.”

Brady said: “Of course, the conduct and termination of the trial would be greatly speeded if we had their confessions in advance.”

“And how do you figure on getting those?” Dermott asked.

“Simple, George. It all depends upon how intrepid you’re feeling this afternoon.”

15

The wicked wind hissed through the clump of alders some twenty yards behind the meteorological station. The trees offered little in the way of cover, but it was the best and closest that the men could find. Luckily, the night was moonless: the buildings showed as black lumps in the snowy landscape.

Bulky as bears in their Arctic gear, the raiders silently watched another figure, flattened to the snow, inch his way up towards them, propelled only by elbows and toes. Arrived in the shelter of the trees, John Carmody rose to a kneeling position.

“They’re there,” he whispered. “Reynolds and the ladies. The ladies are handcuffed together, but they seem all right. Don’t look as though they’ve been maltreated. There are five other men in there, smoking and drinking, but not drinking too much. A little room leads off the big one. Could be there’s someone asleep in there, but I don’t think so. The door’s ajar and the light’s on. Any person who wanted to sleep would have switched the light off.”

“Well done, boy,” said Brady.

“Three other things, sir. At least three of the men are armed, although none actually had a gun in his hand. The whole group is sitting round the table listening to a radio. They’re listening pretty hard, too—trying to catch something. That made me think there wouldn’t be another of them in the small room: he’d have been out there listening too.”

“Could be the two station operators are in there,” said Dermott. “Tied up, I mean.”

“I thought that too,” said Carmody.

“I know what they’re listening for,” Brady whispered. “News of a certain jet having crashed in Alberta this afternoon. What was the third thing you saw?”

“All five men are wearing stocking masks.”

Dermott said: “Which they wouldn’t bother with if they intended to dispose of the hostages.” His husky murmur dropped to a whisper. “Keep low. Keep quiet.”

A rectangle of light had appeared at the side of the cabin. A figure walked through the opened doorway and headed towards the smaller building. Moments later lights came on there.

“One of them,” Brady said. “Hardly likely to let one of the operators stroll across there and send off an S.O.S. Perfect. Come, George, this is where you earn your Congressional Medal of Honour or whatever.”

Brady moved out, travelling quickly and silently, no trace of the comfort-loving fat man left. Arriving at the main cabin door, he looked over his shoulder to check the smaller cabin. The light was still on, the door still closed. Brady turned back to the cabin door, gripped the handle, opened the door and walked inside, .38 in hand, Dermott and Mackenzie at either elbow, with their guns levelled. Brady advanced on the four stocking-masked men sitting round the table. Several started up.

“Keep your hands on that table,” he said. “If you’re not entirely mad. We’re just looking for an excuse to shoot you through the head. One of you turn that radio off—the good news you’re waiting for has just arrived.”

“Jim! Jim!” Jean Brady was on her feet. “You’ve come!”

“Of course.” Brady’s voice held a curious mixture of irritation and smug self-satisfaction. “You thought I wouldn’t? Brady Enterprises always delivers.” As his wife made to approach him, he raised his left hand. “Just a minute. Don’t come too close. These are desperate men. Mr Reynolds, Stella. Sorry we took so long about this but—”

“Dad!” Stella was on her feet, a desperate urgency in her voice. “Dad, a man—”

“Drop your guns.” The deep voice came from the doorway. “Don’t turn round or you’re dead.”

“Do what the man says.” Brady set the example. Within a second the other two guns had clattered to the floor.

“Stay where you are,” the same voice ordered. “Billy.”

Billy didn’t have to be told what to do. His search was quick but thorough. He stepped back and said: “Clean, boss.”

“So.” The door closed and a burly man appeared before them. Like the others, he was masked. “Sit on that bench there.” He waited until they had done so, seated himself by the table and said: “Watch them.” Three of his men produced pistols and covered the three seated men. He put away his gun.

“The ladies, I must say, seem very disappointed. They shouldn’t, really.”

Brady looked at them. “What he means is that things could be worse. If his plan had worked, we three would be dead. As it is, Ferguson is critically ill and two others seriously injured.” He looked at the leader. “You placed that bomb in the plane?”

“I can’t take all the credit. One of my men did.” He lit a cigarette and stuck it through a hole in the stocking mask which had been cut out for that purpose. “So now I have Mr Jim Brady and his two invaluable associates. A full hand, one might say.”

Brady said: “Designed to blow our tail off at 30,000 feet?”

“What else? It would be interesting to know how you’re alive.”

“We’re alive. But one man’s probably dying, and two are seriously injured. God, man, what are you—a psychopathic killer?”

“Not psychopathic. Just a businessman. How come you didn’t die?”

“Because we landed before the bomb went off.” Brady sounded very tired. “We got a report from a forest ranger saying that an off-white helicopter had been seen in these parts. Nobody paid attention except us—we knew you had a white helicopter.”

“How did you know that?”

“A lot of people saw it around the plant at Athabasca.”

“No harm done.” He waved a hand. “All the aces in the pack.”

“Whoever placed that explosive charge in my plane made a lousy job of securing it,” said Brady sarcastically.

“I can vouch for that. He was interrupted.”

“The package moved forward and jammed the controls—the tail ailerons. The pilot had to land—it was on the way down that we caught a glimpse of your helicopter. We crash-landed on another lake. Pilot told us to get out. He tried to remove the charge, and the two others stayed with him. I guess they felt they had to—they were cops.”

“We know that, too.”

“So they were expendable. You had no compunction about murdering them, too?”

“Compunction is not a word in my vocabulary. Why did you come here?”

“For your helicopter, of course. We have to get those injured men to hospital.”

“Why hold us up?”

“Don’t be so stupid. We can’t fly the damn thing.”

The leader turned to one of the masked men. “Sorry about that, Lucky. A pleasure spared.”

“And of course, you people killed Crawford.”

“Crawford?” He turned to another of his men. “Fred, that lad you attended to—”

“Yeah. That was him.”

“And you critically wounded Sanmobil’s president, and a policeman?”

“Seems to have been an awful lot you didn’t know.”

“And it was you who blew up the plant and destroyed the dragline. A pity you had to kill and wound so many in the process.”

“Look friend, we don’t play kiddies’ games. Too bad if someone gets in our way. This is a man’s world, and we play for keeps.”

Brady bowed his head in apparent acceptance, raised his hands to cross them behind his neck. His fingers touched.

What should have been the tinkling of shattered glass was lost in the crash of three shots that sounded almost as one. The masked men with the guns yelled out in agony and stared in shocked disbelief at their shattered shoulders. The door was kicked violently open and Carmody jumped in, machine pistol steady in his big hands. He moved a couple of steps forward. Willoughby ran into the cabin carrying a revolver.

Dermott said: “Your words. This is a man’s world, and we play for keeps.”

Carmody advanced on the masked leader and thrust the barrel of his machine pistol hard against the man’s teeth. “Your gun. By the barrel. Do you know what is my one ambition in life right now?” The man, apparently, did. Carmody pocketed the pistol and turned to the remaining and unwounded member of the quintet, who had his gun on the table before Carmody could even speak to him.

Brady said: “Satisfactory, Mr Willoughby? The floor is yours.”

“An Oscar, Mr Brady. They sang beautifully.” He advanced to the table. “I think you all know who I am?”

Nobody spoke.

“You.” He indicated the person who had so hastily placed his gun on the table. “Towels, cotton wool, bandages. Nobody’s going to mind very much if your three friends bleed to death, but personally I would sooner see them die legally. After they’ve been tried, of course. Let’s see your faces.” He walked round ripping off masks. The first three faces apparently meant nothing to him. The fourth, belonging to the man he’d just appointed to first-aid duty, clearly did.

“Lucky Lorrigan,” Willoughby said. “Erstwhile helicopter pilot, more recently a murderer on the run from Calgary. Severely wounded a couple of officers in your breakout, Lucky, didn’t you? My, aren’t they going to be pleased to see you again!”

He tore the mask from the leader’s face. “Well, well, would you believe it? No less than Frederick Napier himself, second senior charge-hand in Sanmobil security. You’ve strayed a bit from home, haven’t you, Freddie?

“All five of you are hereby taken into arrest and charged with murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and industrial sabotage. I don’t have to remind you about your legal rights, silence, access to lawyers. You’ve heard it all before. Not that it will do any of you the slightest good. Not after the beautiful way Napier sang.”

Brady said: “Would you say he was the best singer of the lot, Mr Willoughby?”

Willoughby stroked his chin. “A moot point, Mr Brady.” He had no idea what Brady was talking about, but had learned to listen when he suggested something.

Brady said: “You really are extraordinarily naïve, Napier. I told you that Mr Willoughby and his officer were severely injured when our plane crash-landed, yet you seemed hardly surprised to see them here. Perhaps you’re just stupid. Perhaps events have moved too fast for your limited intellect. Our plane, of course, did not crash-land. No forest ranger pilot spotted you. We never saw your helicopter on the way to our alleged crash-landing.

“Deerhorn, the lake just over the hill there, was our destination from the time we left Fort McMurray, because we knew exactly where you were. You sing like a lark, Napier. But Brinckman and Jorgensen sing like angels. They’re going to turn State’s evidence. Should get off with five years.”

“Brinckman and Jorgensen!” Napier jumped to his feet then collapsed back in his chair with a whoosh of expelled air as the barrel of Carmody’s machine pistol caught him in the solar plexus. He sat there gasping for breath. “Brinckman and Jorgensen,” he wheezed, and had just started in on a résumé of their antecedents when Carmody’s gun caught him lightly on the side of the head.

“Ladies present,” Carmody said pleasantly.

“State’s evidence!” Napier said huskily. “Five years! Good God, man, Brinckman’s my boss. Jorgensen’s his lieutenant. I’m only number three on the totem pole. Brinckman is the one who fixes everything, arranges everything, gives all the orders. I just do what I’m told. State’s evidence! Five years! Brinckman!”

Willoughby said: “Would you swear to that in court?”

“Too damn right, I would! Treacherous bastard!” Napier stared into space, his mouth no more than a compressed white line.

Willoughby said: “And before all these witnesses, too.”

Napier shifted his gaze from faraway places to Willoughby. His expression was one of total incomprehension.

“Mr Brady was quite right, Napier. You really are a rather simple person, but as a singer you just got raised to the rank of angel. Until this moment we didn’t have a single solitary thing we could pin on either of them. Thanks to you, they’ll join you behind bars tonight. It should be a fascinating get-together.”

The big white helicopter touched down on Deerhorn at five forty-five in the afternoon. Lucky Lorrigan, with the muzzle of Carmody’s pistol screwing into his ear, had flown the seven-minute hop in impeccable style. The two meteorological station operators had been freed and, when told why, had willingly sworn themselves to secrecy for the next twenty-four hours.

Brady was first off the plane, followed by Dermott and the wounded men. A curious reception committee from the Sikorsky, headed by Lieutenant Brown, was there to greet them.

Brown said: “That was fast work. Congratulations! No problems?”

“Routine exercise.” Brady was a master of the throwaway phrase. “Some for Dr Kenmore, though. Three silly people got in the way of flying bullets.”

Kenmore said: “I’ll fix them up, Mr Brady.”

“Thanks. But you look mighty young to me to be an orthopaedic surgeon.”

“So it’s like that?”

“Patch them up as best you can. Nobody’s going to take your licence away from you if they peg out during the night.”

“I understand.” The young doctor’s eyes widened as the women descended the steps. “Well, well.”

“Brady Enterprises,” Brady said with a smirk in his voice, “associate only with the best and the most beautiful. Well, Mr Lowry, we’ll have to see about getting back those splendid machines of yours. And now, Lieutenant, if you will excuse me—a matter of some urgency.”

He had taken some few steps towards his aircraft, when the lieutenant overtook him. “It got pretty cold in your plane, Mr Brady, so I took the liberty of transferring some essential supplies to our nice warm Sikorsky.”

Brady turned ninety degrees without breaking stride and headed purposefully towards the Sky-Crane. He patted Lieutenant Brown on the arm. “A very promising future lies ahead of you.”

Dermott said to Bernie, the Sikorsky radio operator: “Any luck?”

“Got through to all three, sir. Your New York number and one of your Anchorage numbers—a Mr Morrison—said they had no information for you yet and probably wouldn’t have for the next twenty-four hours. Your other Anchorage number—a Dr Parker—asked if you would be kind enough to call him back now.”

“Would you get him, please?”

“No bother.” Bernie smiled. “And then you’d like some privacy?”

Brady had been reduced to the discomfort of sitting on a packing box—admittedly a large one—in the fore part of the Sikorsky’s cavernous hold. He appeared not to be suffering too much. He was speaking to a fully conscious Ferguson.

“You’ve made it, son. You’re damned lucky but not nearly as lucky as we are, thanks entirely to you. We’ll discuss this—ah—later, in private. Sorry your eyes are still troubling you.”

“Just a damned nuisance, Mr Brady. Otherwise, I could fly the plane with no trouble.”

“You’re not flying anything, anywhere,” Kenmore said. “It may be two or three days before we can be sure that your eyesight is stabilised. I know a specialist in Edmonton.”

“Thank you. How are our wounded heroes, by the way?”

“They’ll live.”

“Ah, well. We can’t have everything.”

Two and a half hours later Brady was again presiding over a cheerful company, but this time rather more comfortably ensconced in the best armchair in the Peter Pond Hotel. Doubtless inspired by the thought of the enormous fees he would extort, he was positively Maecenas-like in his hospitality. Reynolds had been joined by his wife. The atmosphere was festive; but Dermott and Mackenzie didn’t seem very jovial. Dermott approached the beaming Brady—he wasn’t beaming at anything in particular but was just sitting there, wife’s hand in his left, daiquiri in his right—and said: “Donald and I would like to slip away for a bit, sir. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. Do you need me?”

“Minor matters, only.”

“Go right ahead, George.” The beam, which had faded slightly, lit up again. Brady would now have the field to himself, and it was possible that his retailing of recent events might vary slightly from the one he would have given if his two lieutenants had been present. He glanced at his watch. “Eight-thirty. Half an hour or so?”

“About that.”

On their way out they stopped by Willoughby’s chair. Dermott smiled at a rather misty-eyed Mrs Reynolds, then said to Willoughby: “Brinckman and Jorgensen?”

Willoughby smiled happily. “Are guests of the Canadian government. Heard fifteen minutes ago. Look, gentlemen, I don’t know how to—”

“Wait.” Mackenzie smiled. “We aren’t through with you yet.”

“Some more matters to be attended to?”

“Not in Alberta. But we have to cast a net again. Can we see you in the morning?”

“When?”

“Late. May we call you?”

Dermott and Mackenzie spent not half an hour but an hour and a half in Dermott’s room, talking, planning, and, mostly, telephoning. When they returned to the lounge Brady greeted them effusively. He was totally unaware of how much time had elapsed. The number of the company had increased. Dermott and Mackenzie were introduced to a couple who turned out to be the mayor and his wife. Jay Shore had returned from the plant and they were introduced to his wife, too. They were introduced to a charming lady who turned out to be Mrs Willoughby. After that they were introduced to two other couples whose names they failed to catch. Jim Brady was spreading his wings that night.

Willoughby came up and spoke to them quietly. “Another item, although it’s just another unnecessary nail in the coffin. We retrieved the prints from Shore’s house and compared them to the ones in the kidnap truck. Two matching sets were found: Napier’s and Lucky Lorrigan’s.”

At eleven o’clock, Dermott and Mackenzie approached Brady again. He was still in sparkling form: his tolerance for rum passed mortal understanding. Dermott said: “Mr Brady. We’re bushed. We’re off.”

“Off? Bed? I’ll be damned.” He glanced at his watch. “The night’s young.” He made a grandiloquent gesture with his arm. “Look at them. Are they thinking of bed?” Jean gave Dermott a rueful smile which indicated that she was thinking of just that herself. “They’re happy. They’re enjoying themselves. Just look!”

Wearily they looked. No question, Brady had the right of it. They were enjoying themselves, not least young Carmody, who had discreetly withdrawn from the main body of the group to sit in a corner with Stella.

“We wish you luck. You want us to collapse dramatically in front of all your guests?”

“That’s the trouble with you young people of today. No get-up-and-go.” When the occasion arose Brady could conveniently forget that his associates and himself were of the same generation. “No stamina. Not fit.” He seemed totally unaware of how preposterous he sounded, but they knew he wasn’t.

“We’d like to talk to you in the morning.”

“You would?” He eyed them both suspiciously. “When?”

“When you’re fit, unlimited stamina, the lark singing.”

“Damn it all, when?”

“Noon.”

Brady relaxed. “In that case, why don’t you stay?”

Dermott went and kissed Jean goodnight, Mackenzie did the same; they made the rounds with punctilious goodnights and left.

They got to bed just after one in the morning. The previous two hours had been spent on the telephone.

Dermott awoke at seven-thirty. By eight, he was showered, shaved, eating off his breakfast tray and busy on the telephone. At nine he was joined by Mackenzie. At ten they were both closeted with Willoughby. At noon, they joined Brady at his breakfast table and explained what they had in mind. Brady chewed through the last of his ham omelette, which had originally been the size of a soup-plate, then shook his head in a decisive fashion.

“It’s out of the question. It’s all over. O.K., there are a few stray threads in Alaska, but who am I to devote my time to that sort of small potatoes?”

“So it is in order if Donald and I resign?”

Fortunately for Brady he was neither eating nor drinking at the moment, so he had nothing to choke over. “Resign? What the hell do you mean?”

“It’s Donald’s fault, really. Half Scots, you know. He hates to see good money being thrown away.”

“Money being thrown away?” Momentarily, Brady looked almost appalled, but his recovery was swift. “What’s this nonsense?”

“How much are you charging Sanmobil for our services?”

“Well, I’m not one to prey on the misfortunes of others. A half million I guess. Plus expenses, of course.”

“In that case, I reckon Donald and I would rate a quarter of a million for picking up stray threads and small potatoes.” Brady was silent, his eyes fixed on something beyond infinity. “With your name,” Dermott persisted, “one can see no reason why the Prudhoe Bay oil companies shouldn’t also come up with a half million. Plus, of course, expenses.”

Brady brought his gaze back from outer space to the dining-room table. “It’s not, as you may think, that I’m not at my best in the morning. It’s just that I have so much on my mind. What time is this meeting tonight?”

16

The meeting was held that evening in the Sanmobil canteen, which was drably lit and decorated in dingy cream and peagreen. Nevertheless, the room had much to recommend it for such a gathering, not least the fact that it was large and warm and a place from which the public could easily be excluded.

The tables and chairs had been rearranged so that the men conducting the proceedings sat in a line—on stage, as it were—facing down the long room. The rest of the seats had been set out in two blocks, divided by a gangway.

In the middle of the top table sat Willoughby, acting as host in his own parish. On his right was Hamish Black, general manager of B.P./Sohio, Alaska, who had flown down from Prudhoe Bay to be present. On Willoughby’s left sat Brady, overflowing a rickety wooden chair, and beside him were his two trusty henchmen.

Down on the floor, the home team was represented by Bill Reynolds, Jay Shore and a handful of others. On the Alaskan side there were eight men, among them Dr Blake, gaunt and cadaverous as ever; Ffoulkes, the Anchorage police chief; and Parker, the police forensic surgeon. Morrison of the F.B.I. had come on the same plane, and behind him sat four of his agents. At the back of the room were nearly thirty other men from Sanmobil brought in so that they could hear the full report of what had been happening. Finally, in an unobtrusive position at one side, John Carmody and a couple of fellow-policemen occupied a flat bench, with their backs against the wall; and sandwiched between them was Corinne Delorme, looking small and wan and rather scared.

Willoughby stood up to open the proceedings.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As the senior representative of the law here in Alberta, and as your nominal host, I would like to thank all you people who’ve been good enough to come from places as far afield as Prudhoe Bay, Anchorage and even New York.”

A murmur went round the room.

“That’s right,” Willoughby confirmed. “Two gentlemen at least have come all the way from New York. Now: the purpose of this meeting is to explain to the senior employees of Sanmobil and BP/Sohio just what’s been going on these past few days, and, if possible, to clear up the few final questions to which we don’t yet have the answers. I call on Mr Hamish Black, general manager of BP/Sohio, Alaska, to put you in the picture.”

Black rose to his feet, all disapproval and severity. Yet when he began to speak, he seemed to acquire a stature and authority that thoroughly surprised Brady and his associates.

“I hardly need tell you,” he began, “that both the Alaskan pipeline and the Sanmobil tar sands complex here at Athabasca have recently been subjected to deadly and intensive industrial sabotage. The action effectively closed down the flow of oil from both centres, and in the process of the sabotage at least four innocent people have been murdered, while several others have been gravely injured.

“We devoutly hope that the savage and brutal attacks are at an end. They certainly seem to be so in Alberta—and for this the sole credit goes to the investigation team of Brady Enterprises, headed by Mr Jim Brady himself and his two senior assistants, Mr Dermott and Mr Mackenzie.”

With the ghost of a smile softening the line of his pencil moustache, Black indicated the Brady team. To his acute discomfort, Brady found himself blushing for the first time in years. He ground his teeth and contrived to look sideways at Dermott without moving his head. The guy they’d treated like dirt was praising them!

“Unfortunately,” Black went on, “no such happy conclusion has been reached in Alaska. Up there, we have no positive guarantee that the sabotage is at an end, for the simple reason that the individuals responsible for the criminal activity have not yet been brought to justice.

“Brady Enterprises have been as deeply involved in making enquiries in Alaska as they have here, and since they are the only people with an overall view of the present position, I should like to call upon Mr Brady himself to give us a report.”

Brady heaved himself upright and cleared his throat.

“Thank you, Mr Black. Ladies and gentlemen, I promise to be as brief as possible, and to waste none of your time. First I will ask for a word from Mr John Young, who is director of City Services, a Federally-backed investigative agency in New York. One of its functions is to oversee and regulate the conduct of private detective and investigative agencies in the State of New York. Mr Young?”

In the front row of the Sanmobil team seats a lean, bald-headed man with thick-rimmed glasses rose to his feet. He looked at the papers in his hand and smiled at Brady, and turning to face the body of the hall, he began.

“City Services was asked by Brady Enterprises—this was with governmental consent—to investigate the background of a private security agency owned and run by one Samuel Bronowski, who later became head of security on the Alaskan pipeline.

“Apart from the fact that an unusually large percentage of valuables entrusted to the firm’s safekeeping had been missing—for readily explainable reasons—we found no evidence of any outright misconduct. But I was further asked to find out the names and identities of any of Bronowski’s associates who left the firm at about the same time as he did—that is to say, within six months either side of his departure date. We came up with ten names—not a particularly high wastage rate in such an agency—but Brady Enterprises were particularly interested in four of them.” Here Young consulted the notes in his right hand. “Their names are Houston, Brinckman, Jorgensen, and Napier.”

Young sat down and Brady rose again to thank him. “Well,” he continued, “for those of you who do not already know, three of the four just mentioned are already in gaol, charged with various crimes from murder downwards. The other man, and Bronowski, you can now see for yourselves.”

He made a small sign to Willoughby, who nodded to one of his uniformed men at the door. Next moment the door opened, to admit Bronowski and Houston, manacled together. They were hustled to seats in the front row of the Alaska-side stalls. Bronowski still sported his impressive head-bandage, and beneath it, his broad, strong face was sullen.

“So.” Brady purred. “I promised we would not waste time. We have established that at least two security agents from the pipeline and three from Sanmobil were old acquaintances, that they were acting in concert, organised widespread sabotage, exchanged codes and were responsible for murder. We have also established that Bronowski was the undisputed leader. These facts have been put on record by many witnesses, who will testify in court. But let us move on, I would like to call on Dr Parker.”

“Yes, well.” Parker paused reflectively. “I act in a forensic capacity for the police at Anchorage. Mr Dermott brought down three corpses from Prudhoe Bay. I examined one of them—an engineer who had been murdered in Pump Station No. 4. He had sustained a most unusual injury to his right index finger. I understand that Dr Blake here attributed this to the force of the explosion which destroyed the pump station. I have to disagree. The finger was deliberately broken—there is no other way it could have happened. Mr Dermott?”

Dermott stood up. “Mr Mackenzie and I have a theory. It’s our belief that this dead engineer was carrying a pistol when he was held up by the people who had planted the explosives. We further believe that he recognised his assailants, and they, knowing this, killed him before he could use his gun in self-defence. We also believe that his dead finger locked over the trigger-grip. That would be possible, doctor?”

“Indeed—quite possible.”

“We surmise the criminals had to break the man’s forefinger to get the gun away. A dead man found with a gun in his hand would have raised serious doubts as to whether the explosion had been a genuine accident.

“Further, papers seen in his coat pocket were later missing. Neither my colleagues nor I know what those papers were. We can only assume that he had accumulated incriminating evidence against someone—which would account for the fact that he was carrying a gun.”

Dermott paused. Then he said: “I would like to ask Mr Brady to discuss the vital question of who is ultimately responsible for this spate of crime.”

Brady hoisted himself upright again. “Mr Carmody—would you be so kind as to stand by Bronowski? I am aware that he is handcuffed, but I’m also convinced he’s a man of violence. Dr Parker?”

Dr Parker rose leisurely and walked across to Bronowski. Carmody was already there. The doctor said to him: “Get behind him and hold his arms.”

Carmodv did so Bronowski yelped with pain as Parker reached forward and ripped away the bandage that covered his forehead and temple. The doctor peered closely at the temple, touched it, then straightened.

“This is a delicate area of the head,” he said. “A blow such as he is alleged to have received would have left a bruise for at least a fortnight. Probably longer. As you can see, there is no such bruise, no sign of any contusion. In other words,” he said, pausing for effect, “he was never struck.”

Brady said: “Things look rather black for you, Dr Blake.”

“They’re going to look a damn sight blacker,” Parker said. He had resumed his place.” Mr Dermott, in Anchorage, made what I then regarded as an extremely strange request. I no longer regard it as such. Despite the fact that you, Dr Blake, had carried out an autopsy on John Finlayson, Mr Dermott asked me to carry out another. Unheard of. But, as it turns out, justified.

“Your certificate said that Finlayson had been struck on the occiput with some form of loaded salt-bag. As in the case of Bronowski, there was no sign of any contusion. The skin had been somewhat abraded, which could have occurred before or after death. What is important is that one of my younger associates discovered traces of ethyl oxide in the blood. It is difficult to conceal such trace elements. On closer examination, we discovered a tiny blue puncture just under the rib cage. Further investigation proved beyond any doubt that a needle or probe had been inserted through this puncture and pierced the heart. Death would have been pretty well instantaneous. In other words, Finlayson had been anaesthetised, then murdered. I do not think there is one medical authority in either of our countries who would dispute my findings.”

Brady said: “Comment, Dr Blake?”

He appeared to have none.

The F.B.I.’s Morrison said: “I have. He’s not a doctor. He was trained in an English university and flung out in his fourth year for reasons as yet undisclosed but which I’m sure we can readily ascertain. No doubt he learnt enough in that time to use a needle or probe.”

Brady said: “Comment, Blake?”

Again he had none.

“I do not know, but I’m pretty sure that this is what happened,” Dermott said. “Finlayson came across Bronowski and Houston tampering with the fingerprint card index. I suggest that Bronowski was removing his own prints from the file. I suggest he was substituting some other prints for his own. Whose, I do not know, but that again we can ascertain. The next suggestion is straightforward and obvious. The prints on that Anchorage telephone box were Bronowski’s. We have only to take his prints to confirm.”

Brady said: “Comment, Bronowski?”

Silence.

“Well.” Brady looked round the room. “Guilty as hell. That almost wraps it up.” He stood up, as if to end the meeting. “But not quite. None of the accused has the intelligence or knowledge to master-mind an operation of this nature. This required a highly specialised degree of knowledge. Someone who had the inside track.”

Willoughby asked: “We have an idea of this person’s identity?”

“I know who he is. But I think I’ll let Mr Morrison and the F.B.I. take over here. My colleagues and I had our suspicions as to the identity of the mastermind behind the killings and sabotage both here and in Alaska, but it was Mr Morrison who got the proof.”

“I got the proof,” Morrison said, “but that was only because my nose was pointed in the right direction. Bronowski claimed to have owned—and maintains he still owns—an investigative agency in New York. This is untrue. As Mr Young discovered in the course of his investigations, Bronowski only acted in the capacity of a front man, a figure-head. The real source of power, the owner, was someone else. Right, Bronowski?”

Bronowski scowled, clamped his lips, and kept his counsel.

“No matter. At least you don’t deny it. Mr Young, accompanied by New York detectives and armed with a search warrant, examined the firm’s private correspondence. The firm had been so naïve as to file away, instead of destroying, fatally damaging and incriminating evidence. This evidence not only revealed the identity of the true owner: it also revealed the astonishing fact that this same individual owned no fewer than four other protection or investigative agencies in the city of New York.” Morrison glanced to one side. “Mr Willoughby?”

Willoughby nodded and looked aside. Carmody nodded, rose and walked leisurely to the back of the room.

“This owner,” Morrison went on, “was an absentee landlord, but only during the past couple of years. Before that he was on the New York stock exchange and an investment counsellor on Wall Street. He wasn’t too successful: not really a financial man at all, though he liked money. More like a bull in a china shop: too extroverted.

“The landlord’s most recent absence was caused by the fact that he had become busy elsewhere. He was busy in Athabasca, at an inconvenient distance from Wall Street. He was, in fact, working for Sanmobil. He was busy being Sanmobil’s operations manager.”

“Don’t move. Keep quite still.” Carmody leant over Reynolds’s shoulder and relieved him of a silenced automatic which he had begun to slide out of a shoulder-holster. “You could cause yourself an injury. What’s a law-abiding citizen like you doing carrying a hand-gun?”

Gasps of surprise broke out all round the room. Almost everybody stood up to get a better view. Reynolds’s face, normally so rubicund, had gone grey. He sat as if paralysed while Carmody slipped manacles on him.

“This is in no way a trial,” Brady announced. “So I do not propose to question him. Nor will I adumbrate the factors that made him turn the way he did—save to say that his main grievance appears to have been that he had been passed over for promotion. He found his way ahead blocked: he conceived the idea that outsiders were always brought into the firm to occupy senior positions. You may think his reaction a little excessive.”

Brady stopped. He had, at this point, intended to have a dig at Black, by mentioning the oil companies’ practice of installing accountants in senior management positions. As things had turned out, however, he decided against it, and merely asked Black to sum up.

This Black did, in a surprisingly warm and human manner. Again he praised Brady Enterprises effusively, and he ended by reassuring everyone present that the campaign of terror and destruction was over. The meeting was closed. Police officers escorted Reynolds, Blake, Bronowski and Houston away to the cells, and in small groups and very slowly everyone else began to leave the hall.

Brady, feeling unwontedly nervous, sidled up to Black.

“My apologies,” he muttered. “Must offer you my sincere apologies. My associates were infernally rude to you that time in the course of their…ah…investigations…no cause for it.”

“My dear fellow—not at all,” said Black magnanimously. “I daresay it was my fault anyway. I hardly realised what deep trouble we were in. I thought your investigations were superfluous. Now I know different.”

“I’d like to apologise, too, sir,” muttered Dermott, stiff with embarrassment. “Trouble was—if I may say so—you seemed so unco-operative.”

“It was the cost that frightened me. Don’t forget, I’m an accountant by training.” To the amazement of the Brady team, Black actually laughed. They laughed too, from sheer release of tension—and the next second, Black caught them neatly on the rebound.

“Well now, Mr Brady,” he said briskly. “As to the question of your fee…”

“Oh…now!” Brady spluttered, caught right off-balance. “I assumed all along I would negotiate that with your London office.”

“No need, I’m glad to say.” Black was all breezy sunshine. “London has empowered me to deal directly with you. Our chairman felt that despite your close friendship, or perhaps because of it—I should settle this up.”

“That’s…well…NO! I mean, I…I never discuss fees myself.” Brady sounded lame, and knew it. But he pulled himself together fast. “I have to consult my accountant, even if you don’t.”

“Forty love, and Black to serve,” muttered Dermott as they moved away. He was about to go for his coat when, down one side of the room, he spotted Corinne Delorme still sitting on a bench, as if in a trance.

“Come on, honey,” he said gently. “Time to go.” “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s not possible.”

“Well—it happened. Are you upset?”

“Not really—no. I didn’t care that much about him. It’s just that I kind of got used to believing what he said.”

“I know, one does. But you saw how devious he was. Anyone who has himself kidnapped to add verisimilitude to the proceedings—anyone who does that is hardly straightforward.”

“I guess that’s right. Those murders, too. Oh God, it’s awful.”

“It was awful. But it’s over. Coming?”

“I suppose so.” She stood up, and Dermott helped her into her coat.

“You and I were the two luckiest people in the whole damn business,” he said. “We both ought to be dead. Without you I would be.”

Suddenly her blank eyes lit up and she smiled.

Dermott smiled back. “What are you going to do now you’ve got no boss to work for?”

“I don’t know. Find another job first.”

“Not many good jobs in Fort McMurray. Why not come south and work for me?”

“For you?” Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Think of it now. Shall we go?”

“O.K.”

“I’d offer you my arm, if it wasn’t still so damned sore.”

“And I might even take it.” She looked upward and snuggled close against him as they went out through the door.

The sight seemed to occasion the most immense merriment in Brady and his one remaining associate. They rolled in their seats like clowns, giving vent to noisy explosions.

“Stay me with flagons, Donald,” cried Brady, as he recovered. “I am seriously in need of liquid refreshment. For unless my investigative powers are dwindling, we have a romance on our hands.”

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D. Litt. from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

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Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

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First published in Great Britain by

William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1980

then in paperback by Fontana 1981

Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers 1980

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © 1980 ISBN: 9780007289202

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

River of Death

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Darkness was falling over the ancient Grecian monastery and the first of the evening stars were beginning to twinkle in the cloudless Aegean sky. The sea was calm, the air was still and did indeed, as is so often claimed for it, smell of wine and roses. A yellow moon, almost full, had just cleared the horizon and bathed in its soft and benign light the softly rolling landscape and lent a magical quality to the otherwise rather harsh and forbidding outlines of the dark and brooding monastery which, any evidence to the contrary, slumbered on peacefully as it had done for countless centuries gone by.

At that moment, unfortunately, conditions inside the monastery could hardly be said to reflect the dream-like outer world. Magic had taken wings, no-one slumbered, peace was markedly absent, darkness had given way to a score of smoking oil torches and there was little enough around in the way of wine and roses. Eight uniformed members of the Nazi S.S. were carrying oaken chests across the flagged hallway. The brass-bound boxes were small but so heavy that it required four men to carry one of them: a sergeant supervised their operations.

Watching them were four men. Two of those were high-ranking S.S. officers: of those, one, Wolfgang Von Manteuffel, a tall, thin man with cold blue eyes, was a major-general, no more than thirty-five years old: the second, Heinrich Spaatz, a thick-set, swarthy man who had apparently elected to choose a scowl as his permanent expression in life, was a colonel of about the same age. The other two watchers were monks in cowled brown habits, old proud men but now with mingled fear and pride in their eyes, eyes that never left the oaken chests. Von Manteuffel touched the sergeant with the tip of his gold-handled malacca cane which could hardly have been regulation issue to S.S. officers.

‘A spot check, I think, Sergeant.’

The sergeant gave orders to the nearest group who, not without difficulty, lowered their chest to the floor. The sergeant knelt, knocked away the retaining pins in the iron hasps and lifted the hinged lid, the screeching of the ancient metal being testimony enough to the fact that many years must have passed since this had last been done. Even in the wavering light of the malodorous oil torches the revealed contents glittered as if they were alive. The chest contained literally thousands of golden coins, so fresh and gleaming they could have been minted that same day. Von Manteuffel contemplatively stirred the coins with the tip of his cane, looked with satisfaction at the resulting iridescence, then turned to Spaatz.

‘Genuine, you would say, Heinrich?’

‘I am shocked,’ Spaatz said. He didn’t look it. ‘Shocked beyond words. The holy fathers traffic in dross?’

Von Manteuffel shook his head sadly. ‘You can’t trust anyone these days.’

With what appeared to be as much a physical effort as an exercise of will, one of the monks averted his fascinated gaze from the glittering chest and looked at Von Manteuffel. He was a very thin man, very stooped, very old - he must have been nearer ninety than eighty. His face was carefully expressionless, but there wasn’t much he could do about his stricken eyes.

‘These treasures are God’s,’ he said, ‘and we have guarded them for generations. Now we have broken our trust.’

‘You can’t take all the credit for that,’ Von Manteuffel said. ‘We helped. Don’t worry, we’ll look after them for you.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Spaatz said. ‘Be of good cheer, father. We shall prove worthy of our stewardship.’

They stood in silence until the last of the treasure chests was removed, then Von Manteuffel gestured towards a heavy oaken door.

‘Join your comrades. I’m sure you will be released as soon as our planes are heard to leave.’

The two old men, clearly as broken in spirit as they were in body, did as ordered, Von Manteuffel closing the door behind them and sliding home the two heavy bolts. Two troopers entered, carrying a fifty-litre drum of petrol which they laid on its side close to and facing the oaken door. It was clear that they had been well briefed in advance. One trooper unscrewed the cap of the petrol drum while the other laid a trail of gunpowder to the outside doorway. More than half of the petrol gushed out on to the flags, some of it seeping under the oaken door: the trooper seemed content that the rest of the petrol should remain inside the drum. Following the departing troopers, Von Manteuffel and Spaatz walked away and halted at the outside doorway. Von Manteuffel struck a match and dropped it on the gunpowder fuse: for all the expression that his face registered he could have been sitting in a church.

The airfield was only two minutes’ walk away and by the time the S.S. officers arrived there the troopers had finished loading and securing the chests aboard the two Junkers 88s, engines already running, parked side by side on the tarmac. At a word from Von Manteuffel, the troopers ran forward and scrambled aboard the farther plane: Von Manteuffel and Spaatz, doubtless to emphasise the superiority of the officer class, sauntered leisurely to the nearer one. Three minutes later both planes were airborne. In robbery, looting and plundering, as in all else, Teutonic efficiency shone through.

At the rear of the lead plane, beyond rows of boxes secured to painstakingly prepared racks on the floor, Von Manteuffel and Spaatz sat with glasses in their hands. They appeared calm and unworried and had about them the air of men secure in the knowledge that behind them lay a job well done. Spaatz glanced casually out of a window. He had no trouble at all in locating what he knew he was bound to locate. A thousand, maybe fifteen hundred feet below the gently banking wing, a large building burnt ferociously, illuminating the landscape, shore and sea for almost half a mile around. Spaatz touched Von Manteuffel on the arm and pointed. Von Manteuffel glanced through the window and almost immediately looked indifferently away.

‘War is hell,’ he said. He sipped his cognac, looted, of course, from France and touched the nearest chest with his cane. ‘Nothing but the best for our fat friend. What value would you put on our latest contribution to his coffers?’

‘I’m no expert, Wolfgang.’ Spaatz considered. ‘A hundred million deutschmarks?’

‘A conservative estimate, my dear Heinrich, very conservative. And to think he already has a thousand million overseas.’

‘I’ve heard it was more. In any event, we will not dispute the fact that the Field Marshal is a man of gargantuan appetites. You only have to look at him. Do you think he will some day look at this?’ Von Manteuffel smiled and took another sip of his cognac. ‘How long will it take to fix things, Wolfgang?’

‘How long will the Third Reich last? Weeks?’

‘Not if our beloved Fuehrer remains as commander-in-chief.’

Spaatz looked gloomy. ‘And I, alas, am about to join him in Berlin where I shall remain to the bitter end.’

‘The very end, Heinrich?’

Spaatz grimaced. ‘A hasty amendment. Almost the bitter end.’

‘And I shall be in Wilhelmshaven.’

‘Naturally. A code word?’

Von Manteuffel pondered briefly, then said: ‘We fight to the death.’

Spaatz sipped his cognac and smiled sadly. ‘Cynicism, Wolfgang, never did become you.’

At the best of times the docks at Wilhelmshaven would have no difficulty in turning away the tourist trade. And that present moment was not the best of times. It was cold and raining and very dark. The darkness was quite understandable for the port was bracing itself for the by now inevitable attack by the R.A.F.’s Lancasters on the North Sea submarine base or what, by this time, was left of it. There was one small area of illumination, and subdued illumination at that, for it came from low-powered lamps in hooded shades. Faint though this area of light was, it still contrasted sufficiently with the total blackness around to offer marauding bombers a pinpoint identification marker for the bombardiers crouched in the noses of the planes of the surely approaching squadrons. No-one in Wilhelmshaven was feeling terribly happy about those lights, but then no-one was anxious to question the orders of the S.S. general responsible for their being switched on, especially when that general was carrying with him the personal seal of Field Marshal Goering.

General Von Manteuffel stood on the bridge of one of the latest of the German Navy’s longest-range U-boats. Beside him stood a very apprehensive U-boat captain who clearly didn’t relish the prospect of being caught moored alongside a quay when the R.A.F. appeared, as he was certain they would. He had about him the air of a man who would have loved nothing better than to pace up and down in an agony of frustration, only there isn’t much room for pacing on the conning-tower of a submarine. He cleared his throat in the loud and unmistakable fashion of one who is not about to speak lightly.

‘General Von Manteuffel, I must insist that we leave now. Immediately. We are in mortal danger.’

‘My dear Captain Reinhardt, I don’t fancy mortal danger any more than you do.’ Von Manteuffel didn’t give the impression of caring about any danger, mortal or otherwise. ‘But the Reichsmarshal has a very short way of dealing with subordinates who disobey his orders.’

‘I’ll take a chance on that.’ Captain Reinhardt didn’t just sound desperate, he was desperate. ‘I’m sure Admiral Doenitz - ’

‘I wasn’t thinking about you and Admiral Doenitz. I was thinking about the Reichsmarshal and myself.’

‘Those Lancasters carry ten-ton bombs,’ Captain Reinhardt said unhappily. ‘Ten tons! It took only two to finish off the Tirpitz. The Tirpitz, the most powerful battleship in the world. Can you imagine - ’

‘I can imagine all too well. I can also imagine the wrath of the Reichsmarshal. The second truck, God knows why, has been delayed. We stay.’

He turned and looked along the quay where groups of men were hurriedly unloading boxes from a military truck and staggering with them across the quay and up the gangway to an opened hatchway for’ard of the bridge. Small boxes but inordinately heavy: they were, unmistakably, the oaken chests that had been looted from the Greek monastery. No-one had to exhort those men to greater effort: they, too, knew all about the Lancasters and were as conscious as any of the imminent danger, the threat to their lives.

A bell rang on the bridge. Captain Reinhardt lifted a phone, listened then turned to Von Manteuffel.

‘A top priority call from Berlin, General. You can take it from here or privately below.’

‘Here will do,’ Von Manteuffel said. He took the phone from Reinhardt. ‘Ah! Colonel Spaatz.’

‘We fight to the death,’ Spaatz said. ‘The Russians are at the gates of Berlin.’

‘My God! So soon?’ Von Manteuffel appeared to be genuinely upset at the news as, indeed, in the circumstances, he had every right to be. ‘My blessings on you, Colonel Spaatz. I know you will do your duty by the Fatherland.’

‘As will every true German.’ Spaatz’s tone, as clearly overheard by Captain Reinhardt, was a splendid amalgam of resolution and resignation. ‘We fall where we stand. The last plane out leaves in five minutes.’

‘My hopes and prayers are with you, my dear Heinrich. Heil Hitler!’

Von Manteuffel handed back the phone, looked out towards the quay, stiffened then turned urgently towards the captain.

‘Look there! The second truck has just arrived. Every man you can spare for the job!’

‘Every man I can spare for the job is already on the job.’ Captain Reinhardt seemed oddly resigned. ‘They all want to live just as much as you and I do.’

High above the North Sea the air thundered and reverberated to the throbbing roar of scores of aero engines. On the flight deck of the point plane of the Lancaster squadrons, the captain turned to his navigator.

‘Our E.T.A. over target area?’

‘Twenty-two minutes,’ the navigator said. ‘Heaven help those poor sods in Wilhelmshaven tonight.’

‘Never mind about the poor sods in Wilhelmshaven,’ the captain said. ‘Spare a thought for us poor sods up here. We must be on their screens by now.’

At that precise instant another aircraft, a Junkers 88, was approaching Wilhelmshaven from the east. There were only two people aboard, which seemed a poor turn-out for what was supposed to be the last plane out of Berlin. Colonel Spaatz, seated beside the pilot, looked uncommonly nervous and unhappy, a state of mind that was not induced by the fact that their Junkers was being almost continuously bracketed by exploding anti-aircraft shells - practically the entire length of their flight lay over what was now Allied-occupied territory. Colonel Spaatz had other things on his mind. He glanced anxiously at his watch and turned impatiently to the pilot.

‘Faster, man! Faster!’

‘Impossible, Colonel.’

Both troopers and seamen were working in a frenzy of activity to transfer the remaining treasure chests from the second military truck to the submarine. Suddenly, the air raid warning sirens began their ululating banshee wailing. As if by command, and in spite of the fact that they had known this was inevitable, the workers stopped and looked up fearfully into the night sky. Then, once more, again as if by command, they resumed their frantic efforts. It would have appeared impossible that they could have improved upon their previous work-rate but this they unquestionably did. It is one thing to be almost certain that the enemy may appear at any time: it is quite another to have the last lingering vestiges of hope vanish and know that the Lancasters are upon you.

Five minutes later the first bomb fell.

Fifteen minutes later the Wilhelmshaven naval base appeared to be on fire. Clearly, this was no run-of-the-mill raid. By this time Von Manteuffel could have ordered the most powerful arc-lamps, searchlights if necessary, to be switched on and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. The entire dock area was an inferno of dense and evil-smelling smoke shot through with great columns of flame, through which shadowy Dante-esque figures moved as in some nameless nightmare, seemingly as oblivious of their surroundings as they were of the screaming aero engines, the ear-numbing explosion of bombs, the sharp whip-like cracks of heavy anti-aircraft fire, the ceaseless stuttering of machine-guns, although what the machine-guns hoped to achieve was difficult to imagine. Through all this the S.S. men and the seamen, reduced now, despite all their will to the contrary, to almost zombie slow motion by the increasingly heavy burden of the chests, continued their by now fatalistic loading of the submarine.

On the conning-tower of the submarine both Von Manteuffel and Captain Reinhardt were coughing harshly as the dense and evil-smelling smoke from the burning oil tanks enveloped them. Tears streamed down the cheeks of both men.

Captain Reinhardt said: ‘God’s sake, that last one was a ten-tonner. And straight on top of the U-boat pens. Concrete ten feet thick, twenty, what does it matter? There can’t be a man left alive there now, the concussion would have killed them all. In heaven’s name, General, let’s go. We’ve had the devil’s own luck till now. We can come back when it’s all over.’

‘Look, my dear Captain, the air raid is at its height now. Try moving out of the harbour now, a slow business as you know, and you have as good a chance of being blown out of the water as you have alongside the quay here.’

‘Maybe so, Herr General, maybe so. But at least we’d be doing something.’ Reinhardt paused, then went on: ‘If I may say so without offence, sir, surely you must know that a captain is in command of his own vessel.’

‘Even as a soldier I know that, Captain. I also know that you’re not in command until you have cast off and are under way. We complete loading.’

‘I could be court-martialled for saying this, but you are inhuman, General. The devil rides your back.’

Von Manteuffel nodded. ‘He does, he does.’

At the Wilhelmshaven airfield a dimly seen plane, later identifiable as a Junkers 88, made so violently bumpy a touch-down that its undercarriage could well have collapsed under the impact. The bumpiness was understandable, the drifting smoke being so intense that the pilot could make only a blind guess as to his height above the runway. Under normal conditions he would never have dreamed of attempting so hazardous a landing but the conditions were far from normal. Colonel Spaatz was a man of a highly persuasive cast of mind. Even before the plane had rolled to rest he had the door open, peering anxiously for his waiting transport. When finally he saw it - an open Mercedes staff car - he was aboard it within twenty seconds, urging the driver to make all possible haste.

The smoke surrounding the submarine was, if anything, even denser and more acrid than it had been minutes before although a sudden gusting wind, no doubt the result of the firestorm, gave promise of an early amelioration of the conditions. But choking and half-blinding though the smoke still was it didn’t prevent Von Manteuffel from seeing what, despite his coolly relaxed calm, he had so desperately wanted to see.

‘That’s it, then, Captain Reinhardt, that’s it. The last chest aboard. And now your men aboard, Captain, and let the devil ride on your back.’

Captain Reinhardt was hardly in the frame of mind to require any second bidding. Shouting hoarsely to make himself heard above the still thunderous din, he ordered his men aboard, ropes to be cast off and engines slow ahead. The last of his men were still frantically climbing up the sliding gangway as the submarine inched away from the quayside. It hadn’t moved more than a few feet when the sound of a motor car screeching and skidding to a halt made Von Manteuffel turn sharply and look at the quay.

Spaatz had leapt from the Mercedes while it was still moving. He stumbled, recovered himself, and stared at the still very slowly moving submarine, his face contorted in desperate anxiety.

‘Wolfgang!’ Spaatz’s voice wasn’t a shout, it was a scream. ‘Wolfgang! God’s sake, wait!’ Then the anxiety on his face yielded abruptly to an expression of utter incredulity: Von Manteuffel had a pistol lined up on him. For some seconds Spaatz remained quite still, shocked into a frozen and uncomprehending immobility, then comprehension came with the crack of Von Manteuffel’s pistol and he hurled himself to the ground as a bullet struck only a foot away. Spaatz dragged his Luger from its holster and emptied it after the slowly moving submarine which, apart from giving vent to his feelings, was an otherwise futile gesture as the conning-tower was apparently empty, Von Manteuffel and Captain Reinhardt having obviously and prudently ducked beneath the shelter of the steel walls off which Spaatz’s bullets ricocheted harmlessly. And then, abruptly, the submarine was lost in the swirling banks of smoke.

Spaatz pushed himself to his hands and knees and then stood upright and stared in bitter fury in the direction of the vanished submarine.

‘May your soul rot in hell, Major-General Von Manteuffel,’ Spaatz said softly. ‘The Nazi Party’s funds. The S.S. funds. Part of Hitler’s and Goering’s private fortunes. And now the treasures from Greece. My dear and trusted friend.’

He smiled almost reminiscently.

‘But it’s a small world, Wolfie, my friend, a small world, and I’ll find you. Besides, the Third Reich is gone. A man must have something to live for.’

Unhurriedly, he reloaded his Luger, brushed the mud and moisture from his clothes and walked steadily towards the Mercedes staff car.

The pilot was in his seat, poring over a chart, when Spaatz clambered aboard the Junkers 88 and took his seat beside him. The pilot looked at him in mild astonishment.

Spaatz said: ‘Your tanks?’

‘Full. I - I didn’t expect you, Colonel. I was about to leave for Berlin.’

‘Madrid.’

‘Madrid?’ This time the astonishment was more than mild. ‘But my orders - ’

‘Here are your new orders,’ Spaatz said. He produced his Luger.

CHAPTER ONE

The cabin of the thirty-seater aircraft was battered, scruffy, unclean and more than a little noisome, which pretty accurately reflected the general appearance of the passengers, who would never have made it to the ranks of the international jet-set. Two of them could have been classified as exceptions or at least as being different from the others although neither of them would have made the jet-set division either, lacking, as they did, the pseudo-aristocratic veneer of your true wealthy and idle layabout. One, who called himself Edward Hiller—in this remote area of southern Brazil it was considered poor form to go by your own given name—was around thirty-five, thickset, fair-haired, hard-faced, obviously European or American and dressed in tan bush-drills. He seemed to spend most of his time in moodily examining the scenery, which, in truth, was hardly worth the examining, inasmuch as it duplicated tens of thousands of square miles in that virtually unknown part of the world: all that was to be seen was an Amazonian tributary meandering its way through the endless green of the rain forest of the Planalto de Mato Grosso. The second exception—again because he seemed not unacquainted with the basic principles of hygiene-claimed to be called Serrano, was dressed in a reasonably off-white suit, was about the same age as Hiller, slender, black-haired, black-moustached, swarthy and could have been Mexican. He wasn’t examining the scenery: he was examining Hiller, and closely at that.

‘We are about to land at Romono.’ The loudspeaker was scratchy, tinny and the words almost indistinguishable.

‘Please fasten seat-belts.’

The plane banked, lost altitude rapidly and made its approach directly above and along the line of the river. Several hundred feet below the flight-path a small, open outboard motorboat was making its slow way upstream.

This craft—on closer inspection a very dilapidated craft indeed—had three occupants. The largest of the three, one John Hamilton, was tall, broad-shouldered, powerfully built and about forty years of age. He had keen brown eyes, but that was about the only identifiable feature of his face as he was uncommonly dirty, dishevelled and unshaven, giving the impression that he had recently endured some harrowing ordeal, an impression heightened by the fact that his filthy clothes were torn and his face, neck and shoulders were liberally blood-stained. Comparatively, his two companions were presentable. They were lean, wiry and at least ten years younger than Hamilton. Clearly of Latin stock, their olive-tinged faces were lively, humorous and intelligent and they looked so much alike that they could have been identical twins, which they were. For reasons best known to themselves they liked to be known as Ramon and Navarro. They considered Hamilton—whose given name was, oddly enough, Hamilton—with critical and speculative eyes.

Ramon said: ‘You look bad.’

Navarro nodded his agreement. ‘Anyone can see he’s been through a lot. But do you think he looks bad enough?’

‘Perhaps not,’ Ramon said judicially. ‘A soupçon, perhaps. A little touch here, a little touch there.’ He leaned forward and proceeded to widen some of the already existing rents in Hamilton’s clothing. Navarro stooped, touched some small animal lying on the floorboards, brought up a bloodied hand and added a few more artistically decorative crimson touches to Hamilton’s face, neck and chest then leaned back to examine his handiwork critically. He appeared more than satisfied with the result of his creative workmanship.

‘My God!’ He shook his head in sorrowful admiration. ‘You really have had it rough, Mr Hamilton.’

The faded, peeling sign on the airport building-hardly more than a shack—read: ‘Welcome to Romono International Airport’ which was, in its own way, a tribute to the blind optimism of the person who had authorised it or the courage of the man who had painted it as no ‘international’ plane had ever landed or ever would land there, not only because no-one in his right senses would ever voluntarily come from abroad to visit Romono in the first place but primarily because the single grass runway was so short that no aircraft designed later than the forty-year-old DC3 could possibly hope to land there.

The aircraft that had been making the downriver approach landed and managed, not without some difficulty, to stop just short of the ramshackle terminal. The passengers disembarked and made for the waiting airport bus that was to take them into town.

Serrano kept a prudent ten passengers behind Hiller but was less fortunate when they boarded the bus. He found himself four seats ahead of Hiller and therefore was in no position to observe him any more. Hiller was now observing Serrano, very thoughtfully.

Hamilton’s boat was now closing in on the river bank. Hamilton said: ‘However humble, there’s no place like home.’

Using the word ‘humble’ Hamilton was guilty of a grave understatement. Romono was, quite simply, a jungle slum and an outstandingly malodorous example of the genre. On the left bank of the aptly named Rio da Morte, it stood partly on a filled-in, miasmic swamp, partly in a clearing that had been painfully hacked out from a forest and jungle that pressed in menacingly on every side, anxious to reclaim its own. The town looked as if it might contain perhaps three thousand inhabitants: probably there were double that number as three or four persons to a room represented the accommodation norm of Romono. A typically sleazy end-of-the-line—only there was no line-frontier town, it was squalid, decaying and singularly unprepossessing, a maze of narrow, haphazardly criss-crossing alleys—by no stretch of the imagination could they have been called streets-with the buildings ranging from dilapidated wooden shacks through wine-shops, gambling dens and bordellos to a large and largely false-fronted hotel rejoicing, according to a garish blue neon sign, in the name of the OTEL DE ARIS, some misfortune having clearly overtaken the missing capitals H and P.

The waterfront was splendidly in keeping with the town. It was difficult to say where the river bank began for almost all of it was lined with houseboats—there had to be some name for those floating monstrosities—relying for their construction almost entirely on tar paper. Between the houseboats were piles of driftwood, oil cans, bottles, garbage, sewage and great swarms of flies. The stench was overwhelming. Hygiene, had it ever come to Romono, had gratefully abandoned it a long time ago.

The three men reached the bank, disembarked and tied up the boat. Hamilton said: ‘When you’re ready, take off for Brasilia. I’ll join you in the Imperial.’

Navarro said: ‘Draw your marble bath, my lord? Lay out your best tuxedo?’

‘Something like that. Three suites, the best. After all, we’re not paying for it.’

‘Who is?’

‘Mr Smith. He doesn’t know it yet, of course, but he’ll pay.’

Ramon said curiously: ‘You know this Mr Smith? Met him, I mean?’

‘No.’

‘Then might it not be wise to wait for the invitation first?’

‘No reason to wait. Invitation’s guaranteed. Our friend must be nearly out of his mind by now.’

‘You’re being downright cruel to that poor Mr Hiller,’ Navarro said reproachfully. ‘He must have gone out of his mind during the three days we stayed with your Muscia Indian friends.’

‘Not him. He’s sure he knows he knows. When you get to the Imperial keep close to a phone and away from your usual dives.’

Ramon looked hurt. ‘There are no dives in our fair capital, Mr Hamilton.’

‘You’ll soon put that right.’ Hamilton left them and made his way in the gathering dusk through winding, ill-lit alleyways until he had passed clear through the town and emerged on its western perimeter. Here, on the outskirts of the town and on the very edge of the forest and jungle, stood what had once passed for a log cabin but was now no more than a hut and even at that, one would have thought, a hut scarcely fit for animal far less human habitation: the grass-and weed-covered walls leaned in at crazy angles, the door was badly warped and the single window had hardly an unbroken pane of glass left in it. Hamilton, not without some difficulty, managed to wrench open the creaking door and passed inside.

He located and lit a guttering oil lamp which gave off light and smoke in about equal proportions. From what little could be seen from the fitful yellow illumination, the interior of the hut was a faithful complement of the exterior. The hut was very sparsely furnished with the bare essentials for existence—a dilapidated bed, a couple of bent-wood chairs in no better condition than the bed, a warped deal table with two drawers, some shelving and a cooker with some traces of the original black enamel showing under the almost total covering of brown rust. On the face of it, Hamilton didn’t care too much for the sybaritic life.

He sat wearily on the bed which, predictably, sagged and creaked in an alarmingly disconcerting fashion. He reached under the bed, came up with a bottle of some undetermined liquid, drank deeply from the neck and set the bottle down somewhat unsteadily on the table.

Hamilton was not unobserved. A figure had appeared just outside the window and was peering inside from a prudent distance, a probably unnecessary precaution. It is more difficult to see from a lighted area to a darkened one than the other way round and the windows were so filthy that it was difficult to see through them anyway. The watcher’s face was indistinct, but the identity of the man not hard to guess: Serrano was probably the only man in Romono who wore a suit, far less an off-white one. Serrano was smiling, a smile composed of an odd mixture of amusement, satisfaction and contempt.

Hamilton extracted two leather pouches from the torn remains of his buttoned pockets and poured the contents of one of them into the palm of his hand, staring in rapt admiration at the handful of rough-cut diamonds which he let trickle onto the table. With an unsteady hand he fortified himself with another drink then opened the other pouch and emptied the contents onto the table. They were coins, glittering golden coins; all told there must have been at least fifty of them.

Gold, it is said, has attracted men from the beginning of recorded time. It unquestionably attracted Serrano. Seemingly oblivious of the possibility of discovery, he had moved closer to the window, so close, indeed, that a keen-eyed and observant person inside the hut might well have seen the pale blur of his face. But Hamilton was being neither keen-eyed nor observant: he just stared in apparent fascination at the treasure before him. So did Serrano. The amusement and contempt had disappeared from his expression, the unblinking eyes seemed huge in his face and his tongue licked his lips almost continuously.

Hamilton took a camera from his rucksack, removed a cassette of exposed film, examined it closely for a moment and, in doing so, dislodged two diamonds which fell and rolled under the table, apparently unobserved. He put the cassette on a shelf beside some other cassettes and cheap camera equipment then turned his attention to the coins again. He picked one up and examined it carefully, almost as if seeing it for the first time.

The coin, indisputably gold, did not appear to be of any South American origin—the likeness of the engraved head was unmistakably of classical Greek or Latin origin. He looked at the obverse side: the characters, clear and unblemished, were unmistakably Greek. Hamilton sighed, lowered some more of the rapidly diminishing contents of the bottle, returned the coins to the pouch, paused as if in thought, shook some coins into his hand, put them in a trouser pocket, put the pouch into one of his buttoned shirt pockets, returned the diamonds to their pouch and his other buttoned pocket, had a last drink, turned out the oil lamp and left. He made no attempt to lock the door for the sufficient reason that, even with the door as fully closed as it would go, there was still a two-inch gap between the key bolt and door jamb. Although it was by now almost dark he did not appear to require any light to see where he was going: within a minute he vanished into the shanty-town maze of corrugated iron and tar-paper shacks which formed the salubrious suburbs of Romono.

Serrano waited a prudent five minutes, then entered, a small flashlight in his hand. He lit the oil lamp, placing it on a shelf where it could not be seen directly from the outside then, using his flashlight, located the fallen diamonds under the table and placed them on the tabletop. He crossed to the shelves, took the cassette which Hamilton had placed there, replaced it with another from the pile of cassettes and had just put the cassette on the table beside the diamonds when he became suddenly and uncomfortably conscious of the fact that he was not alone. He whirled around and found himself staring into the muzzle of a gun expertly and unwaveringly held in Hiller’s hand.

‘Well, well,’ Hiller said genially. ‘A collector, I see. Your name?’

‘Serrano.’ Serrano didn’t look any too happy. ‘Why are you pointing that gun at me?’

‘Calling cards you can’t get in Romono, so I use this instead. Are you carrying a gun, Serrano?’

‘No.’

‘If you are and I find it I’m going to kill you.’ Hiller was still geniality itself. ‘Are you carrying a gun, Serrano?’

Serrano reached slowly for an inside pocket. Hiller said: ‘The classic way, of course, my friend. Finger and thumb on the gun barrel then gently on the table.’

Serrano carefully, as directed, produced a small snubnosed automatic and laid it on the table. Hiller advanced and pocketed it, along with the diamonds and the cassette.

‘You’ve been following me all day,’ Hiller said consideringly. ‘For hours before we boarded that plane. And I saw you the previous day and the day before that. In fact, I’ve seen you quite a few times in the past weeks. You really should get yourself another suit, Serrano, a shadower in a white suit is no shadower at all.’ His tone changed in a fashion that Serrano clearly didn’t care much for. ‘Why are you following me, Serrano?’

‘It’s not you I’m after,’ Serrano said. ‘We’re both interested in the same man.’

Hiller lifted his gun a perceptible inch. If he’d lifted it only one millimetre it would have carried sufficient significance for Serrano who was in an increasingly apprehensive state of mind. ‘I’m not sure,’ Hiller said, ‘that I like being followed around.’

‘Jesus!’ Serrano’s apprehension had become very marked indeed. ‘You’d kill a man for a thing like that?’

‘What are vermin to me?’ Hiller said carelessly. ‘But you can stop knocking your knees together. I’ve no intention of killing you—at least, not yet. I wouldn’t kill a man just for following me around. But I wouldn’t draw the line at shattering a kneecap so that you couldn’t totter around after me for a few months to come.’

‘I won’t talk to anyone,’ Serrano said fervently. ‘I swear to God I won’t.’

‘Aha! That’s interesting. If you were going to talk who would you talk to, Serrano?’

‘Nobody. Nobody. Who would I talk to? That was just a manner of speaking.’

‘Was it now? But if you were to talk, what would you tell them?’

‘What could I tell them? All I know—well, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure—is that Hamilton is into something big. Gold, diamonds, something like that—he’s found a cache somewhere. I know that you’re on his track, Mr Hiller. That’s why I am following you.’

‘You know my name. How come?’

‘You’re a pretty important man around these parts, Mr Hiller.’ Serrano was trying to be ingratiating but he wasn’t very good at it. A sudden thought appeared to occur to him for he brightened and said: ‘Seeing we’re both after the same man, Mr Hiller, we could be partners.’

‘Partners!’

‘I can help you, Mr Hiller.’ Serrano was eagerness itself but whether from the prospect of partnership or the understandable desire not to be crippled by Hiller it was difficult to say. ‘I can help you. I swear I can.’

‘A terrified rat will swear to anything.’

‘I can prove what I say.’ Serrano seemed to have regained a measure of confidence. ‘I can take you to within five miles of the Lost City.’

Hiller’s initial reaction was one of astonishment and suspicion.

‘What do you know about it?’ He paused and recovered himself, ‘Well, I suppose everybody’s heard about the Lost City. Hamilton’s always shooting off his mouth about it.’

‘Mebbe so. Mebbe so.’ Serrano, sensing the change in the atmosphere, was almost relaxed now. ‘But how many have followed him four times to within a few miles of it?’ If Serrano had been at the gambling table he’d have leaned back in his chair, his trump card played.

Hiller had become very interested indeed, even to the extent of lowering, then pocketing, his own gun.

‘You have a rough idea where it is?’

‘Rough?’ Immediate danger past, Serrano invested himself with an air very close to benign superiority. ‘Close is more like it. Very close.’

‘Then if you’ve come all that close why don’t you go looking for it yourself?’

‘Look for it myself!’ Serrano looked almost shocked. ‘Mr Hiller, you must be out of your mind. You don’t understand what you’re talking about. Have you any idea what the Indian tribes in the area are like?’

‘Pacified, according to the Indian Protection Service.’

‘Pacified?’ Serrano gave a contemptuous laugh. ‘Pacified? There isn’t enough money in the country to make those desk-bound pansies leave those lovely air-conditioned offices in Brasilia and go see for themselves. They’re terrified, just plain terrified. Even their field-agents—and there are some pretty tough cookies among them—are terrified and won’t go near the area. Well, four of them did go there once some years back, but none of them ever returned. And if they’re terrified, Mr Hiller, I’m terrified too.’

‘That creates quite a problem.’ Not surprisingly, Hiller had become quite thoughtful. ‘An approach problem. What’s so special about those bloodthirsty people? There are many tribes who don’t care all that much for people from the outside, what you and I would regard as other civilised people.’ Apparently Hiller saw nothing incongruous in categorising himself and Serrano as ‘civilised’.

’Special? I’ll tell you what’s special about them. They’re the most savage tribes in the Mato Grosso. Correction. They’re the most savage tribes in the whole of South America. Not one of them has moved out of the Stone Age so far. In fact, they must be a damned sight worse than the Stone Age people. If the Stone Age people had been like them they’d have wiped each other out—when those tribes up there have nothing better to do, they just go around massacring each other—to keep their hand in, I suppose—and there would have been no human left on this planet today.

‘There are three tribes up there, Mr Hiller. First, there are the Chapates. God knows they’re bad enough, but all they do is use their blowpipes, pump a few curare-tipped poison darts into you and leave you lying there. Almost civilised, you might say. The Horenas are a bit different. They use darts that only knock you unconscious; then you’re dragged back to their village and tortured to death—this, I understand, can take a day or two-then they cut off your head and shrink it. But when it comes to sheer savagery, the Muscias are the pick of the bunch—I don’t think any white man has ever seen them. But one or two of the outside Indians who have met them and survived say that they’re cannibals and if they see what they regard as being a particularly appetising meal they dump him alive into boiling water. Something like lobsters, you know. Go looking for a lost city surrounded by all those monsters? Why don’t you go looking? I can point you in the right direction. Me, I only like cooking pots from the outside.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll have to do a little more thinking on that one.’ Absently, almost, he handed Serrano back his gun. Hiller was no mean psychologist when it came to gauging the extent of a man’s cupidity. Hiller said: ‘Where do you live?’

‘A room in the Hotel de Paris.’

‘If you saw me in the bar there?’

‘I’ve never seen you before in my life.’

An unbiased guidebook to the better taverns of South America would have had some difficulty in finding the space to list the bar of the Hotel de Paris, Romono, in its pages. The bar was not a thing of beauty. The indeterminately coloured paint, what little there was of it, was peeling and blistered, the splintered wooden floor was blackened and filthy and the rough-cut softwood bar bore the imprint of the passage of time. A thousand spilt drinks, a thousand stubbed-out cigars. It was not a place for the fastidious.

The clientele, fortunately, were not of an overly fastidious nature. Exclusively male and dressed for the most part in scarecrow’s clothing, they were rough, uncouth, ill-favoured and hard-drinking. Especially hard-drinking. As many customers as possible—and there were many—pushed up to the bar and consumed huge quantities of what could only be described as rot-gut whisky. There was a scattering of bentwood chairs and rickety tables, largely unoccupied. The citizens of Romono were mostly vertical drinkers. Among the currently vertical were both Hiller and Serrano, separated from each other by a prudent distance.

In such surroundings, then, the entrance of Hamilton did not provoke the horror-stricken reaction that it would have in the plusher caravanserais of Brasilia or Rio. Even so, his appearance was sufficient to cause a marked drop in the conversational level. With his tangled hair, a week’s growth of matted and bloodied beard, and ripped and blood-stained shirt he looked as if he had just returned from the scene of a successfully if messily executed triple murder. His expression-as was indeed customary with him—lacked anything in the way of encouragement towards social chitchat. He ignored the stares and although the crowd before the bar was at least four deep a path opened magically before him. In Romono, such a path always opened for John Hamilton, a man very obviously held, and for a variety of good reasons, in considerable respect by his fellow citizens.

A large, very fat barman, the boss of the four men serving nonstop behind the bar, hurried forward towards Hamilton. His egg-bald pate gleamed in the light: inevitably, he was known as Curly.

‘Mr Hamilton!’

‘Whisky.’

‘God’s name, Mr Hamilton. What happened?’

‘You deaf?’

‘Right away, Mr Hamilton.’

Curly reached under the bar, produced a special bottle and poured a generous measure. That Hamilton should be thus privileged apparently aroused no resentment among the onlookers, not so much because of their innate courtesy, of which they had none, but because Hamilton had demonstrated in the past his reaction to those who interfered in what he regarded as his own private business: he’d only had to do it once, but once had been enough.

Curly’s plump, genial face was alive with curiosity as were those of the bystanders. But Hamilton was not a man to share confidences as everyone was well aware. He tossed two Greek coins on to the bar. Hiller, who was standing close by, observed this and his face grew very still indeed. His face was not the only one to assume sudden immobility.

‘Bank’s shut,’ Hamilton said. ‘Those do?’

Curly picked up the two shining coins and examined them with an air of unfeigned reverence.

‘Will those do? Will those do! Yes, Mr Hamilton, I think those will do. Gold! Pure gold! This is going to buy you an awful lot of Scotch, Mr Hamilton, an awful lot. One of those I’m going to keep for myself. Yes, sir. The other I’ll take and have valued in the bank tomorrow.’

‘Up to you,’ Hamilton said indifferently.

Curly examined the coins more closely and said: ‘Greek, aren’t they?’

‘Looks like,’ Hamilton said with the same indifference. He drank some of his Scotch and looked at Curly with a speculative eye. ‘You wouldn’t, of course, be dreaming of asking me if I went all the way to Greece to get those?’

‘Certainly not,’ Curly said hastily. ‘Certainly not. Will I will I get the doctor, Mr Hamilton?’

‘Thanks. But it’s not my blood.’

‘How many of them? Who did this to you—I mean, who did you do it to?’

‘Just two. Horenas. Same again.’

Although most people at the bar were still looking at Hamilton or the coins, the hubbub of conversation was slowly resuming. Hiller, glass in hand, elbowed his purposeful way towards Hamilton who regarded Hiller’s approach with his customary lack of enthusiasm.

Hiller said: ‘I hope you’ll excuse me. I don’t want to intrude, Hamilton. I understand that after tangling with head-hunters a man would like some peace and quiet. But what I’d like to say to you is important. Believe me. Could I have a word?’

‘About what?’ Hamilton’s tone was less than encouraging. ‘And I don’t like discussing business—I assume it is business—with a dozen pairs of ears hanging on to every word I say.’

Hiller looked around. Inevitably, their conversation was attracting attention. Hamilton paused for a moment, as if in thought, then picked up his bottle, jerked his head and led the way to the corner table most remote from the bar. Hamilton, as always, looked aggressive and forbidding and his tone matched his expression.

‘Out with it,’ he said, ‘and no shilly-shallying.’

Hiller took no offence. ‘Suits me. That’s the way I like it, the only way to do business. I’ll lay it on the line. It’s my belief you’ve found this Lost City of yours. I know a man who’d pay you a six-figure fee to take him there. That straight enough for you?’

‘If you throw away that rot-gut rubbish you have there I’ll give you some decent Scotch.’ Hiller did as requested and Hamilton topped up both glasses. Hiller was clearly aware that Hamilton was less interested in dispensing hospitality than in having time to think and from the just perceptibly slurred note in Hamilton’s voice it could well have been that he could be taking just slightly longer than normal to think quickly and clearly.

‘Well, I’ll say this,’ Hamilton said, ‘you don’t beat about the bush. Who says I’ve found the Lost City?’

‘Nobody. How could they? No-one knows where you go when you leave Romono—except maybe those two young sidekicks of yours.’ Hiller smiled thinly. ‘They don’t look like the type that would talk too much.’

‘Sidekicks?’

‘Oh, come off it, Hamilton. The twins. Everybody in Romono knows them. But it would be my guess that you would be the only person to know the exact location. So, okay, I’m only going on a hunch—and a couple of brand new golden coins that may be a thousand years old, two thousand. Just supposing.’

‘Supposing what?’

‘Supposing you’d found it, of course.’

‘Cruzeiros?’

Hiller kept his face impassive, a rather remarkable feat in view of the wave of elation that had just swept through him. When a man talks money it means that he is prepared to dicker, to make a deal, and Hamilton had the means to bargain. Hamilton had his quid pro quo and that could mean only one thing—he knew where the Lost City was. He had his fish hooked, Hiller thought exultantly: now all he had to do was gaff and land him. That might well take time, Hiller knew, but he had every confidence in himself: he rather fancied his prowess as a fisherman.

‘U.S. dollars,’ Hiller said.

Hamilton thought this over for a few moments then said: ‘An attractive proposition. Very attractive. But I don’t accept propositions from strangers. You see, Hiller, I don’t know you, what you are, what you do, and how come you are empowered to make this proposition.’

‘A con man, possibly?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Oh, come. We’ve had a drink a dozen times in the past months. Strangers? Hardly. We all know why you’ve been searching those damned forests for the past four months and other huge stretches of the Amazon and Paraná basins for the past four years. For the fabled Lost City of the Mato Grosso-if that is indeed where it is—for the golden people who lived there—who may still live there—most of all for the fabled man who found it. Huston. Dr Hannibal Huston. The famous explorer who vanished into the forests all those many years ago and was never seen again.’

‘You talk in clichés,’ Hamilton said.

Hiller smiled. ‘What newspaperman doesn’t?’

‘Newspaperman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Odd. I’d have put you down for something else.’

Hiller laughed. ‘A con? A convict on the lam? Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid.’ He leaned forward, suddenly serious. ‘Listen. As I said, we all know why you’re out here—no offence, Hamilton, but goodness knows you’ve told everyone often enough—although why I don’t know-I’d have thought you’d have kept it secret from everybody.’

‘Three good reasons, my friend. In the first place, there has to be some reason to account for my presence here. Secondly, anybody will tell you that I know the Mato Grosso better than any other white man and no one would dream of following me where I go. Finally, the more people who know what I’m after the greater the likelihood that some person, some time and in some place, will drop a hint or a clue that could be invaluable to me.’

‘I was under the impression that you didn’t require hints or clues any longer.’

‘That’s as maybe. Just you go ahead and form any impressions you like.’

‘Well, all right. So. Ninety-nine per cent of the people laugh at your wild notions, as they call them—though God knows there’s not a man in Romono would dare say it to your face. But I belong to the one per cent. I believe you. I further believe that your search is over and that the dream has come true. I’d like to share in a dream, I’d like to help a man, my employer, make his dream come true.’

‘I’m deeply moved,’ Hamilton said sardonically. ‘I’m sorry—well, no, I’m not really—but something gives here that I just can’t figure. And besides, Hiller, you are an unknown quantity.’

‘Is the McCormick-Mackenzie International?’

‘Is it what?’

‘Unknown.’

‘Of course not. One of the biggest multinational companies in the Americas. Probably the usual bunch of crooks using the usual screen of a battery of similarly crooked international lawyers to bend the laws any which way that suits them.’

Hiller took a deep breath, manfully restraining himself. ‘Because I’m in the position of asking a favour of you, Hamilton, I won’t take exception to that. In point of fact the record of McCormick-Mackenzie is impeccable. They have never been investigated, far less impeached on any count.’

‘Smart lawyers. Like I said.’

‘You can be glad that Joshua Smith is not here to hear you say that.’

Hamilton was unimpressed. ‘He the owner?’

‘Yes. And the Chairman and Managing Director.’

‘The multi-millionaire industrialist? If we’re talking about the same man?’

‘We are.’

‘And the owner of the largest newspaper and magazine chain in the Americas. Well, well, well.’ He broke off and stared at Hiller. ‘So that’s why you—’

‘Exactly.’

‘So. He’s your boss, a newspaper magnate. And you’re one of his newspapermen, and a pretty senior one at that, I would guess—I mean, he wouldn’t send out a cub reporter on a story like this. Very well. Your connections, your credentials established. But I still don’t see—’

‘What don’t you see?’

‘This man. Joshua Smith. A multi-millionaire. A multi-billionaire. Anyway, as rich as Croesus. What’s left on earth for him that he doesn’t already have? What more can a man like that want?’ Hamilton took a long pull at his whisky. ‘In short, what’s in it for him?’

‘You are a suspicious bastard, aren’t you, Hamilton? Money? Of course not. Are you in it for the money? Of course not. A man like you could make money anywhere. No, and again no. Like you—and, if I may say, a little bit like myself-he’s a man with a dream, a dream that’s become an obsession. I don’t know which fascinates him the more, the Huston case or the Lost City, although I don’t suppose you can really separate the two. I mean, you can’t have the one without the other.’ He paused and smiled, almost dreamily. ‘And what a story for his publishing empire.’

‘And that, I take it, is your part of the dream?’

‘What else?’

Hamilton considered, using some more Scotch to help him with his consideration. ‘Mustn’t rush things, mustn’t rush things. A man needs time to think about these things.’

‘Of course. How much time?’

‘Two hours?’

‘Sure. My place. The Negresco.’ Hiller looked around him and gave a mock shudder which could almost have been real. ‘It’s almost as good as it is here.’

Hamilton drained his glass, rose, picked up his bottle, nodded and left. No-one could have accused him of being under the weather but his gait didn’t appear to be quite as steady as it might have been. Hiller looked around until he located Serrano, who had been looking straight at him. Hiller glanced after the departing Hamilton, looked back at Serrano and nodded almost imperceptibly. Serrano did the same in return and disappeared after Hamilton.

Romono had not yet got around to, and was unlikely ever to get around to, street-lighting, with the result that the alleyways, in the occasional absence of saloons and bordellos fronting on them, tended to be very poorly lit. Hamilton, all trace of his unsteady gait vanished, strode briskly along, clearly unbothered by the fitful or nonexistent lighting. He rounded a corner, carried on a few yards, stopped suddenly and turned into a narrow and almost totally dark alleyway. He didn’t go far into the alley—not more than two feet. He poked his head cautiously out from his narrow niche and peered back along the way he had just come.

He saw no more than he had expected to see. Serrano had just come into view. Serrano, it was clear, wasn’t out for any leisurely evening stroll. He was walking so quickly that he was almost running. Hamilton shrank back into the shadows. He no longer had to depend on his hearing. Serrano was wearing steel-tipped shoes which no doubt he found indispensable for the subtler intricacies of unarmed combat. On a still night Serrano could have been heard a hundred yards away.

Hamilton, no more than another shadow in his shadowy place of concealment, listened to the rapidly approaching footsteps. Serrano, almost running now, looked neither to right nor to left but just peered anxiously ahead in quest of his suddenly and mysteriously vanished quarry. He was still peering anxiously ahead when he passed the alleyway entrance. Hamilton, a shadow detaching itself from the deeper shadow behind, stepped out swiftly and in silence brought his locked hands down on the base of Serrano’s neck. He caught the already unconscious man before he could strike the ground and dragged him into the dark concealment. From Serrano’s breast pocket he removed a well-filled wallet, extracted a gratifying wad of cruzeiro notes, pocketed them, dropped the empty wallet on top of Serrano’s prone form and continued on his way, this time without a backward glance. He had no doubt that Serrano had been on his own.

Back in his tumbledown hut, the guttering oil lamp lit, Hamilton sat on his cot and pondered the reason for his being shadowed. That Serrano had acted under Hiller’s instructions he did not for a moment doubt. He did not think that Serrano had intended to waylay or attack him for he could not doubt that Hiller was almost desperately anxious to have his services and an injured Hamilton would be the last thing he would want on his hands. Nor could robbery have been a motive—although they may well have seen the bulges of the two pouches in his shirt pockets—and Hamilton had been well aware that Serrano had been watching him through the hut window—comparatively petty theft would not have interested Hiller; what he was after was the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow and only he, Hamilton, knew where that rainbow ended.

That Hiller and his boss Smith had dreams Hamilton did not for a moment doubt: what he did doubt, and profoundly, was Hiller’s version of those dreams.

Hiller had wanted to find out if he had been going to contact his two young assistants or other unknown parties. Perhaps he thought that Hamilton might lead him to a larger and worthwhile cache of gold and diamonds. Perhaps he thought Hamilton had gone to make some mysterious phone call. Perhaps anything. On balance, Hamilton thought, it was just because Hiller was of a highly suspicious nature and just wanted to know what, if anything, Hamilton was up to. There could be no other explanation and it seemed pointless to waste further time and thought on it.

Hamilton poured himself a small drink—the nondescript bottle did in fact contain an excellent Highland malt which his friend Curly had obtained for him—and topped it up with some mineral water: the Romono water supply was an excellent specific for those who wished to be laid low with dysentery, cholera, and a variety of other unpleasant tropical diseases.

Hamilton smiled to himself. When Serrano came to and reported his woes to his master, neither he nor Hiller would be in any doubt as to the identity of the assailant responsible for the sore and stiff neck from which Serrano would assuredly be suffering. If nothing else, Hamilton mused, it would teach them to be rather more circumspect and respectful in their future dealings with him. Hamilton had no doubt whatsoever that he would be meeting Serrano—officially—in the very near future and would thereafter be seeing quite a deal of him.

Hamilton took a sip of his drink, dropped to his knees, ran his hand over the floor under the table, found nothing and smiled in satisfaction. He crossed to the shelving, picked up a solitary cassette, examined it carefully and smiled in even wider satisfaction. He drained his glass, turned out the light and headed back into town.

In his room in the Hotel Negresco—the famous hotel in Nice would have cringed at the thought that such a hovel should bear the same name-Hiller was making—or trying to make—a telephone call, his face bearing the unmistakable expression of long-suffering impatience that characterised any person so foolhardy as to try to phone out of Romono. But at long last his patience was rewarded and his face lit up.

‘Aha!’ he said. His voice, understandably, had a note almost of triumph in it. ‘At last, at last! Mr Smith, if you please.’

CHAPTER TWO

The drawing-room of Joshua Smith’s villa—the Villa Haydn in Brasilia—demonstrated beyond all question the vast gulf that lay between a multi-billionaire and the merely rich. The furnishings, mainly Louis XIV and not the shadow of an imitation in sight, the drapes, from Belgium and Malta, the carpets, ancient Persian to the last one, and the pictures, ranging all the way from Dutch Old Masters to the Impressionists, all spoke not only of immense wealth but also a hedonistic determination to use it to its maximum. But for all that vast opulence there was nonetheless displayed an exquisite good taste in that everything matched and blended in something very, very close to perfection. Clearly, no modern interior decorator had been allowed within a mile of the place.

The owner matched up magnificently to all this magnificence. He was a large, well-built and dinner-suited man of late middle age who looked absolutely at home in one of the huge armchairs that he occupied close to a sparkling pine log fire.

Joshua Smith, still dark in both hair and moustache, the one brushed straight back, the other neatly trimmed, was a smooth and urbane man, but not too smooth, not too urbane, much given to smiling and invariably kind and courteous to his inferiors which, in his case, meant just about everybody in sight. With the passage of time, the carefully and painstakingly acquired geniality and urbanity had become second nature to him (although some of the original ruthlessness had had to remain to account for his untold millions). Only a specialist could have detected the extensive plastic surgery that had transformed Smith’s face from what it once had been.

There was another man in his drawing-room, and a young woman. Jack Tracy was a young-middle-aged man, blond, with a pock-marked face and a general air of capable toughness about him. The toughness and capability were undoubtedly there—they had to be for any man to be the general manager of Smith’s vast chain of newspapers and magazines.

Maria Schneider, with her slightly dusky skin and brown eyes, could have been South American, Southern Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. Her hair was the colour of a raven. Whatever her nationality she was indisputably beautiful with a rather inscrutable face but invariably watchful penetrating eyes. She didn’t look kind or sensitive but was both. She looked intelligent and had to be: when not doubling—as rumour had it—as Smith’s mistress she was his private and confidential secretary and it was no rumour that she was remarkably skilled in her official capacity.

The phone rang. Maria answered, told the caller to hold and brought the phone on its extension cord across to Smith’s armchair. He took the phone and listened briefly.

‘Ah, Hiller!’ Smith, unusually for him, leant forward in his armchair. There was anticipation in both his voice and posture. ‘You have, I trust, some encouraging news for me. You have? Good, good, good. Proceed.’

Smith listened in silence to what Hiller had to say, the expression on his face gradually changing from pleasure to the near beatific. It was a measure of the man’s self-control that, although apparently in a near transport of excitement, he refrained from either exclamations, questions or interruptions and heard Hiller through in silence to the end.

‘Excellent!’ Smith was positively jubilant. ‘Truly excellent. Frederik, you have just made me the happiest man in Brazil.’ Although Hiller claimed to be called Edward, his true given name would have appeared to be otherwise. ‘Nor, I assure you, will you have cause to regret this day. My car will await you and your friends at the airport at eleven a.m.’ He replaced the receiver. ‘I said I could wait forever. Forever is today.’

Moments passed while he gazed sightlessly into the flames. Tracy and Maria looked at each other without expression. Smith sighed, gradually bestirred himself, leaned back into his armchair, reached into his pocket, brought out a gold coin, and examined it intently.

‘My talisman,’ he said. He still didn’t appear to be quite with them. ‘Thirty long years I’ve had it and I’ve looked at it every day in those thirty years. Hiller has seen this very coin. He says the ones this man Hamilton has are identical in every way. Hiller is not a man to make mistakes so this can mean only one thing. Hamilton has found what can only be the foot of the rainbow.’

Tracy said: ‘And at the far end of the rainbow lies a pot of gold?’

Smith looked at him without really seeing him. ‘Who cares about the gold?’

There was a long and, for Tracy and Maria, rather uncomfortable silence. Smith sighed again and replaced the coin in his pocket.

‘Another thing,’ Smith went on. ‘Hamilton appears to have stumbled across some sort of an El Dorado.’

‘It seems less and less likely that Hamilton is the kind of man to stumble across anything,’ Maria said. ‘He’s a hunter, a seeker—but never a stumbler. He has sources of information denied other so-called civilised people, especially among the tribes not yet classified as pacified. He starts off with some sort of clue that points him in the right direction then starts quartering the ground, narrowing the area of search until he finally pinpoints what he’s after. The element of chance doesn’t enter into that man’s calculations.’

‘You might be right, my dear,’ Smith said. ‘In fact you’re almost certainly right. Anyway, what matters is that Hiller says that Hamilton seems to have located some diamond hoard.’

Maria said: ‘Part of the war loot?’

‘Overseas investments, my dear, overseas investments. Never war loot. In this case, however, no. They are uncut—rough-cut, rather-Brazilian diamonds. And Hiller is an expert on diamonds—God knows he’s stolen enough in his lifetime. Anyway, it appears that Hamilton has fallen for Hiller’s story, hook, line and sinker—in Hiller’s rather uninspired phrase. Two birds with one stone—he’s found both the European gold and the Brazilian diamonds. Looks as if this is going to be even easier than we thought.’

Tracy looked vaguely troubled. ‘He hasn’t the reputation for being an easy man.’

‘Among the tribes of the Mato Grosso, agreed,’ Smith said. He smiled as if anticipating some future pleasure. ‘But he’s going to find himself in a different kind of jungle here.’

‘Maybe you overlook one thing,’ Maria said soberly. ‘Maybe you’re overlooking the fact that you’ve got to go back into that jungle with him.’

Hiller, in his room in the Hotel Negresco, was studying a gold coin which he held in his hand when he was disturbed by an erratic knock on the door. He pulled out a gun, held it behind his back, crossed to the door and opened it.

Hiller put his gun away: the precaution had been unnecessary. Serrano, both hands clutching the back of his neck, swayed dizzily and practically fell into the room.

‘Brandy!’ Serrano’s voice was a strangled croak.

‘What the hell’s happened to you?’

‘Brandy!’

‘Brandy coming up,’ Hiller said resignedly. He gave a generous double to Serrano who downed it in a single gulp. He had just finished his third brandy and was pouring out his tale of woe when another sharp rat-tat-tat came on the door, this knocking far from erratic. Again Hiller took his precautionary measures and again they proved unnecessary. The Hamilton who stood in the doorway was scarcely recognisable as the Hamilton of two hours previously. Two hours in the Hotel de Paris’s grandiloquently named Presidential Suite-no president had ever or would ever stay there, but it had the only bath in the hotel not corroded with rust—had transformed him. He had bathed and was clean-shaven. He wore a fresh set of khaki drills, a fresh khaki shirt without a rent in sight and even a pair of gleaming new shoes.

Hiller glanced at his watch. ‘Two hours precisely. You are very punctual.’

‘The politeness of princes.’ Hamilton entered the room and caught sight of Serrano who was busy pouring himself another large brandy. By this time it was difficult to judge whether he was suffering the more from the effects of the blow or the brandy. Holding the glass in one rather unsteady hand and massaging the back of his neck with the other, he continued the restorative process without seeming to notice Hamilton.

Hamilton said: ‘Who’s this character?’

‘Serrano,’ Hiller said. ‘An old friend.’ It would have been impossible to guess from Hiller’s casual off-handedness that he’d met Serrano for the first time only that evening. ‘Don’t worry. He can be trusted.’

‘Delighted to hear it,’ Hamilton said. He couldn’t remember the month or the year when he last trusted anybody. ‘Makes a welcome change in this day and age.’ He peered at Serrano with the air of a concerned and kindly healer. ‘Looks to me as if he’s coming down with something.’

‘He’s been down,’ Hiller said. ‘Mugged.’ He was observing Hamilton closely but could well have spared himself the trouble.

‘Mugged?’ Hamilton looked mildly astonished. ‘He was walking the streets this time of night?’

‘Yes.’

‘And alone?’

‘Yes,’ Hiller said and added in what he probably regarded as a rather pointed fashion: ‘You walk alone at night.’

‘I know Romono,’ Hamilton said. ‘Much more importantly, Romono knows me.’ He looked pityingly at Serrano. ‘I’ll bet you weren’t even walking in the middle of the road—and I’ll bet you’re that much lighter by the weight of your wallet.’

Serrano nodded, scowled, said nothing and got back to his self-medication.

‘Life’s a great teacher,’ Hamilton said absently. ‘But it beats me how a citizen of Romono could be so damned stupid. Okay, Hiller, when do we leave?’

Hiller had already turned towards a glass-fronted wall cupboard. ‘Scotch?’ he said. ‘No fire-water. Guaranteed.’ He showed Hamilton a famous proprietary brand of Scotch with the seal unbroken.

‘Thanks.’

Hiller’s gesture had not been motivated by an undiluted spirit of hospitality. He had turned his back on Hamilton to conceal what he knew must have been a momentary flash of triumph in his face; moreover, this was definitely a moment for celebration. Back in the bar of the Hotel de Paris he had been sure that he had his fish hooked: now he had it gaffed and landed.

‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘We leave at first light tomorrow.’

‘How do we go?’

‘Bush plane to Cuiabá.’ He paused then added apologetically: ‘Rickety old bus of cardboard and wire but it’s never come down yet. After that, Smith’s private jet. That’s something else again. It will be waiting for us at Cuiabá.’

‘How do you know?’

Hiller nodded towards the phone. ‘Carrier pigeon.’

‘Pretty sure of yourself, weren’t you?’

‘Not really. We like to arrange things in advance. I just go on probabilities.’ Hiller shrugged. ‘One call to fix things, then another call to cancel. Then from Cuiabá to Smith’s private airfield in Brasilia.’ He nodded towards Serrano. ‘He’s coming with us.’

‘Why?’

‘Why ever not?’ Hiller even managed to look puzzled. ‘My friend. Smith’s employee. Good jungle man.’

‘Always wanted to meet one of those.’ Hamilton looked consideringly at Serrano. ‘One can only hope that he’s a little bit more alert in the depths of the Mato Grosso than he is in the alleys of Romono.’

Serrano had nothing to say to this but he was, clearly, thinking: prudently he refrained from voicing his thoughts.

Smith, it would seem, was both a considerate man and one who thought of everything. Not only had he stocked his Lear with a splendid variety of liquor, liqueurs, wines and beers, he’d even provided an exceptionally attractive stewardess to serve them up. All three men—Hamilton, Hiller and Serrano-had long, cold drinks in their hands. Hamilton gazed happily at the green immensity of the Amazonian rainforest passing by beneath them.

‘This fairly beats hacking your way through that lot down there,’ he said. He looked round the cabin of the luxuriously appointed jet. ‘But this is for the carriage trade. What transport is Smith thinking of using when we make our trip into the Mato Grosso?’

‘No idea,’ Hiller said. ‘Matters like that, Smith doesn’t consult me. He’s got his own advisers for that. You’ll be seeing him in a couple of hours. I suppose he’ll tell you then.’

‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ Hamilton said in an almost gently explanatory tone. ‘I only asked what transport he was thinking of using. Any decisions he and his experts have made are not really very relevant.’

Hiller looked at him in slow disbelief. ‘You are going to tell him what we’re to use?’

Hamilton beckoned the stewardess, smiled and handed over his glass for a refill. ‘Nothing like savouring the good life—while it lasts.’ He turned to Hiller. ‘Yes, that’s the idea.’

‘I can see,’ Hiller said heavily, ‘that you and Smith are going to get along just fine.’

‘Oh, I hope so, I hope so. You said we’d be seeing him in two hours. Could you make it three?’ He looked disparagingly at his wrinkled khaki drills. ‘These look well enough in Romono, but I have to see a tailor before I go calling on multimillionaires. You say we’re being met when we arrive. You think you can drop me off at the Grand?’

‘Jesus!’ Hiller was clearly taken aback. ‘The Grand -and a tailor. That’s expensive. How come? Last night in the bar you said you had no money.’

‘I came into some later on.’

Hiller and Serrano exchanged very peculiar looks. Hamilton continued to gaze placidly out of the window.

As promised a car met them at the private airport in Brasilia. ‘Car’ was really too mundane a word to describe it. It was an enormous maroon Rolls-Royce, big enough, one would have thought, to accommodate a football team. In the back it had television, a bar and even an ice-maker. Up front-very far up front—were two uniformed men in dark green livery. One drove the car: the other’s main function in life appeared to be opening doors when the back seat—seats—passengers entered or left. The engine, predictably, was soundless. If it were part of Smith’s pattern to awe visitors he most certainly succeeded in the case of Serrano. Hamilton appeared quite unimpressed, possibly because he was too busy inspecting the bar; Smith had somehow overlooked providing a stewardess for the rear of the Rolls.

They drove through the wide avenues of that futuristic city and pulled up outside the Grand Hotel. Hamilton dismounted—the door having magically been opened for him, of course—and passed swiftly through the revolving door. Once inside, he looked out through the glassed-in porch. The Rolls, already more than a hundred yards away, was turning a corner to the left. Hamilton waited until it had disappeared from sight, left by the revolving door by which he had entered and started to walk briskly back in the direction from which they had come. He gave the impression of one who knew the city, and he did: he knew Brasilia very well indeed.

Five minutes after dropping Hamilton the Rolls pulled up outside a photographer’s shop. Hiller went inside, approached a smiling and affable assistant and handed over the film that had been taken from Hamilton.

‘Have this developed and sent to Mr Joshua Smith, Haydn Villa.’ There was no need for Hiller to add the word ‘immediately’. Smith’s name guaranteed immediacy. Hiller went on: ‘No copy is to be made of this film and neither the person who develops it nor any other member of your staff is ever to discuss it. I hope that is clearly understood.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’ The smile and the affability had vanished to be replaced by total obsequiousness. ‘Speed and secrecy. Those are guaranteed, sir.’

‘And a perfect print?’

‘If the negative is perfect so will the print be.’

Hiller couldn’t think of how else he could threaten the now thoroughly apprehensive assistant so he nodded and left.

Another ten minutes later and Hiller and Serrano were in the drawing-room of the Villa Haydn. Serrano was seated, as were Tracy, Maria and a fourth and as yet unidentified man. Smith talked somewhat apart with Hiller—‘somewhat apart’ in that huge drawing-room meant a considerable distance—glancing occasionally in Serrano’s direction.

Hiller said: ‘Of course, I can’t vouch for him. But he knows an awful lot that we don’t and I can always see to it that he’ll make no trouble. Come to that, so would Hamilton. Hamilton has a rough way of dealing with people who step out of line.’ Hiller went on to tell the sad tale of Serrano’s mugging.

‘Well, if you say so, Hiller.’ Smith sounded doubtful and if there was one thing Smith didn’t like it was being doubtful about anything. ‘You certainly haven’t let me down so far.’ He paused. ‘But your friend Serrano seems to have no history, no past.’

‘Neither have most men in the Mato Grosso. Usually for the simple reason that they have too much of a past. But he knows his jungle—and he knows more Indian dialects than any man except maybe Hamilton. Certainly more than any man in the Indian Protection Service.’

‘All right.’ Smith had made up his mind and seemed relieved for that. ‘And he’s been close to the Lost City. Could be a useful back-up man.’

Hiller nodded towards the unidentified person, a tall, very heavily built, darkly handsome man in his mid-thirties.

‘Who’s that, Mr Smith?’

‘Heffner. My chief staff photographer.’

Hiller said: ‘Mr Smith!’

‘Hamilton would think it extremely strange if I didn’t take a staff photographer along on this historic trip,’ Smith said reasonably. He smiled slightly. ‘I will confess, though, that he can use one or two instruments other than his cameras.’

‘I’ll bet he can.’ Hiller looked at Heffner with even closer interest. ‘Another with or without a past?’

Smith smiled again but made no answer. A phone rang. Tracy, who was nearest to it, picked it up, listened briefly and replaced the receiver.

‘Well, well. Surprise, surprise. The Grand Hotel has no one registered there under the name of Hamilton. Not only that, no member of the staff can recall ever seeing a man answering to the description.’

Hamilton, at that moment, was in a lavishly furnished suite in the Hotel Imperial.

Ramon and Navarro, seated on a couch, were admiring Hamilton, who was admiring himself in front of a full-length mirror.

‘Always did fancy myself in a fawn seersucker,’ Hamilton said complacently. ‘Don’t you agree? This should knock Smith for six.’

‘I don’t know about Smith,’ Ramon said, ‘but in that outfit you’d terrify even the Muscias. So no trouble with getting the invitation?’

‘None. When he saw me flashing those gold coins in public he must have panicked in case someone else would step in fast. Now, I’m pleased to say, he’s convinced he’s got me hooked.’

‘You still think that gold hoard exists?’ Navarro said.

‘I’m convinced it did exist. Not that it does.’

‘Then why did you want those coins?’

‘When this is over they will be returned and the money reimbursed—all except the two that are now in the possession of Curly, the head barman at the Hotel de Paris. But those were necessary: the shark, as we know, took the bait.’

‘So, no hoard, huh?’ Ramon said. ‘Disappointing.’

‘There is a hoard and a huge one. But not of those coins. Perhaps melted down, although that’s unlikely. What is likely is that it’s been split up into private collectors’ hands. If you want to dispose of an art treasure, be it a stolen Tintoretto or a Penny Black, then Brazil is the place in the world. The number of Brazilian millionaires who spend hours in their air-conditioned, humidity-controlled, burglar-proof deep underground cellars gloating over stolen Old Masters boggles the imagination. Ramon, there’s a wet bar right behind you, and I’m developing a sore and thirsty throat from lecturing callow youngsters on the facts of criminal life.’

Ramon grinned, rose and brought a large whisky and soda to Hamilton and a soda each for himself and his brother—the twins never drank anything stronger.

Having eased his throat, Hamilton said: ‘What did you get on Smith?’

‘Nothing more than you expected,’ Ramon said. ‘The number of companies he controls is beyond counting. He’s a financial genius, charming and courteous, totally ruthless in his business dealings and must by any reckoning be the richest man in the Southern hemisphere. A sort of Howard Hughes in reverse. About Hughes’s early days everything was known in detail but the latter part of his life was so wrapped in mystery that many people who should have been in a position to know could scarcely believe that he had died on that flight from Mexico to the States, having been firmly convinced that he had died many years previously. Smith? Dead opposite. His past is a closed book and he never talks about it: neither do any of his colleagues, friends or supposed intimates—no-one really knows whether he has any intimates—for the good reason that none of them was around in his early days. Today, his life is an open book. He conceals nothing and operates in a totally straightforward fashion. Any one of the shareholders in his forty-odd companies can inspect the firm’s books whenever they wish. He appears to have absolutely nothing to hide and I would suppose when you are as brilliant as he unquestionably is there’s just no point in being dishonest. After all, what’s the point in it if you can make more money being honest? Today he knows everybody’s business and lets anyone who wishes know all about his businesses.’

‘He’s got something to hide,’ Hamilton said. ‘I know he has.’

Navarro said: ‘What?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out, isn’t it?’ Hamilton said.

‘I wish you wouldn’t play your cards so close to your chest,’ Navarro said.

‘What cards?’

‘We look forward to watching you at work, Mr Hamilton,’ Ramon said. His tone was neutral to the point of being ambiguous. ‘It should be worth watching. By every account, the man is totally above suspicion. He goes everywhere, sees everyone, knows everyone. And everyone knows that he and the President are blood brothers.’

The President’s blood brother was leaning forward in a chair in his splendid drawing-room, oblivious of the company around him, staring in fascination at the silver screen. The room had been so efficiently darkened by the heavy drapes that he would have had difficulty in seeing those around him: had it been broad daylight, he still wouldn’t have seen them. His absorption was total.

The transparencies were of superb quality, taken with a superb camera by an expert photographer who knew precisely what he was about. The colour was true, the clarity and the resolution impeccable. And the projector the best that Smith’s money could buy.

The first group showed a ruined and ancient city, impossibly clinging to the top of a narrow plateau with, at the far end, a breathtakingly well-preserved ziggurat, as imposing as the best surviving works of the Aztecs or the Maya.

A second group showed one side of the city perched on the edge of a cliff that dropped vertically to a river and the rainforest beyond. The third group showed the other side of the city overlooking a similar gorge with a river sliding swiftly past in the distant depths. A fourth group, clearly taken from the top of the hills, showed a reverse view of the ancient city, with a brief glimpse of scrub-land beyond—once obviously terraced for cultivation—and with the two cliff-sides meeting in the middle distance. A fifth group, obviously taken I80° from the same position, showed a flat, grassy plateau, the sides curving to meet like the bows of a boat. Nearly incredible as those pictures were, the next few groups were staggering.

They were taken from the air and as transparency succeeded transparency, it became evident that they, like a number of the previous ones, could only have been taken from a helicopter.

The first of those helicopter shots showed the entire ruined city from above. The second, from perhaps five hundred feet higher up, showed that the city was perched on top of a vertically-sided, boat-shaped pinnacle of rock splitting a river which swept by on either side of it. Both arms of the river were rock-strewn, foaming white and clearly unnavigable. The third and fourth groups, from an even higher altitude, were a shock: taken horizontally they showed pictures of a densely crowded rainforest, reaching out, it seemed, almost to touch the camera and extending, unbroken, to the distant horizon. The fifth set, vertically downwards, made it clear that the great outer cliff-walls of the twin gorges were at least several hundred feet higher than the top of the cliff-walls that formed the island on which the Lost City was built. The sixth group, taken at a still higher elevation, showed just a narrow gap between two great stretches of forest reaching towards each other, with the Lost City just vaguely visible in the gloomy depths below. The seventh and last group, taken anywhere between five hundred and a thousand feet higher up again, revealed nothing but the continuous majestic sweep of the Amazonian rainforest, unbroken from pictorial horizon to pictorial horizon.

It was small wonder, then, that the planes of the Brazilian ordnance survey services, whose pilots claimed, probably rightly, to have crisscrossed every square mile of the Mato Grosso, had never discovered the site of the Lost City. It just could not be seen from the air. But the ancients had stumbled across it, discovered the most invisible, the most inaccessible, the most impregnable fortress ever created by nature or devised by man.

The viewers in the Villa Haydn drawing-room had sat throughout in silence. They knew they had seen something that no white man, with the exception of Hamilton and his helicopter pilot, had ever seen before, something, perhaps, that no-one had ever seen for generations, maybe even for centuries. They were hard people, tough people, cynical people, people who counted value only in the terms of cost, people conditioned to disbelieve, almost automatically, the evidence of their own eyes: but there is yet to be born a man or woman the atavistic depths of whose soul cannot be touched by that one questing finger that will not be denied, that primitive ancestral awe inseparable from watching the veil of unsuspected history being swept aside.

The slowly comprehending silence stretched out for at least a minute. Then, almost inaudibly, Smith exhaled his breath in a long sigh.

‘Son-of-a-gun,’ he whispered. ‘Son-of-a-gun. He found it.’

‘If your intention was to impress us,’ Maria said, ‘you’ve succeeded. What on earth was that? And where is it?’

‘The Lost City.’ Smith spoke absently. ‘Brazil. In the Mato Grosso.’

‘The Brazilians built pyramids?’

‘Not that I know of. May have been some other race. Anyway, they’re not pyramids, they’re-Tracy, this is more in your field.’

‘Well. Not really my field either. One of our magazines had an article on those so-called pyramids and I spent a couple of days with the writer and photographer on the job. Curiosity only, and wasted curiosity—I didn’t learn much. Pyramid-shaped, sure, but those stepped-sided and flat-topped structures are called ziggurats. No-one knows where they originated although it is known that the Assyrians and Babylonians had them. Oddly enough, this style bypassed the virtually neighbouring country of Egypt, which went in for the smooth-sided and conically-topped version, but turned up again in ancient Mexico where some are still to be seen. Archaeologists and such-like use this as a powerful argument of prehistoric contact between east and west but the only sure fact is that their origins are lost in the mists of those same prehistoric times. My word, Mr Smith, this is going to drive those poor archaeologists up the wall. A ziggurat in the Mato Grosso.’

‘Ricardo?’ Hamilton said. ‘I shall be leaving our friend’s place in about two hours’ time. I’ll be driving—moment.’ He broke off and turned to Ramon lounging on the couch in the Imperial Suite. ‘Ramon, what shall I be driving?’

‘Black Cadillac.’

‘A black Cadillac,’ Hamilton said into the phone. ‘I do not wish to be followed. Thank you.’

CHAPTER THREE

There were six people in Smith’s drawing-room that sunny afternoon—Smith himself, Tracy, Maria, Hiller, Serrano and Hamilton. All had glasses in their hands.

‘Another?’ said Smith. His hand reached out to touch the button that would summon the butler.

Hamilton said: ‘I’d rather talk.’

Smith raised an eyebrow in slight if genuine astonishment. Not only had he heard from Hiller of Hamilton’s reputation as a hard drinker, but his slightest suggestion was usually treated as a royal command. He withdrew his hand from the buzzer.

‘As you wish. So we are agreed on the purpose of our visit. I tell you, Hamilton, I have done many things in the past that have given me a great deal of pleasure, but I’ve never been so excited—’

Hamilton interrupted him, something no-one ever did to Smith. ‘Let’s get down to details.’

‘By God, you are in a hurry. I’d have thought that after four years—’

‘It’s a lot longer than that. But even after only four years a man starts to become a little impatient.’ He pointed towards Maria and Tracy. People never pointed in Smith’s drawing-room. ‘Who are they?’

‘We all know your rough diamond reputation, Hamilton.’ When Smith chose to use a cold tone he could do so most effectively. ‘But there’s no need to be rude.’

Hamilton shook his head. ‘Not rude. Just a man, as you observed, in a hurry. I just like to check on the company I’m keeping. As you do.’

‘As I do?’ Again the eyebrow. ‘My dear fellow, if you would kindly explain—’

‘And that’s another thing,’ Hamilton said. That made it twice in thirty seconds that Smith had been interrupted, which must have constituted some sort of a record. ‘I don’t like being condescended to. I am not your dear fellow. I am not, as you may come to learn, anybody’s dear fellow. As you do, I said. Check up. Or perhaps you don’t know the identity of the person who rang the Grand Hotel to see if I was actually staying there?’

It was a guess, but in the circumstances a safe one, and the flickered glance between Smith and Tracy was all the confirmation Hamilton required. He nodded towards Tracy.

‘See what I mean?’ Hamilton said. ‘That’s the nosey bastard. Who is he?’

‘You would insult my guests, Hamilton?’ Smith’s tone was now positively arctic.

I don’t much care who I insult—or should I say “whom”? He’s still a nosey bastard. Another thing, when I ask questions about people I do it honestly and in the open, not behind their backs. Who is he?’

‘Tracy,’ Smith said stiffly, ‘is the managing director of McCormick-Mackenzie International Publications Division.’ Hamilton looked unimpressed. ‘Maria is my confidential secretary and, I might add, a close personal friend.’

Hamilton looked away from Tracy and Maria almost as if he had already dismissed them from his mind as being of no importance. ‘I’m not interested in your relationships. My fee.’

Smith was obviously taken aback. Gentlemen did not discuss business negotiations in this crude and abrupt fashion. Momentarily, his expression hovered between astonishment and anger. Many years had passed since any man had dared talk to him in such a way. He required considerable willpower to repress his anger.

‘Hiller mentioned it, I think,’ Smith said. ‘A six-figure sum. One hundred thousand dollars—U.S. dollars—friend.’

‘I’m not your friend. A quarter million.’

‘Ludicrous.’

‘I could say “Thanks for the drink” and walk out. I’m not childish. I hope you’re not either.’

Smith had not become the man he was without the ability to make his mind up very rapidly indeed. Without in any way appearing to capitulate he capitulated immediately.

‘A man would want an awful lot of service for money like that.’

‘Let’s get our terms clear. You get co-operation, not service. I’ll return to this point later. I regard my fee as being far from excessive in view of the fact that I’m damned certain you’re in this not just to get a few nice photographs and a human interest story. Who ever heard of Joshua Smith engaging upon any enterprise where money was not the prime and motivating factor?’

‘As far as the past is concerned I would agree with you.’ Smith’s voice was quiet. ‘In this particular instance money is not the principal factor.’

Hamilton nodded in acknowledgment. ‘That could well be. In this particular instance I could well believe you.’ Smith looked taken aback at Hamilton’s concession, then his expression changed to one of speculation. Hamilton smiled. ‘You’re doubtless trying to figure out what I’ve figured out as the other motivation. You need not concern yourself for that in no way concerns me. Now, transportation?’

‘What? What was that?’ Smith had been caught off-balance by the sudden switch in topic which he should not have been as it was a favourite tactic of his own. ‘Ah! Transportation.’

‘Yes. What kind of transportation—air and water, we can forget land—do your companies have available?’

‘A great deal, as you can imagine. What we don’t have we can hire although I should think the need would be unlikely. Tracy has all the details. Tracy, by the way, is both a qualified pilot and helicopter pilot.’

‘Helps. Where are the details?’

‘Tracy has the details.’ Smith said this in such a way as to convey the impression that he was not the man to be concerned with details, which was probably quite an accurate impression for he was famous for his gift in picking top-flight lieutenants and delegating the bulk of the executive work to them. Tracy, who had been following the conversation closely, rose, crossed to where they were standing and handed Hamilton a folder. The expression on Tracy’s face bespoke a marked lack of affection: managing directors do not take kindly to being called nosey bastards. Hamilton appeared to notice nothing amiss.

He took the folder, read rapidly through the loose-leaf contents, pausing briefly now and again as something in particular caught his attention, then closed the folder. One could have been forgiven for assuming that Hamilton had already absorbed the contents: he probably had. For once, Hamilton seemed fairly impressed.

‘Quite an air/sea fleet, haven’t you? Everything from a Boeing 727 to a Piper Comanche. Double rotor freight helicopter—this is a Sikorsky Skycrane?’

‘Yes.’

‘And a hovercraft. Can the helicopter lift the hovercraft?’

‘Naturally. That’s why it was bought.’

‘Where’s the hovercraft? Corrientes?’

Smith said: ‘How the devil do you know?’

‘Logic. Wouldn’t be much good to you here or in Rio, would it? I’ll take this folder. See you this evening.’

‘This evening?’ Smith looked unhappy. ‘Damn it, man, we have to draw up our plans and—’

‘I’ll draw up the plans. I’ll explain them when I return with my assistants this evening.’

‘Damn it all, Hamilton, I am putting up all the money. The man who pays the piper calls the tune.’

‘This time out, you’re second fiddle.’

Hamilton left, leaving behind him a brief but profound silence. Tracy said: ‘Well. Of all the arrogant, hard-nosed, intransigent bastards—’

‘Agreed, agreed,’ Smith said. ‘But he holds the cards, all of them.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Enigma. Rough, tough, but dresses well, speaks well, obviously at home in any territory. Nuances, clever nuances. At ease in my drawing-room. Not many strangers are. Come to that, nobody is.’

Tracy said: ‘And he’s come to the conclusion that this Lost City is so dangerously inaccessible that he’s not prepared to try the same route again. So—a helicopter. Or hovercraft.’

‘I wonder.’ Smith was still looking thoughtful. ‘Why else would a man like that throw in his lot with us?’

‘Because he’s convinced he can eat us alive,’ Maria said. She paused. ‘Maybe he will at that.’

Smith looked at her without expression then crossed to the dining-room window. Hamilton was just moving away in his black Cadillac. A chauffeur stopped polishing a nondescript Ford, glanced towards Smith’s window, nodded, climbed into his car and followed the Cadillac.

Hamilton was driving down one of Brasilia’s broad boulevards. He consulted his rear mirror. The Ford was about two hundred yards behind. Hamilton increased his speed. So did the Ford. Both cars were now travelling well above the speed limit. A police car appeared behind the Ford, switched on the siren, overtook and flagged the Ford to a stop.

The Ministry of Justice was a rather splendid building and the large airy office in which Hamilton sat across a polished leather table from Colonel Ricardo Diaz was suitably sumptuous. Diaz, in an immaculately cut uniform, was large, tanned and looked competent to a degree, which indeed he was. Diaz took a sip of some indeterminate liquid and sighed.

’About Smith, Mr Hamilton, you know as much as we do—everything and nothing. His past is a mystery, his present an open book that anyone is welcome to read. The dividing line between the present and the past can’t be precisely delineated but it is known that he appeared—or, rather, emerged or surfaced in Santa Catharina, a province with a traditionally heavy Germanic settlement, in the late forties. Whether he is of similar origin is not known: his English is as immaculate as his Portuguese but, as far as is known, he has never been heard to speak German.

’His first business venture was to produce a newspaper aimed primarily at the native German speakers in the province but printed in Portuguese: it was conservative and strongly pro-establishment and marked the beginning of a long and close association with the government of the time, an association that has persisted, despite changes of government, until this day.

‘He then branched out into the fields of early plastics and early ball-point pens. Smith was never an innovator—he was and remains a takeover specialist and a share manipulator of genius. Both the publishing and the industrial sides of his businesses expanded at a remarkable speed and within ten years he was, by any standards, a very wealthy man.’

Hamilton said: ‘He couldn’t have been without the odd cruzeiro to begin with.’

‘Agreed. Expansion on a scale such as Smith’s must have called for a great deal of capital.’

‘And the source of capital is unknown?’

’Totally. But that’s nothing to hold against any man. In this country—as in many others—we don’t care to enquire too closely into those things.

‘Now we come to Tracy. He is indeed the general manager of Smith’s publication division. Very tough, very able, nothing known about him in the criminal line, which could mean that he’s either honest or very clever. The best you can say of him is that he’s a soldier of fortune. The police are certain that the bulk of his activities are illegal-diamonds have an odd habit of disappearing when he’s in the neighbourhood—but he’s never been arrested far less convicted. Serrano is a small-time crook, not too bright and a fearful coward.’

‘He can’t be all that cowardly if he ventures alone into the rainforests of the Mato Grosso. Not many white people would.’

‘That thought, I admit, has also occurred to me. I’m merely passing on reported reputation, accuracy not guaranteed. Now, Heffner. Heffner’s the joker. Wouldn’t recognise a camera if he tripped over one. Well known to the New York police. Associated with crimes of violence and alleged gangland killings, but he’s always beaten the rap. Not too surprising really—no police in any country are going to come over all zealous and excited when one hoodlum dispatches another. Curious fellow. Usually well spoken and civilised enough—look at those pillars of society, the Mafia bosses—but the veneer vanishes when he gets next to a bottle of bourbon. And he has a weakness for bourbon.’

‘And all this leaves Smith unaffected?’

‘Nothing known against him, as I said, but you can’t associate with characters like Hiller, Heffner and Tracy without some tar rubbing off. Could well be the other way round, of course.’ He looked up as a knock came at the door. ‘Come in, come in.’

Ramon and Navarro entered. The twins were clad in khaki suits and smiling cheerfully. Diaz looked at them and winced.

‘The famous Detective-Sergeant Herera and the famous Detective-Sergeant Herera. Or infamous. You are far from home, gentlemen.’

‘Senor Hamilton’s fault, sir.’ Ramon spread his hands apologetically. ‘He’s always leading us astray.’

‘Mary’s little lambs. Ah. Major.’

A young officer entered and unrolled on the table a map of Southern Brazil. It was marked with legends of varying kinds. Differently coloured flags in circles and squares indicated different tribes, races and languages. Other symbols indicated the state of hostility or friendliness of the tribes.

The major said: ‘This is the most up-to-date picture the Indian Protection Service can give you. There are some places, you understand, where even the Service do not care to investigate too closely. Most of the tribes are friendly—pacified, if you like. Some are hostile. Nearly always the white man’s fault. A very few cannibal tribes. Those are known.’

‘And to be avoided, of course. The Chapates, Horenas and Muscias especially.’

Hamilton pointed at a town on the map and looked at Diaz. ‘Corrientes. Smith has a hovercraft there—for obvious reasons. It’s at the junction of the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and he must be pretty sure the Lost City lies near the head-waters of one of those. I’m going up the Paraguay. I don’t know it well, there may be bad rapids for all I know, but the helicopter can help if there are.’

Diaz said: ‘Your friend has a helicopter?’

‘My friend, as you call him, has got everything. This is a giant—a Sikorsky Skycrane. Well enough named—it can just about lift any damn thing. We’ll base the helicopter at Asunción. The hovercraft can go up in three stages—to either Puerto Casado or Puerto Sastre in Paraguay, then into Brazil to Corumbá then finally to Cuiabá. From there the helicopter can airlift it to Rio da Morte.’

‘And you would like to have some units of the Federal army exercising near Cuiabá, is that it?’

‘If it can be arranged.’

‘That has already been done.’

‘I am in your debt, Colonel Diaz.’

‘It would be more accurate to say that we are in your debt. If, that is to say—’

‘If I come back?’

‘Precisely.’

Hamilton gestured towards the two young men. ‘With the heavenly two to watch my back, what harm can befall me?’

Diaz looked at him briefly and doubtfully then pressed a button. An aide came in carrying a brown leather case, extracted what looked to be a large movie camera and handed it to Hamilton, who pressed a button on the base. There came the faint whirring noise typical of an electric-powered camera.

Diaz said: ‘You won’t believe this, but it will even take pictures if you wish.’

Hamilton smiled but without humour. ‘I don’t think I’ll be indulging in any photography this time out. What’s the radio transmitting range?’

‘Five hundred kilometres.’

‘Enough. Waterproof?’

‘Naturally. You leave tomorrow?’

‘No. We have to get provisions and jungle gear and fly them to Cuiabá. We must get the hovercraft on the move. More important, though, I must go ahead and check on our friend Mr Jones.’

‘Back to the Colony?’

‘Back to the Colony.’

Diaz said slowly: ‘You are an extraordinarily persistent man, Mr Hamilton. God knows you’ve every right to be.’ He shook his head. ‘I greatly fear for the health of your travelling companions in your forthcoming expedition.’

Hamilton had rejoined his travelling companions-to-be. Outside the uncurtained windows of the Villa Haydn’s drawing-room the sky was dark: the room itself was brightly but not harshly lit by the light from the three crystal chandeliers. There were nine people in the room, most of them standing, most of them with aperitif glasses in their hands. Present were Hamilton, the twin Sergeants Herera, Smith and his entourage. Heffner, to whom Hamilton had just been introduced, was slightly flushed of face, slightly loud of voice and was sitting on an arm of the chair Maria was occupying. Tracy was regarding him with disfavour.

Smith said to Hamilton: ‘I must say your heavenly twins, as you call them, have an air of competence about them.’

‘They’re not much at home in drawing-rooms. But in the jungle, yes. They’re good. Squirrel-hunter’s eyes.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Either of them, with his rifle, can hit a playing-card at a hundred yards. Most people can’t even see a card at that distance.’

‘That meant to sound intimidating, threatening?’

‘Neither. Reassuring. Very useful accomplishment when wild boars or alligators or head-hunters or cannibals come at you. Let’s not confuse this coming trip with a Sunday school picnic.’

‘I’m aware of that.’ Smith was trying to sound patient. ‘Well, your plan sounds reasonable. We leave in a couple of days?’

‘More like a week. I repeat, no picnic: you don’t go dashing off into the Amazonian rainforest at a couple of hours’ notice, especially when you are going to be passing through hostile territory—and, believe me, we will be. We have to allow several days for the hovercraft to get up to Cuiabá—we don’t know what difficulties it might encounter. Then we have to get all our provisions and equipment and fly them over to Cuiabá. At least, you will. I have some business to attend to first.’

Smith raised an eyebrow. He was very good at raising eyebrows. ‘What business?’

‘Sorry.’ Hamilton didn’t sound sorry. ‘Where can one hire a helicopter in this city?’

Smith took a deep breath then clearly made up his mind to ignore the outright rebuff. ‘Well, you know I have this freight Sikorsky—’

‘That lumbering giant? No thank you.’

‘I have a smaller one. And a pilot.’

‘Again, no thanks. Tracy’s not the only one who can fly a helicopter.’

Smith looked at him in silence. His face was without expression but it was not difficult to guess what he was thinking: it would have been perfectly in keeping with Hamilton’s secretive nature, his policy of never letting his left hand know what his right was doing, to have flown his own helicopter over the Lost City, so that no other person could share his knowledge. At last Smith said: ‘Gracious, aren’t you? You don’t see a little friction arising when we set off on this search?’

Hamilton shrugged indifferently. ‘It isn’t a search. I know where I’m going. And if you think some friction is going to arise, then why don’t you leave behind those liable to give rise to friction? It’s a matter of indifference to me who comes along.’

‘I’ll decide that, Hamilton.’

‘Will you, now?’ Again the same indifferent, infuriating shrug. ‘I don’t think you’ve quite got the picture yet.’

It was significant of Smith’s perturbation that he actually went to the bar and poured another drink for himself. Normally, indeed invariably, he would have summoned his butler to perform such menial tasks. He returned to Hamilton and said: ‘Another point. You got your own way about making the plans—but we haven’t yet decided who’s going to be in charge of our little expedition, have we?’

‘I have. I am.’

Smith’s impassive air deserted him. He looked every inch the multi-billionaire he was reputed to be.

‘I repeat, Hamilton, I’m the paymaster.’

‘The ship-owner pays his captain. Who’s in charge at sea? Even more importantly, who’s in charge in the jungle? You wouldn’t last a day without me.’

There was a sudden silence in the room. The tension between the two men was all too obvious. Heffner rose from the arm of the chair, lurched once and then crossed to where the two men were standing. The light of battle was in his truculent and bloodshot eyes.

‘But, boss! You don’t seem to understand.’ Heffner didn’t speak the words, he sneered them. ‘This is the intrepid explorer himself. The one and only Hamilton. Haven’t you heard? Hamilton is always in charge.’

Hamilton glanced briefly at Heffner then at Smith. ‘This is the kind of irritant I mean. Born to give trouble, bound to give rise to friction. What function does he perform?’

‘My chief staff photographer.’

‘Looks the artistic type. He coming along?’

‘Of course he is.’ Smith’s tone was glacial. ‘Why on earth do you think Mr Tracy and I brought him down here?’

‘I thought maybe he had to leave some place in a hurry.’

Heffner took a step closer. ‘What does that mean, Hamilton?’

‘Nothing, really. I just thought that maybe your friends in the New York police department were beginning to take too close an interest in you.’

Heffner was momentarily taken aback, then he took another menacing step forward. ‘I don’t know what the hell you mean. You wouldn’t think of stopping me, would you, Hamilton?’

‘Stopping you from coming along, dear me, no.’

Ramon looked at Navarro. Both men winced.

‘Amazing,’ Heffner said. ‘All you require is twenty pounds over a man to make him see it your way.’

‘Provided, of course, that you’re half-way sober by that time.’

Heffner gazed at him in alcoholic disbelief then swung a roundhouse right at Hamilton’s head. Hamilton moved inside it and brought up his own right in a wicked jab as Heffner’s fist swept harmlessly by his head. Grey-faced and doubled over, Heffner sank to his knees, his hands clutching his midriff.

Ramon said thoughtfully: ‘I do believe, Senor Hamilton, that he’s half-way sober already.’

‘A short way with mutineers, eh?’ Smith was unmoved by the plight of his trusty chief photographer, and his irritation had given way to curiosity. ‘You seem to know something about Heffner?’

‘I read the occasional New York paper,’ Hamilton said. ‘Bit late when I get them, mind you, but that hardly matters as Heffner’s activities cover a fair period. What the Americans call a scofflaw. Suspected involvement in various crimes of violence, even gangland killings. He’s cleverer than he looks, which I don’t believe, or he has a clever lawyer. Anyway, he’s always beaten the rap so far. It is impossible, Mr Smith, that you had no inkling of this.’

‘I confess that there have been stories, rumours. I discount them. Two things. He knows his job and a man is innocent until proved guilty.’ Smith paused and went on: ‘You know anything to my detriment?’

‘Nothing. Everybody knows your life is an open book. A man in your position can’t afford to have it otherwise.’

‘Me?’ said Tracy.

‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings but I never heard of you until today.’

Smith glanced down casually at a still prostrate Heffner, as if seeing him for the first time, and rang a bell. The butler entered. His face remained expressionless at the sight of the man on the floor: it was not difficult to imagine that he had seen such things before.

‘Mr Heffner is unwell,’ Smith said. ‘Have him taken to his quarters. Dinner is ready?’

‘Yes, sir.’

As they left the drawing-room Maria took Hamilton’s arm. In a quiet voice she said: ‘I wish you hadn’t done that.’

‘Don’t tell me I’ve unwittingly clobbered your fiancé?’

‘My fiancé! I can’t stand him. But he has a long memory—and a bad reputation.’

Hamilton patted her hand. ‘Next time I’ll turn the other cheek.’

She snatched her hand away and walked quickly ahead of him.

Dinner over, Hamilton and the twins left in the black Cadillac. Navarro said admiringly: ‘So now Heffner is labelled in their minds as your bad apple in the barrel while Smith, Tracy, Hiller and for all I know Serrano think that they are the driven snow. You really are a fearful liar, Senor Hamilton.’

‘One really has to be modest about such things. As in all else practice makes perfect.’

CHAPTER FOUR

As dusk approached, a helicopter, equipped with both floats and skids, set down on a sandy stretch on the left bank of the River Paraná. Both up-river and down, on the same bank, as far as the eye could see in the gloom, stretched the dense and virtually impenetrable rainforest of the region. The far side of the river, the right or western bank, was invisible in the gathering gloom: at this point, close to where the River Iquelmi flowed into the Paraná, the parent river was more than five miles wide.

The helicopter cabin was dimly lit even although the precaution had been taken of pulling black drapes across the windows. Hamilton, Navarro and Ramon were having their evening meal of cold meat, bread, beer and soda—the beer for Hamilton, soda for the twins.

Ramon shivered theatrically. ‘I don’t think I much care for this place.’

‘Not many people do,’ Hamilton said. ‘But it suits Brown—alias Mr Jones—and his friends well enough. Defensively speaking, it’s probably the most impregnable place in South America. Years ago I traced Brown and his fellow-refugees to a place called San Carlos de Bariloche near Lake Ranco on the Argentine-Chilean border. God knows that was fortress enough, but he didn’t feel secure even there so he moved to a hide-out in the Chilean Andes, then came here.’

Navarro said: ‘He knew you were after him?’

‘Yes. For years. Our wealthy friend in Brasilia has been after him for much, much longer. There may well be others.’

‘And now he no longer feels secure even here?’

‘I’m almost certain he doesn’t. I know he was in the Lost City this year, and several times in the past few years. But he likes his comforts and there are none in that ruin. He may have taken a chance and returned. It’s highly unlikely, but I have to check. Otherwise there’s no point in going to the Lost City.’

‘You have to have this confrontation between Brown and his friend.’

‘Yes. I have no proof. This—ah—meeting will give me all the proof I ever require.’

‘Remind me to take care of myself. I want to be alive to see it.’ Navarro turned and gazed at the curtain facing downstream. ‘It will not be easy to get into this place?’

‘It will not be easy. Brown’s estate here—it’s known as Kolonie Waldner 555—is better guarded than the Presidential Palace. The estate is hotching with trained killers as guards—and when I say that I mean they’re trained and proven killers. There’s dense jungle to the north and south—Paraguay lies to the south and Brown is a close friend of the President there—there’s this river to the east and a large number of German settlements, populated almost exclusively by ex-members of the S.S., lie astride the roads to Asunción and Bella Vista. You won’t even find a single river pilot here who is Brazilian born, they’re all Germans from the River Elbe.’

Ramon said: ‘In view of the fact of what you’ve just told us, a thought occurs to me. How do we get in?’

‘I’ll admit I’ve given the matter some thought myself. Not much option really. There’s a road used by supply trucks, but it’s too long, too dangerous and has to pass through an armed gatehouse with electrified fences stretching away on both sides. There’s also a landing stage about ten miles downriver from here—about fifteen miles north of the Paraguayan border. The road up to the compound is about a mile long and usually heavily patrolled. But it’s the only other way. At least there are no electrified fences along the right bank of the Paraná—or there weren’t the last time I was there. We’ll wait two hours and move on in.’

‘Would it be in order,’ Navarro said, ‘if we gave you what is known as a couple of old-fashioned looks?’

‘Help yourself,’ Hamilton said agreeably. He opened a rucksack, brought out three silenced Lugers, three spare magazines and three sheathed hunting knives and distributed those. ‘Sleep if you can. I’ll watch.’

The helicopter, not under power, drifted with the current down the right bank of the Paraná, keeping as close inshore as possible to avoid the bright light of a brilliant half moon riding high in a cloudless sky. A door in the fuselage opened, a figure appeared, stepped down on to one of the pontoons and lowered an anchor quietly to the bed of the river. A second figure appeared with a bulky package under his arm: there came a subdued hiss and within thirty seconds a rubberised dinghy was fully inflated. A third man emerged from the fuselage carrying a small outboard motor and a medium-sized battery. The first two men stepped gingerly into the dinghy and took those items from him: the engine was clamped on to the transom aft, the battery lowered to the duckboard floor and coupled up to the engine.

The engine, once started, was almost soundless and the south-east wind, the prevailing one in that area, carried what little noise there was upstream. The painter was unhitched from the helicopter and the dinghy moved downstream. The three occupants were crouched forward, listening intently and peering, not without some apprehension, into the gloom beneath the overhanging branches of the rainforest trees.

A hundred yards ahead the river curved to the right. Hamilton switched off the electric motor, the twins dipped paddles into the water and very soon, a paddle occasionally touching the bank, they rounded the bend.

The landing stage, less than two hundred yards ahead, projected out into the river for a distance of twenty feet. Behind it, on land, there was a guardhouse which threw enough light to illuminate the cracked and splintered timber of the stage and two men, rifles shoulder-slung, maintaining a comfortable and relaxed guard on a couple of bent-wood chairs. Both were smoking and they were sharing a bottle. They stood up as two other men came out from the guard-house. They talked briefly, then the two relieving guards took over their chairs—and the bottle—while the previous guards went inside the guard-house.

The dinghy grounded silently on the muddy bank of the river and was secured by its painter to the low-hanging branch of a tree. The three men disembarked and disappeared into the undergrowth.

After they had gone about ten yards Hamilton said to Navarro in a barely audible whisper: ‘What did I tell you? No electrified fences.’

‘Watch out for the bear-traps.’

There were four men inside the guard-house, all dressed in uniforms of the field-grey colour used by the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. Fully clad, they were lying on camp beds: three were asleep or appeared to be. The fourth was reading a magazine. Some instinct—there was certainly no sound—made him glance upwards and towards the doorway.

Ramon and Navarro were smiling benevolently at him. There was nothing particularly benevolent, however, about the discouragingly steady silenced Lugers held in their hands.

On the landing stage the two new guards were gazing out over the Paraná when someone cleared his throat, almost apologetically, behind them. They immediately swung around. Hamilton wasn’t even bothering to smile.

Inside the guard-house all six guards were securely bound beyond any hope of escape and were more than adequately gagged. Ramon looked at the two telephones then questioningly at Hamilton, who nodded and said: ‘No chances.’

Ramon sliced through the wires while Navarro started to collect the prisoners’ rifles. He said to Hamilton: ‘Still no chances?’

Hamilton nodded. The three men left, threw the rifles into the Paraná, then began to move up the road connecting the landing stage with Kolonie 555. The twins pressed in closely to the forest on the left-hand side of the road while Hamilton kept to the right. They moved slowly, with the stealth and silence of Indians: they had long moved at will through the disaffected tribes of the Mato Grosso.

When they were only yards from the compound Hamilton waved his two companions to a halt. The compound of the Kolonie was well lit by the moon. It was built in the basic form of a barrack square and was perhaps fifty yards across. Eight huts faced on to this central square. Most of those were extremely ramshackle, but one at the far left of the square was a solidly built bungalow. Close by that was an arched metal shed and, beyond that, a short runway. At the entrance to the compound, diagonally across the square from the bungalow, was a thatched hut which could well have been a guardhouse, a probability reinforced by the fact that a solitary figure leaned against the entrance wall. Like his colleagues on the landing stage he was in paramilitary uniform and carried a slung rifle.

Hamilton gestured to Ramon, who waved back. The three men vanished into the undergrowth.

The sentry, still leaning against the wall, had his head tilted back, a bottle to his lips. There came the sound of a muffled blow, the sentry’s eyes turned up in his head and three disembodied hands appeared from apparently nowhere. One took the bottle from the already powerless hand while the other two took him under the armpits as he began to sag.

In what was indeed the guard-house six more men lay trussed and gagged. Hamilton, alone in the middle of the room and engaged in rendering rifles and pistols inoperable, looked up as Ramon and Navarro, each with torch in hand, re-entered the room, shaking their heads. The three men left and began to move around the other huts. As they passed by each one, on each occasion Hamilton and Ramon remained outside while Navarro entered. Each time Navarro emerged, shaking his head. Finally, they arrived at the last building, the solidly constructed bungalow. All three entered. Hamilton, in the lead, found a switch and flooded the room with light.

It was a combination office and living quarters and furnished in considerable comfort. Drawers and filing cabinets were searched but they had nothing that interested Hamilton. They moved on to another apartment, a bedroom, and again a very comfortable place of accommodation. Pride of place on the walls were given to three framed and inscribed photographs—those of Hitler, Goebbels and Stroessner, a former Paraguayan president. The contents of the wardrobes were very sparse, indicating that the owner had removed the bulk of the contents. In one cupboard stood a pair of brown riding boots. The Nazis had always insisted on black riding boots, despising brown ones as being decadent: Stroessner, on the other hand, had favoured brown.

From there the three moved into what was Brown’s communication centre, containing two large multicalibrated transceivers of the latest design. They located a tool-box and while Hamilton and Ramon used chisels and screwdrivers to remove the faceplates and destroy the inner mechanisms, Navarro located all the spares and reduced them too to scrap metal and shattered glass.

Navarro said: ‘He’s also got a very nice radio and transmitting set here.’

‘You know what to do, don’t you?’

Navarro knew what to do. From there they moved on to the arched metal shed. It was rather a remarkable place inasmuch as there ran down the middle of it what must have been the Kolonie’s pride and joy, a genuine full-length American bowling alley. They paid no attention to this. What did attract their attention was a Piper Cub in a bay alongside the bowling alley. It took the men less than ten minutes to ensure that that particular Piper Cub would never fly again.

On their way back to the Paraná, this time walking openly in the middle of the road, Ramon said: ‘So your friend has gone.’

‘In that inelegant phrase, the bird has flown the coop, taking most of his hard cases with him-Nazis, renegade Poles, renegade Ukrainians. As fine a collection of war criminals as you’ll ever meet. This bunch here belongs strictly to the second division.’

‘Where do you think they’ve gone?’

‘We’ll ask, shall we?’

The three men entered the landing stage guardhouse. Wordlessly, they sliced the ankle-bonds of one of the prisoners, removed his gag, dragged him to his feet and led him outside down to the river edge by the landing stage.

Hamilton said: ‘Brown had three Piper Cubs. Where have the other two gone?’

The guard spat in contempt. At a signal from Hamilton, Navarro cut the back of the guard’s hand. The blood flowed freely. The guard was then led forward until he was teetering on the very edge of the landing stage.

‘Piranha,’ Hamilton said, ‘can smell blood at a quarter of a mile. Ninety seconds and you’ll be white bones. If a crocodile doesn’t get you first. Either way, being eaten to death is unpleasant.’

The guard looked in horror at his bleeding hand. He was trembling. ‘North,’ he said. ‘North to Campo Grande.’

‘And after that?’

‘I swear to God—’

‘Throw him in.’

‘Planalto de Mato Grosso. That’s all I know. I swear to you—’

Hamilton said wearily: ‘Stop your damned swearing. I believe you. Brown would never entrust his secrets to vermin.’

Ramon said: ‘What do we do with the prisoners?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing. I daresay someone will happen by and free them. Take this character inside and hobble and gag him.’

Navarro looked doubtful. ‘It’s a pretty deep cut. He could bleed to death.’

‘Dear oh dear.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Hamilton, Ramon and Navarro were in a taxi driving along one of Brasilia’s broad boulevards. Ramon said: ‘This woman, Maria, she comes?’

Hamilton looked at him and smiled. ‘She comes.’

‘There will be danger.’

‘The more, the better. It will at least help to keep those clowns under control.’

Navarro was thoughtfully silent for a moment then he said: ‘My brother and I hate all they stand for. But you, Senor Hamilton, hate so much more.’

‘I have the reason. But I don’t hate them.’

Ramon and Navarro looked at each other in lost comprehension then nodded as if in understanding.

A Rolls-Royce and a Cadillac had been backed out of Smith’s six-car garage to make storage room for what Smith regarded as being more important, however temporarily, than the two cars. Hamilton, in the company of the eight people who were going to accompany him, surveyed, with an apparently uncritical eye, the extremely comprehensive layout of the most modern and expensive equipments necessary for survival in the Amazonian rainforests. He took his time about it, so much so in fact that one or two of the watchers were beginning to look, if not apprehensive, then at least uncomfortable. Smith was not one of those. There was a slight tightening of the lips presumably indicative of a growing impatience. It was almost a law of nature that tycoons do not care to be kept waiting. Smith immediately proved that his patience was on a very short fuse indeed.

‘Well, Hamilton? Well?’

‘So. How the multi-millionaire—or is it billionaire?-travels into the boondocks. But good, really excellent.’

Smith visibly relaxed.

‘But there’s one exception, though.’

‘Indeed?’ One has to be very wealthy before one can—or is permitted to—raise one’s eyebrows in the proper fashion. ‘And what might that be?’

‘Nothing missing, I assure you. Just some items surplus to requirements. Who are those guns and pistols for?’

‘Us.’

‘No deal. Ramon, Navarro and I carry weapons. You don’t. None of you do.’

‘We do.’

‘Deal’s off.’

‘Why?’

‘You are children in the rainforests. No popguns for kids.’

‘But Hiller and Serrano—’

‘I admit they know more than you do. That doesn’t mean very much. In the Mato Grosso they might even rate as adolescents. Forget what they’ve ever told you.’

Smith lifted his shoulders, looked at the rather splendid armoury of weapons he had assembled, then back at Hamilton. ‘Self-protection—’

‘We’ll protect you. I don’t much fancy the prospect of you lot going around shooting harmless animals and innocent Indians. Even less do I fancy the prospect of being shot in the back when I’ve finally shown you where the Lost City is.’

Heffner stepped forward. He obviously had no doubt that the reference had been to himself. His fingers were actually clutching and unclutching, his face dusky with anger. ‘Look here, Hamilton—’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Stop it.’ Smith’s voice was cold and incisive but when he spoke again the tone had changed to one of bitterness and left no doubt that he was addressing Hamilton. ‘If I may say so, you have a splendid capacity for making friends.’

‘Oddly enough, I do. I have quite a few in this city alone. But before I make a man my friend I have to make sure he’s not my enemy or potential enemy. Very sensitive about those things, I am. But so’s my back—sensitive, I mean, sensitive to having a knife stuck in it. I should know, I’ve had it done twice to me. I suppose I should have you all searched for flick-knives or some such toys but in your case I really don’t think I’ll bother. The harmless animals and innocent Indians are safe from any ill intentions you may develop, for, quite frankly, I can’t see any of you lot taking on an armed Indian or a jaguar with what is, after all, little more than a pen-knife.’ He made a small gesture with his right hand, as contemptuous as it was dismissive, and from the sudden tightening and whitening of Smith’s lips, it occurred to Hamilton, not for the first time, that Smith might well and easily be the most dangerous man of them all.

Hamilton gestured again, this time towards the very considerable pile of equipment lying on the garage floor. ‘How did those arrive—the packaging, I mean?’

‘Crates. We crate them up again?’

‘No. Too damned awkward to handle aboard a helicopter or hovercraft. I think—’

‘Waterproof canvas bags.’ He smiled at the slight surprise on Hamilton’s face. ‘We thought you might require something like that.’ He pointed towards two large cardboard boxes. ‘We bought them at the same time as we got the equipment. We’re not mentally retarded, you know.’

‘Fine. Your plane, a DC6, I understand—what’s its state of readiness?’

‘Superfluous question.’

‘I suppose. Where are the hovercraft and helicopter?’

‘Almost at Cuiabá.’ ‘Shall we join them?’

The DC6 parked at the end of the runway of Smith’s private airfield may not have been in the first flush of youth but if the gleaming fuselage was anything to go by its condition would have ranked anywhere as immaculate. Hamilton, Ramon and Navarro, aided by an unexpectedly helpful Serrano, were supervising the loading of the cargo. It was a thorough, rigorous, painstaking supervision. Each canvas bag in turn was opened, its contents removed, examined, returned and the bag then sealed to make it waterproof. It was a necessarily lengthy and time-consuming process and Smith’s patience was eroding rapidly.

He said sourly: ‘Don’t take many chances, do you?’

Hamilton glanced at him briefly. ‘How did you make your millions?’

Smith turned and clambered aboard the aircraft.

After half-an-hour’s flying time out from Brasilia the passengers, with the exception of Hamilton, were all asleep or trying to sleep. No-one, it seemed, felt philosophical enough or relaxed enough to read: the clamour from the ancient engines was so great as to make conversation virtually impossible. Hamilton, as if prompted by some instinct, looked around and his gaze focused.

Heffner, sprawled in his seat, appeared, from his partly opened mouth and slow deep breathing, to be asleep, a probability lent credence by the fact that his white drill jacket, inadvertently unbuttoned, lay so as to reveal under his left armpit a white felt container which had obviously been designed to accommodate the aluminium flask inside. This did not give concern to Hamilton: it was perfectly in character with the man. What did concern him was that on the other side of his chest could just be seen a small pearl-handled gun in a white felt under-arm holster.

Hamilton rose and made his way aft to the rear end of the compartment where the equipment, provisions and personal luggage were stored. It made for a very considerable pile, but Hamilton didn’t have to rummage around to find what he was looking for—when loading he had made a mental note of where every item had been stored. He retrieved his rucksack, opened it, looked casually around to see that he was unobserved, removed a pistol and thrust it into an inside pocket of his bush jacket. He replaced the rucksack and resumed his seat up front.

The flight to Cuiabá airport had been uneventful and so now was the landing. The passengers disembarked and gazed around them in something like wonder, which was more than understandable as the contrast between Cuiabá and Brasilia was rather more than marked.

Maria was gazing around her in apparent disbelief. She said: ‘So this is the jungle. Quite, quite fascinating.’

‘This is civilisation,’ Hamilton said. He pointed to the east. ‘The jungle lies over there. That’s where we’ll be very soon and once we get there perhaps you’d sell your soul to be back here.’ He turned and said sharply to Heffner: ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

Heffner had been walking in the direction of the airport building. Now he stopped, turned and looked at Hamilton with a languid, insolent air.

‘Talking to me?’

‘I’m looking at you and I don’t squint. Where are you going?’

‘Look, I can’t see it’s any of your business, but I’m going to a bar. I’m thirsty. Any objections?’

‘Every objection. We’re all thirsty. But there’s work to be done. I want all the equipment, food and luggage transferred to that DC3 there, and I want it done now. Two hours on and it will be too hot to work.’

Heffner glared at him, then looked at Smith, who shook his head. Sullenly, Heffner retraced his steps and approached Hamilton, his face heavy with anger. ‘Next time I’ll be ready, so don’t be fooled by last time.’

Hamilton turned to Smith and said, almost wearily: ‘He’s your employee. Any more trouble or threats of trouble and he’s on the DC6 back to Brasilia. If you disagree, I’m on the plane back there. Simple choice.’

Hamilton brushed contemptuously by Heffner who stared after him with clenched fists. Smith took Heffner by the arm and led him to one side, clearly having trouble keeping his anger in check. He said, low-voiced: ‘Damned if I don’t agree with Hamilton. Want to ruin everything? There’s a time and a place to get tough and this is neither the time nor the place. Bear in mind that we’re entirely dependent upon Hamilton. You understand?’

‘Sorry, boss. It’s just that the bastard is so damned arrogant. Pride cometh before a fall. My turn will come and the fall is going to be a mighty big one.’

Smith was almost kind. ‘I don’t think you quite understand. Hamilton regards you as a potential troublemaker—which, I have to say, you are—and he’s the sort of man who will eliminate any potential source of trouble. God, man, can’t you see? He’s trying to provoke you so that he can have a reason, or at least an excuse, for disposing of you.’

‘And how would he do that?’

‘Having you sent back to Brasilia.’

‘And failing that?’

‘Don’t even let us talk about such things.’

‘I can take care of myself, Mr Smith.’

‘Taking care of yourself is one thing. Taking care of Hamilton is another kettle of fish altogether.’

They watched, some of them with evident apprehension, as a giant twin-rotored helicopter, cables attached to four lifting bolts, clawed its way into the air, raising a small hovercraft with it. The hovercraft’s rate of climb was barely perceptible. At five hundred feet, it slowly began to move due east.

Smith said uneasily: ‘Those hills look mighty high to me. Sure they’ll make it?’

‘You’d better hope so. After all, they’re your machines.’ Hamilton shook his head. ‘Do you think the pilot would have taken off unless he knew it was on the cards? Only three thousand feet. No trouble.’

‘How far?’

‘The headwaters of the Rio da Morte are only a hundred miles away. To reach the landing strip? Perhaps eighty. In half-an-hour’s time we’ll leave in the DC3. We’ll still be there before them.’

Hamilton moved off and sat by the side of the river, idly lobbing stones into the dark waters. Some minutes later Maria appeared and stood uncertainly beside him. Hamilton looked up, smiled briefly, then glanced indifferently away.

She said: ’Is it safe to sit here?

‘Boy-friend let you off the leash?’

‘He’s not my boy-friend.’ She spoke with such vehemence that Hamilton looked at her quizzically.

‘You could have fooled me. Misinterpretations, so easily come by. You have come, no doubt, or been sent, to ask a few craftily probing questions?’

She said quietly: ‘Do you have to insult everybody? Wound everybody? Antagonise everybody? Provoke everybody? Back in Brasilia you said you had friends. It is difficult to understand how you came by them.’

Hamilton looked at her in some perplexity then smiled. ‘Now look who’s doing the insulting.’

‘Between gratuitous insults and the plain truth there’s a big difference. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’ She turned to walk away.

‘Oh, come and sit down. Childish, childish. Maybe I can ask a few probing questions while you congratulate yourself on having found a chink in Hamilton’s armour. I suppose that could be misinterpreted as an insult, too. Just sit down.’

She looked at him doubtfully. ‘I asked if it’s safe to sit here.’

‘A damn sight safer than trying to cross a street in Brasilia.’

She sat down gingerly, a prudent two feet away from him. ‘Things can creep up on you.’

‘You’ve read the wrong books or talked to the wrong people. Who or what is going to creep up on us? Indians? There’s not a hostile Indian within two hundred miles of here. Alligators, jaguars, snakes—they’re a damned sight more anxious to avoid you than you are to avoid them. There are only two dangerous things in the forest—the quiexada, the wild boar, and the carangageiros. They attack on sight.’

‘The caran what?’

‘Giant spiders. Great hairy creatures the size of soup plates. They come at you one yard at a time. Jumping, I mean. One yard and that’s it.’

‘How horrible!’

‘No problem. None in these parts. Besides, you didn’t have to come.’

‘Here we go again.’ Maria shook her head. ‘You really don’t care much for us, do you?’

‘A man has to be alone at times.’

‘Evasion, evasion.’ She shook her head again. ‘You’re always alone. Married?’

‘No.’

‘But you were.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

Hamilton looked at her, at the remarkable brown eyes which reminded him painfully of the only pair he’d ever seen like them. ‘You can tell?’

‘I can tell.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Divorced?’

‘No.’

‘No? You mean—’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh! Oh, I am sorry. How—how did she die?’

‘Come on. Plane to catch.’

‘Please. What happened?’

‘She was murdered.’ Hamilton stared out across the river, wondering what had caused him to make this admission to a total stranger. Ramon and Navarro knew, but they were the only two in the world he’d told. Perhaps a minute passed before he became conscious of the light touch of finger-tips on his forearm. Hamilton turned to look at her and knew at once that she wasn’t seeing him: the big brown eyes were masked in tears. Hamilton’s first reaction was one of an almost bemused incomprehension: this was totally out of character with the image she—ably abetted by Smith—projected of herself as a worldly-wise, street-wise cosmopolitan.

Hamilton gently touched the back of her hand and at first she didn’t appear to notice. Perhaps half a minute passed before she wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand, disengaged her other hand, smiled apologetically and said: ‘I’m sorry. What must you think of me?’

‘I think I may have misjudged you. I also think that in some way, some time, you may have suffered a lot.’

She had nothing to say to this, just wiped her eyes again, rose and turned away.

‘Battered’ is the adjective invariably, and perhaps inevitably, used to describe vintage and superannuated DC3s and this one was no exception: if anything it was an epitome, a prime example. The gleaming silver fuselage of yesteryear was but a fond and distant memory, the metal skin was pitted and scarred and appeared to be held together chiefly by large areas of rust: the engines, when started up, were a splendid complement to the rest of the plane, coughing, spluttering and vibrating to such an extent that it seemed improbable that they would not be shaken free from the airframe. But the plane lived up to its reputation of being one of the toughest and most durable ever built. With what seemed a Herculean effort-it couldn’t have been, it was under-loaded—it clambered off the runway and headed east into the late afternoon sky.

There were eleven people in the plane, Hamilton’s party, the pilot and co-pilot. Heffner, as was customary, was taking counsel with a bottle of Scotch: the aluminium flask, presumably, was being held as an emergency reserve. Seated across the aisle from Hamilton, he turned to him and spoke or, rather, shouted, for the rackety clamour from the ancient engines was almost deafening.

‘Wouldn’t kill you to tell us your plans, would it, Hamilton?’

‘No, it wouldn’t kill me. But what does that matter? How’s that going to help you?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘No secret. We land at Romono airstrip about the same time as the helicopter and hovercraft. Helicopter refuels—even those big birds have only a limited range—takes the hovercraft downstream, leaves it, returns and takes us down to join it in the morning.’

Smith, sitting in the seat next to Hamilton and listening, put a cupped hand to Hamilton’s ear and said: ‘How far downstream and why?’

‘I’d say about sixty miles. There are falls about fifty miles from Romono. Not even a hovercraft could negotiate them so this is the only way we can get it past there.’

Heffner said: ‘Do you have a map?’

‘As it happens, I have. Not that I require it. Why do you ask?’

‘If anything happens to you it would be nice to know where we are.’

‘You better pray nothing happens to me. Without me, you’re finished.’

Smith said into Hamilton’s ear: ‘You have to antagonise him? You have to be so arrogant? You have to provoke him?’

Hamilton looked at him, his face cold. ‘I don’t have to. But it’s a pleasure.’

Romono airstrip, like Romono itself, looked, as it always did, a miasmic horror. The DC3 and the helicopter-cum-hovercraft arrived on the strip within minutes of each other. The helicopter’s rotors had hardly stopped when a small fuel tanker moved out towards it.

The passengers disembarked from the DC3 and looked around them. Their expressions ranged from the incredulous to the appalled.

Smith contented himself with saying merely: ‘Good God!’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Heffner said. ‘What a stinking, nauseating dump. Jesus, Hamilton, is this the best you could do for us?’

‘What are you complaining about?’ Hamilton pointed to the tin shed which constituted both the arrival and departure terminals. ‘Look at that sign there. Romono International Airport. What more reassuring than that? This time tomorrow, gentlemen, you may well be thinking of this as home sweet home. Enjoy it. Think of it as the last outpost of civilisation. Look, as the poet says, your last on all things lovely every hour. Take what you need for the night. We have a splendid hotel here—the Hotel de Paris. Those who don’t fancy it—well, I’m sure Hiller will put you up.’ He paused. ‘On second thoughts, I think I could have a better use for Hiller.’

Smith said: ‘What kind of use?’

‘With your permission, of course. You know that this hovercraft is the lynchpin to everything?’

‘I’m not a fool.’

‘The hovercraft will be anchored tonight in very dicey waters indeed. By which I mean that the natives on either side of the Rio da Morte range from the unreliable to the downright hostile. So, it must be guarded. I suggest that this is not a task for one man, Kellner, the pilot, to do. In fact, I’m not suggesting, I’m telling you. Even if a man could keep awake all night, it would still be extremely difficult. So, another guard. I suggest Hiller.’ He turned to Hiller. ‘How are you with automatic weapons?’

‘Can find my way around, I guess.’

‘Fine.’ He turned back to Smith. ‘You’ll find a bus waiting outside the terminal.’ He reboarded the plane and emerged two minutes later bearing two automatic weapons and some drums of ammunition. By this time Hiller was alone. ‘Let’s go to the hovercraft.’

Kellner, the hovercraft pilot, was standing by his craft. He was thirtyish, sun-tanned, tough.

Hamilton said: ‘When you anchor tonight don’t forget to do so in midstream.’

‘There’ll be a reason for that?’ Kellner, clearly, was an Irishman.

‘Because if you tie up to either bank the chances are good that you’ll wake up with your throat cut. Only, of course, you don’t wake up.’

‘I don’t think I’d like that.’ Kellner didn’t seem unduly perturbed. ‘Midstream for me.’

‘Even there you won’t necessarily be safe. That’s why Hiller is coming with you—needs two men to guard against an attack from both sides. And that’s why we have those two nasty little Israeli sub-machines along.’

‘I see.’ Kellner paused. ‘I’m not much sure that I care for killing helpless Indians.’

‘When those same helpless Indians puncture your hide with a few dozen darts and arrowheads, all suitably or perhaps even lethally poisoned, you might change your mind.’

‘I’ve already changed it.’

‘Know anything about guns?’

‘I was in the S.A.S. If that means anything to you.’

‘It means a great deal to me.’ The S.A.S. was Britain’s elite commando regiment. ‘Well, that saves me explaining those little toys to you, I suppose.’

‘I know them.’

‘One of my luckier days,’ Hamilton said. ‘Well, see you both tomorrow.’

The saloon of the Hotel de Paris, after closing hours, had six occupants. Heffner, glass in hand, was slumped in a chair, but his eyes were open: Hamilton, Ramon, Navarro, Serrano and Tracy were asleep or apparently so, stretched out on benches or on the floor. Bedrooms were, that night, at a premium in the Hotel de Paris. As they were all equally dreadful and bug-ridden, Hamilton had explained, this was not a matter for excessive regret.

Heffner stirred, stooped, removed his boots, rose and padded his noiseless way across to the bar, deposited his glass on the counter, then crossed silently to the nearest rucksack. It was, inevitably, Hamilton’s. Heffner opened it, searched briefly, removed a map, and studied it intently for some minutes before returning it to the rucksack. He returned to the bar, poured himself a generous measure of the Hotel de Paris’s Scotch. Wherever the birthplace of that particular brand was it hadn’t been among the highlands and islands of Scotland. He returned to his seat, replaced his shoes, leaned back in his chair to enjoy his nightcap, spluttered and emptied half the contents on the floor.

Hamilton, Ramon and Navarro, heads propped on hands, were regarding him with a quietly speculative air.

Hamilton said: ‘Well, did you find what you were looking for?’

Heffner didn’t say whether he had or not.

‘One of the three of us is going to keep an eye on you for the remainder of the night. You try to stir from that chair and I will take the greatest pleasure in clobbering you. I don’t much care for people who meddle in my private belongings.’

Hamilton and the twins slept soundly throughout the night. Heffner did not once leave his chair.

CHAPTER SIX

Just after dawn, the helicopter pilot, John Silver-generally known as Long John—was at the controls. The party of nine embarked and stowed their overnight luggage with the food and equipment that had been transferred from the DC3. Hamilton took the co-pilot’s seat. So cavernous was the interior of the giant helicopter that it seemed virtually empty. It rose effortlessly and flew more or less east, paralleling the course of the Rio da Morte. All the passengers had their heads craned, peering through what few windows there were: they were seeing for the first time the true Amazonian rainforest.

Hamilton turned in his seat and pointed forward. ‘That’s an interesting sight.’ His voice was a shout.

On a wide mud flat, perhaps almost a mile long, and on the left bank, scores of alligators lay motionless as if asleep.

‘Good God!’ It was Smith. ’Good God! Are there so many ‘gators in the world?’ He shouted to Silver: ‘Take her down, man, take her down!’ Then to Heffner: ‘Your camera! Quick!’ He paused, as if in sudden thought, then turned to Hamilton. ‘Or should I have asked the expedition commander’s permission?’

Hamilton shrugged. ‘What’s five minutes?’

The helicopter came down over the river in great sweeping, controlled circles. Long John was clearly a first-rate pilot.

The alligators, hemmed in the narrow strip between forest and river, seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. It was, depending upon one’s point of view, a fascinating, horrifying or terrifying spectacle.

Tracy said, almost in awe: ‘My word, I wouldn’t care to crash-land amongst that lot.’

Hamilton looked at him. ‘Believe me, that’s the least of the dangers down there.’

‘The least?’

‘This is the heart of the Chapate territory.’

‘That meant to mean something to me?’

‘You have a short memory. I’ve mentioned them before. It would mean something to you if you ended up in one of their cooking-pots.’

Smith looked at him doubtfully, clearly not knowing whether to believe him or not, then turned to the pilot.

‘That’s low enough, Silver.’ He twisted in his seat and shouted at the top of his voice: ‘God’s sake, man, hurry!’

‘Moment, moment,’ Heffner bawled back. ‘There’s such a damned jumble of equipment here.’

There was, in fact, no jumble whatsoever. Heffner had already found his own camera, which lay at his feet. In Hamilton’s rucksack he had found something that he had missed the previous night for the good enough reason that he hadn’t been looking for it. He held a leather-bound case in his hand, the one Colonel Diaz had given to Hamilton. He extracted the camera from the case, looked at it in some puzzlement, then pressed a switch in the side. A flap fell down, noiselessly, on oiled hinges. His face registered at first bafflement, then understanding. The interior of the camera consisted of a beautifully made transistorised radio transceiver. Even more importantly it bore some embossed words in Portuguese. Heffner could read Portuguese. He read the words and his understanding deepened. The radio was the property of the Brazilian Defence Ministry, which made Hamilton a government agent. He clicked the flap in position.

‘Heffner!’ Smith had twisted again in his seat. ‘Heffner, if you—Heffner!’

Heffner, radio case in one hand and his pearl-handled pistol in the other, approached. His face was a smiling mask of vindictive triumph. He called out: ‘Hamilton!’

Hamilton swung around, saw the wickedly smiling face, his own camera held high and the pearl-handled pistol and at once threw himself to the floor of the aisle, his gun coming clear of his bush jacket. Even so, despite the swiftness of Hamilton’s movement, Heffner should have had no trouble in disposing of Hamilton, for he had the clear drop on him and his temporarily defenceless target was feet away. But Heffner had spent a long night of agony in the Hotel de Paris. As a consequence, his hand was less than steady, his reactions were impaired, his co-ordination considerably worse.

Heffner, his face contorted, fired twice. With the first came a cry of pain from the flight deck. With the second the helicopter gave a sudden lurch. Then Hamilton fired, just once, and a red rose bloomed in the centre of Heffner’s forehead.

Hamilton took three quick steps up the aisle and had reached Heffner before anyone else had begun to move. He stooped over the dead man, retrieved the camera-radio case, checked that it was closed, then straightened. Smith appeared beside him, a badly shaken man, and stared down in horror at Heffner.

‘Between the eyes, between the eyes.’ Smith shook his head in total disbelief. ‘Between the eyes. Christ, man, did you have to do that?’

‘Three things,’ Hamilton said. If he was upset, he had his distress well under control. ‘I tried to wing him, and I’m a good shot, especially at four paces, but the helicopter lurched. He twice tried to kill me before I pulled the trigger. Third thing. I gave orders that no-one was to carry guns. As far as I’m concerned, he’s dead by his own hand. God’s sake, why did he pull a gun on me? Was he mad?’

Smith, perhaps fortunately, was given no time to lend consideration to either of those things, even had he then been of a mind to, which he almost certainly was not. The helicopter had given another and even more violent lurch, and although it still carried a good deal of forward momentum, seemed to be fluttering and falling from the sky like a wounded bird. It was a singularly unpleasant sensation.

Hamilton ran forward, clutching at whatever he could to maintain his balance. Silver, blood streaming from a cheek wound, was fighting to regain control of the uncontrollable helicopter.

Hamilton said: ‘Quick! Can I help?’

‘Help? No. I can’t even help myself.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘First shot burnt my face. Nothing. Superficial. Second shot must have gone through one or more hydraulic lines. Can’t see exactly but it can’t have been anything else. What happened back there?’

‘Heffner. Had to shoot him. He tried to shoot me, but he got you and your controls instead.’

‘No loss.’ Considering the circumstances, Silver was remarkably phlegmatic. ‘Heffner, I mean. This machine is a different matter altogether.’

Hamilton took a quick look backwards. The scene, understandably, was one of confusion and consternation although there were no signs of panic. Maria, Serrano and Tracy, all three with almost comically dazed expressions, were sitting or sprawling in the central aisle. The others clung desperately to their seats as the helicopter gyrated through the sky. Luggage, provisions and equipment were strewn everywhere.

Hamilton turned again and pressed his face close to the windscreen. The now pendulum-like motion of the craft was making the land below swing to and fro in a crazy fashion. The river was still directly beneath: the one plus factor appeared to be that they had now left behind them the mudflats where the alligators had lain in so lifeless a manner. Hamilton became suddenly aware that an island, perhaps two hundred yards long by half as wide, lay ahead of them in the precise middle of the river, at a distance of about half a mile: it was wooded but not heavily so. Hamilton turned to Silver.

‘This thing float?’

‘Like a stone.’

‘See that island ahead?’

They were now less than two hundred feet above the broad brown waters of the river: the island was about a quarter of a mile ahead.

‘I can see it,’ Silver said. ‘I can also see all those trees. Look, Hamilton, control is close to zero. I’ll never get it down in one piece.’

Hamilton looked at him coldly. ‘Never mind the damned chopper. Can you get us down in one piece?’

Silver glanced briefly at Hamilton, shrugged and said nothing.

The island was now two hundred yards distant. As a landing ground it looked increasingly discouraging. Apart from scattered trees it was, but for one tiny clearing, thickly covered with dense undergrowth. Even for a helicopter in perfect health it would have made an almost impossible landing site.

Even in that moment of emergency some instinct made Hamilton glance to the left. Directly opposite the island, at about fifty yards’ distance and on the bank of the river, was a large native village. From the expression—or lack of it—on Hamilton’s face it was clear that he didn’t care for large native villages, or, at least, this particular one.

Silver’s face, streaked with rivulets of sweat and blood, reflected a mixture of determination and desperation, with the former predominating. The passengers, tense, immobile, gripped fiercely at any available support and stared mutely ahead. They, too, could see what was about to happen.

The helicopter, swinging and side-slipping, weaved its unpredictable way towards the island. Silver was unable to bring the helicopter to the hover. As they approached this one much too small clearing, the helicopter was still going far too fast. Its ground-level clearance was by then no more than ten feet. The trees and undergrowth rushed at them with accelerating speed.

Silver said: ‘No fire?’

‘No fire.’

‘No ignition.’ Silver switched off.

One second later the helicopter dipped sharply, crashed into the undergrowth, slid about twenty feet and came to a jarring stop against the bole of a large tree.

For a few moments the silence was complete. The engine roar had vanished. It was a silence compounded of the dazed shock caused by the violence of their landing and the relief of finding themselves still alive. No-one appeared to have sustained any injury.

Hamilton reached out and touched Silver’s arm. ‘I’ll bet you couldn’t do that again.’

Silver dabbed at his wounded cheek. ‘I wouldn’t ever care to try.’ If he was in any way proud of his magnificent airmanship it didn’t show.

‘Out! All out!’ Smith’s voice was a stentorian shout, he seemed unaware that normal conversational tones were again in order. ‘We can go up any moment.’

‘Don’t be so silly.’ Hamilton sounded weary. ‘Ignition’s off. Stay put.’

‘If I want to go out—’

‘Then that’s your business. Nobody’s going to stop you. Later on, we’ll bury your boots.’

‘What the hell is that meant to mean?’

‘A civilised interment of the remains. Maybe even those won’t be left.’

‘If you’d be—’

‘Look out your window.’

Smith looked at Hamilton then turned to the window, standing so as to achieve a ground view. His eyes widened, his lips parted and his complexion changed for the worse. Two very large alligators were only feet from the helicopter, fearsome jaws agape, their huge tails swinging ominously from side to side. Wordlessly, Smith sat down.

Hamilton said: ‘I warned you before you left, the Mato Grosso is no place for mindless little children. Our two friends out there are just waiting for such children. And not only those two. There’ll be more around, lots of them. Also snakes, tarantulas and suchlike. Not to mention—’ He broke off and pointed to the port windscreen. ‘I’d rather you didn’t have to but take a look anyway.’

They did as he asked. Among the trees on the left bank could be seen a number of huts, perhaps twenty in all, with an especially large circular one in the centre. Several columns of smoke shimmered up into the morning air. Canoes, and what looked like a pinnace, fronted the village. A large number of natives, nearly naked, stood on the bank, talking and gesticulating.

‘But this is luck,’ Smith said.

‘You should have stayed in Brasilia.’ Hamilton sounded unwontedly sour. ‘Sure it’s luck—the most fiendishly bad luck. I see the chiefs are getting ready.’

There was a fairly long silence then Maria said almost in a whisper: ‘The Chapate?’

‘None else. Complete, as you can now see, with olive branches and calling cards.’

Every native ashore was now armed or was in the process of getting armed. They carried spears, bows and arrows, blowpipes and machetes. The angry expressions on their faces went well with the menacing gesticulations in the direction of the island.

‘They’ll be calling soon,’ Hamilton said, ‘and not for tea. Maria, would you give Mr Silver a hand to fix up his face?’

Tracy said: ‘But we’re safe here, surely? We have guns, plenty. They’re carrying nothing that could penetrate our screens, far less the fuselage.’

‘True. Ramon, Navarro, get your rifles and come with me.’

Smith said: ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Discourage them. From crossing. Shame, really. They may not even know what a gun is.’

‘Tracy made sense,’ Smith said. ‘We’re safe here. You have to be a hero?’

Hamilton stared at him until Smith looked uncomfortable. Hamilton said: ‘Heroism doesn’t enter into it, just survival. I wonder whether you would be half-way brave enough to fight for your own survival. I suggest you leave this to someone who knows how the Chapate wage war. Or do you want to be ready for immediate consumption when they get you?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Smith tried to sound blustery but his heart wasn’t in it, his ego had been too severely dented.

‘Just this. If they get as much as a foothold on this island the first thing they’ll do is to set fire to the undergrowth and roast you alive in this metal coffin.’

There was a silence that lasted until Hamilton, Ramon and Navarro had left the helicopter.

Ramon, the first to touch the ground, had his rifle on the nearest alligator immediately but the precaution proved needless: both alligators immediately turned and scuttled away into the undergrowth.

Hamilton said: ‘Just keep an eye on our backs, Ramon.’ Ramon nodded. Hamilton and Navarro moved towards the rear, took shelter behind the tail of the helicopter and looked cautiously ashore.

A squat, powerfully built Indian dressed in a pink feather headdress, teeth necklace, a series of arm bracelets and little else—definitely the chief—was ordering warriors into half-a-dozen canoes. He himself was standing on the bank.

Navarro looked at Hamilton, his reluctance plain. He said: ‘No choice?’

With equal regret Hamilton agreed, shaking his head. Navarro lifted his rifle, aimed and fired in one swift motion. The report of the rifle momentarily paralysed all activity on the bank. Only the chief moved: he cried out in pain and clutched his upper right arm. A second later, while the warriors were still immobilised in shock, another report was heard and another warrior struck in precisely the same place. Navarro was clearly a marksman of the most extraordinary accuracy.

Navarro said: ‘Not nice, Senor Hamilton.’

‘Not nice. As the old saying goes, it’s people like us who have made people like them what they are. But this is hardly the time and place to explain that to them.’

Ashore the warriors rapidly abandoned their canoes and ran for the shelter of their huts and the forest, taking the two wounded men with them. From those shelters they could be seen almost immediately drawing bows and lifting blowpipes to their mouths. Hamilton and Navarro prudently dropped behind cover as arrows and darts rattled and rebounded harmlessly off the fuselage. Navarro shook his head in sorrow and wonderment. ‘I’ll bet they’ve never even heard a rifle report before. It is something less than a fair contest, Senor Hamilton.’

Hamilton nodded, but made no comment for comment would have been superfluous. He said: ‘That’s all for now. I don’t think they’ll try anything again before dark. But I’ll keep watch—or arrange for others to do it. Meantime, you and Ramon get rid of our four-legged friends and the creepy-crawlies. Try to chase them away, shoo them away. If you have to shoot, for goodness’ sake don’t do it by the water’s edge or in the water. Bath-time tonight and I don’t want to attract every piranha for miles around.’

Hamilton reboarded the helicopter. Tracy said: ‘That was quite a hailstorm out there. Arrows and darts, I assume?’

‘Didn’t you see?’

‘I wasn’t too keen on looking. I’m sure those windows are made of toughened glass but I wasn’t going to be the one to put them to the test. Poisoned?’

‘Certainly. But, almost equally certainly, no curare, nothing lethal. They have a less final but equally effective poison that merely stuns. Too much curare affects the flavour of the stew.’

Smith said sourly: ‘You certainly have a summary way of dealing with the opposition.’

‘I should have parleyed with them? The brightly coloured beads approach? Why don’t you go and try it?’ Smith said nothing. ‘If you have any futile suggestions to offer, I suggest you either translate them into action or shut up. There’s a limit to the number of niggling remarks a man can take.’

Silver, his face bandaged, intervened pacifically. ‘And now?’

‘A lovely long siesta until dusk. For me, that is. I shall have to ask you to take turns in keeping watch. Not only the village, but as far upstream and downstream as you can see—the Chapate might contemplate launching a canoe attack at some distance from their village although I consider it highly unlikely. If anything happens, let me know. Ramon and Navarro should be back in twenty minutes; don’t bother letting me know.’

Tracy said: ‘You place a great deal of faith in your lieutenants.’

‘Total.’

Smith said: ‘So we keep awake while you sleep. Why?’

‘Recharging my batteries for the night ahead.’

‘And then?’

Hamilton sighed. ‘This helicopter, obviously, will never be airborne again so we have to find some other means of rejoining the hovercraft, which I reckon must be about thirty miles downstream. We can’t go by land. It would take us days to hack our way down there and, anyway, the Chapate would get us before we covered a mile. We need a boat. So we’ll borrow one from the Chapate. There’s a nice, big and very ancient motor launch moored to the bank there. Not their property for a certainty: the original owners were probably eaten long ago. And the engine will be a solid block of rust and quite useless. But we don’t need power to go downstream.’

Tracy said: ‘And how do you propose we-ah—obtain this boat, Mr Hamilton?’

‘I’ll get it. After sunset.’ He smiled faintly. ‘That’s why I intend recharging my batteries in advance.’

Smith said: ‘You really do have to be a hero, Hamilton, don’t you?’

‘And you’ll really never learn, will you? No, I don’t have to be a hero. I don’t want to be a hero. You can go instead. You be the hero. Go on. Volunteer. Impress your girl-friend.’

Smith slowly unclenched his fists and turned away. Hamilton sat and appeared to compose himself for slumber, oblivious of the dead Heffner laid now across the aisle from him. The others looked at one another in silence.

It was many hours later, at dusk, when Hamilton said: ‘Everything packed? Guns, ammunition, last night’s overnight bags, food, water, medicines. And, Silver, the chopper’s two compasses might come in handy.’

Silver indicated a box by his feet. ‘They’re already in there.’

‘Excellent.’ Hamilton looked around him. ‘Well, that seems to be all. Heigh-ho, I think.’

‘What do you mean, that seems to be all?’ Smith said. He nodded towards the dead Heffner. ‘How about him?’

‘Well, how about him?’

‘You going to leave him here?’

‘That’s up to you.’ Hamilton spoke with an almost massive indifference. He did not have to spell out his meaning. Smith turned and stumbled down the helicopter steps.

At the downstream end of the island, only Navarro, of all the party, was absent. In the gathering darkness Hamilton again checked all the various packs. He seemed satisfied.

‘There will be a moon,’ he said, ‘but it will be too late to save us. Moonrise is in about two and a half hours. When they attack—there’s no “if” about it—it must be inside those two and a half hours, which means it could be any time now although I should guess that they’ll wait a bit until it is as dark as possible. Ramon, join Navarro now. If they attack before you get my signal, hold them off as best you can for as long as you can. If my signal comes first, get back here at once. Tracy?’

Tracy said: ‘I can tell you, I haven’t been too happy here for the past hour. No, no alligators. No sign. Not a ripple. No gun?’

‘Guns make noises. Guns get wet.’

Maria shivered and pointed to his big sheath knife. ‘And that does neither?’

‘Sometimes the first blow doesn’t kill. Then there can be a lot of noise. But no heroics. I don’t expect to have to use it. If I do, it means I’ve botched my job.’

Hamilton looked out across the river. The darkness had now so deepened that the shoreline was no more than a dimly seen blur. He checked that the coil of rope, the waterproof torch and the sheath knife were securely attached to his waist, walked noiselessly into the river and then slowly, silently, began to swim.

The water was warm, the current was gentle and around him he could see nothing but the calm dark water. Suddenly, he stopped swimming, trod water and stared ahead. He could see what he imagined to be a tiny ripple in the black smoothness without being able to see what caused it. His right hand came clear of the water, clenched round the haft of his sheath knife. The tiny ripple was still there but even as he strained to watch it, it disappeared. Hamilton replaced the knife in its sheath. He wasn’t the first person to have mistaken a drifting log for a crocodile, a considerably healthier position than the other way round. He resumed his silent swimming.

A minute later he drifted in towards the bank and caught hold of a convenient tree root. He straightened, paused, looked carefully around, listened intently then emerged swiftly and silently from the river and disappeared into the forest.

A hundred yards brought him to the perimeter of the village. There were at least a score of native huts, haphazardly arranged, none of them showing any sign of life. In their approximate centre was the much larger circular hut: light could be seen through the numerous chinks in its walls. Ghostlike, Hamilton moved off to his right and moved round the perimeter of the village until he was directly to the rear of the large hut. Here he waited until he was sure—or as sure as he could possibly be—that he was alone then moved forward to the rear of the hut. He selected a small, lighted chink in the wall and peered through it.

The communal hut was illuminated by some scores of tallow tapers. It was completely unfurnished. Dozens of natives were standing several deep round a cleared space in the middle where an elderly man was using a stick to make a diagram on the sand-covered floor while at the same time explaining something in an unintelligible tongue. The diagram was the outline of the island. Also shown was the left bank of the river on which the village stood. The speaker had drawn lines from the village, from above the village and from below the village, all towards the island. A multi-pronged attack was to be launched on the helicopter and its passengers. The lecturer lifted his stick from time to time and pointed it at various natives: it was apparent that he was allocating canoe crews for their lines of attack.

Hamilton moved away in the direction of the upper river bank, still circling the village perimeter. As he passed the last hut, he stopped. At least twenty canoes, some quite large, were tethered to the bank. Almost at the end of the row, upriver, was the dilapidated, paintflaked motor launch, a little over twenty feet in length. It was deep in the water but floating so to that extent might be deemed riverworthy.

Two Indian warriors, talking quietly, stood guard at the downstream end of the row of canoes. As Hamilton watched, one of them gestured towards the village and walked away. Hamilton moved around to one side of the hut and crouched there: the Indian walked by on the other side.

Another problem had arisen, one that Hamilton could well have done without. Even fifteen minutes ago he could have remained where he had been and the remaining Indian could have come within a few feet without seeing him. Not any more. The sun was gone, moonrise was still some time away, but, unfortunately, the evening clouds which, earlier, had so obligingly offered concealment, had passed away and the southern skies were alive with stars-and in the tropics stars always seem so much bigger and brighter than they do in temperate climes. Visibility had become disconcertingly good.

Hamilton knew that the last thing he could afford to do was to wait. He straightened and advanced soundlessly, knife held in the throwing position. The Indian was gazing out towards the island, now quite visible. A shadow appeared behind him and there came the sound of a sharp but solid blow as the haft of Hamilton’s knife caught him on the base of the neck. Hamilton caught him as he was about to topple into the water and lowered him none too gently to the bank.

Hamilton ran upstream. He came to the motor launch, pulled out his signal torch, hooded the beam with his hand and shone it inside.

The launch was filthy and had at least four inches of water in the bottom. The torch beam lit on the centrally positioned engine which, as Hamilton had expected, was now no more than a solid block of rust. Floating incongruously in its vicinity were three cooking pans, obviously intended as bailers, at a guess the property of some optimistic but now departed missionaries. The beam played swiftly around the entire interior of the boat. There was no means of propulsion whatsoever: no mast, no sail, no oars, not even a solitary paddle.

Hamilton straightened and moved quickly to examine some of the nearest canoes. Within a minute he had collected at least a dozen paddles. He deposited those in the launch, hurried away, selected two large canoes and pulled them close to the launch. He unwound the rope around his waist, cut off two sections and used those to tie the canoes in tandem to the launch. He sliced through the manila painter, pushed the launch into deeper water, scrambled in, seized a paddle and began to move silently away from the bank.

Paddling the launch—and its attendant canoes—diagonally downstream, Hamilton was soon making heavy weather of it. The launch was naturally cumbersome and made more so by the amount of water in it and Hamilton, able to use only one paddle, had to switch continuously from side to side to keep it on course. Briefly, he paused, located what he could discern to be the upstream end of the island, now almost directly opposite him, pulled out his torch and pressed the button three times. He then pointed his torch diagonally downstream and flashed again three times. He replaced his torch and resumed paddling.

Ashore, an Indian warrior emerged from the communal hut, and walked casually towards the upper river bank. Suddenly, he hurried forward and stooped over an Indian lying face-down on the bank. A trickle of blood was coming from what was the beginning of a massive bruise on the base of his neck. His fellow tribesman straightened and began to shout, repeatedly and urgently.

Hamilton momentarily ceased paddling and glanced involuntarily over his shoulder. Then he bent himself again to his task but with even more energy this time.

Ramon and Navarro, as by pre-arrangement, had already begun to move to the other end of the island. Now they stopped abruptly when they heard the cry ashore, a cry now taken up by the shouting of many more angry voices.

Ramon said: ‘I think Senor Hamilton must have been up to something. I also think we’d better wait a little.’

The two men crouched on the island shore, rifles at the ready, and peered out across the channel. The bulky outline of Hamilton’s launch and the two canoes he was towing were now visible not thirty yards from where they were. Not as visible, but still distinct enough to be unmistakable, were the shadowy forms of canoes putting out from the village in pursuit.

Ramon shouted: ‘As close to the island as you can. We’ll cover you.’

Hamilton glanced over his shoulder. The nearest of half a dozen canoes was already less than thirty yards away. Two men stood in the bows, one with a blowpipe to his mouth, the other pulling back the string of his bow.

Hamilton crouched as low as possible in the boat, glancing almost desperately to his right. He could now see both Ramon and Navarro and he could see that they had their rifles levelled. The two shots came simultaneously. The warrior with the blowpipe toppled backwards in the canoe: the one with the drawn bow pitched into the water, his arrow hissing harmlessly into the river.

‘Quickly,’ Hamilton called. ‘Join the others.’

Ramon and Navarro loosed off a few more shots, more for the sake of discouragement than with the intent of hitting anything, then began to run. Thirty seconds later they rejoined the remainder of the party at the downstream end of the island, all looking anxiously upriver. Hamilton was struggling, unsuccessfully, to bring his unwieldy trio of boats ashore: it looked as if he would miss the tip of the island by feet only.

Ramon and Navarro handed over their rifles, plunged into the river, seized the bows of the motor launch and turned it into the shore. There were no orders given, no shouts for haste: such were needless. Within seconds all the equipment and passengers were aboard the motor launch, the boat pushed off and paddles distributed. They cast frequent and apprehensive glances astern but there was no cause for concern. The canoes, unmistakably, were dropping behind. There was going to be no pursuit.

Smith said, not even grudgingly: ‘That was rather well managed, Hamilton. And now?’

‘First we bail out. There should be three cooking pans floating around somewhere. Then we move out into the middle of the river—just in case they’ve sent some sharp-shooters down the left bank. There’s going to be a full moon shortly, the skies are cloudless so we might as well carry on. Kellner and Hiller must be distinctly worried about us by this time.’

Tracy said: ‘Why the two empty canoes?’

‘I told you yesterday evening that there were falls about fifty miles below the town. That’s why we had to airlift the hovercraft beyond them. The falls are about twenty miles farther on now. We’ll have to make a portage there and it would be impossible to make it with this elephant. When we get there and have emptied her we’ll give her a shove over the edge. Maybe she’ll survive, the falls are only fifteen feet.’

Some little time later the now bailed-out motor launch glided gently down the centre of the river, six men at the paddles but not exerting themselves; the current bore them along. The newly risen moon gleamed softly on the brown water. It was a peaceful scene.

Five hours later, as Hamilton guided the launch into the left bank, the passengers could distinctly hear the sound of the falls ahead, no Niagara roar, but unmistakably falls. They made the bank and tied up to a tree. The portage was not more than a hundred yards. First all the equipment, food and personal luggage were carried down, then the two canoes, and just in case the motor launch should survive its fall, the three cooking utensils for bailing as well.

Hamilton and Navarro climbed into a canoe and reached a spot where the white water ended about a hundred feet below the foot of the falls and paddled gently to maintain position. Both men were looking upriver towards the falls beyond which, they knew, Ramon was at work.

For half a minute there was only the brown-white smoothness of the Rio da Morte sliding vertically downwards. Then the bows of the motor launch came in sight, appeared to hesitate, until suddenly the entire boat was over and plunging down. There was a loud smack and a considerable cloud of spray as the launch first entered the water then disappeared entirely. All of ten seconds elapsed before it reappeared. But reappear it did, and, remarkably, right side up.

The launch, so full of water that there were only about four inches of freeboard left, drifted sluggishly downstream until Hamilton got a line aboard. With no little difficulty he and Navarro towed it to the left bank and tied up. Bailing operations commenced.

The brightly illuminated hovercraft lay anchored in midriver. Navigation, deck and cabin lights were on. Kellner and Hiller were already close to despair because the expected arrivals were already fifteen hours late and it hardly seemed likely that if they hadn’t arrived by that time, that they would be arriving at all. They had no cause for worry as far as they themselves were concerned. They had only to continue downriver till they came to the junction with the Araguaia and some form of civilisation. Both men were prepared to wait indefinitely and both for the same unexplained reason: they had faith in Hamilton’s powers of survival. And so Kellner had his hovercraft lit up like a Christmas tree. He was taking no chances that the helicopter would bypass him in the darkness.

He and Hiller, both men with their machine-pistols immediately and constantly ready to hand, stood on the brief afterdeck between the fans, ears always straining for the first faint intimation of the rackety clamour of the Sikorsky. But it was his eyes that gave Kellner the answer he was waiting for, not his ears. He peered upriver, peered more closely, then switched on and trained the hovercraft’s powerful searchlight.

A powerless but impassively manned motor-launch and two canoes had just appeared in line ahead round a bend in the Rio da Morte.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The hovercraft’s cabin was luxuriously furnished although on a necessarily small scale. The bar was splendidly if selectively equipped and, at the moment, well patronised. Most of the passengers from the wrecked helicopter gave the impression of having escaped from the jaws of death. The atmosphere was relaxed, almost convivial, and the spirit of the departed Heffner did not appear to hover over the company.

Hamilton said to Kellner: ‘Any trouble during the night?’

‘Not really. A couple of canoe-loads of Indians approached us just after midnight. We turned the searchlight on them and they turned and headed back for shore.’

‘No shooting?’

‘None.’

‘Good. Now, the big question tomorrow is the rapids that the Indians call the Hoehna.’

‘Rapids?’ Kellner said. ‘There are no rapids shown on the chart.’

‘I daresay. Nevertheless, they’re there. Never been through them myself although I’ve seen them from the air. Don’t look anything special from up there, but then nothing ever does. Much experience with rapids?’

‘A fair bit,’ Kellner said. ‘Nothing that a boat hasn’t navigated though.’

‘I’m told boats have made it through the Hoehna.’

‘So where’s the problem? A hovercraft can navigate rapids that no boat made by man could ever hope to.’

Serrano said: ‘Knowing you, Senor Hamilton, I thought you would have had us on our way by this time. A clear night. Bright moon. A beautiful night for sailing. Or is it “flying” in one of those machines?’

‘We need a good night’s rest, all of us. It’s going to be a hard day tomorrow. The Hoehna rapids are less than a hundred miles away. How long to get there, Kellner?’

‘Three hours. Less, if you want.’

‘One does not navigate rapids by night. And only a madman goes there in the hours of darkness. Because of the Horena, you see.’

Tracy said: ‘The Horena? Another Indian tribe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like the Chapate?’

‘They’re not at all like the Chapate. The Horena are the Roman lions, the Chapate the Christians. The Horena put the fear of living death into the Chapate.’

‘But you said the Muscias—’

‘Ah! The Muscias are to the Horena what the Horena are to the Chapate. Or so they say. Goodnight!’

‘Rapids!’ Ramon called out. ‘Rapids ahead!’

In the two and a half hours since the hover-craft’s dawn departure the Rio da Morte, though flowing at a rate of about fifteen knots, had been almost glassily calm and, although visibility had been poor because of fairly heavy rain, no problems had been encountered. But now conditions had dramatically altered. At first indistinctly through the now sheeting rain, but then suddenly, frighteningly, and all too vividly rocks could be seen, some jagged, some curved, thrusting up from the river bed. For as far as the eye could see hundreds of them spanned the entire width of the river with white-veined, seething water coursing down between them. The hovercraft, throttled back to a point where directional control could just be maintained, was almost at once into this white and seething cauldron.

When Kellner had said that he had some little experience of navigating rapids he had been doing himself less than justice. As far as the untrained observer could see, he was masterly. He was positively dancing a jig at the controls. He no longer had the throttle pulled back but kept altering it between half and full ahead which, considering their speed, might have seemed foolhardy, but wasn’t. By doing this and by ignoring the air ducts and maintaining the cushion pressure as high as possible he could all the more easily avoid making violent course alterations which would have slewed the hovercraft broadside and into disaster. Instead, he was deliberately aiming for and riding his hovercraft over the less fearsome rocks in his path. Even here he had to be selective, searching out the more rounded rocks and avoiding the jagged ones which, at that speed, would have ripped even the abnormally tough apron skirts, leading to the collapse of the cushion and turning the hovercraft into a boat which would then have foundered in short order. One moment he was jerking the pitch control back, putting power on the left fan, then if this proved insufficient, applying right rudder to give him directional stability while only seconds later he had to reverse the procedure. His task was made harder by the fact that even the high-speed windscreen wipers were capable only intermittently of clearing the spray and rain.

Kellner said to Hamilton who was seated beside him: ‘Tell me again about all those boats that were supposed to navigate the Hoehna.’

‘I guess I must have been misinformed.’

Further back in the hovercraft no-one spoke because all their energies were concentrated on hanging on to their seats. The general effect of the motion was that of a roller-coaster—except that this roller-coaster, unlike the fairground type, also shook violently from side to side.

Up front, Kellner said: ‘Do you see what I see?’

Some fifty yards ahead the river appeared to come to an abrupt end. They were obviously approaching a waterfall of sorts.

‘Unfortunately. What are you going to do about it?’

‘Funny.’

The hovercraft was being swept helplessly along to what was indeed a waterfall. The drop in the river level must have been at least ten feet. Kellner was doing the only thing he could do—trying to keep the hovercraft on a perfectly straight course.

The hovercraft swept over the fall, dipped sharply and plunged downwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. With an explosion of sound and spray, the hovercraft momentarily disappeared save for the stern. Not only the bows but part of the front of the cabin had gone completely under and in that way and at that angle the hovercraft remained for several seconds before it slowly struggled to the surface again, water cascading off its decks. It settled deeper in the water, the effect of partially losing its air cushion when the stern had come completely clear of the water.

The interior of the craft was a scene of appalling confusion. The angle of fall and the stunning impact had catapulted everyone to the deck. Equipment which had been stored but not lashed aft was now scattered throughout the cabin. To make matters worse, a window had been smashed and hundreds of gallons of water were sloshing about the interior of the cabin. One by one the passengers struggled upright. They were bruised, dazed and slightly concussed, but there seemed to be no broken bones.

As the air cushion began to fill again and the water gurgled away through the self-draining ports, they could feel the hovercraft rise slowly to its normal position.

Three times in the next few minutes the hovercraft went through a similar experience, although none of the waterfalls were as high as the first time. At last the hovercraft passed into an area of smooth, rock-free water, but it was then that another danger manifested itself. The forested banks gave way to what was at first low rock, which quickly became higher and higher until they were passing through what was virtually a cliff-sided canyon. At the same time the river swiftly narrowed to about a third of its original width and the speed of the river and hence that of the hovercraft rapidly more than doubled.

Hamilton and Kellner stared through the windscreens, glanced at each other, then looked forward again. Ahead, the steep-sided river walls fell sharply away, but this promised no surcease. A quarter of a mile ahead a jumble of huge black rocks blocked the river from side to side.

‘Bloody charts!’ Kellner said.

‘Indeed.’

‘Pity, really. These machines are very expensive.’

‘Make for the left.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘The Horena live on the right bank.’

‘Left, as the man says.’

The rocks were about three hundred yards away. They appeared to form an impenetrable barrier, no two sufficiently far apart to afford passage to the hovercraft.

Hamilton and Kellner looked at each other. Simultaneously they shrugged. Hamilton turned and faced the rear.

‘Hang on tight,’ he said. ‘We’re about to stop very suddenly.’ He had no sooner spoken than he realised that his warning had been unnecessary. They had seen what was coming up. They were already hanging on for dear life.

The rocks were now no more than a hundred yards distant. Kellner was guiding the craft towards the biggest gap between any two of them, the first and the second from the left bank.

For one brief moment it seemed that the hovercraft might just have one chance of making the passage as Kellner arrowed straight for the centre of the gap. The craft’s bows passed through but that was all: the passage was at least eighteen inches narrower than the midships beam of the hovercraft. With a grinding, screeching tearing of metal, the hovercraft came to an abrupt halt, immovably jammed.

Kellner went into reverse and applied maximum power. Nothing happened. Kellner eased off the fans but kept the engine running to maintain the cushion. He straightened up, muttering to himself, ‘Now with an ocean-going tug …’

Ten minutes later there was a pile of rucksacks, canvas bags and other improvised luggage containers on deck and Hamilton was securing a rope around his waist. He said: ‘It’s only twenty feet to that bank but the water’s mighty fast so kindly don’t let go of the end of that rope.’

It was a danger, but not the only one. Even as he finished speaking there came a sudden grunt and Kellner collapsed to the deck. A dart protruded from the back of his neck. Hamilton swung round.

On the far right bank, less than fifty yards away, stood a group of Indians, ten or twelve in all. Every man had a blowpipe to his mouth.

‘Horena!’ Hamilton shouted. ‘Down! Take cover behind the cabin, inside the cabin. Ramon! Navarro!’

Almost immediately, Ramon and Navarro, all humanitarian principles forgotten at the sight of Kellner, were on the cabin roof, stretched out on their elbows, rifles in hand. More darts struck the metal sheathing but none found a target. In three seconds the twins fired six shots. At five hundred yards either man was accurate. At fifty yards they were deadly. One after another, in those few seconds, three Horena toppled into the river, three others crumpled and died where they stood, and the others melted away.

Hamilton gazed down in bitterness at the lifeless Kellner. Not for the Horena the use of timbo, the poisonous bark of a forest vine which merely stunned: the dart which took Kellner had been tipped with curare.

Hamilton said: ‘If it weren’t for Kellner we’d all be dead. And now Kellner is dead.’ Without another word he jumped into the river. The only danger here was the speed of the water: neither alligators nor piranha ever inhabit rapids.

At first he was swept downstream and had to be hauled back. On the second attempt he succeeded in reaching the bank. He stood there some time, regaining his breath—the buffeting had been severe—then undid the rope around his waist and secured it to the bole of a tree. Another rope was thrown across to him. This he passed round a branch and threw back to the hovercraft where, in turn, it was passed round a fan bracket and thrown back to Hamilton, forming, in effect, an endless pulley.

The first item of equipment—Hamilton’s own rucksack—was ferried across, well clear of the water, as was all the rest of the equipment. The members of the party had to make it the wet way.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sweat-soaked and stumbling, mostly from near exhaustion, the heavily laden party of nine made their painfully slow way through the afternoon gloom of the rainforest. Even at high noon there was never more than half-light in its depths. The crowns of the great liana-festooned trees stretched out and intertwined a hundred feet or more above the ground, effectively blocking out the sunlight.

Progress was not slow because they had to hack their way with machetes through the dense undergrowth, because of dense undergrowth there was none. For plants to grow at ground-level, sunshine is essential. Jungle, in the true African sense of the term, did not exist. The progress was slow primarily because there was as much swampland as there was firm ground and quicksands were an ever-present peril. A man could step confidently on to what appeared to be an inviting stretch of greensward and on his second step find himself shoulder deep in a swamp. For safe locomotion in the forest, a probe, in the form of a hacked-off and trimmed branch, was essential. For every mile covered as the crow flew, it was not uncommon to have to traverse five miles. That, and the time it took to locate patches of firm ground, made for time-consuming, frustrating and exhausting travel.

Smith, in particular, was making heavy weather of it. His clothes were so saturated with sweat that he might well have just been dragged from the river. His legs had gone rubbery and he was gasping for breath.

Smith said: ‘What the hell are you trying to prove, Hamilton? How tough you are and how out of condition we city dwellers are? God’s sake, man, a break. An hour wouldn’t kill us, would it?’

‘No. But the Horena might.’

‘But you said their territory was on the right bank.’

‘That’s what I believe. But don’t forget: we killed six of their men. Great lads for revenge, the Horena. I wouldn’t put it past them to have crossed the river and be following us. There could be a hundred of them within a hundred yards of here, just waiting to get within blowpipe range, and we wouldn’t know a thing about it until too late.’

Smith, it appeared, was possessed of reserves of strength and endurance of which he had been unaware. He hurried on.

Towards evening, they reached a small and largely swampy clearing. Most of the party were now shambling, not walking.

‘Enough,’ Hamilton said. ‘We’ll make camp.’

With the approach of dusk the forest appeared to come alive. All around them was sound. Mainly, it came from birds—parrots, macaws, parakeets. But there was animal life too. Monkeys screeched, bull-frogs barked and now and again the deeply muffled roar of a jaguar came at them from the depths of the forest.

Everywhere there were creepers, vines, parasitic orchids and there, in the clearing, exotic flowers of almost every conceivable colour. The air was damp and fetid, a miasmic smell all-prevalent, the heat overpowering and leaden and enervating, the floor underfoot almost an unbroken expanse of thick, clinging, evil-smelling mud.

Everyone, even Hamilton, sank gratefully to what few patches of dry ground they could find. Over the river, not much higher than the tree-tops, several birds, with huge wing-spreads, seemed suspended against the sky, for their wings were motionless. They looked evil, sinister.

Maria said: ‘What are those horrible-looking creatures?’

‘Urubus,’ Hamilton said. ‘Amazonian vultures. They seem to be looking for something.’

Maria shuddered. Everybody gazed unhappily at the vultures.

‘A poor choice, I suppose,’ Hamilton said. ‘The cooking-pots, head-hunters or the vultures. And speaking of cooking-pots, some fresh meat might help. Curassow—a kind of wild turkey—armadillo, wild boar, all very tasty. Navarro?’

Ramon said: ‘I’ll come too.’

‘You stay, Ramon. A little more thoughtfulness, please. Someone has to look after these poor souls.’

Tracy said: ‘To keep an eye on us, you mean.’

‘I don’t see what mischief you can get up to here.’

‘Your haversack.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Tracy said deliberately: ‘Heffner appeared to find something there just before you murdered him.’

Ramon said: ‘Before Mr Heffner met his unfortunate end is what Mr Tracy means.’

Hamilton eyed Tracy thoughtfully then turned away into the forest, Navarro following. Less than two hundred yards from the camp Hamilton put a restraining hand on Navarro’s arm and pointed ahead. Not forty yards away was a quiexada, that most savage of all the world’s wild boars. They are so devoid of fear that they have been known to invade towns in herds, driving the citizens into their houses.

‘Supper,’ Hamilton said.

Navarro nodded and raised his rifle. One single shot was all that Navarro would ever need. They began to make their way towards the dead animal then halted abruptly. A herd of perhaps three dozen quiexada had suddenly appeared from the forest. They halted, pawed the ground, then came on again. There was no mistaking their intention.

Only on the riversides do Amazonian trees have branches, for only there can they get sunlight. Hamilton and Navarro reached the lowermost branches of the nearest tree a short distance ahead of the boars, which proceeded to encircle the tree and then, as if in response to some unseen signal, began to use their vicious tusks to savage the roots of the tree. The roots of the Amazonian trees, like those of the giant sequoia of California, are extremely long—and extremely shallow.

‘I would say they have done this sort of thing before,’ Navarro said. ‘How long is this going to take, do you think?’

‘Not long at all.’

Hamilton sighted his pistol and shot a quiexada that seemed to be more industrious than its companions. The dead animal toppled into the river. Within seconds, the smooth surface of the river was disturbed by a myriad ripples and there came the high-pitched, spine-chilling buzzing whine as the needle teeth of the voracious piranha proceeded to strip the quiexada to the bone.

Navarro cleared his throat and said: ‘Perhaps you should have shot one not quite so close to the river.’

Hamilton said: ‘Quiexada to one side, piranha to the other. You don’t by any chance see a constrictor lurking in the branches above?’

Involuntarily, Navarro glanced upwards, then down at the boars which had redoubled their efforts. Both men started firing and within seconds a dozen quiexada lay dead.

Navarro said: ‘Next time I go boar-hunting—if there is a next time—I shall bring a sub-machine-gun with me. My magazine is empty.’

‘Mine too.’

The sight of their dead companions seemed only to increase the blood lust of the boars. They tore at the roots with savage frenzy—and, already, several of the roots had been severed.

Navarro said: ‘Senor Hamilton, either I’m shaking or this tree is becoming rather—what is the word for it?’

‘Wobbly?’

‘Wobbly.’

‘I don’t think. I know.’

A rifle shot rang out and a boar dropped dead. Hamilton and Navarro swung round to look back the way they had come. Ramon, who seemed to be carrying a pack of some sort on his back, was less than forty yards away and was prudently standing by a low-branched tree. He fired steadily and with deadly accuracy. Suddenly an empty click was heard. Hamilton and Navarro looked at each other thoughtfully, but Ramon remained unperturbed. He reached into his pocket, extracted another magazine clip, fitted it and resumed firing. Three more shots and it finally dawned on the quiexada that they were on to a hiding to nothing. Those that remained turned and ran off into the forest.

The three men walked back towards the camp, dragging a quiexada behind them. Ramon said: ‘I heard the shooting so I came. Of course, I brought plenty of spare ammunition with me.’ Deadpan, he patted a bulging pocket, then shrugged apologetically. ‘All my fault. I should never have let you go alone. One has to be a man of the forest—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Hamilton said. ‘Thoughtful of you to bring my rucksack along with you.’

Ramon said pontifically: ‘One should not expose the weak-minded to temptation.’

‘Do be quiet,’ Navarro said. He turned to Hamilton. ‘God only knows he was insufferable enough before. But now, after this—’

The cooking fire burned in the near darkness and boar steaks sizzled in a glowing bed of coals.

Smith said: ‘I appreciate the necessity for all the shots. But if the Horena are around—well, that must have attracted the attention of everyone within miles.’

‘No worry,’ Hamilton said. ‘No Horena will ever attack at night. If he dies at night his soul will wander for ever in the hereafter. His gods must see him die.’ He prodded a steak with his sheath knife. ‘I would say those are just about ready.’ Ready or not, the steaks were dispatched with every sign of gusto and when they were finished Hamilton said: ‘Better if it had hung a week, but tasty, tasty. Bed. We leave at dawn. I’ll keep the first watch.’

They prepared for sleep, some lying on waterproof sheets, others in lightweight hammocks slung between trees at the edge of the clearing. Hamilton flung some fuel on the fire and kept on flinging it until it flared up so brightly that the flames were almost ten feet high. Machete in hand, Hamilton departed to obtain some more fuel and returned with an armful of branches most of which he cast on the already blazing fire.

Smith said: ‘Well, granted, granted, you know how to make bonfires. But what’s it all in aid of?’

‘Safety measures. Keeps the creepy-crawlies at bay. Wild animals fear fire.’ He was to be proved half right, half wrong.

He was on his third fuel-hunting trip and was returning to camp when he heard the piercing scream of fear. He dropped the fuel and ran into the brightly lit clearing. He knew the high-pitched scream could only have come from Maria and as he closed on her hammock the reason for her terror was obvious: a giant anaconda, at least thirty feet in length and with its tail still anchored to one of the trees that supported Maria’s hammock, had one of its deadly coils wrapped round the base of her hammock. She was in no way pinned down, just too paralysed with fear to move. The anaconda’s vast jaws were agape.

It was not Hamilton’s first anaconda and he had a nodding respect for them but no more. A full-grown specimen can swallow a 150-pound deer in its entirety. But while they could be endlessly patient, even cunning, in waiting for their next meal to come along, they were extremely slow-witted in action. While Maria continued to scream in the same mindless terror, he approached within feet of the fearsome head. No more than any other creature on earth could an anaconda withstand three Luger bullets in the head: it died immediately, but even in its death the coil slipped over the girl’s ankles and continued to contract. Hamilton struggled to pull the leathery coil free but was brushed aside by Ramon who carefully placed two rifle bullets into the upper centre of the coil, severing the main spinal nerve. The anaconda at once went limp.

Hamilton carried her across to his groundsheet close by the fire. She was in a state of mild shock. Keep a shocked patient warm, Hamilton had often heard, and the thought had no sooner occurred to him than Ramon knelt alongside, a sleeping-bag in his hands. Together they eased the girl inside, zipped up the bag and sat to wait. Navarro came to join them and jerked a thumb in the direction of an apparently sleeping Smith.

‘Observe our gallant hero,’ he said. ‘Asleep? He’s wide awake. Has been all the time. I watched him.’

Ramon said complainingly: ‘You might have come and watched us.’

‘When you and Senor Hamilton can’t take care of a simple-minded reptile like that it’s time for us all to retire. I saw his face and he was terrified, seemed quite unable to move: not, I am sure, that he wanted to move or had any intention of moving. Has the girl been hurt?’

‘Not physically,’ Hamilton said. ‘I’m afraid this is basically my fault. I had a big fire going to frighten off wild animals. Well, anacondas are also wild creatures and as frightened of fire as any other. This one just wanted out: it was the devil’s bad luck that it was roosting in the tree that helped support Maria’s hammock. I’m pretty sure she would have come to no harm. The reptile was simply easing its way down the tree. Apart from the fact that its belly is swollen and obviously would not be requiring another meal for a fortnight, it probably had a much greater matter on its mind, such as getting the hell out of here. All very unfortunate but no harm done.’

‘Perhaps,’ Ramon said. ‘I hope.’

‘You hope?’ Hamilton said.

‘Trauma,’ Ramon said. ‘How deep does a trauma lie? This has been a traumatic experience. But I think that’s only a side issue. I have the feeling that her whole life has been a traumatic experience.’

‘You plunging into the deep waters of psychology, psychiatry or what-have-you, Ramon?’ Hamilton didn’t smile as he spoke.

‘I agree with Ramon,’ Navarro said. ‘Twins, you know,’ he added apologetically. ‘Something is wrong or not what it appears to be. Her actions, her behaviour, the way she talks and smiles—I find it hard to believe that this is a bad person, a common whore. Smith, we know, is a bad person. She doesn’t care for him, any fool can see that. So what goes on?’

‘Well,’ Hamilton said judicially, ‘he’s got a lot to offer—’

‘Ignore Senor Hamilton,’ Ramon said. ‘He’s just trying to provoke us.’

Navarro nodded in agreement then said: ‘I think she is a prisoner in some way or another.’

‘Possibly,’ Hamilton said. ‘Possibly. Has it occurred to either of you that he might be in some way her prisoner, without ever knowing it?’

Navarro looked at Ramon, then accusingly at Hamilton. ‘There you go again, Senor Hamilton. You know something that we don’t know and you’re not telling us.’

‘I know nothing that you don’t know and far be it from me to suggest that I look more closely and, perhaps, think a little more deeply. But, then, you are young.’

‘Young?’ Navarro was indignant. ‘Neither of us, Senor Hamilton, will ever see thirty again.’

‘That’s what I meant.’ He put his fingers to his lips. Beside him, Maria was stirring. She opened her eyes, still huge with fear and horror. Hamilton touched her gently on the shoulder.

‘It’s all right now,’ he said gently. ‘It’s all over.’

‘That horrible, ghastly head.’ Her voice was no more than a husky whisper and she was shaking. Ramon rose and walked away. ‘That awful snake—’

‘The snake is dead,’ Hamilton said. ‘And you are unharmed. We promise you, no harm will come to you.’

She lay there breathing shallowly, her eyes closed. She opened them again when Ramon returned and knelt by her side. He had an aluminium cup in one hand, a bottle in the other.

Hamilton said: ‘And what do we have here?’

‘The finest cognac,’ Ramon replied. ‘As is only to be expected. Smith’s private supplies.’

‘I don’t like brandy,’ she said.

‘Ramon is right. You’d better like it. You need it.’

Ramon poured a generous measure. She tasted it, coughed, screwed her eyes shut and emptied the cup in two gulps.

‘Good girl,’ Hamilton said.

‘Awful,’ she said. She looked at Ramon. ‘But thank you. I feel better already.’ She glanced across the clearing and fear touched her eyes again. ‘That hammock—’

‘You’re not going back to that hammock,’ Hamilton said. ‘It’s safe enough now, of course, it was just sheer bad luck that the anaconda was up the tree when your hammock was slung, but we can understand your not wanting to go back there. You’re in Ramon’s sleeping-bag and on a ground-sheet. You’ll stay just where you are. We’ll keep a big fire going all night and one of the three of us will keep an eye on you till the morning. Come the dawn, I promise you not even a mosquito will have come near you.’

Slowly she looked at the three men in turn then said huskily: ‘You are all very kind to me.’ She tried to smile but it was only a try. ‘Damsel in distress. Is that it?’

‘Perhaps there’s a little bit more to it than that,’ Hamilton said. ‘But now’s not the time to talk about it. Just you try to sleep—I’m sure Ramon will give you a night-cap to help you on your way. Oh, hell.’

Smith, who obviously felt that he had maintained his distance long enough, was approaching, his whole attitude manifesting his resentment of Maria’s close proximity to the three men. As he dropped to his knees beside her, Hamilton rose, looked at him, turned and walked away, the twins following.

Ramon said: ‘Senor Hamilton. Quiexada, piranha, anaconda, a sick girl and a villain. To pick so divine a resting spot in such unique company is a gift not given to many.’

Hamilton just looked at him and moved off into the forest to retrieve his load of firewood.

Early in the morning Hamilton led the others in single file through the rainforest and across firm ground, firm because the terrain was gently rising and the water table was now well below them. After about two hours’ walking Hamilton stopped and waited until the others gathered round him.

‘From here on,’ Hamilton said, ‘no talking. Not one word. And watch where you put your feet. I don’t want to hear as much as the crackle of a broken twig. Understood?’ He looked at Maria, who looked pale and exhausted, not so much from the rigours of the walk, for there had been none, but because she had not slept at all: the previous night’s experience, as Ramon had said, had been something more than traumatic. ‘It’s not much further. Half an hour, at most, then we’ll have a rest and carry on during the afternoon.’

‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’m beginning to hate this rainforest. I suppose you’ll be telling me again that no-one asked me to come.’

‘A snake on every tree, is that it?’ She nodded. ‘No more worry,’ Hamilton said. ‘You’ll never again spend a night in the forest. That’s another promise.’

Tracy said slowly: ‘I take it that that can mean only one thing. I take it that we’ll be in the Lost City tonight.’

‘If things go as I hope, yes.’

‘You know where you are?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve known ever since we left the hovercraft.’

‘True. How did you know?’

‘Because you haven’t used your compass since.’

Half an hour later, exactly as he had forecast, Hamilton, finger to his lips, stopped and waited for the others to come up to him. When he spoke, it was in a whisper.

‘On your lives. Not a sound. Stay hidden until I tell you otherwise. On your hands and knees then lie prone until I give the word.’

And so on hands and knees they advanced in total silence. Hamilton dropped forward and eased himself slowly ahead, using elbows and toes. He stopped again and waited until the others had joined him. He pointed forward, through the trees. In a lush green valley below them they could see an Indian village. There were dozens of large huts and, in the centre, a very large communal hut, which looked as if it could accommodate at least two hundred people with ease. The place seemed to be deserted until suddenly a small copper-coloured child appeared carrying a flint axe and a nut which he placed on a flat stone and proceeded to belabour. It was like a scene from the Stone Age, from the dawn of prehistory. A laughing woman, statuesque and also copper-coloured, emerged from the same hut and picked up the child.

In slow wonderment, Tracy said: ‘That colour? That appearance? Those aren’t Indians.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Hamilton said urgently. ‘They’re Indians all right but they do not come from the Amazon basin. They come from the Pacific.’

Tracy stared at him, still in wonderment, and shook his head.

Suddenly people, scores of them, began to emerge from the communal hut. That they were not Amazonian Indians was obvious from the fact that there were as many women as men among them: normally, in the Amazonian basin, women are banned from the meeting places of elders and warriors. All were of the same copper colour, all possessed of a proud, almost regal bearing. They began to disperse towards their huts.

Smith touched Hamilton on the arm and said in a low voice: ‘Who are those people?’

‘The Muscias.’ Smith turned pale.

‘Goddamned Muscias!’ he said in a vicious whisper. ‘What the hell are you playing at? Head-hunters, you said. Head-shrinkers! Cannibals! I’m off!’

‘Off where, you clown? You’ve got no place left to run to. Stay here. Don’t, don’t, don’t show yourselves.’

The advice was probably superfluous. No-one, clearly, had the slightest intention of showing himself.

Hamilton rose and walked confidently into the clearing. He had gone at least ten paces before he was noticed. There was a sudden silence, the babble of voices ceased, then the chatter redoubled in volume. An exceptionally tall Indian, old and with his forearms almost covered in what were unquestionably gold bracelets, gazed for some seconds then ran forward. He and Hamilton embraced each other.

The old man, who was surely the chief, and Hamilton engaged in an animated, if incomprehensible, conversation. The chief, with an expression of incredulity on his face, repeatedly shook his head. Just as firmly Hamilton nodded his. Suddenly, Hamilton extended his right arm and made a semi-circular motion, bringing his arm to a sudden halt. The chief looked long at him, seized him by the arms, smiled and nodded his head. He turned and spoke rapidly to his people.

Tracy said: ‘I’d say those two people have met somewhere before.’

The chief finished addressing his people, all of whom had now gathered in the clearing, and spoke again to Hamilton, who nodded and turned.

Hamilton shouted to his waiting companions: ‘You can come now. Keep your hands well away from any weapon.’

Not quite dazedly, but not understanding what was happening, the other eight members of the party entered the clearing.

Hamilton said: ‘This is Chief Corumba.’ He introduced each of the eight in turn. The chief gravely acknowledged each introduction, shaking each in turn by hand.

Hiller said: ‘But Indians don’t shake hands.’

‘This Indian does.’

Maria touched Hamilton on the arm. ‘But those savage head-hunters—’

‘These are the kindliest, most gentle, most peaceable people on earth. In their language they do not have a word for war because they do not know what war is. They are lost children from a lost age and the people who built the Lost City.’

Serrano said: ‘And I thought I knew more about the tribes of the Mato Grosso than any man alive.’

‘And so you may, Serrano, so you may. If, that is to say, I can take the word of Colonel Diaz.’

‘Colonel Diaz?’ Smith said. He was clearly floundering in deep water. ‘Who’s Colonel Diaz?’

‘A friend of mine.’

Tracy said: ‘But their ferocious reputation—’

‘A fiction invented by Dr Hannibal Huston, the man who found these lost people. He thought that such a reputation might ensure them—what shall we say?—a little privacy.’

‘Huston?’ Hiller said. ‘Huston? You—you found Huston?’

‘Years ago.’

‘But you’ve only been in the Mato Grosso for four months.’

‘I have known it for many years. Remember in the Hotel de Paris in Romono you mentioned my search for the golden people? I forgot to mention that I also met them years ago. Here they are. The Children of the Sun.’

Maria said: ‘And Dr Huston is still in the Lost City?’

‘He’s still there. Come, I believe these good people want to offer us some hospitality. First, however, I owe you a small explanation about them.’

‘High time, too,’ Smith said. ‘Why all the dramatic, stealthy approach to them?’

‘Because if we had approached as a group they would have run away. They have every good reason to fear those from the outside world. We, ironically known as the civilizados—in practically everything that matters they’re a damned sight more civilised than we are—bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilisation, which harms them even more, and disease, which kills them. These people have no natural resistance to measles or influenza. Either of those are to them what bubonic plague was to Europeans and Asiatics in the Middle Ages. Half a tribe can be wiped out in a fortnight. The same thing happened to the people of Tierra del Fuego. Well-meaning missionaries gave them simple clothes, primarily so that the women could cover their nakedness. The blankets came from a hospital where there had been a measles epidemic. Most of the people were wiped out.’

Tracy said: ‘But our presence here. Surely that endangers them?’

‘No. Almost half the Muscias were destroyed by measles or influenza or a combination of both. These people here are the survivors, having acquired natural immunity the hard way. As I said, it was Dr Huston who found them. Although mainly famous as an explorer, his real life’s work lay elsewhere. He was one of the original sertanistas—men wise in jungle ways—and a founder member of the FUNAI, the National Foundation for the Indian, people who dedicate their lives to protecting the Indians and rendering them harmless to civilizados. “Pacification” is the term generally used but in truth what they mainly required was protection against the civilizados. Sure, many of the tribes were genuinely savage—well, not so many, there are less than two hundred thousand pure-blood Indians left-but their savagery sprang from fear and very understandably so. Even in modern times, those civilised gentlemen from the outer world, and by no means all Brazilians, either, have machine-gunned them, dynamited them from the air and given them poisoned food.’

‘This is all news to me,’ Smith said, ‘and I’ve lived in this country for many years. Frankly, I find it very hard to believe.’

‘Serrano will confirm it.’

‘I confirm it. I take it that you, too, are a sertanista.’

‘Yes. Not always a very happy job. We have our failures. The Chapate and the Horena, as you’ve seen, are not too keen on the idea of co-operation with the outside world. And, inevitably, we bring disease as we did here. Come along, Chief Corumba is summoning us to eat. It may taste a little odd, but I can assure you that no harm will come to any of you.’

One hour later the visitors were still seated around a rough wooden table outside the communal hut. Before them lay the remains of an excellent if rather exotic meal—game, fish, fruit and other unknown delicacies concerning the nature of which it had been thought more prudent not to ask: all had been washed down with cachassa, a rather potent brew. At the end, Hamilton thanked Chief Corumba on behalf of all of them and turned to the others.

‘I think it’s time we were on our way.’

Tracy said: ‘One thing intrigues me. I’ve never seen so many gold ornaments in my life.’

‘I thought that might intrigue you.’

‘Where do these people come from?’

‘They don’t know themselves. A lost people who have lost everything and that includes their history. It was Dr Huston’s theory that they are the descendants of the Quimbaya, an ancient tribe from the Cauca or Magdalena valleys in the western Andes of Colombia.’

Smith stared at him. ‘So what in God’s name are they doing here?’

‘Nobody knows. Huston thinks they left their homeland all those hundreds of years ago. He thinks they may have fled to the east, found the headwaters of the Amazon, come all the way down until they reached the Rio Tocantis, turned up that until they came to the Araguaia, then up the Rio da Morte. Again, who knows? Stranger migrations have happened. It could have taken them generations: they were weighed down with many possessions. I believe it. Wait till you see the Lost City and you’ll understand why I do believe it.’

Smith said: ‘How far away is this damned city?’

‘Five hours. Six.’

‘Five hours!’

‘And easy going. Uphill, but no swamps, no quicksands.’ He turned to Chief Corumba, who smiled and again warmly embraced Hamilton.

‘Wishing us good luck?’ Smith said.

‘Among quite a few other things. I’ll have a longer chat with him tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow!’

‘Why ever not?’

Smith, Tracy and Hiller exchanged flickering glances. None of the three said anything.

Just before they walked away Hamilton spoke quietly to Maria. ‘Stay behind with these people. They will look after you, I promise. Where we’re going is no place for a lady.’

‘I’m coming.’

‘Suit yourself. There’s an excellent chance you’ll be dead by nightfall.’

‘You don’t much care for me, do you?’

‘Enough to ask you to stay behind.’

In the late afternoon Hamilton and his party were still making their way towards the Lost City. The going underfoot was excellent, dry, leafy and springy.

Unfortunately for people like Smith, the incline was fairly severe and the heat was, of course, as always oppressive.

Hamilton said: ‘I think we’ll have a half-hour break here. We’re ahead of time—we can’t move in until it’s dark. Besides, some of you may think you’ve earned a rest.’

‘Too bloody right, we have,’ Smith said. ‘How much longer do you intend to crucify us?’

He sank wearily to the ground and mopped his streaming face with a bandana. He was not the only one to do so. With the exception of Hamilton and the twins, everyone seemed to be suffering from a shortage of breath and leaden, aching legs. Hamilton had, indeed, been setting a brisk pace.

‘You’ve done very well, all of you,’ Hamilton said. ‘Mind you, you might have done even better if you hadn’t guzzled and drunk like pigs down in the village. We’ve climbed almost two thousand feet since leaving there.’

Smith said: ‘How—much—longer?’

‘From here to the top? Another half hour. No more. I’m afraid we’ll have to do a bit more climbing after that—downhill, mind you, but a pretty steep downhill.’

‘Half an hour,’ Smith said. ‘Nothing.’

‘Wait until you start going down.’

‘The last lap,’ Hamilton said. ‘We are ten yards from the brink of a ravine. Anyone who hasn’t a head for heights had better say so now.’

If anyone didn’t have a head for heights he or she wasn’t saying so. Hamilton began to crawl forward. The rest followed. Hamilton stopped and motioned to the others to join him.

Hamilton said: ‘You see what I see?’

Smith said: ‘Jesus!’

Maria said: ‘The Lost City!’

Tracy said: ‘Shangri-la!’

‘El Dorado,’ Hamilton said.

‘What?’ Smith said. ‘What was that?’

‘Nothing, really. There never was an El Dorado. It means the golden man. New Inca rulers were covered in gold dust and dipped—only temporarily, of course—in a lake. You see that peculiar stepped pyramid with the flat top at the far end?’

The question was really unnecessary. It was the dominant feature of the Lost City.

‘That’s one of the reasons—there are two others—why Huston thought that the Children of the Sun came from Colombia. It’s what you call a ziggurat. Originally it was a temple tower in Babylonia or Assyria. No traces of those remain in the Old World—the Egyptians built a quite different form of pyramid.’

Tracy said, as if not knowing: ‘This is the only one?’

‘By no means. You’ll find well-preserved examples in Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and Peru. But only in Central America and the north-west of South America. But nowhere else in the world-except here.’

Serrano said: ‘So they’re Andean. You couldn’t ask for better proof.’

‘You couldn’t. But I have it.’

‘Complete proof? Total?’

I’ll show you later.’ He pointed with outstretched arm. ‘You see those steps?’

Stretching from the river to the top of the plateau and hewn from the vertical rock-face, the stone stairway, terrifying to look at even from a distance, angled upwards at 45°.

‘Two hundred and forty-eight steps,’ Hamilton said, ‘each thirty inches wide. Worn, smooth and slippery—and no hand rail.’

Tracy said: ‘Who counted them?’

‘I did.’

‘You mean—’

‘Yes. Wouldn’t do it again, though. There had been a hand rail once and I’d brought along equipment to rig a rope rail. It’s still on the hovercraft—for obvious reasons.’

‘Mr Hamilton!’ Silver spoke in an urgent whisper. ‘Mr Hamilton!’

‘What’s the excitement about?’

‘I saw someone moving in the ruins down there. I swear to it.’

‘The pilot’s eagle-eye, eh? No need to swear to anything. There are quite a number of people down there. Why do you think I didn’t fly in by helicopter?’

Serrano said: ‘They are not friends, no?’

‘No.’ He turned to Smith. ‘Speaking of helicopters, I don’t have to explain the layout of this place to you. You know it already.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That film cassette you had Hiller steal for you.’

‘I don’t know what—’

‘I took them a year ago. I left Hiller no option but to steal them. Taken from a helicopter. Not bad for an amateur, were they?’

Smith didn’t say whether they were or not. He, Hiller and Tracy had again, momentarily, assumed very odd expressions, mainly of deep unease.

Hamilton said: ‘Look to your left there. Just where the river forks to go round the island.’

At a distance of about half a mile and about three hundred feet below their present elevation a spidery, sagging, and apparently twisted series of ropes spanned the gorge between the top of the plateau and a point about half-way up the top of the cliff on which they were lying. Immediately below the cliff anchorage a small waterfall arced out into the river.

‘A rope bridge,’ Hamilton said. ‘Well, a liana bridge. Or a straw bridge. Those are normally renewed once a year. This one can’t have been renewed for at least five years. Must be in a pretty rotten state by this time.’

‘So?’ Smith said. The apprehension in his voice was unmistakable.

‘So that’s the way we go in.’

The silence that followed was long and profound.

At last Serrano said ‘Another proof of Andean ancestry, no? I mean, there are no rope bridges in the Mato Grosso—well, there’s not one now—nor, as far as I know, anywhere in Brazil. The Indians never learnt how to make them. Why should they have done—they never needed them. But the Incas and their descendants knew how to make them—living in the Andes, they had to know.’

‘I’ve seen one,’ Hamilton said. ‘On the Apurimac river, high up in Peru—about twelve thousand feet. They use six heavy braided straw cables for the main supports—four for the footpaths, two for the hand rails. Smaller ropes for closing in the sides and a bed of twigs spread over the footpath so that only a three-year-old could possibly fall through. Can support scores of people when new. I’m afraid this one is not new.’

A narrow cleft ran down the cliff at an angle of close on 60°. A small stream, probably fed from some spring above, fell, rather than flowed down this cleft, leaping whitely from spur to spur. On one side of this cleft a series of rough steps had been cut, obviously a very long time ago.

Hamilton and the others started to descend. It was a fairly arduous descent but not really either difficult or dangerous as Hamilton had taken the precaution of binding together a series of tough lianas, anchoring one end to a tree and letting the rest fall down the cleft.

At the foot of the cleft, just above where the waterfall arced out above the river, a platform, about eight feet by eight, had been quarried out of the cliff-face. Hamilton was already standing there. One by one he was joined by the others.

Hamilton moved to examine a stone bollard and an iron post that had been hammered into the platform. Three now threadbare lianas were attached to both. Hamilton produced his sheath knife and scraped at the iron post. Thick brown flakes were shaved away.

‘Keep your voices down,’ Hamilton said. ‘Rusty, isn’t it?’ He turned away to look over the gorge. The others did the same. The straw bridge was very flimsy and clearly venerable. Both the hand supports and the footpath were severely frayed. Several of the straw ropes appeared to have rotted and fallen away.

Hamilton said: ‘Not in the best condition, wouldn’t you say?’

Smith, his eyes wide, was obviously appalled. ‘Good God in heaven. That’s suicide. Only a madman would go on it. Do you expect me to risk my life on that?’

‘Of course not. Why on earth should you? You’re only here for the story, for the pictures. You’d be crazy to risk your life just for that. Tell you what. Give me your camera and I’ll take the pictures for you. And don’t forget—the people over there may not be welcoming to trespassers.’

Smith was silent for some time, then said: ‘I’m a man who sees things through to the end.’

‘Maybe the end is closer than you think. It’s dark enough now. I’m going first.’

Navarro said: ‘Senor Hamilton. I am much lighter—’

‘Thank you. But that’s just the point. I’m a heavy man and I’m carrying a heavy pack. If it takes my weight—well, you should all be okay.’

Ramon said: ‘A thought occurs to me.’

‘And to me.’ He moved towards the straw bridge.

‘What was that meant to mean?’ Maria said.

‘He thinks, perhaps, that they will have a welcome mat out over there.’

‘Oh. A guard.’

Hamilton moved steadily across the straw bridge. That is, he made steady progress. The bridge itself was shockingly unsteady, swaying from side to side. Hamilton was now more than half-way across. The bridge sagged so badly in the middle that he had to haul himself up a fairly steep incline. But he was experiencing no great difficulty. He arrived safely on a platform similar to the one he had left on the other side of the gorge. He crouched low, for the platform was only a few feet lower than the plateau. Cautiously, he lifted his head.

There was, indeed, a guard, but he was not taking his duties too seriously. He was smoking a cigarette and, of all things, relaxing in a deck chair. Hamilton’s bent arm was raised to shoulder level. His handkerchief-wrapped hand held the blade of his heavy sheath knife. The guard drew deeply on his cigarette, clearly illuminating his face. He made no sound as the haft of the knife struck him between the eyes, just tipped to one side and fell out of his chair.

Hamilton turned and flashed his torch three times. Within minutes he was joined one by one by eight people who had not enjoyed their passage across the rope bridge.

Hamilton said: ‘Let’s go and see the boss man.’ He could find his way blindfolded and led them silently through the ancient ruins. Shortly he stopped and pointed.

There was a large and fairly new wooden hall with lights showing. The sound of voices carried.

‘Barracks,’ Hamilton said. ‘Mess hall and sleeping accommodation. Guards.’

Tracy said: ‘Guards? Why?’

‘Guilty conscience somewhere.’

‘What’s that noise?’ Smith said.

‘Generator.’

‘Where do we go from here?’

‘There.’ Hamilton pointed again. At the foot of the giant ziggurat was another but much smaller wooden building. Lights also shone from that building.

‘That’s where the guilty conscience lives.’ Hamilton was silent for a few moments. ‘The man who every night feels dead feet trampling over his grave.’

Silver said: ‘Mr Hamilton—’

‘Nothing, nothing. Ramon, Navarro. I wonder if you see what I see?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Ramon said. ‘There are two men standing in the shadow of that porch.’

Hamilton seemed to ponder for a few moments. ‘I wonder what they could be doing there?’

‘We’ll go and ask them.’

Ramon and Navarro melted into the shadows.

Smith said: ‘Who are these two? Your assistants, I mean. They are not Brazilian.’

‘No.’

‘European?’

‘Yes.’

Ramon and Navarro returned as silently and unobtrusively as they had left.

‘Well,’ Hamilton said. ‘What did they say?’

‘Not a great deal,’ Navarro said. ‘I think they may tell us when they wake up.’

CHAPTER NINE

Inside the smaller wooden house was a large dining-cum-living-room. The walls were much behung with flags, banners, portraits, swords, rapiers, guns and pictures, all German. Behind a table a large, rather red-faced, heavily jowled man was eating a solitary meal to be washed down by beer from a pewter litre mug beside him. He looked up in amazement as the door crashed open.

Hamilton, pistol in hand, entered. He was followed by Smith, then the others.

‘Guten abend,’ Hamilton said. ‘I’ve brought an old friend along to see you.’ He nodded towards Smith. ‘I think old friends should smile and shake hands and say “hallo”, don’t you? You don’t?’

Hamilton’s pistol fired, gouging a hole in the seated man’s desk.

‘Nervous hands,’ Hamilton said. ‘Ramon?’

Ramon went behind the desk and removed a gun from an already half-opened drawer.

‘Try the other drawer,’ Hamilton said. Ramon did so and came up with a second gun.

‘Can’t really blame you,’ Hamilton said. ‘There are thieves and robbers everywhere these days. Well. Embarrassing silences bother me. Let me introduce you to each other. Behind the desk, Major-General Wolfgang Von Manteuffel of the S.S., variously known as Brown or Jones. Beside me, Colonel Heinrich Spaatz, also known as Smith, also of the S.S., Inspector General and Assistant Inspector General of the north and central Polish concentration and extermination camps, thieves on a colossal scale, murderers of old men in holy orders and despoilers of monasteries. Remember, that’s where you last met—in that Grecian monastery where you cremated the monks. But, then, you were specialists in cremation, weren’t you?’

They weren’t saying whether they were or not. The stillness in the room was total. All eyes were on Hamilton with the exception of those of Von Manteuffel and Spaatz: they had eyes only for each other.

‘Sad,’ Hamilton said. ‘Very sad. Spaatz came all this long way to see you, Von Manteuffel. Admittedly, he came to kill you, but he did come. Something, I believe, to do with a rainy night in the Wilhelmshaven docks.’

There came the sharp crack of a small-bore automatic. Hamilton looked at Tracy who, gun loose in an already nerveless hand, was sinking to the floor and from the state of his head it was clear he would never rise again. Maria had a gun in her hand and was very pale.

Hamilton said: ‘My gun is on you.’

She put her automatic back in her bush jacket pocket. ‘He was going to kill you.’

‘He was,’ Ramon said.

Hamilton looked at her in bafflement. ‘He was going to kill me, so you killed him?’

‘I was waiting for it.’

Navarro said thoughtfully, ‘I do believe the young lady is not all that we thought she was.’

‘So it would seem.’ Hamilton was equally thoughtful. He said to her: ‘Whose side are you on?’

‘Yours.’

Spaatz at last looked away from Von Manteuffel and stared at her in total incredulity. She went on quietly: ‘It is sometimes quite difficult to tell a Jewish girl from other girls.’

Hamilton said: ‘Israeli?’

‘Yes.’

‘Intelligence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah! Would you like to shoot Spaatz too?’

‘They want him back in Tel Aviv.’

‘Failing that?’

‘Yes.’

‘My apologies, and without any reservations. You’re becoming quite unpopular, Spaatz. But not yet in Von Manteuffel’s class. The Israelis want him for obvious reasons. The Greeks’—he nodded to Ramon and Navarro in turn—’those two gentlemen are Greek army intelligence officers—want you for equally obvious reasons.’ He looked at Hiller. ‘They supplied me with those gold coins, by the way.’ He turned back to Von Manteuffel. ‘The Brazilian government want you for dispossessing the Muscia tribe and for the killing of many of them and I want you for the murder of Dr Hannibal Huston and his daughter, Lucy.’

Von Manteuffel smiled and spoke for the first time. ‘I’m afraid you all want a great deal. And I’m afraid you’re not going to get it.’

There came a loud crashing of glass and simultaneously the barrels of three sub-machine-guns protruded through three smashed windows.

Von Manteuffel smiled contentedly. ‘Any person found with a gun on him will be shot out of hand. Do I have to tell you what to do next?’

He didn’t. All guns were dropped on the floor, including two that Hamilton had not known that Spaatz and Hiller were carrying.

‘So.’ Von Manteuffel nodded in satisfaction. ‘So much better than a blood bath, don’t you think? Simpletons! How do you think I have survived for so long? By taking endless precautions. Such as this little press button my right foot rests on.’

He broke off as four armed men entered and watched them in silence as they searched the captives for further weapons. Predictably, they found none.

‘And the rucksacks,’ Von Manteuffel said.

Again the search failed to turn up any weapon.

Von Manteuffel said: ‘I would have a word with my old friend Heinrich, who would appear to have come a very long way for nothing. Ah, and this man.’ He indicated Hiller. ‘I gather he’s an accomplice of my dear ex-comrade in arms. The rest—take them and their pestilential luggage across to the old grain store. Perhaps I shall be subjecting them to some intensive and, I fear, very painful questioning. On the other hand, perhaps not. I shall decide after I’ve had my chat with Heinrich.’

CHAPTER TEN

The old grain store was built entirely of beautifully cut and fitted stone without any mortar whatsoever. It was about twenty feet by twelve, and had three storage bins on either side. The sides and the partitions of the bins were made of heavy adze-cut wood. A single weak and naked electric lamp, suspended from the ceiling, burned in the centre of the store. There were no windows and only one door-opening without a door, which the presence outside of a man with a cocked machine carbine made superfluous anyway. There were no furnishings of any description. Hamilton and his fellow captives had nothing to do but to look at each other or at the sentry, who faced them, his elderly but no doubt still lethal Schmeisser levelled directly at them: he had about him the look of a man who was yearning for an excuse to use it.

Navarro finally broke the silence. ‘I fear for the health of our Mr Smith. Hiller, too, come to that.’

‘Never mind about their damned health,’ Hamilton said. ‘Start fearing for your own. When he’s finished with those two who do you think is next on his list, whether or not he indulges in a little torture beforehand?’ He sighed. ‘Trust old trusty secret agent Hamilton to tell all. Von Manteuffel knows who I am, who Maria is, and who you two so-called Greek intelligence officers are. He can’t let us live and I’m afraid he can’t let Silver or Serrano live either—obviously.’

‘In the meantime,’ Serrano said, ‘could I have a word with you?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘In private, if you please.’

‘If that’s what you want.’ The two men moved to a corner of the room where Serrano spoke in a low rapid tone. Hamilton lifted his eyebrows and his face registered surprise, an emotion he had practically never betrayed. Then he shrugged his shoulders, nodded twice, turned thoughtfully away and looked at the sentry.

‘Big man,’ Hamilton said. ‘My size. Black from head to toe—beret, jacket, trousers, shoes. I want those clothes. More importantly, I want that gun. Even more importantly still, I want them both fast.’

‘Easy,’ Ramon said. ‘Just ask him.’

Hamilton didn’t reply. Savagely, almost, and to the accompaniment of the indrawn hiss of Maria’s breath, he bit the ball of his left thumb. At once the blood began to flow. He squeezed the torn flesh until the blood flowed even more freely, then smeared it over Ramon’s uncomprehending face.

‘All in the interest of art,’ Hamilton told him. ‘Brother, what a fight this is going to be.’

The ‘fight’ started in the corner of the store, just out of the sentry’s line of sight. The sentry would have been less than human not to locate the source of the sound of the heavy blows, the shouting and swearing. He moved forward into the doorway.

Hamilton and Ramon were belabouring each other mightily, fighting in apparently vicious fury, kicking and punching and obviously intent on inflicting grievous and mutual bodily harm. The sentry was clearly startled, but not suspicious. He had a heavily brutalised face behind which there lurked no great intelligence.

‘Stop that!’ he shouted. ‘You madmen! Stop it or—’

He broke off as one of the combatants received a seemingly murderous blow and came staggering to fall flat on his back, half in and half out of the doorway, eyes turned up in his head, the face masked with blood. The sentry stepped by him, ready to quell any further signs of trouble. Ramon’s hands closed round his ankles.

Four men prepared to carry three blanket-covered, stretchered forms from Von Manteuffel’s room. Von Manteuffel said: ‘It can be fatal to allow an enemy to live longer than is necessary.’ He paused, briefly, for thought. ‘Over the side with them. Think of all those poor starving piranha. As for our other friends in the grain store, I don’t think they can supply me with any more useful information. You know what to do.’

‘Yes, Herr General,’ one of the men said. ‘We know what to do.’ His face was wolfish in anticipation.

Von Manteuffel glanced at his watch. ‘I will expect you back in exactly five minutes. After you’ve given the piranha their second course.’

A figure, dressed all in black, faced the grain store with a levelled Schmeisser in his hands. He heard the sound of footsteps some way off and glanced quickly over his shoulder. Four men—the four who had disposed of Spaatz and Hiller—were about thirty yards away: their machine carbines were shoulder slung. The dark figure continued to gaze at the door of the grain store, waited until his ears told him that the approaching group were no more than five yards away, then swung round with his Schmeisser blazing.

Maria said in a subdued tone: ‘You play for keeps, don’t you? You didn’t have to kill them.’

‘True. True. But, then, I didn’t want them to kill me. You don’t play footsy with cornered rats. Those are desperate men and you can bet that each one is a trained, efficient and practised killer. I don’t much feel like apologising.’

‘And no need,’ said Ramon who, like his brother, had remained unmoved by the proceedings. ‘The only good Nazi is one who has stopped breathing. So. Five guns. What do we do?’

‘We stay here because here we’re safe. Von Manteuffel may have thirty, forty men, maybe even more. Out in the open we’d be massacred.’ He glanced down at the stirring figure of the sentry. ‘Ah! Junior is coming to. I think we’ll send him for a little walk so that he can apprise his boss that there’s been a slight change in the status quo. Remove the rest of his uniform—should give Von Manteuffel quite a turn.’

Von Manteuffel was making some notes at his desk when the knock came on the door. He glanced at his watch and smiled in satisfaction. Exactly five minutes had elapsed since his four men had departed, just over two minutes since he had heard the burst of machine-gun fire which could only have signalled the end of the six captives. He called out permission to enter, made a final note, said: ‘You are very punctual,’ and looked up. His self-satisfied expression surprise vanished and his eyes opened almost impossibly widely. The stumbling figure before him was clad only in his underclothes.

The store was deep in shadow. The single lamp had been switched off and what little light there was came from a newly risen moon.

‘Fifteen minutes and nothing,’ Navarro said. ‘Is that good?’

‘It’s inevitable, I suppose,’ Hamilton said. ‘We’re in darkness. Von Manteuffel’s men are exposed, or would be if they showed themselves and they don’t dare show themselves. What can they do? Smoke us out if the wind is right? But no wind, so no smoke.’

Ramon said: ‘Starve us out?’

‘We should live that long.’

The time crawled by. Apart from Navarro, who stood by the doorway, everyone was lying down. They may or may not have been trying to sleep for some had their eyes shut but were unquestionably wide awake. Navarro said: ‘Two hours. That’s two hours gone now. Still nothing.’

‘Would you mind, watchman? I’m trying to sleep.’ Hamilton sat up. ‘Don’t think I will sleep. They may be up to something. I’ve no cigarettes. Anybody? No?’ Serrano proffered a packet. ‘I thought you were asleep. Thanks. You know, I wasn’t quite sure whether or not to believe what you told me, but I believe you now, if for no other reason than the fact that it has to be as you say. So I guess I owe you an apology.’ He paused reflectively: ‘Apologising seems to have become a habit with me.’

Ramon said curiously: ‘May we know what the present apology is about?’

‘Of course. Serrano is government. On the need-to-know principle, I suppose, Colonel Diaz kind of forgot to tell me.’

‘Government?’

‘Ministry of Culture. Fine Arts.’

‘God help us all,’ Ramon said. ‘I would have thought there were enough genuine vultures in those godforsaken parts without adding culture vultures to the list. What on earth are you doing here, Serrano?’

‘That’s what I hope to find out.’

‘Forthcoming, aren’t we? Senor Hamilton?’

‘I told you, I only learnt of this a couple of hours ago.’

Ramon looked at him reproachfully. ‘Senor Hamilton, you’re at it again.’

‘At what?’

‘Being enigmatic and evasive.’

Hamilton shrugged and said nothing. Serrano said: ‘An honest doubt doesn’t require an apology.’

‘There’s a little more to it than that,’ Hamilton said. ‘I thought you were Hiller’s man. Back in Romono, that is, when I first met you. I’m afraid I’m the person who clobbered you. I’ll give you back the money I took from your wallet. There’s not much I can do about your stiff neck. Forgive me.’

‘Forgive, forgive,’ Maria said. ‘I don’t suppose anyone is going to forgive me.’

There was a brief silence, then Hamilton said, mildly enough: ‘I have apologised.’

‘Apologies and forgiveness are not the same thing and you’re clearly of the opinion that my association—that’s the nicest way I can put it-was unforgivable. It all depends upon who is doing the judging and casting the first stone. All four of my grandparents died in Auschwitz and the chances are high that it was Von Manteuffel or Spaatz who sent them there. Or both. I suppose the world is tired of hearing about it, but six million Jews did die in the concentration camps. Was I so wrong? I knew if I stayed with Smith long enough he’d lead me to Von Manteuffel and he was the one we really wanted. I knew of only one way of staying with him. So I—we—found Von Manteuffel. Was I so wrong?’

‘Tel Aviv?’ Hamilton made no attempt to conceal his distaste. ‘Another of those barbaric Eichmann show trials?’

‘Yes.’

‘Von Manteuffel will never leave the Lost City.’

‘This Dr Huston,’ Serrano said carefully. ‘He meant so much? And his daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were here at the time they—ah—died?’

‘Murdered. No. I was in Vienna. But a friend of mine—Jim Clinton—was here. He buried them. He even gave them a tombstone and inscription-burnt on wood with a red-hot poker. Von Manteuffel killed him also—some time later.’

‘Vienna?’ Maria said. ‘Wiesenthal? The Institute?’

Serrano said: ‘What’s this, young lady?’

‘You should watch those slips of the tongue, Mr Serrano, such as calling me a young lady. The Institute is a Jewish central organisation for hunting down war criminals. Based in Austria, not Israel. Mr Hamilton, why can they never let the left hand know what the right is doing?’

‘Same old need-to-know principle, I suppose. All that I really know is that I’d a double reason for hunting Von Manteuffel down. I got close to him twice in the Argentine, twice in Chile, once in Bolivia, twice in the Kolonie 555. An elusive character, always on the run, always surrounded by his Nazi thugs. But I’ve caught up with him.’

‘Or the other way around,’ Serrano said.

Hamilton remained silent.

‘Your friends are buried here?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m hungry and I’m thirsty,’ Navarro said plaintively. It was half an hour before dawn.

‘I am deeply moved by your sufferings,’ Hamilton said. ‘What’s a damned sight more important is that you’re alive. I didn’t want to depress anyone any more than we already were by saying what was in my mind, but I didn’t really think we’d see the night out.’

Ramon said: ‘And how could that have been?’ ‘Quite simple, really. Lots of ways. With a small cannon, a rocket launcher, any kind of antiaircraft gun or a mortar. They could have directed two or three very nasty rounds of high explosive straight through this open doorway. Maybe the shrapnel would not have got us all, but the concussion in this confined space would have finished us off. Or they could have crawled over the grain store roof from the back and lobbed in a few grenades or a stick or so of blasting powder. The effect would have been the same. Maybe they didn’t have any of those materials to hand, which I don’t for a moment believe—Von Manteuffel lugs around with him enough weaponry and artillery for an armoured battalion. Maybe the idea just didn’t occur to them, which I don’t believe either. I think that Von Manteuffel believes, as he has reason to, that we are dangerous in the dark and is waiting for daylight before moving in for the kill.’

Serrano said unhappily: ‘It will be daylight quite soon.’

‘It will, won’t it?’ In the first faint glimmering of light Maria, Serrano and Silver stared at Hamilton without comprehension as he extracted the camera from his haversack, opened it, released the flap to display the transceiver, extended an aerial and spoke into the microphone.

‘Night-watch,’ Hamilton said. ‘Night-watch.’

The speaker crackled and the reply was immediate.

‘We have you, Night-watch.’

‘Now.’

‘Now it is. How many vultures?’

‘Thirty. Forty. A guess.’

‘Repeat after me: Stay under cover. Napalm.’

‘Stay under cover. Napalm.’ Hamilton switched off. ‘Useful, no? Very thoughtful is Colonel Diaz.’

‘Napalm!’ Ramon said.

‘You heard the man.’

‘But napalm!’

‘Very tough, those airborne commandos. But, no, they don’t use it directly. They’ve no intention of dropping the stuff on us. They ring the area. Not a new technique but very intimidating.’

Hamilton made another switch on the camera and a faint bleeping sound could be heard.

‘Homing signal,’ Ramon explained to no-one in particular. ‘How else do you think they’d ever locate this place?’

‘You’ve got everything organised, haven’t you?’ Maria sounded slightly bitter. ‘Never thought to tell us, did you?’

‘Why should I?’ Hamilton said indifferently. ‘Nobody ever tells me anything.’

‘How long will they take to get here?’

‘Twenty minutes. No more.’

‘And dawn is in about the same time?’

‘About.’

‘It’s starting to get light already. They could still attack before your friends get here.’

‘Most unlikely. In the first place, it’ll take Von Manteuffel and his minions some time to get organised and if we can’t hold them off for a few minutes after that then we’ve no right to be here in the first place. Secondly, as soon as they hear the sound of the helicopter engines they’re going to forget all about us.’

It was becoming quite light now but still the courtyard remained deserted. If Von Manteuffel and his men were preparing to launch an attack they were being extremely discreet about it.

By and by Ramon said: ‘Engines. I can hear them now. They’re coming in from the south.’

‘I don’t hear them myself, but if you say they’re coming in, then they’re coming in. Do you see what I see, Ramon?’

‘Yes, indeed. I see a man on the roof of their mess hall with a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He must have good hearing, too. The legs?’

‘If you would.’

In his typical one-sweep movement Ramon lifted his rifle and squeezed the trigger. The man with the binoculars collapsed to the roof then, after some seconds, scuttled crab-wise away on two hands and a knee, dragging a useless leg behind him.

Hamilton said: ‘Our friend, General Von Manteuffel, must, as they say, be losing his cool or he wouldn’t have taken a stupid liberty like that. I don’t think we’ll be seeing any more sky-watchers.’ He paused. ‘I can hear them now.’

The sound of the aero engines was now unmistakable and increased rapidly in strength as the craft approached: finally, the rackety clamour of the engines reached an almost intolerable pitch as three large gunships began to descend between the reverberating walls of the cliffsides.

Hamilton said: ‘Inside, I think.’

Maria paused in the doorway. ‘Okay to look?’

Hamilton pushed her roughly inside and behind a wooden partition where he joined her.

‘Napalm, you ninny. Some of that stuff could fly loose.’

‘Rockets? Bombs?’

‘Jesus! This is an historic monument.’

Moments later, almost having to shout to make herself heard over the clamour, she said: ‘That awful smell.’

‘Napalm.’

‘Shouldn’t we—shouldn’t we go out and help them?’

‘Help them? We’d only be in their way. Believe me, those lads don’t require help of any kind. And has it occurred to you that they’d probably mow us down before we got three paces beyond that doorway? They don’t know who we are and airborne commandos have the odd habit of shooting you first and asking who you are afterwards. A little discretion and patience until peace and calm reign again.’

The peace and calm came within two minutes. The sound of the helicopter engines died away. A klaxon sounded, presumably to indicate an all-clear. Not one shot had been fired.

Hamilton said: ‘I think the intrepid Captain Hamilton and his gallant crew may now safely risk a peek outside.’ They filed out through the open doorway.

Three gunships stood in the courtyard before the ziggurat. The ruins of the ancient city were ringed with smoke from the still burning napalm. At least fifty commandos, looking very tough and very competent and certainly armed to the teeth, had their guns trained on about three dozen of Von Manteuffel’s followers, while four commandos, one of them carrying a carton of handcuffs which had been brought along for the purpose, moved along them securing their wrists behind their backs. In the forefront of the captives was Von Manteuffel himself, already handcuffed.

As Hamilton and the others reached the centre of the courtyard an army officer advanced to meet them.

‘Mr Hamilton?’ he said. ‘Major Ramirez. At your service.’

‘You have already been of more than enough service.’ They shook hands. ‘We are most grateful. That really was efficient.’

‘My men are disappointed,’ Ramirez said. ‘We had expected a rather more—ah—challenging training exercise. You wish to leave now?’

‘An hour, if we may.’ Hamilton pointed to Von Manteuffel. ‘I’d like to speak to that man.’

Von Manteuffel was brought forward between two soldiers. His face was grey and without expression.

Hamilton said: ‘Major, this is Major-General Wolfgang Von Manteuffel of the S.S.’

‘The last of the infamous Nazi war-time criminals, no? I do not have to shake hands?’

‘No.’ Hamilton looked consideringly at Von Manteuffel. ‘You have, of course, murdered Colonel Spaatz. And Hiller. Along, of course, with Dr Huston, his daughter, scores of Muscias and God knows how many others. To every road there is an end. With your permission, Major, there are a couple of things I would like to show Von Manteuffel.’

Accompanied by a group of soldiers armed with shovels, powerful electric torches and two large battery-powered floodlamps, they made their way towards the base of the ziggurat.

‘This ziggurat is unique,’ Hamilton said. ‘Every other known one is solid throughout. This one has been hollowed out and honeycombed like the great Egyptian ones. Please follow me.’

He led them along a winding, crumbling passage-way until they came to a low, vaulted cavern, smooth-walled, with no further passageway leading from it. The floor was deeply covered with broken fragments of rock and a great deal of gravel to a depth of between one and two feet. Hamilton spoke to Ramirez and indicated a particular area: eight soldiers with shovels immediately began to excavate this area. In a short time an area of about six feet by six had been cleared to reveal a square slab of stone with an inset iron ring at either end. Crowbars were inserted into the rings and the slab, not without some considerable difficulty, lifted clear.

A shallow flight of stairs led down from the opening in the cavern floor. They moved down these, along a rough-hewn passage and halted before a heavy wooden door.

Hamilton said: ‘Well, Serrano, this is where you come into your own. As for you, Von Manteuffel, let your last reflections on earth be the most ironic you’ve ever had. You’d have given your heart and your soul—if you ever had one—for what lies beyond that door but you sat atop it all those years and never dreamed it was there.’

He paused, as if deep in thought, then said: ‘It’s a mite dark in there. There are no windows or lights. If you would be so kind, Major, as to have your men switch on all torches and floodlamps. I’m afraid the air will also be a bit musty, but it won’t kill you. Ramon, Navarro, give me a hand with this door.’

The door proved to be reluctant to yield, but with a sepulchral creaking sound, yield it eventually did. Hamilton took one of the floodlights and passed through, the others crowding close behind.

The large square cavern was hewn from the solid rock. All four sides had stepped rock shelves cut into them to a depth of fifteen inches. The spectacle was astonishing, far beyond any belief: the entire cavern gleamed and glittered with thousands upon thousands of artifacts in solid gold.

There were bowls, chalices, plates, all in solid gold. There were helmets, shields, plaques, necklets, busts and figurines, all in solid gold. There were bells, flutes, ocarinas, rope-chains, vases, breastplates, openwork headdresses, filigree masks and knives, all in solid gold. There were monkeys, alligators, snakes, eagles and condors, pelicans and vultures and innumerable jaguars, all in solid gold. And for good measure there were half a dozen open boxes, sparkling and glittering with an untold fortune in precious stones, more than half of them emeralds. It was a treasure house inconceivably far beyond the dreams of avarice.

It seemed as if the awed silence would last for ever. Serrano, at last, was the first to speak.

‘The lost treasure of the Indies. The El Dorado of a million dreams. The Spanish always believed that some vanished tribe had taken with them a huge treasure trove such as this: mankind has believed in the myth ever since and thousands have lost their lives in the search for El Dorado. But it was no myth, no myth.’

Serrano, it was clear, was scarcely capable of believing the evidence of his eyes.

‘It was a myth, all right,’ Hamilton said. ‘But the golden treasure was there all right but everybody looked for it in the wrong place—up in the Guianas. And they all looked for the wrong thing—they thought it was royal Inca gold. But it wasn’t. The people who made these were the Quimbaya of the Cauca valley, the greatest masters of the goldsmith’s art in history. For them gold had no commercial value, it was solely a thing of beauty.’

‘And the Spaniards would have melted the lot and sent it back to Spain in ingot form. Mr Hamilton, you have done the world of art an immeasurable service. And you were the only non-Indian alive who knew of this. You could have been the richest man alive.’

Hamilton shrugged. ‘Once a Quimbaya, always a Quimbaya.’

Ramirez said: ‘What will become of this?’

‘It is to be a national museum. The rightful owners, the Muscias, will return and become the custodians. Few people, I’m afraid, will ever see this—just accredited scholars from all over the world and but a few of those at a time. The Brazilian government—who don’t even know the location of this place yet—is determined that the Muscias, what’s left of them, will not be destroyed by civilisation.’

Hamilton looked at Von Manteuffel who was gazing, trance-like, at the immense fortune that had lain beneath his feet. He was stunned. But then so, too, was everyone else.

Hamilton said: ‘Von Manteuffel.’ Von Manteuffel turned his head slowly and looked at him like a sightless man.

‘Come. I have one last thing to show you.’

Hamilton led the way into another, much smaller cavern. Side by side at the far end lay two stone sarcophagi. Above each was a plain pine board with poker-burnt inscriptions.

Hamilton said: ‘A friend of mine did those, Von Manteuffel. Jim Clinton. Remember Jim Clinton? You should. After all, you murdered him shortly afterwards. Read them. Read them aloud.’

Still in the same odd sightless fashion Von Manteuffel looked slowly around, looked at Hamilton, and read: ‘Dr Hannibal Huston. R.I.P.’

‘And the other?’ Hamilton said.

‘Lucy Huston Hamilton. Beloved wife of John Hamilton. R.I.P.’

Everyone stared at Hamilton. Shocked comprehension came slowly but it came.

Von Manteuffel said: ‘I am a dead man.’

Hamilton, with Ramon and Navarro, Von Manteuffel and the others trudging along closely behind, made their way to a helicopter which was parked at the edge of the courtyard only yards from the rim of the plateau. Suddenly Von Manteuffel, wrists still handcuffed behind his back, ran towards the edge of the cliff. Ramon started after him, but Hamilton caught him by the arm.

‘Let him be. You heard what he said. He’s a dead man.’

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a schoolmaster. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt. from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

1

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1981 then in paperback by Fontana 1982

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1981

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © 1981 ISBN: 9780007289387

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Partisans

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of

Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

First Sterling edition 2012

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1982

© 1982 Alistair MacLean

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-9258-8 (paperback)

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purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at

800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

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www.sterlingpublishing.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents

portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

To Avdo and Inge

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

ONE

The chill night wind off the Tiber was from the north and carried with it the smell of snow from the distant Apennines. The sky was clear and full of stars and there was light enough to see the swirling of the dust-devils in the darkened streets and the paper, cardboard and assorted detritus that blew about every which way. The darkened, filthy streets were not the result of the electrical and sanitation departments of the Eternal City, as was their peacetime wont, staging one of their interminable strikes, for this was not peacetime: events in the Mediterranean theatre had reached a delicate stage where Rome no longer cared to advertise its whereabouts by switching on the street lights: the sanitation department, for the most part, was some way off to the south fighting a war it didn’t particularly care about.

Petersen stopped outside a shop doorway – the nature of its business was impossible to tell for the windows were neatly masked in regulation blackout paper – and glanced up and down the Via Bergola. It appeared to be deserted as were most streets in the city at that time of night. He produced a hooded torch and a large bunch of peculiarly shaped keys and let himself in with a speed, ease and dexterity which spoke well for whoever had trained him in such matters. He took up position behind the opened door, removed the hood from the torch, pocketed the keys, replaced them with a silenced Mauser and waited.

He had to wait for almost two minutes, which, in the circumstances, can be a very long time, but Petersen didn’t seem to mind. Two stealthy footsteps, then there appeared beyond the edge of the door the dimly seen silhouette of a man whose only identifiable features were a peaked cap and a hand clasping a gun in so purposeful a grip that even in the half-light the faint sheen of the knuckles could be seen.

The figure took two further stealthy steps into the shop then halted abruptly as the torch clicked on and the silencer of the Mauser rammed none too gently into the base of his neck.

‘Drop that gun. Clasp your hands behind your neck, take three steps forward and don’t turn round.’

The intruder did as told. Petersen closed the shop door, located the light switch and clicked it on. They appeared to be in what was, or should have been, a jeweller’s shop, for the owner, a man with little faith in the occupying forces, his fellow-countrymen or both, had prudently and totally cleared all his display cabinets.

‘Now you can turn round,’ Petersen said.

The man turned. The set expression on the youthful face was tough and truculent, but he couldn’t do much about his eyes or the apprehension reflected in them.

‘I will shoot you,’ Petersen said conversationally, ‘if you are carrying another gun and don’t tell me.’

‘I have no other gun.’

‘Give me your papers.’ The youngster compressed his lips, said nothing and made no move. Petersen sighed.

‘Surely you recognize a silencer? I can just as easily take the papers off your body. Nobody will know a thing. What’s more to the point, neither will you.’

The youngster reached inside his tunic and handed over a wallet. Petersen flicked it open.

‘Hans Wintermann,’ he read. ‘Born August 24, 1924. Just nineteen. And a lieutenant. You must be a bright young man.’ Petersen folded and pocketed the wallet. ‘You’ve been following me around tonight. And most of yesterday. And the evening before that. I find such persistence tedious, especially when it’s so obvious. Why do you follow me?’

‘You have my name, rank, regiment – ’

Petersen waved him to silence. ‘Spare me. Well, I’m left with no option.’

‘You’re going to shoot me?’ The truculence had left the youngster’s face.

‘Don’t be stupid.’

The Hotel Splendide was anything but: but its dingy anonymity suited Petersen well enough. Peering through the cracked and stained glass of the front door he noted, with mild surprise, that the concierge, fat, unshaven and well stricken in years, was, for once, not asleep or, at least, wide enough awake to be able to tilt a bottle to his head. Petersen circled to the rear of the hotel, climbed the fire escape, let himself in to the third-floor passage, moved along this, turned into a left-hand corridor and let himself into his room with a skeleton key. He quickly checked cupboards and drawers, seemed satisfied, shrugged into a heavy coat, left and took up position on the fire escape. Despite the added protection of the coat his exposed position was considerably colder than it had been in the comparative shelter of the streets below and he hoped he would not have to wait too long.

The wait was even shorter than he had expected. Less than five minutes had passed when a German officer strode briskly along the corridor, turned left, knocked on a door, knocked again, this time peremptorily, rattled the handle then reappeared, frowning heavily. There came the creaking and clanking of the ancient elevator, a silence, more creaking and clanking, then the officer again hove into sight this time with the concierge, who had a key in his hand.

When ten minutes had passed with no sign of either man Petersen went inside, eased his way along the passage and peered round the corner to his left. Halfway along the corridor stood the concierge, obviously on guard. Just as obviously, he was an experienced campaigner prepared for any contingency for, as Petersen watched, he produced a hip flask from his pocket and was still savouring the contents, his eyes closed in bliss, when Petersen clapped him heartily on the shoulder.

‘You keep a good watch, my friend.’

The concierge coughed, choked, spluttered and tried to speak but his larynx wasn’t having any of it. Petersen looked past him and through the doorway.

‘And good evening to you, Colonel Lunz. Everything is in order, I trust?’

‘Ah, good evening.’ Lunz was almost a look-alike for Petersen himself, medium height, broad shoulders, aquiline features, grey eyes and thin black hair: an older version, admittedly, but nevertheless the resemblance was startling. He didn’t seem in any way put out. ‘I’ve just this moment arrived and –’

‘Ah, ah, Colonel.’ Petersen wagged a finger. ‘Officers, whatever their nationality, are officers and gentlemen the world over. Gentlemen don’t tell lies. You’ve been here for exactly eleven minutes. I’ve timed you.’ He turned to the still red-faced and gasping concierge who was making valiant efforts to communicate with them and clapped him encouragingly on the back. ‘You were trying to say something?’

‘You were out.’ The convulsions were easing. ‘I mean, you were in, but I saw you go out. Eleven minutes, you said? I didn’t see – I mean, your key –’

‘You were drunk at the time,’ Petersen said kindly. He bent, sniffed and wrinkled his nose. ‘You still are. Be off. Send us a bottle of brandy. Not that tearful rot-gut you drink: the French cognac you keep for the Gestapo. And two glasses – clean glasses.’ He turned to Lunz. ‘You will, of course, join me, my dear Colonel?’

‘Naturally.’ The Colonel was a hard man to knock off balance. He watched Petersen calmly as he took off his coat and threw it on the bed, lifted an eyebrow and said: ‘A sudden chill snap outside, yes?’

‘Rome? January? No time to take chances with one’s health. It’s no joke hanging about those fire escapes, I can tell you.’

‘So that’s where you were. I should have exercised more care, perhaps.’

‘No perhaps about your choice of lookout.’

‘True.’ The Colonel brought out a briar pipe and began to fill it. ‘I hadn’t much choice.’

‘You sadden me, Colonel, you really do. You obtain my key, which is illegal. You post a guard so that you won’t be discovered breaking the law yet again. You ransack my belongings –’

‘Ransack?’

‘Carefully examine. I don’t know what kind of incriminating evidence you were expecting to find.’

‘None, really. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who would leave –’

‘And you had me watched earlier tonight. You must have done, otherwise you wouldn’t have known that I had been out earlier without a coat. Saddens? It shocks. Where is this mutual trust that should exist between allies?’

‘Allies?’ He struck a match. ‘I hadn’t thought about it very much in that way.’ Judging by his expression, he still wasn’t thinking very much about it in that way.

‘And more evidence of mutual trust.’ Petersen handed over the wallet he had taken from the young lieutenant, together with a revolver. ‘I’m sure you know him. He was waving his gun around in a very dangerous fashion.’

‘Ah!’ Lunz looked up from the papers. ‘The impetuous young Lieutenant Wintermann. You were right to take this gun from him, he might have done himself an injury. From what I know of you I assume he’s not resting at the bottom of the Tiber?’

‘I don’t treat allies that way. He’s locked up in a jeweller’s shop.’

‘Of course.’ Lunz spoke as if he had expected nothing else. ‘Locked up. But surely he can –’

‘Not the way I tied him up. You not only sadden me, Colonel, you insult me. Why didn’t you give him a red flag to wave or a drum to beat? Something that would really attract my attention.’

Lunz sighed. ‘Young Hans is well enough in a tank but subtlety is not really his métier. I did not, by the way, insult you. Following you was entirely his own idea. I knew what he was up to, of course, but I didn’t try to stop him. For hardly won experience a sore head is little enough to pay.’

‘He hasn’t even got that. An ally, you see.’

‘Pity. It might have reinforced the lesson.’ He broke off as a knock came to the door and the concierge entered bearing brandy and glasses. Petersen poured and lifted his glass.

‘To Operation Weiss.’

‘Prosit.’ Lunz sipped appreciatively. ‘Not all Gestapo officers are barbarians. Operation Weiss? So you know? You’re not supposed to.’ Lunz didn’t seem at all put out.

‘I know lots of things that I’m not supposed to.’

‘You surprise me.’ Lunz’s tone was dry. He sipped some more brandy. ‘Excellent, excellent. Yes, you do have a penchant for picking up unconsidered – and classified – trifles. Which leads to your repeated use of the world “ally”. Which leads, in turn, to what you possibly regard as our undue interest in you.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘You’ll have to improve on that injured tone of yours. Certainly we trust you. Your record – and it is a formidable one – speaks for itself. What we – and especially myself – find difficult to understand is why such a man with such a record aligns himself with – well, I’m afraid I have to say it – with a quisling. I do not hurt your feelings?’

‘You’d have to find them first. I would remind you that it was your Führer who forced our departed Prince Regent to sign this treaty with you and the Japanese two years ago. I assume he’s the quisling you’re talking about. Weak, certainly, vacillating, perhaps cowardly and no man of action. You can’t blame a man for those things: nature’s done its worst and there’s nothing we can do about nature. But no quisling – he did what he thought was best for Yugoslavia. He wanted to spare it the horrors of war. “Bolje grob nego rob”. You know what that means?’ Lunz shook his head. ‘The intricacies of your language –’

‘ “Better death than slavery”. That’s what the Yugoslav crowds shouted when they learned that Prince Paul had acceded to the Tripartite Pact. That’s what they shouted when he was deposed and the pact denounced. What the people didn’t understand was that there was no “nego”, no “than”. It was to be death and slavery as they found out when the Führer, in one of his splendid rages, obliterated Belgrade and crushed the army. I was one of those who were crushed. Well, nearly.’

‘If I might have some more of that excellent cognac.’ Lunz helped himself. ‘You don’t seem greatly moved by your recollections.’

‘Who can live with all his yesterdays?’

‘Nor by the fact that you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to fight your own countrymen.’

‘Instead of joining them and fighting you? War makes for strange bed-fellows, Colonel. Take yourselves and the Japanese, for instance. Hardly entitles you to a holier-than-thou attitude.’

‘A point. But at least we’re not fighting our own people.’

‘Not yet. I wouldn’t bank on it. God knows, you’ve done it enough in the past. In any event, moralizing is pointless. I’m a loyalist, a Royalist, and when – and if ever – this damned war is over I want to see the monarchy restored. A man’s got to live for something and if that’s what I choose to live for, then that’s my business and no-one else’s.’

‘All to hell our own way,’ Lunz said agreeably. ‘It’s just that I have some difficulty in visualizing you as a Serbian Royalist.’

‘What does a Serbian Royalist look like? Come to that, what does a Serbian look like?’

Lunz thought then said: ‘A confession, Petersen. I haven’t the slightest idea.’

‘It’s my name,’ Petersen said kindly. ‘And my background. There are Petersens all over. There’s a village up in the Italian Alps where every second surname starts with “Mac”. The remnants, so I’m told, of some Scottish regiment that got cut off in one of those interminable medieval wars. My great-great-great grandfather or whatever, was a soldier of fortune, which sounds a lot more romantic than the term “mercenary” they use today. Like a thousand others he arrived here and forgot to go home again.’

‘Where was home? I mean, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, what?’

‘Genealogy bores me and, not only don’t I care, I don’t know either. Ask any Yugoslav what his ancestors five times removed were and he almost certainly wouldn’t know.’

Lunz nodded. ‘You Slavic people do have rather a chequered history. And then, of course, just to complicate matters, you graduated from Sandhurst.’

‘Dozens of foreign countries have had their officers graduate from there. In my case, what more natural? My father was, after all, the military attaché in London. If he’d been the naval attaché in Berlin I’d probably have ended up in Kiel or Mürwik.’

‘Nothing wrong with Sandhurst. I’ve been there, as a visitor only. But a bit on the conservative side as far as the courses offered are concerned.’

‘You mean?’

‘Nothing on guerrilla warfare. Nothing on espionage and counter-espionage. Nothing on code and cypher breaking. I understand you’re a specialist on all three.’

‘I’m self-educated in some things.’

‘I’m sure you are.’ Lunz was silent for some seconds, savouring his brandy, then said: ‘Whatever became of your father?’

‘I don’t know. You may even know more than I do. Just disappeared. Thousands have done so since the spring of ’41. Disappeared, I mean.’

‘He was like you? A Royalist? A etnik?’ Petersen nodded. ‘And very senior. Senior officers don’t just disappear. He fell foul of the Partisans, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps. Anything is possible. Again, I don’t know.’ Petersen smiled. ‘If you’re trying to suggest I’m carrying on a vendetta because of a blood feud, you’d better try again. Wrong country, wrong century. Anyway, you didn’t come here to pry into my motives or my past.’

‘And now you insult me. I wouldn’t waste my time. You’d tell me just as much as you wanted me to know and no more.’

‘And you didn’t come here to carry out a search of my belongings – that was just a combination of opportunity and professional curiosity. You came here to give me something. An envelope with instructions for our commander. Another assault on what it pleases you to call Titoland.’

‘You’re pretty sure of yourself.’

‘I’m not pretty sure. I’m certain. The Partisans have radio transceivers. British. They have skilled radio operators, both their own and British. And they have skilled code-crackers. You don’t dare send secret and important messages any more by radio. So you need a reliable message boy. There’s no other reason why I’m in Rome.’

‘Frankly, I can’t think of any other, which saves any explanation on my part.’ Lunz produced and handed over an envelope.

‘This is in code?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Why “naturally”? In our code?’

‘So I believe.’

‘Stupid. Who do you think devised that code?’

‘I don’t think. I know. You did.’

‘It’s still stupid. Why don’t you give me the message verbally? I’ve a good memory for this sort of thing. And there’s more. I may be intercepted, and then two things may happen. Either I succeed in destroying it, in which case the message is useless. Or the Partisans take it intact and decipher it in nothing flat.’ Petersen tapped his head. ‘A clear case for a psychiatrist.’

Lunz took some more brandy and cleared his throat. ‘You know, of course, of Colonel General Alexander von Löhr?’

‘The German Commander in Chief for southeastern Europe. Of course. Never met him personally.’

‘Perhaps it is as well that you never do. I don’t think General von Löhr would react too favourably to the suggestion that he is in need of psychiatric treatment. Nor does he take too kindly to subordinate officers – and, despite your nationality, you can take it that he very definitely regards you as subordinate – who question far less disobey his orders. And those are his orders.’

‘Two psychiatrists. One for von Löhr, one for the person who appointed him to his command. That would be the Führer, of course.’

Colonel Lunz said mildly: ‘I do try to observe the essential civilities. It’s not normally too difficult. But bear in mind that I am a German Regimental Commander.’

‘I don’t forget it and no offence was intended. Protests are useless. I have my orders. I assume that this time I will not be going in by plane?’

‘You are remarkably well informed.’

‘Not really. Some of your colleagues are remarkably garrulous in places where not only have they no right to be garrulous but have no right to be in the first place. In this case I am not well informed, but I can think, unlike – well, never mind. You’d have to notify my friends if you were sending in a plane and that message could be just as easily intercepted and deciphered as any other. You don’t know how crazy those Partisans could be. They wouldn’t hesitate to send a suicide commando behind our lines and shoot down the plane when it’s still at an altitude of fifty or a hundred metres, which is an excellent way of ensuring that no-one gets out of that plane alive.’ Petersen tapped the envelope. ‘That way the message never gets delivered. So I go by boat. When?’

‘Tomorrow night.’

‘Where?’

‘A little fishing village near Termoli.’

‘What kind of boat?’

‘You do ask a lot of questions.’

‘It’s my neck.’ Petersen shrugged his indifference. ‘If your travel arrangements don’t suit me, I’ll make my own.’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time you’d borrowed shall we say, a boat from your – ah – allies?’

‘Only in the best interests of all.’

‘Of course. An Italian torpedo boat.’

‘You can hear one of those things twenty kilometres away.’

‘So? You’ll be landing near Ploe. That’s in Italian hands, as you know. And even if you could be heard fifty kilometres away, what’s the difference? The Partisans have no radar, no planes, no navy, nothing that could stop you.’

‘So the Adriatic is your pond. The torpedo boat it is.’

‘Thank you. I forgot to mention that you’ll be having some company on the trip across.’

‘You didn’t forget. You just saved it for last.’ Petersen refilled their glasses and looked consideringly at Lunz. ‘I’m not sure that I care for this. You know I like to travel alone.’

‘I know you never travel alone.’

‘Ah! George and Alex. You know them, then?’

‘They’re hardly invisible. They attract attention – they have that look about them.’

‘What look?’

‘Hired killers.’

‘You’re half right. They’re different. My insurance policy – they watch my back. I’m not complaining, but people are always spying on me.’

‘An occupational hazard.’ Lunz’s airily dismissive gesture showed what he thought of occupational hazards. ‘I would be grateful if you would allow those two people I have in mind to accompany you. More, I would regard it as a personal favour if you would escort them to their destination.’

‘What destination?’

‘Same as yours.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Two radio operator recruits for your etniks. Carrying with them, I may say, the very latest in transceiver equipment.’

‘That’s not enough, and you know it. Names, background.’

‘Sarina and Michael. Trained – highly trained, I might say – by the British in Alexandria. With the sole intent of doing what they are about to do – joining your friends. Let us say that we intercepted them en route.’

‘What else? Male and female, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘I’m a fairly busy person. I don’t like being encumbered and I’ve no intention of acting as a shipborne chaperon.’

‘Brother and sister.’

‘Ah.’ Petersen said. ‘Fellow citizens?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then why can’t they find their own way home?’

‘Because they haven’t been home for three years. Educated in Cairo.’ Again the wave of a hand. ‘Troubled times in your country, my friend. Germans here, Italians there, Ustaša, etniks, Partisans everywhere. All very confusing. You know your way around your country in these difficult times. Better than any, I’m told.’

‘I don’t get lost much.’ Petersen stood. ‘I’d have to see them first, of course.’

‘I would have expected nothing else.’ Lunz drained his glass, rose and glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll be back in forty minutes.’

George answered Petersen’s knock. Despite Lunz’s unflattering description George didn’t look a bit like a killer, hired or otherwise: genial buffoons, or those who look like them, never do. With a pudgy, jovial face crowned by a tangled thatch of grey-black hair, George, on the wrong side of fifty, was immense – immensely fat, that was: the studded belt strung tightly around what used to be his waist served only to emphasize rather than conceal his gargantuan paunch. He closed the door behind Petersen and crossed to the left-hand wall: like many very heavy men, as is so often seen in the case of overweight dancers, he was quick and light on his feet. He removed from the plaster a rubber suction cap with a central spike which was attached by a wire to a transformer and thence to a single earphone.

‘Your friend seems to be a very pleasant man.’ George sounded genuinely regretful. ‘Pity we have to be on opposite sides.’ He looked at the envelope Petersen had brought. ‘Aha! Operational orders, no?’

‘Yes. Hotfoot, you might say, from the presence of Colonel General von Löhr himself.’ Petersen turned to the recumbent figure on one of the two narrow beds. ‘Alex?’

Alex rose. Unlike George, he had no welcoming smile but that meant nothing, for Alex never smiled. He was of a height with George but there any resemblance ended. His weight was about half George’s as were his years: he was thin-faced, swarthy and had black watchful eyes which rarely blinked. Wordlessly, for his taciturnity was almost on a par with the stillness of his face, he took the envelope, dug into a knapsack, brought out a small butane burner and an almost equally small kettle, and began to make steam. Two or three minutes later Petersen extracted two sheets of paper from the opened envelope and studied the contents carefully. When he had finished he looked up and regarded the two men thoughtfully.

‘This will be of great interest to a great number of people. It may be the depths of winter but things look like becoming very hot in the Bosnian hills in the very near future.’

George said: ‘Code?’

‘Yes. Simple. I made sure of that when I made it up. If the Germans never meant business before, they certainly mean it now. Seven divisions, no less. Four German, under General Lütters, whom we know, and three Italian under General Gloria, whom we also know. Supported by the Ustaša and, of course, the etniks. Somewhere between ninety thousand and a hundred thousand troops.’

George shook his head. ‘So many?’

‘According to this. It’s common knowledge of course that the Partisans are stationed in and around Bihać. The Germans are to attack from the north and east, the Italians from south and west. The battle plan, God knows, is simple enough. The Partisans are to be totally encircled and then wiped out to a man. Simple, but comprehensive. And just to make certain, both the Italians and Germans are bringing in squadrons of bomber and fighter planes.’

‘And the Partisans haven’t got a single plane.’

‘Even worse for them they don’t have antiaircraft guns. Well, a handful, but they should be in a museum.’ Petersen replaced the sheets and re-sealed the envelope. ‘I have to go out in fifteen minutes. Colonel Lunz is coming to take me to meet a couple of people I don’t particularly want to meet, two radio operator etnik recruits who have to have their hands held until we get to Montenegro or wherever.’

‘Or so Colonel Lunz says.’ Suspicion was one of the few expressions that Alex ever permitted himself.

‘Or so he says. Which is why I want you two to go out as well. Not with me, of course – behind me.’

‘A little night air will do us good. These hotel rooms get very stuffy.’ George was hardly exaggerating, his penchant for beer was equalled only by his marked weakness for evil-smelling, black cigars. ‘Car or foot?’

‘I don’t know yet. You have your car.’

‘Either way, tailing in a blackout is difficult. Chances are, we’d be spotted.’

‘So? You’ve been spotted a long time ago. Even if Lunz or one of his men does pick you up it’s most unlikely that he’ll have you followed. What he can do, you can do.’

‘Pick up our tail, you mean. What do you want us to do?’

‘You’ll see where I’m taken. When I leave find out what you can about those two radio operators.’

‘A few details might help. It would be nice to know who we’re looking for.’

‘Probably mid-twenties, brother and sister, Sarina and Michael. That’s all I know. No breaking down of doors, George. Discretion, that’s what’s called for. Tact. Diplomacy.’

‘Our specialities. We use our Carabinieri cards?’

‘Naturally.’

When Colonel Lunz had said that the two young radio operator recruits were brother and sister, that much, Petersen reflected, had been true. Despite fairly marked differences in bulk and colouring, they were unmistakably twins. He was very tanned, no doubt from all his years in Cairo, with black hair and hazel eyes: she had the flawless peach-coloured complexion of one who had no difficulties in ignoring the Egyptian sunshine, close-cropped auburn hair and the same hazel eyes as her brother. He was stocky and broad: she was neither, but just how slender or well proportioned she might have been it was impossible to guess as, like her brother, she was clad in shapeless khaki-coloured fatigues. Side by side on a couch, where they had seated themselves after the introductions, they were trying to look relaxed and casual, but their overly expressionless faces served only to accentuate their wary apprehensiveness.

Petersen leaned back in his arm-chair and looked appreciatively around the large living-room. ‘My word. This is nice. Comfort? No. Luxury. You two young people do yourselves well, don’t you?’

‘Colonel Lunz arranged it for us,’ Michael said.

‘Inevitably. Favouritism. My spartan quarters –’

‘Are of your own choosing,’ Lunz said mildly. ‘It is difficult to arrange accommodation for a person who is in town for three days before he lets anyone know that he’s here.’

‘You have a point. Not, mind you, that this place is perfect in all respects. Take, for instance, the matter of cocktail cabinets.’

‘Neither my brother nor I drink.’ Sarina’s voice was low-pitched and quiet. Petersen noticed that the slender interlaced hands were ivory-knuckled.

‘Admirable.’ Petersen picked up a briefcase he had brought with him, extracted a brandy bottle and two glasses and poured for Lunz and himself. ‘Your health. I hear you wish to join the good Colonel in Montenegro. You must, then, be Royalists. You can prove that?’ Michael said: ‘Do we have to prove it? I mean, don’t you trust us, believe us?’

‘You’ll have to learn and learn quickly – and by that I mean now – to adopt a different tone and attitude.’ Petersen was no longer genial and smiling. ‘Apart from a handful of people – and I mean a handful – I haven’t trusted in or believed anyone for many years. Can you prove you’re a Royalist?’

‘We can when we get there.’ Sarina looked at Petersen’s unchanged expression and gave a helpless little shrug. ‘And I know King Peter. At least, I did.’

‘As King Peter is in London and London at the moment isn’t taking any calls from the Wehrmacht, that would be rather difficult to prove from here. And don’t tell me you can prove it when we get to Montenegro for that would be too late.’

Michael and Sarina looked at each other, momentarily at a loss for words, then Sarina said hesitatingly: ‘We don’t understand. When you say it would be too late –’

‘Too late for me if my back is full of holes. Bullet wounds, stab wounds, that sort of thing.’

She stared at him, colour staining her cheeks, then said in a whisper: ‘You must be mad. Why on earth should we –’

‘I don’t know and I’m not mad. It’s just by liking to live a little longer that I manage to live a little longer.’ Petersen looked at them for several silent moments, then sighed. ‘So you want to come to Yugoslavia with me?’

‘Not really.’ Her hands were still clenched and now the brown eyes were hostile. ‘Not after what you’ve just said.’ She looked at her brother, then at Lunz, then back at Petersen. ‘Do we have any options?’

‘Certainly. Any amount. Ask Colonel Lunz.’

‘Colonel?’

‘Not any amount. Very few and I wouldn’t recommend any of them. The whole point of the exercise is that you both get there intact and if you go by any other means the chances of your doing just that are remote: if you try it on your own the chances don’t exist. With Major Petersen you have safe conduct and guaranteed delivery – alive, that is.’

Michael said, doubt in his voice: ‘You have a great deal of confidence in Major Petersen.’

‘I do. So does Major Petersen. He has every right to, I may add. It’s not just that he knows the country in a way neither of you ever will. He moves as he pleases through any territory whether it’s held by friend or enemy. But what’s really important is that the fields of operations out there are in a state of constant flux. An area held by the etniks today can be held by the Partisans tomorrow. You’d be like lambs in the fold when the wolves come down from the hills.’

For the first time the girl smiled slightly. ‘And the Major is another wolf?’

‘More like a sabre-toothed tiger. And he’s got two others who keep him constant company. Not, mind you, that I’ve ever heard of sabretoothed tigers meeting up with wolves but you take my point, I hope.’

They didn’t say whether they took his point or not. Petersen looked at them both in turn and said: ‘Those fatigues you’re wearing – they’re British?’

They both nodded.

‘You have spares?’

Again they nodded in unison.

‘Winter clothing? Heavy boots?’

‘Well, no.’ Michael looked his embarrassment. ‘We didn’t think we would need them.’

‘You didn’t think you would need them.’ Petersen briefly contemplated the ceiling then returned his gaze to the uncomfortable pair on the couch. ‘You’re going up the mountains, maybe two thousand metres, in the depths of winter, not to a garden party in high summer.’

Lunz said hastily: ‘I shouldn’t have much trouble in arranging for these things by morning.’

‘Thank you, Colonel.’ Petersen pointed to two fairly large, canvaswrapped packages on the floor. ‘Your radios, I take it. British?’

‘Yes,’ Michael said. ‘Latest models. Very tough.’

‘Spares?’

‘Lots. All we’ll ever need, the experts say.’

‘The experts have clearly never fallen down a ravine with a radio strapped to their backs. You’re British-trained, of course.’

‘No. American.’

‘In Cairo?’

‘Cairo is full of them. This was a staff sergeant in the US Marines. An expert in some new codes. He taught quite a few Britishers at the same time.’

‘Seems fair enough. Well, a little cooperation and we should get along just fine.’

‘Cooperation?’ Michael seemed puzzled.

‘Yes. If I have to give some instructions now and again I expect them to be followed.’

‘Instructions?’ Michael looked at his sister. ‘Nobody said anything –’

‘I’m saying something now. I must express myself more clearly. Orders will be implicitly obeyed. If not, I’ll leave you behind in Italy, jettison you in the Adriatic or just simply abandon you in Yugoslavia. I will not jeopardize my mission for a couple of disobedient children who won’t do as they’re told.’

‘Children!’ Michael actually clenched his fists. ‘You have no right to –’

‘He has every right to.’ Lunz’s interruption was sharp. ‘Major Petersen was talking about garden parties. He should have been talking about kindergartens. You’re young, ignorant and arrogant and are correspondingly dangerous on all three counts. Whether you’ve been sworn in or not, you’re now members of the Royal Yugoslav Army. Other rankers, such as you, take orders from officers.’

They made no reply, not even when Petersen again regarded the ceiling and said: ‘And we all know the penalty for the wartime disobedience of orders.’

In Lunz’s staff car Petersen sighed and said: ‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite achieve the degree of rapport back there that I might have. They were in a rather unhappy frame of mind when we left.’

‘They’ll get over it. Young, as I said. Spoilt, into the bargain. Aristocrats, I’m told, even some royal blood. Von Karajan or something like that. Odd name for a Yugoslav.’

‘Not really. Almost certainly from Slovenia and the descendants of Austrians.’

‘Be that as it may, they come from a family that’s clearly not accustomed to taking orders and even less accustomed to being talked to the way you did.’

‘I daresay they’ll learn very quickly.’

‘I daresay they will.’

Half an hour after returning to his room, Petersen was joined by George and Alex. George said, ‘Well, at least we know their name.’

‘So do I. Von Karajan. What else?’

George was in no way put out. ‘The reception clerk, very old but sharp, told us he’d no idea where they’d arrived from – they’d been brought there by Colonel Lunz. He gave us their room number – no hesitation – but said that if we wanted to see them he’d have to announce us, ask permission and then escort us. Then we asked him if either of the rooms next to the number he had given us was vacant and when he told us those were their bedrooms we left.’

‘You took your time about getting back.’

‘We are accustomed to your injustices. We went round to the back of the hotel, climbed a fire escape and made our way along a narrow ledge. A very narrow ledge. No joke, I can tell you, especially for an old man like me. Perilous, dizzying heights –’

‘Yes, yes.’ Petersen was patient. The von Karajans had been staying on the first floor. ‘Then?’

‘There was a small balcony outside their room. Net curtains on their French windows.’

‘You could see clearly?’

‘And hear clearly. Young man was sending a radio message.’

‘Interesting. Hardly surprising, though. Morse?’

‘Plain language.’

‘What was he saying?’

‘I have no idea. Could have been Chinese for all I knew. Certainly no European language I’ve ever heard. A very short message. So we came back.’

‘Anyone see you on the fire escape, ledge or balcony?’

George tried to look wounded. ‘My dear Peter –’ Petersen stopped him with an upraised hand. Not many people called him “Peter” – which was his first name – but, then, not many people had been pre-war students of George’s in Belgrade University where George had been the vastly respected Professor of Occidental Languages. George was known – not reputed, but known – to be fluent in at least a dozen languages and to have a working knowledge of a considerable number more.

‘Forgive me, forgive me.’ Petersen surveyed George’s vast bulk. ‘You’re practically invisible anyway. So tomorrow morning, or perhaps even within minutes, Colonel Lunz will know that you and Alex have been around asking questions – he would have expected nothing less of me – but he won’t know that young Michael von Karajan has been seen and heard to be sending radio messages soon after our departure. I do wonder about the nature of that message.’

George pondered briefly then said: ‘Alex and I could find out on the boat tomorrow night.’

Petersen shook his head. ‘I promised Colonel Lunz that we would deliver them intact.’

‘What’s Colonel Lunz to us or your promise to him?’

‘We want them delivered intact too.’

George tapped his head. ‘The burden of too many years.’

‘Not at all, George. Professorial absent-mindedness.’

TWO

The Wehrmacht did not believe in limousines or luxury coaches for the transportation of its allies: Petersen and his companions crossed Italy that following day in the back of a vintage truck that gave the impression of being well enough equipped with tyres of solid rubber but sadly deficient in any form of springing. The vibration was of the teeth-jarring order and the rattling so loud and continuous as to make conversation virtually impossible. The hooped canvas covering was open at the back, and at the highest point in the Apennines the temperature dropped below freezing point. It was, in some ways, a memorable journey but not for its creature comforts.

The stench of the diesel fumes would normally have been overpowering enough but on that particular day faded into relative insignificance compared to the aroma, if that was the word, given off by George’s black cigars. Out of deference to his fellow-travellers’ sensibilities he had seated himself at the very rear of the truck and on the rare occasion when he wasn’t smoking, kept himself busy and contented enough with the contents of a crate of beer that lay at his feet. He seemed immune to the cold and probably was: nature had provided him with an awesome insulation.

The von Karajans, clad in their newly acquired winter clothing, sat at the front of the left-hand unpadded wooden bench. Withdrawn and silent they appeared no happier than when Petersen had left them the previous night: this could have been an understandable reaction to their current sufferings but more probably, Petersen thought, their injured feelings had not yet had time to mend. Matters were not helped by the presence of Alex, whose totally withdrawn silence and dark, bitter and brooding countenance could be all too easily misinterpreted as balefulness: the von Karajans were not to know that Alex regarded his parents, whom he held in vast respect and affection, with exactly the same expression.

They stopped for a midday meal in a tiny village in the neighbourhood of Corfinio after having safely, if at times more or less miraculously, negotiated the hazardous hair-pin switch-backs of the Apennine spine. They had left Rome at seven o’clock that morning and it had taken over five hours to cover a hundred miles. Considering the incredibly dilapidated state of both the highway and the ancient Wehrmacht truck – unmarked as such and of Italian make – an average of almost twenty miles an hour was positively creditable. Not without difficulty for, with the exception of George, the passengers’ limbs were stiff and almost frozen, they climbed down over the tail-board and looked around them through the thinly falling snow.

There was miserably little to see. The hamlet – if it could even be called that, it didn’t as much as have a name – consisted of a handful of stone cottages, a post office store and a very small inn. Nearby Corfinio, if hardly ranking as a metropolis, could have afforded considerably more in the way of comfort and amenities: but Colonel Lunz, apart from a professional near-mania for secrecy, shared with his senior Wehrmacht fellow-officers the common if unfair belief that all his Italian allies were renegades, traitors and spies until proved otherwise.

In the inn itself, the genial host was far from being that. He seemed diffident, almost nervous, a markedly unusual trait in mountain innkeepers. A noticeably clumsy waiter, civil and helpful in his own way, volunteered only the fact that he was called Luigi but thereafter was totally uncommunicative. The inn itself was well enough, both warmed and illuminated by a pine log fire in an open hearth that gave off almost as much in the way of sparks as it did heat. The food was simple but plentiful, and wine and beer, into which George made his customary inroads, appeared regularly on the table without having to be asked for. Socially, however, the meal was a disaster.

Silence makes an uncomfortable table companion. At a distant and small corner table, the truck-driver and his companion – really an armed guard who travelled with a Schmeisser under his seat and a Luger concealed about his person – talked almost continuously in low voices; but of the five at Petersen’s table, three seemed afflicted with an almost permanent palsy of the tongue. Alex, remote and withdrawn, seemed, as was his wont, to be contemplating a bleak and hopeless future: the von Karajans who, by their own admission, had had no breakfast, barely picked at their food, had time and opportunity to talk, but rarely ventured a word except when directly addressed: Petersen, relaxed as ever, restricted himself to pleasantries and civilities but otherwise showed no signs of wishing to alleviate the conversational awkwardness or, indeed, to be aware of it: George, on the other hand, seemed to be acutely aware of it and did his talkative best to dispel it, even to the point of garrulity.

His conversational gambit took the form of questions directed exclusively at the von Karajans. It did not take him long to elicit the fact that they were, as Petersen had guessed, Slovenians of Austrian ancestry. They had been to primary school in Ljubljana, secondary school in Zagreb and thence to Cairo University.

‘Cairo!’ George tried to make his eyebrows disappear into his hairline. ‘Cairo! What on earth induced you to go to that cultural backwater?’

‘It was our parents’ wish,’ Michael said. He tried to be cold and distant but he only succeeded in sounding defensive.

‘Cairo!’ George repeated. He shook his head in slow disbelief. ‘And what, may one ask, did you study there?’

‘You ask a lot of questions,’ Michael said.

‘Interest,’ George explained. ‘A paternal interest. And, of course, a concern for the hapless youth of our unfortunate and disunited country.’

For the first time Sarina smiled, a very faint smile, it was true, but enough to give some indication of what she could do if she tried. ‘I don’t think such things would really interest you, Mr – ah –’

‘Just call me George. How do you know what would interest me? All things interest me.’

‘Economics and politics.’

‘Good God!’ George clapped a hand to his forehead. As a classical actor he would have starved: as a ham actor he was a nonpareil. ‘Good heavens, girl, you go to Egypt to learn matters of such importance? Didn’t they even teach you enough to make you realize that theirs is the poorest country in the Middle East, that their economy is not only a shambles but is in a state of total collapse and that they owe countless millions, sterling, dollars, any currency you care to name, to practically any country you care to name. So much for their economy. As for politics, they’re no more than a political football for any country that wants to play soccer on their arid and useless desert sands.’

George stopped briefly, perhaps to admire the eloquence of his own oratory, perhaps to await a response. None was forthcoming so he got back to his head-shaking.

‘And what, one wonders, did your parents have against our premier institute of learning. I refer, of course, to the University of Belgrade.’ He paused, as if in reflection. ‘One admits that Oxford and Cambridge have their points. So, for that matter, does Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, Padua and one or two lesser educational centres. But, no, Belgrade is best.’

Again the faint smile from Sarina. ‘You seem to know a great deal about universities, Mr – ah – George.’

George didn’t smirk. Instead, he achieved the near impossible – he spoke with a lofty diffidence. ‘I have been fortunate enough, for most of my adult life, to be associated with academics, among them some of the most eminent.’ The von Karajans looked at each other for a long moment but said nothing: it was unnecessary for them to say that, in their opinion, any such association must have been on a strictly janitorial level. They probably assumed that he had learned his mode of speech when cleaning out common rooms or, it may have been, while waiting on high table. George gave no indication that he had noticed anything untoward, but, then, he never did.

‘Well,’ George said in his best judicial tones, ‘far be it from me to visit the sins of the fathers upon their sons or, come to that, those of mothers upon their daughters.’ Abruptly, he switched the subject. ‘You are Royalists, of course.’

‘Why “of course”?’ Michael’s voice was sharp.

George sighed. ‘I would have hoped that that institute of lower learning on the Nile hadn’t driven all the native sense out of your head. If you weren’t a Royalist you wouldn’t be coming with us. Besides, Major Petersen told me.’

Sarina looked briefly at Petersen. ‘This is the way you treat confidences?’

‘I wasn’t aware it was a confidence.’ Petersen gestured with an indifferent hand. ‘It was too unimportant to rate as a confidence. In any event, George is my confidant.’

Sarina looked at him uncertainly, then lowered her eyes: the rebuke could have been real, implied or just imagined. George said: ‘I’m just puzzled, you see. You’re Royalists. Your parents, one must assume, are the same. It’s not unusual for the royal family and those close to them to send their children abroad to be educated. But not to Cairo. To Northern Europe. Specifically, to England. The ties between the Yugoslav and British royal families are very close – especially the blood ties. What place did King Peter choose for his enforced exile? London, where he is now. The Prince Regent, Prince Paul, is in the care of the British.’

‘They say in Cairo that he’s a prisoner of the British.’ Michael didn’t seem particularly concerned about what they said in Cairo.

‘Rubbish. He’s in protective custody in Kenya. He’s free to come and go. He makes regular withdrawals from a bank in London. Coutts, it’s called – it also happens to be the bank of the British royal family. Prince Paul’s closest friend in Europe – and his brother-inlaw – is the Duke of Kent: well, he was until the Duke was killed in a flying-boat accident last year. And it’s common knowledge that very soon he’s going to South Africa, whose General Smuts is a particularly close friend of the British.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Michael said. ‘You said you’re puzzled. I’m puzzled too. This General Smuts has two South African divisions in North Africa fighting alongside the Eighth Army, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Against the Germans?’

George showed an unusual trace of irritation. ‘Who else would they be fighting?’

‘So our royal family’s friends in North Africa are fighting the Germans. We’re Royalists, and we’re fighting with the Germans, not against them. I mean it’s all rather confusing.’

‘I’m sure you’re not confused.’ Again Sarina’s little smile. Petersen was beginning to wonder whether he would have to revise his first impression of her. ‘Are you, George?’

‘No confusion.’ George waved a dismissive hand. ‘Simply a temporary measure of convenience and expediency. We are fighting with the Germans, true, but we are not fighting for them. We are fighting for ourselves. When the Germans have served their purpose it will be time for them to be gone.’ George refilled his beer mug, drained half the contents and sighed either in satisfaction or sorrow. ‘We are consistently underestimated, a major part, as the rest of Europe sees it, of the insoluble Balkan problem. To me, there is no problem just a goal.’ He raised his glass again. ‘Yugoslavia.’

‘Nobody’s going to argue with that,’ Petersen said. He looked at the girl. ‘Speaking – as George has been doing at some length – of royalty, you mentioned last night you knew King Peter. How well?’

‘He was Prince Peter then. Not well at all. Once or twice on formal occasions.’

‘That’s about how it was for me. I don’t suppose we’ve exchanged more than a couple of dozen words. Bright lad, pleasant, should make a good king. Pity about his limp.’

‘His what?’

‘You know, his left foot.’

‘Oh, that. Yes. I’ve wondered –’

‘He doesn’t talk about it. All sorts of sinister stories about how he was injured. All ridiculous. A simple hunting accident.’ Petersen smiled. ‘I shouldn’t imagine there’s much of a diplomatic future for a courtier who mistakes his future sovereign for a wild boar.’ He lifted his eyes and right arm at the same time: the innkeeper came hurrying towards him. ‘The bill, if you please.’

‘The bill?’ Momentarily the innkeeper gave the impression of being surprised, even taken aback. ‘Ah, the bill. Of course. The bill. At once.’ He hurried off.

Petersen looked at the von Karajans. ‘Sorry you didn’t have a better appetite – you know, stoked the furnaces for the last part of the trip. Still, it’s downhill now all the way and we’re heading for the Adriatic and a maritime climate. Should be getting steadily warmer.’

‘Oh, no, it won’t.’ It was the first time Alex had spoken since they had entered the inn and, predictably, it was in tones of dark certainty. ‘It’s almost an hour since we came in here and the wind has got stronger. Much stronger. Listen and you can hear it.’ They listened. They heard it, a deep, low-pitched, ululating moaning that boded no good at all. Alex shook his head gravely. ‘An east-northeaster. All the way from Siberia. It’s going to be very cold.’ His voice sounded full of gloomy satisfaction but it meant nothing, it was the only way he knew how to talk. ‘And when the sun goes down, it’s going to be very very cold.’

‘Job’s comforter,’ Petersen said. He looked at the bill the innkeeper had brought, handed over some notes, waved away the proffered change and said: ‘Do you think we could buy some blankets from you?’

‘Blankets?’ The innkeeper frowned in some puzzlement: it was, after all, an unusual request.

‘Blankets. We’ve a long way to go, there’s no heating in our transport and the afternoon and evening are going to be very cold.’

‘There will be no problem.’ The innkeeper disappeared and was back literally within a minute with an armful of heavy coloured woollen blankets which he deposited on a nearby empty table. ‘Those will be sufficient?’

‘More than sufficient. Most kind of you.’ Petersen produced money. ‘How much, please?’

‘Blankets?’ The innkeeper lifted his hands in protest. ‘I am not a shopkeeper. I do not charge for blankets.’

‘But you must. I insist. Blankets cost money.’

‘Please.’ The truckdriver had left his table and approached them. ‘I shall be passing back this way tomorrow. I shall bring them with me.’

Petersen thanked them and so it was arranged. Alex, followed by the von Karajans, helped the innkeeper carry the blankets out to the truck. Petersen and George lingered briefly in the porch, closing both the inner and outer doors.

‘You really are the most fearful liar, George,’ Petersen said admiringly. ‘Cunning. Devious. I’ve said it before, I don’t think I’d care to be interrogated by you. You ask a question and whether people say yes, no or nothing at all you still get your answer.’

‘When you’ve spent twenty-five of the best years of your life dealing with dim-witted students – ’ George shrugged as if there were no more to say.

‘I’m not a dim-witted student but I still wouldn’t care for it. You have formed an opinion about our young friends?’

‘I have.’

‘So have I. I’ve also formed another opinion about them and that is that while Michael is no intellectual giant, the girl could bear watching. I think she could be clever.’

‘I’ve often observed this with brother and sister, especially when they’re twins. I share your opinion. Lovely and clever.’

Petersen smiled. ‘A dangerous combination?’

‘Not if she’s nice. I’ve no reason to think she’s not nice.’

‘You’re just middle-aged and susceptible. The innkeeper?’

‘Apprehensive and unhappy. He doesn’t look like a man who should be apprehensive and unhappy, he looks a big tough character who would be perfectly at home throwing big tough drunks out of his inn. Also, he seemed caught off-balance when you offered to pay for the meal. One got the unmistakable impression that there are some travellers who do not pay for their meals. Also his refusal to accept money for the blankets was out of character. Out of character for an Italian, I mean, for I’ve never known of an Italian who wasn’t ready, eager rather, to make a deal on some basis or other. Peter, my friend, wouldn’t even you be slightly nervous if you worked for, or were forced to work for the German SS?’

‘Colonel Lunz casts a long shadow. The waiter?’

‘The Gestapo have fallen in my estimation. When they send in an espionage agent in the guise of a waiter they should at least give him some training in the rudiments of table-waiting. I felt positively embarrassed for him.’ George paused, then went on: ‘You were talking about King Peter a few minutes ago.’

‘You introduced that subject.’

‘That’s irrelevant and don’t hedge. As a departmental head in the university I was regarded – and rightly – as being a man of culture. Prince Paul was nothing if not a man of culture although his interests lay more in the world of art than in philology. Never mind. We met quite a few times, either in the university or at royal functions in the city. More to the point, I saw Prince Peter – as he was then – two or three times. He didn’t have a limp in those days.’

‘He still doesn’t.’

George looked at him then nodded slowly. ‘And you called me devious.’

Petersen opened the outer door and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘We live in devious times, George.’

The second half of the trip was an improvement on the first but just marginally. Cocooned, as they were, to the ears in heavy blankets, the von Karajans were no longer subject to involuntary bouts of shivering and teeth-chattering but otherwise looked no happier and were no more communicative than they had been in the morning, which meant that they were both totally miserable and silent. They didn’t even speak when George, shouting to make himself heard above the fearful mechanical din, offered them brandy to relieve their sufferings. Sarina shuddered and Michael shook his head. They may have been wise for what George was offering them was no French cognac but his own near-lethal form of slivovitz, his native plum brandy.

Some twelve kilometres from Pescara they bore right off the Route 5 near Chieti, reaching the Adriatic coast road at Francavilla as a premature dusk was falling – premature, because of gathering banks of dark grey cloud which Alex, inevitably, said could only presage heavy snow. The coastal road, Route 16 was an improvement over the Apennines road – it could hardly have failed to be otherwise – and the relatively comfortable though still cacophonous ride to Termoli took no more than two hours. Wartime Termoli, on a winter’s night, was no place to inspire a rhapsody in the heart of the poet or composer: the only feelings it could reasonably expect to give rise to were gloom and depression. It was grey, bleak, bare, grimy and seemingly uninhabited except for a very few half-heartedly blacked-out premises which were presumably cafés or taverns. The port area itself, however, was an improvement on Rome: here was no blackout, just a dimout which probably didn’t vary appreciably from the normal. As the truck stopped along a wharf-side there was more than enough light from the shaded yellow overhead lamps to distinguish the lines of the craft alongside the wharf, their transport to Yugoslavia.

That it was a motor torpedo boat was beyond question. Its vintage was uncertain. What was certain was that it had been in the wars. It had sustained considerable, though not incapacitating, damage to both hull and superstructure. No attempt had been made at repair: no-one had even thought it worthwhile to repaint the numerous dents and scars that pockmarked its side. It carried no torpedoes, for the sufficient reason that the torpedo tubes had been removed; nor had it depth-charges, for even the depth-charge racks had been removed. The only armament, if such it could be called, that it carried was a pair of insignificant little guns, single-barrelled, one mounted for’ard of the bridge, the other on the poop. They looked suspiciously like Hotchkiss repeaters, one of the most notoriously inaccurate weapons ever to find its mistaken way into naval service.

A tall man in a vaguely naval uniform was standing on the wharf-side at the head of the MTB’s gangway. He wore a peaked badgeless naval cap which shaded his face but could not conceal his marked stoop and splendid snow-white Buffalo Bill beard. He raised his hand in half-greeting, half-salute as Petersen, the others following close behind, approached him.

‘Good evening. My name is Pietro. You must be the Major we are expecting.’

‘Good evening and yes.’

‘And four companions, one a lady. Good. You are welcome aboard. I will send someone for your luggage. In the meantime, it is the commanding officer’s wish that you see him as soon as you arrive.’

They followed him below and into a compartment that could have been the captain’s cabin, a chart-room, an officers’ mess-room and was probably all three: space is at a premium on MTBs. The captain was seated at his desk, writing, as Pietro entered without benefit of knocking. He swung round in his swivel-chair which was firmly bolted to the deck as Pietro stood to one side and said: ‘Your latest guests, Carlos. The Major and the four friends we were promised.’

‘Come in, come in, come in. Thank you, Pietro. Send that young ruffian along, will you?’

‘When he’s finished loading the luggage?’

‘That’ll do.’ Pietro left. The captain was a broad-shouldered young man with thick curling black hair, a deep tan, very white teeth, a warm smile and warm brown eyes. He said: ‘I’m Lieutenant Giancarlo Tremino. Call me Carlos. Nearly everyone else does. No discipline left in the Navy.’ He shook his head and indicated his white polo neck jersey and grey flannel trousers. ‘Why wear uniform? No-one pays any attention to it anyway.’ He extended his hand – his left hand – to Petersen. ‘Major, you are very welcome. I cannot offer you Queen Mary type accommodation – peacetime accommodation, that is – but we have a very few small cabins, washing and toilet facilities, lots of wine and can guarantee safe transit to Ploe. The guarantee is based on the fact that we have been to the Dalmatian coast many times and haven’t been sunk yet. Always a first time, of course, but I prefer to dwell on happier things.’

‘You are very kind,’ Petersen said. ‘If it’s to be first name terms, then mine is Peter.’ He introduced the other four, each by their first name. Carlos acknowledged each introduction with a handshake and smile but made no attempt to rise. He was quick to explain this seeming discourtesy and quite unembarrassed about doing so.

‘I apologize for remaining seated. I’m not really ill-mannered or lazy or averse to physical exertion.’ He moved his right arm and, for the first time, brought his glove-sheathed right hand into view. He bent and tapped his right hand against his right leg, about halfway between knee and ankle. The unmistakable sound of hollow metal meeting hollow metal made the onlookers wince. He straightened and tapped the tips of his left fingers against the back of his right glove. The sound was against unmistakable although different – flesh meeting metal. ‘Those metal appliances take some getting used to.’ Carlos was almost apologetic. ‘Unnecessary movement – well, any movement – causes discomfort and who likes discomfort? I am not the noblest Roman of them all.’

Sarina gnawed her lower lip. Michael tried to look as if he weren’t shocked but was. The other three, with eighteen months of vicious and bitter warfare in the Yugoslav mountains behind them, predictably showed no reaction. Petersen said: ‘Right hand, right leg. That’s quite a handicap.’

‘Just the right foot really – blown off at the ankle. Handicap? Have you heard of the English fighter pilot who got both legs destroyed? Did he shout for a bath-chair? He shouted to get back into the cockpit of his Spitfire or whatever. He did, too. Handicap!’

‘I know of him. Most people do. How did you come by those two – um – trifling scratches?’

‘Perfidious Albion,’ Carlos said cheerfully. ‘Nasty, horrible British. Never trust them. To think they used to be my best friends before the war – sailed with them in the Adriatic and the Channel, raced against them at Cowes – well, never mind. We were in the Aegean going, as the lawyers say, about our lawful occasions and bothering no-one. Dawn, lots of heavy mist about when suddenly, less than two kilometres away, this great big British warship appeared through a gap in the mist.’

Carlos paused, perhaps for effect, and Petersen said mildly: ‘It was my understanding that the British never risked their capital ships north of Crete.’

‘Size, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It was, in fact, a very small frigate, but to us, you understand, it looked like a battleship. We weren’t ready for them but they were ready for us – they had their guns already trained on us. No fault of ours – we had four men, not counting myself, on lookout: they must have had radar, we had none. Their first two shells struck the water only a few metres from our port side and exploded on contact: didn’t do our hull much good, I can tell you. Two other light shells, about a kilo each, I should think – pom-poms, the British call them – scored direct hits. One penetrated the engine-room and put an engine out of action – I regret to say it’s still out of action but we can get by without it – and the other came into the wheelhouse.’

‘A kilo of explosives going off in a confined space is not very nice,’ Petersen said. ‘You were not alone?’

‘Two others. They were not as lucky as I was. Then I had more luck – we ran into a fog bank.’ Carlos shrugged. ‘That’s all. The past is past.’

A knock came at the door. A very young sailor entered, stood at attention, saluted and said: ‘You sent for me, Captain.’

‘Indeed. We have guests, Pietro. Tired, thirsty guests.’

‘Right away, Captain.’ The boy saluted and left.

Petersen said: ‘What’s all this you were saying about no discipline?’

Carlos smiled: ‘Give him time. He’s been with us for only a month.’

George looked puzzled. ‘He is a truant from school, no?’

‘He’s older than he looks. Well, at least three months older.’

‘Quite an age span you have aboard,’ Petersen said. ‘The elder Pietro. He can’t be a day under seventy.’

‘He’s a great number of days over seventy.’ Carlos laughed. The world seemed to be a source of constant amusement to him. ‘A socalled captain with only two out of four functioning limbs. A beardless youth. An old age pensioner. What a crew. Just wait till you see the rest of them.’

Petersen said: ‘The past is past, you say. Accepted. One may ask a question about the present?’ Carlos nodded. ‘Why haven’t you been retired, invalided out of the Navy or at very least given some sort of shore job? Why are you still on active service?’

‘Active service?’ Carlos laughed again. ‘Highly inactive service. The moment we run into anything resembling action I hand in my commission. You saw the two light guns we have mounted fore and aft? It was just pride that made me keep them there. They’ll never be used for either attack or defence for the perfectly adequate reason that neither works. This is a very undemanding assignment and I do have one modest qualification for it. I was born and brought up in Pescara where my father had a yacht – more than one. I spent my boyhood and the ridiculously long university vacations sailing. Around the Mediterranean and Europe for part of the time but mainly off the Yugoslav coast. The Adriatic coast of Italy is dull and uninteresting, with not an island worth mentioning between Bari and Venice: the thousand and one Dalmatian islands are a paradise for the cruising yachtsman. I know them better than I know the streets of Pescara or Termoli. The Admiralty finds this useful.’

‘On a black night?’ Petersen said. ‘No lighthouses, no lit buoys, no land-based navigational aids?’

‘If I required those I wouldn’t be much use to the Admiralty, would I? Ah! Help is at hand.’

It took young Pietro an heroic effort not to stagger under the weight of his burden, a vertically-sided, flat-bottomed wicker basket holding the far from humble nucleus of a small but well-stocked bar. In addition to spirits, wines and liqueurs, Pietro had even gone to the length of providing a soda syphon and a small ice-bucket.

‘Pietro hasn’t yet graduated to bar-tender and I’ve no intention of leaving this chair,’ Carlos said. ‘Help yourselves, please. Thank you, Pietro. Ask our two passengers to join us at their convenience.’ The boy saluted and left. ‘Two other Yugoslav-bound passengers. I don’t know their business as I don’t know yours. You don’t know theirs and they don’t know yours. Ships that pass in the night. But such ships exchange recognition signals. Courtesy of the high seas.’

Petersen gestured at the basket from which George was already helping the von Karajans to orange juice. ‘Another courtesy of the high seas. Lessens the rigours of total war, I must say.’

‘My feeling exactly. No thanks, I may say, to our Admiralty who are as stingy as Admiralties the world over. Some of the supplies come from my father’s wine cellars – they would have your threestar sommeliers in raptures, I can tell you – some are gifts from foreign friends.’

‘Kruškovac.’ George touched a bottle. ‘Grappa. Pelinkovac. Stara Šljivovica. Two excellent vintages from the Neretva delta. Your foreign friends. All from Yugoslavia. Our hospitable and considerate young friend, Pietro. Clairvoyant? He thinks we go to Yugoslavia? Or has he been informed?’

‘Suspicion, one would suppose, is part of your stock-in-trade. I don’t know what Pietro thinks. I don’t even know if he can think. He hasn’t been informed. He knows.’ Carlos sighed. ‘The romance and glamour of the cloak-and-dagger, sealed-orders missions are not, I’m afraid, for us. Search Termoli and you might find a person who is deaf, dumb and blind, although I much doubt it. If you did, he or she would be the only person in Termoli who doesn’t know that the Colombo – that’s the name of this crippled greyhound – plies a regular and so far highly dependable ferry-service to the Yugoslav coast. If it’s any consolation, I’m the only person who knows where we’re going. Unless, of course, one of you has talked.’ He poured himself a small scotch. ‘Your health, gentlemen. And yours, young lady.’

‘We don’t talk much about such things, but about other things I’m afraid I talk too much.’ George sounded sad but at once refuted himself. ‘University, eh? Some kind of marine school?’

‘Some kind of medical school.’

‘Medical school.’ With the air of a man treating himself for shock George poured some more grappa. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a doctor.’

‘I’m not telling you anything. But I have a paper that says so.’

Petersen waved a hand. ‘Then why this?’

‘Well you might ask.’ Momentarily, Carlos sounded as sad as George had done. ‘The Italian Navy. Any navy. Take a highly skilled mechanic, obvious material for an equally highly skilled engineroom-artificer. What does he become? A cook. A cordon bleu chef? A gunner.’ He waved his hand much as Petersen had done. ‘So, in their all-knowing wisdom, they gave me this. Dr Tremino, ferryman, first class. Considering the state of the ferry, make that second class. Come in, come in.’ A knock had come on the door.

The young woman who stepped over the low coaming – she could have been anything between twenty and thirty-five – was of medium height, slender and dressed in a jersey, jacket and skirt, all in blue. Pale-complexioned, without a trace of make-up, she was grave and unsmiling. Her hair was black as night and swooped low, like a raven’s wing, over the left forehead, quite obscuring the left eyebrow. The pock-marking, for such it seemed to be, high up on the left cheekbone, served only to accentuate, not diminish, the classical, timeless beauty of the features: twenty years on, just as conceivably thirty, she would still be as beautiful as she was at that moment. Nor, it seemed certain, would time ever change the appearance of the man who followed her into the cabin, but the sculpted perfection of features had nothing to do with this. A tall, solidly built, fair-haired character, he was irredeemably ugly. Nature had had no hand in this. From the evidence offered by ears, cheeks, chin, nose and teeth he had been in frequent and violent contact with a variety of objects, both blunt and razor-edged, in the course of what must have been a remarkably chequered career, It was, withal, an attractive face, largely because of the genuine warmth of his smile: as with Carlos, an almost irrepressible cheerfulness was never far from the surface.

‘This,’ Carlos said, ‘is Lorraine and Giacomo.’ He introduced Petersen and the other four in turn. Lorraine’s voice was soft and low, in tone and timbre remarkably like that of Sarina: Giacomo’s, predictably, was neither soft nor low and his hand-clasp fearsome except when it came to Sarina: her fingers he took in his finger and thumb and gallantly kissed the back of her hand. Such a gesture from such a man should have appeared both affected and stagey: oddly enough, it did neither. Sarina didn’t seem to think so either. She said nothing, just smiled at him, the first genuine smile Petersen had seen from her: it came as no surprise that her teeth would have been a dentist’s delight or despair, depending upon whether aesthetic or financial considerations were uppermost in his mind.

‘Help yourselves,’ Carlos gestured to the wicker basket. Giacomo, leaving no doubt that he was decisive both as to cast of mind and action, needed no second urging. He poured a glass of Pellegrino for Lorraine, evidence enough that this was not the first time he had met her and that she shared the von Karajans’ aversion towards alcohol, and then half-filled a tumbler with scotch, topping it up with water. He took a seat and beamed around the company.

‘Health to all.’ He raised his brimming glass. ‘And confusion to our enemies.’

‘Any particular enemies?’ Carlos said.

‘It would take too long.’ Giacomo tried to look sad but failed. ‘I have too many.’ He drank deeply to his own toast. ‘You have called us to a conference, Captain Carlos?’

‘Conference, Giacomo? Goodness me, no.’ It didn’t require any great deductive powers, Petersen reflected, to realize that those two had met before and not just that day. ‘Why should I hold a conference? My job is to get you where you’re going and you can’t help me in that. After you land I can’t help you in whatever you’re going to do. Nothing to confer about. As a ferryman, I’m a great believer in introductions. People in your line of business are apt to react over-quickly if, rightly or wrongly, they sense danger in meeting an unknown on a dark deck at night. No such danger now. And there are three things I want to mention briefly.

‘First, accommodation. Lorraine and Giacomo have a cabin each, if you can call something the size of a telephone box a cabin. Only fair. First come, first served. I have two other cabins, one for three, one for two.’ He looked at Michael. ‘You and – yes, Sarina – are brother and sister?’

‘Who told you?’ Michael probably didn’t mean to sound truculent, but his nervous system had suffered from his encounter with Petersen and his friends, and that was the way it came out.

Carlos lowered his head briefly, looked up and said, not smiling, ‘The good Lord gave me eyes and they say “twins”.’

‘No problem.’ Giacomo bowed towards the embarrassed girl. ‘The young lady will do me the honour of switching cabins with me?’

She smiled and nodded. ‘You are very kind.’

‘Second. Food. You could eat aboard but I don’t recommend it. Giovanni cooks only under duress and protest. I don’t blame him. He’s our engineer. Everything that comes out of that galley, even the coffee, tastes and smells of oil. There’s a passable café close by – well, barely passable, but they do know me.’ He half-smiled at the two women in turn. ‘It will be a hardship and a sacrifice but I think I’ll join you.

‘Third. You’re free to go ashore whenever you wish, although I can’t imagine why anyone should want to go ashore on a night like this – except, of course, to escape Giovanni’s cooking. There are police patrols but their enthusiasm usually drops with the temperature. If you do run into any, just say you’re from the Colombo: the worst that can happen is that they’ll escort you back here to check.’ ‘I think I’ll take my chance on both weather and the police,’ Petersen said. ‘Advancing years or too many hours in that damned truck or maybe both, but I’m as stiff as a board.’

‘Back inside an hour, please, then we’ll leave for the meal.’ He looked at the bulkhead clock. ‘We should be back at ten. We sail at one o’clock in the morning.’

‘Not till then?’ Michael looked his astonishment. ‘Why, that’s hours away. Why don’t we –’

‘We sail at 1.00 a.m.’ Carlos was patient.

‘But the wind’s getting stronger. It must be rough now. It’ll be getting rougher.’

‘It will not be too comfortable. Are you a bad sailor, Michael?’ The words were sympathetic, the expression not.

‘No. Yes. I don’t know. I don’t see – I mean, I can’t understand –’ ‘Michael.’ It was Petersen, his voice gentle. ‘It really doesn’t matter what you can’t see or can’t understand. Lieutenant Tremino is the captain. The captain makes the decisions. No-one ever questions the captain.’

‘It’s very simple, really.’ It was noticeable that Carlos spoke to Petersen not Michael. ‘The garrison that guard such port installations as they have at Ploe are not first-line troops. As soldiers go, they are either superannuated or very very young. In both cases they’re nervous and trigger-happy and the fact that they have radio notification of my arrival seems to have no effect on them. Experience and a few lucky escapes have taught me that the wisest thing is to arrive at sunrise so that even the most rheumy eyes can see that the gallant Captain Tremino is flying the biggest Italian flag in the Adriatic.’

The wind, as Michael had said, had indeed strengthened, and was bitingly cold but Petersen and his two companions were not exposed to it for long, for George’s homing instinct was unerring. The tavern in which they fetched up was no more or less dingy than any other dockside tavern and it was at least warm.

‘A very short stroll for such stiff legs,’ George observed.

‘Nothing wrong with my legs. I just wanted to talk.’

‘What was wrong with our cabin? Carlos has more wine and grappa and slivovitz than he can possibly use –’

‘Colonel Lunz, as we’ve said, has a long arm.’

‘Ah! So! A bug?’

‘Would you put anything past him? This could be awkward.’

‘Alas, I’m afraid I know what you mean.’

‘I don’t.’ Alex wore his suspicious expression.

‘Carlos,’ Petersen said. ‘I know him. Rather, I know who he is. I knew his father, a retired naval captain but on the reserve list: almost certainly on the active list now, a cruiser captain or such. He became a reserve Italian naval captain at the same time as my father became a reserve Yugoslav army colonel. Both men loved the sea and both men set up chandlers’ businesses: both were highly successful. Inevitably, almost, their paths crossed and they became very good friends. They met frequently, usually in Trieste and I was with them on several occasions. Photographs were taken. Carlos may well have seen them.’

‘If he has seen them,’ George said, ‘let it be our pious hope that the ravages of time and the dissipation of years make it difficult for Carlos to identify Major Petersen with the carefree youth of yesteryear.’

Alex said: ‘Why is it so important?’

‘I have known Colonel Petersen for many years,’ George said. ‘Unlike his son, he is, or was, a very outspoken man.’

‘Ah!’

‘A pity about Carlos, a great pity.’ George sounded, and may well have been, profoundly sad. ‘An eminently likeable young man. And you can say the same about Giacomo – except, of course, not so young. An excellent pair to have by one’s side, one would have thought, in moments of trouble and strife, which are the only ones we seem to have.’ He shook his head. ‘Where, oh where, are my ivory towers?’

‘You should be grateful for this touch of realism, George. Exactly the counter-balance you academics need. What do you make of Giacomo? An Italian counterpart of the British commando?’

‘Giacomo has been savagely beaten up or savagely tortured or perhaps both at the same time. Commando material unquestionably. But not Italian. Montenegrin.’

‘Montenegrin!’

‘You know. Montenegro.’ George, on occasion, was capable of elaborate sarcasm, an unfortunate gift honed and refined by a lifetime in the groves of academe. ‘A province in our native Yugoslavia.’

‘With that fair hair and impeccable Italian?’

‘Fair hair is not unknown in Montenegro and though his Italian is very good the accent overlay is unmistakable.’

Petersen didn’t doubt him for a moment. George’s ear for languages, dialects, accents and nuances of accent was, in philological circles, a byword far beyond the Balkans.

The evening meal was more than passable, the café more than presentable. Carlos was not only known there, as he had said, but treated with some deference. Lorraine spoke only occasionally and then to no-one except Carlos, who sat beside her. She, too, had, it seemed been born in Pescara. Predictably, neither Alex nor Michael nor Sarina contributed a word to the conversation but that didn’t matter. Both Carlos and Petersen were relaxed and easy talkers but even that didn’t matter very much: when Giacomo and George were in full cry, more often than not at the same time, even the possibility of a conversational hiatus seemed preposterous: both men talked a great deal without saying anything at all.

On the way back to the ship they had to face not only a perceptibly stronger wind but a thinly driving snow. Carlos, who had drunk little enough, was not so sure on his feet as he thought or, more likely, would have others think. After the second stumble he was seen to be walking arm in arm with Lorraine: who had taken whose arm could only be guessed at. When they arrived at the gangway, the Colombo was rocking perceptibly at its moorings: the harbour swell responsible bespoke much worse conditions outside.

To Petersen’s surprise and an ill-concealed irritation that amounted almost to anger, five more men were awaiting their arrival down below. Their leader, who was introduced as Alessandro, and for whom Carlos showed an unusual degree of respect, was a tall, thin, grey-haired man with a beaked nose, bloodless lips and only the rudimentary vestiges of eyebrows. Three of his four men, all about half his age, were introduced as Franco, Cola and Sepp, which names were presumably abbreviations for Francesco, Nicholas and Giuseppe: the fourth was called Guido. Like their leader, they wore nondescript civilian clothes. Like their leader they gave the distinct impression that they would have been much happier in uniform: like their leader they had cold, hard, expressionless faces.

Petersen glanced briefly at George, turned and left the cabin, George following with Alex, inevitably, close behind. Petersen had barely begun to speak when Carlos appeared in the passage-way and walked quickly towards them.

‘You are upset, Major Petersen?’ No ‘Peter’. The trace of anxiety was faint but it was there.

‘I’m unhappy. It is true, as I told Michael, that one never questions the captain’s decisions but this is a different matter entirely. I take it those men are also passengers to Ploe?’ Carlos nodded. ‘Where are they sleeping?’

‘We have a dormitory for five in the bows. I did not think that worth mentioning, any more than I thought their arrival worth mentioning.’

‘I am also unhappy at the fact that Rome gave me the distinct impression that we would be travelling alone. I did not bargain for the fact that we would be travelling with five – seven now – people who are totally unknown to me.

‘I am unhappy about the fact that you know them or, at least, Alessandro.’ Carlos made to speak but Petersen waved him to silence. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t think me such a fool as to deny it. It’s just not in your nature to show a deference amounting almost to apprehension towards a total stranger.

‘Finally, I’m unhappy about the fact that they have the appearance of being a bunch of hired, professional assassins, tough ruthless killers. They are, of course, nothing of the kind, they only think they are, which is why I use the word “appearance”. Their only danger lies in their lack of predictability. For your true assassin, no such word as unpredictability exists in his vocabulary. He does precisely what he intends to do. And it is to be borne in mind, when it comes to the far from gentle art of premeditated and authorized murder, your true assassin never, never, never looks like one.’

‘You seem to know a lot about assassins.’ Carlos smiled faintly. ‘I could be speaking to three of them.’

‘Preposterous!’ George was incapable of snorting but he came close.

‘Giacomo, then?’

‘One is left with the impression that Giacomo is a one-man panzer division,’ Petersen said. ‘Coldblooded stealth is not his forte. He doesn’t even begin to qualify. You should know – you know him much better than we do.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because acting isn’t your forte.’

‘So our school drama teacher said. Lorraine?’

‘You’re mad.’ George spoke with conviction.

‘He doesn’t mean you are.’ Petersen smiled. ‘Just the suggestion. Classically beautiful women almost never have gentle eyes.’

Carlos confirmed what seemed to be the growing opinion that he was indeed no actor. He was pleased, and not obscurely. He said: ‘If you’re unhappy, then I apologize for that although I really don’t know why I’m apologizing. I have orders to carry out and it’s my duty to follow orders. Beyond that, I know nothing.’ He still wasn’t a very good actor, Petersen thought, but there was nothing to be gained in saying so. ‘Won’t you come back to my cabin? Three hours before we sail yet. Ample time for a nightcap. Or two. Alessandro and his men, as you say, aren’t so ferocious as they look.’

‘Thank you,’ Petersen said. ‘But no. I think we’ll just take a turn on the upper deck and then retire. So we’ll say goodnight now.’

‘The upper deck? This weather? You’ll freeze.’

‘Cold is an old friend of ours.’

‘I prefer other company. But as you wish, gentlemen.’ He reached out a steadying hand as the Colombo lurched sharply. ‘A rather rough passage tonight, I’m afraid. Torpedo boats may have their good points – I may find one some day – but they are rather less than seakindly. I hope you are also on friendly terms with Father Neptune.’

‘Our next of kin,’ George said.

‘That apart, I can promise you a quiet and uneventful trip. Never had a mutiny yet.’

In the lee of the superstructure Petersen said: ‘Well?’

‘Well?’ George said heavily. ‘All is not well. Seven total strangers aboard this boat and the worthy young Carlos seems to know all seven of them. Every man’s hand against us. Not, of course, that that’s anything new.’ The tip of his nauseous cigar glowed redly in the gloom. ‘Would it be naïve of me to wonder whether or not our good friend Colonel Lunz is acquainted with the passenger list of the Colombo?’

‘Yes.’

‘We are, of course, prepared for all eventualities?’

‘Certainly. Which ones did you have in mind?’

‘None. We take turns to keep watch in our cabin?’

‘Of course. If we stay in our cabin.’

‘Ah! We have a plan?’

‘We have no plan. What do you think about Lorraine?’

‘Charming. I speak unhesitatingly. A delightful young lady.’

‘I’ve told you before, George. About your advanced years and susceptibility. That wasn’t what I meant. Her presence aboard puzzles me. I can’t see that she belongs in any way to this motley bunch that Carlos is transporting to Ploe.’

‘Motley, eh? First time I’ve ever been called motley. How does she differ?’

‘Because every other passenger on this vessel is up to no good or I strongly suspect them of being up to no good. I suspect her of nothing.’

‘My word!’ George spoke in tones of what were meant to be genuine awe. ‘That makes her unique.’

‘Carlos let us know – he could have been at pains to let us know – that she, too, came from Pescara. Do you think she comes from Pescara, George?’

‘How the devil should I tell? She could come from Timbuktu for all I know.’

‘You disappoint me, George. Or wilfully misunderstand me. I shall be patient. Your unmatched command of the nuances of all those European languages. Was she born or brought up in Pescara?’

‘Neither.’

‘But she is Italian?’

‘No.’

‘So we’re back in Yugoslavia again?’

‘Maybe you are. I’m not. I’m in England.’

‘What! England?’

‘The overlay of what it pleases the British Broadcasting Corporation to call Southern Standard English is unmistakable.’ George coughed modestly, his smugness could occasionally verge on the infuriating. ‘To the trained ear, of course.’

THREE

Both Alex and Carlos had made predictions and both had turned out to be wrong or, in Alex’s case, half wrong. He had said, gloomily and accurately, that it was going to be very very cold and at three a.m. that morning none of the passengers on the Colombo would have disagreed with him. The driving snow, so heavy as to reduce visibility to virtually zero, had an uncommonly chilling effect on the torpedo boat, which would have been of no concern to those in an adequately central-heated boat but on this particular one the central-heating unit, as became practically everything else aboard, was functioning at about only one-third degree efficiency and, moreover, had been of a pathetically ancient design in the first place so that for the shivering passengers – and crew – the snow had become a matter for intense concern.

Alex had been wrong, even if only slightly – and what he had said had been a statement, really, not a fact – when he spoke of an east-north-east wind. It was a north-east wind. To a layman or, indeed, anybody not aboard an elderly torpedo boat, a paltry twentythree degree difference in wind direction might seem negligible: to a person actually aboard such a boat the difference is crucial, marking, as it did for those with inbuilt queasiness, the border-line between the uncomfortable and the intolerable. Had the Colombo been head-on to wind and seas, the pitching would have been uncomfortable: had the seas been on the beam, the rolling would have been even more uncomfortable: but, that night, with the seas two points off the port bow, the resultant wicked corkscrewing was, for the less fortunate, the last straw. For some people aboard the torpedo boat that night, the degree of sea-sickness ranged from the unpleasant to the acute.

Carlos had predicted that the trip would be quiet and uneventful. At least two people, both, at least outwardly, immune to the effects of sea and cold, did not share Carlos’ confidence. The door to the bo’sun’s store, which lay to the port hand of the stairway leading down to the engine-room, had been hooked open and Petersen and Alex, standing two feet back in the unlit store, were only dimly visible. There was just enough light to see that Alex was carrying a semi-automatic machine-pistol while Petersen, using one hand to steady himself on the lurching deck had the other in his coat pocket. Petersen had long ago learned that with Alex by his side when confronting minimal forces, it was quite superfluous for him to carry a weapon of any kind.

Their little cabin, almost directly opposite them on the starboard side of the ill but sufficiently lit passage-way, had its door closed. George, Petersen knew, was still behind that door: and George, Petersen also knew, would be as wide awake as themselves. Petersen looked at his luminous watch. For just over ninety minutes he and Alex had been on station with no signs of weariness or boredom or awareness of the cold and certainly with no signs of their relaxed vigilance weakening at any time: a hundred times they had waited thus on the bleak and often icy mountains of Bosnia and Serbia and Montenegro, most commonly for much longer periods than this: and always they had survived. But that night was going to be one of their shorter and more comfortable vigils.

It was in the ninety-third minute that two men appeared at the for’ard end of the passage-way. They moved swiftly aft, crouched low as if making a stealthy approach, an attempt in which they were rather handicapped by being flung from bulkhead to bulkhead with every lurch of the Colombo: they had tried to compensate for this by removing their boots, no doubt to reduce the noise level of their approach, a rather ludicrous tactic in the circumstances because the torpedo boat was banging and crashing about to such a high decibel extent that they could have marched purposefully along in hobnailed boots without anyone being any way the wiser. Each had a pistol stuck in his belt: more ominously, each carried in his right hand an object that looked suspiciously like a hand-grenade.

They were Franco and Cola and neither was looking particularly happy. That their expressions were due to the nature of the errand on hand or to twinges of conscience Petersen did not for a moment believe: quite simply, neither had been born with the call of the sea in his ear and, from the lack of colour in their strained faces, both would have been quite happy never to hear it again. On the logical assumption that Alessandro would have picked his two fittest young lieutenants, for the job on hand, Petersen thought, their appearance didn’t say too much for the condition of those who had been left behind. Their cabin was right up in the bows of the vessel and in a cork-screwing sea that was the place to be avoided above all. They halted outside the door behind which George was lurking and looked at each other. Petersen waited until the boat was on even keel, bringing with it a comparative, if brief, period of silence.

‘Don’t move!’

Franco, at least, had some sense: he didn’t move. Cola, on the other hand, amply demonstrated Petersen’s assertion that they weren’t hired assassins but only tried to look like ones, by dropping his grenade – he had to be right-handed – reaching for his pistol and swinging round, all in what he plainly hoped was one swift coordinated movement: for a man like Alex it was a scene in pathetically slow motion. Cola had just cleared the pistol from his left waistband when Alex fired, just once, the sound of the shot shockingly loud in the metallic confines. Cola dropped his gun, looked uncomprehendingly at his shattered right shoulder then, back to the bulkhead, he slid to the deck in a sitting position.

‘They never learn,’ Alex said gloomily. Alex was not one to derive childish pleasure from such childishly simply exercises.

‘Maybe he’s never had the chance to learn,’ Petersen said. He relieved Franco of his armoury and had just picked up Cola’s pistol and grenade when George appeared in the cabin doorway. He, too, carried a weapon but had had no expectation of using it: he held his semi-automatic loosely by the stock, its muzzle pointing towards the deck. He shook his head just once, resignedly, but said nothing.

Petersen said: ‘Mind our backs, George.’

‘You are going to return those unfortunates to the bosom of their family?’ Petersen nodded. ‘A Christian act. They’re not fit to be out alone.’

Petersen and Alex moved back up the passageway preceded by Franco and Cola, the former supporting his stricken comrade. They had taken only four steps when a door on the port side, just aft of where George was standing, opened and Giacomo stepped out into the passage-way, brandishing a Biretta.

‘Put that thing away,’ George said. His machine-pistol was still pointing at the deck. ‘Don’t you think there has been enough noise already?’

‘That’s why I’m here.’ Giacomo had already lowered his gun. ‘The noise, I mean.’

‘Took your time, didn’t you?’

‘I had to get dressed first,’ Giacomo said with some dignity. He was clad only in a pair of khaki trousers, displaying a tanned chest rather impressively criss-crossed with scars. ‘But I notice you are fully dressed, so I take it you were expecting whatever did happen.’ He looked in the direction of the quartet making their slow way along the passage-way. ‘What exactly did happen?’

‘Alex has just shot Cola.’

‘Good for Alex.’ If Giacomo was moved by the news he hid it well. ‘Hardly worth wakening a man for.’

‘Cola might view matters differently.’ George coughed delicately. ‘You are not, then, one of them?’

‘You must be mad.’

‘Not really. I don’t know any of you, do I? But you don’t look like them.’

‘You’re very kind, George. And now?’

‘We won’t find out just by standing here.’

They caught up with the others in just a matter of seconds which was easily enough done as the now moaning Cola could barely drag his feet along. A moment afterwards a door at the for’ard end of the passage-way opened and an armed figure came – or lurched – into view. It was Sepp and he wasn’t looking at all like the ruthless killer of a few hours ago. It required no imagination to see the slightly greenish pallor on his face, for slightly green he indisputably was: time and the seaway had wrought its effect. It was not difficult to understand why Alessandro had selected Franco and Cola for the mission.

‘Sepp.’ Petersen’s tone was almost kindly. ‘We have no wish to kill you. Before you can reach us, you would have to kill your two friends, Franco and Cola. That would be bad enough, wouldn’t it, Sepp?’ From Sepp’s pallor and general demeanour of uncertainty it seemed, that for him, things were quite bad enough as they were. ‘Even worse, Sepp, before you could get around to killing the second of your friends, you yourself would be dead. Drop that gun, Sepp.’

Whatever other parts of Sepp’s physiology were in a state of temporary dysfunction there was nothing wrong with his hearing. His elderly Lee Enfield .303 clattered to the deck.

‘Who fired that shot?’ Carlos, his habitual smile in momentary abeyance, had come limping up behind them, a pistol in hand. ‘What goes on?’

‘It would help if you could tell us.’ Petersen looked at the gun in Carlos’ hand. ‘You don’t require that.’

‘I require it as long as I am the master of this vessel. I asked’ – he broke off with an exclamation of pain as George’s massive hand closed over his gun-wrist. He struggled to free his hand, an expression of incomprehension spread over his face and he bit his lips as if to hold back another cry of pain. George removed the gun from the suddenly nerveless fingers.

‘So that’s it,’ Carlos said. His face, not without reason, was pale. ‘So I was right. You are the assassins. It is your intention to take over my vessel, perhaps?’

‘Goodness gracious, no.’ It was George who answered. ‘Your forefinger has gone white at the knuckles. Precipitate action isn’t going to help anyone.’ He handed the pistol back to Carlos and went on pontifically: ‘Unnecessary violence never helped anyone.’

Carlos took the pistol, hesitated, stuck it in his waistband and began to massage his right wrist. The demonstration of pacific intentions had had an unsettling effect. He said uncertainly: ‘I still don’t understand –’

‘Neither do we, Carlos,’ Petersen said, ‘neither do we. That’s what we’re trying to do at this moment – understand. Perhaps you could help us. Those two men, Franco and Cola – Cola, I’m afraid is going to require your peacetime professional skills quite soon – came to attack us. Perhaps they came to kill us but I don’t think so. They bungled it.’

‘Amateurs,’ George said by way of explanation.

‘Amateurs, agreed. But the effect of an amateur bullet can be just as permanent as a professional one. I want to know why those two came for us in the first place. Perhaps you can help explain this, Carlos?’

‘How should I be able to help you?’

‘Because you know Alessandro.’

‘I do but not well. I have no idea why he should seek to do you harm. I do not permit my passengers to carry out guerrilla warfare.’ ‘I’m sure you don’t. But I’m equally sure that you know who Alessandro is and what he does.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t believe you. I suppose I should sigh and say how much trouble it would save all round if you were to tell the truth. Not, of course, that you are telling lies. You’re just not telling anything. Well, if you don’t help us, I’ll just have to help myself.’ Petersen raised his voice. ‘Alessandro!’

Seconds passed without reply.

‘Alessandro. I have three of your men prisoner, one of them badly injured. I want to know why those men came to attack us.’ Alessandro made no reply and Petersen went on: ‘You don’t leave me any option. In wartime, people are either friends or enemies. Friends are friends and enemies die. If you’re a friend, step out into the passage-way: if you’re not, then you’ll just have to stay there and die.’

Petersen didn’t show any particular emotion but his tone sounded implacable enough. Carlos, his pain forgotten, laid a hand on Petersen’s forearm.

‘People don’t commit murder aboard my ship.’

‘Haven’t committed. And murder is for peacetime. In wartime we call it execution.’ For those listening inside the cabin the tone of his voice could have lent little encouragement. ‘George, Alex. Help Franco and Sepp into the cabin. Keep out of any line of fire.’

Franco and Sepp didn’t need any kind of helping. Execution chamber or not they couldn’t get inside it fast enough. The door banged shut and a watertight clip came down. Petersen examined the pear-shaped object in his hand.

Carlos said apprehensively: ‘What’s that?’

‘You can see. A hand-grenade of sorts. George?’ George didn’t need telling what to do. He never did. He took up position by the cabin door, his hand reaching up for the closed watertight clip. With one hand Petersen took a grip on the door handle, with the other he pressed a lever on the bottom of the grenade as he glanced at George who immediately opened the clip. Petersen jerked open the door the requisite few inches, dropped the grenade inside and banged shut the door as George closed the clip again. They could have rehearsed it a hundred times.

‘Jesus!’ Carlos’ face was white. ‘In that confined space –’ He stopped, his face puzzled now, and said: ‘The explosion. The bang.’

‘Gas-grenades don’t go bang. They go hiss. Reactions, George?’ George had taken his hand away from the clip.

‘Five seconds and then whoever it was gave up. Quick-acting stuff, is it not?’

Carlos was still almost distraught. ‘What’s the difference? Explosives or poison gas –’

Petersen spoke with patience. ‘It was not poison gas. George.’ He spoke a few words in the ear of his giant Lieutenant, who smiled and moved quickly aft. Petersen turned to Carlos. ‘Is it your intention to let your friend Cola die?’

‘He’s not my friend and he’s in no danger of dying.’ He turned to the elder Pietro who had just arrived on the scene. ‘Get my medicine box and bring along two of your boys.’ To Petersen he said: ‘I’ll give a sedative, a knockout one. Then a coagulant. A few minutes later and I’ll bandage him up. There’ll be a broken bone or bones. It may be that his shoulder is shattered beyond repair, but whatever it is there’s nothing I can do about it in this seaway.’ He glanced aft, passed his hand over his forehead and looked as if he would like to moan. ‘More trouble.’

Michael von Karajan was approaching them, closely followed by George. Michael was trying to look indignant and truculent but succeeded only in looking miserable and frightened. George was beaming.

‘By heavens, Major, there’s nothing wrong with this new generation of ours. You have to admire their selfless spirit. Here we are with the good ship Colombo trying to turn somersaults but does that stop our Michael in the polishing of his skills? Not a bit of it. There he was, crouched over his transceiver in this appalling weather, headphones clamped over his ears –’

Petersen held up his hand. When he spoke his face was as cold as his voice. ‘Is this true, von Karajan?’

‘No. What I mean is –’

‘You’re a liar. If George says it’s true, it’s true. What message were you sending?’

‘I wasn’t sending any message. I –’

‘George?’

‘He wasn’t transmitting any message when I arrived.’

‘He would hardly have had time to,’ Giacomo said. ‘Not between the time I left our cabin and when George got there.’ He eyed the now visibly shaking Michael with open distaste. ‘He’s not only a coward, he’s a fool. How was he to know that I wasn’t going to return at any moment? Why didn’t he lock his door to make sure that he wasn’t disturbed?’

Petersen said: ‘What message were you going to transmit?’

‘I wasn’t going to transmit any –’

‘That makes you doubly a liar. Who were you transmitting to or about to transmit to?’

‘I wasn’t going to –’

‘Oh, do be quiet. That makes you three times a liar. George, confiscate his equipment. For good measure confiscate his sister’s as well.’

‘You can’t do that.’ Michael was aghast. ‘Take away our radios? They’re our equipment.’

‘Good God in heaven!’ Petersen stared at him in disbelief. Whether the disbelief were real or affected didn’t matter. The effect was the same. ‘I’m your commanding officer, you young fool. I can not only lock up your equipment, I can lock you up too, on charges of mutiny. In irons, if need be.’ Petersen shook his head. ‘ “Can’t”, he says, “can’t”. Another thing, von Karajan. Can it be that you’re so stupid as not to know that, in wartime at sea, the use of radio by unauthorized personnel is a very serious offence.’ He turned to Carlos. ‘Is that not so, Captain Tremino?’ Petersen’s use of formal terms lent to his enquiry all the gravity of a court-martial.

‘Very much so, I’m afraid.’ Carlos wasn’t too happy to say it but he said it all the same.

‘Is this young fellow authorized personnel?’

‘No.’

‘You see how it is, von Karajan? The Captain would also be justified in locking you up. George, put the sets in our cabin. No, wait a minute. This is primarily a naval offence.’ He looked at Carlos. ‘Do you think –’

‘I have a very adequate safe in the office,’ Carlos said. ‘And I have the only key.’

‘Splendid.’ George moved off, a disconsolate Michael trailing behind him, passing by Pietro, bearing a black metal box and accompanied by two seamen. Carlos opened the medicine chest – it appeared to be immaculately equipped – and administered two injections to the hapless Cola. The box was closed and removed: so was Cola.

‘Well, now,’ Petersen said. ‘Let’s see what we have inside.’ Alex, not without considerable effort, managed to free the watertight clip – when George heaved a watertight clip home it tended to stay heaved – then levelled his machine-pistol on the door. Giacomo did the same with his pistol, clearly demonstrating that whoever’s side, if any, he was on it clearly was not that of Alessandro and his henchmen. Petersen didn’t bother about any weapon, although he had a Luger on his person: he just pushed the door open.

The guns were unnecessary. The four men were not unconscious but, on the other hand, they weren’t very conscious either, although they would be very soon. No coughing, no spluttering, no tears running down their cheeks: they were just slightly dazed, slightly woozy, slightly apathetic. Alex laid down his machine-pistol, collected the several weapons that were lying around, then searched the four men thoroughly, coming up with two more hand-guns and no fewer than four very unpleasant knives. All these he threw out into the passage-way.

‘Well.’ Carlos was almost smiling. ‘That wasn’t very clever of me, was it? I mean, if you had wished to dispose of all of them you’d have thrown Cola in here, too. I missed that.’ He sniffed the air professionally. ‘Nitrous oxide, I’d say. You know, laughing gas.’

‘Not bad for a doctor,’ Petersen said. ‘I thought that gas was confined only to dentists’ surgeries. Nitrous oxide, a refined form of. With this, you don’t come out of the anaesthetic with tears in your eyes, laughing, singing and generally making a fool of yourself. Normally, you don’t come out of it at all, by which I mean you’d just keep on sleeping until you woke up at your usual time, quite unaware that anything untoward had happened to you. But I’m told that if you’ve recently undergone some sort of traumatic experience immediately before you’ve been gassed, the tendency is to wake up directly the effects of the gas have worn off. They also say that if you had something weighing on your mind, such as a nagging conscience, the same thing happens.’

Carlos said: ‘That’s a strange sort of thing for a soldier to know about.’

‘I’m a strange sort of soldier. Alex, take up your gun while I have a look around.’

‘Look around?’ Carlos did just that. The cabin, if one could call it such, held five canvas cots and that was all: there wasn’t as much as even a cupboard for clothes. ‘There’s nothing to look around for.’

Petersen didn’t bother to reply. He ripped blankets from the cots and flung them on the deck. Nothing had lain beneath the blankets. He picked up a rucksack – there were five of them in the cabin – and unceremoniously dumped the contents on a cot. They were innocuous. Among some clothes and a rudimentary toilet kit there was a considerable amount of ammunition, some loose, some in magazines, but those, too, Petersen considered innocuous: he would have expected nothing else. The second rucksack yielded the same results. The third was padlocked. Petersen looked at Alessandro, who was sitting on the deck, his ravaged face expressionless: the effect was chilling, even a hint of balefulness would have been preferable to this emptiness but Petersen was not the man to be moved by expressions or lack of them.

‘Well, now, Alessandro, that wasn’t very clever, was it? If you want to hide a thing you do it inconspicuously: a padlock is conspicuous. The key.’

Alessandro spat on the deck and remained silent.

‘Spitting.’ Petersen shook his head. ‘Unpleasant, for second-rate villains. Alex.’

‘Search him?’

‘Don’t bother. Your knife.’

Alex’s knife, as one would have expected of Alex, was razor sharp. It sliced through the tough canvas of the rucksack as if through paper. Petersen peered at the contents.

‘Yes, indeed, twinges of conscience.’ He extracted a very small butane burner and an equally small kettle. The kettle had no top – the spout had a screwed top. Petersen shook the kettle: the glugging of water inside was unmistakable. Petersen turned to Carlos.

‘Doesn’t say much for the hospitality of the Colombo, does it, when a man has to bring along his own equipment for making tea or coffee or whatever.’

Carlos looked slightly puzzled. ‘Any passenger aboard this ship can have as much tea or coffee or any other drink that he wants.’ Then his face cleared. ‘For shore use, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Petersen tipped the remainder of the contents of the rucksack on to another cot, rummaged briefly around, then straightened. ‘Although, mind you, it’s difficult to see how we can make any of those refreshing beverages without any tea or coffee to make them. I’ve found out all I want to know even although I knew in advance anyway.’ He turned his attention to the fourth rucksack.

Carlos said: ‘If you’ve already found out what you want to know why keep on?’

‘Natural curiosity together with the fact that Alessandro, I’m afraid, is not a very trustworthy man. Who knows, this bag might contain a nest of vipers.’

There were no vipers but there were two more gas-grenades and a Walther with a screwed-on silencer.

‘And a stealthy killer to boot,’ Petersen said. ‘I’ve always wanted one of those.’ He put it in his pocket and opened up the last rucksack: this yielded only a small metal case about half the size of a shoe-box. Petersen turned to the nearest of his prisoners who happened to be Franco.

‘You know what’s inside this?’

Franco didn’t say whether he did not not.

Petersen sighed, placed the muzzle of his Luger against Franco’s knee-cap and said: ‘Captain Tremino, if I pull the trigger, will he walk again?’

‘Good God!’ Carlos was used to war but not this kind of war. ‘He might. He’ll be a cripple for life.’

Petersen took two steps back. Franco looked at Alessandro but Alessandro wasn’t looking at him. Franco looked at Petersen and the levelled Luger.

Franco said: ‘I know.’

‘Open it.’

Franco released two brass clips and swung back the lid. There was no explosion, no release of gas.

Carlos said: ‘Why didn’t you open it?’

‘Because the world is full of untrustworthy people. Lots of these boxes of tricks around. If an unauthorized opener doesn’t know where a secret switch or button is he’s going to inhale a very nasty gas. Most of the latest safes incorporate some such device.’ He took the box from Franco. The interior was shaped and lined with velvet and contained glass ampoules, two round boxes and two small hypodermic syringes. Petersen took out one of the round boxes and shook it: it rattled. Petersen handed the box to Carlos.

‘Should interest a medical man. At a guess, a variety of liquids and tablets to render the victim temporarily or permanently unconscious, by which I mean dead. Seven ampoules, you observe. One green, three blue, three pink. At a guess, the green is scopolamine, an aid to flagging memories. As for the difference in colour in the other six ampoules, there can be only one reason. Three are lethal, three non-lethal. Wouldn’t you agree, Captain?’

‘It’s possible.’ It was Carlos’ night for being unhappy and Petersen was no longer as surprised by his unhappiness as he had been earlier, nor at the obvious apprehension in which he held Alessandro. ‘There’s no means of telling one from the other, of course.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on that,’ Petersen said. He turned round as George came through the doorway. ‘All is well?’

‘A little trouble with the young lady,’ George said. ‘She put up a surprisingly spirited resistance to the confiscation of her radio.’

‘Nothing surprising about that. Fortunately, you’re bigger than she is.’

‘I’m hardly proud of that. The radios are in the captain’s cabin.’ George looked around the cabin which looked as if a small tornado had lately passed by. ‘Untidy lot, aren’t they?’

‘I helped a little.’ Petersen took the box from Carlos and handed it to George. ‘What do you make of that?’

It is difficult to conceive of a beaming, plump and cherubic face changing in an instant to one of graven stone but that was what happened to George’s.

‘Those are death capsules.’

‘I know.’

‘Alessandro’s?’

‘Yes.’

George looked at Alessandro for some seconds, nodded, and turned back to Petersen. ‘I think perhaps we should have a talk with our friend.’

‘You’re making a mistake.’ Carlos’ voice was not quite as steady as it could have been. ‘I’m a doctor. You don’t know human nature. Alessandro will never talk.’

George faced him. His expression hadn’t changed and Carlos visibly recoiled.

‘Be quiet, little man. Five minutes alone with me, ten at the most, and any man in the world will talk. Alessandro is a five minute man.’

‘It may come to that,’ Petersen said. ‘It probably will. But first things first. Apart from the capsules, we picked up one or two other interesting objects. This silenced gun, for instance.’ He showed George the Walther. ‘Two gas-grenades and a spirit burner and kettle and about two hundred rounds of ammunition. What do you think the kettle was for?’

‘One thing only. He was going to gas us, steal some real or imagined document, steam open the envelope – odd, that he should be convinced that there was an envelope around – study the contents, reseal the envelope, return it to our cabin, gas us again, wait a few seconds, replace the envelope, remove the gas-canister and leave. When we woke up in the morning we almost certainly wouldn’t be aware that anything had happened.’

‘That’s the only way it could have happened or was intended to happen. There are three questions. Why was Alessandro so interested in us? What were his future plans? And who sent him?’

‘We’ll find all that out easily enough,’ George said.

‘Of course we will.’

‘Not aboard this ship,’ Carlos said.

George studied him with mild interest. ‘Why not?’

‘There will be no torture aboard any vessel I command.’ The words sounded more resolute than the tone of the voice.

‘Carlos,’ Petersen said. ‘Don’t make things any more difficult for yourself – or us – than you can help. Nothing easier than to lock you up with this bunch of villains: you’re not the only person who can find his way to Ploe. We don’t want to nor do we intend to. We realize you find yourself in an invidious situation through no fault of your own. No torture. We promise.’

‘You’ve just said you’ll find out.’

‘Psychology.’

‘Drugs?’ Carlos was immediately suspicious. ‘Injections?’

‘Neither. Subject closed. I had another question but the answer is obvious – why did Alessandro choose to surround himself with such a bunch of incompetents? Camouflage. A dangerous man might well be tempted to surround himself with other dangerous men. Alessandro’s too smart.’ Petersen looked around. ‘No heavy metal objects and only a cat could get out of that port-hole. Carlos, would you have one of your men bring us a sledge-hammer or as near to it as you have aboard.’

The suspicion returned. ‘What do you want a sledge-hammer for?’

‘To beat out Alessandro’s brains,’ George said patiently. ‘Before we start asking questions.’

‘To close this door from the outside,’ Petersen said. ‘The clips, you understand.’

‘Ah!’ Carlos stepped into the passage-way, gave an order and returned. ‘I’ll go and have a look at the fallen hero. Not much I can do for him, I’m afraid.’

‘A favour, Carlos. When we leave, may we go up to your cabin or whatever you call the place we met you first?’

‘Certainly. May one ask why?’

‘If you’d been standing frozen in that damned passage-way for an hour and a half you’d understand why.’

‘Of course. Restoratives. Help yourselves, gentlemen. I’ll step by and let you know how Cola is.’ He paused then added drily: ‘That should give you plenty of time to prepare your intensive interrogation of me.’

He left almost immediately to be replaced by Pietro, bearing a small sledge-hammer. They closed the door and secured one of the eight water-tight clips. One was enough. George struck it with one blow of the hammer. That, too, was enough – not even a gorilla could now have opened that clip from the inside. They left the sledge-hammer in the passage-way and went directly to the engineroom, which was unmanned, as they had known it would be: all controls were operated from the wheelhouse. It took them less than a minute to find what they were looking for. They made a brief excursion to the upper deck then repaired to Carlos’ cabin.

‘A thirsty night’s work,’ George said. He was on his second, or it could have been third, glass of grappa. He looked at the von Karajans’ radios on the deck beside him. ‘These would have been safer in our cabins. Why have them here?’

‘They’d have been too safe in our cabins. Young Michael would never have dared to try to get at them there.’

‘Don’t try to tell me that he might try to get at them here.’

‘Unlikely, I admit. Michael, it is clear, is not cast in the heroic mould. He might, of course, be a consummate actor, but I don’t see him as an actor any more than a hero. However, if he’s desperate enough – and he must have been desperate to try to get off a message at the time and place he did – he might try.’

‘But the radios will be in the safe as soon as Carlos returns. And Carlos has the only key.’

‘Carlos might give him that key.’

‘Oh! So that’s the way our devious mind works. So we keep an eye on our Michael for the remainder of the night? Not that there’s all that much left of it. And if he does try to recover the radios, what does that prove except that there is a connection between him and Carlos?’

‘That’s all I want to prove. I don’t expect either would say or admit to anything. They don’t have to. At least, Michael doesn’t have to. I can have him detained in Ploe for disobedience of orders and suspicion of trying to communicate with the enemy.’

‘You really suspect him of that?’

‘Good Lord, no. But, no question, he’s been trying to communicate with someone and that someone might as well be a spy. It’ll look better on a charge sheet. All I want to see is if there’s any connection between him and Carlos.’

‘And if there is you’re prepared to clap him into durance vile?’

‘Sure.’

‘And his sister?’

‘She’s done nothing. She can come along with us, hang around Ploe or join him in, as you say, durance vile. Up to her.’

‘The very flower of chivalry.’ George shook his head and reached for the grappa. ‘So we may or may not suspect a connection between Carlos and Michael but we do suspect one between Carlos and Alessandro.’

‘I don’t. I do think that Carlos knows a great deal more about Alessandro than we do but I don’t think he knows what Alessandro is up to on this passage. A very simple point. If Carlos were privy to Alessandro’s plans then he, Alessandro, wouldn’t have bothered to bring along a kettle and burner: he’d just have gone to the galley and steamed the envelope open.’ He turned round as Carlos entered. ‘How’s Cola?’

‘He’ll be all right. Well, no danger. His shoulder is a mess. Even if it were a flat calm I wouldn’t touch it. It needs a surgeon or an osteologist and I’m neither.’ He unlocked a safe, put the radio gear inside then relocked the door. ‘Well, no hurry for you, gentlemen, but I must return to the wheelhouse.’

‘A moment, please.’

‘Yes, Peter?’ Carlos smiled. ‘The interrogation?’

‘No. A few questions. You could save us a lot of time and trouble.’

‘What? In interrogating Alessandro? You promised me no torture.’

‘I still promise. Alessandro tried to assault us and steal some papers tonight. Did you, do you know about this?’

‘No.’

‘I believe you.’ Carlos raised his eyebrows a little but said nothing. ‘You don’t seem unduly concerned that your fellow-Italian has been made a prisoner by a bunch of uncivilized Yugoslavs, do you?’

‘If you mean does he mean anything personally to me, no.’

‘But his reputation does.’

Carlos said nothing.

‘You know something about his background, his associations, the nature of his business that we don’t. Is that not so?’

‘That could be. You can’t expect me to divulge anything of that nature.’

‘Not expect. Hope.’

‘No hope. You wouldn’t break the Geneva Conventions to extract that information from me.’

Petersen rose. ‘Certainly not. Thank you for your hospitality.’

Petersen was carrying a canvas chair and the metal box of capsules when he entered the cabin in which Alessandro and his three men were imprisoned. George was carrying two lengths of heaving line and the sledge-hammer with which he had just released the outside clip. Alex was carrying only his machine-pistol. Petersen unfolded the chair, sat on it and watched with apparent interest as George hammered home a clip.

‘We’d rather not have any interruptions, you see,’ Petersen said. He looked at Franco, Sepp and Guido. ‘Get into that corner there. If anyone moves Alex will kill him. Take your jacket off, Alessandro.’

Alessandro spat on the floor.

‘Take your jacket off,’ George said pleasantly, ‘or I’ll knock you out of it.’

Alessandro, not a man of a very original turn of mind, spat again. George hit him somewhere in the region of the solar plexus, not a very hard blow, it seemed, but enough to make Alessandro double up, whooshing in agony. George removed the jacket.

‘Tie him up.’

George set about tying him up. When Alessandro had recovered a little from his initial bout of gasping, he tried to offer some resistance, but an absentminded cuff from George to the side of the jaw convinced him of the unwisdom of this. George tied him in such a fashion that both arms were lashed immovably to his sides. His knees and ankles were bound together and then, for good measure, George used the second heaving line to lash Alessandro to the cot. No chicken was ever so securely trussed, so immobile, as Alessandro was then.

George surveyed his handiwork with some satisfaction then turned to Petersen: ‘Isn’t there something in the Geneva Conventions about this?’

‘Could be, could be. Truth is, I’ve never read them.’ He opened the metal box and looked at Alessandro. ‘In the interests of science, you understand. This shouldn’t take any time at all.’ The words were light enough but Alessandro wasn’t listening to the words, he was looking at the implacable face above and not liking at all what he saw. ‘Here we have three blue ampoules and three pink. We think, and Captain Tremino who is also a doctor agrees with us, that three of these are lethal and three non-lethal. Unfortunately, we don’t know which is which and there’s only one simple, logical way to find out. I’m going to inject you with one of these. If you survive it, then we’ll know it’s a nonlethal ampoule. If you don’t, we’ll know it’s the other ones that are non-lethal.’ Petersen held up two ampoules, one blue, one pink. ‘Which would you suggest, George?’ George rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘A big responsibility. A man’s life could hang on my decision. Well, it’s not all that big a responsibility. No loss to mankind, anyway. The blue one.’

‘Blue it shall be.’ Petersen broke the ampoule into a test tube, inserted the needle of the hypodermic and began to withdraw the plunger. Alessandro stared in terrified fascination as the blue liquid seeped up into the hypodermic.

‘I’m afraid I’m not very good at this job.’ Petersen’s conversational calm was more terrifying than any sibilant threats could ever have hoped to be. ‘If you’re careless an air bubble can get in and an air bubble in the blood stream can be very unpleasant. I mean, it can kill you. However, in your case, I don’t think it’s going to make very much difference one way or another.’

Alessandro’s eyes were staring, his whitened lips drawn back in a rictus of terror. Petersen touched the inside of Alessandro’s right elbow. ‘Seems a suitable vein to me.’ He pinched the vein and advanced the syringe.

‘No! No! No!’ Alessandro’s voice was an inhuman scream torn from his throat. ‘God, no! No!’

‘You’ve nothing to worry about,’ Petersen said soothingly. ‘If it’s a non-lethal dose you’ll just slip away from us and come back in a few minutes. If it’s a lethal dose, you’ll just slip away.’ He paused. ‘Just a minute, though. He just might die in screaming agony.’ He brought out a pad of white linen cloth and handed it to George. ‘Just in case. But watch your hand, though. When a dying man’s teeth clench they stay clenched. Worse, if he draws blood you’ll get infected too.’

Petersen pinched the vein between fingers and thumb. Alessandro screamed. George applied the pad to his mouth. After a few seconds, at a nod from Petersen, he withdrew the pad. Alessandro had stopped screaming now and a weird moaning noise came from deep in his throat. He was struggling insanely against his bonds, his face was a mask of madness and a seizure, a heart attack, seemed imminent Petersen looked at George: the big man’s face was masked in sweat.

Petersen said in a quiet voice: ‘This is the killer dose, isn’t it?’ Alessandro didn’t hear him. Petersen had to repeat the questions twice before the question penetrated the fear crazed mind.

‘It’s the killer dose! It’s the killer dose.’ He repeated the words several times, the words a babble of near-incoherent terror.

‘And you die in agony?’

‘Yes, yes! Yes, yes!’ He was gasping for breath like a man in the final stages of suffocation. ‘Agony! Agony!’

‘Which means you have administered this yourself. There can be no pity, Alessandro, no mercy. Besides, you could still be telling a lie.’ He touched the tip of the needle against the skin. Alessandro screamed again and again. George applied the clamp.

‘Who sent you?’ Twice Petersen repeated the question before Alessandro rolled his eyes. George removed the pad.

‘Cipriano.’ The voice was a barely distinguishable croak. ‘Major Cipriano.’

‘That’s a lie. No major could authorize this.’ Careful not to touch the plunger Petersen inserted the tip of the needle just outside the vein. Alessandro opened his mouth to scream again but George cut him off before he could make a sound. ‘Who authorized this? The needle’s inside the vein now, Alessandro. All I have to do is press the plunger. Who authorized this?’

George removed the pad. For a moment it seemed that Alessandro had lost consciousness. Then his eyes rolled again.

‘Granelli.’ The voice was a faint whisper. ‘General Granelli.’ Granelli was the much-feared, much-hated Chief of Italian Intelligence.

‘The needle is still inside the vein, my hand is still on the plunger. Does Colonel Lunz know of this?’

‘No. I swear it. No!’

‘General von Löhr?’

‘No.’

‘Then how did Granelli know I was on board?’

‘Colonel Lunz told him.’

‘Well, well. The usual trusting faith between the loyal allies. What did you want from my cabin tonight?’

‘A paper. A message.’

‘Perhaps you’d better withdraw that syringe,’ George said. ‘I think he’s going to faint. Or die. Or something.’

‘What were you going to do with it, Alessandro?’ The tip of the needle had remained where it was.

‘Compare it with a message.’ Alessandro really did look very ill indeed. ‘My jacket.’

Petersen found the message in the inside pocket of the jacket. It was the duplicate of the one he had in his cabin. He refolded the paper and put it in his own inside pocket.

‘Odd,’ George said. ‘I do believe he’s fainted.’

‘I’ll bet his victims never had a chance to faint. I wish,’ Petersen said with genuine regret, ‘that I had pressed that plunger. No question our friend here is – was – a one-man extermination squad.’ Petersen sniffed at the test-tube, dropped it and the ampoule to the deck, crushed them both beneath his heel and then squirted the contents of the hypodermic on the deck.

‘Spirit-based,’ Petersen said. ‘It will evaporate quickly enough. Well, that’s it.’

In the passage-way, George mopped his forehead. ‘I wouldn’t care to go through that again. Neither, I’m sure, would Alessandro.’

‘Me neither,’ Petersen said. ‘How do you feel about it, Alex?’

‘I wish,’ Alex said morosely, ‘that you had pushed that plunger. I could have shot him as easy as a wink.’

‘That would have been an idea. At least he’d have gone without the agony. In any event, he’s all washed up as an operative of any kind or will be as soon as he gets back to Termoli. Or even to Ploe. Let’s fix this door.’

All eight water-tight clips were engaged and with each clip in turn, to muffle sound, Alex held in position the pad that had been so lately used for another purpose, while George hammered home the clip. When the eighth had been so dealt with, George said: ‘That should hold it for a while. Especially if we throw this hammer overboard.’

‘Let’s make sure,’ Petersen said. He left and returned within a minute with a gas cylinder, a welder’s rod and a face-mask. Petersen was, at best, but an amateur welder but what he lacked in expertise he made up in enthusiasm. The completed result would have won him no prizes for finesse but that was unimportant. What was important was that for all practical purposes that door was sealed for life.

‘What I’d like to do now,’ Petersen said, ‘is to have a word with Carlos and Michael. But first, I think, a pause for reflection.’

‘How does this sound,’ Petersen said. He was seated at Carlos’ desk, a scotch in front of him and, beside it, a message he had just drafted. ‘We’ll have Michael send it off by and by. Plain language, of course. COLONEL LUNZ. Then his code number. YOUR WOULD-BE ASSASSINS AND/ OR EXTERMINATORS A BUNCH OF INCOMPETENTS STOP ALESSANDRO AND OTHER BUNGLERS NOW CONFINED FORE CABIN COLOMBO BEHIND WELDED STEEL DOOR STOP SORRY CANNOT CONGRATULATE YOU GENERAL VON LOHR GENERAL GRANELLI MAJOR CIPRIANO ON CHOICE OF OPERATIVES REGARDS ZEPPO. “Zeppo”, you may recall, is my code name.’

George steepled his fingers. ‘Fair,’ he said judicially, ‘fair. Not entirely accurate, though. We don’t know that they are assassins and/or etc.’

‘How are they to know that we don’t know? Should cause quite a stirring in the dovecote. Not too much billing and cooing, wouldn’t you think?’

George smiled broadly. ‘Colonel Lunz and General von Löhr are going to be fearfully upset. Alessandro said they knew nothing of this set-up.’

‘How are they to know that we didn’t know,’ Petersen said reasonably. ‘They’ll be fit to be tied and ready to assume anything. I’d love to be listening in to the heated telephone calls among the named parties later on today. Nothing like spreading confusion, dissension, suspicion and mistrust among the loyal allies. Not a bad night’s work, gentlemen. I think we’re entitled to a small nightcap before going to have a word with Carlos.’

The wheelhouse was lit only by the dim light from the binnacle and it had taken Petersen and his two companions some time to adjust their eyes to the gloom. Carlos himself was at the wheel – at a discreet word from Petersen the helmsman had taken temporary leave of absence.

Petersen coughed, again discreetly, and said: ‘I am surprised, Carlos – I would almost say acutely distressed – to find a simple honest sailorman like yourself associating with such notorious and unscrupulous characters as General Granelli and Major Cipriano.’

Carlos, hands on the wheel, continued to gaze straight ahead and when he spoke his voice was surprisingly calm. ‘I have never met either. After tonight, I shall take care that I never shall. Orders are orders but I will never again carry one of Granelli’s murderous poisoners. They may threaten court-martial but threats are as far as they will go. I take it that Alessandro has talked?’

‘Yes.’

‘He is alive?’ From the tone of his voice Carlos didn’t particularly care whether he were or not.

‘Alive and well. No torture, as promised. Simple psychology.’

‘You wouldn’t and couldn’t say so unless it were true. I’ll talk to him. By and by.’ There was no hint of urgency in his voice.

‘Yes. Well. I’m afraid that to talk to him you’ll have to have yourself lowered in a bo’sun’s chair to his cabin porthole. Door’s locked, you see.’

‘What’s locked can be unlocked.’

‘Not in this case. We apologize for having taken liberties with an Italian naval vessel but we thought it prudent to weld the door to the bulkhead.’

‘Ah, so.’ For the first time Carlos looked at Petersen his expression registering, if anything, no more than a polite interest. ‘Welded? Unusual.’

‘I doubt whether you’ll find an oxyacetylene lance in Ploe.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘You might have to go all the way back to Ancona to have them freed. One would hope you are not sunk before you get there. It would be a terrible thing if Alessandro and his friends were to go to a watery grave.’

‘Terrible.’

‘We’ve taken another liberty. You did have an oxyacetylene flame. It’s at the bottom of the Adriatic.’

Although he could see no gleam of white teeth, Petersen could have sworn that he was smiling.

FOUR

As the seas had remained rough throughout the crossing and had hardly moderated when they reached what should have been the comparative shelter of the Neretva Channel between the island of Pelješac and the Yugoslav mainland, the seven passengers who were in a position to sit down to have breakfast did not in fact do so until they had actually tied up to the quay in Ploe. True to Carlos’ prediction, because they had arrived after dawn and were flying a ludicrously large Italian flag, the harbour garrison had refrained from firing at them as they made their approach towards the port that not even the most uninhibited of travel brochure writers would have described as the gem of the Adriatic.

Breakfast was unquestionably the handiwork of Giovanni, the engineer: the indescribable mush of eggs and cheese seemed to have been cooked in diesel oil, and the coffee made of it, but the bread was palatable and the sea air lent an edge to the appetite, more especially for those who had suffered during the passage.

Giacomo pushed his half-finished plate to one side. He was freshly shaven and, despite the ghastly meal, as cheerful as ever. ‘Where are Alessandro and his cut-throats? They don’t know what they’re missing.’

‘Maybe they’ve had breakfast aboard the Colombo before,’ Petersen said. ‘Or already gone ashore.’

‘Nobody’s gone ashore. I’ve been on deck.’

‘Prefer their own company, then. A secretive lot.’

Giacomo smiled. ‘You have no secrets?’

‘Having secrets and being secretive are two different things. But no, no secrets. Too much trouble trying to remember who you are supposed to be and what you are supposed to be saying. Especially, if like me, you have difficulty in remembering. Start a life of deception and you end up by being trapped in it. I believe in the simple, direct fife.’

‘I could believe that,’ Giacomo said. ‘Especially if last night’s performance was anything to go by.’

‘Last night’s performance?’ Sarina, her face still pale from what had obviously been an unpleasant night, looked at him in puzzlement. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Didn’t you hear the shot last night?’

Sarina nodded towards the other girl. ‘Lorraine and I both heard a shot.’ She smiled faintly.

‘When two people think they are dying they don’t pay much attention to a trifle like a shot. What happened?’

‘Petersen shot one of Alessandro’s men. An unfortunate lad by the name of Cola.’

Sarina looked at Petersen in astonishment. ‘Why on earth did you do that?’

‘Credit where credit is due. Alex shot him – with, of course, my full approval. Why? He was being secretive, that’s why.’

She didn’t seem to have heard. ‘Is he – is he dead?’

‘Goodness me no. Alex doesn’t kill people.’ Quite a number of ghosts would have testified to the contrary. ‘A damaged shoulder.’

‘Damaged!’ Lorraine’s dark eyes were cold, the lips compressed. ‘Do you mean shattered?’

‘Could be.’ Petersen lifted his shoulders in a very small shrug indeed. ‘I’m not a doctor.’

‘Has Carlos seen him?’ It was less a question than a demand.

Petersen looked at her thoughtfully. ‘What good would that do?’

‘Carlos, well – ’ She broke off as if in confusion.

‘Well, what? Why? What could he do?’

‘What could he – he’s the Captain, isn’t he?’

‘Both a stupid answer and a stupid question. Why should he see him? I’ve seen him and I’m certain I’ve seen many more gunshot wounds than Carlos has.’

‘You’re not a doctor?’

‘Is Carlos?’

‘Carlos? How should I know?’

‘Because you do,’ Petersen said pleasantly. ‘Every time you speak you tread deeper water. You are not a born liar, Lorraine, but you are a lousy one. When first we practise to deceive – you know. Deception again – and it’s not your forte, I’m afraid. Sure he’s a doctor. He told me. He didn’t tell you. How did you know?’

She clenched her fists and her eyes were stormy. ‘How dare you cross-examine me like this.’

‘Odd,’ Petersen said contemplatively. ‘You look even more beautiful when you’re angry. Well, some women are like that. And why are you angry? Because you’ve been caught out, that’s why.’

‘You’re smug! You’re infuriating! So calm, so reasonable, so sure, so self-satisfied, Mr Clever know-all!’

‘My, my. Am I all those things? This must be another Lorraine talking. Why have you taken such offence?’

‘But you’re not so clever. I do know he is a doctor.’ She smiled thinly. ‘If you were clever you’d remember the conversation in the café last night. You’d remember that it came up that I, too, was born in Pescara. Why should I not know him?’

‘Lorraine, Lorraine. You’re not only treading deep water, you’re in over your head. You were not born in Pescara. You weren’t born in Italy. You’re not even Italian.’

There was silence. Petersen’s quiet statement carried complete conviction. Then Sarina, as angry as Lorraine had been a few moments earlier, said: ‘Lorraine! Don’t listen to him. Don’t even talk to him. Can’t you see what he’s trying to do? To needle you? To trap you? To make you say things you don’t mean to say, just to satisfy his great big ego.’

‘I am making friends this morning,’ Petersen said sadly. ‘My great big ego notices that Lorraine hasn’t contradicted me. That’s because she knows that I know. She also knows that I know she’s a friend of Carlos. But not from Pescara. Tell me if I’m wrong, Lorraine.’

Lorraine didn’t tell him anything. She just caught her lower Lip and looked down at the table.

Sarina said: ‘I think you’re horrible.’

‘If you equate honesty with horror then, sure, I’m horrible.’

Giacomo was smiling. ‘You certainly do know a lot, don’t you, Peter?’

‘Not really. I’ve just learned to learn enough to stay alive.’

Giacomo was still smiling. ‘You’ll be telling me next that I’m not Italian.’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

‘You mean I’m not Italian?’

‘How can you be if you were born in Yugoslavia? Montenegro, to be precise.’

‘Jesus!’ Giacomo was no longer smiling, but there was neither rancour nor offence in face or tone. Then he started smiling again.

Sarina looked bleakly at Petersen then turned to Giacomo. ‘And what else did this – this –’

‘Monster?’ Petersen said helpfully.

‘This monster. Oh, do be quiet. What other outrage did this man commit last night?’

‘Well, now.’ Giacomo linked his fingers behind his head and seemed prepared to enjoy himself. ‘It all depends upon what you call an outrage. To start with, after he had Cola shot he gassed Alessandro and three other men.’

‘Gassed them?’ She stared at Giacomo in disbelief.

‘Gassed. It was their own gas he used. They deserved it.’

‘You mean he killed them? Murdered them?’

‘No, no. They recovered. I know. I was there. Simply,’ he added hastily, ‘you understand, as an observer. Then he took away their guns, and ammunition, and grenades and a few other nasty things. Then he locked them up. That’s all.’

‘That’s all.’ Sarina breathed deeply, twice. ‘When you say it quickly it sounds like nothing, doesn’t it? Why did he lock them up?’ ‘Maybe he didn’t want them to have breakfast. How should I know. Ask him.’ He looked at Petersen. ‘A pretty fair old job of locking up, if I may say so. I just happened along that way as we were coming into port.’

‘Ah!’

‘Ah, indeed.’ Giacomo looked at Sarina. ‘You didn’t smell any smoke during the night, did you?’

‘Smoke? Yes, we did.’ She shuddered, remembering. ‘We were sick enough already when we smelled it. That was really the end. Why?’

‘That was your friend Peter and his friends at work. They were welding up the door of Alessandro’s cabin.’

‘Welding up the door?’ A faint note of hysteria had crept into her voice. ‘With Alessandro and his men inside! Why on earth – ’ She was suddenly at a loss for words.

‘I guess he didn’t want them to get out.’

The two girls looked at each other in silence. There was nothing more to say. Petersen cleared his throat in a brisk fashion.

‘Well, now that’s everything satisfactorily explained.’ The two girls turned their heads in slow unison and looked at him in total incredulity. ‘The past, as they say, is prologue. We’ll be leaving in about half an hour or whatever time it takes to obtain some transport. Time to brush your teeth and pack your gear.’ He looked at Giacomo. ‘You and your friend coming with us?’

‘Lorraine, you mean?’

‘Got any other friends aboard? Don’t stall.’

‘All depends where you’re going.’

‘Same place as you. Don’t be cagey.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Up the Neretva.’

‘We’ll come.’

Petersen made to rise when Carlos entered, a piece of paper in his hand. Like Giacomo, he was shaven, brisk and apparently cheerful. He didn’t look like a man who hadn’t slept all night but then, in his business, he probably slept enough during the day.

‘Good morning. You’ve had breakfast?’

‘Our compliments to the chef. That paper for me?’

‘It is. Radio signal just come in. Code, so it doesn’t make any sense to me.’

Petersen glanced at it. ‘Doesn’t make any sense to me either. Not until I get the code book.’ He folded the paper and put it in an inside pocket.

‘Might it not be urgent?’ Carlos said.

‘It’s from Rome. I’ve invariably found that whenever Rome thinks something is urgent it’s never urgent to me.’

Lorraine said: ‘We’ve just heard that a man has been shot. Is he badly hurt?’

‘Cola?’ Carlos didn’t sound very concerned about Cola’s health. ‘He thinks he is. I don’t. Anyway, I’ve sent for an ambulance. Should have been here by now.’ He looked out of the small window. ‘No ambulance. But a couple of soldiers approaching the gangway. If, that is, you could call them soldiers. One’s about ninety, the other ten. Probably for you.’

‘We’ll see.’

Carlos had exaggerated the age disparity between the two soldiers but not by much: the younger was indeed a beardless youth, the older well stricken in years. The latter saluted as smartly as his arthritic bones would permit.

‘Captain Tremino. You have a Yugoslav army officer among your passengers?’

Carlos waved a hand. ‘Major Petersen.’

‘That’s the name.’ The ancient saluted again. ‘Commandant’s compliments, sir, and would you be so kind as to see him in his office. You and your two men.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘The Commandant does not confide in me, sir.’

‘How far is it?’

‘A few hundred metres. Five minutes.’

‘Right away.’ Petersen stood and picked up his machine-pistol. George and Alex did the same. The older soldier coughed politely.

‘The commandant doesn’t like guns in his office.’

‘No guns? There is a war in progress, this is a military post, and the commandant doesn’t like guns.’ He looked at George and Alex, then slipped off his machine-pistol. ‘He’s probably in his dotage. Let’s humour him.’

They left. Carlos watched through the window as they descended the gangway to the quayside. He sighed.

‘I can’t bear it. I can’t. As an Italian, I can’t bear it. It’s like sending a toothless old hound and a frisky puppy to round up three timber wolves. Sabre-toothed tigers, more like.’ He raised his voice. ‘Giovanni!’

Sarina said hesitatingly: ‘Are they really like that? I mean, I heard a man in Rome yesterday call them that.’

‘Ah! My old friend Colonel Lunz, no doubt.’

‘You know the Colonel?’ There was surprise in her voice. ‘I thought – well, everybody seems to know everything around here. Except me.’

‘Of course I know him.’ He turned as the lean, dyspeptic looking engineer-chef appeared in the doorway. ‘Breakfast, Giovanni, if you would.’

Giacomo said wonderingly: ‘You can really eat that stuff?’

‘Atrophied taste-buds, a zinc-lined stomach, a little imagination and you could be in Maxim’s. Sarina, one does not approach me at the quayside at Termoli, jerk a thumb towards the east and ask for a lift to Yugoslavia. Do you think you’d be aboard the Colombo if I didn’t know the Colonel? Do you have to be suspicious about everyone?’

‘I’m suspicious about our Major Petersen. I don’t trust him an inch.’

‘That’s a fine thing to say about a fellow-countryman.’ Carlos sat and buttered bread. ‘Honest and straightforward sort of fellow, one would have thought.’

‘One would have – look, we’ve got to go up into the mountains with that man!’

‘He seems to know his way around. In fact, I know he does. You should reach your destination all right.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. Whose destination – his or ours?’

Carlos looked at her in mild exasperation. ‘Do you have any option?’

‘No.’

‘Then why don’t you stop wasting your breath?’

‘Carlos! How can you talk to her like that?’ Lorraine’s voice was sharp enough to bring a slightly thoughtful look to Giacomo’s face. ‘She’s worried. Of course she’s worried. I’m worried, too. We’re both going up into the mountains with that man. You’re not.’ She was either nervous or had a low temper flash-point. ‘It’s all very well for you sitting safe and sound here aboard the Colombo.’

‘Oh, come now,’ Giacomo said easily. ‘I don’t think that’s being too fair. I’m quite sure, Carlos, that she didn’t mean what she implied.’ He looked at Lorraine in mock-reproval. ‘I’m sure Carlos would willingly leave his safe and sound ship and accompany you into the mountains. But there are two inhibiting factors. Duty and a tin leg.’

‘I am sorry.’ She was genuinely contrite and put her hand on Carlos’ shoulder to show it: Carlos, who was addressing himself to the confection that Giovanni had just brought, looked up at her and smiled amiably. ‘Giacomo’s right’ she said. ‘Of course I didn’t mean it. It’s just that – well, Sarina and I feel so helpless.’

‘Giacomo is in the same position. He doesn’t look in the slightest bit helpless to me.’

She shook his shoulder in exasperation. ‘Please. You don’t understand. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know anything. He seems to know everything.’

‘He? Peter?’

‘Who else would I be talking about?’ For so patrician-looking a lady she could be very snappish. ‘Perhaps I can shake you out of your complacency. Do you know that he knows where Giacomo and I are going? Do you know that he seems to know about my background? Do you know that he knows I’m not Italian? That he knows that you and I knew each other in the past, but not in Pescara?’

If Carlos was shaken he concealed it masterfully. ‘Peter knows a great number of things that you wouldn’t expect him to. Or so Colonel Lunz tells me. For all I know Colonel Lunz told him about you and Giacomo, although that wouldn’t be like the Colonel. He may have expected you aboard. He didn’t seem annoyed by your presence.’

‘He was annoyed enough by Alessandro’s presence.’

‘He wouldn’t know about Alessandro. Alessandro is controlled by another agency.’

She said quickly: ‘How do you know that?’

‘He – Peter – told me.’

She removed her hand and straightened. ‘So. You and Peter have your little secrets too.’ She turned to Sarina. ‘We can trust everybody, can’t we?’

Giacomo said: ‘Carlos, you’re beginning to look like a hen-pecked husband.’

‘I’m beginning to feel like one, too. My dear girl, I only learnt this during the night. What did you expect me to do? Come hammering on your cabin door at four in the morning to announce this earthshaking news to you and Sarina?’ He looked up as the dyspeptic engineer-chef appeared again in the doorway.

‘Breakfast has been served, Carlos.’

‘Thank you, Giovanni.’ He looked at Lorraine. ‘And before you start getting suspicious of Giovanni he only means that he’s given food to our friends in the fore cabin.’

‘I thought the door was locked.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ Carlos laid down knife and fork. ‘Suspicious again. The door is locked. Breakfast was lowered in a bucket to their cabin porthole.’

‘When are you going to see them?’

‘When I’m ready. When I’ve had breakfast.’ Carlos picked up his knife and fork again. ‘If I get peace to eat it, that is.’

George said: ‘Took a bit of a risk back there, didn’t you? Chanced your arm, as they say, pretending you knew all about their plans and backgrounds when you knew nothing.’

‘Credit’s all yours, George. Just based on a couple of remarks of yours about ethnic background. Couldn’t very well tell them that, though. Besides, Lorraine gave away more than I extracted. I don’t think she’d make a very good espionage agent.’

They were threading their way through cranes, trucks, both army and civilian, and scattered dock buildings, a few yards behind the two Italian soldiers. The snow had stopped now, the Rili hills were sheltering them from the north-east wind but the temperature was still below freezing point. There were few enough people around, the early hour and the cold were not such as to encourage outdoor activity. The soldiers, as Carlos had said, were either reservists or youths. The few civilians around were in the same age categories. There didn’t seem to be a young or middle-aged man in the port.

‘At least,’ George said, ‘you’ve established a kind of moral ascendancy over them. Well, over the young ladies, anyway. Giacomo doesn’t lend himself to that sort of thing. That paper Carlos gave you – a message from our Roman allies?’

‘Yes. We are requested to remain in Ploe and await further orders.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘You think sending that cablegram was wise? We might have expected this.’

‘I did. I hoped to precipitate exactly this. We know what to expect and we’ve got the initiative. If we’d got clear of the port without trouble and then were stopped by a couple of tanks up the valley road we’d have lost the initiative. Our two guards in front there – they’re not very bright, are they?’

‘You mean they didn’t search us for handguns? One’s too old to care, the other’s too inexperienced to know. Besides, look at our honest faces.’

The two guards led the way to a low wooden hut, obviously a temporary affair, up some steps and, after knocking, into a small room about as spartan and primitive as the exterior of the hut – cracked linoleum on the floor, two metal filing cabinets, a radio transceiver, a telephone, a table and some chairs. The officer behind the table rose at their entrance. He was a tall thin man, middleaged, with pebble glasses which explained clearly enough why he wasn’t at the front. He peered at them myopically over the tops of his glasses.

‘Major Petersen?’

‘Yes. Glad to meet you, Commandant.’

‘Oh. I see. I wonder.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I have just received a detention order –’

‘Ssh!’ Petersen had a finger to his lips. He lowered his voice. ‘Are we alone?’

‘We are.’

‘Quite sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘In that case put your hands up.’

Carlos pushed his chair back and rose. ‘Excuse me. I must have a look at that cabin door.’

Lorraine said: ‘You mean you haven’t seen it yet?’

‘No. If Peter says it’s welded, then it is. I should imagine one welded door looks very much like another. Curiosity, really.’

He was back in just over a minute.

‘A welded door is a welded door and the only way to open it is with an oxyacetylene flame-cutter. I’ve sent Pietro ashore to try and find one. I don’t have much hope. We had one but Peter and his friends dropped it over the side.’

Lorraine said: ‘You don’t seem worried about it.’

‘I don’t get worried about trifles.’

‘And if you can’t get them out?’

‘They’ll have to stay there till we get back to Termoli. Plenty of facilities there.’

‘You could be sunk before you get there. Have you thought of that?’

‘Yes. That would upset me.’

‘Well, that’s better. A little compassion, at least.’

‘It would upset me because I’ve really grown quite fond of this old boat. I would hate to think it would be Alessandro’s tomb.’ Carlos’ face and voice were cold. ‘Compassion? Compassion for that monster? Compassion for a murderer, a hired assassin, a poisoner who travels with hypodermics and ampoules of lethal liquids? Compassion for a psychopath who would just love to inject you or Sarina there and giggle his evil head off as you screamed your way to death? Peter spared him: I wish he’d killed him. Compassion!’ He turned and walked out.

‘And now you’ve upset him,’ Giacomo said. ‘Nag, nag, nag. It’s bloody marvellous. People – well, Peter and Carlos – tried, judged and condemned when you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I didn’t mean anything.’ She seemed bewildered.

‘It’s not what you mean. It’s what you say. You could always try watching your tongue.’ He rose and left.

Lorraine stared at the empty doorway, her face woebegone. Two large tears trickled slowly down her cheeks. Sarina put her arm around her shoulders.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It really is. They don’t understand. I do.’

Ten minutes later Petersen and his two companions arrived. Petersen was driving an elderly truck, civilian not army, with a hooped canvas roof and canvas flaps at the rear. Petersen jumped down from the driving seat and looked at the five on the deck of the Colombo – Carlos, Giacomo, Lorraine, Michael and Sarina, the last four with their rucksacks and radios beside them.

‘Well, we’re ready when you are,’ Petersen said. He seemed in excellent spirits. ‘We’ll just come aboard for our gear.’

‘No need,’ Carlos said. ‘The two Pietros are bringing that.’

‘And our guns?’

‘I wouldn’t want you to feel undressed.’ Carlos led the way down the gangway. ‘How did things go?’

‘Couldn’t have been better. Very friendly, cooperative and helpful.’ He produced two papers. ‘A military pass and a permit for me to drive this vehicle. Only as far as Metkovi but it will at least get us on the way. Both signed by Major Massamo. Would you two young ladies come up front with me? It’s much more comfortable and the cab is heated. The back is not.’

‘Thank you,’ Lorraine said. ‘I’d rather sit in the back.’

‘Oh, no, she wouldn’t,’ Sarina said. ‘I’m not putting up with this walking inquisition all by myself.’ She took Lorraine’s arm and whispered in her ear while Petersen lifted patient eyes to heaven. At first Lorraine shook her head vigorously, then reluctantly nodded.

They shook hands with Carlos, thanked him and said goodbye. All except Lorraine – she just stood there, her eyes on the dockside. Carlos looked at her in exasperation then said: ‘All right. You upset me and I, forgetting that I’m supposed to be an officer and a gentleman, upset you.’ He put his arm round her shoulders, gave her a brief hug and kissed her none too lightly on the cheek. ‘That’s by way of apology and goodbye.’

Petersen started up the rather asthmatic engine and drove off. The elderly guard at the gate ignored Petersen’s proffered papers and lackadaisically waved them on: he probably didn’t want to leave the brazier in his sentry-box. As he drove on, Petersen glanced to his right. Lorraine, at the far end of the seat was staring straight ahead: her face was masked in tears. Petersen, frowning, leaned forward and sideways but was brought up short by a far from gentle elbow in the ribs. Sarina, too, was frowning and giving an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Petersen looked at her questioningly, got a stony glance in return and sat back to concentrate on his driving.

In the back of the truck, already heavily polluted by George’s cigars, Giacomo kept glancing towards the tarpaulin-covered heap in the front. Eventually, he tapped George on the arm.

‘George?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever seen a tarpaulin moving of its own accord?’

‘Can’t say that I have.’

‘Well, I can see one now.’

George followed the direction of the pointing finger. ‘I see what you mean. My goodness, I hope they’re not suffocating under that lot.’ He pulled back the tarpaulin to reveal three figures lying on their sides, securely bound at wrists and ankles and very effectively gagged. ‘They’re not suffocating at all. Just getting restless.’

The light inside the back of the truck was dim but sufficient to let Giacomo recognize the elderly soldier and his very junior partner who had come aboard earlier in the morning to collect Petersen and the other two. ‘And who’s the other person?’

‘Major Massamo. Commandant – Deputy Commandant, I believe – of the port.’

Michael, seated with Alex on the opposite side of the truck, said: ‘Who are those people? What are they doing here? Why are they tied up?’ The questions didn’t betray any real interest: the voice was dull as befitted one still in a state of dazed incomprehension. They were the first words he had spoken that day: sea-sickness and the traumatic experience he had undergone during the night had wrought their toll to the extent that he had not even been able to face breakfast.

‘The Port Commandant and two of his soldiers,’ George said. ‘They are here because we couldn’t very well leave them behind to raise the alarm the moment we were gone, and we couldn’t very well shoot them, could we? And they’re bound and gagged because we couldn’t very well have them raising a song and dance on the way out of the harbour. You do ask stupid questions, Michael.’

‘This is the Major Massamo that Major Petersen mentioned? How did you manage to get him to sign those permits you have?’

‘You, Michael, have a suspicious mind. It doesn’t become you. He didn’t sign them. I did. There were lots of notices in his room all signed by him. You don’t have to be a skilled forger to copy a signature.’

‘What’s going to happen to them?’

‘We will dispose of them at a convenient time and place.’

‘Dispose of them?’

‘They’ll be back in Ploe, safe and unharmed, this evening. Good heavens, Michael, you don’t go around shooting your allies.’

Michael looked at three bound and gagged men. ‘Yes. I see. Allies.’

They were stopped at roadblocks at the next two villages but the questioning was very perfunctory and routine. At the third village, Bagalovi, Petersen pulled up by a temporary army filling station, descended, gave some papers to the corporal in attendance, waited until the truck had been fuelled, gave the corporal some money for which he was rewarded by a surprised salute, then drove off again.

Sarina said: ‘They don’t look like soldiers to me. They don’t behave like soldiers. They seem so – so – what is the word? – apathetic.’

‘A marked lack of enthusiasm, agreed. Their behaviour doesn’t show them up in the best of light, does it? The Italians can, in fact, be very very good soldiers, but not in this war. They have no heart for it, in spite of Mussolini’s stirring, martial speeches. The people didn’t want this war in the first place and they want it less and less as time goes by. Their front-line troops fight well enough, but not from patriotism, just professional pride. But it’s convenient for us.’

‘What were those papers you gave to that soldier?’

‘Diesel coupons. Major Massamo gave them to me.’

‘Major Massamo gave them to you. Free fuel, of course. That tip you handed to the soldier. I suppose Major Massamo gave you the money as well?’

‘Of course not. We don’t steal.’

‘Just trucks and fuel coupons. Or have you just borrowed those?’

‘Temporarily. The truck, anyway.’

‘Which, of course, you will return to Major Massamo?’

Petersen spared her a glance. ‘You’re supposed to be apprehensive, nervous, not full of nosey questions. I don’t much care to be cross-examined. We’re supposed to be on the same side, remember? As for the truck, I’m afraid the Major won’t be seeing it again.’

They drove on in silence and after another fifteen minutes ran into the town of Metkovi. Petersen parked the truck in the main street and stepped down to the roadway. Sarina said: ‘Forgotten something, haven’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Your keys. You’ve left them in the ignition.’

‘Please don’t be silly.’ Petersen crossed the street and disappeared into a store.

Lorraine spoke for the first time since leaving Ploe. ‘What did he mean by that?’

‘What he says. He knows so much that he probably knows I can’t drive anyway. Certainly not this rackety old monster. Even if I could, what place would I have to drive to?’ She touched the back of the cab. ‘Wood. I couldn’t get five yards – that fearful Alex could shoot through that.’ She looked and sounded doleful in the extreme.

Lorraine said: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see him, just once, make a mistake, do something wrong?’

‘I’d love it. But I don’t think we should want it. I have the feeling that what is good for Major Petersen is good for us. And vice versa.’

Twenty minutes elapsed before Petersen returned. For a man who might have been regarded as being on the run, he was in no hurry. He was carrying a large wicker basket, its contents covered with brown paper. This he took round to the back of the truck. Moments later he was back in the driving seat. He seemed in good humour.

‘Well, go on,’ he said. ‘Ask away.’

Sarina made a moue, but curiosity won. ‘The basket.’

‘An army marches on its stomach. Stretch a point and you might regard us as part of an army. Provisions. What else would I have been buying in a food store? Bread, cheese, hams, various meats, goulash, fruits, vegetables, tea, coffee, sugar, a spirit stove, kettle and stewpan. I promised Colonel Lunz to deliver you in fairly good condition.’

In spite of herself, she smiled faintly. ‘You sound as if you wanted to deliver us in prime condition at a slave market. Overlooked your fat friend, didn’t you?’

‘My first purchase. George had the top off a litre flask of beer within five seconds. Wine, too.’

They cleared the outskirts of the town. Sarina said: ‘I thought the permit took you only as far as Metkovi?’

‘I have two permits. I showed only one to Carlos.’

Half an hour later Petersen recrossed the Neretva and pulled up at a fairly large garage on the outskirts of apljina. Petersen went inside and returned in a few minutes.

‘Just saying “hallo” to an old friend.’

They passed through the village of Trebiat and not long afterwards Petersen pulled off the highway and turned up a secondary road, climbing fairly steeply as they went. From this they turned on to yet another road which was no more than a grass track, still climbing, until they finally rounded and came to a halt about fifty yards from a low stone building. They could approach no further because the road ended where they were.

They dismounted from the cab and went round to the back of the truck. Petersen tweaked back one of the canvas flaps. ‘Lunch,’ he said.

Perhaps a minute passed without any signs of activity. Sarina and Lorraine looked at each other in a puzzled apprehension which was in no way lessened by Petersen’s air of relaxed calm.

‘When George ties a knot,’ Petersen said cryptically, ‘it takes a fair deal of untying.’

Suddenly the flaps were parted and Major Massamo and his two soldiers, untied and ungagged, were lowered from the tailboard. Massamo and the older soldier collapsed dramatically immediately on touching the ground.

‘ “Who have we here and what have the wicked Petersen and his evil friends done to those poor men”,’ Petersen said. The young soldier had now joined the two others in a sitting position on the ground. ‘Well, the officer is Major Massamo, the Port Commandant, and the other two you have already seen. We have not broken their legs or anything like that. They’re just suffering from a temporary loss of circulation.’ The other four men in the back of the truck had now jumped to the ground. ‘Walk them around a bit, will you?’ Petersen said.

George lifted the Major, Giacomo the young soldier, and Michael the elderly soldier. But the last was not only old but fat and didn’t seem at all keen to get to his feet. Sarina gave Petersen what was probably intended to be a withering glance and moved to help her brother. Petersen looked at Lorraine and then at George.

‘What shall we do?’ His voice was low. ‘Stab her or club her?’

Not a muscle flickered in George’s face. He appeared to ponder. ‘Either. Plenty of ravines hereabouts.’

Lorraine looked at them in perplexity: Serbo-Croat, evidently, was not her language.

Petersen said: ‘I can understand now why the boyfriend is along. Bodyguard and interpeter. I know who she is.’

‘So do I.’

Lorraine could be irritated and imperious at the same time and she was good at being both.

‘What are you two talking about? It is bad manners, you know.’ In another day and age she would have stamped her foot.

‘It is our native language. No offence. My dear Lorraine, you would make life so much easier for yourself if you stopped being suspicious of everyone. And yes, we were talking about you.’

‘I thought as much.’ But her voice was a shade less assertive.

‘Just try to trust people occasionally.’ Petersen smiled to rob his words of any offence. ‘We’re as much looker-afterers as your Giacomo is. Will you please understand that we want to take care of you. If anything were to happen to you, Jamie Harrison would never forgive us.’

‘Jamie Harrison! You know Jamie Harrison.’ Her eyes had widened and a half-smile touched her lips. ‘I don’t believe it. You know Captain Harrison!’

‘ “Jamie” to you.’

‘Jamie.’ She looked at George. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Tush, tush! Suspicions again. If Peter says he knows him then I must know him. Isn’t that so?’ He smiled as colour touched her cheeks. ‘My dear, I don’t blame you. Of course I know him. Tall, very tall. Lean. Brown beard.’

‘He didn’t have a brown beard when I knew him.’

‘He has now. And a moustache. Brown hair, anyway. And, as they say in English, he’s terribly terribly English. Wears a monocle. Sports it, I should say. Claims he needs it, but he doesn’t. Just English.’

She smiled. ‘It couldn’t be anyone else.’

Major Massamo and his two men, their grimaces bespeaking their still returning circulation, were now at least partially mobile. Petersen retrieved the heavy wicker basket from the back of the truck and led the way up grass-cut steps to the stone hut and produced a key. Sarina looked at the key, then at Petersen but said nothing.

Petersen caught her glance. ‘I told you. Friends.’ The combination of the creaking hinges as the door swung open and the musty smell from within was indication enough that the place hadn’t been used for months. The single room, which made up the entire hut, was icy, bleak and sparsely furnished: a deal table, two benches, a few rickety wooden chairs, a stove and a pile of cordwood.

‘Be it ever so humble,’ Petersen said briskly. ‘First things first.’ He looked at George who had just extracted a bottle of beer from the basket. ‘You have your priorities right?’

‘I have a savage thirst,’ George said with dignity. ‘I can slake that and light a stove at the same time.’

‘You’ll look after our guests? I have a call to make.’

‘Half an hour. I hope.’

It was an hour later when Petersen returned. George was no believer in doing things by half and by that time the hut was a great deal more than pleasantly warm. The top of the stove glowed a bright cherry red and the room was stiflingly hot. Petersen pointedly left the door open and set on the table a second wicker basket he had brought with him.

‘More provisions. Sorry I’m late.’

‘We weren’t worried,’ George said. ‘Food’s ready when you are. We’ve eaten.’ He peered inside the basket Petersen had brought. ‘Took you all that time to get that?’

‘I met some friends.’

Sarina said from the doorway. ‘Where’s the truck?’

‘Round the corner. Among trees. Can’t be seen from the air.’

‘You think they’re carrying out an air search for us?’

‘No. One doesn’t take chances.’ He sat at the table and made himself a cheese and salami sandwich. ‘Anyone who needs some sleep had better have it now. I’m going to have some myself. We didn’t have any last night. Two or three hours. Besides, I prefer to travel at night.’

‘And I prefer to sleep at night,’ George said. He reached out for another bottle. ‘Let me be your trusty guard. Enjoy yourself. We did.’

‘After Giovanni’s cooking anyone would be ravenous.’

Petersen set about proving that he was no exception. After a few minutes he looked up, looked around and said to George: ‘Where have those pesky girls gone to?’

‘Just left. For a walk, I suppose.’

Petersen shook his head. ‘My fault. I didn’t tell you.’ He rose and went outside. The two girls were about forty yards away.

‘Come back!’ he called. They stopped and turned around. He waved a peremptory arm. ‘Come back.’ They looked at each other and slowly began to retrace their steps.

George was puzzled. ‘What’s wrong with a harmless walk?’

Petersen lowered his voice so that he couldn’t be heard inside the hut. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with a harmless walk.’ He told him briefly and George nodded. He stopped talking as the girls approached.

Sarina said: ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

Petersen nodded to a small outhouse some yards from the cabin. ‘If that’s what you’re looking for –’

‘No. Just a walk. What’s the harm?’

‘Get inside.’

‘If you say so.’ Sarina smiled at him sweetly. ‘Would it kill you to tell us why?’

‘Other ranks don’t talk to officers in that tone. The fact that you’re females doesn’t alter a thing.’ Sarina had stopped smiling, Petersen’s own tone was not such as to encourage levity. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because I say so. Because you can’t do anything without my permission. Because you’re babes in the woods. And because I’ll trust you when you trust me.’ The two girls looked at each other in incomprehension then went inside without a word.

‘A bit harsh, I would have thought,’ George said.

‘You and your middle-aged susceptibility. Sure, it was a bit harsh. I just wanted them to get the message that they don’t wander without permission. They could have made it damned awkward for us.’

‘I suppose so. Of course I know they could. But they don’t know they could have. For them, you’re just a big, bad, bullying wolf and a nasty one to boot. Irrational, they think you are. Orders for orders’ sake. Never mind, Peter, when they come to appreciate your sterling qualities, they may yet come to love you.’

Inside the hut, Petersen said: ‘Nobody is to go outside, please. George and Alex of course. And, yes, Giacomo.’

Giacomo, seated on a bench by the table, lifted a drowsy head from his folded arms. ‘Giacomo’s not going anywhere.’

Michael said: ‘Not me?’

‘No.’

‘Then why Giacomo?

Petersen was curt. ‘You’re not Giacomo.’

Petersen woke two hours later and shook his head to clear it. As far as he could tell only the indefatigable George, a beaker of beer to hand, and the three captives were awake. Petersen got up and shook the others.

‘We’re going shortly. Time for tea, coffee, wine or what you will and then we’re off.’ He started to feed cordwood into the stove.

Major Massamo, who had kept remarkably quiet since his gag had been taken off, said: ‘We’re going with you?’

‘You’re staying here. Bound, but not gagged – you can shout your heads off but no-one will hear you.’ He raised a hand to forestall a protest. ‘No, you won’t perish of cold during the long watches of the night. You’ll be more than warm enough until help comes. About an hour after we leave I’ll phone the nearest army post – it’s only about five kilometres from here – and tell them where you are. They should be here within fifteen minutes of getting the call.’

‘You’re very kind, I’m sure.’ Massamo smiled wanly. ‘It’s better than being shot out of hand.’

‘The Royal Yugoslav Army takes orders from no-one, and that includes Germans and Italians. When our allies prove to be obstructive we’re forced to take some action to protect ourselves. But we don’t shoot them. We’re not barbarians.’

A short time later Petersen looked at the three freshly-bound captives. ‘The stove is stoked, there’s no possibility of sparks, so you won’t burn to death. You’ll certainly be freed inside an hour and a half. Goodbye.’

None of the three prisoners said ‘goodbye’ to him.

Petersen led the way down the grassy steps and round the first corner. The truck was standing in a small clearing without a tree near it. Sarina said: ‘Ooh! A new truck.’

‘ “Ooh! A new truck”,’ Petersen mimicked. ‘Which is exactly what you would have said when you’d come back to the hut after finding it. It’s as I say, you can’t trust babes in the woods. Major Massamo would just have loved to hear you say that. He would then have known that we had ditched the old truck and would have called off the hunt for the old truck – there must be a search under way by now – and, when freed, ask for a search for another missing truck and broadcast its details. It’s most unlikely, but it could have happened and then I’d have been forced to lumber myself with Massamo again.’

Giacomo said: ‘Someone might stumble across the old one?’

‘Not unless someone takes it into his head to go diving into the freezing Neretva River. And why on earth should anyone be daft enough to do that? I drove it off only a very small cliff but the water is deep there. A local fisherman told me.’

‘Can it be seen underwater?’

‘No. At this time of year the waters of the Neretva are brown and turgid. In a few months’ time, when the snow in the mountains melts, then the river runs green and clear. Who worries about what happens in a few months’ time?’

George said: ‘What kindly soul gave you this nice new model? Not, I take it, the Italian army?’

‘Hardly. My fisherman friend, who also happens to be the proprietor of the garage I stopped at on the way up here. The army has no local repair facilities here and he does the occasional repair job for them. He had a few civilian trucks he could have offered me but we both thought this was much more suitable and official.’

‘Won’t your friend be held answerable for this?’

‘Not at all. We’ve already wrenched off the padlock at the rear of the garage just in case some soldier happens by tomorrow, which is most unlikely, as it is Sunday. Come Monday morning, as a good collaborator should, he’ll go to the Italian army authorities and report a case of breaking, entering and theft of one army motor vehicle. No blame will attach to him. The culprits are obvious. Who else could it be but us?’

Sarina said, ‘And come Monday morning? When the search starts?’

‘Come Monday morning this truck will probably have joined the old one. Whatever happens, we’ll be a long way away from it by then.’

‘You are devious.’

‘You’re being silly again. This is what you call forward planning. Get inside.’

The new truck was rather more comfortable and much quieter than the old one. As they drove off, Sarina said: ‘I’m not carping or criticizing but – well, you do have rather a cavalier attitude towards the property of your allies.’

Petersen glanced at her then returned his attention to the road. ‘Our allies.’

‘What? Oh! Yes, of course. Our allies.’

Petersen kept looking ahead. He could have become suddenly thoughtful but it was impossible to tell. Petersen’s expression did what he told it to do. He said: ‘That mountain inn yesterday. Lunchtime. Remember what George said?’

‘Remember – how could I? He says so much – all the time. Said about what?’

‘Our allies.’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Vaguely.’ He clucked his tongue in disapproval. ‘This augurs ill. A radio operator – any operative – should remember everything that is said. Our alliance is simply a temporary measure of convenience and expediency. We are fighting with the Italians – George said “Germans” but it’s the same thing – not for them. We are fighting for ourselves. When they have served their purpose it will be time for them to be gone. In the meantime, a conflict of interests has arisen between the Italians and the Germans on the one hand and us on the other. Our interests come first. Pity about the trucks but the loss of one or two isn’t going to win or lose the war.’

There was a short silence then Lorraine said: ‘Who is going to win this dreadful war, Major Petersen?’

‘We are. I’d rather you’d just call me Peter. As long as you’re other wise civil, that is.’

The two girls exchanged glances. If Petersen saw the exchange he gave no signs.

In apljina, in the deepening dusk, they were halted at an army roadblock. A young officer approached, shone his torch at a piece of paper in his hand, switched it to the truck’s plates, then played it across the windscreen. Petersen leaned out of the window.

‘Don’t shine that damned light in our eyes!’ he shouted angrily. The light beam dipped immediately.

‘Sorry, sir. Routine check. Wrong truck.’ He stepped back, saluted and waved them on. Petersen drove off.

‘I didn’t like that,’ Sarina said. ‘What happens when your luck runs out? And why did he let us through so easily?’

‘A young man with taste, sensibility and discretion,’ Petersen said. ‘Who is he, he said to himself, to interfere with an army officer carrying on a torrid affair with two beautiful young ladies. The hunt, however, is on. The paper he held had the number of the old truck. Then he checked driver and passengers, a most unusual thing. He had been warned to look out for three desperadoes. Anyone can see that I’m perfectly respectable and neither of you could be confused with a fat and thin desperado.’

‘But they must know we’re with you.’

‘No “must” about it. They will, soon enough, but not yet. The only two people who knew that you were aboard the ship were the two who are still tied up in the hut back there.’

‘Somebody may have asked questions at the Colombo.’

‘Possibly. I doubt it. Even if they had, no member of the crew would divulge anything without Carlos’ okay. He has that kind of relationship with them.’

Sarina said doubtfully: ‘Carlos might tell them.’

‘Carlos wouldn’t volunteer anything. He might have a struggle with his conscience but it would be a brief one and duty would lose out: he’s not going to sell his old girlfriend down the river, especially, as is like enough, there would be shooting.’

Lorraine leaned forward and looked at him. ‘Who’s supposed to be the girlfriend? Me?’

‘A flight of fancy. You know how I ramble on.’

Twice more they were stopped at roadblocks, both times without incident. Some minutes after the last check, Petersen pulled into a lay-by.

‘I’d like you to get in the back, now, please. It’s colder there but my fisherman friend did give me some blankets.’

Sarina said: ‘Why?’

‘Because from now on you might be recognized. I don’t think it likely but let’s cater for the unlikely. Your descriptions will be out any minute now.’

‘How can they be out until Major Massamo – ’ She broke off and looked at her watch. ‘You said you’d phone the army post at apljina in an hour. That was an hour and twenty minutes ago. Those men will freeze. Why did you lie –’

‘If you can’t think, and you obviously can’t, at least shut up. Just a little, white, necessary lie. What would have happened if I phoned now or had done in the past twenty minutes?’

‘They’d have sent out a rescue party.’

‘That all?’

‘What else?’

‘Heaven help Yugoslavia. They’d have traced the call and know roughly where I am. The call was sent on the hour by my friend. From Gruda, on the apljina – Imotski road away to the northwest of here. What more natural than we should be making for Imotski – an Italian division is headquartered there. So they’ll concentrate their search on the Imotski area. There’s an awful lot of places – buildings, store-houses, trucks – where a person can hide in a divisional headquarters, and as the Italians like the Germans about as much as they like the Yugoslavs – and the order for my detention comes from the German HQ in Rome – I don’t suppose they’ll conduct the search with any great enthusiasm. They may have doubleguessed – I don’t think they’d even bother trying – but go in the back anyway.’

Petersen descended, saw them safely hoisted aboard the rear of the track, returned to the cab and drove off.

He passed two more roadblocks – in both cases he was waved on without stopping – before arriving at the town of Mostar. He drove into the middle of the town, crossed the river, turned right by the Hotel Bristol and two minutes later pulled up and stopped the engine. He went round to the back of the track.

‘Please remain inside,’ he said. ‘I should be back in fifteen minutes.’

Giacomo said: ‘Are we permitted to know where we are?’

‘Certainly. In a public car park in Mostar.’

‘Isn’t that rather a public place?’ It was, inevitably, Sarina.

‘The more public the better. If you really want to hide, there’s no place like hiding in the open.’

George said: ‘You won’t forget to tell Josip that I’ve had nothing to eat or drink for days?’

‘I don’t have to tell him. He’s always known that.’

When Petersen returned it was in a small fourteen-seater Fiat bus which had seen its heyday in the middle twenties. The driver was a small, lean man with a swarthy complexion, a ferocious black moustache, glittering eyes and a seemingly boundless source of energy.

‘This is Josip,’ Petersen said. Josip greeted George and Alex with great enthusiasm, they were obviously acquaintances of old standing. Petersen didn’t bother to introduce him to the others. ‘Get your stuff into the bus. We’re using the bus because Josip doesn’t care too much to have an Italian army lorry parked outside the front door of his hotel.’

‘Hotel?’ Sarina said. ‘We’re going to stay in a hotel?’

‘When you travel with us,’ George said expansively, ‘you may expect nothing but the best.’

The hotel, when they arrived there, didn’t look like the best. The approach to it could not have been more uninviting. Josip parked the bus in a garage and led the way along a narrow winding lane that was not even wide enough to accommodate a car, fetching up at a heavy wooden door.

‘Back entrance,’ Petersen said. ‘Josip runs a perfectly respectable hotel but he doesn’t care to attract too much attention by bringing so many people in at once.’

They passed through a short passage into the reception area, small but bright and clean.

‘Now then.’ Josip rubbed his hands briskly, he was that kind of man. ‘If you’ll just bring your luggage, I’ll show you to your rooms. Wash and brush up, then dinner.’ He spread his hands. ‘No Ritz, but at least you won’t go to bed hungry.’

‘I can’t face the stairs, yet,’ George said. He nodded towards an archway. ‘I think I’ll just go and rest quietly in there.’

‘Barman’s off tonight, Professor. You’ll have to help yourself.’

‘I can take the rough with the smooth.’

‘This way, ladies.’

In the corridor upstairs Sarina turned to Petersen and said in a low voice: ‘Why did your friend call George “Professor”?’

‘Lots of people call him that. A nickname. You can see why. He’s always pontificating.’

Dinner was rather more than Josip had promised it would be but, then, Bosnian innkeepers are renowned for their inventiveness and resourcefulness, not to mention acquisitiveness. Considering the ravaged and war-stricken state of the country, the meal was a near miracle: Dalmatian ham, grey mullet with an excellent Pošip white wine and, astonishingly, venison accompanied by one of the renowned Neretva red wines. George, after remarking, darkly, that one never knew what the uncertain future held for them, there after remained silent for an unprecedented fifteen minutes: no mean trencherman at the best of times, his current exercise in gastronomy bordered on the awesome.

Apart from George, his two companions and their host, Marija, Josip’s wife, was also at the table. Small, dark and energetic like her husband, she was in other ways in marked contrast to him: he was intense, she was vivacious: he was taciturn, she was talkative to the point of garrulity. She looked at Michael and Sarina, seated some distance away at one small table, and at Giacomo and Lorraine, seated about the same distance away, at another, and lowered her voice.

‘Your friends are very quiet.’

George swallowed some venison. ‘It’s the food.’

‘They’re talking, all right,’ Petersen said. ‘You just can’t hear them over the champing noise George is making. But you’re right, they are talking very softly.’

Josip said: ‘Why? Why do they have to murmur or whisper? There’s nothing to be afraid of here. Nobody can hear them except us.’

‘You heard what George said. They don’t know what the future holds for them. This is a whole new experience for them – not, of course, for Giacomo, but for the other three. They’re apprehensive and from their point of view they have every right to be. For all they know, tomorrow may be their last day on earth.’

‘It could be yours, too,’ Josip said. ‘The word in the marketplace – we hoteliers spend a lot of time in the market-place – is that groups of Partisans have by-passed the Italian garrison at Prozor, moved down the Rama valley and are in the hills overlooking the road between here and Jablanica. They may even be astride the road: they’re crazy enough for anything. What are your plans for tomorrow? If, I may add hastily, one may ask.’

‘Why ever not? We’ll have to take to the mountains by and by of course, but those three young people don’t look much like mountain goats to me so we’ll stick as long as possible to the truck and the road. The road to Jablanica, that is.’

‘And if you run into the Partisans?’

‘Tomorrow can look after itself.’

At the end of the meal, Giacomo and Lorraine rose and crossed to the main table. Lorraine said: ‘I tried to have a walk, stretch my legs, this afternoon, but you stopped me. I’d like to have one now. Do you mind?’

‘Yes. I mean, I do mind. At the moment, this is very much a frontier town. You’re young, beautiful and the streets, as the saying goes, are full of licentious soldiery. Even if a patrol stops you, you don’t speak a word of the language. Besides, it’s bitterly cold.’

‘Since when did you begin to worry about my health?’ She was back to being her imperious self again. ‘Giacomo will look after me. What you mean is, you still don’t trust me.’

‘Well, yes, there’s that to it also.’

‘What do you expect me to do? Run away? Report you to – to the authorities? What authorities? There is nothing I can do.’

‘I know that. I’m concerned solely with your own welfare.’

Beautiful girls are not much given to snorting in disbelief but she came close. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll come along with you.’

‘No, thank you. I don’t want you.’

‘You see,’ George said, ‘she doesn’t even like you.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘But everyone likes George. Big, cheerful, likeable George. I’ll come along with you.’

‘I don’t want you either.’

Petersen coughed. Josip said: ‘The Major is right, you know, young lady. This is a dangerous town after dark. Your Giacomo looks perfectly capable of protecting anyone, but there are streets in this town where even the army police patrols won’t venture. I know where it’s safe to go and where it isn’t.’

She smiled. ‘You are very kind.’

Sarina said: ‘Mind if we come, too?’

‘Of course not.’

All five, Michael included, buttoned up in their heavy coats and went out, leaving Petersen and his two companions behind. George shrugged his shoulders and sighed.

‘To think I used to be the most popular person in Yugoslavia. That was before I met you, of course. Shall we retire?’

‘So soon?’

‘Through the archway, I meant.’ George led the way and ensconced himself behind the bar counter. ‘Strange young lady. Lorraine, that is. I muse aloud. Why did she sally forth into the dark and dangerous night. She hardly strikes one as a fresh-air fiend or fitness fanatic.’

‘Neither does Sarina. Two strange young ladies.’

George reached for a bottle of red wine. ‘Let us concede that the vagaries of womankind, especially young womankind, are beyond us and concentrate more profitably on this vintage ’38.’

Alex said suddenly: ‘I don’t think they’re all that strange.’

Petersen and George gave him their attention. Alex spoke so seldom, far less ventured an opinion, that he was invariably listened to when he did speak.

George said: ‘Can it be, Alex, that you have observed something that has escaped our attention?’

‘Yes. You see, I don’t talk as much as you do.’ The words sounded offensive but weren’t meant to be, they were simply by way of explanation. ‘When you’re talking I look and listen and learn, while you’re listening to yourselves talking. The two young ladies seem to have become very friendly. I think they’ve become too friendly too quickly. Maybe they really like each other, I don’t know. What I do know is that they don’t trust each other. I am sure that Lorraine went out to learn something. I don’t know what. I think Sarina thought the same thing and wanted to find out, so she’s gone to watch.’

George nodded a judicious head. ‘A closely reasoned argument. What do you think they both went out to learn?’

‘How should I know?’ Alex sounded mildly irritable. ‘I just watch. You’re the ones who are supposed to think.’

The two girls and their escorts were back even before the three men had finished their bottle of wine, which meant that they had returned in very short order indeed. The two girls and Michael were already slightly bluish with cold and Lorraine’s teeth were positively chattering.

‘Pleasant stroll?’ Petersen said politely.

‘Very pleasant,’ Lorraine said. Clearly, she hadn’t forgiven him for whatever sin he was supposed to have committed. ‘I’ve just come to say goodnight. What time do we leave in the morning?’

‘Six o’clock.’

‘Six o’clock!’

‘If that’s too late –’

She ignored him and turned to Sarina. ‘Coming?’

‘In a moment.’

Lorraine left and George said, ‘For a nightcap, Sarina, I can recommend this Maraschino from Zadar. After a lifetime –’

She ignored him as Lorraine had ignored Petersen, to whom she now turned and said: ‘You lied to me.’

‘Dear me. What a thing to say.’

‘George here. His “nickname”. The Professor. Because, you said, he was loquacious –’

‘I did not. “Pontificated” was the word I used.’

‘Don’t quibble! Nickname! Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Professor of Occidental Languages at Belgrade University!’

‘My word!’ Petersen said admiringly. ‘You are clever. How did you find out?’

She smiled. ‘I just asked Josip.’

‘Well done for you. Must have come as a shock. I mean, you had him down as the janitor, didn’t you?’

She stopped smiling and a faint colour touched her cheeks. ‘I did not. And why did you lie?’

‘No lie, really. It’s quite unimportant. It’s just that George doesn’t like to boast of his modest academic qualifications. He’s never reached the dizzying heights of a degree in economics and politics in Cairo University.’

She coloured again, more deeply, then smiled, a faint smile, but a smile. ‘I didn’t even qualify. I didn’t deserve that.’

‘That’s true. Sorry.’

She turned to George. ‘But what are you doing – I mean, a common soldier –’ Behind the bar, George drew himself up with dignity. ‘I’m a very uncommon soldier.’

‘Yes. But I mean – a dean, a professor –’ George shook his head sadly. ‘Hurling pluperfect subjunctives at the enemy trenches never won a battle yet.’

Sarina stared at him then turned to Petersen. ‘What on earth does he mean?’

‘He’s back in the groves of academe.’

‘Wherever we’re going,’ she said with conviction, ‘I don’t think we’re going to get there. You’re mad. Both of you. Quite mad.’

FIVE

It was three-thirty in the morning when Petersen woke. His watch said so. He should not have been able to see his watch because he had switched the light off before going to sleep. It was no longer off but it wasn’t the light that had wakened him, it was something cold and hard pressed against his right cheek-bone. Careful not to move his head. Petersen swivelled his eyes to take in the man who held the gun and was sitting on a chair beside the bed. Dressed in a wellcut grey suit, he was in his early thirties, had a neatly trimmed black moustache of the type made famous by Ronald Colman before the war, a smooth clear complexion, an engaging smile and very pale blue, very cold eyes. Petersen reached across a slow hand and gently deflected the barrel of the pistol.

‘You need to point that thing at my head? With three of your fellow-thugs armed to the teeth?’

There were indeed three other men in the bedroom. Unlike their leader they were a scruffy and villainous looking lot, dressed in vaguely paramilitary uniforms but their appearance counted little against the fact that each carried a machine-pistol.

‘Fellow thugs?’ The man on the chair looked pained. ‘That makes me a thug too?’

‘Only thugs hold pistols against the heads of sleeping men.’

‘Oh, come now, Major Petersen. You have the reputation of being a highly dangerous and very violent man. How are we to know that you are not holding a loaded pistol in your hand under that blanket?’ Petersen slowly withdrew his right hand from under the blanket and turned up his empty palm. ‘It’s under my pillow.’

‘Ah, so.’ The man withdrew the gun. ‘One respects a professional.’

‘How did you get in? My door was locked.’

‘Signor Pijade was most cooperative.’ “Pijade” was Josip’s surname.

‘Was he now?’

‘You can’t trust anyone these days.’

‘I’ve found that out, too.’

‘I begin to believe what people say of you. You’re not worried, are you? You’re not even concerned about who I might be.’

‘Why should I be. You’re no friend. That’s all that matters to me.’

‘I may be no friend. Or I may. I don’t honestly know yet. I’m Major Cipriano. You may have heard of me.’

‘I have. Yesterday, for the first time. I feel sorry for you, Major, I really do, but I wish I were elsewhere. I’m one of those sensitive souls who feel uncomfortable in hospital wards. In the presence of the sick, I mean.’

‘Sick?’ Cipriano looked mildly astonished but the smile remained. ‘Me? I’m as fit as a fiddle.’

‘Physically, no doubt. Otherwise a cracked fiddle and one sadly out of tune. Anyone who works as a hatchet-man for that evil and sadistic bastard, General Granelli, has to be sick in the mind: and anyone who employs as his hatchet-man the psychopathic poisoner, Alessandro, has to be himself a sadist, a candidate for a maximum security lunatic asylum.’

‘Ah, so! Alessandro.’ Cipriano was either not a man easily to take offence or, if he did, too clever to show it. ‘He gave a message for you.’

‘You surprise me. I thought your poisoner – and poisonous – friend was in no position to give messages. You have seen him, then?’

‘Unfortunately, no. He’s still welded up in the fore cabin of the Colombo. One has to admit, Major Petersen, that you are not a man to do things by half-measures. But I spoke to him. He says that when he meets you again you’ll take a long time to die.’

‘He won’t. I’ll gun him down as I would a mad dog with rabies. I don’t want to talk any more about your psycho friend. What do you want of me?’

‘I’m not quite sure yet. Tell me, why do you keep referring to Alessandro as a poisoner?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I might. If I knew what you were talking about.’

‘You know that he carried knockout gas-grenades with him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You knew that he carried a nice little surgical kit with him along with hypodermics and liquids in capsules that caused unconsciousness – some form of scopolamine, I believe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know that he also carried capsules which, when injected, led to the victims dying in screaming agony?’

Cipriano had stopped smiling. ‘That’s a lie.’

‘May I get out of bed?’ Cipriano nodded. Petersen crossed to his rucksack, extracted the metal box he had taken from Alessandro, handed it to Cipriano and said: ‘Take that back to Rome or wherever and have the contents of those capsules analyzed. I would not drink or self-inject any of them if I were you. I threatened to inject your friend with the contents of the missing capsule and he fainted in terror.’

‘I know nothing about this.’

‘That I believe. Where would Alessandro get hold of such lethal poison?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘That I don’t believe. Well, what do you want of me?’

‘Just come along with us.’ Cipriano led the way to the diningroom where Petersen’s six companions were already assembled under the watchful eye of a young Italian officer and four armed soldiers. Cipriano said: ‘Remain here. I know you’re too professional to try anything foolish. We won’t be long.’

George, inevitably, was relaxed in a carver chair, a tankard of beer in his hand. Alex was looking quietly murderous. Giacomo just looked thoughtful. Sarina was tight-lipped and pale while the mercurial Lorraine, oddly enough, was expressionless.

Petersen shook his head. ‘Well, well, we’re a fine lot. Major Cipriano has just said I was a professional. If –’

‘That was Major Cipriano?’ George said.

‘That’s what he says.’

‘A fast mover. He doesn’t look like a Major Cipriano.’

‘He doesn’t talk like one either. As I was about to say, George, if I were a professional, I’d have posted a guard, a patrolling sentry. Mea culpa. I thought we were safe here.’

‘Safe!’ Sarina spoke with a wealth of contempt.

‘Well, no harm done, let’s hope.’

‘No harm done!’

Petersen spread his hands. ‘There are always compensations. You – and Lorraine – wanted to see me in, what shall we say, a disadvantaged position. Well, you see it now. How do you like it?’ There was no reply. ‘Two things. I’m surprised they got you, Alex. You can hear a leaf fall.’

‘They had a gun at Sarina’s head.’

‘Ah! And where is our good friend Josip?’

‘Your good friend,’ Sarina said acidly, ‘will be helping Cipriano and his men to find whatever they’re looking for.’

‘My goodness! What a low opinion – what an immediate low opinion – of my friend.’

‘Who tipped them off that we were here? Who let them in? Who gave them the keys – or the master key – to the bedrooms?’

‘One of these days,’ Petersen said mildly, ‘someone’s going to clobber you, young lady. You’ve a waspish tongue and you’re far too ready to judge and condemn. If that soldier with the gun at your head had taken the second necessary to pull the trigger he’d be dead now. So, of course, would you. But Alex didn’t want you to die. Nobody let them in – Josip never locks his front door. Once in, getting the keys would be no trouble. I don’t know who tipped them off. I’ll find out. It could even have been you.’

‘Me!’ She stared at him, at first stunned and then furious.

‘No-one’s above suspicion. You’ve said more than once that I don’t trust you. If you said that, you must have had reasons to think that I have reservations about you. What reasons?’

‘You must be out of your mind.’ She wasn’t mad any more, just bewildered.

‘You’ve turned pale very suddenly. Why have you turned pale?’

‘Leave my sister alone!’ Michael’s voice was an angry shout. ‘She’s done nothing! Leave her alone. Sarina? A criminal? A traitor? She’s right, you must be out of your mind. Stop tormenting her. Who the hell do you think you are?’

‘An army officer who wouldn’t hesitate to instruct a very raw enlisted man – boy, I should say – in the elements of discipline. Mind you, a show of spirit at last, but I’m afraid it’s mistimed and misplaced. Meantime, you should rest content with the knowledge that you are not under suspicion.’

‘I’m supposed to be pleased with that while Sarina is under suspicion?’

‘I don’t care whether you’re pleased or not.’

‘Look here, Petersen –’

‘Petersen? Who’s Petersen? “Major Petersen” to a ranker. Or “Sir”.’ Michael made no reply. ‘You’re not under suspicion because after you’d transmitted this message to Rome yesterday morning I rendered your radio inoperable. You could have used your sister’s tonight, but you wouldn’t have had the guts, not after being caught out the previous night. I know you’re not very bright but the inference is obvious. Alex, a word with you.’

As brother and sister looked at each other in mingled apprehension, incomprehension and dismay, Alex crossed the room and listened as Petersen began talking to him.

‘Stop!’ The young Italian officer’s voice was sharp.

Petersen looked at him patiently. ‘Stop what?’

‘Stop talking.’

‘Why ever should I? You just let me talk to that young man and girl.’

‘I understood that. I don’t understand Serbo-Croat.’

‘Your lack of education doesn’t concern me. To compound your ignorance, we’re not talking Serbo-Croat but a Slavonic dialect understood only by this soldier here, the fat gentleman with the beer glass and myself. You think, perhaps, that we are planning a suicidal attack on you, three unarmed men against four machineguns and a pistol? You can’t possibly be so crazy as to think we’re so crazy. What rank are you?’

‘Lieutenant.’ He was a very stiff, very correct and very young, lieutenant.

‘Lieutenants don’t give orders to majors.’

‘You’re my prisoner.’

‘I have yet to be informed of that. Even if I were, which legally I’m not, I’d be Major Cipriano’s prisoner and he would regard me as a very important one and one not to be molested or harmed in any way, so don’t bother looking at your men. If any of them comes over to try to stop or separate us I’ll take his gun from him and break it over his head and then you might shoot me. You’d be courtmartialled, cashiered and then, by the stipulations of the Geneva Conventions, face a firing squad. But you know that, of course.’ Petersen hoped the lieutenant didn’t, for he himself had no idea, but apparently the young man didn’t either for he made no further attempt to pursue the matter.

Petersen talked to Alex for no more than a minute, went behind the bar, picked up a wine bottle and glass – this without even a raised eyebrow from the young lieutenant who might have been wondering how many men it took to constitute a firing squad and sat down at the table with George. They talked in low and seemingly earnest tones and were still talking when Cipriano returned with his three soldiers, Josip and his wife, Marija. Cipriano not only looked less buoyant and confident than he had done when he had left the dining-room: he was still smiling, because he was an habitual smiler, but the smile was of such a diminished quality that he looked positively morose.

‘I am glad to see that you are enjoying yourselves.’

‘We might be just a little justifiably annoyed at having our sleep disturbed.’ Petersen replenished his glass. ‘But we are of a forgiving nature, happy and relaxed in our carefree conscience. You will join us in a nightcap? I’m sure it would help you to frame a more graceful apology.’

‘No nightcap, thank you, but you are correct in saying that an apology is in order. I have just made a telephone call.’

‘To the wise men of your intelligence HQ, of course.’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘Where else does all the misinformation come from? We, as you know, are in the same line of business and it happens to us all the time.’

‘I am genuinely sorry to have inconvenienced you all over a stupid false alarm.’

‘What false alarm?’

‘Papers missing from our Rome HQ. Some misguided genius on General Granelli’s staff – I don’t know, yet, who it was but I’ll find out before the day is over – decided that they had fallen, if that’s the word, into the hands of either yourself or one of your group. Very important papers, very top-secret.’

‘All missing papers are top-secret. I have some papers with me myself, but I assure you they’re not stolen and how top-secret or important they may be I don’t know.’

‘I know about those papers.’ Cipriano waved a dismissive hand and smiled. ‘As you’re probably well aware. Those other, and much more important papers have never left their safe in Rome. A topsecret filing clerk careless about filing top-secret documents.’

‘May one ask what they are about?’

‘You may and that’s all the answer you’d get. I don’t know and even if I did I couldn’t tell you. I wish you an undisturbed night – or what’s left of it. Again, my apologies. Goodbye, Major Petersen.’

‘Goodbye.’ Petersen took the extended hand. ‘My regards to Colonel Lunz.’

‘I will.’ Cipriano frowned. ‘I hardly know the man.’

‘In that case, my regards to Alessandro.’

‘I’ll give him more than that.’ He turned to Josip and took his hand. ‘Many thanks, Signor Pijade. You have been most helpful. We will not forget.’

It was Sarina, nothing if not resilient, who broke the conversational hiatus that followed the departure of Cipriano and his men. ‘“Thank you, Signor Pijade. Most helpful, Signor Pijade. We won’t forget, Signor Pijade.”’

Josip looked at her in puzzlement then turned to Petersen. ‘Is the young lady talking to me?’

‘I think she’s addressing the company.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t think she does either. The young lady, as you call her, is under the ridiculous impression that you notified Major Cipriano – one assumes she thinks it was by telephone – of our presence and then took him and his men on a guided tour of the premises, distributing keys where necessary. She may, of course, be trying to divert from herself the suspicion that she is the guilty party.’

Sarina made to speak but an outraged Marija gave her no chance. Three quick steps and she was before the suddenly apprehensive Sarina. The ivory-knuckled fists and arms held rigidly by her sides spoke eloquently of her outrage: her eyes were stormy and her clenched teeth remained that way even when she spoke.

‘Such a beautiful face, my dear.’ It is difficult not to hiss when one’s teeth are clenched. ‘Such a delicate complexion. And I have long nails. Should I tear your face because you insult the honour of my husband? Or would a few slaps – hard slaps – be enough for a creature like you?’ In the technique of expressing contempt, Marija Pijade had nothing to learn from anyone.

Sarina said nothing. The apprehensive expression on her face had given way to one of near shock.

‘A soldier – not the Major, he’s a civilized man and was not there – pointed a gun at me. Like this.’ Dramatically, she swung up her right arm and pressed her forefinger against her neck. ‘Not pointed. Pushed. Pushed hard. Three seconds, he said, for my husband to hand over the master key. I am sure he would not have fired but Josip handed over the key at once. Do you blame him for that?’

Slowly, dumbly, Sarina shook her head.

‘But do you still think Josip betrayed you?’

‘No. I don’t know what to think, but I don’t think that any more. I just don’t know what to think. I’m sorry, Marija, I’m truly sorry.’ She smiled wanly. ‘A soldier threatened me with a gun, too. He pressed it in my ear. Maybe that doesn’t make for very clear thinking.’

The cold fury in Marija’s face gave way to speculation then softened into concern. She took an impulsive step forward, put her arms round the girl and began to stroke her hair.

‘I don’t think any of us is thinking very clearly. George!’ This over Sarina’s shoulder. ‘What are you thinking of?’

‘ljivovica,’ George said decisively. ‘The universal specific. If you read the label on a Pellegrino bottle –’

‘George!’

‘Right away.’

Josip rubbed a blue and unshaven chin. ‘If Sarina and I are not the culprits, then we’re no nearer to an answer. Who did talk? Have you no suspicions, Peter?’

‘None. I don’t need any. I know who it is.’

‘You know – ’ Josip turned to the bar, picked up a bottle of ljivovica from a tray George was preparing, filled a small glass, drained it in two gulps and when he’d finished coughing and spluttering said: ‘Who?’ ‘I’m not prepared to say at the moment. That’s not because I’m intending to prolong anxiety, increase tension, give the villain enough rope to hang him – or herself – or anything stupid like that. It’s because I can’t prove it – yet. I’m not even sure I want to prove it. Perhaps the person I have in mind was misguided, or the action may have been unintentional, accidental, inadvertent or even done from the best motives – from, of course, the viewpoint of the person concerned. Unlike Sarina here, I don’t go in much for premature judgments and condemnation.’

‘Peter!’ Marija’s voice held a warning, almost peremptory, note. She still had an arm around Sarina’s shoulders.

‘Sorry, Marija. Sorry, Sarina. Just my natural nastiness surfacing. By the way, if you people want to go to bed, well of course, go. But no hurry now. Change of plan. We won’t be leaving until the late forenoon tomorrow. Certainly not before. Giacomo, could I have a quiet word with you?’

‘Have I any option?’

‘Certainly. You can always say “no”.’

Giacomo smiled his broad smile, stood up and put his hand in his pocket. ‘Josip, if I could buy a bottle of that excellent red wine –’

Josip was mildly affronted. ‘Peter Petersen’s friends pay for nothing in my hotel.’

‘Maybe I’m not his friend. I mean, maybe he’s not my friend.’ Giacomo seemed to find the thought highly amusing. ‘Thanks all the same.’ He picked up a bottle and two glasses from the bar, led the way to a distant table, poured wine and said admiringly: ‘That Marija. Quite a girl. Not quite a tartar but no shrinking violet. Changes her mind a bit quick, doesn’t she?’

‘Mercurial, you’d say?’

‘That’s the word. Seems to know you pretty well. Has she known you long?’

‘She does and she has.’ Petersen spoke with some feeling. ‘Twenty-six years, three months and some days. The day she was born. My cousin. Why do you ask?’

‘Curiosity. I was beginning to wonder if you knew everyone in the valley. Well, on with the inquisition. Incidentally, I would like to say that I’m honoured to be the prime suspect and/or the chosen villain.’

‘You’re neither a suspect nor villain. Wrong casting. If you wanted, say, to dispose of George or Alex or myself, or get your hands on something you thought we had, you’d use a heavy instrument. Surreptitious phone calls or secret tip-offs are not in your nature. Deviousness is not part of your stock-in-trade.’

‘Well, thank you. It’s a disappointment, though. I take it you want to ask some questions?

‘If I may.’

‘About myself, of course. Fire away. No, don’t fire away. Let me give you my curriculum vitae. Behind me lies a blameless existence. My life is an open book.

‘You’re right, I’m Montenegrin. Vladimir was my given name. I prefer Giacomo. In England they called me “Johnny”. I still prefer Giacomo.’

‘You lived in England?’

‘I am English. Sounds confusing, but not really. Before the war I was a second officer in the Merchant Navy – the Yugoslav one, I mean. I met a beautiful Canadian girl in Southampton so I left the ship.’ He said it as if it had been the most natural thing in the world to do and Petersen could readily understand that for him it had been. ‘There was a little difficulty at first at staying on in England but I’d found an excellent and very understanding boss who was working on a diving contract for the Government and who was one experienced diver short. I’d qualified as a diver before joining the merchant marine. By and by I got married –’

‘Same girl?’

‘Same girl. I became naturalized in August 1939 and joined the services on the outbreak of war the following month. Because I had a master’s ocean-going ticket and was a qualified diver who could have been handy at things like sticking limpet mines on to warships in enemy harbours and was a natural for the Navy, it was inevitable, I suppose, that they put me into the infantry. I went to Europe, came back by Dunkirk, then went out to the Middle East.’

‘And you’ve been in those parts ever since. No home leave?’

‘No home leave.’

‘So you haven’t seen your wife in two years. Family?’

‘Twin girls. One still-born. The other died at six months. Polio.’ Giacomo’s tone was matter-of-fact, almost casual. ‘In the early summer of ’41, my wife was killed in a Luftwaffe attack on Portsmouth.’

Petersen nodded and said nothing. There was nothing to say. One wondered why a man like Giacomo smiled so much but one did not wonder long.

‘I was with the Eighth Army. Long-Range Desert Group. Then some genius finally discovered that I was really a sailor and not a soldier and I joined Jellicoe’s Special Boat Service in the Aegean.’ Both those hazardous services called for volunteers, Petersen knew: it was pointless to ask Giacomo why he had volunteered. ‘Then the same genius found out some more about me, that I was a Yugoslav, and I was called back to Cairo to escort Lorraine to her destination.’

‘And what happens when you’ve delivered her to her destination?’

‘When you’ve delivered her, you mean. Responsibility over, from here on I just sit back and relax and go along for the ride. They thought I was the best man for the job but they weren’t to know I was going to have the good luck to meet up with you.’ Giacomo poured some more wine, leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly. ‘I haven’t a single cousin in the whole of Bosnia.’

‘If it’s luck, I hope it holds. My question, Giacomo.’

‘Of course. Afterwards. I’d happily turn back now, conscience clear, but I’ve got to get a receipt or something from this fellow Mihajlovi. I think they want me to take up diving again. Not hard to guess why – must have been the same genius who found out that I was an ex-sailor. As Michael said in that mountain inn, it’s a funny old world. I spent over three years fighting the Germans and in a couple of weeks I’ll be doing the same thing. This interlude, where I’m more or less fighting with the Germans – although I don’t expect I’ll ever see a German in Yugoslavia – I don’t like one little bit.’

‘You heard what George said to Michael. No point in rehashing it. A very brief interlude, Giacomo. You bid your charge a tearful farewell, trying not to smile, then heigh-ho for the Aegean.’

‘Trying not to smile?’ He considered the contents of his glass. ‘Well, perhaps. Yes and no. If this is a funny old world, she’s a funny young girl in a funny old war. Mercurial – like your cousin. Temperamental. Patrician-looking young lady but sadly deficient in patrician sang-froid. Cool, aloof, even remote at one moment, she can be friendly, even affectionate, the next.’

‘The affectionate bit has escaped me so far.’

‘A certain lack of rapport between you two has not escaped me either. She can be sweet and bad-tempered at the same time which is no small achievement. Most un-English. I suppose you know she’s English. You seem to know quite a bit about her.’

‘I know she’s English because George told me so. He also told me you were from Montenegro.’

‘Ah! Our professor of languages.’

‘Remarkable linguist with a remarkable ear. He could probably give you your home address.’

‘She tells me you know this Captain Harrison she’s going to work for?’

‘I know him well.’

‘So does she. Used to work for him before. Peacetime. Rome. He was the manager of the Italian branch of an English ball-bearing company. She was his secretary. That’s where she learned to speak Italian. She seems to like him a lot.’

‘She seems to like men a lot. Period. You haven’t fallen into her clutches yet, Giacomo?’

‘No.’ Again the broad smile. ‘But I’m working on it.’

‘Well, thanks.’ Petersen stood. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’ He crossed to where Sarina was sitting. ‘I’d like to talk to you. Alone. I know that sounds ominous, but it isn’t, really.’

‘What about?’

‘That’s a silly question. If I want to talk to you privately I don’t talk publicly.’

She rose and Michael did the same. He said: ‘You’re not going to talk to her without me.’

George sighed, rose wearily to his feet, crossed to where Michael was standing, put his two ham-like hands on the young man’s shoulders and sat him in his chair as easily as he would have done a little child.

‘Michael, you’re only a private soldier. If you were in the American army you’d be a private soldier, second class. I’m a Regimental Sergeant-Major. Temporary, mind you, but effective. I don’t see why the Major should have to be bothered with you. I don’t see why I should have to be bothered with you. Why should you bother us? You’re not a boy any more.’ He reached behind him, picked up a glass of Maraschino from the table and handed it to Michael, who took it sulkily but did not drink. ‘If Sarina’s kidnapped, we’ll all know who did it.’

Petersen took the girl up to her room. He left the door ajar, looked around but not with the air of one expecting to find anything and sniffed the air. Sarina looked at him coldly and spoke the same way.

‘What are you looking for? What are you sniffing for? Everything you do, everything you say is unpleasant, nasty, overbearing, superior, humiliating –’

‘Oh, come on. I’m your guardian angel. You don’t talk to your guardian angel that way.’

‘Guardian angel! You also tell lies. You were telling lies in the dining-room. You still think I sent a radio message.’

‘I don’t and didn’t. You’re far too nice for anything underhand like that.’ She looked at him warily then almost in startlement as he put his hands lightly on her shoulders, but did not try to flinch away. ‘You’re quick, you’re intelligent-unlike your brother but that’s not his fault – and I’ve no doubt you can or could be devious because your face doesn’t show much. Except for the one thing that would disqualify you from espionage. You’re too transparently honest.’

‘That’s a kind of left-handed compliment,’ she said doubtfully.

‘Left or right, it’s true.’ He dropped to his knees, felt under the foot of the rather ill-fitting door, stood, extracted the key from the inside of the lock and examined it. ‘You locked your door last night?’

‘Of course.’

‘What did you do with the key?’

‘I left it in the lock. Half-turned. That way a person with a duplicate key or a master can’t push your key through or on to a paper that’s been pushed under the door. They taught us that in Cairo.’

‘Spare me. Your instructor was probably a ten-year-old schoolboy. See those two tiny bright indentations on either side of the stem of the key?’ She nodded. ‘Made by an instrument much prized by the better-class burglar who’s too sophisticated to batter doors open with a sledge-hammer. A pair of very slender pincers with tips of either Carborundum or titanium stainless steel. Turn any key in a lock. You had a visitor during the night.’

‘Somebody took my radio?’

‘Somebody sure enough used it. Could have been here.’

‘That’s impossible. Certainly, I was tired last night but I’m not a heavy sleeper.’

‘Maybe you were last night. How did you feel when you woke up this morning – when you were woken, I mean?’

‘Well.’ She hesitated. ‘I felt a bit sick, really. But I thought I was perhaps over-tired and hadn’t had enough sleep or I was scared – I’m not a great big coward but I’m not all that brave either and it was the first time anyone had ever pointed a gun at me – or perhaps I just wasn’t used to the strange food.’

‘You felt dopey, in other words.’

‘Yes.’

‘You probably were doped. I don’t suggest flannel-foot crept stealthily in and applied a chloroform pad or anything of the kind, for the smell of that lingers for hours. Some gas that was injected through the keyhole from a nozzled canister that may well have come from the chemist’s joker shop where Alessandro buys his toys. In any event, I can promise you that you won’t be disturbed again tonight. And you rest easy in the knowledge that you’re not on anyone’s black list. Not judged, not condemned, not even suspected. You might at least have the grace to say that I’m not such an awful monster as you thought.’

She smiled faintly. ‘Maybe you’re not even a monster at all.’

‘You’re going to sleep, now?’ She nodded so he said goodnight and closed the door behind him.

Almost an hour elapsed before Petersen, George and Josip were left together in the dining-room. The others had been in no hurry to depart. The night’s events had not been conducive to an immediately renewed slumber and, besides, they were secure in the knowledge that there would be no early morning start.

George, who had returned to his red wine, was making steady inroads on his current uncounted bottle, looked and spoke as if he had been on mineral water all the time. There was, unfortunately, not the same lack of evidence about his cigar-smoking: an evilsmelling blue haze filled the upper half of the room.

‘Your friend, Major Cipriano, didn’t over-stay his welcome,’ Josip said.

‘He’s no friend of mine,’ Petersen said. ‘Never seen him before. Appearances mean nothing but he seems a reasonable enough character. For an intelligence agent, that is. Have you known him long?’

‘He has been here twice. As a bona-fide traveller. He’s no friend. Thanking me for my help was just an attempt to divert suspicion from whoever tipped him off. A feeble attempt, he must have known it would fail but probably the best he could think up at the time. What was his object in coming here?’

‘No mystery about that. Both the Germans and Italians are suspicious of me. I have a message to deliver to the leader of the etniks. On the boat coming across from Italy one of his agents, an unpleasant character called Alessandro, tried to get this message from me. He wanted to see if it was the same as a copy he was carrying. He failed, so Cipriano got worried and came across to Ploe. He was tipped off as to our whereabouts, came up here – almost certainly by light plane – and, when we were herded down here, went through our possessions, steamed open the envelope containing my message, found that it was unchanged and resealed it. Exit Cipriano, baffled but satisfied – for the moment anyway.’

George said: ‘Sarina?’

‘Someone got into her room in the early hours of this morning. That was after she had been doped. Her radio was used to call up Cipriano. Sarina says she trusts me now. I don’t believe her.’

‘It is as always,’ George said mournfully. ‘Every man’s – and woman’s – hands are against us.’

‘Doped?’ Josip was incredulous. ‘In my hotel? How can anyone be doped in my hotel?’

‘How can anyone be doped anywhere?’

‘Who was this villain?’

‘Villainess. Lorraine.’

‘Lorraine! That beautiful girl?’

‘Maybe her mind is not as beautiful as the rest of her.’

‘Sarina. Now Lorraine.’ George shook his head sadly. ‘The monstrous regiment of women.’

Josip said: ‘But how do you know?’

‘Simple arithmetic. Elimination. Lorraine went for a walk tonight and returned very hurriedly. She didn’t go for the walk’s sake. She went for something else. Information. You went with her, Josip. Do you recall her doing or saying anything odd?’

‘She didn’t do anything. Just walked. And she said very little.’

‘That should make it easy to remember.’

‘Well, she said it was odd that I didn’t have the name of the hotel outside. I told her I hadn’t yet got around to putting it up and that it was the Hotel Eden. She also said it was funny that there were no streets signs up, so I gave her the name of the street. Ah! So she got the name and address, no?’

‘Yes.’ Petersen rose. ‘Bed. I trust you’re not going to stay here for the remainder of the night, George.’

‘Certainly not.’ George fetched a fresh bottle from behind the bar. ‘But we academics must have our moments for meditation.’

At noon that day, Petersen and his six companions had still not left the Hotel Eden. Instead, they were just sitting down to a lunch which Josip had insisted they have, a meal that was to prove to be on a par with the dinner they had had the previous evening. But there was one vacant seat.

Josip said: ‘Where is the Professor?’

‘George,’ Petersen said, ‘is indisposed. In bed. Acute stomach pains. He thinks it must have been something he had to eat last night.’

‘Something he had to eat!’ Josip was indignant. ‘He had exactly the same to eat as anyone else last night – except, of course, a great deal more of it – and nobody else is stricken. My food, indeed! I know what ails the Professor. When I came down early this morning, just about two hours after you went to bed, the Professor was still here, still, as he said, meditating.’

‘That might help to account for it.’

That might have accounted for it but it didn’t account for George’s appearance some ten minutes after the meal had commenced. He tried to smile wanly but he didn’t look wan.

‘Sorry to be late. The Major will have told you I was unwell. However, the cramps have eased a little and I thought I might try a little something. To settle the stomach, you understand.’

By one o’clock George’s stomach seemed to have settled in a most remarkable fashion. In the fifty minutes that had intervened since his joining the company he had consumed twice as much as anyone else and effortlessly disposed of two large bottles of wine.

‘Congratulations are in order, George,’ Giacomo said. ‘One moment at death’s door and now – well, an incredible performance.’

‘It was nothing,’ George said modestly. ‘In many ways, I am an incredible man.’

Petersen sat on the bed in George’s room. ‘Well?’

‘Satisfactory. In one way, not well. There were two items that one would not have looked for in such an aristocratic young lady’s luggage. One was a very small leather case with a few highly professional burglarious tools. The other was a small metal box with some sachets inside, the sachets containing a liquid. When squeezed, the liquid turned into a gas. I sniffed only a very tiny amount. An anaesthetic of some kind, that’s certain. The interesting thing is that this little box, though smaller than Alessandro’s, was made of and lined with the same materials. What do we do with this young charmer?’

‘Leave her be. She’s not dangerous. If she were, she wouldn’t have made so amateurish a mistake.’

‘You said you knew the identity of the miscreant. She’s going to wonder why you haven’t disclosed it.’

‘Let her wonder. What’s she going to do about it?’

‘There’s that,’ George said. ‘There’s that.’

SIX

It was snowing heavily and the temperature was below freezing when Petersen drove the stolen Italian truck out of Mostar shortly after two o’clock that afternoon. The two girls beside him were silent and withdrawn, a circumstance that affected Petersen not at all. Relaxed and untroubled, he drove as unhurriedly as a man with all the time in the world and, after passing unhindered through a check-point at Potoci, slowed down even more, an action dictated not by any change of mood but by the nature of the road. It was narrow, twisting and broken-surfaced and urgently in need of the attentions of road repair gangs who had not passed that way for a long time: more importantly, they had begun to climb, and climb quite steeply, as the Neretva valley narrowed precipitously on either side of the river which sank further and further below the tortuous road until there was an almost sheer drop of several hundred feet to the foaming river that lay beneath them. Given the unstable nature of the road, the fact that there were no crash-barriers or restraining walls to prevent their sliding off the slippery road and the fact that the river itself increasingly disappeared in the thickening snowsqualls, it was not a route to lighten the hearts of those of an imaginative or nervous disposition. Judging by the handclenching and highly apprehensive expression of Petersen’s two front-seat companions, they clearly came well within that category. Petersen had neither comfort nor cheer to offer them, not through any callous indifference but because on the evidence of their own eyes they wouldn’t have believed a word he said anyway.

Their relief was almost palpable when Petersen abruptly turned off the road into a narrow gully which suddenly – and to the two girls, miraculously – appeared in the vertical cliff-side to their right. The road was no road at all, just a convoluted, rutted track that offered only minimal traction for the almost constantly spinning rear wheels, but at least there was no way they could fall off it: high walls of rock pressed in closely on both sides. Perhaps five minutes after leaving the main road, Petersen stopped, cut the engine and dropped down.

‘This is as far as we go,’ he said. ‘As far as we can go in this truck, anyway. Stay here.’ He walked round to the back of the truck, parted the curtains, repeated his words and disappeared into the swirling snow.

He was back within a few minutes, sitting beside the driver of a peculiar open vehicle which looked as if it might once have been a small truck that had had both its top and rear sliced off. The driver, clad in British warm – a thick, khaki, woollen overcoat – could have been of any nationality: with a fur cap pulled down to eyebrow level, a luxuriant black beard and moustache and a pair of hornrimmed sunglasses, there wasn’t a single distinguishable feature of his face to be seen except for a nose that could have belonged to anyone. Petersen stepped down as the vehicle came to a halt.

‘This is Dominic,’ he said. ‘He’s come to help us along a bit. That’s a four-wheel-drive vehicle he’s got there. It can go places where this truck can’t, but even then it can’t go very far, perhaps a couple of kilometres. Dominic will take the two young ladies, all our gear and all our blankets – I can assure you we’re going to need those tonight – as far as he can, then come back for the rest of us. We’ll start walking.’

Sarina said: ‘You mean to tell us you expected this friend of yours to meet us here? And at just this time?’

‘Give or take a few minutes. I wouldn’t be much of a tour guide, would I, if I got all my connections wrong?’

‘This truck,’ Giacomo said. ‘You’re surely not going to leave it here?’

‘Why ever not?’

‘I thought it was your custom to park unwanted Italian trucks in the Neretva. I saw some lovely parking spots in the god-awful ravine we just came through.’

‘A sinful waste. Besides, we might even want it again. What matters, of course, is that our friend Major Cipriano already knows we have it.’

‘How would he know that?’

‘How would he not know it, you mean. Has it not occurred to you that the informer who tipped him off to our presence in the Hotel Eden would also have given him all the details of our trip from the torpedo boat, including those of this vehicle? Either by radio or before being apparently dragged from an hotel bedroom, it doesn’t matter. We passed through a check-point at Potoci about an hour ago and the guard didn’t even bother to slow us down. Odd, one might think, except that he had already been given details of our vehicle, recognized it at once and obeyed orders to let us through. Let’s get that stuff out quickly. It’s turned even colder than I thought it would be.’

It had indeed. A south-east wind had sprung up, a wind from which they would have been sheltered in the Neretva valley, and was steadily strengthening. This would not normally have been a cold wind but this was a wind that paid no attention to meteorological norms: it could have been blowing straight from Siberia. The four-wheel-drive vehicle was loaded with passengers and gear and drove off in a remarkably short time: there could be no doubt that Dominic’s sunglasses were, in effect, snow-glasses.

The five men set out on foot and were picked up some fifteen minutes later by the returning Dominic. The ride along an even more bumpy and deteriorating track was, because of the increase in snowdepth and incline, uncomfortable and haphazard to a degree, and only marginally better and faster than walking. None of the passengers was sorry when the truck pulled up at the track’s end outside a ramshackle wooden hut which proved to be its garage. Inside, the two girls were sheltering from the snow. They were not alone. There were three men – boys, rather – in vaguely paramilitary uniforms and five ponies.

Sarina said: ‘Where on earth are we?’

‘Home, sweet home,’ Petersen said. ‘Well, an hour and a half’s gentle ride and we’ll be there. This is the mountain of Prenj, more of a massif, really. The Neretva river makes a big U-turn here and runs around three sides of it, which makes Prenj, in defensive terms, an ideal place to be. Only two bridges cross the river, one to the northwest at Jablanica, the other to the north-east at Konjik, and both of those are easily guarded and defended. It’s open to the south-east but no danger threatens from that direction.’

‘Gentle ride, you said. Do those horses canter or gallop? I don’t like horses.’

‘They’re ponies, not horses, and, no, they don’t canter or gallop. Not on this occasion anyway.

They wouldn’t be stupid enough to try. It’s all uphill and pretty steeply uphill.’

‘I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this climb.’

‘You’ll enjoy the view.’

It was half an hour later and she was enjoying neither the climb nor the view. The climb, though not impossibly steep, was a difficult enough one and the view, remarkable though it was, engendered in her only a feeling that lay halfway between fascinated horror and paralysed terror. The path, barely two metres in width and sometimes noticeably less, had been gouged out of the side of a slope so steep as to be virtually a cliff-side, and ascended it by a series, a seemingly endless series, of hairpin twists and turns. With every step the pony took, the floor of the narrow valley, when it could be seen at all through the driving snow, seemed more remotely and vertically distant. Only she and Lorraine had been mounted: the other three ponies carried all their securely strapped gear and blankets. Lorraine was on foot now, clutching Giacomo’s arm as if he was her last faint hope on earth.

Petersen, walking beside Sarina’s pony, said: ‘I’m afraid you’re not enjoying this as much as I would like you to.’

‘Enjoying it!’ She shuddered uncontrollably, not with cold. ‘Back in the hotel I told you I wasn’t a great big coward. Well, I am, I am! I’m terrified. I keep on telling myself it’s silly, it’s stupid, but I can’t help it.’

Petersen said matter-of-factly: ‘You’re not a coward. It’s been like this since you were a child.’

‘Like what? What do you mean?’

‘Vertigo is what I mean. Anyone can suffer from it. Some of the bravest men I know, some of the most fearsome fighters I’ve ever met, won’t climb a step-ladder or set foot in a plane.’

‘Yes, yes. Always. Do you know about it?’

‘I don’t get it, but I’ve seen it too often not to know about it. Dizziness, loss of equilibrium, an almost uncontrollable desire to throw yourself over the edge and, in the present case, a conviction on your part that your pony is about to jump out into space at any moment. That’s about it, isn’t it?’

She nodded, dumbly. Petersen refrained from saying that if she’d known about her condition and the Yugoslav mountains, she should have stayed in Cairo. Instead he moved round the head of the horse and took her stirrup-leather in his hand.

‘These ponies are more sure-footed than we are and by a long way. Even if it should suffer from a bout of vertigo now, and ponies never do, I would be the first over the edge. And even if you felt like throwing yourself over, you can’t because I’m between you and the cliff edge and I’d stop you and catch you. And I’ll change sides at every corner. That way we’ll be sure to make it to the top. I won’t be so silly as to tell you to sit back and relax: all I can say is that you’ll be feeling a lot better in fifteen minutes or so.’

‘We’ll be away from this cliff by that time?’ The tremor was still in her voice.

‘We will, we will.’ They wouldn’t be, but by that time it would be so dark that she would be unable to see the valley below.

It was quite some time after dark when they passed through the perimeter of what seemed to be a permanent camp of sorts. There were a large number of huts and tents, all close together and nearly all illuminated: not brightly illuminated, for at that remote altitude there was no central power grid and the only small generator available was reserved for the headquarters area: for the rest, the great majority of the guerrilla soldiers and the inevitable camp-followers, there was only the light to be had from oil, tallow or coke braziers. Then there came a quite uninhabited and gently rising slope of perhaps three hundred metres before their small cavalcade fetched up at a large hut with a metal roof and two windows which gave out a surprising amount of light.

‘Well, here we are,’ Petersen said. ‘Home or what you’d better call home until you find a better word for it.’ He reached up his hands and swung the shivering girl to the ground. She clung to him as if she were trying to prevent herself from falling to the ground which was what she was indeed trying to do.

‘My legs feel all funny.’ Her voice was low and husky but at least the tremor had gone.

‘Sure they do. I’ll bet you’ve never been on a horse before.’

‘You’d win your bet but it’s not that. The way I hung on to that horse, clung to it –’ She tried to laugh but it was a poor enough attempt. ‘I’ll be surprised if that poor pony doesn’t have bruised ribs for days to come.’

‘You did very well.’

‘Very well! I’m ashamed of myself. I hope you won’t go around telling everyone that you’ve met up with the most cowardly radio operator in the Balkans.’

‘I won’t. I won’t because I don’t go around telling lies. I think you may be the bravest girl I ever met.’

‘After that performance!’

‘Especially after that performance.’

She was still clinging to him, clearly still not trusting her balance, was silent for a few moments, then said: ‘I think you may be the kindest man I’ve ever met.’

‘Good God!’ He was genuinely astonished. ‘The strain has been too much. After all you’ve said about me!’

‘Especially after everything I said about you.’

She was still holding him, although now only tentatively, when they heard the sound of a heavy fist banging on a wooden door and George’s booming voice saying: ‘Open up, in the name of the law or common humanity or whatever. We have crossed the burning sands and are dying of thirst.’

The door opened almost immediately and a tall, thin figure appeared, framed in the rectangle of light. He came down the two steps and thrust out a hand.

‘It cannot be …’ He had an excruciatingly languid Oxbridge accent.

‘It is.’ George took his hand. ‘Enough of the formalities. At stake there is nothing less than the sacred name of British hospitality.’

‘Goodness gracious!’ The man screwed a monocle, an oddlyshaped oval one, into his right eye, advanced towards Lorraine, took her hand, swept it up in a gesture of exquisite gallantry and kissed it. ‘Goodness gracious me. Lorraine Chamberlain!’ He seemed about to embark upon a speech of some length, caught sight of Petersen and went to meet him. ‘Peter, my boy. Once again all those dreadful trials and tribulations lie behind you. My word, I can’t tell you how dull and depressing it’s been here during the two weeks you’ve been gone. Dreadful, I tell you. Utterly dreadful.’

Petersen smiled. ‘Hello, Jamie. Good to see you again. Things should improve now. George, quite illicitly, of course, has brought you some presents – quite a lot of presents, they almost broke the back of one of the ponies coming up here. Presents that go clink.’ He turned to Sarina. ‘May I introduce Captain Harrison. Captain Harrison,’ he added with a straight face, ‘is English. Jamie, this is Sarina von Karajan.’

Harrison shook her hand enthusiastically. ‘Delighted, delighted. If only you knew how we miss even the commonest amenities of civilization in these benighted parts. Not, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘that there’s anything common about you. My goodness, I should say not.’ He looked at Petersen. ‘The Harrisons’ ill luck runs true to form again. We were born under an evil and accursed star. Do you mean to tell me that you have had the great fortune, the honour, the pleasure of escorting those two lovely ladies all the way from Italy?’

‘Neither of them think there was any fortune, honour or pleasure about it. I didn’t know you had the pleasure of knowing Lorraine before.’ Giacomo had a sudden but very brief paroxysm of coughing which Petersen ignored.

‘Oh, my goodness, yes, indeed. Old friends, very old. Worked together once, don’t you know? Tell you some time. Your other new friends?’ Petersen introduced Giacomo and Michael whom Harrison welcomed in what was his clearly customary effusive fashion, then said: ‘Well, inside, inside. Can’t have you all freezing to death in this abominable weather. I’ll have your goods and chattels taken in. Inside, inside.’

‘Inside’ was surprisingly roomy, warm, well-lit and, by guerrilla standards, almost comfortable. There were three bunks running the length of each side of the room, some tall articles of furniture that could have been either cupboards or wardrobes, a deal table, half a dozen pine chairs, the unheard luxury of a couple of rather scruffy arm-chairs and even two strips of worn and faded carpet. At either end of the room were two doors that led, presumably, to further accommodation. Harrison closed the outside door behind him.

‘Have a seat, have a seat.’ The Captain was much given to repeating himself. ‘George, if I may suggest – ah, foolish of me, I might have known that any such suggestion was superfluous.’ George had, indeed, lost no time in doubling in his spare-time role of barman. Harrison looked around him with an air of proprietorial pride. ‘Not bad, although I say it myself, not bad at all. You won’t find many such havens in this strife-torn land. I regret to say that we live in accommodation such as this all too infrequently, but when we do we make the best of it. Electric light, if you please – you can’t hear it but we have the only generator in the base apart from the commander. Need it for our big radios.’ He pointed to two six-inch diameter pipes angling diagonally upwards along either wall to disappear through the roof. ‘Central heating, of course. Actually, they’re only the stovepipes from our coke and wood stove outside. Would have it inside but we’d all be asphyxiated in minutes. And what do we have here, George?’ He inspected the contents of a glass George had just handed him.

George shrugged and said diffidently: ‘Nothing really. Highland malt whisky.’

‘Highland malt whisky.’ Harrison reverently surveyed the amber liquid, sipped it delicately and smiled in rapture. ‘Where on earth did you get this, George?’

‘Friend of mine in Rome.’

‘God bless your Roman friends.’ This time assuming his beatific expression in advance, Harrison sipped again. ‘Well, that’s about all the mod cons. That door to the left leads to my radio room. Some nice stuff in there but unfortunately we can’t take most of it with us when we travel which, again unfortunately, is most of the time. The other door leads to what I rather splendidly call my sleeping quarters. It’s about the size of a couple of telephone boxes but it does have two cots.’ Harrison took another sip from his glass and went on gallantly: ‘Those quarters, naturally, I will gladly vacate for the night for the two young ladies.’

‘You are very kind,’ Sarina said doubtfully. ‘But I – we – were supposed to report to the Colonel.’

‘Nonsense. Not to be thought of. You are exhausted by your travels, your sufferings, your privations. One has only to look at you. I am sure the Colonel will gladly wait until the morning. Is that not so, Peter?’

‘Tomorrow will be time enough.’

‘Of course. Well, we castaways marooned on a mountain top are always eager for news of the outside world. What of the past fortnight, my friend?’

Petersen put down his untouched glass and rose. ‘George will tell you. He’s a much better raconteur than I am.’

‘Well, yes, you do rather lack his gift for dramatic embellishment. Duty calls?’ Petersen nodded.

‘Ah! The Colonel?’

‘Who else. I won’t be long.’

When Petersen returned, he was not alone. The two men accompanying him were, like himself, covered in a heavy coating of snow. While they were brushing this off, Harrison rose courteously and introduced them.

‘Good evening, gentlemen. We are honoured.’ He turned to the newcomers. ‘Let me introduce Major Rankovi, two of the Colonel’s senior commanders. You venture forth on a wild night, gentlemen.’

‘You mean, of course, why have we come?’ The speaker, Major Metrovi, was a man of medium height, dark, thickset and cheerful. ‘Curiosity, of course. Peter’s movements are always shrouded in mystery and heaven knows we see little enough of new faces from the outer world.’

‘Peter didn’t also mention that two of those new faces were young, female and – I speak as a detached observer, of course – rather extraordinarily good-looking?’

‘He may have done, he may have done.’ Metrovi smiled again. ‘You know how it is with my colleague and myself. Our minds are invariably preoccupied with military matters. Isn’t that so, Marino?’

Marino – Major Rankovi – a tall, thin, dark-bearded and rather gloomy character, who looked as if he let Metrovi do all the smiling for both of them, didn’t say whether it was so or not. He seemed preoccupied and the source of his preoccupation was unquestionably Giacomo.

‘I asked them along,’ Petersen said. ‘I felt it was the least I could do to bring some relief into their cheerless lives.’

‘Well, welcome, welcome.’ Harrison looked at his watch. ‘Won’t be long, you said. What do you call short?’

‘I wanted to give George a chance to finish his story. Besides, I was detained. Much questioning. And I stopped by at my radio hut to see if you’d made off with anything during my absence. It seems not. Perhaps you mislaid the key.’

‘The radio hut?’ Sarina glanced at the door at the end of the room. ‘But we heard nothing. I mean –’

‘My radio hut is fifty metres away. No mystery. There are three radios in the camp. One for the Colonel. One for Captain Harrison. One for me. You will be assigned to the Colonel. Lorraine comes here.’

‘You arranged that?’

‘I arranged nothing. I take orders, just like anyone else. The Colonel arranged it, Lorraine’s assignation here was arranged weeks ago. There’s no secret about it. The Colonel, for reasons that may seem obscure to you but which I understand very well, prefers that Captain Harrison’s radio operator, like Captain Harrison himself, should not speak or understand Serbo-Croat. The basis of the Colonel’s security beliefs is that one should trust nobody.’

‘You must have a lot in common with the Colonel.’

‘I think that’s rather unfair, young lady.’ It was Metrovi again and he was still smiling. ‘I can confirm what the Major has said. I’m the go-between, the translator, if you like, for the Colonel and Captain Harrison. Like the major, I was partly educated in England.’ ‘Enough,’ Harrison said. ‘Let us put unworthy thoughts to one side and concentrate on more important things.’

‘Such as hospitality?’ George said.

‘Such as hospitality, as you say. Be seated, please. What is your choice, gentlemen – and ladies, of course?’

They all told him what they wanted, all, that is, except Major Rankovi. He crossed to where Giacomo was seated and said: ‘May I ask what your name is?’

Giacomo lifted his eyebrows in slight puzzlement, smiled and said: ‘Giacomo.’

‘That’s an Italian name, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Giacomo what?’

‘Just Giacomo.’

‘Just Giacomo.’ Rankovi’s voice was deep and gravelly. ‘It suits you to be mysterious?’

‘It suits me to mind my own business.’

‘What’s your rank?’

‘That’s my business, too.’

‘I’ve seen you before. Not in the army, though. Rijeka, Split, Kotor, some place like that.’

‘It’s possible.’ Giacomo was still smiling but the smile no longer extended to his eyes. ‘It’s a small enough world. I used to be a sailor.’

‘You’re a Yugoslav.’

Giacomo, Petersen was aware, could easily have conceded the fact but he knew he wouldn’t. Rankovi was an able soldier but no psychologist.

‘I’m English.’

‘You’re a liar.’

Petersen stepped forward and tapped Rankovi on the shoulder. ‘If I were you, Marino, I’d quit while I was ahead. Not, mind you, that I think you are ahead.’

Rankovi turned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that you’re still intact and in one piece. Keep on like this and you’ll wake up in hospital wondering if you fell under a train. I can vouch for Giacomo. He is English. He’s got so long and so distinguished a war record that he puts any man in this room to shame. While you’ve been pottering around the mountains he’s been fighting in France and Belgium and North Africa and the Aegean and usually on assignments so dangerous that you couldn’t even begin to wonder what they were like. Look at his face, Marino. Look at it and you’ll look into the face of war.’

Rankovi studied Giacomo closely. ‘I’m not a fool. I never questioned his qualities as a soldier. I was curious, that is all, and maybe, like the Colonel and yourself, I am not much given to trusting anyone. I did not intend to give offence.’

‘And I didn’t intend to take any,’ Giacomo said. His good humour had returned. ‘You’re suspicious, I’m touchy. A bad mix. Let me suggest a good mix or rather no mix at all. You never mix malt whisky with anything, do you, George? Not even water?’

‘Sacrilege.’

‘You were right on one count, Major. I am English but I was born in Yugoslavia. Let us drink to Yugoslavia.’

‘A toast no man could quarrel with,’ Rankovi said. There were no handshakes, no protestations of eternal friendship. It was, at best, a truce. Rankovi, no actor, still had his reservations about Giacomo.

Petersen, for his part, had none.

Considerably later in the evening an understandably much more relaxed and mellowed atmosphere had descended upon the company. Some of them had paid a brief visit to a mess four hundred metres distant for an evening meal. Sarina and Lorraine had pointblank – and as it turned out, wisely – refused to brave the near blizzard that was now sweeping by outside. Michael, inevitably, had elected to remain with them and Giacomo, after a quick exchange of glances with Petersen, had announced that he was not hungry. Giacomo did not have to have it spelt out to him that, even among his own people, Petersen was suspicious of practically everybody in sight.

Compared to Josip Pijade’s midday offerings, the meal was a gastro nomic disaster. It was no fault of the etnik cooks – as elsewhere through that ravaged country, food was at a premium and fine food almost wholly unobtainable. Still, it was a sad come-down from the flesh-pots of Italy and Mostar and even George could manage no more than two platefuls of the fatty mutton and beans which constituted the main and only course of the evening. They had left as soon as decency permitted.

Back in Harrison’s radio hut their relative sufferings were soon forgotten.

‘There’s no place like home,’ Harrison announced to nobody in particular. Although it would have been unfair to call him inebriated, it would have been fair to pass the opinion that he wasn’t stone cold sober either.

He bent an appreciative gaze on the glass in his hand. ‘Nectar emboldens me. George has given me a very comprehensive account of your activities over the past two weeks. He has not, however, told me why you went to Rome in the first place.

Nor did you seek to enlighten me on your return.’

‘That’s because I didn’t know myself.’

Harrison nodded sagely. ‘That makes sense. You go all the way to Rome and back and you don’t know why.’

‘I was just carrying a message. I didn’t know the contents.’

‘Is one permitted to ask if you know the contents now?’

‘One is permitted. I do.’

‘Ah! Is one further permitted to know the contents?’

‘In your own language, Jamie, I don’t know whether I’m permitted or not. All I can say is that this is purely a military matter. Strictly, I am not a military man, a commander of troops. I’m an espionage agent. Espionage agents don’t wage battles. We’re far too clever for that. Or cowardly.’

Harrison looked at Metrovi and Rankovi in turn. ‘You’re military men. If I’m to believe half you tell me, you wage battles.’

Metrovi smiled. ‘We’re not as clever as Peter.’

‘You know the contents of the message?’

‘Of course. Peter’s discretion does him credit but it’s not really necessary. Within a couple of days the news will be common knowledge throughout the camp. We – the Germans, Italians, ourselves and the Ustaša – are to launch an all-out offensive against the Partisans. We shall annihilate Titoland. The Germans have given the name of the attack “Operation Weiss”: the Partisans will doubtless call it the Fourth Offensive.’

Harrison seemed unimpressed. He said, doubtfully: ‘That means, of course, that you’ve made three other offensives already. Those didn’t get you very far, did they?’

Metrovi was unruffled. ‘I know it’s easy to say, but this time really will be different. They’re cornered. They’re trapped. They’ve no way out, no place left to go. They haven’t a single plane, fighter or bomber. We have squadrons upon squadrons. They haven’t a tank, not even a single effective anti-aircraft gun. At the most, they have fifteen thousand men, most of them starving, weak, sick and untrained. We have almost a hundred thousand men, well-trained and fit. And Tito’s final weakness, his Achilles’ heel, you might say, is his lack of mobility: he is known to have at least three thousand wounded men on his hands. It will be no contest. I don’t say I look forward to it, but it will be a massacre. Are you a betting man, James?’

‘Not against odds like that, I’m not. Like Peter here, I lay no claim to being a military man – I never even saw a uniform until three years ago – but if the action is so imminent why are you drinking wine at your leisured ease instead of being hunched over your war maps, sticking flags in here, flags in there, drawing up your battle plans or whatever you’re supposed to be doing in cases like this?’

Metrovi laughed. ‘Three excellent reasons. First, the offensive is not imminent – it’s two weeks away yet. Second, all the plans have already been drawn up and all the troops are already in position or will be in a few days. Third, the main assault takes place at Biha, where the Partisan forces are at present centred, and that’s over two hundred kilometres north-west of here. We’re not taking part in that: we’re staying just where we are in case the Partisans are so foolish, or optimistic or suicidal to try to break out to the south-east: stopping them from crossing the Neretva, in the remote possibility of a few stragglers getting as far as here, would be only a formality.’ He paused and gazed at a darkened window. ‘There may well be a fourth possibility. If the weather worsens, or even continues like this, the best laid plans of the High Command could well go wrong. A postponement would be inevitable. Nobody’s going to be moving around the mountains in those impossible weather conditions for days to come, that’s for sure. Days might well become weeks.’

‘Well, yes,’ Harrison said. ‘One sees why you face the future with a certain resigned fortitude. On the basis of what you say the chances are good that you won’t even become involved at all. For myself, I hope your prognosis is correct – as I’ve said I’m no man of war and I’ve become quite attached to these rather comfortable quarters. And do you, Peter, expect to hibernate along with us?’

‘No. If the Colonel has nothing for me in the morning – and he gave no indication tonight that he would have – then I shall be on my way the following morning. Provided, of course, that we’re not up to our ears in snowdrifts.’

‘Whither away, if one is –’

‘Permitted to ask? Yes. A certain Italian intelligence officer is taking an undue amount of interest in me. He’s trying either to discredit me or hamper me in my operations. Has tried, I should say. I would like to find out why.’

Metrovi said: ‘In what way has he tried, Peter?’

‘He and a gang of his thugs held us up in a Mostar hotel in the early hours of this morning. Looking for something, I suppose. Whether they found it or not I don’t know. Shortly before that, on the boat coming from Italy, some of his minions tried to carry out a night attack on us. They failed, but not for the want of trying, for they were carrying syringes and lethal drugs which they were more than prepared to use.’

‘Goodness me.’ Harrison looked suitably appalled. ‘What happened?’

‘It was all quite painless, really,’ George said with satisfaction. ‘We welded them up in a cabin on the boat. Last heard of they were still there.’

Harrison looked reproachfully at George. ‘Missed this out in your stirring account of your activities, didn’t you?’

‘Discretion, discretion.’

‘This Italian intelligence officer,’ Metrovi said, ‘is, of course an ally. With some allies, as we know, you don’t need enemies. When you meet up with this ally what are you going to do? Question him or kill him?’ The Major seemed to regard that as a very natural query.

‘Kill him?’ Sarina looked and was shocked. ‘That nice man. Kill him! I thought you rather liked him.’

‘Liked him? He’s reasonable, personable, smiling, open-faced, has a firm handshake and looks you straight in the eye – anyone can tell at once that he’s a member of the criminal classes. He was prepared to kill me, by proxy, mind you, through his hatchet-man Alessandro – which, if anything, makes it an even more heinous intention on his part – so why shouldn’t I be prepared to pre-empt him? But I won’t, at least not right away. I just want to ask him a few questions.’

‘But – but you might not even be able to find him.’

‘I’ll find him.’

‘And if he refuses to answer?’

‘He’ll answer.’ There was the same chilling certainty in the voice. She touched her lips with the back of her hand and fell silent. Metrovi, his face thoughtful, said: ‘You’re not the man to ask questions unless you’re pretty certain of the answers in advance. You’re after confirmation of something. Could you not have obtained this confirmation at the hotel you mentioned?’

‘Certainly. But I didn’t want the place littered with corpses, not all of which might have been theirs. I’d promised to deliver this lot intact first. Everything in its due turn. Confirmation? I want confirmation of why Italy is planning to pull out of this war. That they want out I don’t for a moment doubt. Their people never wanted this war. Their army, navy and air force never wanted it. Remember when Wavell’s army in North Africa overwhelmed the Italians? There was a picture taken just after the last battle, a picture that was to become world-famous. It showed about a thousand Italian prisoners being marched off to their barbed wire cages escorted by three British soldiers. The sun was so hot that the soldiers had given their rifles to three of the prisoners to carry. That about sums up the Italian attitude to the war.

‘Given a cause that is close to their hearts, the Italians can fight as gallantly as any people on earth. This cause is not close to their hearts – it couldn’t be further away from it. This is Germany’s war and they don’t like fighting Germany’s war because, basically, they don’t like the Germans. It has been repeatedly claimed, both by the Italians and the British that the Italians are, at bottom, pro-British. The truth is, of course, that they’re just pro-Italian.

‘No-one is more acutely aware of this than the Italian high command. But there’s more to it of course than just patriotism. There’s no lack of first-class minds in the Italian high command and it’s my belief that they are convinced, even at this early stage, that the Germans are going to lose the war.’ Petersen looked round the room. ‘It may not be your belief, it may not be my belief, but that’s irrelevant. What matters is that I’m convinced it is their belief and that they are even now figuring out a way to arrive at an accommodation – for want of a better word – with the British and Americans. This accommodation, of course, would take the form of a full-scale surrender but, of course, it would be nothing of the sort. It would involve full-scale cooperation upon the part of the Italians with every aspect of the British and American forces just short of the front-line engagement of their troops in the front line.’

‘You seem very sure about this, Peter,’ Metrovi said. ‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because I have access to sources and information that none of you has. I am in constant touch with both Italian and German forces in this country and, as you know, I’m a frequent visitor to Italy and have talked to literally hundreds of Italians there, both military men and civilians. I am neither literally deaf nor figuratively dumb. I know, for instance, that Italian Intelligence and German Intelligence are barely on civil speaking terms with each other and most certainly do not trust each other round the nearest corner in the street.

‘General Granelli, Head of Italian Intelligence and Cipriano’s boss – Cipriano is this Intelligence Major I was talking about – is an evil and warped character but out-and-out brilliant. He knows the situation and the options as well as anyone and is in no doubt that the Germans are going to go down in dust and flames and has no intention of joining them there. He’s also pretty certain that I know quite well what the true situation is and that if I start voicing my doubts – my convictions, rather – out loud I could be a positive danger to him. I think he’s been twice on the point of having me eliminated and has twice changed his mind at the last minute. I know there’s going to be a third time which is one reason why I want to get out of here – before Cipriano or some other comes, in the guise of a loyal ally, naturally, and arranges for an accident to happen to me. But the main reason, of course, for my departure is to get to their link-man before he gets to me.’

‘Link-man? Link-man?’ Harrison shook his head in bafflement. ‘You speak in riddles, Peter.’

‘A riddle with a childishly easy answer. If the Germans go down who else is going to go down with them?’

‘Ah-ha!’

‘As you’ve just said, ah-ha. All those who have fought with them, that’s who. Including us. If you were General Granelli and with Granelli’s keen eye to the future, which of the opposing forces in Yugoslavia would you back?’

‘Good Lord!’ Harrison sounded slightly stunned. He looked around the room. The others, if not quite stunned, looked for the most part deeply pensive, not least Rankovi and Metrovi. ‘What you are saying is that Granelli and this Major Cipriano are working hand-in-hand with the Partisans and that Cipriano is the master double-agent?’

Petersen rubbed his chin with his hand, glanced briefly at Harrison, sighed, poured himself some more red wine and did not deign to answer.

Petersen’s radio shack did not begin to compare in magnificence with Harrison’s, which they had left only a few moments previously, a premature departure arising directly from the conversational hiatus that had ensued immediately after Harrison’s last words, a lacuna that went on and on and on. Harrison and the two etnik officers were sunk in profound reverie, Sarina and Lorraine, by their expressions not by words, had made it clear that their aversion to Petersen had not only returned but was in fuller flood than ever and Alex and Michael, as ever, had nothing to say. Those two master conversationalists, George and Giacomo, had battled bravely but only briefly on. It was a lost cause.

The hut would have been big enough to serve as a one-car garage, if the car were small enough. Three beds, a table, three chairs, a cooking stove and that was all: the radio room was a tiny office next door.

‘I am sad and disturbed,’ George said. ‘Profoundly disturbed.’ He poured himself a large glass of wine and drank half of it in one apparently endless gulp just to show how profoundly disturbed he was. ‘Sad, perhaps, is a better word. The realization that one’s life and one’s lifework has been a failure is a bitter pill to swallow. The damage to one’s pride and self-esteem is irreparable. The effect, overall, is crushing.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Petersen said sympathetically. ‘I’ve felt that myself.’

George might not have heard him. ‘You will not have forgotten the days when you were my student in Belgrade?’

‘Who could, ever? As you said yourself, not more than a hundred times, a walk with you through the rose-arboured groves of academe was an experience to remain with one always.’

‘Remember the precepts I preached, the eternal verities I cherished? Honour, honesty, straightforwardness, the pure in mind, the open heart, the outright contempt for deceit, deception, dishonesty: we were, remember, to go through the darkness of this world guided solely by the light of the everlasting flame of truth?’

‘Yes, George.’

‘I am a broken man.’

‘I’m sorry, George.’

SEVEN

There were six of them in all, and six tougher looking and more villainous characters it would have been almost impossible to imagine, far less find. There was a curious likeness about them. They were all just over medium height, all lean and broad-shouldered, all clad exactly alike: khaki trousers tucked into high boots, belted khaki canvas jacket over a khaki tunic, and khaki forage caps. They carried no badges, no identification marks. All were armed in precisely the same fashion: machine-pistols in hands, a revolver at waist level and hunting knives stuck into a sheath on the right boot. Their faces were dark and still, their eyes quiet and watchful. They were dangerous men.

Surprise had been complete, resistance – even the thought of a token resistance – unthinkable. The same company as had been in Harrison’s hut the previous evening, had been there just a few minutes before eight that evening when the outside door had burst open and three men had been inside the door with levelled guns before anyone could even react. Now there were six inside, and the door was closed. One of the intruders, a little shorter and a little broader than the others, took a pace forward.

‘My name is Crni.’ It was the Serbo-Croat word for black. ‘You will take off your weapons, one by one, and place them on the floor.’ He nodded at Metrovi. ‘You begin.’

Within a minute every gun in the room – at least every visible gun – was lying on the floor. Crni beckoned Lorraine. ‘Pick up those guns and put them on that table there. You will not, of course, be so stupid as to even think of firing any of them.’

Lorraine had no thought of firing any of them, her hands were shaking so much that she had some difficulty in picking them up. When they were on the table Crni said: ‘Are either of you two young ladies armed?’

‘They’re not,’ Petersen said. ‘I guarantee it. If you find a weapon on their persons or in their bags you can shoot me.’

Crni looked at him almost quizzically, reached under his canvas jacket and produced a piece of paper from his tunic. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Petersen.’

‘Ah! Major Peter Petersen. At the very top of the list. One can see they’re not carrying a weapon on their persons. But their bags?’

‘I’ve searched them.’

The two girls momentarily stopped being apprehensive and exchanged indignant glances. Crni smiled slightly.

‘You should have told them. I believe you. If any man here is carrying a gun on his person and conceals the fact, then if I find it I’ll shoot him. Through the heart.’ Crni’s matter-of-fact tone carried an unpleasant degree of conviction.

‘There’s no need to go around making all those ludicrous threats,’ George said complainingly. ‘If it’s cooperation you want, I’m your man.’ He produced an automatic from the depths of his clothing and nudged Alex in the ribs. ‘Don’t be foolish. I don’t think this fellow Crni has any sense of humour.’ Alex scowled and threw a similar automatic on the table.

‘Thank you.’ Crni consulted his list. ‘You, of course, have to be the learned Professor, number two on our list.’ He looked up at Alex. ‘And you must be number three. It says here “Alex brackets assassin”. Not much of a character reference. We’ll bear that in mind.’ He turned to one of his men. ‘Edvard. Those coats hanging there. Search them.’

‘No need,’ Petersen said. ‘Just the one on the left. That’s mine. Right-hand pocket.’

‘You are cooperative,’ Crni said.

‘I’m a professional, too.’

‘I know that. I know quite a lot about you. Rather, I’ve been told quite a lot.’ He looked at the gun Edvard had brought him. ‘I didn’t know they issued silenced Lugers to the Royal Yugoslav Army.’

‘They don’t. A friend gave it to me.’

‘Of course. I have five other names on this list.’ He looked at Harrison. ‘You must be Captain James Harrison.’

‘Why must I?’

‘There are two officers in Yugoslavia who wear monocles? And you must be Giacomo. Just the one name. Giacomo.’

‘Same question.’

‘Description.’

Giacomo smiled. ‘Flattering?’

‘No. Just accurate.’ He looked at Michael. ‘And you, by elimination, must be Michael von Karajan. Two ladies.’ He looked at Lorraine. ‘You’re Lorraine Chamberlain.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled wanly. ‘You have my description, too?’

‘Sarina von Karajan bears a remarkable resemblance to her twin brother,’ Crni said patiently. ‘You eight are coming with me.’

George said: ‘May I ask a question?’

‘No.’

‘I think that’s downright uncivil,’ George said plaintively. ‘And unfair. What if I wanted to go to the toilet?’

‘I take it you are the resident comedian,’ Crni said coldly. ‘I hope your sense of humour bears with you in the days to come. Major, I’m going to hold you personally responsible for the conduct of your group.’

Petersen smiled. ‘If anyone tries to run away, you’ll shoot me?’

‘I wouldn’t have put it as crudely as that, Major.’

‘Major this, Major that. Major Crni? Captain Crni?’

‘Captain,’ he said briefly. ‘I prefer Crni. Do I have to be an officer?’

‘They don’t send a mess-boy to bring in apparently notorious criminals.’

‘Nobody’s said you’re a criminal. Not yet.’ He looked at the two etnick officers. ‘Your names?’ Metrovi. This is Major Rankovi.’ ‘I’ve heard of you.’ He turned to Petersen. ‘You eight will be taking your baggage with you.’

‘That’s nice,’ George said.

‘What is?’

‘Well,’ George said reasonably, ‘if we’re taking our baggage with us it’s hardly likely that you’re going to shoot us out of hand.’

‘To be a comedian is bad enough. To be a buffoon, insufferable.’ He turned back to Petersen. ‘How many of the eight have their baggage here? Men and women, I mean?’

‘Five. Three of us have our baggage in a hut about fifty yards away – myself and those two gentlemen here.’

‘Slavko. Sava.’ This to two of his men. ‘This man Alex will show you where the hut is. Bring the baggage back. Search it very carefully first. And be just as careful in watching this man. He has an appalling record.’ For a fleeting moment the expression on Alex’s face made Crni’s statement more than credible. ‘Hurry nothing, watch everything.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We have forty minutes left.’

In less than half that time all the luggage had been packed and collected. George said: ‘I know I’m not allowed to ask a question so may I make a statement? Oh, that’s a question, too. I want to make a statement.’

‘What?’

‘I’m thirsty.’

‘I see no harm.’

‘Thank you.’ George had opened a bottle and downed a glass of wine in what appeared near-impossible time.

‘Try that other bottle,’ Crni suggested. George blinked, frowned, but willingly did what he was told. ‘Seems satisfactory. My men could do with a specific against the cold.’

‘Seems satisfactory?’ George stared at him. ‘You suggest that I could have doctored some bottles, poisoned bottles, against just such an impossible eventuality? Me? A faculty dean? A learned academic? A – a –’

‘Some academics are more learned than others. You’d have done the same.’ Three of his men took a glass: the other two held their unwavering guns. There was a discouraging certainty about everything Crni said and did: he seemed to take the minutest precautions against anything untoward, including, as George had said, the impossible eventuality.

Metrovi said: ‘What happens to Major Rankovi and myself?’

‘You remain behind.’

‘Dead?’

‘Alive. Bound and gagged but alive. We are not etniks. We do not murder helpless soldiers, far less helpless civilians.’

‘Nor do we.’

‘Of course not. Those thousands of Muslims who perished in south Serbia died by their own hands. Cowards, were they not?’

Metrovi made no reply.

‘And how many more thousand Serbians – men, women and children – were massacred in Croatia, with the most bestial atrocities ever recorded in the Balkans, just because of their religion?’

‘We had no hand in that. The Ustaša are no soldiers, just undisciplined terrorists.’

‘The Ustaša are your allies. Just as the Germans are your allies. Remember Kragujevac, Major, where the Partisans killed ten Germans and the Germans rounded up and shot five thousand Yugoslav citizens? Marched the children out of schools and shot them in droves until even the execution squads were sickened and mutinied? Your allies. Remember the retreat from Uice where the German tanks rolled backwards and forwards over the fields until all the wounded Partisans lying there had been crushed to death? Your allies. The guilt of your murderous friends is your guilt too. Much as we would like to treat you in the same fashion we will not. I have my orders and, besides, you are at least technically our allies.’ Crni’s voice was heavy with contempt.

Metrovi said: ‘You are Partisans.’

‘God forbid!’ The revulsion in Crni’s face was momentary but unmistakable. ‘Do we look like guerrilla rabble? We are paratroopers of the Murge division.’ The Murge was the best Italian division then operating in south-east Europe. ‘Your allies, as I said.’ Crni gestured towards the eight prisoners. ‘You harbour a nest of vipers. You can’t recognize them as such, far less know what to do with them. We can do both.’

Metrovi looked at Petersen. ‘I think I owe you an apology, Peter. Last night I didn’t know whether to believe your assessment or not. It seemed so fantastic. Not any more. You were right.’

‘Much good that’s done me. My forecast, I mean. I was twentyfour hours out.’

‘Tie them up,’ Crni said.

Immediately after leaving the hut, to nobody’s surprise, they were joined by two other soldiers: Crni was not the man to spend almost an hour inside any place without having a guard posted outside. That those were élite troops was beyond question. It was a bitter night, with driving snow, a biting wind and zero visibility but Crni and his men not only put up with the extreme conditions but seemed positively to revel in them.

Metrovi had been wrong more than once the previous night. He had said that nobody was going to be moving around the mountains in those impossible weather conditions for days to come: Crni and his men were there to prove him wrong.

Once they were well clear of the camp Crni and his men produced torches. The prisoners were arranged so that they trudged on in single file through the deepening snow – it was already almost knee-high – while four of the guards walked on either side of them. By and by, at a command from Crni, they halted.

Crni said: ‘Here, I’m afraid, we have to tie you up. Your wrists. Behind your backs.’

‘I’m surprised you haven’t done it before,’ Petersen said. ‘I’m even more surprised that you want to do it now. You have in mind to kill us all, perhaps?’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘We are at the head of that track leading down the mountain-side to the valley floor?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the wind hasn’t changed since yesterday. You have ponies?’

‘Two only. For the ladies. That was all you required yesterday.’

‘You are very well informed. And the rest of us are to have our hands bound behind our backs just in case we feel tempted to give you or one of your men a brisk shove over the precipice. Mistake, Captain Crni, mistake. Out of character.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Two reasons. The surface of that rock is broken and slippery with either ice or hard-packed snow. If a man slips on that surface how is he, with his hands tied behind his back, going to grab at the ground to stop himself sliding over the edge – and how’s he going to be able to maintain his balance in the first place with his hands tied? To keep your balance you have to be able to stretch both arms wide. You should know that. It’s as good as sending people to their deaths. Second reason is that your men don’t have to be anywhere near the prisoners. Four of them well in advance, four well behind, the prisoners, maybe with a couple of torches, in the middle. What positive action could the prisoners take then except commit suicide by jumping off the precipice? I can assure you that none of them is in the least suicidally inclined.’

‘I am not a mountaineer, Major Petersen. I take your point.’

‘Another request, if I may. Let Giacomo and myself walk alongside the young ladies’ ponies. I’m afraid the young ladies don’t care too much for heights.’

‘I don’t want you!’ Even the prospect of the descent had brought a note of hysteria into Sarina’s voice. ‘I don’t want you!’

‘She doesn’t want you,’ Crni said drily.

‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying. It’s just a personal opinion of mine. She suffers severely from vertigo. What have I to gain by saying so?’

‘Nothing that I can see.’

As they lined up by the cliff-top, Giacomo, leading a pony, brushed by Petersen and said, sotto voce: ‘That, Major, was quite a performance.’ He vanished into the snow with Petersen looking thoughtfully after him.

A steep descent, in treacherous conditions, is always more difficult and dangerous than a steep ascent and so it was to prove in this case. It is also slower and it took them all of forty minutes to reach the valley floor but reach it they did without incident. Sarina spoke for the first time since they had left the plateau.

‘We are down?’

‘Safe and sound as ever was.’

She gave a long quavering sigh. ‘Thank you. You don’t need to hold my horse any more.’

‘Pony. Whatever you say. I was getting quite attached to the old lady.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that you’re so – so awful and so kind. No, I’m the person who is awful. You’re the person they’re after.’

‘As is only fitting. My rank.’

‘They’re going to kill you, aren’t they?’

‘Kill me? What a thought. Why should they? A little discreet questioning perhaps.’

‘You said yourself that General Granelli is an evil man.’

‘General Granelli is in Rome. Haven’t you given any thought as to what is going to happen to you?’

‘No, I haven’t.’ Her voice was dull. ‘I don’t think I care what’s going to happen to me.’

‘That,’ said Petersen, ‘is what is known as a conversation stopper.’ They moved on in silence, the still heavily falling snow now at their backs, until Crni called a halt. He had the beam of his torch directed at the Italian army truck Petersen had stolen two days previously.

‘It was thoughtful of you, Major, to leave transport so conveniently at hand.’

‘If we can help our allies – you didn’t arrive by this.’

‘It was thoughtful, but not necessary.’ Crni moved the beam of the torch. Another, even larger Italian truck, was parked close by. ‘All of you, into that truck. Edvard, come with me.’

The eight prisoners were ushered into the larger truck and made to sit on the floor crowded up against the cab. Five soldiers followed them and sat on side benches towards the rear. Five torch beams were directed forwards and in the light of the beams it was possible to see that an equal number of machine-pistol barrels were pointed in the same direction. The engine started up and the truck jolted off. Five minutes later they turned right on to the main Neretva road.

‘Ah!’ Harrison said. ‘Bound for the bright lights of Jablanica, I see.’

‘On this road, where else?’ Petersen said. ‘After that the road divides. We could be going anywhere. I would guess that Jablanica is as far as we go. It’s getting late. Even Crni and his men have to sleep.’

Shortly afterwards the driver stopped both the truck and the engine.

‘I don’t see any bright lights around here,’ Harrison said. ‘What are those devils up to now?’

‘Nothing that concerns us,’ Petersen said. ‘Our driver is just waiting for Crni and his friend Edvard to join him up front.’

‘Why? They have their own transport.’

‘Had. It’s in the Neretva now. That lad who met us yesterday – you remember, Dominic, the driver with the sunglasses – would not have failed to note the make and number of the truck. When and if Rankovi are discovered and freed – which may not be for hours yet – the proverbial hue and cry may be raised. “May”, I say. I doubt it. The Colonel is not a man to publicize the security gaps in his forces. But Crni doesn’t strike me as a man to take the slightest chance.’

‘Objection,’ Giacomo said. ‘If your friend Cipriano is the man behind this, he already knows the description of the truck. So what’s the point in destroying the truck?’

‘Giacomo, you sadden me. We don’t know that Cipriano is the man behind this but if he is he wouldn’t want to leave any clue that would point a finger at him in connection with the abduction. Remember that, officially, he and the Colonel are sworn allies, faithful unto death.’

Voices came from up front, a door banged, the engine started again and the truck moved off. ‘That must be the way of it,’ Giacomo said to no-one in particular. ‘Pity about the truck, though.’

They jolted on through the snow-filled night, torch beams and barrels still pointed at them, until suddenly Harrison said: ‘At last. Civilization. It’s a long time since I’ve seen city lights.’

Harrison, as was his custom, was exaggerating to a considerable extent. A few dim lights appeared occasionally through the opened back of the truck but hardly enough to lend the impression that they were driving through a metropolis. By and by the truck pulled off on to a side road, climbed briefly, then stopped. The guards apparently knew where they were and did not wait for orders. They jumped down, lined up torches and guns as before and were joined by Crni.

‘Down,’ he said. ‘This is as far as we go tonight.’

They lowered themselves to the ground and looked around them. As far as could be judged from the light of the beams, the building before them appeared to be standing alone and seemed, vaguely, to be shaped like a chalet. But, in the darkness and the snow it could have been just any building.

Crni led the way inside. The hallway presented a pleasant contrast to the swirling cold of the wintry night outside. The furnishings were sparse enough, just a table, a few chairs and a dresser, but it was warm – a small log fire burned in a low hearth – and warmly if not brightly lit: electric power had not yet reached this part of Jablanica and suspended oil lamps were the norm.

‘Door to the left is a bathroom,’ Crni said. ‘Can be used anytime. There will, of course,’ he added unnecessarily, ‘be a guard in the hall all the time. The other door to the left leads to the main quarters of the house and does not concern you. Neither do those stairs.’ He led the way to an opened door on the far right and ushered them inside. ‘Your quarters for the night.’

The room was unmistakably such as one would only find in a chalet. It was long, wide and low, with beamed ceiling, knotted pine walls and an oak parquet floor. Cushioned benches ran both sides of the room, there was a table, several armchairs, a very commodious dresser, some cupboards and shelves and, best of all, a rather splendid log fire several times the size of the one in the hallway. The only immediately incongruous note was struck by some canvas cots, blankets and pillows stacked neatly in one corner. It was George, inevitably, who discovered the second and not so immediately incongruous note. He pulled back the curtains covering one of the two windows and examined with interest the massive bars on the outside.

‘It is part of the general malaise of our times,’ he said sadly. ‘With the onset of war, the deterioration of standards is as immediate as it is inevitable. The rules of honour, decency and common law go by default and moral degeneracy rears its ugly head.’ He let fall the curtains. ‘A wise precaution, very wise. One feels sure that the streets of Jablanica are infested by burglars, house-breakers, footpads and other criminals of that ilk.’

Crni ignored him and looked at Petersen who was inspecting the bedding. ‘Yes, Major, I can count, too. Only six cots. We have a room upstairs for the two young ladies.’

‘Considerate. You were very sure of yourself, weren’t you, Captain Crni?’

‘Oh, no, he wasn’t,’ George said disgustedly. ‘A blind man could drive a coach and four with bells on through Mihajlovi’s perimeter.’ For a second time Crni ignored him. He had probably come to the conclusion that this was the only way to treat him.

‘We may or may not move on tomorrow. It certainly won’t be early. Depends entirely on the weather. From now on our travel will be mainly on foot. Should you be hungry, there’s food in that cupboard there. The contents of that high dresser will be of more interest to the professor.’

‘Ah!’ George opened the doors and looked appreciatively at what was, in effect, a comprehensively stocked miniature bar. ‘The window bars are superfluous, Captain Crni. I shall not be moving on tonight.’

‘Even if you could, where would you go? When you ladies want to sleep, let the guard know and I’ll show you your room. I may or may not wish to interrogate you later, it depends on a call I have to make.’

‘You surprise me,’ Petersen said. ‘I thought the phone system had ceased to work.’

‘Radio, of course. We do have one. In fact, we have four, the other three being yours and those two very modern sets belonging to the von Karajans. I expect the code books will also prove to be useful.’

He left behind him a profound and fairly lengthy silence interrupted only by the sound of a cork being extracted from a bottle. Michael was the first to speak.

‘Radios,’ he said bitterly. ‘Code books.’ He looked accusingly at Petersen. ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’

‘Yes. Nothing. Crni was amusing himself. All it means is that we will be put to the trouble of getting ourselves a new code. What else do you think they’ll do after they discover the books are missing? They will do this, of course, not to protect themselves against their enemies but against their friends. The Germans have twice broken the code that we use among ourselves.’ He looked at Harrison, who had seated himself, cross-legged, in an arm-chair before the fire and was contemplating a glass of wine that George had just handed him. ‘For a man who has just been driven from house and home, Jamie, or snatched from it, which comes to the same thing, you don’t look all that downcast to me.’

‘I’m not,’ Harrison said comfortably. ‘No reason to be. I never thought I’d find quarters better than my last one but I was wrong, I mean, look, a real log fire. Carpe diem, as the man says. What, Peter, do you think the future holds for us?’

‘I wouldn’t know how to use a crystal ball.’

‘Pity. It would have been nice to think that I might see the white cliffs of Dover again.’

‘I don’t see why not. No one’s after your blood. I mean, you haven’t been up to anything, have you, Jamie? Such as sending clandestine radio messages, in codes unknown to us, to parties also unknown to us?’

‘Certainly not.’ Harrison was unruffled. ‘I’m not that kind of person, I don’t have any secrets and I’m useless with a radio anyway. So you think I might see the white cliffs again. Do you think I’ll be seeing the old homestead on Mount Prenj again?’

‘I should think it highly unlikely.’

‘Well now. A fairly confident prediction and without a crystal ball.’

‘For that, I don’t need a crystal ball. A person who has occupied the – ah – delicate position you have done will never again be employed in that capacity after he’s been captured by the enemy. Torturing, brain-washing, reconversion to a double-agent, that sort of thing. Standard practice. You’d never be trusted again.’

‘I say, that’s a bit thick, isn’t it? A blameless, stainless reputation. It’s hardly my fault that I’ve been captured. It wouldn’t have happened if you people had looked after me a bit better. Thank you, George, I will have a little more. Now that I’m happily out of that place, I’ve no intention of ever returning to it, not unless I’m dragged forcibly back to it, kicking and screaming in the accepted fashion.’ He raised his glass. ‘Your health, Peter.’

‘You have taken an aversion to the people, the etniks, the Colonel, myself?’

‘A profound aversion. Well, not to you, although I must admit I don’t care overmuch for what might be called your military politics. You’re a total enigma to me, Peter, but I’d rather have you on my side than against me. As for the rest, I despise them. An extraordinary position for an ally to find himself in, is it not?’

‘I think I’ll have some wine, too, George, if I may. Well, yes, Jamie, it’s true, you have made your discontent – I might even say displeasure – rather guardedly evident from time to time but I thought you were doing no more than exercising every soldier’s inalienable right to complain loudly and at length about every conceivable aspect of army life.’ He sipped his wine thoughtfully. ‘One gathers there was something a little more to it than that?’

‘A little more? There was a great deal more.’ Harrison sipped his wine and gazed at the burning logs, a man relaxed, at peace with himself. ‘In spite of the fact that the future looks somewhat uncertain, in some ways I owe our Captain Crni a favour. He’s done no more than to pre-empt my decision, my intention, to leave Mount Prenj and its miserable inhabitants at the first convenient opportunity. Had it not been for the unexpected happening of the past couple of hours, you’d have discovered that I’d already made an official request for an official recall. But, of course, as matters stood before the appearance of Captain Crni, I wouldn’t have made any such disclosures anyway.’

‘I could have misjudged you, Jamie.’

‘Indeed you could.’ He looked around the room to see if there was anyone else misjudging him, but there was no-one thinking along those lines: a magnet to the iron filings, he had the undivided attention of every person in the room.

‘So you didn’t – don’t – like us?’

‘I should have thought that I had made that abundantly clear. I may be no soldier, and the good Lord knows that I’m not, but I’m no clown either, all appearances to the contrary. I’m educated after a fashion: in practically any intellectual field that matters the average soldier is a virtual illiterate.

I’m not educated in the way George is, I don’t float around in cloud-cuckoo-land or wander among the groves of academe.’ George looked profoundly hurt and reached for the wine bottle. ‘I have been educated in a more practical fashion. Wouldn’t you agree, Lorraine?’

‘I would.’ She smiled and said as if by rote: ‘B.Sc., M.Sc., A.M.I.E.E., A.M.I.Mech.E. Oh, he’s educated, all right. I used to be James’s secretary.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Petersen said. ‘The world grows even smaller.’ Giacomo covered his face with his hand.

‘Bachelor of Science, Master of Science we understand,’ George said. ‘As for the rest, it sounds as if he was coming down with a terminal illness.’

‘Associate Member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers,’ Lorraine said. ‘Associate Member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.’

‘It’s unimportant.’ Harrison was impatient. ‘Point is I’ve been trained to observe, evaluate and analyze. I’ve been out here less than two months but I can tell you it took only a fraction of that time and a minimum of observation, evaluation and analysis to realize that Britain was backing the wrong horse in the Yugoslav stakes.

‘I speak as a British officer. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but Britain is locked, literally, in mortal combat with Germany. How do we defeat the Germans – by fighting them and killing them. How should we judge our allies or potential allies, what yardstick should we use? One. Only one. Are they fighting and killing Germans? Is Mihajlovi? Is he hell. He’s fighting with the Germans, alongside the Germans. Tito? Every German soldier caught in the sights of a Partisan rifle is a dead man. Yet those fools and dolts and idiots in London keep sending supplies to Mihajlovi, a man who is in effect their sworn enemy. I am ashamed for my own people. The only possible reason for this – God knows it’s no excuse – is that Britain’s war, as far as the Balkans is concerned, is being run by politicians and soldiers, and politicians are almost as naïve and illiterate as soldiers.’

George said: ‘You speak harsh words about your own people, James.’

‘Shut up! No, sorry, George, I didn’t mean that, but in spite or maybe because of your vast education you’re just as naïve and illiterate as any of them. Harsh but true. How does this extraordinary situation come about? Mihajlovi is a near Machiavellian genius in international diplomacy: Tito is too busy killing Germans to have any time for any such thing.

‘As far back as September 1941 Mihajlovi and his Cetniks, instead of fighting the Germans, were busy establishing contacts with your precious Royalist government in London. Yes, Peter Petersen, precious I said and precious I did not mean. They don’t give a damn about the unimaginable sufferings of the Yugoslav people, all they want to do is to regain royal power and if it’s over the bodies of one or two millions of their countrymen, so much the worse for their countrymen. And, of course, Mihajlovi, when contacting King Peter and his so-called advisers could hardly help contacting the British government as well. What a bonus! And naturally, at the same time, he contacted the British forces in the Middle East. For all I know the dunderheaded brasshats in Cairo may still regard the Colonel as the great white hope for Yugoslavia.’ He gestured towards Sarina and Michael. ‘In fact, the dunderheads unquestionably still do. Look at this gullible young couple here, specially trained by the British to come to the aid and comfort of the gallant etniks.’

‘We’re not gullible!’ Sarina’s voice was strained, her hands twisted together and she could have been close to either anger or tears. ‘We weren’t trained by the British, we were trained by the Americans. And we didn’t come to give aid and comfort to the etniks.’

‘There are no American radio operator schools in Cairo. Only British. If you received American training it was because the British wanted it that way.’ Harrison’s tone was as cool and discouraging as his face. ‘I think you’re gullible, I think you tell lies and I believe you came to help the etniks. I also think you’re a fine actress.’

‘Good for you, Jamie,’ Petersen said approvingly. ‘You got one thing right there. She is a fine actress. But she’s not gullible, she doesn’t tell lies – well, maybe one or two little white ones – and she didn’t come to help us.’

Both Harrison and Sarina stared at him in astonishment. Harrison said: ‘How on earth can you say that?’

‘Intuition.’

‘Intuition!’ Harrison, was, for Harrison, being heavily sardonic. ‘If your intuition is on a par with your judgment you can mothball the two of them together. And don’t try to side-track me. Hasn’t it struck you as ironic that when you and your precious etniks’ – Harrison was very fond of the word ‘precious’ and used it, always in its most derogatory sense, with telling effect – ’were receiving arms and payments from the Germans, Italians and Nedi’s quisling Serb régime, that you were simultaneously receiving arms and payments from the western allies – this, mark you, at a time when you were fighting along with the Germans, Italians and Ustaša in an attempt to destroy the Partisans, Britain’s only real allies in Yugoslavia?’

‘Have some more wine, Jamie.’

‘Thank you, George.’ Harrison shook his head. ‘I confess myself to being totally baffled and, when I say that, I mean baffled all round. By you etniks and by my own people. Can it really be that there are none so blind as will not see? Are you so gagged and blinkered by your all-consuming and wholly misguided sense of patriotism, by your blind allegiance to a discredited royalty that your myopic eyes are so reduced to a ten-degree field of tunnel vision that you have no concept of the three hundred and fifty degree of peripheral vision that lies beyond? Are my people in London similarly affected? They have to be, they have to be, for what else could explain the inexplicable, the incomprehensible idiocy of keeping on sending supplies to Mihajlovi when they have before them incontrovertible evidence that he is actively collaborating with the Germans.’

‘I’ll bet you couldn’t say that again,’ Petersen said admiringly. ‘All the big words, I mean. As you say, Jamie, it’s all probably reduced to a factor of vision, what lies in the eye of the beholder.’ He rose, crossed over to the fireplace and sat down beside Sarina. ‘This is not really a switch, we’re talking about the same thing. How did you enjoy your tête-à-tête with the Colonel this morning?’

‘Tête-à-tête? I didn’t have any tête-à-tête with him. Michael and I just reported to him. You told us to. Or have you forgotten?’

‘I’ve forgotten nothing. But I think you have. Walls have ears. Not original, but still true.’

She glanced quickly at Michael then back again. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Walls also have eyes.’

‘Stop brow-beating my sister!’ Michael shouted.

‘Brow-beating? Asking a simple question is brow-beating? If that’s what you call browbeating maybe I should start beating you about the brow. You were there, too, of course. You got anything to tell me? You have, you know. I already know what your answer should be. Your truthful answer.’

‘I’ve got nothing to tell you! Nothing! Nothing at all!’

‘You’re a lousy actor. Also, you’re too vehement by half.’

‘I’ve had enough of you, Petersen!’ Michael was breathing quickly and shallowly. ‘Enough of your bullying my sister and me.’ He jumped to his feet. ‘If you think I’m going to stand –’

‘You’re not going to stand, Michael.’ George had come up behind Michael and laid his hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re going to sit.’ Michael sat. ‘If you can’t keep quiet I’ll have to tie and gag you. Major Petersen is asking questions.’

‘Good Lord!’ Harrison was or seemed outraged. ‘This is a bit thick, George. A bit high-handed, I must say. Peter, I don’t think you’re any longer in a position to –’

‘And if you don’t keep quiet,’ George said with a trace of weariness in his voice, ‘I’ll do the same thing to you.’

‘To me!’ No question, this time the outrage was genuine. ‘Me? An officer? A Captain in the British Army! By God! Giacomo, you’re an Englishman. I appeal to you –’

‘Appeal is denied. I wouldn’t hurt an officer’s feelings by telling him to shut up, but I think the Major is trying to establish something. You may not like his military philosophy but at least you should keep an open mind. And I think Sarina should too. I think you’re both being foolish.’

Harrison muttered ‘My God’ twice and subsided.

Petersen said: ‘Thanks, Giacomo. Sarina, if you think I’m trying to hurt you or harm you then you are, as Giacomo says, being foolish. I couldn’t and wouldn’t. I want to help. Did you and the Colonel have or not have a private conversation?’

‘We talked, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Of course you talked. If I sound a bit exasperated, it’s pardonable. What did you talk about? Me?’

‘No. Yes. I mean, among other things.’

‘Among other things,’ he mimicked. ‘What other things?’

‘Just other things. Just generally.’

‘That’s a lie. You talked just about me and, maybe, a bit about Colonel Lunz. Remember, walls can have both ears and eyes. And you can’t remember what you said when you sold me down the river which is where I am now. How many pieces of silver did the good Colonel give you?’

‘I never did!’ She was breathing quickly now and there were patches of red high up on her cheeks. ‘I didn’t betray you. I didn’t! I didn’t!’

‘And all for a little piece of paper. I hope you got your due. You earned your thirty pieces. You didn’t know that I’d picked up the paper later, did you?’ He brought a piece of paper out from his tunic and unfolded it. ‘This one.’

She stared at it dully, looked at him equally dully, put her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘I don’t know any more. I know you’re a bad man, a wicked man, but I didn’t betray you.’

‘I know you didn’t.’ He reached out a gentle hand and touched her shoulder. ‘But I know what’s going on. I have done all along. I’m sorry if I hurt you but I had to get you to say it. Why couldn’t you have admitted it in the first place? Or have you forgotten what I said only yesterday morning?’

‘Forgotten what?’ She took her hands from her face and looked at him. It was difficult to say if the hazel eyes were still dull for there were tears in them.

‘That you’re far too nice and too transparently honest to do anything underhand. There were three pieces of paper. The one I gave to the Colonel, this one I’d made out before leaving Rome – I never picked anything up after your talk with him – and the one Colonel Lunz had given to you.’

‘You are clever, aren’t you?’ She’d wiped the tears from her eyes and they weren’t dull any more, just mad.

‘Cleverer than you are, anyway,’ Petersen said cheerfully. ‘For some inexplicable reason Lunz thought that I might be some kind of spy or double agent and change the message, forge a different set of orders. But I didn’t, did I? The message I gave the Colonel was the one I received and it checked with the copy Lunz had given you. Paradoxically, of course – you being a woman – this annoyed you. If I had been a spy, a sort of reconverted renegade who had gone over to the other side, you would have been no end pleased, wouldn’t you? You might have respected me, even liked me a little. Well, I remained an unreconstructed etnik. You were aware, of course, that if I had changed the orders that Mihajlovi would have had me executed?’

A little colour drained from her face and she touched her hand to her lips.

‘Of course you were unaware. Not only are you incapable of double-dealing, not only are you incapable of thinking along double-dealing lines, you’re not even capable of thinking of the consequences to the double-dealer who has overplayed his hand. How an otherwise intelligent girl – well, never mind. As I’ve said before, in this nasty espionage world, leave the thinking to those who are capable of it. Why did you do it, Sarina?’

‘Why did I do what?’ All of a sudden she seemed quite defenceless. She said, almost in a monotone: ‘What am I going to be accused of now?’

‘Nothing, my dear. I promise you. Nothing. I was just wondering, although I’m sure I know why, how it came about that you went along with this underground deal with Colonel Lunz, something so completely alien to your nature. It was because it was your only way into Yugoslavia. If you had refused, he’d have refused you entrance. So I’ve answered my own question.’ Petersen rose. ‘Wine, George, wine. All this talk is thirsty work.’

‘What is not common knowledge,’ George said, ‘is that listening is even thirstier work.’

Petersen lifted his replenished glass and turned towards Harrison. ‘To your health, Jamie. As a British officer, of course.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Clutching his glass Harrison struggled to his feet. ‘Of course. Your health. Ah. Well. Extenuating circumstances, old boy. How was I –’

‘And a gentleman.’

‘Of course, of course.’ He was still confused. ‘A gentleman.’

‘Were you being a gentleman, Jamie, when you called her a gullible liar, and an aider and comforter to us miserable lot? This lovely and charming lady is not only not that, she’s something you’ve been looking for, something to gladden your patriotic heart, a true blue loyalist and not a true blue Royalist, a patriot in your best sense of the word, what you would call a Yugoslav. As dedicated a Partisan as one can be who has never seen a Partisan in her life. That’s why she and her brother came back to this country the hard way, to give – as you would put it in your customary stirring language, Jamie – their services to their country, i.e., the Partisans.’

Harrison put down his glass, crossed to where Sarina was sitting, stooped low, lifted the back of her hand and kissed it. ‘Your servant, ma’am.’

‘That’s an apology?’ George said.

‘For an English officer,’ Petersen said, ‘that is – as an English officer would say – a jolly handsome apology.’

‘He’s not the only one who’s due to make an apology.’ Michael wasn’t actually shuffling his feet but he looked as if he would have liked to. ‘Major Petersen, I have –’

‘No apology, Michael,’ Petersen said hastily. ‘No apology. If I’d a sister like that, I wouldn’t even talk to her tormentor, in this case, me. I’d clobber him over the head with a two by four. So if I don’t apologise to your sister for what I’ve done to her, don’t you apologize to me.’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’ He hesitated. ‘May I ask how long you’ve known that Sarina and I were – well, what you say we are.’

‘From the first time I saw you. Rather, let me say I suspected something was far wrong when I met you in that Rome apartment. You were both stiff, awkward, ill at ease, reserved, even truculent. No smile on the lips, no song in the heart, none of the eagerness, the youthful enthusiasm of those marching off into a glorious future. Ultra-cautious, ultra-suspicious. Wrong attitude altogether. If you’d been flying red flags you couldn’t have indicated more clearly that something was weighing heavily on your minds. Your pasts were so blameless, so your concern was obviously with future problems such – as became evident quite soon – how you were going to transfer yourselves to the Partisan camp after you had arrived at our HQ. Your sister lost little time in giving you away – it was in the mountain inn when she tried to convince me of her Royalist sympathies. Told me she was a pal of King Peter’s – prince, as he was then.’

‘I never did!’ Her indignation was unconvincing. ‘I just met him a few times.’

‘Sarina.’ The tone was mildly reproving.

She said nothing.

‘How often must I tell you –’

‘Oh, all right,’ she said.

‘She’s never met him in her life. She sympathized with me about his club foot. Young lad’s as fit as a fiddle. Wouldn’t know a club foot if he saw one. Well, all this is of interest but I’m afraid only academic interest.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Giacomo said. ‘It’s of more than academic interest to me.’ He was, as always, smiling, but in the circumstances, it was difficult to say what he was smiling about. ‘However, as a matter of academic interest, I’m totally in agreement with those kids – sorry, I mean Sarina and Michael. I don’t want to fight – I mean I don’t want to fight in those damned mountains; the Aegean and the Royal Navy will do me very nicely, thank you – but if I have to it’ll be with the Partisans.’

‘You’re like Jamie,’ Petersen said. ‘If you’re going to fight anybody it’s going to be the Germans?’

‘I think I made that pretty clear to you back in the Hotel Eden.’

‘You did. It’s still only a matter of academic interest. What are you going to do about it? How do you intend going about joining your guerrilla friends?’

Giacomo smiled. ‘I’ll wait for a break.’

‘You could wait for ever.’

‘Peter.’ There was a note of appeal, almost desperation, in Harrison’s voice. ‘I know you owe us nothing, that you have no responsibility for us any more. But there must be a way. However different our philosophies, we’re all in this together. Come on, Peter. We could settle our differences afterwards. Meantime – well, a man of your infinite resources and –’

‘Jamie,’ Petersen said gently. ‘Can’t you see the fence down the middle of this room. George, Alex and I are on one side. You five are on the other. Well, you, the von Karajans and Giacomo are. I don’t know about Lorraine. It’s a mile high, that fence, Jamie, and not for climbing.’

‘I see his point, Captain Harrison,’ Giacomo said. ‘The fence is not for climbing. Besides, my pride wouldn’t let me try it. I must say, Major, it’s not like you to leave loose ends lying around. Lorraine, here. Doesn’t she fit into a category? For our edification, I mean.’

‘Category? I don’t know. And not to give you offence, Lorraine, but I don’t really care now. It doesn’t matter. Not any more.’ He sat down, glass in hand, and said no more. As far as anyone could tell, Major Petersen had, for the first time in their experience, lapsed into a brooding silence.

It was a silence, punctuated only by the occasional glug-glug as George topped empty wineglasses, that stretched on and uncomfortably on, until Lorraine said suddenly and sharply: ‘What’s wrong? Please, what’s wrong?’

‘Speaking to me?’ Petersen said.

‘Yes. You’re staring at me. You keep on staring at me.’

‘Being on the wrong side of a fence doesn’t stop a man from having good taste,’ Giacomo said.

‘I wasn’t aware of it,’ Petersen said. He smiled. ‘Besides, as Giacomo said, it’s no hardship. I’m sorry. I was a long long way away, that’s all.’

‘And speaking of staring,’ Giacomo said cheerfully, ‘Sarina’s no slouch at it either. Her eyes haven’t left your face since you started your Rodin the thinker bit. There are deep currents, hereabouts. Do you know what I think? I think she’s thinking.’

‘Oh, do be quiet, Giacomo.’ She sounded positively cross.

‘Well, I suppose we’re all thinking one way or another,’ Petersen said. ‘Heaven knows we’ve plenty to think about. You, Jamie, you’re sunk in a pretty profound gloom. The bright lights? No. The white cliffs? No. Ah! The lights of home.’

Harrison smiled and said nothing.

‘What’s she like, Jamie?’

‘What’s she like?’ Harrison smiled again, shrugged and looked at Lorraine.

‘Jenny’s wonderful,’ Lorraine said quietly. ‘I think she’s the most wonderful person in the world. She’s my best friend and James doesn’t deserve her. She’s worth ten of him.’

Harrison smiled like a man who was well-pleased with himself and reached for his wineglass; if he was wounded, he hid it well.

Petersen looked away until his eyes lighted casually on Giacomo, who nodded almost imperceptibly: Petersen smiled slightly and looked away.

Twenty more minutes passed, partly in desultory conversation but mainly in silence, before the door opened and Edvard entered. ‘Major Petersen?’

Petersen rose. Giacomo made to speak but Petersen forestalled him. ‘Don’t say it. Thumbscrews.’

He was back inside five minutes. Giacomo looked disappointed. ‘No thumb-screws?’

‘No thumb-screws. I would like to say that they’re bringing out a rack and that you’re next. No rack. But you’re next.’

Giacomo left. Harrison said: ‘What was it like. What did they want?’

‘Very humane. Very civilized. What you would expect of Crni. Lots of questions, some very personal, but I just gave them name, rank and regiment, which is all you’re legally required to give. They didn’t press the matter.’

Giacomo was back in even less time than Petersen. ‘Disappointing,’ he said. ‘Very disappointing. They’d never have made the Spanish Inquisition. The courtesy of your presence, Captain Harrison.’

Harrison was away a little longer than either but not much. He returned looking very thoughtful. ‘You’re next, Lorraine.’

‘Me?’ She stood and hesitated. ‘Well, if I don’t go I suppose they’ll come for me.’

‘It would be most unseemly,’ Petersen said. ‘We’ve survived. What’s a lion’s den to an English girl like you?’

She nodded and left, but left reluctantly. Petersen said: ‘How was it, Jamie?’

‘An urbane lot, as you say. Seemed to know a surprising amount about me. No questions that had any military bearing that I could see.’

Lorraine was absent for at least fifteen minutes. When she returned she was rather pale and although there were no tears on her cheeks it seemed clear that she had been crying. Sarina looked at Petersen, Harrison and Giacomo, shook her head and put her arm round Lorraine’s shoulders.

‘They’re a gallant lot, aren’t they, Lorraine? Chivalrous. Concerned.’ She gave them a withering glance. ‘Maybe they’re just shy. Who’s next?’

‘They didn’t ask to see anyone.’

‘What did they do to you, Lorraine?’

‘Nothing. Do you mean – no, no, they didn’t touch me. It was just some of the questions they asked …’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Please, Sarina, I’d rather not talk about it.’

‘Maraschino,’ George said authoritatively. He took her by the arm, seated her and proffered a small glass. She took it, smiled gratefully and said nothing.

Crni came in accompanied by Edvard. He was, for the first time anyone had seen, relaxed and smiling.

‘I have some news for you. I hope you will find it good news.’

‘You’re not even armed,’ George said. ‘How do you know we won’t break every bone in your bodies? Better still, use you as hostage to escape? We are desperate men.’

‘Would you do that, Professor?’

‘No. Some wine?’

‘Thank you, Professor. Good news, at least I think it’s good news, for the von Karajans, Captain Harrison and Giacomo. I am sorry that we have been guilty of a small deception but it was necessary in the circumstances. We are not members of the Murge Division. We are, thank heavens, not even Italians. We are just common-orgarden members of a Partisan reconnaissance group.’

‘Partisans.’ There was no excitement in Sarina’s voice, just incomprehension tinged with disbelief.

Crni smiled. ‘It’s true.’

‘Partisans.’ Harrison shook his head. ’Pon my soul. Partisans. Well, now. I mean. Yes.’ He shook his head then his voice rose an octave. ‘Partisans!’

‘Is it true?’ Sarina had Crni by the arms and was actually shaking him. ‘Is it true?’

‘Of course it’s true.’

She searched his eyes as if searching for the truth, then suddenly put her arm around him and hugged him. She was very still for a moment then released him and stepped back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

He smiled. ‘There’s no regulation that says that a young recruit, female, may not hug an officer. Not, of course, to make a practice of it.’

‘There’s that, too, of course.’ She smiled uncertainly.

‘There’s something else?’

‘No, not really. We’re terribly glad to see you.’

‘Glad?’ Harrison said. ‘Glad!’ The initial shock absorbed, he was in a state bordering on euphoria. ‘Nothing less than a merciful providence has sent you our way!’

‘It wasn’t a merciful providence, Captain Harrison. It was a radio message. When my commanding officer says “move”, I move. That’s the “something else” you wouldn’t talk about, Miss von Karajan. Your fears are groundless. Military regulations don’t allow me to shoot my boss.’

‘Your boss?’ She looked at him, then Petersen, then back at Crni. ‘I don’t understand.’

Crni sighed. ‘You’re quite right, Peter. You, too Giacomo. No espionage material among this lot. If there were they wouldn’t have to be hit over the head with the obvious. We’re both Partisans. We’re both in intelligence. I am the ranking subordinate officer. He is the deputy chief. I’m sure that makes everything clear.’

‘Perfectly,’ George said. He handed Crni a glass. ‘Your wine, Ivan.’ He turned to Sarina. ‘He doesn’t really like being called Crni. And don’t clench your fists. All right, all right, this is life in a nutshell. Decisions, decisions. Do you kiss him or do you hit him?’ The bantering note left George’s voice. ‘If you’re mad because you’ve been fooled, then you’re a fool. There was no other way. You and your hurt pride. You’ve got your Partisans and he hasn’t to face a firing squad. Don’t you know how to be glad, girl? Or is there no room for emotions like relief and gratitude in the minds of you spoilt young aristocrats?’

‘George!’ She was shocked, less because of the words than the tone she had never heard before. ‘George! I am so selfish?’

‘Never.’ His good humour instantly restored, he squeezed her shoulders. ‘It’s just that I thought it would rather spoil the flavour of the moment if you were to give Peter a black eye.’ He glanced sideways. Harrison, his forehead on his forearms on the table, was softly pounding the table with his fist and muttering to himself. ‘You are not well, Captain Harrison?’

‘My God, my God, my God!’ The pounding with the fist continued.

‘A ljivovica?’ George said.

Harrison lifted his head. ‘And the awful thing is that I am cursed with total recall. That,’ he added irrelevantly, ‘was why I was so good at passing exams. I can remember every word I said in that stirring speech about patriotism and duty and loyalty and myopic idiocy and – I can’t go on, I can’t.’

‘You mustn’t reproach yourself, Jamie,’ Petersen said ‘Think what it did for our morale.’

‘If there was any justice, any compassion in this world,’ Harrison said, ‘this floor would open up beneath me at this very moment. A British officer, I called myself, thereby meaning there was no other. A highly skilled observer, evaluator, analyzer. Good God! Total recall, I tell you, total recall. It’s hell!’

‘I’m sorry I missed that speech,’ Crni said.

‘Pity,’ Petersen said. ‘Still, you’ve heard about Jamie’s total recall. He can repeat it to you verbatim any time you want.’

‘Spare the vanquished,’ Harrison said. ‘I heard what you said to Sarina, George, but I remain bitter. Fooled, fooled, fooled. And doubly bitter because Peter didn’t trust me. But you trusted Giacomo, didn’t you? He knew.’

‘I told Giacomo nothing,’ Petersen said. ‘He guessed – he’s a soldier.’

‘And I’m not? Well, that’s for sure. How did you guess Giacomo?’

‘I heard what you heard. I heard the Major telling – suggesting rather, to Captain Crni that his intention to rope us up before descending that cliff path was dangerous. Captain Crni is not the man to take an order or suggestion from anyone. So then I knew.’

‘Of course. I missed it. So you didn’t trust any of us, did you Peter?’

‘I didn’t. I had to know where I stood with you all. Lots of odd things have been happening in Rome and ever since we left Rome. I had to know. You’d have done the same.’

‘Me? I wouldn’t have noticed anything odd in the first place. When did you come to the decision that you were free to talk? And why did you decide to talk? My God, when I come to think of it, when have you ever been free to talk? My word, I can’t imagine it, I just can’t. Can you, Sarina? Living the life of a lie, surrounded by enemies, one false move, one unconsidered slip, one careless word and pouf! And he spent almost half his time with us!’

‘Ah! But I spent the other half with our own people. Holiday, you might say.’

‘Oh, God, holiday. I knew – and I haven’t known you long – that you were something different, but this – but this – it passes my comprehension. And you, a man like you, you’re only the deputy chief. I’d love to meet the man you call chief.’

‘I don’t call him “chief.” I call him lots of other things but not that. As for loving to meet him, you don’t have to bother. You’ve already met him. In fact, you’ve described him. Big fat clown, naïve and illiterate, who spends his time floating around in cloud-cuckooland. Or was it the groves of academe? I don’t remember.’

Harrison spilled the contents of his glass on the table. He looked dazed. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Nobody does. I’m his right arm, only, in charge of field operations. As you know, he seldom accompanies me. This mission was different but, then, this was an unusually important mission. Couldn’t be trusted to bunglers like me.’

Michael approached George, a certain awed incredulity in his face. ‘But in Mostar you told me you were a Sergeant Major.’

‘A tiny prevarication.’ George waved his hand in airy dismissal. ‘Inevitable in this line of business. Tiny prevarications, I mean. But I did say it was a temporary not substantive rank. Generalmajor.’

‘Good God!’ Michael was overcome. ‘I mean “Sir”.’

‘It’s too much.’ Harrison didn’t even notice when George courteously refilled his glass. ‘It’s really too much. Too much for the reeling mind to encompass. Maybe I haven’t such a mind after all. Tell me next that I’m Adolph Hitler and I’d seriously consider the possibility.’ He looked at George, shook his head and drained half his glass. ‘You see before you a man trying to find his way back to reality. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. I was asking you when you came to the decision you were free to talk.’

‘When you told me – or Lorraine did – about your Jenny.’

‘Ah, yes, of course. Jenny. I see.’ It was plain that Harrison was quite baffled. He suddenly, physically, shook himself. ‘What the hell has Jenny got to do with this?’

‘Nothing, directly.’

‘Ah Jenny. Lorraine. The question that Captain Crni asked me through there.’

Lorraine said in a quiet voice: ‘What question, James?’

‘He asked me if I knew Giancarlo Tremino – you know, Carlos. Of course I said yes, I knew him very well.’ He looked down at his glass. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have answered. I mean, they weren’t torturing me or anything. Maybe I don’t have such a mind after all.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, James,’ Lorraine said. ‘You weren’t to know. Besides, there’s been no harm done.’

‘How do you know there’s been no harm done, Lorraine?’ Sarina sounded bitter. ‘I know it wasn’t Captain Harrison’s fault. And I know it wasn’t really Captain Crni who asked the question. Don’t you know that Major Petersen always finds out what he wants? Are we still to regard ourselves as prisoners in this room, Captain Crni?’

‘Good God, no! As far as I’m concerned the house is yours. Anyway, you don’t ask me. Major Petersen is in charge.’

‘Or you, George?’ She smiled faintly. ‘Sorry. I’m not used to the Generalmajor yet.’

‘Quite frankly, neither am I. George is fine.’ He smiled and wagged a finger at her. ‘Don’t try to spread dissension in the ranks. Outside my head office, which at the moment is a disused shepherd’s hut up near Biha, Peter is in sole charge. I just point in the general direction and then get out of the way. If you know you’re not in his class, as I’m wise enough to know, you don’t interfere with the best field operative there is.’

‘Could I speak to you, Major? In the hall?’

‘Ominous,’ he said and picked up his glass. ‘Very ominous.’ He followed her out and closed the door behind them. ‘Well?’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t know quite how to say this. I think –’

‘If you don’t know what to say and you’re still at the thinking stage, why waste my time in this really melodramatic fashion?’

‘It’s not silly. It’s not dramatic! And you’re not going to make me mad. What you’ve just said sums you up. Superior, cutting, contemptuous, never making allowances for people’s faults and weaknesses: and at the same time you can be the most thoughtful and kind person I know. It’s not just that you’re unbearable. You’re unknowable. Jekyll and Hyde. The Dr Jekyll bit I like and admire. You’re brave, George thinks you’re brilliant, you take incredible risks that would destroy a person like me and, best of all, you’re very good at looking after people. Anyway, I knew last night that you couldn’t belong to those people.’

Petersen smiled. ‘I won’t give you the chance of telling me again how nasty I am, so I won’t say you’re being wise after the event.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she said quietly. ‘It was something that Major Metrovi said last night about Tito’s Achilles’ heel, his lack of mobility, his three thousand wounded men. In any civilized war – if there is such a thing – those men would be left to the enemy who would treat them in hospital. This is no civilized war. They would be massacred. You could never be a party to that.’

‘I have my points. But you did not bring me out here to point those out.’

‘I did not. It’s the Mr Hyde side – oh, I don’t want to lecture but I dislike that side, it hurts me and it baffles me. That a man so physically kind can in other ways be so cold, detached, uncaring to the point of not being quite human.’

‘Oh, dear. Or, as Jamie would put it, I say, I say.’

‘It’s true. In order to gain your own ends, you can be – you are – indifferent to people’s feelings to the point of cruelty.’

‘Lorraine?’

‘Yes. Lorraine.’

‘Well, well. I thought it was axiomatic that two lovely ladies automatically disliked each other.’

She seized his upper arms. ‘Don’t change the subject.’

‘I must tell Alex about this.’

‘Tell him what?’ she said warily.

‘He thinks you detest one another.’

‘Tell Alex he’s a fool. She’s a lovely person. And you are tearing her to pieces.’

Petersen nodded. ‘She’s being torn to pieces all right. But I’m not the person who’s doing the tearing.’

She looked closely at him, her eyes moving from one of his to the other, as if hoping that would help her find the truth. ‘Then who is?’

‘If I told you, you’d just go and tell her.’ She said nothing, just kept up her intense scrutiny of his face. ‘She knows who is. But I don’t want her to think that it’s public knowledge.

She looked away. ‘Two things. Maybe, deep down, you do have some finer feelings after all.’ She looked at his eyes again and halfsmiled. ‘And you don’t trust me.’

‘I’d like to.’

‘Try.’

‘She’s a good, honest, patriotic British citizen and she’s working for the Italian secret service, specifically for Major Cipriano and she may well be responsible, however indirectly, for the deaths of an untold number of my fellow countrymen.’

‘I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!’ Her eyes were wide and full of horror and her voice shook. ‘I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!’

‘I know you don’t,’ he said gently. ‘That’s because you don’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe it myself. I do now. I can prove it. Do you think I’m so stupid as to say I can prove a thing when I can’t. Or don’t you believe me either?’

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ she said wildly. ‘Yes, I do. I do. I do know what to believe. I don’t believe Lorraine could be like that.’

‘Too lovely a person, too honest, too good, too true?’

‘Yes! Yes! That’s what I believe.’

‘That’s what I believed, too. That’s what I still believe.’

Her grip on his arms tightened and she looked at him almost beseechingly. ‘Please. Please don’t make fun of me.’

‘She’s being blackmailed.’

‘Blackmailed! Blackmailed! How could anyone blackmail Lorraine?’ She looked away, was silent for some seconds, then looked back again. ‘It’s something to do with Carlos, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Indirectly.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Because she’s in love with him,’ Sarina said impatiently.

‘How do you know that?’ This time he was openly surprised.

‘Because I’m a woman.’

‘Ah, well, yes. I suppose that explains it.’

‘And because you had Captain Crni ask her about Carlos. But I knew before that. Anyone could see it.’

‘Here’s one who didn’t.’ He thought. ‘Well, hindsight, retrospect, yes. But I said only indirectly. Nobody would be stupid enough to use Carlos as a blackmail weapon. They’d find themselves with a double-edged sword in their hands. But, sure, he’s part of it.’

‘Well?’ She’d actually arrived at the stage where she had started shaking him, no mean feat with a person of Petersen’s bulk. ‘What’s the other part of it?’

‘I know, or I think I know, the other part of it. But I haven’t any proof.’

‘Tell me what you think.’

‘You think because she’s honest and good and true that she has led a blameless life, that she can’t possibly have any guilty secrets?’

‘Go on.’

‘I don’t think she’s got any guilty secrets either. Unless you call having an illegitimate child a guilty secret, which I don’t.’

She took her right hand away from his arm and touched her lips. She was shocked not by what he had said but because of its implications.

‘Carlos is a doctor.’ He sounded tired and, for the first time since she had met him, he looked tired. ‘He qualified in Rome. Lorraine lived with him during the time she was Jamie Harrison’s secretary. They have a son, aged two and a half. It’s my belief that he’s been kidnapped. I’ll find out for sure when I have a knife at Cipriano’s throat.’

She stared at him in silence. Two tears trickled slowly down her cheeks.

EIGHT

At nine o’clock the next morning Jablanica looked so much like an idealized Christmas postcard that it was almost unreal, untrue in its breathtaking beauty. The snow had stopped, the clouds were gone, the sun shone from a clear pale blue sky and the air on the windless slopes, where the trees hung heavy with snow, was crisp and pellucid and very cold. It required only the sound of sleighbells to complete the illusion. But peace on earth and goodwill to all men were the last considerations in the thoughts of those gathered around the breakfast table that morning.

Petersen, his chin on his hand and his coffee growing cold before him, was obviously lost in contemplation. Harrison, who showed remarkably little after-effects from the considerable amount of wine he had found necessary to drown his chagrin and bring himself once more face to face with reality, said: ‘A penny for them, Peter, my boy.’

‘My thoughts? They’d be worth a lot more than that to the people I’m thinking about. Not, may I add hastily, that they include any of those sitting around the table.’

‘And not only do you look pensive,’ Harrison went on, ‘but I detect a slight diminution in the usual early morning ebullience, the sparkling cheer. You found sleep hard to come by? The change of beds, perhaps?’

‘As I sleep in a different bed practically every night in life that would hardly be a factor, otherwise I’d be dead by this time. Fact is, I was up nearly all night, with either George or Ivan, in the radio room. You couldn’t possibly have heard it, but there was a long and violent thunderstorm during the night – that’s why we have cloudless skies this morning – and both transmission and reception were close on impossible.’

‘Ah! That explains it. Would it be in order to ask who you were talking to during the long watches of the night?’

‘Certainly. No secrets, no secrets.’ Harrison’s expression of disbelief was only fleeting and he made no comment. ‘We had, of course, to contact our HQ in Biha and warn them of the impending attack. That, alone, took almost two hours.’

‘You should have used my radio,’ Michael said. ‘It’s got a remarkable range.’

‘We did. It was no better than the other.’

‘Oh. Then perhaps you should have used me. After all, I do know that equipment.’

‘Of course you do. But, then, our people in Biha don’t know Navajo which is the only code you are familiar with.’

Michael looked at him, his mouth fallen slightly open. ‘How on earth did you know that? I mean, I’ve got no code books.’ He tapped his head. ‘It’s all up here.’

‘You sent a message just after Colonel Lunz and I had been talking to you. You may be a good radio operator, Michael, but otherwise you shouldn’t be allowed out without a minder.’

Sarina said: ‘Don’t forget I was there also.’

‘Two minders. I’ll bet you never even checked to see if the room was bugged.’

‘Good God!’ Michael looked at his sister. ‘Bugged! Did you – how could you have known we were going to stay –’

‘It could have been bugged. It wasn’t. George was listening on the balcony.’

‘George!’

‘You talked in plain language. George said it wasn’t any European language he’d ever heard. You had an American instructor. The Americans labour under the happy delusion that Navajo is unbreakable.’

‘Now you tell me,’ George said. He seemed in no way upset.

‘Sorry. Busy. I forgot.’

‘Peter’s expertise in espionage is matched only by his expertise in codes. The two go hand-in-glove. Makes up codes all the time. Breaks them, too. Remember he said the Germans had twice broken the etnik code. They didn’t. Peter gave them the information. Not that they know that. Nothing like spreading dissension among allies.’ Harrison said: ‘How do you know the Germans didn’t monitor and break your transmission last night?’

‘Impossible. Only two people know my codes – me and the receiver. Never use the same code twice. You can’t break a code on a single transmission.’

‘That’s fine. But – not trying to be awkward, old boy – will this information be of any use to your Partisans? Won’t the Germans know that you’ve been kidnapped or disappeared or whatever and might pass this message on. If they did, surely they would change their plan of attack.’

‘Don’t you think I have considered this, Jamie? You simply don’t even begin to know the Balkans. How could you, after less than a couple of months? What do you know of the deviousness, the plotting and counter-plotting, the rivalries, the jealousies, the selfseeking, the total regard for one’s own power base, the distrusts, the obsession for personal gain, the vast gulf between the Occidental and Byzantine minds? I don’t think there’s even a remote chance of the Germans finding out.

‘Consider. Who knows I’ve got the plans? As far as the Colonel is concerned, there are only two plans, he’s got both and I’ve never seen a copy. Why should he think so? Metrovi will have given him the name of Cipriano but I’ll bet the Colonel has never heard of him and even if he has what’s he going to tell him? Even if he did tell him Cipriano would be too smart to believe it was the Murge division – a commando unit like Ivan’s never discloses their true identity. Again, apart from the fact that the Colonel’s pride would probably stop him anyway from letting anyone know that his defences have been breached, he could be Machiavellian enough to want the Germans to be taken by surprise, not, of course in order that they should be defeated but that they should suffer severe casualties. Sure, he wants the Partisans destroyed but, when and if it happens, he wants the Germans out of the country. Basically, they’re both his natural enemies.

‘And even if the Germans did eventually find out, so what? It’s too late to change plans and, anyway, there are no other plans they could make. There is no alternative.’

‘I have to agree,’ Harrison said. ‘They’ll go ahead as planned. Forewarned, one takes it, is forearmed. A satisfactory night’s work, no?’

‘It was unimportant. They would almost certainly have found out in any case. We have a considerable number of reliable contacts throughout the country. In the areas held by the Germans, Italians, etniks and Ustaša – and that’s most of the country – there are reliable solid citizens, or are so regarded by the Germans, Italians, etniks and Ustaša, who, while cheerfully collaborating with the enemy, send us regular and up-to-date reports of the latest enemy troop movements. In other words, they are Partisan spies. Their reports are far from complete but enough to give Tito and his staff a fair indication of the enemy’s intentions.’

‘I suppose that happens in every war,’ Harrison said, ‘But I didn’t know the Partisans had spies in the enemy’s camp.’

‘We have had from the very beginning. We couldn’t have survived otherwise. What took up most of our time last night was the distressing discovery – well, we first suspected it about ten weeks ago – that the enemy have spies in our camp. Even more distressing was the discovery that they had spies in the Partisan HQ. In retrospect, it was naïve of us, we should have suspected the possibility and taken precautions long ago. In fairness to us, we weren’t complacent – we were just under the fond misapprehension that every Partisan was a burning patriot. Some, alas, burn less brightly than others. This, and not acting as message boys for General von Löhr, is what has been occupying George, Alex and myself in Italy in the past two weeks. It was a matter of such vital importance that George was actually sufficiently motivated to drag himself away from his snug retreats in Biha and Mount Prenj. Those spies in our camp had become a major threat to our security: we were trying to uncover the Italian connection.

‘That there was, and is, an Italian connection, is beyond dispute. Not German, not etnik, not Ustaša – specifically Italian, for it has been the Italian Murge division, first-class mountain troops, that have been causing us all the trouble. Our Partisans are as good, probably even better mountain troops, but hundreds of them have been killed by the Murge division in the past few months. Never in pitched battle. Invariably in isolated, one-off, incidents. A patrol, a localized troop movement, a transfer of wounded to a supposedly safer area, a reconnaissance group behind enemy lines – it came to the stage where none of those was immune to a lightning strike by specialized Murge units who apparently knew, always, exactly where to strike, when to strike, how to strike – they even seemed to know the number and composition of the Partisan groups they would be attacking, even the approximate number of the groups themselves. Our small-scale guerrilla movements were becoming very hampered, almost paralysed: and a partisan’s army’s survival depends almost exclusively on mobility, flexibility and long-range reconnaissance.

‘The Murge, of course, were receiving precise advance information of our movements. The information had to be coming from a person or persons in the neighbourhood of our HQ. Those secret messages, messages which led hundreds of men to their deaths, were not of course written down, addressed to the enemy and dropped in the nearest letterbox: they were sent by radio.’ Petersen broke off as if to collect his thoughts, his eyes wandering, unseeingly, as it seemed, round the table. Lorraine, he could see, was unnaturally pale: Sarina had her hands clasped tightly together. Petersen appeared to notice nothing.

‘I’ll carry on for a moment,’ George said. ‘At this time, you must understand that Peter has been overcome by his habitual modesty. Peter couldn’t believe that the traitors could be any longserving Partisans. Neither could I. Peter suggested that we check the approximate dates of the first transmissions – the times of the first unexpected swoops by the Murge units – with the time of the arrival of the latest recruits to the Partisans. We did and found that this checked with the arrival of an unusually high number of ex-etniks regularly desert to us and it’s etniks – quite impossible to check out the credentials and good faith of ail of them or even a fraction of them.

‘Peter and some of his men checked on a small number of those and found two who had access to long-range transmitters hidden in a forest on a hill-side. They wouldn’t talk and we don’t torture. They were executed. Thereafter the number of unexpected attacks by the Murge fell off rapidly: but they still continued at sporadic intervals. Which, of course, could only mean that there were still some traitors around.’

George helped himself liberally to some beer. It was but breakfast time, but George claimed to be allergic to both tea and coffee.

‘So we went to Italy, the three of us. Why? Because we – are or were –etnik intelligence officers and naturally associated with our Italian counterparts. Why? Because we were convinced that the messages were being relayed through Italian Intelligence. Why? Because a fighting division has neither the facilities, the ability, the organization nor the cash to mount such an operation. But Italian Intelligence has all of these in abundance.’

‘Amidst the welter of “whys”, George,’ Harrison said, ‘why the cash?’

‘It’s as Peter said,’ George said sadly. ‘You haven’t got the Balkan mentality. Come to that, I doubt whether you have the universal mentality. The etnik agents, like agents and double-agents the world over, are not motivated simply by altruism, patriotism or political conviction. The little gears in their minds only mesh efficiently under the influence of the universal lubricant. Money. They are rather highly paid and, considered dispassionately, deserve to be: look what happened to those two unfortunates unmasked by Peter.’ Petersen rose, walked to the window and stood there, gazing down the gentle valley that sloped away from their chalet. He seemed to have lost interest in the conversation.

‘All in all,’ Harrison said, ‘a fair night’s work.’

‘That wasn’t quite all of it,’ George said. ‘We have located Cipriano.’

‘Cipriano!’

‘None other. Lorraine, my dear! You look so pale. Are you not well?’

‘I feel – I feel a little faint.’

‘Maraschino,’ George said unhesitatingly. ‘Sava!’ This to one of Crni’s soldiers who rose at once and crossed to the liquor cupboard. ‘Yes, indeed. The worthy Major himself.’

‘But how on earth –’

‘We have our little methods,’ George said complacently. ‘We have, as Peter told you, our reliable, solid citizens everywhere. Incidentally, you can now forget all that Peter told you – thank you, my boy, just give it to the lady – all he told you about Cipriano working hand-in-glove with the Partisans. I’m afraid he grossly maligned the poor man but at the moment he deemed it prudent to divert any suspicions that Majors Metrovi and Rankovi might have been harbouring from himself to an absent person. Cipriano was conveniently absent. Our Peter is a very convincing actor, no?’

‘He’s a very convincing liar,’ Sarina said.

‘Oh, tush! Hurt pride again. We’re just mad because he fooled you, too. Anyway, Cipriano’s in Imotski, doubtless closeted with the Murge brigade commander there and hatching fresh devilish schemes against our poor Partisans. I shouldn’t have to explain any of this. You will remember that Peter said in Mount Prenj that he wanted to get to the link-man – Cipriano – because he was aiding and abetting the Partisans. What he meant to say was he wanted to get at the link-man because he was a deadly enemy of the Partisans but he couldn’t very well say that, could he, in front of Metrovi and Rankovi? Come, come, my children, you disappoint me: you had all night long to work out something as simple and obvious as that.’

George yawned behind a massive hand. ‘Excuse me. Now that I’m breakfasted and am once more at peace with myself, I intend to retire and rest lightly for two or three hours. We will not be moving out until the afternoon at the earliest. We await an urgent communication from Biha but it will take some time to collect and collate the information we want. Meantime, how do you people propose to spend the morning?’ He raised his voice. ‘Peter. Those people are free to come and go as they want, inside and out, aren’t they?’

‘Of course.’

Captain Crni smiled and said: ‘May I suggest that you put on your coats and I’ll show you around our little town. There’s not much to show so it would be a short walk and hardly exhausting. Apart from the fact that it’s a lovely morning I know where we can get the best coffee in Bosnia. Far better than that awful swill we’ve just had.’

Sarina said, ‘That way we can still be watched, can’t we?’

Captain Crni bowed gallantly. ‘It would always be a pleasure to watch you and Miss Chamberlain. If however, you wish to go alone and report to the nearest Italian command post that we are Partisans and have designs on a certain Italian intelligence major, then you are by all means free to do so. That, Miss von Karajan, is the extent to which we trust you.’

‘I am sorry.’ She reached out an impulsive hand and caught his forearm. ‘That was a terrible thing to say. Two or three days in this country and I find I can’t trust anyone, not even myself.’ She smiled. ‘Besides, you’re the only one who knows where the coffee shop is.’

They left – without Giacomo who had elected to remain behind – shortly afterwards. Petersen said wearily: ‘She doesn’t trust anyone. God knows I don’t blame her. George, I am a hypocritical liar. Even when I say nothing, I’m a hypocritical liar.’

‘I know what you mean, Peter. Sometimes a tiny voice reaches down to my conscience – God knows how it ever finds it – and says exactly the same thing. The clarion call to duty strikes a pretty cracked note at times. Sava?’

‘General?’

‘Go to the window in the front room and watch the road. If they return unexpectedly, call me. I’ll be upstairs. I’ll let you know when you can stop the watch. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.’

After lunch a very refreshed-looking Petersen – he’d had four hours’ sleep – crossed to where Lorraine sat with Sarina on a bench seat by a window and said: ‘Lorraine, please don’t start getting worried because there is no need to. George and I would like to talk to you.’

She bit her lip. ‘I knew you would. Can – can Sarina come?’

‘Certainly.’ He looked at Sarina. ‘Provided, of course, that you don’t say “Oh!” and “Ah!” and “monster” and clench your fists. Promise?’

‘Promise.’

Petersen ushered them to an upstairs room where George was already seated, a large tankard on the table before him and a crate, presumably for emergency, on the floor beside him. Petersen said: ‘George?’

George shook his head positively. ‘Would you come between a man and his thirst.’

‘I would have thought you slaked that pretty thoroughly at lunch.’

‘This is a post-prandial beer,’ George said with dignity. ‘Pray proceed.’

‘This will be short and painless,’ Petersen said to Lorraine. ‘I’m not a dentist and you don’t have to tell lies. As you must have guessed, we know everything. I can promise you, and George will confirm, that neither retribution nor punishment waits for you. You’re a victim and not a villain and acted under extreme duress. Besides, you didn’t even know what you were doing. All transmissions were not only in code but in Yugoslav code and you don’t understand a word of Serbo-Croat. George’s word, of course, carries immense weight in the war councils, almost totally so in cases such as this, and they listen to me a bit, too. No harm will come to you or Carlos or Mario.’

She nodded, almost composedly. ‘You know about our son, of course?’

‘Yes. When was he kidnapped?’

‘Six months ago.’

‘You have no idea where he is being held?’

‘No. Well, vaguely.’ She was no longer composed. ‘In this country, I know. Major Cipriano wanted him out of Italy. I don’t know why.’

‘I can understand. There are certain things that even Cipriano can’t do in Italy. How do you know he’s in this country?’

‘They let Carlos see him twice. That was twice when I said I wasn’t going to work for them any more because I was sure he was dead. But I don’t know where he is.’

‘Yes. I see. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It doesn’t matter!’ She was no longer composed and her eyes were masked in tears.

George took his evil-smelling cigar from his mouth. ‘What Peter means is that Cipriano will tell him.’

‘Cipriano will tell –’ She broke off, nodded and shivered involuntarily.

‘We have your code books, Lorraine. We searched your room when you were out this morning.’

‘You searched her room!’ Sarina said indignantly. ‘What right –’ Petersen rose and opened the door. ‘Out.’

‘I’m sorry. I forgot. I –’

‘You promised.’

‘Don’t you ever give anyone a second chance?’

Petersen didn’t answer. He closed the door, sat down and said: ‘False bottoms to kitbags are really dreadfully passé these days. But, then, I don’t suppose either you or Cipriano ever dreamed that you would come under suspicion. No names in your book but we don’t need them. There are code numbers, call-up signs and call-up times. It will take us little enough time to trap them.’

‘And then?’

George removed his cigar again. ‘Don’t ask silly questions.’

‘Tell me, Lorraine. You had no idea why you had been sent to Mount Prenj? Oh, you knew what you were to do, but not why. Well, Cipriano knew that you knew Jamie Harrison and that he trusted you completely – after all, you were his confidential secretary – so that he would never suspect you of double-dealing: transferring messages from our diehard etnik friends in Biha to him in Rome or wherever, messages which he could re-transmit to the Murge regiment. But the real reason, of course, is that we had destroyed the only two long-range transmitters they had. With short-range transmitters their contacts with Rome could only be sporadic at best. But Mount Prenj is only two hundred kilometres from Biha. It would be an awfully short range transmitter that couldn’t reach there.’ Petersen paused and considered. ‘Well, that’s all. No, one more thing.’ He smiled. ‘Yes. One more thing. Purely personal. Where did you first meet Carlos?’

‘Isle of Wight, where I was born. He was sailing at Cowes.’

‘Of course, of course. He told me that he often went sailing there before the war. Well, I hope you’ll both go sailing there again after the war.’

‘Will – will Carlos be all right, Major Petersen?’

‘If you can refer to a Generalmajor as George you can refer to a Major as Peter. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s in the clear. Under both Italian military and civilian law he has committed no criminal offence, aided and abetted no-one. With any luck we might see him later on tomorrow.’

‘What! Carlos?’ Her face was transformed.

Petersen looked at Sarina. ‘Yes, you were right, no question.’ He didn’t say what she had been right about. ‘Certainly. Carlos. He hasn’t been up to any aiding or abetting yet, but tomorrow he will.’ She didn’t seem to hear him or, if she did, her mind was elsewhere. ‘He’s still in Ploe?’

‘Yes.’

‘He hasn’t gone back to Italy?’

‘Alas, no. Some disaffected citizen has put sugar in his diesel oil.’ She looked at him for a long moment then smiled slowly. ‘It wouldn’t have been one of those solid, reliable citizens you talk about, would it?’

He smiled back at her. ‘I am not responsible for the actions of solid, reliable citizens.’

At the foot of the stairs Sarina took Petersen’s arm and held him back. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much. That was very kind.’

He looked at her in amazement. ‘What else did you expect me to do?’

‘Nothing, I suppose. But it was wonderful. Especially about Carlos.’

‘Today I’m not an ogre? Not a monster?’

She smiled and shook her head.

‘And tomorrow? When I have to find out where the little boy is? Do you understand what I mean?’

She stopped smiling.

Petersen shook his head sadly. ‘ “Souvent femme varie, bien fol est qui s’y fie”.’

‘What is that meant to mean?’

‘Picked it up from George. Something King Francis I scratched with a diamond on a pane of glass at Chambord. “Often does woman change, and very foolish is he who trusts her”.’

‘Pfui!’ she said. But she was smiling again.

Towards the middle of the afternoon Petersen and Crni walked into the lounge, carrying several machine-pistols and hand-guns.

‘Replacement equipment. Ivan here took ours away so it’s only fair that he should replace them. We’ll be leaving shortly. Ivan, Edvard and Sava are coming with us.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Twenty minutes, shall we say? I want to get through the nasty bit of the Neretva gorge in daylight but not to arrive at our destination until it’s dark, for the usual reasons.’

‘I’m not looking forward to that,’ Sarina said.

‘Have no fear. I’m not driving. Sava is. He’s a truck driver in civilian life.’

‘What destination?’ Harrison said.

‘Ah! I forgot. A new acquaintance for you, Jamie, but an old friend of ours. The proprietor of the Hotel Eden in Mostar, one Josip Pijade.’

‘A solid and reliable citizen,’ Lorraine said.

‘A very solid, very reliable citizen. You have a faraway look on your face, George. What are you thinking of?’

‘Venison.’

NINE

And venison it was. Josip and Marija had excelled themselves and achieved the seemingly impossible – the venison tasted even marginally better than the last time. George excelled himself in a corresponding fashion, but failed to achieve the impossible: halfway through his third massive helping of venison he had to admit defeat. Sleep that night, unlike the last occasion, was undisturbed by unwelcome visitors. Breakfast was a late and leisurely meal.

‘I wish we’d had you up in the damned Mount Prenj for the past two months,’ Harrison said to Josip after the meal. ‘But it’s been worth the wait. I wish someone would station me here for the duration. He directed his attention towards Petersen. ‘Are we permitted to know our plans – well, your plans – for the day?’

‘Of course. They’re concerned primarily, though not entirely, with one person – Cipriano, his apprehension and interrogation. The Biha affair we can consider as being virtually a closed matter. As you know, we failed to make contact yesterday, but Ivan and I had better luck during the small hours – reception, as you know, is always better at night. They’ve come up with no fewer than sixteen etnik-turned-Partisan suspects, there can’t be more than two, at the most three. We send out a coded message at a certain hour on a certain wavelength and note will be taken as to which of the sixteen is absent at the time. He will not of course be apprehended until the other one or two have been similarly trapped. Routine. Forget it.’ That the words were tantamount to a death sentence was evident to everyone, except, apparently, Petersen.

‘Cipriano,’ Giacomo said. ‘Still at Imotski?’

‘He is. We have two men up there on a twenty-four hour watch. We’re in radio contact. Spoke to them last an hour ago. Cipriano’s up and around but shows no sign yet of moving on. He’s got quite an entourage with him.’ He looked at Alex. ‘You might be interested in hearing the description of one of them.’

‘Alessandro?’ Alex said hopefully.

‘No other.’

‘Ah.’ Just for once Alex registered a trace of expression: it was as near to a happy smile as Alex would ever come.

‘Plus, I’m almost certain from the description, Alessandro’s three henchmen. Seems that Carlos must have found a flame-cutter somewhere. We don’t, of course, know which way the fox is going to jump – there are several different exit routes he can take from Imotski – but we’ll be told immediately that is known. He could, of course, be taking a back road to Ploe and hitch-hiking a lift home with Carlos – if the Colombo’s diesel lines have been cleared out – but I think that unlikely. I think he’ll be heading for the military airfield just outside the town here and the fast way back to Rome. Ivan and I are just going out to the airport to check.’

‘Check what?’ Harrison asked.

‘Whether there’s air transport standing by for him.’

‘Won’t the airfield be guarded?’

‘We are two Italian officers. I’ve just promoted myself to Colonel and will probably outrank anyone there. We’ll just walk in and ask them.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Peter,’ Josip Pijade said. ‘My cousin, who owns a garage just outside the airport, works there as a parttime repair and maintenance engineer. Not, unfortunately, on the planes, but on the plant, otherwise the Italian air force would be experiencing mysterious crashes. I have but to lift the phone.’

‘Thank you, Josip.’

Josip left. Lorraine said: ‘Another solid and reliable citizen?’

‘Yugoslavia is full of them.’

Josip was back in two minutes. ‘There is an Italian plane on standby. And it’s reserved for Major Cipriano.’

‘Thank you.’ He nodded to the small transceiver on the table. ‘I’ll take this with me. Call up if you hear from Imotski. We’re almost certain of the route Cipriano will take into town so Ivan and I will go and select an ambush spot. We may take your car, Josip?’

‘Take me, too. I know the perfect spot.’

Sarina said: ‘We can go into town?’

‘I think so. I won’t be needing you until nightfall. The only attention you’re liable to attract is wolf-whistles from the licentious Italian soldiery.’ He looked at Giacomo. ‘I’d feel happier if you went along.’

‘No sacrifice too great,’ Giacomo said.

Sarina smiled. ‘We need protection?’

‘Only from the licentious soldiery.’

The call came, inevitably enough, when they were halfway through lunch. Marija came in and said: ‘They’ve just left They’re heading for Posušje.’

‘The Mostar road. Excuse us,’ Petersen said. He rose as did Alex, Crni and Edvard.

George said: ‘I wish I were coming with you. But everyone knows I’m not a man of action.’

‘What he means,’ Petersen said coldly, ‘is that his jaws haven’t even got out of second gear yet and he’s barely touched his first litre of beer.’

Sarina said: ‘You will be careful, won’t you?’

Petersen smiled and said: ‘Coming, Giacomo?’

‘Certainly not. That’s a public bar through there. The licentious soldiery might come in any moment.’

‘There’s your answer about being careful, Sarina. If Giacomo thought there was the slightest chance of shooting an Italian full of holes he’d be the first aboard the truck. He knows there’s no hope. But thanks all the same.’

Alex, white handkerchief in hand, stood on a low knoll in the rough grazing field opposite the tree-lined lane which led off the main Lištica – Mostar road. In the lane itself, with engine running, Petersen sat in the cab of the Italian army truck which was parked only feet from the entrance to the road.

Alex raised the handkerchief high above his head. Petersen engaged first gear and waited, clutch depressed, accelerator at halfthrottle. Alex brought the handkerchief sharply down and, clutch released, the truck moved forward under full throttle. Three seconds later Petersen jammed on the brakes, bringing the truck to an abrupt halt, fair and square across the width of the main highway.

The Italian army command car which, fortunately for its occupants, was travelling at only a moderate speed, had no chance: even as the driver stamped on the foot-brake he must have realized that his options were limited indeed: he could either keep to the road and hit the side of the truck head-on or swerve to his right into the field where Alex was – a swerve to the left would have fetched him up against the trees lining the lane. Prudently, he chose the latter course. Locked tyres screeching on the tarmac, the car bust through a low wooden fence, broke into the field while balanced on only two wheels, teetered for a couple of seconds then came to rest as it fell over on its left side, wheels still spinning slowly in the air.

Within seconds, rifle butts had smashed in the right-hand windows of the car but the need for haste was not there: the five occupants, unhurt except for cuts about their faces, were too dazed to recognize the presence of their assailants, far less offer resistance: when they did recover some sense of awareness, the sight of the four machine-pistol muzzles only inches from their heads made the thought of offering any resistance too ludicrous for contemplation.

When Petersen and Crni returned to the hotel they found George and his companions – inevitably, in George’s case – in the bar. Equally inevitably, George was presiding behind the counter.

‘Good afternoon, gentlemen.’ George was at his affable best.

‘You’ve finished lunch, then?’ Petersen said.

‘And it wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. What shall it be? Beer?’

‘Beer is fine.’

‘Aren’t you going to ask him what happened?’ Sarina said indignantly.

‘Ah. Alex and Edvard have been cut off in their prime?’

‘They’re in the truck and the truck is in the car park.’

‘That’s what I like. Solicitude. Making sure that the prisoners are not doing themselves an injury. When do you propose to bring them inside?’

‘When it’s dark. I can’t very well march them through the streets, bound and gagged, in broad daylight, can I?’

‘True.’ George yawned and slid off his stool. ‘Siesta.’

‘I know,’ Petersen said sympathetically. ‘Go, go, go all the time. Wears a man down.’

George left in dignified silence. Sarina said: ‘Doesn’t go in much for congratulations, does he?’

‘He postponed his siesta. That shows he’s deeply moved.’

‘So you got Major Cipriano. What do you think of that, Lorraine?’

‘I suppose I should be weeping for joy. I am glad, I’m terribly glad. But I knew he would. I never for a moment doubted it. Did you?’

‘No. It’s very irritating.’

‘ “Souvent femme varie”,’ Petersen said sadly. ‘Josip, would you send someone with your hotel wagon to pick up the prisoners’ luggage and take it upstairs. No, not upstairs: I can examine it just as well down here.’ He turned to Sarina. ‘And you keep quiet.’

‘I didn’t say anything!’

‘You were about to tell me that that was something else I was very good at. Examining other people’s luggage, I mean.’

The five prisoners were brought in by the back entrance as soon as it was reasonably dark. The hotel doors were locked. Cipriano, Alessandro and the three others were settled in chairs and their gags removed. Their wrists remained bound behind their backs. The normally tranquil and civilized Major Cipriano had undergone a radical transformation. His eyes glared and his face was suffused in anger.

‘What is the meaning of this – this abominable outrage, Petersen? Have you gone mad? Stark raving mad? Untie me at once! I’m an officer, an Italian officer, an allied officer!’

‘You’re a murderer. Your rank and nationality is of no importance. Not when you’re a mass murderer.’

‘Untie me! You’re crazy! By God, Petersen, if it’s the last thing I do –’

‘Has it occurred to you that you may already have done your last thing on earth?’

Cipriano stared at Petersen. His lack of understanding was total. Suddenly, he noticed Josip for the first time.

‘Pijade! Pijade! You – you are a party to this monstrous outrage!’ Cipriano was so clearly nearly bereft of reason that he struggled futilely with his bonds. ‘By God, Pijade, you shall pay for this treachery!’

‘Treachery.’ Petersen laughed without mirth. ‘Speak of treachery while you may, Cipriano, because you’re going to die for it. Pijade will pay, will he? How will he do that, Cipriano?’ Petersen’s voice was very soft. ‘Your eternal curses from the bottom of hell where you’ll surely be before midnight tonight?’

‘You’re all mad,’ Cipriano whispered. The anger had drained from his face: he had suddenly become aware that he was in mortal danger.

Petersen went on in the same gentle tone: ‘Hundreds of my comrades lie dead because of you.’

‘You are mad!’ His voice was almost a scream. ‘You must be mad. I’ve never touched a etnik in my life.’

‘I am not a etnik. I’m a Partisan.’

‘A Partisan!’ Cipriano was back to his husky whispering again. ‘A Partisan! Colonel Lunz suspected – I should have listened –’ He broke off and then his voice strengthened. ‘I have never harmed a Partisan in my life.’

‘Come in,’ Petersen called.

Lorraine entered.

‘Do you still deny, Cipriano, that you have masterminded the deaths of hundreds of my fellow-Partisans? Lorraine has told me everything, Cipriano. Everything.’ He produced a small black book from his tunic. ‘Lorraine’s code book. In your own handwriting. Or perhaps you don’t recognize your handwriting, Cipriano, I’m sure you never thought that you would be signing your own death warrant with your own handwriting. I find it ironic, Cipriano. I hope you do too. But irony isn’t going to bring all those hundreds back to life, is it? Even although the last of your spies will have been trapped and executed by the end of the week, those men will still be dead, won’t they, Cipriano. Where’s the little boy, Lorraine’s little boy? Where’s Mario, Cipriano?’

Cipriano made a noise in his throat, a harsh and guttural and meaningless sound and struggled to his feet. Giacomo glanced at Petersen, correctly interpreted the nod and, with evident satisfaction, hit Cipriano none too gently in the solar plexus. Cipriano collapsed into his chair, harsh retching noises coming deep from his throat.

Petersen said: ‘George?’

George emerged from behind the bar, carrying two pieces of rope in his hand. He ambled across the saloon, dropped one piece to the floor and secured Cipriano firmly to his chair with the other. Then he picked up the second rope, already noosed, and dropped it over Alessandro’s chest before the man realized what was happening. Seconds later and he was trussed like the proverbial turkey.

‘Cipriano isn’t going to tell me because Cipriano knows that he’s going to die, whatever happens. But you’ll tell me where the little boy is, won’t you, Alessandro?’

Alessandro spat on the floor.

‘Oh dear.’ Petersen sighed. ‘Those disgusting habits are difficult to eradicate, aren’t they?’ He reached behind the bar and produced the metal box of syringes and drugs he had taken from Alessandro aboard the Colombo. ‘Alex.’

Alex produced his razor-sharp knife and slit Alessandro’s left sleeve from the shoulder to where the ropes bound him at the elbow level.

‘No!’ Alessandro’s voice was a scream of pure terror. ‘No! No! No!’

Cipriano leaned forward and struggled against his bonds, his face suffused dark red as he tried to force words through his still constricted throat. Giacomo tapped him again to ensure his continued silence.

‘I’m afraid I cut him a little,’ Alex said apologetically. He was hardly exaggerating: Alessendro’s arm was, indeed, quite badly gashed.

‘No matter.’ Petersen picked up the syringe and selected a phial at apparent random. ‘Save the trouble of searching for a vein.’

‘Ploe!’ Alessandro’s whispered. His voice was strangled with fear. His breath coming and going faster than once every second. ‘Ploe. I can take you there!’ 18 Fra Spalato! I swear it! I can take you there!’

Petersen replaced the syringe and phials and closed the lid. He said to the girls: ‘Alessandro, I’m afraid, was psychologically disadvantaged. But I never laid a finger on him, did I?’

Both girls stared at him, then looked at each other. As if by some telepathic signal, they shuddered in unison.

When Alessandro’s arm had been bandaged and Cipriano recovered, they made ready to leave. As Alex approached him with a gag, Cipriano looked at Petersen with empty eyes and said: ‘Why don’t you kill me here? Difficult to dispose of the body? But no trouble in the Adriatic, is it? A few lengths of chain.’

‘Nobody’s going to dispose of you, Cipriano. Not permanently. We never had any intention of killing you. I knew Alessandro would crack but I didn’t want to waste time over it. A bit of a pragmatist, is our Alessandro, and he had no intention of sacrificing his life for a man he believed to be already as good as dead. We have every moral justification for killing you but no legal justification. Spies are shot all the time: spy-masters never. Geneva Conventions say so. It does seem unfair. No, Cipriano, you are going into durance vile. A prisoner of war, for however long the war lasts. British Intelligence are just going to love to have a chat with you.’

Cipriano had nothing to say, which was perhaps understandable. When the reprieve comes along just as the guillotine is about to be tripped, suitable comment is hard to come by.

Petersen turned to his cousin as Cipriano’s gag was being fastened. ‘Marija, I would like you to do me a favour. Would you look after a little boy for a day or two?’

‘Mario!’ Lorraine said. ‘You mean Mario?’

‘What other little boy would I be talking about. Well, Marija?’

‘Peter!’ Her voice was full of reproach.

‘Well, I had to ask.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘The bane of my life, but I love you.’

‘So we part once more,’ Jossip said sadly. ‘When do we meet again?’

‘Dinner-time. George is coming back for the rest of that venison he couldn’t finish last night. So am I.’

Edvard stopped the truck several hundred yards short of the entrance to the docks. Alex and Sava dropped down from the back of the truck followed by a now unbound and ungagged Alessandro – they were in the main street and there were a number of people around. The three men turned, without any undue haste, down an unlit side-street.

Crni, seated up front with Petersen, said: ‘Do you anticipate any trouble at the control gate?’

‘No more than usual. The guards are old, inefficient, not really interested and very susceptible to arrogant and ill-tempered authority. That’s us.’

‘Cipriano’s wrecked command car is bound to have been found some time ago. And the people in charge at the airport must be wondering where he’s got to.’

‘If a Yugoslav found it, it will have made his day and he would have driven by without stopping. Whether the airport was expecting him I don’t know – Cipriano seems an unpredictable fellow who does very much what he wants. Even if it’s accepted by now that he’s genuinely missing, where are they going to start looking? Ploe’s about as unlikely a place as any.’

And so it proved. The sentry didn’t even bother to leave his box. Beyond the gate, the docks were deserted – the day’s work was over and the freezing temperatures were hardly calculated to encourage night-time strollers. Even so, Petersen told Edvard to stop two hundred metres short of where the Colombo was berthed, left the cab, went round to the back, called Lorraine’s name and helped her down.

‘See that light there? That’s the Colombo. Go and tell Carlos to switch off his two gangway lights.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes.’ She ran a few steps then halted abruptly as Petersen called her.

‘Walk you clown. No one in Ploe ever runs.’

Three minutes later the gangway lights went out. Two minutes after that the prisoners had made their unobserved way up the unlighted gangway and the truck had disappeared. The gangway lights came on again.

Carlos sat in his usual chair in his cabin, his good left hand tightly held in both of Lorraine’s, the expression on his face not so much uncomprehending and stunned but comprehending and still stunned.

‘Let me see whether I’ve got this right or whether I’m just imagining it,’ Carlos said. ‘You’re going to lock up my crew and myself, abscond with Lorraine and Mario, imprison Cipriano and his men aboard and steal my ship?’

‘I couldn’t have put it more succinctly myself. Except, of course, that I wouldn’t have used the word “abscond”. Only, of course, if you consent. The decision is entirely up to you. And Lorraine, too. But I think Lorraine has already made up her mind.’

‘Yes, I have.’ There was no hesitation in her voice.

‘I’ll be dismissed from the Navy,’ Carlos said gloomily. ‘No, I won’t, I’ll be court-martialled and shot.’

‘Nothing will happen to you. There is not a chance in the world. George and I have gone over it time and again.’

‘My crew will talk and –’

‘Talk? Talk what about? They’re sitting in the mess-room with machine-pistols at their heads. If you had a machine-pistol at your head would you have any doubt whatsoever that your ship had been taken over by force?’

‘Cipriano –’

‘What of Cipriano. Even if he survives his captivity, which he unfortunately probably will as the British don’t shoot prisoners, there’s nothing he can do. There is no way your version and that of the crew – and this will become the official version – can be disproved. And he would never dare lay a personal charge against you – by the time peace comes you can call for the testimony of several solid and respected citizens of Yugoslavia who will testify to the fact that Cipriano kidnapped your son. The penalty in Italy for kidnapping is life imprisonment.’

‘Oh, do come on, Carlos,’ Lorraine said impatiently. ‘It’s not like you to dilly-dally. There is no other way.’ She gently touched his chin so that his eyes came round to hers. ‘We’ve got Mario back.’

‘True, true.’ He smiled at her. ‘That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it?’

‘Not all.’ She smiled in return. ‘You’re back too. That matters a little. What’s the alternative, Carlos? Peter doesn’t want to kill Cipriano, and if Cipriano is free our life is finished. He has to be imprisoned in a safe place and that means in British hands, and the only way to get him there is in this boat. Peter doesn’t make mistakes.’

‘Correction,’ Sarina said sweetly. ‘Peter never makes mistakes.’

‘“Souvent femme varie”’ Petersen said.

‘Oh, do be quiet.’

‘If I’m locked up,’ Carlos said, ‘When will I – and my crew – be released?’

‘Tomorrow. An anonymous phone message.’

‘And Lorraine and Mario will stay with your friends?’

‘Only a few days. Until we provide them with new identity papers. George is a close friend of the master forger in the Balkans. Lorraine Tremino, we had thought. In these troublous times you should have no difficulty in establishing a long-established family unit. A marriage certificate, George?’

George lowered his tankard. ‘For my friend, a trifle. Venue? Rome? Pescara? Cowes? Wherever. We shall see what forms he has available.’

The door opened and Alex entered, Sava close behind him. Alex had a curly-haired little boy by the hand. The boy looked around him, wonderingly, caught a sight of Carlos and ran to him, arms outstretched. Carlos picked him up and set him on his knees. Mario wound his arms round his neck and gazed wonderingly at Lorraine.

‘He’s only a little boy,’ George said comfortingly. ‘For a little boy, Lorraine, six months is a long time. He will remember.’

Harrison coughed. ‘And I am to go with Giacomo on this perilous voyage, this rendezvous with eternity?’

‘Your choice, Jamie, but Giacomo has to have somebody. Besides, you know as well as I do that the Illyrian Alps are not your homeland and that there’s no useful function you can perform here any more. More important, as a serving British officer you will lend credulity – total credibility – to Giacomo’s story – apart from convincing the British of the true state of affairs out here, about which you feel so strongly.’

‘I will go,’ Harrison said. ‘A twisted smile on my face, but I will go.’

‘You’ll untwist your smile when the fast Royal Navy patrol boat comes out to meet you. We will radio Cairo. I don’t have their callup sign but you do, don’t you, Sarina?’

‘Yes.’

‘As a final back-up we will give you a letter explaining the situation fully. Do you have a typewriter, Carlos?’

‘Next door.’ Carlos had handed Mario over to Lorraine. The little boy, while not objecting, still had a suspicious frown on his face.

‘This letter will be signed by the Generalmajor and myself. Can you type, Sarina?’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course. As if it were the most natural thing in the world. Well, I can’t. You should, at least, be pleased. A chink in my armour. Come on.’

Carlos said, ‘I don’t like to say this, Peter, but I think you’ve missed something. It’s a long long way to the south of Italy where I assume this rendezvous will be made.’

‘Your diesel lines are cleared? Your tanks are full?’

‘Yes. That’s not my point. Oh, I’m sure that Giacomo can steer by the sun and the compass but a rendezvous has to be precise. Latitude this, longitude that.’

‘Indeed. But there are some things you don’t know about Giacomo.’

Carlos smiled. ‘I’m sure there are. What?’

‘Do you have a foreign-going master’s ticket?

‘No.’ Carlos smiled again. ‘Don’t tell me. Giacomo has.’

In the tiny cabin next door Petersen said: ‘You liked Cairo, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Sarina looked puzzled. ‘Yes, I did.’ Her puzzlement changed to suspicion. ‘Why?’

‘Aristocratic young ladies like you are not cut out for this life. All the cold and ice and snow and mountains. Besides, you suffer from vertigo.’

‘I’m coming with you.’ The tone in her voice was final.

Petersen looked at her for a long moment then smiled. ‘A Partisan.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘So is Michael.’

‘I’m coming with you in a different way.’

Petersen pondered. ‘If things like that have to be said I think that I should really –’

‘You talk so much I’d have to wait for ever.’

He smiled and touched the auburn hair. ‘About this letter.’

‘Romance,’ she said. ‘Life is going to be full of it.’

‘One little thing you’ve overlooked, Peter,’ Harrison said.

‘Peter never overlooks anything.’ Petersen looked at Sarina and raised his eyes.

‘Souvent –’

‘Please.’

‘Giacomo and I are going to be alone,’ Harrison said. ‘We have to sleep. Five dangerous men to be watched. How are we –’ ‘Alex?’

‘Yes, Major?’

‘The engine-room.’

‘Ah!’ A rare, a very rare smile touched Alex’s lips. ‘The oxyacetylene welder.’

Alistair Maclean

Floodgate

To David and Judy

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The two oddly similar incidents, although both happening on the night of February 3rd, and both involving army ammunition storage installations, had no discernible connection.

The occurrence at De Doorns in Holland was mysterious, spectacular and tragic: the one at Metnitz in Germany was a good deal less mysterious, unspectacular and faintly comic.

Three soldiers were on guard at the Dutch ammunition dump, set in a concrete bunker one and a half kilometres north of the village of De Doorns, when, about one-thirty in the morning, the only two citizens who were awake in the village reported a staccato burst of machine-pistol fire—it was later established that the guards were carrying machine-pistols—followed immediately by the sound of a gigantic explosion, which was later found to have blasted in the earth a crater sixty metres wide by twelve deep.

Houses in the village suffered moderately severe damage but there was no loss of life.

It was presumed that the guards had fired at intruders and that a stray bullet had triggered the detonation. No traces of the guards or supposed intruders were found afterwards.

In Germany, a group calling themselves the Red Army Faction, a well-known and well-organized band of terrorists, claimed that they had easily overcome the two-man guard at the US Nato arms dump near Metnitz. Both men, it had been claimed, had been drinking and when the intruders had left both were covered with blankets—it had been a bitterly cold night. The US Army denied the drinking allegation but made no mention of the blankets. The intruders claimed that they had acquired a quantity of offensive weapons, some so advanced that they were still on the secret list. The US Army denied this.

The West German press heavily favoured the intruders’ account. When it came to penetrating army bases, the Red Army Faction had an impressive record: when it came to protecting them, the US Army had an unimpressive one.

The Red Army Faction customarily list the nature of their thefts in meticulous detail. No such details of the alleged secret weapons were published. It has been assumed that, if the Faction’s account was true, the US Army or the US Army through the German government, had issued a stop order to the press.

ONE

‘It is clear that it is the work of a madman.’ Jon de Jong, tall, lean, grey, ascetic and the general manager of Schiphol airport, looked and sounded very gloomy indeed and, in the circumstances, he had every justification in looking and sounding that way.

‘Insanity. A man has to be deranged, unhinged, to perform a wanton, mindless, pointless and purposeless task like this.’ Like the monkish professor he so closely resembled, de Jong tended to be precise to the point of pedantry and, as now, had a weakness for pompous tautology.

‘A lunatic.’

‘One sees your point of view,’ de Graaf said. Colonel van de Graaf, a remarkably broad man of medium height with a deeply trenched, tanned face, had about him an unperturbability and an unmistakable cast of authority that accorded well with the Chief of Police of a nation’s capital city. ‘I can understand and agree with it but only to a certain extent. I appreciate how you feel, my friend. Your beloved airport, one of the best in Europe—’

‘Amsterdam airport is the best in Europe.’ De Jong spoke as if by rote, his thoughts elsewhere. ‘Was.’

‘And will be again. The criminal responsible for this is, it is certain, not a man of a normal cast of mind. But that does not mean that he is instantly certifiable. Maybe he doesn’t like you, has a grudge against you. Maybe he’s an ex-employee fired by one of your departmental managers for what the manager regarded as a perfectly valid reason but a reason with which the disgruntled employee didn’t agree. Maybe he’s a citizen living close by, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, say, or between here and Aalsmeer, who finds the decibel level from the aircraft intolerably high. Maybe he’s a dedicated environmentalist who objects, in what must be a very violent fashion, to jet engines polluting the atmosphere, which they undoubtedly do. Our country, as you are well aware, has more than its fair share of dedicated environmentalists. Maybe he doesn’t like our Government’s policies.’ De Graaf ran a hand through his thick, iron-grey hair. ‘Maybe anything. But he could be as sane as either of us.’

‘Maybe you’d better have another look, Colonel,’ de Jong said. His hands were clenching and unclenching and he was shivering violently. Both of those were involuntary but for different reasons. The former accurately reflected an intense frustration and anger; the latter was due to the fact that, when an ice-cold wind blows east-north-east off the Ijsselmeer, and before that from Siberia, the roof of the main concourse of Schiphol airport was no place to be. ‘As sane as you or I? Would you or I have been responsible for this—this atrocity? Look, Colonel, just look.’

De Graaf looked. Had he been the airport manager, he reflected, it would hardly have been a sight to gladden his heart. Schiphol airport had just disappeared, its place taken by a wave-rippled lake that stretched almost as far as the eyes could see. The source of the flooding was all too easy to locate: close to the big fuel storage tanks just outwith the perimeter of the airport itself, a wide breach had appeared in the dyke of the canal to the south: the debris, stones and mud that were scattered along the top of the dyke on either side of the breach left no doubt that the rupture of the containing dyke had not been of a natural or spontaneous origin.

The effect of the onrush of waters had been devastating. The airport buildings themselves, though flooded in the ground floors and basements, remained intact. The damage done to the sensitive electric and electronic machinery was very considerable and would almost certainly cost millions of guilders to replace but the structural integrity of the buildings was unaffected: Schiphol airport is very solidly built and securely anchored to its foundations.

Aircraft, unfortunately, when not operating in their natural element, are very delicate artifacts and, of course, have no means at all of anchoring themselves. A momentary screwing of de Graaf’s eyes showed that this was all too painfully evident. Small planes had drifted away to the north. Some were still floating aimlessly around. Some were known to be sunk and out of sight, and two had their tail-planes sticking up above the water—those would have been single-engined planes, carried down head-first by the weight of the engines in their noses. Some two-engined passenger jets, 737s and DC9s, and three-engined planes, Trident 3s and 727s had also moved and were scattered randomly over a large area of the airfield, their noses pointing in every which direction. Two were tipped on their sides and two others were partially submerged, with only parts of their upper bodies showing: their undercarriages had collapsed. The big planes, the 747s, the Tri-Stars, the DC10s, were still in situ, held in position by their sheer massive weight—these planes, fuelled, can weigh between three and four hundred tons. Two, however, had fallen over to one side, presumably because the undercarriages distant from the onrush of water had collapsed. One did not have to be an aeronautical engineer to realize that both planes were write-offs. Both port wings were angled upwards at an angle of about twenty degrees and only the roots of the starboard wings were visible, a position that could only have been accounted for by the fact that both wings must have broken upwards somewhere along their lengths.

Several hundred yards along a main runway an undercarriage projecting above the water showed where a Fokker Friendship, accelerating for take-off, had tried to escape the floodwaters and failed. It was possible that the pilot had not seen the approach of the flood waters, possible but unlikely: it was more likely that he had seen them, reckoned that he had nothing to lose either way, continued accelerating but failed to gain liftoff speed before being caught. There was no question of his plane having been engulfed: in those initial stages, according to observers, there had been only an inch or two of water fanning out over the airfield but that had been enough to make the Fokker aquaplane with disastrous results.

Airport cars and trucks had simply drowned under the water. The only remaining signs of any wheeled vehicles were the projecting three or four steps of aircraft boarding ramps and the top of a tanker: even the ends of two crocodile disembarkation tubes were dipped forlornly into the murky waters.

De Graaf sighed, shook his head and turned to de Jong who was gazing almost sightlessly over his devastated airfield as if still quite unable to comprehend the enormity of what had happened.

‘You have a point, Jon. You and I are sane, or at least I think the world at large would think so, and it is not possible that we could have been responsible for such appalling destruction. But that doesn’t mean that the criminal responsible for this wanton destruction is insane: we will doubtless find, either through our own efforts or because he chooses to inform us, that there was a very compelling reason for what he did. I shouldn’t have used the word “wanton” there, you shouldn’t have used words like “mindless” and “pointless”. This is no random, arbitrary, spur-of-the-moment act of an escaped mental patient: this is a deliberately calculated act designed to produce a deliberately calculated effect.’

Reluctantly, as if by a giant effort of will, de Jong looked away from the flooded airfield. ‘Effect? The only effect it has on me is one of sheer outrage. What other effects could there be? Do you have any suggestions?’

‘None. I’ve had no time to think about it. Don’t forget I’ve only just come to this. Sure, sure, we knew yesterday that this was promised, but like everyone else, I thought the idea was so preposterous as to be not worth considering. But I have two other suggestions. I suggest that we’ll achieve nothing by staring out over Lake Schiphol: and I suggest we’re not going to help anyone or anything by hanging around here and getting pneumonia.’ De Jong’s briefly pained expression showed what he thought of the term ‘Lake Schiphol’ but he made no comment.

The staff canteen was an improvement on the roof-top inasmuch as there was no wind but it wasn’t all that much warmer. All electric heating had inevitably been short-circuited and the butane heaters that had been brought in had as yet had a minimal effect on the chilled atmosphere. An abundance of hot coffee helped: something rather more sustaining, de Graaf reflected, would have been in order, but for those with a taste for schnapps or jonge jenever the presence of the airport manager had a markedly inhibiting effect. As became his ascetic appearance, de Jong was a lifelong teetotaller, a difficult thing to be in Holland. He never made a point of this, he had never even been heard to mention this, but, somehow, people just didn’t drink anything stronger than tea or coffee when de Jong was around.

De Graaf said: ‘Let’s summarize briefly what we know. It has to be brief because we know virtually damn all. Three identical messages were received yesterday afternoon, one to a newspaper, one to the airport authorities—in effect, Mr de Jong—and one to the Rijkswaterstaat of the Ministry of Transport and Public Works.’ He paused briefly and looked across at a burly, dark-bearded man who was placidly polluting the atmosphere with the smoke from what appeared to be a very ancient pipe. ‘Ah! Of course. Mr van der Kuur. The Rijkswaterstaat Deputy Projects Engineer. How long to clear up this mess?’

Van der Kuur removed his pipe. ‘We have already started. We seal off the breach in the canal with metal sheeting—a temporary measure only, of course, but sufficient. After that—well, we do have the best and biggest pumps in the world. A routine job.’

‘How long?’

‘Thirty-six hours. At the outside.’ There was something very reassuring about der Kuur’s calm and matter-of-fact approach. ‘Provided of course that we get a degree of cooperation from the tugboat men, barge men and private owners whose boats are at the moment resting on the mud at the bottom of the canal. The boats that settled on an even keel are no problem: those which have fallen over on their sides could well fill up. I suppose self-interest will ensure cooperation.’

De Graaf said: ‘Any loss of life in the canal? Or anybody hurt?’

‘One of my inspectors reports a considerable degree of high blood pressure among the skippers and crews of the stranded craft. That apart, no one was harmed.’

‘Thank you. The messages came from a man or a group signing themselves FFF—it was not explained what those initials were meant to stand for. The intention, it was said, was to demonstrate that they could flood any part of our country whenever and wherever they wished by blowing up a strategically placed dyke and that accordingly they intended to give a small scale demonstration that would endanger no one and cause as little inconvenience as possible.’

‘As little inconvenience! Small scale.’ De Jong was back at his fist clenching. ‘I wonder what the devil they would regard as a large-scale demonstration?’

De Graaf nodded. ‘Quite. They said the target was Schiphol and that the flooding would come at 11 a.m. Not one minute before eleven, not one minute after. As we know, the breach was blown at precisely 11 a.m. At police headquarters, quite frankly, this was regarded as a hoax—after all, who in his right mind would want to turn Schiphol airport into an inland sea? Perhaps they saw some symbolic significance in their choice—after all, the Dutch navy defeated the Spanish navy at this very spot when the present Schiphol really was a sea. Hoax or not, we took no chances. The canal was the obvious choice for any saboteur so we had both sides of the north bank of the canal closely examined. There were no signs of any kind of disturbance that could have indicated a preparation for the blowing of the dyke. So we assumed it was some kind of practical joke.’ De Graaf shrugged, palms uplifted. ‘As we know too late nothing was further from the mind or minds of the FFF than fun and games.’

He turned to the man seated on his left side. ‘Peter, you’ve had time to think. Have you any idea—sorry, gentlemen, sorry. Some of you may not know my colleague here. Lieutenant Peter van Effen. Lieutenant van Effen is my senior detective lieutenant. He is also an explosives expert and, for his sins, the head of the city’s bomb disposal squad. Have you figured out yet how it was done?’

Peter van Effen was an unremarkable figure. Like his boss, he was just over medium height, uncommonly broad and looked suspiciously as if he were running to fat. He was in his mid or late thirties, had thick dark hair, a dark moustache and an almost permanent expression of amiability. He didn’t look like a senior detective lieutenant, in fact he didn’t even look like a policeman. Many people, including quite a number of people in Dutch prisons, tended to take van Effen’s easygoing affability at its face value.

‘It didn’t take much figuring, sir. Anything’s easy with hindsight. But even had we had foresight there was nothing we could have done about it anyway. We’ll almost certainly find that two boats were tied up bow to stern alongside the north bank. Unusual, but there’s no law, say, against an engine breakdown and a sympathetic owner of a passing vessel stopping to lend a hand. I should imagine that we’ll find that those boats were almost certainly stolen because there is traffic on the canal and any habitual waterway user would have been able to identify them.

‘The two boats would have been very close or even over—lapping, leaving a clear, hidden area where scuba divers could work. If this took place during dusk or night-time, as I’m sure it did, they would have bright lights on deck and when you have those on, anything below gunwale level is in deep shadow. They would have had a drilling machine, something like the ones you use on oil-rigs only, of course, this one would have been on a very small scale and operated horizontally not vertically. It would have been electrically powered, either by batteries or a generator, because the exhausts of a petrol or diesel plant make a great deal of noise. For an expert, and there are literally hundreds of experts operating on or around the North Sea, this would have been a childishly simple operation. They would drill through to, say, a foot of the other side of the dyke—we may be sure they would have taken very careful measurements beforehand—withdraw the bit and insert a waterproof canvas tube packed with explosives, maybe just plain old-fashioned dynamite or TNT, although a real expert would have gone for amatol beehives. They would then attach an electrical timing device, nothing elaborate, an old-fashioned kitchen alarm clock will do very well, plug the hole with mud and gravel—not that there would be a chance in a million of anyone ever looking there—and sail away.’

‘I could almost believe, Mr van Effen, that you masterminded this operation yourself,’ van der Kuur said. ‘So that’s how it was done.’

‘It’s how I would have done it and within the limits of a slight variation that’s how they did it. There is no other way.’ Van Effen looked at de Graaf. ‘We’re up against a team of experts and the person directing them is no clown. They know how to steal boats, they know how to handle them, they know where to steal drilling equipment, they know how to use that equipment and they’re obviously at home with explosives. No wild-eyed, slogan-chanting cranks among this lot: they’re professionals. I’ve asked head office to notify us immediately if they receive any complaints from factories, wholesalers or retailers of the theft of any equipment from the manufacturers or distributors of drilling equipment. Also to notify us of the theft of any vessels from that area.’

‘And beyond that?’ de Graaf said.

‘Nothing. We have no leads.’

De Graaf nodded and looked down at the paper he held in his hands. ‘That message from the mysterious FFF. No indication whatsoever as to the reason behind this threatened—now actual—sabotage. Just a warning that nobody should be at ground level at 11 a.m. this morning and that all planes should be flown out yesterday afternoon or evening to adjacent airfields as the needless destruction of property formed no part of their plans. Very considerate of them, I must say. And even more considerate, Jon, was the phone call you got at nine o’clock this morning urging you to evacuate all those planes immediately. But, of course, we all knew it was a hoax, so we paid no attention. Would you recognize that voice again, Jon?’

‘Not a chance. It was a woman’s voice, a young woman and speaking in English. All young women speaking English sound the same to me.’ Fist clenched, de Jong gently thumped the table before him. ‘They don’t even hint at the reason for carrying out this—this monstrous action. What have they achieved by this action? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I repeat that any person or persons who behave in this fashion have to be mentally unbalanced.’

Van Effen said: ‘I’m sorry, sir, I disagree. I do agree with what the Colonel said on the roof—they’re almost certainly as sane as any one. No one who is mentally unbalanced could have carried out this operation. And they’re not, as I said, wild-eyed terrorists throwing bombs in crowded market-places. In two separate warnings they did their best to ensure that neither human lives nor property would be put at risk. That was not the behaviour of irresponsible people.’

‘And who, then, was responsible for the deaths of the three people who lost their lives when that Fokker Friendship cartwheeled and crashed on take-off?’

‘The saboteurs, indirectly. One could equally well say that you were, also indirectly. It might be argued you might at least have considered the possibility that the threat was not a hoax, taken even the most remote possibility into account and refused permission for the Fokker to take off at exactly 11 a.m. But that permission was given, personally I understand, by you. It is as certain as certain can be that the saboteurs had carefully checked landing and take-off schedules and made sure that there were no planes either taking off or landing at or near that time. That Fokker was the private plane of a German industrialist and was therefore not listed on the scheduled departures. I suggest, Mr de Jong, that it’s futile to ascribe the blame for those three deaths to anyone. Sheer bad luck, an unfortunate coincidence in timing, an act of God, call it what you like. There was nothing planned, nothing calculated, no motive behind those deaths. It was nobody’s fault.’

De Jong had substituted finger-drumming for table thumping. ‘If those evil men were as considerate as you say, why didn’t they postpone the explosion when they saw people boarding the plane?’

‘Because we don’t know that they were in a position to see anything and, even if they were, they were almost certainly unable to do anything about it. Had the explosives been activated by a radio-controlled device, sure, they could have stopped it. But, as I told you, I’m pretty certain it was an electrical timer and to de-activate that they would have had to assemble a boat, scuba gear and diver—and all in broad daylight—in a matter of minutes. In the time available, that would have been impossible.’

There was a faint but unmistakable sheen of sweat on de Jong’s forehead. ‘They could have phoned a warning.’

Van Effen looked at de Jong for a long moment, then said: ‘How much attention did you pay to the previous warning this morning?’

De Jong made no reply.

‘And you’ve just said that the saboteurs have achieved nothing, absolutely nothing, by their action. I know you’re upset, sir, and it seems unfair to press the point, but can you really be so naive as to believe that? They’ve already made a considerable achievement. They have achieved the beginnings of a climate of fear and uncertainty, a climate that can only worsen with the passing of the hours. If they’ve struck once, apparently without a blind bit of motivation, are the chances not high that they will strike again? If they do, when? If they do, where? And, above all, there’s the why. What overpowering reason do they have to behave as they do?’ He looked at de Graaf. ‘Soften up the victim but keep him in suspense as to your purpose in behaving in this fashion. It’s a novel form of blackmail and I see no reason why it shouldn’t work. I have the strong feeling that we are going to hear from the FFF in the very near future. Not to state the reasons for acting as they do, certainly not to make any specific demands. Dear me, no. Not that. That’s not the way you conduct psychological warfare. One turns the wheel that stretches the rack very, very slowly over a calculated period of time. Gives the victim time to ponder more deeply about the hopelessness of his situation while his morale sinks lower and lower. At least that’s how I believe they operated in the Middle Ages—when using the actual instrument, of course.’

De Jong said sourly: ‘You seem to know a lot about the workings of the criminal mind.’

‘A little.’ Van Effen smiled agreeably. ‘I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to run an airport.’

‘And what am I to understand from that?’

‘Mr van Effen just means that a cobbler should stick to his last.’ De Graaf made a placatory gesture with his hand. ‘He’s the author of the now established text-book on the psychology of the criminal mind. Never read it myself. So, Peter. You seem sure the FFF will contact us very soon, but not to tell us about themselves or their objectives. Tell us what? The where and the when? Their next—ah—demonstration?’

‘What else?’

A profound and rather gloomy silence was ended by the entrance of a waiter who approached de Jong. ‘Telephone, sir. Is there a Lieutenant van Effen here?’

‘Me.’ Van Effen followed the waiter from the canteen and returned within a minute and addressed himself to de Graaf.

‘Duty sergeant. Apparently two men reported their boats missing some hours ago. Pleasure boat owners. The sergeant who took their complaint didn’t think it necessary to notify our department. Quite right, of course. The boats have now been recovered. One, it would seem, was taken by force. The boats are in our hands. I told them to take a couple of finger-print men aboard, return the boats to the owners but not to allow the owners aboard. If you can spare the time, sir, we can interview the two owners after we leave here: they live less than a kilometre from here.’

‘A promising lead, yes?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t think so either. However, no stone unturned. We may as well go now and—’

He broke off as the same waiter reappeared and approached him. ‘Phone again. For you this time, Colonel.’

De Graaf returned in a matter of seconds. ‘Jon, have you such a thing as a shorthand typist?’

‘Of course. Jan?’

‘Sir?’ A blond youngster was on his feet.

‘You heard the Colonel?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He looked at de Graaf. ‘What shall I say?’

‘Ask her to take that phone call and type it out for me. Peter, you have clairvoyance, the second sight.’

‘The FFF?’

‘Indeed. The press, I need hardly say. The FFF have their publicity priorities right. Usual anonymous phone call. The sub-editor who took the call was smart enough to tape-record it but I’d be surprised if that is of the slightest help. A fairly lengthy statement, I understand. Shorthand is not my forte. Let us possess our souls in patience.’

They had possessed their souls for not more than four minutes when a girl entered and handed a type-written sheet to de Graaf. He thanked her, looked briefly at the sheet and said: ‘Action this day would appear to be their motto. This, I understand, is their statement in full and a fairly arrogant example of its kind it is, too. This is what the FFF says:

‘“Next time, perhaps, the responsible citizens in Amsterdam will listen to what we say, believe what we say and act accordingly. It is because you did not believe what we said that a misadventure occurred today. For this misadventure we hold Mr de Jong entirely responsible. He was given due warning and chose to ignore that warning. We deplore the unnecessary deaths of the three passengers aboard the Fokker Friendship but disclaim all responsibility. It was not possible for us to arrest the explosion.”’ De Graaf paused and looked at van Effen. ‘Interesting?’

‘Very. So they had an observer. We’ll never find him. He could have been in the airport but hundreds of people who don’t work here visit here every day. For all we know, there could have been someone outside the airport with a pair of binoculars. But that’s not what is interesting. The four first-aid men who brought in the most seriously injured passengers did not know at the time whether the three men who were later pronounced dead were, in fact, dead or alive. Two of them, I understand, died after admission, but none was officially pronounced dead until the doctor certified them as such. How did the FFF know? Neither the doctor nor the first-aid men could have been responsible for leaking the news for they would be the obvious suspects and all too easily checked on. Apart from them, the only people who knew of those deaths are in this room.’ Van Effen looked leisurely around the sixteen men and three women seated at the canteen tables then turned to de Jong.

‘It hardly needs spelling out, does it, sir? We have an infiltrator here, an informant. The enemy has a spy in our camp.’ Again he carried out the same slow survey of the room. ‘I do wonder who it can be.’

‘In this room?’ De Jong looked both disbelieving and unhappy at the same time.

‘I don’t have to repeat the obvious, do I?’

De Jong looked down at his hands which were now tightly clasped on the table. ‘No. No. Of course not. But, surely, well, we can find out. You can find out.’

‘The usual rigorous enquiries, is that it? Trace the movements of every person in this room after the Fokker crashed? Find out if anyone had access to the phone or, indeed, used a phone? Sure, we can do that, pursue the rigorous enquiries. We’ll find nothing.’

‘You’ll find nothing?’ De Jong looked perplexed. ‘How can you be so sure, so sure in advance?’

‘Because,’ de Graaf said, ‘the Lieutenant has a policeman’s mind. Not a bunch to be underestimated, are they, Peter?’

‘They’re clever.’

De Jong looked from de Graaf to van Effen then back to de Graaf. ‘If someone would kindly explain…’

‘Simple, really,’ de Graaf said. ‘It hasn’t occurred to you that the FFF didn’t have to let us know that they knew of the deaths. Gratuitous information, if you like. They would know that we would know this. They would know, as the Lieutenant has just pointed out, that we would know that someone had informed them and that someone would have to be one of us. They would be certain that we would check on the possibility of someone here having made a phone call, so they made certain that no one here made a phone call. He passed the word on to an accomplice who is not in this room: the accomplice made the call. I’m afraid, Jon, that you have another mole burrowing away inside here. Maybe even more. You are aware, of course, that every word of our conversation will be reported back to the FFF, whoever they may be. We will, naturally, go through the motions and make the necessary routine enquiries. As van Effen says, we will, of course, draw a blank.’

‘But—but it all seems so pointless,’ de Jong said. ‘Why should they be so devious so as to achieve nothing?’

‘They’re not really devious and they do achieve something. A degree of demoralization, for one thing. More important, they are saying that they are a force to be reckoned with, that they can infiltrate and penetrate security when they so choose. They are giving the message that they are a highly organized group, one that is capable of carrying out any threats that it chooses to make and one that is to be ignored at our peril.

‘Speaking of threats and perils, let’s return to the FFF’s latest phone call. They go on to say: “We are sure that the Dutch people are well aware that, in the face of an attacker determined to bring it to its knees, it is the most defenceless nation in the world. The sea is not your enemy. We are, and the sea is our ally.

‘“You will not need reminding that the Netherlands has about 1300 kilometres of sea dykes. A certain Cornelius Rijpma, president of the Sea Polder board in Leeuwarden, in Friesland, is on record as saying some months ago that the dykes in his area consist of nothing more than layers of sand and that if a big storm comes they are certain to break. By a ‘big storm’, one would assume that it would have to be a storm of the order of the one that breached the delta defences in 1953 and took 1,850 lives. Our information, supplied to us by the Rijkswaterstaat, is that—’”

‘What! What!’ Van der Kuur, red-faced and almost incoherent with anger, was on his feet. ‘Are those devils daring to suggest that they got information from us? Dastardly! Impossible!’

‘Let me finish, Mr van der Kuur. Can’t you see that they’re using the same technique again, trying to undermine confidence and demoralize? Just because we know that they have contacts with one or more of Mr de Jong’s staff is no proof that they have any with your people. Anyway, there’s worse to come. They go on: “Our information is that a storm of not more than 70% of the power of the 1953 one would be sufficient to breach the dykes. Mr Rijpma was talking about vulnerable dykes. Of the Netherlands’ 1300 kilometres of dykes, almost exactly three hundred have deteriorated to a critical condition. By the best estimates, no repairs will be carried out to the threatened dykes for another twelve years, that is to say, 1995. All we propose to do is to accelerate the advent of the inevitable.”’

De Graaf paused and looked around. A chilled hush seemed to have fallen over the canteen. Only two people were looking at him: the others were either gazing at the floor or into the far distance; in both cases it was not difficult to guess that they didn’t like what they saw.

‘“The dykes cannot be repaired because there is no money to repair them. All the money available, or likely to be available in the future, is being sunk or will be sunk into the construction of the East Scheldt storm-surge barrier, the last link in the so-called Delta plan designed to keep the North Sea at bay. The costs are staggering. Due to gross original underestimates, cost over-runs and inflation, the likely bill will probably be in excess of nine billion guilders—and this massive sum for a project that some engineering experts say will not work anyway. The project consists of 63 lock-gates fitted between enormous, 18,000 tonne, free-standing concrete pillars. The dissident experts fear that heavy seas could shift the pillars, jam the locks and render the barrier inoperable. A shift of two centimetres would be enough. Ask Mr van der Kuur of the Rijkswaterstaat.”’

De Graaf paused and looked up. Van der Kuur was on his feet again, every bit as apoplectic as on the previous occasion: the thought was inevitable that van der Kuur’s normal air of pipe-puffing imperturbability was a very thin veneer indeed.

‘Lies!’ he shouted. ‘Rubbish! Balderdash! Defamation! Calumny! Lies, I tell you, lies!’

‘You’re the engineer in charge. You should know. So, really, there’s no need to get so worked up about it.’ De Graaf’s tone was mild, conciliatory. ‘The dissidents the FFF speak about—they have no hydraulic engineering qualifications?’

‘The dissidents! A handful. Qualifications? Of course. Paper qualifications! Not one of them has any practical experience as far as this matter is concerned.’

Van Effen said: ‘Does anybody have on this project? Practical experience, I mean. I understood that the East Scheldt involved completely untested engineering techniques and that you are, in effect, moving into the realms of the unknown.’ He raised a hand as van der Kuur was about to rise again. ‘Sorry. This is all really irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is a mind or minds among the FFF that is not only highly intelligent but has a clear understanding about the application of practical psychology. First, they introduce the elements of doubt, dismay, dissension and the erosion of confidence into Schiphol. Then they apply the same techniques to the Rijkswaterstaat. And now, through the medium of every paper in the land, this evening or tomorrow morning, and doubtless, through television and radio, they will introduce those same elements into the nation at large. If you ask me, they have—or will have—achieved a very great deal in a very short space of time. A remarkable feat. They are to be respected as strategists if not as human beings. I trust that the traitor in our midst will report that back to them.’

‘Indeed,’ de Graaf said. ‘And I trust the same traitor will understand if we don’t discuss the steps we plan to undertake to combat this menace. Well, ladies and gentlemen, to the final paragraph of their message and incidentally, no doubt, to introduce some more of what the Lieutenant referred to as doubt, dismay, dissension, erosion of confidence or whatever. They go on to say: “In order to demonstrate your helplessness and our ability to strike at will wherever and whenever we choose, we would advise you that a breach will be made in the Texel sea dyke at 4.30 p.m. this afternoon.”’

‘What!’ The word came simultaneously from at least half a dozen people.

‘Shook me a bit, too,’ de Graaf said. ‘That’s what they say. I don’t for a moment doubt them. Brinkman’—this to a uniformed young police officer—‘contact the office. No urgency, probably, but check that people on the island know what’s coming to them. Mr van der Kuur, I’m sure I can leave it to you to have the necessary men and equipment to stand by.’ He consulted the sheet again. ‘Not a big operation, they say. “We are sure that damage will be minimal but it might behove the citizens of Oosterend and De Waal to stand by their boats or take to their attics shortly after 4.30. Very shortly.” Damned arrogance. They end up by saying: “We know that those names will give you a fairly accurate idea as to where the charges have been placed. We defy you to find them.”’

‘And that’s all?’ van der Kuur said.

‘That’s all.’

‘No reasons, no explanations for those damned outrages? No demands? Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I still say we’re up against a bunch of raving maniacs.’

‘And I say that we’re up against clever and very calculating criminals who are more than content to let us stew in our own juice for the time being. I wouldn’t worry about the demands, if I were you. These will come in due time—their time. Well, nothing more we can achieve here—not, on reflection, that we have achieved anything. I bid you good day, Mr de Jong, and hope that you’ll be back in operational services some time tomorrow. It’ll take days, I suppose, to replace the machinery ruined in your basements.’

On their way out, van Effen made a gesture to de Graaf to hold back. He looked casually around to make sure that no one was within earshot and said: ‘I’d like to put tails on a couple of gentlemen who were in that room.’

‘Well, you don’t waste time, I will say. You have, of course, your reasons.’

‘I was watching them when you broke the news of the proposed Texel breach. It hit them. Most of them just stared away into space and those who didn’t were studying the floor. All of them, I assume, were considering the awful implications. Two did neither. They just kept on looking at you. Maybe they didn’t react because it didn’t come as any news to them.’

‘Straws. You’re just clutching at straws.’

‘Isn’t that what a drowning man is supposed to do?’

‘With all the water that’s around, present and promised, you might have picked a less painful metaphor. Who?’

‘Alfred van Rees.’

‘Ah. The Rijkswaterstaat’s Locks, Weirs and Sluices man. Preposterous. Friend of mine. Honest as the day’s long.’

‘Maybe the Mr Hyde in him doesn’t come out until after sunset. And Fred Klassen.’

‘Klassen! Schiphol’s security chief. Preposterous.’

‘That’s twice. Or is he a friend of yours, too?’

‘Impossible. Twenty years’ unblemished service. The security chief?’

‘If you were a criminal and were given the choice of subverting any one man in a big organization, who would you go for?’

De Graaf looked at him for a long moment, then walked on in silence.

TWO

Bakkeren and Dekker were the names of the two boat-owners who had been involuntarily deprived of their vessels during the previous night. As it turned out, they were brothers-in-law. Bakkeren was phlegmatic about the borrowing of his boat and not particularly concerned by the fact that he had not yet been allowed to examine his boat to see what damage, if any, had been done to it. Dekker, by contrast and understandably, was seething with rage: he had, as he had informed de Graaf and van Effen within twenty seconds of their arrival at his suburban home, been rather roughly handled during the previous evening.

‘Is no man safe in this godforsaken city?’ He didn’t speak the words, he shouted them, but it was reasonable to assume that this was not his normal conversational custom. ‘Police, you say you are, police! Ha! Police! A fine job you do of guarding the honest citizens of Amsterdam. There I was, sitting in my own boat and minding my own business when those four gangsters—’

‘Moment,’ van Effen said. ‘Were they wearing gloves?’

‘Gloves!’ Dekker, a small dark, intense man, stared at him in outraged disbelief. ‘Gloves! Here am I, the victim of a savage assault, and all you can think of—’

‘Gloves.’

Something in van Effen’s tone had reached through the man’s anger, one could almost see his blood pressure easing a few points. ‘Gloves, eh? Funny, that. Yes, they were. All of them.’

Van Effen turned to a uniformed sergeant. ‘Bernhard.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll tell the finger-print men to go home.’

‘Sorry, Mr Dekker. Tell it your way. If there was anything that struck you as unusual or odd, let us know.’

‘It was all bloody odd,’ Dekker said morosely. He had been, as he had said, minding his own business in his little cabin, when he had been hailed from the bank. He’d gone on deck and a tall man—it was almost dark and his features had been indistinguishable—had asked him if he could hire the boat for the night. He said he was from a film company and wanted to shoot some night scenes and offered a thousand guilders. Dekker had thought it extremely odd that an offer of that nature should have been made at such short notice and with night falling: he had refused. Next thing he knew, three other men had appeared on the scene, he’d been dragged from the boat, bundled into a car and driven to his home.

Van Effen said: ‘Did you direct them?’

‘Are you mad?’ Looking at the fiery little man it was impossible to believe that he would volunteer information to anyone.

‘So they’ve been watching your movements for some time. You weren’t aware that you were under surveillance at any time?’

‘Under what?’

‘Being watched, followed, seeing the same stranger an unusual number of times?’

‘Who’d watch and follow a fishmonger? Well, who would think they would? So they hauled me into the house—’

‘Didn’t you try to escape at any time?’

‘Would you listen to the man?’ Dekker was justifiably bitter. ‘How far would you get with your wrists handcuffed behind your back?’

‘Handcuffs?’

‘I suppose you thought that only police used those things. So they dragged me into the bathroom, tied my feet with a clothes line and taped my mouth with Elastoplast. Then they locked the door from the outside.’

‘You were completely helpless?’

‘Completely.’ The little man’s face darkened at the recollection. ‘I managed to get to my feet and a hell of a lot of good that did me. There’s no window in the bathroom. If there had been I don’t know of any way I could have broken it and even if I had there was no way I could shout for help, was there? Not with God knows how many strips of plaster over my mouth.

‘Three or four hours later—I’m not sure how long it was—they came back and freed me. The tall man told me they’d left fifteen hundred guilders on the kitchen table—a thousand for the hire of the boat and five hundred for incidental expenses.’

‘What expenses?’

‘How should I know?’ Dekker sounded weary. ‘They didn’t explain. They just left.’

‘Did you see them go? Type of car, number, anything like that?’

‘I did not see them go. I did not see their car, far less its number.’ Dekker spoke with the air of a man who is exercising massive restraint. ‘When I say they freed me, I meant that they had unlocked and removed the handcuffs. Took me a couple of minutes to remove the strips of Elastoplast and damnably painful it was, too. Took quite a bit of skin amd my moustache with it too. Then I hopped through to the kitchen and got the bread knife to the ropes round my ankles. The money was there, all right and I’d be glad if you’d put it in your police fund because I won’t touch their filthy money. Almost certainly stolen anyway. They and their car, of course, were to hell and gone by that time.’

Van Effen was diplomatically sympathetic. ‘Considering what you’ve been through, Mr Dekker, I think you’re being very calm and restrained. Could you describe them?’

‘Ordinary clothes. Rain-coats. That’s all.’

‘Their faces?’

‘It was dark on the canal bank, dark in the car and by the time we reached here they were all wearing hoods. Well, three of them. One stayed on the boat.’

‘Slits in the hoods, of course.’ Van Effen wasn’t disappointed, he’d expected nothing else.

‘Round holes, more like.’

‘Did they talk among themselves?’

‘Not a word. Only the leader spoke.’

‘How do you know he was the leader?’

‘Leaders give orders, don’t they?’

‘I suppose. Would you recognize the voice again?’

Dekker hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Well, yes, I think I would.’

‘Ah. Something unusual about his voice?’

‘Yes. Well. He talked funny Dutch.’

‘Funny?’

‘It wasn’t—what shall I say—Dutch Dutch.’

‘Poor Dutch, is that it?’

‘No. The other way around. It was very good. Too good. Like the news-readers on TV and radio.’

‘Too precise, yes? Book Dutch. A foreigner, perhaps?’

‘That’s what I would guess.’

‘Would you have any idea where he might have come from?’

‘There you have me, Lieutenant. I’ve never been out of the country. I hear often enough that many people in the city speak English or German or both. Not me. I speak neither. Foreign tourists don’t come to a fishmonger’s shop. I sell my fish in Dutch.’

‘Thanks, anyway. Could be a help. Anything else about this leader—if that’s what he was?’

‘He was tall, very tall.’ He tried his first half-smile of the afternoon. ‘You don’t have to be tall to be taller than I am but I didn’t even reach up to his shoulders. Ten, maybe twelve centimetres taller than you are. And thin, very very thin: he was wearing a long rain-coat, blue it was, that came way below his knees and it fell from his shoulders like a coat hanging from a coat-hanger.’

‘The hoods had holes, you say, not slits. You could see this tall man’s eyes?’

‘Not even that. This fellow was wearing dark eye-glasses.’

‘Sun-glasses? I did ask you to tell me if there was anything odd about those people. Didn’t you think it odd that a person should be wearing a pair of sun-glasses at night?’

‘Odd? Why should it be odd? Look, Lieutenant, a bachelor like me spends a lot of time watching movies and TV. The villains always wear dark glasses. That’s how you can tell they’re villains.’

‘True, true.’ Van Effen turned to Dekker’s brother-in-law. ‘I understand, Mr Bakkeren, that you were lucky enough to escape the attentions of those gentlemen.’

‘Wife’s birthday. In town for a dinner and show. Anyway, they could have stolen my boat any time and I would have known nothing about it. If they were watching Maks here, they would have been watching me and they’d know that I only go near my boat on weekends.’

Van Effen turned to de Graaf. ‘Would you like to see the boats, sir?’

‘Do you think we’ll find anything?’

‘No. Well, might find out what they’ve been doing. I’ll bet they haven’t left one clue for hardworking policemen to find.’

‘Might as well waste some more time.’

The brothers-in-law went in their own car, the two policemen in van Effen’s, an ancient and battered Peugeot with a far from ancient engine. It bore no police distinguishing marks whatsoever and even the radio telephone was concealed. De Graaf lowered himself gingerly into the creaking and virtually springless seat.

‘I refrain from groaning and complaining, Peter. I know there must be a couple of hundred similar wrecks rattling about the streets of Amsterdam and I appreciate your passion for anonymity, but would it kill you to replace or re-upholster the passenger seat?’

‘I thought it lent a nice touch of authenticity. But it shall be done. Pick up anything back in the house there?’

‘Nothing that you didn’t. Interesting that the tall thin man should be accompanied by a couple of mutes. It has occurred to you that if the leader, as Dekker calls him, is a foreigner then his henchmen are also probably foreigners and may very well be unable to speak a word of Dutch?’

‘It had occurred and it is possible. Dekker said that the leader gave orders which would give one to understand that they spoke, or at least understood, Dutch. Doesn’t necessarily follow, of course. The orders may have been meaningless and given only to convince the listener that the others were Dutch. Pity that Dekker has never ventured beyond the frontiers of his own homeland. He might—I say just might—have been able to identify the country of origin of the owner of that voice. I speak two or three languages, Peter, you even more. Do you think, if we’d heard this person speaking, we’d have been able to tell his country?’

‘There’s a chance. I wouldn’t put it higher than that. I know what you’re thinking, sir. The tape-recording that this newspaper sub-editor made of the phone call they received. Chances there would be much poorer—you know how a phone call can distort a voice. And they don’t strike me as people who would make such a fairly obvious mistake. Besides, even if we did succeed in guessing at the country of origin, how the hell would that help us in tracking them down?’

De Graaf lit up a very black cheroot. Van Effen wound down his window. De Graaf paid no attention. He said: ‘You’re a great comforter. Give us a few more facts—or let’s dig up a few more—and it might be of great help to us. Apart from the fact, not yet established, that he may be a foreigner, all we know about this lad is that he’s very tall, built along the lines of an emaciated garden rake and has something wrong with his eyes.’

‘Wrong? The eyes, I mean, sir? All we know for certain is that he wears sun-glasses at night-time. Could mean anything or nothing. Could be a fad. Maybe he fancies himself in them. Maybe, as Dekker suggested, he thinks sun-glasses are de rigueur for the better class villain. Maybe, like the American President’s Secret Service body-guards, he wears them because any potential malefactor in a crowd can never know whether the agent’s eyes are fixed on him or not, thereby inhibiting him from action. Or he might be just suffering from nyctalopia.’

‘I see. Nyctalopia. Every schoolboy knows, of course. I am sure, Peter, that you will enlighten me at your leisure.’

‘Funny old word to describe a funny old condition. I am told it’s the only English language word with two precisely opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means night-blindness, the recurrent loss of vision after sunset, the causes of which are only vaguely understood. On the other hand, it can be taken to mean day-blindness, the inability to see clearly except by night, and here the causes are equally obscure. A rare disease, whatever meaning you take, but its existence has been well attested to. The sun-glasses, as we think of them, may well be fitted with special correctional lenses.’

‘It would appear to me that a criminal suffering from either manifestation of this disease would be labouring under a severe occupational handicap. Both a house-breaker, who operates by daylight, and a burglar, who operates by night, would be a bit restricted in their movements if they were afflicted, respectively, by day or night blindness. Just a little bit too far-fetched for me, Peter. I prefer the old-fashioned reasons. Badly scarred about the eyes. Cross-eyed. Maybe he’s got a squint. Maybe an eye whose iris is streaked or particoloured. Maybe wall-eyed, where the iris is so light that you can hardly distinguish it from the white or where the pupils are of two different colours. Maybe a sufferer from exophthalmic goitre, which results in very protuberant eyes. Maybe he’s only got one eye. In any event, I’d guess he’s suffering from some physical abnormality by which he would be immediately identifiable without the help of those dark glasses.’

‘So now all we’ve got to do is to ask Interpol for a list, world-wide, of all known criminals with eye defects. There must be tens of thousands of them. Even if there were only ten on the list, it still wouldn’t help us worth a damn. Chances are good, of course, that he hasn’t even got a criminal record.’ Van Effen pondered briefly. ‘Or maybe they could give us a list of all albino criminals on their books. They need glasses to hide their eyes.’

‘The Lieutenant is pleased to be facetious,’ de Graaf said morosely. He puffed on his cheroot, then said, almost wonderingly: ‘By Jove, Peter. You could be right.’

Ahead, Dekker had slowed to a stop and now van Effen did also. Two boats were moored alongside a canal bank, both about eleven or twelve metres in length, with two cabins and an open poop deck. The two policemen joined Dekker aboard his boat: Bakkeren boarded his own which lay immediately ahead. Dekker said: ‘Well, gentlemen, what do you want to check first?’

De Graaf said: ‘How long have you had this boat?’

‘Six years.’

‘In that case, I don’t think Lieutenant van Effen or I will bother to check anything. After six years, you must know every corner, every nook and cranny on this boat. So we’d be grateful if you’d do the checking. Just tell us if there is anything here, even the tiniest thing, that shouldn’t be here: or anything that’s missing that should be here. You might, first, be so good as to ask your brother-in-law to do the same aboard his boat.’

Some twenty minutes later the brothers-in-law were able to state definitely that nothing had been left behind and that, in both cases, only two things had been taken: beer from the fridges and diesel from the tanks. Neither Dekker nor Bakkeren could say definitely how many cans of beer had been taken, they didn’t count such things: but both were adamant that each fuel tank was down by at least twenty litres.

‘Twenty litres each?’ van Effen said. ‘Well, they wouldn’t have used two litres to get from here to the airport canal bank and back. So they used the engine for some other purpose. Can you open the engine hatch and let me have a torch?’

Van Effen’s check of the engine-room battery was cursory, seconds only, but sufficient. He said: ‘Do either of you two gentlemen ever use crocodile clips when using or charging your batteries—you know, those spring-loaded grips with the serrated teeth? No? Well, someone was using them last night. You can see the indentations on the terminals. They had the batteries in your two boats connected up, in parallel or series, it wouldn’t have mattered, they’d have been using a transformer, and ran your engines to keep the batteries charged. Hence the missing forty litres.’

‘I suppose,’ Dekker said, ‘that was what that gangster meant by incidental costs.’

‘I suppose it was.’

De Graaf lowered himself, not protesting too much, into the springless, creaking passenger seat of the ancient Peugeot just as the radio telephone rang. Van Effen answered then passed the phone across to de Graaf who spoke briefly then returned the phone to its concealed position.

‘I feared this,’ de Graaf said. He sounded weary. ‘My minister wants me to fly up with him to Texel. Taking half the cabinet with him, I understand.’

‘Good God! Those rubber-necking clowns. What on earth do they hope to achieve by being up there? They’ll only get in everyone’s way, gum up the works and achieve nothing: but, then, they’re very practised in that sort of thing.’

‘I would remind you, Lieutenant van Effen, that you are talking about elected Ministers of the Crown.’ If the words were intended as a reprimand, de Graaf’s heart wasn’t in it.

‘A useless and incompetent bunch. Make them look important, perhaps get their name in the papers, might even be worth a vote or two among the more backward of the electorate. Still, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, sir.’

De Graaf glowered at him then said hopefully: ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to come, Peter?’

‘You don’t suppose quite correctly, sir. Besides, I have things to do.’

‘Do you think I don’t?’ De Graaf looked and sounded very gloomy.

‘Ah! But I’m only a cop. You have to be a cop and a diplomat. I’ll drop you off at the office.’

‘Join me for lunch?’

‘Like to, sir, but I’m having lunch at an establishment, shall we say, where Amsterdam’s Chief of Police wouldn’t be seen dead. La Caracha it’s called. Your wife and daughters wouldn’t approve, sir.’

‘Business, of course?’

‘Of course. A little talk with a couple of our friends in the Krakers. You asked me a couple of months ago to keep a discreet, apart from an official, eye on them. They report occasionally, usually at La Caracha.’

‘Ah! The Krakers. Haven’t had much time to think of them in the past two months. And how are our disenchanted youth, the anti-everything students, the flower men, the hippies, the squatters?’

‘And the drug-pushers and gun-runners? Keeping a suspiciously low profile, these days. I must say I feel happier, no that’s not the word, less worried when they’re heaving iron bars and bricks at our uniformed police and overturning and burning the odd car, because then we know where we are: with this unusual peace and quiet and uncharacteristic inactivity, I feel there’s trouble brewing somewhere.’

‘You’re not actually looking for trouble, Peter?’

‘I’ve got the nasty feeling I’m going to find it anyway. Looking will be quite unnecessary. Yesterday afternoon, when that call came from the FFF, I sent two of our best people into the area. They might come across something. An off-chance. But the crime in Amsterdam is becoming more and more centralized in the Kraker area. The FFF would you say qualify as criminals?’

‘Birds of a feather? Well, maybe. But the FFF seem like pretty smart boys, maybe too smart to associate with the Krakers, who could hardly be called the intellectual Titans of crime.’

‘The FFF. So far we’ve got a pretty tall fellow, with maybe something wrong with his eyes and maybe of foreign extraction. We’ve practically got it all wrapped up.’

‘Sarcasm ill becomes you. All right, all right, no stone unturned, any action is better than nothing. What’s the food like at La Caracha?’

‘For that area, surprisingly good. I’ve had a few meals—’ He broke off and looked at de Graaf. ‘You are going to honour us at the table, sir?’

‘Well, I thought, I mean, as Chief of Police—’

‘Of course, of course. Delighted.’

‘And no one will know where I am.’ De Graaf seemed cheered at the prospect. ‘That damned radio phone can ring its head off for all I care. I won’t be able to hear it.’

‘Nobody else will be able to hear it either. That damned phone, as you call it, will be switched off the moment we park. How do you think the dockland citizens are going to react when they hear a phone go off in this relic?’

They drove off. By and by de Graaf lit another cheroot, van Effen lowered his window and de Graaf said: ‘You have, of course, checked up on the proprietor of La Caracha. What’s he called?’

‘He prefers to be known just as George. I know him moderately well. He’s held in high regard among the local people.’

‘A kindly man? A do-gooder? Charitable? An upstanding citizen, you would say?’

‘He’s reputed to be a ranking member of three, perhaps four, successful criminal organizations. Not drugs, not prostitution, he despises those and won’t touch them: robbery, it is said, is his forte, usually armed, with or without violence according to the amount of resistance offered. He, himself, can be extremely violent. I can testify to that personally. The violence, of course, was not directed at me: you have to be out of your mind to attack a police lieutenant and George is very far from being out of his mind.’

‘You do have a genius for picking your friends, associates, or whatever you call them, Peter.’ De Graaf puffed at his cheroot and if he was ruffled in any way he didn’t show it. ‘Why isn’t this menace to society behind bars?’

‘You can’t arrest, charge, try and convict a man on hearsay. I can’t very well go up to George with a pair of handcuffs and say: “People have been telling me stories and I have to take you in.” Besides, we’re friends.’

‘You’ve said yourself that he can be excessively violent. You can pull him in on that.’

‘No. He’s entitled to eject any person who is drunk, abusive, uses foul language or is guilty of causing an affray. That’s the limit of George’s violence. Ejection. Usually two at a time. The law says he can. We are the law.’

‘Sounds an interesting character. Unusual, one might say. Two at a time, eh?’

‘Wait till you see George.’

‘And how do you propose to introduce me?’

‘No need to emphasize the police connections. Just Colonel de Graaf. This is, shall we say, a semiofficial visit.’

‘I may be recognized.’

‘Colonel, there isn’t a self-respecting criminal in this city who wouldn’t recognize you at a distance of half a kilometre. When their kids are misbehaving they probably whip out your picture, show it to their offspring and tell them if they don’t mend their ways—the bogieman will come and get them.’

‘Extremely witty. You’re not exactly unknown yourself, Peter. I’d be curious to know what the—ah—criminal element hereabouts think about you.’

‘You don’t have to be curious. They think I’m bent.’

The unprepossessing entrance to La Caracha was located halfway down a lane so narrow that not even a car could enter it. The cracked plaster of the tiny entrance porch, the fading and peeling paint belied the bar room that lay beyond. This was well lit and clean, with gleaming knotted-pine walls, half-a-dozen tables, each with four small armchairs instead of the usual metal or plastic seats, a semi-circular bar flanked by fixed stools and, beyond the bar, the barman. When one looked at him one forgot about the rest of the room.

He was huge. Very tall and very broad he probably weighed in about a hundred and thirty kilos. He wore a rather splendid Mexican sombrero—one assumed there was some connection between the barman’s headgear and the vaguely Latin American name of the restaurant—a white shirt, a black string tie, an open black waistcoat and black leather trousers. The absence of a gun-belt and a holstered Peacemaker Colt struck a discordant note. The eyes were dark, the bushy eyebrows black and the equally black moustache, equally bushy, luxuriant and dropping down past the corners of his mouth, perfectly complemented the spectacular sombrero. The craggy face appeared to have been hacked from granite by an enthusiastic but ungifted stone-mason. He was the epitome of all those ‘wanted’ portraits that used to adorn the walls of nineteenth-century western American saloons.

‘That’s George?’ Van Effen didn’t bother to answer the superfluous question. ‘When he ejects them two at a time I assume he uses only one hand.’

George caught sight of them and hurried round the corner of the bar, a wide, welcoming smile revealing startlingly white teeth. The nearer he approached, the bigger he seemed to become. His hand was outstretched while he was still quite some distance away.

‘Welcome, Peter, my friend, welcome. And Colonel van de Graaf. My word, this is indeed an honour.’ He pumped the Colonel’s hand as if he were a twin brother he hadn’t seen for twenty years.

De Graaf smiled. ‘You know me then?’

‘If there is anyone in the city who doesn’t recognize our Commissioner of Police he must either be blind or never read newspapers or magazines. Peter, as of this moment, my reputation is made.’ He looked at de Graaf and dropped his voice. ‘Provided, of course that this is not an official visit.’

‘Purely unofficial,’ de Graaf said. ‘Regard me as the Lieutenant’s guest.’

‘It is my pleasure to celebrate this auspicious occasion,’ George said. ‘Borreltje, jonge jenever, whisky, beer, wine—La Caracha has an excellent wine cellar. No better in Amsterdam. But I recommend my bessenjenever, gentlemen. Ice just beginning to form on the top.’ He touched his lips. ‘Incomparable.’

So it proved, and in the quantities that George supplied it the bessenjenever—red-currant gin—was as formidable as it was incomparable. George remained with them for a few minutes, discoursing freely on a variety of subjects but mainly and inevitably about the dyke breach that had brought back into existence the long-vanished Haarlem lake.

‘No need to look for the perpetrators of this crime among the professional criminals of the Netherlands.’ George sounded very positive. ‘I use the word “professional” because one would have to exclude the pitifully amateurish criminals among the Krakers, hot-headed madmen capable of any atrocity, no matter how many innocents suffer, in the name of their crazy and woolly ideals, totally amoral lunatics, mindless idiots who love destruction for destruction’s sake. But they are not Dutchmen, though they may have been born in this country: they’re just members of a terminally sick sub-culture that you’ll find in many other countries.

‘But I don’t think they’re responsible for the Schiphol flooding. However much one may deplore the action of the saboteurs one has to admire the clear-headed intelligence that lies behind it. Nobody with a clear-headed intelligence would ever dream of associating with the retarded morons who make up the Krakers, though that’s not to say the Krakers couldn’t be employed in some subordinate capacity where they wouldn’t be allowed to know enough to do any damage. But no Dutchman, however criminally minded, would or could have been responsible. Every Dutchman is born with the belief, the certain knowledge, that our dykes are inviolable: it is an act of faith. I am not—what is the word, gentlemen?—I am not xenophobic, but this is a foreign-inspired idea being carried out by foreigners. And it’s only the beginning. There will be further atrocities. Wait and see.’

‘We won’t have to wait long,’ de Graaf said. ‘They’re going to breach the Texel sea dyke at four-thirty this afternoon.’

George nodded, as if the news had come as no surprise to him.

‘So soon, so soon. And then the next dyke, and then the next, and the next. When the blackmail demands come, as come they must, for nothing other than blackmail can lie behind this, they will be horrendous.’ He glanced towards his bar where a group of men were making urgent signals that they were dying of thirst. ‘You will excuse me, gentlemen.’

‘An extraordinary fellow,’ de Graaf said. ‘He would have made a splendid politician—he could hardly be accused of being at a loss for words. Strange type to be a criminal alleged to be associated with violence—he’s an intelligent and clearly well-educated man. So, on the other hand, were a number of famous—notorious, rather—and highly successful criminals in the past. But I find him especially intriguing. He seems well into the criminal mind but at the same time he thinks and speaks like a cop. And he got on to the possibility that those criminals might come from another country in a fraction of the time that it took us to arrive at the possibility—and, unlike us, he had nothing to help or guide him towards that conclusion. Maybe you and I are fractionally less clever than we like to think we are.’

‘Maybe you should hire George, on an ad hoc basis, substantive rank of sergeant, as a dyke-breach investigator. Rather a fine title, don’t you think?’

‘The title is fine, the idea is not. Set a thief to catch a thief—the idea never did work. Do not jest with your superior in his hour of need. Speaking of need, when do we eat?’

‘Let’s ask.’ George had returned with fresh supplies of bessenjenever. ‘We’d like lunch, George.’

‘The Colonel will eat here? La Caracha is doubly honoured. This table will do?’

‘I’m expecting Vasco and Annemarie.’

‘Of course.’ George picked up the drinks tray and led the way up four steps into a dining room, bright, cheerful and so small that it held only two tables. George produced a menu. ‘Everything is excellent. The Rodekool met Rolpens is superb.’

‘Shall we have the superb, Peter?’ de Graaf said.

‘Fine. And, George, as our chief of police is with us, I think the expense account could stand a bottle of reasonable wine.’

‘Reasonable? Do I believe my ears? A superb wine to go with a superb dish and strictly on La Caracha. A Château Latour, perhaps? I have said that there is no better cellar than mine in the city. Equally beyond dispute is the fact that I have far the best Bordeaux cellar.’ George handed them their aperitifs. ‘Sharpen your appetites, gentlemen. Annelise, I promise, will excel herself.’

When George left de Graaf said: ‘Who’s Annelise?’

‘His wife. Less than half his size. He’s terrified of her. A wonderful cook.’

‘She is aware of his, what shall we say, extracurricular activities?’

‘She knows nothing.’

‘You mentioned a Vasco and an Annemarie. Those, I assume, are your informants. George seems to know about them.’

‘He knows them pretty well. They’re friends.’

‘Does he also know that they’re working under-cover for you?’ Van Effen nodded and de Graaf frowned. ‘Is this wise? Is it politic? Is it, dammit, even professional?’

‘I trust George.’

‘Maybe you do. I don’t have to. To say you have the best Bordeaux cellar in Amsterdam is to make a pretty large claim. That would cost money, a great deal of money. Is he into the highjacking and smuggling rackets too or does he earn enough from his extra-curricular activities to buy honestly on the open market?’

‘Look, sir, I never said George was a rogue, thief, crook, gangster or whatever. I was only quoting the neighbourhood opinion of him. I wanted you to make up your own mind about him. I do think you already have, only you still have reservations owing to the fact that you have a nasty, devious, suspicious mind which is why, I suppose, you’re the city’s Chief of Police. Annelise knows nothing about George’s extra-curricular activities, as you call them, because there are none. George has never earned an illegal guilder in his life. He’s totally straight and if every man in Amsterdam were as honest as he is you’d join the unemployed by nightfall. I was certain you’d caught on to this when you said he thought and spoke like a cop. He is—or was—a cop, and a damned good one, a sergeant in line for his inspectorate when he decided to retire last year. Phone the Chief of Police in Groningen and find out who he’d give a bag of gold for to have back on his staff.’

‘I am staggered,’ de Graaf said. He didn’t look staggered, he just sat placidly puffing his cheroot and sipping his bessenjenever as if van Effen had been discussing the weather or crops. ‘Different. Yes, different.’ He didn’t say what was different. ‘Might have given me some kind of warning, though.’

‘Thought you’d guess, sir. He’s got cop written all over him. At least he had until he grew his moustache after retirement.’

‘Any specialities?’

‘Drugs and counter-terrorism. I should have said drugs then counter-terrorism.’

‘Drugs? The only drug in the province of Groningen comes out of a gin bottle. Here’s the place for him. Or, if I take you rightly, was. Why was he taken off. Who took him off?’

‘Nobody. Nature took him off. To be a successful drugs cop you have to be able to merge unobtrusively into your background. You’ve seen him. He wasn’t built to merge into anything.’

‘What’s more, they’ve never even seen a terrorist up north.’

‘They’re not all that thick on the ground down here either, sir. Maybe that’s why George resigned—no challenge, nothing left for him to do.’

‘A waste. An intelligence like that devoting its life to serving up superfluous calories to already overweight Amsterdamers. Could be useful. Maybe there’s something to your idea of ad hoc recruitment. In an emergency, could always have him co-opted.’

‘Yes, sir. I thought that to co-opt anyone you required a committee, a quorum.’

‘There’s only one committee and quorum in the Amsterdam police force and I’m it. If you think he could be of help, just ask me. In fact, don’t bother to ask me. I’m hungry.’

‘Ah, yes. George normally serves up hors d’oeuvre. Maybe he thought there was no urgency.’ He surveyed de Graaf’s ample frame. ‘Superfluous calories. However…’ He rose, opened a wooden cupboard door to reveal a refrigerator, opened this and said: ‘Half a smoked salmon. Smoked trout. Mountain Ham. Gouda, Edam, and a few other odds and ends.’

‘There are no limits to the heights you might reach, my boy.’ Some time later, the first sharp edge of his appetite temporarily blunted, he said: ‘If you’re too busy or too cowardly to accompany me to Texel, may one ask what you intend to do.’

‘Depends on what I learn from Annemarie and Vasco. If, of course, anything. On balance, however, I think I’ll go and do what poor George couldn’t, merge unobtrusively among the Krakers in their garden suburb.’

‘You! You’re mad. The unchallenged bête noire of Krakerdom. Two minutes after your arrival all activity and conversation will wither on the vine.’

‘I’ve been there more than once in the past and the vine has remained unaffected. I don’t wear this rather nice pin-stripe you see before you or my official uniform. I wear another uniform. My Kraker uniform. I don’t think I’ve ever discussed my wardrobe with you before.’ Van Effen sipped some more bessenjenever. ‘I’ve a sealskin jacket with lots and lots of tassels and a coonskin hat with a wolverine’s tail attached to the back. Rather dashing, really.’ De Graaf closed his eyes, screwed them tightly shut and then opened them again. ‘The trousers are made of some other kind of skin, I don’t know what it is, with lots of little leather strips down the sides. Moccasins, of course. Those were a mistake. The moccasins, I mean. They leak. Then my hair and my moustache are blond, not platinum, you understand, that would attract too much attention.’

‘The rest of your outfit doesn’t?’

‘The dye is impervious to any rain-storm. Have to use a special detergent to get it off. A painful process. Then I wear half a dozen rings, solid brass, on my right hand.’

‘That the hand you hit people with?’

‘Among other things I’m a Green Peace, antinuclear, environmental pacifist. I also have a multicoloured bead necklace, double chain, and an earring. Only one earring. Two are passé.’

‘This, some day, I must see.’

‘I can get you one like it, if you like.’ De Graaf closed his eyes again and was saved further comment by the arrival of George with lunch. George served the Rodekool met Rolpens, opened the Château Latour with a suitably reverential air and departed. The meal was a simple one, red cabbage, rolled spiced meat and sliced apple, but, as George had promised, splendidly cooked: as was customary in Amsterdam there was enough food for four. The wine, also as George had promised, was superb.

They had just finished when George brought in coffee. ‘Annemarie is outside.’

‘Bring her in, please.’

Annemarie was a young lady of undeniably striking appearance. She wore a roll-necked pullover of indeterminate colour which had once, perhaps, been white. It was about four sizes too large for her, a defect she had tried to remedy by hauling a three-inch studded belt tightly about her midriff. As she had a rather slender waist, the effect was incongruous in the extreme: she resembled nothing so much as a potato bag that had been tied around the middle. The faded and patched blue jeans were fashionably frayed at the cuffs and she teetered, rather than walked, into the room on a pair of stained short leather boots with ludicrously pointed high heels. The condition of her streaky blonde hair showed that she regarded combs as an unnecessary luxury. The jet-black mascara had been applied with a heavy hand, as had the turquoise eye-shadow. The ghastly pallor of her face, which could only have been caused by an over-enthusiastic application of some cheap powder, was in stunning contrast to the two circular red patches on her cheeks, which equally owed nothing to nature. The lipstick was purple and the blood-red nail varnish, which showed to advantage when she removed the cigarette holder from between her stained teeth, was chipped and flaking. The nose-wrinkling smell of her cheap perfume suggested that she had been bathing in it, although the impression was overwhelming that she hadn’t bathed in anything for a very long time. Her brass earrings tinkled as she teetered.

Van Effen looked at de Graaf, but de Graaf didn’t look at him: he was either mesmerized or petrified by the apparition before him. Van Effen cleared his throat, loudly.

‘This is Annemarie, sir.’

‘Yes, yes, Annemarie.’ De Graaf was still staring at her, and it was by a visibly conscious effort of will-power that he turned his head to look at van Effen. ‘Of course, of course. Annemarie. But there are one or two things I haven’t had the opportunity yet to discuss with you and—’

‘I understand, sir. Annemarie, my dear, would you mind for a few minutes—I’m sure George will give you something.’ She blew a long puff of smoke, smiled and tottered from the room.

‘Annemarie, my dear.’ De Graaf sounded and looked appalled. ‘Annemarie, my dear. You in your Kraker uniform and that—that creature, what a couple you would make. Level headed, I’d always thought you, eminently sensible—this must be some kind of joke. Where on earth did you pick up that hussy, that harlot, that harridan, that ghastly spectacle? God, that make-up, that bordello perfume!’

‘It’s not like you, sir, to go by appearances. Snap judgments—’

‘Snap judgments! Those preposterous shoes. That filthy jersey that was built for—for a gorilla—’

‘A very practical jersey, sir. That way no one would suspect the existence of the Biretta automatic she carries strapped beneath her waist.’

‘A Biretta! That creature, that spectacle—she carries an automatic? That—that caricature of a human being carries a gun? You must be mad.’ He drew deeply on his cheroot. ‘No, you’re not mad. I’m not complaining, Peter, but it’s been a shock to my system.’

‘I can see that, sir. Should have warned you, I suppose. She does have rather an effect on people who make her acquaintance for the first time. That awful harridan is in fact a rather lovely young lady, or would be if she soaked in a bath for about an hour. She’s very nice, charming really, intelligent, speaks four languages, is a university graduate and is also a lady policewoman from Rotterdam. Don’t you see, sir, I’m making a point. If she can fool the Chief of Police, who has become Chief of Police by, among other things, being fooled by fewer people than anyone else around, she can fool anyone.’

‘How did you come by this paragon?’

‘Exchange basis. Not a very fair exchange, really. I knew she’d spent six months underground in Rotterdam, and we had no one comparable up here. It wasn’t easy but my opposite number down there is a friend of mine.’

‘Why wasn’t I informed of this?’

‘Because you gave me a free hand, remember. I would have informed you if there had been anything to report. So far there has been nothing. Didn’t want to bother you with trifles.’

De Graaf smiled. ‘I doubt whether the young lady would care to be called a trifle. Have her in, would you?’

Van Effen did so and de Graaf waved her courteously to a seat. ‘Sorry you were kept waiting. You know who I am?’

‘Of course. Colonel van de Graaf. My boss.’ The slightly husky voice was low and pleasant, at complete variation with her appearance.

‘Lieutenant van Effen told you?’

‘He didn’t have to, sir. I work for him and I know he works for you. And I’ve seen your picture dozens of times.’

‘That outfit you’re wearing, Annemarie. Don’t you feel it makes you look rather conspicuous?’

‘Among the people I’m supposed to be investigating? I can assure you, sir, that compared to some of the clothes worn there, mine are low key, positively understated. Isn’t that so, Peter?’

‘Ah! Peter, is it? A lowly ranker addresses my senior Lieutenant by his given name?’

‘On orders, sir. We’ve been out a couple of times together—’

‘Among your—ah—friends?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I wish I had seen that.’

‘We do form rather a striking couple. I told Annemarie that it would be unwise to call me Lieutenant in such company but to call me Peter and always think of me as Peter. That way you don’t make mistakes. Someone drummed this into me years ago.’

‘I was the drummer. I understand that you carry a gun, young lady. You can use it?’

‘I was trained at the police range.’

‘Ever used it?’

‘No. And I must admit I hope I never have to.’

‘Would you use it?’

‘I don’t know. If it was to stop someone from killing a person, well, perhaps, yes. But I couldn’t kill a person. I don’t like guns. I’m afraid I’m not very brave, sir.’

‘Nonsense. Your sentiments do you credit. Feel exactly the same way myself. And it takes a brave girl to venture into Krakerland.’

She half-smiled. ‘That’s where the roll-neck comes in so useful. They can’t see the pulse in my neck.’

‘Rubbish. How are things among your friends? Anything untoward or exciting afoot.’

‘They’re not a very exciting lot, sir. Rather dull, really. Most of them are not the social rebels and anti-authority storm troopers they would like to be thought to be. Of course, there are the drug-pushers and drug-users, and there is a hard core that trade in armaments, selling Russian small-arms to the Irish Republican Army and other disaffected elements. But Peter has told me not to bother about the arms-running side.’

‘Disaffected elements? I rather like that. So, Peter, the young lady does not concern herself with gun-running. Why?’

‘You ask me, sir? America, Russia, Britain, France trade in arms—legally—to the tune of billions of dollars yearly. The Israelis do it, as do the Iranians, Libyans and God knows how many other countries. All with their government’s blessings. Who are we to become all God-fearing, moralistic and holier-than-thou when private enterprise move in on a tiny scale? Anyway, I know you’re not really interested in that side, and that the only things you really are interested in are drugs and those mysterious and increasing threats to the Royal family and members of the Government.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. Anything interesting to report on any of these fronts?’

Annemarie shook her head. ‘Vasco—you’ve heard of Vasco?’

‘Yes. Never met him, though. Supposed to meet him today. In fact I thought I was meeting him with you.’

‘I thought so, too. We’d arranged to meet in a café close by here almost an hour ago. No signs, which is most unlike Vasco.’

‘This friend of yours—he’s a dyed-in-the-wool true-blue Kraker?’

‘Well, he seems to be but he can’t be, can he? They have some kind of leaders, nobody with any personality or charisma, a kind of loose council, and Vasco appears to be a member or close to it. But he says he’s basically against them and I believe him. After all, he works for you. Sort of.’

‘But you’re in two minds about him?’

‘My intelligence, if I have any, says that—well, I’m ambivalent about him. My instincts trust him.’

‘Peter?’

‘Her instincts are right. He’s a cop. Detective sergeant.’

‘A policeman.’ Annemarie’s lips were compressed, her eyes angry. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

‘Don’t be childish,’ van Effen said. ‘You told him you were a policewoman?’

She didn’t answer and de Graaf said hastily: ‘It’s the need-to-know principle, my dear. He didn’t even tell me. I take it he thinks I didn’t need to know. You were about to say something about Vasco?’

‘Yes. Could be important. I don’t know. He told me late last night that he thought he had a lead. He said he had been approached by one of the council, a person who knew that he, Vasco, moved quite often about the outside world—to them, everything beyond their suburban boundaries is the outside world. He said he was being taken to a meeting about midnight to meet someone important. I don’t know who the person was.’

Van Effen said: ‘Who was the person who approached him? Can you describe him?’

‘I can describe him, all right. Short, balding, pepper-and-salt beard and a bad squint in his right eye.’

De Graaf looked at van Effen. ‘Another eye disorder, but this one for real. This person have a name?’

‘Julius.’

‘Julius what?’

‘Just—’ She hesitated. ‘Julius Caesar. I know it’s crazy, but then they’re crazy. Nobody out there ever uses his real name. Right now, as far as names are concerned, they’re going through an historical phase. That’s the kind of follow-my-leader sheep they are. We’ve got Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Lord Nelson, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra—I could go on. They go for macho men or beautiful women, everything that they’re not. Anyway, Julius Caesar.’

Van Effen said: ‘And that’s all you know? No indications as to what kind of lead it was?’

‘No.’ She pursed her lips. ‘That’s not to say that he didn’t know.’

‘An odd comment to make,’ de Graaf said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. I just don’t know whether he knows or not.’

‘Dear me.’ De Graaf studied her quizzically. ‘You don’t trust your fellow officer?’

‘He doesn’t trust me.’

‘Well, once again, dear me. This does make for a happy relationship in the field.’

Van Effen said: ‘Sergeant Westenbrink doesn’t distrust her. It’s just that three years working under-cover tends to make you secretive, a loner.’

‘Westenbrink, is it. I thought I knew all my sergeants.’

‘He’s from Utrecht, sir.’

‘You cast a wide net. Lieutenant van Effen, Annemarie, works on the same principle as Vasco, whose name, I feel quite certain, is not Vasco. The need to know. How can you be hurt when you see me being treated in this cavalier fashion?’

George entered, apologized, picked up a phone set from a side table and placed it in front of Annemarie. She lifted the receiver, listened to the crackling voice for all of two minutes, said: ‘Thank you. Five minutes,’ and hung up.

Van Effen said: ‘The Hunter’s Horn, I presume. What’s the message from Vasco?’

‘The Hunter’s Horn.’ De Graaf frowned. ‘I trust that’s not the Hunter’s Horn that—’

‘There’s only one—ah—establishment of that name in Amsterdam. Beggars can’t be choosers. Apart from La Caracha it’s our only safe house in Amsterdam. A private connection, Colonel. The fair name of the Amsterdam police department remains unbesmirched.’

‘Not to know,’ de Graaf muttered. ‘Not to know.’

‘You’re half right,’ Annemarie said, almost reluctantly. ‘It was the Hunter’s Horn. But it wasn’t Vasco.’

‘Never said it was. I said “What’s the message from Vasco?” It was Henri. Henri, sir, is the owner. Vasco is under observation but whoever is tailing him didn’t know, wasn’t to know, that it’s virtually impossible to follow Vasco without Vasco being aware of it. So he couldn’t come here. The person or persons following him would have raised their eyebrows if they saw you here: they’d have gone into shock if they’d found me, which would have been a small disaster for us and the end of the usefulness of both Vasco and yourself. So the only place left for Vasco was the Hunter’s Horn. Even there he couldn’t use the telephone for he would still be being watched. So he wrote a small note for Henri who did the telephoning. You’re to ask me a question and you’re to give Henri my answer inside five minutes.’

Annemarie sighed. ‘Did you have to spoil it for me?’ Then she brightened. ‘But you didn’t get it all, did you?’

‘I’m brilliant at deducing the obvious. I’m not clairvoyant. The rest, what I didn’t get, can wait, including the reasons why Vasco is going to call me back.’

‘I didn’t say that?’

‘Henri did. The message.’

She made a moue. ‘It went like this. Two tails. Understand can’t ditch. Meet two—’

De Graaf interrupted. ‘What was that meant to mean?’

‘Westenbrink’s shorthand, I imagine,’ van Effen said. ‘Only two ways of getting rid of his tails. He could throw them into the nearest canal, which he’s perfectly capable of doing or he could easily have lost them which he is again perfectly capable of doing. Either course of action would have ended any connection he’s succeeded in making.’

Annemarie went on: ‘Meet two, three men four-thirty Hunter’s Horn.’ She pushed across a piece of paper.

‘Stephan Danilov,’ van Effen read. ‘Pole. Radom. Explosives expert. Oil well fires. Texas. Clear enough. Interesting, sir?’

‘It is indeed. How do you feel about blowing up banks?’

‘Should be interesting to see the law from the other side. They’ll bring along a Polish speaker, of course.’

Annemarie said: ‘You think this is a Polish criminal group.’

‘No. Just to check on me.’

‘But if they speak to you in—’

‘If they speak to him in Polish, my dear,’ de Graaf said, ‘he’ll answer in Polish, in which language he’s very fluent. Your friend from Utrecht, Peter, of course knew this.’

Annemarie said: ‘But—but you’ll be recognized. Everybody in that—that ghetto knows you, I mean, knows who you are.’

‘Ninny. Sorry, but, please. If you think I’m going to present myself as Lieutenant van Effen you can’t be feeling too well. I shall, in the best traditions as befits the circumstances, be heavily disguised. I shall put on about twenty kilos—I have a suit and shirt designed to cope with the excess avoirdupois—fatten my cheeks, tint hair and moustache, wear a sinister scar and a black leather glove. That’s to disguise the fearful scars and burns I sustained when—let me see, yes, of course—when I was putting out this oil fire in Saudi Arabia or wherever. It’s remarkable what a single black glove does. It becomes the focal point for identification in nearly everyone’s mind and if you’re not wearing it, you’re not you, if you follow me. And don’t call Krakerdom a ghetto—it’s an insult to decent Jews.’

‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘I know. I’m sorry. Call Henri, tell him it’s OK and to let a few minutes pass before giving Vasco the nod.’

She made the call and hung up. ‘Everything seems all right. A few minutes.’ She looked at van Effen. ‘You already have all the details you want. Why have Vasco make the call?’

‘Why have Vasco make the call?’ Van Effen tried to look patient. ‘Vasco goes back every afternoon to this empty block of flats that they’ve taken over under so-called squatters’ rights. He’s been under surveillance since his meeting with the council or whatever they call themselves since last night and it’s a safe assumption that he’ll remain under surveillance until the time of the meeting in the Hunter’s Horn. How’s he supposed to have communicated with me to arrange this meeting? Telepathy?’

De Graaf cleared his throat and looked at Annemarie. ‘You must forgive our Lieutenant his old-world gallantry. Do you go back to the dreadful place now?’

‘Very soon.’

‘And you stay there overnight?’

She gave a mock shudder. ‘There are limits, sir, to my loyalty to the police force. No, I don’t sleep there at nights.’

‘No raised eyebrows among the fraternity?’

‘Not at all, sir. I have a gentleman friend who comes calling for me every evening. The Krakers understand this sort of thing.’

‘And you go back in the morning?’

‘Yes, sir.’ She put her hand to her mouth to cover a smile but de Graaf had seen it.

‘You are amused, young lady.’ His tone had lost some warmth.

‘Well, yes, I am a little, sir. Your voice and expression of disapproval and disappointment. This friend is really a very gallant gentleman. Especially as he’s married.’

‘Inevitably.’ De Graaf was not amused.

‘He takes me to his cousin’s house, leaves me there and comes for me in the morning. That’s why he’s gallant, because he’s very much in love with his own wife. His cousin, Colonel de Graaf, is a lady.’

De Graaf said: ‘The Chief of Police is in his usual condition, namely, out of his depth.’ He was noticeably relieved. ‘You will, of course, Peter, have carried out a check on this cousin, this lady?’

‘No I have not.’ Van Effen spoke with some feeling. ‘I wouldn’t dare.’

De Graaf frowned briefly then leaned back and laughed. ‘Behold our intrepid Lieutenant, Annemarie. He’s terrified of his young sister. So

you’re staying with Julie?’

‘You know her then, sir?’

‘My favourite lady in all Amsterdam. Except, of course, for my wife and two daughters. I’m her godfather. Well, well.’

The phone rang. Van Effen picked it up and listened for perhaps half a minute then said: ‘Can anyone overhear my voice if I speak?’ Apparently nobody could for van Effen said: ‘Say that you’ll give me half a minute to think it over.’ At the end of that period van Effen spoke again: ‘Say to me: “Stephan, I swear to you it’s no police trap. My life on it. And if it were a police trap what would my life be worth then? Don’t be silly.” ’

A few moments later van Effen said: ‘That was fine. Will you be coming with them? Fine? Be sure to tell whoever comes with you—I’m sure it won’t be the gentlemen who have you under surveillance at the moment—that I have a police record in Poland and have a United States extradition warrant out against me. I shall be wearing a black leather glove.’ He hung up.

‘Nice touch about the police record and extradition warrant,’ de Graaf said. ‘Nice criminal touch and two statements they have no way of checking on. You will be carrying a gun, I assume?’

‘Certainly. It would be expected of me and I’ll have it in a shoulder holster that should make it obvious to even the most myopic that I am armed.’

Annemarie said doubtfully: ‘Perhaps they will take it off you before discussions start. Just as a precaution, I mean.’

‘One must take a chance about those things. I shall be brave.’

‘What Peter means,’ de Graaf said drily, ‘is that he always carries a second gun. It’s like his single glove theory, that people only concentrate on one thing at a time. It’s in that book of his, I’m sure. If a person finds a gun on you he’s got to be almost pathologically suspicious to start looking for another.’

‘It’s not in the book. I don’t put thoughts like those in criminal minds. Curious, sir, that we’ll both be engaged in something interesting at exactly four-thirty—you and the Minister, schnapps in hand, peering down at the Texel sea-dyke from the safety of your helicopter seats while I am entering the lion’s den.’

‘I’d switch with you any time,’ de Graaf said morosely. ‘I should be back from Texel by six—damn all I can do up there anyway. Let’s meet at seven.’

‘Provided we both survive—you the schnapps, me the lions. The 444 would be in order, sir?’

De Graaf didn’t say that the 444 would be in order: on the other hand he didn’t say it wouldn’t.

THREE

The Chinook helicopter, a big, fast experimental model on demonstration loan from the US Army of the Rhine, suffered from the same defect as other, smaller and less advanced models in that it was extremely noisy, the rackety clamour of the engines making conversation difficult and at times impossible. This wasn’t helped by the fact that it had two rotors instead of the customary one.

The passengers were a very mixed bag indeed. Apart from de Graaf and his Justice Minister, Robert Kondstall, there were four cabinet ministers, of whom only the Minister of Defence could claim any right to be aboard. The other three, including, incredibly, the Minister of Education, were aboard only because of the influence they wielded and their curiosity about things that in no way concerned them. Much the same could have been said about the senior air force officer, the brigadier and rear-admiral who sat together behind de Graaf. Flight evaluation purposes had been their claim. The evaluation tests had been completed a week ago: they were along purely as rubber-neckers. The same could be said of the two experts from the Rijkswaterstaat and the two from the Delft Hydraulics laboratory. Superficially, it would have seemed, their presence could be more than justified, but as the pilot had firmly stated that he had no intention of setting his Chinook down in floodwaters and the experts, portly gentlemen all, had indicated that they had no intention of descending by winch or rope ladder only to be swept away, it was difficult to see how their presence could be justified. The handful of journalists and cameramen aboard could have claimed a right to be there: but even they were to admit later that their trip had hardly been worthwhile.

The Chinook, flying at no more than two hundred metres and about half a kilometre out to sea, was directly opposite Oosterend when the sea dyke broke. It was a singularly unspectacular explosion—a little sound, a little smoke, a little rubble, a little spray—but effective enough for all that: the Waddenzee was already rushing through the narrow gap and into the polder beyond. Less than half a kilometre from the entrance to the gap an ocean-going tug was already headed towards the breach. As the pilot turned his Chinook westwards, presumably to see what the conditions were like in the polder, de Graaf leaned over to one of the Rijkswaterstaat experts. He had to shout to make himself heard.

‘How bad is it, Mr Okkerse? How long do you think it will take to seal off the break?’

‘Well, damn their souls, damn their souls! Villains, devils, monsters!’ Okkerse clenched and unclenched his hands. ‘Monsters, I tell you, sir, monsters!’ Okkerse was understandably upset. Dykes, the construction, care and maintenance of, were his raison d’être.

‘Yes, yes, monsters,’ de Graaf shouted. ‘How long to fix that?’

‘Moment.’ Okkerse rose, lurched forwards, spoke briefly to the pilot and lurched his way back to his seat. ‘Got to see it first. Pilot’s taking us down.’

The Chinook curved round, passing over the waters flooding across the first reaches of the polder and came to hover some fifteen metres above the ground and some twenty metres distant. Okkerse pressed his nose against a window. After only a few seconds he turned away and gave the wave off signal to the pilot. The Chinook curved away inland.

‘Clever fiends,’ Okkerse shouted. ‘Very clever fiends. It’s only a small breach and they chose the perfect moment for it.’

‘What does the time of day matter?’

‘It matters very much. Rather, the state of the tide matters. They didn’t pick high tide, because that would have caused heavy flooding and great destruction.’

‘So they can’t be all that villainous?’

Okkerse didn’t seem to hear him. ‘And they didn’t pick low tide because they knew—how, I can’t even guess—that we would do what we are just about to do and that is to block the gap with the bows of a vessel. Which is what we are about to do with the bows of that ocean-going tug down there. At low water the tug probably wouldn’t have found enough water to get close to the dyke.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t like any of this.’

‘You think our friends have inside information?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘I suggested that to your friend Jon de Jong. That those people have either an informant in or somebody employed in the Rijkswaterstaat.’

‘Ridiculous! Impossible! In our organization? Preposterous!’

‘That’s more or less what Jon said. Nothing’s impossible. What makes you think your people are immune to penetration? Look at the British Secret Service where security is supposed to be a religion. They’re penetrated at regular intervals and with painful frequency. If it can happen to them with all their resources, it’s ten times more likely to happen to you. That’s beside the point. How long to seal the breach?’

‘The tug should block off about eighty per cent of the flow. The tide’s going out. We’ve got everything ready to hand—concrete blocks, matting, divers, steel plates, quick-setting concrete. A few hours. Technically, a minor job. That’s not what worries me.’

De Graaf nodded, thanked him and resumed his seat beside Kondstaal. ‘Okkerse says it’s no problem, sir. Straightforward repair job.’

‘Didn’t think it would be a problem. The villains said there would be minimal damage and they seem to mean what they say. That’s not what worries me.’

‘That’s what Okkerse has just said. The worry is, of course, that they can carry out their threats with impunity. We’re in an impossible situation. What would you wager, sir, that we don’t receive another threat this evening?’

‘Nothing. There’s no point in wondering what those people are up to. They’ll doubtless let us know in their own good time. And there’s no point, I suppose, in asking you what progress you’ve made so far.’

De Graaf concentrated on lighting his cheroot and said nothing.

Sergeant Westenbrink wore an off-white boiler suit, unbuttoned from throat to waist to show off a garishly patterned and coloured Hawaiian shirt, a Dutch bargee’s cap and a circular brass earring. Compared to those among whom he lived and had his being, Vasco, van Effen thought, looked positively under-dressed but was still outlandish enough to make himself and the two men sitting opposite him across the table in the booth in the Hunter’s Horn look the pillars of a respectable society. One of them, clad in an immaculately cut dark grey suit, was about van Effen’s age, darkly handsome, slightly swarthy, with tightly-curled black hair, black eyes and, when he smiled—which was often—what appeared to be perfect teeth. Any Mediterranean country, van Effen thought, or, at the outside, not more than two generations removed. His companion, a short, slightly balding man of perhaps ten or fifteen years older than the other, wore a conservative dark suit and a hairline moustache, the only really and slightly unusual feature in an otherwise unremarkable face. Neither of them looked the slightest bit like a bona fide member of the criminal classes but, then, few successful criminals ever did.

The younger man—he went, it seemed, by the name of Romero Agnelli, which might even have been his own—produced an ebony cigarette-holder, a Turkish cigarette and a gold inlaid onyx lighter; any of which might have appeared affected or even effeminate on almost any man: with Agnelli, all three seemed inevitable. He lit the cigarette and smiled at van Effen.

‘You will not take it amiss if I ask one or two questions.’ He had a pleasant baritone voice and spoke in English. ‘One cannot be too careful these days.’

‘I cannot be too careful any day. If your question is pertinent, of course I’ll answer it. If not, I won’t. Am I—ah—accorded the same privilege?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Except you can ask more what you consider pertinent questions than I can.’

‘I don’t quite understand.’

‘Just that I take it that we’re talking on a potential employer employee relationship. The employer is usually entitled to ask more questions.’

‘Now I understand. I won’t take advantage of that. I must say, Mr Danilov, that you look more like the employer class yourself.’ And indeed, van Effen’s over-stuffed suit and padded cheeks did lend a certain air of prosperity. It also made him look almost permanently genial. ‘Am I mistaken in thinking that you carry a gun?’

‘Unlike you, Mr Agnelli, I’m afraid I’m not in the habit of patronizing expensive tailors.’

‘Guns make me nervous.’ The disarming smile didn’t show a trace of nervousness.

‘Guns make me nervous, too. That’s why I carry one in case I meet a man who is carrying one. That makes me very nervous.’ Van Effen smiled, removed his Biretta from its shoulder holster, clicked out the magazine, handed it to Agnelli and replaced his pistol. ‘That do anything for your nerves?’

Agnelli smiled. ‘All gone.’

‘Then they shouldn’t be.’ Van Effen reached below the table and came up with a tiny automatic. ‘A Lilliput, a toy in many ways, but lethal up to twenty feet in the hands of a man who can fire accurately.’ He tapped out the magazine, handed this in turn to Agnelli and replaced the Lilliput in its ankle holster. ‘That’s all. Three guns would be just too much to carry about.’

‘So I should imagine.’ Agnelli’s smile, which had momentarily vanished, was back in place. He pushed the two magazines across the table. ‘I don’t think we’ll be requiring guns this afternoon.’

‘Indeed. But something would be useful.’ Van Effen dropped the magazines into a side pocket. ‘I always find that talking—’

‘Beer for me,’ Agnelli said. ‘And for Helmut, too, I know.’

‘Four beers,’ van Effen said. ‘Vasco, if you would be so kind—’ Vasco rose and left the booth.

Agnelli said: ‘Known Vasco long?’

Van Effen considered. ‘A proper question. Two months. Why?’ Had they, van Effen wondered, been asking the same question of Vasco.

‘Idle curiosity.’ Agnelli, van Effen thought, was not a man to indulge in idle curiosity. ‘Your name really is Stephan Danilov?’

‘Certainly not. But it’s the name I go by in Amsterdam.’

‘But you really are a Pole?’ The elder man’s voice, dry and precise, befitted his cast of countenance which could have been that of a moderately successful lawyer or accountant. He also spoke in Polish.

‘For my sins.’ Van Effen raised an eyebrow. ‘Vasco, of course.’

‘Yes. Where were you born?’

‘Radom.’

‘I know it. Not well. A rather provincial town, I thought.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘You’ve heard? But you lived there.’

‘Four years. When you’re four years old a provincial town is the centre of the world. My father—a printer—moved to a better job.’

‘Where?’

‘Warsaw.’

‘Aha!’

‘Aha yourself.’ Van Effen spoke in some irritation. ‘You sound as if you know Warsaw and are now going to find out if I know it. Why, I can’t imagine. You’re not by any chance a lawyer, Mr—I’m afraid I don’t know your name?’

‘Paderiwski. I am a lawyer.’

‘Paderiwski. Given time, I would have thought you could have come up with a better one than that. And I was right, eh? A lawyer. I wouldn’t care to have you acting for my defence. You make a poor interrogator.’

Agnelli was smiling but Paderiwski was not. His lips were pursed. He said brusquely: ‘You know the Tin-Roofed Palace, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Dear me. What have we here. The Inquisition? Ah. Thank you.’ He took a glass from a tray that a waiter, following Vasco, had just brought into the curtained booth and lifted it. ‘Your health, gentlemen. The place you’re so curious about, Mr—ah—Paderiwski, is close by the Wista, on the corner of the Wybrzeze Gdanskie and the Slasko-Dabrowski bridge.’ He sipped some more beer. ‘Unless they’ve moved it, of course. Some years since I’ve been there.’

Paderiwski was not amused. ‘The Palace of Culture and Science.’

‘Parade Square. It’s too big.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Too big to have been moved, I mean. Two thousand, three hundred rooms are a lot of rooms. A monstrosity. The wedding-cake, they call it. But, then, Stalin never did have any taste in architecture.’

‘Stalin?’ Agnelli said.

‘His personal gift to my already long-suffering countrymen.’ So Agnelli spoke Polish, too.

‘Where’s the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw?’

‘It’s not in Warsaw. Mlociny, ten kilometres to the north.’ Van Effen’s voice was now as brusque as Paderiwski’s had been. ‘Where’s the Nike?You don’t know? What’s the Nike? You don’t know? Any citizen of Warsaw knows it’s the name given to the “Heroes of Warsaw” monument. What’s Zamenhofa Street famous for?’ An increasingly uncomfortable Paderiwski made no reply. ‘The Ghetto monument. I told you you’d make a lousy lawyer, Paderiwski. Any competent lawyer, for the defence or the prosecution, always prepares his brief. You didn’t. You’re a fraud. It’s my belief that you’ve never even been in Warsaw and that you just spent an hour or so studying a gazetteer or guide-book.’ Van Effen placed his hands on the table as if preparatory to rising. ‘I don’t think, gentleman, that we need detain each other any longer. Discreet enquiries are one thing, offensive interrogation by an incompetent, another. I see no basis here for mutual trust and, quite honestly, I need neither a job nor money.’ He rose. ‘Good day, gentlemen.’

Agnelli reached out a hand. He didn’t touch van Effen, it was just a restraining gesture. ‘Please sit down, Mr Danilov. Perhaps Helmut has rather overstepped the mark but have you ever met a lawyer who wasn’t burdened with a suspicious, mistrustful mind? Helmut—or we—just happened to choose the wrong suspect. Helmut, in fact, has been in Warsaw but only, as you almost guessed, briefly and as a tourist. I, personally, don’t doubt you could find your way about Warsaw blindfolded.’ Paderiwski had the look of a man who wished he were in some other place, any place. ‘A blunder. We apologize.’

‘That’s kind.’ Van Effen sat down and quaffed some more beer. ‘Fair enough.’

Agnelli smiled. Almost certainly a double-dyed villain, van Effen thought, but a charming and persuasive one. ‘Now that you’ve established a degree of moral ascendancy over us I’ll reinforce that by admitting that we almost certainly need you more than you need us.’

Not to be outdone, van Effen smiled in turn. ‘You must be in a desperate way.’ He lifted and examined his empty glass. ‘If you’d just poke your head round the corner, Vasco, and make the usual SOS.’

‘Of course, Stephan.’ There was an unmistakable expression of relief in his face. He did as asked then settled back in his seat.

‘No more interrogation,’ Agnelli said. ‘I’ll come straight to the point. Your friend Vasco tells me that you know a little about explosives.’

‘Vasco does me less than justice. I know a great deal about explosives.’ He looked at Vasco in reproof. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you would discuss a friend—that’s me, Vasco, in case you’ve forgotten—with strangers.’

‘I didn’t. Well, I did, but I just said it was someone I knew.’

‘No harm. Explosives, as I say, I know. Defusing bombs I know. I’m also fairly proficient in capping well-head oil fires but you wouldn’t be approaching me in this fashion if that was your problem. You’d be on the phone to Texas, where I learnt my trade.’

‘No oil fires.’ Agnelli smiled again. ‘But defusing bombs—well that’s something else. Where did you learn a dangerous trade like that?’

‘Army,’ van Effen said briefly. He didn’t specify which army.

‘You’ve actually defused bombs?’ Agnelli’s respect was genuine.

‘Quite a number.’

‘You must be good.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re here.’

‘I am good. I’m also lucky, because no matter how good you are the bomb you’re trying to defuse may be your last one. Peaceful retirement is not the lot of a bomb disposal expert. But as I assume you have no more unexploded bombs than you have oil wells, then it must be explosives. Explosives experts in Holland are not in short supply. You have only to advertise. That I should be approached in a clandestine fashion can only mean that you are engaged in activities that are illegal.’

‘We are. Have you never been? Engaged, I mean?’

‘All depends upon who defines what is illegal and what is not and how they define it. Some people hold definitions which are different from mine and wish to discuss the matter with me. Very tiresome they can be, those alleged upholders of justice. You know what the British say—the law is an ass.’ Van Effen considered. ‘I think I put that rather well.’

‘You’ve hardly committed yourself. May one ask—delicately, of course—whether this discussion you are avoiding has anything to do with your vacationing in Amsterdam?’

‘You may. It has. What do you want me to blow up?’

Agnelli raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, well, you can be blunt. Almost as blunt as you can be, shall we say, diplomatic’

‘That’s an answer? An explosives expert is good for only one thing—exploding things. You wish me to explode something? Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Two things. Banks, boats, bridges, anything of that kind I’ll blow up and guarantee a satisfactory job. Anything that involves injury, far less death, to any person I won’t have any part of.’

‘You won’t ever be called upon to do any such thing. That’s also a guarantee. The second thing?’

‘I don’t seek to flatter you when I say that you’re an intelligent man, Mr Agnelli. Highly intelligent, I should think. Such people are usually first-class organizers. To seek the help of a last minute unknown to help you execute some project that may have been in the planning stage for quite some time doesn’t smack to me of preparation, organization or professionalism. If I may say so.’

‘You may. A very valid point. In your position I would adopt the same disbelieving or questioning attitude. You have to take my word for it that I am a member of a highly organized team. But, as you must well know, the best-laid plans etc. An unfortunate accident. I can explain to your satisfaction. But not just at this moment. Will you accept our offer?’

‘You haven’t made one yet.’

‘Will you accept an offer of a job in our organization, on, if you wish, a permanent basis, on what I think you’ll find a very satisfactory salary plus commission basis, your special responsibility being the demolition of certain structures, those structures to be specified at a later date.’

‘Sounds very businesslike. And I like the idea of commissions, whatever they may be. I agree. When do I start and what do I start on?’

‘You’ll have to bear with me a little, Mr Danilov. My brief for this afternoon is only of a limited nature—to find out, if, in principle, you are prepared to work with us, which I’m glad to say you seem to be. I have to report back. You will be contacted very shortly, sometime tomorrow, I’m sure.’

‘You are not the leader of this organization?’

‘No.’

‘You surprise me. A man like you acting as a lieutenant—well, this leader I must meet.’

‘You shall, I promise.’

‘How will you contact me? No phones, please.’

‘Certainly not. You will be our courier, Vasco?’

‘My pleasure, Mr Agnelli. You know where to reach me any time.’

‘Thank you.’ Agnelli stood up and gave his hand to van Effen. ‘A pleasure, Mr Danilov. I look forward to meeting you tomorrow.’ Helmut Paderiwski didn’t offer to shake hands.

As the door closed behind them, Sergeant Westenbrink said: ‘I need another beer, Lieutenant.’

‘Peter. Always Peter.’

‘Sorry. That was pretty close. The ice was very thin at times.’

‘Not for a practised liar. I rather gather that you’ve given them the impression that I’m a desperate and wanted criminal?’

‘I did mention that there was the odd extradition warrant out for you. But I didn’t forget to emphasize your generally upright and honest nature. When dealing with your fellow criminals, of course.’

‘Of course. Before you get the beer, I have a phone call to make. Well, get it anyway.’

Van Effen went to the bar and said to the man behind it, ‘Henri, a private call, if I may.’

Henri, the proprietor, was a tall, gaunt man, sallow of countenance and lugubrious of expression. ‘You in trouble again, Peter?’

‘No. I hope someone else will be, soon.’

Van Effen went into the office and dialled a number. ‘Trianon? The manager, please. I don’t care if he is in conference, call him. It’s Lieutenant van Effen.’ He hung on for a few moments. ‘Charles? Do me a favour. Book me in as from a fortnight ago. Enter it in the book, will you, in the name of Stephan Danilov. And would you notify the receptionist and doorman. Yes, I expect people to be enquiring. Just tell them. Many thanks. I’ll explain when I see you.’

He returned to the booth. ‘Just booked myself—Stephan Danilov, that is—into a hotel. Agnelli pointedly did not mention anything about where I might be staying but you can be sure that he’ll have one of his men on the phone for the next couple of hours if need be, trying to locate me in every hotel or pension in the city.’

‘So he’ll know where you are—or where you’re supposed to be.’ Vasco sighed. ‘It would help if we knew where they were.’

‘Should know soon enough. There’s been two separate tails on them ever since they left the Hunter’s Horn.’

Van Effen, appearance returned to normal, asked the girl at the Telegraph’s reception desk for the sub-editor who had taken the FFF’s first telephone message. This turned out to be a fresh-faced and very eager young man.

‘Mr Morelis?’ van Effen said. ‘Police.’

‘Yes, sir. Lieutenant van Effen, isn’t it? I’ve been expecting you. You’ll be wanting to hear the tapes? Maybe I should tell you first that we’ve just had another message from the FFF, as they call themselves.’

‘Have you now? I suppose I should say “The devil you have” but I’m not surprised. It was inevitable. Happy tidings, of course.’

‘Hardly. The first half of the message was given over to congratulating themselves on the Texel job, how it had happened precisely as they had predicted and with no loss of life: the second half said there would be scenes of considerable activity on the North Holland canal, two kilometres north of Alkmaar at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘That, too, was inevitable. Not the location, of course. Just the threat. You’ve taped that, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was well done. May I hear them?’

Van Effen heard them, twice over. When they were finished he said to Morelis: ‘You’ve listened to those, of course?’

‘Too often.’ Morelis smiled. ‘Fancied myself as a detective, thought maybe you would give me a job but I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s more to this detecting business than meets the eye.’

‘Nothing struck you as odd about any of the tapes?’

‘They were all made by the same woman. But that’s no help.’

‘Nothing odd about accents, tones? No nuances that struck you as unusual?’

‘No, sir. But I’m no judge. I’m slightly hard of hearing, nothing serious, but enough to blunt my judgment, assuming I had any. Mean anything to you, Lieutenant?’

‘The lady is a foreigner. What country I’ve no idea. Don’t mention that around.’

‘No, sir. I rather like being a sub-editor.’

‘We are not in Moscow, young man. Put those tapes in a bag for me. I’ll let you have them back in a day or two.’

Back in his office, van Effen asked to see the duty sergeant. When he arrived van Effen said: ‘A few hours ago I asked for a couple of men to be put on a Fred Klassen and Alfred van Rees. Did you know about this, and if you did, do you know who the two men were?’

‘I knew, sir. Detective Voight and Detective Tindeman.’

‘Good. Either of them called in?’

‘Both. Less than twenty minutes ago. Tindeman says van Rees is at home and seems to have settled in for the evening. Klassen is still on duty at the airport or, at least, he’s still at the airport. So, nothing yet, sir.’

Van Effen looked at his watch. ‘I’m leaving now. If you get any word from either, a positive not negative report, call me at the Dikker en Thijs. After nine, call me at home.’

Colonel van de Graaf came from a very old, very aristocratic and very wealthy family and was a great stickler for tradition, so it came as no surprise to van Effen when he approached their table wearing dinner jacket, black tie and red carnation. His approach bore all the elements of a royal progress: he seemed to greet everyone, stopped to speak occasionally and waved graciously at those tables not directly in his path. It was said of de Graaf that he knew everybody who was anybody in the city of Amsterdam: he certainly seemed to know everybody in the Dikker en Thijs. Four paces away from van Effen’s table he stopped abruptly as if he had been transfixed: but, in fact, it was his eyes that were doing the transfixing.

That the girl who had risen from the table with van Effen to greet de Graaf had this momentarily paralysing effect not only on de Graaf but on a wide cross-section of the males of Amsterdam and beyond was understandable. She was of medium height, wore a rather more than well-filled ankle-length grey silk gown and no jewellery whatsoever. Jewellery would have been superfluous and no one would have paid any attention to it anyway: what caught and held the attention, as it had caught the riveted attention of the momentarily benumbed Colonel, was the flawless classical perfection of the features, a perfection only enhanced, if this were possible, by a slightly crooked eyetooth which was visible when she smiled, which seemed to be most of the time. This was no simpering and empty-headed would-be Miss Universe contender, churned out with repetitive monotony by a Californian-style production line. The finely chiselled features and delicately formed bone structure served only to emphasize the character and intelligence they served only to highlight. She had gleaming auburn hair, great hazel eyes and a bewitching smile. It had, at any rate, bewitched the Colonel. Van Effen cleared his throat.

‘Colonel van de Graaf. May I introduce Miss Meijer. Miss Anne Meijer.’

‘My pleasure, my pleasure.’ De Graaf grabbed her outstretched hand in both of his and shook it vigorously. ‘My word, my boy, you are to be congratulated: where did you find this entrancing creature?’

‘There’s nothing to it really, sir. You just go out into the darkened streets of Amsterdam, stretch out your hands and—well, there you are.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. Naturally.’ He had no idea what he was saying. He seemed to become aware that he had been holding and shaking her hand for an unconscionably long time for he eventually and reluctantly released it. ‘Remarkable. Quite remarkable.’ He didn’t say what he found remarkable and didn’t have to. ‘You cannot possibly live in this city. Little, my dear, escapes the notice of a Chief of Police and I think it would be impossible for you to be overlooked even in a city of this size.’

‘Rotterdam.’

‘Well, that’s not your fault. Peter, I have no hesitation in saying that there can be no more stunningly beautiful lady in the city of Amsterdam.’ He lowered his voice a few decibels. ‘In fact I would come right out and say that she is the most stunningly beautiful in the city, but I have a wife and two daughters and these restaurants have ears. You must be about the same age as my daughters? May I ask how old you are?’

‘You must excuse the Colonel,’ van Effen said. ‘Policemen are much given to asking questions: some Chiefs of Police never stop.’

The girl was smiling at de Graaf while van Effen was speaking and, once again, van Effen could have been addressing a brick wall. ‘Twenty-seven,’ she said.

‘Twenty-seven. Exactly the age of my elder daughter. And Miss Anne Meijer. Bears out my contention—the younger generation of Dutchmen are a poor, backward and unenterprising lot.’ He looked at van Effen, as if he symbolized all that was wrong with the current generation, then looked again at the girl. ‘Odd. I know I’ve never seen you but your voice is vaguely familiar.’ He looked at van Effen again and frowned slightly. ‘I look forward immensely to having dinner with you, but I thought—well, Peter, there were one or two confidential business matters that we had to discuss.’

‘Indeed, sir. But when you suggested we meet at seven o’clock you made no exclusions.’

‘I don’t understand.’

The girl said: ‘Colonel.’

‘Yes, my dear?’

‘Am I really such a hussy, a harlot, harridan and ghastly spectacle? Or is it because you don’t trust me that you want to speak privately with Peter?’

De Graaf took a pace forward, caught the girl by the shoulders, removed one hand to stop a passing waiter and said: ‘A jonge jenever. Large.’

‘Immediately, Colonel.’

De Graaf held her shoulders again, stared intently into her face—he was probably trying to equate or associate the vision before him with the creature he had met in La Caracha—shook his head, muttered something to or about the same nameless deity and sank into the nearest chair.

Van Effen was sympathetic. ‘It comes as a shock, I know, sir. Happened to me the first time. A brilliant make-up artist, don’t you think? If it’s any consolation, sir, she also fooled me once. But no disguise this time—just a wash and brush-up.’ He looked at her consideringly. ‘But, well, yes, rather good-looking.’

‘Good-looking. Hah!’ De Graaf took the jonge jenever from the waiter’s tray and quaffed half the contents at a gulp. ‘Ravishing. At my age, systems shouldn’t be subjected to such shocks. Anne? Annemarie? What do I call you?’

‘Whichever.’

‘Anne. My dear. I said such dreadful things about you. It is not possible.’

‘Of course it’s not. I couldn’t believe Peter when he said you had.’

Van Effen waved a hand. ‘A loose translation, shall we say?’

‘Very loose.’ Wisely, de Graaf did not pursue the subject. ‘And what in heaven’s name, is a girl like you doing in a job like this.’

‘I thought it was an honourable profession?’

‘Yes, yes, of course. But what I meant was—well—’

‘What the Colonel means,’ van Effen said, ‘is that you should be an international stage or screen star, presiding over a Parisian salon, or married to an American oil millionaire—billionaire, if you like—or a belted English earl. Too beautiful, that’s your trouble. Isn’t that it, Colonel?’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

‘Dear me.’ Anne smiled. ‘Doesn’t say much for your Amsterdam girls. You mean you only employ ugly girls?’

De Graaf smiled for the first time that evening. ‘I am not to be drawn. The Chief of Police is famed for his powers of recovery. But you—you—among those dreadful Krakers and dressed like a—like—’

‘Harlot? Hussy?’

‘If you like, yes.’ He put his hand on hers. ‘This is no place for a girl like you. Must get you out of it. Police is no place for you.’

‘One has to earn a living, sir.’

‘You? You need never earn a living. That, Anne, is a compliment.’

‘I like what I’m doing.’

De Graaf didn’t seem to have heard her. He was gazing at some distant object out in space. Van Effen said to the girl: ‘Watch him. He’s at his most cunning when he goes into a trance.’

‘I am not in a trance,’ de Graaf said coldly. ‘What did you say your surname was?’

‘Meijer.’

‘You have a family?’

‘Oh, yes. The usual. Parents, sisters, two brothers.’

‘Brothers and sisters share your interest in law and order?’

‘Police, you mean. No.’

‘Your father?’

‘Again police?’ She smiled as a person smiles when recalling someone of whom they are very fond. ‘I couldn’t imagine it. He’s in the building business.’

‘Does he know what kind of business you are in?’

She hesitated. ‘Well, no.’

‘What do you mean, well, no? He doesn’t, does he? Why?’

‘Why?’ She seemed to be on the defensive. ‘He likes us to be independent.’

‘Would he approve of what you are doing? And that was no answer you gave me. Would he approve of his darling daughter mingling with the Krakers?’

‘Is this what it’s like to be a suspect, sir, and to be grilled? Am I supposed to have done something wrong?’

‘Of course not. Would he approve?’ The entranced Colonel of a few minutes previously could have belonged to another world.

‘No.’

‘You put me in a quandary. I don’t like you being in this. You, apparently, do. Your father wouldn’t. To whom should I listen—you or your father?’

‘The question hardly arises, sir. You don’t know my father.’

‘Child!’

‘What does that mean. I don’t understand.’

‘I know your father. Very well. We’ve been friends for over thirty years.’

‘Impossible! You can’t know him. You’ve only just met me and you didn’t even know me.’ She was no actress and was visibly upset. ‘This is—this is a trick of some kind.’

‘Annemarie.’ Van Effen touched her arm. ‘If the Colonel says he’s a friend of your father, then he is. Come on, sir.’

‘I know. When next you write or phone, Anne—if you ever do—give my warmest regards to David Joseph Karlmann Meijer.’

Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth as if to speak, closed it again and turned to van Effen. ‘I think it’s my turn for a jonge jenever.’

De Graaf looked at van Effen. ‘My old friend David—we’ve gone sailing, fishing, skiing, hunting over the years—we were even up exploring the Amazon before this young lady here was born—owns a huge construction company. He also owns one of the biggest cement factories in the Netherlands, oil refineries, tankers, an electronics firm and God knows what else. “One has to earn a living, sir,”’ he mimicked. ‘Earn a living! Cruel, cruel landlord throwing the poor orphan out into the snow. Ah!’ He turned to look at the maître d’ at his elbow. ‘Good evening. The young people will choose for me. But, first, another jonge jenever.’ He looked at Annemarie. ‘Must have something to cry into. They say gin is best.’

After the orders had been taken and the maître d’ and his minions departed, van Effen said: ‘You have a scenario, sir, and you don’t like what you see.’

‘I don’t like it at all. Two things. If anything happens to this young lady—well, David Meijer’s wrath is fearful to behold—and it’s considerably worse to be the object of it. Secondly, disguise or no disguise, Anne’s identity may be discovered. It can happen, as you know all too well, Peter: a slip of the tongue, an unguarded reference, some careless action, there are too many possibilities. What a windfall for a penniless Kraker or even worse, a professional kidnapper. Her father would pay five, ten million guilders to get her back. Do you like it, Peter?’

Van Effen made to speak, then glanced at the waiter who stood by his side.

‘Lieutenant van Effen. Phone.’

Van Effen excused himself. De Graaf said: ‘Well, do you like it?’

‘Not the way you put it but—I don’t want to seem impertinent, sir, to disagree with my boss, but I think you put it too strongly. I’ve been doing this kind of work for some months in Rotterdam and nothing has ever happened to me there. And while there may be no Krakers down there, the criminal element are a great deal tougher than they are here. I’m sorry, Colonel, but I think you exaggerate the dangers. I’m rather good at disguises—you as much as said so yourself. I have a gun. Best, of course, is that no one in Amsterdam knows me.’

‘I know you.’

‘That’s different. Peter says that you know everyone—and you must admit that it was a very remote chance that you knew my father.’

‘I could have found out easily enough. Peter knows?’

‘Only my name. Not who I am, not until you spoke about it just now. I must say he didn’t seem particularly surprised.’ She smiled. ‘He could, of course, have been unconcerned or uninterested.’

‘You’re fishing for compliments, my dear.’ She made to protest but he held up his hand. ‘In your case, indifference is impossible. The Lieutenant cares very much for people. That doesn’t mean he goes around showing it all the time. It’s a learned habit. I know he didn’t know. I’m equally sure Julie does.’

‘Ah. Julie. Your favourite lady in all Amsterdam?’

‘I now have two favourite ladies in all Amsterdam. With the usual provisos, of course.’

‘Your wife and daughters, of course.’

‘Of course. Don’t stall. You’re very good at stalling, you know, Anne, at diverting me from the topic at hand, which is you, and don’t give me those big innocent eyes.’

‘Julie knows,’ she said. ‘How did you know that, sir?’

‘Because I know Julie. Because she’s clever. Because she’s a woman. Living so close to you she’s bound to notice things that others wouldn’t. Clothes, jewellery, personal possessions—things the average working girl wouldn’t have. Even the way you speak. Fine by me if Julie knows, she’d never tell anyone, I’ll bet she’s never even told her brother. You like living there?’

‘Very much. And Julie, also very much. I think she likes me, too. I have the honour to sleep in the bedroom that used to be Peter’s. I believe he left about six years ago.’ She frowned. ‘I asked her why he’d left, it couldn’t have been an argument, they’re obviously terribly fond of each other, but she wouldn’t tell me, just said I’d have to ask Peter.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘No.’ She shook her head very firmly. ‘One doesn’t ask the Lieutenant personal questions.’

‘I agree that he does rather give that impression. He’s quite approachable really. No secret about his departure—he left to get married. Marianne. Loveliest girl in Amsterdam, even although I do say it about my own niece.’

‘She’s your niece?’

‘Was.’ De Graaf’s voice was sombre. ‘Even in those days Peter was the best, most able cop in the city; far better than I am but for God’s sake don’t tell him so. He broke up a particularly vicious gang of people who specialized in a nice mixture of blackmail and torture. Four brothers, they were, the Annecys. God knows where they got their name from. Peter put two of them away for fifteen years. The other two just vanished. Shortly after the conviction of the two brothers, someone, almost certainly one or both of the two brothers that had not been brought to justice, placed in Peter’s weekend canal boat a huge bomb wired up to the ignition switch—same technique as was used by the murderers who assassinated Lord Mountbatten. As it happened, Peter wasn’t aboard his boat that weekend. But Marianne and their two children were.’

‘Dear God!’ The girl’s hands were clenched. ‘How awful. How—how dreadful!’

‘And every three months or so since that time he receives a postcard from one of the two surviving Annecy brothers. Never any message. Just a drawing of a noose and a coffin, a reminder that he’s living on borrowed time. Charming, isn’t it?’

‘Horrible! Just horrible! He must be worried to death. I know I would. Wondering every night when I go to sleep—if I could sleep—whether I would wake up in the morning.’

‘I don’t think he worries much—if he did he’d never show it—and I know he sleeps very well. But that’s the reason—although he never mentions it—why he doesn’t return to live with Julie. He doesn’t want her to be around when the bomb comes through his window.’

‘What a way to live! Why doesn’t he emigrate somewhere, live under an assumed name?’

‘If you ever get to know Peter van Effen—really know him, I mean—you’ll wonder why you ever asked that question. Anne, you have an enchanting smile. Let me see it again.’

She gave a puzzled half-smile. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘He’s coming back. Let me see how good an actress you are.’

And, indeed, when van Effen returned to the table she was smiling, a person at ease with the world. When she looked up and saw the expression—more accurately, the total lack of expression—on his face she stopped smiling.

‘About to ruin our dinner, are you, Peter?’ de Graaf shook his head. ‘And such a splendid meal we’ve ordered.’

‘Not quite.’ Van Effen smiled faintly. ‘Might put us off our third bottle of Bordeaux or Burgundy or whatever. Perhaps even the second bottle? First, let me put you briefly in the picture as to what happened earlier today. Yes, sir, I’ll have some wine, I feel I could do with a mild restorative. I’ve been offered a job—at, I’m sure, a far higher salary plus than I’m ever likely to get in this police force—to blow something up. What, I don’t know. Could be the Amsterdam—Rotterdam bank for all I know. Maybe a boat, bridge, barge, barracks, maybe anything. Haven’t been told yet.

‘As you know, Vasco had brought those two characters to the Hunter’s Horn this afternoon. Prosperous and respectable citizens, but, then, no successful criminal ever looks like one. We were all very cagey and crafty, toing-and-froing, sparring and giving nothing away for most of the time. Then they made me this definite offer of a job and I accepted. They said they would have to report back to their superiors but would definitely contact me tomorrow and give me details of the job to be done and what my rewards would be for this. Vasco was to be the courier. So we shook hands like gentlemen and parted with expressions of goodwill and mutual trust.

‘I had two sets of tails waiting at a discreet distance from the Hunter’s Horn. I’ve had a report—’

‘Goodwill and mutual trust?’ Annemarie said.

De Graaf waved a hand. ‘We tend to use figurative terms in our profession. Proceed, Peter.’

‘I’ve had news of both sets of tails. The first say that they lost Agnelli and Paderiwski—that’s what they called themselves—’

‘Good God!’ de Graaf said. ‘Agnelli and Paderiwski. A famous industrialist and a famous pianist. Aren’t they original?’

‘That’s what I thought. Lost them in a traffic jam, they say. Claimed that they hadn’t been spotted. Pure accident. The report about the other two makes me wonder, to say the least.’

‘ “About” the other two?’ de Graaf said. ‘Not “from”?’

‘About. They were found in a darkened alley. Barely able to call for help, barely conscious. Unable to move and both in agony. Both men had had both kneecaps smashed. A sign used in Sicily and certain American cities that some people don’t like being followed and that those who were doing the following won’t be doing it again for some time to come. They weren’t knee-capped—no guns. Iron bars. They’re under surgery. Neither man will be able to walk for months, neither will ever be able to walk properly again. Nice, isn’t it, sir. And a new development in our fair city. Another instance, one supposes, of the steady advance of American culture.’

‘Crippled?’ Annemarie’s voice was low, barely above a whisper. ‘Crippled for life. How can you—how can you joke about such things.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Van Effen looked at her, saw that some colour had gone from her face, and pushed her glass closer to her. ‘Take some. I’ll join you. Joking? I can assure you I never felt less funny in my life. And it’s not just an American practice, sir: it’s become a very popular pastime in Northern Ireland in the past two or three years.’

‘So your other tails were almost certainly given the slip and nothing accidental about it.’ De Graaf sampled his Bordeaux and the distressing news didn’t appear to have upset him unduly for he smacked his lips appreciatively. ‘Excellent. Our friends seem to have a considerable expertise in both evasive and direct action. Professionals. And gone to ground. Ah. All is not lost. The Chateaubriand. You said you would share this with me, my dear.’

She appeared to give a tiny shudder. ‘I know it’s trite, silly, but I don’t think I could eat a thing.’

‘Maybe the moles will come out of their burrows tomorrow,’ van Effen said. ‘I’m still hoping that they will keep their promise and make contact with me.’

Annemarie stared at him, almost blankly. ‘You must be mad,’ she said in a low voice. She seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Either they’ll come and give you the same treatment, perhaps worse, perhaps dispose of you permanently, or they won’t come at all. After they carried out that savage attack on those poor men they could have examined them and found out that they were policemen. They must have been carrying something that would identify them as policemen, even guns. Were they carrying guns?’ Van Effen nodded. ‘Then they’ll know you are a policeman because they’ll know you must have had them followed since they left the Hunter’s Horn. You like the idea of suicide?’ She reached out and touched de Graaf’s wrist. ‘You mustn’t let him do it, sir. He’ll be killed.’

‘Your concern does you credit.’ It was van Effen who answered and he seemed quite unmoved by her plea. ‘But quite uncalled for. The villains don’t necessarily know that I set the tails on their tracks. They might not even have noticed them until long after they’d left the Hunter’s Horn and would have no reason to connect me with them. That’s one thing. The other thing is the fact that though the Colonel is your father’s friend that doesn’t give the father’s daughter the right to advise the Colonel. A fledgling policewoman. A Chief of Police. It would be laughable if it weren’t so presumptuous.’

She looked at him, her eyes hurt as if she had been struck, then lowered her gaze to the tablecloth. De Graaf looked at van Effen, shook his head slightly, then took the girl’s hand.

‘Your concern does do you credit. It does. But it doesn’t give me much credit in your eyes. None. Look at me.’ She looked at him, the hazel eyes at once solemn and apprehensive. ‘Van Effen is absolutely correct. The foxes have to be flushed from their covers and this, at the moment, seems the only way to do it. So Peter will go—I would never order him to go—and with my consent. Good heavens, girl, do you think I would use him as live bait, a lamb to the slaughter, a Daniel in the lion’s den, a tethered goat for the tiger? My word, I do have a way with metaphors. I guarantee, my girl, that, when and if the meeting does take place, both the Hunter’s Horn and the surrounding area will be alive with invisible armed men. Invisible to the ungodly. Peter will be as safe as a man in a church.’

‘I know. I’m silly. I’m sorry.’

‘Pay no attention to the Colonel’s comforting words,’ van Effen said. ‘I shall probably be riddled with bullets. Police bullets. Unless it’s pointed out to them that I’m in disguise. Ironic if they shot the wrong man. Same outfit as before. Just let them concentrate on the black glove. That’s me.’

A waiter approached their table. ‘Sorry, Lieutenant. There’s another call for you.’

Van Effen was back inside two minutes. ‘Well, no surprise, surprise. The FFF, again, mysterious message, no doubt stepping up their demoralizing campaign. They say there could be some havoc wreaked along the North Holland Canal tomorrow at Alkmaar at 9 a.m., but they have made no guarantee that there will be. All they have promised is that there will be some quite considerable activity.’

De Graaf said: ‘That was all?’

‘All. I see. Seems utterly pointless and meaningless. What the devil do you think they’re up to now?’

‘It’s not pointless. That’s just the point—to make us wonder and worry about just what the devil they are up to now. They want to create uncertainty, confusion and demoralization and it would seem to me that they’re going the right way about it. Speaking of the FFF, sir, how was your pleasure trip to Texel this afternoon?’

‘Complete waste of time. I was accompanied, as you more or less predicted, by a bunch of old women.’

‘You don’t intend to be at Alkmaar at 9 a.m. tomorrow?’

‘I intend to be in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. tomorrow. What am I supposed to do? Lurk around and nab anyone who looks as if he is acting suspiciously, such as gloating over the scene of the crime?’

‘An unpromising course of action. You’ve got friends in the University, sir. Specifically, in the linguistics department?’

De Graaf said to Annemarie: ‘I’m supposed to look startled at this sudden switch and ask “why on earth do you ask that?” ’ He looked at van Effen. ‘Well, why on earth do you ask that?’

‘I listened to the FFF’s tapes in the Telegraph’s office earlier on this evening. A woman’s voice. A young woman, I would say. And not Dutch, I’m sure.’

‘Interesting. Very. Back to our mysterious foreigners again. Any educated guesses as to the country of origin of the caller?’

‘That’s the trouble, sir. I speak the odd language, sure, but I’m not what you might call an educated linguist. Regional accents, nuances, pronunciation—that is quite definitely not my field.’

‘And you think the university could help?’

‘It’s a chance, sir. As you say, no stone unturned. The tapes are in my office.’

‘I’ll do what I can. You may as well get to your feet, Peter. A purposeful waiter comes your way.’

Van Effen rose, met the waiter, spoke briefly and moved on. When he took his seat again, he said: ‘The opposition is stirring. Whatever opposition that might be. That was my hotel, the Trianon. Message relayed through the office of course.’

De Graaf said patiently: ‘And how long have you been staying in the Trianon, Lieutenant? You have been evicted from your own apartment?’

‘The register book says that I have been there for two weeks. I arranged that about five o’clock this afternoon.’

‘Dear, dear. Falsifying register books is a civil offence.’

‘I’ve no time to be arrested at the moment. Romero Agnelli or one of his men must have been very busy phoning around and have at last located me as staying at the Trianon. They have posted a watcher in the shadows—in a little old Fiat, actually. I have arranged for another watcher to watch the original. Well, I can’t disappoint them. I shall turn up there later on tonight.’

‘You lead an active life,’ de Graaf said. ‘I assume that you do not intend to spend the night there?’

‘You assume correctly, sir. I shall park my car at the back of the hotel, where I shall be picked up by a police taxi and deposited at the front door. Then I pass through the hotel, exit by the rear entrance and drive home. It’s a nuisance, no more.’

‘And here, again,’ de Graaf said, ‘comes your own private and personal nuisance. My word, you are popular tonight.’

Van Effen looked, sighed, rose, spoke briefly to the waiter again and disappeared towards the telephone booths.

‘The same opposition stirs yet again,’ he said on his return. ‘Ah, a brandy. Thank you, sir. That was Sergeant Westenbrink—Vasco. Message again via the office, of course. Agnelli has been in touch with him. They would, they say, very much like to meet me at 11 a.m., tomorrow morning. Same place. This can mean one of two things.’

‘I know what it means,’ de Graaf said. ‘Either they’re on to us or they’re not on to us. It is quite possible that they had no idea that they were being shadowed ever since leaving the Hunter’s Horn this afternoon. On the other hand it’s perfectly possible that they did know. If they did, they can have only one purpose in wanting to meet you, to see how much you know, what danger your knowledge offers and how best they can eliminate this danger. It should, I imagine, be all very discreet. And, if they suspect you and suspect that you in turn suspect them, they’re being clever, for in that case one would have expected them to opt for a neutral rendezvous, for if they suspect you’re an undercover policeman or working as an agent for the police then they must automatically suspect that the Hunter’s Horn is a police hang-out. But, of course, to go elsewhere would be to tip their hand that they know.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘All very devious and complicated. Designed to spread confusion and doubt on all hands. Maybe they’ve been taking lessons from the FFF. Or vice versa. Another brandy, Peter? No? In that case I suggest we be on our way. I expect we shall be having a rather long day tomorrow. Do you have any particular plan for this young lady tomorrow?’

‘I shall think up some onerous task by and by. As yet, no.’

‘Um.’ De Graaf pondered. ‘You, Anne, are, of course, seen quite often in the company of Sergeant Westenbrink.’

She smiled. ‘I find it difficult to think of him other than as Vasco. Yes, of course. We have to talk and it seems the best—and also the easiest—thing to do it openly.’

‘Quite. Do you come and go as you like there?’

‘Of course. That’s the whole point of being us. No hours, no rules, no regulations. You do as you like, you’re as free as the air.’

‘It would cause no undue comment if you were not to turn up for a day, even two days?’

‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘Am I supposed to be intelligent and guess what you’re getting at, sir?’

‘You’re intelligent enough. It’s just that you lack the training and experience to have a nasty, devious, suspicious mind, such as is possessed by Lieutenant van Effen, and I hope you always will.’

Annemarie shook her head, almost imperceptibly, then looked questioningly at van Effen who said: ‘The Colonel is right, you know.’

‘I don’t know. That is, I’m sure he’s right, but I don’t know what he’s right about. If you’re having fun with me, I don’t think it’s very fair.’

‘We aren’t having fun with you, Annemarie. Teasing or diminishing people is not our idea of having a good time. Look. All this is a matter of connections. It’s at least possible—I’d say a fifty-fifty chance—that Agnelli and company are on to us. In that case, Vasco is also under suspicion because he introduced them to me. And because you are known to associate with Vasco you, in turn, come under suspicion.

‘What the Colonel’s suggesting is that you lie low for a day, maybe even two. Depends how things develop. I have the feeling, irrational, perhaps, that the development is going to be very rapid indeed. It’s not a pleasant thought for the Colonel or myself that you should fall into those people’s hands. Think of those two detectives, the tails who ran out of luck. We already know that those people are ruthless, that the inflicting of pain is a matter of indifference to them. It may even be a downright pleasure. How would you care to be taken by them and tortured? I am not trying to scare you, Annemarie. I’m talking about something that’s halfway between a possibility and a probability.’

‘I think I’ve already told you.’ Her voice was very quiet. ‘I’m not particularly brave.’

‘And then they’d know who it was they had on their hands. They’d be over the moon. Another lovely blackmailing trump in their hands in addition to their still undisclosed trumps. Apart from your own health, you’d be putting us in an impossibly difficult situation.’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ de Graaf said.

She smiled faintly. ‘I’m a coward. I’ll do what I’m told.’

‘Not told, my dear, not told,’ de Graaf said. ‘Just a suggestion.’

Again the faint smile. ‘It sounds like a very good suggestion to me. Where shall I stay?’

‘With Julie, of course,’ van Effen said. ‘An unobtrusive armed guard will be lurking in the vicinity. But before you go into purdah, as it were, there’s one thing I want you to do for me.’

‘Of course.’

‘I want you to go to Vasco in the morning. Tell him what we’ve told you and tell him to disappear. I know where he’ll disappear to and I’ll contact him there when it’s safe to.’

‘I’ll do that.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘When you asked me to do something for you and I said “of course”—well, I wish now I hadn’t. You see what you’ve done to me, Peter. I’m a quivering wreck.’

‘You’re not quivering and for a wreck you look in pretty good shape to me. You may be jumped on there and then your gallant fellow Krakers would look the other way?’

‘Yes.’

‘We are accustomed to those injustices, are we not, Colonel? Nothing will happen to you. You’ll be under constant surveillance, and by constant I mean sixty seconds every minute. The trusty Lieutenant van Effen, suitably disguised—not the Hunter’s Horn disguise, of course—and lumbered with his usual arsenal—there’s a thought for you, Colonel. I think I’ll carry a third gun tomorrow when I meet Agnelli and his friend or friends. They already know that—’

‘That you carry two guns,’ de Graaf said, ‘and so their minds will, of course, be pre-conditioned against the idea of you carrying a third. It’ll be in your book, of course.’

‘Of course, it’s not. One mustn’t put such thoughts in the minds of the criminal element. But, yes, that’s the idea. So, no problem, Annemarie. I won’t be further away than five metres at any time.’

‘That’s nice. But you’ve put all sorts of unpleasant thoughts in my head. I could be jumped on, in your words, anywhere and any time between here and Julie’s house.’

‘More injustice. No worry. I will transport you there in the safety and comfort of my own limousine.’

‘Limousine!’ de Graaf said. ‘Comfort! My God!’ He bent a solicitous eye on the girl. ‘You have, I trust, not forgotten your air cushion?’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘You will.’

They left the restaurant and walked along the street until they came to the Colonel’s car, parked, as usual, in a no parking area. De Graaf kissed the girl in what he probably regarded as an avuncular fashion, said goodnight and climbed into his gleaming Mercedes. The back seat of his Mercedes. Colonel de Graaf, inevitably, had a chauffeur.

Annemarie said: ‘I understand now what the Colonel meant about an air cushion.’

‘A trifling inconvenience,’ van Effen said. ‘I’m having it fixed. Orders. The Colonel complains.’

‘The Colonel does like his comforts, doesn’t he?’

‘It may not have escaped your attention that he was built for comfort.’

‘He’s very kind, isn’t he? Kind and courteous and considerate.’

‘It’s no hardship to be all those things when the object of them is as beautiful as you.’

‘You do have a nice turn of speech, Lieutenant.’

‘Yes, I do, rather.’

She was quiet for a moment, then said: ‘But he is rather a snob, isn’t he? A fearful snob.’

‘In the interests of discipline, I must speak severely. You can’t expect me to condone, far less agree with, denigrating remarks about our Chief of Police.’

‘That wasn’t meant to be denigrating. It was just an observation. I refuse to get to the stage where I must watch every word I say. This is still an open society. Or is it?’

‘Well, well.’

‘Go on. Say it. “Spoken with spirit” or something like that.’

‘I don’t think I will. But you’re about as wrong with your snobbism as you were about your warm-hearted Arthur bit.’

‘Arthur?’

‘Our chief’s first name. Never uses it. I’ve never figured out why. Regal connotations. Sure he’s kind and thoughtful. He’s also tough, shrewd and ruthless, which is why he is what he is. And he’s no snob. Snobs pretend to be what they are not. His is a very ancient, very aristocratic and very wealthy lineage which is why you’ll never find me contesting a restaurant bill with him. He was born with the knowledge that he was different, the one per cent of the one per cent. Never occurs to him to question it. He’s convinced that he radiates the spirit of democracy.’

‘Tough or not, snob or not, I like him.’ She spoke as if that settled the matter, without specifying what the matter was.

‘Arthur, as you may have observed, has a way with the ladies. Especially when he’s off-duty, which is what he considered himself to be tonight.’

‘Are you never off-duty? Am I always a policewoman?’

‘Never thought about it that way. But I will. Think about it, I mean.’

‘You’re too kind.’ She lapsed into silence and remained that way for the rest of the drive. Only van Effen spoke. He called up his office and requested an armed guard for his sister’s house.

It was not difficult to understand why de Graaf had said that Julie van Effen was his favourite lady in all Amsterdam. With hair dark and shining as a raven’s wing, a delicately moulded face and high, rather Slavonic cheek-bones, she was far more than just merely good-looking but her attraction for de Graaf, as for a great many others, almost certainly lay in her laughing dark eyes and laughing mouth. She was almost permanently good-humoured—except when she encountered injustice, cruelty, meanness, selfishness and quite a few other things of which she disapproved, when she could become very stormy indeed—and seemed to love the whole world with the exception of those who encountered her formidable disapproval. She was one of those rare people who radiated happiness, a quality that more than tended to conceal the fact that below it all lay a fine intelligence. Cabinet Ministers do not habitually employ dim-witted secretaries and Julie was a Cabinet Minister’s secretary, private, personal, confidential and discreet.

She was also very hospitable and wanted to cook them a meal as soon as they had entered. It was easy to believe that this multi-talented young lady was also a cordon bleu chef, which, in fact, she was. She then offered sandwiches and desisted only when she learned that they had already eaten.

‘The Dikker en Thijs, was it? Well, the police always did know how to look after themselves. For a working girl, it’s new herring, red cabbage and sausage.’

‘For this particular working girl,’ van Effen said, ‘it’s the ministerial canteen. A gourmet’s paradise, so I’m told—we cops aren’t allowed near the place, of course. Julie, alas, has no will-power—well, you’ve only to look.’ Julie, had in fact, as nearly perfect a figure as it was possible to imagine. She treated this badinage with a lofty contempt, ruffled his hair in the passing and went to the kitchen to prepare some coffee and a café schnapps.

Annemarie looked after her departing form, turned to van Effen and smiled. ‘She can wrap you round her little finger any time, can’t she?’

‘Any time and any day,’ van Effen said cheerfully. ‘And, alas, she knows it. “Minx” is the word for her. Something I have to show you, in case you’re in the house alone.’ He led her to a picture on the wall and pushed it to one side to reveal a red button set flush with the wallpaper. ‘What’s known to the trade as a personal attack button. If you think you’re in danger, suspect it or even sense it, you press this button. A patrol car will be here within five minutes.’

She tried to make light of it. ‘Every housewife in Amsterdam should have one of those.’

‘As there are a hundred thousand housewives in Amsterdam—maybe two for all I know—it would come a mite expensive.’

‘Of course.’ She looked at him and didn’t or couldn’t smile any more. ‘I’ve been with the two of you a few times now and one would have to be blind and deaf not to realize that you’re just potty about your kid sister.’

‘Tut, tut. I can but sigh. Is it so obvious?’

‘I hadn’t finished. You didn’t have that installed just because you love her. She’s in danger, isn’t she?’

‘Danger?’ He caught her by the shoulders, so tightly that she winced. ‘Sorry.’ He eased his grip but left his hands where they were. ‘How do you know?’

‘Well, she is, isn’t she? In danger, I mean.’

‘Who told you? Julie?’

‘No.’

‘The Colonel?’

‘Yes. This evening.’ She looked at him, her gaze moving from one eye to the other. ‘You’re not angry, are you?’

‘No. No, my dear, I’m not angry. Just worried. I’m not a healthy person to know.’

‘Julie knows about the danger?’

‘Of course.’

‘Does she know about the postcards?’ He looked at her thoughtfully and didn’t change his expression as she put her hands on his shoulders and made as if to shake him in exasperation; which was a silly thing to do as van Effen was built along very solid lines. ‘Well, does she?’

‘Yes. It would be difficult for her not to. The postcards come to this address. One of the Annecy brothers’ ways of getting to me.’

‘Dear God. This—this is dreadful. How—how can she be so—so happy?’ She put her head against his shoulder as if she was suddenly tired. ‘How can she?’

‘The old saying, I suppose. Better to laugh than to cry. You’re not about to cry, are you?’

‘No.’

‘The old saying doesn’t quite apply here. She always was a happy child. Only, now she has to work at it.’

Julie came in with coffee, stopped abruptly and cleared her throat. ‘Isn’t it a little early in the evening—’ She laid the tray down. ‘I hope the deafness is a temporary affliction. I said—’ She stopped again, the expression on her face showing her concern, moved swiftly to where they stood, put an arm round Annemarie and gently turned her head until she could see her face. ‘Tears. Full of tears.’ She pulled a lace handkerchief from her sleeve cuff. ‘What’s this ruffian been up to?’

‘This ruffian hasn’t been up to anything,’ van Effen said mildly. ‘Annemarie knows everything, Julie. Marianne, the kids, you, me, the Annecys.’

‘The Colonel, I’ll be bound.’

‘You’ll be bound right.’

Julie said: ‘I know, Annemarie. It’s a shock. To come all at once, it’s a shock. At least it came to me bit by bit. Come. I have the sovereign remedy. A double schnapps in your coffee.’

‘You’re very kind. If I could be excused—’ She turned and walked quickly from the room.

‘Well.’ There was a demanding note in Julie’s voice. ‘Don’t you see what you’ve done?’

‘Me?’ Van Effen was genuinely perplexed. ‘What am I supposed to have done now? It was the Colonel—’

‘It’s not what you have done. It’s what you haven’t done.’ She put her hands on his shoulders and her voice went soft. ‘It’s what you haven’t seen.’

‘I see. I mean, I don’t see.’ Van Effen was cautious. ‘What haven’t I seen?’

‘You clown.’ Julie shook her head. ‘Annemarie. Her heart is in her face, in her eyes. That girl’s in love with you.’

‘What! You’re not well, that’s what it is.’

‘My beloved, brilliant dolt of a brother. But don’t believe me. Ask her to marry you now. A special licence—which you can obtain at the drop of a hat—and you’d be married by midnight.’

Van Effen looked slightly dazed. ‘Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m not. I’m absolutely certain.’

‘But she hardly knows me.’

‘I’m aware of that. After all, you’ve only met her, what—twenty, thirty, forty times?’ She shook her head. ‘The feared interrogator, the writer of books on psychology, the man who can lay bare the innermost secrets of any mind with one piercing glance—well, a hundred per cent for theory, zero for practice.’

‘You’re a fine one to talk. Specialist in marriage counselling—or should I say match-making? Ha! Six marriage proposals for certain—could have been twenty for all I know—and you turned them all down. There indeed speaks the voice of experience.’

‘Don’t try to change the subject.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘Yes, indeed, there speaks the voice of experience. I didn’t love any of them. She is deeply in love with you. I don’t quite understand why.’

‘I need a schnapps.’ Van Effen opened a nearby cupboard.

‘I’ve just brought you a café schnapps.’

‘First of all, I need a schnapps. Then I need a café schnapps.’

‘Not a psychiatrist? Why do you think she’s so upset?’

‘She’s soft-hearted, that’s why.’

‘You should make a splendid match. Soft heart. Soft head.’ She took his head between her hands and studied his eyes carefully. ‘The hawk-eyed detective lieutenant. What you need is a pair of glasses. And you’ve missed your cue, haven’t you? Half a dozen times, at least.’

‘What cue?’

‘Oh dear. That wary hunted look makes you more criminal than cop. What cue? “I wouldn’t marry her if she were the last girl in the world” should have been your answer to the cue. Standard reaction, I believe.’ She smiled again. ‘But of course, you’re not standard.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘A well reasoned answer.’ She sat and took up her coffee. ‘Mental myopia. I believe it’s incurable.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure you’ll find the answer.’ Van Effen was his old self, calm, assured, relaxed and very much back on balance. ‘I don’t particularly care for cool, clinical, slightly superior, slightly amused doctors, but I have to admit you’ve effectively worked a cure in my case. You’ve cured me of any interest I might ever have had in that young lady. Or maybe that was what you wanted. I don’t know.’ She was looking at him with parted lips and uncomprehending eyes. ‘I don’t need—I don’t want, I should say—help, advice or sympathy from you, and not just because they’re uncalled-for, unhelpful, unwanted or unsolicited but because I’m perfectly capable of managing my own life without the assistance of a meddlesome young sister. I’ll go check if the guard is here.’

He went out leaving Julie to stare numbly at the door he’d closed behind him, disconsolate and disbelieving, and she was still in the same position, still gazing sightlessly at the door, the same expression of hurt and bafflement on her face when Annemarie came into the room. Annemarie stopped, looked in puzzlement at the unhappy face, hurried across the room to Julie’s chair, dropped to her knees and said: ‘What’s wrong, Julie? What’s wrong?’

Julie looked away from the door and slowly turned her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.’

‘Nothing’s wrong? Oh, God! Nothing. First me, then you. Tears. And you look—you look so woebegone.’ Annemarie hugged her. ‘Nothing wrong! Julie! Don’t treat me like an idiot.’

‘I’m the idiot. I’ve just made a mistake.’

‘You? I don’t believe it. Mistake. What mistake?’

‘The mistake of forgetting that Peter is not only my brother, he’s a policeman and heir apparent to the Colonel. You didn’t know that, did you?’ Julie sniffled. ‘Common knowledge. De Graaf is due to retire this year but he’s in no hurry to retire as long as Peter is already doing most of his job for him.’

‘Never mind the Colonel. Where’s that ruffian?’

Julie tried to smile. ‘Second time tonight he’s been called a ruffian by two different girls. I’ll bet it’s never happened before. He’s left.’

‘Gone? Gone for the night?’

‘No. Just to check on the guard.’ Julie smiled again, a more successful effort this time. ‘He may be gifted at reducing people to tears but I’m sure he cares for us.’

‘He’s got a funny way of showing it. What did he do to you, Julie? What did he say?’

‘Do? Nothing, of course. Say? I stepped out of line, I guess, and he brought me back into line. That’s all.’

‘You expect me to be satisfied with that?’

‘No, I don’t, my dear. But can we leave it just for the moment? Please?’

They had finished their coffee by the time van Effen had returned. He appeared to find nothing amiss or, if he did, chose not to comment on it.

‘Guard’s here,’ he said. ‘Armed to the teeth. And I have to go now.’

‘But your coffee—’

‘Another time. I am, as they say, summoned forth. Julie, there’s something you must do for me. Could you—’

‘Must?’ She smiled. ‘An order or request.’

‘What does that matter.’ Rarely for him, van Effen was irritated. ‘Do what I ask—please, note the please—or I’ll take Annemarie away with me.’

‘My word! Such threats. And if she chooses to remain here or I ask her to stay?’

‘Rotterdam. Tomorrow morning. Ex-police-woman. You don’t disobey orders in the police and remain on the force. Sorry, Annemarie, that was not directed at you. Julie’s not being very bright tonight. Don’t look shocked, little sister, if you can’t see I’m serious then you’ve become uncommonly stupid. Develop diplomatic flu for the next day or two. Annemarie is in as much danger as you are and I want the two of you here together. Annemarie, nine-fifteen.’

He went to the door and opened it, looked at the two solemn faces and shook his head.

‘Exit the gallant Lieutenant into the dark and dreadful night.’

He closed the door quietly behind him.

FOUR

The tall, thin young man in the dark and dripping raincoat would rarely have called for more than a passing glance or a comment on the fact that he did look rather unprepossessing, an impression increased by the black hair plastered to his head by the heavy rain and that he sported an ill-trimmed black moustache. The moustache, in fact, had not been trimmed at all: he had been in an unusual hurry that morning and had pasted it on ever so slightly askew.

He was standing almost in the middle of the square when he saw her, angling across and coming almost directly towards him. Annemarie, her warpaint back in position again, looked as miserable and bedraggled as the young man, who now stepped out into her path.

‘Annemarie, is it?’

Her eyes widened and she looked quickly around. Despite the near torrential rain there were a fair number of people around and a flower and vegetable open-air market only metres away. She looked again at the young man, who was smiling, a rather pleasant smile despite his overall appearance.

‘Please don’t worry, miss. Hardly the place where anyone would think to carry out a kidnapping. You must be Annemarie—there couldn’t be two people answering the description I was given. I’m Detective Rudolph Engel.’ He brought a badge from his pocket and showed it to her. ‘I could, of course, have stolen this. Lieutenant van Effen wants to see you. He’s in his car.’

‘Why should I believe you? Why did he send you? He knew where I was. He could have come to see me. What car does he have?’

‘A black Peugeot.’

‘You would know that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ The young man was patient. ‘When you’ve worked under someone for five years you do know something about him. The Lieutenant said to me, “Miss Meijer is very suspicious. Mention the Amazon, her father, the Colonel and someone’s ‘lack of courage’.” I have no idea what he meant.’

‘I do.’ She took his arm. ‘I’m sorry.’

Van Effen, relaxed behind the wheel of his car, was this morning sporting a homburg hat and a big, black, square beard of the type favoured by Sephardic jews. He looked round as Annemarie opened the passenger door and looked in.

‘Good morning, my dear.’

‘Good morning, he says. What are you doing here?’

‘Sheltering from the rain. It’s coming down in buckets. You must have noticed. Come in, come in.’

She sat down and looked at him accusingly. ‘Five metres, you said. Never more than five metres away. Sixty seconds in every minute. That’s what you said. Where were you? Your promise to look after me! Fine promise.’

‘Man proposes, God disposes.’ If van Effen was remorse stricken, he concealed it well. ‘Besides, you were being looked after. By proxy. Don’t tell me you didn’t see a rather elderly gentleman hanging around, slightly stooped, grey beard, grey coat and a white stick. He was looking after you.’

‘I saw him. That creature! He couldn’t have looked after a kitten.’

‘Whatever that means. That creature is young, fit, a judo expert and a very accurate shot.’

‘Beards,’ she almost muttered. ‘Beards, moustaches, that’s all they can think of. Disguises! Well, thank you, someone was there, but you broke your promise.’

‘It was politic to do so. I was close behind and you were less than a hundred metres from your rendezvous when I caught sight of none other than Mr Paderiwski following you even more closely than I was. Mr Paderiwski is shrewd, observant and doesn’t like me, which is a nasty combination. He might just have recognized me, especially when I was in close attendance on you. I had taken the precaution of taking two of my detectives with me—think nothing of the fact that we obviously care so much about you—and I decided discretion was the better part of foolhardiness. Hence the switch.’

Engel said through van Effen’s open window: ‘Anything further, sir?’

‘No. Not here. Don’t lose sight of our friend.’

‘Well, I’ve already seen him, sir. There can’t be another bald, pepper and salt beard with a squint around.’

‘Julius Caesar?’ Annemarie said.

‘None other. I didn’t tell Rudolph here what his name was. He wouldn’t have believed me. A close but not too close eye on our Julius. And make sure there are always a few people around. I’d rather lose him than lose you. Don’t forget what happened to your two colleagues yesterday.’

‘I won’t forget, sir.’ The expression on his face was testimony enough to that. He turned and walked away into the rain.

‘Mollified?’ Van Effen started the engine and drove off.

‘A bit.’ She smiled a little. ‘Did you have to tell him I was a coward?’

‘I did not. Someone was, I said.’

‘It doesn’t matter, because I am. I don’t like riding around in this car, for instance.’

‘It takes time to get seats fixed. And what’s that got to do—’

‘Please. I mean that this car is known. To criminals, I mean.’

‘Pfui. There’s a couple of hundred like this in the city.’

She said sweetly: ‘There’s a couple of hundred with the same licence plates?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything? You know the licence number of this car?’

‘More or less. Rotterdam. Three nines. We are trained to be observant, remember?’

‘But not observant enough to notice that these were clip-on plates, not screwed. Today, this car is registered in Paris with a big “F” at the side to prove it. I have access to an unlimited number of plates.’ She made a face but said nothing. ‘You should be interested in more important things. Such as the latest antics of the FFF.’

‘Yes?’

‘There were no antics. They didn’t blow the dyke of the North Holland canal. They called in to both the papers and the police less than ten minutes ago. Positively hugging themselves, they are. Said they never promised they would blow the canal—which is quite true—only that there would be considerable activity in that area at nine o’clock this morning. There were, they reported, scenes of very considerable activity which is again quite true. All rescue and repair teams were there, waiting, as were considerable numbers of police and army, not to mention air force helicopters. They claimed to have taken a good number of aerial photographs of the scenes, just for keepsakes.’

‘You believe that, too?’

‘Certainly. I have no reason to disbelieve it.’

‘But aerial photographs? How could that be possible?’

‘It would be all too simple, I’m afraid. There would be any amount of helicopters buzzing about there this morning. An extra one wouldn’t be noticed especially if, as is highly likely, it was carrying some official markings.’

‘What was the reason behind this pointless and idiotic exercise?’

‘It was far from being idiotic and very much to the point. Just in case we missed the point they spelt it out very clearly. They said that in the space of twenty-four hours they had reduced the country, most especially the authorities, to a state of frustrated helplessness. The so-called authorities—they had a number of cynical and very unpleasant remarks to make about the government, the police, the army and those whose duty it was to look after the safety and welfare of dykes, locks, weirs, sluices, dams and I forget what else—were totally powerless to do anything to stop them. All they had to do, they said, was to stop at home, stick a pin into a map, phone the papers, sit back and never go within a hundred kilometres but still guarantee that the law, the army, the repair and rescue teams would be out in full force. It was, they said, both an entertaining and gratifying situation. One can readily understand why they feel that way.’

‘And not a word about their purposes, no hint as to what lies behind it all?’

‘No hint, but a suggestion that we might soon know what their demands are going to be. They didn’t use the word “demands” but they can have meant nothing else. Tomorrow, they said, they were going to flood a really large area of the country and after that they would probably have talks with the government. Can you imagine? The sheer cold arrogance of it all. They speak as if they are an independent sovereign state. Next, one supposes, they’ll be calling for an open debate in the UNO.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Plenty of time. Two minutes to remove this outfit—no washing or soaking required—and five minutes to put on my Hunter’s Horn uniform. I suggest coffee.’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘You really are going there, aren’t you, Peter.’

‘Of course. I’ve said so. Somebody has to and as I am the only person who’s been in contact with them, it has to be me. How else do you think the law would ever get anywhere unless it’s prepared, just once in a while, to take the initiative?’

‘I wish you weren’t going. I feel certain something is going to happen. Something awful. You could be hurt, even killed, or, maybe even worse, crippled for life. You know what they did to those two men. Oh Peter!’ She was silent for a moment, then said: ‘If I were your wife, I’d stop you.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘Appeal to your better nature, love for me, something like, “For my sake, if you care about me, please don’t go.” Something clever like that,’ she said bitterly.

‘Well, you’re not my wife, and, even if you were, I’d still go. I’m sorry that sounds hard and selfish and cruel, but it’s my job and I have to go.’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘You’re a very kind girl and I do appreciate your concern.’

‘Kind? Concern?’ She caught his wrist and gently removed his hand from her arm. ‘Concern!’

‘Annemarie!’ Van Effen’s surprise was genuine. ‘What on earth’s wrong.’

‘Nothing. Just nothing.’

Van Effen gazed ahead for some moments, sighed and said: ‘I don’t think I’ll ever understand women.’

‘I don’t think so either.’ She seemed to hesitate, then said: ‘I don’t much fancy going to a coffee-shop.’

‘If you wish we won’t. But why not?’

‘I don’t much care for wearing this face in public. Where there are decent people around. It doesn’t matter back there. And I don’t think you are particularly keen on being seen among the same public with a freak like me.’

‘I know what lies behind the warpaint so it doesn’t matter to me.’ He paused. ‘Maybe I don’t know anything about women but I always know when they’re telling fibs.’

‘I’m telling fibs?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Well, yes, I am. Can’t we have coffee at Julie’s place. It’s only another five minutes.’

‘Sure. Time I have. I know you’re very fond of Julie. But are you also worried about her?’

‘I think she’s worried about me. Even though she knew you would be there she didn’t like the idea of my going back to that place.’

‘You didn’t answer my question. You’re not, perhaps—well, just a little bit worried about her?’ She remained silent.

‘The Annecy brothers. Would you believe, I’ve never even seen either of them? I regard them as a fairly distant menace.’

‘The menace I’m thinking of is a great deal nearer to home. Well, not menace. Problem, rather.’

‘This is something new on me. A bagatelle, whatever it is. Give me the name of this person or problem and I’ll attend to it.’

‘Indeed, Lieutenant.’ Something in the tone of her voice caught van Effen’s attention and he gave her a long speculative look. ‘And how do you attend to this bagatelle, when the bagatelle in question is yourself?’

‘Ah. Me again. I don’t suppose there’s any point in repeating the old complaining question?’

‘Which is what?’

‘What the hell am I supposed to have done this time?’

‘By your standards, I suppose, absolutely nothing.’

‘I detect a certain sarcasm? Or is it irony? I’ve noticed an increasing use of it. Not becoming, Annemarie. You should do something about it. Well, what have I done?’

‘Reduced a lovely girl to tears. Not once, but three times. And when I say lovely, I don’t just mean beautiful. I mean the nicest, kindest, warmest person I’ve ever met. Three times. But it’s as I said. By your standards, a bagatelle.’

‘Julie?’

‘Julie! Who else would I mean? Or do you have a whole collection of ladies that you go around reducing to tears?’

‘What’s she crying about?’

‘What’s she—I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe you’re cruel, indifferent. But don’t you care that she’s upset?’

‘Of course I care. I’d care more if I knew why she was upset.’

‘I wonder. You’ll think it funny. For one thing, you left last night without a good-night hug and kiss. You’ve never done that before, she says.’

‘Funny? It’s ludicrous. My men getting hospitalized, a gang of lunatics threatening to inundate our country, another gang of lunatics wanting to hire me to blow up the palace or whatever, nations toppling and I’m supposed to be worried about smooches? A bagatelle? Soon fix that.’

‘Of course you will. A double ration of affectionate farewells. Georgie, Porgy, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.’

‘Shakespeare?’

‘English nursery rhyme.’ Her voice was very curt indeed. ‘Perhaps a bagatelle. What does matter is that she says she hurt two people she loves because she was meddlesome. I suppose she means you and me. Said she thought she was helping but that she was too clever or too stupid for her own good.’

‘That’s her problem. A little bit of self-analysis never did anyone any harm.’

‘Self-analysis! You told her she was interfering and too smart for her own good. Anybody’s good.’

‘Julie told you that?’

‘Of course she didn’t. She’s too loyal—misplaced loyalty, perhaps. Julie would never have said that—she’s too unselfish to think about herself. But it sounds exactly like you.’

‘I’ll say I’m sorry. Very, very sorry.’

‘And, of course, you’ll tell her that I told you to.’

‘No. I must say it’s a sad thing to be held in such low esteem by two ladies you love.’

‘The Lieutenant is pleased to be flippant,’ she said coldly.

‘Flippancy? Never. You don’t believe me?’

‘No, I don’t believe you.’

‘I care very much about you. But as a matter of principle and in the interests of discipline, a barrier must remain between the officer class and rankers.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ The tone was one of pure exasperation.

‘The principle doesn’t seem to be standing up very well,’ van Effen said gloomily. ‘And the barrier’s flat. So much for discipline.’

Annemarie gave no indication that she had heard a word he’d said.

Julie, polite but reserved, had gone to make coffee, Annemarie had headed for the bath and van Effen spoke to the guard, a man called Thyssen, who assured him that all was quiet and that the man he had relieved had had a similarly uneventful night. Julie entered the living-room just as he did: she was still quiet and unsmiling.

‘Julie?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘I’ve hurt my Julie.’

‘You? Hurt? How?’

‘That’s right. Make it easy for me. I know you’ve been upset, most likely still are. Annemarie told me.’

‘Did she tell you why?’

‘No. But it didn’t take my analytical mind, the one you’re always denigrating, very long to figure it out. In retrospect, I could have been more tactful. But things on my mind, lots of things. Apart from those things, you’re upset, Annemarie is upset because you’re upset, and I’m upset because the two of you are upset. I’ve got to go out and see some desperate criminals and I can’t afford to be upset. I have to be careful, crafty, cunning, calculating, watchful and ruthless and I can’t be any of those things if I’m upset, and I’ll only be upset if you insist on remaining upset. So you’ll have me on your conscience for the rest of your life if something happens to me, such as being shot in the head, thrown off a high building or drowned in a canal. Are you still upset?’

She came close to him; linked her hands behind his neck and put her head on his shoulder. ‘Of course I am. Not because of last night, but because of what you’ve just said. You’re the only brother I have and I suppose I have to love someone.’ She tightened her grip. ‘One of those days the gallant Lieutenant is going to go out into what the gallant Lieutenant calls the dreadful night and the gallant Lieutenant is not going to come back.’

‘This is the morning, Julie.’

‘Please. You know what I mean. I feel fey, Peter. I feel something dreadful is going to happen today.’ She tightened her grip even more. ‘I do so wish you weren’t going out. I’d do anything in the world to stop you. You know that this is not the first time—that I’ve felt this way, I mean—it’s been three or four times, and I’ve been right every time. Change your appointment, Peter, please, darling. I know, I just know how I won’t feel this way tomorrow.’

‘I’ll come back, Julie. I love you, you love me, I know you’d be terribly sad if I didn’t come back, so I’ll have to come back, won’t I?’

‘Please, Peter. Please!’

‘Julie, Julie.’ He smoothed her hair. ‘You lot certainly do wonders for my morale.’

‘What do you mean “you lot”?’

‘Annemarie’s been at it too. Feeling fey, I mean. Prophesying death, doom and disaster. You can imagine how this cheers me up no end. Tell you what. A compromise. I promise you I won’t be lured astray by any bad men or go anywhere with them from the Hunter’s Horn. I’ll listen to what they say then make my plans accordingly. Basically, I think that I’ll arrange to meet them again at a time and place of my own choosing, this being after I’ve learnt what their plans are for me—or their evil intentions. So, a deal. If you promise me one of your cordon bleu lunches—finest French wines, of course—for one o’clock, I’ll promise I’ll be here at one.’

Still with her hands linked behind his neck she leaned back and looked at him. ‘You will?’

‘Just said so. Your eyes are funny. About to weep salt tears for the gallant Lieutenant?’

‘I was thinking about it.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’ll think about the lunch menu instead.’

Annemarie came in. She was wearing a bathrobe that was much too large for her and a towel wound around her presumably still very wet hair. She smiled and said: ‘It’s difficult to move around this house without interrupting private conversations. Sorry I look such a fright.’

‘You can frighten me at any time,’ van Effen said cheerfully. ‘She really isn’t too bad looking, is she, Julie?’

‘She’s the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen.’

‘In my profession you don’t get to see many girls, beautiful or otherwise.’ He looked at Julie consideringly. ‘You’re not too bad yourself. But, then, I’m used to your face. It’s a toss-up. And who am I to quibble in—or at—such company?’

‘It pleases the Lieutenant to be carefree and light-hearted, Julie,’ Annemarie said acidly. ‘He was anything but this morning. What have you done to him?’

‘We’ve been conducting a mutual admiration party,’ van Effen said.

‘No, we haven’t. And I haven’t been appealing to his better nature either—I wouldn’t know where to look for that. I think maybe we’re slightly unfair to the poor man. Both you and I, it seems, have been full of bad omens and predicting all sorts of awful things that are going to happen to him. He was just suffering from some gloom and despondency, that’s all.’

‘He wasn’t the only one,’ Annemarie said. ‘Your cloud seems to have lifted a bit, too.’

‘You’re choking me,’ van Effen said.

‘Ah!’ She unclasped her hands. ‘Peter says he isn’t going to do anything brave today. Just going to the Hunter’s Horn, meeting whoever is there, make arrangements for another meeting and then leave. Going to find out what their plans for him are. Thing is, he’s going directly there—where he’ll be guarded by heaven knows how many armed detectives—and coming directly back again.’

Annemarie smiled, her relief as obvious as Julie’s. ‘That is good.’ The smile slowly vanished. ‘How do you know he’ll keep his word?’

‘A police officer’s word—’ van Effen began.

‘Because he’s coming back at one o’clock. For lunch. Extra special. French wines. He knows what I’m like if anyone is late for my meals, far less misses them. Besides, I’d never cook for him again.’

‘Banned for life? No, not that. I’ll be back. Guaranteed.’

Annemarie said: ‘Is he coming for us or for the lunch?’

‘The lunch, of course. Us he can see any time.’

‘Not or—and,’ van Effen said. ‘A peaceful hour. I may well be called upon to attend to something about two o’clock. The FFF, I mean.’

‘I thought,’ Annemarie said, ‘that they weren’t going to do anything until some undisclosed time tomorrow.’

‘I was about to tell you. I was interrupted.’

Julie said: ‘Somebody interrupted you?’

‘She did. She was either being fey, like you, or getting on to me about something or other.’

‘What?’ Annemarie said.

‘How can one remember one instance out of so many? However. The FFF promise to entertain us at two o’clock this afternoon. Same place on the North Holland canal north of Alkmaar as promised this morning—they say the mines have been planted since yesterday, that they elected not to fire them and defy us to find them—and also the Hagestein sluice.’

‘The what?’ Julie said.

‘A sluice. Technically, I believe, a regulable weir. Concrete structure to control the flow of water. South of Utrecht, on the lower Rhine. They may attack one or the other, they say, or both, or neither. The old uncertainty principle. Well, time to dress for my appointment.’

He squeezed his sister’s shoulders, kissed her, did the same to an astonished Annemarie, said: ‘Someone has to uphold the law,’ and left.

Julie looked at the closed door and shook her head. ‘There are times, I feel, when someone should pass a law against him.’

Van Effen, attired as he had been for his visit the previous afternoon, parked his car—not the Peugeot—in a side street three blocks away from the Hunter’s Horn and made his way to the back entrance of the restaurant. As the Hunter’s Horn was situated in a far from salubrious area this door was kept permanently locked. Van Effen had the key. He entered, passed into the semi-darkness of the passageway beyond and had just relocked the door when something hard jabbed with painful force into the small of his back.

‘Don’t move.’

Van Effen didn’t move. He said: ‘Who is it?’

‘Police.’

‘You have a name?’

‘Raise your hands.’ A torch nicked on behind him. ‘Jan, see if he has a gun.’

Hands fumbled at his jacket and he felt his shoulder-holstered gun being removed. Van Effen said: ‘So. My hands are up. My gun is gone. May I turn round?’

‘Very well.’ Van Effen turned. ‘Is that the way, Sergeant Koenis, to teach your men to search for weapons?’ He lowered his hands and hitched up his trousers. There was an ankle holster, each with its Lilliput, attached to each leg. ‘Put on the overhead light.’

The light came on. The man with the gun said: ‘Good God. Lieutenant van Effen. Sorry about that, sir.’

‘Just as long as you didn’t shoot me full of holes, Sergeant. Nothing to be sorry for. Semi-dark, and, with my back to you, my trademarks, scar and black glove, weren’t visible. And, of course, you weren’t expecting me to enter this way. I’m just glad to see that you and your men are so on the alert.’

‘I didn’t even recognize your voice.’

‘Cheek padding. I must admit it does alter the voice somewhat. How many men do you have here, Sergeant?’

‘Five, sir. Two with machine pistols.’

‘And in the street outside?’

‘Another five. Behind first-floor windows. Another two machine pistols.’

‘Very gratifying. To see that the Colonel places so high a value on his Lieutenant.’ He turned to the young policeman who held the gun in his hand. ‘Do you think I could have my property back?’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Of course.’ The policeman was highly embarrassed. ‘I won’t make that mistake again.’

‘I know you won’t. Go and ask Henri if he’ll come here—Henri’s the sad-looking man behind the bar.’

When Henri appeared, lugubrious as ever, he said: ‘I hear you’ve been held at gunpoint, Peter. Must have been a rather unusual experience for you. My fault. I forgot to tell the Sergeant that you had your own key. Never expected you to come that way.’

‘No harm. Customers. How many?’

‘Three only. And, yes, they’re regulars. Any more come in when you and your visitors are talking and I’ll keep them well away. No one will be able to hear a word you say.’

‘Except you, of course.’

Henri almost smiled. ‘Except me. The gentleman who was here said they wouldn’t find the microphone even if they looked for it. He asked me if I could find it and I couldn’t. Not in my own bar. He said he thought it was highly unlikely that they would look anyway.’

‘I think so too. Switch on the recorder in the office as soon as they come through the door. I shall be off now and make a respectable entrance through the front door. They’ve probably got someone watching.’

Van Effen was sitting in the booth nearest the door when the three men entered, Agnelli in the lead. Van Effen stood and shook hands with Agnelli, who seemed no less genial and friendly than he had on the previous occasion.

‘Very pleased to meet you again, Mr Danilov,’ Agnelli said. ‘Helmut, of course, you know.’ Paderiwski didn’t offer to shake hands. ‘And this is my brother, Leonardo.’

Leonardo Agnelli did offer to shake hands. He bore no resemblance to his brother. He was short, squat and had black beetling brows. The brows in themselves meant nothing, he’d just been born that way: in his own ugly way he seemed just as harmless as his brother, which again, of course, meant nothing. Introductions over, van Effen sat down. Agnelli and the other two men remained standing.

Agnelli said: ‘This is your favourite booth, Mr Danilov?’

Van Effen looked slightly puzzled. ‘I don’t have a favourite booth. This is—well, it’s just the one furthest away from the rest of the customers. I thought you might appreciate the privacy.’

‘We do, we do. But would you mind if we went to another?’

Van Effen gave them some more of the same puzzled frown. ‘Not at all. But I think I’m entitled to know why. Stop! I have it. The concealed microphone. A splendid basis for mutual trust.’ He appeared to think briefly. ‘Might have done the same myself.’

‘You’re an explosives expert.’ Agnelli sounded apologetic. ‘Such people usually—always, I believe—have a considerable knowledge of electronics.’

Van Effen smiled, stood, moved out into the aisle and waved a hand toward the empty booth. ‘A thousand guilders to the first man to find the concealed microphone which I’ve just spent hours installing under the fascinated gaze of the proprietor and his customers. A thousand guilders for a few seconds’ work. I have a generous nature.’

Agnelli laughed. ‘In that case, I don’t think we need bother to move.’ He sat and gestured that the other two should do the same. ‘Not joining us, Mr Danilov?’

‘When I’m talking I—’

‘Of course. I think we’ll all have beer.’

Van Effen ordered, sat and said: ‘Well, gentlemen, to the point.’

‘Certainly.’ Agnelli smiled. ‘That’s the way I prefer it. We have reported to our leader and he seems to approve our choice.’

‘I had hoped to see him here this morning.’

‘You’ll see him tonight. At the Dam Square. The royal palace, to be precise, part of which, with your expert assistance, we intend to blow up tonight.’

‘What!’ Van Effen spilled some of the beer which he had just picked up. ‘The royal palace! You did say the royal palace?’

‘I did.’

‘You’re mad. You’re quite mad.’ Van Effen spoke with simple conviction.

‘We don’t think so. Nor are we joking. Will you do it?’

‘I’ll be damned if I will.’

Agnelli smiled his easy smile. ‘You have been overcome by a bout of righteousness? A law-abiding upholder of justice and the straight and narrow path?’

‘None of those things, I must admit. But you must understand that although I operate mainly outside the law and have a past that wouldn’t bear rigorous examination, in fact, any kind of examination, I’m a pretty normal citizen in most ways. I’ve come to like the Dutch, and, although I don’t know them from Adam, I’ve come to respect, even admire, their royal family.’

‘Your sentiments do you credit, Mr Danilov. Believe me, I share them. But I hardly think those are your real reasons for refusing. You said yesterday afternoon that you would not become involved in any operation where there might arise even the danger of risk to limb, far less to life. Is that not so?’ Van Effen nodded. ‘I assure you no such risk will arise tonight.’

‘Then you just want to cause a harmless explosion inside the palace—’

‘Precisely.’

‘And why in heaven’s name should you want to cause a harmless explosion inside the palace?’

‘You are not to concern yourself with that. It is, as you may well guess, a purely psychological gesture.’

‘How am I to know it will be harmless?’

‘You’ll be able to satisfy yourself on this score when you get there. The explosion will take place inside an empty cellar. There are empty cellars on either side of it. All four doors are lockable and we will remove the keys after they have been locked. There are also empty cellars above. There is absolutely no danger to anyone involved.’

‘There’s danger to us. The palace is heavily guarded. Word has it that the guards are likely to ask questions of an intruder after they’ve shot him dead. My aversion to people getting killed includes myself.’

‘Please, Mr Danilov. We are not simple-minded. Do I look like a person who would embark upon an operation like this without every detail being meticulously planned in detail beforehand?’

‘I’ll grant that. You don’t.’

‘Then you may rest assured that we will encounter no trouble. As an additional assurance, both our leader and I will be there with you. We have no more ambition to end up in durance vile than you have.’

‘Maybe your records are not so unblemished either.’

‘Unblemished or not, it would go hard with anyone caught with explosives within the precincts of the palace.’

‘Very neat.’ Van Effen sounded sour. ‘So now you know I have a record whereas I don’t know whether you have or not.’

‘It hardly matters, does it?’

‘If it does, it escapes me at the moment. It’ll probably come to me when it’s too late. What’s this bomb like?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Agnelli smiled. Van Effen had practically committed himself. ‘I’m not an explosives expert. Such talents as I have lie elsewhere, more in the organizing field, shall we say. I understand that it weighs three or four kilos and is made of some material called amatol.’

‘What are the cellars made of?’

‘Made of? You mean the walls?’

‘What else could I mean?’

‘I really couldn’t tell you.’

‘I don’t suppose it matters. I was just trying to figure the blast effect. If the cellars are deep and have—’

‘Those cellars are very deep.’

‘So. And with the palace on top they’ll have to support a very considerable weight. I don’t know how old this particular part of the palace may be, I know nothing about the palace, but the walls would have to be pretty stoutly built. Reinforced concrete is unlikely. Dressed stone, I should guess, and of a considerable thickness. Your little firework is hardly likely to dent them. All the people in the palace will be aware of is a slight shake, if that, a tremor that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows at the nearest seismographic station, wherever that may be. As for the sound factor, it would be negligible.’

‘Are you sure?’ Agnelli’s tone was unaccustomedly sharp.

‘If my assumptions are correct, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be, then I’m sure.’

‘No loud bang?’

‘They wouldn’t hear it in the palace drawing-rooms, far less out in the Dam Square.’

‘How could one ensure that it is heard?’

‘Bring along enough spare amatol, let me have a look at the walls and I’ll tell you. Tell me, is it your intention just to leave the explosive there, lock the doors, throw away the keys—it will have occurred to you, of course, that there will be duplicates?’

‘These we have.’

‘And arrange for the bang after you’re clear of the palace?’ Agnelli nodded. ‘Then why on earth do you want me for a simple job like this? I’ve little enough in the way of conscience but I’d feel downright guilty taking money for a job like this. A young teenager in his first year in a physics or chemistry lab could do this. All you require is a battery, any old alarm clock, some household flex, a fulminate of mercury detonator, a primer and you’re off. Even simpler, all you require is a length of slow-burning RDX fuse. What you don’t want is an explosives expert—me. It’s a matter, Mr Agnelli, of professional pride.’

‘This is a job for a professional. It’s to be set off by remote radio control.’

‘A teenager in his second year in a physics or chemistry lab. Can’t you do it yourselves?’

‘For good reasons we want an expert. The reasons are not for you.’

‘You have the technical data for this radio-controlled device.’

‘A professional needs an instruction book?’

‘Only an amateur would ask a professional such a stupid question. Of course I need an instruction book, as you call it, but it’s not instructions I require. These systems are not difficult if you know how they work. Problem is, there are quite a number of different systems: it’s not instructions I require but data. As far as the device and the control are concerned, I need to know such things as voltage, wattage, wave-length, radio range, type of detonator, the nature of the triggering mechanism, the type of shielding and a few other odds and ends. You have this? The data, I mean?’

‘We have. I shall bring it along tonight.’

‘You will not. I have no wish to give offence, Mr Agnelli, but only a rank amateur would suggest that I start to learn about this device on the spot. I want to be so thoroughly familiarized with the data that I can leave them all behind before I go near the place. I shall want those data at least an hour in advance.’

‘Or no deal?’

‘I wouldn’t insult you by threats or blackmail. I assume that a reasonable man recognizes a reasonable request?’

‘He does. We’ll send it around at, say, six-thirty this evening?’

‘Fine.’ Van Effen paused briefly. ‘Well, well. We have been making diligent enquiries, haven’t we?’

‘It really wasn’t very difficult. We come now to the delicate question of remuneration—although I did promise it would be on a generous scale.’

‘You did mention the possibility of permanent employment?’

‘I did.’

‘Then let’s regard this as a test demonstration. You know, efficiency, reliability, professionalism. If I measure up, let’s then discuss payment for future jobs.’

‘Fair and generous. So fair, in fact, that I feel almost diffident about raising the next delicate point.’

‘I would hate for you to embarrass yourself. Let me raise it for you.’

‘This is more than generous.’

‘My nature. You have given me highly secret and very valuable information for which the police would doubtless reward me handsomely.’ Van Effen knew from Agnelli’s brief frown then renewed smile that he had indeed guessed correctly. ‘I shall not be giving this information to the police. Reasons? One, I am not a double-crosser. Two, I don’t like the police and they don’t like me—I don’t want to be within a long distance of any policemen. Three. Purely selfish and financial—I am certain I can make a great deal more money from working for you on several occasions than I can from betraying you once. Four, I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with a hit man or hit men only one step behind.’ Agnelli was smiling very broadly now. ‘The fifth is the most compelling reason. From what you have just told me you obviously have informers, contacts inside the palace who would immediately alert you to the presence of the police. As there could and would be only one person who could have betrayed you I could, possibly, be summarily disposed of, although I think you would find it much more elegant to turn me over to the police and suggest that they have a look at extradition requests from Poland and the United States. I think I would prefer the States—I might at least get a semblance of a fair trial there. I am not wanted, of course, under the name of Danilov: but the description of villains is usually pretty thorough and there can’t be many wanted men going round with a facial scar and a ruined left hand like mine. You can understand, Mr Agnelli, why I shall be giving the police a very wide berth indeed.’

‘I must say that you and the law don’t appear to have a great deal in common. Thank you, Mr Danilov, for having done my delicate task for me. That was exactly what I did have in mind. I am quite sure that you are going to be a very valuable member of our team.’

‘I can be trusted, you think?’

‘Unquestionably.’

‘Then I am doubly honoured.’ Agnelli raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘I didn’t have to remove the magazines from my guns today.’

Agnelli smiled, stood, shook hands and left with his two companions. Van Effen went to the office, listened to the playback of the recording, expressed his satisfaction and thanks to Henri, pocketed the tape and left.

As had now become his custom, van Effen parked his car at the rear of the Trianon but entered by the front door. A nondescript little man, seemingly engrossed in a newspaper, was seated close by the desk. Van Effen spoke to the man behind it.

‘I’d like a menu, please.’ He paid no attention to the seated man. ‘Thank you.’ He ticked off some items on the menu. ‘I’ll have that, that and that. And a bottle of burgundy. In my room at twelve-thirty please. After that I don’t want to be disturbed—so no phone calls, please. I’d be glad if you would give me a wake-up call at four o’clock.’

Van Effen took the lift to the first floor, walked down the stairs and peered cautiously round the corner. The little man had gone. He went across to the desk.

‘I see you’ve lost a valued customer, Charles.’

‘Hardly valued, Lieutenant. He drinks one tiny jonge jenever once every hour or so. That’s his third time here since last night. He is rather obvious, isn’t he?’

‘He doesn’t seem to think so. Will you cancel my lunch, Charles?’

Charles smiled. ‘Already cancelled.’

Van Effen left the Trianon a few minutes later, his appearance returned to normal.

‘Well,’ van Effen said, ‘were you worried stiff about me?’

‘Of course not,’ Julie said. ‘You told us there was nothing to worry about.’

‘Liar. You, too.’

‘Me?’ Annemarie said. ‘I haven’t said a word yet.’

‘You were about to. Your concern is perfectly understandable. A jonge jenever, large. The very jaws of death, I tell you.’

‘Tell us about brave Daniel,’ Julie said.

‘In a moment. First of all, I must phone the Colonel. He will be consumed with anxiety about his trusty lieutenant.’

‘It’s twelve-thirty,’ Julie said. ‘If I know the Colonel his only concern now is what aperitif he’s going to have before lunch.’

‘You do him an injustice. And, incidentally, me.’ He took the drink from his sister. ‘May I use your bedroom?’

‘Of course.’

Annemarie said: ‘I thought—’

‘There’s a phone there.’

‘Ah. State secrets.’

‘Not at all. Come along. Both of you. It’ll save me from having to repeat myself.’

He sat down on Julie’s bed, opened a bedside cupboard and extracted a phone. Annemarie said: ‘That’s a curious-looking instrument.’

‘Scrambler phone. Any eavesdropper who is locked into your telephone hears only garbled nonsense. A device at the recipient’s end works in reverse and makes the jumble intelligible again. Much used by secret services and the better class of spy. Very popular with criminals, too. The original connection was to my apartment but I can also call de Graaf on it.’

He got through immediately. ‘Good morning, Colonel…No, I have not been attacked, kidnapped, tortured, assassinated or otherwise set upon…Quite the contrary. Positively cordial…No, there was a newcomer. Romero Agnelli’s brother. Genial mafia-type, quite friendly, really, rejoicing in the name of Leonardo Agnelli…Yes, it is rather splendid, isn’t it, and yes, we’ve made some arrangements. I am engaged to blow up the royal palace at eight p.m.…No, sir, I do not jest.’ He covered the mouthpiece and looked at the two startled, wide-eyed girls. ‘I think the Colonel’s drink has gone down the wrong way. Yes, sir, amatol. Triggered by a remote-controlled radio device, details of which I shall be receiving this evening…Certainly I intend to do it. They’re depending on me…No, it’s deep in the cellars. There will be no loss of life…Very well.’

He covered the mouthpiece with one hand and gave his empty glass to Julie with the other. ‘I’m to keep a respectful silence while he communes with himself before telling me what to do. I don’t need telling and I almost certainly won’t agree with what he suggests.’

‘Blowing up the royal palace.’ She looked at Julie who had just brought in the jenever bottle. ‘The palace. Blowing it up. He’s mad. You—you’re a policeman!’

‘A policeman’s lot is a hard one. All things to all men. Yes, I’m listening!’ There was a long pause. Julie and Annemarie studied his face covertly but closely, but he gave no indication as to what he was thinking although he did permit himself the occasional thoughtful expression as he sipped some more jenever.

‘Yes, I understand. Alternatives. First, you can pull me off altogether and you have the means to ensure that I do this, so, of course, I would have to accept that decision. But there’s a difference between pulling me off a job and putting me back on to it again. Should this prove to be the first in a series of bomb outrages—and you know better than anyone that those things almost invariably happen in cycles—then I should have to refuse to be assigned to the investigation on the grounds that I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to investigate this group’s activities and you denied me the opportunity…Certainly, sir, you could ask for my resignation on the grounds of refusing to obey orders. I would refuse to resign. You’d have to fire me. And then, of course, you would have to explain to your minister that you fired me because you had made a mistake, because you had refused to listen to me, because you wouldn’t give me the chance to stop what may be a new crime wave before it started, because you had backed your own judgment against mine and you had been wrong. Throw as many chestnuts as you like into the fire, Colonel. I refuse to pull them out. And I refuse to resign. Excuse me, sir.’

Julie had sat beside him on the bedside and had put both hands on his telephone arm as if trying to pull it away.

‘Stop it, Peter, stop it.’ Despite the fact that van Effen had prudently covered the mouthpiece, her voice was low, tense, urgent. ‘You can’t talk to the Colonel like that. Can’t you see that you’re putting the poor man in an impossible situation?’

Van Effen looked at Annemarie. From her compressed lips and slowly shaking head it was evident that she was of the same opinion as Julie. Van Effen looked back at his sister and she visibly recoiled from the expression on his face.

‘Why don’t you hear me out instead of indulging in a repetition of last night’s unwarranted interference and blundering into things you know nothing about? You think he’s in an impossible situation? Listen to what I say and judge what kind of position I’m in.’ She slowly removed her hands and just looked at him, her expression uncomprehending. Van Effen raised the phone again.

‘Forgive the interruption, Colonel. Julie says that I have no right to talk to you in this fashion and that I’m putting you in an impossible situation. Julie, alas, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Annemarie, who is also here, agrees with her but she wouldn’t know what she’s talking about either. In fairness to them I must say that, judging by the way they are looking at each other, they don’t think I know what I’m talking about either. You people are only on the periphery: I’m the man in the middle. An impossible situation, she says. Consider your alternative.

‘I go ahead as planned with Agnelli and company. You, you say, will ensure my safety. In the first place you are duty-bound—you claim—to notify the royal household using as justification the many threats that have been made against the royal family in recent months. You will have the Dam square invisibly cordoned off by snipers. You will have anti-terrorist police squads inside the palace itself. It has apparently never occurred to you that those criminals have their moles and informants pretty thick on the ground and that the presence of even one extra policeman will be immediately reported. I have been warned that if any such thing happened they would know that there could have been only one source, one person, through whom this information reached the police. And I don’t think—I know— that the palace security is pitiful and that those spies move freely within the gates. Lift that telephone to the palace, to your anti-terrorist squads, to any other policeman, and you might as well reach out for pen and paper and write down and sign my death warrant.’ That was, van Effen was aware, pitching it rather strongly, extradition was the worst he had to face, even assuming they had penetrated his disguise, which was uncertain. But now wasn’t the moment for such niceties.

‘Ensure my safety? You’ll ensure my death, van Effen in a better world by midnight. What’s one detective-lieutenant less just so long as your pettifogging rules and hidebound regulations are concerned? Maybe—no, I’m sure—that Julie and Annemarie don’t like me very much at the moment but I think they’ll have the grace to testify at the inquest that I did do my best to save my own miserable skin.

‘That, of course, is the absolute worst scenario and I’ve no intention of being part of it. I’ve been thinking during our conversation and I’ve changed my mind about one thing. You’ve offered me two alternatives. One leads to being fired, the other to the old pine box. I’m not quite in my dotage yet and I think it would behove me to find some form of work where I’ll be faced with threats of neither dismissal nor extinction. If you send one of your boys round to Julie’s place I’ll let him have my written resignation. At the same time I’ll give him the tape-recording I had made in the Hunter’s Horn this morning. I hope that you and your University friends will be able to make something of it and of the other tape-recorded telephone messages. Sorry about this, Colonel, but you leave me with no option: I seem to have run out of alternatives.’ He replaced the telephone in the bedside cupboard and left the room.

When Julie and Annemarie rejoined him he was sitting relaxed in an armchair, legs crossed and jenever in hand. For a man who had just made such a momentous decision he seemed singularly unconcerned.

Julie said: ‘May I say something?’

‘Certainly. Compared to what the Colonel said and what he is no doubt thinking at this moment your slings and arrows are as nothing.’

She smiled faintly. ‘I haven’t lost my senses or memory. I have no intention of being—how did you put it so charmingly last night—cool, clinical, superior and handing out unwanted and unsolicited advice. I am sorry for what I said in the bedroom. I didn’t know you were in so impossible a situation. But if I go on to say that I also think you’ve put the Colonel in a fearful fix, you’ll probably say that you appreciate that a lieutenant’s life is as nothing compared to the Colonel’s finer feelings. Well, I still say I’m sorry, but—’

Annemarie interrupted. ‘Julie?’

‘Yes?’

‘I wouldn’t bother saying sorry to him again. I don’t for a moment believe he’s in an impossible situation. Look at him. He’s getting high blood pressure through trying not to laugh out loud.’ She gave him a considering glance. ‘You’re not very active. I thought you came through here to write out your resignation.’

He frowned, looked off into the middle distance, then said: ‘I’ve no recollection of saying that.’

‘That’s because you never had any intention of writing out your resignation.’

‘Well, well. We’ll make a lady detective of you yet. You’re quite right, my dear, I did not. How could I? How could I leave Uncle Arthur alone to cope with the rising wave of crime in Amsterdam? He needs me.’

Annemarie said to Julie: ‘If I were to say to him that he is as Machiavellian as he is big-headed, do you think he would fire me? Or just try to reduce me to tears?’

Van Effen sipped his jenever. ‘Fortunately, I am above such things. And you must never confuse Machiavellianism with diplomacy, big-headedness with intelligence.’

‘You’re right, Annemarie. I’m sorry I said “sorry”.’ Julie looked at van Effen with something less than affection. ‘And what are you going to do now?’

‘Just sit. Waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’

‘The phone. The Colonel.’

‘The Colonel!’ Julie said. ‘After what you said to him?’

‘After what he said to me, you mean.’

‘You’re going to have a very long wait.’ Annemarie spoke with conviction.

‘My dear children—or should I say babes in the wood—you sadly underestimate the Colonel. He is infinitely shrewder than either of you. He knows very well indeed what the score is. He’s taking some time to make this call because he’s figuring out a way to beat a strategic retreat without loss of dignity, peace with honour, if you will. Now there, if you like, does go a man with a Machiavellian cast of mind—after forty years battling with the underworld one does develop a certain cast of mind. I told the Colonel that he had left me with no place to go. De Graaf, being de Graaf, realized at once what I meant—that he had no place to go.’

Julie said: ‘Seeing you’re so clever, would you mind—’

‘There’s no need to be unpleasant. Look at me. I am treating you with unfailing courtesy—or should I say chivalry—’

‘I suppose. What’s the Colonel going to say?’

‘That’s on consideration—or on re-consideration—well, he’s going to give me carte blanche. The 8 p.m. assignation is on.’

‘It would be nice to see you wrong for once,’ Julie said. ‘No, I didn’t really mean that. I only hope you are wrong.’

For a time no one spoke. The girls kept looking at the telephone on the coffee table by van Effen’s side. Van Effen wasn’t looking at anything in particular. The phone rang.

Van Effen picked it up. ‘Ah! Yes…I accept that. Maybe I did step out of line. But I was provoked.’ He winced and held the telephone some distance away from his ear. ‘Yes, sir, you were provoked too…Yes, I thoroughly agree. A very wise decision, if I may say so…Of course, you will be kept in the picture, sir…No, they don’t trust me…Yes, sir, here. Goodbye.’

He hung up and looked at Julie. ‘Why aren’t you in the kitchen, my girl? Distinctly smell burning. I was asked for lunch—’

‘Oh, do be quiet. What did he say?’

‘Carte blanche. 8 p.m.’

Julie looked at him, her face still, for what seemed a long time but could only have been a few seconds, then turned and went to the kitchen. Annemarie made a couple of steps towards him, stopped and said: ‘Peter.’

‘Don’t say it. I’ve already got out of one difficult situation. Don’t you and Julie put me in an impossible one.’

‘We won’t. I promise. You know that we can’t help what we feel and you can’t blame us for that. But you could blame us if we did start talking about it, so we won’t. That’s sure.’ She smiled. ‘Now, isn’t that considerate.’

‘Very. Do you know, Annemarie, I do believe I’m beginning to like you.’

‘Like me?’ She gave him a quizzical look. ‘So you didn’t even like me when you kissed me this morning? Absentmindedness, I suppose. Or do you just go around kissing policewomen as a matter of routine? Something to do with their morale, no doubt.’

‘You’re the first.’

‘And, no doubt, the last. We all make mistakes, whatever I mean by that cryptic remark. Who doesn’t trust you?’

‘Who doesn’t—what?’

‘Something you said to the Colonel.’

‘Ah. My criminal associates. We parted at the Hunter’s Horn professing mutual trust and faith. Didn’t stop them from staking a man out at the Trianon. An irritation. No problem.’

‘And after lunch?’

‘Stay here a bit. The Colonel is going to call me. That will be after we hear what, if anything, the FFF have been up to at two o’clock. The Colonel is convinced that they will not blow up the Hagestein. Frogmen have found no traces of any underwater charges in position.’

Van Effen called his office and asked for the desk sergeant. ‘The men on Fred Klassen and Alfred van Rees. They called in at noon?’ He listened briefly. ‘So van Rees has lost our man. Chance or on purpose, it doesn’t matter. I assume you have the licence number. All officers on patrol. Not to approach. Just locate. Note this number and call me here.’

Lunch was an excellent but hardly festive meal. Julie and Annemarie were determinedly overbright and over-cheerful and the harsh edges of strain occasionally showed through: if van Effen noticed anything amiss he made no comment: her brother, Julie knew, rarely missed anything.

They had coffee in the living-room. Shortly after two o’clock a young motorcycle policeman came to collect the Hunter’s Horn tape.

Julie said: ‘I hear that you are awaiting a call from the Colonel. After that?’

‘Your bed, my dear, if I may. I don’t know when I can expect to sleep tonight or even if I will sleep so I think an hour or two might be of some value. That hour or two, of course, would be helped along by the brandy you have—unaccountably—so far failed to offer me.’

The Colonel’s call came when van Effen was halfway through his brandy. It was a brief call and one-sided. Van Effen said ‘yes’ several times, ‘I see’ a couple of times, then told the Colonel goodbye and hung up.

‘The FFF blew up the North Holland dyke at exactly 2 p.m. Extensive flooding, but shallow and no lives lost. Not according to first reports. The Hagestein weir was not touched. As the Colonel says, he expected this. The frogmen had located no charges and he is convinced that the FFF were unable either to approach the weir or conceal charges. He’s further convinced that their blasting techniques are primitive and limited only to simple operations like blowing up dykes and canal banks.’

‘But you’re not convinced of this, are you?’ Julie said.

‘I’m neither convinced nor unconvinced. I know no more about it than you do. Maybe the Colonel finds it preferable, more comforting to think along those lines: maybe the FFF want the Colonel—us, the country—to think along those lines. They have all the hallmarks of being a devious and highly organized bunch. That impression, too, may be deceptive. Are they a simple-minded group trying to make us think they are devious or a devious-minded group trying to make us think they are simple? Figure it out for yourselves. I can’t. I’m going to rest lightly. Turn on the radio, would you? The FFF have, it seems, got into the habit of making a public announcement after what they no doubt regard as being one of their master strokes. Don’t bother to wake me to convey their next dire threat. In fact, don’t bother me for anything.’

He had barely dropped off when Julie came in and shook him awake. He opened his eyes and, as was his custom, was almost instantly awake. He said: ‘This is the way you don’t disturb me? The heav ens have fallen in?’

‘I’m sorry. A letter came for you.’

‘A letter? An exhausted man is torn from his slumbers—’

‘It came by special delivery,’ she said patiently. ‘It has Urgent stamped all over it.’

‘Let me see.’ He took the envelope from her, glanced briefly at the address and postmark, opened the envelope, half extracted the contents, pushed it back inside again and slid the envelope under the pillow. ‘And I’m disturbed by this. One of my fellow officers trying to be witty. Next time, be sure the heavens have fallen in.’

‘Let me see what was inside that letter,’ Julie said sharply. She sat on the bed, laid her hand on his arm and said in a gentle voice: ‘Please, Peter?’

Van Effen made to speak, said nothing, reached under his pillow, retrieved the envelope and gave the contents to Julie. It was not a letter, just a plain postcard, blank on one side. On the other side was a crude drawing of a coffin and a hang-man’s noose.

Julie tried to smile. ‘Well, it has been three months since the last one, hasn’t it?’

‘So?’ Van Effen sounded indifferent. ‘It’s been, as you say, three months. And what’s happened in that three months? Nothing. And no reason on earth why anything should happen in the next three months.’

‘If it’s so unimportant, why did you hide it?’

‘I didn’t hide it. I put it away in the full view of my little sister whom I didn’t want to upset.’

‘May I see that envelope, please?’ She took it, looked at it and handed it back. ‘All the others had come from other countries. This one is postmarked Amsterdam. That was the first thing you saw and that’s why you put it away. The Annecy brothers are in Amsterdam.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. This postcard could have come from any country to a friend or accomplice in Amsterdam who sent it on to this address.’

‘I don’t believe that. Kid sister or not, I’m all grown up and a big girl now. I can think for myself, I can feel for myself. I know they’re in Amsterdam. And so, I’m sure, do you. Oh, Peter. It’s all too much. One set of madmen threatening to flood our country, another set going to blow up the palace and now this.’ She shook her head. ‘Everything at once. Why?’

‘It is an unusual set of circumstances.’

‘It is a—oh, do be quiet. Do you have no idea what is going on?’

‘I’ve no more idea than you have.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not sure I believe you. What are we going to do? What are you going to do?’

‘What do you expect me to do? Patrol the streets of Amsterdam until I find some character carrying a coffin over his shoulder and a noose in his hand.’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘Please excuse momentary irritation. There’s nothing I can do. Second thoughts, yes. I can go back to sleep, Next time, make sure the heavens have fallen.’

‘You’re hopeless.’ She half-smiled, rose, shook her head again when she saw that his eyes were already closed and left the room.

He had barely dropped off for the second time when Julie returned. ‘Sorry again, Peter. The Colonel. I told him you were asleep but he said it didn’t matter if you were dead, I was to bring you back to life again and get you to the phone. He left me in no doubt that it was very urgent indeed.’

Van Effen touched the bedside cupboard. ‘He could have used the scrambler.’

‘Probably using a public phone.’

Van Effen went through to the living-room, took the call, listened briefly, said: ‘I’m leaving now,’ and hung up.

Julie said: ‘Where?’

‘To meet a person the Colonel says may be a friend. I don’t know his name.’ Van Effen put on shoulder holster, tie and jacket. ‘Things, as you said, Julie, tend not to occur singly. First, the dyke nut-cases. Then the palace nut-cases. Then the Annecy nut-cases. Now this.’

‘Whatever “this” may be. Where’s your friend?’

‘Wouldn’t you know. He’s in the mortuary.’

FIVE

The old town of Amsterdam may well be unique in the attraction of its tree-lined winding canals, its medieval charm, its romance, its almost palpable sense of history, its nostalgic beauty. The city mortuary wasn’t like that at all. It didn’t possess a single attractive feature, it had no charm, medieval or modern, was totally and irredeemably ugly. It was clinical, functional, inhuman and wholly repellent. Only the dead, one would have thought, could have tolerated such a place: but the white-coated attendants, while not much given to whistling at their work, seemed no different from your average office worker, factory mechanic or farm labourer: this was their job and they did it in the best way they could.

Van Effen arrived to find de Graaf and a serious young man, who was introduced as Dr Prins, waiting for him. Dr Prins was attired in the regulation uniform of white coat and stethoscope. It was difficult to imagine what function a stethoscope played in a mortuary: possibly to check that incoming admissions were, in fact, dead on arrival: more probably, it was just part of the uniform. De Graaf was in a dark and sombre mood but this was not due to his surroundings for, over the long years, de Graaf had become more than accustomed to mortuaries: what he was not accustomed to was having to leave his fish course and a bottle of Chablis almost untouched on a restaurant table.

Dr Prins led them to a long, cavernous, tomb-like chamber, the furnishings of which—exclusively in concrete, white tiles, marble and metal—accorded well with the chilled atmosphere. An attendant, seeing Prins approach, opened a metal door and pulled out a wheeled rack that ran smoothly on steel runners. A shrouded form lay on this. Dr Prins took the top corner of the sheet.

‘I have to warn you, gentlemen, that this is not a sight for weak stomachs.’

‘My stomach couldn’t possibly be in worse condition than it is,’ de Graaf said. Prins looked at him curiously—de Graaf hadn’t seen fit to make mention of the abandoned fish and wine—and pulled back the sheet. What lay revealed was indeed, as the doctor had said, not a sight for queasy stomachs. Dr Prins looked at the faces of the two policemen and felt vaguely disappointed: not by a flicker of expression did they display whatever emotions they might have felt.

‘Cause of death, doctor?’ de Graaf said.

‘Multiple, massive injuries, of course. Cause? An autopsy will reveal—’

‘Autopsy!’ Van Effen’s voice was as cold as the mortuary itself. ‘I do not wish to be personal, doctor, but how long have you held this post?’

‘My first week.’ The slight pallor in his face suggested that Dr Prins was, himself, having some problems with his internal economy.

‘So you won’t have seen many cases like this. If any. This man has been murdered. He hasn’t fallen off the top of a high building or been run over by a heavy truck. In that case the skull or chest wall or pelvis or the femoral bones or tibia would have been crushed or broken. They haven’t. He’s been battered to death by iron bars. His face is unrecognizable, knee-caps smashed and forearms broken—no doubt when he was trying to defend himself against the iron bars.’

De Graaf said to the doctor: ‘He was, of course, wearing clothes when he was brought in. Anyone been through them?’

‘Identification, you mean, Colonel?’

‘Of course.’

‘Nothing that I know of.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ van Effen said. ‘I know who it is. I recognize that scar on the shoulder. Detective Rudolph Engel. He was shadowing a man known as Julius Caesar—you may remember Annemarie mentioning this character in La Caracha.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Because I was the person who told Engel to do the shadowing. I also warned him that there was more than a degree of danger attached and that he was on no account to be in a position where he would find himself without people around. I reminded him what had happened to the two detectives who had trailed Agnelli. He forgot or disobeyed or was carried away by curiosity or enthusiasm. Whatever it is, it cost him his life.’

‘But to murder him in this savage fashion?’ De Graaf shook his head. ‘Even to kill him at all. Well, it does seem an unbelievable instance of over-reacting.’

‘We’ll probably never know the truth, sir. But if we do we’ll probably find out that he wasn’t disposed of just for shadowing but because he’d found out something they couldn’t let him live to report. High stakes, Colonel.’

‘High indeed. It might help to have a word with this—ah—Julius Caesar.’

‘Probably couldn’t find him in the first place. He’ll have gone to ground, left Amsterdam for healthier climes or, most likely, shaved off his pepper-and-salt beard and got himself a wig for his bald pate and a pair of dark glasses to conceal his squint. Besides, even if we did pull him in, what have we got to charge him with?’

They thanked Dr Prins and left. As they were passing through the entrance hall a man at the desk called the Colonel and handed him a phone. The Colonel spoke briefly, handed back the phone and rejoined van Effen.

‘Not destined to be our afternoon, I’m afraid. Office. Just heard from the hospital. One of our men there. Just been fished out of a canal, it seems.’

‘What’s he doing in hospital? You mean he’s not drowned?’

‘No. Touch and go, it seems. We’d better have a look.’

‘Identity?’

‘Not established. Still unconscious. No papers, no badge. But carrying a gun and a pair of handcuffs. So they guessed it was a cop.’

In the hospital they were led to a private room on the first floor, from which a grey-haired doctor was just emerging. He saw de Graaf and smiled.

‘My old friend! You don’t waste time, I must say. One of your men has just had a rather unpleasant experience. A very close thing, very close, but he’ll be all right. In fact, he can leave in an hour or two.’

‘So he’s conscious?’

‘Conscious and in a very bad temper. Name of Voight.’

‘Mas Voight?’ van Effen said.

‘That’s him. Little boy saw him floating face down in the water. Luckily there were a couple of dock-workers close by. They fished him out and brought him here. Couldn’t have been in the water more than a minute or so.’

Voight was sitting up in bed and looking very disgruntled. After the briefest of courteous enquiries as to his health de Graaf said: ‘How on earth did you come to fall into that canal?’

‘Fall into the canal!’ Voight was outraged. ‘Fall into—’

‘Shh!’ said the doctor. ‘You’ll just do yourself an injury.’ He gently turned Voight’s head: the blue and purple bruise behind the right ear promised to develop into something quite spectacular.

‘Must have run out of crowbars,’ van Effen said.

De Graaf frowned. ‘And what is that meant to mean?’

‘Our friends are being active again. Detective Voight was keeping an eye on Alfred van Rees and—’

‘Alfred van Rees!’

‘You know. The Rijkswaterstaat man. Locks, weirs, sluices and what have you. Unfortunately it would seem that Detective Voight couldn’t watch van Rees and his own back at the same time. Last report, Voight, was that you had lost van Rees.’

‘A patrolman found him again. Gave me the address. I drove down and parked by the canal, got out—’

‘What canal?’ van Effen said.

‘The Croquiskade.’

‘The Croquiskade! And van Rees. You astonish me. Hardly the most salubrious part of our fair city.’

Voight rubbed his neck. ‘I didn’t find it very salubrious either. I saw van Rees and another man coming out of this doorway and then they went back in again. Why, I don’t know. I wasn’t in a police car and as far as I know they’ve never seen me, never suspected I was following them. And then—well, the next thing I knew I was in this bed. Never even heard a footstep behind me.’

‘Did you get the house number?’

‘Yes. Thirty-eight.’

Van Effen picked up a bedside phone, told the switchboard it was police and urgent, gave them his office number and said to de Graaf: ‘I don’t suppose that anyone will still be at number thirty-eight. But we may find something there—if, that is, they didn’t see Detective Voight being fished out of the canal. If they did, it’ll be as clean as a whistle. Question of search warrant, sir?’

‘Damn the search warrant.’ De Graaf was obviously rather shaken that his old friend van Rees could be involved in illegal activities. ‘Effect an entry by any means.’

Van Effen was through to his office almost immediately, asked for a certain Sergeant Oudshoorn, got him in turn just as quickly, gave him the address and instructions and listened for a brief period.

‘No, Sergeant. Take four men. One at the front door, one at the back…No warrant. The Colonel says so. Yes. Take the damned door off its hinges if you have to. Or shoot the lock away. Detain anyone you find inside. Don’t leave there. Radio report to station and await instructions.’ He hung up. ‘Sergeant Oudshoorn seems to relish the prospect.’

They told Voight to call home, have dry clothes brought, go home and rest and said goodbye. In the passage-way de Graaf said: ‘It can’t be. Impossible. Man’s a pillar of society. Good heavens, I even put him up for my club.’

‘Could be a perfectly innocent explanation, sir. The state of Voight’s neck and his immersion in the canal seems to suggest otherwise. Remember, I suggested in Schiphol that perhaps he was a Jekyll by day and a Hyde by night. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe he’s a daylight Hyde.’ As they approached the hospital entrance van Effen stopped abruptly. De Graaf stopped also and looked at him curiously.

‘One rarely sees an expression of concern on your face, Peter. Something amiss?’

‘I hope not, sir. Something’s been nagging away at the back of my mind but I haven’t had time to think about it. Not until now. This call you got while you were lunching—at least, when you were about to have lunch—did it come from the station?’

‘Of course. Sergeant Bresser.’

‘Where did he get his information from?’

‘The hospital I presume. Bresser said he’d tried to find first you, then Lieutenant Valken and failing to find either he’d contacted me. Does it matter?’

‘This matters. Young Dr Prins at the mortuary is neither experienced nor very bright. For all he knew or suspected to the contrary, Engel might have fallen off the top of the Haven-gebouw, or been the victim of a street or industrial accident. The mortuary does not call in senior police officers unless they know or suspect that the victim did not meet a natural end. So the chances are that the call did not come from the hospital. Bresser’s a stolid unimaginative man. Thinking is not his forte. Was it your idea to call me up at Julie’s and ask me to come along?’

‘You’re beginning to get me worried now, too, Peter, although I don’t know why. Your name had been mentioned in the call but whether it was Bresser’s suggestion you come along or mine I’m not clear. Damn these lunches.’

‘Moment, sir.’ Van Effen went to the nearest telephone and dialled a number. He let it ring for perhaps fifteen seconds then dialled again while de Graaf watched him at first in perplexity, then in apprehension, then with the sick dawning of understanding. He was at the front door and holding it open when van Effen replaced the phone and came running towards him.

Van Effen didn’t even bother to knock on Julie’s door, which he unlocked with the key he’d fished out coming up in the lift. The living-room appeared to be in perfectly normal condition, which meant nothing. Julie’s bedroom was also as it should have been but her bathroom told a different story. Thyssen, the guard, was lying on the floor, perfectly conscious and in apparent danger of suffering an apoplectic stroke, whether from rage or an effort to free himself from the ropes that bound wrists and ankles it was difficult to say. Perhaps he had been having difficulty in breathing through his gag. They freed him and helped him to his feet for he was unable to stand: if the blued hands were anything to go by the circulation of his feet must have been almost completely blocked off too. Whoever had tied him had worked with a will.

They helped him through to the living-room and into an armchair. Van Effen massaged circulation back into hand and feet—not a pleasant process if one were to judge by Thyssen’s repeated winces and screwing-shut of the eyes—while de Graaf brought him a glass of brandy. He had to hold it to the man’s lips as Thyssen had yet to recover the use of his hands.

‘Van der Hum,’ de Graaf said referring to the brandy. ‘A universal specific and, in the circumstances, despite regulations—’

Van Effen smiled. It wasn’t the strained smile of a man deliberately repressing emotion: he seemed quite remarkably unaffected by the turn of events. ‘The man who makes the regulations can break the regulations. It wouldn’t come amiss, sir.’

They had barely sipped from their glasses when Thyssen recovered enough strength to seize his, lift his trembling hand to his mouth, and drink half the contents in one gulp: he coughed, spluttered, then spoke for the first time.

‘God, I’m sorry, Lieutenant! Most damnably sorry! Your sister—and that other nice lady.’ He drained his glass. ‘I should be taken out and shot.’

‘I don’t think it will come to that, Jan,’ van Effen said mildly. ‘Whatever happened is no fault of yours. What did happen?’

Thyssen was so overcome with anger, bitterness and self-reproach that his account was so disjointed and repetitive as to be at times incoherent. It appeared that he had been approached by a Dutch army major—who would ever have harboured suspicions about an Army major?—who had produced a pistol fitted with a most un-Army silencer, forced Thyssen to produce his key and open the door, pushed him inside, followed and advised the girls not to move. He had been followed into the room almost immediately by three furniture-removal men: at least, they were dressed in heavy leather aprons of the type much favoured by their profession: what was atypical about them was that they wore hoods and gloves. Beyond that Thyssen could tell them nothing: he had been taken into the bathroom and tied, gagged and left lying on the floor.

Van Effen went into Annemarie’s bedroom—the one that had formerly been his—took one quick look around and returned.

‘There’s a pile of Annemarie’s clothes lying on the bed and a wardrobe missing. They were tied, gagged and carried out in it—to anyone watching an obvious case of legitimate furniture removing. They must have been keeping tabs on me, sir, about the time you made the call to me from the restaurant. They would have had a furniture van parked nearby and would have moved in as soon as they saw me departing. Very neat indeed. A most uncomfortable trip for the young ladies—but I suppose they must have been too terrified out of their wits to worry about discomfort. Ironic, isn’t it, sir, that both of them this morning were full of gloom and woe and foreboding—and prophecies of disaster. Feeling fey was what they called it. They were both convinced that something terrible was going to happen to me: unfortunately for them they picked the wrong subject for concern.’

De Graaf, a second glass of Van der Hum in his hands, paced up and down. Even forty years in the police had left him without van Effen’s ability to mask his emotions: anger and worry fought for dominance in his face.

‘What are those devils up to? What did they want—and who did they want? Annemarie? Julie? Or both?’

‘Julie.’ Van Effen handed him the postcard he and Julie had looked at earlier in the afternoon. De Graaf took it, examined both card and envelope and said: ‘When did this arrive?’

‘Just after lunch. Julie was very upset but I just pooh-poohed it, laughed the matter off. Clever van Effen. Brilliant van Effen.’

‘So your friends have returned, the Annecys back in Amsterdam. Lost no time in making their presence known and got at you in the very best way possible. God, I’m sorry, Peter.’

‘Feel sorry for the girls. Especially for Annemarie. It was just her fiendishly bad luck to be here when they came for Julie. It was that towering genius, van Effen, of course, who had insisted that she remain here for her own safety. The demands should be arriving quite soon. You will not have forgotten, sir, that the Annecys were—and doubtless still are—specialists in blackmail.’ De Graaf shook his head and remained silent. ‘It’s kind of you not to say so, sir, but you will also not have forgotten that they are specialists in torture, which was the real reason I hunted them down.’

‘We haven’t been very clever so far,’ de Graaf said. ‘Things are uncommonly confusing.’

‘Kind of you to say “we” sir. You mean me.’ Van Effen refilled Thyssen’s glass, did the same for his own and sank into an armchair.

After perhaps two minutes, de Graaf looked at him and said: ‘Well, surely there’s something we should be doing? Shall we start by making enquiries among the flat neighbours, the people living opposite?’

‘To check on the modus operandi of the kidnappers? A waste of time, Colonel. We wouldn’t find out any more than we already know. We’re dealing with professionals. But even professionals can make mistakes.’

‘I haven’t seen any so far.’ The Colonel was gloomy.

‘Nor have I. I’m assuming that Julie was the target.’ Van Effen reached for the telephone. ‘With your permission, sir, I’ll find out. Vasco. Sergeant Westenbrink. He was the only one who knew where Annemarie lived. They—whoever “they” are—may have put a tail on him and found out by methods I don’t care to think about.’

‘You think it likely? Or possible?’

Van Effen dialled a number. ‘Possible, yes. Likely, no. I don’t think there’s anyone in Amsterdam who could follow Vasco without his being aware of it: by the same token I don’t think that there is anyone in the City who could be followed by Vasco and be aware of it. Vasco? Peter here. Anyone been taking an interest in you since you left this morning?…Talked to nobody? Annemarie and my sister Julie have been taken away…Within the past hour and, no, we have no idea. Put on your best civilian suit and come round, will you?’ Van Effen hung up and said to de Graaf: ‘Julie it was. Nobody’s been banging Vasco with crowbars.’

‘And you’ve asked him to join you?’

‘Us, sir. He’s far too valuable a man to be lying low and doing nothing. And, with your permission, sir, I’d like to try to recruit George.’

‘Your La Caracha friend? You said yourself he wasn’t very good at merging into backgrounds.’

‘That’s for Vasco. George, on the mental side as you saw for yourself, is very acute and knows the criminal mind probably better than anyone I know: on the physical side he’s a splendid insurance policy. So, progress. A very little, but progress nonetheless. I think it’s now fairly safe to say that the Annecy brothers and the would-be blowers-up of the royal palace are working in cahoots, or how else would the Annecys know that Rudolph Engel, who had been following one of the palace gang’s intermediaries, had been done in and delivered to the morgue?’

‘The palace gang, as you call them, could have done the kidnapping. The Annecys could have told them.’

‘Two things, sir. What possible motive could Agnelli and his friends have in abducting Lieutenant van Effen’s sister? None. The Annecys have a very powerful motive. The second thing is that it doesn’t matter a damn whether the Annecys gave Agnelli this address or not: the point is that they sure as hell know each other.’

‘And how does this knowledge help us, Peter?’

‘At the moment, it doesn’t. And it may even actually put us at a disadvantage. They’re not clowns and may well have figured out that we have figured out and exercise extra precautions because of that. Precautions against what, I can’t imagine.’

‘Neither can I. We’re doing nothing. There’s nothing, as far as I can see, that we can do.’

‘One or two small things, perhaps. Alfred van Rees, to start with.’

‘What’s van Rees got to do with Agnelli and the Annecys?’

‘Nothing. As far as we know. But we would at least be doing something about something. I suggest two tails on van Rees. One to keep an eye on van Rees, the other to keep an eye on the first tail. Just consider how lucky Mas Voight is to be still alive. Then I suggest we investigate van Rees’s bank statements.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘This pillar of the Rijkswaterstaat may be giving the dyke-blowers information that they couldn’t get elsewhere. Selling, not giving. Could be, of course, that if he’s picking up some money that he shouldn’t, he might have it stashed away in another account under another name. But criminals—especially people who are not habitual criminals, and I assume van Rees is not—often overlook the obvious.’

‘Can’t be done. Illegal. Man hasn’t even been charged, far less convicted of anything.’

‘They’ve got Julie and Annemarie.’

‘So. What connection do they have with van Rees?’

‘None. Again, as far as we know. Although I was just thinking of one of the last things Julie said to me, that how extraordinarily odd it was that the dyke-breakers, the palace bombers and the Annecy brothers should all happen along at the same time. Could be a coincidence. Could be too much of a coincidence. Or nothing. Maybe I just hate the whole wide criminal world. Forget it, sir. Just a suggestion.’

The phone rang. Van Effen picked it up, listened, said thank you and hung up. ‘This should cheer us all up. There’s going to be a radio broadcast of the FFF’s latest communiqué in about ten minutes.’

‘Inevitable, I suppose. Your suggestion, Peter. Normally, I should dismiss it out of hand. But your suggestions have an extraordinary habit of turning up something.’ He smiled without any humour. ‘Maybe you share—what’s the word?—this precognition with your sister. We’ll put those two tails on van Rees—my God, the very idea of putting tails on van Rees—and have his liquid assets discreetly investigated. I shall probably be arraigned before Parliament for this. Drag you down with me, of course.’ He reached for the phone. ‘Let me handle this.’

After he had arranged matters in his customary imperious fashion and put the phone down, van Effen said: ‘Thank you. Tell me, sir, do your linguistic friends at the University have all the tapes? Including the one I brought from the Hunter’s Horn?’ De Graaf nodded. ‘When do you expect them to be ready?’

‘When they’re ready, one supposes. Things move leisurely in the groves of Academe.’

‘Think you could hurry them up, sir? National emergency, something like that.’

‘I can but try.’ De Graaf called a number, spoke to someone he called Hector then, still holding the phone, turned to van Effen. ‘Six o’clock?’

‘Five forty-five, if possible.’

De Graaf spoke briefly, hung up and said: ‘Very precise about our timing, aren’t we?’

‘Person coming round at six-thirty to the Trianon to give me the radio data for detonating this bomb in the palace cellars.’

‘First I heard of it. One finds it uncommonly difficult to keep up with your activities. One finds it rather droll, if I may say so, to find a police officer paying the courtesy of punctuality to a criminal.’

‘Yes, sir. Do you know—personally, I mean—any plastic surgeons?’

‘Plastic surgeons! What on earth do you want with—well, I should know better, you’ll have your reasons. But plastic surgeons? Do you think I know everyone in this city?’

‘To my knowledge, sir, yes. Or nearly everyone.’

‘I could talk to the police surgeon.’

‘De Wit is not a plastic surgeon, sir.’

‘Ah! I have it. My old friend Hugh. Outstanding. Professor Hugh Johnson.’

‘Doesn’t sound like a Dutch surgeon to me. I mean, he’s not Dutch, is he?’

‘English. Trained at East Grinstead. I’m told that’s the best plastic surgery unit in Europe, if not the world. Man’s a genius.’ De Graaf smiled. ‘Not as smart as the Dutch, though. Not, specifically, as clever as one Dutch lady, a native of Amsterdam, whom he met here on an exchange visit. Six months after they got married he found himself domiciled in this country. Still doesn’t know how it happened to him. The very man.’ De Graaf cleared his throat in a delicate fashion. ‘If you could give me some slight indication as to what you want—’

‘Certainly. In the guise in which I meet Agnelli I have scars on my face and hands—remind me to tell you what I’ll look like tonight when we meet at the University otherwise you won’t recognize me. I want those scars to look even more realistic and, more important to be of such a nature that they can’t easily be pulled off, washed off or scrubbed off.’

‘Ah. I see. I mean, I don’t see.’ De Graaf pondered briefly. ‘Don’t like this at all. You are referring, of course, to Agnelli and his friends and any suspicions they may harbour. I thought you were of the opinion that your bona fide status as an internationally wanted criminal was fairly secure.’

‘I increasingly believe so, sir. But they don’t sound like a lot with whom one can safely take any chances. Might even find a reason tonight to prove—without seeming to, of course—the genuineness and permanence of those scars.’

De Graaf sighed. ‘We live in a devious world, a very devious world. Without wishing to give offence, Peter, I must say you seem perfectly at home in it. See what I can do. Damned phone again.’

Van Effen picked it up, listened and said: ‘Send a man around with them, will you? Wait a minute.’ He turned to de Graaf. ‘Sergeant Oudshoorn. Says number thirty-eight is deserted. Neighbours say nobody has lived there for years. Most of the furniture is gone, too. Sergeant Oudshoorn—he’s young, enthusiastic, I told you he’d relish this assignment and we did give him a sort of carte blanche—has been investigating some locked cupboards and desk drawers.’

‘With the aid of crowbars and chisels, I suppose.’

‘I imagine so. I also imagine that it’s extremely doubtful that we’ll ever have any complaints on that score. Thing is, he says he’s come across some odd-looking maps, charts and plans that he can’t make head or tail of. Probably of no importance whatsoever. But we’re in no position to overlook one chance in a thousand. I’ve asked Oudshoorn to have them sent round. Do you think that, en route, this messenger might pick up some knowledgeable lad from the City Surveyor’s office who might just be able to enlighten us about those maps?’

‘Chance in a thousand, as you say. Suppose you want me to do the dirty work?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He spoke into the phone. ‘Tell whoever it is that’s bringing the papers round to stop by the City Surveyor’s office and pick up someone who will accompany him here. The Colonel is arranging it.’

While de Graaf was issuing his instructions over the phone—he never made requests—van Effen turned on the radio and kept the volume low. When the Colonel hung up the phone he still kept the volume low—the cacophonous racket of the latest number one on the hit parade was not to van Effen’s taste—but turned it up when the noise stopped. The modulated voice of an announcer took over.

‘We interrupt this programme with a special news bulletin. The FFF, about whose activities you must have all heard or read in the past forty-eight hours, have issued another statement. It reads as follows:

‘ “We promised to breach the North Holland Canal or the Hagestein weir. Or both. In the event, we chose to breach the canal. The reason we did not damage the Hagestein weir is that we have never been within fifty kilometres of it. In spite of this we have to admit that the turn-out of army, police, air-force helicopters and the experts from the Rijkswaterstaat was most impressive.

‘ “It should now not be in doubt that we can cause flooding, of a degree according to our choosing, wherever and whenever we wish and that we can do this with impunity: the possibility of detection does not exist. The country’s authorities, as we have pointed out before and have demonstrated again, are quite powerless.

‘ “We are sure that the people of the Netherlands do not wish this state of affairs to continue. Neither, quite frankly, do we. We have certain terms that we wish to be met and would like to discuss those with a responsible member of the government. We suggest that an arrangement for such a meeting, time this evening, location immaterial, be broadcast over TV and radio at 6 p.m. this evening. No negotiator below the level of cabinet minister will be considered.

‘ “We suggest that our negotiator should not be apprehended, held as hostage or subjected to any degree of restraint. Should any of the authorities be so misguided as to do this we would warn them that mines are already in position to the north and south of Lelystad. Precisely how far north and south we choose, in this instance, not to say. The mines, in this instance, are very much larger than on previous occasions and the repair of the breaches will be a matter of days if not weeks. If our negotiator does not return to us by a certain hour to be agreed, then large portions of Oostlijk-Flevoland will be inundated. No warning will be given as to the time of those breaches: they will be some time during the night.

‘ “We think it almost superfluous to point out that the responsibility for the safety of the Oostlijk—Flevoland and its inhabitants lies exclusively with the government. We do not ask for a great deal—just to speak with a government representative.

‘ “Should the government ignore our small request and refuse to appoint a negotiator, we shall go ahead and flood the polder. After that, when next we make a similar request accompanied by a similar promise, we think the government may deem it more prudent to be a degree rather more cooperative. We are sure that the citizens of the Netherlands would agree that for the government, motivated solely by affronted pride and stiffnecked outrage, to put this large area and those who live there at such risk, would be intolerable and unforgiveable.

‘ “The time to cooperate is now, not when incalculable and avoidable damage has been done.

‘ “The mines are in position.”

‘That is the message in its entirety. The government has requested us—not ordered, requested—not to pass comment on or discuss this outrageous demand until they have decided what course of action to adopt. It wishes to reassure the people of this country that the government is confident that it has the resources at its command to meet this or any other threat.’

Van Effen switched off the set. ‘God save us from politicians. The government, as is its wont, is talking through a hole in its collective hat. It’s been caught off-balance, hasn’t had time to think—one charitably assumes it can think—and can do no better than trot out old boring, meaningless platitudes. Confident, they say. Confident of what? God’s sake, they can’t possibly be confident of anything, far less of themselves. Trust us, they say. I’d sooner trust the inmates of a lunatic asylum.’

‘Treasonable talk, Lieutenant van Effen, treasonable talk. I could have you incarcerated for this.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Trouble is, I’d have to incarcerate myself along with you, as I agree with every word you say. If the government honestly believes that the people will take their meaningless assertions at face value, then they’re in an even worse case than I thought. Which, I may add, I didn’t think was possible. They are in an impossible situation: do you think it even remotely possible that they don’t recognize this?’

‘They’ll recognize it all right. Just as soon as they begin to think in terms of political survival. If they bury their heads in the sand they’ll be turfed out of power within a week. An acute concern about preserving the status quo—their status quo—can work wonders. They have already blundered by having the commentator say that they have been requested—not ordered—to discuss the affair. They have been ordered, not requested, otherwise the commentator, the news-reader, would not have used the term “outrageous demand”. There’s nothing outrageous in their demand. It’s the demands that will be made when the meeting takes place—as, of course, it will do—that will almost certainly be outrageous.’

‘Any discussion about this matter can only be speculative,’ the Colonel said heavily. ‘So it’s not worth the speculation. We have other and more urgent matters to attend to.’

‘There’s a matter I should be attending to at this moment,’ van Effen said. ‘I have an appointment at the Trianon. Well, a kind of appointment. There’s a fellow there who will be expecting me but doesn’t know that I’m expecting him. One of Agnelli’s stake-outs. He’s expecting to see me in my full criminal regalia—he’s under the impression that I’ve been asleep all afternoon, which might have been no bad thing—and I mustn’t disappoint him.’

The phone rang. De Graaf answered it and handed it to van Effen.

‘Yes. Yes, Lieutenant van Effen…I’ll wait…Why should I?’ He held the phone some inches from his ear. ‘Some clown advising me to avoid damage to my ear-drums and to—’ He broke off as a high-pitched scream, a feminine scream, not of fear but of agony, came from the earpiece. Van Effen jammed the phone against his ear, listened for a few seconds then hung up.

De Graaf said: ‘What in God’s name was that?’

‘Julie. At least that’s what the man said. Well, his words were: “Your sister is a bit slow in cooperating. We’ll call again when she does.” ’

‘Torture,’ the Colonel said. His voice was steady but his eyes were mad. ‘Torturing my Julie.’

Van Effen smiled faindy. ‘Mine, too, remember? Possibly. The Annecy brothers’ speciality. But it was just a shade too crude, too pat, too theatrical.’

‘God, Peter, she’s your sister!’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll remind the brothers of that when I meet them.’

‘Trace the call, man! Trace the call!’

‘No point, sir. I have good ears. I could just detect the faint overlay hiss of a recorder. That could have come from anywhere. And it’s what makes me think it’s a phoney put-together job.’

‘Then why the devil was the call made?’

‘Two reasons, perhaps, although I can only guess at the first. I don’t think they thought that I would even suspect that the call was not what it purported to be, that I would be so upset over my sister’s kidnapping that I would take anything in its connection at face value. Second thing, of course, is that they’re not after Julie, they’re after me. This—at least to their highly suspect way of psychological reasoning—is part of the softening-up process.’

De Graaf sat in silence, rose, poured himself another Van der Hum, returned to his seat, thought some more then said: ‘I hardly like to bring up this point, Lieutenant, but has it occurred to you that next time, or maybe the time after next, the Annecys may decide to abandon the psychological approach and say: “Surrender to us, Lieutenant van Effen, or your sister will die and we’ll see to it that she dies very very slowly.” Would you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Give yourself up to them?’

‘Of course. My appointment at the Trianon is overdue, sir. If there is any message for me, would you call me there. Stephan Danilov, if you remember. How long do you intend to remain here, sir?’

‘Until I see those maps or charts or whatever that Sergeant Oudshoorn found, and until I can get Lieutenant Valken here to take over. I’ll put him in the picture as far as I can.’

‘You have all the facts, sir.’

‘One would hope so,’ de Graaf said rather enigmatically.

When van Effen had gone, Thyssen said curiously: ‘I know it’s not my place to speak, sir, but would the Lieutenant really do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Give himself up.’

‘You heard the Lieutenant.’

‘But—but that would be suicide, sir.’ Thyssen seemed almost agitated. ‘That would be the end of him.’

‘It would be the end of someone, and that’s a fact.’ De Graaf didn’t seem overly concerned.

Van Effen returned, via the rear entrance, to his room in the Trianon, called the desk and asked for Charles.

‘Charles? Van Effen. Has our friend returned?…Good. He will, I know, be in a position to hear every word you say. Kindly say the following into the phone. “Certainly, Mr Danilov. Coffee immediately and not to be disturbed afterwards. Expecting a visitor at six-thirty.” Let me know when he’s gone.’

Some thirty seconds later Charles called to inform him that the lobby was now empty.

Van Effen had just completed his metamorphosis into Stephan Danilov when the phone rang. It was de Graaf, who was still at Julie’s flat. He said he had something of interest to show van Effen and could he, van Effen, step round. Ten minutes, van Effen said.

When van Effen returned to the flat he found Thyssen gone and his place taken by Lieutenant Valken. Valken was a short, stout, rubicund character, easy-going and a trencherman of some note, which may have accounted for the fact that although he was several years older than van Effen he was his junior in the service, a fact that worried Valken not at all. They were good friends. Valken was, at that moment, surveying van Effen and speaking to the Colonel.

‘A reversal to type, wouldn’t you say, sir? Cross between a con man and a white slaver, with just a soupçon of a Mississippi river-boat gambler thrown in. Definitely criminal, anyway.’

De Graaf looked at van Effen and winced. ‘Wouldn’t trust him within a kilometre of either of my daughters. I don’t even trust the sound of his voice.’ He indicated the pile of papers on the table before him. ‘Like to sift through all of those, Peter. Or shall I just call attention to the ones that interest me?’

‘Just the ones that interest you, sir.’

‘God, that voice. Fine. Top five.’

Van Effen examined each in turn. They showed plans of what were clearly different levels of the same building: the number of compartments in each plan left no doubt that it was a very large building indeed. Van Effen looked up and said: ‘And where’s van Rees?’

‘Well, damn your eyes!’ de Graaf was aggrieved. ‘How the hell did you know those were the plans of the royal palace?’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No I didn’t.’ De Graaf scowled, which he did very rarely and with difficulty. ‘Not until that young architect or whatever from the City Surveyor’s office told me. You do rob an old man of his pleasures, Peter.’ De Graaf regarded himself as merely approaching the prime of his life.

‘I didn’t know. Just guessed. As I shall be inside that building within three hours you can understand that my thoughts turn to it from time to time. Van Rees?’

‘My old and trusted friend.’ De Graaf, understandably, sounded very bitter indeed. ‘Put him up for my club, by God! Should have listened to you earlier, my boy, much earlier. And we should have expedited the examination of his bank account.’

‘No bank account?’

‘Gone. Gone.’

‘And so, one supposes, has van Rees.’

‘Four million guilders,’ de Graaf said. ‘Four million. Bank manager thought it a highly unusual step to take but—well—’

‘One does not question the motives and the integrity of a pillar of the community?’

‘Blackballed,’ de Graaf said gloomily. ‘Inevitable.’

‘There are other clubs, sir. Schiphol, I assume, is still not open for operations?’

‘You assume wrongly.’ The gloom remained in de Graaf’s face. ‘Heard ten—fifteen minutes ago. First plane out, a KLM for Paris, took off about twenty minutes ago.’

‘Van Rees, clutching his millions, relaxing in the first class?’

‘Yes.’

‘And no grounds for extradition. No charges against him. In fact, no hard evidence against him. That we’ll get the evidence, I don’t doubt. Then I’ll go and get him. When all this is over, I mean.’

‘Your illegal penchants are well known, Lieutenant.’

‘Yes, sir. Meantime, I suggest that my penchants, your blackballing and the fact that van Rees is at the present moment probably entering French air space are not quite of primary importance. What does matter is that van Rees—who has by this time passed over to the dyke-breakers all they’ll ever want to know about sluices, weirs and locks so that they won’t even miss him now—was also tied in with the would-be palace bombers. And we are as convinced as can be that the Annecy brothers are in league with the bombers. It was Julie who first expressed the possibility of this idea, how too much of a coincidence can be too much of a coincidence, although I must say—with all due modesty and not with hindsight—that this possibility had occurred to me before.’

‘Your modesty does you credit, Lieutenant.’

‘Thank you, sir. Well, what we’re faced with now is the probability—I would put it as high as certainty—that we are faced not with three different organizations but only with one. That should make things much simpler for us and easier to cope with.’

‘Oh. Of course, of course.’ De Graaf gave van Effen the kind of look that stops a long way short of being admiring. ‘How?’

‘How?’ Van Effen pondered. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Heaven help Amsterdam,’ de Graaf muttered.

‘Sir?’

De Graaf was saved from enlarging on his brief statement by a knock on the door. Valken opened it to admit a tall, lean gentleman with greying hair, rimless glasses and a faintly aristocratic air. De Graaf rose to his feet and greeted him warmly.

‘Hugh, my good friend. So kind of you to come and to come so quickly. At great inconvenience to yourself, I have no doubt.’

‘Not at all, my dear chief, not at all. The patients of a plastic surgeon do not expire upon the spot if not attended to immediately. With a six-month waiting list one can squeeze in the odd patient here and there.’

De Graaf made the introductions. ‘Professor Johnson. Lieutenant van Effen. Lieutenant Valken.’

‘Ah. Lieutenant van Effen. The Colonel has explained your requirements to me. Rather unusual requirements, I may say, even in our at-times somewhat bizarre profession—we tend to be called upon to remove scars, not inflict them. However.’

He looked at the scar on van Effen’s face, produced a magnifying glass and peered more closely. ‘Not bad, not bad at all. You have quite an artistic bent, my dear fellow. Wouldn’t deceive me—not when you’ve spent all your life studying thousands of different scars of every conceivable variety. But a layman is not a plastic surgeon and I doubt very much whether any layman would question the authenticity of that scar. Let me see the dreadful wound concealed by that glove on your left hand.’ He did some peering. ‘By Jove, even better. You are to be congratulated. Very convenient to have it on your left hand, isn’t it? But a trifle suspicious to the nasty criminal mind, perhaps? You are, of course, right-handed.’

Van Effen smiled. ‘You can tell just by looking at me?’

‘I can tell that left-handed persons don’t carry barely concealed pistols under their left armpit.’

‘Too late for a transfer now, sir. I’m already identified as being a left-hand-glove wearer.’

‘Yes. Well. I see. Your scars more than pass muster. The trouble, I suppose, is that you suspect that those scars might be subjected to some kind of test, such as with a scrubbing brush or even a hot soapy sponge?’

‘A hot soapy sponge is all that is needed.’

‘Normally, you understand, the perfect non-removable scar would take some weeks to achieve. I gather, however, that time is not on your side. Ah, Colonel. Is that Van der Hum I see?’

‘It is indeed.’ The Colonel poured a glass.

‘Thank you. We don’t generally advertise the fact, but members of our profession—well, before an operation, you understand?’

‘Operation?’ said van Effen.

‘A trifle,’ Johnson said soothingly. He took some brandy, then opened a small metal case to reveal a gleaming array of surgical instruments, most of them of a very delicate nature. ‘A series of subcutaneous injections with a variety of inert dyes. There will be no weals, no puffiness, I promise you. There will also be no local anaesthetic. Takes better that way.’ He looked very closely at the facial scar. ‘Must have the position, size and colour as before, you understand. Your left hand is unimportant. Nobody, I assume, has seen that scar. I can give you a much more satisfyingly horrific scar than you have now. Now, if I could have some hot water, sponge, soap.’

Twenty-five minutes later and Johnson was through. ‘Not my proudest achievement, but it will serve. At least, no one can pull or scrub those scars off. Have a look, Lieutenant.’

Van Effen went to a mirror, looked, nodded and came back.

‘First class, sir. A dead ringer for the one I had painted on.’ He surveyed his apparently horribly mangled left hand with melancholy admiration. ‘I’ve really been through it. After such a marvellous job, sir, it seems ungrateful to ask—but how permanent are those scars likely to be?’

‘Not permanent at all. Those dyes are of a completely different chemical composition from tattoo pigments. Absorption time varies—two to three weeks. I shouldn’t worry, Lieutenant—they’re really quite becoming.’

De Graaf and van Effen met Professor Hector van Dam, Professor Bernard Span and Professor Thomas Spanraft in the living-room of van Dam’s house. They didn’t look at all like professors or, more accurately, what professors are supposed to look like. They looked more like a combination of prosperous businessmen and solid Dutch burghers, all curiously alike, all overweight, all cheerful and all with slightly flushed cheeks which might have come from the over-heated room or the large bottle of wine which circulated freely among them.

Van Dam spoke. ‘Well, gentlemen, we think we have the answers you seek. Not too difficult, really. We have in this country linguistic specialists, both occidental and oriental—especially oriental, we have had vast experience of dealing with Asiatic languages over the centuries—as you will find anywhere in Europe. Professor Spanraft has come up specially from Rotterdam. No oriental knowledge in this case. I may start, perhaps, with my own small contribution.’

He looked at van Effen. ‘This gentleman you met in some café with the unusual name of Helmut Paderiwski. He is not Dutch and he is most certainly not Polish. He is, specifically and unquestionably, southern Irish. Even more specifically, he is a Dubliner. My qualifications for making so confident an assertion? A year as visiting scholar and lecturer at Trinity, Dublin. Bernard?’

Professor Span made an apologetic gesture with his hands. ‘My contribution, even smaller than Hector’s, was pathetically easy. I am told that the other two gentlemen the Lieutenant met in the same café with the splendid, if slightly unlikely, names of Romero and Leonardo Agnelli are dark-haired, dark-eyed and of a rather Mediterranean cast of countenance. Gentlemen of such appearance are not exclusively confined to an area south of the Alps. They are even to be found, as you must know, in our own predominantly fair-haired and fair-complexioned society. The Agnellis are two such.’

‘You are quite certain of that, sir?’ van Effen said. ‘I know Italy well and—’

‘Lieutenant van Effen!’ Professor van Dam was shocked. ‘If my colleague—’

Professor Span held up a placatory hand. ‘No, no, Hector, the Lieutenant’s query was a legitimate one. I gather that the enquiries in which he and the Colonel are engaged are of a most serious nature.’ He smiled a deprecatory smile. ‘As a mere academic, of course—anyway, Lieutenant, rest assured that those gentlemen are as Dutch as you or I. My life on it. And at a guess—an educated guess, mark you—from Utrecht. You are amazed, perhaps, by my perspicacity? Please do not be. My qualifications? Impeccable. I’m a Dutchman. From Utrecht. Your turn, Thomas.’

Spanraft smiled. ‘My qualifications are strikingly similar to Hector’s. This lady who makes all those mysterious phone calls. Young, beyond a doubt. Educated. Perhaps even highly so. Northern Ireland, specifically Belfast. My qualifications? I, too, have been a visiting scholar and lecturer. Queen’s, Belfast.’ He smiled. ‘Good heavens, I may even have taught the young lady.’

‘If you did,’ de Graaf said heavily, ‘you didn’t teach her the right things.’

De Graaf turned to van Effen, who was driving a Volkswagen that evening. As it was not impossible that he might be called upon to drive one or more of Agnelli’s group that evening it had been deemed more prudent not to use the Peugeot, where the presence of a police radio might have been inadvertently discovered. Car papers and insurance were, of course, made out in the name of Stephan Danilov.

‘What do you make of this Irish connection, Peter?’

‘I have no idea, sir. We know, of course, that petty criminals have in the past sold Russian and other eastern bloc weapons to the Irish Republican Army; but these, as I say, were petty criminals operating on a relatively petty scale. This, I feel, is something much bigger. The IRA never had any organization worth speaking of in this country. The FFF definitely have. Where can I contact you later on this evening, sir?’

‘I wish you hadn’t mentioned that,’ de Graaf said gloomily. ‘Earlier, I had hoped to spend it in the bosom of my family. But now? If the government does decide to send an emissary to parley with the FFF—good heavens, Peter, we completely forgot to listen in to the six o’clock news—the broadcast, rather, that was to state when and where the government would hold this parley.’

‘We’ve only to lift a phone. It’s of no significance.’

‘True. This emissary I mentioned. Who, do you think, is the logical choice?’

‘The Minister of Justice?’

‘No other. My lord and master whom you have frequently, actionably and accurately described as an old woman. Old women like to have their hands held. Who do you think would best play the part of nursemaid?’

‘You’d make an admirable choice. In fact, I’m happy to say that you would be the inevitable choice. Don’t forget to take an umbrella big enough for both of you.’ Rain had begun to fall and fall so heavily that the Volkswagen’s wipers failed adequately to cope with it. ‘You should consider yourself privileged, sir, to have a ringside seat at what may be, at least, a minor turning point in history.’

‘I’d rather have my own armchair by my own fireside.’ De Graaf reduced visibility even more by drawing heavily on his cheroot. ‘But whatever seat I’m in tonight it’ll be a damned sight safer and more comfortable than the one you’ll be in. Not that I would suppose for a moment that they have armchairs in the palace cellars.’ De Graaf, apparently concentrating on increasing the blue fug inside the car, lapsed briefly into silence then said: ‘I don’t like it, Peter. I don’t like it at all. Too many ifs, buts and question marks.’

‘I have to admit that I’m not all that madly keen on it myself. But we’ve agreed—it’s our only way in. And there’s another thing I don’t like too much and makes me more than glad that your friend gave those scars a degree of permanence. I mean, they may have reservations about me that I didn’t suspect before.’

‘What makes you suspect now?’

‘A rather disquieting remark that one of those gentlemen let drop a few minutes ago—Professor Span, it was. He said he came from Utrecht. He is firmly of the opinion that the Agnelli brothers come from the same place.’

‘So?’

‘It may have escaped your memory, sir, but Vasco—Sergeant Westenbrink—also comes from Utrecht.’

‘Damn it!’ De Graaf said softly. The implications had struck him immediately. ‘Oh, damn it all!’

‘Indeed. Cops and criminals generally have a working knowledge of each other. Two things may help, though. Vasco spent much of his time in Utrecht working under cover and he’s been in disguise—sort of—since he took up residence in Krakerdom. Imponderables, sir, imponderables.’

‘Your continued existence would seem to me to be another imponderable,’ de Graaf said heavily. ‘There is no call—’

‘Yes, sir, I know, over and above the call of duty. Let’s just say in for a penny in for a pound, or, if you like, a calculated risk. By my calculations, the odds are on me.’ He pulled up outside de Graaf’s house.

‘I am glad that I’m not a betting man.’ He peered at his watch. ’Six-Seventeen. If I want to reach you in the next hour or so you will, of course, be in your room in the Trianon.’

‘Briefly only, sir. For about forty minutes, from, say, six forty-five onwards, I’ll be in La Caracha.’

‘The devil you will! La Caracha. I thought someone was delivering some data or whatever it is in the Trianon at six-thirty and that you were going to study that?’

‘I don’t have to look at it. I know how to operate radio-controlled detonations. When I explained to them at length the difficulties involved in radio detonation, that was for their benefit and my benefit. Their benefit, to convince them that I really was what I purported to be, a whizz-kid in explosives: my benefit, to find out how much they really knew about the subject, which appears to be singularly little. Work that one out, sir—why so highly organized a group is anything but organized in what would appear to be a very—if not the most—vital department. That’s one of the reasons why I said that by my calculations the odds are on me—I think they may really need me and be prepared to lean over just so slightly backwards to give me the benefit of the doubt.

‘But the real reason for whatever optimism I have lies in La Caracha. You may remember I asked Vasco to meet me in Julie’s flat. I changed my mind about that: I think that the further he and I—in my capacity of Danilov—keep away from the flat the better. So I’ve arranged to meet him in La Caracha. I also took the liberty of phoning George and asking him if he would be interested in giving me a little assistance. He said he would be more than pleased. I did not—I repeat not, sir—co-opt him in your name. I thought there were some things you’d rather not know about—officially, that is.’

‘I see. You have a point. I sometimes wonder, Peter, how many things I don’t know about, officially and unofficially, but now is not the time for brooding. I mean, you haven’t the time. And how do you propose to have those two help guarantee your continued existence?’

‘They will, I hope, be keeping an eye on me. A close eye. Vasco, as I think I’ve mentioned, has no equal as a shadower. And George—well, he has other virtues.’

‘So I’ve noticed. May heaven help us all.’

Agnelli’s messenger arrived punctually at six-thirty, less than two minutes after van Effen had arrived back in his room at the Trianon. A man, van Effen reflected, ideally suited for his task—a small, drab, unremarkable nonentity of a man who could have been first cousin of the other nonentity who consumed so remarkably few jonge jenevers in the close vicinity of the reception desk in the lobby. He handed over a yellow envelope, said that someone would be around to pick him up at seven forty-five and left, less than twenty seconds after his arrival.

‘No,’ Sergeant Westenbrink said. He was seated with van Effen and George in a small private room in La Caracha. ‘I don’t know the Annecys—the two that you didn’t put in prison, that is.’

‘Do they know you?’

‘I’m sure they don’t. I never came into contact with them. They left for Amsterdam about three years ago.’

‘Ah, I’d forgotten. Either of you hear this broadcast that was supposed to be made to the FFF?’

‘It was made,’ George said. ‘Minister of Justice’s house. 8 p.m. Guarantees of immunity—I assume the government believed in the threat to turn the Oostlijk—Flevoland into a new sea.’

‘Well, doesn’t concern us at the moment. You are sure you want to come in on this, George?’

George seemed to reflect. ‘Could be difficult, even dangerous. There might even be violence.’ He frowned, then brightened. ‘But one does get so tired of serving Rodekool met Rolpens.’

‘So. If you’ll be kind enough to have your car outside the Trianon—or, shall I say, in the discreet vicinity—by seven-forty. Might leave in my Volkswagen, might be in the car of whoever comes to pick me up. I don’t for a moment think you’ll lose us but, in any case, you know we’ll be heading in the general direction of the royal palace.’

George said: ‘Does our Chief of Police know about us—our plans?’

‘He knows about you two and that you’ll be keeping a very careful watch—I hope—over me. The rest, no. It would never do for us to go around breaking the law.’

‘Of course not,’ George said.

At precisely seven forty-five, none other than Romero Agnelli himself came to collect van Effen from the Trianon.

SIX

As far as one could tell, Romero Agnelli was in high good humour: but, then, as far as one could tell, Romero Agnelli was always in high good humour. Even the torrential rainfall drumming on the roof of the car had no effect on his spirits. The car was Agnelli’s, a large and, van Effen had been glad to note, fairly conspicuous green Volvo.

‘Dreadful night,’ Agnelli said. ‘Quite dreadful. And worse still to come, I’m sure. Bad time of the year, this. Always a bad time. Gales, spring tides, north wind—must listen in to the eight o’clock forecast.’ Agnelli, van Effen thought, was uncommonly interested in the weather conditions. ‘Busy day, Mr Danilov?’

‘If you call sleeping being busy, yes, then I’ve had a busy day. Late in bed last night—late this morning, actually—and I didn’t know what hour you’d keep me up to tonight. You have not, Mr Agnelli, been too free with information about your plans.’

‘Would you have been in my situation? Don’t worry, we won’t keep you late. That data I sent round—it proved useful?’

‘Everything I required.’ Van Effen pulled out the yellow envelope from under his coat. ‘Returned with thanks. I don’t want to be found with that in my possession. Where’s the radio?’

‘In the boot. In perfect condition, I assure you.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Nevertheless, I shall want to see it. I trust the amatol, primers and the rest are not in the boot?’

Agnelli looked at him in amusement. ‘They’re not. Why?’

‘I’m thinking of the detonator. Usually made of some fulminating powder, commonly a mercury derivative. Delicate. Doesn’t like being jounced around. And I don’t like being around when it’s jounced around.’

‘They’re in a room we’ve hired off the Kalvetstraat.’

‘Would it be presumptuous of me to ask why the radio isn’t with the explosives?’

‘Not at all. I want to trigger off the device in the palace from the Dam Square itself. Perhaps you wonder why?’

‘Wonder or not, I’m not going to ask. The less I know the better all round. I’m a great believer in the need-to-know principle.’

‘So, normally, am I.’ He switched on the car radio. ‘Eight o’clock. Forecast.’ The forecast, which came through almost immediately, was not encouraging. Wind, force seven, north, veering north-north-east, increasing, heavy rains, temperature dropping. Then followed some technical jargon about stationary depressions and a confident, if gloomy, assertion that the weather would continue to deteriorate for the next forty-eight hours.

‘Sounds bad,’ Agnelli said. His expression did not appear to reflect inner concern. ‘Lots of people, especially the middle-aged and older with longer memories, won’t be feeling any too happy—especially with the recent comments about the decayed state of the dykes. Same conditions as caused those dreadful floods back in the fifties—and the dykes are in no better condition now than they were then.’

‘Putting it a bit strongly, isn’t it, Mr Agnelli? Think of the huge storm-surge barriers they’ve built in the delta area in the south-west.’

‘And what guarantee have we that the North Sea is going to be considerate enough to launch its attack against the delta area? Little point in locking your front door if the back door is falling off its hinges.’

Agnelli parked his car in the Voorburgwal, reached into the back seat and produced two large umbrellas.

‘Not that these are going to be much help in this downpour. Just wait a few seconds until I get the radio out of the boot.’

Just over a minute later they were standing outside a door to which Agnelli had his own key. Beyond lay an ill-lit and dingy passageway, its floor covered with cracked linoleum. Agnelli furled his umbrella and gave a coded knock on the first door to the right—three taps, then one, then three. The door was opened by the man calling himself Helmut Paderiwski who made an unsuccessful effort to restrain a scowl when he recognized the person accompanying Agnelli, who appeared not to notice it.

‘Helmut you have met,’ Agnelli said, and led the way into the room. Unlike the corridor, it was brightly lit and was large and furnished in surprising comfort. Leonardo Agnelli gave van Effen a nod and a smile.

Leonardo apart, there were four other people in the room, all young, all pleasant looking and very respectable: two men and two girls, all looking like refugees from some university honours graduate course, the type that would have more than passed muster in any Parisian grand salon: they were also of the type that, in the past decade, had not only been members of, but had organized and controlled so many politically motivated criminal groups in Germany and Italy. They were considerably more formidable than your common-or-garden criminal who was concerned primarily with the accumulation of as much wealth as possible in the shortest time possible but who would rapidly abandon all thought of ill-gotten gains if personal danger threatened, fanatically dedicated people who would stop at nothing to achieve their own cherished Utopias, no matter how bizarre, sick and undesirable those Utopias might appear to the vast majority of their fellow men and women. They could, of course, have been genuine salon intellectuals who sought no more of life than the opportunity to discuss Proust and Stendhal, Hegelian and Kantian philosophies. But seekers after the higher truths did not commonly assemble in such clandestine fashion, especially not in the close vicinity of sixteen-kilo blocks of amatol explosive which van Effen had at once observed neatly stacked in a corner.

Agnelli indicated the two young men. ‘Joop and Joachim. They have other names, of course, but are not using them at the moment.’ Joop and Joachim, oddly alike in that both were tall, slightly stooped and wore horn-rimmed glasses, bowed slightly, smiled but refrained from reciprocal comment when van Effen said he was delighted to meet them. Agnelli turned to a sweet-smiling dark-haired girl. ‘And this is Maria, who has also for the moment forgotten her surname.’

‘My, my,’ van Effen said. ‘Imagine forgetting a name like Agnelli.’

Agnelli smiled. ‘I didn’t think you would be the man to miss much, Mr Danilov. Yes, my sister. And this is Kathleen.’ Kathleen, petite and slender, had blue eyes, dark hair and a slightly humorous, slightly wry expression which in no way detracted from the fact that she was very pretty indeed.

‘Kathleen?’ van Effen said. ‘But that’s an Irish name. And, if I don’t give offence, you’re every man’s concept of what an Irish colleen should look like. You know, the one in the song “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen”?’

She made a mock curtsy. ‘You choose to flatter me, kind sir. No offence. My mother is Irish. I’m quite proud of it, in my own Celtic way.’

Professor Spanraft’s putative ex-student, van Effen knew. And, beyond doubt, the girl who had spoken over the telephone to the sub-editor Morelis and others.

‘It was promised that I would meet your leader tonight,’ van Effen said. ‘He is not here.’

‘He asked me to convey his apologies,’ Agnelli said. ‘An urgent appointment that he couldn’t break.’ If one were in any way courteous, van Effen reflected, one did not break appointments with Ministers of Justice.

‘Those are all your group?’

‘No.’ Agnelli waved a hand. ‘Those are all that are with us tonight.’

‘Pity I won’t be able to further my acquaintance with them,’ van Effen said. ‘They may be with us but I won’t be with them.’ He turned towards the door. ‘I trust they enjoy their trip to the cellars. I’m sorry, Mr Agnelli. Good-night.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute!’ Agnelli, no longer smiling, was totally taken aback, his face registering his lack of comprehension.

‘A minute? Not a second. Not in this company.’ Van Effen looked around the other equally startled and puzzled occupants of the room, his eyes and mouth dismissive and more than slightly contemptuous. ‘If you imagined that I was going to move into hostile territory—and no matter how good your inside information may be, the possibility of danger is always there—carrying explosives and with this bunch of amateur rubberneckers traipsing at my heels, you have to be out of your mind.’ He reached for the door-handle. ‘Get yourself another demolition expert. Preferably from a lunatic asylum.’

‘Is that what it is?’ Agnelli smiled in relief. ‘My dear fellow, those people are not coming with us. Do you think I am from a lunatic asylum? Only you, Leonardo and myself.’

‘Then what are all those people doing here? And don’t tell me it’s none of my business. It is. I value my freedom above all things and my freedom is endangered when unnecessary risks are taken. Don’t you know that danger lies in numbers? Don’t you think it’s stupid to have your people holed up so near a place where you intend to carry out an illegal act? Don’t you ever operate on the need-to-know principle?’

‘This is not our base, Mr Danilov. One night only.’ Agnelli was slightly on the defensive, slightly uncomfortable. ‘Those people are here simply as observers.’

‘Observing what?’

‘The effects of the explosion.’

‘Effects? The walls of Jericho come tumbling down? There’ll be nothing to observe.’

‘Psychological effects. Reactions. Guide to our future plans.’

‘Effects on whom? The crowds thronging the Dam Square?’ Van Effen looked at him incredulously. ‘That rain’s torrential. There won’t be a single living soul in the square tonight.’ He looked slowly round the unsmiling faces. ‘Sunday-school kids on a Sunday-school picnic. Cheap thrills? Or the feeling that they’re not making a contribution, not really participating unless they’re on the spot? God help us. Let me see all the gear you have.’ Enough moral ascendancy, van Effen thought, was enough.

‘Certainly.’ Agnelli tried, not too successfully, to hide the relief in his face. ‘Joop?’

‘Yes, Mr Agnelli.’ Joop opened a cupboard and brought out some boxes which he set on the carpet and proceeded to open. ‘Primer. Detonators. Battery. The trigger mechanism. The setting on this—here—is activated by—’

‘Joop.’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you detonating this device?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m not an expert. Oh, I see. Sorry.’ Discomfited, Joop withdrew. Van Effen looked at Agnelli.

‘You have the key for the radio box?’

‘Yes, of course.’ He handed it over. ‘Please excuse Leonardo and myself for a moment.’ Both men left by a side door. Van Effen unlocked the metal lid of the radio container and studied the controls on top of the radio. He turned the power on, touched a knob here, pulled a switch there, calibrated the gauges on a couple of dials and adjusted two wave-length bands. No one watching—and everyone was watching—could doubt he or she was in the presence of an expert. He then studied the timing dial on the triggering mechanism, produced pad and pencil, made a few rapid calculations then straightened, obviously satisfied.

‘Nothing to it, really, is there?’ Kathleen was smiling.

‘Agreed. Can’t imagine why I’m here.’ He stooped, locked the lid of the radio container and thrust the key into an inside pocket.

‘You do trust people, don’t you?’ Kathleen said.

‘No. Especially kids. But if you remove temptation from the reach of kids then they can’t possibly fall into it, can they? I have no wish to be blown up in the cellars of the palace.’

He turned as Agnelli and his brother re-entered the room. Both were dressed as policemen, Romero Agnelli as an inspector, his brother as a sergeant. Van Effen surveyed them.

‘You make an excellent inspector, Mr Agnelli. Really most becoming. Your brother looks the part, too, except for one thing: he’s really at least five inches too short for the police force.’

‘Short legs only,’ Agnelli said comfortably. ‘He’s as tall as anyone when he’s seated behind the wheel of a police car.’

‘You surprise me. About the police car I mean. You have—ah—come into possession of one?’

‘Not exactly. We have, shall we say, a car that looks exactly like a police car. Not too difficult.’ He looked at his watch. ‘A police car is expected at the palace in about twenty minutes.’

‘Expected?’

‘But of course. We have friends and we have made arrangements. Joop, be so kind as to pack the equipment, will you?’ He indicated two grey metallic cases that stood nearby.

‘So you just drive up and walk inside?’ van Effen said.

‘We believe in keeping things simple. Of course.’

‘Of course. No reason required, naturally. You just walk in.’

‘Yes.’ He indicated the two metal cases Joop was loading with equipment. ‘With those.’

‘Again, of course. You declare the contents?’

‘Electronic detecting equipment. For locating hidden explosives.’

‘I didn’t know there was any such thing.’

‘I don’t believe there is. However, in this silicon chip, computerized and electro-magnetic age, people believe anything. The explosives we’re looking for have—we believe—been secreted in the basements, somewhere. Underworld tip. So we go to the basements to look.’

‘You have your nerve,’ van Effen said.

‘Not really. Calculated risk and we calculate that the risk is not very high. People don’t normally publicize in advance the fact that they intend to do something which is the precise opposite of what they intend to do. And with those uniforms, the police car and the impressive set of credentials we have we don’t expect to experience too much trouble. We’ve even got a set of papers for you.’

‘That’s fine. Papers. Papers don’t matter a damn to me. Nor does the fact that you haven’t gone to the trouble to find me a uniform. What—’

‘No uniform. You’re a civilian expert. The papers say so.’

‘Let me finish. You two may—and very probably will—get off with your minimal disguises. But how am I going to disguise my scarred face and the fact that I have a crippled hand? My description will probably be in every paper in the country tomorrow.’

Agnelli looked closely at the scar on van Effen’s face. ‘If you’ll pardon the cruel remark, that really is a beauty. Joachim?’ This to one of the two young men. ‘What do you think? Joachim, Mr Danilov, is an art school student and also a makeup designer for theatrical groups. He requires quite a large case to carry all his stock in trade. As you can imagine, in an organization such as ours, we find our friend’s specialized gifts invaluable.’

‘Do you have anything against beards, Mr Danilov?’ Joachim said.

‘Not as long as they don’t make me look worse than I already am.’

‘I have several in a suitably auburn shade. In your case, I’m afraid, it would have to be a beard of rather a luxuriant style. I know the one. I’ll apply some paste.’

‘Just so long as I can get it off again.’

‘Forty-eight hours and it will fall off.’ Joachim left the room.

‘About that black glove, Mr Danilov,’ Agnelli said.

‘I’m afraid there is nothing they can do with that.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘How can I be sure? If you’d a hand like mine don’t you think I’d have tried anything—everything—to camouflage it?’ Van Effen let just the right note of bitterness creep into his voice.

‘Nevertheless, perhaps I might see it?’ Agnelli’s voice was gently insistent. ‘I promise you I won’t say “Good God above” or swoon or anything of the kind.’

Van Effen, being ostentatious without appearing to be, turned his back on the rest of the company and peeled off the black glove. He held his hand up to within a foot of Agnelli’s face.

Agnelli’s normally mobile face became still. He said: ‘I promised you I wouldn’t say “Good God” or anything of the kind—but, well, I’ve never seen anything like it before. How in heaven’s name did this happen?’

Van Effen smiled. ‘Legitimately, believe it or not. Someone made a mistake when we were trying to cap an oil fire in Saudi Arabia.’

‘One trusts he paid for the mistake?’

‘There and then. He was incinerated.’

‘I see. In which case one might almost imagine you’ve been lucky.’ Agnelli took van Effen’s wrist and touched the scars with his finger-nails. ‘That must hurt.’

‘Not the slightest. Skin’s paralysed. Stick a row of needles into it or slice it with a scalpel. Wouldn’t feel a thing.’ It would be unfortunate, van Effen thought, if Agnelli took him at his word. ‘It’s unimportant. All that matters is that I can still oppose finger and thumb.’

Joachim came back and Agnelli said: ‘Do you mind if Joachim looks at this?’

‘If he’s the sensitive artistic type I should imagine he’d be better off looking elsewhere.’

Joachim looked and failed to hide the revulsion in his face. ‘That’s—that’s awful! I couldn’t—I mean—how can you bear to go about like that.’

‘I don’t have much option. It’s the only left hand I’ve got.’

Joachim said: ‘You’d better put your glove back on. There’s nothing I—nothing anyone can do about that.’

‘Time to go,’ Agnelli said. ‘Helmut, we’ll meet you and the others down in the Dam in about half an hour, perhaps forty minutes. Don’t forget the radio.’

‘The radio?’ van Effen said. ‘You’re going to operate the radio in this monsoon?’

‘We have a mini-bus. Where’s the key to the radio?’

‘In my pocket,’ van Effen said. ‘I thought it might be safer there.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

They left, taking the metal cases with them. Agnelli stopped at a door close to the entrance, opened it, went inside. He reappeared, leading a Dobermann pinscher which had about it the homicidal appearance shared by many members of its breed: it was, reassuringly, muzzled.

‘Is that animal as fierce as it looks?’ van Effen asked.

‘I’ve had the good fortune never to find out. However, he’s not here for the purposes of either defence or attack. Dobermann pinschers can be trained to smell out explosives. Use them at airports. Fact.’

‘I know it’s a fact. Has this dog been so trained?’

‘Quite frankly, I have no idea. For all I know, his olfactory nerves may be completely paralysed.’

‘I’m beginning to believe that you might even get off with this,’ van Effen said.

They made the best time they could through the drenching rain and were back at the spot where they had parked the Volvo in the Voorburgwal. Van Effen had his hand on the door when he realized that it was not, in fact, the car in which they had arrived: it was, unmistakably, a police car. Van Effen got into the back seat beside Agnelli and said: ‘You leave your own car here and come back and find a police car in its place. You know, I now do believe that you are going to get off with it after all. You do have your organization.’

‘Organization is all,’ said Agnelli.

Everything went off as Agnelli had confidently expected. They were expected at the palace and their credentials received only the most cursory inspection: they and the car were so obviously official that a more detailed examination could only have seemed superfluous: besides, it was raining very heavily indeed and the guards were very anxious indeed to get back to the shelter just as soon as they could.

Agnelli led them to a doorway which was so completely shrouded in darkness that he had to use a pencil torch to locate the keyhole of a door, a keyhole for which, as he had promised, he had the key. He also had a succession of keys which he used two flights of stairs down to open a succession of cellars. He knew the location of every door, every light switch.

‘You lived here?’ van Effen asked.

‘I’ve been here a couple of times. One has to be fairly meticulous about these things.’ He led the way through a completely empty cellar into another equally bare cellar and said: ‘This is the place. Not too difficult, was it?’

‘I find it hard to believe,’ van Effen said. ‘They do have security systems here?’

‘Excellent ones, I’m told. But security is a relative term. There is no security net that can’t be breached. Look at Buckingham Palace for instance. One of the tightest security shields in the world but as has been proved several times in the past year or so any semi-intelligent person—and, indeed, as has also been proved, those of a considerably lower IQ—can go in and out whenever they feel so inclined. Well, Mr Danilov, it’s yours.’

‘Minutes, only. Open this far door for me—if you have the key.’

Agnelli had the key. Van Effen produced a tape and proceeded to measure the thickness of the walls. He said: ‘How come all those cellars are so empty?’

‘They weren’t a few days ago. They were pretty well filled with old furniture, archives, things that you expect to collect in a royal palace over the years. Not that we were concerned with the wellbeing of those antiquities, most of which were just ancient rubbish anyway. It was no part of our plan to burn the palace down.’

Van Effen nodded, said nothing, went out—accompanied by Agnelli—and climbed a flight of steps to work out the thickness of the ceiling. He returned to the cellar, made a few calculations on a piece of paper then said: ‘We’ll use the lot. Those walls are stouter than I would have expected. But the resulting bang should still be quite satisfactory.’

‘Always a pleasure to watch an expert at work,’ Agnelli said.

‘No more than it is to watch a journeyman brick-layer at work. He does his five years’ apprenticeship. I’ve done mine.’

‘There’s a difference, I suggest, between dropping a brick and dropping a detonator.’

‘A skilled tradesman never drops anything.’ Van Effen busied himself for not more than two minutes, then said: ‘I think I recall you saying that you did have the duplicate keys for the cellars we’ve just passed through?’

‘I did and I have.’

‘So no one else can get near this place?’ Agnelli shook his head. ‘So. Finished.’

Their departure was no more eventful than their arrival had been. Less than ten minutes after van Effen had inserted the detonator into the primer they parked their car just behind a dimly lit mini-bus.

As they stepped out a figure emerged from the shadows. He came up to Agnelli. ‘All well, sir?’

‘No problem, John.’

‘Goodnight, sir.’ The man got into the police car and drove off.

‘More organization,’ van Effen said. ‘Formidable.’

The five people they had left in the room close by the Voorburgwal were all seated in the mini-bus which, being a fourteen-seater, was considerably larger than its name suggested. Van Effen and Agnelli sat in the wide seat in the back.

Van Effen said: ‘May one ask how long you expect to wait here?’

‘Of course.’ Agnelli had become more than his usual smiling self in the past few minutes: He was now positively jovial. He had shown no signs of strain inside the palace but strain there must inevitably have been. ‘Not quite sure myself, to be honest. A few minutes, perhaps. Certainly no more than twenty. But first, one must beware lurking and suspicious policemen. Leonardo? Catch.’

He threw something to his brother then stood up himself and shrugged his way into a long grey raincoat. Then he sat, reached below the seat, pulled out a machine which looked like and was a radio transceiver, flicked a switch which made a red light glow, then brought up a headband with one earphone, which he draped over his knee: he reached down again and brought up a microphone the lead of which was, presumably, attached to the transceiver.

‘Sorry I have to keep you waiting,’ he said, almost apologetically. ‘But I, in turn, have to wait a call.’

‘More organization,’ van Effen said. ‘Quite admirable. But there is one area in which your organization falls down.’

‘Inevitably.’ Agnelli smiled. ‘In what respect?’

‘No heating in this vehicle.’

‘An oversight. Maria?’

‘It’s by the radio.’

Agnelli reached under the seat and, not without some effort, brought up a large wicker basket which he placed on the seat between van Effen and himself. He opened the lid to reveal a rather splendidly appointed picnic basket.

‘What you would have expected, Mr Danilov. A picnic basket for the Sunday-school picnickers. If we cannot have external warmth at least we can provide some of the internal variety.’ The contents of the basket tended to bear out his claim. Apart from two rows of gleaming glasses and packets of sandwiches neatly wrapped in cellophane, it held a very promising variety of bottles. ‘We thought we might have something to celebrate this evening,’ he said, again almost apologetically, ‘and I do think we have. A schnapps, perhaps, Mr Danilov?’

Van Effen said: ‘I unreservedly withdraw my remarks about your organization.’

Agnelli hadn’t even had time to begin to pour the schnapps when the transceiver buzzer rang. He clamped on the headpiece and acknowledged the call then listened in silence for almost a minute. Then he said: ‘Yes, they are foolish. They have no place to go. So a little persuasion to tip the balance? Call me back in one minute.’ He took off the headpiece. ‘Well, who’s the volunteer to press the button?’ There were no volunteers. ‘Well, then, I suggest you, Mr Danilov. You’re the man who prepared the charges so, of course, we’ll all blame you if the explosion turns out to be a damp squib or, alternatively, the palace falls down, so perhaps it’s only fitting that you press the button also. That way the rest of us will all feel blameless while you—’

He wasn’t given time to complete his sentence. Van Effen stabbed the button and less than two seconds later, deep and muffled like a distant underwater explosion but very unmistakable for all that—to anyone with normal hearing, the sound must have been audible up to a kilometre away—the reverberation from the detonating amatol rolled across the square. Van Effen took the bottle from Agnelli’s unresisting hand—Agnelli, not smiling and with lips parted, seemed to be seeing something very far away—and poured himself a schnapps.

‘Seems I’ll just have to congratulate myself. A nice loud bang but the royal walls still stand. As guaranteed. My health.’

‘That was splendid,’ Agnelli said warmly. He was back on his own usual smiling balance again. ‘Perfectly splendid, Mr Danilov. And no damage after all that noise. Unbelievable.’

‘Perhaps a little royal wine spilt on the royal table-cloth.’ Van Effen made a dismissive gesture. ‘I don’t want to seem unduly modest—not in my nature, really—but that was next to nothing. Next time—if there is a next time—something a little more demanding perhaps.’

‘There’ll be a next time. That I promise. And a little more exacting. That I also promise.’ He paused to sip some schnapps as the others, obviously excited and elated, turned to congratulate van Effen, then held up a hand for silence as the buzzer rang again.

‘Ah! You heard it also, did you? Very, very satisfactory. Mr Danilov is a man of his word.’ He was silent for almost a minute then said: ‘Yes, I agree. I’d been thinking along those lines myself. Most fortuitous, most…Thank you. Ten o’clock then.’

He replaced headpiece and microphone, then leaned back in his seat. ‘Well, now, time to relax.’

‘You relax,’ van Effen said. ‘Not me. If you’re not moving on, I am.’ He made to get up and a puzzled Agnelli caught his arm.

‘What is wrong?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just, as I’ve told you, that I’ve got a very acute sense of self-preservation. As soon as the police come to their senses—if they ever lost them, they’re a pretty efficient bunch hereabouts—they’re going to start questioning everyone within eyesight of the palace. I should imagine—no, I’m certain—that a minibus with eight odd characters such as us parked in a rainstorm in the Dam would be a prime target for questioning.’ He shrugged off Agnelli’s hand and rose. ‘I’ve an acute aversion to being questioned by the police. A criminal—and we are criminals—has to be some kind of retarded lunatic to remain in the vicinity of his crime.’

‘Sit down. You’re right, of course. Foolish of me—one should never let one’s guard down. Helmut?’

Paderiwski, who was obviously in full agreement with van Effen, drove off at once.

Back in the room they had so recently vacated, Agnelli sank into an armchair. ‘Thank you, ladies, thank you. Schnapps would be fine. Now, perhaps, Mr Danilov, we can relax.’

‘Safer than where we were. But relax? For me, no. Still too close. Instinct? Plain cowardice? I just don’t know. Anyway, I have an appointment tonight. Nine-thirty.’

Agnelli smiled. ‘You were pretty sure that you were going to keep that appointment?’

‘I never had any reason to doubt it. No, that’s not quite accurate. I never had reason to doubt that the arranging of the explosion was a simple matter. I had ample reason to question your ability to get us in and out undetected. But, then, I had no reason beforehand to be aware of your rather remarkable organizational ability. I’ll have no doubts about you again.’

‘Nor we of you—not after tonight’s performance. I had mentioned the possibility of finding a permanent niche with us. That’s no longer a possibility, it’s a guarantee if you’re still of the same mind.’

‘Of course I’m of the same mind. Tonight, you had a free demonstration. Now, I would appreciate some steady employment.’

‘The point I was about to raise. I think you are now entitled to be taken into our confidence.’

Van Effen looked at him in silence, took a thoughtful sip of his schnapps and smiled. ‘Not, I feel certain, your full confidence. You are not about to tell me your ultimate aims. You are not going to tell me how you came together. You’re not going to tell me how you are financed or by whom. You are not going to tell me where you stay—although, if we’re to work together in however limited a capacity, you’ll have to give me some intermediate contact phone number. You’re not even going to tell me why, in what would appear to be an otherwise highly organized setup, you require my services at such a late date.’

Agnelli was thoughtful. ‘That’s a lot of things you seem to be certain that we’re not going to tell you. How come?’

Van Effen let a little impatience show. ‘Because that is precisely the way I would behave myself. The need-to-know principle. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of that again. What I do believe is that you are about to let me into your very limited confidence about your immediate operational plans. No abnormal prescience on my part. You have to. If, that is to say, I’m to be of any use to you.’

‘Correct on all counts. Tell me, Mr Danilov, are you in a position to acquire explosives?’

‘Good God!’

‘Is that so extraordinary a question to ask of an explosives expert?’

‘My astonishment was not at the fact that you ask me. I’m surprised that—well, that such an organized group should embark upon what I take to be an ambitious project without the essentials to hand.’

‘We have some of what you call the essentials. We may not have enough. Are you in a position to help?’

‘Directly, no.’

‘Indirectly?’

‘Perhaps. I would have to make enquiries.’

‘Discreet, of course.’

Van Effen sighed. ‘Please don’t be so naive. If it were possible to obtain explosives without official permission in the Netherlands you would already have done so.’

‘Sorry. Silly remark. But we have to protect ourselves. Your contact would not, of course, obtain supplies—if he could—in a legitimate fashion?’

‘I’m not being indiscreet in saying that, to the best of my knowledge, my contact has never been involved in any legitimate dealings in his life. He would regard it as an affront to his professional code. He is also, incidentally, the only man in the country who knows more than I do about explosives.’

‘Sounds like a person whose acquaintance it might be useful to make.’ Agnelli studied his glass then looked at van Effen. ‘Not by any chance your friend Vasco? The person who introduced us at the Hunter’s Horn?’

‘Good lord, no.’ Van Effen creased his brow and compressed his lips. ‘Vasco is hardly what you might call my friend, Mr Agnelli. I got him out of bad trouble, once, and have employed him occasionally on some none-too-demanding errands. But we are not soulmates. I’m quite certain that Vasco knows nothing about explosives, has no access to them and would find it difficult to obtain a child’s cap pistol in a toy shop.’

Agnelli turned to his brother and shrugged. ‘Had we known that, Leonardo, you wouldn’t have spent so much time looking for him this afternoon.’

‘Vasco frequently disappears,’ van Effen said. ‘Has a girlfriend in Utrecht, I believe. You are seriously trying to tell me that you were, also seriously, thinking of engaging Vasco’s services?’

‘Not exactly, but—’

‘He comes in the front door and I go out the back and that’s that,’ van Effen said. ‘He’s unstable, unpredictable and highly dangerous, whether he means to be or not.’

‘I don’t quite understand what you mean by that.’

‘And I don’t quite understand you. You mean you’ve never even bothered to check on him, his background?’

‘We didn’t check yours.’

‘You didn’t have to,’ van Effen said bleakly. ‘Not with all those extradition warrants hanging around.’

Agnelli smiled. ‘That was this morning and this morning has been forgotten. You obviously know something about Vasco that we don’t.’

‘Obviously. He’s bad. Poison. He’s the classic example of game-keeper turned poacher. He’s treacherous and a man full of hate. He hates the law and the society that law protects—or is supposed to protect. He’s that most dangerous of criminals, an ex-cop gone wrong.’

‘A policeman?’ Agnelli’s surprise, van Effen thought, was splendidly done. ‘Police!’

‘Ex. No public accusation of wrong-doing, far less a trial. Dismissed without explanation—although doubtless there would have been an explanation made to Vasco. Just try making some discreet enquiries at the Utrecht police station about a certain ex-Sergeant Westenbrink and see what kind of dusty answers you get. My friend George is a different kettle of fish entirely. A firm believer in honour among thieves. An honest criminal, if such a contradiction in terms exists.’

‘This George is your explosives friend?’ Van Effen nodded. ‘He has a second name?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think he’d work for me?’

‘George never works for anyone. He might be prepared to work with someone. Another thing. George never works through anyone. Not even through me. He’s a very careful man. His police record is clean and he wants to keep it that way. He talks to principals only and then it must be face to face.’

‘That’s the way I like it. Do you think you could get him to talk to me?’

‘Who knows? I could ask him. Not here though.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’d advise him against it. He knows I wouldn’t do that without reason. Where can I contact you?’

‘I’ll contact you. At the Trianon.’

‘I won’t make any comments about how touching your trust in me is. Tomorrow morning.’

‘Tonight. Ten o’clock.’

‘You are in a hurry. No point, I suppose, in asking you the compelling nature of this deadline you so obviously have to meet. Besides, I told you, I have a nine-thirty appointment.’

‘Ten o’clock.’ Agnelli rose. ‘You will of course try to see your friend immediately. I’ll put a car at your disposal.’

‘Please, Mr Agnelli. Don’t be so naive.’

SEVEN

‘That’s an Esfahan rug you’re standing on,’ Colonel de Graaf said. ‘Very rare, very expensive.’

‘I’ve got to drip on to something,’ van Effen said reasonably. He was standing before the fire in the Colonel’s luxuriously furnished library, steam gently rising from his saturated clothing. ‘Not for me a door-to-door chauffeur-driven limousine. I have to cope with taxis that go home to roost when the first drop of rain falls and with people who seemed anxious to know where I was going. It didn’t seem clever to let them know that I was going to the house of the Chief of Police.’

‘Your friend Agnelli doesn’t trust you?’

‘Difficult to say. Oh, sure, it was Agnelli who had me followed—couldn’t have been anyone else. But I’m not sure that he’s suspicious of me—I think that, on principle, he just doesn’t trust anyone. Difficult character to read. You’d probably like him. Seems friendly and likeable enough—you really have to make an effort to associate him with anything like blackmail and torture—and even then you find it difficult to convince yourself. Which means nothing. I assume you had a comfortable evening, sir—that you didn’t have to cope with the elements or the thought that you might be shot in the back at any moment.’

De Graaf made a dismissive gesture which could have meant either that such considerations were irrelevant trifles or that they could not possibly apply to him in the first place. ‘An interesting meeting, but only to a limited extent. I’m afraid Bernhard wasn’t in a particularly receptive or cooperative frame of mind.’ Bernhard was Bernhard Dessens, the Minister of Justice.

‘A dithering old woman, scared to accept responsibility, unwilling to commit himself and looking to pass the buck elsewhere?’

‘Exactly. I couldn’t have put—I’ve told you before, Peter, that’s no way to talk about cabinet ministers. There were two of them. Names Riordan and Samuelson. One—person calling himself Riordan—could have been in disguise. The other had made no attempt at any such thing which can only mean that he’s pretty confident about something or other. Riordan had long black hair—shoulder-length, in fact, I thought that ludicrous style had gone out of fashion ten years ago—was deeply tanned, wore a Dutch bargee cap and sun-glasses.’

‘Anything so obvious has to be a disguise.’ Van Effen thought for a moment. ‘He wasn’t by any chance very tall and preternaturally thin?’

De Graaf nodded. ‘I thought that would occur to you at once. The fellow who commandeered that canal boat from—who was it?’

‘At Schiphol? Dekker.’

‘Dekker. This must be the man Dekker described. And damned if I don’t agree with your bizarre suggestion that this fellow—Riordan or whatever—is an albino. Dark glasses. Heavy tan to hide an alabaster complexion. Black hair to hide white. Other fellow—Samuelson—had white hair, thick and very wavy, white moustache and white goatee beard. No albino, though—blue eyes. All that white hair would normally bespeak advanced years but his face was almost completely unlined. But, then, he was very plump, which may account for the youthful skin. Looked like a cross between an idealized concept of a US Senator and some bloated plutocrat, oil billionaire or something like that.’

‘Maybe he’s got a better make-up man than Riordan.’

‘It’s possible. Both men spoke in English, from which I assumed that Samuelson couldn’t speak Dutch. Both made a point of stating that they were Irish-Americans and I have no doubt they were. I don’t have to be Hector or one of his professorial friends to know that—the north-east or New York accent was very strong. Riordan did nearly all the talking.

‘He asked—no, he demanded—that we contact the British government. More exactly, he demanded we act as intermediaries between the FFF and Whitehall on the basis that Whitehall would be much more likely to negotiate with another government than with an unknown group such as they were. When Bernhard asked what on earth they could possibly want to discuss with Whitehall they said they wanted to have a dialogue about Northern Ireland, but refused to elaborate further until the Dutch Government agreed to cooperate.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Whereupon, alas, our Minister of Justice, seething and fulminating, while at the same time knowing damn well that they had him over a barrel, climbed on to his high horse and said it was inconceivable, unthinkable, that a sovereign nation should negotiate on behalf of a band of terrorists. He carried on for about five minutes in this vein, but I’ll spare you all the parliamentary rhetoric. He ended up by saying that he, personally, would die first.

‘Riordan said that he very much doubted that Dessens would go to such extraordinary lengths and further said that he was convinced that fourteen million Dutchmen would take a diametrically opposite point of view. Then he became rather unpleasantly personal and threatening. He said it didn’t make the slightest damn difference to anything if he, Dessens, committed suicide on the spot, for the Oostlijk—Flevoland dyke in the vicinity of Lelystad would go at midnight if the government didn’t agree to talk terms by ten o’clock tonight. He then produced a paper with a list of places which, he said, were in immediate danger of going at any moment. He didn’t say whether or not mines had already been placed in those areas—the usual uncertainty technique.

‘Among the places he listed—there were so many that I forget half of them—were Leeuwarden, the Noordoost polder in the vicinity of Urk, the Amstelmeer, the Wieringermeer, Putten, the polder south of Petten, Schouwen, Duiveland and Walcheren—did we remember what happened to Walcheren during the war? Both the Eastern and Western Scheldt estuaries were on their list, he said—did we remember what happened there in February 1953—while Noord and Sud Holland offered a positive embarrassment of riches. That’s only a representative sample. Riordan then started to make very sinister remarks about the weather, had we noticed how high the level of the North Sea had risen, how the strengthening wind had gone to the north and that the spring tides were at hand—while the levels of the Rhine, Waal, Maas and Scheldt were near an all-time low—so reminiscent of February 1953, didn’t Dessens think?

‘He then demanded that they talked to a minister or ministers with the power and courage to make decisions and not a snivelling time-server bent only on preserving his own miserable political career, which was, I thought, a bit hard on Bernhard.

‘Riordan then said that, to display their displeasure at this wholly unnecessary hiatus in negotiations, they would detonate one of several devices they had placed in public buildings in the capital. Here the two of them had a whispered conference and then Riordan announced that they had chosen the royal palace and defied anyone to find the explosives before they went off. No lives, he said, were at risk in this explosion, which would occur within five minutes of their departure. He added, almost as an afterthought, that any attempt to restrain them, hinder their departure or have them followed would inevitably mean that the Oostlijk-Flevoland dyke would go not at midnight but at nine o’clock this evening. On this happy note, they left. The palace explosion, as you may know, duly occurred.’

‘So I believe.’ It seemed the wrong moment to tell de Graaf that it was he, van Effen, who had pressed the button. He shivered and moved to a less damp patch on the Esfahan. ‘I think I’m getting pneumonia.’

‘There’s brandy.’ De Graaf waved a hand at once indicative of preoccupation and irritation that one should be unaware of the universal specifics against pneumococci. ‘Schnapps, scotch—’ He broke off as a knock came on the library door and a uniformed policeman admitted George and Vasco who were, if anything, even more saturated than van Effen had been. ‘Two more advanced cases, I suppose.’

George said: ‘I beg your pardon, Colonel?’

‘Pneumonia. Help yourselves. I must say I wasn’t expecting you gentlemen.’

‘The Lieutenant said—’

‘I know. It just slipped his memory.’

‘I have a lot on my mind,’ van Effen said. ‘Well?’

‘We had a good look at them when they left the house to go to that small bus. Also had a good look at them in the Dam Square. Recognize them anywhere.’ George paused reflectively. ‘Seemed a very harmless bunch to me.’

‘Ever seen—or seen pictures of—the youthful assassins that made up the Baader-Meinhof gang? All they lacked were harps and haloes. When I said “Well”, that wasn’t what I meant.’

‘Ah! That. Yes. Well.’ George seemed slightly embarrassed. ‘When you left the house—we saw you go but didn’t approach you as you’d asked us not to in case you were being followed—you know you were followed?’

‘Yes.’

‘We waited across the street for ten minutes then crossed to the lighted window. The rain! Talk about standing under Niagara Falls.’ He waited for sympathetic comment and when none came went on: ‘Waited another ten minutes. We could hear music and conversation.’

‘I’ll bet you could. So then, overcome by the rain, impatience or suspicion, you moved in. Light still on. Long-playing cassette on a recorder. Birds flown by the back door. Hardly original. So we still don’t know where they’re holed up. Not your fault—Agnelli’s obsessed by security.’

‘Still could have done better,’ Vasco said. ‘Next time—’

The phone bell shrilled and de Graaf picked it up, listened for some time, said ‘Wait a minute, sir’ and cupped the mouthpiece. ‘Predictable, I suppose. Dessens. Seems the cabinet is a bit shaken about the palace explosion and are convinced that the Oostlijk-Flevoland dyke will go up at midnight. So they’re going to parley. They want me along and suggested 11 p.m. I’d like you to be there. 11 p.m.?’

‘Eleven-thirty possible sir? I have a couple of appointments.’

De Graaf talked some more then hung up. ‘You do seem to have a very crowded appointment book, Lieutenant. I can’t recall your mentioning any of this to me.’

‘I haven’t had a chance to. I have to be at the Trianon at ten o’clock to take a call from Agnelli. He’s a bit short of explosives and I’ve promised to supply him with some.’

‘Explosives. Of course. Naturally.’ De Graaf hardly spilled a drop as he poured himself a brandy. ‘Having already blown up the palace’—it was an exaggeration but a pardonable one in the circumstances—‘one could not expect you to rest on such trifling laurels. And where do you intend to find this explosive? I’m sure you won’t be wanting more than a few hundred kilos of TNT or whatever it is.’

‘Me? Haven’t the time. Haven’t the authority, either. But I thought, perhaps, sir, if you would care to use your influence—’

‘Me! The chief of police? To supply illegally-come-by explosives to a group of terrorists?’ De Graaf considered. ‘I suppose you would expect me to deliver it personally?’

‘Good heavens, no. That’s where George comes in. Sorry, George, haven’t had the chance to explain this or anything. Had a long talk this evening with Agnelli about you and Vasco. I’m afraid, Vasco, that I’ve blackened your character beyond all hopes of redemption. You’re a crooked cop, bent as a horseshoe, untrustworthy, unpredictable and only a couple of steps removed from a psychiatric ward. Agnelli was just that little bit too casual when asking questions about you. I’m certain he knows you are or were a cop. He comes from Utrecht too. Not that that should be any bar to his employing you—after we’ve made certain delicate alterations to your appearance and history—in the not-too-distant future.

‘George, you’re an arms dealer. Heaven knows there are enough of those around, but you’re something special. The king-pin. Mr Big. A Leopard tank? A SAM missile? Even a motor torpedo boat? George is your man. And being Mr Big means you’re important. You talk only to principals. No intermediaries, not even me. Face to face or no deal.’

‘I talk to this Agnelli?’ George smiled widely. ‘You want me on the inside?’

‘I have a feeling that I could do with a little help, sooner rather than later. I’ve no right to ask you, of course. There’s Annelise and your kids. Things might get a little difficult—’

‘A little difficult!’ De Graaf could put a nicely sarcastic edge to his voice when he had a mind to. ‘Difficult. I don’t say it’s crazy because nothing’s crazy if there’s a chance, but I don’t like it at all. It’s based on the assumption that they’re not on to you and that’s an unjustifiable assumption. Sure, they’ve gone along with you so far and you with them, but that’s only because, so far, it’s suited you both. But if they are on to you and they decide a time has come when you’re of no further use to them, then when the time comes to discard you it may be in a pretty permanent fashion. Have you the right to ask that of George?’

‘I’ve just done that.’

The phone rang again and de Graaf picked it up. ‘Ah. Lieutenant Valken…Yes, yes.’ De Graaf’s face became very still as he listened. ‘Never mind if you’ve never heard it before. Wait till I get a piece of paper and pen.’ De Graaf wrote down a few words, told Valken goodbye and hung up. He reached for his glass.

Van Effen said: ‘Julie, Annemarie?’

‘Yes. How do you know?’

‘Valken, your face, brandy. Bad?’

‘Bad enough. Phone call from the brothers. They say the girls are as well as can be expected which can mean anything or nothing. They also say they’ve sent a telegram of condolences to Rotterdam.’ He’d picked up the piece of paper he’d scribbled on. ‘To David Joseph Karlmann Meijer.’

Van Effen sipped his brandy and said nothing. George and Vasco exchanged glances of incomprehension. At length George said: ‘And who might he be?’

‘I forgot,’ de Graaf said. ‘You don’t know, of course. Anne’s—Annemarie’s—father.’

‘Yes,’ George said. ‘I mean no. I don’t understand, Colonel. What about Annemarie?’

De Graaf stared incredulously at van Effen. ‘You mean, you haven’t told them?’

‘I don’t believe I have.’

‘Good God!’ De Graaf shook his head. ‘The need-to-know principle, I suppose. One of those days, Peter, you’re going to forget to remind yourself of something and that will be the end of you.’ De Graaf looked from George to Vasco. ‘Annemarie and Julie—Lieutenant van Effen’s sister—have been kidnapped. The Annecy brothers.’

‘The Annecy brothers.’ George was silent for a moment. ‘Those murderous fiends. You put two of them away for fifteen years.’

‘Correction. Lieutenant van Effen put them away and the two that escaped have been threatening to get him ever since. They’ve gone one better. They’ve got Julie.’

‘I know Julie well. And what’s the significance of this message to Annemarie’s father?’

‘The significance lies in her father. You will find it hard to believe, George, but the father of that fearful frump who used to frequent La Caracha is one of the wealthiest men in the Netherlands. Maybe the wealthiest. And a very powerful man. He has the ear of the government. He’s in a position rather similar to Dassault, the plane maker, in France. There are some areas in which they don’t move without consulting him at first or, at least, listening to what he says. He has power and wealth and a daughter and now they have the daughter and may well turn his power and wealth to their own advantage. Anne Meijer is any crim-inal’s dream hostage come true.’

Van Effen put down his glass and looked at his watch. ‘It’s time, George.’

‘God in heaven! I don’t believe it. You look at your damned watch and say it’s time to go. Doesn’t it occur to you to wonder how in the hell they got that information about David Meijer.’

‘Some sort of persuasion, I suppose.’

‘Persuasion! Torture. They tortured the poor girl!’

‘What poor girl?’

‘Are you all right, Lieutenant? Annemarie, of course.’

The shake of van Effen’s head was very positive. ‘No. Not Annemarie. The Annecy brothers—or at least the two we put away—never tortured without a reason, however twisted that reason might be. The reason was either revenge or to get information. Why should they revenge themselves on Annemarie—what has she ever done to anyone? And information—what information could they possibly get from her. They don’t know who she is, who her father is. Didn’t, rather. As far as they are concerned she’s only a friend of Julie’s and they took her along for no reason other than the fact that she happened to be there. If they tortured anybody—and I suspect it was only a threat of torture, to get information about me—it would have been Julie. My guess is that Annemarie volunteered that information about herself as a sop to the Annecys, to turn their minds to the thought of unlimited ransom money—maybe she even mentioned her father’s influence with the government although people like the Annecys would almost certainly have been aware of that anyway—anything to distract attention from Julie. Annemarie’s no fool—if she were, I wouldn’t have brought her up from Rotterdam. She knows that the Annecys of this world are above all pragmatists and that anything that would further their plans would be of a great deal more interest to them than hurting me by proxy.’

‘Cold-blooded fish,’ de Graaf muttered.

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘You could be right or you could be wrong. Damage both ways. If you’re right the Annecys’ hands have been greatly strengthened and David Meijer’s pocket almost certainly lightened, or will be in the very near future. If you’re wrong, you’re putting your head in that charming hangman’s noose that the Annecy brothers put on their postcards. If you’re wrong she’d have talked of many things, principally that Stephan Danilov is Peter van Effen. I can’t take the chance that you’re not wrong. My orders are that you are not to go through with this.’

George said: ‘Normally, Colonel, I wouldn’t dream of not complying with your wishes. But these aren’t normal circumstances. By refusing your request, I’m not stepping outside the law nor am I making the point that I’m no longer a policeman. I’m just going my own way.’

De Graaf nodded. ‘I can’t stop you. But I can—’

‘You can force him to go his own way, too,’ George said. ‘By resigning. You’d never forgive yourself, Colonel.’

De Graaf scowled, refilled his glass, sank into an armchair and gazed into the fire. Van Effen nodded to Vasco and the three men left the room.

Van Effen and George returned to the Trianon to find that the usual watch-dog was not in his usual place. But there was another and, if possible, even more insignificant character seated some distance from the desk and sipping beer instead of jonge jenever. Van Effen had no doubt that this was a replacement from the same stable. The manager called to them as they passed the desk.

‘This message has just come for you, Mr Danilov.’ He handed van Effen a slip of paper which read: ‘May I see you in your room? Two minutes.’

‘Yes, of course. Thank you.’ Van Effen folded the paper into his pocket and led George to the lift. The promised two minutes later the manager arrived in van Effen’s room. He closed the door behind him, looked doubtfully at George and seemed to hesitate.

‘No problem,’ van Effen said. ‘My friend here is on the side of the angels. George, Charles. The manager. Charles, George. George is police.’

‘Ah. A word of warning, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t use the back entrance tonight—somebody, a stranger to anyone round here—has taken up more or less permanent residence by the back door. He’s in an old DAF. And you will have noticed that your old looker-after in the lobby has been replaced by an even more obvious one. There’s another man who has just started a meal in the dining-room. He’s seated conveniently by the door so that he can see anyone who crosses the lobby. He knows the new shadow. No words exchanged, just a brief look and an even briefer nod. No risk in that, they must have thought—they have no reason to suspect my interest in them. That’s why I waited two minutes, to see if either of them made a move. No disappointment—our dining-room friend was at the public phone almost before the lift doors closed behind you. I waited until he finished his call to whatever person he was reporting your arrival. I was watching them from the mirror as the diner left the booth. Brief nod again, no words.’

‘When you go bankrupt, Charles, apply to me any time. I’ll watch the bogeymen.’ The manager left.

‘So,’ George said. ‘We can expect that phone call any minute now. The man in the restaurant has tipped off Agnelli that Stephan Danilov has returned accompanied by George, the explosives expert and illegal arms supplier. One wonders what lions’ den or nest of cobras they’ve chosen for the rendezvous.’

‘I don’t wonder. There are no lions or cobras in Room 203, which is where we are. Charles tells us that Agnelli—it can only be Agnelli—has two other faithful but not very bright henchmen lurking around the place. Why? Surely it only required one stake-out, the one in the lobby, to advise him of our arrival. The other two are guards, parts of his insurance policy—don’t forget Agnelli has no reason to think that we know of their presence. There may even be others that Charles knows nothing about. This is the last place that we would think would be chosen as a meeting point—or so Agnelli must imagine—and so we wouldn’t think of arranging a reception committee here. And when he does call, you can be sure that he will announce that he will be here in a matter of minutes so that we can’t have the time to arrange one.’

Van Effen was right on both points. Agnelli called in person to say that they would meet at the Trianon and that he and his friends would be there in under five minutes.

‘He’s bringing friends, plural,’ van Effen said after he had hung up. ‘I don’t think Romero Agnelli trusts anyone.’

From the cordial, guileless expression Agnelli wore on his arrival, one could see that van Effen was wrong; here, patently, was a man one could trust anywhere. Agnelli had brought three men along with him. His brother Leonardo, looking, if that were possible, an even more genial member of the Mafioso than he had done the last time, and two others whom van Effen had never seen before. One of them, a burly, slightly florid, pleasant-featured character of indeterminate age—somewhere between forty and fifty, van Effen would have guessed, but it was difficult to be sure—was introduced as Liam O’Brien: from his accent, no less than from his name, he had to be Irish. The other, a handsome young man, dark and slightly swarthy, was introduced as Heinrich Daniken: he could have been of any nationality. Agnelli did not see fit to disclose what the function of either man was.

Introductions over, refreshments proffered and accepted, Agnelli said to George: ‘Do I call you George or do you have another name?’

‘Just George.’ He smiled. ‘I’m an anonymous person.’

Agnelli surveyed the vast bulk before him. ‘You, George, are the least anonymous-looking person I’ve ever seen. Don’t you find it rather a drawback in your profession? Whatever that may be, of course.’

‘Drawback? It’s a positive advantage. I’m a peace-loving man who abhors violence but when you’re as big as I am no one ever offers it to you.’ George, van Effen thought admiringly, was as consummate and convincing a liar as he’d ever known. ‘And, of course, everybody, or nearly everybody—I think particularly of those who are sworn to uphold the law—think that everyone who is as big, fat, cheerful and harmless as I am, must be able to get by very well without being able to think. It’s a kind of law of nature. Well, I’m no Einstein, but I’m not yet ready to be locked away in an institution for the retarded. But we haven’t met here to discuss personalities, Mr Agnelli, have we? Five questions. What do you want? How much or how many? When? Where? Price?’

The slipping of Agnelli’s good-humoured smile was so momentary that only the most alert or observant would have noticed it and even then it could have been as much imagined as seen. ‘You do get to the point rather quickly, don’t you, George? No time for the little business niceties, I see. Well, that’s the way I prefer it myself. Like you, I have no time for beating about the bush: like you, I regard myself as a business man.’ He produced a paper from an inside pocket. ‘Here’s my shopping list. Fairly comprehensive, is it not?’

George studied it briefly. ‘Fairly. Well within my limited capacities, I should think. Most of the items are straightforward, especially the explosives. The ground-to-ground wire-guided missiles—these will be anti-tank missiles, although you don’t say so—and the SAM ground-to-air missiles are also easily come by, as are the plastic mines, grenades and smoke-bombs.’ He paused, sipped some brandy and frowned. ‘Something here I don’t quite understand, don’t even like. I’m not talking about the fact that you seem to be preparing to wage a limited war, even although only a defensive one: that’s none of my business.’ He handed the list over to van Effen. ‘Comment?’

Van Effen studied it for no longer a time than it had taken George then returned the list. ‘Specifications.’

‘Exactly.’ George, not smiling, looked at the four men in turn then concentrated his gaze on Agnelli. ‘This is a lethal enough list as it is. But it could be dangerous in other ways, even suicidal, if it got into the hands of whoever prepared this list.’

Agnelli wasn’t smiling either. He looked more than slightly uncomfortable. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘Then I’d better enlighten you. Specifications, as my friend Stephan has said. Explosives—no specifications. Missiles, ditto—and that applies to both types. What kind of primers? What kind of detonators? Fuses—you don’t even say whether wire or chemical, how slow-burning or fast-acting. No explosives expert ever composed this list. Some amateur did, some bungling incompetent. Who?’

Agnelli studied his glass for some time then said: ‘I’m the incompetent. But I did get some bungling help from my three associates here.’

‘God help us all,’ van Effen said. ‘You’re not fit to be let loose with a box of kiddies’ fireworks. I have to ask you, not for the first time, where the hell are your experts?’

Agnelli smiled ruefully and spread out his hands. ‘I’ll be perfectly frank with you.’ Romero Agnelli, van Effen realized, was about to lie in his teeth. ‘We are temporarily embarrassed. The two men on whom we rely have been called away for other duties and won’t be back for a couple of days. But we thought—well, you gentlemen are both explosives experts and—’

‘That’s no problem,’ George said. ‘We know what to get and can give you simple instructions on how to use them without blowing your silly heads off. The missiles are a different matter. Only a trained man can fire one of those.’

‘How long does that take?’

‘A week. Ten days.’ George was vastly exaggerating, van Effen knew, but the four men’s patent ignorance of all things military was so extensive that it was very likely a safe exaggeration. ‘And don’t ask us, we’re no military men, we’re no more skilled in those matters than you are.’

Agnelli was silent for some time then said abruptly:

‘Do you know of anyone who is. Skilled in such matters, I mean?’

‘Do you mean what I think you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I do.’ The way George said ‘I do’, in a tone just one degree short of impatience, made it clear that it was quite inevitable that he should know.

‘Who?’

George gave him a look of pity. ‘He hasn’t got a name.’

‘You must call him something.’

‘The Lieutenant.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he is a lieutenant.’

‘Cashiered, of course.’

‘Certainly not. A cashiered lieutenant is no good to me. I thought you would appreciate that a person like myself can only operate at second or third hand. A middleman, if you like. Or two.’

‘Ah! I see. Your supplier?’

‘Mr Agnelli. You can’t possibly be so naive as to expect me to answer so naive a question. I’ll see what can be done. Where do you want this stuff delivered?’

‘That depends on how soon you can deliver it.’

‘By noon tomorrow.’

‘Good heavens!’ Agnelli looked incredulous then smiled. ‘It looks as if I’ve come to the right shop. How will it be delivered?’

‘By Army truck, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Agnelli looked slightly dazed. ‘This makes things a bit difficult. I thought it would be at least the day after tomorrow. Could I call up tomorrow to finalize time and place? And could you hold up delivery for at least a few hours?’

‘That can be arranged.’ George looked at van Effen. ‘Mr Agnelli can call here? 10 a.m., say?’ Van Effen nodded and George smiled at Agnelli. ‘Can’t say yet, but somewhere between ten and twelve thousand dollars. We offer the best discount rates in Europe. Dollars, guilders or deutschmarks. More, of course, if our—ah—services are required.’

Agnelli stood up and smiled, his old relaxed and genial self again. ‘Of course. The price, I must say, doesn’t seem too exorbitant.’

‘One thing,’ van Effen said pleasantly. ‘You are aware, aren’t you, Mr Agnelli, that if I moved to another hotel and registered there under another name, that the chances of your ever finding either of us again would be remote?’

‘Remote? They wouldn’t exist.’ Agnelli was frowning. ‘Why ever should you mention such a thing?’

‘Well, a state of mutual trust does exist between us, doesn’t it?’

‘Naturally.’ The puzzlement still there.

‘Well, if it does, call off the watchdogs in the lobby, in the dining-room and outside.’

‘My watchdogs?’ From the expression on Agnelli’s face one could see that, far from being baffled, he was stalling for time.

‘If you don’t, we’ll throw them into the canal—suitably trussed of course—and then move on.’

Agnelli looked at him, his face for once expressionless. ‘You do play for keeps, don’t you? I really believe you would.’ He smiled and put out his hand. ‘Shame. Very well, watchdogs retired. Shame. But they really weren’t up to it.’

When they had gone, van Effen said to George: ‘You really should have taken up a life of crime. Too late now. Anyway, you’d have given Colonel de Graaf apoplexy years ago. I’ll bet Annelise has no idea quite how splendid a liar you are. You have Agnelli hooked, outfoxed, outgunned and demoralized, not to say dependent: at least, let’s hope so. Will you talk to Vasco later this evening and tell him that you’ve got an offer of employment for him in the capacity of an army lieutenant—after, of course, he’s made suitable alterations to his appearance? We mustn’t forget that Agnelli has had the opportunity of studying Vasco at close range.’

‘There’ll be no problem.’ George handed over Agnelli’s shopping list. ‘I’d give a great deal to see the Colonel’s face when he sees what he’s got to go shopping for in the morning. You’ll be seeing him, I take it, in an hour or so. Has it occurred to you that Agnelli might very well be there along with Riordan and this fellow Samuelson?’

‘It’s an intriguing thought and, yes, it has occurred.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘Well, what, he asks. We know that Agnelli is Annecy.’

‘We’re ninety-nine per cent certain. Don’t forget that I never saw either of the two Annecy brothers that we didn’t manage to catch and put away.’

‘The fact that you don’t know him doesn’t mean he doesn’t know you, of course he does—he must have seen your picture in the papers many times during the period of the arrest and trial. How do you think he’s going to react when he sees before him not only the dreaded Lieutenant van Effen but the dreaded lieutenant whose sister he’s got tucked away in some dungeon, the sister who, for all you know, he spends his leisure time with, testing out the latest model in thumbscrews?’

‘Should be interesting.’

‘Colonel de Graaf was right,’ George muttered. ‘You belong a hundred fathoms down. Just a cold-blooded fish.’

‘ “Your ten cents will help to kill a British soldier. It’s a bargain at the price—the best bargain you’ll ever get. That’s what the collectors say when they go around rattling their damn tin cans in the Irish bars in the United States. Especially in the Irish bars in the north-east states. Especially in New York. Most especially of all in the borough of Queens where the Irish are thickest on the ground. Ten cents. That’s all they ask, just ten cents. And, of course, they rattle their cans whenever they hold Irish nights, Irish dances, Irish raffles, Irish whatever you like.

‘If you’ve never heard that there are charitable organizations—charitable they call themselves—which collect for arms, then you live in another century or with your head in the sands. They claim that the millions of dollars that they’ve collected over the years have gone to support the widows and orphans of the IRA members foully slain by the murderous British. Support widows and orphans! The founder of one such evil organization once made the mistake of telling the truth when he said: “The more British soldiers that are sent back from Ulster in their coffins, the better.” Jack Lynch, a former Irish premier, has gone on record as saying that the money is intended for one purpose only—to make widows and orphans. British widows and orphans.’

Riordan, an abnormally tall, abnormally thin man, black-haired, deeply tanned and dressed in a near-ankle-length black raincoat which served only to heighten the looming angularity of the man, was literally shaking with rage as he stood facing his audience, his fists ivory-knuckled on the table before him. His sincerity and outrage were unquestionable, his intensity almost terrifying.

‘God knows it’s bad enough that the contributions to these infamous organizations should come from honest, God-fearing, intensely religious Catholics who are duped into thinking they are contributing to a worthy cause instead of some damnable crew who make Murder Incorporated look like innocent children playing in a kindergarten. The money goes directly to dedicated IRA operatives. Some of it is used to buy guns at black-market sales in New York itself, auctions usually held in razed areas or empty car parks, always by night, nearly always in the Bronx, Queens or Brooklyn. Guns, gentlemen, are rather easily come by in the fair city of New York.’ In the depth of his bitterness, Riordan almost spat the words out. ‘The rest of the money is used by other operatives who openly travel to the southern and midwestern states where gun permits do not exist. Wherever the guns come from, they all end up in the New York area from where they are shipped out, almost always from New Jersey or Brooklyn, with the warm encouragement and complicity of the stevedore unions and the upright US customs, many of whom are first- or second-generation Irish and feel blood-brothers to the murderous IRA. As the Customs Service is controlled by the US Treasury Department, it is logical to suppose that those dealers in death operate with the cognisance if not the connivance of the US Government. The Irish influence in Congress is as well known as it is remarkably powerful.’

‘A moment, Mr Riordan, if you would.’ The interruption came from Aaron Wieringa, the Minister of Defence, a big, florid, blue-eyed and very calm man, a man immensely respected throughout the country and one who would very likely have become premier quite some years ago if he had not been cursed with the unfortunate and crippling handicap, for a politician, of total incorruptibility. ‘One appreciates—one can hardly fail to appreciate—that you are a very angry man. We are not, I assure you, nineteenth-century ostriches and I think it would be true to say that there is not a man in this room who does not understand that your fury is totally justifiable. I would not go so far as to concur in your condemnation of Washington and Congress, but that, in the current and particular circumstances, is by the by. Your opinion, as distinct from your recital of verifiable facts, is not of immediate concern.

‘What is of immediate concern is why your wrath has seen fit to focus itself on our unfortunate country in general and the city of Amsterdam in particular. I cannot, at the moment, even begin to fathom the reason for it, although I am certain we will not be left in ignorance for long. But nothing you have said so far begins to justify your attempt to blackmail us into acting as intermediary between you and the British Government. I appreciate that you may have, and very probably do have, very powerful reasons for wanting all British troops to withdraw from Northern Ireland, but how you can possibly imagine that we have the ability to persuade Britain to accede to your preposterous demands quite passes my understanding. No conceivable reason exists why they should so accede.’

‘A totally conceivable reason exists. Humanitarian motives. Humanitarian motives on your part and on theirs.’

‘Our respective governments would be reluctant to see the Netherlands flooded and countless thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—drowned in those floods? Before even considering such matters, an answer to my question, please. Why us? Is it that, because of our particular geographical situation, we are peculiarly susceptible to threats of genocide?’

‘You have been chosen because Amsterdam is the linchpin in the whole lethal gun-running operation. It is the gun-running centre of Northern Europe and has been for years, just as it has been the heroin centre of Northern Europe. This knowledge is in the public domain, and the continued existence of those two evil practices can only bespeak a deep level of corruption in both government and law-enforcement levels.’ An indignant-looking Mr Wieringa made to interrupt but Riordan imperiously gestured him to silence. ‘There are, it is true, other towns engaged in gun-running, notably Antwerp, but, compared to Amsterdam, Antwerp operates in a minor league.’

This time Mr Wieringa, speaking in almost a shout which was unknown for him, would not be gainsaid. ‘You mean you would find it impossible to flood Belgium.’

Riordan carried on as if he had heard nothing. ‘Not all the guns passing through Amsterdam go to Eire, of course. Some go to the RAF. Others go to—’

‘The RAF!’ It was, almost inevitably, Bernhard Dessens, the Justice Minister, who rarely if ever contributed anything of significance to any discussion. ‘You suggest that the British Air Force is supplied—’

‘Be quiet, you idiot.’ Riordan, it seemed, could descend below the rhetorical level he usually set for himself. ‘I refer to the Red Army Faction, the inheritors of the bloody mantle of the Baader-Meinhof gangsters of the early seventies. Some go to the Sicilian-controlled Mafia-type criminal organizations that are springing up all over Western Germany. But the bulk goes to Eire.

‘Do you know what it’s like in Northern Ireland, Mr Minister?’ Nobody bothered to follow his line of vision to know that he was addressing the Minister of Defence and not the Minister of Justice. ‘Can you imagine the hellish conditions that exist there, the hideous tortures practised by both the IRA and UVF, the homicidal insanity that has ruled there for fourteen years? A country ruled by fear that is tearing it to pieces. Northern Ireland will never be governed by representatives of the two communities, Protestant and Catholic working together, because they are far too bitterly divided by religion and, to a lesser extent, race. There are one and a half million people living together in a small area, but in spite of their divisions ninety-nine point nine per cent on either side have never harmed anyone or ever wished to. That ninety-nine point nine per cent on either side are united in only one thing—in abhorring terrorism and in their desire to live only in peace. It is a desire that, as matters stand, can never be realized. Conventional politicians, with all the faults and frailties of their kind, are still those who observe the conventions. In Ulster, conventional politicians are an extinct breed. Moderation has ceased to exist. Demagogues and gunmen rule. The country is ruled by a handful of crazed murderers.’

Riordan paused for the first time, probably as much for breath as anything else, but no one seemed inclined to take advantage of the hiatus.

‘But murderers, even crazed murderers, must have their murder weapons, must they not?’ Riordan said. ‘And so the murder weapons are shipped from Amsterdam, usually, but not always, inside furniture. The weapons are sealed in containers, of course, and if the Amsterdam customs are unaware of this they must be the worst, the blindest, or the most corrupt and avaricious in Europe. Nine times out of ten, the ships unload in Dublin. How they—the containers, I mean—get past the Dublin customs I don’t profess to know but I don’t think there’s any question of collusion—if there were the customs wouldn’t have turned up a million dollars’ worth of illegally imported arms destined for the IRA four years ago. But most of the guns do get through. From Dublin the arms containers variously labelled, but popularly as household goods, are trucked to a warehouse in County Monaghan and from there to a horticultural nursery in County Louth. Don’t ask me how I know but it would be rather difficult not to know: the people thereabouts know but don’t talk. From there the weapons are taken to Northern Ireland, not smuggled over the border in the middle of the night by daredevil IRA members, but brought in during daylight hours in cars driven by women, mostly young, surrounded by laughing kids. All very innocuous.

‘It’s a long, long way from where a machine-pistol is purchased in a mid-Western state until it’s in the hands of some maniacal killer crouched in the shadows of some back street in Belfast or Londonderry. A long way. But in all that long way the vital stage, the focal point, the nodal point, the venturi in the funnel, is Amsterdam. And so we have come to Amsterdam.’ Riordan sat down.

The breaking of the ensuing silence was far from immediate. There were, altogether, eight men in Dessen’s luxurious lounge. Three men had accompanied Riordan to the Minister of Justice’s house—Samuelson, whom de Graaf had described to van Effen, O’Brien, who had come to the Trianon, and Agnelli, the man who George had forecast would be there. Samuelson and O’Brien probably thought there was nothing they could profitably add to what Riordan had said and Agnelli had probably yet to recover his full powers of speech. When he had entered the room and seen van Effen, appearance returned to normal, sitting there, his eyes had momentarily widened, his lips momentarily parted and a slight but noticeable amount of colour had left his cheeks, and not momentarily either. Almost certainly van Effen was the only person who had noticed the fleeting sea-change that had overcome Agnelli, but, then, probably, van Effen had been the only person who had been looking for it.

There were also four men on the other side of the negotiating table; the two ministers, de Graaf and van Effen, and they had nothing immediately to say either, and this for two excellent reasons: there was nothing they could immediately say that would be in any way helpful and all had to admit to themselves that Riordan had expressed his viewpoint with a certain degree of logical persuasion, however unreasonable, threatening and preposterous his accompanying demands might have been. It was Aaron Wieringa, glancing in turn at each of his three companions, who broke the silence.

‘Before I speak, gentlemen, have any of you any comment to make?’

Van Effen said: ‘I have.’

‘Lieutenant?’

‘Mr Riordan has been surprisingly reticent about one thing. He hasn’t said why he wants all British influence removed from Northern Ireland. If we are to negotiate on his behalf I think we should have the right to know something of his motivation, his intentions. It may be that his intentions are so awful, so appalling, that we would risk any disaster to our country sooner than comply with his wishes. We have, of course, no reason to believe that Mr Riordan will tell us the truth.’

‘The point is well taken,’ Wieringa said. ‘Well, Mr Riordan?’

‘There’s no point in swearing that I’ll tell the truth, because any liar would say the same.’ Riordan had again risen to his menacing height, he seemed to find talking easier that way. ‘I have talked about the ninety-nine point nine per cent of good and decent people in that war-torn country who are utterly dominated by the point one per cent of those maniacal killers. Our sole objective is to eliminate this point one per cent and enable the people of Ulster to resolve their own future in an atmosphere of calm and peace and quiet and hope.’

‘Elimination?’ Wieringa said cautiously. ‘What precisely do you mean by that?’

‘We will exterminate the evil bastards on both sides. We will excise the cancer. Is that blunt enough for you?’ Riordan sat down.

‘It sounds like a high purpose,’ van Effen said. He made no attempt to disguise the contemptuous disbelief in his voice. ‘Noble and humane. Let them resolve their own future. Hardly ties in, does it, with your earlier statement that Northern Ireland will never be governed by representatives of the two communities? Has it not occurred to you that if the most conceivably rabid IRA leader were sitting in that chair he would talk exactly as you are talking now, in order to achieve the same end as you are seeking—to get the British out of Northern Ireland at all costs. What assurance do we have that you are not, in fact, that rabid IRA leader?’

‘You have none.’ This time Riordan had not risen from his chair and his voice was remarkably calm. ‘I can do no more. If you cannot see that I detest the IRA and all its manifestations, you must be blind. I am so appalled at the suggestion that I cannot easily find words to counter it.’

There was another and even longer silence, then Wieringa said: ‘I believe one calls this an impasse.’

‘Impasse, as you say,’ Riordan said. He was still seated, the time for rhetoric had apparently passed. ‘But surely there are certain salient factors that should resolve the impasse. Oostlijk-Flevoland, for instance. Leeuwarden. The Noordoost polder. Wieringermeer, Putten, Petten, Schouwen, Walcheren and others. And I did mention that we have the Royal Palace mined?’

‘The Palace?’ Wieringa said. He didn’t seem particularly overcome.

‘Tonight’s little demonstration was just that. A little demonstration. Just to prove how pathetically easy it is to circumvent your alleged security precautions.’

‘Save your breath, Riordan.’ Wieringa’s voice was curt. No ‘Mr’ this time. ‘The time for threats is past. Only moral considerations remain.’

‘Fifty-fifty,’ van Effen said.

Wieringa looked at him for some moments, then nodded.

‘My way of thinking, too. Thank you, Lieutenant. It is difficult to decide to drown one’s country on the basis of a gamble.’ He looked at Riordan. ‘I am empowered to make decisions. I will call the British ambassador. He will call the Foreign Office in London. We shall make a radio announcement—worded in a suitably cautious fashion, you understand. Those three things I can promise. The outcome of the negotiations, of course, are not for me to predict or influence. That is understood?’

‘That is understood. Thank you, Minister.’ There was no hint of triumph, not even satisfaction, in Riordan’s voice. He stood. ‘Your integrity is a byeword throughout Europe. I am content. Good-night, gentlemen.’

No one wished him goodnight in return.

After the departure of Riordan and his associates there was silence in the room until Wieringa had put through his telephone call. When he had replaced the receiver, he sipped delicately from his brandy glass, smiled and said: ‘Comments, gentlemen?’ He was a remarkably calm man.

‘It’s outrageous, disgraceful and dastardly,’ Dessens said, loudly and predictably. Now that the need for action and decision-making was over, he was all fire and fury. ‘The good name, the honour of the Netherlands lies in the dust.’

‘Better, perhaps, than that its citizens should lie under the flood-waters,’ Wieringa said. ‘Colonel?’

‘You had to consider the balance of probabilities,’ de Graaf said. ‘Your decision, sir, was not only the correct one: it was the inevitable one.’

‘Thank you, Colonel. Lieutenant?’

‘What can I usefully add, sir?’

‘Quite frankly, I don’t know. But, according to the Colonel—and it is, I must say, a most handsome admission on his part—you are closer to those villains than anyone else in Amsterdam.’ He smiled. ‘I do not, of course, use the word “closer” in a pejorative sense.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’d hoped not.’

‘You’re not really very forthcoming, are you, Lieutenant?’

‘A certain uncharacteristic diffidence, sir. I may be the senior detective-lieutenant in the city, but I’m pretty junior in this exalted company. What do you want me to be forthcoming about, sir?’

Wieringa regarded the roof and said, almost inconsequentially: ‘I had to make a pretty important decision there.’ He dropped his gaze and looked at van Effen. ‘Did you believe Riordan?’

Van Effen picked up his glass and considered it without drinking from it. He was obviously marshalling his thoughts. Then he said: ‘Four points, Minister. There are two things I believe about Riordan, one point I’m not sure whether to believe or disbelieve and a fourth where I definitely disbelieve.’

‘Ah! Hence your cryptic remark “fifty-fifty”?’

‘I suppose. First, I believe he is definitely not IRA.’

‘You do, Lieutenant? In that case, am I not entitled to ask why you pushed him?’

‘Confirmation. But I was sure before. That speech of his—that impassioned and violent denunciation of the IRA and all its methods. You’d have to be an exceptional actor to get that amount of hatred into your voice: but you’d have to be an impossibly good one to have a pulse beat like a trip-hammer in your throat.’

‘I missed that,’ Wieringa said. He looked at de Graaf and Dessens. ‘Either of you gentlemen—’ He broke off at their mute headshakes.

‘Secondly,’ continued van Effen, ‘I believe that Riordan is not the leader, the driving force, the man in charge. Why do I believe that? I can’t give a shred of evidence, of proof. But he’s too fiery, too unbalanced, too unpredictable to be a general.’

‘You wouldn’t fight under him, van Effen?’ Wieringa was half-smiling, half curious.

‘No, sir. There’s someone else. I’m certain it’s not Agnelli. I would take long odds it’s not O’Brien—he’s got sergeant-major written all over him. I’m not saying it’s Samuelson. He’s an enigma, a mystery. But his presence is totally unexplained and when any presence is as inexplicable as that then a very big explanation would seem to be called for.

‘Where I’m uncertain whether to believe his story or not, is about Northern Ireland. Riordan said his only aim was to eliminate the monsters. His voice did carry what might have been regarded as the authentic ring of sincerity and, as I’ve said, I don’t believe he’s all that good an actor.’ Van Effen sighed briefly, shook his head and sipped his brandy. ‘I know this is all rather confusing, gentlemen. Let me put it this way. I believe that he believes what he says, but I don’t believe that what he believes is necessarily true. It’s one of the reasons why I’m convinced he’s not the king-pin. Two things. He was caught outright in a flat contradiction yet appeared to be unaware that any such contradiction existed. Then he seems to be unaware that there could be three sets of fanatics around—the extremist Protestants, the extremist Catholics and the Mediators. That’s them. The Mediators could be the most irresponsibly dangerous of all. To achieve the final solution, the Mediators are prepared to drown a million. One could imagine what the final solution would be like in Ulster. No. Let me rephrase that. I can’t imagine that.’

‘The same thought was in my mind.’ Wieringa spoke very slowly. ‘The very same. Although not so clearly formulated. In my mind, I mean.’ He smiled. ‘Well, that should be enough for a day—but you did mention that there was something you didn’t believe.’

‘Yes, sir. I don’t believe his threats. His immediate threats, that is. His long-range threats are a different matter. But the ones he mentioned here tonight—and the ones outlined to Colonel de Graaf earlier this evening—I do not believe, with the exception of the threat to Helystad in Oostlijk-Flevoland. The rest I believe to be bluff. Especially the threat to destroy the Palace.’

‘If you say that, Lieutenant,’ Wieringa said, ‘I’m damned if I don’t believe you. Why do you say that?’

‘Because I don’t believe they have any mines laid inside the Palace. They were concerned that the explosion inside the Palace tonight would be heard over a considerable area to convince you that they had, indeed, the ability to carry out their promise.’

Wieringa regarded him with a puzzled expression. ‘You sound fairly sure about this, Lieutenant.’

‘No, sir. I’m certain.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I have inside information.’

Wieringa looked at him in a speculative fashion but said nothing. Not so Dessens. He had been totally out of his depth all evening but now he thought he was on secure and known footing and that it was time to assert himself.

‘What were the sources of your information, Lieutenant?’

‘That’s confidential.’

‘Confidential!’ Whether the source of Dessens’ immediate anger was due to the reply or the fact that van Effen had omitted the mandatory ‘minister’ or ‘sir’ was difficult to say: he probably didn’t know himself. ‘Confidential!’

‘I’m trying to be discreet, sir, that’s all. I don’t want to divulge my sources because it may cause acute and unnecessary embarrassment. Surely you can understand that—it’s so commonplace in the police world that it’s hardly worth the mentioning. Why don’t you just take my word for it?’

‘Understand it! Commonplace! Take your word!’ Dessens’ mottling complexion was rapidly assuming the hue of a turkey wattle. ‘You arrogant—you arrogant—you—’ He made a visible effort to ward off the onset of apoplexy. ‘I would remind you, Lieutenant’—he put a heavy accent on the word ‘Lieutenant’—’that I am the Minister of Justice’—he put a very heavy accent on that, too—’whereas you are only a junior officer in the force which I personally—’

‘That’s unfair, sir.’ De Graaf’s voice was impersonal. ‘Next to me, van Effen is the senior police officer in the city of—’

‘Keep out of this, de Graaf.’ Dessens tried to let ice creep into his voice but his temperature control had slipped. ‘Van Effen! You heard me.’

‘I heard you,’ van Effen said, then added ‘sir’ almost as an afterthought. ‘I know what I’m talking about because I’m the person who placed that charge in the cellars of the Royal Palace.’

‘What! What!’ Dessens’ complexion would now have made any turkey-cock look to his laurels. ‘Good God! I can’t believe it.’ He was halfway out of his chair. ‘My ears deceive me!’

‘They don’t. Sir. I was also the person who pressed the button that detonated the explosives.’

Dessens said nothing, not immediately. The shocked horror of this threat to the safety of the royal family, this dreadful lèse-majesté, held him in thrall. Van Effen returned to his brandy and made no attempt to keep his opinion of the Minister of Justice out of his face.

‘Arrest this man, de Graaf,’ Dessens shouted. ‘This moment!’

‘On what charges, sir?’

‘On what charges! Have you gone mad as well as—as well as—Treason, man, treason!’

‘Yes, sir. This raises problems.’

‘Problems? Your duty, man, your duty!’

‘Problems, sir. I’m the city’s Chief of Police. All other policemen in Amsterdam are junior to me.’ Every century of de Graaf’s aristocratic lineage was showing. ‘Nobody in Amsterdam has the authority to arrest me.’

Dessens stared at him, his anger gradually changing to bewilderment. He shook his head and said nothing.

‘What I mean is, sir, that if Lieutenant van Effen is to be locked up on a treason charge, then you’d have to lock me up, too, because I’m as much a traitor as he is.’ De Graaf considered. ‘More, I would say. I am, after all, his superior; moreover, I personally authorized and approved every action the Lieutenant has undertaken.’ Inconsequentially, it seemed, but probably to give Dessens time to readjust, de Graaf turned to van Effen and said: ‘You forgot to tell me that you personally had detonated those explosives.’

Van Effen shrugged apologetic shoulders. ‘You know how it is, sir.’

‘I know,’ de Graaf said heavily. ‘You have so much on your mind. You seem to have told me that before.’

‘Why have you stepped outside the law, Colonel?’ There was no reproof in Wieringa’s voice, only a question. Wieringa had remained remarkably unperturbed.

‘We did not step outside the law, sir. We are doing and have done everything in our power to uphold the law. We—Lieutenant van Effen—have gained the entrée—and a highly dangerous entrée it is—into the ranks of the FFF. I think it is more than dangerous, it’s close to suicidal. But Lieutenant van Effen has persuaded me—and I most reluctantly agree with him—that it’s our last best hope. Our only hope.’

Dessens looked at the two policemen dazedly but his mind was beginning to function again, at least after a fashion. ‘How is this possible? Van Effen’s face must be known to every criminal in Amsterdam.’ He had forgotten how junior van Effen had been only moments ago.

‘It is. But not the van Effen you see before you. His appearance, voice and personality have changed to such a remarkable extent that I’d wager my pension that neither of you would recognize Stephan Danilov, which is the pseudonym he has temporarily and conveniently adopted.’ He might have wagered something else, van Effen reflected; de Graaf was so wealthy that his pension was a matter of total indifference to him. ‘Whether the FFF have uncritically accepted Stephan Danilov at his face value, we have no means of knowing. It seems incredible to me that, so far, they appear to have done. If they have not done or will not do so the city of Amsterdam will be requiring a new senior detective-lieutenant. They will also be requiring a new police chief, which the Lieutenant will probably regard as a trifling matter, because I shall have to resign. The Netherlands, of course, will be looking for a new Minister of Justice, because you, Mr Dessens, are also a party to this. Only Mr Wieringa can look forward to a safe tenure.’

Dessens looked stricken. ‘I haven’t said that I’m a party to anything.’

Wieringa took him gently by the arm. ‘Bernhard, if you would, a word in your ear.’ They walked away to a distant corner of the lounge, which was fortunately as large as it was luxurious, and began to converse in low terms. Wieringa appeared to be doing most of the conversing.

Van Effen said: ‘What weighty matters do you think our revered cabinet ministers are discussing?’

De Graaf forgot to reproach van Effen for his unseemly and unconstitutional levity. ‘No prizes for guessing that. Mr Wieringa is explaining to Mr Dessens the principle of Hobson’s choice. If Dessens doesn’t go along, the Netherlands is still going to be looking for a new Minister of Justice. If Dessens hadn’t forced you to divulge your confidential information he wouldn’t have found himself in the impossible situation he does now. Hoisted, to coin a phrase, on his own petard.’ De Graaf seemed to find it a moderately entertaining thought. He settled himself comfortably in his chair, sighed and reached out for the brandy bottle. ‘Well, thank heaven everything’s over for the day.’

Van Effen considerately let de Graaf pour himself some brandy and sip it before producing Agnelli’s shopping list. ‘Not quite complete, I’m afraid, sir. There’s this little item.’

De Graaf read through the list, his face stunned, then read through it again. His lips were moving, but at first no sound came. He had just got around to muttering: ‘This little item, this little item,’ when Wieringa and Dessens returned. Wieringa looked his normal imperturbable self, Dessens like a Christian who had just been given his first preview of the lions in the Roman arena.

Wieringa said: ‘What little item, Colonel?’

‘This.’ De Graaf handed him the paper, put his elbow on the arm of his chair and his hand to his forehead as if to hide his eyes from some unspeakable sight.

‘High explosives,’ Wieringa read out. ‘Primers. Detonators. Grenades. Ground-to-ground missiles. Ground-to-air missiles.’ He looked at van Effen consideringly but with no signs of consternation on his face. ‘What is this?’

‘A shopping list. I was going to ask the Colonel to get it for me.’ Dessens, who had adopted precisely the same attitude as de Graaf, made a slight moaning sound. ‘As you are the Minister of Defence, the Colonel would have had to approach you anyway. I’d also like to borrow an Army truck, if I may. With a little luck I may even be able to return it.’

Wieringa looked at him, looked at the paper in his hand, then back at van Effen again. ‘Balanced against this shopping list, as you call it, the loan of the odd army vehicle seems an eminently reasonable request. All this I can obtain without any great difficulty. I have heard a considerable amount about you, van Effen, and I have learnt a great deal more tonight. I would hesitate to question your judgement.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I think I would question my own first, so I don’t question yours. No doubt it’s just idle curiosity on my part, but it would be nice to know why you require those items.’

‘The FFF seem to be short of explosives and offensive weapons, so I have promised to supply them with some.’

‘Of course,’ Wieringa said. ‘Of course.’ The Defence Minister appeared to be virtually unshockable; certainly, nothing showed in his eyes. Nothing was to be seen in the eyes of de Graaf or Dessens either, but that didn’t mean that they were shockproof: their shading hands still cut their eyes off from the dreadful realities of the harsh world outside.

‘They also seem to be short of explosive experts, so I volunteered my services.’

‘You know something about explosives?’

De Graaf reluctantly uncovered his eyes. ‘He knows a great deal about explosives. He’s also a bomb disposal expert. I wish,’ he said bitterly, ‘that this was something simple, like defusing a ticking 500-kilo bomb.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Van Effen was addressing de Graaf now. ‘I’ve also recruited George and Vasco, George as another person versed in the way of explosives and Vasco as a trained missile launcher. You will understand that I did not have time to consult you on those matters.’

‘You can’t think of everything,’ de Graaf said dully. He discovered, to his apparent astonishment, that his brandy glass was empty and set about rectifying this.

‘Nothing illegal about recruiting those two men, Mr Wieringa. They’re police sergeants. And they weren’t recruited—they volunteered. They know the dangers. There’s nothing to be done about the explosives, sir, but if you could have an armourer deactivate the missiles I’d be very grateful.’

De Graaf lowered his glass. ‘So would I. So would I.’ Not much in the way of life had come back into his voice.

Wieringa said: ‘I suppose I’m just being idly curious again but why are you and your two friends taking these appalling risks?’

‘Calculated risks, sir. I hope. The reason is simple. The Colonel has said that we have gained an entrée into the FFF. That’s not quite accurate. We have been accepted—or appear to have been accepted—on the fringes. We’re just on the outer strand of the spider’s web. We don’t know where the spider is. But if we deliver the requested items, we’ll find out. They’re not likely to leave missiles and missile launchers in a safe deposit box in the Central Station.’

‘Impeccable logic, van Effen, impeccable logic. Except, of course, for one tiny little flaw.’

‘Sir?’

‘The spider may gobble you up. The scheme is mad, quite mad—which is the only reason it might just succeed. I’d be intrigued to know where and when you arranged this.’

‘About an hour and a half ago. Over a drink with Agnelli.’

For the first time, Wieringa’s monolithic calm cracked.

‘Over a drink with Agnelli? Agnelli? Agnelli! One of those men who have just left?’

‘I was Stephan Danilov then. Well, can’t think of anything else so, with your permission, I’ll be on my way. The weather forecast should be interesting tonight—latest reports say flood-level danger inside the next forty-eight hours might even exceed that of February 1953. That will be the time for our friends—and it doesn’t leave a great deal of time for negotiations with the British Government. You will remember that I said I didn’t believe in Riordan’s short-range threats: I’m convinced that the long-range threat, the massive flooding of the country, has been arranged and is totally real. One small point, Colonel. Riordan’s allegations against the integrity of our customs. They’re ludicrous. I know that. You know that. The world doesn’t. I’m convinced that the transfers are taking place in the Ijsselmeer, Waddenzee or the open see. It’s a Navy job. God knows we’ve got a bad enough name already as a gun-running entrepot: I wonder what it will be like when all this is over.’ Van Effen smiled. ‘Still, it’s not a job that can be handled by a junior police officer: only the ministries of Defence and justice can cope. Good-night, gentlemen.’

‘Moment, Peter, moment.’ It was de Graaf and his distress was apparent. ‘Surely there’s something we can do to help?’

‘Yes, sir. There is. Do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Any attempt to help us will probably help us into our graves. These are clever and desperate men so please, please, don’t try anything clever and desperate yourselves. Don’t have the truck followed, not in any way, no matter how clever you think you are, nothing. No helicopters, no blind barrel-organist, nothing. And nothing so futile and puerile as fitting a concealed location transmitter bug to the truck—unless they’re mentally retarded, it’s the first thing they’d look for. Nothing. Do nothing.’

‘We take your point,’ Wieringa said drily. ‘Nothing.’ His tone changed. ‘But from what you’ve just said, Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t insure you for a ninety-nine per cent premium. But you go. For the last time—why?’

‘You heard what Mr Dessens said—the good name and honour of the Netherlands in the dust, and you with its citizens full fathom five. We can’t have that, can we?’

‘Your sister?’

‘What about my sister?’

‘The Colonel told me tonight. God only knows how you carry on as you do. I couldn’t. Kidnapped.’

‘She’s part of it.’

‘I would not care to be the unfortunate man who abducted her when you meet up with him.’

‘I’ve already met up with this unfortunate man.’

‘What!’ For the second time Wieringa’s self-control deserted him, but he recovered quickly. ‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

‘Where?’

‘Here. Agnelli.’

‘Agnelli!’

‘I should have shot him full of holes? There’s a law against it. I’m a policeman. I’m supposed to uphold the law. Sworn to it, in fact.’

He left. Wieringa said: ‘I begin to believe some of the stories about van Effen. The not-so-nice ones. God, Arthur, that’s his sister. No blood in his veins. None. Ice.’

‘Yes, sir. Let’s hope Agnelli has not hurt Julie.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Then he’s a dead man. Sure, sure, van Effen’s sworn to uphold the law—but only in front of witnesses.’

Wieringa stared at him, then nodded slowly and reached for his glass.

EIGHT

At noon on that February day the streets of Amsterdam were dark as dusk. At noon on that same day the streets were as deserted as those of any long-dead city. The cloud cover driven by that icy northern wind must have been black and heavy and thousands of feet in depth but it could not be seen: the torrential slanting rain that bounced knee-high off those same deserted streets limited visibility in any direction, including vertically, to only a few yards. It was not a noontide for the well-advised to venture out of doors.

Van Effen, George and Vasco were among the very few who seemed to be singularly ill-advised. They stood in the porchway of the Trianon hotel, sheltering from the monsoon-like rain behind the side glass panels. Van Effen was subjecting Vasco to a critical examination.

‘Not bad, Vasco, not at all bad. Even if I hadn’t known it was you, I don’t think I would have recognized you. I’m quite certain I would have brushed by you in the street and not given you a second look. But don’t forget that Romero Agnelli had the opportunity of studying you very closely over the table at the Hunter’s Horn. On the other hand, the clothes you wore on that occasion were so outlandish that he probably didn’t spend much time examining your face. It will serve.’

Vasco had indeed undergone a considerable metamorphosis. The long blond locks that had straggled haphazardly over his shoulder had been neatly, even severely, trimmed and parted with millimetric precision just to the centre left. His hair was also black, as were his eyebrows and newly-acquired and immaculately shaped moustache, all of which went very well with his shadowed, thinned-down cheeks and heavy tan. All dyes were guaranteed waterproof. He was the maiden’s conceptualized dream of what every young army officer should look like. Shirt, tie, suit and belted trench-coat were correspondingly immaculate.

‘They could use him in those army advertisements,’ George said. ‘You know, your country needs you.’ George, himself, was still George. For him, disguise was impossible.

‘And the voice,’ van Effen said. ‘I’m not worried about Agnelli, he’s hardly heard you say more than a few words. It’s Annemarie. I don’t know whether she’s a good actress with her emotions under control or not, but I rather suspect not. It would rather spoil things if she flung her arms round your neck and cried “My saviour!”’

‘I have a very bad cold,’ Vasco said hoarsely. ‘My throat is like sandpaper.’ His voice reverted to normal and he said morosely: ‘Whose throat wouldn’t be in this damned weather. Anyway, I’ll be the strong, silent type: I shall speak as little as possible.’

‘And I,’ George said, ‘shall lurk discreetly in the background until one of you have advised the ladies—if the ladies are indeed there—of my presence. But make it fast.’

‘We’ll make it as fast as we can, George,’ van Effen said. ‘We appreciate it’s a bit difficult for you to lurk discreetly anywhere for any length of time. And I have no doubt whatsoever the ladies will be there.’ He tapped the newspaper under his arm. ‘What’s the point in holding a couple of trumps if you don’t have them in your hand?’

The FFF’s latest announcement had been very simple, direct and to the point. They had now with them, they said—crude words like ‘abducted’ and ‘kidnapped’ had been studiously avoided—two young ladies, one of them the daughter of the nation’s leading industrialist, the other the sister of a senior police officer in Amsterdam. They had then proceeded to name names. Condolences, the FFF had said, had been sent to both parents and brother, together with assurances that they were being well cared for and expressing the pious hope that they would continue to remain in good health.

‘I do look forward to meeting those cardplayers,’ George said wistfully. ‘Crafty bunch of devils, aren’t they? I wonder what American university—or it could be Irish—offers a combined course in terrorism and psychology?’

‘They’re not exactly mentally retarded,’ van Effen said. ‘But, then, we never thought they were. Another push up the back for the arm of the government—and another push into an even more impossible situation. Just ending their message with those prayerful good wishes. No threats, no hints of reprisals or what might happen to the girls, no possibility of torture or even death. Nothing. The old uncertainty principle in full operation again. What, we are left to wonder, do they have in mind. That’s left to us—and, of course, it’s only human nature to come up with the worst possible scenario. Bad enough to have the country threatened with inundation, but for the tender-hearted and romantic—and even among the so-called stolid Dutch there are an uncommon number of those around—the thought of what dreadful terrors may lie in store for two beautiful and innocent young damsels could be a great deal worse.’

‘Well, there’s one consolation,’ Vasco said. He was practising his in extremis voice again. ‘I’m sure that’s the last threat about your sister’s well-being that you’ll be getting, Lieutenant.’

‘Stephan,’ van Effen said.

‘Stephan. I know. But I won’t apologize this time.’ Vasco’s voice was back to normal. ‘Once I clap eyes on that lot there’s not the slightest chance I’ll forget.’

‘My mistake,’ van Effen said. ‘I’m the person who’s doing the forgetting—about your undercover years. I agree with you—there’ll be no more threats to Julie. By the same token, I don’t even think they’ll bother to try to extract any money from David Meijer. Apart from the fact that they appear to have unlimited funds of their own, David Meijer is much more important to them as David Meijer—the man who, however unofficially, has very much the ear of the government and is in a position to influence them, to swing whatever decision may be under consideration. Not that I think that the government has any decision under consideration. I think that matter has been effectively taken out of their hands now. The ball, in the American phrase, is now very much in the court of the British.’

‘I wouldn’t very much like to be in the position of the British either,’ George said. ‘They face a position that, if it’s possible, is even worse than the one our government had to face. Are they going to be dictated to, even by proxy, by a bunch of what are essentially no more than terrorists, no matter what lofty motives they may ascribe to themselves? What will happen in Northern Ireland if they did pull out—would there be strife, and murder, even massacre that might cost more than any lives that could or would be lost in the Netherlands—and, of course, we can have no idea of how many lives that might be—hundreds or hundreds of thousands. Or do they just dig in, refuse to move and sit back and let the Hollanders drown and make themselves the lepers of the world, ostracized, perhaps for generations to come, by all nations—and although this is a wicked old world there must be still quite a few left—who still subscribe to some ideals of decency and humanity?’

‘I do wish you’d shut up, George.’ Rarely for him, van Effen sounded almost irritable. ‘You put the damn thing all too clearly. In a nutshell, it’s a toss-up between what value is put on the lives of x number of citizens in Ulster against y number of citizens in the Netherlands.’ Van Effen smiled without much mirth. ‘It’s difficult to solve an equation when you don’t even have a clue as to what the factors are. Imponderables, imponderables. The physicists who ramble on about the indeterminates and uncertainties in quantum mechanics should have this one dumped on their laps. Me, I’d rather spin a coin.’

‘Heads or tails,’ George said. ‘What way do you think the coin would land?’

‘I have absolutely no idea because, of course, no one ever knows which face of the coin is going to show. But there’s one factor that is at least faintly determinate, even although that is wildly uncertain, and that is human nature. So at a wild guess, just as wild as guessing at the toss, I would say that the British would give in.’

George was silent for a few moments, one massive hand caressing his chin, then said: ‘The British haven’t got much of a reputation for giving in. Feed any of them enough beer or scotch or whatever and like as not someone will end up by telling you that no unspeakable foreigner has ever set foot on their sacred soil for a thousand years. Which is true—and it’s the only country in the world that can claim that.’

‘True, true. But not applicable—or at least of importance—here. This is not a case of Churchill declaiming that we will fight in the streets, hills, beaches or wherever and that we will never surrender. That’s for martial warfare and in martial warfare the parameters and issues are clearcut. This is psychological warfare where the distinctions are blurred out of sight. Are the British any good at psychological warfare? I’m not sure they are. Come to that, I’m not sure that any country is—too many indefinables.’

‘I don’t think, anyway, that it’s a factor of either martial or psychological warfare. If there’s any factor that’s going to count, it’s the factor of human nature. This is how it might just possibly happen. The British will bluff and bluster, rant and rave—you have to admit that they yield first place to none when it comes to that—throw their arms in the general direction of a mindless heaven, appeal for common justice and claim they’re as pure and white and innocent as the driven snow, which, at this moment of time and conveniently forgetting their not-so-distant bloody history, they have some justification in claiming to be. What, they will ask, have we done to precipitate this intolerable situation and why should they, luckless lambs being led to the slaughter etc, be forced to find an impossible solution to an impossible problem which is none of their making? All quite true, of course. Why, they will cry, is no one in the world lifting a finger to help us, specifically those idle, spineless, cowardly, incompetent etc, Dutch who can’t bear to separate themselves from their cheese and tulips and gin even for the few moments it would take to eradicate this monster in their midst.

‘Nobody, of course, is going to pay a blind bit of attention to what they are saying. And when I say “they” I don’t mean the British people as a whole, I mean Whitehall, their government. And here’s where the first real bit of human nature comes in. The British have always prided themselves on their compassion, fair-mindedness, tolerance and undying sympathy for the under-dog—never mind what a few hundred million ex-subjects of the British Empire would have to say on that subject—and their kindness to dogs, cats and whatever else takes their passing fancy. That they may be happily existing in a world of sheer illusion is irrelevant: what is relevant for them is that what other people may regard as sheer hypocrisy is, for them, received truth. It is an immutable fact of life—British life, that is—so that if we poor Dutch even as much as got our feet wet, their moral outrage would be fearful to behold. Their indignation would be unbounded, ditto their consternation, the principles of all they think they hold dear destroyed, their finer sensibilities trampled in the mud. The Times letter department would be swamped in an unprecedented deluge of mail, all of it demanding that the criminals responsible for this atrocity should be held to account. X number of heads on x number of chargers. John the Baptist raised to the nth.

‘And now the second real bit of human nature. Whitehall is acutely aware who the John the Baptists would be. The government—any government, come to that—may regard themselves as statesmen or cabinet ministers but deep down in their cowering hearts they know full well that they are only jumped-up politicians strutting their brief hour upon the stage. Politicians they are and politicians in those fearful hearts they will always remain. And in their little egoistic political minds they are concerned, with rare exceptions—our Minister of Defence is one—only with security of tenure, the trappings of office and the exercise of power. Their egos are their existence and if you destroy their egos you destroy their existence or at least consign them to the political wilderness for many years to come.

‘There would be a landslide defeat for them at the next election or, much more likely, they would be turfed out of office very promptly. For your average cabinet minister, such a possibility is too appalling for contemplation. So we won’t get our feet wet. Motivated not by their own miserable fear, cowardice, greed and love of power but by the overriding dictates of common humanity, Whitehall will gallantly bow its head to the terrorists.’

There was a considerable silence, interrupted only by the hissing and drumming of rain on the window panes and streets and the constant rumbling of distant thunder. Then George said: ‘You never did have a very high opinion of politicians, did you, Peter?’

‘I’m in the sort of job where I have the unfortunate privilege of coming into contact with far too many of them.’

George shook his head. ‘That’s as may be. But that’s a very, very cynical outlook to adopt, Peter.’

‘We live in a very, very cynical world, George.’

‘Indeed, indeed.’ There was a pause and this time George nodded his head. ‘But sadly I have to agree with you. On both counts. About the world. And about the politicians.’

Nobody had anything more to say until a van drew up before the hotel entrance—it was, in fact, the mini-bus that had been used in the Dam Square the previous evening. Romero Agnelli, who was driving, wound down the window and slid back the door behind him.

‘Jump in. You can tell me where to go.’

‘Jump out,’ van Effen said. ‘We want to talk to you.’

‘You want to—what’s wrong, for God’s sake?’

‘We just want to talk.’

‘You can talk inside the bus.’

‘We may not be going anywhere in that bus.’

‘You haven’t got the—’

‘We’ve got everything. Are we going to stand here all day shouting at each other through the rain?’

Agnelli slid the door forward, opened his own and got out, followed by Leonardo, Daniken and O’Brien. They hastily mounted the steps into the shelter of the porch.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Agnelli said. The suave veneer had cracked a little. ‘And what the hell—’

‘And who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ van Effen said. ‘We’re not your employees. We’re your partners—or we thought we were.’

‘You think you—’ Agnelli cut himself off, frowned, smiled and hauled his urbanity back into place. ‘If we must talk—and it seems we must—wouldn’t it be a little more pleasant inside?’

‘Certainly. This, by the way, is the Lieutenant.’ Van Effen made the introductions which Vasco hoarsely acknowledged, apologizing profusely for the state of his throat. Agnelli, it was clear, had no idea who he was, even going as far as to say that Vasco couldn’t possibly be anything else than an army officer.

Inside, seated in a remote corner of the lounge, van Effen unfolded his newspaper and laid it on the table before Agnelli. ‘I suppose you can see those headlines?’

‘Um, well, yes, as a matter of fact, I can.’ He could hardly have failed to for the banner headline was the biggest the newspaper could produce. It read, quite simply, ‘FFF BLACKMAILS TWO NATIONS’ which was followed by a number of only slightly smaller headlines which were concerned primarily with the perfidy of the FFF, the heroic resolution of the Dutch government, the dauntless defiance of the British government and one or two other lies.

‘Yes, well, we rather thought you might have read something like this,’ Agnelli said. ‘And we did think you might have been a little troubled. But only a little. I mean, I personally can see no reason for concern, or that anything has radically altered. You knew what the reasons for your employment—sorry, engagement—were and you knew what we were doing. So what has changed so much overnight?’

‘This much has changed,’ George said. ‘The scope of the thing. The escalation of the plan. The sheer enormity of the matter. I’m a Dutchman, Mr Agnelli. The Lieutenant is a Dutchman. Stephan Danilov may not be Dutch born, but he’s a damn sight more Dutch than he is anything else and we’re not going to stand by and see our country drowned. And country, Mr Agnelli, means people. It is certain that none of us three operates inside the law: it is equally certain that none of us would ever again operate outside the law if we thought that our actions would bring harm to any person alive. Quite apart from that, we’re out of our depth. We are not small-time criminals but we do not act at an international level. What do you people want with Northern Ireland? Why do you want the British out? Why do you blackmail our government—or the British? Why do you threaten to drown thousands of us? Why threaten to blow up the Royal Palace? Or haven’t you read the papers? Are you all mad?’

‘We are not mad.’ Agnelli sounded almost weary. ‘It’s you who are mad—if you believe all that you read in the papers. The papers have just printed—in this instance, what your government has told them to say—in a state of national emergency, and the government do regard this as such, they have the power to do so. And the government have told them what we told them to say. They have followed our instructions precisely. We have no intention of hurting a single living soul.’

‘Northern Ireland is still a far cry from blackmailing the Dutch government for a little ready cash,’ van Effen said. ‘This, we thought, had been your original intention and one with which we’d have gone along. Quite willingly. We have no reason to love the government.’ He stared off into the far distance. ‘I have no reason to like quite a number of governments.’

‘On the basis of what you have told me,’ Agnelli said, ‘I can quite understand that.’ He smiled, produced his ebony cigarette-holder, fitted a Turkish cigarette and lit it with his gold-inlaid onyx lighter, all of which demonstrated that he was at ease, in charge and back on balance again—assuming, that is, that he had ever been off it in the first place. ‘Cash is the basis, gentlemen, and only cash. Precisely how it is the basis I am not yet permitted to divulge but you have my assurance that it is the sole and only motivation. And you also have my assurance—which you can take or leave as you choose—that we have no intention of bringing harm to anyone. And, quite honestly, in saying so we are not so moved, perhaps, by humanitarian considerations as you are. Organized crime on a large scale is big business and we run our affairs on a business-like basis. Emotion is nothing, calculation all. Killing not only pays no dividends, it is counter-productive. A robber is pursued by the law, but only within reasonable limits: but he who kills in the process of robbery is relentlessly pursued. No, no, gentlemen, we are in the business of conducting a purely psychological warfare.’

George reached across the table and touched another headline. ‘Kidnapping young ladies is another form of psychological warfare?’

‘But of course. One of the most effective of all psychological forms of blackmail. It touches the strings of one’s heart, you understand.’

‘You are a cold-blooded bastard,’ George said genially. When George was at his most genial he was at his most menacing and the slight compression of Agnelli’s lips showed that he realized that he was in the presence of menace. ‘I wonder how you would like it if your wife, sister or daughter were held with a gun at their heads or a knife at their throats? And don’t throw up your hands in horror. Blackmailers never hold hostages without accompanying threats of what will happen if their blackmailing ends are not achieved. As often as not such threats are carried out. What would it be in this case? Turning them over to some of the less uninhibited among your employees for a few hours’ innocent pleasure? Torture? Or the ultimate? We are, as we have repeatedly told you, not men of violence. But if any harm were to come in any way to those young ladies, totally harmless and innocent as we believe them to be, we would be capable of actions that you would regard as being acts of unimaginable violence. I do wish you would believe me, Mr Agnelli.’

Agnelli believed him all right. The atmosphere in the Trianon’s lounge was acceptably cool but a sheen of sweat had suddenly appeared on Agnelli’s forehead.

George said: ‘Why, for instance, did you kidnap this Anne Meijer? Is it because her father runs a minor kingdom of his own and may be presumed to have a powerful voice in government?’ Agnelli nodded silently. ‘And this’—he twisted the paper to have a glance at it—’this Julie van Effen. She’s only a policeman’s sister. There are thousands of policemen in the Netherlands.’

‘There’s only one van Effen.’ Agnelli spoke with a considerable depth of feeling. ‘We know there’s a nationwide hunt up for us but we also know who’s leading it. Van Effen. If we have his sister, and we do, we may clip his wings a bit.’

‘You don’t sound as if you care for this man very much?’ Agnelli said nothing, the look in his eyes said it for him. ‘And you still ask me to believe that you wouldn’t subject those girls to some subtle or not so subtle forms of persuasion to achieve your ends?’

‘I don’t really care whether you believe me or not.’ Once again Agnelli was beginning to sound more than a little tired. ‘I believe you are quite capable of doing what you say you would do if you found out we are deceiving you. I have no doubt that you are heavily armed. I suggest you come along and see and believe for yourselves. That includes seeing our hostages this afternoon. If you don’t like what you see you can leave or take any other measures you think appropriate. There’s nothing else I can say and I can’t speak fairer than that.’

George said: ‘Stephan?’

‘We’ll go along. Mr Agnelli’s explanations may be a bit thin, but if we are to believe in the essence of what he says—and I have no reason to think that we shouldn’t—then I think we all may have a great deal to lose if we are raising objections to a state of affairs that do not exist. It wouldn’t be very bright of us to cut off our own noses. As Mr Agnelli says, let’s go and see for ourselves.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ Agnelli didn’t mop his brow, perhaps because he wasn’t the brow-mopping kind, but almost certainly because he would not have regarded it as a very politic thing to do. ‘I was by no means convinced that you would come to see it my way—you are exceptionally difficult negotiators, if I may say so—but I am glad you have done.’ Moderation, reasonableness, courtesy—Agnelli could generously afford all of those now that he had had, as he thought, his own way. ‘Now, where’s the truck?’

‘Nearby garage.’

‘Garage? Is it safe—’

‘I own it,’ George said. ‘Goodness sake, do you think this is the first time?’

‘Of course. Silly question.’

‘We have one or two questions,’ van Effen said. ‘We’re committed now and we’ve no more wish to take chances than you have. I don’t for a moment suppose we’ll know where this place is until we get there. Have you a place of concealment for this truck?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many people are going out there?’

‘Apart from yourselves? The three of us, Mr Riordan whom you haven’t met but have read about, Joop and Joachim. Why?’

‘Please. My turn for questions. You travel in the mini-bus?’

‘Well, no. We’d hoped there would be plenty of room in the truck.’

No, indeed, van Effen thought. They wanted to keep the closest possible eye on the three of them and the precious contents of the truck. ‘How many cars?’

‘Cars?’ Agnelli looked faintly surprised. ‘No cars. Why?’

‘Why?’ Van Effen looked at the ceiling, then at George, then back at Agnelli. ‘Why? Tell me, Mr Agnelli, have you ever transported stolen Government property before?’

‘This will be a new experience for me.’

‘I want two cars. One to follow the truck at two or three hundred metres, the other to follow the first car at a similar distance.’

‘Ah! Well, now, I appreciate this. You do not wish to be followed.’

‘I have a rooted objection to being followed. One chance in a million. We do not take that chance.’

‘Good, good. Joop and Joachim. I’ll phone now.’

‘Last question. We forgot to discuss this. Do we return to the city tonight?’

‘No.’

‘You should have told us. We do require a toothbrush or two. However, we guessed right and packed some gear. Three minutes in the lobby.’

Back in his room van Effen said: ‘George, I’ve said it before and say it again. Your career has been a wasted one, ruined and misplaced. That was splendid, quite splendid.’

George made a mock-modest gesture of depreciation. ‘It was nothing.’

‘How to establish a moral ascendancy in one easy lesson. They’re going to go out of their way not to step on our toes. And did you gather the impression, George, that they need us more than we need them. Or, at least, that they think so?’

‘Yes. Intriguing.’

‘Very. Second, they know that they’re not going to be followed. It was our suggestion, so that makes us trustworthy?’

‘Anyone can see that. It will also, we trust, make them relax their vigilance.’

‘We trust. Third, again thanks to you, it is certain that Agnelli has no idea whatsoever who I am. Agnelli is sadly in need of a course of instruction from you. He’s a poor dissembler and overreacts too easily. It is not possible, that, knowing who I was, he could have sat at the same table without giving himself away. Lastly, it seems fairly certain that we’ll be safe until or unless they find out who we are or until we are no longer of any use to them—when they have achieved whatever it is they want to achieve, that is. But I think the latter unlikely. I could understand them wanting to dispose of us if we were to betray their identity but their identity is already well known—the names of those in Dessens’ house last night will probably be in every major newspaper in Europe this morning. Or by night-fall. And the TV and radio. I asked Mr Wieringa to make specially sure about that. And didn’t you love all this talk about limiting themselves solely to pure psychology and being interested only in cash returns? You believed him, of course?’

‘You can always trust a man like Mr Agnelli.’

Agnelli, O’Brien and Daniken were waiting in the lounge when the two men descended. Van Effen said: ‘Fixed?’

‘Yes. But one thing we overlooked—or I overlooked. I said I’d call them back. I didn’t know whether to ask them to come here or not.’

‘We’ll let them know when we move out in the truck.’

‘Why not call them from here?’

Van Effen looked at him as if in faint surprise. ‘Do you ever make two consecutive calls from the same phone?’

‘Do I—’ Agnelli shook his head. ‘And to think that I thought I was the most suspicious, most security-conscious person around. Do we move now?’

‘The heating in Dutch army trucks is rather sub-standard. I suggest a schnapps. We have time?’

‘We have. Very well. Until the Lieutenant comes, I assume.’

‘He doesn’t join us. We join him. That’s why I suggested a schnapps. Takes him a little time.’

‘I see. Rather, I don’t. He’s not going to join—’

‘He’s leaving by the fire escape. The Lieutenant has a penchant for unorthodox exits. Also, he’s bashful about calling attention to himself.’

‘Unorthodox. Bashful. I understand now.’ Standing by what appeared to be a freshly painted army truck in an otherwise empty, brightly lit small garage, Agnelli surveyed the rather impressive figure of Vasco who was now attired in what was obviously a brand new Dutch army captain’s uniform. ‘Yes, I understand. The desk staff in the Trianon would have found the change rather intriguing. But I thought—um—the lieutenant was a lieutenant?’

‘Old habits die hard. You don’t change a man’s name just because he changes his suit. Promoted last month. Services to Queen and country.’

‘Services to—ah, I see.’ Agnelli, it was clear, didn’t see at all. ‘And what’s this bright orange dagger flash on the radiator?’

‘ “Manoeuvres. Do not approach.” ’

‘You don’t miss much and that’s a fact,’ Agnelli said. ‘May I look inside?’

‘Naturally. I wouldn’t like you to think that you’d bought a pig in a poke.’

‘This, Mr Danilov, is the most unlikely looking pig in a poke that I’ve ever seen.’ Agnelli had inspected the neatly stacked and, in the case of the missiles and launchers, highly gleaming contents of the truck and was now actually rubbing his hands together. ‘Magnificent, quite magnificent. By heavens, Mr Danilov, when George here is given a shopping list I must say that he delivers. I wouldn’t have believed it.’

George made a dismissive gesture. ‘A little assistance from the Lieutenant here. Next time, something a little more difficult.’

‘Splendid, splendid.’ Agnelli looked towards the front of the truck and at the heavily side-curtained bench seat behind the front seats. ‘That, too? I see, Mr Danilov, that you share my passion for privacy.’

‘Not I. Senior Dutch army officers on manoeuvres.’

‘No matter. Mr Riordan, I am sure, will be delighted. When you meet him you will understand why. He is a man of a rather striking appearance and rather difficult to conceal, which is a pity, as he does like his privacy.’ Agnelli was silent for a moment, then cleared his throat and said: ‘In view of all this and the very, very stringent security precautions you have taken, Mr Danilov, I do feel a bit—in fact, very—diffident about asking—but, well, do you mind if Mr O’Brien here carried out a closer inspection?’

Van Effen smiled. ‘I’ve often wondered what Mr O’Brien’s function might be. But this? Well, I’m slightly puzzled. If Mr O’Brien knows more about explosives and arms than we three do, then he must be Europe’s leading expert and our services would seem to be superfluous.’

‘Explosives, Mr Danilov?’ O’Brien was an easy smiler and had a pleasant light baritone voice, a natural for the rendering of ‘When Irish eyes’. ‘Explosives terrify me. I’m an electronics man.’

‘Mr O’Brien is being modest,’ Agnelli said. ‘He’s an electronics expert and one of the very best in the business. Security. Alarms. Installation—or deactivating.’

‘Ah. Burglar alarms. Photo-electric rays, pressure pads, things like that. Always wanted to meet one of those. It’ll be a pleasure to watch one at work. Little enough scope, I would have thought, for an electronics man around an army truck. Wait a minute.’ Van Effen paused briefly then smiled. ‘By all means go ahead, Mr O’Brien. I’ll take long odds against you finding one, though.’

‘Finding what, Mr Danilov?’

‘One of those dinky little location transmitters.’

Agnelli and O’Brien exchanged glances. Agnelli said: ‘Dinky little—I mean, how on earth—’

‘Because I removed one this morning. Rather, the Lieutenant did it for me.’

Agnelli, as van Effen had said, would never stand in line for an Oscar. He was perplexed, apprehensive and suspicious, all at the same time. ‘But why should one—I mean, how did you suspect—’

‘Don’t distress yourself.’ Van Effen smiled. ‘Perfectly simple explanation. You see—’

‘But this is an army truck!’

‘Precisely. Far from uncommon on Army trucks. Use them on their silly war games, especially at night, when there’s no lights permitted and strict radio silence. Only way they can locate each other. The Lieutenant knew where they were usually concealed and found and detached this one.’

Vasco opened a map compartment by the driver’s seat, removed a tiny metallic object, and handed it to van Effen, who passed it over to O’Brien.

‘That’s it, all right,’ O’Brien said. He looked doubtfully at Agnelli. ‘In that case, Romero—’

‘No, no,’ van Effen said. ‘Go ahead and search. Be happier if you do. Damn truck could be littered with them, for all I know. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t know where to start looking.’

Agnelli, trying with his usual lack of success to conceal his relief, nodded to O’Brien. Van Effen and George left the truck and wandered idly around, talking in a desultory fashion. Agnelli, they could see, was displaying a keen interest in O’Brien at work, but none in them. In a far corner van Effen said: ‘Must be an interesting profession being a professional dismantler of alarm systems.’

‘Very. Useful, too. If you want to get at the private art collection of some billionaire or other. Or into a secret army base. Or bank vaults.’

‘It’s also useful if you want to blow up a dyke or a canal bank?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so either.’

Although it was only just after 1 p.m. when they left the garage it could well have been night-time for the amount of light left in the sky. And although it seemed impossible that the amount of rain could have increased, it undoubtedly had: the truck was equipped with two-speed wipers but might almost as well have been equipped with none at all. And the wind blew even more strongly from the north. Apart from the occasional triple tram the streets were deserted. One might almost have thought that the efforts and intention of the FFF were wasted: Holland, it appeared, was about to drown under the weight of its own rainfall.

Agnelli had made his phone call from the garage. Shortly after leaving it, at a word from Agnelli, Vasco, who was driving, pulled up outside an undistinguished café off the Utrechtsestraat. Two cars were parked there, both small, both Renaults. Agnelli got out and spoke hurriedly to the invisible drivers of the cars: he had need to hurry, he had no umbrella and his gaberdine raincoat offered no protection at all to the pitiless rain.

‘Joachim and Joop,’ he said on his return. ‘They are following us to a restaurant just this side of Amstelveen. Even the FFF must eat.’ Agnelli was probably back to his smiling again but it was impossible to say. The inside of the truck was almost totally dark.

‘If they can follow us,’ van Effen said. ‘In this weather, I can see that my precautions were superfluous. I thought we were to meet your brother and Mr Riordan. I must say I shall be most interested to meet your Mr Riordan. If the newspaper accounts are anything to go by, he must be a most extraordinary character.’ He ignored George’s heavy nudge in the ribs.

‘He’s all that. They’ve elected to remain in the cars—I don’t suppose they fancied getting wet. We’ll meet up in De Groene Lanteerne.’

Riordan was indeed an extraordinary character. For some extraordinary reason—known only to himself—he had elected to dress himself in a sweeping, neck-buttoned, black-and-white shepherd’s tartan cloak with matching deerstalker, of the type much favoured by Highland lairds and Sherlock Holmes. As the cloak ended six inches above his knees and hence made him look even more incongruously tall and skeletal than ever, he couldn’t possibly have been trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. He had greeted everyone civilly enough—when he wasn’t declaiming against the IRA he was, it seemed, a normally grave and courteous man—raised his eyes at the sight of Vasco’s uniform, readily accepted its explanation and there after remained silent, not from any wish to disassociate himself from those at the table but because he was carrying a large, very intricate and expensive-looking radio and had a pair of earphones clamped to his head. He was listening, Agnelli explained, to weather forecasts and Dutch and international news broadcasts. Agnelli didn’t have to explain why.

Lunch over, Riordan elected to continue the journey in the truck, earphones still in place. He ensconced himself in the right-hand corner of the rear bench seat and seemed to approve of the heavy side curtain which he pushed as far forward as possible. Vasco drove south during the dark afternoon making the best speed possible which, because of the near zero visibility, was no speed at all. Van Effen was particularly impressed by the carefully polite attention Vasco paid to Agnelli’s would-be meticulous instruction as how to drive through Utrecht. As Vasco had been born, bred, lived all his life and been a police driver in Utrecht, it said much for Vasco’s heroic patience that he three times followed directions that he must have known to be wrong.

About mid-afternoon, Riordan unhooked his earphones. ‘Progress, gentlemen, progress. The Dutch Foreign Minister and Defence Minister—that’s that excellent Mr Wieringa of theirs—arrived in London this afternoon and are meeting with their counterparts. A communiqué is expected. It shows that we are being taken seriously.’

Van Effen said: ‘After those scare headlines, those banner headlines in the papers today, and all the emergency news flashes on TV and radio, did you seriously expect not to be taken seriously?’

‘No. But gratifying, none the less, gratifying.’ Riordan re-affixed his earphones and leaned back into his corner. The expression on his face was an odd mixture of the expectant and the beatific. A man with a mission, Riordan wasn’t going to miss out on anything.

Some twenty minutes later the truck pulled off to the right on to a B-road and, a couple of kilometres further on, left on to a still more minor road. It stopped at a building which appeared to be fronted by a brightly-lit porch.

‘Journey’s end,’ Agnelli said. ‘Our headquarters—well, one of them—and our overnight stop. I think you’ll be quite comfortable here.’

‘A windmill,’ van Effen said.

‘You seem surprised,’ Agnelli said. ‘Hardly uncommon in these parts. Disused but still functional, which is also not unusual. Large extensions and quite modernized. It has the additional attraction of being a long way from anywhere. If you look to this side you’ll see the place of concealment I promised for the truck. Disused barn.’

‘And that other barn-like structure beside it?’

‘State secret.’

‘Helicopter.’

Agnelli laughed in the darkness. ‘End of state secret. Obvious, I suppose, since we told people that we had taken aerial photographs of those rather stirring scenes north of Alkmaar on the Noord Holland canal.’

‘So you’re now the happy owner of both army and air-force property?’

‘No. Not air force. Indistinguishable, though. A lick of paint here, a lick of paint there, some carefully selected registration numbers—but it’s unimportant. Let’s go inside and see what we can find in the way of old Dutch cheer and hospitality.’ Now that he had, as he thought, completed his mission with a hundred per cent degree of success he was positively radiating a genial cordiality. It could well, van Effen thought, represent his true nature: nature had not designed him for the cut and thrust, riposte and parry that he had been through that afternoon.

‘Not for me,’ George said. ‘I’m a businessman and a businessman always likes to—’

‘If you’re referring to payment, George, I can assure you—’

‘Payment? I’m not referring to payment.’ George sounded pained. ‘I’m referring to standard business practices. Lieutenant, is there an overhead light? Thank you.’ George produced a sheaf of papers from an inside pocket and handed them to Agnelli. ‘Inventory of goods. You have to sign the receipt but not until I have checked the conditions of all the items—you will understand that I had no time to do so this morning—and see how they survived the transport. Standard business ethics.’ No one seemed to find it peculiar that George should use the word ‘ethics’ in connection with stolen goods. ‘But some of that hospitality wouldn’t come amiss. Beer for me?’

‘Of course,’ Agnelli said, then added delicately: ‘Would you be requiring any help?’

‘Not really. But it is customary for a purchaser or purchaser’s agent to be present. I would suggest Mr O’Brien. Electronics experts are accustomed to small fiddly things and detonators are small fiddly things. A carelessly dropped detonator, Mr Agnelli, and there wouldn’t be a great deal left of your windmill. There wouldn’t be a great deal left of the people inside it, either.’

Agnelli nodded his satisfaction and led the way to the porch that had been added to the windmill. A tall, shock-haired and unshaven youth whose most notable facial characteristic was the negligible clearance between eyebrows and hairline, moved to bar their entrance. A machine-pistol was held loosely in his right hand.

‘One side, Willi.’ Agnelli’s voice was sharp. ‘It’s me.’

‘I can see that,’ Willi scowled—it was the kind of face that wasn’t built for much else—and stared truculently at van Effen. ‘Who’s he?’

‘Hospitality,’ van Effen said. ‘Our genial host, no doubt. God help us. Is this the kind of hired help you have around here?’

Willi took a threatening step forward, lifting his gun as he did so, then subsided gently to the ground, clutching his midriff as he did so: the blow he had received there had been no friendly tap. Van Effen took his gun, removed the magazine and dropped the gun on top of the wheezing Willi. Van Effen stared at Agnelli, his expression a nice mix of consternation and disbelief.

‘Frankly, I’m appalled. I don’t like this one little bit. Is this—I mean, is he typical—you have retarded morons like this on your team? People who are going to hold—no, people who are holding nations to ransom having—having—words fail me. Have you never heard of the weakest link in the chain?’

‘My own sentiments exactly,’ Riordan said gravely. ‘You will remember, Romero, that I expressed my reservations about this fellow. Even as a guard, the only possible function he could serve, his limitations have been cruelly exposed.’

‘I agree, Mr Riordan, I agree.’ It would have been untrue to say that Agnelli was discomfited, but his ebullience was in temporary abeyance. ‘Willi is a disappointment. He shall have to go.’

Willi had now slipped over on to his side. He was conscious enough, propped on one shaky elbow and grimacing with pain. Van Effen looked over his all but prone form to the opened doorway beyond. His sister was there, Annemarie by her side, Samuelson just behind them. The expression on both girls’ faces were markedly similar—slightly wide-eyed, slightly shocked, totally uncomprehending. Van Effen let his eyes rest on them for a brief moment then looked indifferently away.

‘Have to go, Mr Agnelli? Have to go? If he goes, I go. Can’t you see that you’re stuck with him, want it or not. Stuck with him either above ground or below. Let him go and the first thing he’ll do is talk his head off to the first policeman he meets. No drastic methods, preferably, but his silence must be assured. I hope the rest of your Praetorian guard is a cut above this character.’

‘The rest of the Praetorian guard, as you call them, are more than a cut above this unfortunate.’ Samuelson, rubicund, smiling and looking even more prosperous than the previous evening, had gently pushed the girls apart and stepped out on to the stoop. He smelt of some very expensive after-shave lotion. Rubbing his chin with an immaculately manicured hand, he peered down at Willi then looked up at van Effen. ‘You do have a direct way with you, my friend. At the same time one must admit that you come to some remarkably quick conclusions in a commendably short time. I must confess that I have occasionally felt tempted to do just what you have done, but, well, explosive violence of that kind is not my forte. Ah, yes, I saw it all. Very economical, very.’ He extended a hand. ‘Samuelson.’

‘Danilov.’ Judging from both his bearing and his speech, van Effen was in no doubt that he was in the presence of the man who mattered. His speech. Samuelson had said so few words the previous evening that his country of origin had remained uncertain. De Graaf had thought him Irish-American. De Graaf, van Effen thought, had been wrong. This man was English-American. Perhaps even an Englishman who had spent just long enough in the United States to pick up a slight American over-tone. Van Effen gestured to the fallen man. ‘Sorry about this, Mr Samuelson. One does not usually treat a host’s staff in so summary a fashion. On the other hand you must admit that it’s not the average guest who finds himself confronted with a sub-machine gun.’

‘A well-taken point, Mr Danilov.’ Like Agnelli, Samuelson seemed much given to warm and friendly smiles. ‘A breach of hospitality. It will be the last—as you yourself have personally assured. All is well, Romero?’

‘Perfect, Mr Samuelson. Everything there, everything in order. Exactly as Mr Danilov guaranteed.’

‘Splendid. Mr Danilov does have a certain aura of competence about him. Come in, come in. Wretched evening. Absolutely wretched.’ That, thought van Effen, made him English for sure. ‘And good evening to you, Captain. I understood you were a lieutenant.’

‘A very very recent captain,’ Vasco said hoarsely. ‘Sorry about this throat.’

‘Dear me, dear me.’ Samuelson sounded genuinely concerned. ‘A hot toddy, and at once.’ Samuelson did not seem to find it at all amiss that a regular army captain should be in their company: but a man with so smoothly unlined a face could take many things in his stride without registering reactions of any kind. ‘Let me introduce our two charming guests. Miss Meijer, Miss van Effen.’

Van Effen bowed briefly. ‘Those are the two who figured so prominently in the headlines this morning? Their photographs didn’t do them justice.’

Agnelli said: ‘Mr Danilov and his friends were rather concerned about their well-being, Mr Samuelson.’

‘Ah, yes. Compatriots, of course. No need, no need. As you can see, both in excellent health.’

There were five other people in the room, all men. Two were earnest looking, intellectual looking youths cast in the mould of Joachim and Joop. The other three were older, bigger and a great deal tougher looking, although that didn’t mean that they were in any way more dangerous: apart from the fact that they lacked sunglasses they looked uncommonly like the Secret Service men who guard an American president. There was nothing criminal in their appearances. Samuelson didn’t see fit to introduce them: as a result, indeed, of some signal that van Effen had not seen they all quietly left the room.

‘Well, now.’ Van Effen looked at Samuelson, Agnelli and Riordan in turn. ‘I don’t know which of you I should address. It doesn’t matter. We have delivered the material—one of our number is at present checking the explosives and armaments to see that they are in the best possible working order. We understood that some call might be made on our services—our expertise, if one might put it that way. If you don’t require us, there’s no point in our remaining. We have no wish to impose ourselves on anybody.’

Samuelson smiled. ‘You would rather go?’

Van Effen smiled in turn. ‘I think you are perfectly well aware that we would rather stay. I’m as curious as the next man. Besides, it would be most interesting to know what is going to happen without having to wait to read about it in the newspapers.’

‘Stay you shall,’ Samuelson said. ‘We will probably have need of your expertise. We do, in fact, have plans for you. But first, perhaps, a soupçon of borreltje. 5 p.m., and 5 p.m., I understand, is the prescribed hour. Leonardo’—this to Agnelli’s brother who had just entered with Daniken—’be so kind as to have some hot water brought from the kitchen.’ This, van Effen felt certain, made Samuelson the man who called the tune. ‘And some honey. We must do something about this fearful cold the Captain has. Come. Join me.’

A log fire burnt in an open hearth built into the windowless back wall. Adjoining this was a circular oaken bar, small but quite splendidly stocked. Samuelson moved behind this as Riordan said: ‘You will, of course, excuse me.’

‘Of course, James, of course,’ Samuelson said. Van Effen felt faintly surprised. Riordan didn’t look like a man who had a first name. Riordan nodded to the company and mounted a circular stairway.

Van Effen said: ‘Mr Riordan doesn’t approve of our heathenish practice of having a borreltje at this hour?’

‘Mr Riordan doesn’t disapprove. He doesn’t drink himself, nor does he smoke, but he doesn’t disapprove. I may as well tell you—for you will find out anyway and I don’t wish to cause anybody any embarrassment—that Mr Riordan regularly goes upstairs at this hour for prayer and meditation. He does this several times a day and one cannot but respect a man with such deeply-held beliefs. He is very devout—and is, in fact, an ordained minister of the church.’

‘You surprise me,’ van Effen said. He thought briefly. ‘No, on second thoughts you don’t surprise me. It seems very much in character. For such a devout character, I must say, the Reverend has certainly let loose a storm of cats in the dovecotes of Europe today.’

‘You must not think ill of Riordan, nor underestimate him.’ Samuelson spoke very seriously. ‘He is an evangelist, a missionary fired by a burning zeal. He is genuinely appalled by what is happening in Northern Ireland and believes that if blood must be spilled to bring peace to that troubled land then that’s how it will be. In his own words, he’s prepared to use the devil’s tools to fight the devil.’

‘And you support him in all of this?’

‘Naturally. Why else should I be here?’

It would have been interesting, van Effen thought, to know just why else he should be there but it seemed hardly the time and place to raise the question. He hoisted himself on a bar stool and looked around.

The two girls were in whispered consultation. Agnelli and Daniken had already occupied the two stools at the further end of the bar, Vasco, who had been wandering round looking at the paintings and brass and copper work on the walls, made his unconcerned way over to the bar and sat down beside Daniken whom he began to engage in hoarse conversation.

‘Mr Samuelson.’ It was Julie. ‘I think I’ll go to my room. I have a bit of a headache.’

Van Effen remained casually still, drumming his fingers idly on the bar-top, a man perfectly at ease with himself. He was, in fact, very far indeed from being at ease with himself, the last thing that he wanted was that either of the girls should go to their rooms. Samuelson, who had been stooping down behind the bar, came to his unwitting rescue.

‘My dear Julie!’ If he weren’t so certain that he knew what Samuelson would say next, van Effen could have hit him. ‘Not to be thought of. Here we have a fine Tio Pepe. Guaranteed cure for any headache. Would you deprive me of your company?’

They would obviously have cheerfully done just that but just as obviously deemed it prudent to do as he told—prisoners tend to do what their gaolers tell them—and came and perched reluctantly by the bar, Julie close to her brother. She glanced at him briefly, a glance which told him quite clearly what she thought of violent characters who spoke off-handedly about sticking undesirable characters under the ground, then looked away. Almost at once she looked back again, fortunately not too quickly: something had just touched her right thigh. She looked at him, frowning slightly, then glanced downwards. Almost at once she turned away and made some confidential remark to Annemarie, just as Samuelson’s head cleared the bar again. Magnificent, van Effen thought, she was magnificent, the best in Amsterdam wouldn’t be good enough for his sister after this.

She accepted her sherry from Samuelson with a correctly pleasant if somewhat forced smile, delicately sipped her drink, placed it on the bar-top, opened her handbag on her lap and brought out cigarettes and lighter. She was magnificent, van Effen thought. She lit the cigarette, returned the cigarette case but not the lighter to her bag and, while still talking quietly to Annemarie while watching, without seeming to, the men at the bar, dropped her hand till it touched van Effen’s. A moment later, the lighter and the folded note, the top of which had been protruding between the fore and middle fingers of van Effen’s was safely inside her closed bag. He could have hugged and kissed her and made a mental note to do so at the first available opportunity. In the meantime, he did the next best thing, he downed his borreltje in one gulp. He had never much cared for it but this one tasted as nectar must have done to the gods. Samuelson, ever the attentive host, hurried across to replenish his glass and van Effen thanked him courteously. The second borreltje went the same way as the first.

Julie locked the bedroom door behind her, opened her bag and brought out the note which she began to unfold. Annemarie looked at her curiously.

‘What have you got there? And why are your hands shaking, Julie?’

‘A billet-doux that I have just got from a lovelorn suitor in the bar. Wouldn’t your hands shake if you’d just got a billet-doux from a love-lorn suitor in the bar?’ She smoothed out the note so that they could both read it together. It had been meticulously typed so obviously it was not a scribbled note put together at the last moment.

‘Sorry about the appearance and the thick accent,’ it said, ‘but you will understand that I can’t very well go around in my ordinary clothes and using my ordinary voice.

‘The dashing young army captain is Vasco. You will understand why he has developed this sore throat. Annemarie might just have been a little startled to hear his normal voice. Agnelli would have been very startled.

‘George is with us. Couldn’t bring him in at first because George can’t be disguised. Couldn’t have you hugging him with feminine shrieks of delight.

‘You don’t know us and you don’t want to know us. Stay away from us but don’t make it too obvious. Distant, remote and extending to us as much courtesy as you would to any other common criminals.

‘Don’t try to do anything clever. Don’t try to do anything. The men, probably, are not dangerous but watch the girls. They’re shrewd and have nasty devious feminine minds.

‘Destroy this note immediately. I love you both.’

‘And signed,’ Julie said, ‘with his own unmistakable signature.’ Her hands still weren’t too steady.

‘You said he would come,’ Annemarie said. Her voice was like Julie’s hands.

‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? Didn’t expect him quite so soon, though. What are we going to do—cry with relief?’

‘Certainly not.’ Annemarie sniffed. ‘He might have spared us the bits about feminine shrieks of delight and shrewd and nasty devious feminine minds.’ She watched as Julie ignited the note over a wash-basin and flushed the ashes away. ‘So what do we do now?’

‘Celebrate.’

‘In the bar?’

‘Where else?’

‘And ignore them totally.’

‘Totally.’

NINE

The barn that served as a garage was cold and draughty and leaking and couldn’t have served as a barn for many years: the air was heavy with the unsavoury smell of musty hay although there was no trace of hay to be seen. But it was clean and well lit, enough to show that the army truck’s freshly painted bodywork had vanished under a thick encrustation of mud.

George and O’Brien were bent over what appeared to be some kind of check-list when van Effen entered. George looked over O’Brien’s shoulder and lifted an interrogative eyebrow. Van Effen gave a brief nod in return, then said: ‘About through?’

‘Finished,’ George said. ‘All present and correct, I think.’

‘Think,’ O’Brien said. ‘Check, re-check and crosscheck. Never saw a man so meticulous about anything.’ Julie and Annemarie had taken what seemed like an unconscionably long time before making their departure. ‘But I did learn a little about explosives. And a lot about drinking beer.’

They switched off the lights, padlocked the doors—George pointedly pocketing the key while making some remark to the effect that signed receipts came first—and entered the mill. Julie and Annemarie were seated at a table by the fire, each with a small glass before her, a sure indication, van Effen knew, that they had read the note he had left with them. He noted, approvingly, that both girls regarded their entry with an open curiosity: it would have been an odd person indeed who would have registered indifference when encountering George’s vast bulk for the first time. Across the fire-place, and seated at another table, Samuelson was just replacing the hand-set of a rather splendid-looking radio transceiver: when obtaining new equipment the FFF obviously didn’t patronize second-hand markets.

‘All well?’ Samuelson said.

‘All well,’ O’Brien said. ‘Just about managed to stop George testing the detonators with his teeth. That’s quite an arsenal you have there, Mr Samuelson.’

‘Sign here, please.’ George laid three copies of the inventory on the table before Samuelson who signed them, thus confirming that he was, indeed, the man in charge, smiled and handed them back to George who solemnly handed over the garage padlock key.

‘A pleasure to do business with you, George. How would you like the fee to be paid?’

‘Not time for the fee yet,’ George said. ‘The inventory is only a promise. Wait for the guarantee—let’s see if the damn things work.’

Samuelson smiled again. ‘I thought businessmen always demanded cash on delivery.’

‘Not this businessman. If, of course, you decide not to use them, then I’ll present the bill—you understand that I can’t very well return them to the ordnance store. Or if you decide to dispense with our services.’

‘Still a pleasure, George. I’m quite certain we’ll be requiring both your goods and your services. Well, gentlemen, we’ll be hearing a rather—’ He broke off, looked at van Effen, patted the radio and said: ‘You know what this is, don’t you?’

‘A transceiver. RCA. The best, I believe. If you’d a mind to, you could reach the moon with that.’

‘It can reach Amsterdam, which is all I want. Helmut. Helmut Paderiwski, whom you have met, I believe.’

‘Yes. I rather wondered where Helmut was.’

‘Our voice in the capital. He has just arranged for our latest message to be made known.’ He glanced at the wall clock. ‘Exactly eight minutes. TV and radio. We’ve decided not to bother about newspapers any more. I am not being smug when I say that we can now get instant coverage whenever we wish it. I think you’ll all find it a rather interesting message—messages rather. Don’t you think we should give them—ah—advance notice, Romero? Mr Danilov here has said that he likes to know what’s going on before he reads or hears about it.’

‘If it is your wish, of course.’ Agnelli was his usual smiling self. ‘But I would rather they saw it on TV. I think it would be interesting to see what the reaction of the average Dutch citizen would be.’

‘We’ll wait. It’s unimportant. Although I’d hardly call those three average Dutch citizens. Ah! Our provision party has returned.’

The two girls van Effen had met the previous evening in the room off the Voorburgwal entered, each carrying a shopping basket. They were followed by a young man who was having some difficulty in coping with a huge hamper he was carrying.

‘Welcome back,’ Samuelson said benignly. ‘A successful expedition, I see. Ah! Introductions. Mr Danilov, of course, you’ve met. This is George, this is the Captain who for some obscure reason is called the Lieutenant. Maria. Kathleen. You look puzzled, Mr Danilov.’

‘That’s a lot of food.’

‘True, true. But a lot of mouths to feed.’

‘It’s a fair way to Utrecht.’

‘Utrecht? My dear fellow, we shop at the local village store. Delighted to have our trade. Ah, the factor of anonymity.’ He laughed. ‘Romero. If you would be so kind.’

Romero led van Effen to the front door, opened it and gestured. At the foot of the steps stood a dark blue van. Emblazoned on its side, in golden lettering, was the legend Golden Gate Film Productions.

‘Ingenious,’ van Effen said.

‘It is, rather. Not a famous enough name to attract national attention but we’re certainly well enough known locally. Been here for almost a month now. We have a camera crew almost continuously on the move around the area. An isolated spot, this, and it brings a touch of colour into their otherwise drab lives. No trouble at all in recruiting house and kitchen staff: we are generous employers and very well thought of locally.’

‘You’d be even better thought of if they knew that this is probably the only area in the Netherlands that’s immune from flooding.’

‘There’s that, there’s that.’ Agnelli seemed quite pleased with the idea. ‘War film, I need hardly say. Hence the helicopter. Had to get official permission, of course, but that was a mere formality.’

‘I’d wondered how you’d managed that. You do have your nerve, that I must say.’

‘Just had a thought. This newly acquired truck. Change of paint and it can move around in complete freedom. War film—army truck. Follows, no?’

‘Yes. This is your brain-child, of course?’

‘Yes. But why “of course”?’

‘You do have a certain talent for devious organization.’

The TV announcer, soberly suited and tied and ominously grave in expression, looked as if he were about to pronounce a funeral oration.

‘We have just received what is called an interim communiqué from London. It says that the talks about the Dutch crisis are continuing and that a further communiqué can be expected within the hour.

‘It was expected that some further statements would be received from this terrorist organization calling itself the FFF. Those have arrived some fifteen minutes ago. They are not so much statements as threats of the very gravest nature.

‘The first of those states that they, the FFF, expect to hear by midnight that a definite and affirmative answer—that is an answer agreeing to the FFF’s demands—will be announced before 8 a.m. tomorrow. If they do not hear such confirmation by midnight, the Oostlijk-Flevoland dyke will be blown at five minutes past midnight. The citizens of Lelystad are advised to begin to take precautionary measures now. If they fail to do this, the FFF now disclaim all responsibility for their fate.

‘The second statement makes the announcement that the FFF have in their possession a number of nuclear explosive devices which they will not hesitate to use, if the need arises, to achieve their ends. The FFF hastens to assure the people of the Netherlands that those nuclear devices are not of the calibre of hydrogen or atomic weapons. They are tactical battlefield devices intended for delivery by plane, rocket or shell-fire. All are of American manufacture, some still on the secret list. All have been obtained from NATO bases in Germany. They have the serial numbers of those devices—they are clearly stamped on each one—and the US forces in Germany can confirm that those devices are, in fact, missing. If, that is, they are prepared to give this confirmation.’

There was a pause while the newscaster broke off to accept and glance at a sheet of paper that had just been handed him by a studio colleague: judging from the stricken expression on the colleague’s face, he had already read the message.

Van Effen looked around the room. No newscaster, he felt certain, had ever had so rapt an audience. The faces of George and the Lieutenant were expressionless, but that was only because, in certain circumstances such as those, they hadn’t much use for expressions: but their eyes were very still. Julie and Annemarie looked shocked. Kathleen and Maria were smiling, but their smiles were halfhearted and more than tinged by apprehension: no question, they had known what was coming but they still didn’t like hearing it. Agnelli, O’Brien and Daniken looked thoughtful but not particularly gratified. But the normally genial Samuelson was revelling in every moment of it. True, he was still smiling, but there was no warmth in his smile: there never can be in the smile of a hungry crocodile that has just spotted his unwary lunch.

‘We have here,’ the announcer said, ‘a further message from, the FFF. They say they are prepared to release those numbers at any time, but they feel a practical demonstration to prove their possession of those nuclear devices would be much more convincing. Accordingly, they intend to explode one of those devices in the Ijsselmeer in the early afternoon of tomorrow. The power of the charge will be in the range of one kiloton—that is to say, the equivalent of one thousand tons of TNT. This is expected to cause a certain disturbance of the water but the probable height of the accompanying tidal wave—tsunami is the term for it—is not precisely known. It is hoped that the inhabitants of the coastal settlements of the Ijsselmeer will not be too inconvenienced. Inconvenienced!’ The newscaster almost spluttered the word which was obviously not in the script—or the repetition of it. He recovered himself. ‘The demonstration has been delayed until the afternoon in order to allow British cabinet ministers plenty of time to fly across and join their Dutch colleagues in watching this demonstration. The precise time and place will be announced later. The device, they add, is already in position.

‘Finally, they demand some money. This money, they say, will be returned. It is not blackmail money, or ransom money, merely a temporary loan to cover operating expenses. Details of the methods of payment will be announced later this evening—this is to give the parties concerned time to arrange for the transfer. The demand is for one hundred million guilders from the government, twenty million from Mr David Joseph Karlmann Meijer, the Rotterdam industrialist.’ The newscaster laid down his paper. ‘Viewers will not need reminding that Mr Meijer’s daughter, Anne, is being held hostage by the terrorists.’ Samuelson touched a switch before him and the screen went blank.

‘I wish,’ Samuelson said in a complaining voice, ‘that he wouldn’t call us “terrorists”. “Philanthropists” is the word. I rather liked that touch about operating expenses. Anne, my dear, do sit down. You’re over-excited.’

Annemarie, who was clearly and very understandably over-excited was on her feet, face pale, lips compressed, her hands unclenching and clenching into ivory-knuckled fists.

‘You monster,’ she whispered. ‘You utterly evil monster.’

‘You think so, my dear?’ He looked round the room, smiling. Van Effen was one of those who smiled back at him: there were witnesses. ‘Not at all. Philanthropist. Equitable redistribution of excess wealth. Besides, it’s not even that. As you heard, merely a temporary loan. Don’t tell me that the wealthiest man in the Netherlands can’t afford that money. I know all about your father.’

‘You murderer,’ she said softly. Her hands were hanging straight by her sides now, and they were still. ‘You murderer.’ The tears were rolling down her cheeks and now Julie was on her feet, her arm around the girl’s shoulders. ‘You know all about my father. You know then that he has had two major heart attacks this year. You know that he came out of hospital only four days ago after his last heart attack. You’ve killed him.’ Her voice, like her shoulders, was shaking. ‘You’ve killed him.’

Samuelson had stopped smiling. He frowned and said: ‘I did not know this. Before God, I didn’t.’ Without apparently even pausing to think he reached out for the handset of his RCA and pressed a button. He must have received an acknowledgment almost immediately for he started talking into the mouthpiece rapidly and urgently, clearly issuing instructions in a language that no one there knew but which George, from a few odd words, recognized as being Yiddish. He replaced the handset, rose, walked around behind the bar, poured himself a brandy, not a small one, and drank the contents in two or three gulps. This performance was watched with some astonishment but no comment was made.

Van Effen rose in turn, walked round to the bar in turn and poured brandy in turn—two brandies. He carried these round to Anne and Julie, waited until they had both sipped from them and resumed his seat.

‘Fine lot you are when it comes to ladies in distress.’ He looked at Agnelli. ‘That was a nice line in threats.’

‘You think they were meaningless threats, Mr Danilov?’ Agnelli didn’t seem at all reluctant to speak, like others in the room he probably found it embarrassing not to look at Samuelson who was on his second brandy and paying attention to nobody. ‘I assure you they were all genuinely intended. And will be carried out.’

‘So much for your word, Agnelli.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’d have to have a damned short memory not to. Only a few hours ago you promised us that no harm would come to any Dutch people. You warn all the Lelystad people to take the necessary precautions against the breaching of the dykes. Good God, man, it’s pitch black outside and coming down in torrents. They won’t be able to see to take precautions.’

‘They don’t have to see. Flood level won’t be more than half a metre. We’ve checked and checked the area. Plenty of second-floor rooms and attics—although they could remain on the ground floor if they didn’t mind getting their feet wet. And plenty of boats. We’ve checked that also. The message was primarily for intimidation. Surely you can see that?’

‘That’s as maybe. Where’s old Elastic Conscience?’

‘Elastic what?’

‘Elastic who. Riordan. The praying priest. The god-fearing Reverend. Why wasn’t he here watching?’

Agnelli smiled faintly. ‘He regards TV as the work of Satan. Could be right, for all I know. As you saw, he’s practically married to his earphones. There was a simultaneous radio broadcast.’

‘You do really have those nuclear devices? I find it frankly incredible.’

‘I can show them to you.’

‘Well, that answers that. So this man of peace and goodwill is prepared to play around with lethal explosives.’

‘You heard what Mr Samuelson said to you a short time ago.’ Agnelli looked quickly at the bar. Samuelson, still looking at nothing and nobody but with something peculiarly tense in his stance, appeared to be on yet another brandy. ‘Mr Riordan’s prepared to use the devil’s tools to fight the devil.’

‘Too late in the day to talk about pious, hypocritical platitudes, I suppose. How did you get them—those nuclear devices?’

‘You heard. NATO. West Germany. Specifically, US bases.’

‘I heard that. I didn’t ask where. I asked how.’ Van Effen looked away for a moment, then back at Agnelli. ‘I know. The RAF. The Red Army Faction.’

‘Yes. I would have told you but since you’ve guessed it or know—yes.’

‘Jesus! The holy father upstairs must really have the original, twisted, double-dyed, infinite-stretch elastic conscience. The RAF! And only last night, according to the papers—correct me if I’m wrong—he was telling Wieringa, the Defence Minister, that the RAF were the inheritors of the bloody mantle of the Baader-Meinhof gangsters of the early seventies. The fact that his own hands are stained a bright red doesn’t appear to worry the Reverend at all. God, I should have thought of this right away. It’s only a couple of weeks since there was this successful break-in at a US army ammunition depot outside Hanover. The RAF claimed responsibility and their claim was generally accepted: the RAF is rather good at this and the Americans rather poor at guarding their installations. No mention of nuclear devices. It would have been in character for the RAF to have made specific mention of this: one supposes that they did but that the US Army, or the army through the government, put a stop order on this. Anti-nuclear sentiment is high enough already in Germany without the added knowledge that there’s a bunch of woolly-headed hare-brained young terrorists on the loose with nuclear weapons in their suitcases.’

‘No prizes for your guesses, Mr Danilov. Had to be that way. And it was.’

‘Your information, of course, comes from the same source as the nuclear devices.’

‘Where else?’

‘Joachim and Joop. And the two other baby-faced choirboys who were here when we arrived this afternoon.’

‘Who else?’

‘The leisure-time terrorists, as the West Germans call them—nights and weekends only. Since the egregious Christian Klar was captured—along with two lady friends, Mohnhaupt and Schultz I think they were called—and charged with the murders of diverse politicians, prosecutors, bankers and industrialists, the RAF have pulled in their horns and are reported to have moved into neighbouring countries. I suppose Holland was the natural, the inevitable first choice. Should be like a second home to them.’ Van Effen thought briefly then smiled. ‘On the one hand the RAF, on the other your blackmailing demands on the Dutch Government. Don’t you find it rather a splendid thought, Mr Agnelli, that the Dutch Government are going to pay the RAF for nuclear devices to be used against the Dutch people?’

Agnelli didn’t have the opportunity to say whether he did or not for the call-up buzzer on the RCA rang at that moment. He lifted the handset, spoke an acknowledgement, then said: ‘Mr Samuelson, for you.’

Samuelson came and took the handset, listened, said: ‘Thank you, Helmut, thank you very much,’ hung up and looked at his watch. ‘Four minutes. I’m going to my room, Romero, but will be down for dinner. So will Mr Riordan. There’ll be a news flash on TV in four minutes. Please don’t miss it.’ On his way to the stairs, he stopped by Annemarie’s table. ‘I am sorry, Miss Meijer.’ No ‘my dear’, no ‘Anne’. ‘I did not know.’

When the news flash came, interrupting some appropriately lugubrious offering from Handel by the Concertgebouw, it was very much what van Effen expected. ‘The now notorious terrorist group, the FFF,’ the newscaster read, ‘have announced that, for reasons they do not wish to discuss, the demand for twenty million guilders from Mr David Meijer has been withdrawn, effective as from now. Miss Anne Meijer will be released and returned to her father as soon as is conveniently possible. The sum now asked from the Government has been correspondingly increased to a hundred and twenty million guilders.’

Apart from a slow shake of the head, which could have meant anything but probably indicated a total lack of understanding, Annemarie did not react at all. Julie smiled in delight and hugged her. George clapped a hand on van Effen’s knee and said: ‘Well, now, my friend, what do you think of that?’

‘Splendid,’ van Effen said. ‘Quite splendid. Bit unfair on policemen’s sisters, though. They should have let her go as well.’

‘I must admit,’ van Effen said, ‘that it does make it a bit more difficult to kill him, should that unfortunate need arise. If, of course, our friend Samuelson was moved solely by humanitarian principles. One must not misjudge the man. Perhaps he recalled the days when he used to say his prayers at his mother’s knees and his heart was touched. Equally well, he may be an even more calculating villain than we’ve given him credit for.’

‘I can’t see how you can possibly say that,’ Vasco said. They were pacing to and fro on the front porch. It was bitterly cold, now, and the wind of gale force dimensions. They had a certain degree of privacy out there—it had been impossible to conduct a private conversation inside—but only a certain degree. There was a loft over the garage, approached, as was the custom in that area, by an external stairway. Earlier on they had seen one man go up those stairs and another come down: almost certainly a change of watchman who would have taken position behind the loft window. There were probably others similarly stationed in the other barn and in the windmill itself. Whether the purpose was to keep insiders from going out or outsiders from coming in, it was impossible to say. All that could be said was that it was done with great discretion. Civilian staff were employed in the windmill and even the hint of the maintenance of a guard—almost certainly an armed guard—would have done much to destroy the credibility of the Golden Gate Film Productions.

‘I not only say that he may be an exceedingly cunning villain,’ van Effen said. ‘I believe it. Sure it was moving, touching, heartrending even, a fundamentally decent man overwhelmed by his own decency. You noticed the terms of the communiqué. Miss Anne Meijer will be released as soon as conveniently possible. For conveniently possible read inconveniently impossible. People will know that the poor man is trying desperately to return Annemarie to the bosom of her family but finds it impossible to do without jeopardizing his own plans and safety. But he has made the offer. Mr David Meijer, who has not, I assume, accumulated his millions or billions or whatever without having some faint glimmer of intelligence somewhere, will know exactly what the score is and that his daughter is as much a pawn as ever and that he can still be counted on to do the right thing—as far as Samuelson is concerned—about bringing his influence to bear on whatever the government’s decision may be. The government whose decision matters, of course, is the British one. He can’t influence that. But he can influence the Dutch Government to influence the British one, which is just about as useful from Samuelson’s viewpoint.

‘And think what would have happened had David Meijer died while his daughter was still in the FFF’s custody. Unlikely, but that’s not the point. People range from the softheaded to the incurably romantic. The “died-of-a-broken-heart” syndrome has always had a powerful following. Sure, people do die of a broken heart but it’s over the months and the years and not overnight. No matter. If he had died the public reaction to Samuelson and the FFF would have been one of total revulsion and rejection. Attitudes would harden, resistance stiffen, and the average man in the street would say: “The hell with this cold, ruthless, murderous monster. Never give in to him, never. Let him do his worst and see if we care.” That, I should imagine, is the last thing that Samuelson and company want.

‘Going back to that communiqué. Notice the noble, dignified and selfless fashion in which he refused to give the reasons for his decisions. I didn’t know that David Meijer had a heart condition but for all I know it may be common knowledge. If it’s not, I’ll take long odds that it soon will be. Helmut Paderiwski, whom Samuelson calls our voice in Amsterdam, will make good and sure of that and that his voice will be heard. Radio and newspapers will be anonymously and discreetly told that David Meijer has a severe heart condition—the truth of that can soon be established—and hints dropped that his gallant hostage daughter had been pleading for his life. For the newspapers, it’s a natural, a human-angle story to tug at the very heart strings. Suitably dressed up in the usual sickening journalese, this will be manna to Samuelson, a big plus, an image that puts him in line for tabloid canonization. No matter what he’s done or is threatening to do, popular sympathy is going to swing behind him and make it all the easier for his demands to be granted. The whole world loves a reformed rogue, a bandit with a heart of gold. A toast to the Robin Hood of Amsterdam.’

‘This I do believe,’ George said. ‘Among the other accomplishments that you don’t know I have, is a smattering of Yiddish. Not much, not even a working knowledge, but a smattering. I wondered what senseless instructions he was trying to give in Yiddish to this fellow Paderiwski in Amsterdam. I don’t wonder any more. It makes sense.’

‘Lastly, of course, there’s the Dutch reverence for the guilder. What praise, people will say, can be too high for a man who spurns twenty million guilders—the fact that he doesn’t have it and probably wouldn’t have got it anyway is quite irrelevant—at the sight of a tear-drop in the corner of the eye of a lovely maiden. The twenty million, admittedly, is added to the government’s bill, but who ever cared about robbing a government. You still think, Vasco, that Samuelson was motivated only by humanitarian considerations?’

‘When you put it that way, I have to admit that I don’t. He has to be what you say—a crafty conniving villain. Well, it’s all very well you having convinced me. It’s an unfortunate fact that fourteen million other Dutchmen didn’t hear you. I’m convinced that they’re going to stay convinced to the contrary.’

‘Not all of them. Give some of them time and they’ll work it out. The great majority won’t. And that’s what the frightening thing is about Samuelson. It took me quite a time to figure out the angles here and I’m in the heart of this whole messy business. Samuelson’s got a computer mind. He did it all on his feet, within seconds and it would seem automatically, although of course it wasn’t automatic at all. Man’s brilliant. And he’s highly dangerous. It would behove us to have a very long spoon when we’re supping with Samuelson.’

‘Back to the devil again, is that it?’ George said. ‘He’s the key. Nothing else fits the lock. He’s the one who says that Riordan is prepared to use the devil’s tools to fight the devil. I wonder if Riordan uses a long spoon to sup with Samuelson. It must cost thousands of dollars a day to run this operation. Maybe tens of thousands. Agnelli hasn’t got that kind of money and I doubt whether Riordan ever earned a penny in his life.’

‘Samuelson beyond doubt. The paymaster.’

‘Pity we’re in no position to check with Interpol.’

‘Wouldn’t do us any good even if we were. If he’s as clever as I think he is. Interpol will never have heard of him. Interpol simply has no idea as to who the world’s outstanding criminals are. That’s why they’re outstanding. May not even have a criminal past at all—I say criminal past as distinct from criminal record. He’ll have no record. And perhaps, as I say, no past. He may even be what Uncle Arthur suggested he was—a bloated plutocrat, a man who has made his immense fortune in oil or shipping or something of the kind.’

‘Then we would have heard of him.’

‘We may or may not have heard of him—under another name, of course. May not even be a photograph of him in existence. Some of the world’s wealthiest men are never photographed.’

George said: ‘If he’s as wealthy as we think he may be, why is he trying to extract more from other sources?’

‘Show. I’m convinced that Samuelson neither wants nor needs money. But for all I know he may have persuaded his partners that his funds are drying up and he’s now making a show about money to divert attention from the fact that money is of no value to him and that his interests lie elsewhere. Agnelli makes no secret of the fact that he’s very interested in money and this may be Samuelson’s way of keeping him happy. He has a large staff to keep happy and they’ll be keenly interested in seeing Samuelson displaying a keen interest in money. He seems to need us—for what precise purpose we don’t yet know, we may well be here on only a contingency basis—but we need money too. And Riordan, above all, has to be kept happy, for Riordan above all needs unholy money to achieve his holy purposes.’

‘Unholy money for unholy purposes,’ George said. ‘Split mind. Dichotomy. There must be something in this Irish-American connection. We know there are men who are willing to trade heroin for bags of gold to help a so-called worthy cause. Purblindness. That the word?’

‘Something like that. In medical terms, tunnel as opposed to peripheral vision. We have to accept that it’s an illness and try to treat it as best we can.’

‘How do we go about treating this ailment? The good doctor has something on his mind?’ Despite his vast bulk George shivered in the bitter wind. ‘A prescription? A nostrum?’

‘Too late for medicine.’

‘Surgery? I wouldn’t even know which end of a scalpel to hold.’

‘You don’t have to. In the best medical parlance, surgery, at this moment, is contraindicated.’

George cleared his throat delicately, which is no easy thing to do in a gale-force wind. ‘You have suddenly developed a new-found regard for the well-being of murderous villains? Criminals who are prepared to drown God knows how many thousands of our fellow countrymen?’

‘No such sea-change, George. I know they have their quota of hard men and psychopathic nut-cases around here but do you seriously doubt for a moment that we could kill Riordan, Samuelson and Agnelli and get the girls away unharmed?’

‘I know we could—I take back my ludicrous suggestion about your tender heart. Tungsten steel, more like.’

Vasco’s expression didn’t exactly register shock but it did hold a certain amount of apprehension and disbelief.

‘You’re a policeman. Sir. Sworn to uphold the law. I mean, give them a fair trial and hang them in the morning.’

‘I’m my own court of law and I’d shoot them down like wild dogs if I thought it would solve anything but it wouldn’t. Two reasons—one psychological, one practical.

‘The psychological—curiosity, nosiness if you like. I am not convinced that those three are ordinary criminals. I am not convinced that Romero Agnelli is the murderous, ruthless killer we think he is. He bears no resemblance to his two brothers I put behind bars, who were Grade A vicious sadists. The fact that he hasn’t laid a finger on either Julie or Annemarie helps bear that out. Or Riordan. He’s no psychopath. Loony as a nut or nutty as a loon and a demagogue of some note—but only an occasional demagogue. But being loony doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re certifiable: there are quite a number of people tidied up—institutionalized, as they say—in lunatic asylums who are convinced that they are the only sane people around and that there exist great numbers of people, those responsible for wars, hunger, diseases, genocide, heroin pushers and those who talk glibly of nuclear annihilation, not to mention a few other trivial matters, who should be where they are, and who’s to say they’re not right?’

‘And then there’s the factor of demagoguery.’

‘Dema what?’ Vasco said.

‘People who are supposed to go in for ranting and raving. A word that has fallen into disuse. A word associated with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and a few dozen nationalistic leaders in the world today. There are good demagogues and bad ones. Originally it meant people who were opposed to established rules of law, usually bad rules. Christ, if you like, could have been called a demagogue. Riordan, I admit, is no member of the Holy Trinity, but I believe him to be a sincere and honest demagogue, however misguided. I do not believe him to be evil.

‘Samuelson is the nigger in the woodpile—if one can use such racist language in these days. He’s the real enigma. You know that he’s English?’

Both men shook their heads.

‘He is. A wealthy man. Obviously, a very wealthy man. Sure, rich men are normally under a compulsion to become even richer, but there’s a limit even to that and I believe Samuelson has reached that limit. As sane and stable a man as you could ever hope to meet. Beneath that bonhomie and geniality I think he’s an obsessed man. A driven man. I would like to know what drives him. What do you think of Kathleen?’

Both men stared at him, then George said: ‘Wait a minute.’ He disappeared inside the mill and reappeared shortly afterwards with three very large glasses of brandy in his hands. ‘If we are to continue this discussion in Verkhoyansk temperatures—what do you mean “Kathleen”?’

‘What I said. How does she strike you?’

‘We hardly know her,’ George said. ‘A lovely child, of course.’

‘There you go again. You and your middle-aged propensities. Vasco?’

‘I agree with George. I’ve never seen—’ he broke off. ‘She seems kind and gentle and—’

‘An accomplished actress? A case-hardened spy?’ Vasco said nothing. ‘The feminine equivalent of the smiler with the knife under the cloak?’

‘No!’ Vasco was vehement.

‘No, indeed. When she was watching that TV announcement tonight, you weren’t. You were watching her. Not that I blame you, she’s as watchable as anyone in the Netherlands. But that’s not why you were watching her. Apropos of nothing, Vasco, I think you’d make an excellent Inspector. Under, of course, the watchful eye of George, whom I hope to persuade to leave his ill-chosen role of restaurateur.’

‘Me?’ George stared at him as if either or both of them had taken leave of their senses.

‘You. You’re wasted. Keep La Caracha, of course. Annelise is the best cook in Amsterdam and you could always hire a couple of thugs, preferably ex-convicts, to take over your distasteful duties as bouncer. But that’s by the by. What did her eyes tell you, Vasco?’

‘Her eyes?’ Vasco was momentarily confused.

‘Kathleen’s. You were watching her eyes, not her face.’

‘How did you know—’

‘A combination of craftiness, cunning, deviousness and experience. Practice is all. Fear, distress?’

‘Something like that. Distinctly unhappy. Edgy. Odd thing was, she was looking like that before the announcement was made. She knew what was coming or thought or was convinced she knew what was coming and didn’t like it one little bit.’

‘Another driven person,’ van Effen said.

‘If we’re talking about drivers and driven people,’ George said, ‘you could also include Maria Agnelli. A great lip-licker is our Maria. We’ve all met people who lick their lips when they’re in a state of sadistic anticipation but when you’re in a state your lips don’t tremble. Hers did. Nervous apprehension. Revulsion, if you like.’

‘I missed that,’ van Effen said.

‘Well, we’ve each of us got only one pair of eyes,’ George said reasonably. ‘But you only had to have half an eye to see that Samuelson enjoyed every moment of the broadcast. So what do we have? Three driven people. One of those driven people, Samuelson, is also the driver, going hellbent, one might say, round a series of hairpin bends down a pretty precipitous mountain slope. The other two are driven, terrified of going over a precipice at the next hairpin.’

Vasco said in a complaining voice: ‘You’re going too fast for me. You make those two girls sound relatively harmless, maybe even nice. Joachim, Joop and those two other baby-faces in the mill here—Baader-Meinhof, RAF or whatever you call them—they are not nice.’

‘They wouldn’t agree,’ van Effen said. ‘They are the new Messiahs, dedicated to the creation of a nobler and better world. It’s merely because of the blind folly of this misguided world that assassination and the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons have become their stock-in-trade.’

‘And those two girls are their associates and allies,’ Vasco said. He sounded very bitter indeed. ‘Or do you dip your hand into this witches’ brew of murder, mayhem, blackmail, terrorism and theft and bring them out pure as the driven snow?’

‘A little dusting of soot, perhaps. Camouflage. A little coercion here, a little blackmail there, misguided love, misguided loyalty, a warped code of honour, a false sentimentality, a judicious mixture of truth and lies.’

‘ “Conned”, I believe is the word you’re after,’ George said. ‘But they weren’t conning anyone when they kidnapped Julie.’

‘Of course they were. Sure, they hoped to discourage me, but that was only the ostensible reason. Romero Agnelli would never have thought that up on his own and as for hurting my sister I’ve already given it as my opinion that he would be reluctant to tread on a beetle. The orders came from his brothers Giuseppe and Orlando, that delightful duo I put away all those years ago.’

‘But they’re in prison.’

Van Effen sighed. ‘Vasco, Vasco. Some of the most powerful and vicious gangs in the world are controlled by bosses temporarily confined to maximum-security blocks in prisons. Palermo, Cagliari, Ajaccio, Marseilles, half a dozen cities in the United States, even London and Amsterdam and Naples—there’s where the criminal overlords—overlords still with powers of life or death—hang out in their prison cells. It’s Romero’s brothers who have the orders for the sending of those menacing post-cards to me, who ordered Julie’s kidnapping. But they’re not after Julie. I don’t believe they’re even after me. Convicted criminals, oddly enough, don’t usually harbour grudges against the cops who caught them: their resentment is reserved for the judges who sentenced them. Italy is a classic example of this.’

‘If they’re not after you or Julie,’ George said slowly, ‘then my towering intellect tells me they’re after something else. And to think that Samuelson had the staggering effrontery to say that Riordan was prepared to use the devil’s tools to fight the devil.’

‘And I said that one would require a very long spoon to sup with the devil.’

‘Speaking about the devil,’ Vasco said, ‘and with all due respect, of course, what the devil are you two talking about?’

‘The devil,’ George said. ‘Or devils. Part of the flooding—or non-flooding of the country—and it may even be a pre-condition—will be that Romero’s murderous brothers be released from prison or, heaven help us, be given a free pardon.’

There was a brief hiatus while George returned inside the mill to get some more anti-pneumonia specific. When he returned van Effen said: ‘Well, so much for theory. I think we’ve got everything right except Samuelson’s ultimate motivation. We’re not even wrong about that—we just don’t know. Now, practicalities: that shouldn’t take too long. Our options are limited and, besides, it’s too damned cold.

‘We have agreed that now is not the time to dispose of the three boss villains here. There are other and non-theoretical reasons. Samuelson may not be the C-in-C, although I’m convinced he is. There may be others. He has to have someone in the vicinity of the Ijsselmeer to trigger off that damned nuclear device of theirs. They also told us, unwisely, that this is only a stop-over HQ. The other will be their main one and, almost certainly, the one from which they intend to make their final strike. We have to find it so, for the moment, we have to go along with them.

‘I’m more than prepared for the fact that they’ll breach the dykes north and south of Lelystad and flood the east and south Flevoland areas shortly after midnight because I’m equally certain that the British are going to temporize and not throw in the towel before the first bell rings. With any luck there should be no loss of life—human life, that is: I wouldn’t care to guess what is going to happen to the livestock. This nuclear device to be detonated in the Ijsselmeer tomorrow afternoon presents a more serious threat—my guess is that it would be in the Markerwaard—and I wouldn’t much care to be in the vicinity of Marken or Volendam when it went off. Nasty things, tidal waves, especially when the height is unpredictable. Things might even be unpleasant in Hoorn or Amsterdam itself, although I doubt it. After all, this is meant primarily as a demonstration for the British cabinet or whatever. The big bang will come later—considering the steadily worsening conditions that should be at the next high tide afterwards. Or the one after that. In daylight, anyway.’

Vasco said: ‘Why daylight?’

‘You think they have this helicopter just to make a nonexistent film? They want it to take them some place a land-based vehicle can’t reach. An island, perhaps, though that seems unlikely. The point is that it’s very difficult to land a helicopter in gale force winds although highly-trained air-sea rescue pilots do it regularly. But to try it in a gale in total darkness and driving rain—in zero visibility, that is—is foolhardy to the point of suicide—especially if you happen to have as part of your cargo some potentially unstable nuclear devices. So, daylight.’

‘We might be here for a couple of days yet?’ George said.

‘My guess is that we’ll be off first light in the morning. They’ll want to establish themselves in their HQ, near the scene of action. Those ground-to-ground and ground-to-air missiles—they have been deactivated?’ George nodded. ‘How are you when it comes to deactivating tactical nuclear devices?’

‘I’ve never even seen a tactical nuclear device. If I could examine one or see a blue-print, well, yes, perhaps. Otherwise, no. I know I wouldn’t feel a thing but I still don’t much fancy being vaporized.’

‘Well, we’ll have a look at them later on tonight. They’re somewhere on the premises. We don’t even have to look. You heard what Agnelli said—“I can show them to you now.” ’

‘Won’t that make them suspicious?’ George said. ‘That we didn’t ask to see them right away? They’ll be thinking we have been having a conference and have dreamed up some devilish scheme.’

‘Let them think what they like and be as suspicious as they like. We’re as safe as men in a church. We, my friends, are indispensable.’ George and Vasco looked at each other, then at van Effen, but said nothing. ‘We’re also not very bright. Joop, Joachim or some of their psychopathic Red Army Faction pals stole those nuclear devices from the US NATO arms dump near Metnitz on the night of February 3rd. Something else happened on that same night.’

‘February 3rd,’ George said. ‘Of course. We really are not very bright. That was the night the De Dooms ammunition dump was blown out of existence. Samuelson’s explosive experts trying to replenish their supplies. An enormous crater. No replenishments and, of course, no experts. No wonder the FFF were so desperate for our supplies and services. We’re probably the only people around who could set off a squib. Lloyd’s of London would approve of this.’

Vasco said: ‘A marvellous insurance policy, to be sure. But has the thought occurred to you that Joop or one of his lunatic associates may know how to trigger those nuclear devices?’

‘The thought has occurred,’ van Effen said. ‘So we’ll just have to attend to the lunatics or the devices, won’t we? Or both. But before we start attending to anything I suggest we go inside, have a wash and brush up, find out how thoroughly they have examined our luggage, listen to the next riveting communication from the Dutch or British governments or the FFF, then join our genial hosts for dinner. One would imagine that a man of Samuelson’s resources could run to a cordon bleu chef.’

Romero Agnelli greeted them genially on their entrance and at once pressed jonge jenevers on them. ‘You must be needing this after your long stay outside. I mean, it’s pretty cold tonight.’

‘Not for us,’ van Effen said. ‘We’re fresh-air fanatics.’

‘I thought that applied only to the English. Anyway, I trust you enjoyed your stroll.’

‘If you call pacing up and down your verandah a stroll, then, yes, we did.’ Van Effen knew that Agnelli was perfectly well aware that they had not once left the verandah.

‘And, of course, the opportunity for a private conversation.’ Agnelli was still smiling.

‘Well, yes. Pondering our probable future, about which we know precious little. After all, you and your friends are hardly very communicative. We don’t know what we’re here for, what services we are expected to perform, where we’re going, even when we’re going.’

‘That last I can tell you—eight o’clock tomorrow morning. As for the rest, well, you and I are great believers in the need-to-know principle.’

‘True, true. But there’s one thing that we do need to know—where do we sleep tonight? On the floor?’

‘Dear me, no. Mind you, this is no Amstel but we do have accommodation of sorts. Come, I’ll show you. I’ve already had your baggage brought up.’

He led the way up the curving staircase and along to a door at the end of a passageway. The room beyond was of moderate size with three single beds. Agnelli indicated a door at the far end of the room.

‘Bathroom. No marble bath, no gold taps, but serviceable enough.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Dinner in twenty minutes.’ He left, still smiling.

Van Effen and George sat on their beds, engaged in desultory conversation, while Vasco looked around. In this particular kind of looking-around Vasco was a specialist, very meticulous, very thorough. After a few minutes he said: ‘Clear. No bugs.’

George hoisted his medium-sized suitcase on to his knees. It was one of those fancy cases with combination locks, four figures by each of the two keyholes, eight in all. George peered at it closely.

‘Combinations as set?’ van Effen said.

‘As set. But not untouched. Very tiny scratches. This case is brand new, never been used before. Normally, I wouldn’t be seen dead with this junior-executive status symbol but Annelise gave it to me for my birthday and it would have been more than my life’s worth to have left home without it. It’s been opened and closed and in very short order, too. I don’t know of a safe-breaker in the Netherlands who could have done this.

Anyone who knows his job can open a conventional safe—a pair of good ears or a doctor’s stethoscope can hear the tumblers click. No tumblers in this type of lock.’

Van Effen said: ‘I’ll bet O’Brien could open the vaults of the Amsterdam—Rotterdam bank with a bent hairpin.’

‘I wouldn’t doubt it.’ George adjusted the combination figures and opened the case. ‘A very neat character. Everything exactly where it was except of course where it’s naturally settled in the process of being carried.’

‘Yours, Vasco?’

Vasco unlocked his case. ‘Untouched. Spare Smith & Wesson magazines still there.’

‘Naturally.’ Van Effen opened his own case—it hadn’t even been locked—lifted out a rather battered toilet bag and took from it a burgundy-coloured aerosol can with a chrome top. The side of the can bore the legend: Yves Saint Laurent—Pour Homme—Mousse à Raser. The aerosol, in fact, contained no shaving foam.

‘Well,’ George said, ‘nobody’s been touching or sniffing the contents of that lot.’

‘Obviously.’ Van Effen replaced the aerosol. ‘If they had they’d still be here. Horizontal on the carpet. I doubt if they even opened my toilet bag. If there was anything worth finding, they must have reckoned, it would have been in George’s thief-proof case.’ He took a small tablet of soap from his toilet bag and handed it to Vasco. ‘You know what to do with this.’

‘Hygiene is all.’ Vasco went into the bathroom while van Effen and George crossed to the window opposite the beds and opened it. As far as they could judge in the darkness they were about fifteen feet above the cobbled courtyard below, a courtyard shrouded in almost total darkness.

‘Very satisfactory, George, don’t you think?’

‘Very. Only snag is that you’ll have to make a pretty long detour to keep in the darkness in order to reach the back of the barn. And have you thought of anti-personnel land-mines—you know, the nasty kind that jump three feet in the air before exploding?’

‘George, this place is run and staffed entirely by local villagers. If, say, a laundry-maid was just kind of accidentally blown in half—’

‘True. Point taken. But if you were to run into a patrolling member of the FFF—’

‘Anybody out on patrol on a night like this has to be a head case. Gale, driving rain, bitter cold, thunder and lightning due any time—’

‘But—’

‘I’m not going to run into anyone. Someone might run into me. Velvet gloves. Vasco’s taking his time, isn’t he?’ They moved to the bathroom door, tried to open it and found it locked. Van Effen rattled the door handle.

‘Put out your light,’ Vasco said. They did as he asked. Vasco opened the door of the bathroom which was in total darkness. ‘Sorry about that, gentlemen, but I didn’t want the watcher in the shadows to know that he was being watched by another watcher in the shadows. Not, mind you, that our fellow-watcher is very much in the shadows.’

The bathroom window was, in fact, directly opposite the door in the loft of the barn that held the army truck on the ground floor. The man standing in the doorway was making no great effort to conceal his presence and the courtyard light projecting from the mill verandah was quite strong.

‘Doesn’t seem to me to be guarding against anything very much,’ van Effen said. ‘Unenthusiastic. Don’t blame him. Must seem like a pretty useless exercise on a night like this.’

‘And a pretty freezing exercise, too,’ George said.

‘He generates his own heat,’ Vasco said. ‘Wait.’

They didn’t have to wait long. After less than two minutes the guard reached behind him, lifted a bottle to his lips and took what appeared to be a very considerable swig from it.

‘No mineral water, that’s for sure,’ van Effen said. ‘Let’s get inside.’

They closed the bathroom door behind them and switched on the bedroom light. Vasco handed van Effen a small metallic object sheathed in polythene. Van Effen dropped it in his pocket.

‘I’ve stuck the two pieces of soap together and left them in hot water,’ Vasco said. ‘Should be mushed together again pretty soon. I have an idea. Just after I got into the bathroom I saw a man crossing the courtyard towards the barn. That’s when I switched off the light. He disappeared round the back of the barn, you know, where the outside stairs are, and then joined the man who was then standing at the loft door. Changing of the guard, so to speak. That was exactly at seven o’clock. It occurred to me that it might be very convenient if the condition of my throat has deteriorated so badly that I will be unable to join you for dinner. It might be very convenient if we found out how regularly they changed guards.’

‘It would indeed,’ van Effen said. ‘An excellent suggestion, Vasco. Should have thought of it myself. Promotion guaranteed—if, that is, we survive this lot. I’m sure Samuelson will be most distressed. Probably insist on sending you another toddy.’

‘Make sure it’s a large one, if you please. I’m feeling very weak.’

‘Mr Danilov. George.’ As van Effen and George descended the stairs into the living-room, Samuelson advanced to greet them, beaming as if they were long-lost friends. ‘Just in time for the next TV broadcast. Then dinner. But where’s our dashing young Lieutenant?’

‘Our young Lieutenant isn’t feeling at all dashing. Throat’s worse. Flu, I think.’

Samuelson clucked his tongue and shook his head. ‘Damn flu’s everywhere these days. This awful weather. Most important that he’s reasonably fit tomorrow. Herta!’ This to a flaxen-haired young girl who was setting the table for the evening meal. ‘A toddy. A strong one. Take it up to the Lieutenant’s room. Dear me, dear me. Ah!’

Agnelli had just turned up the volume of the TV set and a rock band, which had been playing, mercifully, in apparent mime, faded from the screen to be replaced by the accustomed announcer looking, if possible, even more lugubrious and funereal than he had on the previous occasion.

‘With reference to the threats being made against our country by the unidentified group calling themselves the FFF, the Ministry of Defence has just issued a statement. The British Government and ours are in constant contact but no announcement as to the results of those negotiations can yet be made pending the outcome of discussions between Whitehall and Stormont. Stormont is the parliament or governing body of Northern Ireland which is, of course, next to ourselves, the country most closely concerned with the outcome of those negotiations. Whitehall, it must be said, finds itself in a most difficult and peculiar position. Ulster, Northern Ireland, that is, although an integral part of Great Britain, retains a certain degree of autonomy as far as decisions relating to its own future is concerned. When further news comes to hand the country will be immediately informed.

‘The FFF have informed us that they will issue a further communiqué after this broadcast. This will be transmitted to you at 8 p.m.

‘In the circumstances, the latest report from the meteorological office is relevant. The wind, due north, is Force Nine and strengthening. Torrential rain is sweeping over most of Scandinavia and is heaviest of all over the Netherlands. The North Sea is expected to reach its highest level for at least the past quarter century inside the next forty-eight hours.’

The announcer’s image faded and Agnelli switched off the set.

‘Dear me, dear me,’ Samuelson said. ‘Things do look very unpromising. Or very promising. All depends upon one’s point of view.’ He gestured towards the bar. ‘Romero, see to it that our friends are not neglected. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I shall be back shortly.’ He disappeared up the stairs.

While the Agnelli brothers busied themselves behind the bar van Effen wandered aimlessly around the room apparently admiring the paintings and the bronze and copper artefacts that decorated the walls. He paid particular but very brief attention to the telephone: the telephone number had been carefully and thoroughly inked out, which neither surprised nor disturbed him. He was reasonably certain that he could, later that night, have given that number to the police HQ in the Marnixstraat in Amsterdam, which would have enabled them to pinpoint the exact whereabouts of the windmill, but that would not have suited his purpose: the answer to the machinations of the FFF lay elsewhere. Samuelson, presumably and for reasons best known to himself, had gone upstairs to use another telephone to deliver the text of the next FFF communiqué.

Dinner that night was a rather odd affair. Not that there was anything odd about the food. Obviously, there wasn’t a cordon bleu chef within miles. The Dutch, taken by and large, are not gourmets. Your standard Dutch cook or housewife consider it a matter of personal pride and honour and an insult to their guests if they can see any part of the plate under the mound of food that covers it: the food was palatable enough but Michelin would not have come there a second time.

What was odd was the contrasting behaviour of the diners. Samuelson, Romero Agnelli, van Effen and George were in an expansive, genial and talkative mood. Daniken made an occasional contribution but was clearly no conversationalist. The Rev. Riordan, apart from delivering a lengthy and, in the circumstances, extremely hypocritical blessing before the meal, remained grave and thoughtful and totally silent throughout the meal: Riordan, van Effen reflected, if not quite deranged or demented, was totally detached from reality and possessed of an incredible naiveté. Leonardo was equally silent. He, too, was thinking, but only of his stomach: for a man of his diminutive stature, he was an awesome trencherman. They spoke only when spoken to, smiled but seldom and for the most part were remote and withdrawn to the point of being dispirited.

At one point van Effen said to Romero Agnelli: ‘And where’s our friend O’Brien tonight? He’s not down with the flu, I trust?’

‘O’Brien’s as fit as a fiddle. He’s elsewhere.’

Van Effen said: ‘Ah.’

Samuelson smiled. ‘You really are a singularly incurious person, Mr Danilov.’

‘Would it help any if I knew where he was or what he was doing?’

‘No. Romero has spoken to me several times about your need-to-know philosophy. It is one with which I am in entire agreement.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Romero, it lacks one minute to eight o’clock.’

It was the same newscaster. He looked as if he had just heard that his entire family had been wiped out in an air crash.

‘We have here the latest communiqué from the FFF.’ He didn’t sound at all like a newsreader, he intoned the words like a minister delivering a funeral oration. ‘It is very brief and reads as follows: “We place no credence in the Ministry of Defence’s statement. We think the Dutch and British governments are either stalling or don’t believe in our threats. Or both. We do not intend to stall. We do intend to make them believe our threats. The dykes north and south of Lelystad will be breached a few minutes after midnight. The nuclear device in the Ijsselmeer will be detonated at 2 p.m. tomorrow. We beg you to believe that these two incidents will be regarded as the merest trifles compared to the disaster that will engulf the Netherlands within twenty-four hours of the detonation of the nuclear device.” That is the end of their communiqué.

‘We have also had a further statement from the Ministry of Defence. They say that they have no comment to make on this latest communiqué on the basis that there is no way that they can predict the irrational workings of the minds of terrorists.’ Samuelson clicked his tongue and shook his head sadly. ‘They say they are prepared to believe that the terrorists are insane enough to carry out their insane threats’—more cluckings and shakings from Samuelson—’and can do no more than warn all local authorities to carry out all possible means of protection.

‘Netherlands experts and British nuclear scientists have agreed on the probable results of such a nuclear explosion. It is assumed that this will take place in the Markerwaard. If this device is located in or near the centre of the Markerwaard, the tsunami—the tidal wave—reaching the shores should be of minor proportions, averaging between sixty and seventy centimetres. Should it be placed close inshore the wave could be several times as high and the local results could be disastrous.

‘The nation will be immediately informed of any further developments.’

Agnelli switched off the set. Samuelson, half-smiling, looked at van Effen and said: ‘Do I detect just a trace of a half frown, Mr Danilov?’ Van Effen made no reply. ‘Romero has told me that you are prepared to react in an extremely violent form to any threat to the lives of your fellow citizens or, rather, to the citizens of your adopted country. Romero is of the opinion that you and your two friends are highly dangerous men. I concur. You are, I believe, heavily armed.’

Van Effen opened his jacket to demonstrate that he wasn’t carrying his shoulder-holstered Smith and Wesson, then turned to Agnelli, who was sitting next to him, crossed his knees and pulled up his right trouser leg to show that he wasn’t carrying his Lilliput either. ‘I do not consider guns as being an essential part of dressing for dinner. Do you think I would be so mad as to start a gun-fight in the company of four beautiful young ladies? Any ladies, come to that?’

‘No. My mistake. The nuclear device is in the Markerwaard but is located precisely in its centre. Do you believe me?’

‘If I had your unpleasantly suspicious mind I would say that I’d wait until five past two tomorrow afternoon to find out. As it happens, I believe you. Now, Mr Samuelson, you know that I do not normally probe into anyone’s affairs but I must confess to being just a little concerned about those nuclear devices. My two friends and I are acknowledged explosives experts but we know nothing about nuclear devices. We wouldn’t recognize one if we saw it, far less know how to arm it, activate it or deactivate it. But we do know they are nasty, jiggly and unpredictable things. I do know you have some on the premises, although I don’t know how many. What I do know is that I have a healthy regard for my own skin. I assume you’re transporting them elsewhere—they can be of no use to you here. I have no wish to be aboard whatever form of transportation is taking those devices from here to wherever elsewhere may be.’

Samuelson smiled. ‘Mr Daniken here shares your sentiments exactly.’

‘What has Mr Daniken got to do with it?’

‘Mr Daniken is our helicopter pilot. He doesn’t want to carry those things.’

‘I didn’t refuse to, Mr Samuelson,’ Daniken said. ‘I said I was highly reluctant because of the great risk involved. I agree with Mr Danilov. I don’t know how unstable or temperamental those damn things are. Flying conditions are atrocious, just on the limit. With an updraught or wind shear we can go up or down a hundred feet in two seconds. We could make a heavy landing, a crash landing or, heaven help us, just crash.’

‘You and Mr Danilov can relax. Should have mentioned it before, but we made our minds up just before dinner. No helicopter. We have decided to use the army truck with which Mr Danilov and his friends have so thoughtfully provided us. Those devices are quite small and can easily be concealed in what looks like a couple of extra long-range petrol tanks. We’ll have three men dressed in uniforms, Ylvisaker as a full-scale lieutenant-colonel, and the rest—’

‘Where did you get the uniforms?’ van Effen said.

‘I told you,’ Samuelson said patiently. ‘We’re making a war film. The rest of us go by helicopter.’

‘Must be some helicopter.’

‘A war film, I said. A gunship. The end of the Vietnam war caught the US Air Force on the hop and they had overproduced. Going for a song. Elderly but fully serviceable. Stripped of armament, of course, but we ordered dummies. I suggest we move to more comfortable chairs for our brandies, liqueurs or whatever.’

Van Effen said: ‘If I may be excused, I’d like to have a look at the Lieutenant.’

‘Give him my sympathies,’ Samuelson said. ‘I suggest he might appreciate another toddy.’

‘Thank you. I’m sure he would. If he’s not asleep, that is.’

Vasco was not asleep. He was comfortably seated in a small armchair that he had brought into the bathroom. Using the pencil beam of the variably hooded torch which was an indispensable item of his travelling equipment, van Effen handed Vasco the glass.

‘Compliments of Mr Samuelson.’

‘Very civil of him. Well, it’s eight-twenty now and the same character is still on watch. Judging from his performance with that bottle he must be half sloshed by this time. Like me, as you can see, he’s found an armchair. I’m surprised he hasn’t dropped off by this time. Anyway, I’ll keep watch until they change guard. The toddy will help sustain me through the long watches of the night.’

Van Effen gave him a brief resumé of the Ministry of Defence’s statement and the FFF’s reply, promised that he and George would be back by nine o’clock and left.

He returned to the living-room to find that the group seated in armchairs had been considerably depleted.

‘The Lieutenant seems to have benefited from that first toddy. He doesn’t sound quite so hoarse. Very drowsy but not too drowsy to attack the second toddy. His thanks. And dear me, dear me, the lovely young ladies have departed. Shame. But I’m not surprised. They were hardly what you might call gay and vivacious at the table tonight.’

‘They said they were tired,’ Samuelson said. Julie, van Effen knew, had not been tired. She was a notoriously poor air traveller and the thought of travelling in a helicopter—she’d never been in one in her life—must have been a nightmare. ‘Whatever have they done to make them tired?’

‘Nothing. They’re just nervous and apprehensive.’

‘Just like George and myself.’

Samuelson surveyed him dispassionately. ‘I doubt whether you and your big friend have ever been nervous and apprehensive in your lives.’

‘There’s always a first time. And where’s the holy father?’

‘You know the Reverend doesn’t drink. But it’s not that. Every night before he goes to sleep he spends an hour in meditation and prayer.’

Van Effen said sombrely: ‘Let’s hope he includes in his prayers the souls of the victims of his nuclear toys.’

The silence that followed, of which van Effen seemed to be quite unaware, was, to say the least, embarrassing. It was Romero, in a clear attempt to break the silence, who said hastily: ‘Speaking of those nuclear toys, as you call them, I told you earlier I could show them to you. As an explosives expert, I thought you might be interested—’

‘Not I.’ Van Effen waved an indifferent hand. ‘Same old principles—need-to-know and would it help any if I saw them?’ He was aware of George’s momentary slight frown but knew that no one else had seen it. Van Effen paused, as if something had just occurred to him, then said: ‘Someone has to be able to trigger off those nuclear devices. Don’t tell me it’s Joop and his psychopathic pals.’

‘It is indeed, as you say in your disparaging fashion, Joop and his psychopathic friends.’ The words held a rebuke but the tone didn’t: it required no telepathy to realize that Samuelson shared van Effen’s opinion of the Red Army Faction. ‘When they got hold of those devices in Metnitz, they also obtained copies of the operating instructions. One would have been useless without the other.’

‘Remind me not to be within five kilometres of Joop and company when they arm either of those devices. A palm-reader once told me I had a long life-line but she could have been wrong. How is this device in the Markerwaard to be detonated?’

‘Pre-set timing device.’

‘And the two other devices?’

‘By radio control.’

‘God help us all. Make that ten kilometres.’

‘You don’t trust them?’

‘I wouldn’t trust Joop and his friends with a firework. They are fanatics and fanatics have unstable minds. Unstable hands also, probably. No, I don’t trust them. Neither, I suspect, do you.’

‘You still wouldn’t like to see those devices?’

‘I presume you’re not lunatic enough to keep those in the mill.’

‘They’re a kilometre away in a secure underground cellar.’

‘I’ve no intention of going out in that monsoon. And though you might not be lunatic I think you’re guilty of a grave error of judgement. To detonate any device by radio doesn’t call for the mind of an Einstein but it can be tricky and a job for experts. Joop and his band of trusty experts have never detonated a charge in their lives.’

‘And how would you know that?’

‘That’s being simple-minded. Why did you have to call me in for the palace job?’

‘True, true. Would your scruples, or your objections to monsoons, prevent you from having a look at the operating instructions? We have them in this room.’

Van Effen looked at him then looked away. The TV was on, showing a weirdly dressed quartet who were presumably singing, but, perhaps fortunately, in silence: the volume control had been turned off. Samuelson and his friends were presumably expecting another newscast. Van Effen looked back at Samuelson.

‘Scruples? What you have in mind, of course, is that we should do your work—your dirty work—for you instead of those deranged amateurs. Do you know what would happen if those explosions resulted in the deaths of any citizens?’

‘Yes. You would ensure that I joined the departed. I wouldn’t like that at all.’

‘Let’s see the plans.’

Romero Agnelli removed a couple of papers and handed one each to van Effen and George. George was the first to speak and that only after a few seconds.

‘This isn’t a half-kilo device. It’s only for the equivalent of fifty tons of TNT.’

Samuelson came very close to smirking. ‘The equivalent of ten tons would have suited me equally well. But it’s useful to exaggerate the terror potential, don’t you think?’

George didn’t say what he thought. After less than a minute he looked up and spoke again. ‘Only moderately complicated and very precise. Two snags. The first is that Joop speaks fractured English and people who have difficulty in speaking only the simplest form of a language usually are pretty hopeless when it comes to reading or writing it. The second snag is the jargon.’

‘Jargon?’

‘Technical terms,’ van Effen said. ‘They might as well be in Sanskrit as far as Joop is concerned.’

‘Well?’

Van Effen handed his paper back to Agnelli. ‘We’ll have to think and talk about it.’

Samuelson tried, not altogether successfully, to smother the smile of a man who knows he has won his point. For the next minute or two they remained, sipping their brandies in comparative and apparently companionable silence, when the singers, if such they were, slowly faded from the screen to be replaced by the now familiar figure of the tragedy-stricken newscaster.

‘The government have just announced that they have just received two more demands from the FFF. The first of those concerned the demand for a hundred and twenty million guilders and how it is to be transferred. The government does not say whether it will accede to the request and refuses to discuss the nature of the transfer. The second demand is for the release of two prisoners who were imprisoned several years ago for crimes of extreme violence. The government refuses to disclose the names of the prisoners.

‘We would remind viewers that we shall be on the air again at midnight to find out whether the FFF have, in fact, breached the Flevoland dykes.’

Agnelli switched off the set. ‘Satisfactory,’ Samuelson said. He was actually rubbing his hands together. ‘Eminently satisfactory.’

‘Seems like a pretty silly and stupid broadcast to me,’ van Effen said.

‘Not at all.’ Samuelson was positively beaming. ‘The nation now knows that the government has received details of our demands and, as they have not outright rejected them it probably means that they are going to accede to them. It also shows how weak the government is and in how strong a position we are.’

‘That’s not what I mean. They’ve been stupid. They didn’t have to make that announcement at all.’

‘Oh, yes, they did. They were told that if they didn’t we would radio the communiqué to Warsaw who would be just too delighted to rebroadcast it to Western Europe.’

‘You have a transmitter that can reach as far as Warsaw?’

‘We haven’t got a transmitter, period. Nor do we know anyone in Warsaw. The threat was enough. Your government,’ Samuelson said with considerable satisfaction, ‘is now reduced to such a state of fear and trepidation, that they believe anything we say. Besides, they would look pretty silly, wouldn’t they, if the announcement came through Poland?’

Van Effen refused the offer of a second brandy, he had every reason to keep a clear mind for the next hour or two, and said goodnight.

Samuelson looked at him in some surprise. ‘But you’ll be coming down to see the midnight broadcast?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t doubt your ability to carry out your threat.’

‘I’m going too,’ George said, ‘but I shall be back down. Just going to see how the Lieutenant is. Incidentally, Mr Samuelson, if I may—’

‘Another toddy for the young lieutenant. Certainly, my friend, certainly.’

‘He may have a bit of a head in the morning,’ George said, ‘but he should be halfway towards recovery in the morning.’

Vasco, was in fact, in excellent health and showing no signs of an incipient headache.

‘Still the same lad. I should imagine the changeover will be at nine. Some guard. Spends most of the time with his chin on his chest then jerks awake.’

‘Let’s hope his relief is of the same cast of mind. Me, I’m going to have a snooze. If he’s still there at, say, nine-twenty, give me a shake. If he’s relieved at nine, shake me at ten. How do you operate the radio on that army truck? And what’s its range?’

‘Unlimited. Well, a hundred, two hundred kilometres, I’m not sure. Operation is simple. Just lift the receiver and press the red button. The transmitter is pre-set to the nearest army command base which is always manned.’

‘I particularly don’t want to talk to the army. I want to talk to Marnixstraat.’

‘Easy. Standard tuning dial, standard wavebands and a switch beside the button for illumination that picks out the wave-lengths very easily indeed.’

Van Effen nodded, stretched out on a bed and closed his eyes.

TEN

George woke van Effen at 10 p.m.

‘New sentry took over at nine. Hardly seems an improvement on the other one except, that is, from your point of view. He’s middle-aged, fat, wears two overcoats, is sitting in the armchair with a rug over his knees and, you’ll be pleased to hear, also has a bottle in his hand.’

‘Sounds like my kind of man.’ Van Effen rose and changed his trousers for a pair of denims.

Vasco said: ‘What’s that? Your battle uniform?’

‘What’s Samuelson going to say if he sees me in sodden trousers or even dry trousers that are so wrinkled that it will look as if I’d fallen into a river?’

‘Ah. Well, you’re going to get wet enough, that’s for sure. Rain’s heavier than ever. There are times when we can hardly see the lad in the loft doorway.’

‘Suits me fine. That barn wasn’t built yesterday and old floor-boards in old lofts tend to creak. With rain like this drumming on the roof he won’t be able to hear a thing. Besides, judging from George’s general description, the sentry is probably half deaf anyway.’ He strapped on his Smith and Wesson, shrugged into his jacket and put the aerosol can in one pocket and the hooded torch in the other.

‘Velvet gloves,’ George said.

Vasco said: ‘What’s that?’

‘Silenced pistol and a knockout gas canister. That’s what he calls velvet gloves.’

Van Effen dug into an inside pocket, brought out a small leather wallet, unzipped it, took out the metallic contents, examined them, then returned them to the wallet and pocket.

‘Skeleton keys and picklocks,’ George said approvingly. ‘No self-respecting detective should be without them.’

Vasco said: ‘What happens if you don’t come back, sir?’

‘I shall be back. It’s five past ten now. I should be back by ten-thirty. If I’m not back by eleven go downstairs. Say nothing. No doomladen speeches, no warnings that their end is nigh. Kill Samuelson. Cripple the Agnelli brothers and Daniken, and, if Riordan is there, him also. Remove all weapons of course and one of you keep an eye on them and make sure that nobody tries to stagger out of the room and summon help while the other gets the girls. As your guns are silenced, there should be no interruptions. Then get the hell out of it. If anyone gets in your way, you know what to do.’

‘I see.’ Vasco looked and sounded more than slightly shocked. ‘And how do we get the hell out of it?’

Van Effen touched the pocket where he had replaced his wallet of skeleton keys and picklocks. ‘What do you think those are for?’

‘Ah. The army truck.’

‘Indeed. As soon as you get under way, call up the army or the cops. Give them the approximate location of this place—we know it’s somewhere between Leerdam and Gorinchen—and leave the rest to them.’

Vasco said: ‘They might try to escape by helicopter.’

‘You have the alternative of shooting Daniken in both shoulders or taking him with you. I’m virtually certain that none of this will happen. I don’t want it to happen and that’s not primarily because by the time it happens I’ll probably be dead. It would be a confession of failure and I don’t like being associated with failure. It would be a most unsatisfactory conclusion: in fact, it would be no conclusion at all. Samuelson has another headquarters and, as we have agreed, other associates: O’Brien has almost certainly departed this evening to associate with those other associates. Even although I doubt it, some of those associates may—I repeat may—be in a position to carry out his plans to a successful conclusion.’ He opened the window. ‘Back at ten-thirty.’

He slid down the two knotted sheets and vanished into the shadows.

George and Vasco went into the darkened bathroom. Vasco said: ‘He is a cold-blooded bastard, isn’t he?’

George said: ‘Um.’

‘But he’s a killer.’

‘I know he has killed and would do so again. But he’s very selective, is our Peter. Nobody who has ever departed this world and at his hands has ever been mourned by society.’

Four minutes later Vasco caught George by the arm. ‘See?’

They saw. The sentry had just taken a long swig from his bottle, laid it on the floor beside him, clasped his hands over his rug and appeared to relapse into some kind of yoga-like contemplation. The shadow that had loomed behind him resolved itself into the unmistakable form of van Effen, whose right hand curved round and held the aerosol can an inch or two from the sentry’s face for a period of not more than two seconds. He then pocketed the aerosol, hooked his hands under the man’s knees and eased him forward several inches to ensure that he wouldn’t topple sideways from his armchair, picked up a bottle from the floor, poured some of the contents over the sentry’s face, emptied the remainder of the contents over the front of his clothes, wrapped the fingers of the unconscious man’s right hand round the bottle, thrust hand and bottle partly under the rug, tightened the rug to ensure that hand and bottle would remain where they were then vanished into the gloom.

‘Well, now,’ Vasco said, ‘there’s one character who isn’t going to report himself for dereliction of duty because of dropping off into a drunkem slumber.’

‘Our Peter doesn’t do things by halves. Let’s see now. A two-second burst. He should come to in about half an hour. Peter explained those things to me once.’

‘Won’t he know he has been drugged?’

‘That’s the beauty of it! Leaves no trace. That apart, what would you think if you woke up with your clothes reeking of schnapps or whatever and your hand clasped round an empty bottle?’

The stairs, broad and very creaking and just behind where the sentry slept, led directly to the floor of the barn, now converted into a temporary garage. Torch in hand, van Effen descended quickly, loosed the bolts on the retaining half of the entrance door and turned his attention to the army truck. The exterior was as it had been except that the number plates had been changed. He then wriggled under the truck, scraped clear an area on the underside of the chassis just forward of the rear axle and attached to it the magnetic clamp of the metallic device which Vasco had removed from the bar of soap. Thirty seconds later he was in the driver’s seat and through to the Marnixstraat.

‘Put me through to Colonel de Graaf, please.’

‘Who is speaking?’

‘Never mind who’s speaking. The Colonel.’

‘He’s at home.’

‘He is not. He’s there. Ten seconds or you’re an ex-policeman tomorrow.’

In just ten seconds the Colonel was on the phone. ‘You were a bit harsh on that poor lad.’ His voice held a complaining note.

‘He’s either a fool, an incompetent or was improperly instructed. He was told to keep open an anonymous line.’ Van Effen spoke in Polish, which the Colonel understood as well as he did. Dutch police changed their wave-lengths at infrequent intervals and had done so again only that day. As in every major city in the world, villains occasionally picked up police wavelengths. But the probabilities against a villain who understood Polish picking up a changed wave-length were astronomical. ‘Please switch on your recorder. I don’t know how much time I have and I don’t want to repeat myself.’

‘Proceed.’

‘I shall spell names backwards. We are south of—this is a name—Utrecht—and between—two other names—Leerdam and Gorinchen. You have that?’

‘I have that.’

‘Do not attempt to locate and do not attempt to attack. “The Principals are elsewhere” ’—it was an outright lie but the Colonel was not to know that—’and it would achieve only the deaths of five people who don’t deserve to die. You know the people I mean?’

‘I know.’

‘We have here the army truck. You know which one. It has changed the identification plates. I will give you the new numbers. Backwards.’ Van Effen did so. ‘It will be carrying the nuclear devices you know about.’

‘What!’

‘I have attached a magnetic transmitter bug to this vehicle. Have an unmarked police car in the vicinity as from, say, 7 a.m. It is to track this truck at a safe distance. This police car will also be in radio contact with two or three Army Commando trucks lying to the west. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this truck will be heading towards the Scheldt area. There will be three people in that truck, all dressed in Dutch army uniforms, including a bogus lieutenant-colonel called Ylvisaker, who may even call himself by that name. I want that truck seized along with its occupants and the seizure to be kept in complete secrecy. If you release that news then the responsibility for the flooding of the country will lie in your hands.’

De Graaf’s voice took on an even more complaining note. ‘You don’t have to threaten me, my boy.’

‘I apologize. I am under intense pressure and have to make my points in as impressive a way as I can. One other thing. Have TV and radio announce—or just say, if you like—that they are to be of good heart and that you are closing in on the Rotterdam and Scheldt areas. The reason to be given is that you want every citizen thereabouts to be on continuous alert and report anything abnormal to the police. This is purely psychological and I don’t believe our friends are very good at psychology. But please, please, apart from taking this truck in complete secrecy, no other attempts at interference.’

‘Understood. I have someone with me who would like a word with you and who speaks Polish even better than you and I do.’

‘Spell his name backwards.’

De Graaf did so and Wieringa’s voice came on the phone. ‘Congratulations, my boy.’

‘Those may be a bit premature, Minister. I can’t for instance, stop the breaching of the Flevoland dykes or the detonation of the Markewaard device. A further thought has occurred to me. You might have the media include in their broadcasts about the Rotterdam area that Whitehall and Stormont have arrived at an agreement to begin active and immediate negotiations.’

‘The two parliaments might not like it.’

‘I’m a Dutchman. Instruct them to like it.’

‘Some obscure psychological motive again, I suppose. Very well, I agree. Frankly, my boy, how do you rate our chances?’

‘Better than evens, Minister. They trust us. They have to trust us.’ He explained briefly about the De Doorns ammunition dump and the RAF’s inability to handle radio-controlled devices. ‘Apart from that, I’m not only sure but know that they don’t distrust or suspect us. They are basically naive, complacent, over confident and sure of themselves. They lack the devious minds of honest detectives. I have to move, sir. I’ll call again as soon as whenever possible.’

In the Marnixstraat, the Minister of Defence said: ‘You agree with van Effen’s assessment, Colonel?’

‘If that’s what he thinks then that’s what I think.’

‘Why isn’t that young man—well, young compared to us—not Chief of Police somewhere?’

‘He’ll be the chief here in the not too distant future. In the meantime, I need him.’

‘Don’t we all,’ Wieringa sighed. ‘Don’t we all.’

Van Effen climbed up to the loft, patted the sentry lightly on the cheek, got no reaction and left. Three minutes later he was inside the bedroom. Vasco looked pointedly at his watch.

‘Ten thirty-three,’ Vasco said accusingly.

‘Sorry. I was detained. Anyway, that’s a fine way to welcome back a man who may just have escaped the jaws of death.’

‘There was trouble?’

‘No. Clockwork.’

‘You didn’t unpick the garage lock,’ George said, also accusingly.

‘Another warm welcome. Where are the congratulations for a mission successfully accomplished? Would you have picked that lock if, at the window next to our bathroom, you had seen the Reverend Riordan, who seems to meditate on his feet and pray with his eyes open, gazing out pensively over the courtyard? Instead, I unbolted the garage doors from the inside.’

‘I hope you remembered to re-bolt them.’

‘George!’

‘Sorry. What detained you?’

‘Wieringa, the Defence Minister. He was in the Marnixstraat with Colonel de Graaf. If you refrain from asking questions, I’ll tell you word for word how our conversations went.’

He did so and at the end George said: ‘Satisfactory. You fixed the bug, of course. So why did you go to all this devious trouble of getting hold of the operating instructions for the devices?’

‘Have you ever known of a cop—or soldier—for that matter—who never made a mistake?’

George pondered briefly then said: ‘Present company excepted, no. True, we may yet need that information—Ylvisaker and his friends might just miss the road-blocks. But you didn’t tell them that we were going by helicopter?’

‘I did not. For the same reason that I didn’t take up Samuelson’s unspoken offer to tell us where we are going. If I had done, his immediate reaction—our Defence Minister’s that is—would be to have called his counterpart in Whitehall to send over a Nimrod, the British bomber that is a virtual airborne radar station and which could have tracked us from here to wherever we’re going without our knowing a thing about it.’ He smiled. ‘You wear, what shall we say, George, a rather peculiar expression. The same thought had occurred to yourself?’

‘It had.’ George looked thoroughly chagrined. ‘I thought it rather a good idea, myself.’

‘I don’t. I have no doubt that the Royal Air Force would have been delighted to comply and I have equally no doubt that within a very short time of our arriving at our destination we would have a visit from our paratroopers and commandos who don’t tend to beat about the bush very much. I don’t much care for that idea. Three reasons. I don’t want a fire-fight, a blood bath. Killing or capturing—killing, more likely—Samuelson and his friends would not be the final solution. There may be—in fact I feel certain there will be, don’t ask my why, I don’t know—enough of his men left to carry out the ultimate threat. Thirdly, I don’t much care for the idea of the young ladies being hurt or worse. I wouldn’t much like to gun down—wound, I mean, not kill—a countryman who was threatening the life of one of the girls.’

Vasco said: ‘Julie and Annemarie?’

‘All four.’

George said mildly. ‘The other two are criminals.’

‘They associate with criminals. Different matter entirely. Anyway, if the government were to commit this crass folly, we would be in a position to expose them and dictate our own terms. Wieringa and the Colonel would back us up and they’re the only two people who matter. However, this is all academic. It’s not going to happen. Moment, gentlemen. These denims are rather damp.’

When he’d changed, he said: ‘Our absent friend O’Brien is missing in more than one way—he’s also the missing key. I’d give a great deal to know where he is at this moment. He won’t have gone to their other hang-out for his expertise in debugging and defusing alarm systems wouldn’t be called for there. One could speculate endlessly as to where he has gone to exercise his skills but that would be a waste of time.’

‘I’m neglecting my duties,’ Vasco said. ‘If I may be excused. George, would you come and switch the light on again?’

He turned off the light, went into the bathroom and closed the door. No sooner had George turned the light on than Vasco tapped on the door. George switched the light off again and the bathroom door opened.

‘This may interest you,’ Vasco said.

The sentry’s head was nodding, intermittently and at irregular intervals. After a few seconds of this he held it in an upright position then shook it from side to side. After a few more seconds of this—it was too dark to see what his expression was registering but it was, very probably, one of confusion and apprehension—brought up his right hand from under his rug, looked at the bottle still clutched in it, upended it and apparently established the fact that it was empty, placed it on the floor and pushed himself back in his seat.

‘He’s going to drop off again,’ Vasco said.

‘Not him,’ van Effen said. ‘He’s making a major decision.’

The sentry made his major decision. He lifted his rug to one side, pushed himself groggily to his feet and took a few staggering steps that brought him perilously close to the loft doorway.

Vasco said: ‘He’s drunk.’

‘Again, not him. He’s seen his bottle is empty and assumes because of that and the fact that he reeks of schnapps that he ought to be drunk and acts accordingly. Auto-suggestion, I believe they call it. It could have been a bit awkward if his relief found that he couldn’t wake him. Enough.’

In the bedroom van Effen said: ‘I think we should go downstairs in a few moments. Including you, Vasco, if you feel strong enough.’

‘I’m a captain in the Dutch army. I’m brave.’

George said: ‘You told Samuelson you wouldn’t be down.’

‘My mind changes along with the circumstances. It was freezingly cold out there. I require brandy. More importantly, I want to see their reaction to the news that the hunt for the FFF is now being concentrated in the Rotterdam—Scheldt area. Even more important is that I want those missiles, explosives and other nasties transferred from the truck to the helicopter.’

‘Why?’ George said.

‘The roads between here and the Rotterdam—Scheldt area will be alive with patrols tomorrow morning, police and army, but mainly, I suspect, army. My personal conviction is that Ylvisaker will be intercepted. I want those missiles because the FFF want them mounted for some offensive or defensive purposes and that should give them, from our point of view, owing to the fact that the missiles are totally useless, a splendid sense of false security.’

‘You should have been a lawyer, a politician, a Wall Street broker or a criminal specializing in fraud,’ George said.

‘Such devious minds don’t belong on the ranks of the police forces.’

‘Hark at who’s talking. I have also the hunch that the explosives, grenades and other sundries may prove to be more useful to us than to them. Just a hunch. Vasco, what do you know about the regulations concerning the transport of missiles?’

‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Then let’s invent some.’

‘I’ll wager, sir, that I can invent better regulations than you can.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen!’ Samuelson’s crocodile smile would have shamed an archangel. ‘Delighted to see you. I thought you weren’t coming down, Mr Danilov.’

‘I just couldn’t sleep,’ van Effen said with a transparent honesty that would have shamed the same archangel. ‘As a Dutchman, even an adopted one, I just couldn’t—well, you understand—well, you know, Flevoland.’

‘Of course, of course. I understand. And the Captain—sorry, Lieutenant. Delighted to see you, my boy. I take it you are feeling better?’

‘My voice is not but I am,’ Vasco said hoarsely. ‘Thanks to your kindness, Mr Samuelson.’

‘The universal specific. I suggest another.’ He looked at van Effen and George. ‘Brandies, gentlemen? Large ones?’

‘You are very kind,’ van Effen said. He waited while Samuelson gave instructions to Leonardo. ‘You know that I am a normally incurious person, but two things take my attention. The ladies have returned. I was given to understand that they were still in a state of nervous exhaustion.’

‘As far as I can understand, they still are. Your second question?’

Van Effen smiled. ‘My second question may give the answer to my first implied question. I see your TV is on again. I have by now come to understand that this means that you are expecting a further communiqué or statement or whatever in the near future.’

‘You understand correctly.’ It was Samuelson’s turn to smile, the usual avuncular one. ‘Both questions answered. You will excuse me a moment, gentlemen. I must tell the Reverend that it is earphones time.’

Leonardo brought them their drinks. Van Effen thanked him and led the other two out on to the terrace. No one raised an eyebrow. Apart from the fact that they had already established reputations as eccentric fresh-air fiends, if they wished to have a private conversation they had already had a long time to have held it upstairs.

Van Effen closed the door and said: ‘Well, what do we make of that?’

‘The four young ladies who appear to have recovered from their nervous exhaustion? They’re talking among each other, not animatedly, not very cordially, but they’re talking. And I don’t for a moment believe they’ve come down to watch this next broadcast.’ George sipped his brandy thoughtfully. ‘Somebody wants to talk to us.’

Van Effen nodded. ‘Julie. Could be Annemarie, but my hunch is Julie.’ He looked across at the loft door where the sentry was now pacing to and fro, perfectly steady on his feet and looking every inch a man devoted to his job. ‘When we get back inside—which will be in a very few seconds, it’s like an ice-box out here—I want you to wait a few discreet minutes, then wander aimlessly around, playing the role of a genial, middle-aged Lothario—just act your natural self, that is—and see if you can’t have a word with Julie. Just a few words and don’t let her talk more than a few words with you. If necessary, just say the word “helicopter”. She’ll know what I mean, I’ll try to get next to her and no one can hear a word on a helicopter. I don’t want to go near her myself. If Samuelson has got a leary eye for anyone, it’s for me.’

‘A bagatelle,’ George said.

They re-entered the living-room, both van Effen and Vasco giving exaggerated shudders: George was too big and well-covered for that sort of thing.

Romero Agnelli smiled. ‘Back so soon, gentlemen?’

‘Fresh air is one thing,’ van Effen said. ‘The Polar ice-cap another.’ He looked up at the flickering but silent TV set. ‘Mr Samuelson not down yet?’

‘He’s hardly had time to get upstairs and back, has he,’ Agnelli said reasonably. ‘Your glasses, gentlemen.’

At the bar, van Effen said: ‘It’s a wild night outside and getting wilder. Do you seriously think it’s safe to fly tomorrow?’

‘Do you fly?’

‘As a passenger, a lot. I have—had—a pilot’s licence. Never been in a helicopter in my life.’

‘I have a licence for a helicopter. Total solo flying time—about three hours. In weather like this, you wouldn’t get me within a hundred miles of the pilot’s seat in a helicopter. Daniken’s had thousands of hours. Superb pilot.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’ Van Effen was aware that George and Vasco had drifted away: his eyes made no attempt to follow them. ‘Nice to think we might get there—wherever there is.’

‘If Daniken wasn’t sure he wouldn’t take off.’

They continued an amicable discussion along those lines for two or three minutes until Samuelson reappeared, to all appearances his usual urbane and good-humoured self.

‘Any moment now, ladies and gendemen. I think we should take our seats.’

It was the same lugubrious announcer and he seemed to have aged considerably since his last appearance.

‘We have two announcements to make, both concerning the FFF. The first is that London and Stormont, the Northern Ireland parliament, have arrived at an agreement to begin active and immediate negotiations with our government. Such negotiations have, in fact, already begun.’

Samuelson beamed.

‘The second is that the government advises all citizens of the Netherlands to be of good heart. The Ministry of Defence suspects, although it has no reason to believe, that the FFF will be switching its scene of operations from the Ijsselmeer, where the dyke breaches and the explosion of this nuclear device are promised to take place tomorrow. This is because the FFF have established a practice of not striking twice in the same area. The balance of opinion is that they will concentrate on the southwest, most likely in the Rotterdam—Scheldt. The reason given for this announcement is that the government wants every citizen in that area—repeat every— because it affects every citizen, to be on continuous alert and report anything in the slightest way abnormal to the nearest police or army post. It is appreciated that this statement will also be picked up by the FFF, but the government regards this as the lesser of two evils compared to whatever use it may be to the FFF.’

Samuelson was no longer beaming. Van Effen, forehead furrowed and lips pursed, looked at George, then, without altering his expression, at Samuelson and said: ‘I don’t think I like this very much.’

‘I don’t like it at all.’ His expression was almost a mirror image of van Effen’s and the fingers of both hands were drumming on the arms of his chair. After a few seconds he turned to van Effen and said: ‘And what do you make of this development?’ It was significant, van Effen thought, that Samuelson should have asked him first: it didn’t speak too highly for his confidence in his associates. Van Effen waited about twenty seconds before he replied: he already had the answers to most possible questions but Samuelson wouldn’t have been too impressed by an immediate answer.

‘I think they’re bluffing. Or, at least, counter or double bluffing. They may believe that you intend to strike next in some other spot entirely and that this is intended to put you off your guard and relax while they close in on where they fondly imagine you are, or they may not be bluffing and this may be intended to restrict your movements. Either way, they’re not very bright, but, then, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Defence and the Chief of Police of Amsterdam are hardly renowned for their outstanding intelligence.’ George coughed softly into his hand but retained an impassive expression.

Samuelson looked doubtful. ‘Don’t forget I’ve met Wieringa. He didn’t strike me as a fool.’

‘He’s not a fool. He’s honest, straightforward and the most popular man in government but lacks the devious intelligence to rise to the very top. Plots and counter-plots are not for him. Another thing, if the authorities knew where we were don’t you think we’d have had a visit from a battalion of paratroopers or commandos—or both—quite some time ago?’

‘Ah!’ The thought seemed to cheer Samuel-son up.

‘And still another thing. I’m told you have another operations centre somewhere. Why don’t you call them and see if they’ve suffered any harassment?’

‘An excellent idea.’ Samuelson nodded to Romero Agnelli, who dialled a number, spoke briefly and hung up.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Again excellent,’ Samuelson said. ‘So we’re in the clear.’

‘No, we’re not.’ Van Effen shook his head in a discouragingly definite fashion. ‘Lieutenant, is there any chance that it may have been discovered that the truck and weapons are missing from the armoury from which we took them?’

‘The truck?’ Vasco said hoarsely. ‘Possible but unlikely. The weapons, no. The regular inventory isn’t due for another two weeks.’

Van Effen said: ‘Mr Samuelson, it’s not really for me to say, but shouldn’t we change the identification numbers on that truck?’

Samuelson also smirked. ‘Already done.’

‘Well done. But there’s more to it than that.’ Vasco spoke huskily and unhappily. ‘The authorities, as Mr Danilov says, may be operating in this area. Mention was made of both police and army posts. That means there may be police and army road blocks. Police road blocks present no danger. Army ones do. They know the missiles in transport—which is in itself an extremely rare occurrence—always travel in convoy. If you want to get them to their destination they’ll have to travel by helicopter.’

‘Not in my helicopter, they won’t,’ Daniken said firmly.

‘Mr Daniken, I believe you to be an expert helicopter pilot.’ Vasco’s voice being in the assumed condition it was, it was difficult for him to speak coldly, but his eyes were cold enough. ‘The cobbler should stick to his last. I’m an expert on missiles. A missile cannot be armed until it’s in flight. It’s obvious that you’ve never been in military helicopters. What do you think the Russian gunships use in Afghanistan? Pea-shooters?’ Daniken remained silent. ‘I also think the other weapons and explosives should be removed otherwise you’re more than liable to be asked what armoury you’ve taken them from and to what armoury or army unit you’re taking them. Mobile army controls tend to be very curious, very alert and very persistent—especially when they know there’s a national emergency alert out.’

Daniken looked unhappy. ‘But the detonators—’

‘The detonators,’ George said comfortably, ‘will be in their velvet sockets, wrapped in cotton wool, in a lead-sheathed steel box and resting on my lap.’ He let a note of irritation creep into his voice. ‘Do you think I want to have myself blown up, far less your damned helicopter?’

‘I shouldn’t imagine so.’ It was Samuelson who spoke. ‘What do you think, Romero?’

‘I don’t have to think, Mr Samuelson.’

‘Neither do I. Totally agreed, gentlemen. Excellent precautions. We shall drive the truck down to the helicopter tonight and transfer the missiles and the rest of it after the staff have retired, which may be rather late especially as they, too, will be watching their TV sets at midnight. Not that it matters that much. They are well accustomed to the mysterious goings-on of film companies.’ He paused. ‘I wonder if one of you three gentlemen would care to supervise the transfer of those materials.’

‘I will,’ George said immediately. ‘No coward like a big coward.’ He looked at Daniken. ‘It looks like being a rather bumpy flight tomorrow. As this is an ex-military helicopter, I assume you have clamps, lashings and other devices to secure things that, have to be secured?’

‘We have,’ Daniken said. He still looked distinctly unhappy.

‘Seems to be all,’ van Effen said. ‘Mr Samuelson, I’d like another snooze before this midnight broadcast. Not that I’m convinced that we’ll see anything. Even if there are ships or helicopters around with searchlights, visibility in this driving rain will be zero. George? Lieutenant?’

‘Me, too,’ George said. ‘Any more of this brandy and I’ll be dropping those detonators all over the place.’

Vasco was already on his feet. Without as much as a glance at the four girls they left and made their way up the stairs. In the corridor above van Effen said admiringly: ‘You really are a couple of fearful liars. Have a word with Julie, George?’

‘Certainly not.’ George spoke in a lofty tone. ‘We professionals operate on a higher level.’ He produced a folded bit of paper from his pocket and replaced it.

‘Splendid. Vasco, we approach our bedroom door. Has anything occurred to you?’

‘Visitors.’

Once inside, van Effen carried on a brief conversation about the weather, the best way of securing the missiles and other weapons aboard the helicopter and their conviction that the truck should have no trouble in getting through to its destination while Vasco carried out his usual meticulous inspection. After a few minutes he returned from the bathroom and put his fingers to his lips.

‘Well, me for bed,’ van Effen said. ‘Any gallant volunteers to keep the midnight watch?’

‘No need for anyone to keep a watch,’ Vasco said. ‘I have a travelling alarm.’

Seconds later all three were within the bathroom which had both the mirror and overhead lights on. Van Effen and George had gone in first, from darkened bedroom to darkened bathroom followed immediately by Vasco, who left the now lit bedroom door slightly ajar and turned on the light as he entered. He then switched on the overhead shower in the bath.

‘One doesn’t have to be a genius to know that O’Brien is elsewhere,’ Vasco said. ‘He could never have been responsible for the crude device that’s attached to the underside of my bed. The one device that can’t be de-activated without a listener knowing is inside a shower head—the listener can hear it being unscrewed—and even if there were other bugs in here, which there aren’t, no one can hear a thing over the sound of a shower. Odd, but a fact.’

‘You’re just like our big friend here,’ van Effen said. ‘You should have joined the criminal ranks years ago. You’d have made a fortune. Well, the FFF should now have a tape-recording reassuring them that there’s no way they can fail. Let’s have a look at that note, George.’ George did so and van Effen read it out.

‘ “Something goes on which neither Annemarie nor I understand but which may be of use to you. We have become quite friendly with our two lady criminal ‘kidnappers’ and if they are criminals so are Annemarie and I. Hardened criminals don’t go around looking as if the day of judgment is at hand and trying all the time not to have tears in their eyes. They do.” ’

Van Effen broke off and looked thoughtfully at George. ‘Anyone see Julie slip this note to you?’

‘No.’

Vasco was perturbed. ‘What if Julie, I’m sorry, sir, your sister—you must remember I don’t know her—has told them about us?’

‘Rubbish!’ George said. ‘As you said, you don’t know her. Peter’s faith in her intelligence, judgment and intuition is total, as is mine. In fact,’ George added confidentially, ‘she’s a lot cleverer than he is.’

‘That was quite uncalled for,’ van Effen said coldly. ‘ “Kathleen is quite definitely the one who is under the most pressure. She is definitely afraid of Samuelson or something that Samuelson might do. Maria is under less pressure but doesn’t seem to like what her brother Romero is up to. But she seems to like him and I have to admit that he has been very kind and courteous to us since they took us away.

‘ “I think that, in their own way, they are as much prisoners as we are. I think Kathleen and Maria are here under a form of coercion just as Anne and I are here under coercion, but a different kind of coercion.” ’

‘ “Coercion,” ’ Vasco said. ‘That’s the word you used. On the verandah, remember?’

‘I remember. “We’re here—Annemarie and I—simply because we were abducted. They are here, I’m sure, because they have been misled, lied to, because appeals have been made to their love or loyalty or some misguided sense of honour or all three. I think that they, especially Kathleen, have been lured here under totally false misapprehensions”.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ For once George’s massive calm had deserted him. ‘I’ve heard of rare cases of telepathy between twins but she’s only your young sister. That’s what you said, almost word for word.’

‘Nothing to do with telepathy. Great minds tend to think alike. Still question her intelligence, judgment and intuition, Vasco?’

Vasco shook his head very slowly, several times, and said nothing.

Van Effen looked at George. ‘Hah! And you still think she’s cleverer than I am?’ George stroked his chin and said nothing. Van Effen read on and his face became very still. ‘Maybe you were right at that, George. Listen to this last paragraph.’

‘ “I know why Maria is here. Despite her disapproval of what Romero is up to, there is a genuine bond of affection between them. As for Kathleen, I have mentioned that she is afraid of Samuelson and whatever he has in mind. I have also mentioned misguided love and loyaltv. I am convinced that she is Samuelson’s daughter.” ’

There was a considerable silence then George said: ‘I take back what I said about her being smarter than you. She’s smarter than the three of us put together. She has to be right. There’s no other explanation.’

Van Effen set fire to the note and flushed the ashes away. Then they turned off the shower and left.

Vasco shook van Effen by the shoulder. ‘It’s time, Mr Danilov.’

Van Effen opened his eyes and, as always, was instantly awake. ‘I didn’t hear the alarm bell.’

‘Turned it off—I’ve been awake for some time. George!’

Only Samuelson, the Agnelli brothers and Daniken were in the living-room when the three men arrived.

‘Just in time, gentlemen, just in time,’ Samuelson said. Even though normally cheerful he seemed to be in uncommonly good humour that midnight, a condition that could possibly have been accounted for by the bottle of brandy and glass by his side, but which was almost certainly due to an anticipatory euphoria. ‘Ten minutes and we’re all back in bed.’

‘Not me,’ George said. ‘I’m staying here. Your loading supervisor, remember. When do we begin the transfer?’

‘Of course, of course. Half an hour, say. Leonardo, we are neglecting our guests.’

While Leonardo proceeded to remedy the neglect, van Effen looked at Samuelson. He bore no resemblance to Kathleen but that meant nothing: she probably took after her Irish mother. Van Effen didn’t doubt his sister’s conviction.

The same announcer, whose depth of depression seemed to be matched only by his remarkable stamina, appeared on screen just after midnight.

‘It is with regret that we have to announce that we will be unable to show live the threatened breaches of the Flevoland dykes when and if they occur. It is impossible for our TV cameras to operate in conditions of total darkness and torrential rain. We are, however, in constant radiotelephone touch with a number of observers and will inform you at once as soon as any positive news is at hand.’ His image faded from the screen.

‘Pity,’ Samuelson said. He seemed in no way disappointed. ‘It would have been a stirring spectacle. Still, we shouldn’t have long to wait.’

They had very little time to wait. Less than a minute elapsed before the announcer re-appeared, replacing a phone on his desk.

‘The Oostlijk-Flevoland and Zuidslijk-Flevoland dykes were breached simultaneously some ninety seconds ago. Both breaches appear to be fairly massive but the appalling weather conditions make it impossible to gauge their extent or the severity of the flooding. The authorities say they must wait until the first light of dawn before the scope of the disaster can be accurately assessed. We shall, however, be on the air every hour on the hour to give you what fresh details are available.’ He paused to look at a sheet of paper that had just been handed to him.

‘A phone call has just been received from the FFF. The message reads: “Markerwaard 2 p.m. today.” ’

ELEVEN

Two men were to play particularly important parts in the morning hours of that day.

One of those was Sergeant Druckmann, who was accompanied by two other officers. All three were in plain clothes. Their unmarked police car was mud-covered and slightly battered. It carried an unusual amount of electronic equipment, two separate sets of radio transceivers and a radar tracking device, so much, in fact, that, unusually, it was located on the floor just in front of the right-hand rear seat. The operator sat on the left-hand rear seat with a large-scale road map on his knees. The equipment was, for the moment, covered by a carelessly thrown rug. The car had been in position since six-thirty that morning in a side road just north of Gorinchen.

Two other unmarked police cars, similarly equipped, were within a few miles of them. But it was Druckmann’s car that was to matter that morning.

The other man to matter was one Gropious, dressed in the uniform of a corporal in the Dutch army and sitting beside a private at the wheel of a small Dutch army troop carrier. Two other soldiers sat in the rear. Nobody would have used a photograph of Gropious on a recruitment poster for the Dutch army. His uniform was shabby and rather wrinkled and his long blond locks fell every which way under a hat that was more than slightly askew: the Dutch, for some reason best known to themselves, permit their soldiers to grow their hair to a length that would have had any British soldier confined to barracks for a fortnight. But the blond locks were not his own.

The uniform, like the wig, was a fake. Gropious was undeniably a soldier but no corporal: Lieutenant-Colonel Gropious, of the Dutch army commandos, was a particularly tough specimen of a particularly tough and élite corps.

The 7 a.m. broadcast that morning—the first breakfast-time broadcast in Dutch TV history—had been at once gloomy and slightly reassuring. Hundreds of square miles of the Flevolands had been inundated but to no great depth. As far as was known, no lives had been lost: the loss in livestock could not be estimated until later in the day. Hundreds of engineers were already pouring even more hundreds of tons of boulders and quick-setting concrete between hastily erected and, it was admitted, inadequately secured vertical steel plates. At best, it was also admitted, this could do no more than slightly reduce the effects of the next high tide and operations would have to cease at least three hours before that.

In the living-room of the windmill, where some dozen people were having breakfast, Samuelson was in high good humour.

‘Exactly as predicted, ladies and gentlemen, exactly as predicted.’ He looked in turn at van Effen, George and Vasco. ‘I keep my word, do I not, gentlemen? Maximum psychological impact, yet not a life lost. Things are going our way.’ He paused and listened to the thunderous drumming of the rain on the verandah, gradually lost his expression of good humour, drummed his fingers on the table, looked at Daniken and said: ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t like it much,’ Daniken said. He rose and walked out to the verandah, closing the door behind him. He was back inside ten seconds.

‘The wind’s about the same,’ he said. ‘That is, gale force. I could fly in that. But the rain is the heaviest I’ve ever seen, even worse than the onset of the monsoon in India. Visibility is zero. I can’t fly in that and keep our flight plan as it is.’

‘You mean you won’t fly?’ Samuelson said. ‘You refuse to fly?’ Samuelson didn’t seem unduly perturbed.

‘Not even if you ordered me. I will not be the person who will be responsible for the end of all you wish for. I am the pilot and refuse to be responsible for the deaths of twenty-two people. Which I will be if we stick to our flight plans. Mass suicide is not for me.’

Van Effen cleared his throat delicately. ‘I am normally, as you know, the most incurious of persons, but I don’t like this talk of mass suicide, not least because it involves me. Is the need to leave on time a matter of complete urgency?’

‘Not really.’ It was Romero Agnelli who answered. ‘Mr Samuelson does the honour of leaving all the organization to me.’

‘And exceptionally good you are at it, too.’

‘Thank you.’ Agnelli smiled almost apologetically. ‘I’m just a stickler for timetables.’

‘I don’t think you need to worry too much about timetables,’ van Effen said. ‘I know this country, you people don’t. I’m sure George and the Lieutenant will confirm that downpours of this extraordinary order rarely last more than an hour or so, never as long as two. As I am in this unusually questioning mood, what’s all this about flight paths or flight plans or whatever?’

‘No reason why you shouldn’t know,’ Samuelson said. He was obviously relieved by van Effen’s statement and was in an expansive mood. ‘Daniken has radio-filed a flight plan to Valkenburg, near Maastricht, and this has been accepted. We are, today, filming a scene in hilly countryside and the only hilly countryside in the Netherlands is in the province of Limburg where Valkenburg lies. Romero has even had the foresight to book us hotel accommodation there.’

‘Where, of course, you have no intention of going.’ Van Effen nodded his head twice. ‘Neat, very neat. You take off for Limburg, which lies in a roughly south-south-easterly direction, then Mr Daniken descends and alters course. The Netherlands is a very flat country so one has to fly very low to keep beneath the radar screen. As a pilot myself, I know that altimeters are notoriously inaccurate at very low altitudes. It wouldn’t do us a great deal of good if a sudden down-draught were to bring us into contact with a block of high-rise flats or even one of those massive TV antennaes which are such a feature of this country. Mr Daniken has to see where he is going and I have to say that I am in one hundred per cent agreement with Mr Daniken.’

‘Mr Danilov has put it even better than I could,’ Daniken said. ‘I am in one hundred per cent agreement with him.’

‘And I agree with you both,’ Samuelson said. ‘Leonardo, be so kind as to tell Ylvisaker to delay his departure with the truck until further notice. I do not wish him to arrive at our destination before we do.’

Ylvisaker, resplendent in his lieutenant-colonel’s uniform, and his two companions, dressed in the uniforms of a sergeant and private of the Dutch army, departed at 8.45 a.m. The wind had not eased but the rain, as van Effen had predicted, had lessened to no more than a heavy drizzle.

At 8.46 a.m., Cornelius, the policeman in the rear of Sergeant Druckmann’s car, said: ‘They are moving out, sergeant.’ Druckmann picked up his microphone.

‘Sergeant Druckmann here. Target Zero has just moved out. Will A, B, C, D, E, please acknowledge.’

The five army patrol vehicles acknowledged in alphabetical order.

Druckmann said: ‘Two minutes, three at the most and we should be able to know what route Target Zero is taking. After that, we shall report at minute intervals.’

At 8.47 a.m., twenty-two people filed aboard the giant helicopter. All, except the four girls, van Effen and George, were dressed in Dutch army uniforms. Samuelson said goodbye to four umbrella-carrying staff who had come to see them off, assuring them that they would be back the following evening. All the soldiers, with the one exception, were armed with machine-pistols: the exception, Willi the feckless guard, was burdened only by a pair of handcuffs.

At 8.49 a.m., Daniken lifted off and headed towards the south-south-east.

Also at 8.49 a.m., Sergeant Druckmann reported: ‘Tracking Target Zero at two kilometres. Target Zero is now one kilometre north of Gorinchen. From there the three main exit routes are east, south and west. Two minutes and we should be able to let you know which direction he is heading.’

Van Effen turned to Romero Agnelli, who was sitting beside him, cupped his hand to his ear and said: ‘Two things intrigue me.’

Agnelli smiled and lifted his eyebrows.

‘I was led to believe that the armament on this gunship had been dismantled and replaced by dummies. Those guns are for real.’

‘The armament was dismantled and replaced by dummies. Then we replaced the dummies. These things aren’t hard to come by if you know where to look. What was the other thing?’

‘Why isn’t Daniken climbing? We’re still under a hundred metres.’

‘Look to your left and you’ll see why.’

Van Effen looked. Less than fifty metres away another, much smaller helicopter, was flying alongside them. Even as van Effen looked the pilot slid back his window and waved an arm. Van Effen looked forward. Daniken was waving in return. The pilot of the small helicopter closed his window and began to climb. Daniken gently eased the gunship around until it was heading due south.

‘Neat,’ van Effen said. ‘Very, very neat. In weather like this there will be precious little private flying in the country today. The odd bored air controller might just amuse himself by tracking this helicopter to Valkenburg. That helicopter, of course, is heading for Valkenburg.’ Agnelli nodded. ‘Your idea, of course.’

Agnelli smiled and made a deprecating motion with his hand.

‘Target Zero is heading west on the Sliedrecht road,’ Druckmann report. ‘Which patrol is in the vicinity?’

‘Patrol A.’

‘Ah! Colonel Gropious, sir?’

‘Yes. I am seeing a road block one kilometre east of Sliedrecht. Close up until you have them visually. But not too close.’

‘I understand, sir. Target Zero is travelling at a very leisurely pace—perhaps “circumspect” is the word I’m looking for. Just below fifty kilometres. I estimate they should be with you in just under twenty minutes.’

‘Thank you, sergeant.’

Ylvisaker leaned back luxuriously in his seat and lit a cigar. ‘This,’ he said with a sigh, ‘is the life. Thank God we’re not aboard that damned helicopter.’

That damned helicopter was bumping and lurching its way in a generally west-by-south direction. ‘Generally’, because Daniken was at pains to avoid towns, villages or settlements of any size. It was, van Effen thought, a totally superfluous precaution. There was no earthly reason why, say, a lone farmer should report the passage of an unidentified and probably unidentifiable helicopter. Helicopters were ten a penny in the Netherlands.

Van Effen looked around the gunship. Most of the passengers looked distinctly unhappy and their complexions offered an interesting variety of shades of colour. Annemarie and Julie, who were sitting together, had adopted remarkably similar attitudes—clenched fists and eyes screwed tightly shut. Van Effen himself was untroubled: Daniken was a superb pilot.

He cupped his hand to Agnelli’s ear. ‘How much further?’

‘About fifteen minutes.’

‘Reasonable accommodation?’

Agnelli smiled. ‘It’s a nice little place.’

Judging by the standards of Samuelson’s taste, the nice little place, van Effen thought, was probably about the size of the royal palace in the Dam Square.

The blue and yellow sign read: ‘ROAD CHECK AHEAD. PLEASE STOP AT THE RED LIGHT’. Ylvisaker’s driver slowed and said: ‘What do we do now?’ Ylvisaker took a leisurely puff at his cigar. ‘Drive on, my man.’

Gropious’s driver lowered his binoculars. ‘Target Zero for sure, sir.’ He raised his binoculars again. ‘And the given number.’

Gropious’s vehicle was in the left-hand lane, facing oncoming traffic. On the right-hand side, and slightly behind them, was another troop carrier. Two soldiers, both holding umbrellas, were leaning against their vehicle. Both were smoking cigarettes.

‘Would you look at that sloppy bunch,’ Ylvisaker said. ‘Umbrellas! Cigarettes! I’ll bet there’s not an officer nearer than Rotterdam. And these, mind you, are the gallant troops sworn to defend NATO to the death.’

As they came to a halt at the red light, Gropious and his two men, all three trailing machine-pistols in their left hands, approached the stolen army truck, Gropious going to the front of the truck and his two men to the rear. Ylvisaker opened his door.

‘What’s all this then, Corporal?’

‘Colonel!’ An embarrassed Gropious, perceptibly stiffening, executed as military a salute as could be expected from a slovenly corporal. ‘Colonel. If I had known—’

Ylvisaker smiled tolerantly. ‘What is it, Corporal?’

‘Orders, sir. We are under instructions to stop and examine all vehicles, army trucks included, which may be carrying illegally obtained weapons. We were given the registration number of one particular army truck. This is not the one.’

Ylvisaker displayed some mild interest. ‘Are you searching for anything in particular?’

‘Missiles, sir. Ground-to-ground and ground-to-air missiles. I must admit, sir, that I don’t even know what they look like except that they’re copper coloured and over two metres long.’

‘Duty is duty, Corporal. I see you have two men at the rear. Instruct them to open up and search. Just, you know, for the records.’

Gropious gave the instructions, the rear doors were opened and no missiles were found.

‘My apologies, Colonel,’ Gropious said. He hesitated, then produced a notebook and pencil. ‘My instructions are to make a note of the identification of every person passing through this checkpoint.’

Ylvisaker reached inside his uniform jacket. Gropious said: ‘No, no, sir. In your case, no papers are necessary. Just your name, Colonel.’

‘Ylvisaker.’

‘Colonel Ylvisaker.’ Rather laboriously, Gropious wrote down the name in his notebook. How ironic, he thought, that such a confrontation should occur between a lieutenant-colonel posing as a fake corporal and a civilian—and criminal—posing as a lieutenant-colonel. He put his notebook away and lifted his machine-pistol at the same instant as his two soldiers at the rear of the truck.

‘Move,’ Gropious said, ‘and you’re dead.’

No sooner had Gropious and his men brought Ylvisaker and his two men out on to the roadside than Sergeant Druckmann’s car drew up behind them. Druckmann and his men got out, Druckmann carrying a considerable number of metal objects in his hand. Druckmann looked at the scruffy corporal with the straggling blond locks and said hesitantly: ‘Colonel Gropious?’

‘It is indeed.’ Gropious removed his hat, took off his wig and threw it beyond the roadside. ‘Those damn things itch.’

Druckmann said: ‘Congratulations, sir.’

Gropious, who without his wig now looked remarkably like a lieutenant-colonel, shook his hand warmly. ‘And the very same to you, Sergeant. Your name, please? All I know is that all the police cars were manned by sergeants.’

‘Druckmann, Colonel.’

‘An excellent piece of work, Sergeant Druckmann. Most professional. And what, may I enquire, is all that ironmongery you’re carrying?’

‘Handcuffs and leg irons, sir. I understand that those are not standard army issue.’

‘Splendid. Kindly have one of your men attach them at once.’ He turned to one of his soldiers. ‘Instruct all patrols to return to base. I suggest, Sergeant Druckmann, that you instruct one of your men to do the same for the police cars. Emphasizing, of course, the need for complete secrecy.’

‘At once, Colonel. But there is no need to emphasize secrecy. All of us, myself included, have been threatened by Colonel de Graaf with the equivalent of Devil’s Island.’

‘Ah! Our redoubtable Chief of Police in Amsterdam.’

‘Yes, sir. Whose prisoners are those—yours or ours?’

‘They are now the property of the nation. We will drive to my base, call up Mr Wieringa, the Defence Minister, and Colonel de Graaf and see what is to be done with them. Meantime, let’s have a look at Ylvisaker’s truck—well, his stolen truck.’

Inside the truck Druckmann said: ‘I really know very little about what’s going on. Those three men are FFF?’

‘They are indeed and they face three charges. The first is impersonating army officers. The second is being in possession of a stolen army vehicle.’ Gropious opened the lids of the two fake long-range petrol tanks to reveal the squat, cylindrical shapes of two bronze-coloured metal objects. ‘The third, of course, is to have them explain how come they are transporting a couple of nuclear bombs along the roads of our fair countryside.’

The lids were lowered and they stepped outside. Druckmann said: ‘May I smoke in the Colonel’s presence?’

‘The Colonel is about to do the same.’

After a few moments, Druckmann said: ‘Well, all right. I volunteer.’

Gropious smiled. ‘To drive this truck to base?’

‘I’m a fearful coward, Colonel. I shall take great care.’

‘I have a great deal of time for fearful cowards, Sergeant. By the time we get there we shall have two US experts from Germany standing by to deactivate those damned things. I shall lead the way, red lights flashing and all that sort of thing, you will follow close behind and your police car will follow close behind you. You have this consolation, Sergeant Druckmann. If you’re vaporized, we’re all vaporized.’

The time was 9.27 a.m.

At precisely 9.27 a.m. Daniken touched down outside another isolated windmill-cum-farm-house, considerably larger than the one they had so recently left. Two men and two women, umbrellas in hand, came hurrying out to meet them. It was clear that Samuelson and his friends, judging from the smiles on the faces of the four, were not only known and welcome but also expected.

With the power shut off the interior of the gunship was almost deathly quiet. Van Effen said to Agnelli: ‘Well, yes, you do have a certain gift for organization.’

Agnelli smiled and said nothing.

The living-room of the windmill, which had a similar verandah outside, was considerably larger and even more luxurious than the one they had left behind. There were ten people in the room—Samuelson and the Agnelli brothers, van Effen and his friends and the four girls. Daniken, van Effen guessed, was presumably parking—and concealing—his helicopter in a nearby barn. Riordan had gone upstairs, no doubt to indulge in another bout of meditation and prayer.

Samuelson, relaxed in an armchair before a crackling wood fire, sighed like a man well content with himself.

‘Clockwork, my friends, just clockwork. The penultimate stage successfully completed. I know it’s still relatively early in the morning, but, then, we shall be having an early lunch. Something in the nature of a soupçon of jonge jenever, I think.’

‘An early lunch?’ van Effen said. ‘We are moving on?’

‘Just after two o’clock.’ Samuelson gestured towards a TV set. ‘After we’ve seen what happens in the Markerwaard.’

‘I see.’ Van Effen made it abundantly clear that he didn’t see at all. ‘Well, wherever.’ He shrugged. ‘How many of those establishment do you own in the Netherlands?’

‘None. The owners of this house, for instance, are presently basking in the sunshine of the Bahamas. The Golden Gate pays well. This, as you are aware, is the dead season for farming. A local farmer, also well rewarded, looks after the cattle and sheep. There are no problems. Do you know where you are, Mr Danilov?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ Long experience had taught van Effen to lie with total conviction: he knew exactly where he was. ‘After so short a flight, still somewhere in Holland. Does it matter?’

‘You are a singularly incurious person. We are in the vicinity of Middelharnis. You know of it?’

‘Middelharnis?’ Van Effen frowned then said: ‘Over Flakkee.’

Samuelson smiled, nodded and said nothing.

Van Effen set down the glass that Leonardo had just given him. His face was stonily bleak and his eyes very cold.

‘The Haringvliet,’ he whispered. ‘You’re after the Haringvliet.’ He had been well aware of this for some quite considerable time.

The Haringvliet dam was variously referred to as the valve or the sluice gate of Holland. It blocked the entry to the Haringvliet estuary and many waterways beyond. In the late spring and early summer, when the snows in the Alps, Germany and France melted, it diverted the waters from the swollen Rhine, Waal and Maas rivers past Rotterdam and into the New Waterway which joined the North Sea at Europort simply by keeping its massive hydraulically operated, electrically powered gates closed. It could also, when the level of the river water rose too high, and the level of the North Sea was considerably lower, release water directly into the North Sea simply by opening as many of its gates as was deemed necessary. At this time of the year, however, with the river water shrunk to its lowest level, its main task was to keep out the North Sea except at the very latest of neap tides. The flooding, the damage and the deaths that would inevitably result from the destruction of the sluice gate of Holland were incalculable.

‘Yes, Mr Danilov.’ Samuelson must have been convinced that his life was in danger, but he remained outwardly calm. ‘I am, as you say, after the Haringvliet.’

Van Effen nodded just once, briefly. ‘Hence the nuclear weapons. I hope to God they detonate en route and blast Ylvisaker and his friends into outer space.’

‘A most uncharitable wish, to say the least.’ Samuelson sipped his drink: if he was perturbed, he hid the fact uncommonly well. ‘I see you are wearing your Smith and Wesson, Mr Danilov. I have no doubt your friends are similarly armed. Romero, Leonardo and I carry no arms—it’s a point of principle with us. If you choose to shoot me, there’s nothing I can do about it. But wouldn’t you consider it rather unfair to shoot a man merely because you’re labouring under a vast misapprehension?’ Samuelson seemed to be positively enjoying himself.

‘Go on.’

‘The nuclear devices are most definitely not intended for use on the Haringvliet dam and this for three reasons. Firstly, I don’t relish the prospect of vaporizing myself. Secondly I want the sluice gates to remain intact and in perfect working order. Thirdly, I intend to take over the dam.’

Van Effen sipped his drink in silence for a few moments, as if to take time out for thinking. Not only had he known that the Haringvliet was Samuelson’s target, he’d been equally convinced that Samuelson had had no intention of destroying it.

‘How very ambitious. And how do you intend to set about this takeover?’

‘It’s already half done. About forty hours ago a skilled electrician carried out a very delicate and all but undetectable job of sabotaging three turbo-generators.’

‘The devil he did. He was an employee?’

‘Naturally.’

‘And Dutch?’

‘Yes. Twenty thousand dollars, I’ve always found, has a most profound influence on even the most patriotic of souls. Besides, he had no idea what we had in mind. He, of course, was given the opportunity to trace the source of those faults and when he failed they called in experts from Rotterdam. Those four are currently lodged in a cellar beneath us. They are being well fed and cared for as you can see for yourself any time you wish.’

‘That will not be necessary. And then, of course, you sent in your own four experts.’

‘Yes. Alas, all four have criminal records and have served prison sentences but they have the saving virtue that they are probably the four best safe-crackers in the country. They also have a considerable knowledge of electrics.’

‘Such men could not have been easy to come by,’ van Effen said. He paused then said: ‘Wrong. They could have been easily come by.’ He looked at Romero Agnelli. ‘Your brothers in prison, of course. They must have the names and track records of every outstanding—by their standards—criminal in the country.’

‘They are very able men,’ Samuelson said, ‘but better at safe-cracking than electrics.’

‘Their purpose being, of course,’ van Effen said, ‘to locate and deactivate all the alarm systems in the dam—pressure pads, rays, panic buttons and whatever. Also to discover the location of both on-duty and off-duty guards.’

‘Not to deactivate. Not yet. Might not even be necessary,’ Agnelli said. ‘The rest, yes. There were one or two points about which they were uncertain so they asked permission to bring in the best turbo-generator experts in the country.’

Van Effen nodded. ‘And, of course, they got the best expert in a totally different field. O’Brien. Very clever, I must admit.’

Samuelson waved a hand. ‘All Romero’s work. He would have made an excellent divisional officer. Has O’Brien returned, by the way?’

Leonardo left the room and returned with an O’Brien who was totally unlike his real self owing to the fact that he had acquired a beard and a moustache.

‘Sorry about this,’ O’Brien said. Wincing more than slightly he tore off both moustache and beard. ‘As I’m going aboard with you, I thought the sudden transformation of a civilian engineer into a Dutch army sergeant-major might have caused some eyebrow raising.’

Samuelson said: ‘How is everything?’

‘Ready to go,’ O’Brien said.

‘One point,’ George said. ‘How are we to recognize those four—ah—colleagues you have on the dam. We don’t want to point guns at the wrong people.’

‘A good point,’ Agnelli said. ‘All four are dressed in very light blue overalls.’

‘And carrying only tools in their tool-bags?’

‘The odd pistol. A few gas grenades. Useful things like that.’

‘I’d like some of those,’ van Effen said. ‘Gas grenades, I mean. In a small satchel or suitcase. Like Mr Samuelson, I’m averse to unnecessary violence and the people on the dam are, after all, my adopted countrymen. If it’s necessary to restrain any of them I’d much rather do it with a whiff of gas rather than a bullet.’

‘My sentiments exactly,’ Samuelson said. ‘You shall have them.’

‘One further point,’ van Effen said. ‘How are you going to account for the presence of two civilians in an army group?’

‘Aha!’ Samuelson smiled broadly. ‘Civilians, but not just ordinary civilians. You are two senior members of the Amsterdam police specialist antiterrorist squad. That should fit the bill rather nicely, don’t you think?’

‘That’s nice,’ van Effen said. ‘I always wanted to be a policeman. How do you propose to gain entrance to the dam, Mr Samuelson?’

‘Nothing simpler. We land on the roadway on the dam. First, of course, we send a radio message to the dam to the effect that there is a suspicion, nothing more, that the FFF may be thinking of making an attack on the dam either from the sea or from the river side and that patrol boats will be approaching from the river side and a destroyer from the sea side. We, of course, shall be there first—it’s only a few minutes flying time from here. They will be ordered to maintain complete radio silence—no transmissions, no receptions.’

‘The simplicity of true genius,’ van Effen said. ‘You have your nerve. The young ladies, of course, remain behind?’

‘Most certainly not. I wouldn’t have Kathleen and Maria miss this splendid dénouement for all the world. The rear of the helicopter will be screened off and the four ladies will remain in hiding until we have taken over.’

‘It has occurred to you that the other two girls might scream for help or attempt to overpower Kathleen and Maria?’

‘They find it difficult to scream for anything when they’re gagged and difficult to attack anyone when their hands are tied behind their backs. As an additional precaution, Joop will be with them. Joop is very useful with a gun.’

‘You think of everything,’ van Effen said. He hoped Joop wasn’t too useful, for then Joop would have to die.

Samuelson rose, went to a desk and brought out two sheets of paper. ‘These are the ground and elevation plans of the Haringvliet dam. Leonardo, go and bring the others here. I want every man to know exactly what to do, to know exactly where every guard will be on duty, where the off-duty guards and workers are, and where each man on duty may reasonably be expected to be. There will be no slip-ups.’

Daniken returned just as Leonardo left. In seconds only Leonardo returned, bringing with him Joop, Joachim and the two nameless RAF youths that had been at the other windmill, four older men in their thirties and forties whom van Effen had not seen before and two of the guards he had seen before. The last six looked very tough, very competent. They all crowded round the table, followed by van Effen, Vasco, George, Samuelson, Romero Agnelli, Daniken and O’Brien. Only two men were missing—Willi, who was locked up in a cellar somewhere and Riordan, who was presumably above such mundane and secular matters.

Although it was Samuelson who had called the meeting it was Romero Agnelli who conducted the meeting. His organizational abilities were indeed quite remarkable. He pointed out to each man exactly where he was to go and what was expected of him. He also insisted that they coordinate their watches so that each man should know exactly what time he should be at any given place. This took about five minutes. He then started it all over again. When he started a third time van Effen, accompanied by George and Vasco, headed resolutely towards the bar. Samuelson, smiling, came after them and moved behind the bar.

‘You get easily bored, Mr Danilov?’

‘I don’t have to be told the same thing twice, far less three times.’

‘You have a point. Maybe I am overdoing it a bit.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I find this a bit worrisome. I should have thought the truck would have been here by this time.’

‘Ylvisaker struck me as being a pretty competent character,’ van Effen said. ‘Engine trouble, heavy traffic, burst tyre, anything. Anyway, you can soon find out. You’ve said you have a radio transmitter here. The Lieutenant is an expert operator—and, of course, he knows the frequency of the truck.’

‘Would you, Lieutenant? Thank you.’ Samuelson pointed across the room. ‘There.’

Vasco seated himself at the transceiver, adjusted his headphones and started transmitting. After two minutes he took off the head-phones and returned to the bar.

‘Nothing, Mr Samuelson. Can’t raise him.’

Samuelson pursed his lips. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’ Vasco spoke with just a faint trace of irritation. ‘I know what I’m doing. If you don’t believe me, let Daniken try. He knows what he’s doing too.’

‘No, no. I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Worried, you know.’

‘Two things may have happened,’ Vasco said. ‘He may have had an accident. That’s the more serious and less likely happening. What’s more probable is that the on-off switch is in the off position.’

Samuelson’s brow cleared slightly but only slightly. ‘If he’s late, why doesn’t he call us?’

‘Does he know how to operate the radio?’

Samuelson’s brow cleared even more. ‘Quite honestly, I don’t know.’ He looked up as an aproned maid approached him.

‘Sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like to know that there is to be a government broadcast in two minutes. Less.’

‘Thank you, thank you.’ Samuelson hurried round the bar, gestured to Agnelli to end the lecture and switched on the TV set. Within half a minute, the announcer appeared on the screen, a much younger one than previously, but one who had clearly been trained in the same mortician’s school.

‘The government have three announcements to make. The first is that the British government and Stormont have agreed to withdraw all British troops to barracks. As the troops are scattered all over Northern Ireland this is expected to take several hours but the process is already under way. Although no statement to this effect has been made, this is taken to be indicative of London’s intentions.’

Samuelson beamed in satisfaction. At that moment, Ylvisaker was the last thing in his mind.

‘The second is that the British Foreign Minister, Defence Minister, the chief of the Imperial General Staff and the First Sea Lord are en route to Amsterdam in a VC10 to witness the detonation of this nuclear device in the Markerwaard at 2 p.m.

‘The third is that the government have offered an amnesty to the two as yet unnamed prisoners whose release has been demanded by the FFF.

‘We will, of course, be back on screen at 2 p.m.’

‘Well,’ van Effen said, ‘it looks like wholesale surrender.’

‘Matters are certainly proceeding quite satisfactorily,’ Samuelson said modestly. ‘We will each take a minimum of luggage with us. This can be concealed in the rear of the helicopter—soldiers on active duty do not carry suitcases around with them. Lunch will be at twelve-thirty, so we have about two and a half hours to wait till then. I do not think it would be a good idea to indulge in any more jonge jenevers so I suggest we rest. Although we are not returning tonight we have quarters prepared for you, to which you will be shown. Tell me, Lieutenant, do you intend to have a snooze?’

‘Not I.’

‘Then perhaps you would be kind enough to come down, say, every twenty minutes, and try to contact Ylvisaker?’

‘If you think it’s worth trying, certainly. I’ll go upstairs, have a wash, pack what little equipment I have to pack and be down in twenty minutes. After that, I might as well stay down.’ Vasco smiled. ‘No furtive trips to the bar, I promise you.’

The room to which van Effen and his companions were shown was almost a duplicate of the one they had left in the other windmill. Vasco carried out his usual meticulous search and pronounced the room clear.

Van Effen said: ‘Samuelson is rather concerned about the non-arrival of Ylvisaker and his friends who, I think we may take it, are at present being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. More importantly, Samuelson seems to think that it’s all over bar the shouting. The possibility of failure doesn’t now exist for him. That’s a very dangerous state of mind to be in—dangerous for him, I mean.’

George said: ‘And what do you think he’ll do when he gets to the dam.’

‘Take it over. I can’t see that giving him any trouble. Then he’ll tell the government that he has done just that. Coming so soon after the nuclear explosion in the Markerwaard, it should have a devastating effect on the government who will all too clearly appreciate the implications and realize that the FFF has the nation by the throat.’

‘And then,’ Vasco said, ‘they blow a few bits of concrete off the dam just to show they mean business.’

‘Nothing like that,’ van Effen said. ‘Nothing so crude. The explosives are Agnelli’s idea. Apart from being a first-class organizer, Agnelli is a very prudent fellow. I believe that the explosives are for back-up purposes only, just in case something should go wrong.

‘What I do believe is that O’Brien knows as much about the controls of the hydraulic gates as the man who designed them. They just open the sluices.’

‘And if the authorities cut off the power from the mainland, if you can call it that?’ Vasco said. ‘Then, perhaps, the explosives?’

‘There have to be standby generators. O’Brien will have checked on that. As far as the safety of the country is concerned, the sluice gates of the Haringvliet are the most vital installations in the country. Imagine the sluice gates being open at low tide and a major power failure occurs? They simply cannot afford to rely on a single source of power.

‘For the moment, however, and much more importantly, Samuelson and Agnelli have been kind enough to provide us with a detailed outline of their plans.’

George rubbed his hands. ‘And now we make our own plans.’

‘Now we make our own plans.’ Some forty minutes after Vasco had gone down to the living-room he was joined by Samuelson. Vasco, sitting on the radio chair and idly leafing through a magazine, looked up at his entrance.

‘Any luck, Lieutenant?’

‘None. I’ve called four times—every ten minutes, not twenty, as you asked. Nothing.’

‘Good God, good God!’ Unmindful of his own admonitions, Samuelson went behind the bar and brought back two jonge jenevers. ‘Ylvisaker is wildly overdue. What on earth can have happened to him?’

‘I’ve been thinking, Mr Samuelson. He hasn’t blown himself to pieces or the news would be all over the country by now. Let’s assume he’s had an accident or had a breakdown. Let’s further assume he doesn’t know how to operate the radio. What would you have done, sir?’

‘Gone to the nearest phone and informed us. It’s difficult to move far in any direction in this country without coming across a house with a phone or a public call box.’

‘Exactly. Does Ylvisaker know the telephone number of this place?’

Samuelson stared at him then said: ‘Ylvisaker has never been here. Wait.’

He hurried from the room and returned within a minute, his face grim. ‘The consensus of opinion is that Ylvisaker does not know this number.’

‘But you know the precise route he was taking?’

‘Of course. Two men, a fast car. Bound to intercept. Thank you, Lieutenant. I’m glad to see that there are some minds still working around these parts.’

‘Shall I keep on trying, Mr Samuelson?’

‘It’s a faint chance, isn’t it?’

Vasco shrugged. ‘Very faint. But nothing else for me to do.’

‘Thank you.’ Samuelson brought him another jonge jenever. ‘Another trifle like this is not going to hurt a mind as clear as yours.’

‘That is kind. I think I’ll have it on the verandah, if I may. It is a bit overheated in here.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Samuelson hurried from the room.

The car was a tan-coloured BMW with Antwerp number plates. Vasco watched the car and its two occupants disappear round a corner, finished his drink in a thoughtful manner, then returned inside. He went to the radio, switched wave-band and wave-length and said softly in Flemish: ‘Record.’ He spoke for no more than twelve seconds, then switched back to the previous waveband and length. He tried again for Ylvisaker and was answered by the same silence. He refreshed his drink at the bar, resumed his radio chair, glanced through a magazine and again called the missing truck with the same lack of response. He tried twice more in the next twenty minutes with the same lack of response. He was still trying to make contact when Samuelson returned. He looked at Vasco, went behind the bar and returned with two more drinks.

‘Breaking my own rules, I know, but you’ve earned it and I feel the need for it. Nothing?’

‘Dead. I know Mr Danilov makes a point of being incurious about everything but I’m a serving army officer. Just how important are those nuclear devices to you?’

‘Almost entirely psychological. If necessary, I would have used them to blow off both the northern and southern approaches to the Haringvliet dam.’

‘Whatever for? No senior military commander in the Netherlands would dream of attacking the Haringvliet dam. Bombers? Never. Fighter planes? Never. Not only is your gunship more than a match for any fighter, not only do you have ground-to-air missiles, you will have a large number of hostages whose lives they would never imperil. Destroyer? Torpedo boats? Ground-to-ground missiles are heat-seeking. They’re lethal.’

‘Not bombers?’

‘What would happen if they breached the Haringvliet dam?’

‘Of course. Well, no point in trying any longer. Perhaps we should both have a brief rest before lunch.’

Vasco gave van Effen and George a brief resumé of what had happened.

Van Effen said: ‘So you’ve convinced Samuelson of his total invulnerability and ensured that we will have two fewer hard men to cope with abroad the dam. Whom did you notify?’

‘Rotterdam police.’

‘I think, George, that we may make a policeman of him yet. Well, another hour or so before lunch.’

‘Snooze for me,’ Vasco said. ‘Four jonge jenevers in succession are too much for my delicate constitution.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Dutch hospitality. You know what it’s like.’

Lunch was more than adequate but less than convivial. Samuelson tried to maintain a cheerful façade but he was deeply worried about the fate of his nuclear devices and his worry was almost palpable with the result that the last half hour of the meal was consumed in almost total silence.

Over coffee, Samuelson said to van Effen: ‘Do you think it possible that Ylvisaker and his men could have been seized by the authorities, army or police?’

‘Highly unlikely. I don’t see how they could have been. Your security is total. Even if they had been, the question is, would Ylvisaker or his men have talked?’

‘About the Haringvliet dam? No. Until we got here today only Riordan, Agnelli, Daniken and O’Brien were privy to the plans.’ Samuelson smiled faintly. ‘Your famous need-to-know maxim, Mr Danilov.’

‘One does not want to sound cynical or callous, but what the hell are you worrying about, then?’

‘As you can see,’ the TV announcer said, ‘the weather is as atrocious as ever with correspondingly poor visibility, such as one would expect as dusk approaches. The rain is extremely heavy and the wind, between Force eight and nine, has backed to the north-west. We have four cameras in position—one near Hoorn and one near Volendam, on the west side of the Markerwaard and one on the opposite shore near Helystad. This one, I’m afraid, is virtually useless: in spite of its lens hood the rain is driving straight into the lens. We have a fourth camera in a helicopter and we understand they are having a very rough time indeed. The time is I.58. Our first shots will be taken from the helicopter.’

A white-capped, storm-tossed sea appeared on the screen. Detail was blurred and shifting, because the helicopter was being, it was clear, severely buffeted about, hence making it impossible to maintain a steady camera direction. Another voice took over from the studio announcer.

‘Helicopter camera here. I can assure you that my friend in the studio was not exaggerating. The conditions are abominable and I have to confess that the only person who is not sick is, most fortunately, the pilot. We are flying at seven hundred metres, give or take fifty metres every time this damn machine is going up or down, which we hope is a safe height if the nuclear explosion and its accompanying water spout should occur, which God forbid, directly beneath us. It is now precisely 2 p.m. and’—his voice rose almost by an octave—’there it goes! There it goes! Me and my big mouth. It is directly beneath us!’

The camera lens had been extended to maximum zoom. The surface of the Markerwaard boiled whitely and then erupted a great column of water climbing vertically skywards towards the helicopter’s camera.

‘Would you look at that?’ the excited voice went on. ‘Would you just look at that?’ It seemed rather a superfluous question, as, unquestionably, almost every eye in the Netherlands was looking at nothing else. ‘And the air is full of spray. Our pilot is moving as quickly as possible to the north-west—we want to get out of this area as quickly as possible. We are making poor time against this north-west gale, but he is clearly hoping that that same gale will blow the spout and spray away from us. So do I.’

Van Effen looked at Samuelson. He appeared to have gone into some kind of trance. The only sign of movement came from his hands. His fingers were interlocked but his thumbs were revolving slowly around each other.

The studio announcer appeared. ‘I am afraid the helicopter’s lenses are clouded by that spray. We regret that none of the other three cameras are in visual contact. The detonation appears to have occurred almost exactly in the centre of the Markerwaard.’

The helicopter commentator’s voice came again. ‘Sorry about that. What with the spray and rain we are at the moment quite blind. We are still moving steadily north-west. Wait a minute, wait a minute. We have eyes again.’

The spout was collapsing on itself. The camera, zoom half retracted, was only momentarily on the spout, then began panning the surrounding area. A circle of water could be seen moving steadily outwards from the centre.

‘That,’ the commentator said ‘must be the expected tidal wave. Doesn’t look much like a wave to me, but, then, from this altitude it is impossible to gauge the height of the water.’

The picture faded to be replaced by the studio announcer. ‘We are trying to—wait, wait, we have Volkendam.’

A camera, at full zoom, showed a swell of water, little more than a ripple, it seemed, rapidly approaching the shore-line. A commentator said: ‘I agree with my colleague in the helicopter. This is hardly my idea of a tidal wave. However, I understand those tsunami tend to increase in height as the water shallows. We shall see.’

There wasn’t, in fact, much to see. With the wave less than a hundred metres from land, the commentator estimated its height as just under a metre, which was pretty much in accordance with the scientists’ predictions. Samuelson gestured for the set to be switched off.

‘A few wet feet, no more,’ he said. ‘And not a life lost. An impressive performance, wouldn’t you say, Mr Danilov?’

‘Most impressive.’ True, probably not a life had been lost. Not that day. But the years to come might well record a different story: the radioactive fall-out would have fallen or would be falling over the already flood-beleaguered Flevolands. But it hardly seemed an appropriate moment to point this out to Samuelson.

Samuelson said: ‘Romero, radio the message to the Haringvliet dam. Emphasize the need for absolute radio silence. Where the devil are those two who went in search of Ylvisaker and his friends?’ Nobody knew where the devil they were. ‘Five good men lost to me. Five!’

‘It’s annoying, Mr Samuelson,’ Vasco said. ‘And worrisome. But it can have no effect on the outcome. We have seventeen men. With the element of total surprise in our favour I could guarantee to take the Haringvliet with only four men.’

Samuelson smiled. ‘That’s a comfort. We leave in twenty minutes.’

They left in twenty minutes. All the soldiers were armed, all carried either rucksacks or satchels. Neither van Effen nor George were armed, at least not visibly, but they, too, carried satchels, both crammed with gas grenades. In addidon, van Effen had taken the precaution of taking his Yves Saint-Laurent aerosol.

As they climbed aboard the gunship, van Effen said to Samuelson: ‘Gas, not guns?’

‘Gas, not guns.’

TWELVE

The gunship touched down on the Haringvliet dam roadway at 2.38 p.m.

Romero Agnelli, dressed as a major and in nominal command of the party, was the first down the steps. A fair-haired, youngish man with horn-rims detached himself from a small group of observers, hurried forward to greet Agnelli and shook him warmly by the hand.

‘Damned glad to see you, Major, damned glad. Have you seen what those devils have just done in the Markerwaard?’

‘That we have,’ Agnelli said sombrely. ‘That we have.’

‘How seriously do you take this threat to the Haringvliet?’

‘Well,’ Agnelli said reasonably, ‘there’s no threat now. Quite frankly, I don’t take it seriously at all, but, as soldiers, ours is not to reason why. Quite frankly again, the country is in a state of near panic and ninety-nine per cent of all intelligence reports and agitated phone calls we receive turn out to be groundless. This, I say, may be the hundredth, although, as I say, I don’t believe it.’ He took the man’s arm and led him a few steps from the helicopter as soldiers followed down the steps and others opened the loading doors. ‘May I have your name, sir?’

‘Borodin. Max Borodin. Manager. What on earth are those things they are unloading?’

‘Missiles and their launching platforms. We’ll have one facing the North Sea, the other the river. Ground-to-ground missiles and ground-to-air missiles. Heat-seeking. Lethal.’ Agnelli did not add that they could be swivelled on their platforms to cover both road approaches to the Haringvliet dam. ‘Totally superfluous precaution. The FFF are a mad lot but not mad enough to launch a frontal attack on the Haringvliet dam. We expect a destroyer and patrol boats to be standing by shortly. Again, quite unnecessary.’

‘Unnecessary or not, you’ve taken a great load off my mind. Who are those two rather portly and harmless-looking civilians?’

‘Portly they may be. Harmless they are not. Senior police officers from Amsterdam. Very much specialists in a very specialist anti-terrorist squad. They’ll be wanting to look for any weak spots in your defences. Pure formality but they insist. We shall leave two soldiers by the missiles to keep watch. Inspector Danilov—that’s the less portly one—also insists that my men accompany us. He wants, understandably, that they should familiarize themselves with the general layout of the interior of the dam.’

Twenty minutes it was and a very surprising twenty minutes it turned out to be for Mr Borodin, not least when four blue-overalled mechanics produced Kalashnikov machine guns which had been assembled from their toolbags. It was a completely painless—phsyically, that is, but not mentally for many of those concerned—and bloodless operation. Borodin, his staff and his guards had simply no chance. They all finished up in one of the many giant cellars in which the dam abounded. Agnelli was about to turn the key in the lock when van Effen stopped him.

‘No. Rope. Tie them. Come, come, Mr Agnelli, you’re the man who never overlooks anything.’

‘I’ve overlooked something?’

‘You’ve overlooked the fact that O’Brien may not be the only man in the world who can pick any lock in the world.’

Agnelli nodded. ‘Of course. Rope.’ Rope was fetched, enough to secure a hundred men. When Borodin and his men had been bound hand and foot, Samuelson, looking every inch the successful Roman general back from Gaul and making his ritual entry of triumph into the city of Rome, led them all up to the control room. Van Effen and his two friends lingered some way behind while van Effen opened a small tin and brought out six sodden balls of cotton-wool. These they stuffed into their nostrils. Vasco winced.

‘What the hell is this? Sulphuric acid?’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ van Effen said.

‘And what was this rigmarole about people being able to pick locks? It’s a million to one against there being another O’Brien down there.’

‘We’re going to need rope. Lots of it. There’s a couple of hundred yards of it down there.’

Vasco looked at George. ‘The man thinks of everything.’ He shook his head. ‘Agnelli is not the only one who overlooks things.’

They entered the control room. It was wide and very spacious with serried ranks of control panels lining the right-hand wall and paralleling tables. O’Brien was in the vicinity of them but not examining them: van Effen knew he didn’t have to.

‘Ah!’ Samuelson said. ‘The very man, Lieutenant. I want to talk to Wieringa, the Minister of Defence.’

Vasco showed no surprise, merely thought for a few seconds.

‘The Defence Minister will be out at Volkendam, I imagine. Doesn’t matter where he is. No problem. Wherever he is, office, car or plane, he’s never more than an arm’s length from a telephone. I’ll call the War Office and they’ll patch him in.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘A minute. Less.’

‘A minute!’

‘In the Netherlands,’ Vasco said with a trace of loftiness, ‘the Army has over-riding priority.’ In less than the specified time he handed the phone to Samuelson, who took it, his eyes the eyes of a man whose dreams have come true. Or a madman whose dreams have come true.

‘Mr Wieringa? This is the leader of the FFF, the Fighters For Freedom. I trust you appreciated our little demonstration in the Markerwaard this afternoon. I have some more rather unwelcome news for you. We have taken over the Haringvliet dam. I repeat, we are in complete control of the Haringvliet.’ There ensued quite a lengthy pause, at least on Samuelson’s part before he continued: ‘I am glad, Mr Wieringa that you appreciate the significance of this. Any attempt to retake the Haringvliet, by force or by stealth, will have disastrous effects on Holland. I might also add that we have mined the dykes at Hollandsch Diep and the Volkeral. We have observers there. Any attempts to send divers to investigate will compel us to radio-detonate those mines.

‘At 4 p.m. we will be giving a slight demonstration of what awaits your country if our demands are not met immediately by opening a few sluice gates for a few minutes. You might find it instructive to have a helicopter around to take a few pictures so that the people of the Netherlands may understand what lies in store for them.

‘I do hope you speed up negotiations with the British government.’

‘That was quite a performance, Mr Samuelson,’ van Effen said. ‘You really do have those two dykes mined?’

Samuelson laughed. ‘Of course not. Why should I. That pusillanimous lot now take our everyword for gospel.’

Van Effen and his two friends drifted unobtrustively into the space between the table and wall controls and opened their satchels while Samuelson and his men talked excitedly and congratulated themselves. In the space of just over two seconds ten gas grenades, fairly evenly spaced around the room, exploded. The effects were spectacular. Within a few seconds everyone was staggering about and most were unconscious before they crumpled to the floor. Van Effen snatched a key from Agnelli’s pocket and the three men hastily left the room, closing the door behind them. Their noses were protected but they could hold their breath for only so long.

‘Five minutes and we’ll be able to go back in there,’ van Effen said. ‘They’ll be asleep for half an hour at least.’ He handed Vasco the key. ‘The ropes. Cut Borodin free and tell him to do the same for the others. Explain.’

Vasco entered the cellar and cut an astonished Borodin free, then handed him the knife.

‘Cut the others free. We’re police officers—genuine ones. The one with the scarred face is Lieutenant van Effen of the Amsterdam police.’

‘Van Effen?’ Borodin was, understandably dazed. ‘I’ve seen his picture. That’s not him. I know his face.’

‘Use your head. So does nearly every criminal in Holland.’

‘But the FFF—’

‘Are having a short nap.’ Vasco gathered up the spare ropes and left at a run.

Van Effen approached the man on the seaside missile site. ‘Mr Samuelson wants you. Quickly. Control room. I’ll keep watch.’ The man was just disappearing from sight when van Effen crossed to the other man on the river missile site, his hand round the burgundy Yves Saint-Laurent aerosol with the special fragrance. He lowered the man to the roadway and headed for the helicopter.

The man from the first missile site that van Effen had visited stopped when he saw George, who waved him on encouragingly. As the man passed, George chopped him on the back of the neck. For George, it was just a little chop, but the man, had he retained consciousness would probably have regarded it in a different light. George lowered him gently to the floor.

Van Effen pulled back the curtain and said: ‘Ah, there you are, Joop. Keeping a good watch, I see.’ Joop’s good watch lasted for all of another two seconds before he slumped to the floor. Van Effen produced his Smith and Wesson, waved it in the general direction of Kathleen and Maria and sliced Annemarie’s and Julie’s bonds free. He raised both girls to their feet, helped them free their gags, and, gun still in hand, put his arms round their shoulders. ‘My beloved sister. And my dear dear Annemarie.’ The eyes of Kathleen and Maria were as round as the proverbial saucers.

‘You took your time about it, didn’t you,’ Julie said. There were tears in her eyes.

‘Gratitude was ever thus,’ van Effen sighed. ‘There were problems.’

‘It’s over?’ Annemarie whispered. ‘It’s all over?’

‘All over.’

‘I love you.’

‘I’ll have you repeat that when you are in a more normal state of mind.’

The two seated girls were still staring at them. Kathleen said: ‘Your brother?’ Her voice was husky, her voice disbelieving.

‘My brother,’ Julie said. ‘Peter van Effen. Senior detective-lieutenant of the Amsterdam police force.’

‘It’s a nasty shock, I will admit,’ van Effen said. ‘There may be an even nastier one awaiting you. There are those whom you might like to see or who might like to see you. When they wake up, that is.’

All of the FFF were still sound asleep, bound hand and foot, or in the process of being so bound.

‘Not bad, not bad,’ van Effen said. ‘And what else have you been doing with your time?’

‘Would you listen to him,’ Vasco said. He tightened, with unmistakable enthusiasm, the last knot on the rope binding Samuelson’s legs. ‘To start with, half the police cars and vans in Rotterdam and Dordrecht should be on the dam inside fifteen minutes. I thought that up all by myself.’

‘A promising officer, as I said.’ Van Effen turned to Kathleen, who was staring at her father, her face ashen with shock and fear. ‘Why, Kathleen?’

Instead of replying, she reached inside her handbag and brought out a small pearl-handed gun. ‘You’re not going to take Mr Samuelson. You didn’t know he was my father.’

‘Yes, Kathleen, I did.’

‘You did?’ Her voice faltered. ‘How did you know?’

‘Julie told me.’

Julie stepped between the gun and van Effen. ‘You’ll have to shoot me first, won’t you, Kathleen. I’m not being brave because I know you could never do it.’

Vasco moved quietly forward, removed the gun from the suddenly nerveless hand and replaced it in her handbag.

Van Effen said again: ‘Why, Kathleen?’

‘I suppose it will all come out, won’t it?’ She was crying openly now. Vasco put an arm around her trembling shoulders and instead of resisting she seemed to lean against him. ‘My father is English. He was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Guards, not under that name. His father was an Earl, who left him a fortune. His sons, my brothers, went to Sandhurst. Both were killed in Northern Ireland, one a lieutenant, the other a second lieutenant. My mother was killed by a renegade off-shoot of the IRA. He’s never been the same man since.’

‘I guessed as much. He may be tried in this country or be extradited by the British.’ Van Effen sounded as tired as he undoubtedly felt. ‘In either case, diminished responsibility will apply.’

‘You mean he’s mad?’ she whispered.

‘I’m no doctor. Some kind of temporary derangement, I should imagine. Tell me, Maria, had either Romero or Leonardo anything to do with the murder of my wife and children?’

‘No, no, no! I swear it. They wouldn’t hurt a fly. My two other brothers in prison. I know they arranged it. They are hateful, evil men. I will testify to that in court. I promise.’

‘That could mean another five or ten years to their sentence.’

‘I hope they remain there till they die.’

‘No charges will be brought against you and Kathleen. Accessories are one thing, accessories under duress another. Vasco, be so kind as to release that young lady and put a call through to Uncle Arthur. Tell him all. George, take those four ladies out for a restorative. There’s bound to be a suitable supply in their mess or canteen or whatever. If not, the helicopter is not exactly bereft. Beware of suicide attempts.’

Julie said: ‘I don’t think that anyone is going to commit suicide.’

‘Your feminine intuition, I suppose. Well, I agree. And, George, you could bring something back here. I feel very weak.’

George smiled and ushered the four girls from the control room.

Vasco was two minutes on the telephone then turned to van Effen, his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I believe Uncle Arthur would like a word with you. May I—ah—join the ladies?’

‘By all means.’ Van Effen picked up the phone as he heard the first sound of screaming police sirens. Colonel de Graaf’s congratulations were fulsome in the extreme. So were those of Wieringa, who eventually handed him back to de Graaf.

Van Effen said: ‘I am, Colonel de Graaf, becoming tired of being the handmaiden who does all the dirty washing for you. I want a new job, increased salary, or both.’

‘You shall have both, my boy. An increased salary is inevitably what goes with my job.’ He coughed. ‘Six months, say? A year?’

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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FIRST EDITION

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1983 then in paperback by Fontana 1984

Copyright © Alistair MacLean 1983

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-28927-1

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Alistair Maclean

San Andreas

To David and Judy

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

About The Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

There are three distinct but inevitably interlinked elements in this story: the Merchant Navy (officially the Mercantile Marine) and the men who served in it: Liberty Ships: and the units of the German forces, underseas, on the seas and in the air, whose sole mission was to seek out and destroy the vessels and crews of the Merchant Navy.

1 At the outbreak of war in September 1939 the British Merchant Navy was in a parlous state indeed—‘pitiable’ would probably be a more accurate term. Most of the ships were old, a considerable number unseaworthy and some no more than rusting hulks plagued by interminable mechanical breakdowns. Even so, those vessels were in comparatively good shape compared to the appalling living conditions of those whose misfortune it was to serve aboard those ships.

The reason for the savage neglect of both ships and men could be summed up in one word—greed. The fleet owners of yesteryear—and there are more than a few around today—were grasping, avaricious and wholly dedicated to their high priestess—profits at all costs, provided that the cost did not fall on them. Centralization was the watchword of the day, the gathering in of overlapping monopolies into a few rapacious hands. While crews’ wages were cut and living conditions reduced to barely subsistence levels, the owners grew fat, as did some of the less desirable directors of those companies and a considerable number of carefully hand-picked and favoured shareholders.

The dictatorial powers of the owners, discreetly exercised, of course, were little short of absolute. Their fleets were their satrap, their feudal fiefdom, and the crews were their serfs. If a serf chose to revolt against the established order, that was his misfortune. His only recourse was to leave his ship, to exchange it for virtual oblivion, for, apart from the fact that he was automatically blackballed, unemployment was high in the Merchant Navy and the few vacancies available were for willing serfs only. Ashore, unemployment was even higher and even if it had not been so, seamen find it notoriously difficult to adapt to a landlubber’s way of life. The rebel serf had no place left to go. Rebel serfs were very few and far between. The vast majority knew their station in life and kept to it. Official histories tend to gloss over this state of affairs or, more commonly, ignore it altogether, an understandable myopia. The treatment of the merchant seamen between the wars and, indeed, during the Second World War, does not form one of the more glorious chapters in British naval annals.

Successive governments between the wars were perfectly aware of the conditions of life in the Merchant Navy—they would have had to be more than ordinarily stupid not to be so aware—so successive governments, in largely hypocritical face-saving exercises, passed a series of regulations laying down minimum specifications regarding accommodation, food, hygiene and safety. Both governments and owners were perfectly aware—in the case of the ship-owners no doubt cheerfully aware—that regulations are not laws and that a regulation is not legally enforceable. The recommendations—for they amounted to no more than that—were almost wholly ignored. A conscientious captain who tried to enforce them was liable to find himself without a command.

Recorded eyewitness reports of the living conditions aboard Merchant Navy ships in the years immediately prior to the Second World War—there is no reason to question those reports, especially as they are all so depressingly unanimous in tone—describe the crews’ living quarters as being so primitive and atrocious as to beggar description. Medical inspectors stated that in some instances the crews’ living quarters were unfit for animal, far less human, habitation. The quarters were invariably cramped and bereft of any form of comfort. The decks were wet, the men’s clothes were wet and the mattresses and blankets, where such luxuries were available, were usually sodden. Hygiene and toilet facilities ranged from the primitive to the non-existent. Cold was pervasive and heating of any form—except for smoking and evil-smelling coal stoves—was rare, as, indeed was any form of ventilation. And the food, which as one writer said would not have been tolerated in a home for the utterly destitute, was even worse than the living quarters.

The foregoing may strain the bounds of credulity or, at least, seem far-fetched, but respectively, they should not and are not. Charges of imprecision and exaggeration have never been laid at the doors of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine or the Registrar General. The former, in a pre-war report, categorically stated that the mortality rate below the age of fifty-five was twice as high for seamen as it was for the rest of the male population, and statistics issued by the latter showed that the death rate for seamen of all ages was 47% in excess of the national average. The killers were tuberculosis, cerebral hæmorrhage and gastric or duodenal ulcers. The incidence of the first and last of those is all too understandable and there can be little doubt that the combination of those contributed heavily to the abnormal occurrence of strokes.

The prime agent of death was unquestionably tuberculosis. When one looks around Western Europe today, where TB sanatoria are a happily and rapidly vanishing species, it is difficult to imagine just how terrible a scourge tuberculosis was just over a generation ago. It is not that tuberculosis, worldwide, has been eliminated: in many underdeveloped countries it still remains that same terrible scourge and the chief cause of death, and as recently as the early years of this century TB was still the number one killer in Western Europe and North America. Such is no longer the case since scientists came up with the agents to tame and destroy the tubercle bacillus. But in 1939 it was still very much the case: the discovery of the chemotherapeutic agents, rifampin, para-aminosalicylic acid, isoniazid and especially streptomycin, still lay far beyond a distant horizon.

It was upon those tuberculosis-ridden seamen, ill-housed and abominably fed, that Britain depended to bring food, oil, arms and ammunition to its shores and those of its allies. It was the sine qua non conduit, the artery, the lifeline upon which Britain was absolutely dependent: without those ships and men Britain would assuredly have gone under. It is worth noting that those men’s contracts ended when the torpedo, mine or bomb struck. In wartime as in peacetime the owners protected their profits to the bitter end: the seaman’s wages were abruptly terminated when his ship was sunk, no matter where, how, or in what unimaginable circumstances. When an owner’s ship went down he shed no salt tears, for his ships were insured, as often as not grossly over-insured: when a seaman’s ship went down he was fired.

The Government, Admiralty and ship-owners of that time should have been deeply ashamed of themselves: if they were, they manfully concealed their distress: compared to prestige, glory and profits, the conditions of life and the horrors of death of the men of the Merchant Navy were a very secondary consideration indeed.

The people of Britain cannot be condemned. With the exception of the families and friends of the Merchant Navy and the splendid volunteer charitable organizations that were set up to help survivors—such humanitarian trifles were of no concern to owners or Whitehall—very few knew or even suspected what was going on.

2 As a lifeline, a conduit and an artery, the Liberty Ships were on a par with the British Merchant Navy: without them, Britain would have assuredly gone down in defeat. All the food, oil, arms and ammunition which overseas countries—especially the United States—were eager and willing to supply were useless without the ships in which to transport them. After less than two years of war it was bleakly apparent that because of the deadly attrition of the British Merchant fleets there must soon, and inevitably, be no ships left to carry anything and that Britain would, inexorably and not slowly, be starved into surrender. In 1940, even the indomitable Winston Churchill despaired of survival, far less ultimate victory. Typically, the period of despair was brief but heaven only knew that he had cause for it.

In nine hundred years, Britain, of all the countries in the world, had never been invaded, but in the darkest days of the war such invasion seemed not only perilously close but inevitable. Looking back today over a span of forty and more years it seems inconceivable and impossible that the country survived: had the facts been made public, which they weren’t, it almost certainly would not.

British shipping losses were appalling beyond belief and beggar even the most active imagination. In the first eleven months of the war Britain lost 1,500,000 tons of shipping. In some of the early months of 1941, losses averaged close on 500,000 tons. In 1942, the darkest period of the war at sea, 6,250,000 tons of shipping went to the bottom. Even working at full stretch British shipyards could replace only a small fraction of those enormous losses. That, together with the fact that the number of operational U-boats in that same grim year rose from 91 to 212 made it certain that, by the law of diminishing returns, the British Merchant Navy would eventually cease to exist unless a miracle occurred.

The name of the miracle was Liberty Ships. To anyone who can recall those days the term Liberty Ships was automatically and immediately linked with Henry Kaiser. Kaiser—in the circumstances it was ironic that he should bear the same name as the title of the late German Emperor—was an American engineer of unquestioned genius. His career until then had been a remarkably impressive one: he had been a key figure in the construction of the Hoover and Coulee dams and the San Francisco bridge. It is questionable whether Henry Kaiser could have designed a rowing-boat but that was of no matter. He almost certainly had a better understanding of prefabrication based on a standard and repeatable design than any other person in the world at the time and did not hesitate to send out contracts for part-construction to factories in the United States that lay hundreds of miles from the sea. Those sections were transmitted to shipyards for assembly, originally to Richmond, California, where Kaiser directed the Permanente Cement Co., and eventually to other shipyards under Kaiser’s control. Kaiser’s turnover and speed of production stopped just short of the incredible: he did for the production of merchant vessels what Henry Ford’s assembly lines had done for the Model T Ford. Until then, as far as ocean-going vessels were concerned, mass production had been an alien concept.

Mistakenly, but understandably, there existed a widely-held belief that the Liberty Ships originated in the design offices of the Kaiser shipyards. The design and prototypes were, in fact, English and were conceived by the design staff of the shipbuilders J.L. Thompson of North Sands, Sunderland. The first of what was to become a very long line indeed, the Embassage, was completed in 1935—the prefix ‘Liberty’ did not come into existence for another seven years, and only for some of the Kaiser-built vessels. The Embassage, 9,300 tons, with a raked stem and rounded stern and three triple-expansion coal-burning engines, was a non-starter in the æsthetic stakes, but then J.L. Thompson were not interested in æsthetics:what they had aimed at was a modern, practical and economical cargo vessel and in this they succeeded admirably. Twenty-four more similar vessels were built before the outbreak of war.

Those ships were built in Britain, the United States and Canada, the great preponderance in the Kaiser yards. Hull designs remained identical but the Americans, and only the Americans, introduced two changes which they regarded as refinements. One of those changes, using oil instead of coal as fuel, may well have been: the other, which concerned the accommodation of officers and crew, was not. While the Canadians and British retained the original concept of having the living quarters both fore and aft the Americans elected to have all the crew, officers and men—and the navigating bridge—in a superstructure surrounding the funnel. In retrospect—hindsight and bitter experience make for a splendid conductor to belated wisdom—it was a blunder. The Americans had all their eggs in one basket.

Those vessels were armed—after a fashion. They had four-inch low-angle and twelve-pounder anti-aircraft guns, neither of which was particularly effective, together with Bofors and rapid-firing Oerlikons: the Oerlikons were deadly in trained hands—but there were few trained hands around. They also had weird devices such as rocket-fired parachutes and cables carrying coils of wire and grenades: these were as dangerous to those using them as the aircraft they were supposed to bring down. Some few of these ships had catapult-launched Hurricane fighters—the nearest equivalent to the suicidal Japanese kamikaze planes that Britain ever had. The pilots could not, of course, return to their ships: they had the uncomfortable option of either baling out or ditching. In the Arctic, in winter, their survival rate was not high.

3 From the air, on the sea and under the sea the Germans, often with brilliance, always with tenacity and ruthlessness, used every means in their power to destroy the Merchant Navy convoys.

Basically, they used five main types of aircraft. Their standard or conventional bomber was the Dornier which flew at pre-determined heights and released their bombs in pre-determined patterns: they were useful planes and had their successes but were not particularly effective.

Much more feared, in ascending order, were the Heinkel, the Heinkel III and the Stuka. The Heinkel was a torpedo-bomber, which attacked at wave-top level, its pilot releasing the torpedo at the last possible moment, then using the lightened weight of his aircraft to lift over the ship it was attacking. Those planes had an unusual degree of immunity from destruction: when the anti-aircraft gunners on the merchant ships peered over the sights of their Oerlikons, Bofors or pom-poms—two-pounders—the thought that ‘He gets me or I get him’ didn’t make for the degree of cool detachment which would have been helpful in the circumstances. In the Arctic winter, those torpedo-bombers were not infrequently at a disadvantage, especially for the gallant but unfortunate pilots who flew them: ice could freeze up their torpedo release mechanisms and their burdened aircraft were unable to lift off over their targets. This made little difference to the equally unfortunate crews of the merchant vessels: whether the torpedo was running free or still attached to the aircraft when it crashed into the ship, the results were equally devastating.

The Heinkel III used glider bombers. These were highly effective, exposed their pilots to a much lesser degree of risk and the bombs, once released, were virtually impossible to shoot down: fortunately for the Merchant Navy, the Germans did not have too many of these highly specialized planes.

The Stuka, the dihedral—gull-winged Junker 87 dive-bomber—was the most feared of all. It was their customary practice to fly at high altitude in level formation, then peel off successively in near-vertical dives. Forty years later, the seamen and soldiers—the Germans used the Junker 87 in every theatre of war—who survived those attacks and are still alive will never forget the sound of the banshee shrieking as the Stuka pilots switched on their sirens in their plummeting dive. The sound, to say the least, was unnerving and considerably reduced the effectiveness of anti-aircraft gunners. The Royal Navy used searchlights, customarily of the 44-inch variety, in an attempt to blind the Stuka pilots, until it was pointed out to them that the pilots, who were well aware of this tactic, used dark glasses to reduce the blinding glare to mere pinpoints of light which enabled them to home in even more accurately on their targets. From the German point of view the Stukas had only one drawback: they were essentially short-range planes and could operate effectively only against convoys moving to the north of Norway en route to Murmansk and Archangel.

But, oddly enough, the most effective air weapon the Germans had was the essentially non-combative Focke-Wulf Condor 200. True, it could and did carry 250-kilo bombs and had a fairly formidable array of machine-guns, but with bombs removed and extra fuel tanks fitted in their place, it became an invaluable reconnaissance plane. For that comparatively early flying era, in the early Forties, its flying range was quite remarkable. Condors flew almost daily from Trondheim, in German-occupied Norway, round the western coast of the British Isles to German-occupied France: more importantly, they were capable of patrolling the Barents Sea, the Greenland Sea and, most damagingly of all, the justly dreaded Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland, for it was through that strait that the Russian-bound convoys from Canada and the United States passed. For such a convoy, the sight of a Condor was the guarantee of inevitable disaster.

Flying high and safely out of reach of antiaircraft fire, the Condor would literally circle the convoy, its crew noting down the number of ships, the convoy’s speed, course and precise latitude and longitude. This information was radioed to Alta Fjord or Trondheim and then transmitted to Lorient, the French HQ of Admiral Karl Doenitz, almost certainly the best submarine C-in-C of his time or any time. From there the information was re-transmitted to the growing submarine wolfpack or packs, instructing them when and where exactly to position themselves to intercept the convoy.

As far as surface warships were concerned, the Germans were more than adequately prepared at the outbreak of war. By the Anglo-German agreement of 1937 Germany could build 100% of the British equivalent of submarines but only 35% of surface ships. In fact they built twice as many submarines and completely ignored the other 35% restriction. The Deutschland, Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer were nominally 10,000 ton cruisers: they were, in fact, fast and powerful commerce raiders, in effect pocket battleships of a far greater tonnage than purported. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, 26,000 ton battle-cruisers, were completed in 1938 and it was in that year that the Bismarck and Tirpitz were laid down in the Blohm and Voess shipyards in Hamburg. Those were the best and most powerful battleships ever built, a statement that remains true to this day. By treaty limitations they were restricted to 35,000 tons: they were, in fact, 53,000 tons.

The Bismarck had a brief but spectacular career, the Tirpitz no career at all. It spent its war holed up in northern Norway, where it none the less performed the invaluable function of tying up major units of the British Home Fleet which feared that the giant battleship might slip its moorings in Alta Fjord and break out into the Atlantic. It was at those moorings that the Tirpitz was ultimately destroyed by ten-ton bombs from RAF Lancasters.

Although the British had a very considerable advantage in battleships, they were, individually, no match for those of the Germans, as was tragically proved when the Bismarck sank the battle-cruiser Hood, pride and darling of the Royal Navy, with a single salvo.

Underwater, the Germans used mines and submarines. Less than three months after the outbreak of war the Germans had come up with a rather unpleasant device—the magnetic mine. Unlike the standard type, which had to come into physical contact with a vessel before being activated, the magnetic mine was set off by the electrical current generated by the ship’s hull. Those mines could be laid by either ships or aircraft and in the first four days after their introduction no fewer than fifteen ships were sent to the bottom—the fact that they were nearly all neutrals seemed of no great concern to the Germans: magnetic mines are very clever devices but not clever enough to discriminate between a neutral and an enemy. The British managed to retrieve one intact, took it to pieces—not without considerable danger to those engaged in the dismantling—and came up with electronic counter-measures which enabled minesweepers to detonate the magnetic mine at a respectful distance.

Submarines, of course, were the most deadly enemies the Merchant Navy had to face. The toll taken in the first three and a half years of war was savage beyond belief. It wasn’t until the early summer of 1943 that the menace was brought under some form of control, but it wasn’t until the end of 1944—during the two years 1943-4 480 German submarines were destroyed—that those stealthy pursuers and silent killers ceased to be a factor of consequence.

It was inevitable that the U-boats should be selected as the target for hatred and their crews depicted, both during the war and subsequently, as cunning, treacherous and ice-cold murderers, fanatical Nazis to a man, who hunted down unsuspecting innocents, closed in unheard and unseen, destroyed their victims without mercy or compunction, then moved on again, still unheard and unseen. To a limited extent, this view was valid. The pattern for this belief was set on the very first day of the war when the liner Athenia was torpedoed. In no way could the Athenia have been mistaken for anything other than what it was: a peaceful passenger vessel crammed with civilians—men, women and children. This must have been known to the far from gallant Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, commander of the German U-boat that sent the Athenia to the bottom. There is no record that Lemp was ever reprimanded for his action.

The same charge of ruthlessness, of course, could have been levelled against Allied submariners—to a lesser extent, admittedly, it is true, but that was only because they had a much more limited choice of targets.

The overall U-boat picture is false. Ruthless Nazis there may have been among the crews but they were a tiny minority: the men were motivated principally by an intense pride in the traditions of the Imperial German Navy. Certainly there were acts of brutality by individual U-boat commanders but there were also acts of humanity, gallantry and compassion. What was undeniable was the immense personal courage and spirit of self-sacrifice of those men. It has to be remembered that, out of a total of 40,000 U-boat submariners, 30,000 died, the most shocking casualty rate in the history of naval warfare. While the actions of those men are not to be condoned, the men themselves are not to be condemned. Ruthless they were—the nature of their job demanded it—but they were brave beyond belief.

Such then were the conditions in which the men of the Merchant Navy had to live and die: such, too, were their enemies, who sought, implacably, to destroy them. The odds against the health and lives of the merchantmen surviving, respectively, their living conditions and the attentions of the enemy were high indeed: theirs was a classic no-win situation. In the circumstances it was an astonishing and commonplace fact that men who had survived two or three torpedoings and sinkings would immediately, on their return to Britain, seek out another ship to take them to sea again. By definition, those men were noncombatants but their endurance, tenacity and determination—they would have laughed at words like gallantry and courage—matched those of the men who hunted them down.

ONE

Silently, undramatically, without any forewarning, as in any abrupt and unexpected power cut in a city, the lights aboard the San Andreas died in the hour before the dawn. Such blackouts were rare but not unknown and gave rise to no particular alarm as far as the handling and navigation of the vessel were concerned. On the bridge, the binnacle light that illuminated the compass, the chart light and the essential telephone line to the engine-room remained unaffected because, operating as they did on a lower voltage, they had their own separate generator. The overhead lights were on the main generator but this was of no consequence as those lights were switched off: the bridge, any bridge, was always darkened at night. The only item on the bridge that did fail was the Kent screen, an inset circular plate of glass directly ahead of the helmsman which spun at high speed and offered a clear view in all conditions. Third Officer Batesman, the officer of the watch, was unworried: to the best of his belief there were neither land nor ships within a hundred miles of him with the exception of the frigate HMS Andover. He had no idea where the frigate was and it didn’t matter: the frigate always knew where he was, for it was equipped with highly sophisticated radar.

In the operating theatre and recovery room it was a case of business as usual. Although the surrounding sea and sky were still dark as midnight, the hour was not early: in those high latitudes and at that time of year daylight, or what passed for daylight, arrived about 10.00 a.m. In those two rooms, the most important in a hospital ship, for that was what the San Andreas was, battery-powered lights came on automatically when the main power failed. Throughout the rest of the ship emergency lighting was provided by hand-hung nickel-cadmium lamps: a twist of the base of such a lamp provided at least a bare minimum of illumination.

What did give rise to concern was the complete failure of the upper deck lights. The hull of the San Andreas was painted white—more correctly, it had been white but time and the sleet, hail, snow and ice spicules of Arctic storms had eroded the original to something between a dingy off-white and an equally dingy light grey. A green band ran all the way around the hull. Very big red crosses had been painted on both her sides, as well as on the fore and after-decks. During night-time those red crosses were illuminated by powerful floodlights: at that time darkness accounted for twenty hours out of the twenty-four.

Opinion as to the value of those lights was fairly evenly divided. According to the Geneva Convention, those red crosses guaranteed immunity against enemy attacks, and as the San Andreas had so far been reassuringly immune those aboard her who had never been subjected to an enemy attack of any kind tended to believe in the validity of the Geneva Convention. But the crew members who had served aboard before her conversion from a Liberty cargo carrier to her present status regarded the Convention with a very leery eye. To sail at night lit up like a Christmas tree went against all the instincts of men who for years had been conditioned to believe, rightly, that to light a cigarette on the upper deck was to attract the attention of a wandering U-boat. They didn’t trust the lights. They didn’t trust the red crosses. Above all, they didn’t trust the U-boats. There was justification for their cynicism: other hospital boats, they knew, had been less fortunate than they had been but whether those attacks had been deliberate or accidental had never been established. There are no courts of law on the high seas and no independent witnesses. Either from reasons of delicacy or because they thought it pointless the crew never discussed the matter with those who lived in what they regarded as a fool’s paradise—the doctors, the sisters, the nurses and the ward orderlies.

The starboard screen door on the bridge opened and a figure, torch in hand, entered. Batesman said: ‘Captain?’

‘Indeed. One of these days I’ll get to finish my breakfast in peace. Some lamps, will you, Third?’

Captain Bowen was of medium height, running to fat—‘well-built’ was his preferred term—with a cheerful white-bearded face and periwinkle-blue eyes. He was also well past retirement age but had never asked to retire and never been asked to: in both ships and men the Merchant Navy had suffered crippling losses and a new ship could be made in a tiny fraction of the time it took to make a new captain: there weren’t too many Captain Bowens left around.

The three emergency lamps didn’t give much more light than a similar number of candles would have done but it was enough to see just how quickly the Captain’s coat had been covered in snow in the brief seconds it had taken him to cover the distance from the saloon. He removed the coat, shook it out through the doorway and hurriedly closed the door.

‘Bloody generator having one of its fits again,’ Bowen said. He didn’t seem particularly upset about it, but then, no one had ever seen the Captain upset about anything. ‘Kent screen on the blink, of course. No odds. Useless anyway. Heavy snow, thirty knot wind and visibility zero.’ There was a certain satisfaction in Bowen’s voice and neither Batesman nor Hudson, the helmsman, had to ask why. All three belonged to the group of thought that had minimal belief in the Geneva Convention: no plane, ship or submarine could hope to locate them in those conditions. ‘Been through to the engine-room?’

‘I have not.’ Batesman spoke with some feeling and Bowen smiled. Chief Engineer Patterson, a north-easterner from the Newcastle area, had a high pride in his undoubted skill, a temper with a notoriously short fuse and a rooted aversion to being questioned about his activities by anyone as lowly as a third officer. ‘I’ll get the Chief, sir.’

He got the Chief. Bowen took the phone and said: ‘Ah, John. Not having much luck this trip, are we? Overload coil? Brushes? Fuse? Ah! The standby, then—I do hope we’re not out of fuel again.’ Captain Bowen spoke in tones of grave concern and Batesman smiled: every member of the crew, down even to the pantry-boy, knew that Chief Patterson was totally devoid of any sense of humour. Bowen’s reference to fuel referred to the occasion when, with Chief Patterson off duty, the main generator had failed and the young engineer in charge had forgotten to turn the cock on the fuel line to the auxiliary. Patterson’s comments were predictable. With a pained expression on his face, Bowen held the phone a foot from his ear until the crackling in the earpiece had ceased, spoke briefly again, then hung up and said diplomatically: ‘I think Chief Patterson is having rather more trouble than usual in locating electrical faults. Ten minutes, he says.’

Only two minutes later the phone rang.

‘Bad news, for a fiver.’ Bowen lifted the phone, listened briefly, then said: ‘You want a word with me, John? But you are having a word with me…Ah. I see. Very well.’ He hung up. ‘The Chief wants to show me something.’

Bowen did not, as Batesman might have assumed, go to the engine-room. He went, instead, to his cabin where he was joined within a minute by the Chief Engineer. A tall, lean man, with an unremarkable face and a permanent five o‘clock shadow, he was, like a number of men who are humourless and unaware of it, given to smiling at frequent intervals and usually at inappropriate moments. He was not, however, smiling at that particular moment. He produced three pieces of what appeared to be black carbon and arranged them on the Captain’s table until they formed an oblong shape.

‘What do you make of that, then?’

‘You know me, John, just a simple seaman. An armature brush for a dynamo or generator or whatever?’

‘Exactly.’ Patterson was much better at being grim than he was at smiling.

‘Hence the power failure?’

‘Nothing to do with the power failure. Overload coil thrown. Short somewhere. Jamieson’s taken a bridge-megger and gone off to locate it. Shouldn’t take him long to locate it.’

This Bowen was prepared to believe. Jamieson, the Second Engineer, was a very bright young man with the unusual distinction of being an A.M.I.E.E.—an Associate Member of the Instituteof Electrical Engineers. He said: ‘So this brush comes from the auxiliary generator; it’s broken, you seem unhappy about it, so I take it this is unusual.’

‘Unusual? It’s unknown. At least, I’ve never known of it. The brush is under constant spring-loaded pressure against the face of the armature. There is no way it could have broken in this particular fashion.’

‘Well, it did happen. First time for everything.’ Bowen touched the broken pieces with his finger. ‘A one-off job? Flaw in manufacture?’

Patterson didn’t answer. He dug into an overall pocket, brought out a small metal box, removed the lid and placed the box on the table beside the broken brush. The two brushes inside were identical in shape and size to the one that Patterson had reassembled. Bowen looked at them, pursed his lips, then looked at Patterson.

‘Spares?’ Patterson nodded. Bowen picked one up but only one half came away in his hand: the other half remained in the bottom of the box.

‘Our only two spares,’ Patterson said.

‘No point in examining the other?’

‘None. Both generators were examined and in good shape when we were in Halifax—and we’ve used the auxiliary twice since leaving there.’

‘One broken brush could be an extraordinary fluke. Three broken ones don’t even make for a ludicrous coincidence. Doesn’t even call for thoughtful chin-rubbing, John. We have an ill-intentioned crank in our midst.’

‘Crank! Saboteur, you mean.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose. At least, someone who is ill-disposed to us. Or towards the San Andreas. But saboteur? I wonder. Saboteurs go in for varied forms of wholesale destruction. Breaking three generator brushes can hardly be classified as wholesale destruction. And unless the character responsible is deranged he’s not going to send the San Andreas to the bottom—not with him inside it. Why, John, why?’

They were still sitting there, darkly pondering why, when a knock came at the door and Jamieson entered. Young, red-headed and with an ebullient and carefree attitude to life, he was being anything but ebullient and carefree at that moment: he had about him an air of gravity and anxiety, both quite alien to his nature.

‘Engine-room told me I’d find you here. I thought I should come at once.’

‘As the bearer of bad news,’ Captain Bowen said. ‘You have discovered two things: the location of the short and evidence of, shall we say, sabotage?’

‘How the hell—I’m sorry, sir, but how could you possibly—’

‘Tell him, John,’ Bowen said.

‘I don’t have to. Those broken brushes are enough. What did you find, Peter?’

‘For’ard. Carpenter’s shop. Lead cable passing through a bulkhead. Clips on either side seemed to have worked loose where it passed through the hole in the bulkhead.’

Bowen said: ‘Normal ship’s vibration, weather movement—doesn’t take much to chafe through soft lead.’

‘Lead’s tougher than you think, sir. In this case a pair of hands helped the normal chafing along. Not that that matters. Inside the lead sheathing the rubber round the power cable has been scorched away.’

‘Which one would expect in a short?’

‘Yes, sir. Only, I know the smell of electrically burnt rubber and it doesn’t smell like sulphur. Some bright lad had used an igniting match-head or heads to do the trick. I’ve left Ellis on the repair job. It’s simple and he should be about through now.’

‘Well, well. So it’s as easy as that to knock out a ship’s electrical power.’

‘Almost, sir. He’d one other little job to do. There’s a fuse-box just outside the carpenter’s shop and he removed the appropriate fuse before starting work. Then he returned to the fuse-box and shorted out the line—insulated pliers, ditto screwdriver, almost anything would do—then replaced the fuse. If he’d replaced the fuse before shorting out the line it would have blown, leaving the rest of the electrical system intact. Theoretically, that is—on very rare occasions the fuse is not so obliging and doesn’t go.’ Jamieson smiled faintly. ‘Fact of the matter is, if I’d had a cold in the nose he might have got away with it.’

The phone rang. Captain Bowen lifted it and handed it over to Patterson who listened, said: ‘Sure. Now,’ and handed the phone back. ‘Engineroom. Power coming on.’

Perhaps half a minute passed, then Captain Bowen said mildly: ‘You know, I don’t think the power is coming on.’

Jamieson rose and Bowen said: ‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Well, first of all to the engine-room to pick up Ellis and the bridge-megger and then I don’t know. It would seem that old Flannelfoot has more than one string to his bow.’

The phone rang again and Bowen, without answering, handed it over to Patterson, who listened briefly, said: ‘Thank you. Mr Jamieson is coming down,’ and handed the phone back. ‘Same again. I wonder how many places our friend has jinxed and is just waiting for the opportunity to activate them.’

Jamieson hesitated at the door. ‘Do we keep this to ourselves?’

‘We do not.’ Bowen was positive. ‘We broadcast it far and wide. Granted, Flannelfoot, as you call him, will be forewarned and forearmed, but the knowledge that a saboteur is at large will make everyone look at his neighbour and wonder what a saboteur looks like. If nothing else, it will make this lad a great deal more circumspect and, with any luck, may restrict his activities quite a bit.’ Jamieson nodded and left.

Bowen said: ‘I think, John, you might double the watch in the engine-room or at least bring two or three extra men—not, you understand, for engine-room duties.’

‘I understand. You think, perhaps—’

‘If you wanted to sabotage, incapacitate a ship, where would you go?’

Patterson rose, went to the door and, as Jamieson had done, stopped there and turned. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why, why, why?’

‘I don’t know why. But I have an unpleasant feeling about the where and the when. Here or hereabouts and sooner than we think, quicker than we want. Somebody,’ Captain Bowen said as if by way of explanation, ‘has just walked over my grave.’ Patterson gave him a long look and closed the door quietly behind him.

Bowen picked up the phone, dialled a single number and said: ‘Archie, my cabin.’ He had no sooner replaced the receiver when it rang again. It was the bridge. Batesman didn’t sound too happy.

‘Snowstorm’s blowing itself out, sir. Andover can see us now. Wants to know why we’re not showing any lights. I told them we had a power failure, then another message just now, why the hell are we taking so long to fix it?’

‘Sabotage.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘Sabotage. S for Sally, A for Arthur, B for Bobby, O for—’

‘Good God! Whatever—I mean, why—’

‘I do not know why.’ Captain Bowen spoke with a certain restraint. ‘Tell them that. I’ll tell you what I know—which is practically nothing—when I come up to the bridge. Five minutes. Maybe ten.’

Archie McKinnon, the Bo’sun, came in. Captain Bowen regarded the Bo’sun—as indeed many other captains regarded their bo’suns—as the most important crew member aboard. He was a Shetlander, about six feet two in height and built accordingly, perhaps forty years of age, with a brick-coloured complexion, blue-grey eyes and flaxen hair—the last two almost certainly inheritances from Viking ancestors who had passed by—or through—his native island a millennium previously.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ Bowen said. He sighed. ‘Archie, we have a saboteur aboard.’

‘Have we now.’ He raised eyebrows, no startled oaths from the Bo’sun, not ever. ‘And what has he been up to, Captain?’

Bowen told him what he had been up to and said: ‘Can you make any more of it than I can, which is zero?’

‘If you can’t, Captain, I can’t.’ The regard in which the Captain held the Bo’sun was wholly reciprocated. ‘He doesn’t want to sink the ship, not with him aboard and the water temperature below freezing. He doesn’t want to stop the ship—there’s half a dozen ways a clever man could do that. I’m thinking myself that all he wanted to do is to douse the lights which—at night-time, anyway—identify us as a hospital ship.’

‘And why would he want to do that, Archie?’ It was part of their unspoken understanding that the Captain always called him ‘Bo’sun’ except when they were alone.

‘Well.’ The Bo’sun pondered. ‘You know I’m not a Highlander or a Western Islander so I can’t claim to be fey or have the second sight.’ There was just the faintest suggestion of an amalgam of disapproval and superiority in the Bo’sun’s voice but the Captain refrained from smiling: essentially, he knew, Shetlanders did not regard themselves as Scots and restricted their primary allegiance to the Shetlands. ‘But like yourself, Captain, I have a nose for trouble and I can’t say I’m very much liking what I can smell. Half an hour—well, maybe forty minutes—anybody will be able to see that we are a hospital ship.’ He paused and looked at the Captain with what might possibly have been a hint of surprise which was the nearest the Bo’sun ever came to registering emotion. ‘I can’t imagine why but I have the feeling that someone is going to have a go at us before dawn. At dawn, most likely.’

‘I can’t imagine why either, Archie, but I have the same feeling myself. Alert the crew, will you? Ready for emergency stations. Spread the word that there’s an illegal electrician in our midst.’

The Bo’sun smiled. ‘So that they can keep an eye on each other. I don’t think, Captain, that we’ll find the man among the crew. They’ve been with us for a long time now.’

‘I hope not and I think not. That’s to say, I’d like to think not. But it was someone who knew his way around. Their wages are not exactly on a princely scale. You’d be surprised what a bag of gold can do to a man’s loyalty.’

‘After twenty-five years at sea, there isn’t a great deal that can surprise me. Those survivors we took off that tanker last night—well, I wouldn’t care to call any of them my blood-brother.’

‘Come, come, Bo’sun, a little of the spirit of Christian charity, if you please. It was a Greek tanker—Greece is supposed to be an ally, if you remember—and the crew would be Greek. Well, Greek, Cypriot, Lebanese, Hottentot if you like. Can’t expect them all to look like Shetlanders. I didn’t see any of them carrying a pot of gold.’

‘No. But some of them—the uninjured ones, I mean—were carrying suitcases.’

‘And some of them were carrying overcoats and at least three of them were wearing ties. And why not? The Argos spent six hours there wallowing around after being mined: time and enough for anyone to pack his worldly possessions or such few possessions as Greek seamen appear to have. It would be a bit much I think, Archie, to expect a crippled Greek tanker in the Barents Sea to have aboard a crewman with a bag of gold who just happened to be a trained saboteur.’

‘Aye, it’s not a combination that one would expect to find every day. Do we alert the hospital?’

‘Yes. What’s the latest down there?’ The Bo’sun invariably knew the state of everything aboard the San Andreas whether it concerned his department or not.

‘Dr Singh and Dr Sinclair have just finished operating. One man with a broken pelvis, the other with extensive burns. They’re in the recovery room now and should be okay. Nurse Magnusson is with them.’

‘My word, Archie, you do appear to be singularly well-informed.’

‘Nurse Magnusson is a Shetlander,’ the Bo’sun said, as if that explained everything. ‘Seven patients in Ward A, not fit to be moved. Worst is the Chief Officer of the Argos, but not in danger, Janet says.’

‘Janet?’

‘Nurse Magnusson.’ The Bo’sun was a difficult man to put off his stride. ‘Ten in recuperating Ward B. The Argos survivors are in the bunks on the port side.’

‘I’ll go down there now. Go and alert the crew. When you’ve finished, come along to the sick-bay—and bring a couple of your men with you.’

‘Sick-bay?’ The Bo’sun regarded the deckhead. ‘You’d better not let Sister Morrison hear you call it that.’

Bowen smiled. ‘Ah, the formidable Sister Morrison. All right, hospital. Twenty sick men down there. Not to mention sisters, nurses and ward orderlies who—’

‘And doctors.’

‘And doctors who have never heard a shot fired in their lives. A close eye, Archie.’

‘You are expecting the worst, Captain?’

‘I am not,’ Bowen said heavily, ‘expecting the best.’

The hospital area of the San Andreas was remarkably airy and roomy, remarkably but not surprisingly, for the San Andreas was primarily a hospital and not a ship and well over half of the lower deck space had been given over to its medical facilities. The breaching of watertight bulkheads—a hospital ship, theoretically, did not require watertight bulkheads—increased both the sense and the actuality of the spaciousness. The area was taken up by two wards, an operating theatre, recovery room, medical store, dispensary, galley—quite separate from and independent of the crew’s galley—cabins for the medical staff, two messes—one for the staff, the other for recuperating patients—and a small lounge. It was towards the last of these that Captain Bowen now made his way.

He found three people there, having tea: Dr Singh, Dr Sinclair and Sister Morrison. Dr Singh was an amiable man of ‘Pakistan’ descent, middle-aged and wearing a pince-nez—he was one of the few people who looked perfectly at home with such glasses. He was a qualified and competent surgeon who disliked being called ‘Mister’. Dr Sinclair, sandy-haired and every bit as amiable as his colleague, was twenty-six years old and had quit in his second year as an intern in a big teaching hospital to volunteer for service in the Merchant Navy. Nobody could ever have accused Sister Morrison of being amiable: about the same age as Sinclair, she had auburn hair, big brown eyes and a generous mouth, all three of which accorded ill with her habitually prim expression, the steel-rimmed glasses which she occasionally affected and a faint but unmistakable aura of aristocratic hauteur. Captain Bowen wondered what she looked like when she smiled: he wondered if she ever smiled.

He explained, briefly, why he had come. Their reactions were predictable. Sister Morrison pursed her lips, Dr Sinclair raised his eyebrows and Dr Singh, half-smiling, said: ‘Dear me, dear me. Saboteur or saboteurs, spy or spies aboard a British vessel. Quite unthinkable.’ He meditated briefly. ‘But then, not everybody aboard is strictly British. I’m not, for one.’

‘Your passport says you are.’ Bowen smiled. ‘As you were operating in the theatre at the time that our saboteur was operating elsewhere that automatically removes you from the list of potential suspects. Unfortunately, we don’t have a list of suspects, potential or otherwise. We do indeed, Dr Singh, have a fair number of people who were not born in Britain. We have two Indians—lascars—two Goanese, two Singhalese, two Poles, a Puerto Rican, a Southern Irishman and, for some odd reason, an Italian who, as an official enemy, ought to be a prisoner-of-war or in an internment camp somewhere. And, of course, the survivors of the Argos are non-British to a man.’

‘And don’t forget me,’ Sister Morrison said coldly. ‘I’m half German.’

‘You are? With a name like Margaret Morrison?’

She pursed her lips, an exercise which seemed to come naturally to her. ‘How do you know that my name is Margaret?’

‘A captain holds the crew lists. Like it or not, you are a member of the crew. Not that any of this matters. Spies, saboteurs, can be of any nationality and the more unlikely they are—in this case being British—the more efficiently they can operate. As I say, that’s at the moment irrelevant. What is relevant is that the Bo’sun and two of his men will be here very shortly. Should an emergency arise he will assume complete charge except, of course, for the handling of the very ill. I assume you all know the Bo’sun?’

‘An admirable man,’ Dr Singh said. ‘Very reassuring, very competent, couldn’t imagine anyone I’d rather have around in times of need.’

‘We all know him.’ Sister Morrison was as good with her cold tones as she was with her pursed lips. ‘Heaven knows he’s here often enough.’

‘Visiting the sick?’

‘Visiting the sick! I don’t like the idea of an ordinary seaman pestering one of my nurses.’

‘Mr McKinnon is not an ordinary seaman. He’s an extraordinary seaman and he’s never pestered anyone in his life. Let’s have Janet along here to see if she bears out your preposterous allegations.’

‘You—you know her name.’

‘Of course I know her name.’ Bowen sounded weary. It was not the moment, he thought, to mention the fact that until five minutes ago he had never heard of anyone called Janet. ‘They come from the same island and have much to talk about. It would help, Miss Morrison, if you took as much interest in your staff as I do in mine.’

It was a good exit line, Bowen thought, but he wasn’t particularly proud of himself. In spite of the way she spoke he rather liked the girl because he suspected that the image she projected was not the real one and that there might be some very good reason for this: but she was not Archie McKinnon.

The Chief Officer, one Geraint Kennet, an unusual name but one that he maintained came from an ancient aristocratic lineage, was awaiting Bowen’s arrival on the bridge. Kennet was a Welshman, lean of figure and of countenance, very dark and very irreverent.

‘You are lost, Mr Kennet?’ Bowen said. Bowen had long ago abandoned the old habit of addressing a Chief Officer as ‘Mister’.

‘When the hour strikes, sir, Kennet is there. I hear of alarms and excursions from young Jamie here.’ ‘Young Jamie’ was Third Officer Batesman. ‘Something sinister afoot, I gather.’

‘You gather rightly. Just how sinister I don’t know.’ He described what little had happened. ‘So, two electrical breakdowns, if you could call them that, and a third in the process of being investigated.’

‘And it would be naïve to think that the third is not connected with the other two?’

‘Very naïve.’

‘This presages something ominous.’

‘Don’t they teach you English in those Welsh schools.’

‘No, sir. I mean, yes, sir. You have reached a conclusion, not, perhaps, a very nice one?’

The phone rang. Batesman took it and handed the phone to Bowen who listened briefly, thanked the caller and hung up.

‘Jamieson. In the cold room, this time. How could anyone get into the cold room? Cook’s got the only key.’

‘Easily,’ Kennet said. ‘If a man was a saboteur, trained in his art—if that’s the word I want—one would expect him to be an expert picklock or at least to carry a set of skeleton keys around with him. With respect, sir, I hardly think that’s the point. When will this villain strike again?’

‘When indeed. Flannelfoot—that’s Jamieson’s term for him—seems to be a villain of some resource and foresight. It is more than likely that he has some further surprises. Jamieson is of the same mind. If there’s another power failure when they switch on again he says he’s going to go over every inch of wiring with his bridge-megger, whatever that is.’

‘Some sort of instrument for detecting voltage leaks—you know, breaks in a circuit. It’s occurred to me—’

Chief Radio Officer Spenser appeared at the hatchway of his wireless office, paper in hand. ‘Message from the Andover, sir.’

Bowen read out: ‘Continued absence of lights very serious. Essential expedite matters. Has saboteur been apprehended?’

Kennet said: ‘Cue, I think for angry spluttering.’

‘Man’s a fool,’ Bowen said. ‘Commander Warrington, I mean, captain of the frigate. Spenser, send: “If you have any members of the Special Branch or CID with you they are welcome aboard. If not, kindly refrain from sending pointless signals. What the hell do you think we’re trying to do?” ’

Kennet said: ‘In the circumstances, sir, a very restrained signal. As I was about to say—’

The phone rang again. Batesman took the call, listened, acknowledged, hung up and turned to the Captain.

‘Engine-room, sir. Another malfunction. Both Jamieson and Third Engineer Ralson are on their way up with meggers.’

Bowen brought out his pipe and said nothing. He gave the impression of a man temporarily bereft of words. Kennet wasn’t, but then, Kennet never was.

‘Man never gets to finish a sentence on this bridge. Have you arrived at any conclusion, sir, however unpleasant?’

‘Conclusion, no. Hunch, suspicion, yes. Unpleasant, yes. I would take odds that by or at dawn someone is going to have a go at us.’

‘Fortunately,’ Kennet said, ‘I am not a betting man. In any event I wouldn’t bet against my own convictions. Which are the same as yours, sir.’

‘We’re a hospital ship, sir,’ Batesman said. He didn’t even sound hopeful.

Bowen favoured him with a morose glance. ‘If you are immune to the sufferings of the sick and dying and care to exercise a certain cold-blooded and twisted logic, then we are a man-of-war even though we are completely defenceless. For what do we do? We take our sick and wounded home, fix them up and send them off again to the front or to the sea to fight the Germans once more. If you were to stretch your conscience far enough you could make a good case out of maintaining that to allow a hospital ship to reach its homeland is tantamount to aiding and abetting the enemy. Oberleutnant Lemp would have torpedoed us without a second thought.’

‘Oberleutnant who?’

‘Lemp. Chap who sent the Athenia to the bottom—and Lemp knew that the Athenia carried only civilians as passengers, men, women and children who—he knew this well—would never be used to fight against the Germans. The Athenia was a case much more deserving of compassion than we are, don’t you think, Third?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, sir.’ Batesman was now not only as morose as the Captain had been, but positively mournful. ‘How do we know that this fellow Lemp is not lurking out there, just over the horizon?’

‘Fear not,’ Kennet said. ‘Oberleutnant Lemp has long since been gathered to his ancestors, for whom one can feel only a certain degree of sympathy. However, he may have a twin brother or some kindred souls out there. As the Captain so rightly infers, we live in troubled and uncertain times.’

Batesman looked at Bowen. ‘Is it permitted, Captain, to ask the Chief Officer to shut up?’

Kennet smiled broadly, then stopped smiling as the phone rang again. Batesman reached for the phone but Bowen forestalled him. ‘Master’s privilege, Third. The news may be too heavy for a young man like you to bear.’ He listened, cursed by way of acknowledgment and hung up. When he turned round he looked—and sounded—disgusted.

‘Bloody officers’ toilet!’

Kennet said, ‘Flannelfoot?’

‘Who do you think it was? Santa Claus?’

‘A sound choice,’ Kennet said judiciously. ‘Very sound. Where else could a man work in such peace, privacy and for an undetermined period of time, blissfully immune, one might say, from any fear of interruption? Might even have time to read a chapter of his favourite thriller, as is the habit of one young officer aboard this ship, who shall remain nameless.’

‘The Third Officer has the right of it,’ Bowen said. ‘Will you kindly shut up?’

‘Yes, sir. Was that Jamieson?’

‘Yes.’

‘We should be hearing from Ralson any time now.’

‘Jamieson has already heard from him. Seamen’s toilet this time, port side.’

For once, Kennet had no observation to make and for almost a minute there was silence on the bridge for the sufficient reason that there didn’t seem to be any comment worth making. When the silence was broken it was, inevitably, by Kennet.

‘A few more minutes and our worthy engineers might as well cease and desist. Or am I the only person who has noticed that the dawn is in the sky?’

The dawn, indeed, was in the sky. Already, to the south-east, off the port beam, the sky had changed from black, or as black as it ever becomes in northern waters, to a dark grey and was steadily lightening. The snow had completely stopped now, the wind had dropped to twenty knots and the San Andreas was pitching, not heavily, in the head seas coming up from the northwest.

Kennet said, ‘Shall I post a couple of extra lookouts, sir? One on either wing?’

‘And what can those look-outs do? Make faces at the enemy?’

‘They can’t do a great deal more, and that’s a fact. But if anyone is going to have a go at us, it’s going to be now. A high-flying Condor, for instance, you can almost see the bombs leaving the bay and there’s an even chance in evasive action.’ Kennet didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic or convinced.

‘And if it’s a submarine, dive-bomber, glider-bomber or torpedo-bomber?’

‘They can still give us warning and time for a prayer. Mind you, probably a very short prayer, but still a prayer.’

‘As you wish, Mr Kennet.’

Kennet made a call and within three minutes his look-outs arrived on the bridge, duffel-coated and scarfed to the eyebrows as Kennet had instructed. McGuigan and Jones, a Southern Irishman and a Welshman, they were boys only, neither of them a day over eighteen. Kennet issued them with binoculars and posted them on the bridge wings, Jones to port, McGuigan to starboard. Seconds only after closing the port door, Jones opened it again.

‘Ship, sir! Port quarter.’ His voice was excited, urgent. ‘Warship, I think.’

‘Relax,’ Kennet said. ‘I doubt whether it’s the Tirpitz.’ Less than half a dozen people aboard knew that the Andover had accompanied them during the night. He stepped out on to the wing and returned almost immediately. ‘The good shepherd,’ he said. ‘Three miles.’

‘It’s almost half-light now,’ Captain Bowen said. ‘We could be wrong, Mr Kennet.’

The radio room hatchway panel banged open and Spenser’s face appeared.

‘Andover, sir. Bandit, bandit, one bandit…045…ten miles…five thousand.’

‘There now,’ Kennet said. ‘I knew we weren’t wrong. Full power, sir?’ Bowen nodded and Kennet gave the necessary instructions to the engine-room.

‘Evasive action?’ Bowen was half-smiling; knowledge, however unwelcome that knowledge, always comes as a relief after uncertainty. ‘A Condor, you would guess?’

‘No guess, sir. In those waters, only the Condor flies alone.’ Kennet slid back the port wing door and gazed skywards. ‘Cloud cover’s pretty thin now. We should be able to see our friend coming up—he should be practically dead astern. Shall we go out on the wing, sir?’

‘In a minute, Mr Kennet. Two minutes. Gather flowers while we may—or, at least, keep warm as long as possible. If fate has abandoned us we shall be freezing to death all too soon. Tell me, Mr Kennet, has any profound thought occurred to you?’

‘A lot of thoughts have occurred to me but I wouldn’t say any of them are profound.’

‘How on earth do you think that Condor located us?’

‘Submarine? It could have surfaced and radioed Alta Fjord.’

‘No submarine. The Andover’s sonar would have picked him up. No plane, no surface ships, that’s a certainty.’

Kennet frowned for a few seconds, then smiled. ‘Flannel-foot,’ he said with certainty. ‘A radio.’

‘Not necessarily even that. A small electrical device, probably powered by our own mains system, that transmits a continuous homing signal.’

‘So if we survive this lot it’s out with the fine-tooth comb?’

‘Indeed. It’s out with—’

‘Andover, sir.’ It was Spenser again. ‘Four bandits, repeat four bandits…310…eight miles…three thousand.’

‘I wonder what we’ve done to deserve this?’ Kennet sounded almost mournful. ‘We were even more right than we thought, sir. Torpedo-bombers or glider-bombers, that’s for sure, attacking out of the darkness to the north-west and us silhouetted against the dawn.’

The two men moved out on the port wing. The Andover was still on the port quarter but had closed in until it was less than two miles distant. A low bank of cloud, at about the same distance, obscured the view aft.

‘Hear anything, Mr Kennet? See anything?’

‘Nothing, nothing. Damn that cloud. Yes, I do. I hear it. It’s a Condor.’

‘It’s a Condor.’ Once heard, the desynchronized clamour of a Focke-Wulf 200’s engine is not readily forgotten. ‘And I’m afraid, Mr Kennet, that you’ll have to postpone your evasive action practice for another time. This lad sounds as if he is coming in very low.’

‘Yes, he’s coming in low. And I know why.’ Most unusually for Kennet, he sounded very bitter. ‘He intends to do some pinpoint precision bombing. He’s under orders to stop us or cripple us but not sink us. I’ll bet that bastard Flannelfoot feels as safe as houses.’

‘You have it to rights, Mr Kennet. He could stop us by bombing the engine-room, but doing that is a practical guarantee that we go to the bottom. There he comes, now.’ The Focke-Wulf Condor had broken through the cloud and was heading directly for the stern of the San Andreas. Every gun on the Andover that could be brought to bear had opened up as soon as the Focke-Wulf had cleared the cloud-bank and within seconds the starboard side of the Andover was wreathed in smoke. For a frigate, its anti-aircraft fire-power was formidable: low-angle main armament, pom-poms, Oerlikons and the equally deadly Boulton-Paul Defiant turrets which loosed off a devastating 960 rounds a minute. The Focke-Wulf must have been hit many times but the big Condor’s capacity to absorb punishment was legendary. Still it came on, now no more than two hundred feet above the waves. The sound of the engines had risen from the clamorous to the thunderous.

‘This is no place for a couple of honest seamen to be, Mr Kennet.’ Captain Bowen had to shout to make himself heard. ‘But I think it’s too late now.’

‘I rather think it is, sir.’

Two bombs, just two, arced lazily down from the now smoking Condor.

TWO

Had the Americans retained the original British design concept for accommodation aboard the Liberty Ships, the tragedy, while still remaining such, would at least have been minimized. The original Sunderland plans had the accommodation both fore and aft: Henry Kaiser’s designers, in their wisdom—blind folly as it turned out—had all their accommodation, for both officers and men, including also the navigating bridge, grouped in a single superstructure surrounding the funnel.

The Bo’sun, Dr Sinclair by his side, had reached the upper deck before the Condor reached the San Andreas; they were almost immediately joined by Patterson for whom the Andover’s barrage had sounded like a series of heavy metallic blows on the side of his engine-room.

‘Down!’ the Bo’sun shouted. Two powerful arms around their shoulders bore them to the deck, for the Focke-Wulf had reached the San Andreas before the bombs did and the Bo’sun was well aware that the Focke-Wulf carried a fairly lethal array of machine guns which it did not hesitate to use when the occasion demanded. On this occasion, however, the guns remained silent, possibly because the gunners were under instructions not to fire, more probably because the gunners were already dead, for it was plain that the Condor, trailing a huge plume of black smoke, whether from fuselage or engines it was impossible to say, and veering sharply to starboard, was itself about to die.

The two bombs, contact and not armour-piercing, struck fore and aft of the funnel, exploded simultaneously and just immediately after passing through the unprotected deck-heads of the living quarters, blowing the shattered bulkheads outwards and filling the air with screaming shards of metal and broken glass, none of which reached the three prone men. The Bo’sun cautiously lifted his head and stared in disbelief as the funnel, seemingly intact but sheared off at its base toppled slowly over the port side and into the sea. Any sound of a splash that there may have been was drowned out by the swelling roar of more aero engines.

‘Stay down, stay down!’ Flat on the deck, the Bo’sun twisted his head to the right. There were four of them in line abreast formation, Heinkel torpedo-bombers, half a mile away, no more than twenty feet above the water and headed directly for the starboard side of the San Andreas. Ten seconds, he thought, twelve at the most and the dead men in the charnel house of that shattered superstructure would have company and to spare. Why had the guns of the Andover fallen silent? He twisted his head to the left to look at the frigate and immediately realized why. It was impossible that the gunners on the Andover could not hear the sound of the approaching Heinkels but it was equally impossible that they could see them. The San Andreas was directly in line between the frigate and the approaching bombers which were flying below the height of their upper deck.

He twisted his head to the right again and to his momentary astonishment saw that this was no longer the case. The Heinkels were lifting clear of the water with the intention of flying over the San Andreas, which they did seconds later, not much more than ten feet above the deck, two on each side of the twisted superstructure. The San Andreas had not been the target, only the shield for the Heinkels: the frigate was the target and the bombers were half way between the San Andreas and the frigate before the bemused defenders aboard the Andover understood what was happening.

When they did understand their reaction was sharp and violent. The main armament was virtually useless. It takes time to train and elevate a gun of any size and against a close-in and fast-moving target there just isn’t time. The anti-aircraft guns, the two-pounders, the Oerlikons and the Defiants did indeed mount a heavy barrage but torpedo-bombers were notoriously difficult targets, not least because the gunners were acutely aware that death was only seconds away, a realization that made for less than a controlled degree of accuracy.

The bombers were less than three hundred yards away when the plane on the left-hand side of the formation pulled up and banked to its left to clear the stern of the Andover: almost certainly neither the plane nor the pilot had been damaged: as was not unknown, the torpedo release mechanism had iced up, freezing the torpedo in place. At about the same instant the plane on the right descended in a shallow dive until it touched the water—almost certainly the pilot had been shot. A victory but a Pyrrhic one. The other two Heinkels released their torpedoes and lifted clear of the Andover.

Three torpedoes hit the Andover almost simultaneously, the two that had been cleanly released and the one that was still attached to the plane that had crashed into the water. All three torpedoes detonated but there was little enough in the way of thunderclaps of sound or shock waves: water always has this same muffling effect on an underwater explosion. What they did produce, however, was a great sheet of water and spray which rose to two hundred feet into the sky and then slowly subsided. When it finally disappeared the Andover was on its beam ends and deep in the water. Within twenty seconds, with only a faint hissing as the water flooded the engine-room and with curiously little in the way of bubbles, the Andover slid beneath the surface of the sea.

‘My God, my God, my God!’ Dr Sinclair, swaying slightly, was on his feet. As a doctor, he was acquainted with death, but not in this shocking form: he was still dazed, not quite aware of what was going on around him. ‘Good God, that big plane is coming back again!’

The big plane, the Condor, was indeed coming back again, but it offered no threat to them. Dense smoke pouring from all four engines, it completed a half circle and was approaching the San Andreas. Less than half a mile away it touched the surface of the sea, momentarily dipped beneath it, then came into sight again. There was no more smoke.

‘God rest them,’ Patterson said. He was almost abnormally calm. ‘Damage control party first, see if we’re making water, although I shouldn’t have thought so.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The Bo’sun looked at what was left of the superstructure. ‘Perhaps a fire-control party. Lots of blankets, mattresses, clothes, papers in there—God only knows what’s smouldering away already.’

‘Do you think there will be any survivors in there?’

‘I wouldn’t even guess, sir. If there are, thank heavens we’re a hospital ship.’

Patterson turned to Dr Sinclair and shook him gently. ‘Doctor, we need your help.’ He nodded towards the superstructure. ‘You and Dr Singh—and the ward orderlies. I’ll send some men with sledges and crowbars.’

‘An oxy-acetylene torch?’ said the Bo’sun.

‘Of course.’

‘We’ve got enough medical equipment and stores aboard to equip a small town hospital,’ Sinclair said. ‘If there are any survivors all we’ll require is a few hypodermic syringes.’ He seemed back on balance again. ‘We don’t take in the nurses?’

‘Good God, no.’ Patterson shook his head vehemently. ‘I tell you, I wouldn’t like to go in there. If there are any survivors they’ll have their share of horrors later.’

McKinnon said: ‘Permission to take away the lifeboat, sir?’

‘Whatever for?’

‘There could be survivors from the Andover.’

‘Survivors! She went down in thirty seconds.’

‘The Hood blew apart in one second. There were three survivors.’

‘Of course, of course. I’m not a seaman, Bo’sun. You don’t need permission from me.’

‘Yes, I do, sir.’ The Bo’sun gestured towards the superstructure. ‘All the deck officers are there. You’re in command.’

‘Good God!’ The thought, the realization had never struck Patterson. ‘What a way to assume command!’

‘And speaking of command, sir, the San Andreas is no longer under command. She’s slewing rapidly to port. Steering mechanism on the bridge must have been wrecked.’

‘Steering can wait. I’ll stop the engines.’

Three minutes later the Bo’sun eased the throttle and edged the lifeboat towards an inflatable life raft which was roller-coasting heavily near the spot where the now vanished Condor had been. There were only two men in the raft—the rest of the aircrew, the Bo’sun assumed, had gone to the bottom with the Focke-Wulf. They had probably been dead anyway. One of the men, no more than a youngster, very seasick and looking highly apprehensive—he had every right, the Bo’sun thought, to be apprehensive—was sitting upright and clinging to a lifeline. The other lay on his back in the bottom of the raft: in the regions of his left upper chest, left upper arm and right thigh his flying overalls were saturated with blood. His eyes were closed.

‘Jesus’ sake!’ Able Seaman Ferguson, who had a powerful Liverpool accent and whose scarred face spoke eloquently of battles lost and won, mainly in bar-rooms, looked at the Bo’sun with a mixture of disbelief and outrage. ‘Jesus, Bo’sun, you’re not going to pick those bastards up? They just tried to send us to the bottom. Us! A hospital ship!’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know why they bombed a hospital ship?’

‘There’s that, there’s that.’ Ferguson reached out with a boathook and brought the raft alongside.

‘Either of you speak English?’

The wounded man opened his eyes: they, too, seemed to be filled with blood. ‘I do.’

‘You look badly hurt. I want to know where before we try to bring you aboard.’

‘Left arm, left shoulder, I think, right thigh. And I believe there’s something wrong with my right foot.’ His English was completely fluent and if there was any accent at all it was a hint of southern standard English, not German.

‘You’re the Condor Captain, of course.’

‘Yes. Still want to bring me aboard?’

The Bo’sun nodded to Ferguson and the two other seamen he had along with him. The three men brought the injured pilot aboard as carefully as they could but with both lifeboat and raft rolling heavily in the beam seas it was impossible to be too careful. They laid him in the thwarts close to where the Bo’sun was sitting by the controls. The other survivor huddled miserably amidships. The Bo’sun opened the throttle and headed for the position where he estimated the Andover had gone down.

Ferguson looked down at the injured man who was lying motionless on his back, arms spread-eagled. The red stains were spreading. It could have been that he was still bleeding quite heavily: but it could have been the effect of sea-water.

‘Reckon he’s a goner, Bo’sun?’

McKinnon reached down and touched the side of the pilot’s neck and after a few seconds he located the pulse, fast, faint and erratic, but still a pulse.

‘Unconscious. Fainted. Couldn’t have been an easy passage for him.’

Ferguson regarded the pilot with a certain grudging respect. ‘He may be a bloody murderer, but he’s a bloody tough bloody murderer. Must have been in agony, but never a squawk. Shouldn’t we take him back to the ship first? Give him a chance, like?’

‘I thought of it. No. There just may be survivors from the Andover and if there are they won’t last long. Sea temperature is about freezing or just below it. A man’s usually dead inside a minute. If there’s anyone at all, a minute’s delay may be a minute too late. We owe them that chance. Besides it’s going to be a very quick trip back to the ship.’

The San Andreas, slewing to port, had come around in a full half-circle and, under reverse thrust, was slowing to a stop. Patterson had almost certainly done this so as to manoeuvre the temporarily rudderless ship as near as possible to the spot where the Andover had been torpedoed.

Only a pathetic scattering of flotsam and jetsam showed where the frigate had gone down, baulks of timber, a few drums, carley floats, lifebuoys and life jackets, all empty—and four men. Three of the men were together. One of them, a man with what appeared to be a grey stocking hat, was keeping the head of another man, either unconscious or dead, out of the water: with his other hand he waved at the approaching lifeboat. All three men were wearing life jackets and, much more importantly, all three were wearing wet suits, which was the only reason they were still alive after fifteen minutes in the ice-cold waters of an Arctic winter.

All three were hauled inboard. The young, bareheaded man who had been supported by the man with the grey stocking hat was unconscious, not dead. He had every reason, the Bo’sun thought, to be unconscious: there was a great swelling bruise still oozing blood just above the right temple. The third man—it seemed most incongruous in the circumstances—wore the peaked braided cap of a naval commander. The cap was completely saturated. The Bo’sun made to remove it, then changed his mind when he saw the blood at the back of the cap: the cap was probably stuck to his head. The commander was quite conscious, he had courteously thanked the Bo’sun for being pulled out of the sea: but his eyes were vacant, glazed and sightless. McKinnon passed a hand before his eyes, but there was no reaction: for the moment, at any rate, the commander was quite blind.

Although he knew he was wasting his time, the Bo’sun headed towards the fourth man in the water but he backed off when he was still five yards away. Although his face was deep in the water he hadn’t died from drowning but from freezing: he wasn’t wearing a wet suit. The Bo’sun turned the lifeboat back to the San Andreas and touched the commander gently on the shoulder.

‘How do you feel, Commander Warrington?’

‘What? How do I feel? How do you know I’m Commander Warrington?’

‘You’re still wearing your cap, sir.’ The Commander made as if to touch the peak of his cap but the Bo’sun restrained him. ‘Leave it, sir. You’ve cut your head and your hat’s sticking to it. We’ll have you in hospital inside fifteen minutes. Plenty of doctors and nurses there for that sort of thing, sir.’

‘Hospital.’ Warrington shook his head as if trying to clear it. ‘Ah, of course. The San Andreas. You must be from her.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m the Bo’sun.’

‘What happened, Bo’sun? The Andover, I mean.’ Warrington touched the side of his head. ‘I’m a bit foggy up here.’

‘No bloody wonder. Three torpedoes, sir, almost simultaneously. You must have been blown off the bridge, or fell off it, or most likely been washed off it when your ship went down. She was on her beam ends then, sir, and it took only just over twenty seconds.’

‘How many of us—well, how many have you found?’

‘Just three, sir. I’m sorry.’

‘God above. Just three. Are you sure, Bo’sun?’

‘I’m afraid I’m quite sure, sir.’

‘My yeoman of signals—’

‘I’m here, sir.’

‘Ah. Hedges. Thank heavens for that. Who’s the third?’

‘Navigating officer, sir. He’s taken a pretty nasty clout on the head.’

‘And the First Lieutenant?’ Hedges didn’t answer, he had his head buried in his hands and was shaking it from side to side.

‘I’m afraid Hedges is a bit upset, Commander. Was the First Lieutenant wearing a red kapok jacket?’ Warrington nodded. ‘Then we found him, sir. I’m afraid he just froze to death.’

‘He would, wouldn’t he? Freeze to death, I mean.’ Warrington smiled faintly. ‘Always used to laugh at us and our wet suits. Carried a rabbit’s foot around with him and used to say that was all the wet suit he’d ever need.’

Dr Singh was the first man to meet the Bo’sun when he stepped out of the lifeboat. Patterson was with him, as were two orderlies and two stokers. The Bo’sun looked at the stokers and wondered briefly what they were doing on deck, but only very briefly: they were almost certainly doing a seaman’s job because there were very few seamen left to do it. Ferguson and his two fellow seamen had been in the for’ard fire-control party and might well be the only three left: all the other seamen had been in the superstructure at the time of the attack.

‘Five,’ Dr Singh said. ‘Just five. From the frigate and the plane, just five.’

‘Yes, Doctor. And even they had the devil’s own luck. Three of them are pretty wobbly. Commander looks all right but I think he’s in the worst condition. He seems to have gone blind and the back of his head has been damaged. There’s a connection, isn’t there, Doctor?’

‘Oh dear. Yes, there’s a connection. We’ll do what we can.’

Patterson said: ‘A moment, Bo’sun, if you will.’ He walked to one side and McKinnon followed him. They were half way towards the twisted superstructure when Patterson stopped.

‘As bad as that is it, sir?’ the Bo’sun said. ‘No eavesdroppers. I mean, we have to trust someone.’

‘I suppose.’ Patterson looked and sounded tired. ‘But damned few. Not after what I’ve seen inside that superstructure. Not after one or two things I’ve found out. First things first. The hull is still structurally sound. No leaks. I didn’t think there would be. We’re fixing up a temporary rudder control in the engine-room: we’ll probably be able to reconnect to the bridge which is the least damaged part of the superstructure. There was a small fire in the crew’s mess, but we got that under control.’ He nodded to the sadly twisted mass of metal ahead of them. ‘Let’s pray for calm weather to come. Jamieson says the structural supports are so weakened that the whole lot is liable to go over the side if we hit heavy seas. Would you like to go inside?’

‘Like? Not like. But I have to.’ The Bo’sun hesitated, reluctant to hear the answer to the question he had to ask. ‘What’s the score so far, sir?’

‘Up to now we’ve come across thirteen dead.’ He grimaced. ‘And bits and pieces. I’ve decided to leave them where they were meantime. There may be more people left alive.’

‘More? You have found some?’

‘Five. They’re in a pretty bad way, some of them. They’re in the hospital.’ He led the way inside the twisted entrance at the after end of the superstructure. ‘There are two oxy-acetylene teams in there. It’s slow work. No fallen beams, no wreckage as such, just twisted and buckled doors. Some of them, of course—the doors, I mean—were just blown off. Like this one here.’

‘The cold room. Well, at least there would have been nobody in there. But there were three weeks’ supply of beef, all kinds of meat, fish and other perishables in there: in a couple of days’ time we’ll have to start heaving them over the side.’ They moved slowly along the passageway. ‘Cool room intact, sir, although I don’t suppose a steady diet of fruit and veg. will have much appeal. Oh God!’

The Bo’sun stared into the galley which lay across the passage from the cool room. The surfaces of the cooking stoves were at a peculiar angle, but all the cupboards and the two work tables were intact. But what had caught the Bo’sun’s horrified attention was not the furniture but the two men who lay spreadeagled on the floor. They seemed unharmed except for a little trickle of blood from the ears and noses.

‘Netley and Spicer,’ the Bo’sun whispered. ‘They don’t seem—they’re dead?’

‘Concussion. Instantaneous,’ Patterson said.

The Bo’sun shook his head and moved on.

‘Tinned food store,’ he said. ‘Intact. It would be. And the liquor store here, not a can dented or a bottle broken.’ He paused. ‘With your permission, sir, I think this is a very good time to breach the liquor store. A hefty tot of rum all round—or at least for the men working in here. Pretty grim work and it’s the custom in the Royal Navy when there’s grim work to be done.’

Patterson smiled slightly, a smile that did not touch the eyes. ‘I didn’t know you were in the Royal Navy, Bo’sun.’

‘Twelve years. For my sins.’

‘An excellent idea,’ Patterson said. ‘I’ll be your first customer.’ They made their way up a twisted but still serviceable companionway to the next deck, the Bo’sun with a bottle of rum and half a dozen mugs strung on a wire in the other. This was the crew accommodation deck and it was not a pretty sight. The passageway had a distinct S-bend to it, the deck was warped so that it formed a series of undulations. At the for’ard end of the passageway, two oxy-acetylene teams were at work, each attacking a buckled door. In the short space between the head of the companionway and where the men were working were eight doors, four of them hanging drunkenly on their hinges, four that had been cut open by torches: seven of those had been occupied, and the occupants were still there, twelve of them in all. In the eighth cabin they found Dr Sinclair, stooping over and administering a morphine injection to a prone but fully conscious patient, a consciousness that was testified to by the fact that he was addressing nobody in particular in an unprintable monologue.

The Bo’sun said: ‘How do you feel, Chips?’ Chips was Rafferty, the ship’s carpenter.

‘I’m dying.’ He caught sight of the rum bottle in the Bo’sun’s hand and his stricken expression vanished. ‘But I could make a rapid recovery—’

‘This man is not dying,’ Dr Sinclair said. ‘He has a simple fracture of the tibia, that’s all. No rum—morphine and alcohol make for bad bedfellows. Later.’ He straightened and tried to smile. ‘But I could do with a tot, if you would, Bo’sun—a generous one. I feel in need of it.’ With his strained face and pale complexion he unquestionably looked in need of it: nothing in Dr Sinclair’s brief medical experience had even remotely begun to prepare him for the experience he was undergoing. The Bo’sun poured him the requisite generous measure, did the same for Patterson and himself, then passed the bottle and mugs to the men with the torches and the two ward orderlies who were standing unhappily by, strapped stretcher at the ready: they looked in no better case than Dr Sinclair but cheered up noticeably at the sight of the rum.

The deck above held the officers’ accommodation. It too, had been heavily damaged, but not so devastatingly so as the deck below. Patterson stopped at the first cabin they came to: its door had been blown inwards and the contents of the cabin looked as if a maniac had been let loose there with a sledgehammer. The Bo’sun knew it was Chief Patterson’s cabin.

The Bo’sun said, ‘I don’t much care for being in an engine-room, sir, but there are times when it has its advantages.’ He looked at the empty and almost as badly damaged Second Engineer’s cabin opposite. ‘At least Ralson is not here. Where is he, sir?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘He’s dead,’ the Bo’sun repeated slowly.

‘When the bombs struck he was still in the sea-men’s toilet fixing that short-circuit.’

‘I’m most damnably sorry, sir.’ He knew that Ralson had been Patterson’s only close friend aboard the ship.

‘Yes,’ Patterson said vaguely. ‘He had a young wife and two kids—babies, really.’

The Bo’sun shook his head and looked into the next cabin, that belonging to the Second Officer. ‘At least Mr Rawlings is not here.’

‘No. He’s not here. He’s up on the bridge.’ The Bo’sun looked at him, then turned away and went into the Captain’s cabin which was directly opposite and which, oddly enough, seemed almost undamaged. The Bo’sun went directly to a small wooden cupboard on the bulkhead, produced his knife, opened up the marlinspike and inserted its point just below the cupboard lock.

‘Breaking and entering, Bo’sun?’ The Chief Engineer’s voice held puzzlement but no reproof: he knew McKinnon well enough to know that the Bo’sun never did anything without a sound reason.

‘Breaking and entering is for locked doors and windows, sir. Just call this vandalism.’ The door sprang open and the Bo’sun reached inside, bringing out two guns. ‘Navy Colt 45s. You know about guns, sir?’

‘I’ve never held a gun in my hand in my life. You know about guns—as well as rum?’

‘I know about guns. This little switch here—you press it so. Then the safety-catch is off. That’s really all you require to know about guns.’ He looked at the broken cupboard and then the guns and shook his head again. ‘I don’t think Captain Bowen would have minded.’

‘Won’t. Not wouldn’t. Won’t.’

The Bo’sun carefully laid the guns on the Captain’s table. ‘You’re telling me that the Captain is not dead?’

‘He’s not dead. Neither is the Chief Officer.’

The Bo’sun smiled for the first time that morning, then looked accusingly at the Chief Engineer. ‘You might have told me this, sir.’

‘I suppose. I might have told you a dozen things. You would agree, Bo’sun, that we both have a great deal on our minds. They’re both in the sick bay, both pretty savagely burnt about the face but not in any danger, not, at least, according to Dr Singh. It was being far out on the port wing of the bridge that saved them—they were away from the direct effects of the blast.’

‘How come they got so badly burnt, sir?’

‘I don’t know. They can hardly speak, their faces are completely wrapped in bandages, they look more like Egyptian mummies than anything else. I asked the Captain and he kept mumbling something like Essex, or Wessex or something like that.’

The Bo’sun nodded. ‘Wessex, sir. Rockets. Distress flares. Two lots kept on the bridge. The shock must have triggered some firing mechanism and it went off prematurely. Damnable ill luck.’

‘Damnably lucky, if you ask me, Bo’sun. Compared to practically everybody else in the superstructure.’

‘Does he—does he know yet?’

‘It hardly seemed the time to tell him. Another thing he kept repeating, as if it was urgent. “Home signal, home signal,” something like that. Over and over again. Maybe his mind was wandering, maybe I couldn’t make him out. Their mouths are the only part of their faces that aren’t covered with bandages but even their lips are pretty badly burnt. And, of course, they’re loaded with morphine. “Home signal.” Mean anything to you?’

‘At the moment, no.’

A young and rather diminutive stoker appeared in the doorway. McCrimmon, in his middle twenties, was a less than lovable person, his primary and permanent characteristics being the interminable mastication of chewing gum, truculence, a fixed scowl and a filthy tongue: at that moment, the first three were in abeyance.

‘Bloody awful, so it is, down there. Just like a bloody cemetery.’

‘Morgue, McCrimmon, morgue,’ Patterson said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Me. Nothing, sir. Jamieson sent me. He said something about the phones no’ working and you would be wanting a runner, maybe.’

‘Second Engineer to you, McCrimmon.’ Patterson looked at the Bo’sun. ‘Very thoughtful of the Second Engineer. Nothing we require in the engine-room—except to get that jury rudder fixed. Deck-side, Bo’sun?’

‘Two look-outs, although God knows what they’ll be looking out for. Two of your men, sir, the two ward orderlies below, Able Seaman Ferguson and Curran. Curran is—used to be—a sailmaker. Don’t envy him his job but I’ll give him a hand. Curran will know what to bring. I suggest, sir, we have the crew’s mess-deck cleared.’

‘Our mortuary?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You heard, McCrimmon? How many men?’

‘Eight, sir.’

‘Eight. Two look-outs. The two seamen to bring up the canvas and whatever required. The other four to clear the crew’s mess. Don’t you try to tell them, they’d probably throw you overboard. Tell the Second Engineer and he’ll tell them. When they’ve finished have them report to me, here or on the bridge. You too. Off you go.’ McCrimmon left.

The Bo’sun indicated the two Colts lying on the table. ‘I wonder what McCrimmon thought of those.’

‘Probably old hat to him. Jamieson picked the right man—McCrimmon’s tough and hasn’t much in the way of finer feelings. Irish-Scots from some Glasgow slum. Been in prison. In fact, if it wasn’t for the war that’s probably where he’d be now.’

The Bo’sun nodded and opened another small wall locker—this one had a key to it. It was a small liquor cupboard and from a padded velvet retainer McKinnon removed a rum bottle and laid it on the Captain’s bunk.

‘I don’t suppose the Captain will mind that either,’ Patterson said. ‘For the stretcher-bearers?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The Bo’sun started opening drawers in the Captain’s table and found what he was looking for in the third drawer, two leather-bound folders which he handed to Patterson. ‘Prayer book and burial service, sir. But I should think the burial service would be enough. Somebody’s got to read it.’

‘Good God. I’m not a preacher, Bo’sun.’

‘No, sir. But you’re the officer commanding.’

‘Good God,’ Patterson repeated. He placed the folders reverently on the Captain’s table. ‘I’ll look at those later.’

‘ “Home signal”,’ the Bo’sun said slowly. ‘That’s what the Captain said, wasn’t it? “Home signal”.’

‘Yes.’

‘ “Homing signal” is what he was trying to say. “Homing signal”. Should have thought of it before—but I suppose that’s why Captain Bowen is a captain and I’m not. How do you think the Condor managed to locate us in the darkness? All right, it was half dawn when he attacked but he must have been on the course when it was still night. How did he know where we were?’

‘U-boat?’

‘No U-boat. The Andover’s sonar would have picked him up.’ The Bo’sun was repeating the words that Captain Bowen had used.

‘Ah.’ Patterson nodded. ‘Homing signal. Our saboteur friend.’

‘Flannelfoot, as Mr Jamieson calls him. Not only was he busy fiddling around with our electrical circuits, he was transmitting a continuous signal. A directional signal. The Condor knew where we were to the inch. I don’t know whether the Condor was equipped to receive such signals, I know nothing about planes, but it wouldn’t have mattered, some place like Alta Fjord could have picked up the signal and transmitted our bearing to the Condor.’

‘You have it, of course, Bo’sun, you have it to rights.’ Patterson looked at the two guns. ‘One for me and one for you.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘Don’t be daft, who else would have it?’ Patterson picked up a gun. ‘I’ve never even held one of these things in my hand, far less fired one. But you know, Bo’sun, I don’t really think I would mind firing a shot once. Just one.’

‘Neither would I, sir.’

Second Officer Rawlings was lying beside the wheel and there was no mystery as to how he had died: what must have been a flying shard of metal had all but decapitated him.

‘Where’s the helmsman?’ the Bo’sun asked. ‘Was he a survivor, then?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know who was on. Maybe Rawlings had sent him to get something. But there were two survivors up here, apart from the Captain and Chief Officer—McGuigan and Jones.’

‘McGuigan and Jones? What were they doing up here?’

‘It seems Mr Kennet had called them up and posted them as look-outs, one on either wing. I suppose that’s why they survived, just as Captain Bowen and Mr Kennet survived. They’re in the hospital, too.’

‘Badly hurt?’

‘Unharmed, I believe. Shock, that’s all.’

The Bo’sun moved out to the port wing and Patterson followed. The wing was wholly undamaged, no signs of metal buckling anywhere. The Bo’sun indicated a once grey but now badly scorched metal box which was attached just below the wind-breaker: its top and one side had been blown off.

‘That’s where they kept the Wessex rockets,’ the Bo’sun said.

They went back inside and the Bo’sun moved towards the wireless office hatchway: the sliding wooden door was no longer there.

‘I wouldn’t look, if I were you,’ Patterson said.

‘The men have got to, haven’t they?’

Chief Radio Officer Spenser was lying on the deck but he was no longer recognizable as such. He was just an amorphous mass of bone and flesh and torn, blood-saturated clothing: had it not been for the clothing it could have been the shattered remnants of any animal lying there. When McKinnon looked away Patterson could see that some colour had drained from the deeply-tanned face.

‘The first bomb must have gone off directly beneath him,’ the Bo’sun said. ‘God, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ll attend to him myself. Third Officer Batesman. I know he was the officer of the watch. Any idea where he is, sir?’

‘In the chart room. I don’t advise you to go there either.’

Batesman was recognizable but only just. He was still on his. chair, half-leaning, half-lying on the table, what was left of his head pillowed on a blood-stained chart. McKinnon returned to the bridge.

‘I don’t suppose it will be any comfort to their relatives to know that they died without knowing. I’ll fix him up myself, too. I couldn’t ask the men.’ He looked ahead through the totally shattered windscreens. At least, he thought, they wouldn’t be needing a Kent clear-view screen any more. ‘Wind’s backing to the east,’ he said absently. ‘Bound to bring more snow. At least it might help to hide us from the wolves—if there are any wolves around.’

‘You think, perhaps, they might come back to finish us off?’ The Chief was shivering violently but that was only because he was accustomed to the warmth of the engine-room: the temperature on the bridge was about 6°F—twenty-six degrees of frost—and the wind held steady at twenty knots.

‘Who can be sure, sir? But I really don’t think so. Even one of those Heinkel torpedo-bombers could have finished us off if they had had a mind to. Come to that, the Condor could have done the same thing.’

‘It did pretty well as it was, if you ask me.’

‘Not nearly as well as it could have done. I know that a Condor normally carries 250-kilo bombs—that’s about 550 lbs. A stick of those bombs—say three or four—would have sent us to the bottom. Even two might have been enough—they’d have certainly blown the superstructure out of existence, not just crippled it.’

‘The Royal Navy again, is that it, Bo’sun?’

‘I know explosives, sir. Those bombs couldn’t have been any more than fifty kilos each. Don’t you think, sir, that we might have some interesting questions to ask that Condor captain when he regains consciousness?’

‘In the hope of getting some interesting answers, is that it? Including the answer to the question why he bombed a hospital ship in the first place.’

‘Well, yes, perhaps.’

‘What do you mean—perhaps?’

‘There’s just a chance—a faint one, I admit—that he didn’t know he was bombing a hospital ship.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Bo’sun. Of course he knew he was attacking a hospital ship. How big does a red cross have to be before you see it?’

‘I’m not trying to make any excuses for him, sir.’ There was a touch of asperity in McKinnon’s voice and Patterson frowned, not at the Bo’sun but because it was most unlike the Bo’sun to adopt such a tone without reason. ‘It was still only half-dawn, sir. Looking down, things look much darker than they do at sea level. You’ve only got to go up to a crow’s nest to appreciate that.’ As Patterson had never been in a crow’s nest in his life he probably fell ill-equipped to comment on the Bo’sun’s observation. ‘As he was approaching from dead astern he couldn’t possibly have seen the markings on the ship’s sides and as he was flying very low he couldn’t have seen the red cross on the foredeck—the superstructure would have blocked off his view.’

‘That still leaves the red cross on the afterdeck. Even though it might have been only half light, he must have seen that.’

‘Not with the amount of smoke you were putting up under full power.’

‘There’s that. There is a possibility.’ He was unconvinced and watched with some impatience as the Bo’sun spun the now useless wheel and examined the binnacle compass and the standby compass, now smashed beyond any hope of repair.

‘Do we have to remain up here?’ Patterson said. ‘There’s nothing we can do here at the moment and I’m freezing to death. I suggest the Captain’s cabin.’

‘I was about to suggest the same, sir.’

The temperature in the cabin was no more than freezing point, but that was considerably warmer than it had been on the bridge and, more importantly, there was no wind there. Patterson went straight to the liquor cabinet and extracted a bottle of Scotch.

‘If you can do it I can do it. We’ll explain to the Captain later. I don’t really like rum and I need it.’

‘A specific against pneumonia?’

‘Something like that. You will join me?’

‘Yes, sir. The cold doesn’t worry me but I think I’m going to need it in the next hour or so. Do you think the steering can be fixed, sir?’

‘It’s possible. Have to be a jury job. I’ll get Jamieson on to it.’

‘It’s not terribly important. I know all the phones are out but it shouldn’t take too long to reconnect them and you’re fixing up a temporary rudder control in the engine-room. Same with the electrics—it won’t take long to run a few rubber cables here and there. But we can’t start on any of those things until we get this area—well, cleared.’

Patterson lowered the contents of his glass by half. ‘You can’t run the San Andreas from the bridge. Two minutes up there was enough for me. Fifteen minutes and anyone would be frozen to death.’

‘You can’t run it from any other place. Cold is the problem, I agree. So we’ll board it up. Plenty of plywood in the carpenter’s shop.’

‘You can’t see through plywood.’

‘Could always pop our heads through the wing doors from time to time, but that won’t be necessary. We’ll let some windows into the plywood.’

‘Fine, fine,’ Patterson said. The Scotch had apparently restored his circulation. ‘All we need is a glazier and some windows and we haven’t got either.’

‘A glazier we don’t need. We don’t need to have cut glass or fitted windows. You must have rolls and rolls of insulating tape in your electrical department.’

‘I’ve got a hundred miles of it and I still don’t have any windows.’

‘Windows we won’t need. Glass, that’s all. I know where the best glass is—and plate glass at that. The tops of all those lovely trolleys and trays in the hospital.’

‘Ah! I do believe you have it, Bo’sun.’

‘Yes, sir. I suppose Sister Morrison will let you have them.’

Patterson smiled one of his rare smiles. ‘I believe I’m the officer commanding, however temporary.’

‘Indeed, sir. Just don’t let me be around when you put her into irons. Those are all small things. There are three matters that give a bit more concern. First, the radio is just a heap of scrap metal. We can’t contact anyone and no one can contact us. Secondly, the compasses are useless. I know you had a gyro installed, but it never worked, did it? But worst of all is the problem of navigation.’

‘Navigation? Navigation! How can that be a problem?’

‘If you want to get from A to B, it’s the biggest problem of all. We have—we had—four navigating officers aboard this ship. Two of those are dead and the other two are swathed in bandages—in your own words, like Egyptian mummies. Commander Warrington could have navigated, I know, but he’s blind and from the look in Dr Singh’s eyes I should think the blindness is permanent.’ The Bo’sun paused for a moment, then shook his head. ‘And just to make our cup overflowing, sir, we have the Andover’s navigating officer aboard and he’s either concussed or in some sort of coma, we’ll have to ask Dr Singh. If a poker-player got dealt this kind of hand of cards, he’d shoot himself. Four navigating officers who can’t see and if you can’t see you can’t navigate. That’s why the loss of the radio is so damned unfortunate. There must be a British warship within a hundred or two miles which could have lent us a navigating officer. Can you navigate, sir?’

‘Me? Navigate?’ Patterson seemed positively affronted. ‘I’m an engineer officer. But you, McKinnon: you’re a seaman—and twelve years in the Royal Navy.’

‘It doesn’t matter if I had been a hundred years in the Royal Navy, sir. I still can’t navigate. I was a Torpedo Petty Officer. If you want to fire a torpedo, drop a depth charge, blow up a mine or do some elementary electrics, I’m your man. But I’d barely recognize a sextant if I saw one. Such things as sunsights, moonsights—if there is such a thing—and starsights are just words to me. I’ve also heard of words like deviation and variation and declination and I know more about Greek than I do about those.

‘We do have a little hand-held compass aboard the motor lifeboat, the one I took out today, but that’s useless. It’s a magnetic compass, of course, and that’s useless because I do know the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the geographical north pole: I believe it’s about a thousand miles away from it. Canada, Baffin Island or some such place. Anyway, in the latitudes we’re in now the magnetic pole is more west than north.’ The Bo’sun sipped some Scotch and looked at Patterson over the rim of his glass. ‘Chief Patterson, we’re lost.’

‘Job’s comforter.’ Patterson stared moodily at his glass, then said without much hope: ‘Wouldn’t it be possible to get the sun at noon? That way we’d know where the south was.’

‘The way the weather is shaping up we won’t be able to see the sun at noon. Anyway, what’s noon, sun-time—it’s certainly not twelve o‘clock on our watches? Supposing we were in the middle of the Atlantic, where we might as well be, and knew where south was, would that help us find Aberdeen, which is where I believe we are going? The chronometer, incidentally, is kaput, which doesn’t matter at all—I still wouldn’t be able to relate the chronometer to longitude. And even if we did get a bearing on due south, it’s dark up here twenty hours out of the twenty-four and the auto-pilot is as wrecked as everything else on the bridge. We wouldn’t, of course, be going around in circles, the hand compass would stop us from doing that, but we still wouldn’t know in what direction we were heading.’

‘If I want to find some optimism, Bo’sun, I’ll know where not to look. Would it help at all if we knew approximately where we were?’

‘It would help, but all we know, approximately, is that we’re somewhere north or north-west of Norway. Anywhere, say, in twenty thousand square miles of sea. There are only two possibilities, sir. The Captain and Chief Officer must have known where we were. If they’re able to tell us, I’m sure they will.’

‘Good God, of course! Not very bright, are we? At least, I’m not. What do you mean—“if”? Captain Bowen was able to talk about twenty minutes ago.’

‘That was twenty minutes ago. You know how painful burns can be. Dr Singh is sure to have given them painkillers and sometimes the only way they can work is by knocking you out.’

‘And the other possibility?’

‘The chart house. Mr Batesman was working on a chart—he still had a pencil in his hand. I’ll go.’

Patterson grimaced. ‘Sooner you than me.’

‘Don’t forget Flannelfoot, sir.’ Patterson touched his overalls where he had concealed his gun. ‘Or the burial service.’

Patterson looked at the leather-covered folder in distaste. ‘And where am I supposed to leave that? On the operating table?’

‘There are four empty cabins in the hospital, sir. For recuperating VIPs. We don’t have any at the moment.’

‘Ah. Ten minutes, then.’

The Bo’sun was back in five minutes, the Chief Engineer in fifteen. An air of almost palpable gloom hung over Patterson.

‘No luck, sir?’

‘No, dammit. You guessed right. They’re under heavy sedation, may be hours before they come to. And if they do start coming to, Dr Singh says, he’s going to sedate them again. Apparently, they were trying to tear the bandages off their faces. He’s got their hands swathed in bandages—even an unconscious man, the doctor says, will try to scratch away at whatever irritates him. Anyway, their hands were burnt—not badly, but enough to justify the bandages.’

‘They’ve got straps for tying wrists to the bed-frames.’

‘Dr Singh did mention that. He said he didn’t think Captain Bowen would take too kindly to waking up and finding himself virtually in irons on his own ship. By the way, the missing helmsman was Hudson. Broken ribs and one pierced his lung. Doctor says he’s very ill. What luck did you have?’

‘Same as you, sir. Zero. There was a pair of parallel rules lying beside Mr Batesman so I assume he must have been pencilling out a course.’

‘You couldn’t gather anything from the chart?’

‘It wasn’t a chart any more. It was just a bloodstained rag.’

THREE

It was snowing heavily and a bitter wind blew from the east as they buried their dead in the near-Stygian darkness of the early afternoon. A form of illumination they did have, for the saboteur, probably more than satisfied with the results of his morning’s activities, was now resting on his laurels and the deck floodlights were working again, but in that swirling blizzard the light given off was weak, fitful and almost ineffectual, serving only to intensify the ghoulish effect of the burial party hastening about their macabre task and the ghostlike appearance of the bare dozen of snow-covered mourners. Flashlight in hand, Chief Engineer Patterson read out the burial service, but he might as well have been quoting the latest prices on the stock exchange for not a word could be heard: one by one the dead, in their weighted canvas shrouds, slipped down the tilted plank, out from under the Union flag and vanished, silently, into the freezing water of the Barents Sea. No bugle calls, no Last Post for the Merchant Navy, not ever: the only requiem was the lost and lonely keening of the wind through the frozen rigging and the jagged gaps that had been torn in the superstructure.

Shivering violently and mottled blue and white with the cold, the burial party and mourners returned to the only reasonably warm congregating space left on the San Andreas—the dining and recreational area in the hospital between the wards and the cabins.

‘We owe you a very great debt, Mr McKinnon,’ Dr Singh said. He had been one of the mourners and his teeth were still chattering. ‘Very swift, very efficient. It must have been a gruesome task.’

‘I had six willing pairs of hands,’ the Bo’sun said. ‘It was worse for them than it was for me.’ The Bo’sun did not have to explain what he meant: everybody knew that anything would always be worse for anybody than for that virtually indestructible Shetlander. He looked at Patterson. ‘I have a suggestion, sir.’

‘A Royal Naval one?’

‘No, sir. Deep-sea fisherman’s. Anyway, it’s close enough, these are the waters of the Arctic trawlers. A toast to the departed.’

‘I endorse that, and not for traditional or sentimental reasons.’ Dr Singh’s teeth still sounded like castanets. ‘Medicinal. I don’t know about the rest of you but my red corpuscles are in need of some assistance.’

The Bo’sun looked at Patterson, who nodded his approval. McKinnon turned and looked at an undersized, freckle-faced youth who was hovering at a respectful distance. ‘Wayland.’

Wayland came hurrying forward. ‘Yes, Mr McKinnon, sir?’

‘Go with Mario to the liquor store. Bring back some refreshments.’

‘Yes, Mr McKinnon, sir. Right away, Mr McKinnon, sir.’ The Bo’sun had long given up trying to get Wayland Day to address him in any other fashion.

Dr Singh said: ‘That won’t be necessary, Mr McKinnon. We have supplies here.’

‘Medicinal, of course?’

‘Of course.’ Dr Singh watched as Wayland went into the galley. ‘How old is that boy?’

‘He claims to be seventeen or eighteen, says he’s not sure which. In either case, he’s fibbing. I don’t believe he’s ever seen a razor.’

‘He’s supposed to be working for you, isn’t he? Pantry boy, I understand. He spends nearly all his day here.’

‘I don’t mind, Doctor, if you don’t.’

‘No, not at all. He’s an eager lad, willing and helpful.’

‘He’s all yours. Besides, we haven’t a pantry left. He’s making eyes at one of the nurses?’

‘You underestimate the boy. Sister Morrison, no less. At a worshipful distance, of course.’

‘Good God!’ the Bo’sun said.

Mario entered, bearing, one-handed and a few inches above his head, a rather splendid silver salver laden with bottles and glasses, which, in the circumstances, was no mean feat, as the San Andreas was rolling quite noticeably. With a deft, twirling movement, Mario had the tray on the table without so much as the clink of glass against glass. Where the salver had come from was unexplained and Mario’s business. As became the popular conception of an Italian, Mario was darkly and magnificently mustachioed, but whether he possessed the traditional flashing eyes was impossible to say as he invariably wore dark glasses. There were those who purported to see in those glasses a connection with the Sicilian Mafia, an assertion that was always good-humouredly made, as he was well-liked. Mario was overweight, of indeterminate age and claimed to have served in the Savoy Grill, which may have been true. What was beyond dispute was that there lay behind Mario, a man whose rightful home Captain Bowen considered to be either a prisoner-of-war or internment camp, a more than usually chequered career.

After no more than two fingers of Scotch, but evidently considering that his red corpuscles were back on the job, Dr Singh said: ‘And now, Mr Patterson?’

‘Lunch, Doctor. A very belated lunch but starving ourselves isn’t going to help anyone. I’m afraid it will have to be cooked in your galley and served here.’

‘Already under way. And then?’

‘And then we get under way.’ He looked at the Bo’sun. ‘We could, temporarily, have the lifeboat’s compass in the engine-room. We already have rudder control there.’

‘It wouldn’t work, sir. There’s so much metal in your engine-room that any magnetic compass would have fits.’ He pushed back his chair and rose. ‘I think I’ll pass up lunch. I think you will agree, Mr Patterson, that a telephone line from the bridge to the engine-room and electric power on the bridge—so that we can see what we are doing—are the two first priorities.’

Jamieson said: ‘That’s already being attended to, Bo’sun.’

‘Thank you, sir. But the lunch can still wait.’ He was speaking now to Patterson. ‘Board up the bridge and let some light in. After that, sir, we might try to clear up some of the cabins in the superstructure, find out which of them is habitable and try to get power and heating back on. A little heating on the bridge wouldn’t come amiss, either.’

‘Leave all that other stuff to the engine-room staff—after we’ve had a bite, that is. You’ll be requiring some assistance?’

‘Ferguson and Curran will be enough.’

‘Well, that leaves only one thing.’ Patterson regarded the deckhead. ‘The plate glass for your bridge windows.’

‘Indeed, sir. I thought you—’

‘A trifle.’ Patterson waved a hand to indicate how much of a trifle it was. ‘You have only to ask, Bo’sun.’

‘But I thought you—perhaps I was mistaken.’

‘We have a problem?’ Dr Singh said.

‘I wanted some plate glass from the trolleys or trays in the wards. Perhaps, Dr Singh, you would care—’

‘Oh no.’ Dr Singh’s reply was as quick as it was decisive. ‘Dr Sinclair and I run the operating theatre and look after our surgical patients, but the running of the wards has nothing to do with us. Isn’t that so, Doctor?’

‘Indeed it is, sir.’ Dr Sinclair also knew how to sound decisive.

The Bo’sun surveyed the two doctors and Patterson with an impassive face that was much more expressive than any expression could have been and passed through the doorway into Ward B. There were ten patients in this ward and two nurses, one very much a brunette, the other very much a blonde. The brunette, Nurse Irene, was barely in her twenties, hailed from Northern Ireland, was pretty, dark-eyed and of such a warm and happy disposition that no one would have dreamed of calling her by her surname, which no one seemed to know anyway. She looked up as the Bo’sun entered and for the first time since she’d joined she failed to give him a welcoming smile. He patted her shoulder gently and walked to the other end of the ward where Nurse Magnusson was rebandaging a seaman’s arm.

Janet Magnusson was a few years older than Irene and taller, but not much. She had a more than faintly windswept, Viking look about her and was unquestionably good-looking: she shared the Bo’sun’s flaxen hair and blue-grey eyes but not, fortunately, his burnt-brick complexion. Like the younger nurse, she was much given to smiling: like her, the smile was in temporary abeyance. She straightened as the Bo’sun approached, reached out and touched his arm.

‘It was terrible, wasn’t it, Archie?’

‘Not a thing I would care to do again. I’m glad you weren’t there, Janet.’

‘I didn’t mean that—the burial, I mean. It was you who sewed up the worst of them—they say that the Radio Officer was, well, all bits and pieces.’

‘An exaggeration. Who told you that?’

‘Johnny Holbrook. You know, the young orderly. The one that’s scared of you.’

‘There’s nobody scared of me,’ the Bo’sun said absently. He looked around the ward. ‘Been quite some changes here.’

‘We had to turf some of the so-called recuperating patients out. You’d have thought they were being sent to their deaths. Siberia, at least. Nothing the matter with them. Not malingerers, really, they just liked soft beds and being spoiled.’

‘And who was spoiling them, if not you and Irene? They just couldn’t bear to be parted from you. Where’s the lioness?’

Janet gave him a disapproving look. ‘Are you referring to Sister Morrison?’

‘That’s the lioness I mean. I have to beard her in her den.’

‘You don’t know her, Archie. She’s very nice really. Maggie’s my friend. Truly.’

‘Maggie?’

‘When we’re off duty, always. She’s in the next ward.’

‘Maggie! Good lord! I thought she disapproved of you because she disapproves of me because she disapproves of me talking to you.’

‘Fiddlesticks. And Archie?’

‘Yes?’

‘A lioness doesn’t have a beard.’

The Bo’sun didn’t deign to answer. He moved into the adjacent ward. Sister Morrison wasn’t there. Of the eight patients, only two, McGuigan and Jones, were visibly conscious. The Bo’sun approached their adjacent beds and said: ‘How’s it going, boys?’

‘Ach, we’re fine, Bo’sun,’ McGuigan said. ‘We shouldn’t be here at all.’

‘You’ll stay here until you’re told to leave.’ Eighteen years old. He was wondering how long it would take them to recover from the sight of the almost decapitated Rawlings lying by the wheel when Sister Morrison entered by the far door.

‘Good afternoon, Sister Morrison.’

‘Good afternoon, Mr McKinnon. Making your medical rounds, I see.’

The Bo’sun felt the stirrings of anger but contented himself with looking thoughtful: he was probably unaware that his thoughtful expression, in certain circumstances, could have a disquieting effect on people.

‘I just came to have a word with you, Sister.’ He looked around the ward. ‘Not a very lively bunch, are they?’

‘I hardly think this is the time or place for levity, Mr McKinnon.’ The lips were not as compressed as they might have been but there was an appreciable lack of warmth behind the steel-rimmed spectacles.

The Bo’sun looked at her for long seconds, during which time she began to show distinct signs of uneasiness. Like most people—with the exception of the timorous Johnny Holbrook—she regarded the Bo’sun as being cheerful and easy-going, with the rider, in her case, that he was probably a bit simple: it required only one glance at that cold, hard, bleak face to realize how totally wrong she had been. It was an unsettling experience.

The Bo’sun spoke in a slow voice. ‘I am not in the mood for levity, Sister. I’ve just buried fifteen men. Before I buried them I had to sew them up in their sheets of canvas. Before I did that I had to gather up their bits and pieces and stick their guts back inside. Then I sewed them up. Then I buried them. I didn’t see you among the mourners, Sister.’

The Bo’sun was more than aware that he shouldn’t have spoken to her like that and he was also aware that what he had gone through had affected him more than he had thought. Under normal circumstances it was impossible that he should have been so easily provoked: but the circumstances were abnormal and the provocation too great.

‘I’ve come for some plate glass, such as you have on the tops of your trolleys and trays. I need them urgently and I don’t need them for any light-hearted purposes. Or do you require an explanation?’

She didn’t say whether she required an explanation or not. She didn’t do anything dramatic like sinking into a chair, reaching out for the nearest support or even putting a hand to her mouth. Only her colour changed. Sister Morrison had the kind of complexion that, like her eyes and lips, was in marked contrast to her habitually severe expression and steel-rimmed glasses, the kind of complexion that would have had the cosmetic tycoons sending their scientists back to the bench: at that moment, however, the peaches had faded from the traditional if rarely seen peaches and cream of the traditional if equally rarely seen English rose.

The Bo’sun removed the glass top from a table by Jones’s bedside, looked around for trays, saw none, nodded to Sister Morrison and went back to Ward B. Janet Magnusson looked at him in surprise.

‘Is that what you went for?’ The Bo’sun nodded. ‘Maggie—Sister Morrison—had no objection?’

‘Nary an objection. Have you any glass-topped trays?’

Chief Patterson and the others had already begun lunch when the Bo’sun returned, five sheets of plate glass under his arm. Patterson looked faintly surprised.

‘No trouble then, Bo’sun?’

‘One only has to ask. I’ll need some tools for the bridge.’

‘Fixed,’ Jamieson said. ‘I’ve just been to the engine-room. There’s a box gone up to the bridge—all the tools you’ll require, nuts, bolts, screws, insulating tape, a power drill and a power saw.’

‘Ah. Thank you. But I’ll need power.’

‘Power you have. Only a temporary cable, mind you, but the power is there. And lights, of course. The phone will take some time.’

‘That’s fine. Thank you, Mr Jamieson.’ He looked at Patterson. ‘One other thing, sir. We have a fair number of nationalities in our crew. The captain of the Greek tanker—Andropolous, isn’t it?—might have a mixed crew too. I should think there’s a fair chance, sir, that one of our men and one of the Greek crew might have a common language. Perhaps you could make enquiries, sir.’

‘And how would that help, Bo’sun?’

‘Captain Andropolous can navigate.’

‘Of course, of course. Always the navigation, isn’t it, Bo’sun?’

‘There’s nothing without it, sir. Do you think you could get hold of Naseby and Trent—they’re the two men who were with me here when we were attacked? Weather’s worsening, sir, and we have ice forming on the deck. Would you have them rig up lifelines between here and the superstructure?’

‘Worsening?’ Dr Singh said. ‘How much worse, Mr McKinnon?’

‘Quite a bit, I’m afraid. Bridge barometer is smashed but I think the one in the Captain’s cabin is intact. I’ll check.’ He brought out the hand compass which he’d removed from the lifeboat. ‘This thing’s virtually useless but at least it does show changes in direction. We’re wallowing in the troughs port side to, so that means the wind and the sea are coming at us on the port beam. Wind direction is changing rapidly, we’ve backed at least five degrees since we came down here. Wind’s roughly north-east. If experience is any guide that means heavy snow, heavy seas and a steadily dropping temperature.’

‘No slightest light in the gloom, is that it, Mr McKinnon?’ Dr Singh said. ‘Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. Except this is the other way round.’

‘A tiny speck of light, Doctor. If the temperature keeps falling like this, the cold room is going to stay cold and the frozen meat and fish should stay that way. And we do have a vile man—or men—aboard or we shouldn’t be in the state we are. You’re worried about your patients, aren’t you, Doctor—especially the ones in Ward A?’

‘Telepathy, Mr McKinnon. If conditions deteriorate much more they’re going to start falling out of their beds—and the last thing I want to do is to start strapping wounded men to their beds.’

‘And the last thing I want is for the superstructure to topple over the side.’

Jamieson had pushed back his chair and was on his feet. ‘I have my priorities right, no, Bo’sun?’

‘Indeed, Mr Jamieson. Thank you very much.’

Dr Singh half-smiled. ‘Not more telepathy?’

The Bo’sun smiled back. Dr Singh appeared to be very much the right man in the right place. ‘I think he’s gone to have a word with the men rigging up the telephone line from the bridge to the engine-room.’

‘And then I press the button,’ Patterson said.

‘Yes, sir. And then south-west. I don’t have to tell you why.’

‘You might tell a landlubber why,’ Dr Singh said.

‘Of course. Two things. Heading south-west will mean that the wind and the seas from the northeast are dead astern. That should eliminate all rolling so that you don’t have to put your patients in straitjackets or whatever. There’ll be some pitching, of course, but not much and even then Mr Patterson can smooth that out by adjusting the ship’s speed to the wave speed. The other big advantage is that by heading south-west there’s no land we can bump into for hundreds of miles to come. If you will excuse me, gentlemen.’ The Bo’sun left, together with his sheets of plate glass and hand compass.

‘Doesn’t miss much, does he?’ Dr Singh said. ‘Competent, you would say, Mr Patterson?’

‘Competent? He’s more than that. Certainly the best bo’sun I’ve ever sailed with—and I’ve never known a bad bo’sun yet. If we ever get to Aberdeen—and with McKinnon around I rate our chances better than even—I won’t be the man you’ll have to thank.’

The Bo’sun arrived on the bridge, a bridge now over-illuminated with two garish arc lamps, to find Ferguson and Curran already there, with enough plywood of various shapes and sizes to build a modest hut. Neither of the two men could be said to be able to walk, not in the proper sense of the term. Muffled to the ears and with balaclavas and hoods pulled low over their foreheads, they were so swaddled in layers of jerseys, trousers and coats that they were barely able to waddle: given a couple of white fur coats they would have resembled nothing so much as a pair of polar bears that had given up on their diet years ago. As it was, they were practically white already: the snow, driving almost horizontally, swept, without let or hindrance, through the yawning gaps where the port for’ard screens and the upper wing door screen had once been. Conditions weren’t improved by the fact that, at a height of some forty feet above the hospital, the effects of the rolling were markedly worse than they had been down below, so bad, in fact, that it was very difficult to keep one’s footing, and that only by hanging on to something. The Bo’sun carefully laid the plate glass in a corner and wedged it so that it wouldn’t slide all over the deck. The rolling didn’t bother him, but the creaking and groaning of the superstructure supports and the occasional juddering vibration that shook the bridge bothered him a very great deal.

‘Curran! Quickly! Chief Engineer Patterson. You’ll find him in the hospital. Tell him to start up and turn the ship either into the wind or away from the wind. Away is better—that means hard a-starboard. Tell him the superstructure is going to fall over the side any minute.’

For a man usually slow to obey any order and handicapped though he was by his constricted lower limbs, Curran made off with remarkable alacrity. It could have been that he was a good man in an emergency, but more likely he didn’t fancy being on the bridge when it vanished into the Barents Sea.

Ferguson eased two layers of scarf from his mouth. ‘Difficult working conditions, Bo’sun. Impossible, a man might say. And have you seen the temperature?’

The Bo’sun glanced at the bulkhead thermometer which was about the only thing still working on the bridge. ‘Two above,’ he said.

‘Ah! Two above. But two above what? Fahrenheit, that’s what it’s above. That means thirty degrees of frost.’ He looked at the Bo’sun in what he probably regarded as a meaningful fashion. ‘Have you ever heard of the chill factor, eh?’

The Bo’sun spoke with commendable restraint. ‘Yes, Ferguson, I have heard of the chill factor.’

‘For every knot of wind the temperature, as far as the skin is concerned, falls by one degree.’ Ferguson had something on his mind and as far as he was concerned the Bo’sun had never heard of the chill factor. ‘Wind’s at least thirty knots. That means it’s sixty below on this bridge. Sixty!’ At that moment, at the end of an especially alarming roll, the superstructure gave a very loud creak indeed, more of a screech than a creak, and it didn’t require any kind of imagination to visualize metal tearing under lateral stress.

‘If you want to leave the bridge,’ the Bo’sun said, ‘I’m not ordering you to stay.’

‘Trying to shame me into staying, eh? Trying to appeal to my better nature? Well, I got news for you. I ain’t got no better feelings, mate.’

The Bo’sun said, mildly: ‘Nobody aboard this ship calls me “mate”.’

‘Bo’sun.’ Ferguson made no move to carry out his implied threat and he wasn’t even showing any signs of irresolution. ‘Do I get danger money for this? Overtime, perhaps?’

‘A couple of tots of Captain Bowen’s special malt Scotch. Let’s spend our last moments usefully, Ferguson. We’ll start with some measuring.’

‘Already done.’ Ferguson showed the spring-loaded steel measuring tape in his hand and tried hard not to smile in smug self-satisfaction. ‘Me and Curran have already measured the front and side screens. Written down on that bit of plywood there.’

‘Fine, fine.’ The Bo’sun tested both the electric drill and electric saw. Both worked. ‘No problem. We’ll cut the plywood three inches wider and higher than your measurements to get the overlap we need. Then we’ll drill holes top, bottom and sides, three-quarters of an inch in, face the plywood up to the screen bearers, mark the metal and drill the holes through the steel.’

‘That steel is three-eighths of an inch. Take to next week to drill all those holes.’

The Bo’sun looked through the tool box and came up with three packets of drills. The first he discarded. The drills in the second, all with blue tips, he showed to Ferguson.

‘Tungsten. Goes through steel like butter. Mr Jamieson doesn’t miss much.’ He paused and cocked his head as if listening, though it was a purely automatic reaction, any sound from the after end of the ship was carried away by the wind: but there was no mistaking the throbbing that pulsed through the superstructure. He looked at Ferguson, whose face cracked into what might almost have been a smile.

The Bo’sun moved to the starboard wing door—the sheltered side of the ship—and peered through the gap where the screen had been in the upper half of the door. The snow was so heavy that the seas moving away from the San Andreas were as much imagined as seen. The ship was still rolling in the troughs. A vessel of any size that has been lying dead in the water can take an unconscionable time—depending, of course, on the circumstances—to gather enough momentum to have steerage way on, but after about another minute the Bo’sun became aware that the ship was sluggishly answering to the helm. He couldn’t see this but he could feel it: a definite quartering motion had entered into the rolling to which they had been accustomed for some hours.

McKinnon moved away from the wing door. ‘We’re turning to starboard. Mr Patterson has decided to go with the wind. We’ll soon have both sea and snow behind us. Fine, fine.’

‘Fine, fine,’ Ferguson said. This was about twenty seconds later and the tone of his voice indicated that everything was all but fine. He was, indeed, acutely uneasy and with reason. The San Andreas was heading almost due south, the heavy seas bearing down on her port quarter were making her corkscrew violently and the markedly increased creaking and groaning of the superstructure was doing little enough for his morale. ‘God’s sake, why couldn’t we have stayed where we were?’

‘A minute’s time and you’ll see why.’ And in a minute’s time he did see why. The corkscrewing and rolling gradually eased and ceased altogether, so did the creaking in the superstructure and the San Andreas, on an approximately south-west course, was almost rock-steady in the water. There was a slight pitching, but, compared to what they had just experienced, it was so negligible as not to be worth the mentioning. Ferguson, with a stable deck beneath his feet, the fear of imminent drowning removed and the snowstorm so squarely behind them that not a flake reached the bridge, had about him an air of profound relief.

Shortly after the Bo’sun and Ferguson had started sawing out the rectangles of plywood, four men arrived on the bridge—Jamieson, Curran, McCrimmon and another stoker called Stephen. Stephen was a Pole and was called always by his first name: nobody had ever been heard to attempt the surname of Przynyszewski. Jamieson carried a telephone, Curran two black heaters, McCrimmon two radiant heaters and Stephen two spools of rubber-insulated cable, one thick, one thin, both of which he unreeled as he went.

‘Well, this is more like it, Bo’sun,’ Jamieson said. ‘A millpond, one might almost call it. Done a power of good for the morale down below. Some people have even rediscovered their appetites. Speaking of appetites, how’s yours? You must be the only person aboard who hasn’t had lunch today.’

‘It’ll keep.’ The Bo’sun looked to where McCrimmon and Stephen were already attaching wires from the heaters to the heavy cable. ‘Thanks for those. They’ll come in handy in an hour or two when we’ve managed to keep all this fresh air out.’

‘More than handy, I should have thought.’ Jamieson shivered. ‘My word, it is fresh up here. What’s the temperature?’

The Bo’sun looked at the thermometer. ‘Zero. That’s two degrees it’s dropped in a few minutes. I’m afraid, Mr Jamieson, that we’re going to be very cold tonight.’

‘Not in the engine-room,’ Jamieson said. He unscrewed the back of the telephone and started connecting it to the slender cable. ‘Mr Patterson thinks this is an unnecessary luxury and that you just want it so that you can talk to someone when you feel lonely. Says that keeping the stern on to wind and seas is child’s play and that he could do it for hours without deviating more than two or three degrees off course.’

‘I’ve no doubt he could. That way we’ll never see Aberdeen. You can tell Mr Patterson that the wind is backing and that if it backs far enough and he still keeps stern on to the wind and sea we’ll end up by making a small hole in the north of Norway and a large hole in ourselves.’

Jamieson smiled. ‘I’ll explain that to the Chief. I don’t think the possibility has occurred to him—it certainly didn’t to me.’

‘And when you go below, sir, would you send up Naseby? He’s an experienced helmsman.’

‘I’ll do that. Need any more help up here?’

‘No, sir. The three of us are enough.’

‘As you say.’ Jamieson screwed the back of the telephone in place, pressed the call-up button, spoke briefly and hung up. ‘Satisfaction guaranteed. Are you through, McCrimmon? Stephen?’ Both men nodded, and Jamieson called the engine-room again, asked for power to be switched on and told McCrimmon and Stephen to switch on one heater apiece, one black, one radiant. ‘Still require McCrimmon as a runner, Bo’sun?’

The Bo’sun nodded towards the telephone. ‘Thanks to you, I’ve got my runner.’

One of McCrimmon’s radiant heaters had started to glow a dim red. Stephen removed a hand from the black heater and nodded.

‘Fine. Switch off. It would seem, Bo’sun, that Flannelfoot has knocked off for the day. We’ll go below now, see what cabins we can make habitable. I’m afraid there won’t be many. The only way we can make a cabin habitable—the clearing up won’t take long, I’ve already got a couple of our boys working on that—is to replace defective heating systems. That’s all that matters. Unfortunately, most of the doors have been blasted off their hinges or cut away by the oxyacetylene torches and there’s no point in replacing heating if we can’t replace the doors. We’ll do what we can.’ He spun the useless wheel. ‘When we’ve finished below and you’ve finished here—and when the temperature is appropriate for myself and other hothouse plants from the engine-room—we’ll come and have a go at this steering.’

‘Big job, sir?’

‘Depends upon what damage in the decks, below. Don’t hold me to it, Bo’sun, but there’s a fair chance that we’ll have it operational, in what you’ll no doubt regard as our customary crude fashion, some time this evening. To give me some leeway, I won’t specify what time.’

The temperature on the bridge continued to drop steadily and because numbing cold slows up a man both physically and mentally it took McKinnon and his two men well over two hours to complete their task: had the temperature been anything like normal they could probably have done it in less than half the time. About three-quarters of the way through the repairs they had switched on all four heaters and the temperature had begun to rise, albeit very slowly.

McKinnon was well enough satisfied with their end product. Five sheets of hardboard had been bolted into position, each panel fitted with an inlet oblong of plate glass, one large, the other four, identical in shape, about half the size. The large one was fitted in the centre, directly ahead of where the helmsman normally stood: two of the others were fitted on either side of this and the remaining two on the upper sections of the wing doors. The inevitable gaps between the glass and the plywood and between the plywood and the metal to which they had been bonded had been sealed off with Hartley’s compound, a yellow plastic material normally used for waterproofing external electrical fittings. The bridge was as draughtproof as it was possible to make it.

Ferguson put away the last of the tools and coughed. ‘There was some mention of a couple of tots of Captain Bowen’s special malt.’

McKinnon looked at him and at Curran. Their faces were mottled blue and white with cold and both men were shivering violently: chronic complainers, neither had complained once.

‘You’ve earned it.’ He turned to Naseby. ‘How’s she bearing?’

Naseby looked at his hand-held compass in distaste. ‘If you can trust this thing, two-twenty. Give or take. So the wind’s backed five degrees in the past couple of hours. We don’t bother the engine-room for five degrees?’

George Naseby, a solid, taciturn, dark-haired and swarthy Yorkshireman—he hailed from Whitby, Captain Cook’s home town—was McKinnon’s alter ego and closest friend. A bo’sun himself on his two previous ships, he had elected to sail on the San Andreas simply because of the mutual regard that he and McKinnon shared. Although he held no official ranking, he was regarded by everyone, from the Captain down, as the number two on the deck-side.

‘We don’t bother them. Another five, perhaps, ten degrees off, then we bother them. Let’s go below—ship can look after itself for a few minutes. Then I’ll have Trent relieve you.’

The level of Scotch in the Captain’s bottle of malt had fallen quite rapidly—Ferguson and Curran had their own ideas as to what constituted a reasonably sized tot. McKinnon, in between rather more frugal sips, examined the Captain’s sextant, thermometer and barometer. The sextant, as far as the Bo’sun could tell, was undamaged—the felt lining of its wooden box would have cushioned it from the effects of the blast. The thermometer, too, appeared to be working: the mercury registered I7°F., which was about what McKinnon reckoned the cabin temperature to be. The Captain’s cabin was one of the few with its door still intact and Jamieson had already had a black heater installed.

He gave the thermometer to Naseby, asking that it be placed on one of the bridge wings, then turned his attention to the barometer. This was functioning normally, for when he tapped the glass the black needle fell sharply to the left.

‘Twenty-nine point five,’ the Bo’sun said. ‘Nine nine nine millibars—and falling.’

‘Not good, eh?’ Ferguson said.

‘No. Not that we need a barometer to tell us that.’

McKinnon left and went down from deck to the officers’ quarters. He found Jamieson at the end of the passageway.

‘How’s it coming, sir?’

‘We’re about through. Should be five cabins fit for human habitation—depending, of course, upon what your definition of human is.’

The Bo’sun tapped the bulkhead beside him. ‘How stable do you reckon this structure is, sir?’

‘Highly unstable. Safe enough in those conditions, but I gather you think those conditions are about to change.’

‘If the wind keeps backing and we keep holding to this course then we’re going to have the seas on the starboard quarter and a lot of nasty corkscrewing. I was thinking perhaps—’

‘I know what you were thinking. I’m a ship’s engineer, Bo’sun, not a constructive engineer. I’ll have a look. Maybe we can bolt or weld a few strengthening steel plates at the weakest points. I don’t know. There’s no guarantee. First of all, we’ll go have a look at the steering on the bridge. How are things up top?’

‘Draught-free. Four heaters. Ideal working conditions.’

‘Temperature?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Above freezing, or below?’

‘Below.’

‘Ideal. Thank you very much.’

McKinnon found four people in the staff dining area—Chief Engineer Patterson, Dr Singh, and Nurses Janet Magnusson and Irene. The nurses were off-duty—the San Andreas, as did all hospital ships, carried an alternate nursing staff. The Bo’sun went to the galley, asked for coffee and sandwiches, sat at the table and made his report to the Chief Engineer. When he was finished he said: ‘And how did you get on, sir? Finding a translator, I mean?’

Patterson scowled. ‘With our luck?’

‘Well, I didn’t really have any hope, sir. Not, as you say, with our luck.’ He looked at Janet Magnusson. ‘Where’s Sister Morrison?’

‘In the lounge.’ Neither her voice nor her eyes held much in the way of warmth. ‘She’s upset. You upset her.’

‘She upset me.’ He made an impatient, dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘Tantrums. This is neither the time nor the place. If ever there is a time and a place.’

‘Oh, come now.’ Dr Singh was smiling. ‘I don’t think either of you is being quite fair. Sister Morrison is not, as you suggest, Mr McKinnon, sulking in her tent and, Nurse, if she’s feeling rather unhappy, it’s not primarily the Bo’sun’s fault. She and Mr Ulbricht are not quite seeing eye to eye.’

‘Ulbricht?’ the Bo’sun said.

‘Flight-Lieutenant Karl Ulbricht, I understand. The captain of the Condor.’

‘He’s conscious?’

‘Very much so. Not only conscious but wanting out of bed. Quite remarkable powers of recuperation. Three bullet wounds, all flesh, all superficial. Bled a great deal, mind you, but he’s had a transfusion: one hopes that the best British blood goes well with his own native Aryan stock. Anyway, Sister Morrison was with me when he came to. She called him a filthy Nazi murderer. Hardly makes for the ideal nurse-patient relationship.’

‘Not very tactful, I agree,’ Patterson said. ‘A wounded man recovering consciousness might expect to be entitled to a little more sympathy. How did he react?’

‘Very calmly. Mild, you might say. Said he wasn’t a Nazi and had never murdered anyone in his life. She just stood and glared at him—if you can imagine Sister Morrison glaring at anybody—and—’

‘I can imagine it very easily,’ the Bo’sun said with some feeling. ‘She glares at me. Frequently.’

‘Perhaps,’ Nurse Magnusson said, ‘you and Lieutenant Ulbricht have a lot in common.’

‘Please.’ Dr Singh held up a hand. ‘Lieutenant Ulbricht expressed deep regrets, said something about the fortunes of war, but didn’t exactly call for sackcloth and ashes. I stopped it there—it didn’t look like being a very profitable discussion. Don’t be too hard on the Sister, Bo’sun. She’s no battleaxe, far less a termagant. She feels deeply and has her own way of expressing her feelings.’

McKinnon made to reply, caught Janet’s still far from friendly eye and changed his mind. ‘How are your other patients, Doctor?’

‘The other aircrew member—a gunner, it seems, by the name of Helmut Winterman—is okay, just a scared kid who expects to be shot at dawn. Commander Warrington, as you guessed, Mr McKinnon, is badly hurt. How badly, I don’t know. His occiput is fractured but only surgery can tell us how serious it is. I’m a surgeon but not a brain surgeon. We’ll have to wait until we get to a mainland hospital to ease the pressure on the sight centre and find out when, if ever, he’ll see again.’

‘The Andover’s navigator?’

‘Lieutenant Cunningham?’ Dr Singh shook his head. ‘I’m sorry—in more ways than one, I’m afraid this may be your last hope gone—that the young man won’t be doing any more navigating for some time to come. He’s in a coma. X-ray shows a fracture of the skull and not a hairline fracture either. Pulse, respiration, temperature show no sign of organic damage. He’ll live.’

‘Any idea when he might come to, Doctor?’

Dr Singh sighed. ‘If I were a first-year intern, I’d hazard a fairly confident guess. Alas, it’s twenty-five years since I was a first-year intern. Two days, two weeks, two months—I simply don’t know. As for the others, the Captain and Chief Officer are still under sedation and when they wake up I’m going to put them to sleep again. Hudson, the one with the punctured lung, seems to have stabilized—at least, the internal bleeding has stopped. Rafferty’s fractured tibia is no problem. The two injured crewmen from the Argos, one with a broken pelvis, the other with multiple burns, are still in the recovery room, not because they’re in any danger but because Ward A was full and it was the best place to keep them. And I’ve discharged two young seamen, I don’t know their names.’

‘Jones and McGuigan.’

‘That’s the two. Shock, nothing more. I understand they’re lucky to be alive.’

‘We’re all lucky to be alive.’ McKinnon nodded his thanks as Mario put coffee and sandwiches before him, then looked at Patterson. ‘Do you think it might help, sir, if we had a word with Lieutenant Ulbricht?’

‘If you’re halfway right on your way of thinking, Bo’sun, it might be of some help. At least, it can be of no harm.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit,’ Dr Singh said. ‘The Lieutenant was getting a little bit too active—or beginning to feel too active—for his own good. It’ll be an hour, perhaps two. A matter of urgency, Mr McKinnon?’

‘It could be. Or a matter of some importance, at least. He might be able to tell us why we’re all so lucky as to be still alive. And if we knew, then we might have some idea, or a guess at least, as to what lies in store for us.’

‘You think the enemy is not yet finished with us?’

‘I should be surprised if they are, Doctor.’

McKinnon, alone now in the dining area, had just finished his third cup of coffee when Jamieson and three of his men entered, to the accompaniment of much arm-flapping and teeth-chattering. Jamieson went to the galley, ordered coffee for himself and his men and sat beside McKinnon.

‘Ideal working conditions, you said, Bo’sun. Snug as a bug in a rug, one might say. Temperature’s soaring—it’s almost ten degrees up there. Minus.’

‘Sorry about that, sir. How’s the steering?’

‘Fixed. For the moment, at least. Not too big a job. Quite a bit of play on the wheel, but Trent says it’s manageable.’

‘Fine. Thank you. We have bridge control?’

‘Yes. I told the engine-room to cease and desist. Chief Patterson seemed quite disappointed—seems to think that he can do a better job than the bridge. What’s next on the agenda?’

‘Nothing. Not for me, that is.’

‘Ah! I take your point. Our idle hands, is that it? We’ll have a look at the chances of bracing the superstructure in a moment—a moment depending on how long it takes us to get defrosted.’

‘Of course, sir.’ The Bo’sun looked over his shoulder. ‘I have noticed that Dr Singh doesn’t bother to keep the hospital’s private liquor cabinet locked.’

‘Well, now. A little something in our coffee, perhaps?’

‘I would recommend it, sir. Might help to speed up the defrosting process.’

Jamieson gave him an old-fashioned look, rose and crossed towards the cabinet.

Jamieson drained his second cup of reinforced coffee and looked at McKinnon. ‘Something bothering you, Bo’sun?’

‘Yes.’ McKinnon had both hands on the table, as if preparing to rise. ‘Motion’s changed. A few minutes back the ship started quartering a little, not too much, as if Trent was making a slight course adjustment, but now she’s quartering too damn much. It could be that the steering has failed again.’

McKinnon left at speed, Jamieson close behind him. Reaching the now smoothly ice-coated deck, McKinnon grabbed a lifeline and stopped.

‘Corkscrewing,’ he shouted. He had to shout to make himself heard above the near gale-force wind. ‘Twenty degrees off course, maybe thirty. Something far wrong up there.’

And indeed, when they arrived on the bridge, there was something far wrong. Both men paused momentarily, and McKinnon said: ‘My apologies, Mr Jamieson. It wasn’t the steering after all.’

Trent was lying, face up, just behind the wheel, which was mindlessly jerking from side to side in response to the erratic seas striking against the rudder. Trent was breathing, no doubt about that, his chest rising and falling in a slow, rhythmic fashion. McKinnon bent over to examine his face, looked more closely, sniffed, wrinkled his nose in distaste and straightened.

‘Chloroform.’ He reached out for the wheel and began to bring the San Andreas back on course again.

‘And this.’ Jamieson stooped, picked up the fallen compass and showed it to McKinnon. The glass was smashed, the needle irremediably twisted out of position. ‘Flannelfoot strikes again.’

‘So it would appear, sir.’

‘Ah. You don’t seem particularly surprised, Bo’sun?’

‘I saw it lying there. I didn’t have to look. There are quite a few other helmsmen aboard. That was our only compass.’

FOUR

‘Whoever was responsible for this must have had access to the dispensary,’ Patterson said. He was with Jamieson and McKinnon in the hospital’s small lounge.

‘That won’t help, sir,’ McKinnon said. ‘Since ten o‘clock this morning everybody aboard this ship—except, of course, the wounded, the unconscious and those under sedation—have had access to the dispensary. There’s not a single person who hasn’t been in the hospital area, either to eat, sleep or just rest.’

‘Maybe we’re not looking at it in the right way,’ Jamieson said. ‘Why should anyone want to smash the compass? It can’t just be to stop us from following whatever course we were following or that we might outrun someone. The chances are high that Flannelfoot is still transmitting his homing signal and that the Germans know exactly where we are.’

‘Maybe he’s hoping to panic us,’ McKinnon said. ‘Maybe he’s hoping we’ll slow down, rather than travel around in circles, which could easily happen if the weather deteriorates, the sea becomes confused, and if we have no compass. Perhaps there’s a German submarine in the vicinity and he doesn’t want us to get too far away. There’s an even worse possibility. We’ve been assuming that Flannelfoot has only a transmitter: maybe he has a transceiver, what if he’s in radio contact with Alta Fjord or a U-boat or even a reconnaissance Condor? There could be a British warship in the vicinity and the last thing they would want is that we make contact with it. Well, we couldn’t contact it: but its radar could pick us up ten, fifteen miles away.’

‘Too many “ifs”, “maybes” and “perhaps this” and “perhaps that”.’ Patterson’s voice was decisive, that of a man who has made up his mind. ‘How many men do you trust aboard this ship, Bo’sun?’

‘How many—‘ McKinnon broke off in speculation. ‘The three of us here and Naseby. And the medical staff. Not that I have any particular reason to trust them—nor do I have any particular reason to distrust them—but we know that they were here, all present and accounted for, when Trent was attacked, so that rules them out.’

‘Two doctors, six nursing staff, three orderlies and the four of us. That makes fifteen,’ Jamieson said. He smiled. ‘Apart from that, everyone is a suspect?’

The Bo’sun permitted himself a slight smile in return. ‘It’s difficult to see kids like Jones, McGuigan and Wayland Day as master spies. Those apart, I wouldn’t put my hand in the fire for any of them, that’s to say I’ve no reason to trust them in a matter of life and death.’

Patterson said: ‘The crew of the Argos? Survivors? Guests by happenstance?’

‘Ridiculous, I know, sir. But who’s to say the nigger is not in the most unlikely woodpile? I just don’t trust anyone.’ The Bo’sun paused. ‘Am I wrong in thinking that it is your intention to search through the quarters and possessions of everyone aboard?’

‘You are not wrong, Bo’sun.’

‘With respect sir, we’ll be wasting our time. Anyone as smart as Flannelfoot is too smart to leave anything lying around, or at least to leave it in any place where it might be remotely associated with him. There are hundreds of places aboard where you can hide things and we are not trained rummagers. On the other hand, it’s better than doing nothing. But I’m afraid that’s what we’ll find, Mr Patterson. Nothing.’

They found nothing. They searched every living quarter, every wardrobe and cupboard, every case and duffel bag, every nook and cranny, and they found nothing. A rather awkward moment had arisen when Captain Andropolous, a burly, dark-bearded and seemingly intemperate character who had been given one of the empty cabins normally reserved for recuperating patients, objected violently and physically to having his quarters searched: McKinnon, who had no Greek, resolved this impasse by pointing his Colt at the Captain’s temple, after which, probably realizing that McKinnon wasn’t acting for his own amusement, the Captain had been cooperation itself, even to going to the extent of accompanying the Bo’sun and ordering his crew to open up their possessions for scrutiny.

The two Singhalese cooks in the hospital galleys were more than competent and Dr Singh, who appeared to be something of a connoisseur in such matters, produced some Bordeaux that would not have been found wanting in a Michelin restaurant, but poor justice was done to the food and, more surprisingly, the wine at dinner that evening. The atmosphere was sombre. There was an uneasiness about, even a faint air of furtiveness. It is one thing to be told that there is a saboteur at large: it is quite another to have your luggage and possessions searched on the basis of the possibility that you might be the saboteur in question. Even, or perhaps especially, the hospital staff seemed unduly uncomfortable: their possessions had not been searched so they were not, officially, in the clear. An irrational reaction it may have been but, in the circumstances, understandable.

Patterson pushed back his unfinished plate and said to Dr Singh: ‘This Lieutenant Ulbricht. Is he awake?’

‘He’s more than awake.’ Dr Singh sounded almost testy. ‘Remarkable recuperative powers. Wanted to join us for dinner. Forbade it, of course. Why?’

‘The Bo’sun and I would like to have a word with him.’

‘No reason why not.’ He pondered briefly. ‘Two possible minor complications. Sister Morrison is there—she’s just relieved Sister Maria for dinner.’ He nodded towards the end of the table where a fair-haired, high-cheekboned girl in a sister’s uniform was having dinner. Apart from Stephen Przybyszewski she was the only Polish national aboard and as people found her surname of Szarzynski, like Stephen’s, rather difficult, she was invariably and affectionately referred to as Sister Maria.

‘We’ll survive,’ Patterson said. ‘The other complication?’

‘Captain Bowen. Like Lieutenant Ulbricht, he has a high tolerance to sedatives. Keeps surfacing—longer and longer spells of consciousness and when he is awake he’s in a very bad humour. Who has ever seen Captain Bowen in ill humour?’

Patterson rose. ‘If I were the Captain I wouldn’t be very much in the mood for singing and dancing. Come on, Bo’sun.’

They found the Captain awake, very much so, and, indeed, in a more than irritable frame of mind. Sister Morrison was seated on a stool by his bedside. She made to rise but Patterson waved to her to remain where she was. Lieutenant Ulbricht was half-sitting, half-lying in the next bed, his right hand behind his neck: Lieutenant Ulbricht was very wide awake.

‘How do you feel, Captain?’

‘How do I feel, Chief?’ Briefly and forcefully Bowen told him how he felt. He would no doubt have expressed himself even more forcefully had he not been aware that Sister Morrison was sitting by his side. He raised a bandaged hand to cover a cough. ‘All’s gone to hell and breakfast, isn’t it, Chief?’

‘Well, yes, things could be better.’

‘Things couldn’t be worse.’ Captain Bowen’s words were blurred and indistinct: speaking through those blistered lips had to be agonizing. ‘Sister has told me. Even the boat compass smashed. Flannelfoot.’

‘Flannelfoot?’

‘He’s still around. Flannelfoot.’

‘Flannelfeet,’ McKinnon said.

‘Archie!’ It said much for the Captain’s state of mind that, for the first time ever, he had, in company, addressed the Bo’sun by his first name. ‘You’re here.’

‘Bad pennies, sir.’

‘Who’s on watch, Bo’sun?’

‘Naseby, sir.’

‘That’s all right. Flannelfeet?’

‘There’s more than one, sir. There has to be. I know. I don’t know how I know, but I know.’

‘You never mentioned this to me,’ Patterson said.

‘That’s because I didn’t think about it until now. And there’s another thing I didn’t think about until now. Captain Andropolous.’

‘The Greek master,’ Bowen said. ‘What about him?’

‘Well, sir, you know we’re having a little trouble with the navigation?’

‘A little? That’s not how Sister Morrison tells it.’

‘Well, then, a lot. We thought Captain Andropolous might give us a hand if we could communicate with him. But we can’t. Maybe we don’t have to. Maybe if we just show him your sextant, Captain, and give him a chart, that might be enough. Trouble is, the chart’s ruined. Blood.’

‘No problem,’ Bowen said. ‘We always carry duplicates. It’ll be under the table or in the drawers at the after end of the chart room.’

‘I should be back in fifteen minutes,’ the Bo’sun said.

It took him considerably longer and, when he did return, his set face and the fact that he was carrying with him the sextant in its box and a chart bespoke a man who had come to report the failure of a mission.

Patterson said: ‘No cooperation? Or Flannelfoot?’

‘Flannelfoot. Captain Andropolous was lying on his bunk, snoring his head off. I tried to shake him but I might as well have shaken a sack of potatoes. My first thought was that the same person who had been to attend to Trent had also been to see the captain, but there was no smell of chloroform. I fetched Dr Singh, who said he had been heavily drugged.’

‘Drugged!’ Bowen tried to express astonishment but his voice came out as a croak. ‘God’s sake, is there no end to it? Drugged! How in heaven’s name could he have been drugged?’

‘Quite easily, it would seem, sir. Dr Singh didn’t know what drug it was but he said he must have taken it with something he’d eaten or drunk. We asked Achmed, the head cook, if the captain had had anything different to eat from the rest of us and he said he hadn’t but also said that he had coffee afterwards. Captain Andropolous had his own idea as to how coffee should be made—half coffee, half brandy. Dr Singh said that that amount of brandy would have disguised the taste of any drug he knows of. There was a cup and saucer by the captain’s bunkside table. It was empty.’

‘Ah.’ Patterson looked thoughtful. ‘There must have been dregs. I know nothing about those things, of course, but couldn’t Dr Singh have analysed those dregs?’

‘There were none. The captain could have done it himself—washed the cup, I mean. More likely, I think it was Flannelfoot covering his tracks. There was no point in making enquiries about who might or might not have been seen going into or leaving the captain’s cabin.’

‘No communication, is that it?’ Patterson said.

‘That’s it. Only his own crew were around at the time.’

Patterson said: ‘Assuming that our saboteur has been at work again—and I don’t think we can assume anything else—where the hell would he have got hold of powerful drugs like this?’

‘Where did he get hold of the chloroform? I would think that Flannelfoot is well-stocked with what he considers essentials. Maybe he’s not only a bit of a chemist, too. Maybe he knows what to look for in the dispensary.’

‘No,’ Bowen said. ‘I asked Dr Singh. The dispensary is kept locked.’

‘Yes, sir,’ McKinnon said. ‘But if this person is a professional, a trained saboteur, then among what he rates essentials I would think that a set of skeleton keys comes pretty high on his list.’

‘My cup overfloweth,’ Bowen mumbled. ‘As I said, all gone to hell and breakfast. If the weather breaks down much more, and I understand it’s doing just that, we can end up any place. Coast of Norway, most like.’

‘May I speak, Captain?’ It was Lieutenant Ulbricht.

Bowen twisted his head to one side, an ill-advised move that made him grunt in pain. ‘Is that Lieutenant Ulbricht?’ There was little encouragement in his voice and, had his eyes not been bandaged, it was quite certain that there would have been none there either.

‘Yes, sir. I can navigate.’

‘You are very kind, Lieutenant.’ Bowen tried to sound icy but his blistered mouth wasn’t up to it. ‘You’re the last person in the world I would ever turn to for help. You have committed a crime against humanity.’ He paused for some seconds but it was no pause for reflection, a combination of anger and pain was making speech very difficult. ‘If we get back to Britain you will be shot. You? God!’

McKinnon said: ‘I can understand how you feel, sir. Because of his bombs, fifteen men are dead. Because of his bombs, you are the way you are. So are the Chief Officer, Hudson and Rafferty. But I still think you should listen to him.’

The Captain was silent for what seemed an unconscionably long time. It said much for the regard in which he held the Bo’sun that probably no other man could have given him pause for so long. When he spoke his voice was thick with bitterness. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers. That’s it, isn’t it?’ McKinnon made no reply. ‘Anyway, navigating a plane is quite different from navigating a ship.’

‘I can navigate a ship,’ Ulbricht said. ‘In peacetime I was at a Marine Schule—a marine school. I have a marine navigation certificate.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Not on me, of course, but I have one. Besides, I have many times taken starsights from a plane. That is much more difficult than taking sight from the bridge of a ship. I repeat, I can navigate.’

‘Him! That monster!’ Sister Morrison sounded even more bitter than the Captain but maybe that was because her lips weren’t blistered. ‘I’m quite sure he can navigate, Captain Bowen. I’m also sure that he would navigate us straight to Alta Fjord or Trondheim or Bergen—some place in Norway, anyway.’

Ulbricht said: ‘That’s a very silly statement, Sister. Mr McKinnon may not be a navigator but he must be a very experienced seaman and it would require only one glimpse of the sun or the Pole Star to let him know whether we were steering roughly south-east instead of roughly south-west.’

‘I still don’t trust him an inch,’ Sister Morrison said. ‘If what he says is true, then I trust him even less.’ Her eyes were coldly appraising, her lips firmly compressed, one could see that she had missed out on her profession, she was well on the way to being the headmistress of Roedean with Ulbricht cast in the unlikely role of a trembling and errant pigtailed third-former. ‘Look what happened to Trent. Look what happened to that Greek captain. Why shouldn’t the same thing happen to Mr McKinnon?’

‘With respect, Sister,’ McKinnon said in a voice notably lacking in respect, ‘I have to repeat what Lieutenant Ulbricht said—that’s a very silly statement indeed. It’s silly for two reasons. The first is Naseby is also a bo’sun and a very fine one, too. Not that I would expect you to know that.’ The Bo’sun put an unnecessary emphasis on the word ‘you’. ‘Trent, Ferguson and Curran can also tell the difference between north and south. So, I’m sure, can Chief Patterson and Mr Jamieson. There could be half-a-dozen others among the crew. Are you suggesting that by some mysterious means that passes my comprehension—but not, it would seem, yours—Lieutenant Ulbricht is going to have us all immobilized?’

Sister Morrison parted lips that had been tightly, even whitely, compressed. ‘And the second reason?’

‘If you think that Lieutenant Ulbricht is in cahoots with the persons who were responsible for the destruction of his plane and, near as a whisker, the loss of his own life—well, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.’

If it is possible to clear a throat in a soothing fashion, Patterson did just that. ‘I think, Captain, that the Lieutenant here might not be quite as black a villain as you and Sister think.’

‘Not a villain! The black-hearted—‘ Bowen broke off and when he spoke again his voice was quiet and almost thoughtful. ‘You would not say that without a reason, Chief. What makes you think so?’

‘It was the Bo’sun who first came up with the suggestion. I think I agree with him. Bo’sun, tell the Captain what you told me.’

‘I’ve had time to think about this,’ McKinnon said apologetically. ‘You haven’t. From what Dr Singh tells me about the pain you must be suffering, it must be a damn hard job to think at all. It’s my belief, sir, that the Lieutenant’s Luftwaffe have sold him down the river.’

‘Sold him down—what the devil is that meant to mean?’

‘I don’t think he knew he was attacking a hospital ship. Sure, he knows now. But he didn’t when he dropped the bombs.’

‘He didn’t know! Bomber pilots, I would remind you, Bo’sun, are supposed to have excellent eyesight. All those red crosses—’

‘I don’t think he saw them, sir. The lights were off. It was half dark. As he was approaching from dead astern, he certainly couldn’t have seen the crosses on the sides and he was so low the superstructure would have blocked off any view of the for’ard cross. As for the cross aft, we were making so much smoke at the time that it might have been obscured. And I can’t imagine for a moment that Lieutenant Ulbricht would have made so suicidal an approach, so suicidal an attack on the San Andreas, if he had known there was a British frigate only a couple of miles away. I wouldn’t have put his chances of survival very high.’

‘Neither did I.’ Lieutenant Ulbricht spoke with feeling.

‘And the clincher, sir. Those four Heinkel torpedo-bombers. I know you didn’t see them, sir, even hear them, you were unconscious at the time. But Chief Patterson and I saw them. They deliberately avoided us—lifted over us—and headed straight for the Andover. So what do you make of it, sir? A Condor attacks us—I’m sure it must have been with low-power bombs—and the Heinkels, who could have sent us to the bottom, didn’t. The Heinkel pilots knew the Andover was there: Lieutenant Ulbricht did not. The Luftwaffe, Captain, would seem to have two hands, with the left hand not telling the right hand what it was doing. I’m more than ever convinced that the Lieutenant was sold down the river, sold by his own high command and the saboteur who blacked out our Red Cross lights.

‘Besides, he doesn’t look like a man who would bomb a hospital ship.’

‘How the hell can I tell what he looks like?’ Bowen spoke with, understandably, some irritation. ‘A babyface with a harp can be no less of a murderer, no matter what he looks like. But yes, I agree, Bo’sun, it does raise some very odd questions. Questions that seem to call for some very odd answers. Don’t you agree, Sister?’

‘Well, yes, perhaps.’ Her tone was doubtful, grudging. ‘Mr McKinnon could be right.’

‘He is right.’ The voice was Kennet’s and it was very firm.

‘Mr Kennet.’ Bowen turned to the bed on the other side of him and cursed, not too sotto voce, as his neck and head reminded him that sudden movements were not advisable. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘Never more awake, sir. Just that I don’t feel too much like talking. Of course the Bo’sun’s right. Has to be.’

‘Ah. Well.’ More carefully, this time, Bowen turned back to face Ulbricht. ‘No apologies for what you have done but maybe you’re not the black-hearted murderer we thought you were. Bo’sun, Chief tells me that you’ve been smashing furniture in my cabin.’

‘No more than I had to, sir. Couldn’t find the keys.’

‘The keys are in the back left-hand corner of the left drawer in my desk. Look in the right-hand locker under my bunk. There’s a chronometer there. See if it’s working.’

‘A spare chronometer, sir?’

‘Many captains carry one. I always have done. If the sextant has survived the blast, maybe the chronometer has too. The sextant is functioning, isn’t it?’

‘As far as I can tell.’

‘May I see it?’ Lieutenant Ulbricht said. He examined it briefly. ‘It works.’

McKinnon left, taking the sextant and chart with him.

When he returned, he was smiling. ‘Chronometer is intact, sir. I’ve put Trent back on the wheel and Naseby in your cabin. There he can see anybody who tries to go up the bridge ladder and, more important, clobber any unauthorized person who tries to come into your cabin. I’ve told him the only authorized people are Mr Patterson, Mr Jamieson and myself.’

‘Excellent,’ Bowen said. ‘Lieutenant Ulbricht, we may yet call upon your services.’ He paused. ‘You are aware, of course, that you will be navigating yourself into captivity?’

‘Not a firing squad?’

‘That would be a poor return for your—ah—professional services. No.’

‘Better a live prisoner-of-war than floating around and frozen to death in a rubber raft, which I would have been but for Mr McKinnon here.’ Ulbricht propped himself up in his bed. ‘Well, no time like the present.’

McKinnon placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘Sorry, Lieutenant, it’ll have to wait.’

‘You mean—Dr Singh?’

‘He wouldn’t be too happy but it’s not that. Blizzard. Zero visibility. No stars, and there’ll be none tonight.’

‘Ah.’ Ulbricht lay back in bed. ‘I wasn’t feeling all that energetic, anyway.’

It was then that, for the third time that day, the lights failed. McKinnon switched on his torch, located and switched on four nickel-cadmium emergency lights and looked thoughtfully at Patterson. Bowen said: ‘Something up?’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Patterson said. He had momentarily forgotten that the Captain couldn’t see. ‘Another blasted power-cut.’

‘Another. Jesus!’ The Captain sounded less concerned and angry than just disgusted. ‘No sooner do we think we have cleared up one problem than we have another. Flannelfoot, I’ll be bound.’

‘Maybe, sir,’ McKinnon said. ‘Maybe not. I don’t imagine the lights have failed because someone has been drugged or chloroformed. I don’t imagine they’ve failed because someone wanted to douse our topside Red Cross lights, because visibility is zero and it would serve no point. If it’s sabotage, it’s sabotage for some other reason.’

‘I’ll go see if they can tell me anything in the engine-room,’ Patterson said. ‘Looks like another job for Mr Jamieson.’

‘He’s working in the superstructure,’ McKinnon said. ‘I was going there anyway. I’ll get him for you. Meet you back here, sir?’ Patterson nodded and hurried from the ward.

On the now relatively stable upper deck the lifelines were no longer needed as such but were invaluable as guidelines, for, with the absence of deck-lights and the driving snow, McKinnon literally could not see an inch before his face. He brought up short as he bumped into someone.

‘Who’s that.’ His voice was sharp.

‘McKinnon? Jamieson. Not Flannelfoot. He’s been at it again.’

‘Looks like it, sir. Mr Patterson would like to see you in the engine-room.’

On the deck level of the superstructure the Bo’sun found three of the engine-room crew welding a cross-plate to two beams, the harsh glare of the oxy-acetylene flame contrasting eerily with the utter blackness around. Two decks up he came across Naseby in the Captain’s cabin, a marlin-spike, butt end cloth-wrapped, in his hand and a purposeful expression on his face.

‘No visitors, George?’

‘Nary a visitor, Archie, but it looks as if someone has been visiting somewhere.’

The Bo’sun nodded and went up to the bridge, checked with Trent and descended the ladder again. He stopped outside the Captain’s cabin and looked at Naseby. ‘Notice anything?’

‘Yes, I notice something. I notice that the engine revs have dropped, we’re slowing. This time, perhaps, a bomb in the engine-room?’

‘No. We’d have heard it in the hospital.’

‘A gas grenade would have done just as well.’

‘You’re getting as bad as I am,’ McKinnon said.

He found Patterson and Jamieson in the hospital dining area. They were accompanied, to McKinnon’s momentary surprise, by Ferguson. But the surprise was only momentary.

‘Engine-room’s okay, then?’ McKinnon said.

Patterson said: ‘Yes. Reduced speed as a precaution. How did you know?’

‘Ferguson here is holed up with Curran in the carpenter’s shop, which is as far for’ard as you can get in this ship. So the trouble is up near the bows—nothing short of an earthquake would normally get Ferguson out of his bunk—or whatever he’s using for a bunk up there.’

Ferguson looked and sounded aggrieved. ‘Just dropping off, I was, when Curran and me heard this explosion. Felt it, too. Directly beneath us. Not so much an explosion as a bang or a clang. Something metallic, anyway. Curran shouted that we’d been mined or torpedoed but I told him not to be daft, if a mine or torpedo had gone off beneath us we wouldn’t have been alive to talk about it. So I came running aft—well, as fast as you can run on that deck—it’s like a skating rink.’

McKinnon said to Patterson: ‘So you think the ship’s hull is open to the sea?’

‘I don’t know what to think, but if it is then the slower we go the less chance of increasing the damage to the hull. Not too slow, of course, if we lose steerage way then we’ll start rolling or corkscrewing or whatever and that would only increase the strain on the hull. I suppose Captain Bowen has the structural plans in his cabin?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose he has but it doesn’t matter. I know the lay-out. I’m sure Mr Jamieson does as well.’

‘Oh dear. That means I don’t?’

‘Didn’t say that, sir. Let me put it this way. Next time I see a chief engineer crawling around the bilges will be the first time. Besides, you have to stay up top, sir. If an urgent decision has to be taken the bilges are no place for the commanding officer to be.’

Patterson sighed. ‘I often wonder, Bo’sun, where one draws a line between commonsense and diplomacy.’

‘This is it, you think, Bo’sun?’

‘It has to be, sir.’ Jamieson and the Bo’sun, together with Ferguson and McCrimmon, were in the paint store, a lowermost deck compartment on the port side for’ard. Facing them was an eight-clamped door set in a watertight bulkhead. McKinnon placed the palm of his hand against the top of the door and then against the bottom. ‘Normal temperatures above—well, almost normal—and cold, almost freezing, below. Seawater on the other side, sir—not more than eighteen inches, I would think.’

‘Figures,’ Jamieson said. ‘We’re not more than a few feet below the waterline here and that’s as much as the compressed air will let in. That’s one of the ballast rooms, of course.’

‘That’s the ballast room, sir.’

‘And this is the paint store.’ Jamieson gestured at the irregularly welded patch of metal on the ship’s side. ‘Chief Engineer never did have any faith in what he called those Russkie shipwrights.’

‘That’s as maybe, sir. But I don’t see any Russian shipwrights leaving a time-bomb in the ballast room.’

Russian shipwrights had indeed been aboard the San Andreas, which had sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, as the freighter Ocean Belle, Ocean being a common prefix for American-built Liberty Ships. At the time of sailing, the Ocean Belle was neither fish nor fowl but was, in fact, a three-parts completed hospital ship. Its armament, at that stage, had been removed, its magazines emptied, all but the essential watertight bulkheads breached or partially cut away, the operating theatre completed, as were the cabins for the medical staff and the dispensary, already fully stocked: the medical store was almost finished, the galley partially so, whereas work had not yet begun on the wards, the recovery room and messes. The medical staff, which had come from Britain, were already on board.

Orders were received from the Admiralty that the Ocean Belle was to join the next fast convoy to Northern Russia, which had already assembled at Halifax. Captain Bowen had not refused—refusal of an Admiralty order was not permitted—but he had objected in a fashion so strongly as to be tantamount to refusal. He was damned, he said, if he was going to sail to Russia with a shipload of civilians aboard. He was referring to the medical staff aboard and, as they constituted only a round dozen, they could hardly have been called a shipload: he was also conveniently overlooking the fact that every member of the crew, from himself downwards, was also, technically, a civilian.

The medical staff, Bowen had maintained, were a different kind of civilian. Dr Singh had pointed out to him that ninety per cent of the medical staff of the armed forces were civilians, only they wore different kinds of uniforms: the staff on board the San Andreas wore different kinds of uniforms too, which happened to be white. Captain Bowen had then fallen back on his last defence: he was not, he said, going to take women through a war zone—he was referring to the six nursing staff aboard. A by now thoroughly irritated escort commander forcefully made three points that had forcefully been made to him by the Admiralty: thousands of women and children had been in war zones while being transported as refugees to the United States and Canada: in the current year, as compared to the previous two years, U-boat losses had quadrupled while Mercantile Marine losses had been cut by eighty per cent: and the Russians had requested, or rather insisted, that as many wounded Allied personnel as possible be removed from their overcrowded Archangel hospitals. Captain Bowen, as he should have done at the beginning, had capitulated and the Ocean Belle, still painted in its wartime grey but carrying adequate supplies of white, red and green paint, had sailed with the convoy.

As convoys to Northern Russia went, it had been an exceptionally uneventful one. Not one merchant ship and not one escort vessel had been lost. Only two incidents had occurred and both had involved the Ocean Belle. Some way south of Jan Mayen Island they had come across a venerable V and W class destroyer, stopped in the water with an engine breakdown. This destroyer had been a unit of the destroyer screen escorting a previous convoy and had stopped to pick up survivors from a sinking cargo vessel, which had been heavily on fire. The time had been about 2.30 p.m., well after sunset, and the rescue operation had been interrupted by a brief air attack. The attacker had not been seen but had obviously no difficulty in seeing the destroyer, silhouetted as it was against the blazing cargo ship. It had been assumed that the attacker was a reconnaissance Condor, for it had dropped no bombs and contented itself with raking the bridge with machine gun fire, which had effectively destroyed the radio office. Thus, when the engines had broken down some hours later—the breakdown had nothing to do with the Condor, the V and Ws were superannuated, overworked and much plagued by mechanical troubles—they had been unable to contact the vanished convoy.[*]

The wounded survivors were taken aboard the Ocean Belle. The destroyer itself, together with its crew and unwounded survivors, was taken in tow by an S-class destroyer. It was later learnt that both vessels had reached Scapa Flow intact.

Three days afterwards, somewhere off North Cape, they had come across an equally ancient ‘Kingfisher’ corvette, which had no business whatever in those distant waters. It, too, was stopped, and so deep in the water astern that its poop was already awash. It, too, had survivors aboard—the survivors of the crew of a Russian submarine that had been picked up from a burning oil-covered sea.[*] The Russians, for the most part badly burned, had been transferred, inevitably, to the Ocean Belle, the crew being transferred to an escort destroyer. The corvette was sunk by gunfire. It was during this transfer that the Ocean Belle had been holed twice, just below the water line, on the port side, in the paint store and ballast room. The reason for the damage had never been established.

The convoy had gone to Archangel but the Ocean Belle had put in to Murmansk—neither Captain Bowen nor the escort commander had thought it wise that the Ocean Belle should proceed any further than necessary in its then present condition—slightly down by the head and with a list to port. There were no dry dock facilities available but the Russians were masters of improvisation—the rigours of war had forced them to be. They topped up the after tanks, drained the for’ard tanks and removed the for’ard slabs of concrete ballast until the holes in the paint store and ballast room were just clear of the water, after which it had taken them only a few hours to weld plates in position over the holes. The equalization of the tanks and the replacement of ballast had then brought the Ocean Belle back to an even keel.

While those repairs were being effected a small army of Russian carpenters had worked, three shifts in every twenty-four hours, in the hospital section of the ship, fitting out the wards, recovery room, messes, galley and medical store. Captain Bowen was astonished beyond measure. On his previous visits to the two Russian ports he had encountered from his allies, blood brothers who should have been in tears of gratitude for the dearly-bought and vital supplies being ferried to their stricken country, nothing but sullenness, indifference, a marked lack of cooperation and, not occasionally, downright hostility. The baffling sea-change he could only attribute to the fact that the Russians were only showing their heartfelt appreciation for the Ocean Belle having brought their wounded submariners back home.

When they sailed it was as a hospital ship—Bowen’s crew, paintbrushes in hands, had worked with a will during their brief stay in Murmansk. They did not, as everyone had expected, proceed through the White Sea to pick up the wounded servicemen in Archangel. The Admiralty’s orders had been explicit: they were to proceed, and at all speed, to the port of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Jamieson replaced the cover of the small electrical junction box, having effectively isolated the ballast room from the main power system. He tapped the watertight door. ‘Short in there—could have been caused by the blast or sea-water, it doesn’t matter—should have blown a fuse somewhere. It didn’t. Somewhere or other there’s a fuse, that’s been tampered with—fuse-wire replaced by a nail or some such. That doesn’t matter either. I’m not going to look for it. McCrimmon, go ask the engine-room to try the generator.’

McKinnon tapped the same door. ‘And what do we do here?’

‘What, indeed?’ Jamieson sat on a paint drum and thought. ‘Three choices, I would say. We can get an air compressor down here, drill a hole through the bulkhead at about shoulder level and force the water out which would be fine if we knew where the level of the hole in the hull is. We don’t. Besides, the chances are that the compressed air in the ballast room would escape before we could get the nozzle of the compressed air hose into the hole we drilled which could only mean that more water would pour into the ballast room. Or we could reinforce the bulkhead. The third choice is to do nothing. I’m for the third choice. It’s a pretty solid bulkhead. We’d have to reduce speed, of course. No bulkhead is going to stand up to the pressure at full speed if there’s a hole the size of a barn door in the hull.’

‘A barn door would not be convenient,’ McKinnon said, ‘I think I’ll go and have a look.’

It was a very cold and rather bruised McKinnon who half-climbed and was half-pulled up to the foredeck of the San Andreas, which, engines stopped, was wallowing heavily in quartering seas. In the pale half-light given by the again functioning deck arc lamps they presented a strange quartet, Jamieson, Ferguson and McCrimmon, wraithlike figures completely shrouded in snow, McKinnon a weirdly-gleaming creature, the sea water on his rubber suit, aqualung and waterproof torch already, in that 35° below temperature, beginning to harden into ice. At a gesture from Jamieson, McCrimmon left for the engine-room while Ferguson pulled in the rope-ladder: Jamieson took McKinnon’s arm and led him, the newly-formed ice on the rubber suit crackling as he stumbled along, towards the shelter of the superstructure where McKinnon pulled off his aqualung. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

‘Pretty bad down there, Bo’sun?’

‘Not that, sir. This damned rubber suit.’ He fingered a waist-high gash in the material. ‘Tore it on a jagged piece of metal. From here down the suit is filled with water.’

‘Good God! You’ll freeze to death, man. Hurry, hurrry!’ In what was left of his cabin McKinnon began to strip off his rubber suit. ‘You located the damage?’

‘No problem—and no barn door. Just a ragged hole about the size of my fist.’

Jamieson smiled. ‘Worth risking pneumonia to find that out. I’m going to the bridge. See you in the Captain’s cabin.’

When McKinnon, in dry clothing but still shivering violently, joined Jamieson and Naseby in the Captain’s cabin, the San Andreas was back on course and steadily picking up speed. Jamieson pushed a glass of Scotch across to him.

‘I’m afraid the Captain’s supplies are taking a fearful beating, Bo’sun. This shouldn’t increase the risk of pneumonia—I’ve left the water out. I’ve been speaking to Mr Patterson and the Captain—we’ve got a line through to the hospital now. When I told him you’d been over the side in this weather, he didn’t say thank-you or anything like that, just said to tell you that you’re mad.’

‘Captain Bowen is not often wrong and that’s a fact.’ McKinnon’s hands were shaking so badly that he spilt liquid from his admittedly brimming glass. ‘Any instructions from the Captain or Mr Patterson?’

‘None. Both say they’re quite happy to leave the topside to you.’

‘That’s kind of them. What they really mean is that they have no option—there’s only George and myself.’

‘George?’

‘Sorry, sir. Naseby, here. He’s a bo’sun, too. We’ve been shipmates on and off, friends for twenty years.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Jamieson looked thoughtfully at Naseby. ‘I can see it now. You’ve made arrangements for up here, Bo’sun?’

‘About to, sir. George and I will take turns here, looking after the family jewels, so to speak. I’ll have Trent, Ferguson and Curran spell one another on the wheel. I’ll tell them to give me a shake—if I’m asleep—when or if the weather clears.’

‘Cue for Lieutenant Ulbricht?’

‘Indeed. I would like to make a suggestion, sir, if I may. I would like to have some people keeping watch at the fore and aft exits of the hospital, just to make absolutely certain that nobody’s going to start sleepwalking during the night.’

‘Who’s going to watch the watchers?’

‘A point, sir. The watchers I would suggest are Jones, McGuigan, McCrimmon and Stephen. Unless they’re wonderful actors, the first two are too young and innocent to be criminals. McCrimmon may, indeed, have a criminal bent, but I think he’s an honest criminal. And Stephen strikes me as being a fairly trustworthy lad. More important, he’s not likely to forget that it was a naval minesweeper that picked him up out of the North Sea.’

‘I didn’t know that, either. You seem to be better informed about my own department than I am. I’ll arrange for Stephen and McCrimmon, you look after the others. Our resident saboteur is not about to give up all that easily?’

‘I would be surprised if he did. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Very much. I wonder what form of sabotage his next attempt to nobble us will take?’

‘I just have no idea. But another thought occurs, sir. The person you have keeping an eye on the aft exit from the hospital might also keep an eye on the entrance to A Ward.’

‘A Ward? That bunch of crooks? Whatever for?’

‘The person or persons who are trying to slow us and are doing their best to get us lost might think it a rather good idea to nobble Lieutenant Ulbricht.’

‘Indeed they might. I’ll stay in the ward myself tonight. There’s a spare bed. If I do drop off, the duty nurse can always give me a shake if anyone comes in who shouldn’t be coming in.’ Jamieson was silent for a few moments. ‘What’s behind it all, Bo’sun?’

‘I think you know as well as I do, sir. Somebody, somewhere, wants to take over the San Andreas, although why anyone should want to take over a hospital ship I can’t even begin to imagine.’

‘No more can I. A U-boat, you think?’

‘It would have to be, wouldn’t it? I mean, you can’t capture a ship from the air and they’re hardly likely to send the Tirpitz after us.’ McKinnon shook his head. ‘A U-boat? Any fishing boat, with a few armed and determined men, could take us over whenever they felt like it.’

[*] Throughout the wartime convoy sailings to Murmansk and Archangel the use of rescue ships remained a bone of contention between the Royal Navy at sea and the Royal Navy on land—the latter being the London-based Admiralty which acquitted itself with something less than distinction during the long years of the Russian convoys. In the earlier days, the use of rescue ships was the rule, not the exception. After the loss of the Zafaaran and the Stockport, which was lost with all hands including the many survivors that had been picked up from other sunken vessels, the Admiralty forbade the further use of rescue ships.

This was a rule that was observed in the breach. In certain convoys a self-selected member of the escort group, usually a destroyer or smaller, would assign to itself the role of rescue ship, an assignment in which the force commander would acquiesce or to which he turned a blind eye. The task of the rescue ships was a hazardous one indeed. There was never any question of a convoy stopping or of their escorts leaving the convoy, so that, almost invariably the rescue ship was left alone and unprotected. The sight of a Royal Naval vessel stopped in the water alongside a sinking vessel was an irresistible target for many U-boat commanders.

[*] It was neither appreciated nor reported that the Russians hada few submarines operational in the area at that time. One of them almost certainly damaged the Tirpitz sufficiently to make it return to its moorings in Alta Fjord.

FIVE

McKinnon, deep in sleep though he was, was instantly awake at Naseby’s shake and swung his legs over the edge of Captain Bowen’s bunk.

‘What’s the time, George?’

‘Six a.m. Curran’s just been down from the bridge. Says the blizzard has blown itself out.’

‘Stars?’

‘He didn’t say.’

The Bo’sun pulled on an extra jersey, duffel coat and sea-boots, made his way up to the bridge, spoke briefly to Curran and went out on the starboard wing. Within only a second or two, bent double and with his back to the gale-force wind, coughing and gasping as the ice-chilled air reached down into his lungs, he was beginning to wish himself anywhere except where he was. He switched on his torch and picked up the thermometer. It showed—8° 40° of frost on the Fahrenheit scale. Combined with the strong wind the temperature, expressed in terms of the chill factor on exposed skin, was in the region of—80°F.

He straightened slowly and looked out towards the bows. In the light of the Red Cross arc lamps on the foredeck it was at once clear, as Curran had said, that the blizzard had blown itself out. Against the deep indigo of the sky, the stars were preternaturally bright and clear. Breathing through a mittened hand that covered both mouth and nose, McKinnon turned into the wind and looked aft.

At first he could see nothing, for the bitter wind brought instantaneous tears to his eyes. He ducked below the shelter of the canvas windbreaker, fumbled a pair of goggles from his coat pocket, strapped them under his duffel hood, straightened again, and, by dint of wiping the back of his free mitten against the glasses, was able to see, intermittently, what was going on astern.

The waves—the weather had not yet worsened to the extent that the seas had become broken and confused—were between twelve and fifteen feet in height, their lee sides whitely streaked with spume and half-hidden in flying spray as the wind tore their tops away. The stars were as brilliant as they had been in the other direction and McKinnon soon located the Pole Star, off the starboard quarter. The wind was no longer backing to the north and the San Andreas, as far as he could judge, was still heading roughly between southwest and south-south-west.

McKinnon moved back into the bridge, thankfully closed the door and pondered briefly. Their present course, it was safe to assume, offered no danger: on the other hand it was not safe to assume that they would or could maintain their present course. The weather, in this grey and undefined area between the Barents and Norwegian Seas, was notoriously fickle. He had not, for instance, expected—and had said as much—that the skies would clear that night: there was equally no guarantee that they would remain clear and that the wind would not back further to the north. He descended two decks, selected an armful of warm clothing from the now mostly abandoned crew’s quarters and made for the hospital area. Crossing the dangerously slippery upper deck and guided only by the lifeline, he became acutely and painfully aware that a change was already under way, a factor that he had not experienced on the starboard wing only a few minutes ago. Needle-pointed ice spicules were beginning to lance into the unprotected areas of his skin. It augured ill.

In the hospital mess-deck he came across both Jones and McGuigan, both of whom assured him that no one was or had been abroad. He passed into B ward, at the far end of which Janet Magnusson was seated at her desk, her elbows propped on it, her chin propped on her hands, and her eyes closed.

‘Aha!’ McKinnon said. ‘Asleep on the job, Nurse Magnusson.’

She looked up, startled, blinked and tried to sound indignant. ‘Asleep? Of course not.’ She peered at his armful of clothing. ‘What on earth is that for? Have you moved into the old rags trade, Archie? No, don’t tell me. It’s for that poor man in there. Maggie’s in there too—she won’t be pleased.’

‘As far as your precious Maggie is concerned, I would have thought that a little suffering for Lieutenant Ulbricht would be preferable to none. No salt tears for either Sister Morrison or the Lieutenant.’

‘Archie!’ She was on her feet. ‘Your face. Blood!’

‘As far as the Lieutenant and myself are both concerned that should please your friend.’ He wiped the blood off his face. ‘It’s not nice up top.’

‘Archie.’ She looked at him uncertainly, concern in the tired eyes.

‘It’s all right, Janet.’ He touched her shoulder and passed into A ward. Sister Morrison and Lieutenant Ulbricht were both awake and drinking tea, the sister at her desk, Ulbricht sitting up in bed: clear-eyed and rested, the German pilot, as Dr Singh had said, unquestionably had quite remarkable recuperative powers. Jamieson, fully clothed and stretched out on the top of a bed, opened an eye as McKinnon passed by.

‘‘Morning, Bo’sun. It is morning, isn’t it?’

‘Six-twenty, sir.’

‘Good lord. Selfishness, that’s what it is—I’ve been asleep for seven hours. How are things?’

‘A quiet night up top. Here, too?’

‘Must have been—no one gave me a shake.’ He looked at the bundle of clothing that McKinnon was carrying, then at Ulbricht. ‘Stars?’

‘Yes, sir. At the moment, that is. I don’t think they’ll be there for long.’

‘Mr McKinnon!’ Sister Morrison’s voice was cold, with a touch of asperity, as it usually was when addressing the Bo’sun. ‘Do you intend to drag that poor man out of bed on a night like this? He’s been shot several times.’

‘I know he’s been shot several times—or have you forgotten who picked him out of the water?’ The Bo’sun was an innately courteous man but never at his best when dealing with Sister Morrison. ‘So he’s a poor man, now—well, it’s better than being a filthy Nazi murderer. What do you mean—on a night like this?’

‘I mean the weather, of course.’ Her fists were actually clenched. Jamieson surveyed the ward deckhead.

‘What do you know about the weather? You haven’t been out of here all night. If you had been, I would have known.’ He turned a dismissive back on her and looked at Ulbricht. ‘How do you feel, Lieutenant?’

‘I have an option?’ Ulbricht smiled. ‘I feel well enough. Even if I didn’t I’m still coming. Don’t be too hard on the ward sister, Bo’sun—even your lady with a lamp in the Crimea had a pretty short way with difficult patients—but she’s overlooking my natural selfishness. I’m on this ship too.’ He climbed stiffly out of bed and, with the assistance of McKinnon and Jamieson, started to pull clothing on over his pyjamas while Sister Morrison looked on in frigid disapproval. The disapproval finally culminated in the drumming of fingertips on the table.

‘I think,’ she said, ’that we should have Dr Singh in here.’

McKinnon turned slowly and looked at her and when he spoke his voice was as expressionless as his face. ‘I don’t think it matters very much what you think, Sister. I suggest you just give a shake to Captain Bowen there and find out just how much your thinking matters.’

‘The Captain is under heavy sedation. When he regains consciousness, I shall report you for insolence.’

‘Insolence?’ McKinnon looked at her with indifference. ‘I think he would prefer that to stupidity—the stupidity of a person who is trying to endanger the San Andreas and all those aboard her. It’s a pity we don’t have any irons on this ship.’

She glared at him, made to speak, then turned as Dr Sinclair came into the ward. Sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired, he looked in mild astonishment at the spectacle before him.

‘Dr Sinclair! Thank heavens you’re here!’ Rapidly and urgently she began to explain the situation to him. ‘Those—those men want starsights or navigation or something and in spite of all my protests they insist on dragging a seriously ill man up to the bridge or wherever and—’

‘I can see what’s happening,’ Sinclair said mildly. ‘But if the Lieutenant is being dragged he’s not putting up much in the way of resistance, is he? And by no stretch of the imagination can you describe him as being seriously ill. But I do take your point, Sister. He should be under constant medical supervision.’

‘Ah! Thank you, Doctor.’ Sister Morrison came very close to permitting herself a smile. ‘So it’s back to bed for him.’

‘Well, no, not quite. A duffel coat, a pair of sea boots, my bag of tricks and I’ll go up with them. That way the Lieutenant will be under constant medical supervision.’

Even with three men lending what assistance they could, it took twice as long as expected to help Lieutenant Ulbricht as far as the Captain’s cabin. Once there, he sank heavily into the chair behind the table.

‘Thank you very much, gentlemen.’ He was very pale, his breathing shallow and abnormally rapid. ‘Sorry about that. It would seem that I am not as fit as I thought I was.’

‘Nonsense.’ Dr Sinclair was brisk. ‘You did splendidly. It’s that inferior English blood that we had to give you this morning, that’s all.’ He made free with Captain Bowen’s supplies. ‘Superior Scotch blood. Effects guaranteed.’

Ulbricht smiled faintly. ‘Isn’t there something about opening pores?’

‘You won’t be out in the open long enough to give your pores a chance to protest.’

Up on the bridge McKinnon adjusted Ulbricht’s goggles, then scarfed him so heavily above and below the goggles that not a square millimetre of skin was left exposed. When he was finished, Lieutenant Ulbricht was as immune to the weather as it was possible for anyone to be: two balaclavas and a tightly strung duffel hood made sure of that.

McKinnon went out on the starboard wing, hung a trailing lamp from the canvas windbreaker, went back inside, picked up the sextant, took Ulbricht by his right arm—the undamaged one—and led him outside. Even although he was so cocooned against the elements, even though the Bo’sun had warned him and even though he had already had an ominous foretaste of what lay in store in their brief journey across the upper deck, he was totally unprepared for the power and savagery of the wind that caught him as soon as he stepped out on the wing. His weakened limbs were similarly unprepared. He took two short sharp steps forward, and though he managed to clutch the top of the windbreaker, would probably have fallen but for McKinnon’s sustaining hand. Had he been carrying the sextant he would almost certainly have dropped it.

With McKinnon’s arm around him Ulbricht took three starsights, to the south, west and north, clumsily noting down the results as he did so. The first two sights were comparatively quick and simple: the third, to the north, took much longer and was far more difficult, for Ulbricht had to keep clearing away the ice spicules from his goggles and the sextant. When he had finished he handed the sextant back to McKinnon, leant his elbows on the after edge of the wing and stared out towards the stern, occasionally and mechanically wiping his goggles with the back of his hand. After almost twenty seconds of this McKinnon took his good arm and almost literally dragged him back into the shelter of the bridge, banging the door to behind him. Handing the sextant to Jamieson, he quickly removed Ulbricht’s duffel hood, balaclavas and goggles.

‘Sorry about that, Lieutenant, but there’s a time and a place for everything and daydreaming or sightseeing out on that wing is not one of them.’

‘The funnel.’ Ulbricht looked slightly dazed. ‘What’s happened to your funnel?’

‘It fell off.’

‘I see. It fell off. You mean—I—’

‘What’s done is done,’ Jamieson said philosophically. He handed a glass to the Lieutenant. ‘To help you with your calculations.’

‘Thank you. Yes.’ Ulbricht shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Yes. My calculations.’

Weak though he was and shivering constantly—this despite the fact that the bridge temperature was already over 55°F.—Ulbricht left no doubt that, as a navigator, he knew precisely what he was about. Working from starsights, he had no need to worry about the vagaries of deviation and variation. With a chart, dividers, parallel rules, pencils and chronometer, he completed his calculations in remarkably short order and made a tiny cross on the chart after having consulted navigational tables.

‘We’re here. Well, near enough. 68.05 north, 7.20 east—more or less due west of the Lofotens.Our course is 218. Is one permitted to ask our destination?’

Jamieson smiled. ‘Quite frankly, Lieutenant Ulbricht, you wouldn’t be much use to us if you didn’t. Aberdeen.’

‘Ah! Aberdeen. They have a rather famous prison there, do they not? Peterhead, isn’t it? I wonder what the cells are like.’

‘It’s a prison for civilians. Of the more intractable kind. I should hardly think you’d end up there. Or in any prison.’ Jamieson looked at him with some curiosity. ‘How do you know about Peterhead, Lieutenant?’

‘I know Scotland well. I know England even better.’ Ulbricht did not seek to elaborate. ‘So, Aberdeen. We’ll stay on this course until we get to the latitude of Trondheim, then south until we get to the latitude of Bergen—or, if you like Mr McKinnon, the latitude of your home islands.’

‘How did you know I’m a Shetlander?’

‘Some members of the nursing staff don’t seem to mind talking to me. Then on a more westerly course. That’s speaking roughly, we’ll work out the details as we go along. It’s a very simple exercise and there’s no problem.’

‘Of course it’s no problem,’ Jamieson said, ‘neither is playing Rachmaninoff, not as long as you are a concert pianist.’

Ulbricht smiled. ‘You overrate my simple skills. The only problem that will arise is when we make our landfall, which of course will have to be in daylight. At this time of year North Sea fogs are as common as not and there’s no way I can navigate in a fog without a radio and compass.’

‘With any luck, there shouldn’t be all that much of a problem,’ McKinnon said. ‘War or no war, there’s still pretty heavy traffic on the east coast and there’s more than an even chance that we can pick up a ship and be guided into harbour.’

‘Agreed,’ Ulbricht said. ‘A Red Cross ship is not easily overlooked—especially one with its funnel missing.’ He sipped his drink, pondered briefly, then said: ‘Is it your intention to return me to the hospital?’

‘Naturally,’ Sinclair said. ‘That’s where you belong. Why do you ask?’

Ulbricht looked at Jamieson. ‘I would, of course, be expected to do some more navigating?’

‘Expecting, Lieutenant? “Depending” is the word you’re after.’

‘And at frequent intervals if cloud or snow conditions permit. We never know when the set of the sea and the wind may change without our being aware of it. Point is, I don’t much fancy dragging myself back down to the hospital, then coming back up here again every time I have to take starsights. Couldn’t I just lie down in the Captain’s cabin?’

‘No objections,’ Jamieson said. ‘Dr Sinclair?’

‘Makes sense. Lieutenant Ulbricht is hardly on the critical list and it could only help his recuperation. I’ll pop up every two or three hours to see how he’s getting on.’

‘Bo’sun?’

‘Fine by me. Fine by Sister Morrison too, I should imagine.’

‘I shall have company, of course?’

‘Company?’ Sinclair said. ‘You mean a nurse, Lieutenant?’

‘I don’t mean a nurse. With all respect to your charming young ladies, Dr Sinclair, I don’t think any of them would be much use if this fellow you call Flannelfoot came up to remove or destroy the sextant and chronometer and the way I’m feeling I couldn’t fight off a determined fly. Also, of course, he’d have to dispose of witnesses and I don’t much fancy that.’

‘No problem, Lieutenant,’ the Bo’sun said. ‘He’ll have to try to dispose of either Naseby or myself and I don’t much think he would fancy that. We would, though.’

Sinclair shook his head sadly. ‘Sister Morrison isn’t going to like this one little bit. Further usurpment of her authority. After all, the Lieutenant is her patient, not mine.’

‘Again no problem,’ McKinnon said. ‘Just tell her the Lieutenant fell over the side.’

‘And how are your patients this morning, sir?’ McKinnon was having breakfast with Dr Singh.

‘No dramatic changes, Bo’sun. The two Argos crewmen in the recovery room are much of a muchness—as well as can be expected when one has a fractured pelvis and the other massive burns. The condition of Commander Warrington and his navigating officer is unchanged—Cunningham is still in deep coma and is being fed intravenously. Hudson is stabilized—the lung bleeding has stopped. Chief Officer Kennet is definitely on the mend although heaven knows how long it will be before we can take those bandages off his face. The only one that gives some cause for worry is the Captain. It’s nothing critical, not even serious, just worrisome. You saw how he was when you last saw him—breathing hellfire and brimstone in all directions. He’s gone strangely quiet now, almost lethargic. Or maybe he’s just more calm and relaxed now that he knows the ship’s position and course. That was a fine job you did there, Bo’sun.’

‘No credit to me, sir. It was Lieutenant Ulbricht who did the fine job.’

‘Be that as it may, Captain Bowen appears to be in at least a more philosophical mood. I suggest you come along and see him.’

When a man’s face is completely obscured by bandages it is difficult to say what kind of mood he is in. He had the stem of a rather evil-smelling briar stuck between his burnt lips and again it was impossible to say whether he was enjoying it or not. When he heard McKinnon’s voice he removed the pipe.

‘We are still afloat, Bo’sun?’ The enunciation was clearer than it had been and was costing him less effort.

‘Well, sir, let’s say we’re no longer all gone to hell and breakfast. No more alarms and excursions either. As far as I can tell, Lieutenant Ulbricht is very much of an expert—I don’t think you’d hesitate to have him as your navigating officer. He’s lying down on the bunk in your cabin, sir—but you will have been told that and the reasons why.’

‘Broaching my rapidly dwindling supplies, I have no doubt.’

‘He did have a couple of tots, sir. He needed it. He’s still a pretty sick man and very weak and the cold out there on the wing bridge was vicious, I don’t think I’ve ever known it worse in the Arctic. Anyway, he wasn’t doing any broaching when I left him. He was sound asleep.’

‘As long as he keeps on acting in this fashion he can do as much broaching as he likes. Give him my sincere thanks.’

‘I’ll do that. Have you any instructions, sir?’

‘Instructions, Bo’sun? Instructions? How can I give any instructions?’

‘I wouldn’t know, sir. I’ve never been a captain.’

‘You bloody well are now. I’m in no position to give anyone instructions. Just do what you think best—and from what I’ve heard to date your best seems to be very good indeed. Not,’ Bowen added deprecatingly, ’that I would have expected anything else of Archie McKinnon.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll try.’ McKinnon turned to leave the ward but was stopped by Sister Morrison. For once, she was looking at him as if he might even belong to the human race.

‘How is he, Mr McKinnon?’

‘The Lieutenant? Resting. He’s a lot weaker than he says he is but he’d never admit it. A very brave man. And a fine navigator. And a gentleman. When he says he didn’t know the San Andreas was a hospital ship I believe him absolutely. I don’t believe many people absolutely.’

‘I’m quite sure you don’t.’ The return to the old asperity proved to be momentary. ‘I don’t think I believe he knew it either. In fact, I don’t believe it.’

‘That’s nice.’ McKinnon smiled at her, the first time, he reflected with some astonishment, that he’d ever smiled at her. ‘Janet—Nurse Magnusson—tells me you come from the east coast. Would it be impertinent to ask where exactly?’

‘Of course not.’ She smiled and McKinnon realized with an even greater sense of shock that this was the first time she’d ever smiled at him. ‘Aberdeen. Why?’

‘Odd. Lieutenant Ulbricht seems to know Aberdeen rather well. He certainly seems to know about Peterhead prison and isn’t all that keen on ending up there.’

A brief flicker of what could have been concern registered on her face. ‘Will he?’

‘Not a chance. If he brings this ship back to Aberdeen they’ll probably give him a medal. Both your parents from Aberdeen, Sister?’

‘My father is. My mother’s from Kiel.’

‘Kiel?’

‘Yes. Germany. Didn’t you know?’

‘Of course not. How should I have known? Now that I do know, is that supposed to make a difference?’

‘I’m half German.’ She smiled again. ‘Aren’t you surprised, Mr McKinnon? Shocked, perhaps?’

‘No, I’m not shocked.’ McKinnon looked gloomy. ‘I have troubles of my own in that direction. My sister Jean is married to an Italian. I have a niece and a nephew, two bambinos who can’t—or couldn’t before the war—speak a word of English to their old uncle.’

‘It must make—must have made—communication a bit difficult.’

‘Luckily, no. I speak Italian.’

She removed her glasses as if to examine them more closely. ‘You speak Italian, Mr McKinnon?’

‘Yes. And Spanish. And German. You must be able to speak German—you can try me any time. Surprised, Sister? Shocked?’

‘No.’ She shook her head slowly and smiled a third time. It was borne in upon McKinnon that a smiling Margaret Morrison, with her warm, friendly brown eyes was a totally different creature from the Sister Morrison he thought he had come to know. ‘No, I’m not. Really.’

‘You come from seafaring people, Sister?’ ‘Yes.’ This time she was surprised. ‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t. But it was a fair guess. It’s the Kiel connection. Many British sailors know Kiel well—I do myself—and it has, or did have, the finest regatta in Europe. Your father’s from Aberdeen. A fisherman? A seaman of some sort?’

‘A seaman of some sort.’

‘What sort?’

‘Well…’ She hesitated.

‘Well what?’

‘He’s a captain in the Royal Navy.’

‘Good Lord!’ McKinnon looked at her in mild astonishment, then rubbed an unshaven chin. ‘I shall have to treat you with more respect in future, Sister Morrison.’

‘I hardly think that will be necessary, Mr McKinnon.’ The voice was formal but the smile that followed was not. ‘Not now.’

‘You sound almost as if you were ashamed of being the daughter of a Royal Navy captain.’

‘I am not. I’m very proud of my father. But it can be difficult. Do you understand?’

‘Yes. I think I do.’

‘Well, now, Mr McKinnon.’ The glasses were back in position and Sister Morrison was back in business. ‘You’ll be seeing Lieutenant Ulbricht up top?’ McKinnon nodded. ‘Tell him I’ll be up to see him in an hour, maybe two.’

McKinnon blinked, which was about as far as he ever permitted himself to go in the way of emotional expression. ‘You?’

‘Yes. Me.’ If bridling hadn’t gone out of fashion she would have bridled.

‘But Dr Sinclair said he would come—’

‘Dr Sinclair is a doctor, not a nurse.’ Sister Morrison made it sound as if there was something faintly discreditable in being a doctor. ‘I’m the Lieutenant’s sister-in-charge. He’ll probably require to have his bandages changed.’

‘When exactly will you be coming?’

‘Does it matter? I can find my own way.’

‘No, Sister, you won’t. You don’t know what it’s like up top. There’s a full gale blowing, it’s forty below, black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat and the deck’s like a skating rink. No one goes up top without my permission and most certainly not nurses. You will phone and I will come for you.’

‘Yes, Mr McKinnon,’ she said primly. She gave a slight smile. ‘The way you put it, it doesn’t leave much room for argument.’

‘I’m sorry. No offence. Before you come up, put on as much warm clothing as you think you will need. Then double the amount.’

Janet Magnusson was in B ward when he passed through it. She took one quick look at his face and said: ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Prepare thyself, Nurse Magnusson. The end is nigh.’

‘What on earth do you mean, Archie?’

‘The dragon next door.’ He jerked a thumb towards A ward. ‘She has just—’

‘Dragon? Maggie? Yesterday she was a lioness.’

‘Dragon. She’s stopped breathing fire. She smiled at me. First time since leaving Halifax. Smiled. Four times. Unsettles a man.’

‘Well!’ She shook his shoulders. ‘I am pleased. So you admit you misjudged her.’

‘I admit it. Mind you, I think she may have misjudged me a bit, too.’

‘I told you she was nice, Archie. Remember?’

‘Indeed I remember. And indeed she is.’

‘Very nice. Very.’

McKinnon regarded her with suspicion. ‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘She smiled at you.’

The Bo’sun gave her a cold look and left.

Lieutenant Ulbricht was awake when McKinnon returned to the Captain’s cabin.

‘Duty calls, Mr McKinnon? Another fix?’

‘Rest easy, Lieutenant. No stars. Overcast. More snow, I’m thinking. How do you feel?’

‘Well enough. At least when I’m lying down. That’s physically, I mean.’ He tapped his head. ‘Up here, not so well. I’ve been doing a lot of wondering and thinking.’

‘Wondering and thinking why you’re lying here?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Haven’t we all? At least, I’ve been doing nothing else but wondering about it. Haven’t got very far, though. In fact, I haven’t got anywhere.’

‘I’m not saying it would help any, just call it curiosity if you like, but would you mind very much telling me what’s been happening to the San Andreas since you left Halifax? Not, of course, if it means telling me naval secrets.’

McKinnon smiled. ‘I don’t have any. Besides, even if I did have and told you, what would you do with them?’

‘You have a point. What indeed?’

McKinnon gave a brief résumé of what had happened to the ship since leaving Nova Scotia and when he had finished Ulbricht said: ‘Well, now let me see if I can count.

‘As far as I can make out there were seven different parties involved in the movements of the San Andreas—actually aboard it, that is. To begin with, there was your own crew. Then there were the wounded survivors picked up from this crippled destroyer. After that came the Russian submarine survivors you took from this corvette you had to sink. Then you picked up some wounded servicemen in Murmansk. Since leaving there you’ve picked up survivors from the Argos, the Andover and Helmut and myself. That makes seven?’

‘That makes seven.’

‘We can eliminate the survivors from the broken-down destroyer and the sinking frigate. Their presence aboard your ship could only have been due to sheer happenstance, nothing else. We can equally forget Commander Warrington and his two men and Helmut Winterman and myself. That leaves just your crew, the survivors from the Argos and the sick men you picked up in Murmansk.’

‘I couldn’t imagine a more unlikely trio of suspects.’

‘Neither could I, Bo’sun. But it’s not imagination we’re concerned with here, it’s logic. It has to be one of those three. Take the sick men you picked up in Murmansk. One of them could have been suborned. I know it sounds preposterous but war itself is preposterous, the most unbelievable things happen in preposterous circumstances, and if there is one thing that is for certain it is that we are not going to find the answer to this enigma in the realms of the obvious. How many sick men are you repatriating from Russia?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Do you happen to know the nature of their injuries?’

McKinnon regarded the Lieutenant speculatively. ‘I have a fair idea.’

‘All seriously wounded?’

‘There are no seriously wounded, far less critically injured patients aboard. If they were, they wouldn’t be here. Poorly, you might call them, I suppose.’

‘But bedridden? Immobile?’

‘The wounded are.’

‘They are not all wounded?’

‘Only eight.’

‘Good God! Eight! You mean to tell me that there are nine who are not injured?’

‘It all depends upon what you mean by injured. Three are suffering from advanced cases of exposure—frostbite, if you like. Then there are three with tuberculosis and the remaining three have suffered mental breakdowns. Those Russian convoys take a pretty vicious toll, Lieutenant, in more ways than one.’

‘You have no cause to love our U-boats, our Luftwaffe, Mr McKinnon.’

The Bo’sun shrugged. ‘We do send the occasional thousand bombers over Hamburg.’

Ulbricht sighed. ‘I suppose this is no time for philosophizing about how two wrongs can never make a right. So we have nine unwounded. All of them mobile?’

‘The three exposure cases are virtually immobile. You’ve never seen so many bandages. The other six—well, they can get around as well as you and I. Well, that’s not quite accurate—as well as I can and a damned sight better than you can.’

‘So. Six mobiles. I know little enough of medicine but I do know just how difficult it is to gauge how severe a case of TB is. I also know that a man in a pretty advanced stage can get around well enough. As for mental breakdowns, those are easy enough to simulate. One of those three may be as rational as we are—or think we are. Come to that, all three of them may be. I don’t have to tell you, Mr McKinnon, that there are those who are so sick of the mindlessness, the hellishness, of war that they will resort to any means to escape from it. Malingerers, as they are commonly and quite often unfairly called. Many of them have quite simply had enough and can take no more. During the First World War quite a number of British soldiers were affected by an incurable disease that was a sure-fire guarantee for a one-way ticket to Blighty. DAH it was called—Disorder Affecting the Heart. The more unfeeling of the British doctors commonly referred to it as Desperate Affection for Home.’

‘I’ve heard of it. Lieutenant, I’m not by nature an inquisitive person, but may I ask you a personal question?’

‘Of course.’

‘Your English. So much better than mine. Thing is, you don’t sound like a foreigner talking English. You sound like an Englishman talking English, an Englishman who’s been at an English public school. Funny.’

‘Not really. You don’t miss much, Mr McKinnon, and that’s a fact. I was educated in an English public school. My mother is English. My father was for many years an attaché in the German Embassy in London.’

‘Well, well.’ McKinnon shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s too much. It’s really too much. Two shocks like this inside twenty minutes.’

‘If you were to tell me what you are talking about—’

‘Sister Morrison. You and she should get together. I’ve just learnt that she’s half-German.’

‘Good God! Goodness gracious me.’ Ulbricht could hardly be said to be dumbfounded but he was taken aback. ‘German mother, of course. How extraordinary! I tell you, Bo’sun, this could be a serious matter. Her being my nurse, I mean. Wartime. International complications, you know.’

‘I don’t know and I don’t see it. You’re both just doing your job. Anyway, she’s coming up to see you shortly.’

‘Coming to see me? That ruthless Nazi killer?’

‘Maybe she’s had a change of heart.’

‘Under duress, of course.’

‘It’s her idea and she insists on it.’

‘It’ll be a hypodermic syringe. Lethal dose of morphine or some such. To get back to our six walking unwounded. Widens the field a bit, doesn’t it? A suborned malingerer or ditto TB patient. How do you like it?’

‘I don’t like it at all. How many suborned men, spies, saboteurs, do you think we’ve picked up among the survivors from the Argos? Another daft thought, I know, but as you’ve more or less said yourself, we’re looking for daft answers to daft questions. And speaking of daft questions, here’s another one. How do we know the Argos really was mined? We know that tankers are extremely tough, heavily compartmented and that this one was returning with empty tanks. Tankers don’t die easily and even laden tankers have been torpedoed and survived. We don’t even know the Argos was mined. How do we know it wasn’t sabotaged so as to provide the opportunity to introduce a saboteur or saboteurs aboard the San Andreas? How do you like that?’

‘Like yourself, I don’t like it at all. But you’re not seriously suggesting that Captain Andropolous would deliberately—’

‘I’m not suggesting anything about Captain Andropolous. For all I know, he may be as double-dyed a villain as is sailing the seas these days. Although I’m willing to consider almost any crazy solution to our questions, I can’t go along with the idea that any captain would sacrifice his ship for any imaginable purpose. But a person or persons to whom the Argos meant nothing might quite happily do just that. It would be interesting to know whether Andropolous had taken on any extra crew members in Murmansk, such as fellow nationals who had survived a previous sinking. Unfortunately, Andropolous and his crew speak nothing but Greek and nobody else aboard speaks Greek.’

‘I speak a little Greek, very little, schoolboy stuff—English public schools are high on Greek—and I’ve forgotten most of that. Not that I can see that it would do much good anyway even if we were to find out that a person or x number of persons joined the Argos at Murmansk. They would only assume expressions of injured innocence, say they don’t know what we are talking about and what could we do then?’ Ulbricht was silent for almost a minute, then suddenly said: ‘The Russian shipwrights.’

‘What Russian shipwrights?’

‘The ones that fixed the damage to the hull of your ship and finished off your sick-bay. But especially the hull repairers.’

‘What about them?’

‘Moment.’ Ulbricht thought some more. ‘I don’t know just how many niggers in the woodpile there may be aboard the San Andreas, but I’m all at once certain that the original one was a member of your own crew.’

‘How on earth do you figure that out? Not, mind you, that anything would surprise me.’

‘You sustained this hull damage to the San Andreas while you were alongside the sinking corvette, before you sunk her by gunfire. That is correct?’

‘Correct.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I told you. We don’t know. No torpedoes, no mines, nothing of that nature. A destroyer was along one side of the corvette, taking off her crew, while we were on the other taking off the survivors of the sunken Russian submarine. There was a series of explosions inside the corvette before we could get clear. One was a boiler going off, the others could have been gun-cotton, two-pounders, anything—there was some sort of fire inside. It was at that time that the damage must have happened.’

‘I suggest it didn’t happen that way at all. I suggest, instead, that it was then that a trusty member of your crew detonated a charge in the port ballast room. I suggest that it was someone who knew precisely how much explosive to use to ensure that it didn’t sink the ship but enough to inflict sufficiently serious damage for it to have to make for the nearest port where repair facilities were available, which, in this case, was Murmansk.’

‘It makes sense. It could have happened that way. But I’m not convinced.’

‘In Murmansk, did anyone see the size or type of hole that had been blown in the hull?’

‘No.’

‘Did anyone try to see?’

‘Yes. Mr Kennet and I.’

‘But surprise, surprise, you didn’t. You didn’t because you weren’t allowed to see it.’

‘That’s how it was. How did you know?’

‘They had tarpaulins rigged all around and above the area under repair?’

‘They had.’ McKinnon was beginning to look rather thoughtful.

‘Did they give any reasons?’

‘To keep out the wind and snow.’

‘Was there much in the way of those?’

‘Very little.’

‘Did you ask to get behind the tarpaulins, see behind them?’

‘We did. They wouldn’t let us. Said it was too dangerous and would only hold up the work of the shipwrights. We didn’t argue because we didn’t think it was all that important. There was no reason why we should have thought so. If you know the Russians at all you must know how mulish they can be about the most ridiculous things. Besides, they were doing us a favour and there was no reason why we should have been suspicious. All right, all right, Lieutenant, there’s no reason to beat me over the head with a two-by-four. You don’t have to be an engineer or a metallurgist to recognize a hole that has been blown from the inside out.’

‘And does it now strike you as strange that the second damage to the hull should have occurred in precisely the same ballast compartment?’

‘Not now it doesn’t. Our gallant—ours, not yours—our gallant allies almost certainly left the charge in the ballast room with a suitable length of fuse conveniently attached. You have the right of it, Lieutenant.’

‘So all we have to do now is to find some member of your crew with a working knowledge of explosives. You know of any such, Mr McKinnon?’

‘Yes.’

‘What!’ Ulbricht propped himself up on an elbow. ‘Who?’

McKinnon raised his eyes to the deckhead. ‘Me.’

‘That’s a help.’ Ulbricht lowered himself to his bunk again. ‘That’s a great help.’

SIX

It was shortly after ten o‘clock in the morning that the snow came again. McKinnon had spent another fifteen minutes in the Captain’s cabin, leaving only when he saw the Lieutenant was having difficulty in keeping his eyes open, then had spoken in turn with Naseby, Patterson and Jamieson, who was again supervising the strengthening of the superstructure. All three had agreed that Ulbricht was almost certainly correct in the assessment he had made: and all three agreed with the Bo’sun that this fresh knowledge, if knowledge it were, served no useful purpose whatsoever. McKinnon had returned to the bridge when the snow came.

He opened a wing door in a duly circumspect fashion but, for all his caution, had it torn from his grasp to crash against the leading edge of the bridge, such was the power of the wind. The snow, light as yet, was driving along as nearly horizontally as made no difference. It was quite impossible to look into it, but with his back to it and looking out over the bows, he could see that the wave pattern had changed: the dawn was in the sky now and in its light he could see that the last semblance of serried ranks had vanished and that the white-veined, white-spumed seas were now broken walls of water, tending this way and that in unpredictable formless confusion. Even without the evidence of his eyes he would have known that this was so: the deck beneath his feet was beginning to shake and shudder in a rather disconcerting manner. The cold was intense. Even with his very considerable weight and strength, McKinnon found it no easy task to heave the wing door shut behind him as he stepped back into the bridge.

He was in desultory conversation with Trent, who had the helm, when the phone rang. It was Sister Morrison. She said she was ready to come up to the Captain’s cabin.

‘I wouldn’t recommend it, Sister. Things are pretty unpleasant up top.’

‘I would remind you that you gave me your promise.’ She was speaking in her best sister’s voice.

‘I know. It’s just that conditions have worsened quite a bit.’

‘Really, Mr McKinnon—’

‘I’m coming. On your own head.’

In Ward B, Janet Magnusson looked at him with disapproval. ‘A hospital is no place for a snowman.’

‘Just passing through. On a mission of mercy. At least, your mule-headed friend imagines she is.’

She kept her expression in place. ‘Lieutenant Ulbricht?’

‘Who else? I’ve just seen him. Looks fair enough to me. I think she’s daft.’

‘The trouble with you, Archie McKinnon, is that you have no finer feelings. Not as far as caring for the sick is concerned. In other ways too, like as not. And if she’s daft, it’s only because she’s been saying nice things about you.’

‘About me? She doesn’t know me.’

‘True, Archie, true.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘But Captain Bowen does.’

McKinnon sought briefly for a suitable comment about captains who gossiped to ward sisters, found none and moved into Ward A. Sister Morrison, suitably bundled up, was waiting. There was a small medical case on a table by her side. McKinnon nodded at her.

‘Would you take those glasses off, Sister?’

‘Why?’

‘It’s the Lothario in him,’ Kennet said. He sounded almost his old cheerful self again. ‘He probably thinks you look nicer without them.’

‘It’s no morning for a polar bear, Mr Kennet, far less a Lothario. If the lady doesn’t remove her glasses the wind will do the job for her.’

‘What’s the wind like, Bo’sun?’ It was Captain Bowen.

‘Force eleven, sir. Blizzard. Eight below. Nine-ninety millibars.’

‘And the seas breaking up?’ Even in the hospital the shuddering of the vessel was unmistakable.

‘They are a bit, sir.’

‘Any problems?’

‘Apart from Sister here seeming bent on suicide, none.’ Not, he thought, as long as the superstructure stayed in place.

Sister Morrison gasped in shock as they emerged on to the upper deck. However much she had mentally prepared herself, she could not have anticipated the savage power of that near hurricane force wind and the driving blizzard that accompanied it, could not even have imagined the lung-searing effect of the abrupt 8o°F drop in temperature. McKinnon wasted no time. He grabbed Sister Morrison with one hand, the lifeline with the other, and allowed the two of them to be literally blown across the treacherous ice-sheathed deck into the shelter of the superstructure. Once under cover, she removed her duffel hood and stood there panting, tenderly massaging her ribs.

‘Next time, Mr McKinnon—if there is a next time—I’ll listen to you. My word! I never dreamt—well, I just never dreamt. And my ribs!’ She felt carefully as if to check they were still there. ‘I’ve got ordinary ribs, just like anyone else. I think you’ve broken them.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ McKinnon said gravely. ‘But I don’t think you’d have much fancied going over the side. And there will be a next time, I’m afraid. We’ve got to go back again and against the wind, and that will be a great deal worse.’

‘At the moment, I’m in no hurry to go back, thank you very much.’

McKinnon led her up the companionway to the crew’s quarters. She stopped and looked at the twisted passageway, the buckled bulkheads, the shattered doors.

‘So this is where they died.’ Her voice was husky. ‘When you see it, it’s all too easy to understand how they died. But you have to see it first to understand. Ghastly—well, ghastly couldn’t have been the word for it. Thank God I never saw it. And you had to clear it all up.’

‘I had help.’

‘I know you did all the horrible bits. Mr Spenser, Mr Rawlings, Mr Batesman, those were the really shocking cases, weren’t they? I know you wouldn’t let anyone else touch them. Johnny Holbrook told Janet and she told me.’ She shuddered. ‘I don’t like this place. Where’s the Lieutenant?’

McKinnon led her up to the Captain’s cabin, where Naseby was keeping an eye on the recumbent Lieutenant.

‘Good morning again, Lieutenant. I’ve just had a taste of the kind of weather Mr McKinnon has been exposing you to. It was awful. How do you feel?’

‘Low, Sister. Very low. I think I’m in need of care and attention.’

She removed oilskins and duffel coat. ‘You don’t look very ill to me.’

‘Appearances, appearances. I feel very weak. Far be it from me to prescribe for myself, but what I need is a tonic, a restorative.’ He stretched out a languid hand. ‘Do you know what’s in that wall cupboard there?’

‘No.’ Her tone was severe. ‘I don’t know. I can guess, though.’

‘Well, I thought, perhaps—in the circumstances, you understand—’

‘Those are Captain Bowen’s private supplies.’

‘May I repeat what the Captain told me?’ McKinnon said. ‘As long as Lieutenant Ulbricht keeps navigating, he can keep on broaching my supplies. Words to that effect.’

‘I don’t see him doing any navigating at the moment. But very well. A small one.’

McKinnon poured and handed him a glass of Scotch: the expression on Sister Morrison’s face was indication enough she and the Bo’sun placed different interpretations on the word ’small’.

‘Come on, George,’ McKinnon said. ‘This is no place for us.’

Sister Morrison looked faintly surprised. ‘You don’t have to go.’

‘We can’t stand the sight of blood. Or suffering, come to that.’

Ulbricht lowered his glass. ‘You would leave us to the mercy of Flannelfoot?’

‘George, if you wait outside I’ll go and give Trent a spell on the wheel. When you’re ready to go back, Sister, you’ll know where to find me.’

McKinnon would have expected that her ministrations might have taken ten minutes, fifteen at the most. Instead, almost forty minutes elapsed before she put in an appearance on the bridge. McKinnon looked at her sympathetically.

‘More trouble than you expected, Sister? He wasn’t just joking when he said he felt pretty low?’

‘There’s very little the matter with him. Especially not with his tongue. How that man can talk!’

‘He wasn’t talking to an empty bulkhead, was he?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ McKinnon said reasonably, ‘he wouldn’t have kept on talking if you hadn’t kept on listening.’

Sister Morrison seemed to be in no hurry to depart. She was silent for some time, then said with a slight trace of a smile: ‘I find this—well, not infuriating but annoying. Most people would be interested in what we were saying.’

‘I am interested. I’m just not inquisitive. If you wanted to tell me, then you’d tell me. If I asked you to tell me and you didn’t want to, then you wouldn’t tell me. But, fine, I’d like you to tell me.’

‘I don’t know whether that’s infuriating or not.’ She paused. ‘Why did you tell Lieutenant Ulbricht that I’m half German?’

‘It’s not a secret, is it?’

‘No.’

‘And you’re not ashamed of it. You told me so yourself. So why—ah! Why didn’t I tell you that I’d told him? That’s what you’re asking. Just never occurred to me.’

‘You might at least have told me that he was half English.’

‘That didn’t occur to me either. It’s unimportant. I don’t care what nationality a person is. I told you about my brother-in-law. Like the Lieutenant, he’s a pilot. He’s also a lieutenant. If he thought it his duty to drop a bomb on me, he’d do it like a shot. But you couldn’t meet a finer man.’

‘You’re a very forgiving man, Mr McKinnon.’

‘Forgiving?’ He looked at her in surprise. ‘I’ve nothing to forgive. I mean, he hasn’t dropped a bomb on me yet.’

‘I didn’t mean that. Even if he did, it wouldn’t make any difference.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know.’

McKinnon didn’t pursue the matter. ‘Doesn’t sound like a very interesting conversation to me. Not forty minutes’ worth, anyway.’

‘He also took great pleasure in pointing out that he’s more British than I am. From the point of view of blood, I mean. Fifty per cent British to start with plus two more British pints yesterday.’

McKinnon was polite. ‘Indeed.’

‘All right, so statistics aren’t interesting either. He also says that his father knows mine.’

‘Ah. That is interesting. Wait a minute. He mentioned that his father had been an attaché at the German Embassy in London. He didn’t mention whether he was a commercial or cultural attaché or whatever. He didn’t just happen to mention to you that his father had been the naval attaché there?’

‘He was.’

‘Don’t tell me that his old man is a captain in the German Navy.’

‘He is.’

‘That makes you practically blood brothers. Or brother and sister. Mark my words, Sister,’ McKinnon said solemnly, ‘I see the hand of fate here. Something pre-ordained, you might say?’

‘Pfui!’

‘Are they both on active service?’

‘Yes.’ She sounded forlorn.

‘Don’t you find it funny that your respective parents should be prowling the high seas figuring out ways of doing each other in?’

‘I don’t find it at all funny.’

‘I didn’t mean funny in that sense.’ If anyone had ever suggested to McKinnon that Margaret Morrison would one day strike him as a woebegone figure he would have questioned his sanity: but not any longer. He found her sudden dejection inexplicable. ‘Not to worry, lassie. It’ll never happen.’ He wasn’t at all sure what he meant by that.

‘Of course not.’ Her voice carried a total lack of conviction. She made to speak, hesitated, looked down at the deck, then slowly lifted her head. Her face was in shadow but he felt almost certain that he saw the sheen of tears. ‘I heard things about you, today.’

‘Oh. Nothing to my credit, I’m sure. You can’t believe a word anyone says these days. What things, Sister?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’ The irritation was as unaccustomed as the dejection.

McKinnon raised a polite eyebrow. ‘Sister? But you are a sister.’

‘Not the way you make it sound. Sorry, I didn’t mean that, you don’t make it sound different from anyone else. It’s like those cheap American films where the man with the gun goes around calling everyone “sister”.’

He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t like you to confuse me with a hoodlum. Miss Morrison?’

‘You know my name.’

‘Yes. I also know that you started out to say something, changed your mind and are trying to stall.’

‘No. Yes. Well, not really. It’s difficult, I’m not very good at those things. I heard about your family this morning. Just before we came up. I’m sorry, I am terribly sorry.’

‘Janet?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s no secret.’

‘It was a German bomber pilot who killed them.’ She looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head. ‘Along comes another German bomber pilot, again attacking innocent civilians, and you’re the first person to come to his defence.’

‘Don’t go pinning any haloes or wings on me. Besides, I’m not so sure that’s a compliment. What did you expect me to do? Lash out in revenge at an innocent man?’

‘You? Don’t be silly. Well, no, maybe I was silly to say it, but you know very well what I mean. I also heard Petty Officer McKinnon, BEM, DSM and goodness knows what else was in a Malta hospital with a broken back when he heard the news. An Italian Air Force bomber got your submarine. You seem to have an affinity for enemy bombers.’

‘Janet didn’t know that.’

She smiled. ‘Captain Bowen and I have become quite friendly.’

‘Captain Bowen,’ McKinnon said without heat, ‘is a gossipy old woman.’

‘Captain Bowen is a gossipy old woman. Mr Kennet is a gossipy old woman. Mr Patterson is a gossipy old woman. Mr Jamieson is a gossipy old woman. They’re all gossipy old women.’

‘Goodness me! That’s a very serious allegation, Sister. Sorry. Margaret.’

‘Gossipy old women speak in low voices or whispers. Whenever any two of them or three of them or indeed all four are together they speak in low voices or whispers. You can feel the tension, almost smell the fear—well, no, that’s the wrong word, apprehension, I should say. Why do they whisper?’

‘Maybe they’ve got secrets.’

‘I deserve better than that.’

‘We’ve got saboteurs aboard.’

‘I know that. We all know that. The whisperers know that we all know that.’ She gave him a long, steady look. ‘I still deserve better than that. Don’t you trust me?’

‘I trust you. We’re being hunted. Somebody aboard the San Andreas has a transmitter radio that is sending out a continuous location signal. The Luftwaffe, the U-boats know exactly where we are. Somebody wants us. Somebody wants to take over the San Andreas.’

For long moments she looked at his eyes as if searching for an answer to a question she couldn’t formulate. McKinnon shook his head and said: ‘I’m sorry. That’s all I know. You must believe me.’

‘I do believe you. Who could be sending out this signal?’

‘Anybody. My guess is that it is a member of our own crew. Could be a survivor from the Argos. Could be any of the sick men we picked up in Murmansk. Each idea is quite ridiculous but one has to be less ridiculous than the others. Which, I have no idea.’

‘Why would anyone want us?’

‘If I knew that, I’d know the answer to a lot of things. Once again, I have no idea.’

‘How would they take us over?’

‘Submarine. U-boat. No other way. They have no surface ships and an aircraft is out of the question. Praying, that’s what your whisperers are probably at—praying. Praying that the snow will never end. Our only hope lies in concealment. Praying, as the old divines used to say, that we will not be abandoned by fortune.’

‘And if we are?’

‘Then that’s it.’

‘You’re not going to do anything?’ She seemed more than faintly incredulous. ‘You’re not even going to try to do anything?’

It was quite some hours since McKinnon had made up his mind where his course of action would lie but it seemed hardly the time or the place to elaborate on his decision. ‘What on earth do you expect me to do? Send them to the bottom with a salvo of stale bread and old potatoes? You forget this is a hospital ship. Sick, wounded and all civilians.’

‘Surely there’s something you can do.’ There was a strange note in her voice, one almost of desperation. She went on bitterly: ‘The much-bemedalled Petty Officer McKinnon.’

‘The much-bemedalled Petty Officer McKinnon,’ he said mildly, ‘would live to fight another day.’

‘Fight them now!’ Her voice had a break in it. ‘Fight them! Fight them! Fight them!’ She buried her face in her hands.

McKinnon put his arm round her shaking shoulders and regarded her with total astonishment. A man of almost infinite resource and more than capable of dealing with anything that came his way, he was at an utter loss to account for her weird conduct. He sought for words of comfort and consolation but as he didn’t know what he was supposed to be comforting or consoling about he found none. Nor did repeating phrases like ‘Now, now, then’ seem to meet the case either, so he finally contented himself with saying: ‘I’ll get Trent up and take you below.’

When they had arrived below, after a particularly harrowing trip across the upper deck between superstructure and hospital—they had to battle their way against the great wind and the driving blizzard—he led her to the little lounge and went in search of Janet Magnusson. When he found her he said: ‘I think you’d better go and see your pal, Maggie. She’s very upset.’ He raised a hand. ‘No, Janet, not guilty. I did not upset her.’

She said accusingly: ‘But you were with her when she became upset.’

‘She’s disappointed with me, that’s all.’

‘Disappointed?’

‘She wants me to commit suicide. I don’t see it her way.’

She tapped her head. ‘One of you is touched. I don’t much doubt who it is.’ McKinnon sat down on a stool by a mess table while she went into the lounge. She emerged some five minutes later and sat down opposite him. Her face was troubled.

‘Sorry, Archie. Not guilty. And neither of you is touched. She’s got this ambivalent feeling towards the Germans.’

‘Ambi what?’

‘Mixed up. It doesn’t help that her mother is German. She’s had rather a bad time. A very rough time. Oh, I know you have, too, but you’re different.’

‘Of course I’m different. I have no finer feelings.’

‘Oh, do be quiet. You weren’t to know—in fact, I think I’m the only person who does know. About five months ago she lost both her only brother and her fiancé. Both died over Hamburg. Not in the same plane, not even in the same raid. But within weeks of each other.’

‘Oh Jesus.’ McKinnon shook his head slowly and was silent for some moments. ‘Poor bloody kid. Explains a lot.’ He rose, crossed to Dr Singh’s private source of supplies and returned with a glass. ‘The legendary McKinnon willpower. You were with Maggie when this happened, Janet?’

‘Yes.’

‘You knew her before then?’

‘Of course. We’ve been friends for years.’

‘So you must have known those two boys?’ She said nothing. ‘Known them well, I mean?’ Still she said nothing, just sat there with her flaxen head bowed, apparently gazing down at her clasped hands on the table. As much in exasperation as anything McKinnon reached out, took one of her wrists and shook it gently. ‘Janet.’

She looked up. ‘Yes, Archie?’ Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ McKinnon sighed. ‘You, too.’ Again he shook his head, again he remained silent for some time. ‘Look, Janet, those boys knew what they were doing. They knew the risks. They knew that, if they could at all, the German anti-aircraft batteries and night-fighter pilots would shoot them down. And so they did and so they had every right to do. And I would remind you that those were no mere pinpoint raids—it was saturation bombing and you know what that means. So while you and Maggie are crying for yourselves, you might as well cry for the relatives of all the thousands of innocent dead that the RAF left behind in Hamburg. You might as well cry for all mankind.’

Two tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘You, McKinnon, are a heartless fiend.’

‘I’m all that.’ He rose. ‘If anyone wants me I’ll be on the bridge.’

Noon came and went and as the day lengthened the wind strengthened until it reached the screaming intensity commonly found in the hurricanes and typhoons of the more tropical parts of the world. By two o‘clock in the afternoon when the light, which at best had never been more than a grey half-light, was beginning to fade, what little could be seen of the mountainous seas abeam and ahead of the San Andreas—the blizzard made it quite impossible to see anything abaft of the bridge—were as white as the driving snow itself, the shapeless troughs between the towering walls of water big enough to drown a suburban house or, to the more apprehensive eye, big enough to drown a suburban church including a fair part of its steeple. The San Andreas was in trouble. At 9,300 tons it was not a small vessel and the Bo’sun had had engine revolutions reduced until the ship had barely steerage way on, but still she was in trouble and the causes for this lay neither in the size of the ship, nor the size of the seas, for normally the San Andreas could have ridden out the storm without much difficulty. The two main reasons for concern lay elsewhere.

The first of these was ice. A ship in a seaway can be said to be either stiff or tender. If it is stiff, it is resistant to roll, and, when it does roll, recovers sharply: when it is tender it rolls easily and recovers slowly and reluctantly. Tenderness arises when a vessel becomes top-heavy, raising the centre of gravity. The prime cause of this is ice. As the thickness of ice on the upper decks increases, so does the degree of tenderness: when the ice becomes sufficiently thick the vessel will fail to recover from its roll, turn turtle and founder. Even splendidly seaworthy ocean-going trawlers, specially built for Arctic operations, have succumbed to the stealthily insidious and deadly onslaught of ice: and for aircraft carriers operating in the far north, ice on their vast areas of open upper decks provided a constant threat to stability.

McKinnon was deeply worried by the accumulation of ice on the decks of the San Andreas. Compacted snow from the blizzard had formed a certain thickness of ice but not much, for apart from the area abaft of the superstructure, most of the snow had simply been blown away by the powerful wind: but for hours now, according to the ever-changing direction of the constantly shifting masses of water, the San Andreas had been shipping copious amounts of water and spray, water and spray that turned to ice even before it hit the decks. The vessel occasionally rode on an even keel but more and more frequently it lurched into a sudden roll and each time recovered from it more and more slowly. The critical limit, he was well aware, was still some time away: but without some amelioration in the conditions, it would inevitably be reached. There was nothing that could be done: sledgehammers and crowbars would have had but a minimal effect and the chances were high that people wielding those would have ended up, in very short order, over the side: on those lurching ice-rink decks footing would have been impossible to maintain. For once, McKinnon regretted that he was aboard an American-built oil-burning ship instead of a British-built coal-burning one: boiler ashes spread on the deck would have given a reasonably secure footing and helped considerably towards melting the ice. There was nothing that one could do with diesel oil.

Of even more immediate worry was the superstructure. Except when on even keel the overstressed metal, shaking and shuddering, creaked and groaned its protesting torture and, when it fell into the depths of a trough, the entire structure shifted quite perceptibly. At the highest point, the bridge on which he was standing, McKinnon estimated the lateral movement to be between four and six inches at a time. It was an acutely uncomfortable sensation and a thought-provoking one: how much of a drop and how acute an angle would be required before the shear factor came into operation and the superstructure parted company with the San Andreas? With this in mind McKinnon went below to see Lieutenant Ulbricht.

Ulbricht, who had lunched on sandwiches and Scotch and slept a couple of hours thereafter, was propped up in the Captain’s bunk and was in a reasonably philosophical mood.

‘Whoever named this ship the San Andreas,’ he said, ‘named it well. You know, of course, that the San Andreas is a famous—or notorious—earthquake-fault.’ He grabbed the side of his bunk as the ship fell into a trough and juddered in a most alarming fashion. ‘At the present moment I feel I’m living through an earthquake.’

‘It was Mr Kennet’s idea. Mr Kennet has, at times, a rather peculiar sense of humour. A week ago this was still the Ocean Belle. When we changed our paint from grey to the Red Cross colours of white, green and red, Mr Kennet thought we should change the name too. This ship was built in Richmond, California. Richmond is on the Hayward’s Fault which is a branch of the San Andreas. He was of the opinion that San Andreas was much more of a romantic name than Hayward’s Fault. He also thought it was an amusing idea to name it after a potential disaster area.’ McKinnon smiled. ‘I wonder if he still thinks it was an amusing idea.’

‘Well, he’s had plenty of time for reflection since I dropped those bombs on him yesterday morning. I should rather think he’s had second thoughts on the matter.’ Ulbricht tightened his grip on the side of his bunk as the San Andreas fell heavily into another trough. ‘The weather does not improve, Mr McKinnon?’

‘The weather does not improve. That’s what I came to talk about, Lieutenant. Force twelve wind. With the darkness and the blizzard—it’s as strong as ever—visibility is absolutely zero. Not a chance of a starsight for hours. I think you’d be far better off in the hospital.’

‘Certainly not. I’d have to fight my way against a hurricane, not to say a blizzard, to reach the hospital. A man in my weakened condition? Not to be thought of.’

‘It’s warmer down there, Lieutenant. More comfortable. And the motion, naturally, is much less.’

‘Dear me, Mr McKinnon, how could you overlook the most important inducement—all those pretty nurses. No, thank you. I prefer the Captain’s cabin, not to mention the Captain’s Scotch. The truth of the matter is, of course, that you suspect that the superstructure may go over the side at any moment and that you want me out of here before that happens. Isn’t that so?’

‘Well.’ McKinnon touched the outer bulkhead. ‘It is a bit unstable.’

‘While you remain, of course.’

‘I have a job to do.’

‘Unthinkable. The honour of the Luftwaffe is at stake. You stay, I stay.’

McKinnon didn’t argue. If anything, he felt obscurely pleased by Ulbricht’s decision. He tapped the barometer and lifted an eyebrow. ‘Three millibars?’

‘Up?’

‘Up.’

‘Help is at hand. There’s hope yet.’

‘Take hours for the weather to moderate—if it does. Superstructure could still go at any time. Even if it doesn’t, our only real hope lies with the snow.’

‘And when the snow goes?’

‘Then your U-boats come.’

‘You’re convinced of that?’

‘Yes. Aren’t you?’

‘I’m afraid I am, rather.’

Three hours later, shortly after five o‘clock in the afternoon and quite some time before McKinnon had expected it, the weather began to moderate, almost imperceptibly at first, then with increasing speed. The wind speed dropped to a relatively benign Force six, the broken and confused seas of the early afternoon resolved themselves, once again, into a recognizable wave pattern, the San Andreas rode on a comparatively even keel, the sheeted ice on the decks no longer offered a threat and the superstructure had quite ceased its creaking and groaning. But best of all, from McKinnon’s point of view, the snow, though driving much less horizontally than it had earlier on, still fell as heavily as ever. He was reasonably certain that when an attack did come it would come during the brief hours of daylight but was well aware that a determined U-boat captain would not hesitate to press home an attack in moonlight. In his experience most U-boat captains were very determined indeed—and there would be a moon later that night. Snow would avail them nothing in daytime but during the hours of darkness it was a virtual guarantee of safety.

He went to the Captain’s cabin where he found Lieutenant Ulbricht smoking an expensive Havana—Captain Bowen, a pipe man, permitted himself one cigar a day—and sipping an equally expensive malt, both of which no doubt helped to contribute to his comparatively relaxed mood.

‘Ah, Mr McKinnon. This is more like it. The weather, I mean. Moderating by the minute. Still snowing?’

‘Heavily. A mixed blessing, I suppose. No chance of starsights but at least it keeps your friends out of our hair.’

‘Friends? Yes. I spend quite some time wondering who my friends are.’ He waved a dismissive hand which was no easy thing to do with a glass of malt in one and a cigar in the other. ‘Is Sister Morrison ill?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘I’m supposed to be her patient. One could almost term this savage neglect. A man could easily bleed to death.’

‘We can’t have that.’ McKinnon smiled. ‘I’ll get her for you.’

He phoned the hospital and, by the time he arrived there, Sister Morrison was ready. She said: ‘Something wrong? Is he unwell?’

‘He feels cruelly neglected and says something about bleeding to death. He is, in fact, in good spirits, smoking a cigar, drinking malt whisky and appears to be in excellent health. He’s just bored or lonely or both and wants to talk to someone.’

‘He can always talk to you.’

‘When I said someone, I didn’t mean anyone. I am not Margaret Morrison. Crafty, those Luftwaffe pilots. He can always have you up for dereliction of duty.’

He took her to the Captain’s cabin, told her to call him at the hospital when she was through, took the crew lists from the Captain’s desk, left and went in search of Jamieson. Together they spent almost half an hour going over the papers of every member of the deck and engine-room crews, trying to recall every detail they knew of their past histories and what other members of the crew had said about any particular individual. When they had finished consulting both the lists and their memories, Jamieson pushed away the lists, leaned back in his chair and sighed.

‘What do you make of it, Bo’sun?’

‘Same as you do, sir. Nothing. I wouldn’t even begin to know where to point the finger of suspicion. Not only are there no suitable candidates for the role of saboteur, there’s nobody who’s even remotely likely. I think we’d both go into court and testify as character witnesses for the lot of them. But if we accept Lieutenant Ulbricht’s theory—and you, Mr Patterson, Naseby and I do accept it—that it must have been one of the original crew that set off that charge in the ballast room when we were alongside that corvette, then it must have been one of them. Or, failing them, one of the hospital staff.’

‘The hospital staff?’ Jamieson shook his head. ‘The hospital staff. Sister Morrison as a seagoing Mata Hari? I have as much imagination as the next man, Bo’sun, but not that kind of imagination.’

‘Neither have I. We’d both go to court for them, too. But it has to be someone who was aboard this ship when we left Halifax. When we retire, Mr Jamieson, I think we’d better not be applying for a job with Scotland Yard’s CID. Then there’s the possibility that whoever it is may be in cahoots with someone from the Argos or one of the nine invalids we picked up in Murmansk.’

‘About all of whom we know absolutely nothing, which is a great help.’

‘As far as the crew of the Argos is concerned, that’s true. As for the invalids, we have, of course, their names, ranks and numbers. One of the TB cases, man by the name of Hartley, is an ERA—Engine-Room Artificer. He would know about electrics. Another, Simons, a mental breakdown case, or an alleged mental breakdown case, is an LTO—Leading Torpedo Operator. He would know about explosives.’

‘Too obvious, Bo’sun.’

‘Far too obvious. Maybe we’re meant to overlook the far too obvious.’

‘Have you seen those two? Spoken to them, I mean?’

‘Yes. I should imagine you also have. They’re the two with the red hair.’

‘Ah. Those two. Bluff, honest sailormen. Don’t look like criminal types at all. But then, I suppose, the best criminals never do. Look that way, I mean.’ He sighed. ‘I agree, with you, Bo’sun. The CID are in no danger from us.’

‘No, indeed.’ McKinnon rose. ‘I think I’ll go and rescue Sister Morrison from Lieutenant Ulbricht’s clutches.’

Sister Morrison was not in the Lieutenant’s clutches nor did she show any signs of wanting to be rescued. ‘Time to go?’ she said.

‘Of course not. Just to let you know I’ll be on the bridge when you want me.’ He looked at Ulbricht, then at Sister Morrison. ‘You managed to save him, then?’

Compared to what it had been only a few hours previously the starboard wing of the bridge was now almost a haven of peace and quiet. The wind had dropped to not more than Force four and the seas, while far from being a millpond, had quietened to the extent that the San Andreas rarely rolled more than a few degrees when it did at all. That was on the credit side. On the debit side was the fact that the snow had thinned to the extent that McKinnon had no difficulty in making out the arc-lit shape of the red cross on the foredeck reflecting palely under its sheathing of ice. He went back inside the bridge and called up Patterson in the engine-room.

‘Bo’sun here, sir. Snow’s lightening. Looks as if it’s going to stop altogether pretty soon. I’d like permission to switch off all exterior lights. Seas are still too high for any U-boat to see us from periscope depth, but if it’s on the surface, if the snow has stopped and we still have the Red Cross lights on, we can be seen miles away from its conning-tower.’

‘We wouldn’t want that, would we. No lights.’

‘One other thing. Could you have some men clear a pathway—sledges, crowbars, whatever—in the ice between the hospital and the superstructure. Two feet should be wide enough.’

‘Consider it done.’

Fifteen minutes later, still without any sign of Margaret Morrison, the Bo’sun moved out on the wing again. The snow had stopped completely. There were isolated patches of clear sky above and some stars shone, although the Pole Star was hidden. The darkness was still pretty complete, McKinnon couldn’t even see as far as the fo‘c’s’le with the deck lights extinguished. He returned inside and went below to the Captain’s cabin.

‘The snow’s stopped, Lieutenant, and there are a few stars around, not many, and certainly not at the moment the Pole, but a few. I don’t know how long those conditions might last so I thought you might like to have a look now. I assume that Sister Morrison has staunched the flow of blood.’

‘There never was any flow of blood,’ she said. ‘As you know perfectly well, Mr McKinnon.’

‘Yes, Sister.’

She winced, then smiled. ‘Archie McKinnon.’

‘Wind’s dropped a lot,’ McKinnon said. He helped Ul-bricht on with outer clothing. ‘But those are just as necessary as they were before. The temperature is still below zero.’

‘Fahrenheit?’

‘Sorry. You don’t use that. It’s about twenty degrees below, Centigrade.’

‘May his nurse come with him? After all, Dr Sinclair went with him last time.’

‘Of course. Wouldn’t advise you to come on the wing bridge, though.’ McKinnon gathered up sextant and chronometer and accompanied them up to the bridge. This time Ulbricht made it unaided. He went out on both wing bridges in turn and chose the starboard from which to make his observations. It took him longer than it had on the previous occasion, for he found it necessary to take more sights, presumably because the Pole Star was hidden. He came back inside, worked on the chart for some time and finally looked up.

‘Satisfactory. In the circumstances, very satisfactory. Not my navigation. The course we’ve been holding. No idea if we’ve been holding it all the time, of course, and that doesn’t matter. We’re south of the Arctic Circle now, near enough 66.20 north, 4.20 east. Course 213, which seems to indicate that the wind’s backed only five degrees in the past twelve hours. We’re fine as we are, Mr McKinnon. Keeping the sea and the wind to the stern should see us through the night and even if we do wander off course we’re not going to bump into anything. This time tomorrow morning we’ll lay off a more southerly course.’

‘Thank you very much, Lieutenant,’ McKinnon said. ‘As the saying goes, you’ve earned your supper. Incidentally, I’ll have that sent up inside half an hour. You’ve also earned a good night’s sleep—I won’t be troubling you any more tonight.’

‘Haven’t I earned something else, too? It was mighty cold out there, Mr McKinnon.’

‘I’m sure the Captain would approve. As he said, so long as you’re navigating.’ He turned to the girl. ‘You coming below?’

‘Yes, yes, of course she must,’ Ulbricht said. ‘I’ve been most remiss, most.’ If remorse were gnawing it didn’t show too much. ‘All your other patients—’

‘All my other patients are fine. Sister Maria is looking after them. I’m off duty.’

‘Off duty! That makes me feel even worse. You should be resting, my dear girl, that or sleeping.’

‘I’m wide awake, thank you. Are you coming below? It’s no trouble now, ship’s like a rock and you’ve just been told you won’t be required any more tonight.’

‘Well, now.’ Ulbricht paused judiciously. ‘On balance, I think I should remain. Unforeseeable emergencies, you understand.’

‘Luftwaffe officers shouldn’t tell fibs. Of course I understand. I understand that the only foreseeable emergency is that you run short of supplies and the only reason you’re not coming below is that we don’t serve malt whisky with ward dinners.’

The Lieutenant shook his head in sadness. ‘I am deeply wounded.’

‘Wounded!’ she said. They had returned to the hospital mess-deck. ‘Wounded.’

‘I think he is.’ McKinnon looked at her in speculative amusement. ‘And you, too.’

‘Me? Oh, really!’

‘Yes. Really. You’re hurt because you think he prefers Scotch to your company. Isn’t that so?’ She made no reply. ‘If you believe that, then you’ve got a very low opinion of both yourself and the Lieutenant. You were with him for about an hour tonight. What did he drink in that time?’

‘Nothing.’ Her voice was quiet.

‘Nothing. He’s not a drinker and he’s a sensitive lad. He’s sensitive because he’s an enemy, because he’s a captive, a prisoner of war and, of course, he’s sensitive above all because he’s now got to live all his life with the knowledge that he killed fifteen innocent people. You asked him if he was coming down. He didn’t want to be asked “if”. He wanted to be persuaded, even ordered. “If” implies indifference and the way he’s feeling it could be taken for a rejection. So what happens? The ward sister tells her feminine sympathy and intuition to take a holiday and delivers herself of some cutting remarks that Margaret Morrison would never have made. A mistake, but easy enough to put right.’

‘How?’ The question was a tacit admission that a mistake had indeed been made.

‘Ninny. You take his hand and say sorry. Or are you too proud?’

‘Too proud?’ She seemed uncertain, confused. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Too proud because he’s a German? Look, I know about your fiancé and brother and I’m terribly sorry but that doesn’t—’

‘Janet shouldn’t have told you.’

‘Don’t be daft. You didn’t object to her telling you about my family.’

‘And that’s not all.’ She sounded almost angry. ‘You said they went around killing thousands of innocent people and that—’

‘Those were not my words. Janet did not say that. You’re doing what you accused the Lieutenant of doing—fibbing. Also, you’re dodging the issue. Okay, so the nasty Germans killed two people you knew and loved. I wonder how many thousands they killed before they were shot down. But that doesn’t matter really, does it? You never knew them or their names. How can you weep over people you’ve never met, husbands and wives, sweethearts and children, without faces or names? It’s quite ridiculous, isn’t it, and statistics are so boring. Tell me, did your brother ever tell you how he felt when he went out in his Lancaster bomber and slaughtered his mother’s fellow countrymen? But, of course, he’d never met them so that made it all right, didn’t it?’

She said in a whisper: ‘I think you’re horrible.’

‘You think I’m horrible. Janet thinks I’m a heartless fiend. I think you’re a pair of splendid hypocrites.’

‘Hypocrites?’

‘You know—Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The ward sister and Margaret Morrison. Janet’s just as bad. At least I don’t deal in double standards.’ McKinnon made to leave but she caught him by the arm and indulged, not for the first time, in the rather disconcerting practice of examining each of his eyes in turn.

‘You didn’t really mean that, did you? About Janet and myself being hypocrites?’

‘No.’

‘You are devious. All right, all right, I’ll make it right with him.’

‘I knew you would. Margaret Morrison.’

‘Not Ward Sister Morrison?’

‘You don’t look like Mrs Hyde.’ He paused. ‘When were you to have been married?’

‘Last September.’

‘Janet. Janet and your brother. They were pretty friendly, weren’t they?’

‘Yes. She told you that?’

‘No. She didn’t have to.’

‘Yes, they were pretty friendly.’ She was silent for a few moments. ‘It was to have been a double wedding.’

‘Oh hell,’ McKinnon said and walked away. He checked all the scuttles in the hospital area—even from the relatively low altitude of a submarine conning-tower the light from an uncovered porthole can be seen for several miles—went down to the engine-room, spoke briefly to Patterson, returned to the mess-deck, had dinner, then went into the wards. Janet Magnusson, in Ward B, watched his approach without enthusiasm.

‘So you’ve been at it again.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’

‘No. I don’t know and I don’t care. I suppose you’re talking about your friend Maggie—and yourself. Of course I’m sorry for you both, terribly sorry, and maybe tomorrow or when we get to Aberdeen I’ll break my heart for yesterday. But not now, Janet. Now I have one or two more important things on my mind such as, say, getting to Aberdeen.’

‘Archie.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘I won’t even say sorry. I’m just whistling in the dark, don’t you know that, you clown? I don’t want to think about tomorrow.’ She gave a shiver, which could have been mock or not. ‘I feel funny. I’ve been talking to Maggie. It’s going to happen tomorrow, isn’t it, Archie?’

‘If by tomorrow you mean when daylight comes, then, yes. Could even be tonight, if the moon breaks through.’

‘Maggie says it has to be a submarine. So you said.’

‘Has to be.’

‘How do you fancy being taken a prisoner?’

‘I don’t fancy it at all.’

‘But you will be, won’t you?’

‘I hope not.’

‘How can you hope not? Maggie says you’re going to surrender. She didn’t say so outright because she knows we’re friends—we are friends, Mr McKinnon?’

‘We are friends, Miss Magnusson.’

‘Well, she didn’t say so, but I think she thinks you’re a bit of a coward, really.’

‘A very—what’s the word, perspicacious?—a very perspicacious girl is our Maggie.’

‘She’s not as perspicacious as I am. You really think there’s a chance we’ll reach Aberdeen?’

‘There’s a chance.’

‘And after that?’

‘Aha! Clever, clever Janet Magnusson. If I haven’t got any plans for the future then I don’t see any future. Isn’t that it? Well, I do see a future and I do have plans. I’m going to take my first break since nineteen thirty-nine and have a couple of weeks back home in the Shetlands. When were you last back home in the Shetlands?’

‘Not for years.’

‘Will you come with me, Janet?’

‘Of course.’

McKinnon went into Ward A and passed up the aisle to where Sister Morrison was sitting at her table. ‘How’s the Captain?’

‘Well enough, I suppose. Bit dull and quiet. But why ask me? Ask him.’

‘I have to ask the ward sister’s permission to take him out of the ward.’

‘Take him out—whatever for?’

‘I want to talk to him.’

‘You can talk to him here.’

‘I can just see the nasty suspicious looks I’d be getting from you if we started whispering together and the nasty suspicious questions I’d be getting afterwards. My dear Margaret, we have matters of state to discuss.’

‘You don’t trust me, is that it?’

‘That’s the second time you’ve asked me that silly question. Same answer. I do trust you. Totally. I trust Mr Kennet there. But there are five others I don’t know whether to trust or not.’

McKinnon took the Captain from the ward and returned with him inside two minutes. After she’d tucked him back in bed, Margaret Morrison said: ‘That must rank as the shortest state conference in history.’

‘We are men of few words.’

‘And that’s the only communiqué I’ll be getting?’

‘Well, that’s the way high-level diplomacy is conducted. Secrecy is the watchword.’

As he entered Ward B he was stopped by Janet Magnusson. ‘What was all that about, then? You and Captain Bowen, I mean.’

‘I have not had a private talk with the Captain in order to tell all the patients in Ward B about it. I am under an oath of silence.’

Margaret Morrison came in, looked from one to the other, then said: ‘Well, Janet, has he been more forthcoming with you than with me?’

‘Forthcoming? Under an oath of silence, he claims. His own oath, I have no doubt.’

‘No doubt. What have you been doing to the Captain?’

‘Doing? I’ve been doing nothing.’

‘Saying, then. He’s changed since he came back. Seems positively cheerful.’

‘Cheerful? How can you tell. With all those bandages, you can’t see a square inch of his face.’

‘There are more ways than one of telling. He’s sitting up in bed, rubbing his hands from time to time and twice he’s said “Aha”.’

‘I’m not surprised. It takes a special kind of talent to reach the hearts and minds of the ill and depressed. It’s a gift. Some of us have it.’ He looked at each in turn. ‘And some of us haven’t.’

He left them looking at each other.

McKinnon was woken by Trent at 2.0 a.m. ‘The moon’s out, Bo’sun.’

The moon, as McKinnon bleakly appreciated when he arrived on the port wing of the bridge, was very much out, a three-quarter moon and preternaturally bright—or so it seemed to him. At least half the sky was clear. The visibility out over the now almost calm seas was remarkable, so much so that he had no difficulty in picking out the line of the horizon: and if he could see the horizon, the Bo’sun all too clearly realized, then a submarine could pick them up ten miles away, especially if the San Andreas were silhouetted against the light of the moon. McKinnon felt naked and very vulnerable. He went below, roused Curran, told him to take up lookout on the starboard wing of the bridge, found Naseby, asked him to check that the falls and davits of the motor lifeboats were clear of ice and working freely and then returned to the port wing where, every minute or two, he swept the horizon with his binoculars. But the sea between the San Andreas and the horizon remained providentially empty.

The San Andreas itself was a remarkable sight. Wholly covered in ice and snow, it glittered and shone and sparkled in the bright moonlight except for a narrow central area abaft of the superstructure where wisping smoke from the shattered funnel had laid a brown smear all the way to the stern post. The fore and aft derricks were huge glistening Christmas trees, festooned with thick-ribbed woolly halliards and stays, and the anchor chains on the fo‘c’s’le had been transformed into great fluffy ropes of the softest cotton wool. It was a strange and beautiful world with an almost magical quality about it, ethereal almost: but one had only to think of the lethal dangers that lay under the surrounding waters and the beauty and the magic ceased to exist.

An hour passed by and everything remained quiet and peaceful. Another hour came and went, nothing untoward happened and McKinnon could scarcely believe their great good fortune. And before the third uneventful hour was up the clouds had covered the moon and it had begun to snow again, a gentle snowfall only, but enough, with the hidden moon, to shroud them in blessed anonymity again. Telling Ferguson, who now had the watch, to shake him if the snow stopped, he went below in search of some more sleep.

It was nine o‘clock when he awoke. It was an unusually late awakening for him but he wasn’t unduly perturbed—dawn was still an hour distant. As he crossed the upper deck he noted that the conditions were just as they had been four hours previously—moderate seas, a wind no stronger than Force three and still the same gently falling snow. McKinnon had no belief in the second sight but he felt in his bones that this peace and calm would have gone before the morning was out.

Down below he talked in turn with Jones, McGuigan, Stephen and Johnny Holbrook. They had taken it in turn, and in pairs, to monitor the comings and goings of everybody in the hospital. All four swore that nobody had stirred aboard during the night and that, most certainly, no one had at any time left the hospital area.

He had breakfast with Dr Singh, Dr Sinclair, Patterson and Jamieson—Dr Singh, he thought, looked unusually tired and strained—then went to Ward B where he found Janet Magnusson. She looked pale and there were shadows under her eyes.

McKinnon looked at her with concern.

‘What’s wrong, Janet?’

‘I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. It’s all your fault.’

‘Of course. It’s always my fault. Cardinal rule number one—when anything goes wrong blame the Bo’sun. What am I supposed to have done this time?’

‘You said the submarine, the U-boat, would attack if the moon broke through.’

‘I said it could, not would.’

‘Same thing. I spent most of the night looking out through the porthole—no, Mr McKinnon, I did not have my cabin light switched on—and when the moon came out at about two o‘clock I was sure the attack must come any time. And when the moon went I was sure it would come again. Moon. U-boat. Your fault.’

‘A certain logic, I must admit. Twisted logic, of course, but not more than one would expect of the feminine mind. Still, I’m sorry.’

‘But you’re looking fine. Fresh. Relaxed. And you’re very late on the road this morning. Our trusty guardian sleeping on the job.’

‘Your trusty guardian lost a little sleep himself, last night,’ McKinnon said. ‘Back shortly. Must see the Captain.’

It was Sister Maria, not Sister Morrison, who was in charge in A Ward. McKinnon spoke briefly with both the Captain and First Officer, then said to Bowen: ‘Still sure, sir?’

‘More sure than ever, Archie. When’s dawn?’

‘Fifteen minutes.’

‘I wish you well.’

‘I think you better wish us all well.’

He returned to Ward B and said to Janet: ‘Where’s your pal?’

‘Visiting the sick. She’s with Lieutenant Ulbricht.’

‘She shouldn’t have gone alone.’

‘She didn’t. You were asleep so your friend George Naseby came for her.’

McKinnon looked at her with suspicion. ‘You find something amusing.’

‘That’s her second time up there this morning.’

‘Is he dying or something?’

‘I hardly think she would smile so much if a patient was slipping away.’

‘Ah! Mending fences, you would say?’

‘She called him “Karl” twice.’ She smiled. ‘I’d call that mending fences, wouldn’t you?’

‘Good lord! Karl. That well-known filthy Nazi murderer.’

‘Well, she said you asked her to make it right. No, you told her. So now you’ll be taking all the credit, I suppose.’

‘Credit where credit is due,’ McKinnon said absently. ‘But she must come below at once. It’s too exposed up there.’

‘Dawn.’ Her voice had gone very quiet. ‘This time you’re sure, Archie?’

‘This time I’m sure. The U-boat will come at dawn.’

The U-boat came at dawn.

SEVEN

It was little more than half-light when the U-boat, in broken camouflage paint of various shades of grey and at a distance of less than half a mile, suddenly appeared from behind a passing snow-squall. It was running fully on the surface with three figures clearly distinguishable on the conning-tower and another three manning the deck gun just for’ard of that. The submarine was on a course exactly parallelling that of the San Andreas and could well have been for many hours. The U-boat was on their starboard hand so that the San Andreas lay between it and the gradually lightening sky to the south. Both bridge wing doors were latched back in the fully open position. McKinnon reached for the phone, called the engine-room for full power, nudged the wheel to starboard and began to edge imperceptibly closer to the U-boat.

He and Naseby were alone on the bridge. They were, in fact, the only two people left in the superstructure because McKinnon had ordered everyone, including a bitterly protesting Lieutenant Ulbricht, to go below to the hospital only ten minutes previously. Naseby he required and for two reasons. Naseby, unlike himself, was an adept Morse signaller and had a signalling lamp ready at hand: more importantly, McKinnon was more than reasonably certain that the bridge would be coming under attack in a very short space of time indeed and he wanted a competent helmsman to hand in case he himself were incapacitated.

‘Keep out of sight, George,’ McKinnon said. ‘But try to keep an eye on them. They’re bound to start sending any minute now.’

‘They can see you,’ Naseby said.

‘Maybe they can see my head and shoulders over the wing of the bridge. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. The point is that they will believe I can’t see them. Don’t forget that they’re in the dark quadrant of the sea and have no reason to think that we’re expecting trouble. Besides, a helms-man’s job is to keep an eye on the compass and look ahead—no reason on earth why I should be scanning the seas around.’ He felt the superstructure begin to shudder as Patterson increased the engine revolutions, gave the wheel another nudge to starboard, picked up a tin mug from the shattered binnacle and pretended to drink from it. ‘It’s like a law of nature, George. Nothing more reassuring than the sight of an unsuspecting innocent enjoying a morning cup of tea.’

For a full minute, which seemed like a large number of full minutes, nothing happened. The superstructure was beginning to vibrate quite strongly now and McKinnon knew that the San Andreas was under maximum power. They were now at least a hundred yards closer to the U-boat than they had been when it had first been sighted but the U-boat captain gave no indication that he was aware of this. Had McKinnon maintained his earlier speed his acute angling in towards the U-boat would have caused him to drop slightly astern of the submarine, but the increase in speed had enabled him to maintain his relative position. The U-boat captain had no cause to be suspicious—and no one in his right mind was going to harbour suspicions about a harmless and defenceless hospital ship.

‘He’s sending, George,’ McKinnon said.

‘I see him. “Stop,” he says. “Stop engines or I will sink you.” What do I send, Archie?’

‘Nothing.’ McKinnon edged the San Andreas another three degrees to starboard, reached again for his tin mug and pretended to drink from it. ‘Ignore him.’

‘Ignore him!’ Naseby sounded aggrieved. ‘You heard what the man said. He’s going to sink us.’

‘He’s lying. He hasn’t stalked us all this way just to send us to the bottom. He wants us alive. Not only is he not going to torpedo us, he can’t, not unless they’ve invented torpedoes that can turn corners. So how else is he going to stop us? With that little itsy-bitsy gun he’s got on the foredeck? It’s not all that much bigger than a pom-pom.’

‘I have to warn you, Archie, the man’s going to get very annoyed.’

‘He’s got nothing to be annoyed about. We haven’t seen his signal.’

Naseby lowered his binoculars. ‘I also have to warn you that he’s about to use that little itsybitsy gun.’

‘Sure he is. The classic warning shot over the bows to attract our attention. If he really wants to attract our attention, it may be into the bows for all I know.’

The two shells, when they came, entered the sea just yards ahead of the San Andreas, one disappearing silently below the waves, the other exploding on impact. The sound of the explosion and the sharp flat crack of the U-boat’s gun made it impossible any longer to ignore the submarine’s existence.

‘Show yourself, George,’ McKinnon said. ‘Tell him to stop firing and ask him what he wants.’

Naseby moved out on the starboard wing and transmitted the message: the reply came immediately.

‘He has a one-track mind,’ Naseby said. ‘Message reads: “Stop or be sunk”.’

‘One of those laconic characters. Tell him we’re a hospital ship.’

‘You think he’s blind, perhaps?’

‘It’s still only half-light and the starboard side is our dark side. Maybe he’ll think that we think he can’t see. Tell him we’re a neutral, mention the Geneva Convention. Maybe he’s got a better side to his nature.’

Naseby clacked out his message, waited for the reply, then turned gloomily to McKinnon. ‘He hasn’t got a better side to his nature.’

‘Not many U-boat captains have. What does he say?’

‘Geneva Conventions do not apply in the Norwegian Sea.’

‘There’s little decency left on the high seas these days. Let’s try for his sense of patriotism. Tell him we have German survivors aboard.’

While Naseby sent the message McKinnon rang down for slow ahead. Naseby turned in the doorway and shook his head sadly.

‘His patriotism is on a par with his decency. He says: “Will check nationals when we board. We commence firing in twenty seconds”.’

‘Send: “No need to fire. We are stopping. Check wake”.’

Naseby sent the message, then said: ‘Well, he got that all right. He’s already got his glasses trained on our stern. You know, I do believe he’s angling in towards us. Very little, mind you, but it’s there.’

‘I do believe you’re right.’ McKinnon gave the wheel another slight nudge to starboard. ‘If he notices anything he’ll probably think it’s because he’s closing in on us and not vice versa. Is he still examining our wake?’

‘Yes.’

‘Turbulence aft must have died away quite a lot by this time. That should make him happy.’

‘He’s lowered his glasses,’ Naseby said. ‘Message coming.’

The message didn’t say whether the U-boat captain was happy or not but it did hold a certain degree of satisfaction. ‘Man says we are very wise,’ Naseby said. ‘Also orders us to lower our gangway immediately.’

‘Acknowledge. Tell Ferguson to start lowering the gangway immediately but to stop it about, say, eight feet above the water. Then tell Curran and Trent to swing out the lifeboat and lower it to the same height.’

Naseby relayed both messages, then said: ‘You think we’re going to need the lifeboat?’

‘I quite honestly have no idea. But if we do, we’re going to need it in a hurry.’ He called the engine-room and asked for Patterson.

‘Chief? Bo’sun here. We’re slowing a bit, as you know, but that’s only for the moment. The U-boat is closing in on us. We’re lowering both the gangway and the lifeboat, the gangway on the U-boat’s instructions, the lifeboat on mine…No, they can’t see the lifeboat—it’s on our port side, their blind side. As soon as they are in position I’m going to ask for full power. A request, sir. If I do have to use the boat I’d appreciate it if you’d permit Mr Jamieson to come with me. With your gun.’ He listened for a few moments while the receiver crackled in his ear, then said: ‘Two things, sir. I want Mr Jamieson because apart from yourself and Naseby he’s the only member of the crew I can trust. Show him where the safety-catch is. And no, sir, you know damn well you can’t come along instead of Mr Jamieson. You’re the officer commanding and you can’t leave the San Andreas.’ McKinnon replaced the receiver and Naseby said, plaintive reproach in his voice: ‘You might have asked me.’

McKinnon looked at him coldly. ‘And who’s going to steer this damned ship when I’m gone?’

Naseby sighed. ‘There’s that, of course, there’s that. They seem to be preparing some kind of boarding party across there, Archie. Three more men on the conning-tower now. They’re armed with sub-machine-guns or machine-pistols or whatever you call those things. Something nasty, anyway.’

‘We didn’t expect roses. How’s Ferguson coming along? If that gangway doesn’t start moving soon the U-boat captain is going to start getting suspicious. Worse, he’s going to start getting impatient.’

‘I don’t think so. At least, not yet awhile. I can see Ferguson so I’m certain the U-boat captain can too. Ferguson’s having difficulty of some kind, he’s banging away at the lowering drum with a hammer. Icing trouble for a certainty.’

‘See how the boat’s getting on, will you?’

Naseby crossed the bridge, moved out on to the port wing and was back in seconds. ‘It’s down. About eight feet above the water, as you asked.’ He crossed to the starboard wing, examining the U-boat through his binoculars, lowered them and turned back to McKinnon.

‘That’s bloody funny. All those characters seem to be wearing some kind of gas-masks.’

‘Gas-masks? Are you all right?’

‘Certainly I’m all right. They’re all wearing a horseshoe-shaped kind of life-jacket around their necks with a corrugated hose attached to the top. They’re not wearing it at the moment, it’s dangling down in front, but there’s a mouthpiece and goggles attached to the end of the tube. When did German submariners start using gas?’

‘They don’t. What good on earth would gas be to a U-boat?’ He took Naseby’s binoculars, examined the U-boat briefly and handed the glasses back. ‘Tauchretter, George, Tauchretter. Otherwise known as the Dräger Lung. It’s fitted with an oxygen cylinder and a carbon dioxide canister and its sole purpose is to help people escape from a sunken submarine.’

‘No gas?’ Naseby sounded vaguely disappointed.

‘No gas.’

‘That doesn’t look like a sunken submarine to me.’

‘Some U-boat commanders make their crews wear them all the time they’re submerged. Bit pointless in these waters, I would have thought. At least six hundred feet deep here, maybe a thousand. There’s no way you can escape from those depths, Dräger set or not. How’s Ferguson coming along?’

‘As far as I can tell, he’s not. Still hammering away. No, wait a minute, wait a minute. He’s put the hammer down and is trying the release lever. It’s moving, Archie. It’s coming down.’

‘Ah!’ McKinnon rang for full power.

Some seconds passed, then Naseby said: ‘Half way.’ A similar length of time elapsed, then Naseby said in the same matter-of-fact voice: ‘It’s down, Archie. Eight feet, give or take. Ferguson’s secured it.’

McKinnon nodded and spun the wheel to starboard until he had maximum rudder on. Slowly, ponderously at first, then with increasing speed, the San Andreas began to come round.

‘Do you want to get your head blown off, George?’

‘Well, no.’ Naseby stepped inside, closed the wing door behind him and peered out through the little window in the door. The San Andreas, no longer riding with the sea, was beginning to corkscrew, although only gently so: but the entire superstructure was beginning to vibrate in a rather alarming fashion as the engines built up to maximum power.

‘And don’t you think you ought to lie down?’

‘In a minute, Archie, in a minute. Do you think they’ve gone to sleep aboard that U-boat?’

‘Some trouble with their eyes, that’s for sure. I think they’re rubbing them and not believing what they’re seeing.’

Except that there was no actual eye-rubbing going on aboard the U-boat, McKinnon’s guess was very close to the mark. The reactions of both the submarine commander and his crew were extraordinarily slow. Extraordinarily, but in the circumstances, understandably. The U-boat’s crew had made both the forgivable and unforgivable mistake of relaxing, of lowering their guard at the precise moment when their alertness and sense of danger should have been honed to its keenest edge. But the sight of the gangway being lowered in strict compliance with their orders must have convinced them that there was no thought or possibility of any resistance being offered and that the taking over of the San Andreas was no more than a token formality. Besides, no one in the history of warfare had ever heard of a hospital ship being used as an offensive weapon. It was unthinkable. It takes time to rethink the unthinkable.

The San Andreas was so far round now that the U-boat was no more than 45° off the starboard bow. Naseby moved from the starboard wing door to the nearest small window let into the front of the bridge.

‘They’re lining up what it pleases you to call that little itsy-bitsy gun, Archie.’

‘Then maybe we’d both better be getting down.’

‘No. They’re not lining up on the bridge, they’re lining up on the hull aft. I don’t know what they intend to—’ He broke off and shouted: ‘No! No! Get down, get down!’ and flung himself at McKinnon, bringing both men crashing heavily to the deck of the bridge. Even as they landed, hundreds of bullets, to the accompaniment of the staccato chattering of several machine-guns, smashed into the fore end and starboard side of the bridge. None of the bullets succeeded in penetrating the metal but all four windows were smashed. The fusillade lasted no more than three seconds and had no sooner ceased when the U-boat’s deck gun fired three times in rapid succession, on each occasion causing the San Andreas to shudder as the shells exploded somewhere in the after hull.

McKinnon hauled himself to his feet and took the wheel. ‘If I’d been standing there I’d have been very much the late Archie McKinnon. I’ll thank you tomorrow.’ He looked at the central window before him. It was holed, cracked, starred, abraded and completely opaque. ‘George?’

But Naseby needed no telling. Fire-extinguisher in hand, he smashed away the entire window in just two blows. He hitched a cautious eye over the bottom of where the window had been, saw that the San Andreas was arrowing in on the bows of the U-boat, then abruptly straightened in the instinctive reaction of a man who realizes that all danger is past.

‘Conning-tower’s empty, Archie. They’ve all gone. Bloody funny, isn’t it?’

‘Nothing funny about it.’ The Bo’sun’s tone was dry; if he was in any way moved or shaken by the narrowness of his recent escape he showed no signs of it. ‘It’s customary, George, to go below and pull down the hatch after you when you’re going to dive. In this case, crash dive.’

‘Crash dive?’

‘Captain has no option. He knows he hasn’t the firepower to stop us and he can’t possibly bring his torpedoes to bear. Right now he’s blowing all main ballast. See those bubbles? That’s water being blown from the ballast tanks by high pressure air—something like three thousand pounds per square inch.’

‘But—but he’s left his gun crew on deck.’

‘Indeed he has. Again, no option. A U-boat is much more valuable than the lives of three men. See those valves they’re twisting on the right-hand side of their suits? Oxygen valves. They’re turning their Dräger lungs into life jackets. Much good it will do them if they run into a propeller. Will you go out on the wings, George, and see if there’s any flame or smoke aft.’

‘You could phone.’

McKinnon pointed to the phone in front of the wheel, a phone that had been shattered by a machine gun bullet. Naseby nodded and went out on both wings in turn.

‘Nothing. Nothing you can see from the outside.’ He looked ahead towards the U-boat, not much more than a hundred yards distant. ‘She’s going down, Archie. Fore and aft decks are awash.’

‘I can see that.’

‘And she’s turning away to her starboard.’

‘I can see that, too. Counsel of desperation. He’s hoping that if he can turn his sub at an acute enough angle to us he’ll be struck only a glancing blow. A glancing blow he could survive. I think.’

‘Hull’s submerged now. Is he going to make it?’

‘He’s left it too late.’ McKinnon rang down for full astern and eased the wheel slightly to port. Five seconds later, with the top of the conning tower barely awash, the forefoot of the San Andreas tore into the hull of the U-boat some thirty feet for’ard of the conning tower. The San Andreas juddered throughout its length but the overall effect of the impact was curiously small. For a period of not more than three seconds they felt rather than heard the sensation of steel grinding over steel, then all contact was abruptly lost.

‘Well,’ Naseby said, ’so that’s how it’s done, is it?’ He paused. ‘There’s going to be a lot of jagged metal on that U-boat. If a prop hits that—’

‘No chance. The U-boat’s been driven down, deep down—and they’ll still be blowing main ballast. Let’s just hope we haven’t damaged ourselves too badly.’

‘You said the U-boat captain had no option. We didn’t either. You think there’ll be any survivors?’

‘I don’t know. If there are any, we’ll find out soon enough. I question very much whether they would even have had time to close watertight doors. If they didn’t, then that U-boat is on its way to the bottom. If anyone is going to escape, they’re going to have to do it before it reaches the two-hundred-and-fifty-foot mark—I’ve never heard of anyone escaping from a submarine at a depth greater than that.’

‘They’d have to use the conning-tower?’

‘I suppose. There is a for’ard escape hatch—it’s really an access hatch to the deck gun. But the chances are high that the fore part of the U-boat is completely flooded, so that’s useless. There may be an after escape hatch, I don’t know. The conning-tower is probably their best bet, or would have been if we hadn’t rammed their vessel.’

‘We didn’t hit anywhere near the conning-tower.’

‘We didn’t have to. The compressive power of something like ten thousand tons dead weight has to be pretty fierce. The conning-tower hatch may have been jammed solid. Whether it would be possible to ease it or not I wouldn’t know. Worse still, it may have sprung open and with a hundred gallons of water a second pouring down into the control room there is no way anyone is going to get out, they’d probably be battered unconscious in the first few seconds. I’m going down on deck now. Keep going round to starboard and keep her astern till you stop, then heave to. I’ll take the motorboat out as soon as you’ve lost enough way.’

‘What’s the point in taking the boat out if there are going to be no survivors?’

McKinnon led him out on to the port wing and astern to where three men were floundering about in the water. ‘Those three characters. The gun crew. As far as I could tell they were only wearing overalls and oilskins. Maybe the odd jersey or two, but that would make no difference. Leave them out there another ten, fifteen minutes and they’ll just freeze to death.’

‘Let them. Those three bastards hit us aft three times. For all we can tell, some of those shells may have exploded inside the hospital.’

‘I know, George, I know. But I dare say there’s something in the Geneva Convention about it.’ McKinnon clapped him lightly on the shoulder and went below.

Just outside the deck entrance to the hospital McKinnon found half a dozen people waiting for him—Patterson, Jamieson, Curran, Trent, McCrimmon and Stephen. Patterson said: ‘I believe we’ve been in some sort of collision, Bo’sun.’

‘Yes, sir. U-boat.’

‘And?’

McKinnon pointed downwards. ‘I just hope we don’t go the same way. For’ard watertight bulkheads, sir?’

‘Of course. At once.’ He looked at McCrimmon and Stephen, who left without a word. ‘And next, Bo’sun?’

‘We were hit three times aft, sir. Any damage in the hospital?’

‘Some. All three hit the hospital area. One appears to have exploded when it passed through the bulkhead between A and B wards. Some injuries, no fatalities. Dr Sinclair is attending to them.’

‘Not Dr Singh?’

‘He was in the recovery room with the two injured seamen from the Argos. Door’s jammed and we can’t get inside.’

‘Shell explode in there?’

‘Nobody seems to know.’

‘Nobody seems—but that’s the next compartment to A ward. Are they all deaf in there?’

‘They were. It was the first shell that exploded between the two wards. That deafened them all right.’

‘Ah. Well, the recovery room will just have to wait. What happened to the third shell?’

‘Didn’t explode.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the dining area. Rolling about quite a bit.’

‘Rolling about quite a bit,’ McKinnon repeated slowly. ‘That’s handy. Just because it didn’t go off on impact—’ He broke off and said to Curran: ‘A couple of heaving lines in the motorboat. Don’t forget your knives.’ He went inside and reappeared within twenty seconds, carrying a very small, very innocuous-looking shell, threw it over the side and said to Jamieson: ‘You have your gun, sir?’

‘I have my gun. What do you want the heaving lines for, Bo’sun?’

‘Same reason as your gun, sir. To discourage people. Tie them up if we have to. If there are any survivors, they’re not going to feel very kindly disposed because of what we’ve done to their boat and their shipmates.’

‘But those people aren’t armed. They’re submariners.’

‘Don’t you believe it, sir. Many officers carry hand guns. Petty officers, too, for all I know.’

‘Even if they had guns, what could they do?’

‘Take us hostage, that’s what they could do. And if they could take us hostage they could still take over the ship.’

Jamieson said, almost admiringly: ‘You don’t trust many people, do you?’

‘Some. I just don’t believe in taking chances.’

The motorboat was less than fifty yards away from the spot where the U-boat’s gun crew were still floundering about in the water when Jamieson touched McKinnon on the arm and pointed out over the starboard side.

‘Bubbles. Lots of little bubbles.’

‘I see them. Could be there’s someone coming up.’

‘I thought they always came up in a great big air bubble.’

‘Never. Big air bubble when they leave the submarine, perhaps. But that collapses at once.’ McKinnon eased back on the throttle as he approached the group in the water.

‘Someone’s just broken the surface,’ Jamieson said. ‘No, by God, two of them.’

‘Yes. They’ve got inflatable life jackets on. They’ll keep.’ McKinnon stopped the engines and waited while Curran, Trent and Jamieson literally hauled the gun crew aboard—they seemed incapable of helping themselves. The trio were young, hardly more than boys, teeth chattering, shivering violently and trying hard not to look terrified.

‘We search this lot?’ Jamieson said. ‘Tie them up?’

‘Good lord, no. Look at their hands—they’re blue and frozen stiff. If they couldn’t even hang on to the gunwale, and they couldn’t, how could they press the trigger of a gun even if they could unbutton their oilskins, which they can’t?’

McKinnon opened the throttle and headed for the two men who had surfaced from the submarine. As he did, a third figure bobbed to the surface some two hundred yards beyond.

The two men they hauled aboard seemed well enough. One of them was a dark-haired, dark-eyed man in his late twenties: his face was lean, intelligent and watchful. The other was very young, very blond and very apprehensive. McKinnon addressed the older man in German.

‘What is your name and rank?’

‘Obersteuermann Doenitz.’

‘Doenitz? Very appropriate.’ Admiral Doenitz was the brilliant C-in-C of the German submarine fleet. ‘Do you have a gun, Doenitz? If you say you haven’t and I find one I shall have to shoot you because you are not to be trusted. Do you have a gun?’

Doenitz shrugged, reached under his blouse and produced a rubber-wrapped pistol.

‘Your friend here?’

‘Young Hans is an assistant cook.’ Doenitz spoke in fluent English. He sighed. ‘Hans is not to be trusted with a frying-pan, far less a gun.’

McKinnon believed him and headed for the third survivor. As they approached McKinnon could see that the man was at least unconscious for his neck was bent forward and he was face down in the water. The reason for this was not far to seek. His Dräger apparatus was only partially inflated and the excess oxygen had gone to the highest point of the bag at the back of the neck, forcing his head down. McKinnon drew alongside, caught the man by his life jacket, put his hand under his chin and lifted the head from the water.

He studied the face for only a second or two, then said to Doenitz: ‘You know him, of course.’

‘Heissmann, our First Lieutenant.’

McKinnon let the face fall back into the water. Doenitz looked at him with a mixture of astonishment and anger.

‘Aren’t you going to bring him aboard? He may just be unconscious, just half-drowned perhaps.’

‘Your First Lieutenant is dead.’ McKinnon’s voice carried total conviction. ‘His mouth is full of blood. Ruptured lungs. He forgot to breathe out oxygen on the way up.’

Doenitz nodded. ‘Perhaps he didn’t know that he had to do that. I didn’t know. I’m afraid we don’t have much time for escape training these days.’ He looked curiously at McKinnon. ‘How did you know? You’re not a submariner.’

‘I was. Twelve years.’

Curran called from the bows: ‘There’s one more, Bo’sun. Just surfaced. Dead ahead.’

McKinnon had the motorboat alongside the struggling man in less than a minute and had him brought aboard and laid on the thwarts. He lay there in a peculiar position, knees against his chest, his hands hugging both knees and trying to roll from side to side. He was obviously in considerable pain. McKinnon forced open the mouth, glanced briefly inside, then gently closed it again.

‘Well, this man knew enough to exhale oxygen on the way up.’ He looked at Doenitz. ‘You know this man, of course.’

‘Of course. Oberleutnant Klaussen.’

‘Your captain?’ Doenitz nodded. ‘Well, he’s obviously in considerable pain but I wouldn’t think he’s in any danger. You can see he’s been cut on the forehead—possibly banged his head on the escape hatch on the way out. But that’s not enough to account for his condition, for he must have been conscious all the way up or he wouldn’t have got rid of the oxygen in his lungs. Were you travelling underwater or on the surface during the night?’

‘On the surface. All the time.’

‘That rules out carbon dioxide, which can be poisonous; but you can’t build up carbon dioxide when the conning-tower is open. From the way he’s holding his chest and legs it would seem to be caisson disease; for that’s where the effects hurt most, but it can’t be that either.’

‘Caisson disease?’

‘Diver’s bends. When there’s too rapid a buildup of nitrogen bubbles in the blood when you’re making a very fast ascent.’ McKinnon, with the motor boat under full throttle, was heading directly for the San Andreas, which was stopped in the water at not much more than half a mile’s distance. ‘But for that you have to be breathing in a high pressure atmosphere for quite some time and your captain certainly wasn’t below long enough for that. Perhaps he escaped from a very great depth, perhaps a greater depth than anyone has ever escaped from a submarine and then I wouldn’t know what the effects might be. We have a doctor aboard. I don’t suppose he’ll know either—the average doctor can spend a lifetime and not come across a case like this. But at least he can stop the pain.’

The motor boat passed close by the bows of the San Andreas which, remarkably, appeared to be quite undamaged. But that damage had been done was unquestionable—the San Andreas was at least three feet down by the head, which was no more than was to be expected if the for’ard compartments had been flooded, as, inevitably, they must have been.

McKinnon secured alongside and half-helped, half-carried the semi-conscious U-boat captain to the head of the gangway. Patterson was waiting for him there, as was Dr Sinclair and three other members of the engine-room staff.

‘This is the U-boat captain,’ McKinnon said to Dr Sinclair. ‘He may be suffering from the bends—you know, nitrogen poisoning.’

‘Alas, Bo’sun, we have no decompression chamber aboard.’

‘I know, sir. He may just be suffering from the effects of having surfaced from a great depth. I don’t know, all I know is he’s suffering pretty badly. The rest are well enough, all they need is dry clothing.’ He turned to Jamieson who had just joined him on deck. ‘Perhaps, sir, you would be kind enough to supervise their change of clothing?’

‘You mean to make sure that they’re not carrying anything they shouldn’t be carrying?’

McKinnon smiled and turned to Patterson. ‘How are the for’ard watertight bulkheads, sir?’

‘Holding. I’ve had a look myself. Bent and buckled but holding.’

‘With your permission, sir, I’ll get a diving suit and have a look.’

‘Now? Couldn’t that wait a bit?’

‘I’m afraid waiting is the one thing we can’t afford. We can be reasonably certain that the U-boat was in contact with Trondheim right up to the moment that he signalled us to stop—I think it would be very silly of us to assume otherwise. Flannelfoot is still with us. The Germans know exactly where we are. Till now, for reasons best known to themselves, they have been treating us with kid gloves. Maybe now they’ll be feeling like taking those gloves off, I shouldn’t imagine that Admiral Doenitz will take too kindly to the idea of one of his U-boats having been sunk by a hospital ship. I think it behoves us, sir, to get out of here and with all speed. Trouble is, we’ve got to make up our minds whether to go full speed ahead or full speed astern.’

‘Ah. Yes. I see. You have a point.’

‘Yes, sir. If the hole in our bows is big enough, then if we make any speed at all I don’t see the watertight bulkheads standing up to the pressure for very long. In that case we’d have to go astern. I don’t much fancy that. It not only slows us down but it makes steering damn difficult. But it can be done. I knew of a tanker that hit a German U-boat about seven hundred miles from its port of destination. It made it—going astern all the way. But I don’t much care for the idea of going stern first all the way to Aberdeen, especially if the weather breaks up.’

‘You make me feel downright nervous, Bo’sun. With all speed, Bo’sun, as you say, with all speed. How long will this take?’

‘Just as long as it takes me to collect a rubber suit, mask and torch, then get there and back again. At the most, twenty minutes.’

McKinnon was back in fifteen minutes. Mask in one hand, torch in the other, he climbed up the gangway to where Patterson was awaiting him at the top.

‘We can go ahead, sir,’ McKinnon said. ‘Full ahead, I should think.’

‘Good, good, good. Damage relatively slight, I take it. How small is the hole?’

‘It’s not a small hole. It’s a bloody great hole, big as a barn door. There’s a ragged piece of that U-boat, about eight foot by six, embedded in our bows. Seems to be forming a pretty secure plug and I should imagine that the faster we go the more securely it will be lodged.’

‘And if we stop, or have to go astern, or run into heavy weather—I mean, what if the plug falls off?’

‘I’d be glad, sir, if you didn’t talk about such things.’

EIGHT

‘And what are you doing there?’ McKinnon looked down on the recumbent form of Janet Magnusson who, her face very pale, was lying on, not in, the bed nearest the desk where she normally sat.

‘I normally have a rest at this time of the morning.’ She tried to inject an acid tone into her voice but her heart wasn’t in it and she smiled, albeit wanly. ‘I have been badly wounded, Archie McKinnon. Thanks to you.’

‘Oh dear.’ McKinnon sat on her bedside and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I am sorry. How—’

‘Not there.’ She pushed his hand away. ‘That’s where I’ve been wounded.’

‘Sorry again.’ He looked up at Dr Sinclair. ‘How bad is badly?’

‘Nurse Magnusson has a very slight graze on her right shoulder. Piece of shrapnel.’ Sinclair pointed to a jagged hole in the bulkhead about six feet above deck level, then indicated the scarred and pock-marked deckhead. ‘That’s where the rest of the shrapnel appears to have gone. But Nurse Magnusson was standing at the time and caught quite a bit of the blast effect. She was thrown across the bed she’s on now—it was, providentially, empty at the time—and it took us ten minutes to bring her round. Shock, that’s all.’

‘Layabout.’ McKinnon stood. ‘I’ll be back. Anybody else hurt here, Doctor?’

‘Two. At the far end of the ward. Seamen from the Argos. One in the chest, the other in the leg. Shrapnel ricocheting from the ceiling and pretty spent shrapnel at that. Didn’t even have to dig it out. Not even bandages—cotton wool and plaster.’

McKinnon looked at the man, restless and muttering, in the bed opposite. ‘Oberleutnant Klaussen—the U-boat commander. How is he?’

‘Delirious, as you can see. The trouble with him—I’ve no idea. I tend to go along with your suggestion that he must have come up from a very great depth. If that’s the case, I’m dealing with the unknown. Sorry and all that.’

‘I hardly think there’s any need to be sorry, sir. Every other doctor would be in the same boat. I don’t think anyone has ever escaped from a depth greater than two hundred and fifty feet before. If Klaussen did—well, it’s uncharted territory. There simply can’t be any literature on it.’

‘Archie.’

McKinnon turned round. Janet Magnusson was propped up on an elbow.

‘You’re supposed to be resting.’

‘I’m getting up. What are you doing with that sledgehammer and chisel in your hand?’

‘I’m going to try to open a jammed door.’

‘I see.’ She was silent for some moments while she bit her lower lip. ‘The recovery room, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dr Singh and the two men from the Argos—the one with the multiple burns and the other with the fractured pelvis—they’re in there, aren’t they?’

‘So I’m told.’

‘Well, why don’t you go to them?’ She sounded almost angry. ‘Why stand around here blethering and doing nothing?’

‘I hardly think that’s quite fair, Nurse Magnusson.’ Jamieson, who was accompanying McKinnon and Sinclair, spoke in tones of gentle reproof. ‘Doing nothing? The Bo’sun does more than the whole lot of us put together.’

‘I’m thinking perhaps there’s no great hurry, Janet,’ McKinnon said. ‘People have been banging on that door for the past fifteen minutes and there’s been no reply. Could mean anything or nothing. Point is, there was no point in trying to force that door till there was a doctor at hand and Dr Sinclair has just finished in the wards.’

‘What you mean—what you really mean, Archie—is that you don’t think the people inside the recovery room will be requiring the services of a doctor.’

‘I hope I’m wrong but, yes, that’s what I’m afraid of.’

She sank back in her bed. ‘As Mr Jamieson didn’t say, I was talking out of turn. I’m sorry.’

‘There’s really nothing to be sorry about.’ McKinnon turned away and went into Ward A. The first person to catch his attention was Margaret Morrison. Even paler than Janet Magnusson had been, she was sitting in her chair behind her desk while Sister Maria carefully tied a bandage around her head. McKinnon didn’t immediately go to her but went to the far right-hand side of the ward where Lieutenant Ulbricht was sitting up in his bed while Bowen and Kennet lay flat in theirs.

‘Three more victims,’ Sinclair said. ‘Well, unfortunates, I should say. While the blast in Ward B went upwards I’m afraid it was slightly downwards here…’

McKinnon looked at Ulbricht. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Ulbricht had a thick bandage round his neck.

‘I’ll tell you what’s the matter with him,’ Sinclair said. ‘Luck. The devil’s own luck. A piece of shrapnel—it must have been as sharp as a razor—sliced through the side of his neck. Another quarter-inch to the right and it would have sliced through the carotid artery as well and then he’d have been very much the late Lieutenant Ulbricht.’

Ulbricht looked at McKinnon with little in the way of expression on his face. ‘I thought you sent us down here for our own safety.’

‘That’s what I thought, too. I was certain they’d concentrate their fire on the bridge. I’m making no excuses but I don’t think I miscalculated. I think the U-boat’s gun crew panicked. I’m sure that Klaussen gave no instructions to fire into the hull.’

‘Klaussen?’

‘Oberleutnant. The captain. He survived. He seems fairly ill.’

‘How many survivors altogether?’

‘Six.’

‘And the rest you sent to the bottom.’

‘I’m the guilty party, if that’s what you mean. I don’t feel particularly guilty. But I’m responsible, yes.’

‘I suppose that makes two of us. Responsible but not guilty.’ Ulbricht shrugged and seemed disinclined to continue the conversation. McKinnon moved to the Captain’s bed.

‘Sorry to hear you’ve been hurt again, sir.’

‘Me and Kennet. Left thighs. Both of us. Dr Sinclair tells me it’s only a scratch and as I can’t see it I have to take his word for it. Doesn’t feel like a scratch, I can tell you. Well, Archie my boy, you’ve done it. I knew you would. If it weren’t for those damned bandages I’d shake hands with you. Congratulations. You must feel pretty good about this.’

‘I don’t feel good at all, sir. If there were any survivors and if they managed to find a sealed compartment they’ll be gasping out their lives—now—on the floor of the Norwegian Sea.’

‘There’s that, of course, there’s that. But not to reproach yourself, Archie. Them or us. Unpleasant, but still well done.’ Bowen adroitly switched the subject. ‘Building up speed, aren’t we? Limited damage up front, I take it.’

‘Far from limited, sir. We’re badly holed. But there’s a large chunk of the U-boat’s casing embedded in that hole. Let’s just hope it stays there.’

‘We can but pray, Bo’sun, we can but pray. And regardless of how you feel, every person aboard this boat is deeply in your debt.’

‘I’ll see you later, sir.’

He turned away, looked at Margaret Morrison, then at Dr Sinclair. ‘Is she hurt? Badly, I mean.’

‘She’s the worst of the lot but nothing dangerous, you understand. She was sitting by Captain Bowen’s bedside at the time and was hit twice. Nasty gash on the upper right arm and a minor scalp wound—that’s the one Sister Maria has just finished bandaging.’

‘Shouldn’t she be in bed?’

‘Yes. I tried to insist on it but I can tell you I won’t be doing it again. How about you trying?’

‘No, thank you.’ McKinnon approached the girl, who looked at him with reproachful brown eyes that were slightly dulled with pain.

‘This is all your fault, Archie McKinnon.’

McKinnon sighed. ‘Exactly what Janet said to me. It’s difficult to please everybody. I’m very, very sorry.’

‘And so you should be. Not for this, though. The physical pain, I can tell you, is nothing compared to the mental hurt. You deceived me. Our greatly respected Bo’sun is exactly what he accused me of being—a fibber.’

‘Oh dear. Long-suffering Bo’sun back in court again. What am I supposed to have done wrong now?’

‘Not only that but you’ve made me feel very, very foolish.’

‘I have? I would never do that.’

‘You did. Remember on the bridge you suggested—in jest, of course—that you might fight the U-boat with a fusillade of stale bread and old potatoes. Well, something like that.’

‘Ah!’

‘Yes, ah! Remember that emotional scene on the bridge—well, emotional on my part, I cringe when I think about it—when I begged you to fight them and fight them and fight them. You remember, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I think I do.’

‘He thinks he does! You had already made up your mind to fight them, hadn’t you?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Well, yes,’ she mimicked. ‘You had already made up your mind to ram that U-boat.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Archie?’

‘Because you might have casually mentioned it to somebody who might have casually mentioned it—unknowingly, of course—to Flannelfoot who would far from casually have mentioned it to the U-boat captain who would have made damn certain that he would never put himself in a position where he could be rammed. You might even—again unknowingly—have mentioned it directly to Flannelfoot.’

She made no attempt to conceal the hurt in her eyes. ‘So you don’t trust me. You said you did.’

‘I trust you absolutely. I did say that.’

‘Then why—’

‘It was one of those then-and-now things. Then you were Sister Morrison. I didn’t know there was a Margaret Morrison. I know now.’

‘Ah!’ She pursed her lips, then smiled, clearly mollified. ‘I see.’

McKinnon left her, joined Dr Sinclair and Jamieson, and together they went to the door of the recovery room. Jamieson was carrying with him an electric drill, a hammer and some tapered wooden pegs. Jamieson said: ‘You saw the entry hole made by the shell when you went up to examine the bows?’

‘Yes. Just on—well, an inch or two above—the waterline. Could be water inside. Or not. It’s impossible to say.’

‘How high up?’

‘Eighteen inches, say. Anybody’s guess.’

Jamieson plugged in his drill and pressed the trigger. The tungsten carbide bit sank easily into the heavy steel of the door. Sinclair said: ‘What happens if there’s water behind?’

‘Tap in one of those wooden pegs, then try higher up.’

‘Through,’ Jamieson said. He withdrew the bit. ‘Clear.’

McKinnon struck the steel handle twice with the sledge. The handle did not even budge a fraction of an inch. On the third blow it sheared off and fell to the deck.

‘Pity,’ McKinnon said. ‘But we have to find out.’

Jamieson shrugged. ‘No option. Torch?’

‘Please.’ Jamieson left and was back in two minutes with the torch, followed by McCrimmon carrying the gas cylinder and a lamp on the end of a wandering lead. Jamieson lit the oxy-acetylene flame and began to carve a semi-circle round the space where the handle had been: McCrimmon plugged in the wandering lead and the wire-caged lamp burned brightly.

Jamieson said from behind his plastic face-shield: ‘We’re only assuming that this is where the door is jammed.’

‘If we’re wrong we’ll cut away round the hinges. I don’t think we’ll have to. The door isn’t buckled in any way. It’s nearly always the lock or latch that’s jammed.’

The compartment was filled with stinging acrid smoke when Jamieson finally straightened. He gave the lock a couple of blows with the side of his fist, then desisted.

‘I’m sure I’ve cut through but the damn thing doesn’t seem to want to fall away.’

‘The latch is still in its socket.’ McKinnon tapped the door with his sledge, not heavily, and the semi-circular piece of metal fell away inside. He hit the door again, heavily this time, and it gave an inch. With a second blow it gave several more inches. He laid aside the sledge and pushed against the door until, squeaking and protesting, it was almost wide open. He took the wandering lead from McCrimmon and went inside.

There was water on the deck, not much, perhaps two inches. Bulkheads and deckhead had been heavily starred and pock-marked by shrapnel from the exploding shell. The entrance hole formed by the shell in the outer bulkhead was a jagged circle not more than a foot above the deck.

The two men from the Argos were still lying in their beds while Dr Singh, head bowed to his chest, was sitting in a small armchair. All three men seemed unharmed, unmarked. The Bo’sun brought the light closer to Dr Singh’s face. Whatever shrapnel may have been embedded in his body, none had touched his face. The only sign of anything untoward were tiny trickles of blood from his ears and nose. McKinnon handed the lamp to Dr Sinclair, who stooped over his dead colleague.

‘Good God! Dr Singh.’ He examined him for a few seconds, then straightened. ‘That this should happen to a fine doctor, a fine man like this.’

‘You didn’t really expect to find anything else, did you, Doctor?’

‘No. Not really. Had to be this or something like this.’ He examined, briefly, the two men lying in their beds, shook his head and turned away. ‘Still comes as a bit of a shock.’ It was obvious that he was referring to Dr Singh.

McKinnon nodded. ‘I know. I don’t want to sound callous, Doctor, I know it might sound that way, but—you won’t be needing those men any more? I mean, no postmortems, nothing of that kind.’

‘Good lord, no. Death must have been instantaneous. Concussion. If it’s any consolation, they died without knowing.’ He paused. ‘You might look through their clothing, Bo’sun. Or maybe it’s in their effects or perhaps Captain Andropolous has the details.’

‘You mean names, birth-dates, things like that, sir?’

‘Yes. I have to fill out the death certificates.’

‘I’ll attend to that.’

‘Thank you, Bo’sun.’ Sinclair essayed a smile but it could hardly have been rated as a success. ‘As usual, I’ll leave the grisly part to you.’ With that he was gone, a man glad to be gone. The Bo’sun turned to Jamieson.

‘Could I borrow McCrimmon, sir?’

‘Of course.’

‘McCrimmon, go and find Curran and Trent, will you? Tell them what’s happened. Curran will know what size of canvases to bring.’

‘Needles and thread, Bo’sun?’

‘Curran is a sailmaker. Just leave it to him. And you could tell him that it’s a clean job this time.’

McCrimmon left and Jamieson said: ‘A clean job? It’s a lousy job. You always get the dirty end of the stick, McKinnon. I honestly don’t know how you keep on doing it. If there’s anything nasty or unpleasant to be done, you’re number one on everybody’s list.’

‘Not this time I’m not. This time, sir, you’re number one on my list. Someone has to tell the Captain. Someone has to tell Mr Patterson. Worst of all—much the worst of all—someone has to tell the nursing staff. That last is not a job I’d care for at all.’

‘The girls. God, I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t care for it either. Don’t you think, Bo’sun—seeing you know them so well, I mean—’

‘No, I don’t think, sir.’ McKinnon half smiled. ‘Surely as an officer, you wouldn’t think of delegating to an underling something you wouldn’t do yourself?’

‘Underling! God, that’s rich. Very well, never let it be said that I shirked my duty but as from now I feel one degree less sorry for you.’

‘Yes, sir. One other thing: when this place is clear, would you have a couple of your men weld a patch over this hole in the bulkhead? Heaven knows they’ve had enough practice in welding patches recently.’

‘Of course. Just let’s hope it’s the last patch.’

Jamieson left and McKinnon looked idly around him. His attention was caught by a fairly large wooden box in one corner and that only because its lid had been slightly sprung by the shock of the explosion. McKinnon, not without some effort, lifted the lid and peered for some seconds at the contents. He replaced the lid, retrieved his sledge and tapped the lid securely back into place. Stamped on the lid in big red letters were the words CARDIAC ARREST

McKinnon, rather wearily, sat down at the table in the dining area. The injured sister and nurse, both looking as if they should have been in bed—they had been relieved by Sister Maria and Nurse Irene—were sitting there, as was, inevitably, Lieutenant Ulbricht, who not only gave the impression of having completely forgotten his narrow brush with death but was sufficiently back on balance to have found himself a seat between the two girls. Sinclair, Patterson and Jamieson were clustered round one end of the table. McKinnon looked consideringly at Ulbricht, then addressed himself to Dr Sinclair.

‘Not calling your professional competence into question, sir, but is the Lieutenant fit to be up and around?’

‘My professional competence is irrelevant.’ One could see that Dr Sinclair had not yet recovered from the shock of the death of his colleague. ‘The Lieutenant, like Sister Morrison and Nurse Magnusson, is uncooperative, intransigent and downright disobedient. The three of them would probably call it having minds of their own. Lieutenant Ulbricht, as it so happens, is in no danger. The injury to his neck couldn’t even be described as a flesh wound. Torn skin, more like.’

‘Then perhaps, Lieutenant, you would be prepared to take another fix? We haven’t had one since last night.’

‘At your disposal, Bo’sun.’ If the Lieutenant harboured any ill will towards the Bo’sun for the deaths of his fellow countrymen, he was at pains to conceal it. ‘Any time. I suggest just on noon.’

Patterson said: ‘You finished through in the recovery room, Bo’sun?’ McKinnon nodded. ‘Well, one gets tired of keeping on saying thank-you so I’ll spare you that. When do we bury them?’

‘Your decision, sir.’

‘Early afternoon, before it starts to get dark.’ Patterson laughed without humour. ‘My decision. Chief Engineer Patterson is your man when it comes to making decisions on matters that are of no importance. I don’t recall making the decision to attack that submarine.’

‘I did consult with Captain Bowen, sir.’

‘Ah!’ It was Margaret Morrison. ‘So that was what that two-minute conference was about.’

‘Of course. He approved.’

Janet said: ‘And if he hadn’t? Would you still have rammed that U-boat?’

McKinnon said patiently: ‘He not only approved, he was enthusiastic. Very enthusiastic. With all respect to Lieutenant Ulbricht here, the Captain wasn’t feeling too kindly disposed towards the Germans. Not at that moment of time, anyway.’

‘You’re being evasive, Archie McKinnon. Answer my question. If he had disapproved would you still have attacked?’

‘Yes. No need to mention that to the Captain, though.’

‘Nurse Magnusson.’ Patterson smiled at Janet to rob his words of any offence. ‘I hardly think Mr McKinnon deserves either interrogation or disapproval. I think he deserves congratulations for a magnificent job well done.’ He rose, went to the cupboard where Dr Singh had kept his private supplies and returned with a bottle of Scotch and some glasses, poured a measure for McKinnon and set it before him. ‘I think Dr Singh would have approved of this.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ McKinnon looked down at the glass on the table. ‘He won’t be needing this any more.’

There was silence round the table. Predictably, it was broken by Janet.

‘I think, Archie, that that was less than a gracious remark.’

‘You think so now. Maybe. Maybe not.’ There was no hint of apology in his voice. He raised his glass and sipped from it. ‘Knew his Scotch, did Dr Singh.’

The silence was longer this time, longer and strained. It was Sinclair, embarrassed by the silence, who broke it.

‘I’m sure we all echo Mr Patterson’s sentiments, Mr McKinnon. A splendid job. But—to quote yourself, I’m not questioning your professional competence—you did take a bit of a chance, didn’t you?’

‘You mean I endangered the lives of all aboard?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ His look of discomfiture made it evident that he had thought it, if not said it.

‘It was a calculated risk,’ McKinnon said, ‘but not all that calculated. The odds were on my side, quite heavily, I believe. I am quite certain that the U-boat was under orders that we were to be seized, not sunk, which is why I am equally certain that the gun crew fired into the San Andreas without orders.

‘The U-boat captain, Oberleutnant Klaussen, was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was tired or immature or inexperienced or incompetent or over-confident—he may have been all those things at the same time. What is certain is that an experienced U-boat commander would never have put himself in a position where he was running parallel to us and less than a half a mile away. He should have stayed at a couple of miles’ distance—which in an emergency would have given him plenty of time to crash dive—ordered us to send across a boat, loaded it up with a half-dozen men with machine pistols and sent them back to take over the San Andreas. We could have done nothing to stop them. Even better, he should have closed up from astern, a position that would have made ramming impossible, then eased up alongside the gangway.

‘And of course, he was too confident, too sure of himself, too relaxed by half. When he saw us lowering the gangway, he was convinced the game was over. It never even occurred to him that a hospital ship could be used as a man-o‘-war. And he was either so blind or so stupid that he never even noticed that we were steadily closing in on him all the time we were in contact. In short, he made every mistake in the book. It would have been difficult to pick a worse man for the job.’

There was a long and rather uncomfortable silence. Mario, unobtrusive and efficient as ever, had filled all the glasses on the table but no one, with the exception of the Bo’sun, had as yet touched theirs.

Sinclair said: ‘On the basis of what you say, the U-boat captain was indeed the wrong man for the job. And, of course, you wholly out-manoeuvered him. But surely the danger still existed. In the actual collision, I mean. The U-boat could have sunk us and not vice versa. We are only made of thin sheet plating: the hull of the submarine is immensely strong.’

‘I would not presume to lecture you on medical matters, Dr Sinclair.’

Sinclair smiled. ‘Meaning I should not presume to advise you on matters maritime. But, Mr McKinnon, you’re a bo’sun on a merchant vessel.’

‘Today, yes. Before that I spent twelve years in the submarine service.’

‘Oh no.’ Sinclair shook his head. ‘Too much, just too much. This is definitely not Dr Sinclair’s day.’

‘I’ve known a good number of cases of collisions between merchant vessels and submarines. In nearly all cases those collisions were between friend and friend or, in peacetime, between a submarine and a harmless foreign vessel. The results were always the same. The surface vessel came off best.

‘It doesn’t seem logical but it does make sense. Take a hollow glass sphere with walls, say, of a third of an inch in diameter, submerge it to a very considerable depth—I’m talking of hundreds of feet—and it still won’t implode. Bring it to the surface, give it a light tap with a hammer and it will shatter into a hundred pieces. Same with the pressure hull of a submarine. It can resist pressure at great depths but on the surface a short sharp blow, as from the bows of a merchant ship, will cause it to rupture. Admittedly, the chances of the submarine are not improved by the fact that the merchant ship may displace many thousands of tons and be travelling at a fair speed. On the other hand, even a vessel as small as a trawler can sink a submarine. Point is, Dr Sinclair, it wasn’t all that dangerous: I hadn’t much doubt as to what the outcome would be.’

‘Point taken, Mr McKinnon. You see before you a rueful cobbler who will stick to his last from now on.’

Patterson said: ‘This ever happen to you?’

‘No. If it had, the chances are very high that I wouldn’t be here now. I know plenty of instances. When I was in the service, the trade as we called it, we had a maxim which said, in effect, never mind the enemy, just watch out for your friends. Back in the Twenties, a British submarine—the MI it was—was accidentally struck by a merchant ship off the Devon coast. All died. Not long afterwards the American SI was overrun by the Italian passenger liner City of Rome. All died. Some time later, another American submarine was overrun by a coastguard destroyer off Cape Cod. All died. The Poseidon, British, was sent to the bottom by a Japanese ship. Accident. It was off the north China coast. A good number of survivors, but some died from the diver’s bends. In the early years of the war, the Surcouf, crewed by the Free French and the biggest submarine in the world—so big that it was called a submarine cruiser—was sunk in the Caribbean by a ship in a convoy she was escorting. The Surcouf had a crew of a hundred and fifty: all died.’ McKinnon passed a hand across his eyes. ‘There were others. I forgot most of them. Ah, yes, there was the Umpire. Forty-one, I think. It took only a trawler, and not a very big one, to destroy her.’

Patterson said: ‘You’ve made your point, as Dr Sinclair says, you’ve more than made your point. I accept that the element of risk was not high. You’ll just have to bear with us, Mr McKinnon. Amateurs all. We didn’t know. You did. The fact that the U-boat is at the bottom of the sea is testimony enough to that.’ He paused. ‘I have to say, Bo’sun, that your achievement doesn’t appear to have given you any great satisfaction.’

‘It hasn’t.’

Patterson nodded. ‘I understand. To have been responsible for the deaths of so many men—well, it’s hardly a cheerful thought.’

McKinnon looked at him in mild surprise. ‘What’s done is done. So the U-boat’s gone and its crew with it. It’s no matter for celebration but it’s no matter for recrimination either. The next Allied merchant ship to have appeared on the cross hairs of Klaussen’s periscope sight would surely have gone to where Klaussen’s U-boat is now. The only good U-boat is a U-boat with a ruptured pressure hull at the bottom of the ocean.’

‘Then why—‘ Patterson broke off, plainly at a loss for both thought and words, then said: ‘The hell with the pros and cons, it was still a splendid job. I didn’t fancy a prison camp any more than you. Well, I don’t feel as modest about your accomplishments as you do.’ He looked around the table. ‘A toast to our Bo’sun here—and to the memory of Dr Singh.’

‘I’m not nearly as modest as you think I am. I haven’t the slightest objection to drinking a toast to myself.’ McKinnon looked slowly around the other six. ‘But I draw the line at drinking a toast to the memory of Flannelfoot.’

McKinnon was becoming very expert at causing silences. This, the fourth such silence, was much longer and much more uncomfortable than the ones that had preceded it. The other six stared at him, looked at each other with questioning, frowning glances, then returned their exclusive attention to McKinnon. Again, it was Janet who broke the silence.

‘You do know what you’re saying, Archie? At least I hope you do.’

‘I’m afraid I do. Dr Sinclair, you had a cardiac arrest unit in the recovery room. Did you have another similar unit elsewhere?’

‘Yes. In the dispensary.’

‘And you were under strict instructions that, in an emergency, the dispensary unit was the one that was to be used first.’

‘That is so.’ Sinclair looked at him without understanding. ‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘Because I’m clever.’ The normally calm and unemotional Bo’sun made no attempt to conceal his bitterness. ‘After the event, I’m very clever.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no point in you listening to me telling you how clever I haven’t been. I suggest you go—I suggest you all go—and have a look at the recovery room cardiac unit. The unit’s not there any more—it’s in Ward A, by the Sister’s desk. The lid is closed but the lock has been damaged as has the seal. You can wrench the lid open easily enough.’

All six looked at each other, then rose, left and were back within a minute. They sat in silence and remained in silence: they were either stunned by what they had seen or could not find the words to express their emotions.

‘Nice, is it not?’ McKinnon said. ‘A high-powered radio transceiver. Tell me, Dr Sinclair, did Dr Singh ever lock himself up in the recovery room?’

‘I couldn’t say.’ Sinclair shook his head quite violently, as if to clear it of disbelief. ‘May well have done for all anyone would know.’

‘But he did frequently go into that room alone?’

‘Yes. Alone. Quite often. He insisted on looking after the two injured men personally. Perfectly within his rights, of course—he was the man who had operated on them.’

‘Of course. After I’d found the radio—I still don’t know what made me open up that damned cardiac unit—I examined the lock, the keyhole part that Mr Jamieson had burnt away with his torch, and the latch. Both were heavily oiled. When Dr Singh turned that key you would have heard no sound of metal against metal or even the faintest click, not even if you were listening outside a couple of feet away—not that anyone could have had any conceivable reason for lurking outside a couple of feet away. After locking the door and checking that his two patients were under sedation—and if they weren’t he would make sure they very quickly were—he could use his radio to his heart’s content. Not, I should imagine, that he used it very often: the primary purpose, the essential purpose, of the radio was that it kept on sending out a continual homing location signal.’

‘I still can’t understand it or bring myself to believe it.’ Patterson spoke slowly, a man still trying to struggle free of a trance. ‘Of course it’s true, it has to be true, but that doesn’t make it any more credible. He was such a good man, such a kind man—and a fine doctor, was he not, Dr Sinclair?’

‘He was an excellent doctor. No question. And a brilliant surgeon.’

‘So was Dr Crippen for all I know,’ McKinnon said. ‘I find it as baffling as you do, Mr Patterson. I have no idea what his motives could have been and I should imagine that we’ll never find out. He was a very clever man, a very careful man who never took a chance, a man who totally covered his tracks—if it weren’t for a trigger-happy U-boat gun crew we’d never have found out who Flannelfoot was. His treachery may have had something to do with his background—although he spoke of Pakistani descent he was, of course, an Indian, and I believe that educated Indians have little reason to love the British Raj. May have had something to do with religion, if he had Pakistani roots he was probably a Muslim. The connection—I have no idea. There are a dozen other reasons apart from nationality and politics and religion that make a man a traitor. Where did those cardiac arrest units come from, Dr Sinclair?’

‘They were loaded aboard at Halifax, Nova Scotia.’

‘I know that. But do you know where they came from?’

‘I have no idea. Does it matter?’

‘It could. Point is, we don’t know whether Dr Singh installed the radio transceiver after the unit came aboard or whether the unit was supplied with the transceiver already installed. I would take long odds that the transceiver had already been installed. Very tricky thing to do aboard a boat. Difficult to smuggle the transceiver aboard, equally difficult to get rid of the cardiac unit that was inside the box.’

Sinclair said: ‘When I said I didn’t know where that unit came from, that’s quite true. But I know the country of origin. Britain.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Stencil marks.’

‘Would there be many firms in Britain that make those things?’

‘Again, no idea. Not a question that comes up. A cardiac unit is a cardiac unit. Very few, I should imagine.’

‘Should be easy enough to trace the source—and I don’t for a moment imagine that the unit left the factory already equipped with the transceiver.’ He looked at Patterson. ‘Naval Intelligence should be very interested in finding out what route that cardiac unit took between the factory and the San Andreas and what stopovers it made en route.’

‘They should indeed. And it should take them no time at all to find out where it changed hands and who made the switch. Seems damned careless of our saboteur friends to have left themselves so wide open.’

‘Not really, sir. They simply never expected to be found out.’

‘I suppose. Tell me, Bo’sun, why did you take so long in getting around to telling us about Dr Singh?’

‘Because I had the same reaction as you—I had to work damned hard to convince myself of the evidence of my own eyes. Besides, you all held Dr Singh in very high regard—no one likes to be the bearer of bad news.’ He looked at Jamieson. ‘How long would it take, sir, to fix up a push button on Sister’s desk in Ward A so that it would ring a buzzer in, say, here, the bridge and the engine-room?’

‘No time at all.’ Jamieson paused briefly. ‘I know you must have an excellent reason for this—what shall we call it?—alarm system. May we know what it is?’

‘Of course—so that the sister or nurse in charge of Ward A can let us know if any unauthorized person comes into the ward. That unauthorized person will be in the same state of ignorance as we are at the moment—he will not know whether that transceiver is in working order or not. He has to assume that it is, he has to assume that we may be in a position to send out an SOS to the Royal Navy. It’s obviously all-important to the Germans that such a signal be not sent and that we remain alone and unprotected. They want us and they want us alive so the intruder will do everything in his power to destroy the set.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Patterson said. ‘Intruder? Unauthorized person? What unauthorized person. Dr Singh is dead.’

‘I’ve no idea who he is. All that I’m certain of is that he exists. You may remember that I said earlier that I thought we had more than one Flannelfoot aboard. Now I’m certain. Dr Sinclair, during the entire hour before Lieutenant Ulbricht and his Focke-Wulf made their appearance—and indeed for some time afterwards—you and Dr Singh were operating on the two wounded sailors—now the two dead sailors—from the Argos. That is correct?’

‘That’s so.’ Sinclair looked and sounded puzzled.

‘Did he leave the surgery at any time?’

‘Not once.’

‘And it was during this period that some unknown was busy tinkering with junction boxes and fuses. So, Flannelfoot number two.’

There was a brief silence, then Jamieson said: ‘We’re not very bright, are we? Of course you’re right. We should have worked that out for ourselves.’

‘You would have. Finding Dr Singh’s dead body and then finding out what he was is enough to put any other thought out of your mind. It’s only just now occurred to me. More time to get over the shock, I suppose.’

‘Objection,’ Patterson said. ‘Query, rather. If that set is smashed the Germans have no means of tracking us.’

‘They’re not tracking us now,’ McKinnon said patiently. ‘Battery leads are disconnected. Even if they weren’t, smashing the transceiver would be far the lesser of two evils. The last thing that Flannelfoot number two wants to see is the Royal Navy steaming over the horizon. They may have another transmitter cached away somewhere, although I very much doubt it. Dr Sinclair, would you please check the other cardiac unit in the dispensary, although I’m sure you’ll find it okay.’

‘Well,’ Sinclair said, ’there’s at least some satisfaction in knowing that they’ve lost us.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on that, Doctor. In fact, I’d bet against it. A submarine can’t use its radio underwater but you have to remember that this lad was trailing us on the surface and was almost certainly in constant contact with its shore base. They’ll know exactly our position and course at the time of the sinking of the submarine. I wouldn’t even be surprised if there’s another U-boat tagging along behind us—for some damned reason we seem to be very important to the Germans. And you mustn’t forget that the further south-west we steam, the more hours of daylight we have. The sky’s pretty clear and the chances are good that a Focke-Wulf or some such will pick us up during the day.’

Patterson looked at him morosely. ‘You make a splendid Job’s comforter, Bo’sun.’

McKinnon smiled. ‘Sorry about that, sir. Just reckoning the odds, that’s all.’

‘The odds,’ Janet said. ‘You’re betting against our chances of getting to Aberdeen, aren’t you, Archie?’

McKinnon turned his hands palms upwards. ‘I’m not a gambler and there are too many unknowns. Any of your opinions is just as good as mine. I’m not betting against our chances, Janet. I think we have a fair chance of making it.’ He paused. ‘Three things. I’ll go and see Captain Andropolous and his men. I should think that “radio” is a pretty universal word. If not, sign language should work. Most of the crew of the Argos survived so the chances are good that there is a radio officer among them. He can have a look at this machine and see if we can transmit with it. Lieutenant Ulbricht, I’d be grateful if you could come up to the bridge when it’s time and take a noon sight. Third thing—if the lights in Ward A fail at any time, whoever is in charge is to press the panic button immediately.’

McKinnon made to rise, stopped and looked at his untouched drink.

‘Well, perhaps after all, a toast to the departed. An old Gaelic curse, rather. Dr Singh. May his shade walk on the dark side of hell tonight.’ He raised his glass. ‘To Flannelfoot.’

McKinnon drank his toast alone.

NINE

Less than ten minutes after McKinnon’s arrival on the bridge the phone rang.

‘Jamieson here,’ the voice said. ‘Things do keep happening aboard this damned ship. There’s been another accident.’

‘Accident?’

‘Accident on purpose. Incident, I should have said. Your pal Limassol.’

‘Limassol’ was the name that McKinnon had given to the man whom he had discovered to be the radio operator of the Argos. Apart from this discovery, the only other thing that the Bo’sun had been able to discover about him was that he was a Greek Cypriot from Limassol.

‘What’s happened to my pal Limassol?’

‘He’s been clobbered.’

‘Ah.’ McKinnon was not a man much given to exclamatory outbursts. ‘Inevitably. Who clobbered him?’

‘You should know better than to ask that question, Bo’sun. How the hell should I know who clobbered him? Nobody ever knows who does anything aboard the San Andreas. The Chief Officer was more prophetic than he knew when he gave this ship its new name. It’s a bloody disaster area. I can only give you the facts as I know them. Sister Maria was on duty when Limassol sat down to have a look at the transceiver. After a while he stood and made the motion of screwing his forefinger against the palm of his other hand. She guessed, correctly, that he wanted tools and sent for Wayland Day to take him down to the engine-room. I was there and gave him the tools he wanted. He also took a bridge-megger with him. Gave every impression of a man who knew what he was doing. On his way back, in the passageway leading to the mess-deck, he was clobbered. Something hard and heavy.’

‘How hard, how heavy?’

‘If you’ll just hang on for a moment. We have him down here in a bed in A Ward. Dr Sinclair is attending to him. He can tell you better than I can.’

There was a brief silence, then Sinclair was on the phone. ‘Bo’sun? Well, damn it, confirmation of the existence of Flannelfoot number two—not that any confirmation was needed, but I didn’t expect such quick and violent proof. This lad doesn’t hang around, does he? Dangerous, violent, acts on his own initiative and his mind’s working on the same wavelength as ours.’

‘Limassol?’

‘Pretty poorly, to say the least. Some metallic object, no question, could easily have been a crowbar. I would guess that the attacker’s intent was to kill him. With most people he might well have succeeded but this Limassol seems to have a skull like an elephant. Fractured, of course. I’ll have an X-ray. Routine and quite superfluous but mandatory. No signs of any brain damage, which is not to say that there isn’t any. But no obvious damage, not, at least, at this stage. Two things I’m pretty certain about, Mr McKinnon. He’ll live but he’s not going to be of much use to you—or anyone—for some time to come.’

‘As Dr Singh said about Lieutenant Cunningham—two hours, two days, two weeks, two months?’

‘Something like that. I’ve simply no idea. All I know is that if he does recover rapidly he’ll be of no possible use to you for days to come, so you can rule him out of any plans you may have.’

‘I’m fresh out of plans, Doctor.’

‘Indeed. We seem to be running out of options. Mr Jamieson would like to have another word with you.’

Jamieson came back on the phone. ‘Maybe this could have been my fault, Bo’sun. Maybe if I’d been thinking a bit more clearly and a bit quicker this wouldn’t have happened.’

‘How on earth were you to know that Limassol was going to be attacked?’

‘True. But I should have gone with him; not for his protection, but to watch him to see what he did to make the set work. That way I might have picked up enough to have some knowledge—rudimentary, but some—so that we wouldn’t have to rely entirely on one man.’

‘Flannelfoot would probably have clobbered you too. No point, sir, in trying to place the blame where none exists. The milk’s spilt and you didn’t spill it. Just give me enough time and I’ll find out it was all McKinnon’s fault.’

He hung up and related the gist of his conversation to Naseby, who had the wheel, and to Lieutenant Ulbricht, who had declared himself as feeling so fit that he no longer qualified as a bed patient.

‘Disturbing,’ Ulbricht said. ‘Our friend seems to be resourceful, very quick-thinking and very much a man of decision and action. I say “disturbing” because it has just occurred to me that he may have been Flannelfoot number one and not Dr Singh, in which case we can expect a great deal more unpleasantness. In any event, it seems to rule out the crew of the Argos—none of them speaks English so they couldn’t have known about the fake cardiac unit being in A Ward.’

McKinnon looked morose. ‘The fact that none of them appears to understand a word of English—they’re very good with their blank stares when you address them in that language—doesn’t mean that one or two of them don’t speak better English than I do. It doesn’t rule out the crew of the Argos. And, of course, it doesn’t rule out our own crew or the nine invalids we picked up in Murmansk.’

‘And how would they have known that the tampered cardiac unit had been transferred from the recovery room to Ward A? Only—let me see—only seven people knew about the transfer. The seven at the table this morning. One of us could have talked, perhaps?’

‘No.’ McKinnon was very definite.

‘Inadvertently?’

‘No.’

‘You trust us that much?’ Ulbricht smiled but there was no humour in it. ‘Or is it that you have to trust somebody?’

‘I trust you all right.’ McKinnon sounded a little weary. ‘Point is, it wasn’t necessary for anyone to talk. Everybody knows that Dr Singh and the two injured crewmen from the Argos are dead.’ McKinnon made a dismissive little gesture with his hand. ‘After all, we’re going to bury them inside the half-hour. Everybody knows that they were killed by an explosive blast inside the recovery room and our newest Flannelfoot must have known that the transceiver was there and may have guessed, or suspected, that the case of the cardiac unit had been damaged sufficiently to reveal the existence of the transmitter. It had not, in fact, but that was pure luck on my part.’

‘How do you explain the attack on the radio officer?’

‘Easily.’ McKinnon looked and sounded bitter. ‘Flannelfoot didn’t have to know where the radio was, all he had to know was that we had developed a certain interest in radio. Mr Jamieson tried to take some of the blame for the attack. Totally unnecessary when Mastermind McKinnon is around. My fault. My fault entirely. When I went down to find a radio officer the crew of the Argos were, as usual, in a corner by themselves. They weren’t alone in the mess-deck—some of the injured men we picked up in Murmansk and some of our crew were there—but not close enough to hear us talking. Not that there was any talking. I just said the word “radio” several times, low enough not to be overheard, and this lad from Limassol looked at me. Then I made a motion of tapping my forefinger as if sending a signal in Morse. After that, I spun the handle of an imaginary electrical generator. None of this could have been seen except by the crew of the Argos. Then I made my stupid mistake. I cupped my hand to my ear as if listening to something. By this time Limassol had got the message and was on his feet. But our new Flannelfoot had got the message too. Just one little movement of my hand and he got it. He’s not only violent and dangerous but very smart too. An unpleasant combination.’

‘Indeed it is,’ Ulbricht said. ‘You have it right, you must have, and I can’t see any reason for self-reproach. I used the right word back there—disturbing.’

Naseby said: ‘Do you by any chance remember who exactly was in the mess-deck when you were there?’

‘I do. Every crew member who wasn’t on watch. On the deckside, only two were on watch—you and Trent down in the Captain’s cabin there keeping an eye on the sextant and chronometer. All the off-duty engine-room staff. Two cooks and Mario. Seven of the seventeen invalids we picked up in Murmansk—the three who were supposed to be tubercular cases, the three who are supposed to be suffering from nervous breakdowns, and one of the exposure cases. He’s so wrapped in bandages that he can barely walk so he doesn’t come into consideration. A couple of nurses—they don’t come into consideration either. And there’s no doubt you’re right, Lieutenant—the crew of the Argos has to be in the clear.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ Ulbricht said. ‘A moment ago you were expressing reservations against them which I found rather puzzling, as in that long talk in the Captain’s cabin we had more or less agreed that the crew of the Argos was in the clear. The original suggestion, you may remember, came from you.’

‘I remember. Next thing you know I’ll be looking into the mirror and saying “and I don’t trust you, either”. Yes, I know I made the suggestion, but I still had this tiny doubt. At the time I more than suspected that we had another Flannelfoot aboard but I wasn’t certain until less than half an hour ago. It’s impossible to believe that it wasn’t our new Flannelfoot who blew the hole in the for’ard ballast room when we were alongside that sinking corvette. And it’s unthinkable—and for me this is the clincher—that a member of the Argos crew would deliberately set out to murder a person who was not only a crewmate but a fellow countryman.’

‘At least it’s something,’ Naseby said. ‘Brings it down to our own crew, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, our crew—and at least six allegedly physical and mentally disturbed cripples from Murmansk.’

Naseby shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Archie, this trip is going to be the ruination of you. Never known you to be so terribly suspicious of everybody—and you’ve just said you could find yourself not even trusting yourself.’

‘If a nasty suspicious mind is any kind of hope for survival, George, then I’m going to keep on having just that kind of mind. You will remember that we had to leave Halifax in a tearing hurry, in a cargo ship little more than half converted to a hospital. Why? To get to Archangel and that with all possible speed. Then, after that little accident when we were alongside that corvette it became equally essential that we be diverted to Murmansk. Why?’

‘Well, we were listing a bit and down by the head.’

‘We had stopped making water, weather conditions were fair, we could have reached the White Sea, crossed it, and made Archangel without much trouble. But no, it was Murmansk or nothing. Again, why?’

‘So that the Russians could place that explosive charge in the ballast room.’ Ulbricht smiled. ‘I recall your words—our gallant allies.’

‘I recall them too. I wish I didn’t. We all make mistakes, I’m certainly no exception, and that was one of my biggest. The Russians didn’t place that charge—your people did.’

‘The Germans? Impossible!’

‘Lieutenant, if you imagine Murmansk and Archangel aren’t hotching with German spies and agents, you’re living in Alice’s never-never Wonderland.’

‘It’s possible, it’s possible. But to infiltrate a Russian naval working party—that’s impossible.’

‘It’s not impossible but it doesn’t even have to be necessary. People are capable of being suborned, and while it may not be true that every man has his price, there are always those who have.’

‘A Russian traitor, you suggest?’

‘Why not? You have your traitors. We have our traitors. Every country has its traitors.’

‘Why should we—the Germans—want to place a charge in the San Andreas?’

‘I simply have no idea. In the same way as I have simply no idea why the Germans have attacked, harassed and pursued us—but not tried to sink us—ever since we rounded the North Cape. What I’m suggesting is, it’s very likely that the same German agent or agents suborned one or more of the invalids we picked up in Murmansk. An alleged psychiatric case or mental breakdown patient, who is sick of both the war and the sea, would make an ideal choice for the traitor’s part and I shouldn’t even imagine that the price would have to be very high.’

‘Objection, Mr McKinnon. It was a last-minute decision to detach the San Andreas from the convoy. You can’t suborn a man overnight.’

‘True. At the most, highly unlikely. Maybe they knew a week or two ago that we would be detached to Murmansk.’

‘How on earth could they have known that?’

‘I don’t know. The same way I don’t know why someone in Halifax knew quite a long time ago that Dr Singh would be in need of a transceiver.’

‘And you don’t think it extraordinary that the Russians, if they were not responsible for placing that charge, should have brought the San Andreas into Murmansk apparently for the sole benefit of your mysterious German agents?’

‘They’re not my agents but they’re mysterious all right. The answer again is that I simply don’t know. The truth appears to be that I just don’t know anything about anything.’ He sighed. ‘Ah, well. Close to noon, Lieutenant. I’ll go get the sextant and chronometer.’

Lieutenant Ulbricht straightened from the chart. ‘Still, remarkably, holding the same course—213. Precisely 64° North. Ideally, we should steer due south now but we’re near enough to Trondheim as we are now, and that would only bring us closer. I suggest we maintain this course for the present, then turn due south some time during the night, midnight or thereabouts. That should bring us down the east coast of your native islands tomorrow, Mr McKinnon. I’ll work it out.’

‘You’re the navigator,’ McKinnon said agreeably.

In marked contrast to the conditions that had existed exactly forty-eight hours previously when the mass burial had taken place, the weather was now almost benign. The wind was no more than Force three, the sea calm enough to keep the San Andreas on an all but steady keel, and the cloud cover consisted of no more than a wide band of white, fleecy, mackerel sky against the pale blue beyond. McKinnon, standing by the starboard rail of the San Andreas, derived no pleasure whatsoever from the improvement: he would greatly have preferred the blanketing white blizzard of the previous burial.

Besides, the Bo’sun, the only other attendants or witnesses—by no stretch of the imagination could they have been called mourners—at the burial were Patterson, Jamieson, Sinclair and the two stokers and two seamen who had brought up the bodies. No one else had asked to come. For obvious reasons no one was going to mourn Dr Singh, and only Sinclair had known the two dead crewmen from the Argos and even then as no more than two unconscious bodies on operating tables.

Dr Singh was unceremoniously tipped over the side—not for him the well-wishing for his journey into the hereafter. Patterson, who would obviously never have made it as a clergyman, quickly read the liturgy from the prayer-book over the two dead Greek seamen and then they, too, were gone.

Patterson closed the prayer-book. ‘Twice of that lot is twice too often. Let’s hope there’s not going to be a third time.’ He looked at McKinnon. ‘I suppose we just plod on on our far from merry way?’

‘All we can do, sir. Lieutenant Ulbricht suggests that we alter course by and by to due south. That’ll take us on a more direct route to Aberdeen. He knows what he’s about. But that will be approximately twelve hours yet.’

‘Whatever’s best.’ Patterson gazed around the empty horizon. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as rather odd, Bo’sun, that we’ve been left unmolested, or at least not located, for the better part of three hours? Since all communication from the U-boat has ceased in that time they must be very dense if they’re not aware that something is far wrong with it.’

‘I should imagine that Admiral Doenitz’s U-boat fleet commander in Trondheim is very far from dense. I’ve the feeling they know exactly where we are. I understand that some of the latest U-boats are quite quick under water and one could easily be trailing us by Asdic without our knowing anything about it.’ Like Patterson, only much more slowly, he looked around the horizon, then stood facing the port quarter. ‘We are being tailed.’

‘What? What’s that?’

‘Can’t you hear it?’

Patterson cocked his head, then nodded slowly, ‘I think I can. Yes, I can.’

‘Condor,’ McKinnon said. ‘Focke-Wulf.’ He pointed, ‘I can see it now. It’s coming straight out of the east and Trondheim is about due east of us now. The pilot of that plane knows exactly where we are. He’s been told, probably via Trondheim, by the U-boat that’s trailing us.’

‘I thought a submarine had to surface to transmit?’

‘No. All it has to do is to raise its transmitting aerial above the water. It could do that a couple of miles away and we wouldn’t see it. Anyway, it’s probably a good deal further distant than that.’

‘One wonders what the Condor’s intentions are.’

‘Your guess, sir. We’re not, unfortunately, inside the minds of the U-boat and Luftwaffe commanders in Trondheim. My guess is that they’re not going to try to finish us off and that’s not because they’ve been at great pains not to sink us so far. If they wanted to sink us, one torpedo from the U-boat I’m sure is out there would do the job nicely. Or, if they wanted to sink us from the air, they wouldn’t use a Condor which is really a reconnaissance plane: Heinkels, Heinkel III’s or Stukas with long-range tanks could do the job much more efficiently—and Trondheim is only about two hundred miles from here.’

‘What’s he after, then?’ The Condor was two miles distant now and losing height rapidly.

‘Information.’ McKinnon looked up at the bridge and caught sight of Naseby out on the port wing looking aft towards the approaching Condor. He cupped his hands and shouted: ‘George!’ Naseby swung round.

‘Get down, get down!’ McKinnon made the appropriate gesture with his hand. Naseby raised an arm in acknowledgement and disappeared inside the bridge. ‘Mr Patterson, let’s get inside the superstructure. Now.’

Patterson knew when to ask questions and when not to. He led the way and within ten seconds they were all in shelter except the Bo’sun, who remained in the shattered doorway.

‘Information,’ Patterson said. ‘What information?’

‘One moment.’ He moved quickly to the side of the ship, looked aft for no more than two seconds, then returned to shelter.

‘Half a mile,’ McKinnon said. ‘Very slow, very low, about fifty feet. Information? Shell-holes, say, on the sides or superstructure, something to indicate that we had been in a fight with some vessel. He won’t see any holes on the port side.’

Patterson made to speak but whatever he had to say was lost in the sudden clamour of close-range fire by machine-guns, in the cacophonous fury of hundreds of bullets striking the superstructure and side in the space of seconds, and in the abrupt crescendo of sound as giant aero engines swept by not more than fifty yards away. Another few seconds and all was relatively quiet again.

Jamieson said: ‘Well, yes, I can see now why you told Naseby to get his head down.’

‘Information.’ Patterson sounded aggrieved, almost plaintive. ‘Bloody funny way they set about getting information. And I thought you said they weren’t going to attack us.’

‘I said they wouldn’t sink us. Knocking a few of the crew off would be all grist to their mill. The more of us they can kill, the more they think they’ll have us at their mercy.’

‘You think they got the information they wanted?’

‘I’m certain of it. You can be sure that every eye on that Condor was examining us very closely indeed as they passed by fifty yards away. They won’t have seen the damage to our bows because it’s underwater but they can’t have helped seeing something else that’s underwater up for’ard—our load-line. Unless they’re completely myopic they’re bound to have seen that we’re down by the head. And unless they’re equally dense they’re bound to realize that we’ve either hit something or been hit by something. It couldn’t have been a mine or torpedo or we’d be at the bottom now. They’ll have known at once that we must have rammed something and there won’t be much guessing about what that was.’

‘Dear, oh dear,’ Jamieson said, ‘I don’t think I like this one little bit, Bo’sun.’

‘Nor me, sir. Changes things quite a bit, doesn’t it? Question of the German high command’s priorities, I suppose. A question of alive or dead. Is it more important to them that they take us more or less alive or do they take revenge for their lost U-boat?’

‘Whichever they choose, there’s damn-all we can do about it,’ Patterson said. ‘Let’s go and have lunch.’

‘I think we should wait a moment, sir.’ McKinnon remained still and silent for a few moments, then said: ‘It’s coming back.’

And back it came, flying at the same near wave-top height. The second fly-past was a mirror image of the first: instead of flying stern to stem on the port side it flew stem to stern on the starboard side, again to the accompaniment of the same fusillade of machine-gun fire. Some ten seconds after the firing ceased McKinnon, followed by the others, left the shelter and went to the port rail.

The Condor was off the port quarter, climbing steadily and flying directly away from them.

‘Well, well,’ Jamieson said. ‘We seem to have got off lightly. Bound to have seen those three shell-holes on the starboard side, weren’t they, Bo’sun?’

‘Couldn’t have missed them, sir.’

‘They could be gaining bombing altitude before turning back to settle accounts with us?’

‘He could bomb us from a hundred feet without the slightest bit of danger to himself.’

‘Or maybe he just isn’t carrying any bombs?’

‘No. He’ll be carrying bombs all right. Only the Focke-Wulfs on the big half-circle from Trondheim to Lorient in France round the British Isles, or the ones who patrol as far out as the Denmark Strait don’t carry bombs. They carry extra fuel tanks instead. The ones on shorter patrols always carry bombs—250-kilo bombs, usually, not the smaller ones that Lieutenant Ulbricht used. The pilot of the Condor is, of course, in direct radio communication with Trondheim, has told them why they’re not hearing from the U-boat any more, but still has been told to lay off us. For the meantime, anyway.’

‘You’re right,’ Patterson said. ‘He’s not coming back. Funny. He could have spent all day—till nightfall at least—circling us and reporting our position. But no, he’s off. I wonder why.’

‘No need to wonder, sir. The Condor’s exit is all the proof we require that we are being tailed by a U-boat. No point in having a U-boat and a plane tailing us at the same time.’

‘Isn’t there anything we can do about that damned U-boat?’

‘Well, we can’t ram him because we don’t know where he is and we can be certain that there’s no chance that he’ll surface because he’s bound to have heard by now—or will hear very soon—what happened to the other U-boat. We can, just possibly, shake him off but not at this moment. Sure, by shutting off our engines and generators we could make him lose contact but that wouldn’t be for very long—he’d just raise his periscope, traverse the horizon and nail us again.’

‘Not at this moment—you mean, after it gets dark?’

‘Yes, I thought we might try then. We lie doggo for half an hour, then steam away on a new course at very low engine revolutions—the less racket we make the less chance there is of our being picked up. Might take us the better part of an hour to reach full speed. At the best, it’s only a gamble and even if we do win that gamble it’s still no guarantee that we’re free and clear. The U-boat will just radio Trondheim that they’ve lost us. They still know approximately where we are and a Condor with a few dozen flares can cover an awfully big area in a very short time.’

‘You do my morale a power of good,’ Jamieson said. ‘Their tactics puzzle me. Why do they have a Condor fly out here, fly back again and then, as you suggest, fly out here at dusk? Why doesn’t it stay out here all the time and have another Condor relieve it. It doesn’t make sense to me.’

‘It does to me. Although we’re still a long way from Aberdeen the German brass-hats in Norway may well be making a decision as to whether or not to try to stop us again. My feeling—it’s no more than that—says they will. No way a Condor can stop us without sinking or crippling us. It’s become quite clear that they have no wish to sink us or cripple us to the extent that we can no longer proceed under our own steam. The U-boat can surface about a mile off, watch carefully for even a couple of degrees deviation in our course—and they’ll be watching for that very, very carefully—then proceed to pump shell after shell into the superstructure and hospital zone until we run up the little white flag.’

‘You’re a great comfort to me, Bo’sun.’

As McKinnon entered the bridge, Naseby handed him a pair of binoculars.

‘Starboard door, Archie. No need to go outside. A bit for’ard of midships. Near enough west, I would say.’

McKinnon took the glasses, studied the area indicated for about ten seconds, then handed the glasses back.

‘Mile and a half, I would say. Looks like a mirror only, of course, it’s not a mirror, it’s a U-boat’s periscope reflecting the sun. We, George, are being subjected to psychological warfare.’

‘Is that what you call it?’

‘Meant to see it, of course. By accident, of course. Carelessness, of course. Slowly, very slowly, George, round to port until we’re heading more or less due east, then keep it on that bearing. While you’re doing that I’ll call up the Chief Engineer and ask his permission.’

He located Patterson in the mess-deck, told him the situation and asked for permission to head east.

‘Whatever you say, Bo’sun. Doesn’t exactly get us nearer home, does it?’

‘That’s what will make the Germans happy, sir. It’s also what makes me happy. As long as we’re heading for Norway, which is where they want us anyway, and not to Scotland, they’re hardly likely to clobber us for doing exactly what they want us to do. Come darkness, of course, it’s heigh-ho for Scotland again.’

‘Satisfactory, Bo’sun, very satisfactory indeed. Do we make the news public?’

‘I suggest you tell Mr Jamieson and Lieutenant Ulbricht, sir. As for the rest, any more talk about U-boats would only put them off their lunch.’

TEN

‘Have I the ward sister’s permission to have a few words with the Captain?’

‘The Captain is only two beds away.’ Margaret Morrison eyed the Bo’sun speculatively. ‘Or do you have another secret session in mind?’

‘Well, yes, it is rather private.’

‘More U-boat ramming, is it?’

‘I never want to see another U-boat in my life.’ McKinnon spoke with some feeling. ‘The only thing that heroics will get us is an early and watery grave.’ He nodded towards the bed where Oberleutnant Klaussen was lying, moving restlessly and mumbling to himself in a barely audible monologue. ‘Is he like this all the time?’

‘All the time. Never stops rambling on.’

‘Does any of what he says make sense?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

McKinnon guided the Captain into a chair in the small lounge off the crew’s mess.

‘Mr Patterson and Mr Jamieson are here, sir. I wanted them to hear what I have in mind and to have your permission to—perhaps—carry out certain things I have in mind. I have three suggestions to make.

‘The first concerns our destination. Are we absolutely committed to Aberdeen, sir? I mean, how ironclad are the Admiralty orders?’

Captain Bowen made a few pointed but unprintable observations about the Admiralty, then said: ‘The safety of the San Andreas and of all aboard her are of paramount importance. If I consider this safety to be in any way endangered I’ll take the San Andreas to any safe port in the world and the hell with the Admiralty. We’re here, the Admiralty is not. We are in the gravest danger: the biggest peril facing the Admiralty is falling off their chairs in Whitehall.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The Bo’sun half-smiled, ‘I did think those questions rather unnecessary but I had to ask them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m convinced there’s a German espionage network in Murmansk.’ He outlined the reasons he had given to Lieutenant Ulbricht less than an hour previously, ‘If the Germans know so much about us and our movements, then it’s nearer a certainty than a possibility that they also know that our destination is Aberdeen. Maintaining any kind of course for Aberdeen is like handing the Germans a gift from the gods.

‘Even more important, from my way of thinking, anyway, is why the Germans are so very interested in us. We probably won’t know until we arrive in some safe port and even then it might take some time to find out. But if this unknown factor is so very valuable to the Germans, might it not be even more valuable to us? It is my belief—I can’t give any solid grounds for this belief—that the Germans would rather lose this valuable prize than let us have it. I have the uncomfortable feeling that if we got anywhere near Aberdeen the Germans would have a submarine, maybe two, loitering somewhere off Peterhead—that’s about twenty-five miles nor‘-nor‘-east of Aberdeen—with orders not to let us move any further south. That could mean only one thing—torpedoes.’

‘Say no more, Bo’sun,’ Jamieson said. ‘You’ve got me convinced. Here’s one passenger who wants Aberdeen struck right off our cruise itinerary.’

‘I have a feeling you’re right,’ Bowen said. ‘Maybe one hundred per cent. Even if the chances were only ten per cent we wouldn’t be justified in taking the risk. I have a complaint to make against myself, Bo’sun. I’m supposed to be the captain. Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Because you had other things on your mind, sir.’

‘And where does that leave me?’ Patterson said.

‘I’ve only just thought of it myself, sir. I’m sure that when Mr Kennet and I were ashore in Murmansk we missed something. We must have. What I still don’t understand is why the Russians pulled us into Murmansk, why they were so prompt and efficient in repairing the hole in the hull and completing the hospital. If I had the key to answer that question I’d know the answer to everything, including the answer to why the Russians were so helpful and cooperative, in marked contrast to their standard behaviour which usually ranges from unfriendliness to downright hostility. But I don’t have that key.’

‘We can only speculate,’ Bowen said, ‘If you’ve had time to consider this, Bo’sun, you’ve obviously had time to consider alternative ports. Safe ports. Bolt-holes, if you like.’

‘Yes, sir. Iceland or the Orkneys—that is, Reykjavík or Scapa Flow. Reykjavík has the disadvantage of being half as far away again as Scapa: on the other hand, the further west we go the more we steam out of the reach of the Heinkels and Stukas. Heading for Scapa, we should be within easy reach, practically all the way, of the Heinkels and Stukas based in Bergen and there’s the other disadvantage that ever since Oberleutnant Prien sank the Royal Oak up there, the mine defences make entry impossible. But it has the advantage that both the Navy and the RAF have bases there. I don’t know for certain but I should think it very likely that they maintain frequent air patrols round the Orkneys—after all, it is the base of the Home Fleet. I have no idea how far out those patrols range, fifty miles, a hundred, I don’t know. I think there’s a good chance that we would be picked up long before we’re even near Scapa.’

‘Tantamount to being home and dry, is that it, Bo’sun?’

‘I wouldn’t quite say that, sir. There are always the U-boats.’ McKinnon paused and considered. ‘As I see it, sir, four things. No British pilot is going to attack a British hospital ship. We’d probably be picked up by a patrol plane like a Blenheim which wouldn’t waste much time in calling up fighter support and no German bomber pilot in his senses is going to risk meeting up with Hurricanes or Spitfires. The patrol plane would also certainly radio Scapa to have them open a minefield passage for us. Lastly, they’d probably send out a destroyer or frigate or sloop—something fast, anyway, with enough depth-charges to discourage any U-boat that might be around.’

‘Not a very enviable choice,’ Bowen said. ‘Three days to Scapa, you would say?’

‘If we manage to shake off this U-boat which I’m pretty sure is following us. Five days to Reykjavík.’

‘What if we don’t manage to shake off our shadower? Aren’t they going to become very suspicious indeed when they see us altering course for Scapa Flow?’

‘If they do succeed in following us, they won’t notice any course alteration for a couple of days or more. During that time we’ll be on a direct course to Aberdeen. Once we get south of the latitude of Fair Isle we’ll alter course south-west or west-south-west or whatever for Scapa.’

‘It’s a chance. It’s a chance. You have any preference, Mr Patterson?’

‘I think I’ll leave my preference to the Bo’sun.’

‘I second that,’ Jamieson said.

‘Well?’

‘I’d feel happier in Scapa, sir.’

‘I think we all would. Well, Bo’sun, suggestion number one dealt with. Number two?’

‘There are six exits from the hospital area, sir, three for’ard and three aft. Don’t you think it would be wiser, sir, if we had everybody confined to the hospital area, except, of course, for those on watch in the engine-room and on the bridge? We know our latest Flannelfoot is still with us and it seems a good idea to confine his sphere of operations—if he has any left, which we don’t know—to as limited an area as possible. I suggest we seal up four of those doors, two aft, two for’ard and post guards at the other two doors.’

‘Weld them up, you mean?’ Jamieson said.

‘No. A bomb might hit the hospital. The two doors not sealed off might buckle and jam. Everyone would be trapped. We just close the doors in the usual way and give them a couple of moderate taps with a sledge.’

Patterson said: ‘And maybe Flannelfoot has access to his own private sledgehammer.’

‘He’d never dare use it. First metallic clang and he’d have the whole ship’s company on his back.’

‘True, true.’ Patterson sighed, ‘I grow old. You had a third point?’

‘Yes, sir. Involves you, if you will. I don’t think it would do any harm if you were to assemble everybody and tell them what’s going on—not that you can get across to Captain Andropolous and his crew—because I’m sure most have no idea what’s going on. Tell them about Dr Singh, the transceiver and what happened to Limassol. Tell them that another Flannelfoot is at large and that’s why we’ve closed all four doors so as to limit his movements. Please tell them that although it’s not a very nice thing, they are to watch each other like hawks—it is, after all, in their own survival interests—and to report any suspicious behaviour. It might just cramp Flannelfoot’s style and it will at least give them something to do.’

Bowen said: ‘You really think, Bo’sun, that this—the sealing off of the doors and the warning to the ship’s company—will keep Flannelfoot in check?’

‘On the basis of our performance to date,’ McKinnon said gloomily, ‘I very much doubt it.’

The afternoon and the early evening—and even although they were now more than three hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle early evening in those latitudes was still very early indeed—passed away as peacefully as McKinnon had expected. There was no sign of the U-boat but he had been certain that the U-boat would not show itself. There was no sign of any reconnaissance Condor, which only served to confirm his belief in the enemy concealed below, nor did any Heinkels or Stukas appear over the eastern horizon, for the hour of the coup de grâce had not yet come.

Half an hour after sunset the night was as dark as it was likely to become on the Norwegian Sea. Cloud cover was patchy and the rest of the sky hazy although a few pale stars could be seen.

‘Time, I think, George,’ McKinnon said to Naseby. ‘I’m going below. When the engines stop—that should be in seven or eight minutes’ time—bring her round 180° till we’re heading back the way we came. You should be able to pick up our wash even though it is dark. After that—well, we can only hope that you’ll pick up a star. I should be back in about ten minutes or so.’

On his way down he passed the Captain’s cabin. There was no longer anyone there to guard the sextant and chronometer: with two of the for’ard exits from the hospital area closed off and the third under guard it was impossible for anyone to reach the upper deck and so the bridge. On the deck it was so dark, the Bo’sun was pleased to note, that he had to use the guideline to find his way to the hospital. Stephen, the young stoker, was there, acting the part of sentry: McKinnon told him to join the others on the mess-decks. When they got there McKinnon found Patterson waiting for him.

‘Everybody here, sir?’

‘Everybody. Not forgetting Curran and Ferguson.’ Those two had been holed up in the carpenter’s shop in the bows. ‘Riot Act duly read. Anybody making the slightest sound after we stop—after the engines have stopped, rather—inadvertently or not, will be silenced. Talking only in whispers. Tell me, Bo’sun, is it really true that you can pick up the sound of a knife and fork on a plate?’

‘I don’t really know. I don’t know how sensitive the listening devices on a modern U-boat are. I do know that the sound of a spanner being dropped on a steel deck is easily detectable. No chances.’

He went into the two wards, checked that everybody had been told of the need for absolute silence, switched on the emergency lamps and went down to the engine-room. Only Jamieson and McCrimmon were there. Jamieson looked at him and switched on an emergency lamp.

‘Now, I take it?’

‘It’s as dark as it’s going to get, sir.’

Even by the time McKinnon had reached the mess-decks the engine revolutions had fallen away. He sat down at a mess table next to Patterson and waited in silence until the engines had stopped and the sound of the generator had died away. With the complete silence and only the feeble light from the emergency lamps to illuminate the area, the atmosphere held the elements of both the eerie and the sinister.

Patterson whispered: ‘No chance that the U-boat will think that their listening apparatus has failed?’

‘No, sir. You wouldn’t have to be a very efficient Asdic operator to know when engine revolutions are falling, then dying away.’

Jamieson and McCrimmon appeared, each carrying an emergency lamp. Jamieson sat beside McKinnon.

‘All we need now, Bo’sun, is a ship’s chaplain.’

‘A few prayers wouldn’t come amiss, sir. Especially a prayer that Flannelfoot hasn’t got a bug sending out a location signal.’

‘Please. Don’t even talk about such things.’ He was silent for some moments, then said: ‘We’re heeling, aren’t we?’

‘We are, yes. Naseby is making a 180° turn, heading back the way we came.’

‘Ah!’ Jamieson looked thoughtful. ‘So that he will over-shoot us. Turning back on our tracks. But won’t he do the same? I mean, wouldn’t that be the first thing that would occur to him?’

‘Quite honestly, I don’t and wouldn’t have the faintest idea as to what his first, second or tenth thoughts are. His first thought might be that our reversing course is so obvious a ploy that he’s not even going to consider it. He might even think that we’re carrying straight on for the Norwegian coast, which is so ludicrous a possibility that he may even be considering it. Or we might be heading back north-east again for the Barents Sea. Only a madman would do that, of course, but he’ll have to consider the fact, whether we think he thinks we’re mad—or not. Alternatively—and there are a lot of alternatives—he may figure that once we figure we’re clear of his Asdic clutches we’ll just continue on our course to Aberdeen. Or some place in north Scotland. Or the Orkneys. Or the Shetlands. There are an awful lot of options open to us and the chances are that he will pick the wrong one.’

‘I see,’ Jamieson said. ‘I say this in admiration, Bo’sun, and not in reproof: you have a very devious mind.’

‘Let’s just hope the Oberleutnant in charge of that U-boat out there hasn’t an even more devious mind.’ He turned to Patterson. ‘I’m going up top to join Naseby and see if there’s any sign of life around.’

‘Sign of life? You mean you think the U-boat may have surfaced and is looking for us.’

‘May have done.’

‘But it’s dark, you said.’

‘He’ll have a searchlight. Two of them, for all I know.’

Jamieson said: ‘And you think he’ll be using them?’

‘It’s a possibility. Not a probability. He’s bound to know by this time what happened to his fellow U-boat this morning.’

Patterson touched his arm. ‘You wouldn’t—ah—be considering another possibility—another collision?’

‘Heavens, no. I don’t really think the San Andreas could survive another bump like that. Not, of course, that the captain of that submarine is to know that. He may well be convinced that we’re desperate enough for anything.’

‘And we’re not?’

‘It’s a long way down to the bottom of the Norwegian Sea.’ McKinnon paused reflectively. ‘What we really need now is a nice little old blizzard.’

‘Still the Condor, still the flares. Is that it, Bo’sun?’

‘It’s not a thought that goes away easily.’ He turned to Jamieson. ‘Under way in half an hour, sir?’

‘Half an hour it is. But gently, gently?’

‘If you would, sir.’

McKinnon examined the sea from both sides of the upper deck but all was dark and quiet and still. He climbed to the bridge and went out on the wings, but even from this higher perspective there was nothing to be seen, no sweeping finger of a searchlight, nothing.

‘Well, George, this makes a change. All is quiet, all is peaceful.’

‘Is that a good sign or a bad one?’

‘Take your pick. Still quite a bit under way, aren’t we?’

‘Yes. I’ve just picked up our wake. And I’ve just located a couple of stars, one off the port bow, the other off the starboard. No idea what they are, of course, but it should keep us heading more or less west until we come to a halt.’

‘Which should take quite a while yet.’

In just under fifteen minutes the San Andreas was dead in the water and fifteen minutes after that she came to life again, albeit very, very slowly. From the bridge any sounds from the engine-room were quite inaudible, the only indication that they were under way came from the very faint vibration of the superstructure. After a few minutes McKinnon said: ‘Any steerage way yet, George?’

‘Barely. We’re about ten degrees off course right now. To the south. A couple of minutes and we’ll be heading west again. I wonder, I wonder.’

‘You wonder, I wonder, we all wonder—are we alone in the Norwegian Sea or do we have company, company that has no intention of making its presence known? I just guess and hope that we’re alone. Beyond a certain distance a submarine is not very good at picking up a very slow-turning engine and prop. What it can pick up is a generator—which is why there will be no lights down below for another fifteen minutes yet.’

Just under half an hour after McKinnon had arrived on the bridge the telephone bell shrilled. Naseby answered and handed the phone to the Bo’sun.

‘Bo’sun? This is Ward A. Sinclair speaking. I think you had better come down.’ Sinclair sounded weary or dispirited, or both. ‘Flannelfoot has struck again. There’s been an accident. No need to break your neck, though—nobody’s been hurt.’

‘We’ve been far too long without an accident.’ The Bo’sun felt as weary as Sinclair. ‘What happened?’

‘Transceiver’s wrecked.’

‘That’s just splendid. I’m on my way—at a leisurely pace.’ He replaced the phone. ‘Flannelfoot’s at it again, George. It seems that the transceiver in Ward A is not quite what it was.’

‘Oh Jesus.’ It wasn’t an exclamation of shock, horror or anger, just a sign of resignation. ‘Why wasn’t the alarm buzzer pressed.’

‘I shall no doubt find that out when I get there. I’ll send Trent to relieve you. I suggest you broach Captain Bowen’s supplies. Life aboard the San Andreas, George, is like life everywhere, just one damned thing after another.’

The first thing that took McKinnon’s eye in Ward A was not the transceiver in the Cardiac Arrest box but the sight of Margaret Morrison, eyes closed, lying on a bed with Janet Magnusson bending over her. The Bo’sun looked at Dr Sinclair, who was sitting disconsolately in the chair that was normally occupied by the ward sister.

‘I thought you said nobody had been hurt.’

‘Not hurt in the medical sense, although Sister Morrison might take issue with me on that matter. She’s been chloroformed but will be fine in a few minutes.’

‘Chloroformed? Flannelfoot doesn’t seem to have a very original turn of mind.’

‘He’s a callous bastard. This girl has just been wounded, once quite nastily, but this character seems to have been missing when they handed out humanitarian instincts.’

‘You expect delicacy and a tenderness of feeling from a criminal who tries to murder a man with a crowbar?’ McKinnon walked to the side of the table and looked down at the mangled remains of the transceiver. ‘I’ll spare you the obvious remarks. Naturally, of course, no one knows what happened because of course there were no eyewitnesses.’

‘That’s about it. If it’s any use, Nurse Magnusson here was the person to discover this.’

McKinnon looked at her. ‘Why did you come through? Did you hear a noise?’

She straightened from the bed and looked at him with some disfavour.

‘You are a cold-blooded fish, Archie McKinnon. This poor, poor girl lying here, the radio smashed and you don’t even look upset or annoyed, far less furious. I am furious.’

‘I can see that. But Margaret will be all right and the set is a total ruin. I see no point in getting angry about things I can do nothing about and what passes for my mind has other things to worry about. Did you hear anything?’

‘You’re hopeless. No, I heard nothing. I just came in to talk to her. She was crumpled over her table. I ran for Dr Sinclair and we lifted her into this bed here.’

‘Surely someone saw something. They couldn’t all have been asleep.’

‘No. The Captain and the Chief Officer were awake.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘You may have noticed, Mr McKinnon, that the eyes of both Captain Bowen and Chief Officer Kennet are heavily bandaged.’

‘You just wait,’ McKinnon said sotto voce, ‘until I get you to the Shetlands. They think a lot of me in Lerwick.’ She made a moue and the Bo’sun looked across to Bowen. ‘Did you hear anything, Captain?’

‘I heard something that sounded like the tinkling of glass. Wasn’t much, though.’

‘You, Mr Kennet?’

‘Same, Bo’sun. Again it wasn’t much.’

‘It didn’t have to be. You don’t require a sledgehammer to crush a few valves. A little pressure from the sole of the foot would be enough.’ He turned to Janet again. ‘But Margaret wouldn’t have been asleep. She’d have been bound—no, he couldn’t have come that way. He’d have had to pass through your ward. I’m not being very bright today, am I?’

‘No, you’re not.’ She smiled again but this time without malice. ‘Not our usual hawk-eyed selves this evening, are we?’

McKinnon turned and looked past the Sister’s table. The door to the recovery room was about an inch ajar. McKinnon nodded.

‘It figures. Why should he bother to close it when it would be obvious to anyone with half an eye—he must have forgotten about me—that there was no other way he could have entered. Mess-deck, side passage, operating room, recovery room, Ward A—simple as that. Every door unlocked, of course. Why should they have been otherwise? Well, we don’t bother locking them now. When did this happen, anyone know—sometime between engine start-up and the lights coming back on again?’

‘I think it had to be that,’ Sinclair said. ‘It would have been the ideal time and opportunity. About ten minutes after start-up but five minutes before the generator came on Mr Patterson gave permission for people to talk normally and move around as long as they didn’t make any loud noise. The emergency lights are pretty feeble at the best of times, everyone was talking excitedly—relief of tension I suppose, hopes that we had slipped the submarine, thankfulness that we were still in one piece, that sort of thing—and lots of people moving around. It would have been childishly simple for anyone to disappear unnoticed and return again after a minute, still unnoticed.’

‘Had to be that,’ the Bo’sun said. ‘Anyone of the crew, or that lot from Murmansk—in fact, anyone who was out there. Still no nearer the identity of the man with the key to the dispensary. Captain, Mr Kennet, I am wondering why you didn’t call Sister Morrison. Surely you must have smelled the chloroform?’

Janet said: ‘Oh, come on Archie, you can see that their noses are bandaged up. Could you smell anything with a handkerchief to your nose?’

‘You’re just half right, Nurse,’ Bowen said. ‘I did smell it but it was very faint. The trouble is that there are so many medical and antiseptic smells in a ward that I paid no attention to it.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t have gone back to the mess-deck with a sponge reeking of chloroform. Hands too, for that matter. Back in a moment.’

The Bo’sun unhooked an emergency light, went into the recovery room, looked around briefly, then passed into the operating theatre where he switched on the lights. Almost immediately, in a bucket in a corner, he found what he was looking for and returned to Ward A.

‘A sponge—duly reeking of chloroform—a smashed ampoule and a pair of rubber gloves. Quite useless.’

‘Not to Flannelfoot, they weren’t,’ Sinclair said.

‘Useless to us. Useless as evidence. Gets us nowhere.’ McKinnon perched on the Sister’s table and looked in slight irritation at Oberleutnant Klaussen who was muttering away to himself, unintelligibly, incessantly.

‘Is he still like this? Always like this?’

Sinclair nodded. ‘Goes on non-stop.’

‘Must be damned annoying. To the other patients and to the sister or nurse in charge. Why isn’t his bed wheeled into the recovery room?’

‘Because the sister in charge—that’s Margaret, remember?—doesn’t want him removed.’ Janet was being cool and patient. ‘He’s her patient, she wants to keep a close eye on him and she doesn’t mind. Any more questions, Archie?’

‘You mean why don’t I be on my way or keep quiet or go and do something. Do what? Do some detecting?’ He looked gloomy. ‘There’s nothing to detect. I’m just waiting till Margaret comes round.’

‘Signs of grace at last.’

‘I want to ask her some questions.’

‘I might have known. What questions? It’s as certain as can be that the assailant crept up behind her unseen and had her unconscious before she knew anything about it. Otherwise she’d have reached for the button or called for help. She did neither. There are no questions you can ask her that we can’t answer.’

‘As I’m not a gambler I won’t take your money away from you. Question number one. How did Flannelfoot know—and he must have known—that, apart from Captain Bowen and Mr Kennet who are effectively blind at the moment, everyone else in Ward A was asleep? He would never have dared to do what he did if there was even a remote possibility of someone being awake. So how did he know? Answer, please.’

‘I—I don’t know.’ She was obviously taken aback. ‘That had never occurred to me before. But I don’t think it occurred to anyone else either.’

‘Understandable. Such questions occur only to stupid old bo’suns. You’re just being defensive, Janet. Question number two. Who told him?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘But maybe Maggie does. Number three. What solicitous member of the crew or passengers made solicitous enquiries about the state of health of the patients in Ward A?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Maggie might know, mightn’t she? After all, she would be the obvious choice to be asked that question, wouldn’t she? And you said you could answer any questions that she could. Bosh! Question number four.’

‘Archie, you’re beginning to sound like a prosecuting counsel. I’m not guilty of anything.’

‘Don’t be daft. You’re not in dock. Fourth question and the most important of all. Flannelfoot, as we all know to our cost, is no fool. He must have taken into account the possibility that someone would ask the question of Maggie: with whom, Sister Morrison, did you discuss the state of health of your patients? He had to assume that Maggie was in the position to put the finger on him. So my question is why, to protect his anonymity, did he not, after rendering her unconscious, slit her throat? A nice sharp knife is just as silent as a chloroform sponge. It would have been the logical thing to do, wouldn’t it, Janet? But he didn’t. Why didn’t he murder her?’

Janet had gone very pale and when she spoke her voice was barely above a whisper.

‘Horrible,’ she said. ‘Horrible, horrible.’

‘Are you referring to me again? Goes well, I must say with what you last called me—a heartless fiend.’

‘Not you, not you.’ Her voice was still unsteady. ‘It’s the question. The thought. The possibility. It—it could have happened that way, couldn’t it, Archie?’

‘I’m more than mildly astonished that it didn’t. But I think we’ll find the answer when Maggie wakes up.’

The silence that fell upon the ward was broken by Bowen.

‘Very gallant of you, Bo’sun, very gallant indeed. Not to have reproached the young lady for being unable, as she had claimed she could, to answer the questions you asked. If it’s any consolation to your friend Janet, not one of those questions occurred to me either.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘That was very kind of you. Makes me feel more than halfway better already. See, Archie, I can’t be all that stupid.’

‘Nobody ever suggested you were. How long will it take her to come round, Dr Sinclair?’

‘Five minutes, fifteen, twenty-five? Impossible to say. People vary so much in their recovery times. And even when she does come out of it she’ll be fuzzy for some time, not mentally clear enough to remember and answer what might be difficult questions.’

‘When she is, call me, please. I’ll be on the bridge.’

ELEVEN

Half an hour later McKinnon joined Margaret Morrison in the small lounge off the mess-deck. She was pale and unsmiling but looked composed enough. He sat down opposite her.

‘How do you feel now?’

‘Bit sick. Bit nauseated.’ She half-smiled. ‘Dr Sinclair seemed to be more concerned about the state of my mind. I think that’s well enough.’

‘Fine. Well, not fine, it was a damnable thing to happen to you, but I feel less like commiserating with you than congratulating you.’

‘I know. Janet told me. I’m not one for mock shudders, Archie—but, well, he could have done, couldn’t he? I mean, cut my throat.’

‘He could have done. He should have done.’

‘Archie!’

‘Oh God, that wasn’t very well put, was it? I meant that for his own sake he should have done. He may just possibly have given away enough rope to hang himself.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’ She smiled to rob her words of offence. ‘I don’t think anyone understands quite what you mean. Janet says you’re a very devious character.’

‘Be you white as snow, etcetera. Only the truly honest get maligned in this fashion. A cross one has to bear.’

‘I have difficulty in seeing you in the role of martyr. Janet said you had lots of questions to ask me.’

‘Not lots. Just one. Well, a few, but all the same question. Where were you this afternoon before we stopped?’

‘In the mess-deck. Out there. Then I went to relieve Irene just before the lights went out.’

‘Anyone enquire about the health of the patients in Ward A when you were out there?’

‘Well, yes.’ She seemed faintly surprised. ‘I often get asked about the patients. Natural, isn’t it?’

‘This late afternoon, I meant.’

‘Yes. I told them. Also natural, isn’t it?’

‘Did they ask if anyone was asleep?’

‘No. Come to think of it, they didn’t have to. I remember telling them that only the Captain and First Officer were awake. It was some sort of joke.’ She broke off, touched her lips with her hand and looked thoroughly chagrined. ‘I see. It wasn’t really such a joke, was it—it let me in for half-an-hour’s involuntary sleep, didn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid it did. Who asked the question?’

‘Wayland Day.’

‘Ah! Our pantry boy—ex-pantry boy, I should say, and now your faithful shadow and worshipper from afar.’

‘Not always as far away as you might think, gets a little embarrassing at times.’ She smiled and then was suddenly serious. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, Archie. He may be a bit of a pest, but he’s only a boy and a very nice boy. It’s unthinkable.’

‘I don’t see a tree in sight. Agree, unthinkable. Our Wayland would never be a party to anything that might harm you. Who were the others at your table? Within hearing distance, I mean.’

‘How do you know there was anyone else at my table?’

‘Margaret Morrison is too clever to be stupid.’

‘That was stupid. Maria was there—’

‘Sister Maria?’ She nodded. ‘She’s out. Who else?’

‘Stephen. The Polish boy. Can’t pronounce his surname—no one can. Then there were Jones and McGuigan, who are nearly always with Wayland Day—I suppose because they are the three youngest members of the crew. Two seamen by the name of Curran and Ferguson—I hardly know them because I hardly ever see them. And, yes, I seem to remember there were two of the sick men we picked up in Murmansk. I don’t know their names.’

‘You seem to remember?’

‘No. I do. It’s because I don’t know their names, I suppose. I’m sure one’s a TB case, the other a nervous breakdown.’

‘You could identify them again?’

‘Easily. Both had red hair.’

‘E.R.A. Hartley and L.T.O. Simons.’ McKinnon opened the lounge door. ‘Wayland!’

Wayland Day appeared within seconds and stood at respectful attention. ‘Sir.’

‘Go and find Mr Patterson and Mr Jamieson. Oh yes, and Lieutenant Ulbricht. My compliments to them and ask them if they would please come here.’

‘Yes, sir. Right away, sir.’

Margaret Morrison looked at the Bo’sun in amusement. ‘How did you know that Wayland was so close?’

‘Ever tried to lose your shadow on a sunny day? I can prophesy things—nothing to do with the second sight—such as that Lieutenant Ulbricht will be the first along.’

‘Oh, do be quiet. Has this been of any good to you? Another stupid question. Must have been or you wouldn’t have sent for those three.’

‘Indeed it has. Another little complication but I think we can manage it. Ah, Lieutenant Ulbricht. That was very quick. Please sit down.’ Ulbricht took his seat by the side of Margaret Morrison while McKinnon contemplated the ceiling.

She said in a vexed voice: ‘There’s no need for that.’

Ulbricht looked at her. ‘What do you mean, Margaret?’

‘The Bo’sun has a warped sense of humour.’

‘Not at all. She just doesn’t like me being right.’ He looked round, greeted Patterson and Jamieson then rose and closed the door with a firm hand.

‘As serious as that, is it?’ Patterson said.

‘I’d rather we weren’t overheard, sir.’ He gave them a brief résumé of the talks he’d had with Janet Magnusson and Margaret Morrison, then said: ‘One of those nine people within hearing distance of Sister Morrison knew that Captain Bowen and Mr Kennet were the only two patients in Ward A who were awake and made the fullest use of that information. Agreed?’

No one disagreed.

‘We can rule out Sister Maria. No hard reason, except that it’s inconceivable.’

‘Inconceivable.’ Both Patterson and Jamieson spoke at the same time.

‘Stephen? No. He’s pro-British enough to make us all feel ashamed and he’ll never forget that it was the Royal Navy that saved his life in the North Sea.’

Margaret Morrison looked up in surprise. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Neither did we, Sister, even although he is in the engine-room department. Not till the Bo’sun told us. His agents are in every nook and cranny.’ Patterson seemed slightly aggrieved.

‘Wayland Day, Jones and McGuigan. No. They’re hardly out of kindergarten and haven’t lived enough or been steeped enough in sin to make apprentice counter-espionage agents, junior grade. That leaves us with four suspects.’

‘Curran and Ferguson are out. I know them. They are shirkers and malingerers of the first order and haven’t the energy, interest or intelligence to make the grade. That apart, they spend all their spare time holed up in the carpenter’s shop in the bows and leave it so seldom that they can hardly know what’s going on in the rest of the ship. Final proof, of course, is that though they may not be very bright they’re hardly stupid enough to set off an explosive charge in the ballast room while they are sleeping in the carpenter’s shop directly above. That leaves Simons and Hartley, two of the sick men—or allegedly sick men—that we picked up in Murmansk. Don’t you think we should have them up here, Mr Patterson?’

‘I do indeed, Bo’sun. This is becoming interesting.’

McKinnon opened the door. ‘Wayland!’

If possible, Wayland Day made it in even less time than the previous occasion. McKinnon gave him his instructions, then added: ‘Have them here in five minutes. Tell them to bring their pay-books.’ He closed the door and looked at Margaret Morrison.

‘Wouldn’t you like to leave now?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. Why should I? I’m as interested and involved in this as any of you.’ In a wholly unconscious gesture, she touched her throat. ‘More, I would say.’

‘You might not like it.’

‘A Gestapo-type interrogation, is that it?’

‘How they are treated depends entirely on Mr Patterson. I’m only venturing an opinion, but I wouldn’t think that Mr Patterson goes in very much for thumbscrews and racks. Not standard engine-room equipment.’

She looked at him coldly. ‘Facetiousness does not become you.’

‘Very little does, it seems.’

‘Hartley and Simons,’ Jamieson said. ‘We had them on our list of suspects. Well, more or less. Remember, Bo’sun?’

‘I remember. I also remember that we agreed that the CID were in no danger of a takeover from us.’

‘Something I have to say,’ Ulbricht said. ‘Discouraging, but I have to say it. I was here from the time the generator lights went out until they came on again. With their red heads, those two men are unmistakable. Neither of them left their seats in that time.’

‘Well, now.’ Margaret Morrison had an air of satisfaction about her. ‘Rather puts a damper on your theory doesn’t it, Mr McKinnon?’

‘Sad, Sister, very sad. You really would like to prove me wrong, wouldn’t you? I have the odd feeling that I will have been proved wrong before this trip is over. Not by you, though.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s still sad.’

Sister Morrison could be very persistent. She put on her best ward sister’s face and said: ‘You heard what the Lieutenant said—neither of those two men left their seats during the crucial period.’

‘I should be astonished if they had done.’ Margaret Morrison’s prim frown gave way to perplexity which in turn yielded to a certain wariness. McKinnon looked at Ulbricht. ‘Lieutenant, we are not just dealing with Flannelfoot number two: we are dealing with Flannelfeet numbers two and three. We have established that it was number two, a crew member, who blew the hole in the ballast room when we were alongside that sinking corvette. But no crew member under suspicion was within hearing range of Sister Morrison. So the finger points at Hartley or Simons. Maybe both. It was clever. There was no way we could reasonably associate them with the misfortune of the San Andreas, for at the time the first hole was blown in the ballast they were still in hospital in Murmansk, where one or both had been suborned. Of course neither was going to leave his seat during the time of the attack. That could have been too obvious.’

Ulbricht tapped his head. ‘The only thing that is obvious to me is that Lieutenant Ulbricht is not at his brightest and best today. Hit me over the head with a two-by-four long enough and I’ll see the point as fast as any man. Of course you have the right of it. Obvious.’ He looked at Margaret Morrison. ‘Don’t you agree?’

There was a distinct tinge of red in the normally pale face. ‘I suppose so.’

‘There’s no supposing.’ The Bo’sun sounded slightly weary. ‘What happened was that the information was passed on before—well before—the engines stopped. How long before the engines stopped did Wayland Day ask you the question about Ward A?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’

‘Come on, Margaret. Can’t you see it’s important?’

‘Fifteen minutes?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Maybe twenty. I’m really not sure.’

‘Of course you’re not. People don’t check their watches every five minutes. But during those fifteen or twenty minutes one of those two men left his seat and returned?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was very low.

‘Which one?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Please believe me. I know I said earlier that I could easily identify them—’

‘Please, Margaret. I believe you. What you meant is that you could identify them as a pair, not individually. Both look uncommonly alike, both have red hair and you didn’t even know their names.’

She smiled at him, a grateful little smile, but said nothing.

‘You do have the right of it, Bo’sun. Apart from that, I’m convinced of it because there’s no other explanation.’ Patterson rubbed his chin. ‘This interrogation business. Like Mr Jamieson and yourself, I don’t really think I’m CID material. How do we set about it?’

‘I suggest we first try to establish their bona fides—if any—to see if they are what they say they are. Hartley claims to be an Engine-Room Artificer. I’ll leave him to you. Simons says he’s a Leading Torpedo Operator. I’ll speak to him.’ He looked at his watch. ‘The five minutes are up.’

Patterson didn’t invite either man to sit. For some seconds he looked at them coolly and thoughtfully, then said: ‘My name is Chief Engineer Patterson. I am in temporary command of this vessel and have some questions to ask. The reasons for the questioning can wait. Which of you is E.R.A. Hartley?’

‘I am, sir.’ Hartley was slightly taller, slightly more heavily built than Simons, but otherwise the resemblance was remarkable: Margaret Morrison’s confusion over the pair was more than understandable.

‘You claim to be an E.R.A. Can you prove it?’

‘Prove it?’ Hartley was taken aback. ‘What do you mean—“prove it”, sir? I don’t have any certificates on me if that’s what you’re after.’

‘You could pass a practical test?’

‘A practical test?’ Hartley’s face cleared. ‘Of course, sir. I’ve never been in your engine-room but that’s no matter. An E.R.A. is an E.R.A. Take me to your engine-room and I’ll identify any piece of equipment you have. I can do that blindfold—all I have to do is touch. I’ll tell you the purpose of that or any piece of equipment and I can strip it down and put it together again.’

‘Hm.’ Patterson looked at Jamieson. ‘What do you think?’

‘I wouldn’t waste our time, sir.’

‘Neither would I.’ He nodded to the Bo’sun, who looked at Simons.

‘You L.T.O. Simons?’

‘Yeah. And who are you?’ McKinnon looked at the thin arrogant face and thought it unlikely that they would ever be blood-brothers. ‘You’re not an officer.’

‘I’m a seaman.’

‘I don’t answer questions from a Merchant Navy seaman.’

‘You will, you know,’ Patterson said. ‘Mr McKinnon is hardly the equivalent of the Royal Navy’s ordinary seaman. The senior seaman aboard, the equivalent of your warrant officer. Not that it matters to you what he is. He’s acting under my orders and if you defy him you defy me. You understand?’

‘No.’

McKinnon said in a mild voice: ‘ “No, sir,” when you’re talking to a senior officer.’

Simons sneered, there was a blur of movement and Simons was doubled over, making retching sounds and gasping for breath. McKinnon looked at him unemotionally as he gradually straightened and said to Patterson: ‘May I have an option as regards this man, sir? He’s an obvious suspect.’

‘He is. You may.’

‘Either irons, bread and water till we reach port or a private interrogation with me.’

‘Irons!’ Simons’ voice was a wheeze, a McKinnon jab to the solar plexus was not something from which one made an instant recovery. ‘You can’t do that to me.’

‘I can and if necessary will.’ Patterson’s tone was chillingly indifferent, ‘I am in command of this ship. If I choose, I can have you over the side. Alternatively, if I have proof that you are a spy, I can have you shot as a spy. Wartime regulations say so.’ Wartime regulations, in fact, said nothing of the kind but it was most unlikely that Simons knew this.

‘I’ll settle for the private interrogation,’ McKinnon said.

A horrified Margaret Morrison said: ‘Archie, you can’t—’

‘Be quiet.’ Patterson’s voice was cold, ‘I suggest, Simons, that you will be well advised to answer a few simple questions.’ Simons scowled and said nothing.

McKinnon said: ‘You an L.T.O?’

“Course I am.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘Like Hartley here, I haven’t any certificates with me. And you don’t have any torpedoes to test me with. Not that you would know one end of a torpedo from another.’

‘What’s your barracks?’

‘Portsmouth.’

‘Where did you qualify L.T.O.?’

‘Portsmouth, of course.’

‘When?’

‘Early ‘forty-three.’

‘Let me see your pay-book.’ McKinnon examined it briefly, then looked up at Simons. ‘Very new and very clean.’

‘Some people look after their things.’

‘You didn’t make a very good job of looking after your old one, did you?’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘This is either a new one, a stolen one or a forged one.’

‘God’s sake, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘You know all right.’ The Bo’sun tossed the pay-book on the table. ‘That’s a forgery, you’re a liar and you’re not an L.T.O. Unfortunately for you, Simons, I was a Torpedo Gunner’s Mate in the Navy. No L.T.O’s qualified in Portsmouth in early nineteen forty-three, or indeed for some considerable time before and after that. They qualified at Roedean College near Brighton—used to be the leading girls’ school in Britain before the war. You’re a fraud and a spy, Simons. What’s the name of your accomplice aboard the San Andreas?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Amnesia.’ McKinnon stood and looked at Patterson. ‘Permission to lock him up, sir?’

‘Permission granted.’

‘Nobody’s going to bloody well lock me up,’ Simons shouted. ‘I demand—‘ His voice broke off in a scream as McKinnon twisted his forearm high up behind his back.

‘You’ll stay here, sir?’ McKinnon said. Patterson nodded. ‘I won’t be long. Five, ten minutes. We won’t be needing E.R.A. Hartley any more?’

‘Of course not. Sorry about that, E.R.A. But we had to know.’

‘I understand, sir.’ It was quite apparent that he did not understand.

‘You don’t. But we’ll explain later.’ Hartley left, followed by McKinnon and Simons, the latter with his right wrist still somewhere up in the vicinity of his left shoulder-blade.

‘Ten minutes,’ Margaret Morrison said. ‘It takes ten minutes to lock up a man.’

‘Sister Morrison,’ Patterson said. She looked at him. ‘I admire you as a nurse. I like you as a person. But don’t interfere in things or presume to pass judgement on things you know nothing about. The Bo’sun may only be a bo’sun but he operates at a level you know nothing about. If it weren’t for him you’d be either a prisoner or dead. Instead of constantly sniping at him you’d be better occupied in giving thanks for a world where there’s still a few Archie McKinnons around.’ He broke off and cursed in silent self-reproach as he saw tears trickling down the lowered head.

McKinnon pushed Simons inside an empty cabin, locked the door, pocketed the key, turned and hit Simons in exactly the same spot as previously although with considerably more force. Simons staggered backwards across the corticene, smashed heavily into the bulkhead and slid to the deck. McKinnon picked him up, held his right arm against the bulkhead and struck his right biceps with maximum power. Simons screamed, tried to move his right arm and found it impossible: it was completely paralysed. The Bo’sun repeated the process on the left arm and let him slide down again.

‘I am prepared to keep this up indefinitely,’ McKinnon’s voice was conversational, almost pleasant. ‘I’m going to keep on hitting you, and if necessary, kicking you anywhere between your shoulders and toes. There won’t be a mark on your face. I don’t like spies, I don’t like traitors and I don’t care too much for people with innocent blood on their hands.’

McKinnon returned to the lounge and resumed his seat. Ulbricht looked at his watch and said: ‘Four minutes. My word, you do keep your word, Mr McKinnon.’

‘A little dispatch, that’s all.’ He looked at Margaret Morrison and the still visible tear stains. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. It’s just this whole horrible ugly business.’

‘It’s not nice.’ He looked at her for a speculative moment, made as if to say something, then changed his mind. ‘Simons has come all over cooperative and volunteered some information.’

‘Cooperative?’ Margaret said incredulously. ‘Volunteered?’

‘Never judge a man by his appearances. There are hidden depths in all of us. His name is not Simons, it’s Braun, “au”, not “ow”.’

‘German, surely,’ Patterson said.

‘Sounds that way but he is RN. His passport is a forgery—someone in Murmansk gave it to him. He couldn’t be more specific than that, I assume it must have been a member of what must now be that espionage ring up there. He’s not an L.T.O., he’s an S.B.A., a Sick Bay Attendant, which ties in rather nicely with the chloroform used twice and the drugging of Captain Andropolous.’ He tossed two keys on the table. ‘I’m sure Dr Sinclair will confirm that those are the dispensary keys.’

‘Goodness me,’ jamieson said. ‘You have not been idle, Bo’sun, and that’s a fact. He—Braun—must have been most communicative.’

‘He was indeed. He even gave me the identity of Flannelfoot number two.’

‘What!’

‘Remember, Margaret, that I said to you only a few minutes ago that I would be proved wrong about something before the trip was over. Well, it hasn’t taken long for me to prove I was right about that. It’s McCrimmon.’

‘McCrimmon!’ Jamieson was half out of his seat. ‘McCrimmon. That bloody young bastard!’

‘You are sitting—well, more or less—next to a young lady.’ McKinnon’s tone of reproof was mild.

‘Ah! Yes. So I am. Sorry, Sister.’ Jamieson sat again. ‘But—McCrimmon!’

‘I think the fault is mainly mine, sir. I’ve been on record as saying that although he was a criminal, I regarded him as a trustworthy criminal. Serious flaw in judgement. But I was half right.’

‘I can accept that it was McCrimmon.’ Patterson’s tone was calm and if he was upset it wasn’t showing. ‘Never liked him. Truculent, offensive, foul-mouthed. Two terms in Barlinnie, the maximum security prison outside Glasgow. Both for street violence. I should imagine that the feel of an iron crowbar in his hand is nothing new to that man. The Royal Navy would never have accepted a man with his record. One can only assume that we have lower standards.’ He paused and considered. ‘We pull him in?’

‘I wonder. I’d love to have a little chat with him. Point is, Mr Patterson, I don’t think we’d get any useful information out of him. Men who hired him would be far too clever to tell a character like McCrimmon any more than he needed to know. They certainly wouldn’t tell him what their plans, their end was. It would be a case of “just do so-and-so and here’s your cash”. Also, sir, if we leave him loose, we can watch every move he makes without his knowing that we are watching. It’s quite possible he has something more up his sleeve and if we can watch him in the act of what he’s doing it might give us some very valuable information indeed. What, I can’t imagine, but I have the feeling that we should give him that little more rope.’

‘I agree. If he’s bent on hanging himself, just that little more rope.’

Lieutenant Ulbricht had found them a star to steer themselves by. He was on the bridge with McKinnon as the San Andreas headed due west at full speed, Curran at the wheel. Cloud cover was patchy, the wind light and the sea relatively calm. Ulbricht had just caught a brief but sufficient glance of the Pole Star and had established that they were in almost exactly the same place as they had been at noon that morning. He had remained on the bridge where he seemed to prefer to spend his time except, the Bo’sun couldn’t help noticing, during those periods when Margaret Morrison was off duty.

‘Think we’ve shaken him now, Mr McKinnon? Three and a half hours, maybe four, since we may have shaken him.’

‘Nor hide nor hair of him and that’s a fact. But because we can’t see him, as I keep on saying, doesn’t mean that he’s not there. But, yes, I do have this odd feeling that we may have slipped him.’

‘I have a certain regard for your so-called odd feelings.’

‘I only said “may”. We won’t know for certain until the first Condor comes along with its flares.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about such things. Anyway, it’s possible that we may have lost him and that the Focke-Wulf may fail to find us. How long do you intend to maintain this course?’

‘The longer the better, I should think. If they have lost us, then they’ll probably reason that we’re heading back on a course to Aberdeen—as far as we know, they have no reason to believe that we have reason to believe that they know we’re heading for Aberdeen and would therefore opt for some place else. So they may still think that we’re on a roughly south-south-west course instead of due west. I have heard it said, Lieutenant Ulbricht, I can’t remember who it was, that some Germans at some times have one-track minds.’

‘Nonsense. Look at our poets and playwrights, our composers and philosophers.’ Ulbricht was silent for some moments and McKinnon could imagine him smiling to himself in the darkness. ‘Well, yes, maybe now and again. I sincerely hope that this is one of those times. The longer they keep combing the area in the direction of Aberdeen and the longer we keep heading west the less chance they will have of locating us. So we keep this course for an hour or two more?’

‘Yes. Longer. I propose that we maintain this course throughout the night, then, shortly before dawn, lay off a course directly for Scapa Flow.’

‘Sounds fair enough to me. That’ll mean leaving the Shetlands on our port hand. May even have a glimpse of your islands. Pity you couldn’t drop in in passing.’

‘There’ll come a day. Dinner-time, Lieutenant.’

‘So soon? Mustn’t miss that. Coming?’

‘May as well. Curran, get on the phone and ask Ferguson to come up here. Tell him to keep a constant look-out on both wings. 360 degrees, you understand.’

‘I’ll do that. What’s he supposed to be looking out for, Bo’sun?’

‘Flares.’

McKinnon met Jamieson just after they’d entered the mess-deck and drew him to one side.

‘Our traitorous friend been up to anything he should not have been up to, sir?’

‘No. Guaranteed. Chief Patterson and I had a discussion and we decided to take all the engine-room staff into our confidence—well, all except one, Reilly, who seems to be the only person who talks to him. Reilly apart, McCrimmon would win any unpopularity contest without trying, he’s the most cordially detested person in the engine-room. So we spoke to each man individually, told them the score, and told them not to discuss the matter with any other member of the crew. So he’ll be under constant supervision, both in the engine-room and in the mess-decks.’ He looked closely at McKinnon. ‘We thought it a good idea. You don’t seem quite sure?’

‘Whatever you and Mr Patterson decide is okay by me.’

‘Dammit.’ Jamieson spoke with some feeling. ‘I suggested to the Chief that we talk to you but he was sure you’d think it a good idea.’

‘I really don’t know, sir.’ McKinnon was doubtful. ‘It seems a good idea. But—well, McCrimmon may be a villain but he’s a clever villain. Don’t forget that he’s gone completely undetected and unsuspected so far and would have kept on that way but for a lucky accident. Being a crude, violent and detestable person with a penchant for crowbars doesn’t mean that he can’t be sensitive to atmosphere, to people being over-casual on the one hand and too furtively watchful on the other. Also, if Reilly is on speaking terms with him shouldn’t he be under observation too?’

‘It’s not all that bad, Bo’sun. Even if he does suspect he’s under observation, isn’t that a guarantee for his good behaviour?’

‘Either that or a guarantee that when—if—he does something he shouldn’t be doing he’s going to make damn sure that there’s no one around when he does it, which is the last thing we wanted. If he believed he was still in the clear he might have betrayed himself. Now he never will.’ McKinnon looked at their table. ‘Where’s Mr Patterson?’

Jamieson looked uncomfortable. ‘Keeping an eye on things.’

‘Keeping an eye on things? Keeping an eye on McCrimmon, you mean. Mr Patterson has never missed dinner since joining this ship. You know that, I know that—and you can be sure McCrimmon knows that. If he has the slightest suspicion that we have the slightest suspicion I can just hear those alarm bells clanging in his head.’

‘It is possible,’ Jamieson said slowly, ’that it may not have been such a good idea after all.’

Patterson wasn’t the only absentee at the table that night. Janet Magnusson was on duty and both Sister Maria and Dr Sinclair were engaged in the ticklish and rather painful task of re-bandaging Captain Bowen’s head. Captain Bowen, it was reported, was making a considerable amount of noise.

Jamieson said: ‘Does Dr Sinclair think he’ll be able to see again?’ Jamieson, like the three others at the table, was nursing a glass of wine while waiting for the first course to be served.

‘He’s pretty sure,’ Margaret Morrison said. ‘So am I. Some days yet, though. The eyelids are badly blistered.’

‘And the rest of the ward sound asleep as usual?’ She winced and shook her head and Jamieson said hastily: ‘Sorry, that wasn’t a very tactful question, was it?’

She smiled. ‘It’s all right. It’s just that it’ll take me a day or two to get Simons and McCrimmon out of my head. As usual, only Mr Kennet is awake. Perhaps Oberleutnant Klaussen is too—it’s hard to say. Never still, keeps rambling on.’

‘And making as little sense as ever?’ McKinnon said.

‘None. All in German, of course, except for one word in English which he keeps repeating over and over again as if he was haunted by it. It’s odd, the theme of Scotland keeps cropping up all the time.’ She looked at Ulbricht. ‘You know Scotland well. We’re headed for Scotland. I’m half-Scots. Archie and Janet, although they claim to be Shetlanders, are really Scots.’

McKinnon said: ‘And don’t forget the lad with the chloroform pad.’

She grimaced. ‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’

‘Sorry. Stupid. And what’s the Scots connection with Klaussen?’

‘It’s the word he keeps repeating. Edinburgh.’

‘Ah! Edinburgh. The Athens of the North!’ Ulbricht sounded very enthusiastic. ‘Know it well, very well. Better than most Scots, I dare say. Edinburgh Castle. Holyrood Palace. The shrine. The Gardens. Princes Street, the most beautiful of all—‘ His voice trailed off, then he said in a sharp tone: ‘Mr McKinnon! What’s the matter?’

The other two looked at the Bo’sun. His eyes were those of a man who was seeing things at a great distance and the knuckles of the big hand around the glass were showing white. Suddenly the glass shattered and the red wine flowed over the table.

‘Archie!’ The girl reached across the table and caught his wrist. ‘Archie! What is it!’

‘Well, now that was a damn stupid thing to do, wasn’t it?’ The voice was calm, without emotion, the Bo’sun back on balance again. He wiped away the blood with a paper napkin. ‘Sorry about that.’

She twisted his wrist until the palm showed. ‘You’ve cut yourself. Quite badly.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Edinburgh, is it? He’s haunted by it. That’s what you said, Margaret. Haunted. So he damn well ought to be. And I should be haunted, too. All my life. For being so blind, so bloody well eternally stupid.’

‘How can you say such a thing? If you see something that we can’t see, then we’re all more stupid than you are.’

‘No. Because I know something that you don’t know.’

‘What is it, then?’ There was curiosity in her voice, but it was overlaid by a deeper apprehension. ‘What is it?’

McKinnon smiled. ‘Margaret, I would have thought that you of all people would have learnt the dangers of talking in public. Would you please bring Captain Bowen to the lounge.’

‘I can’t. He’s having his head bandaged.’

‘I rather think, Margaret, you should do what the Bo’sun suggests.’ It was the first time that Ulbricht had used her Christian name in company. ‘Something tells me that the Captain will need no second invitation.’

‘And bring your pal,’ McKinnon said. ‘What I have to say may well be of interest to her.’

She looked at him for a long and thoughtful moment, then nodded and left without a word. McKinnon watched her go, an equally thoughtful expression on his face, then turned to Jamieson. ‘I think you should ask one of your men to request Mr Patterson to come to the lounge also.’

Captain Bowen came into the lounge accompanied by Dr Sinclair, who had no alternative but to come for he was still only half way through re-bandaging Bowen’s head.

‘It looks as if we’ll have to change our minds again about our plans,’ McKinnon said. He had a certain air of resignation about him, due not to the change in plans but to the fact that Janet was firmly bandaging his cut palm. ‘It’s certain now that the Germans, if they can’t take us, will send us to the bottom. The San Andreas is no longer a hospital ship, it’s more of a treasure ship. We are carrying a fortune in gold. I don’t know how much but I would guess at something between twenty and thirty million pounds sterling.’

Nobody said anything. There wasn’t much one could make in the way of comment about such a preposterous statement and the Bo’sun’s relaxed certainty didn’t encourage what might have been the expected exclamatory chorus of surprise, doubt or disbelief.

‘It is, of course, Russian gold, almost certainly in exchange for lend-lease. The Germans would love to get their hands on it, for I suppose gold is gold no matter what the country of origin, but if they can’t get it they’re going to make damned sure that Britain doesn’t get it either, and this is not out of spite or frustration, although I suppose that that would play some part. But what matters is this. The British Government is bound to know that we’re carrying this gold—you’ve only got to think about it for a moment to see that this must have been a joint planned operation between the Soviet and British Governments.’

‘Using a hospital ship as a gold transport?’ Jamieson’s disbelief was total. ‘The British Government would never be guilty of such a pernicious act.’

‘I am in no position to comment on that, sir. I can imagine that our Government can be as perfidious as any other and there are plenty of perfidious governments around. Ethics, I should think, take very much a back seat in war—if there are any ethics in war. All I want to say about the Government is that they are going to be damned suspicious of the Russians and would put the worst possible interpretation on our disappearance—they may well arrive at the conclusion that the Russians intercepted the ship after it had sailed, got rid of the crew, sailed the San Andreas to any port in northern Russia, unloaded the gold and scuttled the ship. Alternatively, they might well believe the Russians didn’t even bother to load any gold at all but just lay in wait for the San Andreas. The Russians do have a submarine fleet, small as it is, in Murmansk and Archangel.

‘Whichever option the Government prefers to believe, and I can imagine it highly likely that they will believe one or the other, the result will be the same and one that would delight the hearts of the Germans. The British Government is going to believe that the Russians welshed on the deal and will be extremely suspicious not only of this but of any future deal. They’ll never be able to prove anything but there is something they can do—reduce or even stop all future lend-lease to Russia. This could be a more effective way of stopping Allied supplies to Russia than all the U-boats in the North Atlantic and Arctic.’

There was quite a long silence, then Bowen said: ‘It’s a very plausible scenario, Bo’sun, attractive—if one may use that word—even convincing. But it does rather depend on one thing: why do you think we have this gold aboard?’

‘I don’t think, sir. I know. Only a few minutes ago, just after we had sat down to dinner, Sister Morrison here happened to mention Oberleutnant Klaussen’s constant delirious ramblings. In his delirium one word kept recurring—Edinburgh. Sister says he seemed to be haunted by that word. I should damn well think he was. It was not so very long ago that a U-boat sent the cruiser Edinburgh to the bottom on her way back from Russia. The Edinburgh was carrying at least twenty million pounds of gold bullion in her holds.’

‘Good God!’ Bowen’s voice was no more than a whisper: ‘Good God above! You have the right of it, Archie, by heaven you have the right of it.’

‘It all ties in too damn nicely, sir. It had been dunned into Klaussen that he was not to repeat the exploits of his illustrious predecessor who had dispatched the Edinburgh. It also accounts—the sinking of the Edinburgh, I mean—for the rather underhanded decision to use the San Andreas. Any cruiser, any destroyer can be sunk. By the Geneva Convention, hospital ships are inviolate.’

‘I only wish I had told you sooner,’ Margaret Morrison said. ‘He’d been muttering about Edinburgh ever since he was brought aboard. I should have realized that it must have meant something.’

‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with,’ McKinnon said. ‘Why should the word have had any significance for you? Delirious men rave on about anything. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if we had found out earlier. What does matter is that we have found out before it’s too late. At least, I hope it’s not too late. If there are any reproaches going they should come in my direction. At least I knew about the Edinburgh—I don’t think anyone else did—and shouldn’t have had to be reminded of it. Spilt milk.’

‘It does all mesh together, doesn’t it?’ Jamieson said. ‘Explains why they wouldn’t let you and Mr Rennet see what was going on behind that tarpaulin when they were repairing the hole in the ship’s side. They didn’t want you to see that they were replacing that ballast they’d taken out to lighten ship by a different sort of ballast altogether. I suppose you knew what the original ballast looked like?’

‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I’m sure Mr Kennet didn’t know either.’

‘The Russians weren’t to know that and took no chances. Oh, I’m sure they’d have painted the bullion grey or whatever the colour of the ballast was: the size and shape of the blocks and bars of the gold would almost certainly have been different. Hence the “No Entry” sign at the tarpaulin. Everything that has happened since can be explained by the presence of that gold.’ Jamieson paused, seemed to hesitate then nodded as if he had made up his mind. ‘Doesn’t it strike you, Bo’sun, that McCrimmon poses a bit of a problem?’

‘Not really. He’s a double agent.’

‘Damn it!’ Jamieson was more than a little chagrined. ‘I’d hoped, for once, that I might be the first to come up with the solution to a problem.’

‘A close run thing,’ McKinnon said. ‘The same question had occurred to me at the same time. It’s the only answer, isn’t it? Espionage history—or so I am led to believe—is full of accounts of double agents. McCrimmon’s just another. His primary employer—his only really true employer—is, of course, Germany. We may find out, we may not, how the Germans managed to infiltrate him into the service of the Russians but infiltrate him they did. Sure, it was the Russians who instructed him to blow that hole in the ballast room, but that was even more in the Germans’ interest than the Russians’. Both had compelling reasons to find an excuse to divert the San Andreas to Murmansk, the Russians to load the gold, the Germans to load Simons and that charge in the ballast room.’

‘A tangled story,’ Bowen said, ‘but not so tangled when you take the threads apart. This alters things more than a little, doesn’t it, Bo’sun?’

‘I rather think it does, sir.’

‘Any idea of the best course—I use that word in both its senses—to take for the future?’

‘I’m open to suggestions.’

‘You’ll get none from me. With all respect to Dr Sinclair, his ministrations have just about closed down a mind that wasn’t working all that well in the first place.’

‘Mr Patterson?’ McKinnon said. ‘Mr Jamieson?’

‘Oh no,’ Jamieson said. ‘I have no intention of being caught out in that way again. It does my morale no good to have it quietly explained to me why my brilliant scheme won’t work and why it would be much better to do it your way. Besides, I’m an engineer. What do you have in mind?’

‘On your own heads. I have in mind to continue on this course, which is due west, until about midnight. This will help to take us even further away from the Heinkels and Stukas. I’m not particularly worried about them, they rarely attack after dark and if we’re right in our assumption that we’ve slipped that U-boat, then they don’t know where to look for us and the absence of any flares from a Condor would suggest that, if they are looking, they are looking in the wrong place.

‘At midnight, I’ll ask the Lieutenant to lay off a course for Aberdeen. We must hope that there will be a few helpful stars around. That would take us pretty close to the east coast of the Shetlands, Lieutenant?’

‘Very close indeed, I should say. Hailing distance. You’ll be able to wave a last farewell to your homeland, Mr McKinnon.’

‘Mr McKinnon isn’t going to wave farewell to any place.’ The voice was Janet Magnusson’s and it was pretty positive. ‘He needs a holiday, he tells me, he’s homesick and Lerwick is his home. Right, Archie?’

‘You have the second sight, Janet.’ If McKinnon was chagrined at having his thunder stolen he showed no signs of it. ‘I thought it might be a good idea, Captain, to stop off a bit in Lerwick and have a look at what we have up front. This has two advantages, I think. We’re certain now that the Germans will sink us sooner than permit our safe arrival in any British port and the further south we go the greater the likelihood of being clobbered, so we make as little southing as possible. Secondly, if we are found by either plane or U-boat, they’ll be able to confirm that we’re still on a direct course to Aberdeen and so have plenty of time in hand. At the appropriate moment we’ll turn west, round a place called Bard Head, then north-west and north to Lerwick. From the time we alter course till the time we reach harbour shouldn’t be much more than an hour and it would take rather longer than that for the German bombers to scramble from Bergen and reach there.’

‘Sounds pretty good to me,’ Jamieson said.

‘I wish I could say the same. It’s far too easy, too cut and dried, and there’s always the possibility of the Germans figuring out that that’s exactly what we will do. Probability would be more like. It’s too close to a counsel of desperation, but it’s the least of all the evils I can imagine and we have to make a break for it some time.’

‘As I keep on saying, Bo’sun,’ Jamieson said, ‘it’s a great comfort having you around.’

TWELVE

The time wore on to midnight and still the Condors kept away. Apart from two men on watch in the engine-room, Naseby and Trent on the bridge and Lieutenant Ulbricht and McKinnon in the Captain’s cabin, two hospital look-outs and two night nurses, everyone was asleep, or appeared to be asleep, or should have been asleep. The wind, backing to the north, had freshened to Force four and there was a moderate sea running, enough to make the San Andreas roll as she headed steadily west but not enough to inconvenience one.

In the Captain’s cabin Lieutenant Ulbricht looked up from the chart he had been studying, then glanced at his watch.

‘Ten minutes to midnight. Not that the precise time matters—we’ll be making course alterations as we go along. I suggest we take a last sight, then head for the Shetlands.’

Dawn came, a cold and grey and blustery dawn, and still the Condors stayed away. At ten o‘clock, a rather weary McKinnon—he’d been on the wheel since 4.0 a.m.—went below in search of breakfast. He found Jamieson having a cup of coffee.

‘A peaceful night, Bo’sun. Does look as if we’ve shaken them off, doesn’t it?’

‘So it would seem.’

‘Seem? Only “seem”?’ Jamieson looked at him speculatively. ‘Do I detect a note of something less than cheerful confidence? A whole night long without a sign of the enemy. Surely we should be happy with our present circumstances?’

‘Sure, I am. The present’s just fine. What I’m not so happy about is the future. It’s not only quiet and peaceful at the moment, it’s too damn quiet and peaceful. As the old saying goes, it’s the lull before the storm, the present the lull, the future the storm. Don’t you feel it, sir?’

‘No, I don’t!’ Jamieson looked away and frowned slightly. ‘Well, I didn’t, not until you came along and disturbed the quiet and even tenor of my way. Any moment now and you’ll be telling me I’m living in a fool’s paradise.’

‘That would be stretching it a bit, sir.’

‘Too quiet, too peaceful? Maybe it is at that. Cat and mouse, again—with us, of course, in the role of mouse? They have us pinned and are just waiting for a convenient moment—convenient for them, that is—to strike?’

‘Yes. I’ve just spent six hours on the wheel and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it—two minutes should have been enough. If there’s anybody living in a fool’s paradise it’s been me. How many Focke-Wulf Condors do you think they have in the Trondheim and Bergen airfields, sir?’

‘I don’t know. Too damn many for my liking, I’m sure.’

‘And for mine. Three or four of them acting in concert could cover ten thousand square miles in a couple of hours, all depending upon how high they are and what the visibility is. Bound to locate us—us, the most valuable prize on the Norwegian Sea. But they haven’t, they haven’t even bothered to try. Why?’

‘Because they know where we are. Because we didn’t manage to slip that submarine after sunset.’

McKinnon nodded and propped his chin on his hands. His breakfast lay untouched before him.

‘You did your best, Bo’sun. There was never any guarantee. You can’t reproach yourself.’

‘Oh yes I can. It’s a thing I’m getting pretty good at—reproaching myself, I mean. But in this case, not for the reason you think. Given only the slightest degree of luck we should have shaken him yesterday evening. We didn’t. We forgot the Factor X.’

‘You sound like an advertisement, Bo’sun. Factor X, the secret ingredient in the latest ladies’ cosmetics.’

‘What I mean, sir, is that even if we slipped him—moved out of his Asdic listening range—he could still have found us, Asdic or not, Condors or not. A good archer always carries a second string for his bow.’

‘A second string?’ Jamieson put his cup down very carefully. ‘You mean we have a second of those damned location transmitter bugs aboard?’

‘Can you think of any other solution, sir? Luck has made us too smug, too self-confident, to the extent that we have been guilty of gravely underestimating the ungodly. Singh or McCrimmon or Simons—all three of them, for all I know—have been smarter than us, smart enough, anyway, to gamble on the likelihood of our missing the glaringly obvious, just because it was too obvious. Chances are high that this won’t be a transceiver, just a simple transmitter no bigger than a lady’s handbag.’

‘But we’ve already searched, Bo’sun. Very thoroughly indeed. If there wasn’t anything there then, there won’t be anything now. I mean, transmitters just don’t materialize out of thin air.’

‘No. But there could have been one before we made our search. It could have been transferred elsewhere before that—it’s entirely possible that any or all of the three Flannelfeet may have anticipated just such a search. Sure we combed the area of the hospital, cabins, store-rooms, galleys, everything—but that’s all we did search.’

‘Yes, but where else—‘ Jamieson broke off and looked thoughtful.

‘Yes, sir, the same thought had occurred to me. The superstructure is no more than an uninhabited warren at the moment.’

‘Isn’t it just?’ Jamieson put down his cup and rose. ‘Well, heigh-ho for the superstructure. I’ll take a couple of my boys with me.’

‘Would they recognize a bug if they saw one? I don’t think I would.’

‘I would. All they’ve got to do is to bring me any piece of equipment that has no place aboard a ship.’

After he had gone McKinnon reflected that Jamieson, in addition to his engineering qualifications, was also an A.M.I.E.E. and, as such, probably able to identify a bug.

Not more than ten minutes later Jamieson returned, smiling widely and in evident satisfaction.

‘The unfailing instinct of your true bug-hunter, Bo’sun. Got it first time. Unerring, you might say.’

‘Where?’

‘Cunning devils. Suppose they thought it would be ironic and the last place we would look. What more fitting place for a radio device than a wrecked radio room? Not only had they used one of the few undamaged batteries there to power it, they’d even rigged up a makeshift aerial. Not that you would ever know that it was an aerial of any kind, not just to look at it.’

‘Congratulations, sir. That was well done. Is it still in place?’

‘Yes. First instincts, of course, were to rip the damn thing out. But then, wiser counsels, if I can use that term about myself, prevailed. If they have us on that transmitter, then they have us on their Asdic.’

‘Of course. And if we’d dismantled our set and stopped the engine and generator, they’d just have poked their periscope above the surface and located us in nothing flat. There’ll be a better time and better place to dismantle that bug.’

‘During the night, you mean, Bo’sun—if we’re still afloat by nightfall?’

‘I’m not rightly sure, sir. As you infer, it all depends upon what condition we’re in come the dark.’

Jamieson looked at him in what could have been a faintly disbelieving speculation, but said nothing.

McKinnon, in an empty cabin next to that of Captain Andropolous, was sound asleep when Johnny Holbrook shook him half an hour after noon.

‘Mr Naseby is on the phone, sir.’

McKinnon sat up in his bunk, rubbed his eyes and looked with something less than favour at the teenage ward orderly who, like Wayland Day, walked in awe of the Bo’sun.

‘Couldn’t somebody else have spoken to him?’

‘Sorry, sir. Specially asked for you.’

McKinnon moved out into the mess-deck where people were already gathering for lunch. Patterson was there with Jamieson and Sinclair, together with Margaret Morrison and Nurse Irene. He picked up the phone.

‘George, I was in a better world right now.’

‘Sorry about that, Archie. Thought you’d better know. We have company.’ Naseby could have been talking about the weather.

‘Ah!’

‘Starboard. About two miles. A bit under, perhaps. Says to stop or he will fire.’

‘Oh.’

‘Also says that if we try to alter course he will sink us.’

‘Is that so?’

‘So he says. May even mean it. Shall I turn into him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Full power?’

‘I’ll ask for it. Up in a minute.’ He replaced the phone.

‘My word,’ Margaret Morrison said. ‘That was an intriguing conversation. Full of information, if I may say so.’

‘We bo’suns are men of few words. Mr Patterson, could we have full power?’ Patterson nodded heavily, rose without speaking and crossed to the telephone.

Jamieson said in a resigned voice: ‘No need to ask, I suppose?’

‘No, sir. Sorry about your lunch.’

‘The usual—ah—direct tactics?’ Sinclair said.

‘No option. Man says he’s going to sink us.’

‘He’s going to say more than that when he sees us altering course towards him,’ Jamieson said. ‘He’s going to say that the San Andreas is crewed by a bunch of unreconstructed lunatics.’

‘If he does, he could well be right.’ As he turned to go Ulbricht put out a restraining hand.

‘I’m coming too.’

‘Please not, Lieutenant. I don’t believe our new acquaintance is going to sink us but he’s sure as hell going to try to stop us. The primary target will be the bridge, I’m sure. You want to undo all the good work Dr Sinclair and the nursing staff have already done, the stitching and bandaging all over again? Selfish. Margaret!’

‘You stay where you are, Karl Ulbricht.’

Ulbricht scowled, shrugged, smiled and stayed where he was.

When McKinnon reached the bridge the San Andreas, under maximum helm, was already beginning to slew round to starboard. Naseby looked round as McKinnon entered.

‘Take the wheel, Archie. He’s sending.’

Naseby moved out on the starboard wing. Someone on the conning-tower of the U-boat was indeed using an Aldis lamp but transmitting very slowly—almost certainly, McKinnon guessed, because a non-English-speaking operator was sending letter by given letter. For’ard of the conning-tower three men were crouched around the deck-gun which, as far as the bo’sun could judge at that distance, was pointed directly at them. The signalling ceased.

‘What does he say, George?’

‘ “Regain course. Stop or I fire”.’

‘Send him that bit about a hospital ship and the Geneva Convention.’

‘He won’t pay a blind bit of attention.’

‘Send it anyway. Distract him. Give us time. The rules say you don’t shoot a man when you’re having a conversation with him.’

Naseby started transmitting but almost immediately jumped back inside the bridge. The puff of smoke from the gun was unmistakable, as was the shock and sound of a shell exploding inside the superstructure almost immediately afterwards. Naseby gave McKinnon a reproachful look.

‘They’re not playing by your rules, Archie.’

‘So it would seem. Can you see where we’ve been hit?’

Naseby went out on the starboard wing and looked below and aft.

‘Crew’s mess-deck,’ he said. ‘Well, what was the crew’s mess-deck. Nobody there now, of course.’

‘Not what they were aiming for, you can be sure of that. A Force four is nothing to us but it makes for a very unstable gun-platform on a submarine. I don’t like that very much, George, they’re liable to hit anywhere except where they’re aiming for. We can only hope that the next one is as high above the bridge as that one was below it.’

The next one came straight through the bridge. It shattered the starboard for’ard window—one of those that had been replaced after Klaussen’s machine-gunners had destroyed them—penetrated the thin sheet-metal that separated the bridge from what had been the wireless office and exploded just beyond. The sliding wooden door, now in a hundred jagged fragments, blew forward into the bridge and the concussive blast of the explosion sent both men staggering, McKinnon against the wheel, Naseby against a small chart table: but the razor-sharp shards of the shell casing had flown in the other direction and both men were unhurt.

Naseby recovered some of the air that had been driven from his lungs. ‘They’re improving, Archie.’

‘Fluke.’ The San Andreas, its superstructure beginning to vibrate quite badly as engine revolutions built up, was now bearing down directly on the conning-tower of the U-boat which, however, was still considerably more than a mile distant. ‘Next one will miss the bridge by a mile.’

The next one, in fact, missed the ship completely and went into the sea a hundred yards astern of the San Andreas. It did not detonate on impact.

The following shell struck somewhere in the vicinity of the bows. Where it had exploded was impossible to tell from the bridge, for there was no visible uplifting or buckling of the fo‘c’s’le deck, but that it had done its damage was beyond doubt: the furious rattling of chain as one of the fore anchors plunged down to the floor of the Norwegian Sea could be heard a mile away. The rattling ceased as abruptly as it had begun, the fastening doubtless torn from the floor of the chain locker.

‘No loss,’ Naseby said. ‘Who’s ever anchored in a thousand feet or whatever?’

‘Who cares about the anchor? Point is, are we open to the sea?’

Yet another shell buried itself in the bows and this time there was no doubt where it had landed for a small area of the fo‘c’s’le deck, port side, lifted upwards almost a foot.

‘Open to the sea or not,’ Naseby said, ’this hardly seems to be the time to investigate. Not as long as they are zeroing in on the bows, which is what they appear to be doing. We’re all that closer now so they’re getting all the more accurate. They seem to be going for the waterline. It can’t be that they want to sink us. And don’t they know the gold is there?’

‘I don’t know what they know. Probably know there’s gold aboard: no reason why they should know where. Not that a little shrapnel lowers the value of gold. Anyway, I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies: at this angle of approach it’s impossible that they can hit the hospital area.’

A third shell struck and exploded in the bows in almost the same position as the previous one—the already uplifted section of the fo‘c’s’le had heaved up almost another foot.

‘That’s where the paint and carpenter’s shops are,’ Naseby said absently.

‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

‘Were Ferguson and Curran in the mess-deck when you left?’

‘That’s why I’ve been thinking. Can’t remember seeing them, although that’s not to say they weren’t there. They’re such an idle couple they might well have passed up lunch for an hour’s kip. I should have warned them.’

‘There wasn’t time for you to warn anyone.’

‘I could have sent someone. I did think they’d concentrate their fire on the bridge but I should still have sent someone. My fault. Slipping, as I told Jamieson.’ He paused, narrowed his eyes in concentration and said: ‘I think they’re turning away, George.’

Naseby had the glasses to his eyes. ‘They are. And there’s someone on the bridge, captain or whoever, using a loud-hailer. Ah! The gun crew are working on their gun and—yes—they’re aligning it fore-and-aft. This mean what I think it means, Archie?’

‘Well, the conning-tower’s empty and the gun crew are going down the hatch so it must mean what you think. See any bubbles coming up?’

‘No. Wait a minute. Yes. Yes, lots.’

‘Blowing main ballast.’

‘But we’re still a mile away from them.’

‘Captain’s taking no chances and I don’t blame him. He’s not a clown like Klaussen.’

They watched for some moments in silence. The U-boat was now at a 45° angle, the decks barely awash and vanishing quickly.

‘Take the wheel, George. Give the Chief Engineer a ring, will you, tell him what’s happened and ask him to drop down to normal speed. Then back on the course we were on. I’m going to check on any flooding for’ard.’

Naseby watched him go and knew that flooding was secondary in the Bo’sun’s mind. He was going to find out whether, indeed, Curran and Ferguson had elected to miss lunch.

McKinnon was back in about ten minutes. He had a bottle of Scotch in his hand and two glasses and no smile on his face.

Naseby said: ‘Their luck run out?’

‘Abandoned by fortune, George. Abandoned by McKinnon.’

‘Archie, you must stop it. Please stop blaming yourself. What’s done is done.’ Janet had intercepted him as he had entered the mess-deck—he had come down with Naseby and left Trent on the wheel with Jones and McGuigan as look-outs—and pulled him into a corner. ‘Oh, I know that’s trite, meaningless, if you want. And if you want another trite and meaningless remark, you can’t bring back the dead.’

‘True, true.’ The Bo’sun smiled without humour. ‘And speaking of the dead—and one should speak no ill of the dead—they were a couple of moderately useless characters. But both were married, both had two daughters. What would they think if they knew that the gallant bo’sun, in his anxiety to get at a U-boat, completely forgot them?’

‘The best thing would be if you forgot them. Sounds cruel, I know, but let the dead bury their dead. We are alive: when I say “we” I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about every other person aboard, including myself. Your duty is to the living. Don’t you know that every single person on this ship, from the Captain and Mr Patterson down, depends on you? We’re depending on you to take us home.’

‘Do be quiet, woman.’

‘You’ll take me home, Archie?’

‘Scalloway? Hop, skip and jump. Of course I will.’

She stood back at arm’s length, hands on his shoulders, searched his eyes, then smiled.

‘You know, Archie, I really believe you will.’

He smiled in return. ‘I’m glad of that.’ He didn’t for a moment believe it himself but there was no point in spreading undue gloom and despondency.

They joined Patterson, Jamieson and Ulbricht at the table. Patterson pushed a glass in front of him. ‘I would say that you have earned that, Bo’sun. A splendid job.’

‘Not so splendid, sir. I had no option but to do what I did. Can’t say I feel sorry for a U-boat captain but he’s really up against a nearly impossible problem, faced with a hiding to nothing. He’s under orders not to sink us so the best he can do is to try to incapacitate us as much as possible. We run at him and he hides. Simple as that.’

‘The way you put it, yes. I hear you had a very narrow escape on the bridge.’

‘If the shell had passed through metal and exploded in the bridge, that would have been it. But it passed through the glass instead. Luck.’

‘And up front?’

‘Three holes. All above the waterline. What with those and the damage that the U-boat did to us—rather, the damage we inflicted on ourselves—there’s going to be a fair old job for the ship repairers when we get into dry dock. The watertight bulkheads seem sound enough. That’s the good part. The bad part—and I’m afraid this is all my fault—is that—’

‘Archie!’ Janet’s voice was sharp.

‘Oh, all right. You’ll have heard—Ferguson and Curran are dead.’

‘I know and I’m sorry. Damnable. That makes twenty now.’ Patterson thought for a few moments. ‘You reckon this situation will continue for some time?’

‘What situation, sir?’

‘That they keep on trying to stop us instead of sinking us.’

McKinnon shrugged. ‘It is much more important to the Germans that they discredit the Russians with our Government than that they get the gold. As things stand at the moment they want both to have their cake and eat it. Factor of greed, really.’

‘So as long as they remain greedy we’re relatively safe?’

‘Safe from sinking, yes. But not safe from being taken over.’

‘But you just said—’

‘All they have to do is to bring up another U-boat and they’ll have us cold. With two U-boats we have no chance. If we go after one the other will parallel our course and pump shells into us at their leisure. Not the engine-room, of course, they want to take us under our own steam to Norway. The hospital area. First shell in there and the white flag flies—if we’ve any sense we’d fly it before the first shot. Next time I go up to the bridge I’ll take a nice big bedsheet with me.’

‘There are times, Bo’sun,’ Jamieson said, ‘when I wish you’d keep your thoughts to yourself.’

‘Merely answering a question, sir. And I have another thought, another question, if you like. Only a tiny handful of people would have known of this operation, the plan to use the San Andreas as a bullion carrier. A cabinet minister or two, an admiral or two. No more. I wonder who the traitor is who sold us down the river. If we get back and if some famous and prominent person unaccountably commits suicide, then we’ll know.’ He rose. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do.’

‘What work, Archie?’ It was Janet. ‘Haven’t you done enough for one day?’

‘A bo’sun’s work is never done. Routine, Janet, just routine.’ He left the mess-deck.

‘Routine,’ Janet said. ‘What routine?’

‘Curran’s dead.’

She looked puzzled. ‘I know that.’

‘Curran was the sailmaker. It’s the sailmaker’s job to sew up the dead.’

Janet rose hastily and left the table. Patterson gave Jamieson a sour look.

‘There are times, Second, when I wish you would keep your thoughts to yourself. You do have half an eye, I take it.’

‘True, true. Delicacy? A water buffalo could have done it better.’

THIRTEEN

Patterson finished speaking—by this time he was getting quite professional at reading burial services—planks tilted and the shrouded forms of Curran and Ferguson slid down into the icy wastes of the Norwegian Sea. It was then that the engine-room noise faded away and the San Andreas began to slow.

Nearly all the crew were on deck—the dead men had been an amiable enough couple and well liked. The cooks and stewards were below, as were the nursing staff and three stokers. Trent and Jones were on the bridge.

Jamieson was the first to move. ‘It looks,’ he said, ‘as if we have made a mistake.’ He walked away, not quickly, with the air of a man who knew that this was not a moment that called for any particular urgency.

Patterson and McKinnon followed more slowly. Patterson said: ‘What did he mean by that? That we’ve made a mistake, I mean?’

‘He was being kind, sir. What he meant was that the all-wise bo’sun has made another blunder. Who was on watch down below?’

‘Just young Stephen. You know, the Polish boy.’

‘Let’s hope he’s not the next to go over the side.’

Patterson stopped and caught McKinnon by the arm. ‘What do you mean by that? And what do you mean—“blunder”?’

‘The one thing ties up with the other.’ McKinnon’s voice sounded dull. ‘Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I’m not thinking too well. Did you notice who wasn’t at the funeral, sir?’

Patterson looked at him for a few silent moments, then said: ‘The nursing staff. Kitchen staff. Stewards. Men on the bridge.’ His grip tightened on the Bo’sun’s arm. ‘And McCrimmon.’

‘Indeed. And whose brilliant idea was it to let McCrimmon roam around on the loose?’

‘It just worked out the wrong way. You can’t think of everything. No man can. He’s a slippery customer, this McCrimmon. Do you think we’ll be able to pin anything on him?’

‘I’m certain we won’t. Nevertheless, sir, I’d like your permission to lock him up.’ McKinnon shook his head, his face bitter. ‘There’s nothing like locking the door when the horse has bolted.’

Stephen was lying on the steel plates, covered with oil still gushing from a severed fuel line. There was a rapidly forming bruise, bleeding slightly, behind his right ear. Sinclair finished examining his head and straightened.

‘I’ll have him taken to hospital. X-ray, but I don’t think it necessary. I should think he’ll waken up with nothing more than a sore head.’ He looked at the two steel objects lying on the deck-plates beside Stephen. ‘You know who did this, Bo’sun?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Stilson wrench that laid him out and the fire-axe that slashed the fuel line. There could be fingerprints.’

‘No.’ With his toe McKinnon touched a clump of engine-room waste. ‘He used that and there’ll be no prints on that. He looked at Patterson. ‘This line can be replaced, sir?’

‘It can. How long, Second?’

‘Couple of hours,’ Jamieson said. ‘Give or take.’

McKinnon said: ‘Would you come along with me, Mr Patterson?’

‘It will be a pleasure, Bo’sun.’

‘You could have killed him, you know,’ McKinnon said conversationally.

From his bench seat in the mess-deck McCrimmon looked up with an insolent stare.

‘What the bloody hell are you talking about?’

‘Stephen.’

‘Stephen? What about Stephen?’

‘His broken head.’

‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Broken head? How did he get a broken head?’

‘Because you went down to the engine-room and did it. And cut open a fuel line.’

‘You’re crazy. I haven’t left this seat in the past quarter of an hour.’

‘Then you must have seen whoever went down to the engine-room. You’re a stoker, McCrimmon. An engine stops and you don’t go down to investigate?’

McCrimmon chewed some gum. ‘This is a frame-up. What proof do you have?’

‘Enough,’ Patterson said. ‘I am putting you under arrest, McCrimmon, and in close confinement. When we get back to Britain, you’ll be tried for murder, high treason, convicted and certainly shot.’

‘This is absolute rubbish.’ He prefaced the word ‘rubbish’ with a few choice but unprintable adjectives. ‘I’ve done nothing and you can’t prove a thing.’ But his normally pasty face had gone even pastier.

‘We don’t have to,’ McKinnon said. ‘Your friend Simons or Braun or whatever his name is—has been, well, as the Americans say, been singing like a canary. He’s willing to turn King’s evidence on you in the hope of getting less than life.’

‘The bastard!’ McCrimmon was on his feet, lips drawn back over his teeth, his right hand reaching under his overalls.

‘Don’t,’ Patterson said. ‘Whatever it is, don’t touch it. You’ve got no place to run, McCrimmon—and the Bo’sun could kill you with one hand.’

‘Let me have it,’ McKinnon said. He stretched out his hand and McCrimmon, very slowly, very carefully, placed the knife, hilt first, in the Bo’sun’s palm.

‘You haven’t won.’ His face was both scared and vicious at the same time. ‘It’s the person who laughs last that wins.’

‘Could be.’ McKinnon looked at him consideringly. ‘You know something that we don’t?’

‘As you say, could be.’

‘Such as the existence of a transmitting bug concealed in the wireless office?’

McCrimmon leapt forward and screamed, briefly, before collapsing to the deck. His nose had broken against the Bo’sun’s fist.

Patterson looked down at the unconscious man and then at McKinnon. ‘That give you a certain kind of satisfaction?’

‘I suppose I shouldn’t have done it but—well, yes, it did give a certain kind of satisfaction.’

‘Me, too,’ Patterson said.

What seemed, but wasn’t, a long day wore on into the evening and then darkness, and still the Germans stayed away. The San Andreas, under power again, was still on a direct course to Aberdeen. Stephen had regained consciousness and, as Dr Sinclair had predicted, was suffering from no more than a moderate headache. Sinclair had carried out what were no better than temporary repairs to McCrimmon’s broken face but it was really a job for a plastic surgeon and Sinclair was no plastic surgeon.

Lieutenant Ulbricht, a chart spread out on the table before him, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and looked at McKinnon who was seated opposite him in the Captain’s cabin.

‘We’ve been lucky so far. Lucky? Never thought I’d say that aboard a British ship. Why are we being left alone?’

‘Because we’re just that. Lucky. They didn’t have a spare U-boat around and our friend who’s trailing us wasn’t going to try it on his own again. Also, we’re still on a direct course to Aberdeen. They know where we are and have no reason to believe that we still aren’t going where we’re supposed to be going. They have no means of knowing what’s happened aboard this ship.’

‘Reasonable, I suppose.’ Ulbricht looked at the chart and tapped his teeth. ‘If something doesn’t happen to us during the night something is going to happen to us tomorrow. That’s what I think. At least, that’s what I feel.’

‘I know.’

‘What do you know?’

‘Tomorrow. Your countrymen aren’t clowns. We’ll be passing very close to the Shetlands tomorrow. They’ll suspect that there is a possibility that we might make a break for Lerwick or some such place and will act on that possibility.’

‘Planes? Condors?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Does the RAF have fighters there?’

‘I should imagine so. But I don’t know. Haven’t been there for years.’

‘The Luftwaffe will know. If there are Hurricanes or Spitfires there, the Luftwaffe would never risk a Condor against them.’

‘They could send some long-range Messerschmitts as escort.’

‘If not, it could be a torpedo?’

‘That’s not something I care to think about.’

‘Nor me. There’s something very final about a torpedo. You know, it’s not necessary to sail south round Bressay and turn round Bard Head. We could use the north channel. Maryfield is the name of the village, isn’t it?’

‘I was born there.’

‘That was stupid. Stupid of me, I mean. We make a sharp turn for the north channel and it’s a torpedo for sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if we steam steadily south past Bressay they may well think that we’re keeping on course to Aberdeen?’

‘We can only hope, Lieutenant. A guarantee is out of the question. There’s nothing else we can do.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Well, there’s something. We can go down below and have dinner.’

‘Our last, perhaps?’

McKinnon crossed his fingers, smiled and said nothing.

Dinner, understandably, was a rather solemn affair. Patterson was in a particularly pensive mood.

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Bo’sun, that we might outrun this U-boat? Without bursting a few steam valves, we could get two or three knots more out of this tub.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m sure we could.’ The tension in the air was almost palpable. ‘I’m also sure that the U-boat would pick up the increased revolutions immediately. He would know that we were on to him, know that we know that he’s following us. He would just surface—that would increase his speed—and finish us off. He’s probably carrying a dozen torpedoes. How many do you think would miss us?’

‘The first one would be enough.’ Patterson sighed. ‘Rather desperate men make rather desperate suggestions. You could sound more encouraging, Bo’sun.’

‘Rest after toil,’ Jamieson said. ‘Port after stormy seas. There’s going to be no rest for us, Bo’sun. No safe harbour. Is that it?’

‘Has to be, sir.’ He pointed at Janet Magnusson. ‘You heard me promise to take this lady back home.’

Janet smiled at him. ‘You’re very kind, Archie McKinnon. Also, you’re lying in your teeth.’

McKinnon smiled back at her. ‘Ye of little faith.’

Ulbricht was the first to sense a change in the atmosphere. ‘Something has occurred to you, Mr McKinnon?’

‘Yes. At least, I hope it has.’ He looked at Margaret Morrison. ‘I wonder if you would be so kind as to ask Captain Bowen to come to the lounge?’

‘Another secret conference? I thought there were no more spies or criminals or traitors left aboard.’

‘I don’t think so. But no chances.’ He looked around the table. ‘I would like it if you all joined us.’

Just after dawn the next morning—still a very late dawn in those latitudes—Lieutenant Ulbricht gazed out through the starboard wing doorway at low-lying land that could be intermittently seen through squalls of sleety snow.

‘So that’s Unst, is it?’

‘That’s Unst.’ Although McKinnon had been up most of the night he seemed fresh, relaxed and almost cheerful.

‘And that—that is what you Shetlanders break your hearts over?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘I don’t want to give any offence, Mr McKinnon, but that’s probably the most bare, bleak, barren and inhospitable island I’ve ever had the misfortune to clap my eyes on.’

‘Home sweet home,’ McKinnon said placidly. ‘Beauty, Lieutenant, is in the eye of the beholder. Besides, no place would look its sparkling best in weather conditions like this.’

‘And that’s another thing. Is the Shetland weather always as awful as this?’

McKinnon regarded the slate-grey seas, the heavy cloud and the falling snow with considerable satisfaction. ‘I think the weather is just lovely.’

‘As you say, the eye of the beholder. I doubt whether a Condor pilot would share your point of view.’

‘It’s unlikely.’ McKinnon pointed ahead. ‘Fine off the starboard now. That’s Fetlar.’

‘Ah!’ Ulbricht consulted the chart. ‘Within a mile—or two at the most—or where we ought to be. We haven’t done too badly, Mr McKinnon.’

‘We? You, you mean. A splendid piece of navigation, Lieutenant. The Admiralty should give you a medal for your services.’

Ulbricht smiled. ‘I doubt whether Admiral Doenitz would quite approve of that. Speaking of services, you will now, I take it, be finished with mine. As a navigator, I mean.’

‘My father was a fisherman, a professional. My first four years at sea I spent with him around those islands. It would be difficult for me to get lost.’

‘I should imagine.’ Ulbricht went out on the starboard wing, looked aft for a few seconds, then hastily returned, shivering and dusting snow off his coat.

‘The sky—or what I can see of the sky—is getting pretty black up north. Wind’s freshening a bit. Looks as if this awful weather—or, if you like, wonderful weather—is going to continue for quite some time. This never entered your calculations.’

‘I’m not a magician. Nor am I a fortune-teller. Reading the future is not one of my specialities.’

‘Well, just let’s call it a well-timed stroke of luck.’

‘Luck we could use. A little, anyway.’

Fetlar was on the starboard beam when Naseby came up to take over the wheel. McKinnon went out on the starboard wing to assess the weather. As the San Andreas was heading just a degree or two west of south and the wind was from the north it was almost directly abaft. The clouds in that direction were dark and ominous but they did not hold his attention for long: he had become aware, very faintly at first but then more positively, of something a great deal more ominous. He went back inside and looked at Ulbricht.

‘Remember we were talking about luck a little while back?’ Ulbricht nodded. ‘Well, our little luck has just run out. We have company. There’s a Condor out there.’

Ulbricht said nothing, just went outside on the wing and listened. He returned after a few moments.

‘I can hear nothing.’

‘Variation in wind force or direction. Something like that. I heard it all right. Up in a north-easterly direction. I’m quite sure that the pilot didn’t intend that we should hear him. Some passing freak of wind. They’re being either very careful or very suspicious or maybe both. They have to consider the possibility that we might make a break for some port in the Shetlands. So the U-boat surfaces before dawn and calls up the Focke-Wulf. Pilot’s doubtless been told to stay out of sight and hearing. He’ll do that until he hears from the U-boat that we’ve suddenly changed direction. Then he’ll come calling.’

‘To finish us off,’ Naseby said.

‘They won’t be dropping any rose petals, that’s for sure.’

Ulbricht said: ‘You no longer think that it will be torpedo-bombers or glider-bombers or Stukas that will come and do the job?’

‘No. They wouldn’t get here in time and they can’t come earlier and hang around waiting. They haven’t the range. But that big lad out there can hang around all day if need be. Of course, I’m only assuming there’s only one Condor out there. Could be two or three of them. Don’t forget we’re a very, very important target.’

‘It’s a gift not given to many.’ Ulbricht was gloomy. ‘This ability to cheer up people and lighten their hearts.’

‘I second that.’ Naseby didn’t sound any happier than Ulbricht. ‘I wish to hell you hadn’t gone out on that wing.’

‘You wouldn’t like me to keep the burden of my secrets alone, would you? No need to tell anyone else. Why spread gloom and despondency unnecessarily, especially when there’s damn-all we can do about it.’

‘Blissful ignorance, is that it?’ Naseby said. McKinnon nodded. ‘I could do with some of that.’

Shortly after noon, when they were off a small and dimly seen group of islands which McKinnon called the Skerries, he and Ulbricht went below, leaving Naseby and McGuigan on the bridge. The snow, which was now really more sleet than snow, had eased but not stopped. The wind, too, had eased. The visibility, if that was the word for it, varied intermittently between two and four miles. Cloud cover was about two thousand feet and somewhere above that the unseen Condor lurked. McKinnon had not heard it again but he didn’t for a moment doubt that it was still there.

The Captain and Rennet were sitting up in bed and the Bo’sun passed the time of day with them and Margaret Morrison. Everybody was being elaborately calm but the tension and expectancy in the air were unmistakable and considerable. It would have been even more considerable, McKinnon reflected, if they had known of the Condor patrolling above the clouds.

He found Patterson and Sinclair in the mess-deck. Sinclair said: ‘Singularly free from alarms and excursions this morning, aren’t we, Bo’sun?’

‘Long may it continue that way.’ He wondered if Sinclair would consider the accompanying Condor an alarm or an excursion. ‘The weather is rather on our side. Snowing, poor visibility—not fog but not good—and low cloud cover.’

‘Sounds promising. May yet be that we shall touch the Happy Isles.’

‘We hope. Speaking of the Happy Isles, have you made preparations for off-loading our wounded cripples when we reach the Isles?’

‘Yes. No problem. Rafferty is a stretcher case. So are four of the men we picked up in Murmansk—two with leg wounds, two frostbite cases. Five in all. Easy.’

‘Sounds good. Mr Patterson, those two rogues, McCrimmon and Simons or whatever his name is. We’ll have to tie them up—at least tie their hands behind their backs—before we take them ashore.’

‘If we get the chance to take them ashore. Have to leave it to the last minute—double-dyed criminals they may be but we can’t have a couple of men go down in a sinking ship.’

‘Please don’t talk about such things,’ Sinclair said.

‘Of course, sir. Have they been fed? Not that I really care.’

‘No.’ It was Sinclair. ‘I saw them. Simons says he’s lost his appetite and McCrimmon’s face is too painful to let him eat. I believe him, he can hardly move his lips to speak. It looks, Bo’sun, as if you hit him with a sledgehammer.’

‘No tears for either.’

McKinnon had a quick lunch and rose to go. ‘Have to go to relieve Naseby.’

McKinnon said: ‘Two hours or so. Perhaps earlier if I can see a convenient bank of low cloud or snow or even fog—anything we can disappear into. You or Mr Jamieson will be in the engine-room about then?’

‘Both, probably.’ Patterson sighed. ‘We can only hope it works, Bo’sun.’

‘That’s all we can do, sir.’

Shortly after three o‘clock in the afternoon, on the bridge with Naseby and Ulbricht, McKinnon made his decision to go. He said to Ulbricht: ‘We can’t see it but we’re near enough opposite the south tip of Bressay?’

‘I would say so. Due west of us.’

‘Well, no point in putting off the inevitable.’ He lifted the phone and called the engine-room. ‘Mr Patterson? Now, if you please. George, hard a-starboard. Due west.’

‘And how am I to know where west is?’

McKinnon went to the starboard wing door and latched it open. ‘Going to be a bit chilly—and damp—but if you keep the wind fair and square on your right cheek that should be it, near enough.’ He went into the wrecked radio room, disconnected the transmitting bug, returned to the bridge and went out on the port wing.

The weather had changed very little. Grey skies, grey seas, moderate sleet and a patchy visibility extending to not more than two miles. He returned to the bridge again, leaving the door open so that the north wind had a clear passage through the bridge.

‘One wonders,’ Ulbricht said, ‘what thoughts are passing through the mind of the U-boat captain at this moment.’

‘Probably not very pleasant ones. All depends whether he was depending on the transmitting bug or the Asdic or both to keep tabs on us. If it was the bug, then he might trail us at a prudent distance so that he could have his aerial raised to pick up the transmitting signal without being seen. In that case he might have been out of Asdic listening range. And if that is the case he might well believe that the transmitter has failed. He has, after all, no reason to believe that we might have stumbled on the bug and that we know of McCrimmon’s shenanigans.’

The San Andreas, silent now, was heading approximately west, still with a good turn of speed on.

‘So he’s in a quandary,’ McKinnon said. ‘Not a position I would like to be in. So what decision does he make? Does he increase speed on the same course we’ve been following in the hope of catching us up or does he think we might be running for shelter and go off on an interception course for Bard Head in the hope of locating us? All depends how crafty he is.’

‘I just don’t know,’ Ulbricht said.

‘I know,’ Naseby said. ‘We’re just assuming that he hasn’t been tracking us on Asdic. If he’s as crafty as you are, Archie, he’ll set off on an interception course—and he’ll ask the Condor to come down and look for us.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that.’

Fifteen minutes passed in an increasingly eerie silence, then McKinnon went out on the port wing. He didn’t remain there long.

‘You were right, George.’ The Bo’sun sounded resigned. ‘He’s out there, searching for us. I can hear the Condor’s engines quite clearly but he hasn’t seen us yet. But he will, though, he will. He’s only got to quarter the area long enough—and that won’t be long—and he’ll nail us. Then a signal to the U-boat, a cluster of bombs for us and the U-boat comes to finish us off.’

‘That’s a very depressing thought,’ Naseby said.

Ulbricht went out on to the port wing and returned almost immediately. He said nothing, just nodded his head.

McKinnon picked up the engine-room phone. ‘Mr Patterson? Would you start up, please? And please don’t bother working her up slowly. Quickly, if you would, and to maximum power. The Condor is down searching for us and it can only be a matter of minutes before he finds us. I’d like to make tracks out of here with all speed.’

‘You’re not as fast as a Condor,’ Naseby said.

‘I’m sadly aware of that, George. But I don’t intend to remain here like a sitting duck while he comes and clobbers us. We can always try a little evasive action.’

‘He can also turn and twist a damn sight faster than we can. You’d be better off trying a few prayers.’

The Condor took another twenty minutes to find them but find them he did and wasted no time in making his presence felt as well as heard. In the classic fashion he approached from astern, flying low as Naseby had predicted he would, certainly at not more than three hundred feet. Naseby gave the rudder maximum helm to port but it was a wasted effort: as Naseby had also said, the Condor could turn and twist much faster than they could.

The bomb, certainly not the size of a 500-pounder, struck the deck some sixty feet for’ard of the superstructure, penetrated and exploded in a flash of flame and a large jet of oily black water.

‘That was odd,’ Naseby said.

The Bo’sun shook his head. ‘Not odd. Greed.’

‘Greed?’ Ulbricht looked at him, then nodded. ‘Gold.’

‘They haven’t given up hope yet. How far would you say it was to Bard Head?’

‘Four miles?’

‘About that. If they don’t get us—stop us, I mean—by that point, then they’re going to sink us.’

‘And if they stop us?’

‘They wait till the U-boat comes up and takes us over.’

‘It’s a sad thing,’ Naseby said. ‘Very sad. This love of money, I mean.’

‘I think,’ McKinnon said, ’that they’ll be back in a minute or so to show us some more love.’

And, indeed, the Condor was executing a very tight turn and heading back to pass the San Andreas on the port side.

‘Some of you Condor pilots,’ McKinnon said to Ulbricht, ‘have very determined and one-track minds.’

‘There are times when one wishes they hadn’t.’

The second attack was an exact replica of the first. The pilot—or his navigator—was evidently a precision bombardier of some note for the second bomb landed in exactly the same place with precisely the same results.

‘These are not very big bombs,’ McKinnon said, ‘but it’s for sure we can’t take much more of this. Another one like that and I think we’ll call it a day.’

‘The white bedsheet, is that it?’

‘That’s it. I have it up here. I wasn’t kidding. Listen! I hear an aero engine!’

‘So did I,’ Ulbricht said. ‘All made in Germany.’

‘Not this one, it’s not. Different note altogether. It’s a fighter plane. My God, how stupid can I be! Come to that, how stupid can you be? Or the pilot of that Condor? Of course they’ve got radar on the island. Place is probably hotching with the stuff. Of course they’ve picked us up, of course they’ve picked the Condor up. So they’ve sent out someone to investigate. No. Not someone. I hear two.’ McKinnon reached out and flooded the decks and side of the San Andreas with its Red Cross lights. ‘We had better not be mistaken for the Tirpitz.’

‘I can see them now,’ Ulbricht said. His voice was without expression.

‘Me, too.’ McKinnon looked at Ulbricht and managed to keep the elation out of his voice. ‘Do you recognize them?’

‘Yes. Hurricanes.’

‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant.’ The regret in the Bo’sun’s voice was genuine. ‘But you know what this means?’

‘I’m afraid I do.’

It was no contest. The Hurricanes rapidly overhauled the Condor from the rear and fired simultaneously, one from above, the other from below. The Focke-Wulf didn’t blow up or disintegrate or burst into flames or anything dramatic of that nature. Trailing clouds of smoke, it crashed steeply into the sea and vanished at once below the waves. Lieutenant Ulbricht’s face still remained empty of all expression.

The two fighter planes returned to the San Andreas and began to circle it, one close in, the other at the distance of about a mile. Although it was difficult to see what they could do against a submarine about to launch a torpedo except blow its periscope off, their presence was immensely comforting and reassuring.

McKinnon stepped out on the port wing and waved at one of the planes, the one making a close circuit of the ship. The Hurricane waggled its wings.

Jamieson answered the telephone when McKinnon called. ‘I think you can reduce to normal speed now, sir. The Condor’s gone.’

‘Gone where?’ There was, as there might well have been, bafflement in Jamieson’s voice.

‘Under the sea. A couple of Hurricanes shot him down.’

The Hurricanes remained with them until they were within a mile of Bard Head when a lean, purposeful frigate approached out of the gathering dusk and slid effortlessly alongside. The Bo’sun was on the deck.

A man aboard the frigate—presumably the captain—used a loud-hailer.

‘Are you in need of care and protection, friend?’

‘Not now we’re not.’

‘Are you badly damaged?’

‘Some. A few shells and bombs. But we’re a going concern. There’s a nasty old U-boat hanging around.’

‘Not now he won’t be. He’ll be all to hell and gone. What’s that you see on my poop?’

‘Ah! Depth charges.’

‘Well, well.’ The bearded naval Commodore shook his head in wonderment and looked at the others gathered in the small lounge of the hotel. ‘The story is impossible, of course, but on the evidence of my eyes—well, I’ve just got to believe you. Your crew and passengers all taken care of, Mr Patterson?’

‘Yes, sir. Here and in nearby houses. We have everything we want.’

‘And there’s somebody very high up in either the Cabinet or Admiralty who’s been telling tales. Shouldn’t take too long to root him out. Bo’sun, you’re quite, quite sure about this gold?’

‘Your pension against mine, sir. I should imagine there’s a considerable difference.’ He rose, took Janet Magnusson’s arm and helped her to her feet. ‘If you will excuse me, everybody. I promised to take this lady back home.’

About the Publisher

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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FIRST EDITION

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1984 then in paperback by Fontana 1985

Copyright © Alistair MacLean 1984

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-28939-4

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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Santorini

Dedication

To Tom and Rena

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

Chapter 1

An overhead broadcaster on the bridge of the frigate Ariadne crackled into life, a bell rang twice and then O’Rourke’s voice came through, calm, modulated, precise and unmistakably Irish. O’Rourke was commonly referred to as the weatherman, which he wasn’t at all.

‘Just picked up an odd-looking customer. Forty miles out, bearing 222.’

Talbot pressed the reply button. ‘The skies above us, Chief, are hotching with odd-looking customers. At least six airlines criss-cross this patch of the Aegean. NATO planes, as you know better than all of us, are all around us. And those pesky fighter-bombers and fighters from the pesky Sixth Fleet bloweth where the wind listeth. Me, I think they’re lost half the time.’

‘Ah! But this is a very odd odd-looking lad.’ O’Rourke’s voice was unruffled as ever, unmoved by the less than flattering reference to the Sixth Fleet, from which he was on temporary loan. ‘No trans-Aegean airline uses the flight path this plane is on. There are no NATO planes in this particular sector on my display screen. And the Americans would have let us know. A very courteous lot, Captain. The Sixth Fleet, I mean.’

‘True, true.’ The Sixth Fleet, Talbot was aware, would have informed him of the presence of any of their aircraft in his vicinity, not from courtesy but because regulations demanded it, a fact of which O’Rourke was as well aware as he was. O’Rourke was a doughty defender of his home fleet. ‘That all you have on this lad?’

‘No. Two things. This plane is on a due southwest to north-east course. I have no record, no information of any plane that could be following this course. Secondly, I’m pretty sure it’s a big plane. We should see in about four minutes – his course is on a direct intersection with ours.’

‘The size is important, Chief? Lots of big planes around.’

‘Not at 43,000 feet, sir, which is what this one is. Only a Concorde does that and we know there are no Concordes about. Military job, I would guess.’

‘Of unknown origin. A bandit? Could be. Keep an eye on him.’ Talbot looked around and caught the eye of his second-in-command, Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder. Van Gelder was short, very broad, deeply tanned, flaxen-haired and seemed to find life a source of constant amusement. He was smiling now as he approached the captain.

‘Consider it done, sir. The spy-glass and a photo for your family album?’

‘That’s it. Thank you.’ The Ariadne carried an immense and, to the uninitiated, quite bewildering variety of looking and listening instruments that may well have been unmatched by any naval ship afloat. Among those instruments were what Van Gelder had referred to as the spy-glass. This was a combined telescope and camera, invented and built by the French, of the type used by spy satellites in orbit and which was capable, under ideal atmospheric circumstances, of locating and photographing a white plate from an altitude of 250 miles. The focal length of the telescope was almost infinitely adjustable: in this case Van Gelder would probably use a one in a hundred resolution, which would have the optical effect of bringing the intruder – if intruder it was – to an apparent altitude of four hundred feet. In the cloudless July skies of the Cyclades this presented no problem at all.

Van Gelder had just left the bridge when another loudspeaker came to life, the repeated double buzzer identifying it as the radio-room. The helmsman, Leading Seaman Harrison, leaned forward and made the appropriate switch.

‘I have an SOS. I think – repeat think – vessel’s position is just south of Thera. All I have. Very garbled, certainly not a trained operator. Just keeps repeating “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday”.’ Myers, the radio operator on duty, sounded annoyed: every radio operator, the tone of his voice said, should be as expert and efficient as he was. ‘Wait a minute, though.’ There was a pause, then Myers came on again. ‘Sinking, he says. Four times he said he was sinking.’

Talbot said: ‘That all?’

‘That’s all, sir. He’s gone off the air.’

‘Well, just keep listening on the distress frequency, Harrison, 090 or near enough. Can’t be more than ten, twelve miles away.’ He reached for the engine control and turned it up to full power. The Ariadne, in the modern fashion, had dual engine-room and bridge controls. The engine-room had customarily only one rating, a leading stoker, on watch, and this only because custom dictated it, not because necessity demanded it. The lone watchman might, just possibly, be wandering around with an oil-can in hand but more probably was immersed in one of the lurid magazines with which what was called the engine-room library was so liberally stocked. The Ariadne’s chief engineer, Lieutenant McCafferty, rarely ventured near his own domain. A first-class engineer, McCafferty claimed he was allergic to diesel fumes and treated with a knowing disdain the frequently repeated observation that, because of the engine-room’s highly efficient extractor fans, it was virtually impossible for anyone to detect the smell of diesel. He was to be found that afternoon, as he was most afternoons, seated in a deckchair aft and immersed in his favourite form of relaxation, the reading of detective novels heavily laced with romance of the more dubious kind.

The distant sound of the diesels deepened – the Ariadne was capable of a very respectable 35 knots – and the bridge began to vibrate quite noticeably. Talbot reached for a phone and got through to Van Gelder.

‘We’ve picked up a distress signal. Ten, twelve miles away. Let me know when you locate this bandit and I’ll cut the engines.’ The spy-glass, though splendidly gimballed to deal with the worst vagaries of pitching and rolling, was quite incapable of coping with even the mildest vibration which, more often than not, produced a very fuzzy photograph indeed.

Talbot moved out on to the port wing to join the lieutenant who stood there, a tall, thin young man with fair hair, thick pebbled glasses and a permanently lugubrious expression.

‘Well, Jimmy, how do you fancy this? A maybe bandit and a sinking vessel at the same time. Should relieve the tedium of a long hot summer’s afternoon, don’t you think?’

The lieutenant looked at him without enthusiasm. Lieutenant the Lord James Denholm – Talbot called him ‘Jimmy’ for brevity’s sake – seldom waxed enthusiastic about anything.

‘I don’t fancy it at all, Captain.’ Denholm waved a languid hand. ‘Disturbs the even tenor of my ways.’

Talbot smiled. Denholm was surrounded by an almost palpable aura of aristocratic exhaustion that had disturbed and irritated Talbot in the early stage of their acquaintanceship, a feeling that had lasted for no more than half an hour. Denholm was totally unfitted to be a naval officer of any kind and his highly defective eyesight should have led to his automatic disbarment from any navy in the world. But Denholm was aboard the Ariadne not because of his many connections with the highest echelons of society – heir to an earldom, his blood was indisputably the bluest of the blue – but because, without question, he was the right man in the right place. The holder of three scientific degrees – from Oxford, UCLA and MIT, all summa cum laude – in electrical engineering and electronics, Denholm was as close to being an electronics wizard as any man could ever hope to be. Not that Denholm would have claimed to be anything of what he would have said to be the ridiculous kind. Despite his lineage and academic qualifications, Denholm was modest and retiring to a fault. This reticence extended even to the making of protests which was why, despite his feeble objections – he had been under no compulsion to go – he had been dragooned into the Navy in the first place.

He said to Talbot: ‘This bandit, Captain – if it is a bandit – what do you intend to do about it?’

‘I don’t intend to do anything about it.’

‘But if he is a bandit – well, then, he’s spying, isn’t he?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, then –’

‘What do you expect me to do, Jimmy? Bring him down? Or are you itching to try out this experimental laser gun you have with you?’

‘Heaven forfend.’ Denholm was genuinely horrified. ‘I’ve never fired a gun in anger in my life. Correction. I’ve never even fired a gun.’

‘If I wanted to bring him down a teeny-weeny heat-seeking missile would do the job very effectively. But we don’t do things like that. We’re civilized. Besides, we don’t provoke international incidents. An unwritten law.’

‘Sounds a very funny law to me.’

‘Not at all. When the United States or NATO play war games, as we are doing now, the Soviets track us very closely indeed, whether on land, sea or air. We don’t complain. We can’t. When they’re playing their game we do exactly the same to them. Can, admittedly, have its awkward moments. Not so long ago, when the US Navy were carrying out exercises in the Sea of Japan an American destroyer banged into, and quite severely damaged, a Russian submarine which was monitoring things a little too closely.’

‘And that didn’t cause what you’ve just called an international incident?’

‘Certainly not. Nobody’s fault. Mutual apologies between the two captains and the Russian was towed to a safe port by another Russian warship. Vladivostok, I believe it was.’ Talbot turned his head. ‘Excuse me. That’s the radio-room call-up.’

‘Myers again,’ the speaker said. ‘Delos. Name of the sinking vessel. Very brief message – explosion, on fire, sinking fast.’

‘Keep listening,’ Talbot said. He looked at the helmsman who already had a pair of binoculars to his eyes. ‘You have it, Harrison?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Harrison handed over the binoculars and twitched the wheel to port. ‘Fire off the port bow.’

Talbot picked it up immediately, a thin black column of smoke rising vertically, unwaveringly, into the blue and windless sky. He was just lowering his glasses when the bell rang twice again. It was O’Rourke, the weatherman, or, more officially, the senior long-range radar operator.

‘Lost him, I’m afraid. The bandit, I mean. I was looking at the vectors on either side of him to see if he had any friends and when I came back he was gone.’

‘Any ideas, Chief?’

‘Well …’ O’Rourke sounded doubtful. ‘He could have exploded but I doubt it.’

‘So do I. We’ve had the spy-glass trained on his approach bearing and they’d have picked up an explosion for sure.’

‘Then he must have gone into a steep dive. A very steep dive. God knows why. I’ll find him.’ The speaker clicked off.

Almost at once a telephone rang again. It was Van Gelder.

‘222, sir. Smoke. Plane. Could be the bandit.’

‘Almost certainly is. The weatherman’s just lost it off the long-range radar screen. Probably a waste of time but try to get that photograph anyway.’

He moved out on to the starboard wing and trained his glasses over the starboard quarter. He picked it up immediately, a heavy dark plume of smoke with, he thought, a glow of red at its centre. It was still quite high, at an altitude of four or five thousand feet. He didn’t pause to check how deeply the plane was diving or whether or not it actually was on fire. He moved quickly back into the bridge and picked up a phone.

‘Sub-Lieutenant Cousteau. Quickly.’ A brief pause. ‘Henri? Captain. Emergency. Have the launch and the lifeboat slung outboard. Crews to stand by to lower. Then report to the bridge.’ He rang down to the engine-room for Slow Ahead then said to Harrison: ‘Hard a-port. Steer north.’

Denholm, who had moved out on to the starboard wing, returned, lowering his binoculars.

‘Well, even I can see that plane. Not a plane, rather a huge streamer of smoke. Could that have been the bandit, sir – if it was a bandit?’

‘Must have been.’

Denholm said, tentatively: ‘I don’t care much for his line of approach, sir.’

‘I don’t care much for it myself, Lieutenant, especially if it’s a military plane and even more especially if it’s carrying bombs of any sort. If you look, you’ll see that we’re getting out of its way.’

‘Ah. Evasive action.’ Denholm hesitated, then said doubtfully: ‘Well, as long as he doesn’t alter course.’

‘Dead men don’t alter courses.’

‘That they don’t.’ Van Gelder had just returned to the bridge. ‘And the man or the men behind the controls of that plane are surely dead. No point in my staying there, sir – Gibson’s better with the spy-glass camera than I am and he’s very busy with it. We’ll have plenty of photographs to show you but I doubt whether we’ll be able to learn very much from them.’

‘As bad as that? You weren’t able to establish anything?’

‘Very little, I’m afraid. I did see the outer engine on the port wing. So it’s a four-engined jet. Civil or military, I’ve no idea.’

‘A moment, please.’ Talbot moved out on the port wing, looked aft, saw that the blazing plane – there was no mistaking the flames now – was due astern, at less than half the height and distance than when he had first seen it, returned to the bridge, told Harrison to steer due north, then turned again to Van Gelder.

‘That was all you could establish?’

‘About. Except that the fire is definitely located in the nose cone, which would rule out any engine explosion. It couldn’t have been hit by a missile because we know there are no missile-carrying planes around – even if there were, a heat-seeking missile, the only type that could nail it at that altitude, would have gone for the engines, not the nose cone. It could only have been an up-front internal explosion.’

Talbot nodded, reached for a phone, asked the exchange for the sick bay and was through immediately.

‘Doctor? Would you detail an SBA – with first-aid kit – to stand by the lifeboat.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Sorry, no time to explain. Come on up to the bridge.’ He looked aft through the starboard wing doorway, turned and took the wheel from the helmsman. ‘Take a look, Harrison. A good look.’

Harrison moved out on the starboard wing, had his good look – it took him only a few seconds – returned and took the wheel again.

‘Awful.’ He shook his head. ‘They’re finished, sir, aren’t they?’

‘So I would have thought.’

‘They’re going to miss us by at least a quarter mile. Maybe a half.’ Harrison took another quick look through the doorway. ‘This angle of descent – they should land – rather, hit the sea – a mile, mile and a half ahead. Unless by some fluke they carry on and hit the island. That would be curtains, sir.’

‘It would indeed.’ Talbot looked ahead through the for’ard screens. Thera Island was some four miles distant with Cape Akrotiri lying directly to the north and Mount Elias, the highest point of the island – it was close on 2000 feet – to the north-east. Between them, but about five miles further distant, a tenuous column of bluish smoke, hardly visible against a cloudless sky, hung lazily in the air. This marked the site of Thira Village, the only settlement of any size on the island. ‘But the damage would be limited to the plane. The south-west of the island is barren. I don’t think anyone lives there.’

‘What are we going to do, sir? Stop over the point where it goes down?’

‘Something like that. You can handle it yourself. Or maybe another quarter or half mile further on along the line he was taking. Have to wait and see. Fact is, Harrison, I know no more about it than you do. It may disintegrate on impact or, if it survives that, it may carry on some distance under water. Not for far, I should think – not if its nose has gone. Number One –’ this to Van Gelder ‘– what depths do we have here?’

‘I know the five fathom mark is about half a mile offshore along the south of the island. Beyond that, it shelves pretty steeply. I’ll have to check in the chart-room. At the moment I’d guess we’re in two to three hundred fathoms. A sonar check, sir?’

‘Please.’ Van Gelder left, brushing by Sub-Lieutenant Cousteau as he did. Cousteau, barely in his twenties, was a happy-go-lucky youngster, always eager and willing and a more than competent seaman. Talbot beckoned him out on to the starboard wing.

‘Have you seen it, Henri?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Cousteau’s normal cheerfulness was in marked abeyance. He gazed in unwilling fascination at the blazing, smoking plane, now directly abeam and at an altitude of under a thousand feet. ‘What a damnable, awful thing.’

‘Aye, it’s not nice.’ They had been joined by Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Andrew Grierson. Grierson was dressed in white shorts and a flowing multi-coloured Hawaiian shirt which he doubtless regarded as the correct dress of the day for the summer Aegean. ‘So this is why you wanted Moss and his first-aid box.’ Moss was the Leading Sick Bay Attendant. ‘I’m thinking maybe I should be going myself.’ Grierson was a West Highland Scot, as was immediately evident from his accent, an accent which he never attempted to conceal for the excellent reason that he saw no earthly reason why he ever should. ‘If there are any survivors, which I consider bloody unlikely, I know something about decompression problems which Moss doesn’t.’

Talbot was conscious of the increased vibration beneath his feet. Harrison had increased speed and was edging a little to the east. Talbot didn’t even give it a second thought: his faith in his senior quartermaster was complete.

‘Sorry, Doctor, but I have more important things for you to do.’ He pointed to the east. ‘Look under the trail of smoke to the plane’s left.’

‘I see it. I should have seen it before. Somebody sinking, for a fiver.’

‘Indeed. Something called the Delos, a private yacht, I should imagine, and, as you say, sinking. Explosion and on fire. Pretty heavily on fire, too, I would think. Burns, injuries.’

‘We live in troubled times,’ Grierson said. Grierson, in fact, lived a singularly carefree and untroubled existence but Talbot thought it was hardly the time to point this out to him.

‘The plane’s silent, sir,’ Cousteau said. ‘The engines have been shut off.’

‘Survivors, you think? I’m afraid not. The explosion may have destroyed the controls in which case, I imagine, the engines shut off automatically.’

‘Disintegrate or dive?’ Grierson said. ‘Daft question. We’ll know all too soon.’

Van Gelder joined them. ‘I make it eighty fathoms here, sir. Sonar says seventy. They’re probably right. Doesn’t matter, it’s shallowing anyway.’

Talbot nodded and said nothing. Nobody said anything, nobody felt like saying anything. The plane, or the source of the dense column of smoke, was now less than a hundred feet above the water. Suddenly, the source of the smoke and flame dipped and then was abruptly extinguished. Even then they failed to catch a glimpse of the plane, it had been immediately engulfed in a fifty-foot-high curtain of water and spray. There was no sound of impact and certainly no disintegration for when the water and the spray cleared away there was only the empty sea and curiously small waves, little more than ripples, radiating outwards from the point of impact.

Talbot touched Cousteau on the arm. ‘Your cue, Henri. How’s the whaler’s radio?’

‘Tested yesterday, sir. Okay.’

‘If you find anything, anybody, let us know. I have a feeling you won’t need that radio. When we stop, lower away then keep circling around. We should be back in half an hour or so.’ Cousteau left and Talbot turned to Van Gelder. ‘When we stop, tell sonar I want the exact depth.’

Five minutes later the whaler was in the water and moving away from the side of the Ariadne, Talbot rang for full power and headed east.

Van Gelder hung up a phone. ‘Thirty fathoms, sonar says. Give or take a fathom.’

‘Thanks. Doctor?’

‘Hundred and eighty feet,’ Grierson said. ‘I don’t even have to rub my chin over that one. The answer is no. Even if anyone could escape from the fuselage – which I think would be impossible in the first place – they’d die soon after surfacing. Diver’s bends. Burst lungs. They wouldn’t know that they’d have to breathe out all the way up. A trained, fit submariner, possibly with breathing apparatus, might do it. There would be no fit, trained submariners aboard that plane. Question’s academic, anyway. I agree with you, Captain. The only men aboard that plane are dead men.’

Talbot nodded and reached for a phone.

‘Myers? Signal to General Carson. Unidentified four-engined plane crashed in sea two miles south of Cape Akrotiri, Thera Island. 1415 hours. Impossible to determine whether military or civilian. First located altitude 43,000 feet. Apparent cause internal explosion. No further details available at present. No NATO planes reported in vicinity. Have you any information? Sylvester. Send Code B.’

‘Wilco, sir. Where do I send it?’

‘Rome. Wherever he is he’ll have it two minutes later.’

Grierson said: ‘Well, yes, if anyone knows he should.’ Carson was the C-in-C Southern European NATO. He lifted his binoculars and looked at the vertical column of smoke, now no more than four miles to the east. ‘A yacht, as you say, and making quite a bonfire. If there’s anyone still aboard, they’re going to be very warm indeed. Are you going alongside, Captain?’

‘Alongside.’ Talbot looked at Denholm. ‘What’s your estimate of the value of the electronic gear we have aboard?’

‘Twenty million. Maybe twenty-five. A lot, anyway.’

‘There’s your answer, Doctor. That thing’s gone bang once already. It can go bang once again. I am not going alongside. You are. In the launch. That’s expendable. The Ariadne’s not.’

‘Well, thank you very much. And what intrepid soul –’

‘I’m sure Number One here will be delighted to ferry you across.’

‘Ah. Number One, have your men wear overalls, gloves and flash-masks. Injuries from burning diesel can be very unpleasant indeed. And you. I go to prepare myself for self-immolation.’

‘And don’t forget your lifebelts.’

Grierson didn’t deign to answer.

They had halved the remaining distance to the burning yacht when Talbot got through to the radio-room again.

‘Message dispatched?’

‘Dispatched and acknowledged.’

‘Anything more from the Delos?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Delos,’ Denholm said. ‘That’s about eighty miles north of here. Alas, the Cyclades will never be the same for me again.’ Denholm sighed. Electronics specialist or not, he regarded himself primarily as a classicist and, indeed, he was totally fluent in reading and writing both Latin and Greek. He was deeply immersed in their ancient cultures as the considerable library in his cabin bore testimony. He was also much given to quotations and he quoted now.

‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung,

Eternal summer –’

‘Your point is taken, Lieutenant,’ Talbot said. ‘We’ll cry tomorrow. In the meantime, let us address ourselves to the problem of those poor souls on the fo’c’s’le. I count five of them.’

‘So do I.’ Denholm lowered his glasses. ‘What’s all the frantic waving for? Surely to God they can’t imagine we haven’t seen them?’

‘They’ve seen us all right. Relief, Lieutenant. Expectation of rescue. But there’s more to it than that. A certain urgency in their waving. A primitive form of semaphoring. What they’re saying is “get us the hell out of here and be quick about it”.’

‘Maybe they’re expecting another explosion?’

‘Could be that. Harrison, I want to come to a stop on their starboard beam. At, you understand, a prudent distance.’

‘A hundred yards, sir?’

‘Fine.’

The Delos was – or had been – a rather splendid yacht. A streamlined eighty-footer, it was obvious that it had been, until very, very recently, a dazzling white. Now, because of a combination of smoke and diesel oil, it was mainly black. A rather elaborate superstructure consisted of a bridge, saloon, a dining-room and what may or may not have been a galley. The still dense smoke and flames rising six feet above the poop deck indicated the source of the fire – almost certainly the engine-room. Just aft of the fire a small motorboat was still secured to its davits: it wasn’t difficult to guess that either the explosion or the fire had rendered it inoperable.

Talbot said: ‘Rather odd, don’t you think, Lieutenant?’

‘Odd?’ Denholm said carefully.

‘Yes. You can see that the flames are dying away. One would have thought that would reduce the danger of further explosion.’ Talbot moved out on the port wing. ‘And you will have observed that the water level is almost up to the deck.’

‘I can see she’s sinking.’

‘Indeed. If you were aboard a vessel that was either going to go up or drag you down when it sank, what would your natural reaction be?’

‘To be elsewhere, sir. But I can see that their motorboat has been damaged.’

‘Agreed. But a craft that size would carry alternative life-saving equipment. If not a Carley float, then certainly an inflatable rubber dinghy. And any prudent owner would carry a sufficiency of lifebelts and life-jackets for the passengers and crew. I can even see two lifebelts in front of the bridge. But they haven’t done the obvious thing and abandoned ship. I wonder why.’

‘I’ve no idea, sir. But it is damned odd.’

‘When we’ve rescued those distressed mariners and brought them aboard, you, Jimmy, will have forgotten how to speak Greek.’

‘But I will not have forgotten how to listen in Greek?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Commander Talbot, you have a devious and suspicious mind.’

‘It goes with the job, Jimmy. It goes with the job.’

Harrison brought the Ariadne to a stop off the starboard beam of the Delos at the agreed hundred yards distance. Van Gelder was away at once and was very quickly alongside the fo’c’s’le of the Delos. Two boat-hooks around the guard-rail stanchions held them in position. As the launch and the bows of the sinking yacht were now almost level it took only a few seconds to transfer the six survivors – another had joined the group of five that Talbot had seen – aboard the launch. They were, indeed, a sorry and sadly bedraggled lot, so covered in diesel and smoke that it was quite impossible to discriminate among them on the basis of age, sex or nationality.

Van Gelder said: ‘Any of you here speak English?’

‘We all do.’ The speaker was short and stocky and that was all that could be said of him in the way of description. ‘Some of us just a little. But enough.’ The voice was heavily accented but readily understood. Van Gelder looked at Grierson.

‘Any of you injured, any of you burnt?’ Grierson said. All shook their heads or mumbled a negative. ‘Nothing here for me, Number One. Hot showers, detergents, soap. Not to mention a change of clothing.’

‘Who’s in charge here?’ Van Gelder asked.

‘I am.’ It was the same man.

‘Anybody left aboard?’

‘Three men, I’m afraid. They won’t be coming with us.’

‘You mean they’re dead?’ The man nodded. ‘I’ll check.’

‘No, no!’ His oil-soaked hand gripped Van Gelder’s arm. ‘It is too dangerous, far too dangerous. I forbid it.’

‘You forbid me nothing.’ When Van Gelder wasn’t smiling, which wasn’t often, he could assume a very discouraging expression indeed. The man withdrew his hand. ‘Where are those men?’

‘In the passageway between the engine-room and the stateroom aft. We got them out after the explosion but before the fire began.’

‘Riley.’ This to a Leading Seaman. ‘Come aboard with me. If you think the yacht’s going, give me a call.’ He picked up a torch and was about to board the Delos when a hand holding a pair of goggles reached out and stopped him. Van Gelder smiled. ‘Thank you, Doctor. I hadn’t thought of that.’

Once aboard he made his way aft and descended the after companionway. There was smoke down there but not too much and with the aid of his torch he had no difficulty in locating the three missing men, all huddled shapelessly in a corner. To his right was the engine-room door, slightly buckled from the force of the explosion. Not without some difficulty, he forced the door open and at once began coughing as the foulsmelling smoke caught his throat and eyes. He pulled on the goggles but still there was nothing to see except for the red embers of a dying fire emanating from some unknown source. He pulled the door to behind him – he was reasonably certain there was nothing for him to see in the engine-room anyway – and stooped to examine the three dead men. They were far from being a pretty sight but he forced himself to carry out as thorough an investigation as he could. He spent some quite considerable time bent over the third man – in the circumstances thirty seconds was a long time – and when he straightened he looked both puzzled and thoughtful.

The door to the after stateroom opened easily. There was some smoke there but not so much that he required to use his goggles. The cabin was luxuriously furnished and immaculately tidy, a condition which Van Gelder very rapidly altered. He pulled a sheet from one of the beds, spread it on the floor, opened up wardrobes and drawers, scooped up armfuls of clothes – there was no time to make any kind of selection and even if there had been he would have been unable to pick and choose, they were all women’s clothing – dumped them on the sheet, tied up the four corners, lugged the bundle up the companionway and handed it over to Riley.

‘Put this in the launch. I’m going to have a quick look at the for’ard cabins. I think the steps will be at the for’ard end of the saloon under the bridge.’

‘I think you should hurry, sir.’

Van Gelder didn’t answer. He didn’t have to be told why he should hurry – the sea was already beginning to trickle over on to the upper deck. He passed into the saloon, found the companionway at once and descended to a central passage.

He switched on his torch – there was, of course, no electrical power left. There were doors on both sides and one at the end. The first door to port opened up into a food store, the corresponding door to starboard was locked. Van Gelder didn’t bother with it: the Delos didn’t look like the kind of craft that would lack a commodious liquor store. Behind the other doors lay four cabins and two bathrooms. All were empty. As he had done before, Van Gelder spread out a sheet – in the passageway, this time – threw some more armfuls of clothes on to it, secured the corners and hurried up on deck.

The launch was no more than thirty yards away when the Delos, still on even keel, slid gently under the surface of the sea. There was nothing dramatic to mark its going – just a stream of air bubbles that became gradually smaller and ceased altogether after about twenty seconds.

Talbot was on deck when the launch brought back the six survivors. He looked in concern at the woebegone and bedraggled figures before him.

‘My goodness, what a state you people are in. This the lot, Number One?’

‘Those that survived, sir. Three died. Impossible to get their bodies out in time.’ He indicated the figure nearest him. ‘This is the owner.’

‘Andropulos,’ the man said. ‘Spyros Andropulos. You are the officer in charge?’

‘Commander Talbot. My commiserations, Mr Andropulos.’

‘And my thanks, Commander. We are very deeply grateful –’

‘With respect, sir, that can wait. First things first, and the very first thing is to get yourselves cleaned up immediately. Ah. And changed. A problem. Clothes. We’ll find some.’

‘Clothing we have,’ Van Gelder said. He pointed at the two sheet-wrapped packages. ‘Ladies. Gentlemen.’

‘A mention in dispatches for that, Number One. You said “ladies”?’

‘Two, Commander,’ Andropulos said. He looked at the two people standing by him. ‘My niece and her friend.’

‘Ah. Well, should apologize, I suppose, but difficult to tell in the circumstances.’

‘My name is Charial.’ The voice was unmistakably feminine. ‘Irene Charial. This is my friend Eugenia.’

‘We could have met under happier circumstances. Lieutenant Denholm here will take you to my cabin. The bathroom is small but adequate. By the time you bring them back, Lieutenant, I trust they are recognizable for what they are.’ He turned to a burly, dark-haired figure who, like most of the crew, wore no insignia of rank. ‘Chief Petty Officer McKenzie.’ McKenzie was the senior NCO on the Ariadne. ‘The four gentlemen here, Chief. You know what to do.’

‘Right away, sir. If you will come with me, gentlemen.’

Grierson also left and Van Gelder and Talbot were left alone. ‘We can find this place again?’ Van Gelder asked.

‘No trouble.’ Talbot looked at him speculatively and pointed towards the north-west. ‘I’ve taken a bearing on the monastery and radar station on Mount Elias there. Sonar says that we’re in eighteen fathoms. Just to make sure, we’ll drop a marker buoy.’

General Carson laid down the slip of paper he had been studying and looked at the colonel seated across the table from him.

‘What do you make of this, Charles?’

‘Could be nothing. Could be important. Sorry, that doesn’t help. I have a feeling I don’t like it. It would help a bit if we had a sailor around.’

Carson smiled and pressed a button. ‘Do you know if Vice-Admiral Hawkins is in the building?’

‘He is, sir.’ A girl’s voice. ‘Do you wish to speak to him or see him?’

‘See him, Jean. Ask him if he would be kind enough to stop by.’

Vice-Admiral Hawkins was very young for one of his rank. He was short, a little overweight, more than a little rubicund as to his features and exuded an aura of cheerful bonhomie. He didn’t look very bright, which he was. He was widely regarded as having one of the most brilliant minds in the Royal Navy. He took the seat to which Carson had gestured him and glanced at the message slip.

‘I see, I see.’ He laid the message down. ‘But you didn’t ask me here to comment on a perfectly straightforward signal. The Sylvester is one of the code names for the frigate HMS Ariadne. One of the vessels under your command, sir.’

‘Don’t rub it in, David. I know it, of course – more accurately I know of it. Don’t forget I’m just a simple landlubber. Odd name, isn’t it? Royal Naval ship with a Greek name.’

‘Courtesy gesture to the Greeks, sir. We’re carrying out a joint hydrographic survey with them.’

‘Is that so?’ General Carson ran a hand through his grizzled hair. ‘I was not aware that I was in the hydrographic business, David.’

‘You’re not, sir, although I have no doubt it could carry out such a survey if it were called for. The Ariadne has a radio system that can transmit to, and receive transmissions from, any quarter of the globe. It has telescopes and optical instruments that can pick out the salient features of, say, any passing satellite, even those in geosynchronous orbit – and that’s 22,000 miles up. It carries long-range and surface radar that is as advanced as any in the world. And it has a sonar location and detection system that can pick up a sunken object at the bottom of the ocean just as easily as it can pinpoint a lurking submarine. The Ariadne, sir, is the eyes and the ears and the voice of your fleet.’

‘That’s nice to know, I must say. Very reassuring. The ability of the commanding officer of the Ariadne is – ah – commensurate with this extraordinary array of devices he controls?’

‘Indeed, sir. For an exceptionally complex task an exceptionally qualified man. Commander Talbot is an outstanding officer. Hand-picked for the job.’

‘Who picked him?’

‘I did.’

‘I see. That terminates this line of conversation very abruptly.’ Carson pondered briefly. ‘I think, Colonel, that we should ask General Simpson about this one.’ Simpson, the over-all commander of NATO, was the only man who outranked Carson in Europe.

‘Don’t see what else we can do, sir.’

‘You would agree, David?’

‘No, General. I think you’d be wasting your time. If you don’t know anything about this, then I’m damned sure General Simpson doesn’t know anything either. This is not an educated guess, call it a completely uneducated guess, but I have an odd feeling that this is one of your planes, sir – an American plane. A bomber, almost certainly, perhaps not yet off the secret lists – it was, after all, flying at an uncommon height.’

‘The Ariadne could have been in error.’

‘The Ariadne does not make mistakes. My job and my life on it.’ The flat, unemotional voice carried complete conviction. ‘Commander Talbot is not the only uniquely qualified man aboard. There are at least thirty others in the same category. We have, for example, an electronics officer so unbelievably advanced in his speciality that none of your much-vaunted high-technology whizzkids in Silicon Valley would even begin to know what he’s talking about.’

Carson raised a hand. ‘Point taken, David, point taken. So an American bomber. A very special bomber because it must be carrying a very special cargo. What would you guess that to be?’

Hawkins smiled faintly. ‘I am not yet in the ESP business, sir. People or goods. Very secret, very important goods or very secret and very important people. There’s only one source that can give you the answer and it might be pointed out that their refusal to divulge this information might put the whole future of NATO at risk and that the individual ultimately responsible for the negative decision would be answerable directly to the president of the United States. One does not imagine that the individual concerned would remain in a position of responsibility for very much longer.’

Carson sighed. ‘If I may speak in a spirit of complaint, David, I might point out that it’s easy for you to talk and even easier to talk tough. You’re a British officer. I’m an American.’

‘I appreciate that, sir.’

Carson looked at the colonel, who remained silent for a couple of moments, then nodded, slowly, twice. Carson reached for the button on his desk.

‘Jean?’

‘Sir?’

‘Get me the Pentagon. Immediately.’

Chapter 2

‘You are unhappy, Vincent?’ Vincent was Van Gelder’s first name. There were three of them seated in the wardroom, Talbot, Van Gelder and Grierson.

‘Puzzled, you might say, sir. I don’t understand why Andropulos and the others didn’t abandon ship earlier. I saw two inflatable dinghies aboard. Rolled up, admittedly, but those things can be opened and inflated from their gas cylinders in seconds. There were also lifebelts and life-jackets. There was no need for this the-boy-stood-on-the-burning-deck act. They could have left at any time. I’m not saying they’d have been sucked down with the yacht but they might have had a rather uncomfortable time.’

‘Same thought had occurred to me. Mentioned it to Andrew here. Odd. Maybe Andropulos had a reason. Anything else?’

‘The owner tried to stop me from boarding the yacht. Maybe he was concerned with my health. I have the feeling he wasn’t. Then I would much like to know what caused that explosion in the engine-room. A luxurious yacht like that must have carried an engineer – we can find that out easily enough – and it’s a fair guess that the engines would have been maintained in an immaculate condition. I don’t see how they could have caused an explosion. We’ll have to ask McCafferty about that one.’

‘That, of course, is why you were so anxious that we pinpoint the spot where the Delos went down. You think an expert on the effects of explosives could identify and locate the cause of the explosion? I’m sure he could, especially if he were an expert at determining the causes of aircraft lost through explosions – those people are much better at that sort of thing than the Navy is. Explosives experts we have aboard but no experts on the effects of explosives. Even if we did, we have no divers aboard – well, you and myself apart – trained to work at levels below a hundred feet. We could borrow one easily enough from a lifting vessel or salvage tug but the chances are high that he’d know nothing about explosives. But there’s really no problem. It would be a simple matter for any lifting vessel to raise an aircraft fuselage to the surface.’ Talbot regarded Van Gelder thoughtfully. ‘But there’s something else worrying you, isn’t there?’

‘Yes, sir. The three dead men aboard the Delos – well, to be specific, just one of them. That’s why I asked the doctor here to come along. The three of them were so smoke begrimed and blackened that it was difficult to tell what they were wearing but two of them appeared to be dressed in white while the third was in a navy blue overall. An engineer wouldn’t wear whites. Well, I admit our engineer Lieutenant McCafferty is a dazzling exception; but he’s a one-off case, he never goes near his engines anyway. In any event I assumed the man in the overalls was the engineer and he was the one who caught my attention. He had a vicious gash on the back of his head as if he had been blown backwards against a very hard, very sharp object.’

Grierson said: ‘Or been struck by a very hard, sharp object?’

‘Either way, I suppose. I wouldn’t know. I’m afraid I’m a bit weak on the forensic side.’

‘Had his occiput been crushed?’

‘Back of his head? No. At least I’m reasonably certain it hadn’t been. I mean, it would have given, wouldn’t it, or been squashy. It wasn’t like that.’

‘A blow like that should have caused massive bruising. Did you see any?’

‘Difficult to say. He had fairly thick hair. But it was fair. No, I don’t think there was any.’

‘Had it bled a lot?’

‘He hadn’t bled at all. I’m quite sure of that.’

‘You didn’t notice any holes in his clothing?’

‘Not that I could see. He hadn’t been shot, if that is what you’re asking and that is what I think you are asking. Who would want to shoot a dead man? His neck was broken.’

‘Indeed?’ Grierson seemed unsurprised. ‘Poor man was through the wars, wasn’t he?’

Talbot said: ‘What do you think, Andrew?’

‘I don’t know what to think. The inflicting of the wound on the head and the snapping of the vertebra could well have been simultaneous. If the two weren’t simultaneous, then it could equally well have been – as Vincent clearly seems to think – a case of murder.’

‘Would an examination of the corpse help at all?’

‘It might. I very much doubt it. But an examination of engine-room bulkheads would.’

‘To see if there were any sharp edges or protrusions that could have caused such a head wound?’ Grierson nodded. ‘Well, when – and if – we ever raise that hull, we should be able to kill two birds with one stone: to determine the causes of both the explosions and this man’s death.’

‘Maybe three birds,’ Van Gelder said. ‘It would be interesting to know the number and layout of the fuel tanks in the engine-room. There are, I believe, two common layouts – in one case there is just one main fuel tank, athwartships and attached to the for’ard bulkhead, with a generator or generators on one side of the engine and batteries on the other, plus a water-tank to port and another to starboard: or there could be a fuel tank on either side with the water-tank up front. In that case the two fuel tanks are interconnected to keep the fuel levels equal and maintain equilibrium.’

‘A suspicious mind, Number One,’ Talbot said. ‘Very suspicious. What you would like to find, of course, is just one fuel tank because you think Andropulos is going to claim that he didn’t abandon ship because he thought another fuel tank was about to go and he didn’t want his precious passengers splashing about in a sea of blazing fuel oil which would, of course, also have destroyed the rubber dinghies.’

‘I’m grieved, sir. I thought I’d thought of that first.’

‘You did, in fact. When the passengers are cleaned up see if you can get this young lady, Irene Charial, alone and find out if she knows anything about the layout of the engine-room. The casual approach, Vincent, the innocent and cherubic expression, although I doubt the last is beyond you. Anyway it’s possible she’s never been there and may possibly know nothing about it.’

‘It’s equally possible, sir, that she knows all about it and may well choose to tell me something. Miss Charial is Andropulos’s niece.’

‘The thought had occurred. However, if Andropulos is not all he might be, then the chances are high that there is some other member of his ship’s company in his confidence and I would have thought that would be a man. I don’t say that that’s because you know what the Greeks are like because I don’t know what the Greeks are like. And we mustn’t forget that Andropulos may be as innocent as the driven snow and that there is a perfectly rational explanation for all that has happened. Anyway, it would do no harm to try and you never can tell, Vincent – she might turn out to be a classic Greek beauty.’

From the fact that the whaler was lying stopped in the water and that Cousteau, his hand resting idly on the tiller, appeared to be expressing no great degree of interest in anything, it was obvious that his wait had been a vain one, a fact he confirmed on his arrival on the bridge.

Talbot called the sonar room. ‘You have pinpointed the location of the plane?’

‘Yes, sir. We’re sitting exactly above it. Depth registered is eighteen fathoms. That’s the echo from the top of the fuselage. Probably lying in about twenty fathoms. It’s lying in the same direction as it was flying when it came down – northeast to south-west. Picking up some rather odd noises down here, sir. Would you care to come down?’

‘Yes, I will.’ For reasons best known to himself Halzman, the senior sonar operator, preferred not to discuss it over an open line. ‘A minute or two.’ He turned to Van Gelder. ‘Have McKenzie put down a marker buoy, about midships. Tell him to lower the weight gently. I don’t want to bump too hard against the plane’s fuselage in case we do actually come into contact with it. When that’s been done, I want to anchor. Two anchors. A stern anchor to the north-west, about a hundred yards distant from the buoy, then a bow anchor a similar distance to the south-east.’

‘Yes, sir. May I suggest the other way around?’

‘Of course, you’re right. I’d forgotten about our old friend. Taking a holiday today, isn’t it? The other way around, of course.’ The ‘old friend’ to which he referred and which Van Gelder clearly had in mind, was the Meltemi wind, referred to as the ‘Etesian’ in the British sailing directions. In the Cyclades, in the summer months – and indeed in most of the Aegean – it blew steadily, but usually only in the afternoon and early evening, from the north-west. If it did start up, the Ariadne would ride more comfortably if it were bows on to it.

Talbot went to the sonar room which was only one deck down and slightly aft. The sonar room was heavily insulated against all outside noise and dimly lit by subdued yellow lighting. There were three display screens, two sets of control panels and, over and above all, a considerable number of heavily padded earphones. Halzman caught sight of him in an overhead mirror – there were a number of such mirrors around, speaking as well as any other kind of sound was kept to a minimum in the sonar room – removed his earphones and gestured to the seat beside him.

‘Those earphones, sir. I thought you might be interested in listening for a minute.’

Talbot sat and clamped the earphones on. After about fifteen seconds he removed them and turned to Halzman, who had also removed his.

‘I can’t hear a damned thing.’

‘With respect, sir, when I said a minute, I meant just that. A minute. First of all you have to listen until you hear the silence, then you’ll hear it.’

‘Whatever that means, I’ll try it.’ Talbot listened again, and just before the allotted minute was up, he leaned forward and creased his brow. After another thirty seconds he removed the head-set.

‘A ticking sound. Strange, Halzman, you were right. First you hear the silence and then you hear it. Tick … tick … tick, once every two to three seconds. Very regular. Very faint. You’re certain that comes from the plane?’

‘I have no doubt, sir.’

‘Have you ever heard anything like it before?’

‘No, sir. I’ve spent hundreds of hours, more likely thousands, listening to sonar, asdics, hydrophones, but this is something quite new on me.’

‘I’ve got pretty good hearing but I had to wait almost a moment before I could imagine I could hear anything. It’s very, very faint, isn’t it?’

‘It is. I had to turn the hearing capacity up to maximum before I stumbled on it – not a practice I would normally follow or recommend – in the wrong circumstances you can get your eardrums blasted off. Why is it so faint? Well, the source of the sound may be very faint to begin with. I’ve been thinking about this, sir – well, I’ve had nothing else to think about. It’s either a mechanical or electrical device. In either case it has to be inside a sealed or waterproof casing. A mechanical device could, of course, operate in water even if it was totally submerged, but operating in water would dampen out the sound almost completely. An electrical device would have to be totally sealed against sea-water. The plane’s own electrical system, of course, has ceased to function, so it would have to have its own supply system, almost certainly battery-powered. In either event, mechanical or electrical, the sound impulses would have to pass through the waterproof casing, after which they must pass through the fuselage of the plane.’

‘Have you any idea as to what it might be?’

‘None whatsoever. It’s a two and a half second sequence – I’ve timed it. I know of no watch or clock movement that follows that sequence. Do you, sir?’

‘No, I don’t. You think it could be some sort of timing device?’

‘I thought about that too, sir, but I put it out of my mind.’ Halzman smiled. ‘Maybe I’m prejudiced against that idea because of all those cheap and awful video film cassettes we have aboard, with all their special effects and pseudo science. All I know for sure, sir, is that we have a mysterious plane lying on the sea-bed there. Lord only knows what mysterious kind of cargo it was carrying.’

‘Agreed. I think we’d better leave it at that for the moment. Have one of your boys monitor it, once, say, in every fifteen minutes.’

When Talbot returned to the bridge he could see the marker buoy just astern, bobbing gently in the very small wake Van Gelder was creating as he edged the Ariadne gently to the north-west. Very soon he stopped, juggled the engines to and fro until he reckoned the bows were a hundred yards distant from the buoy, had the anchor dropped, then moved just as slowly astern, the anchor chain being paid out as he went. Soon the stern anchor had been paid out and the Ariadne was back to where she had started, the buoy nudging the midships port side.

‘Neatly done,’ Talbot said. ‘Tell me, Number One, how are you on puzzles?’

‘Useless. Even the simplest crossword baffles me.’

‘No matter. We’re picking up a strange noise on the sonar. Maybe you’d like to take a turn along there, perhaps even identify it. Baffles me.’

‘Consider it done. Back in two or three minutes.’

Twenty minutes elapsed before he returned to the bridge where Talbot was now alone: as the ship was no longer under way, Harrison had retired to his Mess.

‘That was a long couple of minutes, Vincent, and what are you looking so pleased about?’

‘I really don’t know how you do it, sir. Incredible. I don’t suppose you have any Scottish blood?’

‘Not a drop, as far as I’m aware. Am I supposed to be following you, Number One?’

‘I thought maybe the second sight. You were right. A classic Greek beauty. Irene. Miss Charial, that is. Odd, mind you, blonde as they come. I thought all those warm-blooded young Latin ladies had hair as black as a raven’s wing.’

‘It’s the sheltered life you lead, Vincent. You should go to Andalucia some day. Seville. On one street corner a dusky Moorish maiden, the next a Nordic blonde. We’ll discuss pigmentation some other time. What did you learn?’

‘Enough, I hope. It’s an art, sir, this casual and inconsequential approach. The questioning, I mean. She seems honest and open enough, not ingenuous, if you know what I mean, but quite straightforward. Certainly didn’t give the impression of having anything to hide. Says she doesn’t know the engine-room well but has been there a couple of times. We came to the question of fuel oil – I was just wondering out loud, natural curiosity, I hope she thought – as to what could have caused the explosion. Seems I was wrong when I said there were just two common ways of arranging fuel and water tanks. Seems there’s a third. Two big tanks on either side of the engine, one fuel, one water. How big, I don’t know, she was a bit vague about that – no reason why she should know – but at least thousands of litres, she says. If there was a spare fuel tank she didn’t know about it. I look forward, sir, to hearing Mr Andropulos justifying his decision not to abandon ship.’

‘So do I. Should be interesting. Anyway, congratulations. A good job.’

‘No hardship, sir.’ Van Gelder scanned the sea around. ‘Odd, don’t you think, sir? I mean, are we the only ones who heard the SOS? I would have thought the horizon would have been black with converging vessels by this time.’

‘Not so strange, really. Nearly all the vessels around at this time of year are private yachts and fishermen. Lots of them don’t carry any radio at all and even those who do almost certainly wouldn’t be permanently tuned to the distress frequency.’

‘But we are.’

‘This time I’m ahead of you. The Delos – or at least Andropulos – knew that we would be permanently tuned to the distress frequency, that we are automatically alerted by bell or buzzer whenever the distress frequency is energized. This presupposes two things. He knew we were a naval vessel and he also knew that we were in the vicinity.’

‘You realize what you are saying, sir? Sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound that way. But the implications, sir. I must say I really don’t like those at all.’

‘Neither do I. Opens up all sorts of avenues of interesting speculation, doesn’t it?’ He turned as McKenzie came on to the bridge: ‘And how are our oil-stained survivors, Chief?’

‘Clean, sir. And in dry clothes. I don’t think any of them will make the list of the ten best-dressed men.’ He looked at Van Gelder. ‘I gather you didn’t have too much time, sir, for the selection and careful matching up of clothes. They’re a bit of an odd sight, I must say, but respectable enough. I knew you would want to see them, Captain – Mr Andropulos seems very anxious to see you – and I know you don’t like unauthorized people on the bridge so I took the liberty of putting the four gentlemen and the two young ladies in the wardroom. I hope that’s all right, sir.’

‘Fine. You might ask the Surgeon Commander and Lieutenant Denholm to join us there. And send a couple of your boys up here to keep a lookout. Who knows, our radar might have a day off.’

The six survivors from the Delos were standing around rather awkwardly, not talking, when Talbot and Van Gelder reached the wardroom. The four men, as McKenzie had suggested, did present rather an odd spectacle. They looked rather as if they had just raided an old clothes shop, few of the items of their clothing being a match, and for the most part, fitting only where they touched. In striking contrast, both girls were immaculately clad: dressed in white blouses and white skirts, they could have stepped straight from the pages of Vogue.

‘Please,’ Talbot said. ‘All of you be seated. Before we talk, I suggest we get our priorities right. First things first. You’ve had a harrowing experience and a lucky escape. I suggest you will not take amiss the suggestion of a suitable restorative.’ He pressed a bell and a steward entered. ‘Jenkins. Refreshments. Find out what they would like.’ Jenkins did so and left.

‘I’m the captain,’ Talbot said. ‘Talbot. This is Lieutenant-Commander Ven Gelder. Ah!’ The door had opened. ‘And this is Surgeon-Commander Grierson, whom you have met and whose services you fortunately didn’t require, and Lieutenant Denholm.’ He looked at the short stocky man seated before him. ‘I take it that you, sir, are Mr Andropulos, the owner.’

‘I am, Commander, I am.’ Andropulos had black hair, black eyes, white teeth and a deeply tanned complexion. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved that morning but then, he would always look as if he hadn’t shaved that morning. He leapt to his feet, took Talbot’s hand, and shook it vigorously. He positively radiated a combined aura of benevolence and bonhomie. ‘Words cannot express our gratitude. A close-run thing, Commander, a very close-run thing. We owe you our lives.’

‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that but I’ll admit you were in a rather nasty pickle.’

‘Pickle? Pickle?’

‘Dangerous circumstances. I deeply regret both your loss of the members of your crew and your yacht.’

‘The yacht is nothing. I can always buy another. Well, Lloyd’s of London can buy it for me. Still sadder to lose an old friend like the Delos but sadder still, much sadder, to lose the three members of my crew. Been with me for many years. I treasured them all.’

‘Who were they, sir?’

‘My engineer, chef and steward. With me for many years.’ Andropulos shook his head. ‘They will be sadly missed.’

‘Wasn’t it odd for a chef and steward to be in the engine-room?’

Andropulos smiled sadly. ‘Not aboard the Delos, Commander. It was not exactly run along the lines of a ship of the Royal Navy. They were in the habit of having an after-lunch drink there with the engineer. They had my permission, of course, but they preferred to be discreet about it – and what more discreet place than the engine-room? Alas, their discretion cost them their lives.’

‘That is ironic. May I be introduced to the others?’

‘Of course, of course. This is my very dear friend Alexander.’ Alexander was a tall man with a thin, unsmiling face and black, cold eyes who didn’t look as if he could possibly be anybody’s very dear friend. ‘This is Aristotle, my captain.’ Andropulos didn’t say whether Aristotle was the first or last name: he had watchful eyes and a serious expression but looked as if he might, unlike Alexander, be capable of smiling occasionally. ‘And this is Achmed.’ He didn’t say what occupation Achmed held. He was young, pleasant-faced and smiled readily. Talbot couldn’t even begin to guess at his nationality except that he wasn’t Greek.

‘But I forget myself. Deplorable, deplorable. I forget myself. Such manners. Should have been ladies first, of course. This is my niece, Irene.’ Van Gelder hadn’t made any mistakes about her, Talbot thought, except that he’d missed out on the wide green eyes and a rather bewitching smile. ‘And this is Eugenia.’ This one, Talbot reflected, was much closer to Van Gelder’s concept of a warm-blooded young Latin lady. She had a slightly dusky skin, black hair and warm brown eyes. And she also, no doubt, was quite beautiful. It seemed to Talbot that Van Gelder was going to find himself in something of a quandary.

‘I congratulate you, Mr Andropulos,’ Talbot said gallantly, ‘and ourselves. Certainly the loveliest passengers we’ve ever had aboard the Ariadne. Ah. The steward.’

Andropulos took his glass – a scotch and not a small one, and disposed of half the contents in one gulp.

‘My goodness, I needed that. Thank you, Commander, thank you. Not as young as I was nor as tough, either. Age cometh to us all.’ He quaffed the rest of his drink and sighed.

Talbot said: ‘Jenkins, another for Mr Andropulos. A slightly larger measure this time.’ Jenkins looked at him expressionlessly, closed his eyes momentarily and left.

‘The Ariadne,’ Andropulos said. ‘Rather odd, is it not. Greek name, British vessel.’

‘Courtesy gesture to your Government, sir. We are carrying out a hydrographic charting exercise with your people.’ Talbot saw no point in mentioning that the Ariadne had never carried out a hydrographic exercise in its life and that the ship had been called Ariadne to remind the Greeks that it was a multi-national vessel and to persuade a wavering Greek government that perhaps NATO wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

‘Hydrographic, you say. Is that why we’re moored fore and aft – a fixed platform for taking bearings.’

‘A fixed platform, yes, but in this instance the purpose is not hydrographic. We’ve had quite a busy afternoon, Mr Andropulos, and at the moment we’re anchored over a plane that crashed into the sea just about the time we were receiving your SOS.’

‘A plane? Crashed? Good God! What – what kind of plane?’

‘We have no idea. It was so wreathed in smoke that it was impossible to distinguish any important features.’

‘But surely – well, don’t you think it was a big plane?’

‘It may have been.’

‘But it could have been a big jet. Maybe hundreds of passengers.’ If Andropulos knew it wasn’t a jet carrying hundreds of passengers, his face wasn’t saying so.

‘It’s always possible.’ Talbot saw no point in telling Andropulos that it was almost certainly a bomber and equally certainly not carrying hundreds of passengers.

‘You – you mean to tell me that you left the area to come to our aid?’

‘A reasonable enough decision, I think. We were pretty certain that there were people alive aboard the Delos and we were also pretty certain that there was no one alive aboard that plane.’

‘There could have been survivors aboard that plane. I mean, you weren’t there to see.’

‘Mr Andropulos.’ Talbot allowed a certain coldness to creep into his voice. ‘We are, I hope, neither callous nor stupid. Before leaving, we lowered one of our motorboats to circle the area. There were no survivors.’

‘Oh dear,’ Irene Charial said, ‘Isn’t it awful? All those people dead and there we were, busy doing nothing except feeling sorry for ourselves. I’m not being inquisitive, Captain, and I know it’s none of my business, but why do you remain anchored here? I mean, there can’t possibly be any hope now that some survivors may surface.’

‘There is no hope, Miss Charial. We’re remaining here as a marker until the diving ship arrives.’ He didn’t like lying to her but thought it inadvisable to tell her that there was no rescue ship hurrying to the scene and that, as far as he knew, the only other people who knew of the disaster were the NATO HQ in Italy. More especially, he didn’t want any person or persons in her company to know.

‘But – but it will be too late to save anyone.’

‘It’s already too late, young lady. But they’ll send divers down to investigate, to find out whether it’s a passenger-carrying jet or not and to try to ascertain the cause of the accident.’ He was looking, without seeming to look, at Andropulos as he said the last words and felt almost certain that he saw a flicker of expression cross his face.

Andropulos’s captain, Aristotle, spoke for the first time. ‘How deep is this plane, Commander?’

‘Seventeen, eighteen fathoms. Just over thirty metres or so.’

‘Thirty metres,’ Andropulos said. ‘Even if they do get inside – and there’s no guarantee that they will be able to do so – won’t it be difficult to move around and see anything?’

‘I can guarantee they’ll get inside. There are such things as oxyacetylene torches, you know. And they’ll have powerful underwater torches. But they won’t bother with either of those things. The divers will carry down a couple of slings with them. A diving ship will have no difficulty at all in bringing the fuselage to the surface. Then they’ll be able to examine the plane at their leisure.’ This time there was no trace of expression in Andropulos’s face: Talbot wondered if he, Andropulos, had become aware that such changes in expression were being sought for.

Jenkins entered and handed Talbot a sealed envelope. ‘From the radio-room, sir. Myers said it was urgent.’

Talbot nodded, opened the envelope, extracted and read the slip of paper it had held. He slipped it in his pocket and stood.

‘My apologies, ladies and gentlemen. I have to go to the bridge. Come along with me, Number One. I’ll join you at seven o’clock for dinner.’

Once outside, Van Gelder said: ‘You really are a fearful liar, sir. A fearfully good liar, I mean.’

‘Andropulos isn’t half bad, either.’

‘He’s had practice. Between the two of you – well, in his own phrase, it’s a close-run thing. Ah, thank you.’ He unfolded the slip of paper Talbot had handed him. ‘“Vitally urgent you remain in closest contact with downed plane Stop will join you earliest in the morning Stop Hawkins”. Isn’t that the Vice-Admiral, sir?’

‘None other. Vitally urgent and flying down to see us. What do you make of that?’

‘I make it that he knows something that we don’t.’

‘Indeed. Incidentally, you’ve kind of forgotten to tell me about your visit to sonar.’

‘Sorry about that, sir. I had something else on my mind.’

‘Somebody, not something. Having seen her I can understand. Well?’

‘The noise from the plane? Tick … tick … tick. Could be anything. Halzman half suggested it might be some sort of timing device. Could be that he’s right. I don’t want to sound alarmist, sir, but I don’t think I like it very much.’

‘I don’t particularly care for it myself. Well, then, the radio-room.’

‘I thought you said you were going to the bridge?’

‘That was for Andropulos’s benefit. The less that character knows about anything the better. I think he’s cunning, astute and alert for the slightest nuances.’

‘Is that why you didn’t make any reference to the engine-room explosion?’

‘Yes. I may, of course, be doing him a massive injustice. For all I know he may be as fresh and innocent as the dawn’s early dew.’

‘You don’t really believe that, sir.’

‘No.’

Myers was alone in the radio-room. ‘Another message to Rome,’ Talbot said. ‘Again Code B. To Vice-Admiral Hawkins. Message received. Strongly advise that you come soonest. Tonight. Report repeated two and a half second ticking sounds from plane. Could be timing device. Please phone immediately.’

‘A ticking sound, possibly a timing device, Talbot says.’ Vice-Admiral Hawkins was standing by Carson’s chair as the general read and reread the slip of paper Hawkins had just handed him.

‘A timing device. We don’t have to discuss the implications of this.’ From his high-rise office Carson looked out over the roofs of Rome, then at the colonel across the desk, then finally up at Hawkins. He pressed a button on his desk.

‘Get me the Pentagon.’

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was also standing as the man behind the desk read the slip of paper he had just been handed. He read it three times, laid it down carefully on the desk, smoothed it out and looked across at the Chairman. His face looked drawn and tired and old.

‘We know what this means, or what it could mean. If anything goes wrong the international repercussions will be enormous, General.’

‘I’m afraid I’m fully aware of that, sir. Apart from the universal condemnation, we will become the pariah dog, the outcasts of the world.’

‘And no hint of any Soviet involvement.’

‘None whatsoever. No proof, direct or indirect. As far as the world is concerned, they are blameless. My first reaction is that they are indeed blameless. My second thoughts are exactly the same. I can see no way they are linked with this. We bear the burden, sir.’

‘We bear the burden. And will stand condemned before the court of mankind.’ The General made no reply. ‘The Chiefs have no suggestions?’

‘None that I regard as very useful. In short, bluntly, none. We have to rely on our people out there. Carte blanche, sir?’

‘We have no option. How good are your men in the Mediterranean?’

‘The very best. No rhetoric, sir. I mean it.’

‘And this British vessel on the spot?’

‘The frigate Ariadne? A very special vessel indeed, I am given to understand. Whether or not it can cope with this, no one can say. There are too many imponderables.’

‘Do we pull it out?’

‘That’s not for my decision, sir.’

‘I know it’s not.’ He was silent for a long moment then said: ‘It may be our only hope. It stays.’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

Talbot was alone with Van Gelder on the bridge when the radio-room called.

‘I have voice contact with Rome, sir. Where will you take it?’

‘Here.’ He gestured to Van Gelder to take up a listening phone. ‘Talbot here.’

‘Hawkins. I’m leaving shortly with two civilians for Athens. You’ll have a phone call from there letting you know our estimated time of arrival. We’ll be landing on Thera Island. Have a launch standing by to meet us.’

‘Yes, sir. Take a taxi down to Athinio – there’s a new quay about two miles south of the Thira Village anchorage.’

‘My map shows that the Thira anchorage is nearer.’

‘What your map may not show is that the only way down to Thira anchorage is by mule-track down a precipitous cliff. A seven-hundred-foot cliff, to be precise.’

‘Thank you, Talbot. A life saved. You have not forgotten my twin bêtes noires, my fatal flaws. Till this evening, then.’

‘What bêtes noires?’ Van Gelder said. ‘What flaws?’

‘He hates horses. I would imagine the detestation extends to mules. And he suffers from acrophobia.’

‘That sounds a very nasty thing to suffer from. And what might that be?’

‘Vertigo. A fear of heights. Almost got him disbarred from entry to the Navy. He had a powerful aversion to climbing up rigging.’

‘You know him well, then?’

‘Pretty well. Now, this evening. I’d normally send young Henri to pick anybody up but Vice-Admiral Hawkins and the two no doubt equally distinguished civilians who are with him are not anybody. So we do it in style. A Lieutenant-Commander, I thought.’

‘My pleasure, sir.’

‘And tell them all you know about the plane, the Delos and the survivors. Also our suspicions about the survivors. Saves the time when they get here.’

‘I’ll do that. Speaking about the survivors, when I go ashore do you want me to take them along and dump them?’

‘You are unwell, Number One?’

‘I’m fine. Didn’t for a moment think you’d want them out of your sight. And we couldn’t very well abandon the two young ladies on that barren rock there.’

‘It’s as well the islanders can’t hear you. There’s fourteen hundred people in the Thira township and there’s a fair amount of tourist accommodation. And speaking again of the survivors, not to mention our three other visitors, we’ll have to find sleeping accommodation for them. The Admiral can have the admiral’s cabin – it’ll be the first time an admiral has slept there. There are three empty cabins. You can have mine, I’ll sleep here or in the chart-room. The rest, well, you fix it.’

‘Five minutes,’ said he confidently.

He was back in forty-five.

‘Took me a little longer than I thought. Ticklish problems.’

‘Who’s got my cabin?’

‘Irene. Eugenia has mine.’

‘It took you three-quarters of an hour to arrange that?’

‘Decisions, decisions. Calls for a little delicacy and a modicum of finesse.’

‘My word, you do do yourselves well, Commander,’ Andropulos said. He sipped some claret. ‘Or is this a special treat for us?’

‘Standard fare, I assure you.’ Andropulos, whom Grierson had reported as having a remarkable affinity for scotch, seemed relaxed to the point of garrulity. Talbot would have taken long odds that he was cold sober. He talked freely about quite a number of subjects, but had not once broached the question of being sent ashore. It was clear that he and Talbot had at least one thing in common – the wish that he remain aboard the Ariadne.

Jenkins came in and spoke softly to Van Gelder, who looked at Talbot.

‘Call from the radio-room. Shall I take it?’ Talbot nodded. Van Gelder left and returned within half a minute.

‘Call was delayed, sir. Difficulty in contacting us. They will be there in less than half an hour. I’d better go now.’

‘I’m expecting visitors later this evening,’ Talbot said, ‘I shall have to ask you not to come to the wardroom for some time after they come. Not for too long. Twenty minutes at the most.’

‘Visitors?’ Andropulos said. ‘At this time of the evening. Who on earth are they?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Andropulos. This is a naval vessel. There are certain things I can’t discuss with civilians.’

Chapter 3

Vice-Admiral Hawkins was the first up the gangway. He shook Talbot’s hand warmly. The Admiral didn’t go in much for saluting.

‘Delighted to see you again, John. Or I would be if it weren’t for the circumstances. And how are you, my boy?’

‘Fine, sir. Again, considering the circumstances.’

‘And the children? Little Fiona and Jimmy?’

‘In the best, thank you, sir. You’ve come a long way in a short time.’

‘Needs must when the devil drives. And he’s sitting on my tail right now.’ He turned to the two men who had followed him up the gangway. ‘Professor Benson. Dr Wickram. Gentlemen, Commander Talbot, the captain of the Ariadne.’

‘If you will come with me, gentlemen. I’ll have your gear taken to your quarters.’ Talbot led them to the wardroom and gestured them to their seats. ‘You want me to get my priorities right?’

‘Certainly.’ Talbot pressed a bell and Jenkins came in. ‘A large gin and tonic for those two gentlemen,’ Hawkins said. ‘Lots of ice. They’re Americans. Large scotch and water for me. Quarters, you said. What quarters?’

‘You haven’t been aboard since before commissioning but you won’t have forgotten. For an admiral, an admiral’s quarters. Never been used.’

‘How perfectly splendid. Honoured, I’m sure. And for my two friends here?’

‘A cabin apiece. Also never been used. I think they’ll find them quite comfortable. I’d like to bring along some of my officers, sir.’

‘But of course. Whom did you have in mind?’

‘Surgeon-Commander Grierson.’

‘Know him,’ Hawkins said. ‘Very wise bird.’

‘Lieutenant Denholm. Our electronic Wunderkind. I know you’ve met him, sir.’

‘That I have.’ He looked at his two friends, smiling broadly. ‘You’ll have to mind your p’s and q’s here. Lieutenant Denholm is the heir to an earldom. The genuine article. Fearfully languid and aristocratic. Don’t be deceived for an instant. Mind like a knife. As I told General Carson, he’s so incredibly advanced in his electronic speciality that your high-tech whizzkids in Silicon Valley wouldn’t even begin to understand what he’s talking about.’

‘Then there’s Lieutenant McCafferty, our senior engineer, and, of course, Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder whom you’ve already met.’

‘For the first time. Favourably impressed. Very. Struck me as an able lad indeed.’

‘He’s all that. More. If I were laid low tomorrow you wouldn’t have to worry. He could take over the Ariadne at any moment and you wouldn’t notice the difference.’

‘From you, that’s worth any half-dozen testimonials. I’ll bear it in mind.’

Introductions completed, Hawkins looked at Talbot and his four officers and said: ‘The first question in your minds, of course, gentlemen, is why I have brought two civilians with me. First I will tell you who they are and then, when I have explained the purpose of our coming, you will understand why they are here. In passing, I might say how extraordinarily lucky I am to have them here with me. They seldom leave their home state of California: it just so happened that both were attending an international conference in Rome.

‘Professor Alec Benson here.’ Benson was a large, calm man in his early sixties, grey of hair, cherubic and cheerful of countenance, and wearing a sports jacket, flannels and polo jersey, all of varying shades of grey and all so lived in, comfortable and crumpled that he could well have inherited them from his grandfather. ‘The Professor is the director of the seismological department of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He’s also a geologist and vulcanologist. Anything that makes the earth bang or shake or move is his field. Regarded by everybody in that line as the world’s leading expert – he chaired, or was chairing until I so rudely interrupted him, an international conference in seismology in Rome. You all know, of course, what seismology is.’

‘A rough idea,’ Talbot said. ‘A kind of science – I think “study” would be a better word for it – of the causes and effects of earthquakes.’

‘A kind of science?’ Hawkins said. ‘I am distressed. It is a science.’

‘No offence meant, I’m sure, and none taken,’ Benson said equably. ‘The Commander is perfectly correct. Far from being a science, we’re still only dabbling on the periphery of the subject.’

‘Ah, well. Dr Wickram is a physicist, as well known in his own field as Professor Benson is in his. He specializes in nuclear physics.’

Talbot looked at Dr Wickram who, in startling contrast to Benson, was thin, dark and immaculately dressed in a blue suit, white button-down collar and a black tie, the funereal hue of which went rather well with the habitual severity of his expression, and said: ‘Does your interest in nuclear physics extend to nuclear weaponry, Dr Wickram?’

‘Well, yes, it does rather.’

‘You and the Professor are to be congratulated. There should be some kind of civilian medal for this. Vice-Admiral Hawkins, of course, is acting in the line of duty. I would have thought you two gentlemen should have stayed in Rome. I mean, isn’t it safer there?’

Hawkins cleared his throat. ‘You wouldn’t dream of stealing a superior officer’s thunder, would you?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

‘Well, to the point. Your two signals duly received. The first gave rise to some concern, the second was profoundly disturbing.’

‘The “tick … tick … tick” bit, sir?’

‘The “tick … tick … tick” bit. Both signals were sent to the Pentagon, the second one also going to the White House. I should imagine that the word consternation would suitably describe their reaction. Guessing, of course, but I think the speed of the reply to the second message showed how badly shaken they were. Normally, it can take forever – well, even months at times – to extract just a nugget of information from the Pentagon, but this time minutes only. When I read their reply, I could understand all too well.’ Hawkins paused, possibly for suitable dramatic effect.

‘So can I,’ Talbot said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If I were the Pentagon or the White House I’d be upset too if a US Air Force bomber or cargo plane, carrying a load of bombs, suddenly disappeared into the sea. Especially if the bombs – or missiles – that plane was carrying were of the nuclear variety. Even more especially if they were hydrogen bombs.’

‘Well, damn your eyes, Talbot, you do deprive ageing vice-admirals of the simpler pleasures of life. There goes my thunder.’

‘It wasn’t all that difficult, sir. We had already guessed it was a bomber. Civilian planes, with the exception of Concorde, don’t fly at the height at which we picked it up. We’d have had to be pretty stupid not to assume what we did. Bombers usually carry bombs. American reaction made it inevitable that it was an American plane. And you wouldn’t have come down here in such a tearing hurry, and be accompanied by an expert in nuclear weaponry, unless the bombs were of a rather nasty variety. I can’t imagine anything nastier than hydrogen bombs.’

‘Nor can anyone. When you put it the way you put it, I suppose I should have guessed that you had guessed. Even the Pentagon don’t know or won’t divulge what type of plane it was. They suggest an advanced design of the C.141 Starlifter cargo plane. It was refuelled in the Azores and heading for Greece. From your first message we gathered you saw the plane crash into the sea but couldn’t identify it. Why not?’

‘Number One, show the Admiral why not.’

Van Gelder produced a sheaf of photographs and handed them to Hawkins who flipped through them quickly, and then, more slowly, a second time. He sighed and looked up.

‘Intriguing, I suppose, if you’re a connoisseur of the pattern effects of smoke and flame. I’m not. All I can make out is what I take to be the outer port engine and that’s no help at all. And it gives no indication as to the source or cause of the fire.’

‘I think Van Gelder would disagree with you, sir,’ Talbot said. ‘He’s of the opinion that the fire originated in the nose cone and was caused by an internal explosion. I agree with him. It certainly wasn’t brought down by ship-based anti-aircraft fire. We would have known. The only alternative is a heat-seeking missile. Two objections to that. Such a missile would have targeted on the engines, not the fuselage and, more importantly, there are no vessels in the area. Our radar would have picked them up. As a corollary to that, the missile didn’t come from an aircraft, either. The Admiral will not need reminding that the radar aboard the Ariadne is as advanced as any in the world.’

‘That may no longer be true, sir.’ Denholm’s tone was deferential but not hesitant. ‘And if it is true, then we can’t discount missiles just like that. This is not a dissenting opinion, I’m just exploring another possibility.’

‘Explore away, Lieutenant,’ Hawkins said. ‘Any light that can illumine the darkness of our ignorance, etcetera, etcetera.’

‘I’m not sure I’m all that good as a beacon, sir. I do know that I don’t go along with the belief that the Soviets always trail the West in technological advancement. Whether this belief is carefully and officially nurtured I do not know. I admit that the Soviets spend a certain amount of time and trouble in extracting military secrets from the West. I say “certain” because they don’t have to try all that hard: there appears to be a steady supply of scientists, both American and British, who, along with associates not necessarily involved in direct research at all, are perfectly willing to sell the Soviets anything they want – provided, that is, the price is right. I believe this to be true in the case of computers where they do lag behind the West: I do not believe it in the case of radar.

‘In this field, Plessey, of Britain, probably leads the West. They have developed a revolutionary new radar system, the Type 966, which is fitted, or about to be fitted, to Invincible-class aircraft-carriers, the Type 42 Sheffield-class destroyers and the new Type 23 Norfolk-class frigates. This new radar is designed not only to detect and track aircraft and sea-skimming missiles, but it also –’

Hawkins cleared his throat. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Denholm. You may know this but surely it comes under the heading of classified information?’

‘If it did, I wouldn’t talk about it even in this company, sir. It’s in the public domain. As I was about to say, it’s also able to control Sea Dart and Seawolf missiles in flight and home them in on their targets with great accuracy. I also understand they’re virtually immune to jamming and radar decoys. If Plessey have done this, the Soviets may well have also. They’re not much given to advertising such things. But I believe they have the know-how.’

Hawkins said: ‘And you also believe, in this case, that a missile was the culprit?’

‘Not at all, sir. I’m only suggesting a possibility. The Captain and Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder may well be right. Trouble is, I know nothing about explosives. Maybe there are missiles with such a limited charge that they cause only limited damage. I would have thought that a standard missile would have ensured that a plane it brought down would not have struck the sea with its fuselage relatively intact but in a thousand pieces. Again, I simply don’t know. I just wonder what the security was like at the base from which that plane took off in the States.’

‘Security? In the case of a super-sensitive plane such as this? Total.’

‘Does the Admiral really believe there is such a thing as total security?’ The Admiral didn’t say what he believed, he just sipped his scotch in silence. ‘There were four major air disasters last year, all four planes involved having taken off from airports which were regarded as having maximum security. In all four cases terrorists found the most stringent airport checks childishly easy to circumvent.’

‘Those were civilian airports. This would be a top-secret US Air Force base, manned exclusively by US Air Force personnel, specially chosen for their position, rigidly screened, backgrounds exhaustively researched, and all subjected to liedetector tests.’

‘With respect to the Vice-Admiral, and our American friends, lie-detector tests – more accurately, polygraph tests – are rubbish. Any moderately intelligent person can be trained to beat the polygraph test, which, after all, depends on crudely primitive measurements of pulse rate, blood pressure and perspiration. You can be trained to give right answers, wrong answers or merely confusing ones and the scrutineer can’t tell the difference.’

‘Doesn’t measure up to your idea of electronics, eh?’

‘Nothing to do with electronics, sir. Polygraphs belong to the horse-and-buggy era. You’ve just used the word supersensitive, sir. The Ariadne, if I may put it that way, is a hotbed of super-sensitivity. How many members of this crew have ever been subjected to a polygraph test? None.’

Hawkins considered his glass for a few moments, then looked up at Talbot. ‘Should the need arise, Captain, how long would it take you to contact the Pentagon?’

‘Immediately. Well, half a minute. Now?’

‘No. Wait. Have to think about it. Trouble is, even the Pentagon is having difficulty in extracting information from this Air Force base which is, I believe, somewhere in Georgia. The Pentagon’s own fault, really, although you can’t expect them to admit this. They’ve so inculcated this passion for absolute secrecy into the senior officers of all four services that no one is prepared to reveal anything without the permission of the commanding officer of the Air Force base or ship or whatever. In this particular case, the commanding officer who, to the Pentagon’s distress, would appear to have a human side to his nature, has elected to take twenty-four hours off. No one appears to know where he is.’

Van Gelder said: ‘Makes it a bit awkward, sir, doesn’t it, if war breaks out in the next half-hour?’

‘No. Base remains in full operational readiness. But there’s still no relaxation of the iron-bound rules concerning the release of classified information.’

Talbot said: ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here unless they’d released some information.’

‘Naturally not. The news they’ve released is vague and incomplete but all very, very bad. One report says there were twelve nuclear weapons aboard, another fifteen. Whether they were missiles or bombs was not disclosed: what was disclosed was that they were hydrogen devices, each one in the monster megaton range, twelve to fifteen megatons. The plane was also understood to be carrying two of the more conventional atom bombs.’

‘I think I’ll break a self-imposed regulation and have a scotch myself,’ Talbot said. A half-minute passed in silence, then he said quietly: ‘This is worse than I ever dreamed.’

‘Dream?’ Grierson said. ‘Nightmare.’

‘Dream or nightmare, it won’t matter to us,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘Not when we’re drifting through the stratosphere in vaporized orbit.’

‘A hydrogen bomb, Dr Wickram,’ Talbot said. ‘Let’s call it that. Is there any way it can spontaneously detonate?’

‘In itself, impossible. The President of the United States has to press one button, the man on the spot another: the radio frequencies are so wildly different that the chances of anyone happening on the right combination are billions to one.’

‘Is there a chance – say a billion to one – that the Soviets might have this combination?’

‘None.’

‘You say it’s impossible to detonate in itself. Is there any other way, some external means, whereby it could be detonated?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does that mean you’re not saying or that you’re not sure? I don’t think, Dr Wickram, that this is the time to dwell on such verbal niceties.’

‘I’m not sure. If there were a sufficiently powerful explosion close by it might go up by sympathetic detonation. We simply don’t know.’

‘The possibility has never been explored? I mean, no experiments?’

‘I should hope not,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘If such an experiment were successful, I wouldn’t care to be within thirty or forty miles at the time.’

‘That is one point.’ For the first time, Dr Wickram essayed a smile, but it was a pretty wintry one. ‘In the second place, quite frankly, we have never envisaged a situation where such a possibility might arise. We could, I suppose, have carried out such an experiment without the drastic consequences the Lieutenant has suggested. We could detonate a very small atom bomb in the vicinity of another. Even a charge of conventional explosive in the vicinity of a small atom bomb would suffice. If the small atom bomb went up, so then would the hydrogen bomb. Everybody knows that it’s the fissioning of an atom bomb that triggers off the fusion of a hydrogen bomb.’

Talbot said: ‘Is there any timing device, specifically a delayed one, fitted in a hydrogen bomb?’

‘None.’ The flat finality in the voice left no room for argument.

‘According to Vice-Admiral Hawkins, there may be a couple of conventional atom bombs aboard the sunken plane. Could they be fitted with timing devices?’

‘Again, I don’t know. Not my field. But I see no reason why they couldn’t be.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘Search me. Realms of speculation, Captain, where your guess is as good as mine. The only thing that occurs to me is a mine, a marine mine. Neatly dispose of any passing aircraft carrier, I should think.’

‘That’s thinking small,’ Van Gelder said. ‘A hydrogen mine would neatly dispose of any passing battle fleet.’

‘Whose passing fleet? One of ours? In wartime as in peacetime, the seas are open to all.’

‘Not the Black Sea. Not in wartime. But a bit far-fetched. How would this mine be activated?’

‘My continued ignorance must be a great disappointment. I know nothing about mines.’

‘Well, time was when mines were either magnetic or acoustic. Degaussing has made magnetic mines passé. So, acoustic. Triggered by a passing ship’s engines. Interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we’ve passed over it several times since we first heard the ticking and we’ve triggered nothing. So far. So maybe that ticking doesn’t mean that the mine is set to go off any time. Maybe it’s not activated – by which I mean ready to go off when a vessel passes over it – until the ticking stops. Or maybe it’s just set to go up whenever the ticking stops. Trouble is, we’ve no idea what started the ticking in the first place. I can’t see any way it could have been deliberate. Must have been caused by the explosion that brought down the plane or by the impact of striking the water.’

‘You’re a source of great comfort, Van Gelder,’ Hawkins said heavily.

‘I admit, sir, that the alternatives aren’t all that attractive. My own conclusions, which in this case are probably completely worthless, are that this ticking represents a period of grace – I mean that it cannot explode – as long as the ticking lasts and that it’s not designed to explode when the ticking stops but is then activated and ready to explode when triggered by passing engines. A guess, sir, but not necessarily a wild one. I’m going on the assumption that this mine could well be dropped by a surface vessel as well as a plane. In that case, the ship would want to be a large number of miles away before the mine was activated. So it would start the timing mechanism running at the moment it dropped it over the side. I am sure, sir, that the Pentagon could provide some illumination on this subject.’

‘I’m sure it could,’ Hawkins said. ‘And your conclusions are far from worthless, they make a good deal of sense to me. Well, Captain, what do you propose to do about all this?’

‘I rather thought, sir, that your purpose in coming down here was to tell me what to do.’

‘Not at all. I just came to make myself au fait with the situation and to garner some information in return for some I give you.’

‘Does this mean, Admiral – I say this carefully, you understand – that I have a hand in making the decisions?’

‘You don’t have a hand. You damn well make them. I’ll endorse them.’

‘Thank you. Then my first decision – or, if you like, a suggestion respectfully made – is that you and your two friends depart for Rome immediately. It’s not going to help anyone, and will be a considerable loss to both the scientific and naval communities, if you three gentlemen elect for self-immolation. Besides, by asking me to make the decisions, you have implied that there’s nothing you can do here that my crew and I can’t. Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder is at your immediate service.’

‘The Lieutenant-Commander will have to wait. For me, at least. Your logic is sound but I’m not feeling very logical at the moment. But I do agree as far as my two friends are concerned. They could be back at their international conference in Rome tomorrow, without anyone having noticed their absence. We have no right to put the lives of civilians, not to mention two such eminent civilians, at risk.’

‘You’ve just put your finger on it, Admiral.’ Benson puffed comfortably on a sadly blackened pipe. ‘Eminent or not, we are civilians. Civilians don’t take orders from the military. I prefer the Aegean to Rome.’

‘Agreed,’ Wickram said. ‘Ludicrous. Preposterous.’

‘You don’t seem to have any more clout with your two friends than I have with the three of you.’ Talbot produced two slips of paper from his inner pocket, ‘I suggest you sign those, sir.’

Hawkins took them, looked thoughtfully at Talbot, scanned the two sheets, then read from one of them.

‘“Request urgent immediate dispatch of nearest salvage or diving vessel to 36.21N, 25.22E due south Cape Akrotiri, Thera Island, to recover one sunken plane, one sunken yacht. Further request immediate dispatch by plane to Thera Island two deep-sea divers with diving equipment for four, repeat four. Priority one double A. Signed Vice-Admiral Hawkins.”’ Hawkins looked at Benson and Wickram. ‘This message is directed to Rear-Admiral Blyth, HMS Apollo. Rear-Admiral Blyth is the operational commander of European section of NATO sea forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. Priority one double A means drop everything else, this has absolute priority. Admiral Hawkins is, I take it, my good self. Why, Captain, the request for four diving suits?’

‘Van Gelder and I are trained divers, sir. Ex-submariners.’

‘I see. Second signal directed to Defence Minister, Athens. “Urgent contact Air Control Athens airport for information re aircraft, thought American, that crashed 1415 today south of Thera Island. Did it ask permission for flight path to, and landing in, Athens or other Greek airfield? Further request you enlist immediate aid of police and Intelligence re anything known about one Spyros Andropulos, owner of yacht Delos.” This message is also, I’m flattered to observe, signed by me. Well, well, well, Captain, I nearly did you a great injustice a minute or two ago, I thought you had not perhaps addressed yourself to the problem on hand. But you have, and in some style and quite some time before I arrived. Two questions.’

‘The aircraft and Andropulos?’ Hawkins nodded. ‘At 43,000 feet, the pilot didn’t have to bother to notify anyone about his presence. He knew he was alone in the sky. But once he started descending, it was a different matter entirely. He wouldn’t be too keen on bumping into anyone, especially not with the cargo he had on board. And, of course, he would require permission to land.’

‘But why Greece?’

‘Because the flight path he was following when we first located him would have taken him to Ankara in Turkey, or some place pretty close by. Now, even although Turkey is – nominally, at least – a member of NATO, I’m sure the Americans have no air bases at, or near, Ankara. I don’t even know if they have any air bases at all in Turkey. I’m certain they have no missile launching bases. In Greece, the Americans have both. So, Greece. As for Andropulos, several of my officers and I think he’s a leery customer and a suspicious one. Not one thing that could be proved in a court of law, of course. We suspect that he may know something about the downing of this plane that we don’t know he knows, if you follow me. He says the Delos was sunk as the result of an explosion. But it’s the old question of did he fall or was he pushed? In other words, was the explosion accidental or deliberate? If we could hoist the Delos to the surface we might well find out.’

‘We might well indeed. Still, first things first.’ Hawkins looked briefly at the signals again. ‘Seem to fit the task admirably. I’ll gladly sign.’ Hawkins produced a pen, signed and handed the papers to Talbot. ‘As you had all this figured out quite some time, I suspect, before I left Rome, why didn’t you send those signals yourself?’

‘Lowly commanders don’t give the instructions to Rear-Admiral Blyth. I haven’t the authority. You have. That’s why I asked you to join us as soon as was possible. Thanks for the signing, sir. That was the easy part. Now comes the difficult part.’

‘Difficult part?’ Hawkins said warily. ‘What difficult part?’

‘Have we the moral right to ask the crew of the salvage vessel or lifting vessel, not to mention the divers, to join us, in Lieutenant Denholm’s elegant phrase, in drifting through the stratosphere in vaporized orbit?’

‘Ah. Yes. A point, of course. What do you think?’

‘Again, not a decision for lowly commanders. Admirals only.’

‘Dear, oh dear. Then, if things go wrong, you’ll have nothing on your conscience and everything in the world to reproach me with.’

‘If anything goes wrong, sir, I don’t think we’ll be having too much to say to each other when we’re in vaporized orbit.’

‘True. Mine was an unworthy remark. No one likes to bear the responsibility for such decisions. Send the signals.’

‘Very good, sir. Lieutenant Denholm, ask Myers to come here.’

Hawkins said: ‘I understand – I’m not making comparisons – that the President of the United States was faced with a problem similar to the one you’ve just confronted me with. He asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he should pull out the Ariadne which they knew, of course, was sitting over the crashed plane. The Chairman said, quite rightly, that that wasn’t his responsibility, the old and honoured American tradition of passing the buck. The President decided that the Ariadne should stay.’

‘Well, I could come all over bitter and say that’s very noble and gallant of the President, especially as there’s no chance of his being blown out of his seat in the Oval Office when this little lot goes up, but I won’t. It’s not a decision I would care to have to make. I assume he gave a reason for his decision?’

‘Yes. The greatest good of the greatest number.’

Myers came in. Talbot handed him the two messages.

‘Get these off at once. Code B in both cases. To both messages add “Immediate, repeat Immediate, confirmation is requested.”’ Myers left and Talbot said: ‘It is my understanding, Admiral, that in your capacity as officer commanding the naval forces in the Eastern Mediterranean you have the power to overrule the President’s instructions.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you done so?’

‘No. You will ask why. Same reason as the President. The greatest good of the greatest number. Why the questioning, Captain? You wouldn’t leave here even if I gave a direct order.’

‘I’m just a bit puzzled about the reason given – the greatest good of the greatest number. Bringing a rescue vessel, which admittedly is my idea, will only increase the greatest danger to a greater number.’

‘I don’t think you quite appreciate just how great the greatest number is in this case. I think Professor Benson here can enlighten you. Enlighten all of us, for I’m rather vague about it. That’s why Professor Benson is here.’

‘The good Professor is not at his best,’ Benson said. ‘He’s hungry.’

‘Most remiss of us,’ Talbot said. ‘Of course you haven’t eaten. Dinner, say, in twenty minutes?’

‘I’d settle for a sandwich.’ Talbot looked at Hawkins and Wickram, both of whom nodded. He pressed a bell.

‘I’m a bit vague about it myself,’ Benson said. ‘Certain facts are beyond dispute. What we’re sitting on top of at this moment is one of them. According to which estimate of the Pentagon’s you choose to believe, there’s something like a total of between 144 and 225 megatons of high explosive lying down there. Not that the difference between the lowest and highest estimate is of any significance. The explosion of a pound of high explosive in this wardroom would kill us all. What we are talking about is the explosive power of, let me see, yes, four and a half billion pounds. The human mind cannot comprehend, differences in estimates become irrelevant. All we can say with certainty is that it would be the biggest man-made explosion in history, which doesn’t sound so bad when you say it quickly as I’m saying it now.

‘The results of such an explosion are quite unknown but stupefyingly horrendous however optimistic your guess might be, if optimistic is the word I’m looking for, which it isn’t. It might fracture the earth’s crust, with cataclysmic results. It might destroy part of the ozone layer, which would permit the sun’s ultra-violet radiation either to tan us or fry us, depending upon how large a hole had been blasted in the stratosphere: it might equally well cause the onset of a nuclear winter, which is so popular a topic among both scientists and laymen these days. And lastly, but by no means least, are the tsunami effects, vast tidal waves usually generated by undersea earthquakes: those tsunami have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people at a time when they struck low-lying coastal areas.’

Benson reached out a grateful hand for a glass that Jenkins had brought. Talbot said: ‘If you’re trying to be encouraging, Professor, you’re not doing too well at it.’

‘Ah, better, much better.’ Benson lowered his glass and sighed, ‘I needed that. There are times when I’m quite capable of terrifying even myself. Encouraging? That’s only the half of it. Santorini’s the other half. In fact, Santorini is the major part of it. Gifted though mankind is in creating sheer wanton destruction, nature has him whacked every time.’

‘Santorini?’ Wickram said. ‘Who or what is Santorini?’

‘Ignorance, George, ignorance. You and your fellow physicists should look out from your ivory towers from time to time. Santorini is less than a couple of miles from where you’re sitting. Had that name for many centuries. Today it’s officially known, as it was five thousand years ago at the height of its civilization, as Thera Island.

‘The island, by whatever name, has had a very turbulent seismic and volcanic history. Don’t worry, George, I’m not about to sally forth on my old hobby-horse, not for long anyway, just long enough to try to explain what the greatest number means in the term the greatest good of the greatest number.

‘It is commonly enough imagined that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are two faces of the same coin. This is not necessarily so. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary states that an earthquake is specifically a convulsion of the earth’s surface caused by volcanic forces. The dictionary is specifically wrong: it should have used the word “rarely” instead. Earthquakes, especially the big ones, are caused when two tectonic plates – segments of the earth’s crust that float freely on the molten magma beneath – come into contact with one another and one plate bangs into another or rubs alongside it or dives under it. The only two recorded and monitored giant earthquakes in history were of this type – in Ecuador in 1906 and Japan in 1933. Similarly, but on a lesser scale – although still very big – the Californian earthquakes of San Francisco and Owens Valley were due to crustal movement and not to volcanoes.

‘It is true that practically all the world’s 500–600 active volcanoes – someone may have bothered to count them, I haven’t – are located along convergent plate boundaries. It is equally true that they are rarely associated with earthquakes. There have been three large volcanic eruptions along such boundaries in very recent years: Mt St Helens in the state of Washington, El Chichón in Mexico and one just north-west of Bogotá in Columbia. The last one – it happened only last year – was particularly nasty. A 17,000-foot volcano called Nevada del Ruiz, which seems to have been slumbering off and on for the past four hundred years, erupted and melted the snow and ice which covered most of its upper reaches, giving rise to an estimated seventy-five million cubic yards’ mudslide. The town of Armero stood in its way. 25,000 people died there. The point is that none of those was accompanied by an earthquake. Even volcanoes in areas where there are no established tectonic frontiers are guiltless in this respect: Vesuvius, despite the fact that it buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, Stromboli, Mt Etna and the twin volcanoes of the island of Hawaii have not produced, and do not produce, earthquakes.

‘But the really bad apples in the seismic barrel, and a very sinister lot those are, too, are the so-called thermal hotspots, plumes or upswellings of molten lava that reach up to or through the earth’s crust, giving rise to volcanoes or earthquakes or both. We talk a lot about those thermal plumes but we really don’t know much about them. We don’t know whether they’re localized or whether they spread out and lubricate the movements of the tectonic plates. What we do know is that they can have extremely unpleasant effects. One of those was responsible for the biggest earthquake of this century.’

‘You have me confused, Professor,’ Hawkins said. ‘You’ve just mentioned the really big ones, the ones in Japan and Ecuador. Ah! But those were monitored and recorded. This one wasn’t?’

‘Certainly it was. But countries like Russia and China are rather coy about releasing such details. They have the weird notion that natural disasters reflect upon their political systems.’

‘Is it in order to ask how you know?’

‘Of course. Governments may elect not to talk to governments but we scientists are an incurably gabby lot. This quake happened in Tangshan province in north-east China and is the only one ever known to have occurred in a really densely populated area, in this case involving the major cities of Peking and Tientsin. The primary cause was undoubtedly a thermal plume. There are no known tectonic plate boundaries in the area but a very ancient boundary may be lurking in the area. The date was July 27, 1976.’

‘Yesterday,’ Hawkins said. ‘Just yesterday. Casualties?’

‘Two-thirds of a million dead, three-quarters of a million injured. Give or take a hundred thousand in each case. If that sounds flippant or heartless, it’s not meant to be. After a certain arbitrary figure – a hundred thousand, ten thousand, even a thousand, it all depends upon how much your heart and mind can take – any increase in numbers becomes meaningless. And there’s also the factor, of course, that we’re referring to faceless unknowns in a far-off land.’

‘I suppose,’ Hawkins said, ‘that that would be what one might call the grand-daddy of them all?’

‘In terms of lives lost, it probably is. We can’t be sure. What we can be sure of is that Tangshan rates as no more than third in the cataclysmic league. Just over a century ago the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia blew itself out of existence. That was quite a bang, literally – the sound of the explosion was heard thousands of miles away. So much volcanic material was blasted into the stratosphere that the world was still being treated to a series of spectacular sunsets more than three years afterwards. No one knows the height of the tsunami caused by this eruption. What we do know is that much of the three great islands bordering the Java Sea – Sumatra, Java and Borneo – and nearly all of the smaller islands inside the sea itself lie below an altitude of 200 feet. No tally of the dead has ever been made. It is better, perhaps, that we don’t know.’

‘And perhaps it’s also better that we don’t know what you’re going to say next,’ Talbot said. ‘I don’t much care for the road you’re leading us along.’

‘I don’t much care for it myself.’ Benson sighed and sipped some more gin. ‘Anyone ever heard of the word “kalliste”?’

‘Certainly,’ Denholm said. ‘Means most beautiful. Very ancient. Goes back to Homeric times.’

‘My goodness.’ Benson peered at him through his pipe smoke. ‘I thought you were the electronics officer?’

‘Lieutenant Denholm is primarily a classicist,’ Talbot said. ‘Electronics is one of his hobbies.’

‘Ah!’ Benson gestured with his thumb. ‘Kalliste was the name given to this little lady before it became either Thera or Santorini, and a more singularly inapt name I cannot imagine. It was this beautiful lady that blew her top in 1450 BC with four times the explosively destructive power of Krakatoa. What had been the cone of a volcano became a circular depression – we call it a caldera – some thirty square miles in area into which the sea poured. Stirring times, gentlemen, stirring times.

‘Unfortunately those stirring times are still with us. Santorini has had, and continues to have, a very turbulent seismic history. Incidentally, mythology has it that there was an even bigger eruption about 2500 BC. However it hasn’t done too badly since 1450 BC. In 236 BC another eruption separated Therasia from north-west Thera. Forty years later the islet of old Jaimeni appeared. There have been bangs and explosions, the appearances and disappearances of islands and volcanoes ever since. In the late sixteenth century the south coast of Thera, together with the port of Eleusis, vanished under the sea and stayed there. Even as late as 1956 a considerable earthquake destroyed half the buildings on the west coast of the island. Santorini, one fears, rests on very shaky foundations.’

Talbot said: ‘What happened in 1450 BC?’

‘Regrettably, our ancestors of some thirty-five centuries back don’t seem to have given too much thought to posterity, by which I mean they left no records to satisfy their descendants’ intellectual curiosity. One can hardly blame them, they had too many urgent and pressing matters on hand at the time to worry about such things. According to one account, the explosion caused a tidal wave 165 feet high. I don’t know who worked this out. I don’t believe it. It is true that water levels on the Alaskan coast, caused by tsunami, earthquake-related tidal waves, have risen over three hundred feet but this only happens when the sea-bed shallows close inshore: in the deep sea, although the tsunami can travel tremendously fast, two, perhaps three, hundred miles an hour, it’s rarely more than a ripple on the surface of the water.

‘The experts – an expert may be loosely defined as any person who claims he knows what he’s talking about – are deeply divided as to what happened. Loggerheads would be too mild a term. It’s an archæological minefield. The explosion may have destroyed the Cyclades. It may have wiped out the Minoan civilization in Crete. It may have swamped the Aegean isles and the coastal lowlands of Greece and Turkey. It may have inundated lower Egypt, flooded the Nile and swept back the Red Sea waters to permit the escape of the Israelites fleeing from the Pharaoh. That’s one view. In 1950 a scientist by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky caused a considerable furore in the historical, religious and astronomical worlds by stating unequivocally that the flooding was caused by Venus which had been wrenched free from Jupiter and made an uncomfortably close encounter with earth. A very scholarly and erudite work, widely acclaimed at the time but since much maligned. Professional jealousy? Upsetting the scientific apple-cart? A charlatan? Unlikely – man was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Then, of course, there was Edmund Halley, he of comet fame – he was equally certain that the flooding had been caused by a passing comet.

‘There’s no doubt there was a huge natural disaster all those millennia ago. As to its cause, take your pick – your guess is as good as mine. Reverting to the situation we find ourselves in at this moment, there are four facts that can be regarded as certainties or near-certainties. Santorini is about as stable as the proverbial blancmange. It’s sitting on top of a thermal plume. Thirdly, the chances are high that it is sitting atop an ancient tectonic boundary that runs east-west under the Mediterranean – this is where the African and Eurasian plates are in contention. Lastly, and indisputably, we are sitting atop the equivalent of roughly 200 million tons of TNT. If that goes up I would say it is highly probable – in fact I think I should use the word inevitable – that both the thermal plume and the temporarily quiescent earthquake zone along the tectonic fault would be reactivated. I leave the rest to your imagination.’ Benson drained his glass and looked around hopefully. Talbot pressed a bell.

Hawkins said: ‘I don’t have that kind of imagination.’

‘None of us has. Fortunately. We’re talking about the combined and simultaneous effect of a massive thermonuclear detonation, a volcanic eruption and an earthquake. This lies outwith the experience of mankind so we can’t visualize those things except to guess, and it’s a safe guess, that the reality will be worse than any nightmare. The only consolation, of course, is that we wouldn’t be around to experience anything, nightmare or reality.

‘The extent of potential annihilation beggars belief. By “annihilation” I mean the total extinction of life, except possibly some subterranean or aquatic forms. What lava, volcanic cinders, dust and ashes don’t get, the blast, air percussion waves, fire and tsunami will. If there are any survivors – and this could be in an area of thousands of square miles – the massive radio-active fall-out will attend to them. It hardly seems necessary to talk about such things as nuclear winters and being fried by ultra-violet radiation.

‘So you can see, Commander Talbot, what we mean when we talk about the greatest good of the greatest number. What does it matter if we have two ships or ten out here, two hundred men or two thousand? Every extra man, every extra ship may, just may, be of a tiny percentage more help in neutralizing this damn thing on the sea-floor. What’s even two thousand compared to the unimaginable numbers who might perish if that device does detonate sooner or later – almost certainly sooner – if we don’t do something about it?’

‘You put things very nicely, Professor, and you make things very clear. Not that the Ariadne had any intention of going anywhere but it’s nice to have a solid reason to stay put.’ Talbot thought briefly. ‘Solves one little problem, anyway. I have six survivors from the yacht Delos aboard and had thought to put three of the innocent parties among them ashore but that seems a little pointless now.’

‘Alas, yes. Whether they are aboard here or on Santorini it will be all one to them when they join us in what Lieutenant Denholm is pleased to call vaporized orbit.’

Talbot lifted a phone, asked for a number, listened briefly and hung up.

‘The sonar room. Still tick … tick … tick.’

‘Ah,’ Benson said. ‘Tick … tick … tick.’

Chapter 4

‘You had an enjoyable tête-à-tête with Mr Andropulos, sir?’ Vice-Admiral Hawkins, together with his two scientist friends, had just come to the bridge in response to Talbot’s invitation that they join him.

‘Enjoyable? Ha! Thank you, incidentally, for rescuing us. Enjoyable? Depends what you mean, John.’

‘I mean were you suitably impressed.’

‘I was suitably unimpressed. Interested, mind you, but deeply unimpressed. Man’s character, I mean, not his quite extraordinary affinity for strong spirits. He comes across as whiter than the driven snow. A man of such transparent honesty has to have something to hide.’

‘And he got his slurring wrong, too,’ Benson said.

‘Slurring, sir?’

‘Just that, Commander. Thickened his voice in the wrong places to try and convince us that he was under the influence. Maybe he could have got away with it in his native Greek but not in English. Cold sober, I believe. And clever. Anyway he’s clever enough to hoodwink those two charming young ladies he has with him. I think they’re being hoodwinked.’

‘And his bosom friend, Alexander,’ Hawkins said. ‘He’s not so clever. He comes over as what he might well be – a paid-up member, if not a capo, in the Mafia. He was quite unmoved when I sympathized with them about the loss of the three members of their crew. Andropulos said he was desolated by the deaths of his treasured friends. Van Gelder had already told us that. Maybe he was overcome by grief, maybe not. In view of the fact that, like you, I regard him as a fluent liar and consummate actor, I think not. Maybe he is conscience-stricken at having arranged their deaths. Again, I think not. By that I don’t mean he couldn’t have been responsible for their deaths, I just mean that I don’t think he’s on speaking terms with his conscience. Only information I gathered from him is that he abandoned his yacht because he thought his spare fuel tank was going to blow up. A man of mystery, your new-found friend.’

‘He’s all that. Very mysterious. He’s a multimillionaire. Maybe a multi-multi-millionaire. Not in the usual Greek line of tankers – bottom’s fallen out of that market anyway. He’s an international businessman with contacts in many countries.’

Hawkins said: ‘Van Gelder told me nothing of this.’

‘Of course he didn’t. He didn’t know. Your name attached to a message, Admiral, is a guarantee of remarkably quick service. Reply received to our query to the Greek Defence Ministry received twenty-five minutes ago.’

‘A businessman. What kind of business?’

‘They didn’t say. I knew that would be your question so I immediately radioed a request for that information.’

‘Signed by me, of course.’

‘Naturally, sir. Had it been a different matter I would of course have asked your permission. But this was the same matter. The reply came in a few minutes ago listing ten different countries with which he does business.’

‘Again, what kind of business?’

‘Again, they didn’t say.’

‘Extraordinarily odd. What do you make of it?’

‘The Foreign Minister must have authorized this reply. Maybe censored it a little. He is, of course, a member of the government. I would assume that the mysterious Mr Andropulos has friends in the government.’

‘The mysterious Mr Andropulos gets more mysterious by the moment.’

‘Maybe, sir. Maybe not – not when you consider the list of ten foreign trading partners he has. Four of them are in cities of what you might regard as being of particular interest – Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad.’

‘Indeed.’ Hawkins thought briefly. ‘Gun-running?’

‘But of course, sir. Nothing illegal about being gun-runners – Britain and America are hotching with them. But all governments are holier-than-thou in this respect and never publicly associate themselves with them. Never do to be classified as a merchant of death. Could well explain why the Greek government is being so cagey.’

‘Indeed it could.’

‘One thing strikes me as odd: why is Tehran missing from the list?’

‘True, true. The Iranians – with the possible exception of the Afghans, are more desperate for arms than any other place around. But gunrunners don’t specialize in blowing up planes in flight.’

‘I don’t know what we’re talking about, sir. The Hampton Court maze has nothing on this lot. I have the feeling that it’s going to take us quite some time to figure this out. Fortunately we have more immediate problems to occupy our minds.’

‘Fortunately?’ Hawkins lifted his eyes heavenwards. ‘Did you say fortunately?’

‘Yes, sir. Vincent?’ This to Van Gelder. ‘I should think Jenkins knows the requirements of the Vice-Admiral and his two friends by this time.’

‘You are not joining us?’ Benson said.

‘Better not. We expect to be quite busy later on tonight.’ He turned to Van Gelder again. ‘And give orders for our six shipwrecked mariners to return to their cabins. They are to remain there until further orders. Post guards to see that those instructions are obeyed.’

‘I think I’d better go and do this myself, sir.’

‘Fine. I’m all out of tact at the moment.’

Hawkins said: ‘Do you think they’ll take kindly to this – ah – incarceration?’

‘Incarceration? Let’s call it protective custody. Fact is, I don’t want them to see what’s going on in the next few hours. I’ll explain why in a moment.

‘The Ministry of Defence had another item of information for us. About the bomber. It had been in touch with air control in Athens and had been instructed to alter course over the island of Amorgós – that’s about forty miles north-east of here – and proceed on a roughly north-north-west course. Two fighter planes – US Air Force F15s – went up to meet it and escort it in.’

‘Did you see any such planes in the vicinity?’

‘No, sir. Wouldn’t have expected to. Rendezvous point was to be over the island of Euboea. The destination was not Athens but Thessalonika. I assume the Americans have a missile base in that area. I wouldn’t know.

‘Admiral Blyth on the Apollo has also come through. We’ve had luck here – two pieces of luck. A recovery ship en route to Piraeus has been diverted to Santorini. Diving crews, recovery gear, the lot. You’ll know it, sir. The Kilcharran.’

‘I know it. Auxiliary Fleet vessel. Nominally under my command. I say “nominally” because I also have the misfortune to know its captain. Lad called Montgomery. A very crusty Irishman with a low opinion of Royal Navy regulations. Not that that matters. He’s brilliant at his job. Couldn’t ask to have a better man around. Your other item of good news?’

‘There’s a plane en route to Santorini at this moment with a couple of divers and diving equipment for four aboard. Very experienced men, I’m told, a Chief Petty Officer and a Petty Officer. I’ve sent Sub-Lieutenant Cousteau ashore to pick them up. They should be here in half an hour or so.’

‘Excellent, excellent. And when do you expect the Kilcharran?’

‘About five in the morning, sir.’

‘By Jove, things are looking up. You have something in mind?’

‘I have. With your permission, sir.’

‘Oh, do shut up.’

‘Yes, sir. It will also answer your two questions – why Van Gelder and I are on the wagon and why the six survivors have been – well, locked up out of harm’s way. When Cousteau comes back with the divers and equipment, Van Gelder and I are going down with them to have a look at this plane. I’m pretty sure we won’t be able to accomplish much. But we’ll be able to assess the extent of the damage to the plane, with luck locate this ticking monster and with even greater luck try to free it. I know in advance that we’re not going to have that kind of luck but it’s worth a try. You’d be the first to agree, sir, that in the circumstances, anything is worth a try.’

‘Yes, yes, but, well, you’ll excuse me if I frown a bit but you and Van Gelder are the two most important people on this ship.’

‘No, we’re not. If anything should happen to us personally, and I don’t see what can happen, you are, in your spare time, so to speak, accustomed to commanding a battle fleet. I can hardly see that a mere frigate is going to inconvenience you to all that extent. And if anything should happen on a catastrophic scale, nobody’s going to be worrying too much about anything.’

Wickram said: ‘You are a cold-blooded so-and-so, Commander.’

Hawkins sighed. ‘Not cold blood, Dr Wickram. Cold logic, I’m afraid. And when and if you come back up, what then?’

‘Then we’re off to have a look at the Delos. Should be very interesting. Andropulos may have made a mistake, Admiral, in telling you that he was scared that his spare fuel tank might blow up. But then, he could have had no idea that we were going to have a look at the Delos. That’s why he’s locked up. I don’t want him to know we’ve got divers aboard and I especially don’t want him to see me taking off with divers in the general direction of the Delos. If we find that there was no spare tank, we shall have to keep an even closer eye on him. And, for good measure, on his dear friend Alexander and his captain, Aristotle. I can’t believe that that young seaman, Achmed or whatever his name is, or either of the two girls can have anything to do with this. I think they’re along for the purpose of camouflage, respectability, if you will. In any event we should be back long before the Kilcharran arrives.’ He turned to look at Denholm who had just arrived on the bridge. ‘Well, Jimmy, what drags you away from the fleshpots?’

‘If I may say so with some dignity, sir, I’m trying to set them an example. I’ve just had a thought, sir. If you will excuse me, Admiral?’

‘I think that any thought you might have could be well worth listening to, young man. Not Greek literature this time, I’ll be bound. This – ah – hobby of yours. Electronics, is it not?’

‘Well, yes, it is, sir.’ Denholm seemed faintly surprised. He looked at Talbot. ‘That atom bomb down there, the one that goes tick … tick … tick. The intention is, or the hope, anyway, to detach it from the other explosives?’

‘If it can be done.’

‘And then, sir?’

‘One thing at a time, Jimmy. That’s as far as my thinking has got so far.’

‘Would we try to de-activate it?’ Denholm looked at Wickram. ‘Do you think it could be de-activated, sir?’

‘I honestly don’t know, Lieutenant. I have powerful suspicions, but I just don’t know. I should have imagined that this lay more in your field than mine. Electronics, I mean. I know how to build those damned weapons but I know nothing about those fancy triggering devices.’

‘Neither do I. Not without knowing how they work. For that I’d have to see the blueprint, a diagramatic layout. You said you had powerful suspicions. What suspicions, sir?’

‘I suspect that it can’t be de-activated. In fact, I’m certain the process is irreversible. The second suspicion is also a certainty. I’m damn sure that I’m not going to be the one to try.’

‘That makes two of us. So what other options are open to us?’

Benson said: ‘May a total ignoramus venture an opinion? Why don’t we take it to some safe place a hundred miles away and dump it at the bottom of the deep blue sea?’

‘A tempting thought, Professor,’ Denholm said, ‘but not a very practicable one. It is, of course, a hundred per cent certain that this triggering device is battery-powered. The latest generation of Nife cells can lie dormant for months, even years, and still spring smartly to attention when called on to do their duty. You can’t declare a whole area of the Mediterranean off-limits to all shipping for years to come.’

‘I prefaced my suggestion by saying that I was an ignoramus. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Another doubtlessly ludicrous suggestion. We take it to the self-same spot and detonate it.’

Denholm shook his head, ‘I’m afraid that still leaves us with a couple of problems. The first is, how are we going to get it there?’

‘We take it there.’

‘Yes. We take it there. Or we set out to take it there. Then somewhere en route the ticking stops. Then the triggering device cocks its ear and says, “Aha! What’s this I hear? Ship’s engines,” and detonates. There wouldn’t even be a second’s warning.’

‘Hadn’t thought of that. We could – I say this hopefully – tow it there.’

‘Our little friend is still listening and we don’t know and have no means of knowing how sensitive its hearing is. Engines, of course, would set it off. So would a generator. A derrick winch, even a coffee-grinder in the galley might provide all the impulse it requires.’

Talbot said: ‘You came all the way up to the bridge, Jimmy, just to spread sweetness and light, your own special brand of Job’s comfort?’

‘Not quite, sir. It’s just that a couple of ideas occurred to me, one of which will have occurred to you and one which you probably don’t know about. Getting the bomb to its destination would be easy enough. We use a sailing craft. Lots of them hereabouts. Aegean luggers.’

Talbot looked at Hawkins. ‘One can’t think of everything. I forgot to mention, sir, that in addition to being a student of ancient Greek language and literature Lieutenant Denholm is also a connoisseur of the small craft of the Aegean. Used to spend all his summers here – well, until we nabbed him, that is.’

‘I wouldn’t begin to know how to sail those luggers or caïques, in fact I couldn’t even sail a dinghy if you paid me. But I’ve studied them, yes. Most of them come from the island of Samos or Bodrum in Turkey. Before the war – the First World War, that is – they were all sailing craft. Nowadays, they’re nearly all engined, most of them with steadying sails. But there’s quite a few both with engines and a full set of sails. Those are the Trehandiri and Perama types and I know there are some in the Cyclades. One of those would be ideal for our purposes. Because they have shallow keels, a minimum draught and no ballast they are almost useless performers to windward but that wouldn’t matter in this case. The prevailing wind here is north-west and the open sea lies to the south-east.’

‘Useful information to have,’ Talbot said. ‘Very useful indeed. Um – you wouldn’t happen to know anyone with such a craft?’

‘As a matter of fact I do.’

‘Good God! You’re as useful as your information.’ Talbot broke off as Van Gelder entered the bridge. ‘Duty done, Number One?’

‘Yes, sir. Andropulos was a bit reluctant to go. So were Alexander and Aristotle. In fact, they point-blank refused to go. Infringement of their liberties as Greek civilians or some tosh to that effect. Demanded to know on whose orders. I said yours. Demanded to see you. I said in the morning. More outrage. I didn’t argue with them, just called up McKenzie and some of his merry men, who removed them forcibly. I told McKenzie not to post any guards, just lock the doors and pocket the keys. You’re going to hear from the Greek government about this, sir.’

‘Excellent. Wish I’d been there. And the girls?’

‘Sweet reason. No problem.’

‘Fine. Now, Jimmy, you said a couple of ideas had occurred to you. What was the second one?’

‘It’s about the second problem that the Professor raised. The detonation. We could, of course, try sympathetic detonation by dropping a depth charge on it but as we would be in the immediate vicinity at the time I don’t think that would be a very good idea.’

‘Neither do I. So?’

‘The Pentagon could have the answer. Despite feeble denials to the contrary, everyone knows that the Pentagon controls NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA, in turn, is supposed to administer the Kennedy Space Center. “Supposed” is the operative word. They don’t. The centre is operated by EG & G, a major defence contractor. EG & G – Dr Wickram will know much more about this than I do – oversees such things as nuclear-weapons tests and the so-called Star Wars. More importantly, they are developing, or have developed, what they call the krytron, a remote-controlled electronic impulse trigger that can detonate nuclear weapons. A word from the Admiral in the ear of the Pentagon might work wonders.’

Hawkins cleared his throat. ‘This little titbit of information, Lieutenant. It will, of course, like your other titbits, be in the public domain?’

‘It is, sir.’

‘You astonish me. Most interesting, most. Could be a big part of the answer to our problem, don’t you agree, Commander?’ Talbot nodded. ‘I think we should act immediately on this one. Ah! The very man himself.’

Myers had just entered, carrying a piece of paper which he handed to Talbot. ‘Reply to your latest query to the Pentagon, sir.’

‘Thank you. No, don’t go. We’ll have another message to send them in a minute.’ Talbot handed the paper to Hawkins.

‘“Security at bomber base”,’ Hawkins read, ‘“believed to be 99.9% effective. But cards on the table. However unlikely, there may be one chance in ten thousand that security has been penetrated. This could have been that one chance”. Well, isn’t that nice. Absolutely useless piece of information, of course.

‘“Plane carried fifteen H-bombs of fifteen megatons each and three atom bombs, all three equipped with timing devices”. Well, that’s just fine. So now we have three of those ticking monsters to contend with.’

‘With any luck, just one,’ Talbot said. ‘Sonar picks up only one. Extremely unlikely that all three would be ticking in perfect unison. Point’s academic, anyway. One or a hundred, the big boys would still go up.’

‘Identified by size, they say,’ Hawkins went on. ‘Sixty inches by six. Pretty small for an atom bomb, I would have thought. 4000 kilotons. That’s a lot, Dr Wickram?’

‘By today’s standards, peanuts. Less than half the size of the Hiroshima bomb. If the bomb is the dimensions they say, then it’s very large for such a small explosive value.’

‘It goes on to say that they’re designated for marine use. I suppose that’s a fancy way of saying that they are mines. So your guess was right, Dr Wickram.’

‘Also explains the size of the bomb. Quite a bit of space will be taken up by the timing mechanism and, of course, it will have to be weighted to give it negative buoyancy.’

‘The real sting comes in the tail,’ Hawkins said. ‘“When the ticking stops the timing clock has run out and the firing mechanism is activated and ready to be triggered by mechanical stimulation”, by which I take it they mean ship’s engines. So it looks as if you were right about that one, Van Gelder. Then, by way of cheerful farewell, they say that enquiries so far confirm that the timing mechanism, once in operation, cannot be neutralized and appears to be irreversible.’

The last words were met with silence. No one had any comment to make for the excellent reason that everyone had already been convinced of the fact.

‘A message to the Pentagon, Myers. “Urgently require to know state of development of the EG & G krytron” – that’s k-r-y-t-r-o-n, isn’t it, Lieutenant? – “nuclear detonation device.”’ Talbot paused. ‘Add: “If operating model exists essential dispatch immediately with instructions.” That do, Admiral?’ Hawkins nodded. ‘Sign it Admiral Hawkins.’

‘We must be giving them quite some headaches in the Pentagon,’ Hawkins said in some satisfaction. ‘This should call for still more aspirin.’

‘Aspirins are not enough,’ Van Gelder said. ‘Sleepless nights are what are called for.’

‘You have something in mind, Van Gelder?’ ‘Yes, sir. They can have no idea of the really horrendous potential of the situation here in Santorini – the combination of all those megatons of hydrogen bombs, thermal plumes and volcanoes and earthquakes along the tectonic plate boundaries and the possibly cataclysmic results. If Professor Benson here were to make a very brief précis of the lecture he gave us in the wardroom this evening it might give them something more to think about.’

‘You have an evil mind, Van Gelder. What a perfectly splendid suggestion. Uneasy will lie the heads along the Potomac this night. What do you think, Professor?’

‘It will be a pleasure.’

When Sub-Lieutenant Cousteau, together with the two divers and their equipment, returned from Santorini, they found the Ariadne in virtual darkness. With the thought of the malevolent listening bug on the sea-floor dominating every other in his mind, Talbot had sought Lieutenant Denholm’s advice on the question of noise suppression: Denholm had not been half-hearted in his recommendations, with the result that the use of all mechanical devices on the ship, from generators to electric shavers, had been banned. Only essential lighting, radar, sonar and radio were functioning normally: all these could function equally well, as they had been designed to do, on battery power. The sonar watch on the ticking device in the crashed bomber was now continuous.

The two divers, Chief Petty Officer Carrington and Petty Officer Grant, were curiously alike, both aged about thirty, of medium height and compact build: both were much given to smiling, a cheerfulness that in no way detracted from their almost daunting aura of competence. They were with Talbot and Van Gelder in the wardroom.

‘That’s all I know about the situation down there,’ Talbot said, ‘and heaven knows it’s little enough. I just want to know those three things – the extent of the damage, the location of this ticking noise and to see if it’s possible to remove this atom bomb or whatever, which I’m convinced in advance is impossible. You are aware of the dangers and you are aware that I cannot order you to do this. How does the prospect appeal, Chief?’

‘It doesn’t appeal at all, sir.’ Carrington was imperturbable. ‘Neither Bill Grant nor I is cast in the heroic mould. We’ll walk very softly down there. You shouldn’t be worrying about us, you should be worrying about what your crew is thinking. If we slip up they’ll all join us in the wide blue yonder or whatever. I know you want to come down, sir, but is it really necessary? We’re pretty experienced in moving around inside wrecks without banging into things and we’re both Torpedo Gunner Mates and explosives, you might say, are our business. Not, I admit, the kind of explosives you have down there but we know enough not to trigger a bomb by accident.’

‘And we might?’ Talbot smiled. ‘You’re very tactful, Chief. What you mean is that we might bang into things or kick a detonator on the nose or something of the kind. When you say “necessary”, do you mean “wise”? I refer to our diving experience or lack of it.’

‘We know about your diving experience, sir. You will understand that when we knew what we were coming into we made some discreet enquiries. We know that you have commanded a submarine and the Lieutenant-Commander was your first lieutenant. We know you’ve both been through the HMS Dolphin Submarine Escape Tower and that you’ve done more than a fair bit of free diving. No, we don’t think you’ll be getting in our way or banging things around.’ Carrington turned up palms in acceptance. ‘What’s your battery capacity, sir?’

‘For essential and non-mechanical purposes, ample. Several days.’

‘We’ll put down three weighted floodlights and suspend them about twenty feet above the bottom. That should illuminate the plane nicely. We’ll have a powerful hand-flash each. We have a small bag of tools for cutting, sawing and snipping. We also have an oxyacetylene torch, which is rather more difficult to use under water than most people imagine, but as this is just a reconnaissance trip we won’t be taking it along. The closed-circuit breathing is of the type we prefer, fifty-fifty oxygen and nitrogen with a carbon dioxide scrubber. At the depth of a hundred feet, which is what we will be at, we could easily remain underwater for an hour without any risk of either oxygen poisoning or decompression illness. That’s academic, of course. Provided there’s access to the plane and the fuselage is not crushed a few minutes should tell us all we want to know.

‘Two points about the helmet. There’s a rotary chin switch which you depress to activate an amplifier that lets us talk, visor to visor. A second press cuts it off. It also has a couple of sockets over the ears where you can plug in what is to all effects a stethoscope.’

‘That’s all?’

‘All.’

‘We can go now?’

‘A last check, sir?’ Carrington didn’t have to specify what check.

Talbot lifted a phone, spoke briefly and replaced it.

‘Our friend is still at work.’

The water was warm and still and so very clear that they could see the lights of the suspended arc-lamps even before they dipped below the surface of the darkened Aegean. With Carrington in the lead and using the marker buoy anchor rope as a guide they slid down fifty feet and stopped.

The three arc-lamps had come to rest athwart the sunken bomber, sharply illuminating the fuselage and the two wings. The left wing, though still attached to the fuselage, had been almost completely sheared off between the inner engine and the fuselage and was angled back about thirty degrees from normal. The tail unit had been almost completely destroyed. The fuselage, or that part of it that could be seen from above, appeared to be relatively intact. The nose cone of the plane was shrouded in shadow.

They continued their descent until their feet touched the top of the fuselage, half-walked, half-swam until they reached the front of the plane, switched on their flash-lights and looked through the completely shattered windows of the cockpit. The pilot and the co-pilot were still trapped in their seats. They were no longer men, just the vestigial remains of what had once been human beings. Death must have been instantaneous. Carrington looked at Talbot and shook his head, then dropped down to the sea-bed in front of the nose cone.

The hole that had been blasted there was roughly circular with buckled and jagged edges projecting outwards, conclusive proof that the blast had been internal: the diameter of the whole was approximately five feet. Moving slowly and cautiously so as not to rip any of the rubber components of their diving suits, they passed in file into a compartment not more than four feet in height but almost twenty feet in length, extending from the nose cone, under the flight deck and then several feet beyond. Both sides of the compartment were lined with machinery and metal boxes so crushed and mangled that their original function was incomprehensible.

Two-thirds of the way along the compartment a hatch had been blasted upwards. The opening led to a space directly behind the seats of the two pilots. Aft of this was what was left of a small radio-room with a man who appeared to be peacefully sleeping leaning forward on folded arms, the fingers of one hand still on a transmitting key. Beyond this, four short steps led down to an oval door let into a solid steel bulkhead. The door was secured by eight clamps, some of which had been jammed into position by the impact of the blast. A hammer carried by Carrington in his canvas bag of tools soon tapped them into a loosened position.

Beyond the door lay the cargo compartment, bare, bleak, functional and obviously designed for one purpose only, the transport of missiles. These were secured by heavy steel clamps which were in turn bolted to longitudinal reinforced steel beams let into the floor and sides of the fuselage. There was oil mixed with the water in the compartment but even in the weird, swirling, yellowish light they looked neither particularly menacing nor sinister. Slender, graceful, with either end encased in a rectangular metal box they looked perfectly innocuous. Each contained fifteen megatons of high explosive.

There were six of those in the first section of the compartment. As a formality, and not because of any expectations, Talbot and Carrington applied their stethoscopes to each cylinder in turn. The results were negative as they had known they would be: Dr Wickram had been positive that they contained no timing devices.

There were also six missiles in the central compartment. Three of these were of the same size as those in the front compartment: the other three were no more than five feet in length. Those had to be the atom bombs. It was when he was testing the third of those with his stethoscope that Carrington beckoned to Talbot, who came and listened in turn. He didn’t have to listen long. The two and a half second ticking sequence sounded exactly as it had done in the sonar room.

In the aft compartment they went through the routine exercise of listening to the remaining six missiles and found what they had expected, nothing. Carrington put his visor close to Talbot’s.

‘Enough?’

‘Enough.’

‘That didn’t take you long,’ Hawkins said.

‘Long enough to find out what we needed. Missiles are there, all present and correct as listed by the Pentagon. Only one bomb has been activated. Three dead men. That’s all, except for the most important fact of all. The bomber crashed because of an internal explosion. Some kindly soul had concealed a bomb under the flight deck. The Pentagon must be glad that they added the faint possibility that there was one chance in ten thousand that security might be breached. The faint possibility came true. Raises some fascinating questions, doesn’t it, sir? Who? What? Why? When? We don’t have to ask “where” because we already know that.’

‘I don’t want to sound grim or vindictive,’ Hawkins said, ‘because I’m not. Well, maybe a little. Should cut the gentlemen on Foggy Bottom, or wherever, down to size and make them a mite more civil and cooperative in future. Not only is it an American plane that is responsible for the dreadful situation in which we find ourselves, but it was someone in America who was ultimately responsible. If they ever do discover who was responsible, and it’s not without the bounds of possibility, it’s going to cause an awful lot of red faces and I’m not just referring to the villain himself. I’d lay odds that the person responsible is an insider, a pretty high-up insider with free access to secret information, such as closely guarded secrets as to the composition of the cargo, the destination and the time of take-off and arrival. Wouldn’t you agree, Commander?’

‘I don’t see how it can be otherwise. Not a problem I’d care to have on my hands. However, that’s their problem. We have an even bigger problem on our hands.’

‘True, true.’ Hawkins sighed. ‘What’s the next step, then? In recovering this damn bomb, I mean?’

‘I think you should ask Chief Petty Officer Carrington, sir, not me. He and Petty Officer Grant are the experts.’

‘It’s a tricky one, sir,’ Carrington said. ‘Cutting away a fuselage section large enough to lift the bomb through is straightforward enough. But before we could lift the bomb out we would have to free it from its clamps and this is where the great difficulty lies. Those clamps are made of high-tensile steel fitted with a locking device. For that we need a key and we don’t know where the key is.’

‘It could be,’ Hawkins said, ‘that the key is held at the missile base where the bombs were due to be delivered.’

‘With respect, sir, I think that unlikely. Those clamps had to be locked at the Air Force base where they were loaded. So they would have to have a key there. I think it would be much easier and more logical if they just took the key with them. Trouble is, a key is a very small thing and that’s a very big bomber indeed.

‘If there’s no key there are two ways we can remove that clamp. One is chemical, using either a metal softener or corrosive. The metal softener is used by stage magicians who go in for spoon-bending and such-like.’

‘Magicians?’ Hawkins said. ‘Charlatans, you mean.’

‘Whatever. The principle is the same. They use a colourless paste which has no effect on the skin but has the peculiar property of altering the molecular structure of a metal and making it malleable. A corrosive is simply a powerful acid that eats through steel. Lots of them on the market. But in this case, both softeners and corrosives have one impossible drawback: you can’t use them underwater.’

Hawkins said: ‘You mentioned two ways of removing the clamp. What’s the other?’

‘Oxyacetylene torch, sir. Make short work of any clamp. It would also, I imagine, make even shorter work of the operator. Those torches generate tremendous heat and I should also imagine that anyone who even contemplates using an oxyacetylene torch on an atom bomb is an obvious candidate for the loony-bin.’

Hawkins looked at Wickram. ‘Comment?’

‘No comment. Not on the unthinkable.’

‘I speak in no spirit of complaint, Carrington,’ Hawkins said, ‘but you’re not very encouraging. What you are about to suggest, of course, is that we wait for the Kilcharran to come along and hoist the damn thing to the surface.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Carrington hesitated. ‘But there’s a snag even to that.’

‘A snag?’ Talbot said. ‘You are referring, of course, to the distinct and unpleasant possibility that the ticking might stop while the Kilcharran’s winch engine is working overtime at hauling the bomber to the surface?’

‘I mean just that, sir.’

‘A trifle. There are no trifles that the combined brain-power aboard the Ariadne can’t solve.’ He turned to Denholm. ‘You can fix that, Lieutenant?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How, sir?’ There was a pardonable note of doubt if not outright disbelief in Carrington’s voice: Lieutenant Denholm didn’t look like the type of person who could fix anything.

Talbot smiled. ‘If I may say this gently, Chief, one does not question Lieutenant Denholm on those matters. He knows more about electrics and electronics than any man in the Mediterranean.’

‘It’s quite simple, Chief,’ Denholm said. ‘We just couple up the combined battery powers of the Ariadne and the Kilcharran. The Kilcharran’s winches are probably diesel-powered. We may or may not be able to convert them to electrical use. If we can’t, it doesn’t matter. We have excellent electric anchor windlasses on the Ariadne.’

‘Yes, but – well, with one of your two anchors out of commission you’d start drifting, wouldn’t you?’

‘We wouldn’t drift. A diving ship normally carries four splayed anchors to moor it precisely over any given spot on the ocean floor. We just tie up to the Kilcharran, that’s all.’

‘I’m not doing too well, am I? One last objection, sir. Probably a feeble one. An anchor is only an anchor. This bomber and its cargo probably weighs over a hundred tons. I mean, it’s quite a lift.’

‘Diving ships also carry flotation bags. We strap them to the plane’s fuselage and pump them full of compressed air until we achieve neutral buoyancy.’

‘I give up,’ Carrington said. ‘From now on, I stick to diving.’

‘So we twiddle our thumbs until the Kilcharran arrives,’ Hawkins said. ‘But not you, I take it, Commander?’

‘I think we’ll have a look at the Delos, sir.’

Chapter 5

They had rowed about a mile when Talbot called up the Ariadne. He spoke briefly, listened briefly, then turned to McKenzie who was at the tiller.

‘Ship oars. The timing device is still at it so I think we’ll start the engine. Gently, at first. At this distance I hardly think we’d trigger anything even if the bomb was activated, but no chances. Course 095.’

There were nine of them in the whaler – Talbot, Van Gelder, the two divers, McKenzie and the four seamen who had rowed them so far. Those last would not be required again until they reached the last mile of the return trip.

After about forty minutes Van Gelder moved up into the bows with a portable six-inch searchlight which, on such a clear night, had an effective range of over a mile. The searchlight was probably superfluous for there was a three-quarter moon and Talbot, with his night-glasses, had a clear bearing on the monastery and the radar station on Mount Elias. Van Gelder returned within minutes and handed the searchlight to McKenzie.

‘Fine off the port bow, Chief.’

‘I have it,’ McKenzie said. The yellow buoy, in the light of both the moon and the searchlight, was clearly visible. ‘Do I anchor?’

‘Not necessary,’ Talbot said. ‘No current that’s worth speaking of, no wind, a heavy anchor weight and a stout anchor rope. Just make fast to the buoy.’

In course of time McKenzie did just that and the four divers slipped over the side, touching down on the deck of the Delos just over an hour after leaving the Ariadne. Carrington and Grant disappeared down the for’ard companionway while Talbot and Van Gelder took the after one.

Talbot didn’t bother entering the after stateroom. The two girls had stayed there and he knew it would hold nothing of interest for him. He looked at the dead engineer, or the man whom Van Gelder had taken to be the engineer because of his blue overalls, and examined the back of his head carefully. The occiput had not been crushed and there were no signs of either bruising or blood in the vicinity of the deep gash in the skin of the skull. He rejoined Van Gelder who had already moved into the engine-room.

There was, of course, no smoke there now and very little traces of oil. In the light of their two powerful flashlights visibility was all that could be wished for and it took them only two minutes to carry out their examination: unless one is looking for some obscure mechanical fault there is very little to look for in an engine-room. On their way out they opened up a tool-box and took out a long slender chisel apiece.

They found the bridge, when they arrived there, to be all that they would have expected a bridge on such a yacht to be, with a plethora of expensive and largely unnecessary navigational aids, but in all respects perfectly innocuous. Only one thing took Talbot’s attention, a wooden cupboard on the after bulkhead. It was locked, but on the understandable assumption that Andropulos wouldn’t be having any further use for it Talbot wrenched it open with a chisel. It contained the ship’s papers and ship’s log, nothing more.

A door on the port side of the same bulkhead led to a combined radio-room and chart-room. The chart-room section held nothing that a chartroom should not have had, including a locked cupboard which Talbot opened in the same cavalier fashion he had used on the bridge: it held only pilot books and sailing directions. Andropulos, it seemed, just liked locking cupboards. The radio was a standard RCA. They left.

They found Carrington and Grant waiting for them in the saloon. Carrington was carrying what appeared to be a portable radio: Grant had a black metallic box slightly larger than a sheet of foolscap paper and less than three inches thick. Carrington put his visor close to Talbot’s.

‘All we could find. Of interest, I mean.’

‘We have enough.’

‘Dispatch would appear to be the keynote of your investigations, Commander,’ Hawkins said. Glass in hand, he was seated across the wardroom table from Talbot, ‘I mean, you seem to spend singularly little time on your – um – aquatic investigation.’

‘You can find out interesting things in a very short space of time, sir. Too much, for some people.’

‘You refer to our shipwrecked friends?’

‘Who else? Five things, sir. Van Gelder was right, there were no signs of bruising or blood where the engineer had been gashed on the head. An examination of the engine-room turned up no signs of protrusions, angle-beams or sharp metallic corners that could have caused the injury. Circumstantial evidence, I know, but evidence that strongly suggests that the engineer was clobbered by a heavy metallic instrument. No shortage of those in an engine-room. We have, of course, no clue as to the identity of the assailant.

‘Secondly, I’m afraid the owner of the Delos has been guilty of telling you fibs, Admiral. He said he abandoned the Delos because he was afraid that the reserve fuel tank might blow up. There is no such tank.’

‘Isn’t that interesting. Does make things look a little black for Andropulos.’

‘It does a bit. He could always claim of course that he knew nothing of the layout of the engine-room and had always assumed that there had to be a reserve tank or that in a panic-stricken concern for the welfare of his beloved niece he had quite forgotten that there was no such tank. He’s undoubtedly intelligent, we know he’s a thespian of some note and could put up a spirited and convincing defence in court. But he’d have no defence against a further charge that the explosion was not due to natural causes, unless you regard the detonation of a bomb, almost certainly a plastic explosive, under the main fuel tank as being a natural cause.’

‘Well, well, well. One wonders how he’ll talk his way out of this one. You’re quite certain, of course?’

‘We are wounded, sir,’ Van Gelder said. ‘The Captain and I are developing quite some expertise on the effects of explosives on metal. In the bomber, the metal of the fuselage was blown outwards: in this case the metal of the fuel tank was blown inwards.’

‘We are not explosives experts, sir,’ Talbot said. ‘But it would seem that Andropulos wasn’t either.’ He nodded towards Carrington and Grant. ‘But those two gentlemen are experts. We were talking about it on the way back. They reckon that Andropulos – if it was Andropulos, it could have been Alexander or Aristotle – made an amateurish blunder. They say the villain, whoever he was, should have used what they call an inverted beehive plastic explosive attached to the underside of the tank by a magnetic clamp, in which case more than ninety per cent of the explosive charge would have been directed upwards. It would seem that they didn’t use such a device.’

Hawkins looked at Carrington. ‘You can be sure of this, Chief?’

‘As sure as can be, sir. We do know that he couldn’t have used a beehive. The explosive charge would have been either flat, circular or cylindrical and in any of those cases the disruptive explosive power would have been uniformly distributed in all directions. Grant and I think he didn’t deliberately sink the yacht but that he just, through ignorance, kind of accidentally blew a hole through the bottom.’

‘If it weren’t for the three dead men, this could be almost amusing. As it is, one has to admit that life is full of its little ironies. What’s that you’ve got in front of you there, Carrington?’

‘Some sort of radio, sir. Took it from the captain’s cabin.’

‘Why did you take it?’

‘Struck me as odd, sir, unusual, out of place, you might say. Every cabin is fitted with its own bulkhead radio – all probably fed from the central radio in the saloon. So why should he require this additional radio, especially when he had access to – and was probably the only user of – the much superior radio in his radio-room?’

Talbot looked at Denholm. ‘Just a standard radio, is it?’

‘Not quite.’ Denholm took the radio and examined it briefly. ‘A transceiver, which means it can transmit as well as receive. Hundreds of them around, thousands, most commonly as ship-to-shore radios in private yachts. Also used in geological and seismological work and construction building. Remote control detonation.’ He paused and looked around myopically. ‘I don’t want to sound sinister, but it could equally well be used to trigger off the detonator in an explosive device being carried by an American Air Force bomber.’

There was a brief silence, then Hawkins said: ‘I don’t want to complain, Denholm, but you do rather tend to complicate matters.’

‘I used the word “could”, sir, not “did”. On the whole, given the mysterious and inexplicable circumstances, I rather think I prefer the word “did”. If that is the case it leads, of course, to even more mysteries. How did Andropulos or whoever know when, and from where, that bomber was leaving? How did he know its cargo? How did he know an explosive device was being smuggled aboard? How did he know the radio wavelength to set it off? And, of course, there’s the why, why, why.’

The silence was considerably longer this time. Finally, Hawkins said: ‘Maybe we’re doing Andropulos an injustice. Maybe Alexander is the mastermind.’

‘Not a chance, sir.’ Van Gelder was definite. ‘Andropulos lied about the spare tank. He has connections with main centres of known gun-running activities. The fact that Alexander, who unquestionably plays the role of assistant villain, had the radio in his cabin is of no significance. I should imagine that Irene Charial might be in the habit of dropping in on her uncle occasionally and he wouldn’t want her saying, “Whatever are you doing with a spare radio in your cabin, Uncle?” I can hardly imagine her dropping in on Alexander at any time, far less occasionally. So, Alexander kept the radio.’

‘You mentioned the possibility of an insider at this Air Force base in America, sir,’ Talbot said, ‘I think we should be thinking in terms of a whole platoon of insiders. You will be composing messages for the Pentagon, Air Force Intelligence and the CIA? Suitably etched in acid. I think by this time they must be dreading the thought of another signal from the Ariadne. I don’t see much point in your going to Washington and entering a popularity stakes contest.’

‘The slings and arrows – well, we’re accustomed to injustices. What do you have in that box?’

‘Petty Officer Grant picked this up in Andropulos’s cabin. Haven’t opened it yet.’ Not without difficulty he undid two spring clips and lifted the lid. ‘Waterproof, by Jove.’ He looked at the contents. ‘Means nothing to me.’

Hawkins took the box from him, lifted out some sheets of paper and a paperback book, examined them briefly and shook his head. ‘Means nothing to me, either. Denholm?’

Denholm shuffled through the papers. ‘In Greek, naturally. Looks like a list of names, addresses and telephone numbers to me. But I can’t make sense of it.’

‘I thought you understood Greek?’

‘I do. But I don’t understand Grecian code. And this is what it’s written in – a code.’

‘Code! Damn it to hell.’ Hawkins spoke with considerable feeling. ‘This could be urgent. Vital.’

‘It’s more than likely, sir.’ Denholm looked at the paperback. ‘Homer’s Odyssey. I don’t suppose it’s here just by coincidence. If we knew the connection between the poem and what’s written on those sheets, then cracking the code would be child’s play. But we don’t have the key. That’s locked away inside Andropulos’s mind. Anagrams and word puzzles are not in my line of country, sir. I’m no cryptologist.’

Hawkins looked moodily at Talbot. ‘You don’t have a code-cracker among this motley crew you have aboard?’

‘To the best of my knowledge, no. And certainly not a Greek code-cracker. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find one, I should imagine. The Greek Defence Ministry and their Secret Service are bound to have some cryptologists on their staffs. Just a radio call and a half-hour’s flight away, sir.’

Hawkins glanced at his watch. ‘Two a.m. All God-fearing cryptologists are tucked up in their beds by this time.’

‘So are all God-fearing admirals,’ Denholm said. ‘Besides, my friend Wotherspoon didn’t mind being rousted out of bed an hour ago. Positively cheerful about it, in fact.’

Talbot said: ‘Who, may I ask warily, is Wotherspoon?’

‘Professor Wotherspoon. My friend with the Aegean lugger. You asked me to contact him, remember? Lives in Naxos, seven or eight hours’ sail from here. He’s on his way with the Angelina.’

‘Very civil of him, I must say. Angelina? Odd name.’

‘Better not let him hear you say that, sir. Name of his lugger. Ancient and honoured Grecian name, some sort of classical goddess, I believe. Also the name of his wife. Charming lady.’

‘Is he – what shall we say? – slightly eccentric?’

‘All depends upon what you mean by eccentric. He regards the rest of the world as being slightly eccentric.’

‘A professor? What does he profess?’

‘Archæology. Used to. He’s retired now.’

‘Retired? Oh dear. I mean, have we any right to bring an elderly archæologist into this?’

‘Don’t let him hear you say that either, sir. He’s not elderly. Old man left him a fortune.’

‘You warned him of the perils, of course?’

‘As directly as I could. Seemed amused. Said his ancestors fought at Agincourt and Crécy. Something to that effect.’

‘What’s good enough for a retired archæologist should be good enough for a Greek cryptologist,’ Hawkins said. ‘Not that I follow the logic of that. If you would be so good, Commander.’

‘We’ll radio Athens right away. Two things, sir. I suggest we release Andropulos and his friends for breakfast and leave them free. Sure, we’ve got plenty on them, but as yet no conclusive proof and the three A’s – Andropulos, Aristotle and Alexander – are a close-mouthed and secretive lot and we can be certain they won’t talk to us or give anything away. But they might, just might, talk among themselves. Lieutenant Denholm will lurk unobtrusively. They don’t, and won’t, know that he talks Greek as well as they do. Number One, would you tell McKenzie to warn the four seamen who were with us tonight that they are on no account to mention the fact that we were on the Delos. Keel-hauling, walking the plank, that sort of thing. One other thing. The presence of the cryptographer, when he arrives, will not go unnoticed.’

‘He’s not a cryptographer,’ Van Gelder said. ‘Peace be to Lieutenant Denholm but he’s a civilian electronics specialist who’s come out to fix some abstruse electronic fault that only he can fix. Also gives a splendid reason for him to use Denholm’s cabin while he gets on with his decoding.’

‘Well, thank you very much.’ Denholm smiled and turned to Talbot. ‘With the Captain’s permission, I’d like to retire there right now and get some sleep before this impostor arrives.’

‘An excellent idea. Vice-Admiral Hawkins, Professor Benson, Dr Wickram, I suggest you follow his example. I promise you we’ll give you a shake if anything untoward occurs.’

‘Another excellent idea,’ Hawkins said. ‘After our nightcap. And after you’ve sent your signal to Athens and I’ve composed a suitably stirring message to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.’

‘Stirring?’

‘Certainly. Why should I be the only one suffering from insomnia? I shall tell him that we have every reason to believe that the bomber was carrying a smuggled explosive device aboard, that its detonation was triggered by a radio wave and that we have the miscreant responsible in our hands. Reason to believe, not proof. I shall name Andropulos. I shall want to know how he knew when and from where that bomber was taking off. How did he know what it was carrying? How could this explosive device possibly have been smuggled aboard? How did he know the radio wavelength to set it off? I shall suggest that our concern should be made immediately known to the White House, Air Force Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI. I will suggest that Andropulos has been provided with top-level, ultra-secret information from a very senior official. I will suggest that this should considerably narrow their field of search. I will further suggest that it seems very likely that the traitor is in his own fiefdom, the Pentagon.’

‘Stirring indeed. Laying it on the line as you might say.’ Talbot paused, ‘It has occurred to you, Admiral Hawkins, that you might also be laying your own career on the line?’

‘Only if I’m wrong.’

‘Only if we’re wrong.’

‘In the circumstances, a bagatelle. You would do exactly the same thing.’

‘Five o’clock, sir.’ Talbot woke in his sea-cabin abaft the bridge to find Van Gelder bending over him. ‘The Kilcharran is three miles out.’

‘What’s the latest word from sonar?’

‘Still ticking away, sir. Captain Montgomery says he’s going to shut down his engines in another half-mile. Sees us clearly and reckons he’ll come to a stop more or less alongside. He says that if he’s going to overshoot he’ll use a sea anchor or drop a stern anchor and if he stops short of us he’ll send a crew with a rope. From the way he talks he seems to regard either possibility as a remote contingency. Doesn’t seem the shy or bashful type.’

‘I gathered as much from the admiral. Has our cryptologist arrived?’

‘Yes. Calls himself Theodore. Speaks perfect English but I suppose he’s Greek. Installed in Denholm’s cabin. Denholm himself is up in the wardroom trying to resume his slumbers.’ Van Gelder broke off to accept a sheet of paper from a seaman who had appeared in the doorway, glanced briefly at the message and handed it without a word to Talbot, who read it in turn, muttered something inaudible and swung his legs to the deck.

‘He’ll have to try to resume his slumbers later on. Tell him to join us in the admiral’s cabin at once.’

A pyjama-clad Vice-Admiral Hawkins, propped up on the pillows of his bunk, glowered at the message in his hand and passed it across to Denholm. ‘Pentagon. Unsigned. This krytron device you suggested.’

‘If I were the spluttering type, which I’m not, this would be a sure fire-starter.’ Denholm re-read the message. ‘“Understand krytron experimental device in hand. Endeavour expedite soonest clearance.” Gobbledygook, sir. Writer is ignorant or stupid or thinks he’s clever. Very likely all three at once. What does he mean – “endeavour”? He can either do it or not. What does he mean – “understand”? He either knows or not. Expedite? Means to try to hurry things along. The Pentagon doesn’t expedite – they demand immediate compliance. Same goes for that meaningless word “soonest”. Again, should be immediate. Clearance by whom? The Pentagon can clear anything they want. What do they mean – “experimental”? Either it works or it doesn’t. And doesn’t the phrase “in hand” have a splendid meaningless vagueness about it. Gobbledygook, sir.’

‘Jimmy’s right, sir,’ Talbot said, ‘It’s insulting. Stalling for time. What they’re saying in effect is that they’re not going to entrust their latest toy to their closest ally because we’d flog it to the first Russian we came across.’

‘It’s rich,’ Denholm said, ‘It’s really wonderful. The Americans positively force their Stinger surface-to-air missiles on the rebels who are fighting the Marxist regime in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua. It’s no secret that those guerrilla bands contain a fair proportion of characters who are just as undesirable as the dictatorial governments they’re supposed to be fighting and who would have no hesitation in disposing of those $60,000 missiles, at a fraction of their cost, to any passing terrorists who, in turn, would have no hesitation in loosing off one of those missiles at a passing Boeing 747, preferably one packed with five hundred American citizens. But that’s perfectly OK for the American administration’s ad hoc knee-jerk set of reactions that passes for their foreign policy. But it’s unthinkable that they should allow the krytron into the hands of their oldest ally. It makes me sick.’

‘It makes me mad,’ Hawkins said. ‘Let us give them a lesson on clear and unequivocal English. “Unsigned message received. Meaningless mumbo-jumbo designed to stall and delay. Demand immediate repeat immediate repeat immediate dispatch of krytron or immediate repeat immediate repeat immediate explanation of why not available. Sender of message and person responsible for delay in clearance will be held directly responsible for possible deaths of thousands. Can you not imagine the world-wide reaction when it is learnt that not only is America responsible for this potential disaster but that it was almost certainly caused by treason in the highest American military echelons? A copy of this message is being sent directly to the President of the United States.” That do, you think?’

‘You could have pitched it a bit more strongly, sir,’ Talbot said, ‘but I’d have to spend the rest of the night thinking how. You spoke earlier of sleepless heads along the Potomac. I think we should now talk of heads rolling along the Potomac. If I were you, sir, I’d keep clear of Washington for some little time, by which I mean the rest of your life.’ He rose. ‘The Kilcharran will be alongside in a few minutes. I assume you are in no hurry to meet Captain Montgomery?’

‘You assume right. There is no charity in me.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Five-thirteen. My respects to the captain and ask him to join me for breakfast at, say, eight-thirty. In my cabin here.’

Captain Montgomery, whether by luck or design – design, Talbot was certain – brought the Kilcharran alongside the Ariadne with faultless precision. Talbot stepped across the two gunwales – they were almost exactly of a height – and made his way up to the bridge. Captain Montgomery was a tall, burly character with a jutting black beard, white teeth, a slightly hooked nose and humorous eyes and, in spite of the immaculately cut uniform and four golden rings on either cuff, could easily have passed for a well-to-do and genial eighteenth-century Caribbean pirate. He extended a hand.

‘You’ll be Commander Talbot, of course.’ The voice was deep, the Irish brogue unmistakable. ‘You are welcome aboard. Has there been any further deterioration in the situation?’

‘No. The only deterioration possible, Captain, is one I don’t care to imagine.’

‘Indeed. I shall be sadly missed in the Mountains of Mourne. We’re great ones for the lamentations, the weepings and the wailings in the Mountains of Mourne. Is this atom bomb, or whatever, still ticking away?’

‘It is. I suppose you might call it a deterioration when the ticking stops. You shouldn’t have come here, Captain. You should have nipped into the Gulf of Corinth – you might have stood a chance there.’

‘Not to be thought of for a moment. Nothing to do with heroics – heroics are for those epics they make in Hollywood – or the fact that I couldn’t live with myself. I just couldn’t stand the thought of what that man would say.’

‘You’ll be referring to Vice-Admiral Hawkins?’

‘The very same. Maligning and blackening my character as usual, I dare say?’

‘Hardly.’ Talbot smiled. ‘He did, mind you, make some casual remark about you being allergic to certain naval regulations. He also said you’re the best in the business.’

‘Aye. A fair man and a bloody good admiral – but don’t tell him I said so. I suggest coffee in my cabin, Commander, and perhaps you’ll be kind enough to tell me all you know.’

‘That shouldn’t take long.’

‘Eleven p.m.,’ the President said. ‘What’s the time over there?’

‘Six a.m. There’s a seven-hour time difference.’

‘A very forthright character, this Admiral Hawkins.’ The President gazed thoughtfully at the two dispatches lying on his desk. ‘You know him, of course?’

‘Pretty well, sir.’

‘An able man, General?’

‘Exceptionally so.’

‘He also appears to be an exceptionally tough s.o.b.’

‘That’s undoubtedly true, sir. But then you have to be to command the NATO Mediterranean sea forces.’

‘Do you know him, John?’ This was to John Heiman, the Defence Secretary, the only other person present.

‘Yes. Not as well as the General, but well enough to agree with the General’s assessment.’

‘Pity I never met him. Who selected him for the job, General?’

‘Usual NATO committee.’

‘You were on it, of course?’

‘Yes. I was the chairman.’

‘Ah. The man with the casting vote?’

‘No casting vote. The decision was unanimous.’

‘I see. He – well, he seems to have rather a low opinion of the Pentagon.’

‘He doesn’t exactly say that. But he does appear to have a low opinion, deep suspicions if you like, of a person or persons in the Pentagon.’

‘Puts you in a rather unhappy position. I mean, there must be some stirrings in the Pentagon dovecote.’

‘As you say, Mr President, a few ruffled feathers. Some are hopping mad. Others are giving the matter serious consideration. Generally, you could speak of an air of quiet consternation.’

‘Are you, personally, prepared to lend any credence to this outrageous suggestion? Or what appears to be outrageous?’

‘Think the unthinkable? I don’t have any option, do I? Every instinct says no, this cannot be, those are all my friends and colleagues of many years standing, all honourable men. But instinct is a fallible guide, Mr President. Common sense and what little knowledge of history I have tells me that every man has his price. I have to investigate. The enquiry is already under way. I thought it prudent not to involve the intelligence arms of the four services. So, the FBI. The Pentagon does not care to be investigated by the FBI. It’s an extremely difficult and delicate situation, sir.’

‘Yes. One can hardly go up to an admiral of the fleet and ask him what he was doing on the night of Friday the thirteenth. I wish you luck.’ The President looked at one of the papers before him. ‘Your message re the krytron that provoked Hawkins’s ire must have been badly handled.’

‘It was. Very badly. The matter has been attended to.’

‘This krytron device. Is it operational?’

‘Yes.’

‘Been sent?’ The General shook his head, the President pressed a button and a young man entered. ‘Take this message for the General here. “Krytron device en route. Would greatly appreciate up-to-date assessment of existing problems and measures being taken. Fully appreciate extreme gravity, dangers and complexities of the situation. I personally guarantee total and immediate repeat immediate repeat immediate support and cooperation in all measures undertaken.” That should do it. Sign my name.’

‘I hope he appreciates the three “immediates”,’ the General said.

‘Eight-forty, sir,’ McKenzie said. ‘Admiral’s apologies, but he’d like to see you. He’s in his cabin with Captain Montgomery.’

Talbot thanked him, rose, washed the sleep from his face and eyes and made his way to the admiral’s quarters. A shirtsleeved Hawkins beckoned him to join himself and Montgomery at the breakfast table.

‘Coffee? Sorry to disturb you but these are times that are sent to try men’s souls.’ For a troubled soul Hawkins looked remarkably fresh, rested and relaxed and was attacking his breakfast with some gusto. ‘Captain Montgomery has been reporting the state of progress and I thought you might like to hear it. Incidentally, our friend the timing device is still ticking merrily away.’

‘We are making progress,’ Montgomery said. ‘Slow but steady – slow, because the presence of what the Admiral calls your friend the timing device does have a rather inhibitory effect and we’re probably taking some quite needless precautions as far as acoustic levels are concerned. But we’re dealing with a devil we don’t know and we’re paying the devil more than his due. Our own sonar is now locked on to this device and the sonar room has suddenly become the focal centre of interest in the Kilcharran.

‘We have achieved two things. First, by coupling up the battery resources of our two vessels we have ample electric power to lift this wreck. Your young Lieutenant Denholm looks and talks like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse, but he unquestionably knows his stuff. Your engineer officer, McCafferty, is no slouch either and neither is mine. Anyway, no problem. Secondly, we’ve cut away the port wing of the bomber.’

‘You’ve what?’ Talbot said.

‘Well, you know how it is.’ Montgomery sounded almost apologetic. ‘It was three parts torn away in any case and I figured that neither you nor the US Air Force would have any further use for it. So I had it burnt off.’ Despite his faint air of apology, it was quite clear that Montgomery had no regrets about what had been a wholly unilateral decision: as the only expert on the spot, he had no intention of consulting anybody. ‘A difficult decision and a tricky operation. No one, as far as I know, has ever before cut away the wing of a submerged big jet. That’s where the fuel tanks are located and though it seemed likely that the partial tearing away of the wing had also ruptured the fuel lines and spilled the fuel, there was no way of being sure and no one, again as far as I know, has ever come up against the problem of what happens when an oxyacetylene jet meets a fuel tank under water. But my men were very careful, there was no fuel and so no trouble. And now, at the present moment, my men are securing flotation bags and lifting slings to the plane.

‘Removing this wing gives us two advantages, one minor, one major. The minor one is that with the wing and two very heavy jet engines gone we have all that less to lift although I’m certain we could have lifted the whole lot without trouble. The major one is that the wing, had it been left there, would have snagged on the underside of the Kilcharran as it surfaced and tilted the fuselage, maybe to so acute an angle as to make access to this damned bomb difficult or impossible.’

‘Very well done, Captain,’ Hawkins said. ‘But surely there’s still one problem. When the bomber surfaces, isn’t the weight of the remaining wing and its two engines going to tilt it just as far in the other direction?’

Montgomery smiled in a kindly and tolerant fashion which any average person would have found more than wildly infuriating. Hawkins, fortunately, was not an average person.

‘No problem,’ Montgomery said. ‘We’re also securing flotation bags under that wing. When the fuselage surfaces, the wings will still be under water – you know how low wings are set on a modern jet. In the first stage of surfacing, only the top of the fuselage will be above water-level – when we cut away a rectangular section over where the bomb is located I want as much water as possible below that section to dissipate the heat of the oxyacetylene torches. After we’ve made that hole in the top we’ll lift the fuselage high enough to drain most of the water from it.’

‘How long will it take to inflate the bags and haul the plane to the surface?’

‘An hour or two. I don’t know.’

‘An hour or two?’ Hawkins made no attempt to conceal his surprise, ‘I should have thought a few minutes. You don’t know, you say. I would have thought those things could have been pretty closely calculated.’

‘Normally, yes.’ Montgomery’s air of massive restraint was on a par for provocation with his kindly tolerance. ‘But normally we’d use powerful diesel compressors. Out of deference to the little lady lying on the sea floor, no diesel. Electricity again but using only a fraction of the power. So, an indeterminate period. Do you think I could have some more coffee?’ Montgomery clearly regarded the conversation as over.

Van Gelder knocked on the opened door and entered, a message slip in his hand. He handed it to Hawkins.

‘For you, Admiral. Came in a couple of hours or so ago. Not urgent, so I didn’t think it worth waking you for it.’

‘A wise decision, my boy.’ Hawkins read it, smiled broadly and handed it to Talbot, who glanced at it, smiled in turn and read it out aloud.

‘Well, well,’ Talbot said. ‘Hobnobbing with presidents. Perhaps, after all, sir, you could walk down Pennsylvania Avenue without being clapped in irons or whatever they do to you over in those parts. More importantly, you have the krytron and this splendid pledge of cooperation. Your indignation – the less charitable would call it calculated gamble – has paid off. I like the “repeat immediate” bit. The President would appear to have a sense of humour.’

‘He would indeed. One has to be grateful to him for intervening personally. Very, very satisfactory. I note that he requires information. Would you, please.’

‘Naturally. Emphasis, of course, on the gravity and the dangers?’

‘Of course.’

‘Another item of news, sir,’ Van Gelder said to Talbot. ‘I’ve just had a rather intriguing chat with Irene Charial.’

‘I can well imagine that. Andropulos and company, of course, are now at liberty. How are they this fine morning?’

‘Glowering a bit, sir. At least Andropulos and Alexander were. But the cook was in fine form and they seemed to be thawing a bit when I left them chattering away in Greek with Denholm sitting among them and not understanding a word they were saying. Irene wasn’t there.’

‘Oh? So, naturally, overcome by concern, you hurried up to my cabin to enquire after her health.’

‘Naturally. I knew that was what you would want me to do, sir. She didn’t look as if she had slept too well and admitted as much. Seemed worried, apprehensive even. At first she was rather reluctant to talk about what was bothering her. Misplaced loyalty, I should say.’

‘I would say so too,’ Talbot said. ‘If, that is, I knew what you were talking about.’

‘Sorry. Turned out she wanted to know if Uncle Adam had been sending any radio messages. It seems –’

‘Uncle Adam?’

‘Adamantios Andropulos. His parents have a lot to answer for. Seems that she and her pal Eugenia – both sets of parents live in Piraeus, the two girls are at the University in Athens – were in the habit of phoning home every night. She wanted their parents to know that they had had an accident, were safely aboard a Royal Navy ship and would be home soon.’

‘I hope she’s right,’ Hawkins said.

‘Me too, sir. I told her no messages had been sent and suggested that if Uncle was a businessman – I thought it better not to mention that we already knew he was a multi-millionaire businessman – he might naturally tend to be secretive and that he might also be reluctant to broadcast the fact that he had lost his yacht through what might have been his own fault. She said that was no excuse for not informing the next of kin of the three crew members of the Delos who had died. I asked her if she had raised the question with him and she said no. She was a bit evasive on this point. I gather she either doesn’t know very much about Uncle Adam or doesn’t care very much about what she does know.’ Van Gelder produced a paper from his pocket, ‘I told her to write a message and I would see it was sent.’

Talbot looked at the paper, ‘It’s in Greek. Perhaps this Uncle Adam –’

‘We share the same nasty, suspicious mind, sir. I called Jimmy from the breakfast table. Quite innocent, he says.’

‘I have a better idea. Take the two young ladies to the radio-room. It’s a simple matter to lock into the telephone land lines through the Piraeus radio station. They can talk direct to their folks.’

‘With Jimmy just happening to be there?’

‘We share, as you say, the same nasty, suspicious minds. Before you do that, however, I think we’ll go and see how our latest recruit is getting on.’

‘Ah! Our resident cryptologist. Theodore.’

‘Theodore. After we’ve seen him and the young ladies have finished their calls I want you to take Irene Charial aside.’

‘And engage her in casual conversation?’

‘What else? It would seem that she and her uncle are less than soul-mates and, of course, she will be feeling suitably grateful to you for having permitted her to speak to her folks. Find out what you can about Andropulos. Find out what she thinks of him. See what you can discover about his business or businesses. Find out who his business contacts and friends are and what she thinks of them, assuming, of course, that she’s ever met any of them. And it would be very interesting to know where his travels take him – I’m not talking about his yacht cruises when she is with him – and why they take him there.’

‘You are asking me, sir, in effect, to ply Irene with cunning and devious questions, to entrap her, if you will, to engage in duplicity and extract unwitting information from a sweet and innocent girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘A pleasure, sir.’

Theodore was a cheerful, plump man in his late forties, with a pale face and thick pebble glasses, those last a very probable consequence of having spent a lifetime poring over abstruse codes.

‘You have come to check on progress, gentlemen. I am making some, I’m happy to report. Took me quite some time to find the key, the connection between the code and the Odyssey. Since then, it’s straightforward. These sheets are in three sections and I’m now about two-thirds of the way through the first one.’

‘Found anything of interest?’ Talbot said.

‘Interesting? Fascinating, Captain, fascinating. Statements of his accounts, bank holdings, if you like. He has his money stashed away – “stashed” is the word? – all over the world, it seems. As a matter of interest, I’m totting up the sum of his holdings as I go along. He’s made it very easy for me, everything is in US dollars. So far, let me see, it’s two-eighty. Yes, two-eighty. Dollars.’

‘A man could retire on that,’ Van Gelder said.

‘Indeed. Two-eighty. Followed by six zeros.’

Talbot and Van Gelder looked at each other in silence, then bent forward over Theodore’s shoulders to look at the figures he had added up. After some seconds they straightened, looked at each other again, then bent forward once more.

‘Two hundred and eighty million dollars,’ Talbot said. ‘On that you could retire, Vincent.’

‘If I scraped and pinched a bit, I might manage. Do you know where those bank accounts are kept, Theodore? Cities, countries, I mean?’

‘Some I do, because he’s given names and addresses, some I don’t. For the second lot, he may have another code which I don’t have or he just knows them by heart. By heart, I would guess. I have no means of knowing where at least half the accounts are. Just the amounts, that’s all.’

‘Could you show us some of those?’ Talbot said.

‘Of course.’ Theodore pointed to some entries, flipped over several pages and indicated several more. ‘Just amounts, as I said. As you see, there’s a differing capital letter after each entry. They mean nothing to me. Maybe they do to Andropulos.’

Talbot leafed through the pages again. ‘Five letters, just five, recur regularly – Z, W, V, B and G. Well, now. If you were a thrifty citizen and wanted a safe piggy-bank secure from the prying eyes of nasty parties such as police and income tax authorities, which country would you choose?’

‘Switzerland.’

‘I think the same far from original thought had occurred to Andropulos – for at least half his assets. Z for Zürich. W? Winterthur, perhaps. V? Off-hand, I don’t know about that one.’

‘Vevey?’ Van Gelder said. ‘On Lake Geneva?’

‘I don’t think so. Hardly what you might call an international banking centre. Ah! I have it. Not in Switzerland, but it might as well be. Vaduz. Liechtenstein. I don’t know much about those things but I understand that once cash disappears into the vaults of Vaduz it never surfaces again. B could be Berne or Basle – Andropulos would know, of course. G has to be Geneva. How am I doing, Number One?’

‘Splendidly. I’m sure you’re right. I hardly like to point out, sir, that we still don’t have the names and addresses of those banks.’

‘True. Crest-fallen, but only slightly. We still have names and addresses of other banks. You have a list of those cities where those banks are located?’

‘I don’t have to,’ Theodore said, ‘I have it in my head. They’re all over the place, west, east and in between. Places as different as Miami, Tijuana, Mexico City, Bogotá in Colombia, Bangkok, Islamabad in Pakistan, Kabul in Afghanistan. Why anyone should want to hide away money in Kabul is quite beyond me. Country is torn by war and the Russians occupy and control the capital.’

‘Andropulos would appear to have friends everywhere,’ Talbot said. ‘Why should the poor Russians be left out in the cold? That about the lot?’

‘Quite a few other places,’ Theodore said. ‘Mostly smaller accounts. One exception, though. The biggest deposit of the lot.’

‘Where?’

‘Washington, DC.’

‘Well, now.’ Talbot was silent for a few minutes. ‘What do you make of that, Number One?’

‘I think I’ve just about stopped making anything out of anything. My mind has kind of taken a leave of absence. But my eyes are still working, in a fashion, you might say. I think I see a faint light at the end of the tunnel.’

‘I think if we think a bit more it might turn into a searchlight. How much money?’

‘Eighteen million dollars.’

‘Eighteen million dollars,’ Van Gelder said. ‘My, my. Even in Washington, DC, a man could buy a lot with eighteen million dollars.’

Chapter 6

The Angelina, to put it at its most kindly, was a rather striking-looking craft. An eighty-tonner built of pinewood from the forests of the island of Samos, she had a dazzling white hull which contrasted strongly – some would have said violently – with her vermilion gunwale. Wide of beam and low in the water amidships, she had a pronounced flare aft and for’ard, a curved stem that projected high above the gunwale. As a sailing boat, she was well equipped with a standing-lug main and balance-lug foresail, together with two jibs. Had it been left at that, as she had originally been built, the Angelina, a typical example of the Tehandiri class, would not only have been striking but downright handsome. Unfortunately, it had not been left at that.

The owner, Professor Wotherspoon, although a self-avowed traditionalist, was also strongly attached to his creature comforts. Not content with converting the craft’s very considerable hold – it was, after all, originally constructed as a cargo vessel – into cabins and bathrooms, he had constructed on the deck a bridge, saloon and galley which, while admittedly functional, detracted notably from the overall æsthetic effect.

Shortly before ten o’clock in the morning, the Angelina, almost slack-sailed and ghosting along under a Meltemi that hardly rated as a zephyr, tied up along the starboard side of the Ariadne. Talbot, accompanied by Denholm, climbed down a rope ladder to greet the owner.

The first impression that Talbot had of Wotherspoon was that he didn’t look a bit like a professor or an archæologist but then, he had to admit, he had no idea what a professor or archæologist was supposed to look like. He was tall, lean, shock-haired and deeply tanned: humorous of mien and colloquial of speech, he was the last person one would expect to find wandering through the groves of Academe. He was certainly not more than forty years old. His wife, with auburn hair and laughing hazel eyes, was at least ten years younger and was also, it seemed, an archæologist.

Introductions effected by Denholm, Talbot said: ‘I appreciate this very much, Professor. Very kind of you to come. Not to say very gallant. You appreciate that there is a fair chance that you might find yourself prematurely in another world? Lieutenant Denholm did explain the dangers to you?’

‘In a cautious and roundabout fashion. He’s become very tight-lipped since he joined the Senior Service.’

‘I didn’t join. I was dragooned.’

‘He did mention something about vaporization. Well, one gets a bit tired of studying ancient history. Much more interesting to be a part of the making of it.’

‘It might be a very short-lived interest indeed. Does Mrs Wotherspoon share your short-lived interests?’

‘“Angelina”, please. We had to entertain a very prim and proper Swiss lady the other day and she insisted on addressing me as Madame Professor Wotherspoon. Ghastly. No, I can’t say I share all of my husband’s more extravagant enthusiasms. But, alas, he does have one professorial failing. He’s horribly absent-minded. Someone has to look after him.’

Talbot smiled. ‘A fearful thing for so young and attractive a lady to be trapped for life. Again, thank you both very, very much. I should like it if you would join us for lunch. Meantime, I’ll leave Lieutenant Denholm to explain the full horrors of the situation to you – especially the ones you’ll encounter across the lunch table.’

‘Gloom and despondency,’ Van Gelder said, ‘It ill becomes one so young and beautiful to be gloomy and despondent. What is the matter, Irene?’

In so far as one so young and beautiful could look morose, Irene Charial gazed out morosely over the taffrail of the Ariadne.

‘I am not, Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder, in the mood for flattery.’

‘Vincent. Flattery is an insincere compliment. How can the truth be flattery? But you’re right about the word “mood”. You are in a mood. You’re worried, upset. What’s troubling you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Being beautiful doesn’t mean you’re above telling fibs. You could hardly call that flattery, could you?’

‘No.’ A fleeting smile touched the green eyes. ‘Not really.’

‘I know this is a very unpleasant situation you find yourself in. But we’re all trying to make the best of it. Or did something your parents say upset you?’

‘You know perfectly well that that’s not true.’ Van Gelder also knew it, Denholm had reassured him on that point.

‘Yes, that’s so. You were hardly in a cheerful frame of mind when I first met you this morning. Something worries you. Is it so dreadful a secret that you can’t tell me?’

‘You’ve come here to pry, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. To pry and probe. Crafty, cunning, devious questions to extract information from you that you don’t know you’re giving away.’ It was Van Gelder’s turn to look morose, ‘I don’t think I’m very good at it.’

‘I don’t think you are, either. That man sent you, didn’t he?’

‘What man?’

‘Now you’re being dishonest. Commander Talbot. Your captain. A cold man. Distant. Humourless.’

‘He’s neither cold nor distant. And he’s got a very considerable sense of humour.’

‘Humour. I don’t see any signs of it.’

‘I’m beginning not to be surprised.’ Van Gelder had stopped smiling. ‘Maybe he thought it would be wasted on you.’

‘Maybe he’s right.’ She appeared not to have taken offence. ‘Or maybe I just don’t see too much to laugh about at the moment. But I’m right about the other thing. He’s remote, distant. I’ve met people like him before.’

‘I doubt it very much. In the same way that I doubt your power of judgement. You don’t seem to be very well equipped in that line.’

‘Oh.’ She made a moue. ‘Flattery and charm have flown out the window, is that it?’

‘I don’t flatter. I’ve never claimed to have charm.’

‘I meant no harm. Please. I see nothing wrong with being a career officer. But he lives for only two things – the Royal Navy and the Ariadne.’

‘You poor deluded creature.’ Van Gelder spoke without heat. ‘But how were you to know? John Talbot lives for only two things – his daughter and his son. Fiona, aged six, and Jimmy, aged three. He dotes on them. So do I. I’m their Uncle Vincent.’

‘Oh.’ She was silent for some moments. ‘And his wife?’

‘Dead.’

‘I am sorry.’ She caught his arm. ‘To say I didn’t know is no excuse. Go ahead. Call me a clown.’

‘I don’t flatter, I don’t charm – and I don’t tell lies.’

‘But you do turn a pretty compliment.’ She took her hand away, leaned on the rail and looked out over the sea. After some time, she said, without looking around: ‘It’s my Uncle Adam, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. We don’t know him, we don’t trust him and we think he’s a highly suspicious character. You will forgive me talking about your nearest and dearest in this fashion.’

‘He is not my nearest and dearest.’ She had turned to face him. There was neither vehemence in her voice nor marked expression in her face: at most, a slight degree of bewilderment in both. ‘I don’t know him, I don’t trust him and I think he’s a highly suspicious character.’

‘If you don’t know him, what on earth are – were – you doing aboard his yacht?’

‘I suppose that, too, seems suspicious. Not really. Three reasons, I would think. He’s a very persuasive man. He seems to be genuinely fond of our family – my younger brother and sister and myself – for he is forever giving us presents, very expensive presents, too, and it seemed churlish to refuse his invitation. Then there was the element of fascination – I know practically nothing about him, nor what his business activities are or why he spends so much time in foreign countries. And, of course, perhaps both Eugenia and I are snobs at heart and were flattered by the invitation to go cruising on a very expensive yacht.’

‘Well, good enough reasons. But still not good enough to explain why you went with him if you dislike him.’

‘I didn’t say I disliked him. I said I distrusted him. Not the same thing. And I didn’t begin distrusting him until this trip.’

‘Why start now?’

‘Alexander is why.’ She gave a mock shudder. ‘Would you trust Alexander?’

‘Candidly, no.’

‘And Aristotle is almost as bad. The three of them spent hours talking together, usually in the radio-room. Whenever Eugenia or I went near them, they stopped talking. Why?’

‘Obvious, isn’t it? They didn’t want you to hear what they were talking about. Ever been with him abroad on his business trips?’

‘Good heavens, no.’ She was genuinely startled at the idea.

‘Not even on the Delos?’

‘I’ve only been on the Delos once before. With my brother and sister. A short trip to Istanbul.’

He was going to have less than a sensational report to make to his captain, Van Gelder reflected. She didn’t know her uncle. She didn’t know what his businesses were. She never travelled with him. And her only reason for distrusting him was that she distrusted Alexander, a feeling almost certainly shared by the majority of people who had ever met him. Van Gelder made one last try.

‘Your mother’s brother, of course?’ She nodded. ‘What does she think of him?’

‘She never speaks ill of him. But she never speaks ill of anyone. She’s a wonderful lady, a wonderful mother, not simple or anything like that, just a very trusting person who could never bring herself to speak ill of anyone.’

‘She’s obviously never met Alexander. Your father?’

‘He never speaks of Uncle Adam either, but he doesn’t speak in a very different way, if you follow me. My father is a very straight, very honest man, very clever, head of a big construction company, highly respected by everyone. But he doesn’t speak of my uncle. I’m not as trusting as my mother. I believe my father strongly disapproves of Uncle Adam or whatever businesses he runs. Or both. I don’t believe they’ve talked in years.’ She shrugged and gave a faint smile. ‘Sorry I can’t be of more help. You haven’t learnt anything, have you?’

‘Yes, I have. I’ve learnt I can trust you.’

This time the smile was warm and genuine and friendly. ‘You don’t flatter, you don’t charm and you don’t tell lies. But you are gallant.’

‘Yes,’ Van Gelder said, ‘I believe I am.’

‘Sir John,’ the President said, ‘you have put me in a most damnably awkward position. I speak, you understand, more in sorrow than in anger.’

‘Yes, Mr President. I am aware of that and I’m sorry for it. It is, of course, no consolation for you to know that I am in an equally awkward situation.’ If Sir John Travers, the British Ambassador to the United States, did indeed find himself in such a situation, he showed no signs of it. But then Sir John was renowned throughout the diplomatic world for his savoir-faire, his monolithic calm and his ability to remain wholly unruffled in the most trying and difficult situations, ‘I’m only the messenger boy. Grade one, of course.’

‘Who the hell is this fellow Hawkins, anyway?’ Richard Hollison, deputy head of the FBI, couldn’t quite match Sir John’s tranquil serenity but he had his obvious anger under tight control, ‘I don’t think I care very much for having a foreigner telling the White House, the Pentagon and the FBI how to run their business.’

‘Hawkins is a Vice-Admiral in the British Navy.’ The General was the fourth and only other person in the office. ‘An exceptionally able man. I cannot think of any United States naval officer whom I would sooner have in his place in those near-impossible circumstances. And I don’t think I need point out that I am in the most awkward situation of all. I don’t want to sound overly possessive but, bloody hell, the Pentagon is my concern.’

‘Richard Hollison,’ Sir John said. ‘I’ve known you for some years now. I know your reputation for toughness is matched only by your reputation for fairness. Be fair in this case. Admiral Hawkins, as the General has just said, is in a position of having to cope with almost impossible circumstances which, as you are in a position to know better than most, involves making almost impossible decisions. He’s not telling anyone how to run their business. In order to get a message to the President, without anyone in the Government or the Pentagon seeing the message before the President, he elected to bypass the Pentagon and all the standard avenues of communication. Certainly the Pentagon knows it’s already under investigation, but Hawkins didn’t want anyone to know that he was pointing fingers in certain directions. If it is your intention to set a cat among the pigeons or let loose an eagle in the dovecote, you don’t send a postcard in advance announcing your intentions.’

‘Yes, I accept that,’ Hollison said. ‘With weary resignation, I accept it. But don’t ask me to like it.’

‘Like it or lump it,’ the President said, ‘I accept it, too.’ He looked unenthusiastically at the paper before him on his desk. ‘It would appear that this Adamantios Andropulos, who is Hawkins’s temporary guest – I could well imagine that Admiral Hawkins would use the term “guest” even if this unfortunate were clapped in irons in some shipboard dungeon – has an account with a Washington bank, name and address supplied, of some eighteen million dollars, and would we kindly make enquiries to see if he has been disbursing any of this of late and, if so, in what direction. I know this lies well within your capabilities, Richard. Point is, how long will it take?’

‘All depends upon how many false names, how many dud companies, how much of the usual laundering paraphernalia is involved. The villain, if there is a villain, might well have a numbered account in outer Mongolia. Unlikely, I admit, but you take my point. One hour, maybe three. We will not stand upon the order of our going. Excuse me, Mr President. Excuse me, gentlemen.’ Hollison left.

‘The Army and the Marines will be pleased to learn – when they do learn of it – that Admiral Hawkins does not consider them worthy of his regard,’ the President went on. ‘Only the Air Force and the Navy. The Air Force I can, in the circumstances, understand. But it would be interesting to know why he has deemed the Navy to be deserving of his interests. He gives no indications on that score.’ The President sighed. ‘Maybe he doesn’t even trust me. Or maybe he knows something that we don’t know.’

Sir John said placidly: ‘If that is the case – that he knows something we don’t – I have little doubt that he’ll tell us in the fullness of time.’

The man under discussion in the White House was, at that moment, dwelling on precisely the same subject.

‘Time’s winged chariot, John. I forget the rest of the quotation but it’s definitely on the wing.’ Leaning back in a comfortable armchair, a glass of frosted lime juice in his hand, Hawkins succeeded only in giving the impression of a man with all the time in the world. ‘So much to do, so little time to do it in. How stands the Ariadne in respect of the rest of this uncaring world?’

‘I think you might say, sir, that the patient is coming along as well as could be expected. Our carpenter is aboard the Angelina, building a cradle for the bomb according to the specifications the Pentagon gave us. There will be two hinged clamps to secure it in even the worst weather which, as you can see for yourself, is the last thing we expect today.’

‘Indeed.’ The Admiral looked through the window of his cabin. ‘The weather is all wrong, John. Considering the possibly apocalyptic and doom-laden task we have on hand, the least we could reasonably expect is high winds, torrential rain, thunder, lightning, tempests, tornadoes and all those other adverse weather conditions that King Lear encountered on his walkabout around the blasted heath. But what do we have? A blistering July sun, a cloudless blue sky and the wine-dark seas without even a ripple to show for themselves. Downright disappointing. Also disappointing, not to say extremely disturbing, is the likelihood that if those zero-wind conditions persist, it’ll take the Angelina a week to get even half way towards the horizon.’

‘I don’t think we have to worry about that, sir. Weather conditions in the Cyclades between early July and mid-September are remarkably predictable. It’s already eleven forty-five. Any minute now the Meltemi, the Etesian wind, will start up from the north-west. During the afternoon it reaches Forces 5 or 6, sometimes even 7. Usually dies away in the evening but it has been known to last all night. The Meltemi will be ideally suited for the Angelina. Those luggers, as Denholm said, are hopeless windward sailors but in this case it will be directly astern of them and carry them down towards the Kásos Strait to the east of the easternmost tip of Crete.’

‘Sounds fine, but, well, even if Montgomery manages to raise this bomber, if he manages to cut a hole in the fuselage without blowing us all to kingdom come, if he manages to extract the atom bomb and if he manages to secure it to the Angelina’s cradle, what happens if the thing detonates before he reaches the Kásos Strait?’

‘Then that’s it for Wotherspoon and his crew. For us, the risk is low. I’ve been talking to Dr Wickram about this. He seems convinced of the inherent stability of the hydrogen bomb – after all, he does build the damn things. While he says it would be a hundred per cent certain to go up if an atom bomb exploded alongside it, we mustn’t over-estimate the effects of a more remote explosive shock, even at a distance of a few miles. After all, those bombs did survive the effect of the explosion in the nose of the bomber and the impact of the plane hitting the water at high speed. Besides, the intervening miles of water – we hope there will be those intervening miles – should have a powerfully dampening effect.’

‘There’ll be no such effect for those aboard the Angelina. Curtains. What motivates a man like that, John? Obviously, he’s incredibly brave – but, well, is he all right?’

‘If you mean is he off his rocker, then we’re all off our rockers. He’s as sane as you or I. He’s a romantic at heart, a born adventurer; a couple of hundred years ago and he’d have been somewhere on the other side of the world building up the odd empire.’

‘That’s as may be. But it’s still a terrible thought that a man like that should die for us.’

‘He won’t be dying for all of us. I’m going on the Angelina. So is Vincent Van Gelder.’

Hawkins put down his glass and stared at him. ‘Do you know what you’re saying? I know what you’re saying and I think you’ve taken leave of your senses. Are you mad? You and Van Gelder? Quite mad?’

‘Van Gelder insists on coming along. I insist on going. That’s all there is to it.’

‘I absolutely forbid it.’

‘With the deepest respect, Admiral, you’ll forbid me nothing. Did you honestly expect me to leave a job half done? Did you honestly expect me to let him go out there and die alone? I would remind you that I am the captain of this ship and that at sea not even an admiral can take over from me or give orders which I consider to be to the detriment of this vessel.’

‘Mutiny!’ Hawkins waved a dismissive hand at his lime juice. ‘Have we nothing stronger than this?’

‘Naturally.’ Talbot went to the Admiral’s wine cupboard and prepared a drink while Hawkins gazed at a spot on the deck which was about a thousand miles away. ‘A large scotch and water. No ice.’

‘Thank you.’ Hawkins drained almost half the contents. ‘Mutiny, forsooth!’

‘Yes, sir. Can’t hang me from the yard-arm, though. It’s my yard-arm. You haven’t yet met Angelina – Professor Wotherspoon’s wife, I mean, not the lugger. But you will. I’ve invited them aboard for lunch. Young, rather lovely, nice sense of humour and dotty about her husband. She has to be – dotty, I mean – to do something she clearly doesn’t want to do, that is to go along from here with her husband and the bomb on the lugger.’

‘I’m sure I shall be delighted to make her acquaintance.’ Hawkins took another sip of his drink. ‘What’s she got to do with the matter in hand?’

‘She’s not going with the bomb and the lugger. Neither is Wotherspoon, for that matter, or his two crew members. They remain aboard the Ariadne. Wotherspoon, of course, will have to be forcibly restrained, but that’s no problem at all. Van Gelder and I will take the Angelina down through the Kásos Strait. Two small medals will suffice.’

Hawkins was silent for quite some time, then said: ‘How are you going to pin on a couple of posthumous VCs or whatever when you’re circling the earth in a vaporized orbit?’

‘One problem at a time. We can’t let the girl go.’

‘Good God, no. I’ll never forgive myself. I never even started to think. I wonder –’

‘Wonder me no wonders, sir. We don’t have room for three heroes aboard the Angelina. Someone has to take the Ariadne home again, remember? Well, that’s the Angelina. Now, the Kilcharran. I’ve just been talking to Captain Montgomery. He’s just given a couple of experimental tugs on the lifting slings and he reckons the bomber, with the help of the flotation bags, of course, is nearing a state of neutral buoyancy. Twenty minutes, half an hour at the most, and he’s going to start to haul away. You won’t want to miss that, sir.’

‘No, indeed. What did Walter de la Mare say – look your last on all things lovely every hour? This may be the last thing I’ll ever see?’

‘I rather hope it doesn’t come to that, sir. Apart from the lugger and the recovery of the bomber, we have to wait for three other things. The reaction to the message we sent to the President via our embassy in Washington, which might take quite some time, for even the most cooperative of banks, and banks almost by definition are secretive and detest the very thought of cooperation, are going to be very reluctant to disclose any information about their important clients, because important clients don’t like that sort of thing. Admittedly, Air Force Generals and Admirals are unlikely to be very important financially, but they are from the point of view of prestige and power and would, I should think, carry a disproportionate amount of clout. I do hope we haven’t upset too many people over there. Then, and this I should expect very soon, there should be a reply from Greek Intelligence to our query asking for the complete list of places where Andropulos has conducted business, any kind of business, over the past few years. Then, of course, we await the arrival of this krytron device from America.’

‘Which may arrive any old time. I mean, we have no idea, have we? Do the Americans have supersonic planes?’

‘Sure they have. But fighters only. And their nearest refuelling point would be the Azores and I’m quite certain no fighter could fly the close on two thousand miles they’d have to travel to get there. Question of fuel capacity. Besides, it’s not absolutely essential that we get this device before leaving with the bomb – always assuming, of course, that we do leave. We could always dump the bomb, drop a marker, warn all shipping to keep clear, wait for the krytron to arrive, return there and detonate the bomb.’

‘Much more satisfactory if it could all be done in one fell swoop.’ Hawkins thought for a moment, then smiled. ‘What’s the time in Washington?’

‘Four a.m., I think.’

‘Excellent, excellent. A short message. Ask them how it’s being transported and what’s the expected time of arrival. Give ’em something to do.’ Talbot lifted a phone and dictated the message.

‘Haven’t seen your second-in-command lately,’ Hawkins said. ‘I understood he was prising secrets loose from Andropulos’s niece?’

‘Vincent normally carries out his duties with efficiency and dispatch. When the duties involve Irene Charial, it seems to take a little longer.’

‘Not so many years ago it would have taken me a little longer myself. Ah!’ Van Gelder had appeared in the doorway. ‘Just discussing you, young man. A difficult and protracted interview, I take it?’

‘One treads delicately, sir. But she told me everything she knew.’ He looked reproachfully at Talbot. ‘I detect a trace of scepticism in your expression, sir. Unwarranted, I assure you. I believe her, I trust her and I was not bewitched by her green eyes, owing to the fact that I was on duty at the time.’

‘Less than admirable though they may be, Vincent, deviousness and low cunning have their place in the scheme of things.’

‘It wasn’t like that at all. I told her that you had sent me to try to trap her into making unwary and unguarded statements and unwittingly to betray herself. After that, we got along famously.’

Talbot smiled. ‘Just another way of being devious. What does she know?’

‘Nothing. I guarantee you’d come to the same conclusion, sir. She doesn’t know her uncle, except superficially. She doesn’t trust him. She thinks he’s a highly suspicious character. She thinks Alexander is a highly suspicious character, although that wouldn’t require any great acumen on anyone’s part. She knows nothing about his businesses. She’s never travelled with him. Her father, whom she obviously dotes on and has the highest respect for, thinks he’s a highly suspicious character – he and Andropulos haven’t spoken for years. She’s convinced that her father knows a great deal about her uncle and his businesses, but Dad refuses to discuss any aspect of the matter.’

‘Sounds as if we could do with Dad aboard right now,’ Hawkins said, ‘I have the feeling we could learn some very interesting things from him.’

‘I’m sure we could, sir. One odd thing – she’s convinced that her uncle is genuinely fond of her.’

Hawkins smiled, ‘I think it would be rather difficult not to be fond of the young lady. However, I would point out in the passing, and apropos of nothing, that mass murderers have been known to dote on tiny tots.’

‘I hardly think he’s a mass murderer, sir.’

‘And she’s certainly not a tiny tot.’ He looked speculatively at Talbot. ‘A passing thought, John?’

‘Yes.’ Talbot looked out through the window for an unseeing moment, then back at Hawkins. ‘How do we know he’s not a mass murderer?’

The speculation was still in Hawkins’s eyes. ‘You don’t normally make remarks like that. Not without good reason. You have something in mind?’

‘I think I have. But it’s so far back in my mind that I can’t reach it. It’ll come.’ He turned as Denholm entered the cabin, ‘I seem to recall having asked you this question before. What drags you away from the fleshpots?’

‘Duty, sir.’

‘You will have noticed, Admiral,’ Talbot said, ‘how devoted the Ariadne’s officers are to their duty. I thought, Jimmy, that you were supposed to be lurking and eavesdropping?’

‘I have lurked, sir. And eavesdropped. I have also been plying Mr Andropulos and his friends with strong drink.’

‘At this time of the morning?’ Hawkins said.

‘Captain’s orders, sir. I hope, Captain, that the Admiralty are going to take care of my bar bill.’

‘Prodigious?’

‘Not as prodigious as their thirsts. They have relaxed a bit. They have apparently agreed that I’m simple-minded. They are quite certain I don’t know a word of Greek but even so they’re still very cautious. Much given to allusions and cryptic references, all made, for good measure, in a Macedonian dialect.’

‘Which you learnt at your mother’s knee?’

‘A bit later than that. But I’m at home in it. I don’t know whether you will consider this good news or bad, sir, but Andropulos knows there are hydrogen bombs aboard that bomber. He even knows there are fifteen of them.’

There was a fairly lengthy silence while the other three men in the cabin considered the implications of Denholm’s words, then Hawkins said: ‘Good news and bad news. Good news for us, bad news for Andropulos. Well done, my boy. Very well done.’

‘I echo that, sir,’ Talbot said. ‘Lieutenant Denholm is miscast as either a classicist or electronics officer. MI5 should have him. There is no way that Andropulos could have learnt aboard the Ariadne of the existence of those bombs. So he knew before. Proof, if that were needed, of our near-certain conviction that Andropulos has penetrated the Pentagon.’

‘I would point out, sir,’ Denholm said, ‘that the words hydrogen bombs weren’t actually used. Also, it’s only my word against theirs.’

‘That’s irrelevant and this is no court of law. There will be no confrontation. All that matters is that we know and they don’t know that we do.’

‘My usefulness is over? Or do I continue to lurk?’

‘Lurk, of course. The three A’s must be making some contingency plans. We know now why they wanted aboard the Ariadne. What we don’t know is what they intend to do now that they are here. Resume your wassailing.’

‘Wassailing?’ Denholm sounded bitter, ‘I have an arrangement with Jenkins whereby I consume copious quantities of tonic water, lemon and ice. Ghastly.’ He turned to go but Talbot stopped him as a seaman entered and handed over a sheet of paper.

‘You might as well hear what’s in this.’ He studied the paper briefly. ‘This is in reply to a request we made of Greek Intelligence for as exhaustive a list as they could supply of all places where Andropulos is known either to do business or have contacts. No names, no addresses, just towns. Forty or fifty of them. My, my. This list wasn’t compiled on the spur of the moment. Greek Intelligence must have been taking a more than passing interest in the activities of our friend Andropulos over a long period, years I would think. I wonder why. About half of those places are marked by asterisks. Again I wonder why. Was that for their own information or is it intended to suggest something to us?’

He handed the paper to Hawkins, who studied it for a moment, then said: ‘I know those places marked with an asterisk. I don’t see their relevance in our circumstances. I can’t even remotely associate them with our problem. I’d swear that none of those places had any connection with hydrogen bombs.’

‘So would I,’ Talbot said. ‘Maybe they handle something else. In spite of the situation we find ourselves in, maybe hydrogen bombs aren’t the biggest cause for concern. If you can imagine anything worse than our present situation, that is. Could I have that back, sir?’

He sat at the desk, made some marks on the paper before him, then looked up.

‘Bangkok, Islamabad, Kabul, Bogotá, Miami, Mexico City, Tijuana, San Diego, Bahamas, Ocho Rios, Ankara, Sofia – Andropulos playing both sides of the fence with those last two, the ethnic Turks are having a very bad time in Bulgaria just now, but Andropulos wouldn’t let that interfere with his business interests – and Amsterdam. What does that list suggest?’

‘Drugs,’ Van Gelder said.

‘Drugs. Heroin, cocaine, marijuana, you name. it. Now some more towns. Tehran, Baghad – Andropulos again playing both sides of the fence, Iran and Iraq had been at war for six years now – Tripoli, Damascus, Beirut, Athens, Rome, East Berlin, New York and London. That suggest something?’

‘Yes.’ It was Van Gelder again. ‘Terrorism. I’m not quite sure why New York and London qualify.’

‘I seem to remember there have been two attempts, one at John F. Kennedy, the other at Heathrow to smuggle bombs aboard planes. Both bungled, both failed. I think it’s fairly safe to assume – in fact, it would be criminally negligent not to assume – that the terrorists who planned those crimes are still in residence in London and New York, waiting. Jimmy, would you please go to your cabin and bring Theodore here with whatever further results his cryptology has turned up.’

Hawkins said: ‘I most sincerely hope that you are not thinking what I think you are, if you follow me.’

‘It may be, sir, that I am thinking what you are, if you follow me.’

‘What you are suggesting is that this Andropulos is some kind of mastermind – possible world co-ordinator – of drug-smuggling? Is that what you meant by your remark that we didn’t know he wasn’t a mass murderer?’

‘Yes, sir. What else can that list of contacts he has in drug areas mean? Where else has he accumulated his vast wealth – and we haven’t added it all up yet, not by any means.’

‘There’s no actual proof.’

‘All depends on what you call proof. It’s very powerful suggestive evidence. How far are you prepared to stretch the long arm of coincidence? To infinity?’

‘And you’re further suggesting he’s engaged in terrorism. That he’s using his vast profits from drug-smuggling to finance his terrorist activities?’

‘It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I think the two activities are being run in tandem.’

‘A drug-peddler is one thing. A terrorist quite another. Incompatibles. Poles apart. Never the twain shall meet.’

‘One hesitates to contradict a senior officer. But I’m afraid you’re wrong, sir. Vincent, would you enlighten the Admiral? You know what I’m talking about.’

‘All too well, sir. October 1984, Admiral, our last submarine patrol. North Atlantic, about two hundred miles west of the Irish coast. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. We were asked to move into position to observe, but not to intercept, a small American ship en route from the States to Ireland and given its course and estimated time when it would pass a certain point. Neither the crew of this vessel nor its captain, a certain Captain Robert Anderson who, I believe, is still at large, knew that they had been monitored from the moment they had left port by an American spy-in-the-sky satellite. We upped periscope, identified it, then downed periscope. They never saw us. It was a New England trawler, the Valhalla, based on Gloucester, Massachusetts, from which it had sailed a few days earlier. It transferred its cargo to an Irish tug, the Marita Ann, which was duly seized by the Irish Navy.

‘The cargo consisted entirely of military hardware – rifles, machine-guns, shotguns, pistols, hand grenades, rockets and, as I recall, about 70,000 rounds of ammunition, all destined for the IRA. It was to have been the IRA’s biggest gun-running plot ever, but it was foiled because of what was called “Operation Leprechaun”, where the CIA, our MI5 and Irish Intelligence took a healthy – or unhealthy, it all depends on your point of view – interest in the activities of Noraid, an Irish-American group that specialized – for all I know it may still be specializing – in buying American arms and shipping them to the IRA in Ireland.

‘Round about the same time a Panamanian registered cargo ship by the name of the Ramsland, chartered by the same gang who had organized the Valhalla, put into Boston harbour and was promptly seized by the United States Coast Guard. The Ramsland had secret compartments below decks but the Coast Guard knew all about those secret compartments. They held no less than thirty tons of marijuana, another smuggling record. The proceeds from the sale of those drugs were, of course, intended to fund IRA terrorist activities.’

‘We became quite interested in the drugsterrorist connection,’ Talbot said, ‘and made some discreet enquiries. At least five other drug-terrorist connections had been discovered and broken up. It is believed that considerably more connections have not been discovered and so not broken up. Why should Andropulos be an exception to what appears to be a fairly well established rule?’

‘A suitably chastened admiral sits before you,’ Hawkins said. ‘We live, we learn. You two should join Denholm and offer your services to MI5. Ah, the man himself.’

Denholm entered the cabin with Theodore, who handed over to Talbot some papers he had with him. Talbot looked at them and handed them over to Hawkins.

‘Well, well, well,’ Hawkins said. ‘What an interesting coincidence or, in view of what I’ve just been learning, perhaps not all that much of a coincidence. Fifteen of the towns that Greek Intelligence asterisked – if that’s the word – on their list. Only, in this case – my, my, my! – they give names and addresses. Isn’t that splendid? Captain, a thought has occurred to me. There’s one of those towns marked with an asterisk that you omitted to mention. Washington, DC. Does that come under D for drugs or T for terrorism?’

‘Neither. B for bribery. Are you about through this list, Theodore?’

‘Two-thirds, I would say.’

‘And that will be the end of it?’

‘No, Captain. There’s still a last list.’

‘It would be gratifying if it held some more revelations, but perhaps that would be too much to hope for. How long have you been up and around, Theodore?’

‘Three o’clock this morning. Three-thirty. I’m not sure, I was a bit fuzzy. If I had known what would be required of me this morning I wouldn’t have gone to that birthday celebration last night.’

‘And it’s now noon, or thereabouts. Seven hours of beating your brains out when you weren’t feeling all that hot to begin with. You must be exhausted. But I would appreciate it if you could at least finish this present list off. After that, Jimmy, I suggest that Theodore has a drink, snack and snooze in that order.’ The two men left. ‘If you agree, Admiral, I suggest that Vincent contacts Greek Intelligence after Theodore has finished that list and furnishes them with a list of the towns together with the appropriate names and addresses. Could help.’

‘And what do you imagine Greek Intelligence can do?’

‘Very little, I imagine. But they can forward the list, with utmost urgency, to Interpol. Admittedly, Interpol’s writ doesn’t run worldwide – they would have zero clout in places, say, like Tripoli, Tehran or Beirut – and they are an information gathering and dispensing agency not an executive unit, and they know more about bad people than any other group in the world. And ask them if they suspect – suspect, not have proof – that Andropulos is engaged in drug-running.’

‘Shall be done, sir. Sign it “Admiral Hawkins”?’

‘Naturally.’

Hawkins shook his head. ‘Admiral Hawkins here, Admiral Hawkins there, it seems he’s signing his name everywhere. Or, rather somebody’s signing it for him. I shall have to look to my cheque-books.’

Chapter 7

The heavy steel derrick projected upwards and outwards from the midships side of the Kilcharran at an angle of about thirty degrees off the vertical. From the winch at the foot of the derrick the hawser rose upwards through the pulley at the top of the derrick and then descended vertically into the sea. The lower end of the hawser was attached to a heavy metal ring which was distanced about twenty feet above the fuselage of the sunken plane: from the ring, two shorter cables, bar-taut, were attached to the two lifting slings that had been attached fore and aft to the nose and tail of the bomber.

The winch turned with what seemed to most watchers an agonizing and frustrating slowness. There was ample electrical power available to have revolved the drum several times as quickly but Captain Montgomery was in no hurry. Standing there by the winch, he exhibited about as much anxiety and tension as a man sitting with his eyes closed in a garden deckchair on a summer’s afternoon. Although it was difficult to visualize, it was possible that a sling could have loosened and slipped and Montgomery preferred not to think what might happen if the plane should slip and strike heavily against the bottom, so he just stood patiently there, personally guiding the winch’s control wheel while he listened with clamped earphones to the two divers who were accompanying the plane on its ten foot a minute ascent.

After about five minutes the grotesque shape of the plane – grotesque because of the missing left wing – could be dimly discerned through the now slightly wind-ruffled surface of the sea. Another three minutes and the lifting ring came clear of the water. Montgomery centred the winch wheel, applied the brake, went to the gunwale, looked over the rail and turned to the officer by his side.

‘Too close in. Fuselage is going to snag on the underside. Have to distance it a bit. More fenders fore and aft –’ the side of the Kilcharran was already festooned with rubberized fenders ‘– and lay out ropes to secure the nose and tail of the plane.’ He returned to the winch, eased forward on a lever and slowly lowered the derrick until it was projecting outwards from the ship’s side at an angle of forty degrees above the horizontal. The plane, which could now be clearly seen only twenty feet below the surface, moved sluggishly outwards from the ship’s side. Montgomery started up the winch again and soon the top of the plane’s fuselage broke the surface. He stopped the winch when the top eighteen inches was clear. The starboard wing was still beneath the surface. Montgomery turned to Admiral Hawkins.

‘So far, a simple and elementary exercise. With luck, the rest of it should be equally straightforward. We cut away the appropriate section on the top of the fuselage while attaching more flotation bags to the undersides of the fuselage and the wing and inflating those. Then we’ll lift a bit more until the fuselage is almost clear of the water and go inside.’ He lifted a ringing phone, thanked the caller and replaced the receiver. ‘Well, perhaps not quite so straightforward. It would appear that the timing device has stopped ticking.’

‘Has it now?’ Hawkins didn’t look particularly concerned and certainly not upset. ‘It could have happened at a better time and a better place. But it had to happen. So our friend is armed.’

‘Indeed. Still, no reason why we shouldn’t go ahead as planned.’

‘Especially as we have no option. Every person on both ships to be warned. No mechanical devices to be used: no banging or crashing, everyone on fairy tiptoes. They already know that, of course, but I imagine they’ll now redouble their caution.’

A gangway had been lowered down the ship’s side until one of its feet rested on the plane’s fuselage. Carrington and Grant descended and ran a tape-measure back along the top of the fuselage from the cockpit – the internal distance from the cockpit to the exact location of the bomb had already been measured – to the corresponding area above. This they mopped dry with engine-room waste and then proceeded to paint the outline of a black rectangle to guide the two men with the oxyacetylene cutters who were already standing by.

Hawkins said: ‘How long will this take?’

‘I can only guess,’ Montgomery said. ‘An hour, maybe a bit longer. We don’t know how thick the fuselage skin is or how tough it is. We don’t know how thick or tough the lateral reinforcing members are. What I do know is that we’re going to cut with the lowest possible flame that will do the job – even with that reduced power we’re going to generate a fair amount of heat in the air-space and water below. It goes without saying that no one has ever done this sort of thing before.’

‘Will your standing here, supervising operations – just looking on, rather – help things along? Resolve the unknown, I mean.’

‘Not a bit of it. Ah! Lunch?’

‘Whether we’re here or in the wardroom of the Ariadne, it’s not going to make all that difference if this lot goes up.’

‘True, true. A millisecond here, a millisecond there. The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast. In our case, lunch.’

Lunch, while hardly festive, was by no means the doom-laden affair it could have been in view of the fact that most of the people at the table were well aware that they were sitting on top of a time-bomb that had now ceased to tick. Conversation flowed freely but in no way resembled the compulsive nervous chatter of those conscious of being under stress. Professor Wotherspoon spoke freely and often on any subject that arose, not through garrulity but because he was a born conversationalist who loved discussion and the free exchange of ideas. Andropulos, too, was far from silent, although he appeared to have only one idea in mind, and that was the mystery of the bomber that had just been raised from the depths. He had not been invited aboard the Kilcharran but had seen well enough from the Ariadne what had been going on. He appeared to be deeply and understandably interested in what had happened and was going to happen to the bomber but was clever enough not to ask any penetrating questions or say a word that he knew anything whatever about what was going on. Across the table Talbot caught the eye of Admiral Hawkins who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was clear that they couldn’t keep him completely and totally in the dark.

‘Up to now, Mr Andropulos,’ Talbot said, ‘we have not told you everything we know. We have not been remiss and no apology for our silence is necessary. Our sole concern, I can assure you, was not to cause unnecessary alarm and apprehension, especially to your two young ladies. But a man like you must have a keen interest in international affairs, and you are, after all, a Greek and member of NATO and have a right to know.’ No one could have guessed from Talbot’s openness and relaxed tone that he considered Andropulos to have a keen interest in international crime, that he didn’t give a damn about either Greece or NATO and had a right to know only what he, Talbot, chose to tell him.

‘The plane was an American bomber and was carrying a lethal cargo, among them hydrogen and atomic bombs, almost certainly for a NATO missile base somewhere in Greece.’ Andropulos’s expression, at first stunned, rapidly changed to grim-faced understanding. ‘We can only guess at what caused the crash. It could have been an engine explosion. On the other hand it could have been carrying a variety of weapons, and one of them – obviously of the non-nuclear variety – may have malfunctioned. We don’t know, we have no means of telling and probably, almost certainly, we will never know. The crew, of course, died.’

Andropulos shook his head. The clear, innocent eyes were deeply tinged with sadness. ‘Dear God, what a tragedy, what a tragedy.’ He paused and considered. ‘But there are terrorists in this world.’ He spoke of terrorists as if they were alien beings from an alien planet. ‘I know this sounds unthinkable, but could this have been a case of sabotage?’

‘Impossible. This plane flew from a top secret Air Force base where security would have been absolute. Carelessness there may have been but the idea of the deliberate implantation of any explosive device passes belief. It can only be classified as an act of God.’

‘I wish I shared your trust in our fellow-man.’ Andropulos shook his head again. ‘There are no depths which some inhuman monsters would not plumb. But if you say it was physically impossible, then I accept that, and gladly, for I would not care to be counted as a member of a human race that could proceed to such unspeakable lengths. What’s past is past, I suppose, but there’s also a future. What happens next, Commander?’

‘Before we decide on that we’ll have to wait until we get inside the plane. I understand that impacts and explosions such as those nuclear weapons have experienced can have – what shall we say? – a very disturbing effect on their delicate firing control systems.’

‘You – or some member of your crew – have the expertise to pass judgement on such matters?’

‘Neither I nor my crew know anything about such matters. But seated only two chairs away from you is a man who does. Dr Wickram – I will not spare his blushes – is a world-famous nuclear physicist who specializes in nuclear weaponry. We are fortunate indeed to have him aboard.’

‘My word, that is convenient.’ Andropulos leaned forward and half-bowed to Wickram. ‘I was, of course, unaware that you were an expert on those matters. I hope you can help resolve this dreadful dilemma.’

‘Hardly in the dreadful category yet, Mr Andropulos,’ Talbot said. ‘A problem, shall we say.’ He turned as Denholm, who had not joined them for lunch, entered the wardroom. ‘Lieutenant?’

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir. Lieutenant McCafferty’s apologies, but would you be kind enough to come to the engine-room.’

Once outside, Talbot said. ‘What’s the trouble in the engine-room, Jimmy?’

‘Nothing. This habit of deception grows on one. A message from the Pentagon, sir, and some interesting information turned up by Theodore.’

‘I thought he was resting.’

‘He elected not to, sir. Just as well, as I’m sure you’ll agree.’ He produced a slip of paper. ‘The Washington message.’

‘“Krytron device en route direct New York – Athens via Concorde.” My word, someone over there does carry some clout. I detect the hand of the President in this. Can’t you just see the outrage of a hundred-odd Europe-bound passengers when they find themselves being dumped on the tarmac of John F. Kennedy in favour of a teeny-weeny electrical device? Not that they’ll know why they have been dumped. It goes on: “Fullest cooperation British Airways, Spanish and Italian authorities.”’

‘Why Spain and Italy?’ Denholm said. ‘You don’t require permission to overfly friendly countries. Just Air Control notification, that’s all.’

‘Except, I imagine, when you’re going to upset their normal peace and quiet by a non-stop sonic boom. Message ends: “ETA your time 3 p.m.” Just over an hour. We’ll have to make arrangements to have a plane standing by in Athens airport. Let’s see what Theodore has for us. Something of significance, I’ll be bound.’

Theodore had, indeed, found something of significance, although its relevance was not immediately evident.

‘I’ve started on the third and last list, Captain,’ Theodore said, ‘and this is the sixth name I’ve come up with. George Skepertzis. Full Washington address. Under the address, as you see, it says Ref. KK, TT. Means nothing to me.’

‘Nor to me,’ Talbot said. ‘Anything to you, Lieutenant?’

‘It might. Skepertzis is a Greek name, that’s for sure. Could be a fellow-countryman of Andropulos. And if our friend has contacts in the Pentagon, you can lay odds that he wouldn’t be writing to them, using their names, care of the Pentagon. You’d expect Andropulos to use a buffer-man, a go-between.’

‘I’d expect anything of that character. You’re probably right. So, a message to the bank asking if they have any accounts under those initials and one to the FBI to find out if there are any Air Force generals or admirals with those initials. A shot in the dark, of course, but it might find a target. In the remote event of their contemplating a sound night’s sleep, a personal message to the President, via the FBI, that the tick … tick … tick has stopped and that the atomic mine is armed. We’ll clear it with the Admiral first. Would you ask him to join us. Have Number One and Dr Wickram come along too. I suggest the bridge. I’m sure you’ll think up a suitable excuse on the way to the wardroom.’

‘I don’t have to think, sir. It’s second nature now.’

‘Fair enough.’ Hawkins laid down the three radio messages that Talbot had already drafted. ‘The Greek Ministry of Defence will have a plane standing by when the Concorde lands. If its estimated time of arrival is reasonably accurate we should have this krytron device in Santorini about three-thirty. Even allowing for the fact that your men will have to row to and from at least Cape Akrotiri we should have the device aboard by five p.m. There’s an even chance that the messages to the FBI and the Washington bank may produce some positive results. As to the news that the mine is armed, we shall await the Presidential reaction with interest. Send these at once. You have some other matters on your mind, Captain. Urgent, I take it?’

‘As you said yourself not so long ago, sir, time is on the wing. Questions, sir, and we’d better try to find some answers quickly. Why was Andropulos so restrained in his questioning about the bombers? Because – apart from that ticking time device – he already knew everything there was to know and saw no point in asking questions when he already held the answers.

‘Why did he express no surprise at Dr Wickram here just happening to be aboard at this critical juncture? Even the most innocent of people would have thought it the most extraordinary coincidence that Dr Wickram should be here at the moment when he was most needed and would have said so.

‘What’s going to pass through that crafty and calculating mind when he sees us hauling that atom bomb out of the fuselage – always providing we do, of course? And what are we going to do to satisfy his curiosity?’

‘I can answer your last two questions and explain my presence here,’ Wickram said. ‘I’ve had time to think although, to be honest, it didn’t require all that much thought. You heard that the plane had hydrogen bombs aboard, you didn’t know what the degree of danger was so you called in the resident expert. That’s me. The resident expert informs you there is a high degree of danger. There’s no way to prevent a slow but continuous degree of radioactive emanations from a hydrogen bomb, and there are fifteen of those aboard that plane. This radioactivity builds up inside the atom bomb, which is of an entirely different construction, until the critical stage is reached. Then it’s goodnight, all. All a question of mass, really.’

‘This really happens?’

‘How the hell should I know? I’ve just invented it. But it sounds scientific enough and more than vaguely plausible. Your average citizen has a zero knowledge level of nuclear weaponry. Who is going to dream of questioning the word of a world-famous nuclear physicist which, in case you’ve forgotten Commander Talbot’s words, is me.’

Talbot smiled, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Dr Wickram. Excellent. Next query. What are Andropulos’s code lists doing aboard the Ariadne?’

‘Well, to start with,’ Hawkins said, ‘you put them there. No need for massive restraint, Captain. You had something else in mind?’

‘Wrong question. Why did he leave them behind? He forgot? Not likely. Not something as important as that. Because he thought they’d never be found? Possible, but again not likely. Because he thought that if anyone found them then it would be unlikely that that person would recognize it as a code or try to decode it? Rather more likely, but I think the real reason is that he thought it would be too dangerous to bring them aboard the Ariadne. The very fact that that was the only item he chose to salvage from the wreck would have been significant and suspicious in itself. So he elected to leave them behind and recover them later by diving. He may always have had this possibility in his mind and if he did he wouldn’t have left them in a cardboard folder. So he chose a waterproof metal box.

‘Recovery of the box from the bottom of the sea would mean the presence or availability of a diving ship. Just a hunch. I think that the Delos was sunk by accident and not by design. Probably Andropulos never visualized the need of a diving ship for that purpose. But a convenient diving ship would have been useful for other purposes, such as, dare I suggest, the recovery of nuclear weapons from a sunken bomber. They – whoever they are – wouldn’t have brought it down anywhere in the Sea of Crete – that’s the area between the Peloponnese in the west, the Dodecanese in the east, the Cyclades in the north and Crete to the south – because by far the greater part of that area is between 1,500 and 7,000 feet – much too deep for recovery by diving. Maybe it was meant to bring it down where it was brought down. Maybe this hypothetical diving ship was meant to be where we inconveniently were.’

‘It’s a long shot,’ Hawkins said, ‘but no stone unturned, is that it? What you would like to know is whether there is any diving ship based in those parts or temporarily located or cruising by. Isn’t that it?’ Talbot nodded. ‘Finding out is no problem.’

‘Heraklion in Crete?’

‘Of course. The US Air Force base there is our main centre for electronic surveillance in those parts. They use AWACs and other high-flying radar planes to monitor Soviet, Libyan and other countries’ military movements. The Greek Air Force use their Phantoms and Mirages for the same purpose. I know the base commander rather well. An immediate signal. They’ll either find out in very short order or have the information already. A couple of hours should do it.’

‘I speak in no spirit of complaint,’ Captain Montgomery said to Talbot. His voice, in fact, held a marked note of complaint. ‘But I think we might have been spared this.’ He indicated a bank of heavy dark cloud approaching from the north-west. ‘The wind’s already Force 5 and we’re beginning to rock a bit. Travel agents wouldn’t like this at all. This is supposed to be a golden summer’s day in the golden Aegean.’

‘Force 5 isn’t uncommon here in the afternoons, even at this time of year. Rain is most unusual but it looks as if we’re going to have quite a lot of the unusual in the very near future. Weather forecast is poor and the barometer unhappy.’ Talbot looked over the rail of the Kilcharran. ‘And this is what makes you unhappy.’

Montgomery’s ship was not, in fact, rocking at all. Headed directly north-west into the gentle three-foot swell, it was quite motionless, which couldn’t be said for the plane lashed alongside. Because of its much shorter length and the fact that it was nine-tenths submerged, it was reacting quite badly to the swell, pitching rather noticeably to and fro and snubbing alternately on the ropes that secured its nose and the remnants of its tail to the Kilcharran. Cutting the metal and maintaining balance was becoming increasingly difficult for the oxyacetylene team on top of the fuselage as the tops of the swells periodically washed over the area on which they were working. They had already reached the stage where they were spending more time looking after their own safety than using their torches.

‘Not so much unhappy as annoyed. Their rate of progress has been reduced to almost zero and God knows they were moving slowly enough even in good conditions – that fuselage and especially the transverse members are proving much tougher than expected. If things don’t improve – and looking at that weather coming at us I’m sure they won’t – I’m going to have to withdraw the cutters. They’re in no danger, of course, but the plane might very well be. We have no way of knowing how weakened the nose or tail may be and I don’t care to imagine what will happen if one of them comes off.’

‘So you’re going to float it astern on a single tow-rope?’

‘I don’t see I have any option. I’ll build a cradle of ropes round the nose and wing of the plane, attach a single rope – a heavy one, to act as a spring – to it and let it drift a cable length astern. Have to inform the Admiral first.’

‘No need. He never interferes with an expert. An unpleasant thought occurs, Captain. What happens if it breaks loose?’

‘Send a boat out – rowing, of course – to secure it with an anchor.’

‘And if that goes?’

‘We puncture the flotation bags and sink it. Can’t have it drifting all over the shop ready to blow the whole works whenever the first ship’s engines come within auditory range.’

‘And if it sinks where it is, we, of course, won’t be able to move from here.’

‘You can’t have everything.’

‘Agreed,’ Hawkins said. ‘Montgomery’s got no option. When is he starting?’

‘Any moment. Perhaps you might have a word with him. I said that there was no question but that you would agree, but I think he’d like your say-so.’

‘Of course,’ Hawkins said. ‘What’s your weather forecast?’

‘Deteriorating. Any word from the Washington bank, the FBI or Heraklion?’

‘Nothing. Just a lot of unsolicited rubbish from diverse heads of states, presidents, premiers and so forth commiserating with us in one breath and asking us why we aren’t doing something about it in the second breath. One wonders how the news has been leaked.’

‘I don’t know, sir. What’s more, I really don’t care.’

‘Nor I.’ He waved to some papers on his desk. ‘Want to read them? They don’t know that the tick … tick has stopped.’

‘I don’t want to read them.’

‘I didn’t think you would. What’s next for you, John?’

‘I didn’t have much sleep last night. It’s quite possible I may lack some tonight. Now’s the time. Nothing I can do.’

‘An excellent idea. Same for me when I come back from the Kilcharran.’

When Talbot emerged from his day cabin and passed through to the bridge shortly after six o’clock in the evening it should still have been broad daylight, but so low was the level of light in the sky that it could well have been late twilight. He found Van Gelder and Denholm waiting for him.

‘In this weather,’ Talbot said, ‘I could almost say “Well, watchmen, what of the night?” Everything running smoothly and under control while Drake was in his hammock?’

‘We have not been idle,’ Van Gelder said. ‘Neither has Captain Montgomery. He’s got the bomber strung out about a cable length to the south-east. Riding quite badly – it’s either a Force 6 or 7 out there – but it seems to be holding together. He’s got a searchlight – well, a six-inch signalling lamp – on it, either to check that it doesn’t break away or to discourage the disaffected from snaffling it, although why there should be anyone around, or daft enough, to try that I can’t imagine. I’d advise against going out on the wing to have a look, sir. You might get washed away.’ Van Gelder’s advice was superfluous. The rain falling from the black and leaden skies was of the torrential or tropical downpour variety, the heavy warm drops rebounding six inches from the deck.

‘I take your point.’ He looked at the brown metal box lying on the deck. ‘What’s that?’

‘Voilà!’ Denholm seized the handle let into the top and swept off the cover with all the panache of a stage magician unveiling his latest impossible trick. ‘The pièce de résistance.’ What was presumably the control panel on the top of the box was singularly unimpressive and old-fashioned, reminiscent of a pre-war radio, with two calibrated dials, some knobs, a press-button and two orange hemispherical glass domes let into the surface.

‘The krytron, I assume,’ Talbot said.

‘No less. Three cheers for presidents. This particular one has been as good as his word.’

‘Excellent. Really excellent. Let’s only hope we get the chance to use it under, let us say, optimal circumstances.’

‘“Optimal” is the word,’ Denholm said. ‘Very simple device – as far as operating it is concerned, that is. Inside, it’s probably fiendishly complicated. This particular model – there may be others – runs off a twenty-four volt battery.’ He placed his forefinger on a button. ‘I depress this – and hey presto!’

‘If you’re trying to make me nervous, Jimmy, you’re succeeding. Take your finger off that damned button.’

Denholm depressed it several times. ‘No battery. We supply that. No problem. And under those two orange domes are two switches that have to be rotated through 180 degrees. Specially designed, you see, for careless clowns like me. As an added precaution, you can’t unscrew those domes. One sharp tap with a light metal object, the instructions say, and they disintegrate. Again, I should imagine, designed with people like me in mind, in case we remove the tops and start twiddling the switches around. Designed, if you follow me, to be a one-off operation. The only time those switches will ever be exposed is immediately before the firing button is depressed.’

‘When are you going to attach the battery?’

‘As an added precaution – this is my precaution – only immediately before use. These are positive and negative connections. We use spring-loaded crocodile clips. Two seconds to attach the clips. Three seconds to crack the domes and align the switches. One second to press the button. Nothing could be simpler. Only one other trifling requirement, sir – that we have that atom bomb, on its own and a long, long way from anywhere and us at a very prudent distance when we detonate it.’

‘You ask for very little, Jimmy.’ Talbot looked out at the driving rain and the dark and now white-capped seas. ‘We may have to wait a little – an hour or two as an optimistic guess, all night as a pessimistic one, before we can even begin to move. Anything else?’

‘I repeat, we have not been idle,’ Van Gelder said. ‘We’ve heard from the Heraklion Air Base. There is – or was – a diving vessel in the near vicinity, if you can call the western tip of Crete the near vicinity.’

‘Is – or was?’

‘Was. It was anchored off Souda Bay for a couple of days and apparently took off about one a.m. this morning. As you know, Souda Bay is a very hush-hush Greek naval base, and the area is very protected, very restricted. Foreign vessels, even harmless cruising yachts, are definitely not welcomed. Souda Bay naturally took an interest in this lad. It’s their business to be suspicious, especially at a time when NATO are operating in the area.’

‘What did they find out?’

‘Precious little. It was called the Taormina and registered in Panama.’

‘A Sicilian name? No significance. Panama – a convenience registry, some of the most successful ocean-going crooks in the world are registered there. Anyway, you don’t have to be an artist to change both names in very short order – all you require is a couple of pots of paint and a set of stencils. Where had it come from?’

‘They didn’t know. As it had anchored off-shore it didn’t have to register with either the customs or the port authorities. But they did know that it took off in a roughly north-easterly direction which, just coincidentally, is the course it would have taken if it were heading for Santorini. And as Souda Bay is just under a hundred miles from here, even a slow ship could have been in this area well before the bomber came down. So your hunch could have been right, sir. Only problem is, we’ve seen no sign of him.’

‘Could have been a coincidence. Could have been that the Delos warned him off. Did Heraklion say anything about going to have a look for this ship?’

‘No. Jimmy and I discussed the idea but we didn’t think it important enough to disturb you when you were – ah – resting lightly. And the Admiral.’

‘Probably unimportant. We should have a go. Normally, that is. Where does Heraklion lie from here? About due south?’

‘Near enough.’

‘A couple of planes, one carrying out a sweep to the north, the other to the east, should locate this lad, if he is in the area, in half an hour, probably less. Part of an urgent NATO exercise, you understand. But conditions aren’t normal. A waste of time in near zero visibility. An option we’ll keep in mind for better weather. Anything else?’

‘Yes. We’ve heard from both the Washington bank and the FBI. Mixed results, you might say. Under the initials of KK, the bank says it has a certain Kyriakos Katzanevakis.’

‘Promising. You could hardly get anything more Grecian than that.’

‘Under TT, they have a Thomas Thompson. You can’t have anything more Anglo-Saxon than that. The FBI say there are no high-ranking officers in the Pentagon – by which I take it they mean admirals and Air Force generals or, at the outside, vice-admirals and lieutenant-generals – with those initials.’

‘On the face of it, disappointing, but it may equally well be just another step in the laundering cover-up, another step to distance themselves from their paymaster. The FBI hasn’t been in touch with the bank? Of course not. We didn’t even mention the bank to them. Remiss of us. No, remiss of me. The bank must have addresses for Messrs KK and TT, and although those will almost certainly turn out to be accommodation addresses they may lead to something else. And another omission, again my fault entirely. We didn’t let the FBI have the name and address of this George Skepertzis. We’ll do that now. There’s an outside chance that the FBI may be able to link Skepertzis, KK and TT together. And what was the presidential reaction to the stopping of the tick … tick …?’

‘He appears to be beyond any further reaction.’

Montgomery sipped his drink, gazed gloomily through his cabin window, winced and looked away.

‘The weather has deteriorated in the past half-hour, Commander Talbot.’

‘It couldn’t possibly be any worse than it was half an hour ago.’

‘I’m an expert on such matters.’ Montgomery sighed. ‘Makes me quite homesick for the Mountains of Mourne. We get a lot of rainfall in the Mountains of Mourne. Do you see this lot clearing up in the near future?’

‘Not this side of midnight.’

‘And that would be an optimistic estimate, I’m thinking. By the time we haul this damn bomber back alongside, cut away the hole in the fuselage, hoist it out of the water and extract that bomb, it’ll be dawn. At least. Might possibly be well into the forenoon. You’ll understand if I turn down your kind offer to join you for dinner. An early snack for me, then bed. Might have to get up any time during the night. I’ll have a couple of boys on the poop all night, watching the plane and with orders to wake me as soon as they think the weather has moderated enough for us to start hauling it in.’

Dr Wickram said: ‘How’s that for a brief résumé of the speech I shall so reluctantly make at the table tonight? Not too much, I would have thought, and not too little?’

‘Perfect. Perhaps the tone a thought more doom-laden?’

‘A half octave deeper, you think? Odd, isn’t it, how easily this mendacity comes to one?’

‘Aboard the Ariadne, it’s become positively endemic. Very catching.’

‘I’ve just had a word with Eugenia,’ Denholm said. ‘I thought you ought to know.’

‘That you’ve been neglecting your duty? Not lurking, I mean.’

‘A man gets tired of lurking. I meant what she had to say.’

‘You spoke to her privately, I take it?’

‘Yes, sir. In her cabin. Number One’s cabin, that is to say.’

‘You surprise me, Jimmy.’

‘If I may say so, sir, with some dignity, we had been discussing matters on a purely intellectual level. Very bright girl. Going for a double first at University. Language and literature, Greek ancient and modern.’

‘Ah! Deep calling unto deep.’

‘I wouldn’t call it that, because I spoke only in English. I was under the impression that she was convinced that I didn’t speak a word of Greek.’

‘She’s no longer convinced? A close observer, the young lady? Perhaps you registered a flicker of expression when something was said in Greek when you should have registered nothing. I suspect you were trapped in your innocent youth by some fiendish feminine wile.’

‘How would you react, sir, if you were told that a scorpion was crawling up your shoe?’

Talbot smiled. ‘She spoke in Greek, of course. You immediately carried out a hurried check to locate this loathsome monster. Anybody would have fallen for it. You have not suffered too much chagrin and mortification, I hope?’

‘Not really, sir. She’s too nice. And too worried. Wanted to confide in me.’

‘Alas, the days when lovely young ladies wanted to confide in me appear to be over.’

‘I think she’s a little scared of you, sir. So is Irene. She wanted to talk about Andropulos. Girl talk, of course, and I suppose there’s no one else really on the ship they can talk to. That’s not quite fair, I suppose, they’re clearly very close friends. Seems that Irene repeated to her, more or less verbatim, the conversation she had with Number One this morning and told her she’d told Vincent everything she knew about her Uncle Adam. It would appear that Eugenia knows something about Uncle Adam that his niece doesn’t know. May I have a drink, sir? I’ve been awash since dawn in tonic and lemon.’

‘Help yourself. Revelations, is that it?’

‘I don’t know how you’d classify it, sir, but I know you’ll find it very interesting. Eugenia’s father has quite a lot in common with Irene’s father – apparently they’re good friends – they’re both wealthy businessmen, they both know Andropulos and both think he’s a crook. Well, nothing new in that so far. We all think he’s a crook. But Eugenia’s father, unlike Irene’s, is willing to talk freely and at length about Andropulos and Eugenia hasn’t talked about it to Irene, because she doesn’t wish to hurt her feelings.’ Denholm sampled his drink and sighed in satisfaction. ‘It would seem that Adamantios Spyros Andropulos has a pathological hatred of Americans. Who would suspect such a charming, courteous, urbane and civilized gentleman to have a pathological hatred of anyone?’

‘I would. Well, we all know he’s intelligent so he had to have a reason.’

‘He had. Two. His son and only nephew. Apparently, he doted on them. Eugenia quite believes this, because she says that Andropulos is unquestionably fond of Irene and herself, a feeling, I’m glad to say, that they don’t reciprocate.’

‘What about his son and nephew?’

‘Disappeared in most mysterious circumstances. Never to be seen again. Andropulos is convinced that they were done in by the American CIA.’

‘The CIA has a reputation, justified or not, for eliminating people they regard as undesirables. But they usually have a reason, again whether that is justifiable or not. Does Eugenia’s old man know the reason?’

‘Yes. He says – and he’s convinced of this – that the two young men were heroin peddlers.’

‘Well, well. Ties in all too well with what we have been increasingly suspecting. There are times, Jimmy, when I regard the CIA as being a much maligned lot.’

The atmosphere at the dinner table that night was noticeably, but not markedly, less relaxed than it had been at lunch-time. Conversation flowed rather less freely than it had then, and three men in particular, Hawkins, Talbot and Van Gelder, seemed more given than usual to brief and introspective silences, occasionally gazing at some object or objects that lay beyond a distant horizon. There was nothing that one could put a finger on and the insensitive would quite have failed to recognize that there was anything amiss. Andropulos proved that he was not one of those.

‘I do not wish to pry, gentlemen, and I may be quite wrong, I frequently am, but do I not detect a certain aura of uneasiness, even of tension at the table tonight?’ His smile was as open and ingenuous as his words had been frank and candid. ‘Or is it my imagination? You are surprised, perhaps, Commander Talbot?’

‘No, not really.’ The only thing that surprised Talbot was that Andropulos had taken so long in getting around to it. ‘You are very perceptive, Mr Andropulos. I’m rather disappointed, I must say. I thought – or hoped – that our concern was better concealed than that.’

‘Concern, Captain?’

‘To a slight degree only. No real anxiety yet. No reason in the world why you shouldn’t know as much as we do.’ As Dr Wickram had said, Talbot reflected, mendacity required little practice to become second nature: there was every reason in the world why Andropulos should not know as much as he did. ‘You know, of course, that the bad weather has forced us to suspend operations on the bomber?’

‘I have seen that it is riding several hundred metres astern of us. Operations? What operations, Captain. You are trying to recover those wicked weapons?’

‘Just one of them. An atom bomb.’

‘Why only one?’

‘Dr Wickram? Would you kindly explain?’

‘Certainly. Well, as far as I can. What we have here is a situation of considerable complexity and doubt, because we are dealing largely with the unknown. You will be aware that a nuclear explosion occurs when a critical mass of uranium or plutonium is reached. Now, there’s no way to prevent a slow but continuous degree of radioactive emanations from a hydrogen bomb, and there are fifteen of them aboard that plane. This radioactivity builds up inside the atom bomb, which is of an entirely different construction, until the critical mass of the atom bomb is reached. Then the atom bomb goes poof! Unfortunately, because of something we call sympathetic detonation, the hydrogen bombs also go poof! I will not dwell on what will happen to us.

‘Normally, because of this well-known danger, hydrogen bombs and atom bombs are never stored together, not, at least, for any period of time. Twenty-four hours is regarded as a safe period and a plane, as in this instance, can easily make a long-distance flight with them together, at the end of which, of course, they would immediately be stored separately. What happens after twenty-four hours, we simply don’t know although some of us – I am one – believe that the situation deteriorates very rapidly thereafter.

‘Incidentally, that’s why I have asked the Captain to stop all engines and generators. It is an established fact that acoustical vibrations hasten the onset of the critical period.’

Wickram’s deep, solemn and authoritative voice carried absolute conviction. Had he not known, Talbot thought, that Dr Wickram was talking scientific malarkey he, for one, would have believed every word he said.

‘So you will readily appreciate that it is of the utmost urgency that we remove that atom bomb from the plane as soon as possible and then take it away – by sail, of course, that’s why the Angelina is alongside, the critical mass will decay only very slowly – to some distant spot. Some very distant spot. There we will deposit it gently on the ocean floor.’

‘How will you do that?’ Andropulos said. ‘Deposit it gently, I mean. The ocean could be thousands of feet deep at the spot. Wouldn’t the bomb accelerate all the way down?’

Wickram smiled tolerantly. ‘I have discussed the matter with Captain Montgomery of the Kilcharran.’ He had not, in fact, discussed the matter with anybody. ‘We attach a flotation bag to the bomb, inflate it until it achieves a very slight negative buoyancy and then it will float down like a feather to the ocean floor.’

‘And then?’

‘And then nothing.’ If Wickram were having visions of a passenger cruise liner passing over an armed atomic mine, he kept his visions to himself. ‘It will decay and corrode slowly over the years, perhaps even over the centuries. May give rise to a few digestive upsets for some passing fish. I don’t know. What I do know is that if we don’t get rid of that damned beast with all dispatch we’re going to suffer more than a few digestive problems. Better that some of us – those concerned with the recovery of the bomb – have a sleepless night than that we all sleep forever.’

Chapter 8

Talbot stirred, half sat up in his bunk and blinked at the overhead light that had suddenly come on in his day cabin. Van Gelder was standing in the doorway.

‘Two-thirty. An unChristian hour, Vincent. Something is afoot. Weather moderated and Captain Montgomery hauling in the plane?’

‘Yes, sir. But there’s something more immediately urgent. Jenkins is missing.’

Talbot swung his feet to the deck. ‘Jenkins? I won’t say, “Missing?” or “How can he be missing?” If you say he is, he is. You’ve had a search carried out, of course?’

‘Of course. Forty volunteers. You know how popular Jenkins is.’ Talbot knew. Jenkins, their Mess steward and a Marine of fifteen years’ standing, a man whose calmness, efficiency and resource were matched only by his sense of humour, was highly regarded by everyone who knew him.

‘Can Brown cast any light on this?’ Marine Sergeant Brown, a man as rock-like and solid as Chief McKenzie, was Jenkins’s closest friend on the ship. Both men were in the habit of having a tipple in the pantry when the day’s work was done, an illicit practice which Talbot tacitly and readily condoned. Their tipple invariably stopped at that, just one: even in the élite Royal Marines it would have been difficult to find two men like them.

‘Nothing, sir. They went down to their Mess together. Brown turned in while Jenkins started on a letter to his wife. That was the last Brown saw of him.’

‘Who discovered his absence?’

‘Carter. The Master-at-arms. You know how he likes to prowl around at odd hours of the day and night looking for non-existent crime. He went up to the wardroom and pantry, found nothing, returned to the Marine Mess-deck and woke Brown. They carried out a brief search. Again nothing. Then they came to me.’

‘It would be pointless to ask you if you have any ideas?’

‘Pointless. Brown seems convinced he’s no longer aboard the ship. He says that Jenkins never sleep-walked, drank only sparingly and was devoted to his wife and two daughters. He had no problems – Brown is certain of that – and no enemies aboard the ship. Well, among the crew, that is. Brown is further convinced that Jenkins stumbled across something he shouldn’t have or saw something he shouldn’t have seen, although how he could do anything like that while sitting in the mess writing to his wife is difficult to imagine. His suspicions immediately centred on Andropulos and company – I gather he and Jenkins have talked quite a lot about them – and he was all for going down to Andropulos’s cabin and beating the living daylights out of him. I had some difficulty in restraining him, although privately, I must say, I found it rather an appealing prospect.’

‘An understandable reaction on his part.’ Talbot paused, ‘I can’t see how Andropulos or his friends could have any possible connection with this or have any conceivable reason for knocking him off. Do you think there’s a remote chance that he might have gone aboard the Kilcharran?’

‘No earthly reason why he should have but the thought did occur. I asked Danforth – he’s the Kilcharran’s chief officer – if he’d have a look around, so he collected some of his crew and carried out a search. There aren’t many places you can hide – or be hidden – on a diving ship. Took them less than ten minutes to be sure he wasn’t anywhere aboard.’

‘Nothing we can do at the moment. I have the uncomfortable feeling that there’s nothing we’re going to be able to do either. Let’s go and see how Captain Montgomery is getting on.’

The wind had dropped to Force 3, the sea was no more than choppy and the rain had eased, but only slightly, from torrential to heavy. Montgomery, clad in streaming oilskins, was at the winch: the plane, still bobbing rather uncomfortably, was slowly but steadily nearing the stern of the diving ship. The oxyacetylene crew, also in oilskins, were standing by the guard-rail, torches at the ready.

Talbot said: ‘Your men are going to be able to maintain their footing?’

‘It won’t be easy. The plane should steady up a bit when we secure it fore and aft and we’ll have ropes on the men, of course. And this confounded rain doesn’t help. I think we should be able to make some progress but it’ll be slow. Point is, this may be as good weather as we’re going to get. No point in your remaining, Commander, you’d be better off in your bunk. I’ll let you know when we’ve cut away the section and are ready to lift.’ He wiped rain away from his eyes. ‘I hear you’ve lost your chief steward. Bloody odd, isn’t it? Do you suspect foul play?’

‘I’m at the stage where I’m about ready to suspect anything or anybody. Van Gelder and I are agreed that it couldn’t have happened accidentally so it must have happened on purpose and not, of course, his purpose. Yes, foul play. As to what kind of foul play and the identity of the person or persons responsible, we don’t have a clue.’

It should have been dawn, but wasn’t, when Van Gelder roused Talbot shortly after six-thirty in the morning. The sky was still heavy and dark, and neither the wind nor the steadily drumming rain had improved in the past four hours.

‘So much for your breathless Aegean dawns,’ Talbot said, ‘I take it that Captain Montgomery has cut away that section of the plane’s fuselage?’

‘Forty minutes ago. He’s got the fuselage more than half way out of the water already.’

‘How are the winch and the derrick taking the strain?’

‘Very little strain, I believe. He’s secured four more flotation bags under the fuselage and wing and is letting compressed air do most of the work. He asks if you’d like to come along. Oh, and we’ve had a communication from Greek Intelligence about Andropulos.’

‘You don’t seem very excited about it.’

‘I’m not. Interesting, but doesn’t really help us. It just confirms that our suspicions about Uncle Adam are far from groundless. They’ve passed on our messages to Interpol. It seems – the message, I must say, is couched in very guarded language – that both Greek Intelligence and Interpol have been taking a considerable interest in Andropulos for several years. Both are certain that our friend is engaged in highly illegal activities but if this was a trial in a Scottish court of law the verdict would be “not proven”. They have no hard evidence. Andropulos acts through intermediaries who operate though other intermediaries and so on until either the trail runs cold or, occasionally, ends up in shell companies in Panama and the Bahamas, where much of his money is stashed away. The banks there consistently refuse to acknowledge letters and cables, in fact they won’t even acknowledge his existence. No cooperation from the Swiss banks, either. They’ll only open up their books if the depositor has been convicted of what is also regarded as a crime in Switzerland. He hasn’t been convicted of anything.’

‘Illegal activities? What illegal activities?’

‘Drugs. Message ends with a request – sounds more like a demand the way they put it – that this information be treated in total secrecy, utter and absolute confidentiality. Words to that effect.’

‘What information? They haven’t given us any information that we didn’t already suspect or have. No mention of the one item of information we’d like to know. Who, either in the government, the civil service or the top echelons in the armed forces, is Andropulos’s powerful protector and friend? Possibly they don’t know, more probably they don’t want us to know. Nothing from Washington?’

‘Not a word. Maybe the FBI don’t work at night.’

‘More likely that other people don’t work at night. It’s eleven-thirty p.m., their time, the banks are shut and all the staffs to hell and gone until tomorrow morning. We may have to wait hours before we hear anything.’

‘We’re nearly there,’ Captain Montgomery said. ‘We’ll stop hoisting – in this case more lifting from below than hoisting – when the water-level drops below the floor of the cabin. That way we won’t get our feet wet when we go inside.’

Talbot looked over the side to where a man, torch in his hand pointing downwards, sat with his legs dangling through the rectangular hole that had been cut in the fuselage.

‘We’re going to get a lot more than our feet wet before we get there. We’ve got to pass first through the compartment under the flight deck and that will still have a great deal of water in it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Montgomery said. ‘I mean we don’t have to. We just drop down through the hole we’ve made in the fuselage.’

‘That’s fine, if all we want to do is to confine ourselves to the cargo hold. But you can’t get into the flight deck from there. There’s a heavy steel door in the bulkhead and the clamps are secured on the for’ard side. So if we want to get at those clamps you have to do it from the flight-deck side, and to do that you must pass through the flooded compartment first.’

‘Why should we want to open that door at all?’

‘Because the clamps holding the atom bomb in place have padlocks. Where is one of the first places you’d look if you were searching for a key to the padlocks?’

‘Ah! Of course. The pockets of the dead men.’

‘Enough, Captain,’ the man on the fuselage called out. ‘Deck’s clear.’

Montgomery centred the winch and applied the brake, then checked the fore and aft securing ropes. When he had them adjusted to his satisfaction he said: ‘Won’t be long, gentlemen. Just going to have a first-hand look.’

‘Van Gelder and I are coming with you. We’ve brought our suits.’ Talbot checked the level of the top of the jagged hole in the nose cone relative to the surface of the sea. ‘I don’t think we’ll be needing our helmets.’

They did not, as it proved, require their helmets, the compartment under the flight-deck was no more than two-thirds full. They moved along to the opened hatch and hauled themselves up into the space behind the pilots’ seats. Montgomery looked at the two dead men and screwed his eyes momentarily shut.

‘What a bloody awful mess. And to think that the fiend responsible is still walking around free as air.’

‘I don’t think he will be for much longer.’

‘But you’ve said yourself you don’t have the evidence to convict him.’

‘Andropulos will never come to trial. Vincent, would you bang open that door and show Captain Montgomery where our friend is.’

‘No banging. Maybe our friend doesn’t like banging.’ Van Gelder produced a large stilson wrench. ‘Persuasion. Aren’t you coming, sir?’

‘In a moment.’ They left and Talbot addressed himself to the highly distasteful task of searching through the dead men’s pockets. He found nothing. He searched through every shelf, locker and compartment in the cockpit. Again, nothing. He moved aft and joined Montgomery and Van Gelder.

‘Nothing, sir?’

‘Nothing. And nothing I can find anywhere in the flight-deck.’

Montgomery grimaced. ‘You were, of course, looking through the pockets of the dead men. Sooner you than me. This is a very big plane, the key – if there ever was a key – could have been tucked away anywhere. I don’t give much for our chances of recovering it. So, other methods. Your Number One suggests a corrosive to cut through those clamps. Wouldn’t it be easier just to use an old-fashioned hacksaw?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it, sir,’ Van Gelder said. ‘If you were to try I’d rather be a couple of hundred miles away at the time. I don’t know how intelligent this armed listening device is, but I would question whether it’s clever enough to tell the difference between the rhythmic rasping of a hacksaw and the pulse of an engine.’

‘I agree with Vincent,’ Talbot said. ‘Even if it were only a one in ten thousand chance – and for all we know it might be a one in one chance – the risk still isn’t worth taking. Lady Luck has been riding with us so far but she might take a poor view of our pushing her too far.’

‘So corrosives, you think? I have my doubts.’ Montgomery stopped to examine the clamps more closely. ‘I should have carried out some preliminary test aboard, I suppose, but I never thought those clamps would be so thick nor made, as I suspect they are, of hardened steel. The only corrosive I have aboard is sulphuric acid. Neat sulphuric, H_2SO_4 at specific gravity 1800 – vitriol, if you like – is a highly corrosive agent when applied to most substances, which is why it is usually carried in glass carboys which are immune to the corrosive action of acids. But I think it would find this a very tough meal to digest. Patience and diligence, of course, and I’m sure it would do the trick, but it might take hours.’

Talbot said: ‘What do you think, Vincent?’

‘I’m no expert. I should imagine Captain Montgomery is quite correct. So, no corrosives, no hacksaws, no oxyacetylene torches.’ Van Gelder hoisted the big stilson in his hand. ‘This.’

Talbot looked at the clamps and their mountings, then nodded. ‘Of course. That. We’re not very bright, are we? At least I’m not.’ He looked at the way the clamps were secured to the side of the fuselage and the floor: each of the bases of the four retaining arms of the clamps was fitted over two bolts and were held in place by heavy inch-and-a-half nuts. ‘We leave the clamps in situ and free the bases instead. See how stiff those nuts are, will you?’

Van Gelder applied the stilson to one of the nuts, adjusted the grip and heaved. The nut was big and tightly jammed in position but a stilson wrench affords great leverage: the nut turned easily.

‘Simple,’ Van Gelder said.

‘Indeed.’ Talbot looked at the length of the retaining arms, which projected at ninety degrees from each other, then gauged the width of the hole that had been cut overhead. ‘What’s not so simple is getting the bomb up through the hole. With those arms in position there’s just not enough clearance for it to go through. We’ll have to widen the hole. You can do that, Captain?’

‘No bother. Just means that we’ll have to lower the fuselage down to its previous position. I’m coming around to Van Gelder’s view about taking zero chances. I want as much water as possible in this compartment to dissipate the heat of the torches. It’ll take a couple of hours, maybe longer, to do the job, but better two or three hours late down here than twenty years early you-know-where.’

Van Gelder said: ‘Do I undo those nuts now?’

‘No. We’re stable enough at the moment. But if the fuselage returns to its previous position of being almost submerged and then the weather blows up – well, I don’t think it would be a very clever idea to have an armed atomic mine rolling about all over the shop.’

‘I don’t think so, either.’

Talbot and Van Gelder were back aboard the Ariadne and having coffee in the deserted wardroom when a seaman from the radio-room entered and handed Talbot a message. Talbot read it and handed it to Van Gelder, who read it twice, then looked at his captain with a certain thoughtful surprise.

‘Looks as if I have been casting unjust aspersions on the FBI, sir. It further looks as if they do work at night.’

‘Even better, it seems as if they have no compunction about waking others, such as bank managers, in the middle of the night and making them work also. One gathers from the message that Andropulos’s mysterious friend George Skepertzis, does know the even more mysterious Kyriakos Katzanevakis and Thomas Thompson.’

‘If GS deposits one million dollars each in the accounts of KK and TT and has given them smaller sums on previous occasions one gathers that they are more than passing acquaintances. Unfortunately, it seems that the one person who could identify them, the bank clerk who handled the accounts of all three men, had been transferred elsewhere. They say that they are pursuing enquiries, whatever that means.’

‘It means, I’m certain, that the FBI are going to drag this unfortunate bank clerk from his bed and have him conduct an identity parade.’

‘I find it hard, somehow, to visualize generals and admirals voluntarily consenting to line up for inspection.’

‘They won’t have to. The FBI or the Pentagon itself is bound to have pictures of them.’ Talbot looked out of the window. ‘Dawn is definitely in the sky and the rain has eased off to no more than a drizzle – I suggest we contact Heraklion Air Base and ask them if they’ll kindly go and have a look for the diving ship Taormina.’

Together with the Admiral and the two scientists, Talbot and Van Gelder were just finishing breakfast when a messenger arrived from the Kilcharran. Captain Montgomery, he informed them, had just finished enlarging the opening on the top of the bomber’s fuselage, was now about to raise the plane again. Would they care to come across? He had made especial mention of Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder.

‘It’s not me he wants,’ Van Gelder said. ‘It’s my trusty stilson wrench. As if he doesn’t have a dozen aboard.’

‘I wouldn’t miss this,’ Hawkins said. He looked at Benson and Wickram. ‘I’m sure you gentlemen wouldn’t want to miss this either. It will, after all, be a historic moment when, for the first time in history, they drop a live atomic mine on the deck of a ship.’

‘You have a problem, Captain Montgomery?’ the Admiral asked. Montgomery, winch stopped, was leaning over the guard-rail and looking down at the fuselage which had been raised to its previous position with its cargo deck just above the level of the sea. ‘You look a mite despondent.’

‘I am not looking despondent, Admiral. I am looking thoughtful. The next step is to hoist the bomb from the plane. After that, we have to load it aboard the Angelina. And then the Angelina sails away. Correct?’ Hawkins nodded and Montgomery wet his forefinger and held it up. ‘To sail away you require wind. Unfortunately and most inconveniently, the Meltemi has died completely.’

‘It has, hasn’t it?’ Hawkins said. ‘Most inconsiderate, I must say. Well, if we manage to get the bomb aboard the Angelina without blowing ourselves to smithereens we’ll just tow it away.’

‘How will we do that, sir?’ Van Gelder said.

‘The Ariadne’s whaler. Not the engine, of course. We row.’

‘How do we know that the cunning little brain of this explosive device can differentiate between the repeated creaking of oars and the pulse of an engine? After all, sir, it is primarily an acoustic device.’

‘Then we’ll go back to the naval days of yore. Muffled oars.’

‘But the Angelina displaces between eighty and a hundred tons, sir. Even with the best will and the strongest backs in the world it wouldn’t be possible to make as much as one nautical mile in an hour. And that’s with men continuously pulling with all their strength. Even the strongest, fittest and most highly trained racing crews – Oxford, Cambridge, Thames Tideway – approach complete exhaustion after twenty minutes. Not being Oxbridge Blues, our limit would probably be nearer ten minutes. Half a nautical mile, if we’re lucky. And then, of course, the periods between successive onsets of exhaustion would become progressively shorter. Cumulative effects, if you follow me, sir. A quarter of a mile an hour. It’s close on a hundred miles to the Kásos Strait. Even assuming they can row night and day, which they can’t, and discounting the possibility of heart attacks, it’s going to take them at least a fortnight to get to the Kásos Strait.’

‘When it comes to comfort and encouragement,’ Hawkins said, ‘I couldn’t ask for a better man to have around. Bubbling over with optimism. Professor Wotherspoon, you live and sail in these parts. What’s your opinion?’

‘It’s been an unusual night, but this is a perfectly normal morning. Zero wind. The Etesian wind – the Meltemi as they call it in these parts – starts up around about noon. Comes from the north or north-west.’

‘What if the wind comes from the south or south-west instead?’ Van Gelder said. ‘It would be impossible for the rowers to make any headway against it. The reverse, rather. Can’t you just picture it, the Angelina being driven on to the rocks of Santorini?’

‘Job’s comforter,’ Hawkins said. ‘Would it be too much to ask you kindly to cease and desist?’

‘Not Job, sir, nor his comforter. I see myself more in the role of Cassandra.’

‘Why Cassandra?’

‘Beautiful daughter of Priam, King of Troy,’ Denholm said. ‘The prophecies of the princess, though always correct, were decreed by Apollo never to be believed.’

‘I’m not much of a one for Greek mythology,’ Montgomery said. ‘Had it been a leprechaun or a brownie, now, I might have listened. As it is, we have work to do. Mr Danforth –’ this to his chief officer ‘– detail half-a-dozen men, a dozen, to haul the Angelina round to our port quarter. Once the bomb has been removed we can pull the fuselage for’ard and the Angelina can then move for’ard in her turn to take its place.’

Under Montgomery’s instructions, the derrick hook was detached from the lifting ring and the derrick itself angled slightly aft until the hook dangled squarely over the centre of the rectangular opening that had been cut in the fuselage. Montgomery, Van Gelder and Carrington descended the companionway to the top of the fuselage, Van Gelder with his stilson, Carrington with two adjustable rope grommets to which were attached two slender lengths of line, one eight feet in length, the other perhaps four times as long. Van Gelder and Carrington lowered themselves into the cargo bay and slipped and secured the grommets over the tapered ends of the mine while Montgomery remained above guiding the winch driver until the lifting fork was located precisely over the centre of the mine. The hook was lowered until it was four feet above the mine.

None of the eight securing clamp nuts offered more than a token resistance to Van Gelder’s stilson and as each clamp came free Carrington tightened or loosened the pressure on the two shorter ropes which had been attached to the hook. Within three minutes the atomic mine was free of all restraints that had attached it to the bulkhead and floor of the cargo bay and in less than half that time it had been winched upwards, slowly and with painstaking care, until it was clear of the plane’s fuselage. The two longer ropes attached to the grommets were thrown up on to the deck of the Kilcharran, where they were firmly held to ensure that the mine was kept in a position precisely parallel to the hull of the ship.

Montgomery climbed aboard and took over the winch. The mine was hoisted until it was almost level with the ship’s deck and then, by elevating the angle of the derrick, carefully brought alongside until it was resting against the rubber-cushioned sides of the Kilcharran, a manœuvre that was necessary to ensure that the mine did not snag against the port stays of the foremast of the Angelina when that vessel was brought alongside.

It took what seemed like an unconscionably long time – in fact, it took just over half an hour – to bring the Angelina alongside. Hauling the plane’s fuselage forward to leave space for the lugger had been a quick and simple task, but then, because of the supporting air bags the fuselage was in a state of neutral buoyancy and one man could have accomplished the task with ease. But the Angelina displaced upwards of eighty tons and even the dozen men assigned to the task of towing it found it a laborious task just to get it under way, a difficulty that amply confirmed Van Gelder’s assertion that towing it any distance at all by a whaler propelled only by oars was a virtual impossibility. But eventually, brought alongside it was, the mine gently lowered into its prepared cradle and clamped into position.

‘Routine,’ Montgomery said to Hawkins. If he was experiencing any feelings of relief and satisfaction, and he would have been less than human not to have done, he showed no signs of them. ‘Nothing should have gone wrong and nothing did go wrong. All we need now is a tiny puff of wind, the lugger’s on her way and all our troubles are over.’

‘Maybe all our troubles are just beginning,’ Van Gelder said.

Hawkins looked at him suspiciously. ‘And what, may we ask, are we expected to gather from that cryptic remark?’

‘There is a tiny puff of wind, sir.’ Van Gelder wetted a forefinger and held it upwards. ‘Unfortunately, it’s not from the north-west, it’s from the south-east. The beginning, I’m afraid, of what is called the Euros.’ Van Gelder had assumed a conversational tone. ‘Reading about it last night. Rare in the summer months but not unknown. I’m sure Professor Wotherspoon will confirm this.’ Wotherspoon’s unsmiling nod did indeed confirm it. ‘Can turn very nasty, very stormy. Gusting up to Force 7 or 8. I can only assume that the radio operators on the Kilcharran and the Ariadne have – what shall I say? – relaxed their vigilance a bit. Understandable, after what they’ve been through. Must have been something about it in the weather forecasts. And if this wind increases, and according to the book there is no doubt it will, any attempt to sail or row the Angelina anywhere will end up in her banging not against the rocks of Santorini, as I suggested, but against those of Síphinos or Folégandros, which I believe are rather sparsely populated. But if the Euros backs more to the east, which I understand it occasionally does, then it would bang into Mílos. Five thousand people on Mílos. So it says in the book.’

‘I speak with restraint, Van Gelder,’ Hawkins said. ‘I don’t exactly see myself in the role of an ancient Roman Emperor but you do know what happened to messengers who brought bad news to them?’

‘They got their head chopped off. “Twas ever thus, sir. A prophet hath no honour in his own country.”’

Bearers of bad news were having a hard time of it on both sides of the Atlantic that morning.

The President of the United States was no longer a young man and at half past five on that morning in the Oval Office he was showing every year of his age. The lines of care and concern were deeply entrenched in his face and the skin, beneath the permanent tan, had a greyish tinge to it. But he was alert enough and his eyes were as clear as could be expected of an elderly man who had had no sleep whatsoever that night.

‘I am beginning, gentlemen, to feel almost as sorry for myself and ourselves as I am for those unfortunates in Santorini.’ The ‘gentlemen’ he was addressing were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Hollison of the FBI, John Heiman, the Defense Secretary, and Sir John Travers, the British Ambassador. ‘I suppose I should, in all decency, apologize for bringing you all together at this unearthly hour of the morning, but, frankly, I have no decency left in me. I’m right at the undisputed top of my self-pity list.’ He rifled some papers on his desk. ‘Admiral Hawkins and his men are sitting on top of a ticking timebomb and it seems that nature and circumstances are conspiring to thwart their every attempt to rid themselves of this canker in their midst. With his latest report I had thought that I had reached the ultimate nadir. Inevitably, I was wrong.’ He looked sorrowfully at the deputy head of the FBI. ‘You had no right to do this to me, Richard.’

‘I am sorry about that, Mr President.’ Hollison may well have meant what he said but the sorrow was completely masked by the expression and tone of bitter anger. ‘It’s not just bad news or damnably bad news, it’s shattering news. Shattering for you, shattering for me, most of all shattering for the General. I still can hardly bring myself to believe it.’

‘I might be prepared to believe it,’ Sir John Travers said, ‘and might well be prepared to be shattered along with the rest of you. If, that is, I had the slightest idea what you are talking about.’

‘And I am sorry about that,’ the President said. ‘We have not really been remiss, there just hasn’t been time yet. Richard, the Ambassador has not yet read the relevant documents. Could you put him in the picture, please?’

‘That shouldn’t take too long. It’s a most damnably ugly picture, Sir John, because it reflects badly – just how badly it’s only now beginning to dawn on me – on both Americans in general and the Pentagon in particular.

‘The central figure in the scenario, of whom you have of course heard, is a certain Adamantios Spyros Andropulos who is rapidly emerging as an international criminal of staggering proportions. As you know, he is at present being held aboard the frigate Ariadne. He is an exceptionally wealthy man – I’m talking merely of hundreds of millions of dollars, it could be billions for all I so far know – and he has money, laundered money under false names, hidden away in various deposit accounts all over the world. Marcos of the Philippines and Duvalier of Haiti are, or were, rather good at this sort of thing, but they’re being found out, they should have employed a real expert like Andropulos.’

‘He can’t be all that expert, Richard,’ Sir John said. ‘You’ve found out about him.’

‘A chance in a million, a break that comes to a law agency once in a lifetime. In any but the most exceptional and extraordinary circumstances he would have taken the secret to the grave with him. And I didn’t find out about him – there is no possible way I ever could have done – and no credit whatsoever attaches to us. That he was found out is due entirely to two things – an extraordinary stroke of luck and an extraordinary degree of astuteness by those aboard the Ariadne. I have, incidentally, have had cause to revise my earlier – and I must admit prejudiced and biased opinion of Admiral Hawkins. He insists that none of the credit belongs to him but to the captain and two of his officers aboard the Ariadne. It takes quite a man to insist on that sort of thing.

‘Among his apparently countless worldwide deposits Andropulos had tucked away eighteen million dollars in a Washington bank through an intermediary or nominee by the name of George Skepertzis. This nominee had transferred over a million dollars apiece to the accounts of two men registered in the bank as Thomas Thompson and Kyriakos Katzanevakis. The names, inevitably, are fictitious – no such people exist. The only bank clerk who could identify all three men, inasmuch as he was the person who had handled all three accounts, had left the bank. We tracked him down – he was understandably a bit upset about being dragged out of his bed at midnight – and showed him a group of photographs. Two of them he recognized immediately but none of the photographs remotely resembled the man going by the name of George Skepertzis.

‘But he was able to give us some additional – and very valuable – information about Skepertzis, who seemed to have taken him into some limited degree of confidence. No reason why he shouldn’t, of course – Skepertzis has – had – every reason to believe that his tracks were completely covered. This was approximately two months ago. He wanted to know about the banking facilities in certain specified towns in the United States and Mexico. The bank clerk – his name is Bradshaw – gave him what information he could. It took Bradshaw about a week to find out the details Skepertzis wanted. I should imagine that he was well rewarded for his labours although, of course, Bradshaw didn’t say so. There were no criminal charges that we could have laid against him for that – not that we would, even if we could have.

‘Bradshaw provided our agent with the names and addresses of the banks concerned. We checked those against two lists regarding Andropulos’s banking activities that we had just received from the Ariadne and Greek Intelligence – a third, if you count Interpol. Skepertzis had made enquiries about banks in five cities and, lo and behold and to nobody’s surprise, all five also appeared on the lists concerning Andropulos.

‘We instituted immediate enquiries. Bankers – especially senior banking officials – have profound objections to being woken in the middle of the night but among our eight thousand FBI agents in those United States we have some very tough and persistent individuals who are also very good at putting the fear of God into even the most law-abiding citizens. And we have some very good friends in Mexico. It turns out that friend Skepertzis has bank accounts in all five cities. All under his own name.’

‘You’re ahead of me here,’ the President said. ‘This is news to me. When did you find this out?’

‘Just over half an hour ago. I’m sorry, Mr President, but there just hasn’t been the time to confirm everything and tell you until now. In two of those banks – in Mexico City and San Diego – we struck gold. In each of those banks close on three-quarters of a million dollars have been transferred to the accounts of a certain Thomas Thompson and a certain Kyriakos Katzanevakis. It’s a measure of those two gentlemen’s belief in their immunity to investigation that they hadn’t even bothered to change their names. Not that that would have mattered in the long run – not after we had got around to circulating photographs. One final point of interest. Two weeks ago the bank in Mexico City received a draft of two million dollars in favour of George Skepertzis from a reputable or supposedly reputable, bank in Damascus, Syria. A week later exactly the same amount was transferred to a certain Philip Trypanis in Greece. We have the name of the Athens bank and have asked Greek Intelligence to find out who or what Trypanis is or for whom he is fronting. A cent gets a hundred dollars that it is a pal of Andropulos.’

A silence ensued, a silence that was long and profound and more than a little gloomy. It was the President himself who finally broke it.

‘A stirring tale, is it not, Sir John?’

‘Stirring, indeed. Richard had the right term for it – shattering.’

‘But – well, have you no questions?’

‘No.’

The President looked at him in near disbelief. ‘Not even one little question?’

‘Not even one, Mr President.’

‘But surely you must want to know the identities of Thompson and Katzanevakis?’

‘I don’t want to know. If we must refer to them at all I’d rather just refer to them as the general and the admiral.’ He looked at Hollison. ‘That would be about right, Richard?’

‘I’m afraid so. A general and an admiral. Your Admiral Hawkins, Sir John, is smarter than your average bear.’

‘I would agree. But you have to be fair to yourselves. He had access to information that you hadn’t had until now. I, too, have an advantage that you people lack. You’re deep in the middle of the wood. I’m on the outside looking in.

‘Two things, gentlemen. As a representative of Her Majesty’s Government I am bound to report any developments of significance to the Foreign Office and Cabinet. But if I specifically lack certain information, such as specific names, then I can’t very well report them, can I? We ambassadors have the power to exercise a very wide range of discretion. In this particular instance, I choose to exercise that discretion.

‘The second point is that you all seem convinced – there appears to be a certain doom-laden certainty about this – that this affair, this top-level treason, if you will, is bound to become public knowledge. I have one simple question. Why?’

‘Why? Why?’ The President shook his head as if bemused or stunned by the naïveté of the question. ‘God damn it, Sir John, it’s bound to come out. It’s inevitable. How else are we going to explain things away? If we are at fault, if we are the guilty party, we must in all honesty openly confess to that guilt. We must stand up and be counted.’

‘We have been friends for some years now, Mr President. Friends are allowed to speak openly?’

‘Of course, of course.’

‘Your sentiments, Mr President, do you the greatest possible credit but hardly reflect what, fortunately or unfortunately, goes on in the more rarefied strata of international diplomacy. I am not speaking of deception and deviousness, I am referring to what is practical and politic. It’s bound to come out, you say. Certainly it will – but only if the President of the United States decides that it must. How, you ask, are we going to explain things away? Simple. We don’t. You give me one valid reason why we should move this matter into the realm of the public domain or, as you appear to suggest, make a clean breast of things, and I’ll give you half a dozen reasons – reasons equally valid if not more so – why we shouldn’t.’ Sir John paused as if to marshal his facts but was, in fact, merely waiting for one of the four intent listeners to voice an objection: he had already marshalled his facts.

‘I think, Mr President, that it might do us no harm to hear what Sir John as to say.’ Hollison smiled. ‘Who knows, we might even learn something. As the senior ambassador of a vastly experienced Foreign Office, it seems likely that Sir John must have gained some little expertise along the way.’

‘Thank you, Richard. Bluntly and undiplomatically, Mr President, you have a duty not to speak out. There is nothing whatsoever to be gained, and a very great deal to be lost. At best you will be hanging out a great deal of dirty washing in public and all to no avail, to no purpose: at worst, you will be providing invaluable ammunition for your enemies. Such open and, if I may say so, ill-advised confession will achieve at best an absolute zero and at worst a big black minus for you, the Pentagon and the citizens of America. The Pentagon, I am sure, is composed of honourable men. Sure, it may have its quota of the misguided, the incompetent, even the downright stupid: name me any large and powerful bureaucratic élite that has never had such a quota. All that matters, finally and basically, is that they are honourable men and I see no earthly justification for dragging the reputations of honourable men through the dust because we have discovered two rotten apples at the bottom of the barrel.

‘You yourself, Mr President, are in an even worse position. You have devoted a considerable deal of your presidential time to combating terrorism in every shape and form. How will it look to the world if it comes out that two senior members of your armed forces have been actively engaged in promoting terrorism for material gain? You may hardly know the two gentlemen concerned but they will, of course, be elevated to the status of highly trusted aides, and that’s just looking on the bright side. On the dark side, you will not only be accused of harbouring men who are engaged in terrorism but of aiding, abetting and inciting them to new levels of terrorism. Can’t you just see the headlines smeared across the front pages of the tabloids and yellow press throughout the world? By the time they have finished with you, you will be remembered in history for one thing and one thing only, the ultimate byword for hypocrisy, the allegedly noble and high-principled president who had spent his life in encouraging and promoting the one evil he had sworn to destroy. Throughout the countries of the world that dislike or fear America because of its power, authority and wealth – and that, like it or not, means most countries – your reputation would lie in tatters. Because of your exceptionally high level of popularity in your own country you will survive but I hardly think that that consideration would affect you: what would and should affect you is that your campaign against terrorism would be irrevocably destroyed. No phoenix would arise from those particular ashes. As a world force for justice and decency you would be a spent man. To put it in the most undiplomatic terms, sir, to go ahead as you propose to do you’d have to be more than slightly off your rocker.’

The President stared into the middle distance for quite some time, then said in a voice that was almost plaintive: ‘Does anyone else think I’m off my rocker?’

‘Nobody thinks you’re off your rocker, Mr President,’ the General said. ‘Least of all, I would say, Sir John here. He is merely saying what our unfortunately absent Secretary of State would advocate if he were here. Both gentlemen are high on pragmatism and cold logic and low on unconsidered and precipitate action. Maybe I’m not the ideal person to be passing judgement on this issue. I would obviously be delighted if whatever reputation the Pentagon has survives intact, but I do feel most strongly that, before jumping off the top of the Empire State or whatever one should give some thought to the fatal and irrevocable consequences.’

‘I can only nod emphatic agreement,’ John Heiman, the Defense Secretary said. ‘If I may mix up two metaphors – if I am mixing them – we have only two options. We can let sleeping dogs lie or let slip the dogs of war. Sleeping dogs never harmed anyone but the dogs of war are an unpredictable bunch. Instead of biting the enemy they may well turn, in this case almost certainly would turn, and savage us.’

The President looked at Hollison. ‘Richard?’

‘You’re in the card-game of your life, Mr President. You’ve got only one trump and it’s marked “Silence”.’

‘So it’s four to one, is it?’

‘No, Mr President,’ Heiman said, ‘it’s not and you know it. It’s five to zero.’

‘I suppose, I suppose.’ The President ran a weary hand across his face. ‘And how do we propose to mount this massive display of silence, Sir John?’

‘Sorry, Mr President, but not me. If I am asked for my opinions I am not, as you have seen, slow to give them. But I know the rules and one of them is that I cannot be a party to formulating the policy of a sovereign state. Decisions are for you and for what is, in effect, your war cabinet here.’

A messenger entered and handed a slip of paper to the president. ‘Dispatch from the Ariadne, Mr President.’

‘I don’t have to brace myself for this,’ the President said. ‘As far as dispatches from the Ariadne are concerned, I am permanently braced. Some day I’ll get some good news from that ship.’ He read the message. ‘But not, of course, this time. “Atomic mine removed from cargo bay of bomber and safely transferred to sailing vessel Angelina.” Excellent news as far as it goes, but then: “Unexpected 180 degree change in wind course makes sailing departure impossible. Anticipated delay three to six hours. Hydrogen weapons from plane’s cargo bay being transferred to diving ship Kilcharran. Expect to complete transfer by nightfall.” End of message. Well, where does that leave us?’

Sir John Travers said: ‘It leaves you, Mr President, with a few hours’ breathing space.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Masterly inactivity. Nothing that can be profitably done at the moment. I am merely thinking out loud.’ He looked at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ‘Tell me, General, do those two gentlemen in the Pentagon know they are under suspicion? Correction. Do they know that you have proof of their treason?’

‘No. And I agree with what you are about to say. No point will be served by acquainting them with that fact at the present moment.’

‘None. With the President’s permission, I would like to retire and ponder the problems of state and international diplomacy. With the aid of a pillow.’

The President smiled one of his increasingly rare smiles.

‘What a splendid suggestion. I also shall do exactly that. It’s close on six now, gentlemen. May I suggest that we foregather again at ten-thirty a.m.?’

At 2.30 that afternoon Van Gelder, message sheet in hand, joined Talbot on the bridge of the Ariadne.

‘Radio from Heraklion, sir. Seems that a Phantom of the Greek Air Force located the diving ship Taormina less than ten minutes after taking off from base. It was just east of Avgó Island, which the chart tells me is about forty miles north-east of Heraklion. Very conveniently positioned to break through the Kásos Strait.’

‘What direction was it headed?’

‘No direction. Having no wish to raise any suspicion the Greek pilot didn’t hang around but he reports that the Taormina was stopped in the water.’

‘Lurking. Lurking, one wonders, for what. Speaking of lurking, what’s Jimmy doing at the moment?’

‘Last seen, he was lurking with two young ladies in the wardroom. No dereliction of duty, I assure you. The three A’s have retired, to their cabins, presumably for the afternoon. The girls report a far from subtle change in their behaviour. They have stopped discussing the predicament they find themselves in, in fact they have stopped discussing anything. They appear unusually calm, relaxed and not very concerned about anything, which may mean that they have philosophically resigned themselves to whatever fate may hold in store or they may have made up their minds about some plan of action, although what that could be I couldn’t even begin to imagine.’

‘What would your guess be, Vincent?’

‘A plan of action. I know it’s only the slenderest of clues but it’s just possible that they may be resting up this afternoon because they don’t expect to be doing much resting during the coming night.’

‘I have the oddest feeling that we won’t be doing much resting ourselves tonight.’

‘Aha! The second sight, sir? Your non-existent Scottish blood clamouring for recognition.’

‘When it clamours a bit more, I’ll let you know. I just keep wondering about Jenkins’s disappearance.’ A phone rang and Talbot picked it up. ‘A message for the Admiral from the Pentagon? Bring it here.’ Talbot hung up and gazed out through the for’ard screens of the bridge. The Angelina, to protect it from the buffeting of the four-foot-high waves generated by the now very brisk Euros wind from the south-east, had been moved to a position where it lay snugly in the still waters between the bows of the Ariadne and the stern of the Kilcharran.

‘Speaking of the Pentagon, it’s only an hour since we told them that we expected the unloading of the hydrogen missiles to be completed by nightfall. And what do we have? A Force 6 and the plane’s fuselage streamed out a cable length to the north-west. Lord only knows when the unloading will be finished now. Do you think we should so inform them?’

‘I should think not, sir. The President of the United States is a much older man than we are and the kind of cheery communications he has been receiving from the Ariadne of late can’t be doing his heart any good.’

‘I suppose you’re right. Ah, thank you, Myers.’

‘Bloody funny signal if you ask me, sir. Can’t make head nor tail of it.’

‘These things are sent to try us.’ Talbot waited till Myers had left, then read out the signal.

‘“Identity of cuckoos in the nest established. Irrefutable proof that they are linked to your generous benefactor friend. Sincerest congratulations to Admiral Hawkins and the officers of the Ariadne.”’

‘Recognition at last,’ Van Gelder said.

‘You are the last to arrive, Sir John,’ the President said. ‘I have to advise you that we have already made up our minds what to do.’

‘A very difficult decision, I assume, Mr President. Probably the most difficult you have ever been called upon to make.’

‘It has been. Now that the decision is made and is irrevocable, you can no longer be accused of meddling with the affairs of a sovereign state. What would you have done, Sir John?’

‘Perfectly straightforward. Exactly what you have done. No one is to be informed except two people and those two people are to be informed that the President has suspended them indefinitely from duty, pending the investigation of allegations and statements that have been laid against them.’

‘Well, damn your eyes, Sir John.’ The President spoke without heat. ‘Instead of sleeping all the time I spent a couple of hours wrestling with my conscience to arrive at the same conclusion.’

‘It was inevitable, sir. You had no option. And I would point out that it’s easy enough for us to arrive at decisions. You, and only you, can give the executive order.’

‘I will not insult your intelligence by asking if you are aware what this executive order means.’

‘I am perfectly aware of what it means. Now that my opinion is no longer called for I have no hesitation in saying that I would have done exactly the same thing. It is a death sentence and it can be no consolation at all that you will not be called upon to carry out, or to order to be carried out, the execution of that death sentence.’

Chapter 9

‘Manhattan Project?’ Admiral Hawkins said. ‘What on earth does she mean by “Manhattan Project”?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Denholm said. ‘Eugenia doesn’t know either. She just caught the words as she walked into the wardroom. Only Andropulos, Alexander and Aristotle were there. The phrase was repeated twice and she thought it odd enough – I think it’s very odd, too – to pass it on to me. When they became aware of her presence the subject was switched. She said that whatever the nature of the subject was they seemed to find it rather amusing.’

Talbot said: ‘Even Alexander was amused?’

‘Humour, sir, is not Alexander’s forte. Nobody’s seen him smile since he came aboard the Ariadne, I would doubt if anyone has ever seen him smile. Besides, it was Alexander who was discussing the subject. Maybe he doesn’t laugh at his own jokes.’

‘I know you know something about those things, Denholm,’ Hawkins said. ‘Doesn’t it suggest anything to you?’

‘Zero, sir. The immediate and obvious – far too obvious – connection is the atom bomb. The Manhattan Project, of course, was that immensely long, immensely complicated and immensely expensive project that led to the invention of the atom bomb. “Manhattan” was only a code word. The actual research was carried out in New Mexico and Nevada or thereabouts. I’m sorry, sir, but the significance, the relevance of the phrase in our present situation, quite escapes me.’

‘At least I’ve got company,’ Hawkins said. He picked up two slips of paper from his table in the admiral’s cabin. ‘Those two messages have come in since last we saw you. In this case, I don’t think their significance will escape you.’

‘Ah! This one from the White House itself. “Two of your philanthropist’s beneficiaries are no longer with us. Beneficiary A has been involved in a fatal automobile accident.”’ Denholm looked up from the paper. ‘Has he now? For Beneficiary A I take it we can read either Admiral X or General Y. Did he fall, did he jump or was he pushed?’ He looked at the paper again. ‘And I see that Beneficiary B has just disappeared. Again I assume that Beneficiary B was either X or Y. How very inconvenient for them, how very convenient for us.’ Denholm looked from Hawkins to Talbot. ‘From the very restrained wording I take it that this news is not to be broadcast from the house-tops.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ Hawkins said. ‘We have already arranged for the coded original to be destroyed.’

‘I take it then, sir, that speculation about their abrupt departure is pointless.’

‘Indeed. Not only pointless but needless. They have fallen upon their swords. One does not wish to sound cynical nor stand in condemnation but it’s probably the only faintly honourable thing they have done for a long time. The second signal, Denholm?’

‘The one from Heraklion. Interesting, sir. It seems that the Taormina’s last port of call was Tobruk. Furthermore, although it’s registered in Panama, it appears to be permanently based in Tobruk. It’s more than interesting, it’s intriguing, especially considering that that well-known philanthropist sitting in our wardroom seems to have considerable business interests in Tripoli. It’s most damnably frustrating, sir.’

‘What is?’

‘That we haven’t a single shred of evidence to adduce against him, far less proof.’

‘I have this feeling,’ Talbot said, ‘that neither evidence nor proof will ever be required. Andropulos will never come to trial.’

Hawkins looked at him for a few thoughtful moments. ‘That’s the second time you’ve said that, Captain. You have access to some information that we lack?’

‘Not at all, sir. Maybe I’ve just got blind faith in this blindfolded goddess of justice. You know, the lady who holds the scales in her hands.’ Talbot smiled. ‘Or maybe, as Van Gelder keeps on hinting, I have some traces of Highland blood in me. Says I’m fey, the second sight or some nonsense like that. Ah, the man himself.’

‘A radio message from Greek Intelligence,’ Van Gelder said. He proffered the paper he held in hand.

‘Just tell me,’ Hawkins said. ‘Gently. I’m becoming allergic to bad news.’

‘Not all that bad, sir. Not for us, at any rate. Says that someone attached to the department for Middle East and North African affairs – they carefully don’t give his name, I suppose he’s a minister of some sort, I suppose we could find out easily enough but it seems unimportant – took off by government plane on a routine visit to Canea, the town close by the Souda Bay air base. Never got there. But at exactly the time he should have got there a patrolling Greek Mirage spotted a plane very like the one he was flying in – too much of a coincidence for it not to have been the same plane – passing directly over Heraklion.’

‘So, of course,’ Talbot said, ‘you consulted the chart and arrived at the conclusion that he was heading for some place. What place?’

‘Tobruk.’

‘And you also arrived at the conclusion that he wouldn’t be coming back from there?’

‘Allowing for the vagaries of human nature, sir, I would not have thought so. Greek Intelligence have also established the fact that the vanishing minister, if minister he was, held an account at the same Athens bank that Philip Trypanis honours with his custom. It would appear, to coin a phrase, that they are now hot on the trail of Mr Trypanis. Whether they nab Mr Trypanis or not hardly seems a matter of concern for us.’

‘I would think,’ Hawkins said, ‘if our philanthropist friend in the wardroom knew of the fate of his pal in government here and those of A and B – or X and Y – in Washington his humour might be in marked abeyance by now. And if he knew that we knew of the Taormina and that its home base was Tobruk, he would be downright thoughtful. Was that all, Van Gelder?’

‘On that subject, sir, yes. Captain Montgomery, Professor Wotherspoon and I have been discussing the weather.’

‘You have?’ Hawkins looked at him suspiciously. ‘Don’t tell me that Cassandra has you in her clutches again?’

‘Certainly not, sir. The Euros has died away. Completely. We suspect it will only be a matter of time before the weather returns to normal. A very short time. Latest met. reports confirm that. The Angelina, at the present moment, is lying between our ship and the Kilcharran, facing north-west. If the Meltemi starts up – also from the north-west, of course – we won’t be able to sail her out of her present position. It might be wise to tow her alongside us now.’

‘Of course,’ Talbot said. ‘See to it now, would you, Number One. After that, let us foregather for the last supper.’

Van Gelder looked through the opened doorway. ‘It’s already getting dark, sir. You don’t feel like waiting for the dawn before we take off?’

‘Nothing I’d like better than to wait for the dawn. But we have this duty to our fellow man.’

‘We have to be brave, noble and self-sacrificing?’

‘The sooner we take off, the easier will lie the heads along the Potomac. Not to mention, of course, those on the Kilcharran and Ariadne.’

Denholm looked from Talbot to Van Gelder. His face registered an expression of near incredulity.

‘Am I to understand, Captain, that you and Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder are sailing on the Angelina?’

Talbot shook his head. ‘I suppose it had to come to this, Number One. Junior officers questioning our nautical expertise.’

‘I don’t understand, sir. Why on earth are you and Number One going along on the Angelina? I mean –’

‘We are not going along on the Angelina. We are taking the Angelina. Professor Wotherspoon and his wife are the people who are not going. They don’t know that yet, of course. The good Professor is going to be very wroth but it’s difficult to please everybody.’

‘I see, sir. Yes, I see. I should have guessed. I’d like to come along, sir.’

‘Yes and no. You shall come along, but not on the Angelina. You will take the launch. You won’t start up the engine until we’re at least three miles clear. We don’t want, you understand, to precipitate any premature big bangs.’

‘And then we follow you at that distance?’

‘Not so much follow us as circle us at, of course, the same prudent distance of three miles. Your purpose, again, of course, is to ward off and warn off any unsuspecting vessels that come too close.’

‘And then help tow you back here?’

‘When we’ve dumped the mine and sailed on a sufficiently safe distance, we’ll start the engine and head back. A tow would help. Or perhaps the Admiral will fetch us in the Ariadne. We haven’t decided yet and at the moment it’s not important. But what I’m about to say is important.

‘You will take along with you Chief Petty Officer McKenzie, Marine Sergeant Brown and Petty Officer Myers to operate the radio. Most importantly, you will also take with you, suitably wrapped in plastic, the krytron detonating device and conceal it well. I suggest under the floorboards of the wheelhouse. You will instruct Petty Officer Myers to take along the smallest portable transceiver he can lay hands on and conceal it in the same place. Make sure the floorboards are securely nailed down afterwards.’

‘May I ask the reason for this excessive secrecy, sir?’

‘You may not for the excellent reason that I have no reason to give you. The best I can do is to wave a vague hand and say that I am preparing for unforeseen eventualities. The trouble with the unforeseen is that it is unforeseeable. You understand?’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘I suggest you go now and alert your crew. And for God’s sake don’t let anyone see you wandering around with the krytron under your arm.’

Lieutenant Denholm left. Hawkins said: ‘There are times, Captain, when I feel I have to say, with regret of course, that the truth is not always with you. I mean the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

‘I agree, sir,’ Van Gelder said. ‘Sets a very bad example for junior officers.’

Talbot smiled. ‘Be ye as pure as snow ye shall not escape calumny. Something like that. We captains become inured to such injustices. I have the odd feeling – all right, all right, Vincent, let’s settle for just a few microscopic traces of Highland blood – that Andropulos is going to be asking the odd casual question at table tonight. I suggest we have Dr Wickram up here.’

Andropulos did indeed have the odd casual question to ask at table that night but he was in no hurry to introduce them. It was not until after they had finished the main course that he said: ‘We do not wish to pry, Captain, nor ask questions about purely naval matters which should be none of our concern. But whatever is happening surely does concern us, whether directly or indirectly, and we are but human and very, very curious. We can all see that the Angelina is alongside with that highly suspect atomic mine lashed down in its cradle on the deck. I thought the intention was to sail it away with all possible speed?’

‘We shall be doing just that, Mr Andropulos. In the fullness of time, by which I mean after we’ve finished dinner. You will not be happy until it is gone?’

‘I confess I will feel a considerable degree of relief when I see the Angelina disappearing over the horizon, and with a clear sky and an almost full moon we should be able to see just that. Selfish? Cowardly? Maybe, maybe not.’ Andropulos sighed. ‘I do not see myself in the role of hero.’

‘I don’t see myself as such. No sensible person does.’

‘But, surely – well, that atomic mine is still highly unstable, is it not?’

‘I don’t think it’s quite so highly dangerous as it was. But why ask me? You’re sitting next to the expert.’

‘Of course. Dr Wickram. How do you see things now, sir?’

‘The Captain is right, or I hope he is. The radioactive emanations of the hydrogen missiles, from which of course the atomic mine is now separated, have an extremely limited range. They are no longer affecting the mine which should be now slowly beginning to stabilize itself. But I have to emphasize that it’s a slow process.’

‘How long will it be before it has fully stabilized itself? By which I mean when will it reach a condition when a passing vessel’s engines will have no effect on it?’

‘Ah. Well, now.’ Wickram’s tone was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. ‘As I’ve said, we’re in the realms of the unknown, the untested, but I have been making some calculations. Difficult calculations involving some rather advanced mathematics so I won’t bother you with those, but my estimate is that the mine should be quite safe in twelve hours at the most. Possibly even in six hours. At a lesser time than that – well, the risk would be unacceptably high.’

‘Damn you to hell, Talbot,’ Wotherspoon said. His voice was low and controlled but the ivory-knuckled fists showed the depths of his anger. ‘It’s my boat you’re talking about. It’s not the property of your damned Navy!’

‘I am aware of that, Professor, and I’m most damnably sorry about it.’ Talbot was with Hawkins, Wotherspoon and his wife in the admiral’s cabin. ‘But you are not coming along. Did you honestly imagine that the Royal Navy would idly stand by and let you, civilians, risk your lives for us?’ Talbot smiled. ‘It’s not only our duty but we’re getting paid for it.’

‘It’s not only bloody high-handed, it’s piracy! Hijack. That sort of illegal behaviour you’re sworn to destroy. You are, of course, prepared to resort to force in order to restrain me.’

‘If we have to, yes.’ Talbot nodded to the opened, darkened doorway. Wotherspoon turned, caught sight of three large figures half-hidden in the gloom. When he turned back, he was literally speechless with fury. ‘It’s the last thing we want to do,’ Talbot said, ‘and it’s totally unnecessary.’ He let an element of coldness creep into his voice. ‘Quite frankly, Wotherspoon, my primary concern is not your welfare. I think you’re being most extraordinarily selfish and totally inconsiderate. How long have you been married, Mrs Wotherspoon?’

‘How long have –’ She tried to smile but her heart wasn’t in it. ‘Almost six months.’

‘Less than six months.’ Talbot looked at Wotherspoon without enthusiasm. ‘And yet you’re willing to expose her to danger and – the chance is very real – to send her to her death because your stiff-necked pride has been wounded. You must be proud of yourself. Do you really want to go, Mrs Wotherspoon?’

‘Angelina.’ The correction was automatic and this time she did smile almost certainly because of the incongruity of it in the circumstances. ‘You put me in an impossible situation.’ She paused, then went on quickly: ‘No. No, you don’t. I don’t want to go. I don’t want James to go either. Delving around in antiquities is our business, not violence and death. Heaven knows I’m no latter-day Amazon and if there are any dragons waiting around to be killed I don’t want my husband to be St George. Please, James.’

Hawkins spoke for the first time. ‘I make no appeal to your emotions, Professor. All I ask you is to put yourself in Commander Talbot’s position. I think you would agree it is a pretty impossible one.’

‘Yes.’ Wotherspoon had unclenched his fists. ‘I see that.’

‘I think three signals are in order, John,’ Hawkins said. The Wotherspoons had left. ‘One to the White House, one to General Carson in Rome and one to Rear-Admiral Blyth. The same signal, coded of course, to each. How about “Settled weather with favourable north-west wind. Angelina about to sail with armed mine. Transfer of hydrogen missiles from plane to Kilcharran continuing smoothly.” That should fit the bill?’

‘Admirably. It should come as quite a shock to them all.’

‘We haven’t of late, I must admit, been sending them much in the way of good news.’

A small knot of interested spectators were gathered round the head of the gangway, the foot of which offered easy access to both the stern of the Angelina, whose sails were already hoisted, and the bows of the Ariadne’s launch. Among the more interested of the spectators was Andropulos.

He turned to Talbot and said: ‘How much longer now, Captain?’

‘Ten minutes. Thereabouts.’

Andropulos shook his head as if in disbelief. ‘And then all our troubles will be over?’

‘It’s beginning to look that way, isn’t it?’

‘It is indeed. Tell me, why is the launch there?’

‘Simple. It’s coming with us.’

‘Going with you? I don’t understand. Won’t the sound of its engines –’

‘Maybe trigger off the mine? The launch won’t start up until we’re at least three miles clear. It will then proceed to circle us, again at a distance of three miles, to warn off any vessels – powered vessels, that is – that threaten to come too close to us. We haven’t come this far, Mr Andropulos, to take any chances.’

‘The thought, the precaution, never occurred to me. Alas, I fear I will never make a man of action.’

Talbot gave him what Andropulos misinterpreted as a kindly smile. ‘One cannot be all things to all men, sir.’

‘You are ready to go, Captain?’ Hawkins said. He had just joined them.

‘A few minutes, sir. Sails are filling rather nicely, aren’t they?’

‘You are going, Captain?’ Andropulos seemed a trifle disconcerted.

‘Certainly. I’ve always rather fancied myself as the skipper of an Aegean lugger. You seem rather surprised, Mr Andropulos?’

‘I am. Rather, I was. But not now.’ He looked down to the deck of the Angelina where Van Gelder was adjusting a halyard on the foresail. ‘And of course, inevitably, Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder. Hand-picked men, eh, Captain? Hand-picked by yourself, of course. I congratulate you. I also salute you. I suspect that this is a much more dangerous mission than you have led us to understand, a mission so perilous that you have chosen not to delegate some members of your crew to carry it out.’

‘Nonsense, Mr Andropulos. You exaggerate. Well, Admiral, we’re off. Taking a median estimate on Dr Wickram’s time limits we should be disposing of this mine in nine hours’ time – six a.m. tomorrow. If the wind holds – there’s no guarantee that it will, of course – we’ll be well on our way to the Kásos Strait by then.’

Hawkins nodded. ‘And with luck – although I don’t see why the factor luck should enter into it – we should be picking you up in the early afternoon tomorrow. We shall remain with Captain Montgomery until he has finished loading the hydrogen missiles and until the destroyer I’ve radioed for comes to pick him up and escort him to Thessalonika. That should be between nine and ten in the morning. Then we’ll come looking for you.’ He turned his head. ‘You’re off, Mr Andropulos? I should have thought you would have remained to witness this rather historic moment.’

‘I intend to do just that. I also intended to record this historic moment. I go to fetch my trusty Leica. Well, Lieutenant Denholm’s trusty Leica. He lent it to me less than an hour ago.’

Talbot chatted briefly with Hawkins, said his goodbye, climbed down the gangway, had a brief word with Denholm on the launch and then boarded the Angelina. Van Gelder had already pulled in and coiled the bow rope. Talbot stooped over the cleat on the poop-deck to do the same with the stern rope when he became aware of a certain commotion and exclamations about his head. He straightened and looked up.

Andropulos had made his reappearance not with his trusty Leica but with what was probably an equally trusty and much more unpleasant Navy Colt .44, the muzzle of which was pressed against the temple of a plainly terrified Angelina Wotherspoon. Behind him loomed Alexander and Aristotle, both men similarly armed and both with the muzzles of their pistols similarly pointed at temples, those of Irene Charial and her friend Eugenia, neither of whom looked any happier than Angelina, which was to say that they looked very unhappy indeed. Having a pistol grinding into one’s temple is an unpleasant sensation for even the most hardened: for three young ladies whose nearest previous approach to violence must have been the printed page or some of the less-regarded TV psycho-dramas the effect must have been traumatic.

‘Don’t cast off quite yet, Captain,’ Andropulos said. ‘We’re coming with you.’

‘What in God’s name is the meaning of this devilry?’ Hawkins’s expression reflected an equal degree of shock and anger. ‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’

‘We have not taken leave of our senses. We are just taking leave of you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Hawkins said, ‘I just don’t understand. This is the way you repay us for having saved your lives and offered you every hospitality?’

‘We thank you both for your care and your kindness. However, we have no wish to overstay our welcome or impose upon you further.’ He jabbed Angelina’s temple with a force that made her gasp with pain. ‘After you, Mrs Wotherspoon.’

The six of them descended the gangway in succession and boarded the Angelina. Andropulos transferred the attention of his Colt from Angelina to Talbot and Van Gelder.

‘Nothing rash or heroic or gallant, if you please,’ Andropulos said. ‘Especially gallant. It could only have the most distressing consequences, both for you and the three young ladies.’

‘Is this a joke?’ Talbot said.

‘Ah! Do I detect a certain loss of composure, a crack in the monolithic calm? If I were you, Captain, I would not take me for a joker.’

‘I don’t.’ Talbot made no attempt to conceal his bitterness. ‘I took you for a wealthy businessman and a man of honour. I took you at your face value. I suppose we all learn from our mistakes.’

‘You are too late to learn from this mistake. You are correct in one respect – I freely confess to being a wealthy businessman. A very wealthy one. As to the second charge?’ He shrugged his indifference. ‘Honour is in the eye of the beholder. Let us not waste time. Instruct this young man –’ Denholm standing in the bows of the launch was less than six feet away ‘– to follow his orders precisely. The orders, I understand, that you have given him, Captain. That is, not to start his engines until we have put three miles away from him and then to circle us, at that same distance, to fend off unwanted intruders.’

‘Lieutenant Denholm understands his orders perfectly clearly.’

‘In which case, cast off.’

The wind was fresh, but not strong, and it took the Angelina quite some time to overcome its initial inertia and reach a speed of three or four knots. Slowly the Ariadne dropped astern and after fifteen minutes it was at least a mile distant.

‘Excellent,’ Andropulos said. ‘Rather gratifying, is it not, when things go exactly according to plan.’ There was no hint of undue satisfaction in his voice. ‘Tell me, Commander Talbot, would you believe me when I say that I am genuinely fond, very fond, of my niece and her friend Eugenia and might even come to regard Mrs Wotherspoon in the same light?’

‘I don’t know why I should believe you and I don’t see why it should concern me. It could be.’

‘And would you believe me when I say I wouldn’t harm a hair of their heads.’

‘I’m afraid I do.’

‘Afraid?’

‘Others wouldn’t believe it, or wouldn’t know whether to believe it or not. Which makes them perfect hostages.’

‘Exactly. I don’t need to say that they will come to no harm in my hands.’ He looked thoughtfully at Talbot. ‘You are singularly incurious as to the reasons for my conduct.’

‘I am very curious. But one does not become a wealthy businessman by engaging in idle tittle-tattle. If I were to ask you, you would tell me exactly what you wanted to tell me. No more, no less.’

‘How very true. Now, a different point entirely. The three young ladies pose absolutely no threat to me. You and Van Gelder are a very different kettle of fish. My two friends and I regard you as highly dangerous individuals. We think you are capable of concocting devious and cunning plans and using a great deal of violence in putting those plans to the test – if, that is, you thought there was the slightest chance of success. You will understand, therefore, that we will have to immobilize you. I will remain by the wheel here. You two gentlemen, accompanied by the three ladies, will proceed to the saloon where Aristotle who, as you will readily understand, is very good at knots, will tie you hand and foot, while Alexander, who is every bit as proficient with a gun as Aristotle is with ropes, will ensure that proceedings are conducted in a peaceful fashion.’

Hawkins was bent over Professor Wotherspoon who was lying half propped-up on a sofa in the wardroom. Wotherspoon, dazed and making odd choking noises that were part way between moans and curses, was struggling to open his eyes. Finally, with the aid of his fingers, he managed to do just that.

‘What the hell has happened?’ The watchers had to strain to catch his words, which were no more than an asthmatic croak. ‘Where am I?’

‘Take this.’ Hawkins put an arm around his shoulders and a glass of brandy to his lips. Wotherspoon sipped, gagged, then drained the contents.

‘What has happened?’

‘You’ve been banged over the back of the head,’ Grierson said, ‘and not lightly, either. “Sapped”, I believe, is the current term. By the butt of the revolver, I should guess.’

Wotherspoon struggled to a sitting position. ‘Who?’

‘Andropulos,’ Hawkins said. ‘Or one of his criminal friends. Some more brandy is in order, Doctor?’

‘Normally, no,’ Grierson said. ‘In this case, yes. I know the back of your head must hurt badly, Professor, but don’t touch it. Bruised, bleeding, puffy but no fracture.’

‘Andropulos has hijacked your vessel,’ Hawkins said. ‘Along, of course, with the atomic mine. He has also taken hostages.’

Wotherspoon nodded and winced at the pain it caused him. ‘My wife, of course, is one of them.’

‘I am sorry. Along with Irene Charial and her friend Eugenia. There was no way we could stop them.’

‘Did you try?’

‘Would you have tried if you saw the barrel of a Colt screwing into your wife’s temple? And two other guns screwed into the temples of the two other ladies?’

‘I hardly think so.’ Wotherspoon shook his head. ‘I’m trying to come to terms with the situation. With a head like an over-ripe pumpkin about to burst, it’s not easy. Talbot and Van Gelder. What’s happened to them?’

‘We don’t know, of course. Clapped in irons, handcuffed or some such, I should imagine.’

‘Or permanently disposed of. What in God’s name is behind all this, Admiral? Do you think this fellow Andropulos has gone off his rocker?’

‘By his own standards, he’s probably under the impression that he’s perfectly sane. We have every reason to believe that he is a long-term and highly professional criminal operating on a hitherto unprecedented international scale. Terrorism and drugs would appear to be his forte. There is no time to go into that at the moment. The immediate point is that Lieutenant Denholm is very shortly leaving in the launch to follow them. Do you feel up to accompanying him?’

‘Follow them? Board and capture them? I should say.’

‘As you as much as said yourself, Professor, your mind isn’t yet firing on all cylinders. If the launch were to go within a couple of miles of the Angelina its engine beat would probably detonate the atomic mine.’

‘As you say, I’m not at my best. But if you have any spare rifles or pistols there would be no harm in taking them along. Just in case.’

‘There will be no firearms. If there were to be any exchange of fire you know where the first bullet would lodge, don’t you?’

‘Yes. You do put things so nicely. Less than an hour ago you were prepared to restrain me at all costs. You seem to have changed your mind, Admiral.’

‘It’s not my mind that has changed. It’s the circumstances.’

‘A rapid change in circumstances,’ the President said, ‘does give one a rather more balanced view of life. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I enjoyed that lunch, but then, a couple of hours ago I didn’t expect or wish to have any today. Although the memory of the treachery will be with us for a long time one has to admit that the discreet if tragic settlement of the Pentagon question removes a major burden of worry. But that was only a local and, let us confess it, a basically selfish concern.’ He waved the paper he held in his hand. ‘This, of course, is what matters. The good ship Angelina, with this damned bomb aboard, is heading steadily south-east and with every second that passes it is putting another yard – or is it two? – between itself and all the horrors of Santorini. It is not too much to say, gentlemen, that a holocaust of unimaginable proportions has been averted.’ He raised his glass. ‘I give you a toast, Sir John. The Royal Navy.’

The President had barely returned his glass to the table when a messenger entered. The President glanced at him briefly, looked away, then looked at him again. All traces of satisfaction drained from his face.

‘Bad news, Johnson?’

‘I’m afraid so, Mr President.’

‘The worst? The very worst?’

‘Not the very worst. But bad enough.’

The President took the message, read it in silence, then looked up and said: ‘I’m afraid our celebrations have been rather premature. The Angelina has been hijacked.’

Nobody repeated the word ‘hijacked’. Nobody said anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

‘Message reads: “Angelina and armed mine hijacked by Andropulos and two criminal associates. Five hostages taken – Commander Talbot, Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder and three ladies, one of whom is Andropulos’s niece. Physically impossible for Angelina to return to area so major danger no longer exists. Will keep you posted hourly. Our major and only concern now recovery of hostages.”’

‘Dear me, dear me,’ Sir John said. ‘This is distressing. Both ominous and confusing. Here we have this madman – or genius, who knows how much truth there is in the old maxim that they are the two sides of the same coin – loose in the Levant with an armed atomic mine aboard. Does he know that it’s armed? One rather suspects he doesn’t. Where have the three ladies suddenly appeared from and what were they doing aboard one of Her Majesty’s frigates in the first place? Why, of all improbabilities, should this villain elect to kidnap his own niece? And why, not to mention how, did this same villain kidnap the captain of the frigate and one of his senior officers? And where, in the name of all that’s holy, does he hope to sail his ship, cargo and prisoners, when he must know that every ship and plane in NATO will be searching for him? But he does so hope. That is obvious. His long and spectacularly successful criminal career, undetected until now, proves that he is a devious, cunning and brilliant operator. He has another scheme in mind. Not a man, as we have now learnt to our cost and should have known from his record, to be underestimated. A villain, indeed, but a very resourceful villain.’

‘Indeed,’ the President said. ‘One can only hope that Commander Talbot proves to be even more resourceful.’

‘I have the uncomfortable feeling,’ Sir John said, ‘that at the present moment Talbot is in no position to prove anything.’

Chapter 10

On the hour of midnight, Eastern Mediterranean time, Commander Talbot was in no position to prove anything and, judging from his uncomfortable position on a sofa in the Angelina’s saloon, with his ankles lashed together and his hands bound behind his back, it didn’t seem that he would be in a position to prove anything for quite some time to come. Van Gelder, equally uncomfortable at the other end of the sofa, was in no better case. Aristotle, with a wholly unnecessary pistol held loosely across his knee, was seated very comfortably indeed in a large armchair facing the sofa. The three ladies were in smaller armchairs towards the after end of the saloon and didn’t look at all comfortable. They hadn’t exchanged a word for upwards of two hours. There didn’t seem to be much to talk about and all three, understandably enough, were preoccupied with their own thoughts.

Talbot said: ‘Tell Andropulos I want to speak to him.’

‘Do you now?’ Aristotle lowered the glass from which he had been sipping. ‘You are not in a position, Captain, to give orders to anyone.’

‘Would you kindly present my compliments to the captain and say I would like to talk to him.’

‘That is better.’ Aristotle rose, crossed to the short flight of steps leading up to the wheelhouse and said something in Greek. Andropulos appeared almost at once. He, too, was needlessly armed. There was a relaxed and confident, even cheerful, air about him.

‘When you were aboard my ship,’ Talbot said, ‘we catered for your every desire. Whatever you wanted, you had but to ask. I wish I could say the same for Greek hospitality. Well, your version of it.’

‘I think I take your point. It can’t be easy for you to lie there and watch Aristotle steadily lowering the level in a bottle of retsina. You are thirsty?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s easily remedied.’

In very short order, Aristotle had their bonds quickly and skilfully re-arranged, with Talbot’s left wrist and Van Gelder’s right loosely but securely attached to each other. Their free hands now held a glass apiece.

‘I am becoming suspicious, Captain,’ Andropulos said. He neither looked nor sounded suspicious. ‘You seem totally unconcerned as to the immediate past and the immediate future. I find it very curious indeed.’

‘There’s nothing curious about it. It’s your behaviour that I find extraordinarily curious although I have to admit that that is based entirely on my complete ignorance of what is going on. I fail to understand why you, a very wealthy and, I assume, highly respected businessman, should suddenly decide to put yourself outside the bounds of law. I don’t have to tell you that, by hijacking the Angelina, you have done just that. I can’t even begin to understand why you should jeopardize your career, perhaps even risk a prison sentence, although I have no doubt that with the kind of money you must possess you wouldn’t have too much trouble in bending the law in your direction. Most of all, I don’t understand how you can possibly hope to get away with it. By six o’clock, possibly seven, tomorrow morning every ship and plane in NATO will be looking for you and you must know that it will take very little time to locate you.’

‘You have this famous Royal Navy signal, locate, engage and destroy. Locate, yes. Destroy, no.’ Andropulos was quite undisturbed. ‘Not with the kind of cargo and very select group of hostages I have on board. As for jeopardizing my career, well, I think the time comes in many people’s lives when they should abandon the old ways and strike out in a fresh direction. Don’t you, Captain?’

‘Not where I’m concerned. And perhaps, where you are concerned, it’s not a choice but a necessity. You appear to have taken a fresh step along the road to crime. It’s just possible – it’s difficult to imagine but it is possible – that many of your past steps have led along that same road and that your past is catching up with you. But that’s just empty speculation. I really don’t know and, to be honest, I no longer care. Could I have some more wine?’

‘What are you going to do with us?’ Irene Charial was trying to keep her voice steady but the undercurrent of strain was there. ‘What is going to happen to us?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, my dear. Nothing is going to happen to you. You heard me saying that to Commander Talbot when we came aboard. Unthinkable that you should come to any harm at my hands.’

‘Where are you taking us?’

‘I’m not taking you anywhere. Oh dear, that does sound ominous. To what will probably be my lifelong regret, I shall be parting company with you. Dear, dear, that doesn’t sound much better. Within a very short time I shall be transferring you aboard the Ariadne’s launch and bidding you farewell.’

‘And the two officers here? Do you shoot them or just tie their hands up again and throw them overboard?’

‘I must protest, Irene,’ Van Gelder said. ‘Don’t go around putting ideas into the man’s head.’

‘I had looked for more intelligence from my niece,’ Andropulos said. ‘If it had been my intention to dispose of them, I should have done so immediately we came aboard.’

‘What’s to stop them from coming after you? You know they can call for help.’

‘The Lord help us,’ Van Gelder said. ‘One shudders to think of the minimal levels of university entrance these days.’

‘I’m afraid I have to agree with both Van Gelder and your uncle,’ Talbot said. ‘You are naïve.’ He cocked his fingers, pistol fashion. ‘Poof! Exit engine. Poof! Exit radio.’

Andropulos smiled. ‘As you say, a double poof should do it nicely.’

Denholm looked out at the light flickering from the north. ‘What does the Angelina say, Myers?’

‘“Stop two miles south-east of us and cut engines.” How shall I answer, sir?’

‘We don’t have any option. “Wilco.”’ He waited until Myers had triggered the reply, then said: ‘What’s the latest news about the Taormina?’ The Ariadne had been monitoring the radio traffic between the Angelina and the Taormina for almost three hours and had the position of the Taormina – and themselves – pinpointed to within a few hundred yards.

‘Just ten miles north of Avgó Island and moving, pretty slowly, north.’

‘Proceeding, in what one might say in happier circumstances, with admirable caution.’ The Ariadne had picked up Andropulos’s warning to the Taormina of the danger of their coming together too soon. ‘How long before they make contact?’

‘Three hours, give or take. A bit longer, I should think, if the Angelina stops off alongside for a bit.’

‘Do you think,’ Wotherspoon said, ‘that they might have in mind to sink us, Lieutenant?’

‘I would be grateful, Professor, if you didn’t even think of such things.’

Under the watchful eyes of three men with three guns McKenzie and Brown took and secured the ropes of the Angelina as it came alongside. First aboard was Andropulos himself, followed by Angelina Wotherspoon, who immediately seemed bent on strangling the Professor, then the two girls, Talbot and Van Gelder with their hands still bound behind their backs and finally Alexander and Aristotle, the last carrying a bag.

‘We will not stay long,’ Andropulos said. ‘One or two small things to attend to first, then we shall be on our way.’

‘May one ask what is in that bag?’ Wotherspoon said. ‘A delayed action bomb?’

‘Mankind has so little trust in one another these days,’ Andropulos said. He shook the bag gently and a slight tinkling noise resulted. ‘To while away the time while you await rescue. Commander Talbot’s idea, really. After all, it’s your liquor, Wotherspoon. This, I take it, is the radio.’

‘Do me a last favour,’ Talbot said. ‘A favour to all of us. Don’t blow it apart with a bullet. Just tap it gently with the butt of your revolver. Similarly with the engine. It requires very little effort to destroy the distributor and the plugs.’ He nodded towards the armed mine lying in its cradle. ‘I’m not at all sure how our friend here would react to the explosive crack of a pistol shot.’

‘A well taken point,’ Andropulos said. ‘We just don’t know how temperamental that mine is.’ He reversed his grip on the pistol, levered open the face-plate of the radio and swept the butt across the transistors. It took him scarcely more time to attend to the engine. He next turned his attention to the signalling lamp, smashed it thoroughly and turned to Myers. ‘Is there a spare?’

Myers swore at him softly, and Andropulos raised his gun. Talbot said: ‘Don’t be a fool, Myers. Give it to him.’

Myers, tight-lipped, handed over a small hand-signalling lamp. Andropulos broke the face and threw it into the water. He then turned his attention to a small metal box attached to the deck just outside the wheelhouse and jerked his gun in McKenzie’s direction. ‘The distress flares there. Over the side with them, if you please.’ He was silent for a moment, as if considering. ‘Engine, radio, signalling lamps, distress flares. No, I don’t think there’s any other way you can communicate with anyone. Not that there’s anyone around to communicate with. I trust you do not have too long and uncomfortable a wait before you are picked up.’ He turned to Irene Charial. ‘Well, then, my dear, I will say goodbye.’

She did not answer him, did not even look at him. Andropulos shrugged, stepped across the gunwales and disappeared inside the Angelina’s wheelhouse. Alexander and Aristotle followed him aboard, retrieved the lines that had secured them to the launch and pushed off with boathooks. The Angelina got slowly under way and headed off once more towards the south-east.

McKenzie used his seaman’s knife to slice through the ropes that bound the wrists of Talbot and Van Gelder. ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘certainly used a lot of enthusiasm to tie those knots.’

‘That they did.’ Talbot flexed painful and swollen wrists and hands and looked at the bag Aristotle had brought aboard. ‘However, using two hands, I might just be able to hold something in them.’

Irene Charial looked at him. ‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘Make it a generous measure.’

She stared some more at him, looked away and reached for the bag. Wotherspoon said: ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Captain? How can you be so abnormally calm? You’ve lost out, haven’t you? Lost out all along the line.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ The wind was fresh, the sky cloudless and the full moon, abnormally large and bright, laid a golden bar across the Sea of Crete. Even at the distance of half a mile every detail of the Angelina was startlingly clear. ‘The world, of course, will say that Andropulos has lost out. Andropulos and his two murderous friends.’ Irene was still staring at him, her expression blank and uncomprehending. ‘Things never quite work out the way you want them to.’

‘I’m sure you know what you’re talking about.’ Wotherspoon’s tone of voice left no doubt that he was quite sure that Talbot didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘And you took a hell of a chance there, if I may say so, Captain. He could have killed you and Van Gelder.’

‘He could have tried. Then he would have died himself. Himself, Alexander and Aristotle.’

‘You had your hands tied behind your back. And Van Gelder.’ Wotherspoon was openly incredulous. ‘How could you –’

‘Chief Petty Officer McKenzie and Marine Sergeant Brown are highly trained and highly qualified marksmen. The only two on the Ariadne. With hand-guns, they are quite deadly. That is why they are along. Andropulos and his friends would have died without knowing what had hit them. Show the Professor, Chief.’

McKenzie reached under the small chart table, brought out two Navy Colts and handed them without a word to Wotherspoon. Quite some seconds passed in silence, then he looked up from the guns and said in a quiet voice: ‘You knew those guns were there.’

‘I put them there.’

‘You put them there.’ He shook his head as if in disbelief. ‘You could have used those guns.’

‘Killed them, you mean?’

‘Well, no. That wouldn’t have been necessary. Wounded them, perhaps. Or just taken them prisoner.’

‘What were your orders, Chief?’

‘Shoot to kill.’

‘Shoot to kill.’ It was a night for silences. ‘But you didn’t, did you?’

‘I elected not to.’

Irene Charial clutched her arms and shivered, as if a sudden chill had fallen on the evening air. Nor was she alone in sensing the sudden and almost tangible drop in temperature. Both Eugenia and Angela Wotherspoon were staring at him, their eyes wide with uncertainty, then with fear and then with a sudden sick foreknowledge. Talbot’s words still hung in the air, the fading echo of a sentence of execution.

Talbot said to Myers: ‘The radio, if you would, Chief.’

‘Two minutes, sir.’ Myers moved aft, returned with a hammer and chisel and began to attack the floorboards of the wheelhouse. He pulled up a creaking plank, reached under and brought out a small compact radio with speaker attached. ‘You talk in here, sir. Reply comes from the box. After, that is, you’ve cranked the handle.’ Talbot nodded and spun the handle.

‘HMS Ariadne here.’ The voice was very distinct, very clear and unquestionably the voice of Admiral Hawkins.

‘Talbot, sir. The three ladies, Van Gelder and I have been returned to the launch. Well and unharmed. Andropulos and his two friends are on their way again, moving south-east.’

‘Well, thank God for that, anyway. Damn your eyes, Talbot, you’ve guessed right again. You’ve made up your mind what to do?’

‘I have, sir.’

‘For the record, do you want a direct order?’

‘Off or on the record, no order will be necessary. But thank you. Do you have an estimate of their meeting time, sir.’

‘Yes, I do. At their current speeds – the Taormina is still drifting along – and on their converging courses, about two hours. Three-thirty.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll call again in one hour.’

‘The Taormina?’ Wotherspoon said. ‘Who or what the hell is the Taormina?’

‘A diving ship, in which Andropulos has an interest. By interest, I mean that he probably owns the damn thing.’

‘Commander Talbot?’ Irene Charial’s voice was very low.

‘Yes?’

‘Admiral Hawkins said “you’ve guessed right again”. What did he mean by that?’

‘Just what he meant, I suppose.’

‘Please.’ She essayed a smile but gave up. ‘You all seem to think that I’m not very bright, but I don’t deserve that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m beginning to think that you’re not much given to guessing.’ She looked at the two guns. ‘You didn’t guess that those were here. I don’t think you guessed, I think you knew, that my uncle and the other two were armed.’

‘I knew.’

‘How?’

‘Jenkins, our wardroom steward, had been writing a letter to his family. For some reason, maybe he’d forgotten something, he went back up to the wardroom. He came across your uncle, or his associates, opening up a box in the passageway outside the wardroom. That box – it’s a standard fitting on most naval ships – contained Colt .44s. So they killed Jenkins and threw him over the side. I am sorry, Irene, really and truly sorry. I know how terrible all this must be for you.’

This time she did manage a smile although it was a pretty wan attempt.

‘Terrible, yes, but not as terrible as I thought it might be. Did you guess that my uncle would try to hijack the Angelina?’

‘Yes.’

‘And take the two of you hostages?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you guess he would take three young ladies as hostages?’

‘No. I make guesses and I take chances, but I would never have taken a chance like that. If I’d even dreamed of the possibility, I’d have killed them there and then. On the Ariadne.’

‘I made a mistake about you, Captain. You talk a lot about killing but I think you’re a very kind man.’

‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that.’ Talbot smiled. ‘You made a mistake?’

‘Irene is a pretty fair judge of character, sir,’ Van Gelder said. ‘She had you down as a cruel and inhuman monster.’

‘I said nothing of the kind! When you talked to my uncle on the Angelina you said you knew nothing about what was going on. That wasn’t true, was it? You knew all along.’

‘Well, it’s as you say. I’m a pretty fair old guesser. I have to admit that I had a lot of help from Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder and Lieutenant Denholm is no slouch at the guessing game either. I’m afraid you’ll have to know about your uncle some time, and you may as well know now. It sounds an exaggeration, but it is not, to say that he’s a criminal in the world class, if not in a class of his own, and a totally ruthless killer. He specializes in, organizes and dominates international drug-smuggling and international terrorism. God only knows how many hundreds, more likely thousands, lie dead at his hands. We know, and know beyond any doubt, that he is as guilty as any man can be, but it might take months, even years, to amass the necessary proof. By that time, he would have disappeared. That’s what he’s doing now – disappearing. Even in the past couple of days he’s been doing not too badly. He murdered the engineer, cook and steward on the Delos. They found out too much. What, we shall probably never know.’

‘How on earth can you know this?’ All the colour had left her face and her face registered pure shock. Not grief or horror, just shock. ‘How on earth can you guess that, far less prove it?’

‘Because Van Gelder and I went down to examine the hull on the bottom. He also blew up his own yacht in order to get aboard the Ariadne. You weren’t to know this, of course. Neither, unfortunately for your uncle, did he. For good measure, he’s also been responsible for the suicides of a very senior general and a very senior admiral, both Americans, in the past few hours. He doesn’t know that, but if he did I’m sure it might cost him anything up to a minute’s sleep.’ He looked at McKenzie. ‘Chief, this retsina is dreadful. Can you do no better than this for your long-suffering captain?’

‘It is pretty awful, sir. I’ve tried it. All respects to Professor Wotherspoon, but I’m afraid Greek plonk is very much an acquired taste. There seems to be a bottle of scotch and one of gin in a locker in the wheelhouse. Don’t know how it got there. Sergeant Brown appears to think that it’s marked up in your Mess bill.’

‘I’ll court-martial you both later. Meantime, don’t just hang around.’

‘He’s going to die, isn’t he, sir?’ Brown said, ‘I’m sorry, miss, but if half of what the Captain says is true, then he’s an inhuman man who doesn’t belong in a human world. And I believe everything the Captain has said is true.’

‘I know Jenkins was your best friend, Sergeant, and I cannot say how sorry I am. He will die and by his own hand. He is his own executioner.’ Talbot turned to Eugenia. ‘You heard him mention the words “Manhattan Project”?’

‘Yes, I did. I didn’t know what he meant.’

‘Neither did we, at first. But we worked it out. Andropulos wasn’t interested in the hydrogen bombs. There’s no way you can use a hydrogen bomb as a terrorist weapon. It’s too final, it would achieve nothing and no terrorist would dare admit the responsibility of using it. It would have been impossible for any terrorist to transport anyway. But he was interested in atomic mines and he knew there were three of those aboard this plane. His original plan, we think, was to dump those in the sea approaches to some of the world’s greatest seaports, like San Francisco, New York, London or Rotterdam and let the respective countries know of it. He would inform those countries that he had the means to detonate those mines by means of a long-range, pre-set radio signal and that any attempt to locate, remove or neutralize them might or might not activate the mine and, of course, destroy the investigating vessel.

‘It would have effectively paralysed all seaborne trade and passenger traffic in and out of those ports. It would also have had the additional holier-than-thou advantage that if any such atomic explosion did occur the fault would lie squarely at the door of the country responsible for the explosion and not at the door of the terrorists. The Manhattan Project mine would have been laid somewhere in the Ambrose Channel on the approaches to the Lower New York Bay. It was a brilliant scheme, typical of a brilliant but twisted mind. It had one drawback. It wouldn’t have worked. Andropulos had no means of knowing that. But we did.’

‘How in the world could you know that?’ Wotherspoon said.

‘I’ll come to that. So, Andropulos gets his bomb. Perfect for his purposes, or so he thinks. But there was something else he didn’t know. When the plane crashed it activated a timing mechanism inside the mine. When that mechanism ran out the mine was armed and ready to explode at the first sound of a ship’s engines. Any kind of engine, in fact. That mine aboard the Angelina is armed. But Andropulos fell for that gobbledygook that Wickram fed him about its being temporarily unstable because of the radioactive emanations from the hydrogen bombs. It’s permanently unstable and just waiting to go. Chief, you are being strangely remiss.’

‘Sorry, sir.’ McKenzie handed over a glass of scotch. ‘You can hardly blame me, sir. A man doesn’t often get a chance to listen to a story like this.’

Talbot sampled his drink, ‘It is to be hoped that you will never hear another like it again.’

‘So what’s going to happen?’ Wotherspoon asked.

‘One of two things could happen. He could try to transfer the mine to the Taormina, the sound of whose engines would blow them all to a better world. Well, in the case of Andropulos and his friends, we would hope a much worse world. The crew of the Taormina may be a relatively innocent bunch. Or he could elect to sail it to Tobruk, his final destination. Don’t forget, he would think it perfectly safe to do so because, as far as he knows, the world would still think that he has five hostages aboard. At the sound of the first ship’s or industrial engine in Tobruk, the mine is activated. How many guiltless people dead? Ten thousand? A minimum estimate. Lieutenant Denholm, I grow tired of my own voice. You are alleged to be the Ariadne’s electronics officer. Would you show them this device and explain its purpose.’

‘It’s called the krytron,’ Denholm said. ‘Looks like a small and rather old-fashioned portable radio, doesn’t it? This is what the Captain meant when he said that if Andropulos knew of the existence of this instrument he wouldn’t have gone to all the vast trouble of obtaining an atomic mine. By carrying out a very few simple actions – it is in fact an extraordinarily complex mechanism and I know practically nothing about it – you can send an electronic impulse on a selected wave-length and detonate an atomic bomb. If Andropulos were to have laid this mine in the Ambrose Channel it could have been destroyed from almost any given distance without a ship or a plane going anywhere near it.’

Wotherspoon said: ‘Is one allowed to ask how you so conveniently came by this lethal instrument?’

‘We sent to America for it. It arrived yesterday.’

‘That implies two things. You had prior knowledge of the existence of this device and you’ve known for quite some time about exactly what Andropulos was up to. Did anyone else know?’

‘The Captain disapproves of his officers gossiping.’

Wotherspoon turned to Talbot. ‘You’re going to blow up the Angelina? My Angelina!’

‘Well, yes. I dare say there will be some form of compensation.’

‘What compensation?’

‘How should I know? I’m not sufficiently senior to make any offers. I’ll have to ask the Admiral.’

‘Does it have to be done this way?’ Irene said. ‘You do have a radio. Couldn’t you just tell him to drop the bomb over the side and then have him picked up later?’

‘Apart from the fact that he wouldn’t believe me, I wouldn’t do it anyway. I have told you that obtaining proof against him might take months, even years. I suggest that you and Eugenia ask your respective fathers about him. You will find that they will totally agree with what I am about to do, and that is not to let a mad dog run loose in the world.’

Van Gelder said: ‘This is what you meant by saying, not once but many times, that Andropulos would never come to trial?’

‘He has been tried.’

At 2.30 a.m. Talbot called up the Ariadne and was through to the Admiral immediately.

‘It’s two-thirty, sir. Has the Kilcharran brought all the hydrogen missiles aboard?’

‘It has.’

‘So we go. Two small points, sir. Professor Wotherspoon seems somewhat peeved by the imminent – ah – demise of the Angelina.’

‘Tell him it’s all in a good cause.’

‘Yes, sir. Do you think the Ministry of Defence could run to a replacement?’

‘Guaranteed.’

‘He also mentioned something about gold-plated taps in his bathroom.’

‘Good God! The other small point? A mercifully small point, one trusts.’

‘A bagatelle, sir. How do you view the suggestion that, after all their harrowing experiences, the crew of the Ariadne deserves some leave?’

‘Precisely the same thought had occurred to me. A week, I think. Where do you suggest?’

‘Piræus, sir. I thought it would be rather a nice gesture to take the two girls back home. It would also be an excellent centre for Professor Wotherspoon and his lady to start looking round for gold-plated taps. We will call again in five minutes.’

Talbot replaced the telephone and said to McKenzie and Brown: ‘A couple of sweeps out, if you please, and have the bows lined up to the south-east. Well, Professor, what do you think of the Admiral’s generous offer?’

‘I’m staggered.’

‘So you might well be, as the Admiralty was under no obligation whatsoever to replace it. You must be well aware that Andropulos intended to sink it anyway. Lieutenant Denholm, pass me the krytron.’

‘It’s my job, sir. You can’t have forgotten that I’m your electronics officer.’

‘It’s also your job to call to mind the rules and regulations about seniority,’ Van Gelder said. ‘Pass it to me.’

Talbot reached out and took the krytron, already connected to a battery, from Denholm. ‘Neither of you. When we get to Piraeus, I think that those two young ladies will feel under a moral obligation to show you around the University precincts and indulge in other such-like cultural activities. I don’t think, somehow, that they would feel entirely comfortable in the presence of whoever pressed this button.’

Talbot cracked both orange domes with the hammer, rotated the switches through 180° and pressed the button.

‘“Commander Talbot has elected to destroy and has destroyed the Angelina by detonating the atomic mine. He had my one hundred per cent encouragement and support. Andropulos and his two friends were aboard the Angelina.”’

The President shook his head in disbelief and laid the message down. ‘This Commander Talbot. A totally ruthless and highly resourceful man.’

‘Not ruthless, sir,’ Sir John said. ‘A kind and thoughtful man. If he were ruthless, he could have permitted the destruction of a ship or a city. But resourceful? Yes, I rather think he is.’

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Also by the Author

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1987

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1986

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006174530

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007289400

Version 2

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Alistair Maclean

The Lonely Sea

Collected Short Stories

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

The Dileas

St George and the Dragon

The Arandora Star

Rawalpindi

The Sinking of the Bismarck

The Meknes

MacHinery and the Cauliflowers

Lancastria

McCrimmon and the Blue Moonstones

They Sweep the Seas

City of Benares

The Gold Watch

Rendezvous

The Jervis Bay

The Black Storm

The Good Samaritan

Postscript: Rewards and Responsibilities of Success

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Dileas

Three hours gone, Mr MacLean, three hours—and never a word of the lifeboat.

You can imagine just how it was. There were only the four of us there—Eachan, Torry Mor, old Grant, and myself. Talk? Never a word among the lot of us, nor even the heart of a dram—and there on the table, was a new bottle of Talisker, and Eachan not looking for a penny.

We just sat there like a lot of stookies, Seumas Grant with his expressionless face and yon wicked old pipe of his bubbling away, and the rest of us desperately busy with studying the pattern of the wallpaper. Listening to the screech of the wind, we were, and the hail like chuckies battering against the windows of the hotel. Dhia! What a night that was! And the worst of it was, we couldn’t do a thing but wait. My, but we were a right cheery crowd.

I think we all gave a wee bit jump when the telephone rang. Eachan hurried away and was back in a moment beaming all over. One look at yon great moonface of his and we felt as if the Pladda Lighthouse had been lifted off our backs.

‘Four glasses, gentlemen, and see’s over the Talisker. That was the lightkeeper at Creag Dearg. The Molly Ann got there in time—just. The puffer’s gone, but all the crew were taken off.’

He pushed the glasses over and looked straight at old Grant.

‘Well, Seumas, what have you to say now? The Molly Ann got there—and Donald Archie and Lachlan away over by Scavaig. Perhaps you would be saying it’s a miracle, eh, Seumas?’

There was no love lost between these two, I can tell you. Mind you, most of us were on Eachan’s side. He was a hard man, was old Seumas Grant. Well respected, right enough, but no one had any affection for him and, by Jove, he had none for us—none for anyone at all, except for Lachlan and Donald, his sons. For old Seumas, the sun rose to shine on them alone. His motherless sons: for them the croft, for them the boat, for them his every waking thought. But a hard man, Mr Maclean. Aloof and—what’s the word?—remote. Kept himself to himself, you might say.

‘It’s a miracle when anyone is saved on a night like this, Eachan.’ Old Grant’s voice was slow and deep.

‘But without Donald and Lachlan?’ Eachan pressed. Torry, I remember shifted in his seat, and I looked away. We didn’t care for this too much—it wasn’t right.

‘Big Neil’s weel enough in his own way,’ Grant said, kind of quiet. ‘But he’ll never be the lifeboat coxswain Lachie is—he hasn’t got the feel of the sea—’

Just then the hotel door crashed open, nearly lifted off its hinges by the wind. Peter the Post came stumbling in, heaved the door shut and stood there glistening in his oilskins. It only required one look at him to see that something was far wrong.

‘The lifeboat, Eachan, the Molly Ann!’ he jerked out, very quick and urgent. ‘Any word of her yet? Hurry, man, hurry!’

Eachan looked at him in surprise.

‘Why surely, Peter. We’ve just heard. She’s lying off Creag Dearg and…’

‘Creag Dearg! Oh Dhia, Dhia, Dhia!’ Peter the Post sunk down into a chair and gazed dully into the fire. ‘Twenty miles away—twenty miles. And here’s Iain Chisholm just in from Tarbert farm—three miles in four minutes on yon big Velocette of his—to say that the Buidhe ferry is out in the middle of the Sound, firing distress rockets. And the Molly Ann at Creag Dearg. Mo chreach, mo chreach!’ He shook his head slowly from side to side.

‘The ferry!’ I said stupidly. ‘The ferry! Big John must be smashed mad to take her out on a night like this!’

‘And every boat in the fishing fleet sheltering up by Loch Torridon like enough,’ said Torry bitterly.

There was a long silence, then old Grant was on his feet, still puffing away.

‘All except mine, Torry Mor,’ he said, buttoning up his oilskins. ‘It’s God’s blessing that Donal’ and Lachie went to Scavaig to look over this new drifter.’ He stopped and looked slowly around. ‘I’m thinking I’ll be needing a bit hand.’

We just stared at him, and when Eachan spoke it was like a man in a stound.

‘You mean you’ll take yon old tub out in this, Seumas?’ Eachan was staggered. ‘Forty years old if she’s a day—and the seas like houses roaring straight down the Sound. Why, you’ll be smashed to pieces, man—before you’re right clear of the harbour mouth.’

‘Lachie would go.’ Old Grant stared at the ground. ‘He’s the coxswain. He would go—and Donal’. I canna be letting my boys down.’

‘It’s suicide, Mr Grant,’ I urged him. ‘Like Eachan says, it’s almost certain death.’

‘There’s no almost about it for the poor souls out on that ferry.’ He reached for his sou’wester and turned to the door. ‘Maybe I’ll be managing right enough.’

Eachan flung the counter-flap up with a crash.

‘You’re a stiff-necked old fool, Seumas Grant,’ he shouted angrily, ‘and you’ll roast in hell for your infernal pride!’ He turned back and snatched a couple of bottles of brandy from the shelves. ‘Maybe these’ll come in handy,’ he muttered to himself, then stamped out of the door, growling deep in his throat and scowling something terrible.

Mind you, the Dileas—that was old Seumas Grant’s boat—was a deal better than Eachan made her out to be. When Campbell of Ardrishaig built a Loch-Fyner, the timbers came out of the heart of the oak. And old Grant had added mild steel frames of his own and installed one of these newfangled diesels—a 44 hp Gardner, I remember. But even so.

Outside the harbour wall—you couldn’t imagine it and you’ll never see the like, not even in your blackest nightmares. Bitter cold it was and the whistling sleet just flying lumps of ice that lanced your face open to the bone.

And the Sound itself! Oh Dhia, that Sound! The seas were short and desperate steep, with the speed of racehorses, and the whole Sound a great sheet of driven milk gleaming in yon pitchy blackness. Man, it makes me shudder even now.

For two hours we headed straight up into it, and, Jove, what a wild hammering we took. The Dileas would totter up on a wave then, like she was falling over a cliff, smash down into the next trough with the crack of a four-inch gun, burying herself right to the gunwales. And at the same time you could hear the fierce clatter of her screw, clawing at the thin air. Why the Dileas never broke her back only God knows—or the ghost of Campbell of Ardrishaig.

‘Are you seeing anything, boys?’ It was old Grant shouting from the doghouse, the wind whipping the words off his lips.

‘There’s nothing, Seumas,’ Torry bawled back. ‘Just nothing at all.’

I handed the spotlight, an ancient Aldis, over to Eachan and made my way aft. Seumas Grant, his hands light on the wheel, stood there quietly, his face a mask of blood—when yon great, seething comber had buried the Dileas and smashed in the window, he hadn’t got out of the way quick enough.

But the old eyes were calm, steady, and watchful as ever.

‘It’s no good, Mr Grant,’ I shouted at him. ‘We’ll never find anyone tonight, and nothing could have lived so long in this. It’s hopeless, just hopeless—the Dileas can’t last out much longer. We might as well go back.’

He said something. I couldn’t catch it, and bent forward. ‘I was just wondering,’ he said, like a man in a muse, ‘whether Lachie would have turned back.’

I backed slowly out of the wheelhouse, and I cursed Seumas Grant, I cursed him for that terrible love he bore for those two sons of his, for Donald Archie and Lachlan. And then—then I felt the shame, black and crawling, welling up inside me, and I cursed myself. Stumbling, I clawed my way for’ard again.

I was only halfway there when I heard Eachan shouting, his voice high and excited.

‘There, Torry, look there! Just off the port bow. Somebody in the water—no, by God, two of them!’

When the Dileas heaved over the next crest, I looked along the beam of the Aldis. Eachan was right. There, sure enough, were two dark forms struggling in the water.

In three quick jumps I was back at the doghouse, pointing. Old Grant just nodded, and started edging the Dileas across. What a skill he had with him, that old one! Bring the bows too far round and we’d broach to and be gone in a second in yon great gullies between the waves. But old Seumas made never a mistake.

And then a miracle happened. Just that, Mr MacLean—a miracle. It was the Sea of Galilee all over again. Mind you, the waves were as terrible as ever, but just for a moment the wind dropped away to a deathly hush—and suddenly, off to starboard, a thin, high-pitched wail came keening out of the darkness.

In a flash, Torry had whipped his Aldis round, and the beam, plunging up and down, settled on a spot less than a hundred yards away—almost dead ahead. At first I thought it was just some wreckage, then I could see it was a couple of timber baulks and planks tied together. And lying on top of this makeshift raft—no, by God, lashed to it!—were a couple of children. We caught only flying glimpses of them: up one minute, down the next, playthings of the devil in yon madness of a sea. The poor wee souls. Oh Dhia! The poor wee souls.

‘Mr Grant!’ I roared in old Seumas’s ear. ‘There’s a raft dead ahead—two wee children on it.’

The old eyes were quiet as ever. He just stared straight ahead: his face was like a stone.

‘I canna be picking up both,’ he said, his voice level and never a touch of feeling in it, damn his flinty heart. ‘To come round in this would finish us—I’ll have to quarter for the shelter of Seal Point to turn. Can the children be hanging on a while longer, do you think, Calum?’

‘The children are near gone,’ I said flatly. ‘And they’re not hanging on—they’re lashed on.’

He looked quickly at me, his eyes narrowing.

‘Lashed, did you say, Calum?’ he asked softly. ‘Lashed?’

I nodded without speaking. And then a strange thing happened, Mr MacLean, a strange thing indeed. Yon craggy old face of his broke into a smile—I can see yet the gleam of his teeth and the little rivers of blood running down his face—and he nodded several times as if in satisfaction and understanding…And he gave the wheel a wee bit spin to starboard.

The little raft was drifting down fast on us, and we had only the one chance of picking them up. But with old Seumas at the wheel that was enough, and Torry Mor, with one sweep of his great arm, had the children, raft and all, safely aboard.

We took them below and old Grant worked his way up to Seal Point. Then we came tearing down the Sound, steady as a rock—for in a heavy stern sea there’s no boat on earth the equal of a Loch-Fyner—but never a trace of the two men did we see. A mile out from harbour old Seumas handed over to Torry Mor and came below to see the children.

They were sitting up on a bunk before the stove, wrapped in blankets—a lad of nine and a fair-haired wee lass of six. Pale, pale they were, and frightened and exhausted, but a good night’s sleep would put them right.

Quietly I told old Grant what I’d learned. They’d been playing in a wee skiff, under the sheltered walls of the Buidhe harbour, when the boy had gone too near the entrance and the wind had plucked them out to the open Sound. But they had been seen, and the two men had come after them in the ferryboat: and then, they couldn’t turn back. The rest they couldn’t remember: the poor wee souls they’d been scared to death.

I was just finishing when Eachan came below.

‘The wind’s backing, Seumas, and the sea with it. Perhaps there’s a chance for yon two—if they’re swimmers at all—of being carried ashore.’

Old Seumas looked up. His face was tired, lined and—all of a sudden—old.

‘There’s no chance, Eachan, no chance at all.’

‘How can you be so sure, man?’ Eachan argued. ‘You never know.’

‘I know, Eachan.’ The old man’s voice was a murmur, a million miles away. ‘I know indeed. What was good enough for their old father was good enough for Donal’ and Lachie. I never learned to swim—and neither did they.’

We were shocked into silence, I tell you. We looked at him stupidly, unbelievingly, then in horror.

‘You mean—’ I couldn’t get the words out.

‘It was Lachie and Donal’ all right. I saw them.’ Old Grant gazed sightlessly into the fire. ‘They must have come back early from Scavaig.’

A whole minute passed before Eachan spoke, his voice wondering, halting.

‘But Seumas, Seumas! Your own two boys. How could you—’

For the first and only time old Grant’s self-control snapped. He cut in, his voice low and fierce, his eyes masked with pain and tears.

‘And what would you have had me do, Eachan? Pick them up and let these wee souls go?’

He went on, more slowly now.

‘Can’t you see, Eachan? They’d used the only bits of wood in yon old ferryboat to make a wee raft for the children. They knew what they were doing—and they knew, by doing it, that there was no hope for themselves. They did it deliberately, man. And if I hadn’t picked the wee craturs up, it—it—’

His voice trailed off into silence, then we heard it again, the faintest shadow of a whisper.

‘My two boys, Lachie and Donal’—oh, Eachan, Eachan, I couldna be letting them down.’

Old Grant straightened, reached out for a bit of waste, and wiped the blood from his face—and, I’m thinking, the tears from his eyes. Then he picked up the wee girl, all wrapped in her blankets, set her on his knee and smiled down gently.

‘Well, now, mo ghaol, and how would you be fancying a wee drop hot cocoa?’

St George and the Dragon

If ever a man had a right to be happy, you would have thought it was George. In the eyes of any reasonable man, especially a parched and dusty city-dweller, George, at that very moment, was already halfway to Paradise.

Above, the hot afternoon sun beat down from a cloudless summer sky; on either side the golden stubble fields of the south slid lazily by; beneath his feet pulsed the sleek length of a 25-foot cabin cruiser; and immediately ahead stretched the lovely and unruffled reaches of the Lower Dipworth canal—not to mention the prospect of an entire month’s vacation. Halfway to Paradise? The man was there already.

Dr George Rickaby, BSc, MSc, DS, AMIEE, considered himself the most unfortunate of mortals. How grossly deceived the world would be, he thought bitterly, if it judged by what it saw. What if he had sufficient money to indulge his taste for inland cruising and plenty of time to enjoy it? What if he had for his crew his devoted and industrious ex-batman whose sole aim in life was to prevent George from overexerting himself? What if he was spoken of as a coming man in nuclear fission? What, even, if the Minister of Supply had been known to clap his shoulder and call him George?

Dust and ashes, mused George disconsolately, easing the cruiser round a wooded corner of the canal, just dust and ashes. But he supposed he shouldn’t judge the foolish imaginings of an ignorant world too harshly. He mournfully regarded the spotless deck of white pine. After all, in the days of his youth, he had been criminally guilty of the same thing himself. Why, only three months ago—

‘Look out! You’re going to hit me!’

The high-pitched, urgent shout cut through George’s painful daydreams like a knife. He hurriedly straightened himself to the full height of his painfully lean six feet, clutched at his spectacles and blinked myopically ahead through his thick-lensed glasses.

‘Quickly, quickly, you idiot, or it’ll be too late!’

George had a momentary impression of a barge, its bows fast on the bank and blocking threequarters of the canal, and, in its stern, a noisy and wildly gesticulating young female. All of this registered only superficially. George was not a man of action and his upper centres were momentarily paralysed.

‘Starboard, you fool, starboard your helm!’ she yelled frantically.

George awoke to life and grabbed the wheel. But, as said, he was not a man of action. He was not at his best in emergencies. Spin the wheel he did, and with tremendous speed and energy. But he spun it in the wrong direction.

A mile away on the Upper Dipworth green, smock-coated octogenarians stirred uneasily in their sleep as the sound of the crash reverberated across the peaceful meadows. But in no time at all they were again sunk in peaceful slumber.

Back on the canal, however, matters showed every sign of taking a much more lively turn. The shock of the collision had flung the female bargee, in most unladylike mid-sentence, on to the bows of George’s cruiser. At the same time, George had been catapulted forward. For the space of ten seconds they eyed each other malevolently from a distance of two feet.

The lady spoke first.

‘Of all the bungling fools! Are you completely blind, you—you—you roadhog?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘Or perhaps, poor man—’ this in a tone of vitriolic sweetness—‘too much of the sun?’ She tapped her head significantly.

George rose to his feet in a hurt and dignified silence. With this latest injustice his cup of bitterness was full to overflowing. But he had been brought up in a stern school. He hoped he knew how to behave like a gentleman.

‘If either your boat or yourself is in any way damaged, please accept my apologies,’ he said coldly. ‘But you must admit it is unusual, to say the least of it, to see a barge sailing broadside up a canal. I mean, one doesn’t expect that sort of thing—’

Here George suddenly broke off. He had adjusted his spectacles and now saw the lady clearly for the first time.

She was well worth looking at, George admitted to himself dispassionately. Burnished red hair, intensely blue—if unfriendly—eyes, long golden limbs, a sleeveless green sweater and very abbreviated white shorts—she had, he privately confessed, everything.

‘Sailing broadside, you clown!’ she snapped angrily, brushing aside his proffered hand and climbing painfully to her feet. ‘Broadside, he says.’ She flexed a speculative knee, while George stood by admiringly, and seemed relieved to find that it still worked.

‘Can’t you see I’m stuck right into the bank?’ she enquired icily. ‘It’s just happened and I haven’t had time to move. Why on earth couldn’t you pass by my stern?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said George stiffly, ‘but, after all, your boat is lying in a patch of shadow where these trees are. Besides—er—I wasn’t paying much attention,’ he concluded lamely.

‘You certainly wasn’t—I mean weren’t,’ retorted the redhead acidly. ‘Of all the inept and panic-stricken displays—’

‘Enough,’ said George sternly. ‘Not only was it your fault, but no damage has been done to your old barge anyway. But look at my bows!’ he exclaimed bitterly.

The redhead tossed her head in a nice blend of scorn and indifference, swung round, picked her way delicately over the cruiser’s splintered bows and buckled rails and gracefully stepped aboard the barge. George, after a moment’s hesitation, followed her aboard.

She turned round quickly, stretching her hand out for the tiller, which lay conveniently near. To George, her hair seemed redder than ever. Her blue eyes almost sparked with anger.

‘I don’t remember inviting you aboard,’ she said dangerously. ‘Get off my barge.’

‘I didn’t invite you aboard either,’ George pointed out reasonably. ‘I have merely come,’ he added loftily, ‘to offer what assistance I can.’

She tightened her grip on the tiller. ‘You have five seconds. I’m perfectly capable of looking after—’

‘Look!’ cried George excitedly. ‘The tiller rope!’ He picked up a loose end, neatly severed except for a broken strand. ‘It’s been cut.’

‘What a brain,’ remarked the lady caustically. ‘Do you think the mice have been at it?’

‘Very witty, very witty indeed. The point is, if it’s been cut, somebody cut it. I don’t suppose,’ he added doubtfully, ‘that you go about cutting tiller ropes.’

‘No, I don’t,’ she replied bitterly. ‘But Black Bart does. He’d cut anything. Tillers, mooring ropes, throats—they all come alike to him.’

‘A thorough going villain, it would seem. Possibly you are biased. And who might Black Bart be?’

‘Biased!’ She struggled incoherently for words. ‘Biased, he says. A man who robs my father, puts him in hospital, steals carriage contracts, sabotages barges. Right now he’s on his way to the Totfield Granary to steal the summer contract from me. First come, first served.’

‘Oh, come now,’ said George peaceably. ‘Piracy on the Lower Dipworth canal. In 1953, England and broad daylight. I am, I have been told, a more than normally gullible character—’

‘Do you see any Navy around to prevent it?’ she interrupted swiftly. ‘Or any witnesses—this is the loneliest canal in England.’

George peered thoughtfully at her through his bifocals. ‘You have a point there. Fortunately, you are not alone. Eric—my man—and I—’

‘I’m too busy to laugh. I can take care of all this myself. Get off my boat.’

George was nettled. He forgot his well-bred upbringing.

‘Now, look here, Ginger,’ he burst out, ‘I don’t see why—’

‘Did you call me “Ginger”?’ she enquired sweetly.

‘I did. As I was saying—’

Barely in time, he saw the tiller swinging round. He ducked, stumbled, clawed wildly at the air and fell backwards into the murky depths of the Lower Dipworth canal, clutching his precious bifocals in his left hand. When he surfaced, the redhead was no longer there, and in her place was the ever ready Eric, boathook in hand.

An hour later the cruiser was chugging along the canal at a respectful distance behind the barge. George, clad in a pair of immaculate tennis flannels and morosely watching his duck trousers and jersey flapping from the masthead, had once again fallen prey to his bitter thoughts.

Women, he brooded darkly, were the very devil. Three months previously he had been the happiest of men. And today—this very day was to have been his wedding day. The least his fiancée could have done, he considered, was to have switched her wedding date with the same ease and facility as she had switched prospective husbands.

But women had no finer feelings. Take this redhead, for instance, this termagant, this copperheaded Amazon, this female dragon in angel’s clothing. Perfect confirmation of his belief in women’s fundamental injustice, unfairness and lack of sensibility. Not that George needed any confirmation.

‘Lock ahead, sir,’ sang out Eric in the bows. ‘And another boat.’

George squinted ahead into the setting sun. The redhead was steering her barge skilfully alongside the canal bank and, even as he watched, she jumped nimbly ashore, rope in hand, and made fast. Just beyond hers, another and much more ancient barge was gradually disappearing behind the lock gate. One gate was already shut, the other was being slowly closed by a burly individual who was pushing the massive gate handle. This, George guessed, might very possibly be Black Bart. The situation had interesting possibilities.

‘Take her alongside, Eric, and tie up,’ said George. ‘The presence of a man of tact is called for up there, or I’m much mistaken.’ With that, he leapt ashore and scrambled up the bank to the scene of conflict.

Conflict there undoubtedly was, but it was very one-sided. The man who had been pushing the gate shut, a very large, swarthy, unshaven and ugly customer with the face of a retired prizefighter, continued to close it steadily, contemptuously fending off the redhead with one arm. Such blows as she landed had no effect at all. An elderly and obviously badly frightened lock-keeper hovered nervously in the background. He made no attempt to interfere.

‘Now, now, Mary, me gal,’ the prize-fighter was saying. ‘Temper, temper. Assaulting a poor innocent feller like myself. Shockin’, so it is. A criminal offence.’

‘Leave that dock gate open, Jamieson,’ she cried furiously. ‘There’s plenty of room for two barges, and you know it. Cutting people’s tiller ropes! It’ll cost me an hour if you go through alone. You—you villain.’ The redhead was becoming a trifle confused. She struggled fiercely but to no effect at all.

‘Language, language, my dear.’ Bart grinned wickedly. ‘And tiller ropes’—he started in large surprise—‘I don’t know what you are talking about. As for letting your barge in…No-o-o.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘I couldn’t risk my paint.’ He spat fondly in the direction of the battered hulk which lay in the dock below.

‘Can I be of any assistance?’ interrupted George.

‘Beat it, Fancypants,’ said Bart courteously.

‘Oh, go away,’ snapped the redhead.

‘I will not go away. This is my business. This is everybody’s business. An injustice is being done. Leave this to me.’

Jamieson paused in his efforts and regarded George under lowered eyebrows. George ignored him and turned to the redhead.

‘Mary, me gal—er—I mean, Miss—why won’t this ruffian let your barge into the lock?’ he asked.

‘Because, don’t you see, it’ll give him an hour’s start on me. His barge is far older and slower. It’s sixty miles to the Granary yet. He’s determined to get there first, so he’ll use any method to stop me.’ Tears of rage welled up in her eyes.

George turned and faced Black Bart.

‘Open that gate,’ he commanded.

Bart’s mouth fell open, just for a second, then tightened ominously.

‘Run away, sonny,’ he scoffed, ‘I’m busy.’

George removed his yachting cap and placed it carefully on the ground.

‘You leave me no alternative,’ he stated. ‘I shall have to use force.’

Mary clutched his arm. Her blue eyes were no longer hostile, but genuinely concerned.

‘Please go away,’ she pleaded. ‘Please. You don’t know him.’

‘That’s right. Oh please,’ Bart mocked. ‘Tell him what I did to your father.’

‘Silence, woman,’ George ordered. ‘And hold these.’

He thrust his spectacles into her reluctant hand and swung round. Unfortunately, without his glasses, George literally could not distinguish a tramcar from a haystack. But he was too angry to care. His normal calm had completely vanished. He took a quick step forward and lashed out blindly at the place where Black Bart had been when last he had seen him.

But Black Bart was no longer there. He had thoughtfully moved quite some time previously. Further, and unfortunately for George, Black Bart had twenty-twenty vision and no finer feelings whatsoever. A murderous right whistled up and caught George one inch below his left ear. From the point of view of weight and the spirit in which given, it could be in no way compared to the encouraging clap he had so recently received from the Minister of Supply. George rose upwards and backwards, neatly cleared the edge of the lock and, for the second time in the space of an hour, described a graceful parabolic arc into the depths of the Lower Dipworth canal.

The girl, white-faced and trembling, stood motionless for a few seconds, then swung frantically round on Black Bart.

‘You swine,’ she cried. ‘You vicious brute! You’ve killed him. Quickly, quickly—get him out! He’ll drown, he’ll drown!’ The redhead was very close to tears.

Black Bart shrugged indifferently. ‘I should worry,’ he said callously. ‘It’s his own fault.’

Mary, colour returning to her cheeks, looked at him incredulously.

‘But—but you did it! You knocked him in. I saw you.’

‘Self-defence,’ explained Black Bart carefully. ‘I only stumbled against him.’ He smiled slowly, evilly. ‘Besides, I can’t swim.’

Seconds later, another splash broke the stillness of the summer evening. The lady had gone to the rescue of her rescuer.

‘Get off my barge,’ she ordered angrily. ‘I don’t want your help.’

George seated himself more comfortably on the counter of the barge and peacefully surveyed the wooden jetty where the three boats had tied up for the night. He appeared none the worse for the accident of a couple of hours earlier.

‘I will not get off,’ said George, calmly puffing at his pipe. ‘And neither,’ he added, ‘will Eric.’ He indicated his companion who then engaged in viewing the night sky through the bottom of an upturned tankard. ‘Every young lady—especially a young lady struggling to carry on her father’s business—needs protection. Eric and I will look after you.’

‘Protection!’ she scoffed bitterly. ‘Protection!’ George followed her meaningful glance towards the white shorts and green jersey on the line. They were still dripping. ‘You couldn’t take care of a wheelbarrow. Can’t sail, can’t swim, can’t defend yourself—a fine protector you’d make.’ She breathed deaply and with fearful restraint. ‘Get off!’

‘’Ere, ’ere, Miss,’ said the aggrieved Eric, ‘that’s not quite fair. The guv’nor’s no sissy. ’E’s got a medal, ’e ’as.’

‘What did he get it for?’ she queried acidly. ‘Ballroom dancing?’

‘The lady, I’m afraid, Eric, is annoyed,’ said George. ‘Perhaps justifiably so. All dragons,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘are in a state of perpetual annoyance.’

‘What was that?’ the lady demanded sharply.

‘Nothing,’ said George, courteously but firmly. ‘You will now please retire to your bed. No further harm will befall you or your boat. Eric and I,’ he finished poetically, ‘will watch over you to the break of day.’

Mary made as if to protest, hesitated, shrugged her shoulders resignedly, and turned away.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said indifferently. ‘Perhaps,’ she added hopefully, ‘you’ll both catch pneumonia.’

For some time, there followed sounds of movement in the cabin, then the light was switched off. By and by the sound of deep and peaceful slumber drifted up the companionway. It was in many ways a pleasant sound—infinitely so, indeed, in comparison with the obligato of snores already issuing from the two faithful watchers in the stern.

Sleep, however, was not universal. Far from it. Black Bart and his henchman were not only awake, but uncommonly active. The latter had stealthily vanished into the engine room of George’s cruiser: Black Bart himself was squatting on one of the submerged cross-beams bracing the piers of the jetty. Looped over his shoulder were about sixty feet of slender wire hawser. One end was secured to the pier, the other to the rudder of the barge, immediately below the sleeping warriors. The coils he let fall gently to the bottom of the canal.

At 7.00 a.m. the following morning, George and Eric left the barge in a hurry. The frying pan wielded by the redhead was daunting enough, but far more devastating were her scorn and derision.

At 7.30 Black Bart’s barge moved off, chugged along the canal for a couple of hundred yards, then stopped. Jamieson wanted a grandstand view of the proceedings.

At 8.00 a.m., Eric appeared on deck, luridly cursing the villain who had drained all the paraffin tanks and refilled them with water.

At 8.02 George made his hurried way along the bank to Mary’s boat in urgent search of fuel. He was driven off by unkind words and a bargepole.

At 8.05, Mary cast off, and at 8.06, with a terrific rending, splintering noise, the rudder was torn off. Immediately the barge slewed round and thudded into the bank.

At 8.08, George had run along the towpath and leapt aboard to offer help. At 8.09 the redhead knocked him into the canal and at 8.10 she fished him out again.

Two hundred yards away, Black Bart was bent double, convulsed at the results of his own genius. Finally he straightened up, wiped the streaming tears from his eyes, and journeyed on towards the famous Watman’s Folly, the last stopover of the trip.

‘Ol’ man, I’ve mishjudged you—mishjudged you badly, ol’ man. Sorry, Bart, ol’ man. But you unnershtand how it is. Women! Women! Tchah! Did you see what she did to me? Eh? Did you see it?’ George was incoherent with indignation.

‘Sure, sure, Doc, I saw it.’ Black Bart swore fluently. ‘She’s a bad-tempered young lady.’ ‘Lady’ was not Bart’s choice of word. ‘Better rid of her. Sorry about the scrap at the lock, Doc. All her fault, the wicked little so-and-so.’

‘It’s forgotten, Bart, ol’ man, forgotten. All my own fault. Pals, eh, ol’ man?’

The new-found pals solemnly shook hands, then returned to the serious competitive business of deplenishing the Watman’s Arms available supplies of West Country cider. It was powerful stuff. George appeared to be winning by a short head: but then George was pouring nearly all of his into a convenient window box. Black Bart remained happily unaware of this. He was likewise ignorant of the immense care with which George had arranged this accidental meeting—the Arms was a favourite haunt of Jamieson’s. Striking up an acquaintanceship on a friendly basis had been easy—after what Black Bart had seen that morning, George’s friendliness came as no surprise. Besides, George was spending very freely.

‘’S ten o’clock, Doc,’ said Bart warningly. ‘Chucking-out time, you know.’

‘Imposhible, ol’ man,’ replied George thickly. ‘We’ve only been here ten minutes. Tell you what, ol’ man,’ he continued eagerly. ‘Lesh make a night of it. Eh? ol’ pal? Come on.’

Ten minutes later the old pals were staggering erratically along the towpath, singing in what they frequently praised as wonderful harmony, and swinging a demijohn of cider in either hand. First they passed the cruiser, then Mary’s barge with the jury-rigged rudder—Bart meant to attend to that later on—and finally boarded Bart’s barge.

Bart’s barge lay close by Watman’s Folly, which was only ten miles short of the Granary. The Folly was what is known as a blind lock. It had lock gates at either end, but the outer end led nowhere. It just stopped there, overlooking the Upper Totfield valley—an embryo canal killed by finance. Like most blind locks, it had been sealed by concrete.

Bart’s henchman welcomed them eagerly, and the night’s festivities really commenced. At half past one the henchman slid beneath the table. At a quarter to two George followed him, and at two o’clock Bart, in the act of draining the last demijohn, crashed to the floor in a highly spectacular fashion.

George rose briskly to his feet, dusted down his clothes and strode ashore. First, he boarded Mary’s barge and rapped imperatively on her door.

A light immediately flicked on and in ten seconds a tousled red head and sleepy, rather scared blue eyes peeped round the door. When she saw who it was her expression changed to something curiously like gladness, then merely to relief, finally to exasperation.

‘I know, I know,’ said George. ‘“Get off my barge”. Well, I’m just going. I am not,’ he added hastily, ‘keeping a watch over you tonight. Just came to tell you to be prepared to move early tomorrow. I don’t think Black Bart will be feeling particularly friendly towards any of us in a few hours’ time.’

‘What are you talking about,’ she asked wonderingly. ‘And just what do you propose to do?’ she inquired suspiciously.

‘Wait and see,’ said George ungallantly. ‘Perhaps I’m no sailor, swimmer or boxer but—’ he tapped himself briefly on the forehead—‘possibly I am not completely useless in every department. Goodnight.’

He returned to his cruiser, collected Eric, and together they made their way back to Bart’s barge. They unhitched his mooring ropes, dragged the barge along the canal, opened the gates of the Folly, creaky and stiff with long disuse, and towed the barge inside. Once they had it safely inside, they closed the gates and George, producing a hacksaw, thoughtfully sawed off the handle of the sluice trap, so that it could not be opened to admit water.

While he was doing this, Eric was struggling with the sluice trap at the blind end. Together they raised it and immediately the water rushed out in a continuous jet. They then sawed that handle off, so that it could no longer be closed. In ten minutes the lock was empty, and the barge, with its unconscious crew, was high and dry and fast in the mud. Black Bart and his barge were there for some time to come.

In the end, it was touch and go. The scheme had worked perfectly, but its author almost came to a sticky and premature end.

George had underestimated Black Bart’s terrific powers of recuperation. All were awake early next morning and at seven o’clock, just as George was casting off Mary’s ropes, Black Bart, bloodshot and unshaven, covered from head to foot in mud, slime and grease, appeared over the top of Watman’s Folly like some savage prehistoric monster. Nor did the resemblance stop there. Black Bart was out for blood.

George had no time to reach his own boat, which was just moving off. Cursing and raving like a madman, Black Bart leapt in tigerishly, his great fists swinging in blind anger. But his own speed and power robbed him of revenge. A tremendous blow caught George on the shoulder, spun him round like a top, and knocked him head first into the canal for the fourth time in thirty-six hours.

George struggled wildly in the water, his arms windmilling frantically, spluttering, coughing, going under and resurfacing at regular intervals. But there was no real cause for worry. For a third time a slim vision in red, brown and white sliced down through the waters of the canal and towed the feebly struggling George towards the barge. Eric helped them aboard.

Ten minutes had passed and still George had not recovered. With Black Bart safely half-a-mile behind, still cursing fearfully, George was in no hurry to recover. His head was pillowed on Mary’s lap; a very comfortable pillow he thought. Besides, he could hear his own cruiser purring alongside and he did not feel like meeting Eric’s accusing eye.

He stirred, experimentally, and his eyebrows fluttered open. The redhead still sat motionless on the deck, oblivious of her soaking clothes, mechanically steering with one hand. She was whispering, ‘George, George, oh George’ in a manner highly pleasing to George’s ears: and her blue eyes, usually so hostile and snapping, were now misted over with an anxiety and a soft concern.

But, he thought in a delicious drowsiness, I must remember to warn Eric about the medal. Mary must never know—well, at least not till later. For George really was the holder of nothing less than the George Medal. It had been given him for an amazing feat of personal survival when his fighter had crashed in the Mediterranean, eight miles off the Libyan coast. He had been wounded, dazed, weak from the loss of blood and he ought to have died. But George had reached land.

And he had swum every foot of the way.

The Arandora Star

The Arandora Star had indeed fallen upon evil days. Less than a year had elapsed since the ending of her great days, the proud days when the fluttering of the Blue Star house flag at her masthead had signalled in a score of harbours all over the world the stately arrival of one of the elite of the British Mercantile Marine—a luxury cruise liner on her serene and regal way round the better ports of the seven seas.

Less than a year had elapsed since she had taken aboard her last complement of financially select passengers, wrapped them in a silken cocoon of luxury and impeccable service and transported them painlessly north to the Norwegian fjords in search of the summer sun or south to bask in the warmth of the blue Caribbean skies. Deck games, soft music, cinema shows, dancing to the ship’s band, the tinkling of ice in tall frosted glasses, the unobtrusive but omnipresent white-jacketed stewards—there had been no lack of every last comfort and convenience which might in any way conduce to the perfect shipboard holiday atmosphere of relaxation and romance.

Less than a year had elapsed, but now all that was gone. The change was great. The relaxation and romance were no more. Neither were the bands, the bars, the deck games, the dancing under the stars.

Greater even was the change in the ship itself. The hull, upper-works and funnel that had once so gaily reflected their colours in the millpond waters of fjords and Mediterranean ports were now covered in a dull coat of neutral grey. The public rooms had been stripped of their expensive furnishings, panelling and draperies, cabins and staterooms altered and fitted with crude metal bunks to accommodate twice—and in some cases four times—as many passengers as formerly.

But the greatest change of all was in the nature of the passengers, and the purpose of their voyage. Where once there had been a few hundred affluent Britons, there were now no fewer than 1,600 far from affluent German and Italian internees and prisoners of war: and they were going not in search of the sun, but to internment camps in Canada for the duration of the war.

These internees, composed mostly of British-resident civilians and captured German seamen, were the lucky ones. They were leaving the bleak austerity of blacked-out and rationed England for the comfort and comparative plenty of North America. True, they were going to be locked up and guarded for months or even years, and it was going to be a dull and boring war for them: but at least they would be well clad, well fed—and above all safe.

Or they would have been. Unfortunately, both for the Germans and their Italian allies, soon after 6.00 a.m. on 2 July, 1940, on their second day out from Liverpool and some way off the west coast of Ireland, the Arandora Star slowly swam into view, and framed herself on the crossed hairs of the periscope sights of a German U-boat’s captain.

The torpedo struck the Arandora Star fair and square amidships, erupting in a roar of sound and a towering wall of white water that cascaded down on the superstructure and upper decks, blasting its way through the unarmoured ship’s side clear into the engine room. Deep inside the ship, transverse watertight bulkheads buckled and split under the impact, and the hundreds of tons of water, rushing in through the great jagged rent torn in the ship’s side, flooded fore and aft with frightening speed as if goaded by some animistic savagery and bent on engulfing and drowning trapped men before they could fight their way clear and up to freedom.

Many of the crew died in these first few moments before they had recovered from the sheer physical shock of the explosion, their first intimation of the direction in which danger lay being a tidal wave of seething white and oil-streaked water bearing down upon them even as their numbed minds registered the certain knowledge that the one and only brief moment in which they could have rushed for safety was gone forever.

From the already flooded depths of the ship some few did manage to claw their way up iron ladders and companionways to the safety of the upper deck, to join the hundreds already there: but they had no sooner arrived than it was swiftly borne in upon them that this safety was an illusion, that their chances of being able to get clear away of the already sinking liner were indeed remote.

In the reports of the tragedy which appeared in the British press on Thursday, 4 July and Friday, 5 July, there was a remarkable degree of unanimity with regard to what constituted the reasons for the subsequent appalling loss of life. Not reasons, rather, but one single all-encompassing reason: the unbelievable cowardliness and selfishness of the Germans and the Italians who, grouping themselves on an ugly nationalistic basis, fought desperately for precedence in the boats, with the inevitable result that the speed and orderliness which the rapid loading and lowering of the lifeboats demanded were utterly impossible.

The press reports of the time leave one in no doubt as to that. ‘Casualties due to panic’: ‘Passengers fight to reach boats’: ‘Fights among aliens’ and similar uncompromising captions headlined articles which spoke freely of disgraceful panic, of the wild rushes and cowardice of the Germans—‘great hulking brutes kicking and punching every person who got in their way’—who fought to get into the boats, of the sickening scramble of the Italians who thought of nothing but their own skins, of scores of people being forced overboard, of British soldiers and sailors losing invaluable time, and often their own lives, in separating the madly fighting, screaming aliens.

One report even had the Italians so crazy with fear that they fought not the Germans but among themselves; thirty of them, it was alleged, battling furiously for the privilege of sliding down a single rope.

In order to establish, among other things, just how widespread and uncontrollable this panic had been, survivors of the Arandora Star were recently interviewed and four of these finally selected as providing testimony as impeccable as we are ever likely to have. They were selected on the bases (a) that they represented different contingents—crew, guards and internees—aboard the ship and (b) that their independently volunteered statements were mutually corroborative to a very high degree indeed. Such insignificant discrepancies as existed were readily accounted for by the fact that they were in different parts of the ship and all left it by different means.

These four are: Mr Sidney (‘Nobby’) Fulford, ship’s barman, of 57 Northbrook Road, Southampton: Mr Edward (‘Ted’) Crisp of 210 High Road, North Weald, Essex, a veteran Blue Star Line steward who has been going to sea for 39 years: Mr Mario Zampi, the well-known Italian-born film producer of Wardour Street: and Mr Ivor Duxberry, a War Department employee, of 89 Johnson Road, Heston, Middlesex.

In view of the newspaper reports of the time, their answers to the question of the extent of the panic and pitched battles which are alleged to have taken place are singularly interesting.

‘I saw no signs of panic and no fighting whatsoever,’ Mr Fulford states flatly: and as sixty internees left the Arandora Star in the same boat as he, he should have had an excellent chance to observe anything of the kind. ‘There was confusion, of course, but only that.’

Mr Crisp said exactly the same.

Mr Zampi agreed. ‘These reports of panic and disorder among the internees were just not true. The only trouble I saw was between a British Army sergeant and his men: they had jumped into a lifeboat and shots were fired at them to make them leave.’

This statement by Mr Zampi, who must have suffered considerably on hearing the courage of his countrymen so frequently maligned in the days after the sinking, might well be suspected of being actuated by pique, nationalistic bias, or a very understandable desire to get a little of his own back, especially as it seems so grossly improbable.

In point of fact it is perfectly true, except that it was a corporal Mr Zampi saw and not a sergeant: and that corporal, by a remarkable coincidence, was the fourth witness, then Corporal Duxberry of the Welsh Regiment, the most informative of all the witnesses, whose phenomenal memory is matched only by the detailed accuracy of his recollections of these days.

‘Some of the guard,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘disregarded the order of “Prisoners of war and internees first into the boats”. Major Bethell—CO of the 109 POW unit—using a megaphone from the bridge, ordered them out. When they didn’t respond, he ordered me to fire a volley over their heads to show that he meant business.’ Duxberry fired as ordered, and the soldiers soon left.

Duxberry confirms that there was no general panic or fighting. He did, he says, see two Italians, a young man and an old, fighting for a position in a boat, a fight which quickly ended when a German internee knocked out the younger man with a ship’s dry scrubber and escorted the old man into the boat.

Apart from these minor incidents, there was no trouble at all of the kind described in the papers at the time. Why, then, these reports?

The obvious answer, of course, is that the citizens of an embattled nation tend to become afflicted with an irremediable chauvinism, a nationalistic myopia which only peace can cure, a temporary suspension of reasonable judgment where our side, our troops, become the good, the kindly, the brave, while those of the other, the enemy, become the bad, the wicked and the cowardly.

But, as so often, the obvious answer is the wrong one. Top newspapermen, such as covered these stories, are, as a class, less likely to be affected by such unthinking emotionalism than almost any other people. Hard-headed realists, cynics in the best sense of the word, they tend to regard with a very jaundiced eye indeed the flag-waving, drum-beating, nonsensically juvenile jingoism of the average nation at war. Their job is to get and evaluate facts.

It is more than likely that they did get and evaluate the facts, took a good look at them and hastily put them away, using instead the accounts of a few ill-informed survivors to put flesh on the bones of their stories and at the same time give a reasonable explanation for the dreadful loss of life. They did so because they had a very healthy fear of editors, of the censor and of the terms of imprisonment which might all too easily come the way of any man so foolish as to tell the truth in wartime, if that truth could be interpreted as a violation of security, as lowering morale or giving aid and encouragement to the enemy.

These are the facts, the true reasons for the great loss of life:

1. The ship was grossly overloaded. All the survivors agree on this. Originally—in peacetime—the Arandora Star carried 250 first-class passengers, but later had superstructure alterations made to accommodate another 200 passengers. On the morning of the disaster there were close on 1,700 internees and guards aboard, in addition to the normal ship’s crew.

Ivor Duxberry was with his CO, Major Bethell, when the latter was told by the ship’s master—Captain E. W. Moulton—that he had protested most strongly about the danger of overcrowding, and demanded that his number of passengers be cut by half. The authorities had refused to listen to him. It is not known precisely who these authorities were, except that they were not Frederick Leyland & Co, the owners of the vessel, nor the Blue Star Line, its managers.

2. Some of the survivors state that there were not enough lifejackets. The truth of this statement is difficult to substantiate—obviously no person, other than the chief officer and those directly responsible to him, can know where every lifejacket is—but what seems beyond dispute is that if there were enough, they were not issued to all.

Many people drowned through the lack of these jackets. It may be, although it seems extremely unlikely, that scores of people forgot that they had these jackets: apart from that, many had none in the first place. Steward Crisp had no lifejacket, and neither had Corporal Duxberry, who says that, as far as he knows, not one member of the guard was issued with a lifejacket. Reports at the time speak of army officers handing over their lifejackets to internees, but these were isolated instances.

3. There were far too few lifeboats. There were about a dozen of these, old, worn out, and with a capacity of about sixty each, altogether a total capacity of less than half of the entire complement of the Arandora Star. Some of these had had oars, emergency provisions and plugs removed, to immobilize them against any escape attempt on the part of the internees. How those responsible for this monstrous action thought that any party of internees could steal a lifeboat with armed soldiers constantly on guard and sailors on lookout is difficult to understand: but it is downright impossible to understand how it could be thought possible to lower a boat safely in darkness with the liner racing at full speed through the rough Atlantic seas. It is hard to imagine any naval man being responsible for this action.

4. There appears to have been no lifeboat drill whatsoever. Neither Mr Crisp nor Mr Fulford had anything to say on this matter, very possibly and understandably because they wished to cast no reflection on their employers, one of the world’s most respected shipping companies—an admirable but unnecessary reticence because no blame attaches to the company. But neither Mr Zampi nor Mr Duxberry had any such hesitations, and the absence of drill is borne out in Mr Lafitte’s book The Internment of Aliens.

It would be easy, and perhaps proper, to call this criminal negligence, but, in fairness, it must be borne in mind that there were many confirmed Nazi merchant sailors and submariners on board who might have chosen the confusion of this drill as a cover to gain control of the ship.

5. The rafts, which might have saved most of those who could find no room in the lifeboats, were secured by wire. These wires could only be loosened by special implements which all too often were unobtainable, or their location unknown. Most of the rafts, immovably lashed in position, eventually went down with the Arandora Star.

6. All the above reasons—the overloading, shortage of lifejackets and lifeboats, the lack of drill and jammed rafts—undoubtedly contributed materially to the heavy loss of life. But, nevertheless, all of these taken together did not even begin to equal the lethal, murderous effect of one other item, the existence of which was not even admitted at the time: barbed wire.

The decks of the ship were unrecognizable, surrounded and festooned with impenetrable barbed-wire fencing which turned the Arandora Star into a floating concentration camp.

‘I had had a lot of experience with POW cages,’ Ivor Duxberry says, ‘but I have never seen barbed wire erected more expertly than this. It was impregnable—so closely woven that no space was big enough for a man to get his head through without damaging himself.

‘This barbed wire partitioned the decks—and cut off access to the lifeboats.’

It cut off access to the lifeboats. One single damning statement that holds the key to the tragedy of the Arandora Star—barbed wire cut off access to the lifeboats. Little wonder, indeed, that security clamped down on all mention of this: what magnificent propaganda material it would have made for the Axis!

It is difficult indeed to understand why the omniscient authorities of the time deemed this murderous wire necessary—did they expect, perhaps, to prevent some of the internees from escaping by diving overboard in mid-Atlantic and swimming for the nearest continent?—but it is not difficult to understand the attitude of Captain Moulton who protested with the utmost violence against the erection of this wire.

‘You are sending men to their deaths,’ he insisted, ‘men who have sailed with me for many years. If anything happens to the ship, that wire will obstruct passage to the boats and rafts. We shall be drowned like rats and the Arandora Star turned into a floating deathtrap.’

But the authorities knew better than the man who had spent a lifetime at sea. The barbed wire remained. And the Arandora Star became a floating deathtrap.

That, then, was the desperate situation that confronted all those who finally managed to struggle to the upper deck. But not all of those who survived the initial impact of the explosion or the lethal onrush of the invading waters reached the upper deck.

There were old men aboard, old men and sick men, and many of these never left their cabins—they had been asleep in their bunks when the torpedo struck, and many of them died there. Others were too weak to fight their way along flooded alleys, or took wrong turnings in the Stygian darkness of the great liner’s vast complex of passageways: Edward Crisp owes his life simply to the fact that he knew the internal geography of the ship like the back of his hand.

Others again did reach the upper decks, found their way to the nearest fore or aft lifeboat blocked by rolls of athwartships barbed wire, and went below again to find some passage which would bring them up to a lifeboat no further away than twenty yards from where they stood. But the press and confusion below decks was increasing steadily, the level of the water was rising, and many of those who went below were never seen again.

Major Bethell, OC of the guard, ordered his men to clear away the barbed wire in front of the lifeboats. (It appears that there was some method of loosening sections of the barbed barricade by operating a slipwire, but no instructions had been given in this.) The guard tore at the wire with rifles and bayonets—Ivor Duxberry has still the scars on his arms as the grim proof of his story—and the rush for the boats was on.

Unfortunately, because of the obstructing wire, trained members of the ship’s company were not able to reach all their boats’ positions—or at least not in time. Edward Crisp and Taffy Williams—the bosun’s mate—arrived at their station to find sixty Germans and Italians already sitting in a lifeboat, and had to order them out—no easy task when everyone was convinced that the Arandora Star was already foundering—before they could begin to lower the boat. Elsewhere, some of the internees tried to lower the boats themselves and within a few minutes, in Duxberry’s graphic phrase, half a dozen of them were hanging on one fall like turkeys outside a poulterer’s shop.

But some of the prisoners of war, as distinct from the internees, proved invaluable. One such was Captain Burfend, master of the Adolph Woermann, who marched a group of men—for the most part highly experienced seamen and confirmed Nazis—in a column of two on to the boatdeck, and lowered several lifeboats in perfect order. Nazis or not, their behaviour was all that could have been wished for at this moment of crisis. Especially was this true of Captain Burfend himself. When he had seen as many men as possible, regardless of race, into the lifeboats for which he had assumed temporary responsibility, he denied himself a place in any of these, stepped back and went down with the Arandora Star.

But though there were not enough lifeboats for all, this was not realized. Most of the intervening barbed wire was still in position, with men flinging themselves bodily upon it, trying to tear it apart with their bare hands, only to find within seconds that they were caught beyond any hope of escape. Others smashed a path through with fire hydrants, went back, incredibly, to collect their suitcases, and returned to find the lifeboats gone.

The survivors, of course, were those who were not caught in or trapped by the barbed wire. Mario Zampi, who had lowered a raft only to have it taken over by some of his fellow countrymen already in the water, dived over the side and all but broke his neck when his lifejacket struck the water. Fulford jumped from the boatdeck—a dive at which even an Olympic champion would have baulked—and struck the water far beneath with such force that large quantities of oil and salt water were forced into his stomach and lungs: he, too, was injured by his lifejacket. Edward Crisp, as said, managed to get away in a lifeboat, while Ivor Duxberry slithered down a rope and landed astride the upturned hull of a lifeboat.

Even as the great liner foundered, there were hundreds still aboard. Most of these were trapped. Some were too terrified to jump. Others, like Captains Moulton and Burfend, elected to remain with the ship rather than abandon it before everyone else had been saved. Few of the regimental guard officers survived. When last seen, they were lined up, as one survivor put it, and chatting amiably like suburban passengers waiting in a morning bus queue. It is difficult to recognize either the wisdom or necessity of this quixotism and nonchalant acceptance of a fate which, until they themselves made the decision, had been by no means certain: but it is impossible not to admire their selfless gallantry.

At 7.30 a.m. the Arandora Star heeled over sharply until she was almost on her side in the water, the guard rails far below the surface of the sea, hesitated for a moment, then, momentarily shrouded in clouds of hissing steam, slid quietly beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

The waters in the immediate vicinity of the foundering liner were alive with people on rafts or clinging to planks or nonswimmers frantically churning the surface of the sea with the last of their rapidly failing strength. All saw what was coming, all struggled fearfully, desperately to avoid it, but for all but a few the effort had come too late, a meaningless tribute to the age-old instinct to survive. How many people were sucked down in the vortex of the plummeting Arandora Star will never be known: but no more, it is certain, than were dragged down, trapped by the impenetrable barrier of barbed wire, or still impaled on the savage hooks, helpless flies trapped in this monstrous spider’s web.

The Arandora Star was gone, but almost a thousand of its passengers, guards and crew—mainly Italians and Germans—still lived, scattered in groups or singly over several square miles of the Atlantic. That morning the Atlantic, mercifully, was calm and all but windless—but the sea was bitterly cold. Before long the number of swimmers and those supported only by planks and benches became pitifully fewer and fewer. Mario Zampi lost all but one of the six companions who originally clung to the same bench as he. Their pathetic cries of ‘Mother’, repeated over and over again in three or four languages, grew fainter and fainter and gradually faded away altogether as the numbing cold struck through the scanty clothing and pathetically limited defences of the old, the infirm and the gravely wounded, and stopped the beating of their hearts. And some there were, supported by their life jackets, who, by and by, just lay face down in the water, dead.

About noon, a Sunderland flying boat appeared and circled the area dropping all it had in the way of first-aid kits, emergency rations, chocolate and cigarettes, and then disappeared to guide the Canadian destroyer St Laurent to the scene.

All of the survivors are unanimous in their unstinted praise of the magnificently selfless work performed by the crew of that ship: operating from the St Laurent’s boats while the destroyer itself kept constantly on the move to avoid submarines, they scoured the area for hours until they collapsed unconscious over their oars, having driven themselves far beyond the limits of exhaustion.

In all, the crew of the St Laurent picked up and took to safety over eight hundred survivors, an astonishing feat almost without parallel in the lifesaving annals of the sea, almost enough to make one forget, if even only for a moment, the barbed wire and the thousand men who died.

Almost, but not quite.

Rawalpindi

Even with the two brand new untried battle cruisers under his command, even although he was leading them on this, their first sortie against the enemy and the cold, dark hostility of the winter north Atlantic, Vice-Admiral Marschall was as unworried as any fleet commander can ever hope to be in wartime. Wilhelmshaven was dropping south behind him into the early gathering dusk of a November afternoon and the low flat shores of Jede Bay were already vanishing into nothingness, but Marschall never spared them a glance. He was busy, far too busy for any of this nonsense of sentimental farewells, and, besides, he knew he didn’t have to bother. Barring accidents, it would only be a matter of brief time before he saw these shores again.

And there would be no accidents. Of that the Squadron Commander, Marschall, was convinced. One of Germany’s best and most experienced naval officers, Vice-Admiral Marschall was fully aware that in wartime the element of risk could never be fully eliminated, that chance must always play its part. But the risk was negligible: not only was he the gambler who had been dealt all the best cards in the pack—he was playing against a blindfolded opponent.

Already, in these first few months of war, the German Naval Intelligence Service, with the intensive preparations of years behind them, was operating at maximum efficiency. Its agents were scattered all over Britain and the neutral countries of Western Europe—and these agents were the best there were. The accuracy and completeness of the information obtained was matched only by the speed with which this information was transmitted to Berlin.

German Naval HQ knew the position, speed, course and destination of almost every convoy leaving or approaching Britain. They knew the position of every British capital ship—and they knew that on that day, 21 November, 1939, every British capital ship was either in harbour or in far distant waters: that the Nelson and the Rodney were in the Clyde, the Hood and the French battlecruiser Dunkerque were in Plymouth, a cruiser squadron was fuelling and victualling in Rosyth, and that the only other ship they might have had to fear, the aircraft carrier Furious was in Nova Scotia with the battleship Repulse. They knew, too, that after the torpedoing of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by Leutnant-Kapitän Günther Prien’s U-boat, the British Navy had precipitately abandoned that far northern base, and retreated to the Clyde and Forth, maintaining only a small secret base in Loch Ewe, a northwesterly Scottish fjord. At least it was secret as far as the British public and most of the Royal Navy were concerned: the Germans knew all about it.

There was, of course, no guarantee that these ships would remain where they were. Again, the Germans were unworried. Their experts had completely broken the British naval codes at that time, with the results that British naval redisposition orders were known to the Germans almost as quickly as they were to the captains of the ships concerned.

Not that Marschall had any intention of engaging any large British ships in any case. His superior, Admiral Raeder, had been adamant on this point. This was only a shakedown cruise which might pay the added dividends of dislocating our shipping and drawing off our patrols.

There was the further possibility that news of the departure of the squadron might be transmitted to London by espionage agents, but, in view of past achievements of the British Intelligence Service, that was highly unlikely. At the time, our Intelligence Service was untrained, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffectual—the Deutschland, for instance, after her first Atlantic foray, had been back in the Baltic for over a month before we knew anything about it. And, it must be confessed, our sketchy air patrols over the North Sea were, at the time, not much better than our Intelligence Service.

Vice-Admiral Marschall, therefore, felt justifiably light of heart as his two battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau cleared Jede Bay and sailed out into the cold, wind-swept darkness of the North Sea. A bitter night, a bad night, but Marschall welcomed it, for over and above all the cards he held in his hand, the darkness of the long northern winter nights, the forecasted bad weather and visibility reducing rain-squalls and fog were further powerful allies, that made for safety. Marschall reckoned that it would take him exactly forty-eight hours to reach the Iceland-Orkney line of the British contraband control.

The British Northern Patrols were in position, thinly stretched out over nearly a thousand miles of sea. Cruisers were the backbone of this patrol, but mostly superannuated ships of the old C and D classes. Only four ships could be reckoned as really effective fighting units: the Norfolk and the Suffolk, the same two ships as were to report the historic breakthrough of the Bismarck into the Atlantic in May 1941, were in exactly the same position as they were on that memorable day—the Denmark Strait—the Glasgow was just to the north-east of the Shetlands, with the Newcastle stiffening the line between the Faroes and Iceland. Of these, only the Newcastle was anywhere near the coming scene of action, but even she was too far away.

Holding much of the line in between these cruisers were the armed merchant ships. For contraband control—the stopping and searching of ships carrying proscribed cargoes—these ships were ideal in the high wild latitudes of the Atlantic. Big ex-passenger ships, able to remain at sea for long periods in bad weather, they were stripped of all their luxury fittings, and fitted with guns sufficient to deal with any cargo ship. But only with cargo ships—they were never intended to cope with anything else: it is significant that the very first move of the Admiralty when they finally learnt of the breakthrough of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was to withdraw all the armed merchant ships off the northern patrol. But the order came too late, tragically but inevitably, for one of these ships; for it was not until the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau turned their great guns on the Rawalpindi that the Admiralty knew that these two ships, then the most powerful in the German Navy, were loose in the Atlantic.

The 17,000-ton Rawalpindi, in peacetime a crack P & O liner plying between Britain and the Far East, was one of the first Merchant Navy vessels to be converted to an armed merchant ship. Her gay pre-war colours were gone, lost under a drab coat of battleship grey. The lavishly furnished interior had been gutted, a main control gunnery room constructed and deck fittings removed to make way for ammunition lockers and her hastily installed armament—eight old 6-inch guns, four ranged along either side. But there had been no time, no opportunity to make any alteration to her unarmoured sides and decks, and the strengthening of these was largely impossible anyway: in terms of the penetrating power of modern armour-piercing shells, the hull of the Rawalpindi might as well have been made of paper.

The crew of the Rawalpindi knew this, but just accepted it, with the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug, as just another of the hazards of the sea. Among the 280 officers and men aboard, there was not one to whom the sea and all its dangers were unknown, for in terms of experience if not in actual age—but more often than not in age as well—it was a crew of old men. Apart from fiftyodd officers and men who had served with the Rawalpindi as a regular passenger liner, the entire crew was composed of RNVR men of the Merchant Navy. RNVR—civilians with the bare essentials of naval training—reservists, and pensioners who had come back to the sea after having already completed twenty-two years in the Navy. There was not one active service officer or rating aboard the Rawalpindi, but there was a tremendous fund of knowledge and experience, more than any regular Naval ship could ever hope to boast. The crew knew the sea and its dangers, and accepted them. They knew too the very sharp limitations of their ship and accepted these also. And when, in latitude 63° 40′ North, II° 29′ West, at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 November, they saw the lean sleek shape of the Scharnhorst looming through the ice-cold rain-squalls of the bleak sub-Arctic waters, they knew that this was indeed the end, but they accepted that also.

On the bridge, Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, called back to the colours after seventeen long years in the unwanted wilderness of civilian life, had seen the danger and recognized its implications even before any of his men. He wrongly identified the ship as the Deutschland, but the mistake was one of academic importance only: he rightly identified it as a German pocket battleship or battle-cruiser, 26,000-ton leviathans with 13-inch armour-plate and nine 11-inch and twelve 5.9 guns capable of delivering a 8,000-pound broadside in reply to his own puny 400—and his light 100-pound shells could never hope to penetrate that massive armour anyway.

Even as she emerged from the rain-squalls the Scharnhorst’s big signalling lamp was stuttering out the command to ‘Heave-to’. The sensible thing, the wise and politic thing—for which there couldn’t possibly have been any reproach—would have been to do as the Scharnhorst ordered. But with Kennedy, as with most of the great British naval captains down the centuries, prudence in the face of the enemy was a quality that he had never learned, and certainly never inherited. He knew he could neither fight nor outrun the Scharnhorst, but there were sheltering icebergs and fogbanks nearby and, while there remained even one chance in a thousand he was determined to take it. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over and smoke floats to be dropped to cover their withdrawal.

The Rawalpindi was still heeling over on her turn when the Scharnhorst again ordered her to ‘Heave-to’. This time the message was reinforced with an 11-inch shell that crashed into the sea just ahead, sending a tall, slender column of white-streaked water towering far into the rain-filled darkening sky, twice the height of the tip of the Rawalpindi’s main mast. Kennedy acknowledged the weight of the warning by turning even further away from the enemy and dropping more smoke floats.

And then, for a moment, he thought salvation had come. Far off on the starboard bow, a long dark ship, white water piled high at its bow, emerged out of rain-squall, arrowing in towards the scene. One of their own Northern Patrol cruisers, Kennedy thought jubilantly, almost certainly the Newcastle, and he ordered course altered towards this haven. Almost at once the bitter truth struck him, but it was too late now. The new arrival represented not safety but the certain end of everything: it was the Gneisenau, sister ship to the Scharnhorst.

Even the one chance in a thousand had gone. There could be no escape now and the two pocket battleships, Kennedy knew, could pound his fragile vessel to death in a matter of minutes. There wouldn’t even be a semblance of a fight. Captain Edward Kennedy could have placed scuttling charges, surrendered with honour, and, had he succeeded in reaching Britain again, would almost certainly have been given command of another vessel straight away.

But scuttling charges had never played any part in the Kennedy family’s long and honourable two hundred year association with the Royal Navy, and Kennedy was certainly not the man ever to think of such things now even although he, probably above all captains, most certainly owed nothing to a Navy and an Admiralty that had courtmartialled him in 1922 on a grotesquely unfair charge and, brilliant officer though he was, had axed him from the service in the following year, calling him back only in their hour of need in 1939. But whatever he thought at the time we can only guess at: all we know is what he said as he watched the two pocket battleships bear down on him: ‘We’ll just fight them both.’ As a death sentence for a great ship and hundreds of men, this must rank as the most laconic ever.

And fought them both he did. Three times the Scharnhorst ordered him to abandon ship, and on the third time it had its answer—a salvo that fell just short. At the same time, a salvo from the Rawalpindi struck the Gneisenau amidships, and almost together the two German battle cruisers replied with heavy, accurate and devastating close-range fire.

The first salvo from the Scharnhorst crashed into the Rawalpindi’s high superstructure, wrecking the boat-deck and killing almost everyone on the bridge: but Captain Kennedy survived. Almost immediately, another salvo of 11-inch shells, this time from the Gneisenau, crashed into the main control room of the Rawalpindi, and turned it into a lifeless shambles: all semblance of concerted fire now ceased, but the seven guns—one had already been destroyed—fought on independently.

The fires amidships were already beginning to take hold as yet another salvo sliced through the tissue-thin sides of the liner and exploded deep in its heart. One of these blew up in the engine room, completely destroying the dynamos, and this was the blow that effectively carried into execution Kennedy’s sentence of death. With the dynamos gone, the electricity supply was destroyed: and the shell hoists from the magazines were worked by electricity.

Kennedy, still fighting with his wrecked ship, from the twisted wreckage that was all that was left of his bridge, issued instructions that every available member of the crew should assist in manhandling shells up from the magazines and rolling them across the heaving, shell-swept deck towards those guns that still kept firing: there were only five left now.

That exposed deck of the Rawalpindi, raked by screaming shrapnel and jagged twisted steel, became a blood-soaked abattoir for those who fought to reach the empty breeches of the waiting guns. Some carriers were killed outright, and their shells rolled from side to side with the movement of the ship, through the ever-growing flames and over deck-plates beginning to glow dull red from the heat of the internal fires. Other men were wounded, but ignored their agony: one incredibly gallant man, both legs smashed, wounded to death, and with a shell clutched in his one sound arm, dragged his way along the deck, groping blindly for the breech of the gun that he could not see, swearing that he would get them yet.

The battle was grotesquely one-sided. Shells still crashed into the dying Rawalpindi and the end could not be long delayed. Loose ammunition was falling into the fires and exploding far beneath. The entire ship, excepting only the poop and fo’c’sle, was a leaping, twisting map of flame. One by one the guns fell silent, as the enemy destroyed them, as the crews died beside them and the supply of ammunition, cut off by walls of flame, finally stopped altogether.

As a fighting unit the Rawalpindi was finished, beaten into silence and submission, all but dead in the water. But the sixty year-old Captain Kennedy was a man who was literally incapable of conceiving of the idea of defeat. He left his shattered bridge, groped through the blazing ruins of the superstructure and along the deck towards the poop: if he could only drop some smoke floats, he thought, he might still sail the Rawalpindi to safety. His ship was holed and sinking, damaged beyond help or repair and visibly dying: his guns were gone, his crew was decimated, but still he fought for survival. Such indomitable courage, such unyielding tenacity of purpose when all reason for purpose has long since vanished lies barely within the realms of comprehension.

Captain Kennedy vanished into the smoke and the flame, and died.

He was not long survived by his ship or by all except a tragic minority of the crew that had so magnificently served both himself and the Rawalpindi. Another shell from the Scharnhorst brought the coup de grace—a tremendous roar and a column of white flame lancing high into the gathering gloom of the evening as the erupting main magazine blew out through the sides and deck and burning superstructure and almost severed the Rawalpindi in two.

The guns of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau fell silent: every salvo now could only be so much wasted ammunition. For the handful of men still left alive aboard the Rawalpindi nothing could be achieved by remaining where they were but a death swifter and even more certain than that offered by the ice-cold waters slowly climbing up the rent and gaping sides of the sinking ship.

Miraculously, almost, two of the lifeboats had survived the ferocity of the Germans’ shells, and those few men—twenty-seven in all—who were able, slid down the falls and pulled desperately away from the blazing Rawalpindi: at any moment an explosion might reach out and destroy them, or destroy the ship and pull them after it as it sunk swiftly down to the deep floor of the ocean.

These men, picked up by the German ships, were the only survivors apart from a handful rescued the following morning. Most of the others had been killed by shell-fire, burnt to death or trapped below decks and drowned in the rising waters. Some men who could not reach the lifeboats, jumped into the sea, searching frantically for broken bits of boats, oars, wreckage, anything that would offer even a passing moment’s security before the numbing cold struck deep and their hearts just stopped beating. And many there were, scattered here and there over the decks and in passages and compartments below, too desperately wounded either to move or to call out, who just sat or lay waiting quietly for the end, for the blessing of the freezing waters that would bring swift release from their agonies.

Two hundred and forty men went down with the Rawalpindi, and, in light of the fanatical courage with which they had served both their ship and their commander, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to think that some of those who were still alive when the waters closed over them at 8 o’clock that evening may have derived no little consolation from the thought that if they had to go down with their ship, they could have asked no greater privilege than to do so in the incomparable company of Captain Edward Kennedy.

The Sinking of the Bismarck

PART ONE

Far south of the Arctic Circle, along the great trade routes of the Atlantic, westerly gales die away to a whisper and then the warm sun shines on the long gentle swells. Far to the north, in the numbing cold of the Barents Sea, stretch away the immense reaches of an almost miraculous calm, the sea milk-white from horizon to unbroken horizon for day after endless day. But between these two vast areas, along the belt of the Arctic Circle itself, lie the most bitter seas in the world: and no part of it more bitter, more hostile to man and the puny ships that carry him across the savagery of its galetorn waters than that narrow stretch of ocean between Iceland and Greenland that men call the Denmark Strait.

From the far-ranging Vikings of a thousand years ago to the time of the modern Icelandic fishermen, ships have sailed through this narrow passage, but they sailed always at their peril, only when necessity dictated, and they never lingered long, never a moment more than they had to. No man, no ship, has ever waited there from choice, but, at rare intervals, some few men and ships have had to do it from necessity; just seventeen years ago this month, two ships, with the hundreds of men aboard them, were just coming to the end of the longest vigil man has ever kept on these dark and dangerous waters.

The ships’ companies of His Majesty’s Cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk were tired, tired to the point of exhaustion. They had kept their vigil far too long. Even one winter’s day in the Denmark Strait, with twenty hours of impenetrable darkness, driving snow, a sub-zero wind knifing off Greenland’s barren ice-cap and the ship rolling and plunging steeply, sickeningly, incessantly, is a lifetime in itself, a nightmare that has no ending. And the Norfolk and the Suffolk had been there for months on end, had been there all through the grim winter of 1940 and the spring of 1941, suffering incredible hardships of cold and discomfort, always watching, always waiting. The strain of watching never ceased, the tension of waiting never ended.

But now summer, or what passes there for summer, had come to the Denmark Strait, and the struggle merely to exist was no longer an all-exclusive preoccupation. True, the cold still struck deep through the layered Arctic clothing, the packice stretching out from the shores of Greenland was only a mile or two away and the rolling fog banks to the east, off the Icelandic coast, no further distant, but at least the sea was calm, the snow held off and the darkness of the long winter night was gone. Halcyon conditions, almost, compared to those they had so recently known: even so, the strain was now infinitely greater than anything that had ever gone before, the tension bow-tautened almost to breaking point.

At that moment, just after 7 o’clock on the evening of 23 May, 1941, the strain, the tension bore most heavily on one man and one man alone—Captain R. M. Ellis, on the bridge of his cruiser Suffolk. He had been there, on his bridge, for two days now without a break, he might be there as long again, even longer, but it was impossible that he relax his unceasing vigilance, even for a moment. Too much depended on him. He was not the senior officer in the area: Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker was in his flagship, the Norfolk, but the Norfolk, though not far away, was safely hidden in the swirling fog. The ultimate responsibility was that of Captain Ellis, and it was a crushing responsibility. He could fail in what he had to do, he could all too easily fail through no fault of his own, but the disastrous consequences of any such failure were not for contemplation. Britain had already suffered and lost too much: one more defeat, one more blunder and the war could well be lost.

The war was in its twentieth month then, and Britain was alone and fighting for its life. Twenty dark, gloomy and tragic months, a gloom only momentarily lifted by the shining courage of the young pilots who had destroyed the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, but now the road ahead was more dark, more hopeless than ever before, and no light at the end of it.

The Wehrmacht’s panzer divisions were waiting, the threat of invasion still a Damoclean sword. We had just been driven ignominiously out of Greece. In that very week, Goering’s Eleventh Air Corps, whom Churchill called the flame of the German Army, had launched a ruthless and overwhelming attack on our forces in Crete, and the end was only a matter of brief time. Six million tons of shipping had been lost at sea, 650,000 tons in that April alone, the blackest month of the war, and May might prove even more terrible still, for at the moment when Captain Ellis was patrolling north-east and south-west through that narrow lane of clear water between the Greenland ice and the Icelandic fogs, there were no fewer than ten major freight convoys and one large and vital troop convoy, far scattered and for the most part only thinly protected, sailing over the face of the broad Atlantic.

And what part, people were asking bitterly, was Britain’s mighty Home Fleet playing in all this. Our first line of defence, our last hope in the darkest hour, why wasn’t it throwing all its great weight into these life and death battles? Why wasn’t it patrolling the North Sea and the English Channel (where the Stukas and the Heinkels could have destroyed it between dawn and sunset on any given day) ready to smash any cross-Channel invasion? Why hadn’t it helped in the evacuation of Greece? Why wasn’t it north of Crete, breaking up the seaborne reinforcements without whom Goering’s paratroopers could not hope to complete their conquests? Why wasn’t it at sea, bringing its great guns to bear for the protection of these threatened convoys in the submarine infested waters to the west? Why was it lying idle, powerless and useless, in its retreat in Scapa Flow? Why, why, why?

The Bismarck was the reason why: an overpowering reason why.

Laid down in 1936, launched from the Blohm and Voss shipyards in Hamburg on 14 February, 1939, in the presence of no less a person than the Chancellor of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler himself, the Bismarck was something to haunt the dreams—or nightmares—of foreign navies the world over. Hitler had a genius for exaggeration, but there was no hint of exaggeration in what he said to its crew when he visited the battleship again in early May, 1941, only the simple truth. ‘The Bismarck,’ he told them, ‘is the pride of the German Navy.’

She was indeed. She would have been the pride of any navy in the world. Built in cynical disregard of the 35,000 tons treaty limitations, with an actual tonnage somewhere in the region of 50,000, she was unquestionably the most powerful battleship afloat. She was fast, her speed of over 30 knots a match for any British capital ship: she had an immense beam—far greater than that of any British ship—which provided a magnificently stable firing platform for her eight 15-inch and twelve 6-inch guns—and the German gunnery, far superior to ours, was legendarily accurate under any conditions: and with her heavy armour-plating, double and triple hulls and the infinitely complex sub-compartmentation of the hull itself achieving a hitherto impossible degree of watertight integrity, she was widely believed to be virtually unsinkable. She was the trump card in Admiral Raeder’s hand—and now the time had come to play that trump.

The Bismarck was out. There could no longer be any question about it. First reported by reconnaissance as moving up the Kattegat on 20 May, she had been photographed in the company of a ‘Hipper’ class cruiser, by a Spitfire pilot, in Grimstad fjord, just south of Bergen, on the early afternoon of the 21st; at 6.00 p.m. the following day, a Maryland bomber from the Hatston naval air base in the Orkneys, skimming low over the water in appalling flying conditions, flew over Grimstad and Bergen and reported that the Bismarck was no longer there.

The Bismarck was out, and there could be no mistake where she was going. There were no Russian convoys to attack—Russia was not yet in the war. She could be racing only for the Atlantic, with the ‘Hipper’ cruiser—later identified as the Prinz Eugen—as her scout, there to savage and destroy our Atlantic convoys, our sole remaining lifelines to the outer world. The ‘Hipper’ itself, only a 10,000 ton cruiser, had once fallen upon a convoy and sent seven ships to the bottom in less than an hour. What the Bismarck could do just did not bear contemplation.

The Bismarck had to be stopped, and stopped before she had broken loose into the Atlantic, and it was for this single, precise purpose of stopping her that Admiral Sir John Tovey, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, had so long and so doggedly held his capital ships based on Scapa. Now was the time for the Home Fleet to justify its existence.

Admiral Tovey, a master tactician who was to handle his ships impeccably during the ensuing four days, was under no illusions as to the grave difficulties confronting him, the tragic consequences were he to guess wrongly. The Bismarck could break south-west into the Atlantic anywhere between Scotland and Greenland—a bleak, gale-ridden stretch of fully a thousand miles, with the all-essential visibility more frequently than not at the mercy of driving rain, blanketing snow and great rolling fog banks.

He had to station two squadrons, with two battleships in each squadron—he had no faith in the ability of any one ship of the line to cope with the Bismarck— at strategically vital positions some hundreds of miles apart, the Hood and the Prince of Wales south of Iceland, and his own flagship, the King George V, the Repulse and the carrier Victorious west of the Faroes, where, he hoped, they would be most favourably situated to move in any direction to intercept the Bismarck.

But they couldn’t move until they knew where the Bismarck was, and Admiral Tovey had had his watchdogs at sea for a long time now, waiting for this day to come. Between Iceland and the Faroes patrolled the cruisers Birmingham and Manchester, while up in the Denmark Strait the Suffolk and the Norfolk were coming to the end of a long long wait.

7.20 p.m., 23 May, 1941 and the Suffolk was steaming southwest down the narrow channel between the ice and the fog. If the Bismarck came by the Strait, Captain Ellis guessed, she would almost certainly come through that channel: the ice barred her way to the west, and, over on the east, no captain was going to take the risk of pushing his battleship through a dense fog at something like thirty knots, especially a fog that concealed a known minefield forty miles in length. If she were to come at all, that was the way she would come.

And that was the way she did come. At 7.22 p.m. the excited cry of a sharp-eyed lookout had Captain Ellis and all the watchers on the bridge peering intently through their binoculars out over the starboard quarter, the reported bearing, and one brief glance was enough for Ellis to know that their long exhausting wait was indeed over. Even for men who had never seen it, it was almost impossible to mistake the vast bulk of the Bismarck anywhere. (Or so one would have thought—it was to prove tragically otherwise less than twelve hours later.)

Captain Ellis was not disposed to linger. He had done the first—and most important—part of his job, the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen, he suddenly realized, were only eight miles away, the Bismarck’s guns were lethal up to a range of at least twenty miles, and there had been nothing in his instructions about committing suicide. Quite the reverse—he had been ordered to avoid damage to himself at all costs, to shadow the Bismarck and guide the battleships of the Home Fleet into her path. Even as the Suffolk’s radio room started stuttering out its ‘Enemy located’ transmissions to Ellis’s immediate commander, Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker in the Norfolk and to Sir John Tovey in his battleship far to the south, he swung his cruiser heeling far over in a maximum turn to port and raced into the blanketing safety of the fog that swirled protectively around them only moments after they had entered it.

Deep in the mist, the Suffolk came round, manoeuvring dangerously in a gap in the minefields, the all-seeing eye of its radar probing every move of the German battleship as it steamed at high speed down through the Denmark Strait. Then, once it was safely past, both the Suffolk and the Norfolk moved into shadowing positions astern, and there they grimly hung on all through that long, vile Arctic night of snow-storms, rain-squalls and scudding mist, occasionally losing contact but always regaining it in what was to become a text-book classic in the extremely difficult task of shadowing an enemy craft at night. All night long, too, the radio transmissions continued, sending out the constantly changing details of the enemy’s position, course and speed.

Three hundred miles to the south, Vice-Admiral L. E. Holland’s squadron, consisting of HMS Hood, HMS Prince of Wales and six destroyers, were already steaming west-northwest at high speed on an interception course. The excitement, the anticipation aboard these ships was intense. For them, too, it was the end of a long wait. There was little doubt in anybody’s mind that battle was now inevitable, even less doubt that the battle could have only one ending, that the Bismarck, despite her great power and fearsome reputation, had only hours to live.

With her ten 14-inch guns to the Bismarck’s eight 15-inch the Prince of Wales herself, our newest battleship, was, on paper at least, an even match for the Bismarck. (Only her commander, Captain Leach, and a handful of his senior officers were aware that she was far too new, her crew only semi-trained, her 14-inch turrets, as new and untried as the crew itself, so defective, temperamental and liable to mechanical breakdown that the builders’ foremen were still aboard working in the turrets, desperately trying to repair the more outstanding defects as the battleship steamed towards the Bismarck.)

But no one, not even the most loyal member of her crew, was staking his faith on the Prince of Wales. And, indeed, why should he, when only a few cable lengths away he could see the massive bows of the 45,000-ton Hood thrusting the puny waves contemptuously aside as she raced towards the enemy. When the Hood was with you, nothing could ever go wrong. Every man in the Royal Navy knew that.

And not only in the Navy. It is seventeen years now since the Hood died but none of the millions alive today who had grown up before the Second World War can forget, and will probably never forget, the almost unbelievable hold the Hood had taken on the imaginations and hearts of the British public. She was the best known, best loved ship in all our long naval history, a household name to countless people for whom Revenge and Victory were only words. The biggest, most powerful ship of the line in the inter-war years, she stood for all that was permanent, a synonym for all that was invincible, held in awe, even in veneration. For millions of people she was the Royal Navy, a legend in her own lifetime…But a legend grows old.

And now, with the long night’s high-speed steaming over, the dawn in the sky and the Bismarck looming up over the horizon, the legend was about to end forever.

Safely out of range, but with a grandstand view of the coming action, the men of the Norfolk and the Suffolk watched the Hood and the Prince of Wales, acting as one under the command of Vice-Admiral Holland, bear down on the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. But even at that distance it was obvious that the two British ships were too close together, that Captain Leach of the Prince of Wales was being compelled to do exactly as the Hood did instead of being allowed to fight his own ship independently and to the best advantage, and, more incredibly still, that the closing course, their line of approach to the enemy, was all that a line of approach should not be. They were steering for the enemy at an angle broad enough to present the Germans with a splendid target but, at the same time, just acute enough to prevent their rear turrets from being brought into action, with the result that the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were able to bring their full broadsides to bear against only half of the possible total of the British guns.

Even worse was to follow. The Hood was the first to open fire, at 5.52 a.m., and, for reasons that will never be clearly known, she made the fatal error of concentrating her fire on the Prinz Eugen, and did so throughout the battle. The mistake in identification was bad enough, but no worse than the standard of her gunnery: the Prinz Eugen emerged from the action unscathed.

The Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, consequently, were free to bring their entire armament to bear on the Hood, who, because of her approach angle, could only reply with her two fore turrets. True, the Prince of Wales had now opened up also, but the blunt and bitter truth is that it didn’t matter very much anyway: her first salvo was more than half a mile wide of the target, the second not much better, and the third also missed. So did the fourth. And the fifth.

The Germans did not miss. The concentrated heaviness of their fire was matched only by its devastating accuracy. Both were on target—the Hood—almost at once, the Prinz Eugen’s 8-inch shells starting a fire by the Hood’s mainmast within the first minute. The Bismarck, too, was hitting now, the huge 15-inch projectiles, each one a screaming ton of armour-piercing steel and high explosive, smashing into the reeling Hood and exploding deep in her heart. How often the Hood was hit, and where she was hit we will never know, nor does it matter.

All that matters, all that we do know, is what was seen by the survivors of that battle at exactly six o’clock that morning, as the fifth salvo from the Bismarck straddled the Hood. A stabbing column of flame, white and orange and blindingly incandescent, lanced a thousand feet vertically upwards into the grey morning sky as the tremendous detonation of her exploding magazines almost literally blew the Hood out of existence. When the last echoes of the great explosion had rolled away to lose themselves beyond the horizon and the smoke drifted slowly over the sea, the shattered remnants of the Hood had vanished as completely as if the great ship herself had never existed.

So, in the twenty-first year of her life, the Hood died. This, the first naval engagement of her long life, had lasted exactly eight minutes, and when she went down she took 1,500 officers and men with her. There were three survivors.

PART TWO

The destruction of the Hood, the invincible, impregnable Hood, came as a tremendous shock both to the Navy and the country at large. It was incredible, it was impossible that this had happened—and the impossible had to be explained away, both verbally and in print, with all speed.

As details of the action were at that time lacking, no mention was made of the Hood’s suicidal angle of approach to the enemy, the fatal mistake in identification that led to her firing on the Prinz Eugen instead of the Bismarck, or of the fact that the standard of her gunnery was so poor that she failed to register even one hit throughout the entire engagement. Perhaps it was as well that these things were not known at the time.

The reasons that were advanced at the time—and the source of inspiration of these reasons is not far to seek—were that the Hood, of course, had been no battleship but only a lightly-protected battle cruiser, and, even so, that the 15-inch shell that had found her magazine had been one chance in a million. These explanations were utter nonsense.

True, the Hood was technically classed as a battle cruiser, but it was just that, a technicality and no more: the fact is that with her 12-inch iron and steel sheathing extending over 560 feet on either side and with her total weight of protective metal reaching a fantastic 14,000 tons, she was one of the most heavily armoured ships in the world. As for the one chance in a million shell, senior naval architects had been pointing out for twenty years that the Hood’s magazines were wide open to shells approaching from a certain angle, a danger that could easily have been obviated by extra armour plating. The Hood’s design was defective, badly defective, and the Admiralty was well aware of this.

No such thoughts as these, it is safe to assume, was in the mind of Captain Leach of the Prince of Wales as the smoke and the dust of the awesome explosion cleared away and the Hood was seen to be gone. The Prince of Wales was fighting for her life now, and her captain knew it. Both the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen had swung their guns on him as soon as the Hood had blown up and already the deadly accuracy of their heavy and concentrated fire was beginning to have its effect. Captain Leach summed up the situation, made his assessments and didn’t hesitate. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over, broke off the engagement and retired under a heavy smokescreen.

‘The ship that ran away’. That was what the Prince of Wales was called then, the coward battleship that turned and fled: it is an open secret that ship, officers and men, during the remainder of the Prince of Wales’s short life, were henceforward treated with aversion and cold contempt by the rest of the Navy and this opprobium ended only with the death of the ship and the gallant Captain Leach a bare seven months later under a savage Japanese aerial attack off the coast of Malaya. The opprobrium was more than unjust—it was grotesquely and bitterly unfair. Once again, the Admiralty must shoulder much of the blame.

In fairness, it was completely unintentional on their part. The trouble arose from their official communiqué on the action, which was no better and no worse than the typical wartime communiqué, in that it tended to exaggerate the damage sustained by the enemy while minimizing our own.

Two statements in the communiqué caused the grievous misunderstanding: ‘The Bismarck was at one time seen to be on fire’ and ‘The Prince of Wales sustained slight damage’. Why in all the world then, people asked, hadn’t the ship which had received only slight damage closed with the one on fire and destroyed it. What possible excuse for running away?

Excuse enough. The fire on the Bismarck, while demonstrable testimony to the occasional liveliness of official imaginations, had, in actual fact, consisted of no more than soot shaken loose from her funnel. As for the Prince of Wales’s ‘slight damage’, she had been struck by no fewer than three 8-inch shells and four of the Bismarck’s great 15-inch shells, one of which had completely wrecked the bridge, killing everyone there except Leach and his chief yeoman of signals. Furthermore, one of the Prince of Wales’s big guns was completely out of action, repeated breakdowns in the others led to their firing intermittently or not at all and the jamming of ‘Y’ turret shell ring had put the four big guns of that turret—half of Captain Leach’s effective armament—out of commission. The Prince of Wales, far from being slightly damaged, was badly crippled: to close with her powerful enemy, to expose herself any longer to the murderous accuracy of these broadsides would have been no mere act of folly but quick and certain suicide.

The Bismarck made no attempt to pursue and engage her enemy. With the Hood destroyed and the Prince of Wales badly hurt and driven off in ignominious defeat, she had already achieved success beyond her wildest dreams. A magnificent victory, a tremendous boost to the prestige of the German Navy and, in Goebbels’ hands, a newforged propaganda weapon of incalculable power—why risk throwing it all away by exposing herself to a lucky salvo that might destroy her turrets or bridge or fire control directors—or might even sink her? Besides, her primary purpose in breaking into the Atlantic was not to engage the Home Fleet—that was the last thing Admiral Lutjens wanted—but to annihilate our convoys.

The rejoicing aboard the Bismarck was intense, but no more so than the jubilation in the chancellory of Berlin, where news of this resounding triumph had been flashed as soon as the Bismarck had broken off the action.

Within an hour the news would be in the hands of every newspaper and radio station in the country. By the afternoon every person in Germany—and by the evening every country in Europe—would know of the crushing defeat suffered by the Royal Navy. An overjoyed Hitler sent his own and the nation’s congratulations and admiration to the officers and men of the Bismarck, and personally announced, amongst numerous other decorations, the immediate award of the Knight’s Insignia of the Iron Cross to the Bismarck’s first gunnery officer.

Only one man held aloof, only one man remained untouched by the exultation, the exhilaration of the victory—the man, one would have thought, who had the greatest cause of all to rejoice, Captain Lindemann, commanding officer of the Bismarck. Lindemann was unhappy and more than a little afraid—and no man had ever called Lindemann’s courage into question. A gallant and very experienced sailor, reckoned about the best and the most skilful in the German Navy—and he had to be, to have command of the finest ship in the German Navy—he was filled with foreboding, a dark certainty of ultimate defeat.

Although his ship had suffered no damage either to her guns or engines and was still the complete fighting machine, a shell, crashing through the heavy armour, and exploding in her fuel tanks had perceptibly reduced her speed and he feared he might not have sufficient fuel left for sustained high-speed steaming and manoeuvring—and Lindemann realized only too clearly that he would require all the speed and every pound of thrust the Bismarck’s big turbines were capable of developing. He knew the British, he knew the tremendous regard and affection in which they had held the Hood, and he knew too that, far from being intimidated by the appalling manner of her death, they would have been goaded into a savage fury for revenge and would not rest until they had hunted them down and destroyed them.

These fears he tried to communicate to his senior officer, Admiral Lutjens, and suggested that they return immediately to Bergen, for repairs. Admiral Lutjens, for reasons which we will never know—possibly the elation of their great success had temporarily blurred his judgment and dreams of glory are notoriously treacherous counsellors—overruled his captain. They would go on as originally planned. So the Bismarck turned south-west and pushed on deep down into the Atlantic.

The Navy followed her. All afternoon and evening the Norfolk, Suffolk and Prince of Wales shadowed both German ships, sending out constant radio transmissions to Admiral Tovey, who swung his squadron on to a new interception course.

The Bismarck knew she was being followed, but seemed to be undisturbed by this. Only once, briefly, did she show her teeth. About 6.30 in the evening, she turned on her tracks in a fog bank and opened fired on the Suffolk, but broke off the engagement almost at once, when the Prince of Wales joined in. (It was not realized at the time that this was merely a diversion to let the Prinz Eugen break away to a German oiler, where she refuelled and made her way safely to Brest.)

The Bismarck now turned to the west and the British shadowers followed, Admiral Tovey’s squadron still pursuing. But Tovey’s King George V, Repulse and Victorious were now only three out of many ships converging on the German capital ship.

The battleship Revenge was ordered out from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Vice-Admiral Somerville’s Force H—the battle cruiser Renown, the now legendary Ark Royal and the cruiser Sheffield—were ordered up from Gibraltar. The battleship Ramillies, then with a mid-Atlantic convoy, the cruiser Edinburgh, down near the Azores and the cruiser London, with a convoy off the Spanish coast, were all ordered to intercept. Last, but most important of all, the battleship Rodney was pulled off a Statesbound convoy. The Rodney herself was going to Boston for an urgent and long overdue refit, as her engines and boiler-rooms were in a sorely dilapidated state: but the Rodney’s great 16-inch guns, and the magnificently Nelsonian capacity of her commander, Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton, to turn a blind eye to what he considered well-meant but erring signals from the Admiralty were to prove more than counter-balance for the parlous state of her engines. The greatest hunt in naval history was on.

Late that evening—just before midnight—Swordfish torpedo bombers from the Victorious, nine in all and led by Lieutenant-Commander Esmonde—who was later to lose his life but win a posthumous Victoria Cross for his attack on the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst— launched an attack against the Bismarck in an attempt to slow her. But only one torpedo struck home, exploding harmlessly against the Bismarck’s massive armour plating.

Or so the official Admiralty communiqué claimed. For once, however, the claim was an underestimate. Baron von Mullenheim Rechberg (today the German consul in Kingston, Jamaica) but then the lieutenant-commander in charge of the Bismarck’s after turret—and the ship’s senior surviving officer—said recently, when questioned on this point, that the Bismarck had been torpedoed three times by aircraft from the Victorious. Two of the torpedoes had little effect, but the third, exploding under the bows, caused severe damage and slowed up the Bismarck still more.

And then, at three o’clock on the morning of the 25th, that which both the Admiralty and Sir John Tovey had feared above all else happened—the shadowing ships, zig-zagging through submarine infested waters, made their first and only mistake, broke contact and completely failed to regain it. The Bismarck was lost, and no one knew where she was or, worse still, where she was heading.

Later on that same morning, Admiral Lutjens addressed the crew of the Bismarck. The optimistic confidence with which, only twenty-four hours previously, he had scoffed at Captain Lindemann’s suggestion that they return to Bergen, had vanished completely. He was now a tired and anxious man, a man who realized all too clearly the enormity of his blunder. Incredibly, it seems that he was unaware that they had shaken off their pursuers—it was thought that they were still being shadowed by radar—and when Lutjens spoke the first overtones of desperation were all too clear in his voice.

The British, he said, knew where they were and it was only a matter of time before their big ships closed in, and in overwhelming force. They knew what the outcome must be. They must fight to the death for the Fuehrer, every last man of them, and, if needs be, the Bismarck herself would be scuttled. It is not difficult to imagine what effect this brief speech must have had on the morale of the Bismarck’ screw.

Why had Lutjens been so sure that capital ships of the Royal Navy were bearing down on them? In the first place, wrongly believing that he was still being trailed by the Norfolk and Suffolk, he naturally assumed that they were guiding the British battleships to the scene. Secondly, the Bismarck had just been in wireless contact with the German Admiralty—who, says von Mullenheim, were unaware of the true position—and had just received from them, doubtless on the basis of reports from Doenitz’s U-boats, information about the whereabouts of her hunters which was not only misleading in itself but made doubly so by errors in transmission. British battleships were reported to be in the close vicinity and, acting on this false information, Lutjens ordered alterations in course which lost the Bismarck those few irreplaceable hours that were to make all the difference between life and death.

The Bismarck’s radio transmissions were picked up by listening posts in Britain, and the bearings taken. The Admiralty’s incredulity that the Bismarck should thus suicidally break radio silence and betray its position—they didn’t know, of course, that the Bismarck still thought she was being shadowed—was equalled only by their immense relief and the alacrity with which they sent these bearings to their Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Tovey.

By an ironic and amazing coincidence—and it happened almost exactly at the same time—just as Lutjens aboard the Bismarck had received a completely misleading report on the position of the enemy, so did Tovey on the King George V. In Tovey’s case, however, the bearings had been correctly transmitted but were wrongly worked out on the plot of the battleship. The result, however, was the same. Both admirals were misled, and misled at a vital moment.

The calculations made on the King George V showed that the Bismarck was north, instead of, as expected, south of her last reported position. This could mean only one thing—she was headed for Norway and home, instead of Brest, as everyone had thought. There wasn’t a moment to lose—even now it might be too late. Tovey at once ordered his far-scattered fleet to turn in their tracks and make for the North Sea.

This every ship did—with the major exception of the Rodney. Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton on the Rodney doubted that the Bismarck was, in fact, making for the North Sea and as he was then sitting nicely astride her escape route to Brest he decided to remain there. Some time later the Admiralty, too, sent him a signal to the same effect, but Dalrymple-Hamilton ignored it, backed his own judgment and stayed where he was.

Later in the afternoon, in an atmosphere of increasingly mounting tension and almost despairing anxiety, further Bismarck position reports came in to Tovey that made it clear that the previous estimated Bismarck positions had been wrong and that she was indeed heading for Brest. Tovey was deeply worried, for the Admiralty, he knew, had the same information and yet were acquiescing in the Home Fleet’s search to the north-east. It is now obvious that some powerful person in the Admiralty—we shall probably never know who it was as their Lordships can hardly be accused of garrulity as far as the admission and explanation of their mistakes are concerned—was going in the face of all the evidence and backing his wildly wrong hunches.

Admiral Tovey backed his own hunch, decided he could not wait for the Admiralty to make up its mind and turned his fleet for Brest. Or, rather, such as was left of his fleet, for, apart from his own ship, the Norfolk, the Rodney, the Dorsetshire coming up from the south, and the Renown, Ark Royal and Sheffield of Force H, all the others were one by one being forced to retire from the chase by reason of the Admiralty’s non-existent fuelling arrangements.

The Bismarck, too, was now short of fuel—desperately short. Through some almost unbelievable oversight or carelessness she had left home 2,000 tons of fuel short, and when the Prince of Wales shell, during the action with the Hood, had smashed into her bunkers, many hundreds of tons more had been lost, either directly to the sea or by salt water contamination. She had hardly enough oil left to reach Brest, even at an economical steaming speed—at a moment when she needed every knot she possessed.

The crew knew this, as crews always get to know these things, and to counteract the breaking morale and steadily mounting despair reports were circulated that an oil tanker was already en route to refuel them, and that, before long, the seas around them would be alive with their own U-boats and the skies black with the bombers of the Luftwaffe, to escort them safely into harbour.

But the oil tanker never came. Neither did the U-boats nor the Luftwaffe. What came instead, after thirty-one hours of increasingly frantic searching by British planes and ships, was a long range Catalina of the Coastal Command. At 10.30 on the morning of 26 May, the long wait was over and the Bismarck found again, her last hope gone. She was then about 550 miles west of Land’s End, and heading for Brest.

An illuminating comment on the state of the morale at that moment aboard the German battleship is provided by Baron Mullenheim, who says that the Bismarck had all prepared for instant use a dummy funnel and set of Naval code recognition signals. But, so frustrated and self-defeated—von Mullenheim’s own words—were the crew that neither of these were used at the very moment when it might have been the saving of the Bismarck.

Sir John Tovey’s relief, just as he was convinced that the enemy had finally escaped him, must have been immense—but it was shortlived. His ship and the Rodney, with whom he was now in contact, were, he soon realized, much too far behind the enemy to cut him off before he reached Brest. Neither the Norfolk, the Dorsetshire nor the five destroyers under the command of Captain Vian on the Cossack, recently pulled off a southbound convoy, could even hope to stop the Bismarck— they would have been blown out of the water before they had even begun to get within gun or torpedo range. The last remaining hope of stopping the Bismarck lay with the aircraft of the Ark Royal, approaching rapidly from the south.

Accordingly, at 3 p.m. in the afternoon of the 26th, torpedo carrying Swordfish took off in what was regarded at the time as a last desperate effort to stop the Bismarck. In the words of the official communiqué, ‘the attack proved unsuccessful’. This was hardly surprising in view of two facts that were not mentioned in the Admiralty’s communiqué—many of the torpedoes, fitted with experimental magnetic warheads, exploded on contact with the water, which was just as well as, by what might have been a tragic mistake in identification, the attack was directed not against the Bismarck but their own escorting destroyer, the Sheffield.

Admiral Tovey was now in despair. There was, he felt, no stopping the Bismarck now. Both he and the Rodney, by that time desperately short of fuel, would have to turn for home in only a matter of hours and allow the Bismarck to continue unmolested to Brest. It would have been the cruellest blow of his long and illustrious career.

The blow never fell. Sir John Tovey, and, indeed, the entire Royal Navy, were saved from this bitterest of defeats by a handful of young Fleet Air Arm pilots on the Ark Royal, who were desperately determined to redeem their ignominious blunder of that afternoon.

And redeem it they did. In almost a full gale, in rain squalls and poor visibility, they somehow, miraculously, took off from the treacherously wet, plunging, rolling flight deck of the Ark Royal, sought out the Bismarck in appalling flying weather and pressed home their attack, in face of intense antiaircraft fire, with splendid gallantry. Only two torpedoes struck home—von Mullenheim says three, but the number is unimportant. Only the last torpedo counted, and that one, exploding far aft on the starboard quarter, buckled and jammed the rudders of the great battleship. The Bismarck circled twice, then came to a stop, unmanageable and dead in the water, 400 miles due west of Brest. The long chase was over and the Bismarck was at bay.

PART THREE

Thus, with the crippling of her steering gear by the torpedo bombers of Ark Royal, began the agonizing last night of the brief life of the Bismarck.

The greatest battleship in the world was about to go to her death, and it was almost as if nature knew that nothing could now stay her end, for the weather that night was in dark and bitter harmony with the moods, the thoughts, the bleak and sombre despair of the hundreds of exhausted men who still kept watch aboard the Bismarck.

The wind blew hard, the cold, driving rain lashed pitilessly across their faces, the waves ran high and rough and confused and the darkness was as absolute as darkness ever becomes at sea: there was no moon that night, and even the stars were hidden by the scudding rain-clouds.

Dead in the water, engines stopped, the Bismarck lay in the troughs between the great Atlantic combers rolling heavily, continuously, while the engine room crews worked frantically to free the jammed rudders. Their lives, the life of every man in the ship, depended on the success or failure of their efforts: Brest and safety were only twelve hours’ steaming away, even six hours would have taken them under the protective umbrella of their own Luftwaffe, and there no British battleship would dare venture. But with steering control lost, they were helpless.

One rudder was freed and centred, and there it jammed, but even that was a major step forward: if the other could be freed, or even centred so as to eliminate its drag, there would still be hope, for the battleship could be steered by varying the relative speeds of the two great propellor shafts to overcome the contending forces of wind, wave and tide. But the rudder, buckled and twisted by the impact of the torpedo explosion, remained far over at its acute angle, immovably jammed.

The situation was desperate. Time was running out, and the engineers, haggard, exhausted men who had almost forgotten what sleep was, were now all but incapable of any effort at all, mental or physical: with the interminable plunging of the wildly rolling ship and the fumes of diesel oil seeping back from ruptured fuel tanks even the most experienced sailors among them were almost continually sick, many of them violently so.

It was announced that the man who succeeded in freeing the rudders would be awarded the Knight’s Insignia of the Iron Cross—the highest award Germany can bestow. But there is no place for dreams of glory in the utter wretchedness of a seasick man, and even had a diver gone over the side into that black and gale-wracked sea he could have achieved nothing except his own death, and that in a matter of moments as the great ship, wallowing wickedly in the troughs, crushed the life out of him.

The engineer commander approached Captain Lindemann with a counsel of desperation—they should try to blow the rudder off with high explosive. Lindemann, who had had no sleep for six days and six nights replied with the massive indifference of one who has taken far too much and for whom nothing now remains, ‘You may do what you like. I have finished with the Bismarck.’ These, surely, are the most tragic words that have ever been uttered by the commander of a naval vessel, but it is impossible to blame Captain Lindemann: in his hopelessness, in his black despair and utter exhaustion, he was no longer in contact with reality.

The order was given—it may have been by Admiral Lutjens himself—to get under way, and slowly the Bismarck gathered speed until she was doing almost ten knots. With no steering control left, she yawed wildly from side to side, but her general course was north—towards the coast of England. This was the last thing Lutjens wanted, but there was no help for it: with the constant lifeless rolling in the great troughs, the turret crews had become so seasick that they were unable to fight their guns, and the ship itself had become a most unstable firing platform. More important still, a ship lying stopped in the water was a sitting target for any torpedo attacks that might be delivered in the darkness of the night.

And, inevitably, the torpedo attacks came. All night long the Bismarck was harassed by a group of British destroyers, who, with their vastly superior speed and manoeuvrability, circled it like a pack of hounds waiting to bring down and finish off a wounded stag. But the Bismarck, as the destroyers found, was not to be finished off so easily. Time and again, as a hound darts in to nip the stag, a destroyer raced in and loosed off its torpedoes, but soon discovered that this was an unprofitable and highly dangerous proceeding. Somehow, somewhere, the Bismarck’s gun crews—and they were, after all, the pick of the German Navy—had found their last reserves of spirit and energy and drove off the British destroyers with heavy and extremely accurate radar-controlled fire from their 15-inch turrets.

During the running and intermittent battle, in the intervals between the crash of the gunfire and the momentary glaring illumination of the ship and sea around as the white and orange flames streaked from the mouths of the big barrels, a German naval officer, intent on boosting the morale of his men, kept up a commentary of the fight over the Tannoy system. ‘One British destroyer hit…One hit and on fire…Ship blowing up and sinking…’

(In point of fact, none of Captain Vian’s destroyers were hit, far less sunk, during the night. It is as well to remember, however, that all the inventiveness was not on the German side. The British destroyers claimed, a claim that was backed by the official Admiralty communiqué, that the Bismarck had been torpedoed several times during the night: the truth is that the Bismarck wasn’t hit even once by a torpedo.)

Early on in the night, the Fuehrer himself sent a personal message to the Bismarck: ‘Our thoughts are with our victorious comrades’ to which he received a reply, ‘Ship completely unmanoeuvrable. Will fight to the last shell.’

It is difficult to imagine which of the two messages had the more dismaying effect. Probably the latter. For doomed men to be addressed as ‘victorious comrades’ is irony enough, but for Hitler to learn that all hope had been abandoned for the magnificent ship he had visited only a week or two previously and called the pride of the German Navy must have been a shattering blow.

As Lutjens said, the ship was completely un-manoeuvrable. The long dark night wore on, and in spite of every effort it proved impossible to bring the Bismarck round on a course for Brest. For her own safety she had to keep moving, and with the set of the wind and the sea, there was only one way she could move—north.

Dawn was coming up now, a bleak, cheerless dawn with driving rain clouds and a grey and stormy sea. There was no longer any hiding from the crew the course they were steering, and the despair and the fear lay heavy over the Bismarck. It was almost certainly to counteract this that an official message was passed round to the men at their stations—those who still fought off exhaustion and remained awake at their stations—that squadrons of Stukas had already taken off from Northern France, and that a tanker, tugs and escorting destroyers were steaming out to their aid. There was no word of truth in this. The Luftwaffe was grounded by the same high wind and low, gale-torn rain clouds as were sweeping across the Bismarck, the tugs and tanker were still in Brest harbour and the destroyers never came.

There came instead the two most powerful battleships of the British Home Fleet, the Rodney and the King George V, beating up out of the west so as to have the Bismarck between them and the lightening sky to the east. The men of the Bismarck knew that there would be no escape this time, that the promised Stukas and destroyers and U-boats would never come, and that when the British battleships, bent on revenge for the sunken Hood, finally turned for home again they would leave an empty sea behind them. The Bismarck made ready to die.

Over the guns, by the great engines, in the magazines and fire-control rooms, exhausted men lay or sat by their posts, sunk in drugged uncaring sleep. On the bridge, according to the testimony of one of the few surviving officers, senior officers lay at their stations like dead men, the helmsman was stretched out by the useless wheel, of the Admiral or any member of his staff there was no sign. They had to be shaken and beaten out of the depths of their so desperately needed sleep, awakened to the cruellest, the most bitter dawn they had ever known: and, for all but a handful, it was their last awakening.

Even before they were all roused, closed up at their battle stations and ready to defend themselves, the Rodney, no more than four minutes after she had first been sighted, opened up with her great 16-inch guns. For the waiting men on the Bismarck, the spectacle of a full-scale broadside from the Rodney, with her three massive triple turrets all ranged together on her tremendously long fore-deck and firing simultaneously as they did later in the battle, was an impressive and terrifying sight: but no more terrifying than the express train shriek of the approaching salvo, the flat thunderclaps of sound as the shells exploded on nearby contact with the water, the waterspouts erupting two hundred feet up into the leaden sky.

But this first salvo missed. So, almost immediately afterwards, did the first from the King George V. And now the Bismarck retaliated and concluding, probably rightly, that the Rodney was the more dangerous opponent, directed the first salvo at her. It fell a long way short, but the Bismarck’s reputation for gunnery of a quite extraordinary accuracy, a reputation achieved in only four brief days, was solidly founded in fact: almost immediately she started straddling the Rodney, which took swift avoiding action.

But still the Rodney was firing from every gun that could be brought to bear, and the King George V, temporarily ignored by the Bismarck, was arrowing in head-on, her six big for’ard 15-inch guns firing time and again, as quickly as they could be reloaded. The Norfolk, too, the cruiser that had doggedly followed the Bismarck all the way from the far-distant waters of the Denmark Strait, now joined in the fight and shortly afterwards the Dorsetshire, who had taken a severe hammering all night long as she had raced north through galewinds and heavy seas, appeared on the scene. Within fifteen minutes from the beginning of the action, the Bismarck was being subjected to heavy and sustained fire from two battleships and two cruisers.

The odds were hopeless. Even for a ship capable of high speed and rapid manoeuvre, and with a fresh and confident crew, the sheer weight of enemy shells would have proved far too much: and the Bismarck could now move only at a relative crawl, manoeuvre of any kind was impossible for her and her crew were exhausted, hopeless and utterly demoralized. In retrospect, over the gap of seventeen years, our sympathies tend to lie with the Bismarck, a sitting target lying increasingly helpless in the water, being mercilessly battered into extinction. But there was no thought of mercy at the time, only of revenge and destruction, and understandably so: only four days had elapsed since the Hood and fifteen hundred men had gone to their deaths—and the Stukas and U-boats might appear on the scene at any moment.

Already, within fifteen minutes of the first shots being fired, there was a marked deterioration in the Bismarck’s rate and accuracy of fire. Heavy shells from the two British capital ships were beginning to smash into her, and the concussive impact of the exploding missiles, the clouds of acrid smoke and the bedlam of sound mingling with the crash of their own guns had a devastating and utterly demoralizing effect on the already dazed and exhausted gun crews crouched within their turrets.

Those few officers who still clung stubbornly to the bridge of the Bismarck could see that the gunfire from the King George V was falling off and becoming increasingly spasmodic (suffering from the same turret troubles as her sister ship the Prince of Wales, the King George V had, at one time, only two guns out of her ten capable of firing) and ordered every available gun to concentrate on the Rodney. But it was too late.

The Rodney, close in now, had the range and had it accurately. The big 16-inch shells, each one 2,700 pounds of armour-piercing high explosive, were crashing into the vitals of the shuddering Bismarck with steadily increasing frequency. One 16-inch shell struck the fire control tower, blasting it completely over the side, and after that all semblance of concerted firing and defence ceased. Another 16-inch shell silenced both for’ard turrets at once, wrecking ‘A’ turret and blowing part of ‘B’ turret back over the bridge, killing most of the officers and men left there. Shells from both battleships were exploding deep in the heart of the Bismarck, wrecking the engine rooms, destroying the fuel tanks and adding hundreds of tons of fuel to feed the great fires now raging in the entire mid-section of the ship, the roaring flames clearly visible through the great jagged gaps torn in the ship’s side and armour-plating.

‘Nightmarish’ is the only word to describe the dreadful scenes now taking place aboard that battered, holed and flaming shambles of twisted steel and broken bodies that was all that was left of the Bismarck and its crew.

Sixteen-inch shells from the Rodney, by this time at a point-blank range of only two miles, were now hitting the Bismarck two, four, even six at a time, and groups of fear-maddened men on the upper deck were running blindly backward and forward like crazed animals seeking escape from the twin terrors of these lethal broadsides and the red-hot deck-plates beginning to twist and buckle under their very feet: most of them chose the easy way out, a leap into the shell-torn sea and death by drowning.

In the turrets, sailors abandoned their now useless guns, mutinied and rushed for the turret doors. Some of the commanding officers of the turrets committed suicide, and others turned pistols on their own men, only to be overwhelmed: and then, the men found that the doors were warped and jammed fast, and they went down to the floor of the Atlantic locked in the iron coffin of the turret they had served so well.

Hatches, too, jammed shut all over the Bismarck. Two hundred men, imprisoned thus in the canteen, were fighting madly to force their way out, when a shell crashed through the deck and exploded inside, all the concussive blast and murderous storm of flying shrapnel confined to that one narrow space. There were no survivors.

But they were the lucky ones in the manner of their dying—lucky, that is, compared to the ghastly fate of the sailors trapped in magazines. Raging fires surrounded these magazines on nearly every side, and as the metal bulkheads grew steadily hotter until they began to glow dull red, the magazine temperatures soared. That this could have only one end the few damage control men still clinging to their posts knew all too well—and they could never forget the Hood blown out of existence when her magazines went up. They had no option but to do what they had to do—flood the magazines and drown their comrades in the swiftly rising waters.

And just as nightmarish as the scenes aboard was the appalling spectacle of the Bismarck herself. Weighed down by the thousands of tons of water rushing in through the great gaps torn in her sides, she rolled heavily, sluggishly, in the troughs between the waves, a battered, devastated wreck.

Her mast was gone, her director tower was gone, the funnel had just disappeared. All her boats had been destroyed, the smashed and broken turrets lay over at crazy angles, the barrels pointing down into the sea or up towards an empty sky, and the broken, twisted steel girders and plates of what had once been her superstructure glowed first red, then whitely incandescent as the great fires deep within blazed higher and higher. But still the Bismarck did not die.

Beyond all question, she was the toughest and most nearly indestructible ship ever built. She had been hit by the Prince of Wales, she had been hit by hundreds of heavy, armour piercing shells from the King George V, Rodney, Norfolk and Dorsetshire. She had been torpedoed by aircraft from the Ark Royal and from the Victorious, and now, in this, her last battle, torpedoed also by the Rodney and the Norfolk. But still, incredibly, she lived. No ship in naval history had ever taken half the punishment the Bismarck had, and survived. It was almost uncanny.

In the end, she was not to die under the guns of the two British battleships that had reduced her to this empty blazing hulk. Perhaps, in their wonder at her incredible toughness, they had come to believe that she could never be sunk by shell-fire. Perhaps it was their dangerous shortage of fuel, or the certainty that U-boats would soon be on the scene, in force: or perhaps they were just sickened by the slaughter. In any event, the King George V and the Rodney, their mission accomplished, turned for home.

The Bismarck never surrendered. Her colours still flew high, were still flying when the Dorsetshire closed in on the silent, lifeless ship and torpedoed three times from close range. Almost at once she heeled far over to port, her colours dipping into the water, then turned bottom up and slid beneath the waves, silent except for the furious hissing and bubbling as the waters closed over the red hot steel of the superstructure.

The long chase was over: the Hood was avenged.

The Meknes

The English Channel, during the years 1939-1945, was the setting for countless extraordinary and sometimes, during the invasion summer of 1944, frankly incredible spectacles; but it can safely be said that at no time in the war did it present a sight more astonishing, incongruous and utterly improbable than that to be seen on a night in late July in the year 1940, some 60 miles off the Isle of Wight.

This sight was a ship, just an ordinary 6,000-ton cargo and passenger liner, but it was behaving in a most extraordinary fashion. One could have looked at it, then looked again, and still have been excused for flatly disbelieving the plain evidence before one’s eyes. During the hours of darkness in the wartime Channel secrecy, stealth, and above all an absolutely enforced blackout, were the essentials without which there was no hope of survival. One careless chink of escaping light, one thoughtlessly struck match or cigarette end glowing in the darkness, and the chances were high that a U-boat’s periscope or torpedo boat’s bows lined up and locked on the betrayed bearing.

Yet there was light to be seen aboard this ship. Not just one light, but hundreds of them. It was as if a section of the Blackpool illuminations had been transferred en bloc to the middle of the Channel. Every blackout scuttle had been removed, and the lights behind the portholes switched on. The lights on deck and on the superstructure blazed. The bridge was floodlit. Powerful projectors lit up the name and nationality marks painted on either side of the hull, while another illuminated the big flag painted on the deck. Finally, two powerful searchlights were trained on the tricolour flag that fluttered high above the stern.

The night was fairly calm, the sky clear, visibility good: the brilliantly illuminated vessel must have been clearly visible over at least 500 square miles of the Channel and over 10 times that area for any plane cruising overhead.

The ship was the Meknes, owned by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, and she had excellent reason for this blatant self-advertisement. Or at least, tragically, so it was imagined at the time.

The Meknes was en route from Southampton to Marseilles with 1,180 French naval officers and ratings, mostly reservists who had served aboard a French battle-cruiser until the fall of their country, then transferred to Britain. They had since elected to return to their own country. Marseilles, at that time, was technically a neutral port, and these repatriates were non-combatants: the French Vichy Government, under the aged Marshal Pétain, had just concluded a separate peace with Germany. The French repatriates, therefore, were entitled to be regarded as neutrals, and afforded the protection that international law demands for neutrals. Accordingly, the British Government had informed Vichy of the repatriation, with instructions that the Germans be advised and asked to provide a safe conduct. Precautions would be taken, the British added, to ensure that there would be no mistaking her identity.

And there most certainly was no mistaking her identity, when the Meknes left Southampton at 4.30 p.m., cleared the Isle of Wight, and steamed down the Channel at fifteen knots.

All went well for the first few hours, and even the most apprehensive were beginning to relax, becoming increasingly confident that the guarantee of safe conduct was being scrupulously observed, when, at 10.30 p.m., the officer of the watch heard the sound of powerful motor engines closing rapidly. Blinded by the intensity of the Meknes’s own lights, he was unable to make out even the silhouette of the approaching boat, but the phosphorescent gleam of the high creaming wake it left behind it and the familiar sound of the engines left him in no doubt at all—it was a German E-boat, out on the prowl. At once he picked up the phone to report to the Meknes’s commander, Captain Dulroc, but before he had even begun to speak, the E-boat opened up with its machine guns, raking the superstructure, deck and port side of the ship with heavy and concentrated fire.

Captain Dulroc, ignoring the fire, rushed to the bridge while all around him machine-gun bullets smashed with triphammer thuds against steel bulkheads, and whined off in evil ricochet into the darkness beyond. Dulroc still believed in his guarantee of safe passage. He was convinced this was an error in identification that could soon be rectified. He rang the engine room telegraphs to stop, and gave two prolonged blasts on the ship’s whistle to show that he was no longer under way. The machine-gun fire ceased almost at once, and Dulroc flashed out a ‘Who are you?’ signal.

The reply came immediately—an even heavier burst of fire directed against the bridge with such venom and accuracy that officers and men had to fling themselves flat on their faces to escape the murderous barrage.

Again there came a brief lull in the firing, and Dulroc swiftly seized the opportunity to send out morse signals in the general direction of their still invisible assailant giving the name, nationality and destination of the Meknes over and over again. But the E-boat captain seemed beyond either reason or appeal. He opened fire again, this time not only with machine guns but with heavier calibre weapons, probably something in the nature of two-pounders.

Within seconds every lifeboat but one on the port side was smashed and made useless. Captain Dulroc and his officers had no illusions left now. The earlier bursts of machine-gun fire might have been the results of misidentification or overenthusiasm on the part of a trigger-happy young torpedo-boat captain. But the destruction of their port lifeboats had been no accident. They were clearly visible and sharply etched against the surrounding darkness by the numerous deck-and floodlights that were still switched on. The E-boat had deliberately aimed at and destroyed them with its heavy gun, and the reason for this destruction was not far to seek.

It had destroyed their boats so that they could not be used—and their only use, of course, could be for the saving of survivors. The Meknes, Dulroc knew, was going to be destroyed.

At 10.55 p.m. the now inevitable torpedo was fired from almost point-blank range. One of the survivors, M Macé, says that he was talking to some friends in his cabin, discussing the machinegun attacks, when a terrific explosion burst in the cabin walls and threw the men, one on top of the other, in a confused heap in the middle of the cabin deck. Somebody cried out, rather unnecessarily as Macé drily observes, ‘We have been torpedoed.’ They rose dazedly to their feet and burst their way out through the broken splintered door on to the open deck, to find the ship already sinking beneath their feet, going down rapidly by the stern. But it was not that unnaturally canted angle of the ship that attracted Macé’s attention at that moment. The torpedo struck opposite number three hold—and there were over 200 men confined in that one narrow space.

Macé still remembers, with what he describes as a horrifying vividness, the screams, the moans, and the pitiful wailing of the trapped, the wounded, the dying and the drowning in that deathtrap far beneath his feet.

For the great majority of men down there death came swiftly. Many had died outright and most of those who survived were too badly hurt to make more than a token attempt to escape the all-engulfing flood of hundreds of tons of water that rushed in through the great hole in the ship’s side. At the most, Macé says, a dozen men escaped from number three hold. The situation, he goes on, was almost as dreadful on the fo’c’sle of the ship. He could clearly see it from where he stood, even though the lights had died with the blowing up of the boilers. There had, of course, been no direct damage in the fore part of the ship—only one torpedo had struck the Meknes. But there was another and almost equally terrifying and lethal agent at work there. The stern of the Meknes was already sinking below the surface of the sea, bringing the bows of the ship high up into the air until the forefoot was almost clear of the water. As the angle increased, heavy rafts, several of them already partially released, broke free from their remaining lashings and slid down and aft along the decks, maiming, crushing and killing against bulkheads, rails and stanchions groups of men so tightly knotted that for most of them there could be no escape.

Here the first officer of the Meknes, now Captain Philippe Gilbert, takes up the story. The master, he says, realized at once that there was no hope of saving the Meknes. He ordered an SOS to be sent out—on the emergency radio, as all electricity supplies had been cut off—and for the boats to be lowered at once. Such lifeboats as were still fit to be launched, Gilbert says, were in the water with quite remarkable speed. Although he himself was in direct over-all charge of the lowering, he claims no credit for this. The loss of life, he is certain, would have been far greater had it not been for the happy chance that nearly all the repatriate passengers were themselves sailors, and most of them experienced sailors at that. They did not have to be told what to do. They just did it, and at once.

Never had speed and training served men better. The Mekne’s end was as swift as it was spectacular: she broke completely beneath the surface of the Channel in less than eight minutes from the moment of impact of the torpedo, but in that time every serviceable life-boat—and almost every available raft—was in the water.

As an aside at this point, Captain Gilbert mentions one of the most remarkable things he has ever seen at sea. As the sinking vessel rolled over on its side, one of the men struggling nearby had an extraordinary experience—and escape. ‘As one of the ship’s funnels tipped over into the water,’ Gilbert recalls, ‘this man was sucked into it as by a huge vacuum cleaner. Moments later a violent counter-pressure from the other end of the funnel blew him back into the sea. He was completely black from head to foot.’

The man who is now a pilot in Marseilles was one of the lucky ones. Many of those who escaped safely from the ship did so only to die during the night.

Some of the lifeboats had capsized, one or two to drift away, empty, into the darkness. Another was found to have its buoyancy tanks ripped open by machine guns and foundered soon after launching, throwing its occupants into the sea. For the majority, therefore, rafts and floating pieces of timber—of which there were providentially plenty—were the chief means and hope of salvation. In the two minutes before the foundering of the Meknes, hundreds of men had leaped into the sea and swum towards the bobbing rafts, dragging themselves aboard as best they could. The rafts, Macé says, were soon grossly overloaded. Further, the sea was not nearly so calm as it had appeared from the deck of the Meknes only an hour or so previously; and the combination of the overloaded rafts and unsettled sea proved an evil one.

The rafts sank under the surface of the sea, and soon most of the men found themselves chest deep in the water—and even in July the waters of the English Channel can be bitterly cold. Time and again a wave would sweep over a raft and carry a man away: the more fortunate made their way back again and scrambled aboard—if that word can be used to refer to regaining position on something two feet below the level of the sea. Again and again, Macé says, a false movement, an unconscious shifting of position and weight at the critical moment when the other side of the raft was tilting upwards under the thrust of a passing wave and the entire raft would capsize, throwing everybody into the sea. After this had happened repeatedly, only the strongest men succeeded in regaining the raft. Others sank, exhausted or choked, and were never seen again.

And if the fight for sheer physical survival were not enough, there was a still further danger—the enemy who had so recently sunk them. Survivors claimed that they had been fired at in the water when swimming towards the rafts. Though this was probably true, it is unlikely that much loss of life was caused by it. A swimmer in a darkened sea makes a poor target, and it is significant that neither Macé nor Gilbert, two witnesses whose observations and accuracy of judgment were of the highest order, sought to dwell on this. It appears reasonably certain that, once men had reached rafts or lifeboats, no further attacks were made on them, although one survivor, the purser of the Meknes, claims that men on rafts were machine-gunned and killed. So brief and utterly confused was the entire course of events that the facts are difficult to arrive at.

All night long almost 1,000 men—and two women, officers’ wives, and a five-year-old boy—waited for rescue, some in boats, but most of them just clinging to rafts and floating pieces of wood.

Soon after dawn a plane flew over the area, and within a very short time—for the coast of England was only two hours’ steaming away—the Frenchmen in the water were overjoyed to see four British warships steaming down on them at high speed.

The rescue work was swift and efficient, and all the survivors—with the exception of some who were thought to have made for the French coast and another couple of lifeboats, with 100 sailors in them, that had to be searched for and located by a Blenheim bomber—were back in England in a few hours.

Newspaper reports of the time speak of the pathetic spectacle these survivors presented—most of them only in inadequate scraps of clothing, some in pyjamas, some in underclothes, and not a few with no clothes at all. They were dressed in whatever came to hand—some even in women’s frocks—fed in naval barracks and sent to await the next attempt at repatriation in the chalets of a former holiday camp in the northeast. All, that is, except the 150 officers and men who had to be taken straight to hospital.

It was one of the war’s major sea disasters. Almost 300 Frenchmen, none of whom was at that time a combatant, lost their lives that July night. And when it comes to the prime or first cause of the tragedy it is as difficult to discover the precise truth as it is to apportion the blame. There is no question, of course, as to the immediate cause of the sinking. The Germans made rather ridiculous attempts to lay the loss at the door of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr A. V. Alexander, on the fantastic ground that he had ordered the sinking of the Meknes as a propaganda movement to stir up anti-German feeling in France. In fact the responsibility for the sinking was obvious, as the Germans issued a statement on 25 July saying that one of their torpedo boats had sunk a ship south of Portland—precisely where the Meknes, the only ship that had been sunk for some considerable time in that area, had been that night.

The ship they had sunk, the Germans claimed, was an 18,000-ton armed merchant cruiser—an obvious fabrication and attempt to explain away their embarrassment at sinking an unarmed neutral with all lights on. Later, the Germans changed their tactics. If the Meknes had been sunk by them, they claimed, it was still the fault of Britain. A broadcast by the official German News Agency stated that Britain had not asked for a safe conduct for this vessel, and had not advised the German authorities of the ship’s departure and route.

This, as first sight, was another bare-faced fabrication. Most of the British national newspapers, reporting the disaster, had attacked the perfidy of the Germans who had sunk a ship to which they had given an unconditional guarantee of safe passage. However, on the following day, to the accompaniment of no great beating of drums, there was an official British retraction of the statement that the Germans had given a safe passage guarantee. What had actually happened, it was carefully explained, was that the Vichy Government had been informed of the British intentions and it had been their duty to pass the news to the Germans.

It appeared, in fact, that not only had the Germans not given a safe passage guarantee—it wasn’t even certain that they knew anything at all about it.

Here the Vichy Government stepped in. The French Admiralty stated unequivocally that the British Government had failed to inform them of the sailing of the Meknes, its route, or even its destination. The effect of this statement in certain circles in this country can well be imagined.

Suggestions then appeared in the British Press—it is a fair indication of the extent to which wartime chauvinism (if not indeed something even more sinister) can affect the judgment of experienced journalists—that the Vichy Government had in fact received all the information, passed on to the Germans the news where a sitting, a defenceless target was to be found, and then officially denied that they had received any information at all from the British.

As a solution, this appears extraordinarily unlikely. Had that been the case, the Germans would not have reacted so clumsily to the accusation of the sinking, and would, indeed, have had their story cut and dried, and, the ship safely sunk, indignantly denied all knowledge of it; and it seems improbable in the extreme that any Frenchman would have willingly and however indirectly been the agent responsible for sending perhaps over 1,000 of his countrymen to their deaths.

There can be little doubt that the prime responsibility for the tragic loss of the Meknes lies squarely at the door of the British Government. The official German News Agency said at the time: ‘It was the duty of the British Government to inform the French Government of their intention to repatriate French soldiers and to wait for a reply as to whether the dangerous transport through the war zone could be assured of safe convoy.’

Did the British Government in fact so inform the French? An ‘authoritative’ British source said: ‘The French…were notified in general terms of our intention to repatriate,’ a vague, obscure and weak-kneed attempt at excuse-making that could hardly be bettered.

The French said flatly that they were not informed of the sailing of the Meknes.

What is beyond all dispute—and this is the crux of the matter—no safe conduct or guarantee was given by the Germans. Yet the criminally negligent decision was made to permit the sailing of this unarmed and unescorted vessel into the Eboat and U-boat infested Channel without waiting for a reply from the Germans. It would be interesting indeed to know what British Service or Government department was responsible for this decision. But one can safely assume that the blanket of official anonymity which covers up such a multitude of sins will remain firmly where it is and that none of the parties concerned is going to lift even a tiny corner lest the answers be found to lie uncomfortably close to home.

Besides, in the press of events of a great world war, the death of 300 non-combatants is a small thing, quickly and comfortably forgotten as the first sharp horror of the tragedy fades and finally passes away.

MacHinery and the Cauliflowers

‘I find you well, Mr MacHinery?’ Ah Wong asked courteously. He pronounced the name as ‘Mackinelli’ and although ten years in the Far East had accustomed MacHinery to this heathenish mispronunciation of a legendary Scottish clan name that ranked in antiquity with anything the Almanac de Gotha had to offer, nevertheless his proud Celtic soul winced whenever he heard it. Still, he reflected charitably, it was hardly Ah Wong’s fault. Some parts of the world were still emerging from the caves, so to speak. Primitive, barbaric—in fact, MacHinery conceded generously to himself, very like the MacHinerys of a few centuries ago when the more pressing business activities of cattle-thieving and hacking opposing clansmen to pieces had left them little time for the more cultural pursuits of life. But twenty intervening generations had had their civilizing effect…

MacHinery fingered a beer bottle scar received in a political debate in Glasgow many years previously, and smiled tolerantly.

‘I’m weel enough, Mr Wong. Fair to middling, you ken.’

‘You do not look it,’ Ah Wong said slowly. ‘You are pale but you perspire freely. You perspire but you shiver and shake. And your eyes are not the eyes of a well man.’ He turned to a wall cabinet and poured amber liquid into a tumbler. ‘A welltried specific from your own homeland, Mr MacHinery.’

‘Och, man, it was chust what I was needing.’ MacHinery drank deeply, shuddered violently and coughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks. Ah Wong looked at him with suddenly narrowed eyes. Less than a month had elapsed since two sailors had inconsiderately dropped dead after drinking, in one of his emporiums, a bottle of what had purported to be proprietary Scotch and had it not been for the prompt midnight transfer of a couple of barrels of wood alcohol to the godown of a cherished enemy and the sending to the authorities of a letter signed ‘Pro Bono Publico’, he might have been in trouble indeed. As it was, any adverse reaction to his Scotch now struck deep at Ah Wong’s sensitive soul.

‘You do not like my whisky, Mr MacHinery?’ he asked slowly.

‘Not like it?’ MacHinery coughed. ‘Hoots, mon, it’s perfect, chust perfect.’ MacHinery had, in fact, the misfortune to be allergic to any type of whisky but the part of the hard-drinking Clydeside engineer was no more difficult to sustain than the phoney accent that went with it. ‘Chust a touch of fever, Mr Wong, that’s all.’ Experience had long shown him that no one cared whether the fever in question was chickenpox or the Black Plague.

‘So.’ Ah Wong relaxed a minute fraction, the most he ever permitted himself to relax. ‘And you are the new chief engineer of the Grasshopper, Mr MacHinery?’

‘For ma sins,’ MacHinery said bitterly. ‘A filthier, rustier, auld bucket of bolts—’

‘Beggars cannot be choosers, Mr MacHinery,’ Ah Wong said coldly. He waved a piece of paper. ‘And you are a beggar. According to this letter of introduction from my good friend Benabi, you’d been in the Djakarta gutters for weeks before he gave you this job. Even your chief engineer’s ticket is a forgery—your real one was taken from you.’

‘Aye, and a grosser miscarriage of justice—’

‘Be quiet,’ Ah Wong said contemptuously. ‘The Grasshopper’s cargo has been unloaded and cleared through customs?’

‘Aye. Not thirty minutes ago.’ MacHinery shivered again and stirred restlessly in his seat. Sweat poured down his face. Ah Wong affected not to notice.

‘Good. You will have been given a private copy of the manifest.’ He stretched out his hand. ‘Let me see it.’

‘Well noo, chust wait a minute,’ MacHinery said cunningly. ‘You ken who I am. The letter tells you. But I don’t ken who you are. How do I know you ken one another? You and Benabi, I mean?’

‘Fool,’ Ah Wong said shortly. ‘I, one of the biggest food importers in Malaya? Benabi, of Benabi’s Tjitarum’s truck farms, the biggest suppliers in Indonesia? Not know each other? Idiot!’

‘There’s nae call to be personal,’ MacHinery said doggedly. ‘I hae ma orders, Mr Wong. From Mr Benabi himself. You must match this, he says.’ He drew a piece of rice paper from his wallet and showed Ah Wong a curious ink marking, smaller than a thumbnail.

‘Of course,’ Ah Wong smiled. He twisted a signet ring on his middle finger, pressed it on an ink pad and made an identical mark on the paper. ‘The seal of the broken junk. We have the only two such signet rings in the world. Benabi and I—we are brothers.’

‘You wouldna think it,’ MacHinery said candidly. ‘He’s a tall, well built, good-looking cove, whereas you—’

‘I spoke metaphorically,’ Ah Wong said coldly. ‘The manifest, Mr MacHinery.’

‘Aye.’ MacHinery rose, opened the Gladstone bag he’d left in the middle of the floor of Ah Wong’s sumptuous apartment, fished out a manifest and handed it over.

‘Why the bag?’ Ah Wong asked in idle curiosity.

‘Why the bag?’ MacHinery echoed bitterly. ‘The Grasshopper’s two nights in Singapore and if you think I’m going to spend them aboard yon bloody flea-ridden, cockroach-infested hellhole, you—’

‘Silence!’ Ah Wong opened the manifest. ‘Ah, yes. Sides of beef, one hundred. Of pork, two hundred. Bananas, onions, beans, peppers, eggplants, butter. Yes, yes, all seems there. Best Bandung cauliflowers, eighty crates. Lettuce, fifty. Yes, all in order.’ He broke off, looked thoughtfully at MacHinery and said in Cantonese: ‘I am going to kill you, my friend.’

‘Whit was that?’ MacHinery asked blankly.

‘Nothing.’ Ah Wong smiled. ‘I thought you might be a linguist.’ He picked up a telephone and spoke quickly in Cantonese, referring to the manifest from time to time and ticking off items with a pencil, then replaced the phone. He smiled again. ‘Just ordering up some meat and vegetables from my go-down, Mr MacHinery. From your own cargo.’

‘And the very cream of the crop, I’ll be bound,’ MacHinery said bitterly. ‘Nae bloody flies on you Chinese.’

Ah Wong smiled yet again. The kind of smile, MacHinery thought grimly, that you might expect to see on the face of a spider when a particularly juicy fly landed on its web. Ah Wong, for his part, thought it unnecessary to inform MacHinery that he was of pure Armenian stock and had changed his name partly for business reasons in a Chinese-dominated field of commerce, but mainly because he regarded the honourable name of his ancestors as sullied beyond redemption by its frequent inclusion in Interpol files throughout the world.

‘No need to be bitter, Mr MacHinery,’ Ah Wong said pleasantly. ‘I thought you might like to stay for dinner with me.’

‘Dinner?’ After a brief struggle, a conciliatory smile appeared on MacHinery’s face. ‘Well, noo, Mr Wong, that is kind of you. Very, very kind. I’ll be honoured to accept.’ MacHinery hadn’t sat down again, and now he paced the room restlessly, the sheen of sweat bathing his entire face. He was shivering more violently than ever and one side of his face had begun to twitch.

‘You are not well, I’m afraid,’ Ah Wong said again.

‘I’m fine.’ A pause. ‘Dammit, no, I’m no’. I’ll hae to go oot for a minute to get some medicine. I—I know the cure for this.’ He gulped. ‘I feel sick, Mr Wong, awful sick. Where’s your bathroom? Quick.’

‘Through that door there.’

MacHinery left abruptly and closed the door behind him. He turned on both basin taps, pulled the lever that operated the toilet cistern and used the sound of running water to drown the slight clicking noise made as he lifted the Venetian blind that shut out the hot Malayan sun.

Parked on the opposite side of the street below was a dark van with blue-tinted side windows and a ventilator on top. The ventilator was motionless. MacHinery thrust out a hand, waved briefly, withdrew his hand, waited until he saw the ventilator revolve just once, then lowered the blind as cautiously as he had raised it. He turned off the taps and went back into Ah Wong’s apartment.

‘You feel better, Mr MacHinery?’ It was no light task for Ah Wong to get concern into both voice and face but he made it after a struggle.

‘I feel bloody awful,’ MacHinery said candidly. He was shaking now like a broken bed-spring and his teeth were beginning to chatter. ‘I must go oot, Mr Wong. I must. Ma medicine. I’ll no be but minutes.’

‘Any medicine you care to name, Mr MacHinery, I have it. Among other things, I’m the wholesale supplier to many chemists’ shops.’

‘You’ll no’ find the medicine I need in any bloody chemist’s shop,’ MacHinery said violently. ‘A jiffy, Mr Wong. That’s all I’ll be.’ He headed for the doorway, then stopped abruptly. There was a man standing there. By courtesy definition, MacHinery thought, he might be called a man. He looked more like the early prototype of the Neanderthal caveman, only bigger. Much bigger. He had shoulders like a bull, hands like two bunches of bananas and a brutalized moronic face that might have been carved from granite by a power-chisel.

‘John,’ Ah Wong introduced him. ‘My secretary. I don’t think he wants you to leave, Mr MacHinery.’

‘Aye. Your secretary. No mistaking the intellectual type, is there?’ MacHinery shuddered violently again and dropped his voice. ‘One side, laddie.’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ Ah Wong said sharply. ‘He can break you in half. Come now, Mr MacHinery. Just sit down and take your coat off. Madness to wear it in this heat and sweating as you are.’

‘I’m allergic to sunlight,’ MacHinery said between clamped teeth. ‘Never take it off. One side, you.’

‘There’s no sunlight in here,’ Ah Wong said softly.

‘I must get oot,’ MacHinery shouted. ‘I must. Damn you, Wong, you don’t know what you’re doing to me.’ He made a bull rush for the doorway and tried to dive under John’s outstretched arms. His head and shoulders smashed into a five-barred gate. At least, it felt like a five-barred gate. A couple of power shovels closed over MacHinery’s upper arms, lifted him effortlessly off his feet and bore him back to the armchair in the centre of the room.

‘You are extremely foolish,’ Ah Wong said sadly. ‘I want to be your friend, Mr MacHinery. And I want you to be mine. I think, Mr MacHinery, that you can offer me what a man in my position so very rarely acquires—an unswerving allegiance that neither money nor oaths could buy.’

MacHinery struggled futilely in the grip of giant hands. He said in a strangled voice: ‘I’ll kill you for this, Wong.’

‘Kill me? Kill your doctor? Kill the one man who can give you the medicine you need?’ Ah Wong smiled. ‘You are singularly lacking in intelligence. Take his jacket off, John.’

John removed MacHinery’s jacket. He did it by the simple process of ripping the white lining down the back middle seam and pulling off the two separate halves.

‘Now the shirt sleeves,’ Ah Wong murmured.

John twitched his fingers, the buttons burst from their moorings and the sleeves were pulled up beyond MacHinery’s elbows. For a long moment all three men stared down at the inside of MacHinery’s forearms. Both of them were covered by a mass of pale-purplish spots, none of them more than half an inch distant from its fellows. Ah Wong’s face remained as immobile as ever. He bent over MacHinery’s Gladstone bag, flung a shirt to one side and picked up a narrow rectangular box. He slid a catch, opened the wooden lid and extracted a hypodermic syringe, holding it by the plunger.

‘So very conveniently to hand,’ he said gently. ‘Your medicine goes in this, doesn’t it, MacHinery? And there’s hardly a place left in your arms for you to use it, is there? A junky, Mr MacHinery. A dope addict. And now you’re climbing the walls, as they say, because you’re overdue your next shot. Isn’t that it, Mr MacHinery?’

‘I’ll kill you for this, Ah Wong.’ MacHinery’s voice was weak, mechanical. He was jerking violently in his seat. ‘So help me God, I’ll kill you.’ He arched himself stiffly in his armchair, his eyes showing white, his mouth strained opened. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he croaked.

‘Kill me?’ Ah Wong asked quietly. ‘Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Kill your doctor, as I said before? Kill the doctor who not only recognizes all the symptoms but can prescribe the medicine for it? Prescribe it and supply it. Supply it now. Heroin, is it not, Mr MacHinery?’

John’s grip eased. MacHinery struggled to his feet and gripped Ah Wong by the arms. ‘You have the stuff?’ he whispered. ‘God, you have the stuff? You have it here?’

‘I have it here.’ Ah Wong looked into the stricken eyes. ‘My friend Benabi. He is even more brilliant than I had thought. Always the weak link in our organization was the courier from Djakarta to here. But not any more. You will have as much of the white powder, Mr MacHinery, as often as you like, whenever you like, for the remainder of your days.’

‘You mean—you mean I’ll never have to worry aboot it again? Never have to lie or beg or cheat or steal to get it? It will always be there?’

‘While you remain in the employment of Benabi and myself, it will always be there.’

‘I’m your man for life,’ MacHinery said simply.

‘I don’t doubt it.’ Ah Wong looked at him in distaste, shook off his hands, picked up the phone and spoke rapidly. He replaced the phone and said: ‘One minute. No more.’

‘My God!’ MacHinery said stupidly. ‘When I think of the number of times I’ve chased roond Singapore, near screaming ma head off for the stuff, wondering where I could lay ma hands on it, where the source of supply was, I could—’

‘You’re at the source now, Mr MacHinery. No need to wonder any more.’

‘You—you supply the whole town?’

‘Much of it.’

‘But—but have you never worried aboot whit you’re doing? Have you ever seen a man, a far gone junky, who canna get the stuff? Or a man trying to dry oot? Both going mad. Insane screaming mad. Have you never seen it?’

‘Don’t be so naive, Mr MacHinery. Of course I’ve seen it. The sensible ones stick to a pellet of opium. But the sophisticates—’ his lips curled—‘must have it straight. If I don’t supply it, others will.’ He smiled contemptuously. ‘Now perhaps you’d like to inform the police?’

‘I’ll cut ma throat,’ MacHinery whispered. ‘I’ll blow ma brains oot. But I’ll never, never tell.’

‘I know you won’t,’ Ah Wong said drily. ‘Ah, here it comes.’ A servant crossed to the table and dumped a crate of vegetables on top of it.

‘Cauliflowers?’ MacHinery said stupidly.

‘Best Bandung,’ Ah Wong agreed. He lifted one, gingerly slit the heart with a knife, extracted a twist of cellophane and poured a little white powder into MacHinery’s trembling hand. ‘Try it.’

MacHinery placed it on his tongue, tasted it, tasted it again, then whispered: ‘Dear God. This is it. This is it. And—and this is the way it comes into Singapore?’

‘For years,’ Ah Wong said calmly. ‘An ordinary cauliflower, the heart carefully parted, the heroin inserted, shellac for preservative and to glue the stems together then carried in the crates. Three times the customs have searched the Grasshopper from stem to stern—but who would ever think of cauliflowers?’

‘Damn the cauliflowers,’ MacHinery said hoarsely. His voice shook, his hands trembled more violently than ever. ‘Mix it up for me, for God’s sake!’

Ah Wong nodded, went to the bathroom and returned in a minute with a small vial of milky liquid. He nodded to the syringe lying on the table. ‘Your medicine, Mr MacHinery.’

‘For pity’s sake fill the hypo for me,’ MacHinery begged. ‘My hands—’

‘I can see them,’ Ah Wong said. ‘Unsteady, we might say.’ He lifted the hypodermic, depressed the plunger and inserted the needle in the vial. ‘Sufficient, I should say, Mr MacHinery?’

‘Aye, aye, that’ll do.’ MacHinery grabbed the hypodermic by the plunger, hesitated, then blurted out: ‘God alone knows I’m just a junky, but a man still has his pride. Even a junky. The—the bathroom. And I feel sick again.’

‘You make me sick,’ Ah Wong said dispassionately. ‘Go on.’

MacHinery hurried into the bathroom, pulled the cistern lever, opened the Venetian blind and thrust the hypodermic out of the window. Five men came swarming out of the van below. MacHinery withdrew his arm and, still holding the hypodermic gingerly by the plunger, laid it carefully on the windowsill. He waited twenty seconds then walked back into Ah Wong’s apartment just as the outer door crashed open and the five men from the van, uniformed policemen with guns, burst into the room. MacHinery nodded towards John.

‘Watch the big lad,’ he advised. ‘If he twitches an eyebrow, shoot five or six bullets into him. Not at his head—they’d bounce off.’

Ah Wong stood stock-still, his face inscrutable. After a moment or two he said softly: ‘What is the meaning of this outrage?’

‘Inspector Hanbro,’ the leading policeman introduced himself. ‘Warrant for your arrest, Mr Wong. Receiving, being in illegal possession of and distributing knowingly proscribed narcotics. I have to warn you—’

‘What tomfoolery is this?’ Ah Wong’s face had gone very stiff, very watchful. ‘What wild rubbish—narcotics, you said?’

‘Narcotics, I said.’ Hanbro turned towards MacHinery. ‘This man will testify—’

‘This man,’ Ah Wong said incredulously. ‘This derelict Scots engineer—’

‘Curiously enough, he was an engineer once,’ Hanbro said. ‘Also Scots. Hardly derelict. Changed his profession years ago. Mr Wong, may I introduce Inspector Donald MacHinery of the Hong Kong Vice Squad? Seconded to Singapore for—ah—special duties. The faces of my own men are too well known in those parts.’

‘You can take him away, Inspector Hanbro,’ MacHinery said tiredly. ‘I don’t know how many wrecked lives and suicides lie at his door and it doesn’t matter any more. We have enough on him to put him away for life.’

‘I’m innocent of all charges,’ Ah Wong said dully. ‘As one of the biggest merchants and most influential citizens in—’

‘Shut up,’ MacHinery said shortly. ‘You were right, Mr Wong. Your former courier, the previous chief engineer on the Grasshopper, was your weak link. He got drunk one night in Djakarta and talked too much in the presence of a plain-clothes man. Just enough for a lead, no more. We knew he wouldn’t talk—men who talk in your business invariably die before the night is out—so we let him be while I established myself on the waterfront as a drunken junky engineer. When the time was right the Djakarta cops picked him up and held him incommunicado and there I was waiting, the ideal substitute. Your pal Benabi wasn’t even smart, far less brilliant.’

‘You can’t prove a thing. You can’t—’

‘We can prove everything. Ten years in Hong Kong and I talk Cantonese as well as you do. Better—you Armenians have difficulty with some vowel sounds. Yes, Armenian, Mr Wong—we know all about you. I heard you give the numbers to your go-down—they will correspond exactly to the numbers on the crate.’

‘It’s only your word—’

‘The police had your line tapped, for good measure.’

‘Tapping is inadmissible evidence—’

‘And,’ MacHinery went on remorselessly, ‘every word of our conversation is preserved for posterity. The bottom half of that Gladstone bag of mine—a very efficient recorder, I can tell you. Further, the marks you made on that manifest will match the crate numbers removed from your godown. Graphite tests will show that it was the pencil on that table that made the marks and fingerprint tests will show that you were the last to handle that pencil. That signet seal shared by yourself and Benabi—any court in the East will recognize the significance of that. That crate there, lying on your own floor, with dope in every cauliflower head—how are you going to explain that away? Good lord, man, there’s even enough evidence in the bathroom to have you put away for life—a hypo full of heroin with your fingerprints all over the glass cylinder.’

‘You’re a junky yourself.’ Ah Wong’s voice was a dazed whisper. ‘Narcotics addicts can’t testify. I—I know all the symptoms. You—’

‘Symptoms?’ MacHinery smiled. ‘I’ve already stopped shivering. No bother. And as soon as I remove the three jerseys under my shirt I’ll stop sweating, too. Pale face—makeup. Junky’s eyes—didn’t you know red peppers give exactly the same effect?’

‘But your arms,’ Ah Wong said desperately. ‘Look at them. Riddled with punctures. How—’

‘Sharpened knitting needle sterilized and dipped in aniline dye. Don’t ever try it, Mr Wong. It’s most damnably painful.’

Lancastria

The Tillyer family had come a long, long way. Not so long, perhaps, in terms of actual miles—a moderately fast car could have covered the distance between the Fairey Aviation factory in Belgium, where Clifford Tillyer had worked as a technician, and the port of St Nazaire, in a day. But the Tillyers hadn’t travelled across the smiling peacetime plains of Northern France in a fast and comfortable car: they had travelled, instead, across the war-torn chaos of a newly capitulated country, a country where demoralization, for the moment, was as complete as the defeat: and they had travelled either in overcrowded, haphazardly-routed refugee trains that sometimes covered only a few miles a day, or in the backs of trucks that crawled slowly along roads packed with thousands of refugees fleeing to the south.

The journey had taken a long, miserable month, but they had arrived at last: and as Clifford Tillyer, with his wife Vera and two-year-old baby daughter Jacqueline gazed out across the St Nazaire roads, crowded with Allied shipping which ranged from tiny minesweepers to great ocean-going liners all waiting to embark them and take them home to England, he felt that it had all been a hundred times worth while. The suffering, the fear, the privations of hunger and long sleepless nights all lay safely behind: before lay hope and freedom and home.

So, too, felt tens of thousands of others. No civilian refugees these others, but the last regiments of the British Expeditionary Force to France. Most of the BEF had already been evacuated from the continent. The miracle of Dunkirk was a fortnight old, and almost a third of a million men from these beaches were now safely home in England. Cherbourg, St Malo and Brest had been completely evacuated—a fantastic achievement in which 85,000 men had been snatched from the closing pincers of the Panzer divisions without the loss of a single ship or man. And now these men waiting along the banks of the Loire were almost the last to go. Men like Corporal John Broadbent, who had spent almost six weeks driving his OC from Rheims to the evacuation port and whose picture, published in the newspapers of the world, was soon to be known to countless millions: or like Sergeant George Young of the RASC, leaning against the brand new French bicycle which he had trundled half way across France, whose subsequent adventures in the next three days belonged to the realms of the wildest fiction.

But for Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent, the past, as it was for the Tillyers, was forgotten. The excitement of the immediate present, the promise that their turn would soon come for one of the dozens of tiny trawlers and minesweepers that were ferrying both soldiers and civilians out to the big ships lying offshore—these were all that mattered. Already they had been told the name of—and could clearly see—the ship that was to take them home: the Lancastria. Even at the distance of three or four miles she looked gigantic, massive and solid and secure: once aboard that ship, they told themselves, all their troubles would be over.

The Lancastria, a 16,243 ton Cunard White Star liner, swung gently from her two bow anchors in the Quiberon roads as the scores of small craft fussed busily around her during all that long morning and early afternoon of 17 June, 1940. Steadily the complement of soldiers and civilian refugees aboard her mounted—one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, then four. And still the ferryboats came, the numbers mounted, the decks rang constantly to the disciplined tramp of hundreds of marching feet going to their allotted positions in the ship.

Captain R Sharp, watching the scene from the bridge of the Lancastria, was desperately anxious for the loading to be finished and the Lancastria to be gone. With both anchors down, neither the room nor the ability to manoeuvre the great passenger liner, surrounded by small boats and with the number of refugee troops and civilians aboard steadily mounting with the passing of every minute, he realized all too clearly the hopelessness of offering any organized resistance to aerial or submarine attack.

Submarines, perhaps, were not greatly to be feared—a flotilla of destroyers prowled the estuary unceasingly. But an air attack was another thing: only the previous day the Franconia had been attacked and hit, an adumbration, Captain Sharp feared, of worse things still to come. And now again the Luftwaffe’s heavy bombers were beginning to launch scattered attacks against the passenger ships in the roads.

But however acute Captain Sharp’s apprehensions, however sharp his anxiety for what might befall his ship, he could never have guessed, never have suspected that the name Lancastria, then known only to a comparative few, would within a few short days become the worldwide symbol of the greatest maritime disaster in British history, a tragedy worse even than that of the Titanic, the Lusitania or the Athenia.

Half past three in the afternoon. Air-raid sirens were sounding, anti-aircraft guns were beginning to open up against the heavy bombers of the Luftwaffe circling lazily above the Quiberon roads, as the last refugees were just embarking on the Lancastria— a total complement, now, of almost 6,000 men, women and children.

Among the six thousand were the Tillyers, Corporal Broadbent and Sergeant Young.

Mrs Tillyer had already bathed, dried and dressed young Jacqueline and now, with her husband and daughter, had gone down to the dining saloon for a meal. What Mrs Tillyer remembers most clearly about that moment was the order and courtesy she found on every hand: the smooth, calm efficiency of the white-jacketed stewards who moved about their duties as if quite oblivious of the gunfire and sirens above: the smiling painstaking care of the sailor who adjusted the tapes of Jacqueline’s lifebelt, so that it would no longer slip over the slender shoulders.

Sergeant Young had come aboard almost at the same time as the Tillyers, still lugging his new French bicycle. Ex-Sergeant Young, now living in Wickersley Road, London, admits, in a masterly understatement, that the crew of the overcrowded liner did not take too kindly to the bicycle, but he ignored their curses, hauled it aboard, parked it in what he judged to be a relatively safe position, then went below for a shave, only seconds after he had seen the nearby liner Oransay struck on the bridge by a bomb. Bombs were disquieting enough, Mr Young says: but the need for a shave was imperative.

There were no half-measures like shaves, for Corporal John Broadbent. Ex-Coporal Broadbent, now a London taxi-driver living in Newport Street, confesses that he was feeling slightly apprehensive just at that moment, not because of the falling bombs or the fact that he was completely undressed and about to step into a bath, but because the door of the bathroom bore the legend ‘Officers Only’.

Just after three-thirty, the Lancastria was hit by three aerial torpedoes. One struck for’ard and another aft, but it was the third that caused most of the damage and was responsible for much of the subsequent appalling loss of life.

This aerial torpedo, by one chance in a hundred thousand, plummeted straight down the Lancastria’s single funnel and exploded with curiously little sound but devastating power in the confined spaces of the boiler room and adjacent underwater compartments, many of them immovably packed with troops for whom there had been no room on the upper deck.

The boiler room was destroyed. Fuel tanks and lines were ruptured and thousands of gallons of oil immediately filmed out over the adjacent waters until the sea round the Lancastria was covered in a thick carpet of oil. But, far more terrible was the fate of the men in the underwater compartments: close on five hundred of them, mostly RAF personnel, were blown out through the great jagged hole blasted through the thin, unarmoured sides of the great liner: many were already dead, killed by the concussive impact of the exploding warhead, by great sheets of steel plate wrenched from the sundered bulkheads, by the flying shrapnel that ricocheted blindly, lethally, around the confined spaces in which these men had been standing: many of those who were flung alive into the water survived only to die in choking, coughing agony in the thick oil pumping out from the ruptured tanks and lines immediately behind them.

Already the Lancastria was listing heavily and beginning to settle slowly in the water. Even the most inexperienced aboard—and most of them knew nothing of the sea—knew that the Lancastria had not long to live.

Hundreds were trapped below decks. In some cases watertight doors were shut fast or, like many other doors, immovably warped by the buckling effect of the explosion. Others were trapped just as effectively by the solid mass of men filling the gangways and ladders leading to the decks above—there was little hope indeed for the last men in the queues below decks. Some of these escaped through portholes, others through loading ports on the ship’s side: Father Charles McMenemy, the former Roman Catholic chaplain in Wormwood Scrubs prison, led a group of such trapped men to a loading port some six feet above the water, gave his own life belt to a sergeant-major who couldn’t swim, urged all the men into the sea and went himself last of all. No man ever better deserved to survive than Father McMenemy—and survive he did.

The Tillyers, Corporal Broadbent and Sergeant Young were among the lucky ones—those who reached the upper deck in safety. Broadbent and Young had to take their turn with the others, joining the solid queues of soldiers tramping slowly up the steel-ribbed companionway steps to the freedom of the upper decks and the illusory safety that lay beyond.

Mrs Tillyer had a far easier passage. No sooner had she emerged from the dining room with the lifejacketed baby Jacqueline in her arms than a score of voices took up the cry ‘Make way for a baby’. And make way for the baby they did, every man pressing back against the side of the companionway to afford clear gangway, even though they knew the ship was sinking under their feet. This they did for every woman and child on the ship: it can never be computed how many men lost their lives because, in standing back to give way to others, they sacrificed those few seconds that made all the difference between living and dying.

The Tillyers, Broadbent and Young, reviewing these few ghastly hours, retain three outstanding memories in common, and that was the first of them—the utter calmness, the kindness, the selfless gallantry of the soldiers and crew. Confusion there was, and haste—these were inevitable: but of panic there was no trace.

But this impression, permanently engraved in the memory though it was, was a fleeting one only: there was no time for more. The air was filled with the staccato crash of AA weapons from every quarter of the roads, a bedlam of sound and smoke: Luftwaffe bombers still cruised overhead, some of them mercilessly raking the now sharply canting decks of the Lancastria with machine-gun fire; the steel-tipped bullets swathing through the close-packed ranks of men queuing up for the lifeboats.

First into the lifeboats were the women and children. Clifford Tillyer saw his wife and Jacqueline aboard one of these boats just as it was about to be lowered. He himself then stepped back into the waiting crowd, only to find himself seized by soldiers from a tank regiment and bundled in beside his wife and child. ‘Get in, mister,’ they told him. ‘You’ve got to look after your youngster.’

But the lifeboat was a refuge as temporary as it was treacherous. Even as it started lowering towards the oil-slicked sea, it began to capsize. Neither of the Tillyers hesitated. Over the side they went and struck away from the sinking ship, Mr Tillyer holding Jacqueline’s head above the oil as best he could.

For Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent there were no lifeboats. All those that could be lowered had already gone—arid many of these had capsized.

For the first time in many weeks Sergeant Young forgot all about his bicycle. Lather still on his face from the unfinished shave, he made straight for the side and jumped into the water, into the confusion of wreckage and splintered wood and hundreds of men, many of them nonswimmers with neither life jacket nor anything to cling to, struggling in the water. Young knew what happened to people who stayed too close to sinking ships—and the Lancastria was sinking foot by foot before his eyes. He struck out furiously to get well clear of the foundering liner, of the lethal suction that would be the death of anyone in the vicinity when she plummeted to the bottom of the Quiberon roads.

Corporal Broadbent was exactly as he had been when he had been preparing to take his bath—completely naked. (He was to remain thus for three long days.) Nothing, he says, ever worried him less than his unclothed state at that moment. With the deck sliding away beneath his feet he ceremoniously shook hands with his friend Sid Keenan—who had actually been in the bath when the Lancastria was hit—and dived into the sea.

Then came the moment when the second main impression of the disaster was registered forever on the minds of the two soldiers and the Tillyers—and, indeed, of every one of the thousands who saw it. Its great propellors breaking free above the water, the Lancastria slowly, inexorably, turned over, just before she sunk. Hundreds of soldiers, most of whom presumably were unable to swim, still clung ant-like to the great hull. There was no shouting, no screaming, no sign of fear at all. Instead, they were singing, and singing in perfect unison, ‘Roll out the barrel’ and ‘There’ll always be an England’, and they were still singing when the waters closed over them. It is little wonder that many of the soldier survivors could never again bring themselves to sing ‘Roll out the barrel’, the unofficial anthem of the army in the early years of the war.

Corporal Broadbent was one of the nearest to the ship when it went down. He himself has a personal memory, one which, he says, will always haunt him—the face at the porthole. As the Lancastria tipped over, Broadbent could see a man trapped in a cabin desperately trying to smash in the thick toughened glass of the scuttle—trying and completely failing. For one brief moment Broadbent caught sight of the terror-stricken face, then the porthole slid beneath the oil-blackened surface of the sea.

And now came perhaps the worst experience of all—fire. Not fire aboard the Lancastria— that would have been easy to escape—but fire on the surface of the sea, and for all too many there could be no escape from that. Nor was the fire any accident, but a piece of calculated and cold-blooded callousness for which there can be no forgiveness. In addition to machine-gunning and killing unknown numbers of people in the water—the twenty occupants of one raft, for instance, were completely wiped out by a sustained burst of machine-gun fire—the Luftwaffe pilots began to drop incendiary bombs on the oil-covered sea, and set it on fire.

Oil on fire is the most horrible, the cruellest death known to men. It is death by slow, agonizing torture, by drowning to escape that torture, by incineration of those parts of the body above water in a lung-gasping asphyxiation—for the flames feed on all the life-giving oxygen on the surface of the sea, and a man suffocates in the superheated and lifeless air. But drowning is quiet and simple and almost without pain, and where no hope of escape is left, only a madman would stretch himself out on the shrieking rack of agony a moment longer than was necessary when the means of kindly deliverance lies so close to hand.

The official history of the war at sea professes itself unable to understand why so many people—2,823—lost their lives when the Lancastria went down, even though the disaster happened in broad daylight in a road crowded with many ships, especially small, manoeuvrable ships which were quickly on the scene—the anti-submarine trawler Cambridgeshire alone rescued almost a thousand survivors.

It is difficult to understand this puzzlement: it is remarkable indeed that so many people, about two and a half thousand, were in fact rescued. Most of the ships in the roads were too busy looking after themselves, fighting off the attacks by the Gelrman bombers, and those which did eventually steam to the oil-covered and wreckage-strewn scene of the sinking liner found comparatively few survivors there after the Cambridgeshire had gone. Hundreds had died in the initial explosion, as many again were trapped and taken to the bottom locked inside the shattered hull of the Lancastria. Hundreds more, still clinging to the hull, were drowned as the liner plunged to the bottom, and of those then in the water alongside, many were either killed by the flame-covered sea or had swam so far and so frantically in search of safety, that they had put themselves outside the radius of search of the immediate rescue operations.

Such were Corporal Broadbent, Sergeant Young and the Tillyer family.

Broadbent, almost unconscious in the water, was rescued by a small craft and then transferred to the John Holt, still completely naked—when a newspaperman’s camera clicked. He arrived in Plymouth three days later, still without a stitch of clothes on and bemoaning only the fact that he hadn’t a pocket to carry the cigarettes he had been given, to find himself famous, and with his picture, the symbol of the disaster of the Lancastria, published in newspapers all over the world.

Sergeant Young had found himself clinging to an orange box, one of ten who depended on the same flimsy support. When he was rescued by a French trawler four hours later, only three were left—the other seven had slipped off one by one as their strength failed. He was landed at a convent hospital, nursed by Mrs Joan Rodes—later famous as ‘The Angel of St Nazaire’—given a French sailor’s uniform, transferred to a military hospital and there told by a German officer that he was a prisoner of war and would be shot if he tried to run away. Sergeant Young didn’t quite run away—along with some others he commandeered a Red Cross van, made his way to the coast and was picked up by the destroyer Punjabi.

The Tillyers probably spent even longer than Young in the water—their memories are understandably vague on this point. All that Mrs Tillyer can clearly remember is that a soldier gave up his own piece of wood to which he was clinging to give young Jacqueline every chance possible, and that she kept calling ‘Baby here’, ‘Baby here’ so often, and so insistently, that, she says Jacqueline took up the cry as though it were a game. ‘“Baby here”, she kept crying after me, until she grew too weak to say it any more.’

But the cries were heard and rescue came—a lifeboat from the destroyer Highlander. Neither Mr Tillyer, now a departmental manager with Fairey Aviation in London, nor his wife were, eventually, any the worse for their shocking appearance.

Neither apparently was baby Jacqueline, for the tiny two-year-old who cried ‘Baby here, ‘Baby here’, in the oil-covered waters of Quiberon Bay eighteen long years ago was married on the 5th of July of this year.

McCrimmon and the Blue Moonstones

The wind was blowing offshore from the native quarter, so that breathing, up-town, was only a matter of tolerable difficulty. Night, if not peace, had fallen over the city. The hour was late and all honest citizens were at home, asleep. The streets of Alexandria were thronged.

The scene was typically Eastern. Uncounted thousands were strenuously engaged in their legitimate pursuits of boot-blacking, pocket-picking and the retailing of every conceivable article rigorously proscribed by Egyptian law. But, for the most part, the bulk of the crowds wandered aimlessly, purposelessly around. Some went one way, some another; but whichever way they went, they went only because they happened to be going that way.

But one there was who, although among them, was clearly not of them—one who hastened briskly along, whose every step betrayed the man of action, whose face held that calm set born of fixed determination, whose eye held the bright gleam born of high resolve and, possibly, too much gin. McCrimmon, Able Seaman, torpedoman aboard His Majesty’s Ship Ilara, proud possessor of two badges, a distinguished name and a remarkable set of moral principles, had an urgent appointment which would brook no delay.

HMS Ilara had arrived back in Alexandria, from the Aegean, only that morning, with a large section of her after-funnel missing—the souvenir of a slight estrangement which had arisen between her and the 9.5 German batteries on Milos. McCrimmon, ruthlessly sacrificing his normal afternoon sleep, had hied him ashore immediately after dinner and sought out a certain Mr McCrimmon, a third, or it may have been fourth cousin of his. Mr McCrimmon was a dockyard worker, or, more precisely, one who was paid for being present in the dockyard at certain stated times. He was not due to go home for almost two years yet. He had newly come, it appeared, into the possession of certain valuable information, and, blood—however diluted—being thicker than water, he had, after due deliberation and several brandies, parted with this to his cousin. The latter had maintained throughout an attitude of detached boredom which had deceived no one.

The information, in brief, was this. He, Mr McCrimmon, had learned, through a devious but reliable channel, of a certain native ashore who had rather a fine set of semi-precious stones. That they were not family heirlooms or otherwise legally come by, Mr McCrimmon was quite sure; but that was irrelevant. What was relevant was the fact that their current owner was prepared to sell them at a fantastically low price. They would fetch several times that amount in the inflated home market. Would his cousin, whom he trusted above all men and who was due to go home shortly, carry out this transaction for him and forward fifty per cent of the proceeds?

His cousin would, and ‘tis thus we find him striding through the crowded streets, looking neither to the left nor to the right, automatically cuffing all such boot-blacks as came within range and pausing only occasionally, with a muttered curse, to study proffered works of art, by old masters and others, then hastening along again.

His appointment, as mentioned, would brook no delay. He had already delayed long enough in a saloon down by the Bourse, slaking his thirst and playing poker with three Armenians and a Cypriot. McCrimmon had done very well out of the game, and might have been there yet, had not some inquisitive bystander seen fit to comment, in terms of loud admiration, upon the exquisite delicacy of the workmanship whereby the backs of the cards were painted in fifty-two different patterns. When an impromptu court of enquiry was set up to investigate the ownership of the cards, McCrimmon had left. He had not even stayed to collect his winnings, a recollection which caused him to grind his teeth from time to time as his feet spurned the dust of the Saad Zaghoul.

Arriving at the further end of this, the main street of the city, he turned left and disappeared into one of the several ornate restaurant cum dance-hall establishments clustered around Ramleh Station. Briskly saluting the commissionaire, whom he took for a rear-admiral, McCrimmon passed within the portals, tightened his grip on hat and coat as he went by the hat-check counter and looked around the vestibule. It was empty. The jewel merchant had not yet arrived.

Leaving a few words of instruction and a still fewer number of piastres with the receptionist, McCrimmon vanished within the restaurant. He chose a table where he could observe the cabaret without undue strain to the eyes and seated himself. Removing the ‘Reserved’ card on the table, he handed it, with a grandiloquent gesture, to a passing waiter, along with his order for refreshments. The waiter, convinced that he was dealing with yet another exiled king in disguise, bowed low and moved off.

McCrimmon bent a supercilious eye around the restaurant. It was in no way different from a score of others he knew—the same plush settees, curtained alcoves, brass rails, minute dancing-floor, tired palms and even more tired string orchestra.

He lackadaisically watched the efforts of a couple of professional dancers, demonstrating an old-time waltz. The lurid handbill on his table referred to them as ‘a pair of talented and finished artists’. McCrimmon questioned the ‘talented’ but agreed with the ‘finished’, privately estimating the date at twenty years previously. His boredom mounted apace.

An hour passed. McCrimmon had just lowered his fifth John Collins, and was waxing impatient, when a waiter signalled him. The orchestra was playing ‘Carmelita’ and, as McCrimmon walked out, the music harmonized very well with the not unmelodious tinkling given off by the chromium ashtray and monogrammed forks and spoons in his coat pocket.

Pressing a cylindrical disc of some base metal into the gratified waiter’s hand, McCrimmon emerged into the vestibule. Again there was no one there, but as the waiter had informed him that someone awaited him, he pressed through the only other door, other than the exit, leading off the vestibule.

Again he drew a blank—in one sense. For, though the washplace, for such it was, was empty, McCrimmon’s professional attention was drawn to the row of gleaming chromium taps. He bethought himself of his uncle, proprietor of a flourishing plumber and gasfitter’s firm in the Broomielaw, Glasgow. Muttering some proverb about time lost never being regained, McCrimmon drew forth a ten-inch Stilson wrench, expertly calculated with his eye the gauge of the gland nut on the taps and was adjusting the spanner when a low, sibilant voice behind him said ‘Meester!’

McCrimmon started, performed some masterly sleight of hand with the Stilson, then turned unconcernedly round. If innocence of expression were any criterion, any unbiased judge, could he have seen him in company with an average archangel, would have branded the latter as a habitual criminal.

Before him stood, or crouched, a diminutive, dark-skinned individual, clad in a scarlet fez and an off-white nightgown. His feet were bare. To the casual eye, he seemed to be shaking hands indus-triously with himself; McCrimmon correctly interpreted this as a gesture of propitiation. Again the apparition spoke.

‘Meester Creemon?’ he enquired.

McCrimmon, deeming it useless to point out the correct pronunciation of a legendary Highland name to the unlettered heathen, merely nodded assent. The native, equally a man of few words, said no more. Beckoning, he turned, slipped out of the doorway, through the vestibule and into the street. McCrimmon, suitably impressed by his conspiratorial air, cast a last regretful glance at the chromium taps, made a mental note to bring a haversack next time and lurked after him.

Satisfied that he was not alone, the native shuffled noiselessly across the square. McCrimmon followed, keeping, as became an upholder of the dignity of Western civilization, several ostentatious paces to the rear. The guide led the way up the rue Safia Zaghoul, over the hill, down the other side and into the native quarter immediately east of the docks.

As the streets grew meaner and darker and the smell more villainous, so did McCrimmon’s grip on his wrench tighten. But he did not hesitate. Was he not a McCrimmon? Had not his ancestors done their part nobly and well at Bannockburn and Flodden? Had not, in more recent times, his grandfather run more bootleg hooch throughout the Western Isles than any other man in contemporary history? Had he not seen, with his own eyes, his father, with that cheerful contempt of death so characteristic of the McCrimmons, cheer the Glasgow Rangers to victory whilst imbedded in a solid phalanx of Celtic supporters? There was no lack of glorious precepts. Besides, he had lifted his elbow many times that evening. His courage was as the courage of ten. McCrimmon pressed on.

His guide suddenly stopped before a dilapidated café; outwardly, at least, it was unprepossessing in the extreme. McCrimmon, following the guide through the hanging reeds screening the doorway, found that the outward façade belied the interior, which was considerably worse. It consisted of a bar running the length of the room, half a dozen tables with wicker chairs and a few stools. In one corner, a scruffy individual was toasting a flat loaf over an open brazier. Hard by him two aged gentlemen were squatting on the floor, manfully sucking at a bubbling hookah. McCrimmon could not discern what, if anything, was happening at the other end of the room. Visibility did not exceed four feet.

The guide evidently felt completely at home here. Leading McCrimmon over to a rickety table by the brazier, he sat down and, in a burst of confidence, disclosed himself as one Mohammed Ali. Parenthetically, it may here be remarked that fifty per cent of the male population of Egypt are called Mohammed Ali; the remaining fifty per cent, unambitious souls, are content with calling themselves Mohammed or Ali.

Introductions thus tardily effected, McCrimmon, whom the refinements and social trappings of big business left completely cold, called for drinks and brusquely demanded that they come to business. Mohammed Ali slid a hand into a fold of his robe and drew out a small, wash-leather bag. Weighing this speculatively in his hand, he said nothing, but his enquiring, meaningful glance more than compensated for any lack of words.

McCrimmon demanded to see the stones: Mohammed Ali declined. Surely the English Meester would at least demonstrate his good faith by showing his money. McCrimmon, writhing under the double insult of the opprobious epithet ‘English’ and the disrepute into which the word of a McCrimmon had clearly fallen among the savage tribes of the East, groped for the handle of his Stilson.

Mohammed Ali, to whom the higher forms of etiquette were obviously a closed book, chose this moment to begin manicuring his hands after his own unostentatious fashion. His nail-file took the form of a 9-inch, double-edged throwing knife; McCrimmon, reflecting that, after all, the rude and untutored upbringing of these unfortunates entitled them to pity rather than censure, magnanimously changed his mind about the Stilson and thrust his hand into his left coat-pocket, where he kept his wallet. It remained there for a few seconds, then emerged slowly. His hand was empty. His face wore a most peculiar expression. Not to put too fine a point on it, his wallet was gone.

What ensued would have thrown any aspiring etymologist into transports of rapture. With every second word unprintable, McCrimmon anathematized the world in general and Alexandria in particular for five full minutes without repeating himself once. He held his audience spellbound. Finally, he calmed down, soothed by Mohammed Ali’s consoling words and several glasses of nativebrewed arrack.

After much further argument and bandying of words, it was agreed that they should meet again on the following night, at a café at the hither end of the Sherif Pasha—a rendezvous insisted on by McCrimmon. The advantages were two-fold—it was in the white quarter, and McCrimmon was not unknown there; had they been there that evening, wallet or no wallet, the necessity for a further assignation would not have arisen…

McCrimmon sat on for some time, drinking moodily and deciding to leave only when Mohammed Ali showed no signs of supplying any further arrack. Clutching at the wavering bar in an effort to steady it, he rose to go; he wore the weary air of a man whom fate could harm no more. It was, after all, a pardonable assumption.

Launching forth in the general direction of the door, he found it blocked by a quartette who showed no signs of complying with his imperative calls for gangway. Focusing his eyes with considerable difficulty, McCrimmon peered at the nearest of the four; his mind, harking back several leagues, ultimately identified him as the Cypriot to whom he had been demonstrating the finer points of poker earlier on in the evening. Intuition told him who the remaining three gentlemen were.

Shocked into comparative sobriety and hoarsely uttering the war cry of his clan, McCrimmon leapt back. A high-speed camera would have recorded but a blur as his hand streaked for his Stilson wrench. Wild Bill Hickok, at his best, would have stood in silent wonder. Alas for McCrimmon, the miraculous speed of his draw was grievously hampered by the plethora of assorted cutlery in his pocket. True, it caused but a second’s delay: but it is a scientifically established fact that a heavy stool, impelled by the arms of an enraged Armenian, can cover a distance of four feet in less than half that time.

A naval patrol happened to be passing by as McCrimmon emerged, in slightly unorthodox fashion, through the closed lattice window of the café. It was an unusual method of exit, but not sufficiently so to warrant investigation by any average hardened naval patrol. Pausing only to separate him from the splintered woodwork festooned around his neck, the patrol picked him up and escorted his tottering form to the sanctuary of the docks.

Dragging himself away from the mirror wherein he had been gazing with rapturous admiration for the past ten minutes, McCrimmon adjusted his hat to the correct angle befitting an Active Service A/B, donned his raincoat, checked up on his armoury and prepared to leave the mess-deck.

It was nightfall on the following day, Sunday. During the morning McCrimmon had held a council of war with his cousin, who was that day accumulating an impressive amount of overtime in ‘A’ Turret. Annoyed as he initially was by McCrimmon’s intrusion—for even the most phlegmatic amongst us resents any interruption of a deep and healthful slumber—his cousin was soon cursing luridly and gnashing his teeth in perfect sympathetic unison with McCrimmon as the latter unfolded his sorry tale. But there were no hard feelings—amongst the McCrimmons, recriminations are quite unknown. Another wallet of notes would be forthcoming by evening. The loss, McCrimmon assured his grateful cousin, could be made good by another two or three overtime weekends, even though he was not the man he was, as he had latterly begun to be troubled by insomnia.

Many a lesser man, in his circumstances and in the light of recent events, would have categorically refused to venture ashore; but there are no lesser men among the McCrimmons. He was watch aboard that night, but had easily circumvented that slight technicality by mortgaging his rum for the next three days to a messmate—a practice strictly at variance with Service regulations, and, therefore, all the more dear to the heart of McCrimmon.

Satisfied that all was well, and that his wallet, only to be used as a last resort, was securely stowed in an inner pocket, he climbed briskly up the rope ladder to the upper deck passage-way. It is here worth recording that the steel ladder, normally in position, had been removed that morning for the purpose of welding new foot-grips on the worn, shiny steps.

He arrived ashore in the liberty-boat some thirty minutes later, passed out of the dock, strode up through the native quarter, rolled his way along the vast cobbles of the rue Soeurs, turned into Mohammed Ali square, crossed it diagonally and disappeared down the Sherif Pasha.

On arrival at the rendezvous, he exchanged a few genial words with the proprietor—an old acquaintance of his—pressed some genuine Egyptian currency into the hands of the two large Yugoslav waiters and seated himself in the private recess curtained off from the restaurant. Here he patiently awaited the arrival of Mohammed Ali, from time to time smiling with smug self-satisfaction and automatically easing the heavy wrench in his pocket.

Ten minutes passed, and Mohammed Ali arrived. He was not alone. The man who followed him in stood about six foot one in his bare feet and was so broad that he found it necessary to turn sideways in order to pass through the doorway. A large man by any standards, he was puny and stunted when compared to the other two dark-skinned individuals who pressed in behind him. Mohammed Ali’s companions appeared to have been chosen with a complete lack of the aesthetic viewpoint.

McCrimmon ground his teeth in black fury and bitterly marvelling at the depravity and depths of distrust of human nature, he smiled broadly and greeted Mohammed Ali with a cordiality that would have embarrassed any but the blackest-hearted. Mohammed Ali remained unmoved.

The wrench was hastily pushed well out of sight and the wallet dragged forth from the more remote fastnesses of McCrimmon’s clothing. Mohammed Ali, permitting himself the merest smirk, took out the wash-leather bag, unloosened the neck and spilled the contents on the table. There were eighteen stones in all, blue moonstones, small but perfectly matched.

McCrimmon, who probably knew less about precious stones than any other man living, produced a magnifying glass which the Navigator had carelessly left lying around his chart table and proceeded to examine the stones with the hawk-like eye of the Hatton Garden expert.

For a long time he examined them, one by one. He picked each new one up hopefully, scrutinized it and cast it away in a disparaging fashion, carefully allowing his expression of disappointment to deepen after each unspoken condemnation. Mohammed Ali fidgeted and fumed. McCrimmon ignored him completely.

Mohammed Ali’s patience wore very thin. Clearing his throat after his unpleasant fashion, he stated his price as 800 piastres. McCrimmon, rapidly calculating that, on figures supplied by his cousin, this would give him only 500 per cent profit, cast away another moonstone with an even more marked degree of disgust, and laughed hollowly. He had spent much time in practising and bringing to its present state of perfection that hollow laugh of his and it had served him well more than once in the past.

It affected Mohammed Ali not at all. McCrimmon once more gnashed his teeth and offered 500—a ridiculously high price, but he, McCrimmon, was not the man to haggle over an odd piastre. Neither, apparently, was Mohammed; he restated his original figure and then the haggling began in earnest. Both called for alcoholic sustenance; not, as the innocent might expect, from a spirit of amity but in the fervid, if unChristian, hope that it might cloud the other’s intellect.

When McCrimmon left the café a brief two hours later, the blue moonstones were his; his wallet, true, had been lightened to the extent of 500 piastres, but he was more than satisfied with the night’s work. Granted, there had been a slightly unpleasant scene when McCrimmon, producing a 1938 Currency Quotation book, had endeavoured to pay in Greek money (rate of exchange, in the year ‘44, due to inflation, being approximately five million drachmas to the penny); but further reflection, coupled with the sight of one of Mohammed Ali’s bodyguards absentmindedly tying knots in a small crowbar, had convinced him of the unwisdom of this. Still, as aforesaid, he was satisfied. McCrimmon decided to celebrate.

Some time after midnight, it was borne in upon McCrimmon that, for every twenty paces he took, he was making no more than one yard’s direct progress. Rightly calculating that it would thus take him several hours to cover the mile that separated him from the docks, he hailed a gharry. Mounting, he enthroned himself on the collapsible hood and shouted ironic encouragement to the decrepit Jehu, who uselessly belaboured the ancient collection of skin and bones barely supported by the gharry’s shafts.

They arrived at No 14 gate in ten minutes. McCrimmon vaulted gracefully over the side of the gharry and collapsed in an inert heap in the gutter. Picked up and revivified by the army guard, he staggered down to the quay and found that the last liberty-boat had departed three hours previously. He hired a felucca, and his powerful, off-key baritone, rendering the ‘Skye Boat Song’, reverberated among the silent ships as the two natives laboriously rowed out of the windless inner harbour. In the outer harbour, with sail raised, he switched to ‘Shenandoah’, and so went through his painfully extensive repertoire, craftily changing to ‘Rule Britannia’ as the felucca came within earshot of the Officer of the Watch of the Ilara.

Making good his escape up the chain ladder while the natives searched the bottom of the boat for the handful of carelessly thrown Glasgow Corporation tramway tokens, McCrimmon made his way for’ard. He disappeared into a convenient patch of blackness which enveloped the port side amidships of the Ilara, and tarried there a space while he opened the heavy steel doors of a small compartment and tucked the bag of blue moonstones safely inside. They were completely hidden. He closed the door, tightened the clamps with a tommy bar and departed on his way, smirking widely and fulsomely congratulating himself on his own genius. At no time was McCrimmon’s faith in his fellow-man very marked.

He passed within the for’ard screen door and navigated his unsteady way to the hatchway leading down to his mess-deck. Above this hatchway brightly burned a warning red lamp; this he incorrectly judged to be merely yet another of the brightly coloured spots which had been interfering with his vision for some little time. Swinging his leg over the coaming, McCrimmon started to descend the ladder with the careless aplomb of the born sailor; it was not until he recovered consciousness several hours later in the Sick Bay that he recollected that the ladder had been removed the previous day.

On the following day the Ilara left for operational duties. Three days later McCrimmon was well on the highroad to recovery and on the fourth he suffered a serious relapse.

About 7.00 am on the fourth morning, the Ilara intercepted and sunk a small German transport evacuating troops from Crete. McCrimmon had heard the news and had been not unaware of desultory gunfire. About 10.00 am he summoned the Sick Berth Attendant and lackadaisically asked for details. He was told that the trooper had been disabled by gunfire and, when emptied of troops, sunk by torpedo.

Insofar as it was possible for a complexion the colour of saddle-leather to match a snow-white pillow, McCrimmon’s now did just this. Finding some difficulty with his breathing, he asked the SBA whether he knew which tubes had been used. The SBA did and informed him that the port ones were the ones in question. The SBA was now thoroughly alarmed, as he had it on the best authority that only dying men plucked the coverlet after the fashion his patient was now using.

Moaning slightly, McCrimmon mustered the last tattered shreds of the legendary McCrimmon courage and feebly enquired whether the torpedo which had done the deadly deed had issued from X, Y or Z. ‘Ah! no, no, not X.’ ‘Yes—X.’

As the first wave of kindly oblivion swept over his shattered frame, McCrimmon momentarily and agonizingly relived those few moments of inspired cunning—now clearly seen for the maniacal folly that it was—when he had stowed the moonstones inside X torpedo tube. With the fleeting realization that ‘jewel-studded Aegean’ was no longer the empty phrase that it had been in Byron’s time, McCrimmon lapsed into a stunned unconsciousness which caused the SBA to have no hesitation whatsoever in calling both medical officers at once.

Physically speaking, McCrimmon eventually made a complete recovery: mentally, he is scarred for life. More terrible still, internecine warfare has at last destroyed the historic solidarity of the Clan McCrimmon. I met McCrimmon the other day, striding briskly along Glasgow’s Argyll Street, with an empty haversack over his shoulder—he had just been on a visit to his plumber uncle in the Broomielaw—and he told me sadly that, even after the lapse of years, his cousin was still looking for him.

They Sweep the Seas

It was still night when we cast off and nosed our way through the outer harbour, crammed with vessels of all sizes and nationalities, riding peacefully at anchor. Cold, grey rain was sluicing down mercilessly, spattering off our deck and churning the murky water to a light foam, and from the bridge, visibility scarcely extended beyond the trawler’s bows. We felt, rather than saw, our way out to the open sea, barely making headway. We brushed along the side of a sister trawler, and farther on felt our hull scraping over an anchor cable, the black hulk of the ship’s bows looming perilously near. Approaching the entrance, and feeling reasonably safe, we increased speed, and all but collided with a big Finnish freighter, which had worked with the tide across the harbour mouth; it was the word ‘SUOMI’, painted in six-foot high letters, gleaming whitely through the darkness, that gave us warning. Our skipper cursed fluently, spun the wheel to starboard, and we passed on. But we reached the sea without mishap.

In the harbour, it had been comparatively warm and sheltered, but a very different state of affairs existed beyond the headland. The trawler pitched wickedly in the long, heavy rollers coming in from the Atlantic, drenching itself in spray. Sometimes an exceptionally heavy sea foamed along fo’c’sle high, poured into the well, slid over the deck, and went gurgling through the scuppers; but this did not happen often. The wind was not strong, but possessed that biting quality which makes one raise one’s coat collar and withdraw, hurriedly, to the lee-side of the upper deck. There are few bleaker and more cheerless places than the west coast of Scotland in the early morning of a January day.

As the trawler went butting through the seas, in the chill grey of the breaking dawn, to its appointed station, the two officers on the bridge discussed the prospects of the coming sweep. Both agreed that it would be a trying day, that it would be as boring as ever, and that they would, as usual, encounter no mines. They disagreed, however, concerning the weather: the Lieutenant thought there was little chance of the wind dying down or the weather moderating; but the skipper was of the opinion that both would come to pass, although, probably, later in the day.

Neither the Lieutenant nor the skipper was a young man. The Lieutenant (RNR) wore three rows of ribbon, had been in the Dardanelles in the last war, and walked with a pronounced limp—a memento of Zeebrugge. He had retired ten years ago, but at the outbreak of war had left his comfortable, even luxurious, existence for the unknown perils and hardships of a minesweeper’s existence. He did not do this as a favour to his country: he did it as his duty.

The Lieutenant, as has been said, was not a young man, but the skipper was at least ten years older. Half a century had passed since he first went down to the sea. He had swept mines in the war of 1914-18, but had considered himself, not unnaturally, too old for such an arduous task in this. Then one day, while trawling in the North Sea, he had been bombed and machine-gunned by a Heinkel. The bombs had missed, but the bullets had literally riddled one of his crew. That man was his son. And so he had changed his mind about being too old.

An hour after clearing the harbour mouth, we reached the beginning of our beat and cut the engines until the trawler had barely enough way to keep head on to the seas. We were awaiting the arrival of our companion sweeper, who made her appearance some ten minutes later, pitching heavily up on our starboard quarter, a vague shape in the dim half-light.

We drifted a light line astern and she altered her course to port, to pick it up. A wire was attached to this; we hauled it aboard our own trawler, attached the sweep wire to it, and paid it out astern again. At regular intervals, peculiarly shaped objects, professionally known as ‘kites’, were shackled to the hawser by two seamen, whose stoic features betrayed no signs of the extreme discomfort they must have been experiencing from their raw hands and stiff, coldbenumbed fingers. These ‘kites’ acted as weights upon the sweep wire, keeping it at the requisite distance beneath the surface of the water.

No landlubber or ‘freshwater’ man could have performed this task of paying out the sweep wire; it was an operation that demanded the very highest standards of seamanship. The co-ordination and sense of timing of the man at the wheel, the two ‘shacklers’, and, above all, the winch-driver, were marvellous to a degree. They worked as smoothly and as swiftly as the well-oiled, correlated cogs of an intricate machine.

Everything adjusted to his satisfaction, our Lieutenant signalled, by siren, to the other trawler that he was ready to commence his sweep. She acknowledged his signal, swept round to our starboard beam, and off we went, beating southwards. It was becoming rougher, and the Lieutenant, studiously avoiding the skipper’s eye, was smiling with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was not often that the skipper’s weather forecasts proved false, but this time, for once, he seemed to have slipped up.

We were broadside on to the seas now, one moment lifting over a sullen, spume-capped crest, the next sliding along a shallow trough, clouds of icy spray cascading inboard. The pitching had given place to a rather unpleasant rolling motion, the latter being a decided change for the worse. It was now that the genius—and genius it was—of the winch-driver asserted itself. His job it was to see that the sweep wire did not become too slack, which would have been bad enough, or become too taut, which might have resulted in tragedy. Sailors have, with good reason, a holy dread of overstrained hawsers. A snapped wire is a lethal weapon, and its power of destruction is rather terrifying; such a wire can slice off a man’s head far more efficiently than the sharpest axe. But, judging from our winch-driver’s nonchalance and the deceptively careless ease with which he manipulated the levers, one would have thought that no such unpleasant possibility had ever occurred to him.

On the bridge, the Lieutenant was poring over a minutely detailed Admiralty chart spread open before him. Also consulting it, but with a much lesser degree of concentration, was the skipper, who only did it that he might not hurt the feelings of the Lieutenant, for whom he entertained a very high regard. Privately, however, he held Admiralty charts and all such inessentials in a mighty contempt, and considered them unworthy of a real sailor. He had never needed a chart; a torn, finger-stained school atlas had served his purpose equally well.

When the Lieutenant judged we had reached the end of our beat, he pulled on the siren lanyard, and the other trawler cut her speed down to a mere crawl; whereas we continued at full speed and came sweeping round in a full half-circle, a manoeuvre which, though apparently simple, like all else in minesweeping, was, in actuality, a brilliantly executed bit of seamanship. One might have been excused for thinking that we had been hauled round by centripetal force, our companion trawler acting as the pivot and the sweep wire as the connecting link, so high a state of perfection had the co-ordination existing between the two trawlers reached.

All morning we continued in this fashion, beating up and down and gradually working our way westward. The wind, in the meantime, had veered from the west to north-by-west, and, though not becoming any stronger, had become exceedingly cold. At this juncture, we began to feel truly sorry for the winchman, exposed, as he was, to the full force of the elements, but consoled ourselves with the thought that he was specially adapted for resisting the cold, owing to his enormous girth. We were surprised to learn, however, that he was of normal proportions but wore no fewer than five overcoats under his oilskins and life jacket. But this may merely have been malicious rumour and we never received any confirmation as to its truth. Suffice is it to say that his attitude, regarding the weather, of the completest unconcern was Spartan to a degree.

If he was, undeniably, the most important member of the crew, the second most, equally without doubt, was the cook. Balancing himself with a marvellous agility, born of long and arduous practice, he made his appearance at regular intervals—never exceeding three-quarters of an hour—bearing, in the one hand, a large and muchbattered iron kettle, and in the other, a motley assortment of tin mugs, joined together by a strand of wire passed through their handles. The kettle was filled, alternately, with strong, sweet tea and cocoa, and the contents surpassed, we were of the opinion, anything we had ever experienced in the finest of city restaurants. Apparently coffee does not find favour in the eyes of the crews of minesweepers.

Minesweeping is a dreadfully monotonous business, but we managed to pass the time tolerably well by smoking, spinning yarns, and drinking the cook’s concoctions. In the early morning, a huge, four-engined flying boat of the Coastal Command passed directly overhead, acknowledging our humble presence by dipping graciously in salute, at which we felt highly flattered. About noon, a small convoy appeared on the southern horizon, but was gone within half an hour. Occasionally, gulls or wild duck flew overhead, and twice we saw the round, black, glistening head of a particularly venturesome seal emerge from a nearby wave, stare at us coldly and dispassionately, after the manner of its kind, then sink beneath the waves with an expression of disgust on its face. But noteworthy incidents were non-existent, and we gradually settled down into a state of wakeful boredom.

About two o’clock in the afternoon, when conversation had languished and died, and we were conjuring up fanciful visions of what we should have for our evening meal, our dreams were abruptly shattered by a loud, incoherent, but unmistakably triumphant cry from our indefatigable winch-driver. We dashed to the starboard side of our vessel and scanned the stretch of water under which the sweep wire was passing, eagerly awaiting the first appearance of the mine—as mine it must be. We could see nothing: neither had our winch-driver seen anything, but he had felt some foreign body making contact with the sweep wire—and he was far too experienced a man to make a mistake.

It was a tense moment, holding, as it did, two distinct possibilities regarding the immediate future of the mine—one unpleasant, the other not so. (Parenthetically, it speaks well for our faith in our winch-driver that we never doubted the existence of the mine.) In the first case, our sweep wire might foul the detonating mechanism of the mine, which would forthwith blow up, in which event our sweep wire would be almost inevitably destroyed. Moreover, we had no means of knowing how close the mine was to one or other of our trawlers, and it was far from improbable that the explosion of the mine would entail our own or our companion sweeper’s destruction. Such things had happened before. The other, and infinitely more pleasing possibility was that the mine would be drawn on to one of the cutters, be severed from its anchorage, and float harmlessly to the surface. To our immense relief, it was the latter that came to pass.

At a spot that was almost mathematically equidistant between the two trawlers, the mine rose slowly to the surface and remained there, rising and falling sluggishly with the seas, an evillooking, murderous spheroid of black steel, about three feet in diameter, liberally covered with knobs. These knobs, when broken, set the detonating mechanism in action and explode the mine. We steamed on for some distance farther, in order to carry the sweep well out of the mine’s reach, and, almost before we had stopped, two of the crew had their rifles out and were firing at the mine, patently bent on its early despatch and eager to witness the explosion and its spectacular after-effects. In their laudable efforts they were nobly supported by the crew of the other trawler.

After about a score of ineffectual shots had been fired by each trawler, it became evident that the disposal of the mine was going to be a by no means simple matter. The heaving decks of the trawlers, combined with the fact that the target was not static, made for very inaccurate shooting. Still, persistency had its own due, if not very satisfying, reward, for, after another ten minutes, the mine sank to the floor of the sea, riddled with bullets, none of which had the luck to impinge on any of the detonators. Although our object had been accomplished and the mine rendered harmless to shipping, one and all were grievously disappointed at the mine’s inglorious end, having been pardonably desirous of witnessing a more dramatic finale. With a glow of inward satisfaction, not unmixed with a slight feeling of frustration, we returned to our posts and resumed operations.

Contrary to popular conception, minesweepers do not sweep up and explode dozens of mines every day. Long weeks may pass without so much as the sight of a mine; this was, accordingly, a red-letter day for the crew of our trawler. We had already nine white-painted chevrons adorning our long black funnel, signifying that we had destroyed that number of mines; already the ship’s artist was ferreting out his paint and brush, preparatory to painting our tenth chevron when we should reach port or the weather moderate sufficiently to permit of it.

Towards evening the skies began to clear, the wind backed round to the westward again, and the rough, wind-swept seas gradually calmed down to a gentle swell. If the Lieutenant felt chagrined at his interrupted success as a weather prophet, he concealed his feelings remarkably well; probably, however, the excitement and success of the early afternoon had driven all thought of it from his mind. Some time later the cloudbanks to the west lifted, and, for the first time that day, we saw the sun, an enormous ball of dull red, its circumference very clearly etched through the low-lying winter haze.

Half an hour later, the sun dipped slowly below the southwestern horizon, laying a broken path of crimson over the sea of our ship. Soon after, as the light was failing and we had the better part of twenty miles to go before we reached our home port, the Lieutenant signalled to our companion trawler to cease operations and disconnect the sweep wire. We hauled it aboard, unshackled the ‘kites’ and stowed them carefully away; we then turned the trawler’s bows towards the east, for the first time that day, and set a course for home through the swiftly gathering darkness.

The day’s work was done. The skipper, his hands gently caressing the wheel, was talking quietly to the Lieutenant, relaxed on a disreputable camp stool, his back against the bulkhead, his hands behind his head. Down below, the cook, his labours over, was lying on his bunk, reading a detective novelette. The winch-driver, impervious, as ever, to the icy wind which still blew, had not stirred from his post, but was dreamily regarding our slightly phosphorescent wake, watching it recede gradually into the darkness. A couple of men were sheltering from the following wind in the well-deck before the bridge, quietly smoking. Yet another two men were on the bridge-deck, steadying a ladder, on the top of which was perched a man for whom the slight pitching of the ship, the insufficient light, and the chilly night wind were proving no deterrent in the execution of his task. To him, art was all. He was painting our tenth chevron on the funnel…

Words cannot adequately express what we owe to these men—fishermen all, from the Hebrides and Mallaig, Wick and Peterhead, Aberdeen and Grimsby, Lowestoft and Yarmouth. Call them heroes, and they would jeer at you: yet they are nothing else. Theirs is, at once, the most lonely, monotonous, and dangerous of all our Empire Forces’ tasks, and one indispensable for the maintenance of danger-free sea-lanes for the Merchant Service, our lifeline with the world beyond. They put to sea in the morning, gay or grave according to their wont…and some do not return. But they close their ranks, and carry on.

City of Benares

Colin Ryder Richardson, a city broker, and Kenneth Sparks, a Post Office employee, both live in the western outskirts of London, the former in Worcester Park, Surrey, the latter in Alperton, Middlesex. Both are approximately the same age, both are married, both have a baby son. Superficial similarities, these, similarities that could be duplicated ten thousand times: but through the warp and woof of the lives of these two young men runs a coloured thread of memory that sets them apart from all the others: the memory of that dark and bitter and hopeless night eighteen long years ago, when the torpedoed liner City of Benares slid beneath the gale and sleet-torn surface of the North Atlantic and left them to die in the cold and hostile waters.

They should have died that night. Their chances of survival, the chances of survival of any child, in waters such as these, were remote. But incredibly survive they did—they and a handful of other children. A handful, no more. The chances were remote, and with the sinking of the City of Benares, a tragedy which aroused more pity and indignation than any other naval loss of the war, the law of averages had its inexorable way. Of the hundred young children aboard the liner, no less than eighty-three, far from the parents, the homes, and the friends that had until then made up the entirety of their young lives, died on that night of 17 September, 1940.

Kenneth Sparks was thirteen years old, Colin Richardson only eleven on the day when the City of Benares left England for Canada with a total complement of 406—191 passengers and 215 of a crew. Even today, Kenneth Sparks can recall the dark mutterings of some members of the crew on the choice of a sailing date—Friday the 13th of September.

But no one paid any attention to their gloomy forebodings—certainly none of the children, ranging from five to fifteen years of age, for all of whom this voyage was the most exciting adventure of their lives. There was so much to see—all the other ships in the convoy, the destroyers fussing busily around them, and so much to do—exploring the big liner, playing games, trying their best to do full justice to the magnificent meals set before them.

Nearly all the children were being evacuated, Kenneth Sparks among them, under an official Government scheme, from heavily bombed areas such as London, Middlesex, Sunderland, Liverpool and Newport: there were nine officially employed escorts to look after them. Colin Richardson was an exception, travelling privately under the care of a Mr Raskay, a Hungarian, who had arranged with Colin’s parents to be his guardian for that trip.

On the third day out from England, the destroyers, their charges now safely past the recognized danger zone, turned for home, leaving the convoy on its own. Even among the most hardened sailors in wartime there is always the same feeling of desertion and vulnerability when their naval escort is compelled to withdraw. But this very human apprehension subsided considerably on the evening of the next day when the liner began to pitch and roll in awkward cross-seas as the weather deteriorated and the wind moaned and whistled round the superstructure and through the rigging as it steadily mounted towards gale force, building up the big seas ahead of it.

The tension and the strain aboard the City of Benares eased; it was safe now almost to relax. Uboats, of course, were the great menace. But everyone knew how almost impossible it was to launch an accurate torpedo with such seas running, even if a U-boat captain was lucky enough to see them and have time to take an aiming sight, through the cold rain and sleet showers that were beginning to sweep across the darkening sea. Besides, it was the absolutely recognized convention and law of naval warfare that the torpedoing of liners in gale seas was forbidden: in such heavy seas the chances of survival of the complement of a torpedoed liner were remote indeed.

The City of Benares was torpedoed at exactly 10.00 p.m. that night. The torpedo struck the ship far aft on the port side, almost directly opposite the place where the majority of the evacuee children had their quarters. It is not known exactly how many of them lost their lives in that first lethal moment of impact, when the detonating torpedo ripped a huge hole in the unarmoured hull of the City of Benares from above to far below the waterline. The probability is that nearly half of these children either died in the first moment, were too dreadfully wounded either to struggle to freedom or even cry out for help, or were trapped in their cabins by warped and buckled doors and taken down with the ship with no one near to help them.

Some children, on the other hand, were at first quite unaware either of the fatal extent of the damage or, indeed, of the fact that there had been any damage at all. Among the unsuspecting ones were Colin Richardson and Kenneth Sparks.

Colin was in his bunk at the time, alone in his cabin, reading a comic. He felt a heavy bump, but paid no attention to it—we can only assume that he found the contents of his comic singularly engrossing—and carried on reading. Not until the alarm bells started ringing did he reluctantly abandon his comic, don a pair of slippers, put on his dressing gown over his pyjamas, his vivid red kapok life jacket—given him by his mother with the instructions that he should wear it always, and of so eye-dazzling a colour that he was already known throughout the ship as Will Scarlet—over his dressing gown, a cork life jacket above that and made his way to the ship’s restaurant where he found all the passengers lining up to go to their boat stations.

Kenneth was in bed at 10.00 p.m., and sound asleep. The insistent clamour of the alarm bells brought himself and his two cabin companions—both of whom were to die during the darkness of that night—to their feet, struggling into coats and life jackets before hurrying to their boat positions on the upper deck.

Newly awakened from the soft blanketed warmth of their beds, most of them still halfasleep, the children shivered and tried to crouch more deeply still inside their thin night clothes as the bitter night wind, blowing a full gale now, knifed through their pathetically inadequate garments, drenching them with driving rain and icy hail, blinding them with the bulleting spray whipped off the wave-tops as the already sinking ship, losing way rapidly, began to wallow helplessly in the deep troughs between the seas.

It was not until then that Kenneth Sparks realized what was happening, not until he saw the blown hatch-covers, the snapped and splintered mast, the debris lying everywhere, the dazed and fearful lascar crew members that he understood that the ship was sinking beneath his feet. Both he and Colin Richardson remember clearly that there was no panic, no fear at all among the children, nothing except the lonely sobbing of one little boy, crying quietly in the darkness, his voice carrying only faintly in the sudden moments of silence when the City of Benares listed far over to one side, momentarily blocking the sound and the power of the gale.

One by one the lifeboats were lowered—a difficult and often dangerous task in a wickedly rolling, all but stopped ship in those wild and pitch-dark seas. Some of the lifeboats capsized immediately, throwing the occupants into the water—few of these were ever seen again. Some were swamped and cut adrift. Others came alongside the foot of rope ladders, and women and children clambered down over the side towards them, as often as not to find that the boats were no longer there. And then they would find that they no longer had the strength to climb back up on deck again: for a few seconds they would hang there, being battered against the ship’s side, alternately being plunged deep into the water or hauled high above it as the foundering vessel rolled deeply, sluggishly in the seas: and then their slender strength would fail them, their fingers would open and they were never seen again.

Other women took children in their arms and leapt into the darkness of the sea near a spot where they had seen a raft being dropped over the side. Occasionally—very occasionally—they would reach it, drag themselves aboard and lie there helpless, beaten flat by the wind, the hail and the waves, unable even to so much as raise their heads: more often than not, they would fail to see the raft in the deep gloom of a sea where the towering wave-crests reduced visibility to only a few feet, or, even if they did see one, would find it floating away into the outer darkness more quickly than they could swim after it.

The City of Benares sunk in just over ten minutes from the time she was torpedoed, and the wonder of it is that so many managed to get away at all. Miracles of effort and selfless courage were the order of the day. Crew-members leapt into the water to right upturned boats and rescue what passengers they could. Others stayed on the slippery canting decks until the City of Benares foundered, struggling to free rafts and jammed lifeboats. All too often they were still struggling when the ship foundered, taking them along with it.

In the minds of nearly every one of the crew and the passengers, the children were the first, last and only thought. The Captain died while still searching for them below decks. So did Colonel Baldwin-Webb, MP for the Wrekin Division of Shropshire, who had acted with imperturbable gallantry throughout and had led many children from the cabins to the lifeboats. So did Colin’s guardian, Mr Raskay, who gave up his own place in a lifeboat to a woman and child, turned back, went below, extricated more women and children from blazing cabins, returned to the upper deck and dived into the sea, not to save himself, but to rescue drowning children in the water. It is not known how or where he died, but it was inevitable that he should die. Mr Raskay was a Hungarian, but race and creed meant nothing to him, only humanity.

The chief quartermaster also died in the search for children. He had loaded a lifeboat with women and children, left it in the command of another seaman, climbed back aboard and was never seen again. And the children’s official escorts more than lived up to the trust that had been placed in them: only three of them survived.

One of them was Mrs Towns. She stayed to see as many children as possible into the boats, refused a place for herself, and jumped over the side—and she had never swum before in her life. Somehow she reached an upturned boat and clung on to it, one of fifteen, mainly children, who did so. But the cold struck deep, the biting hail and pounding seas numbed arms and bodies and legs, and one by one the children dropped off during that bitter and interminable night. When dawn came, only Mrs Towns and two little girls were left. They survived.

Colin Richardson and Kenneth Sparks were luckier—they managed to get away in lifeboats. Colin remembers vividly the actual moment of the sinking of the City of Benares, the spectacle of a man being blasted out through a door crashing back on its hinges, the swift plunge, the bursting open of doors and ventilators as the air pressure inside built up swiftly to an intolerable degree.

He remembers too, the strange sight of the sea dotted with the red lights attached to the life belts of the crew struggling in the water, of those who swam alongside and begged to be taken into the already over-crowded boat; the quiet, unquestioning acceptance of nearly all those who were told there was no room left. They swam away to find what floating debris they could, most of them knowing that it could be only a token postponement of the death by exhaustion and exposure that surely awaited all those without either boat or raft. And the fear-crazed selfishness of one or two who desperately hauled themselves aboard, almost sinking the boat.

‘It was a dreadful night,’ Colin Richardson remembers. ‘Rough and bitterly cold: we were continuously swept by icy wind, rain and sleet. There was a half-hearted attempt at singing to keep up our spirits—but this did not last long for every time we opened our mouths we got them full of salt water. So we resigned ourselves to concentrating silently and grimly on keeping our place in the boat.’

And, indeed, that was an almost impossible task. Colin’s lifeboat was swamped, waterlogged, down to its gunwales in the water and kept afloat only by means of its buoyancy tanks. All were sitting waist-deep—for youngsters like Colin, chestdeep—in the freezing water: every time a wave came along, and they came in endless succession all through that endless night, they had to cling on desperately to prevent themselves from being swept away into the sea: when, like Colin, it was impossible even to reach the floorboards with your feet, the chances of holding on and surviving were negligible. But Colin held on—and he survived.

But many failed to hold on, and many died. One by one they died—from exposure, from just drowning where they sat, from that murderous cramp that weakened their last grip on gunwales and on life and let them be swept over the side to the oblivion and swift release of death by drowning.

The lascar seamen died first—ten of them in swift succession: accustomed all their lives to tropical and subtropical heat, they had no defences against that intolerable cold. Then members of the white crew, and some of the women and children also—up to their chests all night in that freezing water, their hearts just stopped beating. One man went mad and leapt over the side. An old ship’s nurse died in Colin’s lap after he had spent much time in comforting her, cradling the tired head in his arms, telling her over and over again that the rescue ship was coming. (Mr Richardson, when interviewed recently, did not mention that he had received the King’s commendation for bravery for his conduct in the lifeboat that night—surely one of the youngest ever to receive it.)

Dawn came, the sea calmed but the cold was as bitter as ever. Still they died, one by one, but Colin Richardson says his most vivid memory of that day was the sight of an upturned lifeboat with five people clinging to it. ‘When first we spotted them, the five waved at us quite happily. But, as the day wore on, one by one they weakened, lost their hold and disappeared. Five, four, three, two, one…’

Rescue came at 4.00 p.m. when the destroyer Hurricane spotted them and came alongside. Only one person was able to climb up the lowered scrambling nets—25-year-old Angus MacDonald, the ship’s carpenter in charge of the boat, and due to whose magnificent seamanship all the survivors undoubtedly owed their lives. All the survivors…ten out of the original forty.

Kenneth Sparks’ adventures form a strange contrast to those of Colin Richardson. He too, was in a crowded lifeboat—there were no less than forty-six people in it—but, instead of being eighteen hours in the boat, as Colin was, before being rescued, he and his forty-five companions spent eight days and nights on the surface of the broad and hostile Atlantic—and all forty-six of them miraculously survived.

The difference in survival ratios appears unaccountable at first sight—until it is remembered that Kenneth Sparks’ boat did not become swamped and waterlogged, and those in it were not condemned to sit in crouching immobility with the ice-cold water up to their chests: with a judicious sharing out of clothes and covering and huddling together for mutual warmth, even the chill night air of the Atlantic can be borne: it is only when one is immersed in the freezing water itself that there can be no defence.

They also had another great advantage—a means of propulsion through the water. Colin Richardson’s lifeboat had had all the oars swept away in the first few moments, but on Kenneth’s boat there were no oars to be lost. There was, instead, a screw attached to a long driving shaft, turned by means of vertically mounted push-pull levers between the seats. Not only did this give them directional stability and enable the man in charge, Third Officer Purvis, to keep head to stern on to the worst of the seas, but it also had the great advantage that it could be worked by anyone, the exercise providing life-giving warmth on even the coldest of nights.

They suffered, of course—they suffered cruelly. The cold and exposure were with them all the time—Kenneth spent two months in hospital after his rescue—so were the discomfort and sheer physical fatigue of holding on in the heavy seas. They had food and drink, but not enough: hunger, thirst and sleeplessness were part of their every waking thought. Kenneth Sparks is convinced that he and the five other children aboard that boat owed their survival to Miss Cornish, an official escort later honoured for her courage: she spent nearly all her waking hours in massaging the hands and feet of the children to keep the lifewarming blood circulating, giving them exercises and telling them countless stories to keep their minds off their desperate predicament. It says much for the entire success of her efforts when Kenneth says that no one among them ever lost hope of being rescued. And rescued they finally were, located in the first instance by a patrolling plane, and then picked up by a destroyer that took them safely home to Scotland.

Such, then, is the tragic story of the City of Benares, surely the most pathetic and heartrending story of the war at sea. It is reasonable to hope that not even the most ruthless U-boat captain would have torpedoed the City of Benares had he known that there were a hundred children aboard, but speculation is no consolation and makes the story no less dreadful.

A dreadful story, but not without its splendour. Apart from Colin and Kenneth and his five companions, only twelve other children survived. A pitiful handful. But it was to give a chance of life to this pitiful handful that dozens of adults out of the 163 crew and passengers gave their own lives willingly and without thought of self.

Who, for instance, was the man who towed a raft away from the sinking ship, just as it was in deadly danger of being sucked under, saw the children on board safely on a lifeboat, turned back again, towed another raft with a woman and four children through the huge seas towards another lifeboat, turned away again into the darkness to search for other survivors and was never seen again?

We do not know, nor does it matter. All we can know is that this man who selflessly gave his own life, would never have thought of recognition nor cared for it had he been given it. An unknown man, a nameless man, but he remains for ever as the symbol of the spirit of the City of Benares.

The Gold Watch

His watch was the pride of our captain’s life. It was of massive construction, being no less than three inches in diameter; it was made of solid gold; it was beautifully engraved with cabalistic designs of extraordinary intricacy; and finally, it was attached to a chain, whose dimensions, with regard to both length and circumference, had to be seen to be believed. The chain also, needless to say, was made of gold. Anyone, who had the temerity to doubt this last fact, was handed the chain and coldly asked to observe for himself that it was stamped on every link.

In addition to the aforementioned merits, the watch, our captain claimed, was completely moisture-proof. We had, on several occasions, urged him to prove his words by submerging the subject of discussion in a basin of water, but, on each occasion, the captain’s reply, uttered in a very injured tone, was to the same effect, namely, that if we did not believe his statement, he was not going to stoop to demonstrate its truth to us. From this, we could only conclude that the captain, like ourselves, had his doubts as to his watch’s ability to defy the ravages of water. It was indeed, we knew, a very, very sore point with our captain, one which he longed, with all his heart and soul, to prove, but lacked the courage to put to the final test.

Usually, this watch was hidden from the plebeian gaze—and fingers—in a locked case, which, in its turn, lay in a locked drawer in the captain’s cabin. But today, it reposed in the captain’s waistcoat pocket, while the chain, such was its length, seemed almost to girdle the area of the captain’s maximum circumference. Waistcoats are very uncommon with ‘whites’, and it was maliciously rumoured that the captain had had his specially made for the purpose of accommodating and displaying the watch and its accessories. Be that as it may, here was our captain, this blistering June afternoon, going ashore for his last interview with his Basrah agents, wearing a genial smile on his face, and, about two feet further south, his beloved time-keeper.

When he came back a bare two hours later, his launch nosing its way through the date-laden lighters surrounding our vessel which was anchored in mid-river, his genial expression was no longer there. Neither was his watch, and our deduction, that the latter circumstance accounted for the former, proved to be correct. Having solicitously helped the red-faced, perspiring captain on board, we waited patiently.

He was, at first, incoherent with rage, and, with his clearly visible, ever-mounting blood pressure, we feared an apoplectic stroke. Fortunately for him, he at last recovered the power of speech, and this undoubtedly relieved, to a great extent, his almost over-powering feelings. He was very bitter. His language, in addition, was shocking, but we had to admit that he had full justification for it.

He had, apparently, been walking peacefully back to the ship from his agents, with malice in his heart towards none, but nevertheless, taking due and proper precautions for the safe-guarding of wallet and watch, when among the riffraff of the street bazaars. Once clear of them, he had dropped these precautions, deeming them needless, and, at the entrance to the docks, he had had to push his way through a group of Arab sailors, whom he, in his great and regrettable ignorance, had thought to be as honest as himself. (His bitterness, at this juncture, was truly remarkable.) Suddenly, he had been jostled in the rear with great violence, and, on turning to remonstrate with the discourteous one, had not felt his watch and chain being slipped from their moorings, with that dexterity and efficiency which bespoke of long and arduous practice, so that, when about to resume his journey, he found his watch no longer there.

At this point he again lost the power of speech, and to our fearful and dreading eyes, his entire disintegration appeared not only probable, but imminent. Recovering himself with a masterly effort, however, he resumed his narrative. Although unable to espy the actual perpetrator of the theft, who had, with commendable discretion and alacrity, completely vanished, he had realized that the jostler must have been his confederate, and had pursued the said confederate for over half a mile, before being eluded by the Arab in a crowded thoroughfare. This, we realized, accounted for our captain’s complexion and superabundance of perspiration.

Here again, having once more relapsed into incoherency, he was left to his vengeful meditations, alternately muttering ‘My watch’ and ‘The villain’, the former with a touching pathos, and the latter, preceded by some highly descriptive adjectives, with an extraordinary depth of feeling.

Thirty hours later found no appreciable diminution in our captain’s just and righteous anger, although he could now speak like a rational being, albeit forcefully, concerning his grievous misfortunes of the previous afternoon. We had loaded our last case of dates just on sunset, and, early that morning, even as the first faint streak of grey in the eastern sky heralded the burning day, had gratefully cleared the malodorous port of Basrah. We were, by this time, fairly into the Gulf and proceeding serenely on our way, South by East, through the stifling tropical night, the darkness of which was but infinitesimally relieved by the cold, unthinkably-distant pinpoints of stars in the moonless night sky.

Our captain, whose outraged feelings evidently refused him the blessed solace of slumber, had recently come up to the bridge, which he was now ceaselessly pacing, very much after the manner of a caged leopard, all the time informing us as to the dire retribution which he intended meting out to the present illegal possessor of his watch, should he ever be fortunate enough to lay hands on him. The lascar quartermaster, very zealous in the cap-tain’s presence, was poring over the compass box, while in the bows, the lookout-man was either thinking of his native village in far-off Bombay, or had found sleep vastly easier to come by than our captain.

This last was, of course, pure conjecture, but it must have approximated very closely to the truth, for the first the lookout knew of the dhow lying dead in our path, was when a loud splintering crash, accompanied by even louder frenzied yells, informed him that our steel-bows had smashed the unfortunate dhow to matchwood.

‘Don’t say we’ve run down another of these b—y dhows,’ groaned our captain wearily (it is a surprisingly common occurrence), ringing the engines down to ‘Stop’, and bellowing for a boat to be lowered with the utmost expedition. This was done, and then minutes later the lifeboat returned with the shivering, brine-soaked crew of the erstwhile dhow; the captain, duty-bound, went down on deck to inspect them, as they came on board.

The rope ladder twitched, and as the first luckless victim—how luckless, he did not then completely realize—appeared over the side, the captain’s jaw dropped fully two inches, and he stood as if transfixed.

‘That’s the gentleman I chased yesterday’—he ejaculated joyfully (‘gentleman’, as will be readily understood, is employed euphemistically), then stopped, staring, with rapidly glazing eyes, at the second apparition, who had just then topped the railing. Dependent from this, the second, ‘gentle-man’s’ undeniably filthy neck, and reaching to his waist, was a most unusual ornament for an impoverished Arab—no less an object than our captain’s purloined watch and chain, thus miraculously restored to him, by the playful caprices of Fortune.

With drawn breath, and with sincere pity in our hearts, we waited for the heavens to fall, for the captain to execute his oft-repeated, bloodthirsty promises, for, in short, the instant and complete annihilation of the Arabs (four in all), who were regarding the captain with the utmost trepidation, which they were at no pains to conceal.

To our no small astonishment—and, it may be added, relief—the expected Arab-massacre failed to materialize. Instead, stepping quietly forward and lovingly removing his watch and chain from the neck of the cringing, violently-shivering Arab, the captain, in a strangely gentle tone, in which there seemed, to us, to be a barely repressed inflection of triumph, merely said, ‘Take these men below and give them something warm to eat; we’ll hand them over to the Bahrein police, in the morning.’

We were astounded. We were amazed. We were utterly and completely dumbfounded. Our modest comprehension could not grasp it. What, we asked ourselves, wonderingly, was the reason for this incredible change of front? We were not left long in ignorance.

Swinging round on us, and brandishing his watch on high, the captain shouted: ‘See!—er, I mean, hear!’ We heard. The clamorous ticktock, ticktock of his watch would have put any selfrespecting alarm clock to shame.

‘Waterproof!’ he cried exultingly. ‘Waterproof, you blasted unbelievers! Waterproof!’

It was, I verily believe, the supreme moment of our captain’s life.

Rendezvous

It was quite dark now and the Great North Road, the A1, that loneliest of Europe’s highways, almost deserted. At rare intervals, a giant British Roadways truck loomed out of the darkness: a courteous dipping of headlamps, immaculate hand-signals, a sudden flash of sound from the labouring diesel—and the A1 was lonelier than ever. Then there was only the soothing hum of tyres, the black ribbon of highway, and the headlights of the Jaguar, weirdly hypnotic, swathing through the blackness.

Loneliness and sleep, sleep and loneliness. The enemies, the co-drivers of the man at the wheel; the one lending that extra half pound of pressure to the accelerator, the other, immobile and everwatchful, waiting his chance to slide in behind the wheel and take over. I knew them well and I feared them.

But they were not riding with me tonight. There was no room for them. Not with so many passengers. Not with Stella sitting there beside me, Stella of the laughing eyes and sad heart, who had died in a German concentration camp. Not with Nicky, the golden boy, lounging in the back seat, or Passière, who had never returned to his sundrenched vineyards in Sisteron. No room for sleep and loneliness? Why, by the time you had crowded in Taffy the engineer, complaining as bitterly as ever and Vice-Admiral Starr and his bushy eyebrows, there was hardly room for myself.

I glanced at the dashboard clock. 2.00 a.m. Nine hours since I had left Inverness and only one stop for gas. I realized I was very hungry.

A couple of miles further on a neon sign blinked garishly through the heavy drizzle. A drivers’ pull-up. I swung the Jaguar off the road, parked beside the heavy trucks and limped inside.

It was a bright, noisy, cheerful place, about half full. I picked up my bacon, sausages and eggs and went over to an empty table by the window.

The meal finished, I lit a cigarette and stared out unseeingly into the driving rain. Now and again I could hear the rumble and swish as a truck or night-coach rolled by on the Great North Road.

The Great North Road. The prelude, the curtain call to all the highlights of my life—long Italian summers on my father’s ship, Oxford and the Law, the Royal Naval Barracks, Portsmouth. All these other times, I reflected, there had been uncertainty. So, too, this time. All these other times excitement, anticipation. But this time only doubt and wonder, foreboding and slow anger.

I fished out Nicky’s telegram again

ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG STOP HALLELUJAH STOP THE DE’IL LOOKS AFTER HIS AIN STOP NOW SUCCESSFUL BREEDER OF OIL WELLS STOP STAYING SAVOY WITH ALL THE OTHER MILLIONAIRES STOP RRR

NICKY

I pushed the telegram back into my pocket. RRR. The Special Service code-sign—‘Where do we rendezvous?’ I had wired back SEE YOU SAVOY 7 P.M. WEDNESDAY.

Even now I did not know why I had done it. It just had to be done. This was one loose end in my life that simply had to be cut off. Courage, fear, curiosity, anger—these did not enter into it. There was just simple compulsion. This I had to do.

I paid my check, climbed into the Jaguar, pulled out on the A1, set the hand throttle and headed south.

I was confused. The bit about the De’il—the Devil looks after his own—a phrase he had picked up from me: that I could understand. He had seen the flaming eruption of disintegrating steel and burning oil as the Heinkel’s glider-bomb had smacked accurately into the engine room of the F149. I had no right to be alive, the surgeon had said—but he had made a pretty good job of my crocked leg and mangled arm.

But I couldn’t figure the rest of the telegram. It was too friendly. Too friendly by half for a man who, when we had last parted—five minutes before the explosion—had been standing on a desolate Tuscan beach at the wrong end of my Service Colt .45. I could see him yet, could see the anger dying in his eyes, the disbelief, the astonishment, the emotionless mask. I had stood there trying to hate him—and failing miserably—and trying not to hate myself. I had failed in that too. And I heard again his promise, quiet, almost conversational: ‘Don’t forget, Mac—I’ll be looking you up one of these days.’

I sighed. Our first meeting had been rather different. I flicked the dashboard switch. 2.45. Two hundred miles to London. I shoved the hand throttle up a notch.

Malta, 1943. The George Cross island. The island of Faith, Hope and Charity—the three obsolete fighters pitted against the savagery of the Axis air fleets. Malta. The sorely battered capital of Valetta and the Grand Harbour, that destination of a very few, very lucky merchant ships, of the 40-knot plus gauntlet-running minelaying cruisers, of the submarine gasoline tankers, of the immortal ‘Ohio’.

But the war was very far away that Spring morning. All was peaceful and still and bathed in sunshine as I walked into the Admiralty HQ.

‘Lieutenant McIndoe to see Admiral Starr?’ the duty petty officer repeated. ‘Along the passage, first on the left, sir. He’s alone just now.’

I knocked and went in. A large bare room, with Venetian blinds and walls covered with maps, it was completely dominated by the huge figure sitting behind the only table in the room. Two hundred and fifty pounds if an ounce, red-faced, whitehaired and with bushy eyebrows, Vice-Admiral Starr had become a legend in his own lifetime. He had the face and expression of a bucolic farmer, a mind like a rapier and a deep-rooted intolerance of those who wasted either time or speech.

He pushed some papers away in a folder and motioned me to a seat.

‘’Morning, McIndoe. Carried out your instructions?’ he asked.

‘To the letter, sir,’ I replied carefully. ‘Gunboat F149 is completely stripped. The extra fuel tanks are fitted and the short—and long-range receiving and transmitting sets were installed yesterday. She’s fuelled, provisioned and ready for sea.’

He nodded in satisfaction. ‘And your crew?’

‘The best, sir. Experienced, completely reliable.’

‘Right.’ He stood up. ‘You’ll contact Ravallo this evening and receive final instructions from him.’

‘Ravallo, sir?’

‘Major Ravallo, US Army. A top espionage agent and just about the best lend-lease bargain ever. From now on, he’s your immediate boss.’

I felt distinctly aggrieved. ‘Am I to understand, sir—’

‘These are your orders,’ he interrupted flatly. ‘Besides,’ he chuckled, ‘Ravallo will welcome you with open arms. The last time he came back from Sicily, he had to swim the last two miles. Damned annoyed, he was.’

‘Quite so, sir. Do I meet Ravallo here?’

Admiral Starr coughed. ‘Well, no, not exactly. Major Ravallo is an American—’ he spoke as if this explained everything—‘and not subject to our discipline. You’ll find him in the Triannon bar at six o’clock.’

‘Have another, Mac,’ Nicky Ravallo urged hospitably. ‘You’ll be needing it tonight yet.’

Major Ravallo, I reflected, would have made a big hit in Hollywood. With his dark, tousled hair, crinkling blue eyes, dark tan, white teeth and weird hodgepodge of a uniform designed strictly by himself, he looked ready-made material for a Caribbean pirate or a second d’Artagnan. But the gallant Major, it seemed to me, treated war much too lightly; besides, I was still smarting from the insult of being placed under an American’s command—and from his smiling refusal to give me any details of that night’s operation until we got to sea.

‘No thanks,’ I replied stiffly. ‘So far I’ve never felt the need for any pre-operational stoking up on alcohol. And I’m not starting now.’ I knew I was behaving badly.

‘Suit yourself, Scotty.’ Ravallo was not only unruffled but positively affable. ‘Starr tells me you’re a specialist on the Italian coast and language and just about the best gunboat handler in the business. That’s all I want. Come along.’

In silence we walked through the white-walled streets towards the harbour and in silence we descended by the fearsome open elevator on the cliff-face to the gathering gloom of Christ’s steps. Here we hired a dico and were rowed out to Motor Gunboat F149, moored at the far end of Angelo creek.

Once aboard, I had him meet my crew—Taffy, Passière, Hillyard, Johnson, Higgins and Wilson, my second in command. They seemed favourably impressed by Ravallo, and he by them, although I did not take too kindly to his cheerful invitation to ‘just call me Nicky, boys.’ They would be calling me ‘Sammy’ next and I wasn’t sure that I would like that.

‘How come Passière?’ Ravallo asked when we were alone again. ‘Hardly an Anglo-Saxon name that.’

‘Like Ravallo?’ I suggested.

He laughed. ‘Touchè. But still,’ he persisted, ‘what’s he doing here?’

‘Free French,’ I explained. ‘There are thousands of them on our side—mostly in their own ships. He’s a refugee from Vichy France, a holder of the Croix de Guerre and just about the best radio operator I’ve ever known. I hope,’ I added sweetly, ‘that you have no objections to the presence of non-British nationals aboard this boat?’

‘Sorry again,’ he laughed. ‘I guess I asked for that.’ He ran his hand ruefully through his thick black hair and grinned quizzically at me.

For the first time, I smiled back.

An hour later, the 149 cleared the entrance of Grand Harbour. Ravallo was in the wheelhouse with me, sitting on a camp-stool, quietly smoking.

He spoke suddenly.

‘We’re going to Sicily, Mac. Rendezvous, midnight, two miles north-west of Cape Passero. OK?’

I said nothing, but turned to my charts and tables.

‘Half-speed, Chief,’ I said to Wilson. ‘Course zero-five-zero. Hillyard, Johnson on watch. Right?’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’

Ravallo jumped to his feet.

‘Here, what’s this?’ he demanded swiftly. ‘Halfspeed? Look, Mac, we gotta hit the rendezvous on the nose. Midnight, Scotty, midnight—not tomorrow morning. Last time I came from Sicily it took fourteen hours. Including two hours swimming,’ he added bitterly.

Wilson and I grinned at each other.

‘Chief,’ I said sorrowfully, ‘I’m afraid we’ve a doubter on our hands. The Major and I are taking a walk forrard. Ask Taffy to open her up—demonstration purposes only.’

The demonstration was brief and entirely effective. At its conclusion we walked slowly aft to the stern and sat down, leaning against the recently emptied depth-charge racks, Ravallo looking very thoughtful, almost dazed.

The effect was almost always the same. The hypnotic effect of the rushing waters and the gigantic bow-wave, coupled with the sheer physical shock of the bone-jarring vibrations of the deck and the banshee clamour of the great aeroengines was almost literally stunning.

Ravallo broke the silence.

‘Sorry again, Mac.’ His face lit up with remembered enthusiasm. ‘My God, Mac, that must be one of the last thrills left on earth. What was she doing—forty-five, fifty knots?’

‘Official secret,’ I said solemnly. ‘Seriously, though, I don’t think you need worry about anything on the surface of the Mede catching us. And now—how about some more information, Major?’

‘Nicky,’ he corrected absently. ‘Right, Mac, this is how it is.

‘This cloak-and-dagger sealed orders act isn’t just for fun. It’s a must. Do you know how many agents we’ve lost this year in Italy?’ he asked slowly. ‘Twenty-six.’ He pounded his fist, very gently, on the deck, his eyes quiet, his voice level.

‘Twenty-six,’ I echoed. ‘That’s impossible.’ (Neither of us knew at the time that the British had already lost twice that number in Holland alone. All died.)

He didn’t seem to hear me.

‘A couple by natural hazards,’ he went on. ‘Maybe half-a-dozen through leaks. The rest—’ he waved a hand forrard—‘well, that’s what this boat is for.’ He paused.

‘Well, go on.’ I was becoming interested.

‘German and Italian radio monitoring stations,’ he explained. ‘Almost all information is sent out by radio. Fairly powerful transmitting sets which are as easily picked up by the enemy as by us. A few cross-bearings and—finish.’

‘But you still haven’t explained—’

‘I’m coming to that. The idea is to fit our agents with weak, short-range transmitters—hardly more than fields—which cuts out ninety per cent of the risk of detection. Your boat will lie close offshore—two or three miles—pick up our agents’ reports on its short-range receiver and re-transmit to base by the big RCA. Starr says he will have six of these boats in action by the end of the year.’

‘Aha!’ I said. ‘Light dawns. I should have thought of that before. It should work.’

‘It must work,’ he said heavily. ‘We’ve lost too many of our best agents already.’

We sat on deck for several minutes, companionably silent, having the last smoke on deck of the day. Presently Ravallo spun his cigarette over the side and rose easily to his feet.

‘Mac?’

I turned my head.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at the radio room?’

‘Help yourself. Passière’s having supper just now.’

He left me. I sat for another couple of minutes, pondering over Ravallo’s news, then went to darken ship.

After supper, we went to the wheelhouse. I took over from Wilson, who went below. The sea was as calm as a mill-pond and there was no moon that night. Conditions were ideal.

I looked at my watch. 11.00 p.m. I wished I could smoke.

‘What happens at the rendezvous, Nicky?’ I asked. ‘Picking up an agent,’ he said briefly.

‘The Syracuse area is getting too hot these days.’

‘Friend of yours?’

‘Sort of. One can’t afford to have friends in our line,’ he said quietly. ‘Too much grief. Besides—’ he paused—‘Stella doesn’t encourage—er—friendship.’

‘Stella?’ I glanced quickly at him. ‘You mean—’

‘Yeah, he’s a she.’ Nicky was laconic. ‘Why not? She’s one of the best in the business—and less liable to suspicion. Parachuted in two months ago.’

I turned this over on my mind.

‘Speaks the language fluently, I suppose?’

‘Strange if she didn’t,’ Nicky smiled. ‘She was born in Leghorn.’

‘An Italian!’ I made a grimace of distaste. ‘Well, I suppose the money’s good.’

In two quick strides he was beside me, his hand gripping my shoulder.

‘Watch it, Scotty,’ he murmured softly. ‘Careful of what you say. She’s a naturalized American, same as I am.’

Silently I cursed myself and gently disengaged his hand.

‘Looks as if this is going to be a record night for apologies, Nicky,’ I said wryly. ‘Damned stupid of me. Keep your eyes skinned, will you?’

We spent an hour of steadily mounting anxiety waiting at the rendezvous. Nicky, I could see, was worried and upset—not at all in character, I thought.

Shortly after one o’clock we heard the angry hum of a small outboard. A 12-foot skiff with two dark figures aboard appeared out of the darkness and slid smoothly alongside. A bump, a couple of out-stretched arms, a heave—just so quickly was the small boat away again and a slender figure in slacks and windbreaker standing there on deck, shivering involuntarily in the cold.

Nicky’s voice was harsh and low. Perhaps from relief, perhaps from anger.

‘You’re late. Far too damn late. How often do you have to be told not to keep a boat waiting in enemy waters? Had to powder your pretty little nose, I suppose?’

‘Sorry, Nicky,’ she pleaded. Her voice was warm and soft and husky. ‘Johnny found a leak in the petrol tank and had to return for more and—’

‘Keep quiet!’ I whispered urgently.

Nicky spoke angrily: ‘Look, Mac, that’s the second time—’

‘Shut up and listen!’

This time they, too, heard it—a muffled creak, ominous, stealthy.

‘Petrol, hell!’ I said softly, bitterly. ‘Nipped back to give his pals the tip-off, you mean. Take her to my cabin, Nicky, quickly.’

She broke from his grip and caught my lapel.

‘Get away as fast as you can,’ she whispered. ‘The Germans have two fast motor-launches in harbour. They’re armed. They’re manned day and night and—’

‘Take her below,’ I interrupted. I wrenched her hand away. ‘And keep her there.’

The crew of the 149 were superbly trained. A couple of low-voiced commands and, as our port and starboard magnesium rockets curved upwards, the 149 was already thrusting through the water at close on twenty knots. Wilson was behind the searchlight and every gun was manned.

There were three of them astern of us, cockleshell rowing boats, with three soldiers—Germans, I thought—in each, every one life-jacketed and armed to the teeth—as wicked looking a boarding party as I’d seen for a long time. But this was going to be easy.

I stopped the engine momentarily, wound down a window, yelled to the crew to get under cover, called to Taffy for full speed and swung the 149 round in a skidding half-turn.

Twenty seconds later it was all over. A brief fusillade of carbine shots—some starring the wheelhouse’s bullet-proof windows—a couple of twenty-five knot racing turns and the three boats were swamped and overturned. We stopped, fished a couple of bedraggled soldiers from the water—prisoners were always welcome at HQ—and headed south-west for home.

Not till then did I realize that Nicky and Stella were with me in the wheelhouse.

‘I thought I told you to get below,’ I said angrily.

‘No fear!’ said Nicky enthusiastically. ‘That was too good to miss.’

‘Please do as I ask. You’re only in the way here,’ I said coldly. ‘Higgins will bring you coffee and sandwiches.’

When I joined them half an hour later, the coffee and sandwiches were still untouched. Stella was sitting on my bunk. This was the first time I had seen her face and not even the harsh glare of the deckhead light could mar the flawless beauty of its perfect oval, the olive complexion, the patrician little nose, the plaited coils of hair, lustrous and silky, black as a raven’s wing. Not even her swimming eyes and tear-smudged cheeks could do that.

‘Oh Lord!’ I said tiredly. ‘What’s up now?’

‘Professional disagreement,’ Nicky said shortly. His black hair was more tousled than ever. ‘Look, Mac, there’s been a slip-up somewhere. A leak from base is almost impossible. So it must have been Stella. Somewhere, somehow, in the past day or two, she made a mistake. She must have.’

‘But I didn’t, Nicky,’ she whispered huskily. ‘I swear I didn’t. I didn’t put a foot wrong. Honestly, Nicky.’

He looked—and sounded—pretty weary.

‘OK, OK, Stella. Let’s leave it at that.’

Nicky and I went outside and stood leaning on the rail. After a minute I turned to him.

‘Nicky.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You don’t seriously suspect her, do you?’

He turned slowly and looked at me.

‘Just how damned stupid can you get, Scotty?’ he asked. His voice was cold, hostile. Abruptly, he turned and left me.

I was alone with my thoughts. I had plenty to think about.

‘What do you reckon Admiral Starr made of it all?’ Nicky asked.

I finished off my Benedictine, put my glass down thoughtfully and smiled at him. Eight hours’ sleep had put us both in an infinitely better humour.

‘Difficult to say. He’s a cagey old bird. Personally, I think he’s as much in the dark as we are.’

‘Just about what I figured. Hullo, here’s Stella.’

He nodded towards the street door of the Triannon and waved.

She was worth waving at, I thought soberly. Dressed in a plain button-through white frock, quite uncluttered by any jewellery, she looked, and was, a lovely and desirable girl.

Nicky must have been watching my face.

‘She’s quite something, isn’t she, Mac?’

I nodded slowly, but said nothing.

‘Couldn’t blame anyone for falling for her,’ he murmured. The smile on his face was half a question. ‘Even you, Mac.’

‘I might at that,’ I replied quietly.

He looked at me, a curious, enigmatic expression on his face.

‘Don’t, laddie, don’t.’ He grinned. ‘It’s like I told you, Mac—in our line of business, it’s just too much grief. ‘Evening, Stella.’ He smiled at her and turned towards the barman. ‘A Dubonnet for the lady.’

Conversation was desultory for a few minutes. I lit a cigarette, peered into the bar mirror and said suddenly: ‘You two made your peace yet?’

Stella smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘I thought so.’ I reached round her and firmly disengaged the hand which I had seen in the mirror gently closing over Stella’s.

‘Ah, ah, Major Ravallo!’ I said severely. ‘Don’t touch! Not in our line of business—too much grief, you know.’

They looked at each other, then at me, and laughed.

I felt suddenly tired. Not sleepy—just tired. The rain had stopped and a moon was struggling to break through the watery clouds. The facia clock stood at 4.15. Another one hundred miles to London.

It was the first and last meeting with Nicky, I reflected, that was etched so clearly in my mind. The years between, in hazy retrospect, were a kaleidoscopic blur.

We three—Stella, Nicky and I—had grown very close to each other. With the crew of the 149, we had been a great team—at first. Three times our base of operation had shifted—Palermo, Salerno, Naples. Eleven times we had set them down, singly or together, on the enemy coast, and each time picked them up without mishap. The completely selfless devotion to their job of my crew—especially Wilson and Passière, both of whom had twice refused promotion—was extraordinary.

But, towards the end, there had been a steady deterioration—in several ways. Laughter, I could see, came less and less readily to Stella’s eyes. She had grown thinner, was intense at times, at others listless and despondent. Scarcely a week went by but she saw Forts, Liberators and Lancasters battering targets in her own homeland—twice, to my certain knowledge, on information supplied by herself. It must have been hell for her.

Nicky, too, had changed. The laughing cavalier of the Malta days had vanished. Taciturn and uncommunicative, he rarely smiled. It was his homeland too, of course. Perhaps it was Stella, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t. Nicky, after his one brief lapse in Malta, followed his own example and armoured himself in indifference towards her. They rarely spoke together without bickering.

Again, in the winter of ‘43, a mixed battalion of Rangers and Commandos, leapfrogging the Allied Army, had landed on the coast in a quiet bay selected by HQ and guaranteed clear by Nicky and Stella. Half-an-hour after the last man had gone ashore, the battalion had been cut to pieces by a Panzer division. It could have been coincidence.

A month later, the largest arms and ammunition drop of the war had fallen into German hands. The waiting Partisans had been wiped out—completely. That, too, could have been coincidence—but coincidence couldn’t explain how the enemy had obtained the correct recognition signals and the agreed sequence of flare markers.

Finally, in the late Spring, eight agents had been set down near Civitavecchia by the 149. For three nights we had waited for radio signals. None came. We did not need to ask what had happened.

It was growing light now on the A1, but there was no corresponding lift in my spirits. I felt again that same nameless sadness, that same heaviness of heart I had felt on that blazing summer afternoon as I had made my way to Admiral Starr’s office in Naples. I had known, subconsciously at least, why he had sent for me.

Admiral Starr, too, had changed. He was tireder now, his face more lined. And he was brutally frank.

‘“Betrayal” is a nasty word, McIndoe,’ he said heavily. ‘The time has come to use it. Thousands of British and American boys are being maimed and killed every month. Kid gloves are out. Agreed?’

I nodded silently.

‘We have no proof,’ he went on bitterly. ‘Not a scrap. But this I do know. Three coincidences are just three to many. Also, after that battalion massacre, the base security staff was completely changed. It made no difference. The leakage is at your end, McIndoe. The logic of it is simple.’ He paused, and smiled thinly. ‘I asssume I am above suspicion.’

He looked down at his hands.

‘Ravallo and his friend are both Italian-Americans,’ he went on quietly. ‘US Army Intelligence swears both are absolutely loyal. I’m not so sure. Neither, I suspect, are you, McIndoe.’

He glanced at me under his bushy eyebrows—to see how I was taking it, I suppose. Again I said nothing.

‘You will meet them in Anzio tomorrow,’ he continued harshly. ‘You will tell them that, owing to a base HQ leak, this will be their last mission. You will lead them to believe that this is a normal mission organized by our base security staff. This is untrue. Only you and I, McIndoe, know of this. Both will be allowed to come and go as they wish until they embark on the 149. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Can you trust your chief and radio man?’

‘Implicitly, sir.’

‘Good. You will take them and them alone into your confidence. Inadvisable, perhaps, but unavoidable. They are to deny all access to deck signalling equipment and the radio room. Any questions?’

I didn’t reply at once. The word ‘radio room’ had exploded a bomb in my mind. And when they came down, the pieces were all in place. I cursed myself for my own stupidity.

‘No questions, sir.’ I took a deep breath. This was going to hurt. ‘As you infer, sir, I have had my suspicions for some time. It’s Ravallo, sir.’

He looked up sharply. ‘Good God, man, how can you be so sure?’

I told him.

We left Naples at dawn and arrived in Anzio at midday. On the way I had briefed both Wilson and Passière. They were incredulous, of course, and grieved—there was no other word for it. They had developed an affection for Nicky and Stella almost as deep as mine.

At midnight that night the 149 was lying offshore three miles north of Civitavecchia. Both Ravallo and Stella were very quiet—had been ever since I had told them. On the whole, they seemed relieved.

Only Stella was to go ashore. She was to contact the local Partisan group—who had already been warned by Starr, by parachute drop the previous night, to prepare for a German sortie tonight—and radio back as soon as possible. I had expected Ravallo to protest violently when Starr’s radio instructions to that effect had come through a couple of hours ago—but he had said nothing.

His easy acceptance of the orders confirmed me in my suspicions. I guessed this suited him perfectly. I suspected he had contacted the enemy before leaving Anzio. How, I didn’t know—but the place was reported to be swarming with spies. Ravallo certainly hadn’t had a chance to communicate with anyone ashore since embarking on the 149. Wilson and Passière had seen to that.

Stella went ashore and Hillyard rowed the dinghy back. Three hours later the radio room receiver started crackling. Ravallo and I stood just inside the radio room door, waiting.

Suddenly Passière’s expression changed. He looked startled, apprehensive. He listened intently, jabbed furiously three or four times at the transmitting key, then leapt to his feet, tearing his headphones off. His hands were shaking.

They’ve got her!’ he burst out. ‘They’ve got Stella! Just after the code-sign and acknowledgement came MMR, MMR’ (the Special Service codesign for danger). ‘Then something about an armoured car. Then—finish.’ He cut down his right arm in a gesture of finality.

I felt sick inside. The best laid plans of mice and men…There had been a slip-up somewhere. Stella—captured! Why hadn’t the Partisans been there?

I flung a glance at Ravallo. His face was expressionless. I wondered savagely how he ought to look. Was that the way Judas had looked? Was Nicky Ravallo paid in pieces of silver?

I wrenched myself back into the present. I knew then what I would have to do. I also knew what it would mean for me—court martial. Just then I didn’t care.

Swiftly I turned to Ravallo.

‘Do you know where she went, Nicky?’ I demanded.

‘Sure I do.’ He had divined my intentions immediately and was into the boat before me.

Hillyard rowed us ashore. We jumped out on the pebbly shore and raced up the beach. Halfway up I stopped short and called softly.

‘Nicky!’

He turned round.

‘Dammit, Scotty, there’s no time—’

He broke off short. His eyes didn’t have to be very good to see the dull gleam of the .45 in my hand.

He remained motionless.

‘What is this?’ he asked slowly.

‘This,’ I said, ‘is as far as I go. Incidentally, that was a marvellous piece of acting. Congratulations.’

He was a trier, I had to admit. The anger, the impatience, the puzzlement—they were perfectly done.

‘Stay where you are!’ I said sharply. He had taken a step forward.

‘The only explanation you are entitled to is why you are still alive. I’ll tell you.

‘Renegades, Ravallo, aren’t always monsters. I liked you, Ravallo—in your own idiom, I thought you were one helluva good guy. Secondly, war is no reason for inhumanity. You know that. And I think it inhuman to ask a man to spy on his own country.’

‘What are you trying to tell me?’ His voice was almost a whisper.

‘Save it, Ravallo. I could have had you taken back to Naples,’ I went on. ‘You know what that means. Court martial—and the firing squad. Or you could have been dropped over the side. I drew the line at that also. So,’ I added, ‘you’re getting what you never gave Stella, Ravallo—a chance. Among your own people,’ I finished bitterly.

‘You betrayed yourself a year ago, Ravallo. I didn’t get it till yesterday. Remember Passero? Remember the rowing boats the Germans used that night to try to board us? Remember the visit you paid to the empty radio room? Remember the fast launches that Stella said the Germans had in Passero? Remember, Ravallo, remember?’

I flung the words at him, hammered them at him. They had no effect. He seemed dazed, showed no reaction at all. The man was a superb actor.

‘How were the Germans tipped off, Ravallo?’ I went on relentlessly. ‘Why didn’t they send their fast launches after us? I’ll tell you, Ravallo. Because they knew they hadn’t a hope in hell of catching us. They knew that a sneak attack was their only hope. They knew that because you told them, Ravallo. And only you could have told them. Only you of all suspects fulfilled the four essential conditions—you knew the speed of the 149, you knew our destination that night, you knew how to use and had access to a transmitter—the I49’s.’

There was no answer to this and Ravallo knew it. There could be no defence—only denial. He said nothing for a long time. His head was bent. The moon, almost full, had broken through the cloud, and I was in a hurry to be gone.

He lifted his head slowly and looked at me.

‘Got it all buttoned up, haven’t you, Mac?’

‘I have indeed. I wish to God I hadn’t. You gave yourself away again today.

‘Starr had it narrowed down to you two—you and Stella. He guessed it was you—rather, I did. He had fixed it so as to give you a chance to sell Stella down the river. You thought her usefulness was over. So you sold her down the river. You didn’t know that base weren’t briefed on this mission, Ravallo, did you? Only you, Stella, Starr and I knew. And once, Ravallo, I could have sworn you loved that girl.’ I looked at him, trying hard to hate him. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t have done that to a dog.’

His face was expressionless.

‘So you threw her to the wolves? Is that it, Mac?’

Why hadn’t the Partisans looked after her, I thought to myself. They had plenty of warning. Illogically, I felt guilty as hell and knew for the first time the salt taste of self-loathing. But I didn’t show it—I knew that.

‘I had my orders. Besides, Nicky,’ I added ironically, ‘we should never have succeeded without your invaluable cooperation. Goodbye.’

He called after me. ‘Mac!’

I turned round.

‘Don’t forget, Mac, I’ll be looking you up one of these days.’

One of these days. Well, that was it.

I had arrived in London at 6.00 a.m. and gone straight to bed. For hours I had lain awake, trying to figure the whole thing out.

It was a mess and it was fantastic. Why hadn’t the Allied authorities seized him after the war? He was obviously a prosperous man now. He had much to lose—I marvelled at his nerve in seeking me out.

What did he want, I wondered. Just to gloat? No, whatever he was, Ravallo had never been small-minded. Revenge—it could only be that. But how? A fusillade of shots in the lounge of the Savoy? Ridiculous—just too fantastic. Besides, Nicky was a smart boy. About midday I gave the whole thing up and fell into a troubled sleep.

7.00 p.m. The lounge at the Savoy was full, but I saw him almost at once. It wasn’t difficult. He was the only man in the place wearing a lounge suit. He was over by the far wall and, characteristically, had managed to obtain—and retain—a table for himself.

There was no change in Ravallo that I could see. Still the same vital, dark haired, laughing d’Artagnan—and he was laughing now. Laughing—the smile on the face of the tiger.

He leapt from his table and came swiftly towards me, hand outstretched, his white teeth shining in a great grin of welcome.

‘Mac, you old son of a gun!’ he shouted cheerfully. ‘Man, oh man, but it’s good to see you again!’

‘Meaning you’d lost all hope of ever catching up with me?’ I asked quietly. I made no move to take his hand and he let it drop slowly to his side. I was dimly aware that dozens of curious people were looking at us.

Ravallo still smiled—albeit a trifle ruefully now. It was the perfect picture of the unjustly slighted friend, still good humoured and tolerant. You’re good, Ravallo, I thought, you’re damned good.

‘My address,’ I said harshly. ‘How did you get it?’

‘Easy. The Admiralty—you’re still on the Reserved List.’ The smile was a trifle uncertain now.

I should have thought of that.

‘Well, I’m here now. What’s on the cards, Ravallo? A cosy little Italian knifing session? Maybe one of your pals in the Mafia? What do you want, Ravallo?’

‘Civility, Scotty, civility.’ The smile was quite gone now. ‘And five minutes of your time—if you can stop being completely daft for that length of time. Here’s my table. How about a drink?’

‘The lapse of nine years and the fact that the war is over doesn’t make treason any less heinous a crime.’ I didn’t bother to lower my voice. ‘As for the drink, not with you, Ravallo. I’ll get my own.’

Something was badly out of focus—I needed time to think. I turned to push my way to the bar through the knot of people crowding round.

Ravallo caught my arm. He was immensely strong.

‘Same as Civitavecchia, eh, Mac?’ he asked softly. ‘Still the same jury, judge and executioner. Is that it?’

‘Yes,’ I said evenly. ‘That’s it.’

‘And I’m the condemned man?’

‘You’re the condemned man.’

‘A last favour, then.’ His voice was very low. ‘It’s my privilege.’

Something about him, about his voice, his eyes, his desperate sincerity caught me. Not even Spencer Tracy was that good. For the first time I knew doubt.

I followed him slowly back to his table and sat down. The curious crowd gradually melted away.

‘Well, I’m listening.’

‘You don’t even have to do that, Mac,’ he said smilingly. ‘Just read these.’

Carefully he placed two documents on the table and smoothed them out. After some hesitation, I picked one up.

It was a transcript from the US Navy Records Office. It had been made in the Pentagon and ran as follows:

Leading Signalman Georges Passière, Official

No P/JX 282131.

A body, dressed in Royal Naval tropical kit, was found on the beach, fourteen miles South of Civitavecchia. 16 May, 1944.

Identified as above rating by identity disc.

Secret lining discovered in flap of belt pouch. Oilskin envelope. List of thirty transmitting and receiving station wavelengths: VHF (very high frequency): mainly short-range. Six positively identified as German: remainder unknown.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I laid the document on the table. I was dimly aware of a waiter by my side, and a tray of glasses. Automatically, unseeingly almost, I picked up a glass with one hand, the remaining document with the other.

Deutscher Geheimdienst.

German Counter-Intelligence Records captured Turin.

Decoded Naples, October 1944.

Luigi Metastasio: Born Rome 1919.

(Then followed an account of Metastasio’s school life, civilian employment, Fascist indoctrination, army service, counter-intelligence training.) Speaks French, German and English fluently: smuggled into France April 1940, German-occupied France August 1940, thence to Fecamp: fishing boat to England. Accepted Portsmouth barracks May, 1941: qualified telegraphist.

The rest was unimportant—and I knew the last line before I read it.

Assumed name—Georges Passière.

I placed this report on the other and gazed at it as though hypnotized. I said nothing—I couldn’t say anything. Neither thoughts nor words would come. My mind seemed to have stopped. I felt beaten, empty, sick—and hopelessly confused.

Nicky was merciful, infinitely so. I hardly heard his voice at first.

‘It was a sweet racket, Mac. The beauty of the short-range receiver.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Sure the Germans couldn’t monitor our agents’ radio messages. By the same paradigm we couldn’t monitor Passière’s short-range reports, probably relayed back immediately afterwards to German and Italian listening posts. The massacred Partisans, the butchery of the Rangers and the Commandos, the capture of our agents, the tip-off at Passero—all friend Passière’s work.’

‘And—and Stella?’ With a great effort I forced the words out. My mind was working again and the realization, stark and unforgiving, of what I had done these long years ago now smashed home like a hammer blow.

I answered my own question, my voice an unbelieving whisper.

‘Passière! That’s how Stella went, Nicky. It must have been. Passière! I, I took Passière into my confidence. Nicky—I told him everything!’

‘Yeah,’ murmured Nicky quietly. I thought it had to be something like that. If he knew she was finished, no more use to him, he would try to tip them off, wouldn’t he?’

Maybe Nicky didn’t stop there. Maybe he went on talking. I don’t know. All I know is that his voice, quiet and level and kind, died away in my ear. I couldn’t hear Nicky any longer. I couldn’t even look at him. I knew I should be apologizing, saying something about never forgiving myself—but I knew that this lay outwith the reach of words.

‘I sold her down the river. I threw her to the wolves,’ I said dully. ‘I did that. Nobody else, Nicky, only me. Just me.’ I buried my head in my hands.

I knew a hundred pairs of eyes were on me and I didn’t care. The lounge had gone very quiet. The seconds—each one an eternity of self-loathing, of bitterness, of despair—ticked slowly by. Slowly, terribly slowly.

Suddenly, petrifyingly, a pair of soft hands clasped gently over my eyes and a well-remem-bered voice, husky with emotion, whispered com-passionately:

‘Enough is enough, Nicky. Hullo, Mac, darling.’

For four or five dazed, reeling, unbelieving seconds I sat motionless. Then I leapt to my feet, swung round, knocked several glasses crashing to the floor—the ritzy clientele of the Savoy were certainly getting their money’s worth tonight—and faced Stella.

Stella! For a moment I could say nothing. I could only stand and look—and look. She stood there, dark and lovely and smiling, the old Stella of the Malta days—only, there were tears in her eyes now.

Then I grabbed her. I hugged her till she cried for mercy. Finally, I kissed her.

The gallery hadn’t missed a thing. They were right on the ball and this was their cue. We sat down to a storm of hand-clapping.

‘And they didn’t get you after all?’ I asked stupidly.

‘Why should they have?’ she smiled.

‘Passière faked her message,’ Nicky explained. ‘There was no MMR, no armoured car. When he jumped up, he must have knocked off the receiving switch. He’d hoped we would go after her and then he’d contact his pals and they’d get the lot of us. Only, it didn’t quite work out that way. You came back and his own pals—the guy in the Heinkel—contacted him first.’

‘Nicky picked me up that night,’ Stella went on. ‘He told me what had happened—about the sinking of the 149. I cried. Didn’t I, Nicky? I cried all night. I’m a fearful crybaby, really. Very secondrate spy material.’ She dabbed her eyes with a tiny square of lace.

I smiled and turned to Nicky.

‘So you looked Stella up after the war? Is that it?’

He grinned. ‘Well, in a way.’

I looked at the rings on her left hand.

‘So then,’ I continued morosely, ‘I suppose you got married?’

Stella smiled. ‘Well, no, not exactly. You see, we always were—1938, to be precise!’

My nervous system couldn’t take much more. I’d just about used up all my reactions. I just sat there half-stunned, conscious that my face was turning a bright and glowing crimson.

‘Sorry, Mac.’ Nicky was apologetic. ‘Couldn’t even tell you. Had anyone known—our side, their side—our usefulness would have been at an end. We would have been a menace to our own people. I told you, Mac, often. You can’t give hostages to fortune.’

Slowly, it all came back to me. I could see it all now and cursed myself for my blindness.

Their overdone casualness and offhandedness towards each other. The constant bickering, yet the unswerving loyalty and belief in each other—how familylike, I thought with chagrin. Nicky’s strange behaviour when I suggested I might fall for her (I squirmed at that thought). His anger when I expressed distaste for her spying. The secret holding of hands. His increasingly haggard and worried appearance—God, I thought, how would I have felt if my wife had been in that position. Finally, his desperate eagerness to rescue her—strictly in defiance of all Special Service orders and, as far as he had known at the time, in the face of certain capture or death.

Without a word I pushed my chair away from the table and rose carefully to my feet. Slowly my leg came back and deliberately, and with great accuracy, I kicked myself.

The gallery, first-nighters to a man and obviously trained to a hair, applauded with great fervour. And as I sat down, I realized that the unbridled enthusiasm of the audience wasn’t entirely on my behalf.

Laughter and tears and love walk always hand in hand. Stella and Nicky were kissing each other with a most unEnglish lack of restraint. They looked for all the world like a pair of newly-weds.

Which for me, of course, was exactly what they were.

The Jervis Bay

The second year of the war, as dark and sombre a year as Britain had ever known, was drawing steadily to its dark and sombre close. November, 1940, and behind lay the long agonizing months of hardship and suffering and crushing defeat, abandonment by our last allies in Europe, the wanton destruction of our cities and towns and thousands upon thousands of civilians, of the never-ending and always imminent threat of invasion by a ruthless and implacable enemy who would be content with nothing short of the annihilation of our country as an entity and a nation.

True, the crushing defeat was a thing of the past, albeit of the recent past: Hitler’s all-conquering Panzer divisions had swept us out of Europe and only a miracle had spared the survivors who had found their way to the desolate beaches of Dunkirk. The collapse of France, also, was long an accomplished fact, and we had at least and at last the satisfaction of knowing precisely where we stood—alone.

But the Battle of Britain was still with us. Night after night, through the lengthening hours of darkness of October and November, the Luftwaffe’s heavy bombers, seldom less than two hundred at a time, droned over our ports and cities and unloaded their cargoes indiscriminately over docks, factories and homes—but principally over homes. And the threat of invasion, the launching of the longawaited operation ‘Sealion’ against our shores, was a looming peril that might at any hour of the night or day explode into devastating reality.

Britain, in that dark hour, was exactly in the position of a beleaguered garrison the remnants of whose army, all but destroyed in the field, have taken refuge behind the walls and barred the gates. But beleaguered garrisons can fall, and invariably do fall, if fear and despair destroy the will to survive or if constant attrition weakens the defenders to the point where continued defence and defiance becomes a physical impossibility, but most surely of all, they can be inexorably starved into surrender.

There was nothing to fear on the first score. Defiance burned like a flame, and with pikes, clubs and home-made petrol bombs the people of Britain were prepared to follow Churchill’s injunction to fight for every beach and street and village in the country. But starvation and attrition was another matter altogether.

We had to have food or die. We had to have minerals and metals and chemicals for the manufacture of tanks and weapons for our weaponless armies, we had to have oil for the naval ships that guarded the shores, for the factories and the power stations, for the manufacture of petrol enough to keep in the air the handful of Hurricanes and Spitfires that alone stood between us and the savagery of the Luftwaffe.

The food, the oil and many of the most essential raw materials had to be imported into this beleaguered garrison; and there was only one way by which these could come—the sea. A garrison without any hope of relief, we were utterly dependent on the merchant ships that sailed upon this sea as our only remaining lifeline to the world that lay beyond. But lifelines can be cut. The Germans knew this as well as anyone.

They spared no effort to cut these lifelines, once and for all. Sabotage in foreign ports, bomber attacks above the sea, E-boats on the sea, U-boats under the sea—they threw in every weapon they possessed. But, at that time, their most deadly and devastating weapon of all was the raider—heavy cruisers and pocket battleships, big fast and powerful vessels that could be stopped by nothing less than a battleship of the line. An armed raider let loose among a convoy was prelude to a merciless and inevitable slaughter—the Hipper, for instance, had once fallen upon a defenceless convoy and sent eleven merchant ships to the bottom in less than an hour.

And now, with the collapse of France and the fall of Norway offering the enemy a thousand miles of Atlantic seaboard as operating base, and with the advent of winter storms and long winter nights affording almost unlimited opportunity to break out into the Atlantic, the menace had reached critical proportions. The raiders, with almost complete freedom of operation, sailed where they liked, struck where they chose and sank with impunity.

This impunity could have been removed, risks halved and effective counter-measures doubled if we had had bases nearer the scene of action: the country at large, no less than the Admiralty, was convinced of this. The use of certain ports in Southern Ireland, would have moved our outposts far west into the Atlantic, and the advantages gained, the scores of ships and thousands of lives saved, could have made all the difference between life and death. But Southern Ireland wasn’t interested in the life or death of its neighbour (officially, that is—it would be most unfair to forget that thousands of its citizens volunteered for and served with distinction in our armed forces during the war) and categorically denied us the use of any port in Ireland. Far from offering us help in these, our darkest days, they were prepared to stand aside while the German raiders cut our lifeline to the outer world and brought us to defeat.

In Britain, in the latter half of 1940, the feeling against Ireland was intense: so it was particularly fitting that it should be an Irishman, Captain Edward Fogarty Fegen, who was to light the beacon of hope in the darkness, who was to show that we could live in spite of the lack of bases, that a convoy could survive even the savagery of a fullscale assault by a pocket battleship…Provided, of course, that there was always a Fegen to stand between the convoy and the enemy.

It was the evening of 5 November, 1940, and Convoy HX 84, in latitude 52° 45′ North, longitude 32° 13′ West—the very heart of the Atlantic—was steaming steadily, peacefully home to England. The sky was a cloudless blue: visibility was exceptional: light airs blew gently out of the south-east and the setting sun glittered across the burnished gold of a sea calm and quiet and smooth as the Atlantic almost never is.

In nine parallel lines, the big convoy slowly zigzagged its way across the broad face of the Atlantic. Thirty-seven ships there were in all in this convoy—including eleven tankers—and the total value of its cargoes of food and machinery and oil quite beyond computation. Millions of pounds, many millions of pounds, but then the value was not to be reckoned in terms of money but in terms of the lives of those who sailed the cargoes home from Halifax, in the lives and the freedom of those who so eagerly awaited these desperately needed supplies.

Among these thirty-seven ships there were some which, for one reason or another, took the attention and the eye more often than the others. The New Zealand Rangitiki, for instance, 17,000 tons and the largest ship in the convoy: the Puck, at the other end of the scale, a tiny 1,000 ton vessel that had no business at all on those great waters: or the Cornish City, wearing the flag of the Convoy Commodore, Rear-Admiral Maltby. These caught the eye, and one or two others: but certainly no one paid much attention to two ships destined for a fame that has diminished but little with the passing of the years—the tanker San Demetrio, London and the Swedish motor vessel Stureholm, Gothenburg—or to the third, sailing steadily east and into immortality, the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay.

The Jervis Bay, the sole guardian and escort of all these ships, was in the middle of the convoy. Neither in appearance nor in fact was she calculated to inspire any confidence at all among the vessels she was supposed to protect. She was big—14,000 tons—but in war size counts for little. What mattered was that she was old—built in 1922—vulnerable, unarmoured, and equipped with only a handful of worn, weak and inaccurate 6-inch guns, twice as old as the Jervis Bay herself: as a man of war, as a fighting ship, she had nothing: but then again she had everything—she had Captain Fogarty Fegen.

Captain Fegen, a big, tough, 47 year-old bachelor Irishman, son of an admiral, grandson of a captain, already twice decorated for his gallantry, was in his usual position on the bridge when a ship was sighted far to the north, hull-down over the smooth, unbroken horizon. That ship had no business to be there, and at once the challenge started flickering out from the Aldis lamp on the bridge of the Jervis Bay.

The stranger made no reply, but kept steaming at high speed towards the convoy. A second challenge went out. That, too, went unanswered. Then a third—but after the third there was no need for more. Fegen had her now. The fox was in among the chickens.

It was the 10,000 ton, 30-knot pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, a powerful, heavily armoured raider equipped with six 11-inch guns of a phenomenal range, and a secondary armament of eight 5.9-inch guns. Only a Nelson, a Rodney or a Hood could have stopped her with certainty—nothing else. She was a killer against whom there was no defence and her helpless victims could only lie there waiting for her, waiting for the inevitable execution: her hull was heaving over the horizon now, and HX 84 could see the setting sun striking golden glints off the white waters piled high at her bow as she raced south under the maximum power of her great engines.

‘Action Station’ bells sounded aboard the Jervis Bay as the signal to the convoy fluttered up to her yardarm—‘Prepare to scatter’. Almost at the same moment, Rear-Admiral Maltby on the Cornish City gave the order for an emergency turn to starboard, away from the enemy: at once all the ships in the convoy heeled far over to port as they broke south-east under cover of a smoke screen.

All the ships—except one. The biggest smoke screen ever laid, Captain Fegen realized grimly, wasn’t going to make the slightest difference to the Admiral Scheer. She would slice through that swirling curtain of smoke as if it didn’t exist, pursue and cut the fleeing convoy to pieces. Smoke was not enough: the convoy had to have time, time to scatter and lose themselves in the great wastes of the Atlantic, time to wait for the protective blanket of night…Fegen pulled the Jervis Bay round to port under maximum rudder and headed straight for the Admiral Scheer.

Even before the Jervis Bay had straightened up on course, the Admiral Scheer, determined that it would not be baulked of its prey by this crazy gesture of defiance, opened up with its 11-inch guns. Some shells fell among the convoy. The Rangitiki was straddled but miraculously escaped: the tanker San Demetrio, then and later, was heavily hit, set on fire, abandoned, then later resighted, boarded and sailed home in triumph.

But the Scheer, at that moment, had no interest in the convoy, only in the big merchantman racing in on a collision course. Two ranging salvos fell one on either side of the armed merchant cruiser, dismaying testimony to the German reputation for gunnery of a quite phenomenal accuracy: the third salvo crashed solidly home into the hull.

In one stroke the foremast was shot away, the bridge all but destroyed, the director and rangefinder wrecked, the transmitting station, which controlled all the guns, knocked out of action and the guns themselves rendered useless for all but primitive hand control—the cables feeding in the electrical supplies had been completely severed.

The battle had not yet properly begun, but already the Jervis Bay was finished as a fighting unit. Kapitän Theodore Krancke of the Admiral Scheer knew that he had nothing more to fear from the big merchantman. He at once altered course to the east to overtake the fleeing convoy, only to find that his way was barred once more: the Jervis Bay, too, had put over her helm, and was again closing rapidly on a head-on collision course.

Savagely the Admiral Scheer lashed out at the crippled merchant cruiser that so infuriatingly baulked him of the retreating convoy. Not one shell or two, this time, but salvo after salvo, each shell 650 pounds of high-explosive steel, screamed across the calm ice-cold surface of the sea and smashed, pairs and threes at a time, into their target with devastating accuracy, killing, maiming and destroying, scything across the upper decks and superstructure in a murderous storm of bursting shrapnel or exploding deep inside the already mortally wounded Jervis Bay. There was no more thought, now, on the part of the Germans, of just silencing the Jervis Bay’s guns and bypassing her to the south: they meant to finish her off, swiftly and without mercy.

But the Jervis Bay was not to be so easily finished off. Impossibly, not only did she still survive, but she still held steadily on course, still making for the pocket battleship that was relentlessly hammering the life out of her. Great holes were now torn in her port side, above water level and below: the boiler room was severely damaged: the wireless room was gone: the bridge and superstructure had been hit again and again, and she was listing more and more heavily with the passing of each moment as rivers of water poured in through the gaping rents in her side.

Fogarty Fegen still stood on what shattered remnants were left of his wrecked and blazing bridge. In the first few minutes Fegen, like his ship, was wounded to death, but like his ship incredibly he survived and kept on closing with the enemy long after death should have claimed him.

He was terribly wounded. An exploding shell had blown his left arm off just below the shoulder, and the arterial blood was pumping out with every heartbeat: the agony must have been indescribable but Fegen ignored it. He still issued his orders calmly, concisely and with the courtesy that had always been his wont as he drove the Jervis Bay ever closer to the enemy, as he directed the firing of those ancient and pathetic guns whose useless shells fell into the sea miles short of the Admiral Scheer.

Another exploding shell, and the main steering controls were severed. At once Captain Fegen ordered the quartermaster back to the emergency steering position—whatever happened they must retain steering control, move in ever closer on the German battle cruiser. The bridge, burning more furiously than ever and beginning to buckle under the captain’s feet, became completely untenable. Steadying himself with his one good arm, Fegen descended the twisted steel ladder and staggered aft, along the promenade deck, through the choking smoke and eddying flames, to the emergency bridge, every foot of his progress marked by a smeared trail of blood on the charred and blackened decks.

Arriving aft, Captain Fegen, his face now chalkwhite and bloodless and wracked by that murderous pain to which he never once gave expression, found himself too weak to climb up to the control position: but he was still the captain, still in command, with no purpose left in life but to shorten the distance between himself and the Admiral Scheer, to give the convoy every life-giving moment of grace he could so that they might make good their escape into the swiftly gathering dusk.

And thinking ever of the convoy, he ordered more smoke-floats to be dropped, to hide HX 84 from the Scheer. He ordered burning cordite charges to be thrown overboard, fresh crews to man the few guns still firing, in place of those men who lay dead around them. But even yet, those worn and useless guns could not reach the enemy.

Another 11-inch shell, another and another, and now the engine room was destroyed, the engines smashed and drowned under hundreds of tons of water. Fogarty Fegen no longer cared. A 14,000 ton ship travelling at maximum speed has tremendous way on her, and he knew that the Jervis Bay had more than enough way in reserve to keep her closing on the Admiral Scheer in the brief span of life that was left to both himself and his ship.

A deafening roar, a flash of searing flame and the after control position above Fegen’s head vanished in the concussive blast of yet another detonating shell. Undaunted, this incredible man, blood still pouring from his shattered shoulder and head-wounds, lurched his dying way back through the smoke and the flames, intent on reaching the blazing bridge he had so lately abandoned, to continue the fight—if this ghastly massacre could be called a fight—from there.

But he never reached that shattered bridge again. Somewhere in the flames he was struck down by a bursting shell, and death must have been instantaneous for, by any medical standards, he was dead on his feet before that shell finally sheared the slender thread of life to which he had clung with such unbelievable courage and tenacity.

In the one brief hour of a November dusk, Fogarty Fegen won for himself the posthumous Victoria Cross and a name which will always be remembered, with that of Sir Phillip Sydney, as a symbol of defiance and an almost inhuman gallantry in the face of fearful odds. The Victoria Cross and an assured immortality—but probably Captain Fegen would have cared for neither. He had done his job. He had stolen from Kapitän Krancke of the Admiral Scheer those vital moments that were never to be regained, and thereby saved the greater part of the convoy.

Fegen was dead, but the victory was his. But not only Fegen’s. Every man under his command had fought, till the guns had fallen silent and fighting was no longer possible, with the same gallantry as their captain. For most of them, the price of their magnificent defiance had been the same. Of the 260 of the crew, almost two hundred were already dead or terribly wounded and about to die.

Listing, sinking deeply by the stern and now all but stopped in the water, the Jervis Bay, still with shells crashing through the smoke and the flame that now consumed almost her entire length, was obviously about to go at any moment. Those who were left—and they were not many—abandoned the dying ship just minutes before she slid stern-first under the waves, taking with her all those in the sea too near or too weakened by wounds to resist the tremendous suction.

It is unlikely that any of the others who escaped would have survived for long—the Admiral Scheer made no attempt to pick them up—had not Captain Sven Olander, master of the Swedish vessel Stureholm, conscious of the great debt they owed to the survivors of the ship that had saved the convoy, ignored all orders and turned back in the darkness of the night to search for the men of the Jervis Bay. It was an act of the utmost courage, for all night long the Admiral Scheer, robbed of her prey, was prowling around the area, firing off star shells as she hunted for the now far scattered members of HX 84. But the great risk Olander took was justified over and over again: they found and rescued from the freezing night waters of the Atlantic no fewer than sixty-five survivors.

A hopeless sacrifice, many people later called the loss of the Jervis Bay. Sheer senseless destruction to send in a cockleshell like the Jervis Bay against the might of a pocket battleship, a folly and a bravado that amounted to nothing less than madness. No doubt such people are right. No doubt it was madness, but one feels that Fegen and his men would have been proud to be numbered among the madmen of this world.

And one feels, too, that it would be unwise, to say the least, to express such harsh sentiments in the hearing of any of the members of the crews of the ships of Convoy HX 84 that came safely home again because Fogarty Fegen and the men of the Jervis Bay had moved out into the path of the Admiral Scheer and died so that they might live.

The Black Storm

I don’t know how much old Glass was worth. Come to that, I don’t suppose he knew himself. But he was as rich as Croesus, that’s a fact.

But Croesus or no, peer of the realm or no, he was still the same old Duncan Glass and hardly a week went by but he came down from the Big House to my harbour office to pass the time of day with me. But he’d something on his mind that Saturday—a sunny breezy morning in late June.

He got his pipe drawing well, then looked round the harbour, at the waves sparkling in the sunshine, at the mast-tops of the fishing boats dancing in the breeze. Then he turned to me, direct as always.

‘Tom,’ he said quietly, ‘what do you think of them? Really think of them, I mean.’

‘Think of who?’

‘You know damn well who! The Tallons, of course.’ He jerked his pipe stem in the direction of the two men working round an old varnished yellow pine fishing boat. ‘Look at them. A holiday, every other man going to the Games, and there they are, still at it.’

‘They seem to like working,’ I said, mildly enough.

Lord Glass glared at me. ‘I didn’t ask you…’

‘All right, all right,’ I said quickly. ‘Well, if you must know, I like old John Tallon and his son.’

Glass glared at me again. ‘No one else does.’

‘No?’ I nodded through the window, then caught Glass’s arm as he reached for the door handle. ‘Leave her be, Duncan. What harm can she come to?’

‘Aye, maybe you’re right,’ he muttered. ‘For the moment anyway.’

He stood in silence and watched the young girl walking down the quay, dark hair and red kilt blowing in the breeze, one hand holding canvas, paints, and brushes while she waved to the Tallons with the other. As she came opposite the Tallons’ boat, the Jeannie, a young man jumped up on the quay, smiled and spoke to her. Moments later he was sitting on a bollard, looking at the canvas the young girl was showing him. The black and flaxen heads were very close together.

‘I don’t like it.’ I could hear Glass’s teeth biting hard on his pipe stem, and his voice was kind of savage and quiet at the same time. ‘I don’t like it at all.’

‘What you mean is you don’t like them.’ I knew how old Duncan Glass felt about Mairi—since her parents had been killed his 11-year-old granddaughter was the only person he had left in the world—but I felt he was being a bit hard. ‘Why don’t you be honest about it, Duncan?’

‘Can you blame me?’ he said angrily.

‘No more than I blame any of the others. You’re just as bad as they are. Forty-five years in the city of London, and you’re still a West Coaster at heart. The Tallons are East Coasters. Oil and water never did mix.’

Glass growled deep in his throat, but I held up my hand.

‘And you’re just as nosy as the others. The Tallons are mysterious, and you don’t like mystery. But if they care to sail through the Caledonian Canal and change the Jeannie’s registration marks in Skye so that they don’t know where they come from, surely that’s their business. It’s certainly none of ours.’

‘You talk like an East Coaster yourself,’ Glass said sourly. ‘Admit it man, they’re a close, standoffish couple.’

I admitted nothing. I knew he was wrong, but I knew I couldn’t convince him. I knew, too, what really rankled with Lord Glass and the others…

The Tallons were far and away the best fishermen in Inverglas. Only six months in the village and already they caught more every day than any two other boats out together, more than men who had fished these sounds and banks all their lives. It was natural, I suppose, that the men should resent that, the seven other skippers who sailed Lord Glass’s boats on a profit-sharing basis. It was natural that they should stand around on the quay, sullen and morose, after a poor day’s haul, while the spotted olive green and white of cod, the silver blue of mackerel spilled from the Jeannie’s overflowing baskets as they were hoisted up for weighing.

However, I couldn’t very well say this to Glass, and I knew he thought I’d nothing more to say in their defence. He changed the conversation, slightly.

‘Mairi’s down here pretty often, isn’t she?’

‘As often as the boats are in. Otherwise she’s usually over by Sunda Bay. Always painting. A very gifted young lassie you’ve got there, Duncan.’

‘She’s all that.’ Lord Glass permitted himself a proud smile, then remembered what he was about. ‘She sees young Tallon quite often, eh?’

‘Now and again.’ I was feeling uncomfortable. ‘When he’s not working.’

‘No idea what they talk about?’

‘As a matter of fact, I have.’ I was on better ground here. ‘Always about painting. Heard the two of them at it the other day. Young Tallon was telling her how important it was that she should always see—see lines and depths and shadow and above all colour. He was pointing out a particular part of the village or harbour or sea or sky and asking her to describe it for him—just to find out how much she saw, and how much she didn’t. I’m sure he helps her.’

‘What the devil does he know about painting?’ Glass snorted. ‘Ignorant young lout who’s never…’

‘How the devil do you know…’ I started angrily, but Glass recognized the signs from 60 long years ago.

‘Sorry, Tom, sorry: let’s not fight about it. But I still don’t like it. It’s gone far enough. I’m going to stop it.’

‘Mairi’s safer here than in Sunda Bay. If the tide…’

‘MacArthur’—that was his chauffeur—‘is always with her. She’ll come to no harm. See you next week, Tom.’

After he’d gone—and taken Mairi with him—I got to thinking about the Tallons. They were a queer pair all right, father and son. Always they were together, John Tallon with his broad shoulders and grey beard and the useless leg swinging between the crutches, and his son, Michael, half a head again taller than his father, with long blond straight hair and a queer faraway look in the washed-out blue of his eyes.

Always they were together—always. It didn’t matter whether they were out fishing, or mending lines, or getting bait or just digging in the kitchen garden behind the little cottage they had rented on the hill, they were as inseparable as Siamese twins. They worked like Trojans, almost inhumanly hard, kept themselves strictly to themselves—and were the most disliked folk in town. Until, that is, the night of the Black Storm.

The Black Storm. It came in the early evening of the day of the Glasgow Fair, in July, and Inverglas was a ghost town for the night. It was the big day of the year in Dalbreath, seven or eight miles away across the bay—gala fete, sideshows, and a dance that lasted far into the morning. Every person who could be there was there.

But not everybody had gone—not quite. I stayed in my harbour office, because the weather forecast had been a bad and bitter one—Force 9 winds with gale seas and thunder—and I had to be there, all the time, in case some ship in distress might be looking for help or shelter.

And the Tallons were there, too—it didn’t need any clairvoyant to know that they wouldn’t be in Dalbreath. It wasn’t just that they knew that they weren’t wanted there: the Tallons never spent any money on amusement, and not a ha’penny more on drink—and everybody knew you couldn’t enjoy a good old-time dance without a dram or two in the right place. Come to think of it, I don’t suppose that helped their popularity any—West Highland fishermen tend to look a bit askance at a man too mean to put his hand in his pocket for a drink.

The Tallons had just finished pumping out the Jeannie when the rain started. It didn’t just rain—the black skies opened and it came down in pailfuls.

At once the two men turned up their collars and hurried up the quay as fast as old John could hobble, but that wasn’t very fast. I slid open the door of the office as they stumbled by and shouted on them to come in.

They were glad enough to come, I can tell you. As I closed the door behind them, old John sunk into a chair and let his breath go in a long gasp.

‘Thank you, Mr Burnett, thank you.’ He looked out at the sky, already dark almost as a tomb, and shook his head. ‘It’s going to be a wild night.’

‘It’s going to be all that.’ I nodded at the stove. ‘Just brewed a pot of tea. Plenty for three.’

John Tallon hesitated, then smiled. ‘It’s very kind of you, Mr Burnett.’

But we never had that cup of tea. I was just about to pour it when the door crashed open and there was Lord Glass himself, his face wild, grey with exhaustion and his breath coming in great heaving gasps.

‘Where are all the men, Tom, the fishermen?’ It took him three long breaths to jerk this out. ‘I can’t see…’

‘They’re all over at Dalbreath, Duncan. You know that. Fair Friday. What in the name of God…’ I broke off suddenly, because I already knew. ‘Mairi?’

‘Aye.’ He nodded heavily, his face sunk in his hands.

‘Sunda Bay?’

He nodded again, said nothing.

‘And the tide making more than half already!’ I could feel the cold horror in my blood. ‘But MacArthur, the man who looked after her…’

‘Gone to Dalbreath, and never a word to me,’ The spirit was back for a moment, the voice savage. ‘When I see him again…’ He left the sentence unfinished.

‘You’re sure she’s there?’

‘I know. When the storm came on, I looked for her. Couldn’t find her. Drove to Sunda, saw her pony there.’ His fists were clenched, his chest still heaving. ‘I ran down the cliff path—but it was too late. The beach is cut off already and the water wild.’

‘You saw her?’

‘I saw her. Shouted to her to get as far up the cliff as she could. Then I ran all the way here.’

The wind was booming outside now, rising up to gale force. How long, I thought frantically, could a little girl hang on in that. Men, ropes, but no, that overhang of the Sunda cliff…

I started and turned as a sudden blast of wind blew papers all over the office floor. Michael Tallon had the door open, his father just behind him, crutches already under his arms. It was John Tallon who spoke.

‘We’ll be back in the half-hour,’ he said quietly. ‘You can come if you like—but it’s a wild night.’

And, my heaven, it was a wild night. The Jeannie rolled and pitched her way across the bar as if every shuddering plunge into the troughs was going to be her last, but she was a tough old craft with a Gleniffer diesel and John knew how every single combing wave was setting towards us even although it was as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. He handled that boat as if he had been born with a tiller under his arm.

We had to quarter our way round Sunda Point—if we had gone broadside into any of these steepwalled troughs we’d have broached to and foundered in a matter of moments—and, by Jove, it’s a trip I don’t want ever to do again. What with the howling of the wind, the thunder beginning to rumble, the rain and the spray tearing at our faces and the wild staggering of the Jeannie—well, as I say, once in a lifetime was once too many.

But we made it, and in a few minutes we were running into Sunda Bay, into the comparative quiet of the water behind the point.

We were maybe 40 yards off the cliff—the sand was already deep under water—when John shoved the Gleniffer into reverse and shouted on Michael to let go the anchor. Surefooted as a cat in the darkness, picking his way with uncanny precision through the boxes, lines and ropes that lay always in the same tidy positions on deck, Michael Tallon moved to the bows and 30 seconds later the Jeannie was anchored head-on to the mouth of the bay, the Gleniffer just ticking over to take part of the strain, the counter swinging wildly only two or three feet from the face of the cliff.

It wasn’t really a cliff at the bottom—but it wasn’t far off it. Halfway up the rock bulged out a wicked overhang, and it was just below this that we saw Mairi right away, her white blouse plain against the darkness of the rock. She was hanging on to a spur for dear life, and in the sudden lulls between the gusts of wind we could hear the wee soul crying.

We all waited for Michael to fetch her—it wasn’t a difficult jump ashore, nor the climb too dangerous for an active young man like himself. Old John couldn’t go—not with only one leg. I suppose Glass or myself could have gone, but don’t forget neither of us would ever see 65 again.

I don’t think I was ever more dumbfounded in my life than when I saw Michael hesitating, making no move at all to go—and I’ll never forget the anguished expression on his father’s face—I was by his shoulder—as he sat there, just watching him.

‘You despicable young coward!’ Duncan Glass, now that he saw his granddaughter still safe, was back on balance again and his voice was the lash of a whip. ‘You’re a damned good man—when you’re sitting with a child’s sketchbook in your hand. But if I ever see you again within a mile…’

He choked in anger, made to push past Michael, then sat down with a gasp on a coil of rope as an iron arm caught him by the lapels and forced him off his feet. Michael Tallon paused only to say a few soft words to his father, bent his ear to the reply, then leapt ashore.

Not quite three feet, yet he almost missed it. His ankle seem to give under him, he tottered back wildly on his heels, his arms flailing, then recovered his balance at the last moment, caught hold of a projecting rock and started climbing.

I didn’t see all of the climb—it was too dark for that—but what I did see I wouldn’t have believed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so clumsy on a rock face. Cat-footed as a tightrope walker on a rolling deck, he was quite lost on a cliff-face. He fumbled and pawed and slipped his way up to where the little girl lay crying, and my heart was never out of my mouth. But reach her he did, caught her in one arm—the poor wee girl was near exhaustion by this time—and made his way slowly, awkwardly, down again. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that I’ll swear he’d have stepped into the sea if old John hadn’t shouted a warning.

The rain had almost stopped now, and the wind changed—changed so that the stern of the Jeannie had moved out seven or eight feet. Duncan it was who caught up a heaving line and threw an end to Michael so that he could pull the stern close in. The line hit Michael on the chest, and fell into the water before he could clutch it.

Duncan Glass pulled in the line, coiled it and flung it once more. Michael lifted his hand to catch it as it whistled towards him, but again he missed it—it seemed to strike the back of his wrist and glanced off into the sea.

‘For God’s sake man, are you blind?’ Glass shouted in exasperation. He hauled in the rope, but I took it from him, and threw it carefully so that it fell over Michael’s shoulders. My mouth was dry, I felt as cold as the tomb.

‘He is blind, Duncan,’ I said, and my voice was only a trembling whisper. ‘He’s completely stone blind.’

And he was. The rest we learned later that night, sitting before a great fire in Glass’s library, stiff tots of whisky in our hands.

‘We were both in the same train smash, Lord Glass,’ old John was saying. He seemed to be glad to be talking, glad that the secrecy and concealment were all over. ‘That’s how I got my leg—well, shortened a bit. And Michael—he got hurt at the same time. He—well, you’ve seen, he doesn’t see too well.’

Doesn’t see too well, I thought—the boy moved in a world of utter dark! The longer I sat there, the clearer things became—and the more I writhed in shame, for myself and my people. No wonder the boy had never left his father’s side. No wonder everything on the deck of the Jeannie had always been in exactly the same place. No wonder, now, that he moved so surefootedly aboard in the dark—day and night were all the same to Michael Tallon. And no wonder that he had had little Mairi describe everything so minutely to him—not only had he wanted to ‘see’ the new world he was living in, but he himself, we found, was an artist, just finishing his final year in the School of Art and she had represented for him the one place where his real interest in life lay—or had lain.

‘But good God, man,’—it was Glass speaking—‘Why did you never tell us?’

‘Because there is—or was—hope for him yet.’ Old John sounded suddenly tired. ‘They told us in Glasgow that there’s a man in Baltimore, in Johns Hopkins Hospital, who’s a genius in the particular eye surgery Michael needs. So—well, we were trying to save a little money to go there and pay for the operation.’

The simplicity of it all, the magnificence of it all, left Glass and myself with nothing to say. A onelegged man, a blind boy, the bitter toil from the dawn till long beyond the sunset—no, this lay beyond tears…After a while, Glass said weakly: ‘But you could still have told us.’

‘And lost my fishing licence? A blind crew? Where would the money have come from then?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know at all.’ Glass drained his whisky tumbler, sat still for a moment, then smiled, a long slow smile. ‘But, by God, I know where it’s coming from now.’

Michael hasn’t had his operation yet—but the last letter from John said that the preliminary tests were almost over. And when it does come—well, I know he’ll carry with him the hopes and prayers of every soul in Inverglas.

The Good Samaritan

It wanted almost an hour to sunset when I took the hill road out of Tarnford, but already the brief spring twilight was all but gone. The sky above was dark not with the coming of night but with deeppiled banks of thundercloud that stretched its purple-black shroud over hills and valleys to the limits of the horizon. The rain, thick gleaming metallic rods in my headlights, battered against the windscreen, bounced inches high off the smoking roadway ahead, and churned into a miniature boiling cauldron, the water trapped in the upturned hub-cap of the spare wheel on the engine bonnet.

I didn’t really care about the weather, about the rain, about the dazzling electric blue of the lightning that left the outline of its jagged path imprinted on the retina of the eyeball long seconds after the flash had gone or the continuous artillery rumble of the thunder overhead. I didn’t care, because I was too tired to care. I’d been up all the previous night trying to save one of the Colonel’s thoroughbred mares, and had just reached home when a panic call from Tarnford, where the big cattle fair had been held that day, had had me on my way again. Foot-and-mouth, they had suspected. A false alarm, but I hadn’t taken any chances. Eleven solid hours in the pens, and now I was exhausted.

Perhaps it was because of the exhaustion, perhaps because of the rain streaming down the windscreen, that I didn’t see the swinging red lanterns on the road before me until it was almost too late. I stamped on the brake; brought the Land Rover to a sliding halt, and stuck my head through the side-screen.

‘What the devil are you fools trying to do?’ I said angrily. ‘Get yourselves killed or what?’ I peered at the approaching figure, caught a gleam of wet cape in the reflected light from my headlamps. ‘Police, is it?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The voice was curt, impersonal. ‘May we see your driving licence, please?’

‘My driving licence?’ I suppose my voice sounded a bit testy, but as a vet I’d been too long accustomed to share with doctors and ministers of religion a comparative immunity from the attentions of the police. ‘Why on earth—’ I broke off, as memory came flooding back. ‘Of course! Sellers and Riordan.’

Sellers and Riordan. They’d talked about nothing else in the market all day, even the foot-and-mouth had come a very poor second as a topic of interest. With reason. In six short days Sellers and Riordan had become the most talked-about pair in England. In seven brief days they had established themselves the reputation of the two most ruthless, most murderous criminals at large in Britain. In seven brief days they had held up a bank in Stepney, killed the manager, wounded a cashier, shot down a policeman who had tried to stop their escape, been arrested after a desperate struggle, remained in custody exactly 24 hours, then escaped, leaving behind them a dead warder, and another who might live or die.

And now they were supposed to be in the neighbourhood. They had been traced through Amesbury and Frome, had been seen in Glastonbury and now all Devon north of the Moor and Somerset west of the Quantocks were alive with police and an estimated 1200 troops, every man armed. But on Exmoor, in this weather, 12,000 wouldn’t have been too many.

‘Yes, sir, Sellers and Riordan.’ The policeman’s voice, more friendly now, brought me back to the present. ‘Your licence, please.’

I handed it over and he nodded.

‘Mr Cartwright. Thought I recognized you, sir. Going far?’

‘Home. Lipscombe.’

‘Lipscombe, eh? It’s a fair way.’ He looked at me, but I couldn’t see the expression on his face. ‘You’ll watch your step, sir?’

‘They’re as near as that, you think?’ Instinctively, I peered into the surrounding darkness, trying to pierce the slanting curtains of rain.

‘Near enough,’ he said grimly. ‘A constable saw them outside Tiverton, just over an hour ago.’

‘He could have been mistaken.’ I was trying to reassure myself, I knew. ‘Five hundred others are supposed to have seen them today also.’

‘The other 500 didn’t get a bullet in the shoulder,’ he said unemotionally. ‘So be careful, Mr Cartwright. No stopping. No lifts—not even to your own grandmother.’

‘The level crossings?’ I tried to keep the anxiety out of my voice. ‘Three of them between here and Lipscombe. If the gates are shut…’

‘No.’ The policeman shook his head positively. ‘Too obvious. Riordan’s far too cagey to try to board a stopped car there.’

‘But if he does…?’

‘Then it’s curtains for Riordan. There’s a platoon of soldiers with machine-pistols at every crossing in North Devon. You won’t see them. But they’ll be there all right.’

No doubt the policeman was right. No doubt there were hidden guards at the first crossing I came to, but as I sat there in the darkness and lessening rain, engine turned off so that I could listen the more intently while I waited for the goods train to come through, the knowledge didn’t make me feel any the more happy. I kept turning and twisting constantly in my seat, pulling my muffler high around my neck. I could not forget how the warder had died: he had been garrotted. It would have been just as easy for them to knock him out, but they had garrotted him. That would have been Riordan’s work. A wild animal, many called him, an animal devoid of all pity and humanity and fear.

The train took an eternity to pass, but pass it eventually did, and I was on my way even as the gates opened, accelerating to maximum revs through all the lower gears. I kept to the middle of the road, occasionally swerving to right or left as some imaginary figure or shadow appeared to resolve itself vaguely in the rain still lancing diagonally down through the glare of my headlights. I was rattled. I was more than rattled. I was scared, badly scared.

The second level crossing was open and then I was on the twisting, hilly five-mile stretch that lay between there and Hurford, the station that served Lipscombe.

The road was absolutely deserted. I hadn’t seen a cyclist, a car, or pedestrian since I’d left Tarnford. The reason wasn’t far to seek. The western regional radio programme had been interrupted by constant warnings throughout the day, and no one was abroad that night. Fear lay heavy over the land. Even the houses looked afraid, the front doors shut—and doubtless barred—with the windows heavily curtained.

It was near the top of that long rise before you dip down to Hurford that I saw him—first an indistinct barely moving blur by the roadside, a blur that, as I approached, resolved itself into the figure of a man crawling slowly, painfully along the side of the road. Crawling, I realized in horror. He was coming downhill towards me, his head hanging low and shaking stupidly from side to side. Even as I approached, my hands ivoryknuckled on the wheel and staring at him in a kind of sick fascination, he flopped over on to the grass verge and lay quite still, one arm outflung on the road, his face up to the night sky.

Anger overcame fear. I could not doubt that Riordan and Sellers had passed this way, and left their mark. I braked violently, jumped out of the Land Rover while it was still moving and bent over the still pathetic figure.

‘The good Samaritan,’ a jeering voice said behind me. ‘Just stand up, sucker, and keep quite still.’

I stood up and I kept quite still. A tall thin man had appeared from nowhere, and he was standing now in the light of my headlamps, a pistol in his hand: I was enough of a movie addict to know that the clumsy cylinder attached to the muzzle of the pistol was a silencer. I was aware that the man I had seen crawling along had jumped briskly to his feet behind me.

‘Riordan and Sellers,’ I said unemotionally. There was no fear in me at the moment: but I knew it would come later.

‘None other, sucker,’ the tall man agreed. ‘I’m Riordan, he’s Sellers. Into the car and start driving. You’ve a couple of back-seat passengers.’

‘There’s no back seat. It’s a Land Rover.’

‘All the better. Get in.’

Even if I hadn’t known who he was, there was something in that voice that made for unquestioning obedience. I got in, while Riordan clambered over the two seats to my left and Sellers scrambled over the tailgate and through the back screens. Both had guns, and one gun was on me all the time.

‘On your way. But take it easy. I want to talk to you.’

Carefully, without any fumbling but like a man in a dream, I started the Land Rover. Riordan’s voice reached me above the sound of the engine as we moved off.

‘Name, mister?’

‘Cartwright.’

‘You seem a pretty cool customer, Cartwright. Not thinking of doing anything clever, are you?’

‘No.’

‘What’s your job?’

‘Vet—veterinary surgeon.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Lipscombe.’

‘About four miles from here?’

‘About that…What are you going to do with me?’

‘Shut up.’ His voice was expressionless. ‘How far is Tarnmouth beyond that?’ Tarnmouth was a tiny fishing village.

‘About the same again. Four miles.’

‘That’s where we’re going. All of us.’

I said nothing. I was trying to think desperately of what I might do, but the fear was beginning to well back and thought, constructive thought, wouldn’t come. All I could think was that I had two ruthless murderers behind me, murderers with guns and an utter disregard for human life.

‘Why are you going to Tarnmouth?’ I asked. My voice was no longer steady.

‘To catch a boat, Mr Cartwright.’

And then I remembered. Riordan was an Irishman, a Kerryman. He had friends, the police knew that, but they didn’t know he had friends of that kind—willing to take the risk of rendezvousing with him and slipping him across the St George’s Channel at night. And once in the hilly wilds of Cork and Kerry…That was as far as that line of thought got when another, and dreadful one, supplanted it. They could never let me live and give this information to the authorities. As sure as the sun would rise next morning, they were going to kill me.

Riordan was speaking again.

‘How long have you lived here, Cartwright?’

‘Seven years.’

‘And a vet, eh? Everyone knows you?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Fine. You’re our safe conduct, Cartwright. Nobody will ever suspect the good healer. But remember this, and remember it good. If we’re stopped, you’re not to mention any place or person whatsoever by name. Understand?’

‘I’m afraid I…’

‘Look, Cartwright. If the police stop you and you volunteer the information that you’re going to Timbuctoo Farm or been to see Mr Smith the Grocer and there’s no Timbuctoo Farm or Smith the Grocer, they’re going to get very suspicious, aren’t they? So as little as possible—and nothing I can’t check on.’

He was shrewd, all right, Riordan. The thought had never even occurred to me.

‘What are all these sacks for, Cartwright?’ Riordan was speaking again. ‘Vets usually carry these?’

‘Quite often. For sick animals and…’

‘All right,’ he interrupted. ‘They’ll cover us fine. You’re carrying sick animals, if anyone asks. Remember, if we’re stopped, I can see every flicker of expression on your face in the driving mirror. And the point of the gun is three inches from your back.’

The third set of level-crossing gates were closed, to let through the evening train. As I braked, John Howarth, the station master, came hurrying up.

‘I thought it was you, Peter. Mary’s coming off this train. Will you take her home? It’s a filthy night, and with these two damned murderers around I…’

‘Of course, I will,’ I said. ‘Tell her to wait in the bus shelter on the other side.’

‘Thank you, boy.’ He looked closely at me. ‘You’re looking a bit under the weather, you know. Too much—sorry, here she comes.’ He hurried off, and we could hear the train approaching in the distance.

‘Mary, eh?’ Riordan murmured from under the sacks. ‘Friend of yours, hey?’

‘Yes,’ I said shortly. ‘And I’m not going to pick her up.’

‘You are, you know.’

‘Do you think I’m going to let you two damned murderers…’

‘You said you would. If you don’t, after promising, they’re going to be as suspicious as hell when she tells the station master.’

‘I don’t give a damn. You can’t make me do it.’

‘Of course, she doesn’t have to tell the station master—by the way, is he a friend of hers too?’

‘Her father.’

‘So. Well, Mr Cartwright, where’s this bus shelter?’

‘A hundred yards or so beyond the line.’

‘And buses this time of night?’

Like a fool I answered: ‘No’.

‘So the shelter’s deserted,’ Riordan said softly. ‘I’ve got a silencer and she could lie there for hours. No suspicions.’

Three minutes later I pulled up by the shelter. Mary came running out, pulled open the door of the Land Rover and jumped inside, tendrils of dark wet hair clinging to her neck and cheek, but cheerful and smiling as always.

‘Hullo, Peter! Am I glad to see you tonight! The thought of walking home…’ She broke off and peered at me. ‘Why, whatever in the world is the matter, Peter?’

‘Move over to the middle seat, Mary.’ Fear for her had driven all fear for myself, and my mind was working at last. I thought I saw a glimmer of hope, no more than a desperate chance: but then I was a desperate man.

She moved slowly across, staring at me.

‘I’m afraid 1 have a bad shock for you, darling,’ I said. I put my arms round her slender shoulders, felt them stiffening under my pressure, sensed rather then saw the widening of the eyes. ‘You’ve

heard of Riordan and Sellers?’

She nodded dumbly.

‘They’re right behind us, darling—and they have guns in their hand.’

She said nothing, just turned slowly in her seat then put her hand to her mouth to stifle a frightened shuddering sigh as she saw the gun, the pale gleam of a face in the gloom.

‘No screaming, young lady,’ Riordan said quickly and quietly. ‘This is a gun. Drive on Cartwright—and don’t blame your friend, lady. If he hadn’t stopped…’ He explained briefly, then went on thoughtfully: ‘Darling this, darling that, darling the next thing. She really does appear to be your friend, Cartwright.’

‘Damn you to hell, Riordan,’ I said savagely. ‘She’s my fiancée and now you’ve…’

‘Your fiancée, eh? Well, well, well.’ His voice changed. ‘How do I know she’s your fiancée?’

‘What the devil does it matter…?’

‘It matters a lot. I never trust anybody or anything. Engaged? Ring?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Emerald, four diamonds.’

Riordan stretched his hand. ‘Show me.’

Wordlessly, Mary struggled to get it off her finger. God, I thought, she was behaving magnificently. She passed the ring back to Riordan, who struck a match, glanced at it and handed it back.

‘Well, well,’ he said softly. ‘Love’s young dream. The perfect set-up, eh, Sellers. Who’s going to question love’s young dream?’

There was a police block at the entrance to Lipscombe. Again there were red swinging lamps with, in the background, a truck across the street as a roadblock. On either side of the road I could see two policemen, strangers to me, mounted on their red-painted 100mph Thunderbird Twin Triumphs. They had that indefinable look of all motor cycle policemen—medium height, lean, very tough, very competent. But it was Sergeant Wynne who approached me. With the possible exception of Ainsworth, the young Vicar, Wynne was my best friend in Lipscombe.

‘Evening, Pete,’ he smiled. His torch reached across my seat, lit up Mary’s face. ‘Oh, hullo.’

‘Evening, George,’ I interrupted. ‘What’s all the cloak-and-dagger stuff for?’ I nodded at the policemen on their motor cycles, the truck across the road, felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I felt the pressure of Riordan’s silencer against the base of my spine. ‘Looking for our wandering boys, Riordan and Sellers?’

‘We are indeed,’ Wynne said grimly. ‘Suppose you’ve seen nothing, Pete.’

‘Sorry,’ I shrugged. ‘All quiet between here and Tarnmouth. I don’t envy you your job on a night like this.’

‘Me neither,’ Wynne said feelingly. ‘Wish I was up looking for a double-twenty in the “Horse and Plough”.’ We were both members of the local darts team. ‘See you up there tonight, perhaps, Pete?’

‘Perhaps, perhaps not.’ I shrugged and grinned, knowing that Riordan was watching every slightest change of my expression in the driving mirror. ‘There’s a dance on in Tarnmouth. May be the small hours before we…’ I broke off, put my arm round Mary’s shoulders and squeezed: she nestled her dark head against my shoulder. ‘Well, you know how it is, George.’

‘Yes.’ He took out his handkerchief, wiped some rain off his face and grinned back at me. ‘Married myself, but I know how it is. Be seeing you, Pete.’

‘Be seeing you.’ I waited till the truck had backed out of the way, let in the clutch and moved off. Riordan stirred in the darkness.

‘Not bad, Cartwright, not bad at all.’ His tone changed, became soft and menacing. ‘Why did you mention Tarnmouth, damn you?’

‘Don’t be such a bloody fool,’ I said wearily. ‘The only road out of Lipscombe leads there.’

We drove there in complete silence. I drove there in low gear most of the way, only once changing into top. It made for rather a noisy journey, but the low gear suited the road, the noise suited me. Every yard of the four miles I feared Riordan would order me to stop the Land Rover and take over himself: and then for Mary and myself there would only be the long sleep in the nearest ditch or behind the nearest convenient hedgerow. But the order to stop came only when we moved on to the Tarnmouth jetty.

‘Far enough,’ Riordan said harshly. He was almost there now, and the strain was beginning to tell, even on him. ‘Kill the motor.’

I put my foot on the clutch, slipped the gear lever silently into first, switched off the ignition key, placed my right hand across the telltale red ignition light, switched the ignition on again and waited. The handbrake was off.

‘Don’t move, either of you,’ Riordan warned. He was quite safe: the edge of the jetty was only 15ft away and deep water beyond. We couldn’t escape that way.

I stared in the rear mirror, saw the pale gleam of light as they lifted the screens above the tailgate, heard the metallic scuffle of a boot against the tailgate, and pressed the self-starter at the same instant.

Everything happened in a moment of time. The Land Rover jerked forward violently for a couple of feet before the engine stalled, Riordan and Sellers, swearing viciously, fell heavily to the ground behind, and the darkness and silence of the night was abruptly broken as two powerful headlights behind blazed into life at the same instant as clutches were let in and the twin cylinder engines of the powerful motor bikes caught with a throaty roar.

Riordan and Sellers had no chance. They were still struggling to their feet, blinded by the lights, when the motor bikes hit them: and before they could get up again four powerful policemen, piling out of the car immediately behind, had fallen on them with batons swinging.

‘Beautifully, done, Pete, beautifully done indeed.’ It was Sergeant Wynne talking, affecting not to notice the almost uncontrollable trembling of my arms and legs. ‘We’ll have that game of darts tonight yet—after a few pints. Tell me all.’

I told him, and at the end he turned to smile down coldly at a dazed and handcuffed Riordan.

‘Mr Cartwright here had a unique opportunity of studying that young lady’s engagement ring. He must have watched another ring being slipped on beside it, for practice like, at least 20 times before her wedding: and Mr Cartwright was the best man. It was hardly likely,’ Wynne finished drily, ‘that the Vicar’s wife was going to go out all night dancing with another man only 48 hours after her wedding.’

Postscript

Rewards and Responsibilities of Success

Some time in 1954 the Glasgow Herald ran a short story competition. I had no writing aspirations—I won’t say literary aspirations, for there are a considerable number of people who stoutly maintain that I never had and still don’t have any literary aspirations—and no hope.

However the hundred pounds first prize was a very considerable lure for a person who had no money at all. I went ahead and entered anyway, with a West Highland sea story carrying the title The ‘Dileas’. I won and was approached by Ian Chapman, the present chairman of Collins, the publishers, who asked me if I would write a novel. To everybody’s surprise, Collins remain my publishers still. After twenty-seven years.

During those twenty-seven years I have written twenty-seven books, fourteen screenplays, and numerous magazine and newspaper articles. It has been, and remains, a fair enough way of earning a living. I have been called a success, but ‘success’, in its most common usage, is a relative term which has to be applied with great caution, especially in writing.

Quantification is far from being all. Some of the most ‘successful’ books, magazines, and newspapers in publishing history have beggared description when one tries to describe the depths to which they have descended. Enlightenment may not be my forte but, then, neither is depravity.

It is difficult to say what effect one’s books have had, what degree of success or failure they have achieved. Consider, for instance, the reactions of those who had the debatable privilege of being on the Glasgow Herald’s editorial board at the time when those short stories of long ago were under consideration.

Some may feel, or have felt, a mild degree of satisfaction that they had the foresight or acumen to pick on someone who was not to prove a total dud: all too many writers produce one story and then are heard of no more. Others on the board may have felt a profound indifference. Still others, gnashing their figurative teeth, may have rued the day they launched on his way, a writer whose style, they felt or feel, in no way matched the high standard set itself by Scotland’s premier newspaper. I shall never know.

The effect on the reading public is equally hard to gauge. I did write a couple of books which I thought might be judged as being meaningful or significant but from readers’ reactions I was left in no doubt that the only person who shared this opinion was myself. I should have listened to Sam Goldwyn’s dictum that messages are for Western Union.

I have since then concentrated on what I regarded as pure entertainment although I have discovered a considerable gulf may lie between what I regard as entertainment and others’ ideas on the subject.

I receive a fairly large mail and most of it is more than kindly in tone. I am aware that this does not necessarily reflect an overall consensus of approval: I am essentially a non-controversial writer and people who habitually sign themselves ‘Indignant’ or ‘Disgusted’ of Walthamstow or wherever, don’t read my books in the first place, or if they do, don’t find the contents worthy of disparaging comment.

The effects of writing on myself, of course, I know fairly well although I’m aware that, even here, there may be room for blind misap-praisal. The main benefits of being a full-time writer are that they confer on one a marked degree of independence and freedom, but that freedom must never be misinterpreted as irresponsibility.

I don’t have to start work at nine a.m., and I don’t: I usually start between six and seven in the morning. But then, though I often work a seven-day week, I don’t work a fifty-two week year.

Being in a position where there is not one person, anywhere, who can tell you what to do—and that’s the position I’m in—is quite splendid. But no one is wholly independent. I have a responsibility towards my publishers.

Publishing houses are not, as has been claimed, a refuge for rogues, thieves, and intellectual criminals who depend for their existence on their expertise in battening on the skills and talents of the miserably rewarded few who can do what the publishers are totally incapable of—string together a few words in a meaningful fashion. Some publishing houses are run by people who are recognisably human. Mine is notably one of those.

I feel some responsibility, though not much, to book editors. Collins New English Dictionary defines an editor as one who revises, cuts, alters, and omits in preparation for publication. I feel moderately competent to attend to the revising, cutting, etc., before it reaches the editor. But they can be of help, to some more than others.

I feel no responsibility whatsoever towards book critics. The first criticism I ever read was of my first book, H.M.S. ‘Ulysses.’ It got two whole pages to itself in a now defunct Scottish newspaper, with a drawing of the dust jacket wreathed in flames and the headline ‘Burn this book.’ I had paid the Royal Navy the greatest compliment of which I could conceive: this dolt thought it was an act of denigration.

That was the first so-called literary review I ever read: it was also the last. I’m afraid I class fiction book reviewers along with the pundits who run what it pleases them to term ‘writing schools’. One must admire their courage in feeling free to advise, lecture, preach, and criticise something which they themselves are quite incapable of doing.

My greatest responsibility and debt are to those who buy my books, making it possible for me to lead the life I do. Moreover, while deriving a perfectly justifiable satisfaction in pointing out my frequent errors of fact, they never tell me how to write. I am grateful.

One great benefit arising from this freedom is the freedom to travel. I do not travel to broaden the mind or for the purposes of research. True, I have been to and written about the Arctic, the Aegean, Indonesia, Alaska, California, Yugoslavia, Holland, Brazil, and diverse other places, but I never thought of writing about these locales until I had been there: on the obverse side of the coin I have been to such disparate countries as Mexico and China, Peru and Kashmir and very much doubt whether I shall ever write about them.

About future writing I really don’t know. From time to time, Mr Chapman has suggested, a trifle wistfully I always think, that some day I might get around to writing a good book. Well, it’s not impossible for no doubt to the despair of all those book reviewers I never read, I wouldn’t like to retire quite yet.

About the Author

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

The Guns of Navarone

South by Java Head

The Last Frontier

Night Without End

Fear is the Key

The Dark Crusader

The Satan Bug

The Golden Rendezvous

Ice Station Zebra

When Eight Bells Toll

Where Eagles Dare

Force 10 from Navarone

Puppet on a Chain

Caravan to Vaccarès

Bear Island

The Way to Dusty Death

Breakheart Pass

Circus

The Golden Gate

Seawitch

Goodbye California

Athabasca

River of Death

Partisans

Floodgate

San Andreas

The Lonely Sea (stories)

Santorini

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

FIRST EDITION

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1985 then in paperback by Fontana 1986

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1985, 2009

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

City of Benares, The Arandora Star, Rawalpindi, The Meknes, The Jervis Bay and Lancastriapublished by the Sunday Express 1960.

Rewards and Responsibilities of Success, The Black Storm and The Good Samaritan published by the Glasgow Herald 1982, 1995 and 1996.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-28933-2

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Table of Contents

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE SERIES

01 The Guns of Navarone by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

1: Prelude: Sunday: 0100–0900

2: Sunday Night: 1900–0200

3: Monday: 0700–1700

4: Monday Evening: 1700–2330

5: Monday Night: 0100–0200

6: Monday Night: 0200–0600

7: Tuesday: 1500–1900

8: Tuesday: 1900–0015

9: Tuesday Night: 0015–0200

10: Tuesday Night: 0400–0600

11: Wednesday: 1400–1600

12: Wednesday: 1600–1800

13: Wednesday Evening: 1800–1915

14: Wednesday Night: 1915–2000

15: Wednesday Night: 2000–2115

16: Wednesday Night: 2115–2345

17: Wednesday Night: Midnight

02 Force 10 from Navarone by Alistair Maclean

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY ALISTAIR MACLEAN

EPILOGUE

ONE PRELUDE: THURSDAY 0000–0600

TWO: THURSDAY 1400–2330

THREE: FRIDAY 0030–0200

FOUR: FRIDAY 0200–0330

FIVE: FRIDAY 0330–0500

SIX: FRIDAY 0800–1000

SEVEN: FRIDAY 1000–1200

EIGHT: FRIDAY 1500–2115

NINE: FRIDAY 2115– SATURDAY 0040

TEN: SATURDAY 0040–0120

ELEVEN: SATURDAY 0120–0135

TWELVE: SATURDAY 0135–0200

THIRTEEN: SATURDAY 0200–0215

03 Storm Force from Navarone by Sam Llewellyn

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE March 1944

ONE Sunday 1000-1900

TWO Sunday 1900-Monday 0900

THREE Monday 0900-1900

FOUR Monday 1900-Tuesday 0500

FIVE Tuesday 0500-2300

SIX Tuesday 2300-Wednesday 0400

SEVEN Wednesday 0400-0500

EPILOGUE Wednesday 1400

About the Author

Also by Sam Llewellyn

Copyright

About the Publisher

04 Thunderbolt from Navarone by Sam Llewellyn

Cover

Title page

PROLOGUE

ONE : Monday 1800-Tuesday 1000

TWO : Tuesday 1000-Wednesday 0200

THREE : Wednesday 0200-0600

FOUR : Wednesday 0600-1800

FIVE : Wednesday 1800-Thursday 0300

SIX : Thursday 0300-1200

SEVEN : Thursday 1200-2000

EIGHT : Thursday 2000-2300

NINE : Thursday 2300-Friday 0300

TEN : Friday 0300-Saturday 0030

EPILOGUE

Also by Sam Llewellyn

Copyright

About the Publisher

UNACO SERIES

01 Hostage Tower by John Denis

Contents

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

EPILOGUE

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S HOSTAGE TOWER

Copyright

About the Publisher

02 Air Force One is Down by John Denis

JOHN DENIS

Alistair MacLean’s UNACO Air Force One Is Down

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

By Alistair MacLean

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S AIR FORCE ONE IS DOWN

Copyright

About the Publisher

10 Prime Target by Hugh Miller

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

11 Borrowed Time by Hugh Miller

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S BORROWED TIME

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

NOVELS

01 HMS Ulysses by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

1. Prelude: Sunday Afternoon

2. Monday Morning

3. Monday Afternoon

4. Monday Night

5. Tuesday

6. Tuesday Night

7. Wednesday Night

8. Thursday Night

9. Friday Morning

10. Friday Afternoon

11. Friday Evening

12. Saturday

13. Saturday Afternoon

14. Saturday Evening I

15. Saturday Evening II

16. Saturday Night

17. Sunday Morning

18. Epilogue

Acknowledgements

02 South by Java Head by Alistair Maclean

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

03 The Last Frontier (aka The Secret Ways) by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

04 Night Without End by Alistair Maclean

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

CONTENTS

ONE: Monday midnight

TWO: Monday 1 a.m.–2 a.m.

THREE: Monday 2 a.m.–3 a.m.

FOUR: Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m.

FIVE: Monday 6 p.m.–7 p.m.

SIX: Monday 7 p.m.–Tuesday 7 a.m.

SEVEN: Tuesday 7 a.m.–Tuesday midnight

EIGHT: Wednesday 4 a.m–8 p.m.

NINE: Wednesday 8 p.m.–Thursday 4 p.m.

TEN: Thursday 4 p.m.–Friday 6 p.m.

ELEVEN: Friday 6 p.m.–Saturday 12.15 p.m.

TWELVE: Saturday 12.15 p.m.–12.30 p.m.

HMS Ulysses: Alistair MacLean

Where Eagles Dare: Alistair MacLean

What’s next?

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

05 Ice Station Zebra by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

06 Fear is the Key by Alistair Maclean

Cover

To W.A. Murray

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

EPILOGUE

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

07 The Golden Rendezvous by Alistair Maclean

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Chapter I.: Tuesday Noon—5 p.m.

Chapter II.: Tuesday Eight p.m.—9.30 p.m.

Chapter III.: Tuesday 9.30 p.m.—10.15 p.m.

Chapter IV.: Tuesday 10.15 p.m.—wednesday 8.45 a.m.

Chapter V.: Wednesday 8.45 a.m.—3.30 p.m.

Chapter VI.: Wednesday 7.45 p.m.—8.15 p.m.

Chapter VII.: Wednesday 8.30 p.m.—Thursday 10.30 a.m.

Chapter VIII.: Thursday Four p.m.—10 p.m.

Chapter IX.: Thursday Ten p.m.—Midnight

Chapter X.: Friday Nine a.m.—Saturday One a.m.

Chapter XI.: Saturday One a.m.—2.15 a.m.

Chapter XII.: Saturday Six a.m.—7 a.m.

About the Author

By Alistair Maclean

Copyright

About the Publisher

08 The Dark Crusader (aka The Black Shrike) by Alistair Maclean

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Prologue

I Tuesday 3 a.m.–5.30 a.m.

II Tuesday 8.30 a.m.–7 p.m.

III Tuesday 7 p.m.–Wednesday 9 a.m.

IV Wednesday 3 p.m.–10 p.m.

V Wednesday 10 p.m.–Thursday 5 a.m.

VI Thursday noon–Friday 1.30 a.m.

VII Friday 1.30 a.m.–3.30 a.m.

VIII Friday 3.30 a.m.–6 a.m.

IX Friday 6 a.m.–8 a.m.

X Friday 10 a.m.–1p.m.

XI Friday 1 p.m.–6 p.m.

XII Saturday 3 a.m.–8 a.m.

Epilogue

09 The Satan Bug by Alistair Maclean

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

10 When Eight Bells Toll by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

One - Dusk Monday – 3 a.m. Tuesday

Two - Tuesday: 3 a.m. – dawn

Three - Tuesday: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

Four - Wednesday: 5 a.m. – dusk

Five - Wednesday: dusk – 8.40 p.m.

Six - Wednesday: 8.40 p.m. – 10.40 p.m.

Seven - Wednesday: 10.40 p.m. – Thursday: 2 a.m.

Eight - Thursday: 2 a.m. – 4.30 a.m.

Nine - Thursday: 4.30 a.m. – dawn

Ten - Thursday: noon – Friday: dawn

11 Where Eagles Dare by Alistair Maclean

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

12 Puppet on a Chain by Alistair Maclean

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY ALISTAIR MACLEAN

13 Caravan to Vaccares by Alistair Maclean

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

EPILOGUE

14 Bear Island by Alistair Maclean

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

15 The Way to Dusty Death by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

16 Breakheart Pass by Alistair Maclean

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

17 Circus by Alistair Maclean

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

18 The Golden Gate by Alistair Maclean

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

About the author

By Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses

Where Eagles Dare

Copyright

About the Publisher

19 Goodbye California by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Author’s Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

20 Seawitch by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

21 Athabasca by Alistair Maclean

Cover

Title Page

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Map

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

22 River of Death by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

23 Partisans by Alistair Maclean

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

24 Floodgate by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

25 San Andreas by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Map

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

About The Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher

26 Santorini by Alistair Maclean

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

STORY COLLECTION

The Lonely Sea by Alistair Maclean

Title Page

Table of Contents

The Dileas

St George and the Dragon

The Arandora Star

Rawalpindi

The Sinking of the Bismarck

The Meknes

MacHinery and the Cauliflowers

Lancastria

McCrimmon and the Blue Moonstones

They Sweep the Seas

City of Benares

The Gold Watch

Rendezvous

The Jervis Bay

The Black Storm

The Good Samaritan

Postscript: Rewards and Responsibilities of Success

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

Copyright

About the Publisher